The Notorious Pagan Jones

by Nina Berry

  He tore his hands out of his pockets and grabbed her arms, the grip strong yet gentle, the touch so familiar. She shook her head and pulled away again, and he let her go.

  Nicky’s touch. The thing she’d longed for most all those months. She had to ask. “Did you ever love me?”

  Horror dawned behind his eyes. “Yes, of course! You’ve got to believe me! Oh, God, it’s my own damned fault.” He ran one hand over his gelled hair. “Everything’s my fault. But see, it was my publicist who told me about the accident, and afterward he wouldn’t let me near the phone. I wanted to call you, but he didn’t give me your messages until after your trial. He kept saying I wasn’t thinking straight, so he’d do it for me. He kept talking about my career. How I was about to hit it really big, and I couldn’t let anything get in the way of that.”

  “Not even the girl you loved.” It wasn’t a question.

  “It killed me, Pidge. He took all the phones out of my house, and only brought one back in so that Momma could call and tell me the same things he was saying. That’s what really threw me. I thought she of all people would understand, but she kept talking about how young we are, how I didn’t have to make any decisions now. She told me to wait. But I know now that I made a bad choice.”

  Her throat was too tight for her to speak. She could feel her lower lip trembling. Treacherous tears pooled in her eyes, and one dripped hot on her cheek.

  Nicky reached out and brushed her cheek softly with his thumb, wiping the tear away. “I was wrong. I want to make it up to you.”

  She shivered at his touch. She remembered how his arms used to enfold her, how safe she’d felt there once upon a time. He was only inches away from her now. So close, but so far.

  “I don’t see how you can,” she said.

  His hand traced the curve of her wet cheekbone and sketched a warm trail down her jaw to her chin. “I’ll do anything you want,” he said.

  She was trembling. Here he was, the boy she’d loved more than anything, begging for her forgiveness, admitting he had been wrong—everything she’d dreamed but told herself would never happen. But was it a dream come true, or a nightmare?

  With the tip of his finger he outlined the curve of her bottom lip. “Anything, Pagan. Name it, and I’ll do it.”

  A low, menacing voice reached out from the dark near the stairs. “Get your hands off her.”

  A blur of movement. Shadows parted as a figure laid hands on Nicky, yanked him out of the cloakroom, and sent him slamming into the opposite wall. Grimacing, Nicky kept his feet, turning on his attacker, who had his back to Pagan. But from the set of the shoulders, from the coiled power in the stance, she knew who it was.

  The elevator in the vestibule creaked, and the doors opened to throw a shaft of yellow light on Devin Black.

  Two late-arriving guests emerged from the elevator, chattering in French, and walked obliviously between the two men up the stairs to the restaurant.

  The moment they were out of sight, Nicky pushed himself away from the wall, fists clenched, ready to fight.

  “Your wife is looking for you,” Devin said, his voice sharp as a dagger.

  Those words cracked something in two. Pagan was shaking but she held her chin up. “Your pregnant wife.”

  Nicky pulled himself up sharp. From the set of his mouth, Pagan knew he was angry. He’d been in his share of fights. His broken nose was evidence of that. He wanted to throw a punch at Devin, but he knew it wouldn’t do him any good. He unclenched his fists and brushed off the shoulder of his jacket that had hit the wall.

  “I’m sorry, Pagan,” he muttered, and ran up the stairs. He paused at the top, silhouetted there, the whole line of his body tense, head half turned as if about to look back at her. Then, with clear effort, he pushed one hand off against the door frame, and he disappeared.

  Devin turned to Pagan, adjusting his tie. “You should go back to the suite,” he said, and held out his hand. “I’ll take you.”

  Pagan shook her head mutely. Devin’s eyes held a question, but she didn’t want to answer. She broke away and slammed through the ladies’ room door. A woman on her way out swore in German as Pagan barreled past her and into a stall.

  The terrible weight of her failures was there, waiting. Overhead, and on every side of her, looming like a tidal wave, the familiar smothering horror threatened to suffocate, annihilate.

  She concentrated on each breath, counting as the analysts had taught her, for each inhale and exhale, until the choking weight retreated enough for the shaking to subside. The chattering voices in the front lounge drifted into the distance.

  Pagan emerged, dry-eyed, and examined herself in the mirror. A bit of mascara under the eyes, dealt with easily enough. The lipstick along the lower edge of her mouth smudged where Nicky had touched her. Wiped away. A touch of powder, an adjustment of hairpins. She walked into the ladies’ lounge, wishing she could somehow fly instantly back to her cozy cell with Mercedes.

  Then she saw the nearly full martini glass sitting on the counter.

  She looked over her shoulder, even though she knew she was alone. The glass was still frosted with cold, a lone olive bobbing lazily in the vodka like a bather in a lake. Pagan drifted toward it, her mind blank.

  That martini sure was going to waste here in the ladies’ lounge.

  If she had a sip, just one little taste, no one would ever know. She needed it, and she’d earned it, God knew. She’d had a night to end all nights, and she deserved a rest.

  The glass was cool and smooth in her hand. The vodka, tinged with salty olive, blazed a piquant trail down her throat. The familiar burn, the starry taste of it loosened the knots in her shoulders and unknit the tangles in her mind. She downed the entire glass. For all the terrible things alcohol had done to her, it had never failed her in this.

  Before long she’d forget all about the shame of this terrible evening. For a little while, she’d be free. The heaviness hanging above her softened, lightened, and feathered into smoke. Soon it would blow away. Light as a summer breeze, Pagan gave one last adjustment to her garters and sailed out of the ladies’ room, ready to see what the rest of the night would bring.

  She’d been braced to encounter Devin, waiting for her impatiently outside the ladies’ room. But there was no sign of him. It was strange he hadn’t stayed to see how she was doing.

  Who cares? She didn’t need Devin Black. She walked steadily back up to the restaurant, to an entire rooftop alive with dancing bodies. The tables had mostly been abandoned, useful only as drink holders and coat hangers, as the band gushed out one lush rhythm after another. There was no sign of Nicky or his wife as Pagan snaked through the laughing, swaying couples, found Thomas and, before he could ask a question, yanked him up for a dance.

  Obediently, he put one hand on her waist, the other lightly holding her hand, and squired her around the floor. “Sorry!” Pagan said over the noise. “I just had the urge to move again.”

  “I’m happy if you’re happy,” Thomas said, but she caught him glancing over her shoulder. Nicky and Donna were there, also dancing, on the other side of the floor.

  “They can’t ruin our good time,” Pagan said, wiggling her hips closer to Thomas’s. “Maybe we should stay here after all.”

  “Whatever you want, Küken.” He jiggled his eyebrows up and down at her and picked up the pace as they rounded the floor. They neared the bandstand, and he sent her out with one hand, pulled some German marks from his pocket, and thrust them at the bandleader. “Come on,” he said, in German. “You must know ‘The Twist’!”

  “And ‘Tossin’ and Turnin’!” Pagan shouted. The band leader nodded and kept the money, and she raised her hand in victory as Thomas tugged her back to dance.

  The moment the saxophone dug into its lead-in and the drums smacked to “The Twist,” a general whoop of ex
citement ran through the younger members of the crowd. Pagan and Thomas were at the center of the dance floor, ready, and began twirling in perfect time as the other kids circled around and followed suit.

  Ladies in furs and gray-haired gentlemen drifted off the floor, sharing confused looks, but Pagan saw Matthew Smalls and his wife in there, rotating their torsos, heads thrown back in laughter. As hips and butts twisted and ground, circled and shook, the puzzled looks on the faces of the older people became expressions of shock.

  Pagan laughed. She knew what they were saying behind their gloved hands. “Young people today are such degenerates!” But for her the twist was liberating. No longer tied to a partner, no longer forced to respond to him, she could move however she liked. She could dance her own dance.

  Her full skirt allowed Pagan to sink especially low as she twisted, and Thomas mimicked her, his long, muscular legs bending deeply at the knees as he put one toe forward and gyrated downward. The segue to “Tossin’ and Turnin’” brought more people to the dance floor, and by the time they started up “Shop Around,” everyone was clapping to the beat.

  Out of breath, Pagan and Thomas took a break, and when Thomas excused himself to go to the men’s room, Pagan couldn’t help looking around for Nicky.

  Through the swiveling bodies and banks of cigarette smoke, she found him, looking at her.

  Her vision swam. Heat rose up from the soles of her feet, and she stumbled to an empty table, found a glass half-full of someone else’s drink, and downed it.

  She set it down with an unsteady hand. Two different colors of lipstick tinted the rim. One was hers. The other…wasn’t. She’d drunk another person’s drink without a thought of how wrong, or how disgusting, that was.

  Mortified, she swayed over to her own table again and guzzled what remained of her lemonade. Water. If she drank nothing but water and sat still for a little while, no one would ever know.

  “Just came by to say good-night.” It was Bennie Wexler, his coat over his arm, smiling at her. The thick lenses of his black-rimmed glasses turned his eyes into huge watery puddles of blue.

  She stood up, wobbled, and steadied herself with one hand on the table. “Thank you so much for the dance earlier,” she said, enunciating each word. She hadn’t slurred, had she? “And for everything.”

  Bennie’s gaze grew more pointed. His endless forehead furrowed. He leaned into her, inhaled, then reared back. “You’ve been drinking.”

  “What?” Goose bumps rose on Pagan’s suddenly cold skin. “Don’t be silly, Bennie. Someone spilled their drink on me. That’s why I was in the ladies’ room, cleaning up.”

  “Don’t kid a kidder, kid.” Bennie’s voice quivered with disappointment, with anger. “I can smell it on your breath. You’re fired.”

  “But…” She didn’t know what she was going to say, but she had to say something, anything. He couldn’t mean it. Think of the delays it would cause in filming, the extra expense. Think what it would mean to her career…

  Bennie didn’t give her a chance to beg. “I told you—one drink and I’d throw you off the picture, and I’m a man of my word. Don’t bother coming in on Monday.”

  “Bennie, please, it’s just one slip!”

  He glared at her, his lips pressed together. “I should never have hired you. Do you know the real reason I threw your mother off the set of Anne of Green Gables, back when you were eleven years old?”

  She shook her head, mute.

  “Your mother was an anti-Semite.” Bennie spat out the word. “She was too smart to say it around Hollywood much. But she hated Jews. When I cut a few of your lines two weeks into the shoot, she told me that I was a typical stingy, manipulative kike, that it was too bad they hadn’t gassed my parents before I was born. Oh, you gasp, but she wasn’t the first, and she won’t be the last to say these disgusting things.

  “So I got rid of her. Just as I’m getting rid of you. I hope she didn’t poison you with her lies, but I guess it doesn’t matter now. You’re out.”

  Pagan fled. She left Bennie glowering, grabbed her purse from her table, and ran for the elevator, not caring who saw.

  Thomas emerged from the men’s room as she stepped into the elevator. He frowned, puzzled, extending a hand, about to ask a question.

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice was more like a croak. It made the elevator operator jump. “I have to go.”

  The doors closed on his mystified expression, and she huddled into the back corner of the elevator until it released her to run down the endless hallway to her suite.

  The place was empty. God knew where Devin was. She slammed the door to her bedroom and, without turning on the light, shed her clothing and got into the shower, head spinning, cursing Bennie Wexler as she cried.

  It had been only one drink! And Mama had been protective, argumentative, yes, but a bigot? Bennie was wrong, so wrong about everything.

  As the hot water cooled to lukewarm, she remembered—it hadn’t been only one drink.

  It had been two.

  She could lie to Bennie, lie to Devin, lie to the whole world and say that she was fine. But she’d told Thomas they shouldn’t keep secrets from themselves. The truth was that abandoned martini in the ladies’ room had dissolved all her cares like magic. And then she’d grabbed someone else’s drink and downed it, too.

  And it had—she had gotten fired off her best film role since Leopard Bay.

  Oh, God, she really was an alcoholic.

  Even thinking that word about herself made her wince. Drunks were disgusting, pathetic. She was Pagan Jones, actress, smart aleck, singer, sister, daughter. People thought of her as the notorious, the bad girl, the killer. All of those identities, from good to horrible, carried a grain or more of truth she could own up to. The one label she’d never accepted was Pagan Jones, the alcoholic.

  “I’m a drunk,” she said out loud. “I’m an alcoholic.”

  Mercedes had known. She’d practically begged Pagan to go to an A.A. meeting. But Pagan had thought she was strong enough to go it alone. She used the staring eyes and boring stories at those meetings as an excuse. She assumed she’d suffered the worst the world could dish out, that she was past it.

  But the world kept churning out challenges. It would never stop. And all that made her want to do was drink.

  She’d been lying to herself about her own drinking. What other secrets had she kept from herself?

  With a dark flash she remembered something else.

  Hitler’s birthday was April 20. That was the date her father had written in the margins of those letters from Rolf von Albrecht to her mother.

  She got out of the shower, wrapping herself in a thick hotel robe, and fished the packet of letters from her luggage again. By the light of the lamp on her nightstand, she found the date in the margin in her father’s round, neat hand. 20 April, 1889.

  The exact date and year of Hitler’s birth.

  Pagan had speculated that there was some key to the code in these letters to her mother. What if…

  She got her pencil and a blank sheet and wrote down the second word after the letter’s greeting, then the fourth word, then the first, eighth, eighth, and ninth. 20-04-1889. She went through the entire first letter, picking out the words that corresponded to those numbers, not wanting to see the sentences as they formed. Her own handwriting was uneven, wandering nervously over the page.

  She stared down and read:

  Our friend says you sympathize. May I stay with you November. Write back same way if you agree.

  Simple boring words, which, put together, still weren’t very interesting, unless you knew they’d been put together with a code key based on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Unless that code had been used by your very own mother. The mother Bennie Wexler said was anti-Semitic.

  May I stay with you November.


  The very month Doctor Someone had come to stay with them when Pagan was eight. Which meant Doctor Someone had to be letter-writer Rolf von Albrecht.

  And whoever von Albrecht was, he’d corresponded in code, using Hitler’s birthday as its key.

  Her mother must have written him back, because there were nineteen more letters to her, and he’d come to stay until the night of her parents’ terrible argument.

  Arthur Jones had fought in the war against Hitler. He’d abhorred the Nazis and everything they stood for. When he’d found the letters and broken the code using Hitler’s birthday as the key, he would have been very angry indeed.

  Not that he could’ve been completely ignorant about Eva Jones before that. He must have suspected something. After all, he’d figured out the key to the code. To do that, he must have known that his wife had a connection to Hitler’s birthday.

  But Daddy had been an expert in avoiding conflict. He’d excelled at denial. The warning signs that Pagan was drinking too much had been everywhere, for years, after her mother’s suicide. Eva would never have let her get away with it, but Daddy had preferred to remain ignorant. So much so that he’d allowed Pagan to drive him and his younger daughter while she was plastered. Daddy’s willingness to deny reality was epic.

  Whatever he’d suspected about Mama, he’d probably ignored it, or pretended it wasn’t true as long as he possibly could.

  Then Rolf von Albrecht had come to stay, Arthur had decoded the letters, and he could no longer refuse to see the truth about the mother of his children.

  Bennie was right. About her drinking. And about Mama.

  Pagan shoved the letters into her nightstand drawer, turned off the light, and sat on her bed in the dark for she didn’t know how long.

  The loving, controlling, ambitious Eva Jones had been a bigot. She’d probably learned it from her own mother, who no doubt had brought it with her all the way from the griffin building now in East Berlin.

  A thought made Pagan stop breathing. Had Mama messed up again somehow four years after these letters had been written? If she had, and Daddy had threatened to leave again with the girls, could that be why she’d decided to kill herself?