“May I ask … ”
“Ask away.”
” … who are you?”
“By all means. One name deserves another. I’m Willem Zeffer.”
“I’m pleased to meet you,” Tammy said. “Again, I’m sorry.” She made a half-hearted glance over her shoulder at the altar. “I shouldn’t have come in here.”
“You weren’t to know. It’s easy to get lost in this … jungle. We should have it all cut back.” He smiled thinly. “You just can’t get the staff these days.”
“That woman,” Tammy said. “The one in the mask?”
“In the mask?” Zeffer said, “Oh. I see. Yes. In the mask.”
“Who is she?”
He stepped to the side, in order to have a dear view of the altar and what was upon it. “She was an actress,” he explained, “many, many moons ago.”
“I thought I recognized her.”
“Her name’s Katya Lupi.”
“Yes?” The name rang a bell, but Tammy still couldn’t name any of the movies this woman had been in.
“Was she very famous?”
“Very. She’s up there with Pickford and Swanson and Theda Bara. Or she was.”
“She’s dead?”
“No, no. Just forgotten. At least that’s my impression. I don’t get out into the world any more, but I sense that the name Katya Lupi doesn’t mean very much.”
“You’d be right.”
“Well, she’s lucky. She still has her little dominion here in Coldheart Canyon.”
“Coldheart?”
“That’s what they called the place. She was such a heart-breaker, you see. She took so many lovers — especially in the early years — and when she was done with them, she just threw them aside.”
“Were you one of them?”
Zeffer smiled. “I shared her bed, a little, when I first brought her to America. But she got tired of me very quickly.”
“What then?”
“I had other uses, so she kept me around. But a lot of the men who loved her took her rejection badly. Three committed suicide with bullets. A number of others with alcohol. Some of them stayed here, where they could be close to her. Including me. It’s foolish really, because there’s no way back into her affection.”
“Why would you want to be … back, I mean?” Tammy said. “She must be very old by now.”
“Oh time hasn’t staled her infinite variety, as the Bard has it. She’s still beautiful.”
Tammy didn’t want to challenge the man, given that he was plainly besotted with this Lupi woman, but the idol of his heart must be approaching a hundred years of age by now. It was hard to imagine how any of her beauty remained.
“Well, I guess I should be getting along.” Tammy said.
She gently pressed past Zeffer, who put up no resistance, and stepped out of the cage onto the walkway. It was so quiet she could hear her stomach rumble. Her Westwood breakfast seemed very remote now; as did the little diner where she’d eaten it.
Zeffer came after her, out into the open air, and she saw him clearly for the first time. He had been extremely handsome once, she thought; but his face was a mess. He looked as though he’d been attacked; punched repeatedly. Raw in places, pale and powdery in others, he had the appearance of a man who had suffered intensely, and kept the suffering inside, where it continued to take its toll. She couldn’t make quite so hurried an attempt to abandon him now that she’d seen him plainly. He seemed to read her equivocation, and suggested that she stay.
“Are you really in such a hurry?” He looked around him as he spoke; he seemed to be reading the peculiar stillness in the air.
“Perhaps we could walk together a ways. It isn’t always safe up here.”
Before she could ask him what he meant by this he turned his back to the door of the cage and picked up a large stick that was set there. The way he wielded it suggested he’d used it as a weapon in the past, and had some expectation of doing so again now.
“Animals?” she said.
He looked at her with those sorrowful gray eyes of his. “Sometimes animals, yes. Sometimes worse.”
“I don’t understand.”