Alone

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I’m not exactly a Faberge egg.” He thanked the designer sincerely for his efforts with the zoning board and said good-bye, relieved to have broken contact. Beneath all his preposterous pretensions, so carefully tailored to California culture, the Russian was dangerously perceptive.

  He checked out of the hotel that same day. A crew was at work in the theater; he greeted them cheerfully, raising his voice above the noise from the power tools, and borrowed a framing hammer from a carpenter to tear down the barricade from the stairs to his apartment in the projection booth. He unpacked immediately and was dialing Harriet to invite her to a housewarming party for two when he remembered they were on a break. That took the shine off the evening.

  The electric generator he’d rented to power Midnite Magic’s equipment had gone back, and the one the construction workers used would leave with them at the end of the shift. He lit the Coleman lantern he used most nights and stretched out on his sofa with the shopping bag Harriet had given him on the floor beside it, sorting out Garbo’s letters in English, saving the rest for translation when he was back in Harriet’s good graces, and reading the accounts of thoughts and events going back eighty years. He didn’t bother to arrange them in order—few were dated, just as she preferred not to sign them—and so he found himself moving back and forth in time, sharing intimacies intended for friends that reflected naive youth, wordly age, temporary elation, deep despair, and a surprisingly long list of prosaic details of a life spent moment to moment, and so far outside glamour as to shout out in protest against it.

  He pictured her, pale to the point of transluscence, chain-smoking cigarettes in her apartment in Hollywood, her condominium in New York City, her hotel in Stockholm, scribbling, scribbling; pouring out her experiences unedited, and managing to break down her life hour by hour without a single salacious confession and no insight deeper than her decision to buy a hat. John Gilbert, the love affair of her life, the tragicomedy of the nascent movie colony and the crack at the point of pressure that brought down the Great Lover in pieces smaller than Humpty-Dumpty’s, was mentioned once in passing and never again. The only comments on her films involved a complaint about an unbecoming dress in A Woman of Affairs and her personal review of her performance in Anna Christie, the landmark that had made Garbo’s voice as famous as her face: “Terrible.” Valentino found himself chafing at her stubborn lack of appreciation. Garbo was wasted on Greta Garbo.

  It was far from a complete record. The letters were addressed to Vera Schmiterlöw and a handful of other Swedish friends of many years’ standing, not the fixtures in the industry that had turned a chubby peasant girl destined to marry some goatherd into a goddess for the ages, mysterious and unobtainable, and gaps in the continuity suggested letters lost or withheld for reasons of privacy. Possibly she’d saved her innermost thoughts for expression in Swedish. But that left dozens of pages that read like the diary of a not very interesting woman who’d led a life so ordinary as to suggest a blind fear of anything that might be described as unique or adventurous. She was passionate about her rug designs, the antiques she collected, the curios she bought to rest her eyes upon when she locked herself away from the world. She had spent the rest on-screen, and left it there when she’d turned away from the Kliegs into the pale reflected sunlight of early retirement. It should have been a sad story, as drenched in pathos as Camille’s, Anna Karenina’s, and Grusinskaya’s, signature roles that continued to burn with a silver flame in revival houses and home theaters in both hemispheres; but it was not. Camille and Karenina had died early, of wasting disease and suicide, and Grusinskaya was consigned to the living death of grief for love lost. Garbo had gone on living.

  Whoever had framed a false letter purporting to drive Garbo from the closet obviously had not known her, or taken the time to learn more from her correspondence than the slope of her Vs. She was not the type to write a love letter of any kind, or to confide to anyone—at least not in writing—the details of her amours or even her impure thoughts. She had armored herself against not only the pryers and busybodies of her time, but of all time. Of all the heroes and legends of past and present, she alone had kept her feet of clay from public view. Garbo was gold: The only substance in the universe that would not deteriorate or even surrender its glow.

  Valentino laid the last letter on his chest, closed his eyes, and slept without dreaming.

  **

  If Greta Garbo was gold, Matthew Rankin was stainless steel. It was the housekeeper’s day off. For an octogenarian left to his own devices after a round-trip flight up the coast and a business meeting that must have been high-powered because it had required his presence, he looked as fresh and burnished as if he’d spent the time at a spa. His face was a healthy shade of bronze, his white hair was brushed and gleaming, and he was one of the very few modern men who could wear a smoking jacket and a silk scarf without looking affected or effete.

  “You’re looking well,” Valentino said, understating it.

  “You’re kind, but if I’m not exactly falling apart I have Andrea to thank. She had a Swede’s own idea of the price of health and put me on a regimen that has repaid the investment many times over. If you look as if you have the time to eat right and exercise and spend an hour or two on the beach, your shareholders tend to think their stock is in capable hands. You, on the other hand, look like a young man whose life has been leading him.”

  Valentino was touched by what appeared to be sincere concern. “It’s been a rough patch, but not as rough as yours. It seems to be turning around. I want to thank you again for lending me Phil’s services as a projectionist. They had an indirect influence on the result.”

  Over drinks in the study, he provided a brief summary of recent events. He left out his romantic troubles as too personal, and the scheme that had rid him of Spink; he’d asked Phil for his discretion, and had compensated him, but he didn’t know how much Rankin might guess.

  “I wish you’d confided in me earlier,” his host said. “I have some contacts in government.”

  “Earlier you had problems of your own.”

  They were sitting in a leather-upholstered conversation area away from the desk. The bust of Garbo and its pedestal were not present. Their removal had lifted much of the oppression from a room where a man had died violently.

  To Valentino’s relief, Rankin didn’t pursue the point. Perhaps he felt, as did his guest, that it was too early in the evening, and too close to home, to bring up the subject of extortion, no matter how well motivated it might have been in Valentino’s case.

  “So you’re back home. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a movie house. If I’d set up domestic arrangements in one of my department stores, I’d have been accused of marrying my work.”

  “I have been, but it’s work I love. I’m sure you can identify with that.”

  “Not really. My father-in-law was fanatically devoted to the business, but I’m still a chemist at heart. If I’d never met Andrea, I’d have been contented with a job in the research lab of some low-profile pharmaceutical company, developing serums that would save millions of lives in the Third World.”

  “I doubt that would give you much opportunity for innovation.”

  “You’re probably right. In those days, a man who spent all his time bent over a Bunsen burner wouldn’t have been caught dead socializing with a computer programmer or vice versa. Now, of course, the two professions are inseparable. Fortune put me in a position to apply my interest in the developing technology to save a dying business. I succeeded, but a healthy bottom line isn’t a cure for the plague.”

  “You don’t seem bitter.”

  “The young chemist would have been. But I have to say wealth and personal credit have their compensations. Given the value I place on privacy, had I remained where I was I’d be some penniless old hermit by now. Recluse is so much more genteel a term, but it requires a substantial income to support it.” He smiled. “But you didn’t ask
to see me just to discuss the paths our lives might have taken.”

  Valentino set his drink on a marble coaster. “I’m sure you’ve heard by now about the arrest in Stockholm.”

  “All the monitors in the airport were tuned to CNN. I suppose I should feel sorry for the fellow, succumbing to temptation to escape a life of manual labor, and temporary employment at that; even in so progressive a country as Sweden, the next step from scrubbing toilets seldom leads upward. I hope they throw the book at him. G.G. didn’t write those letters to entertain any troglodyte with an HP, or for any wretch to turn a buck putting them there.”

  “Whether or not the janitor intended to sell them, he never got around to it. He was found in possession of all the evidence. Every scrap was accounted for.”

  He frowned. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “The authorities haven’t released all the details publicly yet. The police here have them.”

  “Ah. The hauntingly lovely and disconcertingly intelligent Ms. Johansen. How is she?”

  “Busy. Even in so progressive a country as the U.S., the crime rate keeps going up. The police theory was that because Roger Akers was in Stockholm between the time the letters were last seen and when they were discovered missing, he had the opportunity to steal them and use them as models for the counterfeit he used to blackmail you. Without that connection, they’re back to square one on their investigation.”

  “They have the photocopy.”

  “That’s the problem. Your entire defense is based on your statement that Akers attacked you when you refused to go on paying him to keep the letter secret. I’ve told you about Ray Padilla, a lieutenant with the Beverly Hills Police. He has an unreasoning hatred for the rich, especially you, and it’s about to cost him his job. There’s no telling what he’ll do to get himself reinstated, or bring you down with him if he fails. He’s been badgering me for any morsel of evidence he can use against you. He thinks you forged the letter to put Akers in a bad light and make you look like a victim by comparison.”

  “That’s ludicrous! How could I forge the letter without material to base it on? Andrea burned all of Greta’s.”

  “He says we’ve only got your word on that.”

  “Did it occur to him Roger might have found some letters she’d overlooked and used them?”

  “You had better access, he says. He’s a rogue cop, the department has no control over him. It may even reopen the investigation just to put out any fires he might start. Being innocent, you’ve got nothing to worry about from them, but once the media get wind of it, they’ll come swarming around all over again.”

  The ice jingled in Rankin’s glass when he picked it up. He drank half its contents in a gulp; something the health-conscious Andrea would not have approved of. “The vultures. The bloodsuckers. They’d hound me into jail before they took their claws out.”

  “Akers liked money too much to have destroyed the legitimate letters after they’d served their purpose,” Valentino said. “He could have sold them for plenty to collectors who wouldn’t ask embarrassing questions. If they only turned up, the police could plug that hole, and they and the press would be off your back. But they made a complete search of Akers’ apartment and came up empty.”

  “Complete, my foot. Who was in charge of the search?”

  Valentino hesitated. “Ray Padilla.”

  “Once a rogue, always a rogue. If he found them, he kept it to himself. Destroying them wouldn’t be above a creature like that.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. His job wasn’t in trouble then.”

  “Over here, a policeman doesn’t rate much higher than a janitor in Sweden.” Rankin finished his drink. “Thank you, Val. You had nothing to gain by coming here, and that makes you the only person who’s stood by me from the start without looking after Number One. By the time I’m finished contributing, the Film Preservation will have a new wing named after you.” He stood, holding out his hand. “I hate to run you out, but I’m going to get Clifford Adams out of his La-Z-Boy and put him and his briefcase to work.”

  Coasting down the long sloping drive from the Rankin mansion, Valentino felt lower than he had so far in this, the lowest period in his life; and utterly alone.

  **

  IV

  THE BRIDE OF

  RANKIN’S TIME

  **

  CHAPTER

  22

  “ ‘NATURE IS FINE in luff—’”

  “Love.”

  “Love. I said this.”

  “You said luff. Pay attention to your labials.”

  Deep breath. “‘Nature is fine in love, and where ‘tis fine, it sends some precious instance of itself after the tang—’”

  “Thing.”

  “Ting.”

  “Th-ing! Thing!”

  “ ‘Th-ing it luffs. They bore him—’”

  “Loves. ‘Thing it loves.’ “

  “Gott! This wretched language. Why could not Shakespeare be born a Swede?’

  “But he wasn’t, dear. Try again from the beginning of the soliloquy, and remember, Ophelia is mad.”

  “Mad! She is spitting tacks!”

  On the edge of the soundstage, outside the circle of light where the pince-nez-wearing female voice coach and her pretty project sit on tall stools before the microphone on its stand, Louis B. Mayer’s spectacles make smaller circles of reflected light, like headlamps in a tunnel. His cigar smoke crawls toward the ventilating fan mounted in the soundproof wall of the booth where the cameraman is imprisoned so that the whirring of his equipment will not be heard on the soundtrack; for the time being, at least, the talkie revolution has banished sweep, and for that matter simple movement, from the moving picture.

  Sotto voce, speaking out of the side of his mouth like the Chicago gangsters who fascinate him, Mayer addresses Irving Thalberg, who is completely enveloped in shadow at his shoulder. “What’s the name of that dame we tested last month, the French girl without no accent? Colbert?”

  “Colbert. Claudette Colbert. The t’s silent in the last name. She signed with Paramount when I told her it would take seven years to make her a star.”

  “Broads today got no patience. Who else we got don’t sound like von Stroheim in drag?”

  “Let’s not give up on Garbo just yet. We’ve got a lot invested in her. We can’t afford another Gilbert.”

  “It was worth every penny we lost on that S.O.B. to throw his ass off the lot. She’s your baby, Irving. You can go down with the ship. I’m getting off at this station.” A born showman, Mayer exits on this triumph of mangled metaphors, trailing smoke. The boom of the fire door shutting behind him turns the heads of the actress, her coach, and the sound man fiddling with his levels.

  Thalberg raises his voice. “It’s all right. Carry on.”

  “‘Nature is fine in love…”

  **

  This time, when Valentino sat up in bed, morning light fell fully on the screen visible through the square opening in the projection booth, and for a moment he wasn’t sure if he’d been dreaming or watching a movie. But Midnite Magic’s sound system had been dismantled and removed, and the dialogue was still ringing in his ears.

  In any case, movies made more sense than dreams. By all accounts, Garbo’s sound test had impressed everyone at MGM. She’d delivered Margaret’s monologue from Faust in German, sung Solviet’s solo from Peer Gynt in Swedish, and nailed Ophelia’s insanity scene from Hamlet in flawless English, albeit with the heavy accent that would remain her trademark from Anna Christie through the end of her professional career. Her struggles with language had all taken place during her earliest days, when she had spurned the extensive studio system for grooming its contract players for public appearances in favor of private coaching, and unlike Mauritz Stiller, her mentor and probably her lover, she had proven a quick study. Stiller, meanwhile, had endured the confusion of actors and technicians who could not understand his directions in broken
patois, bridled against the restrictions placed upon him by meddlers in the front office, and died a failure at forty-five, with his protégée’s star firmly in the ascendant.

  The female voice coach in the pinch-nose glasses had borne a suspicious resemblance to the identical character who’d despaired of teaching Jean Hagen’s silent diva how to speak properly in Singin’ in the Rain, a telling satire of the infant sound era in Hollywood. Valentino’s subconscious mind seemed to have reached the point where staging remakes of actual cinema history was taking the place of reliable scholarship.

  Ninety minutes later, seated in a glass-walled recording booth at a downtown studio leased by MGM/UA, Inc., he understood the emotions that had led to his dream. A producer ten years his junior had greeted him on the fly, bum’s-rushed him down a corridor, sat him in a padded chair in front of a microphone, also padded, clamped earphones onto his head, and slapped a printed sheet marked up with unfamiliar symbols in red onto a table that pressed into his sternum when he leaned into the microphone; then the man had vanished, shutting the door on him.