A fourteen-year-old Australian girl decides to fight the climate crisis by killing, together with a former Polynesian soldier, the richest men on the planet. A political satire on inequality and eco-anxiety. Her film adaptation is already in development, with a screenplay by Krysty Wilson-Cairns and directed by Craig Gillespie.
In Zenda we reproduce the opening pages of Death to the Billionaires (Lince), by Anders Lustgarten.
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PROLOGUE
Kate
The cameras at Parliament are in flames and collapse into the Thames. But that is not what the crowd is looking at.
The video is projected onto the burning Palace of Westminster, and the man who appears in it is illuminated by leaping flames, like the medieval portrait of a saint. But he is no saint. It is King Charles III at his coronation. Charles sits on his golden throne, dressed in imperial purple, with white ermine fur draped over his shoulders. The crown juts up from his head like the world’s most expensive case of encephalitis, and he wears the somber expression of a bank chief tormented by guilt. His lips move in time with the words that appear on a white strip beneath his chin. The words can be heard, though the roar of the helicopters makes them hard to hear; yet Kate recognizes that nasal, cutting tone of discontent. It is Charles. But what he is saying cannot be true.
—The only real question —the monarch now asks— is whether violence works. Whether it is still justified is no longer up for debate. We offer a ten-million-dollar reward for the removal of a billionaire —the king of England continues, seemingly with complete sincerity—. Do to them what they have done to you. Monetize them. Turn them into profit. Kill a billionaire and we will pay you for it. Ten million dollars. Impossible to trace.
At this moment, Charles leans forward and fixes the camera with his gaze, the crown sways, and his impassive eyes burn with intensity.
“DEATH TO THE BILLIONAIRES.”
The sudden chill and the lash of rain are nothing compared to the shiver that runs through the crowd gathered there at that moment. The screams and shouts. Detective Sergeant Kate Anderson must elbow her way through the dense mass on Westminster Bridge. She wrestles and yells “Police! Police!” in the face of stubborn noncooperation—and, in some cases, active resistance—just to reach the edge of the bridge and see the projection. She averts her eyes from the image for a moment to study the fervent, agitated crowd around her.
The crowd roars with a feral, savage laughter at Parliament’s collapse. They cheer each time a new corpse bag is hauled from the rubble, elbowing one another and pointing as they try to guess which hated fool lies inside. They hear voices mentioning duck stands and PPE contracts. Thunderous cries ring out: “Go home in a fucking ambulance!”
It is as if forty years of pent-up frustration, born of the contempt and hatred that the political class has shown toward the rest of society, erupts that night in an unbridled Saturnalia.
But the projection is something entirely different.
An hour earlier Kate staggers through rooms of flame crowned by golden spires. She moves in a stumbling fashion through ancient cut-stone corridors as they slide toward the Thames, destined to be swallowed whole by the river’s damp, ravenous jaws. The mosaics bend and arch, while statues with powdered wigs—faces half-devoured by time—look down upon her from above with severity. One statue strikes the ground before her; its head detaches and rolls like a stone ball. William Ewart Gladstone. The functions once held in Parliament have ceased to make real sense long ago. Now, even the hollow shell of democracy that, like all shells, holds only a faint echo, is about to vanish. A burning beam crashes down beside Kate with the decisive force of cuts to essential public services.
The MPs debate and hesitate, seemingly unaware of their own mortality. They wear long black coats, white gloves, and ruffled bibs—an odd mix that makes them resemble a cross between oversized children and snooker referees.
The tribal chieftain, dressed in black stockings, underpants, and leather shoes, steps in front of her.
<p—“There are members,” he confides, as if lounged in a leather chair after a glass of cognac and a cigar, “down in the basement.”
Kate lunges forward, racing through halls aflame decorated with frescos of glories now forgotten: Napoleon’s defeat, the Armada, the subjugation of India; all now scorched, smoky, and lost in an irretrievable past. She passes the shooting gallery sign and the Royal Investiture Hall sign. She descends the spiral staircase and enters the beast’s entrails.
The physical foundations of British democracy are rotten to the core. Bricks in disrepair. Labyrinthine and suffocatingly hot catacombs. Kate’s feet splash in mere centimeters of stench-filled liquid that spreads around her. A tangle of cables writhes like intrusive snakes. Damp tunnels house hiss-strips of iron: the heating system is as archaic as the electoral system, albeit less damaging to society in general. Kate dodges the metallic guts and ducks as the tunnels become even more claustrophobic.
She sees two figures. A tall, bony figure presses another, shorter one against the wall. Kate yells as she approaches. They both turn, surprised by their mutual recognition. She recognizes the tall figure: it is her MP. Close up, he is less bony and more viscous, undulating, coiled on himself in loops like an intestinal worm. The look of relief on the young woman’s face is something Kate instinctively recognizes from her own darkest nights.
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Author: Anders Lustgarten. Title: Death to the Billionaires. Translation: Leticia Cosculluela. Publisher: Lince. Sales: Todostuslibros.