Scandal in Babylon

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘You’re tellin’ me!’ he agreed, and then added, ‘If I were the kind of person who’d do a terrible thing like that, which I’m not.’

  ‘No, of course not. And if the murder was an attempt to cause trouble for Miss de la Rose, it was so clumsily done that again, I can’t imagine any halfway intelligent criminal would be behind it.’

  ‘Well, you got some dumb palookas in the business,’ said Cornero. ‘And I’ll keep my ear out for anything I might hear. But anybody who’s running any kind of racket in this town knows enough to be careful around the studios. I’m not sayin’ there aren’t producers an’ stars mixed up with some shady characters, but this … I think you’re right, m’am. This just feels … screwy. An’ as far as I know, Camille de la Rose isn’t involved with anything or anybody sketchy – not the way some of ’em are. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.’

  ‘And I’ll do for you what I can,’ promised Emma, rising. ‘Though I doubt I’ll be able to do anything about the fan magazines …’

  ‘Oh, hell, nobody can do anythin’ about them broads. Ladies,’ he corrected himself, standing up also and picking up his hat. ‘Thanks for the coffee, m’am. An’ if you’re ever down in Santa Monica, stop by the Bel Giardino an’ tell ’em I said to give you an’ Mr Rokatansky here drinks on the house.’

  As he went out onto the porch, Emma heard him say, ‘We’re good, Rico. Go down let the gardener an’ his wife outta that closet.’

  ‘You all right?’ asked Zal, some time later, after they had descended to the rear yard – which lay further around the slope of the hill – and made sure that the ancient Mr Shang and his tiny, ancient wife had been no worse than frightened when two of Cornero’s men had imprisoned them in a closet. The phoneline, Emma had discovered the moment the bootleggers’ car had disappeared onto Ivarene Street, had been cut, probably before she and Zal had even returned to the house that evening.

  When they climbed the tall flight of wooden back-stairs to the kitchen again she found that she was shaking, whether from delayed fear or due to the fact that it was now three o’clock in the morning, she wasn’t certain.

  ‘I think so.’ She sank into one of the kitchen chairs, and Zal poured her out what was left of the tea. Then he dumped the contents of both cartons of Chinese food into a pan, added a little water, and put it on the stove to heat. ‘My father used to tell me about having to pay protection money to bands of banditti in the Apennines … He’d make a funny story of it, but I think he wanted to make sure that when I did go, I wouldn’t wander away from camp, like those silly girls in novels are always doing. My mother was horrified, of course.’

  ‘I’d be, if you were my daughter.’ His eyes met hers, smiling.

  ‘He kept saying he’d teach me to shoot before we went. But then he’d get distracted by some new findings somebody had published, or an eighth-century palimpsest that had part of the Aeneid written on it, and I’d be back in the study cataloging variations of letter shape and usage …’ She shook her head quickly.

  ‘No wonder Hollywood history drives you nuts.’ He carried two plates over to the table. ‘Do you miss it?’

  ‘I … I do.’ She thought she’d be far too upset by the night’s events to eat, but found that after the first mouthful of rice and chow mein that she not only felt much better, but was ravenous. ‘Sometimes I felt like the Lady of Shalott, locked up in a tower weaving tapestries of the tales of other peoples’ lives, that she could see only in a mirror …’ She shook her head. ‘But it was my life. And I was good at it. And I really couldn’t imagine doing anything else, until I met Jim.’

  It felt strange to pronounce Jim’s name to him, as if Jim were still alive somewhere, still married to her. She heard her voice stammer a little on the name, and for an instant it was as if he had just left the room.

  As if he’d just gotten on the boat-train to Dover, to go back to his unit in France.

  She’d stood on the platform for a quarter of an hour after the train was gone, she remembered. As if somehow, if she waited long enough, the train would come back and Jim would hop down from its doorway and say, ‘Hey, it was all a mistake …!’

  As if everything that had happened since was all a mistake …

  The night’s silence deepened outside, and the ticking of the kitchen clock seemed suddenly loud. Wherever Kitty was – and the party was undoubtedly still going on at Peggy Donovan’s – she wasn’t going to be home that night. Emma glanced at the clock as Zal poured himself the last of the cold, over-brewed coffee and downed it. Scene seventy-eight was shooting tomorrow and he had to be on the set at seven …

  The thought of the terrible silence in the house when he left made her shiver, and Zal asked quietly, ‘Would you like me to stay?’

  She said, ‘I know they’re not coming back.’

  ‘Oh, I know that, too. But that’s not what I asked.’

  Softly, she said, ‘Yes. Please.’

  TEN

  Emma woke late, after a dream that she’d had often before. When she was twelve, her father had told her that back in the first century AD, the Roman Emperor Claudius had rounded up the last of the native Etruscans from the Italian hills and had written an Etruscan–Latin dictionary. Her father had been fond of cursing the Christian monks and barbarian chieftains who had been responsible for the disappearance of this invaluable volume during the Dark Ages, and thereafter Emma had dreamed periodically of finding the book, bound and strapped in iron and gold, with Etruscis Latine Lexicon Manuale – Scriptus a Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus written on the cover. (Emma frequently dreamed in Latin. Occasionally she dreamed in what she knew to be Etruscan, which she, unlike any scholar in the waking world, spoke perfectly in her dreams.)

  And there was always a moment before actual waking, when she dreamed she awoke, lying in her bed, with the book clasped in her arms. Delight would fill her like warm sunlight (Father will be so pleased!) …

  And then she’d waken ‘for real’, as the children said, and the book would be gone.

  Zal had left her a note on her night-table, and, she discovered when she descended to the kitchen in her bathrobe, had fed the dogs and filled the kettle for tea. Conscientiously, Emma washed, dressed, boiled an egg for breakfast, and walked down the hill to Franklin Avenue, to make a call to the telephone company to have the line repaired. A further call to the studio established that Kitty was there and shooting scene sixty-three. She left one message with Vinnie begging Kitty to excuse her absence that day, and another to Zal, saying only, Thank you. No sense in saying more, for the edification and amusement of everyone in the studio. Kitty had not been exaggerating when she’d complained of studio gossip.

  Emma did wonder briefly how anyone could consummate a romantic tryst on the catwalks above the lights in Stage Three – but if anyone could do it, Kitty could.

  The men from the telephone company did not arrive until four. Emma spent a meditative day brushing the dogs, balancing Kitty’s check-book, paying the bills and excising the fortune teller from scenes twenty through twenty-four (and from scene seventy-nine, where he made a reappearance among the flames of burning Rome to pronounce the doom of Babylon).

  And reading Aunt Estelle’s letter.

  Thinking about Oxford.

  Thinking about home.

  At five, when the telephone repairman departed – sped on his way by the indignant yapping of the Pekes – Emma made herself another cup of tea, consulted the Times, then switched on the kitchen radio, to hear what the Pettingers had to say about the events of Wednesday afternoon.

  She was not disappointed. Bushrod Pettinger had a rather nasal, but very powerful, voice, and ringingly denounced Hollywood and all its works. ‘Abraham warned his brother Lot, “Do not pitch your tents towards Sodom!”.’ Emma wondered how many of Mr Pettinger’s listeners were sufficiently familiar with the Book of Genesis to know that Lot was Abraham’s nephew, not his brother. Or did they care? ‘Abraham warned his brother that if he so much as
dwelled near the Cities of the Plain, great evil would befall him, and he would stand in danger not only of his life, but of his very soul!’

  Between regular attendance at Sunday school, and Oxford lectures about ancient Mesopotamia, Emma had no recollection of the Patriarch saying a word to his nephew about the spiritual ramifications of real estate in one district over another. She wondered – albeit for only the minutest fraction of a moment – whether Kitty had such a thing as a Bible in her house, to check.

  ‘And so it was then,’ intoned Miss Pettinger, who had a surprisingly beautiful contralto even over the airwaves, ‘and so it is today! Heed the warning, I beg you, my brothers and sisters in Christ! Turn your face away from the painted lures of the Devil, the garish evil that rolls out of every motion-picture palace and nickelodeon! Walk away from those photoplays about harlots and hooligans and cry with Jesus, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”.’

  ‘Nickelodeon?’ Like a gorgeous dragonfly in the frock of changeable eggplant and green that she’d had on yesterday, Kitty appeared in the kitchen door from the rear yard. ‘Are there even nickelodeons around anymore? Oh, my little sweetnesses!’ She crouched, to receive the ecstatic greetings of her furry pets, and an instant later looked up and cried, ‘Oh, darling, are you all right? Zal told me – NO, Jazz! Down, Chang … Zal told me what happened last night – and the Shangs, just now when I put the car away. How awful!’ She stood, and impulsively caught Emma in a hug. ‘I’m so sorry!’

  ‘There’s no need for you to be sorry,’ pointed out Emma. ‘It had nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Oh, but darling, it did! If it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t even be in California! Were you terrified? I’ve met Tony Cornero at his club and he really wouldn’t hurt a fly – well, not someone who wasn’t another gangster, anyway …’

  Reflecting on the other things that bootleggers – like Taffy in the prop warehouse – were likely to be selling, not to speak of the darker end of the business of prostitution, Emma would not have gone so far as to say that. ‘Oddly enough, I wasn’t really afraid,’ she admitted. ‘Not until they’d all left. Then I … I rather went to pieces for a bit …’

  ‘The exact same thing happened to me when Ruggy Brevoort – or was it Clayton, before we got married? – crashed his roadster on the Jones Beach Parkway at two o’clock in the morning. The car rolled completely over and it’s a miracle neither of us was killed, or even hurt, except that I got motor oil leaked onto my pastel silk. I must have chewed him out for fifteen minutes and then we had to hitch-hike back to his place, and I didn’t say a word to him … Oh, no, it was Bert Englemeier! Because he had this marvelous house at Oyster Bay … But once I’d locked him out of my bedroom I just collapsed.’

  She took Emma’s hand in hers. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, in another tone. Her voice was the voice of a friend, and the velvet-brown eyes, looking up into Emma’s, were filled with concern, a friend’s eyes.

  Emma said, quietly, ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  She smiled, and nodded. ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Zal told me you promised to get me to talk to Fishy about laying off the bootlegger angle with the fan magazines, and I made Fishy promise that he would. And it took me forever to catch him, because that imbecile Dirk kept screwing up his sword fight with Elmore, and Madge had us do thirty-five takes, because Dirk didn’t want it to look like Elmore was winning—’

  Emma switched off the radio. ‘I hope he did lose in the end, or else I’m going to have to rewrite the last six scenes of the film, and I don’t think Mr Pugh will be very happy about that.’

  ‘Darling, he’ll have a stroke!’ She’d turned away and was fishing through the icebox, and emerged a moment later, with a scrap of chicken from the little dish of it that Emma had cooked up for the Pekes’ dinners for the next few days. ‘He was acting like an absolute bear all day, glaring at me as if I’d done something wrong at Peggy’s party – which I didn’t! I just know that witch Darlene has been telling him all sorts of horrible things … Oh, there’s Mrs Shang!’

  The rear stairs down to the yard below creaked slightly under the old lady’s barely ninety pounds.

  ‘Would you mind having dinner a little early, darling? They were still filming Nicky’s scenes when I left and I’m crushed with exhaustion.’ She dove into the icebox again and reemerged with the small dish of half-melted ice-chips that Emma had hacked from the main block earlier that afternoon. ‘Oh, thank you for doing this! You’re marvelous!’ And she clattered up the steps to the dining room, the diamonds on her shoe-heels flashing. Emma picked a lime out of the basket on the counter, smiled a greeting to Mrs Shang, and followed. Kitty was already pouring gin into the shaker.

  ‘What did you do at Peggy’s?’

  ‘Nothing, darling!’ Kitty sought for something – probably the soda water – in the depths of the cabinet. ‘I swear it, nothing! But that nasty old trout Prudence Pettinger – what on Earth were you doing listening to her anyway? – had the nerve to turn up at Enterprise Pictures today to complain about Peggy’s party! Peggy told me. Honestly, it isn’t like the Pettingers live in that neighborhood or anything! Myself, I think it was a little tacky of Peggy to tip off the newspapers about it, but we were only on the pavement for about ten minutes, so it couldn’t really have hurt the horses’ feet, and there’s almost no traffic on Wedgewood Avenue at that hour, and you yourself told me only the other day that people in Ancient Greece rode horses not wearing any clothes all the time. Of course if you fell off you’d get a heinous scrape, but Peggy did warn her guests, and it was early enough in the evening that they couldn’t have been that drunk …’

  ‘Newspapers?’

  Kitty dismissed the word with a breezy wave, but Emma thought she smiled, just the tiniest bit. ‘Well, that’s what I hear. And the Pettingers turned up outside the gate, positively fulminating fire and brimstone … and of course they’re just furious about Gloria Swanson waltzing into the Montmartre last night with a cheetah on a leash and that insanely handsome cowboy from Metro …’ She added soda water, and took a silver knife from the drawer – Emma was still amazed by the casual abundance of citrus fruit in California, limes and lemons and oranges as common as crab apples back home. ‘I don’t see why they blame me for it.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Of course they do, darling!’ Abandoning the lime, Kitty darted to the basket of magazines beside the telephone niche, and among the Chinese newspapers favored by the Shangs (and the LA Opinion that Dominga brought in on her cleaning days), found that morning’s Examiner. ‘Didn’t you read the letter they wrote? Accusing me of – Oh, here it is! “Leading the virgin daughters of America into unspeakable sin …”’ She unfolded the paper to the proper page. ‘Though they don’t seem to have any problem speaking about it. Fishy is absolutely over the moon with delight …’

  ‘Delight?’

  ‘Oh, completely delight, darling!’ She returned to her cocktail, her great dark eyes sparkling. After the day’s shooting she had removed her camera make-up and repainted her face for the car-ride home, but under it, Emma could see the marks of fatigue. She wondered if her sister-in-law had slept at all last night (and if so, where?) – or if she had followed her own oft-spoken dictum, Well, it’s easier to STAY up than to GET up … ‘Everybody in the country knows they’re only doing those crazy things to look as unspeakable and abandoned as I am. Fishy says, you can’t buy publicity like that!’

  She sipped the gin with visible ecstasy. ‘Darlene can say what she likes about coke, darling, but it’s gin for my money – and you’re quite right,’ she added. ‘Dope is making Darlene’s skin look coarse – you can see it in the dailies! I’m so glad you warned me what it was doing to my face. She’s such an imbecile! Would you like some of this, darling?’

  Emma refrained from mentioning Kitty’s own consumption, up until a few months ago, of the too-common Hollywood ‘pick-me-up’, and said simply, ‘Yes, please.’ It had ta
ken a co-ordinated effort between herself, Zal, and Mr Volmort in the make-up department to convince her sister-in-law that such things as cocaine and opium cigarettes were rendering her ugly and making her look thirty-five instead of ‘twenty-four’ … Kitty’s colossal vanity had done the rest. (‘And honestly, dear, those cigarettes gave me SUCH a headache …’) She wished she could similarly wean her from alcohol but, she told herself, first things first …

  As Emma had pointed out last night, the contents of Kitty’s liquor cabinet were the finest products of England and Canada – and had quite possibly been brought ashore by Mr Cornero himself. And whatever else could be said about her, Kitty was a superb bartender.

  And then, when the time was right to start working on Kitty to cut down her drinking, Emma reflected, she, Emma, might well be back in Oxford. Walking across Magdalen Bridge on a misty autumn morning with her arms full of books. Saying to … to whom? Saying to a friend, to someone … Oh, I lived in Hollywood for six months …

  Saying to friends a year, two years, ten years in the future (Ten YEARS? 1934?), I used to live in Hollywood …

  With a laugh …

  Did I ever tell you about the time we got held up by bootleggers …?

  The thought of Zal, kissing her last night in the kitchen. Would you like me to stay? A small, sharp blade turned a little in her heart.

  The warmth of his arms around her. The solid strength of his shoulder under her cheek.

  She closed a door on the memory, found again the letter from Bushrod Pettinger to the editor of the Examiner. Evidently – she read further down the column of Biblical brimstone – Miss Swanson and Miss Donovan weren’t the only two actresses out to prove that they had more of ‘It’ than a gorgeous femme fatale accused of a mysterious murder. Last night while Peggy had been doing her impersonation of Lady Godiva on Wedgewood Avenue, Pola Negri had taken care to be seen dancing the tango with Rudolph Valentino at the Townhouse Club in a dress that ‘would have brought a blush to the cheek of Salomé,’ as Mr Pettinger had it, and earrings that had cost $950. The earrings worn by Gloria Swanson at the Café Montmartre – with the aforesaid riding extra and cheetah (which had thrown up a hairball onto the feet of the maitre d’) had cost $1750, and immediately after Peggy Donovan’s bareback riding party, Clara Bow had challenged all comers to an auto race along Sunset Boulevard in the small hours of the morning.