ONE
“Your wife did not want to look around the Fortress any further, Mister Zeffer?” Father Sandru said, seeing that on the second day the middle-aged man with the handsome, sad face had come alone.
“The lady is not my wife,” Zeffer explained.
“Ah … ” the monk replied, the tone of commiseration in his voice indicating that he was far from indifferent to Katya’s charms. “A pity for you, yes?”
“Yes,” Zeffer admitted, with some discomfort.
“She’s a very beautiful woman.”
The monk studied Zeffer’s face as he spoke, but having said what he’d said, Zeffer was unwilling to play the confessee any further.
“I’m her manager,” he explained. “That’s all there is between us.”
Father Sandru, however, was not willing to let the issue go just yet. “After the two of you departed yesterday,” he said, his English colored by his native Romanian, “one of the brothers remarked that she was the most lovely woman he had ever seen … ” he hesitated before committing to the rest of the sentence ” … in the flesh.”
“Her name’s Katya, by the way,” Zeffer said.
“Yes, yes, I know,” said the Father, his fingers combing the knotted gray-white of his beard as he stood assessing Zeffer.
The two men were a study in contrasts. Sandru ruddy-faced and rotund in his dusty brown habit, Zeffer slimly elegant in his pale linen suit.
“She is a movie-star, yes?”
“You saw one of her films?”
Sandru grimaced, displaying a poorly-kept array of teeth. “No, no,” he said. “I do not see these things. At least not often. But there is a little cinema in Ravbac, and some of the younger brothers go down there quite regularly. They are great fans of Chaplin, of course. And there’s a … vamp … is that the word?”
“Yes,” Zeffer replied, somewhat amused by this conversation. “Vamp’s the word.”
“Called Theda Bara.”
“Oh, yes. We know Theda.”
In that year — which was 1920 — everybody knew Theda Bara. She had one of the most famous faces in the world. As, of course, did Katya. Both were famous; their fame tinged with a delicious hint of decadence.
“I must go with one of the brothers when they next go to see her,” Father Sandru said.
“I wonder if you entirely understand what kind of woman Theda Bara portrays?” Zeffer replied.
Sandru raised a thicketed eyebrow. “I am not born yesterday, Mister Zeffer. The Bible has its share of these women, these vamps. They’re whores, yes; women of Babylon? Men are drawn to them only to be destroyed by them?”
Zeffer laughed at the directness of Sandru’s description. “I suppose that’s about right,” he said.
“And in real life?” Sandru said.
“In real life Theda Bara’s name is Theodesia Goodman. She was born in Ohio.”
“But is she a destroyer of men?”
“In real life? No, I doubt it. I’m sure she harms a few egos now and again, but that’s about the worst of it.”
Father Sandru looked mildly disappointed. “I shall tell the brothers what you told me,” he said. “They’ll be very interested. Well then … shall I take you inside?”
Matthias Zeffer was a cultured man. He had lived in Paris, Rome, London and briefly in Cairo in his forty-three years; and had promised himself that he would leave Los Angeles — where there was neither art nor the ambition to make art — as soon as the public tired of lionizing Katya, and she tired of rejecting his offer of marriage. They would wed, and come back to Europe; find a house with some real history on its bones, instead of the fake Spanish mansion her fortune had allowed her to have built in one of the Hollywood canyons.
Until then, he would have to find aesthetic comfort in the objets d’art he purchased on their trips abroad: the furniture, the tapestries, the statuary. They would suffice, until they could find a chateau in the Loire, or perhaps a Georgian house in London; somewhere the cheap theatrics of Hollywood wouldn’t curdle his blood.
“You like Romania?” the Father asked as he unlocked the great oak door that lay at the bottom of the stairs.