City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  THE IRISH TIMES

  Nice Voice, Shame About the View

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that the standard of guests on the Late Late Show has deteriorated in recent years. We all remember the glory days when a David Niven, a Jimmy Stewart, or a Peter Ustinov could hold the floor for an hour or more with a mixture of wit, charm and downright storytelling fairy dust. In fairness, their likes are rarely to be found anywhere nowadays, and the chortling self-congratulation and studied inarticulacy of the modern celebrity is a pale imitation. And while it is also true that, in days gone by, we Irish were not above parading ourselves as horrid cute idiots savants, tottering beneath the joint burdens of infinite charm and vast melancholy, shouldering with a smile and a song (diddley eye), a solemn recitation and a brave sigh, the unfeasible weight of Being Irish, nothing, not Bono claiming joint credit with David Trimble and John Hume for the Peace Process, not Charles J. Haughey asserting his birthright to all of Ireland’s four provinces simultaneously, nothing comes close to the riot of national humiliation and Celtic burlesque that was Jack Donovan’s appearance on the Late Late last Friday.

  I sometimes wonder if Jack Donovan is actually a paid minion of the aforementioned Mr. Vox: when the lead singer of U2 is having an especially difficult time due to, oh I don’t know, everyone occasionally catching up with the fact that he is a pompous, self-regarding, vain, bombastic, tax-dodging, patronizing, caterwauling, do-as-I-say-while-I-buy-a-yacht chancer (take your pick, but you don’t have to—he doesn’t), the preposterous spectacle that is Jack Donovan emerges from whatever primordial bog or Celtic mist he usually inhabits, talking about “our innate spirituality as a nation” and our “instinctual love of great poetry” and littering his speech with constructions such as “man alive” and “with the help of God” and “it’s a long road that has no turn in it.”

  Jack Donovan was born in 1965 and grew up in Sandycove, a middle-class suburb of South County Dublin. He is not a native speaker of the Irish language who was lured from the Blasket Islands to the mainland by a raw hunk of meat. Even if he were, he would have learned how to speak Hiberno-English correctly, not in the affected manner he currently favors.

  The only conclusion one can draw is that this must go over big in America, and that Mr. Donovan has neither the ability nor the wish to modulate his Darby O’Gill tendencies for the more tender native sensibilities. We had fondly thought that Irish America had grown more discerning in its ability to sort the Celtic corn from the Irish gold, but then we remember the title of Donovan’s first film to receive American financing: A Terrible Beauty. God help us all. A Yeats quotation so hackneyed from overuse it had lost its meaning almost entirely fifty years ago, but Donovan shamelessly appropriates it and gets an Oscar nomination for his pains.

  And the perpetuation of these risible clichés continues throughout the films—in The Dain Curse, adapted from the novel by the great detective story writer Dashiell Hammett, the hard-boiled Continental Op quotes Yeats—but then, in Donovan land, everyone is always quoting Yeats, or Joyce, or Synge, everyone is a poetry-talking misty-eyed romantic with a violent streak and a desperate weakness for the gargle.

  He is an altogether ridiculous figure, Edna O’Brien with a beer belly, and the fact that—and I cannot deny it, he has the figures on his side, even the absurd Last Anniversary was a box-office smash in Ireland—he is second only to the equally preposterous Bono in our national affections means we evidently love to be lied to, and to lie to ourselves, about the nature of our great little country. (The ways in which Bono and Donovan resemble one another are so numerous as to border on the supernatural; one that is worth noting, to qualify the justified praise the look of Donovan’s films receive, is that, just as Bono would be nothing without the Edge’s melodic and technical genius, so Donovan’s films owe what power and beauty they possess to the uncanny vision of his cinematographer, Mark Cassidy, their success to the dynamism of his producer, Maurice Faye, and, if we are to believe what highly placed sources tell us, their fluency to his undersung First Assistant Director, Conor Rowan.)

  In Jack Donovan’s Ireland, no one is living in poverty as a result of the abuse of power by politicians or businessmen, or a victim of sexual abuse because of the disgraceful behavior of the priests and religious of the institutional Catholic Church. No gunman is a violent savage, no priest a cold-eyed pedophile. In Donovan’s Ireland, everyone is too febrile, too impassioned, everyone is on the brink of some melodramatic revelation—we nearly had sex, but you’re my brother!—everyone is carrying eight hundred years of poetry and history and nonspecific wistfulness around, urgent but passive, like lovely, friendly, stupid dogs.

  At the end of the show, our host, for whom I’d never thought I’d feel sympathy but who deserved the nation’s last Friday, our beleaguered host, visibly wilting under the epic tide of bullshit, encouraged Donovan to sing. And in singing “Danny Boy,” magnificently, to these nonaficionado ears, at least we had the consolation of discovering something positive about Jack Donovan: that his career as a film director has been a terrible loss to the world of music. If only we could say the same of Bono.

  Every plan has its limits, and there is a point when you have to give fate, or chance, or luck its due and say, and pray: let the will of God guide me, for I have done what I can. The only person he knew that he could ask about Jenny Noble was Madeline, and Madeline was…not evasive, that wouldn’t be fair, just irritatingly vague. Someone Ed Loy knows, she can’t remember his name, his daughter’s a friend of hers, a house on the Southside…what use was any of that? Even if he had the information, he couldn’t simply take the afternoon off, and since there were at least two girls, not to mention this friend of Loy’s, the whole thing sounded far too complicated, and potentially dangerous, and in any case, the furthest he felt he could go with Ed was to ask in general about Jenny’s safety and welfare; any direct inquiry regarding her location could only bring suspicion on his own head.

  The clock is ticking though. It’s strange: the decision to contact Detective Coover had occurred to him on the spur of the moment, but in one sense, it had been planted fifteen years before. He remembers when Coover came to the Ocean Falls set (even if he hadn’t been interviewed by him directly, how could he have forgotten it!). Coover had been impressive, he remembers thinking: a worthy nemesis. And when Coover left, he handed out his card. He had kept that card, and over the years, he had called from public phones, ostensibly to report imaginary crimes, but in fact to keep tabs on Detective Donald Coover, and track his career from Missing Persons to Robbery Homicide, and now from Robbery Homicide to Cold Case Unit. Nice to have a face he knew, a connection, so to speak, almost a friend at court—so that when the time came—and now the time has come—the information would go to someone he had met. He didn’t know why that had been important to him—hadn’t known until today that it was important—but obviously, the fact that he had sustained the “relationship” over all these years spoke for itself. The truth of ourselves, the deepest truth, is not always, is rarely known to us. That is the mystery, and the power, of art, of course: How does one element, of story, or of visual material, that seems insignificant or random, in time assume crucial significance, become in fact the hook upon which the entire film’s meaning hangs?

  Yes, the clock is ticking now. After the Point Dume information, he waited to see what would unfold, and when he was satisfied that Coover was not going to file it with the astrologers and the cranks (he had kept faith in Coover, of course, but you never know), he had entrusted the other locations to him. Such a precious, such a volatile cargo! It was a gift that he had bestowed, and Coover would perhaps never know what he had done to have earned such grace. Of course, he had barely done a thing, just been in the right place at the right time. But that’s the point of grace, surely: we put ourselves in the way of it, but there is little we can do to earn it—God does not judge us in such a primitive way, and His grace is not susceptible to any moral or logical patt
ern.

  Indeed, never was the proof of that more keenly felt than now, and by him. He had made a generous compromise—after all, the three girls, the Fates, had all been cast because of their resemblance to Madeline King—there had never been any attempt to hide that—so why did he not simply jettison the Jenny Noble option and plump directly for Madeline? Well, there had been considerations…but he told himself once more: harden your heart.

  He set Madeline a task—no, that was to give himself airs, he had asked a favor of her—to meet someone at the airport. The two associate producers were coming anyway, so it had been easy to add a third, claim he was arriving separately, give her a flight number and impress on her the need for the personal touch. Of course, she would wait and wait and eventually despair of him arriving, and she would phone him and he would tell her there’d been the most dreadful mix-up but that the producer was here now, at his home, he felt it was his fault, he wanted to make it up to her, everyone else was gathering here for drinks before dinner. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. Madeline would come, he knew that. He doesn’t know her well—could you ever know any of them “well”?—but he knows her well enough. Madeline would come, and that would be the end of it, or at least, the end of that particular chapter.

  But she didn’t come. She hadn’t even phoned. Well, she texted him, once, to say she was in the airport. Nothing since. He had called her three times—he didn’t want to call any more often, didn’t want to leave too vivid a trace—but all he received was a message from her service provider telling him to try again later. He can’t understand it. At the very least, Madeline is reliable. Has she been in an accident? Has she gone on the tear? He almost laughs when he realizes he is asking the questions everyone else has been asking about the missing girls. He almost laughs.

  But it isn’t funny. There is a time for humor, and this isn’t it.

  This is…this is simply…a problem with the ending.

  That’s better.

  Never look at a situation from one angle only.

  Never have just one ending for a story.

  If Madeline is not to be the third…

  Then maybe it is time to consider other, untried options…

  To break the rule of three…

  To raise the stakes.

  To make the last a glorious, a sacred, an unprecedented Three-in-One.

  CHAPTER 16

  Los Angeles, 1998

  Loy didn’t know the bags Jack put his soon-to-be ex-girl-friends’ stuff in were called Birkins, were manufactured by Hermès, and were dreamed of and lusted after by a certain kind of woman in the same way a certain kind of guy lusts after a Ferrari. But after he’d done it once, shamefaced on Jack’s behalf, he realized there was something special about them. Mossy Faye said Jack wouldn’t even give the poor girls the kiss-off himself, and Ed liked the expression “the kiss-off” because it made him feel like a fully fledged L.A. PI and not some shabby creep doing another shabby creep’s dirty work for him, but he had felt the shame receding that first time when, midway through his prepared speech about how Jack felt it would be better for both of them and the problem was all on Jack’s side, he noticed the girl had fallen into some kind of trance over the bag, and he’d had to ask her if she was listening to him.

  “Yeah. Sure I was. Better for both of us,” she said loudly, as if reassuring him that she hadn’t fallen asleep. Within seconds, however, she had dropped eye contact again and was caressing the leather of the bag and seeing if her clutch purse would fit in the inside pocket. When he made to leave, she barely registered his going. Come to think about it, even the fourth girl, the one who had bitten Loy’s ear, succumbed quickly to the bag’s charms, even quicker than the others. In fact, maybe there was nothing to think about there at all, except to be very careful indeed with the kind of girl who might bite your ear.

  Amanda Cole looked at the Hermès Birkin as if it was something an African despot might fill with diamonds and baby-seal furs and give to his mistress, and tossed it across her apartment without looking at it and said something in which the words all his whores were discernible and sat on a sofa in the corner of the darkened room. But then, Loy knew Amanda was not like the other girls. The “Cole” had been Koller, and she had changed it when she moved here in the eighties. Surprised, he said he didn’t think people changed their names anymore; characteristically, she said she didn’t care what “people” did. Her slender grace and dark blond coloring and intense blue eyes were very much what Loy thought of as German qualities; her accent was almost entirely American, but sometimes her phrasing hinted at her origins. The way Loy remembered it, he had noticed her face in the doorway, but that wasn’t true; nor was his memory of her hand flashing up to conceal the bruising. Amanda Cole didn’t do unconscious movements; she was the most highly controlled woman he had ever met. And initially, Loy had been so taken aback, almost to the point of outrage, at the cavalier disregard Amanda had shown for Jack’s titanic largesse that he hadn’t noticed anything else awry.

  And then Amanda looked at him with such a penetrating gaze that he had to turn away. She had the gift of seeing a man as he was at his worst, he had known that, and reflecting that worst right back at him so he could share the view, and in that moment, in her eyes, he saw how deeply he had internalized his role as the hired help, how pathetic he had grown, how, if he didn’t even appreciate his now degraded station, he was in danger of losing, yes, it seemed to him at that moment in the darkened room on Horizon Avenue as he deludedly attempted to tidy up somebody else’s life, in danger of losing his soul.

  “You don’t have to do this,” was all Amanda said.

  “It appears that I do,” Loy said, and willed himself to meet her gaze again. “I’m sorry,” he said, and that was when he saw the bruising on her face, around her left cheekbone. He made an involuntary sound, maybe a gasp, and Amanda smiled in derision, a woman laughing at a child, although she was younger than him. Maybe her laughter, her contempt for him, contributed to his anger, but he didn’t think so. He remembered seeing marks like that once on his mother’s face, remembered his father’s drunken anguish, remembered the stillness of the house for months afterward. He was prepared to change his mind about many things, but there was only one way you could think about men who hit women.

  “Did Jack do that?” he said.

  Amanda Cole made a willowy gesture with her hand, as if by doing so, she could dispense with reality, or so it seemed to Loy.

  “It doesn’t matter. It was my fault.”

  “How could that be? Did you hold a gun on him? A knife?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “What is there to understand?”

  He went closer to her, and saw that her arm was bruised also, yellowing bruises where a hand had gripped and shaken. His fist went into his mouth to stop himself from crying out. Something of his reaction communicated itself to Amanda; her stillness was a little shaken, her face a little flushed; she set her lips and broke Loy’s gaze now.

  “Don’t…he’s not a brute, he didn’t…we got into something, something heavy. I just…I don’t think I’m the right person for Jack. And I guess he agrees. So…so thank you, Ed, and thank him, and just go.”

  “I can’t just go. Because…because if I do, it’s to go around to Jack’s and give him what he gave you.”

  “No!” Amanda’s low voice suddenly came so shrill Loy got a fright. She was on her feet, her hands shaking as she approached, desperate for him to understand.

  “How well do you know your friend?”

  “Not very well, I suppose. We…I know he used to be a singer…he used to be an opera singer…he has a sister.”

  “He has a sister, yes. You know nothing about him, do you? Not really.”

  “I like him very much.”

  “You ‘like’ him very much. You…men! You can’t even say ‘love’ in case people will laugh at you, or think you’re gay. You love him. And he loves you. Two lost boys who never had a bro
ther, found one in each other. I think it’s very fine. But you don’t see…”

  “Don’t see what? Maybe we don’t confess our deepest fears to each other. Way I always understood it, that’s what a guy gets a girlfriend for.”

  “You’re very good, Ed. You have an answer for everything. And for those things you have no answer for, you have your fists. ‘Oh, he beat up a woman. Now I beat him up. I am man, hear me roar.’ And where will that get you?”

  “It’s not supposed to get me anywhere. It’s supposed to…point out to him the error of his ways.”

  “And who made you the judge? You’re the detective, not the judge. When the detective starts to think he is the judge, nothing but trouble. Believe me.”

  Loy was struck by this, and by the ghost of the accent in which it was said, and fell silent.

  “Listen to me, Ed. There is something in his past, deep in his past, something wrong. Do you understand? I know you don’t, but from the way I’m saying it to you, please believe me, it’s immense. It…and I think he needs to see someone, psychologist, psychoanalyst, psychiatrist…but he won’t. He says it’s where everything comes from…his ‘art.’ I said you can’t justify a sickness in the name of art.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “He just laughed, and said, that’s what all the others did.”

  “All the other…artists?”

  “That’s his trip. He suffers so we don’t have to.”

  The irony of this fell heavy in the room. Loy turned to Amanda Cole and held a hand up to her bruised face.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t think I have what it takes to make Jack feel better about himself.”