Alone (17 page)

“Hour is right. The parking attendant here on campus still doesn’t recognize me.”

“These are entertainment people. Face time is face time. Are you interested? The honorarium is rather substantial for an amateur.”

“Substantial as in how many zeroes?”

Oldfield told him the amount. It wouldn’t begin to pay for improvements and delays inflicted by Dwight Spink, let alone the inspector’s bribe; but Valentino was in no position to decline remuneration of any kind. “Tell them I’m interested, if I can get in a plug for the department.”

“I was confident you would be, although I was a bit concerned you might have developed a phobia involving microphones.”

Valentino wasn’t surprised the story had spread throughout the campus. L.A. was a small town for all its sprawl, and the university was smaller still. The attorney spoke again before he could offer this piece of stale wisdom.

“I’ll apprise Henry Anklemire of this situation. I’m sure he’ll want to exploit it.”

“Tell him there’s no hurry.” He hadn’t considered the fact that any outside attention brought the eager little Information Services flack charging from cover. Although he had more patience with Anklemire than anyone else on staff—particularly Kyle Broadhead, who crossed against traffic whenever he saw him approaching—Valentino had never been able to spend even five minutes with him without feeling as if he’d gone ten rounds with a boxing kangaroo. On steroids.

There was little more work to be done that day, but he managed to stretch it into evening, when it was still too early to go back to the drab little room he’d booked at a residential hotel on Ventura. Harriet was working, and now that Broadhead had become determined to contribute to society, he was either away from his office immersed in mysterious research or not much company at all when he was available. Selfishly, Valentino missed the crusty but amiable dilettante devoted solely to the task of taking up tenured space until someone in Human Resources discovered how far he was past the age of mandatory retirement. The archivist found himself resenting Fanta for awakening his friend to his crepuscular potential.

He excavated that day’s
Variety
from the wreckage that littered his desk and opened it to a filler piece informing him that a female impersonator working a popular club on Sunset had jettisoned all his other celebrity impressions in order to center his act around Greta Garbo.
Garbo Speaks
had sped to the top of the bill, and jaded Angelinos were amused to observe long lines of sophisticates, punks, and androgynous patrons in evening gowns, picture hats, and blue-smudged chins strung around the block waiting to get in. A postage stamp-size publicity mug of the ersatz G.G. showed a flattish face and heavily mascaraed eyes set as wide as a Pekingese dog’s, more Susan Sarandon than Swedish Sphinx.

He flung aside the newspaper. Okay, so
Law
&
Order
wasn’t rock bottom; surely this was. But deep down he knew that while the sky was the limit, the earth was not, and that there were depths yet to be sounded, that only God’s poor clay could reach. Mae West, that anti-Garbo, would have loved it, even worked it into her Vegas act, in which she’d slunk, in her sixties, sequined from her celebrated bust to the platform soles that put the lie to her petite sixty inches of relentless pulchritude, on the arms of half a dozen Mr. Universe wannabes in loincloths and body oil.

“I want to be
let
alone,” Garbo had said offscreen; not, as her character in
Grand Hotel
had said, “I want to be alone.” The difference was tangible. She had been no hermit in her later days, but rather a low-profile jet-setter who’d divided her time between her luxury flat in Manhattan, her favorite Paris haunts, and her beloved Sweden, socializing with her small circle of loyal friends, shopping for unique objets d’art in high-end antiques stores and open-air flea markets, wrapped in capes and floppy hats that cast her famous features in shadow, and sitting on the floor in her living room with great sheets of butcher paper designing rugs for the use of her friends and herself. She had not been Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond, festering away in her musty mansion, planning a comeback that would never come and autographing ancient publicity photos for nonexistent fans; fabulous offers had streamed in incessantly throughout middle and old age, and she had ignored them. It had been the unexpected, guilty pleasure of handfuls of New Yorkers and tourists to have experienced headwaiters point her out on the street. A young man, finding himself in an elevator with the legend, had made so bold as to ask her the time of day. He’d dined out for years on her reply: “You look to me like a young man who could afford a watch. I suggest you buy one.”
Garbo actually spoke to me!

She had spent her declining years in comfort: Her early real-estate investments in Beverly Hills, when acres were available for pennies on the dollar, had put her in possession of most of Rodeo Drive, where she had been Gucci’s landlady. But all the money on earth could not separate her from her past. She had died just in time, on the edge of an era that would witness marauding paparazzi hounding Princess Di literally to her death, subject the royal to indignity beyond her grave with tattletale memoirs and profitable interviews granted by her trusted butler and even her own brother, who would charge tourists for admission to her final resting place. Legions of stalkers—would-be rapists and murderers—would make living hells of the lives of John Lennon, George Harrison, even actors in forgettable TV sitcoms. Their own popularity had made prisoners of Elvis, the troubled and haunted Michael Jackson, and Hollywood’s A-list, cooped up in their bulletproof palaces with security goons and savage dogs patrolling the walled perimeters with the insatiable media clawing at the gates, helicopters turning their private airspace into a scene from
Apocalypse Now.
Garbo had died in the fullness of her years and fame, and not a moment too soon.

Desperate for distraction, Valentino took a remote control from a drawer—shoving aside the brochure for Midnite Magic Theater Systems’ new spy toy, the latest assault on personal privacy—and switched on the thirteen-inch TV/VCR combo he now used almost exclusively to see what was on the air.

It was a mistake. He caught
Entertainment Tonight
in the middle of its opening fanfare, with its collage of overexposed faces, breathless hyperbole, and Not Ready for Family Hour subject matter, followed by Mary Hart’s red-carpet headline splash:

“ET
exposes the GARBO HOAX!” (Cue graphics.) “We bring you the exclusive details behind the STUNNING police announcement that the infamous GARBO LETTER is a FAKE!”

At last,
Valentino thought; but too late. Just late enough to inject insulin into a story that should never have been told to begin with.

**

CHAPTER

16

LOCKING UP, HE remembered the budget meeting he had to bug out on in order to link up with Spink. Ruth was shutting down her computer, preparatory to going home or fluttering up to her belfry or wherever she went when she wasn’t drawing her salary. “Ruth, when Professor Broadhead comes in tomorrow, please tell him I’d like to talk to him.”

“What’s wrong with right now? He’s in his office.”

He glanced at the old-fashioned electric clock high on the wall behind her desk, thinking his watch was wrong. “He never stays this late.”

“If you say so, but there’s a pretty good holographic image of him sitting at his desk.”

“Go away.”

Valentino knocked again. “Kyle, it’s Val.”

“Go away,
Val.”

“It’s important.”

“Do you smell gas or see smoke?”

“No.”

“Then it’s not important. Go away.”

He knocked a third time. “Open up, Kyle. I don’t have time to start a fire.”

Broadhead said something he must have picked up in prison in Yugoslavia. “Open it yourself. I misplaced the key ten years ago.”

He found his friend glaring at the monitor of his venerable Wang computer. The only light in the room came from the screen, illuminating his face in acid green with
Bride of Frankenstein
shadows in the hollows. His desk, normally as bare as an airport runway, was stacked with volumes bound in cloth and paper and fusty numbers of cinema journals stitched, stapled, and held together with brads. “Did you know Leonardo DaVinci conducted early experiments in photographic reproduction?”

“Was that before or after he covered up for Jesus?”

Broadhead popped his lips in disgust and cut the power. The ventilating fan inside the computer whirred to a stop. He sat back, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “For a little while there I entertained the conceit I could produce the closest thing to a complete history of cinema that’s ever been written, but the backer I go the backer
it
goes. I’m beginning to suspect Aristotle beat Griffith to the invention of the close-up by twelve hundred years. If this keeps up the project will run ten volumes before I get to
The Great Train Robbery.
Gibbon took only six to polish off Rome, and he was thirty-five when he started. They’ll have to trace my lifeless carcass through the piles of notes by the stink of putrefaction.”

“Maybe you should narrow your focus.”

“You think? I’ve a hunch somebody already wrote
The Idiot’s Guide to World Cinema.”

“You’ll come up with something. I need to ask you a favor.”

“The key’s in the planter by the front door. There’s a dead plant in it. I’ll be here a while longer, committing suicide by the death of a thousand paper cuts.”

“I’m not asking to move back in with you. I need you to sit in for me at the department budget meeting Monday morning. I’ve got a conflict.”

“You do for a fact. I haven’t attended a meeting at this institution since the three-cent stamp. The complaint was we weren’t getting enough money from Washington. Is the program different now?”

“Sometimes there are cookies. Look, I wouldn’t be asking you if it weren’t important. The jocks in the sports department swing a big bat with the fiduciary committee, and we’re pared to the bone as it is. Someone has to defend us from any more cuts. I’ll give you all the facts and figures you need.”

“Get somebody else. That little creep Anklemire likes you, and he can con the tattoos off a carny.”

“The problem is no one likes Anklemire. You’ve got cachet. You’re an ornament of this university.”

“You know where ornaments go the day after Christmas.”

Valentino said nothing. Broadhead looked around, lifted books off the stack and replaced them, found the stem of his pipe stuck between leaves as a bookmark, pulled it out without bothering to keep his place, and bit down on the end. “What’s so important you can’t sit in for yourself?”

“While you’re listening to complaints about Washington, I’ll be bribing a public official of the County of Los Angeles.”

“Spink showed you his belly? How much?”

Valentino told him.

“Can you swing it?”

“I don’t have any choice. It’s the American Dream to fall into debt for life, but going broke is a nightmare. I can’t afford to have him go on nickel-and-diming me into bankruptcy after I’ve invested so much.”

“I seem to recall warning you of this eventuality when you took the plunge.”

“I was pretty sure you were the type not to say I told you so.”

“That privilege is one of the joys of breathing. You made the right decision. Most disastrous failures take place in the name of principle.”

“Harriet thinks I should nail the little pisher.”

“Women will sometimes surprise you with an understanding of the concept of honor. You know where I stand on straying outside one’s specialty. The last time you set out to bring a felon to justice you almost wound up being arrested for committing felony.”

“You were an accomplice, as I recall.”

“I blame Fanta. Youthful enthusiasm is contagious. Fortunately, the experience innoculated me against a relapse in the future.” Broadhead removed the pipe and made a face at it. “Misdemeanors, however, are as hard to resist as the common cold. Right now I’m considering violating state law and university regulations and putting this instrument to use as it was intended.”

“I really need your help, Kyle. Will you sit in for me?”

“I suppose I will. I may even call in some markers from our illustrious administration and shake down a couple of plums from the money tree. My connections with the motion-picture industry are nearly as vast as the inestimable Ruth’s, and there are still a few venerated academics I haven’t managed to alienate entirely. Our president is starstruck when it comes to commencement speakers. What would you say to a jazzy new digital projector for the screening room?”

“A bauble,” Valentino said. “It’d be obsolete before you got it out of the packing material. Meanwhile something timeless is lost to ignorance and the ravages of weather and pollution. I was thinking more along the lines of wiggle room in the travel budget, and broader discretion in the area of acquisitions.”

Broadhead shook his rumpled head. “The treasury is a Chinese box. The bean counters think they’ll be struck by lightning if they take money from one account to invest in something that the money in another account is designated for, as if it didn’t all come from the same source. They understand tangible things: supplies and equipment. Pencils, yes; rescuing the lost
Metropolis
footage from the subbasement of the Polytechnic Institute in Berlin, no.”