Alone (22 page)

“Actually, she didn’t say—”

“You’re an ornament of this institution.”

The statement, and the sudden grave expression that accompanied it, set him aback. He shifted uncomfortably. “Well, you know what happens to ornaments the day after Christmas.”

“I’m on the level. Football, phooey! Endowments from old geezers that can’t fit into their old varsity jerseys, horse puckey! This town was built on moompitchers. Where’d Hugh Hefner be without boobs, I ask you?”

“I really can’t answer that.”

“In the crapper, that’s where! You got to go with your long suit. I was in London last year, can you pipe that? I had frequent flyer miles burning a hole in my pocket, and Israel was at war with somebody or other. I seen some punked-up teenagers bopping through Picadilly, they had on T-shirts with movie stars on ‘em. You think it was Larry Oliver and that tribe? Hell, no! Marilyn, Bogie, Jimmy Dean,
American
what-you-call icons! Detroit can’t compete with the Nips, and those geeks in Silicone Valley can’t get it up with even the South Koreans, but our junk culture—I’m swiping the phrase from those fossils in the English Lit Department—our junk culture has muscled its way clear into Baghdad. Those ragheads can keep their weapons of mass construction. We got Garbo!”

“Look, I’ve only been invited to an audition. I’m not much of a public speaker. It’s highly possible they’ll pass me over for someone who’s a bigger draw. When I agreed to this meeting I thought you wanted to write up my bio, something to throw to the reporters who write for the entertainment page.”

“Hell, I could cobble up something dynamite without taking up your time. As to the rest, I can get you a dialogue coach from Tri-Star. This guy taught Gwyneth Paltrow how to speak English. I asked you here to give me some ideas on how I can turn this canned ham into a honey-baked West Virginia.”

Valentino rubbed his temples with his thumbs. He never came away from a meeting with Anklemire without a thumping headache, and the racket from the pipes next door wasn’t helping. “I may need that dialogue coach. Right now I’m not sure we’re speaking the same language.”

“Look, Garbo’s dead what, fifteen, sixteen years? That’s forever in PR if you can’t come up with a hook to make it what-you-call relevant today.
Greed
was good, it was great; we had that murder. I got up my adrenaline when that shooting went down in Beverly Hills, and when that dyke thing broke I thought we was golden; but it’s been weeks, and I need a sure-enough Dr. Frankensteen to keep it alive till
How to Dress
hits Best Buy.”

“How
Not
to Dress.”

“Schlemiel, Schlemozzle.” He waggled a hand. “Give me input. How can we pump blood into this carcass, make it stand up and shout, ‘Mazoola?’”

“I’ve no idea. I’m an archivist, not a publicist.”

Anklemire studied his face, then sat back, squirming in his blown-out Naugahyde chair; the pernicious hemorrhoids that had driven him from Madison Avenue to this backwater were evident. “Well, I’ll fire up some land of rocket. I ain’t dead yet.”

“I wouldn’t give up hope.”

Valentino had intended the encouragement to be rhetorical, but it was a mistake to underestimate Henry Anklemire’s powers of interpretation. He hounded Valentino with questions all the way to the exit. The man was as bad as the jackals from the press.

**

CHAPTER

21

HE CALLED MATTHEW Rankin’s house, but was told by the housekeeper that her employer was meeting with his board of directors in San Francisco and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Ray Padilla took in the information over his cell phone and told Valentino to call him when he had an appointment.

“I wish we were wrapping this up tonight,” Valentino said. “This waiting is murder.”

“Murder is murder. Having second thoughts?”

“I had those an hour ago. Right now I’m halfway between my third and my fourth.”

“I’d never trust you with this if I were in solid with the department; there’s nothing like having a fat detective sergeant by your side and a prowl car purring at the curb for leverage. Rankin trusts you. If I try to get my foot in the door he’ll call his lawyer and I won’t be able to come within five hundred feet of him without a trunkload of probable cause.”

“I’m not backing out on you, Lieutenant. I just needed a pep talk. I’m still hoping this whole thing turns out to be a monstrous misunderstanding.”

“I don’t. But then I’ve got a pension going down for the third time.” The connection broke. He had the telephone etiquette of an alligator gar.

Valentino’s cell rang while he was driving to his residential hotel. It was Leo Kalishnikov.

“Spink resigned, did you hear?” he said by way of greeting.

“Through the grapevine. Any more good news?”

“Indeed, my friend. The zoning board has conferred and voted to extend you a temporary variance for the remainder of this term, to be reviewed next spring, when if there are no outstanding violations the members will consider making it permanent. Until then you are free to take up residence in the Oracle once again.”

“What about the stairs to the projection booth?”

“Spink withdrew the objection when he submitted his resignation. Evidently he misinterpreted the ordinance.” The Russian made a decorous noise in his throat. “Perhaps you have some insight that can shed light on this surprising turn of events. I myself have none.”

“I didn’t really know the man. Maybe he had an epiphany of some kind.”

“With a bus, maybe, crossing Santa Monica against the light.”

Valentino drove half a block in silence. When Kalishnikov spoke again, his Old World manner was back in place. “I look forward to making your better acquaintance throughout this project. You have facets that do not reveal themselves in the course of casual conversation.”

“I’m not exactly a Faberge egg.” He thanked the designer sincerely for his efforts with the zoning board and said good-bye, relieved to have broken contact. Beneath all his preposterous pretensions, so carefully tailored to California culture, the Russian was dangerously perceptive.

He checked out of the hotel that same day. A crew was at work in the theater; he greeted them cheerfully, raising his voice above the noise from the power tools, and borrowed a framing hammer from a carpenter to tear down the barricade from the stairs to his apartment in the projection booth. He unpacked immediately and was dialing Harriet to invite her to a housewarming party for two when he remembered they were on a break. That took the shine off the evening.

The electric generator he’d rented to power Midnite Magic’s equipment had gone back, and the one the construction workers used would leave with them at the end of the shift. He lit the Coleman lantern he used most nights and stretched out on his sofa with the shopping bag Harriet had given him on the floor beside it, sorting out Garbo’s letters in English, saving the rest for translation when he was back in Harriet’s good graces, and reading the accounts of thoughts and events going back eighty years. He didn’t bother to arrange them in order—few were dated, just as she preferred not to sign them—and so he found himself moving back and forth in time, sharing intimacies intended for friends that reflected naive youth, wordly age, temporary elation, deep despair, and a surprisingly long list of prosaic details of a life spent moment to moment, and so far outside glamour as to shout out in protest against it.

He pictured her, pale to the point of transluscence, chain-smoking cigarettes in her apartment in Hollywood, her condominium in New York City, her hotel in Stockholm, scribbling, scribbling; pouring out her experiences unedited, and managing to break down her life hour by hour without a single salacious confession and no insight deeper than her decision to buy a hat. John Gilbert, the love affair of her life, the tragicomedy of the nascent movie colony and the crack at the point of pressure that brought down the Great Lover in pieces smaller than Humpty-Dumpty’s, was mentioned once in passing and never again. The only comments on her films involved a complaint about an unbecoming dress in
A Woman of Affairs
and her personal review of her performance in
Anna Christie,
the landmark that had made Garbo’s voice as famous as her face: “Terrible.” Valentino found himself chafing at her stubborn lack of appreciation. Garbo was wasted on Greta Garbo.

It was far from a complete record. The letters were addressed to Vera Schmiterlöw and a handful of other Swedish friends of many years’ standing, not the fixtures in the industry that had turned a chubby peasant girl destined to marry some goatherd into a goddess for the ages, mysterious and unobtainable, and gaps in the continuity suggested letters lost or withheld for reasons of privacy. Possibly she’d saved her innermost thoughts for expression in Swedish. But that left dozens of pages that read like the diary of a not very interesting woman who’d led a life so ordinary as to suggest a blind fear of anything that might be described as unique or adventurous. She was passionate about her rug designs, the antiques she collected, the curios she bought to rest her eyes upon when she locked herself away from the world. She had spent the rest on-screen, and left it there when she’d turned away from the Kliegs into the pale reflected sunlight of early retirement. It should have been a sad story, as drenched in pathos as Camille’s, Anna Karenina’s, and Grusinskaya’s, signature roles that continued to burn with a silver flame in revival houses and home theaters in both hemispheres; but it was not. Camille and Karenina had died early, of wasting disease and suicide, and Grusinskaya was consigned to the living death of grief for love lost. Garbo had gone on living.

Whoever had framed a false letter purporting to drive Garbo from the closet obviously had not known her, or taken the time to learn more from her correspondence than the slope of her
Vs.
She was not the type to write a love letter of any kind, or to confide to anyone—at least not in writing—the details of her amours or even her impure thoughts. She had armored herself against not only the pryers and busybodies of her time, but of all time. Of all the heroes and legends of past and present, she alone had kept her feet of clay from public view. Garbo was gold: The only substance in the universe that would not deteriorate or even surrender its glow.

Valentino laid the last letter on his chest, closed his eyes, and slept without dreaming.

**

If Greta Garbo was gold, Matthew Rankin was stainless steel. It was the housekeeper’s day off. For an octogenarian left to his own devices after a round-trip flight up the coast and a business meeting that must have been high-powered because it had required his presence, he looked as fresh and burnished as if he’d spent the time at a spa. His face was a healthy shade of bronze, his white hair was brushed and gleaming, and he was one of the very few modern men who could wear a smoking jacket and a silk scarf without looking affected or effete.

“You’re looking well,” Valentino said, understating it.

“You’re kind, but if I’m not exactly falling apart I have Andrea to thank. She had a Swede’s own idea of the price of health and put me on a regimen that has repaid the investment many times over. If you look as if you have the time to eat right and exercise and spend an hour or two on the beach, your shareholders tend to think their stock is in capable hands. You, on the other hand, look like a young man whose life has been leading him.”

Valentino was touched by what appeared to be sincere concern. “It’s been a rough patch, but not as rough as yours. It seems to be turning around. I want to thank you again for lending me Phil’s services as a projectionist. They had an indirect influence on the result.”

Over drinks in the study, he provided a brief summary of recent events. He left out his romantic troubles as too personal, and the scheme that had rid him of Spink; he’d asked Phil for his discretion, and had compensated him, but he didn’t know how much Rankin might guess.

“I wish you’d confided in me earlier,” his host said. “I have some contacts in government.”

“Earlier you had problems of your own.”

They were sitting in a leather-upholstered conversation area away from the desk. The bust of Garbo and its pedestal were not present. Their removal had lifted much of the oppression from a room where a man had died violently.

To Valentino’s relief, Rankin didn’t pursue the point. Perhaps he felt, as did his guest, that it was too early in the evening, and too close to home, to bring up the subject of extortion, no matter how well motivated it might have been in Valentino’s case.

“So you’re back home. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a movie house. If I’d set up domestic arrangements in one of my department stores, I’d have been accused of marrying my work.”

“I have been, but it’s work I love. I’m sure you can identify with that.”

“Not really. My father-in-law was fanatically devoted to the business, but I’m still a chemist at heart. If I’d never met Andrea, I’d have been contented with a job in the research lab of some low-profile pharmaceutical company, developing serums that would save millions of lives in the Third World.”

“I doubt that would give you much opportunity for innovation.”

“You’re probably right. In those days, a man who spent all his time bent over a Bunsen burner wouldn’t have been caught dead socializing with a computer programmer or vice versa. Now, of course, the two professions are inseparable. Fortune put me in a position to apply my interest in the developing technology to save a dying business. I succeeded, but a healthy bottom line isn’t a cure for the plague.”