It was a story she’d never told but felt safe telling him. Particularly tonight, before he walked the plank. He and all of Hollywood were walking up that red carpet, smiling and waving while knowing they might be marching into a mass grave. Mitzi could risk telling Schlo. “I tried to help a little girl.” With her fingertips she smoothed the lapels of his tux. “I met her in a building, downtown, where she was lost.” Mitzi plucked the flower from the velvet tray and pinned it in his buttonhole. A gardenia it was, simple and white and sweet smelling. “I was twelve, and the girl, this lost girl was seven years old. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Amid all the machinations of her styling, she felt like a mortician. How a mortician must feel primping a dead body.
Schlo slipped a wallet from his back pocket. He took out a couple credit cards and all the cash and left them on the dresser. The wallet he tucked back in his pants, empty except for his driver’s license.
She dug into her bag for a small handful of pills and held them cupped in her hand. Schlo pinched up two and downed them with a dash of martini. He pinched up two more and choked them down with the last of his drink. “Now, tell me.” He was loose, magnanimous, a generously stoned man beaming over her as if she were his daughter. “How were you the hero of this little lost girl?”
The worst she couldn’t tell him, not while the hired car waited to take him to the theater. Why burden what might be his last hours?
Instead Mitzi lifted a comb from the bureau and straightened the part in his hair. She ran the comb over the sides and back of his head. She said, “I took the little girl to meet my father.” A speck of dandruff she flicked off his ear. She leaned close and shined each of the studs on his shirt, using her breath and a tissue. “I thought my father could help her.”
On television the first of the cars were already arriving at the gateway to the theater. Climbing out and traversing the red carpet were already the first arrivals, looking blue-lipped, looking eyes-dilated from whatever sedatives would get them past their fear. This staggering parade of bejeweled zombies. All of Hollywood royalty, lurching along the red carpet and smiling lazy, crazed, drooling smiles.
And soon Schlo would be staggering into the building alongside them. The most glamorous death march in history.
“Did he?” Schlo asked. “Did your father help this little lost girl you brought home?”
Mitzi watched the television. A young actress in a gown, diaphanous and white as any virgin sacrifice ever wore to be thrown into a volcano, this young woman stumbled and fell to her knees on the carpet. Her face streamed with tears, and she raised jeweled hands to fight off anyone who tried to help her to her feet. As two formally dressed security guards caught her under the arms and began to drag her toward the theater doorway, the camera cut to a smiling newscaster.
On an afterthought Mitzi reached into her bag, again. Instead of pills her fingers plucked out a sealed packet of earplugs. If anything happened, maybe if Schlo couldn’t hear he’d have a chance. Like Odysseus plugging the ears of his crew with wax. Maybe if Schlo didn’t hear the Sirens he might escape. She offered the packet like she wanted he should take it.
After a look at the earplugs, then at her, he took them and shoved them into his pocket. Looped and sleepy-eyed, Schlo persisted, asking, “Just how did your father help this little lost girl you brought home?”
The panic room amounted to a panic suite, five rooms with two full bathrooms. One with a bidet. But after a few weeks of hiding, even with forays into the rest of the house, cabin fever loomed. Just as Blush had said, even a big house still made a very small world.
Tonight they were knee to knee watching television. On the screen a young woman in a shimmering white gown stumbled. She sank to her knees on the red-carpet runway.
“I know her,” Blush said, pointing a finger. “She’s what’s-her-name. The girl who starred in that Civil War picture and got stabbed.”
As they watched, two black-suited handlers complete with mirrored aviator sunglasses hoisted the actress by the elbows and dragged her in the direction of the grand theater. First one, then the other silver stiletto slipped from her feet and remained, left behind on the runway as the limp young woman sagged between the two men helping her.
Blush smirked. “Looks as if someone had some pre-party cocktails too many.”
Among the Hollywood royalty none looked too happy. Most staggered and lurched with drugged, half-lidded eyes. A few wept, clutching rosaries or prayer beads between prayerful hands. Some Oscar hopefuls carried Bibles. Bibles! Foster marveled. As if they were condemned prisoners walking to the guillotine. This was a level of Academy Award jitters Blush had never seen.
On the television a famous action hero froze at the doorway to the grand theater. As two burly uniformed ushers stepped up to guide him forward, this two-fisted he-man grabbed the doorframe. In what had to be a slapstick comic setup, a third usher hurried in and swung a small truncheon against the actor’s handsome head. Knocking him unconscious it would appear. Reducing him to a crumpled pile of evening clothes. It was a brand of offbeat physical humor Foster had never seen at the gala event, and he wondered if the Academy was experimenting with stunts in order to boost their television ratings.
After an interval Blush shouted, “There’s Schlo!”
Foster looked.
“You know,” she said, “the man who made the babysitter bloodbath movie.”
Foster looked closer. Here was the man with the voice
