The Skin Palace E-Book

Jack O'Connell

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 688

Beschreibung

A harrowing and ecstatic descent into a breathtaking netherworld aswirl with the real, the imagined and the absolutely unforgettable. Amid the post industrial decay of Quinsigamond glitters a fabulous jewel - Herzog's Erotic Palace - America's most lavish porn theatre and a gangland laundry for semi-sour cash. But most of all, Herzog's is the place where dreamers meet and seductive nightmares find their dazzling realisation. For the obsessed grunge auteur, the heartsick crime king, the apocalyptic tele-evangelist and the young woman intent on a capturing a shrouded past and an onrushing future within a camera's lens, The Skin Palace will reveal all secrets, in a script fraught with danger and feverish transformation.

Leseprobe

SKIN PALACE

A harrowing and ecstatic descent into a breathtaking netherworld aswirl with the real, the imagined and the absolutely unforgettable. Amid the post industrial decay of Quinsigamond glitters a fabulous jewel – Herzog’s Erotic Palace – America’s most lavish porn theatre and a gangland laundry for semi-sour cash. But most of all, Herzog’s is the place where dreamers meet and seductive nightmares find their dazzling realisation. For the obsessed grunge auteur, the heartsick crime king, the apocalyptic tele-evangelist and the young woman intent on a capturing a shrouded past and an onrushing future within a camera’s lens, The Skin Palace will reveal all secrets, in a script fraught with danger and feverish transformation.

About the Author

Jack O’Connell is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, which have earned him something of a cult status. He won the Mysterious Press Discovery Contest for the Best First Crime Novel for Box Nine, which launched his career. This and his other novels Wireless, The Skin Palace, Word Made Flesh and The Resurrectionist are all published by No Exit Press. His work has been praised by James Ellroy, Nail Gaiman, Katherine Dunn, George Pelecanos and Jonathan Carroll, among others. He lives in Worcester, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

Praise for Jack O’Connell

‘Hyper-real noir. A grotesque romance about genocide, language, bibliomania, doubt, obsession, worms, epidermis and sanctuary!’ –James Ellroy

‘The most electrifying debut crime novel you are likely to read all year’ –GQ

‘A feast of unsettling pleasures’ –Independent

‘A surrealistic noir epic that’s part David Lynch and part Bret Easton Ellis’ –Booklist

‘has a kind of hallucinatory fascination...amazing in its density, power, richness of detail, humour and irony...a dazzling piece of work. One of the year’s 10 best!’ –L ATimes

‘Mesmerizing... light-years away from your garden-variety thriller. The Skin Palace may remind you of Blade Runner or the novels of William Gibson, but O’Connell has his own dazzling tale to tell... Wickedly clever’ –Seattle Times

‘It’s a measure of O’Connell’s immense talent that, while creating his absolutely original and hyperbolic world, he also paints a striking vision of the haunting ways in which life and art mirror each other’ –Publishers Weekly

‘It’s a helter-skelter, a roller-coaster, a ride on a ghost train – if the fairground had been designed by Philip K Dick, Stan Lee and Edgar Allan Poe’ –Independent on Sunday

‘No one does the improbable like O’Connell’ –Guardian

‘Jack O’Connell has riffed on language, fire-cleansed genre conventions, and stripped the artifice from the modern noir novel, creating a body of work both exciting and entirely original’ –George Pelecanos

‘A masterpiece, O’Connell’s tour de force has a dose of the uncertainty of Kafka, the fantasy of Bradbury, the crisp prose of Greene, and the noir of Chandler’ –Strand Magazine

‘brilliant writing, original concepts, emotional resonance’ –Washington Post

‘A brilliantly tuned, mesmerizing labyrinth of a quasi-real world as only a master artist could draw it’ –James Ellroy

Novels by Jack O’Connell

Box Nine

Wireless

The Skin Palace

Word Made Flesh

The Resurrectionist

For

Nance & Claire & James

reel one

I was certainly a well-trained dancer. I’m a good actress.I have depth. I have feeling. But they don’t care.All they want is the image.—Rita Hayworth, 1973

ESTABLISHING SHOT

The Ballard Theatre. Night.

Enter the boy. Fifteen years old. He is an immigrant. Hehas been in the city for only a week. At times, he has difficulty breathing. He is dressed formally, in a dark, old-fashioned suit that is wet from the storm outside. He hasonly a tentative grasp of the native language. This does notmatter, as the film he has come to see is a silent feature—the original Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney, Sr.

Enter the young woman. Twenty-two years old. Shestands in the entrance to the theatre and removes her yellow rain slicker. She shakes her head, pushes her mattedhair back from her face. She moves down the center aisleand takes a seat several rows in front of the boy.

They are the only individuals in the theatre. This may bedue to the storm outside. Or possibly the fact that few people have an interest in seeing a silent movie in this day andage.

Several minutes pass. The silence of the theatre is broken occasionally by the wheezing of the boy’s lungs as theystrive for a full, deep breath.

Then, finally, the curtains roll back and the wonderfulsputter-sound of the projector issues and a beam of blue-white light shoots out above their heads and falls flat against the screen.

The boy and the young woman each watch the film indifferent ways, with different expectations and objectives.

The boy wishes to break every image down into itssmallest components. He wants to analyze technique, tounderstand the mechanics of this display.

The young woman wants the entire experience of thefilm, the total package, the overall sensation of anotherworld that she’s been allowed to spy on for the price of herticket.

This is impossible, as the young woman cannot stopthinking about last Tuesday, when her mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. The fishhooks in LonChaney’s mouth cannot compete with the image of the doctor’s office, the whiteness of the doctor’s coat, the vague,grey hue of the X-ray sheets suspended against an illuminated background.

And within minutes the young woman is crying again, asquietly as she can manage, slouched down in the Ballard’svelvet seat, turned sideways, her knees brought up close toher chest.

The boy is more confused than annoyed. His vision istorn over and over between the actions on the screen andthe silhouette of the young woman ten feet in front of him,the crown of her head just visible over her seat, her sobbing the new sound track for the movie, giving the film ameaning it previously didn’t have.

The boy would like to approach the young woman, askher if she needs any assistance, if he can call someone forher, if there’s anything at all he could do. But he stays inhis seat, as fascinated as he is sympathetic.

He’s never known a film to affect someone else this profoundly.

three years later

1

A woman’s face appears on the screen. The face is as large as a house, as big as any three-decker in the city. Because of this enlargement, each wrinkle and fold in the skin becomes a dry riverbed, a crevice of incalculable depth. The woman’s eyes are red and sunken, as if she’s spent a life-time weeping. After a time, her mouth opens and she looks out over the gravel parking lot and says, in the most wounded voice imaginable,

On October first, my daughter, Jennifer Ellis, disappeared while walking home from the Ste. Jeanne d’Arc elementary school on Duffault Avenue. Jennifer is ten yearsold. She is four and a half feet tall. She was dressed in herschool uniform, a green plaid jumper and a white blouse.I implore you, if you have any information at all aboutwhat happened to my baby, please call the number on thisscreen. Please help me find my daughter. I beg you.

“God,” Perry says, “I wish they’d stop showing that clip. It’s on TV every night. I hear her voice on the radio driving to work every morning.”

Sylvia takes a sip of wine and says, “Do you think they’ll find her?”

“They’ve got to find her,” Perry says. He takes a breath, uncomfortable with the conversation, looks across the parking lot and asks, “You think the line’ll be bad at the snack bar?”

“No drive-in food,” Sylvia says. “We’ll both regret it in the morning.”

Perry smiles, nods his agreement, lets his head fall back against the seat.

Sylvia would love to shoot his face this way. To frame it in exactly this light, exactly this expression. But she’s learned. It makes Perry tense when she takes the camera out at moments like this. He smiles, but you’d have to hear the tone of his voice when he says, “Is it necessary to record everything?”

The answer is no, of course not. Most of life is more or less insignificant. But Sylvia’s argument, her defense, would be that what she does with the camera has nothing to do with recording. Her intention isn’t to nail down the image for some kind of documentation. She’s not all that interested in that kind of history. She doesn’t see things that way. And she’d have thought Perry would know that by now.

Anyway, Sylvia doesn’t want an argument tonight. So she leaves the camera in the trunk of the car. But it’s loaded with a fresh roll of Fuji. Just in case.

Perry had called her from the office around three. She was in the cellar, developing yesterday’s shots from the Canal Zone. She was working on a print of Mojo Bettman, the guy without the legs who sits on his skateboard selling newspapers and magazines all day. Perry must have let the phone ring twenty times. Sylvia ran up the three flights of stairs and grabbed the receiver, pulling a little for air. Perry said, “The Cansino. Eight o’clock. Big News.”

And then he hung up. He hates the phone. And he knew if he stayed on Sylvia would press for details.

She’s not sure why he feels the need to be so dramatic. They’ve both been waiting for the big news for months. Perry’s been aching for it. And Sylvia has been fearful of it. She doesn’t like acknowledging that. It makes her feel vindictive and kind of spoiled, maybe mean-spirited. This news is what Perry wants. This is why he puts in all the hours. After she hung the receiver back into the cradle on the wall, Sylvia stood there for a second and tried to picture Perry as he heard the words. She’s sure it was Ratzinger that took him to lunch. Probably at the top of the bank building, that restaurant that used to revolve. The firm has an open account there. Perry says Ratzinger eats there every day of the week.

She pictured them both holding club sandwiches in their hands, little leaves of purplish lettuce hanging over the corners of the toasted bread. Ratzinger dabbing mayonnaise off his lips with the rose-colored napkin. She pictured Perry nodding, that sort of slight, humble tilt of the head, as Ratzinger listed all the things they liked—the studiousness, the ease with the clients, the ability to work on the team.

She could see Perry clenching down on his back teeth, curling up his toes inside his wing tips, waiting for the moment when Ratzinger actually said the word, let it fall from his lips as the waiter cleared the coffee cups: Partnership.

They’re in the backseat of the Buick and they’ve got the top rolled down. It’s the same car Perry was driving on the day they met—a maroon ’65 Skylark that guzzles gas. Last year they dropped a wad getting the floorboards replaced. Now, with Perry’s big news, Sylvia is sure it’s only a matter of time before he starts pushing for a Saab or a Volvo. For all she knows, Ratzinger may have already made the suggestion.

“This is the part I love,” Perry says. So far there are about a dozen parts he loves.

“We’re going down in the elevator,” he says, “and Ratzinger waits for this guy to get out at the garage level, okay? And then he turns to me and he does this clap on the back, and the whole time there’s no eye contact,you know. He’s got his eyes on the floor numbers. And we get to the street level and before the doors open he says, ‘and by the way, there’ll be a little something extra come Fridays from now on.’ ”

He bites in on his bottom lip and slaps the driver’s seat.

“A raise,” Sylvia says.

He’s nodding at the words. “This is the way these guys work, you know. He never mentions a figure, okay? Just alittle something extra, you know. Make me guess. Make me wait for Friday so I can see the numbers.”

“You deserve every dime,” she says.

The Cansino Drive-in is one of the last of its kind in the country. In high school, Sylvia came here a handful of times with a packed carload of forgotten friends. It’s gotten a lot seedier since then. The Buick is parked in the very last row of the lot where asphalt gives way to a scrubby dirt patch that dissolves into full-blown forest. The parking lot is half-filled with teenagers. Lots of pickup trucks with fat tires and skinny girls with blonde hair down to their behinds. The kids all sit in the truck beds around coolers of beer. They smoke cigarettes and make constant trips to the snack bar.

The movie’s sound track is beamed at them over the radio. Those beautiful, ribbed-silver window speakers are long gone, but the white mounting posts they hung from still stand, circles of weed springing up through the posts’ tear-shaped concrete foundations.

They’re half-watching something called The Initiationof Alice. It’s a pretty standard soft-core exploitation job by Meyer Dodgson. Lots of female nudity and beach locations, but nothing too explicit. Upon the screen, a topless coed is admiring her own reflection in an ornate, fulllength mirror.

“I spoke with Candice, who got the same pitch,” Perry says, “only from Ford. I knew Candice would be the other one they tapped.”

“I remember. You said Candice.”

“We both figure they’ll run us around the track for a year, maybe a little less. Then they’ll give us the title.”

“Partner.”

“Big day, Sylvia. I want to remember this day.”

“You’ll need some new suits.”

He sits back, lets his shoulders slump a little.

“I want to buy you something, Sylvia.”

“Okay, next movie’s on you.”

His voice goes lower and he reaches over and takes her hand.

“I’m serious. Something nice.”

“A movie would be nice. I don’t need—”

He waves away the thought. “I know you don’t need,” he stretches out the word. “This isn’t about need. Isn’t there something you want?”

She shakes her head, passes him the wine bottle and picks a licorice twist out of its bag.

“C’mon, I want to mark this occasion. If you don’t help me out I’ll pick out something on my own.”

“Perry—”

“Some awful piece of jewelry you’ll keep in the box in the dresser . . .”

She nods and squints at him and bites the end off the twist. He’s referring to this enormous silver bracelet he gave her last Christmas, which makes her arm look like it just came out of a cast. But she knows the thing cost a fortune and feels guilty every time she opens her drawer to take out a sweater.

She says, “I thought we were going to start saving.”

“We are, believe me. Second check starts the down-payment fund.”

Perry’s all hot for buying a house this year, but Sylvia loves where they live now.

“C’mon, give me some idea. I’ll go out blind and buy earrings. It’ll be scary. Don’t make me do it.”

He can still make her laugh. And he usually gets his way when he’s being funny.

“Okay, there is something . . .”

He’s thrilled. He does a drumroll on his knees with his fingers and says, “Bingo.”

“I was down in the Zone last week . . .”

Already, she’s said the wrong thing. Perry hates the Canal Zone.

“Yes,” he says, dragging out the s,trying to prepare himself for anything.

“There was this ad. On a bulletin board in the Rib Room—”

“God,” he says, forcing a smile, trying to make his distaste into a weary joke. “I hate it that you eat down there. I just don’t think it’s healthy.”

She cocks her head to the side, purses the lips a little.

“Sorry,” he says, annoyed with himself for jarring the mood. “Go ahead. An ad.”

“It was a good price. I checked the catalogs. And they said it was in mint condition.”

“A good price on . . .”

She takes a breath and lets it out, “An Aquinas.”

“An Aquinas,” he repeats.

She nods, not sure whether to get defensive or laugh at herself, like it’s the same old Sylvia and some things never change.

He says, “Another camera?”

“It’s an Aquinas, Perry—”

“What does that make? Four, right? Four cameras?”

“Four?”

“Yeah, four. The Canon, the Yashica, and the Polaroid.”

She stares at him, her mouth crooked like he’s been sarcastic, but still inside the margin of funny. A beat goes by and his expression remains unchanged and she realizes he’s being serious.

“The Polaroid? C’mon, Perry, that’s like a twenty-dollar camera. I just use it for proofs. I just use it for taking note of something I’ll want to do later.”

“A Polaroid isn’t a camera? A Polaroid suddenly doesn’t count as a camera?”

“Okay, forget it,” she says, looking up at the screen as the young woman in front of the mirror starts to rub sunscreen into her shoulder. “It was your idea. You brought up buying something.”

He reaches across for her hand again.

“I meant, like, diamond stud earrings or something, I meant—”

She squeezes the hand and lets it go.

“Diamond stud earrings, Perry? When would I wear diamond studs? They’d clash with the decor down at Snapshot Shack.”

Perry has begun to hate Sylvia’s job. She works in one of those tiny film booths you see at the edge of every mall parking lot in America. To a degree, she understands his feelings. Those little huts are about five feet square. Barely enough room inside for you to turn around. She thinks just the sight of them gives a lot of people a kind of unconscious jolt of claustrophobia. And the particular booth Sylvia works in is even worse. It was built as an enormous scale replica of an old Brownie camera. But she likes the job. Right now, it’s exactly what she wants to do. Maybe it’s this visible lack of ambition, this absence of a career that bothers Perry. Maybe he can’t envision turning to Ratzinger over lunch and saying, “Sylvia? She sells film from inside of a big camera . . .”

“There’ll be all kinds of places to wear them,” he says. “Believe me.”

“Look, I said forget it.”

His eyes narrow a little. He shifts over to sit next to her. He doesn’t want the night to go bad.

“Okay,” he says, smiling, being indulgent. “Tell me about the . . .”

“Aquinas,” she says.

“Doesn’t sound Japanese,” he says, putting on a shocked expression.

“It’s made in Italy,” she says.

“Good camera?”

“It’s about the best you can get.”

He says, “Why go for a used one? Isn’t it like a used car? Like you’re buying someone else’s problem?”

She smiles at him. He’s trying. He has to force the interest in cameras. She knows that he’d rather be talking about house hunting. Or maybe even wedding plans.

“You want to guess what a new Aquinas would cost?”

“Not a clue.”

She takes a deep breath. “Try over ten grand.”

This genuinely shocks him.

“You’re kidding.”

She shakes her head no.

He leans forward and says, “The house I grew up in? Okay? My parents bought it for around ten grand.”

“Yeah,” she says, “but the Aquinas doesn’t get water in the basement.”

“How much are they asking for this used one?”

She smiles and shakes her head no again, but says, “The ad said fifteen hundred.”

He stares at her and starts a slow nod and at the same time tries to hold off from smiling. He can’t manage it and the smile breaks and he turns his attention up to the screen as Alice starts a long jog down a supposedly deserted beach.

Then he looks back and says, “All right, let’s get it.”

She starts to fight him. “Perry . . . ,” she says with this small pseudo-whine to her voice that she can’t stand.

He holds up a hand and says, “Listen, Sylvia, I want to get you something. I honestly do. And this is what you want.”

She shrugs. “I’d have to check it out. I mean, I’d have to check the age and the condition. See what’s included. Lenses. A case.”

“You check it out. If it looks good, if it’s what you want, write the check.”

She stares at the side of his face, more excited than embarrassed.

“Really? I should really get it?”

She thinks she sounds like a teenager. Like her mother said she could use the car on Saturday night. But Perry seems suddenly delighted with himself. He turns to her, leans in and puts his arm around her.

“If it looks good,” he repeats, “buy it.”

“You’re sure?”

He brings his mouth down to the side of her neck, kisses there a few times. Then he moves up to her ear and whispers, “I still want to get you the diamond studs.”

In five minutes Sylvia’s jeans are off and Perry’s pants are down around his ankles and she’s straddling him, riding him, her knees indenting the Buick’s backseat as Perry watches the exploits of the surf-bimbette flashed up on the Cansino’s huge and dingy screen.

And as Perry’s breath starts to catch and Sylvia feels the muscles in his thighs buck and tense and release and tense again and he starts to make that suppressed-whine sound through his nose, she’s thinking of the Aquinas. She’s thinking of the first time she’ll hold it up to her eye and pull something into focus.

She’s thinking of the rush that will come when she presses down on the shutter release and opens the lens and imprints some flawless instant, some slice of life. Some instinctively chosen and absolutely perfect image.

She’s wondering what it will be.

2

Until recently the Hotel St. Vitus served as a convent for a sect of Eastern European nuns known as the Sisters of Perpetual Torment & Agony, a cloistered Order always rumored to be on the precipice of papal destruction due to heretical word and deed. The nuns’ catechistic practice somehow managed to splice their traditional Catholicism with a vague line of occultist teachings. No one in Bangkok Park knows exactly what the Sisters dabbled in, but there was loose talk of midnight rites during the equinox, a kind of earth-mother, druidic gloss layered over their prayers and chanting.

For their part, the Sisters almost seemed to encourage the dark rumors, never venturing out of the convent but for the weekly shopping trip to the all-night Spanish market. Even then they’d remain encased in a cloud of silence, their bodies wrapped head to toe in black wool habits, their faces obscured by hanging black-lace veils. They seemed to purchase bulk quantities of blood sausage, sweet red wine, and candles.

In public, Bishop Flaherty tolerated the Order with pleas for an understanding of the deeply spiritual quest the women had devoted their lives to, but during private lunches with his banker pals in the chancery dining room, Flaherty called them spooky old hags, and voodoo fanatics. And alone in his room, after his nightly prayers, the bishop looked out his window toward Bangkok Park and genuinely wondered if the witches had it in for him.

Officially, the Quinsigamond Police Department does not know what happened to the Sisters. The nuns no longer occupy their old convent. A week after their disappearance, the chancery released a statement that the entire flock had returned to Eastern Europe where their services were desperately needed. The statement made no mention of the rumor that the walls of the abandoned convent’s chapel had been found covered with a mixture of human and animal blood. One of the Canal Zone’s more hysterical newsrags offered speculation that all the sisters had been massacred and the FBI was blanketing the entire event. Another weekly announced there was no mass murder, but rather the nuns had splintered from the Church and become some kind of pagan-feminist terrorists, vanished into an undisclosed mountain region of South America for training and recruitment. The Spy never bothered to cover the story beyond the box ad in the real estate classifieds announcing that the diocese of Quinsigamond was offering the convent for sale at a very reasonable price.

Hermann Kinsky picked up the building for a song and rechristened it the Hotel St. Vitus. He’s held the deed to the property for close to a year now but has yet to check in his first guest. This may have something to do with both the location—on Belvedere Street at the western end of Bangkok Park—and the fact that Hermann never bothered to renovate the place. The St. Vitus is still outfitted as a dark, icon-choked convent, full of stark wooden corridors hung with pictures of obscure and grotesquely martyred saints, small, mattressless cots in cell-like rooms, and a kitchen whose only concession to this century’s progress is running water.

But Hermann doesn’t care if he’s failing as a hotelier. He needs a profession for the tax forms and innkeeper is as good as any. And he’s immune to the spartan, gloomy ambience of the St. Vitus, the haunted, Gothic flavor that emanates from every crevice of the rambling building. It reminds him of his hometown of Maisel in Old Bohemia, the thousand-year-old city of golems and alchemists from which he fled three years ago with his only son, Jakob, his nephew, Felix, and his oldest friend and most trusted business aide, Gustav Weltsch.

In the old country, it had been a given that Hermann could rise only so high, that his will and his intelligence, his savvy and his tenacity would always be undercut by his ghetto birth and the mind-numbing, sloughing grip of decades of Communist puppet-regimes. But here in America, here in the new world, possibilities were endless. You practically had to shun them as they pounded on your door, day and night, saying, here’s a new idea, here’s a fresh venture, here’s another chance for improvement, investment,progress, success.

Back in Maisel, Hermann had labored by day as the owner of Kinsky Neckware, a small, open-air haberdashery booth in Old Loew Square, but it was his night work in the back alleys of the grey marketplace that earned his exit fee—the cash he had to pay to a whiny subminister of Emigration—to bring himself and his three charges to Quinsigamond. He sold contraband gasoline, cigarettes, racks of horse meat. He ran dice and lottery games. He advanced an always growing book of illegal loans, broke a record number of recalcitrant kneecaps. And ultimately, in a manner that became his trademark and gave an additional, darker meaning to the phrase face the music, Hermann garrotted an army of desperate but doomed men with Schonborn piano wire. I only use Schonborn, he would tell his gasping victim, it never breaks.

His wife had died giving birth to Jakob, and his greatest regret is that she was never able to see the bounty of all those long, often bloody post-midnight hours skulking around Kaprova Boulevard in fingerless gloves. There are still late nights when the boys and Weltsch are asleep and he sits at his desk, a former altar, in what was once the St. Vitus chapel, a room of poor lighting with an enormous stained-glass window that depicts a weeping woman being crucified upside down, and Hermann Kinsky allows himself to take out his paper-thin wallet and withdraw a fading photograph of his only love and whisper, Julia, I did it all for you.

Hermann has no use for the irony that the quality he most loved in his late wife is the very one that disturbs him when he sees it in his son. That dreaminess, that vague, lost, otherwordly sense of absence, as if the boy were living on some different plane of existence, as if Jakob believed that by not acknowledging the ugly facts of this life, he could avoid them. It came from the mother. She could keep that same look in her eyes, that glazed, unfocused sheen. In fact, they looked very much alike, both with the thin, almost brittle physique, the small bones and dewy eyes and thin lips, the ears that wing out. Both with the spots on the lung and all the breathing problems. Nothing like Hermann or his nephew Felix with their stocky frames and barrel chests.

Julia loved the movies, just like the boy, just as passionately, as if the picture shows were some kind of religion, were something to be taken seriously. It was the only way she would consent to date Hermann when they first met. For a night in Cinema Kierling, she would sometimes tease, I would walk on the arm of the village idiot.

And if it was Julia’s genes that planted the seed of this movie-love in the son, it was that fishwife, the fifteen-year-old governess Hermann hired out of the Schiller ghetto, that ultimately poisoned little Jakob. Bringing that girl into the household was the mistake of a lifetime. She dragged Jakob to the cinema each day, even when he got older and should have been in school. Felix was immune to the nanny’s influence from the start, born without any interest in artifice. But Jakob was lost from the moment he entered the Kierling. And now Hermann curses the day some foolish genius invented this thing called film.

Because it’s one thing for a woman to waste her time with such trifles and another altogether for a young man. And it’s a prescription for disaster when that young man is heir to the fastest growing crime dynasty in town. Hermann has tried every trick he can think of to get the boy more interested in the business. He’s taken the harsh and angry road. He’s taken the understanding and patient road. He’s yelled, wheedled, begged, threatened. He’s even tried bribery, buying the son his own movie camera, a 16mm Seitz, stolen contraband negotiated out of the trunk of a nervous cabdriver. Remember, the hackman said at the close of the barter, tell him it belonged to Uher himself, hisfirst camera.

Hermann asked Weltsch to speak to the boy, thinking maybe it’s a problem of blood, being too close, the father too large a role model for the son to comprehend. Weltsch—with his CPA and recent law degree, his absolutely dispassionate, almost mathematical sense of logic, numbers as a personal dogma—came back shaking his head, unable to penetrate the fantastic cloud perpetually swimming around Jakob’s skull. He insisted on speakingof a film noir, whatever this is, Weltsch said, his voice as halting as if he’d discovered a new tax code he couldn’t decipher, so befuddled that Hermann found the day’s deposits miscalculated when he reviewed them that evening.

So odd that Felix, the nephew, the brother’s boy, nineteen and just a year older than Jakob, should have all the attributes that the son lacks. Felix has the head for numbers, the instinct to note the viable venture from the probable loser, the anger that could allow him to put a gun to an enemy’s temple, pull the trigger and then go to dinner without another thought. And most important, Felix wants. He wants to be Prince. He wants to emulate his Uncle Hermann in every way. He desires Jakob’s birthright the way his lungs desired air on the day of his birth—an unusually large baby, the midwife said for years that he screamed loud enough to wake all the dead in Strasnice Road Cemetery. Felix wants the number two spot at the table so badly that, unfortunately, Hermann can see he’s come to resent his once-loved cousin. If Weltsch can’t understand Jakob’s dreamy, antibusiness ways, Felix despises them.

But there is hope, there is one deal on the horizon that could bind Jakob into the Family, and make an honorable percentage in the process. First, however, a bit of unpleasant discipline must be dispensed. These nickel-and-dimeAsians, Hermann thinks, why do I even bother?

Jakob Kinsky thinks of his bedroom on the top floor of the Hotel St. Vitus as the smallest studio in cinematic history. But that’s all right. He’s still a one-man operation and so far the bedroom fits all his needs. A year ago, upon moving in, he decided that since this tiny cell was where he’d be spending the majority of his time, it should reflect his aesthetic principles. So he’s made everything stark black and white and shadowy. His bed is a metal-frame cot that looks like it was scavenged from Spooner Correctional. The lighting is supplied by a bare bulb hanging from a short length of electrical cord. His clothing—three black suits and three white cotton shirts—hangs from a gunmetal coatrack in the corner.

It isn’t that Jakob sees his room as a blatant rejection of Papa’s bid to make good in the New World. It’s simply that Jakob has a theory that by living day and night in this bleak and boxy terrain, he can’t help but completely realize the imagistic imagination that he’s been striving for since the day his nanny, Felice Fabri, brought him to the Kierling Theatre back in Maisel and together they watched a non-subtitled screening of Beware, My Lovely.

He was just six years old. And he knew, upon emerging back into the blinding, headache-inducing sunlight of Loew Square, that he had to make films. Over the years and countless trips to the Kierling that followed, he knew that he had to make strange, haunting, black-and-white crime films. That he had to become the noir-est of all noir directors. That, in fact, he had to move beyond the confines of simply directing and become a true auteur—conceiving, writing, casting, editing, virtually willing his total vision into celluloid being.

That first screening was a dozen years ago and Jakob’s pursuit of his dream has never flagged. The bedroom, the studio, the original home office of his imagined company—Amerikan Pictures—is a shrine to his persistence in the face of paternal incredulity. The walls are completely papered with old movie posters—The Blue Dahlia.Shadow of a Doubt. So Dark the Night. The cot is covered with dog-eared copies of dozens of screenplays—Thieves’Highway. The Tattooed Stranger. Sudden Fear. The floor looks like some demented architect’s model for a black, plastic city with towers of videotapes stacked and tottering everywhere—The Big Combo. Call Northside 777. Cult ofthe Cobra.

The only other things in the room are a black-and-white TV hooked to a VCR and currently playing This Gun forHire with the volume off, a Hubbard 2000 vaporizer, a wrought-iron bookcase filled with cinematography texts, a portable, manual Clark Nova typewriter, and Jakob’s prize possession, the thing he sleeps with, his most cherished appendage, a Seitz 16 mm movie camera.

Jakob knows the Seitz was intended as a bribe from Papa. But it’s his ticket to attaining his dream and though he sometimes feels a bit guilty about the implications of accepting such a present, there’s no way he can part with it now. Not when he’s this close to a start date for filming on his first feature, on the work that will announce his arrival into the world of film, a masterpiece he’s titled Little GirlLost.

He’s been writing Little Girl Lost since the Family arrived in Quinsigamond. He thinks he needs one more polish on the screenplay before he’s ready to turn the Seitz loose on the world. He writes every chance he gets, staying up all night in the tiny studio, clicking out rewrite after rewrite on the Clark Nova, scribbling notes and cost sheets and location possibilities in his spiral notebooks. But even with all the hours he’s put in he can’t believe his script is close to completion.

He picks it up now, this revision on yellow paper, holds it gingerly in his hand, stares at the title page:

16 mm: B & W “Lumiere Flat”

Revision 9

An Amerikan Pictures/H.A.G. release

Maisel/Quinsigamond

Little Girl Lost a screenplay by

Jakob Kinsky

dedicated to the memory of Felice Fabri, lover of film

“the image must be pure to the point of horror”

He turns the page to the first scene and reads once again

FADE IN

TIGHT SHOT – THE DOOMED MAN

FILLS SCREEN. CAMERA studies his panicked, sweat-drenched face, partly obscured in shadow. His eyes are blinking and darting from left to right and back again. His Adam’s apple heaves as he gasps for breath. Camera pulls back to

MEDIUM SHOT – EXT. TRAIN STATION – NIGHT RAIN

The Doomed Man is attempting to hide himself behind a large steel girder. He presses his back against the beam, steals furtive, rapid glances in either direction down the train yard. The collar of his coat is turned up against the wind and driving rain. In the distance, a chorus of barking dogs can be heard, the sound, once detected, getting progressively closer.

CLOSE UP – EYES OF THE DOOMED MAN, RAPIDLY BLINKING

MEDIUM SHOT – FREIGHT CAR ACROSS THE YARD FROM THE DOOMED MAN

The Doomed Man makes an awkward, tripping dash across the open yard, planting feet in deep, muddy puddles, finally reaching and boarding the ancient, rusted, wheelless freight car. He sits inside on the floor, huddles into himself, cups hands and blows on them, stares up, terrified, at the smashed-out windows of the train. Finally, he pulls from inside his coat a crumpled page of newsprint.

POV/THE DOOMED MAN

Camera tracks in on the newspaper. The headline reads:

BODY OF MISSING GIRL DISCOVERED Divers recover remains of Felice Fontaine

Accompanying photo shows sweet-faced, ten-year-old child.

TIGHT SHOT – FACE OF DOOMED MAN

as he reacts to newspaper. Face dissolves in weeping horror. He crumples newspaper in hands, brings it to face as if a handkerchief, and begins to cry into it.

A throat clears behind Jakob. He jumps, pulls the script into his chest. His cousin Felix is standing in the doorway wearing an annoyed grin.

Felix shakes his head and says, “We’re ready to start the meeting.”

Hermann Kinsky is seated at the head of the altar. Weltsch has left this month’s ledger before him but Kinsky hasn’t bothered to open it. Hermann doesn’t need a balance sheet to tell him when he’s been betrayed. He feels the Judas in his stomach, senses the transgression the old way, in the blood and the spleen.

Felix sits next to him on his left and Uncle Hermann knows his nephew is anxious to tell of this week’s exploits by the resident Kinsky muscle, a growing gang that’s come to be known as The Grey Roaches. Hermann doesn’t know why Felix has settled on this appellation, but there’s something about it he likes. He’s upset, however, by the fact that the Roaches take their marching orders from Felix rather than Jakob. It’s a bad sign to hang out to the neighborhood, a gesture that could easily be misinterpreted. And for this reason he refuses to pay too much attention to gang business. He lets Weltsch keep track of the pack’s extortion accounts and pharmaceutical dealings.

Jakob sits to his father’s right, dressed, as always, in his black bar mitzvah suit, though he’s outgrown it by a size or two. Look at the boy. It’s as if he’s uncomfortable with his own presence. As if each moment of his short life has been lived on the trap of a gallows. Why can’t he have some of his cousin’s confidence and bravado? How did two boys, raised together since Felix was orphaned in the July Sweep, end up so different? Kinsky blood running through both sets of veins, Hermann thinks, looking at his son’s profile, but they’re night and day.

What Hermann doesn’t realize is that through the open chapel door, Jakob can see across the hall into his bedroom and makeshift studio where he’s left the TV on, playing a tape of This Gun for Hire. The volume is turned off and as Alan Ladd mouths dialogue, Jakob can hear each line in his head.

Jakob would love to be Alan Ladd, or rather, Ladd’s character on the screen: Raven, the heartless, hired killer, the contract assassin who walks through a beautifully moody, 1942 black-and-white world in his trench coat, possessed by his legion of inner demons. When Laird Cregar asks Raven how it feels to kill someone, Jakob mouths the response, “It feels fine.”

Weltsch enters the chapel with Johnny Yew, one of Hermann’s new mid-level managers based down in Little Asia. Johnny runs the sex co-op on Alton Road that the Kinsky’s picked up in a very hostile takeover last May. Hermann brought in a Bulgarian contractor for the move and disappeared Yun-fat, the cooperative’s founder and Johnny’s former boss. Normally, that kind of brassy nerve would have triggered some all-out reprisal, but since Doc Cheng was eliminated last year, Little Asia has been up for a lot of quick grabs.

Weltsch sits down next to Felix without a word and Johnny Yew slides in next to Jakob, saying, “Good to see you, Mr. K,” across the table to Hermann.

“It is good to see you, Johnny,” Hermann says in a low and unusually warm voice, so friendly-sounding that Jakob looks away from the distant television screen for a second to study his father’s face.

“Gustav tells me you have something important to discuss,” Yew says, both nervous and excited. He’s dressed in a double-breasted shark-skin suit that looks a little like the one Felix is wearing.

Hermann gives a slow nod.

“I’ve asked you down today, Johnny, to discuss your future with the company.”

Jakob hears Yew swallow, feels his legs shift under the table.

“We’re extremely pleased with the job you’ve been doing for us down at the co-op. You’ve settled in nicely.”

Johnny’s head bobs. “It’s a wonderful position, Mr. Kinsky. I’ve worked hard and—”

Hermann waves a hand.

“We know you have, Johnny. Gustav and I never anticipated such returns. To be honest with you, there were doubts at the start.”

“Yes, sir. Doubts.”

“Huge doubts,” Felix pipes up and his uncle puts a hand on the nephew’s shoulder.

“You have to understand, Johnny, Little Asia is not our home base. We didn’t know quite what to expect from the locals. Yun-fat was a popular man.”

“Popular, yes, sir.”

“We envisioned some degree of backlash. Resentment against a foreign investor.”

“You cleaned the place up, Mr. K. It was a mess under Yun-fat. Merchants always fighting. A poor selection of goods. The quality of service shot up immediately.”

Hermann smiled. “You’re being too modest, Johnny,” he says. “We couldn’t have done it without you. You’re only as good as your people on the front line. You’ll need to remember that.”

“I will, Mr. K. I’ll remember.”

“Because when we send you out on the road, you can’t be calling back home every few minutes. You’ll have to develop some personnel skills. You’ll have to learn how to pick the cream of the crop.”

Johnny sits up in his chair. He looks from Weltsch to Felix, wonders if this is some kind of confusing joke.

“On the road?” he finally says.

Hermann pushes up from his seat, walks to Yew’s back, puts both hands on the manager’s shoulder and says, “Tell him, Gustav.”

In a bland and quiet voice, Weltsch says, “The co-op has proved so successful that we’ve decided to back a franchise. Ultimately we’d like to go national if arrangements can be made with the Families. For now we will initiate a pilot program. Keep things in the northeastern Chinatowns. You move in for the entire length of the start-up and training programs. I estimate a three-month stay in each town.”

“You’ll need your own bankroll,” Hermann says from behind. “We’ve already begun to contact the appropriate people about lines of credit. But you’ll have to seek out the workforce and the merchants. I’d be happier if they didn’t speak English. At least at the beginning.”

Johnny Yew can’t believe his ears. He made the jump to Kinsky only six months ago and now he’s about to become a trusted lieutenant. He’s about to become wealthy. He’s about to become a man of influence and respect and importance in the scheme of this Family. Johnny Yew, who escaped Hong Kong and a street hustler’s short life by selling his sister to a freighter captain, who spent his first years in Quinsigamond washing dishes and gutting fish around the clock for any noodle house that would have him, who doesn’t even have his first gang tattoo yet, this Johnny Yew is about to become the chief sales rep for the Kinsky Family. He’d like to dive into the Benchley tonight, find what’s left of Yun-fat’s body, pull it to the surface just to spit in the skeleton’s face and say, Fuck you and your tribalpreaching. I’m not your shop clerk anymore, asshole.

“All our projections say we can’t miss,” Hermann says. “The sexual appetite is something you can bank on. You’ll want to monitor which booths become our top grossers, see if this differs from city to city or if there’s a standard we can rely on.”

“We should be tracking the demographics from the start,” Weltsch adds.

“What’s to track?” Felix says, staring at Johnny. “Every hard-up chink in the country. There’s your customer base.”

“Felix!” Hermann barks and glares at the young man. “Forgive my nephew, Johnny. He has a weakness for crude humor that I can’t seem to curb. I don’t have to tell you that we harbor no exclusionary policies in this family. The coops will be open to all peoples.”

“Everyone’s money is green,” Johnny says.

Hermann nods. “You are a real find, Johnny Yew.”

He reaches into his pocket and slaps a wad of crisp new cash in front of Johnny.

“You go out and celebrate tonight, young man. You are on your way, as the saying goes.”

Hermann’s hand slides back into his suitcoat pocket.

“I know of the perfect club,” Hermann says. “You must take your young woman. Do you like music?”

Johnny just stares down at the money. The top bill features a picture of Grover Cleveland. Across the table, Felix stares up at the ceiling and laughs.

“Mr. Kinsky . . .” Johnny begins and immediately goes silent, unable to harness words powerful enough to express the enormity of his gratitude.

Herman pulls out a length of Schonborn wire, twines it in equal lengths around both of his meaty hands.

“Piano music, Johnny?” he asks. “Do your people like the piano music?”

“How can I thank—” Johnny starts, shaking his head at the immensity of his good fortune, beginning to turn around and smile on his benefactor.

It’s a single, fluid move, one honed into a reflex in the alleys off Kaprova back in Maisel. Nothing harsh or jerking, a simple arc over the Asian’s head and then the retraction backwards. The wire has already bitten its groove into Yew’s neck before Johnny realizes he’s choking.

“You steal from me,” Hermann explodes now. “You pathetic yellow cur.”

The piano wire passes in all the way to the trachea as Johnny’s eyes do the patented bulge and his hands flail upward furiously but ineffectually.

“You steal from Kinsky,” Hermann screams, his body an unmoving block of stone, the fat hands doing all the work, keeping the wire taut and ever-closing.

Blood is oozing down Johnny’s chest, soaking the tailored shirt under his jacket. The body begins to jerk in its seat as if the impetus toward death were electricity. Felix stares at the scene, tries not to blink, studies his uncle’s form, concentrates on the victim’s tortured upheaval.

Jakob stares out the door and across the hall where Veronica Lake is doing a combination magic act and song and dance routine.

But the sound track to Veronica’s performance is the horrible noise seeping from somewhere in Johnny Yew’s face, a muted scream grafted onto a nauseating gurgle, all accented by the furious scuffling of his loafers off the floor and the chair legs.

And then, finally, it is over.

Hermann unwraps the wire from his left hand, takes hold of Yew’s bristly buzz-cut and pulls Johnny’s head back, which opens the running gash fully from ear to ear. The smell of blood gulfs around the table and no one speaks.

Hermann leans forward until he’s inches above Johnny’s slack face. Then he spits into the left eye and Felix hears him mutter, “Never steal from Hermann Kinsky.”

Hermann turns and walks to the far side of the room until he’s standing before the stained-glass window, bathed in the transformed light of the moon. Weltsch and Felix nod to each other, get up simultaneously, take hold of the body, and begin to carry it from the room as if they were dispassionate medics who have seen too much of an endless war.

The silence in the chapel is awful.

Until Hermann turns away from the window and stares at the quivering back of his only son and whispers, “You see how easy it can be, Jakob?”

3

They get home, both a little drunk, Perry worse than Sylvia, though he drove. They try to be quiet helping each other up the back stairs to the apartment, hoping they don’t wake Mrs. Acker, the landlady, or trip over one of her cats. It’s not that Mrs. A would get angry. She’d just start in again, asking Perry about the legal ramifications of her refusal to return the grocery cart she appropriated from Blossfeldt Discount Mart. But they’ve got so many carts, she always ends up yelling with her hands at the sides of her head.

There are mornings Sylvia see Mrs. Acker from the living room window, coming back from the grocery store or Levi Park, and the landlady could be mistaken for some homeless streetperson. But Perry got talking to her one night and found Mrs. A has six figures planted in mutual funds that she tracks on a daily basis. She’s really a sweet-heart and she’s been kind to them, but Sylvia doesn’t want to talk with Mrs. Acker right now because Perry’s hands are everywhere. The back stairway has always had this effect on him, even when he hasn’t had a drink. When they first moved into the apartment, they could barely get in the door with their clothes on.

Sylvia remembers the first month they lived together, coming in from the movies, groping each other with more force and speed at each landing, and finally making love with her back pressed up against the door to their third-floor apartment, the bedroom six yards away, one of the calicos mewing around Perry’s ankles.

Now he just grabs her behind and tickles her and slides his hands inside the waist of her jeans. It’s more playful than passionate and that’s okay. She jiggles the key inside the old lock and Perry leans against her, rests his head against her back.

“The Counselor’s a lightweight,” she says, opening the door.

“The Counselor is getting old,” he says, following her in and locking up behind them.

Sylvia turns on the kitchen light and shrugs out of her blazer. Perry pulls off his tie and unfastens the top button of his shirt, looks at the stack of catalogs on the counter and asks, “Anything come in the mail?”

“Junk,” she says, going to the refrigerator for some ice water. They’re both going to want aspirin before bed, so she pours a full glass. She closes the door and turns around, leans against it and looks at him as he browses the new offerings from the book club. His eyes look heavy.

“You done good, partner,” she says.

He looks up from the mail, still hunched over the counter, leaning on his elbows.

“Partner in the corporate sense or the romantic one?”

“Both,” she says, extending the water to him. Then she adds, “Which one buys me the camera?”

He laughs, thinks and says, “The lover buys you the camera.” He comes upright and puts his hands on the small of his back and arches backward. Sylvia actually hears a cracking sound.

“But the attorney pays for it,” he says.

In ten minutes, Perry falls into one of his heavy-breathing wine-comas. Sylvia knows that when she makes the bed in the morning he’ll have drooled on the pillowcase.

The wine seems to be having the opposite effect on her lately. They’ve started buying it by the caseload, direct delivery by an import company out of Boston. Perry’s delighted and kind of proud of the enormous discount they’re getting. But having that much wine in the house all the time encourages you to kill a bottle with every dinner. For a while there they were crazy for these heavy reds and then, somehow, Sylvia got the idea that red wine can lead to edginess and paranoia. She dipped into a couple of reference books to back herself up, but couldn’t find this theory confirmed in print. Once it was in her head, though, it was as good as true, so their next purchase was twelve bottles of a four-year-old French Chardonnay. She fell in love and Perry called the importer and loaded in three more cases.

They’ve made this small makeshift storage rack down in the cellar, around the corner from where Sylvia has set up the darkroom. With two of her favorite pastimes situated there, the basement has become a dank retreat for her. She’s drawn to it more and more often. She’s not content on the couch in the living room anymore, labeling Polaroids while Perry dozes on the couch with the television tuned to a sports network. She finds herself thinking Why am I listening to the sound of kickboxing from Reno, Nevada, when Icould be playing with the enlarger, sipping a glass of ’88white burgundy.

She doesn’t want to give the impression of dissatisfaction. Perry has pulled her life together for her. They’ve known each other almost three years now, lived together for over a year, and before Perry there was no direction. After her mother died, Sylvia quit her job at the front desk of the Baron. She’d had one night too many of taking smut from the mouths of fifty-year-old bellhops. She moved into her mother’s apartment, closed the drapes and became a kind of secular nun in the religion of grief and confusion.

Her father had died when her mother was seven months pregnant with Sylvia. Ma had never had a lot of money, but what she left behind was burned through by the end of that year. Because she couldn’t bring herself to move any belongings out of her old apartment, Sylvia paid rent and utilities on both places. From June through Christmas, she stayed on Ma’s couch, like she was in grammar school again and had come down with the flu and was watching old I Love Lucy reruns on the TV and Ma would be bringing in a tray of toast and tea before the next commercial.

She read a couple of the paperbacks she’d found jammed in the drum table by the front window, big fat novels that usually chronicled some family of immigrants who toughed it out through unbearable hardships to make good in America. But mostly she watched dozens of old forties movies on some all-night cable channel. After a while they all seemed to star Rita Hayworth.

While she was growing up, Sylvia and her mother shared a consuming passion for movies. It never felt as if her mother had actively instilled this love in any way. It was more like she’d passed on a rare gene, that Sylvia picked up the obsession in utero, came into the world already addicted to film. When she recalls the nights of her childhood, she thinks of sitting in her mother’s lap, in an overstuffed easy chair, both of them staring at the blue-white beam from the RCA watching Tales of Manhattan or You’ll Never Get Rich. As she entered adolescence, Sylvia’s devotion increased like a religious vocation or an eating disorder. And her mother encouraged the calling. They went to every new release that opened, then came home and pushed the TV into the bedroom and fell asleep watching the classics.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that when her mother died Sylvia’s life boiled down to watching old films and sleeping. She slept about fourteen hours a day. Always in her clothes. And always on the couch.

Twice a week, she’d force herself outside for food and supplies. She’d walk down to the corner at two in the morning and buy everything at the all-night convenience store. She didn’t care that she was paying double the price for things she could have gotten six hours later at the supermarket. She considered the cost part of the deal, the charge for the privilege of shopping while everyone else was asleep.

When Perry first heard the story of her life as a hermit, his immediate response was, “Didn’t anyone come looking for you? No friends? No relatives?”

He had a hard time believing that the answer was simply “No.” Sylvia knew nothing about her father’s family or even if there was one. Her mother had one older brother who’d died in the Korean War. Sylvia had gone to college out in the western part of the state and hadn’t kept in touch with any childhood friends she might have had.

She remembers Perry shaking his head as she told him this. His reaction got her slightly angry. She said, “These are the facts. I’m not making this up. People have lives like this.”

The day after Christmas, as she sat on the couch and opened the checkbook to pay some bills, she realized she had no money. She closed the checkbook and stood up, and pushed it in under one of the sofa cushions. Then she put on Ma’s winter coat and went outside and started to walk. She wasn’t used to the sun and with the glare off the snow, she was half-blind for the first block. The freezing air was kind of painful going into her lungs and yet she didn’t want to go back inside. She wanted just to keep moving, to keep her legs in motion. She didn’t care about direction or destination. She just wanted to be walking and breathing. She didn’t want to think beyond those two actions.

About three miles from Ma’s apartment was a small shopping plaza, an old fifties kind of thing, a strip of a dozen linked stores all housed in a large one-story rectangle of a structure with a flat roof and dingy metal canopy that hung out over the sidewalk. There was a five-and-ten and a drug store, a liquor store, a soft-serve ice cream shop, and a shoe repair place. More than half the shops were empty and the plate glass windows were whited out with what looked like soap. Sylvia stood and stared at the soaped windows and wondered why they did that. Didn’t that just call attention to the demise of the business and contribute to the seedy feeling of the place in general? It drove her kind of crazy that she couldn’t come up with a single decent reason for whitewashing the window of an empty storefront.