***
Deal saw it all happen, though none of it seemed real: the big man clutching dumbly at the rod that had driven itself impossibly deep, its point protruding a foot out his back. He’d staggered past, out of balance, out of luck, his feet plowing drunkenly through the talus, spraying showers of loose rock, his hands clawing awkwardly at the iron bar that pierced his throat. His dazed glance locked momentarily on Deal’s, and then he was gone, hurtling on down the slope.
He went over backward, slammed against the side of the Lincoln. Deal thought he would slide off the wreckage, roll on over the edge of the cliff, but he didn’t. He stayed where he was, hands outflung against the side of the car, the point of the tire iron piercing the sheet metal of the Lincoln’s quarter panel, holding him fast like a specimen on a strange mounting board.
Deal saw the man’s pleading gaze come back to his, saw one huge hand reach out for help, felt his own hand start out in reflex. And that was when the car groaned again, a sound that might as easily have come from the big man pinned to its side, and went on over. First the car was gone, then the big man’s feet whipped skyward with a speed that seemed impossible, and everything disappeared.
There was a long moment of silence, a terrific sound of impact from below, and finally an explosion—straight from the gates of hell, Deal thought—as a gale of superheated air rushed past him into the cool morning sky.
Mahler was on his way across the wide brick courtyard of the compound,
headed toward the east wing, where they were scheduled to shoot some of the innocuous dean-in-the-president’s office material in the early hours. As Foxe, the booze-hound British cinematographer, had pointed out to him, at this time of day their actors would have a hard time working up a lather for the more physical stuff. They could get some of the bridge scenes out of the way, let the actors ease into a toot, by late afternoon they could break out the leather sheets again.
Mahler had listened to the man, nodded his okay. It had become apparent that he and Cross would more or less rely on Foxe, who’d made a career in this arena, to get them through the project, after all. And they wouldn’t be the first producer-director team to take credit for work the cameraman had actually done. Still, it usually worked the other way around: the director had his head down in a mound of coke or soaked in a drum of hootch, the inmates would have to run the show. In this case, Mahler believed himself to be the only clearheaded, sane person within rifle shot of the proceedings, and all he could really do was look on and try to act as if he knew what was important. He shook his head, took a deep draft of the clear desert air. He’d never thought sex could become so tedious, but that was a movie set for you. Clearly, making a movie could turn anything to dreck.
He heard a muffled explosion from somewhere in the hills behind him, nodded with satisfaction. Maybe it was blasting, one of the undying breed of wildcat miners, still combing the hills for the lost mother lode. Better yet, it would be Gabriel, wanting to be sure, taking out the two detectives from Florida with a case of dynamite this time.
He sighed, inured to the necessities by now. The important thing was to focus on where he was headed and to count his blessings that he had associates providing the necessary help. Imagine if there had been no old man, with his cadre of thugs to turn to. What would he have done? Bury the two detectives under a mountain of old scripts?
In any case, what needed to be done would be done. He had more important things to accomplish. He squared his shoulders, moved on across the courtyard. If he were lucky, the old man would prove to be disinterested in the morning schedule, they could get something accomplished without having to listen to a lecture on the superior values of a Chinese higher education.
He heard the sound of a truck engine then, noticed that the He-Men Film Services van was bouncing down the lane away from the compound toward the gates. Odd enough that even one of that crew might be headed off somewhere, since they were short of manpower as it was, but then he noticed another one of the brain-dead group in the passenger seat.
Maybe there’d been some equipment malfunction, and they were headed off to Palm Springs for repairs or replacement parts. But why send two of them? Furthermore, it being a two-hour round trip and likely to cause problems with the shooting schedule, why wouldn’t anyone have notified him? He picked up his pace toward the cloister doors on the other side of the courtyard.
He hurried through the entry, down the dimly lit hallway, increasingly concerned at the stillness that gripped this wing of the house. He’d been very explicit at the end of shooting the night before, and even Foxe had weighed in with the crew on the need to start promptly.
He covered the last few steps to the library entrance, where, he and Foxe had determined, the mouse-nibbled volumes on the shelves and neo-Inquisition decor would suggest a college president’s office closely enough for their purposes. His concern had built to anger by this time. He burst through the broad double doors of the library, ready to lay into the first of the slackers he encountered…then stopped short when he saw what had happened. The set that had been so carefully arranged the night before was in disarray, the “president’s” desk swept clean, its banker’s lamp toppled over, papers and books littering the floor. The rented camera scaffolding was in a shambles, and all of the lighting equipment that the four He-Men had labored on positioning until well past midnight had vanished. He heard a sound and turned to see Foxe bent over one of his silver camera cases, grunting with effort as he wrestled something into place. The cinematographer snapped the case closed, then stood, his face crimson from strain. When he saw Mahler, his expression darkened another, impossible shade.
“Fuck you,” Foxe said. His accent seemed to give the phrase an added, chilling force.
Mahler stared back at him, dumbfounded. “Foxe, what is this?” he managed, sweeping his arm about the room. It occurred to Mahler that a moment ago he was to be the one expressing his outrage, but the best he could now seemed like a whimper.
“Just fuck you altogether,” Foxe said, brushing past him toward the door. The heavy case cracked into Mahler’s knee, and he yelped with pain.
Foxe seemed not to notice. He paused at the archway and turned to stab a menacing finger back at Mahler, who was bent over, holding his knee. “You pricks want to pull the plug, it’s okay with me,” Foxe said, his face seeming to glow now, “but I turned down two jobs to truck out into the middle of nowhere for you, Mahler. I’d better see the rest of my money on schedule, or your fucking ass is going to be fucking grass.”
Mahler was gasping with pain. He tried to manage some response, but his mouth was still moving soundlessly as Foxe turned and disappeared through the doorway. After a moment, he limped to one of the casement windows, sat down heavily, rubbed his knee until feeling returned to his leg.
A bad dream, he was thinking. In a moment he was going to wake up and see that all this was nothing but the creation of a nocturnal gas bubble, he could stroll down to the real set, the meticulously arranged “Office of the President,” where the biggest problem would be coaching Cross’s wife through the delivery of her lines according to the generally agreed upon rules of English grammar.
But it wasn’t a dream, he knew. His knee throbbed and his stomach sloshed with acids that could surely eat through lead. What in God’s name had happened? He glanced out the window, down toward the lake, which still steamed placidly in the vast shadows of the mountains, then got another jolt: The seaplane was still tethered in place, all right, but the wardrobe and makeup RV that had been stationed near the dock had disappeared.
“The ship is sinking, Marvin,” that’s what the little voice inside was whispering, but he wasn’t going to listen. There was a reasonable explanation for what was happening. And an equally good reason why he’d been left out of the loop. He forced his gaze from the pile of litter that had been left by the dock, which was scuttling, piece by Styrofoam piece, into the reeds by the shoreline. The pain in his knee had subsided now. He thought he could make it back to the main house. He could catch Foxe before he got away…
“Augh…!” The cry escaped him involuntarily.
“Old man need to see you,” the wraithlike little man said. He’d appeared at Mahler’s side soundlessly once again, startling him so badly that he had to struggle to catch his breath.
“Right,” Mahler said, pushing himself up. “Tell him I’ll be right there.” He started to push himself past, but the little man was instantly in his path.
“Old man say
now
.”
Mahler met the little man’s gaze. “You going to get out of my way?” he said.
“Say to bring you,” the little man replied impassively.
Mahler considered things. The Chinese guy might have been 5'4", weighed possibly a hundred and thirty pounds. Mahler was 6'2" when he remembered to stand up straight, suck in the gut that had pushed him up to about 220. He still worked out with the free weights in the gym, played racquetball twice a week, jogged on the days he didn’t.
In the early sixties, a columnist had once written a story about Mahler punching out a noted leading man who’d hit on Rhonda Gardner at a party in the Hollywood Hills. The truth was that the guy, drunk as a lord, had taken a swing at Mahler, whom he’d overheard demeaning his sexual preferences. Rhonda had screamed, Mahler had ducked, and the leading man took himself through a sliding glass door with the force of his swing. Mahler, who had seen no need to correct the published accounts of the incident, had not had anything resembling a physical encounter since, but, given his frequent verbal pyrotechnics, he had enjoyed the reputation of being a brawler ever after. How could it hurt, he had reasoned. In tough negotiations, he’d perfected a glower that seemed to reach right back to that night in the Hills when he’d duked out the toughest cowboy in filmdom. It was not a tactic he used often, but the other brawlers in the business seemed to appreciate it: He just had to look like he might come unhinged, and as often as not, he’d win his point.
Apparently the Chinese guy had not read any of his press, however. He hadn’t moved, stared back through Mahler’s glower as if it didn’t exist.
“Okay,” Mahler said finally. “Where is he?”
“Come,” the Chinese guy said, and led him out the door.
***
“Mmmmm-mmmmmm,” the young man said, smoothing Paige’s hair back from her brow. “What happened to you anyway, darlin’?”
A nice young man from the country, she thought dreamily. Some odd accent, part hillbilly, part Deep South. It was beyond her to determine things like that, though. And it didn’t matter anyway, did it? She drifted along in her separate little dimension, caught occasional glimpses of that other world she’d once belonged to. But there was no possibility of bridging the gap that separated her from that world now, was there? She couldn’t speak, she couldn’t move. She could only stare out helplessly at what might cross the path of her vision, as if her eyes were windowpanes, her consciousness some ghost that had taken up residence behind them.
“Not many of us left,” the young man said. “Cutting and running. Everybody cutting and running.”
He sat on the edge of the bed beside her, stared off idly as he dipped his fingers into a big Ziploc bag he was holding. He brought his fingertips, now covered in some white powder, up to his nose, inhaled sharply. He sucked his fingertips clean, then turned back to her.
“The He-Men took off so quick they forgot their stash,” he said, holding up the bag for her to see. She had no idea who the he-men were, but there must have been a half pound of whatever powder was inside the bag he was holding, maybe more. Methedrine? Cocaine? She had no idea. Maybe the young man would like some of what Mahler was feeding her.
“You see this?” the nice young man said. He held the bag close to her eyes until she saw some kind of trademark printed in red against a white background: a tiger leaping out of the underbrush, fangs and claws bared at the watcher, Chinese hieroglyphics printed below.
“The best scag in the world,” the nice young man said. “China White. All packaged up like it was rice cakes or something.” He shook his head. “Makes what I used to bring up out of Mexico look like shit.” He shrugged. “It is shit, of course. All of it is, but I could live for a year off what this would bring me back in Austin.”
He dangled the bag again. “They were paying those He-Men in scag, you know that? Then the dummies took off and left it. Maybe they think it’s still in that little compartment in their truck, but all they’ve got is flour.” He shook his head. “Took me about a minute and a half to find it.” He grinned at her. “I had a lot of experience hiding dope, I have to say.”
He stared down at her for a bit. “You have a drug of choice, darlin’? Is that what you’re doing down here? That’s what they told me, but to believe anything those people told you, you’d have to be dumber than dirt.”
He sat quietly for a moment, staring off. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” he said. “I’m not a thief or anything.” He shrugged philosophically. “I’m the writer on this picture.”
He glanced back at her. “The fact is, the guy who hired me took off already and I’m just trying to make sure I come away with something to show for my trouble.” He reached into his shirt pocket, held up another, smaller bag. “Now this crank, I liberated it from the guy’s wife. It’s got a bit of an edge,” he said, “but you hit it with a little scag, it isn’t bad.” He dropped the smaller bag back into his pocket.
“I mean, it’s not like you want to go demanding things from those Chinese guys, I can tell you that.” He shook his head.
He gave her his smile again, an expression that was somewhere between a grimace and a dream state. “That’s why I wanted to look in on you, darlin’. Make sure everything was okay.” He surveyed her face again, shook his head. “Somebody gave you a pretty good lick, didn’t they? Mmmm-mmmm. Hit a woman all tied up. That’s about as low as it gets,” he said. He studied her again. “You look familiar to me, you know that? You ever been to Austin?”
She heard footsteps in the hallway outside then, and a startled look came over the nice young man’s face. She felt his weight disappear from her bed, heard scurrying noises, heard a door open and close somewhere. After a moment, the footsteps in the hallway paused and the door to her room swung open. She saw, standing in the doorway, the diminutive Chinese man who’d taken the phone from her in some previous time she could only vaguely remember. But she knew he was the one who’d hit her, who’d done whatever damage the nice young man from the country had seen. She felt a mixture of hatred and helplessness well up in her, then fade away almost as suddenly as it had come, as if even emotion were too difficult to muster.
The man glanced suspiciously about, as if he might have been drawn by the sounds of voices, then entered the room and crossed to her bed. She felt his hands moving about her body, and wondered for a moment what fresh indignities she was about to suffer. After a moment, however, she realized he was simply loosening the restraints that held her fast to the bed. In the next moments, and though she was sure she was very nearly the equal of the small man in size, she felt herself being lifted like a feather and draped over his narrow shoulder. She was being carried off, she thought, but she was no princess being rescued from her prison chamber. No problem figuring that much out. She could feel it in the way he held her. She was just a sack of goods being taken somewhere to dump.