City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, Jack has had people picking up after him for years. First me, now you. No doubt there were others. What is it this time?”

  On my way from the Nighttown set to Ringsend, I stopped at a stationer’s and made photocopies of the anonymous letters Jack claimed he had been sent. I show his sister the first three. She reads them silently, and then looks up at me.

  “What are these?”

  “Jack said someone sent them to him in the past few weeks, since he’s been back in Dublin.”

  “And he thinks it’s me?”

  “He wonders if it might be. He didn’t seem very sure.”

  Marie Donovan’s face lights up with a smile of genuine amusement. She reads the letters aloud then, her voice injecting them with melodrama, as if they are the most ridiculous things she has ever come across. As a result, that’s exactly how they sound.

  “‘All praise to God the Father, all praise to God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, eternal Three-in-One.’ That’s a hymn, do you know it? It goes on, ‘till all the ransomed number fall down before the throne, and honour, power and glory ascribe to God alone.’ ‘For All Your Saints in Glory,’ I think it’s called. ‘Flanked by thieves, Jesus remained Lord. But all three died the same death.’ The power of three, do you see? And then: ‘Once, twice, three times a dead man. He will know neither the day nor the hour.’ Is that supposed to be a death threat? It might be a bit scarier if it didn’t echo a Lionel Richie song.”

  “The Commodores, I think.”

  “Same difference. What? Am I to take this seriously? Are you fucking kidding me? How drunk was my brother? What crazy lady has her hooks in him this time? Who advised him he needed a private detective, his astrologer? This is a joke, right?”

  “He appears to be taking them seriously.”

  “No he doesn’t. Do you know why? Because he’s not an eleven-year-old schoolgirl or an old lady who lives alone with her fat dog. Come on. What does he want?”

  With some people, you could spend hours going around the houses so they might say something unguarded. I reckon Marie Donovan is one of the other kind of people, the kind who match truth with truth. Besides, I can’t think of anything else to say: she’s right, on the basis of those three letters alone, the whole thing is ludicrous.

  “He wants…this is basically what I used to do for Jack in L.A. I was starting out as a PI, and I didn’t get to choose my cases. Not a lot has changed there, but…anyway, Jack would break up with some woman, without telling the woman. And it fell to me to say good-bye on his behalf.”

  “Nice work if you can get it.”

  “I know. And you’re his sister, not his girlfriend. And…well, he told me some of the reasons you might have sent him these letters—”

  “Really. Tell me them. Tell me the reasons.”

  “He said you had become something of a religious fanatic. Or that you were involved with people who were pretty far out there in that department.”

  “That might account for the content. For the sake of argument. But why would I want to send them at all? Did he give you any clue as to that?”

  “He seems to think you’ve always resented him. That he has had the kind of career you wish you had, not literally, but in terms of scale, of success. That you feel somehow that he has stolen your luck.”

  “And in order to settle this karmic debt, all I’m prepared to do is send him a few not-very-sinister letters? That’s it?”

  “I think Jack feels there are certain not exactly veiled threats contained within the letters.”

  Marie Donovan sits bolt upright now, pale eyes glittering behind her spectacles, her voice taut and sharp as a whip. I can see why Jack didn’t want to say any of this to her in person. What I have yet to determine is why he wanted any of it to be said at all.

  “Is there more?”

  I nod and produce a copy of the fourth letter, with its bloodred daubs of fetus and crucifix, and push it across the table. She looks at it quickly and then averts her eyes, almost flinching, and then turns back and focuses on it at greater length.

  “And why did Jack think I might have sent him this?” she says, in a very careful, deliberate voice that makes me want to run straight out the door and give Jack Donovan his money back and wash my hands of him and all belonging to him. I don’t answer her. I don’t need to. She sits for a while, staring at the photocopy, nodding and shaking her head and pursing her lips and suppressing half smiles that aren’t really smiles at all. Occasionally she summons herself, as if about to speak, then subsides and resumes her brooding, her bitter meditation. I don’t know how long we spend in silence. For me, it telescopes back through many such silences, where I sit across a table from a woman to whom I have just confessed, knowingly or otherwise, something unforgivable, and I wait to be told just how I am not to be forgiven. And although it is Jack Donovan’s transgression, not mine, it doesn’t make me feel any less culpable.

  Marie Donovan stands up and goes to the fridge and finds a half-full bottle of Pinot Grigio with a vacuum stopper in the neck and two glasses and sits back down and pours a glass of wine and I put my hand over the second glass to indicate that I won’t have any. She drinks a little of hers, a sip, and rubs the edge of the paper with the fetus and the upside-down crucifix beneath her fingertip, making an insidious scraping sound.

  “Did Jack ever tell you about our parents?” she says.

  “Only that they died in a car crash when you were quite young. Fourteen?”

  “Jack was thirteen, I was sixteen. Yes. Coming back from the opera in town. La Traviata. Which didn’t inhibit Jack in any way when he came to shoot a film based on that particular opera; he just ignored the connection completely.”

  “Didn’t he dedicate it to them?” I say.

  “Very good of him,” Marie says, and drinks more than a sip of her wine. “I found La Traviata, all of Verdi in fact, pretty much impossible to listen to ever since. The fact that his parents had died on the way home from a performance of a Verdi opera seemed of no consequence to Jack. But that’s not relevant, of course, the pros and cons of Jack’s glittering career, not relevant in the slightest. What is relevant is that that’s when it all began. You know we lived on in the house together, Jack and I?”

  “Just the two of you?”

  “Just the two of us. I was sixteen, nearly seventeen, in fact, going on seventeen. I…and Jack was training, singing, his voice matured so early, and Mum and Dad had been so passionate about his blessed opera singing, and so that was, that became my, almost my obsession, in spite of the fact that every note he sang, or played, not alone of Verdi but opera in general, Puccini, Donizetti, whoever, all it did was preserve the grief, the loss of our parents. In my mind. Maybe it was some kind of…I was going to say, tribute in his. But I don’t think that’s true. Not in a bad way, just…the level of self-absorption involved, being so closed off to what anyone else might think or feel, Jack always had that to an extent that was enviable, almost frightening. His voice. That’s what they say about a writer, you know, a really great writer, they talk about his voice, how it’s utterly his own. I don’t know how you get that, but Jack always had it. Even when the movies don’t work, you always know they’re his. How did he get that?”

  She shakes her head. I have trouble telling if she despises or reveres him, hates him or loves him. It looks like she has the same trouble herself. She finishes her wine and pours herself a second glass and pushes the bottle in my direction in case I change my mind. I have changed my mind about her at least once, and I’m not done yet.

  “So I…stood guard for Jack, I suppose you’d say. I made sure he was protected, so that all he had to concentrate on was his…was his art. Mum and Dad had left some money but not enough. So I sold the house, in 1986, well before the property boom, which wasn’t very smart, but fuck it, Jack needed money for lessons. And I didn’t go to college, I got a job straight from school, in the bank, to pay rent on a flat and
keep us eating.”

  She looks at me then and sees my obvious surprise.

  “Let me guess, Jack told you he’d bought me this house for me, but he didn’t tell you why it was kind of right that he did?”

  I nod, unable to speak.

  “That’s the other thing about the…artist… he does it all himself. It’s all down to him. He kind of has to see it that way. I understand. Wishing you were one gives you great insight into what the real thing is like. I don’t mean it in any humble or modest way, but I just don’t hold myself in high enough regard. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe it’s that I don’t have any talent.”

  Marie laughs loudly, surprising herself, and blinks, and pushes her wineglass from her.

  “Stupid. Drinking at lunchtime. On an empty stomach. Would you like something to eat? Or are you afraid of what might be in my fridge?”

  “I’m all right, thanks. I can come back, if you’d like. Or not.”

  “Oh Jesus, what makes you think I’d want you to come back?” Marie Donovan says with such frank disdain that I start to laugh myself, and after attempting a few slurred apologies, so does she, laughs until she has tears in her eyes. I wait until she recovers herself, wait until she’s ready to say what she is burning to say. I don’t much want to hear it, am dreading what I might hear, but that’s what you have to put up with when you ask questions for a living. Marie reaches for her glass again. Maybe she has forgotten how fast the wine has gone to her head. Or maybe, with what she wants to say, she remembers all too well.

  “Have you ever noticed, in all of Jack’s films, no matter what the source, whether original or adapted, there’s always a brother and sister, a brother-and-sister thing going on? Have you ever noticed that?”

  I say that I have.

  “Yes. Because then there was the time Jack decided he was not going to be an opera singer after all, opera was over, it was history, he wanted to be a film director. This, after my having not gone to university, and his having very much gone there, as well as expensive classes with Ronnie Dunne at the Royal Irish Academy, after we sold the house for half a crown and I…I got a place in RADA, you know, actor training, I…and turned it down, and by the time I had the energy, the focus, the concentration to try again, it was too late. Not in age, in…what you need, Ed. In heart, in spirit, in guts. Was that Jack’s fault? No. I probably didn’t have what it takes. If I had, I wouldn’t have given it up for my little brother. But I did give something, a lot, up. I made…what used we say in the Olden Days? Sacrifices. And sometimes, that selfish big shite behaves like any trouble in his life is my fault, like all I’m there for is to take the blame.

  “So. That thing. The brother-and-sister thing. In the movies of Jack Donovan. Have you noticed it, Ed?”

  I say again that I have.

  “It’s quite strong, isn’t it? I mean, a strong relationship between a brother and sister. Quite strong. And quite…pointed, for it to be in every film.”

  Marie Donovan looks at me now. She removed her glasses when she was wiping away her tears, and hasn’t put them back on. Her eyes seem filmy and out of focus, and one has a squint of some kind, so that while she looks at me, she seems to be looking elsewhere also, to the door, to the window, for help, perhaps, or reinforcements. I wish they would come, too. I wish they would come soon.

  Marie holds up the page with the red-daubed fetus and upside-down crucifix and points at it.

  “Did Jack…I assume Jack told you why this might have some kind of significance for me?”

  My job is to elicit as much information as I possibly can from whoever I’m talking to and then to get out fast so I can figure out what to do with that information. I can only assume that some inner determination to delay hearing what Marie Donovan wants to tell me accounts for my reply.

  “I guess the crucifix has something to do with Catholicism—”

  “That’s very shrewd, Ed. Crucifix, Catholicism, well done. And what does that make the fetus, Baby Jesus?”

  “I don’t know. Jack did say you had got involved with some extreme Catholic group, the SSPX?”

  “The Society of Pius the Tenth? Where did he get that idea? They are extreme, they’re a bunch of fanatics. Why would Jack think I’d get involved with people who want to take the church back to the Pre–Vatican Two years?”

  “He said something about Latin masses—”

  “In the Procathedral. Every Sunday, there’s a sung Latin mass. But in every other respect it’s perfectly ordinary. I like the music. It’s a boys’ choir. I like the Latin, too.”

  “And another group called Communion and Liberation—”

  Marie nods wearily.

  “Yes. Yes, they’re…I don’t think there’s anything extreme about them. The last time I met Jack, I probably talked about them a lot. They’re good people, they’re not like Opus Dei or anything, they’re not only interested in rich people. But eventually…”

  Marie makes a gesture in the air with her hand to indicate futility and pointlessness, then brings her two hands alongside each other to help her make a point.

  “The problem with a lot of Irishwomen my age is, you know, that Chesterton quote, having given up on Catholicism—for obvious fucking reasons, all of which I share—it’s not that they believe in nothing, they believe in everything. So you know, a little Buddhism, a little Tao, a little Reiki, a little crystal healing, a little earth-goddess worship, a little Wicca…”

  Marie Donovan’s expression broadens into a grin as the list gets longer; now she picks up her glass of wine and giggles.

  “A little white wine, a little scented candle, a little Enya…it’s such bullshit, such a retreat into fantasy. I mean, men have their own fantasy world: it’s called sport. With a revolving pantheon of deities, more gods than Olympus. Whereas for women, it’s the exotic, it’s the glamour…you know, massage is spiritual, perfumes are spiritual…fashion is spiritual…it’s so narcissistic, it’s pathetic, it’s like a grown-up version of princesses and dressing up dollies. And not even that grown-up. And I…well, I believe in God, you know? The one I always did believe in, the one who is Jesus and the Holy Ghost and so on. Three in one, like whoever wrote your anonymous letters there. Not me, in case you’re interested. And I’d like to worship God in many of the ways I used to, you know, like the mass, which is the perfect ritual if you do it right. I just don’t believe God’s that bothered about all the things He was supposedly so uptight about, especially in this country. Like sex, mainly. Christ, the only people who are as obsessed with sex as the Irish Catholic Church are the people who do it for a living: whores, and porn stars, who are whores on camera. And at least whores know how overrated it all is.

  “And I thought I could just take what I wanted from the Church and leave the rest, do it à la carte, but it’s difficult, not just because of the never-ending flow of revelations about sexual abuse among priests and religious, but because I’m a woman in the twenty-first century. And the Catholic Church’s take on women…well, it’s still struggling to get out of the nineteenth. And not struggling terribly hard. And I’m struggling back. Is that a crime? Does that make me the kind of sad old church mouse who’d send her brother anonymous letters?”

  I shake my head.

  “Has it occurred to you that he wrote them himself? Because he has a guilty conscience, my brother. Not that he displays it, but he’s not an idiot, and he’s not a moral idiot. He knows the truth. He knows what I did for him. And he knows what we did together. And I think he wants to confess. It’s like with his movies, have you noticed, he’ll almost always follow a success with a disaster, like he doesn’t believe he deserves it, like he’s compelled to drag himself down. Who else are you going to see? It can’t be just me. I bet that little wife he had for half an hour is on the list. He treated her appallingly, too.”

  I have to stop myself reaching for the wine bottle. What Marie was saying has the ring of truth: you get close to Jack, and then too close, and then he would let you see s
omething you didn’t want to see and couldn’t forget. Maybe that’s what he wanted, to push anyone who cared about him away, to fall and keep falling, over and over, until the only one left at the scene of the accident was Jack.

  I was ready to hear the worst. I pick up the page with the blood daubs on it and point at the picture of the fetus.

  “Jack told me you were pregnant. He said the father wasn’t on the scene, that you wanted the child, that he encouraged you to have an abortion, or at least that that was how you interpreted it. And so you did. Is there anything you want to say?”

  Marie Donovan looks at me with no expression on her face.

  “The father had a choice. He chose not to be on the scene. That had a bearing on everything else that happened.”

  “Who was the father?”

  “Jack knows who the father was. I think you need to go back and ask him. I’ve told you all I want to tell you. He can help you with the rest. If he wants to.”

  I look at Marie Donovan for as long as I can, willing her simultaneously to tell me and to keep her counsel. She holds my gaze as steadily as her squinting eye will let her. She doesn’t move as I get up from the table. I let myself out, and walk past my car and cross the main road and stand on the dock, watching an improbably large red ship sail out into the bay and wishing everything I have in my head could be stowed aboard that ship and cast adrift on the open seas.

  CHAPTER 9

  Los Angeles, 1998

  Ed Loy hadn’t been in the Sidewalk Café on Venice Beach for years. Well, that wasn’t strictly true: he would occasionally find himself in the bar late at night, when the mist was in and the moon was down and holiday makers had been warned that the beach was liable to be used as the after-hours stage for the ongoing feud between the Latino Venice 13 and Culver City gangs and the African American Shoreline Crips, and LAPD surveillance choppers would keep a steady overhead presence just in case they forgot. In complete contrast to the tourist-trap boardwalk tables in full sight of the beach, the bar was a seedy dive joint frequented by bikers and dealers and lowlifes and drunks and the kind of women who found company like that congenial, and sometimes that was the kind of company Ed Loy sought out at the end of the day, not so much to take the edge off as to relocate it somewhere more exciting.