In the Company of Thieves

by Kage Baker

  Joseph, who had been slouched down in the car seat, sat bolt upright. “Oh, no,” he said.

  “What?” said Lewis.

  “All in good time, Muriel, all in good time. If you’ll permit me—”

  “Oh, sure, you go right ahead and finish your soup.”

  “I have this bad feeling about how Lawrence is planning to impress dear Muriel,” said Joseph. Lewis intensified his focus and listened in. There was gallant small talk interspersed with the sound of soup being consumed, there were modest replies, there were the sounds of china being cleared away, and then:

  “Oh! Lawrence, you shouldn’t have!”

  “Uh-oh,” said Lewis.

  “Nonsense. I saw this trifle, and I said to myself: ‘That’s the very thing for my Columbina!’”

  “‘Columbina’?” said Joseph.

  All was made plain when, after fifteen more minutes of coy chatter, the mortals exited the building and came into view on the corner, where they looked both ways before crossing to Lawrence’s Model T.

  “Oh, Harlequin and Columbina,” said Lewis. Joseph said something unprintable. Lawrence wore a diamond-patterned suit of blue and green, with a black domino mask; his lady friend wore a frilly skirt and jacket in a matching diamond pattern in purple and lavender. A mortal could not have made it out at that distance, but to cyborg vision it was painfully clear: there around her neck, on a chain, was a flashing violet light, brilliant as a movie starlet’s eyes.

  “Of all the lousy luck!” Joseph leaned forward and beat his forehead against the dashboard a few times.

  “Stop that! You’ll dent it. They’re driving away, you know. Shouldn’t we be following them?”

  “Sure. Why not?” said Joseph listlessly.

  Lewis started the car again and raced after the Model T. He followed it all the way to Highland and up past the Hollywood Bowl, by which time Joseph had recovered himself enough to be plotting again.

  “O.K., all is not lost. The next time they pull up at a traffic signal, I’ll leap out and grab the rock through the window. I’ll run off into the bushes and up over the hill, you make a u-turn and pick me up again out on Mulholland—”

  “What if they get my license number and call the police?”

  “Then we’ll ditch the car on Mulholland and you can report it as stolen—heads up, there’s a traffic signal! Get ready!”

  “Joseph, I’ve only had this car six months, and—”

  “Dammit!” Joseph clutched his hair and pulled, in his frustration. Rather than stopping at the signal, the Model T had turned onto a side street that climbed steeply, paralleling Cahuenga. “No! Go after ’em!”

  Lewis swerved to follow, neatly and narrowly missing an oncoming truck, whose driver shook his fist and pounded on the horn. The street climbed, and climbed; leveled out briefly and then climbed some more, throwing in a curve for good measure. A spectacular view of the Cahuenga Pass and the San Fernando Valley beyond opened out to the right, but there was no time to admire the scenery. As Lewis was shifting gears, Joseph pointed and yelled. “There!”

  To their left, a number of cars were parked along the street, and the Model T was performing the profoundly chancy maneuver of turning around in a driveway just under a blind curve. Lewis slowed his car to watch as the Model T completed the turn safely and pulled in behind the other cars, from which other costumed mortals were emerging.

  “It must be a studio party,” said Lewis. “Look! There’s Charlie Chase. And there’s one of the Cherry Sisters, and Ralph Falconer...that’s Richard Talmadge, he was a stuntman around the same time I was.”

  “Huh,” said Joseph, looking thoughtfully up at the house to which the mortals were climbing. It sat at least eight flights of zigzagging stairs above the street, and was a sprawling, many-leveled Spanish-style place, with balconies and gardens. “Big house, lots of guests in masks, lots of booze flowing. I could crash it! I just need a costume.”

  “Where are you going to get a costume at this hour on a Friday night?”

  Joseph snapped his fingers. “Last-Minute Lester’s!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A little Industry secret. He’s on Curson Street. Let’s go!”

  As they were headed back downhill through the Cahuenga Pass, Joseph explained: “This guy worked in Wardrobe at most of the little studios. When a shoot wrapped, he used to take one or two of the costumes back to his place and forget to return them, you know what I mean? So he built up a collection. He pays for mothballs by renting out costumes to people in the know.”

  Fifteen minutes later they pulled up in front of a modest bungalow on a tree-lined street. Lewis waited in the car as Joseph went to the door; it was opened by a gaunt man cradling a small poodle in his arms. Joseph went inside.

  Half an hour later Lewis looked into the rear-view mirror and beheld Joseph approaching the car. Startled, he turned around and stared out the window.

  “God Apollo! What on earth—”

  “It was all he had left tonight,” said Joseph. “That a guy could wear, anyhow. Just shut up and let me in the car, O.K.?”

  He wore a skin-tight black body suit, black pumps with spats, and white gloves. Lewis thought he might be impersonating Mickey Mouse, until noting the cane and bulky papier-mâché body under Joseph’s arm.

  “Mr. Peanut?”

  “Yeah. Can we get this damn thing in the back seat? I’m not riding through the night wearing it.”

  Lewis got out and rolled down the window, but the giant peanut shell wouldn’t go through; nor could he get the passenger seat tilted far enough forward to push it into the back.

  “It’s not going to fit in the boot, either,” he said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to put it on. Cheer up! It’s not as though anyone will recognize you.”

  Muttering viciously to himself, Joseph lifted the peanut shell and struggled into it.

  “Can you take his little top hat off?” Lewis asked. “Otherwise you’ll have to ride sort of bent over.”

  “No, the damn hat is built in,” said Joseph, a bit muffledly. He got his arms out through the appropriate holes at last. “Boy, this is some tight squeeze. At least I can see O.K. Well, fairly O.K. Where’s the cane?” He spotted it on the grass and bent to pick it up. There was a sound richly evocative of cyborg flesh bursting through overstrained elasticized cotton-silk fabric. It was followed by a burst of profanity in Neolithic proto-Euskaran.

  “Oh, dear,” said Lewis.

  “Does it show?” Joseph turned to and fro.

  “No, you’re all right—can you get the shell off again?”

  Joseph peered down at himself. “Not without getting arrested.”

  He climbed awkwardly into the front seat, accompanied by more ominous sounds of fabric tearing. “Just drive, Lewis.”

  There were at least six traffic signals on the way back to the party, and Joseph shrank farther down into the seat at each stop, though Lewis merely smiled and waved at his fellow motorists when they stared. Not soon enough, they came back to the high winding street above which the house sat.

  “My, they’re in full swing,” said Lewis, gazing up at the house. Every window was lit, and the sound of music and laughter floated forth.

  “So much the better, huh?” said Joseph, groping for his cane. “Why don’t you just let me off here, and park someplace close and wait? I’m not walking back to Morningside in this getup.”

  Lewis had to open the door for him, after which Joseph crawled out, straightened up and began his resolute climb of the first of the flights of steps. Lewis found a parking space halfway down the block below, and pulled in to wait.

  It was dark, and quiet. The sloping lot on the other side of the street was dense with old trees, which filtered out traffic sounds from the Cahuenga Pass below. A single swaying bulb hung from a telegraph pole, halfway down the block, giving no particular competition to the crescent moon and stars. Lewis yawned. He settled himself into a more comfortable position and folded
his arms.

  “‘Oh, weary night, oh long and tedious night/ Abate thy hours! Shine comforts from the East/ That I may back to Athens...’” he murmured to himself. Now, that would be pleasant. He’d liked Athens, when he’d been stationed there in the third century. There’d been a nice little wine-shop just off the School of Philosophy that had been a great place to relax with a scroll. Really quite a lot like California, at least in the quality of the light, that hot bright shimmer...

  And of course there hadn’t been any Wood Near Athens, more’s the pity, unless you counted olive groves. Too thickly settled, even in the third century...there might have been a wood a league without the town in Theseus’s day, but it wouldn’t have resembled Shakespeare’s English forest...rocky hills like Hollywood’s, instead, with the same live oaks, and whatever the Mediterranean equivalent of sagebrush was... actually rather a lot like what Reinhardt had built, down the pass. Lewis wondered if he realized it?

  He yawned again and let his primary consciousness fade to standard maintenance, while his secondary consciousness sorted through the day’s work. He found it easy to forge Reinhardt’s handwriting, but much more difficult to reproduce his sketches. Something to do with being a cyborg, perhaps. It was curious that Company operatives, though responsible for salvaging and preserving so much great art, seemed incapable of any creativity themselves...

  Lewis was analyzing chromatic value in a watercolor study of the Faery Court when he was roused to primary consciousness by lights flaring behind him. He peered into the rear-view mirror. A car was being started; someone leaving the party. Perhaps he ought to pull into the spot they had vacated?

  As he was watching the other car’s tail lights diminish down the hill and trying to decide whether to move, something hit the rear of the Plymouth with a thump. A second later Joseph had yanked the passenger door open and was frantically squeezing his costumed bulk into the seat.

  “Go!” he shouted.

  “Did you get it?”

  “No. Follow that car!”

  “But that wasn’t Larry Montcalm—”

  “I know! It was another thief!”

  Lewis threw the Plymouth into neutral and coasted forward, starting the engine on the way down the hill. Joseph, gasping inside the papier-mâché peanut head, finally caught his breath enough to say—well, nothing that would edify the sensitive reader. When he had finished venting, however, he added:

  “Arnaud Fletcher!”

  “What, the gossip columnist?” They reached the bottom of the hill. The other car was nowhere in sight. Lewis, peering about uncertainly, switched to thermal vision and picked up the car’s track—heading not down into Hollywood, but up Mulholland Drive. He followed.

  “Yeah,” said Joseph. “I was so close! No trouble getting in, at least once I’d got up all those damn stairs. I found a bathroom window open on ground level. Flushed the toilet and walked out bold as brass. Nobody even noticed. The gin was flowing free, let me tell you. All kinds of Industry old-timers there. Half the people who used to work at Edendale and box-lunch extras of DeMille’s.

  “They were pretty lively, for a bunch of has-beens; there was this big front room where they’d pushed all the furniture to the edges and rolled up the rugs, and they were dancing to Victrola records. Which made it hell to get through the room, see, which I had to do because Harlequin and Columbina were doing the Lindy clear across on the other side. So I just sort of insinuated myself out on the dance floor and tapped some guy on the shoulder, and there I was Lindyhopping with this dame dressed as Marie Antoinette when this dog came leaping in!”

  “He cut in on you?” Lewis inquired, steering around a curve with a precipitous drop on one side.

  “No, not a guy dressed as a dog; a real dog! A Saint Bernard!”

  “Oh, dear. And I guess he wanted to rend you limb from limb?”

  “No; this one couldn’t tell I was a cyborg. He was a happy dog. He loved me. In the least dignified way imaginable, O.K.? Marie Antoinette broke away from me, just shrieking with laughter, which pretty much blew my plan of unobtrusively partner-swapping my way across the dance floor to Columbina’s arms.

  “There was this sideboard at one edge of the room with canapés and drinks and stuff, so I went over there with the dog still lurching all over me. I grabbed a martini for myself and dropped him a couple of deviled eggs; did he lose interest in me? Not a chance. He jumped up and tried to put his forelegs around my neck. Then he noticed my martini, and dove into it nose-first.”

  “He spilled your drink?”

  “No, he drank it! The mutt was drunk! That was why he was so goddammed happy. You know what drunk dog breath smells like?”

  “Please don’t tell me.” Lewis peered forward, straining to make out the fading heat trail that wound on ahead.

  “So I set about three martinis on the floor for him and he ceased waxing amatory, thank the gods, just started lapping ’em up, and I looked around to see Harlequin Larry and Columbina Muriel retiring from the dance floor to a settee in a nice dark corner. I pushed through the crowd and worked my way along the wall, sort of over and around the furniture. I overheard all kinds of snippets of conversation that would make me a fortune, if I was inclined to blackmail somebody.

  “In fact—” Joseph pounded his fists on the dashboard. “In fact, I remember Arnaud Fletcher talking about this other party that’s going on tonight! That must be where the son-of-a-bitch is headed!”

  “Well, where is it?” asked Lewis. A vista of Hollywood opened out to the left, a carpet of lights glittering as far as the sea; but up here was night and silence, and the occasional coyote blinking in the beam of the Plymouth’s headlights.

  “He didn’t say! Except that it’s at ‘Jack’s place,’ wherever that is. Supposedly it’s one wild party. ‘Plenty of hot stuff, brother, and I do mean hot,’ he said. He said it just like that, insinuating, you know?”

  “I suppose he meant cocaine or something,” said Lewis, as they came to the intersection of Outpost and Mulholland. Down or up? He focused and made out the tracks continuing up along Mulholland, though they were fading fast as the night air cooled them. He followed as fast as he dared.

  “I guess. Or hookers. Anyway I managed to get over near the settee at last. It had been pushed up against a table and a couple of other pieces of furniture, so there was some space behind it, see? And I pretended to pass out and fall over, which nobody even noticed. In fact, there were already a couple of drunks snoring away in various corners back there. I crawled close up under the table until I was right behind Larry Montcalm and Muriel Whoever, and scanned ’em.”

  “That must have been a little difficult in a peanut costume,” said Lewis, slowing the car as he studied the thermal track of his quarry. The other vehicle had left Mulholland and driven up a straight dirt track leading to a still higher elevation. Gingerly he urged the Plymouth forward.

  “You’re telling me, brother! But I thought I’d gotten lucky at last, because Larry had Muriel’s feet in his lap and was rubbing her bunions, and she was lying back right above me in a sort of ecstatic state. I was able to rise up on my hands and sneak a peek; sure enough, neither of them noticed me. And there was the Tavernier Violet, hanging around the dame’s neck on a dime-store chain—Say, watch out!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Lewis, through his teeth rather. “Plymouth doesn’t equip their cars with mountain goat feet.”

  “Jeepers, what kind of idiot would build a house up here?” Joseph looked around. “See, if I hadn’t been wearing the peanut suit I could have just hooked my cane through the chain, flipped the damn thing up and grabbed the stone, and been out one of the windows before anybody could yell. I wasn’t any too sanguine about running blind down all those steps, though. Muriel was pretty far gone in bliss, so I figured I could try a little stealthy theft instead. I pulled off a glove with my teeth and got my finger and thumb on the catch, and managed to unfasten it.

  “But right then somebody put on “The
Charleston,” and what did Muriel do but sit up squealing about how that’s her favorite dance. She grabbed Larry by the hand and jumped out on the dance floor. I scrambled to my feet and—look out! Jesus, Lewis, you want to end up at the bottom of a cliff?”

  “I don’t think I can turn around here,” said Lewis, gazing out into the black ravine that yawned before the Plymouth’s front bumper.

  “Come on, then,” said Joseph, getting out of the car. Lewis set the hand brake and got out too. “Hey hup ho—”

  Between them the two immortals lifted the car and walked in a half-circle. “So I jumped over the back of the couch,” Joseph continued, “just in time to see the Tavernier Violet go bouncing off Muriel’s chest onto the dance floor. She didn’t notice it. I Charlestoned my way out into the madding throng, hoping to do a quick dip and grab it, but Larry (who didn’t notice it’d fallen either) kicked it, in a burst of terpsichorean frenzy, and it went skating across the floor, trailing its chain, ping ping ping, in a series of bank shots off mortal feet, and ended up right under the nose of Mr. Arnaud Fletcher, who was dressed like Valentino in The Sheik, by the way.”

  “Just hold it there a moment, won’t you?” Lewis climbed back in the car and shifted gears.

  “Sure.” Joseph held the car in place with one hand, then gave it a push as Lewis stepped on the gas. The car teetered for a moment and then climbed effortfully toward a still-narrower and more steep trail, with Joseph plodding alongside. “Where was I? So Arnaud Fletcher looked down, saw the rock at his feet. He stooped on it like a duck on a june bug, whammo, and stashed it in his robes. He exited the party, I exited in hot pursuit, slightly delayed because my big friend the Saint Bernard noticed me again and wanted to pitch some woo. By the time I found Fido another drink and got out the door, the damn mortal was at the bottom of the stairs and heading for his car.”

  “Er—” Lewis trod on the brake and leaned out the window. “I can’t get up this goat path, I’m afraid. But I think we’ve found the other party, Joseph.”

  “What? Oh.” Joseph looked up the trail. The moonlight was glinting off a number of automobiles, parked somewhat precariously on the side of the precipice. Beyond them rose something that looked remarkably like the dome of a mosque.