Greg Bear: Dead Lines

Peter stood for a moment on the red tiles and looked up through the trellis at the bright blue sky. He pressed his elbow against a rough, sun-battered post, breath coming hard: The old anxiety he always found in tight places, in corners and shadows. When events fell outside his control or his ability to escape. A minute passed. Two minutes. Peter’s gasping slowed. He sucked in a complete breath and pressed the inside of his wrist with two fingers to check his pulse. Not racing. The hitch behind his ribs untied with a few solid pushes of cupped fingers under the edge of his sternum. He had never asked a doctor why that worked, but it did.

He wiped his face with a paper towel, then scrawled a note for Helen on the smudged blackboard nailed below the Soleri bell. Reaching into the oil drum that served as an outdoor closet, mounted high on two saw horses, he tugged out a lightweight suit coat of beige silk, the only one he had, a thrift-store purchase from six years ago. He sniffed it; not too musty, good for another end of summer, soon to turn into autumn.

Peter let the old Porsche roll back out of the garage. The engine purred and then climbed into a sweet whine after he snicked the long, wood-knobbed shift into first gear.

Last he had heard, Phil had been traveling in Northern California, trying to unblock a novel. They hadn’t seen each other in months. Peter tried to think why friends wouldn’t stay in touch from week to week or even day to day. Some of his brightest moments had been with Phil; Phil could light up a room when he wanted to.

Peter wiped his eye and looked at his dry knuckle. Maybe tonight. But Helen might drop off Lindsey, and if he started crying with Lindsey around, that might rip open a wound that he could not afford to even touch.

Numbness set in. He drove toward the ocean and Salammbo, the estate of Joseph Adrian Benoliel.

The sunset beyond the hills and water was gorgeous in a sullied way: lapis sky, the sun a yellow diamond hovering over the gray line of the sea, dimmed by a tan ribbon of smog. Peter Russell pushed along in second gear, between lines of palm trees and golf-green lawn spotted with eucalyptus. Flaubert House cast a long cool shadow across the drive and the golf-green approach. Crickets were starting to play their hey-baby tunes.

Salammbo covered twenty acres of prime highland Malibu real estate. She had survived fires, earthquakes, landslides, the Great Depression, the fading careers of two movie stars, and tract-home development. In more than thirty years in Los Angeles and the Valley, Peter had never encountered anything like her – two huge, quirky mansions set far apart and out of sight of each other, looking down descending hills and through valleys rubbed thick with creosote bush and sage to Carbon Beach.

Here was illusion at its finest: the fantasy that peace can be bought, that power can sustain, that time will rush by but leave the finer things untouched: eccentricity, style, and all the walls that money can buy. Life goes on, Salammbo said with sublime self-assurance, especially for the rich. But the estate’s history was not so reassuring.

Salammbo was a nouveau-riche vision of heaven: many mansions ‘builded for the Lord.’ The lord in this case had died in 1946: Lordy Trenton – not a real lord but an actor in silent comedies – had risen from obscurity in the Catskills for a good twelve-year run against Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. His character – a drunken aristocrat, basically decent but prone to causing enormous trouble – had palled on audiences even before the onset of the Depression. Trenton had gotten out of acting while the getting was grand. One grand, to be precise, which is the price for which he had sold all rights to his films in 1937.

During the Depression, Lordy had invested in sound equipment for the movies and made big money. In the mid-thirties, he had built Flaubert House and then started to erect what some architectural critics at the time referred to as Jesus Wept. Trenton’s friends called it the Mission. The Mission featured a huge circular entry beneath a dome decorated with Moorish tile, high vaulted ceilings, bedrooms furnished in wrought iron and dark oak, an austere refectory that could seat a hundred, and a living room that by itself occupied two thousand square feet. It consumed much of his fortune.

In the early forties, beset by visions of a Japanese invasion of California, Lordy connected Flaubert House and the Mission with a quarter-mile underground tramway, complete with bomb shelter. He lined the smoothly plastered stone-and-brick tunnel with a gallery of nineteenth-century European oils. At the same time, he became involved with a troubled young artist and sometime actress, Emily Gaumont. After their marriage in 1944, she spent her last year obsessively painting full-sized portraits of Lordy and many of their friends – as clowns.

In 1945, during a party, a fire in the tunnel killed Emily and ten visitors and destroyed the tram. Four of the dead – including Emily, so the story went – were burned beyond recognition.

A year later, alone and broken by lawsuits, Trenton died of acute alcohol poisoning.

The next owner, a department-store magnate named Greel, in his late sixties, acquired a mistress, allegedly of French Creole descent. To please her, he spent a million dollars finishing the Mission in Louisiana Gothic, mixing the two styles to jarring effect. The name Jesus Wept acquired permanence.

Greel died in 1949, a suicide.

In 1950, the estate was purchased by Frances Saint Claire, a Hitchcock blond. Blackballed by the studios, her career ruined by allegations of leftist sympathies, Saint Claire had married a savvy one-time pretty boy named Mortimer Sykes. Sykes, playing against type, wisely invested her money and endlessly doted on her. In 1955, they built the third and final mansion of Salammbo, the trendy, Bauhaus-inspired Four Cliffs. In 1957, just six months before Saint Claire’s death from breast cancer, a grove of eucalyptus trees caught fire. The flames spread to two of the mansions. Four Cliffs burned to the ground. Most of Jesus Wept survived, but the refectory lay in ruins. A police investigation pointed to arson, but friends in local politics hushed up any further investigation, suggesting there was already enough tragedy at Salammbo.

In 1958, Sykes put the estate up for sale and moved to Las Vegas. A broken man and heavily in debt, he tried to borrow money from the wrong people. Two years later, hikers discovered his body in a shallow grave in the desert.

The estate lay vacant for five years. In 1963, Joseph Adrian Benoliel became Salammbo’s newest master. A lifelong bachelor, Joseph had made his fortune producing beach flicks and managing a chain of real-estate franchises.

And between 1970 and 1983, he had secretly financed four of Peter’s titillation movies; lots of nudity but no actual sex.

Peter parked the car, got out, and pulled his coat down over a slight paunch. Broad-shouldered, he carried the extra weight well enough, but he was starting to look more like an aging bodyguard than an artist. No matter. The Benoliels didn’t care.

Peter lifted and dropped the bronze fist on the striker plate mounted on the huge oak door. A young man with short black hair, dressed in an oversized blue sweater and beige pants, opened the door, looked him up and down, and held out something as if making a donation to the poor. Peter had never met him before.

‘Here, Mr Benoliel doesn’t seem to want one,’ he said in a clipped tone of British disappointment. ‘They’re free. Who are you?’ He pressed a black plastic ovoid into Peter’s hand and stood back to let him in.

‘That’s Peter,’ Joseph said. ‘Leave him alone,’ He walked into the entryway with a persistent poke of his rubber-tipped cane, moving fast for a man with a limp. ‘I hate the goddamned things.’ He did not sound angry. In fact, he smiled in high good humor at Peter. In his early seventies, with a football player’s body gone to fat and the fat carefully pared away by diet, the flesh of Joseph’s arms hung loose below the short sleeves of his yellow golf shirt. Bandy legs weakened by diabetes stuck out below baggy black shorts. His bristling butch-cut hair had long since turned white. ‘Hate them when they beep in restaurants. People driving and yakking. Always have to be connected, like they’d vanish if they stopped talking. There’s too much talk in the world already.’ He waved his hand in a gesture between permission and irritated dismissal. ‘If you take the damned thing, turn it off while you’re here.’