“What about Dan? Is he dead as well?”
“I wish I knew. That’s one of the many things I’m still trying to find out.”
She chuckled. “Right in at the deep end, Clark, as always. And you really haven’t been sent up here to kill me?”
“The nearest my current work gets to violence is when some husband’s broad comes at me with a pair of nail scissors. And she’s normally wearing a peekaboo negligee.”
“So you’re that kind of private eye?”
“Well, I was. I got roped into this because April Lamotte hired some other dick to find a lookalike for her husband, and I guess I was tall enough and jug-eared enough to fit the bill. I think her plan was to make it look as if Dan had killed himself by dressing me up as him and gassing me in his car, then stage her own suicide and make a run for it. Instead, she ended up dead, and so did the other private eye.”
Peg flung another rock. “She must have gotten really desperate.”
They sat there for a while in silence. Clark glanced over at Peg. The wind stirred her loose blonde hair, which he guessed was probably styled in this feathery way after the fashion of whatever character she’d most recently been playing. The loose strands of it seemed to cause the details of her face to blur, and he thought again of how difficult it was for someone like her. Always putting on the next veil, the next disguise. Even amid the car crashes and the marriage breakups, you were always playing someone other than yourself.
“You as much as anyone know how things were with me, Clark,” she said. “I could never see myself as anything other than an actress. I suppose it was down to my dad and the way I grew up. I only felt good about myself when I was onstage or in front of a camera… Or perhaps just before or after when I was in front of the dressing room mirror, putting on or taking off my makeup. Then Hilly comes along with all sorts of promises to lure me out to Los Angeles and tales about how this place was the future of everything. Which I suppose it probably was.
“So I took the train from New York and I went to all the parties and I attended all the auditions, and I met people like you, Clark. For a while I felt like I was floating, but then it seemed as if I was falling. I remember…” She gave a laugh. “The very day I arrived and came out of Union station I looked up at this sign. And even then it sort of passed through my head that if I failed I might as well throw myself off it. Hilly…” She shook her head. “Well Hilly somehow picked up on that without me ever consciously telling him. When he did those cards for me—the tarot, they’re called, aren’t they?—the symbol he kept coming up with was this figure falling from a high tower. And he said nonsense things about a circle of worlds, and how events can happen in several ways and send our lives off in different directions, but that certain places and people will always have some kind of magnetic draw. So when the work stopped coming… Well, to be honest, it hardly ever started, and this sign seemed to be forever gazing down at me, it eventually came to feel like only a matter of time before I…” She paused. “I don’t quite mean to say threw myself off. It isn’t that simple, and perhaps it never is. That evening when I walked along Beachwood and climbed over the fence and up here I was in part just curious. I felt as if watching myself scrambling up over these rocks. It was like some kind of experiment. To see how far you can take something, and if it really can be done. And then I guess I was lucky. If you can call it that. Anyway, the police came and I got arrested before I could work out how to climb my way up. And when they asked me what I was doing up here in the first place, I simply told them the truth. Which got me into the Met.
“It wasn’t so terrible. I mean, there are no poolside parties, no meetings with producers who basically want you to take your clothes off. When somebody in the Met tells you something, they mostimes genuinely mean it—even if it’s some story about little men from Mars. So I kind of got to like being in there. It was almost like throwing myself off this sign. Another form of letting go—or giving up. April Lamotte was a nurse there. And Penny Losovic—you’re heard of her as well, haven’t you?—she was a young intern. You form friendships in such places just like any others, and by some standards I was less mad than some of the other residents. I soon became a ward trustie.
“So when I’m asked if I’d be interested in helping in some research project, I really wasn’t likely to say no. They said it was a new facility, and that it might lead to some great insights into the workings of the human mind. This was late in 1929 and I’d been in the Met for several months, and the thing I suppose I feared above anything was having to go back into the outside world. And of course there was still Hilly. He was egging me on as well. So there it was. We were taken to this place of low, new fenced-off buildings. We called it Thrasis after the old mining town that had once been there, but it was so far out in the Mojave that it really wasn’t anywhere at all. I suppose we had to call it something, although I never liked the sound of that word.
“In some ways, Thrasis wasn’t so very different from the Met. I was the bright spark, the helpful patient—good little Peg Entwistle who can be relied upon to be sensible and helpful and toe the line. There was a doctor there—I think he was pretty famous for his work on the human brain.”
“Guy called Theobold?“
She nodded. “He’s dead now, of course. But he and other experts said they were especially interested in me because I was an actress, and because I’d attempted suicide. It seemed weird back then—although I know that now it would seem far less so—when I was asked to sit in this electrically shielded room and try to work myself back into that state. Try to imagine, they told me, that you’re climbing the back of that letter H, and then the moment of decision, and throwing yourself off, the act of plunging, falling… and how all of that might feel. It was sold to me like it was a kind of cleansing of the spirit, but in truth I think we all knew that this was about human minds pushed to their far extremes. I was mostly kept apart from the other residents. We lived I—I wouldn’t exactly call them cells. We weren’t allowed to mingle. But I knew enough. I heard enough. Sometimes, thick though the concrete walls were, you could hear screams. And I helped do the laundry, being good little Peg. And I tell you, Clark, there was far too much blood on the things that needed washing… So I’m not making excuses. I knew what was really going on in those shielded and soundproofed rooms at Thrasis, and in my own small way I was involved. I just chose somehow to close my eyes and heart and ears. I rather think that millions of people across in Europe are learning how to do the same…”
“So Thrasis really is a place out in the desert?”
“I think you could say that. But don’t ask me where it is, Clark, because it was and is nowhere. You know how the wind sounds when its been coming at you for miles? It seemed to be saying this word. It was some other kind of presence. And then Thrasis was closed and we achieved what we achieved and that presence seemed to follow those of us who returned to what were supposed to be our ordinary lives. Of course, we were all pledged to secrecy. But the deal almost seemed to be worth it, and for our silence we were lavishly paid. There was money behind Thrasis, Clark, like you wouldn’t believe, but there was influence as well. For me, it was about my career. For April, of course, it was getting Dan the breaks he needed to succeed as a writer of feelies. For Penny, it was a job where she could help others. It was…” She shrugged and wiped her eyes.
“A deal with the devil?”
“And we’re all still paying the price. I mean, it was never said. It was never explained. But you started noticing it in the papers, and amongst people who’d worked in Thrasis that you’d known. The deaths, the suicides, the disappearances. The message was pretty clear. If you cracked, or came close to going public, you died. It was worse than that, though. It was Hilly who explained that. He’d been involved as some kind of supplier of whatever was needed—bodies, patients, muscle. I suppose, in a way, he’d supplied me. But he was losing it himself by then—I guess all that nonsense talk of spirits and other worlds had fi
nally got to him—and he called me one night to say he’d had this letter filled with sand and he knows that there’s nothing left to be done.”
“A letter filled with sand?” Even though he knew it was empty, Clark felt his hand move toward his suit coat pocket.
She nodded. “It was a kind of signal—that was the cleverest thing about how it was all done. The deaths, you see, were mostly suicides. But if you didn’t kill yourself and put an end to things neatly, it wasn’t just you that died, but everything that was precious to you was destroyed as well. It happened to Doctor Theobold. He and his family died… in a terrible way. It’s happened to many others. I used to keep up some contact with one or two others. April, for example. And Penny. But it’s been years… I’ve been too afraid.”
“So this is why you’re up here? You thought that I …? Last night… ?”
“When you turn up out of nowhere and mention Thrasis, what else was I to think? Look, Clark, I’ve honestly got no idea of how these people really got killed, or why they killed themselves. All I know is that they are dead.”
Clark gazed out at the city. Everything about it seemed faint, distant. With or without these glasses, he wondered if Los Angeles would ever seem real to him again. “And all that guff about the Bechmeir field?”
“Just another way of covering up for Thrasis. That, and a marketing ploy. Lars Bechmeir is nothing more than a way of selling a product. He’s the Quaker Oats man made flesh. Or was, anyway. And look at how he lost his wife… So there you are, Clark. This is what you’ve blundered into. And, if you didn’t know enough before to get yourself killed, you do now.”
“Peg—this old friend of yours. This Doctor Losovic. I’m sorry, but I think she’s vanished as well. It might be nothing…”
She blinked slowly but said nothing. If this was a feelie, Clark thought, and Peg was any decent kind of actress, she’d be crying by now. But her eyes were as dry and glassy as the lens of an iconoscope.
“The thing is,” he said, “that everything you’ve told me makes it clear that you can’t let this go on. We have to blow the whole thing open. It’s the only way.” He thought of Star Talk. He thought of Barbara’s busy little press. “I don’t care what the hell happens. But from here on in I’m going to give it the good old college try.”
“Then you haven’t been listening to what I’ve told you at all.” Her voice was a lost monotone. “You’re going to do something stupid. I know you, Clark.”
“Since when has that been news?”
Shade seemed to have fallen over them. Glancing back, he saw that the sign now lay between them and the sun.
“Look, Peg. What are you going to do? You’re not going to—”
“No. I won’t do that. Maybe I was never brave enough. I think I’ll just sit up here a while longer. It’s not such a bad spot. From here you can see that the city has an ending—that it doesn’t just go on and on and on. Then I’ll wander back down. Call a cab, check with Mina about any new scripts that are in, go back home and take an early night. You know what it’s like. I’ve got a dawn call for a readthrough because the director and the writer can’t agree about a comma. And if anything else happens, if anyone comes…” A dusty wind stirred around them. She gave a shivering shrug. “It’s only what I deserve. Now, will you let me alone… ?”
He wanted to tell her no. Wanted to tell her how good things had once been and could be again. How the dream wasn’t all lost and dead. Wanted to tell her a whole lot of things. But instead, he simply got up and headed off down the slope.
FIFTY ONE
HE DROVE BACK INTO LOS ANGELES, parked the Delahaye, got out, dodged the 5th Avenue traffic and took the County Library steps at a run. It was coming up to two o-clock. He’d been in this library several times when he was checking up on cases. Dust made pillars of the sunlight. Huge friezes told the story of the city as if all of it—the Spaniards and the slaughtered Indians and the citrus farmers and the chanting monks—had all been leading up to some perfect moment. But there was a reek of incontinent bodies amid the tall avenues of shelves.
He looked quickly for Barbara. First in the main reading room. Then, in increasing alarm, he tried the smaller alcoves. Nothing but snoring hobos. He asked a passing woman to check the ladies’ washroom, then went back along the way he’d come, telling himself to stay calm. But what had made him think that a place this public would be safe, even before everything that Peg had told him? He pushed through doors into private offices. He ran stairs. Then, bursting through swing doors marked Map Room, he found her sitting alone and calm-as-you-like at the big center table.
“Hey Clark, where have you been? You look as if…”
He drew up a chair and sat there panting. He could have used a cigarette. “Just saw some people. Like I said.”
“Don’t tell me you’re protecting your sources?”
“It isn’t like that, but… Well, I’ve got a pretty clear idea now about this thing called Thrasis. It’s—”
“I know, Clark. It’s a place. It’s out in the desert.”
All around her along the map room walls were wide, thin-drawed cabinets and racks of what might have been holes in a pigeon coop, only they were stuffed with rolls of paper.
“It was obvious, really,” she said. “I remembered that Dan had a County Library ticket—stands to reason, he’s a writer, and he’d need to do research. I work here quite a bit myself, so I just tried asking my old friend Max at the main counter. Not that he remembered Dan’s name, but he recognized the description. And he took me in here. It’s in the map room log that Daniel Lamotte was in here Tuesday and Wednesday last week. I was even able to find out what maps he’d been looking at… and here they are…”
A wrinkled sea of yellowed sheets covered the table. They gave off gritty crackles. Many had been rolled and folded so often that they had fallen apart. All were so aged it was hard to tell where the stains gave out and the real makings began.
“They show bits of the Mojave, the high desert, and were mostly done by prospectors and wildcatters last century. No one’s ever got round to cataloguing them properly, and they don’t make much sense. They weren’t meant to. See, a map you’d marked out to show where the mineral seam or an oil seep that you’d discovered was—that was valuable information, and you sure as hell didn’t want anyone else to work it out. So it stands to reason that these maps aren’t coherent or accurate. They’re in code, mirror-written, out of scale. They were meant to confuse—or possibly even lead competitors to their deaths. But it’s right here—I mean Thrasis—on some of them anyway. Look…”
She dragged over a small square that looked to have flaked apart from a far larger map. The old paper had a gritty, glittery feel, and was discolored to dark brown in one corner with what might have been ancient blood. The writing was spidery and dense, and maybe his sight wasn’t as good as hers, because Barbara had to show him where the word was. But, once you saw it blocked there in shaky print, there was no doubting. THRASIS. And there it was again, scrawled in a different hand on the corner of another map, which had been drawn on the back of a poster for some quack medical cure.
“Thrasis isn’t on any of the more modern surveys or atlases. But the State surveyors are only concerned with proper geological features. Some abandoned mining settlement would probably be ignored. There are dozens of places like that up in the high desert, or more likely hundreds, and these maps are scrappy things…”
“Like a jigsaw.”
“Or several jigsaws with the pieces mixed. But Thrasis is somewhere real, Clark. It’s a place that you can narrow down pretty accurately to a set of map coordinates and then get into a car and drive out to. Dan must have realized that as well. So what he did when he’d finished in this map room was pretty straightforward.” She felt down in the bag beside her feet and produced the receipt for RTS Taxis. “I’ve been wondering about this since I first saw it. I couldn’t understand why on earth anyone would pay a taxi firm more than fourteen doll
ars for one journey. But it’s for Thursday June 20th, just over a week ago—the day after Dan finished looking at these maps. The Delahaye was up at Erewhon, and maybe he was getting wary of April by then, so he simply called a cab. That’s probably the day he gets that gun, as well. And Friday’s when he sees April at Edna’s Eats to tell her what he’s found. Although she knows most of it already because she was involved in it herself. And that’s why she’s afraid.”
“And then he vanishes.”
“Exactly. Just like everyone else who’s ever got near the truth.”
She took him to the main reading room and unfolded heavy volumes of bound newspapers.
There was a financier called Hilton Edwards, who’d been killed in a hit-and-run on Sunset in 1933. There was Sol Hayden, a civil engineer who’d won a Distinguished Service Medal in the Great War and worked for many years in LA, but had become a hermit and somehow contrived to starve himself to death in a fishing shack up on the Bay of Funday in Canada in 1935. And there was Ralph Kilbrack, whose body was found in a hotel room in Tijuana only last year. PART TIME ACTOR AND LIMO DRIVER FOUND SKINNED ALIVE IN MYSTERY MEXICO KILLING was the lurid headline in the LA Times. And the only thing these people had in common apart from being dead was that they’d attended the premiere of the first ever feelie.
“Of the people on the guestlist, it looks like at least eighteen are dead. And several others are missing.” She tapped her fingers on the table and smiled at him. “But it’s your turn now, Clark. You can tell me whatever you like about where you’ve been and who you’ve seen, but it’s obvious that it has something to do with a name recognized on that guestlist. Used to be someone yourself, didn’t you? Or nearly. Mr Clark Gable of the talking silver screen. Hollywood’s a small enough village, and it was even smaller then. So the chances are you knew at least some of those people. And, being who you are, I also reckon that the ones you knew best would be young and pretty and female… And wasn’t Peg Entwistle there last night at Herbert Kisberg’s? And isn’t she on that list?” She was still smiling. “Am I warm, Clark?” She tapped her fingers again. “Am I close?”
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