Night Film(121)

She grinned impishly, her eyes bright.

“You get the idea. And you can imagine what Stanny’s dear wife, Genevra, from a swank Milanese family, thought about such backwoods heathens. She pleaded with him to erect a fence around the property for protection, to keep them out. So he did. He put up a twenty-foot electric fence, spent a fortune on it. The problem was, what he’d actually done was, rather than keeping them out, he’d barricaded himself and his family in.”

She fell silent for a moment.

“I don’t know how he fell into experimenting with it,” she went on. “He never told me. Stanny wasn’t afraid of the unknown. Within the universe. Within ourselves. It was the subject he plumbed endlessly. He took submarines down there. He went down, down into the dark crags and muck of human desire and longing into the ugly unconscious. No one knew when he’d come back, if he ever would. When he was working on a project he disappeared. He breathed it. He’d write all night for days and days until he was so tired he slept for two weeks like a hibernating monster. He could be agony to live with. I, of course, experienced it firsthand, up close and personal.”

Visibly proud of this pronouncement, she gulped down the Heaven Hill, a drop sliding off her chin.

“The problem with Stanny,” she went on, wiping her mouth, “as with so many geniuses, was his insatiable needs. For life. For learning. For devouring. For f*cking. For understanding why people did the things they did. He never judged, you see. Nothing was categorically wrong. It was all human in his eyes and thus worthy of inquiry, of examining from all sides.”

She squinted at us.

“You’re his fans, are you not?”

I couldn’t immediately answer. I was too stunned, not just by what she was saying but by her sudden energy and sanity, both of which seemed to increase in direct ratio to the amount of Heaven Hill she guzzled—now almost half the bottle.

“What do you know about his early life?” she demanded.

“He was the only child of a single mother,” I said. “Grew up in the Bronx.”

“And he was amazing at chess,” Nora added. “He used to play for money at the tables in Washington Square Park.”

“That was Kubrick. Not Cordova. Get your geniuses straight, for f*ck’s sake.” Marlowe surveyed us. “That’s it?”

When we said nothing, she scoffed.

“That’s what I’ve always found so pathetic about fans. They weep when they have a live glimpse of you, frame the fork you touched. Yet they’re impervious to doing anything with that inspiration, like enriching their own lives. It drove Stanny-boy crazy. He used to say to me, ‘Huey’—it was his nickname for me—‘Huey, they see the films five times, write me fan letters, but the underlying meaning is lost on them. They take nothing away. Not heroism. Not courage. It’s all just entertainment.’ ”

Huey sighed, taking another swig.

“Stanny was raised to be a good Catholic. His mother, Lola, worked two jobs as a maid in one of the big New York hotels. She was from a small village outside of Naples. Yet she knew a great deal about stregheria. You’ve heard of it, I suppose?”

“No,” Nora said, shaking her head.

“It’s an ancient Italian word for witchcraft. A seven-hundred-year-old tradition, passed along mostly in wives’ tales, yarns to scare children, make them eat their vegetables and go to bed early. Cordova’s father was from the Catalan region of Spain, a blacksmith. The family lived together in a small town outside Barcelona before they were due to immigrate to the States when Stanny was three years old. The day they were meant to leave, the father decided he couldn’t go. He didn’t want to leave his homeland. So, Lola took her son and set out for America. Within a year the father had a new family. Stanny never spoke to his father again. But he remembered his Spanish grandmother telling him about bruixeria, the Catalan tradition of witchcraft. He said she told him on New Year’s Eve witches have the utmost power, and that’s when they kidnap children. She told him to put the fire tongs in the form of a cross over the embers in the fireplace, sprinkle them with salt, and the boy would prevent a witch’s entry via the chimney. So, you see, my dears, Stanny grew up with superstition. Certainly not taken seriously, yet it was nevertheless present on both his mother’s and his father’s side of the family. And Stanny’s imagination on the worst of days is stronger than our realities. I think with a background like that, he was sadly predisposed to it … susceptible, you might say.”

She gazed at us, her fingers fiddling with the pearl ring, twisting it around and around her finger.

“He never told me how it happened. But shortly after building the fence around the property, he realized the townspeople were still trespassing.”

“How?” I asked.

“They came by boat. The estate is north of Lows Lake. If you leave from the public shore and make your way to the northern side and along a narrow river, eventually it will feed into a lake on The Peak property. When Stanislas found this breach, he had his men build a chain-link patch straight down to the bottom of the riverbed so only a thimble could get past. A week later he and his wife woke up to the sound of drumming. Voices. Screams. The next morning he went back to the fence and saw that the spot barring the way by the river had been sawed straight through. And he could see from the way the wires were cut it’d been done by somebody on the inside of the property, not the out.”