Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (29 page)

“Why didn’t you tell me about the film?”

“Because it’s inconsequential in terms of other things that happened.”

“You told me you spat in an SS colonel’s face when he asked you to be his mistress.”

“Because that’s what I did.”

Then I spoke the worst words that ever passed through my lips. “That’s not what you’re doing in the film.”

She set the butcher knife down and stepped back, as though untangling herself from thoughts she didn’t believe herself capable of. “Do you want to know the colonel’s name?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I find out who he is and learn that he’s alive, I’ll go wherever he is and kill him.”

“Tell me what you think you saw.”

“
Think
I saw?”

“Tell me!” She shoved me in the breastbone.

“I won’t discuss it.”

“You watched him fuck me. What else did you see?”

“Don’t you use that language.”

She hit me again in the chest, harder this time, knocking me backward. “Tell me!”

“I just want you to explain how it happened. You were well dressed. You were wearing pearls. You had a white rose in your hair.”

“You’re shocked because of what you saw. I was the person he used and degraded while others watched. How do you think I feel?” This time she made a fist before she hit me. “There’s no way I’ll ever wash him off me.”

“I saw the whole reel. You acted like you were his lover.”

“Because he told me he’d spare my family!” she said.

She slashed at my face, kicking my shins, her thumb reaching for my eyes. I grabbed her with both arms and locked my hands behind her back and lifted her into the air, carrying her into the living room while she fought.

“I understand,” I said. “I was in an artillery barrage that I would have killed my best friend to get out of. I apologize for hurting you. We have to find out who put the reel in my car.”

“Put me down, Weldon. Put me down or I will kill you.”

“I will. Don’t hit me again. Roy Wiseheart said somebody would ruin our names and turn us against each other. That’s what they’re doing to us now. But we’re not going to cooperate with them.”

She started to raise her fists again.

“Did you hear me?” I said, taking her by the wrists. “We’re stronger than these men are. Whatever you were forced to do in that camp has nothing to do with who you are. Whatever happened back there is nothing more than a decaying memory. It has no substance other than as a reminder that you were willing to undergo a torment worse than death to save your family.” I could barely restrain her; she had the body and strength of a woman who had done hard physical work all her life. “Don’t fight me, Rosita,” I said. “Nothing can ever come between us. I’m going to find the men behind this. It’s just a matter of time.”

“And do what?” she asked.

“It’ll be a memorable day in their lives.”

I saw the heat go out of her face, the brightness fade in her eyes. “You were a soldier, but you’re not a violent man,” she said. “You must never become one.”

I released her wrists. “You don’t know me.”

“Don’t do their bidding. That’s what they want. They’ll put someone in your path who’s dispensable. They destroy people’s souls. That’s how they work. They’re cowards, all of them.”

“Grandfather went after Pancho Villa. These guys don’t make the cut.” I put my hands on her shoulders and tried to make her smile.

“You don’t know your enemy,” she said.

“What do you think life was like at Saint-Lô and in the Ardennes?”

“The men who put that film in your car are far worse. They’re your countrymen, too. They have greater power than the Nazis because you don’t believe they’re among us.”

“Could be,” I said. “But you and I are going out for dinner. Then we have a date upstairs. And no one, and I mean no one, will ever harm you again.”

I went into the kitchen and picked up the film can from the drainboard and wrapped it in tinfoil and electrician’s tape, then got a shovel out of the tool closet on the back porch.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“To bury this,” I replied. “Maybe it’ll stay in the ground forever. If I find the men behind it, I’ll dig it up and pack it down their throats with a broom handle. That’s not a metaphor.”

M
YTHOS IS USUALLY
created to justify the self-indulgence of those who control the lives of others. Dalton Wiseheart’s reputation as an iconoclast was no exception. The supposedly humorous stories told about him were not funny. He called up people in the middle of the night and forced them to make business decisions when their minds were fogged and their defenses weak. He took his private plane to pick up business associates in New York or Los Angeles and have them flown to a hangar in a remote section of Nevada or Utah. After he concluded his business, he flew away and let them get home on their own.

He carried a sack lunch to his office. At Christmastime, he gave bottles of deodorant to black employees. One night a year he rented every girl in Norma Wallace’s brothel on Conti Street in New Orleans. He watched 1930s black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoons at a drive-in theater on South Main, where admission consisted of the ten cents a patron was required to spend on a mug of root beer. He left nickel tips at Jimmy’s Coney Island and used a water witch to drill for oil. He spent twenty-six hours at a Reno poker table, then put his six-figure winnings in a canvas bag and stuffed it in the poor box of a rundown church on the edge of town.

He had no pattern. That was obviously his goal. No one knew his thoughts or plans. He could buy a banana republic with a personal check or take a nap in his car at a traffic light; one had about as much importance as the other. Grandfather always said the man to kill you will be the one taking out your throat before you realize you’re wearing a red bib. I think Grandfather may have had Dalton Wiseheart in mind.

I wanted to find Dalton and ask if he had seen my wife’s degradation on the film that he or his minions had gotten from a British or American intelligence agency. I wanted to ask what it felt like to be a coward and a character assassin. I wanted to humiliate him in public and tell him I couldn’t do him physical harm because of his age; otherwise, I would probably take a whip to him.

My head was filled with my own vituperative rhetoric, repressed anger turning in my chest like a set of kitchen knives. Wealth buys not only control and transcendence but inaccessibility. Dalton Wiseheart had turned to smoke.

I tried to get to him through Roy. His wife hung up on me again, and his secretary told me he had left for Los Angeles on the Sunset Limited.

“Oh yes, I think I remember his mentioning that,” I said. “Can you give him a message?”

“He’s still on the train.”

“Is he staying at the hotel he normally uses?”

“Nice try,” she replied.

A week passed. I worked out of our office downtown and left Hershel in charge of our projects in Louisiana. Then I received a call I didn’t expect. “This is Jack Valentine,” the voice said. “I need to talk with you.”

“You want to have another get-together with Bugsy Siegel?” I said.

“Siegel is dead.”

“What?”

“Somebody shot him through his window in Beverly Hills. His eye was blown out of his head. The photo was in the paper. Maybe he wasn’t so tough after all.”

“Why are you calling me?”

“We’re on the same side. We can help each other.”

“Wrong on both counts,” I said.

“Wait till you hear what I have to say. That cunt is in the middle of it.”

“What did you say?”

“I’m talking about Linda Gail Pine. Get off your high horse. They’re going to cook the flesh off your bones, Holland. I know who’s going to do it, and I know how. You want to talk or not?”

Valentine gave me the name of a bowling alley. I found him in the lounge. He wore a fedora and a brown shirt with a red-and-silver-striped tie, zoot trousers hitched up on his sides. He was drinking a beer at the bar. A pinball machine was dinging just inside the door, the maple-floored bowling lanes echoing with the explosion of wood pins. I sat down on a stool next to him. “You always hold your business meetings here?” I said.

“Some people have electronic ears, know what I mean?” he replied. “You ever hear a clicking sound on your telephone?”

“Somebody has my phone tapped?”

“What do you think?”

“I think I don’t trust you.”

“Linda Gail got me fired.”

“How?”

“Through Roy Wiseheart.”

“Too bad.”

“I want my job back. He’s your friend. I’ll give you his number. You get me my job back, I’ll give you everything you want.”

“What is it you think I want?”

“I know all their secrets. I know who’s blackmailing who, I know who’s screwing who. I know they’re going to hang you up by your scrotum.”

“Can you tell me why ‘they’ want to do that?”

“You grew up down here, right? A coon gets out of line, they give him a warning. Next time around, they take the skin off his back. He does it again, they bounce him off a tree limb. Hollywood works the same way.”

“What do I have to do with Hollywood?”

He shook his head as though he had been talking to someone of diminished capacity. “I hear you got a private screening of your wife’s film talents. That was for openers, Holland.”

“You know about the Nazi film reel?”

“Word gets around.”

He was smirking. I picked up his bottle of beer and poured it on his fly. “You don’t want to come near me again, Mr. Valentine.”

When I walked out of the lounge, the sound of the bumpers on the pinball machine seemed to have crawled inside my head, growing louder and louder, turning to flashes of light behind my eyes, reaching a crescendo that left my ears popping.

L
INDA GAIL’S AGENT
was Morton Lutz and had been introduced to her by Roy Wiseheart. Roy said “Moe” was a rare man in Hollywood and would not deceive or cheat her. He lived in Pasadena with his wife and five children and looked like a pink whale stuffed inside a three-piece suit with a red boutonniere in the lapel. When he smiled, which was most of the time, his eyes disappeared inside his face. Moe told Linda Gail she was a “nice goil.” They were standing in the garden outside the Beverly Hills Hotel, waiting to go inside and sign a contract whose content made Linda Gail’s head swim.

“I’m nervous,” she said.

“What’s to be nervous?” he asked.

“I don’t understand how the contract works. I’m being sold to Warner Brothers?”

“Something is happening here that doesn’t happen often,” he replied. “It’s all because of Roy Wiseheart. Castle Productions is letting you go to a studio that is going to pay you ninety thousand dollars a year. Warner Brothers is very happy to do that. What does that tell you?”

“I don’t know.”

“It tells you if you belong to a church, put something extra in the basket.”

“I feel funny calling you Moe.”

“If you don’t call me Moe, I won’t know who you’re talking to. Where would that leave us?”

“I’m getting a break because of Roy?”

“Call it that. Castle is letting you go because of him. The money Warner Brothers is paying for your contract is not a break and not connected to him. That’s the kind of money you’re worth. This bunch doesn’t spend money to give people breaks or make them feel good. The money gets spent to make more money.”

There was a newspaper folded in his coat pocket. He moved into the shade under a palm tree and put on his reading glasses. “You’re in Louella Parsons’s column this morning,” he said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“This is what she says: ‘Linda Gail Pine is the freshest and brightest thing since the invention of flowers and sunshine.’” He lowered the newspaper. “You’re so innocent, butterflies light on your hair. Look.” He used the back of his hand to lift a Mourning Cloak butterfly off her shoulder. He set it down in a flowerbed. “You ready to go inside?”

“What do I say?”

“Nothing. You’ll go home rich. In a week you’ll be famous. After that, who knows?”

“What’s that mean?”

“We’ll talk,” he said.

She thought he was about to make another joke. But he didn’t. And his smile had disappeared.

The signing of the contracts inside the meeting room was formal and perfunctory; it reminded her of people meeting at a bus stop and exchanging pleasantries and disappearing ten minutes later into their own lives.

She had lunch with Moe in the dining room. Through the window, she could see the golf course and the swimming pool and the shade trees and the cottages where the most famous celebrities in the world stayed. “You waiting for Roy?” he asked.

“Yes, he said he would meet us.”

“He called and said he got tied up. I forgot to tell you.”

“Oh,” she said.

“It’s just as well.”

“Why?”

“Because I got to tell you a couple of things,” he said. “These are not things meant to offend you. So when I say them, they are not directed at you. These are the rules that apply to everybody out here. It doesn’t matter who. You can do almost anything you want in this town, and that means sleep with almost anybody you want to, but you got to be careful. You know what John Huston always says? You got to respect your audience. That means you got to look and act like the sweet goil that lives next door. The goil next door doesn’t wake up in the morning not remembering where she left her panties.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t talk to me like that.”

“I’m not saying these things about you. I’m talking about the rules. There are two things out here you don’t go near. Narcotics is one. For you I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. You know what the other one is, don’t you?”

“No,” she replied.

“Some of the writers here are Reds. At least they pretend to be. Most of them read
The
Wall Street Journal
every morning. You know any Communists?”

“In Bogalusa, Louisiana?”

“That’s what I thought. Good for you. You and your husband are busted up?”

“Pardon?”

“That’s what Roy said. Maybe I got it wrong. There he comes now, on the edge of the pond in the golf course, splashing his trouser cuffs. That’s what I call a different sort of guy. A war hero blasting Japs out of the sky, more money than King Farouk, a face that melts the ladies’ hearts, and not one friend he didn’t have to buy.”