The Notorious Pagan Jones

by Nina Berry

  Over lunch she told Devin about her night. He didn’t take notes, but she could see he was logging all of the details in his mind as she spoke. The conversation continued as they called for a car and got into the new black limousine to visit Thomas in the hospital.

  “Alaric Vogel,” Devin repeated after she described going through the pockets of the soldier she’d beaned into unconsciousness. “Did he recognize you as Pagan Jones, the movie actress?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “None of the soldiers seemed to know me.”

  He nodded, looking satisfied. “Better for the East Germans to think you had as little to do with the Krugers’ escape as possible.”

  “Well, that one guard at the House of the Birches saw me outside the window, waving at him, just before Thomas whacked him with the poker.”

  “Hmm.” Devin seemed to be making a mental note. “I’ll see if I can find out what they know about you.”

  “Oh, I have a present for you.” She reached into her purse and pulled out the Zippo lighter with its red-and-black insignia. “I took it off Alaric Vogel.”

  He looked down at the battered silver case, and his lips twitched. “I’m honored,” he said. “But it’s a souvenir of your adventure. You keep it.”

  She nodded, stroking the lighter with her thumb. “Speaking of souvenirs. Why do you keep a used bullet with your gun?” As his eyebrows rose, she grinned. “I found them in your toilet tank.”

  His jaw dropped, and then he laughed. “That’s what you were doing there! You bloody sneak.”

  “You’re one to talk,” she said. “So. Where’s the bullet from?”

  His eyelids dropped like shutters over his eyes. She could feel him withdrawing. “Maybe someday,” he said.

  She wasn’t going to let him off the hook just yet. “Aren’t you a bit young to be running some espionage scheme for MI6? Did they recruit you when you were twelve or something?”

  “Fourteen,” he said, staring out the car window. “Well, that’s when they started grooming me. Something about how my early training as a thief would be—” he hesitated, then said the last word with bite “—advantageous. And I’m not running this lovely scheme alone.”

  “You’re not in charge.” She gave him a half smile as he turned his head to stare at her. “I overheard you talking on the phone to someone the night before the garden party. That’s when I figured out what you were, and that you were talking to your boss.”

  “I searched your room before I said a word!” he said, and shook his head. “You dodgy monkey.”

  “Fourteen.” She imagined Devin five years younger, smaller and skinnier, all knees and wary blue eyes. “Even younger than me. What happened when you were fourteen that made them recruit you?”

  A jeep full of red-hatted British military police passed by. Devin turned to look at them, his face devoid of emotion.

  “A lot,” he said. “A lot happened.”

  And he said no more. She decided to respect his privacy. For the moment.

  They’d seen more soldiers about than usual on their drive, but no tanks or trucks full of troops were heading toward the new wall. The Allies had mustered no organized armed military response to the closing of the border. But the streets were buzzing. Their car passed a number of angry pedestrians, flocks of bicyclists, and cars full of West Berliners, heading toward the border with the East. The official response had been to stay quiet and let Ulbricht’s new wall go into effect. It looked as if Kennedy and the other Allied leaders might not start a nuclear war over Berlin, at least not today.

  The civilians had other ideas. Devin had heard about growing crowds gathering near the Brandenburg Gate and other former border crossings. The Westerners were demonstrating, chanting, demanding that the Allied armies stand up to the Communists, even as East German troops reinforced the barbed wire with bricks and mortar. Buildings had been divided down the middle; families torn in half.

  A swarm of young people on motorcycles buzzed past, heading toward the border, probably to throw rocks over the wire at the vopos and the Stasi. Devin had received reports of other last-minute escapes, of babies handed across the Wall to their mothers, of East German soldiers themselves hopping over to freedom.

  But most of the population had been trapped like water in a dam. The East German troops, tanks, and water cannons lined up along the border had turned toward their own people now. They weren’t worried about the Western response anymore. And the flood of refugees had stopped.

  “What will happen to the East Berliners now?” she asked.

  Devin shook his head and said nothing. They’d reached the hospital.

  Thomas grinned like a school kid on summer holiday as Pagan ran into his hospital room and threw her arms around him. He had a row of stitches in his broad forehead, a leg cast, and a brace on his left hand, but he was otherwise healthy. She took her gloves off to sign her name on the cast. His mother and Karin, he explained, were safe in a hotel nearby. They’d both been released from the hospital early that morning.

  Devin said hello, shook Thomas’s unbroken hand, and then faded down the hallway to let them speak together alone.

  “Thanks to you, my family is safe. And we’re free,” Thomas said to Pagan. “I’ll be forever grateful. If you need anything from me, you have only to ask and it will be done.”

  She smiled at his very German phrasing. “I wouldn’t say last night was fun, exactly.” She paused as Thomas laughed incredulously. “But I feel different this morning. I haven’t thought about having a drink in at least an hour. Maybe it was good for me in some strange way.”

  She didn’t say it out loud, but she suspected she knew the reason for the difference in her. For the past ten months she’d been nothing but a killer, someone who brought only pain and suffering to others. As of last night she was a person who helped people, too.

  “For me and my family, your life is a symphony of hope,” Thomas said, echoing her thoughts. “I wish I could do as much for my poor countrymen.”

  Pagan’s heart sank, thinking about the East Berliners. She remembered with a sad flash the building with the griffin. “Whatever I might have learned about my mother by talking to her neighbors is gone now,” she said. “Unless the wall falls, I can’t go back and talk to anyone over there about her.”

  Thomas’s eyebrows crowded over his nose, and he shifted uneasily in the narrow hospital bed. “I have something you should know. This morning my mother told me that Frau Nagel said something interesting that day, about Emil Murnau. Something my mother didn’t share with us then.”

  “The old lady said something about my grandfather?” Pagan sat up straighter. “Why didn’t your mother tell me?”

  “She was embarrassed, I think. It’s something looked down upon, particularly for women. It made her angry, to think that your grandmother needed to lie. She thought maybe she should keep your grandmother’s secrets for her and not embarrass her or you.”

  “Embarrass me?” Pagan had no idea what he could be saying. “About what?”

  “Frau Nagel said that Emil Murnau could not have been your grandfather. Emil Murnau was an elderly veteran of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war who lived in that building, but he passed away a few days after your grandmother moved there with her baby, your mother. At the time, he was a widower of ninety-three with no living children.”

  “But…” Pagan’s brain was a cloud of confusion. “Why would my grandmother say he was the father of her baby if he wasn’t?”

  “Frau Nagel said that your grandmother bore her child out of wedlock, and to hide the shame, she used the name of a dead man to make your mother seem legitimate.”

  “Grandmama was never married?” Pagan conjured up the stiff, aging, self-righteous face of her grandmother, and struggled to believe it. “But she was so proper!”

  “
Mother said that sometimes women use a mask of propriety to cover up their sins. Or what others see as their sins. Mother herself thinks women are unfairly labeled when it comes to their sexual activity, but she is quite modern that way.”

  Pagan nodded. “Your mother’s amazing. And it’s still difficult to have a baby out of wedlock. I knew some girls in reform school who had to give up their babies for adoption. Back in the twenties it would have been even worse.”

  “Mother told me last night, here in the hospital,” Thomas said. “She felt guilty for having kept it from you. She just didn’t want you to hate your grandmother.”

  “No, that’s all right,” she said. “But I can’t help wondering…”

  “Who your real grandfather is.” Thomas nodded. “Of course.”

  “And did my mother know?” Pagan asked. Was this somehow connected to Mama’s suicide? Clearly, her family had its secrets. She’d managed to uncover a few. More than ever, she wanted to dig deeper, to find out more. Something somewhere would clue her in on the reason for Mama’s death.

  She spent the next hour rehashing their crazy night together with Thomas, until Devin came to get her. She kissed Thomas on the forehead and told him that if his family moved to California, they could stay with her in her big empty house in the Hollywood Hills as long as they liked. She truly hoped they would take her up on the offer, and Thomas said it was possible.

  Out in the strangely deserted hallway, Devin wasn’t alone. A stooped, balding man with a sagging belly and wan blue eyes had joined him. The man wore a long gray raincoat belted over a gray suit and a stained gray hat that covered up his thinning hair.

  Devin said, “Pagan Jones, this is my boss, Frank Ballantyne.”

  “Miss Jones.” Ballantyne looked down his pinched nose at her and shook her hand with a limp grip. His voice was smooth, educated, and very English. “I wanted to thank you for all you did to save Thomas last night, and to apologize. We had thought only to use you to get Thomas invited to that garden party. We had not imagined your involvement would go any further than that.”

  “Your imagination department might need some new recruits, Mister Ballantyne,” she said. “But I managed.”

  Ballantyne smiled, looking like nothing more than a genteel, dotty old man happy to look at a pretty girl. Only his shrewd eyes revealed that there was more to him than that. “You managed quite splendidly, Miss Jones. Our hats are off to you this day. I think you should know why we put you in such danger. You see, we had no idea the wall was scheduled to go up. Unfortunately, Erich Mielke’s secret service outsmarted us in that. We wanted Thomas to go through Ulbricht and Mielke’s papers for quite another reason. We believe our organization, or one of those we work with closely, has a mole.”

  “Mole?” She hadn’t heard the term used except to describe garden pests.

  “A double agent, planted within our ranks to report our every move to the East Germans. We’ve been so sorely uninformed about their activities and so thwarted at every turn that we know someone inside our own ranks, or inside our allies, has to be giving the East Germans information.” Ballantyne spread his age-splotched, veiny hands open. “Thomas was not able to find out who the mole is. But we are nonetheless grateful to you for keeping him out of the hands of the Stasi. Otherwise, they may have learned even more about us.”

  “A double agent.” A memory stirred in Pagan’s brain from the night before. “I heard Ulbricht and Mielke say something after they hung up the phone with Honecker last night.”

  “Honecker.” Ballantyne’s tissue paper eyelids drooped in thought. “No doubt he was the architect behind the border operations last night.”

  “They were congratulating him, and after they hung up, Ulbricht said something to Mielke about how recruiting Felfe was worth it, how Felfe had kept you all in the dark.”

  Ballantyne’s nearly nonexistent eyebrows arced toward his vanishing hairline. His rheumy eyes sparkled.

  “Goddamn Heinz Felfe,” Devin said, anger clouding his face. “It would explain a lot.”

  “Indeed,” Ballantyne said, and in the steel behind that single word Pagan glimpsed an incisive, implacable will. Gray-man Ballantayne was more formidable than he seemed. Pagan wasn’t the only one who knew how to act harmless.

  Then before her eyes he seemed to shrink again into a silly old codger. He took her hand softly in his and shook it again. “We shall look into what you’ve told us, Miss Jones. Our counterparts in the CIA are aware of your actions, and they’ve spoken to Benjamin Wexler about your role in his movie.”

  Pagan’s grip on Ballantyne’s hand tightened, her heart skipping a beat. “What did Bennie say?”

  “You’re back on the film,” Devin said, grinning widely as she gasped. “Bennie was pretty touched to hear how you helped Thomas and his family, so you’re getting another chance.”

  Ballantyne nodded. He removed his hand from Pagan’s death grip, smiling with sagging basset hound eyes. “Because of the wall going up, and Thomas’s injury, they’re probably going to postpone shooting for a little while and move production to the studios in Munich. It would best if you flew there as soon as possible.”

  Pagan didn’t care how English and uptight the old man was. She shouted “Hurray!” and threw her arms around his neck, squeezing him tight.

  “I say, I say,” he said, standing stiffly until she released him. He adjusted his coat, his drooping cheeks burning with spots of red. “Very kind, I’m sure.”

  “Thank you, Mister Ballantyne,” she said.

  “Thank you, Miss Jones.” He tipped his gray hat at her and shuffled away, humming a little under his breath.

  Pagan and Devin watched him go. “Is he…” she started to ask.

  “Whatever you’re about to ask,” he said, “I won’t be able to confirm or deny.”

  Pagan rounded on him. “But you can confirm that you and Mister Ballantyne and this organization of yours used me to get Thomas to a garden party to hunt for evidence on a mole. Information I got for you instead, by accident!”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can confirm that.”

  “What a circus,” she said with a derisive snort. “Did you blackmail the judge into giving me parole? Is that how you got Mercedes a parole hearing?”

  “That’s classified,” he said, but his smirk was confirmation enough. “Right along with how I convinced the studio to push Bennie to give you and Thomas your parts in his movie.”

  “You are such a schemer!” She gave him a little shove. “Were you ever an art thief, or was that another bluff?”

  He captured her hand in both of his, his expression quite sober. “All that was true.”

  “Redemption.” The memory of him saying that word to her back at Lighthouse now made all kinds of sense. “You jumped at the chance for it.”

  He pulled her hand to his chest, reeling her in closer. His heart beat steadily beneath her palm. “I’m sorry I lied to you, Pagan. But I’m not sorry it happened. If it weren’t for you, Thomas and his family would be trapped in East Germany, and we’d know nothing about Felfe being the mole.”

  She stared at his elegant fingers, wrapped around her own. When he spoke again, his voice was low and intimate.

  “And I’m not sorry I got to meet you.”

  She slid her other hand around his. “Should a legal guardian be holding hands with his underage ward?”

  He chortled softly, but he didn’t let go of her, leaning in close until his forehead touched hers. His indigo eyes were all she could see. “That was always meant as a temporary measure.”

  “To give you control over me,” she said, but she didn’t pull away. The warmth of his body was so close, like glowing coals behind a fire grate

  “When has anyone, ever, had control over you?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Who gets to try now t
hat you’re stepping down?”

  He slowly, deliberately slid his hand down her arm and around her shoulder, drawing her against him.

  She gasped, her heartbeat skyrocketing, but didn’t resist. His other hand stroked her hair, sinking his fingers between the soft strands, then tracing the outline of her ear. “Steps are already being taken to transfer guardianship to your family attorney.”

  Her insteps and her knees were melting. She had to lean against him to stay upright, her head on his shoulder, but he didn’t seem to mind. His breath was warm on her cheek.

  “Poor Mister Shevitz,” she said. “Do you think he’ll want to share my suite?”

  “If he does, I’ll have him killed,” Devin said, and pressed his mouth to hers.

  She’d been kissed before—stiff, closed-mouth kisses on a movie set, fumbling first kisses with boys she never saw again, and finally Nicky Raven’s eager puppy-dog smooches. She’d made out in cars, in beds, on couches, and on a blanket spread over the grass. She’d gone farther with Nicky than nice girls were supposed to go. She thought she knew all about kissing and lovemaking.

  But no kiss had ever burned her lips like Devin’s. No hands had ever blazed such a trail of fire on her skin, or ever gripped her so expertly, so ruthlessly. She pressed close, near swooning as his arms crushed her to him. She needed that strength, needed his solid weight pressing down on her. She forgot everything she ever knew as the boundaries of her body melted away in a rush of near-volcanic heat.

  A long silence followed, during which his suit and shirt came unbuttoned and her hair was mussed.

  He finally pulled away, his lips half-open, blue eyes turned black with desire. “Pagan,” he said.

  “Mmm,” she said, and gently bit his neck.

  She thought his knees buckled a little, and she laughed softly against his skin.

  He put a hand to her cheek, thumb stroking her lower lip, tender now where a moment ago he’d been almost brutal. “Pagan, we’re still in a hospital. Now that Ballantyne’s gone, the staff are free to walk through here. There’s a nurse coming down the hallway.”