by David Hewson
The Muir Woods weren't the overrun tourist destination he'd believed, not in this part anyway. Here, the woods felt vast and timeless and desolate, an army of identical redwood monoliths stretching towards a darkening sky in every unfathomable direction. A place where a man could lie dead for months and maybe never be found.
Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black had gone off to a small clearing. They'd been there a long time, talking out of earshot. Making a phone call or two. Frank could hear the distant electronic beep of a phone and envied the way it communicated so easily, so swiftly with the outside world.
If he could just find his own…
They'd be dead by the time anyone came. The idea of rescue was one confined to the pages of fiction. In the real world there was no escape, except perhaps through meek, obedient submission. The brothers had told Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black what they knew: an Italian woman they both liked believed Tom was innocent and might be able to help if only he'd get in touch. Then she'd pass him on to a friendly cop who, for once, didn't come with a bunch of preconceptions about presumed guilt. Frank had taken the lead, as he usually did in such situations, offering to make the call, promising he'd do nothing to compromise their location, or Jimmy Gaines's identity.
They'd listened, then left. Something in the way they walked hadn't filled him with optimism.
Frank wriggled, trying to get a little more comfortable. He wished he could look at his brother eye-to-eye. He wished he could understand what might be going on in Hank's head. Closeness could make you deaf and blind to things that sensitive, observant people spotted instantly. Over the decades, their relationship had settled into an easy, unspoken rhythm. Frank was the practical one, the right-brainer, as Teresa Lupo had so cannily noticed. Frank handled the money and the day-to-day problems of keeping the house in the Marina going: bills and taxes, repairs and improvements. Hank was the dreamer, the would-be poet, more interested in the San Francisco of yesterday than now, more obsessed with the cerebral puzzles of Conan Doyle than the gutter reality of Dashiell Hammett that Frank preferred. Neither had much real preparation for their present quandary. Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade were myths, ghostly actors in tales that chose entertainment over mundane, prosaic reality.
There weren't any favorable ends when it came to men with guns. Not in the Muir Woods. Not anywhere. Jimmy Gaines, when he wanted, would simply walk over and pop them, one after the other, straight in the head as they sat, tied together in a place that stank of moss and rotting vegetation. A jerk of the trigger was all it took. He'd been thinking of Jimmy a lot in the hour or so since Tom Black had appeared from behind the sequoias, like a lost forest creature in search of salvation. Jimmy Gaines taking them to bars where they didn't really feel comfortable. Jimmy Gaines swinging hard and viciously at a stranger who'd said the wrong thing, thought the wrong thought, looked the wrong way.
Like the idiots they were, he and Hank had walked straight up to him at Lukatmi based on that single sighting of Gaines with Tom Black weeks before, when they had, now Frank thought of it, seemed the very best of friends. That was the trouble with the Marina. It was a community, a little village full of smart, engaged, occasionally difficult people, all living on top of one another. It was hard to keep secrets. Jimmy Gaines, a solitary bachelor who quietly declined to go to some of the bars the other guys did after duty, had never really kept his. People were simply too polite—too uninterested, frankly—to mention it. So when a secret became big, became important, a man just passed it by like all the others. Familiarity didn't breed contempt. It bred a quiet, polite ignorance, a glance away at an awkward, embarrassing moment, a cough in the fist, then, after a suitable pause, a quick smile while glancing at the ground and formulating a rapid change of subject.
All of which led them to the Muir Woods while a line from an old movie kept running and running and running round his head like some loose carnivore circling the big, dark forest of his imagination.
I don't like it… knowing I have to die.
Hank's elbow nudged him in the ribs. He felt his brother's bristly cheek rub up against his.
“How are you doing?”
“Never felt better.”
“This is my fault. Sorry.”
“No need to apologise. We are jointly responsible for our own stupidity.”
Hank cleared his throat. “May I remind you I am the junior, here?”
Frank so wished he could look his brother full in the face at that moment. “By seven minutes, if you recall,” he pointed out, thinking it was a long time since they'd had this conversation. Maybe five decades or so.
“Seven minutes, seven years. It doesn't matter. It still makes me younger. Still makes you the old one. The serious one. The one who does things the way you do ‘cause you think that's what's expected.”
They never argued. If there was cause for complaint, they simply fell into silence and waited till the cloud lifted. It had worked this way for almost sixty years, since they learned to speak.
“So what?” Frank asked.
“So we're clever and stupid in different ways. Normally, I'd say you were the cleverer and me the stupider. But this isn't normal, is it?”
Tom Black and Jimmy Gaines were on the phone again. Frank was glad of that. They weren't taking any notice of the two old men they'd tied up next to a redwood tree.
“I am inclined to concur,” he said. “Your point being?”
Hank shuffled round a little. They could just about catch the corner of each other's eye.
“The point being,” Hank went on, “whether this is a left-brain or right-brain situation. Whether it's one best handled by me.” The nudge in the ribs again. “Or by you. And you think it's you. Because you're like that. No offence, brother. You are. That's fine.”
“Hank,” Frank said very calmly, “this could be difficult. We might have a lot of talking to do. Talking's something best left to me. We've always worked that way.”
“There you are wrong, brother.” There was anger and determination in that lone, bright eye. “This is not about talking at all. Did they look remotely interested when you offered to call Teresa? Well, did they?”
Frank thought about that. He'd been a little scared when Jimmy Gaines had demanded the Italian pathologist's number. He just wanted to give the man anything he could if it kept that big old gun out of their faces.
Jimmy Gaines and Tom Black never asked them to do a damned thing once they had Frank's address book.
“No. They didn't.”
“Another thing,” Hank added. “I can hear better than you these days. They weren't talking about Teresa. They kept using that cop's name, the one whose number she gave us. Costa. Seemed like Black knew who he was already.”
“That's good.”
“No, it isn't. That Italian cop doesn't know us from Adam.”
Frank felt scared again. Very.
“Listen to me, Frank. I don't know who they've called already but pretty soon they're going to call the Costa guy. Then Tom's going to go to see him and cut some kind of a deal. You know the routine. You read it a million times in all that stupid pulp fiction of yours: ‘I didn't know what was going on, Officer. I just got scared and ran away. I got your number sometime. You seemed a nice, gullible guy.'” He took a deep, wheezy breath. “What ever. And then…”
Hank's single eye peered at him. Frank marvelled at the fact he'd learned more new stuff about his twin brother this last week than at any time in the last twenty years.
“Then it's just Jimmy Gaines and us,” Frank replied. “And us knowing that was all a pile of crap, and that he was in there with them, too, which Costa won't get told because Jimmy Gaines doesn't want to go to jail, not for anybody.”
“You old guys,” Hank muttered with some sly amusement. “You get there in the end. Just listen to your little brother and do what he says.”
“OK,” Frank said, and was amazed how odd the concession sounded.
“Good. They're working out their story. Their plan.
Pretty soon Tom Black's going to make that final call, then he's going to get out of here. After that, Jimmy Gaines is going to walk over, say a brief apology, and blow our brains out.” He sighed. “Or so he'd like to think.”
Frank Boynton watched his brother's lone eye wink the way it did when they were children.
“Good thing the stupid, head-in-the-clouds kid brother had the gumption to bring a knife, huh?” Hank asked lightly.
After that, Frank didn't say a word. He stayed still and silent, hustling up a little closer to his brother so that the two men locked in conversation by the trees didn't get suspicious about what Hank was doing with his hands.
A little while later they heard Tom Black make one more call, and the name Costa came into that. It didn't last long. Then he left without once looking back.
Jimmy Gaines stayed by the big redwood and lit a cigarette. He smoked it slowly.
At least he seemed a little reluctant. Frank Boynton gave him that.
VERTIGO LASTED JUST OVER TWO HOURS. THEY watched in silence, Costa upright, Maggie reclining, her head on his shoulder, hair brushing against his cheek, sweet and soft and full of memories of another. They had nothing to say, nothing to share except the same sense of fearful wonder watching what was taking place on the screen, a fairy tale for adults imagined long before they were born.
The day started to die beyond the curtains. The lights in the streets and adjoining buildings began to wake for the evening. He scarcely noticed much except the movie and the presence of the woman by his side, so close she was almost part of him, and equally rapt in the strange, disjointed narrative playing out in front of them, one which meshed with their identities and the city beyond.
Maggie let out a sharp, momentary gasp at the scene outside the Brocklebank, with the green Jaguar pulling away, Kim Novak at the wheel, made blonde by Hitchcock. Some parts made her shiver against him: Madeleine falling into the Bay at Fort Point, not far from the Marina, and Scottie rescuing her, an act which was to establish the bond between them; again when she was wandering among the giant redwoods, lost, uncertain of her own identity; Madeleine in the Legion of Honor, staring up at the painting of Carlotta Valdes, seeming to believe this long-dead woman somehow possessed her own identity, in her hands a bouquet identical both to the one in the painting and to that left in Maggie's borrowed car.
Most of all she seemed affected by what happened at the old white adobe bell tower of San Juan Bautista, erect in a blue sky like some biblical monument to a warped sense of justice, the place where the real Madeleine fell to her death, and where the woman who usurped her identity—and Scottie's love—followed in the cryptic, cruel finale.
Her eyes were wide with shock at that final act. Unable to leave the screen. Together they watched Jimmy Stewart, tense and tragic, frozen in the open arch high above the mission courtyard, his own vertigo cured, but at a shocking price: the life of the female icon—not a real woman—whom he'd come to love, obsessively, with the same voyeuristic single-mindedness with which Hitchcock himself pursued her through the all-seeing eye of the camera.
When the credits rolled, she got up anxiously and took her glass into the kitchen. She hadn't touched it for the entire duration of the movie. Maggie returned with a fresh cocktail, full of ice and lime and booze, in her left hand, and a glass of wine for him in her right.
“I need a drink after that,” she announced, and sat down, putting just a little distance between them. “Don't you?”
“I don't know what I need.” He didn't reach for the wine.
Maggie gulped at the vodka, let her head drift back onto the sofa, breathing deeply, as if to calm herself.
“What does it mean?” she asked, her green eyes suddenly alive with interest.
That question had never left him from the moment the spectral figure of Madeleine Elster walked across the screen, through a world that seemed so like the one they now inhabited.
“Perhaps it's what Teresa said all along. Someone, somewhere is using the movie as a template for what they're doing. A riddle, a reminder, a taunt…The way the Carabinieri think that Dante is being used. Maybe they're both right.”
There was a half smile on her face, and an expectant look. Costa knew he hadn't said enough.
“There's nothing here that could possibly interest the SFPD. I'm a cop like them. We don't think along these lines. We don't watch movies for inspiration. Or read books of poetry. We do something real, something concrete and direct. It's all we know. If a case gets inside your head, that's usually when it all starts to go wrong.”
There was another problem, though he didn't want to say it. There had to be more. Some link, some individual inside Inferno who was the catalyst. Whether what had happened was a simulacrum of The Divine Comedy or Vertigo—or both—some event, some conversation, perhaps recent, perhaps long forgotten, must have given life to the dark, convoluted story that began in the park of the Villa Borghese.
She moved closer. “Like it went wrong for Scottie? They said he was a good cop. Then along comes a woman who isn't what she seems…”
“You could put it that way.”
“Nic.” Her green eyes shone with bright intelligence. “I was really asking about the movie. What does that mean?”
“Next to a murder investigation? Nothing.”
She sighed, disappointed. “What I wanted was for you to tell me about Scottie. About Madeleine. The woman he thought he loved, the woman who didn't really exist. Then that sad little thing who did exist, who pretended she was Madeleine just because that was what Scottie wanted. That could make him happy, so that he would love her in return.”
“I don't know what it's about,” Costa confessed. “It's supposed to be enigmatic. Art's not there to give you answers, not always. Sometimes it's enough simply to ask a question.”
“What question?”
He thought about Scottie and the way he looked at the woman he believed to be Madeleine Elster. How he'd undressed her while she was unconscious after rescuing her at Fort Point. How he waited expectantly by his own bed until she woke, naked, beneath his sheets.
“I don't know,” he said again. “Scottie can't extricate himself from his desire for Madeleine, even though a part of him knows it's not real. The way he's always following her, watching, thinking. Hoping. It's the pursuit of some hopeless fantasy. Like…”
He felt cold. He felt stupid. He felt more awake—more alive— than at any time since Emily had died.
“It's like Dante's Inferno,” he said, and could feel the revelation rising inside him. “Scottie and Madeleine Elster. Dante and Beatrice. It's the same story, the same pilgrimage, looking for something important, the most important thing there can be. The big answer. A reason for living.”
Costa shook his head and laughed. “Why couldn't I see this before? Vertigo is Inferno. It's just a different way of looking at the same question. Scottie… Dante… they're both just Everyman looking for something that makes him whole. Some reason to live.”
“‘I don't like it…knowing I have to die,'” Maggie Flavier said, quoting from the movie in the same quiet, lost voice, one so accurate she might have been the woman they'd just watched on the screen.
“Do you know what Simon told me once?” she asked in a whisper. “When I asked him what Inferno was really about? Not Tonti's movie. The poem.”
“What?”
“He said it was about knowing you never got to see the truth, to get a glimpse of God, until you're dead. That everything up to that point is just some kind of preparation, a bunch of beginnings. You live in order to die. One gives meaning to the other. Black and white. Yin and yang. Being and not being.” She snatched at the glass. “But none of it's up to us, is it?” she asked, and there was a quiet note of bitterness in her voice. “That's for God, and if we play that role, we lose everything. Scottie tried to make the woman he wanted out of nobody. He tried to play God. In the end, that killed her. A man's just a man. A woman can only be what she is.”
/> “What did you say? When he told you that?”
“I damn near slapped his face and told him not to be so stupid. I don't believe in anything except here and now. Don't ask me to trade that for some kind of hidden grace I only get when I'm dead. Don't ever do that.”
The blonde hair extensions he'd seen at the Palace of Fine Arts were there on a low coffee table. She picked them up and held them to her head. There was a movement in her eye, an expression she had somehow picked up from that photo in his wallet, something else he couldn't define because, unlike her, he'd never consciously noticed…
Instantly the associations rose for him, ones that were both warm and worrying.
She wasn't Emily. She could pretend to be, though. If he wanted.
“I'm just like the woman in the movie, aren't I? I can be anything you like. That's what I do.”
He felt uneasy; he wondered whether it was time to leave, whether that was even possible.
“Is that what you'd like, Nic? Would it make things easier?”
“I want you to be you.”
She threw the false hair onto the table, brusquely, as if she hated the things. “That's very noble. What if I don't know who I am?”
“Then it's time to find out.”
“Doing what? Commercials? Too cheap. Theatre? I'm not good enough. Get them to revive L'Amour L.A. so I can stare into the camera one more time and say, ‘But ‘oo can blame Françoise?'”
Her eyes were glassy. This was a conversation she both needed and feared. “Or become one more suburban housewife who used to be something. Getting pointed at in supermarkets while I buy the diapers. Getting pitied. I don't think so.”
“Doing whatever you want.”
She took a deep breath, looked him in the eye, and said, “The only thing I want right now is you. I've wanted that ever since the moment I saw you in the park, Nic, looking lost and so sad, not knowing who the hell I was and still wanting to help me, protect me, in spite of all that pain you had inside. That's never happened before. Something so selfless. Not anything like it. And I've seen them all, Nic. The filthy rich, the astonishingly beautiful.” She pushed away the glass on the table. “I've been drunk on this shallow little existence since I was thirteen years old. It was only when I got to know you I realised I might as well have been dead all that time. Or a creature from someone's imagination. Like that woman who pretended to be Madeleine Elster.”
