Anno Dracula (30 page)

‘Alucard is an independent producer, you say. Perhaps he’s a fan?’

‘I don’t think he’s seen any of my pictures.’

‘Do you think this is a cruel prank?’

Welles shrugged, raising huge hands. Oja was more guarded, more worried. Geneviève wondered whether she was the one who had insisted on calling in an investigator.

‘The first cheques have cleared,’ said Welles. ‘The rent is paid on this place.’

‘You are familiar with the expression...’

‘The one about equine dentistry? Yes.’

‘But it bothers you? The mystery?’

‘The Mystery of Mr Alucard. That is so. If it blows up in my face, I can stand that. I’ve come to that pass before and I shall venture there again. But I should like some presentiment, either way. I want you to make some discreet inquiries about our Mr Alucard. At the very least, I’d like to know his real name and where he comes from. He seems very American at the moment, but I don’t think that was always the case. Most of all, I want to know what he is up to. Can you help me, Mademoiselle Dieudonné?’

‘You know, Gené,’ said Jack Martin wistfully, contemplating the melting ice in his empty glass through the wisps of cigarette smoke that always haloed his head, ‘none of this matters. It’s not important. Writing. It’s a trivial pursuit, hardly worth the effort, inconsequential on any cosmic level. It’s just blood and sweat and guts and bone hauled out of our bodies and fed through a typewriter to slosh all over the platen. It’s just the sick soul of America turning sour in the sunshine. Nobody really reads what I’ve written. In this town, they don’t know Flannery O’Connor or Ray Bradbury, let alone Jack Martin. Nothing will be remembered. We’ll all die and it’ll be over. The sands will close over our civilisation and the sun will turn into a huge red fireball and burn even you from the face of the earth.’

‘That’s several million years away, Jack,’ she reminded him.

He didn’t seem convinced. Martin was a writer. In high school, he’d won a national competition for an essay entitled ‘It’s Great to Be Alive’. Now in his grumbling forties, the sensitive but creepy short stories that were his most personal work were published in small science fiction and men’s magazines, and put out in expensive limited editions by fan publishers who went out of business owing him money. He had made a living as a screenwriter for ten years without ever seeing anything written under his own name get made. He had a problem with happy endings.

However, he knew what was going on in ‘the industry’ and was her first port of call when a case got her mixed up with the movies. He lived in a tarpaper shack on Beverly Glen Boulevard, wedged between multi-million-dollar estates. He told everybody that at least it was earthquake-proof.

Martin rattled the ice. She ordered him another Coca-Cola. He stubbed out one cigarette and lit another.

The girl behind the hotel bar, dressed as a magician, sloshed ice into another glass and reached for a small chromed hose. She squirted Coke into the glass, covering the ice.

Martin held up his original glass.

‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could slip the girl a buck and have her fill up
this
glass, not go through all the fuss of getting a fresh one and charging you all over again. There should be infinite refills. Imagine that, a utopian dream, Gené. It’s what America needs. A
bottomless
Coke!’

‘It’s not policy, sir,’ said the girl. With the Coke came a quilted paper napkin, an unhappy edge of lemon and a plastic stirrer.

Martin looked at the bar girl’s legs. She was wearing black fishnets, high-heeled pumps, a tight white waistcoat, a tail coat and top hat.

The writer sampled his new, bottomed, Coke. The girl went to cope with other morning customers.

‘I’ll bet she’s an actress,’ he said. ‘I think she does porno.’

Geneviève raised an eyebrow.

‘Most X-rated films are better directed than the slop that comes out of the majors,’ Martin insisted. ‘I could show you a reel of something by Gerard Damiano or Jack Horner that you’d swear was Bergman or Don Siegel. Except for the screwing.’

Martin wrote ‘scripts’ for adult movies, under well-guarded pseudonyms to protect his Writer’s Guild membership. The Guild didn’t have any moral position on porno, but members weren’t supposed to take jobs which involved turning out a full-length feature script in two afternoons for three hundred dollars. Martin claimed to have invented Jamie Gillis’s catchphrase, ‘Suck it, bitch!’

‘What can you tell me about John Alucard?’

‘The name is...’

‘Besides that his name is “Dracula” written backwards.’

‘He’s from New York. Well, that’s where he was last. I heard he ran with that art crowd. You know, Warhol and Jack Smith. He’s got a first-look deal at United Artists, and something cooking with Fox. There’s going to be a story in the trades that he’s set up an independent production company with Griffin Mill, Julia Phillips and Don Simpson.’

‘But he’s never made a movie?’

‘The word is that he’s never
seen
a movie. That doesn’t stop him calling himself a producer. Say, are you working for him? If you could mention that I’m available. Mention my rewrite on
Can’t Stop the Music.
No, don’t. Say about that TV thing that didn’t happen. I can get you sample scripts by sundown.’

Martin was gripping her upper arm.

‘I’ve never met Alucard, Jack. I’m checking into him for a client.’

‘Still, if you get the chance, Gené. You know what it would mean to me. I’m fending off bill-collectors and Sharkko Press still hasn’t come through for the
Tenebrous Twilight
limiteds. A development deal, even a rewrite or a polish, could get me through winter and spring. Buy me time to get down to Ensenada and finish some stories.’

She would have to promise. She had learned more than the bare facts. The light in Jack Martin’s eyes told her something about John Alucard. He had some sort of magic effect, but she didn’t know whether he was a conjurer or a wizard.

Now, she would have to build on that.

Short of forcing her way into Alucard’s office and asking outright whether he was planning on leaving Orson Welles in the lurch, there wasn’t much more she could do. After Martin, she made a few phone calls to industry contacts, went through recent back numbers of
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
and hit a couple of showbiz watering holes, hoping to soak up gossip.

Now, Geneviève was driving back along the Pacific Coast Highway to Paradise Cove. The sun was down and a heavy, unstarred darkness hung over the sea. The Plymouth, which she sometimes suspected of having a mind of its own, handled gently, taking the blind curves at speed. She twiddled the radio past a lot of disco, and found a station pumping out two-tone. That was good, that was new, that was a culture still alive.

‘
...mirror in the bathroom, recompense

all my crimes of self-defence...
’

She wondered about what she had learned.

It wasn’t like the old days when the studios were tight little fiefdoms and a stringer for Louella Parsons would know everything going on in town and all the current scandal. Most movies weren’t even made in Hollywood any more, and the studios were way down on the lists of interests owned by multi-national corporations with other primary concerns. The buzz was that United Artists might well be changing its name to TransAmerica Pictures.

General word confirmed most of what Martin had told her, and turned up surprisingly few extra details. Besides the Welles deal, financed off his own line of credit with no studio production coin as yet involved, John Alucard had projects in development all over town, with high-end talent attached. He was supposed to be in bed with Michael Cimino - still hot off
The Deer Hunter
- on
The Lincoln County Wars,
a Western about the vampire outlaw Billy the Kid and a massacre of settlers in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1870s. With the Mill-Simpson-Phillips set-up, he was helping the long in-development Anne Rice project,
Interview With the Mummy,
which Elaine May was supposed to be making with Cher and Ryan O’Neal -unless it was Nancy Walker, with Diana Ross and Mark Spitz.

In an interview in the
Reporter,
Alucard said: ‘The pursuit of making money is the only reason to make movies. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. Our obligation is to make money.’ A lot of execs, and not a few directors and writers, found his a refreshing and invigorating stance, though Geneviève had the impression Alucard was parroting someone else’s grand theory. If he truly believed what he said, and was not just laying down something the studios’ corporate owners wanted to hear, then John Alucard did not sound like someone who would happily want to be in business with Orson Welles. Apart from anything else, his manifesto was a 1980s rewrite, at five times the length with in-built repetition to get through to the admass morons at the back of the hall, of ‘showmanship, not genius’.

What she couldn’t find out was what his projects really were. Besides Welles’s
Dracula
, which wasn’t mentioned by anyone she had talked with, and the long-gestating shows he was working on with senior production partners, he had half a dozen other irons in the fire. Directors and stars were attached, budgets set, start dates announced, but no titles ever got mentioned, and the descriptions in the trades - ‘intense drama’, ‘romantic comedy’ - were hardly helpful. That was interesting and unusual. John Alucard was making a splash, waves radiating outwards, but surely he would have to say eventually what the pictures were. Or had that become the least important part of the package? An agent at CAA told her that for men like Alucard, the art was in the deal not on the screen.

That did worry her.

Could it be that there wasn’t actually a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow? The man was a vampire, but was he also a phantom? No photographs existed, of course. Everyone had a second-hand description, always couched as a casting suggestion: a young Louis Jourdan, a smart Jack Palance, a rough trade David Niven. It was agreed that the man was European, a long time ago. No one had any idea how long he had been a vampire, even. He could be a new-born fresh-killed and risen last year, or a centuried elder who had changed his face a dozen times. His name always drew the same reaction: excitement, enthusiasm, fear. There was a sense that John Alucard was getting things on the road, and that it’d be a smart career move to get close, to be ready to haul out of the station with him.

She cruised across sandy tarmac into the trailer park. The seafood restaurant was doing a little New Year’s Day business. She would be thirsty soon.

Someone sat on the steps of her trailer, leaning back against the door, hands loose in his lap, legs in chinos, cowboy boots.

Someone dead.

The someone on her steps was
truly
dead. Over his punctured heart a star-shaped blotch was black in the moonlight.

Geneviève felt no residue. The intangible thing - immortal soul, psychic energy, battery power - which kept mind and body together in both
nosferatu
and the warm was gone.