Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

I moved up the steps and rang the doorbell.

  There was no response.

  I rang it a second time, then a third. Not that I expected her to open the door—it was to alert Hopper. It would signal to him to get the hell out. I jogged swiftly down the steps, heading toward Park. At the corner, I crossed north, finding Nora where I’d left her.

  “He’s still inside,” she whispered. “I texted him but haven’t heard back—”

  “You’re not going to believe this. That was Inez Gallo. Cordova’s assistant for years. The Cordovas must own this place.”

  It was stupefying—not just that Hopper had broken in, but he was now trapped inside a personal residence of Cordova’s.

  Nora, amazed, turned back to the townhouse, where a bright light had just illuminated the second floor, revealing a dark, wood-paneled library, the shelves lined with books.

  “Now he has no way out,” Nora whispered. “Should we call nine-one-one?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But we have to do something. She might shoot him—”

  “We need to give him time to look around.”

  “How long?”

  Distant wails of sirens answered her question. They grew louder, and suddenly three police cars came barreling down the street, screeching to a halt in front of the townhouse. Four policemen jumped out, hastening up the steps, Gallo opening the door, and they disappeared inside. Two cops remained on the front steps, staring suspiciously down the street.

  “Time to get the hell out of here,” I said.

  “But we have to make sure he’s okay—”

  “We’ll be more help to him out of jail.”

  But suddenly there were loud voices, and the cops reemerged, leading Hopper down the steps.

  He was handcuffed, and his gray coat had been confiscated, but otherwise, in his faded blue T-shirt and jeans, he looked rather undaunted by the proceedings. His eyes purposefully avoided our direction, though I swore I caught a faint smile on his face as they shoved his head down and pushed him roughly into the backseat.

  69

  At home, I called an old friend, a criminal defense attorney named Leonard Blumenstein. I’d never needed him—not yet, anyway—but he’d pulled plenty of people I knew out of rocks and hard places. Apparently, you could call Blumenstein a couple of hours after killing your wife and, in a voice silkier than an Hermès scarf, he’d assure you it was all going to be fine. Then he’d give you a directive, as if the issue were simply that you’d lost your passport.

  I left a message with his answering service: Someone assisting me with some research had gotten carried away and broken into a private residence—though he’d been unarmed and stole nothing—and was now in police custody.

  The woman assured me she’d have Blumenstein call me back.

  Nora and I then moved into my office to research Inez Gallo.

  “What do we know about her?” asked Nora, curling up on the couch beside the box of research.

  “Not much,” I said. “She was supposedly Cordova’s longtime assistant.”

  After digging through the papers, I pulled out Inez Gallo’s wedding photo. The picture always turned up whenever her name appeared in the press. In it, she looked like every other beaming newlywed, which only made it tragic. Years later, she’d abandon this very husband and her two children to go work alongside Cordova.

  “We also found that page on the Blackboards,” noted Nora. “The one that contends she and Cordova are the same person. They both have a tiny wheel tattoo on their left hands. Are you sure it was a woman?”

  “Positive.”

  We dug around YouTube and found the grainy film clip of Gallo’s infamous acceptance speech on behalf of Cordova at the 1980 Oscars.

  It began with co-presenters Goldie Hawn and Steven Spielberg announcing, “And the Oscar goes to … Stanislas Cordova, for Thumbscrew.”

  The audience gasped because it was a startling upset. Best Director was believed to be a shoo-in for Robert Benton, the director of Kramer vs. Kramer. In fact, Benton was so convinced he was going to win, he actually got out of his seat, making his way to the stage before his wife jumped up and physically restrained him. There was a long, confused pause during which the audience, disconcerted, was whispering, looking around, wondering if it was a mistake, if Cordova had actually showed.

  Then the cameras focused on Inez Gallo, who was quickly making her way down the narrow side aisle of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. They had her sitting in the back, away from the real stars, Jack Lemmon, Bo Derek, Sally Field, and Dudley Moore.

  Gallo was black-haired and heavyset, with strong, brawny features—undeniably similar to Cordova’s in his early photographs—dressed in a black T-shirt and combat boots. Later, people in the audience would profess to thinking she was crashing the event like the 1974 streaker, Robert Opel, who jogged across the stage naked when David Niven was about to introduce Elizabeth Taylor—or when Marlon Brando, at the 1973 ceremony, sent Sacheen Littlefeather to turn down his Best Actor award for The Godfather on behalf of exploited Native Americans. Awkwardly, Inez Gallo took the Oscar from Spielberg and said into the mike, two feet too tall for her: “This is a summons to those watching to break out of your locked room, real or imagined.”

  She then ran offstage, and the network cut to a commercial.

  We watched the speech a few times, then logged on to the Blackboards. Most of the discussion of Inez Gallo concerned rumors about the exact nature of her relationship to Cordova, that she was his sister, his puppeteer and Svengali, his female doppelgänger, an obsessive caretaker and enabler who catered to Cordova’s every need and desire, a custodian who cleaned up his every mess.

  Combing through one rumor after the next, Nora’s eyes were closing, so she headed to bed, though I stayed up a few more hours reading.

  Maybe it was simply my shock at encountering her, but there had been something unaccountably bizarre about Gallo’s wide chiseled face, the hard features, the embittered voice.

  Maybe the key to all of this was exactly what Cleo had said at Enchantments: Dark magic passed from generation to generation.

  I searched on the Blackboards for mention of it, witchcraft and Inez Gallo, or another reference to the wheel tattoo that both she and Cordova supposedly had on their left hands, but other than a brief mention of her being from Puebla, Mexico, and her selfless devotion to the director being the stuff of legend (“There’s nothing Gallo won’t do to protect him,” claimed one poster)—there was nothing else there.

  70

  “Woodward?”

  I cracked open an eye. The clock read 4:21 A.M.

  “Are you asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you talk?”

  “Sure.”

  Nora opened the door, slipping through the darkness. She was again wearing that ghostly nightgown, a pale blur perched on the end of my bed.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, propping myself up on the pillows.

  She said nothing. She seemed nervous. She had a way of being quite talkative, then suddenly growing silent and still, so you studied her face like some hard blue desert sky, waiting for some sign of life, however distant, a hawk, an insect.

  “You’re going to have to give me more to go on,” I said, after a moment. “I’m a guy. I’m illiterate when it comes to reading between lines.”

  “Well …” She sighed, as if it were the end of the conversation rather than the beginning. This meant, because she was a woman, she’d probably already had this discussion umpteen times in her head.

  “Is it about Hopper?” I asked. “Are you worried about him spending the night in jail? Because he’ll be fine.”

  The bed jerked.

  “Did you nod? It’s too dark to see in here.”

  “It’s nothing to do with him. It’s something I said that I feel bad about.”

  “What?”

  “That I wouldn’t sleep with you.”

  “No need to clarify it. It goes unsaid. A
nd it’s nothing I haven’t heard before.” I did not know where Bernstein was going with this, but I had a bad feeling. It was crucial to get the girl out of my room, back to her own bed, stat. Adding sex to investigative reporting was as inspired an idea as Ford unveiling the Pinto—what was meant to be fun, sexy, and practical was actually a nightmare, causing great personal injury on all sides.

  “You’re handsome,” Nora said. “If you were at Terra Hermosa, the ladies would die.”

  “Isn’t that what they do anyway?”

  “I didn’t want any professional lines to be crossed.”

  “You were right. I can’t tell you how many women I’ve crossed all kinds of lines with and afterward felt terrible.”

  “Really?”

  “Like I’d just been given a prognosis of a few weeks left to live.”

  She giggled.

  “Started my very first time when I was fifteen. Lorna Doonberry. Talk about lines; she played bridge with my mother. I got carried away. She fell into a shower curtain. You know that little soap holder in bathtubs?”

  “Sure.”

  “Her face hit it. She lost two teeth. Blood everywhere. Lorna went from a perfectly attractive fortysomething divorcée to a lead character in Night of the Living Dead.”

  “My first time was Tim Bailey.”

  I waited for more information. None came.

  “Don’t tell me he was a resident at Terra Hermosa.”

  “Oh, no. He worked at Premier Pool Services. He cleaned the pool every Friday.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Sixteen. But an old sixteen. He had a wife and two kids. I felt awful about it. It’s a terrible thing, to lie. It’s a field you keep seeding and watering and plowing, but nothing will ever grow on it.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, fidgeting her shoulders. “I tried to end it a couple times, but Tim and I would go out behind the kitchen when everyone was at Wine and Cheese, and he’d dance with me to the country music coming through the kitchen window. He was a good dancer. But he was sad. He dreamed of just taking off and starting over, pretending his life never happened in the first place.”

  “Did he?”

  “Don’t know. Can I tell you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “You won’t make a big deal out of it?”

  “I promise.”

  “When I first got to New York at Port Authority it was three in the morning. Septimus got stolen.”

  She paused, clasping her hands between her knees.

  “One of the people on the bus did it. I knew who it was. He got on at Daytona Beach, and he sat behind me and Septimus the whole way. He smelled like alcohol, and he tried hard to make conversation during the ride, but I just put on my headphones and pretended to be asleep. Something was wrong with him. Mentally, you know? But when we got to Port Authority I let my guard down when we were all getting off. This lady needed help getting one of her kids into a stroller. I helped her, then went to the underneath part to get my bag, and when I went back to the curb Septimus wasn’t there. His cage was gone. I went crazy. I told the driver, and he told me to report it to the main office, but all I could think was that I was going to die. I was going to die without Septimus. I couldn’t think. By then all the other passengers had left. I exited the lot into the part where all the shops are and it was quiet. The next thing I knew, that same man was walking behind me. He whispered he had my bird. He said he wanted to give him back. All I had to do was give him a blowjob in the bathroom.”

  I stared at her. I felt as if the wind had been kicked out of me, so sudden was this confession. I was careful not to do anything at all, not even to move.

  “I said I didn’t believe him, so he brought me behind a Villa Pizza and into the women’s bathroom. Septimus’s cage was there on the floor, but it was empty. And then I saw that the man had stuck him in one of those silver containers in the stalls. You know, where you throw stuff away? He was fluttering around in there, going crazy. Because he hates the dark. Always has. You’re supposed to put a sheet over the cage to calm a bird, but Septimus doesn’t like it. He has to see. The man said all I had to do was that and he’d let him go. I got into the stall with him. There was actually a lady getting dressed in the back, but she didn’t say anything when I called out to her. He unzipped his pants and leaned back with his fist clamped hard on the lid of the silver thing. So I did it. I thought of trying to get Septimus out, biting the man, but there wasn’t the chance. When I stopped, the man punched me in the face. He kept calling me Nancy over and over. Nancy. Nancy. When it was done, he smiled and took out Septimus, holding him really tight in his fist, squeezing him like toothpaste. I screamed and screamed, and when I couldn’t take it anymore he laughed and threw him out of the stall. I didn’t know where he was at first. But then I found him on the floor under the radiator. I got his cage and my bag, and I ran as fast as I could. The place was deserted with closed-up shops, only a few people staring at nothing like a bunch of ghosts. I took the escalator up to the street. I went over to the taxi stand, climbed in, and I asked the driver to take me to the center of everything. Madonna did it, when she first came to New York. She asked the cabdriver to take her to the center of everything.”

  She looked over at me as if asking a question.

  “He didn’t know where that was. I said Times Square. He took me right there. There were people everywhere, lights like it was the middle of the afternoon. And I knew I was going to be fine. Because I was right where I was supposed to be. I’d spent my whole life feeling like I was waiting to be someplace else. For the first time, I didn’t.” Nora turned to me, her hands clasped over her knees. “I never told anybody.”

  “I’m glad you told me,” I said.

  It took a moment to hear it all; the story seemed like a toxic vapor wafting through the room that needed time to dissolve. I felt at once sick to my stomach and an overwhelming need to make sure she was all right, to extract the memory of such a thing from her head. It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.

  “You didn’t want to go to the police?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t want to waste another minute on it. My life was meant to begin. The bad things that happen to you don’t have to mean anything at all. And anyway, he’ll answer to God for what he did.”

  She announced this with great certainty. For a girl with nothing to her name but a parakeet, to have such unwavering belief in the reckoning of evil in the world—a belief I could never bring myself to have, having seen, time and time again, depravity go unchecked—it awed me, and it was some time before I could bring myself to speak.

  Outside, a car cruised down Perry Street, and the night’s stillness made it sound drowsy and relaxed; it might have been a rowboat wafting by.

  “You are a magnificent and powerful person,” I said.

  I hadn’t intended to say that, exactly—it’d never been my strong suit, whipping out the right words to mend that ever-present wound in a woman’s heart—but it made Nora smile. She slipped toward me, mattress creaking, kissed me on the cheek, and hopped off the bed, a blurred blueish figure floating through the dark.

  “I’m a fan,” I added. “And that’s an unconditional lifetime warranty. I’m like Victorinox luggage and Darn Tough socks.”

  She laughed sleepily, slipping out of the room. “Night, Woodward,” she whispered over her shoulder. “Thanks for listening.”

  I don’t know how long I sat there, staring into the darkness, the hardened shadows thawing as the minutes passed, the only sounds night-shivers of the city outside. After a while, when I was half asleep, her presence lingered as if some wild creature had been inside my room, a fawn or iridescent bird, or maybe a kirin.

  71

  “He was held overnight in the Tombs,” Blumenstein informed me over the phone. “I sent a junior associate downtown to get him out. They d
ropped burglary in the second degree, but he’s facing criminal trespass. Bail will be around five thousand dollars.”

  “Why so high?” I asked, wedging the phone against my ear as I pulled my coat out of the closet and pulled it on.

  “He has three priors. Assault of a police officer in Buford, Georgia. Petty theft in Fritz Creek, Alaska.”

  “Alaska?”

  “And two years ago. Possession of a controlled substance for the intent of sale. This was in Los Angeles.”

  “What was the substance?”

  “Marijuana and MDMA. He served two months, did a hundred hours community service.”

  I told Blumenstein I’d cover the bail, then, hanging up, quickly relayed the conversation to Nora as we prepared to leave for the meeting with Olivia Endicott. I’d made Nora an omelet this morning, but as soon as she saw it, she announced she wasn’t hungry, her face red. I chalked this up to that bizarre black box of feminine behavior that defied explanation, until I realized—cursing my stupidity—it was because of what she’d told me last night. She didn’t want me to treat her with kid gloves, didn’t want to be handled like some fragile thing with a crack through it. So I brutally chucked out the omelet and announced that Moe Gulazar’s black sequin leggings and Captain Sparrow blouse didn’t suit a meeting with one of New York’s most elegant swans. I ordered her to change her clothes, which made her smile with relief as she raced upstairs to do so. Within minutes, we were out the door, hurrying down Perry Street.

  It was a gray day, the sky threatening rain. We headed for the subway because we were already late. And if there was one thing I knew about New York’s wealthiest, they loved to keep you waiting, not the other way around.

  72

  “Mr. McGrath. Welcome.”

  The woman who greeted us at the door of apartment 17D was in her fifties, dressed in a dust-gray suit. She had the dimmed-bulb face of someone who’d lived a life in servitude. Her eyes moved inquiringly to Nora.

  “This is my assistant. I hope it’s all right if she joins us.”