Technicolor Love

by Billie Sue Mosiman

Even in his Hollywood cottage not too far from the studios, Peter Lorre's double could not get away from fans who thought him the real actor.

"Mr. Lorre, I must talk to you about 'The Beast With Five Fingers'."

The girl must have climbed onto the lid of the garbage can to be at window level in his kitchen. He'd been drinking a glass of tap water, washing down three aspirin for one of his frequent headaches when her face materialized on the other side of the window screen. He almost dropped the glass, kerplunk, in the sink, and only narrowly kept his hold on it.

"Good God, get out of here," he shouted. "I'm not Peter Lorre, you idiot!"

Oh, he shouldn't have been so abrupt and discourteous, but it was just getting to be too much. His nerves were shot to hell. No wonder his head hurt all the time. People followed him down the street, trailed his car, intruded on his meals when he was in restaurants. Half of them wouldn't believe he wasn't the great actor. He looked like the man, of course, that's why they used him for a double during dangerous shots, and he could fake the strange, lisping quality of Lorre's voice when he wanted, but couldn't they see he wasn't the actor? Didn't Jonah Lokonski have any reality in the world at all beyond looking like a famous movie star?

So he had started yelling at fans when they crept up unexpectedly as the girl at the window had done. He sometimes even threatened them. These actions were getting press in the tabloids. PETER LORRE HATES FANS! PUNCHES PHOTOGRAPHER! RIPS AUTOGRAPH BOOK FROM LITTLE GIRL!, and Lorre's attorney had called him with his own veiled threat: Stop acting up and making Mr. Lorre look bad. You want your job, don't make waves, chump.

Yeah, like the studio could find someone else who looked like Lorre. And limburger cheese farts smell like rosewater. How many jaundiced-skinned, short, balding, foreign looking guys with bug eyes could you find hanging out in L.A. anyway? Or in America? Or in the Ukraine, come to that?

Before Lorre became a star, Jonah was treated like a pariah. Employers thought Jonah was going to steal from them; he had a shifty look they said. Girls, well, girls didn't come within ten feet of him, and he had known they wouldn't from the time he was ten years old. Society in general was not kind to a man with his odd features. He hadn't enjoyed the talent Peter Lorre did. There was nothing to save him from a lowly life that came to nothing except for the uncanny likeness he had been born to play.

So he tried to control himself, even though he knew Lorre's attorney was blowing hot wind. Still--what was he supposed to do with a migraine and some kid climbing through his kitchen? Ask her in, pour her lemonade and serve up oatmeal cookies? Kee-rist in a handbasket, being a celebrity look-a-like sure had its drawbacks.

"You're not Peter Lorre?" came a small apologetic voice from the front screen door.

Jonah whirled from the sink and stomped to the front room. He put his hands on his hips and was just about to deliver a blistering tirade against misfits who chased after movie people when the girl surprised him by stepping inside the screen and closing it behind her. She stood silhouetted with the afternoon sun at her back. Yellow light spilled through her thin white muslin dress, outlining long shapely legs. The dress dipped from the shoulders to display the tops of full creamy breasts. It was a looker. Not a kid at all, maybe a woman in her early twenties, with a headful of shocking auburn hair, lips full and sensual. Pouty, that's what the movie screen magazines would call those lips.

His practiced harangue died in his throat. He felt himself responding to her beauty and couldn't find his voice at all.

She moved across the room, her sandaled feet whispering over the straw mats he had strewn on the floor. She stopped when she was close enough to see him clearly in the waning light. "You're not him. He doesn't smile that way. Who are you?"

Gorgeous babe or not, she had no call to be asking him that question. Who was he? He was a man who was paid a decent salary to do stupid stuff for movie directors, who did she think she was talking to anyway? "Who are you?" He tried to ask it with some real attitude, but to his own ears he sounded small and squeaky and off-balance. Probably because he was. Women always put him into a nervous state.

"You don't sound like him either. My name's Veronica," she said and moved to his bamboo coffee table to take up a book on film. Just as if he'd invited her to make herself at home. But he was beyond anger. She was too much of a piece of work to get under his skin no matter what she did now. And she was tall, not that most women weren't taller than him, they were, but she was statuesque.

"You want to get in the movies, I guess." What else? If they didn't want his autograph or a scrap of his shirt or a cutting of his hair, they wanted to be Shelley Winters or Bette Davis.

"I wouldn't be in a movie if they paid me a million dollars."

He laughed. She glanced up at him from beneath long dark lashes. "That's a lot of money," he said. "Even Lorre doesn't get that kind of dough. Especially lately."

"Name the amount, then," she said. "I wouldn't take anything."

"But you like the movies," he said. "You like Lorre."

"Only in that one movie. I wanted to . . . I thought you were . . ."

"You only like Lorre in 'The Beast'? You're not a fan of his other films? He was masterful in 'M'."

She shook her head slightly, having moved back to the coffee table to deposit the book unceremoniously. "I never saw 'M'. It must be an old movie. My father's a pianist, you know."

Yes, and what did that have to do with this conversation? "Well, as you can see, I'm not Peter Lorre, but why don't you take a seat, park it a minute and I'll rustle up a couple of beers."

She looked at him again. "Were you on the sets when they made 'The Beast With Five Fingers'?"

He was on his way to the fridge. A good cold one might help his migraine. His head already hurt less with the woman in the room. Veronica. Pretty name. Movie star-ish. She was probably lying about not wanting to be in the movies. Everyone wanted to be in the movies. He wondered what it would take to get her between the sheets. Did she like Lorre enough for that? She wasn't quite the typical fan. She hadn't even touched him yet and they always tried to touch him, even when they discovered he was a double. He hated being touched. "Yeah, I was on the sets. I was his stand-in for a couple shots."

"Which ones?"

He had his head in the Kelvinator and the cool soothed his heated throbbing temples. He backed out with two bottles of brew and shut the fridge door with his foot. He found the bottle cap opener and clicked off the caps, grimacing slightly when they pinged onto the counter. His head wasn't all that much better after all.

"Oh, you know," he said, trying to make himself appear more important than he really was for the first time in ages. " . . . I was on the piano when the disembodied hand wrapped around his neck. That was me. And I threw the blasted thing into the fireplace. And . . ." He paused. She had taken a seat on the sofa and crossed her pretty legs. He reached out to hand her a bottle of beer when in the midst of his lies, he encountered her stare.

"Did the hand ever really die?" When she said those fateful words, a chill crawled up his rounded belly and slithered right through the skin over his chest to hold his heart hostage.

"What?"

She took the beer and drank, but she kept her gaze on his face. "The hand," she said, lowering the bottle from rosy lips. "Is it dead? Finally? Really?"

He backed to an easy chair and slid into it. He hadn't touched his drink yet and didn't know if he would. "It was a movie," he said stupidly.

"Of course, it was," she said, smiling at him as she might at a slow child. "But the hand. That was real, wasn't it? Even Hollywood couldn't make that hand crawl, could it? It had a life of its own."

Her stupefying statements left him speechless. She wasn't kidding. This bimbo was off her nut. The white jackets must have let her out of the asylum just about ten years too early.

Could he still salvage a little ole roll in the hay out of this? What the hell. "Special effects," he said. "You know. Like in 'Topper'?"

Wrong approach. She frowned and set the bottle on the table. "I really must speak to Peter Lorre." She stood, preparing to leave.

Then it came to him what to do. He hadn't had a woman in six months. Not even a paid woman. And this woman was more luscious than any he'd ever had, free or for money. "Hey, I was just doing what the studio told me to do," he said. "They had to keep this one a secret, we were put under oath and I could get in trouble talking this way. They let it out the hand was real, it could really move like that, there'd be a panic. But you're pretty smart, you picked up on that in the film. How'd you guess?"

She had turned back to him. "Then where is it?"

Goddamn. He hadn't expected her to ask him that. He was getting in a little bit deep, he'd never put on such a show for a dame, but he had it on the roll now, no time to turn the train around.

"I'm not sure," he said, glancing around, thinking fast. "I could find out, maybe."

"You could? Would you?"

God, she was kneeling right at his knee, her breasts pressed against the flesh of his thigh. He almost dropped the beer and lunged for her. Cool it, he told him, we're getting close now. The headache kicked in hard with a mule punch and he winced at the pain.

"I could be persuaded," he said. "I could get in a lot of trouble they ever found out I ever told you anything, but . . ."

She leaned in closer still and her lips covered his. I'm a frog, that's all he could think, I'm a frog prince and this kiss is going to give me back my kingdom.

She delivered, boy howdy, did she. Left him breathless and spent and dizzy. While she dressed across the room all he could do was lie back on the rumpled sheets and half doze. For the first time in days his headache had left him.

"Jonah?"

"Hmmm.."

"When will you bring the hand here for me to see it?"

"Kinda . . . macabre, isn't it? You sure I got to . . ."

"You promised. You didn't lie to me did you, Jonah? Nothing worse I hate than liars and cheats."

"Uh . . . okay. Next week. Same time. Saturday, say? I'm off on Saturday."

"That's a long time to wait. You can't get it before then?"

"What's the rush, baby? I told you it's locked in a vault. I'm pretty sure of that. You saw how it got out in the movie. It can't just lie around on the set in some cigar box."

He heard her sigh. She came to the bed and leaned down into his face. He thought she was going to kiss him good-bye. Instead she opened her mouth and her teeth sank into his left cheek, teeth cutting right to his jaw bone before he reacted. He screamed, slapping at her, and pulling away. He scrambled to the other side of the bed. His hand was to his face and it came away bloody.

"You crazy bitch! What'd you bite me for? Kee-rist! Look at me, I'm bleeding."

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

"Don't lie to me," she said. "If you aren't here Saturday with the hand, I'll do worse than give you a little love bite."

She hurried from the room and he heard the front screen door slam.

Oh, she was certifiable, no doubt in his mind. Now what was he supposed to do, go to the prop man and get the plastic hand? Pay off some anatomy student at the university to cut him off a hand from a cadaver? And when it didn't crawl for her, what then?

The whole idea made him quiver with revulsion. He had never liked that movie, the hand movie. Gave him the creeps. Gave him headaches.

He stood over the sink looking at the bite. Teeth marks ran red half moon tracks on his cheek and it still bleed freely. He washed it and disinfected the wounds and plastered his face with wide ugly Band-Aids.

"Crazy bitch," he muttered.

He'd have to move. No big loss. He hated the cottage anyway. He paid too much for too little. He'd find another place, lie low. He saw Veronica coming, he'd call the cops.

She belonged in a cell somewhere. Below ground. Where there were rats. With big snarling hungry teeth.

Kee-rist. She had gotten onto the studio lot some way and there wasn't a security guard in sight.

It had been three weeks and he'd almost forgotten Veronica. His new place was nicer, with carpet on the floor and tile in the kitchen, not faded linoleum. It would never have occurred to him to worry about her gaining access to the studios. Besides, he'd had to start taking medication for his headaches and the pills didn't let him worry about anything much. He moved through his days in a somber fog, everything quieted down, all the tones rounded, the edges smoothed. The director had yelled at him twice for missing his mark, the son of a bitch. Couldn't he perceive a sick man when he saw one?

He had come late from the dressing room, long after the others had left. They had used a lot of make up on him for a scene in one of Vincent Price's low-budget schlock horror films and it was hell getting that stuff off him.

"Covers those marks on your face, you're lucky. Pete's been pissed all week," the make-up artist said, slathering the blood gook over his cheek. "You have a run-in with a Doberman?"

And here it was, the Doberman, closing the big warehouse door with a resounding boom, click-clacking across the concrete floor in her sandals, those mighty knockers peaking from the top of another low-cut blouse in sky blue and sunny yellow. She looked like an advertisement for Puerto Rican rum and white sandy beaches.

Jonah turned and headed the other direction. There was another way out of the building.

She called out in a commanding voice, "Don't run. There's no where to run. Wait, I have something for you."

He peered over his shoulder without slowing down. She had something in her hand, something he had only seen on sets during the making of movies. Only he knew this wasn't a prop. This would not only stop him in his tracks, it would put a half inch hole in his back and a foot wide hole in his front when it exited with his intestines in ribbons. His stomach coiled into a knot and he stopped, turning to face doom.

"Look," he said, his voice shaking. "I shouldn't have gone along with it. I know it was all wrong, it was a despicable thing to do, but do you blame me? I mean, I know you blame me, but you're so . . . beautiful and I was . . . I was so . . . lonely. I didn't mean to lie, I wouldn't have lied for the world if . . ."

She was upon him and the gun, he saw clearly now, was no prop. Spit dried in his mouth. So this is what they called "cottonmouth." He thought he might piss his pants and tightened his muscles to keep that from happening. There was a lot of differences between celluloid and real life. Namely, the possibility of real death. She just stood there looking glorious, sublime, as pretty as any movie queen he'd ever known, but so much more deadly. Her eyes were fixed, the pupils dilated in anger, he supposed, in betrayal. He swallowed and tried to speak again. He needed one of his pills to dull all this drama. He felt a headache bloom suddenly over his right eye and had to restrain himself from groaning.

"What would you do with it if you had it?" What did you say to crazy people anyway? You asked crazy questions, he guessed. "I mean, really, you never said what you wanted it for. I have a right to know that, don't I? It's a . . . it's a valuable piece of studio property."

When she spoke it was with an eerie coldness, completely without inflection, as if a robot had been turned on with a recorded message. "Why, I want it to kill someone for me, of course. A pianist."

Of course.

"What pianist? Oh. You mean your father, the pianist."

"Him," she said. "He won't quit playing. He plays that piece from 'The Beast With Five Fingers'. Over and over he plays it. It's driving me mad."

Driving her mad? He figured that had happened quite some time ago. "Your father plays that same tune." Kee-rist, he couldn't stand there and repeat what she said. The crazy things she said.

"Take me to where the hand is," she said. "Unless you want to die."

"Certainly. Right away." And he began to think of the prop room where they stored the mechanical hands and the plastic hands and the wooden hands and the stainless steel hands. He might find something there to use as a weapon against her, something to knock the gun from her grasp. Something to brain her with. His head hurt with such fierce intensity now that he could hardly think at all. When it got bad like this, he made all kinds of dumb mistakes, but this was a time for him to tough it out, to be steady and intelligent, he couldn't get fuzzy headed now.

He led her down a long empty hallway and into another warehouse connected to the one they had left. He hoped to find someone cleaning up or doing paperwork or running through a rehearsal, but the cavernous room echoed with their footsteps. It was late. It was twilight. He was on his own and his head kept pounding. Black spots danced before his eyes.

"Here's the prop room," he said, opening wide an oversized door.

"Props? Where's the vault?"

"I think it's here, the hand's in here," he said, carefully maneuvering through the crowded aisle, his gaze searching for something heavy that he could swing into her pretty face.

"It can't be here," she screamed. "It'd get loose!"

"No, wait, wait . . ." Fear was back upon him like a fire and he could hardly breathe. "Look!" He pointed to a long wooden table covered with hands. Big ones, little ones, fat, scrawny, bloody, disfigured, clawed ones. Hands of every imaginable configuration lay upon the table like a coroner's nightmare.

She leaped past him and began to push the hands aside in frantic search. "Where?" she asked. "I want it! It has to do this one job for me, it has to free me!"

He might have felt pity for her if he had not been so driven to protect his own life, to get her out of the way so he could find his pills and stop the horses thundering through his head. He raised the wooden leg high over his head and clubbed her to the floor. The gun fell, skittering underneath the table of hands. As she cried out and turned onto her stomach to crawl for it, he brought the leg down again and again, bashing her, bashing her into submission, bashing her hard and harder to keep her fingers from closing on the gun. He hit her for his pain, for his fear, for keeping him from leaving the set so that he could get on with his dreary, lackluster life.

When he finished, breathless, spent, and a little light-headed, what lay on the floor at his feet was pulp, unrecognizable as having been human.

"Oh God. Oh good God." He sank to his knees and closed his eyes. What had he done, how would he ever explain this thing, this mistake?

Something touched his thigh and he jerked, his eyelids flying open. Her hand. It fingertipped its way up his thigh. It was going to come up his chest, it was going to clamp around his throat and throttle him, kill him, her murderer.

He lifted the wooden leg again and brought it down, snapping her arm in two. He beat the arm and hand over and over until it was no longer her arm, but a bony stick, cracked and fragmented.

And then he crab-crawled backwards away from her body, taking the bloody leg with him. Just in case. She might get up. She might animate herself in some way.

He scrambled to his feet and ran from the prop room, down the empty hall, across the warehouse to his dressing room. There he washed as much of the blood off him as he could and slicked back his hair so that he could get out through the guard gate without arousing suspicion.

He washed the wooden leg too and threw it into a corner with other props and discarded costumes. If only his head would stop throbbing, he would be all right. No one would ever know what he'd done.

It was midnight before he fell asleep on the sofa in his new apartment. He dreamed of the auburn-haired woman and of a father who played the piano incessantly. He woke before dawn soaked in sweat, gibbering into the pillow from his fear.

He thought he heard a scratching sound from the bedroom. Terrified, he turned on all the lights and checked for her. For Veronica. She would come after him, he was sure of that. He had not only lied to her, used her, played a cruel game with her pitiful, deranged mind, but he had taken away her beauty. He had turned her into a horror far worse than anything on the silver screen. She would not let him get away with that. Didn't he understand revenge from all the films he'd been involved with? Hadn't any of the moral lessons contained in those films sunk into his pounding, aching, tormented head?

If Veronica didn't come, some bit or piece or part of her would. That's how it worked in Hollywood. Doubles never got it as good as the actors. They never got protection like the stars did. Where were the limousines, the servants, the jewels, the vacations, the royal treatment? Damnit, he was not a dog, a face that copied a famous face with nothing behind it.

He was still awake, watchful, when the sun rose and the clock hands twisted slowly toward nine o'clock. He had not moved from the sofa after turning on all the lights. He had taken more than enough of his pills, but his head still ached.

The knock came on the door then.

He wouldn't let her in. Her or her hands.

He sat with his feet tucked up on the sofa and said, "Go away, leave me alone!"

"Police. Open up. We'd like to talk to you, Mr. Lokonski."

"Is Veronica with you?" He spoke with his Peter Lorre voice to throw them off.

A silence boomed. Then, "Open the door. This is the police."

He waited until they nearly had the door broken through before he rushed for the bathroom. In there they would not find him, no sir. And he had razor blades, if they did.

When they battered the bathroom door, the splinters shattering inward all around him like sharp knives, he began to scream. The noise, it was killing him! The sounds were destroying his sanity.

A hand came through a hole in the wood, a disembodied hand reaching for the lock.

He slashed out at it and saw the blood flow. He caught it around the wrist and began hacking at it frantically. He couldn't help thinking of Peter Lorre and his trials with this hand, wondering where they might have hidden the loathsome thing, could it have been put into a vault until now?

When he was shot point blank in the chest he had just a couple of fingers off and clutched in his palm.

"Veronica . . . oh baby baby," he murmured, dying, though his words were drowned in the melee of Panasonic voices rising in a crescendo in the small cramped room.

He lifted up his crimson hand and opened his fingers, dropping the three small prizes he clutched to the bathroom floor. Then he began to laugh until another gunshot ignited his brain with the largest pain of all. A Technicolor blast entered through his eyes and took him out to the farthest reaches of echoing darkness.

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