Suspects

by David Thomson

  The mother moved her son to a home on Lake Geneva, where Alexander grew up. In those years, she handled the affairs of Sebastian Inc. with more astuteness than her husband had managed. She saw to it that their coffee penetrated the market of the United States, all the more significant when European sales were interrupted by the Great War. As a child, Alex had private tutors. In 1911, he entered Christchurch College, Oxford, to read Classics.

  During the war, he lived in Switzerland, Brazil, America and England, conducting business under the tutelage of Mrs. Sebastian. He also made himself available to British Intelligence as a source of information picked up on his visits to Berlin. For Alex had secured contracts for delivery of coffee to the German Army. It was galling to mother and son that similar deliveries to France and England were made difficult because of the hostilities. As Alex said at the time, “War should not hinder the flow of necessaries, coffee or information. Only humorless puritanism impedes them.”

  After the war, Alex took increasing control of the business, and in 1918, aged twenty-five, he acquired the monies left by his father and prudently reinvested by Mrs. Sebastian. There was time for pleasure, too. Alex was a gourmet and a devotee of sophisticated company. He spoke five languages (French, German, English, Portuguese and Italian), and moved easily in and out of the great estates of Europe, bending to all politics, consistent in his charm and his faith in trade. In the early twenties, he was a close friend of King Carl II of Rumania and a go-between for him with his mistress, Magda Lupescu. When that couple was forced into exile, they found a home in the Sebastian mansion in Geneva.

  Always interested in novelty, Alex went to Vienna in hopes of being accepted as a patient by Sigmund Freud. He was turned away because there were so many young women ahead of him on the waiting list, and because Freud quickly detected “the balance of a born yachtsman” in Alex. However, Alex liked the city and spent a good deal of time there over the next few years. Among many others, he made the acquaintance of Professor Reinhold Huberman, and one Sunday afternoon he taught croquet to the professor’s exquisite but rather fragile daughter, Alicia.

  It was in 1928 that Alex had an intense weekend of conversation with his mother. She estimated that Europe was in flux, that a new Germany would be born again soon, destined to engage in conflict with the Reds. Its natural ally in the crusade would be America, the land of capitalism and technology. England and France were finished. The allegiances that had been sensible in the Great War should be reassessed. It was up to Alex to identify the emerging forces in Germany and make contact with them. “I suppose so,” he said wistfully, for he could never quite fathom such far-reaching motives, even if intrigue delighted him.

  So Alexander Sebastian drew nearer than he felt was tasteful to the leader of the National Socialist Movement. He also devised a plan whereby, in the scuttle of prominent Jews to get out of the new Germany, a few spies might be passed along too. In particular, he advised Professor Huberman on getting to America, establishing a career there which who knows…? “And Alicia will have so much more fun there, won’t she?”

  By 1937, Alex and his mother had shifted their base to Rio de Janeiro. This was not his inclination. Rio offered less than Europe in the way of society. But his mother pointed out that in an extensive and wide-ranging war it was imperative to be close to one’s raw materials. Moreover, South America lay there on the modern globe, a monster asleep, so unknown that it had to become more important.

  During the war, the coffee trade was a cover for a courier system that brought information down to Rio out of the U.S. and thence across the Atlantic. It was through Alex’s small, adept hands that some of the atomic secrets passed. He did not understand what he was conveying, but he regarded espionage as part of a useful sharing. “In an age of such power as this, secrecy will only lead to undue advantage and precipitate action.”

  But in the middle of the war—torpid days in Rio, with guilt and shortages pressing on the neutrality—his mother fell ill. It had never happened before. So it was food for his curiosity that he felt neither anxiety nor pity. He cared for her, in the usual ways, but he was indifferent to her fate.

  He examined his own life: he was fifty, fit, prosperous, not cast down by the world’s war, not spoiled by his advantages. He deserved better. He would make sure he got it. This ambition took precedence over Sebastian Inc. and the future of National Socialism. It survived his mother’s recovery. He had at last picked up a proper sense of his own soul. It soared above Germany’s possible defeat in the war. Who lost wars anymore? The victors would be obliged to prop up the vanquished.

  In this blithe mood, his life welcomed back Alicia Huberman. He recalled the awkward child on a Viennese lawn, perplexed by the narrowness of hoops. He had made a joke about “Miss Hoop-erman” that had kept her laughing for ten minutes. What bliss that she should appear in Rio now a lovely woman. His mother warned him, but he was not deterred by the difference in age. He married Alicia and he was happy for five months.

  Then his mother demonstrated how Alicia was an agent of the enemy. Nor did she shirk that task. She explained to Alex that he had put them both in jeopardy. She whispered that Alicia had used him, that she was nothing but Devlin’s pawn. He slid back into middle age and he permitted the arsenic to put gradual rings of smoke around Alicia’s sad eyes. They gave it to her every night, a drop in her coffee.

  Alex had to keep the story from the others. His wife would succumb to her illness. Any other solution might point to the error he had made. And so when that suave thug Devlin came in and carried Alicia away, as if she were a rag doll, he had nothing to do but compose his parched face, go back into the house and admit failure. The silent, thrilled disbelief was his death sentence.

  Alexander Sebastian passed away in 1946, in Rio de Janeiro, of a wasting illness that accomplished its end in eight weeks, the invalid meekly sipping coffee every night, watched over by his mother.

  WALKER

  Lee Marvin in Point Blank, 1967,

  directed by John Boorman

  He would be Walker still. Though he lay in an empty cell on Alcatraz, shot more times than he could count, looking up at the dahlia stain of rust and time in the corner of the wall and ceiling, he would fear no demise. He would survive, Walker still. There was a power of imagination that could melt away bullets and heal their wounds, as if the film of him being shot could be run in reverse, the bullets breaking out of skin which closed behind them, the slugs rushing backward to their guns and making the exact insertions no matter that the gun kicked just before they arrived or that a flare was sucked back into the gun just before the bullets.

  In 1967, at the age of forty-five, with his wife, Lynne, and a wartime buddy, Mal Reese, he had carried out the biggest job of his career, of his life, on a Wells Fargo office. Afterward, they had gone by helicopter to the abandoned prison of Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay. But instead of dividing up the money, as agreed, Reese had shot Walker, and Lynne, he realized, was party to the betrayal, not simply the beautiful young wife he had met on the waterfront on a rainy day, with the wet making her silk blouse cling to her body, with drops of water hanging on the lobes of her ears, with her brown hair sticking to her brow, but a liar, a traitor, a whore for jovial Mal Reese.

  Lying in the open cell, crumpled in one corner, gazing up at the stain in the other, Walker estimated that they had cheated him of a ninety-three-thousand-dollar share. The sum was as odd, round and appealing as his dreams of vengeance. He would get them and count off the ninety-three thousand even if every dollar had to be a leaf of their fine skin. He would go after them. He would be Walker, thumping down however many corridors it took until they trembled at the sound of his coming. As he felt his blood knocking in his head, he heard his own hard shoes on the corridor, walking toward his victims.

  He would raise himself from out of the corner and out of the cell, and he would go down staircases and corridors out onto the small island of rocks and brambles to what passed for a beach, and
there he would let himself be carried out on the cold currents of water in the Bay. When Alcatraz had been a prison, it was said that no escapees had ever made that swim. But the prison had had central heating and large meals, so that flabby, tender inmates became too soft for the water. The broken Walker was still hard and cunning. He would make no swim; he would let the current of desire carry him to shore.

  He would survive. The bullets would be removed or his muscular insides would chew and digest them. They would be lodged there like knots in his wood. He would recover, and as his strength came back he would begin to look around for Reese. And one day he would be on a pleasure boat in the Bay, listening to the loudspeaker describe the impossible waters, when a man would approach him, a man who knew what had happened, a man who would tell him Reese had done what he did with the compliance of the Organization. But Walker could go after him if he listened to the man’s advice. This man would be called Fairfax.

  Walker would find Lynne, alone, abandoned by Mal Reese, awash on a sea of narcotics and melancholy. She would kill herself the night he came to her, as if she knew that was a traitor’s only duty. And Walker then could go after Lynne’s sister, Chris, a woman he had always liked, but he had met Lynne first and been lost in her rain-soaked attraction. He would find Chris, and she would agree to help him. There would be no need for explanations. Like two sleepwalkers they would share their dreams.

  He would trace them and track them down one by one, the members of the Organization who had welcomed Mal in. There was Stegman, the car dealer. Walker would go to meet him, to try out a car. He would take Stegman on the trial drive, battering the car against walls and concrete posts until the story spilled out of Stegman. And there would be Carter. He would go to Carter’s office, and push the man around past one Venetian blind after another, the plastic slivers rippling as the man’s body went through them. And he would meet Carter in an L.A. storm drain, but a rifleman would pick off Carter, and Walker would find a parcel of ninety-three thousand cutout pieces of paper, not the money, and only a ribbon of credit cards in Carter’s pockets, like an umbilical cord between him and the system.

  And Chris would be bait for Mal. She would send word to him that she had always wanted him. And the bodyguards would pass Chris up to the penthouse in the outside glass elevator. Walker would watch her rise. And while Mal was slowly undressing Chris, he would come up too, overpower the guards, until he found Chris and Mal both naked. And he would lead the timorous Mal by a sheet wound round his nakedness to the edge of the roof and then, in panic, Mal would move. The sheet would unwind and his pale nude body would drop to the street. Avenged, but still minus ninety-three thousand dollars.

  He would go on, as far as Brewster, the head of the Organization, the one man who could authorize his money. With Chris, he would go to Brewster’s L.A. house, lie in wait for him and terrorize him. The flustered Brewster would say all right, all right, you know you’re a very bad man, Walker, and Walker might smile to himself. No one would see. But the arrangements would be made, for a drop-off of ninety-three thousand dollars, on Alcatraz again.

  And Walker would be there in the sepulchral galleries. He would watch Brewster in the spotlight in the courtyard as the helicopter came down with the package. And Brewster would call out to Walker to come and get his money. But Walker wouldn’t go. Then a shot would ring out and Brewster would be dead. And Fairfax and the rifleman would walk down to the courtyard, like a couple of golfers coming up to the green. And Fairfax would say his plan had worked. He would have used Walker to clear a way to the top of the Organization. Then Fairfax would say that Walker could come down now. It would be safe now. Fairfax would open the package to show him the color of money.

  But Walker would never go down. He would stay transfixed by the way the dried-out puddle in the courtyard had left a stain like a flower.

  CHRIS ROSE

  Angie Dickinson in Point Blank, 1967,

  directed by John Boorman

  She might have been so many things. This is a country made for pretenders, with an art that tempts hope. She lost count of how many times people told her, “You could be a model, did you ever think of that?” And she made herself available. Born in San Diego in 1942, she moved up to Los Angeles when she was seventeen and tried to be noticed. She had boyfriends who knew people in pictures. And once she went for a weekend on Catalina with a photographer. He did a few poses of her, but he was more taken with the fog. She had been to some studio parties. Once an associate producer took her to dinner and a hotel afterward. He asked if she would fellate him, and she agreed if he would test her. “Shit, no,” he said, plaintively, “this is personal.” So she walked out. She had decided to be practical and she knew that someone who might become a star could still end up a hooker.

  So she told herself pictures were corrupt. She ate health foods, she jogged, she went with a schoolteacher and she looked better than ever until a lifeguard at Venice stopped her and said, “You in pictures?” So she went with him and he was nothing but it was the best sex. It was a limited kind of paradise with him, but Chris was empty because what might have been still appealed to her more.

  She had an older sister, Lynne, the wild one, who had gone to Alaska as a waitress and married Walker. Some people called him a psychopath, and Lynne regarded him with fear sometimes. But Chris liked him. Behind that craggy look, she thought, was a weird human who had decided achievement was foolish. They had odd talks in which she went with his silences. “Suppose you think you’re good-looking?” he said once. Chris blushed and Walker studied the fire. “It’s not worth much,” he said. “Won’t last.”

  “I know that.”

  “Yeah, but it’s something,” sighed Walker, as if he had thought about it a lot and come away with respect for transience. Chris looked at his sleepy face. He wasn’t noticing her, but she felt a tugging at her spirit, as if he were imagining her.

  Then one day her mother called from San Diego to say Lynne had phoned and apparently Walker had disappeared.

  “What did she mean?” asked Chris.

  “You know. Gone off. For good, I think. I think it’s for good.”

  Chris called Lynne but there was only an answering machine. Four months later she bumped into Lynne at a Mexican restaurant on Fairfax. She was tanned and happy, and with another guy, Mal Reese. She told Chris they had been to Acapulco for a break.

  “What’s the matter?” said Chris.

  “I’m doing cocaine,” Lynne told her.

  “What about Walker?”

  Her sister’s mood dropped. “What’s it to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You look good, Chris,” resentfully.

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, bitch. You know it.” They laughed and it was over.

  That was the last time Chris saw Lynne. Lynne was found dead in her house two weeks later. She’d taken a whole bottle of antidepressants and she’d choked on her gray vomit. Two days later Mal Reese called her.

  “Is that Chris?”

  “This is she.”

  “I wanted to say this that time we met, you’re a very lovely lady.”

  “Did you know Lynne died?”

  “God no, I didn’t know that.”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Jesus. Is that right? Are you free tonight?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “We must get together so you can tell me about it.”

  So they had dinner, and then Mal suggested taking her back to his penthouse apartment for a brandy. He said he knew a man in casting at NBC. Chris went along with it; it held off the isolation. They hardly mentioned Lynne, and when Chris once talked about Walker Mal shut up completely. She went to bed with him, and in the night, as he rolled over on her for a third time, she felt a breeze in the room and she had a brief, untrusted vision of Walker coming to rescue her with a part in a picture. But nothing came except the morning.

  The happiest man, the most settled and assured, is flawed if he c
annot sleep. And the one to be tortured and shot the next day has mercy if he does not have to stay awake.

  MA JARRETT

  Margaret Wycherly in White Heat, 1949,

  directed by Raoul Walsh

  Born in 1881, in Telluride, Colorado, the daughter of a brothel-keeper, Kitty Reilly, she was named Lucy Gray. Her mother already had offspring—Alvin Brown, Sukie Black, Pence White—and gray was the next color in line. Unacquainted with her father, yet guessing he might still live in the vicinity of the silver-mining town, Lucy developed a forthright questioning manner; every man felt she had her suspicions about him. From the age of seven, she would trudge through the snow, the mud and the summer dust with a six-gun knocking on her slender hip. No one knew whether it was loaded until that day, in 1892, when two fellows held up the Sheridan Hotel and backed out onto the street. “Varmints!” Lucy cried out, to turn them, for she would not shoot a man in the back. Her first shot took one of the bandits in the kneecap, the second went through an onlooker’s beard, and the third struck the manager of the hotel, coming in pursuit, between the eyes.

  This was not good for the brothel business, already disrupted by Lucy’s habit of wandering in and out of rooms looking for her mice. So Kitty, not without a tear, sent her daughter away. The pretext was the child’s alarming cough. Common sense put it down to the cigars, but Kitty reckoned it was the altitude. So Lucy was sent to live with a cousin of Kitty’s in McCook, Nebraska. She learned to ride there and worked at ranching. But she excelled in shooting competitions, and she was known for her way of aiming while smoking a stogie.

  At seventeen, she met William Jarrett in Cheyenne, Wyoming, as Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show played the town. Jarrett was assistant business manager to Colonel Cody, a scrupulous mathematician with a flair for the show business. Sixteen years older than Lucy, he was smitten by her spunk—they met when a mouthful of tobacco juice she had directed at a spittoon (nine feet away) landed on the shiny toe of his shoe. “Were you aiming at it, young lady?” he wanted to know.