Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  She trailed away in a swirl of dogs. Curious, thought Norah, coming back around to the porch steps in time to see her disappear into the house. The presence of strangers had had Buttercreme hiding in the kitchen all day in a state of mortified offense, yet now, in spite of Mr. Shang, all three Pekes were trotting happily at her heels.

  “Mr. Shang,” she said, holding out her hand, which the old man took in one of his twisted ones. “I think perhaps you owe us an explanation of your behavior at the theater last night.”

  The old man hesitated, and she saw the crippled hand flinch slightly on the polished wood of his staff. “Please forgive an old man’s unfamiliarity with the customs of your land, Mrs. Blackstone. I have explained to Miss Flamande already that it was necessary that I speak with her about replacing your gardener Felipe so that I might not startle or upset her when I arrived today instead of he.”

  His throat-cutting gesture flashed briefly through her mind, but somehow she knew he’d only deny it. “And why has Felipe been obliged to quit his job with us?”

  “He is ill.” He spoke calmly, as Brown had spoken his lies, but she felt for one instant that he was afraid. “If you wish, you may telephone him.”

  Christine’s wailing voice could be heard from the hall within: “...honestly, Emily, it’s just left me prostrate.” Emily Violet was her female costar in the new picture, a sweet-faced would-be Pickford. “Will you be at Flindy’s party tomorrow night? Oh, screw your mother. Darling, I can’t tell you. Police, and reporters, and me without hardly any makeup on at all and the gardener quitting and my head just splitting from Frank’s gin last night. What? Well, you can get away from her on the set Monday...”

  It was a good bet, thought Norah, that nobody was going to have access to that phone until Flindy returned, and men Christine would have other things on her mind.

  Mr. Shang bowed again and descended the steps. Norah remained where she was for a moment, then turned abruptly and strode into the shadows of the house. Christine was just hanging up the phone, her hands shaky with exhaustion but her eyes suspiciously bright.

  “Christine, are you aware that Mr. Shang was the man who tried to...?”

  “Of course, darling, of course, he’s already explained that to me.” Earpiece in hand, she was already dialing again. “God knows how I’m going to get through the rest of the evening; I’m absolutely pillaged. Be a dear and get me my gin, will you. I left it around here somewhere.”

  The glass—which smelled like no gin Norah had ever encountered—stood on the edge of a side table enameled with gaudily colored dragons. Norah picked it up but, instead of carrying it immediately to Christine in the hall, walked instead to the breakfast room windows once more.

  Below her she saw Shang Ko holding aside the dark branches of the oleanders as she had done. He released them, and as he stepped back, Norah could almost swear that it was fear that she saw in his face. He hurried away down the hill toward the drive and the semidetached rooms behind the garage that were to be his, and though he leaned on his staff, he moved swiftly, as if in haste to put distance between himself and some dreadful thing.

  What was it? she wondered. What could have made those marks? For although there had been no tracks in the crusty earth beneath the oleanders, the stones of the house’s foundation and the stucco above them had been marked everywhere with fresh scratches, pale on the stone and deep enough to chip and tear the stucco. Huge scratches, ten or twelve inches long, as if the corner of the house had been gnawed in the night by impossible teeth.

  SIX

  MOUNTAIN OVER HEAVEN

  It is auspicious not to dine at home...

  Where there is danger, it is better to stop

  before you get into trouble...

  “HE STAND WITHIN arch of balcony, beholding you as if you were first woman created, and he, first man, in your presence for very first time. You look up from pomegranate you are eating—you see him—you know he is yours, body and soul.”

  “You want to hit that with a baby?” Alec put an eye to the range finder on the side of his camera and adjusted the focal length of the lens. Above swags of shimmering silk, gilded bull faces with their wise eyes and curly beards, and slender pilasters festooned with white chrysanthemums like slightly wilted eiderdown puffs, illusion ended abruptly in a mangle of rafters, catwalks, wiring, and spiderwebs; Los Angeles had more spiders than anyplace Norah had ever seen. Below that line, sharp as if cut with a rule, the queen of Babylon’s bedroom was if not perfect, at least impressive, thick with plaster copies of items Norah recognized from the Assyrian collections of the British Museum and glittering with iridescent paints.

  While the cameraman directed a single lance of moonlight from the smallest spotlight to fall on the curtained bed, Chrysanda Flamande disposed herself languidly among the cushions and drew up one flawless thigh and dimpled knee. “Like this?”

  “Wonderful, wonderful, mon ange.” Mikos Hraldy bustled into the shot line, a prissy, balding man with a smug expression and a receding hairline, clothed in baggy knickerbockers and a very expensive sweater. “Foot a little further forward... comme ça! And hair so, to lie upon shoulder.” Amid the augmented curls, raven flowers cascading over alabaster, the three white moons of her necklace reflected the ersatz limmerance. Hraldy sculpted with his fingers the shadows of the draperies and checked the results with Alec as they shifted the emphasis of the lights with reflecters and screens until the result had the intricate, oddly formal sensuality of a Doré engraving.

  The director turned to look about for Blake Fallon, the square-chinned, blue-eyed hero/victim of the seduction, and Alec went back to adjusting the play of the film in the shutter. A dark backdrop of flat house tops and stars could be glimpsed past a screen of artistically placed palmetto and banana leaves. The lesser Ned—Ned Divine, in suspenders and shirtsleeves—continued to pick chrysanthemums out of a bucket at his side and tie them to every column in sight, incongruous as a janitor at a society wedding.

  Oiled body naked to the waist, Blake Fallon stepped through the archway like a farmer entering a dry-goods store and did a double take that would have embarrassed Snub Pollard.

  Norah winced and returned to watching Alec.

  Filming motion pictures, she had learned in her first week as Christine’s dog minder and lady-in-waiting, was rather like writing a book: it took a great deal of time to produce something that was all over in an hour and a half. In many ways it reminded her of Jim’s description of life on the front; long periods of utter tedium broken by brief flurries of activity. Except, of course, one wasn’t knee-deep in mud, tormented by rats, or picking maggots out of one’s tea sandwiches. Where the hissing klieg lights didn’t raise the temperature to oven proportions, the vast stage was freezing cold, smelling of hot metal and dust; on the other side of Queen Vashti’s bedroom wall a voice could be heard saying, “Come on, Larry, for Chrissakes! You guys just found out that thing you’re locked in the cellar with is a bomb! You and Jerry just gonna sit there lookin’ at it?” In a quiet corner between an Assyrian bull and a spare throne, the three musicians—piano, flute, and violin—warmed up with snatches of Swan Lake.

  It was Monday morning in Hollywood.

  Christine, gamely vamping and pouting under the glare of the lights, looked surprisingly well, considering how suddenly she had been taken ill the previous night. Norah tried to believe that it was a fortuitous bout of fever, a last fillip of Saturday’s hangover compounded by the shock of hearing the news about young Mr. Pelletier, and the late hour to which Saturday night’s séance had run.

  Yet something about it bothered her. What, she could not precisely say, except that Mr. Shang had told Christine two or three times in the course of Sunday she should not go to Flindy’s party Sunday night, an opinion with which Norah, familiar with the red-haired star’s habit of mixing bootleg gin, fast cars, and cocaine, heartily concurred.

  “Good heavens, Mr. Shang, you sound like my mother!” Christine had exclaimed
finally, still smiling but with a dangerous glint in her eye. “Or like that dreadful Never-Never woman with all her nonsense about reincarnation and bean sprouts.”

  True to Alec’s prediction, the seance Saturday night—which had concluded with a “metaphysical dance to pacify the spirits”—had resulted in a diagnosis of an unhappy spirit in the astral plane, in this case the spirit of Chrysanda Flamande’s deceased fiancé, the Comte d’Este. Since the unfortunate comte was wholly the creation of Mr. Fishbein and Colossus Studios’ publicity department, Norah had been less than impressed with Nadi Nefuru-Aten’s divinatory skills. Sitting at the top of the porch steps, watching the clumsy trippings and swirlings of the three adepts to the wheezings of a double flute—Christine’s offer of the gramophone having been refused—and smelling the smoke of the cigarettes Christine and Flindy passed back and forth between them, Norah had been highly aware of the raw-boned shadow of Mr. Shang half-hidden in the oleanders, the moonlight glimmering on the carved dragon of his staff.

  “Although I was interested to hear I’d been a Chinese princess in a former incarnation,” Christine went on, Sunday afternoon. “You know, I’ve always felt that I should have been born in the imperial palaces of China.”

  Shang Ko had moved his flat shoulder beneath a sackful of leaves. “I think you would find it different than you believe,” he said gravely, but his eyes twinkled.

  “I suppose, but I do like Chinese food. Though I don’t imagine they’d let princesses have gin, and they didn’t have chocolate, did they? And the one time I tried opium, all I got was a headache. But Flindy was so sweet yesterday, and she says she’s inviting that darling old millionaire Mr. Conklin to her party, and everybody’s dying to hear about Charlie, so I’m going to go. I’m a big girl, and I can take care of myself, you know.”

  Privately, Norah had her doubts. The conversation had taken place in midafternoon in the garden between rain showers, and despite nearly two hours of work on her makeup and hair, Christine still looked exhausted. Her interview had made the second page of the Times (“I know Mr. Brown told me whether it was Charlie’s mother or father who’s ill, but I’ve been so shocked, so horrified by this dreadful event, I can’t even recall which it was!”), and the photo was a masterpiece of soul-seared sensuality. Kiss of Darkness, Sawdust Rose, and She-Devil of Babylon were all duly mentioned.

  The arrival of Frank Brown and a second contingent of reporters later Sunday afternoon had forstalled a proposed expedition to view the site of the murder. By the time Brown had eaten lunch, kissed Christine, severely vetoed the party at Flindy’s, and gone, Christine had had quite enough of being told what she could and could not do.

  “Now, I’m going to change clothes and get ready,” Christine said to Shang, who had come to the kitchen door to try once more to talk her out of Flindy’s. “Frank canceled our dinner for tonight to talk to some more awful reporters, and I don’t care if the moon’s about to fall out of the sky, I’m going. And don’t think you can pull the magneto out of my car, because I learned all about that with Nicky—that was my first husband. I’ll just call a cab. And that goes for you, too, Norah,” she added with edged playfulness, and swept from the room, trailing the three Pekes.

  The ancient Chinese sighed, exasperated, leaning on one shoulder in the open back door. “Perhaps she is right,” he said. “I think she must have been a princess or some favored concubine. Either that or a milkweed fairy whom not even the August Personage of Jade could command.”

  When Norah walked out with the dogs in the early-falling dark Sunday night, through the uncurtained windows of the cottage she could see the old man sitting in the middle of a chalked circle on the bare floor, surrounded by what looked like glass bottles and sticks of incense, doing something with a handful of thin ivory wands.

  Christine developed a headache immediately after supper and went upstairs to lie down “for a few minutes before I get ready.”

  Norah checked on her at nine and covered her with a Chinese silk quilt. At midnight she checked again and found her curled up like a child with one small white fist balled under her cheek, the thick crepe de chine of her lemon-colored gown creased and flattened and flecked all over with Pekingese hair. Chang Ming, at the foot of the bed, raised his head and studied Norah with solemn dark eyes, then lowered his flat muzzle once more between his paws. Outside the wind groaned through the trees and drove away the clouds, though the moon had not yet risen and the darkness was profound. Norah descended the stairs to find Buttercreme and Black Jasmine in the living room, heads up and ears alert at a time when they would ordinarily be asleep, Black Jasmine with all the toys he could collect arranged in a neat semicircle an inch from his nose.

  When she walked to the window, they rose and followed her. Pushing aside the tapestry curtains, she could just barely see something moving along the front of the house, a blur of colorless smoke she recognized as Shang Ko’s hair.

  “No, no, no!” Hraldy insisted. “You walk like man wearing boots for army! Is this how Laban the Splendid, pride of tents of Israel, enter chamber of woman who is to be his downfall?”

  “You said come in,” Fallon protested, baffled. “I stopped where you put the X, didn’t I?”

  “That is something,” murmured Alec, strolling over to where Norah sat amid tubs of water and chrysanthemums. Black Jasmine and Chang Ming, lying sprawled on their stomachs, lifted their ears, and their tails curled expectantly over their backs.

  On the other side of the wall a voice bellowed, “Look out, boys, it’s a bomb!” and there was a frenzy of feet as the studio’s two top slapstickers did one of their getting-through-the-door routines.

  “To think that two months ago in New York I actually had dreams of being carried away by that man.”

  “What’d you see him in?” Alec asked, correctly interpreting the remark.

  “Guns in the Sunset, God help me. We had only a day or so in New York before getting on the train. I hadn’t seen a film in four years, and Christine said if I was coming to Hollywood, I jolly well should. I blush now even to think of it.”

  “No, Guns was a good film. Campbell tailored that role very carefully for Blake. If you think about it, all he does in that picture is stand, sit, and get on and off horses. Brooks did all the acting, and she can make you think a tree is making love to her by her reactions.”

  Norah thought back on the film and laughed. “You’re right, at that. In this film he actually has to do something.” She considered the sullen Adonis between the pillars, nodding impatiently at Hraldy’s thickly accented instructions—though the director was less than halfway through with them—with the air of one who felt he was being picked on. Christine, at least, listened intently and tried to the best of her nonexistent ability to do what she conceived the director wanted, an attitude that made her complete failure to perform it much easier to take.

  Hraldy strode through the doorway into the boudoir, beheld the she-devil upon her golden bed, and gave a credible imitation of a man suffering heart failure from the sheer erotic impact of the sight.

  “Although I must admit,” Norah went on, “the last time I read the Book of Esther, I completely missed the part about Esther’s former lover Laban being seduced and driven to his death by Queen Vashti.”

  “The cantor in our synagogue seems to have skipped that at Purim, too,” Alec remarked, chewing thoughtfully on a hangnail. “Also the part where Vashti and Haman lead an army in revenge for the slight upon her. Maybe that was in the New Testament version. Are we ready?”

  “We are ready.” Hraldy threw a glance toward the pillars, behind which Laban the Splendid had retreated. Ned the lesser and his tubs of flowers had vanished, leaving climbing galaxies of blossom behind. Alec cranked a few feet and made a last check of the viewing aperture.

  “Now, Chrysanda, amore mia, caress that pomegranate,” crooned the director, rolling his every “r” like a regimental drum.

  “Look out, boys, it’s a bomb!” whooped Larry—
or Jerry—on the other side of the boudoir wall.

  Hraldy ignored the commotion as if he and the queen of Babylon were indeed alone in the darkness of the stage’s artificial night. “You are woman capable of devouring men even as you devour that fruit. Let us see it in your face, in your body, in your ravissante eyes. Lights...”

  Alec stepped back from the camera and hit the switches. With a sudden hissing of kliegs, the boudoir was bathed in a chiaroscuro of white and black, dramatic highlights reveling in every fold of drapery and curl of Christine’s hair. Norah automatically checked her watch—the longest take time so far was an hour and forty-three minutes with Hraldy directing, and the shortest was seventeen minutes for Gus Campbell—caught up the clapper board, and stepped forward as the director said, “Music...”

  Like sweet poison the notes of the overture from Swan Lake threaded into the air (“Look out, boys, it’s a bomb!”). “Camera!”

  Norah held the clapper board in front of the scene for an instant, then removed it as Hraldy shouted, “Action!”

  Laban the Splendid, eyes bulging and lips pulled back in an expression Norah found typical of film actors, clumped through the archway as if, beneath his hawk-embroidered charioteer’s tunic, his undershorts were too tight. Queen Vashti, in a gesture of surprising, if overdone, sensuality, rolled the pomegranate she held against her breast, raised it to her dark red lips, and bit.

  Crimson juice exploded down her chin. Christine reared back with a loud “Eeuh!” and tried to spit out the bitter yellow membrane that had been hidden under the fruit’s skin. Hraldy flung up his hands and cried, “Cut! Cut!” quite unnecessarily, as Alec had already stopped cranking and was expiring with laughter.