Commissioner Campbell said he had no reason to believe that the message was a hoax and that he was treating it with ‘the utmost gravity.’ At the same time, he tried to reassure the citizens of Los Angeles that public security precautions had never been so stringent. ‘Not only that, our anti-terrorist teams are very close to making some significant arrests.’
‘You believe that?’ asked Smitty, popping open another beer. They were sitting on the porch, watching the dog rolling on his back on the grass.
Frank shook his head. ‘Two detectives came around to Nevile Strange’s house this afternoon, when I was there. If they’re still asking a psychic for answers, they can’t have any solid evidence, can they? I’m not saying that Nevile’s not a good psychic. In fact, I think he’s probably the best. It’s just that communications from the spirit world are not exactly a substitute for fingerprints and DNA.’
‘You know what I think?’ said Smitty. ‘I think it’s the end of the world as we know it.’
Frank drove back to the Sunset Marquis. When he walked into the lobby, he found Margot waiting for him, alone, looking pale and pinched, her hair wound up in a pale mauve turban.
‘Frank,’ she said, rising to her feet, ‘we really need to talk.’
‘Sure, OK.’ He checked his watch. It was eight minutes of seven. He led her up to his room and opened the door. She walked in and circled around, her eyes flicking from side to side as if she were looking for clues.
‘You want a drink?’ he asked her. ‘I have Chardonnay, Chardonnay or Chardonnay. Or beer.’
‘No thanks. I simply think we need to work out what we’re going to do next.’
‘I don’t know. What do you think we ought to do next?’
‘Frank, we’ve been married for nine years. Doesn’t that count for anything?’
‘Of course it does. But it’s no use pretending that nothing’s happened.’
‘I can forgive you for what happened to Danny, I know I can.’
‘But not yet?’
‘I’m only asking for time, Frank.’
‘I know. And I’m not blaming you. If our positions had been reversed – if it had been you taking Danny to school when that bomb went off – I would probably be feeling exactly the same way that you’re feeling.’
Margot hesitated, then said, ‘The reason I came here today . . . well, I just wanted you to know that in spite of everything I still love you. You talked about divorce, but I don’t want to think that this is going to be the end of us.’
Frank took a half-empty bottle of white wine out of the fridge and poured himself a large glass. ‘I don’t know. I’m beginning to wonder if Danny was all that was holding us together. We’ve been eating at the same table and sleeping in the same bed, but we haven’t been talking to each other very much, have we?’
‘Was our marriage really so bad?’
‘No, it wasn’t. Most of it was great. But maybe we were both changing into different people and because of Danny we didn’t realize how much.’
‘All I want to know is if I made you happy or not.’
‘Jesus, Margot. That’s like coming up to somebody who’s just walked away from a plane crash and asking them if they had a comfortable seat.’
‘I need to know what you’re thinking, Frank. I need to know what you’re intending to do.’
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. Neither does anybody else in Los Angeles, until they catch these terrorists. The way things are going, we’re all going to wind up jobless and bankrupt.’
‘I’m not talking about your work. I’m talking about us.’
Frank thought about that for a while, while Margot waited. He glanced at her but her expression gave very little away. He went over to the balcony door, slid it open, and stood in the marmalade-colored light of the setting sun. Eventually he turned back to her and said, ‘Nevile did another séance for me. He talked to Danny, and Danny said that I should try to start a new life.’
‘He talked to Danny and Danny said that?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You don’t really believe that Danny would want us to separate, do you?’
Frank didn’t have time to answer. The door opened and Astrid came in, wearing dark glasses, a buckskin jacket and a tight white tube dress.
‘Oh! I’m sorry!’ she said when she saw Margot.
Margot turned back to Frank. ‘I think I might have made a fool of myself.’
‘Of course you haven’t. This is Astrid, she was at The Cedars, too.’
‘We’ve already met, thank you. I’d better be going.’
‘Margot, if you want to talk tomorrow . . .’
‘No, Frank. I don’t think I do. I obviously came here to ask you a redundant question.’
He felt irritable that evening. It wasn’t just Margot; it was Astrid, too. He took her for pollo a tegame at Tony Ascari’s but she ate hardly anything. She seemed twitchy and upset and she kept looking around the restaurant as if she were expecting to see somebody she didn’t want to see.
‘This is not to the lady’s taste?’ asked Marco, the head waiter, when their plates were collected.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Astrid. ‘Just not hungry, I guess.’
‘So what’s wrong?’ Frank asked her. ‘You haven’t eaten anything and you’ve hardly said two words since we came here.’
‘Nothing’s wrong, OK?’
‘So what did you do today? Did somebody upset you?’
‘I went to Venice and met some friends, that’s all.’
‘Venice?’
‘That’s right. We had pizza at Tomato UFO.’
‘Oh . . . That accounts for you not being hungry. You should have said.’
He held her hand over the red checkered tablecloth. He couldn’t see her eyes because of her dark glasses; all he could see was two swiveling candle flames. But he still found her as arousing as cat’s fur stroked backward – not only because of her perfume, not only because of the way she looked, but because she had lied to him. She hadn’t gone to Venice to meet friends. She had gone to Star-TV, and why? To meet the man who had beaten her so badly? To be beaten again? To tell him how much she hated him?
That night, when they went to bed, he was even more sexually charged than she was. They struggled and fought, but he gripped her wrists to prevent her from twisting herself free, and then he pushed himself into her, inch by inch, and kept himself there, as deep as he could possibly go.
‘That hurts,’ she gasped, her hair bedraggled, her cheek slippery with sweat.
‘Lies hurt, too.’
‘Lies? What lies? What are you talking about?’
‘Lies like, “I went to Venice to meet my friends, that’s all. And we all had pizza at Tomato UFO.”’
‘Why should you care?’
‘Because I do. Especially when you come back covered with bruises.’
‘You don’t own me, Frank.’
‘I never said that I did. But I don’t like to see you being hurt.’
‘You mean you don’t like to see me being hurt by another man. It’s all right if you do it.’
Frank eased himself out of her. Immediately she wrapped the sheet tightly around herself and rolled over to the other side of the bed. ‘You shit,’ she said, her voice muffled.
He tried to put his arm around her but she slapped him away. In the end he turned his back to her and tried to get some sleep. It took him two or three hours, because the musician with the beaky nose was playing Bruce Springsteen songs at top volume, and somebody was having a party around the pool, and screaming like a horror movie.
In the very dead of night, he was woken by something touching his cheek. He thought it was a mosquito at first – he had heard one mizzling around the room before he fell asleep. He flapped his hand to brush it away, and then he pulled up the sheet so that it covered his face. He didn’t want to wake up in the morning covered in bites.
But he had been lying there for only a minute or two longer bef
ore the sheet was slowly pulled down again. He opened his eyes, his skin shrinking with alarm. The bedroom was dark, but there was sufficient light for him to see that somebody was standing close beside the bed, looking down at him. A child, with its eyes glittering in the gloom.
‘Daddy hurt me.’
Jesus, it was Danny. Frank lay there and stared at him, not daring to move.
‘Daddy hurt me.’
‘It wasn’t my fault, Danny,’ Frank replied. He had to clear his throat because he had been sleeping on his back. ‘It was a bomb, Danny. I didn’t know that you’d been injured. There was no way for me to tell.’
‘He beat me and then he said he was sorry and then he made me do all those bad things.’
‘Danny, I didn’t beat you and I never made you do anything bad. You know that.’
The figure continued to stare at him. As his eyes gradually grew accustomed to the darkness, he could make out of Danny’s mop-top haircut and his pale, triangular face. God, he looked so much like Margot.
‘He beat me and he made me do all those bad things. But I loved him. I loved him so much. Afterward he used to cry and say that he was sorry and that he was never going to hurt me again.’
Frank eased himself up into a sitting position. Beside him, Astrid stayed deeply asleep, breathing softly and evenly as if she were crossing the universe in the cargo ship Nostromo. He was frightened, because his dead son had appeared in his bedroom in the middle of the night, but his fear was equaled by his urgent need to know why. If he didn’t find out why, he felt that something catastrophic was going to happen to him, and everybody around him.
‘Danny . . . I didn’t beat you, did I? And I never hurt you in any other way?’
‘Daddy hurt me.’
Frank reached out into the darkness. ‘Here . . . take my hand.’
‘Daddy hurt me. He beat me and he made me do all those bad things.’
‘Take my hand,’ Frank insisted. Hesitantly, the figure held out its right hand. ‘Come on, there’s nothing to be scared of.’
Frank leaned forward and took hold of the child’s hand, but the instant he touched it he recoiled in horror. It wasn’t a child’s hand at all. It was soft, but it was a woman’s hand, with long fingernails, and a ring.
He sat there staring at the figure, wide eyed, breathing as quickly as if he had been running. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘You have to tell me who you are.’
‘I’m not allowed to.’
‘You can tell me. I won’t let anybody know that it was you.’
The figure said nothing, but stayed where it was. The first light of dawn was beginning to appear through the drapes, and the figure was slowly becoming clearer. There was no question that it looked like Danny, but it was wearing soiled yellow pajamas with pictures of marching teddy bears all over them. Danny had never worn pajamas like that.
‘You’re not Danny, are you?’ asked Frank.
Astrid stirred. ‘Don’t. Not tonight,’ she said. Frank looked across at her, and when he looked back, the figure had vanished.
He sat up for over twenty minutes, waiting to see if it would reappear, but the drapes grew lighter and lighter, and it was obvious that the figure had gone for good.
In a strange way, Frank was reassured that it wasn’t Danny. He didn’t like to think of Danny wandering around the spirit world, lost and confused and dressed in dirty clothes. But at the same time, he needed to know why it had chosen to appear as Danny, and where the real Danny was, and if he was at peace.
He eased himself out of bed and went into the kitchen for a drink of orange juice, straight out of the carton, so cold that it made his palate ache. It was only then, though, that it occurred to him that Danny had appeared to him without Nevile’s assistance. No séance, no deep concentration, nothing. The figure had just materialized of its own accord.
He went back to bed and found Astrid waiting for him with her eyes open. ‘What time is it?’ she asked him.
‘Five after five.’
‘Couldn’t you sleep?’
He slapped the pillows and settled back under the sheets. ‘Bad dream, that’s all.’
They lay in silence for a while and then Astrid propped herself up on one elbow and kissed him lightly on the lips. ‘I might lie to you, Frank, but I’ll never hurt you.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Sometimes the truth is much too painful to bear. Sometimes lying is a kindness.’
‘So wherever you went yesterday . . . you think it’s better if I don’t know?’
‘Do you still love your Margot?’
‘What does that have to do with the price of pork bellies?’
‘I just want to know if you’re lying to yourself. You can’t give me a hard time for lying to you, if you lie to yourself, too.’
Eighteen
When Astrid left the hotel that morning, Frank followed her again. This time her taxi took her along Sunset Boulevard to Beverly Glen, and up into the winding lanes of Bel Air, among the fragrant flowers and the gilded security gates of Hollywood’s wealthiest homes. The sky was streaked with mares’ tails, as if a change in the weather was coming.
Astrid’s taxi stopped outside the gates of a large white Gone with the Wind-style house. It was mostly hidden from the road, but Frank could see a lofty pillared portico and a green copper dome with a weather vane on top of it, pointing to the west. The steeply sloping gardens were laid out with flowering rose bushes and fountains made of grinning stone dolphins and bosomy mermaids. The taxi driver spoke into the intercom beside the gates and after a few seconds they swung open electronically and the taxi drove in. Frank cruised slowly past, and then turned his car around and cruised slowly back again. He parked about fifty yards down the road, and waited.
The taxi reappeared only two or three minutes later. Frank climbed out of his car and flagged it down. The taxi driver put down his window. He was pockmarked, with a droopy moustache, and a rosary wrapped around his fist like a knuckle duster.
‘Want to do me a favor?’ asked Frank. He produced his Fox-TV business card and handed it over. ‘Did you ever hear of The Beverly Hillbillies?’
‘Are you kidding me?’
‘Well, we’re planning to remake it, with Steve Martin playing Jed and Pamela Anderson as Elly May. I’m looking for locations, see, and this particular house looks like it could just about fill the bill. You don’t happen to know who owns it, do you?’
The taxi driver shook his head. ‘I can’t give you that information, man. That’s privileged.’
‘You’re a taxi driver, for Christ’s sake, not a gynaecologist. Look, how about a finder’s fee?’
He opened his billfold and held up twenty dollars. It was snatched so fast that he didn’t even see where it went.
‘Charles Lasser,’ said the taxi driver. He started off, but immediately jammed his brakes on. ‘You know, Charles Lasser?’ Then he sped away.
Frank stood outside the gates looking up at the house. So Astrid had gone to visit Charles Lasser, the owner of Star-TV. That really confused him. Why would a girl like her visit a man like him? Could they be lovers? Worse, could Astrid be a prostitute? That would certainly account for her reluctance to tell him anything about herself.
Yet, if she was a prostitute, why did she keep on coming back to his bed, every night? Maybe Charles Lasser was the man who was beating her, and she needed somebody to turn to, somebody who was sympathetic and gentle and wouldn’t judge her.
Whether she was a prostitute or not, Frank didn’t have to ask himself what Astrid might find attractive about an ugly, domineering bully like Charles Lasser. A private Boeing 767, for a start, and a 250-foot yacht, and houses in five different countries. Frank knew the wives and mistresses of too many famous actors and too many heavyweight studio bosses, and he knew how much humiliation they were prepared to take to stay within the glittering circle. As Mo had once put it, ‘They would rather eat shit, these ladies, than lose that lifestyle, and I know o
ne who actually has, and dressed herself up in pink silk and pearls to do it.’
Frank drove to the cemetery to visit Danny’s grave. He stood beside it for almost fifteen minutes, his hair flapping in the breeze.
‘Danny?’ he whispered. No answer, of course, only the distant drone of a plane circling around Burbank airport.
‘I wish you’d talk to me, Danny. I just want to know that you’re not too unhappy; and that you’ve found yourself some friends. I can’t bear to think of you being lonely.’
He was about to leave when he became aware of a young man standing not far away, wearing dark glasses and a worn-out leather jacket. The young man had black spiky hair and he was standing with his arms folded as if he were waiting for somebody. As Frank walked past him, he said, ‘You’re one of them, aren’t you?’
Frank stopped. ‘You talking to me?’
‘That’s right. I said, you’re one of them, aren’t you? One of the liars.’
‘Whatever you say,’ Frank replied and carried on walking. He hadn’t gone far, though, before he realized that the young man was following him. He stopped again, and the young man stopped, too. He carried on walking and the young man came after him. Eventually Frank turned around and said, ‘Listen, I don’t know what you’re selling, but I’m not interested.’
The young man smiled. ‘I’m not selling anything, Frank, not the way you do. I don’t sell lies and impossible dreams. I don’t sell hope when I know that there isn’t any.’
‘How do you know my name?’
‘What does that matter? You’re one of the liars, that’s all that counts. You’re one of the moneychangers, in the temple of truth, and just like Our Lord we’re going to drive you out.’
‘Listen,’ said Frank, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, and frankly I don’t want to know. I came here to visit my son’s grave and I’d appreciate it if you’d show us some respect – me and him, both.’
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