Contents

Cover

Also by Barbara Hambly from Severn House

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Also by Barbara Hambly from Severn House

The James Asher vampire novels

BLOOD MAIDENS

THE MAGISTRATES OF HELL

THE KINDRED OF DARKNESS

DARKNESS ON HIS BONES

PALE GUARDIAN

PRISONER OF MIDNIGHT

The Benjamin January series

DEAD AND BURIED

THE SHIRT ON HIS BACK

RAN AWAY

GOOD MAN FRIDAY

CRIMSON ANGEL

DRINKING GOURD

MURDER IN JULY

COLD BAYOU

LADY OF PERDITION

HOUSE OF THE PATRIARCH

SCANDAL IN BABYLON

Barbara Hambly

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2021

by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022

by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House,

an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

severnhouse.com

Copyright © Barbara Hambly, 2021

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Barbara Hambly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9038-2 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-808-5 (trade paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0546-9 (e-book)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

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For Laurie

ONE

He swept her into powerful arms, pressed his lips to hers. The dark-haired woman gasped, struggled to turn her face aside, and the moonlight glimmered on the jewels that circled her throat, and gleamed on the half-unveiled marble of her breasts. Her small hands thrust at his mighty shoulders, clawed at the velvet of his cloak. But even as she struggled, her efforts melted into the grip of passion. The face she tried vainly to avert turned back, as if against her will, and her dark eyes closed with her surrender to passion and destiny …

‘CUT!’ Madge Burdon snatched off her plaid cap and hurled it to the studio floor. ‘Beautiful! Only, Kitty, if you could turn your head back and forth a little more. You’re really in love with this man, even though you hate him. And when Dirk grabs you tighter, really melt into his arms—’

‘If Dirk grabs my butt again,’ announced Kitty Flint – known to film fans from Jersey City to Yokohama as the incomparable Camille de la Rose – in her breathless little-girl coo, ‘he’s gonna get a knee in the balls and then we’ll really see somebody melt. Do you have any gin, darling?’ She turned those immense brown eyes, fringed with lashes like enameled black wire, toward her sister-in-law.

‘No gin.’ Emma Blackstone stepped over the stretched line of string that demarcated the camera area, lipstick and mirror in hand. After nearly six months in Hollywood she still felt rather like Alice stepping through the looking glass, tall and prosaic and a little gawky in her Oxford tweeds among the shadowy splendor of moonlight in Babylon …

Not that the moonlight was real. Nor, indeed, had Babylon been anything more than a heap of ruins when Roman centurions like Marcus Maximus (alias Dirk Silver) were attempting to seduce its empress in (supposedly) the first century AD …

But … διό και ϕιλοσοϕώτερον και σρου δαιότερον ποίησις ίστορίας έστίν, Aristotle had remarked – Emma could still hear Professor Etheridge at Somerville College intoning the ancient sage’s wisdom from on high. Poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.

Frank Pugh, studio chief and part-owner of Foremost Productions, would doubtless agree, though probably not in those words.

That was always supposing one could consider the scenario of Temptress of Babylon ‘poetry’.

‘Nertz.’ Kitty sighed, took the lipstick, and set about repairing the ravages that passion and destiny had wrought on her make-up. The kleig lights snapped off, and without their greenish-blue glare the Motion Picture Yellow of the rest of her face looked garish, without in the least, Emma reflected admiringly, impairing the beauty of those delicate features.

‘Just as well.’ The Empress of Babylon shrugged her perfect (and largely uncovered) shoulders. ‘I’ve simply got to find a new bootlegger before this weekend. I swear that last shipment of gin was straight out of his brother-in-law’s bathtub.’ She pursed her lovely mouth first into a pout, then into a kiss as she renewed its crimson gloss. A yard away, old Herr Volmort from Make-Up, looking more than ever like a bleached lizard in the rather grimy glow of the working lights, assisted Dirk Silver in the same task. Emma wondered what actual Babylonian empresses would have used to embellish their charms – the recipes for cosmetics she had encountered in Ovid and Juvenal didn’t sound like anything she’d want on her own face.

Well, she could use wine-lees, I suppose … But where would one get wine-lees in the United States these days, given the existence of Prohibition?

‘And I swear Dirk waxes his mustache with motor-oil.’ Kitty handed the lipstick back to her. ‘Thank you, sweetheart. Would you be a darling and see if you can find me something decent to drink in my dressing room?’

In six years of date-categorizing Roman statuary – both in her Oxford studies and as her archaeologist father’s assistant – Emma had never encountered anything resembling the debonair, pencil-thin adornment of the leading man’s upper lip. Or would Aristotle (or Professor Etheridge) consider that disregard of fact as another demonstration of the work’s Moral Purpose?

She stepped back over the string that divided the moonlit night in Babylon from the reality (if such it can be termed …) of Stage One at one thirty in the afternoon, and behind her Miss Burdon bellowed, ‘Lights!’ in a baritone that would have shaken the foundations of Olympus. ‘Camera! Action!’

Emma collected an astrology magazine from the nearest folding-chair (Daily Guide to Finding Your Man!), and watched as Kitty moved back toward Dirk. Arms extended, dark eyes – as the script instructed – ‘incandescent with hatred, dread, and passionate desire’ she bore a marked resemblance to a woman confronting a tarantula on the bathroom wall. For all her breathtaking beauty, Kitty was one of the worst actresses Emma had ever seen.

Dirk’s lips descended upon those of the beauty palpitating in his arms. But as he crushed her to his armored bosom she suddenly pushed him away in mid-palpitation … ‘Oh, Emma, darling, I almost forgot!’ (‘Cut!’ roared Miss Burdon.) Kitty fished in the abbreviated gauze recesses of her costume and produced an envelope. Emma would have bet her next week’s tea-money that the garment could not have concealed as much as a postage stamp.

‘This came for you, and Fishy’ – Conrad Fishbein was the head of Foremost Productions’ publicity department – ‘had it sent to my dressing room.’

Mrs Emma Blackstone, it said. C/o Foremost Productions, Hollywood, USA.

The sight of the handwriting was almost a physical shock. Emma turned her face quickly aside, trying to remember, as tears closed her throat, how long it had been since she’d actually cried.

Mother …

It wasn’t actually her mother’s hand. She knew that. Aunt Estelle’s writing was the same as Mother’s … Both had attended The Misses Gibbs’ Select Academy for Young Ladies back home, and had had that copperplate perfection sharply smacked into them with an oaken ruler. As had Emma, in her turn. She looked again and yes, through the blur of tears she saw the Calcutta postmark.

Definitely Aunt Estelle.

She had the envelope open before she reached the little encampment that Kitty always had set up for herself in the corner of any studio ‘stage’, and the scent of her aunt’s dusting-powder sliced her heart like broken glass. Guerlain’s sandalwood with its touch of vanilla. Her mother had used the same. The memory of comfort mingled with bottomless grief, as if her parents had died last week instead of four years ago.

‘Lights!’ boomed Madge Burdon. ‘Camera!’

Emma lowered the letter, and looked around among the collapsible tables and make-up kits for a handkerchief. Hollywood was not a place for genuine tears.

Kitty had a dressing room, of course. It was fancier – and larger – than the parlor of The Myrtles, Emma’s home back in Oxford … or what had been her home. But in Kitty’s opinion it was too far from the shooting-stage – about a hundred feet – and there were absolute necessities in Kitty’s life that had to be instantly on hand: two canvas folding-chairs, an emergency make-up kit, a thermos-bottle of coffee, three mirrors, a silver vase containing three dozen blood-red roses from an admirer, two of Kitty’s kimonos (‘I don’t know what costume I’m going to be wearing, darling, and the red one doesn’t go with everything …’), a gramophone and a half-dozen recordings, a porcelain vase containing pink lilies from another admirer, extra stockings, five silk pillows, a manicure set, a small pile of fan-letters, two astrology magazines and three Pekinese wearing diamond-studded collars.

(‘Darling, this is nothing!’ had protested Kitty, in response to Emma’s startled expression the first day Emma had accompanied her to the set. Emma had later discovered the truth of that statement.)

Frank Pugh considered nothing too fine for his best-known and most wildly popular star.

After six months here, Emma still felt as if she had been dropped on another world. Barsoom, perhaps. Or Oz.

Plumeria Lodge, Calcutta

March 14, 1924

My dearest Emma,

Please, I beg of you, forgive me for not writing you before this. I had no idea of your situation – I had somehow formed the notion that following the death of your parents you had gone to live with your father’s cousin Arminta and her husband in Leeds. But a mutual friend, recently married to a supervisor on the Grand Trunk Railway, informed me only this week that following your parents’ decease (and I do not know if you even received my letter at the time. The influenza was so bad here – millions dead – that services were much disrupted) you were reduced to the position of PAID COMPANION, first to some vulgar button-manufacturer’s widow in Manchester, and then to an AMERICAN ACTRESS (if one can use such a term of a CINEMA PERFORMER).

I understand, from enquiries, that this woman is employed at Foremost Productions, a film studio in Hollywood, California, and I pray that this letter will reach you.

‘Music!’ roared Madge, and slashed a hand at the on-set musicians, who dropped straight back into the overture from Swan Lake on the very note they’d left off five minutes before. The kleigs went up with a blinding glare. ‘Camera! Action!’

Incandescent with hatred, dread, and passionate desire, the Empress Valerna (Valerna is NOT a Babylonian name! Emma had objected, to no avail, when handed the scenario to ‘doctor’ six weeks ago …) swiveled her head back and forth like a clockwork doll, as Marcus Maximus enfolded her yet once more in muscular arms.

Your uncle David and I are leaving at the end of the week on the Empress of Jakarta, bound first for Hong Kong and then for Honolulu and Los Angeles. We reach New York and board the Ravenna for Southampton on May 10th. We are scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles (or San Pedro, which I am given to understand is nearly the same thing) on the 30th of April.

Please wire us IMMEDIATELY if you receive this message. Now that David’s term with the Calcutta office is done we will be taking a house in Oxford again, and that home will be yours as well. Brian is in his last term at Queens, and Cynthia, who is quite a grown-up young lady now, will be returning to us also – so strange to be living under the same roof as one’s children again, after all those years of letters from boarding schools! (Though of course Bella remains at the Roedean School and Lawrence continues at Eton.) We will be staying at the Peak Hotel in Hong Kong, and the Halekulani Hotel (I believe this is how it is spelt) in Honolulu.

‘Fantastic!’ The director hurled her cap to the floor again in her ecstasy. ‘That was amazing! Print that one … Make a note, Zal—’

Cameraman Zal Rokatansky was already doing so in his notebook.

‘A house in Oxford.’ Emma tasted the words and felt tears flood her eyes again. ‘A house in Oxford.’

Fog veiling the willows on the Cherwell. People who understood when you made a joke about Aristotle. Tea with the Dean of New College and the solid joy of seeing a passage in one of Horace’s Odes suddenly make sense of details noted in a Pompeian fresco. Secret gates to secret gardens of quiet colleges …

The world she had lost.

The person she had been.

‘That home will be yours as well …’

The world that had been taken from her. Not just Jim – Emma understood that soldiers died in war, even soldiers deeply loved by the women to whom they’d only been married for six weeks. Her brother Miles had already been dead when the influenza came, a year after that. A mercy, given the little of him that had survived to be sent home like a blind and voiceless parcel. Even that loss, she’d understood, and had been prepared for. Vitaque mancipio nulli datur, Lucretius had written. Life is given to no one for a lasting possession.

But somehow she had never thought that it would be her mother and her father both. And not so soon after Jim and Miles. It had never even occurred to her that The Myrtles would be sold, mortgaged to cover poor Miles’s medical bills. That she would be without a home, as well as without family, when she herself came out of hospital. Her father’s whole income had derived from investments in Russia and Germany. Opening her eyes after that week of delirium, it had been like waking after a shipwreck, to find herself, like Viola in Twelfth Night, cast up on the shores of a foreign land.

The house had already been sold by that time. In the years she’d spent as a paid companion to Mrs Pendergast in Manchester (and ‘vulgar’ did not even approach the actuality of the woman) Emma had sometimes wondered who had bought The Myrtles. Who was sleeping in the room where she’d slept. But she’d never had the courage (or the time … or the train-fare …) to go and find out.

She had not been back to Oxford at all.

Now it was all being offered back to her, like a door opening in what had seemed to her a blank and barren wall.

‘Kill the lights!’ yelled Madge. ‘Ned, you got everything ready out back for the elephant scene? Torley’s gonna have that baby here at two and it’s quarter after one now. Where the hell is Darlene?’

Dear child, I cannot express to you my feelings at not having made inquiries before this, nor to have made sure that you were safe. Everything that your uncle and I can do to make it up to you – to give you a decent home and a decent chance at life again – be sure that we will do.

Please believe me to be,

Your affectionate,

Aunt Estelle

Emma closed her eyes.

Oxford.

I can go home.

‘Everything OK?’

Zal Rokatansky stood beside her. Medium height – and still three inches shorter than Emma’s five-foot-ten-inch gawkiness – with his close-clipped, rust-colored beard and his cap turned backwards to stay out of the way of the camera, he had his usual aspect of a bespectacled teddy bear.

Going home will mean leaving Zal.

She didn’t know what to do with that thought. ‘Yes, everything’s all right.’ She quickly wiped her eyes, folded the letter and tucked it into its envelope. ‘From my mother’s sister. The only one left of my family, who didn’t die of the influenza.’

By the tilt of his head, he clearly saw there was something she wasn’t saying. But before she could make up her mind what to say at this point – if anything – Emma’s thoughts were interrupted, as they so often were in Hollywood, by Madge yelling, ‘Duchess! You following that? You’re gonna have to rewrite scenes twenty to twenty-four. We’re three days behind schedule and we can catch up if we dump all that horseshit about the fortune teller—’

At the same moment Kitty squeaked, ‘Darlings!’ and floated towards the encampment of make-up tables and Pekinese with her ivory arms thrown wide. ‘Did Mama’s celestial cream-cakes miss her?’ The imperial harlot who in scene fifty-six would send a hundred innocent Christians to martyrdom in Rome’s arena fell to her knees and embraced her fluffy pets like a child. Chang Ming and Black Jasmine yanked on their leashes and threshed their plumed tails in ecstasy. Buttercreme, as usual, hid in her wicker carry-box, her invariable reaction to being taken to the studio or in fact anyplace at all. ‘Oh, my little sweetnesses …’

‘And where the hell is Darlene? We can shoot scene fifteen before the elephant gets here—’

‘I’m sorry.’ Emma turned quietly to Zal. ‘Why do we need to dispose of the soothsayer? Without that foreshadowing …’

‘Mostly because Gully Ackroyd’s on a bender again,’ said Zal. ‘And Frank doesn’t want to replace him or reshoot. I’ll fill you in over coffee, if you’re up to an epic saga.’

‘It can’t be any worse than the Aeneid.’ Or for that matter, she reflected, Temptress of Babylon …

Four months previously, while accompanying Kitty to a location shoot in the wilds of the California desert (and no advert she had ever seen had so much as hinted that nearly a quarter of California was a desert), Emma had been press-ganged into an emergency job of hastily rewriting a scenario (Royal Desire) based extremely loosely upon the Book of Esther. (‘Emma knows all about all that ancient stuff!’ Kitty had touted her proudly.) So effectively had she accounted for the unscheduled exchange of one leading man for another (‘You know how much reshoots cost?’ had roared Mr Pugh in dismay) that in addition to her original chores of brushing the dogs, balancing Kitty’s checking account, and locating stray earrings, she had been given scenarios to rewrite, should Dirk or Nick Thaxter (playing Nero to Kitty’s Babylonian Temptress) or Darlene Golden (the ethereal and perennially unclothed Christian heroine) feel their own acting talents were being unfairly scanted.

At the moment – Foremost Productions’ regular scenarist being swamped with rush-jobs for three other projects – there was talk of Emma being given the entire scenario for Kitty’s next film: story, action, and dialog cards.

The title of this opus was Hot Potato, so Emma was fairly certain that her scholarly father would turn over in his grave.

‘And for Chrissake,’ added Madge, ‘who let her in here? Bud!’ she roared, as the queenly form of gossip columnist Thelma Turnbit materialized from the shadows. ‘Ned! Somebody kick her out—!’

As the journalist extended an arm to catch Dirk Silver by the elbow, Kitty rose with the fluid grace of a dancer and intercepted her, purring, ‘Thelma, darling!’ Her natural baby-coo transmuted seamlessly to the smoky purr of a man-eater who had, over the past four years, devoured the hearts of two dozen cinematic fools for breakfast. She slipped an arm through that of Mrs Turnbit, and turned her radiant smile upon the approaching guard and the prop man’s assistant. ‘We won’t be but a minute.’ Her gesture of thanks towards the director was a miniature miracle of gratitude and stubbornness, before she turned to her sister-in-law. ‘Emma, darling, might I trouble you to bring tea for myself and my friend here? The lights, you know,’ she sighed to Mrs Turnbit, and put the backs of her knuckles lightly to her brow. ‘One finds oneself in need of something …’

‘Something’, in Kitty’s case, usually meant ‘gin’, but nobody was about to say so in the presence of this representative of Screen Stories. Particularly not now, when the talk of Hollywood was a contest in print for ‘Who Is The Goddess of the Silver Screen?’ The weird blue-white glare of the lights snapped off once more. The huge rear doors of Stage One were thrown open, and Herr Volmort scuttled to overtake Marcus Maximus with powder-puff and tubes of Motion Picture Orange and lipstick of a shade judged to be both cinematic and manly.

Madge looked on the point of protesting that they were three days behind and scene fifteen could be shot in just a jiffy, but Zal stepped across to the fuming director: ‘I think Pugh’ll want this one to pass, Madge. If Kitty gets voted Goddess of the Silver Screen – the Gal with “It” – it’ll mean killer box office for the picture.’

Madge’s mouth closed. In addition to being the producer of Temptress of Babylon and part-owner of Foremost Productions, Frank Pugh was The Man – so far as he knew, anyway – in Kitty’s life.

During this whole interchange, Doc Larousse and his electrical crew were breaking down the lights, and Ned Bergen’s myrmidons were moving crocodile-legged divans and portable gardens of potted fern out through the rear doors and into the garden set just beyond. When Emma had arrived with Kitty at six that morning, the prop chief had been in the midst of dressing the garden set, and now, through the doors, Emma could see pasteboard archways, potted palms, and a veritable army of semi-nude statues of heroes and gods in the clear California daylight.

‘Somebody tell Darlene to get her ass in here,’ shouted the director, pausing in the wake of the caravan. ‘Where’s the frikkin’ guards? And somebody round up those goddam slave-boys!’

Zal joined Emma beside the trestle table at the other end of the barn-like ‘stage’, where the plebeian thermos bottles of the crew stood ranked. Given the fact that Kitty’s coffee thermos was liberally spiked with bootleg rum, Emma guessed that it was her own ration of tea that was being generously offered to the guest.

‘What is “It” anyway?’ she asked, as the cameraman poured some of his own coffee into one commissary cup and started examining the others in quest of two that were clean. ‘If Kitty is supposed to have it … I asked her and she defined it as “Oomph” …’

‘“It”’ – the cameraman held up a pedagogical forefinger – ‘is defined as the human characteristic that draws all others with magnetic force. At least that’s what Elinor Glyn says.’

‘Mrs Glyn the novelist?’ Emma had met her compatriot at the studio Christmas Party – like a film vamp herself in veils, jet beads, and feathers – and had enjoyed her views on cats, Prohibition, screen-writing, and American cooking.

‘That’s the one. She came up with it, you know, I forget in which book.’ His voice shifted into the breathy register of passion. ‘“With ‘It’ you win all men if you are a woman – and all women if you are a man …”’

‘And here I thought that was the definition of money.’ Their fingers touched on the cup’s fat porcelain handle and she smiled. ‘Pecuniate obediunt omnia, my father would say. “All things obey money”.’

‘Sounds like you’ve been in Hollywood too long.’ Zal returned her smile. ‘What would Dad have said “It” was for a woman?’

‘Quod nominatur non potest … “That which is not to be named.” At least not in polite circles.’ She could almost hear him say it. Almost see the donnish twinkle in his eyes. And then, to cover the pinch of grief in her heart, she added, ‘Myself, I should say that “It” would signify a good lighting-man.’

He laughed, found another clean cup, and sacrificed one of his store of clean spare handkerchiefs – he carried half a dozen for keeping his camera lenses spotless – to polishing it before he gave it to her. ‘And remind me to go through the garden out there and get these back before we shoot, would you? Every extra on the lot has been sitting out there all morning, and we can’t let the audience go around thinking the empress had a cup of joe while sitting on her throne.’

‘I’m sure half of them think it anyway,’ pointed out Emma. ‘Kitty certainly does. And my father would have said that it was no more than could be expected, of Hollywood.’

‘If that was your father’s only complaint about the picture, he wasn’t paying attention.’ Zal looked for a moment as if he was about to ask her something else – as if he guessed that there was something about that letter that troubled her – but turned instead and went to gather up his precious Bell and Howell on its spindly legs, to carry outside. Emma lost sight of him among a knot of Roman soldiers and a platoon of muscular young Nubians recruited from the jazz clubs along Central Avenue, all clothed in gaudy loincloths and bearing long-handled, ostrich-plume fans.

No more than could be expected of Hollywood. Her throat tightened again as she tidied cups, sugar, cream and her thermos onto a tray, exactly as her governess had shown her, back in a world as far distant from her, now, as the sunlit Roman garden visible beyond the great doors.

At this moment in England it was damply cold and the first anemic baby leaves were barely dusting the April trees.

Doc Larousse and his crew wore short-sleeved cotton shirts, and sweat glistened on their faces and arms. Floyd at the front gate had assured her that warm spells like this week’s happened every April: ‘It’ll be all gray and gloomy again in May.’

No wonder people in Los Angeles all run about half-dressed.

‘I do not understand,’ Kitty was saying, her great brown eyes soulful as Emma bore her tray back to the encampment, ‘these women – these actresses – who put on one self before the cameras, and make themselves someone else, like that’ – she snapped her delicate fingers – ‘for other people they are with. I am as I always have been. I cannot help it.’

She sighed deeply, and cast down her gaze, as if she had never in her life danced the Charleston on a tabletop at the Coconut Grove or dared Doug Fairbanks to demonstrate how one carried a helpless maiden while swinging on a chandelier.

‘I see that you, too, are a woman who feels deeply and wholly,’ she went on, and laid that slim hand lightly on Mrs Turnbit’s mustard-yellow tweed sleeve. ‘Someone without pretense; who writes from her heart. Thank you, dearest,’ she added, as Emma set down the tray. Though she retained her throbbing ‘Camille’ voice, the warmth of her smile was genuine. Emma shook her head a little as she retreated to the trestle tables once more. Fifty percent of everything her husband’s beautiful sister said and did was about as genuine as the Empress Valerna’s jewelry – but the other fifty percent was pure gold.

Even her father would eventually have approved of Kitty.

‘Somebody tell Darlene if her butt isn’t out here in five minutes—’ yelled Madge back through the doors …

‘So many people’ – now Thelma Turnbit was confiding in Kitty – ‘only see what I do in terms of … oh, of sensationalism, of vulgarity. But it’s not, you know.’

‘Oh, of course not!’ Kitty looked shocked at the very idea. Gratified, the columnist smiled and turned her attention to the sugaring of her tea …

Emma saw Kitty, in that moment of her guest’s distracted attention, throw a calculating glance at the clock by the doors of the stage.

Oh, dear …

There was only one circumstance that ever made Kitty conscious of what time it was.

Oh, NOT that good-looking stuntman from Famous Players again!

Timing her response perfectly as Mrs Turnbit looked back at her, Kitty went on, ‘Myself, I see what you do as a service. A great sacrifice of time and heart and energy …’

‘Fer Chrissake who the fuck does Madge think she is?’ Darlene Golden strode into the shooting-stage, fragile, fair-haired, and ethereal in her humble (and extremely revealing) slave-girl rags. ‘I’m not some friggin’ extra, you know. I’m …’

She froze beside the trestle tables in the act of removing her stylish lizard-skin pumps when she saw Thelma Turnbit. Then she smiled dazzlingly, stuck her chewing gum on the door frame beside her, and crossed toward Kitty’s little encampment, hands held out and radiating all the ‘It’ she could muster.

She was just opening her mouth to cry an effusive greeting when Kitty got gracefully to her feet and called out through the great doors, ‘Madge, darling, Darlene’s here!’

‘Then get her the fuck out here this frikkin’ minute!’

If looks could maim, Kitty’s body would have been in pieces on the stage floor.

‘Darling …’ Kitty clasped Mrs Turnbit’s hand in hers. ‘It’s been such a privilege – and such a pleasure. But now Miss Golden is here at last we cannot make all those good people wait on us. Please do finish your tea. Emma will look after you, won’t you, darling? Is there anything else you need? We’re all just terribly behind schedule … Do please forgive us …’

Without a backward glance, Kitty walked toward the rear doors, where Mary Blanque, the wardrobe mistress, awaited her with a cloak wrought of peacock feathers. Darlene – who like Kitty was in the running for Screen Stories’ Goddess award – followed perforce, fulminating, behind.

And just as Kitty passed through the door, Emma saw her glance again at the stage clock.

Oh, drat it, it IS that stuntman! Waiting for her someplace …

‘Can I get you anything else, Mrs Turnbit?’

Or maybe that blond-haired extra from Laemmle Studios …

Completely aside from common courtesy, Emma was aware – having been coached by Publicity Chief Conrad Fishbein – that gossip columnists would be almost as eager to have a word with her as with her employer. This would provide an admirable opportunity to pass along a few studio-generated ‘confidences’ about Kitty’s life and loves, Kitty’s actual past being best left in discreet shadow.

That, too, she knew, was part of her job. Her husband’s glamorous sister had rescued her from the dreary horrors of the Pendergast household at least in part to be a respectable female companion, to keep the fan magazines from saying that Kitty was a tart.

Which of course she is …

Like half the other actresses in pictures …

She tried to recall whether Mr Pugh was on the lot that day.

Sure enough, the journalist invited her to share another cup of tea, and bent to ruffle Chang Ming’s red-gold fur. ‘And who are these adorable little creatures?’

While the sweet strains of ‘Swan Lake’ announced the commencement of scene fifteen (hard upon Madge’s bellowed ‘Camera … Action!’) Emma made Mrs Turnbit known to Chang Ming and the tiny, five-and-a-half-pound Black Jasmine. (‘Yes, he had eye damage as a puppy, poor little chap. It’s fairly common, with Pekinese … But Miss de la Rose fell in love with him at first sight and he with her, and of course she doesn’t care a button that he’s half blind …’) That kindness to the minute dog had been, in fact, Emma’s first intimation that there was more to her sister-in-law than gin, cigarettes, and exhausted regiments of discarded lovers.

As usual, shy, flaxen Buttercreme refused to come out of her wicker carry-box (‘I have no idea what she’s doing in Hollywood,’ sighed Emma. ‘She doesn’t approve of the place at all.’).

And, ‘Oh, yes, those are real diamonds on their collars. Miss de la Rose is so very generous to those she loves.

‘She won’t admit it, of course,’ she added, shaking Mrs Turnbit’s hand at the outer door of the vast, barn-like stage, ‘but I know she reads your columns faithfully. And, of course, I don’t think I have any need to tell you, that though Miss de la Rose is … is the most genuine person I know’ – no harm laying it on with a trowel – ‘I assure you, she doesn’t break hearts and send men to their doom in real life.’

The columnist twinkled. ‘I never thought it, Miss—’

‘Mrs,’ returned Emma with a smile. ‘Mrs Blackstone, though please do call me Emma.’

‘Oh, yes, the sister-in-law.’ The older woman nodded, clearly recognizing the name from the studio releases. She may in fact, Emma reflected, have written a little piece herself, on Camille de la Rose’s goodness in taking in her indigent – and highly respectable – English relative. ‘But on the subject of breaking hearts, my dear, could you let me know – well, let my readers know, you understand – if there’s any truth to those rumors about Miss de la Rose and that oil millionaire, Ambrose Crain?’

She leaned close in a cloying aura of lilac perfume. Not a pretty woman, and those virulent tweeds and purple hat did nothing for her complexion, but there was warm and genuine interest in her small hazel eyes. ‘That little piece I saw in Photo Play a few months ago …’

‘Completely untrue!’ Emma made herself chuckle as she said it. The last thing Kitty – or anyone – needed was Frank Pugh going into a fit of jealousy. ‘Isn’t it amazing how one can’t have a cup of coffee with a friend in Hollywood without the press trying to marry one off?’

She hoped her rueful twinkle looked more real than it felt. ‘I can’t imagine where that columnist picked up that rumor. Mr Crain was a friend of Miss de la Rose’s family. Now that he’s spending more time on the West Coast – he owns several thousand acres between here and Long Beach, you know – he likes to “treat” her, as he calls it, to an occasional dinner out, as he used to do when she was a little girl. He’s been separated from his wife for many years, and I think, frankly, that the poor old man’s just lonely.’

Mr Fishbein could certainly have come up with a better tale than that, Emma reflected. And it wasn’t bad for the spur of the moment. But Ambrose Crain was one of the myriad of subjects on which it was probably better that the publicity chief – and Frank Pugh – remain ignorant.

Ambrose Crain, and whoever it was for whose sake Kitty was suddenly and unaccountably preoccupied with the clock …

She shook hands with the visitor (‘I can find my own way to the gate, thank you, Mrs Blackstone …’) but her mind was already occupied with the gap of time between scene fifteen (which involved only two shots that she knew about) and the extensive sequence (scenes eight through twelve) wherein the Empress Valerna arrived in Rome – riding an elephant (did she ride it all the way from Babylon?), with dancing-boys in tow. Setting up for the scenes, and walking through the half-dozen shots of which each consisted (not to speak of close-ups), would easily fill the remainder of the afternoon and much of the night, and it would be best, she thought, if Kitty were under her eye. Just to be on the safe side …

Through the great doors she saw that the elephant – whose name was Socrates – had already arrived in the garden. While she had been sorting out the inconsistencies in the original scenario – and dealing with the fact that sometimes individual shots were identified as scenes, which completely dislocated the numbering system – Zal had helpfully provided Emma with a list of which animals were available in Hollywood through which trainers. Properties Chief Ned Bergen had suggested a chariot drawn by zebras, but rumor had it that DeMille was going to use that in a forthcoming film, and Frank Pugh didn’t want to be accused of copying the better-known producer.

Ned Bergen’s assistant, Ned Devine – Ned the Lesser, he was called – helped her move chairs, make-up, roses, picnic-baskets, gramophone, and pillows to the shade of a couple of beach umbrellas set up just outside the camera-lines. By their third trip scene fifteen was finished – close-ups and all – and Doc Larousse and his minions were shifting reflectors and setting their coffee cups on the bases of the statues again. Emma had left the lap-dogs for last in the moving process, and when she went back to the three little wicker carry-boxes in the echoey cavern of the stage – already being set up for the orgy tomorrow – she found the door of Buttercreme’s box open. Both the little dog, and her Russian-leather leash, were gone.

Emma strode quickly to the rear doors and peered through. For a moment she thought she glimpsed Kitty, reassuringly (and a little surprisingly) where she should be … then realized that the dark-haired girl in the gauze and diamonds was in fact Kitty’s stand-in, Ginny Field. No sign of Kitty herself could be seen in the milling confusion of dancing-boys, wardrobe ladies, men carrying make-up boxes, Babylonian hierophants and a few stray Praetorian Guards. She went back to the other boxes and made sure of her first impression: that Chang Ming and Black Jasmine were still in them, wagging eager tails at the sight of her.

Odd. She’d never known Kitty to walk one of her ‘celestial angel muffins’ without the other two. She straightened up, and was preparing to pick up Chang Ming’s box when both dogs turned their heads sharply and growled.

At the same moment, Emma’s nostrils were assailed by a rancid cocktail of unwashed body-linen, cheap cigars, stale bay rum and even staler whiskey. Turning just as swiftly, she saw behind her in the stage’s semi-darkness a tall, broad-shouldered man, the hazy glare of the spring afternoon outside glinting on his slick dark hair.

‘Kitty here?’ The tobacco-scarred baritone brought a fresh gust of last night’s liquor and this morning’s coffee. ‘Kitty – ah – de la Rose …’ The glare thrown by a reflector outside showed Emma the fleshy remains of what had to have been dazzling handsomeness at least fifteen years ago. In their pouches of fat, his eyes were cerulean blue, and his tobacco-browned teeth were even and straight. What could still be seen of his original jawline and cheekbones was reminiscent of a Greek god.

Something about the way he carried himself said actor. But any would-be actor in Hollywood – especially on a visit to a studio – would take more care to dress in clean clothes.

Certainly any actor who knew enough about Hollywood to want to make an impression on Kitty.

‘I’m sorry.’ Emma stepped politely but firmly in front of him as he made to brush past her and onto the garden set. ‘She’s filming …’

‘I’ll wait, honey. I think she’ll see me.’ He looked her up and down as if startled to see someone almost as tall as himself in a skirt. ‘You tell her Rex is here. And you tell her not to try slippin’ out the back way, neither.’

Bootlegger …

Emma’s heart sank. She knew peddlers of illegal liquor – and worse things – lurked around the studios. A sizeable number of both stars and crew relied on contraband ‘pick-me-ups’ to get through long days and brutal past-midnight shoots under the hammering glare of the kliegs. Emma had heard from several sources that the Los Angeles Police Department made a comfortable living from graft and wouldn’t have dreamed of interfering.

‘They’ll be shooting, probably, as long as daylight lasts,’ she pointed out reasonably. ‘So you may be in for a long wait. I’ll let Miss de la Rose know, of course, Mr …’

‘Festraw,’ said Rex. ‘Rex Festraw. And I don’t think she’ll make me wait.’

He gave her a grimy sidelong grin. ‘She can’t have forgotten me. I’m her husband.’

TWO

When she told him, Zal said a word that Emma remembered Jim saying, that time when the motorcar he’d borrowed to drive with her into the Cotswolds one afternoon had gotten a puncture ten miles from Oxford, just as it was coming on to rain. She assumed that it was Yiddish but he’d refused to translate. She made a mental note to ask Zal its meaning, on some occasion when the studio wasn’t facing serious scandal.

‘Where’d you put him?’ Zal asked her now.

‘In Kitty’s dressing room.’ This was in a wing of the Hacienda, the original adobe farmhouse on whose land the studio had been built.

‘You lock him in?’ Behind him, through those great rear doors, Emma could see Madge Burdon pacing Nero’s garden like Napoleon on the eve of Waterloo. The studio musicians, grouped around the plinth of the nearest statue, were playing pinochle and smoking. Emma winced a little at the statue: it was a life-sized plaster replica of Michelangelo’s David, impressive but 450 years too late for Ancient Rome.

‘I did think about it,’ Emma acknowledged, and tucked a strand of her mouse-brown hair back into the neat bun at the back of her head. ‘But it seemed to me that an irate husband suing the studio for wrongful imprisonment would not help matters. Where is Kitty?’

‘Looking for Buttercreme.’ Zal polished his glasses on another of his clean handkerchiefs. His voice was non-committal. ‘She said.’

Madge was close enough behind him at that moment to hear this theory, and flung up her hands. ‘How long can it take her to catch the damn mutt anyway?’ she demanded. ‘With those short little legs, the thing can’t run that fast.’

Miss Burdon had obviously never attempted to corral Buttercreme when the little dog was scuttling for cover. Mary Blanque of Wardrobe – sitting on Nero’s throne sewing fake diamonds onto an extremely abbreviated brassiere – took a peanut from her apron pocket and tossed it to Socrates the elephant. ‘She’ll be back, honey.’

‘Buttercreme?’ asked Emma, startled.

‘According to Kitty’ – Zal’s tone remained carefully neutral – ‘somebody left the door of Buttercreme’s crate open. Kitty dashed off to look for her.’

It IS the stuntman. Or that extra from Laemmle.

‘Buttercreme’s so timid you could leave the crate open all day and she wouldn’t venture out,’ protested Emma. ‘I can barely get her out to walk her.’

Or maybe that saxophonist she made such a disgrace of herself over last week at the Coconut Grove …

‘Yeah,’ agreed Zal. ‘I know.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘Could be worse,’ he pointed out. ‘This is Hollywood—’

‘I don’t believe I want to know.’

He guided her back through the shadows of Nero’s half-constructed banqueting hall, and out the front door to the studio ‘street’. ‘You tell Fishy?’

‘He said he’d try to reach Mr Pugh by telephone.’ They threaded their way through a forest of light stands and then half a regiment of Louis XV dining chairs outside the main doors of Stage Two. ‘But I thought we’d better warn Kitty, so she doesn’t return to her dressing room and encounter Mr Festraw unawares.’ And – Emma didn’t say, but she saw this, too, in her friend’s eyes – so that Kitty would have time to prepare a story for the producer’s edification.

Zal swore again, but this time his tone was slightly absent-minded, like someone who has encountered a long-petrified hairball behind a couch. ‘Fishbein have any idea who Kitty’s barneymugging these days?’

Emma sighed. ‘He was less than helpful. In fact he suggested we consult the Los Angeles telephone directory, which is not fair, or true!’

‘Oh, Jesus, no. There’s a lot of ugly men in that directory.’ They stepped close to the wall of the carpentry shop, to avoid a troop of Ruritanian cavalry, on the way to the palace revolution about to erupt on Stage Two. ‘You ever heard Kitty mention a kid named Eliot Jordan?’

Emma considered. ‘She has a photograph of a very nice-looking young man in her room. I think it’s signed, Eliot.’

‘Damn it. I was afraid of that. Pugh was all set to sign Jordan back in January for eight-fifty a week, which if you ask me is pretty good for a kid of eighteen.’ They emerged from between the buildings, crossed the open ground that lay before the Hacienda, and headed for the three-story monolith of the prop warehouse. Emma cast a worried glance at the long, two-story wing of the big former farmhouse that housed the ‘star’ dressing rooms, but the door of Kitty’s remained closed.

‘Then Lou Jesperson at Enterprise stole Jordan out from under Pugh’s nose with an offer of a thousand. Pugh is still talking about getting after the kid – and Jesperson – for breach of contract, but he’ll never make it stick.’

Emma wondered if she should have asked Mr Fishbein to have one of the studio guards keep an eye on the door. Or would that have drawn the attention of Mrs Turnbit, who might very well still be on the lot? She had looked like a woman with extremely sharp eyes. ‘How much trouble would there be if Kitty was meeting young Mr Jordan?’

‘A shitload.’ They turned the corner into the narrow ‘street’ between the prop warehouse and the commissary, which also housed the make-up rooms. Beyond these stretched the back lot, five acres of standing sets for medieval villages, generic forests, and a noisy construction site where Ned Bergen’s myrmidons were, in defiance of the adage, attempting to build Rome in a day – or in any case in a week.

‘Frank’s in the middle of a divorce – his fourth, I think – and he’s like a bear with a hemorrhoid. He’s not gonna be thrilled if he hears Kitty’s been making nookie between takes with a kid who “betrayed” him. Dang it.’ Zal stopped, and looked around him at the extras in peasant garb (and one lost, lone Roman soldier – Miss Burdon is going to have that one flogged before the Legions …) milling outside the doors of Wardrobe. Men in shirtsleeves came and went between the long sheds of the garage and those of the toybox jungle of the studio nursery. Emma guessed what he was thinking. The back corners of the prop warehouse, or the farther reaches of the back lot, went unvisited for weeks at a time, and could shelter an army of fugitive lovers.

‘Where would you go,’ asked Zal, propping his glasses on the bridge of his nose, ‘if you wanted to get your ashes hauled?’

‘I would go to City Hall,’ replied Emma, a trifle tartly, ‘and get married.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s exactly what Kitty did,’ he retorted with a grin. ‘For once in her life. And if she hadn’t, we wouldn’t be in this mess.’

She couldn’t keep from laughing, though she could imagine what her mother – and certainly Aunt Estelle! – would have to say on the subject of Kitty’s amours. ‘Oh, dear, I suppose you’re right …’ And they would CERTAINLY say that Hollywood – and Kitty – were a Bad Influence on ME … ‘All right, then, I’d pick the warehouse. I know there are beds in there, and nobody goes there …’

‘Are you kidding? Every bootlegger and dope merchant in town uses it for hand-offs.’ He opened the building’s small side door for her, and flicked the electric switch just inside. ‘And anyway, what makes you think Kitty’s gonna bother with a bed?’ He waved to an unsavory little man sitting on a bejeweled Turkish throne (MUCH nicer than Nero’s!) in the shadows beside a ferocious-looking stuffed grizzly bear. A small suitcase lay at his feet.

‘Hi, Taffy. You see anybody come in here, in the last half-hour?’

‘You mean other than that Turnbit broad?’ Taffy took his meerschaum pipe from his mouth.

‘Mrs Turnbit came in here?’ Emma gasped, startled.

‘Just put her head around the door,’ explained Taffy, in accents that on radio shows (Emma had discovered) seemed to signify inhabitants of the lower depths of the New York waterfront. ‘She saw me and took a powder. The door was unlocked,’ he explained to Zal, ‘on accounta I got an appointment here, see. Meetin’ a man about a dog.’

‘How long you been here?’

‘’Bout since two.’ He checked a gold pocket watch that was visibly more expensive than his clothing.

Zal said, ‘Thanks,’ and led Emma back out. ‘Bootlegger,’ he explained as he shut the door behind them. ‘Deliveryman. Works for the Cornero Brothers.’

Emma rolled her eyes.

‘Could be worse,’ he said again. And then: ‘You call a guard and make sure Thelma Turnbit actually left the lot?’

‘No.’ Emma felt a flash of embarrassment. ‘She said she’d find her own way out.’

‘Yeah, I bet she will. Always call a guard, Em.’ Zal patted her shoulder. ‘She’s a gossip columnist, it’s her business not to go straight back out of here. She’s probably still making the rounds of her informants on the lot … Christ knows how she got past the gate in the first place. All we need is for her to spot Kitty and what’s-his-name coming out the back door of Stage Three all rumpled and giggly—’

‘Well, they have to emerge fairly soon,’ reasoned Emma. ‘I mean, she’s got to get back to shoot scene eight before poor Miss Burdon dies of an apoplexy.’

‘Miss Burdon wouldn’t die if you shot her with a siege howitzer.’ Zal cast a calculating glance toward the Hacienda as they emerged into the open again. ‘But she will get the Praetorian Guard out after me – that elephant rents by the hour. Fishy might be able to … Dang it,’ he added, with another glance at the Hacienda. ‘The Pettingers are here.’

And indeed, Emma could see, on the shaded front veranda of the Hacienda, a man and a woman, both tall, both rawboned, both dressed with a frumpiness which was almost aggressive, in conversation with Foremost’s publicity chief.

‘Evangelists,’ he explained, to Emma’s look of inquiry. ‘Religious fanatics. They have a radio show, Friday evenings, and their own church down on Broadway. Champions of Christian decency and moral censorship. You shoulda heard ’em on the subject of Kitty’s last film.’

Recalling some of the more lurid details of Royal Desire, Emma could understand their indignation. In the shadows of the veranda, Conrad Fishbein – obese, fair, and smiling benevolently behind horn-rimmed spectacles – was holding the door open for his guests. The female Pettinger – Brother and sister, or husband and wife? – drew her skirt aside, as if contact with a ‘film person’ (as Aunt Estelle would have put it) would give her leprosy.

‘What the hell are they doing on the lot today, anyway?’ Zal started to say something else, paused, then looked again at Emma as he turned to lead the way toward the garages. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

Am I all right? Emma considered the question, and the letter in her pocket, and the life she’d left behind her in England.

Why is it that everything that happens here is always interrupted by filming or a deadline or a crisis? Marcus Aurelius, she reflected, would have reminded her that this was no more than to be expected of life … Certainly of life here.

No wonder everyone in Hollywood drinks.

‘It’s not anything that needs to be dealt with now,’ she said.

‘Can we maybe deal with it over dinner at Cole’s Pacific Electric Buffet this evening, if you’re up to it?’ he suggested, a little shyly. ‘Depending on how late shooting runs?’

Emma felt the sudden sensation of having stepped back from everyone’s histrionic love lives, and onto a little island of sanity. ‘I’d like that.’ Placing her hand gently on his shoulder, she leaned down a little – a very little – to kiss him. MORE proof that I’m being corrupted …

She could almost see her mother’s frown, and the quick, disapproving shake of Aunt Estelle’s head.

‘I think probably,’ she added, ‘you had best get back to Rome before they do call out the Praetorian Guard – or the Ruritanian cavalry. Kitty can’t have gone to the backlot. You know how she hates to walk anywhere, even for the sake of love. I have a good view of her dressing-room door from here, and if I miss her here, you can catch her on the set, if you would. We’ll just have to trust Mr Fishbein – words I never thought I should hear myself say. If—’

A flash of crimson at the end of the studio street caught her eye. ‘There! What did I tell you?’

Like a bird of paradise in her gorgeous kimono, Kitty was headed for her dressing room from the direction of the building where the unused film stock was stored. It took all Emma’s training not to pull up her skirt above her knees and cross the dusty square at a run, or to bellow Kitty’s name, à la Madge Burdon. She walked, however, as if pursued by a troop of Ruritanian cavalry (or a ferocious-looking stuffed grizzly bear) and Zal broke away from her and dashed ahead.

Buttercreme, cradled in Kitty’s arms, saw them and began to wriggle eagerly, recognizing friends, and Kitty halted in her tracks.

‘Darlings!’ She scampered towards them, and Emma ascertained at once that whatever else she’d been doing, her beautiful sister-in-law hadn’t been indulging in a romantic interlude with an eighteen-year-old actor or anybody else. Her lipstick and eye-paint were too perfect. ‘Oh, thank God I’ve found you! I didn’t dare go back to the set with Buttercreme here and I simply have to repair my face! Is Madge absolutely furious with me? I simply couldn’t—’

‘Your husband is here,’ said Emma.

Kitty froze in the act of shoving Buttercreme into Emma’s arms. ‘Clayton?’ Staring up at Emma in dismay over the little dog’s head, she gasped the name of her most recent.

‘Rex.’

Under a lavish coat of Motion Picture Yellow, Kitty blenched. ‘Oh, my God … Where is he?’

Emma nodded toward the ersatz Spanish adobe. ‘In your dressing room – I hope.’

‘What’s he doing here? What does he want?’

‘Money, I assume,’ said Emma, with a touch of asperity.

‘Emma, please,’ whispered Kitty. ‘Don’t go all English on me.’ She looked wildly around, as if she expected to see Mrs Turnbit, notebook in hand, lurking behind the corner of Stage One. ‘This is terrible! This is … this is ghastly! Does Frank know?’

‘I have no idea. Mr Fishbein is trying to contact him, but apparently some evangelists have arrived—’

‘Here!’ Kitty seemed almost not to have heard her. ‘Here … Oh, my God …’

Seeing the expression of despairing horror on her sister-in-law’s face, Emma handed Buttercreme to Zal, took Kitty’s arm and steered her back into the shadows around the corner. ‘What is it?’ she asked quietly. Given Kitty’s usually flippant attitude towards former spouses, there was clearly something more here than met the eye. ‘How much trouble can he make for you?’ Visions of abandoned children, of nameless vices (although most of them, Emma was well aware, had perfectly good Latin names), of drunken vehicular manslaughter flitted before her eyes. ‘What would he know about you?’

Kitty stared at her with eyes that seemed even more huge in her delicate face. ‘What would he know about me? He’ll have our marriage license!’ And, seeing Emma’s puzzlement at this. ‘Emma, I married Rex when I was fifteen. I mean, really fifteen, back in …’ She hastily counted on her fingers, and shuddered at the result. ‘Anyway, I’ve been telling everyone in Hollywood that I’m twenty …’

‘Ah.’ Emma felt a wave of relief. ‘So what he could sell to the fan magazines would be the date of your birth.’

‘More than that!’ gasped Kitty, nearly in tears. ‘Worse than that! Because I didn’t have my parents’ consent I told them at City Hall that I was eighteen, which would make me …’ She flinched again, and turned her face aside, unable to bear the thought of her real age, not to mention her real age plus three years. ‘Oh, Emma—!’

‘I’m sure all he wants is money.’ Emma wondered how she managed to get herself into conversations like this and what her mother – not to mention Aunt Estelle – would have said. ‘It will be embarrassing, but I’m sure, given how popular Royal Desire has been, and all the advance interest in Temptress of Babylon, Mr Pugh will be happy to come to some sort of arrangement. Mr Fishbein said he’d try to get hold of Mr Pugh, and he can …’

She made a move toward the Hacienda, but Kitty caught her arm again in a desperate grasp.

‘But what if he tries to make me live with him again?’ she demanded frantically. ‘What if he demands half – or all – of my income for the past nine years? Did he have a lawyer with him?’

‘Kitty …’ Emma frowned, trying to recall what she knew about California divorce law – a subject of perennial discussion amongst Kitty’s colleagues. ‘Did you ever get a divorce from Mr Festraw?’

‘I don’t know!’ Kitty wailed.

Despite her genuine sympathy for her sister-in-law’s distress, Emma could not keep from raising her eyebrows. High.

‘He said he was going to divorce me when I ran off with Ted,’ explained Kitty. ‘Or was it Solly?’ She counted briefly on her fingers again. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, giving up the effort, ‘I left New York right after that, and then I was in Philadelphia for just a very short time and then Chicago, and for awhile in there I was calling myself Raquelita Vasquez … but nobody knows that … so if he did serve me with papers, they wouldn’t have reached me …’

‘It sounds’ – Zal stepped closer to the two women to lower his voice, Buttercreme trying to hide herself in his armpit – ‘like we need to speak to Mr Festraw.’

Kitty’s dark eyes shifted. Then she looked back at Emma, and nodded.

But when she didn’t speak, Emma asked, more gently, ‘Would you like me with you? Or Zal?’ The size – the bulk – of Rex Festraw flashed through her mind. Though the first impression anyone received of Kitty – especially on the screen – was one of intense, voluptuous energy, she was, in fact, a small woman, and though curvaceous, rather delicately built. For an instant Emma saw her as she had been at fifteen, married to a man in his thirties who was six feet tall and muscled like a boxer. Her scalp prickled with a rush of angry heat, remembering the smell of liquor on his breath and person.

She’s afraid of him.

Kitty bore no scars on her flawless face, but the marks were there in her eyes.

‘There’s actually no need for you to see him at all,’ Emma added. ‘I’ll get Mr Fishbein, and … What’s the name of Foremost Productions’ lawyer? Mr Spiegelmann? And Zal … Might you go tell Miss Burdon that you’ve found Kitty, but she’s been taken ill?’ She glanced at her watch. The sky overhead between the stages had the golden tone that suffused California afternoons, and the ‘street’ was slowly filling with shadow. In a lower voice, she asked, ‘Were you meeting someone?’

‘No!’ Kitty stamped her foot, her fright of her husband dissolving into flashing anger. ‘I – That is, poor Buttercreme got away – someone must have left her basket open …’

Emma opened her mouth to acquit ‘poor Buttercreme’ of such bravado, but at that moment, Frank Pugh’s sleek black Pierce-Arrow pulled in through the ornamental gate on Sunset Boulevard and halted before the Hacienda. The producer climbed out, moving with surprising agility for a man of his considerable bulk, and headed for Kitty’s dressing room. He had a small briefcase in hand. Clearly, Conrad Fishbein had reached him by telephone. The publicity chief himself emerged from the Hacienda and hurried to catch him, with a fat man’s rolling stride, presumably with a warning about the Pettingers.

Kitty said, ‘Oh, nertz,’ and darted from the cover of the corner to intercept them both.

‘I hope he left somebody in the office to keep an eye on the Holy Twins,’ muttered Zal, striding at the star’s heels. Emma, making haste to follow, wondered if Thelma Turnbit was still lurking somewhere as well.

Frank Pugh, like Rex Festraw, was a big man. Both were heavily built, dark-haired, and thick with the fleshiness of middle age; the difference being that Festraw had clearly been dazzlingly handsome in his younger days, something which was only said of Frank Pugh by young ladies hopeful of a contract with Foremost Productions. Pugh’s eyes, like Festraw’s, were light, in his case a cold jade-green and shadowed now by a saturnine scowl as his chief moneymaker scurried up to him, flashing with all the jewels of Babylon.

‘Oh, Frank!’ Kitty flung herself into his arms. ‘Oh, thank God you’ve come!’

Her acting before the camera was hopeless. But in real-life situations, reflected Emma, her talents rivaled Duse.

‘Emma just told me,’ sobbed Kitty. ‘I was looking for poor Buttercreme – she was clear out in the backlot, poor darling …’ Kitty’s gold-ribboned sandals bore not the slightest trace of the backlot’s dust. ‘Oh, I thought Rex was dead! I’d heard he’d been killed in a motor accident just after the War. Oh, Frank …’

She burst into a convincing rendition of terrified tears, and the producer handed Fishy the briefcase and gently folded her in his arms. ‘It’s all right, baby,’ he said. ‘The man probably just wants money and I’ve got that. There’s nothing to worry about.’ He kissed the top of her tousled dark head and she raised her face to his, leaving smudges of Motion Picture Yellow on his bosom but having miraculously preserved both her mascaro and lipstick intact.

‘Mrs Blackstone.’ He fixed Emma with his unnerving green glare. ‘Has this Festraw jasper come out of Kitty’s room? Or talked to anyone?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Emma. ‘I’ve been looking for Kitty – I thought it best that she be located right away, and warned.’

‘Good,’ he affirmed. ‘That Turnbit broad still around? Damn it,’ he added, when his publicity chief nodded.

‘And the Pettingers—’

‘Screw the Pettingers.’ He glanced at the dilapidated Pettinger Ford parked in front of the Hacienda beside his own sleek conveyance, as if debating having it hauled away as junk. ‘The Pettingers don’t bribe my switchboard operators and gate-guards to sell them information.’ He put a hand on Kitty’s back, and led the way to the arcade that shaded all six ‘star’ dressing rooms. Kitty leaned into his strength like a schoolgirl clinging for protection, and Emma – joined again now by Zal and Buttercreme – wondered if her sister-in-law’s docility was assumed to emphasize to her lover her dependence on his strength, or to make sure that she was on hand to refute whatever her visitor might have to say.

When they reached the second door along the arcade, Pugh put Kitty gently aside. ‘If this rube thinks he’s gonna put something over on us with some horseshit about still being married to Kitty, he’s gonna find—’

He thrust the door open.

Taller than Kitty and slimmer than Fishbein, Emma was just behind Pugh as he took a half-step through the door, and saw the dressing room at the same moment that he did.

And smelled it. The first warm whoof of air that puffed from its stuffy confines.

The smell of gunpowder, that had lingered in her brother Miles’s uniforms when she’d unpacked them at his return on leave.

The smell of blood. There wasn’t a lot of this. The wounds in Mr Festraw’s chest and forehead were small and hadn’t bled much. He must have been killed instantly. Miles – and Jim – had told her that much about the corpses in the trenches.

The smell of feces was much stronger. Like a lot of victims, Rex Festraw had soiled himself when he died.

Festraw himself had evidently stood up when someone had come into the dressing room, because Kitty’s make-up chair was overset beside his body. He looked like he’d staggered back a pace or two and then fallen. The red roses that Ambrose Crain had sent Kitty that morning – only some of which had gone with her to the set – lay scattered about him, like a tribute. He’d been shot in the forehead and the chest, and the gun – a revolver with a long, thick tube attached to the barrel, which Emma deduced had to be a ‘silencer’ – lay just in front of the threshold.

‘Well,’ said Kitty, ‘damn.’

Emma thought that about summed it up.

THREE

Natura inest mentibus nostris insatialibus, the great Roman jurist Cicero had said, quaedam cupiditas veri videndi.

Our minds possess by nature an insatiable desire to know the truth.

Mr Cicero, reflected Emma, had obviously never visited Hollywood.

‘Of course it’s my gun, Frank, darling.’ Kitty raised huge dark eyes to the studio chief as he steered her into Dirk Silver’s dressing room next door. ‘You gave it to me! But what does that have to do with Rex being dead?’

Silver, ready in cuirass and caligae to welcome the empress in scene eight, looked up startled from the Volkischer Beobachter and set down his tumbler of dark amber liquid.

‘Was ist los?’

Pugh and Fishbein looked at one another warily, neither quite ready to take the irrevocable step of admitting that anything had happened, and Emma stepped forward and asked, in her schoolgirl German, whether Dirk had heard anything next door.

‘Just now?’ the star replied in the same language. His dark curls were rumpled and flattened, and the helmet he’d been wearing in scene fifteen hung on the coat rack in the corner. ‘Only fifteen, twenty minutes I have been here …’

He glanced at the clock – Pugh made damn sure there was a large clock in every dressing room – and then at the gun in Fishbein’s hand, without much interest. Prop guns could turn up anywhere on the lot. But his brow darkened at the sight of Zal and Kitty. ‘Where they been? They’ve had the set ready to go for an hour now and Madge is shitting broken bottles—’

‘You heard nothing?’

‘Heard what?’ The German’s frown deepened. ‘What’s up?’

‘Get him outta here,’ ordered Fishbein, when Emma relayed this information, but Pugh caught Silver’s arm in a hard grip as he turned to get his cloak and leave.

‘He stays here. Fishy, stash that gun in the trunk of my car, and make sure you wrap it up good in something. And have a look through the room for anything else that looks shady. I’ll be with you in a minute. You.’ He jabbed a finger at Silver. ‘Stay here.’ He pointed to the floor, turned back to Kitty. ‘You didn’t know Festraw was in town?’

She shook her head, hugging Buttercreme to her chest as a child will hug a toy for comfort. The Pekinese, not liking the producer’s tone, gathered all her courage and challenged him with a sound much like that produced by a small rubber duck when it’s trodden on.

‘I didn’t even know he was still alive!’ Kitty’s eyes filled with realistic tears.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Silver again, in German.

Zal responded – in much better German than Emma’s, ‘Feller was shot in Kitty’s dressing room.’

‘You!’ Pugh swung around on the cameraman. ‘You don’t tell him a thing! Not a thing! Tell him something was stolen from Kitty’s room, a bracelet or something.’

‘Erschossen?’ Silver exclaimed.

Zal held up a warning hand in the star’s direction, but Silver poured out a torrent of questions and speculation, which fortunately the studio chief did not understand. But when Silver strode towards the door, Pugh stepped in front of him, poked with his finger again. ‘You tell this kraut to stay put, Rokatansky. All of you stay put.’ He glared at Emma and Kitty. Buttercreme barked at him again from the safety of Kitty’s kimono.

Faithful to the legal principles of the Roman Republic, Emma began, ‘Surely the police—’

‘I’ll deal with the police. When was the last time you heard from this four-flusher, Kit?’

‘Not for years!’ she protested, and Emma saw her hastily counting back in her mind and on her fingers. ‘Not for – oh …’

‘When’d you dump him?’

Kitty was spared further mental arithmetic by the opening of the door. ‘I found these, boss.’ Fishbein, the gun still in hand, held out a couple of crumpled pieces of paper. ‘They were in his pocket. I thought you’d better see them.’ Emma caught a glimpse of the elaborate gold curlicues which decorated her sister-in-law’s private, personal notepaper that nearly filled one drawer of her bureau in the dressing room. From the Desk of Camille de la Rose, Foremost Productions, Hollywood, California, not that Kitty had ever sat down at a desk in her life. The engraving of the Hacienda at the top, and the gold scrollwork that surrounded it, occupied a good thirty percent of each page’s surface. Emma could just imagine Aunt Estelle’s reaction, should she receive a reply to her letter inscribed on such a sheet.

You shall never have a penny of my money, was written on one in a girlish scrawl. I hate you and will have nothing to do with you. Leave me alone or I will shoot you dead.

Come near me and I will kill you, said the other.

One was dated April 14th – which had been Monday – the other, yesterday, the 15th. Both were signed, Camille.

‘Oh, come on!’ Zal snatched the papers from Pugh’s hand as the studio chief took them to read. ‘You can’t really think Kitty did it. She can’t hit the side of a barn at three feet.’

‘I can, too!’ Kitty protested.

‘You really shouldn’t touch those,’ pointed out Emma, as Kitty stepped past her and seized the notes from Zal. ‘I’m sure the police are going to want to—’

Pugh took them back, ripped them into pieces, and handed the pieces to Fishbein. Fishbein took the ashtray from Silver’s dressing table (Silver rescued his half-smoked Chesterfield in passing), tossed the litter of stubs and ash out the door, then dropped the evidence into the china dish and lit it. ‘Find anything else?’

‘Not so far.’

‘I didn’t write those!’ Kitty’s fingers shook as she took the tumbler of whisky from Dirk Silver’s hand and drained it.

‘Nobody’s gonna say you did, sugar.’ The studio chief laid a soothing hand on her shoulder. ‘But you gotta come clean with me. Where were you between … What time did she leave the set, Rokatansky?’

‘We finished scene seventeen at quarter after one,’ reported Zal. ‘Then Miss de la Rose talked for about twenty minutes with Thelma Turnbit—’

‘What the hell was that broad doing on the lot in the first place?’ Pugh turned sharply to his publicity chief. ‘Who let her in the gate?’

‘No idea.’

‘Well, get an idea. All we need is for her to get hold of this …’

Furious thumping on the door. Madge Burdon’s voice boomed through the panels, ‘You in there, Kitty? For Chrissake, if we don’t get something in the can we’re gonna have to bring that frikkin’ elephant back tomorrow at twenty-five bucks a—’

‘Beat it!’ yelled Frank back. ‘Miss de la Rose is indisposed!’

‘That you, Frank?’ demanded the director, unimpressed. ‘What are you, doin’ a threesome in there? I didn’t know Dirk was your type.’

Fishbein stepped outside, and shut the door again.

‘I swear it!’ Again Kitty lifted those limpid, tear-filled eyes to her lover’s. ‘I’d left my cigarettes in the stage, and while Madge was having the lights moved, I went back in and saw that someone had left the door of poor Buttercreme’s basket open.’ She hugged the little dog closer. ‘I hunted for her everywhere! I finally found her out in the back lot, near the peasant village sets—’

Outside, Emma heard Madge exclaim, ‘Fuck no! If I’d sent anyone out looking God knows when they’d be back—’

‘When’d you last see the gun?’ Pugh turned back to Kitty.

‘I don’t know!’ Her voice shook and she dabbed at what Emma guessed were now genuine tears. ‘Not for over a year!’

Given the clutter of kimonos, divan, chairs, liquor cabinet, cushions, make-up shelves, old fan mail and fashion magazines that crammed her dressing room, this was not difficult for Emma to believe. You could probably conceal Socrates the Elephant behind the shoe-rack … Behind her, Dirk Silver and Zal were still engaged in explanations in German too swift for her to easily follow, but she did catch the words, Kitty? Sie konnte keinen Heuhaufen schlagen …

‘Did you put that silencer on it?’ asked Emma. ‘And did you ever take it out of the dressing room?’

‘Good heavens, no! I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think so …’ Kitty looked inquiringly at Pugh, as the door opened and Fishbein slipped in again, still holding the gun under his jacket.

The studio chief explained, ‘About a year ago some nut broke into Mae Busch’s place in the middle of the night. The couple who did Kitty’s gardening had just quit, and she hadn’t gotten anybody else to live in the cottage—’

‘But I never did take it to the house,’ put in Kitty. ‘I mean, I was supposed to get a license for it, or a permit, or something, and we were right in the middle of filming Sawdust Rose, and I just never got around to it. There wasn’t a silencer on it when you gave it to me, was there, Frank?’

‘What do we do about the body, Frank?’ asked Fishbein quietly. ‘The gun’s one thing. Do we cop to it, or not?’

‘Hell, no!’ He turned back to Kitty. ‘Nobody was with you looking for pipsqueak there?’ He nodded to the little dog still cradled in her arms. ‘You didn’t get the Duchess to help you?’

‘I sent her to see Mrs Turnbit to the door,’ reported Kitty promptly. ‘And I thought I could find my little treasure right away. I couldn’t imagine she’d get that far!’

The studio chief’s eyes narrowed, but Emma could see him studying – as she had – the pristine state of the star’s make-up and drawing the same conclusion that she had. Whatever Kitty had been up to in the almost two hours that she’d been gone, she hadn’t been kissing anyone. Which, come to think of it, reflected Emma resignedly, was a little unusual in itself …

‘And you didn’t write those notes?’

‘I swear it, Frank! I didn’t know Rex was in town! I didn’t know he was alive!’

‘Anyone could have gotten the stationery from her dressing room,’ pointed out Emma reasonably. ‘And the gun, for that matter. The room isn’t kept locked during the day.’ She restrained herself from making the observation that were the evidence not at that moment dwindling into a little pile of ashes, they might have had the handwriting compared against Kitty’s, for forgery.

The brief glimpse she’d had of it hadn’t looked much like the star’s.

‘You,’ said Pugh. ‘Rokatansky. What the hell’s he yakking about?’ He jerked his head at Silver.

‘Just asking what’s going on,’ replied Zal.

Silver declared protestingly, ‘Wenn ein Mann durch eine kapitalistische Verschwörung ermordet wurde …’ and Emma sighed. She had wondered how long it would take the handsome German to conclude that there was a capitalist plot involved in the murder.

‘You tell him nothing’s going on. You tell him there was a little accident with one of the maintenance boys who went in to fix the sink in Miss de la Rose’s dressing room, but that the man’s fine and has been sent home. You got that?’

Zal nodded at once. ‘Sure thing.’

‘Kapitalistische Schweine …’

‘You. Duchess.’ Pugh rounded on her. ‘You too, Kitty. Mrs Blackstone went with you lookin’ for your little mutt – Zal, you went along, too. You found the pooch and brought it back. You didn’t see anything, you didn’t hear anything.’ He glared at them with his bulging, pale-green eyes. ‘If anybody asks questions about it – cops or reporters or anything – you were out in the back lot from one fifteen to’ – he checked his watch – ‘three thirty. I’ll get a couple of the prop boys to say they saw you out by the Rome set. Got that? Fishy, how much of a mess is there on the floor? How long’ll it take to get the bloodstains out?’

‘That’s gonna be a problem, Frank.’ Fishbein shook his head. ‘There’s not a lot of blood, but it soaked straight through the rug and I’m betting it’s stained the floorboards underneath—’

‘We can get a new rug.’

‘Vinegar or baking soda should take care of the stain,’ provided Zal helpfully.

‘Problem’s gonna be getting the body out of there,’ said the publicity chief. ‘We’ll need to keep the place locked until the lot’s cleared tonight, and Scandalous Lady’s shooting overtime on Stage Two, to make up the time they lost when—’

‘Send ’em home,’ said Pugh. ‘Tell ’em the wiring on Stage Two needs to be checked overnight ’cause there’s danger of fire. Better yet, get in there and set a fire, just enough to burn about a square yard of wall. And dig up somebody who can be trusted, to help with moving the stiff. And I mean somebody who can be trusted not to come around later with his hand out. You empty his pockets?’

‘Surely the police—’ began Emma again, but the producer rounded on her again with those cold protuberant eyes.

‘No police,’ he said. ‘Didn’t happen. Or anyway it didn’t happen here. You remember that, Duchess, or you’re gonna be on the first boat back to England—’

‘As it happens—’ retorted Emma, nettled, and Kitty sprang to her feet and stood between her lover and her sister-in-law like a diminutive ornamental pigeon pecking at a bulldog.

‘Don’t you dare threaten Emma, Frank! She doesn’t work for you, she works for me! And I won’t have you bully her!’ She slipped a protecting arm around Emma’s waist. ‘I mean it. If you try to send her away, you can finish your silly picture by yourself! And that goes for you, too, Fishy.’

Pugh opened his mouth, then closed it. Conciliatingly, Conrad Fishbein set the gun down on the make-up table and took Emma’s hand in his own plump sweaty ones.

‘Mrs Blackstone,’ he purred in his most persuasive tone, ‘I apologize for the misunderstanding. It was entirely my fault that you should misconstrue what we’re asking of you. This is purely a precautionary measure, and a purely temporary one, to avoid adverse publicity. Surely you’ve been in this country long enough to know how the newspapers, and particularly the film magazines, will distort facts and take any statement out of context, with destructive and, I may say, irresponsible results.’

Behind thick lenses, his wide blue eyes gazed earnestly into hers. ‘Mr Pugh and I are very familiar with this kind of sensationalism, and as a personal favor, I’m asking you to trust our judgment. We will, of course, get in contact with the police and turn the whole thing over to them at the proper time. But in an environment like Hollywood, in the light of sometimes unscrupulous competition from other studios who would like nothing better than to see Temptress of Babylon halt production indefinitely, we need to have a clearer picture of what’s going to be said, and how the situation is going to be handled, before we simply let everyone in on today’s events. Don’t you agree?’

He looked from Emma’s face to Kitty’s.

‘And of course,’ he added, ‘the studio will compensate you for the inconvenience and upset that I know this must be causing you.’

Emma glanced at the final curl of smoke rising from the ashes of the two notes, while behind her, Mr Pugh instructed Zal in an undervoice to inform Dirk Silver that his Bolshevik arse would be on the first boat back to Germany if he said one word about any of this to anyone. Or, possibly, that he might find himself in trouble with the Bureau of Investigation …

‘I’ll let you know,’ Fishbein went on in a helpful voice, ‘when it’s time for you to make a statement, and the whole thing may be easily settled by a written affidavit, without you having to be further troubled at all. Nor, of course, Miss de la Rose.’

Pugh’s eyes were on Emma’s face. He must, Emma guessed, be a past master of reading those small details of expression and tension that told him when he’d won an argument, or whether he needed to change tactics. Now, after the pause that followed Fishbein’s words, he said in a mollified tone, ‘Thank you, Mrs Blackstone. Fishy, you better get over to Stage Two and give ’em word to clear out. Get Gully Ackroyd to come over here and help with the Dear Departed. After this last time getting fired, he knows he’ll never work again unless he does us a big favor …’

Emma wondered if this meant that she would not, in fact, be obliged to rewrite scenes twenty to twenty-four, but did not think it the moment to ask.

Fishbein was already heading toward the door.

‘And tell Floyd at the gate to make sure the lot is cleared by six.’

The publicity chief scooped the gun from the make-up table, opened the dressing-room door, and found himself face-to-face with the apostolic Pettingers.

Prudence Pettinger stared at the gun in Fishbein’s hand and gasped. Her brother fell back a pace, shocked.

Veritas nunquam perit, that other great Roman, Seneca, had said.

Truth never perishes.

Frank Pugh, under his breath, said a word that could easily have taken the hide off a charging rhinoceros.

FOUR

The police arrived twenty-five minutes later.

‘They can’t possibly arrest me!’ Kitty paused, half-in and half-out of the stylish walking dress that Emma had fetched from Wardrobe. Knowing that the star’s dressing room would be sealed, she had borrowed a garment which had made its last appearance in the train station scene of Faithful Nell, rather than permit her sister-in-law to go down to the Sixth Division station house in a diamond-studded brassiere and a pair of spangled briefs that wouldn’t have concealed a packet of cigarettes.

Now, looking out the slatted jalousies of Nick Thaxter’s dressing room on what Americans called the second floor, Emma would not have bet any substantial sum on Kitty’s being right. In rewriting a scenario at the end of last month (Lost Lamb) she had learned enough about the examination of bullets to be fairly certain that the slug someone would eventually dig out of poor Mr Festraw could be traced to Kitty Flint’s gun.

And once the Pettingers had seen that gun in Conrad Fishbein’s hand, the jig – as Zal had observed – was definitely up. Trying to conceal the crime at that point would only make everything look a thousand times worse.

So Mr Pugh had been dispatched to call the Los Angeles Police Department, while Mr Fishbein (after ostentatiously placing the gun on the Volkische Beobachter spread out across Dirk Silver’s make-up table) had taken the two evangelists to his office to ascertain what they may have seen and heard – other than the fact that the publicity chief had had the murder weapon in his hand. And Emma had sought alternative costume.

‘Oh, and I look ghastly!’ continued Kitty, regarding herself in Nick’s mirror. ‘Can you come do me up the back, darling? Film make-up is so hideous … Oh, my poor little darling!’ She ducked from Emma’s helpful hands to kneel beside Buttercreme, who was attempting to conceal herself under the make-up table. ‘Don’t be afraid, sweetness! Nothing bad is going to happen … Zal, darling!’ She darted, still exposed from sacrum to fifth cervical vertebra, to the door as Zal appeared in the long window.

‘Would you be a complete darling and get Addie from Make-Up to come here? And bring my kit from Stage One. Oh, no, it’s out in the garden now, isn’t it? Nick has absolutely nothing here in my shade … Oh, except this lipstick …’

Through the open door – from the dusty square below in front of the dressing rooms – Pugh’s voice boomed up, ‘Ask her what the hell’s taking her so long!’

Considering how long the producer had known Kitty, Emma was a little surprised that he’d ask.

Three police cars were now parked in front of the Hacienda and it was all Ned Bergen and Mack Farley – the studio’s Head of Security – could do, to keep the extras from gathering around to gawk. Since Thaxter’s dressing room was directly above Kitty’s, Emma could hear the muted grumble of voices below as plump Lieutenant Meyer and cadaverous Sergeant Cusak examined the scene.

‘I think they can,’ affirmed Emma, catching up with her sister-in-law and doing up buttons. ‘And I think they’re going to, unless you can prove where you were. I know you can’t have been in the back lot because neither your dress nor Buttercreme’s fur has even one foxtail caught in it.’

She picked up the Empress Valerna’s discarded robe and held up the sequined hem. Even in the well-trodden purlieu of the main studio compound, trailing gowns, cloaks, and silk stockings were forever picking up the barbed, arrowhead-shaped seedpods that grew so abundantly in California. Emma daily extracted half a dozen from each Pekinese’s fur while brushing them.

‘They don’t grow everywhere, darling,’ said Kitty unconvincingly, and sat down at the mirror, to mop cold cream on her face. ‘I swear I was just looking for—’

‘Whatever you were doing’ – Zal slipped through the door and shut it behind him – ‘I think you’re going to need a better story than that. Lieutenant Meyer just found three letters from Rex Festraw, dated the beginning of last week, shoved in the back of the top drawer of the vanity in your dressing room, Kit. I thought Pugh was gonna give birth when Meyer brought ’em out.’

Kitty’s mouth popped open in a shocked O. ‘But I never got any! I really, honestly, never got any—’

‘If you’d just tell us—’ Emma began, and her sister-in-law shook her head vigorously, and went back to clearing the pale-yellow maquillage from her face.

‘It had nothing to do with Rex. In fact it had nothing to do with anyone. I was looking for—’

‘Oh, come on, Kit!’ insisted Zal.

Emma’s brow puckered. ‘Why would anyone want to frame Kitty?’

Zal raised his eyebrows and glanced towards the French door. Beyond the walkway outside – and past the railing – Emma could see Darlene Golden scamper across the open ground between the stages and the Hacienda, clothed not in her scanty slave-girl rags, but in even-more-revealing veils from another film entirely …

And she, clearly, had removed her camera make-up and put on the rouge and powder she would have worn on an evening out with a beau.

Frank Pugh came out a few steps to meet her, and Darlene threw herself into his massive arms.

Emma met Zal’s eyes.

An ambulance van and two more police cars turned slowly through the studio gates from Sunset Boulevard. The guards who let them in sprang to intercept the dozen men – some with cameras – who had been crowded up against the gates arguing with Floyd. Zal sighed. ‘Terrific.’

‘Frank won’t let them arrest me.’ Kitty swiveled around from the mirror. Without the thick coating of Motion Picture Yellow and powder, she looked older, and a little fragile. Hollywood, Emma was coming to understand, could be very hard on those who lived there, and she often found herself worrying about this beautiful, maddening goddess who loved her dogs and had made sure that Emma had been invited to the studio Christmas party within a few weeks of her arrival, and who never got enough sleep. ‘We’re three-quarters of the way through filming, and he would never start reshoots this late! It would cost a fortune!’

Down below, Darlene clasped Frank Pugh’s hand, pressed it to her bosom, and (Emma was certain) assured the studio chief that she, Darlene, would stand by him with unshaken loyalty and love through his coming time of trial.

A uniformed officer was briefly glimpsed coming out of the main office, then disappeared again under the arcade, clearly headed in the direction of Kitty’s dressing room below. Zal asked, ‘Want me to see what Winged Mercury found out?’

‘No,’ said Kitty. ‘I want you to get Addie and my make-up, and take poor little Buttercreme, put her in her box, and take all three of them back to my house. Poor darling, this is so upsetting for her.’ She bent down, picked up the little dog, and carried her to the French door where Zal and Emma were still looking out, though thankfully Pugh and Darlene had disappeared back into the arcade. ‘She’s so sensitive, I’m afraid all this is going to make her ill! And poor Chang, and my darling little Jazz, must be wondering what on earth became of me.’

‘They’re not the only ones.’ Zal took Buttercreme into his arms.

Emma put an arm around Kitty’s shoulders. ‘If you’re in any trouble—’

‘I’m not! I was just looking for—’

Detective Meyer and two policemen appeared at the end of the second-floor walkway, trailed by Conrad Fishbein and Al Spiegelmann, the lawyer for Foremost Productions. Down below, Frank Pugh’s voice could be heard snarling, ‘Get these people out of here!’ and a moment later he, too, lumbered up the steps from below, dark face surly. To Meyer he said, as if continuing a conversation, ‘That coulda been anybody phoning anybody … Rokatansky, you tell that kraut muscle-boy if he says one word to those newshounds, I’ll see to it his contract is terminated and his commie ass is on the first boat back to Germany.’

Down below, the reporters were scattering from the menacing bulk of Mack Farley and three studio guards. Some trailed after Madge Burdon, striding off in the direction of Stage One. Others clustered around the ambulance, doubtless waiting for the coroner’s men to remove Festraw’s body. The Pettingers, pushed to one side, approached one or another of the reporters – undoubtedly with the intention of stating their own convictions about the moral turpitude of Hollywood. But, Emma observed, they were being ignored, a state she knew would last only for as long as it took for the police to remove Kitty from the scene.

At that point, she guessed, they would become the center of attention.

Detective Meyer was a short, stout, balding man whose lumpy face was adorned with the style of beard favored by film villains: a black-dyed van dyke with absolutely symmetrical flashes of white at the corners of his mouth.

‘Do you identify the dead man as your husband, Rex Festraw?’ He flipped open his notebook as Pugh shut the dressing-room door on the noise from below. Crammed with Fishbein, policemen, and Spiegelmann (who’d been shut out and had to be admitted once Pugh realized it), the room put Emma forcibly in mind of either a sequence from one of the less demanding two-reel comedies which Foremost produced over on Stage Three, or of the sort of exercise undergraduates at Oxford found hilarious.

‘You don’t have to answer.’ Fishbein wormed through the press to Kitty’s side.

‘Former husband.’ Kitty drew herself up like the Empress Valerna staring down St Peter in scene fifty-eight. ‘I have not seen him since before the end of the War.’

‘You received no communication from him?’

‘None.’

Meyer produced and unfolded three sheets of letter paper. Looking over Kitty’s shoulder, Emma glimpsed the words: I’ll come around on Wednesday and if you don’t have $10,000 it’ll be the worse for you. Another proclaimed: I can spill secrets that’ll have you on the street by next week. ‘That his writing?’

‘Good Heavens, how would I know?’ Kitty turned back to the mirror and appropriated a jar of Nick’s moisturizer. ‘I only ever saw it on IOUs, and that was …’ She stopped herself from any specific revelation about how long it had been since her days as Mrs Festraw. ‘That was just years ago.’

‘Where were you this afternoon between one fifteen and three thirty, Miss de la Rose?’

‘I was looking for my dog.’ She returned her attention to the contents of Nick’s make-up drawers. To Emma, these appeared to contain almost as much high-quality rouge, mascaro, and powder as did Kitty’s own.

‘You didn’t get a telephone call in your dressing room at two ten?’

The question startled her into looking up. ‘I wasn’t in my dressing room at two ten.’

‘The studio operator says a call came through for you at that time. A man’s voice answered – in your dressing room, so presumably that was Mr Festraw – and said, Yeah, she’s here, and called you to the phone.’

‘The operator actually heard Miss de la Rose’s voice?’ asked Emma.

Meyer glanced at her, not troubled at being interrupted, and shook his head. ‘She says she doesn’t listen to calls.’ He glanced sidelong at Pugh. ‘Says she’d get canned if she did.’

‘She’s gonna get god-damned canned anyway—’ growled the studio chief.

‘Anybody go on this dog hunt with you, Miss de la Rose?’

Kitty’s chin came up defiantly, and Spiegelmann put in, ‘You don’t have to answer any of these questions, Miss de la Rose.’

‘Nobody was with me.’ She flicked a glance at Pugh, who flushed an alarming shade of turkey red. Returning to the mirror, she began applying rouge. Fortunately, reflected Emma, Nick Thaxter’s skin tones were reasonably close to Kitty’s. ‘I don’t usually have to take along a bodyguard to find my poor Buttercreme when she gets lost, any more than I need somebody sitting at my bedside all night, in case somebody should accuse me of murder at three in the morning. People do do things by theirselves, you know.’

And a story that involved Emma and Zal accompanying her, Emma thought with relief, could be too easily checked … particularly by the Pettingers.

Kitty dusted powder on her face, and pursed her incomparable lips to dab on the reddest shade in Thaxter’s extensive collection. ‘And you can’t arrest me,’ she added, ‘because I really didn’t do it. Is there any mascaro in there that matches mine, darling?’

Detective Meyer refused to let anyone besides Al Spiegelmann ride down to the Sixth Division Police Station with Kitty. Emma secured a ride in Frank Pugh’s big Pierce-Arrow, clinging to the leather hand-strap in stoic alarm as the furious studio chief roared out onto Sunset Boulevard like a Roman chariot out of the starting gate. The reporters – ejected by Mack Farley and his myrmidons – scattered before him, having clustered around the gates like ants around a jam pot. As they swept full-tilt into the traffic on Sunset, Emma caught a glimpse in the crowd of what looked like Thelma Turnbit’s purple hat and mustard-colored tweeds.

Since she’d stepped from the train last October into the Moorish fantasia of Los Angeles’ Santa Fe station, Emma had periodically experienced the sensation that she’d wandered somehow into a dream – except her own dreams were generally far more prosaic, involving the purchase of broccoli at the market or the cataloging of Etruscan inscriptions. But looking at the anger-darkened face of the man beside her, the cold set of the heavy lips – remembering the sharp, businesslike bark of his conversation with pale, plump, oleaginous Mr Fishbein and the curl of smoke from Dirk Silver’s ashtray as they burned evidence – the sense of being in a dream of some kind returned. A frightening dream, as it sank in on her: he doesn’t care. A man died, shot to death, and he simply doesn’t care. It was literally no more to him than poor Mr Ackroyd getting drunk and being fired from the picture: an inconvenience. Here, Duchess, you rewrite scenes twenty through twenty-four and it never will have happened.

Reporters beat them to the station house. Emma supposed they’d telephoned ahead. ‘The bail bondsman should be here already,’ Pugh snapped, thrusting his way before her to the doors – the first words he’d addressed to her since, Get in the car. There was no sign of either Mr Spiegelmann or Kitty in the station’s reception area, but a tall, golden-haired, extremely handsome, young man in a double-breasted suit sprang to his feet as they entered, and moved straight to the studio chief.

‘Colt Madison.’ He thrust out his hand. ‘Mr Fishbein told me to meet you here.’

Emma took a seat on one of the wooden benches, already occupied by a fat, angry looking man in a cheap tweed jacket that smelled of very stale meat. Three reporters pressed briefly against the glass of the outer door, but had evidently been told to stay out in no uncertain terms. Beyond them, the last of the California daylight threw shadows almost all the way across Cahuenga Boulevard, and flashed on the windscreens of passing cars. Somewhere in the station, a woman insisted, ‘I never told him he could stay! He said he just needed a place to sleep for two or three nights …’ Elsewhere, a typewriter clattered, a telephone rang.

That home would be yours, Aunt Estelle had written, of the green, sweet, familiar quiet of Oxford.

Emma closed her eyes.

It wouldn’t be the same, of course. She knew those long evenings would never come back, when she’d helped her father with cataloging all those small and intricate fragments of inscriptions painstakingly copied in Italian ruins, the endless minutiae on variant medieval versions of Livy and Polybius. In the spring of 1914 he’d been planning to return to the purported Etruscan ruins in the Apennines, which would have been Emma’s first field experience. As late as 1916 he’d still spoken as if it would take place. When all this is over …

At Aunt Estelle’s, she knew, she would be expected to be a sort of senior daughter in the household, a role she was well prepared to play: acting as housekeeper, helping to arrange dinners, chaperoning her cousins when they came ‘out’. She would be the person she had all her life planned to be.

Like Odysseus, she thought, when he finally made it home from Ithaca and cleared out all Penelope’s importunate suitors … Although presumably I won’t have to kill anybody … Tidying up loose ends. Finding those he had loved in his former life … Except that her father, unlike the wanderer’s, would not be there to welcome her back.

But his work will be, she thought. Scholarship, friendship, the world she had known …

And at least nobody will hand me a farrago of a half-written scenario about Babylonian empresses (!) coming to ‘corrupt’ first-century Rome!

Someone came onto the lot and killed a man in Kitty’s dressing room …

She opened her eyes again, and saw Frank Pugh, towering over Detective Meyer, beating his hand on the corner of the sergeant’s desk to emphasize his words.

She wondered where Kitty was.

On her twenty-sixth birthday – this past September – Emma recalled that she’d been making plans to kill herself. She’d known exactly how to go about it. The Romans were very helpful about such matters. Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest, Seneca had written. At nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent.

A thousand doors open on to it …

She had planned to wait until Mrs Pendergast went out to her married daughter’s for afternoon tea. Then she’d steal a razor from Lawrence Pendergast’s room, fill the first-floor bathtub with hot water (the one in the attic never got remotely warm), lie down in it, and slit her wrists. (Longways, the Romans advised, so there was no chance of a small cut closing up again.) Early authorities were almost unanimous in saying that the method did not hurt much.

Not nearly as much, she had concluded, as Mrs Pendergast’s constant, resentful fault-finding; as Lawrence Pendergast’s assumption that any woman who worked for her living was lawful prey.

Not as much as the pain of living without her parents, without her brother … without Jim. As the knowledge that there was nowhere for her to go.

But that was the day that Kitty had come flouncing up to the Pendergast door, trailing an aura of gin, cigarettes, and dissipation, fresh off shooting Passion’s Smoke for Minerva Films in London and in quest of someone to come back to America with her to brush her Pekinese and balance her checkbook and give her a much-needed halo of respectability.

That evening, to her own astonishment, Emma had found herself getting on a boat. It had felt very odd.

The next day she had laughed, for the first time in what felt like years.

Laughter had almost hurt.

I can’t leave her. Not at this moment.

She drew a deep breath, and felt as if Aunt Estelle’s letter – fluttering in the back of her mind like an outraged pale moth – retreated to a shelf marked, To Be Dealt With Later.

‘That’s horseshit!’ roared Pugh. ‘Kitty – Miss de la Rose – didn’t even know the sap was in town!’

‘Then what was he doin’ with two letters from her in his room?’ returned Meyer calmly.

Opening her eyes, Emma saw the detective shift his dark gaze from Pugh to the handsome Mr Colt Madison with a kind of smug wariness.

‘That was Officer Cusak on the phone. I sent him over there the minute we got his address out of Festraw’s wallet.’

Judging by the producer’s expression, Emma guessed he would have words to say to Mr Fishbein about not burning the contents of the wallet along with the other evidence.

‘They found two letters from Miss de la Rose on the table at Festraw’s place. Pretty strongly worded, I gather. Cusak’s on his way over here with ’em now. One of ’em said, and I quote’ – he produced a notebook from his pocket and glanced at it – ‘“Come near me and I will kill you”.’

Pugh’s fist slammed the corner of the desk. ‘Those were a goddam plant!’

‘Are you implying that the police’ – Meyer’s voice was deadly quiet – ‘would manufacture evidence, Mr Pugh?’

Madison stepped forward, leading with one shoulder as if squaring up for a fight. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time in this town, Bub.’

Oh, good. Emma got to her feet. Let’s get the police angry at us … If the wily Odysseus could deal with an irate Cyclops and hungry Laestrygonians, she reasoned, I can certainly deal with one studio chief and a mere detective of the Los Angeles Police …

She stepped forward as Meyer was opening his mouth, and said, ‘Please excuse me, Detective Meyer, but might it be possible for me to see Miss de la Rose for a few minutes?’

Short of snapping, Get lost, sister, neither Meyer nor Frank Pugh could very well continue the brewing battle. Both turned to look at her – Emma thought Mr Madison looked a trifle miffed at being upstaged – and she went on in the firm tones she had used when encountering drunken undergraduates on the High Street. ‘Whatever decision is reached about Miss de la Rose’s status, I know she’ll have instructions for me concerning her household affairs. I would very much appreciate it, if you could spare a few minutes for me to see her – under whatever supervision you consider appropriate, of course.’

Meyer went to the office door in a corner, presumably to ask a sergeant for permission. Madison – whoever he was – turned to Pugh and said, without any effort to lower his voice, ‘Don’t let these goons put one over on you, Mr Pugh. Those letters are a plant. Raymer’ – he jerked his head at the sergeant’s door – ‘would like nothing better than to pin a big one on a movie star – or get the leverage to hit you for a fortune, to make the whole thing go away. Don’t let him make a monkey out of you.’

‘Nobody,’ grated Pugh, in a voice just as carrying, ‘makes a monkey out of me.’

Emma had known Frank Pugh as a powerful man, an intimidating man: a man whom Kitty used as casually as, by her own account, she’d used one or two of her husbands and any number of her admirers. A protector and a source of silk dresses, diamond bracelets, and caviar suppers. There had been something almost comical in the way the glamorous screen star deceived him. But now, looking at him, Emma shivered. He was not, she realized, comical at all, and Kitty was playing with fire.

Behind her, Zal Rokatansky’s voice asked quietly, ‘What’s up?’ He stood at her elbow, make-up case under his arm.

She felt exactly as if she had stumbled and, in the act of falling, been caught by strong arms.

Before she could speak his glance went past her and he said, ‘Jesus Christ, Colt Madison!’

‘Who is he?’ She could not help noticing that Madison, while speaking to Pugh, kept one eye on the glass in the doorway of the sergeant’s office, which reflected the room … and himself.

‘Just about the least competent private investigator in LA,’ said Zal. ‘But the most photogenic. How’s Kitty? Are they booking her? Ambrose Crain’ – he named the smitten millionaire whose crimson roses had glorified Kitty’s dressing room and her base camp in Stage One – ‘turned up just after Pugh left, and gave me a lift up to the house to drop off the celestial creamcakes. He’s waiting in the drugstore across the street, in case Kitty needs a ride home. He was all ready to shell out for bail on the spot, but I told him Pugh would probably take care of that. And I brought the paint box.’ He patted the make-up case. ‘Nick’s rouge a little too pink for Kitty?’

In spite of herself, Emma stifled a giggle. ‘Now, don’t speak ill of Mr Thaxter or his rouge! He was very generous to let us all invade his dressing room.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it. And don’t get me wrong, the rouge looks great on him. And how are you?’

‘Holding up,’ said Emma. ‘A little to my own surprise.’

‘Not to mine.’ He gave her a shy grin. ‘I’ll back a proper educated Englishwoman against the Keystone Kops any day of the week.’

‘Don’t be so sure of that.’ She glanced worriedly in the direction of the watch-room’s street door, as the lugubrious Sergeant Cusak entered and crossed straight to the door of Sergeant Raymer’s office. Beyond the windows, the sky was losing its light. Street lamps, yellow in the California dusk, blossomed along the sidewalks; the drugstore window on the other side of the street flung a garish carpet of light over the sidewalk and the faces of the passers-by. ‘Evidently Detective Meyer sent a man immediately to Mr Festraw’s lodgings and they found letters from Kitty there—’

Zal made the same remark he had made earlier in the day, when apprised of Rex Festraw’s presence on the lot. ‘More of ’em?’ he added after a moment. ‘That’s quite a correspondence …’

‘And the letters said, “Come near me and I will kill you”.’

‘Fuck me. I mean, Gosh. That’s got to be a plant.’

‘Even Mr Madison seems to have figured that out,’ agreed Emma. ‘The identical words … But it makes me wonder who would go to such trouble to have Kitty accused of the crime … and why are they doing such a bad job of it?’

FIVE

It was well after midnight when Frank Pugh dropped Kitty and Emma off at Kitty’s miniature pseudo-Moorish villa, far up Ivarene Street in the Hollywood Hills. Only the stars, and the distant glow of an enormous, lightbulb-plastered sign advertising a failed real-estate development called HOLLYWOODLAND, illuminated the velvety blackness. Sagebrush and dust gave the dry air an exquisite savor that Emma would forever associate with California; the eyes of small animals, foxes or coyote, glinted out of the dark. ‘I do hope poor Ambrose understands why I needed to have Mr Pugh bring me home,’ Kitty said, as they mounted the high steps of the porch, and waved after the departing headlights of the studio chief’s car. ‘Please wake me tomorrow in time to telephone him … Christ, I need a drink! Zal?’

In the Stygian shadow where the ground sloped sharply down from the street, round spectacle lenses caught the porch lamp, very much like the eyes of the smaller prowlers above.

The cameraman emerged from the darkness, where his battered pre-war Ford had been tucked behind the big eucalyptus tree at the turn of the drive. While Kitty had been cold-creaming Nick Thaxter’s not-quite-flattering cosmetics from her face – in the back office generally used, Emma suspected, for the questioning of recalcitrant suspects – and Al Spiegelmann and the bail bondsman were negotiating with the precinct jailer, Detective Meyer, and a district court judge, Zal had asked Emma softly, ‘Does this whole business smell as fishy to you as it does to me?’

‘You mean that telephone call to the dressing room?’ She’d set down the nearly illegible carbons of the booking forms and the police report, suddenly aware that she would cheerfully have done murder herself for a cup of tea. ‘Or the duplicate letters in Mr Festraw’s rooms? Somebody knew she’d be away from her dressing room at two ten – and knew that Mr Festraw would be there. Hiding that set of threatening letters in the back of her bureau, most likely.’

‘And somebody’d been in earlier,’ pointed out Zal, ‘to swipe the gun and the stationery. God knows how he managed to find the gun. And whoever he was, he came back when he knew Festraw was there, which means he was watching the place – if it was a “he” – and had co-ordinated times with whoever made that phone call. It was a set-up, all right, and a pretty careful one.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Emma quietly. ‘So why was something so carefully arranged done so badly?’

‘Darling,’ Kitty had called out, ‘could you give me a hand? This stupid lamp is worse than a klieg light and I can’t see a thing in the mirror …’

In the corridor outside the little interrogation room, Colt Madison’s voice had rattled like a well-modulated typewriter, pouring out his own theory – conspiracy by figures high in the government and police department of Los Angeles – with a rehearsed lucidity that never so much as stopped for breath, let alone to search for a word. It was like hearing an actor declaim – ‘the whole object of creating scandals like these is to draw attention to the need for censorship of the medium’ – a river flowing freely, rather than an ordinary human’s speech.

‘Good thing it was,’ pointed out Zal, turning over the booking sheets. ‘Or else our girl would be spending the night in the slammer, and then Pugh and Madge really would have coronaries. They don’t usually give bail on a murder charge.’

The last form in the pile, Emma had seen, had set a special hearing for the twenty-eighth.

‘I told you they wouldn’t arrest me,’ Kitty had declared, and before Emma could explain to her that they had, in fact, arrested her – and that she had only a combination of studio clout and police corruption to thank that she wasn’t going to spend the night in the cells – Pugh, Fishbein, Spiegelmann and Detective Meyer had returned, filling the little room and all talking at once. Zal had slipped quietly away, presumably to cross Cahuenga Boulevard to the drugstore and let Kitty’s lovestruck millionaire know that his services wouldn’t be required.

But Emma had not been at all surprised, to glimpse Zal’s car in the shadows of the eucalyptus tree as Frank’s big Pierce-Arrow had turned down the steep drive. And now, as he emerged from the darkness and approached the high, tiled steps of the house, she saw that he carried an assortment of small paper bags and boxes, and wafted about him the astonishing scents of egg foo yung and chop suey. Kitty squealed in delight and flung her arms around his neck, at the risk of getting lo mein sauce on the studio wardrobe’s dress, ‘Darling, if you weren’t in love with Emma I’d marry you on the spot!’ She kissed him on both cheeks. ‘I can’t tell you what it means! I’m absolutely dying—’

She scampered ahead of them up the steps, and Emma, pausing to relieve the cameraman of some of his awkward burden, whispered, ‘Thank you!’

‘Would you like a drink?’ called Kitty over her shoulder as she entered the house – surrounded immediately by her three miniature guardians – and made a beeline for the elaborately carved Chinese liquor cabinet. ‘Oh, Zally, did you make sure to tell Mrs Shang to feed … Oh, I see you did!’ She put her head briefly through the door into the kitchen. ‘The gin is nothing to worry about – my bootlegger tells me it comes straight in from Canada, not like that awful bathtub rotgut they serve at the Dome café …’

‘Hey,’ protested Zal good-naturedly, following her across the tiled floor of the dining room and down the five steps to the kitchen. ‘I know the guy who runs in the Dome’s supplies and those come from Canada, too.’

‘Well, he should be reported and locked up for fraud, then.’ Kitty rummaged in the cabinet. ‘Or attempted murder …’

She followed them down, a bottle of Tanqueray and three glasses in hand. ‘Not that any of them ever tell the truth. Did you tell poor Ambrose what was going on, Zal? I saw his car as we drove off the lot, with those awful detectives …’

‘I did.’ Zal spread the paper boxes out on the table as Emma filled the tea kettle. ‘I told him Pugh has already hired a gumshoe but that I don’t think much of him. He says he’ll put up whatever cash we need, to get to the truth. He said – and I agree with him’ – he held Kitty’s chair for her, then started opening boxes – ‘that if whoever really killed Festraw works for Foremost – or for one of the bigger studios, Universal or UA – we might not be able to trust our Fearless Leader to give a straight story to Meyer and his boys.’

Emma, her hands full of plates, hadn’t thought of this. It was like discovering that Patroclus had really been spying for the Trojans. ‘Oh, dear!’

‘But why would somebody who works for Universal or UA want to kill Rex? Do you want any of this, darling?’ Kitty paused, gin bottle in hand. ‘No … Zal? More for me, then …’

‘If they actually wanted to get Kitty out of the way,’ pointed out Emma, ‘they’d have made those notes more convincing.’

Zal took a bottle of olives from his pocket, opened it and handed it to her. ‘If we knew any of that,’ he said quietly, ‘we’d have a better idea of what we need to watch out for … if anything.’

‘Watch out for?’ Her glance went from Zal to Emma and back again. ‘Watch out for what?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Emma gently. ‘We not only don’t know who killed Mr Festraw, but why he was killed. But the facts that have come to light so far: the telephone call to your dressing room, at exactly the moment when you weren’t there; forged correspondence from you to Mr Festraw and vice versa; the fact that whoever killed him did so in your dressing room when there are probably ten thousand less conspicuous places in the Los Angeles area where it could have been done; all tells us that it was worth somebody’s while to arrange his murder in exactly this fashion. Mr Spiegelmann would tear the case against you apart in court.’

Kitty sat down in one of the kitchen chairs, and fished, rather blankly, in the pockets of her dress – which, having come from Foremost Productions’ wardrobe department, didn’t contain a single cigarette. Emma opened the kitchen drawer that contained the household supply. Both the Shangs smoked like chimneys. Zal lit a kitchen match and held the flame to the cigarette as Kitty took it, but his glance crossed Emma’s. ‘And whoever’s behind this,’ he pointed out quietly, ‘would know that.’

Emma said, ‘Yes.’

She was silent, as Kitty thought this through.

‘I think,’ Emma went on after a moment, ‘that until we get some idea of who is behind it – someone, I assume, with a good deal of money – I would suggest that none of us, whatever we find out, talks to anyone about it, until we’ve talked to each other. Not Mr Crain, not Mr Pugh, not Mr Spiegelmann … nobody.’

Zal said, ‘I agree,’ and Kitty, after a swallow of gin, nodded.

‘The way people blab in that studio, God knows where anything will end up. You know, just the other day when they were getting ready for the banquet scene with Nick – darling, did the Romans really eat things like swans and mice? No wonder they died out! – I heard one of the wranglers – the wranglers, dearest! – tell an extra about me and that gorgeous young man in the wardrobe department up on the catwalk above Stage Three … and nobody knew about that …’

‘Presumably the gorgeous young man did,’ pointed out Emma.

‘Yes, darling, but he’d never let it on to anyone because Connor Stark – that’s his agent, you know – is terribly jealous, and would disown any of his young men who so much as looked at a girl … though I don’t see why he should care. Not to mention all those stupid stories about Mr Crain taking me to dinner that ran in Photo Play … But it just goes to show you—’

She picked a fragment of lobster from one of the plates, handling her chopsticks as if she were the Empress of China rather than Babylon. (The motion picture industry, Emma had observed, seemed to survive on Chinese take-out. Zal was teaching her to wield chopsticks, one of several skills – along with mixing cocktails and tallying baseball scores – which she had not expected to learn in America.)

Emma refrained from pointing out that in fact Mr Crain had taken Kitty to dinner, repeatedly … And one never knew when columnists were watching.

‘But that brings us back to the question,’ she said. ‘Why would someone who worked for Foremost, or Universal, or anywhere for that matter, want to murder Mr Festraw? He looked very down-and-out, and of little use to anyone, though of course appearances might be deceiving. And why would they want you blamed for the deed?’

‘Me?’ Kitty’s dark eyes widened. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with it!’

‘Sounds like somebody’s going to a lot of trouble,’ observed Zal, ‘to make a lot of people think that you did.’

‘That’s silly,’ said Kitty firmly. ‘And anyway, like he said in the car, Frank isn’t about to let $250,000 worth of filming get washed out to sea.’

From the moment they’d gotten into Pugh’s Pierce-Arrow outside the Sixth Division station – leaving Al Spiegelmann to hunt for a taxi for himself – the studio chief had poured forth his plans to deflect bad publicity, and to paint Camille de la Rose as the wronged, martyred woman struggling to clear her name (‘And believe me, baby, some of that evidence sounds pretty hinky to me.’). ‘Don’t cry, baby,’ he’d said, taking one hand from the wheel to put it around Kitty’s shoulders as she’d wept – convincingly – with gratitude on his chest. ‘It’s one thing for the papers to go after a big lug like Arbuckle for rape, or make a stink about some director’s shady past when he’s knocked off. Fishy’ll make Festraw the villain, persecuting you … we’ll get the papers to drag in how the police are persecuting you as well.’

Now, poking thoughtfully around in the egg foo yung with the end of a chopstick, Kitty said, ‘Ambrose is a major stockholder in the Hearst chain and Scripps-Howard.’ For all her appearance of a scatterbrained flapper, Kitty had an unerring instinct about where money came from, and where it went. ‘I can’t imagine someone like Lou Jesperson over at Enterprise would think he could push Frank into selling the studio to Enterprise, just by causing a scandal over me. Even if he does have that slick tramp Anita Tempest under contract. He has to know Fishy would use a mysterious accusation like this one to make me even more fascinating with the public, than to hurt me. Especially since the handwriting on those silly letters doesn’t look a thing like mine.’

‘You get a look at them?’ asked Zal.

‘The ones that Mr Pugh didn’t burn?’ Emma couldn’t keep herself from adding.

‘Oh, yes. That awful flat-foot practically waved them under my nose. I said, if he doubted my word, he can check them against my contract and a whole bunch of things I’ve written at the studio.’ She frowned, and her dark eyes grew distant as she considered the implications of the evidence.

‘Darlene would want me out of the way,’ she said at last. ‘She’s ready to do murder, to get herself elected the Goddess of the Silver Screen in that Screen Stories contest … and to get her claws into Frank. I guess you could say the same for the others – Anita Tempest and Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow and Peggy Donovan, though I will say I wouldn’t think Peggy would do something like that. Screw Lou Jesperson, yes. But I don’t think she’d do dirty to a friend. Well, not that dirty. And that new girl Norma What’s-Her-Name at Goldwyn. And I hear Theda Bara’s trying for a comeback …’

‘But would any of them,’ pursued Emma, ‘actually kill a man, to get you out of the way?’

‘Gloria Swanson,’ replied Kitty promptly, ‘would kill a man who beat her to a taxi-cab.’

‘Don’t be silly, Kitty,’ put in Zal. ‘Swanson never takes taxis.’

‘Well, that’s true. But whoever wins that Screen Stories contest is going to make headlines in every photo-play rag in the country. If I could get an extra two thousand a week on my contract, or an extra film … or make a comeback if I hadn’t made a picture in a couple of years … I’d sure kill Rex for it. Even if he hadn’t been my husband.’

Emma considered for a moment. The impossible probable, Aristotle had said, is always to be preferred to the improbable possible. Mostly, her father had generally added, because we seldom actually know the limits of the impossible.

So what are we actually looking at here?

Aristotle – and her father, studying a chart of the Etruscan ruins at Orvieto – would have said, Start with what you know.

‘Tell me about Rex,’ she said. ‘How long did you know him?’

Kitty counted on her fingers. ‘About six months.’

‘And how long after you married him?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘In all. I mean, we were really hardly married at all …’

‘Did you love him?’

‘Oh, passionately!’ Kitty clutched her bosom and raised her face to an imaginary key-light. ‘I was crazy for him – he was gorgeous, and amazing in bed. This one time, just after I got the job with Ziegfeld, he came home with three bottles of cognac and a Hungarian lion tamer …’

‘And that’ – Zal held up a finger – ‘is all we need to know about that.’

‘Oh, I suppose so. But I honestly didn’t know that people could do things like that.’ Her face clouded. ‘It’s hard to tell, you know, looking at someone who’s dead, when the last time you saw them they were alive … But he didn’t look like a Greek god anymore, did he? You said you talked to him …’

‘Briefly,’ said Emma. ‘And, no. The years hadn’t been kind to him.’

‘Good.’ Old anger briefly quenched the old pain in the dark eyes. And behind it, a flicker of remembered fear. ‘He always drank, you know. More than he let on, when he’d come to the stage door. He could hold his liquor better than anyone I’ve ever seen, at least he could then. I think he was really trying to catch Lillian Lorraine – the dancer, you know – between husbands. But he and I …’ The fatigue-bruised flesh around her eyes puckered again, as if she’d accidentally leaned her elbow into an open safety pin, and she took another long drag on her Camel.

Emma recalled what Jim had told her, about what his parents had said of his younger sister’s leave-taking.

‘Well, I’d just left home.’ She exhaled a thin line of smoke. ‘And I was living with three other girls in a fifth-floor walk-up on Pearl Street, and I was wild to get out of there. One of them had given up the stage completely by that time and I’d come home and find three of her boyfriends all sitting in the front room – which was where I was supposed to sleep – all sort of glaring at each other, while she was in the other room with number four. She kept trying to get me to do a sister-act with her, and I wouldn’t go back to my parents, even if they’d take me. And Rex had a really nice apartment, and lots of money – at least, then he did. And, like I said, he was phenomenal …’

She waved the recollection away, as if in those days, at the age of fifteen, she hadn’t been terrified at where she knew it would end.

‘You know, sometimes we were really rich. I’d have a maid, and he’d have a valet, and we’d have a cook, which was a good thing, because I wasn’t any better in the kitchen then than I am now … And we’d live in these beautiful apartments in classy buildings like the Ansonia and the Apthorp, and go out to dinner every night. But then the jewelry he’d buy for me would sort of disappear, and he’d announce we’d have to move, to these awful dives in Harlem or Brooklyn. He was a gambler, and he’d get into debt with the gangsters over on Eleventh Avenue – that’s when he wasn’t buddies with them, lining up rich patsies for their card games. I guess you’d call him a stage-door johnny.’

It wasn’t what Emma would have called him, but she held her peace.

Kitty sighed, and drew in another lungful of smoke. ‘He knew everybody on Broadway, and all the respectable out-of-town businessmen who’d come to New York looking for a good time. He was an actor himself – he was in The Spring Maid – so they were flattered as hell. He’d either cheat them himself, or steer them into scams or crooked games or Gyp the Blood’s whorehouses, and he’d get a percentage of the take. I was working the whole time – either for Ziegfeld or in the line with A Winsome Widow – but some of the men he’d have over to drink when I came home scared me. I don’t mind tough customers …’ Her eyebrows, still dark with mascaro, dipped again, making that angel face suddenly old, and weary. ‘But these guys … You’d look in their eyes and there was nothing there. Just … like beads. And a lot like beads, some of them, with their pupils all down to a pinprick from dope. I remember one of them got angry at one of the others – I don’t remember why, but it was something silly, like who was opening pitcher for the Giants that Sunday or something like that. He knocked him off his chair and kicked him, then picked up the chair and beat him with it, beat him ’til he broke his ribs and his pelvis, while all the rest of them just sat and watched. Rex included.’

She ground out what was left of the cigarette on the saucer that Emma silently handed her. ‘The rest of them, it was just a day’s work to them. And for all I know the bastard really deserved it. He could have robbed orphans or beat his wife or burned down hospitals for the insurance money. But Rex didn’t do a thing, because he was scared.’

She fell silent then, as if she had returned to that tiled apartment kitchen, pressed up against the wall beside her handsome husband’s chair, watching one man beat another almost to death on the floor. For a time the only sound was the tick of the clock, which read quarter past one.

Emma found herself remembering Frank Pugh’s heavy features, red with anger but set and almost expressionless. ‘You didn’t see anything, you didn’t hear anything … Didn’t happen …’

Zal asked, after a time, ‘Why’d you leave him?’

‘He was jealous.’ She looked up at them, returning to the present. Her real self, Emma thought, without the overlays of the gorgeous maneaters she played, or the dazzling, flamboyant star who figured in every screen magazine in the country as the glittering embodiment of ‘It’ (Whatever ‘It’ is …). With just a trace of a defiant sixteen-year-old girl who realizes that she’s in over her head and has no place else to go.

‘Like he had any business bellyaching about my love life … When he was sober he’d yell at me about even talking to other men …’

Her beautiful eyelids lowered for a moment as she concentrated on lighting another cigarette, made Emma certain that talking was not what her sister-in-law had been doing …

‘But when he got drunk, he scared me. One night we got into an awful shouting match, when I came in late. He said he was sick of being married to a tramp, he was going to throw me out on my ear. Well, I’d already heard he’d been out on the town with Minnie Mazzola – she was a vaudeville singer and the sweetest person … she had a lot of money, too, so I knew he was sort of looking for a reason to divorce me so he could marry her. So I said not to put himself to the trouble, and I put on my coat again – the most beautiful chinchilla, silver-gray and black: Ruggy Breevoort bought it for me … Or was it Bottles Findlay? – and I walked out of the flat. It was four in the morning and it took me forever to get a cab on Ninth Avenue, but I went to a friend’s flat, and a few days later I left town with Solly Rosengo, who danced at the Tivoli and had just gotten a job at the Silver Shoes in Jersey City … Or was it Ted?’

She counted on her fingers again. ‘But I never saw Rex again,’ she finished, with the air of one virtuously returning to the subject at hand. ‘He’d been pretty sober when we had our fight, so I knew he meant it, when he said he’d divorce me. And frankly, considering the kind of people he ran around with, I’m a little surprised he made it all the way up to this afternoon.’

‘Do you know anything about his family?’ asked Emma after a moment. ‘Or where he was from originally?’

‘Oh, New York, I’m pretty sure. And to hear him tell it, his family had been well-off, though he sometimes said he’d been to Yale, and sometimes to Princeton. He was always telling me I was just like his mother, which I don’t think was supposed to be a compliment. I always thought he was sort of like me – the family had some kind of money, but gave him the bum’s rush for some damn thing. And frankly, I was just as happy to get out of New York at that point, because to be honest I was always a little afraid I’d run into my parents, or Jim, or one of Papa’s rabbi friends on the street – not that I ever was on the street during the daytime.’

And all during that time, reflected Emma – during Kitty’s brief, tempestuous marriage and her career as a showgirl on the Great White Way – her older brother Jim, after a discreet name-change from Blechstein to Blackstone, had been studying, first at City College and then at New York University. Like his sister, he had sought to shake free from his scholarly father’s expectation that the only proper use of education was to become a rabbi.

He’d been a year from his degree in architecture, when he’d been drafted.

That tall, young man in American uniform, black curly hair falling into his eyes as he gazed around a fashionable shop in the Regent’s Arcade. Then he’d shyly approached her, asked, ‘Excuse me, miss, but … could you spare a minute to help me pick out something for my sister?’

The sister who at that moment had been surreptitiously packing her bags in preparation to leave her third husband (or, as it turned out, the man she thought was her third husband) to head out for Hollywood …

The sister he had written to in secret, without their parents’ knowledge, for years.

The sister he had never ceased to love.

Kitty stubbed out her cigarette, poured herself another gin, kissed her and Zal goodnight, and went up to bed. ‘Of course Frank isn’t going to stop the shooting and I’ve got to be in costume by seven … I suppose it would make more sense to stay up than to get up, but it isn’t fair to you, Zally, or to poor Emma. Frank’s going to send a studio car for us …’

She blithered for another fifteen minutes about how they all really should get some sleep, before Emma finally herded her up to bed. Coming downstairs, she found Zal still in the kitchen, Chang Ming snoring like a fluffy red-gold bear in his lap. Zal gently shifted the little dog to another chair without waking it, rose, and picked up his cap. ‘Anything else you need?’

‘Other than three more hours of sleep than I’m going to get?’ Emma smiled ruefully. ‘I trust Mr Pugh is going to hand this Mr Madison carte blanche to question everybody in the studio about whether they saw either Kitty, or anybody else coming or going from her dressing room? Or heard a shot between two ten and four this afternoon?’

‘Good luck with that.’ Zal poked his glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose as he followed her across the living room, with its chromium furniture and Chinese antiques, and out the front door. ‘You could probably shoot off a gun without a silencer and people would figure it was palace revolutionaries warming up for scene sixty-seven. We have close to four thousand people working on that lot, plus probably 300 extras, between Temptress of Babylon and Scandalous Lady and the comedies over on Stage Three.’

‘And that’s not even counting people like your friend Taffy in the prop barn.’

‘I forgot about Taffy.’ Zal grinned. ‘Not that Taffy would hurt a fly.’ It was very late now; a night bird in the abyssal shadows of the hills whooped a strange, eerie cry. Emma saw the reflected glow of the lamp in Kitty’s bedroom vanish from the leaves of the eucalyptus tree. She felt suddenly, absolutely exhausted, and the thought of getting up again in four hours was like sandpaper on her nerves.

‘But Kitty’s Number One Boy sounds like he could have pretty much anybody after him,’ Zal went on after a moment. ‘Except I think you’re right. Why drag Kitty into it at all? Why not take Mr Festraw up to the mountains and shoot him? Or drop him off the Venice Pier at four o’clock some morning? Unless there’s somebody so obviously pissed at Festraw the cops would land on him – or her – first thing, if he was just found in some bean field in the Valley.’

‘Then why not do a better job forging her handwriting? The samples I saw didn’t look a thing like hers. Why set up something as obvious as a love tryst to keep her busy – because I’ll swear that’s what it’s going to turn out to be …’

Zal slowly shook his head. ‘But you’re right about one thing,’ he said. ‘We don’t know who’s passing along information to who, or why. There’s a lot of money in this town, Em, and everybody from the mayor to the shoeshine boy is on the take from the studios and the bootleggers. The head of the Vice Squad used to run the biggest prostitution ring in town.’

Emma shivered. Her months in Hollywood had given her a front-row seat on an astounding display of the misuse of power, and there were far worse things to spend money on than fountains of bootleg champagne at one’s parties or solid gold door-handles for one’s car.

‘Whether Kitty murdered her husband or whatever else she was doing for those two hours, what’s going to matter at the hearing is what somebody else wants to happen … for reasons we have no idea what they are.’

He took her fingers gently in his, and lifted himself – a very little – on the balls of his feet to kiss her lips. In a film, Emma reflected with a tiny inner smile, Madge would have had him stand on a box.

‘See you in Babylon,’ he said.

She stood on the high porch and watched him descend the steps, cross the drive in the yellow California moonlight, and – after a suitable cranking and grinding and advancing and adjusting the old Model-T’s spark – drive slowly up to the road, and vanish into the blackness of the hills.

SIX

LOVE’S FATAL TRAGEDY! sobbed the headline in the Examiner.

‘I like that,’ approved Zal, when Emma brought it – and a cup of coffee – to the empress’s garden at eight thirty the following morning. ‘Fishy’s a better writer than most of the people cranking out scenarios in this town.’

‘The same could be said of Black Jasmine.’ She unfurled the Times, which trumpeted, THE SILVER SCREEN MURDER across the front page, accompanied by a studio publicity shot – not a snap from the sidewalk outside the Sixth Division police station – of Camille de la Rose. Personally, Emma was a little surprised they’d managed to find one that made Kitty look tragic and hunted (though still heart-stoppingly beautiful) instead of like a femme fatale.

Fatale, she reflected, was not the image that people needed to see at the moment.

‘Looks like Crain got right on it.’ Zal sipped the coffee gratefully, keeping a watchful eye on the assembled Nubians, Praetorians, and dancing girls, similarly reviving themselves on the palace steps. Knowing exactly what he sought, Emma also made a mental note of coffee cups and cigarette butts. Madge Burdon – chain-smoking like the Dark Satanic Mills of Manchester – had the look of a woman who didn’t need the news that scene ten would require yet another retake (elephant and all) because someone had left a half-burned Chesterfield on the pedestal of Michelangelo’s David.

‘You should’ve seen the headlines about the pink nightie somebody found in Bill Taylor’s bungalow when he was murdered,’ he went on. ‘I heard Paramount dropped Mary Minter as soon as they could do it without a lawsuit – it was supposed to be hers. The scandal went on for months.’

‘According to this’ – Emma refolded the paper to the inner-column continuation of the story of poor ‘Camille’s’ shock, prostration, and tremulous courage in going on with shooting of Temptress of Babylon – ‘Mr Festraw was mixed up with bootleggers, both in New York – where he’s evidently been living – and here. Somebody on the Times must have stayed up late wiring the East Coast.’

‘Or else they made it up.’ Zal set down his cup and took the paper. Madge glared at her watch, glared at the gates, and glared at Zal, though until Kitty was finished with her make-up and came across to the set there wasn’t much the cameraman or anyone else could do. They had already set up the lights and reflectors – Ginny Field, a bathrobe over her copy of the empress’s diaphanous black-and-gold gown, now made up the fourth of the musicians’ endless pinochle game by the David statue. ‘It sounds a lot like what the publicity boys at Goldwyn came up with, about drug dealers murdering Bill Taylor because he was about to turn stool-pigeon. Though from what Kitty said last night, it could actually be true about the late lamented.’

Madge swung toward the big stage door like a gun dog scenting blood, but it was only four soldiers of the Praetorian Guard, grumbling curses about Colt Madison’s wholesale enquiries in the studio canteen.

The detective had already set up shop there when Emma and Kitty had arrived at the studio gates at six thirty, and was systematically grilling everyone who’d been on the lot the previous day about where they had been and what they had seen between one forty-five and four p.m. By seven, Madge had been ready to do murder herself. So had Ned Bergen, who had barely a week to complete the Burning of Rome set and whose workers were being held for special questioning about small dogs and crimson kimonos.

When Emma had gone to the canteen for coffee, the line of gaffers, riggers, women from Wardrobe, and extras had snaked around amongst the tables and almost out the door, reminding her of a somewhat eccentric East End soup kitchen. Six old-fashioned Victorian dressing-screens – borrowed from the prop warehouse – formed a sort of cubicle in one corner, and from behind them, Madison’s clear, sharp voice could be heard: ‘So what time did you come out of Wardrobe? And what route did you take to Stage Two?’

‘Which is silly,’ Emma had remarked to Kitty, when she’d returned to the dressing room with her tray. Actually to Nick Thaxter’s dressing room, now a jumble of make-up kits, kimonos, costumes, shoes, and astrology magazines … Poor Nick had been moved in with Marsh Sloane for the time being, to the great alarm of them both. ‘There are whole categories of people who couldn’t possibly have seen anything: the entire camera and lights crews of Temptress, to begin with, and everyone working on Scandalous Lady. Plus Mr Sloane and Miss MacKenzie and Miss Violet …’ She had named the principal players of the Ruritanian epic. Down below, a little gang of prop men swarmed in and out of Kitty’s room, bearing buckets and holystone and the remains of the bloodstained carpet.

‘It’s silly because I wasn’t anywhere!’ Kitty had insisted, pouring gin from her flask into the coffee. ‘I mean, I was in the backlot looking for my poor little creamcake …’ She’d cast a melting glance at Buttercreme, visible as nothing more than a leash and a few strands of ivory-pale tail, trailing out of the wicker crate.

In a corner, Chang Ming and Black Jasmine had stared at one another in hostility over a marabou slipper, like two wigs readying to do battle.

Emma had opened her mouth to point out that she was perfectly well aware that so far as she knew, the carpenters at work on Rome had seen nothing of the studio’s major star – in a crimson kimono and four square inches of sequins, she’d have been difficult to miss – and then closed it. She read the defensive glint in Kitty’s eye, and the tightening of those fragile shoulders, and knew that contradiction would only result in a display of mulishness that would make Scenes Nine through Twelve even later than they already were.

Entering the garden now, trailed by Mary Blanque bearing the peacock-feather cloak (in itself easily worth more than the salary of all the extras put together), Kitty looked fresh and bright-eyed – astonishingly so, given how little sleep she’d had. As she hastened to Madge, grasped her hands and begged her forgiveness with her beautiful smile, Emma retreated with the newspapers to the little camp outside the string-marked boundaries of the shot, and settled into Kitty’s chair. On location, she had at times doubled her chores as scenarist by acting as script-girl, but on the lot, it was usually Herbie Carboy, Zal’s assistant, or one of the extras, who would hold the clapperboard. So she was free – if ‘free’ was a word applicable to anyone on a film set – to peruse the articles regarding the quietus of Rex Festraw.

Zal was right, she reflected. The enamored Mr Crain had clearly used his influence at both the Examiner and the Times (and to a lesser degree the Express and the Hearst-owned Herald) to slant the accounts of yesterday’s events to emphasize mysterious tragedy and the victimization of a plucky and dazzling film star, rather than the somewhat bald fact that Camille de la Rose’s ex-husband had been found shot dead in her dressing room, with her gun. Stunned as much by the sudden shadow arising from her tragic past, as by the terrible shock of the discovery itself, Miss de la Rose nevertheless insisted on accompanying detectives to the Hollywood Division station to assist with their investigations …

No hint whatever that the weapon had been hers.

The Herald contained a full-column letter from Bushrod Pettinger denouncing the moral turpitude of the West Coast Babylon (right next to a half page extolling the latest models of ladies’ underwear), but Emma sensed that not only Mr Fishbein, but the all-powerful Mr Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, had been at work to soften the scandal.

In the past few years, Emma gathered, there had been scandals enough. Where there was room to turn this one from a sordid melodrama to a Gothic tragedy, it would be done.

At least, she reflected uneasily, so long as Kitty had Frank Pugh’s support.

She returned her attention to the Examiner article, and the skimpy paragraph at the bottom that gave details about Rex Festraw’s (1880–1924) life. He had, indeed, been born in New York, and was described as an actor, though no stage credits were given to support this assertion. They had been married ‘during the War’ (which Emma knew wasn’t true) and Festraw was described as deserting ‘Camille’, also not true – no date given. In the end, after searching in vain for word of the man who, in spite of his treatment of her, she still loved, Miss de la Rose had no choice but to file for divorce on the grounds of desertion. In her heart, she told this reporter, she believed him dead, and for many dark months was consumed with grief.

In that, Emma also detected the fine hand of Conrad Fishbein.

She glimpsed Mr Fishbein’s influence as well in the insinuations that Mr Festraw – ‘an habitual drunkard and wife-beater’ – was mixed up with gangsters and bootleggers in New York and had undoubtedly come west to get into the smuggling business. For weeks, it said, he had been harassing his terrified ex-spouse with threats which she gallantly threw back in his face.

‘All right, you guys,’ yelled Madge. ‘Remember you’re pagans! You hate these goddam Christians! They tried to murder the empress who’s frikkin’ paying you! She gets killed, and you’ll all be suckin’ sidewalk!’

Emma looked up, her attention drawn to the gaggle of extras assembling behind the great bronze doors which had already done years of service in British castles, Egyptian palaces, and French dungeons … rather, she reflected, like the extras themselves. Clothed in rough tunics, tattered dresses, and the occasional more patrician toga, they had stormed fortresses, fled in panic from invading Huns, and cheered triumphant heroes … and in street clothes, like everybody else, had undoubtedly driven cabs and slung hash and loved their children and hated their in-laws when they got home …

She’d see them every morning on arrival, lined up outside Belle Delaney’s office just within the studio gates: ‘You got anything for me today, Belle?’ If the answer was no, it was a short streetcar ride down Sunset Boulevard to Nestor or Enterprise or Monarch, hoping for that three dollars and fifty cents that might prove the difference between making the rent and packing your slender belongings in a shoebox and doing a midnight flit.

‘So charge in there like you mean it!’ Madge flung fisted hands into the air like a Ruritanian dictator yelling for the head of the hero.

Four dollars, Emma thought, if you were a ‘dress extra’ in a rich-people’s party scene and you had your own evening dress.

Five-fifty, for those displaced cowboys who’d drifted West with the closing of the cattle ranges, to become ‘riding extras’. Most of these, Emma knew, were at this moment over in Wardrobe, being fitted by Millie Katz in cavalry uniforms while the studio wrangler and the fellow from Chatsworth Livery out in the San Fernando Valley saddled up a 150 horses …

Mr Madison will never track down all the extras.

She lowered the newspaper and frowned, completely ignoring the sudden near-riot as forty-two enraged citizens of Rome burst the gates of the Babylonian empress’s garden to surround poor Darlene Golden, cowering at Kitty’s feet. Though the film was silent, the mob cried, ‘Slay her! Slay her!’ though several gentlemen audibly yelled, ‘Repeal Prohibition!’

An extra could walk all over the lot in costume and nobody would look twice at him.

Emma got to her feet and went back into Stage One, threading her way between the empress’s deserted balcony, where it was still night (with the stars dark in the backdrop of the sky) and a vaguely Regency parlor being set up for a party sequence in Scandalous Lady, and so to the outer door. From it the Hacienda was visible, across the dusty plaza bounded by the studio gates, and, extending from one side of the Hacienda, the dressing rooms.

People crossed and recrossed the square: extras in swanky evening dress, prop-men carrying chairs. Young women from the accounting and purchasing offices wearing the short skirts that Emma still found slightly disconcerting. (Her mother, she recalled, had been scandalized at the three inches of leg visible above Emma’s ankle in her VAD uniform. What she’d say of the current hemlines – just below the knee …!) A trickle of cameramen, of shirtsleeved gaffers and drivers emerged from the canteen, where Mr Madison was still hard at work.

The thought of Gloria Swanson or Peggy Donovan murdering a rival in order to win a Screen Stories contest – additional picture or not – was almost, but not completely, ridiculous on the face of it. Someone like Theda Bara – a sultry vamp now pushing forty, according to Zal, who hadn’t made a picture for nearly five years – might conceivably think it a good idea, especially if she regarded Camille de la Rose as her only real competition.

But Camille de la Rose – even without the cachet of being arrested for a crime of passion – wasn’t the only competition.

And an actress who had even a chance of being named the Goddess of the Silver Screen would presumably have the money to hire someone to do the job for her. (How much do assassins charge in Los Angeles these days? I wonder if Mr Madison knows?) Would one of them be so silly as not to realize that an accomplice would blackmail her?

Baroque scenarios of Gloria Swanson taking a murderer for her lover and then shooting him herself (What would she do with the body?) flitted briefly through Emma’s mind … I think I’ve been in Hollywood too long …

Peggy Donovan – the red-haired hot tomato over at Enterprise who was Kitty’s bosom friend – would probably consider that a perfectly reasonable plan.

And it did occur to her to save the idea for a future scenario …

Now I KNOW I’ve been in Hollywood too long …

Emma sighed, and crossed to the small side-door of the Hacienda which opened into the studio telephone exchange.

Vinnie Lowder – very young, very stout, her blonde hair screwed into a wispy pompadour and a look of cornered anxiety in her lovely blue eyes – sat at her switchboard, trying to read another copy of the Herald but, Emma thought, not able to concentrate. The girl looked up quickly and said, ‘Oh, Mrs Blackstone! I’m so sorry about what I said to that police detective—’

‘Was it true?’ Emma took one of the room’s wooden desk chairs and spoke in her gentlest voice, as if calming a shopgirl who’d just spilled nail varnish all over a customer. ‘Of course you had to speak the truth, and it’s a good thing that you did! I think even Mr Pugh will see that, once he calms down. Think what a horrid mess there’d be, if you came up with a lie and they caught you in it – which they would, you know. Then everything would look even worse.’

‘That’s what I thought!’ Vinnie’s rosebud mouth puckered briefly, in an effort not to cry. ‘I mean, I didn’t exactly think it at that moment, but I’ve always felt that. That if you tell a lie and get found out, it always makes things more complicated. But Ginny Field – she was outside Mr Thaxter’s dressing room – says she heard Mr Pugh say he was going to f-fire me …’ She almost couldn’t get the words out.

‘I’ll speak to Mr Pugh,’ said Emma. ‘And I’ll tell Miss de la Rose to speak to him as well. You know he’ll listen to her.’

The girl nodded, desperate for reassurance. The switchboard buzzed at that point and she quickly plugged in a wire, saying into her speaking-tube, ‘Foremost Productions … Yes, Mr Goldwyn, I’ll connect you …’

She changed over the wire. ‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘I just can’t lose this job. People always want to know why …’

‘You won’t.’ Emma leaned a little forward. ‘What time did that call come in?’

‘Ten minutes after two,’ replied the girl promptly. ‘A man called, asking for Miss de la Rose. When I connected to her phone, a man’s voice answered in her dressing room.’ She looked a little self-conscious. ‘Which doesn’t mean anything, you know, Mrs Blackstone. It could have been Mr Volmort from Make-Up, or someone sent over to fetch something from the set, you know.’

Actually, Emma was well aware that in Kitty’s case, a man in Kitty’s dressing room often did mean something, but not, as a general rule, in the middle of the day. Unless he was very good-looking … or Kitty had had a bit more gin than usual …

But it took a good deal of gin to make Kitty that careless (or the man in question had to be extremely comely), and in general, she answered her own telephone.

‘The man said, “Yes, she’s right here”, and then, “Camille, come to the phone”.’

‘He called her Camille? You’re sure?’

‘Oh, yes. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, but would her former husband call her Camille and not Kitty? Though I suppose if they’ve been separated for so long …’

Like pretty much everyone at Foremost, Vinnie was under the impression that Camille was Kitty’s real name.

‘And you didn’t hear Miss de la Rose’s reply?’

‘Oh, no. I disconnected myself from the call at once.’ She blushed a little. ‘I know better than that. Even when … well, certain people … would pay me to listen, it wouldn’t make up for losing a steady job.’

Thelma Turnbit, presumably … and a dozen like her.

‘And you didn’t recognize the caller’s voice? Or that of the man who answered?’

Vinnie shook her head. ‘The man who answered would have to have been poor Mr Festraw, wouldn’t he? Wasn’t that awful, what the newspaper said he did to her? I never knew – she’s so brave … I didn’t know the caller’s voice. It wasn’t one I’ve heard a lot – or at all, probably.’

‘Young man’s voice? Old man’s?’

‘A regular man,’ said the girl, after a moment’s thought. ‘Not a boy, and not creaky like a very old man gets. Sort of light – not deep like Mr Pugh’s – and well-spoken. No accent, I mean, and – well – upper-class. Like someone with an education. But of course he only asked me to connect to Miss de la Rose’s dressing room …’

‘Of course,’ said Emma, recalling Taffy the Bootlegger’s slangy New York patois. ‘Thank you. It doesn’t sound like anyone Miss de la Rose knows, or at least not anyone I’ve met. I promise I’ll tell Miss de la Rose to speak to Mr Pugh, and to Mr Fishbein, but I don’t really think you have anything to worry about …’

The switchboard buzzed again and Vinnie plugged in another wire. ‘Foremost Productions. Oh, yes, Mrs Pugh. I’ll connect you right away. But I know Mr Pugh is away on location this morning—’

Emma had seen him ten minutes previously, crossing from the canteen to the Hacienda.

‘Of course. Of course …’

Thoughtfully – as yet another line buzzed – she waved her farewell with a smile, which Vinnie returned, and took her leave.

She stood for a moment outside the door, watching as the property men carried armloads of costumes, shoes, kimonos, gramophone records, and wicker dog beds up the outside steps to the shaded gallery along the upper floor of dressing rooms. A wrangler passed across the square, leading four horses in what Hollywood fondly believed to be Roman saddles (meaning blankets strapped over English saddles, with anachronistic stirrups visibly dangling).

Father would turn in his grave.

A man emerged from Kitty’s door bearing Ambrose Crain’s silver vase of crimson roses, blown-out now and beginning to shed their petals. These strewed the steps behind him as he climbed, like a trail of dripped blood on the stairs.

SEVEN

The canteen was still full of people.

Only a few of them – guards, drivers, Darlene Golden’s stand-in Evvie Parton, a little crone whom Emma recognized as one of Mary Blanque’s seamstresses from Wardrobe – weren’t glancing irritably at their watches and then at the little cubicle of screens. Emma was surprised at how many of the people in the line she knew, at least by name. Even some of the extras – Ricardo Diaz from Spring Street downtown, who had a face like a sixteenth-century buccaneer, and Peachy Blume, as always resplendent in an evening gown sufficiently elegant to get her hired but not eye-catching enough to compete with the star in any scene – ‘Heya, Duchess, you going by Stage Two? Would you be a doll and tell Larry I’m still sittin’ in the verkakte line? Bless you, sweetheart …’

Emma stepped around the screens just as Sam Wyatt, the studio’s regular scenarist, was saying, ‘Where was I? I was behind my desk where I’d been since eight o’clock yesterday morning and where I was until midnight last night, tryin’ to come up with some kind of endin’ for that bag of sugar-coated moonshine they’re filmin’ over on Stage Two, is where I was, and if Larry comes bangin’ on my door this afternoon askin’ where the hell is scene eighty-five, I’m gonna refer him to you, buster …’

‘Yeah?’ Madison’s chin came forward. ‘So when the LAPD hauls Miss de la Rose away in handcuffs and the studio closes and everybody, including yourself, are out of a job, and they come to ask me how come? I’m gonna refer them to you.’

Drunk, Sam Wyatt’s responses to self-important provocation were legendary – and Emma saw the shy little secretary that Fishbein had lent Madison getting ready to bolt. But Sam only rolled his eyes, shook out a smoke from his pocket, and said in a patient voice, ‘At one fifteen yesterday I was at my desk working, and I was there until I heard the commotion and the cops downstairs. After they all went away I went back to work. I didn’t go to the windows, I didn’t hear a shot. Nuthin’.’

He even ignored Madison’s smug nod of triumph, as if the refusal to get into a quarrel over the matter were an act of cowardice. When the detective said, ‘You got that, kid?’ to the secretary, Sam picked up his hat and quietly departed. ‘Yeah, beautiful.’ This to Emma. ‘What can I do you for?’ He had very bright, very lazy blue eyes under dark lashes which contrasted strikingly with that corn-silk hair. A short, straight nose and a mouth made for kisses, at present occupied by most of a cigarette. His glance was an invitation: I can have you for the asking, baby, and you’ll beg me for more.

Emma wanted to pour the secretary’s tumbler of water over his head.

‘I won’t keep you but a moment,’ promised Emma, stepping aside to let Sam past her. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have made a note of Mr Festraw’s address, would you?’

‘You bet I did.’ He fished in the pocket of his wide-lapelled jacket and produced a notebook. ‘But I warn you, honey, the bulls went through that place like Sherman going through Georgia and I doubt you’ll find so much as a laundry ticket there now.’

‘It can’t hurt to have a look. Is this his telephone number?’ Just above the address – 202 East Third Street, # 4H – was a string of letters and numbers: MI 59063.

‘You ain’t planning on going down there, are you, doll? ’Cause I’ll bet you, that hotel – the Winterdon – has already got that room cleaned out, hosed down, and rented to some other sucker. The phone number’s Frannie’s, a deli over on Flower. Good pastrami.’

He shrugged, and gave her another visual once-over, as if adding up the pale-brown silk of her old-fashioned bun, the neat challis skirt and plain shirtwaist. ‘You’re Camille’s … secretary? Don’t tell me you’re her sister …’ He was clearly comparing her height and long-legged slenderness with Kitty’s pocket-Venus sensuality.

‘Sister-in-law.’ Emma held out her hand. ‘Mrs Blackstone.’

He grasped it, firm, warm fingers and, she noticed, manicured nails. ‘I understand you wanting to help, sis,’ he said. ‘Frank tells me she fished you out of some pretty grim bouillabaisse in Blighty. But I have an instinct about these things, and this stinks of politics. Anything aimed at the studios does.’

‘You don’t think it would be worthwhile to try to find out a little more about Mr Festraw?’

His grin was engagingly boyish. ‘Don’t tell me you believe Fishbein’s applesauce about bootleggers! No, baby, it’s pretty clear to me Festraw came to town to put the touch on Camille, and somebody in City Hall – or the police – heard about it and followed him to the studio, hoping to touch off a scandal that would look real good on their record, come election time. Studios are always big news. Camille de la Rose – the Goddess of the Silver Screen, the Queen of “It”.’ His hands framed an imaginary movie screen. ‘What more could any crooked cop want?’

Emma parted her lips to object that this view took no account of the phone call – at precisely the moment to establish that Kitty was in her dressing room with Rex – but Colt Madison patted her hand with another dazzling display of perfect teeth.

‘If you want my advice, sugar, don’t get yourself mixed up with this. I know what I’m doing. I’ve dealt with these goons for years. Unless’ – his blue eyes got suddenly sharp – ‘you know something about where Camille really was between two and four?’

Emma made a swift decision, withdrew her hand from his, and widened her eyes. ‘I think she was in the backlot, looking for her dog.’

Filming would go on, she knew, for as long as daylight lasted; it was barely nine fifteen. After Mr Madison’s cloying caresses her first urge was to go wash her hands, but as she stepped around the screen she was intercepted by Sam Wyatt, a thin sheaf of scenario pages in his hand. ‘Say, Mrs B, you wouldn’t know why snooty rich ladies fire their maids, would you? I mean unfairly – this girl ain’t no thief or nuthin’.’ He gestured with the pages. Medium-sized, dark, and thin, Sam Wyatt had run guns to the Arabs in the War, driven a taxicab in El Paso and operated a saloon on Zanzibar. Nevertheless, he frequently came to Emma to double-check the likely behavior of the wealthy aristocrats about whom he was required to write tales, as if they were inhabitants of an alien planet.

‘Spilling perfume,’ said Emma promptly, remembering Mrs Pendergast. ‘Accused of stealing something that’s been mislaid. Or if Mrs Snooty has a son of marriageable age who tries to kiss the poor girl, or thinks she’s beautiful, that would do it. Is East Third Street in Los Angeles a decent neighborhood?’ she inquired, into Sam’s expression of shocked outrage. ‘I mean, safe for a woman to go to alone?’

‘Oh, sure, sure. I mean, it’s not fancy – it’s just a street, you know. You’ll be plenty safe, unless you step in front of a taxi or somethin’.’

‘And are you familiar with a delicatessen called Frannie’s? On Flower Street?’

‘Yeah, Eighth and Flower.’ He thumbed his scenario pages to find one so scribbled-over as to be useless, then fished a pencil from his pocket and sketched a map. ‘For a buck they’ll sell you some of the worst bootleg tonsil-varnish I’ve ever got drunk on, out the back door. Good pastrami.’

Armed with these reassurances, Emma took the bright yellow streetcar along Sunset Boulevard, and thence down Broadway into Los Angeles itself. Big frame houses nestled in the sunlight on hillsides behind St Vincent’s Hospital; the slopes bright with white and golden wildflowers against the dusty-gray background of brush that had made the town look so dreary when she’d arrived with Kitty last Fall. Here and there weird plants punctuated the general sage, fleshy leaves with spiky tips, or weird clusters of things like sword blades, more suited to Mr Burroughs’ Barsoom than to Earth. Leaving England, Emma had known she would miss the beech and oak and ivy of the woods … but hadn’t been prepared for this outré otherworld flora.

Any more, she reflected, than she’d been prepared for Chinese and Mexican food.

As the Yellow Car approached the hills of the city’s center, more and more dilapidated adobe structures appeared, amid the stretches of weeds and cactus. Then rather grim brick apartment buildings and residence hotels, and automobiles that blocked the streetcar’s progress at every intersection under a thickening spiderweb of telephone and electrical wires overhead.

At one such delay, Emma consulted Sam Wyatt’s sketch-map, to see how far it was from the Winterdon to Frannie’s, and was momentarily distracted by the strong, black scribble of titles, names, and cryptic plot-notes on the back.

Stop the Clock. Kentucky Derby Katie. Turn Back the Clock. Time. Years. Cash or Check? The Monkey’s Eyebrows.

Ellie McCall. Goldie McCall M’Gurk. Blind Pig M’Gurk. Hammie Blackie Denham

Ted tries to stay away (Blackie threatens)?

Building burns, Ellie disappears (?)

Amnesia – marries Roger

Kidnapped – switches clothes with maid – secret love-child

Oscar finds

Who’s Oscar? Emma wondered. And what happened to Ted?

Sinister Chinaman pursuing Goldie – really father’s servant – twins

Higginbotham murdered, father Roger accused

As the streetcar lurched into motion again, Emma lowered the paper and wondered what any of the stirring events hinted at had to do with a monkey’s eyebrows. As the buildings around her grew taller and grimier, she pushed aside the uncomfortable sensation behind her breastbone, and told herself firmly not to be silly. London was a much larger city than Los Angeles, and presumably a more dangerous one, with its crowded tenements, concealing fogs, and miles of dockside flophouses …

But I KNOW London.

She had trodden London’s sidewalks a thousand times: with her father, from Paddington to the British Museum; with her mother or Aunt Margaret to their dressmaker on Jermyn Street or to the Regent’s Arcade. With her family, via Underground, to Kensington, to marvel at the great, gray, threatening shapes of the dinosaurs outside the Crystal Palace …

Los Angeles, with its surreal palm trees and grubby gray-green weeds growing through the cracks of every sidewalk, with its brown faces and black faces mingling with the white, its glaring billboards (What on EARTH does a candy bar have to do with playing baseball …?), was an alien place.

Hot, dusty, and threatening.

Ante omnia tempus habent, she told herself firmly. There is a first time for all things. The Winterdon Hotel on Third Street was, a little to Emma’s surprise, not the sordid flophouse she had extrapolated from Rex Festraw’s seedy coat and liquor-laden breath. It was a four-story brick building stuccoed white, its shallow porch flanked by bougainvillea bushes already gorgeous with magenta flowers. The lobby, when she climbed its three low steps, though starkly plain, was spotless and smelled of bleach. The leather couch and chairs were old but in good repair. The middle-aged man behind the counter – backed by a wall divided equally between keys and pigeonholes for mail – was clean, prim-faced, clearly sober, and redolent of soap and piety.

Mr Festraw must have had more money than he appeared, if he was staying here.

She said, ‘Excuse me,’ and approached the counter. Halfway down from Hollywood she’d realized her name may have appeared in Thelma Turnbit’s column as Kitty’s ‘secretary and companion’, and though this gentleman didn’t look as if he’d touched a film magazine in his life, she recalled what Zal had said last night. It was better to be safe than sorry. ‘My name is Flavian – Mrs Augustus Flavian. Is this …? Did a man named Rex Festraw stay here?’

The clerk’s upper lip lengthened and his thin nostrils flared. ‘He did, m’am.’ His gentle drawl marked him as a transplant from the American South. ‘I’m afraid he is no longer a resident.’

Whatever grief he felt about this could have been concealed behind a folded gum-wrapper.

‘No,’ said Emma. ‘No, I understand he … He’s deceased. Under unfortunate circumstances.’

The clerk’s chill eye spoke of un-Christian thoughts, piously suppressed.

‘The thing is,’ she went on, ‘I’m looking for … that is, Mr Festraw …’ She puckered her brow and clutched the clasp of her handbag in what she hoped sufficiently resembled distress. Kitty had told her once about imagining herself in her characters’ situations (though Emma would have been hard-pressed to guess her own reactions had she actually found herself Empress of Babylon …). ‘My sister became – involved – with Mr Festraw just before Christmas. She left home – she’s only seventeen, and … She’s very good-hearted,’ she added earnestly. ‘But … wild. Impulsive. We got a postcard that she’d left with Mr Festraw, but we’ve only just heard – my mother and I – that they came here to Los Angeles. Did Mr Festraw … was there a woman … a girl, really …’

‘Mr Festraw’ – the clerk handled the name as he would have handled a deceased mouse discovered in his soup – ‘generally did not spend his evenings here at the Winterdon. The woman he brought here this past Monday night’ – he looked Emma up and down with eyes like ball bearings – ‘would not have been any relation to a lady such as yourself, m’am.’

Emma lowered her eyes and tried to picture a maenad like the Emperor Augustus’ wastrel daughter Julia, clinging to Rex Festraw’s arm. In a subdued voice, she murmured, ‘What did she look like, sir? Julia …’ She stopped herself, as if too mortified to go on.

‘She is shorter than yourself, m’am,’ said the clerk, in the tone of one washing his hands of the whole encounter. ‘And … ahem … voluptuously built. Her hair is red – rather emphatically so – bobbed short and waved.’ He paused to consider, approvingly, the braided knot at the back of Emma’s neck, and the hemline that Kitty had more than once informed her ‘went out with bustles’. ‘She wore a frock of red artificial silk flowered in black and her fingernails looked like she’d started to grow them long before Christmastime. They were painted, too. Quite vivid red.’ More gently, he added, ‘She didn’t look seventeen, m’am, or anywhere near it. And her speech, when she opened her mouth, was nothing like yours.’

And, when Emma said nothing, he went on, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘And Mr Festraw never mentioned any other … any other companion?’

‘I never had words with the man.’ The chilly eyes softened to kindness. ‘He arrived last Thursday night, just a week ago. His room had been paid for in advance. He had only a small suitcase with him, and the police removed that yesterday when they came. He only slept here, but he’d come in late some nights – walking steady, but I could smell the liquor on him, from where I stood here behind the counter. Monday night was the only night he brought a woman here, and I don’t need to tell you, that of course I didn’t let her past the lobby.’

The narrow lips tightened again. ‘I asked her to leave – in my opinion she was also intoxicated – and she did. Then ten minutes later I had to stop Mr Festraw from unlocking the rear service door of the hotel which opens into the alley. Had Mr Festraw not met with an unfortunate accident yesterday, I would probably have asked that he take his custom to another establishment. He was not the sort of guest we look for here at the Winterdon.’

Emma looked around her at the lobby and exclaimed, ‘Oh, heavens, no!’ Then she frowned again, as if puzzled, and said, ‘His room was paid for in advance? De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, of course, but that hardly sounds like what I know of Mr Festraw.’

‘I am of one mind with you on that head, m’am. But it might help you to get in touch with this’ – he opened a drawer under the counter, removed a blue-backed ledger, and looked up a notation – ‘Mr Stanislas Markham in New York, who might be able to give you some further clues about Mr Festraw’s other acquaintances in Los Angeles. That might point you in the direction of finding word of your sister.’

Emma gasped, ‘Oh!’ Her face flooded with unfeigned delight. She hadn’t hoped for any information so definite as a name. ‘Oh, sir, I cannot thank you enough! God bless you, sir! I can never repay your kindness!’

And she made a note of the name, shook hands with the clerk, and hurried out the door, reflecting that writing improbable scenarios for Foremost Productions appeared to provide valuable training after all.

She was seriously tempted to return to the studio at that point. Who on EARTH is Stanislas Markham of New York and WHY would he pay for a hotel room for Mr Festraw … And did the police think to ask about this? But the mild brightness of the spring day, and her unexpected success, gave her heart. After consulting the correct side of Sam Wyatt’s sketch-map, Emma walked the some twelve blocks, past the trees and fountain of Pershing Square and up the tidy, downtown streets to Frannie’s Delicatessen, at Eighth Street and Flower.

The large room with its black-and-white tile floor was a little grimier than the Winterdon, and very much more noisy. The entire place seemed to be tiled, without a soft surface anywhere to be seen, save the bodies and clothing of the people seated at the tiny, marble-topped, round tables. Their voices ricocheted from walls, floor, and pressed-copper ceiling like an avalanche of ping-pong balls: gentlemen in business suits whose condition and cleanliness advertised the wearer’s probable financial state; women in neat frocks like the ladies of Wardrobe or Vinnie Lowder; ladies in outrageously short skirts or fringed frocks with no sleeves. Dusky Mexican mothers helped black-haired, black-eyed children eat ice-cream sodas. A black girl of sixteen or so, neatly dressed as for work in an office, hurried in, waved a quick greeting to the young man behind the counter and made straight for the three telephone boxes just beyond the end of the counter itself. She dropped in her coin without closing the booth door, dialed, and had a hasty conversation – no more than a sentence or two – before hanging up.

Then she crossed back to the counter, asked the young man, ‘Anybody call for me, Roy?’

He fished a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and pushed it across to her. ‘Sounded like your sister. She just asked you to call.’

The girl glanced at the number and beamed like a reprieved life prisoner. ‘God bless you, Roy. Coffee and a donut?’ While Roy was getting them she went straight back to the telephone box. The young man – red-haired and freckled from hairline to collarbone – set the coffee and sweet, together with a paper napkin, at the end of the counter for her, and turned with a welcoming smile as Emma approached.

‘Can I help you, m’am?’

Emma glanced at the girl in the phone box – the second box was now occupied by a slender dark gentleman in the overalls of a petrol-station attendant – and said, ‘I’m looking for a woman who I think uses your telephone to make her calls. Do you have tea?’ She sat on one of the tall, leatherette-cushioned stools. ‘And that donut smells awfully good.’ It was no flattery; the pastry on its thick white porcelain plate waiting for the girl in the phone box glistened with freshness and glaze. ‘Might I have one also?’

‘’Fraid we don’t have tea, m’am.’ Roy tonged a donut from some mysterious bin below the counter. Even his arms and hands were freckled. ‘Just brewed a new pot of coffee, though. As for the lady you’re lookin’ for, I guess half the neighborhood uses this place as an office and me as the secretary …’ He grinned, as, at her assent, he poured out some coffee and gently pushed the cream pitcher and sugar jar in her direction. In a stage whisper, he added, ‘Least I don’t have to wear a frilly hat an’ high-heeled shoes!’

Emma’s eyes twinkled back at him. ‘Oh, I don’t know; I think one of those fascinators with a couple of long feathers would suit the shape of your face very well.’

‘I been told I should never wear an eye-veil,’ he returned, in mock anxiety.

‘Whoever told you that was simply jealous of your cheekbones. It would be quite becoming.’

‘It would be coming off.’ His grin widened. ‘What’s she look like, this lady? I know pretty much all the regulars.’

Emma repeated the description the clerk at the Winterdon had given her, and saw the bright, bantering look fade from the counterman’s lashless green eyes. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Her.’

And he studied Emma in silence for a moment.

‘I’m not a bill collector,’ said Emma quietly. ‘Nor with the police. I just … She knows – knew – an acquaintance of mine, who met with an accident yesterday. I’m trying to find out what he was doing in Los Angeles, and who else he might have known in town. He was …’ She hesitated, looking aside a little shamefacedly, trying to imagine Lesbia asking Catullus for money. ‘He was supposed to be bringing my mother money.’

‘If he was keepin’ company with Phyllis,’ said the counter-man, his voice suddenly dry, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, m’am, that he likely wouldn’t have a dime of your mama’s money left in his pockets.’

Emma conjured all the resources of her imagination, and murmured, ‘Thank you. I still have to try.’

‘’Course.’ He nodded towards the plate-glass window, which gave a view, across the brightness of Flower Street, of a four-story building in yellowish brick, like a cardboard box whose corners were capped with unlikely-looking square turrets. ‘She lives someplace in there.’ He glanced at the clock, just beside the telephone boxes. ‘She ain’t been in yet, and she usually comes in for coffee an’ to make phone calls, oh, close to noon. She’ll be in an’ I think’ – his eyes narrowed, calculating – ‘she’ll be awake. Phyllis Blossom. Does extra work – she says – over at Century … when she’s sober.’

He turned away then, and went to take the order of a couple of uniformed policemen a few seats down the counter. Emma sipped her coffee – which when sufficiently doctored with cream and sugar bordered on drinkable – and turned over in her mind what Roy had said, and what she had learned, over the past few months, about young ladies who claimed to work ‘in the pictures’ who didn’t get much work. It was – she turned to look at the clock – eleven fifteen. At the studio they would be midway through scene ten. She supposed she could wait in Frannie’s until Miss Blossom came in … if Miss Blossom came in.

When Roy next had a moment to spare he brought her a slip with the price of her refreshment scribbled on it – twenty-five cents – and she laid thirty-five on top of the little paper. Leaving her handbag slightly open and nudging a one-dollar bill far enough out of it to show, she looked into the young man’s eyes and said, ‘You’re going to think this terribly forward of me – Mother would die of mortification if she thought I’d gone to … well, to certain lengths to get information from the sort of woman it sounds like this Miss Blossom is … But would you know of any … any argument that might gain me her time and attention for a few minutes? That would keep her from shutting the door in my face?’

The young counterman’s eyes moved from her face to her handbag, then back up again to her face, on which she wore an expression which she hoped would convey forlorn embarrassment and desperation. Like Juliet: Come weep with me, past hope, past cure, past help …

After a moment’s struggle with himself he said, ‘Go down to the corner of Ninth and around to the alley. Our back door’s the third one along. Knock twice.’

Wishing she could blush on cue – her cousin Maud could – she looked away from him, lips pursed as if in great pain (Mother really WOULD die of mortification … And the recollection, even at four years’ distance, that her mother had actually died brought genuine tears to her eyes). She managed to whisper, ‘Thank you,’ and slid the bill under the donut plate as she slipped from the stool, and hastened out the door.

EIGHT

Breathless as she was at her own shame and embarrassment (Aunt Margaret was right when she said bad company would turn a woman bad …), Emma had to admit that the little brown bottle that Roy passed to her through the back door of Frannie’s worked like a miracle. It was unlabeled, but strong enough – when, in Phyllis Blossom’s grubby furnished room, she unscrewed it to add to the reheated coffee that the ‘actress’ poured out for them both – to fell a horse.

Miss Blossom shut her eyes and sighed after the first long swig, like a woman warmed to the ends of her red-nailed toes. ‘Shit fuck, I needed that. You are a fucking angel, Mrs F.’

‘Um … Thank you.’ By her tone, Miss Blossom was obviously sincere.

The excuse Emma gave for the liquor – and for her visit – was to let Miss Phyllis Blossom know that Rex Festraw had ‘met with an accident’, and to offer her sympathy and solace. At the news Miss Blossom voiced a string of curses in a tone that held no anger, nor even sorrow: just a sort of philosophical melancholy at the shortness of men’s days. ‘The Corneros get him?’ she asked, curious rather than vengeful.

‘Who?’

‘Tony the Hat, and his brother Frank. Biggest rum-runners in town. They bring in the stuff by freighters from Canada, unload it into motorboats to bring it ashore at Long Beach and then truck it into the clubs. I told Rex not to get mixed up with those guys.’

Good Heavens, was Mr Fishbein right after all?

‘I didn’t think Mr Festraw was in Los Angeles long enough to even meet bootleggers,’ said Emma, and Miss Blossom, with an absent-minded air, took the bottle and dumped about a gill of it into her half-empty coffee cup.

‘Oh, Rex was connected.’ She made a long arm for her bright-red handbag, perched on a corner of the minuscule table on top of a litter of bills, magazines, bread-wrappers and stray items of tableware, and extracted a cigarette. ‘He worked for Joe Adonis and the Luciano boys in New York. He said he was out here on other business, but needed some extra.’ Miss Blossom shook her head, and lit the little tube of tobacco. As the clerk at the Winterdon had promised, her fingernails were long, red as sealing-wax, and chipped.

Familiar as Emma was, after six months in Hollywood, with cosmetic embellishment that would have gotten any girl she’d previously known thrown into the street, Phyllis Blossom redefined the limits of the vulgar. At least, Emma reflected, her highly-painted sister-in-law knew how to apply her make-up. The blood-crimson of Miss Blossom’s lips made Kitty’s efforts in that direction look virginal. Her small, rather puffy, hazel eyes glinted from caked masses of kohl and rouge, and her mascaro looked as if she’d slept in it, and then simply applied a fresh coat on top of last night’s.

She had, in fact, upon Emma’s arrival at her door, been dressing to go out. Curling tongs lay across an unwashed frying pan on the room’s single gas ring: the tiny apartment smelled of scorched styling lotion and lightly charred hair.

‘I never saw a man unload as much as Rex did, on the ponies, and the fights – I swear if he’d lived long enough for baseball to start he’d have been in the poorhouse.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘He sure knew how to show a girl a good time, but he couldn’t have picked the winner in a fight between a lion and ham sandwich. When he showed up Monday throwin’ money around like confetti – and I knew he’d done a job for Tony Cornero Friday, soon as he got into town – I said, “You better be careful messin’ around with them boys”.

‘You know what he said? He said, “Relax, doll. I don’t have to make the drop to Tony ’til Friday, and with the dough I got comin’ in Wednesday, he won’t even know it’s gone”.’

‘And he never mentioned what money he had coming in on Wednesday?’

Miss Blossom shook her head, shrugged, and removed her cigarette long enough to drain her now cold coffee cocktail. Emma couldn’t imagine how she swallowed the stuff. Her own cup was untouched. The liquid smelled like motor oil, and whatever it was in Roy’s bottle couldn’t have helped. ‘Guys like Rex, they always got money comin’ in. Or say they do.’

‘Did he mention who else he might have seen or spoken to here in town?’

‘Well, Tony and Frank. And somebody named Al, who he said was a cheap-ass Jew-bastard and didn’t pay worth shit, and somebody else named Sid, who was fucking worthless as far as Rex was concerned and was never around when you needed to get hold of him, and somebody else named Jerry, who Rex said would … well, it doesn’t matter ’cause it’s just what men say about other men they don’t like. It didn’t sound like it had anything to do with your mama’s money. I’m sure sorry, honey.’

Miss Blossom leaned across the corner of the cluttered table and patted Emma’s hand. ‘I swear to you, if Rex had any plans to hand over so much as a dollar to your poor mother, he didn’t act like it. I can’t even really say I’m sorry he’s dead, because he was a real dick when he was drunk, but I’m sorry you and your mama got screwed.’

‘It’s all right.’ Emma manufactured a brave smile, trying to look as if it wasn’t. Then she frowned, and added, as an afterthought, ‘He didn’t happen to mention his ex-wife, did he? Or his wife, he might have called her – someone named Kitty?’

It crossed her mind then how he’d pronounced de la Rose in the stage. Almost mockingly. And he had known her as Kitty, the name she’d gone by as a chorus dancer on Broadway. Yet the man Vinnie had heard on the telephone had called her Camille. Would Rex have countered that with, You mean Kitty?

The young woman’s eyes narrowed as she cast her mind back. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘’Course, that kind of guy, he’s not gonna breathe a word about an ex-wife to the girl he’s seein’, much less a wife. Crap,’ she added, glancing at the new – and very expensive-looking – watch that adorned her slender wrist. ‘I gotta go, or I’m gonna be late. Look,’ she said, as she and Emma stood. ‘You need money? You OK for carfare, and a place to stay …?’

She reached for her handbag again.

‘Really,’ said Emma, startled, ‘I’m quite all right.’

‘You sure?’ She’d pulled a five-dollar bill from the bag. ‘It’s no skin off my ass, it’s Rex’s money, so you got it comin’.’

After a panic-stricken moment as she tried to decide what her assumed persona of a robbed woman would have done, Emma looked shamefaced again (And you SHOULD be ashamed …!) and held out her hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re very kind.’

As she stepped out into the hallway she glanced back, to see Miss Blossom swig down the remainder of the bottle – which Emma had left on the table – and then the contents of Emma’s cold and untouched coffee cup.

Well, I suppose if Odysseus could get information by giving libations to the spirits in Hell, it’s no surprise it works here as well.

She took the streetcar back to the studio.

‘Sounds like the cops never even got in touch with her,’ Zal remarked, when, many hours later, he joined Emma in Kitty’s little base-camp with the usual half-dozen paper cartons of chow mein and egg fu yung for a late and hasty dinner before embarking on scene fifty-three. Chairs, make-up table, folding rack of kimonos, gramophone, dogs, pillows and magazine bin had all been carried to the same corner of Stage One in which they’d been set up yesterday (Was it ONLY yesterday?). Kitty had slipped away immediately after scene seventy-seven (the Empress Valerna’s confrontation with Nero). ‘Darling, you will look after my tiny beloveds for me, won’t you?’

Emma wondered if it was the same man this time, or a different one. Or Frank Pugh, who was on the lot that day …

Darlene Golden had certainly been looking daggers at her all through rehearsals, walk-through, and setting up the lights for the virtuous Philomela’s plea for the lives of her co-religionists.

The virtuous Philomela was still out in the shadows of the empress’s garden, sitting on the pedestal of the Rape of the Sabine Women (the original sculpted in 1583 and almost certainly not a part of Nero’s palace décor), deep in conversation with a good-looking young man in a tuxedo. Kitty’s stand-in Ginny Field joined them, the young man – clearly a refugee from the Ruritanian palace ball taking place (still) that day on Stage Two – producing a hip flask. Beside Emma’s chair, Chang Ming and Black Jasmine, replete with dinner, snored in their boxes as only Pekinese can. As usual, Buttercreme had been too timid to eat, so Emma knew the little moonlight dog would need to be fed when they got back to the house up on Ivarene, at whatever hour that would be.

‘That home will be yours as well …’

Emma pulled herself back to the present with an effort. ‘I suspect Detective Meyer, like Mr Madison, has his own view of why Mr Festraw was killed, and isn’t going to look in any other direction than that.’

‘He may.’ Zal set out little cartons of egg rolls and lo mein on the make-up table. ‘Or he may not really give a rat’s ass, and just wants to find some evidence damning enough that Pugh’ll have to give him money to mislay it. Or,’ he added generously, seeing Emma’s exasperated expression, ‘he may just be following orders about that from upstairs. A lot of ’em just do what they’re told and don’t ask why.’

Emma turned her face aside for a moment, feeling a little like Gulliver in Lilliput when confronted with the vicious internecine conflict over which end of the soft-boiled egg should be opened first. After six months I shouldn’t be bothered by this …

But it was the first time she’d come up against it first-hand. And if anything went amiss at the special hearing, or at the trial …

‘That home will be yours as well …’

‘You should have seen the way Famous Players tried to smooth over Jack Barrymore pissing into the planters of the Plaza Hotel while he was filming Jekyll and Hyde.’ Zal handed her a plate. ‘If Rudy Valentino ever ran over a total stranger in broad daylight on Hollywood Boulevard, I’m pretty sure the nice folks at Ritz-Carlton Pictures would find some poor shlub in the studio to take the rap for him and do the time, so that Rudy could go on making money for them. That’s Hollywood.’

Yes, thought Emma.

Did Odysseus feel this way, standing on the cliff-top of Ogygia, looking towards his home?

Slowly, she said, ‘Someone paid for Rex Festraw to be in Los Angeles – obviously, for the purpose of murdering him in Kitty’s dressing room. That’s over a hundred dollars for even a third-class train ticket, not to speak of the cost of the room.’

‘That’s not actually a lot,’ returned Zal, ‘if he was acting as a runner for Luciano or Bugsy Siegel. Who knows what else he was really doing here in town? He may have used his connections here to try to put the touch on Kitty, like he said to your Miss Blossom, as a way of getting extra cash – in which case it would make sense for his New York employers to phone up Tony Cornero or somebody in the City Hall Gang and ask them to clean things up on their end. Putting the blame on Kitty would do exactly what it is doing: shoot off enough fireworks in the newspapers that nobody’s going to look for who else might have wanted Festraw dead.’

Emma half-opened her mouth to reply, closed it, and went back over the things that bothered her, like potsherds laid out on a table in her father’s study. The probable impossible is to be preferred to the improbable possible …

Behind them, voices echoed as the prop men and gaffers drifted in from the canteen again, to finish setting up the dungeon where the saintly but handsome Demetrius would resist being ravished by the Temptress of Babylon. It was nearly eight thirty: judging by the amount of set-up time needed, and a walk-through, and then close-ups, everyone was going to be on the set until midnight. No wonder bootleggers peddle cocaine from the prop warehouse!

‘Maybe,’ she said slowly. ‘But … between the gun being stolen, and the stationery, and however they got Kitty away from the set at precisely the right time, I keep wondering if the real target isn’t Kitty herself.’

Zal started to reply to that, but at that moment Madge yelled to him from the dungeon – something about having to shift the lights around – and he merely leaned over to give Emma a quick kiss, devoured a shrimp wonton, and hastened away, licking sauce from his fingers. At the same moment Chang Ming and Black Jasmine woke, sat up, and began wagging their tails furiously, even Buttercreme ventured to poke her flat little nose around the edge of her basket doorway as Kitty slipped in through the huge rear doors from the moonlit garden.

‘Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud, Ambrose!’ she giggled, to the trim, elderly gentleman whom she tugged after her by the hand. ‘I’ll send Emma. Oh, there’s Emma! Oh, and she’s got Chinese food! I’ll send Emma over to Wardrobe and we can get you fixed up as a Roman soldier – everybody’s always sneaking their friends in as extras—’

‘My entire family would disown me,’ protested Ambrose Crain, chuckling. ‘Or they would if they weren’t so set on inheriting my shares in US Steel. And if the other members of the board of directors happened to see me in the background of a film they would suffer a collective seizure.’

‘Chicken,’ laughed Kitty. ‘I double-dog dare you! And there, I told you I wouldn’t be late! They’re only just setting up the lights! Oh!’ she added, picking up a pair of chopsticks. ‘Oh, you darling, Emma, I have absolutely not had a moment to eat anything and I’m positively going to faint in front of the cameras. And anyway, we have to disguise poor Ambrose so Frank won’t see him, when he comes in …’

‘I’m flattered beyond words that you think I would blend in with the Roman legions, Kitten.’ The old man caught, and kissed, her hand. ‘But honestly, I will sit quietly in this corner and enjoy a cup of tea with Mrs Blackstone and watch you work … And trust me, I have the discretion to disappear when it becomes necessary. One cannot get you in dutch with the management.’

‘Darling—’ crooned Kitty, just as Madge bellowed from the set.

‘Is that Kitty over there? Where the hell have you been? Somebody get Ginny in here!’

The lights went up with a hell-fire crackle and a blinding glare of bluish-green brilliance. Flinching and shading his eyes, Mr Crain took the folding chair at Emma’s side. He wasn’t the only audience, lingering in the shadows around the dungeon set: Emma glimpsed, beside the doorway that led out to the empress’s garden, both Darlene Golden and the handsome young man in the tuxedo giggling now uncontrollably. Ginny Field scampered past them, at a distance eerily identical to Kitty in her diaphanous golden gauze and ersatz rubies, the dark cloud of her hair sparkling with gems. From another direction Scotty Sears ambled in, the middle-aged stand-in for the handsome young star Ken Elmore, shedding his bathrobe to reveal muscles glistening with cocoa butter and a loincloth the size of a business envelope.

Beside Emma, Mr Crain murmured, ‘Extraordinary,’ as Madge ordered Scotty and Ginny to take their places in front of the new arrangement of the lights so that Zal could adjust his lenses.

‘Emma, darling …’ Kitty came hurrying back to them. ‘There’s some champagne in my dressing room … the new dressing room, upstairs … or see if Margaret over on Stage Two has some cognac … Margaret always has cognac in her handbag …’

‘Please, Mrs Blackstone,’ said Mr Crain, as Emma started to rise. ‘If you’ll let me steal a little of your tea, that’s all I need. What on earth,’ he added after a moment, ‘is the Empress of Babylon doing in Rome?’

Emma rolled her eyes. ‘Time traveling, like that gentleman in Mr Wells’s novel! I keep telling Mr Pugh that there was no Empress of Babylon during Nero’s reign! Babylon was in ruins by that time – and Nero had a perfectly good Sinful Empress to persecute Christians.’

‘Really?’ The old man cocked his head. ‘Are you sure? Because it makes much more sense, that the Empress of Babylon would have turned the Romans against Christianity. Why, John the Evangelist even said so, in Revelation. The Romans were such a sensible and virtuous civilization, I’ve always wondered why they persecuted the Christians in the first place.’

He had clearly never heard of the Emperor Caligula. Emma was still struggling to find a response that was both tactful and accurate when he added, ‘I will take your word for it, though. Kitty tells me that you studied “all those ancient times” you went to Oxford, she says?’

‘I did.’ Emma smiled. ‘I was up at Somerville College during the War. My father taught Classics at New College. His specialty was Etruscan inscriptions, though. He was really more of an archeologist than a historian. From the age of ten I was drafted to be his assistant. My mother kept telling him it was no occupation for a young lady.’

The lights went down; Madge’s voice boomed from the direction of the set. And what would Madge’s mother, Emma reflected, have to say about HER occupation …?

‘And I suppose,’ sighed Mr Crain, ‘that had you been a boy, your mother would have been ecstatic to see you following in your father’s footsteps.’

Emma turned her head quickly at the note of sadness in the old man’s voice, and remembered things Kitty had told her about Crain’s son Timothy. An absolute STICK, darling! Ambrose tells me he lives with his mother on Long Island and never goes ANYWHERE but his office in the city. He’s never even been out of NEW YORK! All he THINKS about is staying in his office and making money!

Was that the family that would disown Mr Crain for donning Roman guise to stand in the back of a cinematic crowd?

‘LIGHTS! CAMERA!’

The musicians plunged into the Habanera from Carmen. Ken Elmore – Elmore Perkins, at his baptism in Bismarck, North Dakota – glistening like his stand-in, with cocoa butter and just as skimpily semi-draped, lunged against his chains and bared his teeth, as Scotty and Ginny retreated beyond the camera line and lit cigarettes.

‘ACTION!!!’

The Temptress of Babylon, sinuous as a cobra and beautiful as the night, appeared in the doorway of the dungeon cell.

Mr Crain heaved a sigh of beatific ecstasy.

‘Get the fuck out of my dungeon, bitch!’ shouted the saintly Christian Demetrius, wrenching at his bonds, and Valerna raised her hands like claws.

‘Fool!’ she cried. ‘I’m going to screw you senseless!’

The title cards for this interchange, Emma recalled, would read: Begone, harlot! And Yield to the embraces of the Goddess of Love!

One can only hope there are no lip-readers in the audience …

The millionaire chuckled softly, and murmured, ‘Oh, dear, oh dear oh dear …’

‘Mr Crain,’ murmured Emma, below the dark gleam of the music. ‘Mr Rokatansky told me that you offered last night to help us. I think … I know it sounds melodramatic, but I think there’s something going on with this murder, something beyond what meets the eye.’

He looked surprised. ‘I thought it was bootleggers. All the newspapers – and the film magazines – say that Mr Festraw was mixed up with gangsters.’

‘I know,’ said Emma. ‘And yet there’s something … I may be completely wrong. But there’s something about the affair that doesn’t … doesn’t smell right to me. It sounds silly—’

‘Not silly at all, m’am.’ He set down his mug of tea. ‘I’ve had the same experience with financial transactions. Everything my broker laid out on paper looked perfectly above-board and profitable, and yet … it’s as if little alarm bells were ringing in the distance. Or like the smell of smoke when you’re dropping off to sleep.’

Emma said, very quietly, ‘Yes.’

‘What would you like me to do?’

‘Do you know of anyone in New York – or know how we might find someone in New York – who could be trusted to find out about Mr Festraw there? Find out who this Stanislas Markham is, who paid for Mr Festraw to come out to Los Angeles? And anything else about Mr Festraw that it would help us to know?’

This had been Zal’s suggestion. Frank Pugh had studio money – as indeed did Kitty – but there was far greater likelihood (said Zal) of Pugh being mixed up in this than old Mr Crain.

‘I’ll put in a call to our New York offices tomorrow,’ he said at once. ‘I remember we hired … well, an investigator in New York a few years ago, when my son had … a little trouble with … with the consequences of falling into bad company.’ A slight flush darkened his cheekbones and he looked aside, mortified.

Emma thought, Good heavens! Did the dull stick Timothy Crain step out a little wide with a showgirl after all? But the old man seemed so disturbed that she only said, ‘Thank you. That is most good of you.’

At nearly eleven, Kitty came tripping over from the dungeon between takes to eat another wonton (‘Sweets for the sweet,’ murmured Mr Crain, a malicious twinkle in his eyes) and kiss her elderly inamorato goodbye. ‘I’m sure your Mr Pugh will be along any moment,’ Mr Crain said, ‘and is bound to frown on outsiders watching the magic of Hollywood taking place.’

Which was, Emma thought, a tactful way of putting it.

‘Dreadful as it would be for members of my board to glimpse me in Roman armor at the back of a cinema film, it would be a thousand times worse for tomorrow’s headlines to read, “Corporation President Ejected from Film Studio” …’

‘Darling, he never would!’ cried Kitty. ‘You’re a stockholder! But you’re right – Frank is so jealous …’

She spoke in her film-vamp voice – as if it were nothing to her, to have men quarreling over her like a latter-day Ninon de l’Enclos – but Emma reflected that now was not the time for her to lose the support of her studio. She also was aware of a twinge of uneasiness, seeing Darlene Golden – who was not a part of this scene at all – still lingering in the shadows of the garden set beyond the open rear doors, watching Kitty’s visitor with narrowed eyes. And indeed, not ten minutes after Mr Crain took his leave (and Emma prudently disposed of his mug back on the trestle tables at the front of the stage) Frank Pugh entered, looking tired and crumpled. Kitty abandoned the saintly Demetrius mid-embrace, and rushed to the producer’s side to clasp his hands, press her forehead (being very careful not to disarrange her make-up) against his massive shoulder, and gaze up with what looked like genuine worship in her eyes.

He bent his head over hers, gathered her small hands against his breast. Madge looked as if she might have said something, but didn’t.

Darlene looked as if she might have spit blood … but didn’t.

‘Darling,’ Kitty cooed a moment later, hurrying back to Emma, ‘Frank and I are going to go have a little bite at the Café Montmartre when we’re done here – and Madge says we have only one or two more takes left … and then we’ll be going on to Peggy’s. She’s having a little get-together, and I think’ – she lowered her voice conspiratorially – ‘Frank wants to pump her about Lou Jesperson’s new projects at Enterprise. Would you be an angel and take my little beloveds home?’ She crouched gracefully to gather the eagerly wriggling Chang Ming into her arms. The other two Pekes stood on their hind-legs, forepaws on her knees and back, licking their own noses with excited delight. ‘And could you get Zal to drive my car? He can take a cab home, charged to the studio account … Zal, darling …’

She scurried to the cameraman’s side.

Thus Emma packed up the camp chairs, the magazine bin, folded up the make-up table and neatly consolidated the un-eaten remains of the feast into two containers, and by the time she’d given the Pekes a final constitutional outside, the last few takes had been taken, and Zal brought Kitty’s big yellow Packard around to the door of Stage One.

Emma sank into the soft leather of the upholstery as the big car purred along Sunset Boulevard – stilled now in the deeps of the night – and turned up the darkness of the Cahuenga Pass. Stars sprinkled the sky, brighter as they wound up into the hills; the white shapes of pseudo-Spanish houses glimmered among fan-palms, and a coyote trotted across the road. In the back seat, the Pekes snored in their boxes.

Emma’s hand stole into the pocket of her cardigan. For thirty-six hours, she had been dragged like Alice through the looking-glass country – doing all the running she could, just to stay in the same place – and aside from the sleep she’d snatched when they’d finally gotten home last night, had been preoccupied with rewriting scenes twenty to twenty-four in one of her pile of school copybooks. Added to this had been the chore of getting Kitty to where she needed to be and keeping track of the dogs and trying to sort out what it was about this whole business of the murder that troubled her so deeply …

But not for a moment had Aunt Estelle’s letter been completely gone from her mind.

She was exhausted now, but in the quiet of the car – Zal, blessedly, seemed to sense that stillness was what she craved – she went back over the words.

Over the memories.

The Myrtles … How will I ever live close enough to walk to The Myrtles, without feeling grief whenever I turn down Holywell Street?

Her parents’ grave, in the Wolvercote Cemetery. Miles asleep for eternity beside them. It will be good to be able to visit. To remember without pain … or with much less pain …

She didn’t know where Jim was buried. The War Department had written her a letter – it was one of the many things that hadn’t been in that single small suitcase that somebody had saved for her when they’d cleared out the house. It didn’t matter, really, since the letter had contained no information either. Only the date, and the information that his effects would be mailed to her, which they hadn’t been.

If I return to Oxford I’ll be able to look up my old friends again. Did Anne Littleton ever return from the Front? Is Professor Etheridge still lecturing at Sommerville? So many people had simply disappeared from her life, in the wake of the War and the epidemic. Letters returned unanswered. No Longer Here, printed on the envelopes. As it had been, she knew, on the letters that had arrived at The Myrtles for her …

She closed her eyes. I’ll be able to look them up again …

Somewhere in the hills to the west, along Wedgewood Avenue, Peggy Donovan’s preposterous castellated mansion was lit up like a Christmas tree, her guests whooping and shrieking with laughter around her swimming pool … her two swimming pools … while a fortune teller in an Arabian tent in the rear of the property read peoples’ palms. Just the thought of the noise made Emma shudder. What am I doing here?

And Zal’s elbow brushed the side of her arm, accidentally and very lightly, as he turned the wheel and the big car swayed its way slowly down the steep drive. The dell at the bottom of the drive, below the road, was a well of indigo shadow, and on the opposite hillside Kitty’s Moorish fantasy of a house seemed to glimmer in the moonlight. Opening her eyes, Emma saw the star-threaded outline of Zal Rokatansky’s face, the glint of reflection in his glasses. After a day of sweating at the studio he still smelled, very faintly, of soap and bay rum.

He turned the car around the big eucalyptus tree in the drive, stopped before the fancy tiled steps up to the porch. Getting out, he took Chang Ming’s box and that of Black Jasmine. Emma withdrew Buttercreme’s, and followed him up the steps. The porch light had been switched off, probably, she guessed, by the gardener’s wife, a tiny, bent Chinese woman who watched every penny spent in the household, as if they were paupers.

Can I leave Zal?

And can I find my house key …?

In their boxes, Chang Ming and Black Jasmine both jolted suddenly, and set up a salvo of barking.

Emma stopped on the porch steps in the moonlight, looking up. Behind her, Zal set down the boxes he carried, called out, ‘Who’s there?’

Emma turned to retreat as a shadow moved in the porch, and she saw another shadow emerge from the tangle of rhododendron that grew around the tall foundation of the house. A man’s dark shape reached the bottom step in two strides and a man’s deep voice commanded, ‘Don’t try it,’ as Zal moved. To flee? To fight?

In the same moment the man from the porch reached her and caught her arm in a frighteningly powerful grip. The two male Pekes in their boxes were yapping furiously, challenging, like enraged lions, and she saw that both men had guns.

NINE

Another voice said, from the black abyss of the porch, ‘There’s nuthin’ to be afraid of, Miss. Mr Cornero just wants to have a few words with you.’ And then: ‘Shut them mutts up, will you, Rico?’

Emma said, in a voice that astonished her by its calm, ‘They’re only doing their jobs – as I’m sure you are as well.’

This second man emerged from the shadows and descended the steps to her, even as another – also brandishing a pistol – joined the one who stood next to Zal.

‘May I get my house key?’ she continued. ‘I promise you I don’t have a weapon in my handbag.’

And the man next to her said, ‘Crap, it’s the secretary. Where’s Miss de la Rose?’

‘Having a late dinner at the Club Montmartre,’ said Emma. ‘Can we all go inside? Or at least switch on the porch light? Yes, I’m Mrs Blackstone, Miss de la Rose’s secretary …’

A third man came down the steps, held out a gloved hand politely to her. His accent was pure radio-hoodlum, but his voice was pleasant. ‘I’m sorry we have to bother you this way, Mrs Blackstone, but there’s a couple things we need to get straightened out, and you can’t be too careful in my business.’

After shaking her hand he descended another two steps to offer his hand to Zal. ‘Tony Cornero,’ he introduced himself.

‘Zal Rokatansky. I take it this is in connection with Rex Festraw?’

The first hoodlum having released her arm, Emma set Buttercreme’s carry-box down on the step, located her house keys by touch in the dark of her handbag. ‘Could you get that box for me, please?’ No reason a gun-toting gangster can’t make himself useful …

Mother would FAINT …

She unlocked the door, switched on the lights in the living room (‘Put that bulb back in the porch light, Rico,’ commanded Cornero over his shoulder), and said, ‘Thank you,’ as the gunman set the little dog’s box down near the door. Zal entered, flanked by Cornero and his thugs and carrying the other two dogs.

‘Hey, pooch.’ Cornero bent to peer through the little wicker window at Chang Ming. ‘They bite?’

‘They couldn’t do you any harm if they did,’ pointed out Zal, and the bootlegger laughed.

‘Like hell they couldn’t! Worst bite I ever got in my life was from that little dustmop that belonged to my stepfather’s landlady in North Beach. Che lupa, what a bitch! I had to get like five stitches on my arm!’

Tony the Hat, a little to Emma’s surprise, turned out to be a year or two younger than herself – not yet twenty-five, she guessed – a good-looking young man of medium height with intelligent dark eyes and a pleasant manner. He turned to his men and said, ‘I think we’re OK here, boys,’ and the men obediently trooped out onto the porch. Emma indicated one of the sleek, black-and-chrome chairs, and seated herself on the couch, with Zal, quiet but wary, at her side.

‘I am glad to make your acquaintance, Mr Cornero,’ she said. ‘All the way back from downtown this afternoon I was cudgeling my brains, to come up with some way of asking you a few questions about Mr Festraw, so this all works out very nicely – I hope. You didn’t … Are Mr Shang – the gardener – and his wife all right? They’re down in the cottage—’

‘Oh, yeah, yeah!’ The bootlegger raised both hands with a slight pushing gesture, palms out, as if to show them clean of innocent blood. ‘One of my boys is down there with them, that’s all. Just to make sure they don’t get excited and phone the cops or anything. Not that I have any reason to worry about the law,’ he added quickly. ‘Just … people misinterpret things, you know?’

Being held at gunpoint would certainly lead one to jump to conclusions, Emma was careful not to say. And in fact from all she’d heard, Tony Cornero didn’t have any need to fear the law in Los Angeles. Instead she turned to Zal, said, ‘Zal, could I possibly trouble you to make some coffee? I’m sure it will be all right.’ That last was in reply to his look, not to any words spoken.

‘It will,’ said Cornero. ‘Really. And thank you, Mrs Blackstone.’ He touched the brim of his pale-ivory fedora respectfully. ‘I appreciate it. What makes you think I had anything to do with Rex Festraw?’ he added, with an appearance of innocence. ‘I came here because, frankly, I was disturbed by what the movie rags are saying, that I or my brother Frank might have had something to do with the man’s death. We’re businessmen, Mrs Blackstone. We’re not gangsters. If movie stars go around murdering their ex-husbands, that’s one thing, but that kind of rumor and slander can be very harmful.’

‘Oh, quite,’ agreed Emma. ‘He that hath a bad name is half hanged, as the Scots say. But – please correct me if I’m wrong – I understand that Mr Festraw did work for you last Friday, and in fact may have … well, taken an unauthorized advance on his salary.’

All the warmth vanished from his eyes, but he only tilted his head a little. ‘Who’d you hear that from? Do you mind me asking?’

‘An acquaintance of his,’ she returned. ‘Of course I have no idea how true it is, and haven’t spoken to anyone about it. And I suspect the name she gave me – Elizabeth Bennet – wasn’t her own. But she did show me some quite impressive pieces of jewelry that she said he’d bought her.’ She folded her hands composedly. ‘Now, I’m not sure where the publicity department of Foremost Productions – or the columnists who write for Screen Stories and Photo Play – get their information, but they did seem to know that Mr Festraw was associated with bootleggers in New York. They may simply have drawn an inference that he would seek out similar business opportunities in Los Angeles, to earn himself some extra money while preparing to blackmail Miss de la Rose. The young lady I spoke to did seem to be a fairly expensive proposition.’

The corner of Cornero’s mouth tugged sidelong, and under the sleek, expensive suiting, his shoulders relaxed. ‘Rex Festraw was small-time,’ he said dismissively. ‘The dough he stole from me – well, he heisted a motorboat with sixty cases of single-malt Scotch in it – that was penny-ante. Twenty-five hundred bucks, tops. What kind of a man would risk a rap for conspiracy to do murder for that kind of chicken feed?’

Emma’s brow creased a little. ‘That does seem an extremely modest amount. Now, there were Roman Emperors – Tiberius springs to mind – who would have had men cut up and fed to their pet eels, for quite trivial transgressions, simply because seeing it done had such a good effect on their other servants.’

‘Roman Emperors had pet eels?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Emma. ‘Not pets, precisely, but eels were considered a delicacy, and the Emperors Tiberius and Caligula kept great pools of them, so they could have eel for dinner whenever they wanted.’

‘Wouldn’t that affect the taste of the meat?’

‘I should think so,’ agreed Emma. ‘But I don’t imagine either Tiberius or Caligula would much care. And of course,’ she added, ‘as Emperors of Rome, they could get away with that sort of lesson to their subordinates much more easily than someone like – what name did Miss Bennet mention? Joe Adonis? – could.’

‘Yeah, but if you fed Rex Festraw to a bunch of eels,’ grinned Cornero, ‘they’d get so drunk they’d just float down to the bottom of the pond an’ lay there. Same goes for anybody who ate the meat off ’em. Thank you,’ he added, as Zal came in with two cups of coffee and one – to Emma’s touched delight – of tea, on a tray.

‘Who fed Rex Festraw to eels?’ inquired Zal, but Emma noticed he kept a wary eye on Cornero and glanced swiftly around the room to make sure ‘the boys’ were all still back on the porch.

‘The Emperor of Rome,’ said the bootlegger with a laugh. ‘That’s a new one, I’ll remember that. But I tell you honestly, Mrs Blackstone,’ he said, ‘I had nothing to do with Festraw buying it. Yeah, if he hadn’t paid me the full price of that Glenfiddich I won’t say he wouldn’t have been sorry – and from what I’ve heard about him from the New York boys, I don’t think they’d have shed a lot of tears over him comin’ to grief. But the fact is, he wasn’t one of my regular boys. I put him in charge of drivin’ a motorboat, not distribution or set-up. Joe Adonis suggested Festraw might be useful for little jobs, but I wouldn’t put a new man in charge of anythin’ worth – well, worth runnin’ any risks over.’ He shrugged. ‘Even the Roman emperors would be smarter than that.’

‘I suspect,’ said Emma, ‘that when anyone says “bootlegger”, people find that a handy explanation.’

‘They do. When all I’m really doin’ is savin’ a hundred an’ twenty million people from bein’ poisoned by the homemade stuff. By the way,’ he added, reaching into his coat, ‘if you’d care for—’

‘No, thank you.’ Emma smiled.

‘Kitty’ll kill you,’ warned Zal.

‘Kitty has three dozen bottles of everything you could name in the kitchen cupboards. And none of it homemade.’ She turned back to Cornero. ‘But thank you very much for the thought, all the same, Mr Cornero. Did Mr Festraw happen to mention to you having some other job on hand? Another source of income in Los Angeles?’

The young man pondered for a moment. He was little more than a boy, Emma judged, and by his accent had immigrated from Italy, but his well-fitting brown suit and subdued silk tie were the garments of a very wealthy man. Evidently saving the population of the United States from its own bathtub gin was an extremely profitable undertaking. The diamond on his pinkie-ring was small enough to be real but large enough to have cost the price of a new car – six months with Kitty had made Emma something of a connoisseur of diamonds. When he took off his gloves to handle the coffee cup, she noticed that his hands were manicured. This was a man – like Colt Madison – who took his personal appearance seriously.

‘To hear Festraw tell it,’ he said at last, ‘he needed the job somethin’ bad. But he was stayin’ at the Winterdon, which ain’t no flophouse. An’ one of my boys said he’d seen Festraw at the Bel Giardino – one of my nightclubs – buyin’ drinks for a dame who was makin’ like a napkin in his lap. This was Sunday night, so he was either spendin’ what he’d got sellin’ my liquor under the table, or he had some other source of dough, or both. I was reservin’ judgment til Friday, when he was supposed to hand me the delivery money for the shipment.’

‘And he didn’t tell you how he happened to be staying at the Winterdon?’

Cornero shook his head. ‘I thought that sounded a little screwy at the time, but it wasn’t my business. If somethin’ had happened and I hadn’t got my dough Friday, then maybe I’d have asked some questions.’

‘Were you keeping an eye on him?’ Zal made a gesture to lift the coffee pot again, to which the bootlegger shook his head with a motion of thanks.

‘Not really, though if he’d taken a powder my boys would have been able to find out where in a coupla hours. You know how it is. Everybody knows somebody, all over town. He wouldn’t’a been hard to find.’

Emma considered the matter. ‘Do you know anyone – or know of anyone – named Stanislas Markham? I think he’s in New York.’

‘Yeah,’ said Cornero at once. ‘Stan Markham – Stan the Mark. He’s sort of medium smalltime in Queens. He’s got a club – the Four Queens – but he does all kinds of stuff: launders a little money, runs crap games, maybe arranges shipments in from Canada for Luciano. Nice guy. Stays out of trouble and keeps his nose clean.’

‘According to the clerk at the Winterdon, Mr Markham wired the money for Mr Festraw’s room.’

‘Makes sense,’ agreed Cornero. ‘If I was sendin’ somebody someplace on a job, I’d have Stan make arrangements for me. What I can’t get is who’d do that for Festraw? I mean, he may know Adonis and Luciano to recommend him, but he’s not connected connected. He’s not in with any of the big pezzonovantes that I’ve ever heard of. Takin’ a look at him, I wouldn’t’a put him as worth the buck-fifty a night it cost to put him up at the Winterdon. So what gives?’

‘I don’t know,’ returned Emma. ‘But something obviously does. Would this Mr Markham happen to know any forgers?’

‘Oh, yeah! Stan can get you set up with anybody on the East Coast. You send him the stationery, and a sample of your mark’s fist, he’ll get you turned around in a week. That’s what they tell me, anyway.’ He looked a little self-conscious at having this knowledge.

Emma reflected briefly on the number of people who came and went through the studio gates every day – from delivery boys to agents to Thelma Turnbit slipping dollar bills to Floyd – and the fact that almost nobody locked the doors of their dressing rooms. ‘And would you by chance have heard of anyone else who’d have reason to kill Mr Festraw? Someone who might have thought that having Miss de la Rose accused of the crime might distract everyone’s attention from any other motive?’

She was aware of Zal watching the younger man’s face as Cornero turned the question over in his mind. He didn’t look shifty, she thought. But then, it was part of his job not to.

At length he shook his head. ‘I ain’t heard nuthin’,’ he said. ‘And I think my own boys would have told me, if he’d been dealin’ with anybody else in town.’

‘I should think so, too,’ agreed Emma. ‘Thank you. And taking such pains to cover the murder doesn’t really make sense, for someone as … as insignificant as Mr Festraw. It isn’t as if he were wealthy or famous, or that the police would really care who killed him, you know. I’ll speak to Mr Fishbein about soft-pedaling any innuendos that Mr Festraw might have been shot by bootleggers. Quite honestly,’ she added, ‘if you were trying to kill Mr Festraw yourself, I think you’d do a much better job of it.’

‘You’re tellin’ me!’ he agreed, and then added, ‘If I were the kind of person who’d do a terrible thing like that, which I’m not.’

‘No, of course not. And if the murder was an attempt to cause trouble for Miss de la Rose, it was so clumsily done that again, I can’t imagine any halfway intelligent criminal would be behind it.’

‘Well, you got some dumb palookas in the business,’ said Cornero. ‘And I’ll keep my ear out for anything I might hear. But anybody who’s running any kind of racket in this town knows enough to be careful around the studios. I’m not sayin’ there aren’t producers an’ stars mixed up with some shady characters, but this … I think you’re right, m’am. This just feels … screwy. An’ as far as I know, Camille de la Rose isn’t involved with anything or anybody sketchy – not the way some of ’em are. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.’

‘And I’ll do for you what I can,’ promised Emma, rising. ‘Though I doubt I’ll be able to do anything about the fan magazines …’

‘Oh, hell, nobody can do anythin’ about them broads. Ladies,’ he corrected himself, standing up also and picking up his hat. ‘Thanks for the coffee, m’am. An’ if you’re ever down in Santa Monica, stop by the Bel Giardino an’ tell ’em I said to give you an’ Mr Rokatansky here drinks on the house.’

As he went out onto the porch, Emma heard him say, ‘We’re good, Rico. Go down let the gardener an’ his wife outta that closet.’

‘You all right?’ asked Zal, some time later, after they had descended to the rear yard – which lay further around the slope of the hill – and made sure that the ancient Mr Shang and his tiny, ancient wife had been no worse than frightened when two of Cornero’s men had imprisoned them in a closet. The phoneline, Emma had discovered the moment the bootleggers’ car had disappeared onto Ivarene Street, had been cut, probably before she and Zal had even returned to the house that evening.

When they climbed the tall flight of wooden back-stairs to the kitchen again she found that she was shaking, whether from delayed fear or due to the fact that it was now three o’clock in the morning, she wasn’t certain.

‘I think so.’ She sank into one of the kitchen chairs, and Zal poured her out what was left of the tea. Then he dumped the contents of both cartons of Chinese food into a pan, added a little water, and put it on the stove to heat. ‘My father used to tell me about having to pay protection money to bands of banditti in the Apennines … He’d make a funny story of it, but I think he wanted to make sure that when I did go, I wouldn’t wander away from camp, like those silly girls in novels are always doing. My mother was horrified, of course.’

‘I’d be, if you were my daughter.’ His eyes met hers, smiling.

‘He kept saying he’d teach me to shoot before we went. But then he’d get distracted by some new findings somebody had published, or an eighth-century palimpsest that had part of the Aeneid written on it, and I’d be back in the study cataloging variations of letter shape and usage …’ She shook her head quickly.

‘No wonder Hollywood history drives you nuts.’ He carried two plates over to the table. ‘Do you miss it?’

‘I … I do.’ She thought she’d be far too upset by the night’s events to eat, but found that after the first mouthful of rice and chow mein that she not only felt much better, but was ravenous. ‘Sometimes I felt like the Lady of Shalott, locked up in a tower weaving tapestries of the tales of other peoples’ lives, that she could see only in a mirror …’ She shook her head. ‘But it was my life. And I was good at it. And I really couldn’t imagine doing anything else, until I met Jim.’

It felt strange to pronounce Jim’s name to him, as if Jim were still alive somewhere, still married to her. She heard her voice stammer a little on the name, and for an instant it was as if he had just left the room.

As if he’d just gotten on the boat-train to Dover, to go back to his unit in France.

She’d stood on the platform for a quarter of an hour after the train was gone, she remembered. As if somehow, if she waited long enough, the train would come back and Jim would hop down from its doorway and say, ‘Hey, it was all a mistake …!’

As if everything that had happened since was all a mistake …

The night’s silence deepened outside, and the ticking of the kitchen clock seemed suddenly loud. Wherever Kitty was – and the party was undoubtedly still going on at Peggy Donovan’s – she wasn’t going to be home that night. Emma glanced at the clock as Zal poured himself the last of the cold, over-brewed coffee and downed it. Scene seventy-eight was shooting tomorrow and he had to be on the set at seven …

The thought of the terrible silence in the house when he left made her shiver, and Zal asked quietly, ‘Would you like me to stay?’

She said, ‘I know they’re not coming back.’

‘Oh, I know that, too. But that’s not what I asked.’

Softly, she said, ‘Yes. Please.’

TEN

Emma woke late, after a dream that she’d had often before. When she was twelve, her father had told her that back in the first century AD, the Roman Emperor Claudius had rounded up the last of the native Etruscans from the Italian hills and had written an Etruscan–Latin dictionary. Her father had been fond of cursing the Christian monks and barbarian chieftains who had been responsible for the disappearance of this invaluable volume during the Dark Ages, and thereafter Emma had dreamed periodically of finding the book, bound and strapped in iron and gold, with Etruscis Latine Lexicon Manuale – Scriptus a Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus written on the cover. (Emma frequently dreamed in Latin. Occasionally she dreamed in what she knew to be Etruscan, which she, unlike any scholar in the waking world, spoke perfectly in her dreams.)

And there was always a moment before actual waking, when she dreamed she awoke, lying in her bed, with the book clasped in her arms. Delight would fill her like warm sunlight (Father will be so pleased!) …

And then she’d waken ‘for real’, as the children said, and the book would be gone.

Zal had left her a note on her night-table, and, she discovered when she descended to the kitchen in her bathrobe, had fed the dogs and filled the kettle for tea. Conscientiously, Emma washed, dressed, boiled an egg for breakfast, and walked down the hill to Franklin Avenue, to make a call to the telephone company to have the line repaired. A further call to the studio established that Kitty was there and shooting scene sixty-three. She left one message with Vinnie begging Kitty to excuse her absence that day, and another to Zal, saying only, Thank you. No sense in saying more, for the edification and amusement of everyone in the studio. Kitty had not been exaggerating when she’d complained of studio gossip.

Emma did wonder briefly how anyone could consummate a romantic tryst on the catwalks above the lights in Stage Three – but if anyone could do it, Kitty could.

The men from the telephone company did not arrive until four. Emma spent a meditative day brushing the dogs, balancing Kitty’s check-book, paying the bills and excising the fortune teller from scenes twenty through twenty-four (and from scene seventy-nine, where he made a reappearance among the flames of burning Rome to pronounce the doom of Babylon).

And reading Aunt Estelle’s letter.

Thinking about Oxford.

Thinking about home.

At five, when the telephone repairman departed – sped on his way by the indignant yapping of the Pekes – Emma made herself another cup of tea, consulted the Times, then switched on the kitchen radio, to hear what the Pettingers had to say about the events of Wednesday afternoon.

She was not disappointed. Bushrod Pettinger had a rather nasal, but very powerful, voice, and ringingly denounced Hollywood and all its works. ‘Abraham warned his brother Lot, “Do not pitch your tents towards Sodom!”.’ Emma wondered how many of Mr Pettinger’s listeners were sufficiently familiar with the Book of Genesis to know that Lot was Abraham’s nephew, not his brother. Or did they care? ‘Abraham warned his brother that if he so much as dwelled near the Cities of the Plain, great evil would befall him, and he would stand in danger not only of his life, but of his very soul!’

Between regular attendance at Sunday school, and Oxford lectures about ancient Mesopotamia, Emma had no recollection of the Patriarch saying a word to his nephew about the spiritual ramifications of real estate in one district over another. She wondered – albeit for only the minutest fraction of a moment – whether Kitty had such a thing as a Bible in her house, to check.

‘And so it was then,’ intoned Miss Pettinger, who had a surprisingly beautiful contralto even over the airwaves, ‘and so it is today! Heed the warning, I beg you, my brothers and sisters in Christ! Turn your face away from the painted lures of the Devil, the garish evil that rolls out of every motion-picture palace and nickelodeon! Walk away from those photoplays about harlots and hooligans and cry with Jesus, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”.’

‘Nickelodeon?’ Like a gorgeous dragonfly in the frock of changeable eggplant and green that she’d had on yesterday, Kitty appeared in the kitchen door from the rear yard. ‘Are there even nickelodeons around anymore? Oh, my little sweetnesses!’ She crouched, to receive the ecstatic greetings of her furry pets, and an instant later looked up and cried, ‘Oh, darling, are you all right? Zal told me – NO, Jazz! Down, Chang … Zal told me what happened last night – and the Shangs, just now when I put the car away. How awful!’ She stood, and impulsively caught Emma in a hug. ‘I’m so sorry!’

‘There’s no need for you to be sorry,’ pointed out Emma. ‘It had nothing to do with you.’

‘Oh, but darling, it did! If it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t even be in California! Were you terrified? I’ve met Tony Cornero at his club and he really wouldn’t hurt a fly – well, not someone who wasn’t another gangster, anyway …’

Reflecting on the other things that bootleggers – like Taffy in the prop warehouse – were likely to be selling, not to speak of the darker end of the business of prostitution, Emma would not have gone so far as to say that. ‘Oddly enough, I wasn’t really afraid,’ she admitted. ‘Not until they’d all left. Then I … I rather went to pieces for a bit …’

‘The exact same thing happened to me when Ruggy Brevoort – or was it Clayton, before we got married? – crashed his roadster on the Jones Beach Parkway at two o’clock in the morning. The car rolled completely over and it’s a miracle neither of us was killed, or even hurt, except that I got motor oil leaked onto my pastel silk. I must have chewed him out for fifteen minutes and then we had to hitch-hike back to his place, and I didn’t say a word to him … Oh, no, it was Bert Englemeier! Because he had this marvelous house at Oyster Bay … But once I’d locked him out of my bedroom I just collapsed.’

She took Emma’s hand in hers. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, in another tone. Her voice was the voice of a friend, and the velvet-brown eyes, looking up into Emma’s, were filled with concern, a friend’s eyes.

Emma said, quietly, ‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re sure?’

She smiled, and nodded. ‘I’m sure.’

‘Zal told me you promised to get me to talk to Fishy about laying off the bootlegger angle with the fan magazines, and I made Fishy promise that he would. And it took me forever to catch him, because that imbecile Dirk kept screwing up his sword fight with Elmore, and Madge had us do thirty-five takes, because Dirk didn’t want it to look like Elmore was winning—’

Emma switched off the radio. ‘I hope he did lose in the end, or else I’m going to have to rewrite the last six scenes of the film, and I don’t think Mr Pugh will be very happy about that.’

‘Darling, he’ll have a stroke!’ She’d turned away and was fishing through the icebox, and emerged a moment later, with a scrap of chicken from the little dish of it that Emma had cooked up for the Pekes’ dinners for the next few days. ‘He was acting like an absolute bear all day, glaring at me as if I’d done something wrong at Peggy’s party – which I didn’t! I just know that witch Darlene has been telling him all sorts of horrible things … Oh, there’s Mrs Shang!’

The rear stairs down to the yard below creaked slightly under the old lady’s barely ninety pounds.

‘Would you mind having dinner a little early, darling? They were still filming Nicky’s scenes when I left and I’m crushed with exhaustion.’ She dove into the icebox again and reemerged with the small dish of half-melted ice-chips that Emma had hacked from the main block earlier that afternoon. ‘Oh, thank you for doing this! You’re marvelous!’ And she clattered up the steps to the dining room, the diamonds on her shoe-heels flashing. Emma picked a lime out of the basket on the counter, smiled a greeting to Mrs Shang, and followed. Kitty was already pouring gin into the shaker.

‘What did you do at Peggy’s?’

‘Nothing, darling!’ Kitty sought for something – probably the soda water – in the depths of the cabinet. ‘I swear it, nothing! But that nasty old trout Prudence Pettinger – what on Earth were you doing listening to her anyway? – had the nerve to turn up at Enterprise Pictures today to complain about Peggy’s party! Peggy told me. Honestly, it isn’t like the Pettingers live in that neighborhood or anything! Myself, I think it was a little tacky of Peggy to tip off the newspapers about it, but we were only on the pavement for about ten minutes, so it couldn’t really have hurt the horses’ feet, and there’s almost no traffic on Wedgewood Avenue at that hour, and you yourself told me only the other day that people in Ancient Greece rode horses not wearing any clothes all the time. Of course if you fell off you’d get a heinous scrape, but Peggy did warn her guests, and it was early enough in the evening that they couldn’t have been that drunk …’

‘Newspapers?’

Kitty dismissed the word with a breezy wave, but Emma thought she smiled, just the tiniest bit. ‘Well, that’s what I hear. And the Pettingers turned up outside the gate, positively fulminating fire and brimstone … and of course they’re just furious about Gloria Swanson waltzing into the Montmartre last night with a cheetah on a leash and that insanely handsome cowboy from Metro …’ She added soda water, and took a silver knife from the drawer – Emma was still amazed by the casual abundance of citrus fruit in California, limes and lemons and oranges as common as crab apples back home. ‘I don’t see why they blame me for it.’

‘Do they?’

‘Of course they do, darling!’ Abandoning the lime, Kitty darted to the basket of magazines beside the telephone niche, and among the Chinese newspapers favored by the Shangs (and the LA Opinion that Dominga brought in on her cleaning days), found that morning’s Examiner. ‘Didn’t you read the letter they wrote? Accusing me of – Oh, here it is! “Leading the virgin daughters of America into unspeakable sin …”’ She unfolded the paper to the proper page. ‘Though they don’t seem to have any problem speaking about it. Fishy is absolutely over the moon with delight …’

‘Delight?’

‘Oh, completely delight, darling!’ She returned to her cocktail, her great dark eyes sparkling. After the day’s shooting she had removed her camera make-up and repainted her face for the car-ride home, but under it, Emma could see the marks of fatigue. She wondered if her sister-in-law had slept at all last night (and if so, where?) – or if she had followed her own oft-spoken dictum, Well, it’s easier to STAY up than to GET up … ‘Everybody in the country knows they’re only doing those crazy things to look as unspeakable and abandoned as I am. Fishy says, you can’t buy publicity like that!’

She sipped the gin with visible ecstasy. ‘Darlene can say what she likes about coke, darling, but it’s gin for my money – and you’re quite right,’ she added. ‘Dope is making Darlene’s skin look coarse – you can see it in the dailies! I’m so glad you warned me what it was doing to my face. She’s such an imbecile! Would you like some of this, darling?’

Emma refrained from mentioning Kitty’s own consumption, up until a few months ago, of the too-common Hollywood ‘pick-me-up’, and said simply, ‘Yes, please.’ It had taken a co-ordinated effort between herself, Zal, and Mr Volmort in the make-up department to convince her sister-in-law that such things as cocaine and opium cigarettes were rendering her ugly and making her look thirty-five instead of ‘twenty-four’ … Kitty’s colossal vanity had done the rest. (‘And honestly, dear, those cigarettes gave me SUCH a headache …’) She wished she could similarly wean her from alcohol but, she told herself, first things first …

As Emma had pointed out last night, the contents of Kitty’s liquor cabinet were the finest products of England and Canada – and had quite possibly been brought ashore by Mr Cornero himself. And whatever else could be said about her, Kitty was a superb bartender.

And then, when the time was right to start working on Kitty to cut down her drinking, Emma reflected, she, Emma, might well be back in Oxford. Walking across Magdalen Bridge on a misty autumn morning with her arms full of books. Saying to … to whom? Saying to a friend, to someone … Oh, I lived in Hollywood for six months …

Saying to friends a year, two years, ten years in the future (Ten YEARS? 1934?), I used to live in Hollywood …

With a laugh …

Did I ever tell you about the time we got held up by bootleggers …?

The thought of Zal, kissing her last night in the kitchen. Would you like me to stay? A small, sharp blade turned a little in her heart.

The warmth of his arms around her. The solid strength of his shoulder under her cheek.

She closed a door on the memory, found again the letter from Bushrod Pettinger to the editor of the Examiner. Evidently – she read further down the column of Biblical brimstone – Miss Swanson and Miss Donovan weren’t the only two actresses out to prove that they had more of ‘It’ than a gorgeous femme fatale accused of a mysterious murder. Last night while Peggy had been doing her impersonation of Lady Godiva on Wedgewood Avenue, Pola Negri had taken care to be seen dancing the tango with Rudolph Valentino at the Townhouse Club in a dress that ‘would have brought a blush to the cheek of Salomé,’ as Mr Pettinger had it, and earrings that had cost $950. The earrings worn by Gloria Swanson at the Café Montmartre – with the aforesaid riding extra and cheetah (which had thrown up a hairball onto the feet of the maitre d’) had cost $1750, and immediately after Peggy Donovan’s bareback riding party, Clara Bow had challenged all comers to an auto race along Sunset Boulevard in the small hours of the morning.

This, fumed Mr Pettinger, was what came of encouraging celluloid wantons in extravagant misbehavior, and what would come of it, with such horrors glamorized before the eyes of the pure young girls of America, he wept to think.

‘I wonder if I can get Ambrose to buy me that pair of diamond earrings I saw at Van Cleef and Arpel’s last week,’ mused Kitty, ‘that cost two thousand seven hundred, for me to wear at the hearing?’

Zal telephoned her, just before eight – still at the studio, he said – to make sure all was well (‘Other than the Pettingers preparing to launch a Holy War against us?’). It was good, only to hear his voice. But sleeping that night, Emma dreamed of Oxford. Oxford before the War, when she’d glide like a bird on her bicycle along Longwall Street, to The Misses Gibbs’ Select Academy where she had been a day pupil, or to Mrs Willis’s out along the Botley Road for her piano lessons. Walking with her mother early in the cool of May morning, to hear the choir singing in the Magdalen Tower. Seeing the undergraduates who looked so grown-up in their gowns when she was sixteen, that heartbreakingly beautiful summer before the War. Who looked so terribly young three years later, when she’d drive the ambulances from the train station to bring the wounded to hospital at Bicester. Sometimes, on warm nights in Michaelmas term, she had heard them strolling, late, along the Parks Road, singing. Those beautiful tenors and baritones, harmonizing in the dark.

In her dream she crossed the Magdalen Bridge, and quickened her step along Longwall Street. She thought, I’ve missed them so. It will be good to see them again: Mother, Papa, Miles. She had two of her father’s books under her arm, and knew she’d taken them along to read when she’d been … wherever she’d been. Macaulay’s The Lays of Ancient Rome, and a pocket copy of Much Ado About Nothing, always entertaining for a train ride … Her father would have acquired a catalog of the newest finds at the necropolis at Arrentium, he’d need help codifying the dates …

She glimpsed Miles, walking ahead of her. Miles jaunty and healthy, half-turning as if he’d wait for her, as he’d done ever since they were children, to go up the steps together.

But the house wasn’t there. The place where it had stood on Holywell Street was only a thicket of trees, a tangle of overgrown rose bushes: albas, her mother’s favorite, with petals fluffy as the skirts of Spanish dancers. The three shallow stone steps that had led up from the street to the door ended in nothing.

Miles was gone.

Emma cried, ‘What happened?’ and the effort to produce sound from her throat woke her.

For a moment she lay in the darkness, looking at the three tall, barely-seen rectangles of window opposite the foot of her bed and wondering, What room am I in?

The bow window of her bedroom at The Myrtles should have been there. The night-light (That’s not MY night-light … What happened to my little gold-glass night-light?) showed her a low, square, boxy bureau, an unfamiliar chair.

And she remembered. Not one single thing from her bedroom had been saved, when they’d cleared out the house to sell. Someone from the hospital had gone in and gotten the clothes they’d thought she’d need, to go down to that dreary lodging in Headington, for the week she’d stayed, recuperating, before taking the train to Manchester and Mrs Pendergast’s. Everything was gone.

All Father’s notes had simply gone into the rubbish.

She’d never found out what had happened to Daphne, Mother’s fat, white cat.

This wasn’t the first time she’d waked like this, for one second puzzled that she wasn’t in her own bedroom. It had happened every few weeks, during the horrible years she’d spent at Mrs Pendergast’s.

It just felt like the first time.

It always felt like the first time.

It was Chang Ming barking.

Not the furious, defensive intruder-bark of last night, but the wary ‘whuff’ of suspicion.

Doggy toe-nails clattered in the hall outside her room. Black Jasmine gave a short yap as well, like a little quack.

Not enough to wake Kitty, Emma didn’t think. After dinner her sister-in-law had had her usual round of telephone calls to Peggy Donovan (‘Did I do anything really frightful last night, darling?’), Marie Prevost over at Warners (who was one of her main competitors for the title of the Silver Screen Goddess), and Blanche Sweet, one of the longtime reigning queens of Hollywood. But at nine fifteen Emma had come into Kitty’s room and found her sleeping like a dead woman, the softly-complaining telephone under her nerveless hand.

It was now – she glanced at the clock on the nightstand – a quarter past one in the morning.

Headlights briefly swept Emma’s window, then quickly died.

Cornero.

The glint of starlight on gun barrels leaped to her mind.

A deep voice saying, Don’t try it. And then, Where’s Miss de la Rose?

Emma swept her robe from the foot of her bed, wrapped it around her as she went to the window in the hall that looked out over the silly pseudo-balcony above the porch, and so down into the scrubby vale that was the front yard.

Kitty stood there, a darkly shimmering figure in the moonlight. From the shadows of the eucalyptus tree a man emerged, little more than a tall silhouette, and the white V-shaped gleam of a shirt-front. Dark hair, and the glisten of brilliantine – Emma thought, Drat it! as he approached, and Kitty, shaking back the dark cascade of her tousled hair, stretched out her arms to him.

Then movement at the top of the bank above them caught Emma’s eye, and the drench of moonlight – only a day or two from full – showed her a man standing on the edge of the road, and the glint of something metal in his hands.

ELEVEN

Emma wrenched at the window-sash but the latch held fast. French doors opened from Kitty’s room onto the balcony – she had almost reached them when she realized that the moonlight that shone so brightly on the tumble of sheets on the bed outlined a woman’s hand and wrist. Hand and wrist and tousle of black curls among the pillow-lace.

She stood for a moment, then stepped close to the bed.

That was Kitty, all right. Sleeping like an innocent child, her other arm curved around Buttercreme, whose little round head rested in the hollow of her shoulder.

Quietly, Emma walked to the French doors, and looked out.

The dark-haired woman and the man in evening dress were still embracing, with a theatrical abandon that looked like progressing on to the honeymoon stage right there in the moonlight between the steep slope of the road-bank and the house.

It’s Kitty’s own house. Why fornicate in the front yard when there’s a perfectly good bed …

The dress the dark-haired woman was wearing was the one Kitty had had on Wednesday night at the police station.

The one she got from the wardrobe department.

Which has at least three duplicates …

Ire smote her. Not anger or rage … simple vexation, as she understood what she was looking at.

OH!!!

She would have stamped her foot, had she not feared to wake Kitty – the genuine Kitty – sound asleep in her own bed …

Emma yanked the belt of her robe tight, ghosted back into her own room long enough to get her slippers, then ran lightly down the stairs, through the kitchen – catching up the house-keys from the counter and locking the back door behind her – and down the back steps. The inky shadow of the hill blanketed the driveway itself – concealing the rather seedy little car parked there – and Emma kept to the drive’s verge as she climbed towards the road. She reflected that the couple in front of the house were putting on a sufficiently interesting scene that there was little likelihood that the man up on the road – Is that a telescope he has in his hand? Binoculars? – would hear approaching footfalls.

And as she climbed she recalled the glimpse she’d had through the doors of the empress’s garden last night, of Darlene Golden in her exiguous rags, talking earnestly with an extremely handsome young extra – in evening dress – from the Scandalous Lady set.

Ginny Field had been in the garden, too, she recalled. Kitty’s stand-in. Her height, her build, with her same dark hair.

OH!!!

It was a scene straight out of Much Ado About Nothing, although Emma doubted Darlene knew its provenance. She paused beside the car at the top of the drive, long enough to write down its license-plate number before walking around it to the shape of the man, crouched low beside the road bank, above that long slope of shadow. Binoculars in hand. She said, very softly, ‘Mr Madison?’ and he swiveled on his heels, jerked to his feet.

Before he could say a word she stepped onto the top of the little road bank, called down into the darkness in her gruffest voice, ‘You there! This is the police!’ And taking Madison’s hand – because it was indeed Colt Madison, speechless for once – pulled him to the brink and down the slope of rocks and weeds towards the couple, the yard, and the house.

‘You see they’re not making for the house,’ she said, holding herself steady on the man’s arm. ‘They know the front door will be locked. Drat these plants …’

‘Mrs Blackstone—’ he began, his attention diverted between her and the fleeing lovers, who could be seen dimly in the moonlight, scrambling up the shallower slope where the road curved around the lot immediately to the south.

‘Did Miss Golden hire you?’ she asked, drawing him firmly after her up the tiled front steps. ‘Or Mr Pugh?’

‘I’m not at liberty to—’

‘Naturally not.’ Emma cut him off. ‘Do you like Shakespeare, Mr Madison? He could get away with some amazingly hackneyed plots on sheer good writing. But ordinarily I’m annoyed by those plays in which the entire problem could be resolved in five minutes by one character asking another, “What were you actually doing?”’ She had guided him across the living room and up the stairs – trailed by Chang Ming, the only one of the Pekes who could get up and down the stairs unaided – and stopped outside Kitty’s door.

‘I would really rather not waken Miss de la Rose at this hour,’ she continued softly, ‘considering how early she must get up to be on the set tomorrow. But do please look and make sure that that is Miss de la Rose – and please take my word for it that she has been in bed, and asleep, since nine thirty.’

The detective stood in the doorway of the room, looking at the woman sleeping in the moonlight, her tiny dog snoring audibly in the curve of her arm. Then he backed away, and with Emma beside him, retreated to the head of the stairs. ‘I suppose you were asleep yourself, m’am.’ In the dark of the upstairs hall, little was visible of the young man but the outline of moonlight on his handsome profile, and the pale blur of his topcoat.

‘I was,’ returned Emma. ‘But do you imagine that Kitty – startled in the midst of her … er … transports – would have fled into the next lot and up the bank to the road, instead of back into her own house? Do you think that she could have circled back to come into this house through the back door …? Drat it,’ she added, as the faint growl of a car starting in the drive reached them, ‘there goes Romeo … Do you think that she could have circled back into this house and gotten undressed and settled down in bed in the time that it took yourself and me to come in and up here? And gotten her dog to fall asleep? I wonder if they came together or if she’s left a car somewhere also.’

Taking his elbow, she led him down the dark stair to the living room again. ‘Did you see her come out of the house, by the way?’

‘I saw her come down out of the shadows of the porch.’ Profoundly flustered, Madison seemed to have lost all his cockiness and seemed a bit adrift without it.

Emma glanced through the long windows that flanked the front door, though she’d noticed already that the porch-light had been yet again quenched – almost certainly robbed once more of its bulb. Quietly, she finished, ‘Would you like me to waken Miss de la Rose so that you can look at her in good light and ascertain that yes, she has just actually awakened from a sound sleep?’

Colt Madison was quiet for a time, his expression hidden by the stygian shadow of his hat. But she did see his lips, and they were tightly pressed. ‘No,’ he said, at length. ‘That’ll be fine.’

Which, Emma felt, told its own tale.

She led him out onto the porch, and closed the front door behind them. ‘I believe the woman you saw was Miss Field, Miss de la Rose’s stand-in,’ she said after a moment. ‘Though there is no way to prove this, if she denies it, as I’m sure she will. Are you prepared to believe that any of the extras on the Foremost lot – or in fact any extra in Hollywood – would be capable of accepting payment to enact a love scene such as you were told would be taking place here tonight, no questions asked?’

‘Oh, hell, yeah,’ said Madison at once. ‘For twenty-five dollars and rental on the tux, I’d do the scene.’ He was silent for a moment, fishing a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. ‘So you figure somebody’s trying to make Pugh jealous? Get him to dump Camille?’

‘Or get him to withdraw his support – studio support – from her before the hearing.’

‘And using me as a chump.’

‘And using you as a chump,’ Emma affirmed.

Flame illuminated his narrowed eyes, his lips hardened now in anger.

‘You can’t pick your clients,’ she went on after a pause. ‘And of course I’m sure that the reason your client chose you for this task was because Mr Pugh trusts your observations. Perhaps you could tell your client that you could observe nothing because the police were called?’

‘I’ll tell her that and I’ll tell her to stick her damn job.’ He expelled a line of smoke from one corner of his mouth. ‘Make a monkey out of me …’

He slapped her on the shoulder, man-wise. ‘You’re a square broad, Duchess.’ He started to turn towards the steps, then added, frowning, ‘Can I ask you to keep this on the QT? I told Pugh I was out workin’ a lead about Marion Davies – and I was, earlier tonight … and she’s clean … But seeing as this was just a peep show tonight, I’d just as soon keep separate things separate.’

‘It isn’t my business,’ said Emma. ‘Unless of course for some reason it becomes Miss de la Rose’s business.’

He nodded, and blew another line of smoke. ‘Understood.’ He shook hands vigorously with her, and descended the steps.

A moment later, Emma heard his shoes scrunch the gravel of the drive. Am I EVER going to get a complete night’s sleep in this place?

The headlights of his car went up. A moment later, the dark bulk of the vehicle slipped away down Ivarene Street.

Emma sighed, and looking down, saw Chang Ming sitting alertly on the threshold of the door, waiting to go in. It was probably, Emma guessed, after two …

Movement on the road made her turn her head. Moonlight gleamed on a second car, driving without lights, as it pulled out of the driveway of the darkened house just up the road from where she stood, and followed Madison’s car away in the direction of Franklin Avenue.

Kitty said, ‘OH!!!’ when Emma told her – some three hours later – of the night’s events, in the cold electric whiteness of the tiled kitchen as she made coffee. ‘It’s that bitch Darlene! It has to be!’

‘That would be my guess,’ agreed Emma, and poured steaming water into the coffee-press first, then the fat brown teapot for herself. More water bubbled gently around the eggs on the stove. Chang Ming and Black Jasmine, having devoured their own breakfasts, stared at Buttercreme’s dish in passionate agony as the little moonlight dog picked at a fragment or two of chicken liver, then sat back thoughtfully and contemplated the uneaten remains.

‘So that’s why Frank was acting so strangely yesterday! I will fire that nasty little slut Ginny—’

‘You’ll have to explain why,’ pointed out Emma. ‘And you know she’ll deny it. As will Darlene.’ She bore the coffee, and a small glass of orange juice, over to the table, all the sustenance Kitty could endure early in the morning. Awake since four, her sister-in-law had already bathed and donned full make-up – which would be changed to camera make-up the moment they arrived on the Foremost lot – and looked as exquisite as a jeweled doll. ‘I doubt Mr Pugh will appreciate having to find another stand-in for you at short notice.’

Kitty sipped her coffee, and lit her third cigarette of the day. ‘Do you think you could talk Zal into having trouble with his camera settings so we could make Ginny stand under the lights for two hours while he fixes them?’ she asked.

They needn’t have worried. Ginny Field did not show up for work that morning, so the start of scene sixty-three was delayed while Madge stormed across to Belle Delaney’s little cubicle and ordered up another extra of approximately Kitty’s height, build, and coloring like a sandwich. While waiting for this young lady – Ruby Saks was her name – to be dressed and made up and acquainted with her duties, Kitty leafed through the morning papers in her dressing room, looking for accounts of how her rivals in the Silver Screen Goddess sweepstakes had sought to prove their glamorous outrageousness on the previous night.

‘Oh, Colleen Moore turned up at the Café New York with Ronnie Coleman, wearing a necklace that cost three thousand dollars! And they ordered a bottle of champagne that cost one hundred dollars! I’ll have to tell Ambrose about that – he thinks nothing of paying that for a bottle of wine …’

‘A hundred dollars?’ Emma calculated what that was in pounds, and was – even after six months in Hollywood – scandalized.

‘Oh, darling, that’s nothing!’ Kitty looked up from her paper in childlike surprise. ‘Gloria Swanson has a solid gold bathtub. They almost couldn’t get it into her house, it weighs so much! John Barrymore paid I don’t know how much – sixteen thousand dollars, I think – for his dining-room chandelier. Peggy’s new car has real leopard-skin upholstery and solid gold door-handles. And Ambrose had an entire Italian villa taken apart in Italy … He’s having it reassembled in the hills about two hours north of here … Villa Something-Or-Other. It belonged to some tremendously famous Italian a long time ago … Caruso? The opera singer? Robinson Caruso? Or was it somebody else? You’d probably know …’

She turned over a page. ‘Oh, and Peggy told me that Anita Tempest over at Enterprise challenged Clara Bow to a chariot race! Not that Anita’s ever sober enough to drive, and Peggy says Mr DeMille refused to lend either of them any chariots.’

‘Good for Mr DeMille.’ Emma wondered whether any of the leading contenders for the title of Goddess of the Silver Screen would manage to get herself accused of a still-more-glamorous, mysterious crime before the fan votes were cast on the twenty-fifth.

‘And if she did,’ she added, when she encountered Zal later in the morning in the Imperial Box at the Coliseum, ‘would the Pettingers try to have Kitty arrested as Accessory Before the Fact? Or just suffer an apoplexy from sheer outrage?’

Zal considered the matter for a moment. ‘Myself,’ he said at last, ‘I’d vote for Clara, or Anita, getting kidnapped and taken out to some mysterious shack in the desert, and rescued by Ramon Navarro. Or Ford Sterling, if Navarro’s too expensive.’

‘You can have Colt Madison for twenty-five dollars and the rental of a tuxedo,’ Emma informed him helpfully. ‘Personally, I fully expect to see one of them fly an aeroplane to Cuba, to reunite with a lost love.’

‘That’s not bad.’ He craned to look over the carven balustrade to where the Christians were assembling below. ‘And if the girls don’t think of it, I bet you can sell that to Frank as the scenario of Kitty’s next picture.’

The emperor’s box overlooking the floor of the Coliseum for scene sixty-three was truly an impressive construction. A flight of thirty steps, of gold-latticed marble, led from the sand up to the terrace itself (‘Won’t the lions climb up them to eat the emperor?’ inquired Emma), and the throne at the top was, a little to Emma’s surprise, a handsome marble copy of an actual curule chair – ersatz marble, but still more or less Roman. While Doc Larousse and his minions shifted reflectors, Madge walked Kitty through her entrance through the great double doors at the top, slave-boys and priests following her and among them, head bowed in chains, poor (and still very scantly clad) Elmore Perkins, humbled and enslaved.

A little shyly, Emma went on, ‘Thank you for staying Thursday night.’

‘My pleasure. I’m only sorry I missed last night’s show. You all right?’

She nodded, and their hands briefly touched.

‘Duchess!’ yelled Madge. ‘You hear that? I’m gonna need a scene before this one, of Elmore in the dungeon with his mom. Get down here …’

His glance was like a smiling kiss, and her eyes received it like one, before she hurried down the thirty marble steps to the 2000 square feet of laboriously imported sand.

Frank visited the set just before lunch. Darlene Golden, in a flutter of discreetly placed rags, halted on the bottom step of the flight (up which it was her task run, to throw herself at Kitty’s feet) and instead flew to the producer’s side. As Madge’s exasperated ‘Cut!’ rent the air, Kitty turned her head and met Frank’s eyes with what novelists generally called a ‘speaking glance’: I adore you but I will not delay the filming … unlike SOME people I could name …

Frank evidently understood. He was noticeably short with Darlene and, when the blonde actress returned, a little chagrined, to the gaggle of nervous Christians in front of the lion cage (‘You’re not really going to let those lions out of the cage while we’re down here, are you, m’am?’ inquired one of the younger girls timidly), clearly had eyes for no one but the empress.

When at about four o’clock Madge finally yelled, ‘Print that one!’ and Mr Torley emerged from the lions’ cage to retrieve his food-stuffed and opium-drowsy pets, Darlene turned again to the producer, with some manufactured query. Pugh answered her, but his eye was on Kitty, descending the marble stair like an empress indeed, peacock cloak making iridescent wings around her and jewels glittering in the California sunlight. Emma could not keep from smiling at Darlene’s expression as Pugh strode to meet Kitty, hands outstretched.

‘You don’t really think Darlene actually had anything to do with Mr Festraw’s death, do you?’ Emma asked, as the lights crew began to dismantle set-ups and shift reflectors.

‘The stakes for her are pretty high.’ Zal polished his glasses with one of his clean handkerchiefs, following her gaze. ‘Darlene claims twenty-five but she’s closer to thirty-five. She worked for Christie Studios just before the War, and before that was doing one-reelers for Polyscope in ’09. She called herself Mary Freedom back then and her hair was brown. If she doesn’t hit it big this year or next it’s gonna start to show.’

Down below, Madge was herding Christians into position for what would be – until sundown and probably far beyond – a succession of close-ups and reaction shots. ‘Zal!’ she shouted. ‘You think we can get scene sixty tonight, while we got all the Christians here? It’ll save us half a day tomorrow—’

He raised his hand in assent, turned back to Emma. ‘Is that worth killing a man for?’ he asked quietly. ‘You tell me.’

‘You tell me if she makes enough to hire someone to do the shooting,’ said Emma slowly. ‘She’d certainly have had access to Kitty’s dressing room, to get the gun and the stationery. Although …’ She hesitated, not sure how to express her thought that something, somewhere didn’t fit. ‘In a way,’ she added, ‘it would make things simpler if she was behind it.’

‘Zally!’ yelled Madge again, as Elmore’s unfortunate mother and sisters took their places amid the reset reflectors which would immortalize their terror and agony in close-up.

Zal raised his eyebrows. ‘You mean, now at least we know which way to look?’

Emma drew breath to say, Maybe, and then let it out. For the third or fourth time that morning, she wondered if she had indeed seen a second car, gliding without lights down Ivarene Street in the moonlight last night. And if so, if it had meant anything …

Prior to her tender encounter with Mr Pugh at the foot of the marble staircase, Kitty had spoken of exhaustion and looking forward to another night of sleep. But Emma wasn’t in the least surprised when, at five – the Christians being disposed of – Kitty scampered to her dressing room and reemerged made-up, hair dressed, and exquisite in a black-and-emerald street frock just as Frank Pugh had his long black Pierce-Arrow brought up to the Hacienda’s front door.

‘I’ll be home before ten, I promise!’ Kitty squeezed Emma’s hands, and Mr Pugh smiled benignly. ‘I’m absolutely ruined … but I can’t pass up steak at the Brass Rail!’ She turned her head, raised eyes brimming with adoration upon her escort.

Personally, Emma doubted she’d see her errant sister-in-law much before midnight. She packed up dogs, astrology magazines, make-up, kimonos, and stray earrings in the grateful expectation of (at last!) a quiet evening, and was indeed able to complete scene sixty-five A (the saintly Demetrius whispering words of comfort to his mother and sisters in the dungeon) before Kitty returned at ten.

‘Honestly, it’s Darlene I’m going to murder one of these days, not Rex.’ Kitty unpinned her hat, shook out the storm cloud of her dark hair. ‘Filling Frank’s head with lies about me – after he let Darlene positively hang on him this afternoon, too! So unfair … Yes, darling, Mama’s home!’ She stooped to cuddle Black Jasmine, standing on his shaky little hind legs to gaze up in adoration into her face. ‘And did you see that gorgeous boy they’ve got working Wardrobe now? He must have eyelashes an inch long …’

After Kitty went up to bed, Emma stepped out onto the porch – for the third time that evening – thinking she had heard some sound in the street. Nothing stirred in the velvety darkness. In the leaves of the eucalyptus tree, the reflection of Kitty’s bedroom light went out. Silvery above the hills, the moon cast the street, and the yard, in blackest shadow. An army of bootleggers – or disgruntled cinema goddesses – could be hiding near the house …

Except, of course, the dogs would bark.

Emma smiled at the thought of them. Faithful little guardians …

She still checked every door and window three times, before she went to bed herself.

Lying in the darkness, she could not put from her mind the image of Rex Festraw’s body, lying on the dressing-room floor with rose petals strewn about him.

It’s no accident, she thought. No random event.

A man was killed, and killed for a reason. Brought out here from New York – specifically – and killed …

And Kitty knows more than she’s saying. Unless she really WAS with that saxophone player from the Grove …

But why not say so? Not to Mr Pugh or Mr Fishbein, of course, but …

A door creaked in the hall and she nearly startled out of her skin.

The soft tread of stockinged feet. A faint clatter of doggy toe-nails. Kitty’s whisper, ‘No, darlings, you can’t come with me – be good little cream cakes for Mama …’

Emma looked at her clock. Twelve thirty.

Moving soundlessly to the door, Emma saw her in the moonlight, in slip, stockings, and a softly-gleaming kimono. She almost stepped into the hall herself – What on EARTH are you doing up at this hour?

And the next second: She’ll lie.

And if she knows I know she’ll take more care next time …

Kitty tiptoed back into her room, carrying the lipstick and powder-box which she must have left in the smaller bathroom at the top of the stairs.

Emma swept her robe from across the foot of her bed, slipped it over her nightdress and padded in swift silence down the stairs to the telephone-niche in the lower hall.

She’s meeting him again. Whoever he is.

And if I can catch them, at least I’ll be able to make sure that she isn’t convicted of shooting Mr Festraw. And maybe I’ll learn something of who she’s screening. And why.

Kitty’s bedroom door had been left ajar, and by the faint trickle of light she could see to dial. Zal’s voice was sleepy but unsurprised. Presumably he got calls at this hour from the studio as well. ‘Yeah?’

‘Zal, it’s Emma,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry to wake you, but … Kitty’s going out. Secretly, without waking me. She came home early and pretended to go to sleep. I suspect she’s going to meet whoever it was she met Wednesday. She’s putting on her make-up now.’

‘The woman never disappoints me.’ The drowsiness vanished from Zal’s voice at once. ‘Don’t stop her. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

It was a good fifteen miles to Venice, where Zal lived, and in the daytimes, with automobile traffic and streetcars impeding one another at every intersection, Emma knew it could take upwards of twice that in Zal’s rickety Model-T.

But even before Kitty crept downstairs, shoes in hand, oblivious to her hastily-dressed sister-in-law sitting in the dark of the living room, Emma saw the flicker of headlights on Ivarene Street. A moment later she glimpsed the dark gleam as the Model-T turned itself around at the top of the drive: carefully. Ivarene was a narrow street, and without headlights it was little more than a slot of darkness between the close-crowding hills. A moment later she heard the slight rustle of silk and drew back further into the darkness of the curtains, as Kitty passed through the hall and into the kitchen, dressed again in emerald and black, diamonds winking on her heels.

The door of the kitchen clicked very softly. Emma at the same moment slipped through the front door, and made haste to cross the scruffy grass patch which Californians considered a lawn – though she knew it would take Kitty several minutes to get the garage open, and more if Mr Shang heard her and came out to inquire. Zal met her halfway down the rough, pebbly slope that led up to the road, and helped her up with surprising strength.

In the stillness, the sound of the Packard starting up sounded like a salvo of cannon-fire.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered as he opened the Tin Lizzie’s door for her in the darkness of a neighboring drive.

‘Don’t thank me, I’m dying to find out what the hell she’s really up to. If we can track down the forged notes, that’s the only thing Meyer really has on her, you know.’

‘I know,’ Emma whispered. ‘And it’s one of the things that keeps me from thinking this is all just some plot of Miss Golden’s, you know. Not that she was lured away – but that she won’t say where she was. You don’t think she could be mixed up in something like … like smuggling, do you? Trafficking in opium or something?’

‘If I was running dope I wouldn’t trust Kitty to hang onto so much as a reefer. She’d either lose it in her handbag, or give it away to one of her mah jong buddies. Besides, this is Los Angeles. Meyer himself may be bringing in hop by the wheelbarrow load. There she goes.’ He let in the clutch, but didn’t turn on the lights. It was a half-mile down Ivarene Street to Vine, the moon sufficiently bright (Emma hoped) to keep Zal from driving over the steep side of the road. The streets were deserted at this hour, and the big yellow Packard was easy to follow, up through the rough-pelted dark bulk of the hills, then along Ventura Boulevard past small shops and a golf course, the indigo emptiness of the orchards and bean fields and the far-off glitter of lights where a housing development huddled in the darkness.

Then hills again, and deeper dark. Kitty put her car full-pelt up swooping curves of backbone ridges, heading towards the sea. Now and then the headlights of another car flashed in the Ford’s rear-vision mirror, or glared yellow coming toward them – traveling every bit as fast as Kitty was, Emma thought – and then roaring past them and zooming away to the east.

It was faster than she’d ever traveled in a car before – and felt faster still with the lights off. But the full moon was bright, and she felt no fear. Zal was a good driver – better than she’d known, having only ridden with him in the streets of Hollywood and Los Angeles. And the moonlight on the hills, silver where it stippled the chaparral and cosmos-deep Prussian blue before it graded into the velvet of shadow in the gullies, had a magic for her, a sort of heart-shaking amazement that such a place, such a rolling wildness, existed only a few miles from places like Frannie’s drugstore.

The silence was like the breath of the universe, overlaid with the muted road noise of the tires. The red lights of Kitty’s car ran before them, fugitive willy-wisps. The smell of the sage-brush was like song.

And then the sea. She’d seen it in daytime, never at night. Sapphire endlessness, threaded white where the moon was going over from zenith. Black islands floated in a blue-black world indescribable. Peace seized her heart and made her want to weep.

She looked north where the road wound to infinity along the ocean’s hem and said, ‘There …’

Gold lights, tiny with distance, following the road.

Zal said, ‘Sycamore Canyon’s a couple miles up. There’s a roadhouse about a mile in. The City Hall Gang used to run it as a speakeasy, but it got flooded out last year – it’s right on top of the wash there. Bet me that’s where she’s headed.’ He slowed, and steered the little car carefully now down the twists of the road as it descended to the highway. ‘Must be some affaire,’ he added.

They passed one or two turn-offs into other canyons, moon-drenched for their first hundred yards and then black with shadow. Headlights overtook them, roared past and were gone. The world was an emptiness of hills and sea, waves running up to the drop just beyond the western edge of the road. A thread of starlight touched the side of Zal’s glasses. It crossed Emma’s mind to say, Can we just keep driving? Kitty can find her own way home … and she wondered where those words had come from, or where they might have gone, had they been uttered. Whoever Kitty was shielding – or whatever Kitty had been up to last Wednesday afternoon for two hours – unless that was cleared, there was no telling what a jury would think.

Particularly if members of the jury listened to the Pettingers’ radio program on Friday evenings.

Or if Frank Pugh happened to have read that rumor-column in Photo Play last month …

Just before the road crossed the outlet of a stream on a white-painted wooden bridge, a dirt road turned off into a canyon. The stream didn’t look like much – certainly not powerful enough to destroy a speakeasy, Emma thought – but her father had often spoken of how inconspicuous little watercourses like that one could swell unexpectedly to deadly torrents.

Moonlight glinted on flowing silk, smooth round stones. Zal guided the car with slow care over the unpaved surface. Pewter moonlight edged shadows deeper than death.

And there, sitting in the middle of the road, was the Packard. On the other side of the stream, where the shadows of the hills lay black, a broken sprawl of timbers spewed down the hillside into the stream, beside the remains of a rickety wooden stair.

At the top, in the cock-eyed remains of half a building, lantern-light gleamed.

TWELVE

When Zal helped Emma down the shallow bank to cross the stream, Emma could see, parked ahead of Kitty’s yellow Packard, another car, sleek and new and flashy and black, nearly hidden by the shadows of the canyon and the trees. The stream ran noisily over a succession of small waterfalls to her right, where the canyon wound inland. Rocks ranging in size from that of an orange to that of a washtub cluttered the stream-bed, and by the moonlight Emma picked her way across more or less dry-shod, guided by Zal’s steadying grip. With a hand on her waist as they approached the ruined house, he moved her gently to one side, so that she climbed the wooden steps close to the beam that supported them, almost in silence. They crossed the broken boards of what had been a sort of terrace above the stream – it still contained a couple of dilapidated tables and a kitchen chair, much the worse for weather – and she heard Kitty’s sweet, almost childlike voice inside the house.

‘This is all the money I could get together. I hope it’s enough.’

As Zal was reaching for the handle of the twisted door a chair scraped sharply, and a man said, ‘What’s that?’

And Kitty: ‘Oh, shit—’

Zal pushed open the door and stepped inside. And, Emma noticed, dodged quickly to the right …

One man had half-risen from the rustic table that was all that could be seen of the room in the yellow glow of a hurricane lamp that had been set on it. Emma had an impression of burly strength, like an overweight bear, and a long-chinned, slightly crooked face behind horn-rimmed glasses. Across the table from him stood Kitty, next to probably the most beautiful young man Emma had ever seen.

Between them on the table was Kitty’s small, suede handbag, a paper sack, and a couple of crumpled packets of bills.

Kitty squeaked, ‘Zal!’ and caught the wrist of the beautiful young man as he would have made a move to dash back into the shadows of the broken room. ‘It’s all right,’ she added to the young man. ‘Zal’s all right—’

‘You’re sure?’ Panic showed in the gleam of white, all around those dark pupils. ‘He’s had me followed—’

‘Oh, utterly, Eliot! I’ve known Zal for just years … Emma!’ she exclaimed, catching sight of her sister-in-law, still in the doorway. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Trying to learn what you’re doing here,’ Emma replied. ‘I take it,’ she added, looking across at Kitty’s companion, ‘that this is the gentleman with whom you actually spent the time when you were supposedly murdering Mr Festraw?’

‘I didn’t!’ Kitty almost stamped her foot in vexation, and Zal stepped closer to the table, and held out his hand.

‘Jordan,’ he said to the young man. ‘I’m Zal Rokatansky, one of the cameramen at Foremost. I think we worked together on The Devil’s Wedding.’

After a moment’s hesitation, Eliot Jordan came around the table and accepted his grip. In the lantern-light Emma read even more clearly the fear in that exquisitely-boned, painfully youthful face; the desperation that stiffened the Greek god shoulders. The burly man moved to stand beside the young actor, with a protectiveness that chimed in Emma’s mind like a bell.

‘Eliot was just telling me,’ said Kitty, ‘that he never sent me that note! And I waited for him in the filmstock room for nearly two hours—’

‘Was that where you were?’ asked Emma.

Kitty nodded. ‘I have a key. Pretty much everybody on the lot has keys.’

Including Taffy the Bootlegger, I suppose …

‘I never sent a note, Mrs Blackstone.’ Jordan’s voice was a youthful, rather scratchy tenor. No older than some of the boys she’d taken to hospital from the train station, she thought. He should still be in school!

‘I was just telling Kitty. And I wouldn’t have done it anyway. I know better than to go anywhere near Foremost these days. Mr Jesperson would have my head. He’s got me under a personal services contract …’

‘But I got a note from Eliot – or supposedly from Eliot,’ Kitty amended, ‘Wednesday morning, saying he just had to see me, that it was urgent. Well, we’d talked about him leaving Hollywood – why he has to leave Hollywood – and I thought it was about that. I hoped I was mistaken,’ she added, with a sidelong glance of mischief at the youth’s face in the lantern-light, ‘and that he’d been suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to make passionate love to me …’

Eliot ducked his head and laughed as if in spite of himself, and his bulky companion’s grimness melted, suddenly, into a swift, disarmed – and surprisingly beautiful – grin.

‘But I thought it was just about money.’

‘It’s all these movie stars ever want,’ sighed the burly man, shaking his head. He held out his hand to Zal, said, ‘Ricky Lyman.’ He had a baritone as comforting as the scent of well-made coffee. ‘I work in the accounting department at Enterprise.’ He shook hands with Zal, then clasped Emma’s fingers in a light, courtly grip, almost as if he’d bend to kiss them.

‘This money?’ Zal nodded at the bills on the table.

Eliot Jordan raised his chin a little, said, ‘Kitty agreed to help us – me,’ he corrected himself quickly. ‘Help me. I have to get out of Hollywood – get out of California. I haven’t done anything – anything evil,’ he added. ‘But I can’t … Mr Jesperson, the owner of Enterprise, has … threatened me. And threatened me with legal action if I try to quit the studio. It’s … not something I can take to court.’

Emma’s glance went from the young actor’s face to that of the overweight, bespectacled young accountant who stood at his elbow, who watched him with such anxious caring, the whole of his heart in his eyes. ‘Eliot’s most recent picture made three hundred thousand at the box office in three months,’ Lyman said after a moment. ‘If you’ve met Mr Jesperson, Mrs Blackstone – I know you have, Zal – I think you’ll understand why Eliot would want to leave the studio. I’ve tried to talk him out of it – our employer may be the reincarnation of a rabid hyena but he’s right when he says that Eliot will be the next Valentino. I don’t think that’s something he should throw away—’

Eliot said softly, ‘I can’t.’ He moved his hand back, without turning his head to look, and grasped Lyman’s hand. The reassuring strength with which the pressure was returned confirmed Emma’s conviction of what was going on – between these two young men, and the studio head who wanted to shape the publicity for Eliot Jordan’s career. She wanted to ask, Did he order you to marry one of his female stars? but knew that wasn’t a thing that could be spoken of.

What existed between these two men was against the law. Lou Jesperson going to the police with it would not only end his new leading man’s career, it could easily result in both men being jailed.

Jordan said, ‘We’re going to Oregon. Ricky and I. I have some land up near Eugene, in the mountains …’ He moved his hand, to silence something Lyman would have said. ‘It was my grandpa’s. But Jesperson’s had a PI on my tail for a week now, ever since we finished shooting Who’s Her Man? He’s vindictive. He gave me an ultimatum.’ He shook his head.

‘And I got this note on Wednesday morning,’ put in Kitty. ‘Saying Eliot had to see me, right away, that it was urgent, and to meet him in the filmstock storeroom at two. I took Buttercreme with me because I knew Madge would give birth to a litter of kittens if I just disappeared. I waited nearly two hours, and when I tried to phone Eliot Thursday he couldn’t answer. So I couldn’t very well say anything, really, because it would all come out in the fan magazines, you know, and Jesperson, the old pig, would hear of it. I can’t imagine how Peggy manages to sleep with him!’

‘Kitty,’ admonished Lyman gently, ‘that’s really a very unkind thing to say about pigs.’

‘Do you have the note?’ asked Emma.

‘Oh, gosh, no! I tore it up and flushed it down the toilet behind the extras’ dressing room. You never know who’s lurking around in that studio. That’s the kind of thing Thelma Turnbit, the nasty old shrew, would love to get her hands on, or that tattletale who writes the column in Photo Play. And I mean, if bootleggers or one of Rex’s other ex-wives or Gloria Swanson or someone—’

‘Gloria Swanson?’ said Lyman, startled.

‘If one of them could manage to sneak onto the lot and kill Rex in my dressing room, they’d for sure steal a love note from Eliot.’

‘Why would Gloria Swanson want to murder your ex-husband, Kitty?’

‘Did it look like his handwriting?’ asked Zal.

Kitty frowned. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen your handwriting, Eliot. It was on Enterprise Studios notepaper. But anyway,’ she went on, ‘Eliot met me at the Café Montmartre Thursday night when I was there with Frank – that was when I saw Gloria come in wearing those gorgeous earrings … Eliot slipped me a note by one of the waiters, and we met by the telephones at the back just for a second, and he said, he and Ricky had to leave, soon, tonight, and could I help them? Because he knows Jesperson is going to sue him and have him prosecuted for breach of contract if he leaves, so he can’t really touch his bank account. But they have to get away before Mr Jesperson makes him marry that awful bitch Desiree Darrow … And I said I’d help them. And Jesperson’s going to have a stroke,’ she finished triumphantly, ‘when he hears Eliot is gone. I’ll clip out the obituary and send it to you,’ she promised, with a dazzling smile.

Eliot smiled down at her – the top of her head barely reached his shoulder. ‘Kitty, if you could cook,’ he said softly, ‘I’d marry you.’

Ricky Lyman took her hand, and pressed his lips to her fingers. ‘And I’d marry you, too.’

‘Don’t even talk to me,’ wailed Kitty, ‘about marrying anyone—’

‘It would solve your problem with Jesperson,’ pointed out Zal, and Emma poked him in the ribs.

‘Brute! I’m sorry,’ she added, turning to the two lovers. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude on your personal affairs, but it’s Kitty’s refusal to say anything about where she was last Wednesday afternoon that has gotten her into trouble. I felt … Well, I’m afraid I felt that we had to at least find out a bit more of who she was screening, and why – though of course everything that has been said here tonight will go no farther.’

‘Kitty,’ began Eliot, reaching for her hand, and Emma shook her head.

‘What you’ve told me tonight,’ she said, ‘has helped us, really. I mean, the police won’t believe the faked note no matter who it was supposed to be from. But the fact that someone faked it tells us that … Well, that someone is going to a great deal of trouble to have Kitty accused of the murder, but that they’re going about it very stupidly. Too stupidly for it to be a serious attempt.’

Eliot said, ‘Hunh?’ and Ricky Lyman nodded.

‘You mean someone wants her accused real good, but not convicted.’

‘Yes,’ said Emma softly.

Zal cocked his head to one side. ‘You mean it’s a publicity stunt.’

‘I …’ She hesitated. ‘To do murder – to kill a man—’

‘We don’t know,’ pointed out Zal, ‘whether Festraw hit up Pugh for money before Festraw even got onto the lot. We don’t know what, exactly, Festraw had on Kitty.’

‘I don’t know what he could have had,’ protested Kitty. ‘Well, other than my birthdate …’

‘Festraw might not even have been telling the truth,’ said Zal. ‘And if you don’t think Frank Pugh is capable of murder … Think again.’

‘And Darlene was just trying to make what she could of the situation last night,’ said Kitty slowly. ‘But … Frank doesn’t know about me and Eliot. I mean, about me being passionately in love with Eliot—’

‘Are you sure about that?’ asked Emma thoughtfully. ‘Might rumors of it have surfaced somewhere, like that Photo Play story about you and Mr Crain? Might this be an effort to punish you, for instance? And Miss Golden is certainly doing what she can to exacerbate his jealousy. Jealousy is the only thing I can think of, that would cause him to do something this stupid.’

There was silence, during which the silvery clucking of the stream outside sounded very loud.

‘And it is stupid,’ agreed Zal after a moment. ‘It’s always stupid, to bring the cops into anything, especially in LA. It’s always stupid to bring anything to trial. Particularly now, with the Hays Office snorting brimstone all around the town and people like the Pettingers hollerin’ about Sodom and Gomorrah. Roscoe Arbuckle was acquitted – acquitted – of raping that girl in San Francisco, and these days he can’t even get work as an extra in this town. The fans may think you being accused of a crime of passion is glamorous and romantic, but any DA – any judge – in LA would just love to make headlines for convicting a movie star of anything, much less something spectacular like murdering her husband. Frank’s too smart not to know that once something goes to trial, things can turn on a dime. He may think Kitty deserves a scare for making goo-goo eyes at you, Eliot … but I don’t think he’s stupid enough to risk a picture, or a big-name star, on it.’

‘That just shows you’ve never talked to some of the men I’ve dated,’ remarked Kitty. ‘They get jealous, they start thinking with their little brain, not their big one. If they have a big one.’

She turned, and held out her hands to Eliot and his friend. ‘Send me a letter when you get to Oregon,’ she said, her smile sudden and dazzling. ‘I’ll write to you when we find out who’s really behind this, though I’ll just bet it’s Frank … Or at least, I’m so terrible at writing, it’ll probably be Emma who’ll write first, but I will really write, too. Ricky …’

She stepped close, and the big man gathered her up in his arms, hugging her with such affection as to lift her off her feet. When he set her down she turned to Eliot, who asked her softly, ‘Would you like a mad, passionate kiss, or a real one?’

Kitty’s smile was suddenly soft. ‘A real one,’ she said.

He framed her face in gentle hands, and kissed her forehead. ‘You’re a good friend,’ he said. ‘Thank you. More than I can say.’

THIRTEEN

‘You want to be careful getting out of here,’ said Zal quietly, as they descended the steps and picked their way across the narrow stream. ‘I thought a couple of times there might have been somebody following us.’

‘Why would they follow you?’ asked Ricky. ‘I could understand Jesperson’s dogs following us … How would they even know about you?’

‘I don’t know who knows what about who,’ said Zal. ‘I just … and I may be completely wrong. Depends on if this really is a publicity stunt. Or what Lou Jesperson might be up to.’

Ricky and Eliot stationed themselves on the rocks above the narrow stream, Eliot holding the hurricane-lantern high. By its light Zal backed his Ford around where the stream widened and shallowed below the old nightclub, and into a flat spot which Emma guessed had been used for a carpark in the building’s livelier days. ‘The thing we do not need,’ he said, easing the little vehicle backwards up the gentle slope, ‘is a puncture. I’m amazed we didn’t get one on the way here, the way Kitty was driving—’

Under Ricky’s guidance, Kitty maneuvered the Packard down through the stream after them, turning more sharply and pointing its long nose back down the canyon road to the highway, dimly glimpsed in the moonlight beyond. ‘You want to ride with me back to Kitty’s?’ asked Zal, glasses flashing in the reflected headlamps as he cut the wheels around.

‘If you live in Venice,’ protested Emma, ‘you can get home from the highway—’

‘It’s no bother,’ he said.

He has to be on the set at six tomorrow morning … THIS morning …

He came only to help me. To help Kitty.

‘Are you all right?’ He waved to Kitty, and the Packard roared away like the proverbial bat out of hell. ‘I keep asking you that.’

As Zal, much more sedately, guided the Ford back onto the road Emma looked back, and saw Ricky put an arm around Eliot’s shoulders as the two men walked into the shadows to Eliot’s car.

A long drive in the sinking moonlight, she thought, along that black-sapphire sea. North to Oregon, hundreds of miles, endless …

‘I have some land up near Eugene …’

She said, ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Anything I can help with? “No, I’d rather not talk about it”, is a perfectly acceptable answer.’

‘I don’t think it’s anything you can help with,’ she said after a time. ‘I got a letter Wednesday from my Aunt Estelle, the only one of my family to have survived the influenza. She’ll be coming through Los Angeles on the thirtieth, on her way back from India – her husband is a senior clerk at the consulate in Delhi. Was, I should say. He’s gotten a posting in England, and they’re returning to Oxford. She’s offered to take me back with them, and give me a home there.’

He was a dark shape in the dark car, the headlights two slanted cones on the pavement ahead. A silver glint on the corner of his glasses. ‘You going to take her up on it?’

‘I don’t know.’ It was enormous relief only to say it. To say it to him.

After a long time he said in a quieter voice, ‘I know you miss it.’

‘I miss the life I led there, yes,’ she agreed softly. ‘I miss the quiet …’

But this place – this stillness, driving along the moon-fringed sea – was quiet, a silence different, but just as deep as the mists on the Cherwell. Just as heart-healing.

She went on, a little hesitantly, ‘I miss working at something I love. Having … a purpose in life, beyond looking after Kitty’s dogs. Being around people who understand why I’d even want such a thing. People who understand the hunt for what really happened, the piecing-together of puzzles from manuscripts and old poems and bits of pots and tombs.’

Zal said, ‘I know. I worked for three years in a paint factory, after my dad died, just so my mom and sister would have a roof over their heads. The whole time I felt like – I don’t know, like I’d been shut into an iron maiden. Or like I’d been transported to another planet, where nobody understood about light, and texture, and how things look …’ He shook his head, his eyes on the road unspooling before them. ‘The worst of it was not knowing if I’d ever be able to get out. I used to have nightmares about that. About waking up old, and still being there.’

Stillness for a time, and the whisper of the tires on asphalt. The blue-black infinity of the sea.

She asked softly, ‘Are you happy now?’

‘I am.’ She could hear the smile in his voice. ‘Happy now in 1924, and happy now this minute.’ And, quieter: ‘Will you be able to go back to your studies there?’

‘I think so. In Oxford, at least. I’d wanted to study in Paris, but Father needed me. So I read History at Somerville, which I could walk to from home. I loved the work, but … I did feel as if I’d been trapped. It was one reason I’d wanted to go to Paris. But of course it was for the best, because of the War. A lot of people had a hard time getting out, the Germans invaded so suddenly. And it was my father, who was training me to be an archaeologist. So when I married Jim I felt … Oh, like I was running away with the gypsies. He said we’d live in the United States – he’d been offered a job with an architect’s firm in New York, so that’s where we’d be living. He loved New York. I felt terrible, as if I were betraying my father, but Father said, “You must go, of course. Whatever will make you happy.”’

‘You were lucky.’

There was a note in his voice that made her glance quickly sidelong at him, but his gaze was on the road ahead. In time she went on, ‘Working with Father – studying classics and Latin and Greek, and getting ready to go on a dig with him – it was odd for most girls, I suppose. But among the dons and scholars at Oxford it felt … well, very usual. Expected, in a way. On a dig, one would take camp-baths and clean linen and one’s cook and a change of clothes to dress properly for dinner. Some people took their valets. With Jim, I felt like gates were opening up before me, into a new land, a new life, something I’d never done before. Never dreamt, never even thought about.’

With someone I loved …

Even now her hands ached for the light strength of his grip.

‘And now you have run away with the gypsies,’ said Zal, his voice gentle. ‘You think you’ll be able to live with Aunt Estelle?’

‘Oh, yes. She’s Mother’s older sister, and I always found her a little prudish and stuffy. But like Mother, she’s a great believer in letting people live their own lives. And her husband is a dear. To look at him, you’d think he’d been mummified in pipe tobacco for a hundred years, but he’s kind, and always trying to be helpful. He’s deeply involved in the Church – I think he’s an advertisement for all that’s best about Christianity. And he collects all sorts of things from India, picture-scrolls and ceremonial dishes and musical instruments. And I’m … I’m tired,’ she confessed. ‘When I thought of New York, I thought of being there with Jim. With someone to share things with, someone I could go to, if there was a problem. I never thought I’d be trying to make my own living in a foreign country, on my own.’

‘Are you happy here?’

Am I happy here?

The moon on the sea, where it frothed silver on the rocks, forty feet below the road. The stillness of the dry hills they’d come through. An alien planet, an alien land. The strength of his arms the night he’d asked, Do you want me to stay?

Had the nymph Calypso asked Odysseus, Are you happy? finding him alone on the cliffs of her island, looking towards Ithaca?

She opened her lips to say, Sometimes … or maybe to say, Yes … but suddenly there was a dark rushing shape and a roar of tires and Zal yelled, ‘Shit!’ and swung the wheel as a lightless car, bigger than the Ford and faster, whooshed up beside them and cut hard into their side.

Zal hit the brake in the instant that the other car swerved toward them, so that the impact was barely a clip on the left side of the hood. Then he whipped the wheel around again, trying to swing past on the left. Their attacker gunned his engine, the bellow of far more power than the Ford could boast, and slammed them toward the cliff that rose on the land side of the highway. Emma grabbed the hand-strap beside the door, heart pounding as Zal braked again, shoved the car into reverse to pull clear, though she guessed there was no way they’d be able to escape the bigger vehicle. The Model-T lurched in a way that told her, tire puncture, tipped over into the ditch that separated highway from landward cliff and the next instant bashed diagonally into the cliff itself. The other car stopped and she saw the bulky shape of a man framed beside its driver-side door.

Saw the glint of steel in his hand.

Saw the glint of steel because headlights were roaring towards them from the south, at what Themistocles of Athens would have termed ramming speed. The man in the attacking car fired at the Model-T, and the glass of the window behind Emma’s head exploded in a torrent of shards. The oncoming headlights swelled and the attacker ducked down and into his own vehicle. It pulled back and roared away north only feet in front of Kitty’s yellow Packard, whose headlight-glare showed that it lacked a rear license-plate, and that its curved rump was dark-green with the black shape of a tire on it, and a boxy cabin beyond.

The Packard screeched to a stop and Kitty sprang out, stumbling in her diamanté heels as she ran towards them (ONLY Kitty would wear shoes like that on an expedition to meet someone in a ruined roadhouse up a canyon …).

‘Darling!’ she gasped. ‘Darling, are you all right?’

Zal had already cut the engine. He scrambled out and was coming around to help Emma, should she need it, when she pulled herself out by the sides of the door. Her legs shook so badly she nearly fell. ‘I’m all right,’ she managed to say, as Zal caught her elbow. ‘I’m not hurt …’

A few bits of glass clinked from the sleeve of her jumper. She felt something warm on her face near her ear and wiped at it, wincing as her fingers caught another splinter of glass. It was big, she pulled it free …

He shot at us. He was trying to kill us …

‘Darling, what happened? Who was that?’

‘Tell me and we’ll both know,’ said Zal grimly. His hand on Emma’s arm was perfectly steady, but the next second he pulled her to him, clutched her hard against his body for an instant. His grip was like a gasped cry: You’re alive. You’re alive …

‘I realized I could just as easily get back to Hollywood through Venice as I could over the Pass,’ Kitty gabbled. ‘I was going to let you catch up and ask Emma, did she want to leave you at your house and come back home with me. Then I saw this car try to hit you—’

‘I thought somebody might have been following us.’ Zal kept his steadying hold on Emma’s arm as he led her back towards Kitty’s car. ‘But pretty much nobody ever drives out that way, not on a Saturday night. And who the hell would be following Kitty? Other than us.’

‘This isn’t just jealousy.’ Emma sank into the velvety squabs of the Packard’s upholstery, trembling now as if the mild spring night had turned arctic. Kitty produced a silver flask from her glovebox and Zal opened it, and passed it to Emma. It was very high-quality gin.

Courtesy of Mr Cornero, I suppose …

‘And it isn’t a publicity play …’

‘He’s insane,’ said Kitty unsteadily. ‘Frank. Oh, God …’

‘If it is Frank.’ Emma thought of his eyes, of the cold fury as he’d pulled out into traffic on Sunset Boulevard. Of Darlene’s attempts to stir up just that emotion in him …

‘Rex got that way, sometimes.’ Kitty shivered. ‘Really, literally crazy with jealousy. But he’d be cold in everything else, like Frank. He’d lie, and get very, very clever about his lies. You can’t reason with them when they’re like that, or expect them to be thinking reasonably.’

‘You get a look at the car at all?’ Zal handed the flask back to Kitty after taking another swig himself.

Kitty shook her head. ‘I think it was a coupe …’

‘Chrysler coupe,’ he agreed. ‘I didn’t see the plates.’

‘There weren’t any,’ said Emma. ‘At least not on the back. But the car was dark green. And I’m pretty sure the driver was alone.’

‘Why pretty sure?’ Zal slid into the back seat; Kitty polished off the gin in the flask, lit a cigarette, and pressed the self-starter. The big engine rumbled into life like a dragon purring.

‘It was the driver who shot at us. If there’d been anyone else in the car, I should imagine the driver would have stayed at the wheel, ready to escape. Thank you.’ She turned her head, to Kitty’s profile outlined against the reflection of the headlamp glow. ‘You saved our lives.’

That’s twice, she thought, Kitty has saved my life. Once from violent death, once from a slow one …

‘I’m just sorry this bus isn’t equipped with a Maxim gun.’ Kitty’s voice was suddenly hard as flint. ‘And if that was Frank …’

‘We have no idea who it was,’ said Emma firmly. ‘But I think it might be a good idea to speak to Mr Cornero again, and see what advice he has to give on the subject of murder.’

And then, between exhaustion and shock and not enough sleep the night before, she burst into tears.

FOURTEEN

The Bel Giardino Club stood a few blocks from Chaplin Studios, a two-and-a-half story building of brick with a stucco arcade nearly hidden behind a blazing wall of pink-and-turquoise neon. Helped from the back seat of Ambrose Crain’s Hispano-Suiza, Emma had an impression of shop-windows behind the arcade on the ground floor. Dark now – it was nearly ten o’clock Sunday night – they seemed darker still against the vivid hell-mouth glow of the club’s open doorway.

Emma wondered if bootleggers – even good Italian Catholic ones – respected the Fourth Commandment. Film producers, at least, did not, particularly film producers whose pictures were half a week behind schedule and required rental elephants. She hoped that Kitty – who had been at the studio since seven that morning – and Zal, who had been there since five – wouldn’t have too grueling a night when rioting mobs stormed Nero’s palace.

A doorman who resembled a tractor in a bellboy’s uniform bowed as Mr Crain entered, with Emma on his arm. The wide hall just within was carpeted in crimson and ablaze with light-bulbs, and a doll-faced young woman behind a counter, wearing far too much eye-paint and far too little clothing, took the sable stole that Kitty had lent Emma for the occasion (‘Darling, you CAN’T go to a nightclub wearing that tweed thing of yours!’). Mr Crain surrendered his very handsome vicuña topcoat and silk hat at the same time, and inclined his head approvingly at the sight of Emma’s dress. (‘I had Mary Pickford pick it out for you, dearest,’ Kitty had explained, when the box was delivered to her dressing room that afternoon. ‘She has the best taste of anyone I know!’) The midnight blue silk, stitched with black and silver beading, had taken Emma’s breath away.

It was the first evening dress she’d had in ten years. The first new garment she’d had in seven. ‘Kitty—!’ she had protested, and her sister-in-law – refreshing the pallid yellow camera make-up and resplendent in yet another ensemble of the exiguous gauze that seemed to be standard daywear for ladies in Babylon – had waved her words aside.

‘If Ambrose is taking you hunting bootleggers all around the nightclubs tonight you can’t go dressed like somebody’s maiden aunt.’

‘Before I met Kitty,’ confided Ambrose Crain, when arrangements had been confirmed over the telephone, ‘it had been quite twenty years since I’d gone to nightclubs. I shall feel quite the dog, turning up at one with another woman!’

Will I turn up in Photo Play now as well? she had wondered.

Now, surveying her dress in the garish lobby, he murmured, ‘Exquisite, Mrs Blackstone,’ and once again offered her his arm. ‘A privilege as well as a joy to be seen with you.’ He led her up the stairs to the nightclub above.

In a well-fitting but elderly tuxedo, the old millionaire looked almost dapper himself. With a tingling delight which almost distracted her from her apprehension, Emma looked around her. When she’d told Zal – over a hasty commissary lunch – of the evening’s plans, she’d answered his query, ‘At heart, I know nobody’s going to try to murder me in a nightclub. Not when I’m with someone like Mr Crain. And if Tony Cornero wanted to murder me he’d have done so the other night, wouldn’t he? I’ll be quite all right.’

She almost believed this.

During that conversation, Madge had already been bellowing for Kitty and the cameras, so Zal could only take Emma’s hands and kiss her quickly on the lips. ‘Wish I was there tonight instead of at Caesar’s joint,’ he’d said. Emma had gone to help Kitty out of her kimono and to make notes of the changes Madge had made in the preceding scene, which would involve an alteration of tomorrow’s dialog (altered twice already to account for the disappearance of the Soothsayer).

She’d taken the dogs home by cab, fed them, bathed and made herself up simply, and inserted half a paragraph and three title-cards which explained the sudden reappearance of the commander of Nero’s bodyguard as well (last seen falling into the lions’ den in scene twenty-one). As she dressed, she felt obliquely glad to know that old Mr Shang and his wife were down in the cottage behind the house, even though that antediluvian couple would have been of no assistance whatsoever had the owner of the dark-green Chrysler turned up on the doorstep with a gun. Her heart beating swiftly, she’d had a few minutes to wait before the headlights of Mr Crain’s Hispano-Suiza had zig-zagged down the drive, to reflect that this was the first time in six years that she’d ‘put on the dog’, as Jim had termed it. That she’d dressed up to go dancing.

The last time had been the sixth of May, 1918. Almost exactly, she thought, six years. It had been Jim’s last night in London, before returning to the Front. The last time they’d danced together, joked together. The last time she’d gone to sleep with the soft smoothness of his skin beneath her cheek. The following morning, May seventh, just before dawn, had been the last time they’d made love.

Four weeks later, he was dead.

As she’d heard the car stop at the bottom of the drive, heard the chauffeur’s door open and then the door of the back seat, she’d whispered, ‘Oh, Jim. I’m sorry.’

But the echo of his voice that she’d heard in her heart had been light: For God’s sake, Em, don’t be sorry! He had had, in his way, a spirit as eager for enjoyment as his sister’s. Have some champagne for me!

He knew, she thought, that she’d still be with him if she could.

So when the maitre d’ took them to a table that bordered the dancefloor and Mr Crain asked, ‘Would you like something to drink, Mrs Blackstone? I understand the drinks here are first-class,’ she had said, ‘Champagne, please.’

‘Your best,’ instructed the old millionaire quietly, and Emma smiled.

Jim had loved good champagne.

To the maitre d’, she’d murmured, ‘Is Mr Cornero here this evening? My name is Mrs Blackstone; he said that I might be able to find him here.’

‘Mrs Blackstone.’ The man bowed, small and sleek in a Latin-lover way but exquisitely polite. He’d clearly heard her name before. ‘Mr Cornero should be here at about eleven, m’am. Would you care to wait? Drinks are on the house.’

She glanced across at Mr Crain, who nodded. ‘I’ve been drinking bootleg cocktails for a year in Kitty’s company,’ he whispered, as the maitre d’ retreated in the direction of the bar. ‘But this is the first time I shall make the acquaintance of a gangster. I must say, I’m quite tickled – though of course,’ he added more seriously, ‘I am shocked, and concerned, at the circumstances. I’ve asked Mr Hwang’ – that was his chauffeur – ‘to remain in the building after he’s parked the car. He’ll be downstairs in the hall, in case of – well – need.’

And Emma smiled again, and told him what she’d said to Zal that afternoon. ‘I truly don’t think what happened last night has anything to do with Mr Cornero. If he’d wanted to harm any of us, he had plenty of opportunity to do it Thursday night. But somebody means us harm – Mr Rokatansky and myself. And I can only assume it’s because of whatever it is that’s going on with Kitty. Whatever it is.’ She spread her hands. ‘You wouldn’t have any idea – any thought of any possibility …?’

‘I have cudgeled my brains, Mrs Blackstone,’ said the old man, with a helpless gesture. ‘And Kitty – well, she doesn’t often talk about herself, does she? It’s as if she lets go of her past, in her eagerness to run on ahead and see what the future holds.’

‘That’s as good a description of her as I’ve ever heard, sir.’

His answering smile, and the movement of his fingers, brushed the compliment aside. ‘It’s a quality I wish I shared,’ he said. ‘Are you familiar with Cafavy’s poem “Ithaca”? I forget how it goes, exactly: That Ithaca will not make you rich; it’s the road that makes you rich.’ His breath escaped him in a little sigh. ‘I think that’s how Kitty sees life.

‘I wish I could. Even now I find myself entangled in the past, like my poor son, who hasn’t ventured off Long Island in fifteen years. He’ll go into New York, but I doubt he’s even been as far afield as Connecticut. He has our money – my money, actually – and he’s going to stay home and cultivate what’s there like a potato-patch. My wife – my ex-wife,’ he corrected, a trifle stiffly, ‘does not travel, and doesn’t want him to. Sometimes I think they both think it’s still 1910. And I find myself preoccupied by things I did wrong, or should have done differently. Wanting to go back and make things be the way I think they should have been.’

His smile was rueful and a little sad. ‘Do you do that, Mrs Blackstone? Want to go back as Kitty does on the filmset, and do a second “take” because she tripped or turned the wrong way, or because someone had left a coffee cup on the arm of the throne?’

‘Sometimes,’ said Emma softly. ‘Do you think one can do it, sir? Go back and do another take?’

The kindly gray eyes rested on her for a moment, as if trying to see what lay behind the words. ‘I should like to think one could,’ he replied slowly, then nodded friendly thanks to the waitress who set two glasses on the table, a single-malt scotch, and her champagne, and slipped a dollar bill onto the woman’s tray. ‘But it’s never exactly the same situation, is it? Faced with the identical situation, and given the same information with which to meet it as we had before, would we not make the same decision?’

For a moment she was back in that lingerie shop in Regent’s Arcade, where a tall young man in an American uniform was looking around him in bemused bafflement. The street outside had been full of young men in American uniforms, tall and robust, healthy as the English, after a year and more of food shortages, had ceased to be. When his eyes had met hers, she’d smiled. It was her smile, she thought, as well as her VAD uniform, that had given him permission to come over to her, to ask, Excuse me, miss, but could you help me pick something out for my sister …?

Her mother, and the governess she’d had as a child, would both have cut off the exchange before the smile, let alone before she could say, ‘Yes, of course …’ She recalled she’d felt a little shocked at herself for speaking to the young man.

Had he met her eyes because she’d worn her blue-and-white uniform that afternoon? Would things have been different if she hadn’t?

Where did these things start, anyway?

Or did it matter?

The memory made her glance aside from her companion, and across the dancefloor she saw, with a start of surprise, Colt Madison, his hair now tar-black and shining with brilliantine. He was in evening dress and wore the least-convincing Van Dyke and monocle this side of Millie Katz’s Wardrobe counter …

Their eyes met for a startled moment. Then Emma saw the petite, delicate, and unmistakable figure of Gloria Swanson a few yards away, glittering like a jewel-crusted stiletto as her escort – a French nobleman whom Emma had encountered at Frank Pugh’s Christmas Party the previous December – bowed her into her chair.

Good heavens, is he still sleuthing after the other women in that silly competition?

After last night the hypothesis seemed absurd – Even if it WAS Gloria Swanson or Darlene Golden or Blanche Sweet, they’d have hired someone else to do the deed …

But the thought that another star’s studio would cover her transgressions, and pay Detective Meyer to ‘lose’ whatever evidence there was, returned like a queasy shadow on her thoughts, and she felt as if she’d reached into a dark cupboard and encountered half a century worth of cobwebs and spiders.

Hollywood …

You will have a home with us, Aunt Estelle had promised.

Well, far be it from me to ‘blow’ the poor man’s ‘cover’, as I think they say in the espionage novels …

She sipped her champagne and replied to her companion’s question with a half-smile. ‘Nine times out of ten I think yes, we’d still take that left-hand path, sir. But do you sometimes want to just … go back to that place and that time? Not for any particular decision, but simply to smell the air there? To see the sunshine of that particular day again?’

‘New York in the Eighties?’ His answering smile was as gentle and as dry as the champagne. ‘Struggling and maneuvering to make sure one is seen at the best houses? To make sure one meets the “best men of business”? What a long time ago it seems.’ He almost chuckled.

‘And speaking of the best houses,’ said Emma, ‘Kitty tells me you’re building an Italian villa, one that used to belong to someone Italian and famous. She doesn’t think it was Robinson Caruso the opera singer, or the Pope—’

Crain chuckled. ‘No, nobody so famous. One of the lesser Medici, I was told. It’s probably late-eighteenth-century. You’ll see it,’ he added, ‘once Kitty is done with this picture. I plan to take her there for a rest, and I’m virtually certain she won’t go without her dogs …’

‘And her gramophone.’ They both laughed, at the foibles of their friend.

‘And her astrology magazines …’

‘Excuse me – Mrs Blackstone. Mr Crain.’ Colt Madison executed a very continental bow, to go with the generic European intonation of his words.

Mr Crain regarded him in some surprise, and Emma said to her companion, ‘Would you excuse me for a moment, sir?’ and got to her feet. Madison led her to the far end of the bar with the practiced grace of a gigolo, and touched his lips with a cautionary forefinger.

‘You’re very astute, Mrs Blackstone,’ he murmured. ‘I beg of you, not a word to me, or a sign that you know me. Too many people here would recognize my face.’

‘Including Miss Swanson?’

He nodded slowly, as if approving her perspicacity. ‘So far, so good,’ he said. ‘I’ve ruled out Barbara la Marr and Pola Negri – you can always find out from their maids what a movie queen has been up to – but the woman I talked with over at Paramount said Swanson sometimes meets with some fairly sketchy customers here. And that boyfriend of hers knows enough people in the City Hall Gang that he bears checking on, if you know what I mean. We’ll find ’em,’ he added, nodding wisely. ‘We’ll find ’em.’

He glanced across at Miss Swanson – whose necklace really did look as if it had cost $1,750, though, thank goodness, she’d left her cheetah back at the Paramount menagerie. Her companion helped the Paramount star to her feet, and they moved out onto the polished boards of the dancefloor. As all film stars did, Miss Swanson, in person, had a slightly fragile air within her sheathe of bugle-beads and sequins. The camera, Emma knew, made its subjects look about ten pounds heavier than they actually were, and every actress in Hollywood had a ‘potato clause’ in her contract, specifying immediate suspension if she gained too much weight.

No wonder so many of them take cocaine …

Or, in Miss Swanson’s case, lived on health food …

‘Your secret is safe with me,’ whispered Emma. ‘And honestly, I wouldn’t have gone to speak to you, seeing that you were in disguise.’

Madison smiled, and patted her cheek. ‘You’re a good egg, Duchess.’ And he wove his way back through the crowd to his table.

Turning back to her own table, Emma saw the sleek head and burly shape of Tony Cornero there. Both he and Mr Crain rose as she approached. ‘Would you rather I left you together here, Mrs Blackstone?’ Mr Crain asked. ‘I realize your business may be confidential.’

Cornero raised his eyebrows, with a glance that referred the question to Emma. Emma said, ‘Not … Not as such. If you don’t mind, Mr Cornero …’

‘Hey, I’m just a businessman trying to make a living.’ The bootlegger spread his hands innocently, as he had done Thursday night. ‘Just like Mr Crain – but on a much smaller scale, of course. I’m not the one who owns five hundred acres of Long Beach oil fields. Giovanni said you wanted a word with me, m’am?’

Crain held her chair for her as she sat, and took the seat beside her again. Briefly, Emma outlined what had taken place the previous night: that Miss de la Rose had gone out, late and secretly, to meet and help a friend who had to leave Los Angeles immediately and needed money. ‘Nothing to do with Mr Festraw’s death or the film industry,’ she added, not quite truthfully. ‘It was a personal matter, and a confidential one.’

Cornero made a very Italian grimace and gesture, to show he understood.

‘Miss de la Rose drove back along the coast highway toward Santa Monica, and my friend Mr Rokatansky and I followed in his car. We were overtaken by another car which first tried to drive us off the highway – over the cliff there into the sea – and then shoved us into the cliff that comes down on the inland side of the road. The driver of that car – which was without lights – then stood up out of the car and fired a shot at us. But by that time Kitty had seen what was happening, turned around, and came back. The other driver got into his car again and fled. No one was hurt,’ she concluded, ‘but it was clearly an attempt on our lives. I don’t know whether the other driver thought Miss de la Rose was in the car – whether he thought Mr Rokatansky was driving Miss de la Rose’s car back to town. Mr Rokatansky said he thought we’d been followed from Hollywood and along Ventura Boulevard and through the hills. We’d left Miss de la Rose’s house at about twelve thirty and there’s very little traffic on the road, he said, at that time.’

‘Mannaggia,’ said Cornero quietly. ‘You get a look at the car?’

‘It was a dark-green Chrysler coupe. The license plate had been removed. If you know of – or know how to find out about – the owner of such a car … I understand that in your business as nightclub owner,’ she added tactfully, ‘you have the opportunity to hear things from people.’

‘Yeah,’ said Cornero. ‘Yeah, I’ll ask around. Thing is, there’s a gumshoe named Sid Gross who drives a dark-green Chrysler coupe. Has offices downtown in the Bradbury Building. And he’s the kind of guy, if I wanted some dirty work done, I might take it into my head to ask him if he knew anybody who might want to do something like that, if you know what I mean. You want I should ask the folks at his garage whether he’s got any new scratches on his fenders this morning?’

‘Thank you,’ said Emma, from the bottom of her heart. ‘If you can.’

Mr Crain spoke up. ‘Will you need an advance of some kind to cover incidental expenses?’ he asked, and reached for his wallet. ‘In case, for instance, this Mr Gross has hidden his vehicle—’

‘Thank you,’ said Cornero. ‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Crain, and yes, we’ll probably need some kind of grease. I don’t need anything now. Can I let you know?’

‘Of course. And do you have,’ he went on, with the soft-voiced good breeding of a businessman inquiring about market shares, ‘any recommendations for an investigator in New York, to follow up on this Stan Markham Mrs Blackstone told me booked rooms for Mr Festraw at the Winterdon? My son handles my firm’s business matters in New York,’ he added apologetically. ‘But as I was telling Mrs Blackstone just now, he works mostly from our home in East Hampton. He has never really approved of me personally handling the California interests.’

He frowned, as if at the recollection of conversations that had ended in uncomfortable compromise. ‘He thinks I should purchase some respectable property in Palm Beach – which in fact I have – and retire there myself instead of building a hotel. He is extraordinarily old for a man nearly forty, and I doubt he’d know the names of any investigator in the city.’

‘I’ll hook you up with one,’ said the bootlegger. ‘A good honest one, not some half-baked ambulance-chaser. Though who the hell,’ he added, as Crain handed him a card from his silver case, ‘would want to bring Rex Festraw clear out here, and put him up in a class joint like the Winterdon, just to bump him off? You could save your money and have him done in Jersey. Bad management.’

He shook his head. ‘The guy wasn’t connected back in New York – strictly small-time. Unless he was secretly romancing some wealthy widow and her family wanted to rub him out to keep her from disinheriting them, but frankly, the way that guy’s shirt smelled – not to speak of his breath – that don’t seem very likely to me. And I never heard of it. Not from the boys in New York.’

He frowned, puzzling over the inconsistency.

‘It’s one of the things I hope to learn from your investigator,’ said Crain.

Emma turned back to them, having become momentarily distracted by the entrance of Kitty’s friend Peggy Donovan, clearly intent on out-vamping both Miss Swanson and Kitty in a golden dress flashing with sequins and fringe and a necklace that made Miss Swanson’s look like something picked out of a Christmas cracker. She was accompanied by two unbelievably handsome young men – Emma wondered whether she’d rented them for the occasion.

Now she said, ‘But why drag Kitty – Miss de la Rose – into it, which it’s quite obvious that the murderer has taken pains to do? Everything connected with Mr Festraw’s death is the … the oddest mixture of what sounds like careful – and expensive – planning, and sheer clumsiness.’

‘Perhaps they’re simply out to obfuscate their own guilt,’ suggested Crain, ‘without seriously harming Miss de la Rose. They know she’s the obvious suspect, if the man is murdered for some other reason …’

‘That’s what it looked like,’ said Emma quietly, ‘until they – whoever “they” are – made a very serious attempt to murder Mr Rokatansky and myself. And maybe Miss de la Rose as well, if they thought she was in Mr Rokatansky’s car. What could be at stake that’s worth that?’

There was an uncomfortable silence, into which Miss Swanson’s voice could be heard saying, ‘Peggy! Darling! That dress is gorgeous on you – far better than it looked on me in Gilded Cage …’

‘And it makes me wonder,’ concluded Emma quietly, ‘what “they” – whoever “they” are – are going to try next.’

FIFTEEN

‘Mr Madison!’

At the sound of a feminine voice Colt Madison turned from the door of the studio guard-shack with his cocky, welcoming smile: Hey, women call my name all day …!

Past his shoulder Emma saw the guard’s book open on the counter. Checking who’d come and gone last Wednesday – she wondered whether Rex Festraw had entered his name, or had simply slipped Floyd a couple of dollar bills, as she was fairly certain Mrs Turnbit had done. ‘Hey, baby—’

She paused a few feet from him, and nodded toward the far corner of the little kiosk, out of range of a casual eavesdropper. And simply out of the way of passers-by: in the brightness of a Monday morning, with Christian martyrs scheduled to be thrown to the lions on Stage One and the studio’s two resident comedians commencing an epic about a dance competition on Stage Three, the open dirt between the gate and the Hacienda fairly swarmed.

Madison followed her around the corner. His golden locks had none of the residual stain and deadness left by dye, so what he’d had on last night must have been a wig. The skin along his hairline showed traces of reddening, as well as that on his lip and chin, where the Van Dyke had been glued last night.

‘Do you know a Mr Sid Gross?’ she asked.

He stepped back a half-pace with a movement of his head that Madge Burdon – and Zal – would have described as a ‘double take’. ‘Hey, you’re not getting mixed up with him, are you, Duchess?’ His brows plunged down over the Praxiteles perfection of his nose. ‘He’s bad medicine, and crooked as a dog’s back leg.’

‘A gangster?’ Emma widened her eyes.

Madison’s lip curled. ‘It takes’ – he bit back Kitty’s favorite items of anatomical synecdoche descriptive of courage, and substituted a less vulgar body part – ‘guts to be a gangster, baby. Gross is a bagman for Charlie Crawford’s Connection, to drop off payments to City Hall.’

‘Is he dangerous?’

The detective thought about it for a moment. ‘If he thinks he can get away with it,’ he said at last, and shrugged. ‘Give him enough money and he’ll shoot somebody in the back, if that’s what you mean. What’re you askin’ about him for, doll? Nobody in the Connection would trust a job to the guy; everybody downtown knows him too well by sight. No,’ he went on, ‘the guys they’d use would be Iron Man or maybe Teddy Knucks. I know ’em all by sight. Gross …’ He shook his head. ‘He’s not one of that group. Personally, I’m surprised Crawford uses him. The guy’s scum. Where’d you hear about him?’

‘Oh.’ Emma tried to sound taken aback. ‘Oh, dear. Yesterday I found his card in the mailbox at Kitty’s house, you see. I have no idea how long it had been sitting there. It’s a deep box, and generally I just reach in and grab whatever’s there.’

‘Hunh.’ Madison frowned again, and groped in his pocket for a cigarette. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, hon. But let me know if the guy tries to get in touch.’

‘I will. Thank you.’ Emma looked as helpless and admiring as she could, not easy with a man only an inch or two taller than herself. ‘What does he look like, by the way? Mr Gross?’

‘Gross,’ replied the detective, and laughed at his own pun. ‘Big guy.’ He measured something above his own six-foot height. ‘Fat. Not Fatty Arbuckle fat, but big like a wrestler.’ Emma recalled the tall bulk of the shape rising out of the driver’s side of the dark-green Chrysler.

‘Dimple in his chin, kind of thick mouth, squinty little eyes. Fat earlobes that sort of hang down.’ He demonstrated with his thumbs. Emma felt a moment’s surprise at this very technical description, but realized in the next second that this was Madison’s job; to note things that couldn’t be easily altered. ‘Nose that comes down straight and then like a little potato at the tip; mole on his left nostril. No oil painting, that’s for sure.’ He chuckled again, just a trifle smugly, as if comparing the man with his own movie-star countenance.

‘Say, I want to thank you for not blowin’ me last night, Duchess,’ he added. ‘Far as I can tell, Swanson’s out of it. And I got hold of Darlene’s bankbook, and the dough she paid Ginny Field and Barney Grissom – that was lover boy the other night – seems to be the only outlay that doesn’t look kosher. No big pay-outs, like you’d see if she was setting someone up for an underground hotel-room. So it’s lookin’ like I said.’ He blew a line of smoke, and moved his head a little, to survey a couple of shapely young extras who stopped at Floyd’s window, then hastened on towards Belle Delaney’s open door at the corner of the Hacienda, slim ankles almost twinkling in the morning sun.

Et vera incessu patuit dea, reflected Emma. As Virgil said of Venus. ‘Her true godhead was obvious in her walk …’

‘Festraw’s got to have been mixed up with the City Hall Gang. They’re the only ones who’d be keepin’ it this quiet. Which is good,’ he added with a self-satisfied smile. ‘Means it’ll be easy to sort out. Couple thousand to Crawford, couple thousand to Cryer’s re-election campaign fund … Kitty hasn’t come clean about where she was, has she?’ The blue eyes narrowed piercingly into hers. ‘’Cause that’s what’s holdin’ up the show.’

Emma shook her head. ‘I honestly think she was looking for that silly dog.’

‘Well, if she was,’ said Madison, ‘nobody out there buildin’ the sets saw her. And that red kimono she was wearing—’

He must have gotten that part of the description from Mr Fishbein—

‘—would’a made her hard to miss.’

And anyone in the armor and helmet of the Praetorian Guard, Emma reflected – as she followed in the wake of the two goddesses now bound for Wardrobe – or in a Ruritanian cavalry uniform, or fancy evening dress at two in the afternoon – even carrying a gun – would have passed completely unnoticed.

There had been two hundred and fifty extras on the Foremost lot on Wednesday afternoon. Emma had brought one of her blank copybooks with her, and Millie Katz in Wardrobe – skinny and brisk, like a reincarnated witch – was perfectly happy to turn over Wednesday’s log to her, and give her a place to sit in her cubbyhole office, and a cup of coffee. Past the open door Emma watched them come through – men, women, and three or four children – and fill out wardrobe slips. Millie would then check the list of the day’s costumes, write a size, and toss the slip into her basket. The names, outfits, and sizes would be transferred to the ledger once the rush was done and the sixty-five ‘rags’ extras had gone around first to Wardrobe, then to the extras’ dressing room, where two of Herr Volmort’s assistants waited with buckets of blood-paint and dirt. Madge would need them all in the Coliseum set just after lunch, looking suitably downtrodden, blood-streaked, and radiant with the glory of martyrdom.

On Wednesday, costumes had been needed for cavalry, peasantry, Romans, slaves, aristocratic dinner guests, and Roman soldiers – not to speak of thirty horses from Chatsworth Livery, and Socrates the Elephant. The cavalry, Emma guessed, had been mostly the known ‘riding extras’ and set them aside for last. Three Roman soldiers, ten male peasants, four male slaves, and three dinner guests had needed ‘extra large’ costumes. She copied the names, and when Millie finished the most recent batch of martyrs and brought the slips in to the back office, Emma said, ‘Mrs Katz—’

‘Millie!’ the woman corrected her with a wave. ‘For God’s sake, call me Millie. You call me Mrs Katz and I’ll think you’re talking to my mother-in-law, God forbid!’ And she made three tiny spit-noises to avert so evil a possibility.

‘Millie,’ Emma corrected herself. ‘And please, call me Emma … Bless you for letting me check this list! When you have a moment – and only when you have a moment, I see you’re run off your feet here! – could you take a look at these names and let me know which ones are regulars? Are they people you knew by sight?’

The shrewd, dark eyes twinkled. ‘Mr Gumshoe finally caught on that anybody could walk onto the lot claiming to be an extra, did he?’ She took the list, pulled a pencil out of the tight, dark bun of her hair, and scratched off twelve names. ‘Guy you’re lookin’ for white or black, honey?’

‘White.’ It hadn’t occurred to Emma to ask Madison about this, but upon reflection she felt sure the man would have mentioned it, or Cornero would have, had Gross been a man of color.

Millie scratched out two more.

A Roman soldier, four peasants, and a slave were left.

The Empress Valerna stared down from the marble height of the Imperial Box at the Coliseum (which occupied most of what had been her garden the previous week), surveying with haughty scorn the 5,000 square feet of empty sand where the Christians would be standing in two hours. ‘Come on!’ Madge exhorted her. ‘These are people who’re always telling you what an evil slut you are! These are people who’re getting what they deserve for being so fucken good all the time! Lemme see that contempt!’

Zal’s assistant Herbie Carboy – like an undernourished scarecrow in a glaringly checkered vest – darted in front of Zal’s camera with the leader board. This was take six. The camera itself hung in mid-air, mounted on a crane about two yards in front of the Imperial Box. Just out of the shot-line, the Rothstein Boys struck up Saint-Saëns’ ‘Rouet d’Omphale’. ‘Camera!’ yelled Madge. ‘Action!’

Kitty bulged her eyes and bared her teeth. ‘Well, fools,’ she snarled. ‘Where is your Redeemer now?’

‘Cut! C’mon, Kitty, you’re gonna watch ’em die, you’re not gonna eat ’em!’ Madge swept her arm in the direction of the imaginary martyrs. ‘It’s the Pettingers down there, an’ they’re beggin’ you for mercy!’

Emma returned to the base camp just within the big doors, where Chang Ming and Black Jasmine rushed to the ends of their leashes, licking their noses in adoration, and stood up against her knees to be patted. The ‘Rouet d’Omphale’ revived like the curl of a breaking wave, and a moment later Madge shouted, ‘Yeah! That’s it! You’d spit on ’em if you weren’t a lady!’

‘Well, fools,’ cried Kitty, ‘where is your Redeemer now?’

It was another two hours – closer to tea-time than lunch, though Emma unpacked her own sandwich and her thermos flask of tea at one thirty – before Kitty came down from her box, accompanied by Nicky Thaxter, in a golden wreath and the gold lamé toga which made Emma cringe. No, no, even Mr Pugh should know they didn’t have gold lamé in Rome! ‘What can I get you?’ she asked, rising.

‘Gin.’ Kitty collapsed into her chair. ‘And lots of it!’

‘Make that two, darling.’ Nicky hung his wreath over a corner of the magazine rack.

Emma unpacked the glasses from Kitty’s picnic basket, set out the thermos, then went to the table by the stage door and brought them sandwiches. As she was loading up the plate Zal’s voice asked at her elbow, ‘What’d you find?’

‘Six extra-large extras whom Millie Katz didn’t know,’ said Emma. ‘A soldier and a slave in Rome, four peasants in Ruritania.’

‘Shouldn’t be hard to count.’ Zal’s face was beaded with sweat, despite the kerchief he’d tied around his head under his cap. Unlike Kitty and Nick, he hadn’t had anyone from make-up fluttering over to him to touch up powder and Motion Picture Yellow between shots. ‘We’re gonna do the Christians long-shots this afternoon, and nothing scheduled for tonight, may wonders never cease. Can you be back here at eight? It’s all indoors tomorrow. Nick gets to strangle Kitty and after thirteen takes to get the chariot scene right this morning I don’t blame him one bit. God knows how long that’ll take.’

‘You’re exhausted—’ Emma began to protest, and Zal grinned.

‘Hey, I’ve been waiting for weeks for a chance to take you to the movies. I just didn’t think I was gonna have to run the projector myself.’

Emma chuckled, and started to shake her head again, but Zal’s face turned quietly grave. ‘After what happened Saturday night,’ he said, ‘I don’t think we can wait.’

‘No.’ Emma touched the scab on her temple where the shot-in window-glass had cut it. ‘No.’

For almost another hour Madge rehearsed the martyrs being brought into the Coliseum while Zal and Emma, Kitty and Nick, joked and flirted over gin, tea, and sandwiches. Most of the morning had been spent filming the lions as they’d snarled and paced behind the barred grate at the side of the arena. ‘Come on, Madge,’ Gren Torley had coaxed, ‘the poor guys are starving!’

‘Good,’ retorted Madge. ‘I want ’em to look starving! If they eat now they’ll fall asleep on me, and we gotta have ’em lookin’ mean in the background.’

Herr Volmort, more than ever resembling something that had crept out of a sepulcher in the middle of the night, descended on the base camp, to powder the Imperial couple and touch up their hair (‘Does that spit-curl look the way it did this morning, darling?’ inquired Nick anxiously), and Emma was left alone again, with Buttercreme and Black Jasmine on her lap and Chang Ming panting happily at her feet.

The lions glared at the tiny dogs. ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, boys,’ Torley apologized, and put his hand through the bars to scratch Big Joe’s ear. The lion licked his hand disconsolately.

Among the extras, Darlene Golden seemed to shimmer like an orchid in a bed of geraniums – a portion of the morning, between lions, had been spent filming close-ups of her, reacting to the Evil Valerna’s triumphant scorn. Zal checked the reflector dedicated to keeping a luminous aura on the beautiful slave-girl’s face and hair, and gave Herbie a brief lesson in its more subtle effects. The Rothstein Boys left their pinochle game behind the dais, and now plunged into ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, as the Christians filed onto the bloodied sands of the arena to meet their destinies. At the top of the stairway, the Temptress of Babylon flung back her head with a victorious sneer. ‘Well, fools,’ she cried, for the two hundredth time that day, ‘where is your Redeemer now?’

‘You’re crowding up back there!’ roared Madge. ‘What’d I tell you about crowding up? Anybody’d think you wanted to get chomped by those lions!’

The Christians retreated into the passageway.

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war …

‘Action!’

‘Well, fools, where is your Redeemer now?’

‘You frikkin’ idiots, stop at the frikkin’ tape! We’re payin’ for those cats, we gotta see ’em in the background!’

The Christians retreated into the passageway again.

‘Action!’

‘Well, fools, where is your Redeemer now?’

Among them, Darlene looked sulky whenever the camera wasn’t actually rolling. Emma noticed that Frank Pugh did not put in an appearance on the set.

At four, she hooked up the leashes on all three dogs, and took them for a stroll around the Hacienda.

Returning, she met Kitty and Nick in the stage doorway, both resplendent in gaudy kimonos, his more vivid than hers. (That gold lamé must be excruciating under the lights …) Kitty flung out a hand, tossed her head, sneered at Emma and cried, ‘Well, fool, where is your Redeemer now?’

‘In the office,’ returned Emma, curtseying deeply. ‘Preparing the paperwork to send you to Hell, your Majesty. Do you need help getting changed?’

By the time Emma had gathered all Kitty’s usual impedimenta and arranged with one of the guards to have it taken to the car, Kitty had changed clothes, cold-creamed the camera make-up from her face, and completely reapplied foundation, powder, rouge, and kohl, despite the fact that she was going straight home. She was just putting on her mascaro when Emma climbed the steps to the temporary dressing room – shivering a little, still, as she passed the door of the suite in which Rex Festraw had died.

‘Peggy’s going to meet us at the house, darling,’ announced Kitty. ‘I’m too absolutely ruined to do anything but play a little pinochle, but she’s stopping at Lee Chang’s, so we’ll have a decent supper anyway … Did you find out anything last night?’ she added, as they descended to the car. ‘I’m sorry I was too devastated this morning to ask. We didn’t finish filming until nearly midnight, and if I ran down that corridor once I ran down it three hundred times …’ Beneath the flawless concealment of foundation and powder, Emma could see the smudges of exhaustion under the huge, brown eyes. ‘Did you have a nice time? Isn’t Ambrose a pet?’

‘Mr Crain is a lovely gentleman.’ Emma smiled. ‘And a very nice dancer.’

‘I must say I like a man with a little more oomph,’ admitted Kitty, slipping in behind the Packard’s leather-upholstered wheel – which was, Emma reflected, putting it mildly. ‘But at least he doesn’t step on your feet, like Tor would – you remember Tor Westlake, darling? That absolutely divine looking creature at Monarch? I was utterly ready to fall passionately in love with Tor until he stepped on my feet dancing …’

‘I felt a little sorry for him,’ said Emma softly. ‘Mr Crain, I mean. He sounded so wistful, when he spoke of … well, not his family, but a family.’

‘I’d take almost any family,’ declared Kitty, ‘over that pack of ghouls he’s told me about. I thought I was bad, asking for two hundred dollars a month in alimony even if Clayton was a lot fonder of his valet than he was of me – though I will admit Duke was gorgeous! But I didn’t take away Clayton’s home, which I probably could have, if we’d really gone to court over it …’

She shook her head, pushing aside the recollection of her most recent spell of matrimony. ‘And anyway, I wouldn’t have done that to his mother. Clayton’s mother is the sweetest person …’

Emma tried to estimate when this interlude could have been, as Kitty went on, ‘Did he tell you about his villa? It’s in the National Forest. He showed me pictures – of the way it looked when it was in Italy, I mean, before they took it apart. You’ll love it, dear! We’ll leave the minute the picture is wrapped.’

‘I’m sure it’s beautiful.’

And I may not see it. I may be on a train heading east – heading home. Thinking … What? Thinking, ‘Whew, that’s over. I shattered the mirror and sailed down the river to Camelot and here I am, wet and bedraggled, going home at last to Shalott … Going home at last to Ithaca.’

Kitty swung the big car up Ivarene, and her red mouth, more generous than the fashionable Cupid-bow pout in which it was painted, tightened. ‘I just hope … Well, that somebody finds out about what really happened. About who really sent me that note that was supposed to be from Eliot, and who brought Rex out here from New York, and why they wanted to shoot him in my dressing room. I mean, it’s all very well to have everyone thinking what a femme fatale and woman of mystery I am … Oh, Emma, did I tell you? Desiree Darrow planned to fly a golden aeroplane over Venice Beach and toast everyone there in champagne, only she got Jackson White – the stuntman – to teach her how to fly and wrecked his plane before she even got it off the runway … and nobody even mentioned her, in letters to the editor or anything, and Jackson is just furious. And she got two black eyes out of it and California Studios has had to put back filming Maiden of Paris for a week …’

Her sparkling glee faded suddenly. ‘But the thing is, I want to know, one way or the other. I need to know, because once someone starts doing crazy things because they’re jealous, they only get worse. And I don’t want to spend the next five years looking over my shoulder every time Frank starts to think I might be seeing someone like Ambrose. Or Dusty over at Fox. Or Kenny at Independent.’ She sighed. ‘Or whatever-his-name is, that beautiful waiter at the Townhouse …’

It was on Emma’s lips to say, I think Mr Crain loves you … But she didn’t. So far as she could tell, Kitty’s abiding emotional love was reserved for her friends, and her dogs, not for the regiments of men she flirted with, danced with, slept with, and discarded like laddered stockings. And why not? she reflected. Kitty’s extraordinary beauty, Jim had told her once, had made her little more than a commodity since the age of fourteen. If she’d been plain, he had said, a little sadly, our parents wouldn’t have cared much where she went, or with who. But because of how she looked, they treated her like she was a bitch in heat. They’d lock her in at night, pound her with every story in the Bible – Eve and Jezebel and Potiphar’s trampy wife – every time she’d look at a boy in the street …

No wonder she distrusted love.

And why, perhaps, she failed to recognize it in men.

Peggy Donovan – laden with cardboard cartons of Chinese food and blithering with news about the new picture she would be starting at Enterprise next week – was waiting for them on the porch. Emma shared a little egg fu yung with them, fed the dogs, and left the two actresses and three Pekinese together as the sun was westering to walk the three-quarters of a mile down to Vine again, to take the streetcar to the studio. The last of the Christian martyrs were departing – traces of blood and arena sand in the edges of their hair – but the gates were still open. Arnie the night guard greeted her with a wave. Zal, looking like ten sweaty miles of bad road, greeted her with a grin and a kiss as she entered the little screening room at the back of the Hacienda. ‘Our girl all right?’

‘The plan is for her to spend the evening playing two-handed pinochle with Peggy Donovan and go to bed early.’ Emma followed the cameraman down to the three rows of seats that occupied the center of a chamber which had clearly started life as a dining room. ‘Something I wouldn’t mind doing myself. I hope to goodness they don’t have four gins apiece and suddenly decide it’s a good night to go to the Coconut Grove.’

‘You can’t be her mother,’ pointed out Zal.

‘No.’ Emma sighed, and relaxed. ‘Nor would I want to be.’ She sank into the chair, glad of the room’s quiet. Glad of the stillness of the lot outside in the mild spring twilight, save for the rumble of far-off traffic on Sunset Boulevard. ‘And under ordinary circumstances I wouldn’t think twice. But …’

‘Kitty Flint’ – Zal used her legal name – the name of her most recent husband – ‘has a brain the size of a fingernail-clipping, but she knows how to take care of herself. And I’m pretty sure she knows how much use Peggy Donovan would be to her in an emergency. Now sit down,’ he added, ‘and let’s see what we’ve got for last Wednesday.’

He retreated to the projection room, switching off the lights as he went.

Emma had seen dailies before, the raw hanks of moving imagery from which stories were later woven by the editors. It was rather like watching the filming that afternoon: dozens of nearly-identical scenes, of Dirk Silver and his cohort arriving at the empress’s garden, of Dirk (a.k.a. Marcus Maximus) gathering Valerna in his arms while she fought against him and against her own passions. Of Valerna in her garden, coming upon the beautiful Philomela also (albeit unwillingly) in Maximus’s arms, slapping her and condemning her to die. Over and over and over again. The beautiful Philomela flinched before she was slapped. The beautiful Philomela’s hair got caught in one of the empress’s bracelets. One of the Praetorians in the background scratched his armpit. There was a coffee cup on the plinth of the statue of David (Emma didn’t know which was worse – the presence of the cup or the presence of a Renaissance statue in first-century Rome).

Two of the slaves were big men, well deserving of the appellation ‘XLge’.

No Roman was nearly that size.

Then over an hour of watching the mob of peasants outside King Romberg’s palace. They rattled scythes and cleavers and clubs, and shouted for the blood of the stinking aristocrats, until the cavalry charged in and scattered them. Larry Palmer was a much more laissez-faire director than Madge Burdon – or there was less precision required in the teeming mob – but he had two or three wide shots in which the camera panned the mob assembled in the courtyard. Emma easily spotted the three ‘XLges’.

Someone – Emma checked her notebook when the lights went up, and identified the name of the missing Extra-Large Praetorian as Eddie Crump – had checked out cuirass, helmet, cloak, shield, and greaves, and had not reported for duty. He’d checked them back in at three forty-five, an hour and a half before any of the other Praetorian extras had.

‘I saw him,’ she said suddenly, as Zal appeared in the projection-room door. ‘When we were looking for Kitty. He was over near Wardrobe with the peasants.’

Zal raised his brows.

‘I thought at the time that Madge would thrash him with a vine-stalk, the way Centurions used to do with misbehaving troopers.’

‘What time?’

She turned events over in her mind. ‘It must have been two thirty or so. Not later than that, because when your friend Taffy looked at his watch, I looked at mine.’

‘Sounds like they knew exactly when she’d be out of her dressing room, all right.’

‘I wonder what Mr Crump told Millie?’ She helped him gather the film cans from the projection-room table, and carry them across the hall to Editing.

‘Could have told her anything,’ pointed out the cameraman. ‘Migraine headache. Overdose of commissary food. Happens all the time. We can check Payroll but I’ll bet you a fortune cookie nobody came in to pick up that money.’

SIXTEEN

But it was one thing to be reasonably certain that a ‘gross’ semi-crook named Gross had finagled his way onto the Foremost lot Wednesday afternoon disguised as an extra – and indeed, subsequent enquiry proved that a) ‘Eddie Crump’s’ $3.50 pay envelope was still sitting in Payroll waiting to be picked up and b) nobody of that name had ever worked for the studio before or since – murdered Camille de la Rose’s ex- (or current) husband, and left forged correspondence at the scene. Proving it was another matter.

‘If the guy’s connected with Crawford or the City Hall Gang,’ pointed out Zal, over a very late donut and cup of tea at the Pacific Dining Car on Sixth Street that night, ‘he’s gonna have five guys swearing he was with them anyway. Or the cops will write down on their report that five guys named Smith, Smith, Smith, Smith, and Baskerville swore he was with them. And that doesn’t really solve our problem.’

‘No.’ Emma turned from the glare of the street lamps and the wall of brick buildings across the street, to the soft yellow gleam of the Dining Car’s lamps. The restaurant was nearly empty at this hour, the owners sitting at the only other occupied table in the room, adding up the day’s take. She felt a pang of guilt – for keeping them up, and for leaving Kitty with no better protection than the empty-headed Peggy. But that egg fu yung had been many hours ago, and at the moment she felt a good deal of sympathy for poor Mr Torley’s lions.

And it wasn’t Kitty that Gross tried to kill Thursday night.

Was it?

‘And proving that he was on the lot – even proving that he pulled the trigger – still leaves us with the question of why?’

Zal sighed. ‘Makes me long for the days when I was just photographing the pig races in Fresno.’

Zal drove her back to the house, in the late-model black Ford that Mr Crain had arranged for one of his employees to sell to him (‘I insist on paying – if something should happen to Miss de la Rose I want to be sure you’ll be able to pursue the culprits …’). They found Peggy’s car in the yard, the front door unlocked, and old Mr Shang sitting on the front steps with his wife, playing a long-necked Chinese lute. ‘All is well,’ said the old man, setting the instrument aside. Starlight shimmered white on the silk of his long hair as he rose to his feet and bowed deeply. ‘Yet knowing that there are those who wish the lady ill, we came here to await your return. It is no hardship for the beautiful Mrs Shang and this insignificant servant to contemplate the stars.’

He helped his wife to her stubby little bound feet, and they disappeared into the shadows around the side of the house, like a crane and a tortoise, the lute slung on his back.

Peggy and Kitty slumbered on the living-room couches amid a storm-wrack of cards, empty champagne glasses, and snoring Pekinese. ‘If you can drive the Ford to the studio in the morning I can just take Sleeping Beauty here home without waking her.’ Zal gestured to Peggy.

‘It’s hardly fair to you.’ Emma gathered up the red-haired actress’s coat and handbag and collected crumpled piles of five- and ten-dollar bills that strewed the coffee table and the carpet round about. She was tired now and her head ached, and the thought that Mr Gross – whoever had hired him – had been able to walk on and off the Foremost lot at will did nothing for her unease about the darkness of the hills around the house. ‘They live like spoilt children – get drunk where and when they please, seduce whoever comes in their path regardless of consequences or previous marital arrangements on either side, drive while intoxicated … and expect you to pick up after them, like an unpaid nanny.’

‘And feed their dogs,’ added Zal with a grin, taking an empty Veuve Cliquot bottle from beneath the table. ‘And fetch chilled slices of cucumber to put on their eyes when they wake up after a bender – and it sure doesn’t look like much of an orgy went on here tonight.’ He gently shook another bottle which stood on a corner of the gramophone. The motor had run down with the needle still resting at the end of the groove: Baby of Mine, said the label. Recorded in Chicago.

Emma raised her eyes from Kitty, whom she had been regarding, she realized, with a combination of exasperation and tenderness. Zal went to the bar, and split the remains of the bottle between two clean glasses.

‘And what do you expect?’ He handed her a glass. ‘From what Kitty’s told me, the farm Peggy grew up on would make a Louisiana convict camp look like a weekend at the Ritz. Peggy told me once she ran away because she got tired of being raped by her cousins – and because one of them had started pimping her to his friends in the truck-stop in Tulsa. Rudy Valentino bussed tables and worked in dance halls when he came to this country; Barbara la Marr worked burlesque. Clara Bow’s crazy father swore he’d knife her before he’d let her come to Hollywood. Tried it, too. These are people who have whatever that is, whatever that fire inside is called, that brings other people to warm themselves when they bring these stories to life … Like Mrs Glyn says, they have “It”. But they’ve had no training for it. Or pretty much for anything else. La Marr’s, what, twenty-eight? Rudy’s the same … Clara isn’t even twenty. They don’t know they’re not going to be beautiful forever. You give ’em a pile of money and a nice place to live and the whole world telling ’em they’re God’s gift, what do you think is going to happen?’

‘And she didn’t have to bring me out here.’ Emma sighed again, and sipped her champagne, recalling with a smile her father’s strictures on the beverage – delivered in flawless Latin, of course. And Kitty, she suspected, couldn’t actually have told Veuve Cliquot from Miller High Life. ‘Nor help poor Eliot Jordan. And you’re right about Kitty. She can’t act to save her life, but I see her on film and she makes every scene come alive.’

‘That’s what “It” is. They’re kids.’ Zal met her eyes over the rim of his glass, sipped the champagne. ‘They’ll get slapped with the hard side of this business soon enough. In a lot of ways they already have been. You be all right here tonight?’

Emma nodded, set her glass down on the mantelpiece, and after a long moment, Zal set his down also, took her in his arms, and kissed her. A little awkward, his beard tickling and the corner of his glasses brushing her cheekbone. But his arms around her were strong, as Jim’s had been. The warmth of his hands was a comfort that went straight through her bones, to her heart. ‘Whatever you decide to do about your aunt, and going back to Oxford … I want you to be happy, Em. Even if it’s not with me. You let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

He turned, scooped up Peggy in his arms – and he was right, she didn’t stir – and carried her out the door and down the front steps, Emma following with an armful of velvet and monkey fur, sequined shoes and handbag full of cash.

Throughout the following day, and the next, Emma tried systematically to work out who, in Kitty’s life, would want to have her accused of murder. Accused but not convicted – ‘I can’t believe anyone would actually think that that telephone call to her dressing room, much less those silly notes, would be accepted by a court,’ she said to Zal, during a brief break in the filming of the strangling scene on Wednesday. ‘But it’s equally hard for me to believe that Mr Pugh – or Mr Fishbein – would go to the extent of … of actually killing someone …’ She found she almost couldn’t put into words the thought that had flickered into her mind half a dozen times since Rex Festraw’s death.

And as she pronounced them, it struck her even more deeply how absurd was the idea. ‘Much less bringing someone here specially from New York, and putting him up at a hotel …’

Not Mr Pugh …

Or the smiling, bespectacled Mr Fishbein …

‘Don’t you?’ Zal’s eyebrows tilted. ‘You ever heard the details about the night Bill Taylor was murdered a couple of years ago? Before anybody even called the cops, his studio had a team over there cleaning up: burning love letters, trousering account books, tearing pages off his telephone pad, wiping up stains. I’ve seen tap dancers in vaudeville move slower than the press boys at Paramount trying to cover for wherever the hell Mary Minter had been the night before, not that I think poor Mary had the slightest thing to do with it … And I understand from men I’ve talked to on the force that about a week into the investigation they all got word to lay off. Is covering up a fishy crime the same as paying Sid Gross to go in and rub out an inconvenient spouse? You tell me.’

He tapped the copy of World of Film that lay on Kitty’s make-up table, next to a thermos of gin and a bronze ashtray upheld by three muscular nude atlantes. The Goddess of the Silver Screen, flared the header of the article, accompanied by a photo of Kitty looking mysterious and several much smaller shots of the other contenders. ‘This is coast-to-coast news.’ He glanced back at the magazine rack beside Kitty’s camp-chair. Another photo, equally sphinx-like, adorned the cover of Photo Play under the headline of The Secret Tragedy. Screen World bore a photograph of Kitty as the Empress Valerna, beside the words, Temptress of Babylon – The True Tale! And in less conspicuous letters, The Triumphs and Passions of Peggy Donovan. ‘You can’t buy publicity like this … except of course that they can.’

Commentary on Miss Swanson’s cheetah and earrings at the Café Montmartre ran a modest third.

‘But … to bring Mr Festraw out here from New York – to put him up in a hotel, not to speak of having those notes forged …’

‘Festraw could have phoned Pugh weeks ago,’ pointed out Zal. ‘And Pugh could have read that Photo Play rumors column about Kitty and Crain – and we won’t even get into the studio gossip about what’s-his-name on the catwalk in Stage Three. Free publicity and a way to show her she needs his protection – what more could a guy want?’

‘And killing us?’ she asked softly.

Zal was silent. A few feet away, Kitty sat before her portable make-up table, while Zena Gosford delicately reshaped the dark storm cloud of her hair.

‘I talked to Benny Parr, by the way,’ Emma went on after a moment. ‘Mr Pugh’s driver, you know. He says Mr Pugh got Mr Fishbein’s call on Wednesday at a realtor’s downtown, and he seemed to be truly horrified and outraged. They had to rush to the Merchants’ Bank to get cash – which of course is exactly what I’d do, if I wanted people to think I’d been caught off-guard.’

‘Well, he did used to be an actor,’ said Zal. ‘Way back, and not on Broadway. But he can put a show on if he needs to.’

Emma was silent, arranging and rearranging the notes she’d made on torn-out pages of her notebook, as she did when concocting scenes in a film.

Mr Pugh jealous. Stanislas Markham. Worked a job for Cornero Friday. Who could come onto the lot to get the gun and the stationery? (Dressed as extra …) Who phoned the dressing room?

Like Sam Wyatt’s notes about sinister Chinamen and long-lost twins and the monkey’s eyebrows …

What makes sense?

Or like trying to fit fragments of broken pottery into a design.

The probable impossible is to be preferred to the improbable possible …

‘Do you really think he did it? Or had it done?’

‘Kitty was right when she said some men go kind of crazy when they think somebody else is making nookie with their woman. When I was hiding out from the Draft Board in St Francisville, Louisiana, the whole parish was in an uproar because one of the most respectable men in town murdered a priest – a kindly, devout man, according to everyone in town that I talked to. Turned out Mr Respectable was “taking an interest in” – as they say – a girl at the local high school, and convinced himself the padre had evil designs on her. He spent thousands of dollars setting up a way to get the padre alone twenty miles outside of town and shot him, with evidence manufactured to convict some poor black sharecropper … and then left mud from the murder site on the floorboards of his car when he drove back to town. People do get crazy when they get jealous, Em. I don’t understand it, but I know you can’t tell by lookin’ at ’em.’

Zal returned to his camera. The Two Neds wheeled troughs of crumpled newspapers into position between the set’s windows and the backdrop of Rome, and more troughs behind the backdrop, to be ignited when the cameras rolled. Water-trucks were wheeled into position, just out of shot-line. Kitty and Nick Thaxter, make-up refreshed, took their places once again among the debris left by the ravening mob, for close-ups. Nick had spent the morning strangling Kitty for the master shot and it was now time for the interminable series of reaction shots.

‘I cannot tell you,’ sighed Kitty, when at seven o’clock that night she sat before her dressing-room mirror, repainting, ‘how glad I’ll be tomorrow when we finish burning Rome and I can be done with all this. Did I remember to tell you we’re driving down the coast Saturday to San Diego, to stay at the Del? That tiresome man who was supposed to have the plumbing hooked up yesterday at Ambrose’s villa never turned up – at least, that’s what Ambrose told me – and now the place won’t be ready for weeks! And by that time I’ll be filming Hot Potato, and poor Ambrose will be tied up with Standard Oil. Did I tell you they struck oil on his Long Beach land? Oceans of it, darling – this was last month sometime – and he says Standard Oil has offered him a fortune for it … And of course the cook and the other servants he intended to hire for his villa for next week now won’t be available until sometime in July! Oh, and I got him to write down what it’s called … it’s here somewhere … But the Del Coronado is gorgeous, darling, and you’ll love it …’

‘And what does Mr Pugh think you’re doing over the weekend?’

‘Oh, he thinks I’m going with him up to San Simeon ranch.’ She licked the tip of her finest brush, and concentrated on edging her lashline with kohl. ‘Mr Hearst – Marion’s friend, the newspaperman, you know – invites people to go camping up there, but it’s not really like camping … It’s like what you were telling me about archaeologists bringing along table linen and portable bathtubs and their valets. Frank wants to get on Mr Hearst’s good side to get financing for land to film Westerns on.’

Turning on her chair, she smiled sunnily upon Emma. ‘You’ll need to call him early Saturday morning, when he’s just about to leave to pick me up, and tell him I’m sick and will join them Sunday if I feel better.’

As she followed Kitty down the stairs to where the car waited – Buttercreme’s wicker carrier in one hand and Black Jasmine tucked under her other arm – Emma wondered whether Kitty had some kind of back-up plan in case Mr Pugh offered to rush right over to Kitty’s house with offers of hot toddies and chicken soup?

Although, she supposed, if the studio chief were willing to murder a man to generate publicity for his star he certainly wouldn’t walk away from a weekend spent with William Randolph Hearst …

And though she tried to be flippant about that thought, it made her shiver.

And what, for that matter, would Detective Meyer have to say about the proposed vacation? The special hearing was scheduled for Monday.

And Kitty had nothing more to her defense than, I didn’t do it.

She dreamed that night about Jim. About the endless warm twilight of early May, the sky still light at nine thirty but the trees of the Baliol meadows submerged in blue dusk. The last twitterings of the daytime birds, and the hoot of an owl somewhere. The smell of wet grass.

The bones of his big hand holding hers, the smoothness and texture of his palm. Six years later, she thought, she would still know the feel of his skin in the dark.

Still know his voice …

He said, ‘If I should die …’

‘Don’t.’

‘Hey.’ She’d heard his grin, as much as seen it. He’d been quiet all evening, as if he could see the hours counting down on the clock. Only forty-one to go … ‘Your dad goes digging around dead people all the time.’ He finger-combed back the black swatch of hair that fell over his forehead. ‘He’s got about six skulls down in his study – those have to have belonged to somebody. From what he’s told me,’ he added in a softer voice, ‘some of ’em a lot younger than me.’

She’d whispered again, ‘Don’t.’

‘I just don’t want you to turn into one of those crazy ladies in an old novel, Em. The ones who go around wearing black for the next fifty years.’

Smiling, she said, ‘If it was good enough for Queen Victoria, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be good enough for me,’ and he’d laughed, and with his arm around her shoulders hugged her tight. They’d turned into Holywell Street and she could see the lights of The Myrtles ahead of them in the darkness, the jaunty, eccentric roofline through the trees. Sleeping, she wondered why they’d come here – after the wedding they’d taken a room at the George, and he’d laughed at her, for feeling shy about lying with her husband under her parents’ roof. (‘You think they don’t know what we’re up to?’)

But here they were.

‘I mean it,’ he’d said softly. ‘If I don’t come back, I don’t want to die thinking about you living the rest of your life alone.’

And he’d signed for her to walk ahead of him, to where the light glimmered. Halfway there she turned back to him.

But he was gone.

The following night, Rome burned.

Emma had been on the set that afternoon, while Madge was walking Kitty and the vengeful Praetorian Guards along the route and Zal set up his cameras. He’d spent the previous evening testing light settings and discussing angles with the director, and with Doc Larousse. Doc’s reflectors and lighting trees surrounded the maze of unpainted pillars, cardboard statues, and cock-eyed architraves like H.G. Wells’s Martians closing in for the kill. Emma herself had seen how wide the pathways were, that looked so narrow from where Zal would stand.

‘It’s all an optical illusion,’ he’d said. ‘It all is. The folks in the seats never really understand that we’re forcing their point of view. If you stand exactly here, it’ll look like this … Like those anamorphic peep-boxes Renaissance painters used to make, or those portraits that look like nothing but a slur of lines unless you look at them with a curved mirror.’

‘Father took me to see half a dozen of those in Oxford,’ agreed Emma with a smile. ‘After King Charles I was executed, you know, his supporters would have anamorphics painted of him, to hang in their houses, to honor his memory without getting into trouble themselves. I was always fascinated by how they could do that.’

And she smiled at the memory. There’d been something both delightful and eerie, seeing those loops and streamers of light and dark paint suddenly meld into the sad features of the doomed king.

He was there all along, her father had said, to Emma’s delighted ten-year-old squeals. Like everything, you just need to look at it differently. You just need to know the secret.

‘It’s easier if you’ve got a camera.’ Zal led her, and the dogs, along the edge of the trench that would lie between his camera and the path, where galvanized trashcans stood, ready filled with chunks of wood and bushels of crumpled newspapers. Emma glimpsed Kitty’s picture on one of them as they passed.

On the path itself Madge stood, feet apart, beefy arms folded, watching with narrowed eyes as Kitty – clothed in a simple skirt and sweater – practiced tripping, and the shirt-sleeved Praetorians thundered up behind waving their spears and swords.

‘It’s Madge’s job, and Kitty’s job, and my job, to make them not realize that what they’re seeing, isn’t what’s really going on at all.’

As Emma walked back to Kitty’s base camp – now pitched at the foot of the slope on which Rome was built and incorporating, as well as a beach umbrella, a tent that had clearly done service in an epic of the Crusades – she saw the massive dark bulk of Frank Pugh, standing on the path that led back to the main lot. Like Madge he stood with arms folded, and like Madge, seemed to be watching Kitty.

But whether in admiration, adoration, or bleak suspicion, Emma was too far off to tell. And by the time she’d reached the little cluster of chairs and make-up table, gramophone and vases (orchids today – from God alone knew who! – and a glorious exultation of yellow lilies), like Jim, the big man was gone.

‘This is gonna be the greatest fire since Chicago!’ exulted Madge, when she and Kitty returned to the camp and Ned Bergen’s myrmidons moved in with the firehose wagons, to soak the dirt that surrounded the sprawl of columns and walls and ‘abandoned’ carts and market-baskets. There were, in fact, four ‘burn’ sets, this one and three smaller clusters of ruins at a respectful distance, against which Zal would film terrified extras fleeing, screaming, and falling under what looked like showers of flaming debris that in fact landed in pits of water eight or ten feet from their ‘victims’, while Kitty and Mr Crain sipped champagne at the Hotel Del Coronado.

And they’ll come back, thought Emma, on Monday for the special hearing …

And on Wednesday, Aunt Estelle and Uncle David would arrive in San Pedro, and – Emma guessed – telephone the studio and ask her where she would like to meet them, and if she was packed to go.

And I’ll tell them what?

She felt as if she’d barely had two minutes undistracted, to make up her mind.

What if the judge at the hearing remands Kitty for trial? What if her defense of: ‘I got a note from a friend who was in trouble and went to meet that friend, who never showed up …’ only increases Mr Pugh’s suspicions – surely inflamed, by that time, by a feeble excuse of being sick over the weekend?

What kind of testimony would he give, regarding the gun, and who could gain access to Kitty’s dressing room and under what circumstances?

And – perhaps most disquieting of all – how safe would Kitty be after that?

Always supposing he doesn’t simply withdraw studio support and inform the judge that justice might take its course for all he cared.

He wouldn’t endanger the picture …

But will he consider a star’s tragic death as much of a publicity coup as the title of Goddess of the Silver Screen?

Why couldn’t Aunt have written last October? When all this seemed so strange and uncomfortable, when I still thought Kitty was little more than a self-absorbed featherbrain? When I barely knew Zal?

Emma drew a deep breath, and went into the tent to get her own thermos of tea, Kitty’s of coffee laced with rum, and the packet of sandwiches she’d prepared that morning. Leashed to the tent-poles, Chang Ming and Black Jasmine leaped to their feet, tails threshing. The leash leading into Buttercreme’s box moved a little, as the tiny dog retreated further in disapproval of the entire process. Let’s wait and see what happens, before we make any decisions, Emma told herself.

Kitty’s costume hung from a portable rack, shimmering black and gold. Necklaces, earrings, rings glittered on a folding table. Outside, Emma heard Herr Volmort’s slippery, reptilian voice greeting Madge and Kitty. ‘Are you ready, Miss de la Rose?’

And she smiled, because he invariably sounded like the Grand Inquisitor politely steering his victim into the torture chamber. The kindest and most scholarly of men, his voice combined with that Middle-European accent would have made ‘Mary had a little lamb’ sound sinister.

And Kitty: ‘Darling, can you bring me a robe from in there?’

Can I leave her, not knowing?

She didn’t know.

At least, she reflected, gathering up the light cotton garment that would swathe Kitty for make-up, she wouldn’t have to worry about the Praetorian Guards.

She’d gone over to Wardrobe early that afternoon, as soon as she and Kitty had arrived on the lot, and had confided in Millie Katz that she feared that whoever had shot Mr Festraw might have designs on Kitty as well. ‘I know it’s probably foolish,’ she’d said, with a self-deprecating gesture. ‘But I’ve heard some … some quite unbelievable stories about … well, about obsessed fans. Like that woman the other day who climbed over the wall of Mr Valentino’s house and dove nude into his swimming pool …’

‘Honeybunch,’ Millie had sighed, ‘compared to the stunts other women have pulled – and men! – that particular little mermaid was riding in the Sane and Respectable car with Grace Coolidge. Whatcha need?’

‘I’d just like to make sure that you know who all the extras will be, during the burn filming tonight.’

Millie had checked. There were fifteen Praetorians and all their names were familiar to her, men who’d waltzed in ballrooms for Lubitsch or bled on DeMille’s battlefields. ‘This ain’t a scene where anybody wants to be breaking in a new boy.’

One thing I don’t have to worry about.

Two, actually, Emma reflected, as Kitty settled into her chair and closed her eyes for the little German to cold-cream her face. A call had come in for her to Kitty’s dressing room shortly after their arrival on the lot, and Tony Cornero’s unmistakable voice had said, ‘Mrs Blackstone? I got somethin’ for you that may help you, if you care to come by the club tomorrow at about four.’

She’d smiled a little at the young man’s careful circumlocution – he clearly suspected that his telephone was tapped – but had thanked him, doubly glad that at least she’d have some better idea about Sid Gross’s movements before going down to San Diego Saturday. There would be time, she reflected, while Kitty and Mr Crain were having their little seaside idyll for her to look over the list for anything that looked familiar, in terms of times and places …

And if worst came to worst, she could telephone Zal, and take the train back to Los Angeles if necessary.

Darkness stole over the hills, into the sky. When Ned Bergen walked past, Kitty asked, ‘Can I set the fire?’ and her dark eyes danced like an eager child’s. A child who lives for the moment when she can set off a firecracker, and see the glory of its apotheosis.

Bergen glanced at Madge, who rolled her eyes.

‘It’ll take about ten minutes for everything to get cooking, once the fuses are lit.’ The prop chief spoke like an indulgent father.

‘You take Little Ned with you,’ ordered Madge resignedly, ‘and you get back here on the double. Heinrich’s got to spray your face with sweat before you go.’

The fire was terrifying. Fourteen men were standing around with hoses just out of shot-line and the ground was saturated for yards in every direction. Nevertheless Emma struggled against a sense of panic, as if the blaze were a live thing, live and seeking a way to break free. The heat that streamed over her had an oily feel to it; the noise seemed to beat on her head, an uncontrolled animal roar. Her heart was in her throat as she watched Kitty flee along the path, stumbling in her torn rags of black and golden gauze, half-turning to gaze over her shoulder like a frightened beast. Emma had rewritten the scenario she’d been given last month as a melodrama of comeuppance. The Harlot of Babylon, immortalized in Revelations, had sent hundreds of Christians (and a few perfectly innocent and virtuous pagans) to their deaths, had had poor blameless little Philomela flogged in the arena and had made the noble Demetrius watch the deaths of his mother and sisters after he had given in to her lusts to save them …

This was the pay-off. The moment that God showed the evil Valerna what it felt like, to be pursued, to be terrified, to be alone.

She had pictured it differently while she was writing it, and wished that the fire wasn’t so close to those fluttering tags of silk. (A week later, watching the dailies, she was aghast at how close the blaze appeared with Zal’s forced perspective.) The third take, from a different angle with the infuriated Praetorians pounding along the path behind her, made Emma shiver, remembering that Sid Gross had walked about the lot in that armor with absolute impunity. It wouldn’t take but a moment for one of them to spring forward, hurl Kitty into the blaze …

Stop it. Millie knows them all …

Three of them were very definitely Extra-Large …

STOP IT! Everything will be fine …

And everything was. Madge took different shots from different angles, Herr Volmort meticulously patted Kitty’s face dry between takes, renewed her make-up with precise speed, dusted her with powder and then sprayed her with photogenic sweat, though by the end of each take her face dripped unattractively with the real thing. The director was determined to take full advantage of the burn – four times the size of the sets arranged for the close-ups with the extras – and it was nearly eleven before she scanned the crumbling inferno and ruled, ‘That’s it.’

‘About fucking time.’ Kitty accepted the thermos of orange juice that Emma had brought to her between takes – with a straw in it, so as not to disarray the battered and terrified empress’s immaculate lipstick. Standing with Kitty and Madge at the head of the path, Emma looked along that crooked track that Kitty had run, staggered, stumbled down a dozen times (and then another score for close-ups). It was a good ten feet wide and its sides glistened like amber oil where the flamelight caught the water that Ned’s crew had sprayed between takes.

Emma still wasn’t certain she’d have had the nerve to run down that slot between the flames.

Is that, too, part of ‘It’?

She wondered if Kitty would have nightmares about it.

‘Thank you, honey.’ Kitty held out her hand to Madge. ‘That couldn’t have gone better! None of it could.’ She smiled, warm as sunlight. ‘What a shoot, hunh? Can I come tomorrow and see the dailies?’

‘They won’t be ready til Friday.’ And, seeing Kitty’s face fall, she added, ‘You going out of town with Frank for a day or two, honey? I sure would,’ she added, a schoolboy grin suddenly transforming the habitual grimness of her face. ‘You tell me when, and I’ll put on a special show for you.’ Behind them, the strategically placed kliegs were going down. Ned and his minions were hosing the ruins, clouds of smoke billowing gray in the reflected glare of the work-lights, into the star-splattered sky.

Surrounded by tired Praetorians, Emma and Kitty followed the path back to the studio.

Claudite am rivos, pueri, Virgil had said, of the farmers finishing a day’s hard work. Close the sluices, boys. The fields have drunk enough.

More lights were extinguished behind them, as if the night came closer, and followed them home.

SEVENTEEN

Kitty slept late Friday morning, though Emma had instructions to wake her at noon. Her manicurist, Pearl, would arrive at two.

Emma herself was waked, as usual, by the gentle clatter of Pekinese toenails on the floor of her bedroom, at seven, the dogs having long ago learned who was in charge of the icebox. With the Pekes orbiting her feet, she washed, dressed, and descended to the kitchen, to mince up the cold chicken she’d cooked on Tuesday for precisely this purpose and mix it with biscuit cakes – Kitty had heard that canned meat for dogs was being sold but had reservations about what was actually in it.

As usual, Chang Ming and Black Jasmine wolfed down their rations and sat – trembling with impatience under Emma’s watchful eye – while Buttercreme picked at the contents of her own dish at the opposite end of the kitchen.

What sort of arrangements would be on offer, Emma wondered, at the Hotel Del Coronado? The kitchen staff could certainly be bribed into storing shredded meat and dog biscuit, and presumably the Pekes would sleep in her room rather than in the suite shared by Kitty and Mr Crain.

I’ll miss them. She shivered a little, remembering Mr Pugh standing on the pathway yesterday afternoon, watching Kitty rehearse without making a move to go to her.

Of course he wouldn’t want to derail preparations for a scene that’s costing I don’t know how many thousands of dollars, and that can only be shot once …

With any luck, thought Emma, as she opened the kitchen door and carried Black Jasmine and Buttercreme down the tall steps to the yard below, there would be something in whatever Mr Cornero would give her this afternoon, which would prove who Mr Gross had met with. (Surely there wouldn’t be a description of a clandestine rendezvous with Gloria Swanson after all?) It might well be that it had nothing whatsoever to do with Mr Pugh, and she could turn the information over to Zal, and return to Oxford with a clear heart.

If return to Oxford is what I want to do. And for a moment, instead of the uneven line of The Myrtles’ roof, the glimmer of its windows in the dusk, she saw the sinking moon over the night-black Pacific. Heard the grind of tires following the sea-road north.

And for a moment it seemed to her – there in the twilight on Holywell Street – she glimpsed Jim in the gloaming behind her, lifting his hand to wave to her and then walking away into the dusk. And she knew there was someone else waiting for her, in the shadows of the porch.

When the three dogs had thoroughly explored the long grass around the scrubby orange trees, and pattered over to bid old Mrs Shang good-morning, Emma carried them back up to the service porch beside the kitchen and brushed them, which at this season involved almost a cupful of foxtails and clumps of shed undercoat the size of baby rabbits. Then, feeling a bit guilty because she knew she’d neglected her next project, she got out her stack of composition books, and for two hours, while birds chirped outside the open back door and now and then Mr Shang’s clippers made a sword-like snick as he trimmed the bushes around the garage, she sank into the world of wild parties, social marriages, agonizing jealousies and passionate kisses – all freely cribbed from Manon Lescaut, with an occasional dash of Suetonius.

I’ll have to turn this scenario over to Sam, she reflected. In between pouring drinks for ivory poachers and dodging German patrols in the Red Sea, had the scenarist ever heard of either Manon Lescaut or The Lives of the Twelve Caesars? Well, he DOES quote a good deal of Shakespeare when he gets drunk …

She knew she shouldn’t really care whether Frank Pugh was left high and dry for a scenario or not. If he’d had Rex Festraw murdered, and had paid Mr Gross to try to murder her and Zal, it would serve him right …

But she couldn’t bring herself to walk out on a project. And whether Mr Pugh had anything to do with these events or not, it wasn’t fair to Kitty, or Madge, or whoever else was going to be connected with Hot Potato. (Can I REALLY tell Aunt Estelle that my first professional work was an epic with that title?)

At three, leaving Kitty in the hands of the birdlike little manicurist, Emma walked down Ivarene Street to Vine, to take the bus and then the streetcar along Sunset, to meet with Tony Cornero.

The Bel Giardino was quiet when she tapped at its door. It was opened by the enormous doorman, neatly buttoned into his burgundy uniform but with his cap askew. He bowed a trifle awkwardly, touched his cap, and said, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Blackstone,’ in the slangy radio-Brooklynese that seemed to have come, factory-installed, on all of Mr Cornero’s henchmen. Locking the door behind her, he led her upstairs. The big room itself was shadowy and nearly empty, save for a charwoman running an immense electric vacuum-cleaner over the snowy carpet that bordered the dancefloor, and the low mutter of a radio announcer’s voice rattling off the narration for what sounded like a race of some kind. Horses? Dogs?

Pigs, perhaps? She’d have to ask Zal the details about that …

And where was Fresno?

‘Mrs Blackstone.’ Tony Cornero – and another man with his same sturdy build, and the suggestion of kinship in his chin and nose – rose from a corner table.

The other man said, ‘I’ll be down the cellar, Tony,’ and bowed again to Emma before he left. Cornero held Emma’s chair for her as she sat.

‘This’s the best we could do.’ Returning to his own chair, the bootlegger took from among the neat stacks of papers on the table three sheets stapled together. ‘Far as my boys could tell, sounds like Sid Gross is laying low.’

He held up his hand, snapped his fingers for the bartender: ‘What’ll you have, Mrs Blackstone? Champagne again?’

‘Tea.’ She smiled. ‘If it’s not inconvenient.’

‘Louie!’ he called out. ‘Tea for the lady, and don’t go tellin’ me we ain’t got any … Louie wouldn’t know tea if the Queen of England spilled it in his lap.’ He sipped his own drink, which smelled of gin and lime.

‘Gross ain’t been to his apartment and he hasn’t been at his office since last Thursday. His girlfriend ain’t seen him since the Monday before that. The Pasadena police found his car day before yesterday in a gully up in the Santa Susanna hills. The left front fender was scraped and dented, like he’d bumped it into another car, and the glovebox and trunk were cleared out.’

Emma paused, halfway down the first page of a list of sightings: Gross’s apartment on Hope Street on the thirteenth – the Sunday before the murder. The café at the corner of Hope and Washington on the fourteenth for breakfast. The barbershop on West 23rd that same Monday afternoon. ‘He would have gotten another, surely.’ Whoever had assembled this had better informants than Colt Madison. Zal’s wrecked Model-T had been hauled back to Foremost Productions the day after the attempt on their lives: Emma was fairly certain it was destined to go off a cliff or in front of a train in the next Wildcat Slim two-reeler. ‘Can that be traced through the Motor Vehicles Department?’

‘Sure could,’ agreed the bootlegger. ‘If Gross bought it under his own name, which I’ll lay you five to one he didn’t.’

Emma opened her mouth to speak her thought – that this seemed another case of someone having a great deal of money – and then closed it. Mr Crain had purchased the black Ford coupe for Zal, used, from one of his employees; it couldn’t have cost more than a hundred dollars. The price, evidently, of a high-class bottle of wine. Yet the idea nagged at her thoughts, and with it, the sense that she could almost see what was really going on.

Like Zal’s forced perspective. It’s all an optical illusion … We’re forcing their point of view …

A peep show, Mr Madison had said.

He was there all the time … you just need to know the secret …

She thought, Yes. We’re only seeing what’s in the shot-lines. A Silver Screen Goddess award. A powerful man’s jealousy.

What’s beyond those lines?

But she said, ‘Thank you for this,’ then smiled at the bartender when he brought her a cup of tea which smelled vaguely of coffee grounds. ‘Please let me know what it cost you to get this information, Mr Cornero. I know some of this’ – she gestured with the papers, which included information, she could see running her eye down the first page, gleaned from cab drivers and the owner of the magazine-stand across the street from Sid Gross’s apartment building – ‘can’t have come cheap.’

Cornero waved her question away. ‘I’ll settle that with Mr Crain,’ he said. ‘He’s a real gent, Mr Crain – unlike that crooked cheap-ass son of his.’

Startled, Emma asked, ‘Do you know his son?’ From Kitty – and old Mr Crain – Emma had developed a mental picture that combined Uriah Heep with Cato the Censor: dour, stingy, and self-important in an oleaginous way. At least Cato the Censor wouldn’t – as Kitty assured him that Young Mr Crain did (only he was nearing forty) – constantly write to his father hinting for money.

‘I seen him.’ The young bootlegger made a face. ‘When I was back in New York, he’d come into the 300 Club to meet his business pals after hours, lookin’ around him like he was at the zoo and couldn’t wait to do his deals and scram.’

‘A nightclub?’ Emma almost laughed. ‘And here he gives his father the impression he never leaves the sanctity of Long Island and his country club.’

‘Country club my – uh – foot. You can do crooked stock deals at a country club as easy as you can at the 300, or anyplace in town … It’s why you coulda knocked me over with a feather, when Selma downstairs told me she’d seen him at Doolittle’s, last Wednesday night.’

‘Doolittle’s?’

Selma must be the kewpie-doll coat-check girl.

‘Club over on Avocado Street, in Los Feliz.’ Cornero shrugged. ‘Quiet little place. Charlie Crawford owns it; Selma’s dating one of the musicians there.’

Wednesday night. Emma flipped through to the last of the pages. Drinks with Tim Crain, Doolittle’s, nine p.m. ‘Are you sure? Is she sure?’ Her heart was suddenly beating fast.

What they’re seeing isn’t really what’s going on at all …

Ambrose Crain’s son. Here.

‘Yeah. Selma used to wait tables at the Quick and Easy, around the corner from the Crain Building on Fifth Avenue. She said for a guy that rich Crain was the world’s lousiest tipper and treated the staff like garbage. She said the kitchen boys would take turns comin’ up with the worst stuff they could drop in his food – I’m not even gonna tell you the stuff they made that crooked mammalucco eat.’

‘Crooked?’

‘Oh, hell, yeah, crooked,’ said Cornero. ‘I don’t know whether poor old Mr Crain ever knew about it, but I know of at least twice, that his boy nearly got into felony territory, signing his old man’s name to back stock deals that I know for sure were under the table.’

Emma sat for a long time, looking at that single typed line. Drinks with Tim Crain, Doolittle’s. Last Wednesday at nine o’clock …

Here. In Los Angeles.

Meeting Sid Gross.

And feeling a cold certainty, as if she’d felt when those little bits of hands on pottery fragments had fallen into relationship with one another, those corners of robes, disembodied feet …

A column in Photo Play a month ago.

Kitty’s voice. ‘Did I tell you they struck oil on his Long Beach land? OCEANS of it, darling – this was last month … Standard Oil offered him a fortune for it …’

LOVE’S FATAL TRAGEDY …

Tony himself saying, Unless he was secretly romancing some wealthy widow and her family wanted to rub him out …

We’re seeing what they want us to see.

The mournful dark eyes of King Charles I. He’s been there all along …

Like Ned Bergen’s minions, setting up a scene. Like Zal, forcing perspective.

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly. ‘Thank you.’

She folded the papers and put them into her handbag, finished her tea, and went down the stairs to catch the streetcar on Sunset Boulevard for home.

The dogs rushed to her in a frou-frou of flouncing fur and clattering toenails as she opened the door. It was late, nearly seven – home-going traffic had as usual blocked every intersection along Sunset Boulevard and stopped the streetcar repeatedly – and the sky was filled with the glow of sunset light. Emma called out, ‘Kitty?’ but got no reply. In the kitchen, she saw at once that the dogs hadn’t been fed. When they dashed in at her heels she stopped, taken aback, at the tiny spots of blood on the yellow tile of the kitchen floor. A second glance showed her that Chang Ming was limping. She knelt, and saw that under his long fur he had an abraded bruise on his right foreleg.

Cold to her heart, she ran upstairs.

Kitty’s suitcase was gone.

Descending, she checked the living room – where the dogs’ three wicker crates were still lined up neatly. With a sensation of the shaky cold spreading through the whole of her body, she almost ran through the kitchen and down the back steps to the gardener’s cottage. The Shangs were in its tiny kitchen, preparing a skillet of vegetables and rice – This what real Chinese eat, Mr Shang had told her once. To her query, the old man said, ‘Mr Crain man call, say, he and lady go away together, sudden. She not even wait to pack, he say. Like kids. Run off, be together alone.’

‘When was this?’ Emma asked.

The long eyebrows puckered over Shang’s nose. ‘Not so long. Six o’clock maybe?’

‘And they phoned the cottage here?’

He nodded, and glanced at his wife for confirmation. ‘Something wrong, Mrs Backston?’

Emma said softly, ‘I don’t know.’ But as she climbed the stair to the kitchen again, she knew there was. Setting up a scene. We’re seeing what they want us to see.

LOVE’S FATAL TRAGEDY …

Zal was at the lot already when she phoned.

Madge will kill him … Frank will kill him …

‘Yeah?’ He had an office the size of Kitty’s upstairs bathroom, where he kept his lenses and his notes. She knew he was sitting at his cluttered desk, feet propped on the wastepaper basket.

‘Zal,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know what’s happening, but I think something’s happened to Kitty. I think … this sounds so stupid, but I think she may have been kidnapped.’

He didn’t say, Oh, come on! Or, Why would anybody …?

‘Who by?’

‘Sid Gross,’ said Emma. ‘Working for Mr Crain’s son. He – Timothy Crain – was in Los Angeles last Wednesday night, the day of Mr Festraw’s murder. Mr Cornero’s coat-check girl recognized him with Gross at some nightclub in Los Feliz. That was on the paper I got from Mr Cornero this afternoon. When I got home Kitty was gone, and one of the dogs is hurt – it looks as if he’d been kicked. Mr Shang tells me he got a telephone call, supposedly from one of Mr Crain’s employees—’

‘You at the house? I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

She had no idea what he was going to say to Madge Burdon, and didn’t ask. She barely had time to say, ‘Thank you,’ when he hung up.

EIGHTEEN

When she passed through the living room to fetch the first-aid kit from the bathroom, Emma halted, conscious again of the last, fading whiff of a half-familiar smell there. A smell that brought back something, some feeling of horror …

She came back into the kitchen, snipped Chang Ming’s fur clear of the wound and daubed the abraded flesh with rubbing alcohol, a treatment the little dog bore with stoic patience. She manipulated his foreleg gently to make sure no bones had been broken, and indeed, once she’d set down their food bowls the limp almost disappeared. She returned to the living room, cringing at whatever that was …

… whatever that was …

Chloroform. The ambulances she’d driven from the Oxford station out to Bicester Hospital had reeked of it. Sometimes she still smelled it in her dreams.

I was right. I’m not making this up.

Headlights swept across the windows in the growing dusk. Zal said, ‘What happened?’ as Emma opened the door. ‘You’re sure it was Crain?’

‘The woman who saw him was sure. She used to wait tables at a café where young Mr Crain had lunch in New York. She knew him by sight because he was such a bad customer. Mr Crain – Kitty’s Mr Crain – and I spent Saturday evening together and his son’s name came up in the conversation. I’m reasonably sure he would have said something, had he known his son was in town. The man who phoned the Shangs said Mr Crain and Kitty had decided, just like that, to run off on vacation together, but she’d never have left without feeding the dogs. And I honestly don’t think she would have gone without them at all. In either case she’d have left me a note. And Chang Ming was hurt.’ She stooped, to touch the red dog’s head where he sat beside her ankle. ‘Kicked, it looks like.’

Zal said, ‘Momzer. You phone Crain’s place?’

‘I was about to when you arrived. According to Mr Cornero, Crain the Younger has used his father’s property more than once, as collateral on loans, without Mr Crain’s knowledge. I suspect all this has something to do with that.’

‘Why bring Kitty into it?’

‘Because she’s notorious,’ said Emma quietly. ‘Because she’s the Goddess of the Silver Screen. Because she has “It”. Her name has been plastered across every newspaper in the country for the past week and a half. So when Mr Crain – and his scandalous mistress – both turn up dead, nobody is going to run about investigating his son’s financial activities.’

Zal’s eyebrows went up, as if half admiring the scheme. ‘Activities that’d come to light when Standard Oil runs a title check on the property that Daddy Crain’s about to sell them?’

‘Yes,’ Emma said quietly. ‘But only if Timothy Crain isn’t the owner of them himself. Kitty is the obvious suspect in his murder – like the newspaper said, “Love’s Fatal Tragedy”. It’s a story everyone will buy. But only if she’s dead.’

Zal repeated the Yiddish word he’d used when informed of the presence of Rex Festraw in Kitty’s dressing room last Wednesday. ‘Makes sense. She’s trashy, she’s flashy, she’s a “celluloid wanton” and thanks to the Pettingers and Thelma Turnbit, everybody in the country knows her name. You know where this Villa Whatever is?’ he went on, crossing to the telephone niche. ‘It’s the only place where Gross and Junior could set up a show like that … if you’re right. And I think you are.’ He turned his head slightly, frowning. Sniffing.

‘I think – I’m not sure – that what you smell is chloroform,’ said Emma. ‘And no, I’m not certain of any of this. But it makes sense. Kitty said the Villa was right on the edge of a forest, but I’ve never heard of a forest anywhere in two hundred miles …’

‘There is actually one up in Big Bear. Or it could be Angeles National Forest – or any one of a whole string of national forests in the other direction, going up the coast. They might know at Crain’s, if you’ve got the number – there’s no phone at this Villa, is there?’

‘Not hooked up.’ She opened the drawer beneath the telephone cabinet itself, with a whispered prayer of thanks that one of the first things she’d done when entering her sister-in-law’s household last October had been to sort and arrange its contents. ‘Nor is the plumbing, evidently …’

‘You got a California map?’

‘In that cabinet.’ She heard Zal dialing behind her as she went up the stairs. A few minutes later, in the midst of digging through the scented chaos of Kitty’s bureau drawers, she heard his voice, short questions spaced as if he were getting shorter answers. When she came downstairs, empty-handed, he was back in the living room, unfolding one of the California Auto Club’s enormous printed maps on the glass-and-chrome coffee table, the dogs clustering around his feet as if he were unwrapping a sandwich.

‘No answer at his office.’ He spoke without looking up. ‘His butler says he got a call about six o’clock from a voice he didn’t recognize, saying, “This is Andy Wilkins, I’m an old friend of Mr Crain’s and he asked me to phone you and let you know he’ll be late getting home tonight. We met at Joy’s” – that’s the drugstore across the street from Crain’s office on Highland – “and we’re having dinner”. Then he hung up before the butler could ask him where, or could he speak to Mr Crain. No soap on the Villa?’

She shook her head.

‘This look familiar?’ He held up a business card. On one side was neatly printed the name, office address, and office telephone number of Ambrose Crain. On the other, a firm, regular hand she recognized had written: 100 Mint Canyon Road.

Again she shook her head. ‘It’s Mr Crain’s writing, though.’

‘His butler said the Villa Foresta is on the edge of the Angeles National Forest … Here we go.’ He stabbed at the column of infinitesimally tiny print at one side of the map, then scanned the map itself.

‘Kitty said it’s about two hours’ drive north of here.’

‘Back-side of the mountains, then. This would be easier if we knew what Kitty thinks she means when she says “north”.’

Emma sat beside him on the couch, leaned around his arm. Vast pale-green blocks of empty country, threaded with white roads.

‘Here we go. Mint Canyon Road – Christ, that’s a distance. And if it turns out that’s just the address of some lady who breeds Pekinese …’ Zal paused, the map half folded-up again in his hands. ‘Then I guess we’ll have lost.’ He scooped his cap from the coffee table where he’d dropped it, led the way out onto the porch, down the steps to the waiting car. Emma gathered her coat and handbag, locked the door behind her, descended as the last dove-blue darkness was deepening to indigo.

‘Do you …?’ she began as she got in, and stopped herself, self-conscious and wondering if she’d ever remotely thought that she’d be uttering the words …

Zal glanced at her, headlight glare slipping off the lenses of his glasses as he maneuvered the Ford up the steep drive.

‘Do you have any kind of weapon?’ She almost blushed: I sound like someone in a blood-and-thunder novel …

‘Glovebox,’ he said. ‘It’s Dirk Silver’s.’

She opened it, only long enough to see that the automatic pistol was there.

‘It’s a Luger. I knew he kept one in his dressing room. God knows when it was last cleaned or fired, or whether he has a permit to carry the thing. I sure don’t. It is loaded …’ He braked halfway up the drive. ‘Does Kitty have one? I’d rather have one that won’t blow up in my hand. She had the gun Gross must have swiped from her dressing room to shoot Festraw with …’

‘I’ve never heard her speak of another. Of course,’ she added, ‘I’d never heard her speak of the murder weapon, either … But I’ve just gone through her bureau looking for the address of the villa, and I didn’t see one. If there’s another in the house, I doubt I could find it in under two hours.’

He let in the clutch. Gravel spurted from the wheels as they lunged up the drive. ‘That’s our girl.’

‘There’s two ways of getting there.’ The hills rose up around them. Spots of light amid trees that were no more than dark within darkness, where the Gloria Swansons and Rudolph Valentinos and Charlie Chaplins of the world sat on their terraces, looking down on the electric fires of Babylon, or out towards the endless sea. ‘We can take this road northwest around the corner of the San Gabriels, then follow the Southern Pacific right-of-way back along the feet of the hills. That’s about an hour, hour and a half at this time of night. Two hours in traffic. If we cut straight through the hills through Burbank and Altadena we can probably get there in forty-five minutes – if we don’t blow a tire. That road is pretty primitive.’

Emma’s heart gave a little lurch. ‘What do you recommend?’ The steadiness of her own voice surprised her. ‘You say Mr Crain’s butler got his call at about six, which must be shortly after Young Mr Crain secured his father’s company in some way. It’s …’ She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s just after eight now. They have to have both of them there at the villa, and they have to do whatever they need to do, to set up the house to look like a love-nest killing.’

‘If that’s what’s happening.’

‘Do you think it is?’

‘I do.’ He was barely a shadow against the glare of his headlights. ‘Mostly because Tim Crain’s got the money to set up Festraw’s murder, in order to make Kitty famous coast-to-coast as a woman who’d kill a lover.’

‘And set it up in such a way that it won’t get her put in jail. That,’ agreed Emma, ‘was clever. That the evidence was just enough to make all the newspapers, but would leave her still within his reach. He must have put detectives out to find Mr Festraw in New York, the minute he heard that the land he’d already signed over as collateral on some stock transaction was going to be sold and title-checked … He would be able to get that information, wouldn’t he?’

‘Oh, sure. If he follows market news and reports like Crain says he does … And if I were making hanky-panky with somebody else’s real estate, you bet I’d have somebody in one of the brokerage houses keeping an eye on it. But we both could be wrong.’

‘And we could be wrong about where this is all taking place,’ said Emma quietly. ‘Although I can’t think of a place where Timothy Crain would have more control of the … the set-dressing of his father’s murder by a scandalous woman. Our only alternative is to call the Los Angeles county sheriff …’

‘Yeah, without a shred of proof and no idea where this is actually taking place, in four thousand square miles of LA county. They’re gonna rush right out to thwart that crime.’

‘Go through the hills.’ She let her breath go in a little sigh. ‘I think … I think we don’t have any time to lose.’

The hillside homes disappeared in the dark. The lights of the village of Burbank among its orchards twinkled for a moment, then also were gone. The hills closed in around the little car, and when Emma wound the window down, the wind that flowed over them was redolent with the smells of dust and sagebrush. She could see the strip of ill-kept asphalt that looked barely newer than the ruined pavement that had led up Sycamore Canyon Saturday night, and wondered how robust the tires on the little Ford were.

And whether Sid Gross had anyone else with him.

At length she said, ‘I’m sorry about calling you—’

‘Herbie was dying for the chance to shoot. It’s cut-and-dried stuff, extras running through the burning city screaming.’

‘Even so—’

‘Hey.’ He took his hand from the wheel long enough to grasp her wrist. ‘I love Kitty. She drives me nuts, but she’s like a sister to me. And I couldn’t let you …’ He hesitated.

‘There’s nothing I could have done,’ said Emma, ‘if you hadn’t come when I called.’

‘I know. And I’m pretty sure you’re right about what’s going on. And when the newspapers came out about finding her body, I couldn’t let you go through your life wondering if there was something you could have done.’

‘Thank you.’ There didn’t seem to be much else to say. Around them the hills loomed taller, lightless as velvet under a velvet sky. There was still no sign whatsoever of a forest, but the pavement dwindled to little more than a graded track of broken asphalt, cut by watercourses and walled in by prickly shoulder-high brush, barely visible in the feeble gleam of the headlamps. Zal drove swiftly but carefully, the car swaying with the uneven roadbed but never jolting.

‘Do you …?’ Again she hesitated.

‘Do I know how to shoot a gun?’ She could hear the sidelong flicker of his half-grin. And, more soberly, when she didn’t reply: ‘Or, do I think I can pull the trigger on another human being?’ Silence for a time, and the soft grind of the tires on gravel. She remembered that he had spoken of dodging the draft. ‘Can you shoot?’

Emma shook her head. ‘Jim – my husband – offered to teach me, but I’m afraid I … I thought too much about what it would mean, to actually be ready to kill someone. And if one doesn’t mean it, I don’t expect one can be convincingly threatening in an emergency.’

‘You’d be surprised.’

‘That’s what Jim said. Have you ever shot anyone?’

He said, ‘Whoa,’ and braked, cutting the headlights as another pair of far-off lights pin-pricked the blackness before him. In liquid moonlight Emma had the impression they’d come out on a wider road that curved down to their left, the direction from which the other car was coming. Uphill, she thought. Framed by the shoulders of the hills around them she had a dim sense of flat land beyond, and infinitely far off, a tiny salting of lights.

She kept silent, watching the car-lights approach. She recalled the headlights that Zal had mentioned seeing in their rear-vision mirror, twice or thrice on the twisty drive along the backbone of the Santa Monica hills, and the silent bulk of a car slipping away down Ivarene Street in the wake of Peggy’s departure. Invisible in the blackness she could tell nothing of Zal’s face. She herself felt curiously without fear.

We’re dealing with people who calmly plan to kill Kitty and Mr Crain for money. Have been planning it for weeks. Had killed Mr Festraw the way a cook wrings a chicken’s neck, because that’s what’s on the dinner menu … not that the man was any great loss. But she knew to the marrow of her bones that it wouldn’t have mattered to these people – Sid Gross, and his employer Timothy Crain – if he had been. He was just a convenient piece of a convenient scheme.

How much money did one get in a murky business deal involving oil wells and stock futures, anyway?

Quite a bit, it sounded like.

She remembered the way Mr Crain had glanced aside when the subject of his son had arisen. Even now, I find myself entangled in the past, he had said. Preoccupied by things I did wrong, or should have done differently …

Concerning his son?

Heard in her mind Kitty’s voice, casually speaking of an early swain in her chorus-dancing days. Well, he was passionately in love with me but if his father’d cut him off he had no way – nothing – of making his own living. None of them do, you know. They can sell stocks but they can’t wash dishes.

She wondered if Mr Crain had given his son any ultimatum.

Kitty’s in that car …

The headlights swung, disappeared around the shoulder of a hill. Her heart was pounding but she still didn’t feel any fear. How far is the villa from the main road? Did he see our headlights before Zal switched them off?

Zal let in the clutch, guiding the car – carefully – by moonlight down the grade. In a startlingly matter-of-fact tone, Emma asked, ‘Will they be able to hear us?’

‘Depends on how many of them there are. If Junior’s smart it’ll be just him and Gross, unless he wants to be paying blackmail for the rest of his life. And if Gross is smart, he’ll watch his back for the rest of his life. This may be the first time Junior’s killed for gain. I’ve been told the second time’s always easier.’

‘Jim said that about war.’

Two stone plinths, barely visible in the gloom, marked a driveway that led downhill to the left. In the moonlight – only a few days past full – Emma could make out the brass numbers on one of the plinths: 100. As Zal turned the car between them she felt behind her breastbone the breathless sensation she’d had, just before her first piano recital. Chopin’s second piano sonata. Her fingers – her wrists – twitched with the recollection: slow dark opening, then flickering notes like fire … This is a stupid time to be remembering that …

Across a shallow valley three enormous windows threw lakes of topaz out into the darkness. Zal cut the engine, steered the little Ford in silence over what felt like new paving, smooth and silent. Every molecule of Emma’s flesh cringed, waiting for the sounds of shots that would tell her they were too late.

In moonlight and the residual glow from the windows, she saw there were two cars, parked in front of the three wide, shallow steps that ascended to a tiled terrace outside the windows. Trees made dark clouds beside the house, the only sign Emma had seen so far of the ‘forest’ of which everyone had spoken. In California, did two trees constitute a forest?

Why am I thinking this? If those men have guns I may be dead in the next ten minutes. WE may be dead … myself, Zal, Kitty, Mr Crain …

Poor Aunt Estelle will arrive to that news …

Through the windows she could see a couch, a chair, a long narrow refectory table, Renaissance antiques or very good fakes. A door of that big tapestried room opened and a thinnish, balding man came in, taller than Mr Crain but with enough resemblance to his sharp-featured face that she guessed at once that this was Timothy. He was speaking over his shoulder to someone in the dark of the hall.

A moment later a bigger man came in, tall, broad, and just the respectable side of fat. Emma remembered that ‘XLarge’ notation on Millie’s costume log.

He was carrying Kitty in his arms.

She was unconscious, limp as a rag doll in the frock of wine-colored charmeuse she’d had on that afternoon, waiting for her manicurist. Gross – the man had to be Sid Gross, she could see the mole on his nose – dumped her into one of the chairs, and turned as Timothy crossed to the big carven fireplace, gesturing like a man giving instructions.

‘You stay here.’ Zal had stopped the car far back enough from the house that, hopefully, it wouldn’t be seen from those great windows. Not with the lamps on inside, it won’t …

He took the Luger from the glovebox, and in the darkness his voice was grim and steady. ‘I’m going to check the other cars to see if there’s another weapon in either of them, and then I’ll see if there’s a way into the house. You keep the doors locked and be ready to start up and get the hell out of here the minute there’s trouble. Don’t stick around waiting for me. They won’t be able to find me in the hills. Starter-pedal on the floor here, button on the dash here … All right?’

She whispered, ‘All right.’

He started to get out of the car, leaned back in, caught her by the shoulders and kissed her, hard. Then he slipped out and vanished almost at once into the darkness.

The three large windows framed the scene within like a triple proscenium arch. Evidently no drapes had yet been hung. Timothy Crain was still giving instructions in dumb-show; Gross nodded, then went out the door into the dark of the house once more. The millionaire’s son went to the sofa, bent over it and with a visible effort dragged up the man who, up until that moment, had lain out of sight there. The whole scene was about thirty feet away but Emma recognized Ambrose Crain’s slender form, gray suit, and white head lolling as his son propped him in a corner of the seat. Timothy studied his father for a moment – Emma wasn’t close enough to see his expression – then changed his position, and turned to tip over the low, long coffee table in front of the couch. Emma saw that he was wearing gloves. When Sid Gross came back in, he was wearing them, too.

Gross bent to the humidor that had been on the coffee table, which had flown open when the table was upset, spilling cigars on the Persian carpet. Young Mr Crain – though Kitty was right, Emma thought, thirty-five at least, unhealthily pallid, the bare spot on his scalp blotchy with eczema – stepped over to him with a rebuke, and there was a brief argument. It’s got to look natural, thought Emma. It can’t look as if a third – or a fourth – person was here …

She was reminded again of Ned Bergen, arranging the empress’s chamber for Marcus Maximus to stride in by moonlight …

When Gross handed Young Crain a small silver box, and Young Crain turned to calculate where it should fall if it were knocked off the table, the detective quickly stooped and helped himself to a half-dozen of the scattered cigars. (Come ON, Zal, where are you …?) Young Crain flipped the silver box open and dusted a little white powder on Kitty’s chest, then dabbed the fingertips of her right hand in it (You’ll never get away with that, everyone in Hollywood knows she hasn’t touched the stuff since February …). With a flick of his hand he flung box and its remaining contents obliquely across the floor.

Star Slays Lover and Self in Dope Frenzy …

Of course he’ll get away with it. Standard Oil’s going to pay him millions for that Long Beach land.

Love’s Fatal Tragedy …

Young Crain gave another curt order. Gross went to the decidedly un-Renaissance liquor cabinet behind a carved screen, came back with two glasses and a satchel. The satchel contained two nearly-empty bottles – by their shapes and color Emma guessed one was Gordon’s gin, the other imported whiskey of some kind. Young Crain sprinkled whiskey over his father’s body and the couch, sloshed the other glass with gin and dropped it on the floor.

Zal, where ARE you …?

Gross picked Kitty up, carried her to the side of the fireplace, laid her face-down on the floor. Both men stood back, considering the scene.

ZAL …!

Young Crain nodded briskly, dug in his pocket for an envelope and handed it to Gross. Gross counted what was in it, shoved it into the breast of his jacket, and took out a gun.

NINETEEN

Emma jammed the starter-pedal with her foot, hit the self-starter, yanked the car into gear and slammed the accelerator. The Ford roared into life – Gross and Young Crain snapping around like two characters in a play – and the little car bounced as it leaped up the shallow steps to the terrace …

Emma’s foot rammed to the floorboards and she thought, Now don’t close your eyes or you’ll run over poor Mr Crain …

She hit the windows in an explosion of flying glass, slammed on the brake, and prayed that Zal was somewhere close by as she opened the door.

Gross brought the gun up and Young Crain swatted the weapon aside.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Emma, in the tone that had worked when one of Lawrence Pendergast’s drunk and rampant friends had cornered her in the pantry. ‘How are you going to account for a third corpse? Or a bloodstain on this carpet? They’ll test the blood, you know,’ she added, as Gross’s gun wavered in his hand. Sam Wyatt had told her that much. ‘They’ll know it isn’t either Mr Crain’s or Miss de la Rose’s.’

Gross looked at Young Crain. Emma could almost see a title-card, ‘Wadda we do now, Boss?’ The wily Odysseus would have rolled his eyes in disgust.

‘Mr Devine is already on his way back to Pasadena,’ Emma went on, extemporizing from the dialog of every film she’d ever seen. ‘Someone recognized you, Mr Crain, at Doolittle’s Wednesday—’

The hall door opened and for an instant Emma’s heart leapt to her throat, but it was, thank God, Zal, Luger in hand.

Gross’s hands were already coming up in surrender when Young Crain lunged at him, almost tripping in the process, grabbed the gun he held, and fired at Zal. Zal ducked, and Young Crain knocked the carved screen over into him, sending Zal’s Luger flying. Young Crain spun, again almost over-balancing himself, and fired at Emma – who heard the clang of a bullet hit metal as she dodged behind the Ford’s open door. As he turned back toward Zal, Kitty reared herself up unsteadily onto one hand, Zal’s dropped Luger in the other.

Gross had already leaped behind the couch, and Timothy Crain turned and quite deliberately – at a distance of five feet – shot him. Then he bolted like a deer for the broken window and pelted into the night. Kitty fired after him – the police later found that bullet lodged in the ceiling – and Zal scrambled out from under the heavy screen, yet another gun in hand. (‘Found it in the glovebox of Crain’s car,’ he told her later.)

Gross meanwhile had begun to sob, ‘I’m hit! I’m hit! Oh, God!’ and Emma, true to her VAD training, ran to his side. Zal ran to his other side and waved Emma back, searched the groaning detective for another weapon even as Kitty staggered to her feet and stumbled toward the windows, Luger held out at arm’s length.

Emma caught her as she passed, her mind filled with bullets coming out of the dark, but Zal, tearing open Gross’s coat to reveal a huge soak of blood over his right hip, said, ‘He won’t get far. Do the phones here work, Kit?’

‘I don’t …’ She looked hazily around her. ‘Where are we? Ambrose!’ She fell to her knees beside the couch, gathered her elderly lover into her arms. ‘Oh, Ambrose! Oh, my God, is he all right?’

Emma took the gun away from her. We need an extra henchman, she thought, as Gross continued to gasp and sob – he was quite clearly really injured, and not just faking in order to grab Emma as a hostage (which was how Sam Wyatt would have handled the scene …). Zal was pulling off his sweater, and then his shirt (prudently keeping hold of his gun); Emma tucked the Luger down into the couch cushions in such a way that even if it went off it would only shoot the floor, and pulling up her skirt, tore the flounce from her petticoat, which appeared to be much simpler to do in the movies than it was in actual fact … but perhaps that was because her hands had begun to shake.

Zal tore open the buckle of Gross’s belt, undid his flies, and pulled his trousers down. He wadded sweater and shirt on either side of the streaming wounds in his hip and bound them tight with the strip of petticoat-silk. Emma meanwhile crossed to the liquor cabinet – miraculously still standing on its legs – and found another bottle of gin and three of Apollinaris water, as well as two small, neatly-folded bar towels.

‘What happened to him?’ Kitty looked up at her as she returned to the couch. ‘Is he – Ambrose!’ He stirred in her arms, as Emma soaked a towel with the water and applied it to his face. ‘Oh,’ she added, looking around her again. ‘We must be at the villa! Thank you, dearest.’ Emma had put three fingers of gin in the glass. Kitty took it from her hand, drank most of it, and poured the remainder between the old man’s gray lips.

Mr Crain coughed. He whispered, ‘Kitty …’ and made a vague gesture with his hand.

‘Gimme some of that water, Em.’ Zal held out his hand. ‘The phone, Kit – does it work?’

She brushed back her hair with the back of her wrist. ‘I don’t think so. That’s one of the things we were waiting for. And – was that Tim Crain? Oh, Ambrose …’ For a moment she turned distractedly back to the old man. Then: ‘Was he behind it all? I didn’t think he ever left New York! He’ll be long gone—’

‘Not really.’ Zal finished giving his own patient some of the water, then helped him lie back again. ‘Not if I can get to Palmdale fast enough. I disconnected the self-starter motors in both cars outside. Kitty’ – he rose to his knees, looking over the back of the couch at her – ‘are you OK? I mean, could you read a map while Emma drives? I think the closest hospital is Olive View – you feel all right, Mr Crain?’

The old man managed to say, ‘I … I think so. Is that Kitty?’ He groped for her hand, and shook his head woozily. ‘Tim – My son … I – I thought he was here – I mean I thought he was at my office …’

‘Get the map out of my car. What’s left of my car.’ Zal glanced ruefully at the Ford, sitting with four blown tires and its radiator hissing as water streamed from it onto the glass-strewn carpet. ‘Easy come, easy go … You know Sylmar, Kit? Think you can get Emma there?’

‘I can drive.’ She lifted her chin proudly while steadying herself on a corner of the couch as she rose.

‘Darling’ – Emma had heard those words in that tone of voice before – ‘we have no idea what Mr Gross might have injected you with after he chloroformed you. And if you’d had anything to drink—’

‘Only some gin.’ Kitty refilled the glass, and re-emptied it, with the virtuous air of one who has abstained all night. Then she looked down at the bosom of her dress, and brushed at the drift of white powder. ‘And I’ll swear I never took so much as a sniff of dope …’ She turned, and hastily checked her reflection in the mirror. ‘Oh,’ she gasped. ‘Oh, I look terrible—’

Zal was right, Emma reflected. Kitty never disappointed.

‘Get me to a doctor,’ whimpered Mr Gross, at Emma’s feet. ‘For the love of God, get me to a doctor—’

‘It would serve you right if we left you here.’ Kitty put a knee on the couch to look over the back of it at him. From her expression, Emma almost expected her to add, Fools, where is your Redeemer now? ‘I mean, the police are going to be along—’

‘Soon as I can get to Palmdale and call them,’ said Zal. ‘But I think …’ He came around the couch and felt Crain’s hands, something Emma had done already. They were ice-cold. ‘I think Mr Crain, as well as First Murderer down here, should get looked at pretty quick. And I for one don’t like the idea of leaving you ladies here with Junior running around loose out there in the dark. You don’t happen to know if Junior knows anything about cars, do you, Kit?’

Mr Crain was unconscious again.

Feeling rather as if she’d blundered into one of those nursery riddles about fox, geese, and a bag of corn, Emma followed Zal out into the darkness, with the electric torch from the wrecked coupe in one hand and the Luger in the other. She divided her attention between the blackness of the hills beyond the glow of the villa’s lights, and the stage-set brightness of the living room on the other side of the broken windows, half fearful that Timothy Crain would come springing out of the night with a gun in each fist and three previously unaccounted for henchmen at his heels. If Sam were writing this, he would …

The larger – and newer – of the two cars outside the villa was a long-nosed monster with a collapsible roof – fortunately in its raised position – velvet upholstery and gold-plated door-handles. Zal reconnected the starter, and drove it up the shallow steps onto the terrace, so that he and Emma could move Gross into it, using a tarpaulin which the plumbers had left on the bathroom floor as a makeshift stretcher. Kitty followed, pointing the Luger in all directions around her at the hills.

‘We really do need a henchman …’ Emma panted, as they gently maneuvered the wounded man into the back seat.

‘If we had one,’ returned Zal, ‘he’d be in the kitchen even as we speak, making coffee.’

Mr Crain could be brought back to consciousness long enough to stagger to the car, but he was clearly under the influence of something.

‘Which makes sense,’ said Emma, ‘if his son planned this to look like a … a murder-suicide during a drug-addled lover’s quarrel. Don’t they test a victim’s blood and stomach contents?’

‘If somebody hasn’t slipped the coroner a thousand dollars they do,’ agreed Zal. He fetched a pail, a rubber tube, and, after a little searching, a funnel from among the plumber’s things in the bathroom, and siphoned the remaining gasoline from the disabled Ford, to pour into the tanks of both other vehicles. ‘That should get you back to town all right. Take a left at the top of the drive, another left on the road when you get down out of the mountains, and follow that trail along the Southern Pacific tracks into Sylmar.’

Emma took a deep breath. ‘All right.’ If Queen Boadicea could lead an army to sack Londinium, I can certainly cope with this.

Zal helped her into the driver’s seat, then leaned down again to kiss her lips. ‘You OK?’ His mustaches tasted of gasoline. Emma didn’t care.

She nodded, not terribly certain whether this was true and wondering when the blood-rush of battle – which both Jim and Miles had told her about – was going to wear off, and what she’d do if this happened before they reached the hospital. Men she’d nursed in London had spoken of this, too: Like as if somebody’d thrown a switch, miss, was how one Devonshire man had put it, when she’d moved through the ward from bed to bed, making sure the men she’d ferried from the station were well and resting on the following day. And another had told her, If we’d had a push on, an’ come back to the trench, I knew I dasn’t sit down ’til the whole show was over, for once I let mesel’ get a bit cold I knew I’d never stand up again.

‘I think so. Yourself?’

And, when he’d nodded, she added, ‘Thank you. I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see anyone in my life.’

He kissed her again. ‘Scipio Africanus has nothing on you, Em.’ And, as Kitty clambered into the passenger seat with the Luger in one hand and the Auto Club roadmap in the other, ‘See you ladies in Babylon.’

Two Los Angeles County sheriffs were waiting in the driveway when Emma drove up to Olive View Sanitarium, so she knew Zal had successfully reached a telephone. Olive View was a low building in the Spanish style that reminded her powerfully of the original hacienda back at Foremost Productions, and lit up like a Christmas tree. Kitty had fallen asleep within minutes of leaving the Villa Foresta. In between picking her way cautiously down the graded – but barely paved – road from the hills, and the scarcely-better ‘trail’ that paralleled the railway tracks, Emma had braked a half-dozen times to consult the Auto Club map by the light of Zal’s electric torch. Even with the windows down she could smell, faintly, the scent of blood from the rear seat, and prayed that this was only seepage from Mr Gross’s wounds and not a major hemorrhage (Not that he doesn’t deserve it … but still …).

The car was eerily silent, the stars above the hills cold and steady in the bleached landscape of indigo and silver. The metallic awfulness of gasoline still lingered on her lips, and she shook her head a little, that Zal would have retained the presence of mind to check that after a drive of some eighty miles, there would still be enough fuel to get back to town.

Of course Zal would check.

It occurred to her how completely she trusted the man.

And, she reflected – if she read his voice and his words and his touch aright – how completely he trusted her. When she had telephoned the studio, it had never occurred to her – though she knew how dedicated was his commitment to his work – that he’d say, ‘Em, we’re about to start filming! Call the police.’

The brown-uniformed officer opened the car door for her, asked, ‘Mrs Blackstone?’ and two orderlies hastened from the hospital door with a wheeled stretcher. ‘Is this Mr Gross?’ He nodded toward the man being gently lifted from the back seat.

‘Mr Sid Gross, yes,’ said Emma. ‘He attempted to murder me – and Miss de la Rose’ – the men’s eyes got big as they recognized Kitty, who raised her head and pushed the dark maelstrom of her hair from her face – ‘earlier this evening. Mr Crain as well.’ Another orderly was helping the groggy millionaire to stand. ‘I believe he’s been drugged, as well as chloroformed earlier this evening.’

‘Drugged, hell.’ Kitty rubbed her forehead with a look of agony in her eyes as she climbed from the front seat of the car. Emma noted with relief that she’d already brushed the cocaine from her frock. Questions about that would be all they’d need. ‘I feel like I’ve had about half a bottle of gin poured down my throat, darling – and I didn’t even enjoy it. I don’t even remember it. Please don’t tell us we’re under arrest,’ she added, widening those beautiful eyes at the nearest sheriff.

He capitulated with the speed of the leading man in any one of her past fifteen films. ‘Not arrest, m’am – Miss de la Rose. But we do need to ask you some questions, and probably the Los Angeles Police will be along to ask you some more … and you really should see a doctor—’

‘And don’t try to tell anyone anything,’ warned Emma, ‘until you’re talking to the sheriffs. Oh, dear,’ she added. ‘I wonder if anyone’s thought to call Mr Fishbein?’

And she realized as she said it that she had definitely been in Hollywood too long.

What had begun as a tiring afternoon turned into a very, very long night. It seemed to Emma that she had taken the streetcar along Sunset Boulevard to the Bel Giardino in some other year – or some other lifetime. Part of this, she realized at about one o’clock in the morning, was simply the effect of hunger. When Zal walked into the sanitarium’s small lounge bearing a greasy paper sack of sandwiches from a railroad workers’ bar in Palmdale, she flung herself into his arms, kissed him, and almost wept.

‘Wow,’ said Zal. ‘This works better than booze!’

Conrad Fishbein came in fifteen minutes later – pink and cheerful with his hair combed and his beard trimmed – trailed by Al Spiegelmann, who looked as if he’d been pulled, still damp, out of the bottom of a laundry bag. Both men stared hungrily at the sandwich she and Zal had been saving for Kitty, until Emma rose and went into the corridor, found the little cluster of nurses and orderlies chattering excitedly at the nurses’ station, and asked, ‘Is there any possibility that the kitchen could be opened up? The police are going to be here shortly, and it looks like we may be here for quite some time. Of course,’ she added, ‘it goes without saying that Mr Crain will reimburse the hospital for whatever inconvenience this causes you.’

By the time the police arrived, an orderly had brought in a tray of vegetarian sandwiches (healthful but nowhere near as good as the ones from Rennie’s Railway Café) and enough coffee to revive the American Expeditionary Force.

Emma told her story to the sheriff’s deputies and then to Detective Meyer, and produced from her handbag (which she had managed to keep with her through mayhem, destruction, vehicular assault and attempted murder) the papers Tony Cornero had given her what seemed like a hundred and fifty years ago at the Bel. ‘I had reason to suspect that Mr Sid Gross was the driver of a car that attempted to run myself and Mr Rokatansky off the coast highway Saturday night,’ she said. ‘I was told that the car itself was found by the Pasadena police in the Santa Susanna mountains. Mr Cornero had very kindly offered to use his resources to find out what he could.’

‘We know all about Sid Gross, m’am.’ Avram Meyer fished a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, then replaced it a little self-consciously. ‘He came out from under ether singin’ like a canary. But I’d like to get your story before I tell you what his is.’

‘You don’t have to answer anything, Mrs Blackstone,’ said Spiegelmann, around a mouthful of Swiss cheese and wholemeal bread. ‘And I would like it to go on record that it was Mr Crain, Senior, who hired Mr Cornero, on the recommendation of a private detective, and that Mrs Blackstone had no previous connection or acquaintance with Mr Cornero or any of his associates.’

‘So noted,’ agreed Meyer, as Mr Spiegelmann rather ostentatiously fished for something – a billfold, perhaps? – in his breast pocket, and Emma made herself look as innocent as she knew how. ‘Can I have one of those sandwiches?’

And in fact, though she felt a little odd about it under the circumstances, the story she told was the unvarnished truth: how she had recalled Mr Crain’s remarks about his son never leaving New York; how a remark made by someone at the Bel Giardino – she did not recall who (Well, REASONABLY unvarnished, anyway …) – seemed to indicate that the younger Mr Crain might easily have been involved in financial chicanery with his father’s oil property in Signal Hill; how she had returned to the house at seven to find Miss de la Rose gone, one of the dogs injured, and the air smelling faintly of chloroform, an odor she recognized from her days driving an ambulance during the War.

‘It occurred to me, you see,’ she said, ‘that if anything happened to Mr Crain, the first person to be suspected would of course be his son – particularly if this was not the first time he’d used his father’s property as collateral for his own financial speculations. But if his father were linked with a notorious screen star, who would even then be on trial for the murder of her ex-husband – particularly if Miss de la Rose were found dead at the scene herself, with a gun in her hand – no one would so much as glance at his son’s dealings. Particularly,’ she added, ‘if he could produce witnesses that he was in New York at the time.’

Meyer’s smile slowly widened in his villainous Van Dyke. ‘Well, aren’t you the clever girl – m’am,’ he added. ‘From what Gross has coughed up so far, you guessed it pretty much down the line: he’s the one who got onto the Foremost lot the week before last and swiped the gun and the stationery from Miss de la Rose’s dressing room. And he’s the one who plugged Festraw, the minute Festraw was done takin’ that dressing-room phone call from Tim Crain. He knew all about Stan the Mark payin’ for Festraw to come out to LA …’

‘Did Mr Festraw actually intend to blackmail Miss de la Rose?’ asked Emma curiously.

‘Sounds like he thought that was what the whole thing was about, yeah,’ agreed the detective. ‘Crain using Festraw to put the squeeze on Miss de la Rose. Festraw didn’t know a thing about the letters – Gross planted those in the dressing room, and on Festraw, after Festraw was dead … and in Festraw’s room …’

‘Sounds like Gross had a lot to say for himself,’ remarked Fishbein, without losing his perpetual, friendly smile.

Meyer scratched a corner of his mustache. ‘I’d be talkative too, if after all my trouble my boss turned around and plugged me on general principles. You mind if we take this, Mrs Blackstone?’ He held up the stapled sheets Cornero had given her.

Spiegelmann reached across and plucked them from his hand. ‘Our office will have a copy for you in the morning, Detective Meyer.’

Emma wondered if Tony Cornero’s secretary had made a carbon-paper copy of the list, and how much of a battle there would be if Spiegelmann’s copy turned out to contain information different from the original …

And then gave it up. She had to let it out of her hands sometime, and couldn’t imagine how anyone could profit from exonerating either Crain or Gross. And she felt, simply, too tired to try to untangle further conspiracies that may or may not have existed.

‘Mr Spiegelmann, Mr Fishbein – you may want to be with me while I talk to Mr Rokatansky and Miss de la Rose. If you don’t mind, Mrs Blackstone …’ He paused on the way to the door, turned back. ‘Oh, Mr Rokatansky said to give you this. It’s from the sanitarium’s library.’

He handed her a copy of Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome.

TWENTY

Emma finished the night in one of the sanatorium’s rooms reserved for the families of patients.

Waking late the following afternoon, she was informed by Nurse Alvarez that Mr Crain’s servants had appeared with a large touring car at eight, and had carried off Mr Crain – much improved by sleep and saline draughts – Miss de la Rose, and Mr Spiegelmann back to Los Angeles. But, said Nurse Alvarez, Miss de la Rose had telephoned only an hour ago, begging everyone’s pardon for not remembering that Mrs Blackstone was still asleep at the sanatorium, and would they please give her whatever she asked for – and of course bill Foremost Productions for whatever inconvenience this might entail – and ask Mrs Blackstone to telephone her at Mr Crain’s – or at her house – or at Foremost Productions – when she woke up?

She could just imagine Kitty getting out of the car at the house, looking at the dogs, and gasping, Oh, nertz! We forgot Emma!

As Zal had said, That’s our girl.

If I go back to Oxford, Emma reflected with a sigh, at least people will remember where they left me …

But the whole idea seemed a very long way off.

She was consuming tea and toast in the shade of the cloister garden, feeling rather like Odysseus having a quiet dinner with King Alcinous and reading Macaulay’s long, deliciously scholarly preface, when Zal appeared.

‘There are times,’ he said as he crossed the flagstones in the mild California sun, ‘when I want to dunk Kitty in the rain barrel. Only Kitty would forget you were here – after you saved her life …’

Emma smiled, marked her place and stood. ‘Did you think she wouldn’t?’

‘As my mother would say,’ sighed Zal, ‘oi gevalt. You OK?’

They kissed. It felt as natural as smiling.

They kissed again, and stood for a long time, arms around each other, sprinkled with the dappling of pepper-tree shade. I could have been killed last night, thought Emma. Or last Saturday. Zal could have been killed.

Aunt Estelle will be here on Wednesday.

Her breath went out in a little sigh.

She said, ‘I knew you’d come. Thank you. And thank you for the Macaulay—’

‘It was that or Lady Paget’s Colloquies With An Unseen Friend.’

Emma shuddered. That congeries of spiritualism, the hollow earth theory, and speculations upon the fate of Atlantis had been a favorite of Mrs Pendergast and she had been obliged to read it aloud not once but several times.

‘Thank you for looking.’ Emma sat again, Zal drawing up the other wicker chair. ‘It wouldn’t even have occurred to me that a sanatorium must have a library – at least it wouldn’t have, last night. Will you have coffee? Kitty telephoned earlier this morning and told the staff here to send Mr Pugh a bill for all their inconvenience – which included accidentally leaving me behind – so they’re falling over themselves to be of service to me … Is that more sandwiches?’ She nodded toward the paper sack he’d set down beside the chair.

‘Underwear,’ he said. ‘And a hairbrush, and a clean blouse, from Make-Up and Wardrobe – I think this was on screen in Sparkin’ in the Dark. Millie Katz put them together when I stopped by the studio this morning to make sure the cameras are set for the retakes tomorrow. And, Madge asked me to ask you to please rewrite scenes eighty-three through eighty-seven and have St Peter actually marry Philomela and Demetrius on-screen, so people won’t think they’re up to anything they shouldn’t be. And she needs this by tomorrow night. They caught Tim Crain.’

Emma drew a deep breath. ‘Did they? Good.’ Nurse Alvarez – who seemed to have been appointed (or appointed herself) guest liaison – appeared under the archways of the patio’s little cloister, and crossed to them.

‘Can I get you anything, Mr Rokatansky?’

‘Coffee, if you would, thank you, m’am. Mounted sheriffs picked him up just north of Granite Mountain, and I guess he was almost happy to be taken in, til he found out he was under arrest. I gather he started out denying he was Timothy Crain – they found his driving license and business cards in his wallet – and then pretended he had amnesia. Meyer tell you what he got out of Gross?’

Emma nodded. ‘Once we knew Gross had met with Crain it was fairly obvious what was going on. If he hadn’t tried to run us off the highway I’m not sure we’d ever have known Gross was in it.’

‘Well, I gather that was the one thing Gross was worried about – that Kitty would start comparing notes with Eliot Jordan about that so-called rendezvous in the film room, and start inquiries on her own. Gross figured if something went wrong, he’d be the guy to take the fall – but if Kitty died in a car smash-up, it would queer Crain’s deal but leave Gross safe. Nice people.’

He shook his head, and ran his fingers along the cover of the Lays of Ancient Rome.

‘Nicer than the Romans,’ Emma pointed out.

Zal looked up and grinned. ‘Meyer told me this morning they’ve already traced the money Stan Markham in New York sent to the Winterdon back to Junior’s account, and the cost of his train ticket out here as well. I guess Junior was putting through a deal for controlling shares of Iron State Copper, that his dad had already turned down. The Long Beach property was his security. You were right – that’s what this was all about.’ And after a moment he added, ‘That, and getting his hands on Dad’s money once and for all.’

Quietly, Emma asked, ‘How is Mr Crain taking it?’

‘He’s leaving for New York in the morning,’ said Zal. ‘With his lawyer, Kitty says, to see if there’s anything he can do for the ex-Mrs Crain. He’s also meeting with the accountants who’re going to go over his son’s books with a nit comb. And signing the papers to cut Junior out of his will. And consulting with Cornero’s PI about how to find out whether the ex-Mrs Crain was in on it as well.’

Emma winced. ‘Whether she was or she wasn’t, that will be hard.’

‘I feel bad for the guy.’ Zal made a small gesture, helpless in the face of another man’s pain. ‘According to Meyer, Crain Senior never saw this coming. He said he’d clashed with his son a couple of times, and knew that Junior had stuck his hand in the till once or twice, and had some bad debts. But you don’t think … Christ, you don’t expect something like this. Not from your son. And maybe your wife.’

Do you do that, Mrs Blackstone? Want to go back and do a second take …?

‘You don’t,’ said Emma softly. ‘And I don’t. And I’m sure that young Mr Crain felt totally justified, because of his father’s affair with – as my aunt would say – a “cinema performer”.’

Zal sighed a little, and whispered, ‘Jesus. Crain says – according to Meyer – that Junior met him just outside the Commercial Exchange Building, as he was coming out at five. I guess the soda jerk in the drugstore across the street can testify that Junior waited at a table beside the telephone there for forty minutes, until it rang. He jumped up like a jack-in-the-box, answered it, and went straight out the door and across the street, so I’m guessing somebody in the building had been paid off to play chicky. Crain says Junior was all over himself about how glad he was he’d caught dear old Dad, and he had to talk to him, and he’d give Dad a ride home.’

He smiled his thanks to Nurse Alvarez, who came out at that point with a cup of coffee, some sugar and a little pitcher of cream on a tray. ‘I appreciate it, thank you, m’am. And thank you – all of you – for putting up with that whole invasion last night.’

‘This is a hospital,’ said the nurse. ‘Most of our patients are tuberculosis cases, and very quiet. But we’re here to help.’ Leaning closer, she whispered, ‘Everybody was thrilled. And Miss de la Rose signed autographs, for the entire crew, including the kitchen staff.’

As she went back into the shadows of the cloister, Zal said, ‘I’m gonna talk to Crain and make sure he writes these nice people a great big check. Maybe they didn’t save his life, but they could well have saved Gross’s … and it’s Gross who’s gonna put Junior behind bars for the rest of his life. Crain says Junior pulled into the driveway of one of those twisty canyon drives above Sunset, got into the back seat with him, whipped out an oilskin wrapper of chloroform rags and slapped it over his face, and that was the last thing Crain knew until he woke up in the hospital. I guess Junior poured about half a bottle of cognac down his throat when he was half-conscious, so the booze would show up in the autopsy. Nice boy. The funnel was still under the seat, with his fingerprints all over it. Thought of everything.’

Emma shivered. ‘So Gross was watching the house all that time?’

Zal nodded. ‘Like I said, he was afraid that if Kitty – or you, because he knew you were part of her household – figured out there was a conspiracy to get her out of the way right at that time, the cops might start looking below the surface, the way you started to. I mean, if Kitty’s husband turns up dead and Madge Burdon, Darlene Golden, Socrates the Elephant and thirty-seven extras all have proof of where she was at the time, so what? It’s her not being able to say where she was, that smears the whole thing all over every newspaper in the state.’

Emma nodded slowly. ‘It had to be notorious,’ she agreed quietly. ‘It had to be a scandal. Kitty had to be the obvious suspect. And she had to keep her mouth shut about where she really was. Gross knew about Eliot, I take it?’

‘Oh, yeah. Gross did a lot of work around the studios. It was a good plan.’ Zal stirred sugar into his coffee. ‘It would have worked, if you’d kept your nose out of it.’

And no one would have cared, thought Emma. Not really.

Yes, there would have been TREMENDOUS hoopla in the papers, and Temptress of Babylon would have done land-office business in theaters because of the scandal and murder and tragedy … But in a year, or six months, or maybe just a few weeks, Foremost would have a new top star, and Mr Pugh would have a new mistress, and the cinema-going public would sigh and forget. If Camille de la Rose disappears – the way Martha Mansfield and Olive Thomas disappeared – there’s always Gloria Swanson and Theda Bara and Colleen Moore and all the other Goddesses of the Silver Screen.

And I’d read the news in The Times in the breakfast parlor of my quiet home in Oxford and think, Oh, how terrible! I knew her …

Or alternately, Aunt Estelle would arrive Wednesday and make enquiries at the studio and be told, We’re so sorry, Mrs Blackstone was involved in some sort of accident Friday night …

And Aunt Estelle would cry a little and get on the train for New York and …

And what?

And nothing.

Emma rested her forehead on her knuckles, suddenly weary with the crushing weariness of last night, and last Wednesday, and six months of brushing Pekinese and sorting out Kitty’s checkbook and watching her bring home every good-looking stuntman and saxophone player in Hollywood, and wondering who was going to tamper with evidence and why …

A warm hand rested on her back. ‘Come on,’ said Zal quietly. ‘Let me get you home.’

‘You love this man,’ said Madge Burdon. ‘You lust after him the way you lust after Eliot Jordan and Ricky Dix and that stunt-rider last week at Anita Tempest’s party. And here’s this mealy-mouthed psalm-singin’ Christian prissy-pants all over Demetrius like a cheap suit—’

‘Phillymelly ain’t no prissy-pants!’ yelled Darlene, and cracked her gum. ‘She’s a woman of … of passion and fire, sensuous and unforgettable—’

Emma had the impression she’d read those descriptive words in one of the film magazines, only they’d been applied to someone other than Darlene’s character.

‘Oh, nertz! Demetrius forgets all about her for about seventy-two scenes,’ Kitty retorted.

‘That’s what I want to see, girls!’ cried Madge. ‘I wanna see sparks fly! You run up that staircase like it’s your man’s soul you’re saving from that Babylonian slut! Kitty, I want to see jealousy and contempt in every muscle of your body!’

The marble-and-gold staircase had been reassembled yesterday, just after someone had taken a belated look at the dailies of scene fifty-six and noticed a coffee cup on the bottom step. Given the amount of champagne which Kitty had consumed last night after the dismissal of the Special Hearing – and the very small hour at which she had returned home that morning – Emma reflected that she looked quite good, standing in the royal box with poor Mr Perkins, dog-sick with the hangover of the century, kneeling in chains at her feet.

Emma, who had celebrated much more circumspectly with Zal at the house, had to admit to feeling a bit sleepy herself.

The Rothstein Boys crashed into the middle of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Marche Slave’, and Darlene hurled herself up the stair as if she planned to tear out her rival’s hair, rather than fling her arms around her agonized beloved, at the top.

She didn’t get the chance to do either. Just as she reached the thirtieth of the thirty-two golden steps, Kitty flung up her hand in a gesture of passion and jealousy, took half a step back, and tripped on the side of the throne.

‘Cut!’ Madge yelled, as the empress caught her balance. ‘You OK, Kit?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Kitty apologized. ‘That was so clumsy of me. I’m just a little … tired this afternoon.’ She smiled sweetly, as if everyone knew why she was just a little tired.

Beside her, Emma was aware of Frank Pugh standing just behind the cluster of chairs and dog boxes, watching the scene with a fatuous smile illuminating his face. ‘Poor kid,’ he said. ‘It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have kept us out so late—’

‘Oh, Mr Pugh.’ Emma raised her eyes to him, just as if she hadn’t spent a good portion of the previous week wondering if he were a murderer … and just as if she didn’t still think him capable of it. ‘After the strain of the last few weeks, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if Kitty’s all the better off for being able to relax as she did.’

He beamed, as Darlene stomped down the thirty marble steps to the arena’s sands, and took her place like a passionate, sensuous, and unforgettable runner on the blocks. ‘D’you think so, Duchess?’

Languidly, Kitty turned her gaze towards the studio chief and gave him a look of smoldering allure, instants before Madge yelled, ‘Camera! Action!’ and the ‘Marche Slave’ blazed forth once more.

Galvanized with rage, Darlene charged up the stairs. Kitty lifted her hand in a gesture of passion and jealousy, took half a step forward, and stepped on Demetrius’ chains, causing him to sprawl headlong.

‘Cut!’ yelled Madge.

‘I’ve seldom seen her so … so happy as she was when she came in last night,’ said Emma. No harm in laying it on with a trowel. She was fairly certain that Kitty had.

Mr Pugh almost rolled over onto his back and purred.

The morning’s new issue of Screen Stories lay on the make-up table, glorified with the face of Camille de la Rose in the crown of the Empress of Babylon. THE GODDESS OF THE SILVER SCREEN, shrieked the letterhead. The Queen of ‘It’, the Cat’s Pajamas, the One and the Only …

Enough to disgruntle anyone, thought Emma, even were it not plain to everyone in the studio that Mr Pugh had accepted Kitty’s explanation that all those nasty stories about her having dinner at the Coconut Grove with other men were the productions of Mrs Turnbit and her vile ilk. They were all part of the horrible plot to use Kitty as a cat’s-paw in a scheme that involved murder and stock fraud and oil wells on Signal Hill and had nothing to do with genuine romance …

If what exists between Kitty and Mr Crain IS genuine …

‘Take four!’ shouted Madge. ‘Action!’

‘Marche Slave’ thundered into life. Darlene dashed with unflagging malice but a certain diminution of vitality up the thirty-two marble steps … and Kitty turned her head sharply, as if at some noise from elsewhere in Stage One, where Ned Devine’s crew were hammering together flats which tomorrow (God willing) would be the palatial living room of the wealthy Shepherd family, whose son has risked all to marry the raven-haired ‘hot potato’ Cincinnati Wilder, the chorus girl with the heart of gold.

Over a dinner of Chinese leftovers and bootleg champagne in the kitchen, after their return from the Los Angeles County Courts building yesterday, she and Zal had come up with seven or eight completely improbable conclusions to Hot Potato, in between toasting the dismissal of charges against Kitty Flint, a.k.a. Camille de la Rose, a.k.a. Mrs Chava Festraw …

And maybe one or two toasts, Emma reflected, to the fact that she and Zal hadn’t been killed themselves in the process.

During take seven – with Darlene visibly laboring up the steps yet again (Kitty had dropped one of her bracelets) – Emma picked her way through the clusters of light stands on the edge of the new set, to the trestle tables by the door, in quest of cups and her tea thermos and water for the dogs. Aunt Estelle should be calling me tomorrow, she reflected, but her heart felt curiously calm. You HAVE run away with the gypsies, Zal had said to her, in the velvet darkness of the highway beside an ocean turned to liquid silver by the moon.

And she recalled Mr Crain, paraphrasing Cafavy’s poem: Ithaca will not make you rich; it’s the road that makes you rich.

Dodging Laestrygonians and bootleggers, Cyclopes and crooked cops …

But I don’t belong here, she thought. And I could have been killed, Friday night, while my right work, my true work, lies undone back in Oxford …

Do I ever get to make it back to Ithaca?

Or return to my tower of Shalott?

‘Emma?’

She stopped halfway to the trestles with their serried ranks of coffee cups and thermoses.

She had forgotten how much Aunt Estelle’s voice sounded like her mother’s.

Or had put it out of her thoughts, she reflected, for four agonizing years.

The scent of Guerlain’s sandalwood in the dimness, like the whisper of a ghost.

And there she was. Taller than Mother, and stouter. Mother had been the more beautiful of the sisters, but the bone structure that Emma had known all her life was there, and the smile was the same.

I can go home! For two weeks she had known it, but the reality of it was like waking from a dream, to find the Emperor Claudius’ Etruscan–Latin Lexicon clasped in her arms.

I can go home …

Turning her head she saw Zal Rokatansky, his cap turned backwards so the bill wouldn’t scrape the take-up reel, cranking gently while the wicked Valerna tore the gentle, Christian, and somewhat winded Philomela from Demetrius’s arms, and hurled her to the ground. ‘Get your meathooks off him, bitch!’ cried the empress, a command which would appear on the title-card as: Unhand one whom your better has chosen, wench!

And the thought came to her, But then I will lose THIS home.

As if the words – like the face of Charles I – had been there all along.

Then Estelle was in her arms, saying, ‘Oh, Emma, darling!’ and Emma clasped her close, the familiar scent that dusted her clothing, whispered from her hair – silk-fine and netted close in a tidy snood, still the mousy hue somewhere between brown sugar and barley-straw, like Emma’s own. Mother’s had begun to turn … It would all be silver by now …

She whispered, ‘Aunt …’ and began to cry. She knew perfectly well that her tears were for the home she was losing, as much as for the one she knew now she would choose.

‘Oh, darling!’ Estelle Vambrace was weeping also. ‘Oh, dearest! Oh, you look so much like Sarah … David, doesn’t she look like Sarah?’

Uncle David – so much like a caricature of a colonial official, in his London tailoring and close-clipped mustache that Emma almost laughed through her tears – muttered an inaudible assent and held out an awkward hand. Emma grasped it. ‘So glad,’ she said. ‘So glad!’

‘They said at the office that we should find you here.’ Estelle’s rich contralto was her own, not Mother’s, with a volume that rivaled Madge’s. ‘Good heavens, is that how they film cinema shows?’ She looked out through the great doors into the gardens. ‘How extraordinary! Is that a woman?’ She stared at Madge Burdon in disapproval and didn’t even trouble to lower her voice.

Emma sank hers to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Everyone in Hollywood wants to know that.’

She took them by the hand – this respectable British couple, daughter and son of Victoria’s empire, as her own parents had been – and led them across to the doors.

Madge yelled, ‘Cut! Elmore, what the hell was that? You defeat frikkin’ Marcus Maximus in hand-to-hand combat and then you go trip on your own frikkin’ chains?’

Fuming (and panting) Darlene descended the stairs yet again …

Herr Volmort bustled over to her to dust powder and touch up paint; Zal crossed to the door, shaking his head. Kitty descended behind Darlene, looking as innocent as if she hadn’t just made her rival run up a very long flight of stairs seven times and clearly planned to do it at least eight more.

‘Mr Zal Rokatansky,’ said Emma, ‘Miss Camille de la Rose – these are my dear Aunt Estelle and Uncle David. They’re on their way through to New York, to take the Ravenna back home to Britain next week. They most kindly stopped here to visit with me on their way.’

There was a momentary shocked pause, as Aunt Estelle and Uncle David stared at her. It came to Emma that neither her aunt nor her uncle had remotely contemplated even the possibility that she would not fall, sobbing with gratitude, into their arms and then run home to pack her bag.

That she would not choose to leave.

Zal’s eyes touched hers, and she saw his shoulders relax. If he could have found an appropriate way to do so he’d have taken her hand. But behind the thick glass of his spectacle-lenses, his glance said everything. Then he turned to ask Uncle David something about India, true and genuine in a way that made up for every ersatz screen kiss and false-fronted set. Kitty cried, in her sweet little-girl voice, ‘Oh, darling, you can’t let your Aunt and Uncle take a cab to the station! Tomorrow you take the Packard and drive them.’

And Emma said, ‘Of course. Thank you.’

As Kitty turned back to Herr Volmort and his powders, and Madge summoned Zal for a conference about the lights, Aunt Estelle drew Emma aside. ‘Dearest,’ she said – and she sounded both disapproving and dismayed, ‘surely you’ll be coming with us! We’ve already wired the American Line asking for accommodations for five on the voyage.’

It took Emma a moment to realize that each of them had a body-servant, probably Indian, who would form the nucleus of the Oxford household.

‘I’m so sorry.’ She almost laughed with the sudden clarity of her relief, but knew they wouldn’t understand. ‘There was no way I could get in touch with you …’

Appalled, Aunt Estelle turned to survey Kitty, in her elaborate shreds of jewels and gauze, her Pekinese pattering eagerly around her sandaled feet. Looked past her at the arena, where prop men smoked in their shirt-sleeves as they raked sand and shifted historically inaccurate statues, and the Nubians of the empress’s retinue – glistening with cocoa butter – clustered around the casting ads in the back of Variety (which also – prominently – bore Camille de la Rose’s name).

‘You can’t actually say that you prefer living in this place!’ She gazed round-eyed as the glittering Goddess of the Silver Screen, the temptress of Babylon, accepted a cigarette from Frank, and let him escort her to the make-up table, past the fulminating Darlene, her Pekinese trailing behind.

Her aunt didn’t, Emma observed, even seem to notice Zal, or the way Zal’s eyes touched her own as he returned to his camera.

Jim standing in the deepening twilight of Holywell Street, bidding her go on ahead of him. Miles smiling at her as she climbed the steps of The Myrtles once again.

But Jim was gone. Miles was gone.

The road will make you rich.

And there were other things ahead.

Gently, she said, ‘Thank you – more than I can ever say – for your offer to take me back. To let me make a home with you. I’ll never forget that kindness.’ She took her aunt’s hands.

The scent of her mother’s perfume.

‘But I will stay. I have … my life here, now.’

Uncle David was peering out into the arena, as Zal checked the light meters, and Darlene, at the bottom of the endless marble stair yet again, tried to look as if she didn’t know exactly what Kitty was up to. ‘Deuced interesting! What are they doing now?’

Emma hugged her aunt again. ‘And I will drive you down to the train station tomorrow – Miss de la Rose has the most shockingly enormous car. Where are you staying, darling? I can take you there now, and come back for you this evening, to take you out to dinner – did you just arrive?’

‘Last night.’ Aunt Estelle looked around with distaste as Ned the Lesser, in his undershirt and with a cigarette dangling from his lip, brushed past her with a papier-mâché bronze clock for the Hot Potato set.

And very quietly, as his wife’s attention was diverted, Uncle David asked, ‘You’re sure, my dear?’

Emma smiled. ‘I’m sure.’ She had never felt more sure of anything in her life.

Estelle sighed, and shook her head. ‘What your mother would say I can’t think!’

Emma didn’t reply, as she led them toward the outer doors of the stage. But in her heart she knew exactly what her mother would say.

And what her father would say.

And Jim.

Whatever makes you happy.

The bravura strains of Tchaikovsky swelled from the set behind her, and she stepped out into the mild California sunshine.