The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  He wants to kick some ass, Alexander would think sometimes, he wants to get out there and make trouble, disembowel a couple of Dobermans, break into a greenhouse and eat all the orchids, get out onto the road and play the death game with the nightlights of fast-running automobiles . . .

  Alexander pulled himself up out of the pool, not bothering to swim over to the broad steps, and threw himself into a garden chair, the thick white towel laid out for him by an invisible servant while he was doing his laps. He gave his head a vigorous rub and then lay back to let the morning sunlight dry him off. Shading his eyes, he tried to see into the darkness of the tropical shrubbery for a glimpse of his rabbits. He snicked his lips, although they had never come when he snicked before, and probably never would. He grinned. One of the things he liked best about his rabbits, as opposed to say dogs or cats, is that they were prey, and lived by the rules of prey, totally foreign to human thought. They would not come when you called, yet they were very loving when they did decide to come sit on your chest, or to sit beside you in the twilight enjoying the sunset, their legs kicked out in that relaxed way . . . and those legs were powerful; prey or not, a rabbit could kill with those legs or die of a snapped spine if they missed their target. Brave little bastards is what they were, independent, and funny.

  “Here bunny bunny bunny, you sons of bitches,” Alexander called softly.

  The two rabbits, sleek and beautiful as seals, hopped out onto the lawn and began nibbling at the grass. Alexander laughed happily and went over and picked them up, carrying one on each big arm carefully around the lawn, talking to them and enjoying their company.

  THE GARAGE was on the other side of the house, a white building with service quarters over it and all the big overhead doors open. In front of the garage was a brick courtyard, nearly surrounded by evergreens and one huge live oak, which had probably been there for a hundred years or more. Alexander came out of the back of the house through the service entrance, dressed in a dark blue three-piece suit and heavy black brogues. He was full of breakfast and had spent the usual seven minutes working on his teeth and gums. The question now before him was, which car to take to work? There were five of them, including his Mercedes 600 limousine, whose driver, Orfeo, was coming down the steps beside the garage building right now, wearing a uniform that made him resemble a South American general. Certain kinds of days required Orfeo and the 600; on others, Alexander preferred to drive himself.

  Then there was the lady’s car, pulled over at the corner of the courtyard, a cute little Alfa Spyder probably borrowed from somebody since she did not live in Southern California, but which meant Alexander would not have to either drive her home himself or detail Orfeo for this job.

  Which would it be? thought the man whose first car had been a fifty-dollar pile of junk, into which he had sweatingly and patiently poured hours and hours of time after work and on Sundays, bruised knuckles, ingrained grease and precious cash until he had not only a workable 1947 Ford sedan, but a damned good one, too. He wished he had it still. The cars ranged in front of him like hookers at a Nevada whorehouse were all better than any ’47 Ford, but there was a lot to be said for having done the work yourself. You knew what you were driving. Not that Orfeo wasn’t a good mechanic, he was the best, but still things came up that would not have been surprises if Alexander was doing the work. For a moment, he envied Orfeo his basically happy-go-lucky life, and then of course laughed at himself.

  Well, which car? The little Mercedes 380 SEL, which was more like a toy than a car? The Jaguar 4.5? The 1937 La Salle which was Orfeo’s favorite? A beautiful old two-tone green convertible whose top groaned like an old man when you put it down, but was an object of art on a par with the Golden Gate Bridge . . . The Daimler-Benz, handmade and autographed, black, squat, his gangster car . . .?

  Teresa di Veccio came out of the house, dressed as she had been the night before, in a dark cocktail dress and black heels.

  “I thought you were gone,” she said.

  “Did you get any breakfast?” he asked her.

  “I didn’t want any, thank you. I hope I left the keys in the car,” she said. “I can’t find them on me.”

  Alexander remembered that he had driven the car home and Orfeo had gone for his. Naturally, he would have left the keys in the ignition. The two of them strolled over to the little Alfa, not as if they had been wildly making love an hour before, but just two people walking toward a car. A mockingbird started up in the oak tree, and Teresa di Veccio said, “Oh, what a beautiful sound!” and Alexander told her about mockingbirds. Orfeo’s expression, as they walked past him, was deliberately noncommittal. Wouldn’t it have been more natural for them to be arm in arm, touching, kissing, bumping together like lovers, instead of this sexless stroll? The truth was, Alexander barely knew the woman, certainly did not know her well enough to put his arm around her affectionately, or even lustfully, previous intimacies to the contrary notwithstanding. It seemed so stupid. The hell with it, he grabbed her and swept her up in a big kiss. She went stiff immediately and her lips flat and hard. Alexander dropped her.

  “Yep, here’s the keys,” he said. “I’m late for a meeting, but I’ll call you at the Beverly Hills . . .”

  “All right,” she said. She sounded a little disappointed. She got into her car, had a little trouble getting it started, then rumbled down the drive and out of sight.

  Alexander scratched the top of his head. The woman meant nothing to him, an opportunity fuck, that was all, rich, young, beautiful and full of wiggles, but nothing special.

  “I’ll take the Daimler,” he said to Orfeo without meeting his eye.

  “Okay,” Orfeo said without a trace of hidden meaning.

  THE BLACK Daimler turned left onto Sunset Boulevard joining the early-morning swarm of expensive automobiles heading for Beverly Hills or on to Los Angeles. As always, it amused Alexander to see drivers of Mercedes, Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Ferraris and Lamborghinis peer furtively into his car to see who it was in such a rarity. There were long snakelike curves on Sunset and it was a pleasure to take a fine automobile through them, but many of these drivers either lacked the experience or the proper nervous balance to execute this stretch of roadway with anything like style. Their cars were simply too much for them, and so they roared and squealed. Alexander, on the other hand, was an experienced driver of every kind of vehicle, from tanks to ten-speeds, even a few months driving a big rig on the Portland, Oregon–Chicago run. He had a natural affinity for mechanical transportation, and when he got behind the wheel of a fine car, it was as if his and the car’s nervous system merged, becoming one creature, half metal and half flesh.

  Every once in a while some jerk would try to race with Alexander Hellstrom, not knowing who he was, or perhaps filled with a wild ambition, knowing he was Alexander Hellstrom and hoping by this foolish plan to somehow come to his attention. Alexander, of course, paid no attention to them at all, beyond a disgusted snick of his lips and a resolve not to make eye contact as the two machines would pull up at some red light, the challenging race car or luxury sedan noisily making ready for the signal change, the Daimler silent and untrembling.

  Then the traffic would surge again. Alexander seldom bothered with the speed indicator or the tachometer. He could feel how things were going, and without any sense of competition, although he was a very competitive man, had an awareness of the location of the other machines around him. But it was hard not to notice when somebody was so obviously keying on you and racing you even when you weren’t racing, and it was difficult to hold down a grin when, light after light, you came out ahead, and yet never even had to put the brakes on hard. A glance in the mirror and there he would be, the challenger, helplessly stuck among the raffle of traffic backed up against the light.

  Another advantage, hardly applicable, but nevertheless a point of interest: you could park a Daimler anywhere and no cop would dare give it a ticket. You never could tell who owned the damn things, but whoever they were,
they had a lot of bucks, even for big rich Los Angeles a lot of bucks.

  Alexander turned right just before coming to the big pink sprawl of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and once again thought about Teresa di Veccio. He wondered whose car she had borrowed. Some guy who hoped to get somewhere with her, and then hadn’t even been invited to the party last night? More likely, judging from the type of automobile, somebody’s wife, who had gone to school with Teresa and could struggle along with the station wagon for a few days. But Teresa herself, what about her? He envisioned her sitting alone in her hotel room, perhaps just out of the bath, nothing to do, too early to go out by the pool (she didn’t have much of a tan), too self-conscious to turn on the television—she didn’t seem like the kind of a girl who could order a big breakfast from room service and turn on the TV and the hell with what the waiter thought. Maybe she was reading a book or writing letters.

  He would call her later:

  “What did you do this morning?”

  “Oh, wrote some letters, and read a little Fitzgerald. I’m rereading all my college favorites these days . . .”

  Down the leafy street in the morning sunshine, past the homes of the not-quite-rich of Beverly Hills. Alexander decided to dismiss her from his mind until the afternoon call. He wondered if he would take her out. He would have to look at his calendar to see if there was anything appropriate within the few days she would be in town. (What was she doing here, anyway? She had never said.) He wondered if they would sleep together again. It had been very nice, now that he remembered. Not desperately show-off, like a hambone, or somebody on the everlasting make, but a soft kind of innocence, curious word to describe somebody as good at it as she, but it was the right word . . .

  His chest began to glow and he felt a daring exuberance, as if he were a young boy, and about to jump off the roof with an umbrella for a parachute.

  Well, here goes! he thought, and swung the car around on its remarkable wheelbase and headed back for the Beverly Hills. There was a telephone in the car, and he could have called his office and told them to back everything up for an hour, but he did not. He was excited now, thinking dizzily of her sleepy-eyed but suddenly tremendously desirable naked figure.

  He pulled up the curved drive, left the engine running, opened the door himself as the boy in the garage greens rushed toward him. “Don’t bury it,” he said over his shoulder and entered the hotel. Black thoughts rushed into his head. She was with somebody, there was another man rooting around on that inexpressibly sweet girl, she was groaning with passion at this moment. He rushed down the corridor. He brushed past people who looked at him wide-eyed, as you would at a masked man carrying a gun. He felt hot all over, itchy-nervous. He rapped on her door, and, unable to stop himself, listened with his head tilted forward. Time passed. He knocked again. He should have telephoned from the lobby. She was not there, or they were in there holding themselves silently, giggling with their eyes and waiting for him to go away. More time passed, and he knocked again. Maybe she was out by the pool.

  He was aswarm with doubts, but deep inside, where hid the secret cool individual who was never moved, he wondered what the hell was the matter. Was he being driven by some genetic combination that triggered this response whether he wanted it to or not? Was he helpless in the grip of a hundred thousand years of natural selection? He did not know, he only knew that he had knocked three times and she had not answered. Maybe out by the pool. He turned to go and a totally unexpected wave of depression passed through him like the ghost of some long-dead Beverly Hills Hotel lover spurned and dead by his own hand. And then the door opened and he was looking down into her fresh innocent face.

  Teresa broke into a smile and the door opened wider. “Come in,” she said. “I was just washing my face.”

  She did not seem surprised to see him, but that was how they trained them at college, he thought, as he grabbed her rudely and kissed her as hard as he could. This time she did not freeze and her lips did not harden. She melted into him, her belly warm beneath her robe, her leg moving between his, and the touch of her cool fingertips on the back of his neck.

  Then they were on the bed, and Alexander felt as if his heart would burst with pleasure. They weren’t even undressed, and he did not see how they would ever be undressed, because he was not going to let go of her, nor she of him. “I knew you would come,” she said in a sweet smug tiny voice. He pulled her robe open and saw beauty incarnate, and that helped him get his own clothes off. He simply had to be touching her everywhere at once. He even took off his shoes and socks.

  Everything in his love life up to now had been mere preparation, schooling for this unimaginable experience. Alexander was a man not unfamiliar with hyperbole, but this was beyond it all, into wordless pleasure. Even the man inside was impressed, so impressed that he too was silent. This, Alexander decided after he could catch his breath, and in that regretful but deeply satisfied moment when reality swims back into view, must be love. That’s it. Love. I thought I’d been in love before, but no. This was it.

  “Am I in love?” he said, half to himself.

  She murmured something sweet and her puffed mouth brushed his nipple. Pink joy radiated everywhere, and they were off again. He could laugh at himself later, as he sweetly reran moments of their lovemaking, he could laugh and feel lighthearted, but underneath it all he was stunned.

  The day which had begun so well was now a disaster. Appointments were backed up, and naturally meetings would get shortened and some might even have to be cancelled. Alexander Hellstrom did not make a habit of cancelling, so God knew what people would think when told their meeting was off.

  He pulled up to the entrance of the studio and paused for a moment’s conversation with Charlie Devereaux, the guard captain, who had been a fellow pool-digger with Alexander back in the old days, had gone on the cops for a while and then moved into his present job. Devereaux had been working at the studio longer than Alexander, as a matter of fact, and this symbolic bit of seniority kept their relationship on a fairly even keel, where otherwise it might have collapsed. Alexander was always careful to defer to Charlie and never gave him orders, only requests; and Charlie, on his part, did not choose to attend most of the functions Alexander had him invited to—just a few key screenings and Alexander’s New Year’s Day party, which was just a bunch of hung-over guys getting drunk and watching football.

  The two men liked each other, and their morning exchange of greetings was important to both. Today Charlie, in lieu of having a worried expression on his face, merely tapped the clock in front of him and said, “Big party last night?”

  Alexander wanted to blurt, “Met a girl!” but didn’t. There are certain things you don’t burden people with, and a possible twenty-four-hour case of Hot Pants was one of them. At the thought he brightened. Hell, I might feel better by tonight, be laughing about the whole thing. He grinned up at Charlie. “How’s the coffee this morning?”

  “Tastes like shit,” Charlie said, handing it to Alexander for a sip—his first of the day.

  “Yeah, but what did they do to it?” Alexander joked, as usual, and tooled on into the lot. He drove slowly around the Administration Building, past the gigantic standing sets of the most expensive movie the studio had ever made, turrets and battlements, gun loops and weathervanes, an overweight extravaganza that was still limping around the world in scarred and noisy prints, trying in vain to keep up with the interest payments.

  This had been under a previous administration, but Alexander ruled that the sets, which had turned out to be so criminally expensive, should stand, not only as a reminder of one of Alexander’s favorite parables (“Sometimes it’s cheaper to go to England”) but also as something for the tourists to look at as they rode around the lot in their little elephant trains. This was one of Alexander’s innovations, right after he became vice president in charge of production. “Universal does it, and it comes out profit, so what the hell.”

  A lot of people complained mightily that
it was bush league and unprofessional and demeaning to have strings of tourists gawking at them as they worked, but the hambones didn’t bitch, hell, it was their life, and for once Alexander agreed with them. And it was the hambones the tourists wanted to see, not some jerk who thought he was the new Shakespeare. He parked at the elevator door where the curb was painted red, and went up to the third floor to his office. He unlocked his private door and sat down behind his desk with a sigh. There was a cold cup of coffee sitting in the middle of his blotter, testament to his normal promptness. To be impulsive was to screw everything up, he thought a bit sadly, and then a rush of pleasure coursed through him as he remembered Teresa. He pressed the intercom: “This coffee’s cold!” he said.

  The first problem of the morning was, naturally, a picture that was running scared. The producer, the director, the writer and the production supervisor were ranged uncomfortably in Alexander’s office, like boys who had been caught torturing frogs. They were slipping behind, and the production board was getting harder and harder to fit in with the star’s commitments. According to the production supervisor, Ted Gage, an old salt thirty years in the business, if they lost any more days they would have to pay so much to the actor for his time that other aspects of the production would suffer, perhaps fatally.

  Ted Gage put it strongly, while the producer stared at the rug. “We’re gonna lose reality, we’re gonna lose lighting time, and we may wind up having the actor unavailable for the loops we’re gonna need if we have to rush through everything from this point on.”

  “In other words, you need more money,” said Alexander, just to be saying something. The producer, Eric Seymour Katz, looked up hopefully.