Just then Sassoon called them all back.
“Everyone can break for today and take the next two days off.” There were groans from the extras, who were paid only for the days they worked. “We might be off another week, but keep your schedules open in case I call you all back early.”
“What’s the holdup?” Lulu asked, managing (thanks to Mrs. Wilberforce’s deportment lessons) to sound sweet despite her impatience. She’d never have a shot at The House of Mirth now. True, with the days off she could make the audition more easily, but once they heard she wouldn’t be finished with this dumb flick on time, they’d pick someone else. Probably Ruby Godfrey, who had only two more scenes to shoot and would be done long before Lulu.
“We nixed the dog. But the script doctors had a brilliant solution: Instead of a pooch, Jezebel will pick up a fella. A regular street rat, a down-on-his-luck petty thief whom she wants to reform.”
“So now this fella will be the one to bite me?” she asked wryly.
“They’re still working that out. He’s blackmailing you, he’s a gigolo, he tries to steal your beloved grandmother’s pearls, Lord knows. But in the end, a knife comes out and you get carved up.” Lulu heard Ruby snort with laughter. “Elegantly carved up, of course. Can’t have our star disfigured, even with putty and paint.”
“You have the story line laid out,” Lulu said as persuasively as she could. “Do you really have to wait a week?”
“We have to find the fella,” Sassoon said. “I figure we get someone authentic. The streets are teeming with good-looking indigents. It can be a publicity stunt—studio picks bum for bum part, changes his life, that kind of thing. So tomorrow I’ll send a scouting crew out, and maybe by the end of the week we can start shooting again.”
“Tomorrow?” she asked, aghast. “I could find you someone in an hour and get him coached and ready in three. Give me a loaf of bread, let them fight over it on the dole line, and the winner gets the part.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Sassoon said. “You can’t just pluck a star out of the gutter. We have to audition them, train them. . . .”
I was plucked out of the gutter, Lulu wanted to protest. But even on the set, even with Sassoon, she was supposed to maintain the charade that she was a cheeky finishing-school runaway. “Tell you what,” she said. “Don’t break for the day.Break for an hour. When I come back, I’ll have the perfect fella for you. You just see if I don’t.” She stalked off, pulling the set door violently open, letting a shocking beam of real sunlight into that artificial world. Then the door slammed behind her.
The handsome young man in the pin-striped suit missed Lulu by minutes. He strolled up to the guard shack, his meaty hands loose, his eyes hard.
“Sorry, sir,” the guard said. “This is a closed set.”
The man with the suspicious bulge under his exquisitely tailored jacket handed the guard a bill. It had the right number of zeros. “Nothing’s closed to me,” the man said, and asked where Mr. Niederman’s office might be.
FOURTEEN
Frederick had been traveling nonstop ever since Ben’s death. He’d abandoned the steady westward progression he and his friend had been pursuing and simply peregrinated around the continent, surviving. Shortly after Ben had been tossed ignominiously into a pauper’s grave at the outskirts of town, Frederick had a scare. Needing something to stuff into his shoe to fill the hole in his sole, he’d snatched a three-day-old newspaper that had been tumbleweeding on the breeze . . . and saw his own face on the front page.
The photo had been faded by the sun, but he recognized it immediately. It had been taken at a gala benefiting the Metropolitan Opera. He stood smugly in his sleek white tie, a Young Turk with the world at his feet.
The photo disgusted him. But beneath the disgust was an ache. Would his happiness have lasted if he’d never been enlightened as to the terrible truth of his fortune? He longed for that blissful ignorance, Adam in Eden.
He read the article, and his chest began to feel tight. “Beloved son of tycoon Jacob van der Waals . . . missing, presumed endangered . . . kidnapped . . . amnesia . . .” Anything but the truth, that he had fled everything his family stood for. There was a quote from his father. “Whoever has taken my son, I promise you won’t be arrested or charged if you just release him or deliver him to the nearest hospital or police station. If you come forward, you will be rewarded. If you prefer to remain anonymous, I will never hunt for you. Only return my son.”
Does he really think I’ve been kidnapped? Frederick wondered. No, he had to know what really happened. How had Jacob van der Waals explained Mr. Shaw’s death? What lawyers, what criminals had he called to sweep that blood, and guilt, under the rug? There was no mention of it in the article, of course.
The article went on to say that anyone who provided information leading to Frederick’s recovery could be eligible for a reward of up to half a million dollars. That phrasing brought a rueful chuckle. It was so lawyerly that it promised nothing. “Could” be eligible . . . “up to” half a million. Even if someone caught him and brought him home, his father would never pay.
Why, now that he understood what his father was capable of, Frederick thought he might even make anyone who helped his son simply disappear. Frederick shuddered. It had happened before, and in his innocence he hadn’t realized who must have been behind it. A man who owned the corner store of a commercial block Jacob wanted to buy conveniently fell into an elevator shaft after months of refusing to sell. When city officials couldn’t be bribed into razing a historic building that sat on land Jacob coveted, the building conveniently burned to the ground, along with seven residents.
Frederick skimmed the rest of the article. “Mr. van der Waals has an army of private investigators searching for his son.” Frederick would expect nothing less. The next lines chilled him:
The young man has been spotted by reliable sources at numerous points around the country. A railroad guard in Pittsburgh saw him in the company of what appeared to be a hardened criminal, possibly a drug fiend. And only yesterday, a vest bearing his initials was discovered in a decrepit barn about a hundred miles outside of Wichita, Kansas. There was blood on the floor and signs of a desperate struggle. People for miles around are being interrogated as van der Waals’s private investigators swarm to the locale.
They were close! Before Frederick could even read the last paragraph, which he dimly saw had a quote from Violet, he had folded the newspaper, shoved it into his shoe, and run as fast as he could. It didn’t matter where. Away was enough.
Only later had he wondered what Violet might have had to say about his disappearance. Late that night he had pulled the newspaper out of his shoe and tried to read the last few sentences. But they had been worn away by sweat and dirt, and the single word he could read of her statement to the press was “money.”
After that scare, Frederick had never stopped moving. Even when he wasn’t heading west, every step seemed to take him farther from his old home. He’d settled into a mostly solitary routine of begging, breadlines, and occasional work. It was penance for almost eighteen years of crime. The crime hadn’t been his, but he’d benefited from it all the same, and in his eyes that made him just as culpable as his father.
Frederick was lonely, deeply, deeply lonely. He kept to himself as much as possible lest someone recognize him. He hadn’t seen a mirror for months, but he hoped that by now nothing of his old self showed in his face or manners. Still, he couldn’t risk it, and often he went for days without talking to another human being. Sometimes as he fell asleep in an alleyway or the lee of a dry stone wall, he thought he heard Duncan Shaw’s irrepressible laugh. Frederick would be half on his feet before he realized it was only the call of some distant night bird and remember he’d lost Duncan’s friendship forever. Then in the morning he would be jostled awake by a constable’s boot and smile for that fleeting instant when his bleary brain believed it might be Ben.
I couldn’t save either of them, he
thought. What good am I?
Solitude, anonymity—that was what he thought he deserved. But his gregarious soul called out for a friend, if only so he could have another chance and prove he wouldn’t let everyone down.
Almost by accident, Frederick found himself in California. Someone had told him there might be jobs in New Mexico, so he’d hopped a train, thinking he might even cross the border to old Mexico, continue south, and get lost among jungles and revolutionaries. But he’d slept through the unloading and had then been locked in the sweltering car until it reached California. He’d been found by one of the rare sympathetic railroad bulls, who got him a drink of water and told him he wouldn’t arrest him because dehydration was enough of a punishment for train hopping.
California would do for now, but the Pacific called him. In almost every paper he scavenged from the street, he found another article about the missing van der Waals boy. They didn’t seem to be getting any closer, but they were still looking. Maybe it wasn’t enough to have a mere continent between him and his old life. He could strike out for China, for India. A continent and an ocean or two dividing them might be sufficient to convince Frederick that his father had no hold over him. Not anymore.
Frederick had exactly five cents to his name now. He was saving that in case he wanted to make a call on a pay phone one day. He still wasn’t sure whom he was going to call. His father, to demand an explanation? Or maybe the Department of Justice, to turn his father in. Or Violet, to tell her she was free to marry someone else. Maybe Mugsy, the other person his heart ached for, the man who was so much more of a father than his real father had ever been.
Frederick would never call the van der Waals’s family lawyer, James Cox, Esq., to ask him to wire the latest dividends of his massive trust fund. Nothing on earth would induce him to touch that money again. There was more than a hundred million cash in his own name, safe in a bank that had never failed, and another ten million in bullion locked in an impregnable vault. He had acres of citrus groves in Florida, an oil well in Texas, grain fields and a bottling company in Canada, a house on the Hudson, a hotel in Bermuda, all his by inheritance from his mother, or placed in his name for tax purposes by his father. He hadn’t touched a penny of it. Not when he’d gone two days without eating. Not even when he’d seen a train full of orphans kicked out of their car in the middle of nowhere because they hadn’t been given enough fare to ship them all the way to their new orphanage in Chicago.
He’d arrived in California three weeks ago and had drifted into Los Angeles last week. In the countryside he’d found occasional day labor, and he’d scavenged for wild plants and snared rabbits for stew. But here in Los Angeles there were no rabbits, and the weeds that grew in cracks between the pavement were all unfamiliar. He’d thought California would be a paradise—that’s what the other men of the road said. But where he’d hoped to find oranges free for the picking, he found only more people, less work.
In place of jobs there was charity, much more than in the nation’s heartland. He wasn’t sure why Los Angeles seemed to take slightly better care of its poor than other places did. Maybe, he thought with a snobbish vestige that shamed him, the poor here were of a higher class. In rural America, displaced people were farmers whose land had died under the dust bowl, or factory workers who had barely scraped by even in the best of times. They moved in search of anything, to feed themselves and their families for one more day.
The poor people in Los Angeles, though, had come full of dreams. They didn’t just want to survive—they hoped for meteoric success. When Frederick found a breadline that day, he met four aspiring actors, a dancer, a piano player, an elocution instructor, and a history professor who hoped to consult for studios. There were fast-talking young men who hoped to be agents, clever women who wanted to be publicists.
As he neared the front of the line, he spied a platinum-haired woman in a three thousand dollar dress, no doubt a star or socialite come to dispense charity. Was she born into it, or had she clawed her way to the top? His money—if he’d had any—was on the latter. That was why there was so much charity here in Los Angeles, and in Hollywood in particular. All of these people knew how lucky they were. So many of them came from nothing and caught a break, so they understood the poor, the desperate. They might enjoy their wealth, and flaunt it, just like my father does back in Manhattan, but they give it away, too. His father could not even imagine what it must be like to have no money, no prospects. But these Hollywood people could.
FIFTEEN
It must have been Satan himself who invented high heels, Lulu thought as she minced along the pavement between huge warehouselike sound stages to catch one of the many studio cars waiting to chauffeur their stars. She felt like a prisoner in her pinching, pointy—though admittedly elegant—shoes and her skintight dress of silver lamé. She was picturing a huge clock ticking down a deadline until her missed opportunity when she heard a yip, and a thud, and a whine from around the corner of the commissary.
Curiosity had gotten her into trouble before. That other time, the cry had been human, and this one was obviously canine. But they were similar, somehow, filled with the helpless knowledge that something terrible was coming and there was absolutely no hope of escape.
She hesitated at the corner of the dark alley, chewing her lip in a way that would have made her makeup artist, Max, give her a stern lecture. She heard a curse, a kick, and the unseen dog gave another yowl.
Before she even knew what she was doing, she was running down the alley—blisters be damned—and had grabbed a big man by the shoulder. “If you kick that dog again, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
She broke off. What could she do? The last time she’d cowered in the face of threats. Not this time. She lifted her chin defiantly.
“Back off, toots,” the man said. “I been giving this mutt meat I could have fed to my kids, thinking he’d be a star. But ten auditions and the lazy cur ain’t got one role.” He aimed another kick at the little muddy shadow cringing at his feet, but Lulu used all her strength to pull him back, and he missed. “Guy sold him to me said he’d earn his weight in gold, if only I fed him right and took him to casting. Well, he’s sucked down his last slice of liver. First I ax the fleabag, and then I track down the fraud who sold him to me.”
“Stop! You can’t do that!”
“Says who?” The man looked down at the little dog and lifted his big boot. Lulu shoved him as hard as she could, and when the man raised his arm to backhand her, she quickly slid a bracelet off her wrist.
“Here, take this. It’s worth ten times what that dog costs.”
“You on the level, lady?” he asked, examining the platinum links, the winking little rubies.
She nodded.
“If the pawnshop tells me this is a fake, I’m coming back to find you.” He scowled at her, then glanced down at the dog. “Looks like you earned me some cash after all, pooch,” he said, and reached out his hand to pat the dog’s head. He retreated with a curse, blood dripping from his palm.
Lulu suppressed a titter. “Scram, before I call security,” she said with fraudulent cool. Which, now that she thought of it, would have been the best thing to do in the first place.
“You scram, too,” she told the dog when the man was gone. There would surely be some other sucker who would give him a good home. The dog seemed inclined to engage in a silent staring competition with her until she felt compelled to explain her situation to the animal. “I’ve got to find a diamond in the rough I can polish up in an hour and get back to shooting.”
The dog gave a skeptical bark and cocked his head at her. She gave him a closer look. “Oh, foot! It’s you.” It was the ham, the wire-haired terrier with the knowing eyes. She reached down and let him sniff her knuckles, then jerked her hand away. “No sir, you aren’t going to bamboozle me. I know a sharp when I see one. You need an owner. Fine. Trot off and find some other sucker, because it ain’t going to be me. The last thing I need is a dog.”
&nbs
p; He barked again, plainly saying he begged to differ.
She huffed off, embarrassed at carrying on a conversation with a dog. Even one who gave every indication of listening and understanding.
As she strode away, she heard the clatter of nails on the pavement behind her and turned to see the little dog trotting after her. He plopped down on his haunches and wagged his short tail so fast it was a blur.
“I don’t want a dog,” she told him sternly. The golden-brown tufts of hair above his eyes twitched. Dogs might not have eyebrows, but this one sure thought he did.
She started walking again and sighed at the sound of little paws trotting after her. “I’ll give you one thing, mutt—you’re loyal. Okeydoke. I saved you and you’re grateful. You can follow me if you want to. You’re your own man now. Go wherever you like. But I’m not feeding you.”
She leaned over and patted his fur before taking his small face in her hands. He bared his teeth at her in a canine grin. “You think I’m a softie, don’t you?” she said as she fondled his ears. They flopped forward, looking like the corners of a library book that’s been checked out too many times. “It’s no use licking my hand. You might be with me, but you’re not my dog.”
But she smiled when she got into the studio fleet car and the dog hopped in beside her and lay down with his chin on her lap. Loyalty and gratitude were equally hard to come by in Hollywood. She’d better take them where she could get them.
“Where to, miss?” the driver asked.
“Where’s the nearest breadline?”
He thought she was joking, but at last agreed to take her to a place where the Salvation Army handed out two meals a day. “I’ll get a ticket if I park here,” he said as they neared, “so I’ll drive around the block. Be careful,” he cautioned. “They’re an unsavory crowd.”
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