"Austria, huh? Always wanted to go to Vienna and see those white horses. You know, the ones that dance around on their back legs?"
I looked at him questioningly.
"The postmark. Austria?" He pointed to the package in my hands. What the hell was Veronica doing in Austria?
When he left, I continued standing there, looking at the package. I gave it a gingerly squeeze and shake. Felt like a book or a video. The last two videotapes I'd watched had sent my life into serious fibrillations: The first had introduced me to Veronica's porno career, the second had documented the end of David Cadmus's life. I wasn't sure I wanted to see what was on this one. But Veronica in Austria was too intriguing and I knew I had to look.
I opened the envelope and took out the tape. There was no label, nothing describing what was on it. Wrapped around it was a handwritten letter in the emerald green ink she liked so much.
Sam,
There are over five hundred people named Bayer in the Vienna phone book, but I found who I was looking for. You'll understand if you watch this. I hope you do. It's only the rough cut, but it'll give you an idea of what I'm trying to do. Working on it made me miss you so much I sometimes couldn't breathe. But I've done so many things wrong that this separation now is the best thing.
I hope your book is going well. I treasure the memory of that sunny morning in Seattle when you told me the idea for the first time. I kept saying to myself, "He is telling me the story of his new book. The one he hasn't even begun yet!"
Thank you for making many dreams come true. Thank you for watching this film, if you do find the time. Even if we had never met, it would make me so proud to know Samuel Bayer spent part of a day watching something I did. I mean that with all my heart.
I put her tape right into the machine.
It began with toast. That familiar scratchy noise of someone buttering a piece of toast. Black screen, scratchy sound. Then a male voice starts to speak and, recognizing it even before his face appeared, I hooted with glee.
"Samuel Bayer is a dreadful writer! He was also a dreadful student in class. It amazes me how successful he has become with those tepid little thrillers he writes." My old high school English teacher (and Pauline's) Mr. Tresvant stops buttering. Sighing, he shakes his head. He is in a bathrobe with a pattern on it that looks like 1950s wallpaper. The robe is open at the throat. His scrawny neck and old man's wattles are sad and unattractive. There are a bunch of moles across his chest, things we students never saw because Mr. Tresvant's shirts were always buttoned right up to the top. He takes a bite of toast. Crumbs fall down around him but he pays no attention. How did Veronica convince the uptight fuddy-duddy to go on camera in his robe and pajamas? One of the most controlled people I'd ever known, he looks here like a bum in an eleven-dollar-a-night Utah motel room.
He rambles on, all grumble and gripe. Veronica's brilliant trick is to shoot him in such a way that after a while you don't believe a word he says. This old man is one repellent flop of a human being. Why would you want to hear, much less trust, his opinion on anything?
Off camera, Veronica asks, "Why aren't you proud that one of your former students went on to become a world-famous writer?"
Tresvant sneers. "One should never take credit for participating in mediocrity." He looks away and takes another bite of toast. More crumbs fall. A small piece sticks to the corner of his mouth. He doesn't notice. The camera lingers on him. It is lethal because everything about this man – his pretentious tone, the dingy robe and unshaven face – exudes nothing but mediocrity.
"Would you like to hear what Bayer said about you?" Veronica's voice is emotionless.
Which stops the old pedant in midchew. His toast goes down and the eyes narrow. You can see he thought she was just going to let him pontificate and throw all the punches. Not so, lago.
But right there the film blacks out! What the hell did Bayer say about Tresvant?
The picture comes back up. I'm in a hotel room, pulling on a pair of pink socks. When we traveled together, Veronica carried a small video camera with her everywhere. I never paid attention after the first days because it seemed to be her third eye – she was always filming something.
Socks on, I sit back and smile. "School? The only thing I learned there was what I didn't like. That's what school's for – it teaches you what to avoid the rest of your life. Cell mitosis, calculus, the complete works of George Bernard Shaw . . . things like that."
Cut to a horse-drawn carriage, clopping down Vienna's Ringstrasse. I knew that beautiful street from one of my many honeymoons – this time with Cassandra's mother.
I had casually mentioned to Veronica that both sides of my family came from Vienna. She remembered. She found great-uncle Klaus and his adorable fat wife, Suzy. They gave her an inspired guided tour of the Bayer family's Vienna. The stories they told, the sights she chose to show, the way she segued from one thing to another – all of it was riveting.
From the top of St. Stephen's Church they talked about the Bayer who had helped rebuild the cathedral roof after it was destroyed by Allied bombing at the end of World War II. Over dinner of Tafelspitz at the King of Hungary Hotel, they described the distant cousin who had been Gustav Mahler's favorite tailor.
Any family memoir is a flock of small stories that periodically collide with history's propellers. The Bayers were no different. Although I was nominally the subject of her film, Veronica chose to paint a much larger, more panoramic picture. By cutting back and forth across time, across continents, from the astonishing to the forgettable, she was able to paint one of those gigantic canvases that portray whole battles, or the building of the Tower of Babel, a day in the life of a great city.
When the story returned to me and my life, she interviewed people and showed events I had forgotten long ago. I kept blinking or gasping, "That's right! God, I forgot all about that." I was spellbound throughout, and not just because it was my own life on the screen. She chose a narrative line so precise and encompassing that the result was the most thorough and loving biography any person could ever hope for. It saddened me because it brilliantly displayed a side of Veronica Lake I had never seen but could only admire. How I wished things had gone differently between us. Here was a great love letter. Tragically, it was created by a woman who came as close to scaring me as any intimate I had ever known.
Frannie watched as I ferried back and forth from my car to the house, carrying boxes and bags full of mysterious things I hoped would rouse him from his thousand-year sleep.
At a good market in my town I had bought a large array of groceries, hoping he'd take one look at the bounty on his kitchen counter and be inspired to help me cook a few fabulous meals.
After my third trip, he followed me out to the car in his pajamas.
"What is all this?"
"Resurrection soup."
"What do you mean?" He put both arms behind his back. Standing there shrunken in his wrinkled pajamas and flyaway hair he looked like an alumni from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
I hoisted a jumbo bag of groceries out of the trunk. "Frannie, have you noticed I'm busting my ass here lugging these groceries? How 'bout throwing on a robe and joining the process?"
Once we'd gotten everything into the kitchen, I pushed him out and said he could come back when I was ready. It took a while because the look and presentation had to be both dramatic and inspiring. I did my best. When it was done, I thought it looked pretty damned spiffy.
A few minutes before, the telephone rang but I barely heard it. Coming out of the kitchen, I heard him laughing very loudly. I was thrilled when I got him to answer anything with a full sentence. Who could reach him to laugh like that?
He was alone talking on his portable phone, wearing a big happy smile. He waved when he saw me and held up a finger for me to wait a second. "Here's the man, fresh out of the kitchen. He's doing something mysterious in there and won't let me see. You wanna talk to him?" He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, "It's Veronica."
&n
bsp; My eyebrows went up as far as they could go. The only contact I'd had with her in weeks was the videotape from Vienna. He pulled the phone away from his ear, as if whoever was on the other end of the line was shouting at him.
"All right, all right, take it easy, Veronica! You don't have to talk to him. What? Yeah, okay. Bye." He pressed the disconnect button and dropped the phone into his robe pocket. "Whoa! What did you do to the girl? She totally freaked out."
I tried to speak calmly. "Frannie, Veronica called you?"
"Sure she has, every day. She's been as nice as you since I've been sick, Sam. Comes by, cooks, calls . . . She's a good woman. I'm sorry things haven't been working out between you two."
"She comes and cooks for you? Why didn't you tell me this?"
"Because she asked me not to. That's her right. I gotta respect it. Besides, she's been so kind to me, you can't believe –"
I put up a denying hand. "How did she know you were shot?"
"She was going to interview me for your movie, but then it happened. Been watching over me ever since. I got all these guardian angels around me these days. I'm a lucky guy."
"McCabe, if you knew some of the things about Veronica that I know, you'd arrest her."
"What, the thing about cutting your pen in two? She told me! I laughed my ass off. Sam, the woman's a bucking bronco. She knows that, and that's probably why you like her, if you'll just admit it to yourself. You can't have everything safe and comfy when you're with her. That's part of her attraction."
I looked at the floor and told myself several times that this was a sick man who needed gentle treatment. "Come in the kitchen and take a look."
"At what?" He walked over and bumped me with his hip. "We're not having an affair, Sam. She's nice to me. That's all. You gotta be grateful to women who are nice to you." For the first time in weeks, he had the old impish glint in his eye. "You know what I've been thinking about today? I was just telling Veronica: high school. I've been thinking how we used to walk down those halls so fuckin' sure of ourselves. A hundred and fifty pounds of sperm. Remember that immortal feeling? We were King Kong, Teflon, radioactive, and free as a dollar you find in the street. Everything was imminent, you know what I mean? Everything was right around the corner, due to arrive any minute. And we had no doubt it would arrive because it had to. Because we were us! That's what's great about being a kid: You know things are going to work out and you can beat every guy in the house."
I cooked dinner that night, but for the first time in ages Frannie pitched in by chopping leeks and dicing potatoes. I had to order him to stop turning on and off the new Cuisinart I'd bought, but he didn't suggest TV when we were done. We spent the rest of the evening talking about the good old days. My hopes were up.
The next morning there was something on the windshield of my car. It had snowed the night before, and this early in the morning everything was silent and still, covered in white. The air smelled cold and clear with a touch of wood smoke in there somewhere. I stood on the porch looking around, enjoying being outside while things were still wearing their white hats, untouched. A bird flew off a tree branch causing snow to drift lightly down. The sky was full of dark clouds whizzing by. I heard a car coming, its tires hissing on the wet pavement. A black Lexus rolled slowly by, the color contrasting starkly with the white world around it. A good-looking blond was driving and to my great delight gave a big wave. I understood. Here we were, just the two of us out in this picture-postcard morning, all ours for a little while longer. Hello there, isn't it great? I waved back with two hands just as the car went around the corner, adding glowing red taillights and gray exhaust smoke to the picture.
Smith, McCabe's cat, stood on the other side of the street looking at me. The color of orange marmalade, he stood out vividly against the snow. It surprised me that Frannie kept any pet. The tough guy I knew years ago would have owned a psychotic pit bull or a Komodo dragon. But adult McCabe got a real kick out of a cat.
It leaped up onto the hood of my car and froze, only his tail curling back and forth in the air. Another car passed. Then I noticed my windshield had been cleared of snow and a piece of paper was under the wiper. Had I gotten a ticket? Parked in front of the chief of police's house?
Approaching the car, I listened to the snow crunching beneath the soles of my sneakers. My shoes were much too thin for the weather and I felt the cold through them in no time. Smith stayed on my car, impassively watching as I walked toward him.
"What's under the windshield?"
He looked at me with nary a flicker in his impassive gold eyes. I reached over and lifted the wiper. Beneath it was a standard-size envelope wrapped inside a plastic bag. I took my pocketknife and slit through the plastic, then the envelope itself. Inside was a Polaroid of my daughter and Ivan walking down a street, smiling at each other. The photographer could not have been more than three feet away from them. On the back of the picture was a green Post-it with this message typed on it:
"Hi, Sam! I want to read what you have written so far. Put it on a disk (MS-DOS, please) and send it to Veronica Lake. I will tell her what to do with it.
"Don't tell anyone about this. Cassandra is pretty. Act fast."
Closing my eyes, I tried to swallow but couldn't. Suddenly there wasn't enough oxygen on the planet to fill my lungs. My daughter? This scumbag had been killing people for thirty years. Now he knew who Cassandra was and had gotten close enough to photograph her? I realized I was talking out loud. Of course he'd gotten close to her. This was the same man who had left the videotape on Cadmus's doorstep, a taunting note on my papers after the lecture in New Jersey, pizza on McCabe's porch.
But why send it to Veronica? How did she fit into this? Was she in contact with the killer, or was she being used by him for some unknown purpose?
My daughter! He had stood a few feet away from her. She and Ivan had walked by, oblivious to everything but their shared happiness.
I looked at the photograph again and realized it had been taken from directly in front of the couple. They'd probably seen him, but would they remember? Kids don't see anything but themselves, especially when they're in love.
My manuscript was already on computer disk. There would be no trouble copying it and sending it to Veronica, but then what?
The thought was unbearable. He said I shouldn't talk to anyone, but I had to ask Frannie – the cop, my friend, the person who had been as close to this story as anyone.
"Do what he wants, Sam. Make a copy and send it to him. What else can you do? Why are you even asking? He said don't tell a soul. Well I'm a soul."
"Frannie, for God's sake! You're the only one I know who knows about this kind of crap. I've got to hear what you think I should do. I'm lost here, man! This is my daughter! Do you understand? Cassandra! The dirty son of a bitch was this far away from her. Have a fucking heart, willya? Be a little helpful in this situation!"
We stood in the kitchen. For the first time in ages he was dressed in normal clothes – a pullover, jeans, boots. At another time, I would have rejoiced at the change in him. But it was today and a blade was an inch from my neck and maybe Cassandra's.
Before I showed him the note he had been full of good cheer and wisecracks. Now he had his hand on the button of the Cuisinart again and kept switching it on and off as he had the night before. Only now it was every second and so annoying I wanted to throw the thing out the window. I didn't have to.
When I finished accusing him, my chin was stuck out so far I could feel the cords of my neck stretching. He did nothing but look at his hand on the machine. On off on off on . . . Then without any warning, he scooped up the gadget and heaved it like a fastball against the refrigerator. Ka-bam! Parts exploded in every direction. It had been so long since I'd seen how strong Frannie was. When we were young, McCabe did things in fights that amazed everyone. You never, ever, not even in your dreams, messed with Frannie McCabe.
Yanking his sweater up, he pointed at the large white bandage across his
stomach. "I was shot! Guy put a hole here 'cause he wanted me dead. Understand? I can't help you with your kid, Sam. Sorry, but my tank's empty at the moment because I'm scared too. He's after me, you, Cass, everybody! And we're not gonna win this time, brother.
"You can be good, you can be moral . . . So What? Fuuuuck you! You still die, because some nobody don't like the way you breathe. Now you're beginning to understand it. I saw it in Nam, I saw it here, and now they got me. Look at what happened to Pauline! Makes absolutely no sense, and that was thirty years ago. Compared to today, things were safe then! She fights with her boyfriend while some mass murderer's watching. Guy doesn't even know her but kills her anyway! Hey, why not, she's pretty. So her poor husband goes to jail, gets the shit beat out of him, goes nuts . . . Come on!
"I give up, Sam. I admit it. I'm gonna sit in my house, watch videos and listen to The Pirates of Penzance. What should you do? Show the guy your book. Save your daughter. Save your ass. Forget the rest."
To my immense relief and dismay, Veronica acted like an angel. With great reluctance, I called and told her about the killer's demand. She was aghast to hear about the photograph of Cassandra and said she would do whatever she could to help.
Neither of us said anything about what had happened between us recently. Hearing her voice again, part of me melted, another part stiffened and wanted to shout, "Why did you lie to me? I need to trust you now, but how can I?" But I kept my mouth shut because I desperately needed her, Cass needed her, and what she had to do to help could be extremely dangerous.
How would the killer contact her once she had the disk? I despised him for putting me in this spot. Why couldn't I just have sent it to him at an untraceable address, or drop it off someplace –
"Because he wants you to know how much he knows about your life," she said gently. "Maybe he shot Frannie, he sent that envelope to Durant with the old clippings, took the picture of Cassandra . . . Think about it. It's intimidation, Sam. He wants you to feel him breathing in your face."
Kissing the Beehive Page 16
