Bride of the Rat God (10 page)

Hraldy strode through the doorway into the boudoir, beheld the she-devil upon her golden bed, and gave a credible imitation of a man suffering heart failure from the sheer erotic impact of the sight.

“Although I must admit,” Norah went on, “the last time I read the Book of Esther, I completely missed the part about Esther’s former lover Laban being seduced and driven to his death by Queen Vashti.”

“The cantor in our synagogue seems to have skipped that at Purim, too,” Alec remarked, chewing thoughtfully on a hangnail. “Also the part where Vashti and Haman lead an army in revenge for the slight upon her. Maybe that was in the New Testament version. Are we ready?”

“We are ready.” Hraldy threw a glance toward the pillars, behind which Laban the Splendid had retreated. Ned the lesser and his tubs of flowers had vanished, leaving climbing galaxies of blossom behind. Alec cranked a few feet and made a last check of the viewing aperture.

“Now, Chrysanda,
amore mia,
caress that pomegranate,” crooned the director, rolling his every “r” like a regimental drum.

“Look out, boys, it’s a bomb!” whooped Larry—or Jerry—on the other side of the boudoir wall.

Hraldy ignored the commotion as if he and the queen of Babylon were indeed alone in the darkness of the stage’s artificial night. “You are woman capable of devouring men even as you devour that fruit. Let us see it in your face, in your body, in your
ravissante
eyes. Lights...”

Alec stepped back from the camera and hit the switches. With a sudden hissing of kliegs, the boudoir was bathed in a chiaroscuro of white and black, dramatic highlights reveling in every fold of drapery and curl of Christine’s hair. Norah automatically checked her watch—the longest take time so far was an hour and forty-three minutes with Hraldy directing, and the shortest was seventeen minutes for Gus Campbell—caught up the clapper board, and stepped forward as the director said, “Music...”

Like sweet poison the notes of the overture from
Swan Lake
threaded into the air (“Look out, boys, it’s a bomb!”). “Camera!”

Norah held the clapper board in front of the scene for an instant, then removed it as Hraldy shouted, “Action!”

Laban the Splendid, eyes bulging and lips pulled back in an expression Norah found typical of film actors, clumped through the archway as if, beneath his hawk-embroidered charioteer’s tunic, his undershorts were too tight. Queen Vashti, in a gesture of surprising, if overdone, sensuality, rolled the pomegranate she held against her breast, raised it to her dark red lips, and bit.

Crimson juice exploded down her chin. Christine reared back with a loud
“Eeuh!”
and tried to spit out the bitter yellow membrane that had been hidden under the fruit’s skin. Hraldy flung up his hands and cried, “Cut! Cut!” quite unnecessarily, as Alec had already stopped cranking and was expiring with laughter.

“Apple, he say.” Mikos Hraldy flung up his hands in despair. “As if it is small matter to alter symbolism upon which entire scene is fulcrum! Apple! He is Philistine, that Brown! Philistine!”

Christine, with Black Jasmine’s childlike face poking out below hers from the swaddling ocean of chinchilla, frowned. “Are the Philistines in this movie, too?” The big saloon rocked as it turned off Santa Monica Boulevard and onto Vermont, the first of a little procession of studio cars wending their way through the gathering dusk. “And I don’t see what’s wrong with using an apple instead of those messy old pomegranates. Look, I got juice all over my hands and it’s stained everything in sight. It would have stained the costume if there’d been more costume to stain.”

“After all,” Norah pointed out good-humoredly, “Eve tempted Adam with an apple.”

“Bah!” Hraldy swept back his three long strands of top-cover hair. Buttercreme, already hiding in the folds of Norah’s cardigan, shrank back still farther in profoundest disapproval. “It is pomegranate, not apple, is metaphysical symbol of woman’s power over man! Ask any translator what is fruit of knowledge of good and evil.” He turned a dissatisfied brown gaze out the window, contemplating the luminous windows of the bungalows perched high on the hills above them. Except for the ubiquitous palm trees, this stretch of Vermont Avenue, rising steeply into the more exclusive precincts of Edendale, could have been lifted wholesale from some small midwestern town. The palm trees; and the
HOLLYWOODLAND
sign that blazed behind them in the blue dimming of the light like some garish Great Wall of China.

“But is typical,” he went on bitterly. “That Brown, he has soul of... of
producer
!
”

Christine, leaning to readjust her makeup over the driver’s shoulder in the rearview mirror, regarded the director with surprise. “But Frank
is
a producer,” she pointed out.

“
Hélas
!” Hraldy retorted, and turned back to Norah, in whose relative silence he read sympathy for his woes. “Listen to me, Madame Blackstone. I make greatest biblical epic ever produce in this country, in any country. Not some shallow and facile love tale of indiscretions of kings, but story of all spectacle of
Intolerance,
couple with deepest, most moving of all stories. I pour my heart, my soul into it, I make it as it should be make, as surely ancient prophets would make. Twenty-six reels
Trials of Job
was, six and a half hours of greatest, most moving, most heroic story of human passion and human struggle ever wrote. It is story which encompass deepest question of human life, most pro-found search of foundation of man’s relation with Almighty, and what does your Mr. Brown do to it?”

“Cut it, I hope!” exclaimed Christine, lipstick in hand.

“You see!” Hraldy made a gesture that nearly put his hand through the roof of the car. “Philistine!”

“I thought it says in the script Vashti is a Persian. In fact I’m sure it does.” She dug around for her script in the carpetbag of cosmetics that inevitably accompanied her to the set, while Black Jasmine licked her chin.

“Eighty-five minutes!” mourned the director.
“Eighty-five minutes
he cut it to! Six and a half hours of pathos, of struggle! Scenes with Job’s sons at wedding of their sister, and when Job bid them farewell on their sea voyage, he cut—only did he leave in shipwreck in which they are devoured by the Leviathan, when no one has any small idea who these two men are!”

“I don’t remember a shipwreck in Job,” Norah commented, unheard.

“Job mourning upon his dung heap, covered in sores, while his worthless friends mock at and scorn him, his long wrestlings of soul, his conversations with Satan and with God... gone! Only scene where evil woman whom once he love come in zebra-drawn chariot to sneer at him...
bien sur!
And what does he give me instead?” He caught the edge of the seat in front of him as the car turned up the steep hills of Edendale, carefully negotiating the narrow, erratic streets. “A marital squabble, a domestic spat.”

“With battles,” Norah pointed out helpfully.

“Pah!”

“There!” Christine looked up in triumph from her script. “‘Oh, my little dove of Persia.’ Asu-What’s-His-Name says that, and he’s her husband, so he ought to know. She wasn’t a Philistine, after all... Unless the Philistines were Persians?”

“Is this the place?” Norah craned her neck to look up the steep hillside as the little procession drew to a stop. All she could gather was an impression of overgrown greenery draping the shoulders of rock for some twenty-five feet, surmounted by a stucco wall.

The driver got out and opened the door. Christine stepped grandly forth, the dogs bounding happily before her and rushing off to sniff everything in sight. “Up there,” she said as Norah and Hraldy climbed out on her heels. “All the studios rent it because it’s got the most
gorgeous
courtyard, straight out of the Arabian Nights. In fact, I thought Frank ought to use it for a movie about the Arabian Nights. I mean, after
Robin Hood,
he could make a big picture about the Arabian Knights meeting the Knights of the Round Table...”

She drew her furs more closely about her, though the evening, by Manchester standards, was mild.

“Isn’t that terribly inconvenient for the owners?” asked Norah, going back to the second car and taking the awkward bundle of light stands Alec handed out to her. Blake Fallon, likewise bundled in fur, had already disembarked and now went to catch up with Christine on the long stone stairway, followed by Zena Franklin, Christine’s autocratic hairdresser. Hraldy and Mary DeNoux, the wardrobe mistress, each took a magazine of spare film; the flute and cello players—the celloist had switched from piano—handed their instruments to Alice, the violinist, and lent a hand with the reflectors. Mindlebaum himself carried his camera as if it were a fragile and cranky baby, which was exactly what it was.

“The owners are glad to get money for it,” he said as they climbed innumerable steps to the squat gate at the top. “They can’t rent it and won’t live in it. It’s supposed to be haunted.”

“Rubbish,” Hraldy declared. “We film here for Job, film wedding feast of his daughter—
which
your Mr. Brown cut out also—and where is ghost, eh? Show the ghost on film, and I will believe ghost.”

Chang Ming, after solemnly balancing on three short legs to baptize the base of the steps, bounded after the procession. Over the walls, Norah could see lights and hear the faint exchange of voices from those who had been sent ahead to properly deck the set with chrysanthemums and hangings suitable to the queen of Babylon’s gardens. Black Jasmine, dashing back from an investigation of another driveway, added his mite to Chang Ming’s efforts, then tried unsuccessfully to follow the party up the stairs. Norah deposited her burden beside the gate and went down to get him.

“There may not be a ghost,” remarked Alec, who waited for her at the top, “but every time I shoot here—and I’ve shot seven pictures in this courtyard—I make sure I get at least five extra takes, because something’s going to go wrong with at least half of what I do. Other cameramen say the same. I know two major stars who refuse to film here at all, and at least six stuntmen.”

“Why?”

The gate was opened from within. As the lights from the house fell upon it, Norah gasped, realizing that what she had thought was wood was in fact solid bronze, embossed with intricate arabesques. Beyond, instead of the Grand Guignol of cobwebs and horror called to mind by the talk of ghosts and haunting, the courtyard lay like a dream of Omar Khayam’s, its tiles embossed with flowers and its walls decorated with exquisite bas-reliefs of bulls and winged gods, priests and maidens bearing tribute, all half-hidden behind stands of bamboo and banana, trailing roses and bougainvillea. Every vine and tree in sight, of course, sported the ubiquitous chrysanthemums, and the tall stands of the lights with their trailing cables running back into the house somewhat marred the magic of the place. Still, Norah could see why every epic of ancient passion was filmed here.

Beyond the door—a scaled-down replica of one in the British Museum’s Persian collection—she could hear Christine’s voice. “My
God,
can’t we get some
heat
in here? I swear if I put on
all thirty
of my costumes for this film one on top of the other, I’d
still
freeze to death....Oh, Butterpie, Mama’s going to take care of you, don’t be nervous, princess...” Buttercreme, Norah deduced, had as usual made a beeline for Christine’s chinchilla the moment her mistress had shed it and would stay in its familiar-smelling safety until filming was done. Chang Ming and Black Jasmine, by contrast, trotted busily around the court, clearly intent on assisting and supervising, respectively, with the lights. In a corner the musicians set up, the pianist/cellist muttering to his brother about the effect of cold on the strings.

Truly, thought Norah, gazing around her, like the intrepid Dorothy Gale, she had managed to stumble into another world.

Through that exquisite Sassanian door she could see a very long, empty room in which Mary laid out makeup and Zena unpacked costumes. Viewing them by the line of 100-watt bulbs jury-rigged from the solitary overhead fixture, Norah had to admit that her sister-in-law had a point Neither the fragile black serpent-pattern creation she was currently wearing nor the ensemble of gold tissue and peacock eyes to be donned later was designed to do anything but display the maximum of the wearer’s charms. An arch at the far end of the room revealed a stairway; two other arches showed only another room, long and dark and empty of furniture, breathing a cold, strange smell Norah put down to neglect.

“You are on balcony, taking night air...”

She stepped back outside at the sound of Mikos Hraldy’s light, prissy voice. Illuminated by the reflected glow of the courtyard arcs, he stood, prosaic in his knickerbockers and sweater, beside the enchanted form of Vashti, queen of Babylon. In the artificial lighting the strange, slightly greenish tint of camera makeup was far less obvious, creating only a kind of deathly pallor against which Christine’s dark eyes seemed enormous. She leaned on the railing and shook her hair down over the space below; Alec, moving about the courtyard like a good-natured brown djinni, aimed a baby spot into the waters of the fountain, and Christine was suddenly bathed in a moiré of reflections, as if seen through a jewel.

Her necklace—the same one she had worn in
Kiss of Darkness
—actually looked more natural in this setting than it had with the sleek, modern evening dress she had worn to take her plunge over the cliff. Whatever Frank Brown had told Christine about it when he’d given it to her, Norah guessed that it was undoubtedly old, though whether it had actually been looted from the Forbidden City was a moot point. It was Chinese, which was what counted for Christine, and probably extremely valuable, which also counted: an intricately worked double strand of bronze leaves, vines, and chains in which small, Baroque freshwater pearls and cabochon garnets had been set as if they’d grown there like fruit. Two of the three round plaques that lay crosswise on the wearer’s breast were definitely opals. The center gem, the largest, Norah thought might be opal as well or some kind of jade, white and cold and shining now with a moony radiance in the flickering reflections from below.