Innocent Blood (22 page)

He waited by the phone but Astrid didn't call that evening, so shortly after eight o'clock he drove over to Burbank to see Margot. They were still husband and wife, after all, and he was beginning to feel guilty about leaving her to cope with her grief on her own.

Margot answered the door but Ruth was close behind her, dressed in some extraordinary hand-woven poncho with fraying edges, embroidered with a sun symbol, and baggy brown cotton pants. Margot was wearing denim dungarees and no makeup. Her face was as pale as a scrubbed potato.

‘Was there something you wanted?' she asked him.

‘I thought we could talk.'

‘I thought you said everything you had to say when you defaced my paintings.'

‘You still believe that I did it?'

‘Do you care what I believe?'

Frank looked at Ruth and Ruth looked back at him with her usual slitty-eyed hostility. ‘Margot needs time to repair her emotional value system.'

‘Oh. I didn't know it was broken.'

‘Of course it's broken, Frank. Margot's entire concept of conjugal weights and balances is in total disorder.'

Frank frowned at Margot as if he couldn't quite remember who she was. In fact, he was trying to see in her face the reason why he had married her, and why they had conceived Danny together, and why they had stayed together for so long. But all he could see was the mole on her upper lip.

‘Is this true?' he asked her. ‘Your
entire
concept of conjugal weights and balances?'

‘How can you make fun of me after what's just happened?'

‘I'm not making fun of you, Margot. I'm making fun of a world that turns real feelings into meaningless jargon. I'm trying to tell you how sorry I am. But I'm also trying to tell you that we can't turn the clock back. Either we're going to share this grief together, and struggle on, and see what we can make of this marriage, or else we're going to say that we've been holed below the waterline, and abandon ship, and then it's every man for himself. Or woman,' he added, before Rachel could say it.

Margot didn't answer at first. Ruth came forward and took hold of her hand, giving Frank a smug proprietorial look, as if to say,
you've lost her now; she's mine
.
We're sisters together, look at our hideous clothes and our tied-back hair and our unplucked eyebrows. We don't need to look attractive to men because we don't need men.

‘Frank,' said Margot, ‘I know what you're saying, I know how sorry you are. But I really need much more time.'

‘All right,' Frank agreed. ‘I'm prepared to be generous. How much do you want? Two weeks, a month? A year, maybe? How about a decade?'

Then they finally looked at each other and they both knew that it was over.

Frank said, ‘I'll have my horologist get in touch with your horologist, OK?'

When he returned to the Sunset Marquis, he called Nevile.

‘Signor Strange, he leave town,' said his maid.

‘Do you know when he's going to be back? This is Frank Bell. I needed to talk to him urgently.'

‘He no say. Maybe you try his cell-a-phone.'

‘OK, thanks.'

He dialed Nevile's cellphone number but the phone was switched off. It was late now, after all – well past 11:30
P.M
. He left a message and that was all he could do. For some reason he was beginning to feel panicky, as if something bad was going to happen, even though he couldn't think what it was. He had been very disturbed by Danny's appearance in Nevile's hallway, all bruised and bleeding. What did it mean? Had Danny been trying to show him that he had been indifferent as a father, neglectful to the point of cruelty? He had always been pretty strict, he admitted that, sometimes too strict. But he thought that he had always been fair, and caring.

Maybe the bruises had been a metaphor for something else. After all, if Nevile had been right, then it hadn't been Danny at all, but a much more powerful spirit masquerading as Danny. But if it was a much more powerful spirit, why had it allowed itself to be flung across the hallway, and then dragged away?

He stared at himself in the mirror. His hair was wild and there were dark circles under his eyes. ‘Portrait of a lunatic,' he decided.

He was sitting on his balcony, his legs propped up on the railings, when he thought he heard a bang toward the north-east. Other people must have heard it, too, because they stopped splashing and laughing around the pool, and stood still, listening.

‘Hear that?' said the musician with the long hair and the beaky noise. ‘That was a bloody bomb, that was.'

Frank went inside and switched on the television. He flicked through the channels until he found CNN, then waited. After less than five minutes, a newsflash came up on the screen.

‘Reports are coming in of a massive explosion at Walt Disney Studios on Buena Vista Road in Burbank. Eye witnesses are saying that “scores” of people have been killed and injured, and that over half of the main administrative block has been demolished.'

He stayed in front of the television for the rest of the afternoon. Gradually it emerged that a car bomb had killed forty-five Disney staff and that more than a hundred had been maimed by blast and shrapnel. Offices had collapsed and fires were still raging through the building, destroying millions of dollars worth of irreplaceable artwork and cells. Only three of the Seven Dwarf figures, which held up the roof, remained intact.

Police Commissioner Campbell appeared on the screen. ‘Los Angeles has again lost precious lives. The whole world has lost its innocence.'

Fourteen

T
wo hours after the Disney bomb went off, Frank's producer, Peter Brodsky, called him.

‘Now they've bombed
Disney
? Jesus.'

‘They're not going to stop, Peter. They're not going to stop until there's no Hollywood left.'

They shared a moment's silence, but then Peter said, ‘I thought you'd better be the first to know.
Pigs
has been canceled until further notice.'

‘Well, I can't say that we haven't been expecting it.'

‘You know that it's absolutely no reflection on you or the show. We have to think about the safety of everybody involved in it, that's all. Just as soon as they've caught these goddamned terrorists—'

‘Peter, I totally understand.'

‘You're OK, are you, Frank? Marcia was wondering if you'd like to come over for brunch on Sunday morning.'

‘Well, that's very thoughtful of her, please say thanks. The thing is, though, I'm going down to Rancho Santa Fe to spend the weekend with some friends.'

‘Good, good. So long as you're not alone.'

He called Nevile again, but he was still away. He left a message on his voicemail asking him to call back as soon as he could.

‘I'm feeling spooked . . . I don't exactly know why. This bomb at Disney hasn't made me feel any better, either.'

Mayor Joseph Lindsay was being interviewed outside the archway of Disney Studios. Behind him, Alameda Avenue was still crowded with fire trucks and ambulances, their red lights flashing. The mayor was saying, ‘I think I speak for everybody in the city of Los Angeles when I say that Disney cartoons were a precious part of my growing-up. When somebody attacks the Disney studio, they're attacking not only my freedom of speech as an adult, they're attacking my childhood, too. They're attacking my memories and my values. They're attacking my cultural heritage.'

Part bored, part edgy, Frank drove round to see Mo, who lived in a split-level house on Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica. Mo was obviously hosting a party because there were cars parked all the way along the street and colored lights in the trees outside. Mo came to the door in a voluminous gold kaftan, drunk, with a large glass of whiskey in his hand.

‘Frank! In the nick of time! Look here, everybody! The ship may be sinking fast but the captain's on the bridge!'

‘Sorry, Mo. If I'd known you had guests . . .'

Mo flung his arm around him. ‘Baloney. It's the end of the world as we know it, Frank. It's Armageddon. Everybody's welcome.'

The hallway and the living room were crowded with people, most of them shouting and arguing, while almost unheard, a gingery-headed man who looked like an overweight Art Garfunkel, played Irving Berlin favorites on the piano. Mo's wife, Naomi, was in the kitchen serving up tuna knishes and challah sticks and barbecued chicken legs, assisted by seven or eight of her friends who all knew more about serving up food than she did.

‘You should never serve barbecue chicken on a paper napkin,' he heard one say. ‘It sticks – you want your guests spitting out bits of tissue?'

Mo found Frank a very cold Coors out of the fridge. ‘This is my mother's seventy-ninth birthday party. I guess I should have invited you, but then I thought, no, I like Frank too much to have him meet my family. Look at them. The Cohens. I've seen hyenas with Alzheimer's behaving better than this.'

Frank was introduced to the birthday girl, a withered woman in a red silk gown, with a mahogany suntan and diamond-encrusted claws. ‘Mo's told me so much about you. I imagined you taller.'

‘Well, I expect you were sitting down at the time.'

Mo breathed whiskey in Frank's ear. ‘She doesn't understand humor. Only discomfiture. The last thing that made her laugh was Naomi's kugels.'

Frank was introduced to several other Cohens, one of whom owned a local Oldsmobile dealership, another who played cello for the Santa Monica Symphonia, another who was big in tomatoes. Each of them paused for long enough in their arguments to say to Frank, ‘You lost your boy, didn't you? What can I say?'

He and Mo ended up on the veranda, by the light of a guttering torch. ‘Strange times, you know, Frank,' said Mo. ‘One day you think you know exactly what the world is all about; you think you got all of your parameters fixed. You got steady work, you live in a nice place, you got your family all around you. Then God comes along and says, “Excuse me, may I remind you that you're stuck by your feet by an invisible force to a ball of unstable rock which is hurtling around in a total vacuum, and that you're obliged to share this ball of unstable rock with millions of demented people, many of whom don't use deodorant, and some of whom would like nothing better than to pocket all of your possessions, torture your pets and blow your head off. Not only that, everything that makes this situation bearable, like cheeseburgers and whiskey and reasonably priced cigars, is going to shorten your life, and in any case you're going to die anyhow, half-blind, half-deaf, in wet pajamas, in Pasadena.”'

Frank swallowed beer and wiped his mouth with his hand. ‘I guess that's one way of looking at it.'

He told Mo about the séance. Mo was beginning to sober up now, and he listened and nodded and occasionally patted his sweaty face with a balled-up tissue.

‘You're sure this wasn't your imagination working overtime? After all – what – it's only been ten days now since Danny died. Don't kid me that
you're
not traumatized, too.'

‘I saw him, Mo. Or whatever spirit it is that's pretending to be him. I just don't understand what it's all about.'

‘Not everything in this life has to have a logical explanation, Frank. Look at my family.
Quod erat demonstrandum
.'

‘I never hit Danny, though, Mo. I never bruised him, I never made him bleed.'

‘Of course you didn't. But look at it this way. Maybe this spirit is using Danny to get your attention.'

‘What?'

‘Your folks never had much money, right, and when you were a kid you didn't have any confidence, and you kept doing things like the time when you were trying to impress that girl and you sneezed that huge green booger on to the back of her hand. But if you personally went on television and whined about your miserable childhood –
you
, Frank Bell – who would want to know?'

‘I don't follow you.'

‘Poor old hard-done-by Frank Bell!
Nobody
would want to know, would they? But in
Pigs
you've invented Dusty and Henry, and when Dusty and Henry get embarrassed, or upset, or make idiots of themselves, people can identify with them, right? The audience feel
empathy
. “Gee, that was exactly the way I felt, when I was a kid.” That's why the show's so goddamned popular.'

‘You've lost me, Mo. Maybe you need another drink.'

‘No, no, listen! Maybe this spirit is doing the same thing. If he appeared to you like he really is – some dead guy that you've never even met – you wouldn't be interested in his childhood, would you, no matter how much he was knocked around? But he's pretending to be Danny, because you care what happens to Danny, like your audience cares what happens to Dusty and Henry. In spite of yourself, when you see Danny, even though you know that it's not really him, you can't stop yourself from feeling protective.'

Frank thought about that, and then shrugged. ‘I guess that's as good a theory as any. But that still doesn't tell me
why
.'

Mo raised his glass. ‘“Ah, what is man! Wherefore does he why? Whence did he whence? Whither is he withering?” Do you know who said that? Dan Leno. Do you know who Dan Leno was? And don't say Jay Leno's kid brother.'

‘I was right. You
do
need another drink.'

They went back into the living room. The arguing was even louder. The pianist was playing ‘Isn't it a Lovely Day?' and Mo's mother was singing along in a high, breathless screech.