IT ONLY TOOK TWO PHONE CALLS from a public booth. He’d imagined he would probably need a drive to Sunset Pier or Hermosa along the coast, and be gone for far longer than he’d told Barbara. But he only had to go a few blocks. Even in a place like LA, he barely needed to get in the Delahaye.
There was so much activity going on outside the Biltmore that he had to turn off from the main frontage and park along Hill Street on the far side of Pershing Square, then cross over past the statues and the sleeping winos in the little park; no flustering studio flunkies or concierges or car valets to greet him now, but when he looked up at the giant hotel’s three big towers he felt like he was tripping back into a world he’d briefly savored in his nearly-made-it days. But the world had moved on—California had anyway. Construction workers and lighting electricians were busy preparing the scene for tonight’s big bash at the Biltmore Bowl when Herbert Kisberg would declare himself as a man fit to become the nation’s first Liberty League president. Even as Clark watched, they were unrolling Stars and Stripes and Liberty League banners down the building’s sides. A number of NBC radio trucks were also parked outside, readying everything for the live feed on Star Talk. There was absolutely no fucking way, Clark decided once again, that he was going to succumb to Barbara’s suggestions that he reprise his performance as Daniel Lamotte with Wallis Beekins tonight.
The Clipper Bar was a basement affair, set around the side and down some steps. Although basement was hardly the word. The first thing which struck him was the place’s smooth chill. That, and the odd taste he was getting in the back of his mouth. Just air conditioning, but to him it felt like stepping into a feelie theater when the Bechmeir field generators were turned full on. The place had the look of a feelie as well. All gloss mahogany and deep pile rugs and recessed lights. Some black guy was playing tasteful piano music in the background, and the theme of the Clipper Bar, now his skin had stopped crawling and his eyes had grown more used to the dimness, was supposedly maritime. There were fishnets which had never seen a trawler hooked across the ceiling. There was a whole chandlery store of unused shipping brasswork screwed gleaming to the walls. And there was barely anyone here.
The sole figure who sat at the bar turned to look at him with sad brown eyes. He returned his attention to his drink as Clark drew up a stool.
“How they biting, skipper?”
The man shook his head. “They ain’t biting at all.” There was a near-full ashtray before him and he spoke without shifting his cigarette from the corner of his mouth.
“Another?”
“Yeah. Why not? You paying?”
As Clark opened out his billfold, he saw his old friend’s gaze focus through the smoke haze towards it. He wasn’t sure whether there was enough light in here for anyone to make out that he was using another man’s driver’s license and State ID.
The barman did them two fresh mint bourbons in the quick, efficient way that barmen in swish places like this always had. The taste of the cool, exquisite drink in the heavy shot glass hit Clark like another lost memory. The piano played on. “How long’s it been?” he asked.
The guy shrugged. “A couple of years. More… What made you find me now? I’m guessing from the way you’re dressed you ain’t looking for a pleasure cruise.”
“Not exactly, no. And I’m guessing from the way you’re dressed that you are?”
“Guess away.” Humphrey Bogart was wearing a striped seaman’s sweater. Beside him on the bar counter he’d placed a braided old captain’s cap. Up on the wall in the far corner, there was even a poster of him, standing on a pier with a boat behind. The lettering above said Bogey’s Tours.
“Aren’t you a bit far inland?”
“Not if you want to get the prime work. I’ve got a deal with the Biltmore concierge. Anyone with enough money fancies a spot of fresh air and fishing, they don’t expect to have to drive out to Playa del Rey to make a booking. They just ask him, and he sends them down here and I do the sea dog act and sell them a nice boat trip… Or they just come in for a drink, they get the same act.” He shook his head. “Most are sorts have got no idea how far they are from the coast here, anyway. The only kind of breeze they’re interested in is the one that comes out their own ass.”
“Right. So you’re the Ancient Mariner?”
Bogart looked at him as he ground out his cigarette. “And that makes you the visitor with the glittering eye. Although I’ve seen glitterier…”
Clark took out what was left of his pack of Lucky Strikes. When he offered one, Bogart shook his head. “I’ll smoke my own. Thought you used to roll yours.”
“I did. But I’ve—”
“Yeah. Changed. Like that suit, and that snazzy watch you’re wearing. Business taking photos of yourself screwing other men’s wives so they can sue the broads on grounds of adultery must be good.”
That was unfair. He’d only ever done that a couple of times. And the wives had been more than willing. But Clark let it pass. They talked then of people they’d known—friends and rivals. Some who’d just been starting to get used to the limousines and the easy fucks and the rooms which always had flower displays, and others who were starving in soup kitchen queues, when the feelies intervened. Women like Garbo, who’d been so big in the silents that she could barely walk down the street, and whom he’d once heard had high-tailed it back to wherever it was in Europe that she’d come from. Guys like Spencer Tracy, who was still scraping a living with walk-on character roles in B-feelies the last time Clark had heard, although that had been near-on five years ago. Pals, really. Proper mates. But fame, or the loss of it, or the realization that it would never be there, did funny things to friendship, like it did funny things to your head.
“Another drink?”
“Why not?”
Just sitting here, two anonymous middle-aged guys that no one would now give a second glance, it was still so easy to fall back into the old ways.
“It’s like,” Bogart said, pulling a face that showed the scar on his lip, “the whole thing we thought we had was blown apart by a bomb.”
“Yeah. A bomb… But can I ask you a question or two?”
“I’ve been waiting to find out why you’re here.” He held up his hands. “Whoever she is, Gable, I didn’t screw her.”
“Nothing like that. It’s just… Well, it’s about those times. Remember Hilly Feinstein?”
“Sure, I remember Hilly.”
“Know much about how he killed himself?”
“Well…” Bogart was watching him more closely now. “Only what I read in the papers. Hadn’t seen or heard of Hilly for a year or two by then. Guy was found in his office with his brains blown out. Simple as that.”
“Suicide?”
“Why not? Gun in his hand. Brains all over those weird paintings he liked on the walls and the rest of him more than filling up his chair the way Hilly did. It wasn’t like Hilly was your regular kind of guy, and that was a thing you could like about him or not. Only person sadder than an actor without any roles is a agent without any clients.”
“And before that—say, round about ’30, ’29—didn’t he have you on his books?”
“Are you gonna tell me what this is about?”
“Would if I knew. I’m sorry, Bogey, but this is something you’re going to have to take on trust.”
Bogart ground out his latest cigarette. The piano music was still playing. He took a slug of his drink. “Hilly did kinda represent me. Or he said he would. You remember what the guy was like. He’d talk the horn off a rhino, then grind it up and say it was fairy dust. All that kind of witch doctor stuff.”
“Do you remember anything about the premiere of the first feelie, that thing Hughes did called Broken Looking Glass?”
Bogart thought for a moment. Then he felt in his pants’ pocket. Clark was half hoping that he’d produce some vital new piece of evidence. All he came out with was another crumpled pack of Chesterfields, although the impossibly elegant way he lit one up and tossed the still-smoking match into the ashtray somehow reminded Clark of what a fine actor Humphrey Bogart was—or could have been if the world had turned out different.
“Not much, no. Although I do remember Hilly was pretty excited about it—so maybe that was another pie he had his fat little fingers in. Said how it would bury guys like Warner, Thalberg, D W Griffith…” Bogart chuckled. “But then, he also said he’d make me the next Lionel Barrymore. Well, he sure as fuck got that wrong didn’t he? But Hilly was Hilly. He believed his own bullshit better than anyone else—weird stuff about tarot cards and God knows what else. And that in the end was probably what did for him. With Hilly, nothing was simple. There was all this Svengali shit about auras and the circle of the something he was giving me. How some people cast a special shadow across all possible worlds. All kinds of nonsense.”
Clark, remembering that, took a while over his drink. “Can you tell me any more? I mean, what kind of work did Hilly get for you?”
“Way I remember it, barely any. I mean, kinda guy Hilly was, it was probably easier for him to find work for the ladies. You know, doing nude life classes, and those ridiculous tricks they used to pull at parties where they’d have a dozen girls jump out of a huge cake. That kinda stuff. And I’m guessing that’s just the, uh, top layer.”
“So nothing at all?”
“It’s hard to remember. I was on a few agents’ books back then—not that they knew that—and I was pretty desperate for work. If Hilly had asked me, there were probably days when I’d have jumped out of a frigging cake and shook my titties.”
They both laughed.
“You know what this sounds like, Gable?”
“What?”
“Like you’re angling for a bite from something big, deep and dangerous, and you don’t even know what it is.”
“You’re not far off.”
“Okay. And now you’re about to go, and I’m supposed to say—Oh, there is one thing now you mention it…”
“That’s about right, Bogey.”
“There is.”
“No kidding?”
“Christ knows what it has to do with anything, but yeah. Hilly was all the things you and I know about, and he had a finger in some pretty odd pies. That’s the only way I can figure why he was trying to persuade his clients to do construction.”
Clark nodded. Although he couldn’t see where this was leading, the idea of getting actors into building work wasn’t so odd. Many of them had come up the same way he had—through putting up sets. Give them a trowel or a hammer and they’d know what to do with it. And actors weren’t unionized. And they almost always needed the money.
“Hilly got me in and gave me all the usual this’ll help tide you over bullshit. But what it amounted to was hanging around on the corner of 3rd at five in the morning for a bus to take you to work your guts out in the desert. It was in, I’d say, oh, about the middle of ’29.”
“So… ?” Clark tried to keep his voice calm and easy. “Did you do it?”
Taking his time, Bogart chain-lit another cigarette. “I was never quite that desperate—not even in ‘29. But I knew a few guys who were. Remember Wilfred Bird—big guy, but bent as a three dollar note? He did a couple-a weeks. Frankie Smott. Then that creepy guy with the lisp that went away as soon as he was reading lines. Him as well. A few others. I saw them around that time. You know how it was. And they were saying they were putting up buildings and pouring concrete in this nowhere place, and no one would tell them shit. Not so much that’s unusual there, maybe. But they kept saying it didn’t feel right. Frankie especially.”
“Didn’t Frankie… ?”
“Yeah. Killed himself just a year or two after. Jumped right in front of an express train. Anyway, by the time they’d scraped up what was left of him, there wasn’t else you could tell. Wilfred Bird didn’t last much longer, either. Believe it was supposed to be a heart attack. A stroke. Some kind of embolism. Hard to say.”
“You mean, he was just found dead?”
“That’s the way it was told. Found dead in the gutter and gazing up at the stars just the way a whole bunch of others have been found in this city over the years, and no one was that surprised to hear that Wilfred of all people had gone that way. Guy got himself in a real bad state. Rang me up a couple times close to what turned out to be the end spouting all the dumbest kinds of Shinola. Stuff about how he knew something and he couldn’t say what it was but he was scared as hell and if he did let it out there’d be people after him and he’d be dead.” Bogart exhaled. “And then of course he was dead. But he’d been drinking. Maybe doing some other stuff as well. And we weren’t exactly bosom pals—like you can imagine, Wilfred had his own set. And you can’t start believing the things people tell you in LA. So I’m not saying there was a link with anything that Hilly had Wilfred doing. At least, I wasn’t saying that ’til just now when I saw that look on your face.”
“This thing—this construction project out in the desert? Any idea where it was?”
“None at all. I don’t think the guys ever knew themselves. I remember Frankie saying the windows on the bus were so dirty they couldn’t even see out.”
“Did anyone ever mention a name?”
“What kind of a name?”
“Thrasis… Something like that.”
Bogart frowned. “You should stick to dirty bedsheets, Gable. An’ I’ll stick to letting rich men play sailor on my boat.”
“But that word… ?”
“It could have been… Like I say, the last time I heard from Wilfred he wasn’t exactly… Thrasis? It’s got a weird sound… It’s like—I dunno.”
Clark suppressed a shiver. He still hadn’t got used to this air conditioning, and the pianist was playing too loose and loud, the way pianists did when they knew no one was listening.
Bogart shook his head. “Back in the times, eh, Gable?”
“Yeah.” They clinked glasses. “Back in the times.”
“Only person I ever heard did any good out of knowing Hilly was Peg Entwistle. And look how good she did. So maybe that counts for all the rest of us. I mean, in the bigger picture.”
“Yeah. The bigger picture.”
They laughed, and clinked glasses again.
“Remember, Gable, that little guy Otto? Used to live next door to Peg for a while, said he was a trained classical actor and had done all the big roles in Shakespeare yet never got a single sniff of work in this town about three years. All he ever got was someone punched him in the face so bad that the last time I saw him he was all bandaged up like the invisible man.”
“Well.” Clark knocked back the last of his drink. The cubes had melted and the bourbon was almost warm, but it felt like something chill and sleek as the shadows at the back of this bar had crept up behind him and was playing its fingers down his ribs. “Guess we’re all invisible now.”
“You fancy another?”
“Better be going.”
“You’re wrong, by the way.”
“About what?”
“Whatever it is you’re chasing, it’ll never make any sense. Nothing ever does. You know that, don’t you?”
“I guess I do.” Clark smiled at his old friend. “And now I know where you are, Capt’n. You’re either here or up on that poster.”
“Sure. I’ll take you out, bring some bottles, we can fish for bluefin. It’ll be like the old days but without the women. Just you make sure the bluefin aren’t fishing for you.”
Clark stood up, and they clasped hands.
He heard Humphrey Bogart shout at the pianist, “Hey, Sam, will you clam up that racket?” as he left the Clipper Bar and climbed back out into the warm city.