City of Myths Read online

“Assuming he would even take my call.”

  “Not unless he was curious to learn why. The trick is to make him want to take your call.”

  Kathryn fell back in her chair. “And how do I do that?”

  “Miss Massey, my job isn’t about pulling out a magnifying glass and fingerprint kit. It’s about understanding human nature and finding a way to use that understanding to extract the information I’m after.”

  “Are you about to tell me that Hoover is human?” As soon as she said it, Kathryn wished she hadn’t. This guy was about to impart useful information and here she was running off at the mouth.

  He continued as though she had said nothing.

  “People respond better when you’ve done them a favor. First you do the favor, you let some time go by, and then you approach them again. You say, Hey listen, I’m sorry to bother you but do you think you could help me out?”

  He laid his hands on the table, palms toward the ceiling, as though to say So what kind of favor could you do for the head of the FBI?

  A loud crack rang out from beyond Kathryn’s living room window. The handyman called down to his coworkers that he’d broken his last scraper, which meant they’d have to go to the hardware store on Santa Monica Boulevard and buy a dozen more. And while they were at it, some more paint “on accounta this job was bigger’n I planned.”

  Kathryn listened to him fuss and cuss down the ladder until she heard his boots crunch on the gravel path leading toward the pool. It was all the time she needed to come up with something that might tempt Hoover to take her call.

  CHAPTER 8

  Marcus sat at a sidewalk table in front of the Ristocaffé Colosseo wishing he’d thrown on a thicker sweater. The afternoon sun flooded the Colosseum in languid light but very little warmth.

  He had contacted the popular rental agencies in Rome but their meager list of penthouses had run out days ago. Back in Hollywood the Zanuck name opened all doors, but over here, it merely induced a blank look and a Continental shrug.

  In his recent “No penthouses for love or money” cable, Marcus had added “and money is running low.” He hoped Zanuck would tell him to return to California, so he was disappointed when he arrived home to a scribbled message that American Express had called again.

  He was desperate to get back to the Garden, to Kathryn and Gwendolyn, and to his old life. But on the other hand, there was Domenico Beneventi.

  What a name! It rolled off the tongue like the guy was a Renaissance sculptor. He liked to whisper it over and over when he was alone.

  It’d been late when Marcus had brought him home. They’d tried to tiptoe in without catching the signora’s attention, but the squeak of a floorboard and a chianti-induced giggle triggered her curiosity. Her door cracked open and a quizzical eye squinted at them. Domenico told her that he was ashamed to admit that he was too drunk to go home to his unforgiving mamma, so Marcus had offered him a rug on which to sleep it off. She’d closed her door and left them to mount the stairs to Marcus’s room, where they had fallen into bed and unleashed pent-up cravings that caught them by surprise.

  It wasn’t like Marcus hadn’t bedded anybody since Oliver. There had been some dalliances here and there, and a few fumblings in the dark. But the following morning, he’d woken up with Domenico’s wrist fitted neatly into the cleft of his chest, and a pinkie finger resting lightly on a nipple. They’d made love—an unhurried, sensual encounter. When it was over, Marcus had expected the guy to jump out of bed, pull on his clothes, toss off some sort of half-hearted thanks for helping him over the hump of putting Jacopo past him, and hurry out the door.

  But instead, Domenico had pulled the blankets over them and woven his legs around Marcus’s as they drifted back to sleep. Marcus dreamed that they were at the ornately carved seminary door. They walked through it and onto the Garden of Allah’s poolside patio where a party was in progress. It was a languid dream where everybody was in soft focus, like movie stars past their prime.

  Later, they’d rolled out of bed for a late breakfast of strong espresso and fresh croissants. Soon, they were spending most evenings together once Domenico was finished corralling legionnaires and villagers at Cinecittà.

  And now it was three weeks later and, sitting at a café overlooking the Colosseum, Marcus realized that being stuck in Rome might not be all bad.

  He lifted the camera to his eye and adjusted the zoom lens until the crumbling amphitheater sharpened in his viewfinder. He pressed the shutter as a flock of pigeons took to the sky amid a cacophony of squawking.

  A nearby diner caught his attention—or, rather, her familiar curly, ash-blonde hair. He bowed to the left to get a clearer look at the woman’s face. It was angled down as she leafed through a copy of Look magazine. She stopped at something that made her blink with surprise, then giggled to herself.

  Christ almighty, it’s her!

  The Hollywood actress denounced on the floor of the US Senate as “a powerful influence for evil” was sitting ten feet away from him, reading a magazine while soaking up the last of the Italian summer sun.

  Marcus thought about Domenico’s assertion that the European magazines would pay him handsomely. Zanuck’s second wire transfer had been half of the first. Domenico hadn’t clarified exactly how much “handsomely” amounted to, but it was probably enough for another couple of weeks’ rent.

  Even without the benefit of studio makeup and lighting guys, Ingrid Bergman looked every bit as natural as she had in Casablanca. Marcus had always felt she hadn’t deserved to become the target of the relentless accusations thrown at her by Americans outraged that she’d left her family and career to pursue an affair with a foreign director. Stromboli was an escape hatch from an unhappy marriage with a controlling husband, as well as from a creatively stifling career. The American public didn’t care. They saw her as Sister Mary Benedict in The Bells of St Mary’s and wanted her to remain that way.

  Guilt overcame Marcus for invading the privacy of a woman who’d lost so much. Who was he to take what little solitude she had left?

  As he hesitated to release the shutter, the sun slipped behind a wisp of a cloud, softening the light. The Ingrid Bergman that filled his viewfinder became so achingly beautiful that Marcus couldn’t resist. Just because I take some pictures, doesn’t mean I’ll sell them. He managed to click off eight frames before his conscience reasserted itself. He lowered his camera to the table just as the waiter approached and handed him a folded note. “Dalla signora al tavolo dietro.” From the lady at the back table.

  At the rear of the café, tucked away in the shadows, was a woman in a wide-brimmed hat of black straw. Under it, she wore a turban of dark red felt, and on her nose sat an oversized pair of sunglasses.

  He unfolded her note and read the single word written there:

  skybound

  Marcus wove through the tables until he stood in front of the mystery woman.

  “Melody?”

  She tipped her sunglasses forward to confirm that she was Melody Hope, the former MGM star whose booze-sodden fall from grace had been humiliatingly documented in the entertainment press. Several years later, she had popped up in his life with the idea for a vehicle that could serve as a comeback for both of them: a biopic about the life of Amelia Earhart, called Skybound.

  As Marcus took a seat, Melody ordered Negronis. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw you.”

  Marcus wished she’d take off those ridiculously huge sunglasses so that he could get a better look at her. “Were you sitting here this whole time?”

  “Long enough to see you take those sneaky snaps of Ingrid. Oh, sweetie, I’m just so gosh-darned pleased to see you! How long has it been?”

  The last time Marcus had seen Melody was the night she and Trevor Bergin stopped by the Garden of Allah to announce they’d each been cast in Italian movies after a propagandistic booklet called Red Channels had killed the careers of hundreds of people.

  “Three years.” The Negronis arrived
and the two of them clinked glasses. “We didn’t hear from you after you left Hollywood. So how are you?”

  “Let’s see. I came over here to make Titus Flavius. I played a Judean queen who was mistress to the Roman emperor who built that.” She tipped her glass toward the Colosseum. “It wasn’t a big role, but I must have made an impression because they gave me my own movie, Queen of Judea. And that did so well, I was cast in Rome Burns, playing Poppaea Sabina. She was the wife of Nero and such a bitch, but of course a hell of a part.”

  Marcus smiled to himself. Ask an actress how they are, and they give you their résumé. “It’s a shame none of your movies made it to the States.”

  She gave an apathetic shrug and peeked over the top of her sunglasses to get an unfiltered view of him. “You have a glow about you.”

  “I do?”

  “It’s exactly the sort of glow someone told me I had after I took a lover.” Her eyes widened. “Marcus! Have you taken on an Italian lover?” She thwacked him across the arm. “Aren’t they the best? So passionate! So sensual! They’re like a goddamned friggin’ tidal wave, am I right?” She pushed her sunglasses back up her face.

  “Yes to all of the above,” Marcus said. “It’s made my time here much more bearable.”

  A ruckus erupted off to the right. A striking woman—all breasts and curves and short dark hair—sauntered into view. Her blindingly white dress hugged her hips then flared out, cascading around her knees as she sashayed along the cobblestones in stiletto-heeled mules.

  A thicket of men followed her like a pack of ravenous wolves. To snag her attention, they called out a word over and over, but Marcus couldn’t catch it.

  “Are those guys the scattini I’ve heard about?” he asked.

  “They sure as hell are.”

  “Do they go after you?”

  “Why do you think I’m all covered up like an Arabian concubine? But I don’t blame them. We’re all trying to make a buck. And they can help you get noticed when you’re an up-and-comer like Miss Va-Va-Voom Italian Style over there.” The woman in white was now leaning against a low marble fence, a study in nonchalance with the Colosseum behind her.

  “That’s not Sophia Loren, is it?” Marcus asked.

  “She’s the other one, Gina Lollobrigida. She made a movie with Bogie called Beat the Devil.”

  “What are they calling out?”

  “La Lolla. It’s her scattini nickname.”

  Forming a semicircle around her, they jockeyed for the best angle, gently elbowing each other in the ribs and laughing when one of them pretended to fall at her feet. But the mood changed when a new guy, dressed in a linen suit dyed pastel yellow, thrust himself through the group.

  “Oh God,” Melody muttered, “here comes trouble.”

  The new photographer shouted out “GINA! GINA!” in a loud, almost angry tone.

  “Who’s that?”

  “He probably sells more photos to more magazines than the rest of those guys combined.”

  “Emilio Conti?”

  “Sure is.”

  Conti positioned himself at the front. He started directing Lollobrigida—Turn your hips to me and twist your shoulders in the opposite direction—while the others yelled at him in rapid-fire colloquial Italian that Marcus couldn’t catch. Conti paid no attention.

  Melody opened her purse and pulled out some lira. “Let’s go.” She led him into a maze of streets bordered by two- and three-story houses in varying stages of dilapidation. “I’m starting a new movie soon. After much campaigning—some may call it ‘nagging’—they’re finally letting me play a modern woman.”

  “No more togas?”

  “And I couldn’t be more excited. It’s called Metropolitana and it’s about a group of World War II French resistance fighters who live in the Paris subway, which they call the Metro. I play a plucky French girl who recruits an Italian to fight for them.”

  “You’ll be shooting in Paris?”

  “Get this: Metropolitana is a French-Italian-American co-production, set during the war in Paris but shot at Cinecittà, and staffed largely by Americans from—are you ready?—MGM! How’s that for irony? Well, here we are.”

  They had turned off a deserted backstreet and onto an alley. An arched wooden gate stood at the top of a short flight of steps. Craggy from years in the sun, strips of weathered paint hung in jagged ribbons. Flakes of it lay scattered among a layer of vivid purple petals that carpeted the stone steps.

  Melody twisted a black iron ring to the left. The gate opened inward, revealing a large bricked courtyard shaded by a lattice of vines. She pointed to an especially thick creeper whose tendrils curled around an explosion of bougainvillea. “The gardener told me it’s older than Garibaldi. Amazing, huh?”

  “This is where you live?”

  “And I thought Hollywoodland was nice.”

  She led him through the courtyard to the entrance of a six-story building Marcus wouldn’t have guessed was there. “Only two apartments per floor, except at the very top.”

  “There’s a penthouse?” His hopes beginning to climb, Marcus shaded his eyes to catch a glimpse of the top floor. “Does anybody live there?”

  “One of those surly old ladies, always dressed in black, always rubbing some old crucifix around her neck. Crabby as all get-out and never says hello, goodbye, or kiss my ass.”

  “Has she lived here long?”

  Melody took him through the marble foyer—its walls were painted off-white and hung with horrific scenes of medieval torture—and down one flight of stairs. “She looks ancient enough to remember opening day at the Colosseum. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen her in ages. She’s probably too decrepit to leave the house.”

  The living room was bigger than Marcus’s entire pensione and filled with light that poured in from three sides. Through the broadest window, Marcus could pick out the tops of columns dotting the Palatine Hill.

  “You’ve landed on your feet,” he told her.

  “Don’t I know it.” She ditched the sunglasses on the dining table, plucked off the sun hat, and unwound the red turban. Her hair was lighter than Marcus remembered, almost sandy blonde. She wore it longer now; its natural curls framed her face like a halo.

  She handed a bound movie script to him with a single word centered in the middle of the first page.

  METROPOLITANA

  “Do me a favor and read it?”

  “Right now?”

  “The screenwriter arrives tomorrow.”

  In Marcus’s experience, the writer seldom went on location. His place on the chain gang was in a cramped cubicle, swallowing too much Benzedrine until the script was done. “Lucky guy.”

  “Not really.” Melody threw herself onto a long sofa handsomely upholstered in damask that looked like a Venetian tapestry. “I demanded that they send for him because the story doesn’t quite work. I can’t figure out why, but I don’t want to come off like some birdbrain. You could finish it in an hour and a half.”

  Marcus fanned the pages through his fingers. It sure felt good to be holding one of these babies. “What would you have done if we hadn’t bumped into each other?”

  She coiled a lock of hair around her finger. “I probably would have faced him sounding like some birdbrain.”

  Marcus dropped onto the sofa next to her. “So make with the coffee already.”

  From the very first page, the script reminded Marcus of his days laboring in MGM’s B Unit where they’d had a stack of twenty scripts that recycled the hero into a heroine, the racetrack location into a baseball stadium, the greedy banker into a greedy developer, and the whole thing—abracadabra!—into a brand-new movie.

  But at the halfway mark where Metropolitana’s heroine, Ursula, meets the Italian love interest, Marcus stopped reading.

  “Finished already?” Melody called from her balcony, where she was chain-smoking.

  “Does this movie end with Ursula staying underground to live permanently and Alfredo climbing a ladd
er to the surface?”

  She joined him on the couch, stinking of harsh cigarette smoke. “You think they’re going to climb back up to civilization together. He goes but she stays. It’s a total letdown. They keep telling me ‘But it’s neo-realism.’ Yuck! I know what moviegoers want and it ain’t that.”

  Marcus tossed the script onto the coffee table. “About twenty years ago, I wrote a short story called Subway People, which got published in The Saturday Evening Post. MGM bought the screen rights and sold them to Cosmopolitan Pictures, who wanted to turn it into a movie for Marion Davies called Ursula Goes Underground.”

  Melody gaped at the script, then back at him. “I don’t remember any picture like that.”

  “The script was deemed subpar and the movie never got made.” Marcus flipped to the front page and read the name of the screenwriter: Wendell Pitt. “Is this who they’re flying over to meet with you?”

  “Nah. They’re sending a script doctor.” She reached over to the narrow table standing against the back of the sofa where a stack of telegrams sat in a messy pile. She flicked through them. “Vernon Terrell.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You know him?”

  “Back in the day, we called him ‘Hoppy’ on account of how he wanted to play Hopalong Cassidy, but he lost a leg in the first world war so that was the end of that. It was a tough break, but he reinvented himself into a damn fine screenwriter. The last time I saw him, he was working at Columbia.”

  That was the night Jim Taggert had handed Marcus the job of running MGM’s writing department while celebrating the bombing of Hiroshima. Boy, what a week that had been—and what a day this had turned into. Marcus couldn’t wait to share all this with Domenico.

  “When does he arrive?” he asked Melody.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “And when are you meeting him?”

  “Production starts soon and the script isn’t set, so they’re losing their minds. He’s coming straight from the airport. He’ll be here this time tomorrow.”