Burning Garbo

by Robert Eversz

  “And what have you found here?”

  The voice was a woman’s and it came from behind me. I looked over my shoulder. The woman I took for Angela Doubleday stood at the crack in the sliding glass door. She slid the door fully open, as though inviting me inside the house, and pointed a little black Beretta at my gut.

  I stepped through the gap in the sliding-glass door, lowering my hands because the idea of escape had become impossible now that the woman I’d come to help rescue seemed to be pointing a gun at me. A ruby-and-diamond brooch shaped like a rose sparkled from her pale-blue sweater. Gauze so completely covered her face that I couldn’t be sure who stared from behind the mask. Who else but Angela Doubleday would wear that brooch? Her hair, pulled back in a taut ponytail, was a shade of black as false as my own. I called her name, uncertain I called her or some impostor. The woman neither confirmed nor denied the name. The eyes matched in color, shape, and expression Doubleday’s eyes, and the voice sounded like hers, a voice that one film critic described as an iron fist in a velvet glove, but I knew her solely from her films, and film can lie.

  She glanced at Davies, who kicked the sliding-glass door closed with his heel. I wondered if I’d entered a scenario in which the kidnap victim so completely bonds with her kidnappers she becomes complicit in the crime.

  “I already talked to the newspaper,” I said. “They know you’re here. I told them I found you.” I stepped away from Davies, toward a row of suitcases, packed by the door. “Killing me will just add to your problems, not solve them.”

  “And who am I?” The woman pointed the gun not just at me but everywhere, as though she held not a deadly weapon but a glass, a cigarette, a rolled-up script—any prop that didn’t inhibit the articulate gestures of her hands.

  I said, “Angela Doubleday.”

  “But my face is covered in bandages. Really, anybody could be behind this mask.”

  “I know your voice.”

  The gauze around her mouth crinkled, and by that I knew she was smiling. The voice that projected from the mask changed to the distinctive cracks and staccato rhythm of Katharine Hepburn. “You can’t believe everything you hear, now can you?” The voice shifted rhythms, dropping and deepening to a breathy tone that made every syllable sound like sex. “But what’s a girl to believe? She has only her senses. If she can’t believe her ears, what can she believe?”

  “My mistake,” I said. “You’re really Marilyn Monroe.”

  “I can do Elvis too, but I’ll spare you.” Her free hand, unadorned by rings or bracelets, played out to a beam of sunlight streaming from the wall of windows. The iron returned first to her voice and then the velvet, and when she spoke again, she was unmistakably Angela Doubleday. “Impersonations are a cheap trick of the trade, but identity, that is an act of true creation. There are two great philosophical questions: What is God? and Who am I? There is no answer to the first. The actor realizes the answer to the second is multiple-choice. Whatever is invented can be reinvented.”

  I looked again at the bruising of her eyes and the gauze covering her face and said, “You haven’t been beaten.”

  She shook her head, said, “No.”

  “You’ve been to a plastic surgeon.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re pulling a Garbo. You never want to be seen again, not as. Angela Doubleday.”

  She dipped her head like bowing before an audience. “How much will it cost for you to go away?”

  I didn’t understand, said, “I’m sorry?”

  “Money,” she said, speaking the word with malice. “How much is this going to cost me?”

  I’m not much of an actor. I needed money, but the last thing I expected with two guns pointing at my chest was a payoff.

  “Come on, don’t play stupid,” she said. “I don’t have the time or patience. How much would the tabloids pay you for a photograph of me?”

  “It would be safer to kill her,” Davies said.

  “Our safety isn’t the only issue.” Doubleday spoke sharply, confident of her command. “We’re not killers.”

  “But she fucked up everything!”

  “How was I to know you hadn’t kidnapped or killed her?” I asked him, trying to sound reasonable.

  “If you knew anything at all, you’d know I could never harm her. But you don’t know anything, do you? And so you stumble around like a blind cow, breaking things you’re too stupid to understand.”

  “Her niece is worried sick. I’m here for the newspaper, yes, but I’m also here because she asked me to help save her aunt.”

  “Arlanda? Is she worried, really?” Doubt laced Doubleday’s voice, but wonder too, as though such an idea astonished her.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Does she know I’m alive?”

  “She suspects it.”

  “And that’s why you’re here? For her?”

  “Yes,” I lied again.

  “She’s playing a game with you, Angie. She’s not a friend of the family. She works for the tabloids. She’s your enemy.”

  Doubleday lowered her little black Beretta, said, “I know who my friends and enemies are, and I know my conscience.” She turned her back to me, and I was afraid that she might tell Troy to shoot me, but instead she circled slowly behind him and, laying her head on his shoulder, pushed the barrel of his shotgun until it pointed to the floor. “We’re almost home, Troy,” she whispered. “No one must be hurt, remember? It’s the only way we can live in peace, you and I.”

  Davies tilted his head as though her words caressed him, and when he looked at her, his eyes gleamed with a weird light, brighter than admiration and fiercer than worship. She stepped around him, walked up to me, and took my hand in hers. Her eyes were marvelously complex instruments, brimming with no single emotion and not a mixture of emotions either; fear and hope resided in the same glance, simultaneous and separate, and the flint in her eyes yielded at closer look to someone not just vulnerable but in pain. “If you’re a friend of my niece, you will not want to see her aunt jailed and disgraced and the small fortune I left for her canceled to pay for my defense fund.” She spoke to me simply, like a woman with an open heart. “So I ask you the same question, this time not as my enemy but as the friend of my niece, how much do you want to go away, pretend you saw none of this?”

  I didn’t believe she was lying, but I didn’t think she told the truth either. She couldn’t tell the truth because she didn’t know it. “Nothing,” I said.

  “But I must give you something. It’s not fair that you get nothing. You followed Troy all the way up here. You found me. It’s not your fault I wasn’t the same Angela Doubleday you sought.”

  “I don’t want any of your money or your diamonds,” I said.

  “We can’t just let her walk away!” Davies’ voice was anguished, something tearing him apart that I was too blind to see. He sidestepped toward the front door, and when Doubleday’s back was clear of the line of fire, he raised his shotgun again.

  “Troy?”

  The note of surprise in Doubleday’s voice frightened me. Not even she knew what was going on. Every appearance deceived. Her disappearance. Her murder. Her voice. Her face. And Troy Davies, who wasn’t even Troy Davies by birth but someone else named Tom Davis. Then I got it, what Frank had been trying to tell me.

  “Does she know who you are?” I asked. “Have you told her your real name is Tom Davis?”

  Doubleday turned to me and didn’t notice how the question paled him. “Davies or Davis, what’s the difference?” She said. “Natalie Wood was born Natasha Gurdin. Almost every actor changes her name.”

  “The name Davis means nothing to you?”

  Her eyes trembled behind their white mask, as though from some terrible inner shift of recognition. I slid a step to the side to bring her into the line of fire. I knew what it was like to be accused, how emotions long choked down could suddenly burst free. I spoke to Davies gently. “Did you abandon Tom Davis ten years ago, when you changed
your name and moved to L.A.? Or was he always lurking beneath the surface, urging you closer to the woman who must have caused you considerable pain?”

  In color and expression his face turned cadaverous, so pale and still I wasn’t sure he heard anything at all. The barrel of the shotgun dipped to the floor.

  “I’m not an actor,” I said. “So I don’t understand these things, not the way you do. Where does Tom Davis end and Troy Davies begin? Do they stand side by side, front to back, or does one sit inside the other, pulling strings? Troy Davies may be innocent, but what about Tom Davis? He’s been preparing for Angela Doubleday since the day his brother was shot to death for stalking her. What other possible motive could he have—could you have—except revenge? But you haven’t harmed her, not that I can see, and so I wonder, who are you right now? Tom Davis or Troy Davies?”

  He wiped at his face with his left hand and backed toward the stone fireplace. Braced under his right shoulder, the shotgun threatened nothing for the moment but the hardwood floor. I contemplated flight, five steps back and a quick cut down the hallway that branched away from the main room, but I didn’t know the layout of the house and wasn’t certain of my escape. He could too easily shoot me in the back before I found a way out.

  “I don’t know.” His admission fell softly into the room. Those three words were all he said for a minute, and with his head lowered, I couldn’t tell whether he gathered himself together or pried himself apart. “I wanted to hurt you, Angie. That’s a good place to start. For years, before we ever met, I wanted to hurt you. In my darker moments, I considered murdering you. It didn’t seem like it would be that difficult from a distance. You had abandoned the world. You lived alone in a big house. You saw no one. I decided instead to make love to you. And when you loved me to the point of dependency, like my brother loved you, I would abandon you. Either that, or I’d kill you.”

  Doubleday didn’t shrink back on hearing his confession, but stepped nearer. She said just one word, “Yes?” and it conveyed more emotion than a speech.

  “I thought I’d have the strength to pull it off, but I’d never met anyone like you before.” A smile whispered across his lips like the punch line to a grim joke. “When I’m not around you, it’s hard to explain, it’s like I’m not there. I’m a hollow shell, waiting to be filled. Funny thing is I think I was always that way. I just didn’t realize it until we met.”

  “That’s why we act,” she said. “To fill that sense of hollowness at the center of our being. Did you really wish to kill me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “When you first confessed to me that you wanted to disappear, six months ago, I was still thinking I’d do it. It was as though you were asking me to kill you. I had the perfect opportunity. But I no longer had the will.”

  “Then do it now. Kill me now.”

  He raised the shotgun, the tears in his eyes desperate to escape, but he didn’t point it at her. “I can’t,” he said, pointing the shotgun at me instead.

  She moved, calmly and deliberately, between the barrel of the shotgun and my chest. “But I want to die,” she said.

  When Davies shook his head the tears leapt free, and again, he dropped his shotgun as though incapable of harming her even if she commanded him to. He stumbled backward, until his heels struck the front ledge of the fireplace, and then he sat down hard, cradling the shotgun against his chest, and wept.

  I said, “Lady, you don’t want to die. If you’re that unhappy with humanity, go buy yourself a shack on a deserted island someplace. You can afford it.”

  “I’m not unhappy with humanity. Not at all.” She stepped toward the suitcases packed at the door, wrapping her arms around her chest as though suddenly chilled, the Beretta still in her grip but forgotten. “I’m unhappy with myself. And I’ve already lived on an island. What was my estate in Malibu, if not an island? No matter where I. went, you’d still find me, and I’d still be me.”

  I tried to protest but she silenced me with a pinpoint glance.

  “If not you, someone else. I’d always be hunted. To be a celebrity, it’s the life of a criminal, not a human being. Do you know what it’s like, to be hunted every moment of your life? To not be able to make a simple trip to the grocery store for fear that some poor deluded soul has fallen in love with that glimmering image on the screen and thinks that image is you? To be accosted everywhere you go by strangers who protest they know and love you, so that no public place offers any refuge, not even a stall in the ladies’ room? And those are the ones who wish you well, not the ones who have appointed you to star in their own private psychodrama, who claim to everyone they’re engaged to you or married to you, that they sleep with you regularly and ecstatically, the ones who stalk you on the street, send you letter after letter of abject longing and utter delusion, who protest their love one moment and threaten you with the most horrible insults the next, who are so desperate for any kind of attention they will assault or kill you just for that moment of frisson when you recognize them? Can you blame me if, in the words of dear Garbo, all I want is to be alone? I can’t be alone!”

  While she spoke she held the little black Beretta more like a prop than a deadly weapon, slapping it against her thigh in frustration one moment, pointing it like a finger the next. Not until she mentioned Garbo did she look at it for what it was, but even then, her glance was absent of understanding its mortal power.

  “Not in this life,” she said. “Not as Angela Doubleday. I’m so terribly tired of playing Angela Doubleday.”

  “So tired that you killed for the privilege of leaving her behind?” The question came out more angrily than I had intended.

  “I killed no one. Troy? Tell her.”

  “We used a corpse to double for Angela’s body, I mean, Ray and his brother did.” Davies’ face glistened from the wet work of crying. The fierceness in his eyes had dulled, the indignant anger in him extinguished. “That was always the plan, to steal a cadaver from UCLA Medical School. I gave the Belgards plaster casts of Angela’s teeth, so they could match the dentals.”

  “I never would have countenanced harming anyone,” Doubleday said. “I thought about this carefully, and that was always a precondition. No one must be harmed.”

  “What about Lupe Potrero?”

  “Who?”

  She didn’t know his name.

  “Your gardener.”

  She nodded as though recognizing the function he filled, if not the man or why I had mentioned him.

  “Lupe saw one of the Belgards at the estate some days before they burned it, talking to Troy.” I glanced at Davies. He didn’t contradict me. “Lupe tried to blackmail you. Five days ago, the Belgards murdered him. They not only murdered him, they pulled out all his teeth and threw him into the sea.”

  “Troy?” Doubleday’s eyes flashed, wild and stunned as those of a bird after it smacks into a plate-glass window, wrenched from the trance of flight by something unforeseen. “Is it true? Are we murderers?”

  “You aren’t responsible. It’s my fault. I brought them in. But I couldn’t control them.”

  I asked, “Were you there when they murdered him?”

  “No.” He stared at a spot on the floor as though it held a secret to himself he was just understanding. “But I let them do it.”

  “Do they know Doubleday is still alive?”

  “I told them I killed her. They know about my brother, you see. They thought it was personal.”

  Her voice brightened. “So it’s all over?”

  Troy didn’t answer, his glance immobilized.

  “I wanted my anonymity back,” she said to me. “Everyone has the right to make a new life for themselves. Isn’t that what being American is all about? To be able to move on after having failed miserably at being who you are? Not having to settle, but to move somewhere else, to a new neighborhood, new friends, new job, a new sense of self? To find your true self or to shed your self completely, like the skin of a snake? The only way I can reinvent myself now
is to die. Death is the last, great reinvention of the self. And complete anonymity.”

  Her glance traced the contours of the grip and barrel of her little black Beretta, and such was the brilliance of her transparency I could see her imagine the trajectory of the bullet, watch her contemplate her own suicide.

  Whatever Davies had sought in staring so long at one spot on the floor changed him when at last he looked up. “We can still escape. We just have to do one more thing.” He stood, his left hand gripping the ridged walnut pump below the barrel of his shotgun. “I warned you once,” he said to me. “In Douglas. But you didn’t listen. I knew I’d have to kill you, after that. You should have died when the trailer went down, you and the son of a bitch who killed my brother. And still, you keep coming around, fucking things up.” When he pointed the shotgun at me this time it was clear he intended to fire.

  Doubleday shouted his name and leapt between us. I backpedaled for the sliding-glass door that led to the patio, to the lake, to safety. His first shot jerked high and to the side, shattering a floor-to-ceiling pane of glass. She lunged for his gun. He tipped the barrel toward the ceiling and snapped the butt forward. The blow struck her full in the face, the sound of it like a ripe melon hitting the floor. I half turned to work the latch as the gunstock wedged into his shoulder and felt rather than saw that I wasn’t going to have enough time to make it. I dove parallel to the wall of plate-glass windows the moment before the violent hurl of buckshot punched out the glass door at the level of my head. I landed on my back and slid on the polished hardwood floor, kicked with my heels, and took cover in the coffin-size space between the back of the couch and the window.