“Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”
His mouth felt dry. His head was spinning. Maggie Flavier had become a different woman. Her hair was fuller, longer, and had lost its chestnut hue. It was no longer an expensive, straggly impersonation of an English page boy’s. Through some process he could not begin to comprehend, it had become a pure golden shade of yellow, and had straightened into a serious, slightly old-fashioned cut falling down to her shoulders. She was changed. No, he corrected himself. She was transformed, almost into someone else altogether.
What took his breath away were the memories, the connections. Maggie’s hair vividly resembled that of Emily in the photograph in his wallet the actress had briefly seen in the Cinema dei Piccoli. The similarity both shocked and fascinated him. She didn’t look like his late wife. Her eyes were a different colour, her neck more slender, her skin a subtle shade darker, and her face possessed a more classical, timeless beauty. All the same …
“I hate it,” Maggie said, reading his mind. “But I have no choice. I’m testing for some new part. Some 1950s mystery. I’m a waitress in a diner.”
“You look beautiful,” he said, without thinking.
She blushed, and seemed even younger. “Please …”
“No,” he said, laughing, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. It was just such a … surprise. How do you do this? Where does it come from?”
“Fake,” she replied, and put one hand up to her long, soft locks, then tugged out a length with her fingers. “Everything’s fake that’s not flesh and blood, and there may come a time when I can’t even say that.”
The familiarity between them was strange, and had been from the start. It was as if there had never been a point of introduction, a border that was crossed between their being strangers and their being … friends.
“Now look what you’ve made me do,” she complained, holding up the hank of golden hair. “I can’t put it back myself. Nic?”
She turned. He found himself staring at the back of her neck, which bore the lightest olive tan, so dissimilar to the pale northern skin of Emily. They weren’t alike. Apart from the single physical resemblance, and the same directness and utter lack of self-consciousness.
He took the bunch of hair and found some way to pin it back in place. His hands shook.
She noticed but didn’t mention it.
“I can show you,” Maggie said, turning to face him.
“Show me what?”
“Where it comes from. If you like.” She moved closer and whispered, “If we can shake off the goons. I want to get away from this place. I need to. I feel like a dummy in a shop window. Please …”
She turned to the man working behind the counter of the catering van and asked, “Do you have any fruit?”
It took a moment but from somewhere a shiny red apple appeared. She took it, rubbing the skin against her sweater, and made as if to eat, then stopped.
“Food is one of life’s great pleasures,” Maggie said, her green eyes holding Costa. She held up the apple. “I’ll eat this on the way. So? Do you want to see a secret or not?”
5
Hankenfrank — somehow she thought of them as a single entity — led her across Chestnut, past the fire station — where a few gruff words were exchanged with the poor young officer who was unlucky enough to be cleaning the engine — then down the street towards the stores a few blocks away. As they walked, Teresa saw a building rise in her vision ahead and knew somehow that this had to be their destination.
An old and probably defunct neon sign on the side read Marina Odeon. It was attached to a grimy bell tower that rose three storeys above the low line of houses and shops on the street. Like the building itself, the tower was clad in rough white adobe plaster.
It was a cinema. More than that, it was somehow familiar, in a way that was nagging her, exactly as the name of Carlotta Valdes had.
The two men in identical brown clothing got to the entrance. Hank hammered on the shuttered ticket booth. Frank stood stock-still and yelled, “Anyone home?”
She caught up with them.
“What do you mean, is there anyone at home?” she demanded. “The place is derelict.”
“Derelict?” Hank objected vociferously. “Derelict? This is San Francisco. Dereliction is a trait of character, not a notice of death. This old Odeon’s just a little careworn. That’s all.”
“It’s a dump,” Frank added. “The young guy who’s got it inherited the thing from his uncle or something. He opens it up when he feels like, so he can show ancient movies to ancient people like us. Good old movies, in wide-screen Technicolor, with just a couple of speakers for sound, not some goddamned rock band’s racket machine like you get in the new theatres.”
“Is the popcorn good?” she asked.
“We are not children,” Hank pronounced, folding his strong arms. “But yes. It is. Do you want to see Carlotta Valdes or not?”
“I do! I do! And I want to know about this place. I’ve seen it before.”
Frank shook his head. His walrus moustache bristled with the pride of superior knowledge.
“No, you haven’t. You just think you have. In spite of appearances, this is not San Juan Bautista. That’s ninety miles south, and you won’t find the bell tower there either. That was a lie as well. We’re dealing with the movies, Teresa. Remember? Everything worthwhile usually turns out to be an invention. You don’t sit in those hard, bald seats for the truth.”
She stared at the stumpy white tower. It was all coming back. An old, old film, one she’d loved when she was a teenager, juggling dreams of getting a job in Cinecittà, following in the footsteps of the greats: Fellini, Bertolucci, Pasolini. Even Roberto Tonti, for one brief teenage summer spent spellbound by a horror flick mired in gore.
The title of the movie eluded her but she could picture it now and it was here. In San Francisco, an earlier incarnation of the city but one still recognisable. Some sights — the Palace of Fine Arts, the city streets, the view towards Fort Point and the Golden Gate Bridge — were scarcely changed. The colours were the same: the bright, sharp sun, piercing, relentless.
The name danced in the shadows at the back of her head.
“There’s no one around,” Frank announced. “They won’t mind if we walk around the back. Hell, if they didn’t want visitors, they wouldn’t have something like that in the garden, now would they?”
There was a particular colour that mattered, Teresa recalled, in a way she never quite understood. It was a dark yet vivid green, the colour of a vehicle, and of a woman’s flowing, elegant evening dress, all somehow iconic of a lost and deadly desire.
“Garden?”
They were already pushing their way through a battered wooden gate by the tower side of the cinema. She looked up and got a momentary fearful ache in her stomach. That was a memory, too. Of a man staring down from just such a campanile as this, his face creased in misery, as if all the cares and tragedies in the history of the world had fallen on his shoulders at that moment.
“Here it is,” one of the two brothers — she couldn’t see which — was shouting. “There’s a donation box. We could put something in it.”
Even for her, a Roman pathologist well used to stepping off the straight and narrow, this seemed strange. To be following two complete strangers, eccentric old firemen, well read, self-educated probably, into an unkempt backyard — it was no garden, not in her judgment — of an odd little rotting cinema in a lazy, sunny suburb of San Francisco called the Marina.
“Just like I remembered,” Frank said. She recognised his voice this time. It was a little higher, exactly half a tone. Mirror twins. Identical in most ways. Differently similar in others.