Zeroville (14 page)

She chooses her words carefully. “What matters,” she says, “is that you tried to help me. So I have been wanting to thank you …

Vikar says in a low voice, “Did I kill that man?”

She draws herself up when she says, “I never saw them before and have not seen them since.”

“I waited for the police to come to my apartment. I’m not one of the singing family that killed those people.” He gazes at the Mustang across the street. “Was Zazi all right?”

“Of course.”

“I mean from that night.”

“Sometimes I’m certain she’s tougher than I. That she’s not as beautiful, for which I’m grateful, so the men won’t get the same look in their eyes. Perhaps,” she shifts from the fountain, “she will not spend her teenage years in and out of institutions like her mother.”

“But that night—”

“She was with friends,” says Soledad. “With her father.” She shrugs. “You don’t want to miss your plane,” and she turns to cross the street to the Mustang, where Vikar can barely make out Zazi in the back, watching her mother and watching him.

From the liquor cart going up and down the aisle of the airplane, Vikar orders three vodka tonics. Notwithstanding Viking Man’s assurance that Vikar would have thirteen hours to read
Là-Bas
five more times, Vikar makes it through only once before pulling the script for Viking Man’s movie from the MGM envelope.

He reads the script twice and the third time begins breaking the story into sequences and numbering them as he would identify the parts of an architectural structure. When the sun is behind him, he puts the script away and watches a Spanish movie he doesn’t understand; the actress in it navigates between relationships with two men and Vikar keeps seeing Soledad in the part of the woman. At one point he closes his eyes.

In the dark of his lids, the Spanish movie intercuts with the open horizontal rock of his dream and its white ancient writing and the mysterious figure lying on top. Vikar sits up with a start.

When he finally dozes again, it’s to the dull roar of the engines and the pitch black of the night above the Atlantic. Upon landing at Barrajas Airport in the late afternoon Vikar remembers only at the last minute, as he steps through the door, to pull the cap from his coat pocket and down over his head.

The customs officials make him take the cap off. In the waiting area beyond the customs control Vikar can see a driver holding a cardboard sign that reads VICAR, with a C. When Vikar takes off the cap, everyone around him—customs officials, police, passengers—stops and a hush falls on the room.

As Vikar is ushered into a smaller room, he looks back over his shoulder at the driver in the distance with the sign. In the room, one of the officials takes Vikar’s passport and motions for him to sit at a table. On the wall hangs a portrait of a mild looking man in a uniform, wearing small round spectacles to go with his small trimmed moustache; Vikar realizes this is the General person of whom Viking Man spoke. He doesn’t appear fearsome.

Several of the officials lean over Vikar to study his head. “
Anarquista
?” one asks. The official with Vikar’s passport vanishes and for a while no one says or does anything. The official finally returns ten minutes later with another who’s studying the passport as he walks in the door; he looks at Vikar and says, “Señor Jerome?”

I should have stayed in Hollywood where nothing bad happens except singing families that slaughter people. “Yes.”

“Welcome to our country.”

“Thank you.”

“How long do you plan to be with us, Señor Jerome?” the official asks.

“I’m not sure.”

“Is your purpose here business or holiday?”

“Business.”

“What is the name of your company?”

I don’t have a company, Vikar almost answers, but says, “MGM.”

“The hotel,” says the official.

“The movies,” Vikar says. “I believe there is a hotel as well.”

“Las Vegas. Dean Martin.”

“
Rio Bravo
,” Vikar nods.

The official looks at Vikar, some inexplicable annoyance flashing across his eyes. “I speak English,” he says.

“What?”

“Is there someone who can vouch for your business here?”

“A man outside,” says Vikar.

“A man?”

“Holding a sign.”

The official turns and says something in Spanish to one of the other officials, who leaves the room. The official sits down next to Vikar and looks at his head. He points at Vikar’s head and says, “There are not many people in my country who appear like this.”

“No.”

“In America there are many people who appear like this?”

“No.”

The official looks around at the others. “Myself,” he confides to Vikar, “I am a great admirer of Miss Natalie Wood.”

Vikar just nods.

“I saw her in the film about the two married couples who trade.” He shrugs. “This film is not allowed in my country. I saw it while on holiday in Paris. Miss Natalie Wood is very beautiful in this film.” A low, desperate groan seems to emanate up from within him. “
Muy, muy, muy
. Do you know this film?”

“Yes.”

“She is very beautiful.”

“Yes.”

“She is very immodest in this film. You hear my English is excellent.”

“You should see
Splendor in the Grass
.”

“This
Splendid
film stars Miss Natalie Wood?”

“Yes.”

“In this film she is immodest?”

“It’s like
The Exorcist
, except better.”

“I know of this
Exorcist
film, this is the film about Satanás. Yes?”

“What?”

“
Diablo
. The Devil.”

“Yes.”

“This film is not allowed in my country.”

Vikar nods. “It’s not very good.”

“
This
film,” the official taps Vikar on the head hard, “is not allowed in my country.”

Vikar says, as politely as possible, “It’s not Natalie Wood.”

The official rises slightly from the chair, looks at Vikar’s head. He studies the woman’s face.

“It’s Elizabeth Taylor,” says Vikar.

“Elizabeth Taylor?”

“And Montgomery Clift.
A Place in the Sun
.”

“
Qué
?”

“The name of this movie,” Vikar taps his own head in turn, speaking slowly, “is
A Place
…
in
…
the
…
Sun
.”

“This,” the official says, tapping Vikar’s head back even harder, “is …”
tap
“… not …”
tap
“… the …”
tap
“… film with Miss Natalie Wood about the young degenerate American hoodlums who are probably homosexuals?”

“No.”

“Do you know this film that I mean?”

“
Rebel Without a Cause
.”

“This is the one I mean,” the official nods, “it is not allowed in my country.” The two men say nothing more but sit at the table looking at each other. Five minutes pass, then ten.

The door opens and the other official returns, and says something in Spanish.

The official sitting with Vikar continues to stare at him as if barely registering whatever has been said. Then he stands. He hands Vikar his passport. “This film you are working, is Miss Natalie Wood in this film?”

“I don’t believe so,” Vikar says.

“Perhaps your film will be allowed in my country.”

“I’m certain it will be a very good movie,” Vikar says.

When the phone rings in his hotel room, Vikar assumes it’s Viking Man. But amid the static of the phone call he hears a female voice saying his name; for a moment he imagines it’s Soledad and only after the phone has gone dead does he realize it was Dotty. He waits for the phone to ring again but it doesn’t, and finally he sleeps.

When he wakes in the morning, someone seems to have been knocking at his door for hours.

The same driver who met Vikar at the airport and drove him to the hotel now drives him through a depressed part of Madrid to an ugly industrial building twenty minutes away. In the editing room Vikar finds bread, butter and jam but no knife to spread them, coffee and bottled water, and a stack of film cans that have just arrived from a lab. There are no instructions from Viking Man or anyone else.

For a while Vikar sits staring at the cans. He eats the bread with the butter and jam that he spreads by using the other end of the china pencil with which he’ll mark the print. He doesn’t drink the coffee.

He sits a while longer staring at the cans. He believes his life itself is in a kind of jet lag. After half an hour he gets up and begins stripping away posters, photos and memos from the room’s largest wall until it’s bare.

He takes the film can on top and separates the lids. He threads the film through the drive mechanism of the viewer. For the moment he doesn’t concern himself with what kind of splices to make, with fades or dissolves or wipes, let alone with lighting or color. He’s putting miles of film into order, which means locating the sequences that he’s marked in the script, and the camera set-ups within each sequence.

Over the weeks to come, first he’ll match the exposed film with the soundtrack, then select a representative still from each setup, sometimes more than one.

If there is, for instance, a sequence in which the Berber chieftain lops off the head of a thief, Vikar will choose a single still of perhaps a flying head, or a head rolling on the ground. He’ll print an enlargement of the still and number it and tack it onto the bare wall that he’s stripped. He’ll group set-ups chronologically into sequences, then number and group sequences as they’re represented by the set-up stills, until finally he’s determined the sequence for everything that’s been shot. He’ll catalog images and sounds by a synchronization code, then begin splicing together footage. Sometimes he’ll make a decision for one take over the others when the choice seems clear, particularly from a technical standpoint.

As Vikar does this, more rushes come each day or sometimes arrive every two or three days, or occasionally two or three times in one day. He works nine hours a day. Around one o’clock his driver brings lunch, and sometimes he eats dinner around ten o’clock in the Spanish fashion. Not once in the weeks to come will he receive a phone call from Viking Man.

At night, after his work, he falls asleep in the back of the car, and the driver shakes him awake when they reach Vikar’s hotel. Vikar doesn’t go out into the city at all; he doesn’t care about the city. Madrid is a ghost town, fixed in the suspension of the Generalissimo’s pending death. Black wrought iron wreathes the city’s doors and balconies and fountains and windows. As the weeks pass, on the Fuencarral below his hotel window Vikar notices first the appearance of one streetwalker, then another, then another.

After he’s been in Madrid three weeks, one night on the way back to his hotel Vikar wakes not to the driver’s touch but rather the jostling of the car, and realizes he’s blindfolded.

He also realizes his hands are bound. “What’s happening?” he says; he can feel someone on each side of him in the backseat. “What’s happening?” he says again, and someone answers, “Please do not talk. We will be there soon.”

“Where?”

“Please do not talk.”

Soon he feels the car come to a stop. All the doors open and someone pulls Vikar out of the backseat. Led blindfolded for several minutes, at one point Vikar trips and two men catch him and pull him to his feet.

They stop and there’s the metal creak of an opening door. “There is a step here,” someone says. Vikar lifts his feet to step inside the door, which he hears pulled closed behind him.

Vikar assumes he’s been arrested by the same officials who interrogated him in customs when he entered the country. When the blindfold is taken off, he expects to see the fan of Miss Natalie Wood waiting for him.

Instead he’s in some sort of warehouse. On the far side is what appears to be a makeshift soundstage with a bed, and in one corner a particularly old moviola. Lined against the wall are a dozen guns and rifles and rounds of ammunition.

There’s also a small screen and projector with a low table nearby and someone sitting on a stool watching a movie. Vikar looks around him; one of the men, his driver, holds several film canisters. The other men wear rifles on their shoulder or guns in their belts. The figure on the stool doesn’t turn to look at Vikar but continues watching the movie.

When the man on the stool turns from the movie to Vikar, he doesn’t look like a policeman or customs official.

He’s slight in stature, dark, in his late twenties. He wears dark pants and combat boots and a kind of workshirt; a scarf is tied around his neck. On the table next to the stool where the man sits, next to a bottle of wine and several glasses, Vikar sees a military issue .45.

The man on the stool notes Vikar’s bound hands. “Untie his hands,” he says to the other men. He says to Vikar, “I apologize for the ropes. Please,” and indicates another nearby stool for Vikar to sit. He turns his attention back to the movie, and together the two men watch.

The movie is about a young bride who travels to Thailand to be with her French diplomat husband. Among the embassy’s aristocratic females, the bride has a number of sexual relationships, then is sent by her husband to be trained by an older man in the art of sexual submission.

Vikar believes that the young woman is very attractive but perhaps the movie is not so good. “This film is not allowed in my country,” the man on the stool says to Vikar. “You know of this actress?” Over the man’s shoulder, Vikar watches the driver of his car set the film cans on the editing table.

“No.”

“Miss Sylvia Kristel,” the man says, as though this explains everything.

“Is she French?”

“The film is French. She is …” he thinks, “… Dutch, I believe.”

They watch awhile longer, the man riveted by the Dutch actress. Then he reaches over and turns off the projector. He says, “You are Señor … Vicar? How do you say it?”