Wake Up and Dream (27 page)

Another wild swing, and he was falling back, arms flailing. Clark grabbed at him instinctively, and for a moment the two men teetered over the drop, then Clark got a better grip and pulled him straight.

“Nearly there, eh? Nearly the perfect fucking moment.” Timmy was still laughing, although the usually buoyant coiffure was flattened into black wings from which dye seemed to be streaming. “You and Lars Bechmeir on
Star Talk
tomorrow fucking night at the Biltmore Liberty League rally. Just you see, Danny boy-o. Just you fucking wait…”

With a pratfall which poor, dead Harold Lloyd would have envied, Timmy slip-staggered his way down the castle steps.

Clark watched him go. The rain was lessening by now. Amazing, really, that no one had gotten seriously hurt in this storm. Although, with the things he’d seen recently, maybe he should give up on being amazed at anything.

He took the puddled walkway down. Then, glancing back up at the castle, he thought he caught sight of an indistinct shape close to the place on the black battlements where he’d been standing. Was there someone still up there that he hadn’t noticed? Or was it just a flare of moonlight catching through the thinning clouds? But the thing was pale, half-solid, and it was moving, floating, and it seemed for a moment to be nearly alive. A chill passed over him, and with it came a sense of awe. He found that he was straining his eyes, holding his breath, somehow wishing for the moment to extend itself and become more real. But then came a fresh gust of wind, a new flurry of heavy raindrops. The darkness seemed to pulse and the shape extinguished itself like a black candleflame. In another moment, Clark was almost certain he’d seen nothing at all.

A
WEIRD KIND OF DEMOCRACY
reigned at Herbert Kisberg’s party in the aftermath of the storm. A few flecks of mud. A lost eyelash or cuffpin. The run colors of a silk shawl. These guests were unaccustomed to such discomforts, and, with their wet shoulders, hastily reapplied makeup and rearranged hair, they rejoiced in briefly becoming almost like everyone else.

Many were looking to find Herbert Kisberg so they could congratulate him for arranging such a dramatic storm. Others had heard rumors of a sighting of Lars Bechmeir, but at parties like this such things were par for the course. Factions were fragmenting, and there had even been talk of some people leaving, but that idea soon became ridiculous—for where else would you go, and what might you miss if you went? There was still that giddy sense that the next five minutes might spring that crucial role, screw or deal.

Whether to hang out with the drunkards, for example, or go with those who were just good at pretending to be drunk? Whether to slum it with the servants and maybe pick up a waiter or a maid? As was the custom, several feelies were now being played in Kisberg’s suite of viewing rooms: showings from the rushes of new productions, or hilarious cuts of some big name having a strop. Other attractions were also being screened in more informal arrangements—legendary or rumored items which would never go on general release. The looped sound, film and feelie track of a famous leading lady’s orgasm. Next door, the equally famous clip of a genuine starlet being strangled to death by a bathrobe belt. It would only be a matter of time before someone suggested running the two showings together.

Clark wandered. Meeting Kisberg, and then Lars Bechmeir, and getting that live slot on tomorrow’s
Star Talk
… all in all, he didn’t think he’d done a bad job tonight of doing whatever a real screenwriter would have done, whether he was Daniel Lamotte or not. But it had been a long day, and he was tired past caring, and he wanted to get back to Blixden Apartments, and to sleep for about twenty hours, and where the hell had Barbara Eshel gone?

“Clark?”

He was alone in a room where open French windows flapped and creaked. A smell of strawberries and caviar, and that feelie theater after-storm tingle, changed and mingled in the air. He didn’t instantly recognize his own name.

“Clark
Gable
? Is that
you
?”

Peg Entwistle’s evening dress was wet and her blonde hair was plastered in a mid-parting across her head, but she still looked as regally beautiful as she had in
The Virgin Queen
and as he remembered her.

“Yeah. It’s me.”

“I thought I saw you earlier,” she said, taking a few steps further, “but I couldn’t be sure. You look
different
.”

“It’s these glasses. But you Peg… you look just the same.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you heard my idiot directors.” She smiled. “But I’ve had a good innings. Near the top for almost ten years.”

Innings
.
Idiot
. Even that trace of a soft English accent, which Clark knew was really Welsh, remained. “I finally got around to seeing
The Virgin Queen
just a few days back,” he said. “You were brilliant. It’s everything everyone always says. Not that I actually follow the feelies much since… well, since. Although the screenwriter Daniel Lamotte’s a kind of friend of mine.”

“Really?” Peg smiled again. Was that a hint of recognition, or something else, or nothing at all? Whatever it was, she closed it off quickly. “So you’re still in the business?”

“Not at all. I do investigative work.”

“Oh.” He was certain he now saw that famous gray-green gaze grow a fraction more wary. “What sort of things do you investigate?”

“Oh, I just serve subpoenas. Follow people. Find out where they really go when they’re supposed to be playing poker on Saturday evenings. It’s like the kind of roles I was expected to play on stage when I was still acting, but without most of the glamour. Or the money.”

“But you’re here.”

“I live in Venice. I keep myself—well, pretty busy. Still occasionally run into a few of the old names. But less and less. You know how it is. But you’re right. It’s work of a sort that I’m on tonight, although it’s nothing to do with you. So I’d rather you didn’t mention you’d seen me.”

She tipped her chin. “So that’s how it is?” They both knew there was no point in him asking how things had gone with her. Just like her face, Peg’s life was public property. The three marriages, the bust-ups with leading men. That car accident which had nearly gone to court when she’d crippled a kid. Even though Clark never read town gossip, all these things and more about Peg Entwistle had somehow seeped through to him.

“Do you think much about the old times?” he asked. She gave a mock-actressy sigh. “What do you think?”

“Yeah.” He waited. Looking at her. Then he pulled off the glasses, stuffed them clumsily away. “Look, Peg… I’m sorry about back then. What you went through. I mean, I know I let you down.”

“Perhaps you did.” She met his gaze. “But there were others who could have helped. Not least myself. And it wasn’t as if you and I were in love.”

“But we were close?”

Now they both had to smile, simply because it was true. He and Peg might not have been in love, but they’d certainly been lovers. And close. Yep, close probably
was
the best word. Things might have broken apart between them before she’d got in such a bad way that she’d ended up getting arrested for aggravated trespass and carted off to the funny farm, but not so broken and so bad that he couldn’t have seen it coming. All that succeed or die shit. The crap she’d talked about trying to throw herself off that sign which had turned out not to be crap at all. Was his stupid dislike of any kind of hospitals even an excuse, and at that a feeble one, for not even bothering to visit her at the Met? He knew it wasn’t. The real reason he’d ignored her pleas for help, he guessed, was that he’d been too busy being—or trying to be—Clark Gable. And look where it had got him. And her.

As if she’d been exactly following his thoughts, Peg gave a small tilt of her head in partial agreement. For all that they were talking about a catastrophic part of her life, she seemed less the actress now, and more relaxed. There were so few people who even knew about that time in her life, he realized, that it was probably rare that she ever got the chance to speak of it.

“I guess I was always desperate for fame,” she said. “But I used to ask myself, isn’t everyone desperate? And I looked around at all the other people I knew and convinced myself that I was nothing but normal.” She smiled. “Which is always a bad thing to do in LA. So it wasn’t your fault, Clark, that things got on top of me. And that Hollywoodland sign—it was a sort of promise I made.” She took a breath. Her shoulders rose and fell. “And, like a bargain in a fairy tale, it assumed its own life. I don’t know if I’d have actually done it that day, if those maintenance guys hadn’t stopped me climbing and called for the police. But it was like I needed to find out.”

“And now, nobody even knows it happened.”

“The studios, both the old and the new ones, have always been good at hushing things up. But I doubt if anyone cares that much. I’m not really the Peg Entwistle you knew, Clark. I’m just a figure, a voice, a face. Always before the microphone, the iconoscope, the lens, and then down in print, and buried in the thoughts and dreams of people I’ll never meet. It sometimes feels almost like the primitive tribes are supposed to feel—like something in you is constantly being sucked away. Everyone knows who you are, but…”

“The wrong kind of immortality?”

“Yeah. Maybe. But I always knew these things come at a price. And I wouldn’t give it up. I
was
desperate back then. But I guess I did finally get what I was after… Even if it was…” Her gaze had drifted off. Those gray-green sparks had dulled. “… by a far longer and rockier road than I could ever have imagined.” Then she chuckled, and Clark shivered, for it was an impossibly sad sound. Peg still had that maudlin side, even if it was now seemingly under better control. It was that same mixture of gaiety and sorrow which had first appealed to him. And, he guessed, to all the millions who sucked up her presence in the feelies. “But maybe that’s what the price of fame is—that I can only feel real after the director in a studio calls action.” She shrugged, smiled. “But it’s not such a hard life, Clark. Of course it isn’t.”

“And what about tonight, Peg? Are you happy here, with these people, at the party of a guy like Kisberg?”

“He’s a powerful player. It’s part of my contract that I should be here—the most important bit that never gets put in writing. I really can’t afford to think much further than that. The people back in Britain are already calling me a traitor and a whore for still working in Hollywood. They can’t even show
The Virgin Queen
because I’m in it. Mina says—”

“Mina? You’re with Mina Wallace?”

“Mina took over all Hilly’s talent. What there was of it, anyway. She still does okay by me. Even though she’s—”

“Jewish?”

“Yeah. Even though she’s that.”

“Not here tonight, is she?”

“You know what Mina’s like. Won’t come to anything unless there’s a contract on the table. But you should look in and say hi to her.”

Clark nodded. Mina Wallace had once been his own agent—back in those mythical times of what-might-have-been. But another piece of showbiz news he’d picked up on was that Peg’s old agent Hilly Feinstein had blown his brains out in his office back in ’35. Now that knowledge trickled through his head in a different way. It felt like cold mercury.

“Mina’s still in that same old office and—” Peg stopped. Once again, she seemed to be tracking his thoughts. “Why exactly
are
you here, Clark? You’re not doing anything stupid, are you?”

“I spend my whole life doing stupid things, Peg. But no. Not in the way that you think. But can I ask you a question?”

“I thought you said this was nothing to do with me.”

“It’s nothing special. I was just wondering if you remember going to go to the premiere of the first ever feelie.”

“You mean
Broken Looking Glass
?” The drapes behind him flapped in a stronger gust of wind and Peg Entwistle’s gaze flickered as if she was expecting someone to enter. Then she nodded her head. “Yes, I think so. I was just getting back on my feet. I
think
it was Hilly got me in…” She nodded again, a little too vigorously, like the poor actress she wasn’t. “Yes. It was Hilly.”

“And now he’s dead and you’re famous.”

“Just what the hell are you saying, Clark?”

“I don’t know, Peg. I really don’t.” The rain had dried from her skin but a sheen of sweat had replaced it. He was almost worried for her again. And almost ready to pull back. But not quite yet. “Can I just ask you one last question. Well, it’s not even a question. You see, I was at the Met today, Peg—”

“—Clark, you’re—”

He held up a hand to stop her. “And I spoke to Howard Hughes. Remember him? Although they’ve dug out half his head now and everyone calls him Howie. Anyway. There was this odd word he used, and I wondered if you’ve ever heard of it. It’s…”

But he didn’t even need to say it. Peg’s face was white. She was mouthing that word.
Thrasis
. “… You want…” She took a breath. Swallowed. “… some advice?”

“Whatever I say, Peg, I get the feeling you’re going to give it to me.”

“Stay away. Keep well back. If you go around lifting up enough rocks in the way you seem to be doing you’re going to… Going to…” Shakily, she waved an arm.

“Uncover a nest of rattlers?”

“That. Yes. That. Exactly.”

“Look, Peg. I’m not after
you
. I’m just trying to make sense of a few things that have happened.”

But she was looking around again as if sensing the arrival of some other presence, and didn’t seem to be really hearing him. “I’d better go,” she muttered. “You understand—there are still a few people here I haven’t yet seen and I…”

Then she turned and was fleeing from him at a half run, damp skirt bunched in her hands.

O
NCE HE STARTED REALLY LOOKING
for Barbara Eshel, she wasn’t hard to find.
Flash
.
Pop
. Excited whoops. Starlets and has-beens and maybe even a few people who actually were someone were preening before the precious lens of her Graflex. He stood and watched for a while, amused but disappointed. She’d been wrong when she’d said people would ignore her once she’d told them she was a writer. For she’d somehow managed to convince them that she was that most precious and dangerous Hollywood commodity, the showbiz journalist.