“We think the Nazis have the spear of Longinus. Combine that with the Jewel of Seven Stars, and they might trump our Ark of the Covenant. We’d need Excalibur and the Holy Grail to beat that.”
“And the Maltese Falcon?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s real too. The Knights Templar still have it. By now, it might be charged with some minor power. We don’t need to bother with that. Do we, Gees?”
The fellow with all the Gs nodded. These people had a complex private history I didn’t want to go into.
You might not think it to look at me, but I do know what the spear of Longinus is. Also known as the heilige lance. And everybody’s heard of Excalibur and the Holy Grail. From that, I could deduce the sort of item this Jewel of Seven Stars was supposed to be.
“Mountmain has the jewel,” Judge Pursuivant boomed. His tones were impressive enough to disturb coyotes out in the canyon. “All is lost.”
“He may have the jewel,” Winthrop said. “But that’s not the half of it. Getting it out of its vessel is notoriously a sticky business. We know that it is to be done at dawn, and in this mysterious White House of the prophecy. Mountmain’s uncle couldn’t manage it, which is why we’re here all these years later. And the last twenty years will have shaped its aura in all manner of configurations. When you think of the life John Barrymore has lived. The heights, the depths, the triumphs, the humiliations, the genius, the despair. How much was Barrymore and how much the jewel? And how has all this experience affected the stone?”
Winthrop was excited, whereas the rest of his company was scared. Maybe he was a man of greater vision than they. Or maybe he was mad.
“We should be in Washington,” Finlay said, gloomily. “We’ve missed the thing here. We should be there at dawn. The President himself might be in danger.”
Winthrop wasn’t convinced.
“We have Washington covered. And North Africa. And Maison Blanche in New Orleans.”
Finlay killed another cigarette.
“This jewel,” I asked. “You say it’s in a vessel?”
Winthrop nodded, happily.
“What kind of vessel?”
“Why, John Barrymore’s body, of course.”
*
About midnight I was back in my office in the Cahuenga Building, telephoning hospitals and morgues, asking if a surplus stiff might have washed their way, one that seemed oddly familiar if looked at from the side. It was proper detective work, and as tedious and pointless as hell.
Someone—most likely this Bennett Mountmain bird—had John Barrymore, and inside the Great Profile was a rare and fabulously valuable jewel. Of course, if Mountmain hacked out the Seven Stars and dumped the body somewhere I could find it, then I’d still be living up to the letter of my mission. Lorre wanted the body back, not some priceless MacGuffin hidden inside it.
I was not yet suspicious enough to wonder whether Lorre had known about the Jewel of Seven Stars. He was only a sinister conspirator in the movies.
After the call-round was finished, I hit a few bars where newsmen hang out and invested some of Lorre’s money in buying drinks and pumping for information. You can imagine the sort of newsman who has to stay behind in Los Angeles while all the decent writers head off to become war correspondents, and who also happens to be an after-midnight boozer.
I knew a lot of fellows like that.
Having struck Milton Parsons, I wondered if I’d come across a convenient squealer who was the spitting image of Elisha Cook, Jr. a shifty, sad-eyed little man who had the secret of the plot and was willing to swap it for a pathetic sliver of conversation. Of course, if I found an Elisha it was most likely he would wind up horribly dead by dawn, as an example.
Sometimes, it doesn’t work out like that.
Nobody had even heard of Bennett Mountmain.
*
I got back to my office at about three, and found men waiting for me. I walked right into trouble. A fist sunk into my gut before I could get my hat off. Someone tried to take my coat off without unbuttoning it, yanking it from my shoulders to improvise a straitjacket. I heard my spiffy coat rip as I was trussed.
The man-handlers were a couple of blank-faced goons in shabby overcoats. They smelled like Tijuana whores, but I didn’t get fairy vibrations off them. They wore the scent to cover another smell. That was a familiar note.
In my chair sat a man with a gun. It was a very nice gun, an automatic. He showed it to me without actually pointing it anywhere, twirling it by the trigger guard. I happened to notice that the safety catch wasn’t on. My visitor was a locked-room murder mystery waiting to happen.
“Twenty years I’ve waited,” my visitor said.
He had an Irish accent, soft but sinister. I knew who this was, but didn’t say so.
“And before that, my uncle wasted a lifetime. To be so close to the achievement of such a purpose and have it snatched away. Do you have any idea, you foolish little detective, what that kind of frustration can make a person do?”
I was just deducing something when the gun went off. A bullet spanged off my filing cabinet, putting a dent in it and ringing the mostly empty thing like a coffin-shaped bell. The bullet ricocheted my way, and thunked into the meaty shoulder of one of the men holding me.
He didn’t say a thing. He barely even moved. I saw a slow trickle of dark blood seep into his sleeve. The man’s lack of complaint frightened me.
Mountmain was pointing the gun now. At me.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“This is where I say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and you sneer, ‘but of course you do, foolish little detective’”—I liked the phrase—“and try to beat it out of me for an hour or two. The flaw in your plan is that I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
There was no harm trying it on.
“You are working for the Diogenes Club,” he sneered. His favoured mode of expression was the sneer.
“I am working for Mr. Moto.”
Deliberately, he shot the man he had wounded. This time, he put a bullet in the man’s forehead. His hat blew off in a red cloud. No matter how John Barrymore looked, this fellow looked worse. The trickling hole between his eyebrows didn’t help.
“That’s someone I rely on and, in a strange sort of way, am fond of,” Mountmain said. “Now imagine what I’ll do to you, whom I’ve never met before and to whom I’ve taken an intense dislike.”
“This would have something to do with a recently deceased Sweet Prince?”
“Give the man a goldfish.”
“And a rock?”
Mountmain’s sneer verged on a snarl.
“A rock? You could call it that. If you were a very stupid person indeed.”
I did my best to shrug. Not easy.
Until five minutes ago, I’d assumed Mountmain had Barrymore. Certainly, that was what Winthrop thought. And he had read the program, which gave away all the story I had missed.
Not so.
“Your response time is excellent,” I said. “I only started asking about you two hours ago.”
Mountmain sneered away the compliment.
“Ten thousand dollars,” he said. “If you lead me to the jewel. If not, you’ll be tortured until you tell what you know. In unspeakable ways.”
“I’ve never been tortured in a speakable way.”
“Americans are such children. You always ‘crack wise’. But you don’t know what wise means in Europe.”
He took my letter opener from my desk. He flicked his cigarette lighter, raising a flame. He held the flame under the blade, looking from it to me.
“I’d have taken the ten thousand dollars,” he said.
“You’ve waited twenty years for something. If you wouldn’t put up with torture after that, then you’re not the man I think you are.”
He almost smiled.
“Very cleverly put. Indeed, I’d endure anything. But that’s because I know what’s at stake.”
The blade was r
ed.
“You, ma cushla, know nothing.”
I tried to wrestle free, but the two goons—if that was all they were—held me fast. Mountmain stood up. He put his lighter away and spat on the redhot blade. There was a hiss.
My office is on the sixth floor. Behind Mountmain was the window, and beyond that the irritating neon light. A face hung upside down at the top of my window, a fall of blonde hair wavering.
I was impressed. Geneviève had either climbed up from the street or down from the roof.
She clambered like a lizard, her arms and torso visible through the window, and lunged forwards, breaking through the glass.
Mountmain turned as her arms went around his waist. He stabbed with my letter opener, and she grabbed it with her bare hand. I smelled burning flesh and heard the sizzle. She bared sharp—unnaturally sharp—teeth and hissed, but did not scream. Mountmain bent backwards.
He shouted words in a language I didn’t know.
I was let go and the goons rounded on Geneviève.
The office was too small for much of a fight. Geneviève took hold of the first goon, the one with the holes in him, and stuffed him out of the window. He fell like a stone. I felt the building shake as he smacked against the sidewalk.
The other goon hung back.
Mountmain scrambled to the doorway and tipped an invisible hat, sneering another command in old Irish or whatever. Then he left us with the goon.
This was a bigger specimen. It had an acre of chest, and eyes like white marbles. Geneviève made a face at it.
“It’s been around too long,” she said. “The binding is coming loose.”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
Come to that, I was only just taking in the subtle changes in her. She still wore the evening gown, and had even scaled the building in heels, but her face was a different shape, sharper somehow. She had pointed teeth and diamond-shaped claw-nails.
We were in the world of the weird.
Geneviève held out her wounded hand. I saw the weal shrivel and disappear, leaving her white palm unmarred. The goon lurched towards her.
She knelt down, scooped up the letter-opener, and stuck it into his head. He halted, like a statue, but his eyes still rolled. He fell over, rattling the floorboards, and lay on his back.
“Do you keep foodstuffs here?” she asked.
“Is this the time to eat?”
“Table salt. I need salt.”
She was on the mark. I’ve had too many meals in the office, while working odd hours. I have a hoard of basic groceries stashed in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, below the liquor. Without questioning her, I found a halffull bag of salt. It must have been there for years.
She smiled tightly as she took it, never looking away from the goon. With a pointed finger, she yanked his jaw open. Then she poured salt into his mouth, filling it entirely until trails spilled out.
“Needle and thread would be too much to ask. Do you have an office stapler? A first-aid kit?”
There was a small box of pills and salves. She took a roll of bandage and wound it around the lower half of the goon’s head, mummifying the salt inside his mouth. Then, she stood up.
The goon shook, and came apart. He dissolved into what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe once described as a “loathsome mass of putrescence”.
“Zombies,” she spat. “Hateful things.”
*
I drove, with Geneviève beside me, legs up on the seat like a child. She chattered and I interjected, and we tried to figure it out.
“Mountmain must have had Barrymore, but lost him,” I said.
“He’ll have him again soon. More importantly, he’ll have the jewel. I’m surprised he bothered to call on you. It shows an impatience that is not good for him.”
“How did he find Barrymore in the first place? The mortuary attendant couldn’t have known where Lorre and Walsh took him.”
“That’s a nasty business. Scrying. It involves disembowelling a cat. Twice in one night would be pushing it, but my guess is that having failed to get what he wanted from you, he’ll be here-kitty-kittying in some alleyway.”
“He can find Barrymore by gutting a cat?”
“Magic. Hocus pocus. It works, you know.”
“With so much at stake, couldn’t you find a cat willing to give its life for the war effort?”
“It’s not as easy as that. You have to be steeped in black magic for it to work. And that’s not a good thing to be. It has long-term implications.”
“But Mountmain doesn’t care?”
“I should think not. That’s why black magic is a temptation. You get ahead easily, delaying the payoff until it’s too late.”
“What are you, a white witch?”
She laughed, musically.
“Don’t be silly. I’m a vampire.”
“Bloodsucking fiend, creature of the night, accursed nosferatu, coffin-dwelling undead …”
“That sort of thing.”
I let her go with it. Obviously, it wasn’t worth arguing.
“Where are the rest of you? Winthrop and the others?”
“I’m afraid we have certain differences among ourselves. The War makes for odd alliances. I have a distaste for government work, which has been set aside for the moment. I’ve been keeping track of the Jewel of Seven Stars since its rediscovery. Edwin is a servant of the crown. The Diogenes Club, and its equivalents in the allied nations, wants to get hold of the Seven Stars to use as a weapon of war.”
“How can a jewel win the War?”
“Think of it as a lens. It can focus intense destructive power. It seems to have a specific purpose. It is a device for destroying empires.”
“Like Germany and Japan? Sounds good.”
“You don’t mean that. You haven’t thought through what it means. It’s not enough to win. You have to win without tainting yourself, or you’re just piling up debts future generations will have to pay. Edwin can rationalise that; I can’t. Of course, it’s likely I’ll be around to go through whatever future generations have to put up with.”
“Mountmain wants the jewel to help Hitler?”
“And himself. His family believes in a destiny. He is the head of something called the Order of the Ram. It is foretold that the Ram will reign over the last days of the world. You know who Nostradamus is?”
“Fortune teller?”
“That’s the bimbo. In his suppressed quatrains, Nostradamus is surprisingly specific about the MontMains. An expression disturbingly equivalent to ‘thousand-year reich’ crops up quite a lot.”
“Errol Flynn has the body,” I said.
She was quiet, and thoughtful.
“He’s the only player left in the game. Mountmain wouldn’t have taken him seriously, a drunken hero. He got hold of the body and escaped. Then, Mountmain must have revised his first impression and assumed Flynn was acting to a deliberate plan rather than careening at random. He’d start looking around for confederates, and that would lead to the person rattling his cage, to whit: me.”
“I loved him in The Adventures of Robin Hood,” she said. “‘It’s injustice I hate, not Normandy!’”
“But where is Flynn? It’s a shame your prophet didn’t say where we could find him.”
“Michel de NostreDame wasn’t always accurate. Sometimes, he didn’t understand what he saw. Sometimes, he filled in with nonsense. He does describe a crisis, but his suggestion is absurd. He says that the jewel is to be found at the White House. Edwin has someone in Washington. And Finlay is on a plane, racing the sun. Just in case the jewel is spirited across country by dawn.”
“Dawn?”
“Two hours’ away. That’s where the quatrain is highly specific. Even allowing for changes in the calendar since 1558.”
I shook my head.
“There are white houses in California.”
“To be frank, it could mean anything. The expression Nostradamus uses is ‘Maison Blanche’.”
I st
opped the car. We were outside the Warner Brothers lot. Lorre’s home base. And Errol Flynn’s. The pre-dawn light was already turning the water tower into a Martian War Machine.
I laughed out loud.
This was what it was like. When you saw it, and nobody else did. This was what made a detective.
“It’s here,” I said.
“How can you know that?”
“Variety. The trade paper. Most of my work is related to the studios. I keep up with the industry. Peter Lorre’s shooting a film at Warners at the moment. With Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.”
Geneviève was prettily puzzled. Her face had settled down to her ingenue look again.
“I don’t see …”
“It’s called Casablanca, Geneviève. Casa Blanca. Maison Blanche. White House.”
She looked across the lot, to the sound stages.
“Not the White House in Washington, not the city in North Africa. Here, Casablanca, Hollywood.”
I drove onto the lot.
*
There were night-watchmen around, and a few early arriving or late staying technicians. I asked a uniformed guard if he’d seen Flynn. The man didn’t want to say anything.
“I know he’s on a bender,” I said.
Finally, he nodded to a stage.
“He’ll be sleeping it off now,” the guard said. “He’s a good lad, and we don’t mind covering for him. The stories you hear don’t mean anything.”
I thanked him.
I could not resist a little triumph when I told Geneviève I had been right. We walked rapidly to the stage and found an unlocked door.
Inside was an Alice world. Half the stage was converted into a nightclub, with ceiling fans, a beat-up piano, twenty-five yards of bar, a backroom full of gambling equipment and row upon row of bottles of cold tea. Glasses and guns and hats were strewn around, each precisely in the spot they would need to be for shooting to resume. There were black cameras, like huge upright insects, halted where the club carpets gave way to bare concrete. Unlit lights hung from frames above.
In the centre of the set were two men, slumped over a bottle.
Flynn was so drunk and scared that he was drinking cold tea as if it were best bourbon. Barrymore was dead, but moving. The supposedly dark set was lit by a ruby glow from inside the dead man’s chest.
Dark Detectives Page 25
