On the shelf behind the bar a tiny orchestra was playing that trumpety little number for the seventeenth time. Litsky put a hand on the table and tried to stand again, but he couldn’t budge. He shook the inner workings of his head, and for a moment he could clearly see the features of this blonde who’d come out of nowhere. She was studying him the way that she had studied the band—with her narrowed eyes and her that’s-more-like-it sort of smile.

She leaned over him so closely that he could smell her perfume.

—Where did you come from? he heard himself asking.

—From a hurricane, she said.

Then the warm circumference of her beauty began to recede, diffuse, and finally disappear.

On the periphery of his awareness, someone a lot like Litsky knocked over a chair. Its clatter echoed through the hallowed halls of Hollywood, mimicking the geometric pattern of the tin ceiling overhead. A door closed, an orchestra abandoned its search for the twentieth measure, and a string of gently swinging Christmas lights went out one by one, leaving Litsky in the ebon embrace of the eternities.

Marcus

ON THE FIRST OF March, Marcus Benton parted the louvers of his window shade with two fingers and looked out onto the lot, thinking he still wasn’t used to the weather. Without a bleak winter hour or sweltering summer night, February hadn’t felt like February anymore than July would feel like July. In Southern California, it was as if a glimpse of spring were repeated week after week, month after month, year after year.

Central Casting must have been listening to his thoughts, because a barefooted boy wearing a floppy straw hat suddenly appeared from around Building Four with a makeshift rod on his shoulder.

As a boy, Marcus could have assembled a better one with his eyes closed. He could have stripped a sapling, bent and threaded a needle, tied a double hinge. Having slipped out the back of the schoolhouse, he could have skirted the town hall to avoid the feed store and circled back to Keeper’s Hollow, where Whistling Billy McGuire would have already dropped his line. But here in Culver City, the boy with the floppy hat was stopped by a young blonde in a bright blue blouse. She asked him a question and he pointed toward Marcus’s office.

Marcus let the louvers fall.

He resumed his place behind his desk and took up the small green dossier. A glance at the photograph inside confirmed that the blonde in blue was the one he was waiting for. He leafed through the file, reacquainting himself with what little they knew: that she had been raised in New York, attended a finishing school in Europe, worked for a year at a literary press; and that she had fled the gossip mill of Manhattan when her engagement to a blue-blooded banker had been abruptly called off.