LITMIR.BIZ

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spot, invited Maxine and Todd to get out of the limo in order to show them a certain view, then presented them with a photograph taken on precisely the same spot sixty or seventy years before, when many of the places they visited had been little more than an expanse of cactus and sand. It had been an education for Todd. He hadn’t realized until then how recent Los Angeles was, nor how tenuous its existence was. The greenery was as artificial as the stucco walls and the colonial facades. The city was one enormous back-lot, fake and fragile. If the water ever ceased to pump then this verdant world, with its palaces and its swooning falls of bougainvillaea, would pass away.

      As it turned out, Todd hadn’t ended up buying any of the properties Jerry had shown them that day, which was probably for the best. He finally decided to stay in his house in Bel Air, but substantially remodel it. It didn’t matter, Jerry had said, apparently reserving his opinion on whether Todd would join the pantheon of guests, nobody legendary had ever lived there.

      Once Todd had said yes to the house in the hills, it took a day to get the move to the Hideaway properly organized; a day which left Todd spent sitting at the window of the Malibu house, staring at the pale reflection of his bandaged face in the rain-spattered glass. Technically, the painkillers Burrows had given him should have left him without any discomfort whatsoever, but for some reason, even when supplemented by some of Bunny’s specials – not a minute of that day passed without his being acutely aware of the pressure of the gauze and the bandages on his face. He morbidly wondered if perhaps he wouldn’t be left with this residue of feeling for the rest of his life; he’d heard of people who’d had certain operations who were made much worse by the surgeon’s knife, and indeed were never the same again. The thought terrified him: that he’d done something completely irreversible. But there was no use in regretting it. All he could do now was hope to God that this unavoidable complication, as Burrows insisted it was, would be quickly cured, and he’d have his face back intact. He wasn’t even hoping for improvement at this point. Just the old, familiar Todd Pickett face would do fine; creases, laugh-lines and all.

      Later, Marco came to pick Todd up, having spent the morning moving some essentials over to the new house. Todd went with him in the sedan, Maxine followed on.

      ‘I got lost twice this morning,’ Marco said, ‘going back and forth from the old house to the new one. I don’t know why the hell it happened, but twice I got all turned round and found myself back onto Sunset again.’

      ‘Weird,’ Todd said.

      ‘There are no street signs up there.’

      ‘No?’

      ‘There aren’t many houses, either, which is what I like. No neighbours. No tour buses. No fans climbing over the walls.’

      ‘Dempsey used to get them!’

      ‘Oh yes, old Dempsey was great. Remember that German? Huge guy? Climbs over the wall, gets Dempsey’s teeth clamped in his ass and then –’

      ‘Tries to sue me.’

      ‘– tries to sue you.’

      They chuckled at the incident for a moment, then rode in silence for a while.

      Chapter 6

      ‘So what exactly did Jerry tell you about this place?’ Todd asked Maxine as they stood outside the Hideaway.

      ‘Not much. I told you he’d played here as a kid? Yes, I did. Well, he said he had wonderful memories of the house. That was about all.’

      Maxine hadn’t taken any pictures of the exterior, it had been raining so hard that day. Now, seen clearly for the first time, the house appeared much larger than Todd had anticipated; perfectly deserving of the term ‘dream palace’. He couldn’t get a complete grasp of its size because the vegetation around it had been left to run wild. A large grove of bamboo to the right of the front door had grown fully thirty feet, its tallest stalks standing higher than the chimney-stacks. Bougainvillaea grew everywhere in lunatic abundance, purple, red, pink and white; and even the humble ferns, planted in the shade of the perimeter wall, had flourished there, and grown antediluvian. There was room beneath the fronds to stand with your hands raised and still not touch the nubby spores on their underbellies.

      The house itself was palatial Spanish in style, with more than a hint of Hollywood fantasy in its genes. The stucco was a washed-out pink, the roof a washed-out red. There was a great deal of elaborate tilework at the front steps, and around the windows, the tiles themselves still bright blue and turquoise and white, the complex interplay of their patterns lending a touch of Moorish beauty to the façade. The front door looked as though it had been purloined from the set of a medieval epic; the kind of door Douglas Fairbanks Senior might have slammed and bolted shut to keep out an army of evil-doers. It would have sufficed too, in its enormity. Maxine had to push hard to open it; and when it finally swung wide it did so not with a gothic creak but with a deep rumble, as a system of counterweights hidden in the wall aided her labour.

      ‘Very dramatic,’ Todd remarked, playing it off. In truth, he was impressed by the scale of the place; by its scale and theatricality. But guileless enthusiasm he’d had shamed out of him long ago. It wasn’t cool to like anything too much, except yourself.

      Maxine led the way through the turret, with its grandiose spiral staircase and its trompe l’oeil ceiling, into the house. The photographs she’d taken had come nowhere near doing the place justice. Even stripped of most of its furniture, as it was, and in need of repair, it was still nothing short of magnificent. There was everywhere evidence of master craftsmen at work: from the pegged wood floors to the elegantly carved ceiling panels; from the exquisite symmetry of the marble mantels to the filigree of the wrought iron handrails, only the best had been good enough for the man or woman who’d owned this place.

      Marco had artlessly arranged a few items of Todd’s furniture in the living room, a little island of brittle modernity in the midst of something older and more mysterious. Todd made a mental note to give every thing he owned away, and start again. In future, he was going to buy antiques.

      They went through to the kitchen. It was built on the same heroic scale as everything else: ten cooks could have happily worked in it and not got in one another’s way.

      ‘I know it’s all ridiculously old-fashioned,’ Maxine said. ‘But it’ll do for a little while, won’t it?’

      ‘It’ll do just fine,’ Todd said, still surprised at how much the place pleased him. ‘What’s out back?’

      ‘Oh the usual. A pool. Tennis courts. And a huge koi pond. Probably a polo field for all I know.’

      ‘Any fish in the pond?’

      ‘No. You want fish?’

      ‘It’s no big deal.’

      ‘I can get koi for you if you want them. Just say the word.’

      ‘I know. But it’s not worth it. I’ll be here a month and gone.’

      ‘So take them with you.’

      ‘And where would I put them?’

      ‘Okay,’ Maxine shrugged. ‘No fish.’ She went to the kitchen window and continued her description of the real estate. ‘The whole Canyon belongs to the house, as far as I can see, but the gardens spread down the hill an acre and a half and all the way up to the top of the hill behind us. There’s a guest-house up there. Perhaps two. I didn’t go look: I figured you wouldn’t be having any visitors.’

      ‘Does Jerry know anything about the history of the place?’

      ‘I’m sure he does, but to be honest I didn’t ask.’

      ‘What did you tell him about me?’

      ‘I told him you had a stalker, and she was getting dangerous. You needed to get out of the Bel Air house for a while until the police had caught her. Frankly, I’m not sure he bought it. He’s got to have heard the rumours. I think we’d

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