Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

“Didn’t I tell you to leave him alo—?”

  “The cigarettes!”

  He tried to collect himself. “If you’re the first character who appears in the scene after the Murad cigarettes have been smoked, it means you’re marked, McGrath. You’re fated. You’re doomed.”

  “But there’s some way out—”

  “No.” He arched an eyebrow. “There is a very slim chance if you manage to make a huge and improbable leap of faith you will survive, but it’s like jumping from the top of one skyscraper to the next. It almost always ends with you splat on the sidewalk, either dead or caught forever in a sticky hell, struggling in your cocoon like Leigh at the end of La Douleur.”

  I jotted it down. “What about Boris the Burglar’s Son?”

  “Cordova’s longtime stuntman. His full name is Boris Dragomirov. He’s a diminutive but brawny Russian. His father was a notorious gangster known back in the motherland simply as The Black Eye. The man managed to successfully escape every gulag they ever locked him in and he taught his only son, Boris, all of his techniques. Cordova used Boris in every film. He did all the dirty work, the cons, the beat-ups, the breaking and entering, the car wrecks, the cliff dives. His largest role was playing the blackmailer in A Crack in the Window, the one who appears on the other side of that confessional screen, scaring the bejesus out of Jinley. He runs as fast as a supercharged Maserati and can escape anything at any time.”

  It took only a second for me to know where I’d encountered him.

  “I chased him,” I said. “I spoke to him.”

  “You spoke to Boris the Burglar’s Son?”

  Quickly I explained how he’d broken into my apartment, hightailed it across the West Side Highway out onto the pier, posing as a cruising gay man and then vanishing in the blink of an eye.

  “McGrath, how could you miss it? He used the Horny Geezer on you, one of his most legendary cons.”

  “What about One-Eyed Pontiac?”

  Beckman thoughtfully interlaced his fingers. “There’s always a dark-colored Pontiac, black, blue, or deep maroon, with a single headlight. Whatever object or person it illuminates in its single glaring light will be annihilated.”

  I remembered it immediately: Hopper had claimed to see such a car in the parking lot of the Evening View, when they’d been waiting for me to return from The Peak. I hastily made a note of it, Beckman eyeing my scribbles.

  “You saw the One-Eyed Pontiac?” he gasped. “Don’t tell me you were in its headli—”

  “I wasn’t. Someone else saw it. The Peeping Tom Shot?”

  He blinked in flustered exasperation. “It’s Cordova’s trademark shot. Much like Tarantino’s signature trunk shot, the Peeping Tom is a single extended shot of another person who doesn’t know he or she is being closely observed. It’s always framed by a pulled curtain, venetian blinds, the muddy backseat window of a car, or a cracked door.”

  I thought it over, but it didn’t seem to shed any light on what I’d encountered over the course of the investigation.

  “The Know Not What?” I went on.

  Beckman shrugged. “He’s the henchman, the right-hand man, the face-man, the flunky. He appears when his boss will not, passively carrying out his orders with no judgment, thereby releasing a dark, malevolent force upon the world. The phrase comes from the Bible, of course, Luke, chapter twenty-three: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ ”

  It took me a moment of racking my brain, and then the answer hit me. It was so obvious I nearly laughed out loud. I scribbled down his name.

  “Theo Cordova?” said Beckman, reading over my shoulder. “What do you want with Theo Cordova?”

  “He’s been following me.”

  “Cordova’s son? But how did you know it was he?”

  “He’s missing three fingers on his left hand.”

  Beckman looked startled. “That’s right. Theo was always a strange, silent young man. Badgered by his father, lovesick for the same older woman for years.”

  I hastily made a note of it. “Steak Tartare?”

  Beckman eagerly licked his lips. “In every Cordova film someone, often an extra, can be seen eating finely chopped raw meat. Well. The very next person who appears on-screen in either a medium or close-up shot after this uncooked consumption? He or she will be malignant. He or she has secretly—usually off-screen—become a turncoat, a whore, a defector, a deserter, and can no longer be trusted. It’s Cordova reminding us of our omnipresent inner cannibal, a reminder that we all are, in the end, ravenous beasts who will satisfy our ugliest desires when the timing is right. They say it’s his favorite meal.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d noticed anyone eating the dish. I wrote a question mark beside it.

  “Evil King?”

  “Evil King,” Beckman announced officially, clearing his throat. “He’s the villain. A universally terrifying character of both myth and the real world. He can look outwardly repellant or totally innocuous. Usually it’s someone in a position of great power. The smarter and more conniving the Evil King, the more turbulent and satisfying the tempest he creates.”

  That one was easy. Cordova.

  “Phil Lumen?”

  Beckman nodded. “A small detail. The Phil Lumen Company is the manufacturer of all light sources in a Cordova film. Lightbulbs, flashlights, headlamps, strobes, lava lamps, and streetlights—they all come from the Phil Lumen Company, which is Latin for love of light. Occasionally the name is called out in airport or store intercoms. ‘Paging Mr. Phil Lumen. Please report to United Airlines Terminal B.’ ”

  I didn’t recall hearing anything of the kind—not that I would have noticed.

  “The Shadow?”

  Beckman paused, smiling sadly. “My favorite. The Shadow is what people are hunting throughout the tale. Or else it can dog the hero, refusing to leave him alone. It’s a potent force that bewitches as much as it torments. It can lead to hell or heaven. It’s the hollow forever inside you, never filled. It’s everything in life you can’t touch, hold on to, so ephemeral and painful it makes you gasp. You might even glimpse it for a few seconds before it’s gone. Yet the image will live with you. You’ll never forget it as long as you live. It’s what you’re terrified of and paradoxically what you’re looking for. We are nothing without our shadows. They give our otherwise pale, blinding world definition. They allow us to see what’s right in front of us. Yet they’ll haunt us until we’re dead.”

  It was Ashley. Beckman had seamlessly described my encounter with her at the Reservoir. As he watched me write down her name, his black beady eyes moved from the word to my face.

  “What else?” I asked.

  “What else about what?”

  “Cordova’s mind. His stories.”

  After a moment, Beckman shrugged, a wistful expression on his face. “Those constants festering inside Cordova’s brain are all I’ve ever been able to come up with. The rest, as they say, is—not history, I’ve never liked that phrase—but revolution. Constant upheaval. Conversion. Rotation. Oh, dear.” He jolted upright, struck by an idea. “One thing, McGrath.”

  “What?”

  “Often, at some point in a Cordova narrative, the hero encounters a character who is life and death itself. He or she will be sitting at the intersection of the two, the beginning of one, the end of another.” Beckman took a short breath, pointing at me. “It will be a decoy, a substitute to grant freedom to the real thing. He’s Cordova’s favorite character. He’s always there, when Cordova’s mind is at work, no matter what, do you understand?”

  I wasn’t sure I did, but hastily made note of it.

  “And what about his endings?”

  “Endings?” Beckman looked startled.

  “How does it all end?”

  He nervously scratched his chin, too troubled to continue.

  “You know as well as I do, McGrath. His endings are seismic jolts to the psyche. Parting shots that keep you awake and wondering for days, for the rest of your life. Yo
u just never know with Cordova. His ends can be as full of hope and salvation as the tiny green-white bud of a new flower. Or they can be devastating charred-black battlefields strewn with lost legs and tongues.”

  I made a note of it, feeling an insidious wave of dread as I did, folding the scrap of paper into my pocket.

  “Thank you,” I said to Beckman—abruptly he appeared to be in too ruminating a mood to speak. “I’ll explain when I have more time,” I added, starting down the hall.

  “McGrath.”

  I stopped, turning. He was staring after me.

  “I need to give you a last bit of advice in the off chance this rather extraordinary and enviable situation in which you find yourself is actually true—that somehow you’ve fallen deep down into a Cordova story.”

  I stared back at him.

  “Be the good guy,” he said.

  “How do I know I’m the good guy?”

  He pointed at me, nodding. “A very wise question. You don’t. Most bad guys think they’re good. But there are a few signifiers. You’ll be miserable. You’ll be hated. You’ll fumble around in the dark, alone and confused. You’ll have little insight as to the true nature of things, not until the very last minute, and only if you have the stamina and the madness to go to the very, very end. But most importantly—and critically—you will act without regard for yourself. You’ll be motivated by something that has nothing to do with the ego. You’ll do it for justice. For grace. For love. Those large rather heroic qualities only the good have the strength to carry on their shoulders. And you’ll listen.”

  He licked his lips again, frowning.

  “If you’re the good guy, you just might survive, McGrath. But of course, there are no guarantees with Cordova.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good luck to you,” he said, then spun quickly on his heel and, without looking at me again, vanished back inside his classroom.

  108

  I cased the townhouse on East Seventy-first Street—the one Hopper had broken into—for the next eleven days. I returned home to fitfully sleep, of course, leaving a small thread clandestinely strung across the base of the front door, secured with a microscopic piece of tacking putty, so I’d know if anyone entered while I was away.

  But the thread remained intact.

  At this point, all that I accepted as the truth was that somehow I’d been artfully set up, beginning, I sensed, with Ashley appearing that night at the Reservoir. But why or how it had been planned and executed, whether or not the witnesses we’d tracked down had even been telling the truth about Ashley’s behavior, what was real, what wasn’t—I didn’t know anymore. Could something be real when all evidence of it was gone? Was something categorically true if it lived on only in your head, same as your dreams?

  Cordova, in his life and art, had blended fantasy and reality, and so he seemed to be flagrantly showing off to me, much to my chagrin, such an intermingling of truth and fiction. Perhaps it was his way of underscoring for me not just his superiority—that he was beyond unmasking, that I’d never catch him—but that, in some cases, the biggest truth about a family, about a person’s life, was the fantasy and it was only a simple man’s mind that craved one being tidily distinguished from the other.

  Hopper and Nora, shortly after I’d interrupted Beckman’s lecture, had both called me back within a few hours of each other, worriedly asking if I was all right. It seemed, then, that the two of them had not disappeared like all the others, but were only preoccupied with getting on with their lives. Nora was in the midst of practicing Al Pacino’s opening monologue from Glengarry Glen Ross, which she was planning to do for her Hamlette audition at the Flea Theater. My conversation with Hopper, though civil, was stilted, part of which was because we were constantly interrupted by his incoming calls and he hadn’t exactly forgiven me for my choice to keep stripping away the truth about Ashley. They both asked me if I was still working on the investigation, but didn’t seem to want to hear the answer. I sensed that Ashley was something in their pasts now, a dusky beautiful day they wanted to remember in a certain moody light, with a certain haunting theme song, and they didn’t want to hear another experience that would tarnish this image. I hung up with both of them, mentioning nothing about the disappearances of every one of our witnesses or anything about the Murad cigarettes, the Cordova trademarks that seemed to have peppered the real-life investigation.

  There was one crucial person, however, who remained exactly where I’d found her.

  I went back to Enchantments, stepping unannounced through the black curtain into the back room, expecting to see someone new sitting at the round table who’d duly inform me Cleo had moved to the Louisiana bayou.

  But to my shock—and relief—Cleo was there. She was surprised to see me, and after a few awkward pleasantries, which involved me asking her if she knew Cordova (“That director? No,” she answered, visibly confused) or ate steak tartare (“I’m vegan,” she said blankly), also checking the red bulb in the light overhanging the table to see if by chance it was manufactured by Phil Lumen (it was GE)—I thanked her and swiftly left, my mind obsessively replaying the last time I’d seen her, when she’d showed me how the leviathan’s tail moved with a mind of its own.

  That had been real.

  It couldn’t be explained away by my having ingested Mad Seeds. It was a hint of the reality of black magic, of dark and invisible fractures cutting through our ordinary world.

  Wasn’t it? Thinking all of this over for days, finally I received the phone call I’d been waiting for.

  “McGrath. Sharon Falcone.”

  I felt uneasy hearing her voice. Something told me I was not going to like what she said about the stained shirt I’d given her and the bones.

  “We were able to take a look at what you gave me.”

  “And?”

  “There’s nothing there.”

  She paused, as if sensing I’d be distressed by the news.

  “There’s no blood, animal or otherwise, in the sample. What they found was trace glucose, maltose, some oligosaccharides.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Corn syrup. It might have been soda, some canned or bottled beverage that spilled on the shirt. How it was stored over the years must have created the stiffness. But it’s such a degraded sample, it’s hard to say.”

  “There’s absolutely no chance it’s human blood?”

  “No chance.”

  I closed my eyes. Corn syrup.

  “And the bones?” I asked.

  “They were traced to family Ursidae, probably Ursus Americanus.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A black bear. It’s probably the foot of a cub.”

  A black bear.

  “You need a vacation,” Sharon said. “Leave town for a couple weeks. The city can screw with your head. Like all toxic love affairs, you need to take a break before you go back in for more pain and heartbreak.”

  I had nothing to say, because it couldn’t be right. I’d been so certain, certain of the film sets, that they had contained real human suffering. It couldn’t end like this.

  “You still there?” Sharon asked.

  “I’m sorry to have bothered you with this,” I managed to say.

  She cleared her throat. “You need to move on. I understand, believe me, how this stuff gets to you, that there’s nothing more important than finding that hidden door which will lead to the underground bunker where the truth is sitting there behind bars. But sometimes the truth just isn’t there. Even if you can smell it and hear it. Or there just isn’t a way in anymore. It’s grown over. Rocks have shifted. Shafts caved in. There’s no human way to get to it, not even with all the dynamite in the world. So you leave it at that. And you move on.”

  As she said this, a phone began to bleat on her end, though she ignored it.

  “The dark side of life has a way of finding us all anyway, so stop chasing it.”

  “Thank you, Sharon. For everything.”
>
  “Forget it. Now, would you go to the beach, get a girlfriend, a tan, something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Take care.”

  “You, too.”

  The line went dead. A black bear’s foot.

  I went about the rest of my day, trying to get my mind off the sheer disappointment, telling myself to accept it, that Hopper and Nora were right. I’d come to the end of the road. And found an undeniable dead end. There was no evidence of any crime.

  But then, I realized, there was one last stone to turn over. There was one person left who might shed light on the situation, who could explain from an insider’s point of view what it all meant—and that person was Cordova’s longtime assistant, Inez Gallo.

  I needed only to wait for her to return to the townhouse. I’d wait as long as it took. And when that woman finally appeared—whether it was tomorrow or three years from now—I’d be ready.

  109

  It happened the twelfth day I’d been watching. Just after five o’clock in the evening, I was returning from a deli on Lex when I noticed a petite woman in a black coat walking swiftly down the sidewalk, half a block in front of me.

  It was Inez Gallo. I recognized her immediately: the hastily cropped gray hair, hunched, stalwart bearing like a tiny bull poised to charge. As if she didn’t want to be seen, she hurried up the steps, disappearing inside.

  I waited for a few minutes, and when the street remained deserted, I grabbed the wrought-iron grate spanning the townhouse’s first-floor window and began to climb. I needed Gallo off her guard, and I remembered how Hopper had done it: wedging his feet between the bars, bracing his right foot on the old-fashioned lamp over the front door. Seizing the latticed railing along the second floor high over my head, I managed to hoist myself up to the balcony, hooking my right leg over the side, climbing up, and collapsing onto the leaf-strewn floor. I headed to the window on the right, the one that Ashley had disabled from the house alarm.

  Gallo had turned on quite a few lights in the entrance hall below, because light was shining through the doorway opposite, allowing me to see. It was an ornate wood-paneled library, every piece of furniture covered in white sheets. It was empty.