Zeroville

by Steve Erickson

  “What?”

  “Dot’s going to get you out of that W. C. Fields nonsense and I’ve set it up with the MGM front office, they’re making the arrangements. Someone will pick you up—probably day after tomorrow at the soonest—put you on an Iberia jet out of LAX, and someone will be waiting for you on the other end in Madrid.”

  “I’ve been reading this book.”

  “While we’re still shooting, we need to sync and assemble as much of a rough as we can if we’re going to stay on schedule. We’ll do the fine cut back in L.A. Seville is the nearest city but they don’t have the facilities so we’ll set you up in Madrid and get dailies to you there, fly them in or send them by truck over five hundred kilometers of bad Spanish roads if need be.”

  “God I love this book.”

  “We’ve found a cutting room we can use in the Chueca section of town. We’ll put you up in a hotel somewhere around the Gran Villa.”

  “I can’t come …”

  “We’re losing this connection, vicar.”

  “… I’ve read this book five times and need to read it again …”

  There’s a particularly long pause and Vikar wonders if the connection has broken. “What are you talking about, vicar,” Viking Man’s voice finally comes through, “is this book of yours chained to the Hollywood Sign? You’re going to be on an airplane thirteen fucking hours, you’ll be able to read it another five times.”

  “I want to stay in Hollywood.”

  “God love you, vicar, but you’re being a pussy. Don’t you understand? This is Hollywood.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This godforsaken stretch of Gibraltar. The cutting room in Madrid. Paris, Bombay, Tokyo, fucking Norway, wherever—it’s all Hollywood, everywhere is Hollywood, the only place on the planet that’s not Hollywood anymore is Hollywood. You got a passport?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you don’t. Well, that’s just going to add another day or two. I’ll get Stacey or Kate or one of the girls in the Culver City office to expedite things but of course you’ll need to apply yourself, can’t do that for you. They’ll also get you a copy of the script so you can be looking at that. I wish there was a way to get you shooting boards but that will have to wait until you get to Spain. Now there’s one more thing. You still there, vicar?”

  132.

  “Yes,” Vikar says.

  “The Generalissimo over here,” Viking Man says, “is dying and taking his sweet time about it. There are more troops than usual in the streets and things are a bit tense and may get more so. So I’m having the girls in the front office pick you up one of those woolen ski caps nobody wears in L.A., and before you get off that plane and go through customs, I want you to pull that cap down over your head. Do you understand?”

  “The General who?”

  “Pull that cap down over your head, because one look at you and the officials might get irritable. The Generalissimo may not be a George Stevens man.”

  133.

  Four days later, a limo is parked outside the Paramount Gate with the back door open. Sitting on the black leather backseat is a plane ticket, passport and shooting script, the MGM lion roaring in the upper left hand corner of the envelope. From the radio comes a song—What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?—by an old Los Angeles band whose singer died in Paris; perhaps he lived in a bell tower, in pursuit of the world’s greatest satanist, the right-hand man of Joan of Arc. Between the limo and the gate, Soledad Palladin sits on the edge of the fountain, arms folded, as though Vikar conjured her.

  134.

  Four years have passed since she left him on Sunset Boulevard, but she looks at him as if they’ve seen each other every day since.

  Her auburn hair is sun-bleached and she wears a simple black dress, slightly low cut, that seems more like a slip. Perhaps she’s more beautiful than when he last saw her, the small cleft in her chin more perfect and irresistible. She nods hello to him more than she says it; across the street, not far from where it was that day in the rain when he last saw Zazi, is the black Mustang. Vikar leans into the limo and says to the driver, “Just a minute.”

  “This is for you?” Soledad says. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Spain.”

  She looks at the car. “Right now?”

  “Viking Man is making a movie there.”

  “Oh yes,” she smiles, “pirates or something. A boy’s adventure.”

  “They’re shooting outside Seville.”

  “My hometown.”

  “I’ll be in Madrid. I’m cutting a rough from dailies. Do you still see the people at the beach?”

  “Everyone is busy now,” she says. “I get a small role now and then.”

  “I saw you in The Long Goodbye,” Vikar says. He looks across Melrose at the Mustang and the girl in the backseat. “She’s gotten big,” he says.

  “They do that.” Soledad says, “I have been wanting to talk to you for a while, but …” She’s lost a bit more of her accent. “About that night.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “What?”

  “I vex people.”

  Her eyes look away and she tilts her head slightly. She takes hold of her hair and wraps it around her fist distractedly. “I wonder if I know what you mean.”

  “But I would never hurt her.”

  “Who?”

  “Your little girl. Or … do anything bad.”

  She looks back at him. “I wonder if I know what you mean,” she says again, except this time she sounds like she really does.

  “That night.”

  “Which night?”

  “In the car. When you drove me home from the beach house.” She stares at him blankly; he believes she may be most beautiful when she’s blank. “When she was in the front and I said you should put her in the back.” He adds, “You left me on Sunset.”

  “Oh,” she says. “I had forgotten that. I know you wouldn’t hurt her. It had more …” She stops. “It had more to do with … other things … experiences of my own … than with you. I was not speaking of that night. I was speaking of the other night.”

  “The other night?”

  “The night,” she says, “in the cemetery.”

  135.

  The limo driver says, “Mr. Jerome?”

  Stunned, Vikar nods at the driver and turns back to the woman. “Did they hurt you?” he says finally.

  She chooses her words carefully. “What matters,” she says, “is that you tried to help me. So I have been wanting to thank you …

  Vikar says in a low voice, “Did I kill that man?”

  She draws herself up when she says, “I never saw them before and have not seen them since.”

  “I waited for the police to come to my apartment. I’m not one of the singing family that killed those people.” He gazes at the Mustang across the street. “Was Zazi all right?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean from that night.”

  “Sometimes I’m certain she’s tougher than I. That she’s not as beautiful, for which I’m grateful, so the men won’t get the same look in their eyes. Perhaps,” she shifts from the fountain, “she will not spend her teenage years in and out of institutions like her mother.”

  “But that night—”

  “She was with friends,” says Soledad. “With her father.” She shrugs. “You don’t want to miss your plane,” and she turns to cross the street to the Mustang, where Vikar can barely make out Zazi in the back, watching her mother and watching him.

  136.

  From the liquor cart going up and down the aisle of the airplane, Vikar orders three vodka tonics. Notwithstanding Viking Man’s assurance that Vikar would have thirteen hours to read Là-Bas five more times, Vikar makes it through only once before pulling the script for Viking Man’s movie from the MGM envelope.

  He reads the script twice and the third time begins breaking the story into sequences and numbering them as he would identify the parts of an arc
hitectural structure. When the sun is behind him, he puts the script away and watches a Spanish movie he doesn’t understand; the actress in it navigates between relationships with two men and Vikar keeps seeing Soledad in the part of the woman. At one point he closes his eyes.

  In the dark of his lids, the Spanish movie intercuts with the open horizontal rock of his dream and its white ancient writing and the mysterious figure lying on top. Vikar sits up with a start.

  When he finally dozes again, it’s to the dull roar of the engines and the pitch black of the night above the Atlantic. Upon landing at Barrajas Airport in the late afternoon Vikar remembers only at the last minute, as he steps through the door, to pull the cap from his coat pocket and down over his head.

  137.

  The customs officials make him take the cap off. In the waiting area beyond the customs control Vikar can see a driver holding a cardboard sign that reads VICAR, with a C. When Vikar takes off the cap, everyone around him—customs officials, police, passengers—stops and a hush falls on the room.

  138.

  As Vikar is ushered into a smaller room, he looks back over his shoulder at the driver in the distance with the sign. In the room, one of the officials takes Vikar’s passport and motions for him to sit at a table. On the wall hangs a portrait of a mild looking man in a uniform, wearing small round spectacles to go with his small trimmed moustache; Vikar realizes this is the General person of whom Viking Man spoke. He doesn’t appear fearsome.

  Several of the officials lean over Vikar to study his head. “Anarquista?” one asks. The official with Vikar’s passport vanishes and for a while no one says or does anything. The official finally returns ten minutes later with another who’s studying the passport as he walks in the door; he looks at Vikar and says, “Señor Jerome?”

  I should have stayed in Hollywood where nothing bad happens except singing families that slaughter people. “Yes.”

  “Welcome to our country.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How long do you plan to be with us, Señor Jerome?” the official asks.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Is your purpose here business or holiday?”

  “Business.”

  “What is the name of your company?”

  I don’t have a company, Vikar almost answers, but says, “MGM.”

  “The hotel,” says the official.

  “The movies,” Vikar says. “I believe there is a hotel as well.”

  “Las Vegas. Dean Martin.”

  “Rio Bravo,” Vikar nods.

  The official looks at Vikar, some inexplicable annoyance flashing across his eyes. “I speak English,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Is there someone who can vouch for your business here?”

  “A man outside,” says Vikar.

  “A man?”

  “Holding a sign.”

  The official turns and says something in Spanish to one of the other officials, who leaves the room. The official sits down next to Vikar and looks at his head. He points at Vikar’s head and says, “There are not many people in my country who appear like this.”

  “No.”

  “In America there are many people who appear like this?”

  “No.”

  The official looks around at the others. “Myself,” he confides to Vikar, “I am a great admirer of Miss Natalie Wood.”

  Vikar just nods.

  “I saw her in the film about the two married couples who trade.” He shrugs. “This film is not allowed in my country. I saw it while on holiday in Paris. Miss Natalie Wood is very beautiful in this film.” A low, desperate groan seems to emanate up from within him. “Muy, muy, muy. Do you know this film?”

  “Yes.”

  “She is very beautiful.”

  “Yes.”

  “She is very immodest in this film. You hear my English is excellent.”

  “You should see Splendor in the Grass.”

  “This Splendid film stars Miss Natalie Wood?”

  “Yes.”

  “In this film she is immodest?”

  “It’s like The Exorcist, except better.”

  “I know of this Exorcist film, this is the film about Satanás. Yes?”

  “What?”

  “Diablo. The Devil.”

  “Yes.”

  “This film is not allowed in my country.”

  Vikar nods. “It’s not very good.”

  “This film,” the official taps Vikar on the head hard, “is not allowed in my country.”

  Vikar says, as politely as possible, “It’s not Natalie Wood.”

  The official rises slightly from the chair, looks at Vikar’s head. He studies the woman’s face.

  “It’s Elizabeth Taylor,” says Vikar.

  “Elizabeth Taylor?”

  “And Montgomery Clift. A Place in the Sun.”

  “Qué?”

  “The name of this movie,” Vikar taps his own head in turn, speaking slowly, “is A Place … in … the … Sun.”

  “This,” the official says, tapping Vikar’s head back even harder, “is …” tap “… not …” tap “… the …” tap “… film with Miss Natalie Wood about the young degenerate American hoodlums who are probably homosexuals?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know this film that I mean?”

  “Rebel Without a Cause.”

  “This is the one I mean,” the official nods, “it is not allowed in my country.” The two men say nothing more but sit at the table looking at each other. Five minutes pass, then ten.

  139.

  The door opens and the other official returns, and says something in Spanish.

  The official sitting with Vikar continues to stare at him as if barely registering whatever has been said. Then he stands. He hands Vikar his passport. “This film you are working, is Miss Natalie Wood in this film?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Vikar says.

  “Perhaps your film will be allowed in my country.”

  “I’m certain it will be a very good movie,” Vikar says.

  140.

  When the phone rings in his hotel room, Vikar assumes it’s Viking Man. But amid the static of the phone call he hears a female voice saying his name; for a moment he imagines it’s Soledad and only after the phone has gone dead does he realize it was Dotty. He waits for the phone to ring again but it doesn’t, and finally he sleeps.

  141.

  When he wakes in the morning, someone seems to have been knocking at his door for hours.

  The same driver who met Vikar at the airport and drove him to the hotel now drives him through a depressed part of Madrid to an ugly industrial building twenty minutes away. In the editing room Vikar finds bread, butter and jam but no knife to spread them, coffee and bottled water, and a stack of film cans that have just arrived from a lab. There are no instructions from Viking Man or anyone else.

  For a while Vikar sits staring at the cans. He eats the bread with the butter and jam that he spreads by using the other end of the china pencil with which he’ll mark the print. He doesn’t drink the coffee.

  142.

  He sits a while longer staring at the cans. He believes his life itself is in a kind of jet lag. After half an hour he gets up and begins stripping away posters, photos and memos from the room’s largest wall until it’s bare.

  He takes the film can on top and separates the lids. He threads the film through the drive mechanism of the viewer. For the moment he doesn’t concern himself with what kind of splices to make, with fades or dissolves or wipes, let alone with lighting or color. He’s putting miles of film into order, which means locating the sequences that he’s marked in the script, and the camera set-ups within each sequence.

  143.

  Over the weeks to come, first he’ll match the exposed film with the soundtrack, then select a representative still from each setup, sometimes more than one.

  If there is, for instance, a sequence in which the Berber chieftain lops
off the head of a thief, Vikar will choose a single still of perhaps a flying head, or a head rolling on the ground. He’ll print an enlargement of the still and number it and tack it onto the bare wall that he’s stripped. He’ll group set-ups chronologically into sequences, then number and group sequences as they’re represented by the set-up stills, until finally he’s determined the sequence for everything that’s been shot. He’ll catalog images and sounds by a synchronization code, then begin splicing together footage. Sometimes he’ll make a decision for one take over the others when the choice seems clear, particularly from a technical standpoint.

  As Vikar does this, more rushes come each day or sometimes arrive every two or three days, or occasionally two or three times in one day. He works nine hours a day. Around one o’clock his driver brings lunch, and sometimes he eats dinner around ten o’clock in the Spanish fashion. Not once in the weeks to come will he receive a phone call from Viking Man.

  144.

  At night, after his work, he falls asleep in the back of the car, and the driver shakes him awake when they reach Vikar’s hotel. Vikar doesn’t go out into the city at all; he doesn’t care about the city. Madrid is a ghost town, fixed in the suspension of the Generalissimo’s pending death. Black wrought iron wreathes the city’s doors and balconies and fountains and windows. As the weeks pass, on the Fuencarral below his hotel window Vikar notices first the appearance of one streetwalker, then another, then another.

  145.

  After he’s been in Madrid three weeks, one night on the way back to his hotel Vikar wakes not to the driver’s touch but rather the jostling of the car, and realizes he’s blindfolded.

  He also realizes his hands are bound. “What’s happening?” he says; he can feel someone on each side of him in the backseat. “What’s happening?” he says again, and someone answers, “Please do not talk. We will be there soon.”