by Simon Brett
‘Action!’ the director snarled.
At the command the driver engaged gear and the loaded truck leapt forward. It trundled along at speed, seemed about to follow the curve of the road, but instead flew across the kerb to smash into the back of the park bench. The seat itself stood firm, but the canoodling couple were ejected straight into the lake.
At the same time, some mechanism was released so that the back of the truck flipped up, catapulting its load of truncheon-waving Kops over the driver’s cab and into the lake.
At the moment they splashed in, the doors fell off both sides of the truck and a plume of smoke rose up from its crushed frontage.
‘Cut!’ yelled the director. ‘Move on to the painting scene!’
Blotto and Twinks watched the Krazy Kopz pick themselves out of the lake and hobble across to the next set-up. Some looked as if they’d been painfully injured by their flight from the back of the truck, but there were no murmurs of dissent. They all knew how easy it was to lose your job in Hollywood.
Blotto and Twinks did hear one of the Kops ask the director, ‘Don’t we get time to dry off our uniforms?’
‘No,’ came the snarled reply. ‘On the movie it won’t show whether they’re wet or dry! Get to the painting set-up!’
This scene used one of the backlot’s permanent structures, the façade of an apartment block, against which a framework of wooden scaffolding had been erected. On boards at the various levels of the structure had clambered the company of various-sized Krazy Kopz. Some carried paintbrushes, others buckets of whitewash. At the director’s shout of ‘Action!’ they started to mime painting the building. (Twinks reckoned they were only miming so that, like their uniforms, the frontage wouldn’t have to be cleaned afterwards.)
While the policemen mimed painting above, down at street level some more action was taking place. An attractive young woman walked along the sidewalk past the apartment block with a huge, but apparently docile, mastiff on a lead. At the end of the scaffolding she stopped, looked at the dress shop next door and mimed elaborately that she wanted to enter and inspect their stock. Tying the mastiff’s lead to the nearest wooden scaffolding upright, she disappeared into the shop.
At this point, a tall Krazy Kop came strolling along the sidewalk from the same direction as the young woman. He moved with nonchalance, twirled his truncheon and, though he was in a silent film, whistled. As he passed the mastiff, the dog, who had clearly undergone training and rehearsal, bared its teeth at him. The Kop looked down at the animal and, keeping a safe distance away, stuck his tongue out. The dog growled (though again the viewers in the picture palaces would only see rather than hear its rage).
The policeman was beginning to enjoy the game. He crouched down and, sticking his fingers in his ears, flapped his hands to further antagonise his quarry. The mastiff leapt forward, lead straining against the wooden post to which it was attached.
Then the Kop got bored. He stood up and, again twirling his truncheon and whistling, strolled past the dress shop and out of shot.
As a result, so far as the movie-goer was concerned, the policeman didn’t know what the results of his actions were. The set must have been carefully prepared for what happened when the mastiff’s drag on its lead pulled the restraining post away from its footing.
The entire scaffolding structure came down, scattering planks and struts, paint pots and Krazy Kopz in every direction.
Though the director didn’t ‘do breaks’, the next scenes he had to shoot – blowing up a couple of cars – didn’t involve any human beings. Even in Krazy Kopz productions there were some safety limits and, to the director’s patent disappointment, his superiors had decreed that the bodies thrown sky-high by the explosions would have to be dummies. So Blotto and Twinks finally got an opportunity to pursue their investigation.
‘Well, I didn’t see any spoffing clues,’ said Blotto.
‘I did,’ said Twinks, predictably enough.
While the director and his cameramen had left the immediate area, the Krazy Kopz had picked themselves up and stumbled in through the door of an Episcopal cathedral façade. The smells of liniment and embrocation emanating from the building suggested that it was a kind of field hospital to treat the numerous bruises and fractures suffered in the manufacture of Krazy Kopz slapstick.
Blotto was about to enter, but Twinks stopped him. ‘No, no, Blotters. Our quarry isn’t in there.’
‘What? By Wilberforce, do you mean you know who he is?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘But how, in the name of strawberries?’
‘Did you notice, Blotto me old headache powder, that only one of the Krazy Kopz didn’t get hurt in any of the scenes we’ve just witnessed? He wasn’t touched by a custard pie, he was the driver of the truck that chucked everyone else into the lake, and he was one who made fun of the dog and moved on. Didn’t you notice that?’
‘No,’ said Blotto, honest as ever.
‘Well, it’s true. Which of course means that he has some privileged position here in the Krazy Kopz set-up. Razzy told us that this is where the Barolo Brothers operate, so I’d put my last shred of laddered silk stocking on the fact that the one who escaped all the painful stuff is connected to the Barolo Brothers. What’s more,’ continued Twinks, leading her brother towards a swish first class railway carriage stranded rather absurdly on a few yards of track, ‘I saw him go in here.’
The light let in by her opening the door made the man inside the carriage look up. Dark-haired and very thin, he was resting on a chaise-longue. A bottle of Bourbon stood on the table beside him and the glass on the way to his lips was frozen in midair.
‘It’s creamy éclair to meet you,’ said Twinks, ‘Umberto.’
22
Confrontation in a Carriage
The man reached to the pocket of his Krazy Kopz uniform for a gun, but was stopped by Twinks saying, ‘You’d be a total soft-top to do that, Umberto . . . seeing what I’ve got in my hand.’
The Mafioso and Blotto looked with equal surprise at the small snub mother-of-pearl-handled Derringer that Twinks had whipped out of her sequined reticule. In fact, Blotto’s surprise was probably the greater. In most of their escapades he and his sister had not resorted to firearms. Neither felt that their use was quite ‘playing the game’. It was fair enough to use a firearm knocked out of an adversary’s grasp, but for more general combat Blotto preferred to rely on his trusty cricket bat. He regretted that he didn’t have it with him at that moment. He must remember to pick the thing up from the hotel before embarking on the next stage of their adventure.
And he must remember to ask Twinks why she had resorted to having a Derringer at the ready, though now probably wasn’t the moment.
Umberto didn’t go any further in producing his own gun, but he chuckled lazily and said, ‘You think I’m afraid of that little peashooter.’
‘It may look like a peashooter, but it can still kill you as sure as a bedtime yawn. Don’t forget, Umberto, it was one of these little bellbuzzers that did for your President Lincoln.’
The smile stayed on the Mafioso’s face. ‘Yeah, babe, but you only got two barrels. You shoot that thing at me twice, you miss me twice, you have to reload. Giving me time to draw out my revolver and pump six helpings of lead into your gut.’
‘You wouldn’t do that, you stencher!’ asserted Blotto gallantly. ‘Because I would stand between my sister and the bullets.’
Umberto took this on board. ‘OK, bud. You stand in front of her, I pump three into your gut. You fall down, I pump the other three into hers. Equal rights for men and women, huh?’
Blotto had to admit that this sounded reasonable, but his train of thought was interrupted by Twinks saying, ‘One little thingette you have failed to take account of in your thought-throwing, Umberto, is that if I shoot this little peashooter at you, I won’t miss. And I certainly won’t miss twice.’
Something in the way she spoke gave him pause. He quailed, as he might hav
e done were he facing the Dowager Duchess. And when Twinks ordered Blotto to take his revolver, Umberto did not resist.
‘I’d better put this slug-shifter somewhere safe,’ said Blotto, looking around the carriage.
‘You don’t put it somewhere safe!’ said Twinks, coming as near to exasperation as she ever did with her brother. ‘You cock it and point it at this lump of toadspawn’s head . . .’
‘Tickey-Tockey.’ Her brother did as instructed.
‘. . . so that we can show him we mean business.’
‘Meaning’, said Umberto, whose confidence was clearly returning, ‘that there are now two people to shoot me if I don’t co-operate?’
‘You’re bong on the nose there,’ said Twinks. ‘Give that pony a rosette.’
‘OK.’ The Mafioso was grinning again now. ‘But there’s one – if may use your word, “thingette” – which means I ain’t trembling in my boots too much at the prospect of being filled fuller of holes than a colander by you, and that is that I don’t think either of you would actually pull the trigger.’
‘If you think that,’ said Twinks in a tone of icy defiance, ‘then you’ve plumped for the wrong plum.’
‘Oh yeah?’ He looked coolly at Twinks. ‘You wouldn’t shoot me.’
‘I’d think no more of it than I would of crushing a cockroach under my ballet pump.’
Again he believed her, so he turned the beam of his argument on to what he reckoned to be the weaker partner. ‘How about you, buddy boy? You ever shot anyone in cold blood?’
‘Well, I . . . er . . . um . . .’ Blotto was torn between his desire to support Twinks and his instinct for honesty. ‘Well, not as such.’
Umberto pressed forward his advantage. ‘Have you ever actually fired a gun?’
‘Oh yes, by Denzil. Given an air gun for my second birthday. Bagged twenty rabbits and a hare before I was three. Oh, and a nurserymaid . . . but it was her fault, she stepped in front of the hare.’
‘And shooting in cold blood?’ Umberto persisted.
The conflict within Blotto was expressed in a deep blush as he admitted, ‘No, I wouldn’t shoot anything in cold blood . . . well, except for a partridge, obviously . . . or a pheasant . . . or a stag, come to that. But people, no . . . Not cricket. A boddo has to dig a trench somewhere, you know.’
‘Blotto,’ Twinks hissed, ‘you’re not helping my argument.’
‘No, he isn’t, is he?’ Umberto rose nonchalantly from the table and walked towards them. ‘So I reckon I’m pretty safe. Little Lord Fauntleroy here has admitted he won’t shoot me and you, sugarbabe, you ain’t going to shoot me till you got some information. So I reckon there’s nothing to stop me from stepping out that door, rousing up the rest of the Barolo Brothers and clearing the United States of America of two more undesirable immigrants.’
Blotto made no move to stop him, but as the crook walked past Twinks, she said softly, ‘It just so happens, Umberto me old tea-strainer, that I know everything about the Japanese Theatre Stranglings.’
She hadn’t fired a bullet from her Derringer, but nothing short of that could have stopped him so suddenly in his tracks. His confidence crumbled. He seemed physically to diminish in stature before their eyes. In a cracked voice, he asked, ‘You’re not about to tell the other Barolo Brothers about that, are you?’
‘That rather depends’, replied Twinks evenly, ‘on whether you give me the information I require or not.’
Within two minutes Umberto had told them not only where Mimsy La Pim was being held, but also the fate that was being prepared for her.
‘Larksissimo!’ cried Twinks, as Corky Froggett drove them back to the Hollywood Hotel. ‘Razzy really is a Grade A foundation stone! How he gets that kind of detailed information from his room in St Raphael’s I will never know.’
‘So,’ asked Blotto, ‘what happened in the Japanese Theatre Stranglings? And how was that thimble-jiggler Umberto involved in them?’
‘I haven’t a batsqueak of an idea,’ his sister replied airily, ‘but the fact that Umberto thought I knew turned the tumblers like a good ’un, so everything else is lah-di-dah and pom-pi-pom.’
Blotto could not but agree. Both were in jubilant mood. At last their investigation was getting somewhere. Twinks, who had been becoming jolly bored with being Hollywood’s latest screen sensation, now had a challenge worthy of her planet-sized brain. And, though he didn’t mention it to his sister, Blotto was secretly rather excited about the imminent prospect of seeing Mimsy La Pim again.
But the next stage, Twinks was all too aware, wouldn’t be easy. Though the information they’d got from Umberto represented a huge step forward, they would still have to defeat the full power of the Barolo Brothers to rescue the kidnapped star.
Her brother, though, didn’t have any such qualms. ‘Corky,’ he called out, ‘don’t take us back to the hotel. We’re going to the Barolo Brothers’ HQ!’
‘No, we’re not,’ said Twinks calmly. ‘Corky, drive to the Hollywood Hotel!’
The chauffeur brought the Lagonda to a sedate halt and waited. He had experienced many such differences of opinion between the siblings over the years. He knew that Twinks’s opinion would always eventually hold sway, but he also knew that they had to go through the ritual of an argument before that happy resolution was reached.
‘Well, you may have a pointette, Twinks me old sherry trifle,’ Blotto finally conceded, and Corky Froggett put the car back into gear.
By the time the Lagonda drew up outside the Hollywood Hotel, having firmly rejected Blotto’s suggestions, they – or rather Twinks – had decided their immediate plan of action. She wanted to evaluate what their next step should be, and to do that she needed to spend a couple of hours alone in her suite, basically just thinking. Blotto, aware of his limitations, knew that this was an area where he could contribute little, and so he was happy to accept his sister’s recommendation that he should do a little reconnaissance of the location where the next stage of the drama would be played out. So, with only a minor delay while he fetched his cricket bat from his suite, Blotto returned to the Lagonda and gave Corky directions to their destination.
In both siblings the jubilant mood continued. Whether it would have done had they known about the other dangers that threatened them is not so certain.
23
Exchange of Contracts
The fact was that a lot of people were rather angry with Blotto and Twinks. The cause of the anger in each case was the same: bruised ego. And that was the one part of the Hollywood anatomy that nobody could bruise without anticipating a comeback.
The Mafia ego was equally sensitive.
And there was no denying that Lenny ‘The Skull’ Orvieto’s ego had received a severe battering when he was locked in his own office by some limey swell. What was more, his ego-battering had been witnessed by two of his own men, Giovanni and Giuseppe. That kind of thing didn’t sit well with the self-image – not to mention reputation – of Lenny ‘The Skull’ Orvieto.
True, he’d said he wouldn’t need to come after Blotto because the Barolo Brothers would get him. Which might be true. But the idea of such a resolution stuck in his craw. He, Lenny, was the one who’d been made to look a dumbo. He, Lenny, should be the one to revenge the insult.
He brooded on the matter for some time after he’d had to phone one of his security team to let him out of his office – another indignity, and he wasn’t sure the man had believed the story about him having mislaid his key. (Of course, he could have got out by getting Giovanni and Giuseppe to break the door down, but the place had recently been professionally decorated and Orvieto liked things to look good. He was as dandyish about his environment as he was about his clothes.)
It took only a couple of hours’ brooding before Lenny decided he had to take action. Blotto had not only shamed him personally, he had brought dishonour on the whole Orvieto family. If news of what had happened got around the other Mafia gangs – particularly the Barolo Brothers �
�� his family would become objects of ridicule. Something had to be done. Orvieto summoned Giovanni and Giuseppe.
‘The guy who was just here . . .’ he began.
‘The guy who locked us in?’ suggested Giovanni or Giuseppe.
Their boss winced. There was no need to remind him. But he just nodded, then drew a finger across his throat.
Giovanni and Giuseppe understood. They knew what was required of them. A contract had just been taken out on Blotto’s life.
They would have left straight away to get on with their mission, had not a visitor been announced by their boss’s very pretty (but strictly untouchable) secretary. It was Toni Frangipani.
Giovanni and Giuseppe watched as the two men greeted each other with huge hugs. Their association went back a long way. Indeed, before Frangipani’s career had started, Orvieto had been thinking of getting a foothold in the movie business before the other Mafia gangs muscled in. And he’d decided the best approach would be to develop a Hollywood star who owed all his success to the Orvieto family.
Lenny relied on teenage girl cousins back in the old country to pick the right candidate, trusting that they would know what kind of man turned them on. And they selected a Sicilian itinerant grape-treader called Baldassare Zappacosta, whose attraction to the opposite sex had been validated by at least a dozen unwanted pregnancies.
The young man was shipped over to the States and targeted on Hollywood stardom by all the means the Orvieto family had at their command. The name Baldassare Zappacosta was very quickly replaced by the more euphonious Toni Frangipani. In New York he was taught basic manners and kitted out with an extensive wardrobe. In case he might be feeling amorous, he was introduced to a lot of ‘nice young ladies’ who were ‘nice’ to him as if their lives depended on it (as indeed they did).
When Lenny ‘The Skull’ Orvieto thought the boy was ready, Toni Frangipani was transported to Hollywood. There he attracted the interest of some major producers. (Amazing how easily some people’s interest can be attracted when their families are being threatened.) And he also began to do very well at auditions. (Again, amazing how easy it is to get parts when all the other candidates are found dead in burnt-out cars.)