Bride of the Rat God (15 page)

“Not really. Too dark you can fix, though it’ll look fixed even if you tint the stock. Washed-out is washed-out. What was the next take?”

“Eight.” During Monday’s shooting at Colossus Norah had frequently looked over Alec’s shoulder at his notebook of shots, which listed, among other things, the exposures of each to be matched against the test strips he ran at the end of every take. Today, Norah had taken over the notebook and the running log of the action, recording close-ups of Queen Vashti’s exhortation to her currently nonexistent troops and scenes of Emily Violet staggering through the desert in search of Blake Fallon. She had learned a good deal about changing film in a bag as well.

“She said just what Shang did, that he had to speak to her about taking over Felipe’s job. He denies that he said it was life or death, and I can’t swear to his exact words, but I know he said
something
of the kind.” She hesitated, wondering if she should tell Alec about the throat-cutting gesture he had made, but decided that it was too inconclusive. “She says he isn’t acting like a fan.”

While Alec held another strip under the thin trickle of wash water, Norah walked back to the rack where the finished test films hung drying. Canisters of exposed, undeveloped film made a small stack on the plank trestle table, draped in sheets to protect against the all-pervading dust. They would be sent to Los Angeles in the morning, though they would not be processed until Alec returned with his tests. All the cans were carefully marked in his neat block printing.

No wonder, she thought, studying a discarded leader, savages thought one’s soul would be trapped forever on a piece of film if one allowed one’s picture to be taken. As she peered through the negative at the red tight, it gave her an odd feeling to see herself in clear-etched miniature, clapper board in hand, all elbows and knees with her snuff-brown hair pulled back under her wide-brimmed felt hat.

Immortality of a sort, though she herself would end up, as they said in Hollywood, on the cutting room floor. But fifty years from now people could run this film and know how Christine had looked at thirty (her claims of twenty-one notwithstanding), posturing and pouting and then sitting up with an indignant shriek as pomegranate juice exploded all over her chin.

The later takes of that particular scene had been done with a silver knife, as sensuous an exhibition of fruit carving as Norah had ever seen, though Christine had been in serious danger of cutting off a finger. It had taken four tries before they got a take where the juice didn’t drip, and that had occurred only because Norah, on her second trip down to the grocery on Franklin Avenue, had had the wit to purchase a grossly unripe specimen that was then painted with Christine’s nail polish.

“But he is behaving like a fan,” Alec said. “His protectiveness of her is very... proprietary. Which is what fans are all about. The marks you saw him making the night he circled the house that way were probably to put a protective joss on the place. He probably marked the car, too.”

“Joss?”

“Magic. Gris-gris. If his magic coins tell him she’s in danger, he’s doing what he can to keep her safe. They tell fortunes by throwing coins,” he added. “Heads or tails, but they use three coins tossed twice and have sixty-four ways of interpreting the results, and they’ll stick by their coin toss till hell freezes.”

The grainy strains of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” which had filled the red-lit darkness, died away. Alec turned to the gramophone he’d brought to Red Bluff with great trouble, along with his light stands, reflectors, and vats. “I’ve got Rossini—Berlin Phil with Nikisch conducting—Paderewski doing the Brandenburgs, or Fats Waller.”

“Who?”

“Blues singer. I happen to love him, but blues isn’t for everybody.”

“Is that like jazz?” She’d heard the terms used in the same breath.

“Sort of. It’s not as popular, but you’ll hear both in the clubs along Basin Street. It’s hard as hell to get recordings, and most of the race labels have rotten sound quality, but it’s the best I can do.” He cranked up the motor and set the needle down on the brittle shellac. The recording itself sounded no worse than the Mozart, the deep voice filled with gritty, unrepining alien grief. After Mozart the contrast was jarring, but there was a haunting quality to it, too.

“As for the marks on the house...” Alec shook his head. “Could have been a puma. A mountain cat they call them in Texas. They still spot them in the San Fernando Valley if it’s been a dry winter and the deer come down out of the hills. Tell me if you can’t stand this, by the way. I’ve never heard of one going down as far as Hollywood, but it’s possible.”

“Maybe,” Norah said slowly. But the marks she had seen had been gnawed, not scratched; she was willing to swear to it. And if Brown and Fishbein had found animal tracks in Sandringham’s bungalow, they would have trumpeted the fact. Outside in the bitter-cold darkness a coyote raised its voice in a drawn-out howl; closer, and clearly audible through the shack’s thin walls, came the stride of a man crossing to the privies that ranged behind Red Bluff’s dozen or so surviving buildings, the last outposts of civilization on the verge of a wasteland of ocotillo, sand, and moonlight.

They had reached the town at two in the afternoon after a jolting drive across the desert from the dusty cattle-town of San Bernardino. Rather to Norah’s surprise, it hadn’t been hot at all but sunny and clear, the air like crystal and the “high desert,” as Alec termed it, a rolling expanse of lizard-colored dust and scrub punctuated by ridges of reddish rock hills. Hraldy had intended to film that first evening, when the light acquired an exquisite molten beauty, but in the absence of Blake Fallon he had been forced to be content with numerous takes of desert scenery, two or three scenes of Queen Vashti in form-fitting silver armor exhorting the hordes of extras who wouldn’t put in their appearance until later in the week, and the gauzy-veiled and demure Emily Violet stumbling through the sand dunes in quest of her vanished lover, staring into the sunset with yearning eyes and stretching out to faint with thirst upon artistic patches of sand from which the rocks and bull thorns had been carefully removed.

When the light began to fail, Alec set up the darkroom while Mikos and Ned Bergen scouted likely spots for army encampments and Queen Vashti’s pavilion. Lucky Kallipolis, the camp cook, organized the kitchen. The three Pekingese went exploring and found every patch of thorns, weeds, and stickers in the vicinity to bring home in their trailing fur.

Blake Fallon showed up just after dinner, driving a studio Ford and filled with suave apologies and convincing accounts of the misfortunes that had prevented his making it to the station on time. “Honestly, I don’t know which was worse, the police or the reporters,” he said, sipping the wine he’d brought with him. By that time very few people were left in the long building—Frenchy’s Saloon, said the faded sign above the door that Lucky had taken over for the mess hall. Alec had already retired to the tent he was sharing with Doc, and Norah had just come across to fetch a glass of milk for Christine, who reposed amid a pile of dogs in the one-room offices of the former
Red Bluff Sentinel,
claiming she was on the point of dying of sunstroke from the afternoon’s exertions. What was likelier, thought Norah, was that she was simply exhausted. The effects of repeated pick-me-ups had finally worn off, leaving her to deal with forty sleepless hours, of which nearly half had been spent on camera.

“They seem to think anyone connected with Colossus Films knows everything about that little pansy’s murder,” Fallon went on. “When Frank and Fishy ran them off the lot, they hunted around for anyone else they could catch. You’re lucky you got Chris out of your place on time, Norah,” he added, turning toward her with a dazzling flash of smile. “You probably beat them down Highland Avenue by minutes. Would you like some of this?”

He hefted the wine bottle and moved to put his arm around her. Norah stepped clear and shook her head politely. On the set he’d seemed merely cloddish, a good-natured and incredibly vain man who spent his time surreptitiously looking for reflective surfaces in which to check his appearance. Why she felt an active distaste for him tonight she could not have said. Perhaps it was the way he followed her, making a second try at taking her arm. Perhaps, she added to herself, it was her own overtiredness. Christine wasn’t the only one who’d been up for a day and a half.

“You have inconvenience everyone by stopping to talk to these people,” Mikos Hraldy said crisply from the table where he was sipping a small cup of black Turkish coffee. “You have put us behind schedule already, and extras all coming to film great battle Saturday, and all else must be done by then. Days are short, and soon will begin rain. So you will obligate me by beginning to film at dawn, as soon as he is light enough to work. This way we may catch ourselves. Good night.”

He set down his little cup of curdled mud and stalked out. Mrs. Violet calmly turned a page of the trade section of the
Hollywood News,
which she had arranged to have brought out by courier to Red Bluff for the duration of her stay.

“Gee, I’m sorry,” Fallon apologized to the room at large. “Say, Christine isn’t mad at me, is she?” he added, rising to intercept Norah at the doorway. “Maybe I can come over to her cabin with this—” He gestured with the wine bottle. “—and make it up to her.” He widened his flag-blue eyes with an attempt at boyishness, but Norah felt only annoyance. She thought for a moment that his clothes had a vaguely musty smell, sweetish and unpleasant, as if he had spent the night sleeping in a cellar where mice had made their nests.

“I think she’d be likelier to appreciate a good night’s sleep.” Norah evaded his hand again. “Particularly since we are all going to begin filming at dawn.”

She pulled her cardigan more firmly about her and stepped through the door; glancing back, she saw him turn away, back to the tables, and there was something odd in his movement that it took her a moment to identify.

The big mirror over the bar, dingy, flyspecked, discolored with age and the smoke of forgotten cigars, was almost the only portion of the old saloon’s decor that had survived the years. She had almost subconsciously expected Fallon to turn and admire himself in it out of the side of his eye.

But he didn’t.

He avoided the sight of it completely.

The peculiar thing was, she thought, returning to the hanging forest of test strips, that, perhaps in contrition, Fallon had given an absolutely stunning performance that day. It might have been only the effect of the open air or the largeness of the wasteland around him, but his movements lost their contrived jerkiness and took on a kind of animal strength. His formerly stagy gestures now combined the sweep of power with a spare grace precisely suited to the intimacy of film. She held up a strip of tiny, progressive images of Fallon enfolding a fainting Christine in his arms and asked, “Was it my imagination, or was he really good today? I thought he made poor Christine look terrible.”

“He did.” Alec came over to the table, wiping his fingers on the towel hanging at his belt, and carefully used the back of his wrist to rub his eyes. “I didn’t think he had it in him.” He checked the magazine of exposed film on the table and made a note in his book, only smiling when he noticed that in addition to scene number, take number, and exposure and shot description, Norah had jotted down the time it had taken from the moment Hraldy had started trying to explain to Christine what he wanted to the command “Camera.”

“Well, he did look wonderful in
Guns of the Sunset
, and that was an outdoor picture,” she pointed out. “That might have something to do with it. He was a cowboy, wasn’t he?”

“In that he spent six months repairing fences in the Chicago stockyards when he was fifteen, you could say so.” Alec stretched his cramped shoulders, then took her by the hand, led her to the other end of the table, and lifted a long strip of film to hold to the red light. “The same definition would qualify me for the title on the strength of my stint in chaps and a ten-gallon hat taking pictures of kids in Scratch Ankle, Alabama. Here. Take a look at these.”

Norah obeyed. “What are they?” She could make out Christine’s hip and shoulder in one and something that might have been Fallon behind a curious cloud that blotted most of the shot. They seemed to be standing in front of a vine-covered wall.

“The film we took Monday night in Edendale. I tested exposures last night since I didn’t have time to look at the stock before we left.”

Norah ran the sprocketed edges doubtfully through her fingers, then picked up another shot. Strange blurs and fogs obscured shot after shot, as if lights had been shining into the camera from odd angles. Half a dozen takes were simply white, as if the film had been exposed in the magazine. Others were scored with long marks like scratches. In one an animal seemed to be running along the wall, though Norah knew the dogs had not been in the courtyard during the shooting.

She looked at Alec, puzzled.

“Could those lights have been reflected off the fountain? Or from the windows beneath the balcony?”

“Could have.” He shrugged. “But then they would have showed up to some degree on all takes.”

“A problem with the camera? There’s a lot of scratching.

“There’s ten times more scratching than I usually get. There’s really not a lot that can go wrong inside a camera, Norah. It’s just a dark box; artists and philosophers were making them in the Middle Ages. They just didn’t have the film. The modern parts of a camera are the lenses, the shutter, and the mechanism that moves the film through the gate.”

The music had ceased. Alec walked over to the gramophone, wound it again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God.

“This kind of thing always happens, shooting in that house.” He shrugged and set the film aside. “I just didn’t want you to think I was superstitious.”

“I didn’t,” said Norah. “Well, not as such.” She smiled a little, and their eyes met.