SEVEN
There came a point, as Jerry’s car was carrying Katya out of for the first time in the better part of three quarters of a century, when her fears seemed to get the better of her. Jerry heard a voice, as dry as a husk, out of the darkness behind him: “I’m sorry … I don’t know that I can do this.”
“Do you want me to turn around?” he asked her. “I will if you want me to.”
There was no reply. Just the soft sound of frightened weeping. “I wish Zeffer was still here. Why was I so cruel to him?” None of this seemed to be for open discussion. It was more like a private confessional. “Why am I such a bitch? Jesus. Jesus. Everything I’ve ever loved … ” She stopped herself, and looked up at Jerry, catching his reflection in the mirror. “Don’t mind me. It’s just a crazy old woman talking to herself.”
“Maybe we should go back and find Mr. Zeffer? He could come with you. I realize there was some bad blood between you — ”
“Zeffer’s dead, Jerry. I lost my temper with him, and — ”
“You killed him?”
“No. I left him in the Devil’s Country. Wounded by one of the hunters.”
“Lord.”
Jerry brought the car to a halt. He stared out of the window, horrified. “What would you like me to do?” he said after a while. “If you can’t go on without him, I mean.”
“Take no notice of me,” Katya said, after a short period of reflection: “I’m just feeling sorry for myself. Of course I can go on. What other choice do I have?” She took another moment to study the passing world. “It’s just that it’s been a long time since I was out in the real world.”
“This isn’t the real world, it’s LA.”
She saw the joke in that. They laughed together over the remark, and when their laughter had settled into smiles, he got the car going again, down the hill. At some unidentified point between the place where her faith had almost failed her, and Sunset Boulevard, they crossed the boundary of Coldheart Canyon.
Their destination was already decided, of course, so there wasn’t much reason to talk as they went. Jerry left Katya to her musings. He knew his Hollywood history well enough to be sure that she would be astonished by what she was seeing. In her time Sunset Boulevard had been little more than a dirt track once it got east of what was now Doheny. There’d been no Century City back then, of course, no four lane highways clogged with sleek vehicles. Just shacks and orange groves and dirt.
“I’ve been thinking,” Katya said, somewhere around Sepulveda.
“About what?”
“Me and my wickedness.”
“Your what? Your wickedness?”
“Yes, my wickedness. I don’t know why it came into my mind, but it did. If I think about the women I’ve played in all my really important pictures, they were all wicked women. Poisonous. Adulterers. One who kills her own child. Really unforgivable women.”
“But don’t most actors prefer to play bad characters? Isn’t it more fun?”
“Oh it is. And I had a lot to inspire me.”
“Inspire you?”
“As a child, I saw wickedness with my own eyes. I had it’s hands on me. Worse, it possessed me.” Her voice grew cold and dark. “My mother ran a whorehouse, did I ever tell you that? And when I was ten or so, she just decided one night it was time to make me available to the customers.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s what I said to myself. Every night, I said: Jesus, please help me. Jesus, please come and take me away from this wicked woman. Take me to heaven. But he never came. I had to run away. Three times I ran away and my brothers found me and dragged me back. Once she let them have me, as a reward for finding me.”
“Your own brothers?”
“Five of them.”
“Christ.”
“Anyway, I succeeded in escaping her eventually, and when you’re a thirteen-year-old, and you’re out in the world on your own, you see a lot thirteen-year-olds shouldn’t have to see.”