Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

  Harry made a sour face. “In the first place, my dear girl, the only world anyone needs is right here in Tuggle. And in the second place, the man Winchell is constructed primarily of baloney. Trust me on this one, Mary girl.” He probed with his toothpick, sucked a filling.

  “You’re a professional nay-sayer, Harry.” She wiped her hands on the flowered apron. “Your bark’s one thing, your bite’s another.” She reached behind her and untied the apron strings. Watching her, the comfortable byplay between Mary and Tom Hayes, Harry Madrid wondered what might have happened if his own wife had lived, if the stomach cancer hadn’t wasted her down to nothing and then taken her away. Maybe he’d have retired like Tom and gone off to some peaceful little burg like Tuggle and been a chief or even a deputy, done some hunting, listened to the radio with the wife and had a good laugh over Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly and paid attention to Walter Winchell. Well, it was a pointless reflection, he supposed, because the cancer had taken her and Harry had fallen in with Cassidy who was all right and Terry Leary, of all people, who couldn’t help being what he was. Good God, you never knew, you surely never did.

  “Man to man, smoke Roi-tan.” Hayes held out the box of cigars. “Let’s take a walk, Harry. The wife likes me to do my smoking out of doors.”

  Harry Madrid went to the dining-room archway. Mary was sitting at the table cutting out a dress pattern. On the sideboard behind her was a silver-framed photograph of young Tom, Jr., in his navy uniform. He’d died years before, killed in the North Atlantic, killed on what they called “the Murmansk Run.” Twenty-three years old and all that was left was his picture in the dining room, all the memories and sorrow his parents would never be through with. All because of the goddamn Ratzis. “Wonderful meal, Mary.”

  “You’re not done yet,” she said, clipping away. “Apple pie and Vermont Cheddar when you get back. Work up an appetite.”

  It was a crisp autumn evening. Dry leaves rustled underfoot, the tang of distant woodsmoke hung in the air. Tom Hayes’s Labrador ran ahead barking desultorily at the rolling leaves. The moon was nearly full, the night sky clear for the first time in several days. The cheap cigar smoke was harsher than Leary’s cache of Max Bauman’s Havanas but there was something in it Harry Madrid preferred, quite possibly the stirring of youthful memories, a simpler world. Looking around the darkened streets of the small town that had somehow been hollowed out of the surrounding forests, Harry Madrid felt like a foreigner on some kind of rustic moon. He wore his long black overcoat and a handsome derby he’d bought on the Lower East Side in 1919. He looked at Tom Hayes ambling along in his black-and-red wool plaid jacket with a hunting cap to match. “My Christ, Tommy, look at you! You’ve gone native!”

  “So what? I’m gonna live forever, too. It’s healthy country, Harry. Some day, you pack it in, you oughta think about coming up here. Buy a nice little spread, five grand.”

  “Well, I’ve never had a notion I’d live forever. Then when I lost the wife …” He shrugged. “I didn’t much care what happened anymore. I’ve got to give Terry Leary credit—”

  “Never thought I’d hear you say that. That boy used to be a thorn in your paw.”

  “Well, sometimes people change.”

  Hayes laughed softly. “That’s for sure. Question is, you do the changing or did Leary?”

  “Both of us, I guess. The kid gave me an interest in life again, and if you laugh you’ll be eatin’ that cigar, Tom.”

  “I ain’t laughing, Harry.”

  “Cassidy, now he’s what you’d have to call a peculiar sort of fella. Guts of a burglar. But he’s been hurt down deep inside. Hurt bad, like a man who’s been gut-shot. He’s had some bad luck with women. I never had much to do with women. Never really got the hang of what the hell they thought was going on. I knew they were in there thinking, but none of it ever really made any sense to me, not so far as I could tell, anyway. The wife, God rest her soul, was as bad as any.”

  “Well, y’know what they say.” Tom Hayes inspected the glowing tip of his cigar. “You can’t live with ’em, you can’t shoot ’em.”

  They walked on in companionable silence. The smell of the forest, the damp dark earth, the leaves; Harry Madrid rather missed the stink and roar trapped in the dark Manhattan alleyways where sun was unknown.

  “I finally got hold of the fella I was telling you about, Harry.”

  “That’s good work, Tom. Where is he?”

  “That’s his place up ahead. Little bungalow up there. He’s gonna show you on his map right about where he heard the crash. It was night, y’see, he was camping out—poaching, to be blunt—and the Guv’nor takes a dim view of trespassing and such like. Fella’s name is Seth Marson. Poacher from way back. Well, he naturally didn’t want to come forth and risk the wrath of the Guv’nor. But you know how it is, Harry, small town, I put the word out there might be something in it for him—”

  “What’s fair?”

  “Up here? Fifty simoleons.”

  “I’ll make it a hunnert.”

  “You’ll spoil my sources,” Tom Hayes said.

  “Well, I may need him to do some guide work.”

  “I’ll be doing the guiding, Harry. Seth don’t want no part of this after he talks to you.”

  They turned in at Seth Marson’s gate. The wind was whipping at the crisp leaves, Hayes’s Lab dashing on ahead, tongue flapping, looking for something to retrieve.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IT WAS CLAIRE BENN’S PARTY, she being the more charitably inclined of the couple, but the house at Sag Harbor had been in Liddell Benn’s family for enough years to make them—and it—handsomely decorative details of the Long Island power-structure façade. The road was narrow, constantly winding among birches and elms that had pushed to the paving’s edge and seemed ready to march across to meet their fellows. They brushed and scraped at the sides of Terry Leary’s cream-colored Chrysler sedan.

  Boulders two stories high and somewhat smaller security guards in smartly creased black uniforms flanked the gated entrance to the Benn estate. Far up the driveway a white house with plenty of white columns sat in a glow of self-satisfaction that threw shadows at the groves of oaks and elms and maples surrounding it. Halfway up the drive you could hear the music, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Vernon Duke, heavy on the strings, muted brass; in the shadows on the side lawn the caterer’s trucks sat quietly, the drivers smoking, laughing among themselves.

  Leary pulled up before the columns and one of the mess-jacketed kids ran over to open the doors and park the car. Karin looked pale and beautiful as she stepped from the car. Cassidy had questioned the wisdom of dragging her into the evening’s strategy but Winchell had stopped him, said that Karl Dauner was the heart of the Nazi end of things: he, or his friends, would want some proof that Cassidy’s side had a blue chip to bring to the table.

  An hour later Cassidy reflected that she had never been more beautiful; painfully, soulfully beautiful. He stood near the doorway to the billiards room with its heavy oak doors and watched her across acres of Italian marble, lit by the pink glow of the candles caressing the peach marble columns. She wore a simple low-cut black dress, her breasts full and firmly rounded, the gown strapless and well off the shoulder, a pearl choker, her hair thick and tawny and unadorned. She was dancing with Terry Leary, her eyes downcast. Terry was staring into her face, as if he were searching for some hint of the past, or at least a hint of her memory of it. Terry had told him that there was something about her that didn’t ring true for him. “She either remembers and isn’t telling you,” he’d said, “or she’s holding back something else. … I don’t know if it’s Manfred Moller on her mind, or you, but there’s more going on in there than the good doctor thinks there is.” Now Leary seemed to be seeking a hint. From the looks of things, he wasn’t finding it.

  The band was playing on a balcony over the foyer that swept away into the ballroom. The women were in ball gowns and the men in full evening kit, most in white tie and
tails. The evening’s scam seemed to center around an auction of objets d’art, the proceeds for the benefit of European War Refugee Relief. Liddell and Claire Benn had lent their humble residence for the venue. Winchell had assured Cassidy that no one could have been straighter politically than the Benns. Liddell, Winchell said, would have shit a gold brick the size of Fire Island if he’d known that his pal Karl Dauner was a Nazi. “So for chrissakes, don’t tell him, keed. Ignorance is bliss,” Winchell had smirked. “The dumb fucker!”

  “You coming to the party, Winch?” Cassidy had wondered.

  “You never know,” Winchell replied. “As you should know, Winchell is ubiquitous, he knows all, sees all, and tells Mr. and Mrs. America what they need to know. Benn has been informed that he’s to make sure you get a chance to have a chat with Dauner. And remember, Benn thinks Dauner is as big a horse’s ass of a Republican as he is!”

  The music was just swell and the lobster thermidor and the beef Wellington hit the spot. European War Refugees would doubtless have enjoyed the spread but there didn’t seem to be any on the guest list. The champagne flowed like champagne, Bollinger by the truckload, and the punch filled a Medici fountain. The house was full of good spirits, toasts to the victors, and twenty or thirty works of art—paintings and Russian eggs and bits of sculpture and even an illuminated manuscript or two—but Cassidy kept worrying about Karin. She was still on Dr. Moller’s sedatives. She was reacting in a kind of slow motion as if she weren’t quite getting the jokes. Her eyes had a film over them. She moved hesitantly, as if she weren’t sure of her footing. She was only registering the general outlines of the scene and Cassidy wondered if she’d remember she’d been dancing at the ball. She floated on the dance floor like an angel, unaware, soft in his arms. But, the drugs aside, he wondered how fragile she really was, how much her mind could handle if the memory of the bombing of Cologne came swirling back at her from the booby-trapped past.

  Would it crush her like Dr. Moller’s threatened eggshell?

  Cassidy thought the doctor might be selling her short: the Karin that Cassidy had married could have handled it, could have handled anything—but this Karin, wounded and scared, how could you be sure? Which Karin was he holding against him as they danced? The delicate shell that might crack or the resourceful woman, who had turned up at his apartment and begun seeing flashes of the past, their past?

  Looking down at her as they danced—the shine in her hair, the faint smile, the curl at the corners of her mouth, Cassidy knew the answer to the questions Terry and Winchell had asked.

  Cassidy knew he wanted her. He wanted her back, he loved her as he’d loved her before. She could fill the empty center of his life. He loved her … didn’t he?

  If she could survive the reconstruction of her memory, wouldn’t she then be his Karin again? He’d never know until she’d recovered what was gone.

  How to do it? That was going to be the hard part. What would it take to see her through that dark passage, to the safety on the other side where, almost as another man, he saw himself waiting for her?

  The band had struck up “You Do Something to Me.” Cassidy, watching Karin again from across the room, decided he was tiptoeing dangerously near the rim of obsession. It was time to stop watching Karin and pay attention to business. In the end, there was only one way to get her back, and that involved paying attention to business. It always came back to that.

  Liddell Benn materialized at his side, bald and mustachioed, smelling of perfumed wax. “Enjoying yourself, Mr. Cassidy?”

  “Enjoying the scenery,” Cassidy said.

  “You refer to the ladies? Yes. Remarkably beautiful women seem determined to do their bit for the survivors of the recent war. Well, damn me if I don’t say it’s a good thing!”

  “How true.”

  “Take my father. A racing man. He’d have been glad the war was over. He’d have headed back for the English racing, the French season. He was a great admirer of horse flesh, doncha know? You didn’t know Dad by any chance, did you? Short man, fancied rather boisterous hacking jackets—”

  “No, I didn’t know Dad.”

  “Well, let me tell you,” Benn said, surveying the crowd, “I prefer mounting another kind of filly—that’s where Dad and I differed!” His white eyebrows shot up. He made a face of surprise at this moment of confidence-sharing. He smoothed his white mustache with a bony knuckle. “Haw, haw,” he said, “haw, haw. Now that filly you brought. Damn fine conformation, seems to me. Good breeding.”

  “You should take a gander at her teeth.”

  “Deep chest, good wind. A stayer.” He sounded as if he might saddle her up at any moment. Or go on this way forever.

  A waiter with a tray of champagne came floating past and Cassidy took two glasses. He handed one to Benn, said: “To all the fine and brave refugees.”

  The host nodded but amended the toast: “And to all the fine womanhood in support of wogs, kikes, frogs, bohunks, spies, wops, and assorted whatnot!”

  They drank and Benn licked the fringe of his mustache. “Seems to me I was supposed to introduce you to someone. Ring any bells with you, Cassidy?”

  “Why, yes, I believe it does.”

  “Now, Mr. Winchell told me I wasn’t to let on, just arrange it. Said it was something to do with the national interest. Do you think that could be true? Damn me, but he’s a wonderful man. Great humanitarian!”

  “Winchell?”

  “Winchell? God no, he’s a jumped-up little git, a twister, to my way of thinking. No, no, I have reference to Karl Dauner—name just came to me. One of the unsung heroes of the war—”

  “Just the way he wants it, I’m sure.”

  “A great man. Backbone of the country, let’s face it.”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Do I detect a note of sarcasm, young fella?”

  “I don’t even know the man.”

  “Sarcasm is for the birds, Mr. Cassidy Well, come along into the billiards room, come along.”

  The billiards room was oak-paneled, wore an exhausted Persian rug, heavy brocade draperies, a couple of portraits of long-ago Benns with villainous eyes. Art-wise the rest of the room was strictly horses. There were a well-stocked liquor cabinet and wall sconces and several high chairs so you could watch the action on the table if it got too exciting to ignore.

  Karl Dauner was tall and thin, a hawk-nosed aristocratic old party with a better tailor than anyone should be able to afford. He was playing what Cassidy would call pool and Benn would inevitably refer to as pocket billiards. He had an elegant soft stroke, no flourishes, no frills, just the balls kissing one another with a kind of Zen delicacy, just hard enough to propel them off the edge. That would be his style. Just enough force to get the job done with the least amount of fuss.

  He was probably only sixty but so spare he looked older. His face was deeply lined, as if chiseled out of some unyielding stone that would chip but not carve. He had an ageless look in his eyes and a stance that made you think of somebody who’d been standing on a pedestal in the park since the end of the War Between the States. His face was long and rectangular and thin and he wore a hearing aid, the wire stretching from behind his ear to the battery pack in the breast pocket of his dinner jacket. It was a common accessory among men who’d been in the trenches thirty years before. He slowly, methodically, ran six balls while Benn and Cassidy watched. The band was playing “Isn’t It Romantic?” and the draperies were thrown back, the windows open to the faint breeze. The room was full of blue cigar smoke but nearly empty of human habitation, just Dauner and another man with a cue and a vaguely familiar face.

  His run having emptied the table, Dauner looked up and smiled at Benn. The balls were clicking as the other man emptied the pockets. Benn introduced them while Dauner’s eyes played across their mouths, as if he were lip-reading as well, not entirely trusting his hearing aid. “Mr. Cassidy,” he said, “it is indeed a great pleasure to meet you. I had a season box in the old days at
the Polo Grounds. I saw you play there. Business kept me away on that ill-fated day that will live in infamy … but I was sorely distressed at the way your career ended.” He had a way of talking, as if he were listening for the echo from the box in his breast pocket. It gave him a slightly quizzical expression every few words. He might have been hearing Fred Allen doing his best material on that little box.

  “Roughly a thousand years ago,” Cassidy said.

  “I’m sure it must seem so to you,” Dauner said.

  Liddell Benn interrupted: “Karl, we’re counting on your interest in the choice little Tiepolo? Is that the one? Well, you know the one I mean—if it isn’t a picture of a horse, I don’t know one from another.”

  “My dear Helena will be handling the bidding, Del. She has no sense of economy, I’m afraid—”

  “Which will be wonderful for the refugees,” Benn said.

  “The refugees,” Dauner mused, “the storm-tossed, they are always with us.”

  They were standing near the drinks table. Dauner splashed some extra soda into his scotch. The other man with a cue had sunk two balls, then missed one badly, and muttered something in a language Cassidy had never heard before. Benn turned to him, introduced him to Cassidy. “Jaroslav Harkavy, the Rumanian pianist,” Benn said. “One of our most honored refugees … Lewis Cassidy. Jaroslav is giving a recital at Town Hall on Friday.” Harkavy bowed from the waist, without offering his hand. He wore a patchy beard and heavy glasses that slipped down his nose every time he leaned over to take a shot.

  Benn and Harkavy left the room speaking of Michelangelo and Cassidy stood watching Dauner line up a shot of his own while he went on chatting casually. “Are you a lover of art, Mr. Cassidy? Or simply one who wishes these poor victims of war well?”