Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  He opened the door to Jack Best, who did in fact appear ill and unhappy.

  “Jack, baby,” he said cheerfully, “what’s this we hear about the choreographer at the Sands?”

  “Ah,” Jack muttered biliously. “Dumb gag.”

  “I didn’t even know the Sands had a line,” Patty Drogue said.

  “It doesn’t,” her husband assured her. “Would you like a drink, Jack?”

  Jack Best mastered a slight spasm of his jaw. Patty hastened to fix a whiskey and soda for him.

  “Dumb gag,” he said. He took the drink from Mrs. Drogue and swallowed half of it. “One too many.”

  “So what do you want here, Jack? Where’s your camera?”

  Best finished his drink and looked lugubriously about the room. His eyes were bright with the squamous resentment of an old snapping turtle.

  “We got trouble,” he said. He was holding a magazine in his hand. He opened it to reveal a photograph that had been inserted between its pages. He put the magazine aside and clutched the photograph to his breast. Everyone in the room looked at it.

  “Run along, my dear,” old Drogue said kindly to Joy. “I’ll join you very shortly.” As Joy left pouting, the old man blew her a kiss.

  “I can’t believe,” Patty Drogue said, “that you talk to her like that.”

  “What’s the pic, Jack?” young Drogue asked.

  Best looked from father to son in a state of agitation. He showed his teeth like a frightened pony.

  “Miss Verger,” Jack said. “And that Walker. They been shacked up all day.”

  The Drogues, father and son, exchanged glances.

  “Yeah?” young Drogue asked. “So what?”

  Best tried to hand his picture to the old man. His son intercepted it.

  “Walker been mistreating you, Jack?” young Drogue asked, turning the picture face up. “He’s such a troublesome guy.”

  He looked down at the picture for some time. His wife came to look at it over his shoulder.

  “Golliwilkins,” she said. “Gag me with a spoon. And I was so reassuring to poor Lionel.”

  The photographs were sunlit shots of Lu Anne and Walker naked in bed. Walker was holding a small shiny rectangle while Lu Anne sniffed at its surface through a drinking straw.

  Young Drogue handed the picture to his father.

  “So what’s this, Jack? A handout?”

  “They got a whole bunch like this,” the aged publicist croaked urgently. “It’s a shakedown.” He turned rather desperately to old Drogue. “Right, Wally? Like when Eddie Ritz had those pictures of Mitch? That’s what it’s like.”

  Drogue senior looked from the picture to his old friend. He shook his head sadly, put the print down and walked out of the bungalow.

  Finding himself abandoned to the rising generation of Drogues, Jack Best began to shake. The ice in his glass tinkled audibly.

  Young Drogue watched him with a bemused smile.

  “This is odd,” he told his wife. “I think these were taken very recently. I think they were taken here. On our very own location.”

  “It’s a shakedown,” Jack Best croaked.

  “I see,” young Walter Drogue said. “What shall we do, Jack? I mean, I’ve heard of these things happening in the business. But I’ve never actually encountered it until now.”

  Jack cleared his throat. He looked from side to side in a conspiratorial fashion.

  Drogue put a cupped hand to the side of his mouth.

  “You can talk here, Jack,” he whispered. “Right, Patty?”

  “Righto,” Patty Drogue whispered back.

  “It was Madriaga,” Jack told him. Madriaga was the jefe of the unit’s Mexican teamsters, a vicious clownish former policeman. “He come up to me. He was a cop, you see. They went to him. The ones that took the shots. He come to me. They want five big ones. Or they put it out. The reporter that’s here. They would give it to him. And around. Europe. England and France. Worldwide. It’s like before. You could ask your father. When Eddie Ritz had these pictures of Mitch.”

  “Bless my soul, Jack,” Drogue said, “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.” He turned to his wife. “Can you, dear?”

  Patty shook her head. “I liked it, though. I liked it when he said five Big Ones.”

  “What are Big Ones, Jack?” Drogue asked.

  “A grand,” Jack said urgently. “A thou.” His voice rose in panic. “A thousand dollars.”

  Drogue took Jack’s empty glass from his unsteady hand.

  “Jack,” Walter Drogue junior said, “that’s blackmail. Who would do such a thing? Not someone on our set? Not one of our own?”

  Best began to titter and chatter in an almost simian fashion.

  “Plenty of them. They ain’t got any—they don’t care anymore. They treat you like dirt. Just look around. They ain’t no good, Walter. They’ll make bad publicity. Shit where they eat.”

  “I’m no good at this,” Drogue said dejectedly. “I can’t even follow you. What do we have to do, Jack? Will it involve telling Charlie? Will I have to give you money?”

  “I could tell you,” Jack stammered, “if you ask your old man. I can handle them. Shakedown artists. I got ways. Like when they had Mitch’s picture.”

  “Maybe we should call the police,” Patty Drogue suggested.

  “The inside of a Mexican jail,” Drogue said with hearty indignation. “That’s the place for these dirty blackmailers. How about that, Jack?”

  “No,” Jack said.

  “No?” Young Drogue picked up the wireless house telephone on one of his bookshelves and began to dial. “You think not, Jack? Think we should pass on that one? A no-no?” When he had finished dialing, he picked up a pen and began doodling on a note pad.

  “No cops,” Jack said. “I mean, Mexican cops? I mean, you’d gotta be crazy. You gotta leave it to me.” He stared at the futuristic telephone receiver in young Drogue’s hand. “I can handle it.”

  “How would you do it, Jack?” He looked angrily at the wireless phone receiver. He had not obtained a connection. “Fucking thing,” he muttered. The sight of his unhappy public relations adviser seemed to soothe him. “Would you do it like they did it before Marty? Would you do it like they did it before sound?”

  “Hey, Wally,” Jack said, “Walter—I never worked before sound, Walter. My first picture was with Dick Powell. That was sound.”

  Drogue was dialing again.

  “Axelrod?” he said into the phone. “Put him on.”

  Jack turned to Patty Drogue. “Dick Powell,” he said.

  Drogue sat waiting for Axelrod’s response, holding the miniature receiver in a clenched fist beneath his chin. Jack Best began to stare at the device with such intensity that the young director’s attention was diverted.

  “Did you want to see this, Jack?” he asked kindly.

  In his confusion and haste to be agreeable, Jack nodded eagerly. He reached out for the sleek receiver with such gleeful anticipation that it was possible to see why he had once been called Smilin’ Jack Best. At the last moment Drogue withdrew it from the old man’s soiled grasping reach.

  “It’s a telephone, Jack,” he snarled. Jack cringed. “Axelrod!” he said into the receiver. “I got this grotesque situation to cope with. You want to give me a hand?” He looked at Best. “A man’s supposed to be an artist,” he said ill-temperedly. “Instead you end up as a carny boss.”

  Jack Best could not reply. His face was trapped in the rigor of his own smile. No matter how hard he attempted to disengage his features from their merry aspect, he was unable to do so. He turned from the young director to the latter’s wife. Patty twinkled back at him. She was holding a Polaroid Instamatic. Rising, she stalked the publicist.

  “Now, Jack,” she cooed, “we’ll see what you really truly look like.”

  Jack wrenched his jaw into motion.

  “Chrissakes,” he protested. “I seen it was a phone, Walter. I mean, chrissakes. I think my glasses
… my specs … I seen it was a phone, Walter.”

  Now the Drogues inclined together, watching for images of Jack Best to form on the blank print. They seemed rapt.

  “When a thing fits in your hand,” Jack explained, “you gotta be sharp. Like the pics. You aren’t sharp, they’ll kick your teeth in. I know, Walter, because I been there. They say—he’s a nice fella and they eat you alive. Walter? Am I right or wrong?”

  “Ooh,” Patty Drogue said, “there he is, the old scamp.” She tore free the Polaroid print of Jack’s photograph and handed it to him. Jack looked down into his own smiling face.

  “Walter,” he said. “Honest to God, I dealt with the roughest and toughest, and the good of the organization was all that mattered to me. You could ask your father. It was dog cat dog. Murder. A jungle.” He set the ghastly picture of himself on the shelf beside the strange little telephone. Beside it was the pad on which young Drogue had been doodling. On the pad he read the words: “Five Beeg Wons.” He began to weep.

  Patty Drogue leveled the Instamatic at him, giving no quarter.

  “You shouldn’t,” Jack said. He raised his hands to cover his face but she made the shot. Jack fought for breath.

  “It was …” he tried to say. “It was …”

  Patty lowered her camera and ran at him. She thrust her face into his. Her voice, when she spoke, was a comic rasp.

  “It was money talks—before Marty!” she growled. “It was bullshit walks—before sound!”

  She stepped back and pulled out the print of her latest snapshot.

  “Oh, see!” she cried as the print came into composition. She showed it to her husband triumphantly as though she were vindicating her position in some point under dispute. “See how he looks?”

  Instead of looking at the picture, Drogue looked directly at the cringing man.

  “He looks,” the young director said, “like Abbott and Costello are waiting for him.”

  A brisk alarming triple knock sounded against the bungalow door. The sound was muted and urgent and had nothing of good news about it.

  Walker had been reading New York Arts on the patio while Lu Anne slept. He put the magazine aside and opened the door to Axelrod.

  “You’re a stupid fuck,” the unit manager told him.

  Walker was taken aback. Openings like Axelrod’s usually presaged a narrative of nights forgotten, and he was quite certain that he could account for the entire period since his arrival.

  “Look at this,” Axelrod said, and handed him an envelope of photographs. When he had looked at them, he went back to the patio table where he had been reading and sat back down. Axelrod followed him.

  “Taken today, right, Gordon?”

  “No question.”

  “You never heard of shades?”

  Walker looked out to sea. A darkening cloud bank hovered on the horizon, supporting a gorgeous half rainbow.

  “Basic precautions, Gordon,” Axelrod said in an aggrieved tone. “A little discretion. You think you have nothing but friends around here?”

  “I thought you got to do everything and they didn’t care anymore.”

  “Did you, Gordon? I got news for you. Even today there are things you don’t do. You don’t snort in your front window with the shades up. If you do you can find yourself in a seven-million-dollar production without a dime’s worth of insurance. If our insurers, Gordon—you listening to me? If our insurers had these pictures they would cancel our insurance forthwith and this thing could close down today.”

  “That’s a worst-case scenario. Is it not?”

  “Gordon, Gordon,” Axelrod said with a mirthless smile, “this could have been a bad case. Remember Wright’s picture for Famous? Coke on the set? There was a corporate crisis in New York at Con Intel. The stockholders went apeshit. And it’s not only a matter of insurance. There’s a theory around that ripped people make lousy movies.”

  “Lu Anne’s asleep,” Walker said. He rested his cheekbones on his fists and looked down at the uppermost print. “They’re in color,” he said. “That’s far out.”

  “What did you think, asshole? That they’d have a black border? Look at yourself. You look like a vampire.”

  Walker found the image troubling.

  “The drinking straw came out nice. Like a little barber pole.” He looked up at Axelrod. “Who took them?”

  “Jack Best.”

  Walker nodded. “I thought it might have been Jack. Trying to relive his heroic past.”

  “He used to get pictures back for us all the time. If you wanted pictures back you went to him. Half the time he probably set the people up.”

  “I was teasing him a little.”

  “You were stepping on his balls a little. He claimed his principals wanted five thousand dollars. Depression prices. So I went over and yelled at him and he folded up.”

  “Didn’t Walter believe him?”

  “Only an idiot would have believed him. You could see his mind work through the holes in his head.”

  “It’s sad,” Walker said. “I mean, he taught me how to read a racing form. I’m really sorry.”

  “He was some schemer,” Axelrod said dreamily. “He got back those famous pictures of Mitchell Drummond and the kid. What’s-his-name who was the child actor that O.D.’d last year. That was his greatest number. He knew all the mob guys and all the cops.”

  “Really sad,” Walker said. “Poor Jack. Tell him he can take my picture any time he wants but I wish he’d leave my friends alone.”

  “He’s finished, Gordon. He’s going where Winchell and Kilgallen went.”

  “A tragedy,” Walker said. “Do we have all the pictures back?”

  “He says he put one print under Dongan Lowndes’s door. Seemed kind of funny.”

  “It’s a riot. Confidential closed, so he takes them to New York Arts. Van Epp can run them next to Nelson Eddy goosing chorines.”

  “It makes no sense,” Axelrod said. “So I thought, well, he’s senile, he’s out of it …”

  “Do we have to worry about what Lowndes thinks of us?” Walker asked. “He’s supposed to be a gentleman. He’ll give us the picture back.”

  “Gordon,” Axelrod said, “let me tell you something that’s also funny. I just tossed the gentleman’s room again. I went through his gear as completely as I could without leaving traces. The print’s not there.”

  “Maybe Jack was lying.”

  “I don’t think so.” Axelrod took a chair in the shade. “I think Lowndes has it. If he was going to give it back he would have done it by now.”

  “That’s not very nice of him,” Walker said. “But then he isn’t very nice, is he?”

  “Not in my opinion. In my opinion he’s a smart prick.”

  “He’s worse than that,” Walker said. “He’s an unhappy writer.”

  Axelrod mixed himself a drink from the setup on the umbrella-shaded table beside him.

  “It’s not good,” he said. “These shots kick around—sooner or later they end up in print.”

  Walker watched the sea-borne rainbow fade into blue-gray cloud.

  “It wouldn’t hurt this picture,” Axelrod went on. “It wouldn’t help you much. But I wouldn’t think it could hurt you much either.”

  “People would get the impression I take drugs.” He turned toward the bungalow’s bedroom window. The blinds were closed. “But Lu Anne may be in a divorce court presently.”

  “Careerwise also,” Axelrod said. “If it got around that in addition to her other problems she had this—you understand me.”

  “We should really get the print back,” Walker said.

  “Definitely. We should talk to Lowndes. We should get him to do the right thing. I mean,” Axelrod asked, “why should he want to keep it?”

  “They’re such depressing pictures,” Walker said, raising one with his thumb and forefinger.

  “Some things you do,” Axelrod observed, “you don’t want to see yourself doing them.”

  Wal
ker stared at the picture and shook his head in disgust.

  “She caught me with it,” he explained. “It’s very hard to say no to Lu Anne.”

  “I know that, Gordon. I understand.”

  “You know what they say about her, Axelrod? They say her pictures don’t make money and she has no luck with men.”

  “I’ve heard that said about her, Gordon.” He finished his drink and pushed the glass away. “She needed that doctor. He could say no to her.”

  “It’s very irritating, Lowndes keeping that picture. What a cheap stunt!”

  “No class,” Axelrod said. “No self-respect.”

  Walker looked out to sea.

  “Of course, it might make a good lead,” Walker said, “if he was writing a certain kind of story.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m writing for New York Arts,” Walker said. “Here’s my lead: On the third day after my arrival at The Awakening’s Bahía Honda location, a package arrived at my feet having been slid under my bungalow door. Naturally I assumed it contained the daily trades … ha-ha, jape, flourish et cetera. Imagine my—and so forth—when upon opening it I find it to contain a photograph of two of the principal artists naked in bed, apparently in the act of scoffing I know not what, tooting up, coke and the movies, sordidness and blackmail, hurray for Hollywood, movies as metaphor, crazy California, decline of the West, ad astra ad nauseam! You like my lead?”

  “It’s a colorful lead. Is there more?”

  “Yes,” Walker said, “there’s more. There’s effect. Charlie Freitag—the movies’ answer to Bernard Berenson, the only man in California off the Redlands University campus who wears a bow tie—is deeply hurt. He subscribes to New York Arts. His wife subscribes, his gardener, the people next door across the canyon. His high-class flick is getting the mondo-bizarro treatment in his very favorite magazine. Sun Pix is pissed off at him. Amalgamated Can is pissed off at Sun Pix. It’s a litigious age. Van Epp is scared stiff. He calls in Lowndes … Did you make this up, Dongo? A literal Dutch uncle. The novelist’s—the former novelist’s—mouth is wreathed in a putrid smile. He reaches under his cape. Observe the snap, mynheer Van Epp.”