Night Film(52)

“Even if it was an accident,” said Nora, “for your first wife and your daughter to die by accident—that’s not a good track record in terms of karma. But what really stood out was what her friend said.”

“That she was melancholy.”

She nodded. “Genevra might have committed suicide. If Ashley did, too, what does that say about Cordova?”

“He’s toxic. On the other hand, for a mother to commit suicide, orphaning her infant child, goes against the primal impulses of motherhood.”

“It was from being around him.” Nora leaned forward, staring dubiously down at the stacks of papers. “I read your other notes, but you didn’t get too far in terms of anyone talking about him.”

“Thanks for the memo.”

“What about Matilde? Ever hear anything about it?”

“Cordova’s supposed final film?” I was surprised she knew the title. Only diehard Cordovites knew about Matilde.

She nodded.

“Apart from a few unsubstantiated rumors that the script was a thousand pages and had driven him mad, no,” I said.

She nibbled her thumbnail, sighing. “We need a new direction.”

“I did have something promising. But I haven’t been able to crack it.”

“What?”

“The Blackboards. The invisible Cordovite network on the onion. A community for his hardcore fans.”

“What’s the onion?”

“The hidden Internet. You download a plug-in for Firefox to access it. I managed to get the URL from a professor friend, tried logging on. It kicks me out every time.” I carried my laptop over to the desk to show her, attempting to log on to the site, but again I was thrown back to the welcome to the blackboards page.

“Well, that’s your problem,” Nora said. “The user name you’re trying is Sire of Fogwatt. We should try something Cordova-related.”

Nora unplugged my wireless router in the corner, waited for five minutes, explaining that this would give me a new IP address, which wouldn’t be recognized and barred by the site. When she plugged it in again, she made it to THE CLIMB in page, where she typed in new registration details.

“For a user name, let’s try Gaetana Stevens 2991.”

Gaetana Stevens was the name of Ashley Cordova’s character in To Breathe with Kings (1996), Cordova’s last film, one of the black tapes.

I was amazed. Few people had actually seen it. I’d only managed to do so at Beckman’s, five years ago. He had one bootleg copy, which he’d refused to loan me because there was an impenetrable lock on the DVD prohibiting any type of copying or downloading—and Beckman suspected, probably rightly, that I’d never give it back.

To watch the film once was to be lost in so many graphic, edge-of-your-seat scenes that when it was over, I remembered feeling vaguely astounded that I’d returned to the real world. Something about the film’s darkness made me wonder if I would—as if in witnessing such things I was irrevocably breaking myself in (or just breaking myself), arriving at an understanding about humanity so dark, so deep down inside my own soul, I could never go back to the way I was before. This anxiety, of course, subsided as ordinary life took over. And even now that terrifying tale in my memory was little more than a collection of darkly lit, chilling images, punctuated by the presence of Ashley Cordova, whom I remembered as a beautiful, gray-eyed child who wore her hair in a red-ribboned ponytail.

She spends the film in silence, running in and out of drawing rooms, hiding under stairs and in maids’ closets, peering through keyholes and wrought-iron gates, blasting her bicycle fast across the lawn, leaving lurid slash marks on the grass.

The film’s plot was straightforward—as most of Cordova’s plots were, employing the general storyline of the odyssey or hunt. It was adapted from an obscure Dutch novel, Ademen Met Koningen, by August Hauer. The wealthy, corrupt Stevens family—a gorgeous clan of dissipated Caligulas living in an unnamed European country—is calculatingly butchered, one by one, confounding police. Though the inspector assigned to the case eventually arrests a tramp who did landscaping work for the family, the movie’s final hairpin twist reveals the killer is actually the family’s youngest child, the mute, watchful eight-year-old Gaetana—played, of course, by Ashley. By the time the inspector pieces this grisly truth together, it’s too late. The little girl has vanished. The last scene shows her strolling along the side of the road, where she’s picked up by a traveling family in a station wagon. In true Cordova style, it’s left ambiguous if this family is destined to meet the same horrific fate as her own, or if she simply made herself an orphan so she could be raised by a happier family.

“How did you manage to see To Breathe with Kings?” I asked Nora.

She’d finished registering on the Blackboards, pressed I’m ready, and we were waiting to see if the page would successfully load.

“Moe Gulazar,” she said.

“Who’s Moe Gulazar?”

“My best friend.” She blew a strand of hair off her face. “He was an old horse trainer who lived down the hall. He loved everything about Cordova. Had black-market connections, too, so one day he traded all his horse trophies for a box of the black tapes. He held secret midnight screenings in the Activity Room all the time.” She looked at me. “Moe was a triple threat.”