Bride of the Rat God (14 page)

“I don’t think they had Pekingese in ancient Babylon,” Alec pointed out with a grin.

“Well, they had them in ancient China.” She made a face at the lemonade, nudged aside Black Jasmine to get to the pocket of the fur piled up at her side, and flashed out a silver flask. “I’m sure no one would notice the difference. You want some of this, Mary? Emily?”

“There!” cried Hraldy, flinging up his hands. “You see?”

They’d reached home at four-thirty—two and a half hours before they had to depart for the station in Los Angeles—and Christine, true to her word, had proceeded immediately to bathe, change, and renew her makeup while Norah, invigorated by two more cups of coffee, made omelettes in the kitchen. Even so, they had nearly been late, Christine wailing as Norah bundled her ruthlessly into the car that she looked
terrible
and hadn’t even
started
on her hair. Not, reflected Norah, with the way Christine wore her hair, that it made much difference.

She and Shang Ko had loaded the luggage into the car, including a wicker box for Buttercreme, who did not like to travel unprotected, and a carpetbag bulging with the fashion magazines, hand lotion, pillows, veiled hats, chocolates, Russian cigarettes, and flasks of toilet water and gin that Christine considered indispensable to her comfort in the desert. Christine also did not like to travel unprotected. Shang had accompanied them to the station, Christine promising to ask Frank to have someone from the studio drive the car—and Shang—back home when all was safely on the train. Privately, Norah had provided herself with a map of southern California, and as they’d slogged their way south through the truly appalling downtown morning traffic, where gridlocked intersections and trapped streetcars added to the confusion, she had laboriously worked out a route to San Bernardino, to be driven if they missed the train.

They’d pulled into the Santa Fe station on Broadway to find that echoing sandstone mosque mobbed with reporters, all shouting questions about Keith Pelletier’s murder and Charles Sandringham’s disappearance. As Norah breasted through the press with one hand gripping the carpetbag and the other clutching Christine’s wrist, she repeated over and over, “I’m sorry, we’re going to miss our train. I’m sorry, we have to catch our train now.” She had by this time developed a throbbing headache that the flash powder going off all around her did nothing to improve; nor did the fact that Chang Ming and Black Jasmine kept crossing up their leashes and running under her feet. Everything blended into a bizarre kaleidoscope of jostling faces and shouted words through which her mind fastened with a strange lucidity on the pink sandstone frieze with its inscription,
EAST OR WEST, SANTA FE IS BEST
. “Darling, can’t I pose for just one teensy picture? I can’t let them take a picture of me being dragged along like this. Surely they’ll hold the train for us.”

Alec was waiting for them on the platform. So was A. F. Brown, stalking up and down in a cloud of cigar smoke, watch in hand and face purpling toward apoplexy, while Conrad Fishbein gave yet another measured account of Charles Sandringham’s movements on Saturday night, elaborated with a hair-raising tale of racing along Wilshire Boulevard at ninety miles per hour to catch the midnight Flier and buying a toothbrush in one of the lobby shops. “Of course he didn’t take the train under his own name, gentlemen. If you were as famous as Mr. Sandringham and laboring under such a burden of grief and anxiety, would you have wanted to risk the possible delays that revealing your true identity might have incurred? As he got on the train, he told Mr. Brown that he hoped to return to Hollywood in time for the premiere of his newest adventure film,
The Midnight Cavalier,
a stirring drama of...”.

“I’m gonna kill that Fallon,” Brown growled as Christine dashed up to give him a quick embrace.

“I phoned Suzanne.” Ned Bergen came up beside them as Brown and Christine—and Black Jasmine—posed momentarily for a burst of flash powder and Alec, Shang, and Ned Divine manhandled the four trunks from Shang’s hand truck into the baggage car. “And that redhead over at Vitagraph he’s been seeing...”

“Oh, he was at the Montmartre last night,” Christine said, turning to pose with Black Jasmine and Chang Ming for another shot. “See, darling,” she added over her shoulder to Norah. “We made it here in just
oodles
of time, like I said we would.”

A blue-uniformed station official tugged despairingly at Brown’s sleeve. There was a deep chugging and a burst of steam from the engine.

“He was with Hans—Hank—” She corrected herself with a quick glance toward the reporters. “—and those girls who came up to the Edendale shoot last night. I think one of them’s an extra over at Jasper . . .”

“Miss Norah.” Shang Ko’s hand, like a bundle of dried vines, stayed her as she passed Buttercreme’s box up to Alec. The old Chinese was stronger than Norah had at first imagined—of course Christine hadn’t even thought to ask if he was physically able to perform the burly Felipe’s tasks—but his touch was as tight as a cat’s inquiring paw. The previous morning before first light she’d seen him through the kitchen windows, performing what looked like a very slow and elaborate series of exercises in the small space of level ground at the bottom of the driveway in front of the garage. She wondered how old he actually was.

Her mind was dragged from its exhausted drifting by the anxiety under the calm softness of his voice. “This place that you went to last night with Miss Flamande, this house...”

“The one in Edendale?” She flinched at some undercurrent of memory connected with the house, like a half-recalled nightmare obliterated by the variegated avalanche of subsequent events. Fear and the scurry of tiny claws in the dark...

“No. The other house, the house where the blood was. The house where the young man was killed.”

“How on earth do you...?”

He shook his head violently, waving the question away. Conductors were herding Christine toward the train, and she lit a cigarette and posed for one final picture, every line of her body implying that she crushed the life from male hearts every day and twice on Sundays instead of spending most of her time playing mah-jongg.

“It is not important,” said Shang. “Who was this young man? He was the same one of whom Mr. Brown came to speak to you and Miss Flamande. What was he to Miss Flamande? It is important that I know,” he added, seeing the doubt and distaste on her face. “I would not ask were it not desperately important. Please.”

Norah shook her head. “He was just a stunt performer on the last picture she did,” she said, mindful of a star’s reputation and the baying throng of reporters just outside the platform gate. “Mr. Sandringham—another actor, whose house it... it happened at—was helping him get his start in pictures. But how you knew—”

“It is not important how I knew,” Shang repeated, glancing worriedly along the platform, where a uniformed official was telling Brown something the producer didn’t wish to hear.

“If that worthless playboy isn’t here inside of two minutes...” Brown’s voice carried clearly to them over the reportorial clamor that echoed off the high ceiling. “Fishy—FISHY!”

“He was an actor with her?” pressed Shang.

“No, a—a stuntman.” Norah passed a hand over her face. Her headache was getting worse by the moment, exhaustion making her shake. She knew she should press the issue of how he knew where she and Christine had been the previous night. Had he followed them? He couldn’t have; he couldn’t drive a car. And what of Christine’s mysterious illness Sunday night and the disparity between the grandson who had been with him at the Million Dollar premiere and his claim to have no family? But someone seemed to have poured cold treacle over her brains.

“If the script calls for Christine to do something dangerous—like that scene where she hung by her hands over the cliff—she doesn’t really do it. The stuntman—Mr. Pelletier—put on her dress and jewelry and a wig, and did the fall, with the camera far off enough so that it looked like Christine falling.”

“So.” The word was little more than an indrawn breath, and his black eyes widened, shocked, as if he had seen some dreadful thing. “I see. In the opera—the Chinese opera, you understand—it is often so. A tumbler dons the mask and costume of an actor who cannot spring and tumble. And, of course, in the opera all of the women are in fact men.”

“How do you know we went there?” pleaded Norah, trying desperately to collect her fatigue-sodden thoughts. “What were the marks on that house? I saw the same ones—”

“All aboard!”

The old man put a quick hand on her elbow and guided her to the door of the car. “Miss Norah, you must remain close to her in the desert. You must watch her. The desert...” He hesitated, as if stopping himself from saying something, then changed it to, “Her stars are in a very poor aspect right now, very poor. Her life is in danger.”

“What makes you say so?” she demanded, clinging to the railing in the door as the train gave a starting lurch. “You said that on the night of the premiere—why? Why did you lie about it later?”

“If you love her, Miss Norah, watch out for her.” Like a desiccated walking stick he followed along the platform, steam blowing his white hair in long wisps around his face. “Do not let her be alone with strangers. She is too trusting; she loves life too much and does not think.
Do not let her be alone
.”

“Who on earth would want to hurt her?” Shock and confusion as well as exhaustion clouded her thoughts; her mind kept flitting back to the darkness in the bungalow with its brown-stained walls and stench of blood, back to the way the flashlight beam glanced off the shards of broken mirror above the bar. They passed Frank Brown like a puffing monument, glaring furiously out across the still Fallonless platform; Shang almost had to run to keep up now. Flash powder coruscated, and Norah turned to see Christine leaning far out the doorway at the other end of the carriage, Black Jasmine cradled in her arms, her head thrown back as she blew a languid kiss at the gentlemen of the press.

“Protect her, Miss Norah,” Shang called out. “Stay by her side.”

Clouds of steam veiled him; he was backlit by a final blaze of flash powder as he raised one scarred and crooked hand. The next instant—though, tired as she was, Norah wasn’t sure how long her eyes might have been shut in a blink—he was gone.

She rubbed her forehead now, trying to recall whether it had actually happened that way. It all seemed to blend into the events of the night and of the day before, with the memory of blood trailing away into darkness and of clouded, suffocating dreams of old griefs, while the Pekes scratched furiously in the comers, hunting something she was never able to see. Mikos Hraldy’s voice came to her from what seemed like an enormous distance away.

“...new drama, modern drama, with heart and soul and meaning as great as timeless stories of Old Testament. But your Mr. Brown, he say, ‘How can make a film about a man who awaken up to find he has transform in night into giant cockroach? What will ladies in Pretoria—”

“Peoria.”

“—Petoria say to that? And what can you do with attitude like that, eh?”

And like the scent of flowers in the background, soft twittering voices, “...that’s a pung, two kongs, and a pillow, and doubled because they’re all ones and nines, and doubled again because I’m south and that’s summer and another double because...”

“...danced around the house in these veil sort of things. But they
did
say my mystical attraction for Chinese tilings is because I was a Chinese princess in my previous incarnation—Flindy was, too—though if I wanted to remember it like they do, I’d have to give up gin and saxophone players and take cold showers outside at the absolute
crack
of dawn...”

The jogging of the train car was like the rocking of a ship, the steady throb of the wheels over the rails like the beating of some curiously benevolent metal heart. She forced her eyes open and regarded without comprehension the emerald landscape with its spidery windmills and slowly-circling hawks. Beneath the table, Chang Ming barked in his dreams so vigorously that his plump body bounced.

Did he dream about chasing unseen things in the darkness of an empty house in Edendale? Norah wondered. Or about guarding the doors against something huge and invisible, scuttling along the house wall in the screaming wind?

It is old,
Kama Shakti had said.

Do not let her be alone.

Her head sank back onto the sturdy corduroy shoulder that had lately been supporting it, and she drifted again to sleep.

A sign of great sacrifice.

A time of preparation, not action...

Cultivated persons work hard in the daytime,

are alert by night, and thus are safe

in a situation of danger...

Good omens for the true of heart...

“D
ID YOU TELL
Christine?” Alec lifted the end of a three-foot strip of film from the vat of developing fluid, his glasses catching the weak, bloody glow of the safe-light like an insect’s eyes. “Thanks,” he added as she took the strip from him.

“It only happened at the station. She was asleep by the time I finished helping you set up here, and I haven’t had time to talk to her alone today.”

“I mean about Shang being the old man at the premiere.” He went back to washing the next test-strip as Norah carried the film to the spiderweb of wires at the back of the blacked-out cabin, a shabby structure that had started life as the Red Bluff barbershop. The interior had been thoroughly tar papered the first time a film company had used the town as a base; Alec and Norah had spent an hour Tuesday evening rechecking the paper and adding more where it had shrunk or cracked. Then they’d swept the place before and after setting up the tanks, hoses, and slatted drum-shaped racks, with the result that today Norah felt as if she’d been beating carpets.

“How does that look, by the way?”

Norah hesitated, holding up the strip to the red light. It was difficult to judge the black for white of a negative, but her eye was improving. “I think it looks a little washed-out. Is that something you can fix when the scene is printed?”