“Bye, Maggie.”
“Bye, Sam.”
Chapter 33
The phone rings at 2:12 a.m.
“Get here,” says Lily.
I race west on the 10 and north on the 405 toward Brentwood and Bel Air. Nobody’s out. The night is crystal. Palms in moonlight. I drive up a slight rise and pull in behind Lily. I park and get into her car.
“You were supposed to stay farther away,” I say. “You’re right across the street.”
She hands me binoculars and points to Orlov’s villa. The gates are open. All the lights are on. Silhouettes move in windows. Three black SUVs are parked in front, near the fountain of the peasant girl. On the lawn, just beyond the jasmine and bougainvillea, a movie, Orson Welles’s The Third Man, with Joseph Cotten wandering the black-and-white streets of postwar Vienna, is playing on a screen about half the size of a billboard. Chairs are set up on the grass but they’re empty. No one is watching, except a woman sitting in the middle of a row. Small crews are filming around her.
“What’s going on?”
“Looks like they’re making a movie,” says Lily. “Shit started happening about two hours ago. The gate opened, and the SUVs rolled in. Bunch of guys and a woman got out. I think it’s the same woman who’s watching the movie. She talked to Orlov on the lawn for a while; then they went into the house and came back out. The movie on the screen started, and she sat down. The camera crew arrived. Then a bus came, and people in tuxedos and evening gowns got out and walked around back. But the woman and the crew stayed. The movie kept playing. I think the guy behind one of the cameras is Orlov.”
“I can’t tell, but I think you’re right.”
“This is surreal, even for LA. What’s the plan?”
“Gate’s open,” I say. “Let’s go in.”
“Hey, Carver, I think other people—FBI or who knows who—are casing the place too. You feel it? Lot of eyes. A few cars went up the road earlier, parked, and then left. More cars came. They left too, but I don’t know. We’re not alone.”
“Probably not. Let’s go in. You okay?”
“Don’t get me shot, and I’ll be fine. We need backup?”
“No. Let’s just see what’s going on first.”
We drive through the gate and park by the SUVs. Armando Torres appears in the headlights. Lily clicks them off. He walks toward us and waves us out. He’s dressed in his usual chauffeur chic, but his tie is loose, and he’s holding a martini glass and smoking a cigarette.
“I’m an extra,” he says.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t like you, Detective. If it was up to me, I’d toss you out. Who’s this?”
“Lily Hernandez.”
“You gotta pee, Lily Hernandez? You’ve been sitting out front a long time. What kind of binoculars you using?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer. He leads us across the lawn toward the screen. I see the extras, in tuxes and evening gowns, at a party in back by the pool. No music, no sounds, just pantomime and silver trays. It’s reminiscent of Jay Gatsby and his parties in West Egg—rich and pretty people beyond the ash heaps and smoke of New York before the crash. They move like jeweled ghosts as cameras glide among them. Lily and I stop at the last row of chairs facing the movie screen. Joseph Cotten and darting eyes and spiral staircases and men following shadows in a Europe ruined by war. The sound is off. The woman watching alone in the middle row is Juliette Binoche. A camera is perched a few feet beside her, another behind. A hand touches my arm.
“Shh, come, Detective,” whispers Orlov.
He leads Lily and me to a bank of monitors off to the side. Juliette Binoche appears on three small editing screens. She’s wearing a dress and pearls; her hair is combed behind her ears. She’s crying, looking up at the movie, gray light playing against her face. She seems a long-ago lover from a scrapbook. I imagine her wandering into a cinema from a rainy street in Paris or Belgrade or Berlin. Orlov leans close to the monitors. He traces a finger against her profile. He gently pulls me down, so my face is level with his. “Do you see it?” he says. “The ache. Look at her face. She is remembering. The movie has brought her to a time. It has unfrozen what was once before. Do you see it? Juliette can do that. She can put the past into an expression. It’s exquisite, don’t you think, Detective? The pain of memory.”
He rises. The big screen goes dark. Joseph Cotten and Vienna disappear. The villa’s lights click off. Juliette vanishes from the three monitors. The only radiance is the silent party in the distance by the pool. Orlov is not so formal. He wears jeans and a black cashmere sweater. He strikes a match and lights a cigarette, hands me one. We stand in the night. Juliette Binoche stays in her seat in the middle row. Alone.
“I’ve produced a lot of films, Detective, but I’ve never directed one,” he says. “This is my film. I’ve been making it for years. My passion project.” He smiles and nods to the big, empty screen. “Orson Welles worked on films for years, you know. He was either too obsessed or too distracted. Somewhere between is where his genius lay. That’s true with many artists. I work on this whenever I can, accumulating bits and pieces. I fear it’s becoming a too-scattered mosaic.”
“What’s it about?”
“A woman’s life. She sits in the theater watching the movie on the screen, and another inside her head. One is real; one is not. But sometimes it’s hard to tell. They spool together and apart. That is the battle of life, no?” He blows smoke. “Do you know who the woman is, Detective?”
“Maria.”
“You are right. Katrina’s mother. I thought you might guess that. Juliette is such a close resemblance. She is how Maria would have aged.”
“And Katrina?”
“I don’t know if she’ll be in this movie.” He looks to Lily. “Who’s your friend?”
“Lily Hernandez,” says Lily.
“That’s musical. Lily Hernandez,” says Orlov. He glances to me. “So tell me, Detective, why have you wandered uninvited onto my property?”
“You know why.”
“I already told you . . .”
“Will you take a DNA test? That’s why I’m here.”
“Now?”
“Tomorrow.”
He looks at Lily. Looks at me. He looks over the dark lawn to the outline of Juliette Binoche.
“Come in the morning, Detective, and we’ll get this over with. It’s a misguided supposition you’re working on. If I’m her father, I’m her murderer too. I don’t understand it. But you have your logic. I’ll have my lawyers here.”
“We just want to check—rule out—everything.”
“Yes, I know how it works,” he says. “You know, in another time, you could not . . .”
“Could not what?”
“Let’s leave it at that,” he says walking toward Juliette. He turns back around.
“I often wonder,” he says, “if I’ll ever finish my movie. I don’t know what memories to give her and what not. I don’t know if we remember the same thing in the same way. I would hope that some of it is the same, that for a brief moment long ago, two people saw themselves and the world so clearly.”
“It doesn’t happen often.”
“I suppose not,” he says. “You’re a romantic, aren’t you, Detective?”
“A little, maybe.”
“I think more than that.”
Orlov scans the lawn, twirls a hand in the air. “Much is going on tonight. Within and beyond these walls. Can you feel it? I can.”
“How long will they stay?” I say, pointing toward the silent party at the pool.
“Until dawn, I should think. They are part of her memory.”
I start to speak.
“Yes, I know, Detective. It’s a time for new disguises, like in the movies.”
“Did you . . .”
“
Don’t finish that thought,” he says with clipped anger. “You don’t want to be straying too far out of your jurisdiction, do you?”
He turns and walks toward Juliette. She hasn’t moved. He sits beside her. Joseph Cotten appears again on the screen, and they watch, like a couple on a date.
“You were going to ask him about the election hacking,” says Lily.
“Yes.”
“You see how pissed he got. His eyes. Instantaneous.”
“Then it went away.”
“She’s a good choice,” says Lily.
“Who?”
“Juliette Binoche. No one cries like her.”
“You’re the romantic,” I say.
“No, I just know a good weeper when I see one.”
“Let’s go.”
“I love this town,” says Lily.
“This isn’t our world.”
“For a little while, it is.”
We get into the car and drive through the gate. It closes behind us.
“Where?” says Lily.
“Across the street, where you were earlier.”
“I like stakeout overtime. It adds up.”
“This is the only in and out?”
“Yeah, there’s a wall around the whole thing.”
We sit in the car, passing the binoculars, watching Orlov’s stylish dream through the gates. Lily is good, on the mend. Ortiz was right. She had to get back to who she is. I reach over and touch the scar on her neck. “The stitches came out yesterday,” she says. She presses my hand there for a moment. The scar is small, a slight bump. It will fade. I take my hand away and look at her and imagine the movie I would make. It is after four. Cold, clear, a night of stars. It’s quiet from the arroyos to the ocean. LA slumbers, and I can feel its almost imperceptible pulse.
“It was calculated, you know,” says Lily.
“I know.”
“He wanted us to see that part of him. Why?”
“Another deception.”
“The movie was real.”
“I believe the movie. But he let us in. He knew we were here, and he let us into his great unfinished project.”
“You’d think a guy with all that money would just finish the damn thing.”
“He doesn’t want to finish. If he finishes it, he loses it.”
“Maria must have been some woman,” says Lily. “What percent odds do you give that he’s Katrina’s father?”
“One hundred.”
“Guess we’ll find out in a few hours.”
Lily yawns and says, “Bitch of a stakeout up here. No coffee shops around. Just money and space.”
Dawn burns in slowly, creeping through Lily’s back window, warming us. Orlov’s gate hasn’t opened. The movie screen is blank. Juliette Binoche has disappeared from the middle row. The villa’s lights are out. A few windows are open; a curtain blows back and forth in one. And on the circular drive near the peasant-girl statue, a couple from the pool party, their chic from the night before rumpled and tawdry in the new day, kiss and wander across the lawn, leaving dark footprints in the dew.
“It’s a little after six,” says Lily.
“We’ll get the DNA guys out here at eight.”
“Bet they don’t show up before ten.”
I pass her the binoculars. She lifts them.
“I like the night better than the day,” she says.
Chapter 34
A stream of black and flashing blue arrives. An armored personnel carrier bursts through Orlov’s gate. SUVs and cars pour in. Two helicopters circle. A SWAT team fans across the lawn. Radios scratch and crackle. Lily and I run to the gate. It feels as if war has broken out in a small kingdom. The tuxes and the evening gowns, hands in the air, file from the house and kneel in rows on the grass, men with guns surrounding them. A helicopter lands by the pool. Two men and a woman, yellow FBI letters on their jackets, get out and run beneath the whirl toward the villa. They point. One of them lifts a phone. A face from beneath a helmet yells from a second-floor window, “Secure.” The helicopter near the pools lifts and flies west, and the chaos calms a bit. The sense of danger is gone, but the air is charged and alert, and I can tell by the faces of the FBI agents, who look to the villa and the kneeling rows of frightened extras, that Orlov, as if in a movie, has vanished.
“Long night, Carver?”
“What’s going on?”
Azadeh is zipped in a blue FBI windbreaker, her ponytail threaded through a ball cap. Her sunglasses reflect my unshaven face as she waves for Lily and me to walk with her, past blueprints unfurled on a car hood, and through the gate along a line of agents with guns out. We stop on the lawn, beneath the screen and the empty rows of chairs where Juliette Binoche sat hours earlier in her dress, pearls, and tears.
“He’s gone.”
“Orlov?”
“We watched the gate all night,” says Lily. “No one came or went. There’s no other way out.”
“There’s a tunnel.”
“Fuck,” says Lily.
“We didn’t know it until a CI tipped us a few days ago. But we weren’t positive until right now. Our guys in the house just radioed that it’s in the wine cellar, near the room where he kept his paintings.”
Azadeh looks to the sky. The second copter circles the estate once more and skims east.
“Orlov had it dug after he got here in the nineties. Brought in a construction crew from Ukraine and then sent them back. No one knew. It goes under the pool and beneath the back wall to the street.”
“A man like that is going to keep an out,” I say. “We should have known.”
“He had a lot of outs,” says Azadeh. “We figured he left right after you guys had your movie night. About three-thirty a.m.”
“It’s almost eleven now.”
“You were watching the place, too, right?” says Lily.
“We were going to let your DNA thing play out,” says Azadeh, “to see if you could get him for Katrina.”
“You still don’t have enough on him, do you?” I say. “For the hacking.”
“Not prosecutable, but we know.”
“If you knew he had a tunnel, why didn’t you move?”
“I told you, we only just found out. We didn’t know where it came out. We didn’t think he’d take off. We’ve been listening to him. He thought he could beat you, Carver. He actually kind of liked you. You should hear him on the tapes. You made an impression.”
“What did he say about Katrina?”
“He never mentioned her one way or the other. I think he sensed we were onto him. We stayed far away and left no trace, but I suspect he knew. This Russian shit with Putin and Mueller’s investigation. Maybe something in that came out—some leak or crack his intel picked up.”
“Maybe Moscow pulled him,” I say.
“Is he still in the city?” says Lily. “Were you watching his plane?”
“His plane didn’t go anywhere,” says Azadeh. “But another one took off from Van Nuys just after four a.m. Guess who it was registered to?”
Azadeh takes off her sunglasses, looks right at me.
“Holly Martins,” she says.
“Who’s that?” says Lily.
“You were watching him last night,” says Azadeh, pointing to the blank screen. “Up there.”
“Joseph Cotten’s character in The Third Man,” I say.
“That’s him,” says Azadeh.
“That was the movie last night?” says Lily.
“Correct.”
“Son of a bitch,” says Lily.
“Made a life out of it,” says Azadeh.
Azadeh was right. She told me days ago that Orlov hid in the films he produced. Comedy, romance, thriller—it didn’t matter; they were about loss. He slipped into them and peeked out. It was a
ll there last night on the screen: Juliette Binoche’s face, memories of a life he wanted but couldn’t have, long-ago fragments he kept twisting and reinventing. Maria. She was his country. He couldn’t have her, and he became a man of many lives. The movie he was making was not meant to end; it was a ghost of the imagination.
“Sinking in, huh, Carver?” says Azadeh.
“He’s smarter than we are. More disciplined.”
“He’s not smarter than everyone,” says Azadeh.
“What do you mean?” says Lily.
Azadeh sits in a chair, looks to the screen.
“We think he’s dead.”
“What?”
“Holly Martins’s plane last had contact with air-traffic control in New York. It landed on Long Island, refueled, and took off. Minutes later, wreckage falls from the sky around fishing boats off Montauk.”
“How can you be sure?”
“We aren’t until we find the pieces. The plane, whose ever it was, wasn’t at high altitude. The debris fell in a tight pattern. We’ve got teams and divers out there now.”
“If you thought he was gone, why all this here?” I say.
“We didn’t know. We just moved. We had knowledge of the tunnel. You were pressing him for DNA. We were scared of losing him.”
“I think you did,” says Lily.
“Is Armando Torres here?” I say.
“The bodyguard? No. Probably went through the tunnel with him.”
“Juliette?”
“She was sleeping in a back bedroom,” says Azadeh. “Our guys are questioning her now. I don’t think she knew anything. She and Orlov talked a lot on the phone. About the movie. She became as intense about it as he was. She loved the idea of aging incrementally. A little like Richard Linklater did in Boyhood. But Orlov was going for something more intense—more European, anyway. The slow fuse of time. A Cold War heartbreak.”
“She said all that?” I say.
“In a sense. It was quite important to her.”
“Were they lovers?” says Lily.
“Juliette and Orlov?” says Azadeh, looking perplexed at the idea. “No. We have nothing like that. I hadn’t even thought of it. I think her character made her too sacred to him, you know? If he touched the flesh of it, it would be ruined all over again.”
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