“There’s a book. It’s in French. I’ve read it many times.”
“We can make a lot of things happen if you pull this out for us.”
223.
Vikar says, “About Soledad.”
“You want her off the picture.”
“Why would I want that?”
“What, then?”
“Off the picture?”
“Vikar, listen. You said to find her so we found her. You saw her. If that’s what it took to make you happy, then that’s what we were ready to do. If you were a normal person we would have done things the normal way and supplied you with the usual kilo of coke.” He adds, “She had her own interest at stake, too.”
“It’s her daughter.”
“Her daughter?”
“She’s sleeping in cars and going to clubs she shouldn’t go to and she’s nine.” He says, “Actually, she’s twelve.”
“A little young for you, wouldn’t you say, Vikar?”
“What?” Something barely comprehending compels him to say, “Her mother doesn’t take care of her,” with an undertone of violence that makes Rondell draw back.
“Sorry,” Rondell laughs uneasily, “bad joke.”
“Find her and make sure she’s all right. Get her a room in a hotel.”
“And her mother?”
“If she’s with her mother,” Vikar says.
“I’ll do what I can. It’s all I can promise.”
“Do what you can.”
224.
He returns to the Bowery at night looking for Zazi, but she isn’t there and no one has seen her. “We can’t find her,” Rondell says when Vikar phones four days later from the cutting room, “on my word we’ve tried. Production wrapped a week ago, they’re probably driving back to L.A. Short of the Highway Patrol putting out an APB, I don’t know what else to do.” On Vikar’s last night in New York, confronted with a choice between the Sound and the Movies, he finds he loves the Movies after all, raiding the archives one last time.
225.
Variety, May 8, 1978: “NEW YORK — A subject of intense gossip, rumor and speculation over the past year, United Artists’ production of Your Pale Blue Eyes will premiere in competition at the 31st annual Cannes film festival beginning next week, it was announced today.
“Rife with difficulties during production, the motion picture is now at the center of a heated dispute leaving it without an officially credited director, pending arbitration before the DGA. Editing of the picture reportedly has changed hands several times in the last eight months.
“Other U.S. pictures in competition at Cannes this year include An Unmarried Woman, Coming Home, Midnight Express, Pretty Baby and Who’ll Stop the Rain. The jury that bestows the Palme d’Or and other prizes is headed by an American, director Alan J. Pakula (All the President’s Men, The Parallax View), for the third time in the festival’s history, following screen legend Olivia de Havilland in 1965 and, two years ago, playwright Tennessee Williams.”
226.
The large boxes packed with movies are waiting when Vikar returns to Los Angeles, after being gone nearly six months. He unpacks his library that now crowds his apartment, and falls asleep to visions of smashing Soledad in the face with a Coke bottle.
227.
Vikar doesn’t know it, but everything now has been reset to zero.
226.
The first movie he sees back in Los Angeles is a French gangster film where a beautiful samurai hit man floats through Paris without expression, in white fedora and gloves. Vikar is most taken with a scene involving a huge ring of keys that the hit man uses to steal cars. In the driver’s seat of a car that isn’t his, the hit man in white coolly lays out on the passenger seat beside him a ring of what must be a hundred keys; one by one he takes each key from the ring and tries it in the car’s ignition until finally the correct key starts the car. As each key fails, the hit man lays it with precision on the passenger seat next to the previous key. In the movie, the fourth attempt starts the car — but what if he had begun at the ring’s other end? The car wouldn’t have started with the fourth key but the ninety-sixth. Under what growing spell and for how long would the audience be held as each key failed? The entire scene is shot from the vantage point of the passenger’s seat, which is to say the hit man’s right profile, the profile that reveals his calm, resolve, grace.
225.
For a week and a half Vikar hires a car to drive him around the city, looking for a black Mustang. He phones the beach house where he hasn’t been for years now, Viking Man whom he hasn’t spoken to since before Madrid, anyone who might know where the daughter and mother are. He calls methodically as though laying out on the passenger seat the keys of a car to be stolen.
224.
Over the course of the following week the phone doesn’t ring at all, then one morning he receives three calls, the first two from the Los Angeles Times and Variety asking for Vikar’s reaction to the response at Cannes to Your Pale Blue Eyes. “The true movie has been set free from within the false movie,” he says, to silence on the other end of the line. The third call is from Mitch Rondell.
223.
Vikar says, “You found them.”
“What?” says Rondell.
“You found Zazi and her mother.”
Rondell sounds slightly flustered. “I’m at JFK, about to get on a plane for France. Vikar, we need you to come over.”
“To New York?”
“Europe. There’s an Air France flight this evening. We’ve booked you a first-class seat.”
“Newspapers are calling.”
“About the picture?”
“Yes.”
“So you’ve heard.”
“Heard what?”
“It screened in competition at Cannes a week ago. Apparently it was riotous. You didn’t hear?”
“No.”
“Not Rite of Spring tear-up-the-theater riotous, but the sort of commotion one picture in the festival always whips up every year. I gather it was hard to tell whether the applause or boos were louder.”
“Boos?”
“Air France will fly you into Nice and someone will meet you and drive you to Cannes, which is the next town over.”
“People booed?”
“Vikar, it’s the picture everyone’s talking about.”
“They booed.” Vikar is fascinated.
“We’ve booked you a small suite at the Carlton, which at this point was difficult. Truth is we had to move someone else out.”
Vikar says, “Is it farther than Spain?”
“You may have to change planes in Paris …”
“Perhaps I’ll come in a couple of weeks. I just got back to Los Angeles.”
“Vikar, there won’t be a festival in a couple of weeks.” Now the tension in Rondell’s voice is unmistakable. “The closing ceremony is tomorrow night. The driver will take you straight to the Palais.”
“The director of the movie should be there.”
“There is no director of this movie. Literally, at this point there is no ‘Directed by’ in the credits. Until the DGA decides otherwise, this picture directed itself.”
“I don’t want to.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to come.”
222.
Vikar can hear the panic rise in Rondell’s voice.