A BLACK SEDAN with a hood nearly as long as the Bugatti’s (into which his own car could fit without scratching the fenders), narrow running boards, and blazing whitewall tires drifted into the loading zone in front of The Oracle. It was shaped like the spaceship in a Buck Rogers movie, sleek as a shark, every part curving gracefully into every other, with chrome so bright it caught cold fire under the sun of another brilliant day in southern California. Its plate and the insignia above the radiator grille—a gold-and-red enamel escutcheon—identified it as a 1948 Packard.
Valentino, standing in front of the theater’s glass-and-nickel doors, was prepared to accept it as the one Van Oliver had driven in throughout Bleak Street; it was a graven image, as much as the man himself. At this point in the affair that had begun less than a week earlier in the lobby of the Bradbury Building, he was inclined not to discount anything as impossible.
History repeated itself, never more relentlessly than today.
The rear passenger’s door popped open and Ignacio Bozal leaned out, placing a small foot in a crisp brown-and-ivory wingtip onto the running board. The elderly collector had abandoned his shabby house wear for a dove-gray fedora with the brim tugged down rakishly over one eyebrow and a Burberry trench coat knotted rather than tied at the waist, the buckle dangling; the outfit looked more natural on him than it had on his grandson. Valentino caught a glimpse of blue pinstripes, black silk socks that hugged his ankles too snugly to have been held up other than by elastic garters, and a silk necktie decorated with red and black squares set at diamond-shaped angles. He touched the knot as if to secure it, and uncased his store-bought teeth in a neon grin.
“Get in the car.”
He made it sound gruff, like a henchman in an old crime film. There was no trace of a Spanish accent.
Valentino asked him where they were going.
“For a ride, what else?”
The archivist didn’t laugh. Knowing what he now knew of the man, the answer sounded less like a joke and more like a sinister promise.
Bozal sensed his hesitation. “Around the block a few times; as many as it takes to talk. You never rode in a car like this. I own more’n a hundred, and this one’s my favorite. I’m not forgetting the Bugatti. It’s got breeding, but this one’s got flash.” He withdrew his foot and slid to the other side.
It was the second time the archivist had been waylaid by a wealthy and powerful figure in a luxury sedan. As often as he’d seen the scene replayed on-screen, it had never gotten old: until now. Nevertheless he got in.
He recognized the driver. This time he was wearing a chauffeur’s uniform. “Where to, Grandpapa?”
“Shut up and drive. I’m still sore at you. Your sister too.”
“We were only—”
“Can it!”
Emiliano’s face lost its eager-to-please expression. It looked even more like Oliver’s; like Bozal’s, stripped of the six decades that had taken place since Bleak Street. For they were one and the same.
Bozal shook his head. “Can’t lay eyes on that kid without feeling someone’s walking over my grave. Like looking in a mirror that stopped sixty years ago. Genes are sneaky. They’ll go into hiding for generations, then jump out and yell ‘Boo!’ That what tipped you? I knew it was you when the phone rang. I got the story out of the kids by then. You were smart enough to figure out the rest.”
“Not as smart as you think. I should have seen it long before then, but I still didn’t get it, not till I could put a little distance between us. The resemblance couldn’t have been just coincidence. Neither did all the other signs: Estrella’s portrait, painted years after Madeleine Nash left pictures to get married, but the features hadn’t changed along with the hairstyle; Esperanza, who could double for Madeleine, except I’d only seen her in black-and-white, not in color or in person; your language—not learned secondhand from watching old movies on TV, but ingrained in you during your time with the New York mob.”
They were moving now, cruising through East L.A. neighborhoods he’d never visited. The motor wasn’t muted, like the one in Turkus’ modern town car, nor did it rumble, like the twelve pistons charging up and down under the Bugatti’s hood. It was a powerful throb one could feel in the soles of his feet; the suppressed growl of a savage animal engaged in the stalk.
“Why Estrella, by the way?” Valentino asked. “Why not call her Magdalena?”
“That and Ignacio Bozal were the names on the papers we bought in Tijuana. There wasn’t time to have fresh forgeries made. I got used to it. I never could call her Madeleine; that was some PR flak’s brainstorm to make her more acceptable to a WASP audience, like when they changed Rita Cansino’s last name to Hayworth. She died in Peru in ’sixty-five—Estrella, not Rita. Cancer. That’s why I left Acapulco. We had eight good years, but there were too many memories there. The kids—Esperanza and Emiliano’s parents and aunts and uncle—were my staff when I opened the hotel. They learned good manners and passed them on; even misplaced loyalty.”
“You’re Van Oliver. Or do you prefer Benny Obrilenski?”
They were passing down a narrow street walled by blank-faced buildings, carnicerias and laundries catering to the local restaurant trade, and probably an indoor cannabis farm or two under grow lights. They cast shadows in which only Bozal’s bottom teeth showed in a shark’s grimace. “I ditched it when I quit the Outfit. Couldn’t get used to Van Oliver, though; sounded like a dance-hall gigolo with greased hair and patent-leather pumps.”
Valentino had the bizarre feeling he was riding with a stranger, yet one he’d known almost as long as he’d known Bozal. Sometimes—likely from years of careful habit—the man would lapse even now into the border accent, but for the most part it was pure Flatbush: “berl” for “boil,” “goil” for “girl,” peppered generously with dropped g’s and expectorated t’s. The clothes, the car, and especially the candor of their conversation had turned the clock back to 1957.
He said, “I knew you’d figured it out last night, when I called to see if Roy was up for a visit and they said he had one. It had to be you. No one else comes to see him these days.”
“Did they tell you the rest?”
“Yeah. Call me Madame Zara, I guess. I had a feeling, which is why I called. This morning I was about to check with Cedars of Lebanon when the phone rang and it was you.”
“I checked. He’s stable. That’s all they’d tell me.” Valentino went on. “I’d have figured it out a lot earlier if I’d thought to check the visitors’ register the last time I was at the Country Home. There was your name, the one you’re using now. You signed in three times this year, across from Fitzhugh’s name. Ignacio Bozal had no reason to shoot the breeze with an old character actor. Van Oliver did.”
“How much did he tell you?”
Valentino gave him part of it. Bozal nodded, his aquiline profile silhouetted in a crack of sunlight between buildings.
“He’s slipping, all right. In the old days he wouldn’t of said help if he was drowning.”
“He’s still cagy. All I got out of him at first was you and Madeleine Nash went to Mexico, and that only indirectly. You were the only one who said she went to Europe with her new husband. You misdirected me twice. You said you got Bleak Street from a private estate sale in Europe.”
“I didn’t lie about getting it from the editor, just that he was dead when I got it. I slipped him a grand back in ’fifty-seven. Just a sentimental souvenir. I met Estrella on that set.”
“What about the rest of the money? RKO paid you twenty-five hundred a week all the time you were on contract. None of that ever showed up. In the end the authorities concluded you’d stuck it in a safe-deposit box under an assumed name and never came back to claim it. That helped confirm the theory you were murdered.”
“It’d just as easily meant I skipped with it; but by then the press was tired of the case and so were the cops.”
Emiliano turned a corner into full sunlight. His grandfather’s cheeks showed color for the first time; he never looked more like Benny Obrilenski, the mob bodyguard who’d struck Hollywood paydirt. “I earned that money! I wasn’t about to kick back half to that sawed-off runt Mickey Cohen. He was raking in plenty enough from every racket in this burg without shaking me down for more.
“That’s why we took it on the ankles, Maggie and me.” He’d lapsed into Roy Fitzhugh’s nickname for Madeleine Nash. “We’d go on making movie after movie, and half of what we got would go into the Mick’s pocket. Our only way out was to skip and start over where nobody’d look for us. We sank dry shafts in every tank town and prairie dog hole in Central and South America, picked coffee beans right alongside the hired hands, till we scrounged up the case dough to buy that roach motel in Acapulco and turn it around. You know the rest.”
“Not quite. Fitzhugh couldn’t cross you into Mexico because of that old smuggling rap. How much did you pay Constantine Turkus to smuggle you across the border?”
“Old Roy sure turned squealer at the end, didn’t he?”
“Cut him slack. He was breathing bottled oxygen, waiting for the ambulance to take him to ICU. I ambushed him with a picture of Turkus. It got a reaction.”
“I don’t hold no grudge. He kept his trap shut all those years when it mattered. I didn’t give the Turk much more than cab fare. I think he got a boot out of sneaking U.S. citizens into Mexico instead of the other way around.”
“How’d you know him?”
“How do you think? Cohen got him his start busting heads for the studios. I had the lovely job of watching his back while he was doing it.”
“That’s terrible!”
“You won’t get no argument from me. It’s why I jumped at the chance when Howard Hughes offered me a contract. Son, you’re looking at the only actor who didn’t want to be a star. All I wanted was a way out. Maggie—my Estrella—she was a gift from God: Maybe it meant I’d served my time in Perdition.”
“You owed her a lot,” Valentino said. “Magdalena Novello was a good Spanish tutor.”
“She was, but she was raised Castilian. I got the local accent from the natives. I had the coloring to pass, at least with gringos. As far as Mexicans were concerned, it was un asunto de no importa. They’d been pulling the wool over gringos’ eyes for a hundred years.”
“Everyone here was satisfied he’d seen the last of Van Oliver. As long as you stayed in character, anyone who happened to recognize you years later might have doubted his own judgment.”
It was too warm for a trench coat. The old man unbelted and unbuttoned it, spread it open, and took off his hat. He rested it on his knee and ran a brown hand through his white hair. “I had a couple of close calls, when some mugs came down for vacation. But by then Cohen was in stir for the long haul. I upgraded their rooms, tore up their bills, and they decided they’d made a mistake. Also by then I had some pull in Mexico City. It didn’t pay to blow any whistles.”
“You sound just like your character in Bleak Street.”
“You might say I was the first method actor. I started rehearsing it back in Brooklyn. But I’ve been playing Bozal so long, I had to climb into this getup to pull off Benny O. I figured you earned a second feature, that’s why I offered you the film; getting Greed on a quid pro quo was just an excuse. ’Course I knew you’d dope out the rest. That’s your M.O.”
“But it’s not why you agreed to see me today.”
“No. If it wasn’t for this phony town, I’d of wound up on a slab back East or making gravel in Sing Sing. I only done two things right in my life. You got to see what come of ’em both.” He made his crooked grin. “How about them kids? They’re smart where it’s okay to be dumb and dumb where it counts to be smart. When I ran the picture for her, Esperanza spotted me in the first scene. She’ll be a great TV reporter, or whatever it is she’s training for. She’s got the eye.
“Everything else she found on the Internet, all that bushwah about a great Hollywood mystery. When I let go of Bleak Street, she thought I was going screwy, setting myself up for some kind of rap, maybe even a pair of cement overshoes. She’s sharp—sharper than Emiliano, for sure—but she let her heart get in the way of her head, protecting me from mugs that were taking a dirt nap before she was born.”
His tone dripped with derision, but there was a glint of pride in his eyes. With her brother as an accomplice, she’d nearly brought off a con job that Van Oliver and his old associates could have imagined only in their dreams.
Emiliano called out from the front seat. “The hat and coat were my idea, Grandpapa.” His tone was indignant.
“Shut up and drive.”
“What about the rest of your family?” Valentino asked. “Do they know?”
Bozal shook his head. “They’re bound to, after I’m gone and the biographers nose around long enough to pick up the scent. It won’t matter then. I worked a hell of a lot longer getting Bozal right than that character I played in the movie, and anytime you watch an actor put everything into a part and tell him what a good actor he is, it means he screwed up. I’d rather not get bad reviews from my own flesh and blood.
“’Course,” he said, “I won’t hold you to anything. A deal’s a deal, and you held up your end. You got clear title to Bleak Street and everything caught up in it.”
The archivist made a decision.
“I’ve got a born-again classic, and an enduring Hollywood mystery to promote it. At this point, a solution would only gum up the works, like if they raised the Titanic or identified Jack the Ripper. It could squelch any interest in the film before it sees the light of day.”
“You sure? Connie Turkus was camera-shy. If you showed Fitzhugh his picture, you must of got it from his nephew. He won’t be too happy to see that can of worms spill out.”
“Let me worry about Mark David Turkus, sir. It took me three times as long as it should have, but in the end I’m usually smart where it counts.”
Ignacio Bozal—the name Valentino would always associate with him first and foremost—reached over and took his knee in a grip that would crack iron. “My whole film library goes to UCLA two minutes after I croak. There’s some stuff there I bet even you never heard of.”
Valentino was moved. “Señor, when that day comes, I’ll make all the arrangements.”
Van Oliver put his hat back on, tugging the brim over his left eyebrow, and buttoned and belted his trench coat. His grin was sinister.
“You and what army?”