Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  “Certainly.”

  Smiling, the woman ushered us into the foyer, where an old codger wearing a rumpled burgundy jacket appeared—seemingly from the walls—to take our coats. Wordlessly he drifted with them back down another dim hall.

  “Right this way.”

  She led us in the other direction down a dark gallery. The wine-colored walls were plastered with paintings, the way scaffolding downtown was covered with ads for concerts: only these happened to be Matisses and Schieles, Clementes, the odd Magritte, each painting sporting its own bronze lamp like a miner’s helmet. Between these masterpieces were dark open doorways, and I slowed to glance inside. Every room looked like a grotto, dank and stalactited with brocade curtains and Louis XIV chairs, vases and Tiffany lamps, busts in marble, ebony sculpture, books. We passed a formal dining room, the walls celery green, a crystal chandelier like a frozen jellyfish floating midair.

  The woman led us briskly into a large sitting room. The windows framed a northwestern view, turning the city into a serene concrete still life with gray sky. A helicopter hovered over the Hudson like an errant fly.

  The woman gestured for us to sit on the yellow chintz couch in front of a coffee table covered in miniatures: porcelain schnauzers, sheepherders, finger bowls. Fresh yellow and red tulips exploded out of a Chinese vase. They matched the yellow walls and the red jackets of the riders in the giant foxhunt oil painting looming behind us.

  Nora sat down stiffly beside me, folding her hands in her lap. She looked nervous.

  “May I offer you some tea while you wait? Mrs. du Pont is finishing up a telephone call.”

  “Tea would be nice,” I said. “Thank you.”

  The woman slipped out of the room.

  “This is what you call jumbo rich,” I whispered to Nora. “These people are their own strange breed. Don’t try to understand them.”

  “Did you see the shining armor on the way in? Real shining armor just standing there, waiting for a knight.”

  “The two percent of the world’s richest people have over half of the world’s wealth. I think it’s all in this apartment.”

  Nora, biting her lip, pointed at the small end table on my right, where there was a black-and-white photograph in an antique silver frame. It was Olivia standing with her husband, Knightly, probably some twenty years ago. They had their arms around each other, posing beside an antique Bentley in front of a colossal country manor. They looked happy, but, of course, that didn’t say much. Everyone smiles for a photograph.

  Abruptly, Nora sat up.

  A woman was entering the room. I stood up immediately, Nora following my lead, fidgeting to straighten her skirt.

  It was Olivia.

  She didn’t walk so much as float, three Pekingese dogs shuffling alongside her feet. The room had obviously been designed with her in mind, or vice versa. Her chin-length brown hair, streaked with silver—worn in a rich candy swirl around her face—matched the Persian rug, the carved lion-paw legs of the table, even the silver cigarette case with the elegant initials engraved on the lid—OPE—the fine lettering like tangled strands of hair clogging a shower drain.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d expected—some grande dame blistering with jewelry—but she was surprisingly light and airy, devoid of ornamentation. She wore a simple gray-and-black dress, plump pearls roped twice around her neck. Her oval face was attractive and soft, neatly made up, long splinters of eyebrows framing her bright brown eyes, an elegant neck like a stalk on a flower just starting to wilt. How many times had Marlowe Hughes dreamed of wringing that thing?

  As Olivia moved toward us, smiling, I realized her right arm hung limply in a sling fashioned out of a black-and-red floral scarf. The hand hung there like a broken wing, but she seemed resolved to pull off this handicap gamely. The fingernails on that withered hand were perfectly painted tomato red.

  On the ring finger of her functioning hand, which she now extended to us, was a pale blue diamond, at least twelve karats. It stared out, unblinking, like a mesmerized eye.

  “Olivia du Pont. I’m so pleased you could come, Mr. McGrath.”

  “My pleasure.”

  After shaking her hand, we all sat down, including her three Pekingese, which resembled fat girls stuffed into fur suits. Olivia settled into the white couch opposite, extending an arm over the white throw draped across the back, and the dogs piled around her as if to form some sort of fluffy stronghold, then stared at us expectantly as if we were meant to entertain.

  “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. It’s quite mad around here with the move.”

  “You’re leaving the city?” I asked.

  “Just for the season. We spend the winter in Switzerland. The whole family comes out. My grandchildren love to ski and hike, though Mike and I tend to just laze around. We really sit down in front of the fire and don’t budge for four months.”

  She laughed, a crisp, elegant sound, bringing to mind a spoon tapping a crystal glass before some dignitary made a toast.

  Boy, had the apple fallen far from the tree. It was astounding how a woman, when she struck marital gold, procured not just a new wardrobe and new friends but a new voice straight out of a 1930s gramophone (brittle, mono-stereo) and a vocabulary that reliably included laze, season, and terribly sorry. I had to actively remind myself Olivia was an army brat who’d grown up so impoverished, her mother had a third job cleaning the bathrooms of the very public high school she attended. Now Olivia probably had six estates and a yacht as big as a city block.

  “My grandson, Charlie, is a huge fan of yours, Mr. McGrath.”

  “Scott. Please.”

  “Charlie’s in eighth grade at Trinity. He read your first book, MasterCard Nation, over the summer. He was quite impressed. Now, he’s reading Cocaine Carnivals and wants to be an investigative reporter.”

  I assumed she was about to ask if I would please read some marvelous story he’d posted on his blog or else she wanted me to give him a job, thus coming to the reason behind this invitation.

  “I never doubted you, you know,” Olivia said, arching an eyebrow. “That hoopla a few years back about you and Cordova, your fictitious chauffeur, the outrageous assertions you made on television. I knew exactly what was going on.”

  “Did you? Because it was a mystery to me.”

  “You’d done something to provoke him.” She smiled at my look of surprise. “Surely you’ve noticed that the space around Cordova distorts. The closer you get to him, the speed of light slackens, information gets scrambled, rational minds grow illogical, hysterical. It’s warped space-time, like the mass of a giant sun bending the area surrounding it. You reach out to seize something so close to find it was never actually there. I’ve witnessed it firsthand myself.”

  She fell silent, pensive, just as her three uniformed maids entered with the tea. They set about arranging it before us on the coffee table, fine china, a five-tiered silver tower laden with cakes, petits fours, mini-cupcakes, and triangular sandwiches. Olivia slipped off her velvet heels—from Stubbs & Wootton, I noticed, the billionaire’s Nike—curling her black stocking feet underneath her. As the maids poured the tea, I noticed Nora was blinking in shock at the elaborate setup.

  “Thank you, Charlotte.”

  Charlotte and the other girls nodded demurely and darted away, their shoes silent on the carpet.

  “You must be wondering why on earth you’re here,” said Olivia, sipping her tea. “You’ve resumed work on your investigation of Cordova, have you not?”

  Her eyes met mine as she set down the teacup. They were bright as a schoolgirl’s.

  “How did you hear that?”

  “Allan Cunningham.”

  The name rang a bell.

  “The director of Briarwood Hospital? I’ve done some charity work for them. He told me he caught you digging rather shamelessly around the grounds last week. Posing as a potential guest.”

  Of course—Cunningham had hauled me into the Security Center and threatened to
have me arrested.

  “How is the investigation going?” she asked.

  “It hasn’t been easy getting people to talk.”

  Returning the teacup to the saucer, she sat back, staring at me.

  “I’ll talk,” she announced.

  I couldn’t help but smile, amused by her directness. “About?”

  “What I know. It’s quite a lot, believe me.”

  “Because of your sister?”

  Her smile faltered. That was unexpected; I’d have assumed she’d gotten over Marlowe long ago, had put her away in some safe-deposit box of childhood and locked it, tossing the key. But the mention of her sister visibly irked her.

  “I haven’t spoken to Marlowe in forty-seven years. I don’t know what she thought of Stanislas or what her experiences were. I had my own encounters. And I’ve never wanted to speak about them. Until now.”

  “Why the change of heart?”

  “Ashley.”

  She said it matter-of-factly. Nora was leaning forward, nervously eyeing the petits fours, as if worried they’d scurry away if she went for one.

  “Police think it was suicide,” I said.

  Olivia nodded. “Perhaps. But there’s more to it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I met her once.” She paused to sip her tea, and when she set the teacup down, she looked at me, her eyes piercing. “Do you believe in the supernatural world, Mr. McGrath? Ghosts and the paranormal, unexplained forces we can’t see yet nonetheless affect us?”

  “No, not really. But I do believe in the human mind’s ability to make something like that seem very real.”

  “Stanislas and his third wife, Astrid, have an estate in the Adirondacks near Lows Lake.”

  “Yes, I know. The Peak.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “You’ve been?”

  “I tried stopping by to pay my respects five years ago. Never got past the security gate.”

  Olivia smiled knowingly, sitting back against the couch. “I went there the first week of June in 1977. I was a struggling actress. Twenty-nine years old. Cordova was preparing his next film, Thumbscrew. His assistant, Inez Gallo, wrote to my agent and said Cordova had seen me in Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre and was very impressed by my work.” She smiled with visible embarrassment.

  “I had a rather pitiful walk-on role, my back to the camera the entire time. So it seemed a cruel joke. But the assistant insisted he loved my look and was considering me for a very unusual part, which he’d written specifically with me in mind. He invited me to stay for the weekend at The Peak so we might discuss the role. I lived in the East Village then. I borrowed money from a girlfriend to rent a Packard station wagon, and I drove all the way up there, all by myself. I hadn’t booked a job in over a year. I was desperate. As I drove I made a pact with myself that I’d do anything—absolutely anything—for the role.”

  She paused for a moment, her hand idly stroking one of the dogs.

  “The drive in was quite beautiful. When you’re past the woods and the security gate, it becomes a leisurely drive through oak trees and undulating hills. There wasn’t a soul around. It was bright, hot. The sun was out, and yet I remember feeling so nervous, it soon slipped into terror, as if I were entering a graveyard in the dead of night. Every now and then I could hear a flock of birds, crows, screeching overhead. But when I slowed the car and looked up, there was nothing in the sky or the trees. Nothing.”

  She sipped her tea.

  “When I arrived at the house, a dark, colossal mansion straight out of—I don’t know—a Poe short story, I parked by the other cars. There were quite a few, as if other actresses had been summoned as well. Yet I found myself unable to get out of my car. It was a terrible feeling. But I wanted that part. I needed it. To be in a Cordova picture was really the ultimate, you see. I’d heard it could not just make your career, but your life.”

  She paused to smile ironically at this last comment.

  “I climbed out and knocked on the front entrance and immediately found myself greeted by a stunning Italian woman who acted oddly withdrawn. Without saying a thing to me, she beckoned me to lunch, already under way outside on a loggia draped with wisteria. There was a large group eating there—no one I recognized. Cordova’s groupies, I imagined. But there was no sign of the man himself. Not that I had a clear picture of what he looked like. I asked someone where he was and was duly informed he was working. They pulled up a chair for me to sit at the table. They were all talking about this object someone had just purchased at a private auction. They were passing this object around. Eventually it came to me. And for some reason when I had it everyone went very silent, and they asked me what I thought it was. It was odd. It looked like a sort of dagger. The bronze handle was intricately carved, the blade narrow, about five inches long, with a strange loop in the middle of it. A young blond man in clerical garb sitting at the very end of the table—he was beautiful, like an Adonis—suggested that I should stick it in my wrist to see what happened, and they all erupted in loud laughter. The only person who didn’t laugh was the gorgeous Italian woman who’d answered the door. I came to understand that she was Cordova’s wife, Genevra. She only stared back at me with a haunted look, like a prisoner too terrified to speak. I felt so emotional and upset, for a moment I thought I’d burst into tears, but then someone snatched it from me and the lunch was finished. Later, I looked it up and discovered what it was.”

  “What was it?” I asked when she didn’t immediately go on.

  She looked at me, her face somber. “A pricking needle. They were used in European witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They’re made of precious metals, artfully engraved. The ‘pricker’ would use it to stab the accused woman, usually stripped naked, all over her body. When he at last found a spot that didn’t bleed or cause pain, he’d found the witch’s mark. If he found such a place, it was of course because she could no longer scream. She’d been stabbed by this needle some three hundred times and was unconscious, slowly bleeding to death. These things, archaic instruments of torture, have a vibrant market today for certain willing collectors.”

  Nora was so captivated she’d forgotten to chew the rather large piece of cake in her mouth. A crumb fell from her lips, which she hastily collected from the hem of her sweater. She swallowed with a loud gulp.

  “But I soon put the bizarre lunch out of my head, because someone—a masculine-looking hausfrau with a sweaty face and gleaming black eyes—announced that Cordova was ready to meet with me. I was escorted through various corridors, into a large room filled with filing cabinets and a long dining-room table. A man sat at the very end. He was like a king on a throne, stacks of papers and photographs of locations, costumes, scene notes, piled all around him. He was fat, but not grotesque in the way Orson Welles became, or Hitchcock, or even Brando. His massiveness was somehow distinguished. He had a round face with thick black hair, and he wore glasses, the lenses round and black as ink. He was handsome. At least I think he was. He had one of those faces that captivated you. And yet you couldn’t remember it a minute later, as if your brain just couldn’t memorize the features, the way it can’t memorize an infinite number. Possibly this was due to the glasses, the lack of eyes. For a moment I thought he was blind, but he wasn’t, because he stared at me without saying a word and then informed me I had parsley on my lip. I did, much to my chagrin. And then he asked if I wanted to be in his picture. Obviously I eagerly said yes, oh, yes. I’d been a huge fan since Figures. He smiled. Then he began to ask me a series of pointed questions, all of which became increasingly personal and unsettling. He asked if I had family, a boyfriend, if I was sexually active, how regularly did I go to the doctor, who was my next of kin. Was I healthy? Was I easily spooked? That was quite a preoccupation. He wanted to know what I was afraid of: heights, spiders, drowning, the sea. How much physical pain had I ever endured? What was my worst nightmare? I began to suspect the underlying purpose of the questions wasn’t so much to kno
w me or see if I was right for the part but to learn how isolated a person I was, who would notice if I ever vanished or changed in some way. I kept asking what the part was. I very much wanted to see the script. He greeted such requests with only silence and a knowing smile. Finally another person came in—a woman—and escorted me out. It felt like I’d been grilled for over an hour. It was only fifteen minutes.”

  Olivia took a deep breath and poured us more tea with her functioning hand. When she grabbed the tongs for a sugar cube and dropped it into her cup, I noticed with surprise her fingers were trembling. She was nervous.

  “It became clear,” she went on, “that there would be further discussion of Thumbscrew after supper. I agreed. A maid brought me to my room. It was an enormous house, and my room was a suite, a wall of windows with gauzy curtains like long bridal veils and a view of a lake far down the hill. I’d never seen such a beautiful room. I lay down on the bed, intending to shut my eyes for just a moment, but fell into a deep sleep. I must have been more exhausted from the drive than I realized. Three hours later, I woke up very suddenly in the dark, gasping for air, my throat hurting as if someone had been strangling me. My wrists and arms felt as if they’d somehow been pinned down. They ached. But there was no one, no sign of any restraints. And then I saw with horror my suitcase was empty. All of my clothes had been neatly hung up in the closet. Even my underwear had been folded into meticulous piles in the dresser drawer. A dress of mine that I was seemingly meant to wear down for dinner was laid out for me, including earrings and a silver comb for my hair. The windows were open, too, the curtains blowing every which way. They’d been closed when I fell asleep. Every hair on my arms was standing up, as if I were about to be struck by lightning. I had only one thought. I had to escape. Dinner was starting at eight o’clock, and there were more guests arriving. I didn’t care. I threw my clothes into the suitcase and hurried out, managing to find a back staircase, running outside into the night. My car was exactly where I’d left it, and I drove out without turning on my headlights. At first I was sure someone was following me. There were headlights a few turns in the road behind me. But they were gone by the time I reached the gate. It was closed. I got out, unlocked it myself, and frantically drove away. I didn’t stop for six hours. But that feeling—a weight, a suffocation, as if my entire body had been put in some sort of vise—it didn’t go away for four days. I came very close to checking myself into a hospital.”