Wake Up and Dream (30 page)

He’d never been much of a one for why-the-hell-am-I-doing-this-crap tantrums which were a regular part of any kind of dramatic production. But these things got to a guy, and acting of any kind was always an emotional process, and he soon reached the point where he was doing most of his best acting, as the saying went, after the director had called that’s a wrap. Things came to a head when he was asked to break down in tears fifteen whole separate fucking times until the technicians finally managed to get something resembling a signal down on wire. And even then they said they weren’t happy with it. Something about amplitude, the way the machine was picking him up. He’d been feeling it as well. That was the thing. He’d been sobbing like a fucking baby as if he was really mourning for something he didn’t even know he’d lost. By the fifteenth take the process of emotional collapse had gotten so absurdly easy that he could barely stop. And still it wasn’t right.

But for him that was it. As far as he was concerned, this wasn’t acting, this was some new bullshit freaktent claptrap crock he was involved in, and Louis B and all the rest of them could shove it all the way to midnight up their tight Jewish asses. He wiped his face and blew his nose and left the set and drove to his suite at the Ambassador in his current MGM rented limo. There, he ate some complimentary chocolates and waited for the pleading phone call from the director which didn’t come. Mina, though, did plead with him—at least, when she heard about the incident a few hours later—but even she seemed to have sensed some kind of defeat. Clark hung around some more, which was something any actor had to be good at doing. He even tried calling the director himself the next day, only to be told that the plug had been pulled on the whole project and that it wasn’t his fault and these things were understandable and he wasn’t to fret. So he kicked his heels for a few days longer as he waited for a courier to bring his next script. But it was the hotel maître came to his door instead, to enquire in that gratingly polite way of all maîtres why his last two week’s bills for this suite, not to mention room service and the bar, hadn’t been paid. Quietly, but in that lingering way people do when they know they’re leaving somewhere they will most likely never see again, Clark gathered up the few things from the suite that he could actually call his own, and then a few others that strictly speaking weren’t. And he left. He thought for a while that this was the end of Clark Gable. He only realized later that what he’d really witnessed was the end of MGM.

Things happened fast in LA—that was something he should have made proper note of when he was on the way up in this business. There were all sorts of reasons he could have given as to why he’d fallen from grace so rapidly, but in his heart of hearts he knew that the real fall from grace had been somewhere inside him. And now he’d got so far down what had briefly seemed like a golden way that he couldn’t bring himself to tread the boards again, and the directors and producers were already wary of anyone with a taint of the old talkies about them, especially a nearly-star whose few headlining appearances had all nosedived.

It was one of those things you could look at in a hundred different ways, and not one of them would make the slightest difference, as Clark had long ago discovered. Sure, he could blame Mina, or the studio. Sure, he could—and he did—blame himself. He could even blame that idiot director, or lousy luck with the choice of scripts, or some wooden performances by his leading ladies, or not enough kissing of the right kind of ass. Or maybe he should have tried harder and been more patient with technology which everyone agreed was a hard enough bullet to bite. But none of that mattered, and Clark took the view that most things in life really weren’t that complex when you took them apart and wiped the grease off them and laid them out. When people asked Clark what had gone wrong, which had happened less and less over the years and barely at all now, he preferred the simplest answer because he reckoned it was also the truest. There had always been that way the camera seemed to like some actors more than others, and it was the same with iconoscopes.

He told people that he hadn’t liked the feelies much, and that the feelies hadn’t liked him.

I
T WAS COMING ON NINE
next morning by the time he’d fully woken up. Pipes were hissing, radios were playing and a singer was practicing her scales as he lumbered along the corridors in search of a washroom. The place he found was in much the sort of state he’d have expected. Hopeful damp-furred notices about tenants showing respect for others. The ledge of a dusty window lined with rusting tins of Drano and jars of Sal Hepatica Laxative. Someone’s socks and underthings left to marinate in the corroded lion’s claw bath. A day or so longer here, and he’d be doing the same. But he knew it couldn’t last. He cleaned his teeth using his finger and someone else’s tin of Pepsodent. He cleared a space on the mirror glass with a wet hand and thought how odd the guy on the other side of it now looked without his glasses.

Barbara had fixed him coffee and a bowl of Cream of Wheat by the time he’d dressed. He sat down in her room and lit a Lucky Strike and thought again of Peg’s worried face—and the way she had fled from him last night—as this pretty Jewish broad, who was scarcely old enough to be a woman, went on and on about some huge Goddamn conspiracy. Not that he didn’t doubt that she was right, but couldn’t she see that they were an ant’s squeak away from becoming its next casualties?

The room soon hazed with his cigarette smoke and Barbara went to the window and pulled back the sash. She stood there for a while as the sunlit haze drifted around her like an aura. Then she turned and picked up something strange and dark.

“And there was something else I found.”

He almost cringed when it she flapped it toward him.

“Although you might need a mirror to look…”

It was that piece of carbon paper with that same word stamped through into it on about fifteen hundred times.

“Yes. I know. It says Thrasis. I saw it a while back.”

“And you didn’t think to mention it?”

“Jesus, Barbara! How much crap have we had flying around here?”

“That word is there repeatedly on that weird toilet sheet draft that you found stuffed in the wastecan at that pine lodge.” She was looking at him more intently now. “Or did you know that as well?”

“Not exactly. But I can’t say I’m totally surprised. You see, Howard Hughes said it to me. Like it was some kind of full stop on everything. Like he couldn’t help saying it even though it was the last thing on earth he ever wanted to say.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me that either?”

“Take me out and shoot me, Barbara. It’s a word written down backwards that someone has also said to me. What the hell else can I say?”

“Only it isn’t a word.” She nodded toward her bookshelves, which were lined with encyclopedias and dictionaries. “I’ve just looked it up. It isn’t listed. But it’s somehow important, isn’t it?”

He shrugged. For a moment, he heard a weird hissing sound, and sensed a faint return of the presence he had glimpsed before. “I guess it probably is.”

B
UT THERE WERE STILL SO MANY QUESTIONS.

Crowded in with Barbara in the phone booth on the street, he tried calling the Nero Agency again. Still no pick up. If Abe really was the guy April Lamotte had hired to find a lookalike for her husband, they’d have to find another way of working it out. He used the same dime to get put through to the communal hall in Doges Apartments, and the phone rang for almost as long as the Nero call before Glory picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Hi. It’s Clark. Just thought I’d ring to check if anything’s up.”

“Up?”

“Any mail? Visitors? That kind of thing.”

“The guy about repossessing your car no show again if that what you mean.”

“Great. And, er, mail?”

“I look…” Footsteps. A long pause. Footsteps again. “Final demand for the IRS. Bill for the landlord. What look like a bill—”

“Just bills, then?” He could tell Barbara was laughing even though he could only see the back of her head. “Nothing else?”

“No, but you hiding or somesuch thing? Where you been?”

“Just busy on a case. Might take another day or so.”

“I hope she worth it.”

“I really do wish it was that kind of case, Glory.”

“Oh, and that woman I tell you ’bout call again. She still no give her name but say how much she worry about the husband. I give number again?”

“I guess so,” he muttered, knowing what Glory was like if you didn’t humor her.

“Well, Clark,” Barbara said, still chuckling as he put down the phone. “That was an interesting glimpse into your exciting life.”

“I’m not the one who’s living in that flea pit over there.”

“Sounds like your apartment is the total height of luxury…”

The air back out in the street smelled fresher this morning after last night’s rain, and there were puddles in the gutters, but Roger and his pals were busy as ever kicking their usual tin can.

“Say…” the kid drawled, chewing what was probably an entirely imaginary piece of gum. “It’s Tim Cookson and Frederica West. That car of yours still needs looking after, you know. Get all sorts of savory types around here.”

“It’s unsavory.” Clark handed him a quarter. “Anything much you noticed out here?”

“Not out
here
.” Roger winked at him, then looked at Barbara, who was back to wearing her usual mannish slacks and a Fairisle sweater, up and down in a way which was far too knowing for someone his age.

Barbara sighed. “Shouldn’t you be at school? Or in a reformatory?”

“Ain’t nothing I can learn there, lady, that I can’t pick up ten timesneater on these here streets.”

With another quarter stuffed in his pockets, Roger agreed to listen out again for the phone.

T
HE INSIDE OF THE DELAHAYE
smelled damper than ever. It was like something was beginning to rot, and there was a gouge down the driver’s side which Clark presumed Roger and his mates had caused. The engine didn’t sound quite right, either, as they drove past the fake palms and papier-mâché hula girls outside the new Clifton Cafeteria on the corner of Broadway and First.

Abe Penn’s offices were in a three story building set between a lower sprawl of warehouses and lots. There was a failed oil pump site and few signs of life.

“Thought you said he was up the pecking order from you, Clark,” Barbara muttered, looking up at the spackle-filled three story frontage as they climbed out.

Plates for all sorts, sizes and types of business clung to the wall outside. A chiropractor. A lonely hearts bureau. The registered offices of some oddly-named companies, amongst which was Abe Penn’s Nero Detective Agency. None of the plates looked new. The glass pane in the swing door had once had a long piece of surgical tape stuck across it to try to hold together a long crack. Once the door had stopped screeching, it felt very quiet inside. The only sound was the stick of their feet on warm linoleum and the buzz of a few flies. There was a noticeboard beside the stairs, one of those things that you slide letters in like a feelie signboard or the hymn numbers in a church. It repeated some of the names from the business plates outside, and added a few others. Abe Penn’s office was apparently up on the top floor.

There was no elevator, and the air grew even hotter as they climbed. More silent, as well—they were both almost holding their breath—apart from the continued bumble and buzz of those flies. Most of the business signs in the glass-windowed doors along the final corridor had been stuck over with brown paper or scratched out. The words
NERO DETECTIVE AGENCY
faced them from the far end, and Clark thought to himself as he swatted another fly and tried to peer through the glass frosting that this whole place was such a distillation of a certain kind of existence that they’d probably use it in the feelies—in the unlikely event that it ever became fashionable to work this city as a private dick, that was.

He couldn’t make anything out, and fully expected the door to be locked. But the oval handle instantly gave, and something terrible hit his senses as the door swung. With it came a rush of flies.

“Jesus. Shut the door.” He was fumbling for a handkerchief. “No—not on the
outside
, Barbara.” He hissed. “You’ve got to come
in
…”

The remains of what could only be Abe Penn depended from a rope which had been looped around the rosette of an old metal fan on the ceiling, and a swivel chair had been kicked away from underneath. Flies were everywhere. On the walls. In the air. Darkening the metal-framed windows. Seeking their eyes and mouths. Keeping close as he could to the corners of the small room, Clark went around to the far side of Abe’s desk. He used the handkerchief to work open the first window catch and a few thousand flies swarmed out, but most of the rest seemed happy enough to stay in with Abe. The other window was already half open.

“What the hell is this?” Barbara was covering her mouth with one hand, fumbling in her handbag with the other.

“What does it look like? Don’t touch
anything
, right?”

“As if I would…”

The roar of the disturbed flies was so loud they were having to shout. Abe looked like a large bag that had burst. His head was so ballooned and distorted, and his neck had been stretched so far by the weight of his leaking body, that it seemed that it could only be moments before the two broke apart. Clark had encountered one or two suicides before—they came with the territory when you dealt with separation and divorce—but never anything this bad. Abe must have been dead for days. No—make that weeks…

An impressive double page a day desk diary was open on the blotter for Friday June 21st, which was seven days ago. The only entry was a doodle of several breasts and the single word
Haircut?
Somehow, Clark found that question mark especially touching. Keeping his fingers wrapped in the handkerchief, he flicked quickly through the previous pages of the diary. More poorly done doodles of impossibly endowed broads decorated the pages, but that was all until, in the looser kind of hand someone might use when they were jotting something down whilst talking on the phone, Abe had written
Lamotte. Erewhon—Stone Canyon—Lookalikes?!?
and a phone number on the page for Friday June 14th.