Skyscape Read online

  Margaret stood and snapped off the flow of words and images. The room was desolate, the furniture, the books, meaningless. She hated the sight of the dumb, unfeeling objects around her. She did not know how she could tell him.

  Margaret did not understand where the fire had taken place. The painting was supposed to be in the Tate, and yet the television had depicted a square in London that Margaret could not recall. Margaret knew well where the painting traveled, keeping a mental note of its sojourn in Tokyo, its visit at the Pompidou, this famous painting on its seemingly endless tour of the world. The television had shown a place that was certainly not the Tate, tall brick Georgian buildings.

  Mrs. Wye had told her to be strong for Curtis. “He will need you.”

  She had always considered herself resourceful. But this was something she could not do.

  She stepped into the studio. It isn’t true. It can’t be true. It wasn’t the Tate, so it couldn’t be the right painting, it was all a mistake.

  Curtis was bending over the pad of drawing paper.

  His eyes were bright, but when he saw her he straightened, setting the tablet and pencil to one side. “Is it Mrs. Wye?” he asked. “Is she all right?”

  She steeled herself. “I have some very bad news, Curtis,” she said.

  His eyes went hard. His lips were tight. He lifted his chin for an instant to say: what is it? He did not move otherwise, or speak.

  She had never seen his anger, not the real anger, the rage that was so famous.

  “Oh, Curtis,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  4

  Patterson stood where he could see just a little bit of desert through the window. It was out there through the palms and the aloes, a big pale empty place.

  “There’s another death threat,” said Loretta Lee.

  The desert shivered. It did this sometimes—mirage making it all shudder like so much ocean. Patterson didn’t bother responding.

  “Called in to KCBS,” she said.

  “We have to leave as soon as Bishop gets back,” said Patterson, taking a certain pleasure in not responding to the news.

  “It was Angie at the mayor’s office.” She held the cordless phone in her hand and wiggled it as though to remind him that she—and the world—existed. “She wanted to know if you wanted any special precautions.”

  Patterson was trying to paint a watercolor. It wasn’t bad. He wasn’t an artist, to his deepest regret. He had, though, a certain touch, he had to admit. “And you told her no.”

  “They’re making a big deal about it.”

  Patterson made a show of faking a yawn.

  “You’re going to have to change the way you live, Red,” said Loretta Lee.

  He gave her a kind smile. It was fairly common: the post-therapeutic patient began to want to help the doctor.

  She added, “We should stay here.”

  She actually sounded frightened, as though this was the first time. Poor Loretta Lee Arno wasn’t quite ready to see him killed. That was certainly sweet of her. “No special precautions. People need to see me and touch me.”

  “I’ll call them and say you’re sick.”

  “I’m never sick.” Patterson didn’t want to die. The thought of these death threats made him nervous. That’s why he had moved the show from LA to San Francisco, back where it had originated all those years ago. San Francisco was smaller, calmer, with a more modest pool of homicidal maniacs to draw from. Even so, there were still enough deranged, hopeless, broken individuals in the City by the Bay.

  At this moment Red Patterson was in the middle of the desert, in the safest place imaginable. The perimeter of the estate was comprised of electric fences and computer-monitored sensors, installed at a staggering price by a technology giant for “promotional consideration.” This meant that their logo floated down the TV screen at the end of every show. There were occasional rumors of people who set forth to take a peek at Owl Springs and were never heard from again.

  “You get sick,” she said. “I’ve seen it.”

  “That’s hay fever,” he said. “I get it maybe two days a year. I don’t have it now.”

  “You want people to think you’re perfect.”

  I am, thought Patterson. Perfect enough. I should do the show from here, he thought. Live from Owl Springs. Live from Red Patterson’s Desert Hideaway. It almost made sense, but then he wouldn’t be able to see and touch the crowd. People needed him.

  “I think you like it,” said Loretta Lee.

  “Like being afraid?”

  “You know what I mean.” Then when it was obvious Patterson was going to stand there picking out a new brush and not saying anything, she continued, “Where did Bishop take you yesterday?”

  It was easy to make something up. “He found a piece of an airplane. Big old wing.” He gave this some thought. “Off a B-29,” he said.

  “It seemed like more of an emergency.”

  “Bishop gets excited about stuff like that.”

  “It was an old plane that crashed,” said Loretta Lee, not really that interested, just worrying the subject to death.

  “Maybe a wing fell off. You know how well a plane can fly on one wing.”

  “You can trust me, Red. You and Bishop have all these secrets just between the two of you.”

  Patterson heard it coming, the whine of the airplane. It was Bishop flying back from Victorville where the Vega was serviced and certified. Bishop got to do all the flying these days because Patterson only had time to jet down here for a day or two once or twice a year. Television was consuming him. It felt good, though, this much success.

  “There are people out there who are afraid of you,” Loretta Lee continued. She was the most striking woman he had ever known, and he had known many. She was his personal assistant and nighttime companion. She was also a former patient, and so blindly loyal that at times like this she was a problem. Looking at her made him happy, though, and sometimes he thought he was in love.

  “I don’t want to get shot,” he said, not looking up. For one thing, he was trying to keep his hand steady so he could finish this desert scene.

  Owl Springs had been designed for a movie producer just before the Second World War. It could be reached only by air. It was an oasis. Sinatra had played stud poker on the patio, and JFK had enjoyed a tryst or two in one of the guest suites. Its glamour was a faded one, however, its charm hidden from the world, and Patterson liked it that way.

  Patterson touched the saturated brush to the paper, and the blush of watercolor—pink, his least favorite color under most circumstances—was absorbed into the surface. You needed a sure hand—the paint dried in an instant in this low humidity. He stirred the brush in the water, the tinkle like the swirl of an old-fashioned glass thermometer in a tumbler of alcohol.

  “I think you do,” she said.

  Do what? he wanted to ask, having lost the thread of their talk entirely. Christ, she could be persistent. “You think I want to get murdered?”

  “Maybe. Unconsciously.”

  The watercolor was starting to look stupid. He threw down the brush. “You think an awful lot these days, don’t you, Loretta?” He tried to make it sound like it was just a carefree disagreement, but he was irritated.

  She looked down. Jesus, now her feelings were hurt.

  He kissed her. He liked sex when he was pissed off. That gave it that extra edge. She had a printout of the calls she had just made, a callback list that hung from breast to knee.

  He didn’t even have time for a decent lustful interlude. The show’s guests for the next month were in the computer. He accepted the list from her hand, and took the long walk down the corridor, across the dining room with its lead crystal wine glasses almost invisible, the drapes shut against the sun and heat.

  There was one room Patterson really liked, the mirrored bedroom, the one with the adjoining viewing room. Voyeurism had been accepted by designers of the place as natural, necessary, even. Sometimes Patterson liked to ste
p across the face of all those mirrors just to watch the sudden population of receding Pattersons. He wasn’t complicated. The truth was simple—he liked himself. No time for that now, though. He continued, until he paused, let the last lave of air conditioning pamper him for a moment, and stepped into the heat.

  The heat stopped him.

  It was a wall, a solid substance. The plane was so far away all you could see was the light spark off it.

  Loretta Lee had followed him. “People like you want to die. It proves something.”

  “You mean us messiah types,” he said, jokingly.

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Was Loretta Lee getting too pushy? Was it about time to let her go back to Woodland Hills, to that condo beside an artificial waterfall, with that view through the khaki air of Warner Park? She’d like that, wouldn’t she. Maybe she could find her agent, if he was out of jail.

  “You’re too important, Red,” Loretta Lee was saying, massaging the back of his neck.

  It was probably too late. Loretta Lee had become his perversion of choice. “I have to keep doing the show,” said Patterson. “It’s the way I do good in the world.”

  “You’ve done enough,” she said.

  She was a former soap opera actress whose character had been killed off when Loretta Lee had a little trouble with cocaine. She had worked as a discreet and expensive prostitute, until she was cured of her contempt for men before an audience of millions. Now she took care of details for the man who had saved her.

  She retained something of an actress’s flatness of affect, and a prostitute’s bluntness. Sometimes just hearing her voice gave him an erection.

  He laughed. “You want me all to yourself,” he said.

  “Of course I do.”

  The great preserver, the anhydrous air, made him wish he had worn his sunglasses. Dry heat keeps. Just stay out of the sun, that’s all. It was the best place for the art, too, if the sun didn’t fall on it, because the sun here flash-burned anything it touched. Christ, that Picasso, that really lovely crayon mother and child, bit gentle sweeps of black line. That thing was already yellow. Get a couple day’s sun on it and the paper would be right out of The Mummy’s Curse, crumbling away to nothing. And the work was only fifty years old.

  He should sell the marvelous but aging drawing and throw in the Degas hound, the dog looking up, out of the picture so you couldn’t see the snout. That was oil pastel on Fin di Siecle cardboard, and the thing was going to disintegrate despite the vacuum cabinet. Stick with those hardy Flemish landscapes, drunks screwing pigs, or thinking about it. Art of that vintage had staying power.

  The temperature was about one hundred and twenty, he estimated. The mirage ripped up the view, rocks trembling up in the air like driftwood floating on a lake and the mountains with big slices of sky cut out of them.

  “There was some other news,” Loretta Lee said. “On CNN.” She knew when to change the subject. She knew Patterson won every argument.

  The plane, when it landed, was so beautiful Patterson just stood there in awe.

  Then he asked her what the news was, in that polite but distracted way he could not help but use with her at times, and she said, “That famous painting got burned up.”

  Patterson turned to face her.

  “That one you like. The sky painting.”

  Patterson stared for a moment. “Skyscape?”

  Loretta Lee shrugged, looking troubled. “That famous one.”

  “The Curtis Newns! Burned!”

  Her eyes showed sympathy, uncertainty. “That’s what they said.”

  Sick. The world was sick. That was what was finally getting to him, how impossible it all was.

  He felt the way he had when the Pieta had been attacked and damaged. He felt the way he had when he heard that Dubrovnik was being shelled, the medieval stonework pounded.

  “How did it happen?” he tried to ask, but he was too shocked to say anything for the moment. This kind of thing was more and more common. A beautiful thing is asking to be destroyed. That’s the way life worked.

  “It was in London. They don’t know—maybe it was terrorists,” said Loretta Lee, troubled to see the way the news was hitting Patterson. “I have to think maybe someone burned it for the insurance.”

  Patterson shook his head in disbelief. “Nobody would do a thing like that. For one thing, you couldn’t get away with it.” And Patterson knew a little bit about getting away with things. “We live in a terrible world.”

  Jesus, what if something like that happened to his collection of airplanes? Like the one cutting its engine right in front of them. The plane was exactly like the one Amelia Earhart had flown.

  He wanted to fly. He could feel it—the need to pilot the craft. But there wasn’t time.

  Bishop gave his report. The plane had passed certification and was in great shape. Bishop had once killed a man in self-defense, a brief struggle in a bar near Edward’s Air Force Base. Patterson remembered the tearful session well, broadcast live, the once-tough pilot freed of his guilt, his stammer, his depression, in one confession under the hot lights.

  But Don Bishop was not a creative individual. Aside from his guilt, now long forgotten, Bishop preferred the rational world of altimeters and cockpit logbooks. He was a man who didn’t like to meet your eyes when he talked, a man with deft hands and a strong, square build.

  Bishop was interested in the new death threat. “You gotta watch that stuff,” said Bishop.

  “They want me to be afraid,” said Patterson.

  He stood beside the glorious silver fuselage, and touched it. The fabric was hot. Patterson liked silver for a plane like this, the same color as the Ryan. For some people it was thoroughbreds, classic cars. For him it was the Ryan, the Stearman, the Lockheed Vega, the Stinson 105, each aircraft restored to what Bishop called cherry shape.

  “We couldn’t make it without you,” said Bishop, sincerity making his voice rough.

  Patterson very nearly had tears in his eyes. These two people would do anything to help him. Dedication—that was the only way to describe it.

  Just a few steps would take them to the shade of the hangar, but there was something wonderful about such heat. Patterson swept both of them into his arms in a big, awkward, hearty embrace.

  “I’m going to be all right,” he said. He had a great laugh he saved for times like this.

  The look in their eyes silenced him for a moment. They believed in him so much that he felt the responsibility, the weight of their love.

  “Fear is for little people. People with no faith in anything,” Patterson said with a smile. And for a moment it was true. He could do anything he wanted. He was bigger than what was called life.

  “What kind of airplane was it?” asked Loretta Lee. “That one you guys went out to look at?”

  Bishop took a split second. His voice was closed-in, noncommittal. “I can’t remember what it was exactly—”

  “Just like the Enola Gay,” said Patterson. “The plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.”

  Sometimes Bishop liked talking to Loretta Lee, once he got started. “One day I found a corset out there—a complete, whalebone corset. It was out east of the Providence Mountains—”

  He got quiet when Patterson gave him a look. Bishop was wearing a short-sleeved aviator shirt, a military twill with button-down epaulets. His pants were permanent press, hard-creased. Bishop carried a small container of Mace clipped to a belt loop. One of the planes being flown to San Bernardino for service had been rushed by fans thinking the aircraft was piloted by Red Patterson. To protect the plane Bishop had been forced to bruise some ribs, bloody a nose, and he hadn’t enjoyed it.

  “Don’t get mad,” said Loretta Lee.

  “About what?” asked Patterson. He was about to turn and walk into the shade, a canyon of cool so deep you couldn’t see the details, the gate, the trees, only a vault of black.

  “I’ve been keeping a secret from you,” said Loretta Lee.


  Patterson didn’t like that. Sometimes she kept her voice so flat he didn’t know when she was being sultry and when she was telling him the hard disk had just crashed. His voice was hard. “Have you?” he asked.

  He knew before she showed it to him. It was one of his talents. Sometimes he knew what an assistant producer was going to say from the second he opened his mouth. For a moment he didn’t really want to get a close look at what Loretta Lee had in her hand.

  It was a small thing, glittering, pearl handled—a thirty-two automatic, a presentation-issue Walther by the look of it. She held it out to him flat, in the palm of her hand. “In case you need it,” she said.

  He had to love her. In a world where famous paintings burned up and famous people got blown to so much goop, such a pretty weapon was little reassurance. On the other hand, if anyone would be able to use a handgun like that to good effect it would be Loretta Lee.

  The truth was, he thought, she looked good with a gun in her hand. Unbutton the blouse a little bit more and you had a perfect picture, the kind that makes your pants tight. “Put it back wherever you’ve been keeping it,” said Patterson, and watched with interest as Loretta Lee tucked it back inside her clothes.

  5

  Despite his confidence, a very troubling thought hit him as he approached the executive jet. It was a Gulfstream V, a sweet thing to look at. It caught the sun, keen and metallic, an elegant shape in the pool of its own shadow.

  The bad thought was: I’ll never see this place again.

  A premonition, maybe. He didn’t know. It made him stop, and Loretta Lee, right behind him carrying a briefcase, held him for a moment, a half-accidental embrace.

  As soon as he climbed into the cute little executive jet he knew he should have shot himself up with one of his mood-helpers, his own blend of phenelzine and just a whisper of phenobarbital, a combination of drugs that any aviation medical examiner could attest would be a sure disqualifier for piloting, but Patterson was always drug-free when he flew. Always. But now he was just a passenger flying back to a city full of firearms and madmen.