Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  4

  There’s something he does to the children.

  Even now, I remembered the old man’s terrified voice on the phone.

  I don’t remember much about my interview on Nightline—except that I did most of the talking. My purpose for appearing on the program was to discuss prison reform. Much to the delight of Nightline’s host, I veered way off topic, bringing up Cordova. After we wrapped, oblivious to the shit storm about to ensue, I was filled with satisfaction, the kind a man feels only when he’s finally told it like it is.

  Then the calls started coming: first, my agent asking what I’d been smoking, then my attorney saying he’d just heard from the brass at ABC.

  “You put a hit out on Stanislas Cordova.”

  “What? No—”

  “They just faxed me the transcript. I’m reading here, you interrupted Martin Bashir to announce Cordova should be terminated ‘with extreme prejudice.’ ”

  “I was being ironic.”

  “There’s no irony in television, Scott.”

  Needless to say, I never heard from John again. He vanished.

  Cordova’s attorneys contended I’d not only put their client’s life and his family at risk, but I’d actually fabricated the anonymous call—that I’d walked to the pay phone a block from my apartment and phoned myself in order to establish record of a fictitious source.

  I laughed at the preposterous allegation—then ate my own words when I realized I couldn’t prove otherwise. Even my attorney was vague on whether or not he believed me. He suggested John was real but had been scared off by my rogue behavior.

  I had no choice but to settle the lawsuit, conceding my guilt of not actual malice, but reckless disregard for the truth. I paid the Cordova estate $250,000 in damages, a fair chunk of what I’d saved from my books and stories, building a career on the notion of uncompromising integrity, which was now in shreds. I was fired from Insider, my column nixed at Time. I’d been in preliminary talks at CNN about hosting a weekly investigative news show. Now the idea was laughable.

  “McGrath’s like a revered sports hero who’s been caught doping,” declared Wolf Blitzer. “We need to question everything the man’s written and everything he’s said.”

  “You should think about teaching or becoming a life coach,” my agent informed me. “In journalism, you’re untouchable at the moment.”

  It was a moment that lasted. Disgraced journalist became cemented to my name like ex-con. I was a “symptom of the sloppy state of American reporting.” A mash-up video of me appeared on YouTube in which I repeated thirty-nine times (my voice Auto-Tuned) terminate with extreme prejudice.

  I abandoned the investigation. The night I made that decision, packing my notes away, I was embroiled in the slander lawsuit. Cynthia and Sam had moved out, leaving a silence so total it felt as if I’d undergone surgery without my consent. Though I was alive, I was left with the vague suspicion something was permanently off inside me. It was beyond my reach, some vital nerve twisted, some organ accidentally put back upside down. I felt only rage toward Cordova—neatly concealed behind his lawyers—an anger especially gutting because it was really toward myself, for my own arrogance and stupidity.

  Because I knew my downfall was no accident. Cordova, displaying a foresight and intelligence I hadn’t anticipated, had outmaneuvered me. I was down, knocked out, the fight over, a winner declared—before I’d even stepped fully into the ring.

  I’d been masterfully set up. John had been the bait. Seeing I was coming after him, Cordova had designed a booby trap using this anonymous caller, knowing, with almost superhuman clairvoyance, the man’s haunting suggestion—there’s something he does to the children—would strike a nerve with me, and then he sat back as I dug my own grave.

  And yet if Cordova had been that concerned about my investigation to go to such lengths to get rid of me, what was he actually hiding—something even more explosive?

  I’d resolved to let it go, leave it alone, focus instead on getting some semblance of a life back.

  But here I was again. I downed the rest of the scotch, grabbed another stack of pages, and within minutes, I found what I’d been looking for.

  It was a thin manila envelope. Ashley was scribbled across the front.

  I unclasped it, pulling out the contents: a sheet of paper and a CD.

  5

  Years ago, focused on Cordova, I’d barely given this article about outstanding freshmen a second glance. I hadn’t even bothered to listen to the CD.

  I tore off the plastic, loaded the CD into my stereo, and pressed play.

  There was a long stretch of silence and then: the piano.

  The first few bars were high-pitched, insistent, so fast and assured, it seemed inconceivable that the person playing was just fourteen years old. The notes rippled, softened for a moment before stirring up into a furious outburst, like a machine gun exploding sound into the air.

  As I listened, the minutes ticked by, and suddenly I became aware of soft footsteps along the wood floors outside my office.

  It was Sam. Recently she’d fallen into the habit of waking up in the middle of the night. The knob turned, and my daughter appeared in the doorway, half asleep in a pink nightgown.

  “Hi, honey.”

  Rubbing her eyes, she only padded over to me. She’d inherited Cynthia’s beauty, including the showstopping blond ringlets straight off a Sistine Chapel angel.

  “What are you doing in here?” she asked in a low, serious voice.

  “Research.”

  She propped her elbows on the desk, doing some strange backward kicking with her foot. She was at that stage where she was always bending, knotting her arms, winding up as if involved in an ongoing game of Twister. She squinted at the Amherst article.

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “Ashley.”

  “Who’s Ashley?”

  “Someone in trouble.”

  She looked at me, concerned. “Did she do something bad?”

  “Not that kind of trouble, honey. The kind that’s a mystery.”

  “What mystery?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  This was our dynamic. Sam launched questions into the air and I scrambled to answer them. Due to Cynthia’s ironclad custody schedule and Sam’s busy life of playdates and ballet, unfortunately I didn’t get to see her very much. The last time was more than three weeks ago for an outing to the Bronx Zoo, during which it was clear she trusted every lowland gorilla in the Congo Forest—including the four-hundred-pound silverback—a hell of a lot more than she trusted me. She had her reasons.

  “Come on.” I stood up. “Let’s get you back into bed.”

  I held out my hand, but Sam only frowned, an unmistakable look of doubt on her face. She seemed to already know what took me forty-three years to figure out, that even though adults were tall, what we knew about anything, including ourselves, was small. The jig had been up since she was about three. And like an innocent convict who’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Sam was resigned to patiently serve out her sentence (childhood) with her inept wardens (Cynthia and me) until she was on parole.

  “How about we go upstairs and find your cloud pajamas?” I asked.

  She nodded eagerly, allowing me to escort her down the hall and upstairs, where she sat patiently on her bed as I dug through her closet. The cloud pajamas—blue flannel, covered in cumulus clouds—were the one thing I’d done right. I’d bought them at a hip children’s store in SoHo, they were Sam’s favorite, and sometimes she cried if she couldn’t wear them to bed—forcing Cynthia & Co. to purchase second and even third pairs of the hit pajamas to shore up Sam’s sleeping on their end—what I took to be a small but powerful personal victory.

  I went through every inch of Sam’s closet, finally locating them on a back shelf. I dramatically unveiled them—Sam liked when I did a lot of Rudolph Valentino–style silent-film acting. We put them on and then I tucked her in.

&nbs
p; “Tighter,” she ordered.

  I tucked.

  “Want me to leave the light on?” I asked.

  She shook her head. She was the one child on earth who wasn’t afraid of the dark.

  “Good night, sweetheart.”

  “Good night, Scott.”

  She’d always called me Scott, never Dad. I could never remember when this started, its origin as impossible to discern as the chicken and the egg.

  “I love you more than—how much again?” I asked her.

  “The sun plus the moon.” She closed her eyes and seemed to fall instantly, magically, to sleep.

  I headed back downstairs. The CD was still playing, the music erratic and wild. I sat at my desk, rereading the Amherst article.

  To forget your name for a while, Ashley had said.

  She had to mean Cordova.

  There’s something he does to the children. What had he done to his own daughter? How had she ended up dead, an apparent suicide, at twenty-four?

  I could feel it starting again—the dark undertow toward Cordova. Forget my fury toward him, which still simmered—this was a chance for absolution. If I went after him again and proved he was a predator—what I’d believed in my gut—all I’d lost might come back. Maybe not Cynthia, I couldn’t hope for that, but my career, my reputation, my life.

  And unlike five years ago, now I had a lead: Ashley.

  There was something violent in the comprehension that this stranger, this wild magician of musical notes, was gone from the world. She was lost now, she’d been silenced—another dead branch on Cordova’s warped tree.

  She could be his fragile corridor.

  It was a covert line of attack described in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Your enemy expected the direct approach. He prepared for it and fiercely fought it off, resulting in severe casualties, the expenditure of major resources—and, ultimately, your own defeat. And yet, occasionally, there was another entrance, the fragile corridor. Your enemy never expected advancement via this route because it was labyrinthine and treacherous, and he often didn’t even know it was there. But if your army managed to make it through, it would deliver you not just behind your enemy’s lines but to his inner chamber, the heart of his heart.

  A tapeworm that’s eaten its own tail, that old journalist had warned me. No use going after it … All it will do is wrap around your heart and squeeze all the blood out.

  No, I never found out what happened to him—but I knew the answer. For all his grumbling, the next morning, surely as the sun rose, he climbed out of bed, packed his bags, and rode a bus straight into that damned village.

  He wouldn’t have been able to stay away from the story.

  Neither would I.

  6

  A little over a week later, at 3:00 A.M., I boarded a Harlem-bound M102 bus—#5378, as Sharon Falcone had instructed—and took a secluded seat in the back.

  If the city had one spot where murmured conversations and dubious glances went ignored, it was this bus at three in the morning. Whatever passengers were present, they were likely to be dead tired, strung out, or involved in shady dealings themselves—so you could bet they wanted to remain as incognito as you did. I’d never understood how Sharon had arranged it, but now, I swore it was the same driver from the last time we’d done this, some nine years ago.

  I first met Detective Sharon Falcone back in 1989 when I was a green reporter for The New York Post and she was a rookie cop helping out on the Central Park jogger case. Even now, more than twenty years later, I still knew just snippets about her, but those bits went a long way, like a pinch of Cajun powder in your food. She was forty-six and lived alone in Queens with a German shepherd named Harley. For the past decade, she’d worked for the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, a specialized unit that helped other precincts with homicides that occurred north of Fifty-ninth Street, and she served her deceased victims with a devotion that seemed old-fashioned in its selflessness and dedication.

  The bus turned west onto East One hundred sixteenth, passing abandoned housing projects, empty lots, tattered churches—SALVATION AND DELIVERANCE, read a sign—men loitering on corners.

  Something must be wrong, I thought to myself. The last time we did this, Sharon had boarded by now. I checked my phone, but there was no missed call, no text. The conversation we’d had the day before had not been promising, nor had she made any real commitment to helping me.

  “Tomorrow night. Same place and time,” she’d said curtly and hung up.

  The bus was turning down Malcolm X Boulevard and I was just beginning to think she’d blown me off, when we abruptly pulled over in front of a ramshackle townhouse, a lone figure standing by the curb. The doors opened, and within seconds Detective Sharon Falcone was hurrying toward me—as if she’d known precisely where I was sitting all along.

  She looked the same: still 53″ and grim, lips thin and unsmiling, a button nose that curved up at the tip like a wood shaving. She wasn’t unattractive. But she was strange. Sharon could pass for a pale nun staring out from a fifteenth-century portrait in the Flemish painting wing at the Met. Only the artist hadn’t quite mastered human proportions, so he’d given her an elongated neck, uneven shoulders, and too-small hands.

  She slid next to me, eyeing the other passengers, letting the black shoulder bag fall to her feet.

  “Of all the M102s in all the towns in all the world, you walk into mine,” I said.

  She didn’t crack a smile. “I don’t have much time.” She unzipped the bag, pulled out a white 8 × 10 envelope, handing it to me. I slid out the thick stack of papers, the first page, a photocopy of a file.

  Case No. 21-24-7232.

  “How’s the investigation going?” I asked, slipping it back and tucking the envelope into my pocket.

  “Fifth Precinct’s handling it. They’re getting a hundred calls a day. Anonymous tips, but they’re bullshit. Last week Ashley was spotted at a McDonald’s in Chicago. Three days before, a Miami nightclub. Already they got two homicide confessions.”

  “Was it homicide?”

  Sharon shook her head. “No. She was a jumper.”

  “You’re positive?”

  She nodded. “No sign of a struggle. Fingernails clean. She took off her shoes and socks, placed them together at the edge. That kind of methodical preparation, very consistent with suicide. They haven’t done a postmortem. Not sure they will.”

  “Why not?”

  “The family attorney’s all over it. Religious reasons. If you’re Jewish it’s a sacrilege to desecrate the body.” She frowned. “I noticed some shots missing in the file. Front and back torso. My guess is they’re being held in a separate file so some creep doesn’t leak them to The Smoking Gun.”

  “The cause of death?”

  “Standard for any jumper. Massive hemorrhaging. A broken neck, lacerated heart, multiple broken ribs, and a skull fracture. She was there for a few days before they found her. She’d been admitted last month to some swank private hospital upstate. They filed a missing-person’s report for her ten days before she jumped.”

  I stared at her in surprise. “Why? She ran away?”

  She nodded. “A nurse confirmed Ashley was in her room, lights off, at eleven o’clock. At eight the next morning, she was gone. Somehow she appeared on just one security camera—crazy, because the place is outfitted like the Pentagon. You can’t see her face. She’s just a figure in white pajamas running across the lawn. A man was with her.”

  “Who was he?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “Why was she at the hospital? A drug problem?”

  “I don’t think they knew what the hell was wrong with her. A few pages of her medical evaluation are in there.”

  “When did the hospital report her missing?”

  “September thirtieth. It’s in the report.”

  “And when did she jump?”

  “Late night on the tenth. Eleven, twelve midnight.”

  “Where did she go during those t
en, eleven days in between?”

  “No one has any idea.”

  “Any activity on her credit cards?”

  Sharon shook her head. “Cell was off, too. She must have known not to turn it on. Seems like she didn’t want to be found. There was just one confirmed sighting in those ten days. When they found the body, she was wearing just jeans and a T-shirt. They found a plastic ticket in her pocket. A tree insignia on the back. It was traced to the Four Seasons Restaurant. You know, that little shack on Park Avenue?”

  I nodded. It was one of the most expensive restaurants in the city, though it played out more like a rare wildlife reserve. One paid an exorbitant entry fee ($45 for crab cakes) to observe—but never disturb—New York’s privileged and powerful as they fed and fought among themselves, displaying all the recognizable traits of their species: hardened expressions, thinning hair, gun-gray suits.

  “A girl working the coat check identified her,” Sharon said. “Ashley came in around ten but left minutes later, without her coat, and never came back. A few hours later, she jumped.”

  “She must have been meeting someone.”

  “They don’t know.”

  “But someone will look into it.”

  “No. There’s no crime here.” She eyed me sharply. “To get to that elevator shaft the girl had to enter an abandoned building, which is a notorious squatters’ hangout, the Hanging Gardens. Then, on the roof, she squeezed through a skylight about a foot wide. Few are small enough to get through such a narrow opening, much less if they were holding someone against their will. They combed the place for trace evidence. There’s no sign anyone was there but her.” Sharon continued to watch me—or perhaps the right word was investigate, because her brown eyes were slowly moving over my face, probably in the same methodical grid pattern she used with a widespread search party.

  “This is when I ask why you want this information,” she said.

  “Some unfinished business. Nothing for you to worry about.”

  She squinted at me. “You know what Confucius said?”

  “Remind me.”