Gods and Pawns (Company) Read online

  As we stood staring at all the antiques and Lewis made admiring noises, the housekeeper continued: “You’ll notice Mr. Hearst has furnished much of this suite with his private art collection, but he’d like you to know that the bathroom—just through there, gentlemen—is perfectly up-to-date and modern, with all the latest conveniences, including shower baths.”

  “How thoughtful,” Lewis answered, and transmitted to me: Are you going to take part in this conversation at all?

  “That’s really swell of Mr. Hearst,” I said. I’m even more nervous than I was before, O.K.?

  The housekeeper smiled. “Thank you. You’ll find your bags are already in your assigned bedrooms. Jerome is unpacking for you.”

  Whoops. “Great,” I said. “Where’s my room? Can I see it now?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Denham,” said the housekeeper, narrowing her eyes slightly. She led us through a doorway that had probably belonged to some sixteenth-century Spanish bishop, and there was Jerome, laying out the contents of my cheap brown suitcase. My black suitcase sat beside it, untouched.

  “If you’ll unlock this one, sir, I’ll unpack it too,” Jerome told me.

  “That’s O.K.,” I replied, taking the black suitcase and pushing it under the bed. “I’ll get that one myself, later.”

  In the very brief pause that followed, Jerome and the housekeeper exchanged glances, Lewis sighed, and I felt a real need for another Lifesaver. The housekeeper cleared her throat and said, “I hope this room is satisfactory, Mr. Denham?”

  “Oh! Just peachy, thanks,” I said.

  “I’m sure mine is just as nice,” Lewis offered. Jerome exited to unpack for him.

  “Very good.” The housekeeper cleared her throat again. “Now, Mr. Hearst wished you to know that cocktails will be served at Seven this evening in the assembly hall, which is in the big house just across the courtyard. He expects to join his guests at Eight; dinner will be served at Nine. After dinner Mr. Hearst will retire with his guests to the theater, where a motion picture will be shown. Following the picture, Mr. Hearst generally withdraws to his study, but his guests are invited to return to their rooms or explore the library.” She fixed me with a steely eye. “Alcohol will be served only in the main house, although sandwiches or other light meals can be requested by telephone from the kitchen staff at any hour.”

  She thinks you’ve got booze in the suitcase, you know, Lewis transmitted.

  Shut up. I squared my shoulders and tried to look open and honest. Everybody knew that there were two unbreakable rules for the guests up here: no liquor in the rooms and no sex between unmarried couples. Notice I said “for the guests.” Mr. Hearst and Marion weren’t bound by any rules except the laws of physics.

  The housekeeper gave us a few more helpful tidbits like how to find the zoo, tennis court, and stables, and departed. Lewis and I slunk out into the garden, where we paced along between the statues.

  “Overall, I don’t think that went very well,” Lewis observed.

  “No kidding,” I said, thrusting my hands in my pockets.

  “It’ll only be a temporary bad impression, you know,” Lewis told me helpfully. “As soon as you’ve made your presentation—”

  “Hey! Yoo-hoo! Joe! You boys made it up here O.K.?” cried a bright voice from somewhere up in the air, and we turned for our first full-on eyeful of La Casa Grande in all its massive glory. It looked sort of like a big Spanish cathedral, but surely one for pagans, because there was Marion Davies hanging out a third-story window waving at us.

  “Yes, thanks,” I called, while Lewis stared. Marion was wearing a dressing gown. She might have been wearing more, but you couldn’t tell from this distance.

  “Is that your friend? He’s cute,” she yelled. “Looks like Freddie March!”

  Lewis turned bright pink. “I’m his stunt double, actually,” he called to her, with a slightly shaky giggle.

  “What?”

  “I’m his stunt double.”

  “Oh,” she yelled back. “O.K.! Listen, do you want some ginger ale or anything? You know there’s no”—she looked naughty and mimed drinking from a bottle—“until tonight.”

  “Yes, ginger ale would be fine,” bawled Lewis.

  “I’ll have some sent down,” Marion said, and vanished into the recesses of La Casa Grande.

  We turned left at the next statue and walked up a few steps into the courtyard in front of the house. It was the size of several town squares, big enough to stage the riot scene from Romeo and Juliet complete with the Verona Police Department charging in on horseback. All it held at the moment, though, was another fountain and some lawn chairs. In one of them, Greta Garbo sat moodily peeling an orange.

  “Hello, Greta,” I said, wondering if she’d remember me. She just gave me a look and went on peeling the orange. She remembered me, all right.

  Lewis and I sat down a comfortable distance from her, and a houseboy appeared out of nowhere with two tall glasses of White Rock over ice.

  “Marion Davies said I was cute,” Lewis reminded me, looking pleased. Then his eyebrows swooped together in the middle. “That’s not good, though, is it? For the mission? What if Mr. Hearst heard her? Ye gods, she was shouting it at the top of her lungs.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be any big deal,” I told him wearily, sipping my ginger ale. Marion thought a lot of people were cute, and didn’t care who heard her say so.

  We sat there in the sunshine, and the ice in our drinks melted away. Garbo ate her orange. Doves crooned sleepily in the carillon towers of the house and I thought about what I was going to say to William Randolph Hearst.

  Pretty soon the other guests started wandering up, and Garbo wouldn’t talk to them, either. Clark Gable sat on the edge of the fountain and got involved in a long conversation with a sandy-haired guy from Paramount about their mutual bookie. One of Hearst’s five sons arrived with his girlfriend. He tried to introduce her to Garbo, who answered in monosyllables, until at last he gave it up and they went off to swim in the Roman pool. A couple of friends of Marion’s from the days before talkies, slightly threadbare guys named Charlie and Laurence who looked as though they hadn’t worked lately, got deeply involved in a discussion of Greek mythology.

  I sat there and looked up at the big house and wondered where Hearst was, and what he was doing. Closing some million-dollar media deal? Giving some senator or congressman voting instructions? Placing an order with some antiques dealer for the contents of an entire library from some medieval duke’s palace?

  He did stuff like that, Mr. Hearst, which was one of the reasons the Company was interested in him.

  I was distracted from my uneasy reverie when Constance Talmadge arrived, gaining on forty now but still as bright and bouncy as when she’d played the Mountain Girl in Intolerance, and with her Brooklyn accent just as strong. She bounced right over to Lewis, who knew her, and they had a lively chat about old times. Shortly afterward the big doors of the house opened and out came, not the procession of priests and altar boys you’d expect, but Marion in light evening dress.

  “Hello, everybody,” she hollered across the fountain. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but you know how it is—Hearst come, Hearst served!”

  There were nervous giggles and you almost expected to see the big house behind her wince, but she didn’t care. She came out and greeted everybody warmly—well, almost everybody; Garbo seemed to daunt even Marion—and then welcomed us in through the vast doorway, into the inner sanctum.

  “Who’s a first-timer up here?” she demanded, as we crossed the threshold. “I know you are, Joe, and your friend—? Get a load of this floor.” She pointed to the mosaic tile in the vestibule. “Know where that’s from? Pompeii! Can you beat it? People actually died on this floor.”

  If she was right, I had known some of them. It didn’t improve my mood.

  The big room beyond was cool and dark after the brilliance of the courtyard. Almost comfortable, too: it had contemporary sofas and ov
erstuffed chairs, little ashtrays on brass stands. If you didn’t mind the fact that it was also about a mile long and full of Renaissance masterpieces, with a fireplace big enough to roast an ox and a coffered ceiling a mile up in the air, it was sort of cozy. Here, as in all the other rooms, were paintings and statues representing the Madonna and Child. It seemed to be one of Mr. Hearst’s favorite images.

  We milled around aimlessly until servants came out bearing trays of drinks, at which time the milling became purposeful as hell. We converged on those trays like piranhas. The Madonna beamed down at us all, smiling her blessing.

  The atmosphere livened up a lot after that. Charlie sat down at a piano and began to play popular tunes. Gable and Laurence and the guy from Paramount found a deck of cards and started a poker game. Marion worked the rest of the crowd like the good hostess she was, making sure that everybody had a drink and nobody was bored.

  The Hearst kid and his girlfriend came in with wet hair. A couple of Hearst’s executives (slimy-looking bastards) came in too, saw Garbo and hurried over to try to get her autograph. A gaunt and imposing grande dame with two shrieking little mutts made an entrance, and Marion greeted her enthusiastically; she was some kind of offbeat novelist who’d had one of her books optioned, and had come out to Hollywood to work on the screenplay.

  I roamed around the edges of the vast room, scanning for the secret panel that concealed Hearst’s private elevator. Lewis was gallantly dancing the Charleston with Connie Talmadge. Marion made for them, towing the writer along.

  “—And this is Dutch Talmadge, you remember her? And this is, uh, what was your name, sweetie?” Marion waved at Lewis.

  “Lewis Kensington,” he said, as the music tinkled to a stop. The pianist paused to light a cigarette.

  “Lewis! That’s it. And you’re even cuter up close,” said Marion, reaching out and pinching his cheek. “Isn’t he? Anyway you’re Industry too, aren’t you, Lewis?”

  “Only in a minor sort of way,” Lewis demurred. “I’m a stunt man.”

  “That just means you’re worth the money they pay you, honey,” Marion told him. “Unlike some of these blonde bimbos with no talent, huh?” She whooped with laughter at her own expense. “Lewis, Dutch, this is Cartimandua Bryce! You know? She writes those wonderful spooky romances.”

  The imposing-looking lady stepped forward. The two chihuahuas did their best to lunge from her arms and tear out Lewis’s throat, but she kept a firm grip on them.

  “A-and these are her little dogs,” added Marion unnecessarily, stepping back from the yappy armful.

  “My familiars,” Cartimandua Bryce corrected her with a saturnine smile. “Actually, they are old souls who have re-entered the flesh on a temporary basis for purposes of the spiritual advancement of others.”

  “Oh,” said Connie.

  “O.K.,” said Marion.

  “This is Conqueror Worm,” Mrs. Bryce offered the smaller of the two bug-eyed monsters, “and this is Tcho-Tcho.”

  “How nice,” said Lewis gamely, and reached out in an attempt to shake Tcho-Tcho’s tiny paw. She bared her teeth at him and screamed frenziedly. Some animals can tell we’re not mortals. It can be inconvenient.

  Lewis withdrew his hand in some haste. “I’m sorry. Perhaps the nice doggie’s not used to strangers?”

  “It isn’t that—” Mrs. Bryce stared fixedly at Lewis. “Tcho-Tcho is attempting to communicate with me telepathically. She senses something unusual about you, Mr. Kensington.”

  If she can tell the lady you’re a cyborg, she’s one hell of a dog, I transmitted.

  Oh, shut up, Lewis transmitted back. “Really?” he said to Mrs. Bryce. “Gosh, isn’t that interesting?”

  But Mrs. Bryce had closed her eyes, I guess the better to hear what Tcho-Tcho had to say, and was frowning deeply. After a moment’s uncomfortable silence, Marion turned to Lewis and said, “So, you’re Freddie March’s stunt double? Gee. What’s that like, anyway?”

  “I just take falls. Stand in on lighting tests. Swing from chandeliers,” Lewis replied. “The usual.” Charlie resumed playing: I’m the Sheik of Araby.

  “He useta do stunts for Valentino, too,” Constance added. “I remember.”

  “You doubled for Rudy?” Marion’s smile softened. “Poor old Rudy.”

  “I always heard Valentino was a faggot,” chortled the man from Paramount. Marion rounded on him angrily.

  “For your information, Jack, Rudy Valentino was a real man,” she told him. “He just had too much class to chase skirts all the time!”

  “Soitain people could loin a whole lot from him,” agreed Connie, with the scowl of disdain she’d used to face down Old Babylon’s marriage market in Intolerance.

  “I’m just telling you what I heard,” protested the man from Paramount.

  “Maybe,” Gable told him, looking up from his cards. “But did you ever hear that expression, ‘Say nothing but good of the dead’? Now might be a good time to dummy up, pal. That or play your hand.”

  Mrs. Bryce, meanwhile, had opened her eyes and was gazing on Lewis with a disconcerting expression.

  “Mr. Kensington,” she announced with a throaty quaver, “Tcho-Tcho informs me you are a haunted man.”

  Lewis looked around nervously. “Am I?”

  “Tcho-Tcho can perceive the spirit of a soul struggling in vain to speak to you. You are not sufficiently tuned to the cosmic vibrations to hear him,” Mrs. Bryce stated.

  Tell him to try another frequency, I quipped.

  “Well, that’s just like me, I’m afraid.” Lewis shrugged, palms turned out. “I’m terribly dense that way, you see. Wouldn’t know a cosmic vibration if I tripped over one.”

  Cosmic vibrations, my ass. I knew what she was doing; carney psychics do it all the time, and it’s called a cold reading. You give somebody a close once-over and make a few deductions based on the details you observe. Then you start weaving a story out of your deductions, watching your subject’s reactions to see where you’re accurate and tailoring your story to fit as you go on. All she had to work with, right now, was the mention that Lewis had known Valentino. Lewis has Easy Mark written all over him, but I guessed she was up here after bigger fish.

  “Tcho-Tcho sees a man—a slender, dark man—” Mrs. Bryce went on, rolling her eyes back in her head in a sort of alarming way. “He wears Eastern raiment—”

  Marion downed her cocktail in one gulp. “Hey, look, Mrs. Bryce, there’s Greta Garbo,” she said. “I’ll just bet she’s a big fan of your books.”

  Mrs. Bryce’s eyes snapped back into place and she looked around.

  “Garbo?” she cried. She made straight for the Frozen Flame, dropping Lewis like a rock, though Tcho-Tcho snapped and strained over her shoulder at him. Garbo saw them coming and sank further into the depths of her chair. I was right. Mrs. Bryce was after bigger fish.

  I didn’t notice what happened after that, though, because I heard a clash of brass gates and gears engaging somewhere upstairs. The biggest fish of all was descending in his elevator, making his delayed entrance.

  I edged over toward the secret panel. My mouth was dry, my palms were sweaty. I wonder if Mephistopheles ever gets sweaty palms when he’s facing a prospective client?

  Bump. Here he was. The panel made no sound as it opened. Not a mortal soul noticed as W. R. Hearst stepped into the room, and for that matter Lewis didn’t notice either, having resumed the Charleston with Connie Talmadge. So there was only me to stare at the very, very big old man who sat down quietly in the corner.

  I swear I felt the hair stand on the back of my neck, and I didn’t know why.

  William Randolph Hearst had had his seventieth birthday a couple of weeks before. His hair was white, he sagged where an old man sags, but his bones hadn’t given in to gravity. His posture was upright and powerfully alert.

  He just sat there in the shadows, watching the bright people in his big room. I watched him. This was the guy who’d fathered modern journalism, who wit
h terrifying energy and audacity had built a financial empire that included newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, mining, ranching. He picked and chose presidents as though they were his personal appointees. He’d ruthlessly forced the world to take him on his own terms; morality was what he said it was; and yet there wasn’t any fire that you could spot in the seated man, no restless genius apparent to the eye.

  You know what he reminded me of? The Goon in the Popeye comic strips. Big as a mountain and scary, too, but at the same time sad, with those weird deep eyes above the long straight nose.

  He reminded me of something else, too, but not anything I wanted to remember right now.

  “Oh, you did your trick again,” said Marion, pretending to notice him at last. “Here he is, everybody. He likes to pop in like he was Houdini or something. Come on, W.R., say hello to the nice people.” She pulled him to his feet and he smiled for her. His smile was even scarier than the rest of him. It was wide, and sharp, and hungry, and young.

  “Hello, everybody,” he said, in that unearthly voice Ambrose Bierce had described as the fragrance of violets made audible. Flutelike and without resonance. Not a human voice; jeez, I sound more human than that. But then, I’m supposed to.

  And you should have seen them, all those people, turn and stare and smile and bow—just slightly, and I don’t think any of them realized they were bowing to him, but I’ve been a courtier and I know a grovel when I see one. Marion was the only mortal in that room who wasn’t afraid of him. Even Garbo had gotten up out of her chair.

  Marion brought them up to him, one by one, the big names and the nobodies, and introduced the ones he didn’t know. He shook hands like a shy kid. Hell, he was shy! That was it, I realized: he was uneasy around people, and Marion—in addition to her other duties—was his social interface. O.K., this might be something I could use.

  I stood apart from the crowd, waiting unobtrusively until Marion had brought up everybody else. Only when she looked around for me did I step out of the shadows into her line of sight.