Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jayce was shot five minutes after arriving at Salo’s party, and the photographer chided him for moving.

Jayce Talis, at thirty, considered himself a creature made for parties. He looked like a man who might be famous without being memorable and strong without being hard: broad shoulders and a tall frame, dark hair above an open face, and the tan of whatever nationality was convenient. It was an advantage he had resisted once, but beneath the columns of Salo’s mansion on Sunset Boulevard, he admitted it had its uses.

Salo was not famous, and as far as Jayce knew, he had always wished he were. He was a scion of quiet east-coast wealth that had journeyed west to become louder and wealthier, and he had spent his youth in speakeasies and Hollywood parties, playing at producer. At thirty-five he threw his own parties in ancient Roman luxury constructed a few years ago, perched off the tawdry edge of Sunset Strip. He was directing a grand film that was never quite finished, and he dined potential investors lavishly with his parents’ money. He came from Connecticut, and when he was drunk he toasted the lost cause of Dixie.

These were all facts in gossip columns and salacious commentary from Jayce’s other, more outwardly respectable clients. Jayce had never met Salo — and at the mansion’s grand door he gave the name Giopara, hoping not to use it much. He wasn’t in the mood for talking.

Jayce tucked his invitation back into his pocket and gave his hat to a sturdy-looking attendant in the foyer. Through the aperture beyond, the mansion opened into a great marble atrium. Its walls, lined with stairs and balconies, were a white so soft they seemed pillowy. They were splashed with frescoes of myths Jayce had known once and half forgotten. He looked at a painted figure in a toga lying prostrate, guessing whether its expression was pain or ecstasy.

“Excuse me.”

Jayce turned just in time for the snap of a shutter. He winced and cast a hand over his eyes, and when he looked up, the man behind the camera had lowered it in disapproval.

“No one will see your face like that.”

The man with the camera had an accent slightly too soft to be Russian. He flicked golden eyes from Jayce to the viewfinder and back again, chandelier light striking the sharp lines of his pale cheekbones. The lips below were set in a half-smile that left its meaning open to interpretation, and his long fingers had already begun working at the film wheel. Jayce realized he was staring just as one crept up to the shutter button, and he lifted his own hand to block the lens again.

“Maybe I don’t want them to.”

There was nothing precisely wrong with Jayce’s presence, but in most places it was better off undocumented. He wasn’t sure what his employer would have wanted. He still had no idea who they were.

Jayce had been summoned to Salo’s party three days ago. An envelope had arrived at his office, postmarked inside the city with no return address. Behind the invitation inside, he’d found a pair of crisp fifty-dollar bills and a piece of rich cream paper, inked with six words in a flowing hand:

Watch Salo with Hoskel. Take reports.

The money, a bank teller informed him, was quite real.

Jayce assumed the invitation hadn’t come from Salo. But even if he didn’t belong here, his smart double-breasted ivory jacket and crimson tie asserted otherwise — and he looked more at home than the man in front of him. The photographer’s herringbone suit, tapered at his slender waist, was too thick for the early summer heat. His brown hair curled around his face in a loose tangle. As he steadied his hands on the camera, he pushed himself up on a thick metal crutch and favored a brace around his leg. He caught Jayce’s eyes following the crutch’s line and met them with a hint of defiance, as though challenging him to mention it.

“Interesting,” he said at Jayce’s silence. “Most people are flattered to be put on film.”

It had been five minutes, and Jayce had already made someone unhappy. A little shorter than usual for his line of work.

“It’s not that. Just — not right now, okay?”

The man raised his eyebrows. “Are you asking me to find you later?”

Jayce looked helplessly over the crowd. He finally caught Salo’s blond slick of hair against the fresco of a balcony. He fixed on it like a north star.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got a friend to meet.”

He left without looking back. He was unsure if it made him proud of his resolve or guilty about his rudeness.

The mansion’s balconies cut through to its outside, overlooking an acre of ornate gardens and West Hollywood beyond them. Salo’s balcony was too small for Jayce to join him — watch, he thought, implied a degree of separation. He settled for taking a saucer of champagne and ascending some narrow white stairs across the atrium, leaning on the railing of his own balcony and trying to look comfortable. It was only almost entirely an act.

Minutes ticked by. Jayce watched the party, senses dulled by the hum of the crowd. Salo still held court against a fresco and the inexorable gleam of the Strip, whose light lent a glow to the edges of the man’s white suit and poppy shirt. His eyes were cast magnanimously upon an actress Jayce recognized from one of last month’s pictures… and from the time she’d taken up with the husband of one of Jayce’s clients, a few years back.

It was a half-hour before Hoskel arrived fashionably and irritatingly late — though if the gossip Jayce had heard was accurate, he might have simply gotten lost.

Colonel Hoskel was hard money gone to seed. He had made a small fortune in mail-order catalogs and fought in the Philippines for an officer’s title, turned the small fortune larger by running whiskey under Prohibition, and after the repeal of Volstead found himself accidentally a wealthy man of legitimate trade. These days he was an aspiring patron of the archaeological sciences. At museums his purchased artifacts graced display cases and his name graced building wings. He gave lectures at historical societies on his great knowledge of antiquities. To Jayce’s understanding he had never read a book.

Hoskel paused near the doorway, and Jayce spotted the man with the camera again. His face was hidden as Hoskel ran stubby fingers through his mustache. Jayce wondered if he still had that half-smile, wondered what he made of Hoskel’s overfilled dress uniform with its cavalry sword tucked demurely on one hip. The man wouldn’t care about fashion, Jayce decided. He was unsure why he had decided it. Maybe he was slightly embarrassed at how quickly the judgment of Hoskel’s clothes had come to him.

His work, he thought furtively, had not been supposed to go like this.

When Jayce left the Kirammans’ summer ranch for Los Angeles six years ago, he hadn’t thought his hopes unreasonable. He had not expected to be one of the detectives from genteel novels, forever extricating heiresses from blackmailers’ clutches, uncovering foreign smuggling rings. He would have settled for working with ordinary people — the ones police officers dismissed at best and harassed at worst. But Jayce had thought times would get better then, and he had known less.

He had struggled for a year that way, running out his meager savings. Finally, when he was at his lowest, Cassandra Kiramman had made his reputation. She had referred wealthy people with undignified problems to his small downtown office, and through some discreet transfer of information among the city’s upper caste, their references had drawn more. Their money had hit him like a current, sweeping him into new circles of people who would hire him and pay him and pretend they’d never met him afterward. It only made sense for things to end up like this: a letter directing him to a party for reasons he hadn’t even had a chance to ask.

Soon Jayce no longer cared what judgments his mind fixed on. As the first hour passed, he cataloged the gods and mortals stretched across the frescoes. He dated the fashions of the guests’ suits. He waited for Salo and Hoskel to so much as acknowledge each other. The former had taken a seat in a chaise lounge in the pose of a sculptor’s masterpiece. The latter had cornered a young man with a sharp face, regaling him with gestures that suggested he might draw his sword to emphasize their brashness. Without quite admitting he was doing it, Jayce looked for the photographer and couldn’t find him — he supposed the man had better things to do.

Two hours, and the champagne glass was long empty. Hoskel was closely examining a bad reproduction of a famous painting. Jayce sighed and lit a cigarette, drawing the first lungful of acrid smoke with relief.

“Still waiting for your friend?”

It took a moment to realize the words were meant for him. The man with the camera had got up the stairs without Jayce noticing, crutch clacking on the marble. He joined Jayce on the balcony without waiting for an answer.

“Sometimes he’s hard to find.” Jayce scraped his cigarettes from his pocket. “Want one?”

The man’s profile had a razor delicacy. He shook his head, ruffling his loose hair.

“Sorry about earlier,” Jayce said.

The photographer glanced at him curiously. “Did I seem offended?”

The question sounded genuine. It caught Jayce short.

“Disappointed, maybe,” he said.

“Over a picture? A little pretentious, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.” Jayce watched the man’s fingers circle the railing. “Artists, right?”

“I wonder where you heard I was an artist.”

Jayce considered bluffing. Maybe he was sharing the balcony with someone famous. A potential new connection.

“I don’t know anything about you. You sure you don’t want a smoke?” He always kept too many cigarettes, because it meant he would always have something to offer.

The man made a vague gesture. “I don’t. Weak lungs.”

Jayce was silent as those delicate hands lifted the camera. They flicked one of the wheels expertly and pointed the lens at the gardens outside.

“So you’re the photographer?”

“Photography? Never.” The shutter snapped. “I carry a camera only for fashion.”

“Salo’s photographer. Or do you just like crashing parties?”

Jayce’s companion clicked his tongue. “That offends me. To suggest I’d come here for anything but money.”

Jayce stopped himself from disclaiming that he was also here for money. In his business, one let people think what they liked. Still it tempted him. The man would never see him again. They didn’t even know each other’s names. Jayce might reveal the secrets of his life and leave at the end of the night with no harm done.

“I’m Jayce Talis, by the way.” He clipped the urge off at its source.

The photographer glanced at him with a hint of surprise.

“Viktor.”

Viktor’s accent coated his name with an unfamiliar texture. Its hard consonants sheared through the thrum of the party, out where Hoskel had a hand on a chintzy bust of Venus and Salo had one around yet another glass of champagne. Jayce glared at them and started to check his watch before realizing it would look like boredom with the conversation — Viktor wouldn’t know just how damn long he’d been watching these people drink. He dropped his wrist with what he hoped was subtlety.

“It’s eleven-thirty,” Viktor said. “You can check the sundial.”

He pointed to the far edge of the atrium where a gilt fin was fixed upon a marble face, looming damoclean above the crowd. Nearing midnight, a sharp shadow told the time.

Jayce opened his mouth to ask for an explanation, but then he caught Viktor’s expression — appraising, curious. He looked closer.

“Bulbs in the ceiling cast light at different angles,” he said after a moment. “Switches are wired to a clock.”

Viktor’s smile widened. “I wouldn’t have taken you for an engineer.”

“Machines ran in the family. I didn’t pick up the trade.”

Jayce took a deep drag of the cigarette to stop himself from saying more. Even if Viktor hadn’t meant anything by it, the comment rankled; yet another person surprised to learn Jayce had anything going on behind his face and muscles. But better, again — to let people think what they liked. Jayce tapped ash onto a tray embedded in the marble, and a fragment of him wished childishly that he’d dropped it on the floor instead.

“What about you?” he asked. “How’d you meet Salo anyw—”

Beyond the window of the balcony, the night caught fire.

The explosion outside was understated, like a distant firework. At first Jayce took it for the backfire of a car. Then an orange tint permeated the Strip’s glow in a midnight sunrise. He looked out the window with alarm. In the distance, flames licked up the Grecian pillars of the building past Salo’s garden and leapt against the fence.

Inside the atrium, Salo’s crowd jostled against itself like an upset tidal pool. Its members seemed torn between the safety of the mansion and the exciting peril of whatever was happening outside. One of Salo’s hangers-on shoved her way down the stairs and made for the doorway, pulling a green fur tight around her shoulders as if girding for battle. Hoskel’s sharp-faced young man beat her to the door. His exit broke some membrane keeping the rest inside. They flooded toward Sunset Boulevard, ravenous fear scratched into their faces.

But not, Jayce realized, Salo. The scion was unbuttoning his tight coat while he left his balcony for the atrium’s grand stairway with a look of alarm. Hoskel was following him, fighting the party’s flow. Jayce dropped his cigarette and darted after them. He threaded through the crowd and trailed them to a hall in the back, caution forgotten.

Salo took something from his pocket — a key, Jayce realized, as he put it to a gold lock in a cherry door. He fumbled, twisting it twice before he rushed inside. Hoskel caught the door just before it closed. Jayce sprinted to follow. He put an ear to the wood, straining for the sound of voices. One of them was shouting, faint but furious. Its pitch rose to one of surprise and indignation. There was a moment of cold silence. Then the hard crack of a shotgun reverberated through the door.

Jayce pulled back, the sound stinging and tangible. He grabbed the knob and twisted against its lock. Through the door, someone made an imperious and panicked shout.

He through his shoulder into the door. It held. And the gun cracked a second time.

Jayce rammed the door again, again until he heard the lock groan. He backed up and aimed a hard kick. It finally broke — and he gagged at the tang of fresh blood.

The room was lined with things that had been animals. Antlers sprouted like limbs from the wood-paneled walls; a snarling cougar-head’s glass eyes were fixed on nothing; a stuffed eagle hooked with chains presided over the scene. A plate-glass window looked into the gardens, the fire past it faintly visible. And in the center of it all, blood was pooling toward Jayce’s polished shoes, slowly claiming the parquet floor. Salo was stretched on his side, one arm sprawled in faux carelessness. Hoskel lay beside him, eyes as unblinking as the cougar’s. Neither had much left of a chest. Or at least it seemed that way, in the seconds Jayce could stand to look.

He realized suddenly that he was defenseless, his gun back at the office locked in its safe. But the room was empty. He was standing at the only door, and the window was unbroken. Hoskel’s saber lay discarded near Salo’s arm, damming blood behind its curve. There would have been nowhere for even a child to hide — except perhaps for a small cabinet, empty and hanging open.

He caught a glimpse of Hoskel again and tried not to be sick.

A crutch tapped urgently and stopped abruptly, just behind him. Jayce heard the soft sound of a camera dropping on its strap.

“What… is this?”

Jayce took a step back to stand beside Viktor. The man looked stiff with shock, his eyes the only part of him alive, darting around the scene. Jayce put a hand on his arm to steady him.

“I don’t know.”

He looked in vain for a latch on the window that might provide an exit. For a gun on the floor, as if against all odds one man had shot the other and himself. There was nothing — not even a shell.

Jayce cleared his throat. “We should go.”

He expected Viktor to ask if they should call the police. He expected to tell him that they shouldn’t be the first ones on the scene of a double murder with a busted door.

“Yes,” Viktor said. “We should.”