The Sixteen Burdens Read online

  The

  Sixteen

  Burdens

  D A V I D K H A L A F

  The Sixteen Burdens

  Book 1, The Burdens Trilogy

  Available soon on Amazon:

  Houdini's Last Trick

  Prequel, The Burdens Trilogy (December 2015)

  The Seventeenth Burden

  Book 2, The Burdens Trilogy (Fall 2016)

  Copyright © 2015 by David Khalaf. All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Tamara Khalaf

  Book illustrations by Francesca Baerald

  Proofreading by Constantino Duran and Dyanne Khalaf

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Connect with the author: www.facebook.com/davidkhalafwriting

  “Everybody is talented because everybody

  who is human has something to express.”

  — Brenda Ueland, journalist, 1938

  • • • • • • • •

  Dedicated to

  the Source of all true talent

  • • • • • • • •

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Mary Pickford

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Charlie Chaplin

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Douglas Fairbanks

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Howard Hughes

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Houdini's Last Trick

  PROLOGUE

  EVEN

  THE SUN was conspiring against Nina Beauregard, she was sure of it. It bore down upon her face like a celestial spotlight, revealing every laugh line, every forehead crease, every sunspot that her Yardley’s English face cream had promised to remove.

  What do the British know about sun?

  She stepped out of the car and pulled on a hat with a brim so wide it could have been a flying saucer. It hid her from the daylight and, she liked to tell herself, the jealous eyes of pedestrians on Hollywood Boulevard.

  The harsh sunlight reminded her of that fateful screen test she had done for Mr. Selznick—the one where the gaffer had neglected to use a light filter to smooth out her face. He had done it on purpose, she was convinced, because he favored Vivien Leigh for the role. That was why Beauregard had lost what was bound to become the greatest role in 1930s cinema—that of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind.

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  The man who had driven her handed her a pair of shaded glasses. They looked like the typical sunglasses that were becoming the fashion, but when she put them on they completely blocked her vision. There were even small flaps on the sides that prevented a peripheral view.

  The driver took her arm in his to guide her down the sidewalk.

  “If I may.”

  You certainly may.

  Although he was older, he was one of the most attractive men Beauregard had ever met. His strong jawline, his salt-and-pepper hair, his piercing blue eyes—she couldn’t believe he was merely someone’s help. He should have been a star, like her.

  They walked two or three blocks, though in which direction Beauregard couldn’t tell; the man took a number of sudden turns that must have been intended to confuse her. After walking across some uneven pavement, he placed Beauregard with her back against a concrete wall and told her to wait. The wall was hot against her back.

  She was sweating heavily underneath the green, long-sleeve crepe gown, but she didn’t show her arms in public anymore. It was all because of that wretched screen test with Mr. Selznick, when she had taken off her caped coat underneath the hot studio lights, and they had stared at the skin hanging from her arms, jiggling like twin turkey necks. True, Beauregard was more than a decade older than Scarlett O’Hara was described in the book, but she had better experience and better credentials than the rest of the actresses combined. She was from Georgia by way of Louisiana. She had grown up on a plantation. Her grandfather had been a Southern general in the war, for heaven’s sake. If anyone deserved to be Scarlett O’Hara, it was Nina Beauregard.

  And instead they give it to an Englishwoman.

  She heard the man’s footsteps; it sounded as if he were pacing back and forth. After a few moments there was a sound of scraping stone and the man took her arm again. They walked down a steep flight of stairs, descending into air that was cold and stale. They reached the bottom of what must have been a small room, because Beauregard could hear the sound of her heels echo off nearby walls.

  “Please sit,” he said. She obeyed.

  Beauregard became aware of someone else in the room, someone standing just inches from her.

  “If you do this, there is no going back.”

  The voice was a whisper, so soft and neutral that Beauregard couldn’t pick out any defining characteristic. It could have come from a man, a woman, even a child. It might have come from the wind itself.

  “There are dangers,” the voice said. “Not in the procedure. In the outcome.”

  “Yes, yes,” Beauregard said. “I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t already decided. Continue on.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Are you simpleminded? I said continue on!”

  “Very well.”

  The driver removed Beauregard’s glasses, but it did her little good. The room was dim, lit by only a single line of tiny glowing lights in the ceiling. The figure in front of her was wearing a baggy white doctor’s coat and white pants. Covered with a surgical mask and hygienic head covering, the person revealed no more information than when Beauregard couldn’t see. Even the doctor’s eyes were covered in strange medical goggles.

  “Will it hurt?” Beauregard asked.

  “Yes,” the doctor said.

  “Good.”

  Anything worth doing has a cost.

  Beauregard didn’t mind pain for a purpose. She was already suffering from a face that, year after year, looked less like her July 1926 cover in Photoplay. Wasn’t that pain enough? If the results were even half of what the driver promised, she’d gladly swallow a burning coal and wash it down with metal tacks.

  The doctor removed a small object from a box. It was polished wood, conical in shape with one end larger than the other. Both ends were flat and had circular pieces of glass set into them, secured by brass bands around the edges. It looked less like a
medical device and more like a trinket from an antique store.

  “Look into it,” the doctor said, holding up the larger end to Beauregard’s eye. She leaned in and looked into it. There was nothing to see. It was dark, with only a hint of light coming in through the other side.

  Beauregard saw the doctor crouching down to be at eye level with her. She heard the doctor remove one side of the goggles.

  Then Beauregard saw a blurry eye looking through the other end of the device. When it came into focus she saw that it was big, hazel, and quite attractive. But before she had the chance to consider it, the eye seemed to fracture into a thousand little eyes in a kind of honeycomb pattern. One of those tiny eyes began to glow. It became bright very quickly, and Beauregard had a sense of staring directly into the sun. She was about to pull away when there was a sudden jolt, as if she had been shocked by electricity. Then she did pull away, but apparently that was the end of the procedure because the doctor took away the device and quickly pulled the goggles back on.

  “Go,” the doctor said.

  Beauregard stood, but she felt disoriented. She had a fading blind spot over one eye and she had the sense of tingling all over, the way a limb falling asleep feels when it starts to wake.

  “That’s all?”

  The doctor turned away and said nothing more.

  “How do I know it worked?”

  The driver, who had waited in the corner, grabbed Beauregard’s elbow and turned her to a wall. He reached for something and flicked on a switch. Lights flooded Beauregard’s face, so bright that she had to close her eyes. She was standing in front of a dressing room mirror lined with bulbs.

  She slowly opened her eyes and looked at herself. She saw nothing especially different. Not at first. But after a moment, she saw a quivering near her eye, as if she had developed a small twitch. The crow’s feet around her eyes rippled like a current in the ocean, and then disappeared altogether, smooth as a glassy sea. The same happened to her laugh lines and the creases on her brow.

  At first she thought it must be her eyes adjusting to the light, but she next noticed her lips swelling to a fullness she’d never had, not even when she was eighteen and full of curves. Although she had lipstick on, she could see the natural color of her lips deepening. Her eyelids pulled upward like someone retracting a curtain, leaving her fresh-faced and youthful looking. Beauregard’s brittle hair was dyed black, but she could see it becoming full, glossy, and shiny before her eyes, with a fullness even the best stylist in Hollywood had never been able to give her.

  She smiled, and saw that even her teeth were whiter and seemed stronger. The front right tooth, which had always been slightly crooked, had straightened itself out.

  “It’s a miracle!”

  “Is it?” the doctor said, placing the device back in the small box on the table.

  Beauregard felt her arms becoming firm and lean in her sleeves. She looked down at her hands. Her brittle nails, which were always breaking these days, were now growing out before her eyes. The skin around her knuckles pulled taut and became smooth. The liver spots on her hand, which she always covered with foundation, appeared to be gone. It wasn’t just her face; it was everywhere.

  She needed to get out of that room. She needed to go home, to inspect every inch of her new body in front of a full-length mirror.

  If only this had happened before my screen test with Mr. Selznick.

  “How much do I pay you?” Beauregard asked. She was prepared for anything, and she would offer anything. Her car. Her home. Her soul.

  The doctor turned back to her.

  “You fail to understand. You’ve just paid in full.”

  CHAPTER

  O NE

  THE FIFTH WOMAN was abducted late on a Thursday night. Police had discovered no evidence at the scene other than her gold lipstick cap, which officers found gleaming in a dirty gutter like a used bullet casing.

  Aside from that, she had vanished like the others. Like magic.

  A headline in the Los Angeles Examiner stretched across all six columns: “STAR STALKER STRIKES AGAIN!” The only thing larger than the headline was the photo, a recent headshot of the victim, so sultry and seductive that men had picked clean the newsstands by mid-morning.

  The rest of the day’s news—the boring stuff—was squashed together at the bottom: Winston Churchill pushing for pre-emptive action against the German Reich; Mahatma Gandhi enacting a hunger strike against the British; Adolf Hitler narrowly escaping an assassination attempt in a Munich beer hall. Europe was slipping into another great war, but that was half a world away and not nearly as interesting as kidnapped movie stars.

  Gray Studebaker chewed on the tip of a bent cigarette as he read the story. He had filched the paper from the newsboy on the corner, the one his age whose face was always filthy with newsprint. He scratched at his peach fuzz and read on.

  The story itself was brief; the actress had been plucked from the sidewalk late last night as she waited for her driver outside the Cocoanut Grove. There was a scream, and the witnesses who had seen her only moments before saw thin air in her stead.

  Her name was Nina Beauregard.

  Gray knew all about her, of course: She was one of the stars featured on the celebrity maps he sold—or, rather, the maps he should have been selling. Business had been slow since Thanksgiving.

  Beauregard had starred in dozens of silent films in the 1920s, but had dropped out of the spotlight for nearly a decade. In the past year, the dame had experienced something of a comeback, having re-emerged with a refreshed beauty that some called “surgically induced.” Behind her back, of course.

  The news story seemed to be short on fact and long on speculation. Some said the abductions were a Communist conspiracy to destroy the burgeoning film industry. Others blamed the Nazis. The more cynical newspaper columnists wondered whether they were a publicity stunt by the movie studio executives themselves.

  So far the police only had questions: Who was kidnapping these women? Were they still alive? Was there a reason they were all seasoned film actresses?

  “Seasoned” was a reporter’s way of saying old.

  Gray read all the way through to the jump, which was sandwiched between ads for a traveling circus and Bergman’s Hat and Glove Store For Women. It got him thinking.

  There must be some clue the police overlooked—a pattern among the abductions, or some oddity that would reveal the perpetrator. If the detective stories in Black Mask magazine had taught him one thing, it was that sloppy coppers were always overlooking important details.

  Gray lit his cigarette and took a long drag, the way he had seen private eyes do in movies. He erupted into a coughing fit and tossed the ciggie back on the sidewalk where he had found it.

  It’s like sucking on an exhaust pipe.

  He leaned against the wall of the famous Brown Derby, where movie stars went to feed on overpriced steaks and adoration. It had just opened its double doors for lunch, like a lounge singer stretching her arms after a long nap. The dress code was affluent casual, whereas Gray, in his threadbare jacket and dirty tweed cap, was sporting something closer to secondhand pauper.

  A young couple turned from the boulevard and walked toward the restaurant. The woman looked about with the slack-jawed wonder of a tourist. As if Bette Davis herself was going to walk right up and ask her out for gin gimlets at the Trocadero. Gray kicked the cigarette into the gutter and made a futile attempt to smooth the wavy tangle of hair under his flat cap. It was dirty blond, made darker by the actual dirt in it.

  He wiped the jaded juvenile off his face and slipped into forlorn orphan: big eyes, arched brows, a smile as wholesome as Buddy Rogers.

  “Starland maps!” Gray sang out, holding up a stack of cream-colored packets. “Get the famous hand-drawn moviegraphs! Renowned residences! Famous flats! Magnificent mansions! See where all your favorite celebrities live and play!”

  The man glanced away purposefully and kept walking, but the woman yanked hi
m to a halt. Gray gave her a smile so sweet it would melt the heart of J. Edgar Hoover.

  “Just fifty cents.”

  She tilted her head and made a pouting smile, the way someone does to a puppy that has accidentally wet the floor.

  “Oh, Terrance, let’s get one! I want to see where Clark Gable lives.”

  “Proceeds go to my home,” Gray said, “the Emory Partridge Home for Boys.”

  “Home for boys?” the man said. “Look at him, Dolores; the kid’s sprouting whiskers. This is probably one of those scams the guide books warned us about.”

  “Stop being such a cynic, Terrance. We’re on vacation!”

  The man snorted, but fished around in his pocket and threw two quarters at Gray, who caught them with one hand. With the other he handed a map to the woman, careful not to touch her.

  “Thank you, young man,” she said, “and bless your boys home.”

  Gray nodded appreciatively.

  I’d burn it down first.

  She removed an extra nickel from her own purse and dropped it in Gray’s hand, beaming at her own generosity. Everybody wanted to be a hero. He stared at the five cents with mock joy, as if she had just given him the Hope Diamond.

  “Golly!”

  The woman patted him on the head like a dog, and the couple trotted off down the boulevard. The smile evaporated from Gray’s face.

  The best acting in Hollywood ain’t in theaters.

  Gray rubbed at the few slender whiskers that were beginning to pop out along his jawline. Although he was fifteen, he had never shaved. He’d have to start asking for razors if Farrell expected him to keep up the cute-kid act.

  He had thirty-seven maps left to sell by five o’clock, which was unlikely since he had only averaged five or six per day the entire month. If he missed quota again, Farrell was bound to throw a tantrum.

  With the three cents he made from each map, he wouldn’t be able to afford the suit he wanted from Babbit & Dobbs until sometime next year. It was dark gray, stripe worsted, with a white and grey striped shirt and an orange silk tie—exactly the kind of outfit a professional private detective would wear. He had already bought the matching fedora, but that alone had taken him four months.