Ace Atkins: Devil’s garden

Ince blew out the candles and there was applause, and singing, and Marion announced after drinking more than she’d promised that everyone was to find a costume.

“But we brought no costumes,” Hearst said to the gathering.

“Here lies the challenge,” Marion announced, grasping a champagne bottle from a crewman and pouring another drink. Before long, the deck was filled, with one couple saying they were Indians but really just covering themselves with blankets as shawls, another couple simply exchanging clothing, George dressed himself in an old bathrobe and said he was a monk. But, as always, Chaplin stole the show, borrowing a negligee and parading around, patting his long dark curls and asking everyone in that maddening accent, “Don’t I look pretty?”

Even Hearst had to laugh.

There was a scavenger hunt and more song, and Hearst drank his coffee, speaking to the captain in the wheelhouse. It was there, through the glass, that he saw his guests standing on the bow staring up at the great ship’s mast as Chaplin, still in women’s silks, shimmied up the cables like some kind of ape, finding his footing high above them all, screaming and shouting. Hearst watched his enraptured guests, staring up at the drunken idiot.

Chaplin had found footing high in a crow’s nest and began to recite Shakespeare.

“Marion,” Hearst said. “We must-”

“Shush,” she said.

He stared at her. Her head tilted back, eyes up at the starred sky, hands clutched to her breasts.

“… slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them? / To die; to sleep; / No more; and by a sleep to say we end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; / To sleep: perchance to dream”-Chaplin stretched out his arm before him in contemplation-“ay, there’s the rub.”

Chaplin finished, thank God, and upended the bottle of Hearst champagne and tossed it deep into the Pacific. In the red glow of the lanterns, there was great applause, yet what mattered to Hearst was that there was also silence. The goddamn silence of awe for the funny little man.

Hearst put his hand on Marion’s shoulder. But she did not feel it.

Hearst, in his great black boots, turned and stormed below, shutting and locking the door. He took two aspirin, filled a glass with fresh water, undressed, and turned out the lights, the party sounds echoing around him as the guests rocked and spun on the ship.

He awoke at three with a tremendous headache, sliding into his silk robe and slippers, unlocking his door and wandering to the galley, where he found two Chinese crewmen playing fan-tan.

They stood at attention, but he paid them no mind, taking the steps up to the deck and searching for Marion. He would ask her to come back to bed, as he felt much better now, the heat and embarrassment of it all cooled away.

The deck of the Oneida was empty.

Empty bottles of champagne and half-eaten trays of food sat on linen-covered tables, the cloths flapping in a cold wind, an approaching storm heading east.

Many of the candles in the lanterns had burned out and the gaiety of it all had grown dim. The stars gone.

Hearst went below, checking Marion’s quarters, the quarters she kept during such trips with guests, only to find an unmade bed. Her night garments, laid out by George, untouched.

He walked the hallway. He heard laughter and thumping.

He stopped at a door, having to stoop a bit to get his ear to wood.

A woman’s laughter. A man’s laughter. A horrendous thumping sound.

Hearst reached for the doorknob, his mouth gone dry.

The room was dark, but a single oil candle on a bed table burned brightly enough that Hearst could see Marion’s marbled body riding a man who lay flat on his back. The man’s chest was bony, with a thin path of hair. He was sweating and smiling. Marion turned her head and, even in that moment, Hearst noted the beauty of her shoulder blades, the milk of her skin, the golden curls against the nape of her neck.

Hearst screamed. Even to him, he sounded like a woman.

He covered his mouth with a hand for the shame.

Chaplin unlatched himself from Marion and twirled a giant red satin sheet around him, holding up a hand and sliding a smile in surrender. He backed away from Hearst, who moved toward him with some kind of lethargic curiosity. Chaplin found another door, a back door, and bolted from the room as quick as a jackrabbit.

Marion was nude. Not a bit of shame on her.

He looked at the smallness of her, the moist patch of hair between her legs, and he felt a great sadness in him. The sadness broke apart as his right hand balled into a fist, and Marion saw a change coming across Hearst’s face, in the scattered light, as he turned and ran from the room.

Hearst ran to the wheelhouse, robe opened, exposing his aged flesh and sagging stomach, but taking great strides, feeling virile and tall, gray and hard. He reached above the instruments and found a 12-gauge mounted on brass hooks and broke apart the gun, checking the load, and snapping it together with a hard clack.

He was on deck, the robe flowing behind him, the storm’s wind blowing across his hair and eyes and him squinting as the first tapping of rain hit the polished deck, the Japanese lanterns shuttering on the lines, some of them catching in the storm and breaking apart, scattering out to sea.

Hearst yelled for Chaplin.

The coward hid.

He moved aft, around the wheelhouse.

A shadow moved behind a lifeboat.

“Come out,” Hearst said. “Face me.”

The figure moved, hooded in the great sheet he’d wrapped himself in, face shadowed, trying to back away. In Hearst’s mind, a faint memory of calliope music played.

Hearst pulled the trigger.

Blam.

He pulled the second trigger.

Blam.

A design of blood and flesh was visible even in the darkness.

Marion screamed. The wheelhouse came awake with light. Lights switched on in tripping patterns across the deck.

Marion knelt by her lover, pulling away his stained shroud.

The face changed.

It was Tom Ince, his friend.

Marion screamed again.

The deck was cluttered with crewman and the rest of the thirteen. They circled Ince’s body, and one man who worked for Hearst, a physician, pronounced him dead right away. George brought Hearst a whiskey and took him back down below, Hearst talking and babbling but not making a bit of sense to either of them. If only his mother were alive.

Hearst tied the belt around his robe. “George, call the office, have our men assembled.”

“Shall they clean this up?”

“Yes, whatever it may cost,” Hearst said. “It’s all such an awful mess and such a beautiful boat.”

The body was taken ashore; the yacht sailed on. The headline read HOLLYWOOD DIRECTOR DIES OF HEART ATTACK.

SAM QUIT THE PINKERTONS before Roscoe’s third trial, everything known to have happened at that goddamn party already recorded. He sold his.32, used the money to buy a beautiful, somewhat used L. C. Smith. The typewriter had an honored place on the kitchen table that had become his office since the TB had grown worse, he and Jose living off a smattering of government checks and the odd short story that was published in a snotty rag called The Smart Set.

He got paid a penny a word.

He got a really nice response to a little piece called “Confessions of a Detective.”

He wrote about how all the mystery hacks got it wrong, making the business of killing into some kind of parlor game. One of the editors suggested he write for a new magazine of theirs, something called Black Mask.

“What do you think?”