Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  He paused, anxiously twirling the end of the cigarette with his thumb.

  “I was all set to go to the police, when I heard from her. She sent me an email. She was sorry, but she’d made a mistake. We were just a couple of delusional kids, caught up in the moment. She didn’t want to be tied down to anyone. She said she loved our time together, but it was over, simple as that. She told me to keep riding the waves seaward, keep searching for the goddamn chambers of the fucking sea, where the mermaids sang …”

  He irritably cut himself off, taking a long drag on the cigarette.

  “I was sure her parents had put her up to it,” he went on, exhaling smoke in a fast stream. “I wrote back, said I didn’t believe her. I was going to find her and she could say it to my face. She asked me not to contact her. I wrote back again. If this was my Ashley, what was the address of the stoop we’d sat on that first night, when the sun was rising over the block? She wrote the right answer back, in seconds. 131 East 19th. And I’m no one’s Ashley, she wrote. It was a dagger to the heart. A year later, I found out she was attending Amherst. So she was fine. It had been her decision.”

  He brushed his hair out of his eyes, leaning back in the chair, his face calm, even slightly dazed.

  “Did you ever hear from her again?” Nora softly asked him.

  He nodded imperceptibly, his eyes shifting to her, but said nothing.

  “What did she say?” Nora whispered.

  “Nothing,” he answered tersely. “She sent me a stuffed monkey.”

  Of course, the monkey—that faded toy with loose stitching, covered in dried mud. I’d almost forgotten about it.

  “Why?” I asked.

  He stared at me. “It was Orlando’s. He slept with it. I don’t know how Ash had it or where she’d found it. But when I pulled it out of that envelope, I was sick. She was sick, sending it, when she knew every day I thought about that kid, lived every day with the horror of this thing I’d done. I went to the return address she’d written on the envelope, thinking I’d find a reason why she did such a thing.” He looked at me. “That’s when I ran into you.”

  “No wonder you didn’t trust me,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I thought you might be working for her family.”

  “How did you know to go to Klavierhaus?” asked Nora.

  “I went there with Ash once. She used to practice there.”

  Nora bit her fingernails, frowning. “And you didn’t come with us to Rising Dragon because …?”

  “I was paranoid I’d be recognized. It was a long time ago, but … I didn’t want to take the chance. Or be reminded.” He stared with resentment down at the tattoo. “I used to have dreams about cutting off my foot so I wouldn’t have to look at that thing.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked. “At some point, you must have noticed we were just as ignorant as you were as to what was going on.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t recognize the Ashley I knew in any of this, this witch we’ve been tracking. Curses on the floor? Nyctophobia? Ashley wasn’t afraid of the dark. She wasn’t afraid of anything.”

  “Maybe she didn’t send it,” Nora suggested.

  “It’s her handwriting on the envelope.”

  “Someone in her family might have copied it. Maybe they’re afraid of something she told you and they sent it to scare you off.”

  “I’ve been racking my brain for weeks. Trying to think of something she told me. But I never met anyone in her family, and she rarely talked about them, though I definitely sensed, particularly from that one phone call, she and her dad did not get along.”

  “Nothing about witchcraft?” I suggested.

  He looked puzzled. “The idea Ash would be involved in something like that is crazy.”

  “What about why she was sent to Six Silver Lakes?”

  “She told me she’d lost her temper and burned herself on a candle. She had a bad burn scar on her left hand. That was it.”

  “What about when you were inside the townhouse last night?”

  He stared at me with evident unease before answering. “It was the same. Like no one had set foot there since I’d broken in seven years ago. Same exact sheets tossed randomly over the furniture. Same Chopin music on Ashley’s piano, the lid open. The same rugs rolled up, same books piled on top of the tables, same drinking glass on the mantel above the fireplace, only there was about three inches of dust on everything. And this mildewed smell like a tomb. I was heading up to Ashley’s bedroom to see if she’d ever come back. I honestly expected to find her suitcase still packed and hidden in the closet where I’d left it. That was when the doorbell rang and I had to turn back. I was almost at the window when the lights came on and I heard a woman ordering me to put my hands up. She was wielding a fucking shotgun.”

  “Inez Gallo,” I said. “Had you ever seen her before?”

  He frowned. “I thought for a second I recognized her as the driver who picked up Ashley back at Six Silver Lakes. But I’m not positive.”

  “Ashley went back to Rising Dragon for the picture of you together,” said Nora. “She wanted to have it, even though it was lost.”

  He stared at her. “It’s not.” Slowly he reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet, removing a paper from the billfold.

  He handed it to me.

  It was a photograph, crinkled and worn, taken out and stared at a thousand times.

  Even now, after everything he told us, it was startling to see them together, as if two people from two different worlds had collided. They sat in one folding chair, hands clasped. It was a captured moment of youth, of joy—a moment so free the camera couldn’t even hold on to it. It rendered them in streaks and blurs, hinting that they were so new and light there were no words to describe them, their ankles forming that fighting creature on fire, leaping to its death or its life.

  80

  I gave Hopper a pillow and blankets so he could crash on the couch. The rain was still coming down, and he didn’t seem to want to go home.

  Nora drowsily said good night, slipping into Sam’s room.

  I headed to bed myself. I was mentally and physically drained, though before turning out the light, I looked up Six Silver Lakes on my BlackBerry, just to verify the details of Hopper’s story. There were quite a few articles about the drowning, which had occurred July 2003, many of the actual newspaper clippings scanned and posted on a site called Thelostangels.com.

  I read the other articles, every one confirming what Hopper had told us.

  So, he had loved her. Of course, I’d known it already.

  Ashley.

  How elusive she was, how she shape-shifted, seemed composed of as many rival creatures as the tattoo. Head of a dragon, body of a deer. Inclinations of a witch. She was Orlando’s flashlight in the dark behind us, a pinprick of light in the violent downpour, dogging Hopper, dogging me. She was a beacon of mysterious origin and intention, impossible to determine if heading toward me or away. What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?

  I turned out the light, closing my eyes.

  Do I dare?

  I jerked upright, my heart pounding. The bedroom was dark, empty, and yet I had the distinct feeling someone had just whispered those words in my ear.

  I grabbed my phone off the table, Googling Prufrock, my eyes blearily reading the poem.

  It was as searing and sad as I’d found it to be in college—maybe more so, now that I was no longer an arrogant young man of nineteen, now that the lines about time and I grow old … I grow old …meant something. The poem’s narrator, Prufrock, was a sort of insect specimen, mounted and pinned, still squirming, to his tedious little life, a world of endless social gatherings and parties and inane observations; the modern equivalent would probably be man alone with his phones and screens, Tweeting and friending and status updating, the ceaseless chatter of Internet culture. The man’s thoughts veered between r
esignation, the stuttering, delusional belief that he had time, and a profound longing for more, for murder and creation.

  The whole family lived in answer to that poem, Hopper had said.

  If that was true, it was doubtlessly a ferocious, intoxicating way to live. It even corroborated the mystical afternoon Peg Martin had described at the dog run and some of those early stories about Ashley. But it could also be an enslavement, a hell, to keep searching for the enchanted, keep plunging down, down to the lonely chambers of the sea. To seek mermaids.

  It was a tragic thing to do, like looking for Eden.

  I closed my eyes, my limbs so heavy they seemed to melt into the bed, my mind untying all thoughts so they flew into the air, unattached and disordered.

  She attacked a guest. He’s called the Spider. Knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form. You’ve no respect for murk, McGrath. The blackly unexplained. Within that family’s history there are atrocious acts. I’m certain of it. Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.

  The only sound was the rain, playing like an exhausted orchestra on the windows. Only when I was drifting to sleep did the storm let slip a few delicate notes—strands of some new song—and abruptly disband.

  81

  “That’s him,” I said.

  I left Nora and Hopper seated on the guardrail at the dead end of East Fifty-second Street—just outside The Campanile, an elegant limestone apartment building overlooking the East River—and walked swiftly down the sidewalk toward the approaching man wearing the gray doorman’s uniform.

  He was very short and very bald, carrying a small deli coffee cup, an impish spring in his step. He might have been Danny DeVito’s cousin.

  I caught up to him under a gray awning. “You must be Harold.”

  He smiled cheerfully. “That’s me.”

  I introduced myself. He nodded in immediate recognition. “Oh, right. The hotshot reporter. Mrs. du Pont said you’d be stopping by. So, you, uh …” He raised his chin to glance over my shoulder, lowering his voice. “You want to get in to see Marlowe.”

  “Olivia said you could arrange a time for me to talk to her.”

  He smirked. “You don’t talk to Marlowe.”

  “What do you do?”

  “What do you do with any man-eating beast? Tiptoe around and pray they’re not hungry.” He laughed again and then sobered when he saw my confusion. “Come back tonight. Eleven o’clock sharp. I’ll take you up. But, uh, then you’re on your own.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I make a rule never to go past the laundry room.”

  “I’d like to speak to Marlowe. Not break into her apartment.”

  “Yeah, that’s how you speak to Marlowe. It’s how Mrs. du Pont visits. Mrs. du Pont pays for the big spread, so technically she’s sneaking into her own place.”

  “Olivia sneaks into her sister’s apartment in the middle of the night?” I found it difficult to imagine Olivia du Pont sneaking into anything.

  “Oh, yeah. Marlowe Hughes and daylight’s a bad combo. At night she’s, uh, more chill.”

  “And why’s she chill at night?”

  “Her dealer comes at eight. Coupla hours later? She’s riding a magic carpet over Shangri-la.” He grinned, but then, seeing my reaction, shook his head defensively. “I swear it’s the only safe way to enter. That’s when we do repairs, take out her trash, make sure she hasn’t left on a gas burner or clogged the toilet with her fan mail. Once a week Mrs. du Pont takes up fresh food and flowers. If she did it during the day, there’d be carnage. This way, when Marlowe wakes up, she thinks she’s been visited by Santa’s elves.”

  He took a sip of coffee, squinting at something over my shoulder. I noticed one of the other doormen at The Campanile had wandered outside.

  “Artie needs to go on break. Just, uh, come by at eleven and I’ll get you up there. But …” He squinted. “You know those electric tiger prods they use in circuses? You might want to bring one.” He guffawed heartily at his own joke, taking off down the sidewalk. “ ’course, it proved ineffective for Siegfried and Roy,” he added over his shoulder, “so no promises.”

  82

  Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting in the window of the Starbucks at Second Avenue and East Fiftieth.

  “It’s an ideal situation,” said Hopper. “If Hughes is out cold, we’ll have plenty of time to look through her place.”

  I was relieved to see this morning Hopper seemed to be all right after everything he’d told us. After disclosures such as his, it was difficult to gauge how the person would react afterward. But he appeared to be more focused.

  “It’s like having secret access to Marilyn Monroe’s house,” said Nora. “Or Elizabeth Taylor’s. Think of the photos and letters and love affairs with presidents no one knows about. She might even know where Cordova is.”

  “As enticing as it sounds to ransack Marlowe’s home while she’s in a drug-induced coma,” I said, “this operation is possible because of Olivia. I don’t want her to find out I rummaged through her sister’s apartment like a yard sale.”

  “We’ll work fast,” said Hopper, “leave the place exactly as we found it.”

  I said nothing, squinting across the street. A few yards from a restaurant, Lasagna Ristorante, a suspicious-looking white-haired man wearing a black coat was loitering by a brick wall. For the past five minutes, he’d been standing there, having an intense argument on the phone, but every now and then he glanced pointedly right at us.

  “It’s time to get the Waldorf guest list,” I said, keeping an eye on him. “We’ll get the name of every guest who stayed on the thirtieth floor between September thirtieth and October the tenth, the days Ashley was in the city. We’ll compare that to the Oubliette membership. If one name appears on both, that’s the person Ashley was looking for. That’s the Spider.”

  The white-haired man outside hung up and took off, heading north on Second. I waited to see if he’d circle back or cross the street, but he appeared to be gone.

  “But how do we get the names?” asked Nora.

  “The only way.” I drained the rest of my coffee. “Corruption and intimidation.”

  83

  I strolled into the Waldorf Towers lobby to do some reconnaissance.

  Today, behind the front desk there was an attractive woman, thirties, with long shiny black hair—her nametag read DEBRA—and a young Japanese man, MASATO. After answering the phone a few times, Debra fumbled under the desk and produced a large Louis Vuitton bag, a good sign; it meant she liked luxury goods, would welcome some extra cash to buy more. This, while Masato stood stoically at the other side of the desk, doing and saying nothing, like a Kendo warrior proficient in the Way of the Sword.

  The single girl and the last samurai—it didn’t take a genius to decide who’d be amenable to bribery.

  I caught up to Nora and Hopper on the steps of Saint Bartholomew’s, across from the hotel. I gave them Debra’s description and put the three of us on a surveillance rotation, so we could catch her alone as soon as she left the hotel. One of us monitored the employees’ entrance from Saint Bart’s while the other two waited at a Starbucks down the block.

  Four hours passed. And though quite a few employees exited—crossing the street to discreetly smoke a cigarette—Debra never appeared.

  At four, I did another drive-by and realized Debra must have ducked out another entrance, because only Masato remained.

  “Everyone has their price,” Hopper said, when I explained this unfortunate development.

  “Yeah, well, from the look of this guy, his price is three hundred beheadings and a katana sword.”

  At the stroke of six, Nora alerted us that Masato was leaving the hotel. I managed to flag him down.

  “Sure, I’ll do it,” he announced in a flawless American accent, after I explained. “For three thousand dollars. Cash.”

  I laughed. “Five hundred.”

  He stood and walked out of the Starbucks. I was certai
n he was bluffing, but then he was on the subway escalator descending into the dense crowd.

  “Eight hundred,” I said, fighting shopping bags, women giving me dirty looks, to reach him. Masato didn’t turn. “One thousand.” I jostled an owl-looking girl in tortoiseshell glasses to get beside him. “Complete with home addresses.”

  Masato only put large blue deejay headphones over his ears.

  “Twelve hundred. My final offer. And at that price we should know what nuts they ate from the minibar.”

  It was a deal.

  Minutes later, Masato, displaying a fairly impressive poker face, ducked back inside the Waldorf, I went around the corner to an ATM, and then returned to the Starbucks. An hour passed, the crowd of commuters, once a flash flood, had drained to a meager trickle of women with tired faces and men in rumpled suits. Another half-hour, and there was still no sign of Masato. I was beginning to think something had happened, when suddenly he entered, pulled a thick envelope out of his bag.

  There were more than two hundred names, alphabetized according to date, complete with calls made from the hotel phone. I handed him the cash, which he counted in plain sight. Apparently, this Starbucks was used to underworld transactions, because the employees behind the counter who’d witnessed us skulking in the window all day dully carried on taking orders.

  “Quad venti soy latte!”

  Masato stuck the envelope into his shoulder bag and left without a word, donning his headphones and vanishing into the subway.

  The three of us ordered coffees, sat down at a table in the back corner, and started combing through the names, checking them against the Oubliette membership.

  We’d been doing this for more than an hour, taking turns reading aloud, when Nora excitedly jerked forward in her seat, eyes wide.

  “How do you spell that? The last name you just said?”

  “Villarde,” Hopper repeated. “V-I-L-L-A-R-D-E.”

  “It’s here,” she whispered in amazement, holding out the paper.

  I stared down at the name on the Oubliette list.