IN HIS OFFICE, Valentino cleared a stack of old press kits, newspaper cuttings, and lobby cards from his desk and returned to a project he’d been pursuing on and off for months: trying to guess what went into a gap in the last reel of M, Fritz Lang’s sound masterpiece; the long-missing U.S. release dubbed into English, using the standard subtitled version in an all-in-one DVD player and monitor to guide him. The first had come his way from an impound lot in Düsseldorf, where a Swiss-born cinema buff had been appointed to catalogue personal effects seized from a recently convicted Nazi war criminal.
His intercom buzzed while he was comparing Peter Lorre’s impassioned plea for mercy with the original. (Disappointingly, the anonymous actor who’d provided the child-killer’s voice had made no attempt to imitate Lorre’s sinister inflections.) Although the ancient print had been transferred to safety stock, he switched off the Movieola to prevent the bulb from overheating and causing it damage, then answered the call.
“Cheese-it,” was Ruth’s only remark.
By which means he wasn’t surprised to find a uniformed officer standing outside his door. The visitor shoved a fat insulated mailer as big as a king-size pillow into his arms and stuck out a clipboard.
“You have to sign for it. Sergeant Clifford said to come back for you with the siren if you don’t return it by six o’clock.”
Someone had scribbled B.O. on the big envelope with a thick black felt-tip. The archivist, who was still stuck in Germany between the wars, took a moment to realize the initials stood for Benny Obrilenski and not body odor; although the bundle was aromatic enough. It smelled like old newspapers left to gather years of mildew in some outbuilding. He balanced it under one arm and signed the receipt with the ballpoint the officer had handed him. “Why the rush? No one’s looked at it in sixty-three years.”
“Buddy, you’re the one that woke up the bureaucracy.” The officer sneezed violently and blew his nose in a handkerchief. Valentino noticed then a smear of dust on his blue trousers, and felt a twinge of sympathy. This was the luckless grunt who’d been tagged to rummage through the heaps in some sub-sub-basement in search of this one item. He wondered what mistake the officer had made to draw such duty.
After he closed the door, Valentino rewound the German film, put it and the commercial DVD away in separate containers, and made room on the desk. The mailer was new, fastened by only a brass clasp; file material so old would be too dilapidated for safe travel without a sturdy container, and of course while it was being packed up, Clifford would make at least a perfunctory search of the contents before letting them out of her sight. She’d have made time for that, despite her workload.
The envelope was stout enough to stand upright on the floor beside his chair. He reached inside with both hands and hauled a thick sheaf up onto the desk. As it thumped down, dust billowed out in all directions. Bits of brittle rubber bands clung to the cardboard folders. Still, the files held their shape after all those years in snug confinement.
The task ahead wasn’t unfamiliar. Since the dawn of Hollywood, ream upon ream of paper had accompanied each studio project: shooting scripts, inter-office memos, production notes, etc. Pawing through repositories in both hemispheres, he’d ingested enough dust, mold spores, and wood-fiber to shock a physician specializing in black lung disease. He knew enough to crack his door for ventilation, hydrate himself from time to time using the water cooler in Reception, and apply gallons of lotion to his hands to keep them from drying and cracking.
He read dozens of police reports and witness statements typewritten on yellow sheets, none of which added anything significant to his knowledge of the Van Oliver disappearance; the miasma of exasperation shared by the detectives who’d assembled them was nearly tangible. He found two photographs sandwiched between pages: a publicity shot of Oliver, smiling cautiously in a beautifully tailored suit with wide lapels, and a front-and-profile mug of Benjamin Obrilenski, not smiling, taken at the time of his arrest in Brooklyn, New York, for questioning in an election-year sweep of known or suspected offenders. On the evidence in the packet, it was the only arrest on his record, and he’d been released for lack of evidence. His physical description, printed beneath the mug, revealed he was shorter than he appeared on-screen, a mere five-foot six.
Bleak Street’s director, a studio hack named Melvin Fletcher, told police he’d last seen the missing man “tying one on” at the wrap party Fletcher threw at his house on Sunset Boulevard after the end of principal photography, but didn’t see him leave, and never saw him again. The officers spent considerably more time interviewing Madeleine Nash, Oliver’s co-star, but she, too, claimed to have lost him in the crush at the party. She dismissed rumors of an off-screen romantic involvement with Oliver as “PR hooey.” Valentino was inclined to accept this, as Bozal had told him she’d married not long after and gone to live abroad.
Roy Fitzhugh told detectives he’d accompanied Oliver out to the curb and put him in a cab that was waiting there. He’d assumed the star had called for it, as he was too drunk to drive and had declined Fitzhugh’s invitation to take him home. When Oliver failed to report to RKO the next day to discuss publicity, a flunky was sent to his apartment, where he found the door unlocked and his bed made. There was no sign of disturbance, but also none to indicate he’d gone home after leaving the party.
That made Fitzhugh the last person known to have seen Van Oliver/Benny Obrilenski alive. Everyone, the host included, denied ordering the cab, and none of the local taxi companies or gypsies had any record of the fare. Consequently, Fitzhugh had been interviewed twice more, the second time at police headquarters after it was discovered he’d been detained in Mexico in 1936 on suspicion of smuggling firearms across the border from the U.S. He told detectives he’d been with his late father, a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and that the guns were intended for Republican rebels fighting in Spain. No firearms were found in their possession, and they were escorted out of the country. Roy had been only eight years old, but he could never return to Mexico.
He stuck to his story, however, and since in those turbulent days there was no shortage of Americans eager to defeat Fascism, he got the benefit of the doubt.
Clipped to this report was an eight-by-ten photo, probably from Fitzhugh’s résumé, of the actor in his prime. He looked more respectable than most of his movie roles, with no cigarette-burns on his lapels or soup stains on his tie. His heavy jaw and chronic five-o’clock shadow had typecast him as mugs, lugs, and pugs in dozens of programmers; he’d shuttled from soundstage to soundstage, often without changing clothes.
Robbery was considered as a murder motive. Oliver had been paid $2,500 per week for twelve weeks of shooting, and since he had no bank account under either of his names and no cash was ever found, it was possible he had the entire $30,000—a fabulous sum then—on his person when he left the party. But the prevailing opinion, stated in memos, was that the mob, or some old rival from New York, had abducted him in a phony cab and taken him for the well-known ride. Bodies disposed of under such circumstances rarely surfaced.
Even the most high-profile criminal investigations lost steam for lack of a lead. In time the Van Oliver case slipped off the inside pages and into oblivion. For a while it would return, zombie-fashion, when feature editors ran out of material for the Sunday supplements, but eventually it was forgotten. The current generation had no patience for backstage documentaries and paperback accounts of unsolved Hollywood mysteries, leaving such fare to buffs like Valentino.
The fates of the others involved, he remembered, were varied. Madeleine Nash, née Magdalena Novello, quit show business, presumably for wedded bliss; Fitzhugh went on to play a one-man repertoire company of second-tier hoods, weary desk sergeants, and truck drivers until his retirement; other cast members appeared in various features, some successful, some not; director Fletcher was yanked early from his next assignment over “artistic differences” and replaced, to take his own life sometime in the early sixties when the only work he could get was directing second-unit crews for TV westerns. Valentino could only speculate what might have happened to all of them had Bleak Street ever seen the light of day.
He finished his coffee and called Kym Trujillo’s extension. Roy Fitzhugh, she reported, was in fine fettle, having awakened fresh from his nap. He was looking forward to Valentino’s visit.