Read Online Black Is the Fashion for Dying by Jonathan Latimer - Free Book Online

it! Look where you’re going!”
    â€œSorry, Miss Garnet,” the bearer in front said.
    She went over the scene in her mind. Nothing to do but react to the rifle shots, and she had practiced that look of orgiastic satisfaction and triumph in her mirror. In fart, she thought, amused, she had practiced it two-thirds of her life, in various and sundry beds. No trouble there.
    As the men turned on the path, the litter swayed.
    â€œWatch it,” she said.
    â€œFear not, memsahib,” the bearer in back said. “We answer to the rajah if you are hurt.”
    She lifted her head. “You being paid for a bit part?”
    â€œWhy, no.”
    â€œThen knock off the gab.”
    The bearer grinned uncertainly, then turned away. Over his bare shoulder, not ten feet off, she saw a face peering at her through the jungle. She saw it was Fabro, half-hidden by underbrush and a huge wardrobe cabinet, and almost laughed aloud. Checking to see if she’d really lost her buttons. She raised her hand, waved languidly, would have spoken if he hadn’t brought a finger to his lips. Shaking his head, black homburg pulled down over his brow, raincoat hung cloak-wise over thick shoulders, a squat bomb-thrower from the East bank of the Danube, he let his eyes roll towards the camera platform and Josh Gordon.
    For a second she was tempted to call to him anyway, knowing he would be promptly thrown off the set by Josh, but then she remembered she was mad at Josh. And there was no special reason to annoy Fabro, now her contract was safe. Lifting a finger to her lips, she nodded. Fellow conspirators. Then, smiling to herself, she leaned back on the litter.
    She thought about her last scene, the big speech in the tent. Gordon didn’t like what Blake had written, but it really wasn’t bad. Poetic, yes, but what was wrong with that? From a woman who believed she was dying? “Black’s the fashion …” she repeated to herself. Why wouldn’t Barbara Phelps say something like that? Well, it didn’t matter. If Blake came up with something better before lunch, she’d use it. If not, the old speech would do. With a few cuts.
    She thought about Blake, wondering how she had deluded herself into believing he was anything like Edgar. A pleasant hack with a certain amount of talent, she knew now, but with no real fire. She had reached out for him at the start of the picture, she supposed, because of the emptiness, more than emptiness, the hollowness that came when Edgar died. Six years, and it had never left. She was still a hollow woman, a part of her insides, or brain, or soul, even, gone, as though removed by an inept abortionist. She grimaced, remembering that night in her house when driven by the pain that was part of the hollowness, by the capsules that gave her no sleep, by the liquor that deadened nothing, she had actually believed for an insane moment that Blake was Edgar, had clung to him, sobbing and pulling at his clothes.
    Oh, Edgar! she thought, feeling the tears start. What have we done to each other?
    The loudspeakers asked for quiet on the set, and she made the tears stop. It was too late for them anyway. Six years too late. The last time for tears was the day she had watched them put the white cross on the grave she had never visited since. Yet she could see the words as clearly as if it had been yesterday: EDGAR ALLAN PIXLEY POET 1911—1953. And already she was planning the betrayal, already fixing in her mind the terms she would demand that evening at the meeting in the empty house.
    â€œ Roll ’em, ” said the loudspeakers.
    The bearers shifted the litter, preparing to start with it along the path. She felt for tears under her eyes, found there were none, and composed her face. You are Barbara Phelps, she told herself. You are pretending to be unconscious. Your husband is about to be killed by Masterson, the man you love. She closed her eyes.
    â€œ Action! ” said