Coldheart Canyon (6 page)

“And you would sell all that to own
this
?”

“A little piece of Sunset Boulevard for your glorious Hunt? Why not?”

“Because it’s just a room covered with filthy tile.”

“So I have more money than sense. What does it matter to you? A hundred thousand dollars is a great deal of money.”

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“Yes, it is.”

“So, do we have a deal or not?”

“Mister Zeffer, this is all too sudden. We’re not talking about a
chair
here. This is part of the fabric of the Fortress. It has great historical significance.”

“A minute ago it was just a room covered with filthy tile.”

“Filthy tile of
great
historical significance,” Sandru said, allowing himself a little smile.

“Are you saying we can’t find some terms that are mutually satisfying?

Because if you are—”

“No, no, no. I’m not saying that. Perhaps we could eventually agree on a price, if we talked about it for a while. But how would you ever get it back to California?”

“That would be my problem. This is the twenties, Father. Anything’s possible.”

“And then what? Suppose you
could
get everything back to Hollywood?”

“Another room, the same proportions—”

“You have such a room?”

“No. I’d build one. We have a house in the Hollywood Hills. I’d put it in as a surprise for Katya.”

“Without telling her?”

“Well if I told her it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

“I’m just astonished that she would allow you to do such a thing. A woman like that.”

“Like
what
?”

The question caught Sandru off-balance. “Well . . . so . . .”

“Beautiful?”

“Yes.”

“I think our conversation’s come full-circle, Father.”

Sandru conceded the point with a little nod, lifting the brandy bottle as he did so.

“So she’s not as perfect as her face would suggest?” he asked at last.

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“Not remotely. Thank God.”

“This place, with all its obscenities, would
please
her?”

“Yes, I think it would. Why? Does that make you more open to the idea of selling it to me?”

“I don’t know,” Sandru replied, frowning. “This whole conversation hasn’t turned out the way I thought it would. I expected you to come down here and maybe buy a table, or a tapestry. Instead you want to buy the walls!” He shook his head again. “I was warned about you Americans,” he added, his tone no longer amused.

“What were you warned about?”

“Oh, that you thought nothing was beyond your grasp. Or beyond your pocket.”

“So the money isn’t enough.”

“The
money
, the
money
.” He made an ugly sound in the back of his throat. “What does the
money
matter? You want to pay a hundred thousand dollars for it? Pay it. I’ll never see a lei so why should I care what it costs you? You can steal it as far as I am concerned.”

“Let me understand you clearly. Are you agreeing to the sale?”

“Yes,” Father Sandru said, his tone weary now, as though the whole subject had suddenly lost all trace of pleasure for him. “I’m agreeing.”

“Good. I’m delighted.”

Zeffer returned through the maze of furniture to the door, where the priest stood. He extended his hand. “It’s been wonderful dealing with you, Father Sandru.”

Sandru looked down on the proffered hand, and then—after a moment of study—took it. His fingers were cold, his palm clammy. “Do you want to stay and look at what you’ve bought?”

“No. I don’t think so. I think we both need a little sun on our faces.”

Sandru said nothing to this; he just turned and led the way out along the corridor to the stairs. But the expression on his face, as he turned, was perfectly clear: there was no more pleasure to be found above than there was down here in the cold; nor prospect of any.

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There were ten thousand things Zeffer had not witnessed, or even glimpsed, in his brief visit to the vast, mysterious chambers in the Fortress’s bowels; images haunting the tiles which he would not discern until the heroic labor of removing the masterwork from the walls and shipping it to California was complete.

He was a literate man; better educated than most of his peers in the burgeoning city of Los Angeles, thanks to parents who had filled the house with books, even though there was often precious little food on the table.

He knew his classics, and the mythologies from which the great books and plays of the ancients had been derived. In time he would discover dozens of images inspired by those same myths on the tiles. In one place women were depicted like the Maenads immortalized by Euripides; maddened souls in service of the god of ecstasies, Dionysus. They raced through the trees with bloody hands, leaving pieces of male flesh scattered in the grass. In another place, single-breasted Amazons strode, drawing their mighty bows back and letting fly storms of arrows.

There were other images—many, many others—that were not rooted in any recognizable mythology. In one spot, not far from the delta, huge fishes, which had sprouted legs covered with golden scales, came through the trees in solemn shoals, spitting fire. The trees ahead of them were aflame; burning birds rose up from the canopy.

In the swamp, a small town stood on long limbs, its presence appearing to mark the position of some place that had existed there once but had been taken by time, or a prophecy of some settlement to come. The CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 39

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artists had taken liberties with the rendering, foreshortening the scene so that the occupants of the city were almost as big as their houses, and could be plainly seen. There were excesses here, too; perversities just as profound as anything the Wild Wood was hosting. Through one of the windows a man could be seen spread-eagled on a table, around which sat a number of guests, all watching a large worm enter him anally and then erupt from his open mouth. Another was the scene of a strange summoning, in which a host of black birds with human heads rose up from the ground, circling a girl-child who was either their invoker or their victim. In a third house a woman was squatting and shedding menstrual blood through a hole in the floor. Several men, smaller than the woman above by half, were swimming in the water below and undergoing some calamitous transformation, presumably brought on by the
menses
. Their heads had flowered into dark, monstrous shapes; demonic tails had sprouted from their backsides.

As Father Sandru had warned (or was it
boasted
?) to Zeffer, there was no part of the landscape depicted there on the walls that was not haunted by some bizarre sight or other. Even the clouds (innocent enough, surely) shat rains of fire in one place, and evacuated skulls in another. Demons cavorted unchallenged over the open sky, like dancers possessed by some celestial music, while stars fell between them; others rose over the horizon, leering like emaciated fools. And in that same sky, as though to suggest that this was a world of perpetual twilight, teetering always on the edge of darkness and extinction, was a sun that was three-quarters eclipsed by an exquisitely rendered moon, the latter painted so cunningly it seemed to have real mass, real roundness, as it slid over the face of the day-star.

In one place there was painted a line of crowned figures—the kings and queens of Romania, back to ancient times—painted marching into the ground. The noble line rotted as it proceeded into the earth, carrion birds alighting on the descending lineage, plucking out regal eyes and law-giving tongues. In another place a circle of witches rose in a spiral from a spot marked by standing-stones; their innocent victims, babies whose fat had CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 40

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been used to make the flying ointment in which they had slathered themselves, lay scattered between the stones like neglected dolls.

And all through this world of monstrous hurts and occasional miracles, the Hunt.

Many of the scenes were simply documents of the vigorous beauty of the chase; they looked as though they could have been painted from life.

There was a pack of dogs, white and black and pie-bald (one bitch charmingly attending to her suckling pups); some being muzzled by peasants, others straining on their leashes as they were led away to join the great assembly of hunters. Elsewhere, the dogs could be seen accompanying the hunters. Where the Duke had chosen to kneel and pray, a white dog knelt beside him, his noble head bowed by the weight of shared devotion.

In another, the dogs were splashing in a river, attempting to catch the huge salmon outlined in the stylized blue waters. And in a third place, for no apparent reason but the playfulness of the artists, the role of dogs and men had been reversed. A long, beautiful decorated table had been set up in a clearing among the trees, and at it sat a number of finely-bred dogs, while at their booted feet naked men fought over scraps and bones. Closer examination showed the arrangement of figures to be even more anarchic than it first appeared, for there were thirteen dogs at the table, and in their center sat one dog with a halo perched between his pricked ears: a canine Last Supper. An informed observer, knowing the traditional positions of the Apostles, could have named them all. The writers of the Gospels were there in their accustomed seats; John sitting closest to his master, Judas sitting at the perimeter of the company, while Peter (a Saint Bernard) brooded at the other end, his furrowed brow suggesting he already knew he would betray his master three times before the long night was over.

Elsewhere in the landscape, the dogs were painted at far crueler work.

Tearing rabbits apart in one place, and ripping the flesh from a cornered stag in another. In a third they were in a contest with a lion, and many had been traumatically injured by the battle. Some crawled away from the place, trailing their bowels; one had been thrown up into the trees, and its corpse hung there, tongue lolling. Others lay sprawled in the grass in CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 41

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pools of blood. The hunters kept their distance, no doubt waiting for the lion to become so weakened by blood-loss that they could close in and claim the heroic moment for themselves.

But the most perverse of all the scenes were those in which erotic love and hunting were conjoined.

There was, for instance, a place where the dogs had driven a number of naked men and women up a gorge, where they had encountered a group of hunters armed with spears and nets. The terrified couples clung to one another, but the netters and the spearers knew their business. Men were separated from women and the men were run through with spears, the women all bundled up in the nets, heaped on carts, and carried away. The sexual servitude that awaited them was of a very particular kind. Reading the walls from left to right the viewer’s eye found that in an adjacent valley the women were freed from the nets and strapped beneath the bodies of massive centaurs, their legs stretched around the flanks of the animals.

The women’s response to this terrible violation was something the artists had taken some trouble to detail. One was screaming in agony, her head thrown back, as blood ran from the place where she was being divided. Others appeared to be in ecstasy at this forced marriage, pressing their faces joyously to the necks of their deflowerers.

But this part of the story did not finish there. If the “reader,” scanning these walls, had continued his inquiry, he would have found that some of the men had survived the massacre in the gorge, and returned, on a later sequence of tiles, to hunt the creatures that had their wives in sexual thrall. These were some of the most brilliantly painted sequences on the walls: the surviving lovers returning on horseback, so as to match their speed to that of the centaurs. Lassos circling in the air over their heads, they closed on the centaurs, who were slowed down by the very women they carried around to pleasure them. Several were brought down by ropes around the neck, others were speared in the throat or flank. The women they carried were not always lucky in these encounters. Though no doubt their rescuers intended to free them, it was often the case that they perished beneath the weight of their violators, as the dying centaurs CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 42

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rolled over, crushing them. Perhaps there was some moral here—some lesson about the vulnerability of the innocent women when two tribes of males were set against one another; but the artists seemed to take too much grisly pleasure in their depictions for this to be the case. Rather, it appeared to be done for the pleasure of the doing; of the imagining, and of the rendering. There was no moral from one end of this world to the other.

It would be possible to go on listing at great length the horrors and the spectacles of the scenes laid out on the tile: the fields of dancing demons, the fairy races, the succubi squatting on roofs, the holy fools draped in coats of cow-dung, the satyrs, the spirits of graveside, roadside and hearthside; the weasel-kings and the bloated toads; and so on, and so on, behind every tree and on every cloud, sliding down every waterfall and lingering beneath every rock: a world haunted by the shapes of lust and animal lust and all that humanity called to its bosom in the long nights of its despair.

Though Hollywood—even in its fledgling years—was presenting itself to the world as the very soul of the imagination, there was nothing going on before the cameras there (nor would there be, ever) that could compete with what the master tile-painters and their apprentices had created.

It was, as Sandru has said, the Devil’s Country.

Zeffer went to Brascov to hire men, at prices five or six times what he would have paid locally, because he wanted hands that could do the job with some finesse, and minds that could count to a higher number than their fingers. He devised the means by which the masterpiece could be removed himself. The tiles were meticulously numbered on the reverse sides and a huge legend made of the room by three cartographers he had also hired in the city, so that there would be a meticulous record of the way the design had been laid out; and an obsessive accounting of how the tiles were numbered, stacked and packed away; including a detailed description of which tiles were cracked or damaged before they were CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 43