LARISSA MIUSOV

Lucius Shepard

Her beauty was so extreme, such blond Slavic cheekbone perfection, everyone who saw her was forced to take note of it and, rather than admiring her, they were inspired to seek out her flaws, to say that she was a bit shorter than optimum or too full-figured for her height, or that her eyes, a pale chartreuse, were set a smidgen too widely apart and that her lower lip had the merest touch of superfluous fullness. Itemized, then, added up and totaled, she rated a B-minus—a 10.6, let's say—on the scale by which supremely beautiful women are judged. This process of itemization, a process of which Larissa was aware, created a gulf between men and herself that made possible certain unique resolutions, enabling things to be left unsaid that were typically the subject of negotiation, and permitting things that often went unspoken to be discussed openly.

"When I was a little girl," she told me once, "when we still lived in Moscow, Andropov would stop by my father's apartment. Do you know Andropov? Yuri Andropov? He was premier after Brezhnev. Big fat guy. Not so fat as Brezhnev, but still he was very fat. He would come to our apartment and sit in my father's chair and put me on his knee. Like so." She straddled the arm of an easy chair, facing its back, and glanced at me over her shoulder. "It was uncomfortable, but he would say how pretty I was and move his knee. You know, up and down, up and down. I start to like the feeling I get." She made an amused noise and sat normally in the chair.

"Did he intend it?" I asked. "I mean, do you think he knew his behavior was inappropriate?"

She shrugged. "All men wish to be inappropriate, but this is not important. He stole nothing from me. He would tell me stories. I think now they were true. They all take place in a huge room, an underground room bigger than a city, with machines and laboratories . . .but no walls dividing them. And always there were prisoners. Hundreds of prisoners."

"You remember any of the stories?"

"Not so much. Terrible things were happening. Bloody things. They scare me. I don't like to hear them."

"He's telling you horror stories at the same time he's trying to turn you on? Where was your father all this time?"

"It's never just Yuri, you understand. He brings guys with him. They're scientists, like my father. They go in the kitchen and scribble on paper and yell at each other."

"So these occasions, they were basically a dodge that allowed the leader of the Soviet Union to be alone with you? So he could molest you?"

"Maybe . . .I don't know. It didn't feel like he was molesting me. I was very sad when Yuri died, but then I learn to give myself pleasure, so it's okay."

Larissa recognized the commodity of her beauty and traded upon it with skill and aplomb. She had dated movie stars and financiers; she made use of these connections and lived well. The astonishing thing was, being so beautiful did not appear to have weakened her psychologically. Perhaps this could be attributed to her Russian-ness. She tried to explain to me what it was to be Russian, but I was too wrapped up in estimating my chances with her to pay close attention.

"In every apartment in Moscow, no matter how poor," she said, "is enormous piece of furniture. A china closet, a thing like a miniature city, full of plates and precious things, mementos, heirlooms, photographs. It's bigger than anything else in the place. I used to think this is because we love the past; now I believe it's because there is something granite in our souls that loves memorials and tombs."

When I first saw her I thought she was a hooker, a reasonable assumption since she was hanging out at the Room, a Hollywood lounge club, with four women who were, according to a friend, Stan Reis, high-priced call girls. Stan had recently sold a screenplay, his third, and was celebrating. I had been in LA for three and a half years and sold nothing, so letting me be seen with him was for Stan a conspicuous act of charity. We went over to the sofa grouping where the women were seated. Stan started talking with one of them, whom he'd met at a party. The women studied me with cool appraisal, making me feel ill at ease, out of my league. I imagined they knew everything about me, the thickness of my wallet, the size of my dick. It was like being stared at by five predators who had judged you unpalatable. Larissa, sitting closest to me, asked what I did for a living. I told her, with a display of attitude, that I was an unsuccessful screenwriter.

"Don't let him kid you," Stan said. "This guy is going to have massive heat around him before long. He's a fantastic writer!"

"You have project?" Larissa asked me.

"Not yet," I said. "Not with a studio. But I'm working on something good, I think."

I told her about the screenplay, a thriller concerning descendants of the Donner Party, while the background music went from Sinatra to Kraftwerk to King Crimson, and the dim track lighting waxed and waned. She interrupted me from time to time, asking questions in a throaty contralto. They were, for the most part, intelligent questions. I became entranced by her and extended the conversation by inventing side characters and sub plots. She wore a cocktail dress that shimmered blackly whenever she crossed her legs or leaned forward to have a sip of her drink. Her pale skin seemed to hold more of the light than did any other surface. Her narrow chin and delicately molded jaw emphasized the fullness of her mouth and lent her face an otherworldly fragility, a quality amplified by those strange yellowish eyes; yet I had the sense that this was illusory, that she was anything but fragile.

Two of the women went to dance and a third drifted to the bar. Stan and his friend migrated to one of the private rooms, leaving me alone with Larissa. There was still a lot of small town left in me. I wasn't used to dealing with women like her and her physical presence overpowered me. Losing my natural restraint, I inquired as to her price and availability. Her face remained impassive and she asked how much money I had.

"Not enough," I said.

She smiled, an expression that developed slowly, and nodded as if in approval. "This is a very good answer. Very smart."

"I wasn't trying to be smart."

"That makes it even better answer."

She handed me a gold lighter shaped like a cricket and I lit her cigarette. A stream of smoke occulted her. "Tonight I am not working," she went on. "But you must call me. Tomorrow is no good. I have business. Another day. I would like to read your script and talk more about the movies."

She refused to speak about her mother. The lady was dead, I assumed, or else had abandoned her daughter to the care of her husband, a scientist who could be cold and distracted for months at a time. She wouldn't say much about her private life, either. I never understood whether the people she brought home, both men and women, were friends or lovers. My confusion in this regard was intensified by the fact that I never understood her relationship with me. I was in love with her, but it was not the kind of love that breaks your heart. So many things were unstated between us, and there were so many unknowns. It was similar to a crush you might have on an actress, a person you know from screen roles and the tabloids, about whom you have gleaned scraps of information that raise more questions than they answer. My emotions were safeguarded by a built-in temporality: I realized our movie would soon end.

When she was eleven her father was sent to work at a secret Soviet city inside the Arctic Circle, a vast factory-like habitation without a name or a past where weapons systems and space technology were developed. She was one of approximately forty children who were posted to the city along with their parents, but she made no real friends among them. They were closely surveilled and, though the environment bred countless illicit adult affairs, it was not conducive to friendship. A bright child, she took refuge in her studies and became interested in anthropology, especially as related to the nomads upon whose hunting ground the city was situated. Her attempts to study them were hampered by the soldiers who escorted her on field trips.

"When we entered the nomads' camp they would stop talking," she said. "Sometimes we surprised them and they would hide things from our eyes, tucking them under a blanket or inside their coats. I found designs cut in the ice that are reminding me of Mayan calendars. You know, like wheels? They have been defaced, so I could not make accurate sketch. I ask them about the designs and they look at me with amused expressions, as if they knew something valuable, something I could never know."

"How'd you get rid of the soldiers," I asked. "Or were you able to?"

"Eventually. My father says it's too dangerous to visit them alone; but they are not dangerous. You see, the soldiers have put them in a camp and take their weapons. That way they don't tell anyone about city. The camp is nicer than gulag. More like a reservation, but there are fences. Now they are no longer nomads. They are prisoners. Because they cannot hunt, they lose their spirit. Each winter many die. The women prostitute themselves to the soldiers. Their birth rate is in decline." She made a rueful face. "It's very bad, so I stop visiting. When I'm fifteen, I'm bored and I lose my virginity. I'm not serious about the boy. The experience was only clinical, and I start to have sex with other boys. Soon I'm bored with that, but the boys talk about me and my father hears. He beats me, he drinks, he weeps. For a few days, it's awful. Then he comes to me and says he has wangled permission for me to visit the camp alone. I'm not interested in nomads anymore, but he makes me go. Worrying about me, he claims, is interfering with his work. It's like he prefers me to be in danger than to sleep with boys."

I could see she was tired of talking, but I kept asking questions, prolonging the contact—this had become one of our patterns. She told me she had gone to the camp every day for a couple of hours and had become friends with the shaman, who revived her interest in anthropology, teaching her the rudiments of his craft and explaining that the wheel-like markings she had noticed were ritual in nature, designed to attract game to the camp. He hinted that he was contriving a ritual that would significantly improve the nomads' lives. Then one afternoon she found the camp abandoned. The nomads were gone. Shortly thereafter, the project on which her father had worked was shut down and they were sent back to Moscow. Not long after that, the city itself shut down.

"I guess the government decided to get rid of them," I said. "With the city no longer a priority, they didn't want the expense of guarding them, and they couldn't afford to have them running around loose."

"There is a frozen pond at edge of camp," she said. "When I go to look, I see designs carved in ice. Every inch of the ice is carved. There are four wheels at the corners—they are scratched out. And then little houses, like the houses in camp. In the middle of the pond, there are carvings of animals. Foxes and deer. All kinds. In the middle of the animals, there is circle, and inside the circle is nomad family."

"Yeah," I said. "So?"

"So . . .it is the shaman's ritual. They are gone."

"You're saying like a hole opened in the world and they crawled through?"

She glared at me, as if daring me to deny it.

"Well, that's taking the hopeful view," I said.

At the time we met, things were going badly for me. My bank account was dwindling, my connections weren't returning calls, and I was considering a move back east, taking a technical writing job I'd been offered. Better that, I told myself, than this ragged coatsleeve of a life, sharing a two-bedroom West Hollywood roach ranch with an out-of-work set designer, who smoked meth on the couch and talked semi-coherently about using our apartment as a model for the anteroom of Hell in his film version of Dante's Inferno. The reason I hadn't called Larissa, I was in the grip of depression and saw no point in acquiring a new friend. Then one morning the meth head appeared in my doorway, dropped a scrap of paper bearing Larissa's name and address onto my desk, and said in a terrible Russian accent, "Pliss tell Paul to come wisit me. I am at home today."

"When did she call?" I asked.

"A minute ago. She wants you to bring the script you talked about. She claims she may be able to get you some . . ." He waggled his fingers and sang the last word. "Money!"

I glanced at the address—it was an expensive one. "Why didn't you tell me she was on the phone?"

"You told me to say you were working. If you want your basic message personalized, you'll have to give specific instructions."

He was tweaking, spoiling for a fight. A good time, I thought, to take a drive.

The house in which Larissa lived was a hill-topper in Topanga, a multileveled architectural abomination that, come the apocalypse, would likely resemble a flying saucer crashed into a post-modern church. A molded concrete deck ran the length of its steel-and glass façade, bolted to the hill by cantilevers that sprouted from massive piers far below, and divided into two walkways, one leading around to the main entrance and the access road, the other extending farther out over the canyon, supporting a narrow azure pool shaped like a capital I. It belonged to a man named Misha Bondarchuk for whom Larissa served as a conduit and a scout for potential investments. I saw him perhaps half a dozen times in all the months I knew her. He was blandly handsome, tanned and fit, with razor-cut black hair, and sported a large diamond-and-emerald earring. His uncle had been president of the Ukraine prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Misha had since come into possession of the Ukraine's oil leases. I doubted this signaled other than blind luck on his part. As far as I could tell, he had the IQ of wheat and spent his time skiing or at discos with one or another of his Korean girlfriends. He displayed a familiarity with Larissa—pats on the ass, casual caresses—that seemed to reflect a past intimacy, but she denied they had ever had a relationship, acting as if the prospect disgusted her, and said that was simply Misha's style; he only liked Korean women and her association with him was strictly business.

The day she called, she kissed me on both cheeks at the door and led me into a sunken living room with China white carpeting and sofas rising from it like sculpted snow and a spiral, stainless steel staircase like the skeleton of some curious Arctic beast corkscrewing up past obsidian objets d'art and teak bookcases filled with fake books without titles made of black marble. It might have been a set for a '60s TV show about jet-set spies. Larissa flung herself down on a sofa and began reading. I went out onto the deck, leaned on the railing, and watched the progress of a small brushfire atop a nearby ridge. The smell of the burning cleared the vapors of West Hollywood from my head. It was so quiet I could hear wind chimes from one of the houses below. I lay down on a deck chair, thinking that was one great thing about being rich—you got to lower the volume whenever you wanted. I fell asleep in the sun and had a dream filled with noise, with the shouts of corner boys, traffic sounds, the meth head's dry-throated cackle. Larissa shook me awake and sat on a deck chair beside me. I had to shield my eyes against the glare to see her.

"This is very, very good," she said, gesturing with the script. "Too art house for studio, but it can be art house hit. And it's inexpensive to shoot. I think we will put the money to make this movie."

I was pleased, but expressed my doubts that someone in her line of work could pull the funding together.

"You think I am a prostitute," she said. "I am not prostitute. I was playing a joke on you."

She briefed me on her relationship with Misha and said he was in Russia, but would return in two months. I explained that two months might as well be two years unless she could give me an advance, and that if I didn't get out of my apartment, I might be up on murder charges. I'd had more solid deals go south and I laid it on thick. She mulled this over and then led me into a wing of the house that contained an apartment with its own kitchen.

"You can stay here," she said. "It's quiet place for work. No one bothers you."

I wondered why a beautiful woman who lived alone would be so trusting. Perhaps she didn't view me as a threat. I found this notion rankling, but hers was the best offer I'd had since my arrival in LA. On my way out, making small talk, I asked why she had been keeping company with prostitutes—it was a dumb question, but I was attempting to disguise the eagerness I felt over moving in and might have said anything.

"They are friends. Nice girls. And they make it safe for me to flirt with guys. I love to flirt." She opened the door and kissed me on both cheeks. "Other stuff with guys, it's not so good for me."

Larissa was an astute businesswoman and she understood the industry. After I had finished a second draft of the script, she informed me that she was bringing in a director to work with me on subsequent drafts. Naturally I objected, but she held firm and the director she brought in, Vic Echevarrìa, had made a movie I liked and proved helpful. He was a paranoid little man with an alert, foxlike face and a bald spot, always worrying about the money, about when we would start principal photography, about whether the Russian mafia was involved. But he had good ideas and together we gradually beat the script into shape. The contracts, which Larissa herself drew up, were generous and precise, and the actors she suggested for various parts, a mix of older A-list people and new talent, were suited to the roles and approachable. Yet for all her business acumen, she was, to my way of thinking, utterly irrational in every other area of her life.

Her grandmother—her sole living relative, her father having succumbed to a peculiarly Russian fate involving a mysterious boating accident and poor hospital care—still lived in Moscow and each month sent Larissa a package of videotapes. Some tapes consisted of nothing but swirling masses of color and New Age music. Larissa swore they had healing properties. Others were shows hosted by psychics who made prophecies regarding aliens, Second Comings, and subterranean civilizations that outstripped those of the wildest tabloids. From these she derived much of her information about America. She was convinced, for example, that a gigantic serpent lay coiled about an egg in a cavern far below the Smithsonian Institution, and that the hatching of the egg would bring about the end of days. She believed anything that supported the existence of magic. When Misha returned from Russia with his latest Korean girlfriend and his bodyguards, stopping by the Topanga house on the way to his place in Malibu, she pulled me aside and asked, "What is it about Korean women that men find so attractive? Do they have special sexual techniques?"

"Beats me," I said. "Most Korean women I know work in convenience stores."

She looked disappointed.

"But I've heard some of them can change into animals during sex," I said.

"Is it true?"

"That's what I hear."

She appeared to file this information away. "Must be smelly animal," she said. "This one wears too much perfume."

That day marked a shift in our relationship, though I wasn't altogether sure why. Misha spoke to Larissa alone, while the Korean girl paced the deck and the bodyguards sprawled on the white sofas, watching soccer on the big-screen TV. I hovered at the edge of the living room, betwixt and between. After fifteen minutes Misha came out of the room that Larissa used for an office, unbuckling himself from a bulletproof vest.

He grinned at me and said, "You believe it? All the time I'm in Russia, I'm cursing this vest. I can't wait to take it off. But when I get back to the States, I forget I'm wearing it."

For want of anything better to say, I opined that these were dangerous days in Moscow."

"Cowboys and Indians, man!" He fanned the hammer of an imaginary six-gun. "So you are writer, huh? You going to make me big movie?"

He noticed Larissa, who had followed him out of the office, and went to her, arms outspread. "Russian women!" he said, and gave her a smooch for my benefit. "They are too beautiful!"

She pushed him away, a gesture that was not entirely playful and enlisted my hostility toward Misha.

"So beautiful, your heart breaks to see them!" He adopted a clownishly tragic face and clutched his chest. The expression lapsed, and he spoke in his native tongue to the bodyguards, who stood and solemnly adjusted the hang of their jackets. "Okay, I am going," he said, starting for the door, giving me a wave. "So long, Mister Writer!"

"Paul," I said sternly.

He shot me a blank look.

"My name's Paul."

"Paul. Paul?" He repeated the name several more times in different tones of voice. "Okay," he said, smiling. "See you later, Mister Paul." He went toward the door, then swung around and made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger. "Paul, right?" He laughed. "I remember next time."

Once he was out of earshot, I remarked that he came off like a serious asshole.

"He is Russian man," she said flatly, as if that were explanation enough. "Come on. I show you something."

On the computer screen in her office was the record of a money transfer in the amount of fifteen million dollars to the account of Cannibal Films, our production company.

"I thought you were only going to ask for ten," I said.

"Ten, fifteen . . .It's same for Misha. With fifteen, we can shoot period scenes. They are still in the script, right?"

"I was planning to cut them, but yeah . . ." Delighted by how easily the project had come together, I made a clumsy move to hug her. She kissed me lightly on the mouth and eased out of the embrace.

"Get to work," she said.

We both got to work. Vic Echevarrìa and I banged and kneaded and argued over the script, and Larissa initiated the casting process, arranged for camera rentals and such. Her goal, to start principal photography in three to four months, seemed unreasonable, but she put in fourteen-hour days, cut her social life to the bone, and it began to seem doable. Despite this, we spent more time together than we had. We held frequent conferences and fell into the habit of taking our morning coffee on the deck, dallying for an hour or two before getting into the day, talking about this or that, anything except the business at hand. Larissa, never a morning person, came to these breakfasts sleepy-eyed and rumpled, dressed in a short silk robe, loosely belted, that offered me the occasional view of a breast or her inner thigh (she wore no panties). I recalled what she had said about loving to flirt, but rejected the idea that she was flirting with me and chose to believe that her immodesty was due to sleepiness or that she was naturally immodest. My frustration grew and, since I didn't feel secure enough in my position to bring a woman to the house, I became increasingly fixated on Larissa. I thought about asking her to cover up, but I didn't want to offend or to deprive myself of the meager gratification afforded by these intermittent glimpses.

One morning she did not come to breakfast and, after she hadn't put in appearance all day, I went to her suite of rooms in late afternoon and knocked. Receiving no response, I poked my head in and called to her. No answer. I went along the corridor and found her sitting cross-legged on her bed, naked to the waist, wearing a pair of slacks. The drapes were drawn, permitting a seam of light to penetrate, casting the remainder of the room in shadow. An open bottle of vodka rested on the night table. She had an empty glass in her hand. It looked as though she had decided to go on a bender in the midst of getting dressed. I asked if she was all right and she said, "Oh, Paul! I cannot talk now."

"What's wrong?" I asked, thinking it must have to do with the movie.

She stared at me bleakly, then lowered her head and shook it slowly back and forth, her hair curtaining her face. I turned to go and she said, "Wait!" She held out the glass. "Bring me some ice. Please!"

When I returned from the kitchen with her ice, she was still sitting on the bed, struggling to put on a blouse, unable to fit her arm into the sleeve. "Shit!" she said, and crumpled the blouse, tossed it to the floor. I handed her the glass and she slopped vodka into it.

"You want drink? Come! You must drink with me." She pointed to a tray of glasses atop a coffee table that fronted a sofa. "We drink to the movies."

A band-aid on the inside of her elbow had come partly unstuck—I asked if she had cut herself.

"I am giving blood each month." She tried to make the band-aid stick, gave up, and pulled it off; she looked down at her arm, which was no longer bleeding, and giggled. "Is rare charitable impulse."

I sat on the foot of the bed. With a drunken show of painstaking care, she plucked out an ice cube and plinked it into my glass. I had trouble keeping my eyes off her chest.

"To our little movie," she said, and we drank.

"It's still on? The movie?"

"Yes, of course. Why not?"

"Then tell me what's wrong."

"Is too depressing. The bank has failed. My grandmother has lose all her money."

Relieved that it wasn't our bank, I asked what had happened, but she may not have registered the question.

"The bank president," she said mournfully. "He has kill himself."

"Jesus. That's too bad."

She waved in exaggerated fashion, as though hailing a cab. "No, no! Is okay. They make him kill himself."

I tried to imagine what Moscow must be like and suggested she wire money to her grandmother. She told me she had taken care of that, but said that her grandmother was anxious and needed someone to help her through this time.

"Why don't you fly home? We can spare you for a week or so," I said.

"Movie is not keeping me here. Is Misha. Fucking son-of-a-bitch Russian bastard. He say if I go, no movie. Always he wishes to control me."

I didn't know what could be done about Misha. She poured us both another vodka and we drank in silence.

"Anyway," she said glumly, "air on plane is not fit to breathe."

She heaved a mighty sigh that set her breasts to wobbling and stared at them as if she had just noticed they were there. "I can do magic," she said brightly, glancing up at me. "Want me to show you?"

"Yeah, sure."

"You don't believe. I know. You're too busy looking at my tits." She cupped her hands beneath her breasts and wigwagged them. "But while you look, I can disappear. Poof."

I was annoyed with her for teasing me, but I let it slide. "Like the nomads," I said.

"Exactly! Is the same trick."

Energy drained from her. She slumped and hung her head again and then began to wrestle with the top button of her slacks, but couldn't get it undone. I was startled to see tears in her eyes.

"Help me, please," she said. "I want to sleep."

I helped her off with the slacks, touching her skin no more than was necessary. As I moved to pull the sheet over her, she hooked her arms behind my neck and gave me a grave, assessing look that I recognized for an invitation, or at least as the prelude to one. I let the moment slip by. She rolled onto her side, drew her knees up into the fetal position, and passed out.

The next morning I was on the deck, gazing across the fogbound canyon, listening to drips and plops, the remnants of an early morning drizzle, when Larissa walked up and pressed herself against me in a sisterly embrace.

"You're a nice guy," she said, her face buried in my shoulder. "I'm sorry for what I did."

I unpeeled from her and said venomously, "I'm not a nice guy, okay? I could have raped you last night. And you know what? I think I could have lived with myself. That's the only reason I didn't fuck you—because I don't want to know that about myself. I'm not prepared to go there just yet."

"Rape? What are you talking about?"

"That's what it would have been. You were totally out of it. You run around here half-naked, like I'm some kind of fucking eunuch, and . . ." I gestured in frustration. "Forget it!"

She folded her arms and, with a puzzled look, said, "You can fuck me if you want."

It was as if she were saying, Didn't you know that? What's wrong with you? I had no idea how to respond.

"I fuck guys," she went on. "Girls, too. I cannot manage emotional response, but I like you, Paul. If this is a problem between us, you can fuck me."

At that moment the gap between us seemed wider than could be explained by a cultural or a gender divide.

"What is the big deal? This . . ." She indicated her body. "It's nothing. You think I'm so beautiful, maybe with me it's better? Maybe you hear music and feel things you don't feel with other women? For me, it's only sex. Sometimes it's currency. Sometimes it's for pleasure, sometimes for friendship. I can't help if for you it's more."

A grinding sound arose from the fog, sputtered and died; then it started up again.

"Maybe I'm being naïve," I said.

"Yes, I think," she said after a considerable pause. "But you're a nice guy. Believe it."

Larissa acted as though nothing had changed between us, and I suppose nothing had. She continued to wear her robe to breakfast, continued her casual displays of skin. That pissed me off, but I got over it. I concluded that this was her way of letting me know she remained available, and that my problem wasn't her problem. The idea that I might be insufficiently worldly to take advantage of the situation, or that I was too much of a wimp, bothered me; yet whenever I determined to make a grab for her, something held me back. I attributed impossibly subtle manipulative skills to her. Perhaps, I thought, she had perceived a flawed trigger in my psychological depths and understood that by offering herself, she would neutralize my desire. At length I decided that I was simply a romantic chump where she was concerned, and that I had rendered her unattainable by demanding something of her that she could not provide.

Echevarrìa went off to the Sierra Nevadas to scout locations. I gave the script a final polish. Larissa stayed on the phone until late in the evening, going out only for business meetings and, judging by the band-aids on her arm, to give blood. On more than a few occasions I overheard her speaking in Russian to someone. Her side of these conversations ranged in tone from pleading to infuriated, and once she used a Russian epithet she had taught me: "Zalupa (dickhead)." After one such call, she stomped about the house, muttering, picking up books and statuettes as if intending to throw them, satisfying the urge by slamming them down. We were mere weeks away from starting the picture, and I didn't want to jinx the project by asking whether the relationship between her and Misha was deteriorating. I put my blinders on and tried not to dwell on the thousand things that could go wrong.

I returned from a walk one evening to find an extra car parked out front and one of Misha's bodyguards, a slight, blond guy with a pleasant, finely boned face, standing in the living room, watching a mixed martial arts fight on TV. I peeked into Larissa's office. It was empty, and I asked the bodyguard where she was.

"Business meeting," he said without turning from the bloody figures onscreen.

"Where are they?"

He smiled and said he didn't know.

The smile made me uneasy and I started along the corridor toward Larissa's rooms; the bodyguard intercepted me.

"Private meeting," he said.

I tried to push past him and wound up flat on my back, with his hand gripping my throat. He helped me up, asked if I was okay, and steered me back into the living room. I sat on a sofa, feeling impotent and agitated.

"What's going on?" I asked.

The bodyguard flicked his fingers at the TV, where one fighter was celebrating a knockout. "Ken Shamrock," he said admiringly. "He's badass motherfucker!"

Twenty minutes later, Misha came along the corridor. He was buttoning his shirt, carrying a jacket draped over one arm. I couldn't take my eyes off him, quivering like a hound that has been forced to heel, but I don't think he even gave me a glance. He stood in the foyer, combing his hair. The bodyguard went to join him. They left through the front door and I sprinted down the corridor.

The sheets were half-off Larissa's bed, the pillows scattered on the floor. I heard the shower running and called out, asking if she was all right. She said she was fine. When she stepped out of the bathroom, wearing a terrycloth robe, her hair turbaned in a towel, she seemed composed, but her cheek was red and swollen, and there was a tiny cut at the corner of her upper lip. She sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette with her gold cricket lighter. I wanted to ask what had happened, but I knew and I told her she should call the police.

"You cannot hurt Misha that way." She had a hit of the cigarette, exhaled, and tapped the lighter rhythmically against the glass surface of the coffee table, as if sending an SOS. "Best thing to do is nothing. Sooner or later someone will take a big bite out of Misha. He's too stupid to be in position of power."

"You've got to call the cops. If you won't, I will. There's no telling what he'll do next."

"He has done what he wanted. He's humiliated me. That satisfies him. Now he will leave me alone for a while." She gazed out the window at the twilit canyon and said distractedly, "Don't worry. We'll be all right. You want to do something? Be a nice guy. Make some tea."

Her behavior confounded me. A woman who cried when she couldn't undo a button and yet took rape in stride, who viewed it as a humiliation for which the remedy was tea and cigarettes: Maybe it was a Russian thing, but I couldn't get my head around it. I was disappointed in her, almost angry, as if she hadn't lived up to a standard I set for her, some special measure like the scale by which her beauty was appraised. I began spending more time away from the house, washing my hands of the situation, telling myself that I couldn't protect her, though my withdrawal was actually a petty punishment, an expression of my disapproval, and didn't last for long. My work on the script was done, at least for the moment, and the house was a mess, wires and lights everywhere (we were using it as one of the locations), so I seized the opportunity to renew friendships and caught a couple of movies. Then one night Larissa nabbed me as I was heading out and asked me to have a drink with her. She wanted to celebrate the start of principal photography, now eight days away, and was afraid we might not have time later—she was about to get very busy on the production side of things.

It was too windy on the deck, so we went into her bedroom and sat on the sofa and drank vodka martinis, slipping back into our relationship without awkwardness. She talked about the people she had associated with in Moscow, citizens of the new Russia, crazy musicians and charlatan poets and idiot actors, her face glowing with fond recollection, leaning forward to touch me on the knee, the arm. I tried to keep her talking, watching the light shift across her satiny blouse, listening to her breathy inflections and odd tonal shifts, like someone hitting the stops on the upper register of a bass clarinet. She told me that she had been a production assistant on two movies in Moscow, something I hadn't known, and this had given her the expertise needed to produce our movie. It was a dream come true for her, she said, speaking about the quality of the actors and the director she was working with now.

"Your script is the heart of the movie," she said. "They are forgetting this in Hollywood. Everything is explosion, car chase . . .or else it is farce. They no longer care about story. But you have given me such a brilliant script, a beautiful story. I am so grateful to have met you."

I was made confident by her praise, infected by her passion for the movie, and a little desperate because I realized this might be my last, best chance to draw her into a deeper involvement. She wasn't startled when I kissed her. She seemed to want it as much as I did. We moved from the sofa to the bed without a word exchanged. She was a fierce lover. She hissed in delight, she whispered Russian endearments, and she came almost at once, her nails pricking my back, heels bruising my calves, holding me tightly while she let out a series of low, shuddering cries. Then she pushed me onto my back and mounted me. Her hips rolled and twisted, teasing one moment and frenzied the next. The sight of her above me, breasts swaying, her hair flying—it was sublimely sexual. Yet when we were done, when she sat on the edge of the bed sipping her martini, I realized I had been taking mental snapshots of her, filing them away under The Most Beautiful Woman I Ever Fucked, and that her ferocity had been technical, part of a design for pleasure. The relationship had not deepened. It was only sex, though I wanted to believe otherwise.

"You are disappointed," she said, looking down at me.

"Are you kidding me?"

"No, you are disappointed. I know." She set down her glass and lay facing me. "You did not hear music. You felt nothing new."

"No music," I said, giving in to her. "But I maybe felt a couple of new things."

She laughed and caressed my cheek. "Men tell me I am great at sex, and I think, so what? What do you mean? I enjoy it. I want men to enjoy. I have good energy for sex. It's no big thing." She rested her head in the crook of my shoulder. "Do you remember I'm telling you about the shaman? In the camp?"

"Uh-huh."

"We were lovers. It was only way I could get him to tell me things. After we have sex one time, he says, 'You don't have feelings for me.' I say, 'Sure I do,' and he says, 'You want to know what it is to have love feelings for a man?' So I tell him, 'Yes, okay.' I think he'll teach me something if I go along. So he lays me down and rubs oil over my body. And spices, too, maybe. It smells of spices."

"Sounds like a marinade," I said.

"Then he starts to sing. Very low, deep in his throat." She demonstrated. "It's very hypnotic, and I'm getting drowsy. So drowsy, I lose track of what is happening. Soon he's making love to me. It was amazing. It's like I hear the music, I'm feeling new things. I'm . . .I don't know the word. In another place."

"Transported," I suggested.

Her brow furrowed. "Okay, maybe. Afterward I ask if I can go to that place with some other man. He doesn't know. If he performs the ritual some more, it's possible, but he's very busy, he's got no time. Later, he says. Then the nomads disappear and there's no chance to perform the ritual again."

"He probably drugged you."

"Must be hell of a drug," she said. "Because I miss him forever. It takes me a year before I want sex with someone else. You think a drug can make you feel something so strong that you don't really feel?"

"You don't even need drugs for that," I said.

I was watching TV the following Sunday, three days before we were to begin shooting, when the police arrived in force. They had a search warrant and asked if I knew where Misha and Larissa might be. I had no idea where Misha was, but I told them Larissa was probably asleep. They didn't appear to believe me and suggested I come down to Valley Division and answer some questions. During the questioning, I learned that Misha and Larissa had last been seen at a bar in Pacific Palisades. Misha's car had been found early that morning in a gully not far from the house and there were signs of foul play, plenty of blood, too much blood to hope for survivors, yet no bodies. They asked about Misha's relationship with Larissa, about my relationship with Larissa, about people with Russian names whom I'd never heard of. After forty-five minutes, they kicked me loose and told me to keep clear of the house until they were done collecting evidence.

I checked into a hotel and called Echevarrìa and gave him the news. He kept saying, "I knew something would fuck this up." It wasn't the kind of attitude I wanted to hear. I told him I'd contact him when I heard anything new and went down to the bar and drank myself stupid. I shed a few tears for Larissa, but not so many as you might expect, perhaps because I sensed that her tragedy had occurred long before I met her and, like Echevarrìa, I knew something bad was going to happen. I walked around for a week feeling as if a hole had been punched through my chest—I missed being around her, talking to her—and then the police picked me up again, this time conveying me to an interrogation room in the Parker Center with walls the color of carbon paper, where I made the acquaintance of Detectives Jack Trombley and Al Witt, who were attached to the Homicide Special Unit of the LAPD.

Witt, a cheerful, fit man in his thirties, dressed in jeans and a sport coat, offered me cigarettes, coffee, soda, and then said, "So, did you do it?"

"Do what?" I asked.

He looked to his partner, an older, thicker man wearing the same basic uniform, and said, "I don't think he did it. You try."

"Did you do it?" asked Trombley.

I glanced back and forth between them. "I didn't do anything."

"I'm not getting much," Trombley said.

"Inconclusive?" asked Witt.

Trombley nodded.

"If only he hadn't lied, huh?" Witt eyed me sadly. "You said you and the Russian babe were friends, but we got your DNA off her sheets."

"We had sex one time," I said. "But . . ."

"One time!" Trombley snorted. "If it was me, you'd have to pry me off her."

"It was like no good with her or something?" Witt asked.

"Not really," I said. "It was . . .I don't know how to explain so you'd understand."

"Yeah, we're pretty dense. We might not get it." Witt thumbed through the case file. "We found an older sample on the sheets. It belonged to Bondarchuk."

"That must be from the rape."

"Yeah, you said." Witt fingered the edge of a flimsy. "Makes you wonder how come a woman who's been raped would hang onto the sheets? You'd think she'd throw them away, or at least wash them."

"What's your point?"

Witt shrugged. "It's just weird." He played with papers for a second or two, and then asked, "What did you do with the money?"

"The money?"

"Boy, he's good!" said Trombley.

"The fifteen million," Witt said. "The budget for your movie. Where'd it go?"

"It's not in the bank?"

"Not in any Wells Fargo bank." Witt made a church-and-steeple with his fingers. "Here's how I read it. Larissa was planning to set you up for Bondarchuk's murder and scoot with the fifteen mil. That's why she was sleeping on dirty sheets when you nailed her—to implicate you. Maybe she talked you into killing Bondarchuk for her. You caught on to her, chilled them both and buried the money in an offshore account."

"Works for me," Trombley said. "Needs some tailoring, but we can make it fit."

"I couldn't kill Larissa," I said.

"Because you loved her? Love's right up there with greed as a motive for murder." Witt made a wry face. "You're not going to tell us you didn't love her, are you?"

"Yeah. I loved her, but you wouldn't . . .I . . ."

"I know. We wouldn't understand." Witt leafed through the file and pulled out a sheet of paper. "Larissa Miusov, AKA Larissa Shivets. Suspicion of robbery, suspicion of fraud, suspicion of extortion. Here's a good one. Suspicion of murder. Lots of suspicion hanging around your girlfriend, but she always skated. Is that what you loved about her?"

They tag-teamed me for hours, trying to wear me down, to find cracks in my story, but I had no story to crack. Finally Witt said, "We like clearing cases around here and you're looking pretty good for this."

"A guy like Misha," I said. "There must be dozens of people who wanted him dead."

"More than that. But they've all got alibis and a ton of money. You don't."

That night I sat in the hotel bar and worried whether the police would charge me; I drank too much and thought about Larissa; then I repeated the cycle. She hadn't talked much about the years in Moscow after her father died. I assumed they had been a struggle and, having no means of support, that she had done things she wasn't proud of; but hearing the specifics eroded what I believed to be true and raised unanswerable questions about her crimes. Had she been coerced? If so, by who and by what means? And had she intended to frame me? I wanted to deny it, clinging to the notion that we had been friends. Yet it was as if each new thing I learned rendered her less visible, as if during the entire time I knew her, she had been gradually disappearing behind a smokescreen of facts.

After a month they let me back into the Topanga house to collect my possessions. I no longer feared that I would be charged with a double homicide. Though the case remained open, Larissa's death was on its way to becoming part of Hollywood lore and I was close to signing a deal that would guarantee production of the Donner Party script and allow me to direct a picture based on a script I would write about the murders. Very little excites America more than does the mysterious death of a beautiful woman, especially a woman who herself poses a mystery. Photographs of Larissa were splashed on tabloid covers and featured on TV. It was said she had done porn in Russia, that she had slept with Gorbachev, that she was a descendant of the Romanoffs. A 20/20 special was in the works. On the advice of counsel, I turned down requests for interviews.

"Save it for the script," my agent told me.

I packed quickly, oppressed by the house, but before leaving I asked the real estate agent to give me a minute to look around. I walked along the deck, then down to the hall to Larissa's bedroom. The bed had been stripped, but her clothes were still in the closet, her toiletries in the bathroom, and a trace of her perfume lingered on the air. I sat on the sofa, indulging in nostalgia, remembering moments, things spoken and unspoken. I glanced down at the coffee table.

Sunlight applied a glaze to the glass surface, making it difficult to see, but when I leaned close I realized she had left me a message. That's how I interpreted the markings on the glass, though I recognize now they may have been the work of idle hours and I understand they were in essence the ultimate mystification of her life, a magical pass made by her disembodied hand that, literally or figuratively, caused her to vanish utterly behind a curtain of rumors and fictions, the final flourish of her disappearing act. At the time, however, I chose to take the hopeful view. I recalled how she had giggled and remarked sarcastically on the act of giving blood, blood she might have used to cover up a murder, and I also recalled things said about Misha, about me, all supporting the thesis that she had escaped, leaving behind evidence to implicate me, to misdirect the police for a while, yet not enough to convict.

Four wheels resembling Mayan calendars, now defaced by random scratches, were etched into the four corners of the glass. The greater portion of the surface was occupied by marks that appeared to represent the surrounding hills, a crude map of our section of the canyon, and there was a patch of tropical vegetation where the house should have been. I identified palms and banana trees. Inside a circle, dead center of the patch, was the figure of a woman, so carefully incised that I made out breasts and a smiling face and a hand raised in a salute—she was half-turned away from whomever she was signaling, like a beloved and gifted actress waving farewell to her audience, preparing to step through the hole she had opened in the world.