City of Lost Girls Read online

  City of Lost Girls

  Declan Hughes

  To Diarmuid O’Hegarty

  He hadn’t even wanted to kill the third girl.

  No, that wasn’t right, God forbid he should sound like some kind of seething maniac, he hadn’t even wanted to kill the first girl. It had just happened. He knows this is a notoriously inadequate, worse, a barely articulate explanation, but there it is. Not that it hadn’t come unprompted. Oh no, there had been a perfectly good reason for killing the first one. Or at least, he thought so at the time. And no, he hadn’t always wondered what it would feel like, or whether he’d be capable of killing if it ever came to it; he hadn’t felt an overwhelming sense of triumph either, or freedom or euphoria or whatever it was a genuine psychopath supposedly craved by his actions; at the time, he hadn’t felt anything much beyond panic, then sadness and guilt, tinged with relief that he had overcome the practical obstacle that had suddenly confronted him. It was only later…

  He tried to explain it to the second of the Point Dume girls, who he thought exhibited an intelligence and an empathy the others had lacked. He had been mistaken in that, but he still feels it was a good analogy, even if it was unlikely in the extreme that he’d ever set it out for anyone again. Imagine, he told her as they grazed on buffalo wings and drank the semisparkling Prosecco he liked, Prosecco dei Colli Trevigiani, the one in the blue bottle, imagine you awoke to the the sound of an invading army on the streets of your city. By lunchtime, they are in control. By nightfall, the knocking on the doors has begun. Suddenly the world has changed. Resistance would amount to suicide. What do you do? Because through sheer good fortune (still the primary, perhaps the sole determinant of success in life) they don’t want you, they want the blacks, or the Jews, or the bankers. (He hadn’t said bankers back then, but he’d say it now, of course, and he’d get a laugh. Or at least, he imagines he would. He certainly would be entitled to a laugh. But he’d rarely had much success in making girls laugh. In a way, that is part of the problem.) So why not tell the soldiers what they want to know? The Jews are hiding in the attic or in the cellar, they have two dogs you’ll need to poison or shoot, the children are in the shed at the bottom of the garden, thank you and good night, Officer.

  Because, for all our talk of merit and distinction and hard work rewarded, life is measured out in split-second moments when it could go either way—did anyone see you push the other kid off the swing? Did your wife smell your girlfriend’s perfume on you? Did your boss see you out for lunch on the day you called in sick? And of course, it’s not that these moments won’t arise, it’s how you conduct yourself when they do that counts. Because we call it good fortune, or luck, or grace—he calls it grace, God’s grace, if truth be told, yes, the grace of God, old God Himself, either you believe or you don’t and not a lot you can do about it either way—but you have a role to play in that luck, that grace, how it impacts, how it intervenes in your day-to-day, how it makes your fortune, your future, your fate. So in that moment, you have to lie, to prevail, to persuade—the other kid pushed you, too, the perfume was your sister’s, the lunch was with your oncologist, anything that works. The Jews are in the attic, and here I am, finishing my dinner, free.

  And each time you do it, you’re telescoped back through all the other times you’ve done something like it, right back to the first one, the first desperate scrape, the first time you mouthed the prayer: O God, please God, help me, if You only get me out of this, I promise I’ll never, never, never again…

  He has lost track of how many times he has said that prayer. He said it the very first time, of course, just as he said it when the second Point Dume girl was dying. He found it decreased his anxiety levels and helped to leaven the extent of his rage. The first time was the most unexpected, not because it was without precedent—he had had difficulties with girls before—but because of the way he chose to react. It was simple and, he conceded, sordid, in its way. The girl—he called them girls but they were always well into their twenties, he had no interest of any kind in children, never had, even when he had been a child himself—the girl had been blond, greasy cheeks and brow shining through streaky makeup, denim cutoffs, low-cut top, eyes bloodshot, pink nail varnish chipped, red mouth wide and slack and glistening, she’d heard he worked in the industry and that was it, her yeasty breath in his face, her damp hands tugging at him. Later on, he’d come to realize that she was one of a type. A grip had told him that she—or rather, girls who resembled her, and once he started looking around Los Angeles it sometimes seemed as if they all did—was a classic fraying-at-the-edges Hollywood skank. But this was the first time he’d worked in L.A., and girls like this were new to him. Besides, he had thought there was something else around her eyes, he didn’t know what…a certain sadness that he understood, and might like to share, to commingle with a certain sadness of his own.

  Back at his place, he’d poured the cold Prosecco from the blue bottle, even then it had been a favorite of his, he’d tried to get her to sit and talk, he’d asked her questions, told her a little about himself, but she didn’t want any of that, she didn’t want to behave like a person, like a human being. She couldn’t sit still. She’d asked him to play some music, and when he couldn’t find what she needed, she tuned the radio station herself, classic rock, appalling stuff, plastic riffs and shrieking vocals, and she danced for him, like a stripper, and he sat and watched because that was what she wanted, and then she came closer to him, she was in her underwear now, black panties and a red bra, not only did they not match, they weren’t even the same line or brand, he felt ashamed for her as she came closer and knelt before him and unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his jeans. He wasn’t close to hard, wasn’t going to get hard, not this way, not with her, not now, he had felt a tremor in the bar, but nothing since, not as she tugged and yanked on his cock and then took it all into her mouth, not such a great feat really as it was shrinking by the minute and the harder she worked, the more it shrank, until it felt as if it had vanished altogether, as if she had swallowed him down to the root. She looked up at him through bleary, glazed eyes that were suddenly glaring, and he thought perhaps she was angry because of his inability to get an erection, but then she spat him out and said:

  “Let go of my arms!” and he realized, in his anxiety, in his inability, he had been squeezing her forearms, squeezing them tighter and tighter,

  “Let go of my arms, you asshole!” and now his palms were all slick with something greasy, what was it? He released one hand and saw it was beige brown and shiny. Fake tan? And blood, there was blood, too, and he saw that he had opened wounds on her arms, track marks, he realized later, from intravenous drug abuse, the makeup had been there to conceal the needle marks,

  “I’ll call the cops if you don’t let me go, you dickless Irish fuck,” and maybe if she hadn’t said that, in such an abrasive, shrill caw of a voice, and if she hadn’t wrenched her body back and shook her frizzy dried blond head about, and if she hadn’t said it again,

  “I’m calling the cops, you crazy motherfucker!” and if she hadn’t started screaming, yes, it was the screaming that pushed him over, combined with the fear of the LAPD, of going to jail in Los Angeles, the idea was terrifying, unthinkable, and it was a big break for him, this movie, America, everything, he couldn’t let it be jeopardized by this filthy little…

  (He knows he only learned the term later, but he feels ever since that he had thought it at that moment…)

  Filthy little skank…

  His hands were on her neck so quickly, his thumbs pressing hard against the cartilage of her larynx, his fingers gripping the back of her neck, that by the time she started to pummel him with her weakened hands, she was already drifting away, the light in her
bugged-out eyeballs guttering as she died.

  He hadn’t felt much at the time beyond panic, then sadness and guilt, then relief. It was only later, looking back, he felt more. It was the look of it he remembered, the look of the girl as she expired, as the light in her eyes flickered and dimmed. The dying of the light. That’s not why he killed the first girl, of course—because he hadn’t known then what would happen when he played it back in his mind, reran it, unspooled it like a movie. It had been raining outside, he remembered, and as he was strangling her, he thought of lines he had always liked in Macbeth: “There will be rain tonight/Let it come down.” He didn’t kill the third girl because of some lines in Macbeth, though. He did it because he knew that later, he would hold it in his mind’s eye, the exquisite framing of it, the flash of red, the fade to black. He would hold the grace of her light within him.

  CHAPTER 1

  Jack Donovan, the Jack Donovan, in a darkened Dublin bar, great handsome bull’s head tipped back, plume of still-dark hair coiled over broad black-shirted back, full pint of stout held aloft to the east, shot of whiskey to the west, and the feet all pounding in a ring around him as he sinks the dark pint to rising hoots and cries, and then a roar as he knocks the shot back and lifts the empty glasses up through the flickering light: to east, to west, to north and south, a bacchanalian benediction, and bows until his hair sweeps the floor. Josh Tyler steps forward in jeans and Mastodon rock-band T-shirt, slight, unshaven, pint of Guinness in hand, wrists braided and bangled, just another skinny student on the lash if you didn’t know about the Oscar nomination or the thing with Mischa Barton. He embraces Donovan, kisses him on the lips, lifts the pint and tips it slowly over their joined heads. Donovan lifts his face into the falling beer, and Tyler steps aside and drains the glass over his director with a flourish.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, a Jack Donovan picture,” he says, and Donovan bows to whoops and cheers, elevated, as is everyone watching, by the Hollywood anointing: showman Jack, braggart Jack, broth of a Paddy Irish boy Jack, back shooting moving pictures on the streets of his hometown.

  There’s a voice in my ear: dry, amused, ironic.

  “Only trouble is, it’s always the same Jack Donovan picture.”

  Mark Cassidy, Donovan’s director of photography, elegant, Anglo, almost camp, with him since the no-budget movie they made in Dublin nearly twenty years ago, the one that started them all off. If it was always the same picture, Mark Cassidy should know. So should producer Maurice Faye, Jack’s representative on earth, diplomat, scammer, fixer extraordinaire, elfin, tweed waistcoat, hoop earrings, raven thatch now silvering at the edges, phone at his ear as he slides out of the pub to take another call from the West Coast. So should Conor Rowan, First AD, chubby, ruddy, strawberry blond crop, permanently furrowed brow, implacable sergeant major, charged with waging total war for the good of the group. The home team, the gang of four, Jack Donovan’s men since they were hungry guttersnipes dreaming of celluloid glory over the gantry of this very pub with barely the price of a pint between them.

  I smile at the crack, always the eye-rolling same from Mark, only happy when he’s cringing. I assume Mark means that wherever they go, and for as long as they’ve been going, and no matter what kind of film they end up making, it will all come down at some stage to Jack Donovan, carouser extraordinaire, professional Irishman, the life and soul of the all-night party, Jack Donovan howling at the moon, raging once more against the dying of the light, surrounded by the fans and the fakes and the flakes, the casts and the crews and the camp followers, Jack Donovan, lightning rod, channeling the savage energies, tapping the occult information, transmuting the base energies of a Dublin pub through his own alchemical powers into something altogether other, something exalted, into some strange kind of…magic, yes, no less than the intangible quality that pervades all of his movies, even the misfires (perhaps especially the misfires), a roiling, kinetic sense that the veil between this world and the next is gossamer thin, in places a mere shadow, that the concrete, the ordered, the rational, that is the illusion: magic is immanent in the world, and Jack summons it up, like some ancient fire starter, some witch doctor, some shaman. Or so it seems to us, to all of us, even Mark Cassidy, all of a hush now as Jack holds his hand aloft, the vibrations in the room at a precarious pitch, nothing to hear but the clink of glasses and the breath of a hundred souls, and just as I realize what he’s going to do, Mark turns to me and shakes his head, aiming maybe for jaded incredulity but stalling at wonder, and Jack opens his mouth and the first line sails out in that extraordinary voice, pure tenor, not as fine as it was, wood-smoked and whiskey-basted by one careless owner but still mighty, and the expressions on the faces of those who’d heard rumors of this but never dared dream it might be true, let alone that they would witness it, as E lucevan le stelle from Tosca fills them, fills us all with sad joy and desperate longing for a love we didn’t know we’d lost, for a home we’d forgotten we missed.

  Afterward, as people are first too stunned to applaud, and then as they do, the noise they make like thunder, and as reality descends in murmurs and in muted shouts, the evening running down, Mark turns to me.

  “Typical bloody Donovan,” he says, his voice an acrid buzz. “If he’d sung Nessun dorma, the room would have erupted. But Jack always wants to leave the audience yearning.”

  As he says this, it seems to me that there are tears in his eyes. But I can’t be sure, because there are certainly tears in mine.

  It may still be the same Jack Donovan picture, but Maurice and Conor are on their feet as well, still crazy, still in his thrall. Even Josh Tyler, whose last day of shooting was today, whose party this was, is happy to let Jack take center stage.

  What’s the matter with these people?

  It’s simple, really.

  Jack Donovan is the matter with them.

  I should know. A long time ago, he was the matter with me.

  I make a brief appearance in a Jack Donovan picture (don’t reach for your popcorn or you’ll miss me). In his adaptation of The Dain Curse (1997), the Dashiell Hammett novel, I am “Irish man in bar.” I even have a line. I was working as a private detective in Los Angeles back then, and Jack and I had become friends. We were in Hal’s Bar on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice one night while he was casting.

  “Hey Ed, say ‘whiskey.’”

  “Whiskey.”

  “There you go. You could be Irish man in bar, right?”

  “I could. I often have.”

  The movie starred Nick Nolte and Drew Barrymore and Lisa Eichorn and Michael Madsen, and if it didn’t really work, everyone agreed the book didn’t entirely work either. Besides, Hammett’s mix of Californian religious cults, sexual deviance and violent gunplay was hospitable enough to the elements people loved in Jack’s films: sharp dialogue, quirky humor, a strange, poetic sense of yearning, a fraught exchange of status and power between a beautiful older and a beautiful younger woman and an uneasy sexual relationship between a young man and woman who may or may not be related. A couple of the performances won Golden Globes, and there was an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay. (Jack’s movies without exception got best screenplay nominations. According to Jack, it was because he always buried a quotation from Yeats or Joyce or Heaney in there, to act as a watermark denoting Quality Irish Literature: This Is The Real Deal. That may sound cynical on his part, but I believe it was actually self-deprecating: those quotations were never out of context, or at least, they never seemed so to me. And the screenplays were better written than anyone else’s, although that didn’t always make them better movies. But what would I know? When it comes to Jack Donovan, I am far from being a reliable witness.)

  So there I am, waiting for Jack Donovan, and because I’m not drinking, I don’t feel much like extending him the usual indulgence. Apart from on a film set, where he is always on time and available, Waiting For Jack is what everyone who knows him gets used to doing. Maybe it started out because of a romantic lif
e that to be kind you might describe as “complicated.” Maybe it goes back to his childhood (more of both of those later). Maybe he reserves any sense of order, discipline or basic forward planning for his work, allowing himself to be completely unruly and chaotic in his life. Chaos. That’s something else we’ll come back to. Whatever the reason, I’m not interested. Madeline King, Jack’s PA, is coming toward me, late twenties, dressed in black, legs to here, all dark curls and twinkling smiles and professionally casual Galway charm.

  “I know you’re waiting, Ed—”

  “I’m not waiting. I’m leaving.”

  “Stop. It’s the usual fecking nightmare with Jack—”

  “It’s one from which I awoke a long time ago. Jack called me. And I didn’t mind the concert, or watching Josh Tyler play John the Baptist, but I’m not hanging around like a supplicant here. It’s late.”

  Madeline does a slight, smiling double take at this, and checks the time on her phone.

  “It’s nine o’clock. That’s not late sure. From what Jack told me, it’s certainly not late in Ed Loy’s world.”

  I say nothing. It’s true, a few months ago, nine o’clock wouldn’t have been late, would barely have been early. But that was before I’d met a woman who puts her kids to bed around nine, and who has to be caught within the following hour or so, otherwise she’s asleep. A woman who doesn’t drink on a school night. A woman who wouldn’t have fitted into Ed Loy’s world at all and in almost every respect still doesn’t, apart from the minor detail of my having fallen in love with her.

  Madeline rolls her eyes at a text message and says: “The thing of it is, Jack has gone on. He wants you to follow. There’s a car waiting outside.”

  I don’t know if I roll my eyes, but I feel like I should. Jack has gone on. How many times have I heard those words? I don’t think I ever once arrived at the appointed meeting place without Jack having left word behind the bar or with the waitress that he had gone on, and that I should follow. He would always have a car waiting for me, but frequently he would have departed the second spot by the time I’d show up. Usually it was just a schlep across town: from the Formosa to Bar Marmont, or Musso’s to the Ivy. Once, though, during the private plane years, or was it months, however long the big deal with Warner’s that didn’t work out lasted, Jack had gone on to LAX, and was waiting for me on the runway. We flew to New York “for dinner at Patsy’s on Fifty-sixth Street, because Frank says it’s the best,” Jack said, suddenly, improbably on first-name terms with Frank Sinatra. And I think there was a trip to Mexico “to find the real mezcal,” but the details are very hazy. They didn’t last long, but those were the days. But those were also the days when I didn’t much mind who I woke up beside, or where. Those days are gone.