“I don’t know the truth.”
“The truth about this. About us.”
“I don’t even know who you are,” Finch said. He looked at Kirby. “Or you.”
“Let’s keep it that way,” Town said. “This isn’t a kegger.”
“I want to do it,” Kirby said.
“Do what?” Town asked.
“I want to make the video.”
“That ship has sailed,” Town said.
She took a step forward and lifted her chin. “I need you to hear me. I want to do it.”
“Why?”
“Because maybe it helps. Maybe it does something.”
“Or maybe it just adds to the noise,” Town said.
“Maybe. But still.”
“She’s right,” Finch said. “We should do it.”
“Why? Because you made a drunken promise?” Town said.
“No. Because maybe it will help.”
“Since when are you invested in this peace process?”
“Catherine was. And she was my wife.”
Town smiled sourly. “Then take some of the money you get from your new-found fame and start a foundation in her name. But this is over. Accept it.”
“So you just walk into my life and fuck it up and walk out again?” Finch said.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? That’s all I get? Sorry?”
Town scratched his unshaven face. “Okay, there were people backing this. Powerful people. People who would’ve given us a fighting chance of pulling it off. But they’ve stepped off the bus.”
“And thrown us under it?” Finch said.
Town raised a shoulder. “Just the way it goes.”
“Why?” Finch said.
“Why what?”
“Why did they bale?”
“The risks outweigh the potential benefits.”
“So let’s do it without them,” Kirby said.
Town stared at dust motes floating on the air like tiny parachutes, then he focused on the girl and said, “You do realize that if we did it, made that video, and I am saying if, no matter how well we did it, there’d always be people who’d say it’s fake?”
“They would say that even if it really was her,” Finch said.
Town raised his palms to the ceiling.
“Let’s take a vote,” Kirby said, lifting her hand like she was in a classroom.
“This isn’t a democracy,” Town said.
“I’m in,” Finch said.
Town shook his head.
“Come on, man,” Finch said, “what have you got to lose?”
“Why don’t you ask them?” Town said, pointing at the mute TV, at the bodies of the FBI agents under the blankets.
They all looked at the tube and Town lifted the remote and killed it. He went to the window and moved the curtain aside and stared out at the unlovely, sunblasted sprawl. He had a sense of being drawn into something by a force that, like gravity, pulled in only one direction.
Town turned and looked at the weak, wounded man and the silly, innocent young woman and said, “We do it now, today, and then we go our separate ways. Agreed?”
FIVE
Ann, driving east along Sunset toward the Gothic turrets of the Chateau Marmont that rose above the giant billboards and the palms, listened to Nirvana covering Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World.” The music and this city reminding her of what it had been like to be almost young.
Ann knew L.A. well. Okay, she had once known it well. She’d lived here for a couple of years when she’d been in her carefree early thirties. This was not long after the Wall had tumbled and she’d put a tenant in the Brooklyn house, shrugged off some of her seriousness, and had stopped chasing wars and disasters and taken on more entertainment work.
Her Joan Didion years she called them because she’d lived first in Malibu, house sitting for the boyfriend of an acquaintance, where she’d seen the wildfires and the landslides so vividly described in Didion’s The White Album—along with the psycho killers prowling the box canyons north of Los Angeles, whom she, thankfully, had not seen.
When the boyfriend had returned from some ashram in Goa Ann had based herself at the Chateau in West Hollywood. She’d bought an old black Mercedes convertible and cruised the endless freeways, listening to Nirvana, Mazzy Star, Jane’s Addiction and The Breeders, feeling, belatedly, young. In her twenties she’d put her youth on hold and now it was as if she were living it before it was too late.
There’d been sun and sex and some recreational drug usage, and even a very shiny lure dangled before her about directing a movie based on a photographer not unlike herself, with Deborah Winger mooted to play the lead. But it had come to naught, like so many things in this Fata Morgana of a city. Two years had slid by in a sunny blur and it had been fun and then one day it had just gotten stale and Ann had returned to New York. Even though she’d never entirely stopped shooting pictures of rock stars, comedians and actors, she’d found herself inexorably drawn back to the places of conflict and strife.
And over the next two decades she’d become, for Christ’s sake, venerated, her images of human rights abuses and genocide requested for viewing by the U.S. Senate and the United Nations. The accolades and awards had accumulated like the traffic tickets under the windshield wipers of the Mercedes that she’d abandoned on Marmont Lane when she’d quit L.A. A friend had made a project of sending her Polaroids of the car over a three month stretch, until the convertible had finally disappeared, the last photograph showing only a cloud-shaped oil stain on the asphalt.
So, choosing to stay at the Chateau Marmont was a paean to nostalgia, yes, but it was also a flare sent up to her missing husband. When she came out here on increasingly infrequent shoots she always checked into the Chateau, even though there were many more salubrious alternatives.
As irrational as she knew it was, something akin to magical thinking had her believing that Pete, all-knowing, clairvoyant Pete, would divine that she was in L.A. and that she was here, at the Chateau, and would reach out to her.
She allowed herself this for the same reason that she had switched from the news on the radio to a station that played only music from the nineties—as if by not hearing the updates on what had happened out in Eagle Rock she was keeping her husband safe.
Ann left her car with a valet and walked into the lobby, checking at the desk for messages. None. She took a copy of Los Angeles Magazine from a table and went out to the patio by the pool, surrendering to the infantile belief that if she was among these bronzed, smiling, vacuous people, then nothing in the world could be anything but bright and happy. Which she, better than most, knew was a lie, for hadn’t so many of her images of bloodshed and terror been captured under the unblinking glare of the sun?
SIX
Hunt Gidley, his walk a kind of anthropoid lurch, his bald head and shirt as wet as if he’d just blundered through one of the car washes down on Sunset, found the time to mutter, “Thank you Christ for this city of freaks,” as he entered the lobby of the Chateau Marmont on the tail of Ann Town. Nobody looked at him twice, so inured were they to the antics of this human zoo.
He saw the thin brown-haired woman in her black jeans and gray shirt speak to the desk clerk and then walk out in the direction of the pool, snagging a magazine on her way.
Gidley let a floral runner carpet lead him toward a pair of bronze-doored elevators flanked by potted palms. He pressed for an elevator and while he listened to the motor grind and creak he felt a sudden bout of nausea and threw up a mouthful of bitter bile into one of the plant pots.
Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, dislodging a Band-Aid that ineffectually covered a suppurating dog bite, he looked around and saw that his upchucking had gone unobserved. The elevator door slid open and he stepped into the cabin. As he faced the panel of buttons he went blank. Littlefield had told him the photographer’s room number and Gidley had committed it to memory, but it had leaked from his head like hot chee
se from a fondue pot.
Jumping Jesus Christmas Christ.
A raven-haired woman even taller than Gidley on her stilt-like heels was carried into the elevator on a cloud of fragrance as ripe as a midnight souk and he presumed she was either a high-class hooker or a famous actress. She ignored him and stabbed at a button with a long-taloned digit.
Somehow this action jogged Gidley’s memory and he lunged for the fourth floor button, his sweaty finger almost skittering off onto the brass plate.
The elevator rose at a stately pace and the woman’s perfume and the ripeness of her flesh beneath it had him throwing up again, standing with the puke trapped in his mouth. He gulped and swallowed as she adjusted the hem of her tiny dress—the name “fanny pelmet” came to him unbidden—and seated her breasts in her brassiere as unselfconsciously as if she were weighing melons at a fruit market before she quit the elevator and allowed him to rise on with only her fetor for company.
Swallowing the last of the bitter vomit he stepped from the elevator, squinted at room numbers and set off down the corridor, his left shoulder tilted forward like a ship’s figurehead breaking the waves.
He found the photographer’s room and leaned against the door, drinking air. Even in his diminished state the lock yielded to him after a few twists of his pick and he stepped inside.
A bed, a chair, a dresser and a door out onto a balcony. The bed was neatly made. He opened the closet and saw a couple of clothes on hangers. He slid open the top drawer of the dresser and was rifling through it when his legs buckled and he sank to his knees and found himself with his face buried in silk underwear like some panty sniffer.
Gidley tried to drag himself to his feet and met with no success, so, on his knees, he lurched toward the bathroom, feeling puke in his mouth and hot jets of shit squirting into his skivvies.
He gained the cramped bathroom and fought his way onto the privy, spewing into the dainty little deco sink as he unleashed hell into the toilet bowl.
- - -
Ann pulled her cane chair deeper into the shade of the umbrella on the pool deck and sat staring out over the sunbathers sprawling on their loungers.
A waiter came and she ordered a Perrier and as he left she felt a sudden displacement, and thought for a moment it was one of the tremors she’d become so blasé about in the years she’d lived in this city, until she realized she was experiencing a rush of profound anxiety. She took hold of the table to steady herself, breathing, shutting her eyes behind the new pair of Oliver Peoples sunglasses she’d picked up in Beverly Hills en route from Malibu.
The panic receded and she lifted the magazine, ready to read something about art or money or somebody’s idea of culture, anything anodyne that would calm her. But when she took off the shades and reached into her pocket for her reading glasses, she realized that they were up in her room, lying beside the bed where she’d left them that morning.
Ann laid the magazine face down and walked back toward the lobby. She passed the bungalow, shielded by palm and eucalyptus trees, where, back in the early eighties, John Belushi had overdosed just days after she’d shot his portrait for Rolling Stone.
- - -
When Gidley, still enthroned on the shitter, the air of the small bathroom thick with his funk, heard the scratch of a key in the door, he toed the bathroom door closed and entered into a frenzy of wiping. He hauled up his soiled BVDs and chinos, and buckled his belt as he stood against the door and listened to the woman moving around in the room beyond.
He heard the scuff of her shoes on the carpet and a muffled cough and a sniff and a soft rustle coming from near the bed, and then footsteps heading toward him.
If she came into the bathroom he would have no choice but to kill her and he didn’t want to do that.
Not yet.
Holding his breath, ear to the door, he listened. He heard the rattle of the knob of the outside door and the creak of it opening and clicking closed, the lock engaging.
Gidley exhaled and turned and looked at himself in the mirror and knew that, more than anything, he needed that penicillin.
- - -
Ann returned to her table and found a bottle of Perrier and a glass with a half-moon of lemon spiked to its rim. She filled the glass with water and watched the bubbles for moment before taking a sip and setting it down on the table.
When she lifted the magazine she saw a cell phone lying beneath it. A blocky thing with a small face. While Ann stared at the phone the face changed from gray to yellow and the thing yelped and blinked.
As she grabbed for the cell, and stabbed at a button she knew who it must be and had to stop herself from blurting out her husband’s name.
Calming herself, she said, “Hello?”
“No names, please.” Not Pete. Arkady. A sick disappointment rendered her mute. “Are you there?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Has he made contact?”
“No.”
She heard Arkady cough and the suck of his breath. “There has been a development.”
“What development?”
“His sponsors have withdrawn their support.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s on his own. He’s vulnerable.”
“But he’s alive?”
“We believe so, yes.”
“Do you know where he is?” Ann said.
“No. But it is vital that I get to talk to him. I can offer him assistance.”
“I haven’t heard anything.”
“But you will, I think.”
“I don’t know.”
“When you do, convince him that he has to contact me. Yes?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
“Keep the phone with you.”
He was gone.
As Ann pocketed the phone and walked around the pool toward the lobby she felt more exposed than she had in any of the untold warzones she’d photographed.
SEVEN
Littlefield lounged in a chair in his living room facing Señor and Señora Rivera who were perched on the edge of the ornate sofa.
Littlefield balanced a plate of the woman’s sweet pumpkin fritters on his knee, careful not to allow the viscous syrup to stain the pants of his bespoke wool suit, and sipped from a glass of whiskey, even though it was barely noon. The occasion, he felt, demanded a toast, and he’d ordered the Riveras to charge their glasses with a pinot noir from Chile’s Requínoa Valley.
Chloe and Gwen were asleep upstairs. Well, in truth, they were sedated, as they had been since his last visit.
Littlefield had called the Riveras from the city and told them he was coming to speak with them, requesting that they made sure his wife and child were “resting.”
Since his arrival he had not ventured upstairs and didn’t intend to, but he’d heard not a peep from the woman and the child.
Littlefield, under the benign gaze of the Chilean couple, finished the last of the fritters and put the plate aside.
Adopting a suitably somber demeanor, he said, “Señor, Señora, it pains me to admit this, but my marriage has not been a good match.”
The Chileans nodded and hummed and each lifted a hand and laid it on the other’s plump knee, as if to keep their own bond free of contamination.
“So, I think it is time for Señora Gwen to leave us.” He paused and sipped his drink. “And Señorita Chloe, too.”
“Leave us, Señor Keep?” Martina Rivera said.
“Yes. I want them gone. I want no trace of them. I want it to be as if they had never been here. Do you understand?”
The couple exchanged glances and then Señor Rivera cleared his throat and said, “Oh yes, Señor Keep, we understand. This we have had experience with.”
The Chilean launched into the tale of a dissident journalist back in their home country who had proved almost impossible to break. “He was an unreasonable man, Señor. He responded to nothing.” Rivera spread his torturer's hands. “Nothing.”
“So we decided on som
ething, how do you say, more psychological,” Señora Rivera said.
“Yes. Psychological. Yes. We detained him and then arranged for his family, his wife and two children, a small boy and girl, to disappear. Completely.”
The woman nodded her helmet of hair. “Yes. Completely. We went to their apartment in Santiago and took them and disposed of them. And then we removed every single trace of them. Clothes. Toys. Photographs. Toothbrushes. Everything. We scrubbed and vacuumed. Left not a thing.”
“Then we went further,” the man said. “We removed people who knew the woman and children. With the man it was easy, he was an orphan, so there was nobody on his side.”
Littlefield sat up straighter, forced, despite himself, to identify with this luckless reporter who must have lived a version of his own desolate childhood.
“The family of the wife,” Señora Rivera said, “was small for a Catholic one. There had been illnesses and deaths. And they, too, were shameless dissidents, so some of them had paid the price. It was not difficult to erase the few who were left, who had known the journalist’s wife and children.”
“Also a handful of neighbors,” Señor Rivera said. “Some family friends. There were few left, they were also a treasonous lot, you understand? A kindergarten teacher or two had also to be made to disappear. And, of course, all records of the woman and the children were purged. No birth certificates. No identity documents. No passports. No marriage certificates. No paperwork whatsoever.” He made a little exploding gesture with his fingers. “Poof.”
“So we released the journalist,” Señorita Rivera said, “and when he returned to his apartment there was nobody. And he called people and tried to find out where his wife and children were. What wife? What children?” She smiled like a hyena. “It was as if they had never existed.”
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