Night Film(13)

“So?”

“So go down there. Talk to her. She might know something about the family. She was a junkie for fifteen years, so she might not be as steadfast as the others about remaining silent.” He frowned. “I’d also go through that 1977 Rolling Stone article. Cordova’s last interview before he plunged underground. I’ve heard there’s something crucial in there. I’ve looked through it, couldn’t find a thing. Maybe you can.”

“And Cordova? Where is he?”

Beckman drained his glass. “Hiding, probably. I imagine he’s brokenhearted. It’s funny to consider, given the horrors of his work. But I’ve always suspected the dark was there to reveal the light. He saw the mental suffering of people and hoped his films might be a refuge. His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerge charred doves. The fact that people don’t learn these days, that they’re weak, petty, so apathetic about this gift of life as if it were all a mere Pepsi commercial—I don’t blame him for going underground. Have you seen the world lately, McGrath? The cruelty, the lack of connection? If you’re an artist, I’m sure you can’t help but wonder what it’s all for. We’re living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower. Soon it’ll be nothing but a tide pool, then a thimble of water, then a micro drop. They say in the next twenty years we’re going to merge with computer chips to cure aging and become immortal. Who wants an eternity of being a machine? No wonder Cordova hides.” Abruptly he fell silent, looking rather deflated in his chair.

The computer had at last gone dark. I checked my watch. It was after six. I had to get going.

“Thanks for the vodka,” I said. “I also want to formally apologize.”

Beckman said nothing, distracted by some gloomy thought, though after a moment his bright eyes again fell on the black Chinese box on the table. He reached forward, testing the lid with an index finger—but of course it would not open.

“Surprised you didn’t try to crack it open while I was out,” he muttered.

“I do have some scruples.”

He raised a quizzical eyebrow.

Humoring him, I reached over and picked up the box—it was in the shape of a hexagon, quite heavy. I shook it, immediately recognizing the infamous dry thuds clunking inside. I didn’t know what they were—no one did, except the unidentified person who’d locked them in there.

Beckman had purchased the locked box from a black-market memorabilia dealer. It was allegedly a prop stolen from Cordova’s film set Wait for Me Here. In the film, it’s a personal possession of the serial killer, Boyd Reinhart. Though the audience never learns what’s locked inside, it’s supposed to hold the object that caused him to kill, something that had mentally broken him as a boy. Yet, according to the collectibles dealer, due to a problem with the provenance documentation, there was a possibility that the box hadn’t come from the film set at all, but had been stolen from the FBI evidence files for Hugh Thistleton, the copycat killer who’d mimicked Boyd Reinhart from his way of murdering down to his flamboyant clothing.

Beckman loved showing the box to people, letting them pass it around. “There it is,” he’d say reverentially. “The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe. Is it Reinhart’s? Is it Thistleton’s? Or is it yours? Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.”

The last time I was here, when Beckman disappeared into the kitchen for another bottle of vodka, I—quite bombed and egged on by one of his attractive female students—had the brilliant idea of jimmying the lock with a penknife to find out what was inside, once and for all.

The tarnished brass lock didn’t budge.

Beckman had caught me in the act. He’d thrown me out, shouting, “Traitor!” and “Philistine!” His final words to me before slamming the door in my face were: “You couldn’t even see where it opened.”

Olga was carrying in two platters piled with sardines—enough food for the entire otter exhibit at SeaWorld. She set them down on the faded carpet, the cats sniffing them.

“The problem with you, McGrath,” said Beckman, draining the bottle into our glasses, “is that you’ve no respect for murk. For the blackly unexplained. The un-nail-downable. You journalists bulldoze life’s mysteries, ignorant of what you’re so ruthlessly turning up, that you’re mining for something quite powerful that”—he sat back in his chair, his dark eyes meeting mine—“does not want to be found. And it will not.”

He was talking about Cordova.

“Anyway,” he added softly, “a man’s ghoulish shadow is not the man.”

I nodded and held up my glass. “To the murk.”

We clinked and drank. I stood up, bowed deeply at Beckman—he had a soft spot for royal treatment—and stepped past him. He said nothing, slumped helplessly in his chair, trapped in the avalanche of his thoughts.

As I rode down to the lobby, I found myself not only guilty over what I’d done, browsing so brazenly on his computer, but also regretting the direction of the conversation. Thanks to that vodka, I’d been a little too candid. Beckman would have no doubt now that I was back on the trail, after Cordova once again, and I had no idea what he’d do with that information.