Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 20:47:37 -0400 From: "J. Hall" Subject: INT:GP (aka Goldman Pictures): A Three Hour Tour.. "Have faith. I know my luck will get better," she turned toward the ocean, looking like a lost little girl. "We aren't going to die here, anyway. I'm sure of it. Besides, we have too much to live for." She pulled her hair back. "I don't suppose you keep clothes in that plane?" "As a matter of fact..." Blacksmiths. I could hear them laughing, pounding on hot half-forged swords. I could smell their garlicky beards dripping sizzling beads of sweat into flaming beds of coalfires. One of them, a slagheap with suet pits for eyes was especially jolly, banging away while the others sang dark viking songs about pillaging milkmaids. When I asked him to stop his face turned slowly toward me, flickering ash dripping off his maul. It was Tony DeLauro. Stuffed into a stock leather apron and smeared with carbonized blood, sure, but it was DeLauro, his telltale Dino forelock perfectly oiled and dangling. The scream I heard as the hammer came down wasn't mine and I woke instantly, my arm caught in the mouth of Captain Hook's crocodile. "You nearly shot me," Tallulah Bankhead said, her face black in the corona of a huge sun. I had the .38 in my right hand, her fingers a steel claw clenched over the barrel pushing it down. That Tallulah, what a kidder. I grinned, or tried to, and regretted it. "Get this elephant off my head," I moaned and let the gun drop into the sand and crushed coral and rotting weed.. She waited for a moment then released her grip, her hair brushing my face. Probably thinking I was going to sucker punch her after she'd pushed me down the well into the Workshop of the Unholy. Bankhead was always like that. Even here in Hell, you can't trust anyone. "I think you might have a concussion," she boomed, and I winced. I'd had one before, courtesy of an enraged pornographer who'd brained me with a film can back in '49, and hadn't liked it much. I began sending scouts out to the various parts of my body I could remember and most of them came back unhappy. Alive, but unhappy. But my head felt six sizes too big and my throat was drier than one of Hedda Hopper's asides. Maybe Sister Aimee was right, and Hell was just an endless ride on the Playland bumpercars, but if this was the nether region it was awfully messy. "Uhuh. A concuuushh." My mouth decided it would now go back to sleep and I followed it to a place where the blacksmiths were not invited. Something touched my forehead, cool and damp and I drifted down into a dream-place, the cocoon of the injured, a jittery slideshow of faces and onrushing beachfront property clicking merrily along to keep me amused. Lareine Hinton's portrait, frozen in the cockpit lighting of a falling plane stopped the show with a crescendo of horns. And I remembered. When I opened my eyes again there was a sandcrab staring at me in the half-light of either dawn or dusk, it was impossible to tell, the sky was obscured by thick grey wool and a sussurant tide was licking at the bottoms of my shoes. Well, one shoe anyway. I was soaked through, caked with sand and I could feel grit in between my molars. The ceramic crown I'd had since the war wobbled when I pushed at it with my tongue. Pieces of the Bellanca, sea-tcushions and access panels that might have once been clean had been jammed down into the sand behind me to build some sort of miniature Mexican Stonehenge. I flicked a pebble at the crab and told him to go find someone dead to pick clean, then remembered Reinie and Lexie and threw a bigger rock, which manfully landed six inches from my wrist. I was as weak as a starved seal pup and smelled about the same and decided to risk sitting up. The plane was stuck in the beach about thirty yards from me, nose in and bent, a wing completely sheared, the big nose prop buckled, but it wasn't blackened by fire and I said a small thank-you prayer for that. I stood up and wished I hadn't, but when the earth stopped floating sideways I knew I was not going to die and started staggering toward the wreckage. Something was dragging at my belt and I realized it was the .38. I took it out and put the safety on, wondering why I hadn't shot myself in the ass with it yet. Como wasn't going to like what I'd done to his dinner clothes. The silk jacket was ripped down the back and his French cuffs were grimy with engine coolant, tar and someone's blood. I hoped it was mine and not Reinie's and sloshed into the surf to wash some of it off. A lancet of salt ate into my hip and I could feel little places where I'd been cut complaining about the crudity of treatment, but the sea felt wonderful and my head stopped pounding. A few herring gulls sat on the starboard wing of the plane and laughed at me and I made a pistol out of my fingers and went "bang" at them sending the leader into a tizzy of squawks and nervous flapping, though none of them bothered to take off. What danger could a drenched gringo in a shabby tuxedo represent? I accounted it a new low and wondered what Jonah Flescher down at the Herald would do with this picture. LA Detective Unable To Scare Birds Off Beach Flotsam, License Revoked. The starboard cabin hatch was dangling open and I stuck my head inside. Little green birds exploded out of the darkness and when I got my heart to start working again I found no sign of Lexie or Lareine Hinton other than a sodden heap of clothing. Maybe they'd decided to take to the hills and set up a naturist camp with all the money I'd swiped from Lansky. That was gone too. I catwalked up the back of the wheel cowling and flopped into the fuselage with a curse. The Gull-Wing was a tank but the engineers had not provided much in the way of padding around the hatches and new, exotic pains blossomed down my back like sinister jungle flowers. I fully expected to find a slathering puma in the captain's seat but all I found (after crawling through a rat's nest of ripped wiring and shivered paneling) was a set of discarded radio headphones. Automatically I slipped them on, but heard only the sound of my own breathing, which was anything but melodic. I tossed them aside and began systematically searching the interior of the plane for clues, utilizing the Good Detective's Method of Observation. When this didn't work I sat back in the seat I'd crashed the plane in and stared out through the windscreen into the dark line of banyans and palms of the forest, which seemingly I'd missed only by inches, trying to fathom what had happened to Reinie and Lexie. A cool ocean breeze blew through the plane, fluttering bits of loose paper and I absently began toying with switches, knowing nothing much would happen. Nothing did. I reached up and lowered the shade and saw bundles of folded, faded, paper. The overhead map compartment was jammed with charts of airspaces from Denver to Panama City, some of it annotated in a neat but pitched hand in grease pencil with little arrows seemingly pointing at nothing at all. Maybe to a pilot it would make perfect sense. Especially a sneaky one who needed to know where the main commercial and military airways were and who was watching them. I sorted through them and found that the old Navy Gulf of California chart of northern Baja to Cabo San Lucas was deeply creased, nearly falling apart and manically overwritten with notes, most of which seemed to be names. One of them was mine, jotted next to a series of small "X"'s near Mazatlan, Tuxpan and Aculpulco, landings Marlowe and I'd made with Lexie when we were doing rescue duty on the Starlet Express. Another's was Tony DeLauro's. What a surprise. Ensenada four times, La Paz twice, hell he'd been up and down the Baja peninsula more times than Cortez. I stopped counting the entries for the resort cities. Well, well. What little illumination that had filtered through an overhead rip in the cabin had gradually faded, frustrating any further reading and I slipped the map into a oilskin pouch that Admiral Byrd might have once owned then jammed it into my ruined dinner jacket. Most of Lexie's charts looked like military surplus, just like me. I sat back and closed my eyes, my head throbbing when suddenly something grabbed the struts of the Bellanca and began shaking it like an oversized maraca. I stuck my head out the sidescreen window only to be slapped by a wave breaking over the starboard cowling of the big radial. Desultory, indifferent rain began to spatter the windscreen and the plane shook again, this time rising off the sand with a breaker and fishtailing enough to make my stomach flip over with nausea. Time to get out. I popped the portside escape hatch and dropped into three feet of surging water and scrambled away into the shadows of a sentinel shorline banyan only slightly smaller than one of King Kong's shins. "Take my hand..I'm a stranger in paradiiiise.." I turned around and saw two geishas giggling before a small but welcoming fire, sharing a bottle of something amber and trying to harmonize pieces of Kismet. Maybe I really was dead after all. Then I smelled the fish broiling and took a closer look. The Big Geisha looked me right in the eye and grinned like a pirate. "Well, look what the dat cragged in," she announced, arching her eyebrow. The Little Geisha snickered and spit a mouthful of booze into the fire, which flared up like Beelzebub's Grand Entrance. "Hello girls," I waved, my knees watery. Big Geisha lifted her wig and winked. The little one turned the fish and said something sotto voce to her companion. Both of them laughed uproariously. "Been into the cooking sherry again, Lexie?" I stumbled into their little camp of stretched blankets over vines and collapsed against a palm. Either I had serious brain damage or Lexie and Lareine Hinton were done up like a pair of Tojo's tarts. Neither one looked like they'd suffered more than a scratch from the..when had it been? This morning? Yesterday? A year ago? They both looked like they'd been working diligently at the bottle of Old Crow since Christmas. I did the math and figured a day or so to set all the blanket tents up and catch a fish. Little Geisha scratched at her blue silk kimono and glared at me. "You crashed my goddamn plane, buddy." Big Geisha snorted and passed the bottle to Lexie. "Any landing," she began piously, "you can walk away from-" "He didn't walk away!" Little geisha growled. "Neither did I. You dragged us out. There's a legal disstinct-sheyon." I sagged to the ground by the Big Geisha and let the jungle stop spinning. "You could have called me for dinner," I said, and laid back on the carpet of loose leaves and listened to the rain pittering on the canopy above while Lexie and Reinie argued the finer points of whiskey with fish, wondering if Alice had any stranger companions down the rabbit hole. "In case anyone was wondering," I interrupted, "I'm alive. Thanks." Lareine dropped to an elbow and put her arm over my chest. "I know you are," she said softly. Meanwhile Little Geisha belched fire and laughed sadly when I didn't turn into a pile of ashes. "We saw you get up. Alexandra-' "Alexandra?" "Lexie" "Oh. Madame Plumblossom." Reinie laughed silently, her shoulders shaking, her wig draped boozily over one eye. "The samurai's best friend." "Since you haven't asked, she had these getups in the cargo hold." I plucked a bit of silk away from her back. Hmm. "Sure. She just flies around with the costumes from the Mikado and when Christmas comes she drops them down all the good little children's adobes," I said. "Santa Alejandra, all she needs is a red nosed reindeer." Reinie the Big Geisha flicked a look back at Lexie and broke up again, easing down atop me. "She said they were for orphanages." I wondered when anyone would tell the truth again. "Orphanages." "Hmm-mm. OrphanAnniages." Her head got steadily heavier on my chest and I was getting a faceful of lacquered wig. It itched. "How much of that stuff did you guys drink?" I asked her. I got either a V for Victory sign or it was the second bottle. Her breathing began to deepen and slow. "Lareine!" I pinched her lightly and she shrugged. "Mmm later, baby, I'm sleepy." "Lareine, Orpanages don't need these Tokyo Rose outfits. Will you think for a minute?" I heard a mild thud and saw Lexie had literally fallen off a log. Dead drunk, with a skewered fish in her hand. "She works for Uncle Toneeee," I sang into her ear, and got back a snore. I laid there for a while, listening to the fire, the rain, the dual snores of Lexie and the Big Geisha and the sound of my own voice trying to explain everything. Some things were easy. "You're wearing one of Uncle Lord High DeLauro's House of El Caliente Sombrero uniforms, Lariene." I slid the wig off her head and ran my hand down her neck. She'd pinned up her red locks and without the wig she almost looked 17. "I remember hearing about one of them in Cabo," I whispered, "catering to the visiting high roller. Phil and I once hid out one of his girls. Well, Cohen's girls back then. She told us all about it." Reinie stirred uneasily then settled back to sleep. I began to move out from under her, my back and the fact that I really didn't want to stop touching her compressing my movements into little glacial squirms. "Miss Bakubomb over there is a supplier. Not the girls. But the studio stuff, the costumes, the props, the cameras..." I let my voice trail off. The scam was an old one, and I'd heard that the KGB, the Russkies, did the honeytrap perfectly. Tony could probably teach them some variations on it, but then, he had the budget for it. And the livestock. "The first time a bigshot flies in it's all gravy. No cameras behind the mirrors. Just Geishas and sake. Or Princesses. Or Esther Williams lookalikes in RKO costumes." I wondered if Lexie knew the real reason Tony wanted this stuff. She always seemed so marmish before. Probably, she did. I had the feeling that deep down she was as hard as burnt rivets on a Liberty ship. "The next time..well, the next time they make a little movie magic." I lowered her to the sand and kissed her ear. "After all, what good is owning a big chunk of Hollywood if you can't make your own films." Reinie nuzzled her wrists and curled up in a fetal ball. I limped over to Lexie and made sure she was breathing, then threw her fish in the fire. "You see," I said, settling onto the log Little Geisha had fallen off of, "Lexie here hasn't got a license to fly. But she was Frank's co-pilot. Her heart, you know." Both women began to snore in rhythm. Twin engines. "Yeah I guess you do know. Now." I poured out the Crow and flung the bottle into the jungle. The rain had subsided and the fire was dying. Something moved overhead in the trees. Monkeys maybe. I drew my revolver and checked the action. It was a tad gritty and I cracked the cylinder to clean it with my shirt. "I guess she just inherited his connections. Funny how you think you know someone." "Isn't it though?" I sat up and tried to click the cylinder back in but it was caught on my shirttail. The voice had come from beyond the fire. "Don't bother, I'm not a threat." A man walked slowly, but steadily, into the light. He was middle aged, with a sad, hound dog face and slitted eyes. A long barreled hunting rifle lay cradled in his arms over a linen safari jacket. "As you can see, I'm alone." I stopped jerking at my shirt and a cartridge fell out of the chamber onto the ground. I rolled my eyes in mortification. "Are you going to shoot me? Or can I put this weapon down. It's getting a bit heavy." He had a gravelly but educated voice that I'd heard before. Many times. "Put it down," I said, a smile building on my jaw. "I'm sorry, but I can't seem to place your name. You'll have to excuse me, I just put a plane in the ground and I'm a bit on the graceless side after a crash." I tugged at the edge of my shirt. It was caught fast in the trigger guard. "Huston." He laughed, a barking laugh. "John. I think we've met, haven't we?" "Professionally even, " I laughed back and relaxed. Another shell slid out of the cylinder and I slammed it shut before I was totally unarmed. "You were with Phillip Marlowe and Associates, weren't you?" I said I was. "Did he ever tell you about doing The Falcon?" I wished I hadn't poured out the Crow now. A story was building and my mouth was as dry as a bed of coal slag. "Made him a Technical Advisor or something? Uncredited of course." "Of course." Huston's voice was hypnotic. That, or I was slipping into a coma. "So that was you who I heard landing on my beach?" His beach? "I tried for Aculpulco. The plane decided that was too much trouble." Huston nodded and sat down next to me, examining my face, my clothes, my eyes with one brief glance. "You always fly in a tuxedo? Must be some cargo." He took in the two slumbering Geishas without moving his face and grinned mischeviously. "It's a long story," I sighed. "You wouldn't happen to have a drink on you, would you?" Huston chewed on the insides of his mouth and pursed his lips. "No, I wouldn't. But I would have one back at Del Azul." I waited. "It's my home, up there," he said, and pointed into the trees. A rustle of something heavy passed through the jungle not far away as he said that, and he slid the bolt back on his rifle, then slammed a round into the chamber. "There are jaguars on this island, son," he smiled. "I know, I put them here." I swallowed back a joke at the look on his face. "I'll send Ramon down here to keep an eye on you tonight. In the morning he'll take you up to the house. It's a walk. Are you injured?" I ran a hand over my hair, feeling crusted blood. "I've been hurt worse getting seats at the Pantages to see Sinatra," I exhaled, and Huston took it in without comment. He looked at Reinie and Lexie and I followed his gaze. "I think these two are fine. Drunk as stevedores on a Saturday but fine." "Interesting companions, sir. The tall one any relation to you? Sweetheart? Mistress? Wife?" "Yes," I said, and his face fell slightly. "Something." Explanations were hard to come by and I didn't try very hard, but I felt like telling someone and Huston was a good listener. An hour passed and he only interrupted me once, when I mentioned Fleming. "Ian Fleming, the journalist? Has a house down in Jamaica?" "Yes." He laughed knowingly and patted my shoulder. I left out the part about Costello and the dead soldier but for some reason mentioned the money. His eyes widened a little but Huston wasn't interested in money. He was interested in people. I also left out the fact that Reinie was carrying a marker from Meyer Lanksy giving her rights to all of DeLauro's empire. I reached over and smoothed the Big Geisha's kimono over her legs and Huston followed every movement with his heavy Dubliner face. "Well, bring them along. I will have breakfast and such waiting." With that, he stood and we shook hands, his the larger, but no crushing grip. He began to walk out of the light then turned as he reached a tree on the rim of the deep shadows, the flare of a kitchen match erupting yellow-orange, turning his face into something otherworldly. He lit his cigar with eager sucking puffs then blew Cuban smoke at me. "By the way, you should know this little war you've walked into has no national boundaries. I know your Mr. DeLauro. And plenty more like him. If this really is his niece, and I have no reason to doubt you, then you have hooked yourself into a tarpon. Hell, the King Tarpon. The fight will be long and you won't know which way she will run. Under the boat, perhaps. There are many scavengers. Some of them may be out there right now, following the trail. ." I looked down at Reinie's sleeping form. "She saved my life after the crash, I think." "Perhaps." Huston turned back to the jungle and said, "Perhaps she also caused it. It's hard to see the truth with someone you love, isn't it?" In the morning a small dark Indio boy crept out of the bush and tapped me on the nose with a dirty finger. He grinned and slid his little M-1 carbine off a shoulder like a pro and pointed up into the hills. Breakfast. To be continued..