The Gold Diggers (21 page)

Hey proposed, driving him back to Hollywood, that he set aside one day a week. Mr. Varda, he said, would like to use him again. Did they have a number where they could reach him? No. Sam didn't have a phone back then because he didn't want his whole name on file with the phone company, where someone could trace him. Sam was all the name he had any use for. He tried to get gritty with Hey—“You could sure use a little, couldn't you? Doesn't it give you blue balls to watch a naked guy all afternoon?”—to loosen him up and get some information. They didn't hate each other, yet. Sam could talk smut to him and keep it easy and funny. Hey thought it was cute, or he thought it didn't matter, since a hustler's career lasted about as long as a ballet dancer's, and people who did it didn't grow up till afterwards. So at the beginning they played, driving back and forth in the car, and Hey talked bitchy and teased him, too. But he stayed tight with the information. To him, Rusty Varda was an artist, even if they'd taken the film out of his camera. The nude scene at Crook House was a movie. It couldn't be put into words.

But Sam began to figure it out himself, even without Hey's help. After all, he did the very same thing, pool and lunch, every Friday afternoon for five months—Friday perfect because it gave his cock a rest before the weekend, when it went into fourth gear. Varda gave him a few more directions—slow down his walk to the table, don't look at Hey—but after a while Sam was on his own. The scene had something to do with a moment from Varda's own life, Sam decided as he floated on his back or buttered his roll, and Sam was some man who'd obsessed him once. Someone he'd lost.

Then, a month or two into it, he changed his mind and thought instead he was meant to be Varda himself, and the scene at the pool was a picture postcard of LA success. He knew by then the bare bones of Varda's film career. The immigrant juggler who landed on his feet had bought a whole mountain of his own and built a villa. For forty or fifty years, he held his wide-screen perch above the race of the city, but his fullest memory of it all must have been the seven-course days of his youth. So he made this minor little scene of himself, Sam thought, a couple of hours a lifetime ago when nothing particular happened. It was just the kind of time Sam would have plucked out of his own life. He came in the end to play it like Shakespeare, though of course without the words, which he didn't really miss. After all, he did a lot of things as if in a silent movie—streetwalks and sex and drives in his car—so he had a technique to fall back on.

Sam didn't get tired of the show, but Varda became so still in his chair, he seemed half the time to be in transit between planets. No direction in weeks. No chitchat. When the menu began to repeat, Sam felt as if he'd used up this production—the play was too good for it. Five minutes before the end, one Friday in November, he called across to Varda as he spooned up his dessert. Hey was waiting with a tray of iced coffee just outside the door to the dining room. Sam felt it was mostly himself still happening here, still
playing
it.

“Mr. Varda, do you ever look at your pictures?”

To look at him, Varda had to stop looking off. There was a pause in which they waited for the stars to draw back into the planetarium.

“No,” he said, “I hardly remember them.” But it wasn't modest of him to say so, and he wasn't pleading the special case of old age. He had no wish to disparage them, he seemed to say, but he himself had gone on long ago. Sam knew two things about Frances Dean—he'd found them out, from asking around in bars—she was a pinup Cinderella, and she went to pieces at Crook House, where they kept her half-asleep for years. The change in her was the reason he had left his films behind, because it was like staring at a dead child to see her on the screen. Sam was guessing. “Where have
you
seen them?” Varda asked, glad to talk about it if Sam cared so much.

“No, I never go to the movies. I can't sit still.” He put down his spoon, though he hadn't had half enough raspberry mousse, because he had a prince's manners when he was talking about himself. “I only meant—what do you do all day? Not including Friday.”

“I juggle,” Varda said, and though Sam knew it was an evasion, that he didn't do anything, the wand of the weather vane had moved, and the wind was from another quarter. How about a performance then? Sam asked politely, but as if to point out that he'd done enough performing himself and had to be spelled. Varda grinned, called for his box of props, and made his way to the pool. He was wearing his ice cream whites.

Hey could date his hostility to the moment he set down the iced coffee on a wrought-iron bench and went across the terrace to Frances Dean's room, to the walk-in closet where the juggling things were stored. He never stopped feeling threatened after that. Varda did a warm-up with three green balls, then Hey threw him the fourth, and they made a perfect circle in the air. Then one ball leapt about as he tapped it with his shoulder. He did rings next, seven or eight flipped up at once, so that in profile it looked like a team of bicycles. Anyone would have thought, watching him light three candles, about to spin and toss them like sticks and not snuff a single flame—you would have thought he was seducing Sam. But it was the other way around. Sam urged him on, and when Sam laughed to see five pieces of fruit go up in a circle and make a wreath revolving in the air, the laugh brought the morning glories open. He was standing, still naked, in front of Varda, cheering him on. Varda looked through the juggle he was doing as if it were a curtain. And Hey brought the last tray in and poured the iced coffee in the sink.

Well, before that he went to his room and got his Brownie Hawkeye. He stood in the dining room window, which was shaded by a tree, and snapped a half-dozen shots of the scene at the pool. Collecting evidence. He'd had enough of ballet to know the thunder and lightning were gathering force offstage. The two men outside faced each other through a circus act, hardly like two men at all. To Hey they were Beauty and Beast, princess and frog, and he knew which was which. Some great catastrophe followed on the heels of their coming together. Hey remembered the night Frances Dean took a razor to herself. Remembered it from the pictures in the papers, long ago when he was young and lived in South America. Crook House had a well of violence down in the core, he'd felt it the day he walked in, and it shot to the surface whenever it had to. But whatever was tremoring now, Hey planned to survive and not get arrested for it. He went back to his room and hid his camera under a pile of shirts. Then changed his mind, took the film out, and went and put it in the parrot's cage deep in the sawdust. What else could he do? There was no point trying to stop it. This boy had come to take everything.

And the boy didn't even know it himself. Nothing irrevocable ever happened to him, after all. Two or three Fridays later, they started spending an hour in the steam after Sam did his scene, Varda wrapped in towels head to foot, and then an hour in bed. Sam lay there and let it happen and didn't care. He knew whatever it was would come, and he was right. Because Varda said one day as he stroked Sam's skin, out of who knew what set of erotic associations—“There's a treasure buried in Crook House.” It was as if Sam had known it already and only needed reminding. And week after week he begged for more from Rusty Varda. But as it was the one thing he had to be coquettish about, Varda stretched the story out and rambled on about Frances Dean. Still, in another month Sam might have learned the secret of the mirrored door. Bad luck for him, it ended before he even knew what the treasure was.

It was so much on the tip of his tongue that he knew, ten years later, that Rita had a piece of it in her Samsonite. What and where—that is what he waited ten years to go after, and he was like a man serving time. As for the thing going wrong when he was right on the brink of it, there was no surprise in that. Rusty Varda died in his arms, of course. One moment holding on to Sam for dear life, the next a bag of puppet's bones. And Sam got dressed and ran downstairs. Then crept back up and waited till it was the same time as usual. He was no use to Varda now. Varda wouldn't want him in trouble. He went to the kitchen to get Hey, said he was ready, and Hey looked over his shoulder from the parrot's cage and guessed, just like that. He pressed the intercom to Varda's room and politely said his name. He looked like he had enough evidence to hang.

Sam ran out. He crashed downhill through the kitchen garden and landed in the yard of the next house below. No one screamed, though a servant here and there came to the window and stared until he'd passed on through. It didn't matter, not this one any more than Ben, as long as he didn't stop. When he got home, off a bus up Sunset, he decided not to bother with his apartment. It wasn't that he was out of time. As he climbed into the MG, he knew he could have gone up and packed. He had left almost three hundred in cash leafed in the pages of a Gideon Bible. And a set of barbells and a tape-deck. But what the hell. He had a hundred in his pocket from Hey, delivered as usual in advance, in an envelope. The earring was where it had always been, in the glove compartment. Always left behind whenever the car was rifled, because nobody wanted just one. He drove east, toward New York. And didn't return for two and a half years, by which time he had no past. As far as anyone knew, his second time in LA was his first. He might never have come back at all, except there was a treasure in his head.

6

Peter walked out to the pool, stark naked. Rita and Nick, laughing like kids, were bent over something on the table at the far end. Peter struck a meditative pose, as if he were getting his wind in rhythm before throwing himself into a game, tennis or track and field.

“Didn't anybody hear me?” he asked a little wearily. They looked up as if he'd found them making love. They moved in front of the table like curtains and stood together side by side, so he wouldn't see.

“What are you doing up?” Nick wanted to know.

“I got up to find out why no one was paying attention to me. I bet I hollered for ten minutes.”

“I don't see how that's possible, Pete,” Rita said sensibly, looking up to their bedroom window as if to measure the distance. “We were right here.”

“You will both be glad to know,” he said—and he looked as if he'd decided he'd rather not be naked now, but there were things he'd come downstairs to say, and he'd say them first—“I'm getting up for good. I've put away my hot water bottle and my flexible straw. I want to have a party.”

There was a slash of red on his right forearm, inside it the purple lines where he'd slit to get at the poison. It hurt, but not a lot.

“When?” said Nick.

“Tomorrow night.” It was Saturday morning, ten after ten.

“Who do you plan to invite who won't have plans? Hey and Rita and me?”

“Among others. It's a business party, to say that I'm back in business. We'll ask all my clients. If they've made other plans, well that's all right. That's up to them.” It wasn't all right at all. Peter smiled, because he knew he was setting up a crazy test. At least, the smile went on to say, he wasn't testing Rita and Nick. “I want it very simple. Quiche and salad and mousse.”

“Are you going to order it all in?” Nick said, pursuing a line of questioning, as if to say their power had limits. Who took Sunday orders Saturday morning?

“I did already. On Wednesday.”

“So really what you're doing is just inviting us,” Rita said, glad to get it straight, relieved of the responsibility. She turned around to the table, like a figure in a clock going back in. She'd got so she paid no attention when the two of them crossed swords.

“Well, no. We all have to work, because I want to bring a lot of things up from the shop. Look, let me go get dressed, and then I'll explain.”

He turned and strode through the dining room door, but it seemed hardly necessary now, because he'd been talking as if he were fully clothed. He didn't take poses in order to draw them out. Enough was enough. But Rita called “Pete!” and when he came back to the door expectantly, she drifted across the terrace with a package held out in front of her. About the size of a book, done up in foil and black velvet ribbon.

“This is a get-off-your-ass present from Nick and me,” she said. “But I guess it's belated. I don't know what Nick and I are going to do with ourselves, if you're telling the truth. Take it anyway. You may have a relapse.”

“You can all laugh,” Peter said, “but you know, five hundred people die of snakebite every year. Five hundred are
reported
. Who knows how many just shrivel up and die in the bushes.”

He wasn't paying any attention to what he said. Opening a present was his favorite ceremony in the world. He had the loot to prove it, because his friends were glad to know someone who cared so much. He sat down on the doorsill and put it in front of him on the shady terrace floor. He pulled the bow apart as if it were a magic trick. “I hope it's something to wear,” he said dryly, to make a joke about his body, since he knew it had to be a thing. Needless to say, his friends found him less and less easy to please. He was always touched by the thought, but it could be a burden on an end table. It was safest to buy him something fleeting, like Dom Perignon. From Rita, though, he'd always won a prize, because a different order of intuitions came into play when she was giving gifts. She had sent him things in the past that took their places on tables and held firm until the tables wore out from under them. “Why didn't you think of getting me something like
that
?” he'd wanted to say to other people when the tissue stopped flying, pointing across the room at Rita's Haitian mask or Rita's Ethiopian basket.

Today she'd given him a frame for a photograph, meant to sit on a desk. It was gold to begin with, scrolled and etched with a jungle of fruity vines. The berries were pearls and polished pieces of nephrite. At the top, like a pediment on a Greek temple, was a pale blue enamel ground around a large yellow diamond, shining like the sun on the vines below. The center space, for the picture, was empty, just a pad or red damask under glass, but it looked like a photograph would fade or burst into flame if you tried to mount it there. And on the back, signed in Russian: C. FABERGÉ 1912.