“Yeah, I’m keeping all options open,” I said. I smiled at her. “You’ve got me at quite a disadvantage, you know. This dossier of mine, I mean. My life on paper as written by others than myself for once. You having access to all that is not good and certainly not fair, because I know hardly anything about you.”
“We’ve got time now,” she said. “Ask.”
I faltered.
Duff said, “How about my middle name?”
I smiled. “Sure. How about that?”
“Mildred,” she said. “Named in honor of a grandmother I never met. Horrid name. I don’t ever use it. I’m just Duff Sexton.”
“That surname? Sexton’s not your married name?”
“Maiden name. I kept it.” She shook her head, looking out the window. “I had a small career going in entertainment. Singing in clubs. I thought I was going to be doing it professionally and didn’t want to lose the little marquee value I thought I’d earned for myself. My husband hated me not taking his name. But he let me do it anyway.”
I grasped his position. She was that kind of female—the kind of woman for whom a man would swallow his pride. The kind of woman to make a man cede principles, relax otherwise rigorous standards of personal conduct. If you were married to Duff Sexton, did you really need her to carry your last name?
I said, “My first wife kept her last name, too. Just didn’t care for the name Lassiter, I guess.” I hesitated, then said, carefully, “Your husband—his passing?”
Ah, Duff, so blunt: “How’d it happen? That’s what you’re wondering, isn’t it?”
“If you don’t mind,” I said.
“Without getting too specific, it was in the early days of the resistance,” she said. “Things were still, oh, rough. Unorganized. There were early days kinds of problems, you know? They cost him his life.” Duff tipped her head back against the seat. “I hated him for getting involved in all of it. From the first, I wanted him to run. I was desperate to hightail it back to the States and to hide from history. Bolt to California, maybe Washington State. Anywhere, really, but Europe.”
Squirming a bit, I reached down, fumbling around my boot with my left hand. I handed her the flask of Glenmorangie. “Your present involvement in the OSS and the resistance—what’s that about? Penitence? Revenge?”
Was that a little flare of anger in those pretty blue eyes? I accepted the flask back, took a swig, then handed it to her again. She ran her fingers back through her hair once more. It somehow looked redder in the dark. She sipped more whisky. “Both, I guess. But there’s more, too. Friends, family of my husband’s, they were made to wear these yellow stars. Some Jews began disappearing. Even children, like that little girl back there.”
“I know. Like I said, I’m not over here looking for book material. I tried to sit this one out a while, too, at first. Just like our motherland did. It got under the skin of some folks in Spain because I wouldn’t engage the Fascists there directly at the time.”
“Why?”
“Even in early 1937, when I was in Madrid, it was clearly a lost cause,” I said. “By ’39, or so, I knew this was the fight, and one we’d have to win.”
“This little girl—think we’ll make it? Will we really save her, Hector?”
“Sure, we’ll do it.”
Duff laughed softly. “Is that cocky you, blarney you, or is it sincere you venturing that baseless guess?”
“Jimmy would probably tell you it’s all three.”
“But what would you say?”
“I mean to save her. And I mean to deny Werner Höttl his desires.”
“Revenge? Penitence?”
I sighed. “Maybe both.”
Duff surprised me by taking my hand in hers. “You said you met Höttl another time after the 1920s.”
“Yes,” I squeezed her hand.
“Was that in Paris, too?”
“Nah. We crossed paths again in Berlin, in 1929. I went there on some film business, again.”
“Another of your works?”
“No, a screenwriting thing. I was brought in to punch up some dialogue and inject some character business.”
“Another of your pirated works?”
“No, someone else’s screenplay that wasn’t quite up to snuff,” I said. “It’s where I got my start in that business, really.”
“Might I have heard of this film?”
“Perhaps. It was called The Blue Angel. Josef von Sternberg was the director. Marlene Dietrich was the star. Well, eventually she was. It was the movie that really launched the Kraut.”
“Marlene, ‘the Kraut.’ Another of your famous friends and a KA entry,” Duff said. “That where you met her?”
“No. We just missed each other, that time. She hadn’t yet been cast in the role. I met Marlene in Hollywood, in 1932, on the set of Blonde Venus. That was another von Sternberg picture. He and several other German filmmakers had fled for the States by then, already eager to escape Nazi Germany, even if it meant trying to start over in Depression era America. But there in Berlin, in 1929? Höttl was there.”
BERLIN,
SEPTEMBER 1929
Hector had tried to stay on his best behavior during the previous evening’s dizzying, noisy, liquor-soaked crawl through the bars and nightclubs of decadent Berlin.
He had nursed drinks or let comely women commandeer them. He’d stayed dangerously sober as director Josef von Sternberg led Hector and a few others attached to von Sternberg’s new film, The Blue Angel, through a procession of smoky cabarets and jazz clubs.
Von Sternberg had eventually taken them to a lesbian bar called Maly where the femininely dressed women wore violets pinned to their dresses. After that, the director had hauled them to transvestite bars in which some of the people wearing slinky dresses might even have been actual women.
“It’s vital that you absorb the atmosphere, the milieu for our nightclub setting when we start filming,” von Sternberg said. He’d argued this position when Hector and a few others had balked at being ordered to the lesbian and, especially, the transvestite joints.
Standing sweating and a little drunk in the first of the cross-dressing joints—some place called Eldorado—brushing his unruly hair back off his forehead, the director said, “This is Berlin!” He was flanked by a pair of six-foot, two-inch blondes, both of them a bit broad at the shoulder, a bit too-possessed of too-prominent Adams apples. They were wrapped in snazzy, spangled cocktail gowns.
Hector had begged off at that point, choosing to make it an early evening much to the annoyance—perhaps even the disgust—of von Sternberg. But Hector didn’t care about any of that. He was tired of the director’s insistence upon steeping his crew in Berlin’s decadent nightlife. Hector was no Pollyanna, and von Sternberg’s campaign to that end had started almost from the moment Hector had stepped off the train at the Am Zoo railroad station a week before.
For his part, Hector was much more enamored with wandering through the city dayside, exploring the copious gardens, the parks and the forests that abutted the cityscape in several locations.
As to feminine companionship, Hector was drawn to the civilian female population of the city, not the bawdy and often coarse working girls selling themselves on the streets and in the bizarre nightclubs of decadent Berlin.
Decadent, yes, that was certainly the word for the city. And it was a city headed down a dark path, Hector sensed.
In one of the parks, the bucolic surroundings were undercut by a group of men, all members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Wearing matching crimson armbands emblazoned with black swastikas, they were singing an off-key but enthusiastic rendition of “Germany Awake”:
Wir wollen kämpfen für dein Auferstehn
Arisches Blut soll nicht untergehn!
We want to fight for your resurgence!
Aryan blood should not perish!
***
It was half-past-eight in the morning and raining hard in Berlin. Hector sat in an artist�
�s café on Rankestrasse, sipping bitter black coffee, watching the scurrying, sodden pedestrians and exchanging occasional inquiring looks with a pretty blonde at an adjacent table when Josef von Sternberg plopped down across from Hector.
The director shrugged off his soaking coat and tossed it across the back of an adjacent chair. The mustachioed Austrian was broad-shouldered and rather thick across the chest, but not very tall—actually several inches shorter than Hector. Von Sternberg wore a blue blazer, white pants and a black beret. He whipped off the hat, slung it on the table, then ran his fingers back through his unruly, graying hair. He rubbed his temples, wincing. “Such a headache, I have!”
Hangover, more likely, Hector thought.
The director said, “Where did you go after you abandoned me last night?”
“I spent a quiet evening with my typewriter,” Hector said. He signaled the waiter he was ready for another coffee. “So, in your seedy wanderings through the underbelly of Berlin, did you find your leading lady?”
Von Sternberg was desperately looking for an actress to portray “Lola-Lola,” a dancer and femme fatale in the “Blue Angel Cabaret.”
“No, not yet,” von Sternberg said. “I think that my friend, her name is Leni Rifensthal, desperately wants the part, though she hasn’t come right out and asked me for the role. She’s wrong for it, at any rate. Every woman so far is wrong for it. This woman at Der Blau Engel, she must be a sublime temptress. A consummate Circe.”
“The kind of woman a man would burn his life down for,” Hector said, “I know.” Hector specialized in writing such women.
“That’s it, exactly,” von Sternberg said. He appropriated Hector’s second coffee as the waiter sat it on the table. He said to the waiter, “I’ll need cream and sugar for this, too.”
“And a second black coffee,” Hector said, eyeing his stolen java.
“It would be easier, marginally easier, I think, if we weren’t filming in German and in English,” von Sternberg said.
The director was essentially making the same film twice, one version for the domestic market and one for the English-speaking world. The Blue Angel bore the added weight of being Germany’s first major talkie.
“I’m having a meal at Horsch’s,” he said. “I’m taking another look at this actress, Marlene Dietrich. Why don’t you come, Hector?”
The waiter handed Hector his coffee. “A meal? That’s all?” He sipped his coffee, then said, “The event won’t devolve into another freak show sortie through strange cabarets and bottom-feeder nightclubs?”
“Not this time, Hector, no. I’m taking this woman’s measure, that’s all. I’m asking Werner to come, too.”
“Werner?”
“A kind of protégé, studio ordered, if it matters. I met him through Leni. They both have directing ambitions. I think Leni is probably the more promising of the two, but that may change after Werner has worked with me a for a time. He’ll learn. What about you, my friend? Do you perhaps want to direct, too?”
Hector smiled and shook his head. “I write—that’s all. This cinema business, I don’t know how hard I mean to pursue this stuff down the road.”
“You don’t see the medium’s power?” Von Sternberg struck Hector as incredulous and angered by Hector’s admission. “Film will kill books, you’ll see.”
“It’s not like that at all,” Hector said. “Film is a collaborative medium, Josef. I’m more of a solitary artist, I think. And this notion of actors and actresses trying to fix my dialogue on the fly grates, frankly. Anyway, tell me more about this Werner, fella. What’s the guy’s last name?”
It didn’t come as a particular surprise:
“Höttl. Werner Höttl.” Von Sternberg sipped his sweetened, diluted coffee and shrugged. “That name will have to be changed, of course. If he ever wants to direct in your homeland, that is.”
Several years before, when von Sternberg had come to America to direct films in Los Angeles, he had also been made to tinker with his name. That “von,” for one thing—it was an addition insisted upon by some studio-type who thought it made the director’s name “more regal sounding.”
Watching Hector’s reaction, von Sternberg narrowed his eyes. “You know Werner, don’t you? And you don’t like him. I can tell.”
“I might even loathe him if I gave him any serious thought,” Hector said. “We had… a scuffle. It was in Paris a few years ago. He insulted and even tried to physically attack Gertrude Stein.”
Von Sternberg looked skeptical. “Are you serious? Why? What was the problem? Her pretension, perhaps?”
Josef von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg to Viennese Orthodox Jewish parents. Knowing that, Hector went ahead and said it. “Huh-uh. It was Gertrude’s Jewishness. Also a little something over some things she said about the head of the Nazi party.”
The director waved that last away. “The thing to do with the Nazis is to ignore them,” he said. “A passing fad, at best. Political winds will shift, as they always do, and the Socialists will soon be swept from power. Just politics. As to Werner’s behavior, well, I’ve always maintained the only way to succeed is to make people hate you. That way they remember you.”
Hector couldn’t quite buy into that philosophy. He said, “I’ll think about your dinner invitation, Josef. I have no trouble seeing him again, but if Werner is to be there, too, well, I somehow doubt he’ll be as sanguine about a reunion.”
“I’ll lecture him,” von Sternberg said. He stroked his thick moustache. “I would have your opinion of this woman, Hector. Your opinion as a writer, an artist, an audience member, and not the least, as a noted lady’s man. I know Marlene will be acceptable to German audiences, this film will make her a star here. But you have a better sense of American tastes. I need Yankee men to want to bed her.”
Hector rubbed the back of his neck. “And so why would Werner be there?”
“I told you, he’s a protégé,” von Sternberg said. He put back on his beret. “You didn’t actually strike Werner, did you, Hector?”
“Hell I didn’t. And just as hard as I could, Josef.”
Von Sternberg just shook his head. “So juvenile. So American.”
***
Killing time before dinner, Hector decided to wander the seedier corners of Berlin, solo lobo. First, he had fortified himself with some theatre—Kurt Weill.
Humming “Surabaya Johnny,” the tune presently stuck in his head, Hector warily made his way down the sin-soaked streets. Prostitutes, underdressed for the weather, tried to catch his eye. Having walked the district for half-an-hour, he figured he’d gotten—and on his own terms—more than enough of the flavor for Lola-Lola’s tawdry world.
So he veered back to the better parts of the city, looking for another park he might wander in the rain.
It was then he got his first sense of being followed. Two German soldiers were shadowing his steps at some distance. Hector didn’t think they were following him with any particular intent, not yet, anyway.
Cursing under his breath, Hector headed back to his hotel. He’d loaf there for a time, let the bastards lose interest in him.
***
More pounding rain. Hector’s cab rolled up curbside in front of Horsch’s, splashing rainwater from the swollen gutters several feet onto the sidewalk.
Hector settled up with the cabbie, then slid out and trotted under the offered umbrella of a doorman to the shelter of the restaurant.
Across the street, a couple of Nazi party members were standing in the rain, trying to force leaflets on the soggy passers-by. They were boisterously singing:
Wir werden weiter marschieren
Wenn alles in Scherben fällt,
Denn heute da hört uns Deutschland
Und morgen die ganze Welt….
We shall march onwards,
even if everything crashes down in pieces;
for today Germany hears us,
and tomorrow, the whole world…
The men watched Hect
or closely as he trotted into the restaurant.
Hector shrugged off his long black overcoat. He slid the coat check ticket in his suit-jacket pocket and shook out a cigarette. Flicking closed his Zippo, he blew some smoke and said to the hostess, “Von Sternberg, party of four.”
The hostess was honey blond. She smiled with not particularly good teeth and said, “Herr Sternberg hasn’t arrived yet, but another member of your party was seated a few minutes ago. This way, please.”
“Danke.” Hector figured it was fifty-fifty: the first arriving party was this actress, Marlene Dietrich, or it was Werner Höttl. Given his luck in such matters, Hector figured it would almost certainly be the latter.
The German glanced up at Hector, forced a smile.
Höttl hadn’t changed much. He hadn’t put on any weight. He’d lost more hair. His scar was just a little less livid than it had been in Paris. Or maybe he was using makeup of some kind to try and reduce its ghastly prominence.
“I’m not standing up, and I’m not shaking your hand,” Höttl said.
“Hell, that suits me.” Hector took up a chair on the opposite side of the table. He ordered a glass of wine. When the waiter left, he said, “When did you leave Paris to return to Germany?”
Höttl scowled. “Why do you care?”
“Truly? I actually don’t care. I was just making polite conversation. I figure as soon as the Nazis got their foothold here, you dashed back, looking to become some kind of wheel in the Socialist party.”
“For von Sternberg’s sake, I will be civil to you, Lassiter. I will do that until we complete filming.”
“And then?” Hector sampled his wine. It was a shade too sweet for his tastes.
“Then I’ll take my revenge. Consider yourself fairly warned.”
Hector shrugged. “You may want to revise your timetable. I’m only here for another day or two. Von Sternberg and I have completed script work. I’m more or less hanging around to help him cast his female star. We could settle this now, really. Afraid I don’t fence, but then judging by your ugly mug, neither do you, at least not competently. Suppose we could find some seconds and pick a location. You know, pistols at dawn and all that European nonsense.”
Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 7
