“That was some greeting.”
She laughed. “You are my husband. But don’t forget to put those glasses back on. Dan always wears them.”
He did as she said. “’Cept when you’re kissing him?”
“Yeah. Except for then.”
She drove the way Clark would have expected her to drive: well, but with a pushy unconcern for other traffic. And this car really was something else. Even with the top down, you could feel and smell the straight eight engine’s growl over the scents of leather, burr walnut, Kidderminster carpet and April Lamotte’s Chanel.
She felt in her purse for one of her cigarettes, then pressed in a button in the Delahaye’s central console which, after a few moments, popped back out again. The coil which now glowed inside enabled her to light it.
“That’s neat.”
“Is, isn’t it? I got a pack of Luckies if you want a smoke.” She gestured a green-lacquered fingernail toward the glovebox. “Forgot to tell you yesterday they’re the brand Dan prefers.”
He opened the dashboard and found the pack. He tapped one out as she swerved to accelerate past a line of trucks.
“Just press the lighter in. You should use a book of matches otherwise. Dan doesn’t like pocket lighters, says they leak too easily, although I’ve bought him a few over the years. Monogrammed All My Love and forgotten in a drawer somewhere. You’ve been married, haven’t you? You know the sort of thing.”
The sensation of smoking a real Lucky Strike was nothing like as good as the feeling he’d got as Jo-Ann Corkish lit one up yesterday in the feelies. But it wasn’t bad. “Anything else?”
“Anything what?”
“That you haven’t told me.”
“You’ve practiced the signature?”
“Uh-huh. A whole hour this morning.”
“You’ve read the script?”
“You weren’t shitting me when you said it was good. As long as you don’t expect me to say too much about it.”
“Don’t worry. The whole contract’s already fixed. All you need do is sign…” He watched her teeth go over her bottom lip. The lipstick was burgundy as well. “Then, when we’re finished I thought we could maybe go for a meal. I’ve booked a table at Chateau Bansar.”
“Thanks.” He guessed he should probably be impressed, and grateful. “And then that’s it? We’re done? No call-backs or encores?”
“Exactly. You haven’t kept anything? The clothes, the script, Dan’s signatures?”
“I’m either wearing it, or it’s in this suitcase.”
She smiled. “You know, you really do look like Dan. Driving like this, it’s weird. It feels like I’m sitting right by him.”
“How is he, anyway?”
“He’s getting better.”
“When did you last see him?“
“A couple of days back.” The Delahaye’s speed fell a few mph as her foot dropped off the gas. “Seeing as you ask.”
“Does he know anything about what’s happening today?”
“Imagine what it would do to someone in his frail state if I started trying to tell him that I’ve hired this guy to impersonate him.”
“He’ll have to know eventually.”
“I guess he will. Meantime, you’re Daniel Lamotte. Do you really think you can do it, Mr Gable?”
“Sure. But maybe we should cut the Mr Gable act. Seeing as we’ve got no chance for a dress rehearsal.”
“Yes.” She touched at her coiffure, which the wind was doing nothing to disturb. “You’re right.”
“Dan?” “Yeah. Dan.”
“And you’re just April? Not bunnikins or sweet-tits or flot-not?”
“You have an odd sense of humor, Mis…” She smiled and tossed her cigarette into the slipstream. “… Dan.”
They were slowed to a halt by a parade beside the twin radio masts of the Angelus Temple. A brass band of American Legionaries led a procession of capped and uniformed types, the largest and most prominent of whom were wearing Liberty League sashes in blue and red. All ages. All sizes. Women and men. All of them white. The cops were smiling, too, as they held everyone back. He saw that they were also wearing Liberty League badges on their lapels. A few years ago, any display of political allegiance by a city employee would have been illegal, but Herbert Kisberg’s term as governor had put paid to all that.
April Lamotte traced the leather rim of the steering wheel and glanced at her watch as the parade dragged on. Some of the other enforced spectators were getting restless, but the cops were grinning in that way which suggested that you’d better grin along. After all, this was California. You just had to smile.
Clark smiled, too, in a neutral way he’d once practiced for the role of this guy—schmuck, really—he’d played in a fleapit off Broadway, who’d thought the entire world was a swell place until some Prohibition gangsters kidnapped him. Even then, he couldn’t stop smiling, and thinking the world was essentially a kind and decent place. That was why the gangsters had finally shot him, and by the final scene you ended up feeling that it was nothing more than the stupid bastard deserved.
It was all kids now. Scout Cubs. Camp Fire Youths. Pocahontases and Hiawathas. Pioneers. Many of them were carrying banners. NEUTRAL AMERICA. NO FDR THIRD TERM. GIVE IT UP WINSTON. END THE DRAFT. SUPPORT NEW EUROPE. LIBERTY LEAGUERS AGAINST WAR.
He watched it all trail by.
TEN
THE OFFICES OF YORK AND BUNCE were in a smart new concrete and glass mid-rise a block down on Main from City Hall. April Lamotte was able to park almost directly out front.
“Hey, wait,” she said as he moved to open the Delahaye’s door on to the sidewalk. “Let’s have a proper look at you first.”
She laid a hand on each shoulder, drawing him close. Her eyes traveled over him. Close up, they were as green as he’d imagined. Even greener. Her white teeth bit down over her burgundy lower lip.
She straightened his glasses as if they weren’t straight already, then gently stroked the hair back around his ears. “That’s better.” Her hands traced down his arms. He felt his cock start to thicken as they settled on his thighs. “You look just fine. Ready?”
He swallowed. Nodded. “Yeah.” She slid herself around.
“If you’re leaving the top down…” He gestured to the cardboard briefcase on the backseat. “You’d better put that in the trunk.”
She hesitated for a moment, then nodded. He watched her as she walked around to the back of the car and leaned down into the trunk, which was carpet-lined, and empty apart from a thick length of hose. She smoothed down her skirt.
“Let’s get this done.”
This was nothing like the lawyers’ offices he was used to. No battered files and worn-out linoleum. No note about trying the bar opposite if there was no one around. This was all new wood and old paintings, although the air had that frosty, sterile feel which characterized all air conditioned spaces. So did the receptionist.
She consulted her list with a red-taloned finger. “You’re here to see Mr Amdahl.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” April Lamotte said before he could get in a word. “If you’ll…”
But already the receptionist was dialing her phone. Which, allowing for the length of those nails, was some feat. Her talons tapped a little dance on the desktop as the handset purred into her ear. She was actually rather beautiful, Clark decided, studying the honeyed fall of her hair. Women who worked prestige front-office desk jobs in this city generally were. That, and young. He’d often puzzled about what happened to these specimens after they passed from their twenties. Studying the slight sag of her jawline, he wondered if she didn’t have similar thoughts.
A voice crackled from the phone. There was a conversation, mostly of yeses and nos.
“He’ll be down to see you presently,” the receptionist said as she laid the handset down. “If you’ll just take a seat…” She gestured. But, before Clark and April could get their bearings amid the leather couches, a door swung open.<
br />
“Mr and Mrs Lamotte! You’re here about the contract?” Amdahl had an outdoor tan and a fake gray pelt of hair.
“Pleased to see you,” Clark muttered in a timbre which April Lamotte had suggested he make slightly quicker and lighter.
“Yes. Absolutely.” Amdahl nodded. He didn’t look the sort to give anyone much attention just as long as they paid their bill.
They followed him down a corridor set with big sepia blow-ups of some of the lost stars of the silent and talkie eras. Mary Astor. Herbert Marshall. Rudolph Valentino. It was as if York and Bunce were trying to tell their clients something about the industry in which they worked.
Amdahl’s office lay up the first wide flight of stairs, and looked exactly how you’d expect a successful media lawyer’s office to look. Wide windows gave a fine view across Echo Park toward Edendale through the afternoon’s softening haze. He produced a fat folder and proceeded to lay out papers from it across his desk.
“These are the finished versions. Five copies. It’s all been checked. Mrs Lamotte was sent a copy of the drafts last week. But, of course, you’re the signatory, Mr Lamotte. It’s your hard work we’re selling here. I’m happy to explain it all as much as you like.”
“I think I’m okay.” He unclipped the gold Parker pen from his inside pocket. “I mean, if I can’t trust April here, who can I trust?”
They all laughed.
Even allowing for the five copies, a surprising number of signatures was required. Endless heretofores, hereinafters and notwithstandings on cream sheets of legal vellum. As far as Clark was concerned, it might as well have been in Greek, although he was just glad to see that his hand had decided not to shake.
“And we’ll need a Bible to swear the actual affidavit on…” Amdahl’s smile soured to a momentary look of alarm. “Not Jewish are you?”
“Uh…” Clark glanced towards April, who gave a small negative blink. “No.”
“Stupid of me to ask.” Amdahl’s smile had returned. “Of course, the California regulations do allow registered Yids to make contracts, but it’s really getting to be more bother than it’s worth. Oh, and you did tell us that neither of you have any children who we need to call witness on—is that correct, Mrs Lamotte?”
Faust, Clark decided, as April Lamotte assented to their childlessness, would have been required to sign less documentation than this.
Eventually, it was done.
“Congratulations.” Amdahl gave their hands a muscular shake. “I’ll send the copies back by courier. First thing tomorrow, it’ll be on Senserama’s desks for their signature. A week at the very outside and we should all be done. This has been a real privilege. I’m a big fan of your work, Mr Lamotte. Let’s hope this thing runs and runs.”
“So do I.”
“We all do,” April Lamotte added as she slipped her arm around Clark’s. “Dan’s had his ups and downs lately—some very difficult times, to be honest, haven’t you darling?—but we’re hoping we can put the past behind us and move on.”
Clark nodded, gave her ass a squeeze, and said sure, although he was puzzled as to why she was raking up his problematic mental history at this of all moments.
“That’s… terrific.” Amdahl cleared his throat. “And maybe, seeing as we’re close to the cocktail hour… ?” He gestured towards a glass-fronted cabinet.
“Well, I—” Clark began.
“That’s real nice of you.” April Lamotte gave a burgundy smile. “But Dan and I are planning a small celebration. We’ve booked a table at Chateau Bansar.”
“Chateau Bansar … ?” Amdahl looked impressed.
ELEVEN
NO CHALLENGES. NO AMBUSHES. And no sudden surprises—unless you counted the brief issue of his possible Jewishness. He felt a sense of anticlimax as they stepped out from the cool offices of York and Bunce, back into the city’s noise and heat. As roles went, dressing in someone else’s clothes and mimicking their signature was hardly up there with playing Shakespeare. But who needed all the hassle and rejection when you could get paid a thousand bucks for doing this instead?
“So—where’s this Chateau place?” he asked as April Lamotte did something complicated with the Delahaye’s keys to get the engine throbbing.
“Up past Silver Lake.” She looked at him and smiled before pulling swiftly out into the rush-hour traffic. “Well done, by the way. I think we did it, didn’t we?”
“I think we did.”
Traffic was slow at first as she drove back along Sunset and then Hollywood. It always was at this time of day. Beyond the hanging veils of smog, the Santa Monica Mountains seemed scarcely there. So, as they shimmered in the heat pouring off the blacktop and the lanes of queuing cars, did the people on the sidewalks and the nearby buildings.
He lit himself a Lucky Strike using that clever lighter, and lit April one of her pastel cigarettes. She touched his hand with her burgundy-nailed fingertips for longer than seemed entirely necessary as he passed it to her. In pauses in the traffic, she demonstrated a few of the Delahaye’s other tricks. A top of the range Motorola. Windows which powered themselves up and down from the press of an electric button. Electric locks, too. Adjustable vents that blew out what passed in this city for fresh air.
Traffic began to clear as they passed Barnsdall Park and turned north on Cahuenga. The Delahaye’s motor began to roar.
Chateau Bansar was up a drive which wasn’t even signposted, and which wound on for so long, and through gardens so spectacular, that Clark found himself wondering when their designer’s invention would run out.
There were lakes and Chinese pagodas. There were Grecian temples and a huge and genuine-looking waterfall cascading over genuine-looking rocks. A stag deer regarded them from an outcrop. He’d just decided that it was a thing of painted plaster when it raised its head and bolted off.
The chateau itself was all fairyland turrets and balconies, floating in a haze of spotlights against the setting sun. A car valet liveried like a medieval page took the Delahaye and drove it off down an underground ramp so as not to spoil the scene. They wandered beneath arbors and around fountains. Peacocks were preening and cawing. There were swans on a moat.
“Is this what you and Dan do regularly?”
“No.” They were arm in arm.
“So there’s no chance of anyone recognizing us?”
“Absolutely nil. Why do you think I chose it? But don’t forget, you are still Dan tonight.” He felt her shrug. “I just felt we both deserved a treat.”
Wrought-iron candelabra, real fires and sweeping wooden floors. Minstrels playing something minstrel-like from a minstrel gallery. A green-lit carp-filled pool. The woman who checked their reservation and led them around the mosaic pillars to their table was wearing a wimple.
The other diners were dim figures—each alcove was shrouded in ivy and lit by genuine flames—but if you peered hard enough you could make them out. This was a gossip columnist’s paradise, and Clark didn’t doubt that all these handsome faces murmuring to each other over expensive wine belonged to people he should have heard of. Trudy Rester and Saffron Knowles and James H. Pack, maybe, and all those other billboard names he’d given up noticing these last few years. But that would have to be Monumenta Loolie. No one else in the world had breasts like hers, and even he knew about those.
He wondered about the old names—those briefly immortal faces he’d glimpsed along the corridors of York and Bunce. Mary Pickford. William Desmond Taylor. Colleen Moore. A few still lived in this city, or so he’d heard. They’d enough money to keep hold of some fragment of the dream even if no one now remembered or cared about who they’d been. Then there were those other names. People who were just starting to get used to the limousines and the easy fucks and the swish hotels before it all disappeared. People like himself.
The menus were huge and handwritten and had no prices. He was vaguely worried that April Lamotte might decide to deduct his half of the bill off the thousand bucks she was paying him, b
ut for one night he was happy to play along. After all, they had pulled off something pretty impressive together, hadn’t they?
The Champagne was poured. They clinked glasses. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.” He took a slug of the Champagne, then slid the bottle out of the ice bucket and poured them both some more. “When do you think Dan… uh… I’ll be back in good enough order to get back to work?”
Her gaze hardened fractionally. “I don’t know.”
He considered the bubbles in his Champagne. Someone as sharp as she was, he was surprised she wasn’t ahead of him. “What I mean is, April, the contract’s just step number one. The studio will want all the usual stuff once the project goes into development. You know—meetings, revisions. More meetings, more revisions. Table top readings and re-writes for some star who thinks they know about how to make a script work. All the crap that writers have to go through.”
“I guess so.” She was twisting her wedding ring, although she stopped as soon as she noticed him watching.
“And if Dan’s not… If I’m not—Hell, April, no one here’s listening… What I’m trying to say is that I could help you and Dan some more. I could go to the meetings, do the pitches, suck up to the executives. Whatever. And not just for this feelie. Not if the stuff’s as good as Wake Up and Dream is. The Dan who does the writing could keep himself as far out of the way as he wanted from all the shit that rains down in this town. And, if they ever did find out that there were two Dans, the studios wouldn’t care anyway. Not, and pardon my French, the tiniest fuck. Not if the writing’s successful. I mean, who the hell’s losing out? More likely, they’d want to make a new feelie out of the whole scam.”
“You’re not quite the hard-bitten cynic you like to think you are. You’re worse. You’re just an outright romantic, aren’t you?”
“You got me there.” He grinned back at her and raised his glass. “So? What do you think?”
“I think we should order. You’re hungry, aren’t you? I sure am.”
Clark, who liked his food plain even at a joint like this, settled for steak and fries with a brandy sauce. She ordered some kind of fish that still had its head on when it arrived. Once the waiter had gone away, he tried probing some more.
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