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Bride of the Rat God
ONE: WATER OVER THUNDER
Sign of Great Sacrifice
Do not go anywhere ...
Find a local guide ...
Stopped amid much confusion and milling about--
it is best to form a partnership ...
Marriage for the Maiden is not yet in the signs--
it will come ...
It was not that here were no warnings.
But for a long time no one believed.
Exhausted, the girl stumbled to a halt. Though clouds were
gathering fast over the ebony sky, sufficient moonlight lingered to
transform the low ground fog into a chill silver lake that dampened the
dark silk of her dress and made it cling with the clammy grip of a
spider's web. Her black hair lay in a disheveled cloak about shoulders
blanched chalky by the dead light. The blood on her hands showed black
as well.
She swung around, startled, enormous eyes straining to pierce
fog and darkness, and one hand stole to her throat. In the heavy
necklace she wore a jewel flashed, an enormous opal white as the fog.
When she took her hand away, the blood on her fingers left three streaks
on her alabaster skin.
She began to run again, desperately now, like one who realized
there was nowhere to run, no hope of escape. At the cliff's edge she
could run no farther. Dark gaped before her suddenly, and she staggered
in the tangle of dead vines, staring into the abyss. Her hand fluttered
to her mouth; she turned again as if to run back, but a broken branch
underfoot gripped the torn silk of her gown like the hand of death. She
tugged, sobbing, and in that moment dark forms materialized behind her
from the ghostly scrim of mist. They were the men who had pursued her
from the cluttered brightness of her lover's bedroom, where lamplight
gleamed on a dead man's pooling blood. They were retribution.
The girl sprang back, hands thrust out in wordless terror and
denial. Under one high satin heel the cliff edge gave. She grabbed as
she fell at the gnarled knots of an old tree root, and for an eternal
moment her body dangled like a glimmering pendant above the tossing lake
of vapor. The men waded through the ferns, but the black vines clung to
their feet, pulling them back as they reached for the bloodied white
hands.
Her grip slithered from the wet roots as their fingers brushed hers.
Later they found her in the black jumble of rock, shattered
branches, and steel-cold water, the white gem of her necklace shining
eerily, like a fragment of alien moon.
"Where on earth did you film that?" Norah Blackstone reached
for the curved Cubist rainbow of the brazen door handle, and her
sister-in-law put a small, staying hand on her wrist.
"Darling, don't! You can't go out ahead of me or even with me.
We filmed it up at Big Bear Lake, except that first part near the
house--that's the Burbank golf course. I thought I'd freeze to death in
that awful stream, but Campbell insisted. He's a fiend for authenticity.
Thank God Charlie had a flask on him, but I swear they should arrest
that bootlegger of his for poisoning. Stand over there and wait just one
minute, darling."
Norah stepped obediently back. Her diminutive companion drew a
deep breath, shook back her torrent of dark hair--augmented for the
occasion to match the film--and flung wide the door into an explosion of
flash powder and journalistic Hollywood adjectives. "Stupendous!"
"Chrysanda, you've never been more stunning!"
"Gorgeous ..." "Ravishing!" "Fatal beauty at its most
devastating!" "Kiss of Darkness is a picture that shakes you to the
soul!"
Norah, reflecting that her soul hadn't been shaken in the
least, waited until the voices had drawn away a little from the door,
then stepped forth herself with what discretion was possible. Chrysanda
Flamande, raven coiffure a splendor of suggested disarray and the cold
white gems of her necklace glistening on a breast like Carrara marble,
had taken up a position in front of a gleaming bronze warrior, carefully
chosen so no photograph would include a door bearing the inscription
ladies lounge. Her kohl-dark eyelids lowered, her red lips curved in her
famous enigmatic smile, and she stood with one hand on her black silk
hip and the other raised as if to support her back-tilted head. Flash
powder coruscated once more, leaving a haze in the air like a
battlefield and calling echoes from the diamonds that thickly adorned
the white wrists, the prisoned midnight of her hair.
"Miss Flamande, is it true your next picture is going to be
with Valentino?" "Miss Flamande, how did you feel to be playing a scene
so similar to the actual death of your fiancЋ, the Count d'Este?"
Chrysanda Flamande's dark eyes widened, seeming to burn with
emotion under the hundred minuscule electric bulbs concealed in the
arched ceiling. "An artist uses everything that befalls her," she said,
her deep, husky throb quite different from the child-sweet tones in
which she'd spoken to Norah moments before. "Grief as well as ecstasy.
Lucien was killed in a tragic and terrible accident rather than taking
his life like the man in the film, yet it was I who found his poor body
sprawled in a pool of blood. And yes, the horror, the despair I felt
then was in my mind as I enacted that scene. It is always in my mind.
Sometimes I think I shall never be free of it."
She passed a bejeweled hand across a brow suddenly twisted with
pain. "The director did not know, naturally; the scenarists did not
know. I could not tell them, knowing that any change would lessen the
impact of the film. But I knew. And I felt. Yet unless one is able to
devour life in all its glory, to radiate it forth again as art, no
matter how great the pain, one is nothing but a sham."
From a respectful distance--namely, out of camera range--Norah
shook her head at the aptness of that final phrase. "Nothing but a sham"
accurately summed up the mythical Lucien d'Este's existence and, in
fact, most of the studio-written biography of Chrysanda Flamande. With
her soul-devouring eyes and nightshade hair, her slender body and
restless, ethereal movements, she certainly looked as if she could have
been born of a Greek concubine and a French soldier in the harem of the
Grand Turk of Constantinople a solid nine years later than her actual
birth date. There were still times when Norah didn't know whether to be
appalled or to laugh.
Mostly she found herself laughing.
Two months earlier she had not thought she would ever laugh again.
Sixty days ago, almost to the day, she had seriously considered
stealing a razor from her then-employer's son, filling the upstairs
bathtub with hot water, lying down in it, and cutting her wrists.
According to classical authors, it would not have taken long to bleed to
death and would not have hurt much. That had been on her twenty-sixth
birthday. She hadn't known then how she was going to endure another gray
Manchester winter, another year of pain. Another year of Mrs.
Pendergast's hypocrisy, pettiness, and spite. Whatever else could be
said of her, her beautiful sister-in-law--vain, selfish, and apt to
float through life on a sea of pink gin and discarded lovers--had
rescued her from that, and the gift of renewed laughter was among the
most precious she'd ever received.
"One owes it to oneself, as the poet says ..." The throbbing
voice broke into her reverie once more, "... to drink life's wine to the
very lees, to grasp life's roses, never heeding the thorns ..."
Chrysanda--whom Norah couldn't think of by any other name than
Christine, which was how she'd first known her--passed under the baroque
arch and down the stairs toward the lobby, barely to be seen among the
mob of reporters. Norah smiled a little and followed, admiring in
passing the Grauman Million Dollar Theater's very un-Manchesterian decor
of Shakespearean murals, gilded arabesques, and curlicued niches
containing statues of warriors, cowboys, and what looked like dance hall
girls.
Her aunts would have told her the gratitude she felt toward
Christine was perfectly proper ... but ought not go further than that.
One shouldn't, of course, actually like THAT kind of woman...
Norah shook her head again, this time at her own weakness of character.
Mrs. Pendergast had not approved of the cinema; thus Norah,
when she came down into the lobby in her sister- in-law's wake,
recognized almost none of the faces in the crowd that jostled for
position around the staggering buffet at the far end.
Mary Pickford she did recognize, though her ringlets were
upswept this night to alter the girlish sweetness into adult and shining
intelligence. Pollyanna--the last film Norah had seen--had been made
four years earlier and even then the actress couldn't have been as young
as she had appeared on the screen. Douglas Fairbanks, too, she
identified immediately, mostly by the way he moved. Norah smiled again
at herself--she was probably the only person in the civilized world who
hadn't heard of their marriage.
And that extraordinarily handsome young man with the
brilliantined black hair had to be Rudolph Valentino, judging by the
fuss the reporters were making over him.
"I must speak to Miss Flamande!"
The voice was soft but came only a few feet from Norah's side;
turning, she saw a fan who had somehow gotten through the police lines.
Fans were an aspect of Hollywood life for which she had been unprepared.
Two ushers were already conducting him to the wall of plate-glass doors
that formed one side of the theater's lobby. A tall old man, Chinese,
Norah thought, certainly very different from most of the mob who pressed
so close to the velvet ropes and the barrier of police and uniformed
ushers under the blaze of the marquee lights.
"It is a matter of life and death!"
"Yeah, sure, they all say that, Grandpa."
The old man tried to pull his arm free of the usher's grip.
Thin and tall--taller than Norah, who was taller than most men--he wore
his long ash-white hair unqueued, hanging loose around a face hollowed
like ancient ivory and down over bony shoulders. In one twisted hand he
clutched a walking staff as tall as him with a carved dragon on its
head; with the other, he tried to shake the ushers thrusting him
inexorably toward the doors. In his baggy Western-style suit he had the
air of a dilapidated scarecrow, but his eyes were those of a displaced
god. "Look, you want to tell Miss Flamande something, you write her a
letter care of Colossus Studios."
"I tell you it will be too late!" The old man half twisted in
their grip, looking back at Christine, who had been joined by an
enormously fat man with a coarse, pouchy face framed in badly cut black
hair.
More flash powder, more tugging of reportorial forelocks: "Mr.
Brown, can you tell us about the rumor that you're planning to take over
Enterprise Studios?" "Mr. Brown, what's Miss Flamande's next project
going to be?" "Mr. Brown, is it true you're bringing D. W. Griffith out
from the East to direct Charlie Sandringham's next picture?" Three or
four stunningly beautiful girls hovered in the background, gazing at the
black-suited behemoth with expressions of adoring fascination while
Christine put one arm most of the way around his back and leaned into
him with every graceful line of her saying "love and trust."
A. F. Brown owned Colossus Studios.
In a way, Norah supposed, she, too, ought to be expressing
worship, or at least gratitude, since it was ultimately his money that
not only paid for Christine's house but had enabled Christine to bring
her here to this bizarre world in the first place.
She glanced at her wristwatch. It was precisely nine-fifty and twenty seconds.
Curious, she thought, looking around the lobby, how thin they
all looked in real life, Pickford and Chaplin and Mix. Thin and tired
and just a little fragile. They were probably all anxious to get to bed.
Most of the players she had met in the past six weeks, she had never
seen on the screen until tonight. Like Flindy McColl, Christine's best
friend, red-haired and giggling on the arm of a studio Adonis named Dale
Wilmer, or Roberto Calderone, the handsome Mexican who'd emerged from
the fog like a vengeful specter and caused Christine to step back and
plummet to her death over the cliff.
Or, more accurately, Norah revised, had caused Christine to
step back and that good-looking stuntman? Kevin? she'd never heard his
last name--to plummet over the cliff wearing Christine's black silk
dress and eerie opal necklace.
Kevin or Kenneth was near the refreshment table, helping himself
to beluga caviar and lobster patties beneath a glittering life-sized ice
sculpture of Rameses II. The young man, slender and athletic even in a
tuxedo, talked animatedly to Charles Sandringham, last seen lying in a
pool of blood on the floor of Christine's--Chrysanda's. Sandringham was
sneaking nips from a silver hip flask, and Norah guessed he'd done so
all through the premiere. Sober, he'd never have put his hand on the
young stuntman's arm that way in public. She checked her watch again.
Three minutes had elapsed.
"If you're waiting on Miss Flamande for something, I warn you
they'll stand there gassing to the press for half an hour at least."
Norah turned in surprise. A pair of very bright brown eyes,
slightly below the level of her own, blinked at her behind a pair of
very thick spectacles. Perhaps, she thought later, her aunts were right
and Christine was a bad influence on her, because instead of the retreat
proper to a young woman of her station, she said frankly, "Oh, I'm not
waiting. I'm just checking to see how long it is before Christine comes
over to me and says, breathlessly, ТDarling, we're all going over to
Frank's house, so could you possibly take a cab home?'"
He considered the little group. "How long have they been at it?"
"Three and a half minutes."
"I'll say eight, total."
"You don't know Chris. I make it six and a half."
He produced a pocket watch from his much-worn tweed jacket and
compared it with the plain, brushed-steel Elgin on her wrist. "I'll
still say eight. That's Doug Fairbanks talking to Brown now, and Brown
doesn't know him well enough to ask him to his party in less than five.
And what makes you think I don't know Chris?" He snapped the watch shut.
Norah noted how soft and uncallused his hands were, though by no means
weak or unworked. They were also covered with small nicks and cuts,
chemical stains, and abrasions. He bit his fingernails and evidently
kept a cat.
"I'm sorry." Norah smiled ruefully. "Of course you might." Her mind
snagged on his voice, realizing that she did know him from somewhere ...
"I've only been here six weeks, and she must know other people besides
actors."
He drew himself up with great dignity, fully four inches, she guessed,
under her own loose-boned five foot eleven. "And what makes you think I
am not an actor?"
"Your beard," she replied promptly. "And your hands. And the
fact that you're speaking to me and not hovering around the producers."
"Darling." Chrysanda Flamande broke momentarily from the group
in question, casting a glance of soulful longing over her shoulder at
Brown that would have shamed Duse playing Juliet. "Darling, listen,
Frank's asked us all over to his place after this dreadful affair is
over and I haven't the faintest when I'm going to be home, so do you
think you could get a cab?"
Norah automatically checked her watch, and the little man with
the beard and glasses turned quite gallantly away to examine the mural
of King Lear and Cordelia on the wall behind him lest Chrysanda Flamande
see how hard he was working not to laugh.
"Of course, darling," Norah began, but as usual, her
sister-in-law was already babbling, "I knew I could count on you ...
I'll see you in the morning ..." as she flitted back in a firestorm of
diamonds to couple herself once more to the studio head's massive arm.
"Have you tried saying, ТI'm so sorry but I've suddenly
developed a morbid psychological complex about cab drivers?' That was
seven by my watch."
"Curse you, Mr. Fairbanks. I'm still closer by thirty seconds."
"So you are."
A scrimmage of red uniforms caught her eye. It was the Chinese
gentleman, who had tried to reenter the lobby through a small door in a
gilded wall niche, arguing, gesturing with his twisted, crippled hands.
Norah's companion said, "Ah, another life-or-deather," and Norah
regarded him in surprise.
"You heard what he said?"
"Lot of them say that." He pushed his glasses more firmly up
onto the bridge of his nose. "You came in with Chris. You saw the fans.
Cleopatra rolling herself up in a carpet to see Caesar is like an
appointment with a social secretary compared to some of the tricks
they've pulled."
"Hmm," said Norah. Masses of men and womenwith a casualness
that she found unnervinglined the sidewalk eight and ten deep beneath
the garish posters in front of the theater as Christine had docked her
enormous yellow Nash roadster at the curb with her usual lack of
accuracy, shouting her name, reaching through the police lines to touch
her as she walked through them with that slight, seductive sway, her
enormous coat of sables half drooping from alabaster shoulders and the
lights of the marquee sparking the white opals of her necklace. Norah
had followed, feeling invisible as usual, clothed also in black--though
far less fashionably--and leading the small string of Pekingese without
which, these days, Christine was never seen in public.
The Pekes--Christine's latest affectation--currently resided in
the theater manager's office, Chang Ming doubtless sprawled on his back
waiting for someone--anyone--to come play with him, Black Jasmine
jealously guarding all three of the toys Norah had left to amuse them,
and Buttercreme hiding in the darkest corner under the desk, her tongue
lying like a little pink welcome mat on the floor before her flat nose.
Her companion's voice drew her attention again. "So, listen.
I'll pay for the cab and buy you a cup of coffee at Enyart's Grille on
La Brea if you're willing to stop. I'm Alec Mindelbaum." And as if he
sensed her proper upbringing withdrawing from the undocumented
introduction, added, "I did the camera work on that epic that
just--shook us to the soul."
"Ah." Norah remembered him now. He looked very different in a
suit. "Of course. And I'm the--I believe you used the phrase
Тbutterfingered nitwit'--who let Miss Flamande's Pekingese get away on
the set yesterday with such enlivening results."
It was his turn to blush, which he did rather readily behind
the close-clipped rufous beard. "I know," he said a little shyly. "I
feel I owe you a cab ride and a cup of coffee just for that."
The crowd in the lobby was thinning, changing color and
composition as sotto voce invitations to Mr. Brown's party circulated.
The press still surrounded the buffet like sharks feeding on a dying
whale, but the flitter of beaded dresses and the black of formal evening
clothes were bleeding away, leaving only a muddy suit-brown.
"Nonsense," said Norah. "I haven't been in Los Angeles long, but I saw
how long it took Mr. Hraldy to rehearse everyone and set the lights. I
don't wonder you were furious. I think Chang Ming saw a mouse under the
queen of Persia's divan."
"That wouldn't surprise me. That shooting stage must have started life as a mule barn."
"And, of course, Black Jasmine would die before he'd let
himself be outdone. I suspect he's still under the impression he's going
to grow up to be a wolf. Your offer of a cab must include them, you
know."
"I know." Mindelbaum grinned and held out his arm to her with
an old-fashioned courtliness that took her by surprise. No man had
treated her with such consideration since she'd left London. "I'll
cherish to my grave the look on the manager's face when Chris said she'd
leave them in his office during the show."
"Which was quite unjust of him, since they're the most
fastidious animals you could hope to meet. On the boat from England and
later on the train crossing the country, they always waited for their
promenades on the deck or down the station platforms, for which I was
infinitely thankful, since, of course, I was the one looking after them
and Christine wouldn't have so much as scolded if they'd killed and
eaten the conductor."
Mindelbaum left her beneath a poster of Christine and Charles
Sandringham--like moths to a candle's devouring flame, it said--and went
in quest of their coats. Outside the glass the crowd still milled,
striving for one last glimpse of cinema godhood. Norah could almost feel
them glance at, and dismiss, Mindelbaum's threadbare tweed and her
dowdy black crepe.
It was a dismissal she'd grown used to long before she'd come
here to the ends of the civilized world. The Manchester version of it
took in the outdated shirtwaists and mended shoes, the heavy stockings
and hands chapped from washing Mrs. Pendergast's underwear, and said,
Oh. Poor relation. The Hollywood version was, in a way, more democratic.
Oh. Not a star.
A younger Chinese, clothed in the baggy black quilting common
to Chinese from the Limehouse to the Barbary Coast, had appeared through
the same discreet doorway and stood talking to the ushers and the old
man. "You must forgive my grandfather," he said, bowing to the usher.
"He has not long been in your country." And the old man gestured,
furious, at the poster of Chrysanda Flamande smoldering in the doomed
and noble Charles Sandringham's arms.
There was a surge of movement from the direction of the buffet.
Sandringham, after thirty-five years of ruling the stages of the West
End and Broadway, still possessed of exquisite hands and patrician
bones, proceeded to the doors in company with his beautiful stuntman.
They paused so that Sandringham, clearly in his cups, could light the
young man's cigarette. The Dick's Hatband Brigade, Jim would have said
with a raised eyebrow. Norah was reflecting that her mother would never
have credited such a thing of her idol when Alec Mindelbaum's voice
asked in her ear, "That bother you?"
"So long as he doesn't light up at a table where I'm eating,
no." She caught the appreciative twinkle in Mr. Mindelbaum's eye as he
helped her with the worn black coat she had bought for Jim's funeral.
The manager appeared, bowing and trying to keep two very lively
little dogs and one extremely unwilling one from tripping every
departing reporter in the room. Norah took pity on Buttercreme and
picked her up, carrying her across the lobby to the doors.
Nothing about Los Angeles had so convinced her that she had
come to an alien world--an alien universe--as the weather. All week it
had been as warm as an English summer, and even tonight's flickers of
rain had done no more than dampen the streets, yielding a breath of
asphalt and a confusion of yellow reflections from the multiglobed
streetlights on the Los Angeles version of Broadway.
An usher summoned a cab, which edged from the porridge-thick
traffic while everyone crowded around Mr. Sandringham's silver
Dusenberg. Across the street and up a block, the Pantages and Palace
theaters emptied hordes of casually dressed men and smoke-trailing
women: Mrs. Pendergast would have retired to bed for a week in a fit of
scandalized modesty at the sight. Motorcars wove in front of yellow
streetcars and hopelessly impeded their progress. Against the glow of
the sky, feather duster tufts of palm trees spread their spiky fans;
Norah noticed that a good portion of the people passing before the
otherworldly office building opposite were brown-skinned Mexicans and
Chinese in their traditional black pajamas and queues, many more than
she had seen in Hollywood. She had heard someone mention that Chinatown
lay nearby.
As Mr. Mindelbaum helped her into the cab amid much tangling of
leashes and a good deal of "Down, Chang! Sit, Jazz! Off, Chang! No,
Chang! Down, Jazz!" something caused Norah to look back at the theater.
The ancient Chinese gentleman had halted there despite the tugging of
his grandson and now gazed worriedly back into the lobby, as if debating
the possibility of returning for another bout with the ushers.
On both sides of the entry, Sandringham and Chrysanda gazed and
smoldered; the poster artist had flattered the actor by a good fifteen
years and had made Chrysanda's gown far more revealing than it was in
the actual final sequences of the film, though God knew, Norah
reflected, it was scanty enough. The old man gestured at the poster
again, saying something; then he made a quick and universal sign,
slashing his hand across his throat. The grandson shook his head as if
to say, There is nothing to be done.
As her cab pulled from the curb, Norah saw the pair of them
cross through the lights and crowds around the Pantages before they
vanished into the dark of Fergusson Alley.
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