Kitabı oxu: «Coldheart Canyon»

Clive Barker

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COLDHEART CANYON

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001

Copyright © Clive Barker 2001

Clive Barker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006510406

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007301966

Version: 2019-12-12

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Dedication

For David Emilian Armstrong

PROLOGUE

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THE CANYON

It is night in Coldheart Canyon, and the wind comes off the desert. The Santa Anas, they call these winds. They blow off the Mojave, bringing malaise, and the threat of fire. Some say they are named after Saint Anne, the mother of Mary, others that they are named after one General Santa Ana, of the Mexican cavalry, a great creator of dusts; others still that the name is derived from santanta, which means Devil Wind.

Whatever the truth of the matter, this much is certain: the Santa Anas are always baking hot, and often so heavily laden with perfume that it’s as though they’ve picked up the scent of every blossom they’ve shaken on their way here. Every wild lilac and wild rose, every white sage and rank jimsonweed, every heliotrope and creosote bush: gathered them all up in their hot embrace and borne them into the hidden channel of Coldheart Canyon.

There’s no lack of blossoms here, of course. Indeed, the Canyon is almost uncannily verdant. Some of the plants here were brought in from the world outside by these same burning winds, these Santa Anas; others were dropped in the faeces of the wild animals who wander through – the deer and coyote and racoon; some spread from the gardens of the great dream palace that lays solitary claim to this corner of Hollywood. Alien blooms, this last kind – orchids and lotus flowers–nurtured by gardeners who have long since left off their pruning and their watering, and departed, allowing the bowers which they once treasured to run riot.

But for some reason there is always a certain bitterness in the blooms here. Even the hungry deer, driven from their traditional trails these days by the presence of sightseers who have come to see Tinseltown, do not linger in the Canyon for very long. Though the deer venture along the ridge and down the steep slopes of the Canyon, and curiosity, especially amongst the younger animals, often leads them over the rotted fences and toppled walls into the secret enclaves of the gardens, they seldom choose to stay there for very long.

Perhaps it isn’t just that the leaves and petals are bitter. Perhaps there are too many whisperings in the air around the ruined gazebos, and the animals are unnerved by what they hear. Perhaps there are too many presences brushing against their trembling flanks as they explore the clotted pathways. Perhaps, as they graze the overgrown lawns, they look up and mistake a statue for a pale fragment of life, and are startled by their error, and take flight.

Perhaps, sometimes, they are not mistaken.

Perhaps.

The Canyon is familiar with perhaps; with what may or may not be. And never more so than on such a night as this, when the winds come sighing off the desert, heavy with their perfume, and such souls as the Canyon hosts express their longing for something they dreamed they had, or dreamed that they dreamed, their voices so tenuous tonight that they’re inaudible to the human ear, even if there were someone to hear them, which there never is.

That’s not entirely true. On occasion somebody will be tenacious enough to find their way into this vale of luxury and tears; a tourist, perhaps even a family of tourists, foolishly determined to discover what lies off the prescribed route; looking for some famous heart-throb’s love-nest, or a glimpse of the idol himself, caught unawares as he walks with his dog. There are even a few trespassers over the years who have found their way here intentionally, guided to this place by hints dropped in obscure accounts of Old Hollywood. They venture cautiously, these few. Indeed there is often something close to reverence in the way they enter Coldheart Canyon. But however these visitors arrive, they always leave the same way: hurriedly, with many a nervous backward glance. Even the crassest of them – even the ones who’d claim they don’t have a psychic bone in their bodies – are discomfited by something they sniff here. Their sixth sense, they have discovered, is far more acute than they had thought. Only when they have outrun the all-too-eager shadows of the Canyon and they are back in the glare of the billboards on Sunset Boulevard, do they wipe their clammy palms, and wonder to themselves how it was that in such a harmless spot they could have been so very afraid.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Prologue

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

Part Ten

Part Eleven

Keep Reading

About the Author

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Other Books

About the Publisher

PART ONE

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THE PRICE OF
THE HUNT
Chapter 1

‘Your wife did not want to look around the Fortress any further, Mr Zeffer?’ Father Sandru said, seeing that on the second day the middle-aged man with the handsome, sad face had come alone.

‘The lady is not my wife,’ Zeffer explained.

‘Ah …’ the monk replied, the tone of commiseration in his voice indicating that he was far from indifferent to Katya’s charms ‘A pity for you, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Zeffer admitted, with some discomfort.

‘She’s a very beautiful woman.’

The monk studied Zeffer’s face as he spoke, but having said what he’d said, Zeffer was unwilling to play the confessee any further.

‘I’m her manager,’ he explained. ‘That’s all there is between us.’

Father Sandru, however, was not willing to let the issue go just yet. ‘After the two of you departed yesterday,’ he said, his English coloured by his native Romanian, ‘one of the brothers remarked that she was the most lovely woman he had ever seen …’ he hesitated before committing to the rest of the sentence ‘… in the flesh.’

‘Her name’s Katya, by the way,’ Zeffer said.

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ said the Father, his fingers combing the knotted grey-white of his beard as he stood assessing Zeffer.

The two men were a study in contrasts. Sandru ruddy-faced and rotund in his dusty brown habit, Zeffer slimly elegant in his pale linen suit.

‘She is a movie star, yes?’

‘You saw one of her films?’

Sandru grimaced, displaying a poorly-kept array of teeth. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I do not see these things. At least not often. But there is a little cinema in Ravbac, and some of the younger brothers go down there quite regularly. They are great fans of Chaplin, of course. And there’s a … vamp … is that the word?’

‘Yes,’ Zeffer replied, somewhat amused by this conversation. ‘Vamp’s the word.’

‘Called Theda Bara.’

‘Oh, yes. We know Theda.’

In that year – which was 1920 – everybody knew Theda Bara. She had one of the most famous faces in the world. As, of course, did Katya. Both were famous; their fame tinged with a delicious hint of decadence.

‘I must go with one of the brothers when they next go to see her,’ Father Sandru said.

‘I wonder if you entirely understand what kind of woman Theda Bara portrays?’ Zeffer replied.

Sandru raised a thicketed eyebrow. ‘I am not born yesterday, Mr Zeffer. The Bible has its share of these women, these vamps. They’re whores, yes; women of Babylon? Men are drawn to them only to be destroyed by them?’

Zeffer laughed at the directness of Sandru’s description. ‘I suppose that’s about right,’ he said.

‘And in real life?’ Sandru said.

‘In real life Theda Bara’s name is Theodosia Goodman. She was born in Ohio.’

‘But is she a destroyer of men?’

‘In real life? No, I doubt it. I’m sure she harms a few egos now and again, but that’s about the worst of it.’

Father Sandru looked mildly disappointed. ‘I shall tell the brothers what you told me,’ he said. ‘They’ll be very interested. Well then … shall I take you inside?’

Willem Matthias Zeffer was a cultured man. He had lived in Paris, Rome, London and briefly in Cairo in his forty-three years; and had promised himself that he would leave Los Angeles – where there was neither art nor the ambition to make art – as soon as the public tired of lionizing Katya, and she tired of rejecting his offer of marriage. They would wed, and come back to Europe; find a house with some real history on its bones, instead of the fake Spanish mansion her fortune had allowed her to have built in one of the Hollywood canyons.

Until then, he would have to find aesthetic comfort in the objets d’art he purchased on their trips abroad: the furniture, the tapestries, the statuary. They would suffice, until they could find a château in the Loire, or perhaps a Georgian house in London; somewhere the cheap theatrics of Hollywood wouldn’t curdle his blood.

‘You like Romania?’ the Father asked as he unlocked the great oak door that lay at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Yes, of course,’ Zeffer replied.

‘Please do not feel you have to sin on my account,’ Sandru said, with a sideways glance.

‘Sin?’

‘Lying is a sin, Mr Zeffer. Perhaps it’s just a little one, but it’s a sin nevertheless.’

Oh Lord, Zeffer thought; how far I’ve slipped from the simple proprieties! Back in Los Angeles he sinned as a matter of course; every day, every hour. The life he and Katya lived was built on a thousand stupid little lies.

But he wasn’t in Hollywood now. So why lie? ‘You’re right. I don’t like this country very much at all. I’m here because Katya wanted to come. Her mother and father – I’m sorry, her stepfather – live in the village.’

‘Yes. This I know. The mother is not a good woman.’

‘You’re her priest?’

‘No. We brothers do not minister to the people. The Order of St Teodor exists only to keep its eyes on the Fortress.’ He pushed the door open. A dank smell exuded from the darkness ahead of them.

‘Excuse me for asking,’ Zeffer said. ‘But it was my understanding from yesterday that apart from you and your brothers, there’s nobody here.’

‘Yes, this is true. Nobody here, except the brothers.’

‘So what are you keeping your eyes on?’

Sandru smiled thinly. ‘I will show you,’ he said. ‘As much as you wish to see.’

He switched on a light, which illuminated ten yards of corridor. A large tapestry hung along the wall, the image upon it so grey with age and dust as to be virtually beyond interpretation.

The Father proceeded down the corridor, turning on another light as he did so. ‘I was hoping I might be able to persuade you to make a purchase,’ he said.

‘Of what?’ Zeffer said.

Zeffer wasn’t encouraged by what he’d seen so far. A few of the pieces of furniture he’d spotted yesterday had a measure of rustic charm, but nothing he could imagine buying.

‘I didn’t realize you were selling the contents of the Fortress.’

Sandru made a little groan. ‘Ah … I’m afraid to say we must sell in order to eat. And that being the case, I would prefer that the finer things went to someone who will take care of them, such as yourself.’

Sandru walked on ahead a little way, turning on a third light and then a fourth. This level of the Fortress, Zeffer was beginning to think, was bigger than the floor above. Corridors ran off in all directions.

‘But before I begin to show you,’ Sandru said, ‘you must tell me – are you in a buying mood?’

Zeffer smiled. ‘Father, I’m an American. I’m always in a buying mood.’

Sandru had given Katya and Zeffer a history of the Fortress the previous day; though as Zeffer remembered it there was much in the account that had sounded bogus. The Order of St Teodor, Zeffer had decided, had something to hide. Sandru had talked about the Fortress as a place steeped in secrets; but nothing particularly bloody. There had been no battles fought there, he claimed, nor had its keep ever held prisoners, nor its courtyard witnessed atrocity or execution. Katya, in her usual forthright manner, had said that she didn’t believe this to be true.

‘When I was a little girl there were all kinds of stories about this place,’ she said. ‘I heard horrible things were done here. That it was human blood in the mortar between the stones. The blood of children.’

‘I’m sure you must have been mistaken,’ the Father had said.

‘Absolutely not. The Devil’s wife lived in this fortress. Lilith, they called her. And she sent the Duke away on a hunt. And he never came back.’

Sandru laughed; and if it was a performance, then it was an exceptionally good one. ‘Who told you these tales?’ he said.

‘My mother.’

‘Ah,’ Sandru had shaken his head. ‘And I’m sure she wanted you in bed, hushed and asleep, before the Devil’s wife came to cut off your head.’ Katya had made no reply to this. ‘There are still such stories, told to children. Of course. Always stories. People invent tales. But believe me, this is not an unholy place. The brothers would not be here if it was.’

Despite Sandru’s plausibility, there’d still been something about all of this that had made Zeffer suspicious; and a little curious. Hence his return visit. If what the Father was saying was a lie (a sin, by his own definition), then what purpose was it serving? What was the man protecting? Certainly not a few rooms filled with filthy tapestries, or some crudely carved furniture. Was there something here in the Fortress that deserved a closer look? And if so, how did he get the Father to admit to it?

The best route, he’d already decided, was fiscal. If Sandru was to be persuaded to reveal his true treasures, it would be through the scent of hard cash in his nostrils. The fact that Sandru had raised the subject of buying and selling made the matter easier to broach.

‘I do know Katya would love to have something from her homeland to take back to Hollywood,’ he said. ‘She’s built a huge house, so we have plenty of room.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘And of course, she has the money.’

This was naked, he knew, but in his experience of such things subtlety seldom played well. Which point was instantly proved.

‘How much are we talking about?’ the Father asked mildly.

‘Katya Lupi is one of the best-paid actresses in Hollywood. And I am authorized to buy whatever I think might please her.’

‘Then let me ask you: what pleases her?’

‘Things that nobody else would be likely – no, could possibly – possess, please her,’ Zeffer replied. ‘She likes to show off her collection, and she wants everything in it to be unique.’

Sandru spread his arms and his smile. ‘Everything here is unique.’

‘Father, you sound as though you’re ready to sell the foundations if the price is right.’

Sandru waxed metaphysical. ‘All these things are just objects in the end. Yes? Just stone and wood and thread and paint. Other things will be made in time, to replace them.’

‘But surely there’s some sacred value in the objects here?’

The Father gave a little shrug. ‘In the Chapel, upstairs, yes. I would not want to sell you, let us say, the altar.’ He made a smile, as though to say that under the right circumstances even that would have its price. ‘But everything else in the Fortress was made for a secular purpose. For the pleasure of dukes and their ladies. And as nobody sees it now … except a few travellers such as yourselves, passing through … I don’t see why the Order shouldn’t be rid of it all. If there’s sufficient profit to be made it can be distributed amongst the poor.’

‘There are certainly plenty of people in need of help,’ Zeffer said.

He had been appalled at the primitive conditions in which many of the people in the locality lived. The villages were little more than gatherings of shacks, the rocky earth the farmers tilled all but fruitless. And on all sides, the mountains – the Bucegi range to the east, to the west the Făgăras Mountains – their bare lower slopes as grey as the earth, their heights dusted with snow. God knew what the winters were like in this place: when even the earth turned hard as stone, and the little river froze, and the walls of the shacks could not keep out the wind whistling down from the mountain heights.

The day they’d arrived, Katya had taken Willem to the cemetery, so that she could show him where her grandparents were buried. There he’d had proof aplenty of the conditions in which her relatives lived and died. It was not the resting places of the old that had moved Willem; it was the endless rows of tiny crosses that marked the graves of infants: babies lost to pneumonia, malnutrition and simple frailty. The grief that was represented by these hundreds of graves had moved him deeply: the pain of mothers, the unshed tears of fathers and grandfathers. It was nothing he had remotely expected, and it had made him sick with sorrow.

For her part, Katya had seemed untouched by the sight, talking only of her memories of her grandparents and their eccentricities. But then this was the world in which she’d been raised; it wasn’t so surprising, perhaps, that she took all this suffering for granted. Hadn’t she once told him she’d had fourteen brothers and sisters, and only six of them were left living? Perhaps the other eight had been laid to rest in the very cemetery where they’d walked together. And certainly it would not be uncommon for Katya to look coldly on the business of the heart. It was what made her so strong; and it was her strength – visible in her eyes and in her every movement – that endeared her to her audiences, particularly the women.

Zeffer understood that coldness better now that he’d spent time here with her. Seeing the house where she’d been born and brought up, the streets she’d trudged as a child; meeting the mother who must have viewed her appearance in their midst as something close to a miracle: this perfect rose-bud child whose dark eyes and bright smile set her utterly apart from any other child in the village. In fact, Katya’s mother had put such beauty to profitful work at the age of twelve, when the girl had been taken from town to town to dance in the streets, and – at least according to Katya – offer her favours to men who’d pay to have such tender flesh in their bed for the night. She had quickly fled such servitude, only to find that what she’d had to do for her family’s sake she had no choice but to do for herself. By the age of fifteen (when Zeffer had met her, singing for her supper on the streets of Bucharest) Katya had been a woman in all but years, her flowering an astonishment to all who witnessed it. For three nights he’d come to the square where she sang, there to join the group of admirers who were gathered around to watch this child-enchantress. It hadn’t taken him long to conceive of the notion that he should bring her back with him to America. Though he’d had at that time no experience in the world of the cinema (few people did; the year was 1916, and film was a fledgling), his instincts told him there was something special in the face and bearing of this creature. He had influential friends on the West Coast – mostly men who’d grown tired of Broadway’s petty disloyalties and piddling profits, and were looking for a new place to put their talents and their investments – who reported to him that cinema was a grand new frontier, and that talent scouts on the West Coast were looking for faces that the camera, and the public, would love. Did this child-woman not have such a face, he’d thought? Would the camera not grow stupid with infatuation to look into those guileful yet lovely eyes? And if the camera fell, could the public be far behind?

He’d inquired as to the girl’s name. She was one Katya Lupescu from the village of Ravbac. He approached her; spoke to her; told her, over a meal of cabbage-rolls and cheese, what he was thinking. She was curiously sanguine about his whole proposal; practically indifferent. Yes, she conceded, it sounded interesting, but she wasn’t sure if she would ever want to leave Romania. If she went too far from home, she would miss her family.

A year or two later, when her career had begun to take off in America – she no longer Katya Lupescu by then but Katya Lupi, and Willem her manager – they’d revisited this very conversation, and Zeffer had reminded her how uninterested she’d seemed in his grand plan. Her coolness had all been an illusion, she’d confessed; a way in part to keep herself from seeming too gauche in his eyes, and in part a way to prevent her hopes getting too high.

But that was only part of the answer. There was also a sense in which the indifference she’d demonstrated that first day they’d met (and – more recently – in the cemetery) was a real part of her nature; bred into her, perhaps, by a bloodline that had suffered so much loss and anguish over the generations that nothing was allowed to impress itself too severely: neither great happiness nor great sadness. She was, by her own design, a creature who held her extremes in reserve, providing glimpses only for public consumption. It was these glimpses that the audience in the square had come to witness night after night. And it was this same power she would unleash when she appeared before the cinematographic camera.

Interestingly, Katya had shown none of this quality to Father Sandru the previous day.

In fact, it was almost as though she’d been playing a part: the role of a rather bland God-fearing girl in the presence of a beloved priest. Her gaze had been respectfully downcast much of the time, her voice softer than usual, her vocabulary – which often tended to the salty – sweet and compliant.

Zeffer had found the performance almost comical, it was so exaggerated; but the Father had apparently been completely taken in by it. At one point he’d put his hand under Katya’s chin to raise her face, telling her there was no reason to be shy.

Shy! Zeffer had thought. If only Sandru knew what this so-called shy woman was capable of! The parties she’d master-minded up in her Canyon – the place gossip-columnists had dubbed Coldheart Canyon; the excesses she’d choreographed behind the walls of her compound; the sheer filth she was capable of inventing when the mood took her. If the mask she’d been wearing had slipped for a heartbeat, and the poor, deluded Father Sandru had glimpsed the facts of the matter, he would have locked himself in a cell and sealed the door with prayers and holy water to keep her out.

But Katya was too good an actress to let him see the truth.

Perhaps in one sense, Katya Lupi’s whole life had now become a performance. When she appeared on screen she played the role of simpering, abused orphans half her age, and large portions of the audience seemed to believe that this was reality. Meanwhile, every weekend or so, out of sight of the people who thought she was moral perfection, she threw the sort of parties for the other idols of Hollywood – the vamps and the clowns and the adventurers – which would have horrified her fans had they known what was going on. Which Katya Lupi was the real one? The weeping child who was the idol of millions, or the Scarlet Woman who was the Mistress of Coldheart Canyon? The orphan of the storm or the dope-fiend in her lair? Neither? Both?

Zeffer turned these thoughts over as Sandru took him from room to room, showing him tables and chairs, carpets and paintings; even mantelpieces.

‘Does anything catch your eye?’ Sandru asked him eventually.

‘Not really, Father,’ Zeffer replied, quite honestly. ‘I can get carpets as fine as these in America. I don’t need to come out into the wilds of Romania to find work like this.’

Sandru nodded. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. He looked a little defeated.

Zeffer took the opportunity to glance at his watch. ‘Perhaps I should be getting back to Katya,’ he said. In fact, the prospect of returning to the village and sitting in the little house where Katya had been born, there to be plied with thick coffee and sickeningly sweet cake, while Katya’s relatives came by to stare at (and touch, as if in disbelief) their American visitors, did not enthral him at all. But this visit with Father Sandru was becoming increasingly futile, and now that the Father had made his mercenary ambitions so plain, not a little embarrassing. There wasn’t anything here that Zeffer could imagine transporting back to Los Angeles.

He reached into his coat to take out his wallet, intending to give the Father a hundred dollars for his troubles. But before he could produce the note the Father’s expression changed to one of profound seriousness.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Before you dismiss me let me say this: I believe we understand one another. You are looking to buy something you could find in no other place. Something that’s one of a kind, yes? And I am looking to make a sale.’

‘So is there something here you haven’t shown me?’ Zeffer said. ‘Something special?’

Sandru nodded. ‘There are some parts of the Fortress I have not shared with you,’ he said. ‘And with good reason, let me say. You see there are people who should not see what I have to show. But I think I understand you now, Mr Zeffer. You are a man of the world.’

‘You make it all sound very mysterious,’ Zeffer said.

‘I don’t know if it’s mysterious,’ the priest said. ‘It is sad, I think, and human. You see, Duke Goga the man who built this Fortress – was not a good soul. The stories your Katya said she had been told as a child –’

‘Were true?’

‘In a manner of speaking. Goga was a great hunter. But he did not always limit his quarry to animals.’

‘Good God. So she was right to be afraid.’

‘The truth is, we are all a little afraid of what happened here,’ Sandru replied, ‘because we are none of us certain of the truth. All we can do, young and old, is say our prayers, and put our souls into God’s care when we’re in this place.’

Zeffer was intrigued now.

‘Tell me then,’ he said to Sandru. ‘I want to know what went on in this place.’

‘Believe me please when I tell you I would not know where to begin,’ the good man replied. ‘I do not have the words.’

‘Truly?’

‘Truly.’

Zeffer studied him with new eyes; with a kind of envy. Surely it was a blessed state, to be unable to find words for the terribleness of certain deeds. To be mute when it came to atrocity, instead of gabbily familiar with it. He found his curiosity similarly muted. It seemed distasteful – not to mention pointless – to press the man to say more than he expressed himself capable of saying.

‘Let’s change the subject. Show me something utterly out of the ordinary,’ Zeffer said. ‘Then I’ll be satisfied.’

Sandru put on a smile, but it wasn’t convincing. ‘It isn’t much,’ he said.

‘Oh sometimes you find beauty in the strangest places,’ Zeffer said, and as he spoke the little face of Katya Lupescu came into his mind’s eye; pale in a blue twilight.

Chapter 2

Sandru led the way down the passageway to another door, this one rather smaller than the oak door they’d come through to get to this level. Out came his keys. He unlocked the door, and to Zeffer’s surprise he and the priest were presented with another flight of steps, taking them yet deeper into the Fortress.

‘Are you ready?’ the Father asked.

‘Absolutely,’ Zeffer said.

Down they went. The stairs were steep, the air becoming noticeably more frigid as they descended. Father Sandru said nothing as they went; he glanced back over his shoulder two or three times, to be sure that he still had Zeffer on his heels, but the expression on his face was far from happy, as though he rather regretted making the decision to bring Zeffer here, and would have turned on his heel and headed back up to the relative comfort of the floor above at the least invitation.

At the bottom of the stairs he stopped, and rubbed his hands together vigorously.

‘I think before we proceed any further we should take a glass of something to warm us,’ he said. ‘What do you say?’

‘I wouldn’t say no,’ Zeffer said.

The Father went to a small cubby-hole in the wall a few yards from the bottom of the stairs, from which he brought a bottle of spirits and two glasses. Zeffer didn’t remark on the liquor’s proximity; nor could he blame the brothers for needing a glass of brandy to fortify them when they came down here. Though the lower level was supplied with electricity (there were lengths of electric lamps looped along the walls of the corridor) the light did nothing to warm the air nor comfort the spirit.

Father Sandru handed Zeffer a glass, and took the cork out of the bottle. The pop echoed off the naked stone of walls and floor. He poured Zeffer a healthy measure of the liquor, and then an even healthier measure for himself, which he had downed before Zeffer had got his own glass to his lips.

‘When I first came here,’ the Father said, ‘we used to brew our own brandy, from plums we grew on our own trees.’

‘But not now?’

‘No,’ the Father said, plainly saddened at the fact that they were no longer producers of liquor. ‘The earth is not good any longer, so the plums never ripen properly. They remain small and sour. The brandy made from such fruit is bitter, and nobody wants to drink it. Even I will not drink it, so you can judge for yourself how bad it must be!’ He laughed at his self-deprecation, and used the laughter as a cue to fill his glass up again. ‘Drink,’ he said to Zeffer, tapping his glass against Zeffer’s glass as though this was the first he’d had.

Zeffer drank. The brandy was stronger than the stuff he’d had at the hotel in Brascov. It went down smoothly, warming his belly when it arrived.

‘Good, yes?’ the Father said, having downed his second glass.

‘Very.’

‘You should have another before we go on.’ And he filled Zeffer’s glass without waiting for a reply. ‘We’re a long way below ground here, and it gets hellishly cold …’ Glasses were filled, and emptied. The Father’s mood was noticeably better now, and his tone chattier. He put the glasses and the bottle back in the hole in the wall, and then led the way down the narrow corridor, talking as he went. ‘When the Order first came to the Fortress, there were plans to found a hospital here. You see, there are no hospitals within a hundred and twenty miles of here. It would be very practical. But this is not a place for the sick. And certainly not the dying.’

‘So: no hospital?’

‘Well, we made preparations. You saw yesterday one of the wards –’

Zeffer remembered. He’d glanced through an open door and there’d been two rows of iron beds, with bare mattresses.

‘I thought it was a dormitory for the brothers.’

‘No. We each have our own cells. There are only eleven of us, so we can each have a place in which to meditate and pray …’ He offered Zeffer a glance, accompanied by a small smile. ‘And drink.’

‘I can’t imagine it’s a very satisfying life,’ Zeffer said.

‘Satisfying?’ The idea was obviously a little confounding to Sandru. ‘Meaning what?’

‘Oh, just that you don’t get to work in the community. You can’t help people.’

They had come to the end of the passageway, and Sandru sorted through his collection of keys in order to open the third and final door.

‘Who can truly be helped?’ he said, his face turned down to the labour of sorting. ‘I suppose perhaps children can be comforted, sometimes, if it’s dark and they’re afraid. You can tell them you’re with them; and that will sometimes stop them crying. But for the rest of us? Are there really any words that help? I don’t know of any.’ He had found the right key, and now slipped it noisily into the antiquated lock. As he did so, he glanced up at Zeffer. ‘I think there’s more comfort to be had from seeing beautiful women on the cinema screen than in any prayer I know. Well, perhaps not comfort. Distraction.’ He turned the key in the lock.

‘And if that sounds like heresy, well so be it.’ Sandru pushed the door open. The room was in darkness, but despite that fact there was a warmth in the air; at least in contrast to the chilly air of the passageway. Perhaps the difference was no more than two or three degrees, but it felt significant.

‘Will you wait here a moment?’ Sandru said. ‘I’ll just bring a light.’

Zeffer stayed where he was, staring into the darkness, enjoying the slight rise in temperature. There was enough illumination spilling from the passageway behind him to light the threshold. There, carved into stone beneath his feet, was a curious inscription:

Quamquam in fundis inferiorum sumus, oculos angelorum tenebimus.

He didn’t linger to puzzle over this for more than a few seconds, but instead let his eyes drift up and into the room itself. The chamber before him was large, it seemed; and unlike the rest of the rooms and corridors, which were simply constructed, far more elaborate. Could he make out pillars, supporting several small vaults? He thought so. There were chairs and tables within a few yards of where he stood, and what appeared to be lamps or the like heaped on top of them.

The confusion inside was explained a moment later, when the Father returned with a bare bulb, attached to a length of electric cord.

‘We use this as a storeroom,’ he said. ‘Many of the items we found in the Fortress when we arrived we put down here, just to get them out of the way.’ He lifted the light to give Zeffer a better view.

Zeffer’s estimation of the size of the place, and of the complexity of its construction, had been conservative, it now turned out. The chamber was fully thirty-five feet long; and almost as broad, the ceiling (which was indeed divided into eight elaborately-vaulted sections, divided by pillars) higher than the passageway by six feet or more. The floor was littered with furniture and crates; the place plainly filled by hands that had little or no respect for the objects they were moving; wishing only to put them quickly out of sight. It occurred to Zeffer that if indeed there were treasures here the chances of finding them – or indeed of their being in reasonable condition when discovered – were remote. Still, the Father had brought him this far at no little inconvenience to himself; it would be discourteous to now show no interest in what the chamber contained.

‘Did you have a part in moving all of this?’ he asked Sandru, more out of a need to fill the silence between them than because he was genuinely curious.

‘Yes, I did,’ the Father replied. ‘Thirty-two years ago. I was a much younger man. But it was still a back-breaking labour. They built things big here. I remember thinking that maybe the stories were right …’

‘Stories about –’

‘Oh … nonsenses. About this furniture having been built for the retinue of the Devil’s wife.’

‘The Devil’s wife.’

‘Lilith, or Lilitu. Sometimes called Queen of Zemargad. Don’t ask me why.’

‘This is the same woman Katya spoke about?’

Sandru nodded. ‘That’s why the locals don’t have much hope for the sick if they stay here. They think Lilith’s curse is on the place. As I say: nonsenses.’

Whether it was nonsense or not, the story lent some flavour to this banal adventure. ‘May I look more closely?’ Zeffer asked.

‘That’s what we’re here for,’ Father Sandru replied. ‘I hope there’s something that catches your eye, for your sake. All these stairs and doors. I’d forgotten how far down it was …’

‘I’m sorry to have made this so burdensome,’ Zeffer said, quite sincerely. ‘If I’d known you were going to go to so much trouble I wouldn’t have –’

‘No, no,’ Sandru said. ‘It’s not a trouble to me. I only thought there might be an item here that pleased you. But now I’m down here I doubt it. To be truthful I believe we should have taken all this trash up the mountain and thrown it in the deepest gorge we could find.’

‘Why didn’t you do just that?’

‘It wasn’t my choice. I was just a young priest at the time. I did as I was told. I moved tables and chairs and tapestries, and I kept my counsel. Our leader then was Father Nicholas, who was very clear on the best thing to be done – the safest thing for our souls – and would not be moved on the subject. So we did as we were told. Father Nicholas, by the way, had the foulest temper of any man I ever knew. We all lived in fear of him.’

Zeffer moved into the room, talking as he went: ‘May I say something that I hope won’t offend you?’

‘I’m not easily offended, don’t worry.’

‘Well … it’s just that the more I hear about your Order, the less like priests you seem to be. Father Nicholas’s temper and the brothers all familiar with Theda Bara. And then the brandy.’

‘Ah, the sins of the flesh,’ Father Sandru said. ‘We do seem to have more than our share, don’t we?’

‘I have offended you.’

‘No. You’ve simply seen the truth. And how can a man of God be justly offended by that? What you’ve observed is no coincidence. We are all … how shall I put this? … men who have more than our share of flaws. Some of us were never trusted with a flock. Others, like Father Nicholas, were. But the arrangement was never deemed satisfactory.’

‘His temper?’

‘I believe he threw a Bible at one of the parishioners who was sleeping through the good Father’s sermon.’ Zeffer chuckled; but his laughter was silenced a moment later. ‘It killed the man.’

‘Killed –?’

‘An accident, but still …’

‘– with a Bible. Surely not.’

‘Well, that’s how the rumour went. Father Nicholas has been dead twenty years, so there’s no way to prove it or disprove it. Let’s hope it isn’t true, and if it is, hope he’s at peace with it now. The fact is, I’m glad I was never trusted with a parish. With a flock to tend. I couldn’t have done much for them.’

‘Why not?’ Zeffer asked, a little impatient with Sandru’s melancholy now. ‘Do you have difficulty finding God in a place like this?’

‘To be honest Mr Zeffer, with every week that passes – I almost want to say with every hour – I find it harder to see a sign of God anywhere. It would not be unreasonable, I think, to ask Him to show himself in beauty. In the face of your lady-companion, perhaps … ?’

Katya’s face as proof of God’s presence? It was an unlikely piece of metaphysics, Zeffer thought.

‘I apologize,’ Sandru said. ‘You didn’t come here to hear me talk about my lack of faith.’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Well I do. The brandy makes me maudlin.’

‘Shall I take a look then?’ Zeffer suggested. ‘At what-ever’s in here?’

‘Yes, why don’t we?’ Sandru replied. ‘I wish I could give you some kind of guidance, but …’ He shrugged; his favourite gesture. ‘Why don’t you start looking, and I’ll go back and get us something more to drink?’

‘Nothing more for me,’ Zeffer replied.

‘Well, then for me,’ Sandru said. ‘I’ll only be a moment. If you need me, just call. I’ll hear you.’

Zeffer took a moment, when the man was gone, to close his eyes and let his thoughts grow a little more orderly. Though Sandru spoke slowly enough, there was something mildly chaotic about his thought processes. One minute he was talking about furniture, the next about the mad Duke and his hunter’s habits, the next about the fact that they couldn’t make a hospital here because the Devil’s wife had cursed the place.

When he opened his eyes his gaze moved back and forth over the furniture and the boxes without lingering on anything in particular. The bare bulb was stark, of course, and its light far from flattering, but even taking that fact into account there was nothing in the room that caught Zeffer’s eye. There were some finely-wrought things, no question; but nothing extraordinary.

And then, as he stood there, waiting for Sandru to return, his gaze moved beyond the objects that filled the chamber, and came to rest instead on the walls beyond.

The chamber was not, he saw, made of bare stone. It was covered with tiles. In every sense, this was an understatement, for these were no ordinary tiles. Even by so ungenerous a light as the bare bulb threw upon them, and viewed by Zeffer’s weary eyes, it was clear they were of incredible sophistication and beauty.

He didn’t wait for Father Sandru to return; rather, he began to push through the piles of furniture towards the designs that covered the walls. They covered the floor, too, he saw, and ceiling. In fact, the chamber was a single masterpiece of tile; every single inch of it decorated.

In all his years of travelling and collecting he’d never seen anything quite like this. Careless of the dirt and dust laden webs which covered every surface, he pushed on through until he reached the nearest wall. It was filthy, of course, but he pulled a large silk handkerchief out of his pocket, and used it to scrub away some of the filth on the tiles. It had been plain even from a distance that the tiles were elaborately designed, but now, as he cleared a swathe across four or five, he realized that this was not an abstract pattern but a representation. There was part of a tree there, on one of the tiles, and on another, adjacent to it, a man on a white horse. The detail was astonishing. The horse was so finely painted, it looked about ready to prance off around the room.

‘It’s a hunt.’

Sandru’s voice startled him; Willem jerked back from the wall, so suddenly that it was as though he’d had his face in a vacuum, and was pulling it free. He felt a drop of moisture plucked from the rim of his eye; saw it flying towards the cleaned tiles, defying gravity as it broke on the flank of the painted horse.

It was a strange moment; an illusion surely. It took him a little time to shake off the oddness of it. When he looked round at Sandru, the man was slightly out of focus. He stared at the Father’s shape until his eyes corrected the problem. When they did he saw that Sandru had the brandy bottle back in his hand. Apparently its contents had been more potent than Zeffer had thought. The alcohol, along with the intensity of his stare, had left him feeling strangely dislocated; as though the world he’d been looking at – the painted man on his painted horse, riding past a painted tree – was more real than the old priest standing there in the doorway.

‘A hunt?’ he asked at last. ‘What kind of hunt?’

‘Oh, every kind,’ Sandru replied. ‘Pigs, dragons, women –’

‘Women?’

Sandru laughed. ‘Yes, women,’ he said, pointing towards a piece of the wall some yards deeper into the chamber. ‘Go look,’ he said. ‘You’ll find the whole thing is filled with obscenities. The men who painted this place must have had some strange dreams, let me tell you, if this is what they saw.’

Zeffer pushed aside a small table, and then pressed himself between the wall and a much larger piece of furniture, which looked like a wooden catafalque, too large to move. Obliged to slide along the wall, his jacket did the job his handkerchief had done moments before. Dust rose up in his face.

‘Where now?’ he asked the Father when he’d got to the other side of the catafalque.

‘A little further,’ Sandru replied, uncorking the brandy and shamelessly taking a swig from the bottle.

‘I need some more light back here,’ Zeffer said.

Reluctantly, Sandru went to pick up the lamp. It was hot now. He rummaged in one of the nearby boxes to find something to protect his palm, found a length of cloth and wrapped it around the base of the lamp. Then he tugged on the light-cord, to give himself some more play, and made his way through the confusion of stuff in the room, to where Zeffer was standing.

The closer Sandru came with the light the more Zeffer could make out of the painting on the tiles. There was a vast panorama spread to left and right of him; and up above his head; and down to the ground, spreading beneath his feet. Though the walls were so filthy that in places the design was entirely obliterated, and in other places there were large cracks in the tiles, the image had an extraordinary reality all of its own.

‘Closer,’ Zeffer said to Sandru, sacrificing the arm of his fur coat to clean a great portion of tiled wall in front of him. Each tile was about six inches square, perhaps a little smaller, and set close to one another with a minimum of grouting, so as to preserve the continuity of the picture. Despite the sickly light of the bulb, its luminescence still showed that the colour of the image had not been diminished by time. The beauty of the renderings was perfectly evident. There were a dozen kinds of green in the trees, and more, sweeter hues in the growth between them. Beneath the canopy there were burnt umbers and siennas and sepias in the trunks and branches, skilfully highlighted to lend the impression that light was falling through the foliage and catching the bark. Not all the tiles were rendered with the same expertise, he saw.

Some of the tiles were the work of highly sophisticated artists; some the work of journeymen; some – especially those that were devoted to areas of pure foliage – the handiwork of apprentices, working on their craft by filling in areas that their masters neither had the time nor perhaps the interest to address.

But none of this spoiled the power of the overall vision. In fact the discontinuity of styles created a splendid energy in the piece. Portions of the world were in focus, other parts were barely coherent; the abstract and the representational sitting side by side on the wall, all part of one enormous story.

And what was that story? Plainly, given the kind of quarry Sandru had listed, this was more than simply a hunt: it smacked of something far more ambitious. But what? He peered at the tiles, his nose a few inches from the wall, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

‘I looked at the whole room, before we put all the furniture in here,’ Sandru said. ‘It’s a view, from the Fortress Tower.’

‘But not realistic?’

‘It depends what you mean by realistic,’ Sandru said. ‘If you look over the other side –’ he pointed across the room ‘– you can see the delta of the Danube.’ Zeffer could just make out the body of water, glittering in the gloom: and closer by a mass of swampy land, with dozens of inlets winding through it, on their way to the sea. ‘And there!’ Sandru went on, ‘to the left –’ again, Zeffer followed Sandru’s finger ‘– at the corner of the room, that rock –’

‘I see it.’

The rock was tall, rising out of the ocean of trees like a tower, shrubs springing from its flank.

‘That’s called the May Rock,’ Sandru said. ‘The villagers dance there, on the first six nights of May. Couples would stay there overnight, and try to make children. It’s said the women always became pregnant if they stayed with their men on May Rock.’

‘So it exists? In the world, I mean. Out there.’

‘Yes, it’s right outside the Fortress.’

‘And so all those other details? The delta –’

‘Is nine miles away, in that direction.’ Sandru pointed at the wall upon which the Danube’s delta was painted.

Zeffer smiled as he grasped what the artists had achieved here. Down in the depths of the Fortress, at its lowest point, they had recreated in tile and paint what could be seen from its pinnacle.

And with that realization came sense of the inscription he’d read on the threshold.

Though we are in the bowels of Hell, we shall have the eyes of Angels.

This room was the bowels of Hell. But the tile-makers and their artist masters, wherever they’d been, had created an experience that gave the occupants of this dungeon the eyes of angels. A paradoxical ambition, when all you had to do was climb the stairs and see all this from the top of the tower. But artists were often driven by such ambition; a need perhaps, to prove that it could even be done.

‘Somebody worked very hard to create all this,’ Zeffer said.

‘Oh indeed. It’s an impressive achievement.’

‘But you hide it away,’ Zeffer said, not comprehending the way the room had been treated. ‘You fill the place with old furniture and let it get filthy.’

‘Who could we show it to?’ the Father replied. ‘It’s too disgusting …’

‘I see nothing –’ he was about to say disgusting, when his eye alighted on a part of tile-work that he’d cleaned with his arm but had not closely studied. In a large grove a round stadium had been set up, with seating made of wood. The perspective was off (and the solution to the perspective changed subtly from tile to tile, as various hands had contributed their piece of the puzzle. There were perhaps twenty tiles that had some portion of the stadium represented upon them; the work of perhaps five artists). The steep benches were filled with people, their bustle evoked with quick, contentious strokes. Some people seemed to be standing; some sitting. Two more groups of spectators were approaching the stadium from the outside, though there was no room for them inside.

But what drew Zeffer’s eye, and made him realize that the Father had been right to wonder aloud who he might show this masterwork to, was the event these spectators had assembled to witness. It was an arena of sexual sport. Several performances were going on at the same time, all unapologetically obscene. In one section of the arena a naked woman was being held down while a creature twice her size, his body bestial, his erection monstrous, was being roped back by four men who appeared to be controlling his approach to the woman. In another quarter, a man had been stripped of his skin by three naked women. A fourth straddled him as he lay on the ground in his own blood. The other three wore pieces of his skin. One had on his whole face and shoulders, her breasts sticking out from beneath the ragged hood. Another sat on the ground, wearing his arms and pulling on the skin of his legs like waders. The third, the queen of this quartet, was wearing what was presumably the piece de resistance, the flesh which the unhappy owner had worn from mid breast-bone to mid-thigh. She was cavorting in this garish costume like a dancer and, by some magic known only to the maker of the mystery, the usurped skin still boasted a full erection.

‘Good God …’ Zeffer said.

‘I told you,’ Sandru said, just a little smugly. ‘And that’s the least of it, believe me.’

‘The least of it?’

‘The more you look, the more you see.’

‘Anywhere in particular?’

‘Go over to the Wild Wood. Look amongst the trees.’

Zeffer moved along the wall, studying the tiles as he went. At first he couldn’t make out anything controversial, but Sandru had some useful advice.

‘Step away a foot or so.’

In his fascination with the details of the stadium, Zeffer had come too close to the wall to see the wood for the trees. Now he stepped back and to his astonishment saw that the thicket around the arena was alive with figures, all of which were in some form or other monstrous; and all unequivocally sexual. Erections were thrust between the trees like plum-headed branches, women dangled from overhead with their legs spread (a flock of birds, thirty or more, swooped out of the sex of one; another was menstruating light, which was splashing on the ground below the tree. Snakes came out of the scarlet pool, in bright profusion).

‘Is it like this all over?’ Zeffer said, his astonishment unfeigned.

‘All over. There are thirty-three thousand, two hundred and sixty-eight tiles, and there is obscene matter on two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-eight of them.’

‘You’ve obviously made a study,’ Zeffer observed.

‘Not I. An English man who worked with Father Nicholas did the counting. For some reason the numbers remained in my head. I think it’s old age. Things you want to remember, you can’t. And things that don’t mean anything stick in your head like a knife.’

‘That’s not a pretty image, with respect.’

‘With respect, there’s nothing pretty about the way I feel,’ Sandru replied. ‘I feel old to my marrow. On a good day I can barely get up in the morning. On a bad day, I just wish I were dead.’

‘Lord.’

Sandru shrugged. ‘That’s what living in this place does to you after a while. Everything drains out of you somehow.’

Zeffer was only half-listening. He was exhilarated by what he saw, and he had no patience with Sandru’s melancholy; his thoughts were with the walls, and the pictures on the walls.

‘Are there records documenting how this was created? It is a masterpiece, in its way.’

‘One of a kind,’ Sandru said.

‘Absolutely one of a kind.’

‘To answer your question, it’s believed to have been funded by Duke Goga, who had lately returned from the Crusades with a large amount of booty, claimed from the infidel in the name of Christ.’

‘But to build a room like this with money you’d made on the Crusades!’ Zeffer said incredulously.

‘I agree. It seems like an unlikely thing to do in the name of God. Of course none of this is proved. There are some people who will tell you that Goga went missing on one of his hunts, and it wasn’t him who built this place at all.’

‘Who then?’

‘Lilith, the Devil’s wife,’ the Father said, dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘Which would make this the Devil’s Country, no?’

‘Has anybody tried to analyse the work?’

‘Oh yes. The Englishman I spoke of, George Soames, claimed he had discovered evidence of twenty-two different styles amongst the designs. But that was just the painters. Then there were the men who actually made the tiles. Fired them. Sorted out the good from the bad. Prepared the paint. Cleaned the brushes. And there must have been some system to align everything.’

‘The rows of tiles?’

‘I was thinking more of the alignment of interior with the exterior.’

‘Perhaps they built the room first.’

‘No. The Fortress is two-and-a-half centuries older than this room.’

‘My God, so to get the alignment so perfect –?’

‘Is quite miraculous. Soames found fifty-nine geographical markers – certain stones, trees, the spire of the old abbey in Darscus – which are visible from the tower and are also painted on the wall. He calculated that all fifty-nine were correctly aligned, within half a degree of accuracy.’

‘Somebody was obsessive.’

‘Or else, divinely inspired.’

‘You believe that?’

‘Why not?’

Zeffer glanced back at the arena on the wall behind him, with all its libidinous excesses. ‘Does that look like the kind of work that somebody would do in the name of God?’

‘As I said,’ Sandru replied, ‘I no longer know where God is and where He isn’t.’

There was a long silence, during which Zeffer continued to survey the walls. Finally he said: ‘How much do you want for it?’

‘How much do I want for what?’

‘For the room?’

Sandru barked out a laugh.

‘I mean it,’ Zeffer said. ‘How much do you want for it?’

‘It’s a room, Mr Zeffer,’ Sandru said. ‘You can’t buy a room.’

‘Then it’s not for sale?’

‘That’s not my point –’

‘Just tell me: is it for sale or not?’

Again, laughter. But this time there was less humour; more bemusement. ‘I don’t see that it’s worth talking about,’ Sandru said, putting the brandy bottle to his lips and drinking.

‘Let’s say a hundred thousand dollars. What would that be in lei? What’s the leu worth right now? A hundred and thirty-two-and-a-half to the dollar?’

‘If you say so.’

‘So that’s what? Thirteen million, two hundred and fifty thousand lei.’

‘You jest.’

‘No.’

‘Where would you find such money?’ A pause followed. ‘If I may ask?’

‘Over the years, I’ve made some very lucrative investments on behalf of Katya. We own large parts of Los Angeles. Half a mile of Sunset Boulevard is in her name. Another half mile in mine.’

‘And you would sell all that to own this?’

‘A little piece of Sunset Boulevard for your glorious Hunt? Why not?’

‘Because it’s just a room covered with filthy tiles.’

‘So I have more money than sense. What does it matter to you? A hundred thousand dollars is a great deal of money.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘So, do we have a deal or not?’

‘Mr Zeffer, this is all too sudden. We’re not talking about a chair here. This is part of the fabric of the Fortress. It has great historical significance.’

‘A minute ago it was just a room covered with filthy tiles.’

‘Filthy tiles of great historical significance,’ Sandru said, allowing himself a little smile.

‘Are you saying we can’t find some terms that are mutually satisfying? Because if you are –’

‘No, no, no. I’m not saying that. Perhaps we could eventually agree on a price, if we talked about it for a while. But how would you ever get it back to California?’

‘That would be my problem. This is the twenties, Father. Anything’s possible.’

‘And then what? Suppose you could get everything back to Hollywood?’

‘Another room, the same proportions –’

‘You have such a room?’

‘No. I’d build one. We have a house in the Hollywood Hills. I’d put it in as a surprise for Katya.’

‘Without telling her?’

‘Well if I told her it wouldn’t be a surprise.’

‘I’m just astonished that she would allow you to do such a thing. A woman like that.’

‘Like what?’

The question caught Sandru off-balance. ‘Well…so …’

‘Beautiful?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think our conversation’s come full-circle, Father.’

Sandru conceded the point with a little nod, lifting the brandy bottle as he did so.

‘So she’s not as perfect as her face would suggest?’ he asked at last.

‘Not remotely. Thank God.’

‘This place, with all its obscenities, would please her?’

‘Yes, I think it would. Why? Does that make you more open to the idea of selling it to me?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sandru replied, frowning. ‘This whole conversation hasn’t turned out the way I thought it would. I expected you to come down here and maybe buy a table, or a tapestry. Instead you want to buy the walls!’ He shook his head again. ‘I was warned about you Americans,’ he added, his tone no longer amused.

‘What were you warned about?’

‘Oh, that you thought nothing was beyond your grasp. Or beyond your pocket.’

‘So the money isn’t enough.’

‘The money, the money.’ He made an ugly sound in the back of his throat. ‘What does the money matter? You want to pay a hundred thousand dollars for it? Pay it. I’ll never see a leu so why should I care what it costs you? You can steal it as far as I am concerned.’

‘Let me understand you clearly. Are you agreeing to the sale?’

‘Yes,’ Father Sandru said, his tone weary now, as though the whole subject had suddenly lost all trace of pleasure for him. ‘I’m agreeing.’

‘Good. I’m delighted.’

Zeffer returned through the maze of furniture to the door, where the priest stood. He extended his hand. ‘It’s been wonderful dealing with you, Father Sandru.’

Sandru looked down on the proffered hand, and then – after a moment of study – took it. His fingers were cold, his palm clammy. ‘Do you want to stay and look at what you’ve bought?’

‘No. I don’t think so. I think we both need a little sun on our faces.’

Sandru said nothing to this; he just turned and led the way out along the corridor to the stairs. But the expression on his face, as he turned, was perfectly clear: there was no more pleasure to be found above as there was down here in the cold; nor prospect of any.

Chapter 3

There were ten thousand things Zeffer had not witnessed, or even glimpsed, in his brief visit to the vast, mysterious chambers in the Fortress’s bowels; images haunting the tiles which he would not discern until the heroic labour of removing the masterwork from the walls and shipping it to California was complete.

He was a literate man; better educated than most of his peers in the burgeoning city of Los Angeles, thanks to parents who had filled the house with books, even though there was often precious little food on the table. He knew his classics, and the mythologies from which the great books and plays of the ancients had been derived. In time he would discover dozens of images inspired by those same myths on the tiles. In one place women were depicted like the Maenads immortalized by Euripides; maddened souls in service of the god of ecstasies, Dionysus. They raced through the trees with bloody hands, leaving pieces of male flesh scattered in the grass. In another place, single-breasted Amazons strode, drawing back their mighty bows and letting fly storms of arrows.

There were other images – many, many others – that were not rooted in any recognizable mythology. In one spot, not far from the delta, huge fishes, which had sprouted legs covered with golden scales, came through the trees in solemn shoals, spitting fire. The trees ahead of them were aflame; burning birds rose up from the canopy.

In the swamp, a small town stood on long limbs, its presence appearing to mark the position of some place that had existed there once but had been taken by time, or a prophecy of some settlement to come. The artists had taken liberties with the rendering, foreshortening the scene so that the occupants of the city were almost as big as their houses, and could be plainly seen. There were excesses here, too; perversities just as profound as anything the Wild Wood was hosting. Through one of the windows a man could be seen spread-eagled on a table, around which sat a number of guests, all watching a large worm enter him anally and then erupt from his open mouth. Another was the scene of a strange summoning, in which a host of black birds with human heads rose up from the ground, circling a girl-child who was either their invoker or their victim. In a third house a woman was squatting and shedding menstrual blood through a hole in the floor. Several men, smaller than the woman above by half, were swimming in the water below and undergoing some calamitous transformation, presumably brought on by the menses. Their heads had flowered into dark, monstrous shapes; demonic tails had sprouted from their backsides.

As Father Sandru had warned (or was it boasted?) to Zeffer, there was no part of the landscape depicted there on the walls that was not haunted by some bizarre sight or other. Even the clouds (innocent enough, surely) shat rains of fire in one place, and evacuated skulls in another. Demons cavorted unchallenged over the open sky, like dancers possessed by some celestial music, while stars fell between them; others rose over the horizon, leering like emaciated fools. And in that same sky, as though to suggest that this was a world of perpetual twilight, teetering always on the edge of darkness and extinction, was a sun that was three-quarters eclipsed by an exquisitely rendered moon, the latter painted so cunningly it seemed to have real mass, real roundness, as it slid over the face of the day-star.

In one place there was painted a line of crowned figures – the kings and queens of Romania, back to ancient times – painted marching into the ground. The noble line rotted as it proceeded into the earth, carrion birds alighting on the descending lineage, plucking out regal eyes and law-giving tongues. In another place a circle of witches rose in a spiral from a spot marked by standing-stones; their innocent victims, babies whose fat had been used to make the flying ointment in which they had slathered themselves, lay scattered between the stones like neglected dolls.

And all through this world of monstrous hurts and occasional miracles, the Hunt.

Many of the scenes were simply documents of the vigorous beauty of the chase; they looked as though they could have been painted from life. There was a pack of dogs, white and black and pie-bald (one bitch charmingly attending to her suckling pups); some being muzzled by peasants, others straining on their leashes as they were led away to join the great assembly of hunters. Elsewhere, the dogs could be seen accompanying the hunters. Where the Duke had chosen to kneel and pray, a white dog knelt beside him, his noble head bowed by the weight of shared devotion. In another, the dogs were splashing in a river, attempting to catch the huge salmon outlined in the stylized blue waters. And in a third place, for no apparent reason but the playfulness of the artists, the role of dogs and men had been reversed. A long, beautifully decorated table had been set up in a clearing amongst the trees, and at it sat a number of finely-bred dogs, while at their booted feet naked men fought over scraps and bones. Closer examination showed the arrangement of figures to be even more anarchic than it first appeared, for there were thirteen dogs at the table, and in their centre sat one dog with a halo perched between his pricked ears: a canine Last Supper. An informed observer, knowing the traditional positions of the Apostles, could have named them all. The writers of the Gospels were there in their accustomed seats; John sitting closest to his master, Judas sitting at the perimeter of the company, while Peter (a Saint Bernard) brooded at the other end, his furrowed brow suggesting he already knew he would betray his master three times before the long night was over.

Elsewhere in the landscape, the dogs were painted at far crueller work. Tearing rabbits apart in one place, and ripping the flesh from a cornered stag in another. In a third they were in a contest with a lion, and many had been traumatically injured by the battle. Some crawled away from the place, trailing their bowels; one had been thrown up into the trees, and its corpse hung there, tongue lolling. Others lay sprawled in the grass in pools of blood. The hunters kept their distance, no doubt waiting for the lion to become so weakened by blood-loss that they could close in and claim the heroic moment for themselves.

But the most perverse of all the scenes were those in which erotic love and hunting were conjoined.

There was, for instance, a place where the dogs had driven a number of naked men and women up a gorge, where they had encountered a group of hunters armed with spears and nets. The terrified couples clung to one another, but the netters and the spearers knew their business. Men were separated from women and the men were run through with spears, the women all bundled up in the nets, heaped on carts, and carried away. The sexual servitude that awaited them was of a very particular kind. Reading the walls from left to right the viewer’s eye found that in an adjacent valley the women were freed from the nets and strapped beneath the bodies of massive centaurs, their legs stretched around the flanks of the animals.

The women’s response to this terrible violation was something the artists had taken some trouble to detail. One was screaming in agony, her head thrown back, as blood ran from the place where she was being divided. Others appeared to be in ecstasy at this forced marriage, pressing their faces joyously to the necks of their deflowerers.

But this part of the story did not finish there. If the ‘reader’, scanning these walls, had continued his enquiry, he would have found that some of the men had survived the massacre in the gorge, and returned, on a later sequence of tiles, to hunt the creatures that had their wives in sexual thrall. These were some of the most brilliantly painted sequences on the walls: the surviving lovers returning on horseback, so as to match their speed to that of the centaurs. Lassoes circling in the air over their heads, they closed on the centaurs, who were slowed down by the very women they carried around to pleasure them. Several were brought down by ropes around the neck, others were speared in the throat or flank. The women they carried were not always lucky in these encounters. Though no doubt their rescuers intended to free them, it was often the case that they perished beneath the weight of their violators, as the dying centaurs rolled over, crushing them. Perhaps there was some moral here – some lesson about the vulnerability of the innocent women when two tribes of males were set against one another; but the artists seemed to take too much grisly pleasure in their depictions for this to be the case. Rather, it appeared to be done for the pleasure of the doing; of the imagining, and of the rendering. There was no moral from one end of this world to the other.

It would be possible to go on listing at great length the horrors and the spectacles of the scenes laid out on the tiles: the fields of dancing demons, the fairy races, the succubi squatting on roofs, the holy fools draped in coats of cow-dung, the satyrs, the spirits of graveside, roadside and hearthside; the weasel-kings and the bloated toads; and so on, and so on, behind every tree and on every cloud, sliding down every waterfall and lingering beneath every rock: a world haunted by the shapes of lust and animal lust and all that humanity called to its bosom in the long nights of its despair.

Though Hollywood – even in its fledgling years – was presenting itself to the world as the very soul of the imagination, there was nothing going on before the cameras there (nor would there be, ever) that could compete with what the master tile-painters and their apprentices had created.

It was, as Sandru has said, the Devil’s Country.

Zeffer went to Brascov to hire men, at prices five or six times what he would have paid locally, because he wanted hands that could do the job with some finesse, and minds that could count to a higher number than their fingers. He devised the means by which the masterpiece could be removed himself. The tiles were meticulously numbered on the reverse sides and a huge legend made of the room by three cartographers he had also hired in the city, so that there would be a meticulous record of the way the design had been laid out; and an obsessive accounting of how the tiles were numbered, stacked and packed away; including a detailed description of which tiles were cracked or damaged before they were packed, which had been mislaid by the original tilers (there were a hundred and sixteen such tiles; most turned ninety or a hundred and eighty degrees by an artisan too tired, too bewildered or perhaps too drunk to realize his error); all so that when the tiles were unpacked at the house in Coldheart Canyon there would be no difficulty reordering them into the original design.

It was a long process; a total of eleven weeks were to pass before the crated tiles were finally transported from the Fortress.

All the work had drawn much attention of course; from the brothers themselves, who knew what was going on because Father Sandru had told them, and from the villagers, who had only the vaguest of ideas of what all this was about. There were rumours flying around that the removal was being undertaken because the tiles had put the souls of the Fathers in spiritual jeopardy, but precise details of this jeopardy changed from account to account.

The vast sum of money that was now in the possession of the Order did very little to transform the lives of the priests, apart from inspiring some of the most embittered exchanges in the history of the brotherhood. Several of the priests were of the opinion that the tiles should not have been sold (not because of their merit, but because it was not wise to loose such unholy images on the secular world). To this, Father Sandru – who was more often, and more publicly, drunk by the day – offered only a sneering dismissal.

What does it matter?, he said to the complainers: they are only tiles, for God’s sake.

There were a good number of shaken heads by the way of response, and a very eloquent riposte from one of the older Fathers, who said that God had put the tiles into their protection, and it was cynical and careless of him to let them go. What damage might they not do, out there in the world, he said; what hurt to innocent souls?

Sandru was unmoved by all this. There were no innocent souls in Hollywood, he had learned; nor was there any sin or excess painted in the tiles that the people of that city were not intimately familiar with. He spoke with an authority which he didn’t in truth possess, but it sufficiently impressed the brothers – or at least a greater number of them – so that the nay-sayers were finally silenced.

There was much debate about what should happen to the money. One faction, led by the older men, believed it had been acquired by dubious means, and the only uncorrupted way to dispose of it was to distribute it amongst the poor. Surprisingly, very few voices supported this solution; some part of the money might be given to the needy in the village, the priests agreed, but there were other causes that should be attended to. There was some lobbying for a complete removal of the Order to some other place than the Fortress; a more comfortable place, where they could find their way to God without the Devil’s shadow falling across their path. It was Sandru who was the most eloquent advocate of their staying in the Fortress. His tongue well lubricated with brandy, he explained that he felt no sense of regret that he’d sold the tiles; it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and he was glad he’d taken it. Now, he said, they should use the money to rejuvenate the place. Get the hospital up and running, as had always been the plan; see what they could do about refertilizing the land, so that the vineyards would prosper as they had in the old days.

‘Our path is perfectly clear!’ he said to the brothers. ‘Whether our faith in the Lord is secure or not, we can heal here, and we can grow the grape, and pass our lives with purpose.’

He smiled as he spoke. That word – purpose – had not been on his lips for many years, and it gave him pleasure to speak it. But even as he spoke the smile started to die away, and the colour shrank from his ruddy face.

‘I beg you to excuse me,’ he said, putting his hand to his belly, ‘I am sickened by too much brandy.’

With that he pulled out of his robes the bottle from which he had been drinking since early morning, and set it clumsily down on the table in front of him. Then he turned and stumbled out to get a breath of fresh air. Nobody went after him; he had no friends left in the Fortress. His old allies were too embarrassed by his excesses to publicly share his opinions; fearful that his behaviour might reflect poorly on them, and keep them from advancement. So he was alone as he wandered giddily through the ruins of the dead vines. It was evening, and now that the summer was past, the air was beginning to get chilly. But the sky overhead was a perfect blue, and there was a new moon, its pallid crescent just clearing the mountains.

Sandru tried to let the sight of the sky and moon calm him; have them placate the pain of his heart, give life back to his numbed fingers. But the trick was beyond them. He realized suddenly that this was not a spasm brought on by too much brandy. He was dying.

The brothers had medicines for weakness of the heart, he knew; it would not be the end of him if he got back to them quickly enough. He turned on his heel, attempting to voice a shout of alarm. But his panicked chest would provide no breath for him to cry for help. His legs began to fail him, and down he went, face first, into the earth. He tasted the soil in his mouth, bitter and unappetizing. He spat it out; and with the last of his strength he pushed himself up out of the filth and let gravity roll him over.

He could not move, but it didn’t matter. The darkening sky overhead was spectacle enough. He lay there for six or seven shortening gasps, while a star, lonely in its solitude, brightened at his zenith. Then he let life go.

The brothers did not find him until the middle of the night, by which time a frost had settled on the old vineyard, the first frost of that autumn. It glittered on the bulk of the dead Father; on his bulbous nose and in the knots of his beard. It had even inscribed its filigrees on his unblinking eyes.

Chapter 4

There was no hospital established at the Fortress; then or ever. Nor was there any attempt to replant the vineyard, or make the grounds around the Fortress in any way flourish. With Father Sandru’s passing (at the relatively tender age of sixty-two), what little enthusiasm there had been for change withered. The younger men decided to leave the Fortress; three of them left the Order entirely and became members of the secular community. Of the three, one – a young man by the name of Jan Valek took his own life less than a year later, leaving a long suicide note, a kind of epistle to his sometime brothers, in which he wrote of how he’d had a dream after the death of Father Sandru, in which ‘I met the Father in the vineyards, which were all burning. It was a terrible place to be. Black smoke was filling the sky, blotting out the sun. He said to me that this was Hell, this world, and there was only one way to escape it, and that was to die. His face was bright, even in the darkness. He said he wished he’d died earlier, instead of going on suffering in the world.

‘I asked him if they allowed him to drink brandy wherever he was now. He said he had no need of brandy; his existence was happy; there was no need to conceal the pain with drinking.

‘Then I told him I still had a life to live in the world, whereas he had been an old man, with a weak heart. I was strong, I said, and there was a good chance I’d be alive for another thirty, maybe forty years, which was an agony to me, but what could I do?

‘“So take your own life,” he said to me. He made it sound so simple. “Cut your throat. God understands.”

‘“He does?” I said to him.

‘“Certainly,” he told me. “This world is Hell. Just look around. What do you see?”

‘I told him what I saw. Fire, smoke, black earth.

‘“See?” he said. “Hell.”

‘I told him, though of course I was still dreaming, I was going to take his advice. I was going to go back to my room, find a sharp knife, and kill myself. But for some reason, as often happens in dreams, I didn’t go home. I went into Bucharest. To the cinema where Brother Stefan used to bring me sometimes, to see films. We went inside. It was very dark. We found seats and Stefan had me sit down. Then the film began. And it was a film about some earthly paradise. It made me weep, it was so perfect, this place. The music, the way the people looked. Beautiful men and women, all so lovely it took my breath away to look at them. There was one young man in particular – and it makes me ashamed to write this, but if I don’t do it here, in my last confession, where will I do it? – a young man with dark hair and light-filled eyes, who opened his arms to me. He was naked, on the screen, with open arms, inviting me into his embrace. I turned to Father Stefan in the darkness, and he said the very thing that was going through my mind. “He wants to take you into his arms.”

‘I started to deny it. But Stefan interrupted me and said: “Look at him. Look at his face. It’s flawless. Look at his body. It’s perfect. And there – between his legs –”

‘I covered my face in shame, but Stefan pulled my hands from my face and told me not to be ashamed, just to look, and enjoy looking. “God made all of this for our pleasure,” he said. “Why would he give us such a hunger to look at nakedness unless he wanted us to take pleasure in it?”

‘I asked Stefan how he knew it was God’s work. Perhaps the Devil had made nakedness, I said, to tempt us and ensnare us. He laughed, and put his arm around me, and kissed me on the cheek as though I was just a little child.

‘“This isn’t the Devil’s work,” he said. “This is your invitation to paradise.” Then he kissed me again, and I felt a warm wind blowing, as though it was spring in whatever country they had created on the screen. And the wind made me want to die with pleasure, because it smelled of a time I remembered from long ago.

‘So now I have come back to my room. I have a knife. When I have finished writing this I will leave what I have written on the table, and I will go out into the field, and cut my wrists. I know we are taught that self-slaughter is a sin, and that the Lord does not wish us to harm ourselves, but if He does not wish me to end my life, why is this knife within reach of my hand, and why is my heart so much at peace?’

His body was found about a hundred yards from the place where Sandru’s frost-covered body had been discovered. Coming so soon upon the death of the old priest, the death of Jan Valek undid the Brotherhood completely. Orders came from Bucharest, and the Brotherhood was disbanded. There was no need to guard the Fortress any longer, the Archbishop said. The brothers would be more useful to the Church if they worked with the sick and the dying, to offer the Lord’s comfort where it was most needed.

Within a week, the Order of St Teodor had left the Fortress Goga.

There were those among the villagers who felt that the Fortress had invited its abandonment, and began its own process of self-slaughter. Superstition, no doubt; but it was certainly strange that after five centuries of life, during which span it had remained strong, a quick process of disintegration should begin as soon as the community of caretakers departed.

True, the winter immediately following was particularly severe. But there had been heavier snows on the roofs and they had not bowed beneath the weight; there had been stronger winds through the casements and they’d not broken open and smashed, there had been more persistent floodings of the lower floors, and the doors had not been carried off on their rotted hinges.

By the time the spring came round – which was late April that year – the Fortress had effectively become uninhabitable. It was as though its soul had gone out of it, and now all it wanted was to allow the seasons to take their steady toll. They were guileless collaborators. The summer was as violently hot as the winter had been bitter, and it bred all manner of destroyers in the fabric of the building. Worm and fly and wasp contributed to the baking heat of the sun with their burrowings and layings and nestings. Beams that had taken ten men to lift them became dusty, hollow things, as delicate as the bones of immense birds. Unable to support their own weight, they collapsed upon themselves, bringing down entire floors as they fell. By the time September arrived, the Fortress was open to the elements. The ward where the brothers had optimistically laid out rows of beds now had a ceiling of cloud. When the first rains of autumn came the mattresses were soaked; fungus and mildew sprouted where the sick would have lain. The place stank of rot from end to end.

And finally, somewhere in the middle of the second winter in its empty state, the floorboards cracked and opened up, and the lowest level of the Fortress, the level where Father Sandru had brought Zeffer to show him the tiled chamber, became available to sky and storm. If anyone had ventured into the Fortress that winter they would have witnessed the most delicate of spectacles. Through the eight vaults above the once-tiled room – which were now all cracked like eggs – snow came spiralling down. It fell into a room denuded. The workmen Zeffer had hired to do the work of removing the tiles had first been obliged to empty the room of all the monks had left in there. Some of the furniture had subsequently been stolen, some broken up for firewood, and the rest – perhaps a quarter of the bounty – simply left to decay where it had been piled up. The snow settled in little patches on the floor; patches which would not melt for the next four months, but only get wider and deeper as the winter’s storms got worse, the snow heavier.

Just before the thaw, in the middle of the following April, the weight of snow and ice finally brought the vaults down, in one calamitous descent. There was nobody there to witness it, nor anyone within earshot to hear it. The room which had contained the Hunt was buried in the debris of all the vaults, plaster and wood and stone filling the chamber to the middle of the walls. Nobody who visited the Fortress in subsequent years – and there were a few explorers who came there every summer, usually imagining they’d stumbled on something darkly marvellous – a Fortress, perhaps, belonging to Vlad the Impaler, whose legendary territories lay only a few hundred miles off to the west, in Transylvania – none of these visitors dug through the overgrown ruins with any great enthusiasm; certainly none ever asked themselves what function the half-buried room might have once served. Nor, should it be said, would they have been able to guess, even the cleverest of them. The mystery of the ruined chamber had been removed to another continent, where it was presently unfolding its dubious raptures for the delectation of a new and vulnerable audience. Men and women who – like the tiles – had in many cases lately left their homelands; and in their haste to be famous left behind them such talismans as hearth and altar might have offered by way of protection against the guileful Hunt.

PART TWO

_________________

THE HEART-THROB
Chapter 1

There’s a premiere in Los Angeles tonight, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The Chinese has been housing such events since 1923, but of course the crowds were much larger back then, tens of thousands of people, sometimes even hundreds of thousands, would block Hollywood Boulevard in their hunger to see the star of the moment. Tonight’s event is nowhere near that scale. Though the studio publicists will massage the numbers for tomorrow’s Variety and Hollywood Reporter, claiming that a crowd of four thousand people waited in the chilly evening air for the appearance of the star of tonight’s movie, Todd Pickett, the true numbers are in fact less than half that.

Still, a third of the Boulevard is barricaded off, and there are a few cop cars in evidence, just to give the whole event more drama.

As the limos approach the red carpet, and the ushers, who are dressed in the black leather costumes of the villains in the movie, step forward to open the doors a few ‘screamers’, paid and planted in the crowd by the studio publicity people to get a little excitement going, start to do their job, yelling even before the face of the limo’s passenger has been seen. There’s a large contingent of A-list names on tonight’s guest-list, and plenty of faces that elicit screams as they appear. Cruise isn’t here, but Nicole Kidman is; so is Schwarzenegger, who has a small role in the picture as the retiring Gallows, a vengeful, mythological character whom our hero, played by Todd Pickett, must either choose to embody when his time comes round, or – should he refuse – be pursued by the ghosts of several generations of former incarnations of the character, to persuade him otherwise. Sigourney Weaver plays the woman who has broken the curse of Gallows once before, to whom Pickett’s character must go when the phantom pursuers are almost upon him. Her arrival at Grauman’s is greeted by a genuine roar of approval from the fans, who are devoted to her. She waves, smiles, allows a barrage of photographs to be taken, but she doesn’t go near the crowd. She’s had experiences with overly-possessive fans before: she walks straight down the middle of the red carpet, where she’s out of reach of their fingers. Still they shout, ‘We love you Ripley!’, which is the character she plays in the Alien movies, and with which she will be identified until the day she dies. She waves, even when they call the name Ripley, but her eyes never focus on anybody in the crowd for more than a moment.

The next limo in the line contains the bright new star of Gallows, Suzie Henstell, named by this month’s Vanity Fair one of the Ten Hottest Names in Hollywood. She is petite (though you’d never know it on the screen), blonde and giggly; she’s shared a little marijuana with her boyfriend in the limo, and it was a bad move. She stumbles a little as she steps onto the red carpet, but the crowd has been prepped, thanks to several months of puff pieces and photo-spreads and in-depth interviews, to think of this woman as a full-blown star, even though they have yet to see more than a few frames of her acting ability from the trailer for Gallows. So what do they care if she looks a little out of it? Unlike Ms Weaver, who wisely chooses to be elusive, allowing the photographers just a minute or two to catch her, the new girl is still hungry for adulation. She goes straight to the barricades, where a number of young women with souvenir programmes for Gallows are waving them around. She signs a few, giving her boyfriend, who is a six-foot Calvin Klein model hunk, a goofy ‘gee-I-must-be-famous!’ look. The model looks back vacantly, which is the only look in his repertoire. He can give it to you vacantly with a semi hard-on in his jeans, or vacantly with his ass hanging out of his Y-fronts. Either way, it is heart-achingly beautiful; almost troublingly so.

The wind comes in gusts along Hollywood Boulevard, and the security men start to look a little worried. It was some bright publicist’s idea to build two gallows, as a kind of gateway through which the audience for the premiere will need to come. Not, it now seems, a clever notion. The gallows are made to be trashed tomorrow morning, so they’re made of light timber and foam-core. The wind is threatening to topple them; or worse, pick them up entirely and deposit them on top of the crowd. Light though they are, they could do some serious damage if they fell.

Four of the ushers from inside the theatre are summoned from their duties and told to go and stand beside the gallows, two on either side, holding on to them as casually as possible. Security is told that the publicity people only need five more minutes. As soon as Suzie Henstell can be persuaded to move on up the carpet and into the building (which at present she is showing no desire to do), the director’s, Rob Neiderman’s, limo can be brought to the carpet, followed by the last and most important of the bunch, Todd Pickett.

The wind is getting worse; the gallows sway giddily. An executive decision is made to bring Neiderman’s limo in, and if Suzie’s screaming fans are visible waving like lunatics behind Neiderman in his press pictures, so be it. This isn’t a perfect world. It’s already 8:13p.m. At this rate the picture won’t be able to begin until half past the hour, which wouldn’t be a problem if the damn thing weren’t so long, but Neiderman’s cut came in at two hours and forty-three minutes, and though the studio appealed to Pickett to get him to shave the thing down to a tight two hours, Todd came back saying he liked the picture pretty much as it was, so only four minutes were going out of it. That means it’ll be past eleven before the picture’s finished, and almost midnight by the time everybody’s assembled at the party venue. It’s going to be a long night.

Neiderman has persuaded the easily-distracted Miss Henstell away from her fans and down the carpet to the door. The big moment is at hand. The ushers cling to the gallows, their jobs depending on the perpendicularity of their charges. The largest of the limos comes up to the kerb. Even before the door has opened, the fans – especially the women – are in a state of ecstasy, shrieking at the top of their voices.

‘Todd! Todd! Oh God! Todd!’

The cameras start to flash, as though the incomprehensible semaphore of their flashes is going to summon the man in the limo.

And out comes Todd Pickett, the star of Gallows, the reason why ninety-five percent of its audience will be there when it opens next Friday (it is now Monday); Todd Pickett, one of the three biggest male action-movie-stars in the history of cinema. Todd Pickett, the boy from Cincinnati who failed in all his grades but ended up the King of Hollywood.

He raises his hands like a presidential candidate, to acknowledge the shouts of the crowd. Then he reaches back into the limo to catch hold of the hand of his date for the night, Wilhemina Bosch, a waitress-turned-model-turned-actress-turned-model again, with whom he has been seen at parties and premieres for the past four months, though neither will say anything about the relationship than that they’re good friends.

He gathers Wilhemina to him, so that the photographers can get pictures of them together.Then arm in arm, through the blizzard of lights and the barrage of We love you, Todd! coming at them from every side, the pair make their way to the cinema doors, which – having gathered their most important guests into the fold, then close rather defiantly, as if to divide the important from the unimportant, the stable and the solid from those who are simply objects of the night’s wind.

Gallows is an irredeemable piece of shit, of course, and everyone involved with it, from the executives who green-lit it (at a cost of some ninety-million dollars, before prints and advertising costs add another thirty-seven to the bill) to the humblest publicist, knows.

It is, in the words of Corliss’s review in Time, ‘an old fashioned action-horror picture which lacks the full-bone theatrics of grand guignol, and the savvy, John-Woo-style action piece audiences have come to expect. One minute Schwarzenegger is camping it up, the next Todd Pickett, as his unwilling successor, is playing his scenes as though he’s Hamlet on a particularly dreary night in Denmark. From beginning to end, Gallows is bad noose.’

Everybody going up the red carpet that Monday night already knows what Time is going to say; Corliss had made his contempt for the picture very plain in a piece about the state of action movies he wrote two weeks before. Nor does it take an oracle to predict that there will be others who will not like the picture. But the extent of vitriol will prove astonishing, even to those who expected the worst. In the next forty-eight hours, Gallows will garner some of the most negative reviews of the last twelve months, the vehemence of the early news reviewers empowering minor names to pull out the stops. Besides the incomprehensible script, everyone agrees, there is a lacklustre quality to the picture that betrays the cast’s indifference to the entire project. Performances aren’t simply uneven, they seemed designed for entirely different movies: a hopeless mismatch of styles. The worst culprit in this regard? There is no question about that. All the reviewers will agree that the most inadequate performance comes from its star, Todd Pickett.

People writes that: ‘Mr Pickett is plenty old enough to know better. Thirty-something-year-olds don’t act the way Mr Pickett acts here: his trademark “young man with a chip on his shoulder and a thousand-watt smile,” which was looking stale the second (all right, the third) time he did it, seems particularly out-of-place here. Though it seems incredible that time has passed so fast since America first swooned to the charms of Mr Pickett – he’s now simply too old to play the twenty-something Vincent. Only Wilhemina Bosch, as Vincent’s Prozac-chewing sister, comes out of this mess with any credibility. She has an elegant, beautifully-proportioned face, and she can turn a line with the snappy, East-coast smarts of a young Katharine Hepburn. She’s wasted here. Or, more correctly, our time would be wasted here were she not in the movie.’

The premiere audience didn’t seem to mind it. On occasion there were audible gasps and loud laughter (perhaps in truth a little over-loud, a little fake) for the jokes, but there were several long stretches in the Second Act, when the movie seemed to lose their interest. Even in the Third Act, when the action relocates to the orbiting space station, and the special effects budget soared, there was very little real enthusiasm. A few scattered whoops of nihilistic delight when the villain’s planet-destroying weapon actually went off, against expectation, and Washington DC is fried to a crisp. But then, as the smoke cleared and Todd, as the new Gallows, proceeded to finish off the bad guys, the audience became restless again.

About fifteen minutes before the end credits rolled a member of the audience got up from his seat on the aisle and went to the bathroom. A few people caught a look at the man’s face as he looked back at the screen. It was Todd Pickett, lit by the light of his own face. Nobody got up to ask for his autograph.

Pickett stared at the screen for a moment only, then he turned his back on it and trudged up and out of the cinema. He didn’t go to the restroom. Instead he asked

one of the ushers if he could be allowed out of the back of the building. The usher explained that the area around the back had no security.

‘I just want a quiet smoke with nobody watching me,’ Todd explained.

The usher said, sure, why not, and led Todd down a passageway that ran behind the screen. Todd looked up at his reversed image on the screen. All he could remember about the scene that was playing was how damn uncomfortable his costume had been.

‘Here you go,’ the usher said, unlocking the doors at the end of the corridor, and letting Todd out into an area lit only by the ambient light from the Boulevard.

‘Thanks,’ Todd said, giving him a twenty-buck bill. ‘I’ll be back out front by the time the credits roll.’

The usher thanked him for the twenty-note and left him to himself.

Todd took out a cigarette, but it never got to his lips. A wave of nausea overtook him, so powerful and so sudden that it was all he could do not to puke down his own tuxedo. Up came the scotches he’d had in the limo as he drove on down to the premiere, and the pepperoni pizza, with three cheeses and extra anchovies, he’d had to add ballast. With the first heave over (something told him there were more to come) he had the presence of mind to look around, and confirm that this nasty little scene was not being spied on, or worse, photographed. Luckily, he was alone. All he had for company back here was the detritus of premieres past; piles of standees and gaudy scenery pieces designed to advertise movies gone by: Mel Gibson against an eruption of lurid flame; Godzilla’s eye; the bottom half of a girl in a very short dress. He got to his feet and stumbled away from the stench of his vomit, making his way through this graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest place he could find in which to hide his giddy head. Behind him, through the still-open door, he could hear the sound of gunfire, and the muted sound of his own voice:

‘Come on out, you sonofabitch,’ he was yelling to some-body.By now, if the movie had been working, the audience would have been yelling and screaming, wild with blood-lust. But despite the over-amped soundtrack, nobody was yelling, because nobody gave a damn. The movie was dying on its feet.

Another wave of nausea rose up in him. He reached out to catch hold of something so that he didn’t fall down and his outstretched hand knocked over a cardboard cut-out of Tom Cruise, which toppled backwards and hit a cardboard Titanic, which in turn crashed against a cardboard Mighty Joe Young, and so on and so forth, like a row of candy-coloured dominoes, stars falling against ships falling against monsters, all toppling back into a darkness so deep they were an indistinguishable heap.

Luckily, the noise of his vomiting was covered by the din of his own movie. He puked again, twice, until his stomach had nothing left to give up. Then he turned his back on the vomit and the toppled idols, and stepped away to find a lungful of clean air to inhale. The worst was over. He lit his cigarette, which helped settle his stomach, and rather than returning inside, where the picture was two minutes from finishing, he walked along the side of the building until he found a patch of street-light where he could assess himself. He was lucky. His suit was unspattered. There was a spot of vomit on his shoes, but he cleaned it off with his handkerchief (which he tossed away) and then sprayed his tongue and throat with wintergreen breath-cleanser. His hair was cropped short (that was the way it was in the movie, and he’d kept the style for public appearances), so he had no fear that it was out of place. He probably looked a little pale, but what the hell? Pale was in.

There was a gate close to the front of the building, guarded by a security officer. She recognized Todd immediately, and unlocked the gate.

‘Getting out before it gets too crazy?’ she said to him. He smiled and nodded. ‘You want an escort to your car?’

‘Yeah, thanks.’

One of the executive producers, an over-eager Englishman called George Dipper, with whom Todd had never worked before, was standing on the red carpet, his presence ignored by the press, who were standing around chatting to one another, or checking their cameras before the luminaries reappeared. George caught Todd’s eye, and hurried over, dragging on his own cigarette as though his life depended on its nicotine content.

There was scattered applause from inside, which quickly died away. The picture was over.

‘I think it played brilliantly,’ George said, his eyes begging for a syllable of agreement. ‘They were with us all the way. Don’t you think so?’

‘It was fine,’ Todd said, without commitment.

‘Forty million, the first weekend.’

‘Don’t get your hopes up.’

‘You don’t think we’ll do forty?’

‘I think it’ll do fine.’

George’s face lit up. Todd Pickett, the man he’d paid twenty million dollars to (plus a sizeable portion of the back-end) was declaring it fine. God was in His Heaven. For a terrible moment Todd thought the man was going to weep with relief.

‘At least there’s nothing big opening against it,’ Todd said. ‘So we’ve got one weekend clear.’

‘And your fans are loyal,’ George said. Again, the desperation in the eyes.

Todd couldn’t bear to look at him any longer.

‘I’m just goin’ to make a quick getaway,’ Todd said, glancing towards the theatre doors.

The first of the crowd were emerging. If the expressions on the first five faces he scanned were an omen, his instincts were right: they did not have a hit. He turned his back on the crowd, telling George he’d see him later.

‘You are coming to the party?’ George said, hanging on to him as he headed down the carpet.

Where was Marco? Todd thought. Trusty Marco, who was always there when he was needed. ‘Yes, I’ll pop in later,’ he said, glancing back over his shoulder at George to reassure him.

In the seconds since he’d turned away the audience spilling from the theatre door had jumped from five to a hundred. Half of them saw him. In just a few seconds they’d be surrounding him, yelling his name, telling him they loved this and they hated that, touching him, pulling on him –

‘Here, boss!’

Marco called to him from the kerb. The limo door was open. God bless him! Todd raced down the carpet as people behind him started to call his name; cameras started to flash. Into the limo. Marco slammed the door. Todd locked it. Then Marco dashed around to the driver’s seat with a remarkable turn of speed given his poundage, and got in.

‘Where to?’

‘Mulholland.’

Mulholland Drive winds through the city like a lazy serpent for many miles; but Marco didn’t need to know where along its length his boss wanted to be taken. There was a spot close to Coldwater Canyon, where the undulating drive offers a picture-perfect view of the San Fernando Valley, as far as the mountains. By day it can be a smog-befouled spectacle, brown and grey. But by night, especially in the summer, it is a place of particular enchantment: the cities of Burbank, North Hollywood and Pasadena laid out in a matrix of amber lights, receding to the dark wall of the mountains. And moving against the darkness, the lights of planes circling as they await their instruction to land at Burbank Airport, or the police helicopters passing over the city, spitting a beam of white light.

Often there were sightseers parked at the spot, enjoying the scene. But tonight, thank God, there were none. Marco parked the car and Todd got out, wandering to the cliff-edge to look at the scene before him.

Marco got out too, and occupied his time with wiping the windshield of the limo. He was a big man with the bearded face of a bear recently woken from hibernation, and he possessed a curious mixture of talents: a sometime wrestler and ju-jitsu black belt, he was also a trained Cordon Bleu cook (not that Todd’s taste called for any great culinary sophistication) and a twice-divorced father of three with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the works of Wagner. More importantly, he was Todd’s right-hand man; loyal to a fault. There was no part of Todd’s existence Marco Caputo did not have some part of. He took care of the hiring and firing of domestic staff and gardeners, the buying and the driving of cars, and of course all the security duties.

‘The movie’s shit, huh?’ he said matter-of-factly.

‘Worse than.’

‘Sorry ’bout that.’

‘Not your fault. I should never have done it. Shit script. Shit movie.’

‘You want to give the party a miss?’

‘Nah. I gotta go. I promised Wilhemina. And George.’

‘You got something going with her?’

‘Wilhemina? Yeah. I got something. I just don’t know whether I want to. Plus she’s got an English boyfriend.’

‘The English are all fags.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You want me to swing by the party and bring her back up to the house for you?’

‘Suppose she says no?’

‘Oh come on. When did any girl say no to you?’

Todd said nothing. He just stared out over the vista of lights. The wind came up out of the valley, smelling of gas fumes and Chinese food. The Santa Anas, hot off the Mojave, gusted against his face. He closed his eyes to enjoy the moment, but what came into his head was an image of himself: a still from the movie he’d fled from tonight. He studied the face in his mind’s eye for a moment.

Then he said: ‘I look tired.’

Chapter 2

Todd Pickett had made two of his three most successful pictures under the aegis of a producer by the name of Keever Smotherman. The first of them was called Gunner; the kind of high concept, testosterone-marinated picture Smotherman had been renowned for making. It had made Todd – who was then an unknown from Ohio – a bona-fide movie star, if not overnight then certainly within a matter of weeks. He hadn’t been required to turn in a performance. Smotherman didn’t make movies that required actors, only breath-taking physical specimens. And Todd was certainly that. Every time he stepped before the cameras, whether he was sharing the scene with a girl or a fighter-plane, he was all the eye wanted to watch. The camera worked some kind of alchemy upon him; and he worked the same magic on celluloid.

In life, he was good-looking, but flawed. He was a little on the short side, with broad hips; he was also conspicuously bandy. But on the screen, all these flaws disappeared. He became gleaming, studly perfection, his jaw-line heroic, his gaze crystalline, his mouth an uncommon mingling of the sensual and the severe. His particular beauty had suited the taste of the times, and by the end of that first, extraordinary summer of coming-to-fame his image, dressed in an immaculate white uniform which made poetry of his buttocks, had become an indelible piece of cinema iconography.

Over the years, other stars had risen just as high, of course, and many just as quickly. But few were quite as ready for their ascent as Todd Pickett. This was what he’d been polishing himself for since the moment his mother, Patricia Donna Pickett, had first taken him into a cinema in downtown Cincinnati. Looking up at the screen, watching the parade of faces pass before him, he’d known instinctively (at least so he later claimed) that he belonged up there with those stars, and that if he willed it hard enough, willed and worked for it, then it was merely a matter of time before he joined the parade.

After the success of Gunner, he fell effortlessly into the labours of being a movie star. In interviews he was courteous, funny and self-effacing, playing the interviewers so easily that all but the most cynical swooned. He was confident about his charms, but he wasn’t cocky; loyal to his Mid-Western roots and boyishly devoted to his mother. Most attractive of all, he was honest about his shortcomings as an actor. There was a refreshing lack of pretension about the Pickett persona.

The year after Gunner, he made two pictures back to back. Another action blockbuster for Smotherman, called Lightning Rod, which was released on Independence Day and blew all former box-office records to smithereens, and then, for the Christmas market, Life Lessons. The latter was a sweetly sentimental slip of a story, in which Todd played opposite Sharon Campbell, a Playboy model turned actress who had been tabloid fodder at the time thanks to her recent divorce from an alcoholic and abusive husband. The pairing of Pickett and Campbell had worked like a charm, and the reviews for Todd’s performance were especially kind. While he was still relying on his physical gifts, the critics observed, there were definitely signs that he was taking on the full responsibilities of an actor, digging deeper into himself to engage his audience. Nor was he afraid to show weakness; twice in Life Lessons he was required to sob like a baby, and he did so very convincingly. The picture was a huge hit, meaning that both of the big money-makers of the year had Todd’s name above the title. He was officially box-office gold.

For most of the following decade he could do no wrong. Inevitably, some of his pictures performed better than others, but even the disappointments were triumphs by comparison with the fumbling labours of most of his contemporaries.

Of course, he wasn’t making the choice of material on his own. From the beginning he’d had a close relationship with his manager, Maxine Frizelle, a short, sharp bitch of a woman in her mid-forties who’d once been voted the Most Despised Person in Hollywood, and had asked, when the news had reached her, if the awards ceremony was full evening dress. Though she’d been representing other clients when she first took Todd on, she’d let them all go once his career began to demand her complete attention. Thereafter she lived and breathed the Pickett business, controlling every element of his life, private and professional. The price she asked studios for his services rapidly rose to unheard-of heights, and she drove the deal home every single time. She had an opinion about everything: rewrites, casting, the hiring of directors, art-directors, costume designers and directors of photographers. Her only concern was the best interests of her wonder-boy. In the language of an older but similarly feudal system, she was the power behind the throne; and everyone who worked with Todd, from the heads of studios to humble hair-stylists, had some encounter with her to relate, some scar to show.

Needless to say, the Pickett magic couldn’t remain unchallenged forever. There were always new stars in the ascendancy, new faces with the new smiles appearing on the screen every season, and after ten years of devotion the audience that had doted on Todd in the mid-to-late eighties began to look elsewhere for its heroes. It wasn’t that his pictures performed less well, but that others performed even better. A new definition of a blockbuster had appeared; money-machines like Independence Day and Titanic, which earned so much so quickly that pictures which would once have been called major hits were now in contrast simply modest successes.

Anxious to regain the ground he was losing, Todd decided to go back into business with Smotherman, who was just as eager to return to their glory days together. The project they’d elected to do together was a movie called Warrior: a piece of high concept junk about a street-fighter from Brooklyn who is brought through time to champion a future earth in a battle against marauding aliens. The script was a ludicrous concoction of clichés pulled from every cheesy science-fiction B-movie of the fifties, and an early budget had put the picture somewhere in the region of a hundred million dollars simply to get it on screen, but Smotherman was confident that he could persuade either Fox or Paramount to green-light it. The show had everything, he said: an easily-grasped idea (primitive fighting man outwits hyper-intelligent intergalactic empire, using cunning and brute force); a dozen action sequences which called for state-of-the-art effects, and the kind of hero Todd could perform in his sleep: an ordinary man put in an extraordinary situation. It was a no-brainer, all round. The studios would be fools not to green-light it; it had all the marks of a massive hit.

He was nothing if not persuasive. In person, Smotherman was almost a parody of a high-voltage salesman: fast-talking, short-tempered and over-sexed. There was never an absence of ‘babes’, as he still called them, in his immediate vicinity; all were promised leading roles when they’d performed adequately for Smotherman in private, and all, of course, were discarded the instant he tired of them.

Preparations for Warrior were proceeding nicely. Then the unthinkable happened. A week shy of his forty-fourth birthday, Smotherman died. He’d always been a man of legendary excess, a bottom-feeder happiest in the gamier part of any city. The circumstances of his death were perfectly consistent with this reputation: he’d died sitting at a table in a private club in New York, watching a lesbian sex show, the coronary that had felled him so massive and so sudden he had apparently been overtaken by it before he could even cry out for help. He was face down in a pile of cocaine when he was found, a drug he’d continued to consume in heroic quantities long after his contemporaries had cleaned up their acts and had their sinuses surgically reconstructed. It was one of the thirty-five illegal substances found in his system at the autopsy.

He was buried in Las Vegas, according to the instructions in his will. He’d been happiest there, he’d always said, with everything to win and everything to lose.

This remark was twice quoted at the memorial service, and hearing it, Todd felt a cold trickle of apprehension pass down his spine. What Smotherman had known, and been at peace with, was the fact that all of Tinseltown was a game – and it could be lost in a heartbeat. Smotherman had been a gambling man. He’d taken pleasure in the possibility of failure and it had sweetened his success. Todd, on the other hand, had never even played the slots, much less a game of poker or roulette. Sitting there listening to the hypocrites – most of whom had despised Smotherman – stand up and extol the dead man, he realized that Keever’s passing cast a pall over his future. The golden days were over. His place in the sun would very soon belong to others; if it didn’t already.

The day after the memorial service he poured his fears out to Maxine. She was all reassurance.

‘Smotherman was a dinosaur,’ she said as she sipped her vodka. ‘The only reason people put up with his bullshit all those years was because he made everybody a lot of money. But let’s be honest: he was a low-life. You’re a class act. You’ve got nothing to worry about.’

‘I don’t know,’ Todd said, his head throbbing from one too many drinks. ‘I look at myself sometimes …’

‘And what?’

‘I’m not the guy I was when I made Gunner.’

‘Damn right you’re not. You were nobody then. Now you’re one of the most successful actors in history.’

‘There’s others coming up.’

‘So what?’ Maxine said, waving his concerns away.

‘Don’t do that!’ Todd said, slamming his palm down on the table. ‘Don’t try and placate me! Okay? We have a problem. Smotherman was going to put me back on top, and now the son of a bitch is dead!’

‘All right. Calm down. All I’m saying is that we don’t need Smotherman. We’ll hire somebody to rework the script, if that’s what you want. Then we’ll find somebody hip to direct it. Somebody with a contemporary style. Smotherman was an old-fashioned guy. Everything had to be big. Big explosions. Big tits. Big guns. Audiences don’t care about any of that any more. You need to be part of what’s coming up, not what happened yesterday. You know, I hate to say it, but perhaps Keever’s dying is the best thing that could have happened. We need a new look for you. A new Todd Pickett.’

‘You think it’s as simple as that?’ Todd said. He wanted so much to believe that Maxine had the problem solved.

‘How difficult can it be?’ Maxine said. ‘You’re a great star. We just need to get people focussed on you again.’ She pondered for a moment. ‘You know what? We should set up a lunch with Gary Eppstadt.’

‘Oh Jesus, why? You know how I hate that ugly little fuck.’

‘An ugly little fuck he may be. But he is going to pay for Warrior. And if he’s going to put twenty million and a slice of the back-end on the table for your services to art, you can make nice with the son of a bitch for an hour.’

Chapter 3

It wasn’t simply personal antipathy that had made Todd refer to Eppstadt so unflatteringly. It was the unvarnished truth. Eppstadt was the ugliest man in Los Angeles. Charitably, his eyes might have been called reptilian, his lips unkissable. His mother, in a fit of blind affection, might have noted that he was disproportioned. All this said, the man was still a narcissist of the first rank. He hung only the most expensive suits on his unfortunate carcass: his fingernails were manicured with obsessive precision; his personal barber trimmed his dyed hair every morning, having shaved him first with a straight razor.

There had been countless prayers offered up to that razor over the years, entreating it to slip! But Eppstadt seemed to live a charmed life. He’d gone from strength to strength as he moved around the studios, claiming the paternity of every success, and blaming the failures on those who stood immediately behind him on the ladder, whom he promptly fired. It was the oldest trick in the book, but it had worked flawlessly. In an age in which corporations increasingly had the power, and studios were run by committees of business-school graduates and lawyers with an itch to have their fingers in the creative pie, Eppstadt was one of the old school. A powermonger, happiest in the company of somebody who needed his patronage, whom he could then abuse in a hundred subtle ways. That was his pleasure, and his revenge. What did he need beauty for, when he could make it tremble with a smiling maybe?

He was in a fine mood when he and Todd, with Maxine in attendance, met for lunch on Monday. Paramount had carried the weekend with a brutal revenge picture that Eppstadt had taken a hand in making, firing the director off the project after two unpromising preview screenings, and hiring somebody else to shoot a rape scene and a new ending, in which the violated woman terrorized and eventually dispatched her attacker with a hedge-cutter.

‘Thirty-two point six million dollars in three days,’ he preened. ‘In January. That’s a hit. And you know what? There’s nobody in the picture. Just a couple no-name TV stars. It was all marketing.’

‘Is the picture any good?’ Todd asked.

‘Yeah, it’s fucking Hamlet,’ Eppstadt said, without missing a beat. ‘You’re looking weary, my friend,’ he went on. ‘You need a vacation. I’ve been taking time at this monastery –’

‘Monastery?’

‘Sounds crazy, right? But you feel the peace. You feel the tranquillity. And they take Jews. Actually, I’ve seen more Jews there than at my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah. You should try it. Take a rest.’

‘I don’t want to rest. I want to work. We need to set a start-date for Warrior.’

Eppstadt’s enthusiastic expression dimmed. ‘Oh, Christ. Is that what this little lunch is all about, Maxine?’

‘Are you making it or not?’ Todd pressed. ‘Because there’s plenty of other people who will if you won’t.’

‘So maybe you should take it to one of them,’ Eppstadt said, his gaze hooded. ‘You can have it in turnaround, if that’s what you want. I’ll get business affairs on it this afternoon.’

‘So you’re really ready to let it go?’ Maxine said, putting on an air of indifference.

‘Perfectly ready, if that’s what Todd wants. I’m not going to stand in the way of you getting the picture made. You look surprised, Maxine.’

‘I am surprised. A package like that … it’s a huge summer movie for Paramount.’

‘Frankly I’m not sure this is the right time for the company to be making that kind of picture, Maxine. It’s a very hard market to read right now. And these expensive pictures. I mean, this is going to come in at well north of a hundred thirty million by the time we’ve paid for prints and advertising. I’m not sure that makes solid fiscal sense.’ He tried a smile; it was lupine. ‘Look, Todd: I want to be in business with you. Paramount wants to be in business with you. Christ, you’ve been a gold-mine for us over the years. But there’s a generation coming up – and you know the demographics as well as I do – these kids filling up the multiplexes, they don’t have any loyalty to the past.’

Eppstadt knew what effect his words were having, and he was savouring every last drop of it.

‘You see, in the good old days, the studios were able to carry stars through a weak patch. You had a star on a seven-year contract. He was being paid a weekly wage. You could afford a year or two of poor performance. But you’re expensive, Todd. You’re crucifyingly expensive. And I’ve got Viacom’s shareholders to answer to. I’m not sure they’d want to see me pay you twenty million dollars for a picture that might only gross … what did your last picture do? Forty-one domestic? And change?’

Maxine sighed, a little theatrically. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Gary.’

‘Look, Maxine, I’m sorry to be having to say it. Really I am. But numbers are numbers. If I don’t believe I can make a profit, what am I doing making the movie? You see where I’m coming from? That simply doesn’t make sense.’

Maxine got up from the table. ‘Will you excuse me a minute? I’ve got to make a call.’

Eppstadt caught the fire in Maxine’s voice.

‘No lawyers, Maxine. Please? We can do this in a civilized manner.’

Maxine didn’t reply. She simply stalked off between tables, snarling at a waiter who got in her way. Eppstadt ate a couple of mouthfuls of rare tuna, then put down his fork. ‘It’s times like this I wish I still smoked.’ He sat back in his chair and looked hard at Todd. ‘Don’t let her start a pissing competition, Todd, because if I’m cornered I’m going to have to stand up and tell it like it is. And then we’ll all have a mess on our hands.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning …’ Eppstadt looked pained; as though his proctologist was at work on him under the chair. ‘You can’t keep massaging numbers so your price looks justified when we all know it isn’t.’

‘You were saying I’d been a gold-mine for Paramount. Just two minutes ago you said that.’

‘That was then. This is now. That was Keever Smotherman, this is post-Keever Smotherman. He was the last of his breed.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘Well … let me tell you what I’m not saying,’ Eppstadt replied, his tone silky. ‘I’m not saying you don’t have a career.’

‘Well that’s nice to hear,’ Todd said sharply.

‘I want to find something we can do together. But …’

‘But?’

Eppstadt seemed to be genuinely considering his reply before he spoke. Finally, he said: ‘You’ve got talent, Todd. And you’ve obviously built a loyal fan-base over the years. What you don’t have is the drawing power you had back in the old days. It’s the same with all of you really expensive boys. Cruise. Costner. Stallone.’ He took a moment, then leaned closer to Todd, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘You want the truth? You look weary. I mean, deep down weary.’ Todd said nothing. Eppstadt’s observation was like being doused in ice-cold water. ‘Sorry to be blunt. It’s not like I’m telling you something you don’t already know.’

Todd was staring at his hand, wondering what it would feel like to make a fist and beat it against Eppstadt’s face; over and over and over.

‘Of course, you can have these things fixed,’ Gary went on chattily. ‘I know a couple of guys older than you who went to see Bruce Burrows and looked ten years younger when he was finished working on them.’

Still idly contemplating his hand, Todd said: ‘Who’s Bruce Burrows?’

‘Well, in many people’s opinion he’s the best cosmetic surgeon in the country. He’s got an office on Wilshire. Very private. Very expensive. But you can afford it. He does it all. Collagen replacements, lifts, peels, lipo-sculpture …’

‘Who went to see him?’

‘Oh, just about everybody. There’s nothing to be ashamed of: it’s a fact of life. At a certain age it’s harder to get the lovehandles to melt. You get laugh-lines, you get frown lines, you get those little grooves around your mouth.’

‘I haven’t got grooves around my mouth.’

‘Give it time,’ Eppstadt said, a touch avuncular now.

‘How long does it take?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never had any of it done. If I went in there, I’d never get out again.’

‘Too much to fix.’

‘I think it’s bad taste to jump on somebody else’s self-deprecation, Todd. But I forgive you. I know it hurts to hear this. The fact is, I don’t have to have my face out there fifty feet high. You do. That’s what they’re paying for.’ He pointed at Todd. ‘That face.’

‘If I was to get something done …’ Todd said tentatively, ‘about the lines, I mean?’

‘Yes?’

‘Would you make Warrior then?’

He had opened the door to Eppstadt’s favourite word: ‘Maybe. I don’t know. We’d have to see. But the way I look at it, you haven’t got much to lose getting the work done anyway. You’re a heart-throb. An old-fashioned heart-throb. They want to see you kick the shit out of the bad guy and get the girl. And they want their heart-throb perfect.’ He stared at Todd. ‘You need to be perfect. Burrows can do that for you. He can make you perfect again. Then you get back to being King of the Hill. Which is what you want, I presume.’

Todd admitted it with a little nod, as though it were a private vice.

‘Look, I sympathize,’ Eppstadt went on, ‘I’ve seen a lot of people just fold up when they lose their public. They come apart at the seams. You haven’t done that. At least not yet.’ He laid a hand on Todd’s arm. ‘You go have a word with Dr Burrows. See what he can do for you. Six months. Then we’ll talk again.’

Todd didn’t mention his discussion about Dr Burrows to Maxine. He didn’t want the decision process muddied by her opinion. This was something he wanted to think through for himself.

Though he didn’t remember having heard of Burrows before, he was perfectly aware he was living in the cosmetic surgery capital of the world. Noses were fixed, lips made fuller, crow’s feet erased, ears pinned back, laugh-lines smoothed, guts tucked, butts lifted, breasts enhanced. Just about any piece of the anatomy which gave its owner ego problems could be improved, sometimes out of all recognition. Traditionally of course, it had been women who were the eager and grateful recipients of such handiwork, but that had changed. One of the eighties muscle-men, who’d made a fortune parading a body of superhuman proportions some years before, but had begun to lose it to gravity, had returned to the screen last year looking more pumped than ever, his perfect abdominals and swelling pectorals – even his sculpted calf muscles – surgically implanted. The healing had taken a little while, given the extensiveness of the remodelling. He’d been out of commission for five months – hiding in Tuscany, the gossip went – while he mended. But it had worked. He’d left the screen looking like a beaten-up catcher’s mitt, and come back spanking new.

Todd began by making some very circuitous inquiries, the sort of questions which he hoped would not arouse suspicion. The word came back that the procedures were far from painless. Even legendary tough guys had ended up wishing they’d never invited the Drs to mess with them, the process had been so agonizing. And of course once you began, if you didn’t like what you saw you had to let Burrows make some more fixes; wounds on wounds, pain on pain.

But Todd wasn’t discouraged by the news. In fact in a curious way it made the idea of undergoing the procedures more palatable to him, playing as it did both into his machismo side and a deep, unexplored vein of masochism.

Besides, was there any pain on God’s green earth as agonizing as reading Daily Variety and finding that once again you weren’t in its pages? That other actors – names sometimes you’d never heard of – were getting the scripts, the parts and the deals that would once have dropped into your lap as a matter of course? There was no pain as sharp or as deep as the news of somebody else’s success. If it was an actor older than himself that was bad enough. But if it was a contemporary – or worse, somebody younger, somebody prettier – it made him so crazy he’d have to go pop a tranquillizer or three to stop himself getting morose and foul-tempered. And even the happy pills didn’t work the way they had in the old days. He’d taken too many; his body was too used to them.

So: what to do, what to do?

Should he sit on his slowly-expanding ass and start to avoid the mirror, or take the bull by the horns and get an appointment with Dr Burrows?

He remained undecided for about a week. And then one evening, sitting at home alone nursing a drink and flipping the channels of his sixty-inch TV, he came upon a segment from the telecast of last year’s Oscar ceremony. A young actor, whom he knew for a fact was not one of the smartest bunnies in town, was receiving his third Oscar of the night, for a picture he had – at least according to the credits – written, directed and starred in. The latter? Well there was no disputing that. He was in every other frame of the damn picture, back-lit and golden. He was playing a stuttering, mentally unstable poor boy from the Deep South, a role which he claimed he had based on the life of his father’s brother, who had died tragically at the hands of a lynch mob that had mistaken him for a rapist. It was all perfect Oscar-fodder: the ambitious young artist bucking the star system to tell a tale of the human spirit, rooted in his own family history.

Except that the truth was neither so moving nor so magical. Far from having been lynched, the ‘dead’ uncle was still very much alive, (or so gossip around town went) having spent twenty-two years in jail for a rape that he did not to this day contest. He had received a healthy pay-back from the studio that released the picture to stay conveniently quiet, so that his story could be told the Hollywood way, leaving the Golden Boy with his ten-thousand-watt smile to walk off with three Oscars for his mantelpiece. Todd had it on good authority that his directorial skills extended no further than knowing where his Winnebago was parked.

He wasn’t the only one aspiring to snatch Todd’s throne. There were plenty of others, chirpy little cock-suckers swarming out of the woodwork to play the King of Hollywood, when Todd had yet to vacate the role.

Well fuck ’em. He’d knock them off their stolen pedestals, the sons of bitches. He’d have the limelight back in a heartbeat – all that glory, all that love – and they’d be back on the casting couch in a week with their fannies in the air.

So what if it cost him a few weeks of discomfort? It would be worth it just to see the expressions on their pretty little faces when they realized they’d got greedy a decade too early.

Contrary to recent opinions, the King of the Heart-throbs was not dead. He was coming home, and he was going to look like a million dollars.

Chapter 4

On the day Todd had booked to see Burrows for a first consultation, he had to cancel at the last minute. ‘You’re not going to believe my excuse,’ he told the receptionist, ‘but I swear it’s the truth.’

‘Go on.’

‘My dog’s sick.’

‘Well that’s not one we hear very often. So, gold star for originality.’

The fact was that Dempsey, his mutt, was not looking too good that morning; he’d got up to go out into the back yard for his morning piss and he’d stumbled, as though one of his legs was numb. Todd went down to see if he was okay. He wasn’t. Though he still put on a happy face for his boss, his expression looked strangely dislocated, as though he was having difficulty focussing on Todd.

‘What’s wrong with you, boy?’

Todd went down on his haunches in front of the dog, and stroked his ears. Dempsey growled appreciatively. But he felt unsteady in Todd’s arms; as though at any moment he might keel over.

Todd called Maxine and told her he’d be at the vet’s for the next few hours.

‘Something wrong with that flatulent old dog of yours?’

‘You’ll be flatulent when you get to his age,’ Todd said. ‘And yeah. There is something wrong. He keeps falling over.’

He’d had Dempsey eleven years. He’d bought the dog as a pup just before he’d started to shoot Gunner. As a consequence the dog’s first real experience of life beyond his mother’s teat was being carried around a movie studio by his owner and adored; all of which he thereafter took as his God-given right. Dempsey had been with Todd on every set since; the two were inseparable. Todd and Dempsey; Dempsey and Todd. Thanks to those early experiences of universal affection he was a confident dog; afraid of nobody, and–unless somebody was afraid of him–predisposed to be friendly.

The vet’s name was Dr Spenser; an ebullient black woman who’d been looking after Dempsey since puppy-hood. She did a few tests and told Todd that yes, there were definitive signs that Dempsey was having cognitive difficulties.

‘How old is he now?’

‘He’ll be twelve next March.’

‘Oh that’s right – we didn’t know his birthday so we said –’

‘– Oscar Night.’

‘What’s wrong, boy?’ Dr Spenser said to Dempsey, ruffling him under the chin. ‘He’s certainly not his usual happy self, is he?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, I’d like to keep him in here for a few tests.’

‘I brought a stool sample like you asked.’

‘Thanks.’

Todd produced a small Tupperware container of dog poop. ‘Well we’ll have that analysed. You want the container back? Just kidding. Don’t look so grim, Todd –’

‘I don’t like seeing him like this.’

‘It’s probably a virus he’s picked up. We’ll give him a few antibiotics and he’ll be good as new.’

‘But there’s something weird about his eyes. Look. He’s not even focussing on us.’

Dempsey had raised his head, knowing full well he was being talked about, but plainly he was having some difficulty fixing his gaze on whoever was doing the talking.

‘This couldn’t just be old age, could it?’

‘I doubt it. He’s been a very healthy dog so far, and it’s my experience that a mutt like Dempsey is going to last a lot longer than some over-bred hound. You leave him with me. Check in with me at the end of the day.’

Todd did that. The news was there was no news. The stool sample had gone to the lab to be analysed, and meanwhile Dempsey was looking weak, perhaps a little disorientated, but there’d been no noticeable deterioration in his condition.

‘You can either take him home tonight or leave him here. He’ll be perfectly fine here. We don’t actually have anybody monitoring the dogs from eleven p.m. till six in the morning, but the chances of –’

‘I’m going to come and collect him.’

Despite Spenser’s reassurances that there had been no deterioration, Todd disagreed. Usually when he arrived at the vet’s after Dempsey had stayed in for a couple of hours, either for a shot, or his six-month check-up, he was greeted by the dog in crazy mode, yapping his delight at seeing his boss again, and ready to be out of the door before they could stick another damn needle in his backside. But today, when Dempsey came round the corner it seemed to take a moment before the dog even realized it was his master at the door, calling to him. And when he came, though some of his old enthusiasm returned, he was a shadow of his former self. Dr Spenser had already gone off-duty for the night. Todd asked if he could have her home number, but there were some things, it seemed, even being Todd Pickett couldn’t get you.

‘She’s got kids to take care of,’ the male nurse said. ‘She likes to keep this place and her home-life very separate.’

‘But if there’s an emergency?’

‘I’d recommend going to the twenty-four-hour animal hospital on Sepulveda. There’ll be doctors there all night if anything were to happen. But honestly, I think it’s some virus he’s picked up out at the dog park, and it’ll just take a course of antibiotics.’

‘Well can I take some antibiotics then?’ Todd said, getting a little irritated with the casual way Dempsey’s case was being treated.

‘Dr Spenser doesn’t want to give Dempsey anything till she’s got some results from the stool sample, so I’m afraid there’ll be no drugs for Dempsey until tomorrow.’

Dempsey didn’t eat. He just looked at the bowl of food Marco had prepared for him, and turned up his nose at it.

Then he went to lie on the back step and stayed there for the rest of the evening.

In the middle of the night Todd was woken by what sounded like the effects track from The Exorcist, a stomach-wrenching series of mumblings and eruptions. He switched on the bedroom light to find Dempsey at the bottom of his bed, standing in a pool of bright yellow puke. He looked horribly ashamed of having made a mess, and at first wouldn’t come to Todd to be petted, but when he did – and Todd had his arms around the dog – it was clear he was in a bad way. Dempsey’s whole body was cold, and he was trembling violently.

‘Come on, m’man,’ he said. ‘We’re gonna take you to get some proper Dring.’

The noise had woken Marco, who got dressed to drive while Todd held onto Dempsey, who was wrapped in his favourite comforter, a quilt Todd’s grandmother had made for her grandson. The dog lay sprawled over Todd’s knee, all one hundred pounds of him, while Marco drove through the almost empty streets to Sepulveda.

It was five minutes after five in the morning when they arrived at the animal hospital, and there were just two people waiting with their pets to be helped. Even so it took twenty-five minutes before a doctor could be freed up to see Dempsey, during which time it seemed to Todd that Dempsey’s condition worsened. His shaking became more violent than ever, and in the midst of one of his spasms, he convulsively shat brown gruel, mostly on the floor, but on Todd’s leg and shoe too.

‘Well now,’ said the night doctor brightly, ‘what seems to be the trouble?’

Todd gave him an exhaustive run-down on the events of the last day. He then asked Todd to pick Dempsey up and put him on the examination table – choosing this particular instant to remark what a fan of Todd’s he was, as though Todd could have given a damn at that moment.

Then he examined the dog, in a good and thorough manner, but making asides throughout as to which movies of Todd’s he and his wife had particularly enjoyed and which they hadn’t. After about five minutes of this, seeing the expression of despair and anger on Todd’s face, Marco quietly mentioned that Mr Pickett was really only interested right now in the health of his dog. The doctor’s mouth tightened, as though he’d just been badly offended, and his handling of Dempsey (at least to Todd’s eyes) seemed to become a little more brusque.

‘Well, you have a very sick dog,’ he said at the end of the examination, not even looking at Todd but talking to Marco. He was plainly embarrassed by his earlier show of fanboy enthusiasm, and was now over-compensating for it wildly.

Todd went to sit on the examination table to cradle Dempsey, which put him right in the doctor’s line of sight.

‘Look,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m sorry if I’m not being quite as appreciative of … your support of my pictures as I would normally be, Doc. It’s nothing personal. I’m sure we could have a great conversation about it under different circumstances. But I’d like Dempsey comfortable first. He’s sick and I want him better.’

Finally the doctor managed a little smile, and when he spoke his voice had also quieted, matching Todd’s. ‘I’m going to put Dempsey on a saline drip, because he’s obviously lost a lot of fluids in the last twelve to twenty-four hours. That should make him feel a whole lot happier. Meanwhile, you said Dr Spenser over at Robertson VCA was doing stool checks?’

‘She said it could be a virus.’

‘Well … maybe. But looking at his eyes, it seems more systemic to me. If he were a younger dog I’d say parvo or heartworm, which is a parasite. But again, we commonly see toxo in pound dogs or strays, and I’m sure he’s had his heartworm medications. Anyway, we’ll see from the stool results tomorrow.’

‘Wait, wait. You’re saying it could be parvo or heart-worm, but you don’t really think it’s either of these?’

‘No.’

‘So what do you think it is?’

The doctor shook his head. ‘I’d say there’s a better than fifty-fifty chance he’s got some kind of tumour. On the brain or on the brain-stem.’

‘And if he has?’

‘Well, it’s like a human being. You can sometimes fix these things –’

At this juncture, as though to demonstrate that things were not in a very fixable state right now, Dempsey started to shudder in Todd’s arms, his claws scrabbling against the metal table as he tried to stay upright.

‘It’s okay, boy! It’s okay!’

The doctor went for a nurse, and came back with an injection.

‘What’s that for?’

‘Just to calm him down a little, so he can get some sleep.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. It’s a mild tranquillizer. If you don’t want me to give it to the dog, Mr Pickett …’

‘Yes. Yes. Give it to him.’

The injection did indeed subdue Dempsey’s little fit. They wheeled him away into another room to be given an intravenous infusion, leaving Todd with the quilt.

‘Damn dog,’ he said, now Dempsey was out of earshot. ‘More trouble than he’s worth.’ Tears very close.

‘Why don’t we get a cup of coffee?’ Marco suggested. ‘And we can talk to the doctor more when we get back?’

There was a little donut shop in the mini-mall at the top of Sepulveda, and it had just opened. They were the first customers of the day. Todd knew the instant he walked in that both the women serving recognized him, so he turned round and walked out again rather than risking getting caught in a conversation: Marco brought out two coffees and two Bear Claws in greaseproof paper, still warm from the oven. Though he hadn’t thought he had an appetite, the pastry was too good not to be eaten; so he ate. Then, coffee in hand, they walked down to the hospital, the eyes of the women in the donut shop glued to Todd until he had disappeared from sight.

They said nothing as they walked. The day was getting underway; the traffic on Sepulveda backing up as it waited to take its turn to get onto the freeway. These were people with two-hour commutes ahead of them before they got to their place of work; people with jobs they hated, houses they hated, and a pay-cheque at the end of the month that wouldn’t even cover the cost of the mortgage, the car payments, the insurance.

‘Right now,’ Todd said, ‘I’d give my eye teeth to be one of them, instead of having to go back in there.’

‘I can go in for you.’

‘No.’

‘Dempsey trusts me,’ Marco said.

‘I know. But he’s my dog.’

Chapter 5

Again, there was no news. Dempsey had been hooked up to a saline drip, and looked as though the tranquillizer had taken its effect. He wasn’t quite asleep, but he was dazy.

‘We’ll do an X-ray today, and see how he looks,’ the doctor said. ‘We should have the results back by the end of the day. So why don’t you two go home, we’ll keep Dempsey here and see what we can do to get him well?’

‘I want to stay.’

‘Well that’s going to be very uncomfortable for you, Mr Pickett. We don’t have a room we can put you in, and frankly you both look as though you didn’t get a full night’s sleep. Dempsey’s mildly sedated, and we’ll probably keep him that way. But it’s going to be six or seven hours before we get any answers for you. We share our X-ray technician with our hospital in Santa Monica, so she won’t even be in to look at Dempsey until eleven at the earliest.’

‘I still want to stay. You’ve got a bench out there. You’re not going to throw me out if I sit on that are you?’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘Then that’s where I’ll be.’

The doctor looked at his watch. ‘I’ll be out of here in half an hour and the day-doctor, Dr Otis, will be taking over Dempsey’s case. I will of course bring her up to speed with everything we’ve done so far and if she feels there’s something else she wants to try –’

‘She’ll know where to find me.’

‘Right.’

The doctor gave up a wan smile, his second and last of the night. ‘Well, I sincerely hope you have good news with Dempsey, and that by the time I come in again tonight you’ve both gone home happy.’

Todd would not be dissuaded from staying on the bench, even though it was situated a few steps away from the front counter, next to the soda machine, and would leave him in full view of everyone who came through the next few hours. Marco said that he would come back with a Thermos of good coffee and something to eat, and left Todd there.

The parade of the needy began early. About two minutes after Marco had gone a distraught woman came in saying that she’d struck a cat with her car, and the victim was now in her car, alive, but terrified and badly hurt. Two nurses went out with well-used pairs of leather gloves and a syringe of tranquillizer to subdue the victim. They came back with a weeping woman and a corpse. The animal’s panicked self-defences had apparently used up what little energies its broken body had possessed. The woman was inconsolable. She tried to thank the nurses for their help but all she could do was cry. There were six more accidents that rush hour, two of them fatalities. Todd watched all this in a dazed state. Lack of sleep was beginning to catch up with him. Every now and then his eyes would flicker closed for a few seconds, and the scene in front of him would jump, like a piece of film which had had a few seconds’ worth of action removed and then been spliced back together again. People moved abruptly from one place to another. One moment somebody was coming in, the next they were engaged in conversation (often tearful, sometimes accusatory, always intense), with one of the nurses; the next they’d gone, or they were on their way out.

Much to his surprise, nobody gave him more than a cursory glance. Perhaps, they thought, that can’t possibly be Todd Pickett, sitting on a broken-down old bench next to a broken-down old soda machine in a twenty-four-hour animal hospital. Or perhaps it was just that they saw him, recognized him, and didn’t care. They had other things to think about right now, more pressing than the peculiar presence of a weary-looking movie star on a broken-down bench. They had a rat with an abscess, a cat that had had six kittens but had got the seventh stuck, a guinea pig in a shoe box that was dead when the box was opened; a poodle that kept biting itself; a problem with fleas, a problem with mange, two canaries that hated one another, and so on and so forth.

Marco came back with coffee and sandwiches. Todd drank some coffee, which perked him up.

He went to the front desk and asked, not for the first time, to see the day-doctor. This time, he got lucky. Dr Otis, a pale and slight young woman who looked no more than eighteen, and refused to look Todd in the face (though this, he realized was her general practice: she was the same with Marco and with the nurses, eyes constantly averted), appeared and said that there was nothing to report except that Dempsey would be going for X-rays in about half an hour, and they would be available for viewing tomorrow. At this point, Todd lost his temper. It happened rarely, but when it did it was an impressive spectacle. His neck became blotchy-red, and the muscles of his face churned; his eyes went to ice-water.

‘I brought my dog in here at five o’clock this morning. I’ve been waiting here – sitting on that bench – that bench right there, you see it? Do you see that bench?’

‘Yes, I –’

‘That’s where I’ve been since six o’clock. It is now almost eleven o’clock. I’ve asked on several occasions for you to have the common decency to come out and tell me what’s happening to my dog. Always politely. And I’ve been told, over and over again, that you’re very busy.’

‘It’s been a crazy morning, Mr –?’

‘Pickett is my name.’

‘Well, Mr Pickett, I’m afraid I can’t –’

‘Stop right there. Don’t say you can’t get the X-rays until tomorrow because you can. You will. I want my dog looked after and if you won’t do it I’ll take him some place where he can be taken care of and I’ll make sure every damn newspaper in the State of California –’

At this moment an older woman, obviously the hospital manager, stepped into view and took Todd’s hand, shaking it. ‘Mr Pickett. My name’s Cordelia Simpson. It’s all right, Andrea, I’ll take care of Mr Pickett from here.’

The young woman doctor retreated. She was two shades whiter than she’d been at the beginning of the conversation.

‘I heard most of what you were telling Andrea –’

‘Look, I’m sorry. That’s not my style. I don’t like losing my temper, but –’

‘No, it’s okay. I understand. You’re tired and you’re concerned about –?’

‘Dempsey.’

‘Dempsey. Right.’

‘I was told he’d be X-rayed today and we’d have the results back this afternoon.’

‘Well, the speed of these things all depends on the volume of work, Mr Pickett,’ Cordelia said. She was English, and had the face and manner of a woman who would not be pleasant if she were riled, but was doing her best right now to put on a gentler face. ‘I read a piece about you in the LA Times last year. You were on the cover with Dempsey, as I remember. Clearly you’re very close to your dog. Here’s what I’m going to do.’ She consulted her watch. ‘Dempsey is being seen by the radiographer right now, and I guarantee that we’ll have the results back by … six. It might be earlier but I think six we can guarantee.’

‘So how long before I can take him home?’

‘You want to take him now?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll find him rather dopey. I’m not sure he could walk.’

‘I can carry him.’

Cordelia nodded. She knew an immovable object when she saw one. ‘Well I’ll have one of the nurses come fetch you when he’s ready. Is that his?’

She pointed to the quilt on the bench. Quite unconsciously, Todd had been nursing it while he waited. No wonder people had kept their distance.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want me to have him wrapped up in it?’

‘Thank you.’

Cordelia picked up the quilt. ‘And my apologies, Mr Pickett, for any difficulties you may have had. Our Drs are horribly overworked. And, I’m afraid to say, often people who are wonderful with animals aren’t always terribly good with human beings.’

Ten minutes later a burly Latino appeared with a sleepy-eyed Dempsey, wrapped in his quilt. His ears pricked up just a little at the sight of Todd, enough for Todd to know that his holding the dog, and whispering to him, meant something.

‘We’re going home, old guy,’ Todd murmured to him, as he carried him down the steps into the street and round to the little parking lot behind the building, where Marco was backing out the car. ‘I know you didn’t like it in there. All those people you didn’t know with needles and shit. Well, fuck them.’ He put his nose into the cushion of baby fur behind Dempsey’s ear, which always smelled sweetest. ‘We’re going home.’

For the next few hours Dempsey slept in the quilt, which Todd had put on his big bed. Todd stayed beside him, though the need for sleep caught up with him several times, and he’d slide away into a few minutes of dreamland: fragments of things he’d seen from his bench in the waiting room, mostly. The box containing the dead guinea pig, that absurd poodle, nipping its own backside bloody; all just pieces of the day, coming and going. Then he’d wake and stroke Dempsey for a little while, talk to him, tell him everything was going to be okay.

There was a sudden rally in Dempsey’s energies about four o’clock, which was when he was usually fed, so Todd had Marco prepare a sick-bed version of his usual meal, with chicken instead of the chopped horse-flesh or whatever the hell it was in the cans, and some good gravy. Dempsey ate it all, though he had to be held up to do so, since his legs were unreliable. He then drank a full bowl of water.

‘Good, good,’ Todd said.

Dempsey attempted to wag his tail, but it had no more power in it than his legs had.

Todd carried him outside so he could shit and piss. A slight drizzle was coming down; not cool, but refreshing. He held onto the dog, waiting for the urge to take Dempsey, and he turned his face up to the rain, offering a quiet little prayer.

‘Please don’t take him from me. He’s just a smelly old dog. You don’t need him and I do. Do you hear me? Please … hear me. Don’t take him.’

He looked back at Dempsey to find that the dog was looking back at him, apparently paying attention to every word. His ears were half-pricked, his eyes half-open.

‘Do you think anyone’s listening?’ Todd said.

By way of reply, Dempsey looked away from him, his head bobbing uneasily on his neck. Then he made a nasty sound deep in his belly and his whole body convulsed.

Todd had never seen the term projectile vomit displayed with such force. A stream of chewed chicken, dog mix and water squirted out. As soon as it stopped, the dog began to make little whining sounds. Then ten seconds later, Dempsey repeated the whole spectacle, until every piece of nourishment and every drop of water he’d been given had been comprehensively ejected.

After the second burst of vomiting he didn’t even have the strength to whine. Todd wrapped the quilt around him and carried him back into the house. He had Marco bring some towels and dried him off where the rain had caught him.

‘I don’t suppose you care what’s been going on all day, do you?’ Marco said.

‘Anything important?’

‘Great foreign numbers on Gallows, particularly in France. Huge hit in France, apparently. Maxine wants to know if you’d like to do a piece about Dempsey’s health crisis for one of the woman’s magazines.’

‘No.’

‘That’s what I told her. She said they’d eat it up, but I said –’

‘No! Fuck. Will these people never stop? No!’

‘You got a call from Walter at Dreamworks about some charity thing he’s arranging, I told him you’d be back in circulation tomorrow.’

‘That’s the phone.’

‘Yeah. It is.’

Marco went to the nearest phone, which was in the master bathroom, while Todd went back to finish drying the dog.

‘It’s Andrea Otis. From the hospital. I think it’s the nervous young woman you saw this morning.’

‘Stay with him,’ Todd said to Marco.

He went into the bathroom, which was cold. Picked up the phone.

‘Mr Pickett?’

‘Yes.’

‘First, I want to say I owe you an apology for this morning –’

‘No that’s fine.’

‘I knew who you were and that threw me off –’

‘Dempsey.’

‘– a little. I’m sorry.’

‘Dempsey.’

‘Yes. Well, we’ve got the X-ray results back and … I’m afraid the news isn’t very good.’

‘Why not? What’s wrong with him?’

‘He is riddled with cancer.’

Todd took a long moment to digest this unwelcome news. Then he said: ‘That’s impossible.’

‘It’s in his spine. It’s in his colon –’

‘But that can’t be.’

‘And it’s now spreading to his brain, which is why we’ve only just discovered it. These motor and perception problems he’s having are all part of the same thing. The tumour’s spreading into his skull, and pushing on his brain.’

‘Oh God.’

‘So … I don’t know what you want to do.’

‘I want this not to be happening.’

‘Well yes. But I’m afraid it is.’

‘How long has he got?’

‘His present condition is really as good as things are going to get for him.’ She spoke as though she was reading the words from an idiot-board, careful to leave exactly the same amount of space between each one. ‘All that is really a tissue is how quickly Dempsey becomes incapacitated.’

Todd looked through the open door at the pitiful shape shuddering beneath the quilt. It was obvious that Dempsey had already reached that point. Todd could be absurdly optimistic at times, but this wasn’t one of them.

‘Is he in pain?’ he asked the doctor.

‘Well, I’d say it’s not so much pain we’re dealing with as anxiety. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him. And he doesn’t know why it’s happening. He’s just suffering, Mr Pickett. And it’s just going to get worse.’

‘So you’re saying I should have him put down?’

‘It’s not my place to tell you what to do with your dog, Mr Pickett.’

‘But if he was your dog.’

‘If he was my dog, and I loved him as you obviously love Dempsey, I wouldn’t want him suffering … Mr Pickett, are you there?’

‘Here,’ Todd said, trying to keep the sound of tears out of his voice.

‘So really it’s up to you.’

Todd looked at Dempsey again, who was making a mournful sound in his sleep.

‘If I bring him back over to the hospital?’

‘Yes?’

‘Would there be somebody there to put him to sleep?’

‘Yes, of course. I’ll be here.’

‘Then that’s what I want to do.’

‘I’m so very sorry, Mr Pickett.’

‘It’s not your fault.’

Dempsey roused himself a little when Todd went back to the bed, but it was barely more than a sniff and a half-hearted wag.

‘Come on, you,’ he said, wrapping Dempsey tightly in the quilt, and lifting him up, ‘the sooner this is done the sooner you’re not an unhappy hound. Will you drive, Marco?’

It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and though the drizzle had ceased, the traffic was still horrendous. It took them fifty-five minutes to get down to the hospital, but this time – perhaps to make up for her unavailability the last time he’d been there – Dr Otis was at the counter waiting for him. She opened the side door, to let him into the non-public area.

‘You want me to come in, boss?’ Marco asked.

‘Nah, it’s okay. We’ll be fine.’

‘He looks really out of it,’ the doctor remarked.

Dempsey had barely opened his eyes at the sound of Todd’s voice. ‘You know, I realize this may seem like a strange thing to say, but in a way we’re lucky that this caught him so fast. With some dogs it takes weeks and months …’

‘In here?’ Todd said.

‘Yes.’

The doctor had opened a door into a room not more than eight by eight, painted in what was intended to be a soothing green. On one wall was a Monet reproduction and on another a piece of poetry that Todd couldn’t read through his assembling tears.

‘I’ll just give you two some time,’ Dr Otis said. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

Todd sat down with Dempsey in his arms. ‘Damn,’ he said softly. ‘This isn’t fair.’

Dempsey had opened his eyes fully for the first time in several hours, probably because he’d heard the sound of Todd crying, which had always made him very attentive, even if the crying was fake. Todd could be rehearsing a sad scene from a picture, memorizing lines, and as soon as the first note of sadness crept into his voice Dempsey would be there, his paws on Todd’s knees, ready to give comfort. But this time the animal didn’t have the strength to help make the boss feel better. All he could do was stare up at Todd with a slight look of puzzlement on his face.

‘Oh God, I hope I’m doing the right thing. I wish you could just tell me that this is what you want.’ Todd kissed the dog, tears falling in Dempsey’s fur. ‘I know if I was you I wouldn’t want to be shitting everywhere and not able to stand up. That’s no life, huh?’ He buried his face in the smell of the animal. For eleven years – whether Todd had had female company or not – Dempsey had slept on his bed; and more often than not been the one to wake him up, pressing his cold nose against Todd’s face, rubbing his neck on Todd’s chest.

‘I love you, dog,’ he said. ‘And I want you to be there when I get to heaven, okay? I want you to be keeping a place for me. Will you do that? Will you keep a place for me?’

There was a discreet knock on the door, and Todd’s stomach turned. ‘Time’s up, buddy,’ he said, kissing Dempsey’s burning hot snout. Even now, he thought, I could say no, I don’t want you to do this. He could take Dempsey home for one more night in the big bed. But that was just selfishness. The dog had had enough, that was plain. He could barely raise his head. It was time to go.

‘Come in,’ he said.

The doctor came in, meeting Todd’s gaze for the first time. ‘I know how hard this is,’ she said. ‘I have dogs myself, all mutts like Dempsey.’

‘Dempsey, did you hear that?’ Todd said, the tears refusing to abate. ‘She called you a mutt.’

‘They’re the best.’

‘Yeah. They are.’

‘Are you ready?’

Todd nodded, at which point she instantly transferred her loving attention to the dog. She lifted Dempsey out from Todd’s arms and put him on the steel table in the corner of the room, talking to him all the while, ‘Hey there, Dempsey. This isn’t going to hurt at all. Just a little prick –’

She pulled a syringe out of her pocket, and exposed the needle. At the back of Todd’s head that same irrational voice was screaming: ‘Tell her no! Knock it out of her hand! Quickly! Quickly!’ He pushed the thoughts away, wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, because he didn’t want to be blinded by them when this happened. He wanted to see it all, even if it hurt like a knife.

He owed that to Dempsey. He put his hand on Dempsey’s neck and rubbed his favourite place. The syringe went into Dempsey’s leg. He made a tiny little grunt of complaint.

‘Good boy,’ Dr Otis said. ‘There. That wasn’t so bad now, was it?’

Todd kept rubbing Dempsey’s neck.

The doctor put the top back on the syringe and pocketed it. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You can stop rubbing. He’s gone.’

So quickly? Todd cleared away another wave of tears and looked down at the body on the table. Dempsey’s eye was still half-open, but it didn’t look back at him any longer. Where there’d been a sliver of bright life, where there’d been mischief and shared rituals – where, in short, there’d been Dempsey – there was nothing.

‘I’m very sorry, Mr Pickett,’ the doctor said, ‘I’m sure you loved him very much and speaking as a doctor, I know you did the right thing for him.’

Todd sniffed hard, and reached over to pluck a clump of paper handkerchiefs from the box. ‘What does that say?’ he said, pointing to the framed poster on the wall. His tears made it incomprehensible.

‘It’s a quote by Robert Louis Stevenson,’ Andrea said. ‘You know, who wrote Treasure Island?’

‘Yeah, I know …’

‘It says: “Do you think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.” ’

Chapter 6

He waited until he got home, and he’d governed his tears, to make arrangements for Dempsey’s cremation. He left a message with a firm that was recommended by the Animal Hospital for their discreet handling of these matters. They would pick Dempsey’s body up from the Hospital Mortuary, cremate him and transfer his ashes, guaranteeing that there was no mingling of ‘cremains’ – as they described them – but that the ashes they delivered to the owner would be those of their pet. In other words they weren’t putting canaries, parrots, rats, dogs and guinea pigs in the oven for one big bonfire and dividing up the ‘cremains’ (the word revolted Todd) in what looked to be the appropriate amounts. He also called his accountant at home and made arrangements for a ten thousand dollar donation to the Hospital, the only attendant request being that five hundred of that money be spent on putting in a more comfortable bench for people to sit on while they waited.

He slept very well with the aid of several Ambien and a large scotch, until about four thirty in the morning when he woke up and felt Dempsey moving around at the bottom of the bed. The drugs made his thought processes muddy. It took him a few seconds of leaning over and patting the coverlet at the bottom of the bed to bring his consciousness up to speed. Dempsey wasn’t there.

Yet he’d felt the dog, he would have sworn to it on a stack of Bibles, getting up and walking around and around on the same spot, padding down the bed until it was comfortable for him.

He lay back on the pillow and drifted back to sleep, but it wasn’t a healthy sleep thereafter. He kept half-waking, and staring down at the darkness of the bottom of the bed, wondering if Dempsey was a ghost now, and would haunt his heels until the dog had the sense to go on his way to heaven.

He slept in until ten, when Marco brought him the phone with a woman called Rosalie from the Pet Cremation Service. She was pleasant in her no-nonsense way; no doubt she often had people in near hysteria at the other end of the telephone, so a little professional distance was necessary. She had already been in contact with the Hospital this morning, she said, and they had informed her that Dempsey had a collar and quilt with him. Did Todd want these items returned, or were they to be cremated with his pet?

‘They were his,’ Todd said, ‘so they should go with him.’

‘Fine,’ said Rosalie. ‘Then the only other question is the matter of the urn. We have three varieties –’

‘Just the best you’ve got.’

‘That would be our Bronze Grecian Style.’

‘That sounds fine.’

‘All I need now is your credit card number.’

‘I’ll pass you back to my assistant. He can help you with all that.’

‘Just one other question?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you … the Todd Pickett?’

Yes, of course, he was the real Todd Pickett. But he didn’t feel like the real thing; more like a badly bruised lookalike. Things like this didn’t happen to the real Todd Pickett.

He had a way with life that always made it show the bright side.

He went back to sleep until noon then got up and ate some lunch, his body aching as though he was catching a heavy dose of the flu. His food unfinished he sat in the breakfast nook, staring blankly at the potted plants artfully arranged on the patio; plants he’d never persuaded Dempsey not to cock his leg against every time he passed.

‘I’m going back to bed,’ he told Marco.

‘You don’t want to put a holding call into Maxine? She’s called nine times this morning. She says she has news about a foreign buyer for Warrior.’

‘Did you tell her what happened to Dempsey?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said: oh. Then she went back to talking about the buyer.’

Todd sighed, defeated by the woman’s incomprehension. ‘Maybe it’s time I got out of this fucking business,’ he said to Marco. ‘I don’t have the balls for it any longer. Or the energy.’

Marco put up no protest at this. He hated everything about the business, except Todd, and always had. ‘Why don’t we go down to Key West like we always promised ourselves? Open a bar. Get fat and drunk –’

‘– and die of heart attacks at fifty.’

‘You’re feeling morbid right now.’

‘A little.’

‘Well it won’t last forever. And one of these days, we’ll have to honour Dempsey and get another dog.’

‘That wouldn’t be honouring him, that’d be replacing him. And he was irreplaceable. You know why?’

‘Why?’

‘Because he was there when I was nobody.’

‘You were pups together.’

This got a smile out of Todd; the first in forty-eight hours.

‘Yeah …’ he said, his voice close to breaking again. ‘We were pups together.’ He tried to hold back the tears, but they came anyway. ‘What is wrong with me?’ he said. ‘He was a dog. I mean … come on. Tell me honestly, do you think Tom Cruise cries for a day if one of his dogs dies?’

‘I don’t think he’s got dogs.’

‘Or Brad Pitt?’

‘I don’t know. Ask ’em. Next time you see ’em, ask ’em.’

‘Oh sure, that’s going to make a dandy little scene. Todd Pickett and Brad Pitt: “Tell me, Brad, when your dog died did you wail like a girl for two days?”’

Now it was Marco who laughed. ‘Wail like a girl?’

‘That’s how I feel. I feel like I’m in the middle of some stupid weepie.’

‘Maybe you should call Wilhemina over and fuck her.’

‘Wilhemina doesn’t do fucks. She does lovemaking with candles and a lot of wash-cloths. I swear she thinks I’m going to give her something.’

‘Fleas?’

‘Yeah. Fleas. You know, as a last act of rebellion on behalf of Dempsey and myself I’d like to give fleas to Wilhemina, Maxine and –’

‘Gary Eppstadt.’

Both men were laughing now, curing the hurt the only way it could be cured, by being included in the nature of things.

Speaking of inclusion, he got a call from his mother, about six o’clock. She was at home in Cambridge Massachusetts, but sounded ready to jump the first plane and come visit. She was in one of her ‘I’ve a funny feeling’ moods.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Yes there is.’

She was inevitably right; she could predict with startling accuracy the times she needed to call her famous son and the times when she should keep her distance. Sometimes he could lie to her, and get away with it. But today wasn’t one of those days. What was the point?

‘Dempsey’s dead.’

‘That old mutt of yours.’

‘He was not an old mutt and if you talk about him like that then this conversation ends right here.’

‘How old was he?’ Patricia asked.

‘Eleven, going on twelve.’

‘That’s a decent age.’

‘Not for a dog like him.’

‘What kind of dog would that be?’

‘You know –’

‘A mutt. Mutts always live longer than thoroughbreds. That’s a fact of life.’

‘Well, mine didn’t.’

‘Too much rich food. You used to spoil that dog –’

‘Is there anything else you want besides lecturing me about how I killed my dog with kindness?’

‘No. I was just wanting to chat, but obviously you’re in no mood to chat.’

‘I loved Dempsey, Mom. You understand what I’m saying?’

‘If you don’t mind me observing something –’

‘Could I stop you?’

‘– it’s sad that the only serious relationship you’ve had is with a dog. It’s time you grew up, Todd. You’re not getting any younger, you know. You think about the way your father aged.’

‘I don’t want to talk about this right now, okay.’

‘Listen to me.’

‘Mom. I don’t –’

‘You’ve got his genes, so listen for once will you? He was a good-looking man your father, till he was about thirty-four, thirty-five. Now granted he didn’t take care of himself and you do – I mean he smoked and he drank a lot more than was good for him. But his looks went practically overnight.’

‘Overnight? That’s ridiculous. Nobody’s looks go –’

‘All right, it wasn’t overnight. But I was there. I saw. Believe me, it was quick. Five, six months and all his looks had gone.’

Even though this was an absurd exaggeration, there was an element of truth in what Patricia Pickett was saying. Todd’s father had indeed lost his looks with remarkable speed. It would not have been the kind of thing a son would have noticed, necessarily, but Todd had a second point-of-view on his father’s sudden deterioration: his best friend Danny had been raised by a single mother who’d several times made her feelings for Merrick Pickett known to her son. The rumours had reached Todd, of course. Indeed they’d become practically weekly reports, as Danny’s mother’s plans to seduce the unwitting subject of her desires were laid (and failed) and re-laid.

All this came back to Todd as his mother went on chatting. Eventually, he said, ‘Mom, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to make some decisions about the cremation.’

‘Oh, Lord, I hope you’re keeping this quiet. The media would have a party with this: you and your dog.’

‘Well all the more reason for you to clam up about it,’ he warned. ‘If anybody calls, saying they want a quote.’

‘I know nothing.’

‘You know nothing.’

‘I know the routine by now, honey. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.’

‘Don’t even tell the neighbours.’

‘Fine! I won’t.’

‘Bye, Mom.’

‘I’m sorry about Brewster.’

‘Dempsey.’

‘Whatever.’

It was true; when Todd gave the subject some serious thought: Merrick Pickett had indeed lost his looks with startling speed. One day he’d been the best looking insurance agent in the city of Cincinnati, the next (it seemed) Danny’s mother wouldn’t look twice at him. Suppose this was hereditary? Suppose fifty percent of it was hereditary?

He called Eppstadt’s office. It took the sonofabitch forty-eight minutes to return the call and when he did his manner was brusque.

‘I hope this isn’t about Warrior?’

‘It isn’t.’

‘We’re not going to do it, Todd.’

‘I get it, Gary. Is your assistant listening in on this conversation?’

‘No. What do you want?’

‘When we had lunch you recommended a guy who’d done some work for a few famous names.’

‘Bruce Burrows?’

‘How do I get hold of him? He’s not in the book.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll hook you up.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re making a good call, Todd. I hope we can get back in business as soon as you’re healed.’

Once he had the number, Todd didn’t leave himself further room for hesitation. He called Burrows, booked the consultation, and tentatively chatted over some dates for the operation.

There was one piece of outstanding business before he could move on: the disposal of Dempsey’s ashes. Despite the reassurances of Robert Louis Stevenson, Todd did not have any clear idea as to the permanence of any soul, whether animal or human. He only knew that he wanted Dempsey’s mortal remains to be placed where the dog had been most happy. There was no doubt about where that was: the back yard of the Bel Air house, which had been, since his puppyhood, Dempsey’s unchallenged territory: his stalking ground, his school-yard when it came to learning new tricks. And it was there, the evening before Todd put himself into the hands of Bruce Burrows, that he took the bronzed plastic urn provided by the Cremation Company out into the yard. The urn contained a plastic bag, which in turn contained Dempsey’s ashes. There were a lot of them; but then he’d been a big dog.

Todd sat down in the middle of the yard, where he and Dempsey had so often sat and watched the sky together, and poured some of the ashes into the palm of his hand. What part of this grey sand was his tail, he wondered, and which his snout? Which part the place behind his ear he’d love you forever if you rubbed? Or didn’t it matter? Was that the point about scattering ashes: that in the end they looked the same? Not just the snout and the tail, but a dog’s ashes and a man’s ashes. All reducible, with the addition of a little flame, to this mottled dust? He put his lips to it, once, to kiss him goodbye. In his head he could hear his mother telling him that it was a gross, unhealthy thing to do, so he kissed them again, just to spite her. Then he stood up and cast Dempsey’s ashes around, like a farmer sowing seeds. There was no wind. The ash fell where he threw it, evenly distributed over the mutt’s dominion.

‘See you, dog,’ he said, and went back into the house to get himself a large bourbon.

PART THREE

_________________

A DARKER TIME
Chapter 1

For four months, in the summer of his seventeenth year, Todd had worked at the Sunset Home for the Elderly on the outskirts of Orlando, where he’d got a job through his Uncle Frank, who worked as an accountant for Sunset Homes Incorporated. The place was little more than a repository for the nearly-dead; working there had been the most depressing experience of his young life. Most of his duties did not involve the patients – he had no training as a nurse, nor intended to get any. But the care of one of the older occupants, a man by the name of Duncan McFarlane, was given over to him because McFarlane was prone to unruliness when he was being bathed by the female nurses. McFarlane was no great trouble to Todd. He was just a sour sonofabitch who wasn’t going to make anybody’s life one jot easier if he could possibly avoid it. The ritual of giving a bed-bath to his patient was Todd’s particular horror; the sight of his own body awoke a profound self-disgust in the old man. Asking around, Todd had discovered that McFarlane had been an athlete in his prime. But now – at the age of eighty-three – there was no trace of the strength or the beauty his body had once possessed. He was a pallid sack of shit and resentment, revolted by the sight of himself.

Look at me, he would say when Todd uncovered him, Christ, look at me, Christ, look at me. Every time it was the same murmured horror. Look at me, Christ, look at me.

To this day, the image of McFarlane’s nakedness remained with Todd in all its grotesque particulars. The little beard of dirty white hair that hung from the old man’s scrotum; the constellation of heavy, dark warts above his left nipple; the wrinkled folds of pale, spotted flesh that hung under his arms. Todd felt guilty about his disgust, and kept it to himself, until one day it had been the subject of discussion in the day-room, and he’d discovered that his feelings were shared, especially by the male members of the nursing staff. The female nurses seemed to have more compassion, perhaps; or were simply indifferent to the facts of creeping senility. But the other men on the staff – there were four of them besides Todd – were afterwards constantly remarking on the foulness of their charges. One of the quartet – a black guy from New Orleans called Austin Harper – was particularly eloquent on the subject.

‘I ain’t endin’ up like any o’ these ol’ fucks,’ he remarked on more than one occasion, ‘I’d blow my fuckin’ brains out ’fore I’d sink that fuckin’ low.’

‘It won’t happen,’ Todd had said.

‘How’d you reckon that, white boy?’ Austin had said. He’d patted Todd on his backside; which he took every possible opportunity to do.

‘When we’re as old as these folks there’ll be ways to fix it,’ Todd replied.

‘You mean we’ll live forever? Bullshit. I don’t buy any of that science-fiction crap, boy.’

‘I’m not saying we’ll live forever. But they’ll have figured out what gives us wrinkles, and they’ll have a way to smooth them out.’

‘Will they now? So you’s goin’ to be all smoothed out, is you?’

‘I sure as hell am.’

‘You’ll still die, but you’ll die all smoothed out an’ pretty?’ He tapped Todd’s ass appreciatively again.

‘Will you quit doin’ that?’ Todd said.

‘I’ll quit when you quit wavin’ it in my nose.’ Austin laughed, and slapped Todd’s ass a third time, a stinging swat.

‘Anyways,’ Todd said, ‘I don’t give a shit what you think. I’m going to die pretty.’

The phrase had lingered. To die pretty; that was the grand ambition. To die pretty, and not find yourself like poor old Duncan McFarlane, looking down at his own nakedness and saying, over and over: Oh Christ, look at me. Oh Christ, look at me. Oh Christ …

Two months after Todd had left Florida to go to Los Angeles for a screen-test, he’d got a scrawled note from Austin Harper, who – given that it was more or less certain that they’d never see one another again, figured it was okay for Todd to know that if Austin had had a chance he would have ploughed Todd’s ass ‘all the way to Key West and back’. ‘And then you’d be all smoothed out, baby,’ Harper had written.

‘Oh, and by the way,’ he’d added. ‘That old fuck McFarlane died a week ago. Tried to give himself a bath in the middle of the night. Drowned himself in three inches of water. That’s what I call a damn fool thing to do.

‘Stay smooth, m’man. You’re going to do great. I know it. Just remember to thank me when they gives you an Oscar.’

Chapter 2

‘Kiddo?’

Todd was floating in a blind black place, his body untethered. He couldn’t even feel it.

‘Kiddo? Can you hear me?’

Despite the darkness all around, it was a comfortable place to be in. There were no predators here in this no-man’s-land. There were no sharks circling, wanting ten-percent of his flesh. Todd felt pleasantly removed from everything. Except for that voice calling him.

‘Kiddo? If you can hear me, move your finger.’

It was a trick, he knew. It was a way to get him to go back to the world where once he’d lived and breathed and been unhappy. But he didn’t want to go. It was too brittle that place; brittle and bright. He wanted to stay where he was, here in the darkness, floating and floating.

‘Kiddo … it’s Donnie.’

Donnie?

Wait, that couldn’t be right. His older brother, Donnie? They hadn’t talked in months. Why would he be here, trying to seduce him out of his comfortable hideaway? But then, if not Donnie, then who? Nobody else ever called him Kiddo.

Todd felt a dim murmur of anxiety. Donnie lived in Texas, for God’s sake. What was he doing here?

‘Talk to me, Kiddo.’

Very reluctantly, Todd forced himself to reply to the summons, though when he finally coaxed his lips to shape it the sound he made was as remote as the moon.

‘Donnie?’

‘Well, howdy. I must say it’s good to have you back in the land of the livin’.’ He felt a hand laid on his arm. The sensation, like Donnie’s voice, and his own, felt distant and dulled.

‘You had us a bit stirred up for a while there.’

‘Why’s … it … so dark in here?’ Todd said. ‘Will you have someone turn on the lights?’

‘Everything’s going to be okay, buddy.’

‘Donnie. Please. Turn on the lights.’

‘They are on, Kiddo. It’s just you’ve got some bandages over your face. That’s all it is. You’re going to be just fine.’

Bandages on his face.

Now it all started to come back to him. His last memories. He’d been going under Burrows’ knife for the big operation.

The last thing he remembered was Burrows telling him to count backwards from ten. Burrows had been smiling reassuringly at him, and as Todd counted – had thought: I wonder how much work he’s had done on that face of his? The nose for sure. And all the lines gone from around his eyes –

‘Are you counting, Todd?’ Burrows had said.

‘Ten. Nine. Eight –’

There hadn’t been a seven. Not that Todd could remember. The drugs had swept him off to their own empty version of La-La land.

But now he was back from that dreamless place, and Donnie was here at his bedside, all the way from Texas. Why? And why the bandages over his eyes? Burrows hadn’t said anything about bandages.

‘My mouth’s so dry,’ Todd whispered.

‘No problemo, buddy,’ Donnie replied gently. ‘I’ll get the nurse in here.’

‘I’ll have a vodka … straight up.’

Donnie chuckled. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Todd heard him get up and go to the door, and call for a nurse. His consciousness wavered, and he felt himself slipping back into the void from which he’d just been brought by Donnie’s voice. The prospect of that lush darkness didn’t seem quite as comforting as it had a few moments before. He started to panic, scrambling to keep hold of the world, at least until he knew what had happened to him.

He called out to Donnie:

‘Where are you? Donnie? Are you there?’

Footsteps came hurriedly back in his direction.

‘I’m still here, Kiddo.’ Donnie’s voice was tender. Todd couldn’t remember ever hearing such tenderness in it before now.

‘Burrows didn’t tell me it’d be like this,’ Todd said.

‘There’s nothing to get worked up about,’ Donnie replied.

Even in his semi-drugged state, Todd knew a lie when he heard one.

‘You’re not a very good actor,’ he said.

‘Runs in the family,’ Donnie quipped, and squeezed Todd’s arm again. ‘Just kidding.’

‘Yeah … yeah …’ Todd said. As he spoke a spasm of pain ran from the bridge of his nose and spread across his face in both directions. He was suddenly in excruciating agony. ‘Jesus,’ he gasped. ‘Jesus. Make it stop!’

He felt Donnie’s reassuring hand go from his arm; heard his brother crossing to the door again, yelling as he went, his voice suddenly shrill with fear: ‘Will somebody get in here. Right now! Christ!’

Todd’s panic, momentarily soothed by his brother’s voice, started to rise up in him again. He raised his hand to his face. The bandages were tight and smooth, like a visor over his head, sealing him in. He started to hyperventilate. He was going to die in here, if he didn’t get this smothering stuff off his face. He began to claw at the bandages. He needed air. Right now!

Air, for Christ’s sake, air –

‘Mr Pickett, don’t do that! Please!’

The nurse caught hold of Todd’s hands, but the panic and the pain made him strong and she couldn’t prevent him from digging his fingers beneath the bandages and pulling.

There were flashes of light in his head, but he knew it wasn’t the light of the outside world he was seeing. His brain was overloading; fear was leaping like lightning across his skull. His blood roared in his ears. His body thrashed around in the bed as though he was in the grip of a seizure.

‘All right, nurse. I’ve got him now.’

Suddenly, there were hands around his wrists. Somebody stronger than the nurse was gently but insistently pulling his fingers away from his face. Then a voice came to find him through the sound of his own sobs.

‘Todd? This is Dr Burrows. Everything is fine. But please calm down. Let me explain what’s going on. There’s nothing to worry about.’ He spoke like a hypnotist, the cadence of his sentences even, his voice completely calm. And while he went on speaking, repeating the same information – that everything was fine, all Todd had to do was breathe deeply, deeply – he held Todd’s arms against the bed.

After a few moments, the bright bursts of light began to become less frequent. The din of blood began to recede. So, by degrees, did the waves of panic.

‘There,’ Dr Burrows said, when the worst of it was over. ‘You see? Everything’s fine and dandy. Now why don’t we get you a fresh pillow? Nurse Karyn? Would you please get Mr Pickett a nice fresh pillow?’

Oh so gently, Burrows raised the upper half of Todd’s body off the bed, talking to him all the while: the same calming monologue. All the strength to resist, indeed all need to do so, had gone out of Todd. All he could do was abandon himself to Burrows’ care.

Finally he said: ‘What’s … wrong … with me?’

‘First let’s get you comfortable,’ Burrows replied. ‘Then we’ll talk it all through.’

Todd felt the motion of the nurse as she slipped the fresh pillow into place behind him. Then, with the same tenderness as he used to lift him up, Burrows carefully lowered Todd back down upon the pillow.

‘There. Isn’t that better?’ Burrows said, finally letting his patient go. Todd felt a pang of separation, like a child who’d been abruptly deserted. ‘I’m going to let you rest for a while,’ Burrows went on. ‘And when you’ve slept, we’ll talk properly.’

‘No …’ Todd said.

‘Your brother Don’s here with you.’

‘I’m here, Todd.’

‘I want to talk now,’ Todd said. ‘Not later. Now. Donnie! Make him stay.’

‘It’s okay, Kiddo,’ Donnie said with just the right edge of threat, ‘Dr B’s not goin’ anywhere. Answer his question, Doc.’

‘Well, first things first,’ Burrows said. ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your eyes, if that’s what you’re worried about. We just have to keep the dressings in place around your eye-sockets.’

‘You didn’t tell me I’d be waking up in the dark,’ Todd said.

‘No …’ Burrows replied. ‘That’s because the procedure didn’t go quite as we planned. But every operation is a little different, as you’ll remember I explained to you. I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you woke …’

Now that he was calmer, Todd began to recall some of the things about Burrows that had irritated him. One of them was that voice of his: that fake basso profundo that was a practised attempt to conceal his queeniness, and to match his voice to the heroic proportions of his body. An artificial body, of course. The man was a walking advertisement for his craft. He was fifty-five at least, but he had the skin of a baby, the arms and the chest of a body-builder and the wasp-waist of a show-girl.

‘Just tell me the truth,’ Todd said to him. ‘Did something go wrong? I’m a big boy. I can take it.’

There was a pin-drop silence. Todd waited. Finally, Burrows said: ‘We had a few minor complications with your procedure, that’s all. I’ve explained it all to your brother Donald. There’s nothing – absolutely nothing – for you to be concerned about. It’s just going to take a little more time than we’d –’

‘What kind of complications?’

‘We don’t need to go into that now, Todd.’

‘Yes, we do,’ Todd said. ‘It’s my face, for fuck’s sake. Tell me what’s going on. And don’t screw around with me. I don’t like it.’

‘Tell him, Doc,’ Donnie said, quietly but firmly.

Todd heard Burrows sigh. Then that studied voice again: ‘You’ll remember that during the preparation evaluation I did warn you that on occasion there were reactions to chemical peels which could not be predicted. And I’m afraid that’s what happened in your case. You’ve had an extreme, and as I say completely unpredictable allergic response to the peel. I don’t believe for one moment there’s going to be any significant damage in the long term. You’re a healthy young man. We’re going to see some swift epidermal regeneration –’

‘What the fuck’s that?’

‘Your skin’s gonna grow back,’ Donnie replied, his Texan drawl turning the remark into a piece of cold comedy.

‘What do you mean?’ Todd said.

‘The effect of the procedure we use – as I explained in our evaluation, and is fully described in the literature I gave you –’

‘I didn’t read it,’ Todd said. ‘I trusted you.’

‘– the procedures we use may be likened to a very controlled chemical burn, which produces changes in the dermis and the epidermis. Damaged or blemished skin is removed, and after forty-eight hours at the most, new, healthy skin is naturally generated, which has pleasing characteristics. The client regains a youthful –’

This time it was Donnie who interrupted Burrows’ molassic flow. ‘Tell him the rest,’ Donnie said, his voice thick with anger. ‘If you don’t tell him, I will,’ Donnie went on. He didn’t give Burrows a chance to make the choice. ‘You’ve been out of it since you had the operation, Kiddo. In a coma. For three days. That’s why they sent for me. They were getting worried. I tried to have you moved to a proper hospital, but that bitch of a manager – Maxine, is it? – she wouldn’t let me. She said you’d want to stay here. Said she was afraid the press would find out if you were transferred.’

‘We’re perfectly capable of looking after Mr Pickett here,’ Burrows said. ‘There isn’t a hospital in California that could give him better care.’

‘Yeah, well, maybe,’ Donnie said. ‘Seems to me he’d still be better off in Cedar Sinai.’

‘I really resent the implication –’ Burrows began.

‘Will you just shut the fuck up?’ Donnie said wearily. ‘I don’t give a monkey’s ass what you resent. All I care about is getting my brother properly fixed up and out of here.’

‘And as I say –’

‘Yeah. As you say. Tell you what, why don’t you and Nurse Karyn there step out for a few minutes and let me have a private word with my brother?’

Burrows didn’t attempt any further self-justification, and Todd knew why. He could imagine Donnie’s expression in perfect detail: both brothers got colour in their faces when they were riled up; and a cold eye. Burrows duly retreated, which was the wisest thing he could have done.

‘I want to get you out of here, Kiddo,’ Donnie said as soon as they had gone. ‘I don’t trust these people as far as I could throw ’em. They’re full of shit.’

‘I need to talk to Maxine before we do anything.’

‘What the fuck for? I don’t trust her any more than I trust these sons of bitches.’

There was a long silence. Todd knew what was coming next; so he just waited for it.

‘Just so you know,’ Donnie said, ‘you’ve done some damn-fool things in your life, but this whole deal is the stupidest idea I ever heard. Gettin’ yourself a fuckin’ facelift? What kind a thing is that? Christ. Does Momma know about this?’

‘No. I put you down as next of kin. I thought you’d understand.’

‘Well I can’t say I do. It’s a mess. It’s a goddam mess. And I’ve got to go back to Texas tomorrow.’

‘Why so soon?’

‘Because I’ve got a court appearance at eight o’clock on Thursday morning. Linda’s tryin’ to take away my weekends with Donnie Junior, and if I’m not in court her lawyer’s going to get the judge to rule against me. I’ve been up before him a couple of times, and he doesn’t like me. So, I’m going to have to love you and leave you, which I don’t much like doin’. I guess I could call Momma and –’

‘No! No, Donnie, please. I don’t want her here.’ Todd reached out blind; caught hold of Donnie’s arm. ‘I’ll be okay. You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll be just fine.’

‘All right. I hear you. I won’t call Momma. Besides, the worst’s over. I’m sure that’s right. But listen to me, you get yourself the hell out of here and go to a proper hospital.’

‘I don’t want the press finding out about this. If Maxine thinks –’

‘Have you heard a fuckin’ word I said?’ Donnie said, his voice getting louder. ‘I don’t trust that bitch. She’s out for herself. That’s all she cares about. Her piece of the action.’

‘Don’t start shouting.’

‘Well, what the fuck do you expect? I’ve been sitting here for seventy-two hours straight wondering how I was going to tell Mom that you died having plastic fucking surgery on your fucking face –’ He paused for a breath. ‘Christ, if Dad was alive … he’d be so damned ashamed.’

‘Okay, Donnie. I get the message. I’m a fuck-up.’

‘You’re surrounded by so many ass-kissers, you’re not getting good advice. It makes me wanna puke. I mean, these people. They’re all puttin’ on some show – tellin’ me this, tellin’ me that – and meanwhile you’re lying there at death’s door.

‘And will they give you a straight answer? Will they fuck!’ He paused to draw sufficient breath to launch in afresh. ‘What happened to you, Kiddo? Ten years ago you would have laughed your butt off at the thought of getting a face-lift.’

Todd let go of Donnie’s arm. He drew a deep, sorrowful breath. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ he said. ‘But I got to stay on top of the heap somehow. Younger guys keep coming along …’

‘So let ’em. Why do you need to stay on top? Why not walk away from it? You’ve had a good run, for Christ’s sake. You’ve had it all, I’d say. All and more. I mean fuck! What more do you want? Why do this to yourself?’

‘Because I like the life, Donnie. I like the fame. I like the money.’

Donnie snorted. ‘How much more money do you damn well need? You’ve got more than you can spend if you –’

‘Don’t tell me what I’ve got and I haven’t got. You don’t know what it costs to live. Houses and taxes.’ He stopped his defence; took a different track. ‘Anyhow, I don’t hear you complaining –’

‘Wait –’ Donnie said, knowing what was coming. But Todd wasn’t about to be stopped.

‘– when I send you money.’

‘Don’t start that.’

‘Why not? You sit there tellin’ me what a fuck-up I am, but you never said no to the cash when you needed it. Which is all the time. Who paid your last legal bills, Donnie? And the mortgage on the house so you could start over with Linda, for the third time or fourth time or whatever it was? Who paid for that mistake?’

He let the question hang there, unanswered. Eventually, very quietly, Donnie said: ‘This is so fucked. I came here –’

‘– to see whether I was dead or alive.’

‘– to look after you.’

‘You never cared before,’ Todd said, with painful blunt-ness. ‘Well did you? All these years, when have you ever come out here and spent time with me?’

‘I was never welcome.’

‘You were always welcome. You just never came because you were too fucking jealous. Why don’t you admit it? At least once, between us, say it: you were so fucking jealous you couldn’t stand the idea of coming out here.’

‘You know what? I don’t need to hear this,’ Donnie said.

‘You should have heard it years ago.’

‘I’m outta here.’

‘Go on. You did your gloating. Now you can go home and tell everyone what an asshole your brother is.’

‘I’m not going to do that,’ Donnie said. ‘You’re still my brother, whatever you do. But I can’t help you if you surround yourself –’

‘– with ass-kissers. Yeah. You said that.’

Todd heard Donnie get up and cross to the door, dragging his feet as he always had.

‘What are you doing?’ Todd said.

‘I’m leaving. Like I said I would. You’re going to be fine. That faggot Burrows will take very good care of you.’

‘Don’t I get a hug or something?’

‘Another time. When I like you better,’ Donnie said.

‘And when the hell will that be?’ Todd yelled after him.

But all he got by way of reply was the echo of his own voice off the opposite wall.

Chapter 3

Maxine turned up a little after seven, and after a few perfunctory expressions of relief that Todd was ‘back from the dead’, as she indelicately put it, quickly moved on to the news she was here to debate.

‘Somebody in this place has a big mouth,’ she said. ‘I got a call from the editor of the Enquirer this afternoon, asking if it was true that you’d been admitted to a private hospital. I told him absolutely not; this was a lie, garbage etc. etc. And I said that if he published that you were in hospital or anything vaguely resembling that, we’d sue him and his wretched rag. Ten seconds later I’ve got Peter Bart calling from Variety, asking the same damn question. And while I’m on with Peter, trying not to tell him an out-and-out lie ’cause he has a nose for bullshit, I have a call from People on the other line, asking the same question. Coincidence? I don’t think so.’

Todd moaned behind his mask of bandages.

‘I’ve told Burrows we have to move you,’ Maxine went on.

‘Wait, Donnie said yesterday you told him that you wanted me to stay here.’

‘That was before I got the calls. Now it’s just a matter of time before some photographer finds his way in here.’

‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’

‘That would make a nice little picture, wouldn’t it?’ Maxine said, just in case Todd hadn’t already got a snapshot in his mind’s eye. ‘You lying in bed with your face all bandaged up.’

‘Wait!’ Todd said, ‘They’d never be able to prove it was me.’

‘The point is: it is you, Todd. Whoever’s put out the word about your being here is working in this building. They’ve probably got access to your records, your charts –’

Todd felt a spasm of the same panic that had seized him when he’d first woken up. The horror of being trapped. This time he governed it, determined not to let Maxine see him losing control.

‘So when are you getting me out of here?’ he said.

‘I’ve got a car coming at five tomorrow morning. I’ve told Burrows I want the security in this place tripled ’til you leave. We’ll take you to the beach house in Malibu until we find somewhere more practical.’

‘I can’t go home?’ Todd said, knowing even as he floated the idea that it was out of the question. That would be the first place the journalists and the paparazzi would come looking for him.

‘Maybe we should fly you out of state when you’re feeling a little better. I’ll call John; see if I can get him to fly you up to Montana.’

‘I don’t want to go to Montana.’

‘You’d be a lot more secure up there than here. We could arrange for round-the-clock nursing –’

‘I said no. I don’t want to be that far away from everything.’

‘All right, we’ll find some place here in the city. What about your new lady-friend? Miss Bosch? She’s going to be asking questions too. What do you want me to tell her?’

‘She’s gone. She’s shooting something in the Cayman Islands.’

‘She was fired,’ Maxine said. ‘“Creative differences” apparently. The director wanted her to show her tits and she said no. Though God knows some of her runway work has left little to the imagination. I don’t know why she’s got coy all of a sudden. Anyway, she wants to talk to you. What do I say?’

‘Anything you like.’

‘So you don’t want her in on this?’

‘Fuck no. I don’t want anybody to know.’

‘Okay. It’s going to be difficult, but okay. I’ve got to go. Do you want me to send a nurse in to give you something to help you sleep?’

‘Yeah …’

‘We’ll find a place for you, until you mend. I’ll ask Jerry Brahms. He knows the city back to front. All we need’s a little hideaway. It needn’t be fancy.’

‘Just make sure he doesn’t get wind of what’s going on,’ Todd said. ‘Jerry talks.’

‘Give me a little credit,’ Maxine replied. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning. You get some sleep. And don’t worry, nobody’s going to find out where you are or what’s happened. I’ll kill ’em first.’

‘Promise.’

‘With my bare hands.’

So saying, she was out of the room, leaving Todd alone and in the dark.

Donnie was right, of course. This was undoubtedly the stupidest thing he had ever done. But there was no going back on it. Life, like a movie, only made sense running in one direction. What could he do but go with the flow, and hope to hell there was a happy ending waiting for him in the last reel?

A storm moved in off the Pacific in the middle of the night; the seventh storm of that winter, and the worst. Over the next forty-eight hours it would dump several inches of rain along the coast from Monterey to San Diego, creating a catalogue of minor disasters. Storm-drains overflowed and turned the streets of Santa Barbara into white-water rivers; two citizens and seven street-people were swept away and drowned. Power-lines were brought down by the furious winds, the most badly struck area being Orange County, where a number of communities remained without power for the next three days. Along the Pacific Coast Highway, where the wildfires of the previous autumn had stripped the hillsides of vegetation, the naked earth, no longer knitted together by roots, turned into mud and slid down onto the road. There were countless accidents; fourteen people perished, including a family of seven Mexicans, who’d only been in the promised land four hours, having skipped over the border illegally. All burned up together, trapped in their overturned truck. In the Pacific Palisades, the deluge carried away several million dollar homes; in Topanga Canyon, the same.

Of course all this made the business of getting Todd from the hospital to Maxine’s beach house both more lengthy and frustrating than it would have been otherwise, but it may have helped to keep the endeavour secret. Certainly there were no photographers at the hospital door when they left; nor anybody waiting for them in the vicinity of the beach house. But that didn’t mean they were out of danger. Calls to Maxine’s offices inquiring about Todd’s condition had multiplied exponentially, and they were now coming in from further a field – several from Japan, where Gallows had just opened – as the rumours spread. One of the German reporters had even had the temerity to suggest that Todd was undergoing plastic surgery.

‘I gave him hell. Fucking Kraut.’

‘Aren’t you German on your mother’s side?’

‘He’s still a fucking Kraut.’

Todd was sitting in the back of Maxine’s Mercedes, with Nurse Karyn – who had been thoroughly investigated by Maxine and judged reliable – at his side. The nurse was a woman of few words: but those she chose to utter usually carried some punch.

‘I don’t see why y’all give a damn. I mean, what does it matter if somebody gets wind of it? He just got a chemical peel and a few nips and tucks. What’s the big deal?’

‘It’s not something Todd’s fans need to know about,’ Maxine replied. ‘They’ve got a certain idea of who Todd is.’

‘So they’d think it wasn’t too masculine?’ Nurse Karyn said.

‘Shall we just move on from this?’ Maxine said, catching Nurse Karyn’s gaze in the driving mirror, and shaking her head to indicate that the conversation – or at least this portion of it – was at an end. Todd, of course, saw none of this. He was still bandaged blind.

‘How are you doing, Todd?’ Maxine said.

‘Wondering how soon –’

‘Soon,’ Maxine said. ‘Soon. Oh, by the way, I had a word with Jerry Brahms, and told him exactly what we needed. Two hours later he came back to me, said he had the perfect house for you. I’m going to see it with him tomorrow.’

‘Did he tell you where it was?’

‘Somewhere up in the hills. Apparently, it was a place he used to go and play when he was a kid. I guess this is in the forties. He says it’s completely secluded. Nobody’s going to come bothering you.’

‘He’s full of shit. They have fucking bus tours up in the hills. Every other house has somebody famous living in it.’

‘That’s what I told him. But he swore this house was ideal. Nobody even knows about the Canyon it’s in. That’s what he said. So we’ll see. If it isn’t any good for you, I’ll keep looking.’

Later that afternoon, Burrows came out to the beach house to change Todd’s dressings. It was a surreal ritual for all concerned: Todd semi-recumbent on the deco sofa in the large window overlooking the beach, Maxine sitting at a distance, nursing an early vodka stinger, Burrows – his confidence tentatively back in place after the prickly exchanges of the previous day – chatting about the rain and the mud-slides while he delicately removed the bandages.

‘Now the area around your eyes is going to be a little gummed up,’ he warned Todd, ‘so don’t try and open your eyes until I’ve done some cleaning.’

Todd said nothing. He was just listening to the boom of his heart in his head, and outside, the boom of the storm-stirred waves. They were out of step with one another.

‘I wonder,’ Burrows said to Maxine, ‘if you’d mind closing the blinds a little way? I don’t want it to be too bright in here when I uncover Todd’s eyes.’

Todd heard Maxine crossing to the window; then the mechanical hum of the electric blinds as they were lowered.

‘I think that’ll be far enough,’ Burrows said. A click, and the hum stopped. ‘Now, let’s see how things look. Hold very still, Todd, please.’

Todd held his breath as the dressing which the bandages had kept in place was gently teased away from his face. It felt as though a layer of his skin was coming away along with the gauze. He heard a little intake of breath from Maxine.

‘What?’ he murmured.

‘It’s okay,’ Burrows said softly. ‘Please hold still. This is a very delicate procedure. By the way, when I put the new dressing on, I’ll be leaving holes for your eyes, so you’ll be able to … very still, please … good, good … so you’ll be able to see.’

‘Maxine … ?’

‘Please, Todd. Don’t move a muscle.’

‘I want her to tell me what it looks like.’

‘She can’t see yet, Todd.’

Burrows said something to his nurse, half under his breath. Todd didn’t catch the words. But he heard the gauze, which had now been stripped from his face completely, dropped with a wet plop into a receptacle. He imagined it soaked with his blood, shreds of his skin stuck to it. His stomach turned.

‘I want to puke,’ he said.

‘Shall I stop for a moment?’ Burrows asked.

‘No. Just get it over and done with.’

‘Right. Well then I’m going to start cleaning you up,’ Burrows said. ‘Then we’ll see how you’re healing. I must say, it’s looking very good so far.’

‘I want Maxine to take a look.’

‘In a minute,’ Burrows said. ‘Just let me –’

‘Now,’ Todd said, nausea fuelling his impatience. He raised his hand blindly and pushed at Burrows. The man moved aside. ‘Maxine?’ Todd said.

‘I’m here.’

Todd beckoned in the direction of Maxine’s voice. ‘Come and look at me, will you? I want you to tell me what I look like.’

He heard Maxine’s heels on the polished wood floor.

‘Hurry.’ Her step quickened. Now she was close by him. ‘Well?’ he said.

‘To be honest, it’s hard to tell till he –’

‘Christ! I knew it! I fucking knew it! He fucked me up!’

‘Wait, wait,’ Maxine said. ‘Calm down. A lot of it’s just the ointments he put on you. Let him clean it off before we get hysterical.’ Todd reached out to her. She caught hold of his hand. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ she said, though her grip was clammy. ‘Just be patient. Why can’t men be patient?’

‘You’re not patient,’ he reminded her.

‘Just let him work, Todd.’

‘But you’re not. Admit it.’

‘All right. I’m not patient.’

Burrows set to work again, meticulously swabbing around Todd’s eyes, cleaning his gummed lashes. The stink of cleaning fluid was sharp in his nostrils, his sinuses ran, and his eyes, when he finally opened them, were awash.

‘Welcome back,’ Maxine said, unknitting her fingers from his, as though a little embarrassed by the intimacy. It took a couple of minutes for Todd’s sight to clear, and another two for his eyes to become accustomed to the dimmed light in the room. But part by part, face by face, the world came back to him. The large, half-blinded window, and the rain-lashed deck beyond it. The expensive ease of the room; the Indian rug, the leather furniture, the Calder mobile, in yellow, red and black, which hung below the sky-light. Burrows’ knitted brow, and fixed, nervous smile. The nurse, a pretty blonde woman. And finally Maxine, her face ashen. Burrows moved away, like a portrait painter stepping back from a canvas to check the effect he’d achieved.

‘I want to see,’ Todd said to him.

‘Give yourself a minute,’ Maxine said. ‘Are you still feeling sick?’

‘Why? Is it going to make me heave?’

‘No,’ she said. He almost believed her. ‘You just look a little puffy, that’s all. And a little raw. It’s not so bad.’

‘You used to be such a good liar.’

‘Really,’ she insisted. ‘It’s not so bad.’

‘So let me look.’ Everyone in the room remained still. ‘Will somebody get me a mirror? Okay –’ He started to push himself up out of the chair. ‘I’ll get one myself.’

‘Stay where you are,’ Maxine said. ‘If you really want to see. Nurse? What’s your name?’

‘Karyn.’

‘Go up into the bedroom, and you’ll find a little hand mirror there on the vanity. Bring it down.’

It seemed to Todd the girl took an eternity to fetch the mirror. While they waited, Burrows stared out at the rain. Maxine went to refresh her stinger.

Finally, the girl returned. Her eyes were on Burrows, not on Todd.

‘Tell her to give it to me,’ Todd said.

‘Go on,’ Burrows said.

The nurse put the mirror into Todd’s hand. He took a deep breath, and looked at himself.

There was a moment, as his eyes fixed on his reflection, when reality fluttered, and he thought: none of this is real. Not the room, nor the people in it, nor the rain outside, nor the face in the mirror. Especially not the face in the mirror. It was a figment, fluttering and fluttering and –

‘Jesus …’ he said, like Duncan McFarlane, ‘look at me –’

The strength in his hand failed him, and the mirror dropped to the ground. It fell face down. The nurse stooped to pick it up, but he said: ‘No. Leave it.’

She stepped away from him, and he caught a look of fear in her eyes. What was she afraid of? His voice, was it? Or his face? God help him if it was his face.

‘Somebody open the blinds,’ he said. ‘Let’s get some light in here. It’s not a fucking funeral.’

Maxine went to the switch, and flipped it. The mechanism hummed; the blind rose, showing him an expanse of rain-soaked deck, some furniture; and beyond the deck the beach. One solitary jogger – probably some famous fool like himself, determined to preserve his beauty even in the pouring rain – was trudging along the shore, followed by two bodyguards. Todd got up from his chair and went to the window. Then, despite the presence of strangers, he laid his hand against the cold glass and began to weep.

Chapter 4

Burrows had brought both painkillers and tranquillizers that Todd supplemented with a large order from Jerome Bunny, a ratty little Englishman who’d been his supplier of illicit pharmaceuticals for the last four years. Under their influence, Todd spent the next twenty-four hours in a semi-somnambulant state.

The rain was unrelenting. He sat in front of Maxine’s immense television screen and watched a succession of images of other people’s pain–houses gone, families divided – dreamily wondering if any of them would exchange their misery for his. Every now and then a memory of the visage he’d seen in the mirror–vaguely resembling somebody he’d known, but horribly wounded, filled with pus and blood – would swim up before him, and he’d take another pill, or two or three, and wash it down with a shot of single malt, and wait for the opiates to drive the horror off a little distance.

The new dressings Burrows had put on, though as promised they indeed left his eyes uncovered, were still oppressive, and more than once Todd’s hands went up to his face unbidden, and would have ripped the bandages off had he not governed himself in time. He felt grotesque, like something from a late-night horror movie, his face – which had been his glory – become some horrible secret, festering away beneath the bandages. He asked Maxine what movie it was – some Rock Hudson weepie – in which a man was covered up this way. She didn’t know.

‘And stop thinking about yourself for a while,’ she said. ‘Think about something else.’

Easily said; the trouble was thinking about himself came naturally to him. In fact, it had become second-nature to him over the years to put all other considerations out of sight: to care only about Todd Pickett, and (on occasion) Dempsey. Not to have done so would have meant a diminution of his power in the world. After all, he’d been playing a game which only the truly self-obsessed had a chance of victory. All others were bound to fall by the wayside. Now, when it would have been healthier to direct his attention elsewhere, he’d simply lost the knack. And he had no dog by his side to love him for being the boss, whatever the hell he looked like.

Late in the day Maxine came back from her visit to the Hideaway, as she had now dubbed it, with some good news. The house in the hills was just as Jerry Brahms had advertised.

‘It’s the only house in the Canyon,’ she said.

‘Which Canyon?’

‘I don’t even think it’s got a name.’

‘They’ve all got names, for God’s sake.’

‘All I can tell you is that it’s somewhere between Cold-water and Laurel. To be perfectly honest I got a little lost following Jerry up there. He drives like the Devil. And you know my sense of geography.’

‘What is the house like?’

‘Right now it’s practically empty. There’s some old stuff in there – looks like it goes back to the fifties, maybe earlier – but nothing you’d want to use. I’ll have Marco choose some furniture from the Bel Air house and move it over. Get you comfortable. But really it’s ideal for what we need right now. By the way, Ms Bosch has been calling my office. She got quite pushy with Sawyer. She’s absolutely certain you’re in Hawaii screwing some starlet.’

‘If that’s what she wants to think.’

‘You don’t care?’

‘Not right now.’

‘You’re certain you don’t want to see her?’

‘Christ. See her? No, Maxine. I do not want to see her.’

‘She was pretty upset.’

‘That’s because she wanted a part in Warrior, and she thought I’d get it for her.’

‘Okay. End of discussion. If she calls again –?’

‘Tell her she’s right. I’m in Hawaii fucking the ass off anyone you care to name. Manipulative little bitch.’

‘So here,’ Maxine said. She proffered an envelope.

‘What’s this?’

‘They’re the pictures I took of the Hideaway.’

He took the envelope. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said before he’d even looked at the photographs.

‘You might be there for a few weeks. I want you to be comfortable.’

Todd pulled out the photographs.

‘They’re not the best, I’m afraid,’ Maxine said. ‘It’s one of those throwaway cameras. And it was raining. But you get the idea.’

‘It looks big.’

‘According to Jerry they used to call them dream palaces. All the rich stars had them. It’s hokey, but it’s got a lot of atmosphere. There’s a huge master-bedroom with a view straight down the Canyon. You can see Century City; probably the ocean on a clear day. And the living room’s as big as a ballroom. Whoever built it put a lot of love into it. All the mouldings, the door-handles, everything is top of the line. Of course it gets campy. There’s a fresco on the ceiling of the turret. All these faces leaning over looking down at you. Famous movie stars, Jerry said. I didn’t recognize any of ’em but I guess they were from silent movies.’ She paused, waiting for judgment. Todd just kept looking at the pictures. ‘Well?’ Maxine finally said. ‘Too Old Hollywood for you?’

‘No. It’s fine. Anyway, isn’t that what I am now?’

‘What?’

‘Old Hollywood.’

Chapter 5

Jerry Brahms had been a child-actor in the late thirties, but his career hadn’t lasted into puberty. He’d been at his ‘most picturesque’, as he liked to put it, at the age of nine or ten, after which it had all been downhill. Todd had always thought of Brahms as being slightly ridiculous: with his overly-coiffed silver hair, his mock-English diction, and his unforgiving bitchiness about the profession to which he’d once aspired.

But Jerry knew his Hollywood, there was no doubt of that. He lived and breathed the place: its scandals, its triumphs. He was most informed about the Golden Age of Tinseltown, which coincided, naturally enough, with the years of his employment. In matters relating to this period his knowledge was encyclopaedic, as he’d proved three years before, when Todd had been looking for a new house. Jerry had volunteered his services as a location scout, and after a week or two had taken Todd and Maxine on a grand tour of properties he thought might be suitable. Todd had not wanted to go; he found Jerry’s chatter grating. But Maxine had insisted. ‘He’ll be heartbroken if you don’t go,’ she’d said. ‘You know how he idolizes you. Besides, he might have found something you like.’

So Todd had gone along; and it had turned out to be quite a trip. Jerry had organized the tour as though he was entertaining royalty (which perhaps, as far as he was concerned, he was). He’d hired a stretch, supplied a champagne-and-caviar hamper from Greenblatt’s in case they wanted to picnic along the way, and a map of the city, on which he’d meticulously marked their route. They went down to the Colony in Malibu, they wound their way through Bel Air and Beverly Hills; they looked at Hancock Park and Brentwood, their route plotted by Jerry so that he could show off his knowledge of where the luminaries of Hollywood had lived and died. They passed by Falcon Lair on Bella Drive, which Valentino had built at the height of his fame. They went to the Benedict Canyon Drive home where Harold Lloyd had spent much of his life, and past Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace, which was as gaudy as ever, and the house where Marilyn and DiMaggio had briefly lived in wedded bliss. They visited homes occupied, at one time or another, by John Barrymore (‘It still smells of liquor,’ Jerry had remarked), Ronald Colman, Hearst’s widow, Marion Davies, Clara Bow, Lucille Ball and Mae West. Not all the houses were for sale, nor open for inspection; in some cases Jerry’s research had simply turned up a property close by, or one that resembled the house in which some luminary had lived. Other properties were located in areas that had become shadows of their glamorous selves, but Jerry didn’t seem to care, or perhaps even notice. The fact that stars whose faces had become legendary – whose names evoked lives of elegance and luxury – had lived in these homes blinded him to the fact that there was often decay around them. They were like sacred sites, and he a pilgrim. Todd had found the tenderness with which he talked about these places, and about the people who’d once occupied them, curiously touching.

Four or five times during the trip Jerry had directed the driver to a certain spot, invited Maxine and Todd to get out of the limo in order to show them a certain view, then presented them with a photograph taken on precisely the same spot sixty or seventy years before, when many of the places they visited had been little more than an expanse of cactus and sand. It had been an education for Todd. He hadn’t realized until then how recent Los Angeles was, nor how tenuous its existence was. The greenery was as artificial as the stucco walls and the colonial facades. The city was one enormous back-lot, fake and fragile. If the water ever ceased to pump then this verdant world, with its palaces and its swooning falls of bougainvillaea, would pass away.

As it turned out, Todd hadn’t ended up buying any of the properties Jerry had shown them that day, which was probably for the best. He finally decided to stay in his house in Bel Air, but substantially remodel it. It didn’t matter, Jerry had said, apparently reserving his opinion on whether Todd would join the pantheon of guests, nobody legendary had ever lived there.

Once Todd had said yes to the house in the hills, it took a day to get the move to the Hideaway properly organized; a day which left Todd spent sitting at the window of the Malibu house, staring at the pale reflection of his bandaged face in the rain-spattered glass. Technically, the painkillers Burrows had given him should have left him without any discomfort whatsoever, but for some reason, even when supplemented by some of Bunny’s specials – not a minute of that day passed without his being acutely aware of the pressure of the gauze and the bandages on his face. He morbidly wondered if perhaps he wouldn’t be left with this residue of feeling for the rest of his life; he’d heard of people who’d had certain operations who were made much worse by the surgeon’s knife, and indeed were never the same again. The thought terrified him: that he’d done something completely irreversible. But there was no use in regretting it. All he could do now was hope to God that this unavoidable complication, as Burrows insisted it was, would be quickly cured, and he’d have his face back intact. He wasn’t even hoping for improvement at this point. Just the old, familiar Todd Pickett face would do fine; creases, laugh-lines and all.

Later, Marco came to pick Todd up, having spent the morning moving some essentials over to the new house. Todd went with him in the sedan, Maxine followed on.

‘I got lost twice this morning,’ Marco said, ‘going back and forth from the old house to the new one. I don’t know why the hell it happened, but twice I got all turned round and found myself back onto Sunset again.’

‘Weird,’ Todd said.

‘There are no street signs up there.’

‘No?’

‘There aren’t many houses, either, which is what I like. No neighbours. No tour buses. No fans climbing over the walls.’

‘Dempsey used to get them!’

‘Oh yes, old Dempsey was great. Remember that German? Huge guy? Climbs over the wall, gets Dempsey’s teeth clamped in his ass and then –’

‘Tries to sue me.’

‘– tries to sue you.’

They chuckled at the incident for a moment, then rode in silence for a while.

Chapter 6

‘So what exactly did Jerry tell you about this place?’ Todd asked Maxine as they stood outside the Hideaway.

‘Not much. I told you he’d played here as a kid? Yes, I did. Well, he said he had wonderful memories of the house. That was about all.’

Maxine hadn’t taken any pictures of the exterior, it had been raining so hard that day. Now, seen clearly for the first time, the house appeared much larger than Todd had anticipated; perfectly deserving of the term ‘dream palace’. He couldn’t get a complete grasp of its size because the vegetation around it had been left to run wild. A large grove of bamboo to the right of the front door had grown fully thirty feet, its tallest stalks standing higher than the chimney-stacks. Bougainvillaea grew everywhere in lunatic abundance, purple, red, pink and white; and even the humble ferns, planted in the shade of the perimeter wall, had flourished there, and grown antediluvian. There was room beneath the fronds to stand with your hands raised and still not touch the nubby spores on their underbellies.

The house itself was palatial Spanish in style, with more than a hint of Hollywood fantasy in its genes. The stucco was a washed-out pink, the roof a washed-out red. There was a great deal of elaborate tilework at the front steps, and around the windows, the tiles themselves still bright blue and turquoise and white, the complex interplay of their patterns lending a touch of Moorish beauty to the façade. The front door looked as though it had been purloined from the set of a medieval epic; the kind of door Douglas Fairbanks Senior might have slammed and bolted shut to keep out an army of evil-doers. It would have sufficed too, in its enormity. Maxine had to push hard to open it; and when it finally swung wide it did so not with a gothic creak but with a deep rumble, as a system of counterweights hidden in the wall aided her labour.

‘Very dramatic,’ Todd remarked, playing it off. In truth, he was impressed by the scale of the place; by its scale and theatricality. But guileless enthusiasm he’d had shamed out of him long ago. It wasn’t cool to like anything too much, except yourself.

Maxine led the way through the turret, with its grandiose spiral staircase and its trompe l’oeil ceiling, into the house. The photographs she’d taken had come nowhere near doing the place justice. Even stripped of most of its furniture, as it was, and in need of repair, it was still nothing short of magnificent. There was everywhere evidence of master craftsmen at work: from the pegged wood floors to the elegantly carved ceiling panels; from the exquisite symmetry of the marble mantels to the filigree of the wrought iron handrails, only the best had been good enough for the man or woman who’d owned this place.

Marco had artlessly arranged a few items of Todd’s furniture in the living room, a little island of brittle modernity in the midst of something older and more mysterious. Todd made a mental note to give every thing he owned away, and start again. In future, he was going to buy antiques.

They went through to the kitchen. It was built on the same heroic scale as everything else: ten cooks could have happily worked in it and not got in one another’s way.

‘I know it’s all ridiculously old-fashioned,’ Maxine said. ‘But it’ll do for a little while, won’t it?’

‘It’ll do just fine,’ Todd said, still surprised at how much the place pleased him. ‘What’s out back?’

‘Oh the usual. A pool. Tennis courts. And a huge koi pond. Probably a polo field for all I know.’

‘Any fish in the pond?’

‘No. You want fish?’

‘It’s no big deal.’

‘I can get koi for you if you want them. Just say the word.’

‘I know. But it’s not worth it. I’ll be here a month and gone.’

‘So take them with you.’

‘And where would I put them?’

‘Okay,’ Maxine shrugged. ‘No fish.’ She went to the kitchen window and continued her description of the real estate. ‘The whole Canyon belongs to the house, as far as I can see, but the gardens spread down the hill an acre and a half and all the way up to the top of the hill behind us. There’s a guest-house up there. Perhaps two. I didn’t go look: I figured you wouldn’t be having any visitors.’

‘Does Jerry know anything about the history of the place?’

‘I’m sure he does, but to be honest I didn’t ask.’

‘What did you tell him about me?’

‘I told him you had a stalker, and she was getting dangerous. You needed to get out of the Bel Air house for a while until the police had caught her. Frankly, I’m not sure he bought it. He’s got to have heard the rumours. I think we’d be best letting him in on what’s been happening –’

‘We’ve had this conversation once –’

‘Hear me out, will you? If we make him feel like he’s part of the conspiracy, he’ll stay quiet, just because he wants to please you. He’ll only get chatty if he thinks we kept him out because we didn’t trust him.’

‘Why the hell would he want to please me?’

‘You know why, Todd. He’s in love with you.’

Todd shook his bandaged head, which was a mistake. The room around him swam for a moment, and he had to grab hold of the table.

‘You okay?’ Maxine said.

He raised his hands, palms out, in mock surrender. ‘I’m fine. I just need a pill and a drink. I sent Marco out to get some supplies.’

‘But Todd … it’s barely gone noon.’

‘So? If I stay here and get shit-faced every day for the next month who’s going to care? Find me something to drink, will you?’

‘What about Jerry? We didn’t finish –’

‘We’ll talk about Jerry some other time.’

‘Am I telling him or not?’

‘I said I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

‘All right. But if he starts to gossip, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘If he tells the fucking National Enquirer it’s my fault. Happy?’

Todd didn’t wait for a reply. Leaving Maxine to search for the liquor, he wandered out to the back of the house. The lawn – which lay at the bottom of a long flight of steps from the house, their railings entirely overtaken by vines – was the size of a small field, but it had been invaded on every side by the offspring of the plants, shrubs and trees which surrounded it, many of them in premature flower. Bird of Paradise trees twenty feet tall, sycamore and eucalyptus, rose bushes and fox-gloves, early California poppies shining like satin in the grass; meadowfoam and corn lily, hairy honeysuckle and wild grape, golden yarrow, blue blossom and red huckleberry. And everywhere, of course, the ubiquitous pampas grass; soft, fleecy plumes swaying in the sun. It was uncommon, even uncanny, verdancy.

Todd strode across the lawn, which was still wet from the rain, down to the pool. Dragonflies flitted everywhere; bees wove their nectar trails through the balmy air. The pool was a baroque affair, descending from the relatively restrained style of the main house into pure Hollywood kitsch. The model, perhaps, was B de Mille Roman. A large mock-classical bronze fountain was set at the back of the pool, the intertwined limbs of its figures – a sea-god and his female attendants – rendered more baroque still by the tracery of living vines which had crept up over it. A sizeable conch in the sea-god’s hands had once been a source of rejuvenating waters for the pool, but those waters had ceased to flow a long time ago. Todd was mildly disappointed. He would have liked to have seen sparkling blue water in the pool instead of the few inches of bottle green rain-water that were there at the bottom.

He turned and looked back towards the house. It was still more impressive from this side than it had been from the front, its four floors rising like the tiers of a wedding cake, its walls lush with ivy in places, and in others naked. Beyond it, further up the hill, Todd could just see a glimpse of one of the guest-houses that Maxine had mentioned. Altogether, it really was an impressive parcel of land, with or without the buildings. Had Jerry shown it to him as part of the grand tour Todd might well have been tempted to invest. The fact that Jerry hadn’t done so probably meant that it had not belonged to anyone of significance, though that seemed odd. This wasn’t just any Hollywood show-place: it was the crème de la crème, a glorious confection of a residence designed to show off all the wealth, power and taste of a great star.

By the time he’d made his way back inside, Marco had turned up from Greenblatt’s with a car-load of supplies. He welcomed his boss with his usual crooked smile and a generous glass of bourbon.

‘So what do you think of the Old Dark House?’ ‘You know … in a weird way I like it here.’ ‘Really?’ said Maxine. ‘It’s nothing like your taste.’ She was plainly still mildly irritated by their earlier exchange, though for Todd it was past history, soothed away by his wanderings in the wilderness.

‘I never really felt comfortable in Bel Air,’ he said. ‘That house has always been more like a hotel to me than a home.’

‘I wouldn’t say this place was exactly cosy,’ Maxine remarked.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Todd said. He sipped on his bourbon, smiling into his glass. ‘Dempsey would have liked it,’ he said.

Chapter 7

On Thursday, 18th of March, Maxine got a call that she knew was coming. The caller was a woman called Tammy Lauper, who ran the International Todd Pickett Appreciation Society, which despite its high falutin’ title had its headquarters, Maxine knew, in the Laupers’ house in Sacramento. Tammy was calling to ask a very simple question, one that she said she was ‘passing on’ to Maxine from millions of Todd’s fans worldwide: Where was Todd?

Maxine had dealt with Tammy on many occasions in the past, though if she possibly could she ducked the calls and let Sawyer deal with them. The trouble was that Tammy Lauper was an obsessive, and though in the eight years she’d been running the ‘Appreciation Society’ – (she’d once said to Maxine she hated to hear it called a fan club. ‘I’m not an hysterical teenager,’ she’d said. This was true: Tammy Lauper was married, childless, and, when last spotted, an overweight woman in her middle thirties) – she’d done a great deal to support Todd’s movies, and could on occasion be a useful disseminator of deliberately erroneous information, she was not somebody Maxine had much time for. The woman annoyed her, with her perpetual questions about trivia, and her unspoken assumption that somehow Todd belonged to her. When she was obliged to speak to the Lauper woman– because there was some delicate matter in the air, and she needed to carefully modulate the flow of news – she always aimed to keep the exchanges brief. As courteous as possible – Tammy could be prickly if she didn’t feel as though she was being given her due – but brief.

Today, however, Tammy wasn’t about to be quickly satisfied; she was like a terrier with a rat. Every time Maxine thought she’d satisfied the woman’s curiosity, back she’d come with another enquiry.

‘Something’s wrong,’ she kept saying. ‘Todd’s not been seen by anyone. Usually when he goes away, members of the Society spot him, and they report to me. But I haven’t heard one word. Something’s wrong. Because I always hear.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

‘So what’s going on? You’ve got to tell me.’

‘Why should anything be going on?’ Maxine said, doing her best to maintain her equilibrium. ‘Todd’s tired and he needs a break, so he went away for a few weeks.’

‘Out of state?’

‘Yes. Out of state.’

‘Out of the country?’

‘I’m afraid he asked me not to say.’

‘Because we’ve got members all over the world.’

‘I realize that, but –’

‘When he went on his honeymoon to Morocco,’ Tammy went on, ‘I had six reports of sightings.’ (This was a reference to the event which had caused Maxine more publicity problems than any other in Todd’s life: his short-lived marriage to the exquisitely emaciated model Avril Fox, which had been strewn with potentially image-besmirching scenes: adulteries, a couple of ménages-à-trois involving Avril’s sister, Lucy, and a spot of domestic violence.)

‘Sometimes,’ Maxine said, a trace of condescension creeping into her voice now, ‘Todd likes to be out in public. Sometimes he doesn’t.’

‘And right now?’

‘He doesn’t.’

‘But why would he mind being seen?’ Tammy went on. ‘If there’s nothing wrong with him …’

Maxine hesitated, wondering how best to calm the suspicions she was clearly arousing. She couldn’t just make an excuse and jump off the phone; that would make the Lauper woman even more curious than she already was. She had to manoeuvre the conversation away from this dangerous area as carefully as possible.

‘I’ll tell you why,’ she said, dropping her voice a little, as though she was about to share something of real significance with Tammy. ‘He’s got a secret project in the works.’

‘Oh?’ Tammy said. She didn’t sound persuaded. ‘This isn’t Warrior, is it? I read that script, and –’

‘No, it isn’t Warrior. It’s a very personal piece, which Todd is writing himself.’

‘He’s writing it? Todd is writing something? He said in an interview with People last July he hated writing. It was too much like hard work.’

‘Well, I lied a little,’ Maxine said. ‘He’s not doing the actual writing. He’s working with somebody on the project. A very well-respected screenwriter, actually. But he’s pouring out his heart, so it’ll be a very personal project.’ There was a silence. Maxine waited. Had Tammy taken the bait or not?

‘So this is autobiographical, this movie?’

‘I didn’t say it was a movie,’ Maxine said, taking some petty pleasure in catching Tammy out. ‘It may end up on the screen, but right now he’s just working hard to get his feelings down. He and the writer, that is.’

‘Who is the writer?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘You know it would make all this very much more believable if you gave me some more details,’ Tammy said.

That was it. Maxine lost her composure. How dare this little bitch suggest her lies weren’t believable?

‘You know I’ve really said more than I should already, Tammy,’ she snapped. ‘And I’ve got six calls waiting. So if you’ll excuse me –’

‘Wait – What am I going to tell the members?’

‘What I just told you.’

‘You swear Todd’s fine?’

‘Good God, how many times? Yes. Todd is perfectly fine. In fact, he’s never been better.’ She drew a deep breath, and attempted to calm herself a little before she ended up saying something she regretted. ‘Look, Tammy, I really wish I could tell you more. But this is a matter of Todd’s privacy, as I’m sure you understand. He needs a little time away from the pressure of being a celebrity, so he can work on this project, and when he’s finished I’m sure you’ll be one of the first to hear about it. Now really, I’ve got to go.’

‘One more question,’ Tammy said.

‘Yes.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘What’s what called?’ Maxine replied, playing for time.

‘The script. Or the book. Or whatever it’s going to be. What’s it called?’

Oh shit, Maxine thought. Now she was in deep. Well, why the hell not give the damn woman a title? She’d lied herself into a hole as it was, one more shovelful wouldn’t hurt. She pictured Todd in an image now indelibly inscribed in her mind’s eye, sitting waiting for Burrows to start cutting away the bandages. And the title came:

‘The Blind Leading the Blind,’ she said.

‘I don’t like that,’ Tammy said, already proprietorial.

‘Neither do I,’ Maxine replied, thinking not just of the title, but of this whole, sprawling, exhausting mess. ‘Trust me, Tammy. Neither do I.’

Tammy Jayne Lauper lived on Elverta Road in Rio Linda, Sacramento, in a one-storey ranch-style house fifteen minutes from the Sacramento International Airport, where her husband had worked for eight years as a baggage handler. They had no kids, nor any hope of having any, this side of a miracle of Biblical proportions. Arnie had a zero sperm count. Tammy didn’t mind much. Just because God had given her breasts the size of watermelons didn’t mean she was born for motherhood. And of course the absence of children left plenty of space in the house for all the files relating to what Arnie sneeringly called ‘Tammy’s little fan club’.

‘It isn’t a fan club,’ Tammy had pointed out countless times, ‘it’s an Appreciation Society.’ Arnie said Tammy wasn’t no appreciator, she was a fan, plain and simple, and he knew every time they’d used to sleep together and she closed her eyes it was that dickhead Pickett she’d been imagining on top of her fat ass, and that was the whole unvarnished truth of it. When Arnie got to talking like that, Tammy would just tune him out. He’d stop eventually, when he knew she wasn’t listening; go back to sitting in front of the TV with a beer.

The main centre of the Todd Pickett Appreciation Society’s operations was the front bedroom. The room she and Arnie slept in was considerably smaller, but as she’d pointed out to him, it didn’t really matter since all they did was sleep in it. They still had a double bed, though God knows why; he never touched her; and a couple of years back she’d stopped wanting him to. The third bedroom (and all the closets), were used for storage: files of clippings, issues of the fanzine (quarterly for the first year, then monthly, now quarterly again), photographs and biographies to be distributed to new members, copies of press kits from every film Todd had ever made, in twenty-six languages. Downstairs, in what would have been the family room, she kept the Collection. This was made up of items related to Todd and his career, all of them relatively rare, some one-of-a-kind items. Hanging in zipped-up plastic laundry bags were articles of clothing made for the cast and crew of his pictures. On the mantelpiece, still sealed in their boxes were six Todd Pickett dolls that had been the hot thing to own during his teen-idol period, the boxes signed by Todd. Preserved in a vacuum pack were several unused latex makeup pieces for his Oscar-nominated performance as the maimed firefighter in The Burning Year. She didn’t ever look at those. She’d been warned that they deteriorated when they were exposed to sunlight.

The collection also contained a comprehensive library of scripts for his movies, with all their addenda, including one marked up in Todd’s handwriting, along with a complete set of novelizations of the movies, leather-bound with gilt lettering. There were also credit-listings on all the crews who worked with him, costume sketches and call-sheets, and of course, posters of every size and nationality. If the Smithsonian ever wanted to open a wing dedicated to the life and career of Todd Pickett, Tammy had once boasted, they need look no further than her front room. Once, she’d attempted to enumerate the items she owned. It was something in the region of seventeen thousand three hundred, not including those pieces of which she had more than one copy.

It was to this shrine that Tammy had come after her frustrating exchange with Maxine Frizelle. She closed and locked the door (though Arnie would not be back from work and his after-hours carousing for some time), and sat down to think. After a few minutes, turning over the conversation she’d just had, she went to the very back of the room, and took from its place amongst the treasure-trove a box of photographs. These were her special pride and joy: pictures of Todd (fourteen of them in all) which she’d managed to buy from somebody who’d known the still photographer on Todd’s third picture, Life Lessons. This was Todd’s coming-of-age picture: the one in which he’d changed from being a Boy to being a Man. Of course, his smile would always be a boy’s smile, that was part of its magic, but after Life Lessons he went on to play tougher roles: a homecoming soldier, a firefighter,a man wrongfully accused of his own wife’s murder. Here then, caught in the moment before his cinematic adulthood, was the boy-man of Tammy’s dreams. She had even purchased the negatives from which the series of pictures had been printed, and along with them the assurance from the person she’d got them from that they had been ‘lost’in the production offices before they were ever seen by the director, the producer or by Todd himself. In short, she had the only copies.

Their rarity wasn’t the reason she valued them so highly however. What made them her special treasure – the quality that made her return to them over and over, when Arnie was out at work, and she knew she had time for reverie – was the fact that the photographer had caught his subject unawares. Well, shirtless and unawares. Todd was sleek and pale, his body not heavy at all, not all muscle and veins popping out, just a nice, ordinary body; the body of the boy next door if the boy next door happened to be perfect. She had never seen a body she thought so beautiful. Then there was his face. Oh that face! She’d seen literally thousands of photographs of Todd in the last eleven years – and to her adoring eyes he was handsome in every single one of them – but in these particular pictures he was something more than handsome. There was a certain lost look in his eyes, that allowed her to indulge the belief that if she’d been there at that moment – if he’d seen her and looked at her with the same forsaken feeling in his heart as was in his eyes – everything in her life would have been different; and maybe, just maybe, everything in his.

When she was thinking clearly, she knew all this was romantic nonsense. She was a plain woman; and, even though she’d shed thirty-two pounds in the last two years, was still thirty overweight. How could she hope to compare with the glossy beauties Todd had romanced, both on screen and off? Still she allowed herself the indulgence, once in a while. It made life in Sacramento a little more bearable to know that her secret glimpses of Todd were always there, hidden away, waiting for her. And best of all, nobody else had them. They were hers and hers alone.

There was one other wonderful thing about the fourteen pictures: they had been snapped in such quick succession that if she leafed through them fast enough she could almost create the illusion of movement. She did that now, while she thought about the way Maxine had talked to her on the phone. That nonsense about Todd going away to write his life-story, or whatever she’d said it was going to be; it didn’t ring true. It simply wasn’t like Todd to be so inaccessible. Every vacation he’d taken – in India, in New Guinea, in the Amazon, for God’s sake – he’d been spotted. Somebody had had a camera, and he’d posed; smiled, waved, goofed around. It just wasn’t like him to disappear like this.

But what could she do about it? She wasn’t going to get any answers out of anybody close to Todd: they’d all trot out the same story. She’d already exhausted her contacts at the studios, all of whom claimed not to have seen Todd in a while. Even over at Paramount, where he was supposedly making his next picture, nobody had seen him in many months. Nor, according to her most reliable source over there, the secretary to Sherry Lansing’s assistant, were there any meetings on the books, either with Todd or any of his production team. It was all very strange, and it made Tammy afraid for her man. Suppose they were covering something up? Suppose there’d been an accident, or an assault, and Todd had been hurt? Suppose he was in a hospital bed somewhere on life-support, his life slipping away, while all the sons of bitches who’d made fortunes off his talent were lying to themselves and anyone who’d listen, pretending it was going to be okay? Things like that happened all the time; especially in Hollywood. Everyone lied there; it was a way of life.

Her thoughts circled on these terrible images for an hour or more, while she sat amongst her treasures. At last, she came to a momentous decision. She could do nothing to solve this mystery sitting here in Sacramento. She needed to go out to Los Angeles, and confront some of these people. It was easy to tell somebody a lie on the telephone. It was harder to do when you were face to face with someone; when you were looking into their eyes.

She took one last look through the sequence of photographs, lingering on the last of the fourteen, the one in which Todd’s gaze was closest to making contact with the camera. Another shot, and he would have been looking directly at her. Their eyes, as it were, would have met. She smiled at him, kissed his picture, then put the photographs away, tucked the box out of sight and went through to the kitchen to call Arnie at the airport, and tell him what she planned to do. He was in the middle of his shift, and couldn’t come to the phone. She left a message for him to call her; then she made a reservation on Southwest for the flight to Los Angeles, and booked a room in a little hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, which she’d stayed in once before when she’d come into LA for a Todd Pickett convention.

The flight was scheduled at 3:10 that afternoon, and was to get into Los Angeles at 4:15, but the departure was delayed for almost two hours, and then they circled over LAX for almost three quarters of an hour before they could land, so it wasn’t until half-past seven that she stepped out of the airport into the warm, sweet-smog air of her beloved’s city.

She didn’t know what she was going to do, now she was here; how or where she was going to begin. But at least she wasn’t sitting at home brooding. She was closer to him, here, whatever Maxine Frizelle had said about him being off in some faraway place. That was a lie; Tammy knew it in her bones. He was here. And if he was in any trouble, then by God she would do her best to help him, because whatever anybody might say she knew one thing for certain: there wasn’t a soul on earth who cared for the well-being of Todd Pickett more than she. And somewhere, tucked away in a shameful corner of her head she almost hoped that there was some conspiracy here; because that would give her a chance to come to his rescue; to save him from people like Frizelle, and make him understand who really cared about him. Oh, wouldn’t that be something! She didn’t dare think about it too much; it made her sick with guilt and anticipation. She shouldn’t be wishing anything but the best for her Todd. And yet the same thought kept creeping back: that somewhere in this city he was waiting for her – even if he didn’t know it yet; waiting to be saved and comforted. Yes, she dared think it: perhaps even loved.

Chapter 8

Todd and Marco had settled into life at the Hideaway in the Canyon quite easily. Todd occupied the enormous master bedroom which had (as Maxine had boasted) an extraordinary view down the canyon. On clear days, of which there were many in that early March, Todd could sit at his window and watch the ocean, glittering beyond the towers of Century City. On exceptional days, he could even make out the misty shape of Catalina Island.

Marco had taken a much smaller bedroom on the top floor, with an adjacent sitting room, and did much as he had in the Bel Air home: that is, served with uncanny prescience the needs of his boss, and having provided such services as were required, then retreated into near-invisibility.

The area was much quieter than Bel Air. There seemed to be no through traffic on the single road that wound up through the Canyon, so apart from the occasional sound of a police helicopter passing over, or a siren drifting up from Sunset, Todd heard nothing from the city that lay such a short distance below. What he did hear, at night, were coyotes, who seemed to haunt the slopes of the canyon in significant numbers. On some nights, standing on one of the many balconies of his new mansion nursing a drink and a cigarette, he would hear a lone animal begin its urgent yapping on the opposite slope of the canyon, only to hear its call answered from another spot, then another, the din rising into a whooping chorus from the darkness all around him, so that it seemed the entire canyon was alive with them. They’d had coyotes up in Bel Air too, of course. Their proximity to the house would always send Dempsey into a frenzy of deep-chest barking, as though to announce that the dog of the house was much larger than he was, in reality.

‘I’m surprised we’ve got so many coyotes up here,’ Marco said, after one particularly noisy night. ‘You’d think they’d go somewhere with a lot more garbage. I mean, they’re scavengers, right?’

‘Maybe they like it here,’ Todd observed.

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘There’s no people to fuck with them.’

‘Except us.’

‘We won’t be here long,’ Todd said.

‘You don’t sound too happy about that.’

‘Well I guess I could get used to it here.’

‘Have you been up on the ridge yet?’

‘No. I haven’t had the energy.’

‘You should go up there. Take a look. There’s quite a view.’

The exchange, brief as it was, put the thought of a trip up the hill into Todd’s head. He needed to start exercising again, as Maxine had pointed out, or he was going to find that his face was all nicely healed up and his body had gone to fat. He didn’t believe for a minute that his face was anywhere near being healed, but he took her point. He was drinking too much and eating too many Elvis Midnight Specials (peanut butter, jelly, crispy bacon and sliced banana on Wonder Bread sandwiches, deep fried in butter) for the good of his waistline. His pants were feeling tight, and his ass – when he glimpsed it in the mirror – was looking fleshy.

In a while he’d have to get back to some serious training: start running every morning; maybe have his gym equipment brought over from the Bel Air house and installed in the guest-house. But in the meantime he’d ease back into the swing of things with a few exploratory walks: one of which, he promised himself, would be up the top of the hill, to see what the view was like when you got to the end of the road.

Burrows and Nurse Karyn came every other day to change the dressings and assess the condition of his face. Though Burrows claimed that the healing process was going well, his manner remained subdued and cautious: it was clear that the whole sorry business had taken a toll upon his confidence. His sun-bed tan could not conceal a certain sickliness in his pallor; and the skin around his eyes and mouth, taut from a series of tucks and tightenings, had an unnatural rigidity to it, like a teak mask under which another, more fragile man, was trapped. Superficially, he remained unfailingly optimistic about Todd’s prognosis; he was certain there would be no permanent scarring. Indeed he was even willing to chance the opinion that things were going to work out ‘as planned’, and that Todd was going to emerge from the whole experience looking ten years younger.

‘So how long is it going to be before I can take off the bandages?’

‘Another week, I’d say.’

‘And after that … how long before I’m back to normal again?’

‘I don’t want to make any promises,’ Burrows said, ‘but inside a month. Is there some great urgency here?’

‘Yeah, I want people to see me. I want them to know I’m not dead.’

‘Surely nobody believes that,’ Burrows said.

Todd summoned Marco. ‘Where are those tabloids you brought in?’ he asked. ‘The doctor’s not been reading the trash in his waiting-room recently.’

Marco left the room and re-appeared with five magazines, dropping them on the table beside Burrows. The top one had a blurred, black and white photograph of a burial procession, obviously taken with an extremely long-distance lens. The headline read: Superstar Todd Pickett Buried in Secret Ceremony. The magazine beneath had an unsmiling picture of Todd’s ex-girlfriend, Wilhemina Bosch, and announced, as though from her grieving lips: ‘I never even had a chance to tell him good-bye.’ And underneath, a third magazine boasted that it contained Todd Pickett’s Last Words! ‘I saw Christ standing at his death-bed, claims nurse.’ Burrows didn’t bother with the others.

‘Who starts bullshit like this?’

‘You tell me,’ Todd replied.

‘I hope you’re not implying that it was somebody in my surgery, because I assure you we’ve been vigorous –’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Todd said. ‘You’re not responsible for anything. I know. See? I finally got smart. I read the small print.’

‘Frankly, I don’t see where your problem lies. All you’d have to do is make one call, tell them who you are, and the rumours would be laid to rest.’

‘And what would he say?’ Marco asked.

‘It’s obvious. He’d say: I’m Todd Pickett and I’m alive and well, thank you very much.’

‘And then what?’ Todd said. ‘When they want to come to take a photograph to confirm that everything’s fine? Or they want an interview, face-to-face. Face. To. Face. With this?’

His face was presently unbandaged. He stood up and went to the mirror. ‘I look like I went ten rounds with a heavyweight.’

‘I can only assure you that the swelling is definitely going down. It’s just going to take time. And the quality of the new epidermis is first-rate. I believe you’re going to be very pleased at the end of everything.’

Todd said nothing for a moment. Then, with a kind of simple sincerity he’d seldom – if ever – achieved in front of a camera, he turned and said to Burrows: ‘You know what I wish?’ Burrows shook his head. ‘I wish I’d never laid eyes on you, you dickhead.’