Marisha Pessl - Night Film

There were more than two hundred names, alphabetized according to date, complete with calls made from the hotel phone. I handed him the cash, which he counted in plain sight. Apparently, this Starbucks was used to underworld transactions, because the employees behind the counter who’d witnessed us skulking in the window all day dully carried on taking orders.

“Quad venti soy latte!”

Masato stuck the envelope into his shoulder bag and left without a word, donning his headphones and vanishing into the subway.

The three of us ordered coffees, sat down at a table in the back corner, and started combing through the names, checking them against the Oubliette membership.

We’d been doing this for more than an hour, taking turns reading aloud, when Nora excitedly jerked forward in her seat, eyes wide.

“How do you spell that? The last name you just said?”

“Villarde,” Hopper repeated. “V–I-L–L-A-R-D-E.”

“It’s here, ” she whispered in amazement, holding out the paper.

I stared down at the name on the Oubliette list.

Hugo Gregor Villarde III.

On the Waldorf list, he was Hugo Villarde.

Villarde was a guest in room 3010 for one night on October the first. He made no phone calls. His home address was in Spanish Harlem.

175 East 104th Street.

I Googled the name on my BlackBerry.

Not a single result came up.

“ That’s the scariest result of all,” said Nora.

“Try Googling his address,” said Hopper.

A business listing came up, a shop called The Broken Door. It had no website, only a bare-bones listing on Yelp.com, which described it as a shop for “discerning connoisseurs of oddity antiques.”

“Open Thursday and Friday, four to six,” Nora read over my shoulder. “Those are weird hours.”

“We’ll go there tomorrow when it opens,” I said.

Staring down at the single name on both pages, I felt a wave of exhilaration and relief. At long last, a decent break —a minute crack to wedge my fingers into to pry the whole thing wide open: the man Ashley had been searching for in the days before she died.

“You have nothing to worry about,” Harold explained, stopping on the tenth-floor landing to wipe his bald forehead, drenched with sweat, before continuing up the flight behind us. “Her dealer came by at eight tonight so she’s deep in Candy Land.”

“Does she stay conked out the whole night?” Nora asked him.

“If you keep quiet. Coupla months ago we sent up a workman to do some repairs. She sat up in bed and started talking to him like he was her ex-husband. Accused the poor guy of screwing around. All he wanted to do was replace a radiator valve. But she’s weak and needs a wheelchair to move even a few feet, so don’t worry about her getting physical.”

I stopped to make sure he was joking, but he was only wheezing heavily as he cleared the last step onto the eleventh-floor landing, catching up to us. He dug in his pants pockets for the keys and stepped toward one of two white doors marked 1102.

“If you need me for an emergency, there’s an intercom in the kitchen.”

“What kind of emergency?” I asked.

“Just be careful. Try not to touch anything. She hates her things moved.” He twisted the knob, gently opening the door, but it was locked on the inside with a chain.

“She must be extra-paranoid tonight,” he muttered, slipping his hand through and nimbly sliding the chain loose. “Lock the door from inside when you leave.” He took off back down the stairs. “Good luck to you.”

The three of us exchanged bewildered glances.

“I feel sorry for her,” said Nora. “Locked up in here.”

The only sound was the neon sizzle of the bulb in the stairwell, the steady thuds of Harold’s footsteps retreating below.

We slipped inside, entering a dim laundry room reeking of body odor and baby powder. I switched on the overhead light. Mountains of silk robes and pajamas were piled everywhere, on top of the washing machine, spilling out of laundry baskets, heaped on the floor. One looked like something worn by the King of Siam, billowing sleeves, a red sash. I cracked the door opposite, staring into a long, dark hall.

It was silent. The only light came from an open doorway at the very end, Marlowe’s bedroom, according to Harold’s instructions.

“She must sleep with her lights on,” whispered Nora, beside me.

“We’ll check in on her,” I said. “Then take a look around.”

We moved into the hall, the walls covered, salon style, with framed photos. There was just enough light to make them out: Marlowe reclining poolside surrounded by palm trees, a wide-brimmed black hat on her head; Marlowe at the premiere of The Godfather II with Pacino on her arm; wearing an eighties wedding dress (puffed sleeves like flotation devices), smiling up at a nondescript groom who looked rather shell-shocked to be marrying such a knockout. It had to be the veterinarian she’d married after Cordova. Beckman had just one thing to say about him: “A man so far out of his league he suffered from altitude sickness.” I looked, but there was no evident shot of Cordova or her time at The Peak. After a photo of Marlowe on the film set of Lovers and Other Strangers sitting in Gig Young’s lap, exactly midway down the hall was the centerpiece: a giant black-and-white print of her glorious profile, her head tipped back, soaked in shadows and light. Her beauty was astounding, so high-decibel it blew out lenses and lightbulbs, made the mind short-circuit and stutter impossible. A signature graced the corner: Cecil Beaton, 1979 .

We passed three dark open doorways, though I couldn’t see anything. The curtains had to be pulled.

Outside Marlowe’s bedroom, we stopped, stunned by the vision in front of us. Never before had I seen such decayed tropical splendor.

It looked like a dried-up lagoon, a flamingo habitat for a zoo that had gone bankrupt years ago. Two giant fake palms dolefully touched the ceiling. Black mold spangled the faded pink floral wallpaper, giving the room a five-o’clock shadow. There was a strong stench of Glade air freshener on top of mildew on top of chlorine from a motel pool. A tiny brass lamp drenched rose light all over antique wooden dressers and end tables carved and gilded. Porcelain figurines were sprinkled everywhere — drummer boys and pugs and swans with chipped beaks. Vases bulged with fake flowers that made no attempt to look real, the leaves shiny and plastic, the giant blooms colored like synthetic candy. Dominating the far side of the room, floating there like an old docked ferry, was a baroque king-size bed.

Right in the center, submerged under ripples of pink satin sheets, was a tiny curled-up form.

Marlowe Hughes. The last flamingo.

She was so small and bony, it was almost inconceivable there was actually a woman under there — certainly not the one Life magazine had proclaimed “a swimming pool in the Gobi.” Spiky tufts of platinum-blond hair sprouted out of the sheets like dune grass.

I tiptoed inside, Hopper behind me, our footsteps silenced by the carpet, which looked to have once been pale cream, now browned in deeply treaded pathways around the room. I stepped over to the bedside table on the left, littered with orange prescription bottles; a glass bottle filled with a strange, neon yellow liquid; an ashtray filled with cigarette butts, many smudged with maroon lipstick. A red fire extinguisher stood beside the bed. In case she accidentally incinerated herself.

Her face was entirely concealed under the sheet. There was something so vulnerable about that immobile, deflated mound, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt about what we were doing.