City of Lost Girls Read online

  “There’s a picture of them in this morning’s Star.”

  “Yeah, well, Kate didn’t show up this morning, and Nora hasn’t come in either, and everyone’s freaking out, Jack wanted to sack Geoff Keegan, the second AD, and two of the trainee ADs have been sacked, I think mostly because Maurice was afraid Jack was going to kill them if he didn’t get them off the set, there’s blood on the fucking walls here—”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “I know Jack would really appreciate it. And Maurice Faye asked if there was any way you could—”

  “I’ll be there, Madeline. You can set it out for me then.”

  I dress and drink another cup of coffee and think about not having a hangover and how much better that feels than how I’m feeling now. I’m wearing a black linen suit and a white cotton shirt with French cuffs which I fold back but leave without links although I carry a pair in my coat pocket and plain black oxfords from Church’s. On mornings like this, when the panic in the streets meets an alcoholically manufactured panic surging through my bloodstream, my habit of dressing like an undertaker or an orchestral musician is a reassurance to me, a reliable constant in an inconstant world. I think for a moment about the denizens of the film business and their necessary flair for the dramatic, and how it has a tendency to continue out of range of the camera. I think about pretty, careless girls who simply get bored being extras (because a film set is one of the most boring places on earth, where, as somebody said, nothing happens at great and painstaking length) and decide not only that they’ve had enough, but that they don’t want to be hassled anymore by the maniacs who’ve been herding them around for the past while, so they turn off their phones and take care not to let anyone know where they’re going. In short, I do everything I can to avoid listening to that voice in my head, the one that, as soon as it heard mention of Kate Coyle’s name, preceded by that of Nora Mannion’s, began to repeat, with grace notes supplied by the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean and the roar of the Coast Highway traffic, at intervals as regular and ominous as the tolling of a bell: Those girls are gone.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Nighttown set runs along a terrace of three four-story Georgian houses on Gardner Street above Sherrard Street, extending back through laneways and yard space as far as Dorset Lane. Madeline King is waiting for me on the street and greets me with a wave. She holds her head inclined away from me and won’t meet my eyes. Having had notably pale, milky skin yesterday, her face is thick with shiny bronze makeup today. I’m not an expert, but she had struck me as more than a few cuts above the orange-faced type of girl. She leads me down a side lane to a yard that runs the length of the terrace, crammed with trucks and generators. An old-fashioned double-decker bus does service as the film’s catering truck. A couple of security goons in black T-shirts and baseball caps and shades with two-way radios loom into my path, then stand aside as Madeline smooths the way. One of the goons looks familiar, but then, if you hang around Dublin long enough, pretty much everyone looks, maybe even is, familiar; that is its blessing, and its curse.

  “Mossy’s waiting for you upstairs,” Madeline says, and steps aside to let me pass, again holding her face away. I touch her elbow as gently as I can. She starts violently and turns on me, then her hand flies up to cover her cheek.

  “What happened to your face, Madeline?” I say.

  It isn’t the most gallant of lines, but it can’t be helped: Madeline’s left cheek is bruised and swollen in ways makeup can’t conceal. Madeline makes her eyes do a smiling thing that looks very close to a crying thing, and shakes her head in a cartoon manner, as if I’d never begin to guess how stupid she can be.

  “Stop, I know sure, Madeline as in Mad, headless-chicken hour this morning and there’s me running around the set trying to keep track of it all and don’t I turn smack bang into a light stand, whap. I’ve been seen by the nurse and I’m fine, but that’s why I have the mad orange face.”

  She is evidently shaken and upset, and who wouldn’t be: her injuries look painful, and any blemish to the face is upsetting, especially for a woman. I tell her I’m sorry, and she makes a joke about it being her luck finally to look like a lady who lunches just when all said ladies have ducked for cover, and I smile and squeeze her arm and climb aboard the bus and hope she is telling the truth.

  Maurice Faye, Mossy to friend and foe alike, not that he has made a great number of the latter, greets me with a laugh and an embrace, as if needing to consult a private detective to sort out a crisis on a movie set is the most delightful thing that has happened to him in weeks. Mossy is wearing a tan waistcoat over a collarless white shirt; his dark, silver-flecked hair falls in ringlets about his sallow, drawn face; his eyes sparkle with energy and life. He wears a Celtic-style wedding ring; his wife of twenty years or more, whom I have never met but feel I knew since she is a feature of the newspaper society pages, is a ferociously groomed blonde of indeterminate middle age who runs four or five children, a couple of cancer charities and an equestrian school from their farmhouse near Moycullen in County Galway; Jack once asked me, with a skepticism I didn’t quite follow, “Has anyone ever seen them together?”

  “Good man Ed, like the style, looking sharp these days. Welcome aboard. You’re either on the bus or you’re off it, am I right?”

  “That’s one way to look at it, I guess.”

  “Oh now. Equivocation, and it not even lunchtime? We’ll have to keep on our toes with the Loy, won’t we Maddy? No change there, we know this fella of old so we do. Sit down now like a good man.”

  The rows of seats on the bus have been rearranged to face each other and tables have been bolted in between. A smell of fried food and pungent spices hangs in the air. I sit facing Maurice; Madeline King sits across the aisle.

  Mossy looks at me, frowns, rolls his eyes as if at the ridiculousness of the situation and then laughs again.

  “God, it’s mad though. Just when you think nothing can go wrong, ha? And everyone’s delighted with the dailies, Jack’s on massive form, massive. And we’ve just wrapped Josh Tyler, who is going to be HUGE, Ed, by the time Nighttown comes out Josh Tyler is going to be the, the next, the new, put it this way, by the time it comes out, we wouldn’t be able to afford him. And now this!”

  “And now what, Mossy? Set it out for me, will you? Two special extras missing, is that it so far?”

  “That’s about the size of it. Nora Mannion took a wander yesterday afternoon. She wasn’t in the last shot but she was still on call. It’s, you remember the way Jack always has a trio of women somewhere in the film, the Three Degrees, I always call them. Anyway, I think this time out, Jack decided he wasn’t going to have them, you know the way, worried he might be repeating himself. And then sure when the extras come in, there are three young ones who are ringers for each other. And to be honest with you, ringers for Madam King there as well, this did not go unnoticed, I can tell you.”

  “Fuck up, Mossy,” Madeline says sharply, pure Galway; Maurice Faye yelps in delight and winks at me. If I had been unfamiliar with Maurice, I might have thought he wasn’t taking the situation seriously; knowing him, I understand the reverse to be the case: the more skittish and borderline hysterical he appears, the graver he is underneath. That hail-fellow Mossy persona concealed a shrewd intelligence and a surprisingly complex love of cinema; I’d heard him say his two favorite directors of all time were Andrei Tarkovsky and Michelangelo Antonioni, which is not what movie producers who actually make any money in the film business tend to think, let alone admit.

  “Sling us over the glossies there so Ed can see what we’re dealing with,” Maurice says.

  Madeline passes a file of photographs across, and while I look at three standard ten-by-eight head shots of Nora Mannion, Kate Coyle and Jenny Noble, Maurice continues talking.

  “Anyway, Jack sees the three and says he, this was meant to be, and from then on, he’s going to feature them as special extras.”

  “What does
that mean?” I say.

  “It means they don’t have any lines, but they’re shot in significant ways, you get to know the faces. It means they’re key to the visuals.”

  “And presumably they get paid more as a result?”

  Madeline King makes a sound somewhere between a cough and a jeering laugh; Maurice Faye rolls his eyes again.

  “They should, you’re right, we’ll probably do something for them in retrospect,” Maurice says, and flinchs, Madeline taking no care to disguise her laugh this time.

  “Jaysus, your one is spoiling for it today,” he says, grinning. “Did you hear, Ed, she’s already had a row with a lighting stand. Which one of us is safe, I ask you?”

  “Get on with it, Mossy,” Madeline says.

  “No respect, Ed. That’s what I get for hiring neighbors. Ah sure, it’s Ireland, how can you avoid it, aren’t we all neighbors anyway?”

  It’s Madeline’s turn now to roll her eyes at this particularly heavy-handed piece of paddy-whackery. The bus is hot, and the smell of stale food is making me queasy. I slide open the top of the window next to me and breathe in some fresh air, and reflect that at least Madeline was telling the truth about how her facial injuries had come about. For this relief, some thanks.

  “What we didn’t do, I mean, they were all young ones with barely tuppence worth of experience between them, amateur dramatics about the height of it, I said to Geoff Keegan, he’s the second AD whose job it is to run the extras, I said, see how it goes, Jack didn’t want them to begin with, maybe it won’t work out, no sense upgrading them before we have to.”

  “What difference would it have made? I mean, to their going missing?”

  “Well, in the first place, there’s the extra money they would have made, and the extra status they’d’ve had, which might have meant they wouldn’t’ve gone for a wander, if that’s what they’ve done. And second, Geoff could have kept a closer eye on them himself, or reinforced with the trainee ADs that they needed close watching and hand-holding and all the rest.”

  I stare at the three girls’ photographs—and girls is all they are, really. They are each posed in classic cheesy head-shot fashion, two with their chins perched on their folded hands, one with her head tipped to one side, as if she’s about to expire from cuteness. That’s Nora Mannion. It’s almost impossible to tell what they’re like from these photographs, whose purpose is to make their subjects look as adaptable and castable and, as a perhaps unintended consequence, as bland and unexceptional as possible.

  “I got hold of Nora Mannion’s sister, Rose, on the phone last night,” Madeline says. “She hadn’t heard from Nora, couldn’t get her on the phone. This was after I went out to where she was staying, a shared house in Killester with three young actors, the casting agent Debbie Moyers fixed her up there. They hadn’t seen her, said she was very quiet, not really a party girl, if she came to the pub with them she’d have the one drink and that’d be it. Early to bed, early to rise. Rose said the same, Nora wasn’t into partying, she was quite serious about acting, hoping to get a place in the Gaiety School, wanted to get some experience and see what it was all like. She was absolutely thrilled to have gotten work in a Jack Donovan movie, Rose said she got all his films out on DVD and watched them twice or three times each.”

  “So this is not a girl who is just going to get bored and wander off, or say to hell with it and do a runner; this is a serious, ambitious girl who wants to impress.”

  “That’s how it’s looking,” Maurice Faye says. “Even when we couldn’t find her last night, I had high hopes, whatever, she’d hooked up with some young fella, first time in Dublin, quiet ones you have to watch, didn’t want big sis or anyone else to know, she’d scuttle back onto set this morning and nobody would be any the wiser. Instead, not only has she gone, we can’t find Kate Coyle either.”

  “Just, before we go any further, the third girl, Jenny Noble, where is she?”

  “She’s on the costume truck. Jess O’Leary, the supervisor, said she’d look after her,” Maurice says. “We can get her anytime, if you want to talk to her.”

  “She’s going to be safe there, is she?”

  Maurice and Madeline exchange an amused look at this.

  “If Jess O’Leary looks after you, you know you’ve been looked after,” Maurice says.

  “Mossy’s a teeny bit scared of the costume ladies,” Madeline says.

  “With good reason. God, they’d eat you now, Ed, I’m not codding you.”

  “They would not, don’t mind him, Jess is lovely sure,” Madeline says.

  “Ah no, yeah, she is, absolutely, no, yeah, they all are, what I mean is, coming through, don’t get in their way, they know how to get the job done, mighty now. In fact, if Jess and the girls had been in charge of Nora and Kate, we’d have them yet.”

  “And how are you managing? How’s Jack?”

  “Ah, grand. Toys are all back in the pram. We rejigged the schedule so he can do interior scenes with two or three principals. And once the two or three principals concerned have got over the schedule rejig, we’ll be laughing,” Maurice says, for once without even the trace of a laugh himself.

  “Mossy’s been running around like the Good Humor man all morning, trying to keep everyone happy.”

  “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken, isn’t that right, Ed?” Maurice says, and dredges up a desperate chuckle from the depths.

  “Tell me about Kate Coyle,” I say.

  Maurice lifts his hands up and looks across to Madeline.

  “I don’t really…day to day, Madeline’s been on set more than I have, with Jack and the actors.”

  Madeline looks uncertain for a moment, and then nods decisively, as if some internal jury has finally returned its verdict.

  “It’s not beyond the bounds…Kate Coyle is a wild little yoke, a real party girl. So it’s not beyond the bounds of anyone’s imagination that she might stroll in yet, still trashed from a wild night out. And little Nora tucked beneath her arm. So—”

  “So it could all be much ado, Ed,” Maurice says. “I mean, it’s all about money, when it comes down to it, what we can reshoot and what we can’t, and the sooner we know, the sooner we can decide what has to be done.”

  “How wild can this girl be? She looks as if butter wouldn’t melt.”

  Madeline grins.

  “Ah, she’d play on that. Kate, she’s brilliant crack actually. Her brothers are both actors, a lot of theater, the Abbey, the Gate, big drinkers the pair of them. Family’s well-off, Southside, Kate got expelled from one of those posh girls’ schools, Loreto or Holy Child, for, I don’t know what, sex and drugs and rock and roll. Her folks wanted her to go to college, but Kate’s in too much of a hurry. Not that bothered what she’s hurrying toward, she’s done some modeling, a bit of DJing, I don’t think she had much of a sense of the script or of Jack either, she just knew Josh Tyler was in the movie and that was, like, wicked, y’know, Cool for Kate, yeah? Totally Southside, she’d make you laugh, but not thick.”

  “And when was she last seen?”

  “She was at the party last night. And then…people I spoke to said, she was there and then she was gone. Didn’t make it home, I spoke to her mum this morning. Who was totally underwhelmed, I called at eight in the morning, she said, Is this not what God invented mobile phones for? I said I couldn’t reach Kate on hers, and her mum checked her room and there was no sign, and she just said, if my daughter has not made it back to her bed, it won’t be the first time, she’s over eighteen and there’s nothing more I can do, I’m sure she’ll surface at some stage in the game, please give her her mother’s love and tell her to look after herself. And then she hung up on me.”

  “We should probably hear from Jenny Noble at this stage, see if she knows anything.”

  “She says she doesn’t,” Madeline says. “I’ll get her for you now.”

  While she is gone, I tell Maurice what I charge, and Maurice does a lot of Mossy-acting about everyone
’s fee being negotiable in these hard times, and I say that’s as maybe but last time I checked, he was a movie producer and if he’s doing that job and he doesn’t have any money maybe he should think about getting into another line of work. Maurice hums and haws and won’t let it go, and finally as Madeline comes up the stairs with Jenny Noble, I tell him if he doesn’t want to pay me, he can go to the Guards; in fact, why didn’t he go in the first place? From the sudden pallor that spreads across his sallow skin, I see there must be a good reason; I just don’t know what it is yet.

  What strikes me most about Jenny Noble is not how much more individual or idiosyncratic she seems in the flesh than in her head shot, or, like most young Irishwomen, what a bizarre combination of youth and pseudo-sophisticated middle age she possesses, it’s how closely she resembles Madeline King, or at least, Madeline pre-bruising and orange makeup. Her hair is raven black, swept back from a high brow, her eyes intense blue pools, her skin milky white; her head belongs on the prow of a ship. I would have trouble telling my Graces from my Furies, but if it came to ensemble goddesses, I would cast Jenny as a Fate, no question. But I wonder if Jack had the Muses in mind when he cast three women who look so much like his current love.

  Jenny Noble speaks with an educated Cork accent, and in a let’s-face-it-girls manner that belies her years. Initially she appears skeptical that anything sinister has taken place.

  “Kate Coyle was fit to fly so she was. I said, Kate girl, shooting a film’s the same as shooting a person: they need to see the whites of your eyes. And at the rate you’re lashing into those Breezers, your eyes won’t have any whites at all, and certainly not at six in the morning. But Kate was high as a kite, plotting and scheming how to drag Josh Tyler to Club 92 and work her magic on him.”

  “Club 92. Is that out in Leopardstown, at the racecourse?” Maurice says.