Marcus held up his hand as though to say, That’s quite all right. “Can I assume you’ll be casting William Tell?”
“You can.”
“Have you started putting together a list of possible actors for the lead?”
“I have.”
“May I throw in a suggestion?” Marcus knew he was crossing borders. “Ever heard of a guy by the name of Trevor Bergin?”
“The champion archer?”
Forrester kept his face immobile and his hand at rest. Marcus couldn’t tell if he’d overstepped his mark, or if he’d genuinely piqued the guy’s interest, but he’d gone too far by now to back off. Marcus nodded in the direction of Bergin’s table. “He’s sitting right over there, very anxious to meet with you. In fact, he told me just now that he’s keen to do anything necessary to be considered for the role. If you catch my meaning.”
But Forrester didn’t turn to look at Bergin. He lit his third cigarette since Marcus approached and smiled to reveal two rows of crooked teeth stained with nicotine. “What’s your angle? You just being the screenwriter and all.”
Marcus deepened his voice half an octave. “This picture could be the making of my career, so it’s in my interests to see the best man cast in the lead. Not only is Trevor Bergin a matinee idol in the making, he’s the best archer in the country. And he’s very willing—”
“There is such a thing as ‘too handsome.’”
“Too handsome?”
“In my book, there is. I don’t trust ’em.” Forrester’s green eyes turned hard as jade. “Life comes too easily to them. Personally, I prefer fair-haired, round-faced, apple-cheeked types. Horn-rimmed glasses. Sensitive. Clever with words.” The thick eyebrows rose and furled again while Forrester’s meaning sunk in.
Marcus craved the smooth burn of expensive bourbon and the calming power of a Chesterfield. First I have sex with somebody to get my picture back, and now I have to do it with this lump of donuts to ensure it stays here?
Doing it with Quentin was one thing. The guy was a kindred spirit, honest about what he was doing, and reasonably attractive, too. But this guy? With his sausage-skin tweed and his horrible teeth, his French liqueur and stinking cigarettes? Oh no, no, no, no, no. I’m willing to do a lot, but not that. Leastways, not with this smarmy jerk.
Marcus slid out of the booth. “I get now why they just want the writers to write and the casters to cast.”
Forrester shrugged. “Quel dommage. Trevor Bergin would have been perfect for the role.”
Marcus lingered for a moment, trying to summon a stinging riposte, but nothing came to him. Instead, he shot the guy a withering look and turned back toward Quentin and Trevor’s table. But he found he couldn’t face them, either, so he headed for the door.
Outside on the sidewalk, the sun had sunk below the horizon, leaving the evening air crisp and cool. Marcus felt William Tell slipping through his fingers yet again. And for the slimmest, narrowest sliver of a moment, he considered marching back in and taking Forrester up on his offer. But then he pictured those teeth and that smug smile, and he knew he couldn’t go through with it.
Even us whores have standards.
CHAPTER 10
Gwendolyn was happy she’d taken the job at Bullocks Wilshire, and not just because she got to handle luxurious lingerie, perfume, and accessories. Slow days left her free to examine the construction and patterns of outfits, storing them up in her bank of ideas for Chez Gwendolyn.
She’d even learned to unchain her envy of the women who frequented the store. They wandered aimlessly, with no significant purpose or real reason for getting up in the morning. Chez Gwendolyn may never see the light of day, and if it did, it might not amount to much, but it had come to instill a purpose in Gwendolyn, and she loved the feeling it gave her.
As far as she was concerned, there was only one problem, but it was overwhelming. At her current rate of pay, it was going to take her thirty-three years to save enough money to open her store. By that time, she’d be sixty-five and ready for the old folks’ home. She needed to make more money.
As she waited for the store to open, she polished the lingerie counter’s glass top and thought about the breathtaking diamond choker that Errol—almost incoherent with shame—had presented her with. He’d impressed her with the effort he made by going to Harry Winston’s and selecting a spectacular way to declare his mea culpa. Dazzling though it was, it didn’t stop her from calculating the rate of interest she might get if she hocked the necklace and invested in war bonds. She was tallying figures in her head when Mr. Dewberry approached her counter.
“Good morning, Miss Gwendolyn,” he said. “We need to talk about Miss Delores.”
Gwendolyn glanced at Delores’ deserted perfume counter. “It’s not like her to be late.”
He fiddled with the gold stickpin in his burgundy necktie. “It seems Miss Delores has left us.”
Gwendolyn gave a start. “She quit?”
“She sent a telegram this morning giving her immediate notice. It appears she’s taken a job at one of the new munitions factories down in Long Beach.”
Delores always arrived at work with every hair in place, her face precisely made up, each accessory cherry-picked to complement her ensemble. Gwendolyn could scarcely picture her toiling in a noisy, smelly—not to mention dangerous—munitions factory. She tried to imagine herself in shapeless overalls, her hair fastened with a grimy scarf, bent over a production line filling missiles with explosives. Not for three times the pay could I do that, she decided. Not even for Chez Gwendolyn.
“I suppose she won’t be the first staff member we’ll lose,” Dewberry said mournfully. “I do hope we shall not be receiving the same sort of telegram from you, too.”
“Oh, Mr. Dewberry,” Gwendolyn giggled, “can you really see me working in a munitions factory?”
“I can’t picture Delores doing it, but here we are.” He had a point. All Gwendolyn could do was nod. “At any rate, we’re expecting next month’s shipment of gloves, stockings, and garters today. The man should be here about eleven. Have you taken deliveries before?”
“No, sir. Delores always did that.”
“There’s not much to it. Just count the number of boxes to ensure what’s on the delivery invoice is what’s been delivered, then stock them on the storage shelves accordingly. I’ll get Myra from the Saddle Shop to cover you when it arrives.”
At eleven, Myra appeared and Gwendolyn let herself into the stock room tucked away on the store’s western side. It was a long room with two aisles of shelves. At one end was a large table next to a wide set of gray double doors that led out to the delivery dock.
Gwendolyn sat at the desk leafing through a magazine until the delivery man walked in pushing a dolly loaded with two dozen shiny pink boxes labeled The Gorgeous Gams Company. He looked like a Brooklyn street-wise version of Mickey Rooney, and stared at Gwendolyn with a mixture of surprise and suspicion, all the while chewing manically on spearmint gum.
“Delores out sick, or su’um?”
Gwendolyn extended her hand toward the guy’s clipboard. “She left us for better-paying pastures. I’m Gwendolyn.” She squinted at the name patch sewn to his breast pocket. “Lester, is it?”
Lester screwed his eyes tightly. “Son of a bitch!” He popped them open again and scowled at her. “Where did she go?”
Gwendolyn wondered how it was any business of his where Delores went. Was he her boyfriend? “The boss said she took a job at a munitions factory down in Long Beach.”
“The hell she did.” Lester leaned against his boxes. “A girl like Delores? Getting all dirtied up in a factory? I can see you don’t buy that story anymore than I do.”
“No,” Gwendolyn confessed, “it does seem out of character.”
Lester read her nameplate, rolling something over in his mind. He looked around to check that they were alone. “She told me if she ever disappears, you’re the one I should talk to.”
“About wh
at?”
“She said you were solid. You could keep a secret.”
“If it’s a secret worth keeping.”
He looked her up and down. “It is.”
As he worked his gum some more, Gwendolyn studied him anew. He didn’t seem the dangerous type. More like a fresh-faced kid off some Midwest corn farm by way of Flatbush Avenue.
“Delores was my best distributor,” he said quietly.
“Of what?”
“Nylons. You know, black market.”
She looked, bug-eyed, at the stack of pink boxes behind him. “These are black market stockings?”
“Nah. These are legit. But in my truck out back I got others. Three dozen pairs. Every bit as good as Gorgeous Gams, guaranteed.”
“Where do you get black-market—?”
“I deliver these babies once a month. You pay me the going rate, then sell them for whatever you can get.”
Over the past six months, more and more commodities had been rationed: rubber, gasoline, sugar. Just as Monty predicted, when nylon was added to the list, panic stabbed at the heart of every well-dressed American woman.
“I see.” Gwendolyn wondered why Delores had never offered her any. “You think this has got something to do with why she quit?”
“You bet your sweet patootie it is,” Lester said sourly. “Delores was good at it because she was ambitious. She told me she wanted the money to go into business. Wanted to set herself up as a freelance secretarial service for traveling businessmen who come into town and need a typist or whatever. Did you know that broad can type sixty-five words a minute and speaks four languages?”
Good for you, she told Delores silently. “I guess she made enough to do what she wanted.”
“Nah. These past few months she’s been selling so many, I think she got greedy. And in this business, if you get greedy, you get careless. That girl sold to the wrong person.”
“The cops?”
“Could be.”
“Do you think the cops would care much about a shop girl selling black-market nylons?”
“Who knows?” Lester spat his chewing gum into a trashcan under the delivery desk. “There’s money to be made and the rules are easy.”
Gwendolyn knew exactly how she wanted Chez Gwendolyn to look. The front display would have two mannequins in the window: one dressed in formal wear, the other in casual. The name of the store would be in the same sophisticated French lettering she’d seen on the label of a gown in the couture department upstairs, and a little brass bell over the door would jingle every time a customer came in. “What are the rules?” she asked.
“There’s really only one,” Lester said. “Never sell to anyone you don’t got no connection to. Family—fine. Neighbors—fine. Friends—fine. Friends of friends, and even friends of friends of friends—fine. Famous people or anyone with a public profile are okay, too. But not strangers. Nobody you can’t track down. I’ll bet my last plug nickel that’s what Delores did. And now she’s gone and I’m stuck with a stack of merchandise.”
Gwendolyn could already see the formal mannequin dressed in lilac chiffon with a mint green fleck, strapless with a sweetheart neckline. “How much?”
“Twenty-five cents per pair.”
“What did she sell them for?”
“A buck fifty, maybe two.”
“At one fifty per pair, that’s a dollar twenty-five profit. Multiplied by three dozen, that’s—” She did a quick calculation. “That’s a profit of forty-five dollars. So six dozen pairs mean nearly a hundred bucks profit, even more if I charge two dollars!”
“Nylon’s only going to get scarcer the longer the war goes on,” Lester pointed out.
“So if I can move five dozen a week, and if the war goes on for three years, that’s fifty-two times three, times five dozen stockings a week at a profit per pair of a dollar twenty-five . . . ” The numbers tumbled through Gwendolyn’s mind like a stock-market ticker. “That’s nearly three grand by the end of the war!”
“You figured all that out in your head? Without pencil and paper?”
Gwendolyn peered at Lester. “It’s only numbers,” she said. “So you have three dozen pairs at twenty-five cents a pair, that means you’ll let me have Delores’ stock for nine dollars?”
“Are you saying you want in?”
Gwendolyn thought of Errol Flynn’s diamond choker and wondered how much she could get for it. She felt her fingers start to tremble.
CHAPTER 11
A clod of damp soil walloped Marcus in the side of his head. Ineffectively suppressed giggles followed.
“I say, Marcus!” It was Robert Benchley, of course. “It appears you’ve got a wee spot of schmutz on your mug.”
Marcus left the dirt plastered to the side of his face. “Something tells me you’re about to get a whole pile of schmutz in your lemonade vodka.”
Dorothy Parker covered the top of her glass with her hand. “All I ask is that none of it ends up in mine.”
Even planting a victory garden was an excuse for a party at the Garden of Allah.
Marcus swiped the dirt off his face, then sniffed it. He nudged Kathryn’s shoulder with his. “I haven’t smelled something like this since I left Pennsylvania.”
“I don’t think I ever have.” She dug her fingers into the soil. “It’s cooler than I expected.”
It was Madame Nazimova who first suggested the residents dig a victory garden. Food was starting to be rationed, and posters had appeared around town encouraging people to start growing their own food. Nazimova pointed out that the fifteen-by-twenty-foot plot of grass outside her apartment received a lot of sun, and on the first weekend in September, eleven people showed up for the inaugural working bee to plant beets, lettuce, cabbage, and radishes. Each resident arrived with some sort of gardening implement in hand, and since it was the Garden of Allah, a drink in the other.
“Of course the soil is cool.” Alla joined the other two on her knees. “If you were expecting it to be warm, like fresh bagels, it is time you reconnect with Mother Earth.” She scraped at the soil with a trowel. “Back in Russia we planted our own potatoes and cabbages. Wait till you see what I do with these!”
A devilish glee lit up her lined face. Marcus realized that he’d seen her smile more often since her return to the movies. Last year she made her mark in a Tyrone Power picture over at Fox in a Valentino remake, filling the screen with her remarkable presence. After that, a role in a Norma Shearer vehicle at MGM gave her movie career a second wind and put a bounce back in her step.
“Well, now!” A cultured voice rang out across the victory garden. Nobody needed to look up to see who it was, but everybody did anyway because they knew the view would be worthwhile. Errol Flynn stood at the other end of the plot, a bottle of champagne in each hand. “When nobody was sitting around the pool,” he announced, “I knew something was up.”
“Refreshments we have already,” Alla told him. “An extra pair of hands is what we need.”
Flynn deposited his contribution on the table next to Benchley and accepted one of the hoes offered to him by new resident Bertie Krueger.
Bertie was an heiress to a canned beer fortune who’d decided that life at the Garden of Allah offered more appeal than the stuffy Garden Court Apartments on Hollywood Boulevard. She’d recently moved into what used to be Nazimova’s own bedroom in the main house.
The girl had an unfortunately horsey look about her: widely spaced teeth, thick eyebrows, an unruly mop of hair she dubbed her Wild Man of Borneo, and a pair of hips that Reubens would have killed his grandmother to paint. But she was kindhearted, generous to a fault, and fun to have around. For a girl who’d never worked hard at anything, she’d taken to the victory garden with gusto.
“Marcus,” Errol said, “I hear your William Tell starts shooting soon.”
“Rehearsals begin Monday.” Marcus took out a cabbage seedling from a little paper envelope and pushed it into the ground with his thumb.
Erro
l dug the hoe into the earth with a grunt. “My boxing instructor on Gentleman Jim tells me he has a pal who specializes in archery and jousting. He was hired by MGM for your picture, but there’s nothing for him to do. Bergin doesn’t need any help hitting the bull’s-eye.”
After he fled the Retake Room that day, Marcus had mentally prepared himself to hear that William Tell was dead in the water. But before the month was out, MGM’s PR department started heralding it as one of their biggest, most expensive, and most exciting pictures for 1943. And to ensure the story was told with accuracy and panache, they’d cast Trevor Bergin in the lead. “I guess Forrester was bluffing,” Marcus had later told Kathryn.
Moreover, Jim Taggert took Marcus aside last week and told him that Mayer was so happy with Marcus’ script, he planned to lobby for a Best Original Screenplay nomination.
“The studio has high expectations all around.” Marcus watched Alla for a moment to make sure he was planting the cabbage seedlings correctly, then continued. “If they have half the success Warners had with your Robin Hood, they’ll be as happy as—”
“ROBIN FUCKING HOOD!”
Everyone turned to look at the figure slouched against the acorn tree.
The guy was a far cry from the virile example of American sportsmanship Marcus had seen at the Retake Room earlier that summer. This version looked like he’d slept in his clothes for a week and hadn’t shaved in at least that long. His eyelids hung like broken window blinds.
Marcus scrambled to his feet. “What brings you here?”
The guy stood shuddering in the breeze for a moment, then laid a hand against the bark to steady himself. He fixed Errol with a stare, hostility radiating out of him. “All I ever hear is Robin Hood! Robin Hood!”
“Steady on, old boy.” Errol tried one of his disarming smiles.
“I’m so sick of hearing about you and Robin Hood, and how this movie has to be better and bigger than yours. What I want to know is, why didn’t they just hire you for the job and leave me the goddamned hell alone.”
Searchlights and Shadows (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 4) Page 7