Billie smiled on them both. “You may now kiss the bride,” she said.
March 14, 1937
The train had just left Pennsylvania Station, New York, bound for Washington, D.C., when Brady, alone in a compartment, opened the envelope. It contained two glossy full-plate photographs. One of them, a flash-photograph, showed Mr. Hoover wearing a sparkling sequined ball gown (oddly similar to the one Miss Billie had been wearing on the night of her abduction), an elaborately curled blonde wig perched on his toad-like head. As female impersonations go, it was unconvincing in the extreme; Mr. Hoover’s customary swarthy scowl was the antithesis of feminine charm. The second seemed to have been taken clandestinely through a window, but it was quite clear enough for Brady to make out Hoover, still in his ball gown, engaged in a very intimate act with his assistant director, Clyde Tolson, who was not wearing a ball gown, or anything else, for that matter. Brady shuddered at the thought of ever having to make use of these striking pieces of evidence, as no doubt Micky Angel had, but he decided to keep them safe. Along with the purloined Necronomicon, they would be put in a very secure place indeed.
The photographs did have one almost immediate effect on Brady. When, later that day, he knocked on the door of Hoover’s office in Washington, Brady did so without even a trace of nervousness or apprehension. Having heard the word “Come!” he entered directly and found Hoover standing by the window staring out at the Capitol Building. Brady could not help, just for a second, re-clothing him in his mind’s eye in that sequined ball gown and grotesque wig. When Hoover turned toward him, he must have noticed some change in Brady’s manner because he took a step back, then mounted the dais where his desk stood.
“Ah, Brady. Good man.” His tone was slightly hesitant; it might even have contained a touch of obsequiousness. “So,” he went on, “we nailed those commie bums, but you know and I know that it doesn’t stop there. You are Agent Number One of the Human Protection League and I want you to help me to recruit a whole bunch more. We’ve got one hell of a fight on our hands, have we not, Mr. Brady?”
“We have, sir!”
“Good man! You’ve got spunk, Brady, and I like a man with spunk. Have you any further suggestions for recruits, then?”
“Just one at present, Mr. Hoover.”
“I’m listening, Brady.”
“Mr. Lovecraft, sir.”
“Lovecraft! That cockamamy sonofabitch! You want him?”
“He has been very useful to us so far. Tomorrow he is undergoing an operation at the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital in Providence. It is for cancer of the small intestine, but we are hopeful of a successful outcome. If that occurs, I suggest that we relocate him to a safe place where he can continue his invaluable researches. He has yet to decipher the three Voorish Invocations, but given time, he will do so, and that may prove invaluable in our fight.”
“And this Lovecraft guy agrees to this?”
“He suggested it himself. It appeals to his reclusive nature. His Aunt Anne will be suborned and we will, of course, supply him with all the comforts and resources he requires, but he is not a man of extravagant tastes.”
“You seem to have got this all worked out.”
“I apologize, Mr. Hoover, if I have over-anticipated your intentions.”
“Well I was going to put forward something on those lines myself, so consider yourself pardoned, Brady. Mr. Lovecraft can become officially HPL Agent Number Two.”
“An excellent idea, Mr. Hoover.”
“It is an excellent idea, Brady. These excellent ideas come to me all the time. That’s why I am the director. Bear that in mind, young man. Now about the Roxy Palace, you’re sure those commie bums—Armies of the Night, or whatever they call themselves—have been eliminated?”
“For the time being.”
“Consider yourself commended, Brady. You hit a hole in one there. You and your lady-friend who seems to have helped out. What was her name? Ellie?”
“As a matter of fact, sir, Miss Ellie Jackson and I were thinking of getting married.”
“Well, I can’t stop you, Brady. And at least it shows you’re not a goddamn fag. But if I were you I’d take up golf instead. You can’t do both golf and marriage in my experience, and golf’s one hell of a lot easier to get right.”
“Thank you for the advice, Mr. Hoover, sir. I’ll bear it in mind.”
“The Eyrie,” Weird Tales Vol. 29, No. 6, June 1937
Sad indeed is the news that tells us of H. P. Lovecraft’s death on March 15, in the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. He was a titan of weird and fantastic literature, whose literary achievements and impeccable craftsmanship were acclaimed throughout the English-speaking world. He was only forty-six years of age, yet had built up a following such as few authors ever had. As a child he was a prodigy. He learned the alphabet at two years of age, and early developed a liking for old-fashioned and fantastic books. Always a weak and nervous child, he managed to stick out four years in high school at the cost of a breakdown which kept him from college and put him virtually out of the world for a number of years. About 1920 his health began of itself to effect that mending which specialists for thirty years had sought in vain to bring about; and shortly afterward he began traveling, visiting new places and meeting old friends whom he had contacted through his wide correspondence. He had a masterful command of several languages; and, as E. Hoffman Price once remarked, “There is scarcely an artistic or cultural subject on which H. P. Lovecraft cannot learnedly hold forth, and with an unfailing hold on the attention of the listener.” As for his hobbies, let us quote Price again: “His hobbies? This is not a catalogue; let me short-circuit that by saying that the range must be from architecture to zoology.” Between 1917 and 1936 Lovecraft wrote forty-six stories, each of which is a tour de force in itself. He invented the Lovecraft mythology (the Necronomicon, Abdul Alhazred, etc.), which has been adopted by many other writers of weird fiction. With all his studies, his capabilities, his wide knowledge, and his vast intelligence, H. P. Lovecraft was a kindly, generous human being, modest as to his own work, and ever ready to lend a helping hand to others. He carried on a voluminous correspondence with over seventy-five weird-fiction enthusiasts, and endeared himself to all of them with his kind patience and generosity. His death is a serious loss to weird and fantastical fiction; but to the editors of Weird Tales the personal loss takes precedence. We admired him for his great literary achievements, but we loved him for himself; he was a courtly and noble gentleman, and a dear friend. Peace be to his shade!
FOUR
The Olde Fellowes
CARL WAS PUTTING HIS jacket on when his wife came into the apartment’s small, frigid bathroom. She tutted, stood in front of him, and deftly made his tie look the way it should. With a pretty-recently ironed blue shirt and an only slightly-creased black suit Carl looked as smart as he was ever going to, though he’d been told more than once that he’d come out of the womb rumpled and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Usually by his wife.
“It has to be now?”
“It does.”
“Even though you know what’s cooking?”
Michelle would be the first to admit that in general her cooking was workmanlike at best, but her famous meatloaf—learned at her mother’s knee, doubtless with plenty of contradictory advice from her grandmother, the crankiest woman on God’s earth—was the best Carl ever expected to taste. There was sage in it, or something. His stomach had been growling the whole time he was getting ready. “Even though. You’ll leave me some, right?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Not many, with the way the kid eats now.”
“I’m certainly not promising anything.”
Carl Jr. was at the table in the cramped living room, puzzling over homework by the light of a small lamp. Michelle refused to use the overhead lights on the grounds the harsh glare made the rooms look tired and sad and low-rent. She was right. This way, the room was
almost cozy. With little choices like that she made a big difference in their lives.
Carl Jr. looked even more puzzled when he saw his father was headed out. “Where are you going?”
“Work.”
“But it’s nighttime.”
“It’s only six o’clock.”
“It’s dark, and that makes it nighttime.”
Carl conceded this. His son had recently developed a pedantic streak. Apparently that was common at around nine years old, especially in boys. They suddenly understood the importance and precision of the way words structured the world, and cottoned onto the idea that they might control it too. “You have two tasks while I’m out, okay?”
“Depends what they are.”
“Finish your homework, and leave me some food.” Carl Jr. made a noncommittal sound. “Seriously. On both. But mainly the meatloaf. Okay?”
His son smiled, suddenly, the kind of smile you only ever see from your own child, and when they’re still young. Not a judged or chosen expression, a smile of a particular kind, not a genre of smile or a smile that’s supposed to reassure or convince or mislead or do any kind of job at all. Just a kid’s face, reflecting what’s fleetingly inside, to the person who’s half of their universe. “No,” he said.
Carl laughed and gave him a hug. “Love you, kiddo.”
“You too,” his son said, turning back to his homework. “But I’m still not leaving any meatloaf.”
As he left, Carl turned back and saw his wife setting a plate on the counter, and knew she’d put some food aside for him. “Not much longer,” he said.
“Good.”
“And I won’t be late,” he said.
“Also good.”
But he was, and he never saw either of them again.
When he stepped outside the building it was dark and cold. The McCray was a looming Victorian on top of Beach Hill, looking down toward the ocean half a mile away. Built as a private house fifty years back and for a while the town’s social hub, then a high-end hotel, its glory days were long behind it—and you got the sense the building knew this. The outside needed repainting, badly. The gardens were overgrown. The rooms were all by-the-week rentals now, and Carl was looking forward to not renting one of them any more. Michelle was too. People tended to assume that because she was pretty and quiet she was also dumb. They were wrong. In addition to being whip-smart she was good at listening, at making people feel comfortable enough to talk in the first place—and with the intuition to know who’d be worth talking to. It was Michelle who’d heard about what happened four years before, in 1933, when a female resident shot her ex-employer on the grounds for reasons that were never established, and how thirty years before, one of the mansions on the next street had seen a retired army major killing both his daughter and himself on the anniversary of his wife’s death. Not to mention that the old woman who lived in the corner room on the first floor of the McCray had even told Michelle that back in 1908 plumbers doing work under the street outside had uncovered the remains of an actual Indian burial ground.
Carl didn’t know whether that last was true or not, but Beach Hill had a weird vibe either way. The whole damned town did. Sure, it was attractive, with unspoiled beaches, seventy miles of emptiness north until San Francisco, and forty miles of the same south until Monterey. There was a fishing industry, mainly in the hands of Italian families, and overall the town was weathering the Depression better than some, helped by the “Suntan Special”—a Southern Pacific train that rounded up families from Palo Alto and San Jose and brought them over the mountains to spend their money every weekend at the popular boardwalk. After six months in town, Carl still didn’t like or trust Santa Cruz, however, and he hoped that—if tonight’s business was successful—they could soon be on their way. He didn’t know where. Somewhere. Anywhere. The League would tell him when the time came.
He got in his car and drove along the steep road down the inland side of the hill, and up through the center of town along Pacific. A few miles along the highway and then a turn into the lower slopes of the hills which ringed the town. That was one of the strange things about Santa Cruz— the way how, surrounded as it was by either mountains, wilderness or sea, it could seem like an island, cut off from the rest of California and even the United States in general. The area seemed to attract an unusual number of crackpots too—like William Riker, who’d bought a hundred and forty acres on the other side of the summit and established a community called Holy City, based around a set of half-baked ideals he called the Perfect Christian Divine Way. On a practical level this primarily seemed to involve selling groceries and cheap gas to people headed one way or the other over the mountains, although the tiny town also had a zoo and an observatory and a bunch of other weird shit. Though Riker preached abstinence in most things, he had a tendency to drive his car off the road while drunk, and—if you were in the know—also plied a discrete trade in other methods of intoxication, examples of which were lodged in the inside pocket of Carl’s jacket.
It was Carl’s job to know people, and know things, and get things done. And tonight, more than anything, it was his job to change someone’s mind. But first he had to find her—and Marion Hollins could be hard to track down.
He arrived at Pasatiempo ten minutes later. Pulled up at the gate and winked at the guy in the booth.
“How’s it hanging, Jimmy?”
“Cold,” Jimmy said. “Cold, is how.”
“You got that right. Know where she is?”
Jimmy shrugged, looking even vaguer than usual. Jimmy was in his midtwenties and had the demeanor of a guy who’d be performing low-level tasks in a booth for the rest of his life, and be happy with the arrangement so long as not much in the way of thought was asked of him. It wasn’t his job to know where the boss was at any given moment. To know, or care. “Around. I guess. Here, or there. Hell, you know what she’s like.”
“I do.” Carl reached in his jacket, glanced back along the road, and tossed something to Jimmy.
He caught it—barely—and made the small package disappear into his pocket. “You’re a gent.”
“Use it wisely.”
Jimmy raised the bar and Carl drove under it and up the long, curving road toward the clubhouse. He’d try there first, though the thing about Marion Hollins was that she was a body in constant motion. You wouldn’t expect that if you saw her from a distance. She was forty-five, stocky, plain to the point of homely. Though by all accounts one of the best female golfers in the country—and thus the world—she didn’t look designed for movement or attention. When you got closer you saw the truth was very different. She had an aura. Carl didn’t know how you’d put it any other way. She made you feel the night was always young and that there were forever good times to be had. She was smart. She took risks. She was fun.
She made things happen too. Back in 1927 she’d been horseback riding in the hills of what was then the Rancho Carbonero—owned by William Bickle, a character who’d allegedly buried treasure on the property from he and his brother’s privateering activities (needless to say, never found, though that didn’t stop people from looking)—and decided it would make the ideal spot for a country club. Funded by a lucky score in oil a couple of years later, she made it happen: hiring a guy she’d previously used down in Carmel for Sam Morse’s celebrated golf course at Pebble Beach, but keeping so close an eye on the process that not a single tree was allowed to be felled without her permission. Having spent a fair bit of time with Marion over the last months, Carl absolutely believed the story.
He parked up and walked into the club. Soon as he was inside he was hit by the noise. People talking loud and hard. A jazz combo in the corner, belting out “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Raucous laughter. Red faces. A good time being had by all. Carl spotted a familiar face on the other side of the room and made his way through the throng to a table in the corner where a woman sat at a small table by herself.
“Good evening, Miss Pickford,” he said.
&nbs
p; Mary looked up. Her eyes were hazy and her voice a little slurred. “Mr. Unger. A pleasure, as always.”
“Alone this evening?”
“My husband is . . .” She looked around the room. As usual—Pasatiempo hosted everyone from movie stars like Pickford and Charles “Buddy” Rogers to the Vanderbilts and other notables—nobody in the room stared at her. Marion had a knack of getting people to rub along happily, even mixing the Hollywood crowd with East Coast socialites, a combination that didn’t usually come off. At Pasatiempo everyone knew to play it cool in the presence of fame, and that what happened in the club stayed there—whether it be someone seen leaving a cabin in the dead of night (and one that didn’t hold their own spouse) or a rich young scion lying drunk in the bushes to the side of the 16th fairway. “Actually, I have no idea where he is. Nor, at the moment, if I’m absolutely honest, do I much care.”
Normally, as part of his loosely defined role at the club, Carl would have spent a while talking with Mary. Since her divorce from Douglas Fairbanks the year before, she’d not been quite the cheerful presence people remembered in the past—despite her marriage in June to Rogers, yet another Tinseltown actor (nobody expected it to last). Right now, however, he didn’t have the time.
“Have you seen Marion?”
“Of course,” Mary said. “You know dear Marion. Sit in one place for long enough and she’s bound to stride past.”
“Recently?”
Pickford frowned, looking a lot like one of the curly-haired moppets she’d made her career portraying. Like that, and even more drunk. “No,” she said. “Now I come to think of it, not for hours. Why don’t you sit with me, and we’ll have a glass of Champagne and wait for her together.”
“Can’t, I’m afraid.”
“Aha. Some secret mission to perform. Forever working in mysterious ways.”
“I help things run smoothly, that’s all.”
“You’re a dark one, Carl. Well, when you find her majesty please tell her that I’m rather bored and require her to come and get disreputably drunk with me.”
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