Wake Up and Dream (2 page)

Stepping inside, he called hello. Seemingly with a will entirely of their own, the sides of the door hummed shut behind him. The huge, polished hallway shimmered with dark reflections like silent birds. Should have done what he often did when he first saw a client and wandered around back on the pretense of not being able to find the right entrance—which would have made perfect sense here. Or talked to the neighbors. Or the servants or the houseboys. Or that gardener, maybe. Anything, really, other than just charge straight in like he had. He’d got distracted by the beautiful roadster, and the way the sun had flashed and sparkled on that reservoir, and the security guard, and the eau de cologne-scented air.

The hallway opened into a kind of atrium. His voice echoed and was lost as he called hello again. There was glass above him. Clouds fractured where the edges of the panes met as if they’d been put together like some huge, moving jigsaw. He caught glimpses of antique sofas and rugs in empty rooms. Flowers everywhere. Some of them were real. Some were in paintings. With some he couldn’t tell.

He reached a corridor. It was long and wide and tall, set to the left with dozens of windows open to the gardens beyond. White curtains drifted, bringing in the scent of cut grass. Midway along it, something else seemed to be moving, although he took it at first to be the curtains’ shifting reflections caught in mirror glass.

Close to, he realized that this was something else. He felt a cool prethunderstorm prickle across the hairs on his hands and forearms and down his neck which even he, who rarely went to the feelies, recognized as coming from a Bechmeir field. But this wasn’t like the dusty grids which fizzed behind the projector screen in thousands of theaters in every town and city across the country. This field coiled like gusting snow—or a dust devil—in the space between a black plinth and the swan-neck which curved six or seven feet above it. Held between the two charged plates which this structure, elegant in itself, supported, the feelie wraith gave off a faint crackling as it shimmered and danced. The plinth looked to be made of solid marble, although he guessed that it wasn’t; you had to put all the electronics somewhere, and he presumed that it was in there. A brass plaque—or solid gold, for all he knew—was inset into the plinth. Finely engraved on it was the single word
Muse
.

This, he supposed, was what you got. What you got, that was, when you’d already got the house, and the Cadillac and the Delahaye and all those gardens and the walk-in closet you could get seriously lost in.

He felt a thickening in his throat and the imminent pressure of sound within his ears as he looked up at it. It really had been years since he’d been to a feelie theater, and he’d forgotten just how powerful the sensation was when you stood before the plasm of a Bechmeir field. And how unsettlingly weird. No use telling yourself that some tiny nub in your brain was simply picking up the amplified waves of a clever recording. No use thinking of wires and transformers. And here, unaccompanied by the usual moving images and soundtrack, the feeling seemed to be strengthened rather than weakened.

Instead of a shapeless blur, the swirl, the presence, of the wraith seemed to form itself into a misty amalgam. Translucent mouths smiled down at him. Limbs stretched out in chill embrace. He caught flashes of vanished laughter, dark whispers of lost lives. He blinked hard. He knew how easy it was to get drawn in by a Bechmeir field’s tawdry allure. But it didn’t feel tawdry. Not at the time. That was the damndest thing.

“You’re like everyone else who comes here, Mr Gable…”

He turned. Something was coming towards him from the far end of the corridor. It seemed for a moment to be dark and indefinite, and he felt a sense of dread. But then he saw that the figure was human, and that it was female, and plainly composed of flesh and blood.

“… that damn thing stops almost everyone in their tracks. I’m April Lamotte. You obviously got my letter.” She held out a hand. She smelled expensive and she’d recently put on some kind of hand cream, but the grip was hard and purposeful. As was the way that she was looking at him. “Have to say you’re not quite what I was hoping for, Mr Gable. No, not at all, really. But I guess you’ll have to do.”

“Mrs Lamotte…” He cleared his throat as she finally let go of him. “You have a very nice place here.”

She glanced around as if the thought had never struck her. “You don’t think it over-ostentatious?”

“I’m hardly equipped to judge.”

“But you wouldn’t want to live here?” “Not sure I’d know how.”

“There probably is a knack to it.” She gave a sharp laugh. Standing as close to the wraith as they still were, he tried not to shiver. “One I’m still attempting to learn…” She turned and headed back along the corridor towards the room from which she had emerged, glancing back as he followed in a way which he might normally have thought of as almost flirtatious. Here, he wasn’t sure. This really was a different world.

“P
LEASE SIT DOWN.”

April Lamotte looked gracefully young in the measured way that only rich, mature women ever did. She was wearing a pale green silk pants suit and seemingly little else. She was slim, almost thin—not his type, really—and her feet were bare. She had lustrous center-parted, red hair. He already had her down as a sharp and determined piece of work as she gestured for him to sit on a long couch.

His ass sank and his legs bobbed high, but she remained standing, her fingers turning her gold wedding ring in quick circles, and he was glad to see that small sign of nervousness.

“You did as I asked? You brought the letter? No one else knows or is at all aware that you’re coming here?”

He nodded. Clients were often over-obsessed with secrecy, and that security guard who’d stopped his car really didn’t seem worth mentioning. “Discretion’s a given in the sort of work I do, Mrs Lamotte.”

“As you can see, I’ve given leave to all my servants.
None
of this must come out. Absolutely
nothing
. Ever. You understand? I’d like that letter now. May I have it please? And the envelope… ?”

He watched her flick a large silver lighter, turn the papers under its flame and lay the burning, blackening remains in a big crystal ashtray. The process made him wonder again how the letter, and the enticing fifty-C note which had come with it, had arrived at his delivery locker back in Venice with no stamp or postmark.

”Maybe,” he said, “you could tell me a little more of what all this is about. Perhaps we could begin with some basic details—”

“I’m more than aware of the sort of work you do, Mr Gable. Before you start asking questions which aren’t appropriate, I should tell you that I don’t want a divorce. Neither is my husband having any kind of affair. In a way, perhaps, that might have helped.”

“You say you know what I do, Mrs Lamotte,” he said. “But I think you should know what I don’t do as well. There’s no violence or coercion. I don’t carry a gun. Beyond parking fines, for which I bill as normal, I try to avoid breaking any kind of law. I may help evidence along but I don’t manufacture it. In fact, most of what I do is simply to find out about what people are already doing, and then make sure it’s witnessed and photographed as cleanly and clearly as such things ever can be. My hourly rate’s three dollars.”

April Lamotte made a small gesture of dismissal; even the tripling of his normal fee didn’t faze her. It was hard to tell the exact color of her eyes, although he’d have guessed at green. There was a slight pinch at the tip of her nose which, in its own way, wasn’t unattractive. The light was strange in here, dim after the brightness of those corridors, lit from a semi-circular bay of half-closed drapes which covered a wider sweep of window, but caught within the gloss of so many shining objects, this silk-clad woman included, that it sort of had a quality and substance of its own. Like fresh paint, the shine of that Delahaye’s dials, or that feelie ghost.

“You’ll have a drink?” She slung ice from a silver bucket into a cut glass jug.

Clark, who had sunk down so far by now into the couch that he was in a sort of embryonic hunch, attempted the gesture of someone who wouldn’t normally think of drinking this early in the day but was prepared to be sociable.

She poured with quick ease. He strained over his knees to take the glass, which was heavy and cold and deeply cut. The fluid inside was flecked with stuff which could have been mint, but the taste was so cold and sharp it was impossible to tell. Just the way he always did with any client, he watched the way April Lamotte drank. A short sip, and that was all. She was no lush.

“Mind if I smoke?” He tapped a roll-up against its case. She nodded and took one of her own from a lacquered Japanese cigarette box. Her cigarette was baby blue. They shared the flame of the lighter. She blew a plume of smoke. Outside, the soft sounds of morning filled this opulent valley. Birds and bees and distant lawnmowers were chirruping and buzzing and droning. Something about the way April Lamotte was standing there, sheathed in the glisten of silk, reminded him again of that feelie ghost along the corridor. He pushed the idea away.

“What I want from you, Mr Gable,” she said, “what I’ll pay you for, and pay you royally by your standards—is for you to play my husband. I want you to become Daniel Lamotte.”

I
F THERE WAS ONE THING
which he’d learned in his job, it was when to make an exit. He could swig back the rest of this drink, make some stupid non-apology, climb out of this couch. Keep the fifty, of course.

And go.

“I’m sorry, Mrs Lamotte. I could take your suggestion one of several ways—and I don’t say that some of those ways don’t leave me flattered—but not one of them is the kind of work I do. If you’re looking for a chaperone, I guess I have a few friends who do that sort of thing when they’re between acting jobs. And if you’re looking for… Well, if you’re looking for
more
than a chaperone, there are some guys I know who—” “I’m not looking for any of those things, Mr Gable. Or anything else you might imagine.”

“Well…” He gazed up at her, wondering why the hell he was still sitting here. “That’s okay too. I’m really not here to judge. But I’m not here to waste your time either.”

“You’re going to tell me next you’re a busy man, I suppose.”

The tone, the swagger, was new. April Lamotte was some piece, no doubt about it. She was unlike pretty much every other client he’d ever encountered. And he was almost certain by now that she was wearing nothing underneath her silky green trouser suit.

“I’m asking you not to leave, Mr Gable.
More
than asking. If you do, there will be consequences. Your State license, for example. That document you always say you have in the car, or at the office, or in the pocket of your other suit. As if you
had
another suit.” She gave a nasty chuckle. “Or a proper office. Or pay road tax on that rusty old car. Believe it or not Mr Gable, I’ve had you looked into—discreetly, I might add—and I
do
need the help of someone like you. You fit the bill in most ways, even if you’re not perhaps as good a match as I’d been hoping for…”

April Lamotte strode over to a dresser. She came back with a framed photograph. “Here.”

The frame was heavy and gilt-edged. He had to squint and tilt it before he could get a proper look at the photograph inside, which was of a guy standing before a low wall in that kind of hunch that tall men often affect. He was thickly bearded and wore heavy tortoiseshell glasses, along with suede loafers, pleated slacks and a white button-up tee shirt. His dark hair was messily slicked back so it stuck out around his noticeably protuberant ears. He wasn’t smiling and he had his hands stuffed in his pockets. He didn’t really look the sort of person who liked having their photograph taken.

“You can’t tell from the photo, but Dan’s got buck teeth much like yours. Never would have them fixed. Says they’re part of what he is. And he’s pretty much your exact height and build—
and
he’s got those jug ears as well.” She gave another of those sharp laughs. “So maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so disappointed when I first saw you. I mean, how close can two men get? There’s Dan’s beard of course. False ones always look false. But all you need to do is say that you’ve shaved it off. You know how different men look after they’ve done that. Then you can add in the way you’ll look with something like Dan’s glasses on as well.”

She was getting way ahead of him. “So…” The photo made a dull clang as he laid it on the glass-top table. “… what is it that you want me to do?”

“As I say, I want you to become my husband. But only for a few hours. The risks are so small that they’re barely worth mentioning. And the rewards—well, what would you say to a thousand dollars?”

“I’d say that nobody gets paid that sort of money unless they’ve earned it. Or the person who’s paying is desperate.”

“Desperate.” She considered him and the word, her head tilted. “I wouldn’t say that exactly. But I do need your help. And I can make it
extremely
difficult for you if you walk out.”

“Where’s your husband now?”

“I’ll come to that.”

“And you want me to—”

“I’ll come to that as well. But first, let me tell you something about me and Dan…I won’t bore you with my life story, Mr Gable, but you should know that I grew up in mid-state nowhere and was always ambitious. I knew I wasn’t bad-looking, but I realized young that getting runner-up place in the local beauty pageant wouldn’t wash for much. My sister and I used to talk about it—make plans nights as we lay in bed. I decided to train as a nurse. I reckoned that that was the best chance I had of getting rich, and that LA was the best place to try. You know—changing the sheets and wiping the ass of some rich old guy in a big mansion who doesn’t see his family from one year to the next. A whirlwind romance, maybe a few blissful months of marriage, and then…”

“That’s a neat plan.”

“Is, isn’t it? Only trouble was, I wasn’t the first. You wouldn’t believe it, Mr Gable, but even the nursing agencies in the city of Los Angeles have a casting couch.”