Valentino: Film Detective

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You were a beautiful woman.” He didn’t know what else to say.

  “Poor Dick. Do you know what he was asking for the film? Ten thousand dollars. I told him he could get ten times that from Red. He said he preferred dealing with me. He was so nervous, and so ashamed. I think he’d have given it to me for nothing if it weren’t for Junior’s situation. He would have been that glad to be out of it.”

  “Why didn’t you pay him?”

  “I couldn’t. I don’t have any money. The museum, this ranch, all the bank accounts and investment portfolios are in Red’s name. I haven’t had control of a cent since the day we married. I have to ask him for money to visit the beauty parlor. My husband is a mean, stingy man, Mr. Valentino. And that’s not even his worst quality.”

  Valentino said nothing. He felt he was on the verge of learning something he’d just as soon never know; but the hints Dick Hennessey, Sr., had dropped into his daily journal had started him in a direction he couldn’t reverse.

  “Red has a violent temper. All our friends think I suffer from migraines. That’s what Red tells them when they visit and I’m upstairs waiting for my bruises to heal. In nineteen fifty he threw me down a flight of stairs and told the press I broke my leg when I fell while exercising Cocoa, my mare. I won’t go into every incident. It galls him to pay the servants as much as he must to keep them from selling the real story to the tabloids.”

  “Why didn’t you divorce him?”

  “Weakness. Pride. Red Montana and Dixie Day is one of the great love stories of Hollywood. Who was I to blow apart the fairy tale? The old studio system made us slaves to our public images. By the time I finally stopped caring, it was too late. You get used to living in hell. That doesn’t mean you stop hating the devil.”

  Valentino had begun to experience the same dizzy sensation he’d felt at the museum. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “I haven’t many weeks left,” she said. “I suppose it’s the time for confessions.”

  “You’re the blackmailer?”

  “Only indirectly. I told Dick he could squeeze a hundred thousand out of Red easily. I even helped him work out the details. The only thing my husband has is the pure white image of Red Montana and Dixie Day. It’s an icon. He’s built his fortune on it; it’s his ticket to immortality. I knew if Dick succeeded I’d never hear a word about it from Red. I was right.

  “Dick offered to split the money with me,” she went on. “I didn’t want it, but I did ask him for one thing.”

  “A print of the stag film.”

  She smiled a Dixie smile, straight off the milk carton.

  “You shouldn’t sell yourself short as a detective. I’d planned to release it to an exhibitor when Red died, but fate forced my hand. In a way I was glad. Now I’d get to watch him suffer.”

  “You sent him the frame enlargements.”

  “A very old friend of mine made them in the film laboratory at Sony. I felt the need to torment Red. They’ll drive him crazy until I’m gone. He’ll think he’s safe then. What he doesn’t know is I’ve arranged for my friend to make additional prints and send them to every sleazy theater and cable station in Southern California. Let Red try to exploit that for his own glory the way he did my terminal cancer. The only thing I’ve had since our wedding that was truly mine.”

  She balled her fists on the arms of the wheelchair. Beneath the makeup her face was a naked skull. “Think of it. However long he outlives me, he’ll bear the stigma of the has-been cowboy hero who married Jezebel. And when he’s gone, the world will be only too relieved to forget us both.”

  Suddenly Valentino found that sun-filled room in the Hollywood Hills suffocating. He wanted to be anywhere else.

  His hostess misinterpreted his discomfort. “I’m sorry, Mr. Valentino. Whatever my husband promised you, I assure you he won’t honor it when he hears the truth. You’d be better off telling him you failed. Is there something I can do to make it up to you? I’d offer to autograph a picture, but I don’t think it will be worth much for long.”

  Valentino thought of Six-gun Sonata, that monument to chivalry and innocence, as thin as the celluloid it was made of. He didn’t think he could watch it, or any Montana-Day picture, without seeing a bloated egomaniac and his battered, bitter wife. He shook his head and left. He didn’t breathe easily again until he’d descended into the smog and smut of Los Angeles.

  Picture Palace

  “I WAIT FOR YOU, signore,” said the taxi driver. “Signore Diavolo entertains no visitors.”

  Valentino paid his fare, including a tip in return for the little man’s concern. “That won’t be necessary. He’s agreed to see me.”

  “I wait.” The driver slid a Florence newspaper from above the sun visor and unfolded it.

  Giuseppe Diavolo’s villa, perched on a hill overlooking the city of Dante, was very much in keeping with the man’s work: earthy but elegant. The columns on the portico were discolored and cracked, like those of an ancient ruin, and the marble facing on the walls had been patched many times with plaster of varying quality that faded in different colors, creating a harlequin effect. Valentino had never before visited a director’s home that reminded him so much of his movies.

  The woman who answered the doorbell was very tall and looked even taller because of her hair—teased and heavily sprayed so that it resembled architecture, and obviously dyed black. It brought out the lines in her face beneath the thick pancake. She wore a long printed dress of heavy silk. “Sì?” She looked down at him along the straight length of a nose that belonged on a Greek statue.

  “My name is Valentino. Mr. Diavolo is expecting me.”

  “No.” She shut the door.

  He rang the bell again. When she opened the door again, he showed her the letter he had brought. “I wrote Mr. Diavolo back in February that I’d be in Florence at this time and would like an appointment. This is his invitation.”

  She glanced at the sheet, snatched it out of his hand, and pushed the door shut again.

  He rang again. The woman’s voice came from inside. “Go away! I call police.”

  As Valentino approached the cab, the driver folded his newspaper and returned it to its place above the visor. “You see?” He started the motor. “Geniuses, they are pigs. I say to my wife, be happy you married un imbecille.”

  Valentino barely heard him. “Do you know where to find the office of Celluloide?”

  Celluloide was the cinema magazine with the largest circulation in Florence; which meant the driver had to radio his dispatcher for directions. At length he drew up before a crumbling building in a dilapidated neighborhood, collected his fare and another tip, and was still watching his former passenger anxiously when Valentino looked back from the entrance.

  A clanking elevator the size of a coffin lifted the visitor to the third floor, where he found the office behind a door with the magazine’s name flaking off the frosted glass.

  “Angela Mondadori, please.”

  The underfed male seated behind the front desk looked up briefly from his ancient typewriter, then leaned back and shouted at the top of his lungs. “Angie!”

  The clatter of typewriters that filled the shabby room paused not at all. Soon a tall, slender young woman with black hair shorn close to her skull emerged from behind a partition plastered over with playbills and approached Valentino with her dark brows lifted. She was an elegant figure in such a setting, expertly made up in a tailored pink suit that put him in mind of the young Jackie Kennedy. She might have stepped off the cover of an Italian fashion magazine of the 1960s.

  When Valentino introduced himself she smiled warmly. “I’ve enjoyed your letters. Face-to-face I can’t believe you’re not Rudolph’s grandson.” Her English was fluent, although charmingly accented.

  “We share the same brand of hair oil.” His resemblance to the silent-film star whose name he bore never embarrassed him in the company of fellow aficionados. “May I take you to lunch? I’d like to talk.”r />
  “Let me take you.”

  Her car was tiny even by modern standards, a classic. Riding in it, he felt he’d stepped into a frame of The Bicycle Thief. She steered them deftly through a succession of twisting streets jammed with traffic, using her horn more often than her brakes, and parked before a restaurant with a terrace that looked out on most of the city. The waiters addressed her as Signora Mondadori. Her guest complimented the wine and pasta.

  “My ex-husband and I dined here all the time,” she said. “I got custody of the place on weekdays.”

  “Salud.” He clinked his glass against hers and drank. “I tried to see your father today. A woman slammed the door in my face twice.”

  “That would be Constanza. My dear stepmother.”

  “I showed her Signore Diavolo’s letter. It got in; I didn’t. Has she always been this protective?”

  “Until about two months ago, she was one of the most gracious hostesses in Tuscany. Then suddenly she started turning away visitors. Even I can’t get in.”

  He breathed in the air of Tuscany, redolent of spice and tomato sauce and the dust of Caesars. “Giuseppe Diavolo is one of the greatest auteur directors of the postwar period. After you gave me his address, I spent months persuading him to donate a print of his masterpiece, L’enfanti del Inferno, to the UCLA archives. I’d rather fall on my sword than return empty-handed.”

  “Constanza claims he’s too ill to see anyone, but she won’t say if he’s consulted a doctor. I know he was treated for a heart condition several years ago. I’ve called every physician in the city. None has seen him. Am I permitted to dust off a movie cliché and say I suspect foul play?” She smiled nervously.

  “Does she fit the role of femme fatale?”

  “I always felt she married my father for security rather than love, but that’s an ancient and honorable custom in Italy. We got on well enough until I started pressing for details.”

  “Have you tried the police?”

  She toyed with her pasta. “I’m unsure of my ground. My parents separated when I was small. My father never visited; his films were more important to him than his family. I suppose I still resent him for that. When I began reviewing films I used my husband’s name and built up a reputation independent of Giuseppe Diavolo’s. I renewed contact with him last year more as a journalist than as his daughter. We’re practically strangers.”

  “The police don’t know that. You should tell them your suspicions and have them accompany you for a visit.”

  “I envy you Americans.” She smiled again. “You refuse to accept the existence of insoluble problems.”

  “It’s all those movies. Everything is resolved inside two hours. Will you let me know how this comes out?” He gave her the name of his hotel.

  “Of course. Movies need endings.” She summoned the bill.

  Il Circolo Sesto was playing on the television in Valentino’s room. He doubted it was coincidence; the city of Diavolo’s birth was bound to feature his films on the local station regularly. The archivist, who considered this most famous title in the director’s oeuvre his most murky and pretentious, enjoyed nevertheless the scene in which the hero arm-wrestles the Devil. He stretched out on the bed to watch it and found himself still riveted half an hour later when the telephone jarred him out of the sequence in the Roman catacombs.

  “Valentino.” He punched the Mute button on the remote.

  “This is Angela Mondadori. My stepmother told the police they are welcome to visit, but that if I come with them I won’t be admitted.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “No. The police assume my father and I don’t get along. ‘It is their home, signora; we cannot tell them who they must or must not allow to cross their threshold.’ ” Her impression of an Italian police official came right out of Vittorio De Sica.

  “Obviously he’s never seen Open City.”

  “Will you go in with them? We haven’t known each other long, but I trust you more than I do the police. If you say everything’s all right, I’ll believe you.”

  “Why would your stepmother let me in after barring you? She’s turned me away once already.”

  “Please? I’m frightened. I know I haven’t the right, but I am his daughter.”

  He watched Sophia Loren pleading with an impossibly young Marcello Mastroianni on the black-and-white screen at the foot of the bed. When he agreed to accompany the police to Diavolo’s door, he wasn’t sure which request was more effective; the one in his ear or the one playing out in silence in front of him. He decided, not for the first time, that he had seen far too many movies.

  The police inspector’s name was Cabrini. He reminded Valentino of Claude Rains in Casablanca, minus the urbanity. The archivist was pretty sure Inspector Renault would not sit behind his desk with his cap on, no matter how jauntily it was slanted, nor conduct an official conversation with the remains of his lunch spread out on his blotter and a napkin tucked inside his uniform collar. The pencil moustache, at least, was authentic.

  “You are a detective?” Cabrini was looking at Valentino’s business card.

  “A historian, actually. That bit about ‘film detective’ is just to get people’s attention. Tracking down odd scraps of celluloid can be like a manhunt sometimes.”

  “I would not know. I am myself an enthusiast of the opera.” He returned Valentino’s passport. “Since your papers are in order, you are free to visit any public place in our beautiful city. If, however, Signora Diavolo refuses to admit you to her house, I cannot argue the point.”

  “I understand.”

  “Buòno.” The inspector rose, tugged down his short jacket, and led the way to the door. There he glanced down, and with a sheepish expression went back and deposited the napkin on the desk.

  Today, Constanza Diavolo had on a sleeveless dress of maroon velvet. Valentino admired the muscle definition in her upper arms, rare in a woman her age. She had been warned by telephone of the visit, and so did not appear surprised to find an official in uniform standing on her porch. Her eyes hardened dangerously when they shifted to Valentino. His thin hope that she would not recognize him from their brief first meeting vanished.

  Removing his cap, Cabrini launched into what sounded like a formal apology in Italian. Valentino heard his name. Again the hard look, longer this time. Presently it flickered. She shrugged and opened the door wide.

  The entryway was as large as some houses, with sunlight gleaming off polished marble and a number of life-size statues scattered about like guests at a cocktail party. The visitors followed their hostess through a succession of similar rooms, elegantly furnished in mahogany and silk, onto a back terrace whose view of Florence and the broad, unpredictable River Arno made the vista from yesterday’s restaurant look like a faded mural. An elderly man in a white linen suit and Panama hat sat at an umbrella-shaded table reading, of all things, Variety.

  Valentino’s throat caught when the newspaper came down, exposing tanned features behind plain black Ray Bans and a neat white pencil moustache beside which Cabrini’s was a silly prop. From the crown of his hat to the unlit cigar propped between the fingers of his left hand, the man was an icon. He made the film detective, who met regularly with international stars, feel like a little boy holding an autograph book.

  Diavolo shook the inspector’s hand, speaking softly in Italian, then switched to English when he grasped Valentino’s. “I have enjoyed your letters. Please sit and share my shade.”

  Constanza withdrew, to return moments later bearing a tray containing glasses and a pitcher of lemonade. She poured and served, then seated herself beside her husband. Valentino noted that no servant had yet made an appearance.

  “This is a beautiful home,” said Cabrini.

  “Grazie.” The director flashed his famous white smile. “My best films began here, in my head. It is less a home to me than a national treasure.”

  Valentino was charmed rather than put off by his host’s frank egotism. It was as emblema
tic of him as his white suits and cold cigar. “I’m surprised you don’t invite more people in.”

  Diavolo understood the implied question.

  “My wife is protective of my privacy. I am writing my memoirs, you see, and concentration is a problem. To spare me interruptions she has appointed herself my Cerberus.”

  “It is a difficult thing to be forced to lie to one’s own daughter.” The inspector fingered his cap in his lap.

  Constanza muttered something in Italian.

  Diavolo sipped from his glass. The hand holding the cigar remained motionless on the table. “You forget she is a member of the press. If she knew the truth, she would be after me to publish excerpts in her magazine. So her stepmother tells her I’m ill.”

  “When will you finish?” Valentino asked. “The world has waited so long to hear you comment at length on your career.”

  “Six months, a year. Chi consta, who knows? I am old, and no studio is pressing for a release date. I shall tell her when I am receiving visitors again.”

  “About L’enfanti del Inferno—” Valentino began.

  Constanza turned to the inspector. “You wanted to know, my husband, is he in good condition. You are satisfied?”

  “Sì.” He stood abruptly and leaned down to shake the director’s hand again. “Thank you, signore, for your hospitality. I apologize for this interruption.”

  “Prego.”

  Cabrini turned a stony face on Valentino, who had no choice but to follow his lead. Signora Diavolo thumped the front door shut behind them with finality.

  “I don’t buy it!” Angela said. “I don’t buy it for a minute. It’s bunk.”

  Despite his sympathy, Valentino was amused by the language of her displeasure. It was obvious she had learned her English from old Hollywood movies. They were standing in the lobby of his hotel, where she had been waiting when he returned from her father’s villa. She was wearing another tailored suit, this one powder-blue. She reminded him now of Audrey Hepburn.