Coldheart Canyon (23 page)

She was almost at the end of the walkway now. The final cage on her right was in a much better state than the others. Foliage had been interwoven with the bars so cunningly that there was practically nothing of the interior visible. Its gate, which was similarly covered, stood a little ajar.

Tammy peered in. The air inside smelled of some subtle perfume, its source the candles which were set in a little cluster at the far end of the cage. There was a small cot set against the wall to her right, somewhat incongruously made up with two oversized red silk pillows and a dirty yellow comforter. There was a chair and a tiny table on the other side of the cage, and on the table paper and pen. Beside the cot there was an upended wooden box, which also functioned as a table. Books were piled high upon it. But her attention didn’t linger on the books. It was drawn to the cluster of candles at the far end of the cage. There was a kind of altar there, roughly made; set on a few pieces of wood raised up on rocks. In the middle of the altar was what Tammy first thought was a piece of CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 167

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sculpture, representing the face of a beautiful young woman. When she got closer to it, however, she saw that it was a life-mask. The mouth carried an oh-so-subtle smile; and there was a slight frown on the subject’s otherwise perfect brow. Such beauty! Whoever this woman was—or had been—it was easy to understand why she’d been elected for this place of honor in the candlelight. It was the kind of face that made you gape at its perfection. The kind the camera loved.

Ah now
; the mysteries of this house and place began to seem more soluble. Was this beauty the owner of this once-great house; remembered here by some obsessive fan? Was this shrine made out of devotion for a woman who’d walked in these gardens, once upon a time?

Tammy took another step toward the altar, and saw that besides the life-mask there were a number of other, smaller items set there. A scrap of red silk, one edge of it hemmed; a cameo brooch, with the same woman’s face carved in creamy stone; a little wooden box, scarcely larger than a matchbox, which presumably held some other treasure; and lying flat beneath all of these a cut-out paper doll, about twelve inches tall, of a woman dressed in the frilly underwear of a bygone era. The paper from which the doll was made had yellowed, the colors of the printing faded. It was something from the twenties, Tammy guessed. Her knowledge of that era of cinema was sketchy, but the three faces, one of cardboard, one of plaster, one of stone, teased her: she
knew
the woman whose image was thricefold copied here. She’d seen her flickering black-and-white picture on some late-night movie channel. She tried to put a name to the face, but nothing came.

Despairing of the puzzle, she took a step back from the altar, and as she did so she felt a rush of cool air against the back of her neck. She turned, completely unprepared for what met her gaze. A man had come into the cage behind her, entering so silently he was literally a foot from her and she hadn’t heard his approach. There were places in the leafed and barred roof where the sun broke through, and it fell in bright patches upon him.

One of them fell irregularly upon his face, catching both his eyes, and part of his nose, and the corner of his mouth. She saw immediately that it CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 168

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wasn’t Caputo. It was a much older man, his eyes, despite the sun that illuminated them, gray, cold and weary, his hair, what was left of it, grown out to shoulder length and quite white. He was gaunt, but the lack of flesh on his skull flattered him; he looked, she thought, like a saint in her grandmother’s old Bible, which had been illustrated with pictures by the Old Masters. This was a man capable of devotion; indeed addicted to it.

He raised his hand and put a homemade cigarette to his lips. Then, with a kind of old-fashioned style, he flicked open his lighter, lit the cigarette and drew deeply on it.

“And who might you be?” he said. His voice was the color of his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Tammy said. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“Please,” he said gently, “let me be the judge of that.” He drew on the cigarette again. The tobacco smelled more pungent than any cigarette she’d ever inhaled. “I’d still like your name.”

“Tammy Lauper. Like I said—”

“You’re sorry.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t mean to be here.”

“No.”

“You got lost, I daresay. It’s so easy, in the garden.”

“I was looking for Todd.”

“Ah,” the stranger said, glancing away at the roof for a moment. The cigarette smoke was blue as it rose through the slivers of sun. “So you’re with Mister Pickett’s entourage.”

“Well no. Not exactly.”

“Meaning?”

“I just . . . well, he knows me . . .”

“But he doesn’t know you’re here.”

“That’s right.”

The man’s gaze returned to Tammy, and he assessed her, his gaze, though insistent, oddly polite. “What are you to our Mister Pickett?” he said. “A mistress of his, once?”

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Tammy couldn’t help but smile at this. First, the very thought of it; then, the word itself.
Mistress
. Like the flick of his lighter, it was pleasantly old-fashioned. And rather flattering.

“I don’t think Todd Pickett would look twice at me,” she said, feeling the need to be honest with this sad, gray man.

“Then that would be his loss,” the man replied, the compliment offered so lightly that even if it wasn’t meant it was still beguiling. Out of nowhere she remembered a phrase her mother had used, to describe Jimmy MacKintosh, the man she’d eventually divorced Tammy’s father to pursue. “He could charm the birds off of the trees, that one.” She’d never met a man with that kind of charisma before, in the flesh. But this man had it. Though their exchange so far had been brief and shallow, she knew a bird-charmer when she met one.

“May I ask . . .”

“Ask away.”

“. . . who are you?”

“By all means. One name deserves another. I’m Willem Zeffer.”

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Tammy said. “Again, I’m sorry.” She made a half-hearted glance over her shoulder at the altar. “I shouldn’t have come in here.”

“You weren’t to know. It’s easy to get lost in this . . . jungle. We should have it all cut back.” He smiled thinly. “You just can’t get the staff these days.”

“That woman,” Tammy said. “The one in the mask?”

“
In
the mask?” Zeffer said. “Oh. I see. Yes. In the mask.”

“Who is she?”

He stepped to the side, in order to have a clear view of the altar and what was upon it. “She was an actress,” he explained, “many, many moons ago.”

“I thought I recognized her.”

“Her name’s Katya Lupi.”

“Yes?” The name rang a bell, but Tammy still couldn’t name any of the movies this woman had been in.

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“Was she very famous?”

“Very. She’s up there with Pickford and Swanson and Theda Bara. Or she was.”

“She’s dead?”

“No, no. Just forgotten. At least that’s my impression. I don’t get out into the world anymore, but I sense that the name Katya Lupi doesn’t mean very much.”

“You’d be right.”

“Well, she’s lucky. She still has her little dominion here in Coldheart Canyon.”

“
Coldheart?
”

“That’s what they called the place. She was such a heart-breaker, you see. She took so many lovers—especially in the early years—and when she was done with them, she just threw them aside.”

“Were you one of them?”

Zeffer smiled. “I shared her bed, a little, when I first brought her to America. But she got tired of me very quickly.”

“What then?”

“I had other uses, so she kept me around. But a lot of the men who loved her took her rejection badly. Three committed suicide with bullets.

A number of others with alcohol. Some of them stayed here, where they could be close to her. Including me. It’s foolish really, because there’s no way back into her affections.”

“Why would you want to be . . . back, I mean?” Tammy said. “She must be very old by now.”

“Oh time hasn’t staled her infinite variety, as the Bard has it. She’s still beautiful.”

Tammy didn’t want to challenge the man, given that he was plainly besotted with this Lupi woman, but the idol of his heart must be approaching a hundred years of age by now. It was hard to imagine how any of her beauty remained.

“Well, I guess I should be getting along,” Tammy said.

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She gently pressed past Zeffer, who put up no resistance, and stepped out of the cage onto the walkway. It was so quiet she could hear her stomach rumble. Her Westwood breakfast seemed very remote now; as did the little diner where she’d eaten it.

Zeffer came after her, out into the open air, and she saw him clearly for the first time. He had been extremely handsome once, she thought; but his face was a mess. He looked as though he’d been attacked; punched repeatedly. Raw in places, pale and powdery in others, he had the appearance of a man who had suffered intensely, and kept the suffering inside, where it continued to take its toll. She couldn’t make quite so hurried an attempt to abandon him now that she’d seen him plainly. He seemed to read her equivocation, and suggested that she stay.

“Are you really in such a hurry?”

He looked around him as he spoke; he seemed to be reading the peculiar stillness in the air.

“Perhaps we could walk together a ways. It isn’t always safe up here.”

Before she could ask him what he meant by this he turned his back to the door of the cage and picked up a large stick that was set there. The way he wielded it suggested he’d used it as a weapon in the past, and had some expectation of doing so again now.

“Animals?” she said.

He looked at her with those sorrowful gray eyes of his. “Sometimes animals, yes. Sometimes worse.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Perhaps, with respect, it would be better not to try,” he advised. The stillness seemed to be deepening around them, the absence of sound becoming heavier, if that were possible. She didn’t need any further encouragement from Zeffer to stay close to him. Whatever this stillness hid, she didn’t want to face it alone. “Just take it from me that Coldheart Canyon has some less-than-pretty occupants.”

Something behind the cages drew Zeffer’s attention. Tammy followed the direction of his gaze. “What were the cages for?” she asked him.

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“Katya went through a phase of collecting exotic animals. We had a little zoo here. A white tiger from India, though he didn’t live very long.

Later, there was a rhinoceros. That also perished.”

“Wasn’t that cruel? Keeping them here, I mean? The cages look so small.”

“Yes, of course it was cruel. She’s a cruel woman, and I was cruel for doing her bidding. I have no doubt of that. I was probably unspeakably cruel, in my casual way. But it takes the experience of living like an animal”—he glanced back at the cage—“to realize the misery they must have suffered.”

Tammy watched him scrutinizing the shrubbery on the far side of the cages.

“What’s out there?” she said. “Is it animals that—”

“
Come here
,” Zeffer said, his voice suddenly dropping to an urgent whisper. “
Quickly
.”

Though she still saw nothing in the shrubbery, she did as she was told.

As she did so, there was a blast of icy air down the narrow channel between the cages, and she saw several forms—human forms, but dis-torted, as though they were in a wind-tunnel, their mouths blown into a dark circle lined with needle teeth, their eyes squeezed into dots—come racing toward her.

“
Don’t you dare!
” she heard Zeffer yell at her side, and saw him raise his stick. If he landed a blow she didn’t see it. The breath was knocked from her as two of her attackers threw themselves upon her.

One of them put a hand over her face. A spasm of energy passed through her bone and brain, erupting behind her eyes. It was more than her mind could take. She saw a white light, like the light that floods a cinema screen when the film breaks.

The cold went away in the same instant: sounds and sights and all the feelings they composed, gone.

The last thing she heard, dying away, was Willem Zeffer’s voice yelling:

“
Damn you all!
”

Then he too was gone.

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•

•

He threw the stick down on the ground, his eyes stinging with tears.

Then the strength ran out of him completely, and he went down on his knees at the threshold of his hovel, cursing Katya. She wasn’t the only one to blame, of course. He had his own part to play in this tragic melodrama, as he’d admitted moments before. But he still wanted Katya damned for what she’d done, as he was damned: for the death of tigers and rhinoceros, and the murder of innocent women.

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O N E

Three days after Tammy had pursued Marco Caputo up Sunset Boulevard and into the mysterious arms of Coldheart Canyon was Oscar Night: the Night of Nights, the Show of Shows, when billions of people across the world turned their eyes on Tinseltown and Tinseltown did a pirouette and a curtsy and pretended it was a lady not a five-buck whore.