“Where you headed?”
“Lucky me,” Sam said. “I get to play chauffeur to Mrs. Arbuckle.”
“You don’t mean…?”
“I do.”
HEARST MET MARION DAVIES when she was sixteen and performing in the chorus line in Stop! Look! Listen! on Broadway. He’d made the show every night it had run, paying a boy to wait at the stage door with flowers and jewelry and a diamond-encrusted watch that Marion had promptly lost on their third date. But he’d agreed to more watches-that she never wound or checked-and there were secret dinners at Delmonico’s and drinks at the Plaza and lovemaking that made Hearst feel half of his fifty-eight years. Hearst’s wife, Millicent, had been a chorus girl, too, but back in the nineteenth century, and after five boys she’d lost a bit of her charm and zest for life. With Marion, he’d finally found a solid girl with enough energy to keep up with him and realize that life was just one big rolling party where the world provided constant entertainment. And it was best in San Francisco. There they could escape the prying eyes of the scandal sheets and be out on the town as producer and ingénue, getting ready for the town’s world premiere of Enchantment in November.
By the time they left the Opera House, they were already feeling a bit of the champagne they’d had at the intermission of Tosca, and it had all been a bunch of laughs during the opera, because Marion had dressed as a little Chinese man in a blunt-cut wig and silk pajamas. She’d even made up her eyes to look like an Oriental, while Hearst had dressed as a grand emperor with a flowing red robe decorated with dragons and flowers and a Fu Manchu mustache pasted to his face.
A driver in a Cadillac touring car motored them up Nob Hill from the Civic Center, looping to the portico of the Fairmont, and the grand Chinese Ball that had brought out all the little yellow people from the Chinese colony to serve food, dance, and mix with the elite dressed gaily in their own pajamas and silks.
The lobby air had been perfumed with incense and jasmine, and there was much handshaking and silly bowing by the city elite, and the Oriental people scrambled around with big smiles, offering up pork with bamboo shoots and chrysanthemum salad and little cups of ny ka pa. Dozens of men donned a dragon costume that snaked through the party, and women dressed as men or as Oriental princesses squealed and yelped in the great candlelit room decked out in silk tapestries and gold.
Hearst clapped and pronounced the affair wholly magnificent when approached by District Attorney Matthew Brady and Chief O’Brien. Both men smiled and shook Hearst’s hand warmly. Marion did a little bow and stayed in character, rattling off some gibberish that no one in their right mind would think was Chinese. Somewhere was the sound of a xylophone. Cymbals crashed. The giant, bigheaded dragon wove in and out of screaming, laughing women.
“Judge Brady, Chief,” Hearst said, “Miss Marion Davies.”
Brady said hello. Chief O’Brien kissed her hand.
The men introduced their wives, in jade and ostrich feathers and floor-length Oriental robes. More fireworks crackled in the ballroom. The two women looked uncomfortable meeting Miss Davies, and Hearst put his arm around the smaller woman’s waist for reassurance.
The lobby, lit with green and red lanterns, cast the faces in a weird light. Judge Brady was a bit younger than Hearst and had been serious-minded enough to keep on his black tie and tails from Tosca. He had a hangdog face and droopy eyes, with gray hair parted to the side, but was sharp and smart and wanted more than anything to be California’s next governor.
“No costume?”
“I’m not much for theatrics,” Judge Brady said.
“Confucius see,” Hearst said. He smiled a big-toothed smile and rubbed the phony mustache. He then smiled normally, dropping the act. “A hold-over from my school days back east.”
The men exchanged glances with their spouses. Hearst looked to Marion.
The women left.
“Where can a man get an honest drink in this town?” Judge Brady asked.
A little Oriental walked past with small blue china cups on a silver tray. Chief O’Brien stopped the man and gathered three. The pointy straw hat on O’Brien’s head seemed out of place with his walrus mustache, giant gold-rimmed glasses, and bright blue eyes. The seams on his black pajamas were about to burst.
“Manslaughter?” Hearst asked.
Brady looked to Chief O’Brien. Chief O’Brien cleared his throat and said, “Our detectives have some new information.”
Hearst squinted his eyes, slid his hands into the opposite sleeves of his silken robe, and bowed. “I see… I see.”
Hearst toasted the men and took his drink.
Judge Brady finished the drink, pronouncing it god-awful, and placed his hand in the pant pocket of his tuxedo. He glanced around the room, his eyes staying away from Hearst’s stare, which was making him nervous. Hearst could always do that with the stare, could watch a man incessantly without prejudice or malice, his eyes merely lingering on the man’s face, making strong men grow shy. It was almost as if some felt Hearst’s gaze to be too private, too intimate, the way his eyes could rove over you and take in all of you and seem to know what you were thinking even as he was trying to figure it all out.
Miss Davies bounced up and bumped her behind to his and handed him another cup of the ny ka pa and said, “What’s the h-haps, Daddy?”
And Hearst smiled at that. The chief and the D.A. looked uncomfortable with the informality of the exchange. Hearst bowed, formally and very Orientally, and took Miss Davies’s arm and led her into the deeper red-and-green light and the smell of sweet jasmine. He slid his large hand onto her lower back, the spread of his fingers encompassing the base of her spine, and whispered into her ear, “I wish I could take you here in front of everyone.”
She squealed and said, “W.R.!”
The feeling of her so close, even in the silliness of a costume ball where they could be anyone and no one, made his heart race. He remembered only days ago standing with her alone at the beaches of San Simeon and taking pictures with his big box camera as she would emerge from the sea, a Venus with golden locks, covered in sand. Her beautiful, healthy body glowing from sun and sand and vitality and life.
He made love to her there in a cove along the shores and in the gentle sound of the surf, the cool night creeping in from the Pacific, and he could feel the rage drumming in his blood and in his ears until he thought his entire body would ignite in flame.
“Are you okay?” she asked. Her breath a sweetness, a cooling mint in his face.
“Just fine,” Hearst smiled. “Let’s dance.”
THE TRAIN WAS LATE.
Eight hours late from the east, coming in on the Overland Limited, some trouble with another train’s wreck in Iowa, and now the big Southern Pacific clock on the wall of the station terminal read two in the morning. Sam went back to the paper, sitting on the large bench drinking a cup of coffee he’d bought from a blind man at the newsstand. He massaged his temples, reading up on five men busted in Bakersfield for trying to organize oil workers on strike in Kern County. The Examiner called them “card-carrying reds” and agitators with the International Workers of the World. The sheriff rounded them up, drove them out of the city, and turned them loose to walk south toward Los Angeles. The paper said if the owners of the oil rigs couldn’t handle their men, they’d take over the job.
Sam folded the paper and leaned back into his seat, his cap sliding down in his eyes, as a conductor walked into the giant cathedral in Oakland and announced that the Overland Limited would arrive in ten minutes.
Sam checked his watch and made his way to the platform, watching that giant eye of the locomotive grow closer in the dark, chugging and steaming. He yawned and rested a hand against a metal support beam and then noticed all the men crowding behind him carrying writing tablets and pencils and box cameras and flashes. The Old Man had told him there was to be some sort of announcement at the station and that one of Dominguez’s men, a fella named Brennan, would handle it. But after Arbuckle’s wife said a few words, to take her and her mother back to the city by ferry, making sure they weren’t hassled by any newsmen.