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Great Depression, the fading careers of two movie stars, and tract-home development. In more than thirty years in Los Angeles and the Valley, Peter had never encountered anything like her – two huge, quirky mansions set far apart and out of sight of each other, looking down descending hills and through valleys rubbed thick with creosote bush and sage to Carbon Beach.
Here was illusion at its finest: the fantasy that peace can be bought, that power can sustain, that time will rush by but leave the finer things untouched: eccentricity, style, and all the walls that money can buy. Life goes on, Salammbo said with sublime self-assurance, especially for the rich. But the estate’s history was not so reassuring.
Salammbo was a nouveau-riche vision of heaven: many mansions ‘builded for the Lord.’ The lord in this case had died in 1946: Lordy Trenton – not a real lord but an actor in silent comedies – had risen from obscurity in the Catskills for a good twelve-year run against Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. His character – a drunken aristocrat, basically decent but prone to causing enormous trouble – had palled on audiences even before the onset of the Depression. Trenton had gotten out of acting while the getting was grand. One grand, to be precise, which is the price for which he had sold all rights to his films in 1937.
During the Depression, Lordy had invested in sound equipment for the movies and made big money. In the mid-thirties, he had built Flaubert House and then started to erect what some architectural critics at the time referred to as Jesus Wept. Trenton’s friends called it the Mission. The Mission featured a huge circular entry beneath a dome decorated with Moorish tile, high vaulted ceilings, bedrooms furnished in wrought iron and dark oak, an austere refectory that could seat a hundred, and a living room that by itself occupied two thousand square feet. It consumed much of his fortune.
In the early forties, beset by visions of a Japanese invasion of California, Lordy connected Flaubert House and the Mission with a quarter-mile underground tramway, complete with bomb shelter. He lined the smoothly plastered stone-and-brick tunnel with a gallery of nineteenth-century European oils. At the same time, he became involved with a troubled young artist and sometime actress, Emily Gaumont. After their marriage in 1944, she spent her last year obsessively painting full-sized portraits of Lordy and many of their friends – as clowns.
In 1945, during a party, a fire in the tunnel killed Emily and ten visitors and destroyed the tram. Four of the dead – including Emily, so the story went – were burned beyond recognition.
A year later, alone and broken by lawsuits, Trenton died of acute alcohol poisoning.
The next owner, a department-store magnate named Greel, in his late sixties, acquired a mistress, allegedly of French Creole descent. To please her, he spent a million dollars finishing the Mission in Louisiana Gothic, mixing the two styles to jarring effect. The name Jesus Wept acquired permanence.
Greel died in 1949, a suicide.
In 1950, the estate was purchased by Frances Saint Claire, a Hitchcock blond. Blackballed by the studios, her career ruined by allegations of leftist sympathies, Saint Claire had married a savvy one-time pretty boy named Mortimer Sykes. Sykes, playing against type, wisely invested her money and endlessly doted on her. In 1955, they built the third and final mansion of Salammbo, the trendy, Bauhaus-inspired Four Cliffs. In 1957, just six months before Saint Claire’s death from breast cancer, a grove of eucalyptus trees caught fire. The flames spread to two of the mansions. Four Cliffs burned to the ground. Most of Jesus Wept survived, but the refectory lay in ruins. A police investigation pointed to arson, but friends in local politics hushed up any further investigation, suggesting there was already enough tragedy at Salammbo.
In 1958, Sykes put the estate up for sale and moved to Las Vegas. A broken man and heavily in debt, he tried to borrow money from the wrong people. Two years later, hikers discovered his body in a shallow grave in the desert.
The estate lay vacant for five years. In 1963, Joseph Adrian Benoliel became Salammbo’s newest master. A lifelong bachelor, Joseph had made his fortune producing beach flicks and managing a chain of real-estate franchises.
And between 1970 and 1983, he had secretly financed four of Peter’s titillation movies; lots of nudity but no actual sex.
Peter parked the car, got out, and pulled his coat down over a slight paunch. Broad-shouldered, he carried the extra weight well enough, but he was starting to look more like an aging bodyguard than an artist. No matter. The Benoliels didn’t care.
Peter lifted and dropped the bronze fist on the striker plate mounted on the huge oak door. A young man with short black hair, dressed in an oversized blue sweater and beige pants, opened the door, looked him up and down, and held out something as if making a donation to the poor. Peter had never met him before.
‘Here, Mr Benoliel doesn’t seem to want one,’ he said in a clipped tone of British disappointment. ‘They’re free. Who are you?’ He pressed a black plastic ovoid into Peter’s hand and stood back to let him in.
‘That’s Peter,’ Joseph said. ‘Leave him alone,’ He walked into the entryway with a persistent poke of his rubber-tipped cane, moving fast for a man with a limp. ‘I hate the goddamned things.’ He did not sound angry. In fact, he smiled in high good humor at Peter. In his early seventies, with a football player’s body gone to fat and the fat carefully pared away by diet, the flesh of Joseph’s arms hung loose below the short sleeves of his yellow golf shirt. Bandy legs weakened by diabetes stuck out below baggy black shorts. His bristling butch-cut hair had long since turned white. ‘Hate them when they beep in restaurants. People driving and yakking. Always have to be connected, like they’d vanish if they stopped talking. There’s too much talk in the world already.’ He waved his hand in a gesture between permission and irritated dismissal. ‘If you take the damned thing, turn it off while you’re here.’
‘They don’t turn off,’ the young man explained to Peter, drawing closer. His wide blue eyes assessed Peter’s character and the size of his wallet. ‘You can turn the ringer down, however.’
Peter smiled as if at a half heard joke. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Free talk,’ Joseph said. ‘But it doesn’t work. Where’s Mishie?’ ‘She told me to get the door,’ the young man said. ‘Well, hell, Peter has a key. Mishie!’
The young man regarded Peter with newfound but uncertain respect.
Mishie – Michelle – walked out of the hall leading back to the drawing room. ‘I’m here.’ She smiled at Peter and hooked her arm around Joseph’s. ‘Time for his lordship’s monkey nut shots,’ she announced with thespian cheer. ‘Come along, dear.’
Joseph stared gloomily at the small elevator to the left of the long flight of stairs, as if doom awaited him there. ‘Don’t ever leave me alone with her, Peter,’ he said.
‘You two fine young bucks wait in the drawing room,’ Michelle instructed primly. ‘We’ll be down in a whiffle.’
‘I’m down now,’ Joseph said. ‘If there’s anything I hate, it’s monkey nuts.’ He patted Peter’s arm in passing.
‘Nice couple,’ the young man said as they sat in an alcove looking over the west lawn. The wistful last of the day faded far out over the cliffs and the ocean. ‘They were joking, weren’t they?’
‘I think so,’ Peter said. ‘I’m Peter Russell.’ ‘Stanley Weinstein.’
They stretched out of their chairs and shook hands. Chairs throughout Flaubert House were always set shouting distance apart from one another.
‘Scouting for an investment?’ Peter asked.
‘An investor,’ Weinstein corrected. ‘One million dollars, minimum. A pittance to finance a revolution.’
‘In telecom?’
Weinstein cringed. ‘Let’s please avoid that word.’
Peter raised the plastic ovoid to eye level and twisted it until he found a seam, then tried to pry it open with a thumbnail. It wouldn’t budge. ‘If it’s not a phone, what is it?’