Siren Queen(13)

“Such a beauty never was born within the walls of old Petrograd,” he crooned, his mouth too close to my face, his acidic breath husking over my cheek. “Do you know those words, foreign girl? They wrote it up on the cards as if I spoke them, but I never did.”

“Let me go,” I cried, struggling uselessly before I remembered to fight. It took two solid kicks, like kicking a limestone block, and I stumbled back when he let me go. There was a step just behind me, and I toppled back over it into the dusty yard on my back. The fall bumped my tailbone, and the scratches from where he had dug his fingernails into my shoulders flared with hot pain.

Peter Nikolic stood in the doorway, his skin flaming silver, his eyes like cigarette burn holes through the world. He wasn’t old for the moment, not with my terror ringing in his ears. He was great and grand and silent, Count Zakharov come to see the world burn for his Esma, and I stared at him in wonder.

Then the door slammed with an old man’s mocking cackle, and I got slowly to my feet. The scratches on my shoulders would need peroxide if I didn’t want them to get infected, and in a sullen rage, I picked up his shirts from the ground, pedaling back to the reservoir to throw them in.

Luli found me as I started back, and she hopped up on the handlebars as if we had arranged the whole thing. She smelled like turpentine, and I saw that her nails were filthy, ragged and torn with blue paint dug in so deeply she’d have to go after it with a pocketknife if she cared to clean it at all.

“Good day?” I asked, momentarily forgetting to be acidic, and she flashed me a bright real smile.

“Yeah.”

After that I gave up on actors. Desperate for some kind of traction, I went to the waterholes where the crews gathered, rough places that only existed after dark. I dressed in shabby, baggy clothes, and I listened more than I talked. It took months, but finally, I heard something I could use. There was a trolley to Aspen Hills, and I was on it the next day.

These days, Aspen Hills is all tattoo shops and Friday-night enchantments, but back then, it was a quiet neighborhood, overgrown and smelling of the oleander and jacaranda that smudged the streets with creamy white and icy purple.

I got off the trolley and walked slowly along the cracked sidewalk, looking for the house number that I had gotten, all unlikely, from the phone operator. At the last, I didn’t need it at all because I came to a large house in faded turquoise with a brass plaque on the low stone wall that surrounded the property. For a moment, I ran my fingers along the raised letters reading HAVERTON’S HOME FOR FORMER ARTISTES before I opened the black iron gate.

When I opened the glass-and-mahogany door, I was first met with a smell of linseed and lemon, almost strong enough to overshadow something bitter and slightly acrid underneath. The stout woman behind the counter gave me a stern look as I approached, but she didn’t question my presence, not even when I asked for Mrs. Hezibah Wiley. She only nodded towards the staircase to my left and told me to go all the way up.

“You should have brought flowers,” the receptionist said. “She favors those who bring her flowers.”

I learned about Mrs. Wiley from Martilo, who ran cables on Jacko’s set. He was a big man with an enormous black mustache, and one night, he told the bar about the great Hezibah Wiley, who had become Eleanor Bloom and then turned it all away. He was some kind of relation of hers, a second cousin or something like that, and the pride he took in her, for both achieving and then leaving, was obvious. He said that these days, she had returned to her old name—what she called her real name—and she lived in Aspen Hills.

The staircase was longer than I thought it was. The steps were steeper than the ones at the laundry for all that they were polished wood, and bare, which seemed to me a dangerous thing for the housing of pensioners. The striped wallpaper to either side of me was relieved by a museum’s gallery of color process, sketches, tintypes, daguerreotypes, and even the odd sketch or small painting. The ones closest to the ground floor were nearly modern, shots from movies that I had seen when I was just a little younger, but further up, I saw older ones, ones I had never heard of, going right back through the silent movies to the bright printed handbills for vaudeville acts.

At the very top of the stairs was a door with a pattern of iron nails pounded into it, and I realized Mrs. Wiley was kept or kept herself in the attic rooms. At my knock, a restrained Mid-Atlantic accent called for me to come in, and taking a deep breath, I did so.

The rooms at the top of Haverton’s Home for Former Artistes were bright, windows thrown open to let in the California sunshine. There was a riot of green plants everywhere, Eden heaved onto the fourth story, and amidst it all, Mrs. Wiley herself was nearly lost to view.

She was a small woman with an ancient smiling face, reminding me of an orange that had been forgotten on the windowsill and left to wrinkle and dry. She sat at a small table with a half-finished game of patience in front of her, and she watched me with eyes that seemed as sharp as splinters. It was impossible for a woman as ancient as she looked to have been in the movies; the film industry wasn’t old enough yet to have true elders, not even among the strange and dark ones who owned the studios, but she sat in front of me like a marker of something older and wilder.

“You didn’t bring flowers,” she observed.

“I didn’t know to do so,” I said. “I came for information.”

“Then what did you bring me instead of flowers? I can see that you are no fan of mine, no worshiper.”