Bride of the Rat God (33 page)

Upon their arrival once more at Ivarene Street, Shang Ko renewed the signs he had drawn on the doors and windows of Christine’s house, with Chang Ming and Buttercreme scurrying busily around his feet. He marked the stones at the bottom of the hill with signs that he said would give him warning if the police passed by the place, then moved back into the shabby room below the garage as if he had never been gone.

That night Norah’s dream returned with a crystalline clarity that frightened her upon awakening, for there were several minutes in which she wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t actually been outside.

As she had the previous night, she shared the lace-and-cupids wonderland of Christine’s bed with the frightened woman whose persona of flapper insouciance could not survive the turning out of the light. In her dream she rose and for a moment looked down at the pale, pointy face in its sea of dark hair, the two bundles of soft fur like muffs of sable and ivory sleeping in the hollow of her side. Norah put on her robe, bent down to gather up the sleeping dogs into her arms, and clucked softly to wake Chang Ming at the bed’s foot. He trotted after her across the room, and Buttercreme sleepily licked her hand as she deposited the three of them in the bathroom and closed the door.

Dreaming still, she descended the stair to the living room, where Alec was little more than a tangle of rusty curls above his borrowed blanket on the divan, his glasses resting on the lacquered Chinese chest nearby. The gramophone he’d brought up from Venice was a solid square of oak on the table beside the chinoiserie bowl of nuts, and the dreaming Norah remembered listening to Mozart, Ellington, Berlin earlier in the evening.

She opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. It was colder than it had been the previous night, the grass along the edge of the pavement white and stiff with frost. A day past full, the moon was sinking toward the hills that concealed the Hollywood Bowl in Daisy Dell.

Jim was definitely waiting for her in the shadows of the eucalyptus at the turn of the drive.

She drew the robe around her, the cold sharp on her wrists and feet. It had been five years since they’d met. She wondered if he’d notice that she still wore the wedding-ring he’d placed on her finger.

It was the first thing he noticed, taking her hand in his. His grip was stronger than she remembered, his fingers less smooth and soft. He pressed his lips to the thick band of gold. The shadows beneath the trees were so deep, she could not see his face at all.

“This is going to sound strange, Norah,” he said softly, “but you have to trust me. Do you trust me?”

“With my life! Jim...”

He touched her lips with the side of one curved finger and smiled in the darkness, a glint of teeth. “I know,” he said. “I’ve always known. This is hard for me to say, Norah, and it’ll be harder yet for you to hear, but they’ve lied to you. Mr. Shang and his grandson, they’ve told you backward. It’s Chavaleh who’s been taken by the Rat-God, Chavaleh whose body he’s taken over now, Chavaleh who’s a prisoner in her own flesh.”

“What?” Norah stared at him, appalled, her eyes trying to pierce the shadows. It was so strange to hear him speaking his sister’s childhood nickname, which she had forbidden anyone to use from the age of five. Even the smell of him was the same, the smoky wool smell of his uniform, imbued like everything else with the cigarette smoke of trenches and waiting rooms and trains, and beneath that the dim, clean freshness of his flesh.

“Norah, we have to save her. I can’t do it because I’m dead; it has to be you. If you love her, take a knife from the kitchen... It’s in her blood, Norah. The demon’s in her blood. If you cut her throat, cut it deep so the blood runs out, it won’t be able to stay in her.”

Norah stepped back in horror. “No...”

“Norah, it’ll be all right,” insisted Jim’s voice. He reached out to her, his hand white where the moonlight fell. “I’ll stop the bleeding once the Rat-God leaves her. I have that power now, because I’m dead. She won’t die; she’ll be fine.”

“No!”

“Norah, it’ll be all right. It won’t be any worse than helping with those operations at London Hospital. We have to do it, Norah. If we save her—if
you
save her—they’ve told me I can come back.”

Norah stepped back still farther, straining her eyes to pierce the gloom, trying to see something besides the very faint metallic shine of Jim’s uniform buttons. From the corner of her eye she was peripherally aware of something glowing on the doors of the house, signs written in Chinese that seemed to conjure other images, the shapes of two armed men, like ghosts in strange helmets, axes in their hands.

“Norah, I can come back,” he pleaded. “I can be with you again. They’ve told me if you do this they’ll let me come back! Norah, please...”

“NO!”

She woke with a gasp, sitting up sharply in the dimly lighted room. On the bed beside her Buttercreme and Black Jasmine raised their heads and regarded her with solemn eyes.

Beside her, Christine slept still.

Soundlessly, Norah got to her feet, crossed unwillingly to the front window, and drew aside the dragon-brocaded curtains, though part of her shrank in fear that she would see a man’s shape in the shadows of the trees beside the drive.

The moon had set, leaving denser night that crouched like a black wolf among the hills. She couldn’t tell if there was anything there.

She was aware of the soft pressure of footsteps in the rooms below. Since none of the dogs barked, she knew it had to be Alec. A moment later came the characteristic clink of kettle on stove. Making cocoa, she thought.

He was. She found him in the kitchen, wrapped in a specimen from Christine’s vast collection of kimonos, this one royal blue embroidered with bronze dragons and extravagant pink birds. His hair was rumpled, and the portions of his cheeks he usually shaved were flecked with dark hairs. He looked up, pushing up his glasses as she appeared in the door.

“Bad dream,” she explained with a grimace. She was aware that her hair hung in a tangle of brown-sugar waves down her back, showing through it the extravagant red and green flowers on her kimono. The clock on the wall ticked softly, its hands at three-thirty. The kitchen smelled of chocolate, of Buttercreme’s half-eaten food, of heating milk.

Alec’s eyes met hers for a time, then he nodded. He fetched another mug from the cupboard. “What did he offer you?” he asked.

Work on
She-Devil of Babylon
having come to a standstill owing to the disappearance of both Mordecai and Laban the Splendid—and with funding for his takeover of Enterprise Pictures hanging fire, A. F. Brown seemed a likely candidate for a stroke before the new year—Christine decreed that the next day, Sunday, might profitably be spent buying Christmas presents.

Profitably, Norah reflected, for the merchants along Broadway.

Trailing Pekingese and a faint odor of
Trésor de Jasmin
, Christine went through the jewelry shops and high-fashion department stores of the district like Sherman through Georgia. She picked out jade cuff links for Frank Brown and a pearl stickpin for Alec (“You go down the street to Silverwoods and look at shoes or something, Alec; I’m going to buy you a Christmas present”), a bias-cut silk nightgown of palest candy pink for Alexandra Flint back in Charleston (“Honestly, I’ve never given Clayton another thought, but I really do miss his mother”), and an Ingersoll watch for Monty, who had regained consciousness late Saturday in the hospital and whose parents had come out from Bismarck to take him home. She bought the parents a box of California fruits.

“And I’m
so
glad nobody knows what happened to Nick,” added Christine, who seemed to have recovered her nerve or at least determined—with the assistance of a judicious swig of gin—to put her fears aside. She frowned, turning over in well-manicured fingers a pair of cloisonne earrings shaped like tiny diamond-studded bananas in Oscar Fresard’s in the Biltmore Hotel’s exclusive shopping arcade. “I mean, what
does
one get an ex-husband, and not even a recent ex-husband at that?”

With two hundred dollars from the scenario of
She-Devil
in her pocket—more money than she’d ever had in her life—Norah was acutely conscious of how few people remained in her life to buy Christmas presents for. “Not Mrs. Pendergast?” Christine inquired, as they waited for the clerk to open yet another jewelry case.

“In the four years I lived under that woman’s roof,” Norah said with quiet iciness, “I was never invited to eat at her table on Christmas day, much less given so much as a handkerchief. If I hadn’t chucked the Rat-God’s necklace into poor Miss Bow’s burning car, I should be strongly tempted to send it to
her.”
She was surprised at the anger she felt, surprised to feel her hands shake in their mended kid gloves where they rested on the glass top of the counter. Four years of anger, she realized. Four wretched Christmases when she’d been told,
Oh, who would you buy presents for, anyway, dear? They’re all passed to a greater world beyond the sun...
Four years of hurting throughout the dark winter season, not just on the eve and the day itself, when she-remembered, with killing poignance, crackers and her mother’s playing of carols and the taste of her father’s eggnog, but during the weeks before, when her every instinct told her to shop for a new murder mystery for Sean and a tie for her father, when she felt like a woman who had lost a hand and was reminded of the loss every time she forgot and reached for something with the stump.

Had Shang Ko gone through that, she wondered, those first years in America? Knowing he had been betrayed by friends and separated from every friend he once had possessed? All the other wizards were put to death, Hsu Kwan had said...

With some hesitancy, while Alec and Christine were in Robinson’s arguing whether to get Flindy McColl a half ounce of Maya perfume or ten pounds of imported Belgian chocolate (“But Flindy
loves
chocolate, Alec!” “Flindy’s got a potato clause in her contract with Enterprise. If you genuinely care anything about her, get her the stinkum.”), Norah walked three doors down Seventh Street to a very small shop owned by an elderly German who’d been passing himself off as a Swiss for the past six years. After some discussion, she purchased a Zeiss fifty-millimeter close-up lens. Returning to Robinson’s to find her friends still in an intensive discussion of the proper gifts to get a woman while Black Jasmine and Chang Ming snored on the expensive red porphyry underfoot, she bought a scarf of bright green silk for Mr. Shang and two shirts—in Alec’s size but with longer sleeves—for Charles Sandringham.

There were worse things, she realized, thinking about the dreary room in the Pacific Sands where she knew he remained, than having no family and only a few close friends to buy presents for at Christmas.

They repaired to Fior d’ltalia for a lunch of chicken cacciatore while the dogs played in the deserted courtyard. Coming out, Norah walked to the corner of Main to a newsstand and bought a copy of the
Daily News.
She’d done this the previous day in Chinatown and hadn’t found what she had sought. Today she did.

MOVIE STAR FOUND DEAD
, the headline said.

“Blake Fallon
murdered Keith Pelletier?” But A. F. Brown didn’t say it disbelievingly at all. He simply turned the words over on his tongue as he turned a sharp yellow pencil over and over in his hands while the bas-reliefs of ancient pharaohs and monkey-faced gods stared impassively down from the study walls behind his head. He was, Norah knew, fingering the idea in his mind to see whether the press, and the police, would buy it.

“Is mere any reason why he couldn’t have?” she asked.

“God knows he was acting crazy when he got to Red Bluff,” put in Christine, gently stroking Black Jasmine’s ears where the little dog sat, panting happily, in her lap. “That was only a couple of days later. He might have already been having what do you call them—brainstorms.”

The studio head’s bulging gray-green eyes moved to her for a moment, studying her, then returned to Norah, who sat in a very deep and not at all Egyptian leather chair in front of his wide, scarred, and businesslike desk. Beyond the heavy curtains with their lines of hieroglyphics and papyrus buds, early winter evening was gathering over the sphinx-lined terrace, the acre of lawn. Christmas wreaths still decked the statues like absurd bowties. Norah couldn’t believe the party had been only the night before last.

Brown looked surly and tired, and no wonder, she thought. Reading between the lines of his terse statements in the columns of the Los Angeles papers, she could tell he was desperately trying to keep the lid on the second tragedy to strike a picture on which he already had $500,000 riding until he knew how it would affect his attempted takeover of Enterprise Pictures. A smaller article in the trade section had reported that Aaron Jesperson still refused to sell and was talking instead of buying Colossus out.

Reasonably, she said, “When did Mr. Fallon leave your party after the premiere?”

The big man shook his head. “We’ll have to find that out.”

“Well, I know he’d gone by two,” piped up Christine ingenuously, “because that awful blonde he was seeing at Vitagraph was storming all around the house looking for him, drunk as a sailor and swearing.” She dug in her purse for a cigarette. “I couldn’t swear who he left with, though, but I know he was coked to the gills earlier and drinking like a fish.”

Brown looked thoughtful.

“The thing is,” added Alec, leaning back and chewing on a hangnail, “we’ve got most of Blake’s scenes shot. With one more day’s shooting in the desert—and the weather looks like it’s going to hold—we can kill him off in a long shot in the battle and have a quick scene of Emily crying over a stand-in. And if Blake killed Keith,” he went on, “that means we can bring back Charlie.”

“I’ve talked to Mr. Sandringham,” Norah said quietly. “He honestly has no recollection of that night, but he’s sworn to see a psychiatrist—I know there are some good ones in New York, at least. And personally, I don’t think a man as drunk as he was when I saw him at Enyart’s
could
have killed a twenty-two-year-old stuntman. Mr. Fallon could have. Mr. Fallon certainly almost killed that boy Monty Perkins, and we
do
have a witness to that.”