Original Copy: CH2 - Donovan Earle / CH3 - Dead Dreams
Jack eased off the accelerator as he turned off Sunset Boulevard, coasting smooth to a stop in the parking garage. Handing the keys to the valet, he took in the ivory edifice looming above him. Flanked by towering Mexican fan palms and slender Lombardy poplars, the Chateau Marmont stood as a beacon of bygone elegance—like a weary aged monarch.
It was easy to see why Earle had been drawn here. He was the moth; this was his flame. His refuge, where he could drink with his ghosts and pray the dark secrets they guarded would seep away by dawn. Up the hill from the Marmont proper, he sat in the dark of his cottage. Out the window, the city’s glow bounced soft off the clouded sky, lighting the courtyard. His drinking had worsened these last few weeks. New rumors of old brutalities grated his memories raw. They begged him to relive the past and robbed him of his appetite.
Jack picked his path up the walkway towards the cottages, damp enough to be miserable. Carla Reyes manned the night desk, a sharp-tongued raven-haired dame who owed him a solid for some pro-bono relocation of a rotten-to-the-core ex-husband. She gave up Earle’s room a little too eagerly. Pausing beneath the foliage, he listened for something, anything. Maybe Carla owed Earle more than she owed him, or maybe Earle finally had one drink too many. Either way, he waited.
Swirling the lone ice cube in his glass, Donovan watched the whiskey spin like water down a drain. He let the maelstrom settle, then, tilted the glass, felt the burn pass between his lips.
“How long have you known?” The whisper came through the window. Donovan jerked, looking towards the sound, sputtering a cough. In one motion, he let the glass fall, palming his revolver.
Earle barked a whisper, “Deckard!? Is that you?”
“Anyone else you know willing to help you waste your swill?”
Donovan yanked the door open and waved for Jack to come inside. “Get in here, Jack. Damn it—you’re a sight for sore eyes.” He shut and latched the door, “Three, maybe four months. How many have you come across?”
“Two confirmed. Third one tonight. Same story. Just like Berlin.”
Donovan shoved a glass into Jack’s hand, poured two heavy shots. “Cheers.”
“Not just L.A., Jack. Chicago and New York also. Could be worse than Berlin. We don’t know where those twisted German minds landed unless Uncle Sam made ‘em build rocket ships. The doctors, the real evil, are out there in the shadows.”
He held the bottle out for Jack. “Another?”
“Sure.”
“They could be here, maybe working in some Soviet lab. I’ve heard Brazil. No matter where, they’re doing the devil’s work.”
“Jack, I got a telegram from Cuthbert. She’s in France again, setting up networks across Europe for when the Soviets decide to infect Western Europe with their special brand of Red Mange.” Donovan leaned in close, “She’s got people around the globe, searching. She has everything we gathered from Berlin. She knows more than she will say, at least by telegram.”
Jack leaned back in his chair, remembering Virginia Hall. A smile eased his hard features as he remembered the one time they let their guards down over dinner. Her wooden leg had a name—Cuthbert. It was really only half of a leg, a necessity after she wounded herself in a hunting accident. She and that leg were one and the same to anyone that knew her. She was the most formidable of OSS agents, supporting untold operatives throughout France and building a network for downed Allied airmen. So many owed her, maybe they were paying her back from the deepest shadows across the globe.
“We need to know more. I need to know more. What are we looking for, a lab, university medical research? Are we looking at our own people? Too many unknowns. Can you get word back to her?”
Donovan exhaled the weight of the world, then sucked in the last drops of his drink. Momentarily peering at Jack through the bottom of the glass, he said, “It will take a day. You know her, she trusts only a few. There is…a Belgian I know. He can get her attention. Gather everything you have, I will send word. Book a room at the Roosevelt two nights from now. Use your old name. I will find you.”
Jack caught the weariness in his old friend’s face as he dragged his coat up across his back, wondering if he’d ever see him again, “Two days.”
The booze throbbed between his ears, hammering his soul as he slipped into the night.
CH 3 – Dead Dreams
The ragged edges of Jack’s memory wrestled with his fatigue, tossing him about the bed in a losing battle for sleep. His mind teemed with porcelain-faced dead, juggling their own heads reanimated, spinning and mocking with winks and sickly sweet kisses.
The ringing phone drilled into Jack’s dream, waking him with a wide-mouthed sucking gasp. Reaching through the blinding sunlight, he knocked the receiver off the hook, sending it clattering to the floor. It sprang erratically as Jack yanked the curly cord, bouncing by his head like a hammer on a loose spring, barely missing his face.
Jack recognized the tiny voice scratching its way out of the phone as he finished wrangling the bouncing receiver, “Jack, hello, Jack. What the heck, Hellooooo!!!”
“Silas, what gives with this obscenely early phone call?”
“It’s not early, Jack. Its 11 AM. I need you down here in one hour”
“I’ll be there in thirty.” Silas hadn’t even waited to hang up. Not unusual for the most direct person in all of LA County.
Silas Larchmont had been cutting up bodies so long that he sometimes forgot the living can talk.
The bags under Jack’s eyes were softer than he felt. After washing his head in the bathroom sink and running his fingers through his hair like a fat comb, he hurriedly dressed in the cleanest clothes he could find, drank a cold cup of leftover coffee and left.
The morning sun had beat down on his car turning it into a four-door broiler. Hot plastic seats and a ring of fire for a steering wheel. He was sure his hands suffered second-degree burns before he could reach the speed limit.
