Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  Olivia paused to take two orange petits fours from the tea stand, feeding one to herself, the other to a Pekingese. When she looked back at us, she smiled ruefully.

  “Of course, the more time that went by, when I thought back to that incident I felt humiliated. Time leeches most horror and pain from our memories. All that so-called terror I’d felt, I reasoned it’d been my youth, an overwrought imagination. Distortion, his picture about the teenagers’ contagious insanity—it had made a deep impression on me. I’d gotten mixed up. I’d confused the art with the life. I wrote Cordova three notes of apology shortly after the episode and heard nothing back from him except a very churlish response.”

  “What was it?”

  “Something to the effect of, if I was the last person on Earth, he’d never cast me in one of his pictures. I suppose that invitation to The Peak was my audition and I’d blown it.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. What she said corroborated seamlessly with Beckman’s letter from Cordova to Endicott, the one he passed around to his students.

  She shrugged dismissively. “It was fine by me. Two years later, I was a married woman. I had a family, real love, a real life. I’d long given up my actress dreams, dreams of fame, which I understood was nothing more than consigning oneself to a cheap carnival where one lives forever in a cage, applauded and ridiculed by equal measure. Then, in 1999, I received an invitation quite out of the blue. It was from Cordova. He was inviting me to a private dinner at his home, this time in the city. This was a few years after his final film, To Breathe with Kings, long after he’d buried himself underground, when he was more secretive and chilling a figure than ever before. I was hesitant to accept, but then again, it was Cordova. I was still a fan. I’d gone to considerable lengths to obtain copies of his contraband work. To me he was more of a magician, a hypnotist in the vein of Rasputin. Not a filmmaker. All these years later, I still felt unrequited about him. It gnawed at me, ever so slightly, this question about him I needed answered. The location of the dinner was almost next door, just across Park Avenue on Seventy-first Street. If I felt uncomfortable I could leave at any time and simply walk home.”

  I glanced at Nora, and she nodded imperceptibly, making the same connection I was. The townhouse Hopper had broken into last night was on East Seventy-first; Olivia had to be referring to that very house. I also recognized the sentiments she described, the unrequited feeling about Cordova, the need for a resolution, for an end, how it nibbled at you over the years; I had it myself.

  “By then, I was fifty years old, no longer the skittish ingenue. I’d been married for twenty years, had raised three boys. It would take a hell of a lot more to terrify me.”

  She leaned forward, taking another cake. The three Pekingese’s eyes were glued to it. To their evident heartbreak, she placed it in her own mouth, chewing.

  “It was a beautiful dinner, but oddly enough Cordova wasn’t even there. There was only his wife, Astrid, who explained her husband had gotten waylaid working in the country and wouldn’t be able to make it. I was thrown by this. I suspected something was wrong, as if it were a trap. And yet it was a wonderful mix of people, two of whom I knew from my old theater days. Whatever reservations I had about being there soon dissipated. A Russian opera star, a Danish scientist, a French actress known for her immense beauty—and yet the unmistakable center of attention was Cordova’s daughter, Ashley. She was cultivating a rather stellar piano career at the time. She was twelve, the most beautiful child I’d ever seen, eyes almost clear. She played for us. Shubert, a Bach concerto, a movement from Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and then she joined us for dinner. Oddly enough, she chose to sit right beside me. Immediately, I felt disconcerted. Her eyes, they were so beautiful and yet so …”

  Olivia clasped her hands, frowning.

  “What?” I prompted.

  Her eyes met mine. “Old. They’d seen too much.”

  She paused to take a deep breath, smiling ruefully.

  “Dinner was fantastic. The conversation, fascinating. Ashley was charming. And yet when she fell silent she seemed absent, as if she’d slipped off somewhere else, into some other world. When dinner was over, Astrid suggested we play a Japanese game that she claimed the family often played after dinner, having learned it from a real Japanese samurai who apparently lived with the family. It was called The Game of One Hundred Candles. Later, I looked up the Japanese term. Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai is what it’s called. Have you heard of it?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “It’s an old Japanese parlor game. It dates back to the Edo period. The seventeenth, eighteenth centuries. One hundred candles are lit, and each candle is blown out after someone tells a short kaidan. Kaidan is Japanese for ghost story. This continues, the room gradually getting darker and darker, until the final candle is blown out. It’s at this moment that a supernatural entity is finally inside the room. It’s usually an onryo¯—a Japanese ghost who seeks vengeance.”

  Olivia took a long breath, exhaling.

  “We began to play, all of us fairly drunk on port and dessert wine, each of us grasping at our stories, but when Ashley told hers they were perfectly succinct tales. I assumed she’d memorized them—unless at twelve she could speak so eloquently, right off the top of her head. Her voice was leisurely and low, and at times it sounded like it was coming from somewhere else in the room. Every story she told was riveting, some disturbingly violent. One I remember described a master raping a poor servant girl and leaving her for dead on the side of the road. I was amazed at how easily her lips formed the words as if she were talking about something perfectly natural. At times I had a sense of being outside myself as she talked, somewhere else. And then—I don’t know how exactly it turned out that way—there was one candle left and Ashley was up to tell the final story. It was a tale of unrequited love, a Romeo and Juliet tale of illness and hope, a girl dying young, thereby setting her lover free. Everyone was mesmerized. She blew out the candle, and it was pitch-black in the room. Too dark. People were giggling. Someone told a dirty joke. Suddenly, there was a sucking noise and I felt a cold finger touching my forehead. I was certain Ashley had reached over and touched me. I shrieked, tried to stand, yet both of my legs had fallen asleep. To my utter humiliation, I tumbled out of my chair, right onto the floor. Astrid, apologizing, helped me to my feet and turned the lights on. Everyone was laughing. Ashley sat there, without looking at me, but smiling. That feeling I’d had all those years ago when I was at The Peak, that pressing, as if my insides were being taken hold of, it was there again. I waited a few moments, feeling ill, then made my excuses and left. I went home, fixed myself some tea, and went to bed. But hours later, when Mike woke up beside me, I was in a coma. I’d had a stroke. I regained consciousness in the hospital and realized I’d lost the use of my right arm.”

  Olivia gazed down at her limp arm cradled in the scarf, almost as if it were separate from her, the gnarled albatross she was forced to carry.

  “I’d had a brain aneurysm. Doctors said it was my stress over the incident that must have triggered it. I’m a practical woman, Mr. McGrath. I am not prone to drawing hysterical conclusions. What I do know is that they did something to her, to Ashley, to make her behave in such a way.”

  “Who?”

  “Her family. Cordova.”

  “And what exactly do you think they did?”

  She looked thoughtful. “Do you have children?”

  “A daughter.”

  “Then you know she was born innocent, yet soaks up everything around her like a sponge. Their way of life at The Peak, my own encounter there all those years ago, the questions he asked me. It was as if I were an experiment. They must have done that to Ashley. Except, unlike me, she couldn’t run away. At least not as a child.”

  I glanced at Nora. She looked spellbound. What Olivia said fit in with my assumption, that at the time of her death Ashley had been on bad terms with her family, hiding under an assumed name, searching for
someone known as the Spider. What I couldn’t understand was why she returned to the townhouse, unless it was to meet with Inez Gallo. Perhaps Gallo lived there.

  “Have you heard of someone connected to Cordova with the nickname the Spider?” I asked, sitting forward.

  “The Spider.” Olivia frowned. “No.”

  “What about Inez Gallo? It wouldn’t be her nickname, would it?”

  “Cordova’s assistant? Not to my knowledge. But I don’t know anything about her, except I believe she was the woman who escorted me in to see Cordova. And while he interviewed me, she sat on his right side, as if she were his henchman or bodyguard, or perhaps his subconscious.”

  I nodded. This subservient, looming position certainly backed up what was written about Inez Gallo on the Blackboards.

  “Why doesn’t anyone talk about Cordova?” I asked.

  “They’re terrified. They ascribe a power to him, real or imagined, I don’t know. What I do know is that within that family’s history there are atrocious acts. I’m certain of it.”

  “Why haven’t you looked into it? You’re obviously quite passionate about the matter. Surely you’d have a vast array of resources at your disposal.”

  “I made a promise to my husband. He wanted me to put the business behind me, given what happened. If I ruffled feathers, trying to get to the bottom of it, would I lose the use of my other arm? And then my legs? Because a part of me actually believes, you see, that yes, there was something in that room summoned by that girl, and what I was brought there for, an act of revenge, had happened exactly as they’d planned. I’d been made to pay for some perceived offense I’d done against my sister.”

  I couldn’t help but think of the killing curse. Technically, my life had grown more hazardous since we’d walked through it; I’d nearly drowned. It eats away at your mind without you even realizing it, Cleo had told us. It … isolates you, pits you against the world so you’re driven to the margins, the periphery of life. I could actually understand such a phenomenon happening to someone going after Cordova.

  Olivia sighed. She looked tired, the intensity gone from her face, leaving it drained of color.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have much more time,” she noted, glancing across the room at the doorway. I followed her gaze and realized I’d been listening so attentively I hadn’t noticed that the woman in the gray suit who’d greeted us—Olivia’s secretary, I assumed—had stuck her head into the doorway, silently alerting her mistress to her next pressing appointment.

  “You mentioned Allan Cunningham,” I said. “Ashley was a patient at Briarwood prior to her death. I wanted to know the circumstances of her being admitted there, but Cunningham gave me a hard time. Any way you could help me out with him?”

  Olivia smiled, bemused. “Allan assured me Ashley was never a patient there. But I’ll certainly ask again. We’ll be in Saint Moritz through March.” She sat forward, slipping her feet into her shoes. “The number you have reaches my secretary directly. Contact her if you need me for anything at all. She’ll be able to get me a message.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  She stood up from the couch—her three Pekingese plopping onto the carpet around her feet—and arranged the silk scarf around her immobile arm. As Nora and I rose, Olivia reached out and took my hand with a disarmingly warm smile, her brown eyes gleaming.

  “It’s certainly been a pleasure, Mr. McGrath.”

  “Pleasure’s been all mine.”

  We started for the door.

  “But one last thing,” I said.

  She stopped, turning. “Of course.”

  “If I wanted to speak with your sister, where might I find her?”

  She looked irritated. “She can’t help you,” she said. “She can’t even help herself.”

  “She was married to Cordova.”

  “And the whole time she was addicted to barbiturates. I doubt she remembers a thing about the marriage—except maybe fucking Cordova a few times.”

  There it was—beneath the flawless elegance—the scrappy army brat.

  “It would still be invaluable to talk to her about what she saw up there, what the man was like, how he lived. She was an insider.”

  Olivia stared me down imperiously, not accustomed to being disagreed with. Or perhaps it was exasperation that again, even after all these years, her sister’s name still came up in her presence.

  “Even if I gave you the address, she’d never see you. She doesn’t see anyone except her maid and her drug dealer.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She took a deep breath. “Her maid comes here every week to give me her bills and an update on her health. My sister doesn’t know she’s bankrupt, that I’ve been paying for her care and drugs for the last twenty years. And if you’re wondering why I haven’t sent her away to Betty Ford or Promises or Briarwood, I assure you I have. Eleven times. It’s no use. Some people don’t want to be sober. They don’t want reality. After life trips them, they choose to stay facedown in the mud.”

  “All right,” I said. “But if what you told us is true—”

  “It is,” she snapped.

  “Marlowe might be able to give me even more. The most unreliable witness still has the truth inside them.”

  Olivia surveyed me challengingly, then sighed.

  “The Campanile. Beekman Place. Apartment 1102.” She turned, swiftly gliding to the door, her furry entourage panting to keep up. “Speak to the doorman, Harold,” she added over her shoulder. “I’ll phone him this afternoon. He’ll make the arrangements.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “When you do see her, don’t mention me. For your own well-being.” I swore I caught a faint satisfied smile on her face as she said this.

  “You have my word.”

  She escorted us through the gallery to the entrance hall, the old codger already waiting with our coats. He looked so stiff I couldn’t help but imagine he’d been standing there for more than an hour.

  “Thank you,” I said to Olivia, “for everything. It’s been invaluable.”

  “Hopefully you can do something about it. Avenge that girl. She was special.”

  Nora stepped inside the elevator, and though I entered behind her, I stuck out my hand to prevent the doors from closing.

  “One more question, if you don’t mind, Mrs. du Pont.”

  She turned, her head inclined at that artful angle between curiosity and superiority.

  “How did you meet Mr. du Pont? I’ve always wondered.”

  She stared me down. I thought she was going to icily pronounce it was none of my business. But to my surprise, after a moment, she smiled.

  “Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. We got into the same elevator. We were both on our way to visit Marlowe on the eighth floor. The elevator got stuck. Something to do with a bad fuse. When it got unstuck an hour later, Mike no longer wished to go up to the eighth floor to visit Marlowe.”

  She met my eyes with a look of triumph.

  “He wanted to come down to the lobby with me.”

  With a soft smile, Olivia turned coolly on her heel and vanished down the shadowy hall, her dogs at her feet.

  73

  When Nora and I stepped outside under the pale gray awning onto Park Avenue, I was surprised to find it raining quite hard. I hadn’t noticed it upstairs with Olivia, probably because I’d been so absorbed by what she was saying. Unless her apartment was so elegant it simply edited out bad weather as if it were a terrible faux pas.

  The doorman handed me a golf umbrella and, opening one for himself, raced into the street to hail a taxi.

  “She wasn’t what I expected,” I said to Nora. “She was frank and fairly convincing.”

  Nora shook her head, breathless. “All I could think about was Larry.”

  “The tattoo artist?”

  She nodded vigorously. “Remember what happened to him?”

  “He died.”

  “Of a brain aneurysm. Don’t y
ou see? It’s a trend. Olivia had one, and Larry. Both after they’d encountered Ashley.”

  “So, what are you saying, she’s the Angel of Death?” I meant it facetiously, though suddenly I recalled the incident Hopper had described at Six Silver Lakes—the rattlesnake found in the counselor’s sleeping bag, the widespread belief that Ashley had put it there. And, of course, her appearance at the Reservoir.

  “Olivia described the same thing Peg Martin did,” I said. “A visit to The Peak. But their experiences were so different. One was petrifying. The other was some kind of childhood fantasy dream sequence.”

  “Wonder which one’s true.”

  “Maybe both. The incidents occurred almost twenty years apart. Olivia said she went in June 1977. That’s a year after Cordova had purchased The Peak with Genevra and a month before she drowned. Peg Martin’s picnic at the estate was in 1993.”

  “It was scary how Olivia described Genevra, his first wife, don’t you think?”

  “The prisoner too terrified to speak.”

  She nodded. “And what about that witch-pricking needle?”

  “It actually corroborates what Cleo back at Enchantments suggested, that Ashley comes from a dynasty of black-magic practitioners.”

  Nora nibbled her fingernails, apprehensive. “I bet if we ever broke into The Peak, that’s what we’d find up there.”

  I knew exactly what she was thinking; somehow Cleo’s words had engrained themselves in my head when she’d described the lurid realities of those working with black magic. Old leather-bound journals filled with spells written backward. Attics stockpiled with the really obscure ingredients, like deer fetuses, lizard feces, baby blood. This stuff is not for people with queasy stomachs. But it works.