Bride of the Rat God (20 page)

“Whatever Freud would see in your subconscious, I know what’s floating around in mine. I don’t have Blake’s kind of experience—or his kind of looks, more’s the pity—but trying to get me to run interference doesn’t sound like a man flirting because he’s bored. See you in Babylon.”

He gave her a cockeyed salute and turned from the porch, and as he did so, without quite knowing why, Norah stood up and reached impulsively to touch his shoulder. For a moment Alec stood looking up at her—he was a good four inches shorter—then he stepped close, put his hands very gently on her arms above the elbows, and brushed her lips with his.

Then quickly, with a slightly embarrassed air, he shifted his satchel on his shoulder and hurried away between the buildings, whose shadows swallowed him up.

During the morning Fallon made three or four attempts to catch Christine alone. Twice the dogs barked frenziedly, and when Norah rose from her seat at the vanity—where she was making the Book of Esther throb amid a clearing in the powder canisters and hairpins—she glimpsed those powerful shoulders in their pale blue sweater disappearing around the corner of Emily’s cabin. On the second occasion Christine rolled over, sighed, and murmured, “What on
earth
are those dogs hunting?” Ten minutes later she sat up and rubbed her eyes.

It was by that time ten o’clock. Having clocked Christine making up and dressing before this, Norah felt serenely confident that Fallon would have no time for anything major in the way of seduction before they all had to be on the set at twelve. According to the lesser Ned, on his way through Red Bluff to the train station in San Bernardino to meet Roberto Calderone, both the pavilion and the army encampment sets were well under way.

“Good thing, too,” he added, brushing back his duck forelock of sand-colored hair. “The extras are arriving tomorrow afternoon, and Mikos is going to have to take ’em through their paces at least once when they get out here. That leaves just the morning for filming all King What’s-his-name’s scenes with Roberto and Emily, plus whatever setup the explosives man is going to need.”

While Christine put on powder and rouge, lipstick and eyepaint—not film makeup, but there was no question of crossing to the mess hall less than fully decorated and she had learned not to suggest it—Norah brushed the dogs and entertained her sister-in-law with an account of Fallon’s attempts to get time alone with Christine to such effect that when he encountered them on their way back after breakfast, Christine was in her most minxish mood.

“Of course, Blake darling, I’d
adore
to ride out to the set with you.” She smiled, gazing up at him from beneath the shade of her broad-brimmed hat. “So kind of you. Emily,” she called out to the heavily veiled blonde just emerging from her cabin with mother in tow. “Emily, Blake’s offered us all a ride out to the set this afternoon. Wasn’t that sweet of him? Do you think there’ll be room for Zena as well? I mean, with Norah and the dogs, but you won’t mind holding my little celestial Changums on your lap, will you? Norah’s got a pot of coffee, Emily darling. Would you care to come over and have a cup with me while I put on my makeup?”

She smiled her leave of the actor, batting her long black lashes through a scrim of cigarette smoke, and Norah had to turn quickly away so as not to be seen laughing.

At quarter to one, which was good timing for Christine, the five ladies loaded themselves into Fallon’s car, Norah and Christine sharing the backseat with Zena and the dogs—“Hush now! Uncle Blake’s being very good about giving us all a ride out to the set, you naughty boy!”—leaving Mrs. Violet to sit like a whalebone sword blade between the admiring Emily and the seething star. There was further delay when they reached the dry wash, which had inexplicably ceased to be dry and was a good two feet deep in rushing brown water, necessitating some very careful driving.

“A flash flood?” Christine regarded Doc LaRousse with surprise-widened eyes upon her arrival at the pavilion among the rocks. “How could it flood? It didn’t even rain last night!”

“It rained in the hills,” the electrician explained. “We heard the water come roaring down round about ten after twelve, a huge wall of it, boulders, rocks, jackrabbits that couldn’t get out of the wash... We were damn worried about you, Chris.”

“I’m
so
sorry!” She drew about her shoulders the light wrapper of yellow silk she wore to keep any possibility of sun from her copiously exposed skin and looked up at him while Zena and Mary DeNoux fussed around behind her, repinning curls that the drive and her protective veiled hat had disarrayed. “You see, Norah? If we’d hurried up like you kept telling me to, we might have gotten caught in that flood, though I still don’t see how you could
possibly
have a flood if it didn’t rain!”

With barely two hours of daylight left, the filming proceeded apace. At Norah’s suggestion, three key shots were shifted from day to night and a long sequence predicated on Laban’s previous involvement with—and desertion of—Esther was dropped as no longer necessary. “It is possible that Laban’s coming to tent could have been at night rather than at day,” Hraldy agreed doubtfully, studying the yellow notebook pages covered with Norah’s French-governess hand. “But these surely could be film Monday, after we have finish with battle.”

“If you want to bank on the weather holding,” remarked Alec, switching the turret over to a shorter lens. “Personally, at this season of the year, I wouldn’t.”

So they sent Deacon Barnes and Mary DeNoux back to Red Bluff to bring out the portable generator, a myriad of lights, Lucky Kallipolis, and an enormous picnic dinner, while Norah and Hraldy discussed which scenes needed to be reshot to include a brother for Esther and Christine maddened her frustrated suitor by refusing to leave the wardrobe tent where she sat in her dragon-embroidered yellow kimono, playing mah-jongg with the musicians and smoking. The Pekes, which in Fallon’s absence had spent their time hunting lizards and marking every bush, rock, and tripod as their personal property, remained stubbornly on guard around their mistress’s feet, though they refrained from barking in his presence.

Stay close to her... watch her,
Shang Ko had said as the steam of the departing train blew around him in a cloud.
Do not let her be alone.

The thin, gawky figure walking around the house in the darkness, leaning on his staff, stooping now and then to draw signs on the gnawed foundations, signs of which, in the morning, Norah could find no trace.
Do not let her be alone.

“Norah, darling, I’m thinking about seducing that
darling
cello player. What do you think?” Christine stepped out to the pavilion’s entry, following the three musicians with her eyes as they took their places for the next scene. “His name is Stephen, and he has absolutely the most
gorgeous
nose, and it would drive Blake crazy, and besides, Jazzums likes him, don’t you, my little celestial cupcake?” And the little black dog in her arms strained to lick her chin.

“Norah,” Alec called over his shoulder as he was checking the camera loops, “we’re going to take this at f/8...”

Her thoughts slipped away like a handful of sand in the running water of a flood.

In addition to Roberto Calderone, the afternoon train brought several stuntmen and Felix Worthington-Pontehart, a nimble and lanky Englishman who’d spent most of the war blowing up German entrenchments. The first of the horses arrived that evening from the ranches around San Bernardino. Red Bluff became a seething encampment of tents and corrals and property sheds where weapons and chariots were checked and touched up by the two Neds under Doc’s ubiquitous strands of lights. That, too, comforted Norah when they returned very late from the night shoot. That morning the silence and emptiness of the ghost town had troubled her more than she had allowed herself to admit. Even without Mr. Shang’s enigmatic warning, she had been obscurely glad for the presence of the dogs.

With the horses came a dozen hard-bitten veterans of the range who accepted Black Jasmine as their mascot from the first moment he showed up at their campfire. They nicknamed him Skunk, and thereafter, if there was any question about the whereabouts of the tiny dog, Norah knew to search for him at the cowboy camp on the other side of the corrals.

Norah spent Friday doctoring the script in one of the white tents of Queen Vashti’s troops, which did double duty as a dressing room and the home of the Red Bluff mah-jongg club. Christine and Emily kept looking over her shoulder and suggesting things they’d like to do: “Can’t you
please
write in a scene for me with naked dancing boys, darling?” Periodically Hraldy would burst in, seize a handful of pages, and shout, “Yes! YES!
Bravissima
!” causing Buttercreme to retreat under one of the cots and challenge him in a voice like a trodden-upon rubber toy. Fallon tried once to insinuate himself into the game, but the dogs would have none of him.

“Besides,” added Christine, meticulously assisting Roberto Calderone and Mrs. Violet in building the Great Wall of China on the plank table in their midst, “Blake never showed the slightest interest in playing before this, so he can just sit outside with the extras and talk about showgirls.” She grinned wickedly at the thought of his frustration and lit another cigarette.

Because of the huge inconvenience of night location shooting, her hours were largely limited to daylight, which was short anyway because of the season. She looked better than she had in weeks and, Norah noticed, seemed to consume far less liquor and no cocaine.

If she walked around a great shoulder of red rock, Norah could see the stuntmen on the battlefield figuring out charges, troop maneuvers (including Laban the Splendid’s miraculous reappearance with a previously unaccounted for battalion of vengeful Israelites), and chariot falls.

The men worked in baggy trousers and undershirts—to Christine’s loudly expressed admiration—brown muscles standing out like braided leather as they flung themselves casually here and there or walked the courses they would ride, over and over, timing out exactly where the sand had been poured for a softer landing or precisely where a partner was going to wheel his horse aside. Christine seemed to have forgotten her ambitions of seducing the hapless cello player and had fallen violently in love with a shy youth named Monty.

Watching them, Norah thought again of Keith Pelletier. A good stunter, Alec had called him. She could not imagine a sedentary and elderly inebriate like Charles Sandringham being able to kill one of these men or even take one by surprise.

According to the paper, which still carried the story under the urging of “informants in Hollywood,” nothing had been stolen from the house. Though, of course, after Brown and Fishbein had been through the place, who could tell?

So,
Shang had said,
I see...
And something about the look in his eyes, the quality of his voice, told her did he
did
see... something. Something when she had told him that the boy was a stuntman. Not just horror. Recognition. Pieces falling into place. But pieces of what, she could not tell.

Chinatown,
Alec had said.

At Norah’s feet Black Jasmine gave a gruff little yak, as if satisfied that the latest tumble—both horses going down and sideways, the chariot fishtailing, and the driver and the warrior rolling in a long, slapping dive—was up to his standards. The horses scrambled to their feet, obviously unhurt, shaking the dust indignantly from their manes, while the beautiful Monty and a leathery expert named Smoky Hill Dan, after a moment of motionless death, leaned up on their elbows and grinned.

Pelletier had done that, Norah thought. Pelletier, who had wanted to meet Mr. Fairbanks and become a star and had been willing to prostitute himself to do it. Pelletier who had grinned—
Jesus, honey, if you wait to be invited in this town, you’ll never go anywhere!
—and steered his elderly
erastes
to the speakeasy in the back room. Pelletier who had ended up dead in the reeking shadows of that silent little house, the house with blood trailing down its hall and tooth marks on its foundations and a mirror smashed to oblivion on the wall.

What would leave marks like that?

Shang Ko knew. Of that Norah was positive. She had been too tired, too rushed, too confused at the train station, but upon their return she would force him to tell her something besides the fact that the stars were not in a good aspect for the women he seemed determined to take under his wing.

Shang Ko was still on her mind when they returned to Red Bluff at close to ten that night to find the place awash in extras. Most were unemployed from the streets of Los Angeles, unshaven and dirty and not caring much what they did or how well they did it. Others were Mexican farm workers out of jobs for the winter or unskilled laborers, men who’d come west looking for fortunes in the golden land. But there was a fair salting of men who knew what they were doing, Gower Gulch cowboys or soldiers who’d campaigned with Griffith and DeMille on a score of biblical battlefields, and these Hraldy enlisted as corps commanders and standard-bearers.

Everyone who knew anything about filming and could be trusted to follow orders was impressed to the colors as well. During a late conference in Frenchy’s, while Lucky cleared up the ruins of a truly fearsome assault on the food supplies, Norah took notes on a battle plan that would require Deacon Barnes (mysteriously revived from death), Doc LaRousse, Ned the lesser, and Jeffrey the flute player all to lead troops under the Persian king; when she left, they were debating whether the diminutive Mrs. Violet could be inconspicuously fitted into armor as well.

Wardrobe tents had been set up opposite Frenchy’s, open-fronted, glowing like stage sets and swarming with men. Against the desert darkness the yellow glare had a brittle quality, fragile and inadequate on the faces of the extras: plain or craggy or soft, a da Vinci catalogue of noses, chins, warts, and hairlines.
Like soldiers before any battle,
Norah thought.

Something stabbed inside her, bitter pain that she had thought long laid.