“Penthouse?” she asked.
Ric felt like the infatuated detective in that classic film, who fell in love with the portrait of a dead woman. He almost stumbled over his feet in confusion. He’d have to be brain dead not to react to this parade of beautiful women changing over and over again before his eyes into everything his teen self had fixated on. “Laura” led him on a few steps, then stopped and turned to face him.
“Will it be just us?” she asked.
She had become Hedy Lamarr, the most exotic brunet beauty of all. He recognized her from late-night films because she was a favorite of Delilah’s for a bunch of reasons.
First, she was the rare woman who’d rejected Howard Hughes. Delilah took glee in that. Second, she was the rare Hollywood glamour queen with mathematical gifts. She’d helped invent an early version of frequency hopping with a piano roll to change between eighty-eight frequencies. That musical-mathematical duet had helped crack codes in WWII and had led to Wi-Fi, among other modern marvels. Delilah loved her digital-everything. It didn’t hurt that Lamarr’s title role in the sexy Biblical epic made Samson and Delilah the biggest-grossing film of its year.
Brains and beauty, just like his Delilah.
“Just us?” Hedy repeated. The most beautiful woman in the world in her day was even more exquisite in person.
“Dios, sí.” He was feeling confused and . . . unfaithful. “Nothing kinky,” he added hoarsely, as if he was actually contemplating . . .
She had stopped walking. Gliding, you’d really describe it. “A one-woman man. How refreshing for level L. My hair is caught in my necklace clasp.” She lifted it to bare her neck.
He reached to touch it, experimentally. Warm. He fumbled with the clasp, tantalized by a virgin neck as white as Delilah’s, or was hers as white as the Hedy Lamarr CinSim’s? He wanted . . . needed to press a kiss on it, more than a kiss. He reached for the gown’s shimmering side . . . and it changed into black satin brocade in his palm, a slightly raised pattern over a shape a blind man would lust for.
Ric stumbled back. Had the elevator pumped an aphrodisiac or drug invisibly into the air? This woman’s black hair was coiled like a satin snake into a luxuriant sort of bun, her figure as willowy as the long narrow satin gown she wore, which was slit to the top of a white thigh.
That’s what Chinese dragon ladies had worn for decades up to now. Ric recognized the gown, called a cheongsam. Law enforcement nowadays was attuned to global customs, but Delilah would know style . . . and Delilah would kill him if she knew what he’d walked into like any horny postadolescent guy.
“Don’t stop now,” the CinSim whispered, her head turning over her shoulder. Her eyebrows and eye makeup were dark winged slashes on her white face. “Opium bed?”
Ric’s dazed enchantment ended as he recognized the nose, chin, and cheekbones under the cinematic makeup.
He stepped back, horrified.
This was Myrna Loy in one of her Asian femme fatale roles.
He’d been programmed to lust after Nick Charles’s film wife, Nora.
That felt even creepier. No way could he tell himself she was Delilah in some other guise. He wasn’t a home-breaker, not even a CinSim home-breaker.
“I . . . know you,” he said. “You’re about as Asian as I am.”
Recognizing her seemed to disrupt the programming.
The Myrna Loy CinSim blinked. “You haven’t been here before.”
“No.”
“It wasn’t anything I said or did?”
“I found ‘opium bed’ highly inciting. Trust me.”
“And you don’t want to . . . ?”
“I won’t,” he answered honestly.
“I’ve never had to entertain a . . . won’t.”
“I’m . . . unentertainable.”
Her original poise and film person were returning like gangbusters.
“You look perfectly functional. In fact, you look perfect. A tasty Anglo adventurer in a world of opium, yellow peril, and sin.”
“You’re charming, but politically incorrect down to your . . . metal fingernails.”
“You’d be surprised what these can do in an opium bed.”
“No, I wouldn’t be. Delilah would know who you’re playing—”
“I am not ‘playing’ you. I deliver.”
“Isn’t there something inside you that longs for a . . . kinder, gentler life than ‘entertaining’ any man who happens along?”
The black lipsticked CinSim lips paused, then pursed. “Fu Manchu is something of a bore.”
“He is . . . ?”
“My . . . enforcer, I suppose you’d say. I have been schooled in current expressions.”
“That’s ugly to hear. Do you have any choice about what you do here?”
“Of course not. It’s a role.”
“Don’t you long for a different one?”
She considered. “I do it very well. It doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. I don’t often get customers who ask questions, as you do.”
“Wouldn’t you give anything to escape this artificial atmosphere? To be a witty and devoted wife, for example?”
“I am Fa Lo See, I take much personal . . . satisfaction in tormenting the helpless white man.”
“I’m Latino.”
She shrugged. “I do not care what language you scream in.” Her long metal nails extended toward his chest.
Ric caught her wrists in an imprisoning grip. Delilah would know what breed of movie villainess this was, Myrna Loy underneath it or not.
“Is this an S&M level? Why on earth would I end up here?” He looked around, encountering the same vague fog that had greeted him outside the elevator. “Why am I here?”
“Perhaps merely because I require . . . customers.”
Her exotic features had turned satanic. Did customers get what they wanted, or did they “serve” the CinSim characters? That was not what he’d come here to find out.
One thing he’d learned: There was no Myrna/Nora here to save. Only his own skin.If he’d stuck with the other women’s images, he’d have been channeled into an island-girl or city-sophisticate setting. Recognizing and “picking” the Loy CinSim from a cheesy racist bent–sex film manifestation was going to get him pulp-fiction treatment. He knew what he should do, where he should be next.
Outta here.
Nick Charles wouldn’t put up with playing pin cushion for a sexual sadist, even if she was enacted by the same actress who was his smart and sexy wife. Celebrity CinSims were a more morally confusing construction than he’d ever guessed.
Chapter Nine
A DRY MIST curled up from my body, like steam rising. Breath came back with a cough. I scrambled upright, my barefoot soles burning. Support. I needed something to grab onto. My searching hands found slick cool walls circling me along with a multitude of my reflections.
I turned in a slow circle. My image turned with me, not Lilith this time, but distorted Easter Island heads of myself, familiar but . . . different.
This glassy cool chamber felt like the inside of a bullet. Recognition made me forget my burning feet and freezing fingertips. Was this was some . . . upright cryogenic preservation chamber?
No seam in the surface betrayed a door. I hadn’t “gone” anywhere. I was trapped in the slick steel heart of the mirror-world diamond pendant. And, for sure, I hadn’t reached my heart’s desire and wherever Ric was a target for the wrath of whatever Loretta Cicereau had become.
I was more of a prisoner than ever.
At first I just threw myself against every curved slick reflective surface.
Reflective surfaces had been my friend since I’d come to Las Vegas in search of my roots. If it shone, glittered, and reflected, I’d always been able to pass through, even if I’d reach the other side bleary and confused. And Vegas had been built on shine, glitter, and glitz.
I’d grabbed my new talent and run with it, expecting it always to be there, like my shadow.
Not now.
Now my efforts to escape stainless-steel custody were just bruising my pale skin until my blurred reflection looked like King Kong had impressed his fingerprints all over me. I wasn’t used to being simply human. I thought of Loretta Cicereau first sensing the fey twins’ webs all over her ghostly image.
Someone . . . something . . . had made Loretta take physical form again.
Someone . . . something . . . had wanted to undo my clever method to freeze a girl gone wild. That same force was bottling me on the inside of a giant . . . bullet.
I would not go gently into that shining metal night, like Metropolis’s human heroine Maria went from lying comatose in a glass coffin in a mad scientist’s laboratory into the instant mummy case of a robot suit, no matter how glamorous. I pounded my fists against their distorted fuzzy reflections.
I stopped, feeling like Superman confronting Kryptonite for the first time.
Stainless steel was somewhat reflective and had a reflective chrome component, but contained not a bit of sterling silver or silver nitrate. It was not a friend of mine, and it had been chosen to entomb me, to torture me with what might be happening to Ric beyond my power to prevent it.
Panting, I pushed my face and body tight against the curved side of my personal mummy case. I’d have to rely on Ric to save himself, and maybe me.
Oops. I was kissing myself. I was so close to my blurry reflection that I couldn’t focus. My palms felt the metal warming against my touch. Was I sensing just a reflection, or was I contacting Lilith?
Whatever I saw was just my height, and just my coloring, a pale face with a halo of cloudy dark hair.
I brought the spread fingers of both hands up to my face, trying to push the image away. The silver familiar streaked across my shoulders and down my arms to my wrists, like a mitten string inside your heavy coat. Only kids who’d grown up in a climate with cold winters, as I had in Kansas, knew that feeling. Instead of mittens, though, the familiar encased my wrists and first knuckles in chain-mail workout gloves. Cool but . . . impractical.
I spread my hands apart to study the effect, and the stainless steel wall in front of me split. The two halves of my reflection slid to the edges of my vision, and a 3-D version in living black-and-white, a knockout brunet Cinema Simulacrum, stood barring my way out.
I was eager enough to escape to push right into her, which might feel bizarre. Humans up top avoided contact with the CinSims, very aware of the zombie body in possibly questionable condition beneath the attractive monotone surface.
Dreading first contact was not necessary. Two hands in glorious living color grasped her off-white upper arms and shuffled her aside.
“Get lost, chica de cine,” someone said.
Chapter Ten
THE MAN WHO stepped from behind the clawing glamour-puss looked confused, but unruffled as any man could who’d just fought off a sexy CinSim.
“Ric! Thank God. Somehow the familiar cracked the lid on my steel coffin.”
“Delilah? How’d you get here? What do you mean . . . coffin? I just pushed the elevator Up button and . . . here you are waiting to pop out of the car like a jack-in-the-box.”
“More like a Jill, I hope.” I frowned at the femme fatale still trying to glue herself to his side. Was that . . . it couldn’t be! Screen vamp Maria Montez.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“Ah. Research.”
“Does ‘research’ always make you look so sheepish, amor? And exactly where is ‘here’?”
Looking around, I glimpsed black-and-white film vistas of native girls in tropical lagoons cheek by, uh, lower cheek with slinky dames on nightclub floors. Whether nature or nurture, the scenes were populated by gorgeous, more ungowned than gowned, Hollywood stars of the pre-Technicolor days.
Uh-oh, Irma warned. Our main man has been window shopping on the naughty side of Vegas.
This time Ric grabbed my upper arm. “I don’t want to explain here, in front of the, um, populace. Let’s just hop back into the elevator and get to the main floor.”
“The main floor where?”
He looked startled. I usually knew where I was coming from, if not always where I was going.
“Delilah, are you . . . all right?”
“Pretty much, or so you whisper in my ear nights. Regularly.”
Ric closed his eyes as if hoping all this, even I, would go away.
“So, Ricardo, you have some ‘’splaning’ to do. Where are we?”
“At the Inferno.”
Now it was my turn to be speechless. I turned to examine the bullet elevator. I’d never seen one like it at the Inferno, not even on the way to Snow’s penthouse.
“Where did you think you were?” Ric asked.
“Maybe . . . in some fey-sprung time trap. Loretta Cicereau is loose and set me up for a big fall in mirror-land. You haven’t seen her? She’s out to destroy you and seemed in a big hurry.”
“Maybe she can’t find me.”
“I sure wouldn’t have been able to. What is this place and why was that CinSim siren pressing wrinkles into the left arm of your best suit?”
“Let’s just get into the elevator and out of here, Del.”
“I’m not anxious to hop back on the Claustrophobia Closet. Isn’t there another exit?”
Ric looked around. I noticed some of the dark-haired CinSim honeys abandoning their exotic settings and gathering like the three brides of Dracula around us. Ordinarily I’d have loved to interview each and every one, unemployed reporter and rabid film fan that I am, but something was wrong here and it involved a “honey” of my own.