After a day, I’d had some excitement but I hadn’t done much for Janey Wilde. I was no nearer being able to explain the absence of Mr. Brunette from his usual haunts than I had been when she left my office, leaving behind a tantalising whiff of essence de chine.
She’d given me some literature pertaining to Brunette’s cult involvement. Now, the third slug warming me up inside, I looked over it, waiting for inspiration to strike. Interesting echoes came up in relation to Winthrop’s shopping list of subjects of peculiar interest. I had no luck with the alphabet soup syllables he’d spat at me, mainly because “Cthulhu” sounds more like a cough than a word. But the Esoteric Order of Dagon was a group Brunette had joined, and Innsmouth, Massachusetts, was the East Coast town where the organisation was registered. The Esoteric Order had a temple on the beach front in Venice, and its mumbo-jumbo hand-outs promised “ancient and intriguing rites to probe the mysteries of the Deep.” Slipped in with the recruitment bills was a studio biography of Janice Marsh, which helpfully revealed the movie star’s place of birth as Innsmouth, Massachusetts, and that she could trace her family back to Captain Obed Marsh, the famous early 19th Century explorer of whom I’d never heard. Obviously Winthrop, Genevieve, and the FBI were well ahead of me in making connections. And I didn’t really know who the Englishman and the French girl were.
I wondered if I wouldn’t have been better off reading Weird Tales. I liked the sound of Satan in a Tuxedo. It wasn’t Ted Carmady with an automatic and a dame, but it would do. There was a lot more thunder and lightning and I finished the bottle. I suppose I could have gone home to sleep but the chair was no more uncomfortable than my Murphy bed.
The empty bottle rolled and I settled down, tie loose, to forget the cares of the day.
* * * *
Thanks to the War, Pastore only made Page 3 of the Times. Apparently the noted gambler-entrepreneur had been shot to death. If that was true, it had happened after I’d left. Then, he’d only been tortured and drowned. Police Chief John Wax dished out his usual “over by Christmas” quote about the investigation. There was no mention of the FBI, or of our allies, John Bull in a tux and Mademoiselle la Guillotine. In prison, you get papers with neat oblongs cut out to remove articles the censor feels provocative. They don’t make any difference: All newspapers have invisible oblongs. Pastore’s sterling work with underprivileged kids was mentioned but someone forgot to write about the junk he sold them when they grew into underprivileged adults. The obit photograph found him with Janey Wilde and Janice Marsh at the premiere of a George Raft movie. The phantom Jap sub off Santa Barbara got more column inches. General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, called for more troops to guard the coastline, prophesying “death and destruction are likely to come at any moment.” Everyone in California was looking out to sea.
After my regular morning conference with Mr. Huggins and Mr. Young, I placed a call to Janey Wilde’s Malibu residence. Most screen idols are either at the studio or asleep if you telephone before ten o’clock in the morning, but Janey, with weeks to go before shooting started on Bowery to Bataan, was at home and awake, having done her thirty lengths. Unlike almost everyone else in the industry, she thought a swimming pool was for swimming in rather than lounging beside.
She remembered instantly who I was and asked for news. I gave her a précis.
“I’ve been politely asked to refrain from further investigations,” I explained. “By some heavy hitters.”
“So you’re quitting?’’
I should have said yes, but “Miss Wilde, only you can require me to quit. I thought you should know how the federal government feels.”
There was a pause.
“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” she told me. It was an expression common among my clients. “Something important.”
I let dead air hang on the line.
“It’s not so much Laird that I’m concerned about. It’s that he has Franklin.”
“Franklin?”
“The baby,” she said. “Our baby. My baby.”
“Laird Brunette has disappeared, taking a baby with him?”
“Yes.”
“Kidnapping is a crime. You might consider calling the cops.”
“A lot of things are crimes. Laird has done many of them and never spent a day in prison.”
That was true, which was why this development was strange. Kidnapping, whether personal or for profit, is the riskiest of crimes. As a rule, it’s the province only of the stupidest criminals. Laird Brunette was not a stupid criminal.
“I can’t afford bad publicity. Not when I’m so near to the roles I need.”
Bowery to Bataan was going to put her among the screen immortals.
“Franklin is supposed to be Esther’s boy. In a few years, I’ll adopt him legally. Esther is my house-keeper. It’ll work out. But I must have him back.”
“Laird is the father. He will have some rights.”
“He said he wasn’t interested. He... um, moved on... to Janice Marsh while I was... before Franklin was born.”
“He’s had a sudden attack of fatherhood and you’re not convinced?”
“I’m worried to distraction. It’s not Laird, it’s her. Janice Marsh wants my baby for something vile. I want you to get Franklin back.”
“As I mentioned, kidnapping is a crime.”
“If there’s a danger to the child, surely...”
“Do you have any proof that there is danger?”
“Well, no.”
“Have Laird Brunette or Janice Marsh ever given you reason to believe they have ill will for the baby?”
“Not exactly.”
I considered things.
“I’ll continue with the job you hired me for, but you understand that’s all I can do. If I find Brunette, I’ll pass your worries on. Then it’s between the two of you.”
She thanked me in a flood and I got off the phone feeling I’d taken a couple of strides further into the La Brea tar pits and could feel sucking stickiness well above my knees.
* * * *
I should have stayed out of the rain and concentrated on chess problems but I had another four days’ worth of Jungle Jillian’s retainer in my pocket and an address for the Esoteric Order of Dagon in a clipping from a lunatic scientific journal. So I drove out to Venice, reminding myself all the way that my wipers needed fixing.
Venice, California, is a fascinating idea that didn’t work. Someone named Abbot Kinney had the notion of artificially creating a city like Venice, Italy, with canals and architecture. The canals mostly ran dry and the architecture never really caught on in a town where, in the twenties, Gloria Swanson’s bathroom was considered an aesthetic triumph. All that was left was the beach and piles of rotting fish. Venice, Italy, is the Plague Capital of Europe, so Venice, California, got one thing right.
The Esoteric Order was up the coast from Muscle Beach, housed in a discreet yacht club building with its own small marina. From the exterior, I guessed the cult business had seen better days. Seaweed had tracked up the beach, swarmed around the jetty, and was licking the lower edges of the front wall. Everything had gone green: wood, plaster, copper ornaments. And it smelled like Pastore’s bathroom, only worse. This kind of place made you wonder why the Japs were so keen on invading.
I looked at myself in the mirror and rolled my eyes. I tried to get that slap-happy, let-me-give-you-all-my-worldly-goods, gimme-some-mysteries-of-the-orient look I imagined typical of a communicant at one of these bughouse congregations. After I’d stopped laughing, I remembered the marks on Pastore and tried to take detecting seriously. Taking in my unshaven, slept-upright-in-his-clothes, two-bottles-a-day lost soul look, I congratulated myself on my foresight in spending fifteen years developing the ideal cover for a job like this.
To get in the building, I had to go down to the marina and come at it from the beach-side. There were green pillars of what looked like fungus-eaten cardboard either side of the impressive front do
or, which held a stained glass picture in shades of green and blue of a man with the head of a squid in a natty monk’s number, waving his eyes for the artist. Dagon, I happened to know, was half-man, half-fish, and God of the Philistines. In this town, I guess a Philistine God blended in well. It’s a great country: if you’re half-fish, pay most of your taxes, eat babies, and aren’t Japanese, you have a wonderful future.
I rapped on the squid’s head but nothing happened. I looked the squid in several of his eyes and felt squirmy inside. Somehow, up close, cephalopod-face didn’t look that silly.
I pushed the door and found myself in a temple’s waiting room. It was what I’d expected: subdued lighting, old but bad paintings, a few semipornographic statuettes, a strong smell of last night’s incense to cover up the fish stink. It had as much religious atmosphere as a two-dollar bordello.
“Yoo-hoo,” I said, “Dagon calling...”
My voice sounded less funny echoed back at me.
I prowled, sniffing for clues. I tried saying nom de something and twiddling a nonexistent moustache but nothing came to me. Perhaps I ought to switch to a meerschaum of cocaine and a deerstalker, or maybe a monocle and an interest in incunabula.
Where you’d expect a portrait of George Washington or Jean Harlow’s Mother, the Order had hung up an impressively ugly picture of “Our Founder.” Capt. Obed Marsh, dressed up like Admiral Butler, stood on the shore of a Polynesian paradise, his good ship painted with no sense of perspective on the horizon as if it were about three feet tall. The Capt., surrounded by adoring if funny-faced native tomatoes, looked about as unhappy as Errol Flynn at a Girl Scout meeting. The painter had taken a lot of trouble with the native nudes. One of the dusky lovelies had hips that would make Lombard green and a face that put me in mind of Janice Marsh. She was probably the Panther Princess’s great-great-great grandmother. In the background, just in front of the ship, was something like a squid emerging from the sea. Fumble-fingers with a brush had tripped up again. It looked as if the tentacle-waving creature were about twice the size of Obed’s clipper. The most upsetting detail was a robed and masked figure standing on the deck with a baby’s ankle in each fist. He had apparently just wrenched the child apart like a wishbone and was emptying blood into the squid’s eyes.
“Excuse me,” gargled a voice, “can I help you?”
I turned around and got a noseful of the stooped and ancient Guardian of the Cult. His robe matched the ones worn by squid-features on the door and baby-ripper in the portrait. He kept his face shadowed, his voice sounded about as good as the radio in Pastore’s bath, and his breath smelled worse than Pastore after a week and a half of putrefaction.
“Good morning,” I said, letting a bird flutter in the higher ranges of my voice, “my name is, er...”
I put together the first things that came to mind.
”My name is Herbert West Lovecraft. Uh, H.W. Lovecraft the Third. I’m simply fascinated by matters Ancient and Esoteric, don’t ch’know.”
“Don’t ch’know” I picked up from the fellow with the monocle and the old books.
”You wouldn’t happen to have an entry blank, would you? Or any incunabula?”
”Incunabula?” He wheezed.
”Books. Old books. Print books, published before 1500 anno domini, old sport.” See, I have a dictionary too.
”Books...”
The man was a monotonous conversationalist. He also moved like Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the front of his robe, where the squidhead was embroidered, was wet with what I was disgusted to deduce was drool.
”Old books. Arcane mysteries, don’t ch’know. Anything cyclopaean and doom-haunted is just up my old alley.”
“The Necronomicon?” He pronounced it with great respect, and great difficulty.
”Sounds just the ticket.”
Quasimodo shook his head under his hood and it lolled. I glimpsed greenish skin and large, moist eyes.
”I was recommended to come here by an old pal,” I said. “Spiffing fellow. Laird Brunette. Ever hear of him?”
I’d pushed the wrong button. Quasi straightened out and grew about two feet. Those moist eyes flashed like razors, ”You’ll have to see the Cap’n’s Daughter.”
I didn’t like the sound of that and stepped backwards, towards the door. Quasi laid a hand on my shoulder and held it fast. He was wearing mittens and I felt he had too many fingers inside them. His grip was like a gila monster’s jaw.
”That will be fine,” I said, dropping the flutter.
As if arranged, curtains parted, and I was shoved through a door. Cracking my head on the low lintel, I could see why Quasi spent most of his time hunched over. I had to bend at the neck and knees to go down the corridor. The exterior might be rotten old wood but the heart of the place was solid stone. The walls were damp, bare, and covered in suggestive carvings that gave primitive art a bad name. You’d have thought I’d be getting used to the smell by now, but nothing doing. I nearly gagged.
Quasi pushed me through another door. I was in a meeting room no larger than Union Station, with a stage, rows of comfortable armchairs, and lots more squid-person statues. The centrepiece was very like the mosaic at the Seaview Inn, only the nymph had less shells and Neptune more tentacles.
Quasi vanished, slamming the door behind him. I strolled over to the stage and looked at a huge book perched on a straining lectern. The fellow with the monocle would have salivated, because this looked a lot older than 1500. It wasn’t a Bible and didn’t smell healthy. It was open to an illustration of something with tentacles and slime, facing a page written in several deservedly dead languages.
“The Necronomicon,” said a throaty female voice, “of the mad Arab, Abdul Al-Hazred.”
“Mad, huh?” I turned to the speaker. “Is he not getting his royalties?”
I recognised Janice Marsh straight away. The Panther Princess wore a turban and green silk lounging pajamas, with a floor-length housecoat that cost more than I make in a year. She had on jade earrings, a pearl cluster pendant, and a ruby-eyed silver squid brooch. The lighting made her face look green and her round eyes shone. She still looked like Peter Lorre, but maybe if Lorre put his face on a body like Janice Marsh’s, he’d be up for sex goddess roles too. Her silk thighs purred against each other as she walked down the temple aisle.
“Mr. Lovecraft, isn’t it?”
“Call me H.W. Everyone does.”
“Have I heard of you?”
“I doubt it.”
She was close now. A tall girl, she could look me in the eye. I had the feeling the eye-jewel in her turban was looking me in the brain. She let her fingers fall on the tentacle picture for a moment, allowed them to play around like a fun-loving spider, then removed them to my upper arm, delicately tugging me away from the book. I wasn’t unhappy about that. Maybe I’m allergic to incunabula or perhaps an undiscovered prejudice against tentacled creatures, but I didn’t like being near theNecronomicon one bit. Certainly the experience didn’t compare with being near Janice Marsh.
“You’re the Cap’n’s Daughter?” I said.
“It’s an honorific title. Obed Marsh was my ancestor. In the Esoteric Order, there is always a Cap’n’s Daughter. Right now, I am she.”
“What exactly is this Dagon business about?”
She smiled, showing a row of little pearls. “It’s an alternative form of worship. It’s not a racket, honestly.”
“I never said it was.”
She shrugged.
“Many people get the wrong idea.”
Outside, the wind was rising, driving rain against the Temple. The sound effects were weird, like sickening whales calling out in the Bay.
“You were asking about Laird? Did Miss Wilde send you?”
It was my turn to shrug.
“Janey is what they call a sore loser, Mr. Lovecraft. It comes from taking all those bronze medals. Never the gold.”
“I don’t think she wants him back,” I said, “ju
st to know where he is. He seems to have disappeared.”
“He’s often out of town on business. He likes to be mysterious. I’m sure you understand.”
My eyes kept going to the squid-face brooch. As Janice Marsh breathed, it rose and fell and rubies winked at me.
“It’s Polynesian,” she said, tapping the brooch. “The Cap’n brought it back with him to Innsmouth.”
“Ah yes, your home town.”
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 28