Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive! (21 page)

“Your intern? Just what are you getting that boy into?”

“
Please,
Harriet!”

“I’m going with you or I’m calling the police.”

“You can’t do that. They’ll kill Lorna.”

“Lorna Hunter? Who will?”

He gave up then. He’d lost three minutes already. “I’ll bring the car around.”

“First tell me where you think you’re going.”

“Where you just came from. LAX.”

She watched him gather up the two cans of film. “I might have known this would have something to do with some movie no one but you cares about.”

“If I thought I was the only one, I’d never have let myself get into this. But there are some things more important than movies. Human life, for one.”

“I’m glad to hear you say it. So what is it this time, lost footage from the Zapruder film, or the Second Coming? The image of Christ on an overexposed frame?”

“
Frankenstein
.” He mumbled it, sliding the cans into his dilapidated briefcase.

“Excuse me?”

“The test reels for the 1931
Frankenstein,
starring Bela Lugosi.”

“Boris Karloff starred in
Frankenstein
. I’ve heard that from you a thousand times if I’ve heard it once. Val, how hard have you been working?” She sounded concerned for him for the first time that night.

“I’ll explain later.”

“LAX,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Well, that should give us time for you to fill me in.”

He leased space in a garage around the corner. Harriet was waiting on the sidewalk in front of the theater as he approached. He let up on the accelerator, then as she stepped forward he pushed down, gaining speed. In the rearview mirror Valentino saw the love of his life with her mouth open in a furious
O
, groping inside her handbag for her cell. He was a good deal more worried about the conversation they’d have later than whatever information she was giving her employers at police headquarters. The airport had been the first place he’d thought of when she’d asked his destination. It had been freshest in his mind.

*   *   *

Light glowed in the high gridded windows of the defunct buzz-saw blade factory. Even from the street he could hear the music from inside, reminiscent of the din that had accompanied its productive years. Either it was just the Halloween season or Steampunks were the party-throwingest creatures in a region notorious for its late-night blowouts.

At the top of the concrete steps worn hollow by the tread of many work boots, Valentino banged on the door. The edge of his fist was aching before someone heard it above the noise on the other side. A young woman—she might not have been more than a girl under metallic makeup that made her resemble a distaff Tin Man from
The Wizard of Oz
—opened up and beckoned him in with a finger encased in a black kid glove. Evidently his description had preceded him. He hoped it wasn’t too unflattering.

The floor shook beneath the bass notes of a band playing a switched-on version of the Anvil Chorus. The bulbs of a chandelier rigged up from a tractor tire suspended by tow chains from the twenty-foot ceiling strobed, bathing musicians and dancers in shifting hues; highlighting, then plunging in shadow figures in top hats and bowlers, picture brims and Bobbie helmets, bedecked with gears and pulley attachments and wedding veils fashioned from steel mesh. A massive flywheel twelve feet in diameter decorated a naked brick wall with a full-length coronation portrait of the young Queen Victoria mounted in the center in a jointed pipe frame. The great piece of machinery must have weighed more than a ton and had to have been brought in with a forklift truck at the least. The moment he formed that conclusion, he spotted the truck itself, hitched incongruously to a brace of life-size papier-mâché horses complete with blinders.

Gripping the newcomer’s hand in a palm studded with hobnails, Tin Woman led him serpentine fashion through the press of bodies to a sparsely populated area behind the bandstand, with exposed plumbing on more brick and lingering odors of scorched metal and lubricating grease. He wondered if the smells were that persistent after so many years or if they’d been sprayed from a can just before the guests arrived.

As visitor and escort neared their terminus, the music changed abruptly: Electric guitars and amplifiers were replaced with the sweet strains of violins and the low mellow murmur of a cello. The dancers ceased gyrating and began to waltz, decorously and at arm’s length. Valentino had spent so much of his rest time lately in dreams that if it weren’t for the urgency of his errand he’d have suspected the entire affair was the distorted fancy of an overworked mind and a hyperactive imagination.

Jason Stickley broke out of a small group to greet him. The boy wore his high silk hat accessorized from the scrapyard, frock coat, padlock and chain. “How do you feel about reinforcements?” He turned a palm toward the group—young men all, so far as Valentino could determine behind the metalwork, stiff collars, machinists’ goggles, waistcoats, and gentlemen’s headgear circa 1890, with a hefty helping of H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
. Shy grins and gestures of welcome came with clanking accompaniment.

The archivist seized Jason’s arm and turned him aside. “I didn’t give you permission to tell anyone.”

“You didn’t say I couldn’t.” The intern sounded hurt.

“I’d be less conspicuous driving a wagon loaded with pots and pans.”

“Oh, we’ll dump the paraphernalia. We’re not stupid.”

“You’re all barely old enough to vote. I can’t be responsible for putting you in jeopardy. I’ll go alone.”

“Too late, Mr. Valentino. I know where you’re going, remember. Anyway, we’re old enough to join the army and fight a war.”

“I start basic training next month,” said one of the others who’d overheard.

“I figure this makes me older.” Another smacked his palm with a heavy brass knob fixed to a stout walking stick.

“I can’t fit you all in my car.” He realized the weakness of the argument even as he raised it.

“Pat’s got his dad’s Hummer,” Jason said. “We can all fit in it with room to spare.”

“Me, too.” Tin Woman’s valley girl accent sounded like the real thing.

“No women.” This came in chorus from the group of young men.

She stuck out a tongue that looked blood-red against silver skin. “That Victorian male chauvinist B.S. won’t work even here. See, I’m armed.” A hobnailed hand dove into her lace décolletage and came up with a steel whistle on a chain around her neck. She blew it. The shrill sound slashed across the chamber music, turning heads their way briefly from the dance floor.

“We’re going whether you say yes or no,” Jason said. “We’re not freaks. When someone’s in trouble, we help.”

Valentino took his fingers out of his ears. “Just don’t blow that thing unless you absolutely have to. If these guys hear a police whistle, they’ll shoot first and ask questions never.”

“So we’re all in?” Jason’s grin was almost too broad for his narrow face.

“God help me, but I can’t fight the mob and all of you at the same time.”

“Way to go, Joy Stick!” said the boy with the bludgeon.

“Joy Stick?”

The intern flushed. “Jason Stickley, you know? We all have nicknames.”

“I’m Link.”

“Wilde Thing. With an
e
.”

“Pat Pend.”

“I’m Whiz. Short for Whistler’s Daughter.” The girl raised her whistle to her lips again. Valentino’s hand shot out and grasped it. She colored under the undercoat and dropped it back between her breasts.

He looked at his strap watch. They had less than twenty minutes to go fifty blocks. “You have to follow all my orders to the letter. If you don’t agree, I’ll call the cops right now and rat you all out as underage guests at a party where alcohol is served.” He showed them his cell.

“There’s no—” someone started.

“He knows about the keg from before,” Jason interrupted. “He’s hip for an old dude.”

“‘Hip’?” Link, the youth in basic training, furrowed his brow under a deerstalker cap with a brass steam pressure gauge cemented to the crown.

“Properly informed.” Whiz’s upper-class Brit clashed with her Moon Zappa.

Valentino let out the sigh of a ninety-year-old man. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

The partyers divested themselves of chains, bells, and everything else likely to make noise and climbed into the boxy vehicle parked not far from the compact. Valentino leaned his head through the open window on the passenger’s side and asked Jason if he had his phone. Joy Stick showed him his punked-up cell.

“I’ll call you just before I go in and leave it on. That way you’ll hear what’s going on inside. What’s your number?”

“I don’t know if I have that many minutes.”

“I’ll pay for the extra.”

“I didn’t mean that.” His tone was plaintive. “It’s prepaid. It cuts off when my time runs out.”

Whiz, sprawled across three laps in the backseat, said, “This is why we like Victoriana.”

“Here.” Pat Pend, behind the wheel, excavated an unadorned model from a waistcoat pocket and handed it to Jason. He gave the number to Valentino, who punched it into the memory.

“If things turn sour, call the police,” he said.

“What if they take away your phone?” asked Jason.

“Wait fifteen minutes,
then
call the police.”

“Fifteen minutes is a long time.”

“It’s just right if everything goes smoothly. Any less is risky. It wouldn’t be smart to startle them with sirens just when we’re making the exchange.”

“There wouldn’t have to be sirens. We outnumber these guys three to one.”

Valentino pushed his face close to the boy’s. “Do
not
go in, understand? No matter what. These men are killers. They’re what the police are for. When things go wrong, nobody calls the Steampunks.”

“
You
did.”

A chorus of agreement came from the other seats.

And I pray I don’t regret it.
Aloud he said, “You know where this place is in case we get separated?”

Jason’s teeth glistened in the light from a streetlamp. “I’d be one lousy film student if I didn’t.”

Valentino decided, if he survived the night, to ask his department head to appoint this boy—this young man—to a salaried position. Anyone who could make him smile under those circumstances was worth keeping around.

21

THE HOLLYWOOD WAX
Museum was one of Valentino’s favorite haunts, a place to go and revisit the giants of his Movie Channel youth in 3-D—the real thing, without a cumbersome pair of glasses coming in between. The white stucco building with its electric marquee-type sign was an ancient institution by local standards: Its oldest figures from the silent age had modeled for the sculptors in person. When the season sagged beneath ponderous special effects and actors with crow’s-feet playing horny high school students, the archivist would bring a sack lunch and dine with Francis X. Bushman, Blanche Sweet, and Rin Tin Tin.

But at that hour, with the sign switched off and Hollywood Boulevard as deserted as any street ever got in a major metropolitan area (he’d heard stories of coyotes slinking down from the hills and prowling the Walk of Fame), the museum appeared anything but friendly, a mortuary reflecting the smog-muted starlight from its pale front. A box that had once held a Magic Chef electric range slouched on the corner, providing sleeping quarters for one or more of the L.A. homeless, modern-day Bedouins who folded their tents and stole away come the dawn. Whatever they witnessed during the night vanished with them.

The Hummer had turned off a block short of the address, as arranged, and Valentino had his choice of parking spaces. He pulled up directly in front of the arched entrance so he and Lorna could make their escape as quickly as possible. Or so he prayed.

He remembered to call Pat Pend’s number, and after a quick exchange with Jason, left the line open and slid the phone into the slash pocket of his Windbreaker. Despite the delays he’d reached his destination with four minutes to spare, thanks to the thinness of the traffic. Gripping the wheel in both hands, he took a deep breath, held it a moment, and expelled it with a rush. Then he tipped up the door handle and got out.

The front door opened without resistance. He shook his head. Security personnel the world over were underpaid. He hoped that whatever amount Grundage had slipped the person responsible was worth the loss of his job if it got back to his superiors.

No alarm had gone off when he pulled at the door, and when he stepped inside, the motion sensors mounted high on the walls regarded him without interest. They would have been disarmed, most likely by the same person who’d left the door unlocked. Surveillance cameras attached to the ceiling had ceased their relentless oscillation, their red lights dark.

A shudder racked his shoulders. A wax museum is an eerie enough place by daylight, but at night, with the bare minimum of lights left on to discourage intruders, this one may as well have been excavated from the dust of centuries, and he the first man to enter it, and to lay eyes upon freshly interred remnants from the age of superstition and black magic. The deserted ticket counter, the garlands of theater ropes arranged to control visitor traffic during peak periods, the racks of free brochures promoting other local tourist attractions, all took on a grim aspect when shadows skulked about the extremities. A bright banner strung high overhead across the lobby advertising the current featured exhibit in honor of the Halloween season (HIGH STAKES: THE VAMPIRE IN FILM FROM
NOSFERATU
THROUGH
TWILIGHT
) writhed like a venomous serpent in the air stirred by his entrance.

Valentino had never enjoyed being frightened, even in fun. It was one thing to be scared out of one’s wits in a crowded theater, where the experience was shared, quite another to walk home down an empty street or climb a dark flight of stairs alone and with one’s imagination filled with grisly images. He had never seen a horror movie made since the original 1968
Night of the Living Dead
more than once, and after his first experience with
The Exorcist
, he had sworn off every chiller that followed. He’d never seen anything in the Wes Craven canon or that of any of his imitators and, based on what he’d witnessed in trailers, doubted that he was any poorer for the decision. He preferred to snuggle up with Henry Hull’s werewolf of London, Frankenstein’s Monster from Karloff through Glenn Strange, and anyone who played Count Dracula until Hammer Films got carried away and started buying its Max Factor blood by the barrel. In those earlier films the hero always won, defeating the mad scientist and winning the heart of the heroine, and the ghoul thoroughly destroyed, at least until the cameras began rolling on the sequel. But even these pleasant memories became sinister when only the sound of his own breathing and the beating of his heart were present.