Coldheart Canyon (38 page)

There was a brief Golden Age, when the royalty of America lived a life of near-perfection; sitting in their palaces dreaming of immortality. And why not? It seemed they had found the means to renew their beauty whenever it grew a little tired. So what if they had to dabble in the supernatural for their fix of perfection; it was worth the risk.

Then—but inexorably—the Golden Age began to take its toll: the lines they’d driven off their faces began to creep back again, deeper than ever; their eyesight started to fail. Back they went into the Devil’s Country, desperate for its healing power, but the claim of time could not be arrested.

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nightmare stories. Somebody had woken up blind in the middle of the night, it was said; somebody else had withered before her lover’s appalled eyes. Fear gripped the Golden People; and anger too. They blamed Katya for introducing them to this ungodly panacea, and demanded that she give them constant access to the house and the Hunt. She, of course, refused. This quickly led to some ugly scenes: people started appearing at the house in the Canyon in desperate states of need, beating at the door to be let in.

Katya hardened her cold heart against them, however. Realizing she would soon be under siege, she hired men to guard the house night and day. For several months, through the spring and summer of 1926, she and Zeffer lived in near-isolation, ignoring the entreaties of her friends who came (often with magnificent gifts) begging for an audience with her; and for a chance to see the Devil’s Country. She refused all but a very few.

In fact nobody truly understood what was happening in the bowels of the house. Why should they? They were dealing in mysteries even old Father Sandru, who had sold Zeffer the piece, did not understand. But their eager flesh had discovered what the dry intellect of metaphysicians had not. Like opium addicts denied their fix they went blindly after the thing that would heal their pain, without needing to understand the phar-macology that had driven them to such desperation.

For a time they had been happy in the Canyon, they remembered; happy in Katya’s house, happy looking at the pictures of the Hunt on the tiled walls, which had moved so curiously before their astonished eyes. So it followed—didn’t it?—that if they kept returning to the Canyon, and into that strange country of tile and illusion, they would be happy and healthy again. But Katya wouldn’t let them; she was leaving them to suffer, denied the only thing they wanted.

Of course Katya was no more knowledgeable about the alchemy at work in her dream palace than those in her doomed circle. She knew that the gift of healing and the fever of need that followed was all brought about by being in the Devil’s Country, but how it worked, or how long it would operate before its engines were exhausted, she had no idea. She CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 283

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only knew that she felt possessive of the room. It was hers to give and take away, as her will desired.

Needless to say, the more tearful visitors she had at her gates, the more letters she received (and the more chaotic the tone of those letters), the less inclined she was to invite in those who’d written them, partly because she was afraid of the depth of addiction she had unleashed in these people, partly because she was anxious that the power of the Devil’s Country might not be limitless, and she was not about to be profligate with a power that she needed as much as they.

There
might
come a time, she supposed, when she would need the healing effects of the house purely for herself, and when that time came she’d be covetous of every wasted jot of it. This wasn’t something she could afford to be generous with; not any longer. It was her life she was playing with here;
her life everlasting
. She needed to preserve the power she had locked away below ground, for fear one day its sum would be the difference between life and death.

And then—as though things were not terrible enough—they had suddenly got worse.

It began on Monday, the 23rd of August, 1926, with the sudden death of Rudy Valentino.

Only three weeks before he had managed to get past the guards in Coldheart Canyon (like one of the heroes he’d so often played, scaling walls to get to his beloved) and had pleaded with Katya to let him stay with her. He didn’t feel good, he told her; he needed to stay here in the Canyon, where he’d spent so many happy times, and recuperate. She told him no. He became aggressive; told her—half in Italian, half in English—that she was a selfish bitch. Wasn’t it time she remembered where she came from? he said. She was just a peasant at heart, like him. Just because she acted like a queen didn’t make her one; to which she’d snappily replied that the same could
not
be said for him. He’d slapped her for that remark.

She’d slapped him back, twice as hard.

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Always prone to sudden emotional swings, Valentino had promptly started to bawl like a baby, interspersing his sobs with demands that she please God have mercy on him.

“I’m dying!” he said, thumping his gut with his fist. “I feel it in here!”

She let him weep until the carpet was damp. Then she had him removed from the house by two of her hired heavies, and tossed into the street.

It had seemed like typical Rudy melodrama at the time:
I’m dying, I’m
dying
. But this time he’d known his own body better than she’d given him credit for. He was the first to pay the ultimate price for visiting the Devil’s Country. Three weeks after that tearful conversation he was dead.

The hoopla over Valentino’s sudden demise hid from view a series of smaller incidents that were nevertheless all part of the same escalating tragedy. A minor starlet called Miriam Acker died two days after Rudy, of what was reported to be pneumonia. She had been a visitor to the Canyon on several occasions, usually in the company of Ramon Navarro. Pola Negri—another visitor to the Canyon—fell gravely ill a week later, and for several days hovered on the brink of death. Her frailty was attributed to grief at the passing of Valentino, with whom she claimed to have had a passionate affair; but the truth was far less glamorous. She too had fallen under the spell of the Hunt; and now, though she denied it, was sickening.

In fact death took an uncommonly large number of Hollywood’s luminaries in the next few months. And for every one who died there were ten or twenty who got sick, and managed to recover, though none were ever possessed of their full strength, or flawless beauty, again. The “coincidence” was not lost on either the fans or the journalists. “
A harvest of death
is sweeping Hollywood
,”
Film Photoplay
morbidly announced, “
as star after
star follows the greatest star of all, Rudolph Valentino, to the grave.”

The idea that there was some kind of plague abroad caught the public’s imagination and was fed voraciously by those who’d predicted for reasons of their own that judgment would eventually fall on Tinseltown.

Preachers who’d fulminated against the sinners of the New Sodom were now quick to point out the evidence in support of their grim sermons.

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actors as the new Royalty of America, were now just as entertained by the spectacle of their fall from grace. They were fakes and foreigners anyway, it was widely opined; no wonder they were falling like flies; they’d come here like plague-rats in the first place.

Hollywood was going to Hell in a hand-cart, and it didn’t matter how rich or beautiful you were, there was no escaping the cost of the high life.

Up in the Canyon, Katya dared believe she was safe: she’d added three German Shepherd dogs to the retinue guarding her; and she had men patrolling the ridges and the roads that led to the Canyon night and day. It was such a strange time. The whole community was unsettled. There was talk of lights being seen in the sky; especially in the vicinity of death-sites.

A number of small cults came into being, all with their own theories of what was happening. The most extreme interpreted these lights as warnings from God: the end of the world was imminent, their leaders announced, and people should prepare themselves for the Apocalypse.

Others interpreted the lights more benignly. They were messengers from God, this faction claimed; angels sent to guide the deceased out of the coil of mortal confusions into the next life. If this was the case then these heavenly presences were not happy that Hell now had a stronghold in the Canyon. Though the dead came there, the lights did not. Indeed on several occasions they were seen at the bottom of the hill, three or four of them gathered in a cloud of luminescence, plainly unwilling to venture into the Canyon.

For her part, Katya took such reports as evidence that her defenses were working. Nobody could get into her precious Canyon. Or such was her conviction.

In fact her sense of security, like so much else in her increasingly fragile life, was an illusion.

One evening, walking in the garden, the dogs suddenly got crazy, and out of the darkness stepped Rudy Valentino. He looked entirely unchanged by death: his skin as smooth as ever, his hair as brilliantly coiffed, his clothes as flawless.

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He bowed deeply to her.

“My apologies,” he said, “for coming here. I know I’m not welcome.

But frankly, I didn’t know where else to go.”

There was no hint of manipulation in this; it seemed to be the unvarnished truth.

“I went home to Falcon Lair,” Rudy went on, “but it’s been trampled over by so many people, it doesn’t feel as though it’s mine anymore.

Please . . . I beg you . . . don’t be afraid of me.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Katya replied, quite truthfully. “There were always ghosts in my village. We used to see them all the time. My grandmother used to sing me to sleep, and she’d been dead ten years. But Rudy, let’s be honest. I know why you’re up here. You want to get in to see the Hunt—”

“—just for a little while.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“
No!
” she said, waving him away. “I really don’t want to hear any more of this. Why don’t you just go back to Sicily?”

“Costellaneta.”

“Wherever. I’m sure they’ll be pleased to see the ghost of their favorite son.”

She turned her back on him and walked back toward the house. She heard him following on after her, his heels light on the grass, but solid enough.

“It’s true what they said about you.
Cold heart
.”

“You say whatever you like, Rudy. Just leave me alone.”

He stopped following her.

“You think I’m the only one?” he said to her.

His words brought her to a halt.

“They’re all going to come up here, in time. It doesn’t matter how many dogs you have, how many guards. They’ll get in. Your beautiful Canyon’s going to be full of
ghosts
.”

“Stop being childish, Rudy,” she said, turning back to look at him.

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“Is that how you want to live, Katya? Like a prisoner, surrounded by the dead? Is that the life you had in mind for yourself ?”

“I’m not a prisoner. I can leave whenever I want to.”

“And still be a great star? No. To be a star you will have to be here, in Hollywood.”

“So?”

“So you will have company, night and day. The dead will be here with you, night and day. We will not be ignored.”

“You keep saying
we
, Rudy. But I only see you.”

“The others will come. They’ll all find their way here, sooner or later.

Did you know Virginia Maple hanged herself last night? You remember Virginia? Or perhaps you don’t. She was—”

“I know Virginia. And no, I didn’t know she hanged herself. Nor, frankly, do I much care.”

“She couldn’t take the pain.”

“The pain?”

“Of being kept out of this house! Being kept away from the Devil’s Country.”

“It’s my house. I have a perfect right to invite whoever I like into it.”

“You see nothing but yourself, do you?”

“Oh
please
, Rudy, no lectures on narcissism. Not from you, of all people.”

“I see things differently now.”

“Oh I’m sure you do. I’m sure you regret every self-obsessed moment of your petty little life. But that’s really not my problem, now is it?”

The color of the ghost before her suddenly changed. In a heartbeat he became a stain of yellow and gray, his fury rising in palpable waves off his face.

“I will make it your problem,” he shrieked. He strode toward her. “You selfish
bitch
.”

“And what did they call you?” she snapped back. “Powder-puff, was it?”

It was an insult she knew would strike him hard. Just the year before an anonymous journalist in the
Chicago Tribune
had called him “a pink powder puff.” “
Why didn’t somebody quietly drown Rudolph Guglielmi, alias
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Valentino, years ago?
” he’d written. Rudy had challenged the man to a boxing match, to see which of them was truly the more virile. The journalist had of course never shown his face. But the insult had stuck. And hearing it repeated now threw Valentino into such a rage that he pitched himself at Katya, reaching for her throat. She had half-expected his phantom body to be so unsubstantial that his hands would fail to make any real contact.

But not so. Though the flesh and blood of him had been reduced to an urn full of ashes, his spirit-form had a force of its own. She felt his fingers at her neck as though they were living tissue. They stopped her breath.