Outside, on the pavement in front of the cinema, I finally catch sight of her features in the light of the red neon sign above the box office. She looks like an actress who, together with Pola Negri, was one of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties but whose name eludes me. An old-fashioned beauty: thin, darkly painted lips, bright white teeth, smouldering eyes emphasized with black eyeliner, heavy eyebrows. The sort of woman that, inexplicably, I fall for. She takes out a cigarette and looks at me enquiringly. As if by a miracle I find a lighter in my coat pocket. That same gold Dupont with which I can see myself lighting Debbie Marchal’s cigarette too in the Bogart Bar.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asks.
I don’t know what she is referring to. Does she mean the film or the way in which she pressed her thigh against mine?
“At times I found it particularly erotic,” I reply.
“Me too, and that doesn’t happen often. My name is Virginia.”
“Virginia Rappe!”
“No, Steiner, Virginia Steiner.”
“I mean you look like Virginia Rappe. Ever heard of her?”
“No.”
“An actress. She didn’t get very far.”
“Thanks.”
“Despite her incredible beauty.”
“That’s a bit better. Do I really look like her?”
“Like two peas in a pod. And you have the same name.”
“Then I want to know all about her. You got time for a drink?”
“On the Grote Markt?”
“Fine by me. And what is my new friend called?”
“Victor.”
A little later I am walking silently besides her along the Suikerrui with my hands in my pockets so as not to touch her hand. She is an unknown woman with whom I have shared the thrilling intimacy of the cinema in the half-dark for two hours. Now and again she turns to me and laughs, radiating the danger of innocence. And I smile back, as if I have awoken after an indistinct night beside a woman I do not recognize. I am ready to follow her like a dog wherever she may lure me.
On the Melkmarkt we go into the Keystone Café, a bar I did not even know existed. On the faintly illuminated stage at the back of the room, a few chalky-white couples are dancing to a sentimental song from the Thirties that I have never heard before but immediately recognize: ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’. She sits down at a table with a cracked marble top. I ask her what she would like to drink.
“Water,” she replies, “because of my medication.”
I order two bottles of sparkling Spa mineral water at the bar and bring them over to the table. She has removed her coat. She is wearing a deep-cut summer dress in a black-and-white houndstooth pattern. The same dress as Virginia Rappe on the sheet-music cover that made her famous, a dress that I suspect conceals the Milky Way.
“What a sad voice,” I hear her say.
I reply, without knowing where the information is coming from: “The voice of Ruth Etting. She recorded it in 1931. But the song dates from 1910. The lyrics are by Beth Slater. The music is Leo Friedman.”
She takes my hand and leads me to the dance floor. As we dance on the spot, pressed closely against each other, she whispers the refrain in my ear:Let me call you “Sweetheart”, I’m in love with you.
Let me hear you whisper that you love me too.
Keep the love-light glowing in your eyes so true.
Let me call you “Sweetheart”, I’m in love with you.
I shut my eyes. I have heard that voice before.
“And now for Virginia’s story!”
We sit down at the little marble table facing each other. I start the story. It is I who speak but it is a voice deep inside me that is dictating the words.
“Her real name was Virginia Caroline Rapp. She was born in New York City on the nineteenth of September 1895. Her mother was an unmarried prostitute. She never knew her father. She was eleven when her mother died. She moved to Chicago, where distant relations took care of her. By the time she was sixteen she was earning her living as a model. Her picture appeared on the sheet-music cover of the song that we were just dancing to.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Maybe it’s purely coincidence, but that’s life. At least, my life. You can still see her in some film roles. But it was the tragic manner in which she died rather than her acting achievements that earned her a place in the history books. She was a few days short of her twenty-sixth birthday when she was buried in the Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery on the thirteenth of September, 1921.”
“My age exactly. But how do you manage to remember all these names?”
“No idea. It’s as if I know them all personally. They live in me like parasites, like ghosts from the past.”
“How exactly did she die?”
“That’s no story for sensitive little girls.”
“If I look so like her it’s my right to know. And I would love to see a photo of her, if that’s possible.”
“I happen to own a couple of beautiful original prints.”
“Would you let me see them one day?”
“You may. Tonight if you like.”
When we leave the Keystone Café, Ruth Etting is singing ‘What Do We Care If It’s One O’Clock’ and the dance floor is empty. On the Nationalestraat, Virginia takes my arm and asks where we are going.
“To the elephant,” I reply.
She laughs, unaware of any danger. Now it is her turn to follow me. First down the narrow passageway, then over the courtyard under a rectangle of starry sky, with, in the exact centre, a wafer-thin crescent moon.
Once inside, I switch on the spotlights, one by one. Like a child in Disneyland for the first time, she stares around her with her mouth wide open. I let her get on with it, not without some feelings of pride, and while I look for the photos of Virginia Rappe in a cardboard box labelled Silent Movie Female Stars – original prints 1915 – 25, I do not let her out of my sight.
“Look, here,” I say once I’ve found the carbon prints. She follows me into the elephant, too confused to ask any questions. She looks at the photos as if they are her own reflection.
“How beautiful she is,” she sighs.
“You must admit that there’s a strong resemblance.”
“Even her dress is like mine…”
“Wait a minute…”
I take a hanger with an ivory-coloured cocktail dress bordered with pearls and sequins off a copper rail and lay the valuable piece of clothing on the table.
“This was the dress she wore in The Foolish Virgin.”
“The actual one?”
“Of course.”
“How do you come by all this stuff?”
“Passion and patience.”
“How soft,” she says, stroking the shimmering material with her fragile fingers.
“Pure silk.”
She flings her raincoat into the corner, unbuttons her dress and lets it slip to the floor. She is wearing transparent underwear, and nylon stockings with black lace garters. My suspicions were correct. Her bra cradles two milky-white, tender breasts. She puts on the silk dress, which looks as if it had been made for her. Virginia Rappe is standing there in front of me in the cold rays of an old spotlight. She says: “And now I want to know how I died.”
Sitting at my desk, her legs slightly apart, she listens with obvious excitement to the story of the fatal party that took place on Labour Day, 1921, in room 1221 of the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco. When I’ve finished, I produce from one of the display cabinets a champagne bottle with a photo of Fatty Arbuckle on the neck and a label bearing Rappe’s portrait and the word SCANDAL.
“Look what they sold in Hollywood’s souvenir shops at the time.”
Breathing heavily, she presses the champagne bottle against the inside of her thigh, just above the garter, strokes the neck and whispers: “Fuck me.”
I don’t know how I can resist this vision, but I say in a strangled voice: “Come, come, Miss Steiner, you are young enough
to be my daughter.”
“With the bottle, I mean. Do you know what my medicine is? Tritherapy – triple antiretrovirals. Sex signed my death warrant long ago. Come on… Victor…” Just then there’s a ring at the doorbell.
Cox starts up, bathed in sweat, groping for his clock on the bedside table: it is a quarter to nine. The bell rings again. He rolls out of bed in a daze, pulls his dressing gown over his shoulders and stumbles down the corridor to the front door.
“Did I wake you up, Professor?” asks the postman.
“To be honest, you did.”
“Is anything wrong?”
Cox looks terrible.
“No, no…”
“I couldn’t fit this parcel in your letter box.”
“Oh yes, the biography of Barbara Stanwyck that I ordered from Amazon.”
“And a letter.”
He puts on the coffee and opens the letter. It is a new message from his mysterious correspondent:“Now you be a good girlie, or I’ll lock you in the garage!”
Groucho Marx to Thelma Todd in Horse Feathers.
Good luck,
Henri C.
33
Peggy Rose
Cox calls Katia to say that he will not be coming around that morning because he has another appointment. She finds it both nice and a little odd that he lets her know. She is not used to that kind of old-fashioned consideration from her clients.
He stays in his study, pacing up and down until noon. He cannot shake off the previous night’s dream. Some of the details are so realistic that he starts to question himself. It is as if he has a double memory: a selective memory where he files away his knowledge and important events from his past and from which he can draw particular pieces of information when he wants, and a second, unconscious memory that preserves, in a twilight zone of his brain, hidden facts, sublimated visions, concealed emotions, names and dates that he does not normally recall. The zone of repressed feelings, of unspoken consciousness. A perfect example is the name of the singer Ruth Etting, which he has never heard before but which appears as something self-evident in his dream. Perhaps he has accumulated too much information over the years and now, in order to free up space, is beginning to suffer from a kind of uncontrollable and programmed memory loss.
He places the Barbara Stanwyck biography between Terence Stamp and Anna Sten on his bookshelf, puts Henri C.’s new letter in a plastic cover and leaves the house at around quarter past twelve. Before going to the police station, he makes a detour along the Nationalestraat in order to test the most disconcerting details of his nightmare against reality.
To the uninitiated, his depository looks like disorder and chaos. But he knows the place of every object, and heads straight for the display cabinet where he keeps the souvenir bottle from Fatty Arbuckle’s trial. He bought the bottle in a junk shop on Rodeo Drive during his honeymoon. He remembers that Shelley found the object rather tasteless but it cost only a few dollars, and who knows what a collector would pay for it nowadays. But the bottle, which used to stand between a plastic bust of Mae West and a bronze Bugs Bunny, has vanished. A dark ring in the material on the shelf still clearly indicates the place. Cox feels dizzy and holds on to the cabinet to catch his breath. Then he enters the elephant and switches on the desk lamp. Everything seems normal, just as he left it on his last visit. In September 1996 there was an attempted break-in but the neighbours heard the noise and the thieves had no time to take anything. Perhaps he overlooked the disappearance of the bottle at the time. And come to think of it, was it not in September 1996 that Virginia Steiner was murdered?
With something approaching relief he goes up to the shelves where he keeps his collection of costumes in large flat cardboard boxes. Opening the box labelled V. Rappe – 1920 he carefully removes the ivory-coloured dress that Virginia Steiner put on in his dream. Aghast, he sees that the dress has been torn in various places and is now displaying a dozen dark-brown, dried bloodstains, like a bouquet of sinister roses. Cox knows for certain that the garment was as good as new when he acquired it at Sotheby’s Hollywood Collectors’ Items auction in 1986. But after the previous night’s horrible dream he has begun to doubt everything. Perhaps, without knowing it, he bought the very dress that Virginia wore to Fatty Arbuckle’s party in the St Francis Hotel. He falls into a panic, uncertain what he should do with it. Burn it or tell The Sponge? The second solution appears too risky, especially as he has no logical explanation for the bloodstains. He takes a third option and stuffs the box provisionally back into the cupboard under a pile of rusty cases of reels of Joseph H. Lewis’s film So Dark the Night after removing the label with the name Virginia Rappe from the lid.
His dream is continuing to dog him with intense clarity and in fact seems more like a vision than a dream. He decides to walk down the Melkmarkt to find the bar where he saw himself dancing to an old tear-jerker with Virginia Steiner because he has never noticed it before in his wanderings.
He has no difficulty recognizing the narrow brick building with its door framed in bluestone. Everything is just as it was the previous night, except for the neon sign on the front. The Keystone Café has been replaced by Pita Arno. Cox had been was so unsettled that morning that he forgot to have breakfast, and the aroma of the cylinder of meat, dripping with fat as it revolves in the window, makes his mouth water. He goes into the restaurant, sits down at a Formica table, orders a shawarma wrap and looks round. The place appears familiar but the decor has changed. Where the dance floor was there is now a big round table with eight plastic chairs. A kitschy portrait, its frame decorated with gold leaf, hangs among the glasses behind the bar, showing a platinum blonde staring dreamily at the sky over her bare shoulder.
A suntanned fellow with combed-back, shining black hair brings him his sandwich and a beer. Cox asks how long the restaurant has been there.
“You’re not from Antwerp are you, Mister?”
“I am,” replies Cox, slightly irritated, “but it’s been a long time since I was in this area.”
“I can see that. We opened in summer 1997. At the height of the kebab craze.”
“Wasn’t there a bar here before?”
“More like a kind of dance spot for seniors. The Keystone Café. They used to play oldies. We took it over from Peggy Rose when she decided to give it up. She was eighty-seven.”
“Peggy Rose?”
“Never heard of Peggy Rose the singer?”
The man gestures at the picture behind the bar.
“That’s her at the height of her glory, in the Forties. After the Liberation she married an American, and even performed for a week in Las Vegas. ‘Arno,’ she said when we were at the notary’s, ‘promise me one thing: keep my portrait up there in the bar.’”
“I think I must have been here before,” says Cox.
“Anyway, enjoy your meal,” says Arno.
34
Henri Cassin
“How long have you been waiting for him?” asks Lannoy.
“Over quarter of an hour.”
“Is it OK if I stay?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I’ve got a feeling something’s not right with this guy. The fact that he knew all the victims more or less, his wife’s so-called accident, that anonymous letter sent to him and not to us, the so-called disappearance of his girlfriend and now these breakthroughs linked to old films no normal human being has ever heard of…”
“I know, I know. But if anyone is innocent…”
“His sudden need to cooperate with us…”
“It was me who suggested that. By the way, have you heard anything yet about Miss Mortenson? He’s bound to ask me.”
“According to the foreign ministry her father was posted back to New York. As PR for The Belgian House – a sort of information centre promoting Belgian tourism and culture in the Big Apple. I’m waiting for more details from our ambassador over there.”
“So maybe Starr is still alive and went with them. I can’t see the family
moving away without their daughter just for the hell of it.”
“That’s for sure. I also managed to trace her dentist. The cast of that jaw that Lejeune sent out doesn’t match hers.”
“Good news.”
“But I wouldn’t let Cox know. I don’t want him tearing after her like a randy dog and leaving the country.”
There’s a knock at the door. It’s Cox, covered in sweat and out of breath.
“Where did we get to yesterday?” asks Luyckx.
“The resemblance between Debbie Marchal and Debbie Marsh. But first I have to show you something.”
Cox pulls the letter out of his pocket.
“I’ve received another message from Henri Cassin.”
Luyckx and Lannoy look at each other in astonishment.
“So you know who he is?”
“Who?”
“Henri C.! You just said Henri Cassin.”
Cox stares in confusion.
“Did I say that?”
“I heard you clearly,” says Lannoy.
“Who is Cassin?”
“No idea.”
“Come on, Victor. Who is Cassin?”
“I really don’t know. This is happening to me more and…”
“What?”
“Remembering names that I have never heard before. Visualizing situations that I cannot place.”
“You’ve been watching too many films,” says Lannoy, leafing through the telephone book.
“Found anything?” asks Luyckx.
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