Charisma

by Steven Barnes

  The others nodded understanding, and Shermie moved off, leaving Patrick and Destiny alone on the bench.

  Patrick looked at the two-story school building, the heap of brick and stone surrounding him, and for a minute, it felt more like a prison yard. “Only a few more weeks,” he said wistfully. “And then summer.”

  “That will be good,” Destiny said.

  “Will it?” Patrick said. He pushed at a twig with the tip of his toe. “You’re going away.”

  She shrugged. “Two weeks at camp.”

  “Then a month at your grandmother’s, in Utah.”

  She laid her hand softly over his. It was soft and warm. “It’s not so bad.”

  He turned away from her, and said so softly that the words barely reached: “I’m going to miss you.”

  Destiny smiled. “I think that’s the first time you’ve ever said that to me.”

  “I was thinking it,” he said. “You feel it, don’t you? I’m just all confused. The things I saw under the bridge just made it … sharper. I hardly recognize myself right now. And I want to.”

  Destiny smiled at him more gently. “What would Musashi say?”

  He laughed. “Not much help. He wasn’t into relationships much. But Marcus used to say that the most important thing in his life was his relationship with his mom. He said she kept him sane.”

  She nodded. “Is there any chance you could talk to your mother?” His expression was horrified. “I’m sorry. Stupid question.”

  For a time they sat, just feeling the air move around them. Then finally he spoke. “Summer dance is coming up. Would you maybe—?”

  She shrugged regretfully. “Billy’s already asked me, Patrick. You know that.”

  He turned away from her again, his heart thundering. His face felt like it was on fire. “You gonna go with him forever?”

  She looked straight ahead, and for a moment he wondered if she had heard the question, whether in fact he had made a terrible mistake in saying that. Then, almost without moving her lips she said: “Maybe not even all summer.”

  He turned, and looked at her with hope in his eyes. “Really?”

  Destiny stood up. “I’ve got to go now.”

  She stole a glance, making sure that Billy wasn’t looking, and leaned over to peck Patrick on the cheek. Then she left him there on the bench, by himself.

  He saw Frankie with the leadership class, Shermie with his soccer game, Destiny with her tall, lean, pale boyfriend. Patrick sat there alone, the darkest, somberest face on the entire school ground.

  21

  TUESDAY, MAY 22

  Renny Sand parked his Toyota in an underground lot, and took a token from a little attendant, a pale, withered old guy who made Renny wonder if the last three generations of his family had all been raised underground.

  The hotel desk called Penelope Costanza’s room for him, and if they felt any discomfort with their guest’s notoriety, they didn’t reveal it. It was just business as usual at the Beverly Palm. He doubted if they really cared whether their guests were radio talk-show hosts, expatriate dictators, or former madams. As long as the bill was paid and no one set fire to the rooms, that was all that concerned them.

  Ms. Costanza wasn’t actually paying the bills, of course: the deep pockets belonged to her publishers. Her expense account must have been a doozy. The cheapest room in the place, offseason, had to be about three hundred a night, and Tiffany wasn’t traveling third-class. Her room was on the fourteenth floor, and as Sand walked across the gold-and-marble-trimmed foyer, he had the distinct impression of being watched, measured, and found wanting.

  He approached room 1412, and knocked.

  The door was opened by a sloe-eyed creature in a brocaded satin dress slitted almost to her waist. She was Chinese, gorgeous, her eyes as hard as diamonds behind the deferential manner. “Mr. Sand?”

  “Yes. And you are?”

  “Shan,” she said.

  “Shan. Is Ms. Costanza in?”

  “She is waiting for you.” Shan gave the distinct impression of being disappointed that he wasn’t late, or rude, or hadn’t presented her with some other excuse for a disapproving stare.

  The hotel room was late-nineteenth-century simulated to a turn. The outer room was designed as a study. A gold-inlaid Empire clock rested on the mantel, beneath a painting labeled The Outing, green trees shading to gold against a foam of clouds, by a painter he didn’t recognize named Johann M. Culverhouse. Picnicking and horseback-riding in a pastoral setting, superbly rendered. The walls were covered with gold-mounted paintings, and he suspected that many of them weren’t reproductions at all. Chairs, tables, chandelier—all were Neoclassical, still generations removed from Arts Nouveau or Deco, suggesting an elegant echo of an older country with deeper roots.

  Through the wall-wide window, Los Angeles was simply breathtaking.

  “Walk this way, please,” Shan said, perhaps noticing his reluctance to leave the study.

  “If I could walk that way, I’d be in the wrong business.” She frowned at the old, lame joke, and led him into the master bedroom. She opened the door, entered with him, and closed the door.

  The bedroom was just as ornate. The four-poster bed was all hand-carved wood and handmade quilts framing a mattress thick enough to sink the Titanic. All of the artificial light was oblique, seeming to seep in from the corners and edges. The rug was a tufted blue-gray rife with garlands of stars and golden feathers. He took a long moment’s breath, letting it sink in.

  “Mr. Sand?” a husky voice behind him inquired.

  He whipped around to face a tiny woman who, Sand swore, hadn’t been there when he first entered. Her eyes caught his attention first. They were pure feline, half-lidded, harmless as undetonated land mines. Penelope Costanza was barely five feet tall, molded like a young Elizabeth Taylor, and carried herself as if she were playing Cleopatra. She took tiny gliding steps, almost as if her feet had been bound in her youth. She offered her hand, which was small and pleasantly warm. It took close inspection to verify that this woman was, indeed, in her fifties. She wore a brocaded emerald and silver Chinese robe, and it fit her like a glove.

  “Ms. Costanza?” he asked.

  “Please. Penelope.” Her manner was calculatedly self-deprecatory.

  “Penelope, then.”

  “We haven’t much time,” she said, and seated herself carefully on the bed. “I hope that you don’t mind this venue. It’s been a long book tour, and I enjoy transacting my business…” she paused, and lowered her lids.

  “In the bedroom?” Bizarrely, he found myself himself responding to her, felt his lips growing heavy and clumsy. His face felt hot.

  “In my bare feet,” she said, delighted with his discomfort. “It reminds me of my childhood.”

  Right. This was a game, and she had, in some odd way, taken first blood.

  She motioned him to sit on a bench at the side of her bed. Shan sat in a straight-backed chair near the door.

  “Not much about your childhood in your book, Penelope.”

  “Right to business are we?” She twinkled at him. “I suppose it’s as well. You work for American Journal, don’t you?”

  “No. Eyeful.”

  “But still Marcus Communications?”

  There was something just a little odd about the way she asked that question. Insinuating, but not quite insulting. He wondered at that, but didn’t bristle. Yet.

  “Do you mind if I set up my tape recorder?”

  “I would prefer it. Memory is so … flexible.”

  That task occupied his hands, but his mind was buzzing, wondering if he had merely imagined the odd inflection.

  “So. You came to Hollywood in … 1957?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Seeking fame and fortune.”

  “And made a few small films.”

  “Yes. Caltiki the Immortal Monster—down in Mexico. And a couple of Beach Party films. But I soon discovered I had … other talents.”

  “You seem
to have a unique perspective on that.” He pulled out his notebook, and quoted from a Xeroxed clipping. “In your book you said: ‘I discovered that there was a supply-and-demand vacuum. Intelligent, beautiful, adventurous women without a touch of slutty nature, who could be relied upon to make a good impression in any environment…’”

  “Yes. I had more knack for making friends than acquiring cinema roles. While disappointing, one makes adjustments in life. Merely by introducing my male and female friends to each other, I generated a very reliable income stream.”

  “You … pimped your friends?”

  “No, of course not. I arranged encounters. Adventures. What two adults do behind closed doors … on a deserted beach … on boats or in cabins … that is, of course, up to them.”

  Right. He skimmed his notes. “Now, for several years you were the … friend…”

  “Mistress. I prefer that word.” She seemed to be talking to herself. “Master and Mistress. Both are roles of power. Neither role is shameful or tawdry, except for small, shame-filled, tawdry minds.”

  Somehow, she had caught him off guard again, and he didn’t like that feeling at all. “Yes. Of Louis Fillipo, one of the most powerful men in Las Vegas. A mid-level singer—”

  “He opened for Sinatra,” she sniffed. “That is hardly midlevel.”

  “Sorry. Who graduated to guest services and then casino management. Sometimes known as ‘Louis the Fixer.’”

  She laughed delightedly. “Mob Chic, my dear. He just loved to have people wondering how deep his connections went.…”

  * * *

  And so it went through the afternoon. Shan fetched fizzy water for Sand as he asked questions, and Penelope laughed her way around him, flirting with salacious revelations, then coquettishly avoiding any names that hadn’t already turned up on the police blotter. Anyone who watched A&E Biography or read the Enquirer could probably guess half of them: the bodybuilder turned box-office giant who was addicted to prostitutes. The faded star of a comedy-suspense television show who turned discreet tricks for five figures a night. The child star turned infomercial queen who was caught in the locker room of a major southern California university’s football stadium, giving her all for the team.

  He’d pretty much given up getting anything that would be really usable. The entire interview was becoming exactly what he had feared: a puff piece for a whore with a golden contract.

  Throughout it all, she teased him, and there was something about the teasing that was not entirely friendly. A couple of additional times she mentioned American Journal instead of Eyeful, perhaps a jolly reminder of how far he had fallen in life. She also made it clear (indirectly) that there was something about the entire company that was worthy of scorn. That simmering contempt, just beneath the surface of her apparent bonhomie, took him to the brink of distraction. Sand wanted to grab her and shake her.

  He was frustrated with the afternoon, with the fact that he was conducting the damned interview in the first place. This wasn’t news. This wasn’t anything remotely resembling news. And every atom in his body resented the fact that, in all likelihood, this was all he was good for any more.

  So when he began to put up his briefcase, and she laid back on the bed and looked at him through those slitted copper eyes, there was a challenge of some kind there that he couldn’t afford to think about.

  “Well,” he said. “I guess that about covers it.”

  Penelope was lounging on the bed now, watching him very carefully. “Are you sure that there’s nothing else you want?”

  “This is strictly professional,” he said, trying not to let his voice crack.

  “Oh, I am. But you’re cute, in a kind of severe way. I remember the article you wrote on the Gary Hart scandal.”

  That startled him. He hoped she wouldn’t notice. “You remember that?”

  She looked at him like a cat who has recently cleansed her paw of cream. “Charming boy—sex is my business.”

  For the first time, she seemed to be looking at him directly, and now he realized what had put him off before. She had considered him a useful tool. And she had, for a flickering moment, seemed to be making a veiled sexual offer. Or had she? And if not, then what? And why?

  For the first time, he had the sense that he was looking at the real Penelope, and there was something hard, and cruel, and ruthlessly intelligent in there. Something inside him took a deep breath.

  “I also remember the article on the cocaine,” she said.

  It took everything he had not to react. Yes. The cocaine. The mistake of a lifetime. The kind you don’t come back from. The kind apparently remembered even by eight-bit hookers in thousand-dollar-a-night hotel suites.

  “I’d rather not talk about that.”

  “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” She studied her aqua-blue fingernails. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. What in the hell did she want?

  “Excuse me?”

  “A writer of your quality. That’s why you’re interviewing a sixty-year-old madam instead of covering Washington, or Wall Street. Isn’t it?”

  He stood. “Thank you for your interview. I wish you luck with the book.” Bitch. He slammed the briefcase lid down, and stood up.

  But she had a hold of something. There was something so insinuating in her voice that he couldn’t just let it go.

  “Have I offended you? I didn’t mean to.”

  Yeah, right.

  “I read your piece on Marcus, Reynard Sand,” she said.

  “You do your homework.”

  “As it happens, yes. You’ve written about him several times. You even helped kill a story about him once.”

  He paused. “And how would you know that?”

  “It’s my business. It concerned one of three subjects I found of greatest interest.”

  “Sex, of course. Vegas. And…?”

  She drew a little silver box out of the dresser next to the bed. When she flipped it open, he could see the little plastic bag. She looked at him as if hoping he would be shocked. He merely felt tired. “Cocaine, dear boy. Would you like a line?”

  “No, thank you. And Marcus?”

  She nodded, her eyes holding steady on his. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose Marcus is the fourth.”

  “I guess he fascinated the whole country.”

  “Brilliant young Harlemite, raised by a single mother, who rises to power, wealth and acclaim? Of course he fascinated us.” She spooned out a little pile of white powder. “Do you like what you do?” she asked. Something in the words told him that they were a little closer to the truth, closer to some revelation of what this was all about. “I was frank with you, Renny Sand.”

  “You are selling a book. This is my life. It’s not for public discussion.”

  “I understand people, Renny Sand,” she said. “Especially men. I collected them—the powerful and the poseurs. You are something odd—a lion pretending to be a lamb.”

  There seemed a shimmering about her, something quiet and deadly. “What is this about?” He knew, could sense, that she cared not a jot for him, or his career, and yet it somehow served them both to act out a charade. Leaving him to ask again, more stridently, if silently: What the hell is this about?

  “I have something for you. Something that could help you get back on top.”

  His antennae were up, and he sensed that he had heard the truth, and also a terrible lie. “Why would you want to help me?”

  “First, I want the truth about something,” she said. “I want to know what happened to you.”

  Another pause. His mind was reeling. “It’s not an accident that I’m here today, is it?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Why me?”

  “Tell me,” she said again. “What happened to you?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because I have something for you, Renny Sand. Pulitzer-nominated investigative reporter who reveres Alexander Marcus, who now spends his days flacking for elderly whor
es.” With a gold-plated razor blade she chopped a dime-sized pile of coke into a fluffy row, and snorted half of it through a silver straw. Then the other half.

  “Jesus,” he said. “I’m out of here.” He headed toward the door. Sand wanted to hit something. He wished that Shan were a man, and that she would try to stop him.

  “There are stories I left out of the book, Reynard Sand.”

  “Don’t call me that,” he said. But her voice stopped him. His emotions were devolving to total confusion. “That’s hard to believe,” he said without turning around. “People like you will say anything to get what they want.”

  “People like us, Reynard.” Another thin sniffing sound. Then: “Would you say that I am honest, Mr. Sand?”

  He wanted to lie, but couldn’t. “When it suits you.”

  “I can help you.”

  “Why? Why me?”

  “Because I want to know the truth. And because I want the truth to be known. And you can give me both. But it must be today, Reynard. It must be now.”

  He could hear his own heartbeat, and the traffic far below on Sunset Boulevard, but nothing else. “It’s that big a story? Isn’t it dead by now?”

  “Stories like this never die, Mr. Sand.”

  Hating himself, he turned and came back to his chair.

  He gestured toward Shan. “Have her leave.”

  Penelope Costanza motioned, and the girl disappeared.

  He sighed heavily. “I don’t know why I’m doing this, but I guess I’m going to do it. I hope you don’t mind if I say I don’t like you.”

  She placed one delicate hand over her breast. “You wound me.”

  “Oh, please. But I can trust you for ten minutes. Quid pro quo?”

  She nodded.

  Sand crossed and then uncrossed his legs, trying to delay the inevitable. Then he leaned back in the chair, and spoke words that he hadn’t breathed to a soul in years. “Let’s say there’s a reporter for the L.A. Times,” he said. “Young guy, during the Reagan administration. He hears Nancy ranting ‘Just Say No’ until it’s coming out of his ears. Then one day he hears that during Vice President Bush’s tenure as chief of the CIA, huge amounts of cocaine were smuggled into the United States, and sold to finance covert operations.”