Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  When she’d first come to California, Norah had wondered how on earth people like Charlie Chaplin managed to go out of their houses without being mobbed, but it was apparently done frequently. And now, having seen Mr. Chaplin in street clothes without his mustache and Douglas Fairbanks in a suit, she understood. So much of being a star, she realized, was being a star. A way of walking, of posing, of standing that cried out, “Look at me! I’m Blake Fallon!”

  Certainly nobody would associate the disheveled and giggling schoolgirl whom Alec escorted off the Blarney Racer with the She-Devil of Babylon.

  “And were you indeed,” inquired Norah, nodding toward the sign, “scared to death?”

  Christine adjusted her hat with a haughty gesture. “Queen Vashti of Babylon fears nothing,” she said in Chrysanda Flamande’s deep, throbbing drawl. “Now let’s try the Zip over on the other side of the pier.”

  Norah walked to the edge of the pier and gazed across the water at the lights of the Venice and Sunset piers, which were shining softly through thickening fog.

  Like a swirl of brightly-colored petals, the music of the carousel’s pipe organ floated around her, mingling with the delighted screams from the roller coaster and the Captive Aeroplanes on their little pierlet nearby and the hroosh of the dark waves among the pilings below. She could smell seaweed, popcorn, and a stray whiff of someone’s cigar smoke. The last time she had been on a pier, she reflected, she hadn’t been old enough to be permitted up this late at night. And with the rowdy laughter, the jangle of bells signaling somebody’s win at something, and the good-natured squeals of brightly clothed girls who weren’t any better than they should be, the place was a far cry from Brighton with Sean and her parents on a hot summer day.

  She gathered her incongruous monkey-fur collar around her face and thought, Sean.

  Sean would like this, she thought, as if her brother had not been brought back from Belgium a mute and twitching automaton with a metal lower jaw who had given no sign of recognizing anyone for the eighteen months he had lived. Jim would like this.

  The thought came to her gently, a passing reflection, without the angry pain of wondering why he wasn’t there to share it with her. Jim would like California... Jim would love this silly Renaissance on the beach.

  And for the first time there was no resentment in her thoughts.

  She would always love him, she knew, but something in that love had changed. She had clung to his ghost to get her through the wretchedness of those years in Manchester, years when she had been almost a ghost herself. But almost imperceptibly, as life had stirred back into her—in the desert, in the studio, in the Baroque lobby of the Million Dollar Theater—the ghost had pressed her hand into the hand of a living man.

  Had Jim been waiting to find someone he both liked and trusted?

  Norah shook her head, impatient at this piece of silliness. It was just, she thought, that enough time had passed. And when enough time had passed, Alec had been there, in this place where she’d never in her wildest dreams expected to be. Possibly, she added, because her dreams had never been sufficiently wild.

  No dream seemed too wild for Christine, and maybe, Norah thought, she had a point.

  “Wonderful!” Christine gasped, wobbling a little on her diamante heels and hanging on to Alec’s arm. “Just fabulous, darling! Now we’ve got to go down to Venice Pier and try Some Kick!”

  “Another night,” Alec said, smiling. “I have the suspicion that changes or no changes in the scenario, we’re all going to have to be at Colossus come morning.”

  “Oh, pooh!” said Christine. She’d carefully schooled herself never to say balls in front of reporters or anyone who might talk to reporters. “Nobody needs sleep!”

  “Besides,” Norah added grandly, “you two had your rides, and now it’s my turn. I want to go on the carousel. And,” she added as Christine’s face blossomed like a flower with delight at this evidence of her sister-in-law’s sudden descent into crass frivolity, “I want to ride properly on one of the horses that goes up and down and not sit in one of those dull little carts like a grown-up.”

  They concluded the evening’s program with a visit to the Dome Theater at the end of the pier, where Christine led them on a quick descent of inconspicuous stairs that debouched into a network of sand-floored passageways and small, smoke-filled rooms. Games of baccarat, roulette, wheel of fortune, and what Norah assumed to be poker and blackjack were all going full swing, and ladies as colorfully dressed and as uninhibitedly behaved as Blake Fallon’s friends from the Montmartre giggled and glittered and adjusted their garters in public. Standing in the doorway of one red-lit bolgia, while a black trumpeter coaxed soaring despair from his instrument and Christine flirted with the good-looking bartender who mixed her a cocktail, Norah turned to Alec with a flicker of amusement in her eyes and said, “Whatever else can be said about her, Christine never disappoints me. Of course she’d know the location of every speakeasy in town.”

  “Oh, everybody knows about this one,” said Alec. “I come here myself when I have time, for the music, but that’s usually only between pictures.” Reflections from the mirrored ball above the dance floor flashed across his glasses like sun thrown from the sea. “My brother has a speakeasy up the street, under the Pacific Sands Hotel. Awful house band, ukuleles, and rah-rah college songs, but then, Ira always did have a tin ear.”

  “Hey, Alec, old sadiq!” A huge figure in sloppy tweeds appeared in the doorway behind them, seeming to fill the narrow hall. With a start, Norah recognized the white-bearded Father Christmas who’d spoken to Alec at Enyart’s on the night of the premiere, over a week earlier. Close up he smelled of cigar smoke and sweat. “Jack’s been telling me you’re looking for a man to—”

  Alec held up a warning hand and glanced at Norah; Father Christmas paused, then took another look, and grinned. “You leading this innocent little girl astray, Ackey?” He held out an enormous, white-furred paw from whose creases the stains of engine grease would probably never be completely excised. “Captain Otto Oleson, at your service, miss.”

  “Captain.” Norah smiled. “Norah Blackstone. And this,” she added as Christine wove her way expertly through the intervening crowd, “is my sister-in-law, Christine Flint.”

  “Alec!” Christine laughed, holding out the hand unoccupied by a glass of gin for Captain Oleson to kiss at some length. “Don’t tell me you know bootleggers!”

  “Bootlegger!” Oleson swept off his soft cap in indignation. “Never! Just a humble pilot of an excursion boat out to Catalina and down the coast to Mexico... Named her after my wife,” he added gravely to Norah. “After all five of ‘em, actually.”

  “Good heavens,” said Norah, surprised. “What’s she called?”

  “The Whatshername,” Oleson replied serenely. “Fastest, most beautiful thing you’ll see on water from here to the Persian Gulf. You ask this boy to show you his photographs, you hear?” he added, slapping Alec on the shoulder and looking over at the two girls. “He may have to shoot movies for his living, but one day people are going to realize it’s the stills that’re the real art. You call me about—” He hesitated at Alec’s warning head shake, then concluded, “—about our business, you hear?”

  “He used to run guns into Arabia and the Belgian Congo, back before the war,” Alex explained as, later on, cones of insubstantial pink cotton candy in hand, they sought the Electric Avenue streetcar once more. “I know him through Ira, my brother. When they passed the Volstead Act, he figured there was more money here without getting his head blown off. And he was right.”

  Norah glanced behind them as they climbed onto the crowded streetcar. She had heard Oleson’s voice again and, as she’d thought, saw him through the crowding backs on the rear platform of the car. He held the arm of a seedy, unshaven man, talking in a low voice.

  “Didn’t anybody think what would happen if they outlawed liquor in this country?” she asked, leaning on Alec’s shoulder against the jostle of the
uneven street. The general smell and presence of liquor all along the pier and the boardwalk that faced it had not escaped her.

  “Surely the congressmen who passed the law didn’t believe that every man and woman in the country was going to fling up their hands and say, ‘Goodness, I’m so glad they’ve made it impossible for me to get drunk.’”

  “Are you kidding?” Alec’s eyes glinted cynically behind his spectacles. “That’s exactly what they thought would happen. We’d just saved the world for democracy, remember—or they had, anyway. Of course people would quit doing what was bad for them if it was against the law. What do you think all these films are about? You think most people don’t believe deep down in their souls that a woman who lives for nothing but sex and money is eventually going to run from her house with a bad attack of guilty conscience and fall over a cliff like she deserves? Instead of living on to a riotous old age surrounded by diamonds, French chefs, and dancing boys?”

  “Well, I intend to,” Christine said matter-of-factly. She plucked a huge feather of cotton candy from her cone and licked the residue from her fingers. “Not that either Nick or Clayton ever committed suicide over me, like Charlie did in that silly film. And it was Clayton, drat him, who ended up with the dancing boys in spite of everything I could do.”

  Alec looked down at her, surprised. “You tried to take him away from his dancing boys?” The fact that Christine would have tried to change anyone, even a husband, was completely unexpected.

  “No, silly, I tried to take the boys.”

  The car lurched to a halt, with Norah catching herself on the rail to keep from falling and Alec bracing his feet and holding her by the waist. The front platform where they stood was nearly as crowded as the car; all along the street people were coming and going from the brightly lit hotels, dance halls, cafes, and establishments of shadier purpose as if it were midday. It was as if the Volstead Act had never been passed.

  Norah saw Captain Oleson step from the streetcar with his disreputable friend still in tow and head for the lighted glass doors of a cheap hotel. He glimpsed Norah, Christine, and Alec on the car and raised a callused hand in greeting as they passed.

  Norah returned the greeting, reflecting that one certainly did meet all kinds in California. Then her hand froze in midgesture as Captain Oleson’s friend turned hastily toward the hotel’s door.

  With his hair unkempt and three days of beard on his jaw, with a defeated slump to his shoulders and white visibly streaking his dark hair, Norah almost didn’t recognize him.

  But the profile gave him away, the profile her mother had swooned for all those years before in the theaters of Leicester Square.

  The man with Captain Oleson was definitely Charles Sandringham.

  FIFTEEN

  HEAVEN OVER WATER

  In the face of a lost suit in court, hide...

  In the face of a lost suit in court,

  return and accept your fate...

  All will be well...

  “MY DEAR MRS. Blackstone.” Sandringham stood in the half-open door of his room, ravaged face a study in utter defeat. He shut his eyes for a moment, adjusting; then he sighed and stepped back to admit her. His hand shook a little as he closed the door behind her, but he managed a wry half smile as he added, “Welcome to Vermont.”

  Norah looked around at the dingy room. A single window opened onto an alley smelling of sewage and ducks, and the morning light it admitted lay thin and unkind on the narrow bed and single threadbare towel, the rust trails down the porcelain of the sink, and the closet whose door didn’t close properly. Mentally she compared it with the quality of the furniture glimpsed in the corners of that bungalow on Highland and compared the man before her with the handsome and inebriated gentleman in evening clothes bowing to her at Enyart’s. She remembered her mother’s early love.

  Her eyes met the actor’s. There didn’t seem to be a great deal to say.

  “I take it,” he said gently, “that you really aren’t carrying a message from Captain Oleson?”

  “No. I just told them that at the desk.” She wondered now why she had. Why she had intruded herself this way, taken on herself the burden of silence and guilt and that of being an accessory after the fact.

  Sandringham sighed and brought up the room’s single chair. “Please excuse me for sitting on the bed. They seem to ration these things. God knows why. If anybody paid more than ten cents for it brand-new, they were cheated.” His palms and fingers were decorated with bandages and sticking plaster. He had not shaved since her glimpse of him last night, and his beard was thickly streaked with white.

  “I hoped you hadn’t spotted me on the streetcar. I didn’t see you until I was on, because of the crowd, and then I hoped you’d get off before I did. I could have struck that old pirate for waving at you. Did Miss Flamande see me, too?”

  Norah shook her head. Christine had gone early to the studio—early for Christine, anyway—and had left instructions for Norah to get the luggage back to the house, which had been thoroughly checked by the Los Angeles police force. No sign of Mr. Shang had yet been found. “Nor did Mr. Mindelbaum.” Then she thought and said, “But he must know, mustn’t he? I mean, he knows Venice and knows Captain Oleson...” She fell silent again and sat looking at the graying man before her, seeing how soft and white his hands were under the bandages and how the fingers trembled despite his efforts to keep them still.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  He said softly, “Would to God I knew. I didn’t think I was drunk enough at Brown’s party to pass out. Good God, I’ve played Hamlet to rave reviews twice as drunk as that and even remember some of it! But I... I woke up on someone’s front lawn on Melrose Avenue, my clothes covered with blood. And sometimes when I sleep—which isn’t often—I think I see Keith in front of me, peering at me...” His face for a moment uncannily mimicked the younger man’s, his eyes narrowing in puzzlement, nervousness, growing fear. “And I think he’s saying, ‘Charlie? What’s the matter? Why are you looking like that?’”

  A long shudder racked him; he quickly covered his mouth with one bandaged hand. Eyes closed, words half-stifled by his fingers, he went on. “Usually I wake up then. I’ve been living in terror that some night I... I’ll remember what happens next. It’s been either that or the rat—”

  “The rat?” Norah’s stomach lurched.

  “What?” He opened his eyes, startled, as if waking from half a dream.

  “Do you dream about a rat?”

  He swallowed hard, his eyes avoiding hers. “I... I...” For a long time his voice seemed to jam, as though his flesh were unwilling to cooperate with his mind.

  Very gently, Norah asked, “What does the rat do? What does it say to you?”

  “It says... I don’t know. It...” His voice thinned and clinched. “Its eyes. I saw its eyes reflected in the mirror above the bar.” He shook his head violently, his eyes squeezed shut again as if against a vision of those other eyes, red and watching. Norah saw tears leak from beneath the battered lids.

  “I’m sorry,” he said after a time. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I haven’t touched alcohol since that night I... If it was me, it was the drink.” His voice stumbled, his words coming fast now, falling out of him with panic and despair.

  “I swear it was the drink, but I don’t remember. Thank God I made that film; thank God Brown is a cheat and a crook and trying to take over Enterprise Studios and can’t afford to lose the money on that stupid piece of costumed drivel I cranked out this summer! When I read his moving account of my parent’s illness and how he took me to the train station in his own car, I would have gone on my knees and kissed his shoes, I swear it, Mrs. Blackstone!”

  He caught himself again, pressing his hands over his mouth, his whole body trembling as he fought for control. Wrung with pity, Norah leaned over and touched his knee. It felt like an ocean-smoothed rock under the worn and chemical-stained twill of his trousers.

  The trousers were too
short for him, showing bony ankles in lisle socks of a color she’d seen on Alec. Of course, she thought. Alec must have lent him the clothes he’s wearing and probably the money to pay for the room as well.

  Carefully, Sandringham said, “Mrs. Blackstone, please don’t betray me. At the end of the week Captain Oleson is going to take me to Mexico. I have no idea how I’m going to make a living there, but I swear to you I’m never going to touch alcohol again. I don’t know whether I killed Keith or not, but you see, it doesn’t matter. I’ll be convicted of murder, if it comes to trial.”

  “Well,” Norah said thoughtfully, “after Mr. Brown and Mr. Fishbein got through with your place, there was certainly no evidence remaining to pin it on anybody else. On the other hand...”

  She hesitated, struggling against the thoughts that persisted in surfacing in her mind. I saw his mark there, where the young man was killed, Shang had said. The priest never remembered afterward doing the things that it was clear that he had done...

  A half-remembered glimpse of a crimson dress, a drugged girl giggling, the shine of evil jewels...

  Slowly she said, “Mr. Sandringham, listen. In the desert someone tried to kill Christine.”

  His eyes widened with shock. “You mean that wasn’t just Fishy hoping people won’t notice Fallon’s acting when the film comes out?”

  “No,” Norah said quietly. “That was genuine. Mr. Fallon’s acting has been fabulous, by the way. He truly seems to have found himself. But the thing is, Mr. Fishbein has been thumping the drum over it in the hopes of getting people—especially the reporters at the Examiner—to forget Mr. Pelletier’s murder. I’m wondering now if there isn’t some way to... to tie the two together. To give the police the impression that’s the direction they should look for the real killer.”

  Her eyes couldn’t meet his as she said it. His own, she saw, turned aside also, and she heard the ragged draw of his breath.