Bad Dreams Page 7

  She threw the tongs at the barman, and picked up a heavy metal and leather chair. The barman dodged the tongs, but did not try to come out and get her. The weight of the chair felt good.

  Some of the businessmen were applauding, and calling for more. The blond was diverted from his ladylove's boot, and looking up at Anne, imploring with his watering eyes.

  Everyone was staying out of the reach of Anne's chair. She jabbed it in the air a couple of times, like a lion-tamer. People cringed.

  Anne felt the need to hit Eric with the chair. She brought it down on him with a log-chopping swing. He grunted and held his head, still trying to struggle out of the hood.

  She threw the chair aside, and pushed through the doors. She did not know if Eric was after her or not.

  She raced down the corridor.

  She nearly lost a shoe on the staircase, but made it easily to the street. For the first time in years, she had a stitch.

  Slowing down and trying to get her breath, she walked briskly through the shop and into the street. The cold wrapped around her. After the Inferno Lounge, which she now realised had been overheated, the outside chill was almost welcome.

  As she tried to walk away, there was a tug at her smarting shoulder. Someone was pulling her handbag.

  'Excuse me, miss…'

  TWELVE

  'LOOK,' said Tail Gunner Joe, ' 'sn't that Bogart?'

  It was somebody else, but the observation helped the Monster understand the Junior Senator. Sitting in Romanoff's, an ill-fitting suit and a sweaty grin among so many tailcoats and panstick-smooth faces, the man was stargazing, like any other gawk-eyed Mid-Westerner visiting Sin City - Hollywood, California. It almost made him endearing. Tail Gunner Joe was made for this town. Like the glove salesmen tycoons, the grease-monkey apemen, the waitress demigoddesses and the bogus Russian royalty restauranteurs, the war hero witchfinder was a Great American Fraud. Even politics was not a big enough backdrop for his imagined autobiography. Tail Gunner Joe had to get into Showbiz, and rate more mentions in Variety than in The New York Times. His was an addictive personality, and the need for fame was as desperate in him as the need for his favoured stimulant, morphine. The Monster knew that the Junior Senator was on his crusade so someone would one day cast Spencer Tracy as him in a film of his heroic life from the dogfights of the war to the pit-bull tussles of the Senate. Like every crooked politician in the United States, he had seen Mr Smith Goes to Washington several times, and always identified more fiercely with Jimmy Stewart than Claude Rains. When he had got up in the Senate with his list of 'card-carrying Communists', he had been thinking of Mr Smith.

  The Lawyer, a boyish mouse of a man with an intensity that frightened most, was irked by Tail Gunner Joe's lack of concentration. A quiet Jew, he was intent on his papers, and wanted to get the discussion back to the agenda. And the woman, creeping into middle-age with her bobbed hair and staring eyes, was just gaga. Russian originally, she was a prophet of Americanism, and had dignified her sloppy thinking with a neologism, styling herself as the avatar of Objectivism. Even Tail Gunner Joe, who was awed by her intellect, thought of her as a dingbat. The Monster knew there were only two people who counted at this meeting; him, and the Lawyer. They knew that Red-baiting was just a passing thing, and that there was a more important prize to be won through the Committee and its hearings. Between them, the Lawyer and he could own the dreams of America more thoroughly than Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner or Sam Goldwyn.

  'Mr Farnham,' said the Lawyer, 'as I am sure you are aware, we do not want to repeat of the fiasco of Thomas and the Hollywood Ten.'

  He nodded. Congressman J. Parnell Thomas had been the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Commission back in '47, the figurehead of the first anti-Communist purge in the film capital. Currently, he was serving an eighteen month sentence, for accepting bribes, in a prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where, by a nasty coincidence even the Monster found amusing, two of his fellow inmates were Ring Lardner Jr and Lester Cole, doing a stretch for Contempt of Congress as a direct result of their appearances as 'unfriendly' witnesses before Thomas and the Committee.

  'Thomas was a fool,' he said. 'You can't be St George and have your hand in the till.'

  Tail Gunner Joe coughed, obviously not wanting to discuss graft and corruption. The Lawyer ticked off some point on his agenda, and the waiter returned with their drinks. The Junior Senator had obviously been hitting the sauce all afternoon, and was pleasantly squiffed. The Monster had arranged for the party to be taken on a tour of the Paramount lot this afternoon, and the Junior Senator was still excited at having met Cecil B. DeMille and Bing Crosby.

  The entrees arrived, and Tail Gunner Joe attacked his seafood cocktail hungrily. The Objectivist picked at her salad, and the Lawyer stuck to his soft drink. They were an interesting contrast in repressions, the Objectivist trembling with her neurotic drives, the Lawyer locked tight up inside himself. They both wanted him, the Monster knew.

  He sent back the soup to throw a scare into the chef. To him, something as invisible as power was a pleasure only if it were exercised at every opportunity. A new bowl, identically excellent, arrived instantly, along with the apologies of the management and an offer to tear up the bill for the whole meal. He graciously accepted, and lapped up a few spoons of bisque, savouring the taste.

  Arriving in California shortly before Pearl Harbour, it had taken him a while to grow into Hugh Farnham. As always, when he remained in one place long enough, he adopted protective colouring. His face set, and he allowed it to change only to simulate the gradual process of ageing. Professional qualifications were easy to come by, and the false details of 'Hugh Farnham's' early life were almost absurdly easy to plant in various records. There were people who would swear to have known him as a young man, even as a child. Now, he was officially 'lawyer to the moguls' - sanctioned by both Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons - and a big wheel in the motion picture industry, the California state legislature and the coming wave, Americanism. If he had actually been born in a log cabin on the prairies and grown up with the taste of Coca-Cola in his mouth and the prospect of a dignified old age on the White House lawn, he could not have been more American. After so many years of wandering, it did him good to put down roots. This was such a rich and stupid country. He had fed better here than he had for centuries.

  The Lawyer still wanted to talk business, and the Objectivist wanted to talk philosophy, but, underlying their conversation, the Monster sensed their desire for him. He was amused that their preferences should be so similar, and relished the stag reels they were playing over and over in their brains. On a basic level they would never be able to articulate, they sensed some of what he was, and longed to submit to his feeding frenzy. The Lawyer, he knew, could never admit to his secret needs, and would even go so far into the closet as to link 'perversion' with the political doctrines he was intent upon helping the Junior Senator stamp out. The Objectivist, however, would sublimate her frenzies into her writing, turning out more and more turbulent, half-literate, half-blathering prose about the failures of altruism, the paramount rights of the individual and the tyranny of the common masses. It was so obvious that the hero of her most famous novel was her imagined version of Hugh Farnham that even one or two of the reviewers had noticed it.

  A movie star came into the restaurant, weighed down by furs and diamonds, and trailed by her mother and a discreet entourage. The Monster waved, and the mother, one of the friendliest of the friendlies, beamed a grotesque smile at him. Tail Gunner Joe was impressed that he knew such legendary screen figures, and insisted on being introduced.

  'Ginger,' the Monster said, 'this is the Senator from Winsconsin you've been hearing so much about.'

  The dancer put on a smiling face as the plump, rumpled politician kissed her hand. The Junior Senator was as sincere as if he were soliciting votes.

  'You were wonderful in The Groom Wore Spurs,' Tail Gunner Joe, the undiscriminating picture fan, said. The star's s
mile froze solid, and the Monster tried and failed to remember what her last good film had been.

  'I hope you'll be kicking the Reds in the ass,' said the star's mother, claiming the Junior Senator's attention with expansive gestures. She was expensively made up to look like her daughter's bloated twin.

  Tail Gunner Joe grinned, even as the Lawyer was wincing, and made a meaty fist. 'Sure will, ma'am,' he said, 'anything to please a lady.'

  The star and her entourage swept past. Tail Gunner Joe was warmed with a glow he would retain all evening. He had met real movie stars, and had something to boast about to the folks back home.

  'The real problem is in the content,' the Objectivist said, trying to impress him, 'all too often industrialists, bankers and businessmen are presented on the screen as villains, crooks, chiselers or exploiters. The Communists want to put over the message that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others, and that every man has hurt somebody by becoming successful. It's pernicious nonsense, of course. The Reds say they want to destroy men like Hitler and Mussolini, but what they really want to destroy are men like Shakespeare, Chopin and Edison.'

  It was a neat little speech, and the Junior Senator was pleased with it, nodding as if he understood. The Lawyer had an 'all very well, but…' expression, and was holding up his papers again. He was impatient for names, dates and times. The Monster was reminded of a first-time director trying to wrestle a pair of recalcitrant stars into following his script. For him, the Objectivist was just window dressing, of no real interest except for her intellectual credentials. For too long, all the thinkers and artists had been on the left; the crusade had to take the eggheads it could get, no matter how scrambled. The Lawyer was perceptive enough to realise how sham the Objectivist was, and cynical enough to know that, even if he had not been able to finish her last book, there were a million Americans who had and swallowed her bombast as deep thought. If it were not for his cowardice and self-denial, the Monster would have quite admired the Lawyer. Quite.

  The dance band was playing 'Mona Lisa', an Oscar-winner the year before for Captain Carey, USA. The Monster enjoyed the Academy Awards, and always made sure he got the best seats for the ceremony. The tangle of emotions was so delicious. Winners and losers were meat and drink to him. These days, he just tapped his meals, disdaining to drain them completely, sampling the dreamstuff but sparing the flesh. It was a revelation, how much he could enjoy feeding without killing. In a sense, there was more delight in leaving his broken prey alive.

  'Let's talk names,' said Tail Gunner Joe, belching.

  The Objectivisms claws came out. 'Yes, let'ssss. You should squeeze Trumbo, Lawson, Dmytryk and Hammett some more.' Her face was tightened as she spoke, her elaborately-applied make-up cracking. 'A spell in prison will have jolted them. They should be ready to turn on their fellow Reds.'

  Thejunior Senator looked contemptuous. 'Hah. Trumbull, Dimitri and Hackett are nobodies. Who cares about directors…'

  'Writers,' the Objectivist said, with a little moue. 'They are writers.'

  'Writers, then,' Thejunior Senator signalled for another drink. The armpits of his lightweight suit were getting alcoholically dark. 'Writers are chickenshit.'

  The best-selling novelist knitted her fingers and shut up. The Lawyer enjoyed her discomfiture. And the Monster rolled the little tangle of emotions around in his mouth, like brandy. He had a slight rush.

  'What the Senator means to say,' the Lawyer interpreted, 'is that the Committee should make every effort to secure high-profile witnesses. We must not underestimate the importance of the public recognition factor in these hearings.'

  'Nobody gives a fuck about who writes pictures,' the Junior Senator growled. 'What we want, dollface, is stars. Am I right, Hugh?'

  The Monster nodded.

  'We gotta get out of this business with Joe Shmoe from Kokomo, author of Andy Hardy Goes to Leningrad, or Sammy Kikestein, assistant trainee camera operator on Pinkos of the South Sea Islands.'

  The Lawyer's face did not move when Tail Gunner Joe mentioned the mythical 'Sammy Kikestein', but he winced inside. Anti-semitism, the man knew, was a two-edged sword.

  'If those writers are Commies,' Tail Gunner Joe blustered, 'they should just be taken out and put against a wall. We could all care less about them… them…'

  'Anonymous masses,' the Objectivist suggested.

  'Yeah, anomynous. Now, if Clark Gable was a Red…'

  '… not that we have any reason to suspect he is,' the Lawyer put in, addressing his footnote to the Monster.

  'No, but if he were, if Katharine Hepburn or William Holden or Kirk Douglas were pinkos. Then that would be news. You gotta gimme stars.'

  'Gale Sondegaard,' the Objectivist stammered.

  'Who?' asked the Senator, spitting pugnaciously.

  'An Academy Award winner.'

  'Best Supporting Actress. Nothing. Gimme before-the-title stars.'

  'John Garfield.'

  'A has-been.'

  The Monster sat back, and watched them squabble. There was a great nexus of power forming around these people, he knew, and, as Hugh Farnham, he would have to be in the centre of it. But they were such petty tyrants, schoolchildren playing domination games. The Objectivist was squirming, trying to swallow her distaste for the Junior Senator, and to suppress the pictures she was making in her mind of herself spreadeagled naked and bleeding over a rockface as Hugh Farnham savagely drilled her from the rear, the flesh of his body merged with oily quarrying equipment. A founder member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the Objectivist had spun her suppressed kinks into a successful novel and a travesty of a film, and the Monster found it strange to see himself distorted through the broken lens of her mind into the masterful brute played so stiffly in the movie by Gary Cooper. The veins in his cheeks and neck swelled as the Objectivist worked herself up to a crazed interior climax, while trying to pay attention to the Junior Senator. A drop of sweat dribbled from her hairline like a tear. The Monster breathed in her flood of feelings, and was nourished by them.

  Here, in Romanoff's, surrounded by fools and knaves, he felt again like the King of the Cats.

  'Say,' the Junior Senator asked, 'would you think Ginger would mind if I asked her for a dance?'

  The Monster was amused. Tail Gunner Joe was no replacement for Fred Astaire. The Junior Senator was taken with the idea, and rolled it around his mind for a while, forgetting the Committee and the purpose of this meeting.

  In dreams, Tail Gunner Joe was top-hatted, white-tied and tailed, swirling gracefully with the movie star; the Lawyer was in the dark with a wet-mouthed Japanese boy, nervously certain he was being watched by invisible eyes; the Objectivist was grovelling in the mud, Hugh Farnham's huge hands pressing her shoulders down, his pile-driver penis thrusting brutally into her.

  In dreams…

  In the 20th century, Hollywood was the capital of the Dreamworld. It was the perfect place for him.

  Then, she walked in…

  THIRTEEN

  THE FLAT IN Old Compton Street had a Yale lock and a Chubb, and Nina was not quite up to the relatively simple set of motions necessary to deal with them. She kept her keys in her handbag, and had to root about for a while. Then, she rattled the long Chubb key in its hole, struggling with a rusted mechanism. Her hands started shaking and she could not insert the Yale key properly without putting her bag down and using both hands. She had really not stopped crying yet, and occasionally added yelps of frustration to her strangled whining. She made a hell of a racket.

  A door across the hall opened a crack. Anne was acutely uncomfortable in the dingy corridor, fully aware what the invisible neighbour would think. At least Nina lived in Soho, within easy distance of the place where she had accosted Anne. Otherwise, Anne would never have been able to steer her to a safe place and do what had to be done. Come to that, Anne wished she knew precisely what did have to be done.

  Finally, Nina got into the f
lat. Anne noticed a formidable array of extra locks and chains on the inside of the door. If it was hard for the girl to get in, it would be impossible for anyone else. A sensible precaution in her line of business, Anne supposed.

  Nina crumpled up and fell into a balding armchair. Anne had to pull the keys out of their holes, pick up Nina's handbag, and lock the door behind them. Anne wondered again how she was going to handle this.

  She could not help but find the young girl unnerving. At first, Anne had thought her a shade too chic for the Club Des Esseintes. Her dress looked like the sort of thing Lauren Bacall used to wear to a gangster-owned casino, and her face could have been put together for a Vogue fashion shoot. Now, with tear-tracks in the pancake on her cheeks, and her hair turned ratty as she ploughed fingers through it, she looked much more like what Anne realised she was. A junkie and a hooker. Exactly like…

  … exactly like Judi. Nina might be able to pull herself together and make herself presentable when she went out, but Anne suspected that she was finding it increasingly hard to assemble a desirable face. She looked about the slightly messy flat. There had been no card thumbtacked to the door-jamb downstairs and the most expensive appliance in the living room was an Ansafone, so she guessed that Nina was a call girl rather than a streetwalker. By the standards of her profession, she was probably doing quite well. For the moment. Judi must have lived out her last years in rooms like this. Also, she must have been as near the edge as this girl was now.

  'Do you know Judi Nielson?' Nina had asked on the street. 'I'm looking for Coral and her.'

  Anne had not known any easy way to break the news, and she had not been ready for such a complete crack-up. It was odd, having to comfort a stranger for her own bereavement. And embarrassing, hugging a crying girl in the middle of the pavement, with cursing shoppers flowing around them. Also, Anne was worried that the Club Des Esseintes might send someone after her. The executioner could hardly dash out onto the street in his leather outfit, waving an axe, but he must have street clothes somewhere.