by David Khalaf
Sugar entered the grubby stand-alone fly tent where Deda spent most of his days. The old man filled his time mixing health tonics for himself from plants he collected during their travels. These may have extended his life, but what a lonely, pathetic life it was.
The old man squinted as Sugar wheeled him out into the daylight. Even in warm weather he wore that wretched coat of human hair, the only vestige of his past. He was a shriveled thing, with skin so loose they could have stretched it out for the acrobats to use as a trampoline. Hunched over in a ball, he looked like a deformed fetus.
“You don’t look well,” Atlas said.
“My tonics,” he said. “I’ll be well soon.”
Atlas stuck a long bullhook in the cage and gently turned Pickford’s face toward Deda.
“Look, I’ve found a friend.”
Deda beckoned to Sugar. She wheeled him closer to the bars of the cage. He looked at Pickford’s sleeping form through his milky, squinting eyes.
“It’s her.”
Deda reached out and caressed a bar on the cage as if it were her face.
“The four physical Burdens together in one place.”
He looked up and muttered at the cloudless blue sky, toward a partial moon visible near the horizon. A prayer of thanksgiving, perhaps.
“May we wake her?” Deda asked.
“I suppose so.”
Atlas turned his body so that he was facing away from the cage. Sugar went around back and stuck her hand through the bars. She waved a bottle of smelling salts under Pickford’s nose, then retreated. In a flash Pickford was wide awake and looking around. She jumped to her feet and took a step, only to trip and fall hard to the ground. Her leg, she saw, was chained to a large metal eye bolt in the floorboards.
“It’s nicer than the prison Houdini put me in,” Atlas said to her.
“You put yourself there,” Pickford said. “By attacking Harry and then killing two police officers while resisting arrest. I’m surprised they let you out after only ten years.”
“For good behavior,” Atlas said. “It’s hard to get into trouble when you’re alone in a concrete pit fifty feet deep.”
With only yourself to talk to.
And me too.
Pickford noticed Deda staring at her, drool pooling at the corner of his mouth.
“Hello,” Pickford said to him. “Would you unchain me, please?”
“Yes, of course.”
The old man tried to raise himself out of his chair, but he couldn’t get himself up. After a brief struggle he fell back into it.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her. “I’m too weak.”
Deda was grasping the armrests of his wheelchair with his frail hands.
“I’ve never met a beauty so strong,” the old man said. “There’s something different about you.”
Atlas stepped in front of Pickford but avoided eye contact. If he fell under her spell, they would all be done for.
“I don’t believe you’ve met Deda. It means grandfather. He’s not much help when the elephant dung needs to be scooped, but he’s a wealth of information. He helped me find you.”
“And how did he do that?” Pickford asked.
“Because of who he is. I’ll bet you’ll never guess.”
From a nearby table, Atlas picked up a plate of roasted leftovers from last night’s dinner. He slid it through a narrow gap in the cage meant for feeding animals. From the corner of his sight he could see Pickford eye the plate hungrily, but she didn’t take from it. Not yet.
“I’ll give you a hint,” he said. “You are familiar with the Ottoman Empire?”
She sat genteelly on the dirty floor with her legs folded under her.
“History was never really my subject.”
“It was one of the most powerful forces in the world since the 14th Century,” Atlas said. “This old man here lived through most of it.”
She looked at the shriveled heap in front of her.
“That’s impossible. He’d be five or six hundred years old.”
“Five hundred and nine,” Atlas said. “As far as he can remember.”
Pickford gasped.
“No one has seen the person gifted with health for centuries!”
Atlas sucked the cartilage from a small bone and then threw it to the ground.
“That’s because it has been the same man for centuries,” he said. “Despite his withering body, he’s in perfect health. Never so much as a sniffle. How he hasn’t gotten shot, stabbed or crushed by a horse carriage in five hundred years is the real miracle.”
The old man reached for Pickford’s hands. She seemed to take pity on him and took his shriveled hands into hers.
“I have met the person with your gift twice before in my life,” he said. “The first was a servant girl of the caliph, whom I met in Egypt when I first fled the Kingdom of Hungary in 1477. The second was Marie Antoinette in 1778, after I had moved to France. You, my dear, far outshine both of them.”
“You’re very kind,” Pickford said. She turned to Atlas. “You’re holding the poor man prisoner.”
“He’s a valued guest. And he can leave whenever he likes.”
He couldn’t leave even if he wanted to.
Good luck making it to the road.
Atlas picked up a long piece of meat from the platter and began gnawing on it like a cob of corn.
“I’ve been researching your talent ever since I learned that the person gifted with beauty took Newton’s Eye,” Atlas said. “That servant girl the old man speaks of died of the Black Death before turning eighteen. And that pretty head on Marie Antoinette may have won her the hand of King Louis XVI, but it was the first thing the revolutionaries lopped off when they had the chance.”
“What’s your point?” Pickford asked.
“Beauty never seems to live long.”
Pickford pulled her hands away from Deda and turned a steely gaze upon Atlas.
“That’s not a threat,” the strongman said. “Merely an insight. Strength never seems to live long either. Just look at poor Samson. Or Alexander the Great. He made it to thirty-two. Or Crazy Horse, the Indian who died prematurely of a bayonet wound. The physical Burdens all die young, with the exception of health, of course. Why is that?”
“Being strong attracts trouble,” Pickford said. “So does being pretty.”
“I imagine so.”
Atlas was feeling strong today, more powerful than he had in a long time. There was something about Los Angeles that was making him stronger than ever. Or perhaps it was because he had been eating so well. There was power in meat.
Was it the bear?
You know very well.
Atlas picked a piece of skin out of his mouth.
“I think it’s safe to say that both of us are living on borrowed time. And neither of us has fulfilled our purpose. We have a destiny together, you and I.”
Pickford snorted.
“I’m sure that’s what Clyde told Bonnie.”
It was Deda who had revealed to Atlas his destiny. After his brother was imprisoned in Sarajevo and the rest of his family slaughtered, the old man had taken Atlas and fled to Switzerland. There, in a small town nestled high in the mountains, Deda had educated Atlas and provided for him with funds that seemed to appear from nowhere. For four years he lived in seclusion, until the Great War was over. By then Atlas was eighteen, and strong, and ready to take the lead.
“I want us to work together,” Atlas told Pickford. “To stop the tyranny in this world.”
“You don’t want to end tyranny,” Pickford said. “You just want to be the tyrant.”
Pickford was as confrontational as the other actresses he had kidnapped, but he needed to treat her gingerly until he got answers from her.
“I’ll give you one day to tell me where the Eye is,” he said. “After that, we’ll see how much of your beauty remains when we begin carving pieces out of you.”
Atlas walked over to the animal cage closest to Pic
kford’s. He opened the back and yanked hard on a chain. The thing on the other end slithered to the ground and wriggled across the uneven dirt. Atlas attached his end of the chain to Pickford’s cage. She poked her head through the bars just as the crocodile jumped up and snapped at her face. Pickford scuttled backward.
“The wonderful thing about animals,” Atlas said. “Is that they don’t care how attractive their prey is. I suggest you don’t try to depart prematurely.”
Atlas turned to leave.
“Ask her about the young man,” Deda said.
In his excitement over capturing Pickford, Atlas had nearly forgotten about the young man she had stepped into the ring to save.
“Yes, who is that fellow you saved?”
Pickford said nothing.
That blood of the young man was strange; there was power in it. Atlas had felt energy coursing through him when they touched.
Sugar approached the cage. She ran her knife along the bars.
“I been reading the gossip columns in newspapers since I was a girl. It’s how I learned to read. The Pickford woman left the country a long time back to be getting herself some kind of beautification surgery. We know now that was a cover story. But covering up what? As I remember, that was about fifteen years back.”
Atlas did the math. He risked a quick glance at Pickford; her downcast face had gone white and she was clenching her lips together.
“You think the young man at the circus is her son?”
Sugar nodded.
“Let me find him. Either he will have the Eye, or he’ll be giving your beauty here the motivation to share its whereabouts.”
“Very well,” Atlas said. He turned to Pickford, his gaze averted. “And you—you don’t look so well. You’d better eat to keep up your strength.”
Pickford didn’t move. Atlas put his hand on one of the thick bars and bent it, ever so slightly, with just the pinching strength of his fingers.
“I said eat.”
Pickford picked up the smallest piece on the platter and raised it to her mouth to nibble. She stopped short and dropped the piece to the wooden floor. It rolled near the edge of the cage.
“What’s wrong?”
Pickford seemed unable to speak. Atlas picked up the piece and looked at it. Attached at one end of it was a half-burned, brightly painted, red fingernail.
“What do you expect when you choose a bony piece like that? Try a piece of thigh instead. Nina Beauregard really does have the best legs in Hollywood.”
CHAPTER
S IXTEEN
GRAY WAS USED to doors closing on him, but Charlie Chaplin was the skeleton key that opened them all. As they passed through layers of security at the United Artists studio lot, Gray met eyes with a glowering guard and a resentful receptionist, but everyone let him through without a word.
“They don’t like me,” Gray said.
“Does that bother you?” Chaplin asked.
“Not really.”
“Good,” Chaplin said. “Nobody ever achieved greatness on the quest to be liked.”
Even though it was Saturday, the United Artists offices were bustling with activity. A row of typists against one wall clacked away like an out-of-sync percussion band. Telephones sang out to each other like mynah birds.
They walked into Chaplin’s office. It was a large space adorned in dark browns and deep reds. There were soft leather chairs in one corner and, below the window, a massive wooden desk with ornate gold accents. Like Chaplin’s home, the opulence of the space didn’t seem to suit him. Gray guessed that someone else had decorated the space for him.
Nothing seemed to get much use except for a massive globe in one corner. It was covered with adhesive dots of all colors, all with illegible scribbles next to them.
“What’s this?”
“Ostensibly, it’s a location-scouting globe for our films. In reality, it’s the culmination of more than a decade of searching for other Burdens—an idea from Houdini. Atlas wants to recruit them to his cause. World domination and such. We’ve been trying to find them first and convince them otherwise.”
“How do you even begin to look?”
“That’s the problem. It’s not like they have name tags.”
Chaplin pointed to the built-in shelving spanning a full wall of his office; it was filled with bound collections of newspapers.
“We read. A lot. Looking for places in crisis. Looking for stories of people doing extraordinary things. But maybe with you helping us the search would go faster. It seems you can see us in ways others can’t.”
“I ain’t nobody’s tool,” Gray protested.
“I didn’t call you a tool. I said you were an Artifact. At least that’s my theory.”
“But how can I be?” Gray asked. “You said those things were made by two Burdens.”
“You were made by two Burdens,” Chaplin said. “Just not in the traditional fashion. If I’m correct, it would be extraordinary.”
A gray-haired woman with tight lines around her mouth entered the room.
“Speaking of extraordinary.”
“The production keeps calling,” she said. “They have a million questions.”
Chaplin handed her his cane and hat.
“Tell them this: No. No. That costs too much. Let him get back to you on that. Just cycle through those responses and you should be fine. And clear the rest of my day.”
Her lips pursed so tightly she could crack a walnut. She stormed off.
“The best secretaries have no sense of humor. Come now. We have one meeting we simply can’t miss.”
They exited the main building, passing through a serene rose garden meant for the kind of contemplation no one there seemed to have time for.
Chaplin led them through a small lot to a huge building that had no windows. It was silver with a curved roof and must have been four stories high. He grunted as he put all his weight into yanking open a large, sliding metal door.
“This is my exercise for the day.”
Bright lights shone inside, bright as the sun.
“Welcome to the Village.”
Gray stared in wonder. It looked as if he were stepping from one outside into another. Inside the hangar was a small, rustic village surrounded by trees. He and Chaplin stood on a dirt road leading to a tiny plaza with a stone well at its center. The homes were quaint one-room structures, the kind that might be found in a village anywhere from medieval Europe to present-day California.
“What’s this?”
“It’s the set from The Mask of Zorro. And The Three Musketeers. And The Iron Mask. And half a dozen other films. It’s our generic rural settlement, which seems to find itself in nearly every film of ours at some point. We keep trying to tear it down but it’s too useful. Sometimes it’s a French hamlet, other times it’s a colonial settlement or an Indian reservation.”
Chaplin led Gray up the dirt road, which cut through a realistic meadow that faded into blackness on both sides of them.
“Right now it’s useless because we’re shooting a prehistoric adventure, but it’s perfect for a bit of privacy.”
As real as the landscape looked, it smelled like nothing, as sterile as a hospital room. And as quiet as a library. Gray felt the heat of giant spotlights overhead as they passed the false well and entered the largest of the homes at the very back of the Village.
Inside was a large tavern, decorated with rich velvet drapes and Spanish-style armor and paintings. At the center was a massive banquet table and, at the table, two men.
“You’re late,” said one man, who wore a black suit and looked stuffy, like an accountant or lawyer.
“I’m not,” Chaplin said. “I always arrive exactly when I intend.”
“Can’t you be serious for once?”
“It’s not in my nature.”
The man looked vaguely familiar to Gray, but he couldn’t quite place him. The other, however, with his thin mustache and slick hair, was unmistakable. Gray couldn’t help
himself.
“You’re Douglas Fairbanks!”
The man smiled and winked.
“Am I?”
There in front of Gray was the greatest adventure hero in silent film. The man who had flown on magic carpets, shot arrows through apples at a hundred yards and had won more sword fights than anyone could count. Despite himself, Gray rushed up to shake his hand.
“It’s an honor to meet you!”
“It’s an honor to be me!”
They shook. Fairbanks flashed his trademark smile, the beguiling one that in films had galvanized soldiers and melted the hearts of fair maidens. His hair was grayer and his face rounder than his days as Zorro and Robin Hood, but his presence was as charismatic as ever. Gray half expected him to jump onto the table with a sword in his hand, ready to cut down pirates or thieves.
“It seems you have a fan,” Chaplin said to Fairbanks. “I can assure you he didn’t greet me with the same enthusiasm.”
Fairbanks smiled, and Gray saw the energy in the room bend toward the man. It was nearly imperceptible, but the air around Chaplin and the other man pulled toward Fairbanks. It was as if the man’s mere presence was a magnet.
The stuffy man stood up. His hair was thinning and he had wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and mouth. He reached out to shake Gray’s hand.
“Good day,” he said. “My name is D.W. Griffith.”
His voice was kind, and it belied his stern expression. They shook.
Chaplin sat Gray down at the table. A spread there included boiled eggs, a bowl of fruit and a platter of finger sandwiches made of cucumber and cream cheese. Griffith poured Gray a glass of iced tea.
Fairbanks leaned back in his chair and put his feet on the table, as if he were a young rogue during the Middle Ages and not a modern-day movie star in his mid-fifties.
“Who is this young man and what is he doing here?” Fairbanks asked. “I thought this was a private meeting to talk about Mary.”
“It is,” Chaplin said. “And who better to help than Mary’s son?”
Chaplin held out his hands with a flourish, as if he were a salesman showing off a new car. His guilty smile didn’t help sell it.