The moon had set, leaving denser night that crouched like a black wolf among the hills. She couldn’t tell if there was anything there.
She was aware of the soft pressure of footsteps in the rooms below. Since none of the dogs barked, she knew it had to be Alec. A moment later came the characteristic clink of kettle on stove. Making cocoa, she thought.
He was. She found him in the kitchen, wrapped in a specimen from Christine’s vast collection of kimonos, this one royal blue embroidered with bronze dragons and extravagant pink birds. His hair was rumpled, and the portions of his cheeks he usually shaved were flecked with dark hairs. He looked up, pushing up his glasses as she appeared in the door.
“Bad dream,” she explained with a grimace. She was aware that her hair hung in a tangle of brown-sugar waves down her back, showing through it the extravagant red and green flowers on her kimono. The clock on the wall ticked softly, its hands at three-thirty. The kitchen smelled of chocolate, of Buttercreme’s half-eaten food, of heating milk.
Alec’s eyes met hers for a time, then he nodded. He fetched another mug from the cupboard. “What did he offer you?” he asked.
Work on She-Devil of Babylon having come to a standstill owing to the disappearance of both Mordecai and Laban the Splendid—and with funding for his takeover of Enterprise Pictures hanging fire, A. F. Brown seemed a likely candidate for a stroke before the new year—Christine decreed that the next day, Sunday, might profitably be spent buying Christmas presents.
Profitably, Norah reflected, for the merchants along Broadway.
Trailing Pekingese and a faint odor of Trésor de Jasmin, Christine went through the jewelry shops and high-fashion department stores of the district like Sherman through Georgia. She picked out jade cuff links for Frank Brown and a pearl stickpin for Alec (“You go down the street to Silverwoods and look at shoes or something, Alec; I’m going to buy you a Christmas present”), a bias-cut silk nightgown of palest candy pink for Alexandra Flint back in Charleston (“Honestly, I’ve never given Clayton another thought, but I really do miss his mother”), and an Ingersoll watch for Monty, who had regained consciousness late Saturday in the hospital and whose parents had come out from Bismarck to take him home. She bought the parents a box of California fruits.
“And I’m so glad nobody knows what happened to Nick,” added Christine, who seemed to have recovered her nerve or at least determined—with the assistance of a judicious swig of gin—to put her fears aside. She frowned, turning over in well-manicured fingers a pair of cloisonne earrings shaped like tiny diamond-studded bananas in Oscar Fresard’s in the Biltmore Hotel’s exclusive shopping arcade. “I mean, what does one get an ex-husband, and not even a recent ex-husband at that?”
With two hundred dollars from the scenario of She-Devil in her pocket—more money than she’d ever had in her life—Norah was acutely conscious of how few people remained in her life to buy Christmas presents for. “Not Mrs. Pendergast?” Christine inquired, as they waited for the clerk to open yet another jewelry case.
“In the four years I lived under that woman’s roof,” Norah said with quiet iciness, “I was never invited to eat at her table on Christmas day, much less given so much as a handkerchief. If I hadn’t chucked the Rat-God’s necklace into poor Miss Bow’s burning car, I should be strongly tempted to send it to her.” She was surprised at the anger she felt, surprised to feel her hands shake in their mended kid gloves where they rested on the glass top of the counter. Four years of anger, she realized. Four wretched Christmases when she’d been told, Oh, who would you buy presents for, anyway, dear? They’re all passed to a greater world beyond the sun... Four years of hurting throughout the dark winter season, not just on the eve and the day itself, when she-remembered, with killing poignance, crackers and her mother’s playing of carols and the taste of her father’s eggnog, but during the weeks before, when her every instinct told her to shop for a new murder mystery for Sean and a tie for her father, when she felt like a woman who had lost a hand and was reminded of the loss every time she forgot and reached for something with the stump.
Had Shang Ko gone through that, she wondered, those first years in America? Knowing he had been betrayed by friends and separated from every friend he once had possessed? All the other wizards were put to death, Hsu Kwan had said...
With some hesitancy, while Alec and Christine were in Robinson’s arguing whether to get Flindy McColl a half ounce of Maya perfume or ten pounds of imported Belgian chocolate (“But Flindy loves chocolate, Alec!” “Flindy’s got a potato clause in her contract with Enterprise. If you genuinely care anything about her, get her the stinkum.”), Norah walked three doors down Seventh Street to a very small shop owned by an elderly German who’d been passing himself off as a Swiss for the past six years. After some discussion, she purchased a Zeiss fifty-millimeter close-up lens. Returning to Robinson’s to find her friends still in an intensive discussion of the proper gifts to get a woman while Black Jasmine and Chang Ming snored on the expensive red porphyry underfoot, she bought a scarf of bright green silk for Mr. Shang and two shirts—in Alec’s size but with longer sleeves—for Charles Sandringham.
There were worse things, she realized, thinking about the dreary room in the Pacific Sands where she knew he remained, than having no family and only a few close friends to buy presents for at Christmas.
They repaired to Fior d’ltalia for a lunch of chicken cacciatore while the dogs played in the deserted courtyard. Coming out, Norah walked to the corner of Main to a newsstand and bought a copy of the Daily News. She’d done this the previous day in Chinatown and hadn’t found what she had sought. Today she did.
MOVIE STAR FOUND DEAD, the headline said.
“Blake Fallon murdered Keith Pelletier?” But A. F. Brown didn’t say it disbelievingly at all. He simply turned the words over on his tongue as he turned a sharp yellow pencil over and over in his hands while the bas-reliefs of ancient pharaohs and monkey-faced gods stared impassively down from the study walls behind his head. He was, Norah knew, fingering the idea in his mind to see whether the press, and the police, would buy it.
“Is mere any reason why he couldn’t have?” she asked.
“God knows he was acting crazy when he got to Red Bluff,” put in Christine, gently stroking Black Jasmine’s ears where the little dog sat, panting happily, in her lap. “That was only a couple of days later. He might have already been having what do you call them—brainstorms.”
The studio head’s bulging gray-green eyes moved to her for a moment, studying her, then returned to Norah, who sat in a very deep and not at all Egyptian leather chair in front of his wide, scarred, and businesslike desk. Beyond the heavy curtains with their lines of hieroglyphics and papyrus buds, early winter evening was gathering over the sphinx-lined terrace, the acre of lawn. Christmas wreaths still decked the statues like absurd bowties. Norah couldn’t believe the party had been only the night before last.
Brown looked surly and tired, and no wonder, she thought. Reading between the lines of his terse statements in the columns of the Los Angeles papers, she could tell he was desperately trying to keep the lid on the second tragedy to strike a picture on which he already had $500,000 riding until he knew how it would affect his attempted takeover of Enterprise Pictures. A smaller article in the trade section had reported that Aaron Jesperson still refused to sell and was talking instead of buying Colossus out.
Reasonably, she said, “When did Mr. Fallon leave your party after the premiere?”
The big man shook his head. “We’ll have to find that out.”
“Well, I know he’d gone by two,” piped up Christine ingenuously, “because that awful blonde he was seeing at Vitagraph was storming all around the house looking for him, drunk as a sailor and swearing.” She dug in her purse for a cigarette. “I couldn’t swear who he left with, though, but I know he was coked to the gills earlier and drinking like a fish.”
Brown looked thoughtful.
“The thin
g is,” added Alec, leaning back and chewing on a hangnail, “we’ve got most of Blake’s scenes shot. With one more day’s shooting in the desert—and the weather looks like it’s going to hold—we can kill him off in a long shot in the battle and have a quick scene of Emily crying over a stand-in. And if Blake killed Keith,” he went on, “that means we can bring back Charlie.”
“I’ve talked to Mr. Sandringham,” Norah said quietly. “He honestly has no recollection of that night, but he’s sworn to see a psychiatrist—I know there are some good ones in New York, at least. And personally, I don’t think a man as drunk as he was when I saw him at Enyart’s could have killed a twenty-two-year-old stuntman. Mr. Fallon could have. Mr. Fallon certainly almost killed that boy Monty Perkins, and we do have a witness to that.”
“Witness, hell,” said Christine, and adjusted the black and white scarf around her neck.
“Come to think of it,” Norah said, “the first attempt on Christine involved a stuntman, too. What I think happened,” she went on with slow emphasis, “is that Mr. Sandringham fled because he saw that the killer was someone he knew, someone who would be after him, and because he was drunk, he knew he couldn’t hope to be believed. Then he phoned you and begged you to come up with a cover story while he remained in hiding.”
The head of the studio had begun to nod slowly, rubbing his hand across his chin, which was, for once, not covered with stubble. He’d evidently shaved for yesterday’s harrowing by the press. “You think the papers’ll buy that Blake got some kind of crazy fixation against stuntmen?”
“I don’t know what the papers will buy,” said Norah. “I’m only saying that the police will find the three incidents extremely similar. A star and a stuntman together, Mr. Fallon attacks the stuntman, then attacks the star. Or, in the second attempt, tried to kill both together. In Christine’s case, we were barely able to save her. Mr. Sandringham was so terrified after the attack, he went into hiding, and believe me, after being pursued by Mr. Fallon Friday night, I don’t blame him.”
“And I’ll tell you what the papers will buy,” Christine put in suddenly. “They’ll buy a film with a curse on it, a film with a story behind it. No matter how good or bad that picture is, people will see it because they’ll want to see Blake, and me, and Charlie. They’ll want to see that chariot stunt because they know there was a bomb in the sandpit. They’ll want to see Blake to see if they can tell that he was going insane while it was filming. And I’ll bet it’ll kick up receipts for that silly sword fight picture of Charlie’s, too!”
The producer regarded them both for a time, turning the pencil over and over against the surface of his desk like a single piston while his mind shuffled, sorted, wrote, and rewrote scenarios almost visibly behind the glass-pale eyes. At length he put down the pencil, picked up a cigar, and said, “All right. We’ve got to finish shooting by the fifteenth of January if we’re going to get the cutting done. That means we shoot through Christmas and New Year’s. We’ll keep Charlie under wraps and the set closed until we’ve squared the police, but tell Charlie to be here tomorrow morning. You know,” he added as they stood to leave, “when they found Blake’s body, he’d been burned, and his head was bashed in with a crowbar or something. That’s what they think killed him.”
“If it was the crowbar he was chasing us with,” replied Alec, meeting the producer’s gaze squarely, “I’m only glad somebody managed to take it away from him before he could use it on them. Where was he found?”
Brown rose to his feet. “They wouldn’t say.” He stepped across to Christine and, rather unexpectedly, took her hand and brought it to his lips. Then he raised his voice to a bellow. “FISHY!”
Conrad Fishbein popped like a pale, stuffed Pantaloon doll through the study’s outer door.
“Fishy, get in here. We’ve found Charlie.”
NINETEEN
THE WIND
Sign of small sacrifice...
Either advancing or retreating,
the soldier must be steadfast,
and all is well...
In hiding, he employs wizards and diviners,
and all is well...
“POOR BLAKE.” CHRISTINE turned her face from the daffodil lights visible through the dark trees and the occasional mosquelike turrets, medieval towers, and ornate Chinese rooflines against the clear, darkening lapis of the sky as they wound their way back down from Beverly Hills.
Sunset in Oz, thought Norah.
“He never really meant any harm, you know,” she went on.
“No,” Norah agreed. Neither, she supposed, had Lawrence Pendergast the night he’d come in drunk from a party and tried to rape her in her attic room. She still remembered his voice muttering thickly in her ear: Be a sport. She hadn’t dared tell his mother; she had had nowhere else to go. In some ways Fallon reminded her a good deal of Lawrence Pendergast.
Above them the lights of Beverly Hills twinkled like stars through the oak and pepper trees. Beyond the edge of those scattered shoals of spangles the sinister towers of the oil fields lifted under a pall of smoke from one still-burning rig. Norah glimpsed it as they passed the clump of trees that marked the tar pits where the bones of strange and fabulous monsters had been found.
Norah smiled a little, recalling Christine’s reaction to the skeletons on display in Finlay’s Museum on Lick Pier the night they’d gone roller-coaster riding with Alec. “I don’t believe a word of it, darling,” she’d announced, fitting cigarette to holder as she regarded the enormous brown-stained skeletons of dire wolves, impossibly huge sloths, and saber-tooths arranged on their platforms, with jungly “artist’s reconstructions” posted before them to show what those creatures had looked like in life. “I mean, I’ve been past those tar pits, and they stink to heaven! If you’re a megatherium or an anaconda or whatever those things were and you saw a lot of other megatheriums or whatever sticking in all this tar sinking out of sight, would you go wading right in?”
“Perhaps that’s why they’ve become extinct,” Norah had said.
In spite of the chill, the Shining Crane sat in the dense darkness of the cottage porch with Buttercreme in his lap, sheltered from the cold by a blanket wrapped around them both. He seemed to be expecting them as they picked their way down the path that curved around from the kitchen’s rear door. Perhaps, Norah thought, he had heard their feet on the gravel. As he opened the door, the candles within—dozens of them, stuck on the corners of the table or protruding from the necks of Coke bottles—ignited into sudden, welcoming flame.
After the events of two nights ago, Norah didn’t even blink.
Shang Ko’s narrow mattress had been dragged over to one side of the room. The small table was heaped high with the same confusion of scrolls and books she had seen in the brick chamber deep below Chinatown, volumes in Latin and German as well as Chinese, plus blank paper, a brush and an inkstone, a tortoiseshell, chalk and slate, the brass web of an armillary sphere, an astrolabe, the intricate set of concentric black disks Shang referred to as a luopan, the ancient bird-shaped fire vessel, and the green porcelain bowl of water. The rear half of the room was occupied by a complex diagram chalked on the stained plank floor.
Shang Ko studied without a word the newspaper account of Blake Fallon’s death.
“I take it that only means he’s gone on to some other poor sap,” Alec surmised, perching on a corner of the table. “If all he needs is a brain blown out on jake or dope, God knows skid row’s full of candidates.”
Very dimly, where the upper corner of the cottage shared a wall with the lower part of the kitchen, Dominga could be heard bustling about as she made supper. Chang Ming and Black Jasmine, their leashes removed, sniffed at everything in the front part of the cottage, though they avoided the diagram as if a wall stretched across the room. They stood up against Shang Ko’s shins to receive their due of attention, then dashed up the path to the kitchen to get their dinners, Buttercreme trotting in their wake like an imperious dust mop.
&nb
sp; “It may be,” Shang Ko said softly, folding up the paper with his crooked hands. “But such a person would have trouble coming close to Miss Christine. He will take whom he can, use whom he can.” The white brows flinched together, and Shang Ko passed a hand across his eyes, recalling, perhaps, others the Rat-God had used.
Then he straightened a little and handed the newspaper back to Norah. “I have taken readings of the sky, of the stars, of the moon and the wind.” He gestured to the equipment on the table, the stone he used in his fire readings, and beside it, a neat stack of three bronze coins. “I have made calculations of... of rightness of direction all throughout these hills and as far as the sea.
“The season of the Rat-God’s strength lasts from the full moon of the ninth month until the coming of the new year, six weeks from now. Many years ago, when first I challenged his strength, I did so under the duress of time, going against him as quickly as I could, in the time of the moon’s waxing. The moon is waning now. Moreover the green star, the wizard’s star, is coming into the constellation you call the Bull, a configuration from which I am able to draw some power.”
His twisted fingers stroked the bronze circles of the armillary sphere, where strange beasts took the place of the more familiar stars.
“It will be difficult,” he said. “If you are still willing to do this thing, Miss Christine—if you are willing to trust me and my grandson and the strength of whatever power we can summon from the stars and the sea and the influences of the sky—it must be done in two weeks, when the moon is at its smallest. There is a magic which can be made from the new moon as well as the full. Not as strong, but effective. My old friend and partner Ni Kuei Nu, the Mud Tortoise—” His voice hesitated just fractionally on the name. “—was good at such magics.” He was silent a moment, white brows drawn down over eyes that gazed away into shadows of another time.
Bride of the Rat God Page 26