Then, back in something which was vaguely closer to the real world, he was looking up at the same view, before which hung the feelie cage, and the thing within was flowing, enormous. If such creatures had ever existed, it really could have been an angel. And still all the many machines were spinning, and the wraith seemed to be drawing in all the dust and the light—all the humming noise—which filled this stage-set. He remembered the thing he had glimpsed on the pier back at Venice, and again at the overlook, and in the restroom at City Hall, and under the tree shadows of Pershing Square—and how it had somehow always composed itself out of whatever lay around it. It seemed to be doing the same here. But the sense of presence and purpose was far stronger. The cage swayed. Then one of the wires which was attached to it flew off in dark zigzags, spewing sparks. It hit a book flat at the far end of the stage as it landed, which crashed over. Then another wire flew loose, and this time the flying sparks caught on a trailing rope, which had grown as dry as tinder in this hot and empty soundstage and instantly caught light.
We’re all going to burn to death, Clark thought. But Penny Losovic, who surely could have pulled the plugs and cut down that rope and stamped the flames out before they took hold, was still just standing there. And her mouth was still moving in a continuation of that same quiet conversation in which she had long been engaged, although by now as other wires thrashed and hissed the noise was so great that it was hard to hear what she was saying. But she seemed happy. She seemed unconcerned. Her words, if anything, were things like marvelous and wonderful and achievement …
Another bookflat crashed over and flakes of paint, whole strips of rotting canvas, joined with the smoke and dust which were pouring toward the cage. Ribbon-like strips of torn set were flapped across the bars before they were sucked in like litter down a stormdrain. In another moment, the entire backdrop of Los Angeles was in flame. The next thing to catch were the ropes which were holding the cage. The thing yawed, then collapsed in a tornado of light and dust and fragmenting set props.
The entity stretched its arms then hollered a feedback roar. It was formed by now mostly of smoke and flame, but Clark could see the smog of this city inside, and its teeming lights and shadows as well. Loops of celluloid and wire writhed out as the projectors and recorders unspun. Just as with everything else, the entity sucked them in. It was far bigger than anything human now. Its head seemed to reach as high as the soundstage roof. There was an enormous shudder, and chunks of lighting rig rained down around him. He was knocked sideways, and as he went sprawling he felt something break in the chair to which he was bound. He kicked and pulled until it fell apart, then stumbled up, pulling trailing scraps of rope and canvas from his wrists.
He looked around. Barbara was still tied to her chair, but rocking back and forth as the flames licked closer. He tried to step toward her, and immediately fell across the rope which still bound his ankles.
“Jesus, Clark! Can’t you just get me out of this…”
But he was. Or at least he was trying. Although his fingers were numb and he could scarcely breathe. Then the ropes gave and he was helping Barbara, fighting with her really, to get the fucking chair from off her arms and legs. Something huge—a crane perhaps—rushed by them in a gale of sparks. Although it was hard to imagine that the air could get any hotter, it was doing so by the moment. Retching and coughing, Barbara stumbled to her feet.
“This way!” he shouted, although he’d lost any sense of which way was out.
Barbara spat, shook her head, mouthed the word Dan.
They ploughed through a maze of thrashing wires and burning equipment. The air shimmered. Everything was dissolving into flame. But Daniel Lamotte was still seated on the stage-set, and still unconscious. With no time left to do much else, they hauled him across the floor, still attached to his director’s chair. But wait, wait… There was another figure behind them. Penny Losovic’s arms were outstretched, and somehow they could still hear her quiet exclamations as she walked, arms outstretched as if in welcome, toward a thing of living flame. Then, in a final cataclysmic shudder, some central strut of the building gave and they staggered away.
All the fake forests, plaster mountains and tinfoil lakes were ablaze as they dragged Dan off. They reached a wall and were beating their way along it—it was impossible to see through the smoke—when the whole soundstage fell up and away, and they were blasted out.
Later, Clark was to wonder about that moment; why, as the fire did what all fires did and sucked in more air, they should be flung away. But at the time, as he and Barbara picked themselves up on the concrete and looked back to see the galvanized flanks of Soundstage 1A tumbling into the sky, all he could think of was taking another breath and crawling further from the flames.
For all the heat at their backs, the night felt blessedly cool as he and Barbara loosened Daniel’s Lamotte’s arms and legs. The man gave a drooling groan. His eyes flickered. Momentary puzzlement crossed his face. Bells and sirens were already growing loud. The first firetruck swung into view as they dragged him toward a grassy bank. A fleet of white ambulances and black police cars followed as they laid him down.
“Hey!” Barbara shouted as uniformed figures emerged. “We got someone injured over here!”
“We can’t—”
“—what we can’t do, Clark, is leave him here.”
Clark and Barbara were already backing into the shadows as the ambulancemen turned their way. Soundstage 1A was beyond rescue—a roaring, groaning maelstrom—and the firemen were keeping well back from the flames. Ducking around to what had been the front of the building, Clark saw Penny Losovic’s black Mercury sedan. Barbara was ahead of him and had already run to swing open its door and slide into the driver’s seat before he could catch up.
“Can you drive?” he shouted.
“What the hell do you think I’m doing!”
Back through the rear window, the scene was amazing. Light from the soundstage pulsed against the sky. As Barbara swung the Mercury around a side alley toward the exit, Clark glimpsed the figure of a plump cop stood silhouetted against the flames. His cap was off, and he was staring their way.
“Where did you leave the Delahaye?”
They shot out into Overland Avenue past the first rush of arriving rubberneckers and journalists.
“East. Not that turn… The next…”
The car slewed. “There’s still time, Clark. If I can get Dale started with the printing, and you can reach the Biltmore, there’s no reason why you can’t—”
“—This isn’t some hold-the-front-page scoop, Barbara. This is—”
“Jesus, Clark! You’ve got to go to the Biltmore. You can’t, simply can’t just let this—”
“No, no. I’ll do whatever I can. And you should try to get that paper of yours out—who knows, there might even finally get to be some genuine truth in LA. What I mean, Barbara, is I can’t see how this can end for us in a good way.”
FIFTY FIVE
THE DELAHAYE’S GEARS sounded like broken china, and this city had a steely, glossy look tonight—a mix of sea fog, smog and smoke from the fire at Soundstage 1A. It snagged in the palms and hazed the intersections and swirled around the streetlights, turning everyone and everything—the zigzag modern buildings, the women walking their diamond necklaced pooches, the shoeless bums trying to sell screenplays—into mist, plasm, dream.
The area around the Biltmore was almost as bright as the MGM lot had been. So many searchlights pillared the sky that it looked like one of those newsreels of London. All that was missing were the bombs and screaming planes. He parked at back of South Broadway and walked, weary and wary, toward the waiting bonfire of fame.
It was like the biggest kind of premier, with the three-tiered bleachers set up on either side of Olive and West 5th swept by sea-waves of excited commotion as each new limousine rolled in. All of Senserama’s stars were there, and so were most of this city’s other players. Harmensworth Fowley, with his trademark cravat and
pipe. Mark Crave and Peyton Jones, still arm in arm despite the rumors about that dead Puerto Rican boy in their pool. Then came Monumenta Loolie, who made a far better performance out of squeezing herself out of the back of a Cadillac than any of her wooden efforts in the feelies. But tonight Herbert Kisberg was the biggest star. As he stepped from his limousine and pulled his cuffs and glanced around him with that who me? little boy smile he had, he seemed too real to be real, the way people did when they were on the verge of being great. No need for a Bechmeir field tonight—the crowd was already a rebounding collision of sweat and breath and need. Beneath the reek of underarms and cheap cigarettes and even cheaper perfume, you could smell the natural plasm of all those thought waves like churned seawrack on a beach.
Clark remembered how there was a knack to facing the glare. The flick of the hair, the flash of a smile, the eternal challenge of dealing with the same shouted question like it was something new. Anacondas of electricity powered a forest of lights, camera lenses and microphones. KFI were there, and KJH, as well as the Pathe and Movietone cameras, and NBC had gone one better and would be broadcasting the entirety of their flagship show Star Talk across the entire country tonight on a live feed.
Despite how he must look, Clark found that Daniel Lamotte’s name got him a tick on a clipboard and entry past the security goons. With his blackened clothes and face, they probably imagined that he was already in character for one of those nigger acts from which white performers made so much money. Not that he was allowed to walk up the red carpet itself, but, as the final rope was lifted and he was let into the Biltmore’s lobby through a plateglass sidedoor, he got an echo of what the old days had been like.
But this was bigger. This wasn’t just the movies or even the feelies, this was politics as well—assuming there was still any difference left. People talked with loud, breathless voices as they headed toward the Biltmore’s famous Bowl, pausing only briefly to take a flute of Champagne and glance smilingly at the seating plan as if it didn’t matter at all.
“Dan, Daniel…”
He was slow to react to Timmy Townsend’s voice.
“Dan, where have you been? Well, thank God you’re here—but what the fuck are you wearing? What happened… ?”
“My car broke down.”
“Take my advice, ol’ Danny-o, and never have shit to do with anything that’s mechanical and French. Your average Pierre might know about putting something tasty on a plate, but anything else… ?” Beaming as ever, his eyes and cheeks aglow, the tip of his nose a drippy red, Timmy Townsend shook his head. “Just not in their blood. Like asking a coon to play chess. At least, that is, until the Germans get them good and sorted. Then things’ll be different. Then, the frogs’ll be like a whore who’ll fuck oyou all night and clean the sheets up in the morning. Neat and funky at the same time if you get my meaning. Speaking of which, I think we need to get you sorted…”
The Biltmore accommodated for most things. In a long basement room, there were enough evening dresses, suits, shirts, ties and every other kind of apparel to kit out a largish department store. Timmy Townsend stayed around as Clark stripped and wiped himself down with steamed towels and then began to get changed. He was still talking about all the marvels the European nations would accomplish once the Germans had knocked the bastards into proper shape. Just like Barbara Eshel, although for different reasons, the sight of Clark’s bare ass didn’t even cause him to blink. It was strange to think how accustomed powerful men were to seeing each other naked: at the Turkish bath, in the shower after playing polo, or sharing a few broads for an afternoon in a hotel suite. It was like they always had an extra layer of gloss which nakedness alone couldn’t remove.
“I sometimes wonder why Herbert even bothers with America,” he was saying as he offered Clark a red-lined silk dinner jacket, “when California’s more than powerful enough to be a country on its own. I mean, who needs fucking Iowa, or hillbilly dumps like Arkansas? We could fucking invade Mexico any time we wanted, just on our own…”
Clark finished dressing in his hundred dollar penguin suit, put back on his Daniel Lamotte glasses for what he was sure would be the last ever time, then followed Timmy into the Biltmore’s main halls. He remembered that story in the Bible Jenny had once told him as they walked through long suites of differently-themed rooms. The one about the guy—Samson, wasn’t it?—who’d had his hair cut and had been tied up to some pillars in a gilded palace much like this one, and had dragged the whole fucking thing down, low divans, leather Chesterfields and all. “The way it’s going to work is this, Dan baby. There’s the first half of the show which is just good old entertainment, then comes the break, when you’ll get to be live-interviewed by Wallis Beekins, and then after the re-start Herbert comes up on stage, and he’ll get the spotlight to point at wherever it is that Lars Bechmeir’s sitting. The crowd’ll go apeshit, of course, and after that he’ll announce—”
“What are you expecting me to say?”
“Expecting?” Timmy Townsend looked puzzled. “You just say whatever you want to say, Dan. About Wake Up and Dream. Why you wanted to write it, and what a journey of fucking discovery the whole thing’s been. All that usual crap. You’re okay with that, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Hey.” Timmy clapped an arm around Clark’s shoulder. “There’s no need to worry. Whatever you say, the listeners’ll gobble it up. I mean, what the hell do they know that the likes of us don’t know already?”
They’d reached the edge of the Biltmore Bowl’s murmuring sea of glass, table linen and faces, and Timmy Townsend’s attention was starting to drift. A quick check like everyone else at the seating plan, and they were working their way toward their separate tables just as the Fred Waring Orchestra struck up with Devil Got My Woman and the lights began to dim.
Things settled. Food was served. Clark noticed that his hands were shaking as he raised his first forkful of salmon mousse. Rope bruises were starting to show on his wrists. He shot his cuffs to cover them and smiled at the other people on his table. He wasn’t with the big names here, and his announcement that he was merely a screenwriter had got disappointed looks. Here were guys who manufactured grape candy, room deodorizers and rods for shower curtains, who’d all come here tonight with their second wives to soak up a bit of vicarious glamour. After all the money they’d donated to the Liberty League, they’d obviously been hoping for someone who was proper Hollywood—a star, or at the very least a character player, instead of some friggin’ guy who wrote the stuff—to share their table. Still, they brightened up once the entertainment started, and were happy to chat between turns about how the average working man wasn’t worth jackshit, how it had now been scientifically proven that niggers didn’t have proper souls (I’ve seen the photos—believe, me your average Jimmy Crack Corn’s got less aura than a bar of soap), and how they were thinking of setting up a new factory in TJ because costs over the border were so much cheaper.
More of the Fred Waring Orchestra, then that woman who was famous for being able to sing and swim at the same time, and some beloved old comedian Clark had been certain was dead, and whole squadrons of dancers in not much more than sequins and smiles. Nothing that spectacular, really, although he knew it was an old enough trick. If you want to make an impact in the second act, bore your audience ’til their asses ache in the first … And now the lights were coming up, and the Biltmore Bowl was erupting into yet more applause, and an averagely drop-dead beautiful blonde in a lowcut black evening dress was tapping his shoulder and saying something about Star Talk in a fragrant murmur, and asking him if he’d mind coming this way…?
FIFTY SIX
SO MUCH MUSCLE AROUND. Guys so big inside their padded jackets that they looked like upmarket Michelin Men. Private security types with that gaze which went right through you even when they weren’t wearing sunglasses. More obvious sorts in buzzcuts and khaki Liberty League uniforms. Career cops who’d never seen a sidewalk. Less obvious varie
ties he probably wasn’t even spotting.
This, he thought, as he followed the hipswaying, averagely drop-dead beautiful woman along the fluorescent-lit corridor, is what the future is going to be like. Hotels like the Biltmore will spread, and they and all the shopping malls will link up, and these new Americans will spend their whole lives indoors and underground, lulled by hidden music and Bechmeir fields. It’ll be like the Metropolitan Hospital already is, but with wall to wall carpets, endless opportunities for shopping and plastic palms. No enforced lobotomies, either; they wouldn’t be necessary.
NBC were broadcasting from a suite of several rooms with their dividers concertinaed back. There were more beautiful women and guys, and more muscle, and geekier types fiddling with lots of expensive electrical equipment. All in all, the scene wasn’t untypical of what Clark had gotten used to seeing lately. A set of big PA speakers were relaying the latest slew of adverts for Perquat Sheets. In the furthest of the rooms, which still had dividers drawn across to keep it separate from the rest, Wallis Beekins was spitting out orders and nursing a large whisky. He paid Clark no attention when he first came in. Beekins was wearing a tux like everyone else, although it barely covered the belly-bulge of a foodstained plaid waistcoat. He had on disastrous twotone wingtips as well, but Beekins was one of those rare creatures in showbiz whose looks didn’t matter. It was that voice, which it was so odd to hear coming in real life from this plump little man with his greasy coxcomb of hair and his agitated pacing. Especially as he was swearing like a longshoreman.
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