The Teleportation Accident (22 page)

Blimk took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Loeser. ‘Smoke so much these days I need a chimney in here.’ He nodded up at a brown discoloured patch on the ceiling above his nest. ‘Think I’m growing a stalactite.’ They both lit up. ‘Where you from, don’t mind me asking?’

‘Germany,’ said Loeser.

‘Oh yeah? What took you to Hollywood? Nazis kick you out?’

Loeser decided if he could be honest with anyone, he could be honest with a pornographer. ‘Nothing to do with that. I’m looking for a girl.’

‘She run off with somebody?’

‘We were never actually attached.’

‘You just like her a lot?’

‘Yes.’

‘You came all the way to America ’cause you had a crush on a girl? My mother’d call that sweet.’

‘I’d never thought of it like that before. Yes, I suppose it is sweet. In a manner of speaking.’

‘Romantic.’

‘Genau.’

‘Find her yet?’

‘No. They have a whole shelf of California telephone directories at my hotel, and I went through all of them this morning. She’s not listed. But she might have changed her name. Especially if she’s going into the movies.’

‘Think that’s likely?’

‘She’s certainly pretty enough. And she’s ambitious. I may have to ask around at the studios. I don’t know what else to try.’

‘You should hire a private dick. I know a fella down the block, you give him a week, he can find anybody in LA.’

Blimk wrote the address on another business card and Loeser paid him for
Dames! And how to Lay them
. ‘Do you have anything by that Lovecraft fellow?’

Blimk went into the back room, looked through a filing cabinet, and returned with a magazine. ‘This one’s my favourite. “The Call of Cthulhu”. You can borrow it but I need it back after.’ It was a tattered copy of
Weird Tales
from 1928. This time, Lovecraft’s name was only listed in small type on the cover, the editors apparently having been more excited about an opus called ‘The Ghost Table’ by Elliot O’Donnell, which was illustrated with a picture of a man with a pistol protecting a woman in a blue dress from a malevolent clawed heirloom. They would never have stood for that sort of thing at the Bauhaus, thought Loeser.

The Bevilacqua Detective Agency

The detective, whose office was above a cigar shop, had a smile that looked as if his mouth were being pulled back at the corners by fishing hooks. ‘Take a seat,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Wallace Blimk recommended you,’ said Loeser. ‘I’m trying to track down a girl. She only arrived in Los Angeles a few months ago.’

As Loeser spoke, Bevilacqua had unwrapped a cherry lollipop and put it in his mouth. When he wasn’t sucking it he rested it carefully in an ashtray. ‘She making any special effort not to be found?’ he said.

‘I doubt it.’

‘Should be straightforward, then. Cost you twenty dollars a day plus expenses.’

‘Is this mostly what you do? Missing persons?’

‘About half that. And about half adultery. Someone thinks their spouse is having an affair and I find out for them.’

‘You do a lot of that?’

‘Plenty,’ said Bevilacqua, in a tone suggesting there was barely a marriage west of the Rockies he hadn’t helped to snuff out.

‘Tell me: when you tell a man that his wife is sleeping with someone else, what’s his reaction?’

‘Furious,’ said Bevilacqua, making an emphatic gesture with his lollipop. ‘But only until they see the proof. After that, they’re just grateful. Real grateful. It’s pathetic, sometimes. Embarrassing. The women, they just go quiet, in my own personal experience. Now, let’s get down to business. What can you tell me about this girl?’

‘Her birth name is Adele Hitler. She’s twenty-two. Black hair, blue-green eyes. Speaks good English with a heavy German accent.’

Bevilacqua looked up from his notebook. ‘Cute?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Is she good-looking?’

Loeser was silent for a moment, then he got up. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind. I hope I haven’t wasted too much of your time.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Goodbye, Mr Bevilacqua.’

Loeser hurried out of the office. There had been something in the expression on Bevilacqua’s face just then that had made Loeser certain that if he found Adele he would fuck her. After all, in Stent Mutton books, private detectives always fucked every single woman involved in the case, from the client’s daughter down to the nearest hat-check girl. After what had happened with Rackenham, he wasn’t going to hand Adele over to another blithe predatory male if he could possibly avoid it. Unless he could enlist a private detective who was certified by three reliable doctors as impotent, he was just going to have to find her without help. He looked around at the bustle of Sunset Boulevard. Just as a past drought would show for ever in the rings of a tree, the Depression was still there in Berlin under the new bark if you knew where to look, but Los Angeles did not feel as if it had ever gone thirsty.

The Mutton House

Carrying his new camera on a leather strap around his neck, Loeser cut diagonally across the prosperous scrubland at the side of the road so that he would be at least partially occluded by bushes as he approached the patio of the house. At first, there was no sign of Dolores Mutton, but when he got closer he saw her through the glass, in the kitchen, eating an orange; all of a sudden the Gugelhupf design seemed as if it were specifically intended for easy surveillance. Drabsfarben evidently hadn’t arrived yet, so Loeser sat down in the shade of a tree, brushed the dust from his trousers, and waited. Dozing emeraldine on a rock a few feet away was a lizard not unlike Mordechai. The smell of the ocean came in on the breeze, such a mild musk for such a huge animal.

Just before noon, a car drew up outside the house and the composer got out and went into the house. Crouching very low, Loeser moved towards the patio. Drabsfarben and Dolores Mutton stood in the sitting room, both already in postures of anger as if they had never interrupted their argument from the party two nights ago. Loeser took a few photos, but he needed them at least to kiss if he was going to force Stent Mutton to admit he was wrong and then luxuriate in the gratitude that Bevilacqua had insisted would follow.

‘What the heck are you doing?’

Loeser’s heart bounced like a tennis ball. He turned. A stocky boy in a denim shirt stood there with a big brown paper bag under one arm.

‘I’m a friend of the Muttons,’ said Loeser.

‘Sure you are,’ said the boy. Then he grabbed Loeser by the collar with his free hand and led him roughly down the slope towards the house, shouting ‘Mrs Mutton! Mrs Mutton!’

Dolores Mutton came out on to the patio. ‘What is it?’

‘I was on my way here with your groceries and I saw this creep hiding up there taking pictures. He’s a prowler or something. He sounds foreign.’

‘Thank you very much, Greg. I know this man. He’s bothered us before. You did just the right thing.’

‘Want me to wait here while you call the cops?’

‘No, there’s no need. I’ll deal with him. Just leave the groceries.’

Greg put down the bag and she took five dollars out of her purse and gave it to him. When he was gone, Loeser whimpered, ‘I just came for my shirt and trousers.’

‘Why were you taking photos of us?’

‘The house. It’s such an architectural—’

‘Like hell.’ She snatched the camera from him, then hurled it against the barbecue grill. It hit with a clang and then dropped to the tiles. The sunlight writhed in her blonde hair like a trapped thing. ‘Let me tell you something, Herr Loeser. I have watched Jascha end a man’s life. Have you ever cut a pomegranate in half and turned the halves inside out to get at the seeds? Do you remember the sound that it makes? Jascha can end a man’s life with a sound not too different from that, and certainly no louder. I was there once and I heard it. If you ever try anything like this again – if you speak one more word out of turn to my husband – Jascha will kill you and make it look like an accident. I wouldn’t be able to stop him even if I wanted to. That camera is going in the trash with your clothes, and I don’t want to see you within a mile of this house as long as you live. Got that?’ Loeser was too shocked to reply, so she repeated, louder, ‘Have you got that?’

‘Yes. I see. Fine. Thank you. Goodbye.’

Loeser turned and ran.

He was terrified, but he knew he shouldn’t be, because what he’d just heard from Dolores Mutton was only a figurative threat. Surely. A vivid, detailed, persuasive, and chilling but still one hundred per cent figurative threat. Drabsfarben wasn’t a murderer. Loeser was certain of that. Then again, he’d been certain that Drabsfarben wasn’t a fornicator. He didn’t know anything. Still, what kind of lunatic would risk the electric chair to cover up a transgression as minor as infidelity? Maybe a Stent Mutton character. But no one in the real world. If only he could ignore the piano wire he’d heard tightening in her voice. ‘For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, awed because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.’ That was Rilke. Obviously at some point old Rainer had crossed Dolores Mutton.

The Gorge House

By now Loeser was all too familiar with California architecture and its vacuous hybrids of Gothic, Tudor, Mission, and so on, but the enormous red-roofed Gorge mansion was such an arbitrary and oxymoronic pidgin of styles that it might have been assembled as part of a game of Exquisite Corpse. Everywhere there were columns, turrets, arches, trellises, balconies, arabesques, and gargoyles, none of which seemed to have any reason for existence beyond making you thirsty for a tall glass of iced Gugelhupf. Still, it did have a strange charm, and the garden at the front of the house was elated with flowers. Waiting on the verandah after he rang the bell, Loeser thought for a moment that he saw someone watching him from the driver’s seat of a black Chevrolet parked at the end of the street, but before he could be sure the front door swung open and he was shown into the house by Gorge’s personal secretary, an epicene fellow called Woodkin.

‘Colonel Gorge is in his study, but he will be down in a moment. Please come through to the parlour.’

The previous afternoon, on his return to the Chateau Marmont, Loeser had been given a telephone message from Rackenham: ‘I’m having supper with Gorge tomorrow night and I’ve told him I’m going to bring a guest. Short notice but you have no friends here so I assume you’re available. Come at seven and try not to be too dour.’ Partly because of that last instruction, and partly because it would justify having accidentally packed the absurd item, he was wearing a tie his great aunt had given him, which had an ugly repeated pattern of clock faces. He didn’t really have a plan for the evening. (‘Yes, Colonel Gorge, I should be delighted to have a tour of the house. Will it by any chance include your legendary giant vault of “rare books”?’) ‘Am I the first to arrive?’ he said.

‘No, Mr Rackenham is already here. Would you like anything to drink?’

‘Whisky, please.’

‘I’m afraid Colonel Gorge does not allow liquor in the house.’ Woodkin’s diction was so gracefully servile that it didn’t sound like he was speaking out loud so much as just drawing your attention to a particular combination of semantic units that he wondered if you might find appealing.

‘What do you mean?’ said Loeser.

‘No alcohol whatsoever. He’s very strict.’

‘O brave new world. Well, I mean, do you have any cologne? Surgical spirit? Cooking wine? Anything of that kind?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘What do people normally drink here?’

‘The Colonel prefers ginger ale.’

The ‘parlour’ was about the size of a cathedral nave. Rackenham stood at the opposite end, practically out of earshot, studying a portrait of a muscular grey-haired man with a grim, almost demented gaze and the sort of moustache that could beat you in an arm-wrestling contest. There were ten such portraits hung around the room, and as he waded through the thick golden carpet to join Rackenham, Loeser happened to pause and look around him, and realised that the steel spokes of their regard converged on an invisible axle precisely where he stood. He let out an involuntary squeak of fear and hopped out of the way, then hurried on. Rackenham nodded hello, and Loeser saw that the engraved brass label on the frame of the nearest portrait read ‘Hiram Gorge: 1854–1911’. He glanced at its peers on the left and right. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘The face in all of these paintings is the same. I mean, it’s not just a family resemblance – they’re identical.’

‘I’m sure you can guess the explanation,’ said Rackenham.

Loeser gasped. ‘
Mein Gott
, you mean Gorge is some sort of immortal undead being like Dracula?’

‘No, not quite. Our host can trace his ancestry back to the seventeenth century, but no original portraits survive. So he had all these commissioned when he built this house. He sat for all ten of them in different period costumes. The artist was rather good – you’ll notice the physiognomy does become subtly more atavistic as they go back in time. Of course, there’s also no hint here that his grandfather’s mother was a Mexican girl. Or that he has some Creole blood from a generation or two before that.’