CHAPTER 27
IF AELFRIC MANHEIM?S MONDAY-EVENING dinner had been reported upon in Daily Variety, the colorful trade paper of the film industry, the headline might have been FRIC CLICKS WITH CHICK.
On the grill, the plump breast had been basted with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt, pepper, and a delicious mixture of exotic herbs known around Palazzo Rospo as the McBee McSecret. In addition to the chicken, he had been served pasta, not with tomato sauce, but with butter, basil, pine nuts, and Parmesan cheese.
Mr. Hachette, the Cordon Bleu-trained chef who was a direct descendent of Jack the Ripper, didn?t work Sundays and Mondays, so that he might stalk and slash innocent women, toss rabid cats into baby carriages, and indulge in whatever other personal interests currently appealed to him.
Mr. Baptiste, the happy cook, was off Mondays and Tuesdays; therefore, on Mondays the kitchen was, in show-biz lingo, dark. Mrs. McBee had prepared these delicacies herself.
By the softly pulsing light of electric fixtures tricked up to look like antique oil lamps, Fric ate in the wine cellar, alone at the refectory table for eight in the cozy tasting room, which was separated [186] from the temperature-controlled portion of the cellar by a glass wall. Beyond the glass, in aisles of shelves, were fourteen thousand bottles of what his father sometimes identified as ?Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, claret, port, Burgundy-and the blood of critics, which is a bitter vintage.?
Ha, ha, ha.
When Ghost Dad was home, they usually ate in the dining room, unless the dinner guests-the old man?s buddies, business associates, or various personal advisers from his spiritual counselor to his clairvoyance instructor-felt uncomfortable having a ten-year-old kid listening to their gossip and rolling his eyes at their trash talk.
In Ghost Dad?s absence, which was most of the time, Fric could choose to have dinner not just in his private rooms, where he usually ate, but virtually anywhere on the estate.
In good weather, he might dine outdoors by the swimming pool, grateful that in his father?s absence no hopelessly dense, tiresomely giggly, embarrassingly half-naked starlets were there to pester him with questions about his favorite subject in school, his favorite food, his favorite color, his favorite world-famous movie star.
They were always trying to cadge some Ritalin or antidepressants from Fric. They refused to believe that his only prescription was for asthma medication.
If not by the pool, he might dine dangerously with fine china and antique silverware at a table in the rose garden, keeping his inhaler ready on a dessert plate in the event that a breeze stirred up enough pollen to trigger an asthma attack.
Sometimes he ate from a lap tray while ensconced in one of the sixty comfortable armchairs in the screening room, which had recently been remodeled using the ornate Art Deco-style Pantages Theater, in Los Angeles, as inspiration.
The screening-room equipment could handle film, all formats of videotape, DVDs, and broadcast-television signals, projecting them onto a screen larger than many in the average suburban multiplex.
[187] To watch videos and DVDs, Fric didn?t need the assistance of a projectionist. Sitting in the center seat in the center row, adjacent to the control console, he could run his own show.
Sometimes, when he knew that no cleaning had been scheduled in the theater, when he was certain that no one would come looking for him, he locked the door to ensure privacy, and he loaded the DVD player with one of his father?s movies.
Being seen watching a Ghost Dad movie was unthinkable.
Not that they sucked. Some of them sucked, of course, because no star rang the big bell every time. But some were all right. Some were cool. A few were even amazing.
If anyone were to see him watching his father?s movies under these circumstances, however, he would be the National Academy of Nerds? choice for Greatest Nerd of the Decade. Maybe of the century. The Pathetic Losers Club would vote him a free lifetime membership.
Mr. Hachette, the psychopathic chef related to the Frankenstein family, would mock him with sneers and by drawing sly comparisons between Fric?s sticklike physique and his father?s maximum buffness.
Anyway, in the only occupied seat of sixty, with the ornate Art Deco ceiling soaring thirty-four feet overhead, Fric sometimes sat in the dark and ran Ghost Dad?s movies on the huge screen. Drenched in Dolby surround sound.
He watched certain films for the stories, though he?d seen them many times. He watched others for blow-out-the-walls special effects.
And always in his father?s performances, Fric looked for the qualities, the charms, the expressions, and the bits of business that made millions of people all over the world love Channing Manheim.
In the better films, such moments abounded. Even in the suckiest of the sucky, however, there were scenes in which you couldn?t help but like the guy, admire him, want so much to hang out with him.
[188] When citing the brightest moments in his finest films, critics had said that Fric?s father was magical. ?Magical? sounded stupid, like gooey girl gush, embarrassing, but it was the right word.
Sometimes you watched him on the big screen, and he seemed more colorful, more real than anyone you?d ever known. Or ever would know.
This super-real quality couldn?t be explained by the giant size of his projected image or by the visual genius of the cameraman. Nor by the brilliance of the director-most being no more brilliant than a boiled potato-nor by the layered details achieved through digital technology. Most actors, including stars, didn?t have the Manheim magic even when they worked with the best directors and technicians.
You watched him up there, and he seemed to have been everywhere, to have seen everything, to know all that could be known. He seemed to be wiser, more caring, funnier, and braver than anyone, anywhere, ever-as though he lived in six dimensions while everyone else had to live in only three.
Fric had studied certain scenes over and over again, scores of times, maybe a hundred times in some cases, until they seemed as real to him as any moments he had actually spent with his father.
Once in a while, when he went to bed drag-ass tired, but was able to settle only on the twilight edge of sleep, or when he woke incompletely in the middle of the night yet continued to skate upon the surface of a temporarily frozen dream, those special movie scenes with his father did seem real to Fric. They played in memory not as though he?d viewed them from a theater seat, but as though they were true-life experiences that he and his father had shared.
These dreamy spells of half-sleep were some of the happiest moments of Fric?s life.
Of course, if he ever told anyone that those were some of the happiest moments of his life, the Pathetic Losers Club would erect a [189] thirty-foot statue of him, emphasizing his uncombable hair and his skinny neck, and they would spotlight it on the same hill that held the HOLLYWOOD sign.
So on this Monday evening, though Fric might have preferred to eat in the theater while watching his father beat the crap out of bad guys and save an entire orphanage full of waifs, he dined in the wine cellar because in the pre-Christmas bustle, little privacy could be found elsewhere in Palazzo Rospo.
Ms. Sanchez and Ms. Norbert, the maids who lived on the estate, had been away on an early Christmas leave for the past ten days. They would not return until Thursday morning, December 24.
Mrs. McBee and Mr. McBee would be gone Tuesday and Wednesday, to have an early Christmas with their son and his family in Santa Barbara. They, too, would return to Palazzo Rospo on December 24, to ensure that the biggest movie star in the world was met with the proper pomp when he arrived from Florida later that afternoon.
Consequently, here on Monday evening, the other four maids and the porters were working late, under the firm direction of the busy McBees, alongside a few outsourced services that included a six-man floor-cleaning crew specializing in the care of marble and limestone, an eight-person holiday-decorating team, and an emergency feng-shui facilitator who would make certain that various Christmas trees and other seasonal displays were arranged and festooned in such a way as not to interfere with the proper energy flow of the great house.
Madness.
Far from the hum of floor-polishing machines and the jolly laughter of the Christmas-besotted decorating team, Fric took refuge deep underground in the wine cellar. Within these brick walls, under this low, vaulted brick ceiling, the only sounds were those he made swallowing and the clink of his fork against his plate.
And then: Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Muffled but audible, the phone rang inside a keg.
[190] Because the temperature in the tasting room was too high for wine storage, the barrels and bottles in this chamber, on the warmer side of the glass wall, were strictly decorative.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Stacked floor to ceiling along one brick wall, several of the enormous barrels featured hinged bottoms that could be swung open, doorlike. Some barrels had shelves inside, on which were stored wineglasses, linen napkins, corkscrews, other items. Four contained televisions, allowing a wine connoisseur to view multiple channels simultaneously.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Fric opened the phone keg and answered his private line in the usual Frician style, determined not to sound intimidated. ?Pete?s Pest Control and School of Home Canning. We?ll rid your house of rats and teach you how to preserve them for future holiday feasts.?
?Hello, Aelfric.?
?Do you have a name yet?? Fric asked.
?Lost.?
?Is that a first name or last name??
?Both. Are you enjoying your dinner??
?I?m not eating dinner.?
?What did I tell you about lying, Aelfric??
?That it won?t get me anything but misery.?
?Do you eat in the wine cellar often??
?I?m in the attic.?
?Don?t seek misery, boy. Enough of it will find you without your help.?
?In the movie business,? Fric said, ?people lie twenty-four hours a day, and all it gets them is rich.?
?Sometimes the misery follows swiftly,? Mysterious Caller assured him. ?More often it takes a lifetime to arrive, and then at the end, there?s a great roaring sea of it.?
Fric was silent.
[191] The stranger matched his silence.
At last Fric drew a deep breath and said, ?I?ve got to admit, you?re a spooky son of a bitch.?
?That?s progress, Aelfric. A little truth.?
?I found a place where I can hide and never be found.?
?Do you mean the secret room behind your closet??
Fric had never imagined that any creepy creatures lived in the hollows of his bones, but now he seemed to feel them crawling through his marrow.
Mysterious Caller said, ?The place with steel walls and all the hooks in the ceiling-is that where you think you can hide??