VALENTINO GATHERED UP the gym bag containing all twenty-four hours of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed. He held up the photograph. “May I keep this?”
“Please do. If everything works out as I’d like, I won’t have to ask for it back.”
“I’ll be in touch.” He opened the door and stepped out.
Mark David Turkus leaned over and took hold of the handle. “Mind you, I don’t expect anything.”
The archivist watched the sleek car sliding down the street. The motor made little more noise than when he’d been riding inside. By comparison, his compact sounded like a cement mixer starting up.
It was another day of brilliant sun, bringing out the green grass and red, yellow, and blue wildflowers in the Hollywood hills like bright scraps of construction paper. The vivid hues in the murals and graffiti in East L.A. were bolder yet, looking as if they’d been slapped on that morning with a brush dipped in a rainbow. He coasted to a stop before the gate in the parti-colored wall that enclosed the Bozal estate, and tooted his horn. The asthmatic bleating sound was a poor substitute for the virile blast of the old man’s Bugatti.
The gate opened far enough for the young Chicano in the uniform to poke his head out.
“Hello, Ernesto. Your grandfather’s expecting me.”
A dazzling white grin split the medium-dark face. He spread the gate the rest of the way.
Everything was as before: children playing in shorts and nothing else, stout women minding them from their porch seats, young Antonio Banderas clones bent under open automobile hoods with heads cocked to keep the smoke from their cigarettes out of their eyes. It was as if four square blocks had drifted free of Guadalajara and come to rest a hundred miles north of the border, carrying with it several generations of Bozals.
Here again was the limestone turnaround at the end of the block, a half-century of classic cars drawn up bumper-to-bumper like circled wagons in a western, and beyond it the large plain house, like anyone might see in one of the better neighborhoods in Mexico: well-tended, unpretentious, and hinting at the cozy life under its roof. He found a spot behind a glistening cherry-red 1936 Cord, the emblem between its hidden headlamps and the historic plate establishing its make and vintage for the visitor.
The door was opened by the master of the house himself, his slight form dressed as casually as before in a rumpled sweater, flannel shirt buttoned to the neck, corduroys shiny at the knees, and scuffed slippers. His head of fine white hair was bare. At sight of the bag his guest was carrying, he exposed his perfect dentures all the way to the eyeteeth.
“I’d hoped,” he said. “That’s the dingus, right?”
Valentino laughed. The old man seemed to have been brushing up on his hard-boiled slang. “I wouldn’t advise you to try watching it in one sitting. It’s ten hours long.”
“At my age I’m lucky to make it ten minutes without getting up to pee.” Before Valentino could react, Bozal grasped the strap and pulled it from his grip.
His ninety-year-old constitution was remarkable. Leading his visitor toward the bar, he carried the bag as if it were a bundle of beach towels.
“Can I corrupt you, fella? Sun’s not down past the yardarm.” He stepped behind the bar, set down his burden, and picked up a cocktail shaker.
Valentino was about to decline; then he realized he hadn’t had a drop of alcohol since the Bradbury party—was it only days ago?—and that he could use a drink. He was as far from an alcoholic as could be without becoming a total abstainer, but he understood the craving then.
“White wine, if you have it.”
“Do I have it. Was W. C. Fields a lush?” He traded the shaker for a bottle with a Mondavi label and inserted a corkscrew. “You know he had more than fifty grand worth of booze socked away in his attic? This was during the Depression, when three bucks would get you a bottle of good bourbon.”
“I never heard that about Fields.”
“Take it or leave it, considering the source. I got it from Groucho Marx. Fields showed him the stash, he said.”
“You knew Groucho?”
“Nobody did, really, except his brothers. I ran into him in the Brown Derby; we were with friends who knew each other. He was hosting You Bet Your Life at the time.” He pulled the cork, filled a stemware glass, and slid it across the bar. Then he retrieved the cocktail shaker and mixed a vodka martini for himself.
Valentino took a healthy sip of wine. It was good Gewürztraminer, slightly sweet and pungent. He swallowed and waited for his inhibitions to leave. “I screened Bleak Street again back at the university. I couldn’t resist.” He studied Bozal’s face closely over the top of his glass.
The old man seemed to be engrossed in balancing a twist of lemon on the edge of his own glass. “Knew you would. It’s just like chili.”
“Like chili?”
“When you got the taste for it, it’s all you want to eat till it’s gone. You won’t need it again for a long time, you’re sick of it, but when you want it, nothing else’ll do. It’s that way with sex, too; till you find the right woman. Then you can’t ever get your fill.”
Was it a bluff? Did he think Valentino was bluffing? The man was the Sphinx. Was everyone involved in this thing a champion poker player except him?
It would take at least another drink to press him outright, but Valentino didn’t want to call attention to his unease. He wandered around the room, carrying his wine; stopped before the portrait above the mantel.
Estrella, Bozal’s wife, dead these fifty years. Her beauty reached across the decades as if she were standing in front of him. He sipped again, barely conscious he was doing so. It wasn’t for courage.
“Forget it, kid.”
He coughed, dribbling wine over his chin. Bozal’s voice was almost at his ear. He hadn’t heard him coming up behind him. Apologizing for his clumsiness, he brushed at the droplets on his shirt.
“It’s jake. Find myself doing it myself when I’m looking at her. Forget it, I said. She was gone before you were born. She won’t come walking in on you from the rain like Laura. You’re a good-looking lad, but you’re no Dana Andrews. Neither was he, when the camera wasn’t cranking. He was a bad drunk off-screen, worse than Fields; when he took it on the set, he was through.”
“You knew him too?”
“Hmm?” Bozal was looking at the painting, his martini untasted.
“You knew Dana Andrews?”
He turned away from the mantel with a jerk. “He came out of retirement for a bit in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre: Nineteen-sixty-seven, it was, but Roger Corman wanted it to look like ’twenty-nine. I rented him some clunkers from my fleet for the city exteriors. Andrews was on the set when I took charge of delivery. He was recovering then. Spilled it all to me, his battle with the bottle; me, a complete stranger. One of the twelve steps, I guess. Anyway it seemed to take. As far as I know he never touched another drop.”
At any other time Valentino might have pressed the old man for more details, but he was scarcely listening. Something had begun to grow in his mind; something that had little if anything to do with whatever had happened to Bleak Street. It was absurd, fantastical, the stuff of a noir movie; but just what about this episode had not been? In any case it was too tentative to broach the subject just yet.
“Thank you for the wine. I’m sorry I can’t finish it. I have a lot of work to do.”
His host seemed surprised. “Shame to come all this way just to turn around and go back. I could’ve sent Eduardo to pick up Greed.”
“It isn’t that pressing,” he lied. “But I need to show myself at the office now and then or they might think I’d defected to USC.”
Bozal took the glass before the other could return it to the bar. “No need to explain, son. I’m grateful as all get-out. Them dagoes from the Vatican are sure to come across with what I need when I give ’em a private screening. You can’t ever go wrong dishing up one of the Seven Deadlies to the clergy.”
“Is Esperanza home? I’d like to see her before I go.”
“Sure. She’s on spring break. Your girl know about this?” He looked sly.
“It’s not like that. I want to tell her what a good job she did in the projection booth.” He assumed a pained look that wasn’t all manufacture. “Sir, I thought you were a little hard on her at the time.”
Bozal showed no trace of resentment. “She’s known me all her life. If she’s looking for the doting grandpa this late in the game she’s got me miscast. Her room’s at the top of the main staircase, on the right. Can’t miss it: smells like a Tijuana cathouse clear down to the ground floor.” The old man shook his hand, picked up the gym bag, and started in the direction of the door to the basement theater.
He felt oddly light-headed as he climbed the stairs from the tiled entrance, passing framed watercolors of the sun rising over the Gulf of Mexico and adobe walls in the moonlight. Confrontations were never his long suit, and beautiful women always brought out the awkward teenager he’d never quite outgrown, even when the women were not much more than half his age. Standing in front of the dark paneled oak door, he felt mad panic, like little Margaret O’Brien preparing to throw flour in the face of the neighborhood curmudgeon in Meet Me in St. Louis.
Get over it, Val. She’s a college freshman, not the Spider Woman. He raised his fist and knocked.
The door opened almost instantly, as if the person on the other side were waiting just for him. The face he saw there emptied his head the rest of the way. He’d seen it twice before, but had never stood this close to young Van Oliver.