And as quickly as we saw this freeway, it is gone: a dream, a hallucination, a vision in the destroyed mind of a broken man. It’s just a remote mountain pass in the year 1847. The world around him quiet as death. It’s dusk. And William Eddy rides out alone.
8
The Grand Hotel
April 1962
Rome, Italy
Pasquale slept uneasily in an expensive little albergo near the terminal station. He wondered how guests in these Rome hotels slept with all the noise. He rose early, slipped into his pants, shirt, tie, and jacket, had a caffè, and then took a cab to the Grand Hotel, where the American film people were staying. He smoked a cigarette on the Spanish Steps as he prepared himself. Vendors were setting up cut-flower stands and tourists were already flitting about, clutching folded maps, cameras around their necks. Pasquale looked down at the name on the paper that Orenzio had given him and said the name quietly so he wouldn’t mess it up.
I am here to see . . . Michael Deane. Michael Deane. Michael Deane.
Pasquale had never been inside the Grand Hotel. The mahogany door opened onto the most ornate lobby he’d ever seen: marble floors, floral frescoes on the ceilings, crystal chandeliers, stained-glass skylights depicting saints and birds and glum lions. It was hard to take it all in and he had to force himself not to gape like a tourist, to appear serious and focused. He had important business with the bastard Michael Deane. People were milling about in the lobby, groups of tourists and Italian businessmen in black suits and eyeglasses. Pasquale didn’t see any film stars, but then he wouldn’t have known what they looked like, either. He rested for a moment against a white sculpted lion, but its face was so much like a human’s that it made Pasquale uncomfortable and he moved on to the front desk.
Pasquale removed his hat and handed the desk clerk the piece of paper with Michael Deane’s name on it. He opened his mouth to say his line, but the clerk looked at the paper and pointed to an ornate doorway at the end of the lobby. “End of the hall.” A long line of people stretched and winded out the doorway where the clerk pointed.
“I have business with this man, Deane. He’s in there?” he asked the clerk.
The man just pointed and looked away. “End of the hall.”
Pasquale made his way to the back of the line at the end of the hall. He wondered if these people all had business with Michael Deane. Maybe the man had sick actresses squirreled all over Italy. The woman in line in front of Pasquale was attractive—straight brown hair and long legs, maybe his age, twenty-two or twenty-three, wearing a tight dress and nervously fingering an unlit cigarette.
“Do you have a light?” she asked.
Pasquale struck a match and held it for her. She cupped his hand and breathed in.
“I’m so nervous. If I don’t smoke right now I’m going to have to eat a whole cake. Then I’ll be as fat as my sister and they’ll have no use for me.”
He looked past her, along the line of people, into an ornate ballroom, big gold pillars in the corners.
“What is this line?” he asked.
“This is the only way,” she answered. “You can try to get in at the studio or wherever they’re filming that day, but I think the lines all go to the same place. No, the best way is to do what you did, just come here.”
Pasquale said, “I am trying to find this man.” He showed her the piece of paper with Deane’s name on it.
She glanced at the paper, and then showed him her own piece of paper, which had the name of a different man on it. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “All of the lines lead to the same place eventually.”
More people fell in line behind Pasquale. The line led to a small table, where a man and a woman were seated with several stapled sheets of paper in front of them. Perhaps the man was Michael Deane. The man and the woman asked each person in line a question or two and then either sent them back the way they’d come, or to stand in the corner or out another door that seemed to lead outside.
When it was the beautiful girl’s turn, they took her paper, asked her age and where she was from, and whether she spoke any English. She said nineteen, Terni, and yes she spoke “English molto good.” They asked her to say something.
“Baby, baby,” she said in something like English. “I love you, baby. You are my baby.” She was sent to stand in the corner. Pasquale noticed that all the attractive young girls were sent to this same corner. The other people were sent out the door. When it was his turn, he showed the piece of paper with Michael Deane’s name to the man at the small table, who handed it back.