Bride of the Rat God (13 page)

“I guess.” Christine let fall her cigarette stub and crushed it out under one glittering heel. Norah removed the flashlight from her unsteady hand and led the way back through the kitchen, the still-trembling Black Jasmine under her other arm. Behind her she was aware of Christine fumbling in her handbag again, this time for the silver flask she always carried. In a small voice unlike her usual blithe tones Christine said, “I guess this wasn’t such a hot idea, after all.”

“It’s all right.” Norah answered the apology her sister-in-law intended rather than the words themselves. After the first rush of pick-me-up, she knew, the crash, exhaustion, and depression long held at bay closed in to claim their own.

The air outside was like a brisk dose of smelling salts, wiping away the stain of the gore-haunted darkness as surely as A. F. Brown and Conrad Fishbein had wiped whatever handprints and footmarks they might have found. At the end of the walk, through the dense jungle of banana leaves, Norah could make out the long yellow roadster at the curb. Chang Ming and Buttercreme were standing up in the driver’s seat, paws on the top of the door and round faces peering worriedly over, ears up, eyes grave, Buttercreme’s tongue hanging down like a raspberry-pink window shade in the streetlight’s gleam. It became suddenly possible to think again about the Canterville Ghost, grumpily obliged to renew the traditional family bloodstains with stolen paints and about Mr. Fishbein’s hasty editing of Frank Brown’s account and to wonder what they’d done with the cleanup rags.

Even in the light of the torch Christine looked very pale.

“We can stop by the Grove if you like,” Norah said, and her sister-in-law gave her a look of such gratitude that she realized how desperate the other woman’s tough facade had been. “Even if I don’t want a drink, I’m certainly not going to want to go to sleep for quite a while after this. And as you said, five hours really isn’t enough.”

I’ll regret this.

“Thank you.” Christine turned to lock the door behind them, but manipulating both the gin flask and the key with hands that were far from steady was beyond her abilities. Norah heard the key ring sharply as it struck the cement of the step; then it vanished with a soft, leathery rustle into the calla lilies. “Oh, damn.”

“I’ll get it.” Norah set Black Jasmine down and crouched to flash the torch into the darkness of the plants. Metal flashed in the dirt—two snails waved their eyestalks at her protestingly—as Norah pushed aside the extravagant, spade-shaped leaves.

She stood up so quickly that she almost knocked Christine off the step, so quickly that she felt dizzy. Lips, hands, feet were suddenly cold as ice. “Let’s go,” she managed to say, catching at the massive puff of gray fur that was her sister-in-law’s arm.

“Darling, what’s the matter?” Christine was trying to screw the cap back onto her flask and light a cigarette at the same time, her black hair trailing down from under her hat and tangling in the huge collar of the coat.

“Nothing. It’s just... let’s get going. I’m—I’m cold.”

“Oh, darling, I’m so sorry! You poor thing, wearing just that sweater, you must be freezing!” Christine moved to surrender her fur, although her own dress of thin peacock georgette was sleeveless and far wispier than Norah’s sensible shirtwaist and tweed skirt.

Norah only shook her head and led the way at a rapid walk through the clutching fronds of the jungle to where Black Jasmine waited impatiently beside the car.

Past the quiet bungalows of Oregon Avenue on the way to the Ambassador Hotel, Norah stared blankly at the forest of oil derricks that reared in the darkness almost to the edge of that establishment’s pool table-perfect lawn, nearly oblivious to Christine’s chatter.

“...I’ve been an absolute
pig,
darling, because I do have
just
the coat for you—
gorgeous
fuchsia with the most wonderful monkey-fur collar—so selfish of me not to have thought of it before! Walter gave it to me—or was it Vernon?—anyway, I never liked him, but it’ll be
just
the thing for you.”

Hollywood,
she thought again. A world that became more alien the more one got used to it. An Emerald City of winter flowers and unlimited money, of crude mechanical monsters with their gas-flame eyes sprouting within a stone’s throw of the Ambassador’s pink Spanish walls, of booze and cocaine and men who could go through that slaughterhouse on Highland Avenue removing evidence because it might cost them a half-million-dollar investment.

And what else?

It was only a few miles from the rough country of the Cahuenga Hills to those little stucco bungalows. The bean and barley fields, the waste ground of abandoned housing developments, and the jungles of oil derricks were closer still. There might be some completely rational explanation for what she had seen.

She had, she reminded herself, been in California for only two months. It was probable there were forms of wildlife unfamiliar to her. What had happened the night before last might be a common occurrence for all she knew.

But her assurances rang hollow in her own ears. Whatever it was that had gnawed the stone foundations of the house on Ivarene had teeth the length of a man’s thumb. If Felipe had remembered to warn her about coyotes, this was not something he would forget.

And whatever it was, it had left the same huge scratches, fresh and raw, on the foundations of Charles Sandringham’s bungalow as well.

The traveler is exhausted,

it leads to calamity...

The traveler is in danger,

and the loyal servants must be looked after...

I
F
C
HRISTINE WAS
right—that staying up was easier than getting up—she had neglected to mention the fact that from three-thirty on things began to take on an extremely surreal cast that only increased as the day advanced.

But perhaps, Norah reflected, Christine’s life was sufficiently surreal that she had never noticed this phenomenon.

Certainly Norah was powerfully aware of it toward nine, seated in the Santa Fe first-class club car, watching Christine flirt with a good-looking waiter and catching snippets of the argument between Emily Violet and Mary DeNoux over whether Four Blessings Hovering Round the Door constituted a no-limit hand or merely a double if it was completed by Catching the Moon from the Bottom of the Sea, while Mikos Hraldy, sitting at her side, held forth about
She-Devil of Babylon.
“Action! All he is interest in is action! Not in human drama of love and temptation and passion, not in
psychologie
that underneaths those so-great stories.”

“Shucks, Miss Flamande, you wouldn’t hardly believe how some folks behave on a cross-country run! Why, there was this rich feller ‘bout a year ago, traveling on the same train as the Shubert vaudeville tour with these four singing bearded ladies...”

“I’m sure that if I’m west, autumn is included in an all-symbols hand and doesn’t count separately, because anyone who gets it...”.

“Now, is spring doubled if I’m east for the game even if this round I’m west?” asked Emily Violet, her rosebud mouth puckered with doubt. The three ladies occupied an inlaid rosewood table beneath a lamp of frosted glass shaped like one of the calla lilies by Charles Sandringham’s back door. The fourth place—east at the moment, Norah deduced—was taken by Emily’s mother, an equally fragile-looking lady absorbed in the pages of the
Hollywood News
while waiting for Christine to return her attention to the game.

Beyond the club car’s windows flashed a magical landscape of winter grass like bright green velvet, rust-dark bushes, and occasional water cuts bright with the glassy threads of streams, punctuated now and then by barbed-wire fences and small bunches of white-faced cattle. Six weeks earlier, when Norah was coming across Texas and Oklahoma on her way to Los Angeles, these hills had been uniformly muffin-colored with the dry season; it was still a wonder to her to see the ripening gold of early oranges in the dark orchards and the bright cloak of color on the land. Hawks perched hump-shouldered on fence posts, sour and cold in the rain.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alec remarked judiciously, shifting his feet to avoid kicking the wicker basket under the table in which Buttercreme napped like a retired dowager. “Frank’s pretty interested in taking over Enterprise Films.”

“So I am saying!” cried Hraldy with a furious gesture. “He only see what—how you say? What fat ladies in front stalls in Petoria—”

“Peoria—”

“—Petoria will think about film and not about it is strength, it is breadth, it is artistic merit or message it is try to convey unto ages!”

Norah blinked, trying to draw her attention back to the prim and impassioned Hungarian seated across the table from herself and Alec. She wasn’t sleepy exactly; numerous cups of coffee, a beverage she usually avoided, had taken care of that. But she was having a dreadful time concentrating. Her mind kept slipping to other conversations, other events.

To the queen of Babylon eating egg foo yung out of a paper carton, the glare of makeshift lights—the kliegs were down unless required for a shot—catching in the white jewels of her necklace, her Pekingese panting contentedly around her feet.

To Nadi Neferu-Aten pressing her hand dramatically to her forehead and saying, “Yes—I see—a nobleman, whose love has followed you down the corridors of time,” while a single candle flickered before her on the table.

To the trail of brown splashes in the yellow circle of flashlight leading down the hall to darkness.

To the gnawed marks on the foundation of the bungalow, though she could not recall any track, any mark in the soft earth of the planted border.

“How very extraordinary,” Mrs. Violet said to no one in particular as she turned a page. “It says here that reporters from the
Herald
have been searching Vermont for Mr. Sandringham’s father—hoping to interview Sandringham, of course, about this terrible murder—and say that so far he doesn’t seem to exist.”

Emily and DeNoux looked up from their study of the rule book, the actress blinking her lovely sapphire eyes with surprise and the wardrobe mistress’s brow descending speculatively.

“I expect they haven’t spelled it right,” Norah said calmly over Hraldy’s tirade. “If that’s his real name and
if
his father goes by it, considering the son’s fame.”

“God knows
I
never can spell it,” added Christine with a certain lack of generosity considering her own nom de guerre. The handsome young waiter departed with his trayful of empty glasses and an enormous tip. “Now, why don’t they have boys like that waiting tables at the Cocoanut Grove? I could forgive them the absence of dancing boys—did you see his
eyelashes,
Emily? And those beautiful lips? Frank should star
him
in this picture, not Blake. Have we built the Great Wall yet, darlings? Oh, that’s right, it’s time to Charleston.”

Mrs. Violet set aside her newspaper, and the four ladies proceeded to solemnly pass three tiles right and three tiles left. “Doing the Charleston,” it was called, a piece of nomenclature Norah strongly suspected of being not original to the game. “Frank may
have
to star him if Blake doesn’t show up once we’re out in Red Bluff,” Alec remarked.

“
Hélas
!
Exactemente
!” Hraldy flung up his hands. “Your Mr. Brown, he inflict upon us this boneheaded
soi-disant
box office star to be feature role, and for why? Only because he is popular with silly women who frequent cinemas in this country.”

He did, thought Norah, have a point.

To nobody’s surprise but Christine’s, the Cocoanut Grove had been closed at two in the morning when the big yellow Nash pulled up the circular drive of the Ambassador Hotel. They had proceeded in due course to the Cafe Montmartre, where Christine had consumed three silver fizzes in the upstairs ballroom and flirted extensively with a slim, dark extra at the next table and Norah had been privileged to watch Blake Fallon and Hans Schweibler getting progressively drunker and rowdier with their little bevy of tarts. At another time the spectacle of the girls laying their cheeks on Fallon’s broad shoulders—leaving huge swatches of white powder on his coat—and their hands upon his thighs would have disgusted her, but tired as she was, she found herself only observing their technique and wondering if it would work on anyone who hadn’t been responsible for the staggering number of empty champagne glasses littering the table.

“Oh, darling, I don’t think they could be professionals,” Christine said when Norah remarked on it. She peered across the room, trying to distinguish the Laocoön of sequins and tweed in the fashionable gloom. “For one thing, I don’t think professionals would get that drunk with a trick.”

There was an explosion of drunken laughter as Fallon poured his latest drink—no longer champagne but something stronger and less identifiable—over the head of the waiter, then performed an exaggerated mime of what could have been either a shuffling blackface minstrel show comedian or a chimpanzee behind the man’s retreating back. Hans and the girls screamed with laughter.

“They’re probably just doing it for the drinks and the cocaine. Coke does let you drink just
gallons
without any bad effects.”

Norah felt inclined to take issue with the statement but couldn’t seem to put her words together at that point. It certainly seemed to have an adverse effect upon one’s sense of social appropriateness, if nothing else.

In any case, when she and Christine arrived at the station with two minutes to spare before the train’s scheduled departure, Blake Fallon had not yet put in an appearance.

Norah sighed at the memory, trying to return her attention to Hraldy’s monologue. “...sensitivity, passion, élan of true hero... These little dogs of Christine’s have more ability to act and,
bien sur,
more brains!”

Christine looked up from her teakwood rail of assorted dots, cracks, bams, and birds in bamboo trees and sipped her lemonade. “You’re right, Mikos,” she said. Beyond a slight pallor and a bruised look about the eyelids, she appeared as lively and beautiful as she had in the queen of Babylon’s bedroom at seven o’clock yesterday morning. “Couldn’t we put Changums or my adorable Jazz in a couple of scenes with me? I know they’d be a hit.”