Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  Three weeks after the accident, Miller re-contacted police. She’d read about Astrid and her famous husband in the intervening period—"I’m not into horror movies,” she explained, when I asked her why, initially, the names meant nothing to her—and she now identified the person she’d seen in the car as Stanislas Cordova.

  The Bainville Police Department took her statement and showed her the door.

  Miller’s claim was never investigated further.

  Page 7 of 9

  Trip to Crowthorpe Falls, NY, and The Peak Estate

  S. McGrath

  The Drive up – April 13, 2006 2:14 P.M.

  Obviously, I was due to pay my own visit to The Peak.

  I climbed into my car and made the left turn that was the entrance to 1014 Country Road 112—according to the GPS-accelerating down the unmarked drive.

  It started out scarred with tire ruts and mud, but about six yards in, it flattened into a surprisingly meticulous gravel road. Some sort of caretaker must regularly attend the path; not a stray limb, shrub, or weed marred the way. On more than a few tree trunks, lower, offending branches had been visibly sawed off.

  On my right I passed a small but conspicuous red-and-white sign: Private Drive, No Trespassing. It was a warm, unthreatening spring afternoon—overhead, sunlight drooled through the trees; the day had an idle, drowsy feel.

  I accelerated around a bend. I was deep in the woods now. The foliage overhead was so dense it felt like I was inside a wool sweater: heavy, knotty, and only now and then a tiny gap where you could see through to the blue sky. The air suddenly reeked of gasoline—my car in need of a tune-up, probably—but something else, too: burning.

  I accelerated past a bizarre tree, three voluptuous trunks writhed around each other in pleasure or in pain. They looked pornographic. My God, I asked myself, could it be this easy?

  I only made it a few more yards.

  I rounded a curve, and directly in front of me loomed a gatehouse, seemingly deserted, overrun with ivy. There was no way around it, either in the car or on foot. Beyond the wrought-iron gate, a massive military fence cut through the forest in either direction. I inched the car closer. Two surveillance cameras hung like wasps’ nests at opposite corners of the gate. I rolled down the window, staring up at one. I swore I saw the lens move, that little Cyclops eye focusing in on me.

  “Any chance I could come up for a cup of coffee?”

  My words sounded lame, flat, in the warm, poised afternoon.

  How did he live up there? Was the property his version of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, Elvis’s Graceland, Walt’s Magic Kingdom? Were the rumors about his lunacy all simply part of the myth and he was no dark prince, but simply an old man who hoped to live the remainder of his life in peace and solitude?

  Maybe the truth was something else entirely. Maybe Kate Miller was right; maybe she had seen Cordova in the backseat of the car in the early morning of May 28, 2003. Maybe he was critically injured from an accident up at The Peak, maybe even killed. Kate Miller, the lone witness, was manipulated to leave the scene. Astrid probably did have a cellphone and immediately called someone—a friend or one of Cordova’s children, Theo or Ashley—and in the intervening minutes, they extracted Cordova from the car and drove him away. Is Cordova alive at The Peak? Is he bedridden, unconscious, confined to a wheelchair? It would explain the series of medical deliveries received by Nelson Garcia more than a year later.

  I climbed out of my car, took a photo of the gatehouse, then took off, speeding back down the driveway and out onto Country Road 112, passing

  Page 8 of 9

  Trip to Crowthorpe Falls, NY, and The Peak Estate

  S. McGrath

  The Drive up – April 13, 2006 2:14 P.M.

  Garcia’s trailer and the garbage disposal site. My foot didn’t let up from the gas until I was back in the gridlocked traffic of the FDR in Manhattan.

  Whatever the truth about Cordova, within fifteen horrifying films, he taught us how our eyes and minds perpetually deceive us—that what we know to be certain never is.

  Now we can only hope one day he might return—so we can see, once again, how blind we’ve been.

  Nelson Garcia

  Phone # (518) 555-1493

  Page 9 of 9

  28

  “The number’s been disconnected,” said Nora, hanging up. She’d tried calling the old man, Nelson Garcia, using the phone number in my notes.

  “He’s probably dead,” I said. “When I talked to him he could barely get up off the sofa.”

  Nora said nothing, only picked up the transcript of the anonymous caller, John, squinting as she read through it.

  It was after eight-thirty. I’d just returned from an early dinner down the street at Café Sant Ambroeus with an old friend—Hal Keegan, a photojournalist from Insider I used to work with, though we’d seen little of each other in the past few years. I’d opted not to tell him what I was working on. I trusted Hal, but despite getting caught by security at Briarwood, I hoped to keep my investigation quiet. For all their hard-nosed rationale, journalists were a superstitious bunch. There was an unspoken understanding that when a reporter chased a story, hunches and theories became airborne and other reporters could catch them like a cold. It was usually just a matter of time before your competitors had all the same inklings about a case that you did. I was under no delusions that I was the sole journalist looking into Ashley Cordova’s death. But there was no glory in being the second or third to crack a case. There was only first.

  When I returned home, Nora was in the same place I’d left her, still at work organizing my papers. I’d brought her some pesto linguini, but after saying, “Gosh, thanks, that looks tasty,” she’d barely touched it, and instead continued scouring with complete absorption Beckman’s syllabus for his obsolete Cordova class. I was surprised by her focus. She’d been in my office for twelve hours straight, stopping her reading only to lavish attention on that prehistoric parakeet, Septimus, whose cage she’d set on the bookshelf by the window—“He loves to people-watch,” she’d said.

  Though she’d said nothing specific, I was gathering Nora had been raised by a pack of free-spirited geriatrics at this place she was always peppering her conversations with: Terra Hermosa. She seemed preternaturally wired to the elderly’s barn-animal hours and feeding times. She’d asked what I was doing for dinner at 4:45 P.M.—the legendary hour of senior suppertime—and used some telling McCarthy-era expressions: gracious, jeepers, Holy Moses, and don’t flip your wig.

  “How soon after you went up to Crowthorpe Falls did you receive the anonymous phone call?” Nora asked me, setting aside the transcript.

  “A few weeks later.” I was on the leather couch typing up notes on my laptop, detailing our trip to Briarwood and the Waldorf.

  “It has to mean what you uncovered up there was real.”

  “You mean Kate Miller and Nelson Garcia?”

  She nodded. “It had to be why John called you. Cordova probably got a clear picture of your face from the security camera when you drove up to his gatehouse. And John was a trap.”

  “I tend to agree, but I’ve never had confirmation.”

  “Maybe Cordova was hurt in the car that night. And someone was sick up at The Peak, which was why they were receiving that medical equipment.”

  “I didn’t mention this in my notes,” I said, setting aside my laptop and sitting back against the cushions. “But I always thought Kate Miller’s ID of Cordova a little suspect. Six months after I talked to her, she tried to sell her story to the Enquirer, but they wouldn’t touch it. There could be no corroboration for anything she said, and they didn’t want to get tied up in litigation. Now, if the National Enquirer won’t touch you because you’re dirty, that means you’re really filthy.” I downed the rest of my scotch. “Anyway, Miller could never explain how she knew what Cordova looked like. Because no one really knows. The Rolling Stone pictures of him appear to be doctored. The infamous close-up of h
im on the set of The Legacy isn’t believed to be him, but a stand-in.”

  “Maybe he’s disfigured like the Phantom of the Opera,” Nora whispered excitedly. “Or maybe it was a dead body Kate Miller saw in the car.”

  “We can’t conclude we’re dealing with homicidal maniacs without proof.”

  She didn’t appear to hear me. “The Cordovas might have some kind of mystical powers. There was what the Waldorf maid told us yesterday. Even Morgan Devold mentioned it—that Ashley somehow knew he was watching her. For a second, he thought he was watching something already dead. In your notes Garcia says that no one will talk about The Peak.” She picked up Ashley’s CD case, staring at the cover. “Even the music she recorded. It means ‘The Devil in the Night.’ ”

  “You’d be shocked how many people go for the paranormal when they can’t explain something,” I said, striding to the bookshelf to refill my glass. “They reach for it like reaching for the ketchup. I, on the other hand, and hence, you, as my employee, will be dealing with cold, hard facts.”

  Even though I was firmly not a believer in the paranormal, there was still the nagging remembrance of how Ashley had appeared the night at the reservoir. I hadn’t told Nora about it. I hadn’t told anyone. The truth was, I was no longer certain of what I’d seen. It was as if that night could be separated from all the others as a night without logic, a night of fantasy and strangeness, born of my own lonely delusions, a night that had no place in the real world.

  Nora had picked up the 8 × 10 envelope containing Ashley’s police file—the one given to me by Sharon Falcone—and pulled out the stack of papers, loosening a page from the front and handing it to me.

  It was one of the colored reproductions of photos taken of Ashley’s body when she’d arrived at the medical examiner’s office. There were a variety of shots—clothed and unclothed, though Sharon was correct in mentioning that any pictures that would be particularly graphic, full-frontal and rear shots, were missing from the file. This shot featured the upper portion of Ashley’s face, her gray eyes blotched red and yellow, staring out, dulled.

  “Look at her left eye,” said Nora.

  Within the iris there was a black freckle.

  “This? It’s concentrated pigmentation in the iris. It’s very common.”

  “Not like that. It’s across from the pupil, perfectly horizontal. It has to be what Guadalupe talked about. Her mark. I can’t remember the Spanish word Hopper said, but it meant evil’s footprint.”

  “Huella del mal.”

  “And then there’s what happened to Cordova’s first wife.”

  “Genevra.”

  Nora nodded.

  “I already looked into it.” I handed her back the photo and returned to the couch. “So did the police and about a hundred other reporters and gossip columnists at the time. She’d learned to swim only two months before. Her family—a bunch of snobs from Milan who loathed Cordova, considered him a working-class heathen—even they conceded it had to be a terrible accident. Genevra had a history of being impulsive. She announced to her son’s nanny she was going down to the lake to practice her swimming. She was asked to wait, but refused. It was an overcast day and it began to rain, which soon became a thunderstorm. She must have become disoriented. Couldn’t tell the direction of the shoreline. After a search, she was found tangled in the reeds at the bottom of the lake. Cordova was busy with postproduction for Treblinka and had a dozen alibis, his entire crew and his producer from Warner Brothers who spoke to the press, Artie Cohen. Five months later, he gave his final interview to Rolling Stone. He never appeared in public ever again.”

  Nora didn’t appear to be listening. She was biting her lip, vigorously digging through the papers again. She pulled an article from my old notes, printed from microfiche, handing it to me.

  I recognized it as something I’d printed out years ago from a library archive. It was dated July 7, 1977, the Albany Times Union.

  “Even if it was an accident,” said Nora, “for your first wife and your daughter to die by accident—that’s not a good track record in terms of karma. But what really stood out was what her friend said.”

  “That she was melancholy.”

  She nodded. “Genevra might have committed suicide. If Ashley did, too, what does that say about Cordova?”

  “He’s toxic. On the other hand, for a mother to commit suicide, orphaning her infant child, goes against the primal impulses of motherhood.”

  “It was from being around him.” Nora leaned forward, staring dubiously down at the stacks of papers. “I read your other notes, but you didn’t get too far in terms of anyone talking about him.”

  “Thanks for the memo.”

  “What about Matilde? Ever hear anything about it?”

  “Cordova’s supposed final film?” I was surprised she knew the title. Only diehard Cordovites knew about Matilde.

  She nodded.

  “Apart from a few unsubstantiated rumors that the script was a thousand pages and had driven him mad, no,” I said.

  She nibbled her thumbnail, sighing. “We need a new direction.”

  “I did have something promising. But I haven’t been able to crack it.”

  “What?”

  “The Blackboards. The invisible Cordovite network on the onion. A community for his hardcore fans.”

  “What’s the onion?”

  “The hidden Internet. You download a plug-in for Firefox to access it. I managed to get the URL from a professor friend, tried logging on. It kicks me out every time.” I carried my laptop over to the desk to show her, attempting to log on to the site, but again I was thrown back to the welcome to the blackboards page.

  “Well, that’s your problem,” Nora said. “The user name you’re trying is Sire of Fogwatt. We should try something Cordova-related.”

  Nora unplugged my wireless router in the corner, waited for five minutes, explaining that this would give me a new IP address, which wouldn’t be recognized and barred by the site. When she plugged it in again, she made it to THE CLIMB in page, where she typed in new registration details.

  “For a user name, let’s try Gaetana Stevens 2991.”

  Gaetana Stevens was the name of Ashley Cordova’s character in To Breathe with Kings (1996), Cordova’s last film, one of the black tapes.

  I was amazed. Few people had actually seen it. I’d only managed to do so at Beckman’s, five years ago. He had one bootleg copy, which he’d refused to loan me because there was an impenetrable lock on the DVD prohibiting any type of copying or downloading—and Beckman suspected, probably rightly, that I’d never give it back.

  To watch the film once was to be lost in so many graphic, edge-of-your-seat scenes that when it was over, I remembered feeling vaguely astounded that I’d returned to the real world. Something about the film’s darkness made me wonder if I would—as if in witnessing such things I was irrevocably breaking myself in (or just breaking myself), arriving at an understanding about humanity so dark, so deep down inside my own soul, I could never go back to the way I was before. This anxiety, of course, subsided as ordinary life took over. And even now that terrifying tale in my memory was little more than a collection of darkly lit, chilling images, punctuated by the presence of Ashley Cordova, whom I remembered as a beautiful, gray-eyed child who wore her hair in a red-ribboned ponytail.

  She spends the film in silence, running in and out of drawing rooms, hiding under stairs and in maids’ closets, peering through keyholes and wrought-iron gates, blasting her bicycle fast across the lawn, leaving lurid slash marks on the grass.

  The film’s plot was straightforward—as most of Cordova’s plots were, employing the general storyline of the odyssey or hunt. It was adapted from an obscure Dutch novel, Ademen Met Koningen, by August Hauer. The wealthy, corrupt Stevens family—a gorgeous clan of dissipated Caligulas living in an unnamed European country—is calculatingly butchered, one by one, confounding police. Though the inspector assigned to the case eventually arrests a
tramp who did landscaping work for the family, the movie’s final hairpin twist reveals the killer is actually the family’s youngest child, the mute, watchful eight-year-old Gaetana—played, of course, by Ashley. By the time the inspector pieces this grisly truth together, it’s too late. The little girl has vanished. The last scene shows her strolling along the side of the road, where she’s picked up by a traveling family in a station wagon. In true Cordova style, it’s left ambiguous if this family is destined to meet the same horrific fate as her own, or if she simply made herself an orphan so she could be raised by a happier family.

  “How did you manage to see To Breathe with Kings?” I asked Nora.

  She’d finished registering on the Blackboards, pressed I’m ready, and we were waiting to see if the page would successfully load.

  “Moe Gulazar,” she said.

  “Who’s Moe Gulazar?”

  “My best friend.” She blew a strand of hair off her face. “He was an old horse trainer who lived down the hall. He loved everything about Cordova. Had black-market connections, too, so one day he traded all his horse trophies for a box of the black tapes. He held secret midnight screenings in the Activity Room all the time.” She looked at me. “Moe was a triple threat.”

  “He could sing, dance, and act?”

  She shook her head. “He could speak Armenian, saddle break a stallion, and pass for a female in drag.”

  “That is extremely threatening.”

  “When he got dressed up, even you’d think he was female.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “He used to say when he was gone, it’d be the end of a rare species. ‘There’ll never be another of me, not in captivity or the wild.’ That was his anthem.”

  “Where’s old Moe now?”

  “Heaven.”

  She said it with such wistful certainty, it might as well have been Bora Bora.

  “He died of throat cancer when I was fifteen. He chain-smoked cigarillos since he was twelve because he grew up at the racetrack. But he bequeathed me his whole wardrobe, so he’s always with me.”