City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  She spends a while with Maurice Faye, who is very Galway and lovely and says Ed is the coolest man in Ireland and would, Anne suspects, say mass if he was let, and even if he wasn’t, and Maurice introduces her to Conor Rowan, Jack’s First AD, and she asks Conor Rowan what a First AD does and Conor Rowan, who has a red face and a blunt, direct manner and a smile that doesn’t reach his boiling eyes, says the First AD directs the movie and gets none of the credit and Anne laughs, thinking it a joke, but Conor, who it now seems to her is not so much blunt and direct as angry and rude, does not laugh, and his smile looks like an affliction, and he does not reply in anything more than grunts to any of her sallies about Jack’s earlier films (she has done her homework) or his opera career (Anne once saw him in a Dublin Grand Opera Society Tosca) or the current economic crisis, and Anne looks longingly across the room toward where the Famous Irish Actor had been but was no longer, and she wonders whether Colin or, indeed, Cillian would appear, and when their glasses are refilled she decides to try once more with Conor Rowan and if he can’t find the manners to reply she will turn on her heel and ignore him, it’s like first term at university, and all she says is if there is such a thing as bad champagne she has certainly never drunk any of it. Well, Conor Rowan suddenly embarks on a monologue about the snobbery over champagne, which of course is a region not a drink, and is vastly overrated and ridiculously overpriced, perfect of course for the kind of yahoos and yobs who have made money in Ireland in the last fifteen years and have no idea what they like on account of their having no taste, so the only way they can mark what they think of as their success is by spending more money than they could afford on things they think they’re supposed to like. What Conor recommends is an Italian semisparkling Prosecco, at eleven euros fifty a bottle, he has been drinking it for fifteen years now, Mitchell’s in Sandycove stocks it, she’d like it, he says smarmily, it comes in a very pretty blue bottle.

  Then he asks her if she has any children, and when Anne says yes, she has two daughters, Conor’s smile intensifies and he says, “Three girls together.” A creepy smile, Anne thinks. A creep, anyway, definitely, and she is relieved to be rescued by a slender fair-haired man in a pale linen suit who says he is Mark Cassidy and asks her if Ed is coming and she says he asked her to come so she assumes so but you can never tell with Ed and Mark laughs like she has said something funny and Anne laughs, too, just in case she has, and her glass needs refilling again and Conor Rowan fades away and Mark starts talking about Nicholas Ray and what a strange career he had and Anne fears she is going to be a long way out of her depth, and too pissed to start bailing, and then she remembers a Nicholas Ray movie because Kevin had been a mad Humphrey Bogart fan and she says something low-key about In a Lonely Place and Mark gets very excited and they talk for a while about how dark and unsettling that story is, a doomed love affair, with Bogart playing a screenwriter prone to bouts of uncontrollable violence which, Mr. Hyde–like, he is unable to recall. Mark starts to talk excitedly about a screenplay he has written around the same themes, or maybe Anne misunderstands him, she isn’t really listening now because Ed has appeared with Jack Donovan.

  It’s strange, shocking, what she feels in that moment, what she sees—both men so different, physically, Ed tall and slender and ramrod straight, Jack broad and bull-like, with the huge head, the mane of hair, but around the eyes, the identical glow, beneath the brightness and the swagger, and they have swaggered in, the pair of them, no show without a pair of Punches, but it’s there around the eyes, a dark, haunted look, as if the worst is inevitable, and you can prepare all you like, no matter, it will end in tears. She has noticed traces of it in Ed before, a sense that he has lost something he can maybe never get back. She loves that chink in his armor, that glimmer of vulnerability. She wants to work on the maybe. But tonight, with Jack Donovan, he looks as if there is nothing left to heal, nothing to look toward, nothing except darkness. It makes her fearful for him, and for herself, and for her girls. It is as if someone has walked across her grave.

  CHAPTER 20

  I don’t know what I was expecting. I never do, in those moments when I am driven to confront a suspect or a less-than-cooperative client, or in Jack’s case, both. Did I think he would delve deep into the past and present me with The Answer, like an analysand in a movie? Unlikely, given the subject in question: Jack Donovan’s movies are delirious with the lack of answers, with the notion that asking the question is in itself the answer. Did I hope he was so soul-sick he would want desperately to confess? And if so, to what? Did I fear he would rear up against me and fight, or flee? All of the above, or none. I needed anything I could get, even while I knew that none of it would make easy listening.

  Across the room, I see Anne Fogarty’s bright head, her crooked, sexy smile, her flashing eyes. I want to go straight to her, to share in her laughter, to join with her against the world, citizens of the independent republic of lovers. But I am carrying what Jack has told me, carrying Jack Donovan, what he has done and what he, or another, might yet do. I see in Anne’s eyes the wit that understands this, and the care that worries on my behalf, and I smile in a way that convinces neither of us, that is probably not even intended to.

  “Did you see the children?” is the first thing Jack Donovan says in the back room in Mulligan’s. He has called for more drinks, so I can’t be sure if the tears in his eyes are distilled from pure emotion or alcohol, but they take me aback. “Joanie and Jackie,” he says, and the uncharacteristically hollow tone betrays him. Jack can make any falsehood sound plausible, convince himself of the truth of any lie—if he wants to. He has the singer’s gift of conviction, of feeling the feeling, never mind the truth.

  “Alice and Daisy,” I say. “Geri told me to tell you their names. She also said that she knows you’re in love with your own guilt and shame. But she’d like to see you, in spite of that.”

  “She said that?”

  “She did. And she said, despite your refusal to acknowledge them as your daughters, you send so much extra money on their birthday, way more than any kind of maintenance settlement would demand, that it’s clear you know you’re their father.”

  Jack’s eyes fill up, and his great frame begins to shake with emotion, and he rests his brow in his hands. There is something so grand about this gesture that, whether heartfelt or not, it appears bogus, and I am moved to anger.

  “What the fuck is the matter with you? Your children, your fucking children…and that woman…you don’t know the first thing about her. Maybe she was a spoiled little brat back then, when you met first…but you had that week together…you chose her…and you know something? She loves you. She only hates you as much as love entitles her to hate someone who’s behaved the way you have. Any man…after five years, and then another five, and she still…any man would be, luck isn’t the half of it, unworthy of such a…and you know, she’s not a saint, she’s bitchy and vain, with good reason…she’s an amazing woman, any man would…what the fuck is the matter with you?”

  Jack looks up at me through blood-flecked eyes. His face looks like a clown’s, stripped of makeup.

  “I ran away,” he says. “I ran away twice. I was…frightened. Because I thought I had made a mistake, the first time. And then…the second time, because I knew the divorce had been the mistake, and I couldn’t turn myself around to admit that. And frightened both times, all the time, of what I might do…”

  “What you did to Amanda Cole?”

  Jack nods, his eyes on his drink.

  “Because I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. And as a result, it could happen again at any time.”

  “What about willpower, Jack, what about making sure it doesn’t by an act of will?”

  “Will? Do you believe in will? I don’t. I believe in fate, Ed. I believe in the things we do, and the people we are as a result, being beyond our control. And you can look at me like Derek Doyle, with mockery in your eyes, you can say I’m a buffoon and a clown and so
on, but my voice…where does that come from? The stories, the characters, the films…you can say they’re crap, or not you, Derek and all the Dereks, all the sneering, eye-rolling, give-me-a-break merchants who live in The Real World and are enraged at everyone who won’t buckle down and join them there, they can say the movies are nostalgic and clichéd and not ‘relevant’ but they can’t say where they come from and neither can I. It’s like…it’s like it’s all already been written, and I’m just chasing after it, trying to get it out.”

  “That’s art, Jack, that’s not life.”

  “It’s all the same to me. So I don’t feel ‘in control.’ And I find…I found it very hard to take the risk. That I would beat the, the mother of my children.”

  “It’s not good enough. In fact, it’s ridiculous, and so are you.”

  Jack subsides into silence again, whether conceding the point or not it’s impossible to tell. I write Geri Foster’s name and address, along with the names of her daughters, on an index card and push it across the table at him.

  “Did you like the house? I chose it, she sent me three possibilities and I picked that one, you know why? Because it’s like the white house in Sandycove, by the Joyce Tower there. I used to dream of that house when I was a kid, swimming in the Forty Foot. And I liked the Art Deco shape of Geri’s house, the house I bought for her, the way it looks like a house in California. I thought that would be good, you know, a way of linking the two places, Dublin and L.A.”

  “And then you broke the link.”

  Jack stares at the index card.

  “Did you write the letters yourself, Jack? As a way of getting me involved with this?”

  “No.”

  “Because if you did—”

  “I didn’t. I…what did my sister say?”

  “She laughed at the idea that you were taking the letters seriously, and then she suggested that you had probably written them yourself.”

  “Do you think she wrote them?”

  “No, I think you wrote them. The three-in-one stuff connects with the way you shoot the girl trios in every movie, the Fates or the Furies.”

  “And now it connects with the killer in Point Dume Beach, and possibly beyond.”

  “That’s right. And the crucifix they found in the grave. And the fetus.”

  “The fetus. Yes. What does that mean?”

  “I asked your sister about it.”

  “Did you? You’re not shy about what you ask, are you?”

  “And she said if I wanted to know who the father of her aborted child was, I should ask you.”

  “And are you asking me?”

  “I was circling around it. I was interested in how close the two of you were. The way she described it, sounds like she played quite a maternal role. She gave up opportunities of her own…in order that your career would flourish. And she stuck with you when you changed courses, when you gave up singing. She passed up the chance to go to university, to drama school, she supported you by getting a job, she paid for your education. That’s a lot of devotion, sacrifice, you might say. I suppose I’m confused, the way you sought to portray her when you hired me as this embittered, spurned figure constantly leaching off you while making it clear how hard done by she feels.”

  “And how does it seem to you, in fact? Like she’s the one more sinned against?”

  “I think that’s how she sees it. And that these letters are very much your bid to confess the truth about what she did for you. Make no mistake, she admires, reveres you, as a creator, as an artist, a lot of the times she was talking she sounded like a muse, more an ex…”

  Jack sits and looked at me as I lapse into silence, and an unpleasant smile twines around his lips.

  “More an ex what? Less of a sister and more an ex-wife? Is that what you wanted to say? Feel free, Ed. I invited you in, after all. Just as I did back in L.A., back with Amanda Cole. Of course, you didn’t follow that through. You ran away, and stayed away for ten years. You didn’t have what it takes. But you’re ready now, are you? You gonna ask me? Because I can tell you, whatever way I stretched the facts about Marie, emotionally, I was down with it. Emotionally, I owe her nothing, she owes me. And if all she has to ponder is a bit of career disappointment, then hey, I think she’s the winner. Because she was, she’ll always be, my big sister, four-year gap, she led the way. I was thirteen when Mam and Dad died, thirteen, and Marie…she was so glamorous, such a beauty. And it was such a shock, and she…she stood guard.”

  “That’s exactly the expression she used.”

  Jack nods.

  “And let nothing intrude. My world was music, and her. I didn’t look outside, I didn’t have ‘groups of friends’…I didn’t have friends. I had my sister. And…have you ever wondered about the women? I mean, when you were cleaning up after me, did you ever wonder, what the fuck is this guy’s problem? Set aside that I could hire you to do my dirty work, the indulgence, the decadence of that, did you wonder, you know, Oscar Wilde, to lose one girlfriend is carelessness, to lose four or five in one year is taking the piss. Did you ever ask yourself, Hollywood director, girls form a queue, can he not just fuck them and forget them? Why does he have to try and fall in love with them?”

  Jack stops here, genuinely interested in what I think.

  “Sure. And there were several who I think would have preferred it that way, too, a quick fuck and a designer bag and good-bye.”

  “Of course they would. But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do without the song and dance. I wanted something more, something different, something…eventually, that I couldn’t have. Something forbidden. When it was offered to me, I found I had no palate, no appetite. My taste had been…corrupted.”

  Jack looks directly at me now, almost smiling, almost triumphant, daring me to ask the question I do not want, do not need to ask. Part of it looks like taunting on his part, but pleading surely plays its part. It’s a crucial moment, and it turns out that I am not ready to meet it, or at least, that when faced with the rival claims of friendship and professional duty, duty wins.

  “I’ve run well past the limits of my abilities as a detective there, Jack. If you want to talk any more about this, I think you need to talk to a different kind of investigator.”

  There is a moment when betrayal flickers in Jack’s eyes, a moment when we both hear the crowing of the cock. Jack shakes his head to dispel it, and pantomimed disappointment spreads across his face instead.

  “I don’t know. I paid you to find who sent these letters, and you don’t appear to have done that, Ed. How do you think that reflects on your professional ability?”

  “Poorly. The third person I needed to talk to is Madeline King. Is there anything you’d like to tell me about her?”

  “That she is at this stage as disappointed as every other woman I’ve ever known. That she is a nosy cow who will not leave well enough alone. And that if you’d been around and willing, I’d have armed you with a bagful of treats and asked you to kiss her good-bye for me.”

  “What do you mean, leave well enough alone?”

  “Poking her nose where it doesn’t belong. I mean, at least I asked you to do it. I deserve what I get. I never asked her to try and…fathom me. Figure me out. ‘I can’t figure you out, Jack.’ ‘That’s not the job description, babe.’”

  “And now she’s disappeared—”

  “Maybe she’s taken the initiative. She’s a bright girl. Penny finally drops. She shouldn’t have to put up with me. Maybe she’s worked it out for herself.”

  There’s nothing more to be said, or at least, nothing either of us wants to say. We walk down the Quays in silence. When we reach the Clarence, it’s time to go straight on to the restaurant. I join Anne as she steps out onto Essex Street, and she pushes her fingers through my hair, and we hold each other as if it’s months and not days we’ve been apart, and slip into a doorway and inhale each other’s scent, and we kiss, at first the way we both want to, and then I kiss her in a way that tells her there
will be less than either of us wants until I come through all this, and she holds me to let me know that it’s fine, though not so fine that she isn’t disappointed.

  CHAPTER 21

  Eden had been Anne Fogarty’s favorite restaurant, had been “her” restaurant, hers and Kevin’s, but infidelity violates more than just intimate memories of your lover; it tarnishes the places where you thought your happiness unfolded, the pubs and clubs and restaurants where you gazed in each other’s eyes, where the staff got to know you, where you acted out the necessary public rituals of your marriage: all ruined, like the wedding photographs she scrawled obscenities in black highlighter pen across, drunk, the night she found out. For a while, the very city that served as the backdrop to your love becomes an unfriendly and unwelcoming zone, a doom-laden landscape of omens and portents. Anne hasn’t been back to the Morrison, or Odessa, and she’s not convinced she could ever cross the door of Thomas Read’s, where they had met.