She stared at the school badge, faded with age, pinched between his fingers. A white fleur-de-lis inside an oval shield with a red and blue crown at the centre. She thought of the name Mickey Fitzwilliam again. Now the memory had a face attached to it, that of a sad, lonely, unexceptional child, one who bragged constantly of his famous father yet always refused to name him.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
His head lolled around his shoulders, his eyes rolled in their sockets, a bad comic actor’s “come again?” routine.
“Is that it? ‘I’m so sorry.’ Me, the poor little bastard you all laughed at, teased, and fucked with. No dad. No money. Just a drunk for a mom and a …”
She could hear it before he even spoke, rattling around her head from across the years.
“… a st-st-st-st-st-stutter …”
Mickey Fitzwilliam, who so wanted to be the same as the rest of them and never could. She’d made sure of that.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“You will be. You’ve got to be. Really sorry, Maggie. Not acting sorry. I know the difference. I had a director for an old man, and in between times when he was pretending I didn’t exist, I got to watch him and learn. Got to know how he worked. Got to learn your tricks over the years. Can’t fool Roberto Tonti’s kid now, can you? Not some two-bit actress who got where she is by handing out a quick fuck on the casting couch to any wrinkled old producer who demanded one.”
“That is not true!” she screamed.
He sat there, smiling, unmoved. “No. It’s not true. So what really got you where you are, Maggie? Do you remember?”
She’d heard that question a million times, from a million different showbiz hacks.
“A little luck,” she said automatically. “A little bit of talent.”
Mickey Fitzwilliam gazed at her, then shook his head. “You’ve got to remember better than that, Maggie.”
He reached down beneath the foot of the bed and his hands came back up with a knife in them. The blade was long and clean and shiny.
“It’s what the fuck-you-kill-you conundrum hangs on.”
6
It was Saturday morning, shoppers’ hell. The traffic started bad and got worse. He was still ten minutes from the theatre when it finally ground to a halt. Up ahead, through the snarl of cars, he heard the wail of a siren and his heart fell. Then a couple of very shiny red fire engines battled their way into the angry mass of stalled machines blocking the breadth of Chestnut. Costa pulled the Dodge over to the side of the road and climbed out.
People were coming out of stores and offices to stand in the street to gawk. There was a cop there, in uniform, looking bored.
Costa caught his attention.
“Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“Fire down at Fort Mason. Stupid contractors lousing up or something. Or maybe the insurance. That place always was bad news.”
A fire. Not an emergency call to the little theatre further down the road on Chestnut. Maybe he had still had time.
“Is the street going to be blocked for long?”
The cop grimaced. “Sadly, my psychic powers just fail me there, sir. You can’t dump your vehicle like that, by the way. You’ll have to wait for this train wreck to clear just like everyone else.”
He’d put on Gerald Kelly’s leather shoulder holster. The black handgun sat snug against his chest. If this cop had been any good, he’d have seen it already.
“Thank you, Officer,” Costa said meekly, and went back to sit behind the wheel of the Dodge.
When the stocky blue uniform crossed the road, wending his way through the choked cars and buses, he climbed out again, looked down the street, past the idle bystanders clustered on the sidewalk. In the distance, crowds of shoppers milled on the sidewalk outside the stores, wandering into the road, darting in between stalled cars the way Romans did in the Corso on a Saturday afternoon.
He took one look at them, saw the cop was returning, looking angrily at Catherine Bianchi’s abandoned Dodge, and then began to move, falling into a steady pace as he wound through the growing throng of bodies, on into the Marina.
7
She did remember. It was all there. Just hidden, waiting to be let out into the light of day like an old poltergeist freed from the basement.
It must have been September. She could still feel the heat. Seventh-grade boys and girls, out on a trip to Crissy Field, doing the things schoolkids did. Working a little. Playing a little. Teasing …
Maggie Flavier could still picture herself on that bright distant morning, thin as a rake but tall for her age and with a look about her that turned men’s heads. She tried not to notice. She felt alone and a little unhappy in San Francisco. This was her mother’s idea, not hers. To flee Paris and an estranged father, to try to find some new life halfway across the world in a city where they knew no one, and had, as far as the young Maggie could see, no clear idea of what the future might bring.
She’d danced at the stage school in France, and men looked then. Her mother had watched and taken note.
They were so kind in the church school on Pine Street. They smiled a lot and listened to her. They didn’t mind she hated trigonometry and algebra and preferred to dress up and play on the stage instead, always inventing something, stories, characters, voices, situations, imaginary people she created to fill the void inside.
These small and seemingly useless talents mattered, her mother told her. Because of the auditions. She spoke the word as if it possessed some magical power. As if it could save them. The young Maggie had no idea how. All she understood was that she possessed a burning, unquenchable need to be noticed, to be applauded. By her peers. By her mother, more than anything.
The notes had been coming for weeks, always unsigned, always written in a crude childish hand on cheap school notebook paper. They were, young Maggie thought, beautiful in a simple, babyish way. Flowery language. Sometimes bad French. Sometimes, she thought, better Italian, which she recognised from lessons in Paris. They were never coarse or dirty, like some she’d received, and some the other girls sent from time to time. All they spoke of, carefully, indirectly, was love. As if there were an emotion somewhere waiting for her to discover it, like a hidden Easter egg, a secret buried in the ground. Something ethereal, something holy, distinct from the hard, cold physical reality of the life she knew. She didn’t really understand the words or the poetry, some of it so old she found the verses unreadable. So she threw them away mostly, until the last.
Had this unseen admirer written, simply, Margot Flavier, je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime, then, perhaps, she would have tried to understand. But nothing was that clear and sometimes the language was so florid, so odd, she thought it was a joke. Sometimes it scared her a little. She was young, she was exiled in a foreign land, with a strange and unhappy mother who wished to push her into a career about which she felt unsure, not that her doubts mattered for one moment.
Naturally, she told the girls. Barbara Ronson. Louise Gostelow. Susan Shanks. The trio who ran the class.
Naturally, when the final note arrived, they had an idea.
That last message came the day after she’d gone to the first successful audition of her life, taking time off school for the short flight to L.A. with her mother, spending hours reading the scripts, trying to make her fast-improving English bad again for a group of men and women who seemed to demand that. Afterwards, when they waited at LAX for the flight home, her mother had made a call on a public phone. When she returned, her face glowed with a happiness Maggie had never seen there before. Maggie had the part. Françoise in L’Amour L.A. A life mapped out in a single day, not that she knew that then, not that she felt anything much at all, except pleasure that this had produced joy in her mother.