Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

ONE

"Your wife did not want to look around the Fortress any further, Mister Zeffer?" Father Sandru said, seeing that on the second day the middle-aged man with the handsome, sad face had come alone.

"The lady is not my wife," Zeffer explained.

'Ah . . ." the monk replied, the tone of commiseration in his voice indicating that he was far from indifferent to Katya's charms. 'A pity for you, yes?"

"Yes," Zeffer admitted, with some discomfort.

"She's a very beautiful woman."

The monk studied Zeffer's face as he spoke, but having said what he'd said, Zeffer was unwilling to play the confessee any further.

"I'm her manager," he explained. "That's all there is between us."

Father Sandru, however, was not willing to let the issue go just yet. "After the two of you departed yesterday," he said, his English colored by his native Romanian, "one of the brothers remarked that she was the most lovely woman he had ever seen ..." he hesitated before committing to the rest of the sentence ". . . in the flesh."

"Her name's Katya, by the way," Zeffer said.

"Yes, yes, I know," said the Father, his fingers combing the knotted gray-white of his beard as he stood assessing Zeffer.

The two men were a study in contrasts. Sandru ruddy-faced and rotund in his dusty brown habit, Zeffer slimly elegant in his pale linen suit.

"She is a movie star, yes?"

"You saw one of her films?"

Sandru grimaced, displaying a poorly-kept array of teeth. "No, no," he said. "I do not see these things. At least not often. But there is a little cinema in Ravbac, and some of the younger brothers go down there quite regularly. They are great fans of Chaplin, of course. And there's a . . . vamp ... is that the word?"

"Yes," Zeffer replied, somewhat amused by this conversation. "Vamp's the word."

"Called Theda Bara."

"Oh, yes. We know Theda."

In that year—which was 1920—everybody knew Theda Bara. She had one of the most famous faces in the world. As, of course, did Katya. Both were famous; their fame tinged with a delicious hint of decadence.

"I must go with one of the brothers when they next go to see her," Father Sandru said.

"I wonder if you entirely understand what kind of woman Theda Bara portrays?" Zeffer replied.

Sandru raised a thicketed eyebrow. "I am not born yesterday, Mister Zeffer. The Bible has its share of these women, these vamps. They're whores, yes; women of Babylon? Men are drawn to them only to be destroyed by them?"

Zeffer laughed at the directness of Sandru's description. "I suppose that's about right," he said.

"And in real life?" Sandru said.

"In real life Theda Bara's name is Theodesia Goodman. She was born in Ohio."

"But is she a destroyer of men?"

"In real life? No, I doubt it. I'm sure she harms a few egos now and again, but that's about the worst of it."

Father Sandru looked mildly disappointed. "I shall tell the brothers what you told me," he said. "They'll be very interested. Well then... shall I take you inside?"

Willem Matthias Zeffer was a cultured man. He had lived in Paris, Rome, London and briefly in Cairo in his forty-three years; and had promised himself that he would leave Los Angeles—where there was neither art nor the ambition to make art—as soon as the public tired of lionizing Katya, and she tired of rejecting his offer of marriage. They would wed, and come back to Europe; find a house with some real history on its bones, instead of the fake Spanish mansion her fortune had allowed her to have built in one of the Hollywood canyons.

Until then, he would have to find aesthetic comfort in the objets d'art he purchased on their trips abroad: the furniture, the tapestries, the statuary. They would suffice, until they could find a chateau in the Loire, or perhaps a Georgian house in London; somewhere the cheap theatrics of Hollywood wouldn't curdle his blood.

"You like Romania?" the Father asked as he unlocked the great oak door that lay at the bottom of the stairs.

"Yes, of course," Zeffer replied.

"Please do not feel you have to sin on my account," Sandru said, with a sideways glance.

"Sin?"

"Lying is a sin, Mister Zeffer. Perhaps it's just a little one, but it's a sin nevertheless."

Oh Lord, Zeffer thought; how far I've slipped from the simple proprieties! Back in Los Angeles he sinned as a matter of course; every day, every hour. The life he and Katya lived was built on a thousand stupid little lies.

But he wasn't in Hollywood now. So why lie? "You're right. I don't like this country very much at all. I'm here because Katya wanted to come. Her mother and father—I'm sorry, her stepfather—live in the village."

"Yes. This I know. The mother is not a good woman."

"You're her priest?"

"No. We brothers do not minister to the people. The Order of Saint Teodor exists only to keep its eyes on the Fortress." He pushed the door open. A dank smell exuded from the darkness ahead of them.

"Excuse me for asking," Zeffer said. "But it was my understanding from yesterday that apart from you and your brothers, there's nobody here."

"Yes, this is true. Nobody here, except the brothers."

"So what are you keeping your eyes on?"

Sandru smiled thinly. "I will show you," he said. "As much as you wish to see."

He switched on a light, which illuminated ten yards of corridor. A large tapestry hung along the wall, the image upon it so gray with age and dust as to be virtually beyond interpretation.

The Father proceeded down the corridor, turning on another light as he did so. "I was hoping I might be able to persuade you to make a purchase," he said.

"Of what?" Zeffer said.

Zeffer wasn't encouraged by what he'd seen so far. A few of the pieces of furniture he'd spotted yesterday had a measure of rustic charm, but nothing he could imagine buying.

"I didn't realize you were selling the contents of the Fortress."

Sandru made a little groan. "Ah . . . I'm afraid to say we must sell in order to eat. And that being the case, I would prefer that the finer things went to someone who will take care of them, such as yourself."

Sandru walked on ahead a little way, turning on a third light and then a fourth. This level of the Fortress, Zeffer was beginning to think, was bigger than the floor above. Corridors ran off in all directions.

"But before I begin to show you," Sandru said, "you must tell me—are you in a buying mood?"

Zeffer smiled. "Father, I'm an American. I'm always in a buying mood."

Sandru had given Katya and Zeffer a history of the Fortress the previous day; though as Zeffer remembered it there was much in the account that had sounded bogus. The Order of Saint Teodor, Zeffer had decided, had something to hide. Sandru had talked about the Fortress as a place steeped in secrets; but nothing particularly bloody. There had been no battles fought there, he claimed, nor had its keep ever held prisoners, nor its courtyard witnessed atrocity or execution. Katya, in her usual forthright manner, had said that she didn't believe this to be true.

"When I was a little girl there were all kinds of stories about this place," she said. "I heard horrible things were done here. That it was human blood in the mortar between the stones. The blood of children."

"I'm sure you must have been mistaken," the Father had said.

"Absolutely not. The Devil's wife lived in this fortress. Lilith, they called her. And she sent the Duke away on a hunt. And he never came back."

Sandru laughed; and if it was a performance, then it was an exceptionally good one. "Who told you these tales?" he said.

"My mother."

"Ah." Sandru had shaken his head. "And I'm sure she wanted you in bed, hushed and asleep, before the Devil came to cut off your head." Katya had made no reply to this. "There are still such stories, told to children. Of course. Always stories. People invent tales. But believe me, this is not an unholy place. The brothers would not be here if it was."

Despite Sandru's plausibility, there'd still been something about all of this that had made Zeffer suspicious; and a little curious. Hence his return visit. If what the Father was saying was a lie (a sin, by his own definition), then what purpose was it serving? What was the man protecting? Certainly not a few rooms filled with filthy tapestries, or some crudely carved furniture. Was there something here in the Fortress that deserved a closer look? And if so, how did he get the Father to admit to it?

The best route, he'd already decided, was fiscal. If Sandru was to be persuaded to reveal his true treasures, it would be through the scent of hard cash in his nostrils. The fact that Sandru had raised the subject of buying and selling made the matter easier to broach.

"I do know Katya would love to have something from her homeland to take back to Hollywood," he said. "She's built a huge house, so we have plenty of room."

"Oh, yes?"

"And of course, she has the money."

This was naked, he knew, but in his experience of such things subtlety seldom played well. Which point was instantly proved.

"How much are we talking about?" the Father asked mildly.

"Katya Lupi is one of the best-paid actresses in Hollywood. And I am authorized to buy whatever I think might please her."

"Then let me ask you: what pleases her?"

"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 Fagaras Mountains—their bare lower slopes as gray as the earth, their heights dusted with snow. God knew what the winters were like in this 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 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.

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 compliant.

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.

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 mercenary 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 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.

"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.