I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story by Glen Duncan

Eighty grand in the bank and I'm living
in a City ex-council with no cable or power shower and a
kitchen the size of a teabag. Oh I laughed, I did. So funny I
could have gouged Gunn's eyeballs out and tossed them into
the road.
    Cabby didn't appreciate it, mind you. One too many rearview checks till I took out a slender wad of fifties and waved
them at him. He was ... well, he was a London taxi driver:
double-chinned with a dark grey comb-over, ear-fluff, jowls
like past-it potatoes, Popeye forearms and a boil like a ruby
on the back of his neck. Further down I knew there'd be the
no-surrender gut, the fat bollock bulge, the waxy bum crack
and haemorrhoidal punnet ... but I preferred not to dwell
on it. My threads had confused him (I've revolutionized
Gunn's wardrobe: Armani black single-breasted pinstripe,
white silk shirt, red paisley tie, Gucci Royalles and threequarter black leather overcoat from Versace ); it was hard for
him to believe that you could be dressed like that and still be
a giggling nutter - but the sterling calmed him. `Fuck
Clerkenwell,' I told him, sliding a crisp note through the
vent. `Take nie to the Ritz.'
    `You mine me arskin what you do for a livin', chief?'
when we pulled up at the yellow-lit facade.
    `I tempt people to do the wrong thing,' I said.

    He seemed happy with this. Tight-lipped, he closed his
eyes and nodded, vigorously, as if I'd confirmed his intuition
(advertising, politics, the law). And well might he, since it
was only by a miracle of self-control that I didn't add: Your
wife, Sheila, for example, who is at this very moment su'alloivi,
the hot and curdy jism of your brother Terry, with whom she's been
enjoying gladiatorial carnal relations for the past eighteen months,
my son. Wasn't mercy (naturally) held me back. Just the
vision of him following me into reception and making a
scene.
    No bags. They love that. Suggestion of whim, flight,
drama or verboten coupling. (Which, illicit or otherwise, was
still very much at the forefront of my mind, Julia
Sommerville's plummy voice and Tracy's rendition of `Hit
Me Baby One More Time' having between them got my
blood up awfully, at long last.)
    At my suite's snooker table-sized mirror I stood and
opened my arms with a smile, the Vegas crooner's gesture of
wordless love in the face of his standing ovation. Spoiled it,
somewhat, I admit, by saying aloud: `Now this, my son, is a
bit more fucking like it,' but I could hardly blame myself,
overwhelmed, as I was, with a deep sense of homecoming.
    I sent my threads down to housekeeping for a wash and
brush up, then eased myself into an excessively foamed, oiled
and salted bath, congratulating myself on having invented
money in the first place. Wealth breeds boredom and boredom breeds vice; poverty breeds anger and anger breeds
vice. More than enough of the angelic me endured to feel it
in the hotel's costly air; more than enough of the corporeal
me to sniff - in the way of charming perceptual correlates -
its practitioners' scents of perfume and aftershave, breath and
broken wind laced with the tang and spice of pricey ingestions. (Money calibrates society's scale of smells, and naturally the folks I'd glimpsed about the place were loaded.
I haven't had to touch most of them (professionally) with a
barge pole, since they've had money from birth. That's the
beauty of money: the only graft I've got to put in is getting
people to acquire it. Once they have acquired it, and the
freedom it brings, most of them (and their beneficiaries)
will go straight off the rails without so much as a bitten
nail.) Money was my leap out of the Dark Ages.

    Humans and human needs lay hid in night.
    I said: `Let money be!' and all was light.
    The key to evil? Freedom. The key to freedom? Money. For
you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not
that that stops you doing what you like, since you like