Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 02 - Alone

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You’re looking well,” Valentino said, understating it.

  “You’re kind, but if I’m not exactly falling apart I have Andrea to thank. She had a Swede’s own idea of the price of health and put me on a regimen that has repaid the investment many times over. If you look as if you have the time to eat right and exercise and spend an hour or two on the beach, your shareholders tend to think their stock is in capable hands. You, on the other hand, look like a young man whose life has been leading him.”

  Valentino was touched by what appeared to be sincere concern. “It’s been a rough patch, but not as rough as yours. It seems to be turning around. I want to thank you again for lending me Phil’s services as a projectionist. They had an indirect influence on the result.”

  Over drinks in the study, he provided a brief summary of recent events. He left out his romantic troubles as too personal, and the scheme that had rid him of Spink; he’d asked Phil for his discretion, and had compensated him, but he didn’t know how much Rankin might guess.

  “I wish you’d confided in me earlier,” his host said. “I have some contacts in government.”

  “Earlier you had problems of your own.”

  They were sitting in a leather-upholstered conversation area away from the desk. The bust of Garbo and its pedestal were not present. Their removal had lifted much of the oppression from a room where a man had died violently.

  To Valentino’s relief, Rankin didn’t pursue the point. Perhaps he felt, as did his guest, that it was too early in the evening, and too close to home, to bring up the subject of extortion, no matter how well motivated it might have been in Valentino’s case.

  “So you’re back home. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a movie house. If I’d set up domestic arrangements in one of my department stores, I’d have been accused of marrying my work.”

  “I have been, but it’s work I love. I’m sure you can identify with that.”

  “Not really. My father-in-law was fanatically devoted to the business, but I’m still a chemist at heart. If I’d never met Andrea, I’d have been contented with a job in the research lab of some low-profile pharmaceutical company, developing serums that would save millions of lives in the Third World.”

  “I doubt that would give you much opportunity for innovation.”

  “You’re probably right. In those days, a man who spent all his time bent over a Bunsen burner wouldn’t have been caught dead socializing with a computer programmer or vice versa. Now, of course, the two professions are inseparable. Fortune put me in a position to apply my interest in the developing technology to save a dying business. I succeeded, but a healthy bottom line isn’t a cure for the plague.”

  “You don’t seem bitter.”

  “The young chemist would have been. But I have to say wealth and personal credit have their compensations. Given the value I place on privacy, had I remained where I was I’d be some penniless old hermit by now. Recluse is so much more genteel a term, but it requires a substantial income to support it.” He smiled. “But you didn’t ask to see me just to discuss the paths our lives might have taken.”

  Valentino set his drink on a marble coaster. “I’m sure you’ve heard by now about the arrest in Stockholm.”

  “All the monitors in the airport were tuned to CNN. I suppose I should feel sorry for the fellow, succumbing to temptation to escape a life of manual labor, and temporary employment at that; even in so progressive a country as Sweden, the next step from scrubbing toilets seldom leads upward. I hope they throw the book at him. G.G. didn’t write those letters to entertain any troglodyte with an HP, or for any wretch to turn a buck putting them there.”

  “Whether or not the janitor intended to sell them, he never got around to it. He was found in possession of all the evidence. Every scrap was accounted for.”

  He frowned. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “The authorities haven’t released all the details publicly yet. The police here have them.”

  “Ah. The hauntingly lovely and disconcertingly intelligent Ms. Johansen. How is she?”

  “Busy. Even in so progressive a country as the U.S., the crime rate keeps going up. The police theory was that because Roger Akers was in Stockholm between the time the letters were last seen and when they were discovered missing, he had the opportunity to steal them and use them as models for the counterfeit he used to blackmail you. Without that connection, they’re back to square one on their investigation.”

  “They have the photocopy.”

  “That’s the problem. Your entire defense is based on your statement that Akers attacked you when you refused to go on paying him to keep the letter secret. I’ve told you about Ray Padilla, a lieutenant with the Beverly Hills Police. He has an unreasoning hatred for the rich, especially you, and it’s about to cost him his job. There’s no telling what he’ll do to get himself reinstated, or bring you down with him if he fails. He’s been badgering me for any morsel of evidence he can use against you. He thinks you forged the letter to put Akers in a bad light and make you look like a victim by comparison.”

  “That’s ludicrous! How could I forge the letter without material to base it on? Andrea burned all of Greta’s.”

  “He says we’ve only got your word on that.”

  “Did it occur to him Roger might have found some letters she’d overlooked and used them?”

  “You had better access, he says. He’s a rogue cop, the department has no control over him. It may even reopen the investigation just to put out any fires he might start. Being innocent, you’ve got nothing to worry about from them, but once the media get wind of it, they’ll come swarming around all over again.”

  The ice jingled in Rankin’s glass when he picked it up. He drank half its contents in a gulp; something the health-conscious Andrea would not have approved of. “The vultures. The bloodsuckers. They’d hound me into jail before they took their claws out.”

  “Akers liked money too much to have destroyed the legitimate letters after they’d served their purpose,” Valentino said. “He could have sold them for plenty to collectors who wouldn’t ask embarrassing questions. If they only turned up, the police could plug that hole, and they and the press would be off your back. But they made a complete search of Akers’ apartment and came up empty.”

  “Complete, my foot. Who was in charge of the search?”

  Valentino hesitated. “Ray Padilla.”

  “Once a rogue, always a rogue. If he found them, he kept it to himself. Destroying them wouldn’t be above a creature like that.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. His job wasn’t in trouble then.”

  “Over here, a policeman doesn’t rate much higher than a janitor in Sweden.” Rankin finished his drink. “Thank you, Val. You had nothing to gain by coming here, and that makes you the only person who’s stood by me from the start without looking after Number One. By the time I’m finished contributing, the Film Preservation will have a new wing named after you.” He stood, holding out his hand. “I hate to run you out, but I’m going to get Clifford Adams out of his La-Z-Boy and put him and his briefcase to work.”

  Coasting down the long sloping drive from the Rankin mansion, Valentino felt lower than he had so far in this, the lowest period in his life; and utterly alone.

  IV

  THE BRIDE OF

  RANKIN’S TIME

  22

  “ ‘NATURE IS FINE in luff—’ ”

  “Love.”

  “Love. I said this.”

  “You said luff. Pay attention to your labials.”

  Deep breath. “ ‘Nature is fine in love, and where ’tis fine, it sends some precious instance of itself after the tang—’ ”

  “Thing.”

  “T’ing.”

  “Th-ing! Thing!”

  “ ‘Th-ing it luffs. They bore him—’ ”

  “Loves. ‘Thing it loves.’ ”

  “Gott! This wretched language. Why could not Shakespeare be born a Swede?”<
br />
  “But he wasn’t, dear. Try again from the beginning of the soliloquy, and remember, Ophelia is mad.”

  “Mad! She is spitting tacks!”

  On the edge of the soundstage, outside the circle of light where the pince-nez-wearing female voice coach and her pretty project sit on tall stools before the microphone on its stand, Louis B. Mayer’s spectacles make smaller circles of reflected light, like headlamps in a tunnel. His cigar smoke crawls toward the ventilating fan mounted in the soundproof wall of the booth where the cameraman is imprisoned so that the whirring of his equipment will not be heard on the soundtrack; for the time being, at least, the talkie revolution has banished sweep, and for that matter simple movement, from the moving picture.

  Sotto voce, speaking out of the side of his mouth like the Chicago gangsters who fascinate him, Mayer addresses Irving Thalberg, who is completely enveloped in shadow at his shoulder. “What’s the name of that dame we tested last month, the French girl without no accent? Colbert?”

  “Colbert. Claudette Colbert. The t’s silent in the last name. She signed with Paramount when I told her it would take seven years to make her a star.”

  “Broads today got no patience. Who else we got don’t sound like von Stroheim in drag?”

  “Let’s not give up on Garbo just yet. We’ve got a lot invested in her. We can’t afford another Gilbert.”

  “It was worth every penny we lost on that S.O.B. to throw his ass off the lot. She’s your baby, Irving. You can go down with the ship. I’m getting off at this station.” A born showman, Mayer exits on this triumph of mangled metaphors, trailing smoke. The boom of the fire door shutting behind him turns the heads of the actress, her coach, and the sound man fiddling with his levels.

  Thalberg raises his voice. “It’s all right. Carry on.”

  “ ‘Nature is fine in love… ’ ”

  This time, when Valentino sat up in bed, morning light fell fully on the screen visible through the square opening in the projection booth, and for a moment he wasn’t sure if he’d been dreaming or watching a movie. But Midnite Magic’s sound system had been dismantled and removed, and the dialogue was still ringing in his ears.

  In any case, movies made more sense than dreams. By all accounts, Garbo’s sound test had impressed everyone at MGM. She’d delivered Margaret’s monologue from Faust in German, sung Solviet’s solo from Peer Gynt in Swedish, and nailed Ophelia’s insanity scene from Hamlet in flawless English, albeit with the heavy accent that would remain her trademark from Anna Christie through the end of her professional career. Her struggles with language had all taken place during her earliest days, when she had spurned the extensive studio system for grooming its contract players for public appearances in favor of private coaching, and unlike Mauritz Stiller, her mentor and probably her lover, she had proven a quick study. Stiller, meanwhile, had endured the confusion of actors and technicians who could not understand his directions in broken patois, bridled against the restrictions placed upon him by meddlers in the front office, and died a failure at forty-five, with his protégée’s star firmly in the ascendant.

  The female voice coach in the pinch-nose glasses had borne a suspicious resemblance to the identical character who’d despaired of teaching Jean Hagen’s silent diva how to speak properly in Singin’ in the Rain, a telling satire of the infant sound era in Hollywood. Valentino’s subconscious mind seemed to have reached the point where staging remakes of actual cinema history was taking the place of reliable scholarship.

  Ninety minutes later, seated in a glass-walled recording booth at a downtown studio leased by MGM/UA, Inc., he understood the emotions that had led to his dream. A producer ten years his junior had greeted him on the fly, bum’s-rushed him down a corridor, sat him in a padded chair in front of a microphone, also padded, clamped earphones onto his head, and slapped a printed sheet marked up with unfamiliar symbols in red onto a table that pressed into his sternum when he leaned into the microphone; then the man had vanished, shutting the door on him.

  The text, it turned out, was a personal introduction of the speaker and his professional credentials, the wording of which he recognized from his portion of a page on the UCLA Web site. Some studio supernumerary had downloaded it for use during his audition.

  “Mr. Ballantyne?”

  He turned, but he was alone in the room. Shadows moved about on the other side of the glass, but the booth was lit more brightly than that area and he couldn’t make out figures or features. He realized then the address had come in over his earphones.

  “Valentino,” he corrected. “Like the actor.”

  “Who?”

  He realized he was talking to the young producer. “Like the fashion designer?”

  “Oh, Valentino. Sorry. We work at warp speed here. These facilities were originally intended for celebrity readings of movie tie-in books on tape, but then DVDs came along with all that room for extras. Jerry Lewis was sitting in that chair ten minutes ago, doing the commentary on Cinderfella; that’ll be a three-disc set.”

  “You’re doing three discs on Jerry Lewis and only two on Garbo?”

  “I just produce them, Mr. Ballantyne. They don’t ask me what I think.”

  “Valentino.”

  “Sorry. Can you read a few words from the sheet, so we can get a voice level?”

  “ ‘Hello. My name is Valentino. I’m—’ ”

  “We didn’t get that. Can you move closer to the mike?”

  “I’m practically swallowing it now.” But he leaned in until his lips nearly brushed the padding, the edge of the table cutting him in half.

  Finally the wizard at the electronic board had his level, and he began reading for the demonstration tape. He got in two lines before the producer stopped him, getting his name right for the first time without prompting.

  “You smacked your lips a couple of times.”

  “I did?”

  “Everyone does, talking, and no one listening notices, or if they do they disregard it automatically. Our equipment is less forgiving; it’s a bit of a tyrant, in fact. It takes in every little flaw and plays it back at a uniform level with everything else. During playback it sounds like you’re chewing your cud. Try it again from the top.”

  Valentino had been pleased to note that the humdrum piece he was expected to read ran only about seventy-five words, which was as much as would fit on one page in oversize type cluttered with mystic symbols apparently understood by professionals on a level that was almost subconscious; but after four or five assaults, aborted when he took in breath audibly, or didn’t take in enough and finished a sentence on a strangling note, or—greatly to his embarrassment—belched, even so short a speech loomed before him like the steps to the top of the Great Pyramid. There was a short break during which the producer, with a show of well-bred patience, called for someone to bring him a glass and a pitcher of water that looked like an old-fashioned milk bottle to lubricate his parched throat, but that strategy backfired when Valentino took too big a gulp on top of a heavy intake of breath and it backed into his nose, burning and making him cough explosively. Nothing like it had happened to him since grade school, when someone had made a crude joke in the cafeteria and he’d laughed so hard that milk came out his nose. The young man who had brought the water was dispatched quickly to slap him on the back until the spasm subsided. When his lungs reinflated he apologized, his cheeks burning. The producer’s solicitous response only contributed to his humiliation. He felt like the victim of a sophomoric fraternity prank. If he didn’t know that Kyle Broadhead was too immersed in his book, he’d have suspected him of setting up the whole situation; Broadhead had the lifelong academic’s appreciation for low humor at a friend’s expense.

  Noon was approaching, and because Valentino had been too nervous that morning to hold down even a light breakfast, his stomach had begun to rumble (was the tyrannical equipment sensitive enough to pick up on the shameful behavior of his bowels?) when he managed at last to get through the text
without interruption. He sat back, utterly depleted and damp under the arms. He had a new appreciation for the people who did voice-overs for a living; previously he’d thought them the fortunate recipients of a pleasing tone, with no more skills attendant than a strong man’s in a circus.

  His review came in the long pause that followed rather than in the polite words of the producer through his earphones: “Nice work. You should’ve heard Tom Hanks the first day he tackled The Da Vinci Code.”

  Outside the booth, the young man shook Valentino’s hand with a torque that turned him toward the exit.

  Not even an invitation to lunch, which in L.A. came as automatically as “Gesundheit” following a sneeze. Two minutes later he found himself in the sun-hammered parking lot, with no one expecting him anywhere at any time. So he grabbed lunch at a stand whose hot-dog shape had put it on the National Register of Historic Places and took his heartburn to the office.

  He finished editing the footage of a Los Angeles that only still existed on film, sealed it in a can, and like any yeoman interrupted during the last stage of a project cursed when his intercom buzzed as he was hand-lettering the strip of masking tape that served as the label.

  “What is it, Ruth?”

  The short blip of silence on the other end of the apparatus dripped with glacial ice. But her voice sounded no less annoyed than usual. “A young lady to see you. Her name’s Faygo.”

  Years of experience with the least receptive receptionist in Southern California had blessed him with the gift of instant interpretation. “I think you mean Fanta.”

  Silence again, during which she conferred with her source.

  “Fanta, then. Are you in?”

  “She’s standing right there, isn’t she?”

  “I’ll send her in.”

  He came out from behind the desk to extend his hand. The willowy brunette ignored it and wound her long arms around him. She smelled of fresh wheat; not a scent in a bottle, but her own natural fragrance. Today she wore a simple boatnecked top that exposed the perfection of her collarbone, a granny skirt, platform sandals, and one of those mod caps with a mushroom crown and a stiff visor that had somehow wound its way from 1964 to the first decade of the new millennium. When they broke, she said, “Free for drinks?”