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“I know you, Clete.”

“Bailey Ribbons is on her way. I heard Helen is beaucoup pissed.”

“Bailey is coming here?”

“Cormier is casting her. I didn’t know how you’d feel about that.”

“She can do whatever she wants. Stop trying to micromanage my life.”

“Want some pancakes?”

I went to Alafair’s room. She was just coming out the door. I told her what Clete had just told me.

“Clete is here?” she said.

“Helen isn’t in the best of moods.”

“And Bailey Ribbons is joining the cast?” Alafair said.

I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to say it again.

“She’s hanging it up with the department?” Alafair said.

“I don’t know. I don’t care, either.”

She pulled me inside the room and closed the door. “How do you want me to say it? You lost two of your wives to violence and one to lupus. You’ll never get over your loss. But you won’t cure the problem with Bailey.”

“We have four unsolved homicides on our desks,” I said. “That’s not an abstraction or part of a soap opera. I need her. I mean at the job.”

“The homicides are not the issue, so stop fooling yourself and stop acting like a twit.”

“Give it a rest, Alafair.”

Her face was pinched, her hands knotting. “Okay, I’m sorry. I get mad at Bailey.”

“Why?”

“She went to the head of the line. She’s attractive and intelligent and has charm and an innocent way that makes men want to protect her. Helen Soileau earned her job. Bailey didn’t. Now she hangs you out to dry and leaves you at war with yourself.”

“I’ll survive,” I replied, and tried to smile.

“Pardon me while I go to the bathroom and throw up,” she said.

I went to the window and looked at the miles and miles of mountain desert to the north, pink and majestic and desolate in the sunrise. It was a perfect work of art, outside of time and the rules of probability and governance of the seasons, as if it had been scooped out of the clay by the hand of God and left to dry as the seas receded and the dinosaurs and pterodactyls came to frolic on damp earth that, one hundred million years later, became stone. As I stared at the swirls of color in the hardpan, the sage clinging for life in the dry riverbeds, and the solemnity of the buttes, massive and yet miniaturized by the endless undulation of the mountain floor, I felt the pull of eternity inside my breast.

I heard Alafair return from the bathroom and felt her standing behind me. “What are you thinking about?” she said.

“Nothing. I bet Desmond casts Bailey as the IWW woman in the book. The one who was at the Ludlow Massacre.” Alafair was looking at me with an expression between pity and anger.

“Can I visit the set?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“I’d like to wish her luck.”

“Better give your well wishes to Desmond. I think he might lose his shirt.”

“I thought he had the Midas touch.”

“He mortgaged his home and vineyard in Napa Valley. He reminds me of Captain Ahab taking on the white whale. He’s always talking about ‘the light.’ He says it’s a Plotinian emanation of the unseen world.”

My attention began to wander. “Clete’s probably still in the dining room. Let’s join him.”

“I have to confess something,” she said. “I think the killings in New Iberia are connected to us.”

“Who’s ‘us’?” I asked.

“Hollywood. The evil we can’t seem to get out of our lives. The legacy of slavery. Whatever.”

“Quit beating up on yourself. We pulled the apple from the tree a long time ago, Alf.”

“Yeah, that bad girl Eve. Save it, Dave.”

Chapter Sixteen

On private land just inside the Utah border, Desmond had constructed an environment meant to replicate nineteenth-century Indian territory and a stretch of the Cimarron River just north of the Texas Panhandle. He had diverted a stream and brought in water tanks and lined a gulley with vinyl and layered it with gravel, then placed a solitary horseman five hundred yards from the improvised riverbank.

Wexler was standing next to me. “This scene is going to cost the boys in Jersey over fifty grand. I hope they enjoy it.”

“Pardon?” I said.

“It’s the last scene in the picture, although we’re only a third into the story. The guy who wrote the book says it’s the best scene he ever wrote, and the last line in the scene is the best line he ever wrote. I bet our Jersey friends would love that.”

“Who are your Jersey friends?”

“Not the Four Seasons,” he answered.

The rider was a tall and lanky boy who looked no older than fifteen. His horse was a chestnut, sixteen hands, with a blond tail and mane. Desmond was talking to the camera personnel; then he flapped a yellow flag above his head. Through a pair of binoculars, I saw the boy lean forward and pour it on, bent low over the withers, his legs straight out, whipping the horse with the reins, his hat flying on a cord. The sun was low and red in the sky, the boy riding straight out of it like a blackened cipher escaping a molten planet. Two leather mail pouches were strung from his back, arrows embedded in them up to the shaft.

“The scene is about the Pony Express?” I said.

“On one level,” Wexler said. “But actually, it’s about the search for the Grail.”

I looked at him.

“Don’t worry if you’re confused,” he said. “Probably no one else will get it, either. Particularly that lovely bunch of gangsters on the Jersey Shore.”

“It’s an allegory?”

“Nothing is an allegory for Desmond. He hears the horns blowing along the road to Roncesvalles. Worse than I.”

The rider went hell for breakfast across the stream, the horse laboring, its neck dark with sweat, water splashing and gravel clacking.

“Cut!” Desmond said. “Wonderful! Absolutely wonderful!”

After the boy dismounted, Desmond hugged him in a full-body press. I felt embarrassed for the boy. “Where’d you learn to ride?” Desmond said.

“Here’bouts,” the boy said, his face visibly burning.

“Well, you’re awfully fine,” Des said. “Get yourself a cold drink. I want to talk with you later. With your parents. You’re going somewhere, kid.”

That was Desmond’s great gift. He made people feel good about themselves, and he didn’t do it out of pride or compulsion or weakness or defensiveness or a desire to feel powerful and in control of others. He used his own success to validate what was best in the people around him. But there is a caveat implied in the last statement. The people who surrounded him were not simply employees, they were acolytes, and I suspected Bailey was about to become one of them. For that reason alone, I felt a growing resentment, one that was petty and demeaning.

“What’d you think, Dave?” Desmond said.

“That young fellow is impressive,” I replied.

“Come on, you’re a smart man. What do you think of us, tattered bunch that we are, talking trash about Crusader knights and trying to sell it to an audience that wants a fucking video game?”

“What do I know?”

Bailey Ribbons was standing thirty feet away, dressed like a fashionable pioneer woman. I had not spoken to her yet.

“What do you think of that scene, Bailey?” Wexler asked.

“I think it’s all grand,” she said. She walked toward us. Her hem went to the tops of her feet. Her frilly white blouse was buttoned at the throat, her hair piled on her head. “Aren’t you going to say hello, Dave?”

“You have to forgive me. I was hesitant to speak on the set.”

“You’re surprised to see me here?” she asked.

“If I’d known you were coming, I wouldn’t have asked Helen for some vacation days. She’s shorthanded now.”