Minot had suggested Chasen’s for lunch and Dave Chasen himself took them to the table, one of the front booths reserved for regulars and recognizable faces. Greer Garson, near the door, seemed not to know who Minot was, but most of the others parading past the table did, and the lunch was interrupted by a series of hellos and handshakes. A surprisingly public place for such a meeting, but what had he expected? Raincoats in an alley? A murky room, drapes drawn? In real life you talked at Chasen’s, hoping for a mention in the columns.
“The chili here is great,” Minot said, ordering it. “Some people never have anything else.”
“Best in L.A.,” Riordan said, a chorus.
“You notice how good Dave is? Smooth. You’re in, he’s gone. He lets you get on with it. Romanoff, he’s all over you, you can’t get rid of him. The Russian prince. Harry Gerguson, Brooklyn.” He had leaned his football shoulders forward, confiding. “That’s the real name.” He shook his head. “There’s a lot of that element here.”
“What element is that?” Ben said, on guard, as if someone had just stamped a J in his passport.
“Phonies. I like to know who people are.”
“You picked the wrong town then,” Ben said, easier. “Half the people in Hollywood have changed names.”
“Well, in the industry sure. That’s just part of the territory, isn’t it? But a waiter pretending to be-”
“A waiter,” Riordan said, amused.
“Anyway, I didn’t pick this town, you know, I was born here. Native Californian, one of the few. I’ve seen it change. A small town in those days-well, small compared-then the phonies and smart guys start coming in. Spoilers. A couple of years ago it was still just oranges here. Like a Garden of Eden. Now you have to be careful you don’t step on the snakes.” He smiled, pleased at the turn of phrase, something he could use again.
“A big city’s bound to have crime.”
“Not crime. Police can handle that. But what do we do with the others? They want to spoil what we’ve got here, where we’re going, and I still don’t know why. Some idea. Have you been down to Long Beach? You see what’s happened there since the war? We can have the biggest port in America, big as New York, and I’ll be goddamned if we’re going to let somebody like Harry Bridges close it down. San Francisco, all he’s got to do is snap his fingers and nothing moves. We don’t want that here. Man’s not even a citizen and he can push a whole city around.”
“He’s not a citizen?”
“Australian. A break for us. You can’t bust a union, but you can sure as hell deport troublemakers. Cheryl, dear.” He rose to greet a grayhaired woman in a feathery hat and fur stole. “How’s George?”
“The flowers meant so much to him, Ken, thank you.”
“Never mind about that, you just get him home. You get the best at Cedars but it’s still not home.” He patted her hand.
“At least they keep him in bed. You know what he’s like. He’ll be a bear.”
“You’ll have a nurse?”
“He says he wants Laraine Day, so I guess he’s getting better,” she said, almost winking. “Well, enjoy your lunch. I’ll tell him you asked.”
“A massive heart attack,” Minot said after she’d gone. “Richfield Petroleum. Not everyone here’s in the movies. Just the ones everybody knows about.” He took a drink from his water glass. “That makes them special. People are interested in the movies. You can get their attention.”
Ben said nothing, waiting for him.
“Dennis here tells me we might have some mutual interests.”
Ben nodded.
“I like the sound of that. That’s how I like to work. What government’s all about. Mutual interests. I don’t believe in isms. Any of them. Just getting things done. But you’ve got people out there, they have a different idea. Not to your face. A fair fight, they know they’d lose. They get underneath. Hide. That’s the way they work. We need to know who they are, get them out into the open.”
“Congressman,” Ben said, stopping him. “A Communist killed my brother. They’re not my favorite people, either.”
“Ken,” Minot said automatically. “And now they want this country.” Unable to let it go. “Your brother did us a great service. Dennis says we can count on you, too.”
“I want to find out who did it.” He nodded to Riordan. “We think it’s somebody he was going to give you, so I figure we both want to know.”
“Like I said.” Minot smiled. “A mutual interest. I have to say, when Dennis told me about this, I was-well, relieved isn’t the right word. It’s a tragedy, what happened, however it happened. A man’s dead. But you hate to think people you work with might be-unreliable. A lot of what we get is hearsay. You’d be surprised how much time we have to spend just making sure information’s worth something. Now with your brother we never had that. If he told us to take a look at somebody, we’d find it all right. He didn’t shoot from the hip, he got it right. So you learn to trust that. Then this happens and you have to wonder. You’re going to have people saying your sources are unstable. And that makes it all suspect. They’d like people to think that, it’s one of their tactics.”
“So it was better as an accident,” Ben said, interrupting the flow.
“That’s right,” Minot said, hesitating, not sure what Ben knew. “But this, this is a whole new game. If it’s true, we could make some real noise. Most of the time it’s hard to get people excited. They think it’s just about union business, organizing the coloreds. Politics. But a trial, that’s something else. A Red kills somebody working for the Bureau- everybody’s going to jump on that.”
“If it’s true?”
“Well, I mean you have to prove it. Otherwise, it’s still just ‘a man fell.’ Dennis here says it’s not going to be easy. Police never took it up, so we’re not long on evidence. We can get some help from the Bureau, on the quiet, but even they can’t make a miracle. Far as I can see, the best chance we have is you.”
“Me.”
“You’re in his house, you know everybody he knows. And it has to be somebody he knows. You don’t name strangers.”
“I’ve already looked through his things. If he was keeping notes, something like that, he wasn’t keeping them there. But sometimes one name leads to another, so it would be useful to see the files.”
“What files would those be?” Minot said, wary.
“What he gave you.”
“Look, let me explain how this works. Your brother never gave us any paper. He liked to play things close to the vest. He didn’t want anything traced back to him. Limits you, once that’s out. People don’t confide in you. No, he’d just give Dennis a name, a little information if he had it, and then it was up to us. Like I said, they were the right names- once we knew where to look.”
“You said there were reports,” Ben said to Riordan.
“With the Bureau, you talk and somebody types it up. That’s how it worked with us. He’d talk to me and I’d memo the file. You don’t have to see them-just ask me.”
“Who did he talk about? Can you give me a list?”
“How this started? The Bureau wanted to know what Ostermann was up to.”
“You thought he was a Communist?”
“We didn’t know what he was. All we knew was when he spoke- wrote an article or something-people listened. There’s a war on, it’s important to know what somebody like that is going to say. And your brother-well, who was in a better position to know?”
“So he agreed to report on him,” Ben said, hoping to be contradicted.
“Tell you the truth, it kind of surprised me, too. I mean, what if the wife found out? How would she feel? But I think maybe he thought he could do him some good. He liked Ostermann. He said we never had to worry about him. And you know, we didn’t. No funny business there at all. Wants to be a citizen now.”
“Maybe you should write him a character reference,” Ben said, more sourly than he’d intended.
“Don’t get touchy. You got an important German figure and we’re at war with Germany, of course the Bureau has to be interested. Nobody ever interfered with him. He went right on making those speeches, all that. I doubt he ever knew.”
“So that’s how it started,” Ben said, leading him. “Who else?”
“We asked about Brecht. No surprises there-we already knew. But that was a kind of test, see if your brother was pulling his punches.”
“And he wasn’t.”
“The important thing, see, was whether somebody was actually in the Party or just had lefty sympathies. Like Feuchtwanger. Your brother’d been inside, so he knew the difference. People approached him, tried to recruit him back in.”
“How? At lunch?” Ben said, opening his hand to Chasen’s.
Minot peered at him. “We don’t recruit. People come to us. Like you.”
“Not to inform on my family.”
“Informing,” Riordan said, waving this off. “Nobody’s informing.”
“He didn’t see it that way,” Minot said calmly. “It was-part of the war effort.”
“And now?”
“It’s a different war.”
“I just want to be clear. Not Ostermann. Not-family. I won’t do that.”
“Nobody gives a rat’s ass what Ostermann says now,” Riordan said, a little exasperated.
“As long as it’s pro-American.”
“But he is pro-American,” Minot said patiently. “And Feuchtwanger writes-what do you call them? Like Anthony Adverse. Kaltenbach can’t get work at the studios so he’s flirting with the East Germans, but he’s not going anywhere.”
“He’s not.”
“I think he’d find it hard to leave the country. We’re not going to give him a passport so he can be some propaganda stunt. The point is, nobody’s asking about the Germans. That’s how it started, with your brother, but that’s not what he did for me. I’m not interested in that.”
“What are you interested in?”
Minot leaned back against the booth, playing with his fork.
“I’m interested in getting people’s attention. This country is under attack and it doesn’t even know it. How do you get them to see it? And here we are, sitting in a district with the most popular thing on earth. You want something to make people sit up and notice, nothing even comes close to the industry. They’ve already got people’s attention. If we show what’s happening here-”
“In the industry? You mean in the unions?”
Minot smiled. “Well, the unions. Nobody would be very surprised at that, would they? Howard Stein, he’s practically got a Party number on his back.” He looked up. “Your brother was helpful about that. Information we can use when the time comes.”
“I thought everybody already knew,” Ben said, his stomach turning over. “At least they assume-”
“And he can deny it. But not under oath. Then you’re looking at perjury.”
“He’s going on trial?”
Minot made another half smile. “No. The industry is.”
Ben looked at the broad, handsome face, remembering his hand on Jack Warner’s shoulder, Bunny eager to please, everyone taking up positions in the chess game of the consent decree. Minot leaned forward.
“I assume all this is in confidence?”
Ben nodded, fascinated, a different game board.
“Hollywood has done a lot for this city,” Minot said. “Nobody knows better than I do. I even know the figures, which is more than you can say for most of them. And the figures are big. Since the war-” He trailed off, letting the obvious finish itself. “So now it’s like a rich widow-everyone wants something out of her. The unions want their piece. The East Coast bankers. Let’s not even think about the payoffs, let’s just pretend they don’t happen. But the Commies want something else, they want to use her to get ideas across.” He caught Ben’s skeptical expression. “They don’t have to be blatant. Nobody’s making Battleship Potemkin here. Good thing,” he said, flashing a smile. “Who the hell would go see it? Nothing that obvious. You don’t attack America. You just chip away at it. Some doubt here. Suspicion. But how do you stop them? First you have to find them.” He nodded, somehow including Ben with Danny. “Then you get them to lie. Actually show them lying. Not even their fans are going to trust them after that. You know, you can’t put someone away just for being a Commie. Conspiracy to overthrow? You spend years making a case like that. But perjury’s quick, and it’s right there. They’re lying or they’re not.” He paused. “As long as you have evidence. So you get some. You ask about files, Tenney’s got files. And Jack can be a little hasty, so god knows what he’s got in them. But we have to be more careful. We’re not just some committee in Sacramento. We’re a congressional committee. Subpoena power. You lie at the hearing, you just bought a ticket inside.”
“And if they do come across,” Riordan said, “you still have a shot at contempt.”
Ben raised his eyebrow, waiting.
“Nobody’s a Red alone,” Riordan said. “But they’re usually reluctant to say who their friends are. Even under oath.”
“So either way,” Ben said.
“Assuming we’ve got the goods on them in the first place.”
“And that’s what Danny was doing for you? Giving you movie stars for show trials?”
“No, we’re a little shy in the star department,” Minot said with a stage modesty, not catching the Moscow reference, something that had happened far away. “But any kind of friendly witness here can be something-you still get the press. There’s lots of ways you can use information. Your brother wasn’t going to testify, anything like that. I told you, he liked to play things close to the vest. Of course, if I’d really had to, I could have subpoenaed him, but why would I do that? He played fair with me. He gave me background. And you can use background in different ways. Sometimes, like I say, to set up a perjury charge. But sometimes to get people to cooperate, lead you somewhere else.”
“Give you other names.”
“That, or help in other ways. Be a friend to the committee. You know, we don’t want to hurt the industry. We want to help it protect itself.”
His voice earnest, without a trace of irony. Was it possible he really believed this? Saw himself as a savior, not just another of the rich widow’s cynical suitors, borrowing her limelight?
“So, are you going to be a friend to the committee?” he said casually, bringing his hands together, fingers touching, putting a question.
But when he looked at Ben, not smiling, his whole body seemed to tense, expectant, as if he were waiting for the snap of the ball, and Ben saw that the rest of the lunch didn’t matter, just this moment. He sat fixed by Minot’s gaze, in a kind of quiet panic, feeling exposed, like the second before you leaned forward to a woman, crossing a line. He thought, wildly, of the first night with Liesl, being drawn in, no going back.
“He was my brother,” he said finally, hoping his voice sounded steady, plausible. “I want to know who did it. I think we both owe him that.”
Minot said nothing, assessing, then nodded, the bargain struck, that easy.
“Everything goes through Dennis, understand? Not through my office. When we’re ready for subpoenas, we want them to come as a surprise.”
“Like an ambush.”
Minot hesitated for a second, then smiled. “That’s right. By the good guys this time.”
“Ben, how nice. You’re every where.”
Paulette Goddard on her way in. He stood up, taking her offered hand.
“Paulette. You remember Congressman Minot?”
“Of course, at the Lasners’. Nice to see you again.” An efficient smile, not overlong.
“Dennis Riordan.”
“Mr. Riordan,” she said. “Goodness, you all look so serious.”
“That’s what happens with just Dennis to look at,” Minot joked, a compliment to her. She was wearing lunch jewels, a solitary drop and a diamond bracelet, everything about her shiny.
“I’m here to eat humble pie with Polly,” she said. “Apparently I owed her a train interview and she’s been seething. Nice if they had told me. But I’m the one in the doghouse.”
“Not for long, I’ll bet,” Minot said, smiling.
“My god, is that chili? At this hour. Men.” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t suppose you have anything I can give her,” she said to Ben. “Otherwise she’ll just go on about Charlie again, and what am I supposed to say?”
“Just kiss and make up,” Ben said.
She giggled. “In Chasen’s. Wouldn’t they be surprised. Well, I’ll let you get back to business. Three men, it’s always business. Don’t sign anything,” she said, putting a finger on Ben’s chest. “That’s my motto. Ken.” She nodded to Minot, remembering his name. When she left, there was a trace of perfume.
“That’s some good-looking woman,” Riordan said.
“Hard to believe she was married to him,” Minot said.
“Chaplin?” Ben said. “That was a while ago.”
“When he wanted to open a second front. Just a little earlier than Ike did. I’d like to get him in front of a microphone now. Tell us all about his Russian friends.”
“I can’t help you there,” Ben said, moving him away from it. “Never met him. Anyway, I doubt they ever talked politics. Would you? With her?”
“Not me,” Riordan said, grinning.
“I don’t want you to expect too much,” Ben said to Minot. “I don’t know the people Danny knew.”
“They’ll know you,” Minot said. “They’ll want to know if you’re sympathetic. His brother. They’ll come to you.”
“But I’ll have no way of knowing whether they’re really- How far it goes.”
“Leave that to Dennis. We’re just looking for background. Sympathies.”
“It would help if I knew who he’d already-”
Minot nodded. “Dennis can help you with that, too. Keep in mind, some of those people agreed to be friends. Protected friends. Even from you. We promised them that.”
Ben looked at his smooth, untroubled face, the careful eyes. What had those conversations been like? No one will know if-not blackmail, just a sensible arrangement to keep information coming. A friend to the committee. What he’d promised now, too. He shifted in the booth, feeling suddenly hemmed in. You can do business with anyone, Otto had said. Until he couldn’t. Across the room, Paulette was ordering a drink. Don’t sign anything. He could still say no, go over to her table, stay in the bright world.
“You understand,” Minot said.
“What you want to do,” Riordan said, “now that we think it’s like this, is go through everything again, calendars, things like that, who he was seeing. He’s not going to pick a name out of the blue. What you want are the contacts. Who’d he take to that room, anyway? Any idea?”
Ben shook his head, surprised at how easy it was to lie. Just another move on the board, protecting your pawn.
“You take a room, it’s somebody to you. You’d talk.”
“You know,” Minot said, slowing them down, “to kill someone, you’d have to have an awful lot at stake. Something important to protect. The people we know about-they’re writers, studio people who wrote a few checks to send an ambulance to Spain, people like that. So who else?” His voice more excited now. “Who had a reputation so big you’d kill to protect it?”
A reputation, Ben thought, you could showcase in a hearing room, newsreel cameras turning while you pounded a gavel.
“You mean a star,” Ben said.
“It’s possible.”
“But everyone thinks his reputation’s important. If somebody’s threatening you, everything you have. Something like this, exposing people-you set up conditions.” He looked at Minot. “You have to be careful.”
“Do you mean me?”
“I meant Danny. But let’s face it, Congressman, you keep going, a few people might think they had a reason to kill you.”
“What kind of talk is this?” Riordan said.
“Just making a point.”
Minot reached over to sign the check, a house account. “Some point. Are we done here, gentlemen?”
They made their way out the door, through another round of nods and waves, and almost collided with Polly rushing in. She was tottering in her heels, the way she had been that morning at Union Station, but came to a dead stop when she saw Minot.
“Congressman,” she said, flustered, a hesitation Ben took as a sign of respect.
“Polly, I’ve been meaning to call you.”
“Me?” she said, almost girlish.
“That piece Sunday. I just hope everybody reads it. Stars still in the service. You know my office gets calls every day-the war’s over, when is he coming home? Now we can say, look at this. Did you read Polly Marks? Is Bob Montgomery home yet? Movie stars. But they’re not bellyaching. They’re doing what we all need to do, hang in there till the job’s done.”
Ben watched, fascinated, as this rolled out in what seemed to be one breath, effortless.
“Congressman-”
“I take my hat off to you. What’s Winchell say? Orchids? An orchid for that one. You know Dennis, I think. My friend Ben Collier here? He’s still in the service, come to think of it. Still working for Uncle Sam. Making one of those great pictures the WAC’s been putting out this year. It’s not over for them.”
“Yes, at Continental. Of course. Good to see you again,” she said, her eyes almost doing a double take. Someone she hadn’t quite got the measure of before, a friend of Minot’s. “I hear Sol Lasner thinks the world of you.”
Ben shrugged, not knowing how to respond.
“Awful about Fay’s cousin, isn’t it? I heard you were there.”
“Terrible,” he agreed, noncommittal, avoiding her eyes.
“You’d think they could’ve met at Sol’s, not have her drive way out there. Road like that. Probably feels terrible about it now.”
“Who?”
“Whoever she was meeting. The one who called.”
“What?” he said, everything stopping for a second, his whole body rooted.
“Somebody called her, that afternoon. They think that’s why she went out.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
How had she? Fay? Lorna? The Hollywood switchboard.
“And in the rain. You’d think-but you never know about people, do you?”
“Well, you do,” Minot said, “that’s for sure. There’s not much Polly misses, or so they tell me.” A wrapping-up voice, ready to leave. Riordan, hearing it, handed a stub to the parking attendant.
“I get paid not to miss anything,” Polly said, smiling again, flattered.
“Well, you keep writing pieces like Sunday’s, they’d better give you a raise. You can tell them I said so, too,” he said, a verbal wink. “That was fine work. Nice to run into you.” Moving her through the door before she could say anything else.
Ben stood still, only vaguely aware of them. Who would she have been meeting? Not Feuchtwanger. Had she been peering through the rain, looking for house numbers? But the houses stopped and she had gone on. But not necessarily lost, or alone.
“That’s a powerful lady,” Minot was saying. “Do you know how many people-first thing they do in the morning, turn to Polly? Millions.”
“One hundred twenty-three newspapers,” Ben said dully, still preoccupied.
Minot looked at him, surprised, then let it pass. “And the radio,” he said. “A good friend to have.” His car was being brought up. “I’m glad we could do this,” he said to Ben. “I think we can do some good work. You know the MPC?”
Ben shook his head.
“Motion Picture Council. For the First Amendment.”
“Pinks,” Riordan said.
“But not a front group. Legitimate. You might think about joining it. Show them where your heart is. What you might be ready for. Let them approach you.” He paused, an interior debate. “How well do you know Kaltenbach?”
“I’ve met him. He’s close to Ostermann. I thought you weren’t interested in the Germans.”
“Only if they’re in the industry.”
“He had a lifesaver contract at Warners in ’forty-one. One year. He hasn’t worked since.”
“At a hundred dollars a week. That still sounds like a lot of money to some people. Hollywood money.”
“He’s nobody.”
“The Germans don’t seem to think so. The East Germans.”
“He’s a famous writer there. Nobody’s heard of him here.”
“Maybe he’ll be better known.”
Ben watched him hand some money to the attendant.
“How?” he said, apprehensive.
“Be a help to us if you could let us know what his plans are.”
“I thought you said-”
“The State Department’s unreliable. People write them-influential people-and they do things they shouldn’t. If it were me, there wouldn’t be a hope in hell he could go anywhere, but it’s not up to me. So we need to keep an eye on him. I don’t want him taking any trips. Not before the hearings.”
“You’re going to call him? He’s a Communist?”
Minot shook his head. “No, just two meetings. A little window shopping. But we can put him at the meetings. That means he can tell us who else was there.”
“I don’t think he’ll do that.”
“He’ll have a lot of incentive under oath.”
“Who put him at the meetings?” Ben said, queasy, already knowing.
Minot looked at him, not saying anything.
“Danny saved his life, in France.”
“I’m trying to save this country,” Minot said. He put his hand on Ben’s shoulder, about to move to his car. “Nice to have you with us.”
Fay assumed it was a condolence call and insisted they have coffee on the back patio. The day was mild but overcast, fall on Summit Drive, and she put a light cardigan over her shoulders as they went out. After Lorna brought the tray, Fay poured from the silver pot, fluttering like Billie Burke, then sat back and lit a cigarette, crossing her still-good Goldwyn Girl legs.
“It was nice of you to come. There’s no one to talk to-who knew her, I mean.”
“It was only the once. But I liked her.”
“The language was a problem. People don’t make the effort.”
“The friend who called-he was German?”
“Well, Lorna didn’t think so at first. She thought it was Bunny, somebody from the studio, you know. But then Genia spoke German to him, so it must have been.”
“A man, then?”
“Mm hmm. Why?”
“I just wondered. He never called again?”
“No, isn’t it the strangest thing? Maybe he doesn’t know. Thinks he was stood up or something. The notice in the papers-if you blinked, you missed it. I can’t imagine who it was. She never talked to anybody.”
“Maybe someone she knew before. Over there.”
“But she never went out. Where would she-?”
“At the party, maybe. She met people then.”
“You, mostly. Of course, Bunny can talk to a stone, so she knew him. Maybe somebody through the Red Cross. I don’t know. None of it makes sense to me. I mean, you call to meet somebody, it’s usually a hotel, a bar, someplace like that.”
“Maybe she was going to his house.”
“And never got there. Or maybe she did. I never thought of that. Maybe it was after.” She frowned, turning this over. “Well, he has the number.”
“Let me know if he calls, will you?”
She looked at him, surprised, her cigarette in midair.
“Just curious. It’s like a mystery.”
“Everything about her was a mystery.” She inhaled some smoke. “Look, we don’t have to pretend. She didn’t slide off the road, did she?”
Ben said nothing.
“I thought it would help, all this,” she said, stretching her hand toward the sloping lawn. “Well, you do what you can. She liked the garden. So that’s one thing.”
“You’ve put a lot of work into it,” he said, taking in the lush rose beds, the perennial borders.
“Me? I wouldn’t know a weed from-well, whatever the opposite is. Miguel does everything. Filipino, but with a Mex name, don’t ask me why.”
“It was a Spanish colony. So lots of Spanish names.”
“Is that right? Ha. Wait till I tell Sol.” She looked over at him. “That’s something everybody knows, right? About it being a colony?”
“No. It was a while ago.”
“But people know.” She laughed. “Who am I kidding? Sitting here with a teapot, la-di-da, like I ever made it past ninth grade. Bunny likes me with all this high-tone stuff, and fine, I like it, too, because Sol likes it, but I know. I like the roses, though, to look at. Sometimes I look at this place and I think, who would have imagined? All those years on the road, washing out things in the sink, and now you’ve got your own roses, not just what some guy brings backstage. A gardener with a fancy name.” She stopped and looked away. “But I guess she didn’t see it that way.”
“You ever miss it?” he said, steering them away. “The business?”
“That life? Not for two seconds. What’s to miss? One town after another with nothing to do-someplace in the sticks, you couldn’t wait to get back to New York. It’s the same here, you ask me, but don’t, because Sol loves it. At least it’s not the road, schlepping around, worrying are you losing your looks. What kind of life is that? Oh, at first, you’re young, you think there isn’t anything else. I never saw myself like this. Married. Mrs. Lasner. And all right, he’s a handful, but you know what? He’s crazy about me. The rest,” she said, waving her hand, “it’s nothing.” She put out the cigarette, looking straight at him. “Would you tell me something? He almost died on the train, didn’t he? Don’t worry, I didn’t get it from you.”
“He had an attack. I don’t know how serious. I’m not a doctor.”
“He almost died,” she said flatly. “He thinks I don’t know. How can you live with somebody and not know these things?”
“What did the doctor say?”
“Rosen? What does he ever say? Retire. And do what? Watch birds? Anyway, he wasn’t there, only later when Sol’s better. You were. You know how I know? How he is with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Close. You almost die, there’s a closeness.”
“I think you’re imagin-”
But she was shaking her head. “He watches you at the studio, how you’re doing.”
“He watches everybody,” Ben said.
“But he tells me about you. How you are with Hal. Other things. He thinks you have a feel for the business. A family thing.”
“Only my father. My mother hated it.”
“Why? Oh, the girls? He got distracted?”
Ben smiled at the word. “Over and over.”
“People say I should worry about Sol, and you know I never do. I figure, if it happens, who’d want to know?”
“She did.”
Fay smiled. “So maybe I’m not telling the truth, either. I’d kill him. Bare hands. But I’ll tell you something, he doesn’t even look. I know. I was on the lot, for years. I know what to look for. The thing about Sol, nobody gets this, he’s a gentleman. They see the rough spots, not here.” She tapped her heart. “Here he’s not so tough.” She looked down, flustered. “I don’t mean the real one. A figure of speech.”
“I know.”
“But that’s right, too, isn’t it? The real one’s not so tough, either. Then what? You know what he thinks about, all the time? What happens to the studio. Me, I guess he figures I can take care of myself. But what happens to the studio. Who could do it? You know we never had children. He said it didn’t matter to him, but now I think it does. You build something, you want to pass it on, not just hand it over to the banks. I said to him once, maybe it’s better, look at the Laemmles, Junior almost took it down with him, and I could tell he’s not even listening. So that’s part of it, I think. Why he watches people.”
“What about Bunny?”
“Bunny’s not a son.”
“I’m not, either.”
“But he likes you. So maybe it was the train, I don’t know. All the sudden you feel you’re running out of time. Maybe this is it. Did you ever wonder how much time you have left? I’ve been thinking about that, because of Sol. But I guess that’s one thing nobody can know.” She paused. “Unless it’s like with her. You decide,” she said, her face softer. “You were nice to come. It’s good somebody came.” She lifted her head, a visual pulling up. “It’s funny, she’s the one contacted the Red Cross. She wanted to come over. You wonder. But you know what I think? It came to me this morning. Does this make sense to you? I think she was already gone. She just didn’t want to die over there-give those bastards the satisfaction.”
There was still a police marker by the broken fence, so Ben stopped short, pulling the car over to the lookout shoulder where couples parked. The drive up Feuchtwanger’s corniche had been no easier in daylight, an ordeal even for anybody familiar with the road. Ben imagined it dark, headlights shining on the wet surface. He got out, not even sure what he was looking for. Something left carelessly behind? But the place seemed undisturbed, even the smashed car removed now, any tire marks or shoe prints washed away. He walked to the fence, looking over into the canyon. A steep drop. All you’d have to do was put the car in gear and let it go. Gravity and a soft skull would do the rest.
Ben went down the slope. There were ruts gouged out of the ground, probably made by the tow truck or whatever kind of winch they’d used to haul the wreck up. The tree that had stopped it had some bark scraped away, but was still standing. Given the angle of descent, the impact must have been violent, a thudding crash, enough to throw a body into the windshield. So why hadn’t there been more blood? He tried to remember the body, his brief look when the sheet was pulled back. Lacerations, the matted wound on the head, but not drenched in blood. But it wouldn’t have been if she’d died instantly. A dead body doesn’t pump blood. Still, the blow on the head had caused a bloody welling. Ben looked up to the broken fence. Unless she’d been hit before the crash, maybe already dead when the car began plunging.
He hiked back to the road and walked along the shoulder to the turnoff. Big enough for two cars, even more, somewhere to meet, marked by the curve. Ben turned back again to the fence, searching the ground. He’d wanted to come back to the site, show himself how it was possible, but he’d known outside Chasen’s that she hadn’t been alone. A phone call, a hasty meeting, dead or almost dead before she went over. The ground falling into Topanga told him nothing. He thought of her at the Lasner party, unafraid to tell him things he shouldn’t know. No more whispers and shadows, not after everything. A German voice on the phone. Who else was at the party, what other ghost? Who recognized her.
He drove back to Feuchtwanger’s house, parking near the other cars along the steep patch of road, one of them, he noticed, Ostermann’s.
“Come in, come in,” Feuchtwanger said, bubbling, his rimless glasses catching the afternoon light.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No. Brecht is starting to make speeches. Please interrupt. What, were you just passing by? Nobody passes by up here.”
He led Ben into a large living room with a spectacular view of the Pacific through the picture window. Couches were arranged to face it, but the group sat instead at the end of the room, away from the light, clustered around a coffee table littered with half-finished cups and hazy with smoke, as intimate as a Ku’damm cafe. Everyone was speaking German.
“So, you can decide,” Feuchtwanger said. “I’m thinking about a play and of course Brecht doesn’t want me to write a play, so he doesn’t like anything about it.”
“Write the play,” Brecht said, deadpan, drawing on his cigar.
“Do you like The Devil in Boston? For a title?”
“The title tells you what’s wrong,” Brecht said. “All right, so witch trials. Yes, everyone sees, a metaphor for what is happening here, what is going to happen, but it’s not exact. It was then about belief, the devil in Boston, a religious phenomenon, not political persecution.”
“It felt the same to the witches,” Feuchtwanger said.
Brecht waved this aside. “It confuses the issue.”
“But the process is exactly the same, the psychology.”
“Oh, psychology,” Brecht said, dismissive.
“Why do you think it’s going to happen,” Ben said, back at Chasen’s, Minot’s hand on his shoulder.
“Because I’ve seen it happen before.”
“Precisely,” Feuchtwanger said. “The process is the same, always. Make the fear, then the fear feeds on itself. That’s the devil. Hitler made the Jew the devil, but it was the fear.”
“The motivations are different,” Brecht said. “Hitler wanted to go to war, that’s what he always wanted. From the first. Not religious hysteria.”
“And the rallies?” Feuchtwanger said. “What do you call that?”
Brecht drew on his cigar with a little smile. “Show business,” he said in English.
“Ach,” Feuchtwanger said, a mock exasperation, but enjoying the joke. “And here?”
“Politics,” Brecht said. “Not even serious politics. Foolishness. It’s a country of children.” He turned to Ben. “You know what his inspiration is? For a play about witches? They refused his application. To be a citizen. Of this place. Why he wants such a thing-”
“Why not gratitude?” Ostermann said. “They took us in. They took you in, too.”
“Yes, and they’ll spit me out. Watch.” He took a drink from a small glass. “We have no place now. Only here,” he said, touching his temple.
“Hah. I’m not such a poet,” Feuchtwanger said. “I live here.” He pointed his finger to the floor.
“But not as an American.”
“Why? What did they say?” Ben asked Feuchtwanger.
“I can appeal. The time isn’t right maybe. With what’s going on.”
“The reason? ‘Premature antifascism,’ ” Brecht said, rolling out the phrase slowly, savoring it. “What can it mean? There must have been a time when it was good to be a fascist. Then not. It’s a trick, finding the right moment. You can be against the fascists, but not too soon. Then you’re-well, what exactly?”
Feuchtwanger shrugged, nodding with him. “A socialist. A pacifist. Before, when you wrote against the Nazis, where could you do it? The places they suspect now. Too left, too this, too that. So it’s not the best time here.”
“Thomas Mann had no problem,” Brecht said, puckish.
“Oh, Saint Thomas.”
They laughed softly, a cafe murmur. Ben looked at them, slumped against cushions, holding cigars, easy with each other. Was this the sort of meeting Danny had described, Riordan scribbling notes? The author of Josephus is preparing a play about the Salem witch trials, drawing analogies to contemporary events. The author of Galileo made remarks critical of the U.S. Hans Ostermann, my father-in-law, saidAll typed up for the files, smoky, idle talk, a harmless report. But no betrayal was harmless.
“What brings you here?” Ostermann said suddenly.
What did?
“Just a quick hello. Lasner wanted me to check on the car, whether they’d towed it.”
“Yes, the accident,” Feuchtwanger said. “I told you about it,” he said to Ostermann. “Terrible.”
“But on this road not a surprise,” Ostermann said. “Someone you knew?”
“A relative of Lasner’s.” Ben turned to Feuchtwanger. “Are there any Germans living here, up on the hill? Besides you?”
“Oh no. We’re famous, Marta and me-the foreigners. Of course Mann is also in the Palisades. Vicki Baum. But not here, nearer the village.”
“Why do you ask?” Ostermann said.
Ben looked up, at a loss. “Maybe this, hearing German. It would be so nice for you if there were someone else nearby.”
“Only Lion has the courage,” Brecht said. “These roads. In Santa Monica it’s safe, all flat. Even Salka, in the canyon, it’s not so bad.”
“But the views,” Feuchtwanger said, extending his hand toward the window and the fading afternoon, copper glints on the water and lights beginning to come on.
“But we always have to drive you,” Ostermann said. “The courageous Lion.”
Another easy laugh, the road familiar to all of them. You didn’t have to live here to know it. Even Lion’s guests, German speakers.
“So how was it at Alma’s?” Brecht asked Feuchtwanger.
“You know she had Schoenberg and Stravinsky? Both. The same dinner.”
“Another play for you,” Brecht said, mischievous.
“No, it was dull. They wouldn’t talk about music. Out of respect. Anything but music-so nothing, really.”
“And Alma talked about herself.”
Ben drank his coffee, half-listening, talk that could go on for hours. No other Germans on the road. Just a place to meet, then, out of the way. He stood up.
“But you’ve just come,” Feuchtwanger said.
“I know. But I have to get back to the studio.”
“Ah, the studio,” Brecht said airily. “Back to the assembly line.” He moved his arms in a pincer, like Chaplin working the wrenches in Modern Times. “More dreams. More dreams.”
“And me,” Ostermann said, standing, too. “No, no, don’t get up. A nice afternoon, Lion. Like before.”
“Nothing’s like before,” Brecht said. “Even before.”
Outside Ostermann walked Ben to his car.
“I thought when you came, it was for me. That you had news.”
“News?”
“About the screen test.”
Almost forgotten. Liesl playing a daughter.
“No, not yet.”
“I don’t want her to be disappointed. After everything. Although to wish such a life for your child- Still, I can hear it in her voice, how she wants it. I was worried, after the funeral. I remembered how it feels, how lonely. But now look. Screen tests. It was good not being alone in the house, I think. So thank you for that.”
Ben looked away.
“They really refused Lion?” he said.
“He’s a socialist. It’s very well known, even here.”
All you had to do was check a file, information from a well-placed source.
“But that’s not-”
“Not before. Now it’s different. His lawyer said, be patient. Now he gets his publisher to write for him. How distinguished he is. He does very well here, you know. The translations. Not like poor Heinrich.”
Is this how it was done? You didn’t have to ask, just let the conversation run, listening for Riordan, a sponge.
“And now there are difficulties. It’s ironic, yes? They didn’t want Heinrich to leave Europe. Now they don’t want him to leave here. This time, no Daniel to arrange the escape. So he goes to offices and waits. For a piece of paper. Just like his script.”
“Why not leave without it?”
“Cross the Pyrenees again? You forget, he had papers then. That’s what Daniel arranged. It’s not so easy without that, a passport. Brecht doesn’t understand, living in his head,” he said with a sarcastic smile. “Why Lion wants his piece of paper. If he leaves, he can’t come back. He’s not a refugee anymore, but not a citizen, either. Of anywhere. So all he can do is stay here, as he is. Yes, it’s very comfortable for him.” He gestured toward the house. “But now a cage also.”
“But Kaltenbach doesn’t want to come back.”
“So he thinks. I wonder what he will say after. When those doors close.” He sighed. “But first he has to get there.”
With Minot watching. With Ben watching for him.
“What about you? Are you having any trouble?”
“Me? Oh, I’m not such a dangerous person as Lion. I wasn’t premature.” He looked down. “Maybe too late. How we waited, hoping it would go away. Thinking a catastrophe would go away.”
There was traffic on Sunset so that by the time Ben got back to Gower the lot had taken on the after-work quiet of skeleton crews and empty sound stages, only a few cars left in their reserved spaces.
“Screening room with Mr. L,” said one of Bunny’s secretaries, anticipating his question. She was putting folders in drawers, evidently working late to catch up on the filing.
“How’d the test go, do you know? Liesl Kohler.” Or had they changed her name?
“When was this, today? Maybe they’re looking at it now. The only way I know is, he writes a memo.”
“On a screen test?”
“Everything,” she said, with a nod to the wall of filing cabinets. What Tenney’s office must look like. Fourteen thousand files, rumors on paper.
“How about the guest list for Lasner’s party Saturday?”
Her head went up, immediately protective.
“I was there,” he explained, “and I talked to somebody and I can’t remember her name. I thought if I could go through the list, you know, it might come back to me. Does he keep them, the lists?”
“Uh huh.”
“Don’t worry. I’m sure it’ll be okay with him.”
She said nothing.
“I could go down to the screening room, have him phone up.”
She hesitated, trying to guess what Bunny’s reaction would be to either course.
“No, it’s here,” she said finally, turning to a drawer. “I just filed it, in fact.” She got it out and handed it to him.
“You mind? I’ll bring it back?”
“You want to take it?” she said, suspicious again.
He began to read down the list. Everyone there, with marks next to the Warners people. Seating plans, names on spokes around a circle, everything thought out. Liesl listed as Ben Collier guest. Rex Morgan, who owned 8 percent. But who had talked to Genia, spotted her across the room? A German speaker, so not Ann Sheridan or one of the starlets. Maybe not at the party at all, just someone who knew she was in town. But it would be easy enough to come up with a short list of possibilities, then use Dennis to check them, routine for a Bureau man. Start somewhere. She hadn’t taken a random turn off Sunset. Someone had told her where to go.
He looked up to find the secretary watching him. “He doesn’t like things to leave the office,” she said, expecting trouble.
“It’s a party list,” he said, folding it. “I’ll tell him downstairs.”
They had already started running the dailies, so Ben slipped into the screening room quietly and took a seat at the back. Bunny was in his usual watching posture, chin resting on a pyramid of fingers, while Lasner made running comments to the directors. It was Dick Marshall again, out of the fighter plane, making a sentimental visit to another pilot in the hospital.
“Why a profile,” Lasner said. “They’re paying to see the face.”
“Watch the eyes when he turns,” the director said. “Now you see the tears. He’s been holding them back.”
“Why? He saw the picture?”
“Sol.”
“The buddy dies? Wonderful. Something upbeat.”
“What can I tell you, Sol? It’s a war picture.”
“All right, all right.”
“He looks good, Jamie,” Bunny said to the director, placating. “Think you can wrap this week?”
There was another clip, Lasner quiet, his silence acting like a sigh, then the directors left.
“Jesus Christ, Bunny,” Lasner said.
The room was still dim, Ben invisible in the back shadows.
“I know. It’ll be okay if we can get it out fast. We can book it with Rosemary’s picture, recover the costs.”
“We’re supposed to be making money, not recovering costs.”
“Sol, you’re the one who taught me. Pay the overhead with these, your wins are twice as big.”
“And what about Dick? We got an investment there, too. Another war picture-”
“I had an idea about that. I want you to see this test.” Bunny picked up the phone. “Could you run the test now? The first one.”
This would have been the moment, Ben knew, to cough, declare himself, but he sat still, too interested to move.
It was the same scene they’d used with Julie, the young girl getting up from the piano and saying good-bye to the older man-her father? her teacher? — who was sending her away, better for everyone for some reason. Liesl was wearing a simple white blouse and skirt, her hair brushed straight, the whole effect young, on the brink. When she lifted her face at the piano, it seemed to draw the key light to it, a sudden radiance. Ben knew that it was framing and makeup and well-placed arcs, that it was Liesl playing the piano, but knowing all of it made no difference. Film transformed everything. Even the piano gleamed. She smiled now at the keyboard, slightly wistful, a girl he had never seen before.
“Watch this?” Bunny said.
“What am I watching?” Lasner said.
“The way she moves. It’s the first thing I noticed. Like a dancer. Watch how she gets up. You know who does that? Cary Grant.”
“He was an acrobat,” Lasner said, “not a dancer.”
“Same thing,” Bunny said, still fixed on the screen. “Now the hands. Watch her with his arm, she just grazes it.”
The way she might have touched Ostermann, a gesture Ben had seen her make, protective.
“Listen,” Bunny said.
“I’m hearing?”
“Someone who went to school.”
The clip ended.
“With an accent,” Lasner said.
“Never mind. That’s part of it. Stay with me. Watch it again.”
He asked the projectionist to rerun it. This time neither of them spoke, paying attention. Lasner was quiet afterward.
“A nice girl,” he said finally.
Bunny nodded. “Exactly. She looks like she could actually play the piano.”
“So? What was with the piano, by the way?”
“You don’t miss much, do you? Vegetable oil. You spray it on and the lights pick it up.”
Lasner shook his head, delighted, another magic trick.
“They don’t line up for nice.”
“This is something else, Sol. Maybe another Bergman.”
“You’re serious about this?”
Bunny picked up the phone. “Run the other one.”
“You made two tests?”
“Nice with something behind it. Watch.”
Liesl was on a terrace now, outside a pair of French windows, about to kiss Dick Marshall. It was a night scene, their faces lit by moonlight, her white skin glowing in a low-cut dress.
“You used Dick in a test?”
“Watch.”
Marshall kissed her and she responded, then began kissing his face all over, devouring it, an eruption of kisses that seemed to well up out of her control. When Dick pulled back, breathless, the camera went to her, leaning forward, still eager, her eyes darting all over his face, as if she were kissing him now with her eyes.
“Somebody’ll see,” Marshall whispered.
“I don’t care,” she said, her breath a gasp, moving up to kiss him again.
Ben’s own breathing stopped for a minute, hair bristling on the back of his neck. Not just the same words, the same face.
“Turner does that with her eyes,” Lasner was saying.
No, Ben thought, Liesl does that, a look printed in the back of his head, just for him. When her lips reached Dick Marshall, he knew how they would open, the same soft yielding. He felt his hand tighten on the armrest. An actress borrowed from life. The look in her eyes now was real, as real as it had been with him. But what if it hadn’t been? Maybe it was just the way she played the scene, with him, with Dick, acting both times. How had she played it with Danny? Something he hadn’t allowed himself to think about before. The same expression, the same eyes all over his face? Or had it been different with him, a different acting, or not acting at all. The way they felt about each other.
“How do you like her with Dick?” Bunny said as the clip ended. Ben scarcely heard him, his mind flooding with scenes-in the pool, on the chaise, her hand reaching up to his neck. Had any of them been real? None of them? Didn’t everybody react this way when they saw someone they knew on film? They seemed the same because the gestures came from the same place-a protective pat on a father’s arm. But not the eyes. Intimacy wasn’t something you could carry away with you, turn into a character touch.
“That’s why you used him?”
“It works, the two of them.”
“So she can kiss. There’s still the accent. You know what it would take? Smooth that out?”
Bunny nodded. “But not yet. The accent’s part of it. Remember Dearly Beloved?”
“The Klausner script. He brings the wife home and the mother makes trouble. I thought you didn’t like it for Dick.”
“I didn’t. Too light for him-a meringue.”
“And with her a strudel. Give it to Rosemary.”
Bunny shook his head. “The problem’s always been, why does she put up with it? Why doesn’t she get wise to the mother? Rosemary’d be onto her in a minute. But if she were foreign-”
“A Kraut.”
“Dutch, whatever. The accent’ll pass for anything. A war bride. Dick brings her home.”
“Now it’s okay for Dick?”
“It’s time to get him out of uniform. He marries her over there. She’s crazy about him. Why not? He saves her. He’s taking her out of there. To heaven, she thinks. Then she gets here, and there’s mom. Before it’s a B about newlyweds. Now you’ve got GIs coming home, it’s about something. Dick can handle that. And she’d be perfect. A nice girl, you’re on her side when the mother starts in. And she gets him back in the end because he’s nuts about her-which you can believe,” he said, flipping his hand to the screen, the remembered kiss. He paused. “We need to get him into something right away.”
“With an unknown. The biggest name we’ve got.”
“She won’t be unknown when the picture opens. She’ll be his new friend. First time they meet on the set, sparks. Then the brush fire. You can see it on the screen, before your eyes. Polly will eat it up.”
Lasner looked down, thinking. “How soon? To get it fixed?”
“Get Ben Hecht to do a polish.”
“A polish. He’s five thousand a week.”
“That’s all he’d need. We could put it into production right away. A Dick Marshall for the holidays.” He paused. “We own it and it’s sitting there.”
Lasner looked over at Bunny. “You really have a feeling about her?”
Ben sat still, fascinated, the moment suddenly important. A feeling about her. Not Brecht’s factory, a casino, as imprecise as a white ball spinning round a wheel. Lasner sighed, a moment of theater, then lowered his voice.
“Standard options. And you have to do something about the name. What are you going to call her?”
“Linda. It’s close. You like ‘Linda Eastman’? Her name means Eastman in German.”
“Now you speak German?”
“Enough to know that.”
Ben sat up. Enough to make a telephone call? But why would he?
“Where’d you find her?”
“At your house. She was at the dinner for Minot. With Ben Collier.”
“Collier? Oh, Otto’s kid. What, he’s screwing her?”
“His brother’s wife.”
“The one who-”
Ben cleared his throat, announcing himself. Both men turned. Bunny touched a switch on his armrest console to raise the lights.
“You’re there all this time?” Lasner said. “Like a spook?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt. I just wanted to see how she did.”
“Dailies are by invitation,” Bunny said, frosty. “Anything you hear stays in this room, understood?”
“It’s all right,” Lasner said, patting Bunny’s arm. “He’s with the studio.”
“He’s also a relative.”
“So when’s that a crime? This whole business is relatives.” He got up, facing Ben. “What’s the matter? You look funny.”
“Nothing,” Ben said, also getting up. “Just seeing someone you know up there.”
“What did you think?” Lasner said, walking up the aisle.
“Don’t ask me-I’m family. Bunny’s the expert,” he said, a peace offering. “The scene with Marshall. Did they improvise the lines or-”
“Improvise,” Bunny said, rolling his eyes. “On a test.”
The words a coincidence, then, but not the face.
“Bunny’s looking for a nice girl,” Lasner said, a tease. “A Bergman.”
“She’s the biggest thing in pictures, Sol. Nice, but something underneath.”
“What, underneath? She’s playing a nun.”
“One picture. You want to borrow her for Dick? It’s a fortune and you won’t even notice him. Somebody new, it looks like he’s pulling her. And we go into production right away.” Making a case.
Lasner hesitated, for effect, then nodded. “One week for Hecht. And no color.”
“No color,” Bunny agreed. “It’s not a musical.”
Lasner glanced up. “Sam come to you yet? About the musical? Now he’s telling me she can sing, the new skirt. As if he would knowanother Pasternak. He hears her humming on his dick, he thinks it’s a musical. A Bar Mitzvah coming up and he’s playing around with that. Well, Sam.”
Bunny had been watching Lasner’s face, scanning a page.
“You want me to put her in something right away,” he said flatly.
“She’s busy, maybe Sam doesn’t think we’re Metro.”
Bunny looked at him, then put a folder of notes under his arm. “I’ll find something.”
“How long does it last with Sam anyway?” Lasner said, but Bunny had begun to usher them out, moving on.
“The first contract’s always boiler plate,” he said to Ben.
“Don’t worry, she’ll sign. She wants this.”
“Everybody wants this,” Bunny said simply, turning to him, explaining something to a child. “Everybody in the world.”
By the time Ben had finished copying the guest list, Bunny’s secretary had finally gone. He put the list back on her desk, then, an impulse, went through to Bunny’s office and glanced around the room, a more careful look than on that first rushed morning. Wood paneling, barrel chairs with metal trim, but none of the personal effects that usually filled shelves, no photographs of Bunny as a child star, no leather-bound favorite scripts-nothing, in fact, but the business of Continental, filing cabinets and in-boxes filled with waiting papers. It was as if his former life had receded with his hairline, leaving the front office to Mr. Jenkins.
He walked over to the desk and ran his eye down the open calendar, tomorrow’s page crowded with appointments and reminders, as detailed and inflexible as a shooting schedule. He glanced up quickly to make sure he was still alone, then flipped back to Monday. Another full page, ending with Rosemary’s wrap party and Rushes with L, the usual last entry. Except he hadn’t stayed to watch them. Ben remembered him standing outside the sound stage, on his way somewhere, Lasner annoyed later when he couldn’t be found. Where? Just out of curiosity, Ben estimated the time between Bunny’s leaving and Lasner getting the police call. How long to the Palisades? Forty minutes, even with the wet roads, maybe less. He could easily have been there. But why would he be? He wasn’t someone in her past, like Danny. He’d probably helped arrange to bring her over. Why ask now for a secret meeting? Still, hadn’t Lorna thought at first the call was from the studio?
When he got home he found Liesl in the screening room, watching one of the Partners movies. The light pouring through the open door had startled her, someone caught in a guilty pleasure.
“You know this one?” she said. “ Car Trouble? It’s from life, when our car broke down. In Laguna. They’re all from life. I never realized before. I never paid attention. The premiere, all you can think about is the audience, do they like it? But he took everything from life.”
Their life, the one they had together.
“I’ll let you finish,” he said, backing away.
“No, turn it off. It’s enough. I just wanted to see you. What you were like. Well, what he thought you were like,” she said, her voice offhand, plausible.
“And how was I?” he said, moving to the projection room.
“Serious. A great believer in justice,” she said, playing with it.
He switched off the projector and raised the lights.
“What made you run it?” he said, coming back. “You weren’t trying to see me. Eddie’s not me.”
“You don’t think so?” she said, an evasive shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe for Daniel. Maybe I wanted to see what was on his mind. You tell me things-you make me think I never knew him. So who was he?”
“Any answers?”
“No. Maybe in the one he didn’t make.” She nodded to the box Republic had sent over.
He picked a script out of the box.
“You’re late again,” she said.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said with a sly smile. “They liked the test.”
“Yes?” she said, lifting her head, alert.
“Lasner, Bunny. They liked it.”
“Tell me,” she said, excited. “What did they say?”
“Get an agent.”
“Yes? They want to make a contract? Well, Kohner, I can call him,” she said, suddenly practical. “He knows my father. They really liked it?”
“Bunny wants to give you a buildup.”
“A buildup,” she said, translating it.
“Publicity.”
“Oh, to make me a movie star,” she said, skeptical. “With my accent. Daniel said it was impossible. With my accent.”
“Times change. He sees you as a war bride. Dick Marshall’s.”
Her eyes widened. “His wife? It’s a real part?”
Ben nodded. “Also his girlfriend. Off screen. At least at Ciro’s, places they take pictures.”
“They can do that?”
“It’s a personal services contract. That’s part of the service.”
“Oh, will you be jealous?” she said, coming over to him, putting her hands on his arms.
“That depends what happens after,” he said, playing along.
“That’s not in the contract, too, is it?”
“No.”
“Good,” she said, reaching her hand up to his neck. “Then there’s nothing to worry about.”
She smiled, her whole body warm against him, eyes darting across his face, just the way they had when she said, “I don’t care.” And suddenly he didn’t care, either. Maybe it was always acting. He thought of the girls in Germany-there’d been no pretense there, a warm mouth for a few cigarettes. No one thought of sex in the back of a jeep as making love, just something you did while you waited to go home, to real intimacy, a cry that wasn’t fake. Her eyes moved over him now, the way they had in the test, but did that make it any less real? He was already hard, wanting to be seduced, wanting the touch that reached inside you, when the eyes were only for you, the way it was in the movies.
Liesl became Linda Eastman, suddenly swept up in a storm of wardrobe fittings and blocking rehearsals, and Ben moved out of the house. It wasn’t a question of propriety. He was family, easily explainable to the photographers, but why raise questions at all? She was supposed to be lonely, waiting for someone like Dick to come along.
He wasn’t superstitious about the Cherokee. Danny may have died there, but he had never actually stayed there, and there was still part of a month already paid for, with the next now paid in advance to Joel. It was convenient, just a few blocks’ walk to drugstore counters on Hollywood Boulevard if he didn’t want to eat in. Still, there was a haunted feeling to the place, especially at night when the thin sound of a radio playing downstairs came in through the window, like smoke. He never saw his neighbors and after a while he began to feel that no one really lived there-they were all just passing through, drinking or washing out nylons or memorizing lines, all waiting, the way they did in Hollywood, for the phone to ring.
Even with his things hung in the closet and books and papers in a small heap on the desk, the room seemed empty. He paced through it, door to kitchen counter to balcony, an animal staking out territory to make it his own. The balcony especially needed to be claimed, swept free of ghosts. He looked down, seeing the body in the photograph again, the huddled neighbors, Riordan hanging back, surprised. If he had been. If he hadn’t been upstairs, racing down with the others to gape. The photograph was real, but everything else was a story you chose to believe. You couldn’t be certain, not of anybody.
Even someone you thought you knew. He’d seen that going through Danny’s reports in Minot’s office, a paper trail of little betrayals, no one ever suspecting. Just listening and passing on, but violating, too. As Ben flipped through folder after folder, he felt he was no longer looking for leads, but for something else, a reason.
At first Riordan hadn’t wanted Ben in the files at all. “It’s not somebody we know, it’s somebody we don’t know, remember?” But Ben had insisted-it was his bargaining chip, a matter of trust-and Riordan finally agreed, but only at night, after everyone had gone. He steered Ben to files that used Danny’s reports-Ostermann, Brecht, the emigre circle. There were even notes on Werfel and Salka and Thomas Mann. Everyone. Danny appeared simply as the initial K in the margins, identifying him as a source on the memos Riordan had written up, Bureau style.
“Subject [Ostermann] requested sign position paper Latin American Committee for Free Germany sponsored by exile group, Mexico City (see Seghers, et al.).” Brecht’s sexual relations with secretary Ruth Berlau were known to wife, Helene Weigel. “Guest Viertel home Santa Monica (arranged Brecht). Numerous visits Brecht.” Kaltenbach had met with Kranzler, Aufbau. “Kranzler under Bureau surveillance after visit Eisler (known CP). Purpose: discuss English translation of subject’s works. No decision reached (K).” According to the files, Kranzler visited other German writers, then the Highland Lounge, “popular with deviants. Entertained US serviceman overnight at Roosevelt Hotel.”
There were more. Brecht’s arguments with Fritz Lang on Hangmen Also Die, Kaltenbach’s finances, Ostermann’s intention to apply for citizenship after the five-year waiting period. Could anyone have taken these seriously? Written down, recorded, sources put into code so that the files themselves became secrets about secrets. Were they all like this? Ben thought of the FBI, the GPU, any of them, with their archives and hundreds of legmen, filling folders with items no more damaging than onions in Winchell. But there were other items, too, from other sources, requests for surveillance, possible new informants, now vulnerable to approach, everyone caught in a fun house hall of mirrors. In Germany files like these had killed.
“None of these are recent,” Ben said.
“That’s what he used to give the Bureau-it’s just there as backup. You know, in case we ever need it. The congressman’s more interested in the industry.”
Riordan pulled another file.
“Subject [Schaeffer] suspected CP, Hollywood branch. K suggests verify with source G, ex-CP.”
“Who’s Schaeffer?”
“A writer. Fox. But you get one, you have a lead to someone else.”
“Did G verify?”
Riordan nodded.
“What happens to Schaeffer?”
“That depends what he says under oath, doesn’t it? When he testifies. How cooperative he is.”
“Who else?”
Riordan looked to the filing cabinets. “I told you, he’s not going to be here. Bring me a suggestion, a name in his desk. We can check that out. But here, it’s a needle in a- What’s that?”
“A guest list. People Danny knew. I thought-” He stopped. What could he tell Riordan? Another crime, with no connection except a shared past? Something Genia must have known. “Look, we’re flying blind here, I know. But I think he was going to put one of these names in here.” He pointed to the files. “Let’s see who’s already there.”
Riordan looked at him, then at his watch, then back again.
“Can I say something to you? I know this is personal with you. But make it too personal, you’re not going to get anywhere. You want to know everything he told us. What’s the point?”
“I want to know where he was looking. If there was a pattern. You think he just pulled names out of a hat?”
“Tell you the truth, I didn’t give it a thought. As long as the names checked out.”
“And they did. So where was he getting them?”
“His memory box, I always thought,” Riordan said, tapping his head. “These are people he knew, some of them.”
“But not all. So there’s another source, not just him. Someone else.”
Riordan stared at him, then got up, a weary shuffling.
“All right, you got an itch about this, scratch it. But-I don’t have to say, anything in here stays here. You know that, right?”
“You think I care whether Schaeffer’s Red or not? There’s only one Communist I’m interested in. You and Minot can have all the rest. I never even saw these, all right?”
Riordan said nothing for a moment, then picked up his hat. “The door locks behind you. I’m just saying, there’s a lot of privileged stuff here.”
“And I’m trying to get you more. One more friendly witness.”
“Just don’t do it solo.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll give him to you.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“What?”
“You get too close, all by yourself, you could get hurt. He’d have to, wouldn’t he? Like before. Wouldn’t think twice.” He put on his hat. “Safety in numbers.”
When he’d gone, the room turned eerily silent, and Ben found himself moving quietly, too, as if he had broken in and had to make sure no noise reached the night watchman. He slid the file drawer out carefully, guest list in his other hand. The easiest way would be to eliminate the obvious names first, then move on to the ones he didn’t know, but it was hard to be methodical. Even when a name had no file he would bump up against another one, not on the list, that seemed vaguely familiar. Paulette Goddard was there, but only as an ex-wife cross-reference to the thick Chaplin file. Ben flipped through this-every speech he’d ever made, every interview, anonymous evaluations of his opinions, a full dossier of meaningless paper, flecked with little drops of professional envy. But someone had taken the time to compile it. Out of curiosity, he looked for his own name, but neither he nor Liesl had attracted anyone’s attention-nor Danny, for that matter, unless the sources had a special file drawer of their own. A Warners director had solicited contributions for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and his films had been reviewed for left-wing sentiments. Feldman, a front office crony Ben knew only by sight, had attended an Anti-Fascist League fund-raiser 1938, Ambassador Hotel, with Gail Simco, ex-CP, 1940. His girlfriend? A party seven years ago. It was when he found a file on Warner himself-production decisions made on Mission to Moscow — that the full craziness of it all struck him. He looked around Minot’s silent office, drawer after drawer of trivia and innuendo, put together during the war, consuming time and expense, to prepare for the war in their imaginations. And Danny a willing part of it. Had his sense by then been blunted, too? Crazy wasn’t necessarily harmless. The files were an arsenal. They were getting ready.
His fingers stopped, surprised, at the tab with Rosemary’s name on it.
“Subject (real name Risa Meyer) raised CP household. Father (Jacob) arrested NYC 1933 strike action, later official ILGWU. Mother (Irene) seamstress, also ILGWU. Both CP 1927–1939, membership on record. Resignation 1939. No evidence subsequent membership but source (G) believes remained socialist. Subject attended Pine Hill, Monticello, NY, children’s summer camp known for CP indoctrination. No known official CP affiliation, but background suggests further investigation.”
Attached were supporting documents, even a camp roster, a list of her magazine subscriptions-obtained how? — SAG membership date, a copy of the police report of her father’s arrest, none of it important or secret, yet sitting in a file, available. He looked at it again, feeling squeamish, as if he’d opened a lingerie drawer, a private place where he wasn’t supposed to be. No K source, at least. He’d reported on Ostermann, on friends. Why not jottings after a weekend at the Biltmore? But he wouldn’t have, one fine line he wouldn’t have crossed. As if Ben knew any longer what he wouldn’t have done.
He came back to her again after he’d checked more names off the list. Had Rosemary known? He thought of her at the party, enjoying her moment, not meeting Liesl’s eyes. Suggests further investigation. What if that had been Danny, listening closely?
The click of the key in the door startled him. He looked up, frozen, at Minot coming in, his hand still on the door, even more surprised. For a second neither of them moved.
“What are you doing?” Minot said finally, his voice flat, waiting to hear. He was in black tie, evidently on his way home from a formal evening.
“Checking files,” Ben said, trying to sound calm. “Riordan had to leave.”
“An eager beaver,” Minot said, squeezing out a small smile. “Dennis shouldn’t have done that.” He went over to his desk and took an envelope out of his in-box. “The files are private.”
“I was just checking my brother’s reports.”
“No offense.” He stopped, taking in the stack in front of Ben. “You understand, we promise people, when they help us. Well, like yourself. You wouldn’t want everyone-”
“The sources are coded.”
Minot nodded, his eyes darting involuntarily toward the bottom drawer, a quick check to see if it had been opened.
“But not impossible. To guess, I mean. We need to protect them. You’d want that, wouldn’t you? Your brother was very particular on that point. And even so. Well, it’s late. Need a lift? I’ve got a car waiting downstairs.”
“I’ll just put these back.”
“No, leave them,” Minot said firmly. “Sally can get them in the morning.”
He was moving to the door now, opening it, expecting Ben to follow.
“Anything for us yet?” he said pleasantly.
“No. I was hoping-” He opened his hand to the files.
“I think you’d find it easier with someone around. Help you navigate.” He switched off the light, closing the door behind them, testing the knob to make sure it had locked.
“What did you mean, even so?” Ben said. “About Danny. You said, ‘and even so.’ “
“Oh. Well, you know things happen. Even when you’re careful. Your brother was very careful. I don’t think anybody ever knew-that he gave us information about them. But somebody did find out. I can’t even remember how-Dennis, I suppose. Your brother chewed him out for it. Said it cost him a job.”
“Who found out?”
Minot slowed, looking at him. “Oh, I see. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. No grudges.”
“But if the guy-”
“It wouldn’t be,” he said evenly. “He became a friend of ours.”
“ After Danny-”
“A friend,” Minot said, cutting him off. “Like you. We trust our friends.” He glanced over. “Be a hell of a world if we didn’t, wouldn’t it?” He waved to the night watchman, his tone suddenly genial. “Frank, where’ve you been keeping yourself?”
“Right here. Not out on the town like some people,” the guard said, smiling at the tuxedo.
“Well, somebody’s got to do it. How’s the wife-better?” A politician’s memory, better than a room of files.
“Like new. I’ll tell her you asked,” he said, pleased, taking in Ben now.
Minot handed him the envelope from his in-box. “Somebody’ll be by for this. Sorry about the hour.”
“I’m here anyway,” Frank said, propping it on the fire extinguisher while he opened the door for them.
Outside a car was waiting, the driver idling the motor. Ben caught a glimpse of a woman’s crossed leg in the backseat, patient Mrs. Minot.
“Sure I can’t give you a lift?”
“No, my car’s over there,” Ben said, nodding to the dark parking lot.
Minot reached out for the door handle then hesitated, turning. “Have you seen Kaltenbach?” he said, lowering his voice. “I keep hearing things. We don’t want to have to move too early, tip our hand. One subpoena too soon, it’s like scaring birds, they start flying all over the place. You want to get the timing right.” He hesitated again. “I’d appreciate it if you spent a little time with him. I know you’ve got something else on your mind and that’s fine, but right now we could use someone inside. I’d think of it as a favor.”
Ben watched his car go, then started over to his own, thinking. A friend of ours. But how willing? Danny said it had cost him a job. He looked toward the dark building then suddenly, with a wheel click, he was back on the Chief. Something that hadn’t worked out. Sol couldn’t remember why.
Frank looked up from a magazine when Ben tapped on the glass.
“Like a dummy, I forgot something and Ken took the key. Do you have a pass? Take me a second.”
The first name did it. A man who’d asked about his wife. Frank led him down the hall and found the key on his ring.
“Thanks. Appreciate it,” Ben said, but Frank stayed with him, just inside the door.
He went over to the bottom drawer and flipped through the tabs. There might have been other jobs, not necessarily- But there it was, Jenkins, so thin he almost missed it. He slipped the file under his arm.
“I owe you one,” he said to Frank, putting on a relieved expression, his homework safe in hand.
In the car he flicked on the overhead light. A studio bio sheet, innocuous, presumably there for reference, and a single report sheet.
“Subject JENKINS attended discussion group 1940, CP Westwood, guest of J. MacDonald.”
Source initial K in the margin. One meeting. Not enough to suggest any serious political window shopping, much less something to use against him later. Maybe it had been nothing more than a courtesy drop-in for MacDonald’s sake. Why even bother to keep the report, now that he was a friend? But why look for logic in any of it? Why report that Kranzler had asked a GI up to his room, that Brecht had arranged trysts at Salka’s, that Rosemary read Collier’s? The peeping, like any compulsion, was an end in itself. No information was useless if the point was the gathering. A brief word from Danny, now permanently on file. To hold over Bunny’s head, keep him friendly? But Bunny had reasons of his own to get close to Minot. Why would he care about this?
Still, he had-enough to be angry with Danny. Maybe it was nothing more than the startled, uneasy feeling of someone who realizes he’s being watched through the window, anger a natural reflex. Maybe it had to do with MacDonald, a name to check the next time he got into the files. But not angry enough to kill. A job denied, no more. I knew who he was, he’d said to Ben. No explanation necessary when Riordan asked him to make the call. Maybe even a touch of satisfaction, bringing source K to an end.
Ben switched off the light and lit a cigarette. Rosemary’s file was more damaging-not a summer camp the studio would want to see written up in Photoplay. Ben wondered if Bunny knew about the report-more interesting, if Rosemary knew about it. Her moment, with everything at stake. There was nothing to indicate that Danny had ever betrayed her. What if she’d thought he had? But Bunny hadn’t made the call for her, he’d made it for Riordan.
He looked up, his eyes caught by the headlights sweeping into the parking lot. Not Minot again, a smaller car. It pulled up to the door, and the driver ran up the steps, tapping on the glass. It was only when Frank turned on another light that the driver became more than a shadow. For a minute Ben still didn’t recognize him-a natural lag, seeing something unexpected, out of place. Frank opened the door and handed over Minot’s envelope, then Kelly started back down the stairs. Ben watched, moving pieces around in his head. Kelly playing messenger. For Minot? But at the Farmers Market he hadn’t known Riordan. The connection must be at the other end.
There wasn’t time to sort it out. Kelly’s lights came on again, the car starting for the street. Almost without thinking, Ben turned the key. Kelly. Getting something for the paper? But at Wilshire he was turning away from downtown, heading toward Beverly Hills. Just keep a few lengths behind. No one ever noticed a tail if he wasn’t looking for it. Kelly was leaning forward to turn the radio knob, just going about his business, whatever it was.
After El Camino, Kelly turned right, passing blocks of stores and then crossing Santa Monica to the horseshoe-curve streets of the flats below Sunset. Ben slowed, dropping farther behind. The streets were empty, dark between the corner lights, half-asleep. Just stop signs now, not enough traffic for lights. Another right turn.
The house was halfway up the block. Ben parked a little way down and across, killing his lights, the car swallowed up in the shade of a big pepper tree. Kelly was walking up the curved pavement. He rang the bell, waited, looking up at the fanlight. A brighter light, then the door opened and Polly Marks stepped out, a drink in one hand. Running an errand for Polly. Not for the first time. A few familiar words, the envelope delivered, and she was turning back to her drink, all in one gliding movement, something they’d done before. In time to get it into the typewriter, a leak from the files. More kindling. He watched Kelly drive away, then sat for a minute looking at the quiet street-shrubs and lawns and even a trellis of flowers. No sound but crickets, peaceful and unaware, not a flame in sight.
He was surprised when Riordan answered the phone.
“You’re there early.”
“Ken likes it. Navy hours or some shit,” Riordan said, his voice husky, only half-awake.
“Studio hours, too,” Ben said, looking at the pile of paper already on his desk. Outside, technicians with coffee cups were heading for the sound stages. “Anyway, I’m glad I caught you.”
“What I hear, Ken caught you. You don’t want to surprise him like that. He gets riled up.”
“I was just checking names.”
“Not anymore,” he said, a thud in his voice. “Files are closed.”
“Great. Open one for me then, will you? See if you have anything on a J. MacDonald. M-a-c. Even a cross-reference.”
“Who is he?”
“That’s what I’m asking you. His name came up, that’s all.”
“Came up how?”
“Dennis, are you going to do this or not? Just see what you have.”
A hesitation, then an exaggerated sigh. “Give me a sec.”
Ben heard the receiver being laid on the desk, the sharp metallic scrape of a file drawer opening. A meeting five years ago.
“Music department. Universal,” Riordan said, reading.
“CP?”
“Not in here. Fellow traveler, though. Lots of organizations, the usual pink. Went into the Army ’forty-two. That’s the last thing we have. Want me to check some more?”
“Check what?”
“Army records. Friend of mine has access. See if he was discharged. Died, maybe.”
“Who was the source on the file?”
“No source, just a general. Stuff you can pull from the papers. This goes back some, nothing recent. You think your brother knew him?”
“Maybe just a loose end. I mean, if there’s been nothing for years-” But he must have known his name. At least well enough to mention it in Bunny’s file. “You have an old address?”
“Uh uh. Nobody ever wrote him up. He’s just a guy on some lists, so they made a file. Strictly what he joined. Anti-Fascist League, things like that. How’d you say he came up?”
Ben glanced at Bunny’s thin file. How long before anyone missed it?
“On a list. Probably nothing. Let me know about the Army though, okay? So I can scratch him off. Do I need to do anything about Ken? I don’t want him to think-”
“He’ll calm down. You’re the only one he’s got now, with the Krauts.”
“I thought he wasn’t interested in them.”
“They meet people. It all connects.”
Like a web, one strand to another. And who else was present, Mr. Kaltenbach? To the best of your recollection. Heinrich must have met people. If he was sympathetic enough to be approached now, invited to return, why not then? A gathering over coffee. One name, then another, until they found one for the newsreels. And who else was at the meeting, Mr. MacDonald? But Bunny would be protected, a friend to the committee. Until it began to eat its own, too hungry to stop.
Ben walked over to the window, looking out at the sunny lot. Cowboys and showgirls coming out of Makeup. Grips moving scenery. Everyone busy, unconcerned. Did any of them know what Minot was planning, what it would mean? For a second he saw the street in a freeze frame, a stopped moment before it all began. They’d turn on each other, running for cover, right into Minot’s hands.
At the gate, there was a commotion as some grips crossed the picket line. More pickets had come out today, not just the usual handful, and the guards had seemed jittery when Ben drove through earlier. Shouts now, instead of breezy catcalls. One of the grips shouted back, then had to be pulled away. Two of the picketers lunged toward him, then stopped, posturing. More shouts, name-calling. But no sticks or stones. A jurisdictional dispute.
He turned back to the paperwork, then saw her coming out of Makeup. She was in the same kind of white blouse and simple skirt they’d used in the test, but now wore heels, so that her legs stretched up. His eyes followed her toward the actors’ trailers, hair catching the morning light, watching the way she moved, the easy glide Bunny had noticed. But Ben had noticed other things, a leg in a mirror, eyes that darted across your face. He missed the swimming pool, sitting on the chaise still wet in terry robes, then the smell of chlorine on her skin, her thigh half open to its soft side.
She looked up into the mirror of her dressing table when the door opened.
“I saw you pass. Going over lines?”
She nodded to the script in front of her. “Today I meet the sister. She’s jealous.”
He closed the door behind him.
“Don’t. People will notice.”
“I’m family.”
“In my dressing room. What if Connie comes? It’s hers, too.”
“You share? You’re the star.”
She smiled. “Not yet.” She held up both hands to the mirror, wriggling them. “I haven’t put my hands in cement. Why do they do that?”
He shrugged. “Why do they do anything?”
“You think it’s all foolish. Only newsreels.”
He walked over to the chair, standing behind her.
“Next week we do the scenes in Germany,” she said to the mirror. “Did you see what they’re building? I live in a house that was bombed. In a cellar. It’s strange, you know? Where I’d be if I’d never come here.”
“Or dead.”
“Yes. You know my name, the character? Maria. No Saras here, either. Like Goebbels.”
“I thought they were making you Dutch,” he said back to the mirror.
“No, they want the ruins. So when I see his mother’s house-”
He put his hands on her shoulders, leaning down to kiss her neck.
“Don’t,” she said, moving forward. “I’ll have to do the makeup all over again. It took hours.”
“To look like this? Not even lipstick?”
“It’s the hardest, Connie says. To look natural.”
He brushed his hand down the back of her hair. “It’s good to see you.”
She looked down. “Maybe it’s good. It gives us time to think.”
“About what?”
She looked at him in the mirror for a moment, then let it go.
“I don’t know,” she said, getting up and turning, so that now they were facing each other.
“How’s Dick Marshall?”
“The perfect gentleman.” She put her hand on his chest, holding him in place. “Not like you.”
“How about I come for a swim?”
She shook her head, still holding him back, their faces close. “He’s taking me to the Grove.”
“After.”
“After I sleep. The camera picks it up. If your skin-”
“There’s nothing wrong with your skin,” he said, moving closer.
“Not here,” she said, pushing her hand against him.
“I can come late. Leave early,” he said, his face almost on hers.
“Don’t,” she said again.
“No one would know.” When she didn’t answer, he waited for another second, then stepped back. “If that’s it,” he said, his voice ironic. He moved away, leaving it, but she reached for his arm, pulling him back.
“Maybe it’s best. For now.”
He stopped still, just looking, trying to read her expression. Could eyes be trained, like voices?
“I wish I knew what you wanted,” he said quietly.
She returned his look, then let her hand drop, moving away from him.
“I wish I knew that, too.” She went back over to the mirror, a final check. “I have to go. They’ll be ready. You, too. Before anyone sees.” She patted her hair. “I have to meet the sister.”
He glanced at his watch, shifting moods with her. “And I have a meeting. Lasner keeps asking me to meetings.”
“He likes you.”
“I think he does it to needle Bunny. All right,” he said, moving to the door. “Do I go first or do you want me to sneak out after you’ve gone?”
“You think it’s a joke. People look for that.”
“By the way, what I came for? Did Danny know a man called MacDonald?”
She thought for a second. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“I came across his name in some papers.”
“What papers?”
“It doesn’t matter. Papers. He never mentioned a MacDonald?”
“No. That’s what you came for? More Daniel.”
“You’re sure?” he said, ignoring this.
“I don’t know. One name, all those years. How would I remember? MacDonald? Like the man on the farm?”
Ben nodded, waiting.
“I don’t think so.” She looked up. “I wish you would stop with this business.”
“When I know.”
“How? Who’s going to tell you? Daniel?”
“Maybe.”
“From the grave. You keep him alive, with all this. Here,” she said, touching her head, then turned and closed the script, her back to him. “It feels like cheating.”
He said nothing, looking into the mirror.
“Maybe that’s what I want,” she said. “Two in the room, not three.”
“I only see two,” Ben said.
He was early for the scheduling meeting. With only one project to manage there was no real need for him to be there at all, but Lasner had insisted, another mark of favor the other line producers took in with nervous wait-and-see glances. Only Sam Pilcer, an old hand at musical chairs, seemed not to care. They were waiting in the conference room next to Lasner’s office, where Bunny had set up a television, the first Ben had actually seen outside magazines. On the small glass screen a clown was performing.
“Again with this,” Lasner said to Bunny.
“Just look at it.”
“Look at what?”
“Found money.”
Lasner waved this off. “You’re like Freeman at Paramount. Remember he set up that Kraut? Right before the war?”
“Klaus Landsberg,” Bunny said. “And what? Two years, minimal investment, and he takes it on the air. W6XYZ. What you’re watching now,” he said, catching Lasner’s puzzled expression. “It’s not an experiment anymore, Sol. The only question is how fast they can make them. Last four years, they’ve all been working for the government. Every electronics company in the country. Army contracts. Now watch. They can start turning these out.”
“To watch this? Clowns.”
“No, Rex Morgan. The Silver Bullet series.”
“That’s ten, fifteen years old.”
“And just sitting there in the warehouse. Pictures nobody’s going to run again. And here’s a new exhibitor. With all day to fill. Why not with Rex? I’m telling you, found money. No prints. No advertising. No overhead. Aunt Tillie just died and left you a little something. Say thank you and cash the check.”
“What kind of money can something like that pay?”
“Not much now,” Bunny said. “But it’s bottom line to us, all of it. Right now we’re making nothing on Rex, just paying storage.”
But Lasner was only half listening, staring at the wooden box, eyes narrowing in thought, and Ben wondered for a moment if he was back in the dry goods store on Fourteenth Street, the fuzzy lines behind the glass just like the jerky figures of light on the tacked-up sheet.
“Of course, the real money,” Bunny was saying, “is going to be in production. But that’s down the road.”
“This is going to be the new pictures?”
“Nobody’s saying that.”
“People say it-I hear it. And we’re going to hand over Continental product for a few bucks? Cut our own throats? Let them stick with the clowns, see how far they get.”
“B product. Old B product.”
“And you said production.”
“It’s getting harder with the B’s, Sol, you know that. If they take away the block booking, we’re going to have a problem on our hands. We’re not Metro.”
“And you don’t see Mayer making clown shows, either.” He looked again at the set. “Where are the kids going to neck?”
“In the balcony. At the movies. That’s not going to change. Not with A product anyway.”
“I know, I know. More A’s. You keep saying.”
Bunny made a little nod, backing away, familiar ground. “It’ll never be pictures,” he said. “But maybe the new radio.”
“We’re not in the radio business.”
“No, the hotel business. It’s about turning over rooms,” Bunny said, spreading his arm to take in the lot outside. “Every time one of those stages is empty, we’re losing money. Sam’s going to wrap next week. Stage Seven,” he said, including Pilcer. “Then we’re dark two weeks until Greg does the interiors on Abilene.”
“Move River House from Five,” Lasner said. “They haven’t built the porch set yet. Then you’ve got Five for a longer shoot. Harry, you wanted six weeks, right?”
Ben listened, interested, the whole scheduling meeting already worked out in their heads.
“We can, yes,” Bunny said to Sol. “But the point is, you’re going to have some off weeks. So why not use the room, not waste it?”
“Bunny, we’re not just talking square feet here.” He looked again at the television. “The money’s not there yet,” he said flatly, as if he’d just run through the expense sheet.
“No, not yet.”
“And I should set up a new Second Unit,” Lasner said to Pilcer. “I think he enjoys it, giving me grief.” He turned to Bunny. “You got something, though, with the Silver Bullet s. What the hell. Get one of these for Rex, he can watch himself all day. Fees, right? Not sales. Just another exhibitor.”
“Fees,” Bunny said, a handshake.
“He keeps an eye out for you, Sol,” Pilcer said.
Bunny dipped his head to Pilcer, self-deprecating, like a courtier in one of his boy prince films.
Sol smiled, touching Bunny’s shoulder. “Who else could squeeze another nickel out of Rex? Christ.”
“All right, shall we start?” Bunny said, pulling out some papers with time graphs. “We’re looking at a two-week overrun on River House and that’s before the retakes, so we’re going to have to move things around. Abilene we’re still okay.”
“Nobody ever lost money on a Western,” Lasner said, about to take a seat. “What the hell’s that?”
They all looked toward the window. Lasner went over, following the shouting coming from below. On Gower Street, the pickets had swarmed around a car trying to go through the gate, yelling, a few of them banging on the fender.
“What the hell-?”
“Why so many today?” Pilcer said, joining him, everyone else following.
“Change of tactics,” one of the producers said. “What I heard,” he said when they all looked at him. “Pick one or two studios to make a point. Instead of spreading themselves thin.”
“So they pick us?” Lasner said.
“And Warners. They’ve got a whole army out on Olive. I heard,” he said when they looked again. “We’re the pick in town. One gate. Paramount, you’d need three times the people.”
Below, the studio police had rushed out and were now pushing people away from the car with clubs. Just night watchmen, Bunny had said.
“I thought this wasn’t supposed to happen,” Lasner said to Bunny.
“With our people, no. You can’t pay off two sides, Sol.”
The car had begun to move, but now the strikers were squaring off against the studio cops, shouting in their faces, still a ritual, not an actual fight.
“There’s that fuck Stein,” a producer said.
Ben followed the pointing finger. Howard was near the edge of the crowd, apparently trying to quiet things down as he made his way through. A technician heading for the gate was stopped by picketers, then surrounded by studio police, pushing the strikers away. One shoved back, grabbing the cop, who raised his stick. Two other pickets rushed over and the cop, alarmed, stuck the club into the striker’s chest to hold him off. The striker, taking it as an attack, swung at the cop and then, in an instant, like a fire catching, everyone seemed to be shoving, pushing chests, the line breaking up, people spilling into each other.
Bunny picked up the phone and dialed an extension. “Carl, get the police. Ask for Healy. Tell him we’ve got a street fight here. And tell Charlie to keep his men out of there. Away from the gate.”
The shouting was now a roar, and Ben felt his neck stiffen, a startled animal’s reaction. Violence was always sudden. A fistfight in a cellar bar, drunk GIs smashing bottles, jeeps pulling up, white helmets and billy clubs. Combat. The same adrenaline fear, your whole body flushed with it, everything happening fast. It was nothing like the movies, no sound-effect punches, choreographed swings. Clumsy, pulling at shirts, gouging, falling down, like the studio cop below, covering his face to ward off a kick. Ben saw Howard Stein, still trying to pull people away, putting out a brush fire.
“Jesus Christ,” Lasner said, but quietly, his face pale, eyes fixed on Gower Street.
Then Ben saw Hal trying to skirt around the crowd to reach the gate. Strikers swerved around to block his way, the crowd now moving by instinct. More shouts, grabbing him as he tried to rush in, the studio police shrinking back. Someone landed a punch, maybe unintentional, and Hal swung back, drawing the others on him. A lucky hit to the face, suddenly a spurt of blood, so startling that everything stopped for a second, a freeze before crossing the line, then a blur of rushing hands. Ben looked down the street. A siren wailing, squad cars. Not one, a stream of them. Like MPs with clubs. Now there wouldn’t be any sides. Just bodies in the way.
He ran out of the conference room, clumping down the stairs and tearing through the gate. A small group of studio workers had clustered behind it, watching.
“Help me get Hal,” he shouted at one of them, but didn’t wait, pushing his way into the crowd.
“What the fuck do you want?”
“The cops are coming. Get out of here. Everybody.”
“Yeah? Friends of yours?”
He kept going. Hal and the striker were now in a kind of wrestling lock, too close to get any punches in, pounding each other’s back.
“Get the fuck out,” the striker said as Ben tried to separate them.
“Let go. The cops are coming. Want to get your head cracked?”
Hal stepped away, the opening the picket had been waiting for. A quick jab to the face, Hal’s nose running blood, then another punch as Hal held his hand to his nose, stunned and reeling now.
“You stupid fuck!” Ben yelled, jumping on the picket, hitting him hard enough to knock him down, then dropping to his chest, another hard punch, so that the striker turned on his side, cowering, trying to cover his head.
Ben pushed himself up and grabbed Hal by the shoulders, herding him toward the gate, his hand throbbing. A studio cop stopped Hal with his stick, anyone bleeding now suspect, and Hal swung back at him. The cop weaved, clutching Hal’s shirt until Hal managed to pry him loose, flinging his arms away. A flashbulb went off somewhere to the side. The cop fell, taking one of the strikers down with him. But people had begun pulling away, looking toward the sirens, the street jumping with sound. Ben got Hal through the gate.
“Call the infirmary,” he said to Carl. “He’s not going to be the only one.”
He pulled Hal over to a low wall, sitting him down, and handed him a handkerchief to wipe the blood. “How’s the nose? Broken?”
“I don’t know. What’s that feel like?”
“Squishy.”
“My head,” Hal said, touching it. “Son of a bitch actually kicked me.”
A studio cop staggered in, blood streaming down the side of his head. One of the infirmary nurses, rushing to the gate, intercepted him, making him sit.
“You know the good part?” Hal said. “I’m on their side.” He looked at the clotted handkerchief. “We never get blood right. It processes too red.”
“You dizzy, anything like that?”
“No, the posse got there in time.” He looked over at Ben. “Thanks. Where’d that come from?”
The police were wading in with clubs, swinging indiscriminately at everyone. Bodies in the way. Even the studio cops were shrinking back, out of range. Some press had arrived, trailing after the squad cars, and more flashbulbs went off around the edges of the fight. Tomorrow the picture would be a mob out of control, a breakdown, not a confused, spontaneous fight, overwhelmed by police clubs. People were falling down, crawling away before they could be trampled. One of the cops bent over to hit a striker again, not finished, drawing some blood before they began the arrests.
“Jesus Christ. Hal,” Lasner said, his voice shaking. Most of the other producers had followed, drawn like gawkers at a highway wreck.
“I’m okay.”
“What the hell is happening?” Lasner said, not really a question, looking out through the gate, his face bewildered.
Some press photographers raced past. Out to the left, two cops had zeroed in on Howard Stein, who had begun with his hands outstretched in a stop signal but now had thrown them on top of his head, trying to wrench himself away as the cops grabbed his shirt, dragging him. A flashbulb. A club whacked his arm. Another striker came to help but the police ignored him, interested only in Stein, pummeling him now.
“Do you need help to the infirmary?” Bunny was saying to Hal.
“Our own people,” Lasner said to himself, still looking out.
They hit Stein again, this time in the head, and he staggered, falling as a second blow got him on the neck, and Ben saw that they weren’t going to stop, a storm trooper kind of frenzy. Another club, raised high, then swung hard. He glanced quickly at Hal, now being swabbed by a nurse, and rushed through the gate again, grabbing some of the others.
“Get Stein! They’ll kill him.”
At first no one seemed to have heard, then one of them looked toward Stein, the swinging clubs.
“Fuck,” he said, dragging another picket and racing over with Ben.
They came up behind the police, jabbing at them with picket sticks, a quick thrust to the knee that brought one down. The other swung around, his club whacking Ben on the arm. Ben lunged for his throat, a surprise, the cop’s face drawn back in a snarl. Then one of the pickets threw a kidney punch and the cop teetered backward, falling against the strikers. More men came over, blocking the cops from Stein. Ben looked down, winded for a second. Stein was lying on the pavement, a pool of blood spreading under his head, Danny in the police photo, his body flung in the same angle. Or did all bodies fall that way, arms awkward, twisted? He knelt down and felt his neck. Not dead. But now the police would have him, resisting arrest the least of it. Legal clubs this time.
“Help me,” he said to one of the pickets. “We have to get him out of here.”
“You shouldn’t move him.”
“Just fucking give me a hand,” he said, a command, lifting Stein from underneath and waiting for the picket to take the other side.
“Fuck,” the man said, grunting as he lifted.
“Howard, can you walk at all? We can’t do deadweight.”
“Not dead.” Almost indistinct, a growl.
“Just try to walk. We’ve got you. Put your arm there. Hold on.”
They went a few steps, Stein dragging, then pulling himself up, putting weight on his feet. Blood was still running from his head, staining Ben’s shoulders.
“Who called the cops?” Stein said, another mumble.
“Just keep walking. There’s a doctor. Not far.”
Stein opened his eyes, squinting at the Continental gate.
“A doctor,” he said, trying to make sense of this.
“Just inside. Keep moving.”
He swiveled his head to check on the two cops, still down, the others not near enough to help. The crowd was a blur of hand fighting. Some people had begun to run away, yelling curses, but retreating. A flashbulb went off in front of them, the photographer probably recognizing Stein. Another siren. Reinforcements. Ben was straining under the weight, sweaty now, his shirt bloody.
“Almost there. Not far,” he said again, trying to move faster, before the police noticed and could cut them off.
At the gate the crowd of employees were still watching, looking dazed. A battle scene on Gower Street. Casualties. Real blood. Ben realized then that they were looking at him, wet with it. But he’d made it to Carl’s booth.
“You can’t bring him in here,” Bunny said. “Do you know who that is?”
“So what? He’s hurt.”
Stein opened his eyes again, looking at Bunny, then Lasner, and began to smile, as if they were acting out a surreal joke.
“You have a stretcher?” Ben said to the nurse. “He’s heavy.”
She hesitated, uncertain, waiting to be told what to do.
“You can’t be serious,” Bunny said.
“You want the cops to finish him off?” Ben said. “He’s hurt.”
“He’s picketing us, ” Bunny said.
“Get the stretcher,” Ben said to the nurse, then turned to Bunny. “Look at his head. You can’t just leave him in the street.”
He looked at Lasner, still sitting next to Hal, a vacant expression on his face, like someone after a house fire.
“Fucking Stein,” one of the producers said.
“He could be dying,” Ben said to Bunny. “You want the papers to see Continental throw him back in the street?” He jerked his head, motioning to the photographers outside the gate. “How would you fix that?”
For a moment no one said anything, then Lasner got up, his eyes on Ben. “Get a stretcher,” he said to the nurse. “And the doc.” He turned to one of the studio cops. “Tell Charlie to get the men back in. That’s it.”
They waited together for a few seconds, an awkward silence, louder than the yells and sirens behind them, then Lasner patted Hal on the shoulder and turned to go. “See if anybody else needs an ambulance,” he said to Carl. “Before they start throwing them in the wagon.” He looked at Bunny, expressionless. “The cops stay off the lot.”
The nurse was running toward them, bringing two aides with a stretcher.
“Get him to Cedars,” Lasner said to her. “When the doc says it’s okay.” Then, his face drained, almost vacant, he started back to the Admin building.
“I suppose you know what’s going to happen when our people see him,” Bunny said to Ben.
“Maybe you should switch unions. Or would it cost you?”
“You don’t know the first thing about it.”
“I don’t care,” Ben said, helping the aides lift Stein onto the stretcher. Stein groaned, eyes half-open.
“Right. Leave it to me to explain. Make a mess and hand somebody else a mop. And when the police come looking for him? Not exactly Mr. X, is he? They know him.”
Ben stood. “And went at him. I saw it. And I have a good memory for faces. Tell them anybody comes after him with cuffs, I’ll ID them. The ones who clobbered him when he was down. And me.” He touched his arm. “Beating up soldiers. I’m still in the Army, remember?”
“Out of uniform.”
“Not when I testify. We can play it that way, if you want. You think this is a mess? You wouldn’t have a mop big enough.” He turned to the aides. “Got him? On two.”
Bunny watched them lift the stretcher. “Why are you doing this?” he said.
“I owe him a favor.”
Stein opened his eyes, watching them both as the group moved past the Admin building toward the infirmary.
“A favor,” Bunny said.
“Plus he’s bleeding.” He turned. “I’d do the same for you.”
In the infirmary, the aides transferred Stein to an examination table, high enough to do stitches. As the nurse swiped his head, stanching blood, Stein reached out his hand, grabbing Ben’s wrist.
“Don’t leave me,” he said.
Ben started, back in the other hospital, another hand on his wrist, a stopped moment.
“You’ll be all right,” the nurse said, reassuring.
A hand with the same urgency, but it was Stein, not Danny, a different meaning.
“Not with them,” he said, looking at Bunny and one of the aides.
Bunny rolled his eyes. “Wonderful. Now I’m Chester Morris. Where did I put my gun?”
“You’d all better scoot,” the doctor said, “while we patch him up. This is going to sting. We can’t use anesthetics until we know what’s going on in there.” He gestured to Stein’s head. “Here, hold on to these.” He put one of Stein’s hands on the gurney frame.
Ben moved the other hand off his wrist. “I’ll be just outside.” He looked toward Bunny, already at the door. “They’re going.”
“What favor?” Stein said, his voice raspy. “Why do you owe me a favor?”
“I figure Danny owes you something. A little payback.”
“Payback?” Stein said, vague.
“He should have been a better friend.”
“Well,” Stein said, shrugging this off, then winced at the antiseptic.
“One more,” the doctor said. “Just a sting.”
“I’ll be right outside,” Ben said.
In the hallway a nurse was wrapping an Ace bandage around a studio cop’s wrist while another lay on a gurney, holding a pad to a cut on his forehead. The aide had gone but Bunny was still there, smoking just outside the screen door. He stepped aside as another stretcher was brought in.
“Christ, Scarlett down at the rail yard,” he said, offering Ben a cigarette. “Looking for Dr. Meade.”
“Thanks,” Ben said, lighting it.
Bunny nodded at the splotch of blood on Ben’s shirt. “Yours?”
“No. Carrying him.”
“How’s the hand?”
Ben made a fist and opened it. “Nothing broken.”
“All very Boy’s Own, I must say. Wading in like that. Who’d have thought?” He looked toward the gate. “The problem is, it won’t solve anything. They’ll be out there again tomorrow. And now we’ve got this little situation here.” He looked back to Stein’s room.
“He’ll be out of here in an hour. What situation.”
“The unions are a little prickly at the moment. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Nobody’ll accuse you of switching sides. Act of mercy. The papers got some pictures, by the way. You might want to see what they’re planning to run.”
“Right,” he said, making a mental note. “It wouldn’t do to have Charlie’s boys looking-well, looking unfriendly. Just the big Boy Scouts they are.” He drew on the cigarette. “God, I hate this. IATSE, all of them. We’re supposed to be making pictures, not-whatever they think they’re doing. I suppose you know your new best friend in there is a Red. Just to make things that little bit more complicated.”
“Does it?”
Bunny circled around, not rising to this, then looked over at Ben. “I hear you’ve been talking to Minot.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Just listening to the drums. Lunch at Chasen’s. Hardly a secret.”
“It was just lunch.”
“What did you talk about?”
“My brother, mostly.”
“Your brother?”
“He worked for Minot. One of his legmen. You know that. You made the call for him. Can we stop this? All the cat and mouse?”
Bunny said nothing for a second, drawing on his cigarette. “All right. I don’t like Tom and Jerry much, either. Dennis asked, I called. Nothing earthshaking. It was an easy favor to put in the piggy bank, that’s all.”
“For someone you’d never met.”
“I didn’t do it for him. I wouldn’t have lifted a finger for him.”
“But Minot-”
“Is important. We need him on the consent decree.”
“So why not help him-what? Tidy up?”
Bunny shrugged. “Very scrupulous they are. Afraid a little of the soot would rub off, I suppose. But who cares? So let’s just say he tripped. Nicer for them. And the family. For you, come to that. Much nicer. And you keep hounding me about it.” He paused. “Now Ken. You’re not hounding him, I hope. He could have you for breakfast before you noticed.”
“And that’s why you jump when-”
“I don’t jump. The studio needs him.”
“For the studio. Not because he has something on you. That’s his specialty, isn’t it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“If he does, he didn’t get it from Danny. If that’s what you think. I checked. All he ever did was put you at a meeting. As a tourist. That’s it.”
“Well, there’s a comfort. He doesn’t ‘have’ anything. There’s nothing to have.”
“Only a meeting? You scare easy. How did Danny know, by the way? Who told him about it?”
“Nobody told him,” Bunny said, dismissive. “He was there.”
Ben looked up, caught off guard. “I thought you said you never met him.”
“I didn’t. We were never introduced. People weren’t. Not exactly a garden party. But I knew who he was.”
“And he knew you.”
“He must have. And, think, to remember all those years. Just store it up here and wait till you need a little mud to throw.”
“So it wasn’t MacDonald.”
Bunny hesitated for a second, either rattled or genuinely confused. “Who?”
“He was at the meeting, too.”
Bunny shook his head. “I told you, nobody was introduced.”
“Danny said you were with him.”
“With him?” Bunny said, wrinkling his brow, acting out thinking. He dropped the cigarette and started rubbing it out. “Oh, Jack. It’s been years. He was in the Pasternak unit, over at Universal. An arranger. He worked on some of the Durbin pictures.”
“A friend?”
“Just someone around.”
“Who took you to meetings.”
“Once. I didn’t know-well, we all say that now, don’t we? Anyway, I didn’t. Not really my idea of a good time.”
“Where is he now?”
“No idea. We’re talking about years-”
“He went into the Army.”
“Did he? I didn’t know.” He looked up. “How did you? Oh, Brother Tell All. What else did he say?”
“Nothing. Just the one meeting.”
“Then what’s this all about?”
“A loose end. I just wanted to know.”
“A loose end of what? You want to hound him, too? Sorry to disappoint. I don’t have the faintest. I expect if the Army got him, he’s probably dead. Not much of a fighter.” He paused, checking himself. “You don’t want to get mixed up with Minot. They don’t fight like this,” he said, waving at Ben’s shirt. “You won’t even see it coming. I don’t want Continental involved in any of his-” He stopped again. “Not one person on this lot.”
“I don’t work for him. I’m not Danny.”
He looked at Ben, then backed off. “Better get a shirt from Wardrobe. Before you start scaring people. I’ll see what’s happening outside. I suppose they’re arresting people.” He sighed. “But they won’t stay arrested.” He started to move off, then stopped. “How much does she know? About all this. I mean, married to him.”
Ben shook his head.
“You’d want to keep this to yourself, then. Not clutter things up.” He tapped a finger against his temple. “You don’t want anything here now but the part.”
Before Ben could answer, the doctor came through the screen door.
“Is he going to be all right?” Ben said.
The doctor nodded. “Just a little agitated. About being on the lot.”
“While we’re so tickled pink,” Bunny said. “So to speak.”
“I’ll go in,” Ben said.
Stein, his head now bandaged, opened his eyes when Ben approached the bed.
“We’ll get you to a hospital. Just take it easy.”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen. Now they’ll say we started it.”
“Probably.”
Stein grimaced. “So thanks for-”
Ben nodded, cutting him off. “We’ll get you an ambulance.”
“You know, with your brother? That was all right. A lot of people lose interest.”
Ben said nothing, confused for a minute, until he realized Stein meant the union.
“I don’t want you to think-he wasn’t a friend. People lose touch, that’s all.”
After Stein was taken away, Ben stopped by the cutting room to check on Hal, already back splicing film, as if nothing very much had happened. But something had. The lot had a hospital quiet, and, even though the police had now cleared the street, people kept looking toward the gate, an accident after the tow truck had pulled away.
“On Gower,” Hal said. “Lasner-it’s like somebody knocked the wind out of him.”
“Nobody’s had a raise since wage controls. He had to expect-”
“It’s not the money. It’s his studio. He knows everybody’s name.”
R OSEMARY WAS in Post-Production, recording, the red light on. Why did he have to know? To salvage one piece of decent behavior? Find one line Danny hadn’t crossed, after crossing all the others?
When she came out on break she was in street clothes, her skin pale, not made up for the camera.
“I heard you got beat up,” she said, noticing the cut on his forehead.
“You should see the other guy.” He smiled. “Cheap line. How’s it going? I thought you wrapped.”
“Dubbing. They want to sneak it and the sound’s still not finished.”
“I need to ask you something. I hope you don’t mind.”
“About Daniel?”
“Yes. Well, about you.”
“Me.”
“Did you ever tell him about Pine Hill? When you were with him, I mean, did you ever mention it?”
She stared at him, clearly thrown. “You have a great way of coming up from behind,” she said finally.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean-”
“Sure you did.”
“Did you? Talk about it?”
“No.” She took out a cigarette and let him light it for her. “Why, did he?”
“No,” he said, a relief audible only to him.
“How do you know about it, then?”
“I read something. It said you’d been there as a kid. I wondered if he knew.”
“Why? Am I supposed to be ashamed of it? Eight years old? Read something where?”
Ben shrugged.
“Or are we going to? Is that what this is, a shakedown? ‘Rosemary Miller: Red Diaper Baby.’ ” She moved her hand through the air, a headline.
“No.”
She looked at him sharply. “I always knew somebody would someday. You never see it coming, though, do you?”
“It’s not coming now. This is just between us.”
“You think I’m afraid of this? There are pictures. Me and Aaron Silber, who later went on to-who knows? His father was a button supplier, he’s probably running that now. Anyway, we’re on a raft. In the lake. Cute. They ran it in the Daily Worker. My parents still have a copy, if that’s what you’re after.”
“I’m not after anything.”
“No, just curious. Want to know what it was like? Nice. We had a lake. Campfires. No running water in the bunks, but that was all right. Everything looks good when you’re eight. Eight.” She looked directly at him. “A child. Who didn’t know it was any different from the other places in the mountains. I felt lucky to go. The classes with the lessons? Only one a day and who listened in class anyway? Not with Aaron Silber around. Shows, too. I was on the stage. My parents came up for it. They thought it was wonderful. They thought the whole thing was wonderful. What the future would be like. One big Pine Hill.” She looked down, her voice lower. “Maybe I would have thought so, too. If I’d had that life. You see these fingers?” She held up her index and middle fingers. “My mother has no feeling in them. Ever operate a sewing machine?” She held her hands in front of her, mimicking pushing material toward a bobbing needle. “Sometimes it slips, you get your fingers caught under the needle. It hurts. Not like a saw or anything. You don’t lose them. But after a while, it happens enough, it kills the nerves, so you lose feeling. My father, with him it’s the cough. From the fabrics, the dust. It gets in your lungs, you never get it out, just keep coughing. So maybe they were right, what they thought. If you have that life.” She looked up at him. “But I don’t. I have this life. But there’s always somebody looking to dump you right back, isn’t there?”
“I’m not-”
“What did they do anyway, that was so wrong? Send me to camp. I’m supposed to apologize for that?”
“No. Stop,” he said, raising his hand a little.
“They’re my parents-”
He raised it higher, a halt. “My father was a Communist, Rosemary.” He looked at her. “So was Danny.”
“What?” Her head tilted, as if it had been literally jarred, hit by something.
“He never said?”
“No,” she said, still off balance.
“I thought he might have talked about it, that’s all. That’s the only reason I asked.” He trailed off, letting them both take a breath. “I’m not trying to-”
“Never. He never said anything like that,” she said, her voice vague, groping. “It’s true? He was?”
“In Germany. Then he changed. That’s what I’m trying to understand. What made him change.”
“But all this time,” she said, moving, her body restless, unsettled.
She dropped the cigarette with a willed half smile. “What my parents always wanted. A boy from-well, but not married.” She shook her head, a physical clearing out. “But how could it be true? He wasn’t like them. He wasn’t even interested.”
“It was a while ago. He was younger.”
“My parents never changed. Every time my father read the paperBut not Daniel. Not even that, what was in the paper. Or maybe he just never talked about it with me. Anything he cared about. Not with the girlfriend.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Oh, you know that, too? What he was thinking. Tell me. I don’t understand any of it. Why would he-?”
“I’ll tell you this. If he never asked you, it means he cared about you.”
“I don’t understand that, either.”
“He was protecting you.”
She looked at him quizzically, then smiled to herself. “Protecting me. It sounds better, anyway. Or maybe you like making him look good. What’s next? Maybe he was in love with me, too.”
“Maybe he was.”
She glanced up, her eyes suddenly moist, but her voice still edged. “Well, that’s something to hold on to.”
Riordan called late in the afternoon while Ben was drafting the last of the voice-overs.
“You’re going to love this.”
“What?”
“John MacDonald.”
“You found him?”
“Army records. Once you’re in-”
“He’s alive?”
“Wounded. Discharged ’forty-four,” he said, reading from notes. “VA Hospital over by Sepulveda until May. Then you follow the disability checks. They thought he was dead because they started coming back for a while, then the change of address came through.”
“So where is he?”
Riordan paused, a delivery line. “Care of Continental Pictures.”
“What?”
“But that’s not the part you’re going to love.”
Ben waited.
“Previous address?” Riordan said, teasing him with it. “Cherokee Arms.”
Ben sat for a minute afterward, his mind racing, then reached for the studio directory. No MacDonald. But had he really expected to find him there?
The mailroom was in the basement of the Admin building, filled with sorting boxes and the deep canvas bins for fan mail, hundreds of envelopes waiting to hear back from Dick Marshall, with his own signature on the photograph. One of the mail boys pushed an empty cart through the door.
“Help you?”
“I’m trying to find somebody. He’s not in the directory, but he gets mail here. So where does it go? You have a list or something like that? MacDonald.”
“Sure. Give me a sec.”
He went over to a clipboard hanging beneath the rows of pigeonholes and started flipping pages. An eternity of minutes, everything in slow motion. Or maybe it was just that Ben already knew what he would say.
“That goes to Mr. Jenkins’s office.”
Joel had only been working at the Cherokee since winter and had never heard of MacDonald, but the name was there on the rent rolls. A few months and then gone, no forwarding address. Danny hadn’t taken 5C until later, so there was nothing to connect them but coincidence. And Danny’s source entry in Minot’s file, familiar. And now Bunny collecting his checks.
But what did he do with them? Bunny got to the studio a little after the first makeup call and usually stayed late to watch the dailies. He took scripts home to an apartment on Ivar, handy to the studio, and seemed to have no personal life at all. According to his calendar, he spent Sundays making the rounds of tennis parties and open houses, and since he organized most of the Lasner dinners, there were frequent entries for Summit Drive, but otherwise the schedule was a long list of business appointments and business in disguise: a premiere, a night at Perino’s with an agent, a producer’s birthday. He was invited to Cukor’s for dinner about once a month and appeared to have standing dates with Marion Davies and Billy Haines, presumably old friends. He never saw Jack MacDonald.
Ben had actually followed him home a few nights, stopping short of his building, but Bunny had stayed in, the reading lamp burning in the corner window. A working Hollywood life, none of the samba bands and white furs that twinkled in Polly’s column every morning.
At the studio, Ben began staying closer to him, spending more time at Admin. Stein had pulled his pickets, which Bunny assumed was a favor to Ben, and a quiet Gower Street was worth an uneasy truce. He even included Ben in the sneak-preview car, usually restricted to the line producer.
“Always Glendale,” Lasner said.
“It’s anywhere.”
“This hour, it’s going to be kids.”
“We want kids,” Bunny said.
“With all the wiseass response cards. Go on the Boulevard, later, you get the swing shift, it’s a better crowd.”
“That was during the war, Sol. They’re not staying open late anymore.”
“They liked everything,” Lasner said stubbornly.
The Glendale audience, as young as predicted, seemed to like it well enough. There was the usual surprise when the unannounced movie came on, but no groans or jokey demands for the regular feature, and they clapped at Rosemary’s name in the credits, a good sign. The Continental group, sitting in the back, had already seen the picture so they watched the audience instead, a kind of seismic reading, alert to rustlings and murmurs and pockets of quiet. On the screen sequined women were dancing in a nightclub, the set of the wrap party, but Ben drifted, more interested in the men around him, seriously at work, one of whom had lied to him. A name he hadn’t heard in years, whose mail came to his office. It would be useless to ask him why. He’d already ducked once. Another question would be a warning, drive him further away.
Ben looked down the row. Bunny sat slumped in his viewing posture, hands tipped, the bald patch on top of his head gleaming slightly. How many pictures had he seen? Half a lifetime sitting in the dark. It was hard to imagine him anywhere else. Not on a balcony at the Cherokee. Ben tried to run the scene in his head, Bunny in one of his soft sport jackets, the fawn eyes narrowing as he pushed-but it kept slipping away, impossible. Besides, he’d been home when Dennis called, hadn’t he? A fixer. Fixing something else now.
Only half the audience bothered to fill out the comment cards, but Lasner ignored these anyway, scanning faces as they came out during the break before the regular feature. He stood near the balcony stairs in his suit, watching the lobby, not looking directly at anybody, just taking in the air. The publicity assistants, who’d been collecting the cards, were sorting them in stacks and handing a few to Bunny. Al Shulman, the producer, had already gone outside to smoke, unable to stand still.
“They’re okay,” Bunny said in the car, riffling through the cards.
“Just okay,” Lasner said.
“It’ll do business.”
“With ‘okay.’ “
“A million.”
“Seven hundred. Eight,” Lasner said. “And that’s with South America. Eight.”
“We can recut,” Shulman said.
“There’s nothing wrong with the picture,” Lasner said. “Harry did a good job. What’s to recut?”
“Rosemary,” Bunny said. “They like her.” He held up one of the cards. “Women, too. They just could like her more. She needs this picture, Sol. It’s time.” He turned to Shulman. “Can you soften the bar scene? Maybe cut to her when he leaves? How it hits her?”
“Sure. From the two shot. Take a day.”
Ben looked at Bunny, hunched forward, calculating, ready to do what had to be done. Another scene, this one easier to imagine: releasing a hand brake, letting gravity do the work, a quick fix. But why? Lasner said nothing, looking out the car window, and after a while his silence became a noise of its own, something audible underneath the talk around him. Ben thought of him looking down at the fighting on Gower Street, distant, thinking something through.
“It’s too late to change the dress,” Bunny was saying. “Anyway, it looks great.”
“You wanted soft.”
“Her face. Not the dress. We’ll keep the heat on the trades. They don’t like to back away-the early word was good.”
Even Paulette had said so, flocking around Rosemary with the others, her moment.
Lasner turned to Bunny. “What did they say?” He nodded to the cards. “The ones that weren’t okay.”
Bunny met his eyes, then picked up one of the cards. “ ‘Didn’t I see this last year? But I liked Dana Andrews. Yes, I’d recommend.’” Then another. “‘Usual hard to believe junk.’” He looked up. “One of the kids. This one says the picture’s okay, but why not in color.” He looked at Lasner. “I’ve seen worse, Sol. It’ll do business.”
Lasner said nothing, then went back to the window. The car was through the pass now, heading west on Fountain. “You feel it in the lobby? We didn’t have the audience,” he said, still looking out. “We used to have the audience.”
The rest of the trip back was dispiriting, Shulman worried, everyone staring at the half-lit billboards, a funeral quiet. Bunny had tried putting a pragmatic good face on things. Seven or eight, even with South America, was respectable and nobody had been expecting Going My Way. But they’d been hoping for something more.
When he got back to the Cherokee, Ben walked down to Hollywood Boulevard to get a sandwich at the Rexall, still brooding. He looked at his reflection in the glare of one of the storefronts, a disembodied image, as if he were not actually there, invisible to the people passing behind him. Why couldn’t Danny, another shade now, appear in the glass beside him, tell him what had happened? Or just talk? Tell one of his jokes.
At the lunch counter, while dishes and coffee cups slammed around him, he took the family picture out of his wallet. All of them together in the Tiergarten, his mother in the cloche hat, Danny grinning, him smiling, held next to each other by Otto, one hand on each shoulder. How could they have changed so much? He looked at his father, holding his boys tight against his coat. Not putting them at risk. His mother leaning against him, eyes laughing, before the bitterness. And Danny, mischievous and daring, who got him into trouble, but protected him, too, who never told on him, gave him away. Partners in crime. None of them the same. But they had been like that once. Maybe you always carried it with you, what you used to be. Danny hadn’t told on Rosemary. Then why the others? Put yourself in his place. But he couldn’t. He was still the boy in the picture, too, wanting to be his brother, before they changed.
The night clerk barely looked up when Ben got back, fixed instead on the crossword he was filling in, his voice lazy, almost a drawl.
“Any luck finding that mail key? Management was asking.”
“No.”
“They’ll charge you, get another one made.”
“Don’t bother, then. I’m not expecting any mail.”
Officially that would still go through the APO, sent on by Fort Roach. But who would write, now that Danny was gone?
“You’ve got some in there now.”
Ben looked at his box, the see-through holes backed white with an open piece of paper, another Current Resident flyer.
“It’ll keep.”
“You have to turn one in when you leave, so you’ll still have the charge.”
“Maybe I won’t leave.”
The clerk didn’t rise to this, his hand still moving across the puzzle. “I’ll order it,” he said indifferently. “Here’s a message.”
He reached over to a box and handed Ben a slip. Liesl. Out tonight, talk tomorrow. Another evening with Dick, the perfect gentleman. And then sleep, because the camera sees everything. But she’d called, hoping to catch him in. He felt a warm stirring on his skin. Just from a message slip.
Upstairs, he poured a drink of the brandy and sat up on the bed with one of Danny’s scripts. The partners were foiling a blackmail scheme. The victim, someone Rosemary might have played, was a woman with a past who was about to marry into society. Danny was coming to her rescue, flirting, and Ben was doggedly following leads. He smiled to himself. There was some business with post office boxes- maybe the lost key downstairs put to use here-and a confrontation in a gambling club. Danny and the blackmailer play cards. “You give yourself away.” What Danny used to say when they played cards, Ben’s eyes apparently acting like mirrors into his hand. But unlike Ben, the blackmailer wasn’t intimidated. He tosses a chip. “You’re wasting your money. That’s all right with me. I own the place. But don’t waste your time, too. You work for her, what have you got? Be a friend to the house, you’ll come out ahead.” Ben sat up straighter, hearing Minot’s voice. He flipped back. Even the physical description fit, an athlete’s swagger. Would he have recognized himself? Was this how Danny saw him, a blackmailer? But why risk offending him? An actor might read it differently, but the likeness underneath would be unmistakable. If you saw yourself that way. And of course Minot didn’t.
What else? Ben kept reading, looking for anything real, the stray detail that might lead somehow to the balcony outside. But Partners ran to formula. After a few kisses, Danny sends the girl back to her rich suitor-better for her and better for the series. The blackmailer goes to jail. Danny remains uncompromised. The brothers drive off together. Everything that didn’t happen. Ben closed the script. But the way he’d wanted it to happen. That was something at least, wasn’t it?
He got up, restless. She’d be home now, before the second set started at the Grove. Talk tomorrow. But there was still tonight, a drink by the pool, his hand idling on her leg, no files with coded sources, scripts with Minot. Just the soft air. Afterward, when she slept, he’d lie next to her, the scent of her still on him.
The driveway was empty. Should he wait? But maybe the car had already been put in the garage, tucked away for the night. There was a faint light coming from around back and he got out and followed it. The way Riordan’s man had come, slipping through the French windows to look for a name. He heard her before he reached the corner of the house, still awake, an easy murmur, leaving part of it behind in her throat. Now a laugh, louder, maybe reading something by the pool. He should call out, not startle her, coming out of the dark. He turned the corner and stopped.
She was kneeling on the chaise, someone beneath her, lowering her face to his. Another murmur, playful, the light catching her bare back now, naked, moving gently, like pool water. Ben felt his stomach clench, punched in. Her hair came up again, white shoulders. He stared, unable to move, step away. Now he took in the rest, the robes lying on the ground, the wine on the table, the blue light coming from the pool. She dipped her head again, then raised it, her face visible over the back of the chaise. His breath was coming back a little, blood rushing to his head. In a second, his face would be flush with it, surprise replaced by something else. She arched her neck back, and her face came up, eyes closed, then opening, then locked on his.
For a second there seemed to be no sound at all, no gasp, not even crickets. They looked at each other, too shaken to react. Then her eyes moved, one thought chasing another, and she reached for her robe, her breasts showing. She said something to the man in the chaise as she put it on, presumably an excuse, improvised, keeping him there as she got up to go into the house, any excuse, moving steadily, not alarmed, not seeing anybody standing by the house. An arm dropped over the side of the chaise and picked up cigarettes. Then a head leaned down, lighting one. Dick Marshall. Liesl stood between him and Ben, but Dick wasn’t looking. He lay back on the chaise, a bare arm flung out. The rest of him would be naked too, waiting for her. Liesl started across the patio, belting the robe, her eyes on Ben again, a flicker of panic. He turned away, heading back to the driveway.
“Wait,” she said, a whisper, no louder than a hiss. Then she was past the patio, following him down the flagstone steps, out of earshot. “Wait,” she said again.
Ben turned, his body still tingling, everything mixed up.
“I guess I should have called,” he said, his voice neutral.
“It’s not what you think,” she said, no longer whispering, but soft, conspiratorial.
“What is it, then?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
He looked at her for a second. “Does he know that? I didn’t.”
She stared back, biting her lip. “Don’t.”
Silence again, the air churning, any words likely to wound.
“Talk to me,” she said finally.
He kept looking at her, not speaking, things still shifting inside, falling. “You’d better get back,” he said, turning to the car.
She reached out and they both looked down at her hand on his arm, something out of place. She pulled it back, the movement opening the top of her robe, so that she had to clutch the lapel, covering herself.
“Did you swim first?” he said, nodding to the robe.
Her eyes flashed, then looked away. “You’ve no right.”
“I guess not. What was it? Just one of those things.”
“No,” she said quietly. “You know that.”
“Getting back at him? Something like that?”
“Don’t be-”
“Not that I didn’t enjoy it. Just next time, let me in on it.”
“We can’t talk now. You’re so-”
He waited. “So what?”
“I don’t know. Angry.”
“Ah,” he said, exhaling it.
She looked down. “How could we go on like that? Him always there.”
“Instead of like this?” he said, motioning toward the pool.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said again.
“It does to me.”
“We have to talk later. Now it’s-”
He shook his head. “You don’t owe me an explanation. Let’s justnot.” He turned to go.
“It’s nothing,” she said, her head down.
“You must have had a good laugh. Me being so-”
She leaned forward, her head close to his chest.
“No. I wasn’t laughing.”
He could feel the robe near him, aware of her. He stepped back.
“You better go finish him off. Before he starts playing with himself. You should have him about halfway there by now. If I remember it right.”
She looked up, her eyes suddenly filling, stung. “Go to hell.”
He took out his car keys, flipping them, about to say something more, but instead just nodded and held one up, a kind of wave, and got into the car. He turned his head backing out, not wanting to see her standing there in her robe, a good-bye glimpse.
In a few minutes, twisting down, he was out of the hills. He stopped for a red light and sat staring out, jumpy, afraid for a second he might be sick. The light changed, then went red again, unnoticed, no one behind him to make him move. Staring, no longer queasy, his mind blank. When he finally turned onto Hollywood Boulevard, the Rexall, the theaters, all of it was still lit up, as if nothing had happened. But he felt that if he got out and walked by the plate glass windows again his reflection wouldn’t be there, that his heart was still beating but the rest of him had disappeared.
Sam Pilcer invited most of the studio to his son’s Bar Mitzvah. The list had begun modestly, just the commissary head table, but then he felt he had to include people in his unit and after that it became impossible to draw the line. People would feel slighted, and why leave yourself open to resentment? Besides, it was the kind of occasion that wanted a crowd. He canceled the small ballroom he’d booked at the Ambassador and took over the Grove instead.
By midmorning there was already a line of cars in front of Wilshire Boulevard Temple. The lot behind was full, but Ben circled around and finally found a spot two blocks in on Hobart. The temple was Byzantine inspired, a scaled-down Hagia Sophia, and the crowd gathering outside made it feel a little like one of the big movie theaters downtown. Ben stopped for a minute, watching people being helped out of black Packards and hugging each other on the sidewalk, another premiere. There were photographers and even the usual cluster of fringe people who’d come to see stars, held away from the entrance doors by ushers. Sam and his younger wife stood at the top of the stairs, hemmed in by well-wishers. Women were in dressy day clothes, navy set off with a diamond brooch, peach silk with pearls, everyone in hats and a few in fur stoles, in spite of the bright autumn sun.
Ben thought, looking at the guests, that all weddings and family parties were the same, everyone falling into predictable place. Rosemary stepped out of her car all ready for the camera, but the beefy middle-aged man off to the side, looking slightly lost, was probably Uncle Al, who ran a linen supply business in Inglewood. Sam’s mother-in-law, on a cane, was being escorted by an older grandchild-Jonathan, the Bar Mitzvah boy, would already be inside looking over the Hebrew passage. Al’s daughter, the pretty one, had brought a new man. Aunt Rose, whom nobody ever knew what to do with, was beaming at a photographer. Happy families, all alike.
The front office people were now arriving, the Lasners first, then everyone else in a quick jumble so that they all reached the steps at once, swarming around Sol the way they had at Grand Central. Fay teetered on high heels, holding on to his arm.
“What are you, walking?” Sol said, seeing Ben.
“I parked behind.”
“Yourself? What if people see?”
“What people?” Ben said, laughing.
“People. There’s always people. You should know that.”
“Just saving the studio money,” Ben said, brushing it off.
“You and who else?”
But he dropped it, tugged by Fay to start up the stairs.
“Rabbi Magnin’s doing it himself,” she said to him, leaning in. “Say something to Esther. She’s thrilled.”
Lasner turned slightly to Ben. “Come sit with us,” he said.
But Ben held back, already imagining Bunny’s scowl, Fay’s appraising glances. Liesl was getting out of a car with Dick Marshall, a little excitement running through the spectators.
“Dick! Over here!” Almost a squeal as he waved, flashing the Marshall grin.
Ben kissed Liesl on both cheeks, a European family greeting.
“You look nice.”
She smiled, relieved, but still tentative. “Wardrobe. I think from the Wehrmacht,” she said, touching one of the padded shoulders. “You know Dick?”
But Dick was flashing the grin again for one of the photographers.
“Save me a dance later.”
“What?” she said, slightly thrown, not sure if it was a double-entendre.
“At the Grove. Sam hired the band, too.”
“Oh. Yes, that would be nice.” Letting her eyes stay on him, talking.
More car doors were slamming, voices getting louder, rising like heat waves.
“Better get inside. There’s Polly,” he said, spying her farther down the row of cars.
“No, we’re supposed to talk to her.”
Dick, seeing her, put his arm around Liesl. “Hey,” he said to Ben, drawing a blank.
Liesl put on a public smile and started to turn.
“Have fun,” Ben said, sliding away, heading for the stairs.
“So glad you could come,” Pilcer said as they shook hands. “You know Esther?”
“Congratulations. You must be proud.”
“Ask me after,” she said pleasantly. “It’s still touch and go with the Hebrew.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said, a meaningless reassurance. But wasn’t it always? How many had he seen-struggling through their readings, rabbis at their sides, but always ending with elated grins. He remembered a whole season of them, the year Danny was thirteen, dreading the boredom of the service, all of it alien to them, who weren’t being instructed, who weren’t in their friends’ eyes even Jews. Otto had been indifferent and their mother gentile, so they’d escaped the Hebrew lessons, the tedious weeks of preparation. The services themselves were exotic, a series of risings and sitting downs and words repeated phonetically, just to go along. Most of the boys used the synagogue in Fasanenstrasse and afterward there would be a formal lunch across the street at the Kempinski, all good manners and politely smiling grown-ups. Years later, after they had left, it had been torched on Kristallnacht. Now there was nothing, a few shell-like walls.
“He’s reading from Esther,” Sam was saying. “For his mother. It’s a nice touch, don’t you think? What did you read? I’ll bet you don’t even remember.”
Ben shook his head. “I didn’t. My father wasn’t observant.”
“Like Sam,” Esther said, nodding to him. “‘A lot of work and who remembers?’ But I think it’s important. Now, I mean.” She faltered a little, embarrassed. “You know, after-”
“Yes,” Ben said, helping her.
“Of course, you would,” Sam said. “You know what he’s making at the studio?” But someone had taken his elbow. “Abe. Wonderful to see you. Esther, you remember Abe Lastfogel. The Morris office.”
“Congratulations again,” Ben said to Esther, letting her go. “He’ll be fine.”
“It’s just, you know, it’s important to have a sense now,” she said, still making a case to herself.
“Yes,” Ben said, moving inside. But was it? Had it mattered before? Even Mischling s had been taken, one parent, people who’d had no teaching at all.
He picked up a yarmulke from a pile on a sideboard. Inside, through the marble arches, people were settling in, waving to friends, the hum before a show. All religion was a kind of theater. He smiled to himself as he walked in. At least here they knew their audience. The whole vaulted ceiling, a night sky, was covered with stars.
He sat with Hal Jasper behind the Lasners, close enough to be in the party without taking anyone’s place. Bunny, who’d also put on a yarmulke, was next to Fay and took his cues from her, rising when she did, mumbling during the unison response. Rabbi Magnin, in wire-rimmed glasses, led the Shabbat service in one of those pleased-with-itself oratorical voices Ben remembered from his childhood. Jonathan sat waiting on the bema, dwarfed in a chair that made him look no older than eight. All of it just as expected. In a few minutes they’d open the ark and walk the Torah through the congregation, letting people reach out to touch it, then finally open it for Jonathan to read and then they’d all go to the Ambassador.
Fasanenstrasse. Otto hadn’t believed in any of it, only allowed them to go because it would have been impolite to refuse the invitations. Drehkopf s, he called the rabbis, head spinners. A hostility that Ben had never really understood until now. No room for two religions. But he would have been killed for either. As a Communist, Genia had said, not as a Jew. But that had only been a matter of time. Ben looked around- all these well-dressed lucky people, faintly bored, waiting to congratulate Sam and go to lunch. It could have been any of them, except they’d been here, out of the way. And Otto had stayed.
He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. It always came back to that. Why make Danny run the same risk? They knew what would happen if they were caught. What did happen, at least to Otto, denounced. And now his denouncer gone, connected somehow to Danny, the link he couldn’t understand but must be there. Could Otto really have believed in it that much, when he didn’t believe in anything else? Or did he know, somehow sense, that he’d left it too late, that he could only help save the others now, before he became one of the millions, no matter what he believed. Somebody Ben had seen standing on the platform and then never saw again.
On the bema Magnin had finished and the cantor got up and walked to the lectern. Another endless wail, Ben thought, another thing he’d hated about the services. He looked at Bunny, wondering how he was reacting, one of the few there for whom this wouldn’t even be a memory, the yarmulke just a prop of respect. Thinking about the studio maybe, or how Polly’s talk had gone with Liesl, a hundred things. How to protect Jack MacDonald.
The first note, high and clear, wavered in the air, dropped, then rose again, a call reaching out. Ben felt his head go up, as if the note were lifting it. A second phrase without a breath, lonely, the voice its own music, but so beautiful that it filled the great room, hushing it. It hung there for a minute, a pure abstraction, and then the imagination rushed in around it, adding color and suggestion as the music began to float, a haunting stream of notes. A few heads nodded, familiar with it, but Ben couldn’t move. A sadness so knowing that it felt like an actual fingertip on his heart. Not a wail, not even a lamentation, but an endless sorrow. He imagined it vibrating through thin air, over bleached rocks, stretches of dry waste, desert music, meant to carry long distances, across emptiness. Had it really been written there, a tribal heirloom, or much later in some Polish village, the desert by then more a story than a memory. There were notes in Gershwin like this, bent midway in a kind of ache. He didn’t know the words-it might have been a simple hymn of praise-but what he saw were figures wrapping a body in linen, laying it into a shallow ditch, rocks and sand. And the body, he knew, was Otto. The day, the temple, had triggered the memories, all the old questions. There hadn’t been a service for him. No details of the death itself, so that it seemed not to have really happened, the official letter a kind of missing persons report. But now here he was in the music, everything he’d denied being, the string that connected Ben to this room of survivors, not lessons but blood.
The music might have meant anything, but in the stillness of the room he saw that it now meant everyone who had gone. It was important to have a sense, Esther had thought. He noticed that Lasner had lowered his head, a tear running down his cheek, overwhelmed by some loss of his own. Or perhaps a sign of age, easily moved. Ben remembered him at the camp, actually sobbing. The first thing Ben had liked about him. Who was it now? The same vast number, a lost father? How long before a blood tie finally dissolved? Never. He was still Otto’s son, after everything. Danny even more so. Ben sat up. Even more so. Otto wasn’t someone he would ever deny, no matter how much his politics had changed. Otto had died for his. You didn’t honor the memory of that by feeding gossip to a Minot. He wouldn’t have done it. But there were the files.
Hal leaned toward his ear. “This is it,” he said softly. “The music. For the pan shot.”
For a moment Ben was confused, still lost in his own thoughts. He needed to think it through, about Otto, and Danny. But the music was moving on and he began to move with it, like a wind, out of the desert, across the steppes to a stretch of cold, flat land. He knew the shot Hal meant. Taken high, from on top of the cab of an Army truck, panning slowly, left to right, over the endless reach of the camp. And as he listened, he saw the finished film, the plain mournful sound passing over the miles of barracks, a perfect match, as if the writer of the song, from its first clear note, had known all along it would end this way.
When the cantor finished there was a stillness. Fay put her hand over Sol’s, bringing him back, the tear discreetly brushed away. Then another piece of music began, the ark was opened, and everything went on.
“You know what it’s called?” Hal whispered.
Ben shook his head and Hal made a note to himself, jotting something on the program.
“You think we could get him?” He nodded to the cantor.
Ben didn’t bother to answer. Did anyone ever say no? But the mood was broken, the haunting music of the dead now just sound to be scored, used. But isn’t that why they were making the film, for them?
“Make it the last shot,” he said. “Use it at the end.”
Jonathan read well, his young boy’s voice surprisingly clear and precise, pitched to his family in the first row. Esther looked side to side, pleased, but Sam kept his eyes on the bema, his face soft with unguarded affection. Around them people were nodding, one of them patting Sam on the arm. A few rows behind, Liesl was following with polite attention, her blond hair hanging back, grazing her shoulders. Another Mischling. Was the hair from Hans, the mother another dark Sara? She turned, meeting his gaze, then looked down, a smile forming at the corners of her mouth, and Ben realized she had misinterpreted. When she looked back again, just a moment between them, she was answering something else, not what had been in his mind at all, and he felt his face answer her, another layer. It could go on this way, he thought, one response building on the next, all begun with a mistake. Maybe that’s how we all talked, not knowing each other, a verbal house of cards.
They were seated at lunch with studio people, away from the family table down front. The Cocoanut Grove was usually lit softly to suggest evening, and the bright daylights now made the prop palms look slightly tawdry, like an island beach that unexpectedly turns out to be littered. The band had already been playing when they arrived and the floor beyond the Moorish arches had been kept clear for dancing, just a few extra tables laid along the side. Waiters had held out trays of drinks as they arrived.
“A little early in the day, don’t you think?” Dick Marshall said, taking one.
“Not for champagne,” Liesl said.
They were playing a couple, moving through the room together. Only a few people were actually sitting down. After they found their place cards, they circled the room, seeing everybody.
“How long is this going to last?” Rosemary said to Ben.
“You have to stay for the speeches. After that-”
“All day, then.”
They had reached the buffet table of canapes, elaborately laid out, with ice sculpture centerpieces.
“They sneaked the picture,” she said suddenly. “You were there.”
“The cards were good.”
“So why is Al so nervous. Level with me.”
“They liked it. They didn’t love it.”
She flinched a little, a jab to the stomach.
“They liked you. It wasn’t you.”
“And that’ll make a difference.”
“Nobody’s saying-”
“Nobody’s saying anything. That’s the trouble. You think I don’t know how to read the tea leaves?”
“You’re overreacting.”
“You think so?” She touched her forehead. “You know what that is, what they call it in the theater? Flop sweat. In a refrigerator like this. Do they always keep it so cold? It’s like a banana boat.”
“Coconuts,” he said, smiling, looking up at the trees, then back at her. “Don’t worry. It’s one sneak. Kids in Glendale.”
“You haven’t been here very long, have you? Don’t worry. How? You stop worrying, you’re dead.”
“I just meant-”
“I know what you meant. My option gets picked up in January. So we have to talk now, and all they’re thinking about is the kids in Glendale.”
“You’re the biggest star on the lot.”
“After Dick. And nobody’s hiring Ben Hecht to do rewrites for me.” She looked across the room to where Liesl was standing with Marshall.
“One week.”
“So, one week. They just shot ours. Every lousy line. For her, Hecht.” She stopped, lowering her head. “They’re rushing her picture. She’s all they’re thinking about now. Funny, isn’t it? That it’s her. After everything.”
The early cocktail hour went on, but the waiters had begun to put out the fruit cups so people slowly gravitated to the tables. It was then that the bandleader announced a special treat and introduced Julie Sherman. She was dressed modestly, a blue jersey with a big pin, but the dress was formfitting, clinging and folding, showing her off. Ben thought of her on the train, drawing eyes. But she’d done the voice-over in a day, professional, and the surprise now was that she was good, one of those performers who comes alive with music, warm and easy, comfortable with herself. They were doing “Let Me Off Uptown,” and while she wasn’t as throaty as Anita O’Day she had the same swinging assurance, fronting the band, too distinctive to be background. A few people turned to look as they made their way to the tables. Bunny, not expecting this, was watching her carefully, evaluating. The up tempo seemed designed to move people to their seats and the band kept it up with “Riding High,” the bright Porter lyrics an even better showcase for her voice.
“Do you believe this?” Lasner said, annoyed. He’d been coming back from the men’s room and stopped midway, next to Ben. “He has her at his kid’s Bar Mitzvah? A piece he’s banging? What the hell is he thinking? What’s Esther supposed to think?”
But Esther, oblivious, seemed happy, the entertainment just another benefit of being a studio wife.
“She knows?”
“It’s the idea of it. Where’s the sense? Anyway, who has a Bar Mitzvah in a nightclub?” He flung his arm to take in the room. “Downstairs in the temple. Some cakes, coffee, maybe lunch somewhere after. No, that’s not enough, he has to have a floor show. With her yet. It’s a question of respect. A nightclub.” He looked around the oasis room. “You know where they got the palms? The Sheik. Off the set. It was Valentino’s idea. Well, that was a while ago. Maybe they’re not the same ones anymore, who knows? Here he brings his kid. You know we go back. Sam, he was an extra, in the Gulch. Waiting around. I pick him one day and he tells me the picture’s a piece of shit. Oh yeah, so what would you do? And he tells me and you know what? He’s right. So I give him a shot. Fix it and we’ll do some business. That’s twenty-five, thirty years now. He never lost me a nickel, not once. Still, all this- You want to chase something, all right, but you don’t bring it home.”
There was applause as Julie finished, followed by a dinner gong, one of those handheld xylophones they used on ships.
“Let’s see where she goes,” Lasner said, his eyes following her off the stage. “She’s going to sit with the family? No, so at least he’s not that crazy. Look at Esther. She’s thanking her, like she’s the help.” He shook his head and turned to Ben. “Hal tells me you’re almost finished with the picture.”
“Almost.”
“So we should talk sometime. What you’re going to do next.”
“That’s up to the Army.”
“Don’t be a schmuck. I talked to Arnold. They’re doing the papers. Maybe a week, two.”
Ben nodded a thank-you.
“My only question is, are you tough enough for this business.”
“How tough do you have to be?”
Lasner smiled, pleased with this, then put a finger on Ben’s chest. “We’ll talk. There’s Fay. Go keep an eye on your sister. Dick’s all over her.”
“He’s supposed to be. That’s the idea. It builds her. For the picture.”
“Yeah, I know all about that. I still say, somebody tell Dick. He’s god’s gift-he likes to be reminded. Any chance he gets. I know. I’m the one had to pay off the paternity suit. So keep an eye.” He tapped Ben’s chest again. “I tell Bunny, these things get out of hand, you’ve got a mess to deal with, but he doesn’t listen. Like he knows. Dames always think it’s real. Besides she’s supposed to be fresh. Right off the boat. Not another chippie. Look at that.” He nodded to the table, where Dick had put his arm around Liesl.
“They’re talking to Polly. It’s for her.”
“Five bucks it’s for him, too.”
Ben joined them after Polly had gone, sitting between Liesl and Julie, Dick still drawing a blank as they were introduced again. Wine was served with lunch, but instead of feeling logy he was more alert than before, Lasner’s bet planted in his head now, watching Dick touch her, all the usual little moves, claiming territory. She smiled back at him, a public smile, but Ben suddenly saw them on pillows, talking lazily about nothing, smoking. He turned his head, cutting away from it. Julie, who’d been talking to Hal, turned at the same time.
“That was terrific before,” he said.
“You’re nice.”
“No, you were good. You should do a musical.”
“From your lips,” she said, laughing, rolling her eyes upward. “Mr. Pilcer’s trying to fix something.”
“At Continental?”
“I know, no musicals. But maybe a first time. If he can get Mr. Lasner to go for it.”
Ben looked at her, lips glistening, her pretty face still young, going places. Did she really believe this?
“But that’s probably not going to happen,” she said, sensible after all. “I mean, the studio’s not really set up for musicals. At Fox-I was there for about five minutes-they had a whole building, all these rooms with pianos. Arrangers. Voice coaches. You know, the whole thing. Maybe I should have done a party, like this. Sang for Zanuck. Anyway, now I’m here.”
“Where they don’t do musicals.”
“But here’s the thing-a loan-out? Mr. Pilcer knows people at Metro. He can get a test over to the Freed Unit. You never know. It could happen that way.” Her voice had got faster, a little breathy. “That would be my dream.” Said plainly, too important for irony.
Ben smiled at her, trying not to look dismayed. The hunger that moved everything here. Did Liesl feel it now, too? Pretending not to care, a European reserve, but there every day at dawn. Maybe, like Julie, doing whatever it took.
“I hope it works out,” he said blandly. What else did one say?
“Something will. Mr. Pilcer’s helped lots of people,” she said, looking at him directly, without embarrassment.
Sam and Esther had got up to dance, a signal to everyone else, and now Liesl and Dick followed, as much an attraction as Julie had been on the bandstand. Wardrobe had done a good job. Beneath the military padded shoulders her dress was soft and flowing, swaying against her long legs. Dick held her in the small of her back, just close enough to brush against her but far enough away to talk. About what? Evening after evening.
When Sam made a welcoming toast during the first course, Esther at his side, Ben glanced at Julie, curious to see her reaction, but her face gave nothing away, a polite guest. He looked around the rest of the table, imagining for a minute all the invisible ties between them, and it occurred to him that Julie might be the only one who knew exactly where she stood, not measuring love, somebody else’s real feelings, not even wondering. Mr. Pilcer helped people, a simple transaction. But was it ever? What did she feel when she saw him beaming with Jonathan and Esther? People came with strings attached. When you touched someone’s skin, you always touched something else.
He looked at Liesl, who was skittish, aware of him, aware of Dick, and he thought of that first night, how easy it had been, unplanned. Not calculated, not for a chance at a song, just because it happened. Dick was standing now and leading the woman on his right to the dance floor.
“Careful with that,” Al Shulman said, joking, apparently his wife.
“Back in one piece,” Dick said pleasantly.
“Stop staring at him,” Liesl said in a low voice, even though they were alone. “He’ll think you’re angry with him. Something.”
“Why would I be? When everybody’s so happy.”
“Do you think I’m enjoying this? I didn’t make up the tables.”
“Come and dance.”
“No.”
Kanon, Joseph
Stardust
“For old times’ sake.” He looked at her. “Otherwise Al Shulman’ll think he has to. Come on, before he gets up.”
On the dance floor, only half-crowded, he put his hand on her waist, then moved it slowly to her back, drawing her to him with the music. “Easy to Love.” She put her hand in his, making contact, their heads still far apart.
“I’ve never danced with you before,” she said.
“No,” he said, feeling her.
“We never did normal things.”
“Like what?”
“Go dancing. Meet in a cafe. Well, that was all before the war.” She looked up at him. “I wonder. If it had been you. In France. If I’d met you. How different everything would have been.”
They moved together, easier, his hand resting higher now on her back. She came nearer, lowering her head. He touched the back of her neck, just one finger, stroking it gently.
“Can anyone see?” she said, shivering a little.
“No.”
“Don’t,” she said, pulling away a little. “Like dancing class.” She looked at him. “Schicklich.”
Another minute, just moving.
“What do I say to you? I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything. We already did that.”
“And now what? My father was asking about you. Why he never sees you anymore.”
“What did you tell him?”
She shrugged. “You’re busy. Both of us. Anyway, he’ll see you tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“At the Observatory. With Dieter. You forgot it’s tonight? But you’re coming, yes? He planned it for you.”
“All of us?”
“Yes, all. You want me to stay home? What would I say? That it’s awkward now? Just to be in the same room. We have to learn how to do this.” She looked away. “What a mess we’ve made for ourselves. If we’d never started this.”
“But we did,” he said. “Why did we?” Not really a question, then looking at her, wanting to know. “Why did you?”
The words hung there for a second, waiting, and he saw something change in her eyes, a flicker of hesitation, then a softening, familiar, the way they’d known each other before.
“Because I wanted to,” she said, her voice low, like a hook, drawing him closer. “And you. We wanted to.”
He drew a breath, remembering the dress slipping off her shoulders, his mouth on her back, excited, both of them wanting it. He felt his lower body now against hers. The same. Not the same. But still drawn in.
He leaned forward, whispering. “Come with me. Now. Just come.”
She pulled her head back. “Are you crazy?” she said, barely audible. “We can’t.” A little breathless, panicky, everything happening on the dance floor, people around them.
“Just for a minute. Come outside.”
“How can-?”
“Go to the ladies’ room. Take the door out to the courts. Just for a minute.”
Her eyes were shining, excited now too, catching his eagerness, stealing just a minute.
“Now. I’ll tell him. A minute.”
“My purse. I can’t go to the ladies’ without my purse.” Complicit.
She drew him by the hand, hurrying to the table before the others, picking up her bag.
“The door out to the courts. Down the hall,” he said, but she had already gone, both of them caught up in a rush, not caring, as if they were throwing off clothes.
Dick returned with Mrs. Shulman.
“Liesl’s gone to the ladies’,” Ben said casually. “Can I bring you something from the bar?”
When Dick said no, Ben started across. You always ran into somebody at the bar, it was bound to take a while to pick up a drink. Minutes, longer. He disappeared behind the crowd and out of the Grove.
The Ambassador had courts and a pool behind the main wing, country club grounds. As he went through the side door he saw, in a blink, the studio cars grouped near the driveway, their drivers smoking in the shade, prepared to wait all day, like coachmen in a period picture, but then he saw her waiting for him, there first, and he took her arm without thinking, pressing her against the wall, and kissed her, his mouth already open.
“We can’t. Not here,” she said.
Without leaving her mouth, he moved her away against the adjoining wall behind a tree.
“Jonathan has to light candles,” he said into her neck, moving back to another kiss. “Name all the relatives.” His mouth on hers again. “It’ll take hours.”
“How do you know?”
“It always does. Ssh.” An open kiss now, no time for talking, excited by the wet, by knowing she was here, wanting to. He leaned closer, pressing against her breasts.
“Oh,” she said, finally breaking the kiss, gulping air. “I hate this.”
“No you don’t,” he said, sure now, nuzzling her, feeling her respond.
“Not this,” she said, moving her neck with him.
“What?”
She pulled her head back, breathing hard. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I used to know what I was doing. Now I-” She looked down. “One minute-now look at us. I’m not like this.”
“Everybody’s like this.”
“I don’t mean that. I don’t know myself anymore. I used to know-” She broke off. “But I was wrong, wasn’t I? All those years, I thought I knew and it wasn’t true.”
He leaned forward again, but she put her hand up.
“No, we have to go back.” She took a breath, calming herself, then smiled. “Tonight. Come tonight.”
“Too many people,” he said, his face close.
She moved her hand up to his cheek. “Not after. When they go to bed,” she said. “Not then. It’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“If you do.”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said, then looked down. “Another mess. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I want to do it anyway.” She brought up her purse and took out a handkerchief, reaching over and wiping lipstick from the corner of his mouth, then stopped, looking at him for a minute.
The door slammed open. They both turned, Ben shielding her. Bunny. Her eyes widened, her fingers clutching him. But Bunny was preoccupied, never glancing to the side, heading straight for the studio cars.
“He didn’t see,” Ben whispered. “Just stay still. What do you think happened? He’s running.”
“I don’t care. If he looks-”
“He’ll just see the tree. Why come out this way?”
Bunny summoned one of the drivers with his fingers, then jumped into the backseat.
“It’s early to leave,” Ben said as the car began to start down the driveway. He turned to Liesl. “Make some excuse for me. I’ll be back later.”
“What excuse?”
“Don’t say anything then. They’ll think I got lucky at the bar.” He touched her shoulder. “Later.”
“But where-?”
He ran out from behind the trees and darted into the lot, looking down the driveway to see which way Bunny turned on Wilshire, then raced back to his car, taking his keys out as he ran. It took two blocks before he got Bunny’s car in sight, hemmed in by Saturday traffic headed for the department stores. Maybe he was going back to the studio, a minor crisis to settle, but they passed all the logical turnoffs for Continental and after a turn on Sunset, Ben knew they must be heading for Bunny’s apartment on Ivar. Maybe he’d just had enough and decided to go home.
Ben parked at the bottom of the block as Bunny got out, thanked the driver, and headed down into the basement garage. Why change cars? A Continental driver would take Bunny anywhere he wanted to go. Ben waited for a few minutes, watching the street, empty and sunny. Then Bunny’s car appeared up out of the driveway and turned back toward Sunset. Ben ducked. When he sat up again Bunny’s car was already at the next corner.
The first blocks on Ivar were tricky because there were no other cars, but on Sunset Ben managed to put a few between them, staying far enough back to avoid being seen. Still heading west, past Highland and Hollywood High, commercial blocks of drive-ins and offices with blinds. Ben anticipated a turning somewhere, but Bunny stayed on Sunset, past Fairfax and then through the Strip, where Dick Marshall took Liesl dancing. I don’t know what I’m doing. But she wanted him to come. And how would he explain this, tracking Bunny? But he wouldn’t have just left in the middle of lunch. Sam would notice.
There was a close moment in Beverly Hills, at the light before the hotel, when the car ahead turned and Ben found himself just behind. He pulled down the sun visor so that Bunny would only see the bottom of his face, then waited until someone had cut in before following again. The streets were quieter here and they picked up some time, Bunny actually running one of the lights. Still heading west, past UCLA, then down the hill past the Bel-Air gates. This endless city- where was he going? In a while they’d be in the Palisades. One of the emigres’ houses, on the steep slopes of the canyon? Why not Paseo Miramar? They were through the village now. If he didn’t turn soon, they’d be at the ocean. Ben imagined him making the hard right and climbing the cliff, past Feuchtwanger’s, past the lonely turn where Genia’s car had gone straight. Did MacDonald live up there, one of the neighbors Lion hadn’t met? He slowed a little, ready to make the turn.
But Bunny didn’t stop, sailing past Paseo Miramar, all the way to the Pacific, and turning north on the coast highway, the sun flashing off the flat blue water. Ben kept following, confused now. They had reached the end, joining the steady stream of traffic going out of town. Ventura? Who lived this far away, where Bunny didn’t want to take a studio car? Ben checked his gas gauge-they could be going anywhere. Then suddenly Bunny’s turning signal started flashing, just before a narrow opening in the cliffs. Not a major road, not even signposted. Ben slowed, watching Bunny turn, but then drove past. Impossible to miss a car behind you on that road. He continued until a break in the traffic let him pull left in a U-turn and double back to Bunny’s road.
What if it were a private driveway, Bunny’s car already invisible in a garage? At first there seemed to be no houses at all, just tall, wild grass. The road switched back as it climbed, the guard rail just like the one Genia had crashed through. A first house, with two cars in front, neither of them Bunny’s, then a modern, glass-fronted house, looking empty. Ben climbed again, another switchback, and the land leveled out, a straight stretch and then a clump of trees and a huge building, stucco with balconies, one of the big Mediterranean beach houses they’d built in the twenties, this one stuck on top of the hill for the views. In the white gravel forecourt there was a half circle of parked cars, Bunny’s at the end. Ben hesitated for a second, not sure what to do next, then pulled in beside it. The checks came to the studio. He had to be somewhere.
Ben got out and looked around. Why so many cars? But he remembered Iris’s car at the house, a city where even maids drove. The morning fog had burned off and there was a breeze. He walked around to the side. The back of the house faced the water, with balconies large enough for outdoor furniture, a chaise to lie on in the salt air. Walking trails had been cut into the bluff. He went back to the forecourt. Someone was coming out, a girl with a sweater over a white blouse-no, over a white uniform, with white shoes.
“The desk is just inside. If you’re looking for somebody,” she said, helping.
He nodded a thank-you and watched her get into her car. Not a private house, but not really a hospital, either, not up this secondary road. He was still standing there, thinking, when Bunny came out and lit a cigarette. He saw Ben and froze, neither of them moving, then hurried over, throwing the cigarette away.
“What are you doing here?” he said, his voice almost a growl. “Are you following me?”
“You said you hadn’t seen him in years, but you get his checks. He lived at the Cherokee. So did Danny. I have a right to know.”
“A right.”
“Is he here?”
“What do you want?”
“Was he there that night? Is that what you were really trying to fix?”
He looked at Ben, his eyes flashing, moving from fury to contempt, his whole body tense, unsettled. And then he quieted, a giving way, and Ben noticed what he’d missed before, the pale skin, the eyes close to brimming, face haunted, like someone after an accident.
“You want to see Jack, is that it?”
“What is this place?”
“It’s where he lives now. Come and see,” he said, turning, his voice sharp.
Ben grabbed his arm, stopping him. “Just tell me one thing. Was he there that night?”
“Take your hand off me,” Bunny said, a stage line, haughty, then he switched, unexpectedly breezy, almost malicious. “Come and see.”
Inside there were more people in white coats, attendants in loose pajama-like uniforms.
“Is this a hospital?”
“It’s a private facility. For people who can’t manage on their own.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s been coming along nicely,” Bunny said, Laraine Day for a second. “But today we’ve had a little setback, I’m afraid. Still, since you’ve come all this way.”
A man holding a clipboard looked up, concerned, but Bunny made a little hand motion that seemed to vouch for Ben. They walked down a hall of polished Mexican tile.
“He’ll be sleeping. So just a look today. I suppose you wanted to talk, have a heart-to-heart about the brother, but that’ll have to wait.”
“Is something wrong. I’m not trying to-”
Bunny turned. “What are you trying to do? Just in here.”
He opened the door to a large bright room facing the sea, what must have been the master bedroom in the old house. It was not a hospital room. There were reading chairs and tables with books and magazines, a small dining area, an ordinary bed, but Ben noticed a pull cord next to a nightstand covered with pill boxes and medicines. MacDonald was lying half propped up, his face away from the light pouring in from the terrace. His bare shoulders and the top of his chest were visible over the sheet, but one of the shoulders ended in a stump, the arm gone. The other arm was lying out on the sheet, the wrist wrapped in a white bandage.
“This is Jack,” Bunny said.
“What happened?” Ben said, almost a whisper.
“He can’t hear,” Bunny said, a normal voice. “They gave him something earlier.” He looked down at the bandage. “He gets sad sometimes. Oh, you mean the arm. A grenade. They took it off over there-New Guinea. God knows what the place must have been like. Probably some tent. Butchers. Next. Anyway, not Cedars, but maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. It was shattered. You knew he was a pianist?”
“At Universal,” Ben said quietly. “An arranger.”
“Helpful, aren’t they, those files? Not just an arranger. A pianist.” He was looking down at him now. “The lightest touch. Chopin, especially. Like night sounds. He was very gifted.” He touched the sleeping man’s hair. “Of course, there’s nothing we can do about the hand now. He can use that to get around,” he said, nodding to a corner where a prosthetic arm rested on an end table, “but not for the piano. The face, though-there’s a surgeon at UCLA who’s been doing wonders with grafts, so we might get that back.” Ben now saw that the side of his face away from the window was a blotch, what must be a burn scar from the same explosion. “He was so good-looking.” He brushed the hair back again, a sleeping child.
“I’m sorry.”
Bunny took his hand away. “Yes. But there’s no bottom to sorry, is there? Down and down. So one of us has to keep things going. It’s just-I wish he didn’t get so sad sometimes.”
There was a knock on the door, then a white coat halfway through.
“Mr. Jenkins? Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, noticing Ben.
“No, it’s all right. Please. Dr. Owen. You wanted to see me.”
“It’s just that-” He glanced again at Ben, uneasy. “It’s just, we can’t take the responsibility.”
“I’ll take the responsibility.”
“We can’t be with him all the time.”
“I know. And accidents will happen.” He looked at the doctor. “But not again. I’ll talk to him. He has to be more careful, that’s all.”
“But Mr. Jenkins, we can’t-” He looked to the terrace. “We can’t be building fences on the balconies. We’re not a-”
“I’ll talk to him,” Bunny said firmly. “All these medicines, you have to be extra careful. So disorienting. But thank you for everything,” he said, coming over, as if he were seeing someone out after a party. “The stitches. It seemed like a nasty cut.”
“Yes, nasty. Mr. Jenkins-”
“He may need a little extra help at meals for a while. You know, with both arms not really- There won’t be any problem with that, will there?”
The doctor faced him down, a moment, then looked away. “No, there shouldn’t be a problem. Mr. Jenkins-”
“I’ll talk to him. I know this will be a warning to him. To be more careful.”
“Yes, a warning,” the doctor said, a last shot, then nodded to Ben and left.
“I’m sorry,” Ben said.
“So you said. So everybody says. Well, they would if they knew. But no one does, except you. The Grand Inquisitor. So let me ask you something. What would you do? Leave him to rot in that Veterans Hospital, everyone walking around on crutches, missing this, missing that, bedpans and people leaking-imagine living there, all the time, looking at who you are, all those people like you. Sad? You might as well-” He stopped and reached into his pocket for a cigarette.
“Is that allowed?”
“Darling, I don’t give a shit. It’s my nickel. Nickel. Thousands. And not even a fucking ashtray. All right, let’s go out there. Better for him, anyway. And no doubt you’ll want to chat, now that you’re here. About that wonderful brother of yours.” He looked at the bed. “Sometimes I think they can hear when they’re under. They come to looking like they know everything.” They were moving out onto the balcony. “Or maybe he’ll look surprised. That he’s here. Until the next time. They’re right, you know. They shouldn’t have to worry about this- give the place a bad name. He’s right about these, too,” he said, touching the balcony wall. “Why not just slip right over? Quite a drop. No, he had to do it that way, all messy and- So maybe he didn’t really mean it. Not finally, anyway. If you really mean it, why not jump? Easier. Yours did.”
“Danny didn’t jump.”
“No, he tripped,” he said, sarcastic, then looked up. “Oh, Jack gave him a push, is that it? With his good arm, no doubt. Really, even you-”
“He lived there. At the Cherokee.”
“For a while. I thought it would be better for him. But he kept running into people.”
“Danny, you mean.”
“Mm. Old comrades. I wasn’t having that.”
“Tell me. Please.”
Bunny looked over at him, then put out the cigarette on the rail.
“You put him there?” Ben said.
“I had to get him out of the hospital. I couldn’t face it. All those boys, trying to come back. Clomping around. They’d fall sometimes and they’d have to wait for someone to pick them up. You could see it in their faces, what it did to them. It was making him worse, being there. So I hired somebody to be with him. Found a place.”
“Why didn’t you bring him home?”
“Home. Where have you been living?” He caught himself and looked away, toward the Pacific. “You don’t know how it is, do you? That really wouldn’t have been on. Sharing. There’s a certain standard you have to keep up here. Not startle the horses. Unless you’re a set dresser, something like that.” He turned to Ben. “And I’m not. So I found him a place. One of the contract players used to live there-”
“Who?” Ben said, thinking of the lists he’d gone through.
“Does it matter? The boy who played the gunner on Dick Marshall’s bombing raid. Dick Marshall,” he said, partly to himself. “That’s the war we gave them. Not the one in there. Well, why not? Dick killing Japs-you’d pay to see that. Who’d pay to see this?” He took a breath. “ Any way, he was at the Cherokee for a while, and I knew about the phone there. That was essential, having the phone, but still private, not the Roosevelt or something, so I moved him in, with Robert to look after him. And I think he liked it. So much better than the hospital. Like being on your own, in a way. That was before the leg got better, so he was still in a wheelchair, but even so. Not as-sad.”
“And Danny was there?”
“No. That was all an accident-a meet cute. Robert was wheeling him, doing errands, I suppose, just getting out, and your brother waswell, I don’t know what he was doing, actually. Make something uplunch at Musso’s. Who knows? Who cares. Anyway, on the street and wouldn’t you know? Long-lost Jack, it’s been years, what happened to you-like that. Robert probably thought they were old Army buddies, not comrades. Anyway, it cheered Jack up, seeing somebody from the old days, so come back and have a drink. And they did. A lot to catch up on.”
“So that’s how Danny knew about the Cherokee.”
Bunny shrugged. “I must say, it never would have occurred to me to use it for- But I didn’t have his imagination.”
“You saw him there?”
“No. I never knew he took a place there until Dennis called. I guess he liked the look of it. All the possibilities. But he saw Jack there. The second time I thought, that’s it, I’m getting him out of here. The reunion’s over. Anyway, Robert really wasn’t enough. He couldn’t be with him all the time. Jack needed somewhere like this. Where they can watch him.” He glanced again into the bedroom.
“Why didn’t you want him to see Danny? I mean, if they knew each other.”
“Well, it’s how, isn’t it? I knew what your brother was doing. I’ve done Minot a favor or two myself. But not like that. Jack left that life a long time ago-well, the war left it for him. It was only his good nature, you know. Always for the underdog. But try to tell anybody that now. He’s been through a lot. He doesn’t need to go through anything more. Not one more thing.”
“You think Danny was going to give him to Minot? A crippled war hero? What for?”
“To see who else he remembers, from those Fuller Brush parties they used to have. Very sinister characters they were. How can we help Paul Robeson? Christ.” He looked up. “His arm’s gone, but his memory’s there. No, thank you.”
“He has a Silver Star.”
Bunny raised his eyebrows, a question.
“Army records,” Ben said.
Bunny said nothing for a second, taking this in. “I always underestimate you.”
“They’re not going to go after somebody with a Silver Star. How would that make them look?”
“They don’t have to play to the gallery. Nobody sees friendly witnesses in closed sessions. I’m not putting him through that, either. I’m not.”
“But Danny didn’t do that-I’ve seen the files. He wouldn’t have.”
“Touching, your faith in him. He was an informer. You don’t want to face that, don’t. I had to. I had someone else to think about. One time, how’ve you been? Fine. Two, he’s after something. So I moved him.”
“What would Danny have said? We went to a meeting five years ago-bring him in? They’re after more than that. Headlines.”
“And they’ll get them. But not here. Not from me. And not from you, either,” he said, leveling his gaze. “Not here.”
“You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Then what are you doing, running errands for Dennis?”
“I’m trying to find out what Danny was doing, that’s all. So I’m friendly. Just like you. To get something.”
“And what was your brother trying to get?”
Ben said nothing, his own question come back at him. He leaned against the rail.
“You’re wrong about him, though,” he said quietly. “He never gave MacDonald away, where he was, even if he’s alive. There’s nothing there. I checked.”
“You forget-he stopped reporting.”
“He wouldn’t have.”
Bunny looked at him, then let it go, taking out another cigarette instead and sitting on the chaise.
“Do you know how it works?” he said, not angry, a resigned patience. “Ever been to the zoo? Watch them feed? The big cats, animals like that? Give them a piece of meat, then another. It only stops when you stop feeding them. The cats just keep eating. You think they can’t be hungry anymore, but they’ll still take the meat. It’s what they do. No matter how much you give them, it’s never enough. You think you know these people? I knew Tenney. That same hunger-I don’t know where it comes from-he could never get enough. But a crackpot. You didn’t have to take all that carrying-on seriously. Look good in Sacramento and he’s satisfied. But Minot’s not a crackpot. You stick your hand through the bars, he’d take it with the meat. Get out of this before it turns on you. Once you’re part of it, you’re expected to supply. Just to prove you’re with them. So you throw them anything. Maybe even Jack. To stay in. Your brother would have done it. But now Jack’s safe. Except from you.”
“I told you, you don’t have to worry about that.”
“I just want to be clear. How unwise that would be. Oh, I know, little Brian, not very scary. But you know who is? Somebody with nothing to lose. And I’m going to lose. Everything I want. I know it.” He looked back to the bedroom. “One of these times it’s going to work. So all I can do is hold on till it does.” He looked back at Ben. “You were never here.”
Ben held his stare. “That’s right.”
Bunny nodded, then drew on the cigarette. “But you were, weren’t you? So now you’re part of it. My confidante. So what do I do? Tell me. I don’t know anymore. He’s going to do it again. I don’t know what to do.”
“Give him time. Even here,” he said, holding his hand to the view. “It takes time.”
“Darling, time. Does it get any hoarier? I suppose I deserve that. Wallowing like this.” He sat up. “Mustn’t grumble. As they used to say in the Blitz. My mother was like that. Mustn’t grumble. Mustn’t grumble.” He covered his eyes with his hand. “Why the fuck not? That’s what I’d like to know.” He paused. “What if it works next time? You’d think I’d be enough. Even with all the rest. You’d think it would be enough-not to want to, for me. But it isn’t.”
Ben was quiet for a minute, then moved away from the railing. “I’d better go.”
“Am I embarrassing you? Or just me,” Bunny said, moving his hands over his cheeks, a quick-change. “What do I say when he wakes up? The last time-”
“Last Monday,” Ben said, trying it.
Bunny’s head jerked up. “How do you know that? Why would you?”
“You left the studio in a hurry. You never leave early. I figured-just now, I mean.”
Bunny stood up, a willed change of mood. “My every move. I didn’t realize I was so fascinating. I still don’t know why. What do you want, exactly? Coming here.”
“Just following a name. I didn’t know.” He looked toward the bed.
“What, all this because he knew your brother?”
“I think somebody tried to stop Danny before he could-”
“Rat on them? I don’t blame him. I’d do it myself.” He raised an eyebrow. “Or did you think that I did? Ben,” he said, drawing the word out. “Well, sorry to disappoint. Dennis called me. At home. I may have picked up a phone from time to time, but my activities don’t extend to-oh, never mind. Think what you like. You might scratch Jack’s name off the list, though, don’t you think? He really wouldn’t have been up to it. Anyway, he was here. Ask anybody.” He waved his hand to the house.
“I had to be sure, that’s all.”
“Well, now you are. So fuck off.” He looked down. “Sorry. Not very nice, was it? What a hard case I have become,” he said, giving it a hint of a Southern accent. “You get that way when you stop telling yourself stories. You can’t change things. No matter how many stories. I remember standing in front of the mirror, looking at my hair go, just crying and crying because I knew everything was coming to an end, and my face just stared right back at me. There it was. Like it or not.” He turned away. “Like it or not.”
From the bed there was a soft rustling, Jack’s head moving slowly, still asleep. Bunny went over and watched for a second. The side of Jack’s face with the purple splotch was more visible now. He made a sound without opening his eyes, some fragment line in a dream. Bunny touched his forehead. “Ssh,” he said, calming him. Ben stood in the room, not moving, afraid any sound would wake him, watching Bunny’s hand stroking Jack’s hair. When he finally turned, satisfied Jack was still asleep, his eyes were squinting, in pain.
“Oh, go ahead and look,” he said, then glanced back at the bed. “He was a hero, did you know? A real war hero. He saved someone’s life. From that grenade. Just-not his. Well,” he said, raising his head. “Mustn’t grumble.” Then he looked at Ben, his eyes brimming. “Do you know what it’s like? When you feel everything slipping away?” He held out his hand, as if it were actually happening. “Like water, right through your fingers.”
There was no point going back to the Ambassador so he drove to the Cherokee to change and throw a sweater in an overnight bag. Weather was vertical here: Mt. Wilson would be chilly at night. First tea, an excuse to see the campus in Pasadena, and then by convoy up the mountain. An evening with the emigres, the last thing he wanted, his head filled now with Bunny and Danny and the unknowability of people.
He parked in back and was about to take the stairs when he remembered the key and went to the front desk instead.
“You have a mail key for me yet?”
“You 5C?” A new clerk, the staff as transient as the guests. He reached under the desk and handed Ben an envelope. “There’s a charge.”
“Put it on the bill.”
“Can’t.”
Ben, exasperated, put a few dollars on the counter and went over to the mailboxes, opening his. For a second he just stared. Empty. But there’d been something there, a flyer for Current Resident, something. The mailman wouldn’t have arbitrarily cleaned out the box.
“Mail’s late today,” the clerk said, helpful. “Should be here soon.”
“But I thought-” He closed the box. No white paper visible through the holes. But there had been.
Upstairs, he packed his small bag, then looked at the key again. If the box had been opened, then someone else must have one. From Danny. He noticed the script on the night stand. Bits of business about post office boxes, something that had been on his mind. Ben glanced at his watch again. Think about it in the car.
When he got to the lobby, he saw the mailman filling the tilted wall of boxes.
“Anything for 5C?” he asked.
The mailman flipped through the stack in his hand. “John Collins, that you?”
Ben held up his key, an ID tag, and took the envelope, staring at it. John Collins, what Danny had called himself here. He went out the back, threw his bag into the car and stood there, holding the letter. John Collins. A name for hotel registers, hiding out. Who knew him as John Collins? A San Francisco postmark. He opened it carefully, as if he were prying. But wasn’t he John Collins now?
Not a letter. A sheet with a list of names, grouped, not boxed like an organizational chart but arranged in clusters, some kind of order. He looked down the list. No one he recognized from the Continental list. Men, not starlets. But a list Danny evidently had wanted. Ben studied the names again, wondering whether any of them were already in Minot’s files or whether they were new. More names to feed him. At the bottom of the list there was a group of numbers, also arranged by some unknown scheme. Army serial numbers? He counted one off against his own-no, wrong number of digits. Some other number then, maybe file references. Sent by some friend in San Francisco.
He looked at the building, half-expecting to see people watching him. Why would Danny get mail here? Where he’d brought his women. Except he hadn’t. Stained sheets in the afternoon-but the maid hadn’t seen any. Rented months before Rosemary. Then used once. But why drive up to Santa Barbara when you had a secret place in town? Ben looked at the list again, then folded it and put the envelope in his pocket. Unless it hadn’t been used for that. No personal items in the bath, no toiletries or leftover boxes of powder. Maybe the point all along had been the mail, not girls. Ben saw him walking Jack MacDonald home, taking in the barely supervised lobby, the anonymous rooms upstairs. Ideal for sex, what everyone would think. Not noticing the boxes. But letters from whom? Not whoever had killed him-he’d have stopped sending them. Someone still unaware that Danny was gone.
Ben looked at the time. Minot’s office would be closed Saturdayshe’d need Riordan to let him in. And he was already running late. Anyway, why suppose the names were already in the files? Danny’s new list. Maybe with the one who’d thought he’d acted in time, before his name was in the mail.
He headed east on Hollywood Boulevard, storefronts slipping by in a blur. There had been a flyer in the box. So someone had opened it recently, maybe looking for the envelope now in his pocket. How long would he wait? And why set it up this way? Why not pass a list in a bar? Call from a pay phone. Unless the source couldn’t be too careful.
He cut down through Silver Lake then crossed the river and followed the winding road through the Arroyo Seco. The old commuter route from downtown, businessmen in starched collars driving home to their Midwestern houses and flowering gardens, what the city had been like before the movies came. Turn-of-the-century lampposts and rows of trees, the streets empty in the yellow afternoon light. He’d expected Cal Tech to be utilitarian, but the look was residential, cloistered quadrangles, the buildings larger versions of the houses down the street. The faculty lounge was even more traditional, dark wood paneling and oil portraits. Dieter was already pouring tea for Liesl and her father. To Ben’s surprise, Kaltenbach rounded out the table.
“I didn’t realize you were coming,” he said.
“Yes, maybe a last chance,” Kaltenbach said in German. “To see heaven.”
“English here, Heinrich,” Dieter said and Ben saw that the purpose of the party had been to show off the lounge, Dieter’s assimilated life.
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
“What happened?” Liesl said, not looking at him directly. “You left so suddenly.” Sprinting across a parking lot.
“I had to see someone in the hospital.”
“The hospital?”
“It’s all right. Just a long drive.”
“Everywhere is far here,” Kaltenbach said.
“A mission of mercy,” Dieter said. “So now you’re here. Some tea?”
Liesl looked over at Ben, curious, but caught his signal to wait. They talked idly for a few minutes, Dieter at one point introducing them to a passing colleague. Ostermann, a folded newspaper near his place, seemed preoccupied. Around the room men sat talking quietly or reading papers, formal in jackets and ties, all moving slowly, like people under water.
“Did you see any of the campus as you came in?” Dieter said to Ben.
“Just a glimpse.”
“The grounds are handsome. Of course everything grows so well here. In Europe-you remember the university? Tram lines outside the door.”
“Another reason to prefer it here,” Ostermann said deadpan, teasing him.
“You admit, it’s more pleasant.” He turned to Ben. “You’re still anxious about him? Your friend?”
“No,” Ben said. Did he look nervous? The rest of the room seemed to be moving at a different rhythm, almost placid. “But is there a phone? If I could call-”
“Downstairs,” Dieter said. “Near the toilets. You have nickels?”
Ben hesitated for a second, as if he hadn’t heard, then nodded. Of course they’d be pay phones. Not Chasen’s, phones plugged in at the tables. He was back in the real world, where no one cared about the Crosby grosses or who was being fed to Minot. Or who hadn’t been. One name. He stood up, the envelope almost pounding in his pocket.
“Right back,” he said, hurrying to the stairs.
Riordan might recognize someone, just hearing the name. The top group, Ben guessed, was the most important. But Riordan wasn’t home. Ben hung up the receiver. How did you find people? Phone books. He took out the list, reading the top names to himself, then started leafing through the flimsy pages. Not in Los Angeles. But why give them to Danny, to Minot, if they weren’t local? San Francisco. He picked up the receiver again and asked for long distance information. The top two names, just to check. It took a few minutes. But they weren’t in San Francisco, either.
“He’s all right, I hope?” Dieter, on his way to the men’s room.
“Yes,” Ben said, startled, sticking the letter back in his pocket. “Fine.”
“We should leave soon. After the light goes, the road-”
“Meet you upstairs,” Ben said, already moving.
Why not just rent a post office box if all you wanted was mail? Wouldn’t it have been safe there? But in the script the partners get the police to search the boxes. A court order. Ostermann said his mail was read. Not at his front door, intercepted at the post office, one branch helping another. Maybe something the FBI did all the time, a consulting tip from Dennis. But who had sent the letter? Danny hadn’t just filed reports from scraps of memory. There’d been a source, someone who might be traced. He thought of the paper in his pocket, any fingerprints now smudged by his own. But the police had ways of finding things, paper and postmarks and typewriter strokes, clues invisible to anyone else. Riordan’s friends could tell him. A rush job, a small favor for Congressman Minot.
Upstairs they had gathered near the door.
“You can imagine my relief when it came,” Kaltenbach was saying in German.
“Yes, but will you use it?” Ostermann said.
“Heinrich, I told you, English here,” Dieter said, joining them.
“Yes, no German,” Ostermann said. He held out the paper. “What would people think?”
Ben looked at the news picture-the first group of defendants at Nuremberg, sitting erect in uniforms and proper suits.
“Don’t be foolish,” Dieter said. “It’s nothing to do with us.”
“Do they know that?” Ostermann said, nodding to the room. “It’s the language of criminals now, our German.”
“Criminals. Who, everybody? Are we supposed to be guilty, too? I don’t feel that. Do you?”
“No, not guilt.” He glanced down at the newspaper. “Shame.”
“Ach. A literary position.” Dieter arched his eyebrows at Liesl, a what-do-you-expect gesture. “All right, Ben, you take the criminals. Speak all the German you like, nobody will hear. Liesl, darling, come with me.” He held up a finger. “English only.”
She smiled and put her arm through his. “My car. You still drive in German.”
Before Ben could say anything, they had paired off, Dieter leading everyone to the lot.
“All-American,” Ostermann said wryly, watching him. “So he doesn’t feel German anymore. Just like that. When does that happen? Take an oath and-”
“Any news on your citizenship papers?”
“Not yet. But my lawyer says it’s a question of time only. I have ‘good moral character,’ ” he said, amused. “How dull I must be.”
“You?” Heinrich said. “‘The most provocative writer today.’ They used to say that, all the critics.”
“Well, now just dull,” Ostermann said, smiling. “You heard the good news?” he said to Ben. “Heinrich’s passport came.”
“An American passport?” Ben said, confused.
“With my moral character?” Kaltenbach laughed. “No, Czech. You know, before the war they would help us, a passport of convenience, so we could leave. And then, no Czechoslovakia. So after the war it was a question, would the new government honor the old passports? Give us new ones. And, yes! So it came, from the consulate.”
“But do you want to be Czech? I thought-”
“I must be something. To travel. You can’t, without a passport. So now I can go anywhere. Not like a prisoner. It’s a wonderful thing.”
They had reached the parking lot, Liesl fiddling with her keys.
Dieter looked at Ben’s car. “Daniel’s,” he said, then looked up. “Yes, of course, I forgot. You’re at the house.”
“Not anymore. Now it’s on Lend-Lease.”
“You’ve moved? I didn’t know.”
“Hm. To the Cherokee.”
“You’re living there?”
“It’s convenient. To the studio.”
“Yes, but-” He stopped, slightly flustered. “You don’t mind that-”
“He never really lived there,” Ben said. “It’s just a room.”
Dieter looked at him, not sure how to respond, then at Liesl to see her reaction. “Well, that’s right,” he said finally, uncomfortable. “Just a room.”
“Ready?” Liesl said.
“Would you show me on the map?” Ben said. “Just in case.”
“Yes, all right. It’s very direct.” She brought a map over to him and opened it.
“This isn’t going to be so easy,” he said to her out of earshot of the others. “Tonight.”
“No. Maybe not. Was that true, about the hospital?”
Ben nodded. “He was visiting someone. It was nothing,” he said, suddenly protective. “But I need to ask you something. The mail key for the Cherokee. You never found it in Danny’s things?”
“Again? You asked me that before. No. Look for yourself. Why is it so important? Get them to give you another one.”
“I want to know where his is.”
“Maybe he never had one. Why would he? ‘He never really lived there,’ ” she said, quoting, then looked down. “Just sometimes.”
“I don’t think he used the place for that.”
“What, then? To write scripts?” She folded the map. “Why are we talking about this? Always Daniel. Right here,” she said, motioning with her hand to the space between them. She stopped and exhaled, collecting herself. “They’re waiting. Now Dieter will want to know. Why you didn’t stay. Family should stay. What do I tell him?”
“That I couldn’t keep my hands off you.”
“A nice conversation for an uncle.” She paused. “The key. What does it mean?”
“If you don’t have it, someone else does.”
“Yes?”
“So how did he get it?”
They drove through the suburbs in the foothills and then started the steep climb on the Angeles Crest Highway, a two-lane road that twisted high into the San Gabriels, the low grassy hills giving way to dry chaparral, clumps of sage and prickly pear cactus and dwarf oaks.
“Like a Western,” Ostermann said, gazing out the window.
“ Ja, a stagecoach,” Kaltenbach said from the backseat. “It’s an agony back here. I feel sick.”
“Look straight ahead, not out the side.”
“All these twists and turns,” Heinrich said as they cut sharply into another hairpin curve. “Look at Liesl, she can’t slow down?” Ahead of them, Liesl’s car kept darting out of sight. “And look how close to the edge. It can’t be safe. Just like Lion’s street. I have to close my eyes when she takes me there. So fast. I don’t know how he can live there.”
“For the views.”
“Views. We had views in Berlin and it was flat. Views everywhere.”
“Not so many now,” Ostermann said gently.
They kept climbing, skirting a sheer drop beyond the chiseled boulders lining the shoulder.
“You know someone went over the edge?” Heinrich said, back at Feuchtwanger’s. “Near Lion’s house. So you see it’s not safe. I always said.”
“And yet you go.”
And so had Genia, Ben thought, but not to see Feuchtwanger. Someone else, familiar with the road.
“A friendship,” Kaltenbach said. Up ahead, Liesl turned sharply. “My god.”
“Dieter says the old road was worse. From the south. In the beginning, not even paved. They had to bring everything up in wagons, with mules. All the pieces of the telescopes. Imagine what that was like.”
The turnoff road for Mt. Wilson seemed narrower, not intended for highway traffic. They had had the sun behind them and now the slopes were becoming shadowy, gathering dark at the bottom. Ben, hunched over the wheel to concentrate on the road, saw what it must be like at night, even headlights swallowed up in the pitch black. Kaltenbach had actually closed his eyes, not wanting to look anymore. There were more trees, forests of conifers.
“Like Germany,” Ostermann said. “So many pines. The Harz Mountains. Well, a long time ago. Heinrich thinks it’s the same.”
“What are you saying?” Kaltenbach said from the back, hearing his name.
“That you should stay here.”
“Another flag-waver. Like Dieter. Even the oranges are better. It’s easy for him. Numbers. You can do that in any language.” He was quiet for a minute. “I’d have a post. At the university. A professor, like him.”
“But you’re still here.”
“You know Dolner, at RKO, is giving Exit Visa to Koerner-he’s the head.”
“You think they would make it now?” Ostermann said politely. “A war story?”
“No, an escape story. That has an appeal anytime. Dolner thinks it’s possible. Even now,” Kaltenbach said stubbornly, a man clutching a lottery ticket.
“Dieter’s fond of Liesl,” Ben said, to change the subject.
“He sees her mother.”
“Were they alike?”
“A physical resemblance. Anna was not so strong. It was hard for her, to live like that, new places. Liesl, maybe she was always an actress. German, now Austrian, French-you learn to adapt. But Anna never did. It killed her, I think. Of course Dieter says it was me, waiting too long. He never saw the nerves, the worry. Not like Liesl that way. To escape with Daniel. The danger. Anna could never have done it.”
Ben saw the solar towers first, poking up through the trees like radio antennas. Beyond them was the dome for the telescope and even farther, on the other side of the complex, another, much larger dome. Scattered between, on side paths, were wooden frame buildings where the staff lived, like a permanent summer camp under the pines. Liesl’s car was turning left to one of these, a long white building with green trim. A man came out to greet Dieter, signaling Ben to park on the side.
“There’s been a little mix-up about the rooms,” Dieter said when they joined him, annoyed but trying to be pleasant. “Professor Davis brought some graduate students, so we’ll have to double-up. They won’t be in the way-they’re working with the sixty-inch-but it does mean sharing. Ben, how about you and Hans? Then Heinrich with me. John will show you where you are.”
Professor Davis, full of dates and statistics, showed them the grounds, a visitor talk he’d obviously given before. The first tower in 1904, then the sixty-inch telescope, finally the one-hundred-inch in 1917, still the largest in the world. The dome was on its own promontory, reached by footbridge over a shallow chasm and a reservoir pond. It was getting dark now, flashlights needed on the path.
“The site is remarkable,” Davis was saying. “It has the best ‘seeing’ in the country.”
“Seeing?” Kaltenbach said.
“The best conditions. Very little atmospheric turbulence.”
“But so close to the city,” Ostermann said. “The lights.”
“Yes, but even so. It’s the turbulence that matters. You know if you stand in a swimming pool and look down, the water moves, your feet seem to move. Turbulence is like that. We see the stars twinkle but they don’t-it’s just air moving across their light. But up here, with the good seeing, they’re steady. Well, you’ll see later. Shall we have some dinner now?”
“They don’t twinkle?” Ostermann said. “It’s a little disappointing.”
Davis looked at him, puzzled.
“All the poems,” Ostermann added lamely. “Songs.”
“Well, songs,” Davis said, at a loss.
Ben hung back as they got near the dining room.
“Now what?” he said to Liesl. “Am I supposed to sneak out while he’s sleeping?”
She smiled. “Like a teenager.” She touched his arm. “Maybe it’s enough for now. To know we want to. Don’t look like that. What are you thinking?”
“Ever hear of Arnold Wallace?” he said, his head still in the letter.
“No,” she said, an abrupt change of mood.
He went down the sheet in his mind, one typed name after another. “Raymond Gilbert?”
“Who are these people?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“More friends of Daniel.”
“People he might have mentioned.”
She looked away. “Not to me.”
The graduate students left as soon as they’d finished eating, but the emigre group lingered, talking with Eric, Professor Davis’s assistant, who had now taken charge of them. Eric was tall and gawky, but eager to please, consumed by astronomy. It seemed to Ben a conversation from another world, beamed in from one of the stars, not nine miles up the slope from Pasadena.
“The hundred-inch is really the point now. Mt. Wilson began as a solar observatory but after Professor Hubble’s work, there was a shift to nighttime research. Without the hundred-inch, modern cosmology-”
Ben drifted and he could see the others were having trouble keeping up. Dieter, to whom all this was familiar, seemed to be monitoring their response, glancing at each of them, ready to interrupt if things became hopelessly tangled. Ben felt the envelope in his pocket. Maybe the names were arranged by studios. How many groups had there been? Five majors, maybe a few Poverty Row companies. But none of the names were familiar. Technicians, screenwriters? He hadn’t heard of Schaeffer at Fox until Minot’s files. But not in the phone book. They couldn’t all be unlisted, not technicians.
“The key was proving that spiral nebulae are distant galaxies. Outside the Milky Way. In other words, the universe is expanding.”
“Expanding,” Ostermann said thoughtfully. “What does it mean? Oh, I know,” he said, waving off Eric, “there’s an explanation, of course. But how do we imagine such a thing? The universe expanding. How do we even imagine the universe?”
“You don’t have to imagine it. You can see it,” Eric said, getting up.
Outside they trailed behind him to the big dome, the sky all lit up.
“If you look that way,” he said, pointing, “you’ll see the section we’re studying at the moment. There. Keep it in mind when we go inside. You’ll see how much more the telescope picks up.”
It seemed impossible there could be more, the stars already too numerous to count, much less name. As Davis had predicted, they were steady lights, not twinkling.
The telescope was more than just the giant shaft that shot out through the dome’s opening. There was the heavy platform with its gears, the series of reflectors and magnifying properties to explain, and Eric grew more excited as he talked, a boy with his wonderful toy. Ben smiled to himself, thinking of the Hal Jaspers at the Moviola, both mechanics at heart. But why would Minot want technicians? Recognizable faces. Nobody cared about the Hal Jaspers. Maybe these weren’t the intended names, just ways to get to them. Sources, like Danny.
They had made an adjustment to one of the mirrors that brought the sky into sharp focus, a swath of stars leaping out of the black. Ben stared at it for a minute, as silent as the others, dazzled. He felt himself getting smaller, a speck, reduced to nothing by a vast indifference. The universe expanded without us. None of it mattered-not the preview audience’s reaction or whether Julie Sherman could sing or whether Danny had filed reports. They were just frames flying by in a movie we’d made to keep us awake in the dark.
“You see the dust to the right of the star we’re measuring?” Eric said, pointing again. “We’re not sure yet, it’s early, but the gap there might be another star forming.”
“When will you know?” Liesl said.
Eric smiled. “Not for years. The dust has to fuse, a long process. But we can track the movement.”
“It’s real dust? Not just light?”
“Real dust. And gas. Particles of elements. But we see it as light. Sometimes it’s what’s in the way. But with this, you see beyond, what’s really there.”
“I wonder,” Ostermann said, “do we want to see everything so clearly.”
“Well, you want to see this clearly or you won’t get the measurements right,” Eric said, no poet.
Ostermann smiled. “Yes, that’s right. A distraction, if we want to know. But beautiful, I think, all the same.”
“Well, yes,” Eric said, not sure what he meant. “You have to be careful. You see the star there on the right, two o’clock? That was mine, my project. I knew it, all its properties. And then there was movement, some dust, and it confused everything. I began to doubt it, what I already knew. But that was with the sixty-inch. With this it was clear again, the same properties. Which was lucky for me. My whole dissertation was based on it. Years of work.”
But nothing was clear yet. The names had to mean something, people Minot would be interested in. Focus. Who interested him? Ben turned to Dieter.
“Is there a phone up here?”
“In the director’s office. You’re still worried about your friend? Come, I’ll show you.”
They walked back across the bridge, stars everywhere, a whole sky of them. There were other phone books. Follow the logic. Dieter turned on the light in the office.
“Thanks. Don’t wait. I can find my way back.”
Dieter hesitated, but then made a polite nod and backed out, pointing to the light, a reminder.
It was late but Kelly was still at his desk.
“See? Something always turns up. You got a body or just a tip?”
“I need a favor.”
“Last time I looked, you owed me.”
“Now I’ll owe you two. You’ve got all the studio phone listings, right?”
“Maybe.”
“You’d have to. They’d be your favorite bedtime reading. I want you to look up a few names-just tell me which studio.”
“I should do this why?” Kelly said, playing with him, a wiseguy line.
“Does your paper know you’re moonlighting for Polly?”
There was a silence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then you’d have a tough time explaining it to them, wouldn’t you? If they ever asked. Come on, Kelly, there’s nothing to this. Just pull the lists out of the drawer, and we’re done in two minutes.”
“There goes one,” Kelly said.
“Wallace, first name Arnold. You’ll find it near the bottom of the list.”
“Ha ha.”
Ben could hear a shuffling of papers.
“Nope.”
“Not at Fox?”
“Not anywhere.”
“Try Gilbert, Raymond.”
Another shuffle.
“Gilbert, Allen, at Republic. No Raymond. Who are these guys supposed to be?”
“Friends of my brother. I found them in his book and I’m trying to get in touch.” The lie said easily, a little wave of turbulence over the wire. “Try Friedman, Alfred.”
But Friedman wasn’t there, either, nor three others. Ben looked at the list, stymied. Minot was going after the industry, but Danny was feeding him someone else.
“So who could they be?” he said aloud, but really to himself.
“Bookies. IOUs. Muscle. All guys, right?” Kelly’s world.
“Okay, thanks. Sorry to bother you.”
“How about a little payback? Something on Dick Marshall and the sister.”
“How would I know?”
“You live there. Give me an item. I could sell anything on them.”
“I’m not there anymore. I’m at the Cherokee.”
“What, his room? Talk about sick.”
“I haven’t run into any ghosts yet.”
“Maybe he’ll talk to you in the night. Tell you who he was banging.”
“I’ll let you know.”
“About that other thing. Polly. How’d you happen to come up with that?”
“A shot in the dark. Thanks for the favor.”
“A shot in the dark.”
“Now I owe you two.”
He stared at the list again, then put it back in his pocket, out of ideas. Maybe he’ll talk to you in the night.
He walked back to the dome smelling the night moisture on the pines, fresh, something to wipe away Kelly. I could sell anything on them. Inside, Eric was demonstrating a spectroscopic binary, the guests following attentively, as if it made sense.
“He’s all right?” Dieter said.
“Yes, thanks. What have I missed?”
Dieter smiled. “Advanced Astronomy 205-his course. Do you think they’ll pass the exam?” he said, nodding to the others.
They adjusted the mirror again, a new perspective, larger than the last, but Dieter noticed that people had begun to tire.
“Eric, I promised the guests a nightcap, so I’m going to steal them from you.”
“Yes, I’ll just finish with this magnification. Now see those very small points there? Outside, they’d be invisible. The eye simply can’t take them in. But they’re out there. We have no idea what we’re going to see when we build the new scope down at Palomar. Two-hundred-inch. Things in there we can’t see now,” he said, pointing to the image, his voice excited.
What wasn’t he seeing? A San Francisco postmark. Someone who didn’t know Danny had died. And no way of telling him, no return address. But they must have communicated somehow. The letter hadn’t dropped out of the sky. Was some response expected? What if he hadn’t taken it, just let it sit there? He held the thought for a minute, like a breath. But it wouldn’t just sit there. Somebody else would have picked it up.
Eric finally finished, to a chorus of thank-yous. Outside, the sky seemed less full, limited by the unaided eye to only a sampling of stars, like the ceiling of the Wilshire Temple. Could it only have been this morning? Gazing up while the music tugged at him, back to Otto, an invisible chord. Suddenly he felt tired, light-headed, as if he had climbed up to this thin air on foot. Good seeing. But how could you do it below? You had to wait for a flash, something that broke through all the obscuring dust. Sam Pilcer looking at his son, his heart suddenly visible. Bunny gazing at a bandage, finally without irony. This wasn’t all they were-the other parts were still there-but without the glimpse you couldn’t really see them, take some kind of measure. Maybe the letter, if he could explain it, was a flash, a way to see Danny.
He stopped, looking up again. But he already knew him. The way Eric had known his star, before all the dust got in the way. The same properties, the same constant light. And if you knew that, you could explain the rest. He hadn’t mentioned Jack MacDonald after he’d seen him, an easy bone to toss. He hadn’t mentioned Rosemary, either. He never stopped writing to Ben, stayed with Otto to the end. Got Liesl out, a dangerous trip. Who he really was.
Back at the lodge, they spoke German for Heinrich’s sake and Ben, already tired, found himself sitting back, not really listening. They were huddled around the table drinking, and for an instant he saw them as Danny might have, refugees in a mountain hut waiting to be smuggled across. But now they were here, at the end of another continent, and Heinrich was talking about going back.
“But you don’t consider the rest of us,” Dieter said. “The effect it might have.” He waved his hand in a circle. “A decision like this-it will draw attention to all of us.”
“But only I would be going.”
“And then they think, who else? Who’s next? Remember during the war, how they watched us?”
“The war’s over.”
“That one, yes. Now a new one. And look where you’d go. The other side. You think it’s so pleasant there now? At least wait a little.”
“I’m an old man, Dieter. How long should I wait?”
“You make yourself old.” Dieter poured more brandy in the glasses. “You talk to him,” he said to Ostermann.
“Maybe we’re a little selfish,” Ostermann said. “We don’t want to see you go.”
“You want to speak German, go to Switzerland,” Dieter said. “Lion is thinking about that. Zurich.”
“Lion has money. No one is asking me to come to Zurich.”
“There’s no rush,” Liesl said to Heinrich. “You can stay with me for a while if you like. The room just sits there.”
“But what about-” Heinrich looked at Ben.
“I’m not there anymore.”
“No. In that apartment,” Dieter said. “You know, where Daniel-” He shook his head. “It seems so strange to me. You don’t feel-”
“He didn’t die there,” Liesl said into her glass. “He died at the hospital.”
Ben looked up, jarred, as if he had just heard a skip on a record, a needle scratch. The hospital, those awful last minutes, people racing, Liesl’s face as she stood in the doorway, “Don’t leave me,” the last thing he’d ever say. But Ben had.
“A technicality,” Dieter said.
“I still wonder to myself, what was on his mind?” Kaltenbach said, then looked at Liesl. “Forgive me. An intrusion. It’s just-someone with so much courage.”
Liesl drew on her cigarette, as if she hadn’t heard, then tamped it on the ashtray, preoccupied.
“You think it’s an act of weakness,” Ostermann said. “I don’t know, maybe it’s the hardest. The rest-you can do anything if you have to.”
“You? With your good moral character?”
“Is there such a thing? I used to think so. Very clear. The Nazis are here,” he said, putting his hand at one end of the table. “And we’re here?” Bookending the other. He moved both to the middle. “No, here somewhere. Mixed together. We know that now. We can cross any line. But that last one-”
“Such talk,” Liesl said, rubbing out the cigarette.
“Any line?” Ben said. “Not killing someone.”
“Look how often we do it. It’s only ourselves we can’t.”
Kaltenbach nodded, settling in for a longer discussion. Ben stood up.
“I want to get an early start back,” he said, an apology.
“But the studios are closed Sunday,” Dieter said. “Even Continental. Well, a last one for me. Liesl? Another brandy?”
“No, no,” she said, picking up her glass and finishing it.
Another skip on the record, watching her drink. He felt the back of his neck go still, the way it had watching the screen test. Except this time he saw Ruth Harris on the penthouse terrace. Easy enough for a woman to do. He shook his head. More interference, dust.
“And you come, too,” she said to her father. “You’ll be up all night, the two of you.”
Outside they all looked up again. Ben tilted his head to where Eric’s star would be-bright and clear, if you knew how to find it. The letter, he thought, was a kind of telescope. The names were out there somewhere, in a bigger file.
No entries turned up at Minot’s office.
“You got me down here on a Sunday morning?” Riordan said, eyes still a little puffy with sleep. Ben had gone straight to his apartment, waking him with drugstore coffee.
“I wanted to make sure. They’re new.”
“So now you’re sure,” Riordan said, waiting.
“We need to get this to the Bureau,” Ben said, holding out the letter.
“We.”
“You could get it to the right desk faster. One of their own.”
“Retired. It’s not exactly a two-way street with the Bureau. They have to be careful, doing favors for the congressman. People get touchy about that.”
“Dennis.”
He sighed. “Why the Bureau?”
“They’re interested in the same people Minot’s interested in. Look, somebody sent this to Danny. Which means they sent it to you, too. You’ve got an interest here. Nobody has files like the Bureau. I’ll bet there’s one on me.”
“Security check,” Dennis said automatically, then half smiled at Ben’s reaction. “You asked.”
“All right,” Ben said. “So, my point. And who’d know better than Danny? He was a source. You the only one he dealt with? Maybe there was someone else he got to know. With access. How much do they give Minot? A spoonful once in a while?”
“They’re careful. I said.”
“So maybe Danny found a backdoor.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Let’s see where the letter comes from. What the lab says. That’s the stuff they’re good at, right? Every typewriter has its own signature. Paper comes from somewhere, has to. What they’re famous for.”
“You know what they’re good at? Sitting in a car all day, watching who goes in and out. I know. I used to do it. Now you want them to run a full investigation just to see who’s mailing things in San Francisco?”
“If these names are in their files, they’ll want to, don’t you think?”
“Why?”
“Because one of them killed a source.”
“Former source.”
“They still owe him.”
Riordan said nothing for a moment, then handed him the letter. “Make a copy. Sometimes things go into the Bureau, they don’t come back.”
Ben sat down and started to write.
“And if they come up dry with these?”
“There’s always a file somewhere,” Ben said.
In Frankfurt there had been rooms of them, millions of index cards, the whole crime at your fingertips.
“This doesn’t come from Minot,” Riordan said. “He’s careful, too. No official ties.”
“Just warm feelings. Can you get it to them today? Sunday, I know, but the Bureau never sleeps, right?”
“Why the rush?”
“Whoever mailed this didn’t know Danny was dead. But somebody else has the key now. How long does he wait for it to show up?”
“Assuming he knows it’s coming.”
“Then why take the key?”
“Want to be sure? Put a dummy letter in. See if it stays there.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Move out.”
He had just finished the names when he heard the lock turn. Without even thinking he covered the paper with another and folded the original in its envelope, his eyes fixed on the shadow behind the translucent glass. Minot opened the door and stopped, staring at them for a second, then took off his hat.
“On your way to church?” he said.
Ben saw Riordan freeze, a burglar caught, too slow-witted to make a move.
“Congressman,” Ben said. “You’re up early.”
“What are you doing here?” he said bluntly.
“Making a report. Dennis was good enough to come down. My only day off.”
“A report.”
“I spent the weekend with the group-Ostermann, Kaltenbach. You asked, so I wanted to get it down while it was still fresh in my mind. Tomorrow I’m at the studio all day.”
“While what’s still fresh? Kaltenbach? The Russian consul come, too?” he said dryly.
“It was just the Krauts,” Riordan said, as if they’d already been over this.
“We went to the observatory. See the stars.” Something easily confirmed.
“And? What happened? That couldn’t wait?”
Ben glanced up, aware of Minot’s eyes, expectant, waiting to be fed.
“Nothing much,” Ben said, flailing inside, looking for something. “But I thought what would interest you is that he’s got a new Czech passport.”
“What?” Minot put his hat on a table and walked over, galvanized.
“He had one before,” Ben said easily. “You probably know. Passport of convenience. But the new government’s agreed to reissue, so I thought you’d-”
“Do you know what this means?” Minot said. “He can travel.”
“Not yet. He’s still trying to peddle an old script at RKO.”
“Don’t be an ass. You can’t leave without papers and believe me, he wasn’t getting any from us. We had him. Now he can go whenever he likes.”
“With what? Congressman, he’s living on handouts.”
“He has friends to help now.”
Ben held out his hands in a whoa gesture. “Nobody was talking about going anywhere.”
“Then why does he need a passport?” Minot said, almost snapping, then catching himself. “Look, you’re new at this. I appreciate-but we can’t afford to take chances. Dennis, we need to get a subpoena. I don’t care what passport he’s got, he’s not going anywhere if he’s under subpoena. How long will it take?”
“Ken, it’s Sunday.”
“I didn’t want to move yet,” Minot said to himself. “You want to orchestrate this. But we can do a closed session. First. No noise, but we keep him here for later. How long?”
“Tomorrow, probably Tuesday.”
“Congressman,” Ben said, alarmed now. “I think we’re overreacting. I was with him. It’s the last thing on his mind.”
“Not on theirs. You don’t know how these people think. The East Germans want him. Why do you think the Czechs got so generous all of the sudden? You think they’re sitting there worrying about Kaltenbach? Nobody cares about Kaltenbach.”
“Then why do you?”
Minot looked up at him sharply.
“I mean-” Ben said, placating.
“He’s my witness,” Minot said calmly. “That’s why. He’s useful.”
“But he’s not a Communist. He’s not anything.”
“Read the file,” Minot said, nodding to the cabinet. “Socialist Party there. Documented. Speeches, the whole thing. Probably what the books are about.”
“That’s years ago. Anyway, Socialist, that’s not the same thing.”
Minot looked at him. “You know that. Thousands don’t. They’ll just see what he’s not.”
“What’s that?”
“American. You establish a pattern,” he said, a willed patience. “Quote the speeches-how far left do you want to go? Gets a visit from the Russian consulate-we have this, witnesses if we need them, actual contact with the Russians. Same man works for Warner Brothers.”
“A lifesaver contract. They gave them to Jews to get them out.”
“I wonder if Jack will mention that,” he said evenly, so that Ben looked up at him, chilled now, someone who realizes, his hand still in the cage, what’s inside. “Of course, he’ll also have Mission to Moscow to explain. A lot of activity over at Warners over the years. And here are your old employees drinking tea with the Russians. Thousands won’t understand that, either. But they see the pattern.”
“But what evidence-?”
“This isn’t a murder case,” Minot said. “It’s not about evidence. It’s about what people are. You think he’s harmless? Just an old man? I’m sorry, I disagree. I’ve read the speeches. You put Lenin’s name on them and then tell me the difference. And once the pattern is there, you’ve got a very useful witness. Ask him if he saw-well, who? Let’s say you. Did you ever attend meetings with Mr. Collier? And he says no, but now your name’s out there, isn’t it, whether he says no or not. All we have to do is put it there. Now why would we ask if there wasn’t something we knew? Ask a few others, people from the studio.”
“You want to use him to squeeze Warner,” Ben said quietly, but his voice so neutral that Minot took his dismay for appreciation.
“We need the studio heads,” he said simply. “We don’t want a fight with the industry. We want to help them clean house. Their own good. I’ve met Jack-you were there, I remember. I think he’s the kind of man who’s going to be friendly to the committee. A good businessman looks after his interests. And he thinks he’s a patriot. Made Yankee Doodle Dandy. That’s the story he wants to tell, how he made that, not how the studio took in left-wing Jews. Not that it’s about Jews. I know how some people feel, but you don’t want to go down that road. I’m looking at the real threat. If you see the pattern. I think Jack’ll see it too. So Kaltenbach, he’s useful. We’d like to keep him close to home. Come to think of it, if he’s got the passport, does that make him a Czech citizen?”
“Technically? I don’t know. A passport of convenience,” Ben said lamely.
“Good question to ask, though. Foreign national. And a Hollywood address all through the war. Some people, there’s no way to help this, are going to think swimming pools. You’d think someone like that would be grateful, not have little parties with the Russians. Well.” He went over to his desk and opened a locked drawer. “Some of us do have to get to church. Dennis, you get on that first thing tomorrow, right? You boys almost done here? You want to put that in the file?” He nodded to the papers in front of Ben.
Ben took the copy and handed it to Dennis, who moved to the cabinet before Minot could ask for it.
“You have the date he received it, the passport?” Minot asked Ben.
“Exact? No. But just. Last few days.”
“See if you can find out. It helps, having things exact. Makes people think everything you’ve got is. Ready?”
They all went out together, Ben scooping up the original letter for his pocket when Minot turned to the door.
“Good work,” Minot said to him in the hall. “You keep your ears open. It’s just like the Commies, isn’t it? Pick on the weak one. Kaltenbach-anything’d look good to him. Jackals.” He signaled to his car. “Keep an eye on him. Until we get the subpoena served. Take him to dinner. I’ll bet he could use a meal.”
When the car pulled away, Ben gave the envelope to Riordan. “Where’d you file the copy?”
“Kaltenbach.”
Ben watched Minot’s car leaving the driveway. “How much of it do you think he believes?”
“All of it.”
“How much do you?”
Riordan looked at him, then started down the stairs. “You know, you retire early, you only get half pension.”
“Then why did you?”
“I took a bullet. My leg. You probably didn’t notice, but I favor my right leg now. My own fault. I should have been paying attention.”
Grazing idly, another straggler. Pick on the weak one.
“Let me know what the Bureau says.”
It was only after they’d both gone and he was alone in the parking lot that it hit him, a lurch in his stomach that felt like nausea. Is this how Danny had felt after one of his deliveries? He saw Kaltenbach sweating at the hearing table in his shabby suit, asking someone at his side to translate, his eyes frightened, his nightmare finally coming true, what he had managed to escape. No, Germany would have been worse-he would have been killed, or left to rot in a camp. Here they would just hollow him out, use him to snatch someone else. But what was the alternative? Ben had been in Berlin. He had no illusions about Russians, the first wave of rapists and thugs now replaced by a grim occupation, the next thousand-year Reich. Nobody could want that, not by choice. And yet there would be pockets of privilege. A prized pawn trapped on the board, but not thrown away. He thought of Kaltenbach at the cemetery, spontaneous tears on his cheeks, mourning the man who had saved him, got him out. But the war, the heroic stories were over. What would Danny do now?
Kaltenbach lived a few blocks off Fairfax, walking distance from Canter’s, where his landlady used to work before she’d brought her sick mother over from Boyle Heights to nurse full time. Kaltenbach had the room now, with a ground floor window that looked out on a magnolia tree and a patch of lawn that needed cutting. Ben drove by, struck again by the Sunday stillness of Los Angeles, as quiet as one of those ancient cities where everyone had vanished, leaving their pottery. He had come to see Heinrich, driving fast, but now that he was here, what could he say? Call your lawyer?
The blinds were drawn, perhaps for a nap after the early drive down the mountain. Or maybe he’d been restless, gone over to Fairfax for a whitefish salad and coffee with other Heinrichs. Then there would be the rest of the day to get through. Ben stopped the car, then suddenly didn’t have the heart to go in. How could he explain? I know this because I’ve been informing on you? And then Minot would know. Who else could have warned him? Is this what it had been like for Danny, a balancing act, hiding from both sides? Anyway, in a day or so it wouldn’t matter. He’d be stuck. Ben looked again at the quiet house. They couldn’t serve the subpoena if he wasn’t there. The only thing to do now was buy time. Liesl could take him home-an insistent invitation, no need to explain anything, until they figured out what to do.
He drove back to the Cherokee, stopping for lights without noticing, and parked behind. Nothing in the mailbox behind the little holes. But why would there be? Sunday. And maybe he’d already taken the last piece that would ever come. The new Joel looked at him, indifferent, and nodded when he got in the elevator.
He opened the door with his key, eyes already fixed on the phone table. He heard it first, a soft whoosh, then the back of his head exploded with a lightning pain, jagged, so fast there was no time to know what was happening. A pulsing afterimage, like staring into a flashbulb, darkening, then another pain, a crack as his knees hit the floor and he realized he was falling. He put his hands out to break the fall but couldn’t find them, off somewhere to his side as his face met the floor, a louder thump, then nothing at all.
Everything was still dark when he felt the animal pawing at him, brushing his clothes aside to get at his chest. Not paws, hands, pulling at his jacket, digging into the pockets, still too dark to see, now at his collar, dragging him. Back to some den. He felt his head scrape on the ground, then a welling, slick, and he knew the blood would excite the animal but couldn’t stop it, everything beyond his control.
A change in the air, like a window being opened, a banging as a door hit the wall and even in the dark he knew it was the French window, the black now just a dimness, being pulled again, out toward the air, the balcony, and he tried to open his eyes, panicking, because he knew, not a dream, that he had become Danny. Dragged out to the balcony, heaved over like a laundry sack. His head was throbbing, a toothache pain. They were in the open air now, the animal wearing a hat, not an animal, still dragging him, another yank at his jacket, panting, almost at the rail. And then they were there, the man grunting as he heaved, turning Ben over, grabbing under his arms, about to lift. And Ben already knew what the next second would be, pitched over the Juliet balcony, no scream, jumpers don’t scream, and then the crash of garbage cans, Danny, him, a loop.
His eyes still wouldn’t open, just slits taking in gray outlines, the man bending forward to secure his grip. In the movies, Ben would leap up now in a violent struggle, but instead he’d become an animal, prey being dragged to the feeding place. He still couldn’t find his hands. No time left. Then the man’s grip slipped, Ben’s head falling again, and as the man reached to grab him, a better angle, Ben turned his head, a move of pure instinct, the effort dizzying, and opened his mouth, teeth connecting with flesh, biting hard on the man’s ankle. The howl must have been more surprise than pain, something dead come back to life, but it startled Ben’s eyes open, the world fuzzy but there, and as the man jerked his foot away, Ben’s hands came up, back now, too, and he held the leg and bit again, the man staggering as he tried to pull it away, no longer pitched forward toward Ben’s shoulders, his hands springing back, grabbing onto the French window, then using the other foot to kick, crunching Ben’s chest, lunging for him again. There was a shout from somewhere, enough to make the man hesitate for a second before he hammered his fist into Ben’s back, a squashing slam that forced Ben’s face tighter against his leg, making the man twist free, away from the window now, the fulcrum of his weight flung backward so that Ben felt the pull of the leg moving and let it go, feeling it hit his face then flying free, following the body, turning as the man reached for the rail, then kept going, into the loud scream that filled the alley, the noise Danny hadn’t made, and then was swallowed up by the crash, lids clanging, cans rolling away from the impact of the body. Ben grabbed the balcony edge and pulled himself up, just enough to look over, to see the police photos again, the pool of blood spreading from the man’s head, but in color this time, dark red, the body splayed out at odd angles, the chalk mark outline where Ben was supposed to have been. He stared at it for a second, nobody he recognized, then heard a window open, a gasp, more windows, the faint sound of a radio, the desk clerk rushing out and looking up at Ben holding on to his balcony, the loop Ben already knew. Soon the ambulance, the crime scene photographers, maybe even Riordan losing himself in the crowd. He lowered his head from the railing, putting his hands in front of him to get up, but couldn’t move, falling instead down an elevator shaft until it was dark again.
The bandage woke him, an unfamiliar weight on his head. The room was all white, which made him smile, a white telephone set, then he remembered the alley. Liesl was standing looking out the window, her back to him, and the loop started running again, Danny’s hospital room, this time Ben in the bed. But not dying, everything in focus, the fuzziness gone.
“Is this Presbyterian?” he said, surprised at the croak in his voice.
She whirled around and stared at him, then shook her head, her eyes filling with relief, caught in the same loop.
“Where?”
“Community. On Vine.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Most of the day. It’s almost four.”
“You’ve been here?” He touched the bandage at the back of his head, then the adhesive tape across the bridge of his nose. A dull throb in his chest. “What else?”
“It’s enough. Head trauma-” She looked away.
“It’s not the same. Not five stories.”
“You still might have died,” she said, still not facing him, then turned and came over, brushing her hand against his forehead.
“How about-whoever it was. Is he dead?”
She nodded.
“Any idea who?”
“Some Schlager. Kelly knows.”
“Kelly?”
“He’s here. Outside. He won’t go until he sees you. First.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t have to. You’ve been out. You should see the doctor first.”
“No, I want to know.” He grabbed her wrist. “I’m fine. It’s the kind of thing you know about yourself, if something’s wrong.”
Kelly came in tentatively, the usual jauntiness left outside. “Can you talk?”
“You doing a story? ‘I didn’t know what hit me.’ Pretty lame, except I didn’t. Make something up, I don’t care. The police out there with you?”
Kelly shook his head. “They want a statement, when you’re ready. Dot the i’s. They already took the witness’s.”
“Who?”
“Guy next door saw him punch you, try to throw you off. Day clerk thought he was in the building. Guy comes in, goes to the mailboxes, so the clerk figures he lives there. Of course, if he’d known it was Ray-”
“Who’s Ray?”
“The guy. Hired hand. If you need something done. People do, so he and the cops go way back. That’s why, when they saw it was him, you didn’t have to draw a map. He used to run with the pachucos, his mother’s a Mex. Then I guess he decided to put it to work, go freelance. He’s already been in once for armed robbery.”
“That’s what they think this is?”
“I have to tell you, don’t take this wrong, when I got the call the first thing I thought-I mean, same place.”
“Monkey see. Maybe a better story.”
“Don’t be like that. It’s what anybody would-”
“If I’d been the one who went over? I know. That’s what he wanted you to think.”
“Who? What are you saying?”
“Whoever paid-what was it, Ray?” He looked at Kelly. “Want something better than robbery? First of all, there’s nothing to steal,” he said, feeling Ray’s hands in his pocket again, not something for Kelly. “The door wasn’t forced. I had to open it with a key. But he was already in.”
“Door’s not a problem for guys like that.”
“Especially if they have a key.”
Kelly looked at him, waiting.
“You know, I never saw his face. He hit me from behind. All he had to do was walk away. If he wanted to kill me, a few more head taps would have done it. So why go through all the trouble? Lugging me out there. Maybe so you’d say, ‘the first thing I thought.’ Anybody would. They’d think I’d been planning to do it.”
“But how would he know?”
“Well, Kelly, how would he?”
“You think he did your brother?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Find out who paid him. But that’s how Danny was killed. I know it. For a few minutes there, I was him. Don’t worry,” he said, touching the head bandage, “I’m not going spooky on you. I just saw how it had to be. Find out who paid him. Work it from that side. Is he the kind who brags? Maybe there’s a girl. He get the money yet?”
“You’re so sure about this.”
“Fine, do it as a robbery. Maybe you get a column. The double jump would have been better, but I screwed that up for you. But a murder? Two? That the police never saw? Exclusive? That’s a ticket up.” He looked directly at him. “No more moonlighting.”
Kelly said nothing for a minute.
“Why don’t the police see it?” he said, biting.
“Because they’re traffic cops. And they like robbery. Come on, Kelly, nobody was supposed to see it. Ask around. Who paid him?”
Kelly picked up his hat to go. “And the pachucos will tell me. Swell.”
“It’s a bigger story.”
Kelly looked at him, a small, ironic smile. “Any studio connection?”
After he’d gone, Liesl moved to the chair next to the bed. “Did you really think that? That you were Daniel?”
“I just saw how it made sense.”
“Imagine if you could do that. Know what somebody was thinking. He could tell you-well.”
“But I know what he’d do. Maybe it took a knock on the head, but it’s clear now.”
He began throwing back the covers.
“What are you doing?”
“I have to get out of here.”
“Don’t be-”
“Listen to me. Heinrich’s in trouble. There isn’t much time.”
“Trouble?”
“I’ll explain later. Where did they put my clothes? Help me, Liesl. I’m all right. See?” he said, getting out of bed and standing. “Not even dizzy.”
But then he was, weaving slightly, putting his hand on the bed to steady himself.
“Get back into bed,” she said, taking his elbow.
“It’s my fault, understand? My fault. I have to help.” He took a breath, exhaled. “There. I just got winded for a second.” He looked down at the adhesive tape on his lower chest. “The rib makes it hard to breathe, that’s all. Here, help me with this shirt.”
“You can’t just walk out. The doctor has to release you.”
“What would Danny have done? Would he have waited?”
She looked at him. “That was different.”
He walked over to the closet, Liesl trailing him.
“We can’t go back to the Cherokee, the cops’ll still be there, so we’ll have to use your car. My wallet’s here. I can use my military ID, they’re not going to say no to that. He’ll need his passport, though.”
“Passport? What are you talking about?”
He took her arm. “I have to get him out. I can do it. But I need you to help me.”
“Get him out,” she said, looking at his head.
“I’m all right. I’m not crazy.”
“No, excited,” she said quietly, looking at him.
“Drop me at the house. Then you go to Heinrich’s alone, in case anybody’s watching,” he said, pulling on his pants.
“Why would anyone be watching?” she said nervously.
“Don’t pack. His landlady sees a suitcase, she’ll start-but anything he really wants. Take a grocery bag, so it looks like stuff for dinner. And the passport, don’t forget. I’ll explain everything to him when you get back. If he doesn’t want to, fine, we give him dinner and drive him home. But he will.”
“With a grocery bag,” she said. “Like a knapsack. And then what? We cross the mountain?”
“No,” he said, buttoning his shirt, too busy to hear her tone. “I get him to Mexico.”
“Mexico.”
“It’s just a drive.” Why the movie people came in the first place, dodging Edison’s patents, sun, and a convenient border. According to Sol anyway. “Where’s my hat? I’m going to need a hat to cover this,” he said, fingering the bandage. “Your father’s in touch with the Germans there. Some of them will know Heinrich. He’ll need help. How much cash do you keep at home?”
“Some. It’s something you learn, in case.”
“Okay, shoes.” He stood up.
“Stop. A minute. Listen to me. You’re in no condition to drive. You’ll both be killed and then what?”
“I have to.”
“Oh, have to. So pigheaded. Just like-” She stopped, looking away. “It’s serious? His trouble?”
He nodded.
“All right, I’ll drive. Don’t,” she said, holding up a hand. “Anyway, it’s my car.”
“You’re sure?” he said, pleased, as if he were extending a hand.
She shrugged, a pretend indifference. “You can’t go alone. It’s breaking the law?”
“Not yet. In a few days it would, but he’ll be gone.”
“Over the border,” she said. “I thought it was finished, all that business.”
Kaltenbach grasped the situation right away. Ben had expected indecision, an arguing back and forth, but the urgency had jolted him into an oddly calm self-assurance, all his usual dithering put away like bits of stage business.
“A political trial,” he said. “Now here.”
“No, it’s a hearing. Closed at first. It’s not the Nazis,” Ben said. “It would be a mistake to think that. To decide that way. It’s not camps or-”
“But a political trial all the same,” Kaltenbach said evenly. “I know what it means.”
“There’s no danger to you. You’re not being charged with anything. Not even being a Communist.”
“Just politically unreliable. So no work at the studios.”
“You’re not working there now,” Ostermann said. They were drinking coffee near the end of the pool terrace, the city below, lights coming on in the dusk.
“No, not for a long time,” Kaltenbach said. “Now longer.”
“I want you to understand,” Ben said. “If you leave, you won’t be able to come back. They’d make sure of that.”
“It’s not like before,” Ostermann said. “What choice did we have? Now there’s a choice. You can’t take this lightly.”
“That’s why you came over? To talk me out of it?”
“No. I talked to Anna in Mexico City. Seghers, you remember. It’s not easy to make a call there. An hour to get through. But I thought she would know somebody. Or somebody who-so, here’s an address in Tijuana. Who can help with arrangements. I said you’d be there tomorrow. If you go.”
“No, tonight,” Kaltenbach said firmly.
“Then I came to say good-bye,” Ostermann said. “If you’re sure.”
Kaltenbach turned away, too emotional to face him. “Look at it,” he said, nodding to the city. “A mirage. Maybe it’s the palm trees that suggest it. But sometimes I think there’s nothing really there. Blink-just sand again. Was I here? You and Dieter, all milk and honey, blue skies. But I wonder, even for you.”
“Almost ready?” Liesl said, coming out of the house. She had changed into cream-colored slacks and a blouse, resort wear. “Was it big enough?” She pointed to one of Danny’s old suitcases, now filled with Heinrich’s few changes of clothes.
Kaltenbach turned back to Ostermann. “I know it’s different there now.” He held his gaze for a second, a silent conversation, then stuck out his hand. “So good-bye, my friend.”
But Ostermann, tearing up, took him in his arms, a fierce hug, and Ben saw in his posture that he had done it before, one more leave-taking. When he finally pulled away, he took some money out of his pocket. “Here.”
“No,” Kaltenbach said, covering his hand.
“You’ll need it.”
Kaltenbach shook his head. “But Frau Schneider, my landlady. There’s rent owing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Keep my good name,” he said, smiling sadly. “I’ll pay you back.” A ritual phrase.
Ostermann took one of the bills from his hand. “Here. For cake at the Romanische.”
Kaltenbach took the money. “ Mohnkuchen. Like nowhere else.” He touched Ostermann on the shoulder, starting to turn away, then stopped and looked at him again. “If you read that I’ve said something-something, you know, that doesn’t sound-you’ll know it’s not me, yes? You’ll remember that?”
“Of course.”
“Even if my name is attached. I may have to- But you know the books. They can’t change those. The rest, don’t listen. Just the books.”
“We should go,” Liesl said. “They look all right,” she said to Ben, now in Danny’s borrowed clothes. “How do you feel?”
“Ready. This all?” He lifted her bag.
“I have to be back. I’m in the scene.”
“They can shoot around you for one day.” He turned to Ostermann. “Have Iris call in sick for her. Doctor’s orders.”
“They won’t like that.”
“We can’t just drop him at the border. One day.”
They started across the terrace, then froze as the phone rang.
“Don’t answer,” Ben said. “That’ll be the hospital, wondering if I ended up here in my nightgown. What did you say at the nurses’ station?” he said to Liesl.
“That you were sleeping. I’d be back tomorrow.”
“Good. So I’m the only one missing. Walking around somewhere near Vine.”
“You’ll be in trouble for this?” Kaltenbach said.
“Not unless they catch us.”
They followed Ostermann’s car down the hill and stayed behind until he veered off with a small wave. Kaltenbach waved back, his eyes fixed on the featureless boulevard, a last look before it shimmered away. By the time they turned on Sepulveda, heading down the coast, he seemed to have lost interest, letting his head rest on the backseat, eyes closed, like someone on a long railroad trip.
“Don’t go too fast,” Ben said. “We don’t want to get stopped.”
“Why are you so nervous? Nobody has any idea. Why are we supposed to be going, if anyone asks?”
“The races. Everybody goes down for the races. Fishing in Ensenada. I don’t know, why does anyone go?”
“Your brother used to say, don’t think about anything,” Kaltenbach said. “Pretend it’s the most natural thing in the world. If you worry at all, they sense it. Like dogs.”
“And did you worry?”
“I was terrified. You know what I think got us through? Alma. The way she’s in her own world. At the border she seemed surprised to see the guards, you know, anything in her way. They didn’t even question us. Of course your brother made a gift to them, but even so. They usually asked questions, to make a show. But not Alma. Si, senora. Up goes the crossing bar. And all I could think was, don’t sweat, don’t let them smell it on you. And you know, if it had gone the other way-well, it was another time. I owe my life to him. Now you.”
“No. This isn’t the same.”
“It feels the same. All that climbing, I was afraid for my heart. Now look, a chauffeur. But the same.” He was quiet for a minute, watching the night landscape pass, dark houses and miles of streetlights stretching down to Long Beach. “I never said good-bye to Alma. I wonder if she’ll notice that I’m gone.”
“Everybody will,” Ben said. “You’ll be in the papers.”
“So. You have to leave to make an impression,” he said, playing with it.
They drove past Huntington Beach, the lights getting fewer, Liesl sneaking glances at him.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing,” she said, a little startled, unaware that he’d seen.
“I’m all right, really.”
“It’s not that. The jacket. I bought it. I was remembering when I bought it.”
He fell asleep without realizing it, his head against the window, dreaming of the stars spilling across the sky on Mt. Wilson. Then he was at the Cherokee, watching blood spread in the alley, someone else’s blood, not his. Had Danny fought back? He woke when she stopped for gas, the station overly bright in the black landscape.
“Where are we?”
“Nowhere. Another twenty miles to La Jolla. Maybe we should stop there. It’s a long drive.”
“No,” Kaltenbach said from the back, “it’s important not to stop.” Another lesson from the Pyrenees. “Even to rest. People notice you. You see that car? It’s been behind us. Now it stops, too.”
“It’s the first station for miles,” Liesl said.
“Go to the toilet,” Ben said. “See if they follow. I’ve got your back.”
The attendant came over to start the pump.
“You encourage him,” Liesl said.
“He’s careful. Want a Coke?”
He went over to the ice cooler and pulled out a bottle and opened it, glancing at the second car as he drank. Two men on a Sunday night. Going where? Kaltenbach came out of the station, head low, his face shadowed by his hat.
“They’re still there?”
“Getting gas. I think it’s all right.”
They paid and left, Ben driving now, one eye on the rearview mirror.
“How would anybody know?” Liesl said to him, using English, Heinrich just a child in the backseat, swiveling his head from time to time. “You think they were watching his house?”
“He’s not the only one in the car. You heard Kelly. The guy was a hired hand. And I’m still here.”
She took this in, thinking for a minute. “And yet you do this. Out here. Where it’s easy for them.”
He said nothing.
“They were going to use Heinrich anyway. You didn’t make them.”
“I helped.”
“So it’s all on your shoulders. All the problems of the world.” She looked out the window, quiet. “You and Daniel.”
“What do I do? Just sit there?” He looked at her. “It’s not much, considering.”
“They’re turning off,” Kaltenbach said, looking out the back.
After La Jolla there were more lights, the hilly outskirts of San Diego. Liesl was fiddling with the radio, Kaltenbach keeping watch for cars.
“In the movies they always hear about themselves on the radio,” Liesl said. “But listen, just music. So we’re safe.” She turned the dial, picking up a Spanish-language station. “We must be close. What will they think of us? Different passports.”
“They don’t care much going out. It’s getting back in. It’ll be easier, just the two of us.”
“With a bandage on your head.” She was quiet for a minute. “Why did he want to kill you? You never told me that part. Why?”
“He was paid.”
“The one who paid him.”
“Maybe I’m getting close.”
“Close,” she said, not following.
“Who killed Danny.”
“Why do you think that? There’s something you’re not telling me.”
He shook his head, dodging. “But I must be.”
“Then he’ll try again,” she said flatly. “You have to go to the police.”
“With what? Tell them Danny was a snitch for Minot? I have to stay close to Minot. That’s the connection.”
She looked down. “He wasn’t that. I still don’t believe it.”
“Maybe he thought he had a reason,” Ben said, letting it go.
“We’re coming to the border,” Kaltenbach said, his voice nervous and melodramatic, as if he had seen guard dogs and soldiers with guns. In fact it was only a string of lighted booths under an arched sign.
“Go to sleep,” Ben said to him. “I don’t want to use a Czech passport if we don’t have to. He’d remember. He’s probably never seen one.”
“I don’t have to show it?”
“We can try. Close your eyes.”
He pulled up to the booth, holding his ID out the open window. A uniform like a state trooper, with a broad-brimmed hat.
“Driving late,” the guard said, checking the ID.
“Want to be early for the races.”
“Not tomorrow you won’t. No races. You didn’t know?”
Ben could feel Liesl tense beside him. “I guess we’ll have to find something else to do,” he said, the suggestion of a leer in his voice.
The officer glanced at Liesl. “I guess.”
She began to hand over her passport, but he ignored it.
“Who’s that?”
“My old man. He likes the ponies. And the tequila.” He nodded to the back. “Got a head start.”
“He’ll feel it, that stuff. Careful tonight. You know where you’re going?”
“We’ve been before.”
“Then I don’t have to tell you. Watch the car. They’ll steal the tires while you’re still in it.”
He stepped back, waving them on, and they drove through the noman’s stretch to the Mexican booth, another bored officer who just looked at them and said “ Bienvenidos ” and then they were over, suddenly in Tijuana.
“It’s done?” Kaltenbach said, almost deflated, cheated out of an expected drama.
“You’re free,” Ben said, stumbling on the word, an unintended irony. “No subpoenas.”
The city was noisy even at this hour, bright with strings of bare incandescent bulbs. San Diego had been asleep, but here there were still crowds, peddlers and shoe-shine kids and Americans in Hawaiian shirts, the smell of frying food, makeshift buildings as dingy as carnival flats. Men with mustaches idled on corners waiting for something to happen, like extras, their eyes following the car. Kaltenbach kept staring out the window, expecting it to get better, but the blocks streamed into each other, the same glare and sinister languor, and for a second Ben wanted to turn around, take him back, make some deal with Minot. But now he was here, even more displaced.
They went to the biggest hotel they saw, with a guarded parking lot, and Ben paid for the rooms in dollars. The desk clerk, a Mexican Joel, barely lifted his eyes as he handed out the keys. There was a restaurant two doors down and they sat in a booth, exhausted, and drank beer, picking at the chiles rellenos the waiter had brought, all that was left before closing.
“How long do you think I will have to stay here?” Kaltenbach said.
“We’ll see Broch tomorrow. I think there’s an airport. Maybe we can get you on a plane for Mexico City.”
“A plane?” Kaltenbach said timidly.
“You don’t like to fly? Oh, such a baby,” Liesl said fondly. “It’s like a bus.”
“In the air.”
“A man who crosses borders. An escape artist.”
Kaltenbach smiled weakly. “Not so difficult. Find a Kohler.” He looked at Ben. “‘My old man.’“
Ben tipped his glass in a toast.
“The other time it was sherry. Your brother found a place, after we got through, and we all drank sherry. It’s what they have there, Spain.” He glanced around the room. “It’s the same language, but this-”
There was a shout from the street, a bar argument that had moved outside.
“Border towns are like this. It’ll be different in Mexico City,” Ben said, wondering if it were true.
“Better food,” Kaltenbach said, looking at it. “Imagine living in such a place. Stealing tires.”
Ben stared at the scarred table top, remembering a wrecked Horch abandoned in Jagerstrasse, tires gone, gold on the black market. Children selling K-rations, as slippery as the kids outside. Where he was sending Kaltenbach. But where Kaltenbach wanted to go.
“It’s an odd feeling,” he was saying. “No one knows I’m here.”
“None of us,” Liesl said. “You could disappear here.” She met Ben’s eyes. “If someone were looking for you. You could-just go. Anywhere. Be safe.”
“Unless you wanted him to find you,” Ben said, looking back at her.
“You could stop.”
“Not now. He won’t stop. I’d always be looking over my shoulder. You can’t live that way.” He touched her hand. “And there’s Danny. Do you want me to walk away from that?”
She raised her head, her eyes wider, as if she were startled to find him there.
“What are you saying?” Kaltenbach said, not following their English.
“Nothing,” she said quickly, sitting up. “Just how it’s like before. When we got out.”
“This place?”
“Yes, everything. How worried I was. What if they turn us back? And then at the border, how easy and you thought, it’s a trick.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Kaltenbach said.
“Then a drink to celebrate. Like this. Everything,” she said, facing Ben again.
“And how calm he was, your brother. Well, and you. ‘My old man.’” He grinned. “But not this,” he said, gesturing to the beer. “Do you think they have schnapps?”
“They may call it that, but it won’t-”
“You can’t celebrate with beer. Not something like this.”
They were another hour, sipping a harsh, burning brandy with a Mexican label, Kaltenbach getting sentimental but not yet maudlin, Liesl smiling to herself as he talked.
“And you’ll come to see me. How far is Berlin? Imagine the neighbors. A movie star. In old Kaltenbach’s flat. Everyone looking, just behind the curtains. You remember the courtyards, how everyone knew your business? Nothing said and they know everything. So you’ll come. Look at you. Since a child. You don’t forget these things. Your mother, so protective. Everything for you, for Hans. Everybody but herself. And then she couldn’t protect you anymore.”
Liesl reached across the table. “Heinrich.”
“Yes, I know, I know. Don’t speak. Like Hans. But then, you know, we begin to forget. They go away from us.” He turned to Ben. “Can I say something to you? Your brother was very brave. I know. This thing, maybe it’s hard for us, but we can’t pretend it didn’t happen. We don’t talk about it, it goes away, but then they go away, too. Look at Hans, he never talks about Daniel now. It reminds him. Once it’s there, in your head-”
“What does he mean?” Ben asked Liesl.
“My mother was anxious. She had pills for that. So one night too many. Maybe an accident. We don’t know, Heinrich,” she said to him. “Not for sure.”
“Ach.” He waved his hand. “So it’s not for sure. And that’s why Hans won’t talk about it. But it’s in his head.”
The kind of idea that can lodge there, Ben thought, so you come back to it, over and over. Use it. Something people don’t want to be sure about, a car off the road, a fall, something they’d rather not see, not even laid out in a pattern. A convenient way to make people look away.
“He talks about it to me,” Liesl said quietly.
“Forgive me, it’s the schnapps. I don’t mean anything by saying this.”
“I know.”
“But your brother,” Kaltenbach said, switching tack. “That was someone. Right past the guards, not a drop of sweat. Always an answer. ‘Who’s this?’ The signature, you know, hard to read. ‘Petain.’ On a laissez-passer. Imagine, Petain. But they believe him.” He cocked his head, looking at Ben. “I used to think, so different, but now I see it. Not the looks, something else. Don’t you see it, Liesl? Doesn’t he remind you?”
She looked at Ben for a second, then finished her glass. “It’s late,” she said, standing up.
At the hotel there was a message in Ben’s box.
“Someone’s here,” Liesl said, apprehensive.
But it was only a flyer from a bar down the street, offering the first drink free.
“Stop worrying,” Ben said, handing it to her.
“Think how easy it would be to do here. Who would know? Somebody in the alley. Another one.”
They were in the hall now, Kaltenbach opening his door.
“So good-night. Thank you again.” He hugged Ben, clamping him on the back, then kissed Liesl. “You’ll knock?”
“Get some sleep,” Liesl said softly. “Lock the door. You, too,” she said to Ben as they moved down the corridor. “It’s not safe.”
“It is tonight. We’re off the map. For one night, anyway.”
“And then what?” She stopped at the door. “He’s so old,” she said, nodding to Kaltenbach’s room. “All of a sudden.”
“You just haven’t been looking.”
“No, no one has.” She touched the bandage on his nose. “How is your rib?”
He shrugged.
“The brandy will make you sleep. You must be tired. It’s not easy, all this.”
He kissed her forehead. “Easier than getting over the mountain.”
She looked at him, eyes darting across his face, suddenly tearing up.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t do it twice.”
“What, the border?”
“You. Him, now you. What if it happens again?” She ran her hand over her eyes. “It’s the brandy. Go to sleep.”
“It’s going to be all right.”
“How do you know?” she said, her head still down. “Was it all right for him?” She started shaking, fighting back more tears.
Ben put his hand to her cheek. “Stop.”
“It’s too many parts. I can’t do so many.”
“Which one do you want?”
She sniffed, a stifled laugh. “War bride. That’s what I want. Turn here, feel this. Be that. Not these. Heinrich’s memory. Your-your what?” She raised her head. “I can’t do it twice.”
“I’m not him.”
“No,” she said, her head sinking again, her voice breaking. “No one is.”
She began to shake harder, pitching forward with sobs, trying to stop by gulping air, so that for a second he thought she might be sick. And then she was letting go, her shoulders suddenly slack and drooped, as if her body were sliding away from her. He put his hands on her arms, holding her.
“Now I do this,” she said. “After all this time. All this time. My god, what a place.”
He followed her glance down the hall, the dim sconces and fraying carpet.
“Ssh,” he said, letting her forehead fall on his chest, a child who’d just tripped, cut her knee.
“Do you know what he said? When I asked him to stop the work? Do you want me to walk away? The same words. You say it and he’s saying it.” Blurted out in a rush, unscripted. “All day he’s there. Still there.”
She started shaking again, and he put his arms around her, holding her, but then the words came back and this time he listened, went still, the smell of her suddenly different, someone he had never held before. He tried to think of her somewhere else, their own time, but his mind went blank because he saw that she had never been there, already taken, somebody else’s. He drew in a breath, stunned by how fast it had happened. Maybe this is how you died, without warning, without the chance to hold on. One minute it was there and then it wasn’t.
She moved her head back, as if she had felt the shift, too, some fluttering away, and looked at him, biting her lower lip. For a minute neither of them moved, letting the air settle.
“It’s not your fault,” she started, but that seemed wrong and she stepped back, her hand over her mouth. “It’s late. I’m not making sense.”
Rewinding, pretending it hadn’t happened. But too late. “No one is.” Spoken out loud, there, everything different.
“Where’s your key,” he said, a disembodied voice.
“I can do it. I’m sorry.” She was wiping her face. “It’s just-I don’t know. Some foolishness.” But still looking at him, seeing something go out of his face, irretrievable. “Too much brandy.” She put her hand up to his neck, just a touch, uncertain, then turned with her key.
“Lock your door,” he said.
In his own room, still dizzy with it, he stood smoking and looking out the window, the room dark except for the weak pool of light by the reading lamp. There were a few people below, moving in and out of shadows, a car radio playing. Why didn’t it all look different? Everything had changed in a beat and no one in the street had the faintest idea.
Broch had already organized the plane.
“Anna will meet you in Mexico City, so someone you know. There’s a group there, they can help you with the arrangements. Did you have any trouble at the border?”
“No. They didn’t even look.”
“Yes, it’s like that. If you want to stay, of course, you need a permit. You might consider Mexico for a while. It’s not a bad place.”
Broch was short, with thinning hair and a soft German accent, Bavarian or even Austrian.
“You mean here?” Kaltenbach said.
“Well, Mexico City. But of course there are business opportunities here.”
He wore a rumpled tropical suit and Mexican sandals, and Ben imagined him in cafes arranging shipments, border-town business, one eye to the door.
“No, I want to go home,” Kaltenbach said.
Broch looked surprised at the word, but didn’t say anything, then took Ben aside. “Are they looking for him? The authorities?”
“No, no, it’s all right. Nothing illegal. No risk to you.”
“I only ask-” He looked back at Kaltenbach, now huddled with Liesl. “Everyone here is waiting for a quota number. To get in. But he leaves.”
“Can you get him to the airport? We should go.”
There were more hugs, Kaltenbach looking wistful. Liesl had stayed near him all morning, solicitous, but also shy of Ben, watching him with side glances, unsure of things.
“So I’ll see you in the Kino, ” he said to her. “Ten feet high. Make a sign, eh? Like this.” He touched his eyebrow. “Then I know you don’t forget.”
“I won’t forget,” she said, brushing his lapel.
“And you, my friend,” he said to Ben. “I can never repay you.”
“Just don’t tell anyone how you got here. Our secret.”
“Who would ask?”
“They’re going to interview you. You know that. The prodigal son.”
Kaltenbach looked away. “It means wasteful, you know. Maybe it’s true. Wasted years. It’s not serious here. It’s too much sun, I think.” He looked up at the hot Mexican sky, already a bright reflecting tin. “We need clouds sometimes. But what choice was there?”
In the car Liesl was restless, checking the passport in her bag, then turning back to the dusty streets lined with open stalls. When they stopped at a corner a woman in a peasant skirt rushed over to sell them a ceramic Madonna.
“I hate it here,” she said.
“We’re almost out.”
“I saw you give him money,” she said.
“He’ll need it. You think this is bad.” He nodded to the street. “I wish I thought we were doing him a favor. Here we go.” The crossing booths were now just down the street. “Got your passport?”
“Just once, not to be nervous. I think they’re going to send me back. Every time.”
“Don’t worry about the Mexicans.”
“No, them.” She looked toward the American gates. “My own,” she said, ironic. “And with this head. So much to drink last night.” Putting it behind them, one glass too many, the evening hazy and vague. “How do I look?”
He turned. “You look fine.”
But different, as if he had changed glasses, the exact same features subtly altered, a shift in definition. She seemed unaware of it, her skin just as it always was, her hair falling loosely on her shoulders, the way she had looked yesterday. But something had been said and now he saw it through a different lens, everything the same but different.
The Mexican guard barely glanced at their papers, but the American flipped through her passport. “Buy any smokes? Liquor?”
“No.”
“You been away how long?”
“Just overnight.”
“Purpose of your trip.”
“Tourism,” Ben said, deliberately not looking at Liesl, letting the guard do it. An unmarried couple.
He took Ben’s ID card. “Just a minute,” he said, turning in to the booth.
“What’s wrong?” Liesl said under her breath.
“Nothing.”
The guard was on the phone, then he was back. “Okay, pull up over there.” He pointed to a building on the right.
“What’s the trouble?”
“Just pull up over there,” he said, beginning to walk beside the car, still holding their papers.
Two men in suits hurried out. Ben put the car in gear and headed slowly to the building.
“Oh my god,” Liesl said, her voice panicky.
“It’s probably just a spot check,” Ben said, a willed calm.
“Check for what?”
“Get out of the car,” one of the men said. “Hands on the car,” he said when Ben stepped out. The other began to frisk him.
“What’s going on?” Ben said. “Is there some trouble?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“What you have to tell us.”
“You want the cuffs?” the other man said, but the first shook his head.
“Tell you about what?”
The man flipped open a wallet to show an FBI badge.
“Let’s start with espionage.”