Bride of the Rat God (24 page)

She fished in her kimono pockets for another cigarette, but her hands still shook too badly to fit it into the holder. She simply stuck the paper end into her mouth and hunted around for a match. “So why can’t Mr. Shang go on cutting the shrubs and watering the grass? Since Felipe got sick and can’t do it anymore...”

“Well, since I haven’t seen this guy, I don’t know,” Blake Fallon said slowly. “But about a year ago I had trouble with an old Chinaman who came around my place asking for work as a houseboy. I told him I already had a houseboy, and darned if my boy didn’t come down sick within days, and the old man show up again.”

He struck a match, keeping a wary eye on Black Jasmine, and leaned across to hold it to Christine’s cigarette, though he kept his hands off her otherwise. The thick, dust-filled light that fell through the saloon’s wide windows rippled on the heavy muscles, burnished the bronze of his armor.

“I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” he went on. “But this old man was always telling me how this was bad luck or that was bad luck, or if I did this or didn’t do that, some evil spirit would get after me. Finally I got sick of it and paid him off. He refused to leave, saying I needed to be protected and only he could do it; he only left when I said I’d call the cops. Later I found that most of my gold cuff links, cigarette cases, and about two thousand dollars had disappeared at the same time.”

“That’s horrid.” Christine stubbed out her cigarette and turned her face away from him. “I refuse to believe that of poor old Mr. Shang. I’m a very good judge of character, and that old man wouldn’t hurt a flea. Besides, Buttercreme likes him, and she doesn’t like
anybody
.” She gathered Black Jasmine to her side. Buttercreme and Chang Ming lay under the bench, growling slightly, Norah noticed, every time Fallon came near or spoke.

The actor rolled his eyes. “Well, Shang’s a pretty common name in China,” he said after a moment. “Maybe it isn’t the same guy. He claim he was a wizard?”

Norah and Alec traded a glance over Christine’s head. Very gently Alec said, “Maybe Blake better take a look at Shang.”

Doc added, “Maybe Chris ought to go through her jewel box when she gets back to town. I don’t want to run the poor guy down or sound like somebody out of a dime novel, but if that explosive had gone off, I don’t think anybody would have been looking to see where this antique necklace was or counting up how many diamond bracelets were there for a long time afterward.”

“Nonsense,” Norah said. “It would be much easier for him to simply greet us on our return with some story about burglars than to blow Christine up in an ‘accident.’”

“If the man’s sane,” Fallon said quietly.

“I think perhaps,” the director said as Norah opened her mouth to snap back, “is best for all, do we simply call police of San Bernardino.”

Thus it was that Deacon Barnes was sent to San Bernardino to the sheriff’s office. But when the deputies arrived, though the door of the brick assay office was still locked and no evidence was found that any board of floor or roof had been dislodged, no sign was found within of the old man.

Sign of sacrifice.

On the road there and back again, seven days—

it is good to travel...

Good luck lies in returning from a short trip...

“W
HAT PUBLICITY, HUH?”
Conrad Fishbein’s round blue eyes flicked avidly from Norah to Christine, and his plump hands rubbed as if hugging each other with joy.
“STAR ESCAPES DEATH! MURDER CULT OF THE EAST! MYSTERIOUS CHINAMAN SOUGHT!”

“We still don’t know that Mr. Shang was the one who set those charges,” Norah protested, steadying her teacup as the three-ten from San Bernardino jostled over the points. A few spits of rain streaked the window as the dusty little town, nestled up against its hills, dropped behind.

“My dear Norah,” purred Fishbein, glancing around for the waiter and then opening his small briefcase to produce a bottle of champagne, “I only said the man’s being
sought.
Besides, the idea of a sinister Chinaman stalking Chrysanda Flamande will make every reporter in town forget that Charlie Sandringham ever existed!” He set the bottle on the table and produced fragile-stemmed glasses, each engraved with the seated Egyptian figure that was Colossus Studios’ emblem, filled two, and handed one to Christine. “To
She-Devil of Babylon.
”

“I refuse to let you say Mr. Shang had anything to do with it,” said Christine. “You can go on about how I worked yesterday surrounded by studio bodyguards, or how I received warnings and worked anyway, or anything you like, but don’t get everybody all stirred up against poor Mr. Shang.”

As she took the champagne glass, there was a glint in her dark eyes that showed she meant it. Fishy looked crestfallen. Norah didn’t see why. The fat publicist had already sent the
Times,
the
Mirror,
the
Daily News,
the
Herald,
and the
Examiner
pictures of Christine mounted in the speeding chariot, with at least two doughty cowboys skylined on the rocks with rifles in hand. Since Colossus Pictures boasted neither a special stills man nor more than one cameraman per picture, Alec had taken the shots—the cameraman whose back was visible in the picture was actually Doc LaRousse—though of course when the fall had been filmed, the cowboys had been out of sight. But they had been there. LaRousse, who’d grown up in the desert, and Smoky Hill Dan had scoured the area for Mr. Shang before shooting had commenced and had patrolled several times during the day, though both agreed that such measures would be little use against someone who knew rough country.

The chariot charge and fall had gone like clockwork. Christine threw back her head and flung out one arm in a suggestion of abandoned laughter. The explosion, up in the rocks but far nearer than Norah personally felt would be safe, was shattering, ten times larger than she had expected, flinging rocks and dirt and sawdust—which made it appear larger still—everywhere. To her own annoyance Norah didn’t even see the actual fall, for the shock made her flinch and close her eyes; when she looked around a moment later, Christine and Smoky Hill Dan lay sprawled on the kicked-up sand near the fallen wreck of the chariot and horses while Alec cranked a long test strip. When she saw the footage in the editing room some weeks later, she was more horrified still, because Alec had angled the camera for a forced perspective that made the explosion seem to take place under the horses’ very hooves, and she would have sworn that neither Queen Vashti nor her charioteer could have survived.

But Christine’s only comment, examining a skinned spot on her elbow as Norah and Smoky Hill Dan got her to her feet, had been, “Well, that’s over, darlings. Now can we go home?”

“How about this?” suggested Fishbein. “This is hardly the first time in her colorful life Chrysanda Flamande has faced danger...”

“Hmm.” Christine paused in the act of fitting a cigarette to her holder, the faraway gleam of her true métier shining in her eyes.

All the way back to Los Angeles, under overcast skies, Christine and Fishbein polished off his champagne and elaborated her adventures in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt while on expedition with a suddenly acquired archaeologist uncle, enthusiastically abetted by Alec. Norah would have helped also—she knew, for instance, that Bedouin raiders would not be found in the Valley of the Nile—if Hraldy had not insisted on sitting beside her and discussing the script revisions that changed Laban the Splendid from Esther’s lover to Esther’s brother, exclaiming over the scenes still to be shot, and praising the changes made.

“A stronger, a far stronger, film will come of it, you will see,” he said, fixing Norah with his eager brown gaze. “Thus! These you have write, you give more to Laban, you make use of this newfound talent, this new power, in our Blake.”

He glanced at the slim, vivid figure across from them, black beadwork panels flashing on the cream silk of her dress, toying with her long strands of pearls and amber as she talked, and lowered his voice. “And I see you have tailor role of Vashti, that it will not show out her weaknesses. Thus is true writing, Madame Blackstone. Is both kind and profitable to studio. Now when they see, those Philistines who run Colossus, who think of nothing but spectacle and armies, eh? Now they will let me pursue my dream!”

“Dream?” asked Norah, distracted. Across from her, Christine was saying, “... and raising my head, I saw that I had been cast into a pit of vipers! They were coiled everywhere on the rocks around me, amid the bones of those who had perished there before...”

“Of course. Having see him as Laban, having see his scope and ability, I see my chance! I see my cockroach!”

Norah blinked, wondering if the director had misread his English and what word he actually meant.

“With him as star, I will be able at last to make Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
! I do him exactly, each scene by scene! It will be
succés fou
of Hollywood, opening of new vistas, new genres, new meaning for modern cinema! Can you not picture Blake Fallon as six-foot insect with soul of man?”

Norah bit her tongue to keep from saying
Quite the reverse,
but the director, enraptured by his topic, leaned closer to her, put his hand over hers, and lowered his voice still further. “Do not you think, perhaps, that this change, this renewal, this inner metamorphosis of Mr. Fallon’s powers might be due to love?”

“To what?”

“...seizing the camel’s bridle, he sprang into the saddle with a single bound and reached down, drawing me up into his powerful arms...”.

“You ever tried to get on a camel, Chris?”

Hraldy made a very European face and spread his hands. “One sees...”.

“What I saw,” Norah said frostily, “was a man trying to seduce a woman and growing as angry as a spoiled child when he was thwarted. I admit I haven’t much experience, but I should think that anger would come out of pride, not love.”

The director gave her a look that was intended to be worldly-wise but that succeeded only in being fatuous. “Ah, but that is a man, is he not? He have his pride, his pride in conquest of woman he love. May be that his pride fuel this newfound talent.”

“It may be,” she agreed. “But if that is the case, I fear both he and Mr. Brown are in for a disappointment. I suppose there are women who are flattered by that kind of insistent wooing, but Christine isn’t one of them.” And annoyed with herself for being goaded into replying for Christine—something she hated to do—she went on briskly. “My question is, What are we going to do about the scenes with Mordecai? Have they located... I mean, has Mr. Sandringham returned?” She turned and raised a straight, dark brow inquiringly in the direction of Conrad Fishbein.

“From everything we’ve heard, Charlie is still in Vermont with his father,” Fishbein replied in his soothing voice. “As we’ve told the press, we’ve had a telegram from him confirming that for reasons of privacy, his father has not used the name Sandringham for years. This dates back to Charlie’s first successes in the West End. But his father is quite old...”

“He must be,” Christine commented with one of her disconcerting flashes of practicality. “I mean, Charlie’s sixty-three if he’s a day, and he told me once he was a younger son.”

“Very old and very frail,” Fishbein said smoothly. “So you see, we won’t be able to tell anything for quite some time.”

“But we cannot let it go
comme ça
!” protested Hraldy. “Even without change now written by Madame Blackstone, there remain entire trial of Haman, torture sequence in dungeons...”

“My guess,” said Alec, leaning back in the glove leather of the seat with a cynical glint in his eyes, “is that we’ll have to find somebody else and reshoot the works.”

“Reshoot!” The director’s eyes bulged with horror. “Is not to be! Orgy alone is cost...”

Alec grinned. “Think of it as a chance to improve on what you’ve already done. Besides, you can’t say Blake was any good in that first orgy, so you can kill two birds with one stone...
if
he’s as good indoors as he was out.”

Hraldy made a small, strangled noise of despair and retreated to pore over his pages of script; Alec took the opportunity to come around the table and take Norah’s hand, leading her to the vacant table across the aisle. Beyond the windows, the brown hills humped up like ruched velvet under slaty skies, reddish tangles of vineyards, and dark orange groves lying like lap robes over their knees.

“Look,” Alec said softly, “I know this isn’t really any of my business, and ‘no, thank you’ is a completely appropriate answer, but I’m not thrilled about you two ladies staying in that house alone. We’ve got no idea where Shang is or if he’s a crook or just a harmless nut case or... Well, somebody set those charges. Until we can talk to Brown and get the Los Angeles police onto it, I’d feel better if I thought you were staying someplace else.”

“I admit the thought of going up there tonight isn’t one I cherish,” Norah said slowly, looking from the gathering gloom to his face. In spite of the fact that it was only four o’clock, the lamps in the club car had been kindled, and a beautiful youth with the features of an African prince asked if people wanted coffee. “The Hollywood Hotel? They’d take dogs—or they’d take Chrysanda Flamande’s dogs, anyway, wouldn’t they? And... if Mr. Fishbein sent word of the attempt on Christine’s life to the papers, are we going to have to deal with a mob of reporters at the station?” The thought of it made her suddenly ill.

He chuckled. “They took Mae Busch’s leopard. The management would welcome three housebroken little dust mops with tears of joy. But my thought was that the three of us—six, counting the fu-dogs—could get off in Pasadena, take a cab all the way out to Venice, and check you two into the St. Mark’s. I could keep the dogs at my place overnight; it’s only a few blocks away. Then I could take you to dinner at the Breakers, and we could go visit the pier.”

Aside from Christine’s—and Fishbein’s—insistence on a Los Angeles arrival (“Darling, as long as I actually
was
almost killed, I might as well get some publicity out of it!”), the program met with unqualified approval. While Christine languished for the lightning storm of reportorial flash powder on the platform with Black Jasmine in her arms and
SAVED FROM DEATH
almost visibly written above her head, Alec, Norah, and a heavily tipped porter piled the lighter luggage, Alec’s precious gramophone, and twenty or thirty sealed magazines of exposed film into Alec’s disreputable Ford, along with Chang Ming and Buttercreme like a purdah empress in her wicker box. With the Bell & Howell cradled on Norah’s lap, they puttered westward through the clearing dusk along Venice Boulevard, red streetcars clattering past them among the bean fields, orchards, and long, marshy stretches of rank, head-high grass and startled waterfowl, making for the sea.