Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 02 - Alone

by Loren D. Estleman

  Desperate for distraction, Valentino took a remote control from a drawer—shoving aside the brochure for Midnite Magic Theater Systems’ new spy toy, the latest assault on personal privacy—and switched on the thirteen-inch TV/VCR combo he now used almost exclusively to see what was on the air.

  It was a mistake. He caught Entertainment Tonight in the middle of its opening fanfare, with its collage of overexposed faces, breathless hyperbole, and Not Ready for Family Hour subject matter, followed by Mary Hart’s red-carpet headline splash:

  “ET exposes the GARBO HOAX!” (Cue graphics.) “We bring you the exclusive details behind the STUNNING police announcement that the infamous GARBO LETTER is a FAKE!”

  At last, Valentino thought; but too late. Just late enough to inject insulin into a story that should never have been told to begin with.

  16

  LOCKING UP, HE remembered the budget meeting he had to bug out on in order to link up with Spink. Ruth was shutting down her computer, preparatory to going home or fluttering up to her belfry or wherever she went when she wasn’t drawing her salary. “Ruth, when Professor Broadhead comes in tomorrow, please tell him I’d like to talk to him.”

  “What’s wrong with right now? He’s in his office.”

  He glanced at the old-fashioned electric clock high on the wall behind her desk, thinking his watch was wrong. “He never stays this late.”

  “If you say so, but there’s a pretty good holographic image of him sitting at his desk.”

  “Go away.”

  Valentino knocked again. “Kyle, it’s Val.”

  “Go away, Val.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Do you smell gas or see smoke?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s not important. Go away.”

  He knocked a third time. “Open up, Kyle. I don’t have time to start a fire.”

  Broadhead said something he must have picked up in prison in Yugoslavia. “Open it yourself. I misplaced the key ten years ago.”

  He found his friend glaring at the monitor of his venerable Wang computer. The only light in the room came from the screen, illuminating his face in acid green with Bride of Frankenstein shadows in the hollows. His desk, normally as bare as an airport runway, was stacked with volumes bound in cloth and paper and fusty numbers of cinema journals stitched, stapled, and held together with brads. “Did you know Leonardo DaVinci conducted early experiments in photographic reproduction?”

  “Was that before or after he covered up for Jesus?”

  Broadhead popped his lips in disgust and cut the power. The ventilating fan inside the computer whirred to a stop. He sat back, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “For a little while there I entertained the conceit I could produce the closest thing to a complete history of cinema that’s ever been written, but the backer I go the backer it goes. I’m beginning to suspect Aristotle beat Griffith to the invention of the close-up by twelve hundred years. If this keeps up the project will run ten volumes before I get to The Great Train Robbery. Gibbon took only six to polish off Rome, and he was thirty-five when he started. They’ll have to trace my lifeless carcass through the piles of notes by the stink of putrefaction.”

  “Maybe you should narrow your focus.”

  “You think? I’ve a hunch somebody already wrote The Idiot’s Guide to World Cinema.”

  “You’ll come up with something. I need to ask you a favor.”

  “The key’s in the planter by the front door. There’s a dead plant in it. I’ll be here a while longer, committing suicide by the death of a thousand paper cuts.”

  “I’m not asking to move back in with you. I need you to sit in for me at the department budget meeting Monday morning. I’ve got a conflict.”

  “You do for a fact. I haven’t attended a meeting at this institution since the three-cent stamp. The complaint was we weren’t getting enough money from Washington. Is the program different now?”

  “Sometimes there are cookies. Look, I wouldn’t be asking you if it weren’t important. The jocks in the sports department swing a big bat with the fiduciary committee, and we’re pared to the bone as it is. Someone has to defend us from any more cuts. I’ll give you all the facts and figures you need.”

  “Get somebody else. That little creep Anklemire likes you, and he can con the tattoos off a carny.”

  “The problem is no one likes Anklemire. You’ve got cachet. You’re an ornament of this university.”

  “You know where ornaments go the day after Christmas.”

  Valentino said nothing. Broadhead looked around, lifted books off the stack and replaced them, found the stem of his pipe stuck between leaves as a bookmark, pulled it out without bothering to keep his place, and bit down on the end. “What’s so important you can’t sit in for yourself?”

  “While you’re listening to complaints about Washington, I’ll be bribing a public official of the County of Los Angeles.”

  “Spink showed you his belly? How much?”

  Valentino told him.

  “Can you swing it?”

  “I don’t have any choice. It’s the American Dream to fall into debt for life, but going broke is a nightmare. I can’t afford to have him go on nickel-and-diming me into bankruptcy after I’ve invested so much.”

  “I seem to recall warning you of this eventuality when you took the plunge.”

  “I was pretty sure you were the type not to say I told you so.”

  “That privilege is one of the joys of breathing. You made the right decision. Most disastrous failures take place in the name of principle.”

  “Harriet thinks I should nail the little pisher.”

  “Women will sometimes surprise you with an understanding of the concept of honor. You know where I stand on straying outside one’s specialty. The last time you set out to bring a felon to justice you almost wound up being arrested for committing felony.”

  “You were an accomplice, as I recall.”

  “I blame Fanta. Youthful enthusiasm is contagious. Fortunately, the experience innoculated me against a relapse in the future.” Broadhead removed the pipe and made a face at it. “Misdemeanors, however, are as hard to resist as the common cold. Right now I’m considering violating state law and university regulations and putting this instrument to use as it was intended.”

  “I really need your help, Kyle. Will you sit in for me?”

  “I suppose I will. I may even call in some markers from our illustrious administration and shake down a couple of plums from the money tree. My connections with the motion-picture industry are nearly as vast as the inestimable Ruth’s, and there are still a few venerated academics I haven’t managed to alienate entirely. Our president is starstruck when it comes to commencement speakers. What would you say to a jazzy new digital projector for the screening room?”

  “A bauble,” Valentino said. “It’d be obsolete before you got it out of the packing material. Meanwhile something timeless is lost to ignorance and the ravages of weather and pollution. I was thinking more along the lines of wiggle room in the travel budget, and broader discretion in the area of acquisitions.”

  Broadhead shook his rumpled head. “The treasury is a Chinese box. The bean counters think they’ll be struck by lightning if they take money from one account to invest in something that the money in another account is designated for, as if it didn’t all come from the same source. They understand tangible things: supplies and equipment. Pencils, yes; rescuing the lost Metropolis footage from the subbasement of the Polytechnic Institute in Berlin, no.”

  “Metropolis is in the subbasement of the Polytechnic Institute in Berlin?”

  “Lay off geekhood for one minute. I’m being hypothetical. Metropolis is fine as is, and Loch Ness is pretty enough without a monster to mess up the surface. You must resign yourself to the plum lying on the ground as opposed to the riper specimen that may or may not reside on a branch near the top of the tree. Chances are it’ll taste like my Aunt Ernestine
’s pudding, which sent half my family to the emergency room on Christmas Eve nineteen-forty-nine.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Old enough for Social Security, but too young to ask my pharmacist for Viagra without blushing. And how is your prostate?”

  Valentino ignored it as a rhetorical question. “The fruit analogy confuses me. If what you’re saying is a new digital projector is the best we can hope for, that’s light-years better than a reduction. I can put you on to the most persistent salesman I’ve ever met, by the name of Red Ollinger.”

  “Sounds like the name of a pirate.”

  “Oh, he’s on record as opposed to piracy.” Valentino gave him a brief summary of his two encounters with the representative of Midnite Magic Theater Systems.

  Broadhead’s pipe had proven too bitter even for him. He laid it in an ashtray fashioned from a lower human jaw he’d smuggled from the Roman catacombs. “I’ve been reading too much ancient history. Society has always celebrated the Henry Anklemires of the world while submitting the Galileos to censure. But at his most brilliant, the sage of the Renaissance never managed to get the goods on Shylock. Have you considered the awesome power of the weapon this cretin Ollinger has offered to place at your disposal?”

  Valentino, who was by no means the scholar his friend pretended to consider him, took several moments translating his language into practical terms.

  “That’s diabolical,” he said at last.

  “You’re at a serious cultural disadvantage,” Broadhead said. “You lack the benefit of a lifetime in the City of Angels.”

  17

  THE ATMOSPHERE IS one of forced gaiety, enshrouded in a time of global bereavement. Rudolph Valentino, the Italian meteor, has finished his supernal ascent in death at age thirty-one; the phosphorescent glow was still visible above the train bearing his body from the pandemonium of its lying-in-state in New York City to its final resting place in Hollywood, with grief-stricken women all along the route threatening to throw themselves beneath the wheels. On this day after the national event of the funeral, John Gilbert and Greta Garbo are to wed.

  The affair has been planned along the lines of a sneak preview, with few aware that the ceremony uniting director King Vidor and actress Eleanor Boardman will be a double event; Garbo’s relentless pursuit of privacy has drawn Gilbert into a conspiracy of silence.

  Gilbert, excitable by nature, is strung tighter than usual. He arrives at Marion Davies’ lavish Beverly Hills mansion just before 6:30 P.M., still in Bohemian costume from the set of La Boheme and Lillian Gish’s arms, and borrows one of Miss Davies’ ninety rooms to change into evening dress. When he emerges, Garbo has not yet arrived. She is, as usual, tardy.

  The stars of the advertised attraction are gracious. Vidor and Miss Boardman stall for time by calling for another session of photographs and another round of champagne for the quests. The Great Lover’s classic features display little of the spirit of the occasion in the pictures in which he appears. The guests grow restless. Some are inebriated, Gilbert included. He snatches stemware off passing trays and deposits the empties on the next.

  The minister clears his throat and whispers to Vidor; he has another appointment. A glance passes between the two prospective bridegrooms. Gilbert jerks a nod.

  Immediately after the ceremony, Gilbert withdraws to a guest bathroom, where Louis B. Mayer, the mercurial chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, is drying his hands on a monogrammed towel. Mayer smiles and claps a hand on the actor’s shoulder. “Cheer up, Jack. Why marry her at all? Sleep with her and forget it.”

  Gilbert snatches Mayer by the lapels and shoves. Mayer falls backward, striking his head on the tiles, his wire-rimmed spectacles flying.

  Drawn by the noise, guests help the studio chief to his feet. They restrain him from charging the actor, and the actor from finishing the job on Mayer.

  “You’re finished, Gilbert!” Mayer’s voice is shrill.

  Eddie Mannix, manager of MGM, turns Gilbert aside as Mayer storms out, a sycophant hurrying after him with his spectacles. “Go home, Jack,” Mannix says. “I’ll smooth things over with L.B.”

  Gilbert, calming, flashes his famous grin. “Don’t grovel on my behalf. I just signed a contract for a million dollars. What can he do to me?”

  ______

  “You’ve gone beyond obsession into psychosis,” Harriet said. “You aren’t even the star of your own dreams anymore.”

  Valentino said, “It isn’t even history, it’s Hollywood hokum. We only have Eleanor Boardman’s word the scuffle even took place, or that Garbo and Gilbert were to be married that day. There’s no wedding license on file.”

  They were in line at Starbucks, a drive-by date arranged in deference to their crowded schedules; he had a pile of facts and figures to prepare for Broadhead’s appearance at the budget meeting, and crime in Los Angeles wasn’t taking any holidays while she caught up with her caseload.

  She said, “I always heard Mayer doctored Gilbert’s voice on his first talkie to make him sound ridiculous, and that’s what ended his career.”

  “They disliked each other from the start, but Mayer was too frugal to throw away a million bucks for spite. There was nothing wrong with Gilbert’s voice, in person or otherwise. The problem was he was still acting for the silent camera. He came off like a ham. He was fine opposite Garbo in Queen Christina three years later, and he should’ve won on Oscar for The Captain Hates the Sea. He drank himself to death at thirty-six.”

  “So why dream about him now?”

  “Search me.” He was sorry he’d told her. He’d awakened in the middle of the night, the images still so vivid it had taken a minute to convince himself he hadn’t been one of the wedding guests. He’d thought the dream amusing enough to share, but he’d forgotten that Harriet analyzed things for a living. “There’s no work at the office and I’m useless at the theater. Maybe I’m fixated on failure.”

  “I’m glad you admit it. I think you should stay away from the Oracle for a few weeks and let Kalishnikov look after the details.”

  “I’ll consider the advice.” He hadn’t told her about his assignation with Dwight Spink; her opinion of submitting to extortion was on record. “How come it took so long to release the truth about the fake Garbo letter to the press?”

  “Why are you changing the subject?”

  “You were right. I need to stop thinking about the Oracle.”

  “I don’t believe you, but I’m tired of hearing about it. We wanted to be sure the letter was fake before we gave Beverly Hills the green light. After we established the similarity in penmanship, we borrowed a consultant from the USC English Department to do a computer analysis of the writing style. Everyone has his own, whether he’s conscious of it or not: habitual turns of phrase, idiosyncratic punctuation, vocabulary. By programming in a broad sampling of the author’s correspondence, an expert can match points of individuality the same way we match fingerprints. That’s how they exposed the hack journalist who wrote that dumb political novel several years ago.”

  “I remember. It’s also how Elizabethan scholars hope to prove who wrote Shakespeare. Why Southern Cal? UCLA has an English Department.”

  “My suggestion.” She asked the barista for a jumbo latte. “My team captain thinks we’ve got one too many connections to UCLA as it is, and I like this job.”

  “Oh.”

  She paid for her order. “Anyway, after comparing it to the samples from Stockholm, the consultant’s one hundred percent sure Garbo didn’t write the letter. There were language mistakes no Swede would make, and as to the rest there was too little Garbo and too much of someone who was trying too hard to sound like Garbo. Case closed.”

  “But if—oh, sorry.” He realized the young man behind the counter was waiting and asked for the special. “If Akers’ Swedish was so bad, I’m surprised Rankin didn’t suspect the letter. He said he’d picked up quite a bit from listening to his wife and her mother.”

  “I didn’t sp
ot it myself, but I’m second-generation American. My father would have. The mistakes were only obvious to someone who was fluent; the consultant confirmed them with a colleague from the Foreign Languages Department. Whoever wrote the letter knew enough to get by, although it might have sounded pidgin to a Swede. It was as good as it needed to be for its intended target.”

  “As long as that target wasn’t the LAPD.”

  On the sidewalk, Harriet tore a notch out of her lid and drank. “I’m working this weekend, but I’ve got Monday off. Why don’t you play hooky and we’ll spend the day together, not talking about Greta Garbo and Matthew Rankin and the theater that ate Valentino?”

  He hesitated. “I can’t.”

  “Why not? You said things are slow at the office.”

  “I’ve got a budget meeting Monday.”

  “Damn. Between the rising crime rate and your gypsy life, we never see each other.”

  She pecked him on the lips and took off through the crowd, in the opposite direction of where he was going. Watching her, he took too big a sip of coffee and burned his tongue. Serves me right, he thought, brushing at the stain on his shirt.

  He spent the morning gathering papers and nursing the blister on his tongue. His filing system was similar to his eye for decor, and he found billing statements, ticket stubs, and other evidence that his department needed cash jammed into the backs of drawers, stuffed under the telephone standard, and anchoring cobwebs woven behind the credenza. When he was reasonably assured he’d assembled everything in intelligible order, he slid it into a ten-by-thirteen manila envelope, wrote Kyle Broadhead on the outside, shoveled the paper fallout into his wastebasket, and went out to give the material to Broadhead. Passing Ruth’s desk he remembered to stop and ask if he was in his office.