Bride of the Rat God (2 page)

And that extraordinarily handsome young man with the brilliantined black hair had to be Rudolph Valentino, judging by the fuss the reporters were making over him.

“I must speak to Miss Flamande!”

The voice was soft but came only a few feet from Norah’s side; turning, she saw a fan who had somehow gotten through the police lines. Fans were an aspect of Hollywood life for which she had been unprepared. Two ushers were already conducting him to the wall of plate-glass doors that formed one side of the theater’s lobby. A tall old man, Chinese, Norah thought, certainly very different from most of the mob who pressed so close to the velvet ropes and the barrier of police and uniformed ushers under the blaze of the marquee lights.

“It is a matter of life and death!”

“Yeah, sure, they all say that, Grandpa.”

The old man tried to pull his arm free of the usher’s grip. Thin and tall—taller than Norah, who was taller than most men—he wore his long ash-white hair unqueued, hanging loose around a face hollowed like ancient ivory and down over bony shoulders. In one twisted hand he clutched a walking staff as tall as him with a carved dragon on its head; with the other, he tried to shake the ushers thrusting him inexorably toward the doors. In his baggy Western-style suit he had the air of a dilapidated scarecrow, but his eyes were those of a displaced god.

“Look, you want to tell Miss Flamande something, you write her a letter care of Colossus Studios.”

“I tell you it will be too late!” The old man half twisted in their grip, looking back at Christine, who had been joined by an enormously fat man with a coarse, pouchy face framed in badly cut black hair.

More flash powder, more tugging of reportorial forelocks: “Mr. Brown, can you tell us about the rumor that you’re planning to take over Enterprise Studios?” “Mr. Brown, what’s Miss Flamande’s next project going to be?” “Mr. Brown, is it true you’re bringing D. W. Griffith out from the East to direct Charlie Sandringham’s next picture?” Three or four stunningly beautiful girls hovered in the background, gazing at the black-suited behemoth with expressions of adoring fascination while Christine put one arm most of the way around his back and leaned into him with every graceful line of her saying “love and trust.”

A. F. Brown owned Colossus Studios.

In a way, Norah supposed, she, too, ought to be expressing worship, or at least gratitude, since it was ultimately his money that not only paid for Christine’s house but had enabled Christine to bring her here to this bizarre world in the first place.

She glanced at her wristwatch. It was precisely nine-fifty and twenty seconds.

Curious, she thought, looking around the lobby, how thin they all looked in real life, Pickford and Chaplin and Mix. Thin and tired and just a little fragile. They were probably all anxious to get to bed. Most of the players she
had
met in the past six weeks, she had never seen on the screen until tonight. Like Flindy McColl, Christine’s best friend, red-haired and giggling on the arm of a studio Adonis named Dale Wilmer, or Roberto Calderone, the handsome Mexican who’d emerged from the fog like a vengeful specter and caused Christine to step back and plummet to her death over the cliff.

Or, more accurately, Norah revised, had caused Christine to step back and that good-looking stuntman—Kenneth? Kevin? she’d never heard his last name—to plummet over the cliff wearing Christine’s black silk dress and eerie opal necklace.

Kevin or Kenneth was near the refreshment table, helping himself to beluga caviar and lobster patties beneath a glittering life-sized ice sculpture of Rameses II. The young man, slender and athletic even in a tuxedo, talked animatedly to Charles Sandringham, last seen lying in a pool of blood on the floor of Christine’s—
Chrysanda’s
—boudoir. Sandringham was sneaking nips from a silver hip flask, and Norah guessed he’d done so all through the premiere. Sober, he’d never have put his hand on the young stuntman’s arm that way in public.

She checked her watch again. Three minutes had elapsed.

“If you’re waiting on Miss Flamande for something, I warn you they’ll stand there gassing to the press for half an hour at least.”

Norah turned in surprise. A pair of very bright brown eyes, slightly below the level of her own, blinked at her behind a pair of very thick spectacles. Perhaps, she thought later, her aunts were right and Christine
was
a bad influence on her, because instead of the retreat proper to a young woman of her station, she said frankly, “Oh, I’m not waiting. I’m just checking to see how long it is before Christine comes over to me and says, breathlessly, ‘Darling, we’re all going over to Frank’s house, so could you possibly take a cab home?’”

He considered the little group. “How long have they been at it?”

“Three and a half minutes.”

“I’ll say eight, total.”

“You don’t know Chris. I make it six and a half.”

He produced a pocket watch from his much-worn tweed jacket and compared it with the plain, brushed-steel Elgin on her wrist. “I’ll still say eight. That’s Doug Fairbanks talking to Brown now, and Brown doesn’t know him well enough to ask him to his party in less than five. And what makes you think I don’t know Chris?”

He snapped the watch shut. Norah noted how soft and uncallused his hands were, though by no means weak or unworked. They were also covered with small nicks and cuts, chemical stains, and abrasions. He bit his fingernails and evidently kept a cat.

“I’m sorry.” Norah smiled ruefully. “Of course you might.” Her mind snagged on his voice, realizing that she
did
know him from somewhere... “I’ve only been here six weeks, and she must know other people besides actors.”

He drew himself up with great dignity, fully four inches, she guessed, under her own loose-boned five foot eleven. “And what makes you think
I
am not an actor?”

“Your beard,” she replied promptly. “And your hands. And the fact that you’re speaking to me and not hovering around the producers.”

“Darling.”
Chrysanda Flamande broke momentarily from the group in question, casting a glance of soulful longing over her shoulder at Brown that would have shamed Duse playing Juliet. “Darling, listen, Frank’s asked us all over to his place after this
dreadful
affair is over and I haven’t the
faintest
when I’m going to be home, so do you think you could get a cab?”

Norah automatically checked her watch, and the little man with the beard and glasses turned quite gallantly away to examine the mural of King Lear and Cordelia on the wall behind him lest Chrysanda Flamande see how hard he was working not to laugh.

“Of course, darling,” Norah began, but as usual, her sister-in-law was already babbling, “I knew I could count on you... I’ll see you in the morning...” as she flitted back in a firestorm of diamonds to couple herself once more to the studio head’s massive arm.

“Have you tried saying, ‘I’m so sorry but I’ve suddenly developed a morbid psychological complex about cab drivers?’ That was seven by my watch.”

“Curse you, Mr. Fairbanks. I’m still closer by thirty seconds.”

“So you are.”

A scrimmage of red uniforms caught her eye. It was the Chinese gentleman, who had tried to reenter the lobby through a small door in a gilded wall niche, arguing, gesturing with his twisted, crippled hands. Norah’s companion said, “Ah, another life-or-deather,” and Norah regarded him in surprise.

“You heard what he said?”

“Lot of them say that.” He pushed his glasses more firmly up onto the bridge of his nose. “You came in with Chris. You saw the fans. Cleopatra rolling herself up in a carpet to see Caesar is like an appointment with a social secretary compared to some of the tricks they’ve pulled.”

“Hmm,” said Norah. Masses of men and women—dressed with a casualness that she found unnerving—had lined the sidewalk eight and ten deep beneath the garish posters in front of the theater as Christine had docked her enormous yellow Nash roadster at the curb with her usual lack of accuracy, shouting her name, reaching through the police lines to touch her as she walked through them with that slight, seductive sway, her enormous coat of sables half drooping from alabaster shoulders and the lights of the marquee sparking the white opals of her necklace. Norah had followed, feeling invisible as usual, clothed also in black—though far less fashionably—and leading the small string of Pekingese without which, these days, Christine was never seen in public.

The Pekes—Christine’s latest affectation—currently resided in the theater manager’s office, Chang Ming doubtless sprawled on his back waiting for someone—anyone—to come play with him, Black Jasmine jealously guarding all three of the toys Norah had left to amuse them, and Buttercreme hiding in the darkest corner under the desk, her tongue lying like a little pink welcome mat on the floor before her flat nose.

Her companion’s voice drew her attention again. “So, listen. I’ll pay for the cab and buy you a cup of coffee at Enyart’s Grille on La Brea if you’re willing to stop. I’m Alec Mindelbaum.” And as if he sensed her proper upbringing withdrawing from the undocumented introduction, added, “I did the camera work on that epic that just—ah—shook us to the soul.”

“Ah.” Norah remembered him now. He looked very different in a suit. “Of course. And I’m the—I believe you used the phrase ‘butterfingered nitwit’—who let Miss Flamande’s Pekingese get away on the set yesterday with such enlivening results.”

It was his turn to blush, which he did rather readily behind the close-clipped rufous beard. “I know,” he said a little shyly. “I feel I owe you a cab ride and a cup of coffee just for that.”

The crowd in the lobby was thinning, changing color and composition as sotto voce invitations to Mr. Brown’s party circulated. The press still surrounded the buffet like sharks feeding on a dying whale, but the flitter of beaded dresses and the black of formal evening clothes were bleeding away, leaving only a muddy suit-brown.

“Nonsense,” said Norah. “I haven’t been in Los Angeles long, but I saw how long it took Mr. Hraldy to rehearse everyone and set the lights. I don’t wonder you were furious. I think Chang Ming saw a mouse under the queen of Persia’s divan.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me. That shooting stage must have started life as a mule barn.”

“And, of course, Black Jasmine would die before he’d let himself be outdone. I suspect he’s still under the impression he’s going to grow up to be a wolf. Your offer of a cab must include them, you know.”

“I know.” Mindelbaum grinned and held out his arm to her with an old-fashioned courtliness that took her by surprise. No man had treated her with such consideration since she’d left London. “I’ll cherish to my grave the look on the manager’s face when Chris said she’d leave them in his office during the show.”

“Which was quite unjust of him, since they’re the most fastidious animals you could hope to meet. On the boat from England and later on the train crossing the country, they always waited for their promenades on the deck or down the station platforms, for which I was
infinitely
thankful, since, of course, I was the one looking after them and Christine wouldn’t have so much as scolded if they’d killed and eaten the conductor.”

Mindelbaum left her beneath a poster of Christine and Charles Sandringham—like moths to a candle’s
DEVOURING FLAME
, it said—and went in quest of their coats. Outside the glass the crowd still milled, striving for one last glimpse of cinema godhood. Norah could almost feel them glance at, and dismiss, Mindelbaum’s threadbare tweed and her dowdy black crepe.

It was a dismissal she’d grown used to long before she’d come here to the ends of the civilized world. The Manchester version of it took in the outdated shirtwaists and mended shoes, the heavy stockings and hands chapped from washing Mrs. Pendergast’s underwear, and said,
Oh. Poor relation.
The Hollywood version was, in a way, more democratic.
Oh. Not a star.

A younger Chinese, clothed in the baggy black quilting common to Chinese from the Limehouse to the Barbary Coast, had appeared through the same discreet doorway and stood talking to the ushers and the old man. “You must forgive my grandfather,” he said, bowing to the usher. “He has not long been in your country.”

And the old man gestured, furious, at the poster of Chrysanda Flamande smoldering in the doomed and noble Charles Sandringham’s arms.

There was a surge of movement from the direction of the buffet. Sandringham, after thirty-five years of ruling the stages of the West End and Broadway, still possessed of exquisite hands and patrician bones, proceeded to the doors in company with his beautiful stuntman. They paused so that Sandringham, clearly in his cups, could light the young man’s cigarette.
The Dick’s Hatband Brigade,
Jim would have said with a raised eyebrow. Norah was reflecting that her mother would never have credited such a thing of her idol when Alec Mindelbaum’s voice asked in her ear, “That bother you?”

“So long as he doesn’t light up at a table where I’m eating, no.” She caught the appreciative twinkle in Mr. Mindelbaum’s eye as he helped her with the worn black coat she had bought for Jim’s funeral.

The manager appeared, bowing and trying to keep two very lively little dogs and one extremely unwilling one from tripping every departing reporter in the room. Norah took pity on Buttercreme and picked her up, carrying her across the lobby to the doors.

Nothing about Los Angeles had so convinced her that she had come to an alien world—an alien universe—as the weather. All week it had been as warm as an English summer, and even tonight’s flickers of rain had done no more than dampen the streets, yielding a breath of asphalt and a confusion of yellow reflections from the multiglobed streetlights on the Los Angeles version of Broadway.

An usher summoned a cab, which edged from the porridge-thick traffic while everyone crowded around Mr. Sandringham’s silver Dusenberg. Across the street and up a block, the Pantages and Palace theaters emptied hordes of casually dressed men and smoke-trailing women: Mrs. Pendergast would have retired to bed for a week in a fit of scandalized modesty at the sight. Motorcars wove in front of yellow streetcars and hopelessly impeded their progress. Against the glow of the sky, feather duster tufts of palm trees spread their spiky fans; Norah noticed that a good portion of the people passing before the otherworldly office building opposite were brown-skinned Mexicans and Chinese in their traditional black pajamas and queues, many more than she had seen in Hollywood. She had heard someone mention that Chinatown lay nearby.