Alone

~ * ~

Alone

[Valentino 02]

Loren D. Estleman

No copyright 
 2013 by MadMaxAU eBooks

**

There is only one Garbo.

—Greta Garbo

**

News item, December 11, 2005:

GARBO’S LETTERS MISSING

Stockholm, Sweden—Two letters and two postcards written by Swedish screen legend Greta Garbo appear to have been stolen from a public archive, officials said Friday.

The documents, written by Garbo to her close friend Vera Schmiterlow after the actress moved to Hollywood in the 1920s, were reported stolen from the military archives of Sweden last month after a researcher found they were missing, archivist Anders Degerstrom said.

Degerstrom said the documents had not been checked out since March 2004, according to archive records. The letters could have been stolen any time since then, he said.

This year’s 100th anniversary of Garbo’s birth was celebrated in Sweden with private screenings of her films and an exhibit at the Swedish National Portrait Gallery.

**

I

THAT TOUCH

OF SPINK

**

CHAPTER

1

WINGED PEGASUS GLIDED along the San Diego Freeway, soared down the ramp onto Sunset Boulevard, and swooped into West Hollywood, full of oats and hubris. There gridlock clipped its wings. It waited for the lights to change with a quizzical smirk and both eyebrows raised in a Victor Mature arch.

L.A. took little notice. A city accustomed to seeing Roman centurions in White Castle and RuPaul anywhere spared only the occasional curious glance for a flying horse in the bed of a rented trailer, even if it wore all the colors of the rainbow and BRUINS SUCK spray-painted on its plaster butt. Valentino got all the way to his last turn before someone seated on the passenger’s side of a wired-together El Camino got his attention with a two-fingered whistle.

“Hey, buddy! Fill ‘er up with regular!”

The man pulling the trailer smiled weakly, waved, and made the turn.

He pulled into the alley next to The Oracle Theater and braked behind a construction trailer piled high with demolition debris. Exhaling with relief, he switched off the ignition. He disliked attracting attention, and had chosen the one place in America to live where it was virtually impossible. The exchange at the intersection had nettled him.

He got out and hoisted himself up onto the wheel of the construction trailer to peer inside. It was filled mainly with sheets of dirty linoleum cratered with old cigarette burns and heaps of broken lath with bits of plaster the color of bad teeth clinging to the slats by strands of horsehair. This, too, was a relief; he lived in fear that without his supervision the workers would throw away something irreplaceable.

“What a hideous way to treat a noble creature that never existed. Where’d you find him, Fire Island?”

Valentino stepped down and turned to meet the owner of the voice. Kyle Broadhead stood outside the fire door propped open on the side of the theater, flanked by a pair of husky young men in UCLA sweatshirts: undergrads, beyond doubt, selected from the football team’s expendable third string. Between them the rumpled film studies professor looked like a garden gnome. He was stuffing his pipe from his old pouch and getting more tobacco on his sweater than into the bowl.

“Not Fire Island, but close.” Valentino followed his gaze to the multicolored sculpture hitched behind his car. “An Armenian rug dealer in the Valley stuck it in front of his shop to attract business. Some students from State have been decorating it once or twice a week for five years. It’ll take ten gallons of mineral spirits just to get down to the original workmanship.”

One of the burly UCLA boys snorted. “Everybody knows you can’t trust a statie with a box of Crayolas.”

“Spoken by the young man who when I asked him who directed
Stagecoach,
said Henry Ford.” Broadhead walked around to the back and scowled at the BRUINS SUCK. “I hope you didn’t drive past campus.”

“I made an end run around it,” Valentino said.

“What’s it made of?” the other student asked. “Coach’ll drop me if I pull a muscle.”

“He’ll drop you if you drop another pass,” said his teammate.

Valentino said, “It’s just hollow plaster. The rug dealer and I got it up there without help.”

Drawing on his pipe, the professor reached up to pat Pegasus on the rump. “Welcome home, Old Paint. Your brother missed you.”

Valentino untied the ropes that lashed the sculpture to the trailer and acted as guide as the students bent their shoulders to their task. They carried it down the ramp that came with the trailer and through the broad doorway into the building, Valentino saying, “Careful, careful,” biting his lip as the horse’s brittle ears passed a bare half inch under the top of the frame, and scurrying around ahead of them to kick hazardous pieces of rubble from their path, walking backward and gesturing gently with arms spread in front of him as if to calm down a beast of flesh and blood. Broadhead wandered in behind them, smoking.

After much grunting, mutual accusations of sloth on the part of labor, and two pinched fingers, the tie-dyed creature of mythology stood at last on a pedestal opposite its twin at the base of the grand staircase in the lobby. For the first time in more than a decade they bracketed the cracked marble steps and mouse-chewed carpet runner.

“There’s teamwork,” Broadhead said.

Valentino glared at him. “What’s that make you, the coach? I missed the part where you contributed.”

“I hired the muscle. A passing grade for twenty minutes’ work.”

The student with the pinched fingers took them out of his mouth. “The new one’s bigger.”

“It won’t be once all those coats of paint have been stripped away,” Valentino said. “They’re both the same age. They were cast by the same artist who sculpted the original out of limestone.”

“How do you figure it made it all the way down to the San Fernando Valley from here?” Broadhead asked. “Those wings don’t really work.”

“Vandals. Pranksters. People have been scavenging the place since it shut its doors. They got tired of it and sold it, or tossed it, and somehow it wound up in a junkshop in Burbank, waiting for someone to buy it and turn it into an advertising gimmick and post a picture of it on his Web site. That’s where I found it, on the Internet. Thank God for those kids with their buckets of paint. They protected it from the rain and smog.”

Broadhead blew smoke at the fallen-in ceiling. “Cost you a fortune to restore it.”

“Not as much as it would’ve to duplicate it from scratch. The artist is dead and the original went down with the
Andrea Doria.”

“What’s the point?” asked the young man who’d come through without injury. “It’s just something to walk past on your way to the show.”

Valentino smiled at him. “It
is
the show, or part of it. I can’t explain it to you if all you know about movies is DVDs and the multiplex. I’ll put you both down for free passes to the grand reopening, and then you can see for yourself.”

“They’ll be in AARP by then,” Broadhead said. “And you’ll be in a crappy nursing home, as penniless as the schnook who went broke on this dump the first time.”

“A man needs a hobby.”

“A hobby is something that has nothing to do with your work. You spend all week sniffing out and restoring old films and all weekend rebuilding a theater to show them in. That’s like an undertaker who stuffs turkeys on his day off.”

But the film archivist wasn’t listening. Standing there admiring the reunited sculptures—really magnificent beasts tossing back their heads, opening their wings, and lifting their front hooves free of the earth—he saw them unsullied and unchipped, all gleaming gold leaf and electric light shining from their eyes. Between them had passed Hollywood’s royalty: Swanson, Gable, Harlow, Chaplin, Bogie and Betty, James Dean, Brando, Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo; flashguns flaring like sheet lightning as they filed in for the premiere of yet another vision from the Dream Factory. Outside, limousines lined the street on both sides for blocks, and sabers of light swiveled and crossed, bleaching the bellies of clouds a hundred stories above the pavement.