Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

  I let myself into my apartment, noticing music coming from the living room. I threw my coat on the chair, striding into the living room, finding Nora curled up in the leather club chair, Septimus the parakeet perched on her knee. Hopper was slouched on the couch, looking over some papers. The three reversing candles Cleo had given us at Enchantments were burning on the coffee table in front of him beside a pizza box.

  “You’re home!” Nora announced brightly.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “You both lost your cellphones and gale-force winds uprooted every landline on the East Coast.”

  “We’re sorry. But we had a good reason to go MIA.” She looked meaningfully at Hopper and he smiled, some shared excitement between them.

  He held out the papers, and I took them. It was fifteen pages, about two thousand names. Many were LLCs or bizarre aliases like Marquis de Roche.

  “It’s the Oubliette membership list,” said Nora excitedly.

  “I can see that. How did you get this?”

  “It wasn’t easy,” said Hopper proudly, stretching his hands behind his head. “The place turned into the Gaza Strip after you took off. But I was in the waiter uniform, so no one glanced at me twice. I talked to one of the girls, ’least I think she was a girl. She told me how to get down to the basement where the offices are. I found one empty, got on the computer, searched the hard drive for membership. Some Excel files came up. I logged on to my email, sent the files to myself, cleared the cache, and got out. Only they’d apparently reviewed the security footage and saw me saving your ass, so, two guards chased me outside onto a neighbor’s property. I had to break into the house, called Nora to come pick me up. I managed to describe to her where the hell I was.”

  “It was a real getaway,” Nora chimed in. “Tires screeching. I felt like Thelma and Louise.”

  “I thought you were Bernstein,” I said.

  “Nora pulled up, headlights off,” Hopper went on. “I climbed out a window, booked it across the yard, and we got the fuck out of there.”

  “What time was this?”

  Nora glanced at Hopper uncertainly. “Four?”

  “I waited at the diner until nine. What’d you do for five hours?”

  “We went back to Oubliette because I wanted a look,” she blurted. “We hid next door, hoping to talk to some of the guests when they left, ask them if they recognized Ashley, but we couldn’t approach any of them. They all looked exhausted, shuttled away by housekeepers in expensive cars and limos. One guy in a wheelchair looked dead. There were too many guards, anyway.”

  “You didn’t think to call? You abandoned the boss, El Jefe, in the field without a single communication?”

  Hopper stood up, yawning and stretching. “I’ll see you guys bright and early tomorrow.”

  “Bright and early?” I asked.

  Nora nodded. “Tomorrow we’re posting missing-person signs for Ashley around 83 Henry Street.” She handed me a flier with the scanned photo of Ashley that Nora had found at Briarwood.

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? SERIOUS REWARD OFFERED FOR REAL INFORMATION. PLEASE CALL ASAP.

  “We’ll weed through the phony reports by asking what color coat Ashley was wearing.”

  Hopper took off, and I headed into my office, leaving Nora scribbling in her notebook. Hopper obtaining a copy of the guest list was stellar investigative work, much better than anything I’d come up with lately—not that I was going to admit this. I spent the next few hours cross-referencing the Oubliette guest list with a list of Cordova’s actors, anyone associated with his world, in the off chance one name appeared on both—to no avail. But it did rule out one possibility: The person Ashley had gone to Oubliette to find—this Spider—was probably not associated with her father’s work. Was he a friend of hers? A stranger? Someone connected to her death?

  I switched out the lamp, rubbing my eyes, heading back down the hall.

  The apartment was quiet. Nora had blown out the reversing candles before going upstairs, but oddly enough, I noticed the wicks were still smoldering orange, as if they refused to be extinguished, three orange pinpricks in the dark. I grabbed them and dumped them in the kitchen sink, running the tap until I was certain they were out, then headed to bed.

  59

  “Hopper promised to be here,” said Nora, squinting down the empty block. “Posting the fliers was his idea.”

  It was 9:00 A.M., and we were back at 83 Henry Street armed with a hundred missing-person fliers. We decided to split up: I covered the blocks west of the Manhattan Bridge up to East Broadway and the Bowery, while Nora handled everything east of the bridge.

  The neighborhood was predominantly Chinese, so I doubted our English-language flier would get us very far. Posting leaflets, as if Ashley were a lost cat, wasn’t exactly my style, but it couldn’t hurt. With Theo Cordova following us, I could no longer hope to keep the investigation quiet. So why not go in the opposite direction, brazenly carpet-bombing the neighborhood with Ashley’s picture, and see where that got us?

  I taped the flier to lampposts and phone booths, mailboxes, Learning Annex stands. A Chinese woman on a bike, orange shopping bags swinging from the handlebars, braked to see what I was doing, scowled at me, and rode on. Quite a few men in bodegas refused to let me post the missing poster after they saw what it was, shaking their heads, shooing me out of the store.

  When this happened for the sixth time, I wondered if they were worried a missing Caucasian woman would bring them bad luck—or if they’d seen something in Ashley’s photo they didn’t like. Or perhaps there was an even more disturbing reason: I looked like I worked for Immigration and Customs.

  It was the opposite reaction at Hao Hair Salon on Madison Street. The teenage receptionist, the female manager, two stylists, and a client (pink robe, hair in tinfoil) surrounded me, smiling, and speaking in excited Cantonese. They took great care taping Ashley’s flier to the window beside a faded poster for eyebrow threading, and when I left, they waved as if I were a beloved relative they wouldn’t see for forty years.

  And yet the longer I walked the streets, past Chinese restaurants, gift stores, unisex hair salons, orange and white koi drifting in pet store windows, I had the sense I was being watched. But every time I checked behind me—once, even popping into a Laundromat and looking out—I noticed nothing suspicious.

  I wondered if the feeling came from the strength of Ashley’s stare, so alive and insistent, gazing out from the white page. All “missing” fliers were unsettling, the lost person smiling out from some candid photo taken at a birthday party or happy hour, so ignorant of their fate. Yet Ashley, alone on that picnic table at Briarwood, had a gravity, an understanding even, as if she knew what awaited her within weeks.

  As I walked on, however, I realized I was absolutely right. I was being watched—by the entire neighborhood. Hopper’s idea to post these fliers wasn’t so simplistic, because if I stood out this much, attracted this many hostile looks and slow drive-bys—once I looked up at an old walk-up and saw an old woman had pulled aside her lace curtains to stare down at me—Ashley was noticed, too.

  They all must have seen her, watched her, wondered about her as she wandered their sidewalks in her red coat.

  Now all we needed was one of them having the courage to call.

  60

  “Tom-may !” the guy at the front desk bellowed in a thick New York accent, turning toward the dozen tattoo artists at work behind him. “These guys got a question for ya!”

  Rising Dragon was a fluorescent, spacious tattoo studio on the second floor of a walk-up on West Fourteenth Street. It was cheerful inside, without the aggressive Easy Rider feel of some of the other tattoo parlors in the city, where the handle-jawed thugs wielding the tattoo guns looked like ink was just a side job, their main work, contract killings.

  The light was clean and clinical, walls decorated with tracing paper and framed stencils of full-body tattoos, skulls, Bu
ddhas and warriors, Maori tribal patterns, shelves cluttered with bottles of colored ink and iodine. Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” blared loudly from speakers.

  “Ask ’em if they’re cops!” The answering male voice sliced through the wasp-buzz of the tattoo guns. Yet every artist remained bent over a client.

  I had no clue who’d just spoken.

  “Are ya cops?” the guy asked us, wincing at the awful thought.

  He had peroxide white-blond hair and the permanently stunned face of a Malibu surfer facing an unexpectedly large wave. Wolf tattoos snarled all over his biceps.

  “No,” I said.

  The kid took this in a moment before turning around again.

  “They’re not cops!”

  “Tell ’em to come over!”

  The kid, bobbing his head to the music, pointed to an alcove in the farthest corner.

  “You can go talk to Tommy, the manager.”

  Tommy appeared to be a large middle-aged man wearing black latex gloves. He was bent over, working intently, though at this distance it looked like he was doing an autopsy on a sperm whale. His client was facedown on a black massage table and was at least three hundred pounds, bald, naked, whiter than a slice of Sunbeam. As I stepped through the shop toward them, Nora right behind me, I saw the tattoo in progress was a massive lotus tree, a gnarled trunk growing out of the guy’s ass crack, up his spine, flourishing all over his back, twisted branches reaching around his chest, a couple of birds—not yet colored in—alighting on his forearms.

  “What can I do you for?” asked Tommy, without looking up.

  “Do you recognize her?” I asked, holding out the picture of Ashley. “She came into your shop a few weeks ago.”

  He ignored me until he’d finished coloring in a pink lotus blossom.

  Grown men with baby names—Bobby, Johnny, Freddy—there had to be some unspoken law that they looked meaner than the rest of us. He had a wide, thuggish face, salt-and-pepper hair. Unidentifiable tattoos peeked out of the neck and sleeves of his skintight silver polyester shirt. He had an easy confidence, as if he were used to people filing through the store to get to his station in the very back—tattoo parlor equivalent of the chairman’s corner office in the sky—asking for his take on things as we were now.

  He dully looked us over, then the photo, and bent back over his client.

  “Sure. She came in a few weeks back.”

  “What color coat was she wearing?” Nora asked.

  “Red coat. Black on the sleeves.”

  Nora shot me an astonished look.

  “Did she come in for a tattoo?” I asked him.

  “Nah. She wanted her after picture.”

  “Her after picture? What’s that?”

  Tommy stopped working to stare up at me. “After we finish your tat, we take your fucking picture.” He gestured toward a far wall, covered with photographs of smiling people showing off with their completed tattoos.

  “She had a tight twofold of a kirin on her ankle,” he went on, resuming his work. “She wanted to know if we still had the after.”

  “A twofold?”

  “One tat on two people. When they’re apart it don’t look like much. But together, when their arms are around each other, hand in hand, lovesick and shit, it turns into somethin’. A very Jerry Maguire ‘you complete me’ kinda thing.”

  Of course—Ashley’s tattoo on her ankle featured only half of the animal, the head and front legs.

  “You said her tattoo was of a kirin?” I asked.

  “It’s popular with Jap tat fanatics. A mystical beast.”

  “Did she say who had her other half?” asked Nora.

  “Nah. But it’s big with lovers, newlyweds, prom dates, couples ’Bout to be split up, like one’s gotta serve time. I did one last week. Couple in their seventies. They drove up here from Fort Myers for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. I got the after picture somewhere.”

  Turning off the ink gun, he spun in his swivel chair to search the messy desk behind him, the black latex gloves making his every gesture faintly dramatic, like a cat burglar or mime. He found the photo, handed it to Nora, turning on the gun again, but bent over to inspect his client’s face under the massage table.

  “How you doin’ down there, Mel?”

  “I’m cool.”

  Mel didn’t look cool. He was drooling on the floor.

  Nora handed me the photograph. It featured two grinning retirees, their arms around each other, wearing matching yellow polo shirts and khaki Bermuda shorts. On the top of her right foot and his left was a tattoo of a red heart with wings. With their feet side by side, it was whole.

  It was a bit schmaltzy for my taste, but Nora was enraptured.

  “I tell all my clients who come in wanting a twofold,” Tommy went on cheerfully, “be a thousand percent sure. Can’t tell you how many times girls come in cryin’ a month later, want the work redone ’cuz her true love ran off with her best friend. At first I thought that’s what your friend wanted.” He nodded at the photo of Ashley. “But she just wanted the picture.”

  “Did she say why?” I asked.

  “Nah.”

  “And did she get it?” asked Nora.

  “Uh-uh. She had the art done a while ago, 2004, when I was at my old location at the Chelsea Hotel. With the move, things got lost. I let her go through our files in the back. She stayed a coupla hours, lookin’. But she couldn’t find it.”

  “We have a receipt stating that she bought something,” I said, removing it from my coat pocket.

  He didn’t bother looking up.

  “There was a young soldier in here on leave. Wanted a portrait of his wife over his heart. She was also a soldier and got killed in Afghanistan. He was a mess, but what he wanted was a real job. Didn’t have the cash. We decided on just her name. But your friend took care of it. Didn’t make a big deal.”

  Nora looked at me, astonished.

  “Did she behave strangely?” I asked him.

  “Apart from not talking much? Not really.”

  “Did she look unwell?”

  “A little pale?”

  “Do you know who did her tattoo back in 2004?”

  “One a’ my old employees. Larry. I could tell from the work.”

  “And where can we find Larry?”

  Tommy chuckled. “Somewhere between heaven and hell.”

  He wiped the finished blossom with a tissue, closely inspecting it, and moved on to the next.

  “One minute Larry was slingin’ ink? Next minute he’s passed out on my floor, blood shooting outta his nose like the Bellagio fountains in Vegas. Died in the ambulance. Aneurysm.” He frowned, bending to survey his client. “Sure you’re all right, Mel? You’re a cadaver down there.”

  “I’m listening,” said Mel.

  Tommy frowned, tilting his head up at us and sighing.

  “So, this is the thing. I go home the night after your friend came in. And I think back to what happened to Larry coupla weeks before he died. This is back, like, summer of ’04. Now for you to understand what I’m about to tell you, you got to understand Larry. He was a big motherfucker. Bigger than a fridge, bigger than a Barcalounger, I swear on a stack of Bibles.”

  “Bigger than me?” asked Mel in a muffled voice from under the table.

  “Not bigger than you. But close.” Tommy resumed his work. “He was a helluva artist. Studied in Yokohama under a Horiyoshi. Guy could pound skin, grind with the best of ’em. He could do a mean Tebori, Horimono, Irezumi, you name it, which was how come I had him in the shop. Because he was an asshole. I’m not sayin’ nothin’ I wouldn’t say to his face. He embraced his assholeness. Hated kids. Called ’em larvae. Had four girlfriends. None of them knew about each other. His whole life was like that. Buncha lies and dodges, unreturned calls and let-downs. So, one day I come in and the shop’s quiet. All the lights are off and Larry’s just sitting in the dark by himself like he felt sick or somethin’. I ask him what’s the matter and he’
s all down and shit, tells me his life’s crap. He’s a coward, he tells me. He’s a cheat. Says he’s made so many mistakes. He says he’s going to change his priorities. First time I ever heard him use a four-syllable word. So I humor him. Ask what the hell brought on his salvation. He said he’d just done a Japanese twofold for two teenagers. They’d just left the shop ten minutes before. He said they were in love and it was like an electric current. Like that lightning that comes out of the blue when there’s not even a storm going on, just a crazy crack in the sky. With something like that right in front of you, you can’t help but feel there’s new possibilities out there. He started goin’ on about life and love and promise.” Tommy glanced up at us, grimacing. “Suddenly, he was Shakespeare. I’m not payin’ attention. I’m pissed as hell ’cuz he did an illegal tattoo on two kids, which means I could get my license revoked. And anyways this is Larry we’re talking about. He’ll go back to being an asshole in a few days, guaranteed. A week later I come into the shop.” Tommy shook his head, rubbing his chin. “And there’s a kid in here. I don’t allow kids in here, but there’s a kid in here. She’s real weird-lookin’. Big. Arms and legs so long they got tangled when she walked. Braces. Frizzy hair out to here.” He gestured a foot off his head. “Freckles everywhere like something exploded on her. I ask who she belongs to. She’s Larry’s. Turns out she’s the daughter he skipped out on a coupla years before when he was slingin’ ink in Kentucky. He tells me he’s gonna be a real dad now.” Grinning, Tommy shook his head, returning to the tattoo. “A real dad. It was a coupla days before he croaked. Who knows if those two teenagers actually turned him around. I like to think they did. I like to think it was forever. Why not? Sometimes people can surprise the hell outta you. Sometimes they can tear your heart out and turn it to putty, can’t they?”