Flicker (91 page)

One point that jarred. I kept coming upon references to movies that had appeared
since
his captivity; usually these arose in connection with innovations he claimed to have anticipated in his films. The French director Georges Franju seemed to be his special hangup. He was convinced Franju had learned all his more macabre touches from him—and that was a distinct possibility. Only how did he know about Franju's films of the late forties and fifties? Moreover, he was convinced that by way of Franju he'd influenced two or three of the New Wave directors of the sixties—and he knew their work in remarkable detail down to specific scenes and shots. It was more than he could have learned from the occasional newspaper or journal Angelotti sent his way. This was something we'd have to discuss.

So now at last I had my definitive study of the great director, supplemented by his own posthumous commentary. Never to see print, unless I should be given a reprieve by my captors. Or escape. Or be rescued. Would any of the above ever happen? I spent nights turning the question over in my mind, wondering if anyone was looking for me.
Anyone.
I confess that more than once I collapsed into tears of self-pity, bawling like an abandoned child. Could I have simply burst and vanished into thin air like a soap bubble? And nobody cared? My parents, my colleagues, my students, above all Clare … weren't any of them trying to find me?

Of course that depended on how well the orphans had covered up my abduction. I now knew they had some experience at this sort of thing. I wasn't the first or even the second prisoner to roam this island.

One evening I brought the matter up with my partner in captivity. Was my case hopeless, I asked. To my surprise, he brightened up at once and began to rehearse my plight far too zealously. He wanted to hear every detail of my trip to Europe right up to the point of my disappearance. When I'd gone back over the ground for him a second and third time, he clapped hands and said, “Ah, you see. Your trail goes cold as soon as you arrive at the airport in Zurich.”

“It does?”

“Did you tell anyone where you would go when you left the airport?”

“No.”

“Then, you see, from the moment you arrive in the city, you are entirely in the hands of your abductors, yes? A private limousine, a private plane. You are a very trusting person.”

He meant it kindly, but I felt like such a fool. “Wouldn't somebody have a record? The authorities … at the airport in Toulouse?”

“Did they check your papers?”

I reached back into my memory. “No. They waved everybody through.”

“So? What record would there be? Who could tell where you landed? Who knows you took off?”

“But people don't just vanish. I have parents, friends who would demand an investigation.”

“From whom? The Swiss? The French? Who would be responsible?”

“Well …
somebody.
”

A sly look came over his face. “Of course, they might have provided for a body. Do you still have your papers with you?”

“No. My passport, my wallet … when I woke, they were gone. You don't mean they'd murder somebody to have a body.”

“Nothing so crude. Besides, it is against our religion. If not, they might just as well have killed you. Or me. With enough money, there are ways to procure a body. And then, let us see … a car is found, crashed and burned, the body mutilated, even the teeth, eh? But your papers manage to survive intact.” He stopped short, frowning with thought. “I have often wondered—was ‘my' body ever found?”

“No body,” I told him.

“No body.” He seemed mildly miffed by the information. “And no one ever came looking?”

“Well, it was wartime, so much confusion. You were reported missing at sea. Torpedoed off the coast of Spain. Were you?”

“Was I what?”

“Torpedoed.”

“Only by a glass of schnapps. I never boarded the ship. I was met in Algiers by a delegation of two of my fellow religionists sent to escort me to Zurich by private plane. Such a generous offer. We downed a few snifters. The next thing, I find myself on this island paradise.”

“Coffee,” I said. “With me it was a cup of coffee on the road to Albi.”

“Ah yes.” After a moment of frowning reflection, he resumed his line of speculation. “And then perhaps they arrange to have someone
impersonate you. One of the brothers, someone of your age and build. He checks into a hotel in Toulouse, carefully calling attention to himself so he will be remembered. The next day he announces that he plans to take a hike. He asks directions, he hires a car, he leaves for the day … and never returns. The car is found parked in rough terrain outside of town. The country in those parts can be quite rugged. One could easily get lost. There is a search; they find nothing.” He thought that one over for a while, then shook his head. “But why draw attention to Toulouse, so close to Albi? Perhaps the imposter, with your papers, heads in another direction entirely. Germany, Italy … he sends a few postcards in a forged hand to dear friends. A false trail. And then he does his disappearing act.”

This was more than he'd said on any subject since my arrival, and all of it with such relish. I finally realized why. He was making up scenarios, one, two, three, four of them, turning my sad plight into a cheap thriller. The experience, so diverting for him, left me depressed for days afterward. It served to show me: there were a dozen ways I could have been erased from the face of the earth. I had only one hope to cling to. Clare. When she learned I'd vanished on a trip to Zurich, surely
she
would suspect the worst. Good old Clare! She'd come through for me. She'd find a way to track me down. She'd be relentless.

And then there came the day when that last slender hope died, suddenly, totally, almost too cruelly to be remembered.

From time to time—unpredictably and with no particular logic—I receive missives from the outside world. Newspapers, magazines, always months out of date, arrive—usually the day after the supply ship makes its call. One of the women drops the material on my veranda when she brings my breakfast. Somebody's idea of a kindness, I gather. Perhaps Angelotti—though there's never a note attached. The publication might be American or French, English or German. Whatever it is, why ever it was sent, I read it avidly, every page, every word, lingering over it as long as possible, drawing out the pleasure, and then reading it again from first to last.

On the day in question—two weeks into the eleventh month of my captivity (I was at the time still marking the days)—I woke to discover a book beside my breakfast tray, a much-handled paperback with a broken binding. The title:
This Is Where I Came In.
The subtitle:
Infantile Obsessions and Premature Senility in Contemporary
Film Culture.
The author: Clarissa Swann. Still another collection of her reviews and essays; there had been three before this.

I felt myself flush with gratitude and anticipation. I turned the precious little volume over and there, as I hoped, was a photo of Clare staring out at me, looking sharp and smart and sexy. It brought on the tears, blurring my vision so that I couldn't read the cover copy for several seconds. As my eyes cleared, they fell haphazardly upon the text before them, as if I were reading through a blowing cloud.

… last book … sorely missed … prepared for publication before the author's still unexplained disappearance … stands as a fitting tribute to the memory of America's most acclaimed film critic … her many fans will not soon forget …

I was leaping and racing over the words, trying to devour them all at once, rereading before I'd read once through. Finally I got the meaning. They were saying this was Clare's
last book.
“Last” in the sense of final, in the sense of never another. And why? Because Clare had “disappeared,” was gone, was no more.

My hands, tightening on the book, were twisting it out of shape, trying to wring more out of what I'd read there. Quickly, I turned to the preface. It was a brief piece by Arlene Fleischer of the Museum of Modern Art that did little more than lavish praise on Clare. There were only two phrases that half answered the questions raging in my head. One referred to Clare's “tragic disappearance in a boating accident last summer.” The other located the accident as having taken place “just after she had attended a film festival in Sydney, Australia.” That was all. Boating accident. What kind of boat? What kind of accident? And why “disappearance,” not death? Presumably because no body had been found.

In pure frustration I wanted to scream. I did scream, a long, miserable howl of hurt and fury. I had no doubt, none whatever, that Clare had suffered the same fate I had. Lost at sea, but not drowned. Imprisoned. Somewhere in a place like this. How could it have happened? Why was she sailing to Sydney? My God! The world cruise! Her husband the yachtsman. Had it happened on her honeymoon? Was her new husband, like Angelotti, an orphan in disguise, lying in ambush? I knew what film festival this was. It would have taken place the previous August, three months after Clare set to sea. That
made the time about right. She could have stopped over in Australia, attended the festival, boarded her yacht, sailed away … and vanished.

One question hammered insistently inside my skull.
Had it happened because of me?
Because Clare was an inconvenient loose end in my story? Because the orphans feared she'd come looking for me, make trouble, spill the beans? Oh God, oh God! I had (effectively) killed the woman I loved.

After that morning, my wretchedness lasted for days. It never went away, but simply settled in, a permanent condition of guilt and grief that hurt less only when I became numb with pain. Often I fell asleep exhausted from weeping, Clare's name on my lips repeated again and again. But the weeping wasn't just for her. Whatever her fate might be, I knew her disappearance made my captivity a life sentence. Nothing ahead of me but one day as lost and hopeless as the last.

And finally… the Conqueror Worm.

It was over a month before I paid another visit to the far end of the island. Since I could hardly go there seeking consolation for the sad news about Clare, what was the point of going at all? Nothing awaited me there but the senile shell of a once possibly great film director, who, when he was in his prime, Clare had warned me to avoid as a force of pure evil. Perhaps I wouldn't have gone back for months more, had I not stepped out on my veranda one morning to see a column of jet-black smoke rising from what I took to be the site of his bungalow. Had the old fool set his house on fire?

I made my way across the island as rapidly as I could, struggling through the thicket of undergrowth that was forever renewing itself in the ravines. Just as I cleared the semisubmerged sandbar, the wind shifted enough to blow a few whiffs of smoke toward me. I stopped
in my tracks as if I'd run into a wall of glass. The acrid chemical odor was unmistakable. Burning film. But, my God! it would take a truckload of the stuff to make that much smoke. What was happening?

I clambered over the rise and came within sight of the bungalow. No sign of damage there. The smoke was issuing from another source: a rock-lined pit off to one side of the house. I'd noticed it before but never bothered to investigate. I assumed it was for burning garbage. There was no fire in sight above the rim now, only a few wisps of gray vapor gusting up. And there he was, his back to me, squatting down beside the pit, rocking on his heels. He was wearing no more than his straw hat and a tattered loincloth. At his side was a wheelbarrow; like all the rest of his gardening equipment, it was rusted and broken down. Without looking, he reached back into it and drew out what looked like a tangled handful of shiny black snakes. It was film stock cut into strands and coils. He casually cast it into the smoldering hole. There was a brief flash of flame, then a puff of black smoke ascending. A moment later, he threw in another fistful.

Even with his back toward me, I saw he wasn't wearing his hearing aid, so he couldn't hear me approach. When I got closer, I heard him whistling to himself, a dry breathy little tune. “Bye Bye Blackbird.” Not wanting to startle him, I slowly circled around to come into his view. When he caught sight of me, he gave an unexpectedly cheery greeting. Then, at once pointing to his ears, he indicated that his hearing aid was in the bungalow. I signaled him to stay put and went to fetch it. I found it lying atop several rumpled pages of my manuscript that he must have found about the house since my last visit. These I folded and stuck into my shirt pocket.

As he worked to plug the hearing aid into his head, I asked, “What the devil's going on here?”

“I hope the batteries still work,” was his answer as he fiddled with the little device.

I asked again, “What are you doing? Where did this film come from?”

This time I was sure he heard me, but, still adjusting his earplug, he pretended he hadn't. Instead he gazed at me with his gap-toothed semismile and asked where I'd been for so long.

“New York, Paris, Rome, the Riviera,” I answered. “I returned when I got homesick. What have you been doing here?”

He noticed the typed pages in my shirt. “You took the book with you last time.”

“It
is
mine.”

“Yes, of course.“

“There are still some pages missing,” I informed him, as if it really mattered.

He nodded apologetically. “So sorry. Did you find my comments helpful?”

I said I had. “I'll be sure to include them before the book goes to press.”

He couldn't mistake the bitterness in my voice. He reached up to pat my arm. “One day, you will leave here.”

He meant to be comforting, but his grandfatherly tone made the words sound condescending. I wagged my head disconsolately. “No, I won't. I lost my one best chance.” And then, though I'd decided not to, I told him about Clare. The story spilled out in a stream of anger.