City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  “That’s the one. For the Canterbury and Dubes crew. Kate’s home from home, I don’t think she’s missed a night there since we started.”

  “And did you see her go, Jenny?”

  “Nah. I left myself around ten, couldn’t say if she was still there or not. I’m telling you though, that’s probably where she ended up. And if she didn’t make it home, well sure, she probably did all right for herself. Clock was ticking like, sure it was only a matter of time before it all caught up with her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s still asleep. Or doing the long walk of shame into work. Although fair play to Kate, shame is just something she doesn’t do.”

  “And what about Nora? Was she at Josh’s party?”

  Jenny shakes her head.

  “She wasn’t. Now Nora is another matter. You know, I’d’ve said it would take something major for Nora to miss five minutes, she just ate it all up. She’d be on set watching when it wasn’t her scene, where the camera was, what the actors were doing. And any spare time she had, she was down the Irish Film Institute or at the Lighthouse, watching all the new art-house movies. Nora Mannion was an intense young one, her and Kate were like chalk and cheese. It was no surprise she wasn’t at the party, but I would be worried Nora hasn’t shown at all today. Maybe she’s been in an accident?”

  “Rose Mannion rang around the hospitals first thing this morning,” Madeline says. “Nothing doing. She’s going to keep calling every couple of hours. As far as she’s concerned, it’s completely out of character for Nora, she’s…she was quite upset, to be honest.”

  The sudden talk of accidents and hospitals and upset blood relations lends the incongruous gathering on the upper deck of the bus a sudden air of gravity; for a moment, no one wants to pursue that line, lest fate perhaps be tempted; when the silence is broken, it’s the grave-faced Fate herself, Jenny Noble, who speaks.

  “On one level, it maybe feels a bit hysterical, two twenty-year-old girls not even missing twelve hours and everyone’s freaked out. And when I was first told, I suppose I thought, if it was any other job in the world, you’d just say, bloody young ones, they don’t know they’re born, and get someone to cover and wait for them to show. I thought, God, what a bunch of drama queens, the way everyone was acting out. But I don’t know if I feel like that now.”

  Jenny Noble turns her vivid gaze on me. Maurice Faye and Madeline King are looking at me anyway. The ball is in my court. But I’m not there, haven’t been there since Jenny had deliberated and, in her considered, serious, yes, fateful way, had come down on the side of loss. I am far away, in space and time. I am in Point Dume, in Malibu, on the beach, in the ocean, on the bluff.

  CHAPTER 6

  Three extras, women in their late teens or early twenties, had gone missing from the set of Ocean Falls, Jack Donovan’s 1994 movie, and I was sitting in a beach bar off Pacific Coast Highway having a version of this conversation with a different Madeline and the same Maurice Faye. To my knowledge, those girls had never been found. They certainly were never found by me.

  Sweat prickles on my scalp and beads on my brow. My tongue feels as if it has doubled in size and been pressed dry, like a sponge. Finally, I manage to get a few words out.

  “I’d like to be able to say there’s no need to worry, but I don’t know if there is or not. People act out of character sooner or later: being who we’re not helps to remind us who we are. So it may well be that Nora Mannion got fed up with being a good girl and an apt student, got so sick of herself she wondered what it was like to be someone else. And she may well have woken or be waking this morning with the knowledge of what that’s like, for better or worse. Let’s hope that’s what happened. It seems highly likely something like that happened to Kate Coyle anyway. The second option is that Nora has been involved in some kind of accident, or fallen ill, in a manner so serious she’s not able to call and let anyone know about it. And of course, that could go equally for Kate. The third option…the third option is that some person or people are in some way holding one or other or both girls, and are preventing them from leaving. They’ve been abducted, in other words.”

  “And murdered,” nobody says, but it hangs in the air like an unheard melody, like the red flash you see when you shut your eyes.

  “Jenny, I don’t want you to panic, but if there is something like this happening, obviously you’re in danger. So we need to make sure you’re somewhere safe, somewhere no one can get to you. Where are you staying?”

  “I’m subletting from a friend in Trinity, she’s gone to the States on a J1 for the summer. It’s a flat in Rathmines, one of the houses the Celtic Tiger didn’t touch. Old place in about twenty-four bedsits, very shabby, crumbling, damp, you could force the locks with the back of a spoon.”

  “Okay, well, if the other girls don’t show up soon, we’re going to have to get you out of there for a start. In the meantime, because I need to talk to Maurice about a few things, Madeline, could you maybe see that Jenny goes back to the costume truck for the time being, and then I’ll be down to figure out where we take it from there.”

  One of the downsides of the way my mind works when I’m on a case is that I assume since I can make the connections, everyone else can, particularly those who are as well placed as me. Those who were in Point Dume fifteen years ago. But when Madeline King got off the bus with Jenny Noble, Maurice Faye holds his hands up as if to concede defeat, and lets a large laugh crash and rattle off the metal fittings of the bus, and nods his head ruefully.

  “Fair play Ed, a thousand a day, you win. Let’s just get it sorted out, search parties, smoke signals, the whole bit. Thing is though, we need to keep it under wraps. That’s why there can be no Garda presence, Jesus, we’d end up all over the fucking Evening Herald.”

  I look at him in a quizzical way, sure he must be able to see the parallels between now and then; he interprets it as my attempting to drive an even harder bargain.

  “Look, a grand a day, that’s what you asked for, and your expenses, don’t push it any further now. Fuck, the trouble we’ve had with insurance on this gig…it’s getting worse every time.”

  “How’s that? I thought you had Universal behind you, their indie strand, what’s it called—”

  “Focus; we do and they’re brilliant. But it’s just…especially after The Last Anniversary, they’re watching very closely. They want Jack back in his box. And as we both know, when you insist on putting Jack in his box, you get nothing but trouble.”

  The Last Anniversary was Jack Donovan’s most recent film, a determinedly obscure epic that centered around a doomed love affair repeating itself with variations across seven different historical periods, from the twelfth-century Crusades to the Vietnam War. Characters moved freely from one period to the next; historical anachronism abounded, and although the periods seemed to have been chosen for contemporary parallels that might be made to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nothing of this came across in the script, nor, Jack insisted, was it intended to. The first cut of the film ran four and a half hours; after much hand-to-hand combat with Universal, Jack finally consented to a version that ran three hours and ten minutes. It opened to universally dreadful reviews, and from a budget of eighty-five million dollars, grossed one and a half million the first weekend, eventually ending up at just above five. It was the kind of extravagant act of folly Hollywood hates to back and directors love to make when coming off a big hit.

  In Jack’s case, that was his 2002 version of Philip K. Dick’s alternative-universe classic The Man in the High Castle, which grossed over four hundred million and let Jack believe he could do anything he wanted. Which was briefly true; what he didn’t realize was that, when he failed to do what he wanted well enough, he would get sent to Hollywood Jail, free to associate with inmates like Michael Cimino, Elaine May, Martin Brest and Michael Lehmann, but unlikely ever to leave. What saved Jack Donovan from shooting episodes of TV shows as a director for hire the rest of his career was the fact that Universal had insi
sted on putting a producer in over Maurice Faye’s head on The Last Anniversary, so when Jack came up with the script for Nighttown, the low budget combined with Maurice’s relatively unblemished track record on the hits they had together meant that Jack Donovan got a second chance. Not that he saw it like that. “Every movie is your first chance,” he told an interviewer from Rolling Stone. “And your last.”

  “And the press are watching everything we do like a hawk,” Maurice says. “So we don’t want the cops anywhere near the production. Unless Colin falls off the wagon when he’s in town and gets into a few rows, they love all that Hollywood Wildman thing.”

  “That’s why they loved Jack so much in the first place, isn’t it? He was Dylan Thomas, Richard Harris and Errol Flynn wrapped up in one.”

  “And he was making them money, Ed. When you start to lose them money, different story. Fuck, I don’t know how many anniversaries we’ll have to live through before we’ve heard the last of The Last Anniversary. Did you see it yourself, Ed?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Maurice yells with laughter.

  “You’re afraid! Jaysus. Imagine how we felt. I think it took Jack two years before he realized, or at least admitted, what a mess it actually was. Maybe he’ll do a director’s cut someday and they’ll rediscover it, in France or some-fucking-where. Anyway. Forward, not back, isn’t that right? The future is the only thing we can change. And the Guards needn’t know, right?”

  I shrug.

  “The Guards won’t be in much of a rush anyway—the girls have been gone such a short time they hardly constitute a missing person case.”

  “All right. Do you think you can find them, Ed?”

  “If they don’t show up themselves…in other words, if we’re at option three, and they’ve been abducted, then chances are they’re dead already. In which case, it doesn’t make any difference to you; your budget is shot to hell. The only other possibility in that scenario is if the kidnapper contacts us. But if he contacts us, it may well be that he wants to mess with us, and he’s already begun to kill them.”

  Maurice’s eyes open wide, and he looks at me with a mixture of alarm and derision.

  ‘“He’s already begun to kill them?’ What the fuck are you talking about man, a serial killer? We’re making a movie, we’re not in one. Fuck’s sake Ed, this is Dublin, not L.A.—”

  “Not L.A. Not Malibu. Not Point Dume.”

  “Not Malibu. Not…fuck…those extras on Ocean Falls…how many were there?”

  “Three. You remember?”

  “I do now.”

  “Three girls of nineteen or twenty. They were surfers, or surfers’ girlfriends. They weren’t that crucial to the shoot, they were just in crowd scenes, beach parties, so on. It wasn’t like they were one of Jack Donovan’s trios, his Furies or his Fates. And in real life, they were runaways, or they had no family, no one seemed to care about them, or even notice that they’d gone. Except for Jack’s girlfriend of the time, who was the extras’ coordinator, I think she pressured you into hiring someone to look for them. And Jack thought of me.”

  “In that beach bar off PCH, that’s when I first met you. What was that, ten—”

  “Fifteen. Ninety-four. It was one of my first cases on my own, after I’d taken over the agency out there. And it was not an auspicious start. I trawled through biker bars down in Long Beach, porn sets in the Valley, those girls left trails all over. But no beginning and no ending. They just vanished into thin air. Vanished back into the thin air they’d come out of.”

  “We got the cops involved on that one though, didn’t we?”

  “We notified them. But you know, the state of California reports between thirty-five and forty thousand people missing every year. And there’s a fair number of those who already went missing from somewhere else, who came to California in the first place in order to disappear. So with the best will in the world, the LAPD will prioritize cases according to who is doing the reporting. And that means a tearful mom shades it over a private investigator whose client is a movie producer and a bunch of missing runaways with no known next of kin. So yes, they have the case on file, and I assume, technically, it remains open. But I doubt if you could describe it as active.”

  Maurice stares at me blankly for a while. He looks as if somebody has removed his brain for servicing. When it has been replaced, and all synapses are firing again, he begins nodding and gesturing animatedly, as if he has been fast-forwarded to a later stage in the conversation and is now keen to pursue me on points I haven’t yet made.

  “So what are you saying, these two…cases, fuck, I don’t want to acknowledge this is a case—”

  “So what am I doing here?”

  “These two cases are linked?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not. It’s one possibility. The first thing that flashed into my mind when Madeline called me was that bar on PCH, the head shots of those sunburned blond California girls.”

  “But what I mean is, if they are linked, we’re the link, aren’t we? Me and Jack.”

  “That would be a way of looking at it, all right. Whoever was on that shoot and is also on this one. You, Jack, Mark Cassidy…anyone else?”

  “Conor. Conor Rowan, he’s been Jack’s First AD all the way through.”

  “Is that it? You haven’t kept anyone else from the beginning?”

  “Just the old Gang of Four. Are you going to tell us we’re suspects, Ed?”

  Maurice fires off a salvo of Mossy-laughs. I let my expression go blank. When the laughter abates, Maurice’s face ripples with sudden anger and he jabs a stubby finger in front of my face.

  “Are you saying one of us would sabotage our own work? Because if those girls are gone, and the costs are such that we can’t recast and reshoot, or CGI them in somehow, or find some other solution I can’t think of at the moment, this will bring the film crashing down around us, you know what I mean? This will be a disaster. Do you think any of us would do that?”

  “Take your finger out of my face or I’ll break it off,” I say quietly. Maurice Faye’s eyes widens and his mouth gapes. He snatches his hand back into his chest like I had burned it.

  “I don’t know what someone who abducts and, presumably, murders three girls for no apparent reason would or wouldn’t do, Maurice. I don’t understand that kind of person. No one does. All I know is, you guys were there, and there were lost girls, and now you’re here, and there are lost girls. Don’t waste my time, or yours, getting angry because I spelled that out. Or because you did.”

  Maurice bows his head. I humiliated him, and he deserved it, but I need him on my side.

  “As regards the bigger picture, you’re the common link, but the nature of the abduction has changed. In Point Dume, the girls were, from the film production’s point of view, replaceable; here, they’re not, or at least, not without great inconvenience and expense. So as you say, it’s unlikely that any of you would want to do that. Isn’t it?”

  Maurice taps his phone and stands up.

  “I need to talk to Jack now about this movie we’re here to make. Just find those girls, Ed. You’ll get whatever help you need from me.”

  “Maurice,” I say. “It might be better if you didn’t lay this out for everyone as bluntly I’ve laid it out to you.”

  Maurice’s lips vanish inside his mouth and his eyes narrow, his expression as close to hostile as I’ve ever seen it.

  “What, I should neglect to mention to them that they may be suspects?”

  “I don’t necessarily consider them—or you—suspects. There are any number of celebrity stalkers and fanatics who like to follow the carnival around. One possibility is that someone who was in Malibu in ’94 could be in Dublin now, could have been in the pub last night, could have Jack, or you, or the Gang of Four, in his sights. Finding out who that might be will be hard enough without all of you closing down on me because you think I’m on your case. And I still don’t even know what we’re dealing with here: kidnappin
g and abduction, or accident and coincidence. So I need a little time and a little flexibility to explore every angle, and I’m asking you to do your best to allow me that. All right?”

  Maurice stares out the window at a bunch of actors taking a smoke break in the yard, the men in military uniforms, the women in silk and satin wrappers. Grips in shorts are unloading a fat-legged Victorian table from a van, and a ponytailed technician is sorting through stacks of cable in the sun. When he turns back to me, his face is grave, and the gaze with which he meets my eyes is steady.

  “If we can’t wrap this movie, we’re finished, end of. Whatever you need, you’ll get.”

  We shake hands, and I follow Maurice Faye down the stairs of the bus and out into the heat of the yard.

  Maybe it had been a mistake. Scratch the maybe, it had obviously been a fucking mistake, he knew the score only too well, special extras? Girls that had already been shot on? What was he thinking? Well, he wasn’t thinking, was he? Driving back to the location, he spotted her coming out of a pharmacy, it was the work of a minute to pull up alongside her. The set was just around the corner but he knew she’d jump at the chance of a lift, of a precious moment alone with him. Not because she was some little operator, absolutely not, but because she was in love with the idea of the cinema, with the magic and the mystery, with the art of it all. And maybe that was all that had been on his mind, to give her a lift around the corner to the set, to bask in a little youthful adulation, but once she was in the car, once he’d gotten a good long look at her, once he’d gotten the scent of her deep in his lungs, he heard himself saying something about there being just one more stop he had to make, he was improvising, playing it by ear, at the outset he had no intention, she wasn’t the kind of girl he did this to, he just wanted, in the moment, to be with her. They talked…what had they talked about? Michael Powell? Nicholas Ray? He can’t remember. For one so young, she knew a hell of a lot about classic cinema, particularly in an era when most kids her age thought movie history began with Star Wars, or at best, Taxi Driver, and balked at the very notion of seeing a black-and-white picture of any kind. Which made what he had done even more inexplicable.