Radiance (26 page)

GIOVANNI ASSISI, interstellar coffee baron, lies face down on a Turkish rug with a Psementhean bridal knife in his back. Madame Mortimer stands over him with her hand on the pommel of her pistol.]

MADAME MORTIMER

Oh, I do love a spot of murder with my tea!

JACINTA LABIANCA

What a thing to say! Poor Mr Assisi!

MADAME MORTIMER

Poor, indeed! Didn't you hear? Typhoons took out his Venusian plantations. The man was just desperate for a wife to top up his coffers—he's been canoodling with half the ship, really scraping the bottom of the blueblood barrel. He'd have been knocking at Father Patrick's door before long. It would seem someone has spared him the embarrassment. Well! The cards are dealt! [She claps her hands sharply.] Place your bets, ladies and gentleman. We have a murderer on the ship and I intend to flush him out. And not only on the ship—I have reason to believe the murderer is
in this very room
!

[All gasp.]

Wilhelmina, darling, would you be so kind as to stand guard by the carriage door? Thank you. I'm afraid I can't allow any of you to leave just yet. Everything we need to solve this sordid little mess is right here at our fingertips, if only we are keen enough to
see
,
grasp,
and
act
! Confusion spreads out from a corpse like blood. The further one gets from the body, the harder it is to see the truth. Mr Assisi's death is a
fact
—everything else is mere supposition.

Let us hew to the facts. Firstly, Giovanni Assisi is dead. Secondly, he lost his fortune. Thirdly, he recently divorced his wife, the long-suffering nurse Annalisa Assisi, leaving her with seven children on Ganymede. Fourthly, he has been carrying on an affair with Miss LaBianca—I'm sorry, my dear, but how many women wear a Venusian coffee flower in their lapel? It's a hideous plant. Besides, you reek of his aftershave.

JACINTA LABIANCA

I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about! I have an aunt on Venus!

MADAME MORTIMER

Don't worry, dear, he meant to break it off with you before we made planetfall. Your … bank accounts … aren't nearly large enough for his tastes. And, fifthly, I'm afraid, he was a frequent customer of Miss Harlow's, and he paid her a great deal of money while we were docked in orbit waiting for our acceleration window. Clearing a bill? Perhaps. A creature of prodigious appetites, our man Giovanni! Next, I believe our young Master Sky owed the deceased a rather large poker debt? He needed you to pay up, and quickly, but you couldn't, could you, Barney?

BARNABY SKY

How the devil would you know that?

MADAME MORTIMER

Oh, it's perfectly obvious. You aren't in the least upset by his death! Our unhappy friend here positively adored cards and played with everyone on board—except you. He wouldn't come near you, and when you dealt in to a table he got up to leave. And Father Patrick—tsk tsk, Father! One of those seven children is not an Assisi, isn't that right? Annalisa is a noble beauty and a pure soul, it's true. But when Papa Johnny here showed Willy and me his lovely family portrait, I couldn't help but notice that one of the little angels—Lucia, was it?—looked
ever
so much like you.

FATHER PATRICK

That's a damnable lie!

MADAME MORTIMER

Oh, I think not. But that's the
marvellous
thing about a murder—it brings everything out in the open. All the dark places just scrubbed with sunshine and flung wide for all to see. A sudden and unexpected crime sharpens the soul wonderfully.

[KILKENNY has been sitting in a chair facing the quiet hearth all the while. He is smoking a pipe, wearing a pinstripe suit and a rakish hat.]

KILKENNY

Well put, Miss Mortimer. I quite agree.

WILHELMINA WILDHEART

Kilkenny!

MADAME MORTIMER

Good morning, sir! I trust you slept well in the cargo bay? You missed stormrise—the great red eye is especially beautiful this time of year.

KILKENNY

I expect I shall see it again. Some small sacrifices must be made in the pursuit of one's ambitions. I've seen a few rainstorms in my time. And how is your sister, Miss Mortimer? I do so miss Emily at Christmastime.

[MADAME MORTIMER'S face flushes angrily; her hand tightens on her pistol.]

MADAME MORTIMER

You know perfectly well how she is. And if you were a decent man, you'd tell me where you buried her!

 

The Ingénue's Handbook

13 January, 1930, Half Past Three in the Afternoon

The Savoy, Grasshopper City, Luna

I've been prancing about in front of a camera for—Heavens!—twenty-two years now, so kindly invest the following statement with grave and dignified Authority.

I love wrap parties more than just about anything else in the world.

Oh, it's lovely to plan, and lovely to work, but
having
worked is ever so much better. And dancing yourself silly in pearls knowing you don't have a thing to do tomorrow is best of all! The fine and the fatigued positively
sparkle
with the frantic fizz of having pulled it off despite the odds—you can't help being light on your feet with all that weight off your shoulders. It's the party at the end of the world—the quick, fantastic world you've all made together, a world that now exists only on a heap of black tape in a tin can. Oh, well! On to the next one! And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off them like Salome's veils, fluttering, fading, but not quite finished tangling the tongue and tripping the feet. You're not in Wonderland anymore, but you positively reek of rabbit. It's a secret, rollicking room where everything is still half make-believe. That scamp can't stop walking like Robin Hood; that
other
fellow isn't done trying to seduce you like Heathcliff; those two prizefighters might come to blows tonight because they haven't quite scrubbed off Cain or Abel; and oh,
gracious
, the mischief you'll get up to while your heart's half Maid Marian, a squidge Cathy, a wee bit Madame Mortimer—but then, I never
completely
shed MM. I've been her almost as long as I've lived on the Moon, which is to say almost as long as I've been alive. Before the Moon, it hardly counts as living. Madame Maxine Mortimer has thoroughly rubbed off all over me. Why, just the other day, Betty Raleigh's black pearls went missing from her dressing room and I'd locked all the doors and started interrogating suspects before I came to my senses.

Poor Betts. Her insides are nothing but sunshine and bunny tails, but she's had a devil of a time lately. It's
intensely
trying. Hartford Crane gave her those pearls right before he ran off with Yolanda Brun. The gossip rags are just full of their sopping laundry, and while Yolanda loads up her supper plate with the attention, sweet innocent Betty can hardly squeak for shame. Cheat first and cheat often, Betts, that way you're never stuck cleaning up after your husband's midnight snacks.

Thus we circle the point, miss it, put our car in reverse, and come round to it again, and the point is this:
The Miranda Affair
is in the can, along with the last, rather wobbly, decade. It'll be Thad's last talkie—the tide's against us. Receipts go up the moment I shut my mouth. I've always liked my voice. It's a pity MM will have to save the day with wild gesticulations, but what the people want, the people will have!

Well, never mind! The wrap party is TONIGHT. And no smoky speakeasy for our rarefied carousing, no sir! Banish silence! Tear up the title cards! My darling maestro Thaddeus has thrown us all such a treat: it's to take place aboard his yacht on the Sea of Tranquillity! The
Achelois
is a grand, wasteful, brilliant beast of a thing—it's got its own ballroom, a ninepins alley, a wine cellar fit for a bevy of Roman emperors, and Thad makes sure there's fresh violets and a dash of snuff in everyone's staterooms.

Or so my darling Regina tells me. This will be my maiden voyage. The yacht used to belong to Jefferson Dufresne, back when he was the King of the Historicals at Plantagenet Pictures and everyone licked his boots for the chance to fart on Bosworth Field. So Regina, my old flatmate (gosh, it feels like a thousand years ago that I had to split the rent!), got to go after she played Empress Josephine in his great big Frenchie flop.
Quelle
injustice! That I should have to wait until I am nearly forty, when she got to go at nineteen!

They'll paddle us all about for a few days, and I don't doubt we'll all turn up on Monday with Earth-tans and hickeys. Boats practically
require
debauchery—why, nothing that happens aboard ship really
matters
! It's a little bubble, floating free away from the world. A weak and idle theme, no more yielding but … blah blah blah. Slap that together with the divine nonsense of a wrap party and I'll be surprised if I survive the weekend.

I plan to wear my best Plutonian buffalo fur, a ruby tiara, and not a lick else. Though at the moment I am looking
quite
respectable in my ecru suit and a hat with just two skinny old feathers in it. I only have this drab thing for meetings with my agent and tribulations at traffic court … bless me, but I am as clumsy as clown shoes in an automobile! But today I shall (probably) not be admonished for speeding on the Hyperion Speedway—for goodness' sake, why call it a speedway if you aren't meant to floor it? Today I have a perfectly ladylike luncheon date with my erstwhile stepdaughter. I'm not certain when my private little teas at the Savoy became teas for two, but I'm ever so glad they did. It's occasionally refreshing to simply sit with someone who has known you a long while and still thinks you're worth a damn. I suppose that's why people have children in the first place. It's hard to scare up such a thing, otherwise.

I do miss old Percy sometimes. Thad invited him along on the yacht, so I may rescind that statement by Sunday night. I wonder if he'll bring a date—other than Clara? The better question is, who
won't
be there? Even that bitter mongoose of a man from
Places, Everyone!
will get his fresh violets and snuff. I suspect Thaddeus let his secretary make the guest list. It's chock-a-block with people who've nothing to do with
Miranda
. It's a wrap party for
my
film. I do not see why
both
my ex-husbands should be in attendance, except that the girl who does her nails while I take my meetings thought that it would be
scrumptious
to see all her favourites in one spot! The Edisons are coming as well, boorish Freddy and Penelope, that fretful slip of a wife he's got.

She wasn't always, you know. When I met her, she was Penny Catarain, a brilliant lit fuse of a girl. A techie, good enough to get hired even with a mountain of boys ahead of her. She always gave the impression of having accidentally wandered in from a mad scientist's conference, and felt rather desperate to get back. She worked sound on my first big studio talkie, before speaking in a flick became the equivalent of farting at a dinner party. Penny made my voice sound like a crystal fountain. But I suppose being married to an
utter
pig will wear a soul down to the nub. I shall make certain to get her good and sauced on the
Achelois
. I'll get Mrs Edison dancing if I have to put firecrackers in her slippers.

I got Penelope alone once at the Capricorn/Plantagenet Studios treaty signing. You can't really call it a merger when Plantagenet invaded—with a squadron of soldiers, three biplanes, and one, albeit very old and crotchety, Chinese tank—Capricorn's backlots in order to liberate two leading men and a stack of prints being held in a vault. Those boys were nothing but an excuse, anyway, a cover to make Mr P look like the injured party. Plantagenet's real objective was to force Cap to “sell” the rights to their marquee characters Marvin the Mongoose, the Arachnid, and Vickie VaVoom for less than I pay for stockings. I took a bullet in the shoulder over a cartoon rodent. But so it goes on the mad old Moon. I heal like a champion.

It was a jollier evening than you might expect: pink paper lanterns, extras dressed up as Marvin and Vickie signing autographs, plenty of champagne and saxophones. Penelope wore blue, I recall. We jawed about the good old days, and she got that look on again, like she'd only slipped away from her fellow mad scientists for lunch and really had to be getting back.

I took her arm. “Honey, does he beat you?”

Mrs Edison looked quite stunned. “No! Christ, what a thing to ask.”

“Then what is it? You always look like you want to lay down and become one with the floor.”