Coldheart Canyon (2 page)

Whatever the truth of the matter, this much is certain: the Santa Anas are always baking hot, and often so heavily laden with perfume that it’s as though they’ve picked up the scent of every blossom they’ve shaken on their way here. Every wild lilac and wild rose, every white sage and rank jimson-weed, every heliotrope and creosote bush: gathered them all up in their hot embrace and borne them into the hidden channel of Coldheart Canyon.

There’s no lack of blossoms here, of course. Indeed, the Canyon is almost uncannily verdant. Some of the plants here were brought in from the world outside by these same burning winds, these Santa Anas; others were dropped in the feces of the wild animals who wander through—the deer and coyote and raccoon; some spread from the gardens of the great dream palace that lays solitary claim to this corner of Hollywood. Alien blooms, this last kind—orchids and lotus flowers—nurtured by gardeners who have long since left off their pruning and their watering, and departed, allowing the bowers which they once treasured to run riot.

But for some reason there is always a certain bitterness in the blooms here. Even the hungry deer, driven from their traditional trails these days by the presence of sightseers who have come to see Tinseltown, do not CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 4

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linger in the Canyon for very long. Though the deer venture along the ridge and down the steep slopes of the Canyon, and curiosity, especially among the younger animals, often leads them over the rotted fences and toppled walls into the secret enclaves of the gardens, they seldom choose to stay there for very long.

Perhaps it isn’t just that the leaves and petals are bitter. Perhaps there are too many whisperings in the air around the ruined gazebos, and the animals are unnerved by what they hear. Perhaps there are too many presences brushing against their trembling flanks as they explore the clotted pathways. Perhaps, as they graze the overgrown lawns, they look up and mistake a statue for a pale fragment of life, and are startled by their error, and take flight.

Perhaps, sometimes, they are not mistaken.

Perhaps
.

The Canyon is familiar with
perhaps;
with what may or may not be.

And never more so than on such a night as this, when the winds come sighing off the desert, heavy with their perfume, and such souls as the Canyon hosts express their longing for something they dreamed they had, or dreamed that they dreamed, their voices so tenuous tonight that they’re inaudible to the human ear, even if there were someone to hear them, which there never is.

That’s not entirely true. On occasion somebody will be tenacious enough to find his way into this vale of luxury and tears; a tourist, perhaps even a family of tourists, foolishly determined to discover what lies off the prescribed route; looking for some famous heart-throb’s love-nest, or a glimpse of the idol himself, caught unawares as he walks with his dog.

There are even a few trespassers over the years who have found their way here intentionally, guided to this place by hints dropped in obscure accounts of Old Hollywood. They venture cautiously, these few. Indeed there is often something close to reverence in the way they enter Coldheart Canyon. But however these visitors arrive, they always leave the same way:
hurriedly
, with many a nervous backward glance. Even the CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 5

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crassest of them—even the ones who’d claim they don’t have a psychic bone in their bodies—are discomfited by something they sniff here. Their sixth sense, they have discovered, is far more acute than they had thought.

Only when they have outrun the all-too-eager shadows of the Canyon and they are back in the glare of the billboards on Sunset Boulevard, do they wipe their clammy palms, and wonder to themselves how it was that in such a harmless spot they could have been so very afraid.

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of the Hunt

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O N E

“Your wife did not want to look around the Fortress any further, Mister Zeffer?” Father Sandru said, seeing that on the second day the middle-aged man with the handsome, sad face had come alone.

“The lady is not my wife,” Zeffer explained.

“Ah . . .” the monk replied, the tone of commiseration in his voice indicating that he was far from indifferent to Katya’s charms. “A pity for you, yes?”

“Yes,” Zeffer admitted, with some discomfort.

“She’s a very beautiful woman.”

The monk studied Zeffer’s face as he spoke, but having said what he’d said, Zeffer was unwilling to play the confessee any further.

“I’m her manager,” he explained. “That’s all there is between us.”

Father Sandru, however, was not willing to let the issue go just yet.

“After the two of you departed yesterday,” he said, his English colored by his native Romanian, “one of the brothers remarked that she was the most lovely woman he had ever seen . . .” he hesitated before committing to the rest of the sentence “. . . in the flesh.”

“Her name’s Katya, by the way,” Zeffer said.

“Yes, yes, I know,” said the Father, his fingers combing the knotted gray-white of his beard as he stood assessing Zeffer.

The two men were a study in contrasts. Sandru ruddy-faced and rotund in his dusty brown habit, Zeffer slimly elegant in his pale linen suit.

“She is a movie star, yes?”

“You saw one of her films?”

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Sandru grimaced, displaying a poorly-kept array of teeth. “No, no,” he said. “I do not see these things. At least not often. But there is a little cinema in Ravbac, and some of the younger brothers go down there quite regularly. They are great fans of Chaplin, of course. And there’s a . . .

vamp
. . . is that the word?”

“Yes,” Zeffer replied, somewhat amused by this conversation. “Vamp’s the word.”

“Called Theda Bara.”

“Oh, yes. We know Theda.”

In that year—which was 1920—everybody knew Theda Bara. She had one of the most famous faces in the world. As, of course, did Katya. Both were famous; their fame tinged with a delicious hint of decadence.

“I must go with one of the brothers when they next go to see her,”

Father Sandru said.

“I wonder if you entirely understand what kind of woman Theda Bara portrays?” Zeffer replied.

Sandru raised a thicketed eyebrow. “I am not born yesterday, Mister Zeffer. The Bible has its share of these women, these
vamps
. They’re whores, yes; women of Babylon? Men are drawn to them only to be destroyed by them?”

Zeffer laughed at the directness of Sandru’s description. “I suppose that’s about right,” he said.

“And in real life?” Sandru said.

“In real life Theda Bara’s name is Theodesia Goodman. She was born in Ohio.”

“But is she a destroyer of men?”

“In real life? No, I doubt it. I’m sure she harms a few egos now and again, but that’s about the worst of it.”

Father Sandru looked mildly disappointed. “I shall tell the brothers what you told me,” he said. “They’ll be very interested. Well then . . . shall I take you inside?”

•

•

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Willem Matthias Zeffer was a cultured man. He had lived in Paris, Rome, London and briefly in Cairo in his forty-three years; and had promised himself that he would leave Los Angeles—where there was neither art nor the ambition to make art—as soon as the public tired of lionizing Katya, and she tired of rejecting his offer of marriage. They would wed, and come back to Europe; find a house with some real history on its bones, instead of the fake Spanish mansion her fortune had allowed her to have built in one of the Hollywood canyons.

Until then, he would have to find aesthetic comfort in the
objets d’art
he purchased on their trips abroad: the furniture, the tapestries, the statuary.

They would suffice, until they could find a château in the Loire, or perhaps a Georgian house in London; somewhere the cheap theatrics of Hollywood wouldn’t curdle his blood.

“You like Romania?” the Father asked as he unlocked the great oak door that lay at the bottom of the stairs.

“Yes, of course,” Zeffer replied.

“Please do not feel you have to sin on my account,” Sandru said, with a sideways glance.

“Sin?”

“Lying is a sin, Mister Zeffer. Perhaps it’s just a little one, but it’s a sin nevertheless.”

Oh Lord, Zeffer thought; how far I’ve slipped from the simple proprieties! Back in Los Angeles he sinned as a matter of course; every day, every hour. The life he and Katya lived was built on a thousand stupid little lies.

But he wasn’t in Hollywood now. So why lie? “You’re right. I don’t like this country very much at all. I’m here because Katya wanted to come.

Her mother and father—I’m sorry, her stepfather—live in the village.”

“Yes. This I know. The mother is
not
a good woman.”

“You’re her priest?”

“No. We brothers do not minister to the people. The Order of Saint Teodor exists only to keep its eyes on the Fortress.” He pushed the door open. A dank smell exuded from the darkness ahead of them.

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“Excuse me for asking,” Zeffer said. “But it was my understanding from yesterday that apart from you and your brothers, there’s nobody here.”

“Yes, this is true. Nobody here, except the brothers.”

“So what are you keeping your eyes on?”

Sandru smiled thinly. “I will show you,” he said. “As much as you wish to see.”

He switched on a light, which illuminated ten yards of corridor. A large tapestry hung along the wall, the image upon it so gray with age and dust as to be virtually beyond interpretation.

The Father proceeded down the corridor, turning on another light as he did so. “I was hoping I might be able to persuade you to make a purchase,” he said.

“Of what?” Zeffer said.

Zeffer wasn’t encouraged by what he’d seen so far. A few of the pieces of furniture he’d spotted yesterday had a measure of rustic charm, but nothing he could imagine buying.

“I didn’t realize you were selling the contents of the Fortress.”

Sandru made a little groan. “Ah . . . I’m afraid to say we must sell in order to eat. And that being the case, I would prefer that the finer things went to someone who will take care of them, such as yourself.”

Sandru walked on ahead a little way, turning on a third light and then a fourth. This level of the Fortress, Zeffer was beginning to think, was bigger than the floor above. Corridors ran off in all directions.

“But before I begin to show you,” Sandru said, “you must tell me—are you in a buying mood?”

Zeffer smiled. “Father, I’m an American. I’m
always
in a buying mood.”

Sandru had given Katya and Zeffer a history of the Fortress the previous day; though as Zeffer remembered it there was much in the account that had sounded bogus. The Order of Saint Teodor, Zeffer had decided, had something to hide. Sandru had talked about the Fortress as a place steeped CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 13

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in secrets; but nothing particularly bloody. There had been no battles fought there, he claimed, nor had its keep ever held prisoners, nor its courtyard witnessed atrocity or execution. Katya, in her usual forthright manner, had said that she didn’t believe this to be true.

“When I was a little girl there were all kinds of stories about this place,” she said. “I heard horrible things were done here. That it was human blood in the mortar between the stones. The blood of children.”

“I’m sure you must have been mistaken,” the Father had said.

“Absolutely not. The Devil’s wife lived in this fortress. Lilith, they called her. And she sent the Duke away on a hunt. And he never came back.”

Sandru laughed; and if it was a performance, then it was an exceptionally good one. “Who told you these tales?” he said.

“My mother.”

“Ah.” Sandru had shaken his head. “And I’m sure she wanted you in bed, hushed and asleep, before the Devil came to cut off your head.”

Katya had made no reply to this. “There are still such stories, told to children. Of course. Always stories. People invent tales. But believe me, this is not an unholy place. The brothers would not be here if it was.”

Despite Sandru’s plausibility, there’d still been something about all of this that had made Zeffer suspicious; and a little curious. Hence his return visit. If what the Father was saying was a lie (a sin, by his own definition), then what purpose was it serving? What was the man protecting?

Certainly not a few rooms filled with filthy tapestries, or some crudely carved furniture. Was there something here in the Fortress that deserved a closer look? And if so, how did he get the Father to admit to it?

The best route, he’d already decided, was fiscal. If Sandru was to be persuaded to reveal his true treasures, it would be through the scent of hard cash in his nostrils. The fact that Sandru had raised the subject of buying and selling made the matter easier to broach.

“I do know Katya would love to have something from her homeland to take back to Hollywood,” he said. “She’s built a huge house, so we have plenty of room.”

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“Oh, yes?”

“And of course, she has the money.”

This was naked, he knew, but in his experience of such things subtlety seldom played well. Which point was instantly proved.

“How much are we talking about?” the Father asked mildly.

“Katya Lupi is one of the best-paid actresses in Hollywood. And I am authorized to buy whatever I think might please her.”

“Then let me ask you:
what pleases her
?”