Coldheart Canyon (3 page)

“Things that nobody else would be likely to—no, could
possibly
—possess, please her,” Zeffer replied. “She likes to show off her collection, and she wants everything in it to be unique.”

Sandru spread his arms and his smile. “
Everything
here is unique.”

“Father, you sound as though you’re ready to sell the foundations if the price is right.”

Sandru waxed metaphysical. “All these things are just objects in the end. Yes? Just stone and wood and thread and paint. Other things will be made in time, to replace them.”

“But surely there’s some sacred value in the objects here?”

The Father gave a little shrug. “In the Chapel, upstairs, yes. I would not want to sell you, let us say, the altar.” He made a smile, as though to say that under the right circumstances even that would have its price. “But everything else in the Fortress was made for a secular purpose. For the pleasure of dukes and their ladies. And as nobody sees it now . . . except a few travelers such as yourselves, passing through . . . I don’t see why the Order shouldn’t be rid of it all. If there’s sufficient profit to be made it can be distributed among the poor.”

“There are certainly plenty of people in need of help,” Zeffer said.

He had been appalled at the primitive conditions in which many of the people in the locality lived. The villages were little more than gatherings of shacks, the rocky earth the farmers tilled all but fruitless. And on all sides, the mountains—the Bucegi range to the east, to the west the Fa˘ga˘ras Mountains—their bare lower slopes as gray as the earth, their heights dusted with snow. God knew what the winters were like in this CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 15

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place: when even the dirt turned hard as stone, and the little river froze, and the walls of the shacks could not keep out the wind whistling down from the mountain heights.

The day they’d arrived, Katya had taken Willem to the cemetery, so that she could show him where her grandparents were buried. There he’d had proof aplenty of the conditions in which her relatives lived and died.

It was not the resting places of the old that had moved Willem; it was the endless rows of tiny crosses that marked the graves of infants: babies lost to pneumonia, malnutrition and simple frailty. The grief that was represented by these hundreds of graves had moved him deeply: the pain of mothers, the unshed tears of fathers and grandfathers. It was nothing he had remotely expected, and it had made him sick with sorrow.

For her part, Katya had seemed untouched by the sight, talking only of her memories of her grandparents and their eccentricities. But then this was the world in which she’d been raised; it wasn’t so surprising, perhaps, that she took all this suffering for granted. Hadn’t she once told him she’d had fourteen brothers and sisters, and only six of them were left living?

Perhaps the other eight had been laid to rest in the very cemetery where they’d walked together. And certainly it would not be uncommon for Katya to look coldly on the business of the heart. It was what made her so strong; and it was her strength—visible in her eyes and in her every movement—that endeared her to her audiences, particularly the women.

Zeffer understood that coldness better now that he’d spent time here with her. Seeing the house where she’d been born and brought up, the streets she’d trudged as a child; meeting the mother who must have viewed her appearance in their midst as something close to a miracle: this perfect rose-bud child whose dark eyes and bright smile set her utterly apart from any other child in the village. In fact, Katya’s mother had put such beauty to profitful work at the age of twelve, when the girl had been taken from town to town to dance in the streets, and—at least according to Katya—offer her favors to men who’d pay to have such tender flesh in their bed for the night. She had quickly fled such servitude, only to find that what she’d had to do for her family’s sake she had no choice but to do CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 16

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for herself. By the age of fifteen (when Zeffer had met her, singing for her supper on the streets of Bucharest) Katya had been a woman in all but years, her flowering an astonishment to all who witnessed it. For three nights he’d come to the square where she sang, there to join the group of admirers who were gathered around to watch this child-enchantress. It hadn’t taken him long to conceive of the notion that he should bring her back with him to America. Though he’d had at that time no experience in the world of the cinema (few people did; the year was 1916, and film was a fledgling), his instincts told him there was something special in the face and bearing of this creature. He had influential friends on the West Coast—mostly men who’d grown tired of Broadway’s petty disloyalties and piddling profits, and were looking for a new place to put their talents and their investments—who reported to him that cinema was a grand new frontier, and that talent scouts on the West Coast were looking for faces that the camera, and the public, would love. Did this child-woman not
have
such a face, he’d thought? Would the camera not grow stupid with infatuation to look into those guileful yet lovely eyes? And if the camera fell, could the public be far behind?

He’d inquired as to the girl’s name. She was one Katya Lupescu from the village of Ravbac. He approached her; spoke to her; told her, over a meal of cabbage-rolls and cheese, what he was thinking. She was curiously sanguine about his whole proposal; practically indifferent. Yes, she conceded, it sounded interesting, but she wasn’t sure if she would ever want to leave Romania. If she went too far from home, she would miss her family.

A year or two later, when her career had begun to take off in America—she no longer Katya Lupescu by then but
Katya Lupi
, and Willem her manager—they’d revisited this very conversation, and Zeffer had reminded her how uninterested she’d seemed in his grand plan. Her coolness had all been an illusion, she’d confessed; a way in part to keep herself from seeming too gauche in his eyes, and in part a way to prevent her hopes getting too high.

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But that was only part of the answer. There was also a sense in which the indifference she’d demonstrated that first day they’d met (and—more recently—in the cemetery) was a real part of her nature; bred into her, perhaps, by a bloodline that had suffered so much loss and anguish over the generations that nothing was allowed to impress itself too severely: neither great happiness nor great sadness. She was, by her own design, a creature who held her extremes in reserve, providing glimpses only for public consumption. It was these glimpses that the audience in the square had come to witness night after night. And it was this same power she would unleash when she appeared before the cinematographic camera.

Interestingly, Katya had shown none of this quality to Father Sandru the previous day.

In fact, it was almost as though she’d been playing a part: the role of a rather bland God-fearing girl in the presence of a beloved priest. Her gaze had been respectfully downcast much of the time, her voice softer than usual, her vocabulary—which often tended to the salty—sweet and com-pliant.

Zeffer had found the performance almost comical, it was so exaggerated; but the Father had apparently been completely taken in by it. At one point he’d put his hand under Katya’s chin to raise her face, telling her there was no reason to be shy.

Shy! Zeffer had thought. If only Sandru knew what this so-called
shy
woman was capable of! The parties she’d master-minded up in her Canyon—the place gossip-columnists had dubbed
Coldheart Canyon
; the excesses she’d choreographed behind the walls of her compound; the sheer filth she was capable of inventing when the mood took her. If the mask she’d been wearing had slipped for a heartbeat, and the poor, deluded Father Sandru had glimpsed the facts of the matter, he would have locked himself in a cell and sealed the door with prayers and holy water to keep her out.

But Katya was too good an actress to let him see the truth.

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Perhaps in one sense, Katya Lupi’s whole life had now become a performance. When she appeared on screen she played the role of simpering, abused orphans half her age, and large portions of the audience seemed to believe that this was reality. Meanwhile, every weekend or so, out of sight of the people who thought she was moral perfection, she threw the sort of parties for the other idols of Hollywood—the vamps and the clowns and the adventurers—which would have horrified her fans had they known what was going on. Which Katya Lupi was the real one? The weeping child who was the idol of millions, or the Scarlet Woman who was the Mistress of Coldheart Canyon? The orphan of the storm or the dope-fiend in her lair? Neither? Both?

Zeffer turned these thoughts over as Sandru took him from room to room, showing him tables and chairs, carpets and paintings; even mantelpieces.

“Does anything catch your eye?” Sandru asked him eventually.

“Not really, Father,” Zeffer replied, quite honestly. “I can get carpets as fine as these in America. I don’t need to come out into the wilds of Romania to find work like this.”

Sandru nodded. “Yes, of course,” he said. He looked a little defeated.

Zeffer took the opportunity to glance at his watch. “Perhaps I should be getting back to Katya,” he said. In fact, the prospect of returning to the village and sitting in the little house where Katya had been born, there to be plied with thick coffee and sickeningly sweet cake, while Katya’s relatives came by to stare at (and touch, as if in disbelief ) their American visitors, did not enthrall him at all. But this visit with Father Sandru was becoming increasingly futile, and now that the Father had made his mer-cenary ambitions so plain, not a little embarrassing. There wasn’t anything here that Zeffer could imagine transporting back to Los Angeles.

He reached into his coat to take out his wallet, intending to give the Father a hundred dollars for his troubles. But before he could produce the note the Father’s expression changed to one of profound seriousness.

“Wait,” he said. “Before you dismiss me let me say this: I believe we understand one another. You are looking to buy something you could find CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 19

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in no other place. Something that’s one of a kind, yes? And I am looking to make a sale.”

“So is there something here you haven’t shown me?” Zeffer said.

“Something special?”

Sandru nodded. “There are some parts of the Fortress I have not shared with you,” he said. “And with good reason, let me say. You see there are people who should not see what I have to show. But I think I understand you now, Mister Zeffer. You are a man of the world.”

“You make it all sound very mysterious,” Zeffer said.

“I don’t know if it’s
mysterious
,” the priest said. “It
is
sad, I think, and human. You see, Duke Goga, the man who built this Fortress—was not a good soul. The stories your Katya said she had been told as a child—”

“Were true?”

“In a manner of speaking. Goga was a great hunter. But he did not always limit his quarry to animals.”

“Good God. So she was right to be afraid.”

“The truth is, we are
all
a little afraid of what happened here,” Sandru replied, “because we are none of us certain of the truth. All we can do, young and old, is say our prayers, and put our souls into God’s care when we’re in this place.”

Zeffer was intrigued now.

“Tell me then,” he said to Sandru. “I want to know what went on in this place.”

“Believe me, please, when I tell you I would not know where to begin,”

the good man replied. “I do not have the words.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

Zeffer studied him with new eyes; with a kind of envy. Surely it was a blessed state, to be unable to find words for the terribleness of certain deeds. To be mute when it came to atrocity, instead of gabbily familiar with it. He found his curiosity similarly muted. It seemed distasteful—not to mention pointless—to press the man to say more than he expressed himself capable of saying.

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“Let’s change the subject. Show me something utterly out of the ordinary,” Zeffer said. “Then I’ll be satisfied.”

Sandru put on a smile, but it wasn’t convincing. “It isn’t much,” he said.

“Oh sometimes you find beauty in the strangest places,” Zeffer said, and as he spoke the little face of Katya Lupescu came into his mind’s eye; pale in a blue twilight.

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T W O

Sandru led the way down the passageway to another door, this one rather smaller than the oak door they’d come through to get to this level. Out came his keys. He unlocked the door, and to Zeffer’s surprise he and the priest were presented with another flight of steps, taking them yet deeper into the Fortress.

“Are you ready?” the Father asked.

“Absolutely,” Zeffer said.

Down they went. The stairs were steep, the air becoming noticeably more frigid as they descended. Father Sandru said nothing as they went; he glanced back over his shoulder two or three times, to be sure that he still had Zeffer on his heels, but the expression on his face was far from happy, as though he rather regretted making the decision to bring Zeffer here, and would have turned on his heel and headed back up to the relative comfort of the floor above at the least invitation.

At the bottom of the stairs he stopped, and rubbed his hands together vigorously.

“I think before we proceed any further we should take a glass of something to warm us,” he said. “What do you say?”

“I wouldn’t say no,” Zeffer said.

The Father went to a small cubby-hole in the wall a few yards from the bottom of the stairs, from which he brought a bottle of spirits and two glasses. Zeffer didn’t remark on the liquor’s proximity; nor could he blame the brothers for needing a glass of brandy to fortify them when CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 22