by K. K. Beck
She favored him with a sly smile.
“But of course,” he continued, “since then I learned he was married to this Lila person, so I guess even if the rights hadn’t expired, she’d own them. If she’s alive.”
“She’s alive,” said Callie with a hard edge. “She left a big message about the movie on the Kali-Ra website.”
“Kali-Ra has a website?”
Callie fluttered her eyelids for a second, opened them, then said in a low, thrilling voice, now free of any Valley Girl intonation, “The power of the Queen of Doom reaches everywhere, my friend, even into cyberspace. Come, Raymond Vernon, surely you do not think Kali-Ra, she who has toiled forever without sleep, would not seize any opportunity to extend her evil power over the hearts and minds of mortals.”
BOOK TWO
In Which Kali-Ra Wreaks Havoc by Moonlight
CHAPTER XIII
COCKTAILS AT VILLA VERA
“What did you say?” said Nick, stunned at her transformation. It had been so sudden. He wondered if he had imagined it, if his brain had been fried by reading too many Valerian Ricardo novels. In any case, she was now sounding like a mall rat again. “Wow, here we are. I can’t believe I’m going to a real movie star’s house.” Brakes squealing, she turned the car into a driveway and stopped in front of forbidding wrought-iron gates.
After they buzzed an intercom and spoke to someone inside the house, the huge gates moved slowly apart, as if opened by invisible hands. Nick told himself to pull himself together. When that spooky voice had come out of her and she’d called him Raymond Vernon, she had just been kidding around.
Callie drove through a dark glen of rhododendrons and the house loomed up at them. It was a huge cream-colored stucco pile in which Moorish, Romanesque, and Tudor elements struggled for dominance. Set at the top of a hill, it seemed to reach far into the sky, like Mont-Saint-Michel. Palm trees jutted out from around the massive structure bursting with gables, turrets, balconies, cupolas, and bay windows. Large swathes of wall were smothered with bougainvillea.
“Nobody but a movie star could live here,” said Nick. “My God, look at it!”
“It’s totally Sunset Boulevard,” said Callie appreciatively. “It must be worth millions.”
They parked on scrunchy gravel and walked up to the enormous planked door trimmed with black square nail heads and heavy ornamental hinges. “Wow,” said Callie, squinting up at a balcony railing bearing a row of giant green ceramic jars like something from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. “It’s all authentic twenties stuff.”
Nick rang the bell, which resonated from behind the door like church bells. A second later, a red-haired young woman with an intelligent face and gray eyes opened the door. She wore jeans and a white T-shirt.
“Hello,” she said. “Welcome to Villa Vera.”
“Villa Vera?” said Nick.
“Come in. I’m Melanie Oakley. And you’re Nick.” She turned to Callie inquiringly.
“I hope it’s okay that I brought my girlfriend,” mumbled Nick. To carry out this fiction, Callie gave his shoulder a possessive little squeeze, then thrust out her hand to Melanie and gave her a handshake more appropriate to a business suit than a bikini top, sarong, and navel ring. “Caroline Cunningham,” she said.
They followed Melanie into the hall. “It was built by an old silent movie star, Vera Nadi,” she explained.
“Villa Vera,” repeated Nick as he glanced around a large, dim entryway with a sweeping staircase and a chandelier that looked like something from a Spanish cathedral. “Villa Truth.”
“Rather ironic, seeing as the architecture is completely fake,” said Melanie.
“Maybe she should have called it Villa Falsa,” said Nick, who had taken Latin in high school.
Melanie laughed. “Villa Adultera would be like Villa Fake. Villa Falsa would mean the house itself was lying.”
“You must have been one of the stars of the Junior Classical League,” said Nick.
She looked pleased. “Actually, I was. Were you?”
“Not really, but I tied a mean toga,” said Nick, slightly embarrassed. Callie would know he’d been a nerd in high school, bouncing through the Midwest with other overachievers on an old school bus to JCL conventions in cheap motels. He glanced at her but she wasn’t listening. Instead, she was staring at the furnishings in a way Nick felt looked just a little crass, as if she were conducting an inventory of the place. But perhaps she was simply absorbing the exotic atmosphere. After all, she was interested in the cultural heritage of Southern California, a phrase that until his arrival a few hours ago Nick would have dismissed as oxymoronic.
“Nadia and I were hoping you’d stay for dinner,” said Melanie. “It’s a regular Valerian Ricardo reunion. Lila Ricardo is here, and Duncan Blaine, the screenwriter on the project, and Doctor Pendergast.”
“He wrote that book about Uncle Sid, didn’t he?” asked Nick.
“That’s right.” Melanie turned to Callie. “I hope you won’t be bored by all this Valerian Ricardo talk.”
“I’m really interested in Valerian Ricardo myself,” said Callie. “We’d love to stay.”
Nick thought maybe he should apologize for bringing an extra person, or Callie should apologize for tagging along, seeing as they were staying for dinner, but then he imagined Nadia Wentworth wouldn’t care. She must have servants. It wasn’t as if she’d have to run out to the store for an extra pork chop, or tell the family to hold back.
“What do you eat?” asked Melanie.
Nick was confused. Maybe an extra guest was an imposition. “Just, um, food,” he said. “But I had a big lunch.”
Callie said, “I do chicken and fish but no red meat, very little dairy, and low sodium.”
Melanie nodded. “Fine. That’s what Nadia does. Our housekeeper, Rosemary, is also our cook, and she’s strictly macrobiotic herself but she’s open-minded.”
“Here’s the book, by the way,” said Nick.
Melanie took it. “Thank you. I’ll put it in the office,” she said. “I always read everything for Nadia. Can I write you a check for it?”
Nick waved his hand expansively. “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of selling it to you. Think of it as the bottle of wine I would have brought if I’d known I was staying for dinner.” He felt like an idiot. He couldn’t imagine Nadia Wentworth would have been impressed with the kind of wine he would have brought—a $5.99 bottle of Chardonnay he’d picked up at Cub Foods.
They followed Melanie down a murky corridor to a large sunny room, full of modern office equipment—a phone with lots of buttons, filing cabinets and a big desktop computer with, Nick noted, a screen saver of an eyeless Roman bust. This room, with a view through French doors out onto sweeping lawns edged with cypresses, seemed decades newer than the rest of the house. Melanie put the book in a desk drawer.
Callie gazed up at the wall and said, “There he is. Valerian Ricardo.” Hanging there was the same publicity shot of Uncle Sid that Nick had seen on the wrapper of the book he’d just handed over.
“Nadia put that there,” said Melanie with a defensive little edge.
Nick looked up. “I don’t think I look a bit like him. Except for the chin, maybe.”
Callie reached over and ran two fingers across his chin, feeling the shape of it. “Maybe,” she said dreamily. This was the third time she’d reached out and touched him, if you counted fingering his jacket down in front of Uncle Sid’s old apartment house.
Because Nick had billed Callie as his girlfriend, he tried to look as if he were on regular terms of physical intimacy with her, all the while fantasizing his own hand touching her gleaming shoulder and then sliding down her bare arm. He pulled himself together and said, “I was noticing your screen saver, Melanie. Isn’t that Marcus Aurelius?”
“Yes, it is,” she said, sounding pleased. “There are eight rotating Romans. In a second, you’ll see Suetonius.”
“Cool,” said Callie politely.
* * *
Duncan Blaine sat out on the brick terrace with Lila, Nadia, and Glen Pendergast. He clutched the gin and tonic that had appeared at two minutes past five, the hour Nadia allowed the bar to be cracked, and scowled. It wasn’t enough that he’d been dragooned up to this Hammer House of Horror to ruin his own script by a jumped-up little tart who’d been given carte blanche by the studio because of her moneymaking mammaries. He was also expected to collaborate and socialize with a loopy, aggressive old harridan with the artistic judgment and charm of a newt. And now there was this twit Pendergast who’d been brought in to muddy the waters some more. Presumably he’d want a credit too.
The academic was now holding forth about the real meaning of Kali-Ra. “Of course, Mrs. Ricardo, I understand completely that the popularity of the series rested, er, rests, on philosophical ideas that many find attractive. The question is, why do people find these ideas attractive? What basic human needs are met by the desire to believe that evil is a rampant but beautiful force with erotic implications?”
God, thought Duncan contemptuously, what basic human needs? It was pretty obvious to any reasonably astute person who’d read those Kali-Ra books what kind of basic needs we were talking about here. They were the kind of needs that were met by whores who posted little notices in London telephone boxes saying, “You have been a disgusting, naughty boy. Mistress Brenda, second floor up, will treat you as you deserve to be treated.”
Now Lila was snapping back in her vicious way. She was on the defensive when confronted by even so sketchily educated an opponent as Glen Pendergast, holder of a doctoral degree in literary trash and a lecturer at some cowboy college on the prairies. “All this talk about sex,” she was saying. “That’s such a shallow interpretation. Valerian was misunderstood in his day by narrow-minded puritans, but I wouldn’t expect a learned professor such as yourself to miss the high-minded, spiritual aspects of the work.”
Duncan turned to Nadia, who was following this exchange with a furrowed brow and a confused light in her lovely, stupid eyes. “What do you think, Nadia?” he asked maliciously. “What’s your take on this central point?”
She looked thoughtful for a moment, then her brow smoothed and she produced a half smile. “I think there’s something to be said for both points of view.”
“In that case,” Duncan replied, “I think we should keep the scene with the Torture of a Thousand Tiny Golden Chains.” This had nothing to do with anything the nasty old bat and the weedy little wanker were saying, but Nadia wouldn’t know that. Duncan had already reluctantly given up on the sapphic revels in the bedchamber of the temple handmaidens. It had been made abundantly clear to him that there was only room for two fabulous breasts in this picture, and that these appendages were firmly attached to the chest of the executive producer.
Melanie Oakley appeared, trailing a couple of people, an agreeable-looking young man and a stunning specimen of half-naked California womanhood with a tight body. Now, at least, there would be something pleasant to look at. Duncan’s eye roved over the flat golden stomach and the navel ring. Piercing, he felt, was a clear signal that you were offering the world a body eager for penetration.
Initially, Duncan had enjoyed leering discreetly at Nadia, but he had grown to loathe her to the point where he actually found the sight of her physically repulsive. There was something menacing about her big teeth, an aggressive example of the American obsession with dentistry, and occasionally there was a slightly rodentlike twitch to her features. He fantasized telling her so. Combining vanity and stupidity as she did, an insult to her sex appeal was the only insult that would ever have the power to wound her.
But of course he couldn’t. He couldn’t fuck this one up. Handled right, he’d be able to get a sole credit on a huge moneymaker. A moneymaker that, with the sly, postmodern jokes he’d slipped in, would also impress the European critics. He had so much to gain.
And even more to lose. After a string of flops, his agent had come right out and told him that this picture was his last chance.
CHAPTER XIV
A STRANGE ACCUSATION
Melanie had impulsively asked the Ricardo nephew and his girlfriend to dinner because she felt the party needed diluting. A couple of extra people, without agendas, would lower the stress level. This afternoon’s script conference had been ugly and feelings were running high. Duncan was irritable, although he might mellow out now that he had a drink. Melanie had been hopeful that Dr. Pendergast would undermine Lila’s influence with Nadia, but so far all she’d been able to detect was politely veiled hostility between them.
“This is Nick Iversen. Caroline Cunningham.” She introduced everyone sitting around the patio. Duncan Blaine pulled out the chair next to his and gestured for Caroline to sit in it. When she did, he smiled lecherously. Melanie glanced over at a disapproving Nadia, who didn’t like other women to be admired.
Caroline goggled at Nadia and gushed, “It’s so exciting to meet you. You have a really great place.” She gestured vaguely at the lily pond and its fountain of porpoises. Nadia, instead of doing her usual gracious-celebrity-being-nice-to-the-little-people thing, gave the girl a frosty smile.
Much to Melanie’s annoyance, Tom Thorndyke’s undercover operative, Kevin, now appeared on the lawn next to them with a noisy, gas-powered leaf blower. Didn’t he realize the devices were illegal in the interests of smog control and shouldn’t be used in front of people? She gestured him away and he ambled off. Kevin had been a big disappointment. He seemed to be out of shape, with greasy hair and glasses that slid down his nose, and he breathed through his mouth, but presumably he was more effective as an undercover operative if he looked like an idiot.
It seemed Melanie would never meet any interesting guys. Why couldn’t Kevin have looked like this Nick Iversen, for instance? Tall and healthy-looking, with an intelligent face. But of course, he was hooked up with this half-naked model-actress-whatever with the ditzy voice.
Melanie found another chair for Nick and fit him in between Nadia and Lila, saying cheerfully, “Nick is actually Valerian Ricardo’s great-nephew.”
“Great-great, I think,” said Nick, smiling at Lila.
Lila had ignored both of them, but now she peered at Nick intently. “There’s no resemblance,” she said flatly. “So you’re one of those Minnesota farmers, eh? I’ve always felt that the fact that Valerian sprang from such stock is clear proof of reincarnation.”
Nick, the philosophy major, who had aced Logic 101, was tempted to lecture the old babe on what would actually constitute clear proof of her metaphysical whimsy. Instead he said, “I’m glad to meet you.” Should he call her Aunt Lila? “I’m kind of curious about Uncle Sid.”
“Uncle Sid?” said Duncan Blaine.
“Valerian Ricardo’s real name was Sidney Gundersen,” explained Nick. He didn’t like the way the Englishman had leered at Callie, so he added patronizingly, “You didn’t really believe anyone would be named Valerian Ricardo, did you?”
Duncan snorted a laugh. “In this country, anything is possible.” He turned to Callie. “It’s refreshing to meet someone with a pretty, real name like Caroline in these parts. The place is teeming with Crystals and Tiffanys and Buffys.”
Lila said stridently, “Valerian Ricardo was too his real name. It was given to him in young manhood by his spirit guides.”
Glen Pendergast seemed to be feeling left out. He cleared his throat and announced, “It’s worth noting that Ricardo’s protagonist, Raymond Vernon, has the same initials as Valerian Ricardo.”
Nadia looked puzzled.
“But reversed of course,” he explained.
“Wow,” said Nadia. “That’s so deep. I never thought of that.”
Melanie took drink orders and went off to the kitchen to ask Rosemary to bring them out. On her way back, she heard the office phone ringing and she went in and picked it up. It was Nadia’s business manager, George, and he sounded terrified, but managed to get his story out, ending with a patheti
c, “Will you explain it to her? Tell her we’re working on the problem.”
“Okay,” said Melanie. “I’ll tell her.” Melanie said this a lot to all kinds of people. Lawyers, agents, producers, accountants, even Manuel the pool man—none of them liked to bring Nadia bad news.
“I really appreciate it,” said George, his voice trembling pathetically. “Listen, Melanie, when you do tell her, I hope you’ll make it very clear that it’s not my fault. There was absolutely no reason to think the damned things weren’t in the public domain. Tell her I’m acting aggressively to check out their claim. Tell her not to panic.” He sounded as if he were doing just that.
“Okay. Who are these people exactly?”
“The corporation is registered on a small island in the Caribbean with unusual banking and tax laws. The letter said they have a lawyer who’ll be in touch. I’m faxing you a copy, and a memo explaining how the Uruguay Round and recent changes in European copyright law affect all this.”
Melanie hung up the phone. So, there was a possibility that Valerian Ricardo’s wretched works were under copyright after all, and that they were owned by a bunch of unfeeling businessmen who wouldn’t be the least bit impressed that they were dealing with a movie star. This would slow Nadia down a bit. By blabbing to everyone who would listen that she was born to play Kali-Ra, she’d managed to jack the price into the stratosphere.
Melanie had mixed feelings. She didn’t want to see millions go down the tubes as the project ground to a halt while the lawyers got into it. This would be bad news for Nadia’s credibility as a producer.
At the same time, there wasn’t much of Nadia’s own money at stake. Maybe during the months or years the agents and lawyers thrashed around wasting a lot of time and money, Nadia would lose interest in the whole thing and get monomaniacal about something else. Maybe a new man, for instance. Nadia was between men now, and in one of her careerist phases. Melanie sighed. Life was a lot easier when Nadia was in love.
