“What you’re saying now sounds similar, but you’ve never said these lines onscreen,” Ric said.
“
“Hardly home movies,” Ric said. “You two were box office magic eighty years ago. You must remember that. Does your CinSim life allow you to improvise? Do you like that? Or do you hate being stuck in this one bar scene, on this one set, glad-handing every starry-eyed tourist who wanders by?”
“Nicky,” Nora said. “The man is deeply troubled. We must help him.”
“Of course.” Nick’s hands lifted, martini-less, and patted the air like a conductor’s.
Looked damn like one in that formal suit, Ric thought.
“Have you ever heard of the fourth wall, my boy?” Nick asked.
“Sure. The part of a stage set that faces the audience. No wall at all. And I’m closer to thirty than to twenty, so I’m nobody’s boy.”
“Yes, you are,” Nora said, as if cooing to Asta. She also made a kissy face at him that was too damn attractive even if she was technically a hundred and ten years old. “Don’t call the man a boy, Nicky. If you want to call someone that, we’ll be forced to have children and you know what will happen to the key to the liquor cabinet, then.”
Nicky contained a shudder. “I believe we’re being subjected to a serious interrogation, my love. What a novel experience.”
“I
“Did we have that in our day, dear?” Nora asked her husband.
“They were out there, but all about low dives and criminal vices and not in our elevated social circles at all.”
“Apparently they’ve improved,” Nora said, eyeing Ric’s suit and, he’d swear, speculating on what was under it.
Nick mock-slapped her hand on his suit shoulder. “Drink your drink.”
“Yes, dear.” She sipped provocatively, her eyelids half-closed under the thin sweep of eyebrow arches plucked to within an eighth-inch of their lives.
Ric remembered then. Delilah said Myrna Loy had been stuck playing pulp fiction Asian dragon ladies before she snagged the part of Nora. Holy
“Don’t you miss playing other roles?” he tried to ask the actors that underlay the personas before him.
“Mr. . . . ?” Nick began.
“Montoya.”
“Montoya,” Nora echoed in a naughty tone.
“Mr. Montoya, I can see you are the sincere sort,” Nick Charles declared with an air of sober dignity. “Rather dull for our Delilah, I fear, but we certainly regard her as one of our rare, real friends. If you are asking how we like our current lives, I can only reply that our careers were dead. We were almost forgotten, except on those interminable nostalgia documentaries. Gin was going undrunk. Our dog, Asta, was only a name in thousands of dreary crossword puzzles. ‘Myrna’ and ‘Loy’ got in them, but ‘William’ and ‘Powell’ almost never.”
“Not my fault,” Nora caroled, “if you were born with a stuffy offstage name.”
“The producers did give you the ‘Loy,’ love. Shorter on a marquee than Williams. Your actual surname was a tribute to me, if you think about it.”
Nora made a face at him. Nick frowned and sipped.
“In addition,” he told Ric, “if you were to ask your Miss Street, she would tell you that I have been of some small service as an investigative advisor and that she derives any style sense she may have from my lovely and patient wife, with whom she helped to reunite me. As well as with the dog.”
Nick Charles took a pause in his speech to sigh. “Where is the dog, dear?”
“Asta is on the other side of the bar, enjoying a dish of tourist pant legs, with discreet growls. No one can hear in this crazy, jingling jazzy casino.”
Now Ric was patting the air, a conductor trying to hush his massive winds section.
“I think I get it,” he told Nick. “You can’t break character, but you’ve got more options than any of the Inferno Hotel brass might suspect.”
Nora’s observant eyes nailed her husband’s. “Maybe not
Nick edged along the bar, forcing Ric to retreat. It wasn’t that Nicky used any muscle, more that Ric wanted to avoid direct CinSim contact. Who knows what they were made of besides zombie bodies and cinema silver nitrate and dreams?
In a few seconds, he saw how foolish that recoil was.
“We Darkside bar habitués,” Nick Charles said, “work the civilized side of the Strip. I personally am glad that Nora and I are more known for our repartee and taste in booze than any intimate hijinks.
“Not that we didn’t get up to them, my lad, but the scripts stopped to discreetly draw the curtains. You’ll find the more ‘personal’ CinSims below. I had my share of lady fans, but I was valued for my mind and inimitable style, rather than my physique. We all acted the scripts we were given. How someone like Jean Harlow or Errol Flynn feels about a new life as the ultimate undead objects of desire, I am thankful to say I haven’t the slightest notion. And if I ever do, I can sip away all that is so casually crass and modern these days. Cheers!”
Ric thanked the family Charles and looked down to see a quizzical white-and-gray wire-haired terrier eyeing his pant leg with intent to water.
“Asta, no!” Nora ordered, but Nicky merely bent to pick him up and install him on the barstool Ric had vacated.
Ric left them there, a family portrait in dramatic black-and-white against the vividly colored liquors above and the dancing demons below, both under glass.
Chapter Seven
I STOOD BECALMED and frantic in a mirror-world turned into a thorny trap.
Where was Ric now? Who would warn him he was under attack if I was confined to fey stir?
Loretta Cicereau had used my curiosity and my guilt at imprisoning her to reverse our roles. Her boyfriend was not only dead and unrevivable, but mine might soon be in the same state by her hands.
“Any magic you can use to help me overcome this wall you created?” I asked Madrigal.
His broad bare shoulders shrugged. “Phasia and Sylphia supplement my powers, but they’ve gone off to sulk now that I’ve put a wall between us. I’m in the doghouse with them as much as your clever canine Quicksilver ever was, but they won’t abandon me here forever. They’re just miffed you and I reconnected through mirrors. Where’s the wolfbane of Cicereau’s pack now?”
“Not where I could really use him.” I couldn’t help sounding brusque. “I’ve never taken Quicksilver into mirror-world. It’s not like I need a bodyguard every minute.”
“Allow me to disagree.” Madrigal looked around. “I called up a protective wall, but this overgrown cage is like Sleeping Beauty’s thorn forest, and she was stuck behind the briars for . . . what? Decades?”
“Who’s counting? This thorn-spiked jungle transformed from those leaf-bare trees that were so petite and frosty and pretty when I entered the mirror, kinda like your fey assistants when I first met them and their claws were in.” I looked around and up. “The entwined branches lock us in on three sides, even on the Black Beyond above us.”
“Mirror backings are painted black,” Madrigal pointed out. “No wonder the edges of everything inside the mirror are dark and look impassable.”
I paced and tried not to grind my teeth. “I hope Loretta can’t travel with the speed of the disembodied now that she’s physical again. I’ve got to get out and get to Ric fast. I’ve got to get there before her.”
Madrigal again shrugged brawny shoulders. “I’m a novice at mirror magic, compared to you, but I believe even if you managed to retrace your steps, you’d be back to wherever you entered the mirror.”
