The Face (18 page)

CHAPTER 27

I
F AELFRIC MANHEIM’S MONDAY-EVENING DINNER had been reported upon in
Daily Variety,
the colorful trade paper of the film industry, the headline might have been FRIC CLICKS WITH CHICK.

On the grill, the plump breast had been basted with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt, pepper, and a delicious mixture of exotic herbs known around Palazzo Rospo as the McBee McSecret. In addition to the chicken, he had been served pasta, not with tomato sauce, but with butter, basil, pine nuts, and Parmesan cheese.

Mr. Hachette, the Cordon Bleu-trained chef who was a direct descendent of Jack the Ripper, didn’t work Sundays and Mondays, so that he might stalk and slash innocent women, toss rabid cats into baby carriages, and indulge in whatever other personal interests currently appealed to him.

Mr. Baptiste, the happy cook, was off Mondays and Tuesdays; therefore, on Mondays the kitchen was, in show-biz lingo, dark. Mrs. McBee had prepared these delicacies herself.

By the softly pulsing light of electric fixtures tricked up to look like antique oil lamps, Fric ate in the wine cellar, alone at the refectory table for eight in the cozy tasting room, which was separated from the temperature-controlled portion of the cellar by a glass wall. Beyond the glass, in aisles of shelves, were fourteen thousand bottles of what his father sometimes identified as “Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, claret, port, Burgundy—and the blood of critics, which is a bitter vintage.”

Ha, ha, ha.

When Ghost Dad was home, they usually ate in the dining room, unless the dinner guests—the old man’s buddies, business associates, or various personal advisers from his spiritual counselor to his clairvoyance instructor—felt uncomfortable having a ten-year-old kid listening to their gossip and rolling his eyes at their trash talk.

In Ghost Dad’s absence, which was most of the time, Fric could choose to have dinner not just in his private rooms, where he usually ate, but virtually anywhere on the estate.

In good weather, he might dine outdoors by the swimming pool, grateful that in his father’s absence no hopelessly dense, tiresomely giggly, embarrassingly half-naked starlets were there to pester him with questions about his favorite subject in school, his favorite food, his favorite color, his favorite world-famous movie star.

They were always trying to cadge some Ritalin or antidepressants from Fric. They refused to believe that his only prescription was for asthma medication.

If not by the pool, he might dine dangerously with fine china and antique silverware at a table in the rose garden, keeping his inhaler ready on a dessert plate in the event that a breeze stirred up enough pollen to trigger an asthma attack.

Sometimes he ate from a lap tray while ensconced in one of the sixty comfortable armchairs in the screening room, which had recently been remodeled using the ornate Art Deco–style Pantages Theater, in Los Angeles, as inspiration.

The screening-room equipment could handle film, all formats of videotape, DVDs, and broadcast-television signals, projecting them onto a screen larger than many in the average suburban multiplex.

To watch videos and DVDs, Fric didn’t need the assistance of a projectionist. Sitting in the center seat in the center row, adjacent to the control console, he could run his own show.

Sometimes, when he knew that no cleaning had been scheduled in the theater, when he was certain that no one would come looking for him, he locked the door to ensure privacy, and he loaded the DVD player with one of his father’s movies.

Being
seen
watching a Ghost Dad movie was unthinkable.

Not that they sucked. Some of them sucked, of course, because no star rang the big bell every time. But some were all right. Some were cool. A few were even amazing.

If anyone were to
see
him watching his father’s movies under these circumstances, however, he would be the National Academy of Nerds’ choice for Greatest Nerd of the Decade. Maybe of the century. The Pathetic Losers Club would vote him a free lifetime membership.

Mr. Hachette, the psychopathic chef related to the Frankenstein family, would mock him with sneers and by drawing sly comparisons between Fric’s sticklike physique and his father’s maximum buffness.

Anyway, in the only occupied seat of sixty, with the ornate Art Deco ceiling soaring thirty-four feet overhead, Fric sometimes sat in the dark and ran Ghost Dad’s movies on the huge screen. Drenched in Dolby surround sound.

He watched certain films for the stories, though he’d seen them many times. He watched others for blow-out-the-walls special effects.

And always in his father’s performances, Fric looked for the qualities, the charms, the expressions, and the bits of business that made millions of people all over the world love Channing Manheim.

In the better films, such moments abounded. Even in the suckiest of the sucky, however, there were scenes in which you couldn’t help but like the guy, admire him, want so much to hang out with him.

When citing the brightest moments in his finest films, critics had said that Fric’s father was magical. “Magical” sounded stupid, like gooey girl gush, embarrassing, but it was the right word.

Sometimes you watched him on the big screen, and he seemed more colorful, more
real
than anyone you’d ever known. Or ever would know.

This super-real quality couldn’t be explained by the giant size of his projected image or by the visual genius of the cameraman. Nor by the brilliance of the director—most being no more brilliant than a boiled potato—nor by the layered details achieved through digital technology. Most actors, including stars, didn’t have the Manheim magic even when they worked with the best directors and technicians.

You watched him up there, and he seemed to have been everywhere, to have seen everything, to know all that could be known. He seemed to be wiser, more caring, funnier, and braver than anyone, anywhere, ever—as though he lived in six dimensions while everyone else had to live in only three.

Fric had studied certain scenes over and over again, scores of times, maybe a hundred times in some cases, until they seemed as real to him as any moments he had actually spent with his father.

Once in a while, when he went to bed drag-ass tired, but was able to settle only on the twilight edge of sleep, or when he woke incompletely in the middle of the night yet continued to skate upon the surface of a temporarily frozen dream, those special movie scenes with his father
did
seem real to Fric. They played in memory not as though he’d viewed them from a theater seat, but as though they were true-life experiences that he and his father had shared.

These dreamy spells of half-sleep were some of the happiest moments of Fric’s life.

Of course, if he ever
told
anyone that those were some of the happiest moments of his life, the Pathetic Losers Club would erect a thirty-foot statue of him, emphasizing his uncombable hair and his skinny neck, and they would spotlight it on the same hill that held the HOLLYWOOD sign.

So on this Monday evening, though Fric might have preferred to eat in the theater while watching his father beat the crap out of bad guys and save an entire orphanage full of waifs, he dined in the wine cellar because in the pre-Christmas bustle, little privacy could be found elsewhere in Palazzo Rospo.

Ms. Sanchez and Ms. Norbert, the maids who lived on the estate, had been away on an early Christmas leave for the past ten days. They would not return until Thursday morning, December 24.

Mrs. McBee and Mr. McBee would be gone Tuesday and Wednesday, to have an early Christmas with their son and his family in Santa Barbara. They, too, would return to Palazzo Rospo on December 24, to ensure that the biggest movie star in the world was met with the proper pomp when he arrived from Florida later that afternoon.

Consequently, here on Monday evening, the other four maids and the porters were working late, under the firm direction of the busy McBees, alongside a few outsourced services that included a six-man floor-cleaning crew specializing in the care of marble and limestone, an eight-person holiday-decorating team, and an emergency feng-shui facilitator who would make certain that various Christmas trees and other seasonal displays were arranged and festooned in such a way as not to interfere with the proper energy flow of the great house.

Madness.

Far from the hum of floor-polishing machines and the jolly laughter of the Christmas-besotted decorating team, Fric took refuge deep underground in the wine cellar. Within these brick walls, under this low, vaulted brick ceiling, the only sounds were those he made swallowing and the clink of his fork against his plate.

And then:
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.

Muffled but audible, the phone rang inside a keg.

Because the temperature in the tasting room was too high for wine storage, the barrels and bottles in this chamber, on the warmer side of the glass wall, were strictly decorative.

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.

Stacked floor to ceiling along one brick wall, several of the enormous barrels featured hinged bottoms that could be swung open, doorlike. Some barrels had shelves inside, on which were stored wineglasses, linen napkins, corkscrews, other items. Four contained televisions, allowing a wine connoisseur to view multiple channels simultaneously.

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.

Fric opened the phone keg and answered his private line in the usual Frician style, determined not to sound intimidated. “Pete’s Pest Control and School of Home Canning. We’ll rid your house of rats and teach you how to preserve them for future holiday feasts.”

“Hello, Aelfric.”

“Do you have a name yet?” Fric asked.

“Lost.”

“Is that a first name or last name?”

“Both. Are you enjoying your dinner?”

“I’m not eating dinner.”

“What did I tell you about lying, Aelfric?”

“That it won’t get me anything but misery.”

“Do you eat in the wine cellar often?”

“I’m in the attic.”

“Don’t seek misery, boy. Enough of it will find you without your help.”

“In the movie business,” Fric said, “people lie twenty-four hours a day, and all it gets them is rich.”

“Sometimes the misery follows swiftly,” Mysterious Caller assured him. “More often it takes a lifetime to arrive, and then at the end, there’s a great roaring
sea
of it.”

Fric was silent.

The stranger matched his silence.

At last Fric drew a deep breath and said, “I’ve got to admit, you’re a spooky son of a bitch.”

“That’s progress, Aelfric. A little truth.”

“I found a place where I can hide and never be found.”

“Do you mean the secret room behind your closet?”

Fric had never imagined that any creepy creatures lived in the hollows of his bones, but now he seemed to feel them crawling through his marrow.

Mysterious Caller said, “The place with steel walls and all the hooks in the ceiling—is that where you think you can hide?”

CHAPTER 28

W
ITH MURDER ON HIS MIND BUT NOT ON HIS conscience, Corky Laputa, fresh from the vault of the nameless dead, crossed the city in the night rain.

As he drove, he thought about his father, perhaps because Henry James Laputa had squandered his life as surely as the vagrants and teenage runaways bunking at the morgue had squandered theirs.

Corky’s mother, the economist, had believed in the righteousness of envy, in the power of hatred. Her life had been consumed by both, and she had worn bitterness as though it were a crown.

His father believed in the
necessity
of envy as a motivator. His perpetual envy led inevitably to chronic hatred whether he believed in the power of hatred or not.

Henry James Laputa had been a professor of American literature. He had also been a novelist with dreams of worthy fame.

He chose the most acclaimed writers of his time to envy. With fierce diligence, he begrudged them every good review, every word of praise, every honor and award. He seethed at news of their successes.

Thus motivated, he produced novels in a white-hot passion, works meant to make the fiction of his contemporaries appear shallow and pallid and puerile by comparison. He wanted to humble other writers, humiliate them by example, inspire in them an envy greater than any he’d directed against them, for only then could he let go of his own envy and at last enjoy his accomplishments.

He believed that one day these literati would be so jealous of him that they’d be unable to take any pleasure in their own careers. When they coveted his literary reputation with such intensity that they were
avaricious
for it, when they burned with shame that their greatest efforts were fading embers compared to the bonfire of his talent, then Henry Laputa would be happy, fulfilled.

Year after year, however, his novels had received only lukewarm praise, and much of this had flowed from the pens of critics who were not of the highest tier. The expected award nominations never came. The deserved honors were not conferred. His genius went unrecognized.

Indeed, he detected that many of his literary contemporaries patronized him, which led him to recognize, at long last, that they were all members of a club from which he’d been blackballed. They
did
recognize the superiority of his talent, but they conspired to deny him the laurels that he had earned, for they were intent on keeping the pieces of the pie that they had cut for themselves.

Pie. Henry realized that even in the literary community, the god of gods was money. Their dirty little secret. They handed awards back and forth, blathering about art, but were interested only in using these honors to pump their careers and get rich.

This insight into the conspiratorial greed of the literati was fertilizer, water, and sunshine to the garden of Henry’s hatred. The black flowers of antipathy flourished as never before.

Frustrated by their refusal to accord him the acclaim that he desired, Henry set out to earn their envy by writing a novel that would be an enormous commercial success. He believed that he knew all the tricks of plotting and the many uses of treacly sentimentality by which such hacks as Dickens manipulated the unwashed masses. He would write an irresistible tale, make millions, and let the phony literati be consumed by jealousy.

This commercial epic found a publisher but not an audience. The royalties were meager. Instead of showering him with money, the god of mammon left him standing in a manure storm, which was exactly what one major critic called his novel.

As more years passed, Henry’s hatred thickened into a malignity of pure, persistent, and singularly venomous quality. He cherished this malignity, and in time it soured and festered into rancor as virulent and implacable as pancreatic cancer.

At the age of fifty-three, while delivering a caustic speech full of fire and outrage to an indifferent crowd of academics at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention, Henry James Laputa suffered a massive heart attack. He fell instantly dead with such authority that some audience members thought he’d daringly punctuated a point with a pratfall, and they applauded briefly before realizing that here was death indeed, not shtick.

Corky had learned so much from his parents. He had learned that envy alone does not constitute a philosophy. He’d learned that a fun lifestyle and cheerful optimism cannot exist in the face of all-consuming, all-embracing hatred without surcease.

He’d also learned not to trust in laws, idealism, or art.

His mother had trusted in the laws of economics, in the ideals of Marxism. She ended as a bitter old woman, without hope or purpose, who seemed almost relieved when her own son had beaten her to death with a fireplace poker.

Corky’s father had believed that he could use art like a hammer to beat the world into submission. The world still turned, but Dad had gone to ashes, scattered in the sea, dispersed, as if he’d never existed.

Chaos.

Chaos was the only dependable force in the universe, and Corky served it with the confidence that it would, in turn, always serve him.

Across the glistening city, through the night and unrelenting rain, he drove to West Hollywood, where the undependable Rolf Reynerd needed to die.

Both ends of the block where Reynerd lived were closed off by police barricades. Officers in black rain slickers with fluorescent yellow stripes used chemical-light torches to redirect traffic.

In the basic colors of emergency, bright skeins of rain raveled through the pulsing ambulance beacons and knitted urgent patterns on the puddled pavement.

Corky drove past the barricade. Within two blocks, he found a parking place.

Perhaps the official bustle on Rolf Reynerd’s street had no connection with the actor, but Corky’s intuition insisted otherwise.

He wasn’t worried. Whatever mess Rolf Reynerd had gotten himself into, Corky would find a way to use the situation to further his own agenda. Tumble and tumult were his friends, and he was confident that in the church of chaos, he was a favored child.