Passing Through the Flame (8 page)

And he led her by the hand out of the big room, down the hallway, and into a small bedroom. There was a big round water bed in the center of the room, a little bar, a couch, two chairs. Everything but the synthetic leopardskin rug was done in brass and black leather: the bed, the bar, the couch, even the walls and ceiling. There were no windows.

“This is my black leather room,” said Beck. “I don’t get black leather urges that often, but when I do, I don’t want to have to stop halfway. I never stop halfway.” He smiled a strange half-smile, went to the bar, and poured out two snifters of brandy. Velva was not exactly terrified, but she did have visions of whips
;
chains, and manacles hidden behind secret panels in the black leather walls.

Beck handed her a snifter, took a sip of his own brandy, said, “Are you afraid of me? Why would anyone be afraid of me?”

Velva took a large gulp of brandy. “You’ve got to admit you’re a little weird, I mean,
this room..
..”

“A whim,” Beck said. “I hardly ever use it. In fact, I hardly ever come to Valhalla. As you’ve seen, the clientele are a pretentious bunch of low-life nerds. The black leather trip keeps them a little freaked out, which is the way I want them.”

“I don’t understand... you don’t seem the type to come to a place like this at all....”

Beck laughed, and downed half of his brandy. “Jeez, do you think I would come to a meatball heaven like this for a
sex scene
? I own the joint, or anyway I control it. Don’t you know who I am?”

“You seem like someone important,” Velva said.

Beck flopped back on the water bed, leaned his back up against a pillow, sipped at his brandy, and stared at Velva. His deep brown eyes seemed to be laughing at her, but there didn’t seem to be anything nasty about it; his smile was warm and teasingly friendly.

 “You really don’t know who I am?” he said. “This is beautiful!”

Velva smiled at him, straightened her posture so as to display her breasts to best possible advantage. Jango Beck has to be someone
really
big, not just a pimp running this place, she thought. To have all these important TV people shitfing in their pants.

“Why don’t you tell me about yourself... Jango?”

In a lithe, catlike motion, Beck was up off the water bed, standing before her. “Delighted,” he said. “You’ve guessed my favorite subject.”

“To begin with,” he said, pulling off his right boot and the black sock beneath it, “I own this grease palace. Good for spare change and lots of leverage.” He took off his other boot and sock, flung the boots grandly away, undid his red velvet sash. “I also own the Den in San Francisco and a couple of other clubs here and there for old times’ sake,” he said, whipping off the sash and tossing it over his shoulder onto the floor, a bright red streamer. Velva’s insides began to throb quietly.

“Of course that’s just the teaser,” Beck said. He crossed his arms and grabbed both sides of the collar of his black leather jacket. Then he uncrossed his arms, pulling downward toward his wrists along both brass-studded arm seams. With the tingly ripping sound of Velcro fasteners parting, the jacket came apart at the seams and fell to the floor in two halves.

Beck began unbuttoning his yellow shirt. “I am also the manager and producer of the Velvet Cloud....”He pulled off the shirt, revealing a slim chest lightly covered with short, curly black hair, did a little bump, and tossed the shirt at Velva. “And president and only major stockholder of Dark Star Records.” Velva caught the shirt, tossed it aside, reached for Beck’s naked flesh.

Coquettishly, Beck danced away from her, holding up a finger. He stood about five feet away, put his hands on his hips. “And furthermore,” he said, ripping Velcro down the legs of his pants, “I’m vice-president of Eden Records.”

The pants fell in two halves at his feet, revealing a trim, well-hung body with a wiry thatch of clipped-looking pubic hair that seemed to match his afro. “The rest,” said Jango Beck, “will have to remain mystery.”

Velva stood there dumbfounded, staring at him, feeling hornier than she had in months. What a sexy man! What an important sexy man!

“You may ball me if you like,” said Jango Beck, sinking back on the water bed and opening his arms in invitation. Velva laughed and threw herself on top of him.

He was coy, then tender, then languid for a long, long time, then deeply penetrating and deliberate, then musky and hot, then fast and powerful. After Velva was satisfied
—really
satisfied—he tapered off through the same stages he had built up. He was just about the best technical lay she had ever had.

But throughout the whole performance, he had seemed a million miles away, cool and aloof, and whenever she chanced to look at them, those dark eyes seemed to be quietly laughing at her. Not laughing cruelly, but laughing just the same. It excited her in a strange way, but it was also a little frightening....

And now here I am, she thought, about to meet Jango for the second time. What do I really know about him? I’ve balled him, but what do I really know?

The Rambler rounded a turn, abruptly revealing a huge amorphous house half-buried in foliage at the peak of the hill still a good distance above them. Dozens of lights of many tints glowed from windows of various shapes set at at least five or six different levels. Trees and vines, whipped by the Santa Ana, flicked back and forth across the lighted windows creating strange strobe effects, turning the house on the hill into a strange, somehow ominous giant light show. Beautiful, yet vaguely sinister, like its master.

The road straightened now, and ahead of them, Velva could see strings of headlights moving up through the darkness toward the fairy castle on the hill.

Fairy castle? No, it was no fairy castle, it had too much of Dracula’s house in it. She couldn’t figure out how it made her feel at all. She seemed to be happy, fearful, nervous, and turned on, all at once. All those feelings seemed wound together inside her like a multicolored ball of twine scraps.

Which, come to think of it, was exactly what it had felt like in that black leather room body to body with Jango Beck.

Paul Conrad decided to be impressed. Why not? Jango Beck had a good cinematic eye; all of this couldn’t be pure dumb chance. The long, winding drive up through the darkness, like a long slow fade through black away from whatever scene you were coming from, then—bang! hitting you with the new scene as you rounded the bend. What Conrad admired most was what had not been done. The estate grounds along the approach had not been landscaped, the road had not been lit, and the tangled chaparral around the house had not been replaced by flat lawn, formal hedges, and puke-plastic cedars. Creepy, but the place had character.

He pulled into the parking lot behind a big boat of a black Rolls; behind his Rambler, a red Italian sports car about a foot high and twenty feet long snarled and burbled angrily in low gear. Velva sighed, fidgeted in her seat, adjusted her dress, and looked uptight. Paul felt as if he were driving a garbage truck.

“Don’t worry, Velva,” he said. “Nobody important is going to see what we drove up in.” She gave him a nervous smile.

The parking lot was well down the slope of the hill from the house, in a depression that looked like an artificially widened gully. It was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence heavily overgrown with ivy; the ridgeline between the parking lot and the house was planted with a narrowly spaced line of shaggy pines. From the house, the unseemliness of the parking lot would be virtually invisible. More points for Jango Beck.

He parked the Rambler between a Cadillac and a Mercedes in a nearly full part of the lot, so that the fewest possible people would see them getting out of it. So as to be kind to Velva. Sure, that’s it, I’m being considerate of Velva.
Sure
I am. Whatever, the maneuver was successful: when they got out of the car, there was nobody in their part of the lot at all.

“Are you happy, Velva? No one saw that you drove up in a pumpkin.” But she was already walking toward the brightly colored flock at the far end of the lot, a glazed look on her face. Paul had to trot a couple of steps to catch up.

They melted easily into the crowd of people walking out of the parking lot, and quite a crowd it was, too. Paul recognized any number of minor-league actors and actresses; a brace of rock stars; Harry Crews, head of production at BRG; Peter Fonda; John Horst, president of EPI; and a vaguely familiar-looking guy who might be either Sonny Barger or Dennis Hopper in a new incarnation. The people he didn’t recognize had the same insouciance as those he did, with the exception of a few odd types—three forthright bikers, two tall girls who seemed to be either Las Vegas hookers or LA transvestites, three very black couples in afros, dashikis, and contemptuous sneers. People who had gotten into this alien reality by the same chance as Velva and himself.

A wide flagstone walk led out of the parking lot up toward the house at a fairly steep incline. It was something over a hundred yards long, and stone benches were set out along both sides at about ten-yard intervals. Behind each bench was a weathered-bronze lamppost ending in a genuine gaslight. Both sides of the walk were densely overgrown with unkempt, tangled chaparral: spiky leaves, gnarled bushes, dry cactus stalks, amoeboid morning-glory vines, prickly-pear patches, all trying to engulf each other. The flickering gaslight created illusions of motion, making the vegetation seem like one great amorphous monster, like something out of an old science-fiction movie, a living glob composed entirely of tentacles, pseudopods, claws, and sucking mouths filled with teeth. Although the climb was long and steep and many of the Beautiful People making it were middle-aged, not a single stone bench was occupied. No one wanted the Vegetable Monster breathing over his shoulder.

Paul loved the effect.

The walk emerged from the foliage onto a short greensward in front of the house; the surrounding walls of chaparral made it seem like, a small clearing in an endless wilderness.

The house itself looked a lot like a ruin half-reclaimed by the jungle. Wide flagstone steps led up to a narrow covered porch which ran the entire length of the house. There was a big Georgian-style doorway in the center of the housefront, flanked by five large windows on either side. Except for the porch, the door, and the windows, the house was entirely overgrown with ivy and morning-glory vines. There seemed to be three tiers of windows receding upward and backward from the ground floor like a ziggurat, but the dense growth made it hard to tell how many stories there actually were. A large, round red-brick tower rose out of the center of this mass of vegetation, crowned by a geodesic hemisphere lit from within by strobing lights of ever-changing color. It reminded Paul irresistibly of an outrageous erect penis. Another tower, taller and thinner, flattened and crenellated on top, rose out of the junglelike growth to the left of the main house. There were four small palm trees growing on the roof of the tower, and about six feet below the roof garden, a ring of windows around the entire circumference. Off to the right, a low rambling wing of the building was entirely overgrown by bougainvillaea, except for the windows, and they were dark.

“How creepy!” Velva said
sotto voce
in Paul’s ear. “It must be fantastically expensive, but what an awful mess!”

“I like it,” Paul said. “It has character. And what a movie set it would make!”

“I can just see myself being chased through the vines by a giant gorilla.”

Paul put on a narrow slitted look and a thick North German accent. “Hmmmm... yes... und in ze role of King Kong, ve have maybe Charley Manson, yes no...?”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’d make you a star.”

“Let’s go inside!”

They walked up the stairs in a group of about a dozen guests, one or two of the faces recognizable to regular TV viewers or fans of obscure Roger Corman films. The door was open, and there were no rentacops guarding it or collecting invitations; everyone just walked right in.

Immediately inside the door was a large foyer, an enclosure made up of three large open arches, all of which led into a long front room which ran the entire width of the house. A big buffet table was set up in front of the rank of windows to the left of the entrance, and there was a large crowded bar in front of the windows to the right, presided over by three long-haired types in bright paisley dinner jackets. A black jazz quartet was playing quietly at the right end of the big room, and a few of the older people were dancing. Frosted orange globes hanging from the sky-blue ceiling illuminated the room with a sunset glow.

Three of the walls were painted a pastel rose, but the long wall at the rear of the room was something else again. It consisted of a series of open Moorish archways in a facade of intricately carved arabesque screenwork, painted in red, green, blue, and gold, almost a Persian rug effect. Through each archway, light of a different character streamed into the main room: flickering orange firelight, strobing neon blue, soft dim red, forest green, yellow, lavender. The effect was that of mysterious and varied Oriental gardens of delight just behind the huge Morrish screen. Except for the crowds around the buffet and bar, there were very few people lingering in the mundane front room, and most of them were over-fifty supersquare studio executive types or the dull wives of interesting husbands holding onto them like captive balloons.

“Should we get something to eat?” Velva asked.

Paul glanced at the crowd in front of the buffet, the big silver chafing dishes filled to the brim with meatballs, rumaki, sausages, spareribs, fried chicken, Chinese shrimp and vegetables, the heaping bowls of salad, the endless platters of canapes, the gigantic mount of black caviar. Tasty as it all looked, the mysteries promised by whatever lay beyond the archways looked tastier still.

“I hate waiting on line,” he said. “Let’s have a good look around first. That food won’t disappear in a hurry.”

Velva pouted. “At least get me a drink first,” she said. “A wet martini with an olive and plenty of vermouth.”