Mendoza in Hollywood (Company) Page 7

  “It was terribly romantic,” Kalugin said, smiling where he lay with his head in Nan’s lap. “I’d been in a shipwreck, and washed up on the coast of Morocco. She was all in silks and bangles, third wife to one of the sultan’s corsairs.”

  Einar leaned his chin on his fist and grunted. “Our anthropologist will be disappointed she didn’t get a chance to talk with you.”

  Nancy opened her reticule. “I’ll leave her one of my calling cards. It is, after all, the correct thing to do in these circumstances in polite society.”

  “Calling cards,” I said. She nodded serenely and handed me a tiny square of pasteboard, embossed, beautifully engraved. I read:

  “D’Araignée?” I asked.

  “An artistic decision,” she said. “French for spider, you see. I have always retained the clearest memories of the folktales of my mortal parents. Indeed, I can scarcely recall anything else from my mortal life.”

  I remembered the angry four-year-old girl that she’d been, telling me how the spider god of her tribe had deserted them, saving only her.

  “Anansi,” she said. “The friend and helper of men, as I understand from my researches into the work of M. Griaule and Mr. Parrinder.”

  I stared into the fire. The immortal operative who’d rescued the child must have named her for the word she repeated most often, thinking it sounded like Nancy. Had the little girl been calling on her god? Had she finally made her peace with him now, since she’d taken his name for her own? I’d never made peace with mine.

  But how wonderful, what style she had, to what good use she’d put her anger.

  “What’s Salon Algeria?” I asked.

  “One of the Company safe houses in Paris,” she said. “I reside there when Dr. Zeus has no pressing errand on which to send me. And it’s useful, too; a certain segment of the artistic denizens on the Left Bank know that I am always interested in seeing canvases, and perhaps paying cash for them. Regretfully, members of the criminal class are also aware of this, and I’m afraid I have purchased stolen paintings on more than one occasion.” She shrugged. “One has the consolation of knowing that everything one purchases in this way will survive for the ages rather than burn in the political upheavals with which France is so frequently visited these days.”

  I nodded. God, she even had a home.

  “What were you doing in a shipwreck?” Juan Bautista raised his head and looked at Kalugin. “I thought we always know when a ship’s going to sink.”

  “We do,” Kalugin told him ruefully. “But when history records that a ship’s going to disappear with all hands, young man, she becomes fair game for the Company. And when history records that she carries valuable cargo, the Company acts. Most people suppose a marine salvage technician is some sort of diver, and it’s true; but, you see, I don’t go down after the wreck. I go down with it.”

  This extraordinary statement was followed by a distant salvo of gunfire, followed by wild laughter from somewhere up the canyon. Porfirio and Eucharia were apparently target shooting by infrared.

  “Anyone can dive down to retrieve gold or jewels,” Kalugin explained. “They aren’t spoiled by a little seawater. But what about manuscripts, paintings, Stradivarius violins? You need someone there, on the scene, someone with the knowledge of what’s to come, who can secure all those perishable treasures in sealed containers before the ship sinks. You need someone to ride the poor wreck to her final resting place, and transmit exact coordinates on her location to a Company salvage team. You need someone to stay with her on the bottom, lest she drift, lest she break up and any of those carefully sealed boxes float away. And you need someone there to guard her, in her grave, lest the chance fisherman or swimmer should find her before the Company team arrives.”

  “You mean you stay in the wreck with all the dead guys?” Juan Bautista asked, horrified. His music faltered for a moment.

  Kalugin nodded sadly.

  “How can you stand that, man?” said Einar.

  “I go into fugue,” said Kalugin. “I shut down. I respond only when there’s a threat to the ship. When the Company divers come, they pull me out, and I go bobbing up to the surface to breathe again. Wretched business, isn’t it? To do one’s work by impersonating a bloated corpse.” He gave a little embarrassed laugh. Nancy took his hand and kissed it.

  “But living on board with those guys, knowing all the time that they’re doomed . . .” Einar shook his head.

  Kalugin seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “Well, it’s rather like what we all face every day, isn’t it? Every mortal who stops here is doomed, eventually. All our fellow passengers in the stagecoach, every one of them bound for the unknown. I just . . . try not to think about it.” He turned his face up to Nancy and smiled. “Fortunately, when not thinking becomes impossible—as it does—I have an angel to pray to.”

  A silence fell. Juan Bautista had stopped playing. I suppose we were all sitting there with identical expressions of appalled sympathy on our faces.

  A voice began to sing, somewhere up on the hill, a woman’s voice powerful and harsh, raw with emotion and alcohol, echoing in the night.

  You hear no sound but my silenced voice.

  You feel no beat but the fire that burns me.

  You draw no breath but I come into you.

  Before you, behind you, I am the sea and the rock.

  I AM THE SEA AND THE ROCK!

  Juan Baudsta lifted his head, recognizing the song, and so did I. It was by the twenty-first-century composer Whelan, from The Unquiet Dead, his Celtic reinterpretation of de Falla’s El amor brujo. Juan Bautista flexed his clenched hands and improvised on the melody, and as the flow of guitar music began again, we all drew breath.

  That night in bed, I tried to occupy my mind with how much better off I was than poor Kalugin, but all I could do was envy him and Nancy their good fortune. Whereas I was alone on the shore, like the girl in the song waiting for my lover to return from the other side . . . And now here he came, from the east, out of the sea. From the east? What coast was I on?

  There was the track of foam breaking the water as he emerged. The white horse bore him up, he was coming on the wave, armored like a knight but all in seashells, and his charger in seashells likewise. Oh, the beautiful arrogance of his big body in armor, and how well he sat a horse! His lance was a narwhal’s horn, a twisted ivory spear, and he wore no helmet but a tall hat banded with a trailing ribbon of seaweed. His eyes were the color of Spanish glass in his stern face, yes, and fixed on me as he came on, and he came faster now and was lowering his lance at me. Yes! I knew what he meant to do and tore at my clothing, baring my heart to his assault.

  “Strike!” I screamed. “Strike, in God’s name!”

  He struck true, and what a great relief it was.

  I awoke in darkness.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I staggered out to make coffee, under the assumption that Porfirio wouldn’t be in any condition to do so; but I was mistaken.

  He was sitting beside the fire with Eucharia, and they were both watching the blue graniteware pot like pilgrims waiting for a miracle to happen. She looked pretty bad; she was clutching her whalebone corset, which I guess had been removed at some point during the target party for convenience, and her mauve taffeta ruffles were torn. As for him, I didn’t think our eyes could sink that far back into our heads.

  I noticed them only for a split second, because my attention was immediately drawn to the dead bear.

  “That’s a dead bear!” I yelled. They both winced.

  “I’m sorry, okay?” Porfirio put his hands to his head. “I’m really sorry. Just keep your voice down.”

  “But we’re trying to keep the damn things from going extinct,” I hissed.

  “It was my fault,” Eucharia said shakily. “Wasn’t it, babe? We were shooting at targets, and he just popped up against the skyline. Thought for a minute I was in a shooting gallery.”

  I paced around the bear. He had a neat bullet hole betwee
n his eyes. “That was some nice shooting, anyway.”

  “I thought Einar could salvage it for DNA,” Porfirio said, reaching for the coffeepot with a trembling hand. “Oh, man. I need to metabolize some glucose. Mendoza, is there any of that pan dulce left?”

  “I’ll go see,” I told him, and as I was entering the adobe, I passed Einar coming from his room. A moment later I heard his howl of dismay at the sight of the bear.

  Nancy and Kalugin emerged slightly later, managing to look like an Arabian Nights illustration despite their primly Victorian morning wear. Nancy took one look at poor Eucharia and led her away, shaking her head. By the time they came out again, Eucharia had been dusted off and freshened up, and you wouldn’t have known her for the gum-popping honey of the previous evening. She looked a lot like the farm wife in American Gothic. By the time the morning stage rolled in, the three of them were back in their roles completely: vaguely foreign gentleman, dull-eyed wife, and meek servant girl.

  As Kalugin was seeing to their trunks, Nancy turned to me and reached out her hand. “Mendoza, will you be all right?”

  Who, me, ashen-faced after a night of erotic death dreams? But I wasn’t the one facing a stagecoach ride with a hungover fellow passenger. “Sure I will. I mean, here I am in the New World. I got what I wanted. Granted, this is a lousy place, but I’ve already put in my request to go back to the Ventana when this tour of duty’s over. It’ll be great. Green wilderness, Nancy, oak trees older than we are and not a mortal soul for miles. You should go up there sometime.”

  “I should love to,” she said. “But, you know, my dear, it’s going to become more difficult to find places in California where there aren’t mortals. Nearly impossible, in another few decades. Where will you go then?”

  And I realized, only then, that I had no clue, none at all. I guess it showed in my eyes, because she gave me a hug. “Oh, Mendoza, find something to make you happy! It’s easier than it seems. You’d be surprised.”

  “Okay,” I said, for lack of anything better to say, and the driver shouted, and we hugged again, quickly, and she was away and running to clamber up on her seat. I wondered how many centuries it would be before I saw her again. With the crack of a whip the stagecoach was off, up Cahuenga Pass, on its long journey to San Francisco.

  Imarte had disembarked and brought a customer with her, her arm wound firmly through his, leading him up the trail to her lair.

  “You’re going to love it here, Mr. Kimberley, the climate’s real nice,” she was telling him. “I bet it’s real cold in England, huh?”

  “Wretched, dear lady,” the John assured her, and he was definitely English. I shuddered at the sound of his voice. “Though England does have the advantage of a certain amount of stability. I trust there are no civil disturbances hereabouts? Relating to the present war, I mean?”

  “No, honey, none at all,” Imarte said, lying through her teeth, because there was a regular secessionist crowd that hung out at the Bella Union, and they not infrequently took potshots at fellow Americans whose accent sounded a bit Down East. Not that I understand how Maine can be down anything when it’s as far north as you can go in the States.

  She led the Englishman away with her, assuring him they had plenty of time before the next stage came through. I thought sourly that if the man had any inkling of how much talking he was expected to do in bed, he’d be running after the departing stage. I wandered away up the canyon to the little brook where you could occasionally find trout and sat there awhile, looking into the brown water, wondering where I would go when California filled up with mortals. Canada, I decided at last, and made a mental note to do some studies on the botany peculiar to our neighbor to the north. Yet I loved California; I was even beginning to like this ghastly corner of it, with its killers lurking in the sagebrush and its yet unborn movie industry.

  And I thought to myself that things weren’t that bad. I had my work, didn’t I? There was my problem! I wasn’t working enough, what with needing an escort for every field trip. That was why Nicholas was haunting me. Well, if I practiced harder with the Navy pistol, maybe Porfirio would decide it was safe to let me go out on my own. In the meanwhile, another good collecting trip was just the thing to chase away the blues.

  By the time I mulled all this over and wandered back to the inn, the afternoon sun had fallen behind the ridge and the dust of the last stage had long settled. Nobody was in sight. I scanned and detected Porfirio and Imarte in the inn, and followed their signals to the pantry room, where Porfirio was kneading dough for a fresh batch of pan dulce. His eyes had come out of their caves a little. Imarte sat with her elbows on the table, watching him. She had a bitchy line between her eyebrows.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

  “The kid’s around here somewhere. Oscar, I don’t know. Einar went off to Antelope Valley again.”

  “Nuts.” I sighed. He probably wouldn’t be home until the next afternoon. “I wanted to go out collecting tomorrow.”

  Porfirio shrugged. “You could go with Oscar,” he suggested hopefully. Now there were two women with bitchy expressions in the room with him. “So, Imarte, what was the deal with the Englishman? Get any good material from him?”

  “Virtually none,” she said. “He never stopped asking me questions all afternoon! In fact he shut up for exactly five minutes, and I leave it to you to guess why. The rest of the time, I might as well have been a tour guide.”

  “Maybe you met up with a kindred soul,” I said. “Dueling anthropologists.”

  “Very funny. I learned nothing of his home region or native customs. The best I could get out of him was that he’s a mining engineer with the Albion Mining Syndicate. Apparently some confidence man persuaded a group of foreigners that there’s been a gold strike on Santa Catalina Island, of all places.”

  I remembered the blue island I’d seen, way out there in the sea. “And it’s a con, you think?”

  “Certainly. Who ever heard of gold out there?” Imarte leaned back in her chair and stretched.

  I actually asked Oscar about his rounds the next day, I was that desperate for work. He was only too happy to oblige; he hadn’t made the West Hollywood sweep in a while, it seemed, and so next morning I crowded onto the seat of the peddler’s cart with him, and we rolled off down the canyon.

  “So, is it hard to get your foot in the door when you’re making your pitch?” I asked as we turned right and headed west.

  “Goodness no, not at all,” Oscar said. “Not like in the States. I mean, the original thirteen. The local inhabitants are charming people, with a keen appreciation of the solid worth and delightful abundance of general merchandise offered by your humble servant. They’ll welcome a salesman into their homes, indeed invite him to dine with them, which is certainly more than I can say for the inhabitants of Rhode Island. The folks here will sit patiently through a complete demonstration of every ingenious and laborsaving device I have to offer. Only problem is, they have no money.”

  “Really?”

  “Nobody here has,” he said. “All these Californio gentlemen, and the Yankee fellows too, have pitifully little cash. All they’ve got is the land and cows. The land’s dirt cheap, but most of it’s mortgaged to the last square inch, with the highest interest rates you’ve ever seen. Why, it’s plain crazy.” He shook his head in commiseration.

  “Boom and bust, huh?” I said. Finance had never interested me, but I craved trivia just now, anything to tie me to the present place and time.

  “And take this new silkworm business.” He gestured angrily with the whip. “Fools planting mulberry trees, thousands of the darned things, everywhere, and importing cocoons from the Orient at great expense. Will it ever produce so much as a handkerchief’s span of silk? No, sir! The whole enterprise is a sham, a bubble, a speculator’s airy impertinence, and the end result will be ruin, you mark my words. And a lot of mulberry firewood.”

  Was that why my orders had included
collecting samples from mulberry trees? I’d wondered about that; they weren’t an indigenous plant. Sounded like another tulip fiasco: when speculation on bulbs wrecked Holland’s economy and prices plummeted, nursery stock was destroyed en masse, and lots of genetic diversity disappeared.

  “Will we be passing any mulberry plantations today?” I asked.

  “More than likely,” Oscar said.

  “Good. I can take some cell samples. Got a customer lined up for your Criterion Patented Brassbound Pie Safe yet?”

  “Just about,” he said, brightening a little. “If my careful analysis of my customers is correct.”

  We followed the rocky track, which paralleled the foothills and continued west in a fairly straight line toward a tiny cluster of adobes, all facing one another on opposite sides of what would undoubtedly one day be an avenue, boulevard, or drive. Tilled fields and orchards took up a few acres around the hamlet; straggling fences of nopal cactus raised formidable paddles against bears, wandering longhorns, and chicken thieves. The place appeared deserted save for a dog lying in the dust in the middle of the avenue, boulevard, or drive, and I’m not sure he was alive.

  “Now this,” Oscar said, “is the ill-fated village of Sherman. I don’t believe it’s named after the redoubtable general of the same name. No, indeed, and it certainly won’t live to be as famous. West Hollywood will obliterate it completely, as a matter of fact. Nevertheless, these people are as receptive to the improvement of their lives by beautiful and useful merchandise as any you’ll find in more progressive communities.”

  “Really. Look, there’s a grove of mulberry trees.” I pointed at a double row of miserable little whippy seedlings, each with its green flame of young leaves waving at the top. “Do you know these people? Think you could get me permission to take samples?”

  “Undoubtedly,” he said, and clucked to Amelia to stop just in front of the first house. Describing it now will save my having to describe nearly any other structure in southern California from here on: a long adobe, its former whitewash peeling and cracked away in places, all of it badly eroded by the winter rains. Flat roofs of pink tile, cracked or missing here and there, held on by thick tar from the nearby La Brea pits. Wooden doors and window frames, closed shutters painted faded blue if they were painted at all. Most were of bare wood silvered and cracked with the weather.