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

doing
what you like more than you like liking what you do ...
    Not entirely inappropriate then that when, having decided
on a tall Tom Collins in the bar (beverage to augment deliberation over how many escorts - okay, rape and murder were
off but for Christ's sake I was damned if I wasn't going to put
my lately acquired love-truncheon to some use), an exhausted
posh female voice should say, from two stools away: `You
don't look like you do anything for a living.'
    I turned. Recognized her straight away. Harriet Marsh.
Lady Harriet Marsh, you'd think, what with the bevelled
vowels and Susanna-York-on-smack looks. Sixty years old
now (quite a while since I'd last seen her) with a freckled
body of complicated wiriness under a black halter-neck
cocktail dress. Magnificently bored green eyes. Hair dyed a
colour between platinum and pale pink, pinned up, with
wispy bits dangling. The odd liver spot. Brazenly crafted Los Angeles teeth. Lady Harriet, you'd think - but you'd be
wrong. It's not blood, it's money. Harriet plucked from a
glittering clutch of possibles forty years ago, bedded and
betrothed in that order to Texan Leonard `Lube' Whallen
(no blood, either, obviously, but a large family of hyperactive
oil wells) who, thanks to some colourful experiences with an
early years nanny from Dorset, had a crippling weakness for
English gals who knew how to boss him about in the sack.
The thing to do, I'd murmured to Harriet at the time, is make
him earn it. I told him it would take him to the deepest
knowledge of himself, to give himself over to her completely. He believed me, looking at his own porous and
moustached face in the morning mirror, astonished and
grimly delighted. One by one family members written out
of the will. Harriet wasn't going back: the beery two-uptwo-down in Hackney, the dodgy dad and threadbare munm,
the wireless, the Woodbines ... She'd been in for the long
haul with Leonard, but he'd surprised her in 1972 by dying
of a heart-attack (four Jack Daniels, devilled prawns, three
injudicious Monte Christos and a dash across the baked
apron to make the private jet's take-off slot), leaving her
more or less sole inheritor. I let her go after that. She wouldn't need me. She worked well on her own. Nov - oh,
honestly, I'm gifted, I am - she owns thirty per cent of Nexus
Films.

    `You don't look like you do anything for a living.' Yes.
The blunt gambit entitlement of the rich and the beautiful.
Candour a match for my own.
    `I do something for a living,' I said.
    `Really? What?'
    `I'm the Devil.'
    `How nice for you.'
    `Currently in possession of a mortal frame, as you see.'

    `I no see.'
    `And you're Harriet Marsh, widow of Leonard Whallen.'
    `And you're not clairvoyant. My name generally precedes
me.
    `But other information does not.!
    'Such as?'
    `Such as that you're currently wearing peach-coloured
cami-knickers from Helene's in Paris. Such as that you were
thinking several things a moment ago: that the English are in
love with failure and loss; that there's no pleasure for you now
like the pleasure of being driven through capital cities in the
last hour before dawn; that my cock would be small and that
it's been a long time since you've even known what you like;
that there should be another dimension or place for the filthy
rich when this world's fruits have been sucked dry; that there's
nothing you'd like more than a long stay in a white-walled
and chilly hospital where nothing was demanded of you; that
you'd need to get drunk if you were going to fuck me:
    `My mistake,' she said, after a sip of her champagne. `How
charming.'
    `Goes with the territory.'
    Raised eyebrows. Tired, our Harriet, tired of life, tired of
having done everything - but willing to be seduced by
curiosity. `Territory?'
    `Being a fallen angel,' I said. `Being the fallen angel.'
    Another exhausted smile. Another sip. It wasn't much,
this, but it was, at least, something.
    `Tell me what I'm