City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  Christ, she sounded like a self-help book. You go, girl.

  Well, no one else is listening. It’s her afternoon.

  And it came after quite a morning.

  God, that was a coincidence. Or rather, that was Dublin for you. Her client, Geri Foster, turning out to be Jack Donovan’s ex-wife. Wait until Ed hears that. On the plus side, she actually got a job out of it. The house is a thirties bungalow that had been designed in what most people would call an Art Deco style, but is strictly speaking Moderne or Streamline Moderne: all white, curved corners, occasional porthole windows, glass bricks, steam-liner railings and so on. Inside it had been decorated in standard minimalist fashion: bare floorboards, white walls, rooms that look like trendy art galleries or cool studio apartments. Anne had crossed her fingers and held her breath and prepared a series of sketches that embraced the Art Deco style full on: furniture, wallpaper, rugs, fabrics, lacquer, mirrors, the lot. And Geri Foster had squealed and clapped her hands and written a deposit check on the spot. Hadn’t she heard about the global recession? Anne reckoned being Jack Donovan’s ex-wife must have its compensations.

  How she found out was, Geri had the papers on the kitchen table when Anne arrived, and a couple of the tabloids were open to Nighttown stories, and when Anne was talking Geri through the Art Deco references, she pointed to some textured wallpaper that you could see quite clearly in one of the newspaper photos.

  And Geri Foster said:

  “Oh yeah. Jack Donovan. We used to be married, you know.”

  And Anne said Oh My God and No and Serious?

  And Geri Foster said:

  “Here’s the thing. If you’re an actress, do anything you want with a director—anything he wants—except marry him. Unless you don’t give a damn about your career. Which, sadly, I do. Or at least, I used to.”

  Anne quite liked that, because it sounded like something Eve Arden or Barbara Stanwyck might have said, in a hat, with a cigarette. In fact, there had been something old-school and good-old-girlish about Geri this morning, in contrast to the Southside spoiled brat she had appeared the first time they met. Anne couldn’t figure her out at all. She fished for a little more Jack Donovan gossip, but Geri wasn’t giving anything away. She ended up liking her a lot more than she thought she had, and way more than she needed to. What was it Tracy Lord said? “The time to make your mind up about people is never”? Anne remembers Ed quoting that to settle some question the girls had asked him, his face still bruised and swollen from Jack Cullen’s thugs. That was when she realized that any man who did the job he did and who could then turn around and quote Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story was a man worth hanging on to.

  Maybe she’ll see him later.

  She knows she’ll see him soon.

  She hopes, wherever he is, that he’s safe.

  It’s not as if you made the rule to start with. Not even God had done that. You see what happens, how people behave, how you behave, and then you try to extrapolate some wisdom, some logic, some order, out of that human mess. In this case, he has acted on impulse, fine, not once, but twice, and feels a desperate urge to make it three, to bring all his work to a glorious crescendo, to achieve a, yes, an apotheosis. But now he has been to some extent thwarted, now the dread hand of the quotidian has intruded, he is obliged to step back and evaluate. You get caught up in the moment, in the frenzy and delirium of the day, in the heat and dust of the forest, and then you climb to a place of tranquillity, to contemplate, to weigh and measure and then to set down some kind of guide for the future. First physics: motion and velocity, the kinetic; then ethics: silence and certainty, the still point of the turning world.

  That’s why he is here now, taking some time from the melee, at the top of the house, in the attic room they’ve left untouched. From the tiny barred windows he can see right across Dublin to the mountains. He grips the bars and tears spring into his eyes. He promised himself, he prayed not to have to endure this kind of homecoming. Not in Dublin, not on this film. He knew it was more than could be borne, that—physics again—the system would overload. But it appears his will is not strong enough. Or is it his spirit that is lacking? Spirit, flesh, will. He doesn’t know, he is not a…what? Theologian? Metaphysician? He does not know what he is not.

  What he does know is that Ed Loy is on the case, and is looking at it as a case. And that he has arranged for Jenny Noble to be taken somewhere. There isn’t much that happens on a film set that does not distill itself into gossip and bubble up and filter down until sooner or later everyone hears about it. A film company at work is as hierarchical and complementary and self-mythologizing as a medieval village. He just needs to be patient, and he will find out where they brought her. He cannot ask Loy—he knows he is a suspect, just as the others are—but he is sure Madeline knows, and it should not prove too difficult to extract the truth from her in due course.

  But patience is not a euphemism for calm. Loy has already made the connection with Malibu, with Point Dume, with the three surfer girls there. If Loy is thinking on that scale…tears spring involuntarily into his eyes again. For God’s sake, what is the matter with him, he is such a disgusting crybaby! The thing to do…because Loy is not going to be fobbed off, or diverted, or in any way deflected from getting to the truth…or is he? It’s important not to mythologize people, to build them up into superhuman icons, he knows that only too well. After all, Loy had been on the case in Point Dume, and those girls had never been found, had they? Loy is formidable, but he is human. He came from out of the mire, just like the rest of us, and to the mire he can quickly return. So the thing to do, the thing to do is: not rush to judgment on the thing to do.

  He remembers the Point Dume girls clearly. They were so utterly trusting, so easy, happy to go along with anything he suggested, however different each had been from the others. The first one—Desiree—she was so skinny, with boy hips and no breasts. She came from somewhere in the south—that was the thing about them, they all came from somewhere else, but they all looked like California girls, all blond hair and blue eyes and tanned skin—and when he offered her a glass of Prosecco, she looked at it in wonder, as if the bubbles popping were fireworks, and gulped it down before it could be taken away from her. Desiree was the most direct of the three, not so much reluctant to talk as confused that he seemed to want to, impatient when he wouldn’t make a move and brisk about initiating things herself. He became irritated by her because she was stupid, and because her teeth were too sharp, and because the fug of her patchouli oil wasn’t enough to mask the strong smell of her feet. She laughed at him, and he hit her, quite hard, he was pretty sure he broke her nose, the bone had twisted to one side and the blood had come gushing, and instead of getting angry—because the other two girls were nice but pretty tough, it would never have occurred to him to hit either of them—she just burst into tears, wailing like a little girl, and all sorts of thoughts ran through his head in the seconds it took to get his hands around her neck, thoughts and visions of her as a little girl, with her family, with her little-girl hopes and dreams, before she had run away, before she knew what her life would be like, and how it was to end.

  Unbearable thoughts, they made him so sad back then, he remembers weeping, actually weeping as he strangled her, the hot blood from her nose spraying onto his hands, hot salt tears in his eyes. He weeps again now at the memory. It was the sudden howl of pain, and the wounded look in her eyes, the eyes of a child, and even if he did receive their light, their grace, it was not an unalloyed benison. The eyes of a child! It wasn’t fair, that he should have such a vision in his head. It really wasn’t fair. He felt shaky and remorseful for days afterward, even though nobody seemed to notice she was missing. That was in part because he was smarter about everything back then, both more cautious but also a little more deliberate, and he had made sure she wasn’t called for another week or so when he made his move. But it was also that she simply was one of those girls nobody seemed to notice, one of those peo
ple whose feet don’t make a deep impression on the earth or kick up much in the way of its dust.

  He wonders sometimes if he overcompensated with the second, Janice, because of his unease over Desiree. But he is pretty sure that was not true. He knows he didn’t waste too much time on the third because he was too upset after he…after Janice…passed. He was so sure Janice would understand what he was doing. But how could she have understood, when he barely had the tools to analyze it himself? It was rage, he sees that now, rage that Janice hadn’t understood him, and that he had had to kill her, even though he didn’t want to, more than mere rage, grief, yes, that’s it, grief expressed as rage, that kicked over onto the third Point Dume girl, Polly, he barely had her through the door before his hands were around her throat, he remembers her necklace broke and the beads went flying everywhere, the sound so clear, a crash or a crack and then a brisk swishing as they sprayed across the wooden floor, like a blind flying up, it took him weeks to find them all, he’d stand on one late at night in his bare feet and convulse, so excruciating, the pain from such a tiny glass bead. He couldn’t wait to kill her. No Prosecco for Polly.

  But with Janice…they liked each other. That was the extraordinary thing. Janice was, and he’d noticed this about so many Americans, hadn’t progressed past high school level, he knew she hadn’t even graduated, certainly had never been to university, but she was widely and well read, better read and more articulate than most of the supposedly educated people he knew. She had read not just the Gavin Lambert novels that Ocean Falls was based around, but his books on Cukor and crime fiction, his biographies of Norma Shearer and Natalie Wood. “It’s the cheapest form of entertainment,” she said. “Check out the used bookstore when you get to a new town. That’s the place that will stop you getting bored.” And her apartment was littered with bookmarks from One World on Venice Beach and Larry Edmunds on Hollywood Boulevard and from all the little stores on Main Street and Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

  And they could just talk. She seemed to know everything about old Hollywood, not just the actors and directors but the designers, the technicians, the producers, too, how the whole studio system had worked at its height. They talked for hours. She was…she was very smart. No, that didn’t do her justice, she was more than smart…she was perceptive, and sensitive, she had taste and judgment, she could marshal an argument, she…and of course, he made the mistake, because they had become so close, had shared many bottles of the blue Prosecco with no consequence more grievous than a sore head, and there never seemed a hint that she was keen to take things in a way he didn’t want to go, never a hint she was impatient with him, sexually, it was…if he had kept his mouth shut, it could have been perfect. No. Not just if he had kept his mouth shut, if he had been someone else. Because how, if they were to be truly close, could he have kept a secret from her?

  So—out of love—he tried to explain. The conquering army analogy. The Jews are in the attic and I am finishing my dinner, free. How it had to be done the first time, out of self-interest, because the girl had gone crazy, was a danger to him, self-preservation had kicked in. And then, after that, well, it was harder to excuse, but it had become a facility. Something he could do. And then perhaps a habit. Something he did. And he had begun to explain about the light in their eyes, the salve of grace, the eternal Three-in-One. But he faltered, partly because that was more difficult to explain—it was more an instinctual thing, a matter of conviction, of faith—and partly because of the expression on her face. She was smiling eagerly at first, even giggling, because she evidently thought it was some kind of joke, some outrageous satire, and then the laughter stopped, and the smile faded, and she looked…before she began to look angry, and scared, yes, this was the worst of it, he could still see the expression on her face, mingling pity and disgust. She looked disgusted at him. And the pity…he didn’t know which was worse.

  A line had been crossed.

  Pity and disgust.

  You can’t base a relationship on that combination, can you?

  She had caught him on the ear with the base of a lamp, and her nails scrabbled at his eyes, but it was always astonishing, it was, yes, truly pitiful, once his hands closed around their necks, how quickly the strength left them.

  The tears come again now, just as they did that day. How he cried, wept as never before or since, howling over Janice’s dead body. But then, the funny, the piquant, the human thing.

  Then he stopped crying. He looked at himself in the glass, contemplated the light, extinguished in Janice’s eyes, now blazing in his own.

  Gift of vision. Salve of grace. He thrived by this sweet blessing.

  Then he got to work: the disposal of the body (nobody has ever found a single body), the return to her apartment to remove the dedication pages of the books he had given, the preparation of a face to face the world, now that he had known true grief, now that he had been truly tested, weathered, had undergone trial by fire. He had known sacrifice and survived it.

  That was the day that changed him.

  That was the day that made him.

  That was the day he had learned to harden his heart, just as Himmler had admonished the SS. Not that he has any sympathies in that direction, he is as appalled by the Holocaust as anyone. Useful and necessary advice, though, could come from any quarter.

  Here come the tears again.

  But that’s all right. Tears are an essential part of any birth. And the more difficult the birth, the more urgent the tears.

  That was what he must contemplate now. Were his impulsive killings of Nora and Kate abortive spasms, the death throes of a dying breed, or are they the first live births to herald a new dispensation? Would killing Jenny Noble round off his life’s work, or be the harbinger of the next, irrevocable phase?

  The next phase.

  The new dispensation.

  It’s fair to say, he has harbored thoughts like this before.

  Monumentalism, you might call it. When your work accumulates, until it becomes a body of work, an oeuvre.

  Until your faith attains the breadth and gravity of a religion.

  He shakes, almost giggles with the adrenaline, now he dares to think it through.

  And of course, it is instantly clear that he has already embarked on the next phase. Where the timid spirit and the cautious mind had balked, blood and bone and sinew had acted. It is clear that the level of danger and self-destruction he invoked in killing Nora and Kate was an act of unconscious supplication: Let us move from private prayer to public worship. Let this work no longer be a private passion: let it be shared by an audience, a congregation. He had begun the process without consultation, all those years ago, when he killed the first girl; now he has raised the stakes. And the question he is asking of himself is:

  Do you have what it takes to honor your own abilities? Do you have the courage to trust your best instincts? Do you understand that, though the inevitable end is your own demise, you can follow no other course of action?

  His phone and two-way radio were flashing. He is always necessary to others. He is always wanted. Always in demand.

  Let them wait a moment longer, until he resolves this in his head, until he attains…what is the expression?

  A moment of clarity.

  To embrace the truth, the deep and lasting truth of paradox.

  That a man must lose his soul to save it.

  That to act counterintuitively is to act with the keenest intuition.

  That character is tyranny, that tyranny must be overthrown, that to act out of character is a consolidation of character.

  That he has been toiling in silence and in secrecy for fifteen years now, in darkness, and the time has come to let in the light.

  Better, the time is ripe to bring his light to the world.

  He lifts his head to the barred window and looks across the city of Dublin to the mountains. His thoughts turn to the man who was killed on a mountain flanked by two thieves, the man in whom he still bel
ieves, always will, despite his own unworthiness, even if he thinks of Jesus more as a rival than an idol.

  Someone not so much to emulate, as to outflank.

  (He sometimes wishes he believed in demons, for then he could invoke the name of Lucifer, the light bringer, the fallen archangel. But try as he might, his faith is not inexhaustible. He believes in God. Demons are the stuff of fairy tales.)

  Jesus said, Follow me.

  He worked in silence and secrecy for thirty years, and then emerged from darkness into the light, knowing it would inevitably lead to His death.

  And that is what he would do.

  He would step into the light. More. He would meet it with his own.

  He will call Detective Donald Coover. Coover had been at Point Dume. He had followed Coover’s career. Coover knew Ed Loy.

  And then the entire world would bear witness.

  And there is still Jenny Noble to come.

  And who knows what, to follow?

  CHAPTER 11

  On the drive from Ringsend to Foxrock, I send Anne Fogarty a text saying I’m sorry I can’t make it for “lunch.” I’m not sure if it’s possible to convey total sincerity through the medium of SMS, but I know if I ring and hear the breathy husk of her voice, I’ll be unable to resist, and I can’t drop the case now, not for a minute, certainly not for an afternoon in bed with a beautiful woman. Why hadn’t she got this idea last week, when all I was doing was working insurance fraud cases and would have had no trouble taking an entire day off? I stop off at a florist’s in Donnybrook and arrange to have some flowers sent around to her house.