Gods and Pawns (31 page)

“Are you okay?” Mendoza leaned from the saddle. “Oh, hell, is that him?”

“The late Isaiah Stuckey,” I said bitterly. “He had a heart attack.”

“I’m not surprised, with all that running uphill,” said Mendoza. “This place really needs those cable cars, doesn’t it?”

“You said it, kiddo.” I got to my feet. “Let’s get out of here.”

Mendoza frowned, gazing at the dead man. “Wait a minute. That’s Catskill Ike!”

“Cute name,” I said, clambering up into the saddle behind her. “You knew the guy?”

“No, I just monitored him in case he started any fires. He’s been prospecting on Villa Creek for the last six months.”

“Well, so what?”

“So I know where he found your quartz deposit,” said Mendoza. “It wasn’t mined up the Sacramento at all, Joseph.”

“It’s in Big
Sur
?” I demanded. She just nodded.

At that moment, the grizzly shoved her way out into the street, and it seemed like a good idea to leave fast.

“Don’t take it too badly,” said Mendoza a little while later, when we were riding back toward our hotel. “You got what the Company sent you after, didn’t you? I’ll bet there’ll be Security Techs blasting away at Villa Creek before I get home.”

“I guess so,” I said glumly. She snickered.

“And look at the wonderful quality time we got to spend together! And the Pope will get his fancy crucifix. Or was that part just a scam?”

“No, the Company really is bribing the Pope to do something,” I said. “But you don’t—”

“—Need to know what, of course. That’s okay. I got a great meal out of this trip, at least.”

“Hey, are you hungry? We can still take in some of the restaurants, kid,” I said.

Mendoza thought about that. The night wind came gusting up from the city below us, where somebody at the Poulet d’Or was mincing onions for a
sauce piperade
, and somebody else was grilling steaks. We heard the pop of a wine cork all the way up where we were on Powell Street…

“Sounds like a great idea,” she said. She briefly accessed her chronometer. “As long as you can swear we’ll be out of here by 1906,” she added.

“Trust me,” I said happily. “No problem!”

“Trust you?” she exclaimed, and spat. I could tell she didn’t mean it, though.

We rode on down the hill.

Opening Credits: 1926

“Take ten!”
called the director, and lowering his megaphone he settled back in his chair. It sank deeper into the sand under his weight, and irritably settling again he peered out at the stallion galloping across the expanse of dune below him, its burnoosed rider clinging against the scouring blast of air from the wind machines.

“Pretty good so far…” chanted the assistant director. Beside him, Rudolph Valentino (in a burnoose that matched the horseman’s) nodded grimly. They watched as the steed bore its rider up one wave of sand, down the next, nearer and nearer to that point where they might cut away—

“Uh-oh,” said the grip. From the sea behind them a real wind traveled forward across the sand, tearing a palm frond from the seedy-looking prop trees around the Sheik’s Camp set and sending it whirling in front of the stallion. The stallion pulled up short and began to dance wildly. After a valiant second or so the rider flew up in the air and came down on his head in the sand, arms and legs windmilling.

“Oh, Christ,” the director snarled.
“Cut! Kill the wind!”

“You O.K., Lewis?”
yelled the script boy.

The horseman sat up unsteadily and pulled swathing folds of burnoose up off his face. He held up his right hand, making an OK sign.

“Set up for take eleven!”
yelled the assistant director. The horseman clambered to his feet and managed to calm his mount; taking its bridle, he slogged away with it, back across the sand to their mark. Behind them the steady salt wind erased the evidence of their passage.

“This wind is not going to stop, you know,” Valentino pointed out gloomily. He stroked the false beard that gave him all the appearance of middle age he would ever wear.

“Ain’t there any local horses that ain’t spooked by goddam palm leaves?” the grip wanted to know.

“Yeah. Plowhorses,” the director told them. “Look, we paid good money for an Arabian stallion. Do you hear the man complaining? I don’t hear him complaining.”

“I can’t even
see
him,” remarked the assistant director, scanning the horizon. “Jeez, you don’t guess he fell down dead or anything out there?”

But there, up out of the sand came the horse and his rider, resuming position on the crest of the far dune.

“Nah. See?” the director said. “The little guy’s a pro.” He lifted the megaphone, watching as Lewis climbed back into the saddle. The script boy chalked in the update and held up the clapboard for the camera.
Crack!

“Wind machines go—and—take eleven!”

Here they came again, racing the wind and the waning light, over the lion-colored waves as the camera whirred, now over the top of the last dune and down, disappearing—

Disappearing—

The grip and the assistant director groaned. Valentino winced.

“I don’t see them, Mr. Fitzmaurice,” the script boy said.

“So where are they?” yelled the director.
“Cut! Cut, and kill the goddam wind.”

“Sorry!” cried a faint voice, and a second later Lewis came trudging around the dune, leading the jittering stallion. “I’m afraid we had a slight spill back there.”

“
Wranglers!
Jadaan took a fall,” called the assistant director in horrified tones, and from the camp on the beach a half dozen wranglers came running. They crowded around the stallion solicitously. Lewis left him to their care and struggled on toward the director.

The headpiece of his burnoose had come down around his neck, and his limp fair hair fluttered in the wind, making his dark makeup—what was left after repeated face-first impact with dunes—look all the more incongruous. He spat out sand and smiled brightly, tugging off his spirit-gummed beard.

“Of course, I’m ready to do another take if you are, Mr. Fitzmaurice,” Lewis said.

“No,” said Valentino. “We will kill him or we will kill the horse, or both.”

“Oh, screw it,” the director decided. “We’ve got enough good stuff in the can. Anyway, the light’s going. Let’s see what we can do with that take, as far as it went.”

Lewis nodded and waded on through the sand, intent on getting out of his robes; Valentino stepped forward to put a hand on his shoulder. Lewis squinted up at him, blinking sand from his lashes.

“You work very hard, my friend,” Valentino said. “But you should not try to ride horses. It is painful to watch.”

“Oh—er—thank you. It’s fun being Rudolph Valentino for a few hours, all the same,” said Lewis, and from out of nowhere he produced a fountain pen. “I don’t suppose I might have your autograph, Mr. Valentino?”

“Certainly,” said Valentino, looking vainly around for something to autograph. From another nowhere Lewis produced a copy of the shooting script, and Valentino took it. “Your name is spelled?”

“L-e-w-i-s, Mr. Valentino. Right there?” he suggested. “Right under where it says
The Son of the Sheik?
” He watched with a peculiarly stifled glee as Valentino signed:
For my “other self” Lewis. Rudolph Valentino.

“There,” said Valentino, handing him the script. “No more falls on the head, yes?”

“Thank you so much. It’s very kind of you to be worried, but it’s all right, you know,” Lewis replied. “I can take a few tumbles. I’m a professional stunt man, after all.”

He tucked the script away in his costume and staggered down to the water’s edge, where the extras and crew were piling into an old stakebed truck. The driver was already cranking up the motor, anxious to begin his drive back to Pismo Beach before the tide turned and they got bogged down again.

Valentino watched Lewis go, shaking his head.

“Don’t worry about that guy, Rudy,” the director told him, knocking sand out of his megaphone. “I know he looks like a pushover, but he never gets hurt, and I mean never.”

“But luck runs out, like sand.” Valentino smiled wryly and waved at the dunes stretching away behind them, where the late slanting sunlight cast his shadow to the edge of the earth. “Doesn’t it? And that one, I think he has the look of a man who will die young.”

Which was a pretty ironic thing for Valentino to say, considering that he’d be dead himself within the year and that Lewis happened to be, on that particular day in 1926, just short of his eighteen hundred and twenty-third birthday.

If we immortals had birthdays, anyway.

Flash Forward: 1933

“Oh, look, we’re at Pismo Beach,” exclaimed Lewis, leaning around me to peer at it. The town was one hotel and a lot of clam stands lining the highway. “Shall we stop for clams, Joseph?”

“Are you telling me you didn’t get enough clams when you worked on
Son of the Sheik
?” I grumbled, groping in my pocket for another mint Lifesaver. The last thing I wanted right now was food. Usually I can eat anything (and have, believe me) but this job was giving me butterflies like crazy.

“Possibly,” Lewis said, standing up in his seat to get a better view as we rattled past, bracing himself with a hand on the Ford’s windshield. The wind hit him smack in the face and his hair stood out all around his head. “But it would be nice to toast poor old Rudy’s shade, don’t you think?”

“You want to toast him? Here.” I pulled out my flask and handed it to Lewis. “It would be nice to be on time for Mr. Hearst, too, you know?”

Lewis slid back down into his seat and had a sip of warm gin. He made a face.

“
Ave atque vale
, old man,” he told Valentino’s ghost. “You’re not actually nervous about this, are you, Joseph?”

“Me, nervous?” I bared my teeth. “Hell no. Why would I be nervous meeting one of the most powerful men in the world?”

“Well, precisely.” Lewis had another sip of gin, made another face. “Thank God you won’t be needing this bootlegger any more.
Vale
Volstead Act, too! You must have known far more powerful men in your time, mustn’t you? You worked for a Byzantine emperor once, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Three or four of ’em,” I corrected him. “And believe me, not one had anything like the pull of William Randolph Hearst. Not when you look at the big picture. Anyway, Lewis, the rules of the whole game are different now. You think a little putz like Napoleon could rule the world today? You think Hitler’d be getting anywhere without the media? Mass communication is where the real power is, kiddo.”

“He’s only a mortal, after all,” Lewis said. “Put it into perspective! We’re simply motoring up to someone’s country estate to spend a pleasant weekend with entertaining people. There will be fresh air and lovely views. There will be swimming, riding, and tennis. There will be fine food and decent drink, at least one hopes so—”

“Don’t count on booze,” I said. “Mr. Hearst doesn’t like drunks.”

“—and all we have to do is accomplish a simple document drop for the Company,” Lewis went on imperturbably, patting the briefcase in which he’d brought the autographed Valentino script. “A belated birthday present for the master of the house, so to speak.”

“That’s all you have to do,” I replied. “I have to actually negotiate with the guy.”

Lewis shrugged, conceding my point. “Though what was that story you were telling me the other night, about you and that pharaoh, what was his name—? It’s not as though there will be jealous courtiers ordering our executions, after all.”

I made a noise of grudging agreement. I couldn’t explain to Lewis why this job had me so on edge. Probably I wasn’t sure. I lie to myself a lot, see. I started doing it about thirteen thousand years ago and it’s become a habit, like chain-sucking mints to ward off imaginary nervous indigestion.

Immortals have a lot of little habits like that.

We cruised on up the coast in my Model A, through the cow town of San Luis Obispo. This was where Mr. Hearst’s honored guests arrived in his private rail car, to be met at the station by his private limousines. From there they’d be whisked away to that little architectural folly known to later generations as Hearst Castle, but known for now just as The Ranch or, if you were feeling romantic,
La Cuesta Encantada.

You’ve never been there? Gee, poor you. Suppose for a moment you owned one of the more beautiful hills in the world, with a breathtaking view of mountains and sea. Now suppose you decided to build a house on top of it, and had all the money in the world to spend on making that house the place of your wildest dreams, no holds barred and no expense spared, with three warehouses full of antiques to furnish the place.

Hell, yes, you’d do it; anybody would. What would you do then? If you were William Randolph Hearst, you’d invite guests up to share your enjoyment of the place you’d made. But not just any guests. You could afford to lure the best minds of a generation up there to chat with you, thinkers and artists, Einsteins and Thalbergs, Huxleys and G. B. Shaws. And if you had a blonde mistress who worked in the movies, you got her to invite her friends, too: Gable and Lombard, Bette Davis, Marie Dressler, Buster Keaton, Harpo Marx, Charlie Chaplin.

And the occasional studio small fry like Lewis and me, after I’d done a favor for Marion Davies and asked for an invitation in return. The likes of us didn’t get the private railroad car treatment. We had to drive all the way up from Hollywood on our own steam. I guess if Mr. Hearst had any idea who was paying him a visit, he’d have sent a limo for us too; but the Company likes to play its cards close to the vest.

And we didn’t look like a couple of immortal cyborg representatives of an all-powerful twenty-fourth-century Company, anyway. I appear to be an ordinary guy, kind of dark and compact (O.K.,
short
) and Lewis…well, he’s good-looking, but he’s on the short side, too. It’s always been Company policy for its operatives to blend in with the mortal population, which is why nobody in San Luis Obispo or Morro Bay or Cayucos wasted a second glance on two average cyborg joes in a new Ford zipping along the road.

Anyway we passed through little nowhere towns-by-the-sea and rolling windswept seacoast, lots of California scenery that was breathtaking, if you like scenery. Lewis did, and kept exclaiming over the wildflowers and cypress trees. I just crunched Pep-O-Mints and kept driving. Seventeen miles before we got anywhere near Mr. Hearst’s castle, we were already on his property.

What you noticed first was a distant white something on a green hilltop: two pale towers and not much more. I remembered medieval hill towns in Spain and France and Italy, and so did Lewis, because he nudged me and chuckled: “Rather like advancing on Le Monastier, eh? Right about now I’d be practicing compliments for the lord or the archbishop or whoever, and hoping I’d brought enough lute strings. What about you?”

“I’d be praying I’d brought along enough cash to bribe whichever duke it was I had to bribe,” I told him, popping another Lifesaver.

“It’s not the easiest of jobs, is it, being a Facilitator?” Lewis said sympathetically. I just shook my head.

The sense of displacement in reality wasn’t helped any by the fact that we were now seeing the occasional herd of zebra or yak or giraffe, frolicking in the green meadows beside the road. If a roc had swept over the car and carried off a water buffalo in its talons, it wouldn’t have seemed strange. Even Lewis fell silent, and took another shot of gin to fortify himself.

He had the flask stashed well out of sight, though, by the time we turned right into an unobtrusive driveway and a small sign that said
HEARST RANCH
. Here we paused at a barred gate, where a mortal leaned out of a shack to peer at us inquiringly.

“Guests of Mr. Hearst’s,” I shouted, doing my best to look as though I did this all the time.

“Names, please?”

“Joseph C. Denham and Lewis Kensington,” we chorused.

He checked a list to be sure we were on it and then, “Five miles an hour, please, and the animals have right-of-way at all times,” he told us, as the gates swung wide.

“We’re in!” Lewis gave me a gleeful dig in the ribs. I snarled absently and drove across the magic threshold, with the same jitters I’d felt walking under a portcullis into some baron’s fortress.