IT WAS FULLY NIGHT NOW, and the waiting Delahaye’s engine was already running, and the inky blue sky shone in rivulets along its long cream flanks. Clark took off the tortoiseshell glasses and gave them a wipe with his DL monogrammed handkerchief as if to get rid of some kind of blurriness. But what he felt was clear-headed. Anyone would, having glimpsed the size of that bill.
“Why don’t you drive?” Less tearful now, April Lamotte let go of his arm. “Like I said, Dan, it’s your car.”
The pull of the engine. The way the suspension rode. He was doing fifty just on the curving driveway out of Chateau Bansar.
“Which way?”
“No hurry. Your car’s down by Los Felice isn’t it, so why not try Mulholland? We can drive up through the mountains and cut down through Ventura.” She laid her hand over his on the gearstick as they waited at the turn. “It’s the kind of night for a drive.”
The smog had blown away in a light wind from off the ocean. The city spilled below them like a box of glittering jewels.
He’d forgotten. He really had. He’d been living and working in this city—at least, the fringes of it—for all these years, and he’d been like someone asleep. Fairyland didn’t stop with those last views in the rearview of Chateau Bansar’s turrets. Up here, driving a car like this above Hollywood, you felt you were traveling pretty much as high and as far as it was possible to get in this world.
He re-found Cahuenga and lost most of the traffic by turning east along the wide detour of Mulholland Drive. The dials twitched. His hands turned easy on the wheel. The Delahaye took the switchtails like a salmon taking the rapids on its way to spawn.
Glimpses east across Cahuenga Ravine toward Griffith Park. That big sign. HOLLYWOODLAND. Grey in the darkness. There’d been talk all these last ten years of getting it demolished but it was still there. He eased the big car on. Nothing but darkness ahead of them now. Nothing but stars above. A couple of times, he caught headlights in the rear-view. He braked slightly, curious as to what kind of automobile it was that was managing to keep up. But the lights hung back.
“You like the Delahaye?”
“Yeah. Who wouldn’t? Mind if I take these things off now?” Without waiting for a response, he tucked the glasses into his top jacket pocket.
“You sure as hell don’t drive like Dan.” “How does he drive?”
“Like a writer. The only risks he takes are in his head.”
He took another bend. The mountains were dark, the city a glittering sprawl.
“Let’s stop somewhere.” She’d slid closer to him. Her hand was on his thigh. “There’s an overlook. You see that turn ahead?”
He took it fast in a spew of dust. The tires rumbled to a halt just before the thin wooden fence that guarded the precipice.
“That’s better isn’t it?” She reached over him and turned off the engine and the lights. Silence fell. The city lay spread below them. He could smell summer thyme and Chanel Cuir de Russie and hot rubber. She didn’t pull back when he reached his arm around her shoulder and touched her hair.
The overlook was empty. Just them and the Delahaye and this night-lit city. Although, as his eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness, there looked to be the shape of some other car parked right off in a corner against the dusty edge of the land. But there were no lights, no movement. The only sound came from their breathing, and the cicadas, and the murmur of Los Angeles which rose up from the mountain-cupped bowl.
“I brought this.” Briefly, she pulled away from him to rummage in her purse. Something metallic glinted. He caught the tang of bourbon as she unscrewed the cap.
He chuckled. “I’d never had you down as the type.” She chuckled as well.
The bourbon was sweet and hard. He wiped his lips, swallowed back the oddly metallic after-tang, handed the flask back to her. She touched it to her lips, then gave it back. The cold metal still held the warm print of her hand.
“So,” Clark murmured as bourbon fizzed with Champagne in his blood. “What happens next?”
“Tonight? Or with me and Dan?”
He let the question slide. His fingers had been toying with April Lamotte’s hair. Now, they touched the jeweled lobe of her ear. Part of him was still doing its best to keep some detachment. She was, after all, a client, and he still hadn’t gotten that main check.
“This city isn’t good for any of us,” she said. ”It sucks us in. Look what it’s done to Dan.” She shifted slightly and laid her head across his shoulder. He breathed the scent of her hair. The flask was nearly empty and still in his hand. For its closeness, her body felt coiled and tense. “People, when they first came here from back east to make movies, they said it was because of the quality of the light. But what they didn’t talk about was the quality of the darkness. I mean whatever’s lurking underneath…”
He blinked. His eyes stung. He thought again of that sign they’d passed, and of all the things he’d done, and hadn’t done. April Lamotte was right about LA. He felt it as something huge and black and ravenous, pouring up toward him in a hissing roar.
She was still talking. “… so I reckoned that if we can get this new feelie finished, maybe it’ll be time for Dan and I to leave. I mean, he’s always said he just wants to write. And there are other, better, places you can write than LA. In fact, I can’t think of any worse…
“We could escape, we could cut our losses and shed the ghosts and live someplace else. And better, and cleaner, and more cheaply. Dan and I used to talk about re-locating to England. About writing real books there—proper novels that said something true. Of course, that’ll only work when the Germans have taken over, and Dan doesn’t like the Nazis much. So maybe we could try Argentina. It’s like this country was a hundred years ago when everything was new and fresh. We could sell Erewhon and get a ranch. He could write and I could… You okay?”
He nodded, swallowed. He’d heard people talk about escaping this city too many times before. It was as big a dream as the one which brought them here in the first place. Bigger, if anything, because it never came true. The dry roaring in his ears wouldn’t go away. “Think so.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have given you that flask.” She pried it from his hand. “I can drive back. There’s no hurry, is there?”
The dim outlines of the car’s interior—the dials, the wood, the chrome, the switches, her stockinged legs, the leather bench—all seemed to blur. Then she reached forward across him toward the dashboard. Keys tinkled, the starter whirred, and the engine—a choir of pistons, a stroked tiger—resumed its easy purr. Then she fiddled with something else and a leather top slowly buzzed over them like a black wing, shutting out the stars.
“A little privacy,” she murmured in the humming warmth after the hood had completed its journey with a series of sharp clicks. “And it was getting cold.” He felt her fingers trace the buttons of his shirt. “For all the many things Dan’s been for me, he’s never been much of a husband in the physical sense…” The interior of the car was far darker now, but the closure of the top and the engine’s throb hadn’t shut off the hissing in his ears. He blinked again as her fingers found a space between the buttons. “You don’t wear an undershirt?” Her breath had quickened.
“Never have.”
Her burgundy suit was black now, and he saw the paleness of her flesh widen as she worked the top of it down from her shoulders and her arms. It was tailored in such a way that, underneath, she didn’t need to wear a bra.
She leaned around him. Almost straddling him now as she removed his glasses. Her scent came to him in a dizzy wave. “You sure you’re okay?“
Her breasts were full, and he longed to touch them, but the way she was sitting over him, and the dark weight of whatever else now seemed to be oppressing him, made it hard for him to move his arms. Her hands were on him, stroking the inner and outer sides of his suit jacket and down into his pants’ pockets, but with a purpose that didn’t feel entirely sexual. When her fingers went to his throat and touched him there as if to feel his pulse, he was reminded that she had once been a nurse.
“How are you feeling?”
He was vaguely aware that April Lamotte was sliding away from him and re-buttoning herself up. Of shifts and rattles as she collected things.
“You okay? Clark? Dan? Mr Gable? Can you hear me?”
He opened his mouth. His throat was filled with something dry and sandy that wouldn’t cough up. Her fingers touched his eyes. He tried to blink, bat her away, but his limbs seemed lost. He felt the rock of the springs, heard the door slam. Heard another door opening, closing. Decided that it was probably the trunk. The Delahaye’s vee eight engine was a warm, dull pulse like the pounding of his heart, which changed slightly as a dark oval, some kind of hose, was wedged into the corner of the window beside him.
There was movement. Footsteps. The indistinct sound of another car starting, a flash of headlights. Then, as he tried to claw himself toward consciousness and scrabbled for a key which wouldn’t budge, then window and door buttons which did nothing, he was only aware that he was inside a car, and that its motor was running, and that he was entirely alone.