Coldheart Canyon (28 page)

There was no reply from within, nor any sound of movement in response to his knocking. He knocked a second time, and then—after a short pause—a third. Still there was no response, so he tried the latch. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open, and stepped out of the sunlight into the cool interior of the house.

At first glance he assumed that he’d misunderstood what Katya had told him, and the house was not occupied after all; merely used as a storage space of some kind. The room before him, which was large and high-ceilinged, was little more than a junk-room, filled with furniture and brica-brac. But as his eyes became more accustomed to the murky light, after the blaze of sun outside, he began to make sense of what he was seeing.

Yes, the place was over-filled, but the contents of the room were far from junk. On the wall to the left hung an enormous tapestry depicting a scene of medieval revelry; on the wall opposite was a series of white marble bas-reliefs that looked to have been filched from a Roman temple. In the far corner, close to a great oak door, were more slabs of stone, these carved with hieroglyphics. There was an elegant chaise longue in front of the massive fireplace; and a table, its legs elaborately carved with baroque grotesqueries, stood in the middle of the room. All of this had presumably been removed from the big house at some point, but that hardly explained the strange confusion of periods and styles.

Moving deeper into the room, Todd called out again to announce his presence. Again, there was no reply. He didn’t linger now to study the furniture or the antiquities, but crossed the room to the large oak door. Here CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 209

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again he knocked, but receiving no reply, he turned the carved handle, and pushed the door open. Given its size, he’d expected it to be heavy, but it wasn’t. On the other side was a wide hallway, the walls of which were hung with white masks. No, not masks,
life-casts
; white plaster faces, all caught with that expression of eerie, enforced repose that such masks always wore. He’d had similar things made of his own face, by special effects men. Once for the face wound in
Gunner
, once for a bullet wound.

It was an eerie experience, to look at the finished work.
This is what I’ll
look like when I’m dead,
he’d thought when he’d been shown the final results.

There were thirty or forty masks displayed on the wall; mostly of men.

He thought that he vaguely recognized some of the faces, but he couldn’t have put names to any of them. They were all handsome; some of them almost beautiful. He remembered Katya’s crazy talk about the parties she’d had in the house. How she’d seduced Valentino. Was this collection the inspiration for that fantasy? Had she dreamed of fucking the famous because she had plaster copies of their faces up on her wall?

The door at the other end of the wall of life-masks was, like the last, deceptively light. This time he paused to puzzle out why, and examining it a little more closely, had his answer. It was fake. The large rusted nails weren’t iron at all, but carved and stippled wood; the patina of antiquity had been achieved by a skilled painter. It was a door from a movie-set; all illusion. And if the doors had been made that way, what about the tapestry and the bas-reliefs and table carved with grotesqueries? They were all most likely fakes. Stolen off a back-lot, or bought from a studio fire-sale.

None of it was real.

He pushed the door open, and came into a second room, this one much smaller than the first, but just as cluttered. On the wall opposite him hung a large mirror, its gilt frame elaborately carved with naked figures, men and women knotted together in configurations which looked both sensual and tormented. He seldom let a mirror go by without putting it to use, and even now—knowing he wouldn’t like what he saw—he paused and assessed his reflection. He was a sad sight, his clothes in disarray from CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 210

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his trip through the shrubbery, his face like an inept copy of its finer self.

He wondered if perhaps he shouldn’t turn back; he was in no condition to present himself to Katya. Even as he was thinking about this the door to the left of the mirror creaked a little, and—caught by the wind—opened a couple of inches. Forsaking his sorry reflection, he went to the door and peered into the room beyond.

The sight before him put all thought of retreat from his mind. Inside was an enormous four-poster bed, its columns decorated in the same lushly erotic style as the gilded frame of the mirror. A swath of dark purple velvet hung in ripe folds like a half-raised curtain. The red pillows heaped on the bed were just as excessive, creamy silk fringed with lace. The sheet, which was also silk, was pulled back, so that the sleeper was left uncovered.

It was Katya, of course.

There she lay, face down; her hair unloosed, her body naked.

He stood at the door, enraptured. The pillow she lay on was so soft and deep that her face was almost concealed, but he could still see the high curve of her cheek, the tender pink of her ear. Was she awake behind her pale lids, he wondered, her nakedness a deliberate provocation? He suspected not. There was something too artless about the way her legs were splayed, too childlike about the way her hands were tucked up against her breasts. And the final proof ? She was snoring. If this was indeed a performance then that was a touch of genius. The perfectly human thing which made all the rest so believable.

His eyes went to the cleft of her buttocks; to the gloss of the hair that showed between her legs. He was suddenly stupid with lust.

He took a step toward the bed. The floor creaked under his weight, but thankfully the noise wasn’t loud enough to stir her. He continued his approach, his gaze fixed upon her face, looking for the merest flutter of a lash. But there was none. She was deeply asleep; and dreaming. He was close enough now to see that her eyes were in motion behind her lids, watching something happening in another place.

At the bedside, he dropped down onto his haunches, his left knee popping loudly. There was a faint dusting of gooseflesh on her limbs, he saw.

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He couldn’t resist the temptation to reach out and touch her skin, as though he might smooth the gooseflesh away with his fingertips. Surely she would wake now, he thought. But no, she slept on. The only sign that she might be surfacing from sleep was the slowing of the motion of her pupils. The dream was leaving her; or she was departing from the dream.

He was suddenly alarmed. What would she think if she woke to find him this close to the bed, his intent so unquestionably voyeuristic?

Perhaps he should go; quickly, before she woke. But he couldn’t bring himself to move an inch. All he could do was kneel there, like a suppliant, his heart beating furiously, his face a furnace.

Then, in her sleep, she murmured something. He held his breath, trying to catch the words. It wasn’t English she was speaking, it was an Eastern European language; probably her native Romanian. He could make no sense of what she was saying, of course, but there was a softness to the syllables; a neediness, which suggested they were supplications. She turned her face up from the pillow, and he saw that her expression was troubled. Her brow was furrowed, and there were tears welling beneath her lids. The sight of her distress bothered him. It brought back memories of his mother’s tears, which he’d watched her shed so often as a child.

Tears shed by a woman left to raise her sons alone. Tears of frustrated rage, sometimes; but more often tears of loneliness.

“Don’t . . .” he said to her softly.

She heard him speaking, it seemed. Her entreaties grew quieter. Then she said: “Willem?”

“No . . .”

The frown nicking her brow deepened and her lids began to flutter. She was waking up now, no doubt of that. He got to his feet, and began to retreat to the door, keeping his eyes fixed on her face. Only when he reached the door did he finally, regretfully, relinquish sight of her and turn away.

As he slipped through the door he heard her speak. “Wait,” she said.

He was sorely tempted to exit rather than turn and face her, but he resisted his cowardice and looked back toward the bed.

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She had pulled the sheet a little way up, to partially cover her nakedness. Her eyes were open, and the tears her dreams had induced were now running down her cheeks. Despite them, she was smiling.

“I’m sorry,” Todd said.

“For what?”

“Coming in here uninvited.”

“No,” she said sweetly. “I wanted you to come.”

“Still, I shouldn’t have stayed . . . watching you. It’s just that you were talking in your sleep.”

“Well it’s nice to have somebody listening,” she said. “It’s a long time since anyone was with me when I slept.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“Were you having a bad dream?”

“I can’t remember,” she said, glancing away from him. He knew from his acting coach what such glances indicated: a lie. She knew exactly what she’d been dreaming about; she just didn’t want to tell him. Well, that was her business. God knows everybody was allowed their share of secrets.

“What time is it?” she said.

He glanced at his watch. “Almost four-thirty.”

“You want to go for a walk before it gets too dark?” she said.

“Sure.”

She threw off her sheet, and got up out of bed, glancing up at Todd as she did so, as though to assure herself of his scrutiny.

“I’m going to bathe first,” she said. “Would you do me a little favor in the meantime?”

“Sure.”

“Go back to the Gaming Room, where we met last night, and—”

“Don’t tell me. Fetch your whip.”

She smiled. “You read my mind.”

“As long as you promise not to be beating me with it.”

“Nothing could be further from my mind,” she said.

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“Okay. I’ll get it . . . but no beating.”

“Take your time. There’s still plenty of light in the sky.”

He left her feeling oddly light-footed, pleased to have an errand from her. What did that say about their relationship? he wondered as he ran.

That he was naturally subservient? Ready to do her will at the snap of her fingers? Well, if so, so.

He found his way back down to the big house without difficulty. Marco heard him in the Gaming Room, heavy-footed as ever, and came to see what all the noise was about.

“You okay?”

“That’s all you ever ask. Am I okay? Yes. I’m better than okay.”

“Good. Only I heard from Maxine—”

“Fuck Maxine.”

“So it doesn’t bother you?”

“No. We had a good run together. Now it’s over.”

He picked up the switch from the mantelpiece.

“What the hell is that?”

“What does it look like?”

He beat the air two or three times. The switch was beautifully balanced; he could imagine learning how to use it with considerable cunning. Perhaps she would let him stroke her body with it.

Marco studied him in silence for a few moments; then he said: “You never told me why you took your bandages off. Were they too tight?”

“I didn’t take them off.
She
took them off.”

“Who’s ‘she’?”

“The woman who owns this house. Katya Lupescu.”

“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.”

Todd smiled. “No more explanations,” he said. “You’ll meet her later. I gotta go.”

He left Marco standing at the door with a befuddled expression on his face, and headed out into the light again, climbing the slope toward Katya’s house, aware that he was behaving like a man who’d just been given a new lease on life.

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He didn’t call her name as he entered this time. He simply made his way through the rooms of fake relics.

The sound of running water came from the room adjacent to the bedroom. Apparently, Katya was still running her bath.

He paused and looked around the bedroom. There were several enormous posters on the wall, which he had not noticed until now. Framed posters: one-sheets for movies, many decades old to judge by the stylized graphics and the yellowing of the paper they were printed on. The same image dominated all seven posters: that of a woman’s face. She was represented in two of them as a waif, a child-woman lost in a predatory world. But in the others she’d matured beyond the orphan, and these were the images that reminded him of the woman he’d met last night—an exquisite femme fatale glowering from the frames as she planned her next act of anarchy. There was, of course, no question who the woman was. Her name was on the posters, big and bold.
The Sorrows of Frederick
, starring Katya Lupi.
The Devil’s Bride
, starring Katya Lupi.
She Is
Destruction
, starring Katya Lupi.

What the hell was he to make of this new piece of evidence? Of course it was possible that Katya had paid to have seven posters representing fictitious films printed on aged paper and framed to look like objects of antiquity, but it wasn’t very likely. Was it possible this Katya Lupi—who bore such a resemblance to the Katya he knew—was hardly the same woman at all but a granddaughter, with an uncanny resemblance to her older relative? It was a more plausible solution than any other he could think of. Certainly the flawless woman he’d seen naked minutes before, her face without so much as a wrinkle upon it, could not be the woman who’d starred in these movies. There had to be some other explanation.

He was about to call out and announce his presence when he heard a soft intake of breath echoing off the bathroom walls. He went quietly to the door, and glanced in. In a large, old-fashioned ceramic bath, half-filled with water, lay Katya, her legs spread, her hips lifted clear of the water so that he could see how her fingers slid inside her. Her eyes were closed.