Night Film(126)

She fell silent. In a mechanical reflex she fastidiously unscrewed the bottle, put it to her lips, but at last noticed, stunned, that there was nothing left in there, not a drop.

“How do you know so much about all of it?” asked Nora quietly.

Marlowe turned, seemingly about to berate her, but then lost steam, only gazed down at her hands, crumpled on her knees. She considered them as if they weren’t part of her, but strange insects that’d crawled up her legs and she was too weary to brush them away.

“Stanny trusted me. He told me everything. He knew I’d understand the pain. Once I experienced such loss, it gutted me. It left me just my skin. When you love like that and lose, you never recover. Stanny knew I’d know how it felt. I’d spent time with Ashley. I certainly didn’t believe any of it when he first told me. But then I took her with me on vacation when she was about eight. We were sitting on the beach near C?té Plongée in Antibes and I’d catch her staring at me. It was as if she saw my past and my future—even my soul where it was headed when I died, writhing forever in limbo. It was as if she saw it all and she pitied me.”

This gutting loss had to be a reference to Marlowe’s dashing fiancé, Knightly, dumping her for her sister, Olivia.

“This priest,” I said, after a moment. “Do you remember his name?”

“People just called him Priest, sort of playfully sarcastic. I remember him during the shooting of Lovechild. He liked to spend his day fishing. I’d spot him from a distance standing on the shore by the lake all in black, like an accidental inkblot seeping into the bright landscape of sky and blue lakes and trees. I wouldn’t know what he was doing until I was near him and noticed his long fishing rod and tackle box, that he was standing there so immobile, patiently waiting for a fish. He looked like he had the self-control to wait forever. Genevra gave him the nickname Ragno. The spider.”

“What?” I asked.

“S—spider.” She slurred the word. “How he moved. So silent.”

“Was his real name Hugo Villarde?”

“I … I don’t really know.”

Marlowe was slipping away again, growing feeble, hunched back in the chair so no light hit her and she was little more than a ghostly white face floating in the dark. When she’d started talking, I’d had little confidence that what she told us would be sentient, much less the honest truth. Yet again and again she’d surprised me, disclosing details that corroborated everything I’d uncovered.

And now: this revelation about the Spider.

“Did you ever meet Cordova’s assistant, Inez Gallo?” I asked.

Marlowe shuddered with distaste. “Coyote? But of course. Wherever Cordova went, his little Coyote followed. She loved him, of course. Did his every bidding, every menial chore, no matter how cruel. All she asked of him in return was to breathe his air. It was Stanny who came up with the title To Breathe with Kings, after her, Coyote’s, sheer pathetic-ness. I think she actually wished he’d eat her alive, so at last she’d be the closest to him of everyone, living out the rest of her days huddled in the darkest corners of his belly.”

“Where is he now?” Nora asked after a moment. “Cordova, I mean.”

“The jackpot question. No one has ever answered it right.”

She mumbled this distractedly and didn’t speak again for such a long time, her chin lowered to her chest, that I wondered if she’d actually dozed off.

“I imagine he’s still there,” she croaked at last. “Or he’s sailed away on his pirate ship out into the sea, never to return. With Ashley dead, I imagine, whatever last bit of humanity he had, my Stanny, he’s let go of it. Let it fly. There’s nothing holding him back now. Not anymore.”

Marlowe made an odd choking noise and, bending over, began to cough, a violent hacking sound.

“My bed,” she whispered. “Take me to my bed. I’m so … so very tired.”

Nora glanced at me. It was my cue to assist Marlowe, though I hesitated. It was the fear of seeing her ravaged face close-up, the worry she was too fragile to touch. She’d retreated again, gone far away, folded up like an old deck chair, so weathered it seemed possible she’d come apart in raw splintered beams in my hands. Nora gently took the Heaven Hill bottle from her—Marlowe was reluctant to let it go, like a child unwilling to part with a doll—and then, bending over her, she gave her a hug.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” Nora whispered.

I stepped beside her, and as carefully as I could, gathered Marlowe into my arms. She clamped her elbows tightly around my neck as I carried her out and down the hall, her face hidden deep inside the hood. When I set her down in her bed, Nora and Hopper stepping in behind me, instantly she buried herself under the covers like a beetle hiding in the sand.

“Don’t leave me yet,” Marlowe whispered hoarsely from under the sheet. “You must read to me so I can sleep. Oh. Swallow. That was it.”

“Read to you?” asked Nora.

“I have a boy who comes. Every night at eight he comes and reads me asleep. There’s The Count. Read me just a little little …”

“What book?” whispered Nora.

“In the drawer. There, there. The Count of Cristo. He’s waiting.”

Glancing at me uncertainly, Nora reached for the handle of the bedside table. And I found myself hoping that Marlowe was telling the truth. She seemed to be referring to the drug dealer both Harold and Olivia had mentioned. It was a fantastic misreading of the world, that someone mistaken for a drug dealer was simply coming up here to read books aloud to an old woman, lightness mistaken for dark, heaven mistaken for hell.