Joseph’s young wife. They had been married two months. Michelle had taken an immediate liking to Peter and had talked up his screenplay, but Joseph had refused to lay out good money for bad horror. Persistent almost to a fault, Michelle had asked Peter if he could do other work. Down to his last few hundred dollars, he had agreed.
Gruff, never easy to get along with, Joseph Adrian Benoliel could turn on the charm when he wanted to, but only if he needed something. Worth half a billion dollars, he rarely admitted to needing anything. Under Michelle’s tutelage, Peter had become his more charming face.
‘You’re a gem, you know that?’ she had told Peter at the beginning of his new role, as she had walked ahead of him, a slight, wiry figure in shorts and halter top, her lambent contralto and slapping zoreys echoing across the marble-lined entry of Flaubert House. ‘You won’t believe the weirdoes trying to take advantage of Joseph. You’re just what he needs.’
For thirteen years now, Peter had toted, met with, dismissed, couriered, and kept mum. He had made more money from helping Joseph and Michelle than he had ever earned from his movies. In the end, Peter had become a decent factotum, fed his family, and acquired a loose sort of freedom from want.
Now he was locked in, wary of trying anything new, of making another wrong move and losing the last important things left in his life.
A fair number of people in LA now knew Peter only as Joseph’s dogsbody.
So had ended his big dreams.
Peter spotted a river rock wall nine feet high and thirty feet long, then found an open space across the street just big enough to fit the Porsche. Beside the wall, twin red cedar garage doors were illuminated by hyperbolas cast by jutting tin-saucer lights fitted with clear glass bulbs. Authenticity meant a lot in Pasadena.
He walked along the rock wall, knuckles brushing the jutting boulders, until he came to the cedar gate. Somewhere deep within the night behind the wall, chimes tinkled. A breeze stirred dry leaves and they made a sound like little hands rubbing together.
Peter found a small ivory button mounted in green bronze above the standard NO SOLICITORS sign and re-checked the description. Nothing else like it on the block. He pushed the button. Security lights switched on within the yard. Two minutes later, a thin woman of sixty or so peered through the gate with intense black eyes.
‘Yes?’ she said, leaning to look behind him.
‘My name is Peter Russell. I’m here for a private meeting with Sandaji.’
‘Representing yourself?’
‘No,’ Peter said.
‘Who, then?’
‘I was told to come here and you’d know everything you needed to know.’
‘Well, identification would certainly help,’ the woman said. Peter produced his driver’s license. She held out a small flashlight and examined it with wrinkled brow. ‘You make a good picture,’ she said, and then stepped back. The gate pulled open on a metal track. To either side of a slate walkway, bamboo formed an undulating curtain, up to and around a stone lantern. Through the stalks, he could see a porch and dimly lit windows.
‘Come in, Mr Russell,’ the woman said. ‘My name is Jean Baslan. I’m Sandaji’s personal assistant. She’s very busy this time of year. We always love coming back to this house. A peaceful place.’ Her voice had a pleasant ululation to it, accompanied by a trace of Nordic accent.
Peter followed her up the winding walkway.
‘We’ve cleared this hour for you,’ Jean Baslan said. ‘If you plan on taking less time, please let us know. Have you met Sandaji?’
Peter said he had not.
Baslan smiled. ‘You have a treat in store, Mr Russell. We’re all totally devoted to her.’ With a gentle wave, she guided him through the front door into the living room. Dark wood and exquisite built-in cabinetry set off antique furniture and hand-woven oriental carpets. Tiffany lamps sat contented and elegant on long tables of solid bird’s-eye maple. Peter recognized Morris chairs that looked genuine, and the books within the glass cases were rich and interesting: leather-bound sets of Voltaire, Trollope, Dickens. He wondered what kind of women had lived in this house when it was first built: no doubt lovely, their dresses ankle-length, stepping like young deer with charming hesitations and subtle glances. He could almost smell their perfume.
‘We’re here to help needy people,’ Jean Baslan said, ‘people living in pain and confusion, who desperately need Sandaji’s message of hope. What sort of question did your friend, your employer, have?’
‘Well,’ Peter said, ‘it’s private.’
‘Is he elderly?’
‘In his seventies,’ he said.
‘A friend as well as an employer?’
Peter tilted his head to the left. ‘We respect each other,’ he said.
‘Is he married?’
Peter smiled. ‘Mostly I run errands and take meetings. That sort of thing.’
‘How intriguing …’ She lifted her hand. ‘Sandaji will know what to tell him, I’m sure.’
They had passed through a dining room and into the rear portion of the house. He saw a sleeping porch with two women sitting in warm darkness on wicker chairs. Their eyes glinted at him as he passed. For a moment, he half imagined them in long silken dresses. The effect was at once charming and disconcerting.
‘You know what our greatest difficulty is?’ Baslan asked. ‘Discouraging proposals. For marriage, you know. The men who come to Sandaji find her so comforting. But then, she is beautiful, very much so, and that confuses many.’
Peter said he was looking forward to meeting her. Personally, however, he had never found age much of an aphrodisiac.
The house was a work in progress and in these back rooms, it looked more like a middle-class grandma lived here than a very rich aunt. Past the dining room, tables, couches and chairs were not antiques. The jambs and rafters still supported decades of paint, rather than being stripped to native wood as in the restored sections.
The first thing Peter noticed as Jean Baslan opened the last door was the scent of freshly crushed herbs: thyme, rosemary, and then spearmint. Aromatherapy, he thought. Oh, goodie.
Sandaji was pressing her dark velvet gown down over her hips, having apparently just stood up from a plain wooden chair. Peter saw her first, and then the room she was in. Later, trying to remember the room, he would be hard-pressed to describe what was in it. The rest of the house remained clear, but from this moment, all he truly remembered was the woman. She stood six feet tall, hair a grey curly fountain tamed by clips and a ribbon to flow down her back. The black gown she wore ended at mid-ankle and she was barefoot, her feet bony but well formed, like the rest of her; hips protruding, though she was not excessively thin, roll of tummy pronounced but not obtrusive, faint nubs on not particularly small breasts. As Peter’s eye moved from bare feet to shoulders, he received the impression of a willowy college girl, and then Sandaji turned her head to face him, and he saw the mature woman, well past her fifties but surely not in her seventies, observant eyes relaxed in a face lightly but precisely seamed by a subset of whole-life experiences. Her
