Authors: Ian R. MacLeod
She nodded. “It was a kind of signal—that was the cleverest thing about how it was all done. The deaths, you see, were mostly suicides. But if you didn’t kill yourself and put an end to things neatly, it wasn’t just you that died, but everything that was precious to you was destroyed as well. It happened to Doctor Theobold. He and his family died… in a terrible way. It’s happened to many others. I used to keep up some contact with one or two others. April, for example. And Penny. But it’s been years… I’ve been too afraid.”
“So this is why you’re up here? You thought that
I
…? Last night… ?”
“When you turn up out of nowhere and mention Thrasis, what else was I to think? Look, Clark, I’ve honestly got no idea of how these people really got killed, or why they killed themselves. All I know is that they are dead.”
Clark gazed out at the city. Everything about it seemed faint, distant. With or without these glasses, he wondered if Los Angeles would ever seem real to him again. “And all that guff about the Bechmeir field?”
“Just another way of covering up for Thrasis. That, and a marketing ploy. Lars Bechmeir is nothing more than a way of selling a product. He’s the Quaker Oats man made flesh. Or was, anyway. And look at how he lost his wife… So there you are, Clark.
This
is what you’ve blundered into. And, if you didn’t know enough before to get yourself killed, you do now.”
“Peg—this old friend of yours. This Doctor Losovic. I’m sorry, but I think she’s vanished as well. It might be nothing…”
She blinked slowly but said nothing. If this was a feelie, Clark thought, and Peg was any decent kind of actress, she’d be crying by now. But her eyes were as dry and glassy as the lens of an iconoscope.
“The thing is,” he said, “that everything you’ve told me makes it clear that you can’t let this go on. We have to blow the whole thing open. It’s the only way.” He thought of
Star Talk
. He thought of Barbara’s busy little press. “I don’t care what the hell happens. But from here on in I’m going to give it the good old college try.”
“Then you haven’t been listening to what I’ve told you at all.” Her voice was a lost monotone. “You’re going to do something stupid. I know you, Clark.”
“Since when has that been news?”
Shade seemed to have fallen over them. Glancing back, he saw that the sign now lay between them and the sun.
“Look, Peg. What are you going to do? You’re not going to—”
“No. I won’t do
that
. Maybe I was never brave enough. I think I’ll just sit up here a while longer. It’s not such a bad spot. From here you can see that the city has an ending—that it doesn’t just go on and on and on. Then I’ll wander back down. Call a cab, check with Mina about any new scripts that are in, go back home and take an early night. You know what it’s like. I’ve got a dawn call for a readthrough because the director and the writer can’t agree about a comma. And if anything else happens, if anyone comes…” A dusty wind stirred around them. She gave a shivering shrug. “It’s only what I deserve. Now, will you let me alone… ?”
He wanted to tell her no. Wanted to tell her how good things had once been and could be again. How the dream wasn’t all lost and dead. Wanted to tell her a whole lot of things. But instead, he simply got up and headed off down the slope.
H
E DROVE BACK INTO LOS ANGELES
, parked the Delahaye, got out, dodged the 5th Avenue traffic and took the County Library steps at a run. It was coming up to two o-clock. He’d been in this library several times when he was checking up on cases. Dust made pillars of the sunlight. Huge friezes told the story of the city as if all of it—the Spaniards and the slaughtered Indians and the citrus farmers and the chanting monks—had all been leading up to some perfect moment. But there was a reek of incontinent bodies amid the tall avenues of shelves.
He looked quickly for Barbara. First in the main reading room. Then, in increasing alarm, he tried the smaller alcoves. Nothing but snoring hobos. He asked a passing woman to check the ladies’ washroom, then went back along the way he’d come, telling himself to stay calm. But what had made him think that a place this public would be safe, even before everything that Peg had told him? He pushed through doors into private offices. He ran stairs. Then, bursting through swing doors marked Map Room, he found her sitting alone and calm-as-you-like at the big center table.
“Hey Clark, where have you been? You look as if…”
He drew up a chair and sat there panting. He could have used a cigarette. “Just saw some people. Like I said.”
“Don’t tell me you’re protecting your sources?”
“It isn’t like that, but… Well, I’ve got a pretty clear idea now about this thing called Thrasis. It’s—”
“I know, Clark. It’s a place. It’s out in the desert.”
All around her along the map room walls were wide, thin-drawed cabinets and racks of what might have been holes in a pigeon coop, only they were stuffed with rolls of paper.
“It was obvious, really,” she said. “I remembered that Dan had a County Library ticket—stands to reason, he’s a writer, and he’d need to do research. I work here quite a bit myself, so I just tried asking my old friend Max at the main counter. Not that he remembered Dan’s name, but he recognized the description. And he took me in here. It’s in the map room log that Daniel Lamotte was in here Tuesday and Wednesday last week. I was even able to find out what maps he’d been looking at… and here they are…”
A wrinkled sea of yellowed sheets covered the table. They gave off gritty crackles. Many had been rolled and folded so often that they had fallen apart. All were so aged it was hard to tell where the stains gave out and the real makings began.
“They show bits of the Mojave, the high desert, and were mostly done by prospectors and wildcatters last century. No one’s ever got round to cataloguing them properly, and they don’t make much sense. They weren’t meant to. See, a map you’d marked out to show where the mineral seam or an oil seep that you’d discovered was—that was valuable information, and you sure as hell didn’t want anyone else to work it out. So it stands to reason that these maps aren’t coherent or accurate. They’re in code, mirror-written, out of scale. They were
meant
to confuse—or possibly even lead competitors to their deaths. But it’s right here—I mean Thrasis—on some of them anyway. Look…”
She dragged over a small square that looked to have flaked apart from a far larger map. The old paper had a gritty, glittery feel, and was discolored to dark brown in one corner with what might have been ancient blood. The writing was spidery and dense, and maybe his sight wasn’t as good as hers, because Barbara had to show him where the word was. But, once you saw it blocked there in shaky print, there was no doubting.
THRASIS.
And there it was again, scrawled in a different hand on the corner of another map, which had been drawn on the back of a poster for some quack medical cure.
“Thrasis isn’t on any of the more modern surveys or atlases. But the State surveyors are only concerned with proper geological features. Some abandoned mining settlement would probably be ignored. There are dozens of places like that up in the high desert, or more likely hundreds, and these maps are scrappy things…”
“Like a jigsaw.”
“Or several jigsaws with the pieces mixed. But Thrasis
is
somewhere real, Clark. It’s a place that you can narrow down pretty accurately to a set of map coordinates and then get into a car and drive out to. Dan must have realized that as well. So what he did when he’d finished in this map room was pretty straightforward.” She felt down in the bag beside her feet and produced the receipt for RTS Taxis. “I’ve been wondering about this since I first saw it. I couldn’t understand why on earth anyone would pay a taxi firm more than fourteen dollars for one journey. But it’s for Thursday June 20th, just over a week ago—the day after Dan finished looking at these maps. The Delahaye was up at Erewhon, and maybe he was getting wary of April by then, so he simply called a cab. That’s probably the day he gets that gun, as well. And Friday’s when he sees April at Edna’s Eats to tell her what he’s found. Although she knows most of it already because she was involved in it herself. And that’s why she’s afraid.”
“And then he vanishes.”
“Exactly. Just like everyone else who’s ever got near the truth.”
She took him to the main reading room and unfolded heavy volumes of bound newspapers.
There was a financier called Hilton Edwards, who’d been killed in a hit-and-run on Sunset in 1933. There was Sol Hayden, a civil engineer who’d won a Distinguished Service Medal in the Great War and worked for many years in LA, but had become a hermit and somehow contrived to starve himself to death in a fishing shack up on the Bay of Funday in Canada in 1935. And there was Ralph Kilbrack, whose body was found in a hotel room in Tijuana only last year.
PART TIME ACTOR AND LIMO DRIVER FOUND SKINNED ALIVE IN MYSTERY MEXICO KILLING
was the lurid headline in the
LA Times
. And the only thing these people had in common apart from being dead was that they’d attended the premiere of the first ever feelie.
“Of the people on the guestlist, it looks like at least eighteen are dead. And several others are missing.” She tapped her fingers on the table and smiled at him. “But it’s your turn now, Clark. You can tell me whatever you like about where you’ve been and who you’ve seen, but it’s obvious that it has something to do with a name recognized on that guestlist. Used to be someone yourself, didn’t you? Or nearly. Mr Clark Gable of the talking silver screen. Hollywood’s a small enough village, and it was even smaller then. So the chances are you knew at least some of those people. And, being who you are, I also reckon that the ones you knew best would be young and pretty and female… And wasn’t Peg Entwistle there last night at Herbert Kisberg’s? And isn’t she on that list?” She was still smiling. “Am I warm, Clark?” She tapped her fingers again. “Am I close?”
She was clever; there was no doubt about it. But what creeped him the most was how she was still treating all of this like some kind of parlor game.
He told her what he now knew about Thrasis. About the work that had gone on there. About the buildings, which had surely been out in that place in the desert which she had shown him, although they had most likely been razed. He even told her about Peg, and her story of Wilfred Bird and that sand-filled envelope, which was the exact same message which April Lamotte had received. Shut up or die. In fact, kill yourself anyway, seeing as you’ve blown things already. That, or be killed along with all that you hold precious in some worse and far more lingering way.
“So Peg Entwistle’s pretty frail? This is a side to her that the press have never got wind of.”
“Or if they have, they showed some compassion and kept it quiet.”
“You really think
that
?”
He had to shake his head. “But I don’t want her any more involved in this than she is already, Barbara. She’s terribly spooked.”
“Spooked seems to come with territory, doesn’t it? I mean, no wonder April tried to fake Dan’s suicide when she realized what he was on to with that script of his…” She snapped her fingers loud enough for some of the reading room’s other occupants to look over. “Of
course
—and she was heading up toward that pine lodge where Dan was right before she stopped, or got stopped. From there and over the mountains, and you’re right in the desert, aren’t you? Leave a car out there with one of those suicide notes she’d been working on, and no-one would even expect to find a body. And those who needed to would understand that she’d chosen to walk off into the Mojave because of Thrasis. It’s like a signal—I give up, I submit. After all, she had supposedly just lost her husband. And from there, they could both simply vanish and start a new life. It’s not a bad plan is it, when you look at it that way?”
“Other than the part that would have left me dead.”
“But when you
didn’t
die, Clark—when you managed to get out of that car and she didn’t get the message from the police that she’d been expecting, she panicked and headed up to the lodge anyway. She was probably just going to get Dan and run the hell for it. Only she got waylaid and died at that overlook. And that suicide, the way it was done, was also a kind of signal. And whoever did that probably also saw to Dan as well. It all makes perfect sense.”
He could have laughed. Had it been funny. “It would hardly stand up in court.”
“But it would look pretty good on the front page of a newspaper.”
“The Bechmeir Trust’d sue the hell out of you.”
“Let them. Once the cat’s out of the bag and running around knocking over all the chinaware and spilling the milk and the horse is out of the stable, there’s not much anyone can do to shove it all back in there.”
“I guess.”
“But you’re right. There are holes everywhere and a lot of hearsay sources you don’t want me to credit even if we could get them to speak out. We still need to do all we can to get more evidence before I go to print. Like, for example, if we could show exactly where Thrasis was, and then prove that Dan went out there. Then there’s that doctor woman. You’re saying she used to know both Peg and April. And she’s got this job in the Bechmeir Trust, and now she’s vanished, and none of this can be a coincidence. If we could find out what’s happened to her. Maybe talk to her. Lay things out and tell her that she’s a crucial witness.”
“If she’s alive.”
“I suppose that’s a tall order. She still isn’t showing at her office, Clark. I rang again from the public phone in here. But I was right when I said we should have looked up her home address in the phone booth. She lives in Edendale.”
“You’ve tried calling?”
“Guess what? There’s no answer. So? What do we do?”
T
HEY AGREED THAT BARBARA
would contact RTS Taxis, which according to their telephone listing had a depot down in his old stamping ground of what had once been the MGM studios, whilst he went to try to find out what had really happened to Doctor Penny Losovic. This time, he took the gun.