Skyscape (28 page)

Stay here. Let Curtis and Margaret and Red Patterson drift toward whatever crash awaited them.

There was a farewell embrace, and then a taxi—a fast taxi, a blurred, giddy careen, the wheels squealing sideways over the traffic-polished stones, through the Porta San Paolo, south toward the airport.

Nothing really mattered very much—that was the truth Bruno had learned over years of passing through to the first-class waiting lounge.

Under this gloss of indifference, however, Bruno was not amused or detached. He was nervous. He felt the wings of the jumbo jet describe the fluctuations of the air at thirty-six thousand feet and he was not comforted, as he had been so many times, by the technology that protected him.

He took some aspirin, four of them—Italian aspirin were too small to do much good. The headache remained. For the first time in his life he felt trapped by the fuselage. He slept, and he dreamed. In the dream he did not want to go where he was going, the destination toward which he seemed to plunge like a stunt diver from a distant perch towards a fatally tiny tub of water.

Los Angeles was a parking lot of buildings, TV antennas, and those metal crowns that sit on rooftops and rotate, ventilating, Bruno supposed. There were telephone poles and vacant lots of broken, glittering glass.

As the large jet approached the airport there was not as much smog as one might expect. The air was not clear, however. It looked as though the oxygen had been used up and replaced with something life-sustaining but degraded, a recycled sky.

Patterson's people met him, all smiles, strong handshakes. Yes, said Bruno, this is the only luggage I have.

He was the sole passenger in the executive jet's cabin.

The interior was luxurious, but it was a neutral sort of plush, high-backed leather seats and a boardroom ease. An attendant offered him a drink and “a bite to eat.” Bruno expressed regrets that he was neither hungry nor thirsty. He asked for aspirin and was given three large Excedrin.

The smaller plane darted, so unlike the airborne whale Bruno had just escaped. This was almost fun, this spearing upward, this gliding along, this banking so Bruno could see. Even by jet it was a long trip over lunar emptiness.

Why am I apprehensive about meeting this TV personality, this exaggerated talent? he asked himself. Red Patterson is the one who should be apprehensive, and I should be coasting along over the desert feeling absolute ease.

Owl Springs lay below them.

From the air the oasis was a rich tangle of verdure. Bruno was reminded of his first lover, a youth so pale that his dark pubic hair was in breath-taking contrast to the lithe chalk of his limbs.

The aircraft did not approach with a grande dame's descent, like the jumbo jet. It paper-airplaned down, gliding, and Bruno found himself almost enjoying the sensation of having the entire pulse of his body located in his throat.

That's where they are, he told himself with a boy's wonderment. In that secret place—that's where Dr. Patterson and Curtis are hiding from the world.

Bruno felt his old confidence return. His headache was gone. I'll stay only a short while, he promised himself. Just a quick visit, just a look—an hour or two.

There can't possibly be any harm.

30

It was one of those days that go so far and then stop dead. The pool doesn't ripple. The wind doesn't stir. Visitors from New York or Boston make it out to the California desert and go wild about the weather, say how wonderful it is. Especially in winter—all that sun. A week later they hate it. Patterson knew: hate didn't carry much weight. The sun was stuck in the sky and nothing was ever going to happen.

“You used to tell me what you were thinking,” said Loretta Lee.

He wanted to smile. He had never been so indiscreet. You gave Loretta Lee something that resembled the truth, the way a bat resembles a bird. “You can usually guess,” he said.

“Bruno Kraft won't stay long,” she said. “Maybe just an hour or two, right?”

Red Patterson sat very still because it was hot. He stayed very quiet and concentrated on the trouble that was on its way.

Loretta Lee was wearing the briefest imaginable swimsuit, a device that was all strap and the kind of pink you see in used-car lots. She did not have much of a tan, detesting what she called “cancer wrinkles.” The telephone lay beside the tube of SPF 45 sunblock.

There had been a certain amount of uneasiness in Patterson's mind about the desert beyond the oasis, ever since Bishop had found those people, those lost campers. There were things out there, other things, and although they were lost to the world they had not vanished. It was just another reason to be where he was, in control.

The telephone trilled. Loretta Lee spoke into it briefly. She put the phone down and said, “The flight from Rome was six minutes late. They just left L.A.”

“How do I look?” he asked.

“You look okay.”

“I have to look better than okay.”

“You do.”

Bruno Kraft was one of those cunning predatory people without morals, Patterson believed. In Kraft's books, in his televised programs on art history, Patterson had discerned a man of cutting intellect and little feeling, the sort of man who makes an excellent hunter as long as it's out of season.

“You want to put on something else,” said Patterson.

“You told me that an hour ago.”

Patterson had been forced to invite the famous critic when Loretta Lee told him that Bruno Kraft was about to go public with his “doubts.” Patterson's intentions were simple: get the man here, and then get him out, quickly. Other, corollary plans lingered in the wings, outside the light and heat, but those could wait.

The body knew that air could not be so hot. The flesh understood—this could not be real. But it was. The sun was all over them, the real sun, not filtered and buffered, but the naked radiation, rich with both visible and invisible spectra, sunlight that sang off the white stepping stones making a virtually audible hiss, as water dappling the poolside vanished, unpeeling and turning into air.

The scent of the air was sterile, blank purity soiled here and there by the musk of plant life in the eleven-acre oasis. If you made the mistake of tilting your head back it was there, the white hole in the sky.

He took a sip of iced tea. The ice chimed prettily. The sunlight off the pool was softened by his sunglasses, aviator-fashion made by hand in Milan.

Loretta Lee said, “I don't like what's happening.”

“I don't like it either. I'll be glad when it's over. He's going to be a very unpleasant guest, but I've told you how we'll treat him.” He put a hand to the frame of his glasses. Imagine, he thought, making glasses everyday, week after week. The result was an elegant piece of work, but imagine the monotony.

“That's not what I mean.”

Patterson was amazed, not for the first time, at how inconsiderate Loretta Lee could be. “You have everything you want,” he said.

“I don't like what's happening.”

Patterson laughed softly. “Everything is going to be different now.”

“You shouldn't have sent everyone away.”

“You like arguing with me, don't you?”

When the video crew decamped, all the staff had left with them, the nurse, the extra cook, everyone packed into the plane, waving happily, all of them sure everything was going to be fine because Red Patterson said so.

“I want you alive and happy, Red.”

“Things have gotten real simple. It's something that occurs to a man when he is almost killed.”

That shut her up, he thought.

He added, “It's time to focus.”

She took a moment to shape her argument. “Look at the pool, for just one example,” said Loretta Lee. “Don't you remember the time it got a tarantula in it?”

One of the things he found fascinating about Loretta Lee was the way her mind worked. “It was a dead spider,” said Patterson with quiet exasperation.

“A dead spider!” said Loretta Lee, as though that proved something incontestable.

“We don't need to keep a staff here just so we can fish out a drowned spider, should one appear.”

“That's just an example, Red. Things go wrong. This is a big place.”

The two of them sat in the shade beside the swimming pool. The dense palms and dark green grass gave the stunning impression of oasis. The edge of the pool was tiled with the same extravagant gold mosaic Hearst had used for his castle, except that this tile was unvisited by tourists and rarely so much as photographed. A leaf had fallen from one of the yuccas, a long spine like a stilletto without its hilt.

Patterson finished the iced tea and put the glass on the small table. The cubes had already melted. He stood and took a moment to get ready for the real heat. He stepped from the shade to the sun, blinking against the press of the light. He retrieved the pool rake from its hiding place.

He used the long implement to secure the leaf from the bottom of the pool. The leaf spun free, and it took a second or two to balance the spine in the rake, which was really more like an oversized hook. The bottom had been repainted twice in the eight years he had owned Owl Springs. Legend was that Marilyn Monroe had belly flopped in the nude off the sparkling, sandpapery diving board.

“I might put the cover over the pool,” he said, setting down the rake.

“And the cooking. You're not going to see me in the kitchen making pancakes—”

“You will if I ask you to.”

There was a long pause. “Sure. If that's what you need,” she said, softening her voice, and doing that thing with her eyes, making them look both wide and unobservant at the same time.

They would be here any minute. He didn't have time for her. “You forget that when we met you were just another stunning beauty exploring that traditional plan B of the actress.”

“I don't like this, Red.”

“I need Bishop, and I need you. That's all.”

Loretta Lee couldn't argue with that. She was quiet, observing him, not simply looking at him, taking him in with a long silence. Patterson let her look. He was right. They would all live a simpler existence. They would be happy.

She said. “And Curtis. You need him, too.”

“Yes, I need him.”

“What's the matter with you, Red?”

“I have seen what they used to call the light,” he said, sitting down again, stretching out his legs. You could hardly breathe the air, he thought. Lungs couldn't take this kind of dryness.

“I've heard you tell people to beware of sudden changes in behavior.” She tried to say this cheerfully, so if he was offended she could pretend it was a bad joke. “That they can be symptoms of mental illness.”

He wondered over the fact that you could love a woman and be sick of her at the same time.

“And the policy stays the same,” he said. “Don't go near Curtis's suite.”

Inside, it was so cool the sweat on his arms and legs felt like frost. The chill was refreshing, but it imparted something phony to the taste of the air.

He padded down one corridor after another. He paused outside Curtis's suite, selecting the key from his pants pocket.

He opened the door, and slipped inside. He was about to hurry down the hallway, and into the studio, when he heard it.

There was no mistaking the sound of the small jet, the Gulfstream V, Bishop himself piloting it, taking a wide approach so the critic could have a good look at what lay below.

And so Patterson would have plenty of time to hear them and finish the preparations. Bishop was smart. Bishop knew things, and he did not make mistakes.

Loretta Lee had thrown on something shimmery, dazzling, and she looked perfect, although she appeared too nervous hesitating there in the dining room, like a hostess whose cook had just run off with the maid. Patterson was touched—she bitched about everything, but she was loyal.

He kissed her. “Give him the impression that I will be down very soon,” said Patterson. “I'm preoccupied and can't tear myself away. We want Bruno to feel that he is a respected visitor, but that we really don't have the time to entertain even someone as important as he is.”

The jet was on the airstrip. The thrust reversers made the compact engine rumble, and once again Patterson told himself that where he really wanted to be was in the air somewhere.

“I look okay, too, right?” she was asking.

“Delectable.”

He waited in the library, the window open so the air-conditioned cool eddied in the heat from outside. He heard Loretta Lee sliding the glass door. He heard the tiny but distinct scrape of the pool rake as Loretta Lee hung it on the hooks where it belonged.

The jet whined, and there was the long pause, the long wait, as the man from the outside, the man who could alter everything with a few words, gathered himself to make his final, personal descent into the heat.

31

Bruno expected it to be hot. Heat didn't bother him. But he had not expected it to be like this.

The executive jet touched the ground, lifted slightly, then settled into a smooth roll. Its engines made that sweet, pleasing whistle of power ebbing. The steps extended to the pavement, but Bruno was still well within the cabin when the heat reached him.

An attractive woman who introduced herself as Loretta Lee Arno held her hand out to him as he paused under the full force of the afternoon sun. “You can call me Loretta Lee,” she said.

“Bruno,” he said, offering her his name with a little smile, as though it were a gift. We don't need last names, he thought. We are just old children, let loose in the tired, dissolute playground of life. “I hadn't realized it when we spoke, but I do recall you from
Hollywood Midnights
, I believe it was. It's your voice—it's so distinctive.”

She did not respond to this. “Dr. Patterson is very excited that you're here,” she said. “He asked me to tell you that he's trying to do something very difficult just now. He wanted me to ask you to please be patient.”