Celebrity Blood

Nathalie Jr. Suteau, Amy Conley

Description

Julie is bored with her office in the French bank where she works – until the day she leaves on a business trip to London and meets Milo, a young computer hacker. Over the course of that weekend, Julie finds a USB drive. Back in Paris, Julie remembers the drive she found. It turns out to be a document written by Mortimer Diggler, a well-known and respected journalist – a document that accuses Stuart Shelby, a Hollywood favorite, of being a serial killer!

Julie decides to spice up her boring life by playing a little game, which quickly gets out of hand. She soon finds herself in London, working for Stuart Shelby, searching for new victims for the killer star. But is he just insane, or is he really a murderer? And is there any truth to his stories about curing his bizarre anemia with the blood of his victims? And if what Shelby says is true, what does that mean... could she become Shelby's prey... and what if Shelby is a sort of vampire, immortal...

Musicians call it "the art of counterpoint" - creating multiple melodies that sound simultaneously several octaves apart. In her own way, Nathalie Suteau practices this art, with all the subtlety it demands, for she is not content to share in her characters' joy at the brusque acceleration of their lives and in the background, she orchestrates a disturbing score. Thus, all the lives caught up in this strange plot are touched by the dark side that comes with an existence that is free from boredom and banality – risk, anguish, and Death as a constant companion.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456608033
• Langue: English

Extrait

Celebrity Blood
 
 
Nathalie Suteau
 
Translation Amy Conley
 


Copyright 2012 Nathalie Suteau,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0803-3
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 


 
Upon reading the pages that follow, you might think I’m mad, or a corruptible young man looking for recognition and his fifteen minutes of fame. I am neither, but I won’t try to prove that to you. I am writing these lines out of love and duty, to bring closure to the first chapter of my short existence. I can no longer content myself with waiting and hoping in anguish and torment. I have to act, to open the next chapter of my life, come what may.
 
Milo Carvalo
 
London, June 16, 2004
 
Part One
(May-December 2002)
 

Chapter 1
 
 
Julie’s Diary – May 2, 2002
 
This morning I found a dead seagull on the sidewalk, just in front of the entrance to my building. It’s a curious thing – it’s as rare to find a dead seagull on the sidewalks of Paris as it is common to come across a dead pigeon. Of course, lots of gulls come up the Seine Valley from the sea, but I imagine their final resting places to be more on the bow of a boat or in the muddy waters of the Seine. I don’t even live by the river – I live in Montmartre.
 
I’ll never know how that seagull came to be there, but today I decided to start a journal – this journal. I like to see that seagull as a kind wink from destiny. I’d like to think that the endless monotony of my life is about to come to an end. In fact, since this morning, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a couple of lines written by Chekhov in The Seagull, when the poet Trigorin addresses Nina after the discovery of a dead gull: Nothing much, only an idea that occurred to me. An idea for a short story. A young girl grows up on the shores of a lake, as you have. She loves the lake as the gulls do, and is as happy and free as they. But a man sees her who chances to come that way, and he destroys her out of idleness, as this gull here has been destroyed.
 
I find myself in the exact opposite situation of Chekhov’s girl. First of all, I’m no longer a girl, but a young woman – I’m 28 – but especially because I am neither happy nor free. I don’t love anyone or anything, much less a lake. Whether it’s a man or something else that comes along suddenly in my life, I doubt that it would destroy me, and in any case, certainly not from idleness. I’m already idle. I’d like to believe that this inversion of situation is going to play out all the way to the end, that this dead seagull marks the end of my boring life and the beginning of my happy and free life – the life of Trigorin’s girl before her fatal encounter.
 
Julie’s Diary – May 3, 2002
 
I was in a very poetic mood when I started this journal yesterday. The crazy hope of a better life floated away upon dumping the dead gull unceremoniously into the garbage. When I came home from work yesterday evening, the caretaker was in the middle of an argument with half of the building’s tenants and the city garbage collectors over whose responsibility it was to get rid of the bird. The caretaker, based on the undeniable fact that the bird had died on the sidewalk, was arguing that it was the garbage men’s responsibility to take care of it. As for the garbage men, they just kept repeating to the caretaker that it was against the rules to remove a dead animal and they would have to wait for a special brigade to arrive.
 
Bored with their useless gabbing, I went over, grabbed the gull by a wing, and tossed it into the green containers provided by the city of Paris. The sound of their vehement protests followed me as I entered the building without turning around. I don’t understand how people can get so passionate about the body of a dead seagull. People fill up their lives with such little, insignificant things. I wish I could be like them – be able to fill up my life with trivialities like that. Without actually being less empty, at least my existence would seem a little fuller. Speaking of my existence, I wonder what I could possibly write about in this journal...
 
Julie’s Diary – May 21, 2002
 
More than anything else, this journal helps me kill some time during the long hours I spend at work. I write in my journal, enclosed in an isolated little office on the 6 th floor of a big French bank. When I finished business school, for the first time in my life, I found myself face-to-face with my destiny. Up until then, I had been on what is generally referred to as “Easy Street” – an excellent student in high school, I received my baccalaureate in the Sciences, followed by two years of preparatory school in Paris, and then the famous École de Commerce . Business school allows you to pursue your studies without ever being passionate about anything – follow the path, stay on track, and you’ll earn a good salary all your life. Like a good little locomotive, or rather, like a good little wagon, I never asked myself any questions, and I was never bored before I arrived in this ridiculous office.
Five years ago, I was hired to manage the accounts for a new computer platform project. I was supposed to be the intermediary between the technical department and the accounting department. No matter – for months on end, I waited in vain for the project to get off the ground. It never did. I’m still waiting. And they never did fire me. I know – it’s as peculiar as a dead seagull on a Parisian sidewalk – I was forgotten right along with the computer project.
As a result, I spend my days surfing the internet, reading and daydreaming. I can’t even catch a glimpse of sky from the tiny window in my office. When I look to the left, I see a brick wall, and to the right, a closed door. In front of me is my computer and its window to the world. And behind me…I don’t know, I’ve never looked. I’ll take a glance now...A wall. A beige wall.
 
During an internship that was slightly more interesting than the bank I work for now, someone told me this true story: Two employees in some French government office worked in the same room – or rather, I should say “were bored in the same room.” One of them was playing with a paperclip, and the other was telling his life story and trying to set the world to rights, all the while looking at his computer screen so as to look busy. Suddenly, the paperclip escaped from the clumsy fingers of our employee and came to rest in his trachea. The poor guy started to choke, but his colleague, too busy with telling his story and being absorbed in his own existence, didn’t notice. Our boy died and fell under the desk, stuck between a filing cabinet, his chair, and the two wooden panels that closed off the office from the front and side.
 
After about fifteen minutes, the other employee asked his colleague an important question – something like, “Don’t you think we should talk to the union about it – about raising the end-of-the-year bonus?” Obviously, the dead guy didn’t respond. The employee looked up from his screen and glanced over at the dead man’s desk. He didn’t see anyone and assumed that his colleague was an impolite imbecile who preferred to get a cup of coffee instead of listening. The body wasn’t found until the end of the day when a secretary came in and tripped over the unfortunate bloke when she went to set some mail down near his computer.
 
My day is over. I wonder how much time would pass before they found me if I met my death in this isolated little office.
 
Julie’s Diary – May 22, 2002
 
A new day to kill. Why don’t I quit this job? After all, I’ve got a good degree, I’m the perfect age, and I wouldn’t have any difficulty filling in my CV to transform these five years of boredom into an exciting, dynamic executive position. I believe once you get used to the boredom, laziness is a fault that sets in very quickly. I don’t want to work seventy hours a week for an internet start-up under some guy who tries to act nice and cool so he can seem like he’s with it. In fact, I don’t want to work at all. I’d rather be bored. Well, maybe not…I would, like so many other people, like to earn money without actually doing anything...on a beach somewhere, far away from this closed-in office.
 
Two years ago, I tried an experiment – the life of a bourgeoise woman from the 16 th arrondissement. I went on holiday to Sardinia, to Porto Cervo – the new St Tropez, only less tacky. I met a single man, 50ish, with an unattractive physique but a much more seductive wallet. His name was George. George was going to be the President of the Chamber of Notaries or something like that. He was going to have to spend a lot of time at mundane dinners and cocktail parties, and he regretted having sacrificed his family life for the sake of his career. Read here, George wanted to have a beautiful woman on his arm that he could call his wife and show off to all his courtesans.
 
After a fairly short seduction – we both understood the terms of the contract perfectly well – I ended up in bed with him. The eight months that followed turned out to be very tiresome. First of all, I had to go out and buy a dozen or so tubes of gel lubricant to make George believe that the mere mention of his sexual desires could set off an intense excitement in me that I had never before experienced. The worst part came once he thought his fish was hooked and marriage was in sight.
 
After three months, he gave me a ring and asked me to marry him. I was delighted with his proposal – I was going to be rich! I had finally achieved my ultimate goal in life, even if – the downside – I was going to be able to buy brand name lubricant instead o