“What I don’t like—” Cicereau leaned forward and pointed at me with the kind of big, dark, stinky cigar familiarly called “a wolf turd.”—“is that girly, high-pitched yammering whining like a bitch in heat all through my hotel. Her you get rid of, and I don’t care how. Right?”
“CICEREAU SEEMS A BIT confused about his CinSims,” I pointed out after I’d washed off the cigar stink in the entry area powder room and joined Sansouci waiting in the hall outside the kingpin’s suite.
“Cicereau hires people to know about things that confuse him.”
“Do you smoke?” I asked.
“Only after sex,” he joked. “Listen. Just do the job and don’t over-think ole Cesar. He doesn’t.”
“Listen,” I answered, leaning my hands on a brass railing related to the one I’d almost been tossed off earlier and cocking an ear at the continuing celestial aria. “That woman has the purest, clearest vocal tone I’ve ever heard and is on perfect key. You can’t say it doesn’t move you. If I could sing like that—”
“If you could sing like that you’d be on Cicereau’s death list.” Sansouci looked up. “Besides, your job is to send her back where she came from. She’ll still be singing somewhere.”
I sighed. “I probably can do that but something’s really off concerning Cicereau’s SinCims purchases. Can you get me some info off Groggle?”
“Me? Look up something for you on a computer? Do I look like a male secretary?”
“I’ll write it down for you. If you can read.”
“I can ‘read’ you. You’re pretty desperate.” He handed me a pencil stub and a Gehenna matchbook from the Hell’s Kitschen Lounge.
“Yeah. Desperate. I need a full report—pronto puppy—from you on these two names, just like you were a private dick.”
“I sort of am,” he said with a gigolo gleam.
“I’ll warn you that they’re dead guys.”
“Bros.” The undercover daylight vampire nodded sagely as he pocketed his makeshift notebook. “This’ll be an intriguing change of pace.”
“And I’ll need to know all about who they were on, and off, the silver screen.”
“You want a freaking book?”
“I think I’ve read part of it, but I need more. You know how to print out from online, don’t you? You just flex your fingers and hit ‘Print.’”
“Five finger exercises are second nature to me. Where’ll you be?”
“In the deepest pit backstage of the hotel theater, entertaining the creep who set her”—I looked up to where the encompassing voice seemed to be ensconced—haunting us.”
WAS I ACHING FOR a reunion with the Hunchback of Notre Dame?
Hell, no! I was hoping for a rendezvous with the Phantom of the Opera, though.
That had to be who had drawn the mysterious voice down from CinSim heaven. After all, the Phantom had been obsessed about making a beautiful young girl into a prima donna.
I might welcome a bit of Internet intervention and detailed info from Sansouci…who would make an admirable private secretary, but I’d already determined that the Gehenna’s troubles were due to the eternal triangle. Man, woman…man.
You just had to picture the key elements as monsters, movie monsters.
Meanwhile, I was developing as extreme an allergy to sopranos as Cesar Cicereau. That we should have something in common was disgusting.
I’d barely arrived back on the main floor, when Sansouci put the make on me again.
“Your printout, madam.”
I reached for it, but he held it behind his back, as if in a game.
“This really means something to you,” he said. “Not just the what and the how, the assignment and the pay, but the who and the why.”
“Maybe. I doubt an ancient vampire like you could understand.”
“Maybe if you knew my what and how and who and why, you would.”
“Maybe that’s a too unhuman place for me to go.”
He considered, then shrugged.
“How do exploring the dark, deep crevices of the human heart, soul, and mind work for you?” I asked.
“My ’hood.”
“Forgive me if I don’t think that you have the depth.”
“Try me.”
I needed an assistant. I could use some muscle, and I could provide the missing “soul.”
“Is that main floor maze through the woods populated by anything but naïve tourists?” I asked him.
“Cicereau was aiming at a walkway of fairy-tale victims.”
“Fairy-tale victims?”
“You know. Toothsome females in supine positions, like Sleeping Beauty.”
“And Snow White in her crystal coffin?” I wondered.
Sansouci grimaced. It didn’t look anywhere near as bad on him like it did on the Hunchback. “She had that Lilith look Cicereau likes.”
“Lilith. My elusive double. Right. He really wants Lilith for his magic show. That’s why he hires me to save his ass. He gets to look at least.”
“It’s a job,” Sansouci consoled. “Like mine.”
“There are jobs and there are jobs. Are you willing to walk Little Red Riding Hood through the woods?”
“You mean, strolling through this hokey ‘attraction’? If it will stop that ghost upstairs from howling, sure.”
“She gets to you too?”
“Nothing gets to me.”
“We’ll see.”
The woodland walk was too new to attract many tourists. No gaming, no glitz. We were alone.
“You realize,” Sansouci said after a while, “You’re Little Red, and I’m the Wolf.”
“Not this time. And don’t let my devoted wolfhound know you even think that.”
“He’s not here.”
“He could be here in two seconds flat if he scents danger,” I said with a grin. “Face it. Your werewolf act is just too tame.”
Just then we heard fierce canine growling in the woods. I shrugged complacently, then rushed toward it. Sansouci held back a bit after my last dig.
The growling ended with a piercing wail of surprised pain that rose up in a weird chorus with the ghostly soprano. I crashed through the carefully planted underbrush to find a blunt-featured, perfectly respectable middle-aged man writhing on the forest floor.
“It bit me!” he cried. Then he spotted me. “Oh, are you all right, miss? You haven’t been bitten too? I tried to divert the wolf from hurting you.” He glowered over my shoulder at Sansouci.
I felt a surge of triumph. My theory was proving out. The starring role and the film and scene had changed. I was no longer the accused witch Esmeralda outside the great cathedral of Notre Dame, but the werewolf-threatened young woman Larry Talbot had saved from a werewolf bite in the forest, making himself the werewolf-to-be instead.
I knelt beside him, another CinSim, yet one still wounded in spirit and fact. “I’m fine. You saved me. What’s your name?” I asked.
The distant trills above made him gaze up through the canopy of leaves. “What beautiful music I hear. That sublime voice. It’s like a lullaby.”
“You mustn’t fall asleep,” I said, shaking him. “Concentrate. What’s your name?”
“Name? Creighton.” The man blinked. “No, that’s not right. My name is Larry now. Not Creighton. I was walking in the wood to visit the gypsy camp and saw you. An enormous wolf was threatening to bite you.”
“You stopped it,” I reassured him.
Meanwhile, my mind went into overdrive. Something was wrong here. His name was Creighton? There went my house of cards of a theory. The movie hero, Larry Talbot, had been played by the son of the Hunchback and the Man of a Thousand faces, Lon Chaney. I was now comforting the Lon Chaney, Jr., CinSim.
Having met both father and son CinSims, both famed for playing multiple roles, multiple monster roles, I should be bringing these events to a conclusion, but the scenario and cast were just getting more confused.
That cheapskate Cicereau had only leased one
CinSim, Lon Chaney. Why was his son here?
And who the hell was the ghastly, ghostly soprano still commanding the upper reaches of the Gehenna Hotel?
I HAD NO DIFFICULTY persuading Sansouci to leave the troubled man in the woods to his own devices. Larry Talbot wandered off, as he had onscreen
“What a wimp,” Sansouci declared when we neared the main concourse. “I got ‘bit’ for eternity too and you don’t see me moaning about it.”
“You’re not the angsty protagonist of a movie classic.”
He snorted derision.
“Scoff all you like, Sansouci, but Lon Chaney, Jr., knew what his father knew, that a likeable monster under the ‘mask’ is much more intriguing than an evil being through and through. Cicereau would be more fully rounded if he actually regretted having his daughter killed.”
“No sell,” Sansouci said of his boss. “You can handle these schizophrenic CinSims shape-shifters?”
“I’ll have to. Stop playing coy and give me the print-outs you made for me. Lon Chaney, Senior, mistook me for his movie leading lady. Most CinSims are leased in a single role, but this pair was known for metamorphosizing. Maybe I can convince ‘Larry Talbot’ I’m his love interest.”
“You’d do all this for Cicereau?”
“Heck, no.” I snatched the folding papers Sansouci produced from his jean jacket pocket. “I’ll do it for getting these helplessly entangled CinSims’ house in order. Whatever’s gone wrong has to do with the actors’ private lives. You’d better leave me to it.”
I stood there and listened after Sansouci left.
The voice was still singing, although familiarity bred dismissal. The passionate aria was becoming just more casino background music. Yet, Larry Talbot had been right. She’d been singing a lullaby while we’d talked in the ersatz woods, Brahms’s famous one, in fact, and it had almost put Larry Talbot to sleep.
Suddenly, I had a plan.
I headed back to the theater area. It was “dark” now, even during daylight, since only two evening shows played there. I knew my way around theaters, and had almost been an indentured attraction here, so I raced down the empty aisles and up the side steps to the stage, then into the dark and curtained wings at stage right.
A huge light board and special effects layouts filled the area. Matching installations were set up at the back of the house. I wanted under, not up, so scrabbled around in the dark until I found a set of narrow, steep steps down to the sub-basement.
Before I descended, I turned on the pinpoint light and punched the button on one of two dozen labeled sound effects—your usual lightning, thunder, rain, murmuring mobs with pitchforks and torches…and there! Just what I needed. Wedding processional.
Sansouci was right. I was making the ultimate sacrifice to pursue this case.
Glad for my flat-heeled shoes, I backed down the ladder-like steps into the dark. Above, I heard the house fill with the thrilling notes of “Here Comes the Bride,” aka Wagner’s operatic Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin. Work lights illuminated the vast empty understage area.
The music from above was ponderous, slow, churchy organ music. I’d never expected to waltz down the aisle to this famous, formal organ music, but it was so crazy appropriate.
I hoped it could end the haunting of the Gehenna and put restless human spirits and silver screen stars to bed in Lullaby Land. I hoped it could meld the past and the present into one big post-mortem family reunion. And I hoped it would conjure the most famous monster of all.
With the vibrations of that thunderous march shaking the stone roots of the subbasement, I stopped and listened for the thin soprano trill that never stopped.
Yes! Faint, but still discernible.
I stepped forward to the march’s beat, clasped my hands at my demure Audrey Hepburn waist and mouthed the words “Here comes the bride, all dressed and wide.” Well, that’s the lyrics we used at Our Lady of the Lake convent school.
“Beautiful,” a thrumming male voice added to the cacophony.
A face from a nightmare leapt in the half-light, right front of me. “You?” the monstrous mouth said. “You girl. You sing like a chorus of angels emerging from one throat. I’ll teach you, shape you, make you even more magnificent.”
I simpered at the grotesque face with the eyes circled in black paint and the blackened and ragged teeth. I couldn’t sing, but I could hear, so I mouthed along with the distant siren, while the Phantom of the Opera closed his lids over those mad, blasted eyes and swayed to the song echoing above…
“Think of Me,” as it is sung at the Las Vegas Venetian hotel-casino performance of The Phantom of the Opera every night, by Christine, the beautiful soprano the Phantom loves and longs for.
Finally, the female phantom vocalist of the Gehenna finished a long, sustained phrase, and…stopped.
The pre-programmed organ melody had died even earlier.
I stood alone in the darkened silence with the Phantom of the Opera, 1925-style, the Man of a Thousand Faces greatest transformation.
“MY LOVE. MY CHRISTINE,” the Phantom said, words Lon Chaney had mouthed on the silent film screen. He’d never uttered an audible word until his last film in 1930 and, dying, this son of deaf-mutes had not been able to speak at all.
“Only you can sing my soul to rest,” he said.
Yes, that was true. To accomplish that, I had to lead him on a merry chase.
Up the stairs I sprang on my brand-new leopard-pattern rose-toed flats, feeling the CinSim clutch at my ragged and ebbing taffeta hem.
Onto the empty stage and up the aisle toward the bright artificial light of the concourse I fled like Cinderella eluding her Prince. Tourists paused to observe and ooh and chuckle. Just part of the performing mimes Las Vegas hotels are famed for.
Then I ducked into the carefully landscaped woods and hoped my high-pitched screams befitted a frightened girl fleeing a werewolf.
Larry Talbot, now fully furred and fanged, rose from the underbrush, growling, determined to stop my pursuer.
I stepped aside like a bit player trying to save her acting wardrobe as monster charged snarling into monster.
THE PHANTOM RULED HIS understage world, but he was an emotional and intellectual monster, driven by ego to disregard his fellow man, and woman.
The Wolf Man hated his predatory self but bared his fangs and a wild, white-eyed look as he pounced on the disfigured, maniacal opera buff.
I couldn’t have the Immortality Mob’s property tearing each other gray limb from black limb, so I hastened to confront them.
“Don’t fight. You both want to save me, noble suitors,” I cried, in what for me was close to a swooning soprano, “do not destroy each other. I love you both.”
Well, there. I’d introduced a logical impossibility into the plot of every film either man had ever acted in.
In confusion, Lon Chaney Jr. morphed into his Mummy persona, the figure of unraveling gray winding clothes with soulful, lost eyes.
“Oh, Kharis,” I said, pressing a restraining hand on his black-blood-smudged chest wrappings. “He is but an old man, a figure of fun, not a rival.”
At which, Lon Chaney Sr. obligingly changed into his demented clown persona.
This is when I discovered that the female love interest is the Queen of the board, the key to every plot of every originally cheesy melodramatic script these film legends had appeared in. She was lovely, she was engaged, she was a swooning wimp, and they ached to own her love, but always lost out to a stalwart handsome ordinary human man.
In some ways, the life and loves of Lon Chaney and his son Creighton—who would resurface as Lon Chaney Jr. after his estranged father’s death, much to his own embarrassment and shame—were as much at stake here as any misunderstood film monster’s fate.
I was getting a lot of melodrama whiplash keeping these legendary actors and their roles apart when a woman’s voice came to my rescue.
“STOP. STOP! I WON’T be caught between you!” A pretty woman in
a pale long gown now stood among us, a figure of hysterical anguish.
The only CinSim ghost I’d ever seen, except for Topper, had materialized like a forest mist, her pert features contorted into a mask of tragedy.
“I won’t be the maiden victim again and again,” she said. “I won’t be silent. I will sing. I’d rather die than be torn between the two of you. Monsters! I am a nightingale and I will not be caged.”
She threw back her slim soprano’s neck and lifted an even slimmer glass vial to her gray lips. A thin stream of what I knew to be mercury slid oysterlike down her throat. Then she screamed, screeched, writhed, clutching for her vocal cords as they corroded and cracked, and she vanished, as would her ability to make any sweet sung sound again.
“You did this,” the Wolf Man accused the Phantom. “You told me she was dead, that I had no mother. But the mercury poison destroyed her vocal cords, not her life.”
“Her vocal cords were her life!” How odd to see the Phantom of the Opera scorning a woman for using her singing gift, but the character had been a control freak too. “Cleva wanted to perform, and you were a young boy, Creighton,” the Phantom said. “You needed a mother with you, not one off in night clubs singing for far less than emperors.”
“Creighton. That was her surname,” Larry Talbot remembered, “given to me, her first-born, as a first name. She tried to kill herself because of you.”
“I had theatrical work, boy, a rising career. Cleva refused to give up her singing to stay with you.”
“Others could have tended me. They already had. You were jealous. You weren’t getting stage acting work, only parts in cheap silent film shorts. She was earning more money and fame than you then. Her voice was unique. No one forgot it, but I never remembered hearing her sing. And now I have.” Lon/Larry looked around wildly for the vanished ghost.
“Yes, her voice was sublime,” said the Phantom, memory softening his tone, “beyond incredibly sweet.”
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