The Sixteen Burdens (30 page)

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY
-T
HREE

T
HE
FADING
ENERGY
on Edward’s face worried Gray more than he let on, and not only for Pickford’s well-being. She was Atlas’s bargaining chip just as Newton’s Eye was theirs. For the moment they were suspended in a fragile equilibrium that would break the moment Pickford died. And without Pickford’s life to use as leverage, Atlas would have to become ruthless.

They got in an elevator and pressed the button for the lobby.

“What’s the matter, Elsie?”

Panchito was watching her as they descended. Gray had been too caught up in his thoughts to notice her clenched jaw and shaking fists. She was an overinflated balloon on the verge of popping.

“So much anger,” she said.

“Who is it?” Gray asked.

She shook her head.

“Who are
they
.”

The elevator doors opened to the lobby and they found themselves in the middle of an angry fracas. Men were everywhere, most of them police officers. They dragged in seven or eight beat-up sailors, most of them with bright red blood staining their white uniforms. Behind them more officers dragged in a half dozen gang members,
pachucos
in baggy zoot suits and big flashy hats. Some men were unconscious and had to be dragged in by hospital staff.

Gray pushed the button to close the elevator doors, but one gang member ripped free from the police and slammed a sailor into the elevator car. Gray yanked Elsie out of the way, and as the two men duked it out they stepped over them and out into the lobby. The exits doors were on the other side, directly through the skirmish.

Elsie was breathing hard and struggling to compose herself. Gray focused himself into a state of calmness, then took her hand. He could feel energy flowing into her. Almost immediately Elsie relaxed.

“Thank you,” she said.

Gray could see a soft blue swirl of energy expanding around them. The two men in the elevator stopped fighting as if they had lost interest. Elsie had created a small bubble of calm around her.

An officer entered through the front doors.

“Get them to a hospital bed and handcuff them to it!” he shouted over the fray. “And for heaven’s sake, split them up unless you want another brawl!”

Gray recognized the voice. He stood up on his tip toes.

Captain Stoker.

Gray flared inside, bursting Elsie’s bubble of calm.

“Don’t,” Elsie said.

“It’s him,” he said. “He’s the one who killed Chaplin. I’ll kill him.”

Gray darted at him.

“Stop him!” Elsie shouted.

Gray weaved through officers, sailors, and gang members. He spotted a gun on an officer who was struggling to carry a large, unconscious
pachuco
. Distracted as he was, it was easy to unbutton the man’s holster and pull it out. He gripped it in his hand and kept going.

Gray ducked under two men and found himself with a clear shot of Stoker. He held up the gun but an unseen force thrust it out of his hands, sending it skidding across the floor.

Gray scrambled after it as a burly officer slammed into him and pinned him to the ground.

“Get off me, oaf,” Gray wheezed.

“I can’t,” the man said. “I’m stuck somehow.”

I’m gonna kill Chito if this fat man don’t kill me first.

In the ruckus, no one seemed to notice them. Stoker stood nearby, watching chaos settle into order as nurses led the injured away. Two deputies stood next to him as the lobby cleared out.

“These gangs get worse every year,” Stoker said. “It’s un-American, provoking our military men when we’re on the brink of war. We should be worrying about the Germans, not these imbeciles.”

Stoker sneered as the last few men were dragged out of the lobby.

One of the deputies nudged Stoker with his elbow.

“Hey Chief,” he said. “Speaking of Germans, how does Hitler tie his shoes?”

Stoker looked at the deputy with a blank stare.

“In little knotzies!”

The two deputies doubled over laughing, but Stoker didn’t so much as crack a smile.

“Start filing your paperwork,” he snapped, then left the lobby.

One deputy leaned in.

“Geez, that guy has no sense of humor.”

The other nodded in agreement.

“He never has.”

The comment made Gray nostalgic for Chaplin, who had the power to change the dynamics of a room with just a few laughs. Captain Stoker didn’t have any aptitude for that. Gray shot up.

Stoker has no sense of humor.

Gray pushed and frantically rolled the big officer off his legs. Elsie and Panchito rushed over to him.

“Sorry,” Panchito said, “but I didn’t want you doing something you’d regret. You taught me that.”

Gray jumped up.

“The morgue!” he yelled. “We have to get to the morgue!”

“He’s dead,” Elsie said, struggling to keep up.

Gray was rushing down a long flight of stairs with Elsie and Panchito trailing behind.

The morgue was easy enough to find; it was in the basement directly below the emergency room. It didn’t say much for their confidence in emergency care.

They entered a large room, well-lit with an uncomfortably low ceiling.

“Quickly,” Gray said.

“Who are we looking for?” Panchito asked.

“Raymond Lisenba.”

“Who’s that?”

Gray didn’t answer. He ran over to a long wooden wall with rows of large square doors, stacked three on top of each other. They looked like a hybrid of an ice box and a giant dresser. The doors had brass slots for holding removable paper placards.

“Help me look!”

They spread out and scanned the placards.

“Here!” Elsie said, pointing to a door halfway down in the middle row.

Gray ran over and pulled the large handle. The door opened and they saw a sheet with the outline of feet underneath it. He tugged on the wood underneath. It slid out like a drawer. They crowded around it.

“Are you sure?” Elsie asked.

Gray didn’t wait; he pulled the sheet off the body’s top half. It was Chaplin’s body, his face pale and cold, a blank expression on it.

The body gasped.

Elsie screamed. Terror ripped through everyone and Chaplin’s eyes shot wide open. He sat up and screamed too. Everyone screamed then.

“Mr. Chaplin!” Gray said. “You’re alive!”

Chaplin gasped a number of times, taking in his surroundings.

“Blanket,” he whispered. “And water.”

Gray searched for something warm while Panchito looked for water. Elsie rubbed Chaplin’s arms to warm him up. They found no blanket, but took a frilly pink robe off a dead woman who looked like she’d had a heart attack halfway through doing her makeup. Panchito and Gray helped him into it as Elsie looked away.

Chaplin shivered for a number of minutes, then managed to get some water down, spilling half onto himself. Eventually his breathing normalized and he seemed to gain control of himself.

“This has got to be the worst hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.”

Gray laughed. He laughed so hard, tears began streaming down his eyes and his stomach hurt.

“You’ve been in here nearly two days!” Panchito said.

Chaplin rubbed his eyes as if the bright light hurt them.

“I think I was passed out for most of it, fortunately. I yelled for help until my mouth went dry. The past ten hours or so I just tried to sleep and forget the fact that I was stuck in a drawer, sandwiched between dead bodies.”

“But how did you survive the chair?” Gray asked.

Chaplin shrugged.

“Lucky, I suppose. The chair seemed to be working. It’s hard to miss two thousand volts going through your body. But the last thing I remember was feeling the current drop out, as if there were a sudden loss in power.”

Gray remembered the jolly guard at the front, and how the warden had warned him that his zeal for Christmas lights would blow a fuse.

“I think you was saved by a prison guard’s twinkle lights.”

“Talk about a Christmas miracle,” Chaplin said. “But how did you know I was still alive?”

“Stoker,” Gray said. “He was the one who killed you, and yet he had no sense of humor. I knew then you might still be alive.”

Chaplin’s expression became grim.

“Then you know what happens if someone murders one of us?”

They all nodded.

“It’s our most carefully guarded secret,” he said. “It would be an endless slaughter if word got out.”

Chaplin tried to stand but wobbled as if walking a tightrope. Gray and Panchito jumped in to help hold him up.

“Do you still have Newton’s Eye?”

“We lost it,” Elsie said.

“But then we recovered it,” Panchito said.

“And now we want to destroy it,” Gray said. “But not before we use it to rescue Mrs. Pickford.”

Chaplin smiled.

“Isn’t it about time you started calling her your mother?”

Gray found himself looking down and giving his head a small shake.

Not yet.

“Very well,” Chaplin said. “Do you at least have a plan?”

“Sort of, but it’s going to be dangerous.”

“Sounds great. I’ll drive.”

Chaplin took a few steps and then stumbled before Panchito caught him.

“Just not quite yet,” he said.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY
-F
OUR

“I
WANT
THE
diamond necklace.”

“Fine, you’ll get a diamond necklace.”

“Not
a
diamond necklace,
the
diamond necklace.”

“I’ll get you a thousand diamond necklaces if that’s what you want!”

Gray and the others stood just inside the front door of Chaplin’s mansion as negotiations unfolded in the foyer between Chaplin and Paulette. Clearly she knew how to drive a hard bargain.

“I want the Harry Winston necklace that Bette Davis bought in New York. She knew I was eyeing it and bought it from right under my nose.”

She stomped her heel on the marble floor, as if challenging Chaplin to say no. Chaplin rolled his eyes. He was trying hard to look strong, but Gray saw him grasping the staircase banister for support. Despite the two days he had slept on Abuelita’s bed, Chaplin was still very weak.

Gray’s eyes kept drifting to the white carpet on the first few steps of the stairs. It had been vigorously cleaned, but the faint outline of blood remained. A stain. A blotch. A reminder of what Atlas could do.

“The Harry Winston necklace, then,” Chaplin said. “Bette and I are good friends. I’m sure she would be more than happy to sell it to me at a severe profit.”

Paulette’s whole demeanor changed. She closed the distance between them with a little skip and hugged Chaplin tight. She gave him a peck on the cheek.

“I’m so glad you’re safe. How ever did you get released from jail?”

“A lucky break,” he said. “Always a lucky break. Now for the favor that will earn you your diamond necklace.”

“Anything, darling.”

“I need you to kidnap Shirley Temple.”

Paulette gave him an unamused smile.

“I’m not joking.”

She let go of him.

“Why would you have me kidnap Hollywood’s most beloved little girl?”

“She’ll be serving as the Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade the day after tomorrow. We need her seat. She won’t be harmed, and it will only be for a few hours.”

She took a step away, distancing herself from Chaplin.

“What if I’m caught? I’d get arrested. It could ruin my career.”

“Honestly, Paulette. Any publicity at this point would only help your career.”

Her eyes narrowed. She put her hand to her chest, feeling the necklace that would soon occupy that spot.

“Fine. I’ll do it.”

“Marvelous!” Chaplin said. “And I’ll need the tickets to those box seats they always send us.”

Paulette held up her hand to silence him.

“For one more thing.”

“Greedy girl,” Chaplin said. “Well, no one would call you inconsistent. What else do you want?”

Paulette pointed a long, manicured finger at Gray.

“I want him gone. I want all of them gone. They can never return to this house again.”

Chaplin looked at Gray. There was a pained expression in his eyes, as if this were some kind of personal betrayal. Gray set his face to stone and nodded.

“Very well,” Chaplin said. “You help us on New Year’s Day. Come January Second, they’ll never step foot in here again.”

Paulette gave Gray a vicious smile, but he didn’t care. If his plan worked, Pickford would be safe and hopefully he could live with her. And if the plan went sour, it wouldn’t be an issue.

The next morning, Gray wrote Darko Atlas a letter. When he gave it to Lulu to deliver, she struggled to read his sloppy penmanship.

“Mary Pickford for the Eye,” she read aloud. “New Year’s Day. Rose Parade. Look for the Grand Marshal.”

Lulu jammed the note in an envelope that held the tickets.

“If he doesn’t agree to meet, it’s probably because he can’t read your awful writing,” Lulu said.

Gray turned red.

“You’re lucky I can’t catch you.”

She flew out the door. They knew from Fairbanks that Atlas was hiding somewhere in the orange groves in the valley north of them, and if anyone could cover hundreds of acres of land quickly, it was Lulu. Gray instructed her to leave the letter in Atlas’s tent, but not to try to free Pickford if she saw her; unlike Lulu, Pickford wouldn’t be fast enough to escape.

Gray spent all day going over the parade route from an article in the newspaper. The plan was set, but he tried to convince himself it was important to review the details. What he was really doing was trying to distract himself.

There was a knock at the door. Panchito answered it and saw Farrell standing there wrapped in a ridiculous fur coat he finally had occasion to use.

“You,” Farrell said.

“
You
,” Panchito said.

Gray walked to the door. Farrell held out a shoe box. Gray took it and opened it. In it was the Eye and its duplicate.

“Which one is which?” Panchito asked.

Gray picked up both. The real one buzzed with energy in his hand, but otherwise they seemed exactly the same.

“It’s good,” he said. “Very good.”

“I do good work when my fingers aren’t arthritic knots,” Farrell snapped.

He rubbed at a streak of gray hair that had popped up in the past two days.

“Now where is the…sauce?”

From the kitchen table Gray retrieved a ketchup bottle that he had emptied and refilled with his blood. He handed it to Farrell.

“You used to be good to me,” Gray said.

“I used to be a lot of things,” Farrell said. “You’d be surprised what a second youth can do. It’s the ultimate drug. You come to resent the one you’re taking advantage of, the one you’re dependent on. Every scar becomes a reminder of what you’re capable of. You become young outside, but ugly inside.”

Like a magician, Farrell made the bottle disappear into the folds of his coat.

“What happens when I run out?”

Gray shrugged.

“I hear Palmolive does wonders.”

He slammed the door. And just like that, Farrell was out of his life.

Gray put the shoe box on the kitchen table.

“I still don’t understand why we can’t just ambush their camp,” Panchito said.

“And do what? None of us can hurt him. He’d lop off our heads with one swipe. And if Fairbanks is there we’d all be under his control with one word.”

Gray pointed to an old
Life
magazine, which had a photo essay of last year’s Tournament of Roses.

“The parade is public and crowded, so Atlas can’t muscle his way through and grab the Eye without thousands of people seeing. And it will be loud, so if Fairbanks is with him, it will be nearly impossible for him to control us with his words. All of our business will be conducted from a distance.”

“Then what?”

“Once Atlas sees the Eye and I see Mrs. Pickford, we’ll make the exchange. He’ll release Mrs. Pickford and I’ll have you push the Eye over to him.”

“The fake one, right?”

Gray shook his head. This was where his plan got tricky.

“He’s sure to inspect it the moment he gets it,” Gray said. “He’ll probably even try it out. We have to give him the real one at first. Once he’s satisfied, Lulu is gonna steal it back and swap it out with the fake. Atlas will be long gone before he notices. And so will we.”

“What do we do with the Eye, then?”

“I’ve talked to Mr. Hughes. He’s agreed to fly far out over the Pacific and drop it deep in the ocean.”

“How do we know Atlas won’t attack us right there?”

“Thousands of cameras will be trained on us,” Gray said. “I doubt a man as large as Atlas wants to live life as a fugitive. He’s too conspicuous. He’d be too easy to track down.”

Panchito set down his drink, an horchata mustache on his upper lip.

“Wait. Why will we have thousands of cameras trained on us?”

Gray gave his eyebrows a wiggle.

“We’ll be on a float.”

“
On
a float? I thought only Lulu—”

Gray went to the closet and pulled out two caveman-style loincloths. Chaplin had snuck into United Artists late last night and snagged them from the costume department.

“You and I will be on the promotional float for
One Million B.C
.”

He handed Panchito one of the costumes.

“Let’s see how well you act like a caveman.”

Elsie poked her head in from the kitchen and looked at the loincloth.

“Where’s the rest of it?”

Panchito held it up.

“This is worse than wearing a bathing suit.”

“But you’re courageous,” Elsie said.

“I may be courageous, but I still have a sense of modesty.”

“Elsie, you’re all set with Lulu?” Gray asked.

She nodded and pulled from her pocket a handful of hairpins.

“What’s that for?”

“Her curls,” she said.

Smoke began to waft from the kitchen and Elsie yelped. She ran in and pulled out a burning lump from the oven. She dropped the whole charred mess in the sink.

“Oh!”

Gray and Panchito opened up the windows to air the apartment out. Elsie grabbed a dish towel and furiously fanned the smoke coming out of the oven, and in the process knocked over a skillet full of green beans she had been sautéing.

Elsie let out something between a shriek and a sob. The boys looked over at the mess. Using a wooden spoon, Gray scraped the beans from the floor back into the skillet.

“They’ll be fine. We’ll just rinse them off real quick.”

Elsie sunk down to the floor and sat with her legs splayed on the linoleum.

“I wanted this meal to be perfect. And it’s ruined!”

“Don’t worry,” Panchito said. “I’ve eaten way worse than this.”

Elsie shot him a glare; she didn’t find that encouraging.

“What were you making?” Gray asked.

“Venison pie,” Elsie said. “I’ve never made it before, but my mother used to make it every New Year’s Eve. It was a tradition. I just wanted us all to…”

She groaned without finishing her thought.

The front door flew open and Lulu ran in. She was red-faced, sweaty and covered in light scratches. Her hair was wild and knotty.

“Did you find them?” Gray asked.

Lulu nodded, still catching her breath. Elsie fussed over her, patting her dirty face with a wet cloth and forcing a glass of water upon her.

“They’re in a clearing a couple miles north of a dirt road. I put the letter in his hand before he even realized it. He smells like all sorts of dead animals.”

“Lulu!” Elsie said. “He could have killed you in one swipe!”

“Nuts! He couldn’t touch me with those big mitts. I was gone before he had the chance to look surprised.”

Chaplin entered from the bedroom, where he was napping. He wanted to stay with them until this was over.

“Something smells positively delightful!”

“Stop teasing!” Elsie said.

“Oh, I didn’t mean you,” he said. “Whatever you’ve been working on smells like a coal factory.”

He pointed toward the front door.

“I mean
that
.”

In the doorway was a young man with a greasy paper bag. It smelled of garlic, onions, peppers, fennel, and anise.

“Chinese takeout.”

He handed the man a few bills and sent him on his way.

“You ordered
Chinese
?” Elsie asked.

It was both an accusation and an expression of relief.

“No offense,” Chaplin said, “but when I saw you turn the oven to five hundred degrees I decided we should have a backup plan.”

He gave Elsie a wink.

Everyone was grateful for the takeout food. Gray and Panchito set the table while the others unboxed the food. The little table was only made to seat four, but they squeezed in two extra chairs. Abuelita arrived home from errands and eyed the strange food warily, but she seemed grateful she didn’t have to cook.

There were egg noodles, fried rice with pork, and a spicy chicken in a reddish brown sauce Gray had never eaten before. Chaplin insisted they also serve the venison pie which, after scraping off the charred crust, wasn’t half bad. Panchito’s grandmother had bought churros, and they set those aside for dessert. It was a strange assortment, and yet somehow it was perfect. Like them.

Elsie talked about her upbringing in Downe, southeast of London, and described the big grassy fields she and Lulu would play in when they were children. Panchito and his grandmother told stories about Pancho Villa’s great battles. Abuelita recalled the time Hollywood filmmakers came to capture an important battle on film, only to arrive too late. Villa and his men had to re-enact the conflict for the cameras.