Beautiful Days (23 page)

Chapter 22

ASTRID HAD NOT IN RECENT YEARS BEEN IN THE HABIT of praying. But she did begin to pray in the dark warehouse. Not audibly, because she could still hear the voices of her kidnappers in the next room, like the hissing of a radiator in winter, and she did not want to call attention to herself. She could not decipher their words, but they seemed to be disagreeing, and that could not be a good thing for her. By then she'd gotten used to the smell, although every time a drop of water hit the concrete floor, the sound had become increasingly more terrible. Her pretty red dress was stained with sweat, and her hair had come undone. It was limp and damp and hung in her face. All these discomforts had at first seemed like indignities thrust upon her by a pack of rogues, but they were coming to seem like only the smallest hints of the vast and as yet unknown peril she was in.

So she prayed. She prayed that if she sat still her heart would stop making such a frightful racket. She prayed that Billie had seen the car pulling away from the tavern, and had followed, and was even now waiting outside with a fleet of policemen. She tried to tell herself magical stories, in which a humble farmer comes along, smells something amiss, and breaks into the warehouse, defeating one man after another before reaching the captured princess. Of course he would be handsome, and of course they would fall in love and be married, their story proclaimed with banner headlines:
HEIRESS WEDS HUMBLE HERO IN FRONT OF HUNDREDS OF HER CLOSE PERSONAL FRIENDS
.

After that she tried making deals with God. She had been vain and stupid and she could see that now. Going to that tavern had been a mistake, and she had been frivolous and silly to think that it would have made an interesting story, or that she was bold or original for going there. And she had defied Charlie because she was angry with him for not paying better attention to her, and she had been trying to teach him a lesson. It was all very childish, and she could see that now, and she promised God that if he would just send someone to save her, anyone, she would be always dignified, the way Cordelia was, and not pout ever.

When this produced no results, she turned against Charlie in her mind. Because he had been lousy and she had been lovely, and she had shown him that she wasn't going to suffer lousiness in the only way she knew how. He had cared too much for the bootlegging business, and too little about her, and now she had been caught up in his war. She, who'd never hurt anyone, and only wanted life to be always exquisitely airy and delicious, and who loved nightcaps and her friends and long summer days. The man with the hacked-up face had said it clear enough: Charlie wasn't negotiating. They didn't want money, they wanted something else, and whatever it was, it was more important to him than she was.

That was when she began to see that she was truly lost. Her mother was a selfish woman who wouldn't notice her absence until it was too late, and Charlie had given up on her. By now she could sense the collecting of moisture on the roof, and she had a wretched premonition of the next drip. Her breathing became short and her pulse quick. The tips of her fingers tingled, and numbness spread over her hands. Though she was still breathing quickly, it was all of a sudden impossible for her to get any air into her lungs. Above her the drop had formed—it hung for a moment, suspended in air, laughing at her predicament, and then it fell to the ground, slowly as though it didn't have a care in the world. The impact when it hit, however, was so great that Astrid felt it over her whole body. The sound ricocheted against the walls and she screamed and screamed until her throat ached.

A metal door banged against the wall and the footsteps came toward her quick.

“What?” the man with the hatchet face snarled. “What?”

The way he'd smelled before seemed benign to her now—pickles and onions were the result of the everyday task of eating, and she longed for that. Now his mouth smelled like nothing so reassuringly common, just vaguely of something that had been rotting for years. His mouth was close to her face, and he put his big hand on her throat, and though she had closed her eyes and begun to tremble, she could feel that he was looking her up and down.

“If you don't shut up, I'll make you shut up.” His breath was hot on her ear. “Your boyfriend's dropped the line, and I was getting awfully tired of you, anyway.”

“No, I'm not—I didn't mean—please—I won't—” she stuttered. For some reason it seemed right then that if she explained about the drip that might help. “It's only the dripping. The dripping is crazy-making. If you could just stop the dripping . . .”

“Shut up,” he repeated, in a tone that made her never want to speak again.

She'd been listening for a long time, and she knew that it was too soon for enough moisture to have collected on the ceiling for another drop. But another noise came then, horrifically loud, and the man's hand tightened on her throat. It wasn't until she heard more gunfire that she knew it had been a single gunshot, and not water from the roof. The man kept holding on to her throat—tighter than was comfortable, but not so much that she couldn't breathe—and listened. She knew he was scared, too, from the way his eyes went glassy. There was shouting and a staccato firing of bullets in the next room, and she could hear car motors starting up. Then she heard another voice, and for the first time in hours she began to hope.

“Get your hands off her,” the voice said. She could tell he meant it.

Both she and her assailant looked, and at first she didn't recognize the man holding the gun. He was wearing a well-tailored deep red suit and his hair, which had once been carefully arranged, was now pushed back at strange angles. He was big, and his brow tensed in a ragged line, and he was breathing heavily through his mouth. It was Charlie—she knew that in her mind. He had Charlie's features and Charlie's voice. But he looked like a stranger.

“Get your hands off her,” he said again.

The man moved, putting her body between himself and Charlie, and gripped her throat with both hands. “Put your gun down or I'll kill her right now.”

“Get your hands off her!” Charlie screamed, and she heard him coming toward them.

“Stay back!”

More footsteps. “Get your hands off!”

“I'll kill her!”

Then everything happened at once. A gun went off; a spray of hot blood hit her face; the man groaned and his hands tensed around her neck; she writhed in his grip, not very successfully, until all of a sudden he let go and fell back hard into a puddle. There was a splash, and Astrid closed her eyes. Behind her, Charlie began to hack at the rope that bound her hands to the chair with a sharp object. When he was done with that he went to work on the rope at her feet. It came off quickly and he put away his knife, but though she was free she could not make herself move.

Charlie bent and scooped her up and began walking quickly toward the door. He was still breathing through his mouth in the same heavy way, and she was so frightened of everything that might have happened, and ashamed of having brought herself to this place, that she couldn't look at him. Instead she put her face under the protective cover of his jacket and began to sob. The tears wet his fine shirt, but he only pressed her tighter to him, as though encouraging her to go on until the shirt was entirely soaked through.

She did not dare to peek from under his suit jacket until he had carried her outside. The place where she had spent the worst hours of her life was nothing more than a row of warehouses, with boats up on scaffolds, and though she couldn't see the sound, she knew from the smell that it was close by. They were moving away from a building where two men lay lifeless—one slumped against the wall by the door, the other face down in the gravel. Victor was waiting by Charlie's car wearing a grave expression. He nodded at Charlie and then got in the car and started up the engine. A second car started up its engine, too.

As they came around to the passenger side, she saw that Danny was in the backseat, his mouth open and eyes closed, as though he were asleep. She had always liked Danny and she was relieved that he was there, until she saw the blood on the other side of his face and realized that he wasn't breathing. She curled back in against Charlie's chest, as he slid into the front passenger seat and closed the door behind them, and tried not to think about what had happened to Danny.

“Don't you ever do that to me again,” he said, once the car had begun to move and they were traveling fast over country roads. His voice was stern, and she knew how scared he'd been.

“I won't, Charlie,” she sobbed.

“From now on you are not leaving my side.”

“I won't.” She bunched his lapel in her hand, and held on to it tight. “I'll stay at Dogwood and do as I'm told, I promise! Only don't ever leave me.”

“I promise, I promise I'll never leave you.” Charlie was smoothing her damp hair back from her forehead, and he strengthened his grip on her, and kissed her forehead. “I want to be with you always, and I want to tell the priest as much as soon as possible. Tomorrow. Tomorrow we're getting married, and we're never going to be apart.”

The road was uneven beneath them, and Victor was driving as fast as he could. “All right,” she heard herself say. “All right, Charlie, whatever you say, only please, don't ever leave me alone.”

Chapter 23

IT IS A FACT OF BIG CITIES THAT ONE GIRL'S DARKEST hour is always another's moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all. So it should not be surprising that beloved socialite Astrid Donal's lowest depth of misery should coincide with the sparkling ascendance of her new friend Letty Larkspur.

Had Letty been nervous when she first stepped onstage? That seemed like a long time ago, and though she smiled at the memory, she could no longer remember the way she had felt then. In the space of an hour she had been transformed. There were certainly no remnants of nervousness when she finished the last of the songs she had practiced a lifetime ago and took a low, sweeping bow. The audience stood and their applause drowned all the other noises out. When she stood up again, she turned and pointed to the band members who had so nimbly backed her up, one by one, so that the audience could clap for them, too. Then she blew a kiss to the room, pulled back the skirt of her gown, and stepped down off the stage.

A path opened up for her and she went through it toward the bar, smiling with somewhat disingenuous bashfulness at the gentlemen who were clapping for her. “Bravo,” some of them called, and a few reached out for her. To those she extended her hand so that they could kiss it. She had no real destination, but this didn't seem to matter anymore once she saw Paulette, who took her by the arm and led her to the most private corner of the bar, where a seat had been cleared for her. In fact, it seemed quite natural at that moment that she should take a step into the world, and that the world would rise to take care of her. By then the audience had begun to talk again, and the general hubbub returned her to a kind of anonymity.

She sighed happily and perched on the stool.

“And to think,” said Paulette, with a disbelieving shake of her head, leaning into the bar on a long arm, “you were just some girl I felt sorry for one night at Seventh Heaven.”

Letty smiled back in the same awestruck way. “Some girl just off the train from Ohio, you mean.”

“Right, just off the train from Ohio.” Here Paulette bent close to her and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Although I wouldn't repeat that too loud. I think Mr. Tinsley may have told everyone you grew up in an orphanage in the Bronx, because your parents were somehow killed in a deal of Grey's gone wrong, but when he found out he adopted you, or something like that. You'll read it in the paper tomorrow, I guess.”

“All right.” Letty laughed at the absurdity of this, and took the golden headdress off, and smoothed her helmet of dark hair over her forehead. “Where is Cordelia, anyway? Did she see the show?”

“Yes, she saw the show.” Paulette paused to straighten Letty's bangs for her. “But everyone was ordering champagne when you were singing because they wanted to celebrate their new discovery and we ran out of bubbly, so she had to go into the basement with the head barman to show him which to open next.”

“Oh.” That seemed like a fine thing, for her voice to be an inducement to ordering a drink as fancy as champagne, and she smiled again, even if she did feel almost lonely, sitting in the corner of the room when a minute ago everyone had been looking at her.

“In fact, I should probably go see what else we're out of. Looks like a lot of people are about to ask for a lot of everything.”

“Oh . . . are you sure?” Letty whispered.

“Don't worry, this gentleman will take care of you. He asked that you be sat next to him once your set was over.”

Paulette moved away from the bar and across the room with a hawklike watchfulness, and Letty saw that all the while there had been a man on the other side of her that she knew well. She smiled, relieved that she had not been left alone, and said, “Hello!” in a loud and happy voice. Then she began to blush, because she realized that despite his familiar face, she had never actually met him before.

“Hello, yourself,” he said, his slender lips parting beneath a pencil-thin mustache. “My name is Valentine O'Dell.”

“I know—what I mean to say is—” Her hands had risen involuntarily to her cheeks. “It's awfully nice to meet you.”

He was wearing a white dinner jacket and a white bow tie, and his hair, which appeared so raven-colored in the pictures, was in fact a warm chestnut brown, combed from one side to the other. His eyes flickered from her face to her dress for a moment, after which he extended his hand for her to shake. “And your name is?”

“Letty Larkspur.”

“Letty Larkspur,” he repeated, holding on to her hand another minute. “Letty Larkspur, I'd like to be the first to tell you that you are a star.”

All she could manage in response to this was a faint squeal. Her gaze went across the room, and though some people did glance back at her, none of them seemed to think it was incredible that she was sitting with Valentine O'Dell, who had played the lead role in at least twenty motion pictures. They seemed only to want a better view. When her attention returned to him, he was still staring at her, almost into her, with such warm steadiness that she felt certain no one had ever really understood her until this moment. Then he sat back onto his stool and let go of her hand so that he could signal the bartender.

“You must let me buy you a drink.” He was smiling at her in the same way that he smiled at Sophia Ray onscreen, from the corner of his mouth and with a certain light in his eyes. In fact, Letty felt as though she herself had drifted onto a big screen—she felt projected large and not quite real. Sitting there, at a nightclub, next to a movie star seemed like the kind of scene that was reserved for the pictures. She knew that in such situations you were supposed to pinch yourself to make sure that you weren't dreaming, but she was too afraid that Mr. O'Dell would notice, and if it was a dream, she wasn't ready for it to end yet. “You were incredible, you know that, don't you?”

“Was I?” she replied breathily, even though she certainly had suspected, because of the enthusiasm of everyone else in the room.

“Exquisite.” The barman approached, and Valentine turned toward her solicitously. “What will you have,
ma chérie
?”

“Champagne, I guess.” She didn't really feel like drinking anything—she was drunk enough on the way her evening kept mounting one miraculous turn upon another, but she liked the way it felt to say
champagne
.

“We'll have a bottle of Pol Roger, the 1911 vintage,” he said to the barman. Then he returned his attention to Letty, and his eyes had that same blazing intensity.

“I wasn't supposed to perform, you know,” Letty said, because it did seem incredible to her that if she had not wanted to show Cordelia that she was all right, and Mona Alexander hadn't drunk herself into a stupor, and if Paulette had not insisted that Letty could sing, then she would not now be sitting here with Valentine O'Dell.

“Indeed—I was told Mona would be the chanteuse tonight. That lady is a sad case—I can imagine what transpired there, how it happened to be that you had to take her place. But you know it is like that with all of us.” He issued a quick wink, and she knew that when he said
us
, he was including her. “A door opens by chance, somewhere in our vicinity, and we walk through it, and we begin to dazzle for everyone to see.”

Letty, blushing, was relieved to see the barman approaching with two glasses and a bottle of champagne. While the barman popped the cork and poured them each a glass and stored the rest of the bottle in a large silver bucket, Letty kept her eyes averted, and it was not until Valentine picked up one of the glasses that she dared turn her eyes to him again.

“Here's to the future of Letty Larkspur,” he said. She raised her glass toward his and took a sip of the sweet, fizzy liquid.

The sip made her feel dizzy and bold, and when she had set her glass down, she fixed Valentine in her gaze and murmured: “It's so strange to sit here, just talking to you . . .”

“You mean, because you've known me as my screen self, and it's odd to see I'm made of flesh and bones instead of celluloid?”

Letty didn't know what celluloid was, but she nodded anyway. “I guess that's it.”

He laughed and took another sip. “You feel like you know me, and yet you don't?”

“Yes, exactly like that.” She was vaguely aware of women off to the side staring at her jealously, but she didn't care anymore. They were staring because she and Valentine made a very glamorous picture, and though she couldn't blame them, she was starting to believe that her rightful place was in the picture.

“But I feel the same way about you,” Valentine went on, leaning his elbow on the bar. “As though I know you somehow, even as I'm meeting you for the first time. I felt that when you were on the stage, you know, this—
familiarity
.”

The way Valentine looked at her, his very presence seemed a confirmation that she was the most gorgeous girl in the room, as though her skin were made of gold dust and flower petals and her eyes were pure sapphire. It seemed as though he was about to tell her that their meeting here tonight had been written in constellations, that it didn't matter that he was married to Sophia Ray, that they were two separated halves of one creature, divided long ago and seeking each other ever since.

“Like destiny, you mean?” Letty whispered.

But Valentine only laughed, not unkindly, and shook his head. “No, of course not, nobody believes in destiny anymore.”

“Oh,” she faintly whispered. For a moment she had been willing to believe in any outrageous fortune—a million dollars had been left to her, the Raja wanted her to come ride elephants with him, a movie star was her one, true love.

“Except when they go to the pictures, of course, or when they forget themselves in a dark theater,” he went on, apparently not noticing her fallen face. “That's because of stars, performers with the talent to make them feel that life is beautiful and magnificent and built upon a cosmic scheme. I hope you won't find me immodest for saying that I have a little of that—it's my only skill, really, and it's allowed me to make a handsome fortune in the show-business racket. You have it, too.
That
is what I saw up there.”

If Letty was disappointed to realize that Valentine O'Dell didn't think they were destined for each other, her disappointment didn't last long. That would have been too good to be true, anyway. He recognized in her a talent comparable to his own, and that was worth much more in the long run.

“I want to propose something to you,” he said, refilling his glass from the silver bucket. “And you must not think that I am lascivious. I am married, as you may know, to the actress Sophia Ray, so you can trust that my motives are purely those of a gentleman and a comrade. I would like to mentor you. I think you have something that one in a thousand, one in a million girls have, and I think with some training, I could turn you into a screen star.”

“You mean you want to put me in the movies.”

He smiled, in the way she had seen him smile at children in his films. “Yes. You do need some training, but natural talent you have in spades. What I propose is this: Come live with Sophia and me on Park Avenue. We'll get you dance lessons and acting lessons and we'll round off your edges, and then we'll see what Mr. Warner thinks about you.”

“You mean Mr. Warner of Warner Brothers?” Letty gasped.

Across the room the same people who had watched her sing onstage were teasing and flirting and pushing back and forth as though this were just any old night. The low, orangey light in the place flattered their features and softened their scowls, and Letty was gratified to see that it was a glorious night. Beyond them, by the door, she caught a glimpse of red, and realized that Cordelia was standing there. Her head was bent listening to the big man with the hat over his face. Afterward, she quickly said something in return. Though Letty watched her for several seconds, Cordelia never looked her way, and then she disappeared amongst the crowd.

“So, Miss Larkspur, what do you say?”

Letty's small mouth spread wide, so that Valentine could see all her pearly teeth. If she hadn't woken up yet, then it must not be a dream, and her own life really had become just like a Valentine O'Dell picture. She felt so flush with promise that she wondered if her small frame could possibly contain the joyful spirit within.

“Yes, absolutely,” she said. “I can't wait.”