He body-checked her as she rose, and like a coach miming a tackle, eased her in his grip across the foot of the bed and held her there. It took all his strength and weight to keep her down. Her face was pressed against his chest, her mouth was open in a scream of pain, but not a sound came out of her. Panting, he held on. If she chose to bite him he would have to give way. Sometimes she bit him, sometimes not. This time she only kept on screaming, and in the single moment that his grip relented she drove him off the bed and clear across the room and into the beige cloth-covered wall. He hung on to her all the way. His body absorbed her unvoiced scream until he felt he could hardly contain, without injury, the force of her grief and rage.
At last she stopped thrashing and he loosened his grip. He backed away, and they lay together on the floor. She cradled her hands prayerfully beneath her cheek; she was facing him. Her lips moved, she prayed, mouthed words, sobbed. He put his hand on her shoulder, an inquiring hand, to ask if she wanted him there or not. When he touched her, she drew closer to him.
“Hey, now,” he whispered absurdly. He put his arm around her, his every move seemed feeble and irrelevant to him. “Hey, now,” he kept repeating, like a man talking to a horse. “Hey, now.”
Around sundown, Axelrod walked into the Drogues’ bungalow with his envelope full of photographs. Young Drogue and his wife were watching a Spanish-language soap opera on their television set. Axelrod set the envelope before them.
“Should I be overjoyed?” Drogue asked. “Is this all of them?”
“All except one print. Dongan Lowndes has it.”
“Jack gave it to Lowndes? But that’s ridiculous.” He looked from Jon to his wife, with an expression of pained mirth. “Isn’t it?”
Axelrod presented Walker’s theory of the Picturesque Lead with Jack’s photograph to support it.
“Somehow,” Drogue said, “I find it hard to take this dopey snapshot seriously.”
“According to Walker, Lowndes is gonna really dish it to us. He says the NYA story will make this location look like Butch’s Garden.”
“What’s that?” Drogue asked. “Some S & M joint known only to weirdos?”
“I don’t think it’s in L.A.,” Patty said.
“He means Lowndes is gonna make us look bad. That’s what he thinks.”
“The hell with what he thinks. He got the whole thing started with his dissolute ways. Anyway, no story in New York Arts is going to hurt us. Or is it?”
“It wouldn’t hurt to get the picture back,” Axelrod said. “Lowndes is unfriendly. The Europeans might go for it. Oggi and those clowns.”
“Christ,” Drogue said irritably. “Does Charlie know about this? He’ll make the night horrible with his cries.”
Axelrod shook his head.
“I think it’s a minor matter,” Drogue said. “It would be nice if we could sort it out without bothering Mr. Freitag.”
“Don’t tell him while he’s eating,” Patty said. “He’s had a bypass.”
“Not only that,” Axelrod said. “He’s got guests.”
“Well,” Drogue wanted to know, “can you get the damn thing back?”
“We’re gonna suggest to Mr. Lowndes that he do the right thing.”
“Don’t start bouncing him off walls. Then we’ll really be in the shit.”
“What I’d like to do,” Axelrod said, “I’d like to have the local police athletic league take his head for a couple of laps around the municipal toilet bowl. Except we’d have to pay mordida and the pigs would probably swipe the print.”
“If he’s unfriendly,” Drogue said, “be my guest. Put the screws to him. Just don’t give him anything to sue about.”
“We’re gonna make him sweat,” Axelrod said. “If he doesn’t deliver maybe we should throw him off the set and tell Van Epp he’s unethical. That way we might kill the story before he writes it. Then Van Epp has nothing to fight for.”
“Let’s see how it goes tonight,” Drogue said. “But I don’t want to get involved. If you want him off the set you have to go to Charlie.”
“Charlie should be outraged,” Axelrod said. “The guy’s supposed to be high-class and he deals with blackmailers.”
“Charlie’s instinct will be to buy him out. Put him on the payroll. Option his next book. Wait and see.”
“You should advise him not to do that.”
“I can’t advise him,” Drogue said. “My father can advise him. Not me.”
“What are you gonna do with Jack?”
“I should pour salt down his throat and make him walk to Tijuana. But since he’s Dad’s old pal I guess I’ll pay him off and fly him home. For my father’s sake.”
“Wow,” Patty said, “that’s Christ-like.”
“Damn right,” Walter Drogue junior said. He picked up one of the photographs and examined it. “This is a truly ugly picture,” he said. “I’ll never be able to look at these two turkeys in the same light.”
“Walker’s into it.”
“Walker’s a bum,” Drogue said. “He’s going to end up like Jack.”
“A lot of them do,” Axelrod said.
“He’s got no survival skills,” the director said. He looked at the picture again. “Neither of them have.”
Patty Drogue lit a joint and took the picture from her husband.
“If any kind of shit hit any kind of fan,” Drogue asked Axelrod, “not that I think it will — do you suppose Walker has some kind of moral turpitude thing in his contract? Some kind of Fatty Arbuckle-type thing?”
“That would cut him out and take his points? I don’t know, Walter. It’s not my department. I doubt it.”
“I’m not trying to take the guy’s points, Axelrod. Why does everybody suspect me of being other than a nice person? I just wondered what kind of risk he ran.”
“Not much,” Axelrod said. “Not like she does.”
Walter took a drag on the joint and gave it back to his wife.
“Sometimes I’m inclined to think this is all Charlie’s fault,” he said. “Charlie’s a silly man. Silly shit happens around his pictures.”
“Really,” Patty Drogue agreed.
“The sixties,” Walter Drogue said to them. “You think they were that great?”
Axelrod shrugged.
“Everybody shoplifted,” Patty Drogue said. “People handed out flowers. You could get laid three times a day with an ugly body.”
“That’s all over now,” Axelrod said.
Bathed, anointed, as cool and clean as chastity, she climbed the lighted path. Walker came behind her, walking carefully. They passed a garden bar and lighted tennis courts, following a yucca-bordered path that led to Charlie Freitag’s casita.
The casita’s sunken patio was lit by flickering torches, set at intervals along its border of volcanic stone. A party of grim mariachis was performing; their music seemed strangely muted to Lu Anne, as if each brass note were being instantly carried off on the wind.
Axelrod appeared from the darkness. He smiled at her and hurried past, approaching Walker. The Long Friends, jubilant, fanned out among the guests. She thought it odd that they seemed happy there.
Across the patio from the musicians was a walled barbecue pit where white-capped chefs labored over a spitted joint. The air was smoky with roasting beef. A great cauldron of boiling sauce stood to one side of the pit and, nearby, a company of men in toques blanches sharpened carving knives. The waiters had set up a buffet and a long well-attended bar.
Axelrod and Walker were conspiring.
“Fuck him then,” she heard Walker say. “Is he here?”
“Not yet,” Axelrod answered. He turned to Lu Anne. “How are you, Lu?”