Gods and Pawns (Company) Read online

  “Aw, hell, no,” I said in my best regular-guy voice. “I wouldn’t do something like that, Marion.”

  “Well, I didn’t really think so,” she admitted, looking at the table and pushing a few grains of spilled salt around with her fingertip. “He doesn’t pay blackmailers, you know. But—y-you’ve got a reputation as a man who knows a lot of secrets, and I just thought—if you’d used me to get up here to talk to him—” She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “That wouldn’t be very nice.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” I agreed. “And I swear I didn’t come up here to do anything like that. Honest.”

  Marion just nodded. “The other thing I thought it might be,” she went on, “was that you might be selling some kind of patent medicine. A lot of people know he’s interested in longevity, and it looked like he’d been drinking something red out of his coffee cup, you see.” Her mouth was hard. “He may be a millionaire and he’s terribly smart, but people take advantage of him all the time.”

  “Not me,” I said, and looked around as though I wanted to see who might be listening. I leaned across the table to speak close to her ear. “Listen, honey, the truth is—I really did need his advice about something. And he was kind enough to listen. But it’s a private matter and believe me, he’s not the one being blackmailed. See?”

  “Oh!” She thought she saw. “Is it Mr. Mayer?”

  “Why, no, not at all,” I answered hurriedly, in a tone that implied exactly the opposite. Her face cleared.

  “Gee, poor Mr. Mayer,” she said. She knitted her brows. “So you didn’t give W.R. any kind of…spring tonic or something?”

  “Where would I get something like that?” I looked confused, as I would be if I were some low-level studio dick who handled crises for executives and had never heard of PT3.

  “Yeah.” Marion reached over and patted my hand. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to be sure.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said, getting to my feet. “But please don’t worry, O.K.?”

  She had nothing to worry about, after all. Unlike me. I still had to talk to Mr. Hearst.

  I strolled out through the grounds to look for him. He found me first, though, looming abruptly into my path.

  “Mr. Denham.” Hearst grinned at me. “I must commend you on that stuff. It works. Have you communicated with your people?”

  “Yes, sir, I have,” I assured him, keeping my voice firm and hearty.

  “Good. Walk with me, will you? I’d like to hear what they had to say.” He started off, and I had to run to fall into step beside him.

  “Well—they’ve agreed to your terms. I must say I’m a little surprised.” I laughed in an embarrassed kind of way. “I never thought it was possible to grant a mortal what you’re asking for, but you know how it is—the rank and file aren’t told everything, I guess.”

  “I suspected that was how it was,” Hearst told me placidly. His little dachshund came racing to greet him. He scooped her up and she licked his face in excitement. “So. How is this to be arranged?”

  “As far as the shares of stock go, there’ll be another gentleman getting in touch with you pretty soon,” I said. “I’m not sure what name he’ll be using, but you’ll know him. He’ll mention my name, just as I mentioned Mr. Shaw’s.”

  “Very good. And the other matter?”

  Boy, the other matter. “I can give you a recipe for a tonic you’ll drink on a daily basis,” I said, improvising. “Your own staff can make it up.”

  “As simple as that?” He looked down at me sidelong, and so did the dog. “Is it the recipe for what I drank last night?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” I told him truthfully. “No, this will be something to prolong your life until the date history decrees that you appear to die. See? But it’ll all be faked. One of our doctors will be there to pronounce you dead, and instead of being taken away to a mortuary, you’ll go to one of our hospitals and be made immortal in a new body.”

  That part was a whopping big bald-faced lie, of course. I felt sweat beading on my forehead again, as we walked along through the garden and Hearst took his time about replying.

  “It all sounds plausible,” he said at last. “Though of course I’ve no way of knowing whether your people will keep their word. Have I?”

  “You’d just have to trust us,” I agreed. “But look at the way you feel right now! Isn’t that proof enough?”

  “It’s persuasive,” he replied, but left the sentence unfinished. We walked on. O.K., I needed to impress him again.

  “See that pink rose?” I pointed to a bush about a hundred yards away, where one big bloom was just opening.

  “I see it, Mr. Denham.”

  “Count to three, O.K.?”

  “One,” Hearst said, and I was holding the rose in front of his eyes. He went pale. Then he smiled again, wide and genuine. The little dog whuffed at me uncertainly.

  “Pretty good,” he said. “And can you ‘put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes’?”

  “I might, if I could fly,” I said. “No wings, though. You don’t want wings, too, do you, Mr. Hearst?”

  He just laughed. “Not yet. I believe I’ll go wash up now, and then head off to the tennis court. Do you play, Mr. Denham?”

  “Gee, I just love tennis,” I replied, “but, you know, I got all the way up here and discovered I’d only packed one tennis shoe.”

  “Oh, I’ll have a pair brought out for you.” Hearst looked down at my feet. “You’re, what, about a size six?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said with a sinking feeling.

  “They’ll be waiting for you at the court,” Hearst informed me. “Try to play down to my speed, will you?” He winked hugely and ambled away.

  I was on my way back to the breakfast room with the vague hope of drinking a bottle of pancake syrup or something when I came upon Lewis. He was creeping along a garden path, keenly watching a flaxen-haired figure slumped on a marble bench amid the roses.

  “What are you doing, Lewis?” I said.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” he replied sotto voce. “I’m stalking Garbo.”

  “All right…” I must have looked dubious, because he drew himself up indignantly.

  “Can you think of any other way to start a casual conversation with her?” he demanded. “And I’ve worked out a way—” He looked around and transmitted the rest, I’ve worked out quite a clever way of detecting the guilty party.

  Oh yeah?

  You see, I just engage Garbo in conversation and then sort of artlessly mention that I didn’t catch the end of Going Hollywood because I had a dreadful migraine headache, so I went back to my room early, and would she tell me how it came out? And if she’s not the thief, she’ll just explain that she left early too and has no idea how it turned out. But! If she’s the one who took the script, she’ll know I’m lying, because she’ll have been in my room and seen I wasn’t there. And she’ll be so disconcerted that her blood pressure will rise, her pulse will race, her pupils will dilate, and she’ll display all the other physical manifestations that would show up on a polygraph if I happened to be using one! And then I’ll know.

  Ingenious, I admitted. Worked all the time for me, when I was an Inquisitor.

  Thank you. Lewis beamed.

  Of course, first you have to get Garbo to talk to you.

  Lewis nodded, looking determined. He resumed his ever-so-cautious advance on the Burning Icicle. I shrugged and went back to La Casa del Sol to change into tennis togs.

  Playing tennis with W. R. Hearst called for every ounce of the guile and finesse that had made me a champion in the Black Legend All-Stars, believe me. I had to demonstrate all kinds of hyperfunction stunts a mortal wouldn’t be able to do, like appearing on both sides of the net at once, just to impress him with my immortalness; and yet I had to avoid killing the old man with the ball, and—oh yeah—let him win somehow, too. I’d like to see Bill Tilden try it some time.

  It was hell. Hearst seemed to think
it was funny, at least; he was in a great mood watching me run around frantically while he kept his position in center court, solid as a tower. He returned my sissy serves with all the force of cannon fire. His dog watched from beyond the fence, standing up on her hind legs to bark suspiciously. She was sure there was something funny about me now. Thank God Gable put in an appearance after about an hour of this, and I was able to retire to the sidelines and wheeze, and swear a tougher hour was never wasted there. Hearst paused before his game long enough to make a brief call from a courtside phone. Two minutes later, there was a smiling servant offering me a glass of ice-cold ginger ale.

  Gable didn’t beat Hearst, either, and I think he actually tried. Clark wasn’t much of a toady.

  I begged off to go shower—dark hairy guys who play tennis in hyperfunction tend to stink—and slipped out afterward to do some reconnoitering.

  Tonight I planned to slip in some minor heart surgery on Hearst as he slept, to guarantee those eighteen years the Company was giving him. The trick was going to be getting in undetected. There had to be another way to reach Hearst’s rooms besides his private elevator, but there were no stairs visible in any of the rooms I’d been in. How did the servants get up there?

  Prowling slowly around the house and bouncing sonar waves off the outside, I found a couple of ways to ascend. The best, for my purposes, was a tiny spiral staircase that was entered from the east terrace. I could sneak through the garden, go straight up, find my way to Hearst’s bedroom, and depart the same way once I’d fixed his heart. I could even wear the tennis shoes he’d so thoughtfully loaned me.

  I was wandering in the direction of the Neptune pool when there was a hell of a racket from the shrubbery ahead of me. Conqueror Worm came darting out, yapping savagely. I was composed enough not to kick him as he raced up to my ankles. He growled and backed away when I bared my teeth at him in my friendliest fashion.

  “Hi, doggie,” I said. “Poor little guy, where’s your mistress?”

  A dark-veiled figure that had been standing perfectly still on the other side of the hedge decided to move, and Cartimandua Bryce walked forward calling out: “Conqueror! Oh! Conqueror, you mustn’t challenge Mr. Denham.” She came around the corner and saw me.

  There was a pause. I think she was waiting for me to demand in astonishment how she’d known it was me, but instead I inquired: “Where’s your new dog?”

  “Still in Mr. Hearst’s kennels,” she replied, with a proud lift of her head. “Dear Mr. Hearst is having a traveling basket made for her. Such a kind man!”

  “He’s a swell guy, all right,” I agreed.

  “And just as generous in this life as in his others,” she went on. “But, you know, being a Caesar taught him that. Ruling the Empire either ennobled a man or brought out his worst vices. Clearly, our host was one of those on whom the laurel crown conferred refinement. Of course, he is a very old soul.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Oh, yes. He has come back many, many times. Many are the names he has borne: Pharaoh, and Caesar, and High King,” Mrs. Bryce told me, in as matter-of-fact a voice as though she was listing football trophies. “He has much work to do on this plane of existence, you see. Of course, you may well wonder how I know these things.”

  “Gee, Mrs. Bryce, how do you know these things?” I asked, just to be nice.

  “It is my gift,” she said, with a little sad smile, and she sighed. “My gift and my curse, you see. The spirits whisper to me constantly. I described this terrible and wonderful affliction in my novel Black Covenant, which of course was based on one of my own past lives.”

  “I don’t think I’ve read that one,” I admitted.

  “A sad tale, as so many of them are,” she said, sighing again. “In the romantic Scottish Highlands of the thirteenth century, a beautiful young girl discovers she has an uncanny ability to sense both past and future lives of everyone she meets. Her gift brings inevitable doom upon her, of course. She finds her long-lost love, who was a soldier under Mark Antony when she was one of Cleopatra’s handmaidens, and is now a gallant highwayman—I mean her lover, of course—and, sensing his inevitable death on the gallows, she dares to die with him.”

  “That’s sad, all right,” I agreed. “How’d it sell?”

  “It was received by the discerning public with their customary sympathy,” Mrs. Bryce replied.

  “Is that the one they’re doing a screenplay on?” I inquired.

  “No,” she said, looking me up and down. “That’s Passionate Girl, the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, told from the unique perspective of her faithful terrier. I may yet persuade Miss Garbo to accept the lead role But, Mr. Denham—I am sensing something about you. Wait. You work in the film industry—”

  “Yeah, for Louis B. Mayer,” I said.

  “And yet—and yet—” She took a step back and shaded her eyes as she looked at me. “I sense more. You cast a long shadow, Mr. Denham. Why—you, too, are an old soul!”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, scanning her critically for Crome’s radiation. Was she one of those mortals with a fluky electromagnetic field? They tend to receive data other mortals don’t get, the way some people pick up radio broadcasts with tooth fillings, because their personal field bleeds into the temporal wave. I couldn’t sense anything out of the ordinary in Mrs. Bryce, though. Was she buttering me up because she thought I could talk Garbo into starring in Passionate Girl at MGM? Well, she didn’t know much about my relationship with Greta.

  “Yes—yes—I see you in the Mediterranean area—I see you dueling with a band of street youths—is it in Venice, in the time of the Doges? Yes. And before that…I see you in Egypt, Mr. Denham, during the captivity of the Israelites. You loved a girl…yet there was another man, an overseer…” Conqueror Worm might be able to tell there was something different about me, but his mistress was scoring a big metaphysical zero.

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” she said, lowering her eyes from the oak tree above us, where she had apparently been reading all this stuff. “Do you experience disturbing visions, Mr. Denham? Dreams, perhaps of other places, other times?”

  “Yeah, actually,” I couldn’t resist saying.

  “Ah. If you desire to seek further—I may be able to help you.” She came close and put her hand on my arm. Conqueror Worm prowled around her ankles, whining like a gnat. “I have some experience in, shall we say, arcane matters? It wouldn’t be the first time I have assisted a questing soul in unraveling the mystery of his past lives. Indeed, you might almost call me a detective…for I sense you enjoy the works of Mr. Dashiell Hammett,” she finished, with a smile as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa.

  I smiled right back at her. Conqueror Worm put his tail between his legs and howled.

  “Gosh, Mrs. Bryce, that’s really amazing,” I said, reaching for her hand and shaking it. “I do like detective fiction.” And there was no way she could have known it unless she’d been in my room going through my drawers, where she’d have seen my well-worn copy of The Maltese Falcon. “Did your spirits tell you that?”

  “Yes,” she said modestly, and she was lying through her teeth, if her skin conductivity and pulse were any indication. Lewis was right, you see: we can tell as much as a polygraph about whether or not a mortal is truthful.

  “You don’t say?” I let go her hand. “Well, well. This has been really interesting, Mrs. Bryce. I’ve got to go see how my friend is doing now, but, you know, I’d really like to get together to talk with you about this again. Soon.”

  “Ah! Your friend with the fair hair,” she said, and looked wise. Then she stepped in close and lowered her voice. “The haunted one. Tell me, Mr. Denham…is he…inclined to the worship of Apollo?”

  For a moment I was struck speechless, because Lewis does go on sometimes about his Roman cultural identity, but then I realized that wasn’t what Mrs. Bryce was implying.

  “You mean, is he a homo?”

  “Given to sins of the purple and crimson nature,
” she rephrased, nodding.

  Now I knew she had the Valentino script, had seen Rudy’s cute note and leaped to her own conclusion. “Uh…gee. I don’t know. I guess he might be. Why?”

  “There is a male spirit who will not rest until he communicates with your friend,” Mrs. Bryce told me, breathing heavily. “A fiery soul with a great attachment to Mr. Kensington. One who has but recently passed over. A beautiful shade, upright as a smokeless flame.”

  The only question now was, why? One thing was certain: whether or not Lewis had ever danced the tango with Rudolph Valentino, Mrs. Bryce sure wished she had. Was she planning some stunt to impress the hell out of all these movie people, using her magic powers to reveal the script’s whereabouts if Lewis reported it missing?

  “I wonder who it is?” I said. “I’ll tell him about it. Of course, you know, he might be kind of embarrassed—”

  “But of course.” She waved gracefully, as though dismissing all philistine considerations of closets. “If he will speak to me privately, I can do him a great service.”

  “O.K., Mrs. Bryce,” I said, winking, and we went our separate ways through the garden.

  I caught up with Lewis in the long pergola, tottering along between the kumquat trees. His tie was askew, his hair was standing on end, and his eyes shone like a couple of blue klieg lights.

  “The most incredible thing just happened to me,” he said.

  “How’d you make out with Garbo?” I inquired, and then my jaw dropped, because he drew himself up and said, with an effort at dignity:

  “I’ll thank you not to speculate on a lady’s private affairs.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud!” I hoped he’d had the sense to stay out of the range of the surveillance cameras.

  “But I can tell you this much,” he said, as his silly grin burst through again, “she absolutely did not steal my Valentino script.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I replied. “Cartimandua Bryce took it after all.”

  “She—Really?” Lewis focused with difficulty. “However did you find out?”

  “We were talking just now and she gave the game away.” I explained. “Oldest trick in the book, for fake psychics: snoop through people’s belongings in secret so you know little details about them you couldn’t have known otherwise, then pull ’em out in conversation and wow everybody with your mystical abilities.