The young woman’s eyes narrowed as she cast her mind back. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘’Course, that kind of guy, he’s not gonna breathe a word about an ex-wife to the girl he’s seein’, much less a wife. Crap,’ she added, glancing at the new – and very expensive-looking – watch that adorned her slender wrist. ‘I gotta go, or I’m gonna be late. Look,’ she said, as she and Emma stood. ‘You need money? You OK for carfare, and a place to stay …?’
She reached for her handbag again.
‘Really,’ said Emma, startled, ‘I’m quite all right.’
‘You sure?’ She’d pulled a five-dollar bill from the bag. ‘It’s no skin off my ass, it’s Rex’s money, so you got it comin’.’
After a panic-stricken moment as she tried to decide what her assumed persona of a robbed woman would have done, Emma looked shamefaced again (And you SHOULD be ashamed …!) and held out her hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re very kind.’
As she stepped out into the hallway she glanced back, to see Miss Blossom swig down the remainder of the bottle – which Emma had left on the table – and then the contents of Emma’s cold and untouched coffee cup.
Well, I suppose if Odysseus could get information by giving libations to the spirits in Hell, it’s no surprise it works here as well.
She took the streetcar back to the studio.
‘Sounds like the cops never even got in touch with her,’ Zal remarked, when, many hours later, he joined Emma in Kitty’s little base-camp with the usual half-dozen paper cartons of chow mein and egg fu yung for a late and hasty dinner before embarking on scene fifty-three. Chairs, make-up table, folding rack of kimonos, gramophone, dogs, pillows and magazine bin had all been carried to the same corner of Stage One in which they’d been set up yesterday (Was it ONLY yesterday?). Kitty had slipped away immediately after scene seventy-seven (the Empress Valerna’s confrontation with Nero). ‘Darling, you will look after my tiny beloveds for me, won’t you?’
Emma wondered if it was the same man this time, or a different one. Or Frank Pugh, who was on the lot that day …
Darlene Golden had certainly been looking daggers at her all through rehearsals, walk-through, and setting up the lights for the virtuous Philomela’s plea for the lives of her co-religionists.
The virtuous Philomela was still out in the shadows of the empress’s garden, sitting on the pedestal of the Rape of the Sabine Women (the original sculpted in 1583 and almost certainly not a part of Nero’s palace décor), deep in conversation with a good-looking young man in a tuxedo. Kitty’s stand-in Ginny Field joined them, the young man – clearly a refugee from the Ruritanian palace ball taking place (still) that day on Stage Two – producing a hip flask. Beside Emma’s chair, Chang Ming and Black Jasmine, replete with dinner, snored in their boxes as only Pekinese can. As usual, Buttercreme had been too timid to eat, so Emma knew the little moonlight dog would need to be fed when they got back to the house up on Ivarene, at whatever hour that would be.
‘That home will be yours as well …’
Emma pulled herself back to the present with an effort. ‘I suspect Detective Meyer, like Mr Madison, has his own view of why Mr Festraw was killed, and isn’t going to look in any other direction than that.’
‘He may.’ Zal set out little cartons of egg rolls and lo mein on the make-up table. ‘Or he may not really give a rat’s ass, and just wants to find some evidence damning enough that Pugh’ll have to give him money to mislay it. Or,’ he added generously, seeing Emma’s exasperated expression, ‘he may just be following orders about that from upstairs. A lot of ’em just do what they’re told and don’t ask why.’
Emma turned her face aside for a moment, feeling a little like Gulliver in Lilliput when confronted with the vicious internecine conflict over which end of the soft-boiled egg should be opened first. After six months I shouldn’t be bothered by this …
But it was the first time she’d come up against it first-hand. And if anything went amiss at the special hearing, or at the trial …
‘That home will be yours as well …’
‘You should have seen the way Famous Players tried to smooth over Jack Barrymore pissing into the planters of the Plaza Hotel while he was filming Jekyll and Hyde.’ Zal handed her a plate. ‘If Rudy Valentino ever ran over a total stranger in broad daylight on Hollywood Boulevard, I’m pretty sure the nice folks at Ritz-Carlton Pictures would find some poor shlub in the studio to take the rap for him and do the time, so that Rudy could go on making money for them. That’s Hollywood.’
Yes, thought Emma.
Did Odysseus feel this way, standing on the cliff-top of Ogygia, looking towards his home?
Slowly, she said, ‘Someone paid for Rex Festraw to be in Los Angeles – obviously, for the purpose of murdering him in Kitty’s dressing room. That’s over a hundred dollars for even a third-class train ticket, not to speak of the cost of the room.’
‘That’s not actually a lot,’ returned Zal, ‘if he was acting as a runner for Luciano or Bugsy Siegel. Who knows what else he was really doing here in town? He may have used his connections here to try to put the touch on Kitty, like he said to your Miss Blossom, as a way of getting extra cash – in which case it would make sense for his New York employers to phone up Tony Cornero or somebody in the City Hall Gang and ask them to clean things up on their end. Putting the blame on Kitty would do exactly what it is doing: shoot off enough fireworks in the newspapers that nobody’s going to look for who else might have wanted Festraw dead.’
Emma half-opened her mouth to reply, closed it, and went back over the things that bothered her, like potsherds laid out on a table in her father’s study. The probable impossible is to be preferred to the improbable possible …
Behind them, voices echoed as the prop men and gaffers drifted in from the canteen again, to finish setting up the dungeon where the saintly but handsome Demetrius would resist being ravished by the Temptress of Babylon. It was nearly eight thirty: judging by the amount of set-up time needed, and a walk-through, and then close-ups, everyone was going to be on the set until midnight. No wonder bootleggers peddle cocaine from the prop warehouse!
‘Maybe,’ she said slowly. ‘But … between the gun being stolen, and the stationery, and however they got Kitty away from the set at precisely the right time, I keep wondering if the real target isn’t Kitty herself.’
Zal started to reply to that, but at that moment Madge yelled to him from the dungeon – something about having to shift the lights around – and he merely leaned over to give Emma a quick kiss, devoured a shrimp wonton, and hastened away, licking sauce from his fingers. At the same moment Chang Ming and Black Jasmine woke, sat up, and began wagging their tails furiously, even Buttercreme ventured to poke her flat little nose around the edge of her basket doorway as Kitty slipped in through the huge rear doors from the moonlit garden.
‘Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud, Ambrose!’ she giggled, to the trim, elderly gentleman whom she tugged after her by the hand. ‘I’ll send Emma. Oh, there’s Emma! Oh, and she’s got Chinese food! I’ll send Emma over to Wardrobe and we can get you fixed up as a Roman soldier – everybody’s always sneaking their friends in as extras—’
‘My entire family would disown me,’ protested Ambrose Crain, chuckling. ‘Or they would if they weren’t so set on inheriting my shares in US Steel. And if the other members of the board of directors happened to see me in the background of a film they would suffer a collective seizure.’
‘Chicken,’ laughed Kitty. ‘I double-dog dare you! And there, I told you I wouldn’t be late! They’re only just setting up the lights! Oh!’ she added, picking up a pair of chopsticks. ‘Oh, you darling, Emma, I have absolutely not had a moment to eat anything and I’m positively going to faint in front of the cameras. And anyway, we have to disguise poor Ambrose so Frank won’t see him, when he comes in …’
‘I’m flattered beyond words that you think I would blend in with the Roman legions, Kitten.’ Th
e old man caught, and kissed, her hand. ‘But honestly, I will sit quietly in this corner and enjoy a cup of tea with Mrs Blackstone and watch you work … And trust me, I have the discretion to disappear when it becomes necessary. One cannot get you in dutch with the management.’
‘Darling—’ crooned Kitty, just as Madge bellowed from the set.
‘Is that Kitty over there? Where the hell have you been? Somebody get Ginny in here!’
The lights went up with a hell-fire crackle and a blinding glare of bluish-green brilliance. Flinching and shading his eyes, Mr Crain took the folding chair at Emma’s side. He wasn’t the only audience, lingering in the shadows around the dungeon set: Emma glimpsed, beside the doorway that led out to the empress’s garden, both Darlene Golden and the handsome young man in the tuxedo giggling now uncontrollably. Ginny Field scampered past them, at a distance eerily identical to Kitty in her diaphanous golden gauze and ersatz rubies, the dark cloud of her hair sparkling with gems. From another direction Scotty Sears ambled in, the middle-aged stand-in for the handsome young star Ken Elmore, shedding his bathrobe to reveal muscles glistening with cocoa butter and a loincloth the size of a business envelope.
Beside Emma, Mr Crain murmured, ‘Extraordinary,’ as Madge ordered Scotty and Ginny to take their places in front of the new arrangement of the lights so that Zal could adjust his lenses.
‘Emma, darling …’ Kitty came hurrying back to them. ‘There’s some champagne in my dressing room … the new dressing room, upstairs … or see if Margaret over on Stage Two has some cognac … Margaret always has cognac in her handbag …’
‘Please, Mrs Blackstone,’ said Mr Crain, as Emma started to rise. ‘If you’ll let me steal a little of your tea, that’s all I need. What on earth,’ he added after a moment, ‘is the Empress of Babylon doing in Rome?’
Emma rolled her eyes. ‘Time traveling, like that gentleman in Mr Wells’s novel! I keep telling Mr Pugh that there was no Empress of Babylon during Nero’s reign! Babylon was in ruins by that time – and Nero had a perfectly good Sinful Empress to persecute Christians.’
‘Really?’ The old man cocked his head. ‘Are you sure? Because it makes much more sense, that the Empress of Babylon would have turned the Romans against Christianity. Why, John the Evangelist even said so, in Revelation. The Romans were such a sensible and virtuous civilization, I’ve always wondered why they persecuted the Christians in the first place.’
He had clearly never heard of the Emperor Caligula. Emma was still struggling to find a response that was both tactful and accurate when he added, ‘I will take your word for it, though. Kitty tells me that you studied “all those ancient times” you went to Oxford, she says?’
‘I did.’ Emma smiled. ‘I was up at Somerville College during the War. My father taught Classics at New College. His specialty was Etruscan inscriptions, though. He was really more of an archeologist than a historian. From the age of ten I was drafted to be his assistant. My mother kept telling him it was no occupation for a young lady.’
The lights went down; Madge’s voice boomed from the direction of the set. And what would Madge’s mother, Emma reflected, have to say about HER occupation …?
‘And I suppose,’ sighed Mr Crain, ‘that had you been a boy, your mother would have been ecstatic to see you following in your father’s footsteps.’
Emma turned her head quickly at the note of sadness in the old man’s voice, and remembered things Kitty had told her about Crain’s son Timothy. An absolute STICK, darling! Ambrose tells me he lives with his mother on Long Island and never goes ANYWHERE but his office in the city. He’s never even been out of NEW YORK! All he THINKS about is staying in his office and making money!
Was that the family that would disown Mr Crain for donning Roman guise to stand in the back of a cinematic crowd?
‘LIGHTS! CAMERA!’
The musicians plunged into the Habanera from Carmen. Ken Elmore – Elmore Perkins, at his baptism in Bismarck, North Dakota – glistening like his stand-in, with cocoa butter and just as skimpily semi-draped, lunged against his chains and bared his teeth, as Scotty and Ginny retreated beyond the camera line and lit cigarettes.
‘ACTION!!!’
The Temptress of Babylon, sinuous as a cobra and beautiful as the night, appeared in the doorway of the dungeon cell.
Mr Crain heaved a sigh of beatific ecstasy.
‘Get the fuck out of my dungeon, bitch!’ shouted the saintly Christian Demetrius, wrenching at his bonds, and Valerna raised her hands like claws.
‘Fool!’ she cried. ‘I’m going to screw you senseless!’
The title cards for this interchange, Emma recalled, would read: Begone, harlot! And Yield to the embraces of the Goddess of Love!
One can only hope there are no lip-readers in the audience …
The millionaire chuckled softly, and murmured, ‘Oh, dear, oh dear oh dear …’
‘Mr Crain,’ murmured Emma, below the dark gleam of the music. ‘Mr Rokatansky told me that you offered last night to help us. I think … I know it sounds melodramatic, but I think there’s something going on with this murder, something beyond what meets the eye.’
He looked surprised. ‘I thought it was bootleggers. All the newspapers – and the film magazines – say that Mr Festraw was mixed up with gangsters.’
‘I know,’ said Emma. ‘And yet there’s something … I may be completely wrong. But there’s something about the affair that doesn’t … doesn’t smell right to me. It sounds silly—’
‘Not silly at all, m’am.’ He set down his mug of tea. ‘I’ve had the same experience with financial transactions. Everything my broker laid out on paper looked perfectly above-board and profitable, and yet … it’s as if little alarm bells were ringing in the distance. Or like the smell of smoke when you’re dropping off to sleep.’
Emma said, very quietly, ‘Yes.’
‘What would you like me to do?’
‘Do you know of anyone in New York – or know how we might find someone in New York – who could be trusted to find out about Mr Festraw there? Find out who this Stanislas Markham is, who paid for Mr Festraw to come out to Los Angeles? And anything else about Mr Festraw that it would help us to know?’
This had been Zal’s suggestion. Frank Pugh had studio money – as indeed did Kitty – but there was far greater likelihood (said Zal) of Pugh being mixed up in this than old Mr Crain.
‘I’ll put in a call to our New York offices tomorrow,’ he said at once. ‘I remember we hired … well, an investigator in New York a few years ago, when my son had … a little trouble with … with the consequences of falling into bad company.’ A slight flush darkened his cheekbones and he looked aside, mortified.
Emma thought, Good heavens! Did the dull stick Timothy Crain step out a little wide with a showgirl after all? But the old man seemed so disturbed that she only said, ‘Thank you. That is most good of you.’
At nearly eleven, Kitty came tripping over from the dungeon between takes to eat another wonton (‘Sweets for the sweet,’ murmured Mr Crain, a malicious twinkle in his eyes) and kiss her elderly inamorato goodbye. ‘I’m sure your Mr Pugh will be along any moment,’ Mr Crain said, ‘and is bound to frown on outsiders watching the magic of Hollywood taking place.’
Which was, Emma thought, a tactful way of putting it.
‘Dreadful as it would be for members of my board to glimpse me in Roman armor at the back of a cinema film, it would be a thousand times worse for tomorrow’s headlines to read, “Corporation President Ejected from Film Studio” …’
‘Darling, he never would!’ cried Kitty. ‘You’re a stockholder! But you’re right – Frank is so jealous …’
She spoke in her film-vamp voice – as if it were nothing to her, to have men quarreling over her like a latter-day Ninon de l’Enclos – but Emma reflected that now was not the time for her to lose the support of her studio. She also was aware of a twinge of uneasiness, seeing Darlene Golden – who was not a part of this
scene at all – still lingering in the shadows of the garden set beyond the open rear doors, watching Kitty’s visitor with narrowed eyes. And indeed, not ten minutes after Mr Crain took his leave (and Emma prudently disposed of his mug back on the trestle tables at the front of the stage) Frank Pugh entered, looking tired and crumpled. Kitty abandoned the saintly Demetrius mid-embrace, and rushed to the producer’s side to clasp his hands, press her forehead (being very careful not to disarrange her make-up) against his massive shoulder, and gaze up with what looked like genuine worship in her eyes.
He bent his head over hers, gathered her small hands against his breast. Madge looked as if she might have said something, but didn’t.
Darlene looked as if she might have spit blood … but didn’t.
‘Darling,’ Kitty cooed a moment later, hurrying back to Emma, ‘Frank and I are going to go have a little bite at the Café Montmartre when we’re done here – and Madge says we have only one or two more takes left … and then we’ll be going on to Peggy’s. She’s having a little get-together, and I think’ – she lowered her voice conspiratorially – ‘Frank wants to pump her about Lou Jesperson’s new projects at Enterprise. Would you be an angel and take my little beloveds home?’ She crouched gracefully to gather the eagerly wriggling Chang Ming into her arms. The other two Pekes stood on their hind-legs, forepaws on her knees and back, licking their own noses with excited delight. ‘And could you get Zal to drive my car? He can take a cab home, charged to the studio account … Zal, darling …’
She scurried to the cameraman’s side.
Thus Emma packed up the camp chairs, the magazine bin, folded up the make-up table and neatly consolidated the un-eaten remains of the feast into two containers, and by the time she’d given the Pekes a final constitutional outside, the last few takes had been taken, and Zal brought Kitty’s big yellow Packard around to the door of Stage One.
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