Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  I took out a credit card, wedged it under the window’s sash, lifting it just enough to get my fingers underneath, slid it open, and climbed inside.

  Hopper had said, the night he’d broken in, that the townhouse looked frozen in time. He found every object to be sitting precisely where it’d been seven years before—the day Ashley and he were due to leave for Brazil and she’d stood him up. Same exact sheets tossed randomly over the furniture, he’d said, the same Chopin music on Ashley’s piano. Now everything was meticulously covered and put away; when I lifted the sheet over the massive Steinway, positioned in the far corner by the bookshelves, there was no music. It seemed to me someone—Inez Gallo, perhaps—had packed up the house more carefully now, maybe as a result of Hopper breaking in. Or else the family had asked her to do it after Ashley’s body had been found.

  There was an armchair facing the library’s entrance, which overlooked the lit-up landing and a spiral staircase. I sat down, waiting, and within minutes I could hear footsteps rapidly coming up the steps.

  Suddenly, there she was—Inez Gallo, in baggy gray wool slacks and a white blouse, hurrying across the landing, headed for the next flight.

  “Miss Gallo.”

  She froze, stunned, and whipped around, staring in at me, though probably couldn’t see much beyond my silhouette.

  “Or do you prefer to be called Coyote?”

  She lurched furiously to the doorway, sliding her hand over a light switch, and suddenly the library was bathed in dim gold light from the overhead lamp.

  When she saw me, she sized me up with enough scorn for me to know she knew precisely who I was.

  “Sorry to drop in like this.”

  “You people just can’t take a hint. I hope you like sleeping in jail.” It was a deep, throaty voice, which sounded better suited for a truck driver or a six-foot bouncer, not such a hefty yet diminutive woman. She was barely five feet but shaped like a cinder block. She strode into the library and snatched a cordless phone off the counter, started to dial.

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “No?”

  “Coyote is an intriguing nickname. Personally, I’d have wanted my term of endearment to be a little less incriminating. Human trafficking for forced labor? My friend at ICE tells me there used to be quite a racket originating from your hometown. Puebla, isn’t it? Apparently, a mysterious woman arrived in an empty minivan once a year and left with it chock-full of people—stacked in the back like firewood. I’ve spoken to a few. They gave a startling description of the woman behind the wheel. The punishment per offense is a minimum of three to seven years. How many films did they work up there? Ten? That’s thirty to seventy years. After The Peak, I expect federal prison will be quite a culture shock.”

  As I said this, I’d been watching Gallo’s face. The second I’d said human trafficking, I knew I’d hit the bull’s-eye.

  And thank Christ—because I was bluffing: I had no friend at the ICE, and not a single witness. For the last few days, I’d pored over my hastily rewritten notes, trying to nail down something, anything, to use against Gallo. I kept returning to her nickname, mentioned by both Peg Martin and Marlowe Hughes: Coyote. A coyote was a wild prairie dog, but it was also slang for anyone who escorts illegal aliens over the Mexican-U.S. border. They could range from makeshift mom-and-pop organizations to those sponsored by billion-dollar drug cartels.

  Peg Martin had specifically mentioned the film crew had used the nickname, and thus I wondered if it was because Gallo had been their actual coyote. That, combined with her birthplace in Mexico and Marlowe’s assertion that Gallo did Cordova’s dirty work, I made the theoretical leap that it just might be Gallo who had transported all of the illegal aliens to The Peak. The arrangement probably was that they worked crew on his film for three months, witnessing any number of appalling acts, and then, after being sufficiently threatened so they’d never spill the beans, were free to go. It was unquestionably a long shot, and I hadn’t expected it to work—until now, when I’d watched the color drain out of Gallo’s face.

  She’d transformed considerably in the years since her bright-eyed teenage wedding photo—even since the day she’d accepted Cordova’s Academy Award for Thumbscrew. It was as if all those decades serving the director, standing in such close proximity to him, had petrified her, made her gray hair grow coarser and wirier, her low brow heavier, her lips tighten as pulled string. There seemed nothing left in her that was light or carefree. But perhaps that was what happened when one decided to forever orbit a hulking planet with a mass that dwarfed one’s own.

  She hadn’t moved a muscle, only watched me intently. She put down the phone.

  “What do you want, Mr. McGrath?”

  “To have a heart-to-heart.”

  “We’ve nothing to discuss.”

  “I disagree. We can start with Ashley Cordova being dead at twenty-four, then I have another problem, the fact that everyone I’ve talked to about Ashley has gone missing, including a man’s house burned to the ground. If you talk to me, maybe my friend at ICE will let slide your slave-labor operation.”

  She looked furious but bit her tongue, striding deliberately to the bar in the corner and pouring herself a drink.

  “If that was slave labor, then millions would die to be slaves,” she muttered. “They lived like kings.”

  “They couldn’t leave. So technically they were prisoners.”

  “It was how they paid for the crossing—all agreed to ahead of time. There was no coercion and no lies. At the end of production, we could hardly get them to go. They wanted to stay on forever.”

  “Like children not wanting to leave Epcot. Touching.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “What do you hope to gain out of all this?”

  “The truth.”

  “The truth.” She smirked, quick as a spark off a defunct lighter, then looked serious. I could see she was genuinely shocked by my showing up here—of that I was certain—and seemed now to be deciding how best to handle the situation, the quickest way to be rid of me. She must have decided to play along, at least for now, because she cocked her head to the side and smiled stiffly.

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “So long as it’s not poured over arsenic.”

  She fixed me a glass of Jameson from the same bottle she’d served herself, and hurried over, thrust the glass at me.

  I noticed, as she sat down on the couch adjacent, she actually had a small wheel tattoo on the back of her left hand—exactly as I’d read weeks ago on the Blackboards. The anonymous poster had claimed it was evidence Gallo and Cordova were the same person. Staring at her rigid profile now, I considered the possibility that the director and his assistant were one and the same, that this was Cordova. But there was something about the woman, in her stocky lieutenant’s bearing, in her flitting eyes, so subservient and unfulfilled—as if the eternal object of her attention was not present, but standing somewhere in the wings.

  No, she was most certainly not Cordova. I was positive. And she was stalling.

  “Before you demand to see the scaffolding, Mr. McGrath,” she said, staring me down, “make sure it is what you actually want to see. The cranks and the ropes and the metal supports. The rust and the heavy chains. Lights painstakingly positioned overhead. It’s a different reality than what’s on-screen. And much less thrilling.”

  She tilted her head, as if struck by a new thought, closely scrutinizing my face and smiling thinly.

  “It’s funny. I’d have thought you of all people would have been on to her. You really never saw it?”

  “Saw what?”

  “Surely you must have noticed hints, here and there, clues—”

  “Hints of what?” Suddenly I sensed I no longer had the upper hand in this situation, that Inez Gallo had recovered—or I’d never had her in a corner in the first place.

  She raised an eyebrow. “You really never figured it out?”

  “Figured out what?”

  “A
shley was sick.”

  “From the devil’s curse.”

  She chuckled. “I can assure you, and so can an army of doctors and specialists around the world, Ashley never suffered from a devil’s curse. Or any other type of curse. She had cancer. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She had it off and on all her life.”

  I stared at her, stunned.

  My first infuriated inclination was to tell her I knew what she was doing, force-feeding me another lie so I’d trust her. It was a preposterous assertion and I knew it wasn’t true.

  It couldn’t be.

  But then, almost as quickly, I wondered if I’d missed something—if Hopper had—if this, a real-life illness, had been there all the time, written in the sand, and we’d been straining our eyes, staring far out to sea, never once looking at our feet.

  “Call Sloan-Kettering if you don’t believe me,” Gallo added petulantly. “Find someone to bribe in the records department, and they’ll tell you. Ashley was treated there three times, registered under Goncourt, her mother’s maiden name. The first time when she was five, the second when she was fourteen, and finally when she was seventeen, also at the University of Texas at Houston.”

  She looked at me with triumph. “You’ll see I’m right.”

  I said nothing, going through the dates in my head. Ashley had been only five years old when she’d crossed the devil’s bridge, condemning her to the curse. At fourteen, she’d abruptly abandoned her classical music career, and at seventeen—I felt a rush of disbelief: At seventeen Ashley had called Hopper, crying. She was desperate, he’d told us. She couldn’t live with her parents anymore. She wanted to go where they couldn’t find her. Had she wanted to escape her illness?

  “It isn’t your fault,” Gallo announced flatly, as if reading my mind. “Whatever wild nonsense you’ve come to believe, curses and Satan, the bogeyman—though honestly, I’d have expected a grown man, a veteran reporter, to be a little more skeptical. But give yourself a break. Ashley was a charismatic girl. You’d be surprised what she’s convinced people of over the years. She was quite proficient in making people believe the impossible. Like her father. They had a knack, the both of them, for taking you by the hand, looking deep into your eyes, so you’d follow them down into the passageways of the absurd and unbelievable and live there forever, a total convert. I know. I did it. For forty-six years. Gave up everything. My husband. My kids. But now that it’s over I can see. Probably because I’m not one of them. I don’t have trouble distinguishing make-believe from reality. I live in the real world. And so do you.”

  She said it insistently, even angrily, crossing her arms.

  “Her sickness tore the family apart. For young children the prognosis for ALL is good. After the first round of treatment, most have remissions that last a lifetime. It wasn’t the case with Ashley. Every time we thought she was out of the woods, that she would at last be granted the gift of a life without round after round of shots and steroids, spinal taps, and stem-cell transplants, a few years would pass, she’d be tested, and the doctors would give us the terrible news again. Matilde had returned.”

  “Matilde?” I repeated.

  She nodded, eyeing me. “It was Ashley’s name for her illness. She nicknamed it, the way other children nickname imaginary friends, which will give you a good sense of the way her mind worked. When she was five, one morning she came into the kitchen, and as she ate her bowl of Cheerios she cheerfully announced to her mother that she had a new friend. Who? Astrid asked her. Matilde, she answered. Matilde. It was a strange name. No one knew where she’d heard it. Matilde is going to kill me, Ashley said. Everyone was startled, but then, she was her father’s daughter. Dramatic. Blessed—you might even say cursed—with the most graphic of imaginations. The very next day, Ashley became sick with a high fever. Tiny red spots covered her arms and her back. Astrid took her to the hospital, and the doctors gave us the terrible news.”

  “But wasn’t Matilde meant to be the title of Cordova’s next film? A film that was never released.”

  Gallo nodded. “He wanted to write about it. But he couldn’t. To write directly about something so gutting is like staring at the sun, day after day. You can’t really make it out, no matter how hard you try. You’re sure to go blind.” She sighed. “He didn’t want to work on another film, wanted only to save his daughter. It’s excruciating for a parent to lose a child. But it’s even worse to watch your child suffer, day in, day out, teetering interminably between life and death, living a life of death. But you go through with it, continue to fight, because you hope one day it won’t be like this. Life can be so cruel. It doles out just enough hope to keep you going, like a small cup of water and one slice of bread to someone on the verge of starvation.”

  She paused to sip her drink. “Ashley made the decision not to tell anyone outside of the family,” Gallo continued. “Against her doctors’ advice. But she was adamant. She didn’t want to be pitied. She said—and she was only six at the time—it would hurt much more to be tiptoed around, treated as if she were a fragile butterfly with a ripped-off wing, than to suffer at the hands of Matilde. We all made a pact with her, swearing never to tell anyone. And if Ashley wasn’t well enough to go out into the world to experience life, her father arranged for the most fascinating and outrageous of lives to come to her. In between her hospital visits to the city four, sometimes five, times a week, she was homeschooled at The Peak, and the estate became a backdrop, a hostel, a secret hidden lodging, populated around the clock with philosophers and actors and artists and scientists, all of them teaching Ashley how to live and think and dream, teaching all of us, really.”

  I was immediately reminded of the afternoon picnic Peg Martin had described. Ashley had been six years old. It would have been around the time she was finishing treatment—if Gallo was telling the truth.

  Ashley took my hand and brought me down to a deserted part of the lake where there was a willow tree and tall grass, the water emerald green. She asked me if I could see the trolls.

  “Astrid had a concert pianist from Juilliard come to the house three times a week to give Ashley lessons. Doctors had warned us, some of the very potent drugs used in treatment could have long-term effects on her nervous system, weakening her motor skills and dexterity, making something like playing the piano difficult, if not impossible. Her hands and fingers might go numb, have increased sensitivity. She might experience dizzy spells. In Ashley, however, the drugs had the opposite effect. She was able to play with astounding speed. Her memory, her ability to master even the most complicated of pieces went into overdrive, became superhuman. It was at the piano she began to live again, escape death, sailing over continents and mountain ranges and seas. She’d been in remission when she won first place in the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. But three years later, when she was fourteen, we all learned the horrible news again. Matilde had come back. Ashley was strong, but it would be logistically impossible for her to travel to her concerts and undergo another round of treatment. She had to give it all up. And she did.”

  Gallo fell silent.

  My mind was spinning from the symmetry of this equation I suddenly faced: magical on one side, scientific on the other, a dark pulsing myth and an acceptable reality. Cordova was desperate to save his daughter, as any father would be—but from a devil’s curse or terminal cancer? Ashley’s sudden musical genius at the piano—caused by her traversing the devil’s bridge or a side effect from the chemotherapy drugs she’d taken as a child?

  I thought back to what Beckman had told me, describing Ashley in concert. She had knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form. But what had given her this knowledge, staring the devil in the face, knowing he’d take her soul, or turning corner after corner of an endless illness, wondering if Death was waiting for her on the other side?

  The explanations were like two sides of the same coin, and the side that I favored revealed something essential about the person I was. Prior to investigating Ashley, with
little hesitation I’d have believed the side most others would, the side that was logical, rational, exact. But now, much to my own shock, like a man who suddenly realized he was no longer a person he recognized, that other impossible, illogical, mad side still had a very firm grip on me.

  I didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to accept that Ashley—such a fierce presence in every story I’d ever heard about her—could be singlehandedly struck down by real life. I wanted a wilder explanation for her death, something darker, bloodier, more insane—a devil’s curse.

  “Things became difficult when Ashley underwent treatment that second time,” Gallo continued sternly. “She’d always had a strong personality. As strong as her father’s. The two of them began to fight constantly—war, really. Doctors warned us that the steroids Ashley was taking could produce volatility—explosions of temper, even violence. No one could control either of them. Not Astrid. Not me. It was like living with two dragons and the rest of us were bluebirds, taking cover in closets and under stairs, hoping not to be incinerated by the crossfire.”

  “What did they fight about?” I asked.

  She arched an eyebrow. “I don’t know if you know much about the temperament of geniuses, but they have hungers unknown to ordinary men. If you’re going to commit to such a person, you have to accept it or there’ll be no end to your suffering. To survive such a person you must bend and twist all the time like a thin piece of wire, making allowances. It’s always changing, the shape you’re in. There were always other women. Other men. Other everything. Astrid accepted it. But Ashley, when she was old enough to understand, thought it unconscionable—a sort of gluttony on his part, a lack of integrity, a total betrayal of the family. One of his longtime lovers came to town and moved back into The Peak, a man Ashley did not like. One night, while I happened to be away, she went to his bedroom, and as he slept, she set his bed on fire. Astrid, not wanting the negative publicity, drove the man, screaming in pain, off the property in the dead of night. Along the way she was in an accident. Theo rescued the man before an ambulance arrived and managed to get him to an emergency room without being spotted. But Ashley got her wish. The man disappeared.” She shot me a look. “I suspect you know most of this already.”