Night Film

41

Back at Gitane, I explained to Hopper and Nora what had happened, that I was certain it was Theo Cordova who’d been watching us.

“It changes everything,” I said. “The family is on to us now, so we’ll have to assume our every move is being watched.”

They responded with somber acceptance, Hopper almost immediately throwing a few crumpled bills on the table and taking off in answer to a text, Nora and I heading home. She went to bed, though I poured myself a Macallan scotch and looked up Theo Cordova.

There were at least a thousand returns in Google images, every one a Cordova film still. He’d played small roles in At Night All Birds Are Black and A Crack in the Window, though most of the photos were from the opening scene in Wait for Me Here, when he runs half naked into the road.

The more I scrutinized the photos, the more certain I was that it was the same man, the same long, thin nose, same pale brown eyes. I checked my notes for his birth date: born in St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany on March 12, 1977, which made him thirty-four.

There was little more about Theo on the Blackboards. In the world of Cordova, it appeared the man’s son was basically an afterthought. According to one source, for the past eleven years he’d been living a life of total obscurity in rural Indiana, working as a landscaper, and had changed his name to Johnson.

After scrolling through a few more pages, I had an idea. I set up a simple post in the TALK TO STRANGERS section, asking for assistance identifying and privately accessing a mysterious club on Long Island with a French name, “held in a former jail or forgotten prison.”

Then I put the computer to sleep and headed to bed.