Countess Dracula (11 page)

‘Well … now you come to mention it …’

‘That’s my boy! Listen, hold that thought – you can tell me all about it at breakfast. You eaten?’

‘No.’

‘Neither have I and it’s driving me wild. What’s the point in mornings unless you fill them with breakfasts? I’ll pick you up in half an hour.’

Henry decided to wait out front. He was happy to get out of a room that was stale with old cigarette smoke and sex. It felt as though his hangover had infected the furnishings.

Outside there was a strong Hollywood sun and a breeze that was taking the edge off the heat. A world away from the dull skies that used to loom over his old life in New York. Here you looked up and wondered if you were seeing eternity. These were the kind of skies you dreamed of flying in.

The car pulled up and Fabio opened the door. ‘What the hell you doing out here? They kick you out?’

‘Just getting some air.’

‘That stuff’s bad for you. Let’s drench it in maple syrup.’

They drove to a little cafe that Fabio claimed ‘served the best damned eggs in town’. (Though Henry was at a loss as to how an egg could be that varied – surely it was either cooked or it wasn’t?)

They took a table near the window. ‘You don’t get anywhere in this town by hiding,’ said Fabio. ‘Let them walk past and see the next brightest star that’s going to light up the screen.’

‘Anyone offered anything?’ Henry asked, because to him you could only be a star if you’d appeared in a film.

‘Give it time, I’m not even considering offers just yet. We want people to wonder if they can even get you. Leave them hanging, let them panic that the other studio sent a better script, offered a bigger package.’

Henry shrugged. Fabio seemed to know what he was doing and he was paying, so let him play it however he wanted to.

‘I’ll have the steak and eggs,’ Henry told the waitress. ‘Keep cooking the steak until the chef cries.’

‘Philistine,’ said Fabio, before ordering eggs benedict with blueberry pancakes to follow.

‘Two breakfasts?’ Henry asked with a smile.

‘Pancakes are dessert – why shouldn’t breakfast come with dessert? Every other damn meal does.’

He got up and walked over to a newspaper stand next to the food counter, grabbed a copy of the daily
Variety
and brought it back to the table. ‘Am I going to find you in this?’ he asked, ‘I damn well hope so … “Bright young thing lights up—”’

He stopped speaking, a rare event in itself, struck by the front page.

Henry glanced over. ‘That’s Elizabeth, the girl I was with last night.’

Fabio couldn’t tear his eyes away from the picture. ‘But it can’t be …’ he muttered.

The waitress arrived with their coffee and had to work around what appeared to be a statue of a fat man holding a newspaper. Fabio gave no indication that he even saw her.

‘You know her?’ Henry asked eventually, feeling someone had to get the conversation moving again.

‘Know her?’ Fabio finally put the paper down, though he still didn’t take his eyes off the photo. ‘She’s another one of my clients.’

‘Is that incest?’ Henry joked.

Fabio looked at him. ‘You shitting me?’ he asked. ‘You actually slept with her?’

‘Well …’ Henry suddenly realised that maybe he had spoken out of turn. He tried to think of a way he could retract what he had already said. There was little point in doing so.

‘Oh Jesus …’ sighed Fabio, ‘you slept with Elizabeth.’

‘She did say she was married,’ Henry admitted, ‘but that it was a business thing …’

‘Then maybe both of you need lessons in how to keep your goddamn mouths shut. What am I working my ass off for here if everyone’s going to run around contradicting my careful work?’

‘Sorry …’

‘Don’t apologise, I’m just amazed you got out with your dick still attached. I mean, Elizabeth … she’s a piece of work.’

Henry assumed Fabio was paying Elizabeth a compliment and smiled. ‘She certainly is – the most beautiful woman in the room and she knew it.’

‘The most …’ Fabio pulled the paper closer and scrutinised the grainy black and white picture intently. ‘How old would you say Elizabeth is?’

Henry shrugged. ‘Older than she looks, I guess. I know she’s been in the business a little while. Maybe twenty-five?’

Fabio stared at him for a moment, then returned to the picture in the newspaper. He didn’t think Henry was bullshitting him: he wasn’t the sort of kid who would lie about that sort of thing. He called a spade a damned spade.

Fabio put the newspaper down. ‘We need to wrap this up quick. I think I should pay Elizabeth a visit.’

‘Have I done something wrong?’

‘Probably not. Or if you have it’s nothing that countless other guys in this town haven’t done over the years.’

Henry took that to be a general point rather than a reference to Elizabeth in particular, thereby misunderstanding Fabio completely. Which was probably for the best: while the young man didn’t know Elizabeth well he was old-fashioned enough to the point where he would have tried to defend her honour, whether she actually possessed any or not.

The waitress arrived with their breakfast. Fabio’s sense of urgency wasn’t strong enough to stop him eating it.

Filled with carbohydrates and caffeine, Fabio had his driver take him to Elizabeth and Nayland’s house. As if his mood wasn’t unsettled enough already he met the police in the driveway.

‘What the hell are they doing here?’ he asked nobody in particular. ‘Jesus … are these two trying to give me a heart attack?’

The fact that he was doing a good enough job of that on his own escaped him, naturally, and he lit a cigar as the car pulled up outside the front door.

The driver rushed around to release both him and the clouds of smoke he was producing and he stepped out onto the gravel just as the police car drove away.

‘Police, Nayland?’ he shouted. His client was standing in the open doorway. ‘Please tell me it’s nothing to worry about.’

‘It isn’t,’ Nayland replied. ‘One of the staff has gone missing, that’s all.’

‘One of the staff? What the hell has that got to do with you?’

‘Nothing, but I’ve had to work hard to reassure the police of that fact. It was Georgina Woolrich, one of the maids. We took her out last night and she never went home.’

‘You took her out? What are you talking about, you took her out?’

Nayland led Fabio into the house. ‘There was an accident. Elizabeth was hurling glassware around the place and the maid got in the way. Nothing serious but I guess Elizabeth panicked, thinking that the girl would cause trouble. So we gave her a little cash bonus and took her out on the town, by way of an apology.’

‘Some apology. There was a time when a maid would be grateful if you hit them – it showed you acknowledged their presence.’

‘Those glory days are long past,’ said Nayland with heavy sarcasm.

‘Breaks your heart, don’t it? So what’s the problem? You took her out …?’

‘And I thought I’d dropped her off at home but it turns out she gave me the wrong address. The police think she might have been embarrassed for us to see where she really lived.’

‘So the dumb kid walks home and something happens to her?’

Nayland shrugged. ‘Maybe she’ll turn up later, I don’t know. Maybe she went on somewhere else. A friend’s house or something.’

‘Who knows? Whatever, it’s not your problem and if the cops call again you tell me and I’ll set them straight on that.’

Fabio walked out onto the patio. ‘Get whatever staff you have left to rustle up some coffee, would you? I want to talk with you both.’

‘Both? Elizabeth isn’t well, she won’t be coming down.’

‘The hell she won’t. I want to see her for myself.’

‘See her?’ Nayland had known this moment was coming, of course, but he was damned if he was going to give in to it easily.

Fabio pulled the copy of
Variety
from his jacket pocket and threw it onto the table. ‘She’s all over the papers. Your night out caused quite a fuss.’

‘Isn’t that good?’

‘Good? It’s great. But I don’t understand it.’ Fabio prodded at the picture on the front page with his finger, as fat and stubby as the cigar he was smoking. ‘How is she looking like that only hours after I last saw her?’

Nayland sighed and made a show of looking at the picture. ‘She’s trying a new regime,’ he said. ‘Takes years off her – that and favourable lighting has done her the world of good.’

‘A new regime? What regime?’

‘I don’t know, Fabio, she’ll tell you all about it when you see her. But not today.’

‘I may be lots of things, Frank, but I’m not an idiot. Elizabeth is seen wandering around the town’s hottest nightspots and she looks half her age. That may wash with the idiots out there, especially the ones that haven’t set eyes on her for five years – which is most of ’em since her career’s so far up Shit Creek it’s amazing the papers even remember her name – but it doesn’t wash with me. I want to know what’s going on and I want to know now.’

Nayland kept his calm. Fabio was nothing he couldn’t handle.

He shouted through to Patience, asking her to rustle up some coffee, making Fabio wait for his reply.

Nayland sat down at the table, the very image of quiet calm.

‘You can’t see Elizabeth,’ he insisted, ‘but you don’t need to. You complain about her not matching your ideal one day, then complain again when she does. Just be happy she’s causing a stir in public again.’

‘Oh, I am happy, Frank, I’m ecstatic. But I’m also nervous that this is something that’s going to bite me on the ass. How did you pull it off? What is it? A lookalike? Jesus … I’m your manager – this is the sort of thing you can discuss with me, this is the sort of thing I arrange, for Christ’s sake. But if I’m not involved I need to know the trick or I’m not going to rest easy.’

‘No trick. It’s just a cream that she’s using, you know what these women are like. Anyway, the image exaggerates. Like I said, it was good lighting, there’s nothing miraculous about it. If you saw her you wouldn’t think she looked any different.’

‘So let me see her!’

‘I told you, not now, she’s in bed.’

Fabio raised his arms in despair. ‘I can’t work like this. I’ve a good mind to drop you from my client list.’

This was a step-up from his usual threats and Nayland knew it. Still, he refused to rise to the bait.

‘That would be a shame. But it’s up to you, of course.’

Fabio met Nayland’s stare: a momentary game of poker, of bluff and counter-bluff. Fabio was surprised at Nayland’s fortitude – the man was normally a pushover. But there was time to turn the tables yet. A good player knew when to fold and when to play on.

He smiled. ‘Look at us! How long have we been working together?’

‘A good few years.’

‘A good few years. And we’re going to throw that away over something as stupid as this?’

‘Your call.’

‘Well, then, one of us needs to be the grown-up and I guess it can be me. But I still want to see Elizabeth. I want to see for myself how good she looks and then make sure we all make the money we deserve.’ The coffee arrived and Fabio made complimentary noises, showering Patience with a charm she neither needed or liked. ‘This is what I’m talking about,’ said Fabio. ‘You ask for what you want and it’s with you in moments, am I right? The perfect relationship.’

‘For the one doing the asking,’ Nayland replied.

‘That’s the world, Frank, it’s divided between people that ask and people that do. And we want to stay on the right side of that equation, right?’

Nayland couldn’t say he was completely comfort able with this simplistic view but he shrugged and nodded anyway.

‘So help me out. If Elizabeth has found some kind of miracle anti-ageing cure and is ready to hit the tiles and turn heads then I need to be working with you on that. I need to turn that into money. Because you need money, Frank – you can’t live off memories and this place must be eating up the savings you had.’

Nayland refused to comment on that. He had no doubt that Fabio knew all he needed to know about his client’s finances but he, Nayland, was still too English to discuss them openly. Besides, Fabio was right: they were by no means as rich as they had once been. But he had stayed ahead of this game so far and wasn’t about to concede a point now.

‘It must be,’ Fabio continued. ‘You need more work. You need bigger successes.’

‘You were offering me a movie yesterday.’

‘Some crappy horror picture? That’s what you want?’

‘Yesterday it was a great opportunity.’

‘To hell with yesterday, yesterday is gone. Today we should be looking for something bigger. You haven’t had press coverage like this for years. My phone will be ringing. So is this a one-off or the start of something?’

Nayland couldn’t answer that question. It had been the only thing on his mind all morning. Fabio didn’t wait for a reply.

‘Because we could be looking at an opportunity here. We could be looking at a route back to the top. If this is more than a lucky break, a moment of good fortune with a drunk photographer in a dark club. If she can make this kind of spread again –’ he stabbed at the paper with his finger once more, ‘– then your career just got a new lease of life.’

Having finally disposed of Fabio, Nayland went upstairs in search of Elizabeth.

She was hiding in her room, drapes closed, a dark cave of tobacco smoke, whisky fumes and misery.

‘Have they gone?’ she asked, buried in the shadows, the bed sheets wrapped around her like a shroud.

‘The police? Yes. They weren’t happy but I think we’ll be all right.’

‘Of course we’ll be all right. What can they prove?’

Nayland shrugged. ‘I think you’re overconfident about how untouchable you are.’

‘About this? Rubbish. We’re royalty in this town and royalty does as it pleases.’ She shifted and he caught a glimpse of her face: mascara run from tears, hair a mess. ‘But I don’t think I’m invulnerable. Not a bit of it. How could I? All the mirrors are only too happy to remind me how fragile I am.’

‘At least you had a taste, a night to remember …’

‘A taste? What use is that to me? All it did was rub my nose in it. And look at me now, I look older than ever, a shadow, a walking corpse.’