Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

  “All the time in the world,” she said. “Aren’t you afraid of tempting fate? No one who has lived through a war, even one she cannot remember, puts much faith in all the time in the world. But before anything else, we must find Manfred.”

  “Is Manfred the key?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Manfred.”

  “How much does he know?”

  “He’s the missing piece. And it’s funny. He knows the least of all. Poor Manfred … I wake in the middle of the night, maybe from a dream about you, and I think of Manfred. I feel so sorry for him now.”

  Late that evening Cassidy sat in the darkened living room of his apartment. He had skipped dinner. He hadn’t gone to Heliotrope with Terry. He sat in the dark, staring out at Washington Square but not really seeing it. He kept trying to put it all together but it was like playing chess out of your league, against somebody who knew all your moves almost before you did. He was losing badly when the ringing doorbell woke him up.

  He rubbed his eyes and stood up, stumbling over an empty highball glass and a cushion from the couch. He felt like Robert Benchley in the movies, demonstrating all the ways to be clumsy and confused, set upon and brought to grief by inanimate objects that move when you’re not looking. The bell kept ringing.

  It was a Western Union delivery boy. “Just about gave up on you, mister.” He looked down at the telegram in his hand. “Cassidy, is it?”

  “That’s right. I hope you’re not about to break into song.”

  “What? Oh, singing telegrams? No, that’s not my department. This is just your plain old regular telegram, sir.”

  Cassidy gave him half a dollar and went back inside. He turned the lights on and blearily opened the envelope.

  It didn’t make sense at first, all the little strips of paper with all the words in upper case and jumbled together. Then, in a flash of consciousness, it came together. It had been sent from Beverly Hills, California.

  CASSIDY. IF YOU WANT THE MAN YOU CAME LOOKING FOR I’VE GOT HIM STOP NAME IS FRED MILLER STOP I’M READY TO MAKE A DEAL STOP I CAN DELIVER STOP GO TO OCEAN VIEW MOTOR COURT NORTH OF MALIBU STOP REGISTER AS BRIAN SHEEHAN STOP COME ALONE STOP I’LL COME TO YOU STOP JUST WAIT FOR ME STOP MONA

  Cassidy read it through several times.

  It was either real or it was a setup and he could think of only one way to find out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE FOG SWIRLED IN AND puffed at the darkness as if it carried its own light, more fog than was needed, really, for setting the scene. Cassidy’s father would have said the special-effects man was overdoing the whole thing. But, in the odd way things happen, this was real and you couldn’t cut back on the fog. Cold and autumnal, it swept in off the Pacific and the coast highway disappeared and so did the Malibu cliffs and the rocky beaches stretching northward toward Santa Barbara. Somewhere in the fog, lost like an abandoned, derelict freighter, a rust bucket, sat the scarred relic from the Great Depression, the Ocean View Motor Court.

  The sign had been painted over but the old name could still be seen, a palimpsest, faded gold lettering, each letter outlined in green. In the old days, it had proclaimed the El Dorado Tourist Cabins. Under the three light bulbs shining on the sign through the blowing fog the new red lettering looked gaudy and desperate. It had already begun to flake and peel in the damp salt air. It was not a Mona Ransom kind of place but it was the right place. When he’d checked in two days before, Cliff Howard, the owner, had sucked his toothpick, tilted his big straw cowboy hat back on his head, and said: “Oh, so you’re Mr. Sheehan, we’ve got your reservation here. Guess your people didn’t know when you were due in. Just told us to hold a cabin for you. Hard to believe,” he chuckled sourly, “but it ain’t been too tough to do. We’re sort of betwixt and between here, nineteen cabins and you got your pick of seventeen of ’em. We’re not actually on the celebrity tourist trail. Hell, one day, coupla years back musta been, I thought honest-to-God Alan Ladd checked in one day. Wife and I both love a good Alan Ladd picture. …” He shifted the toothpick and shook his head balefully. “Alan Ladd. Sheeee-it. Turned out to be an insurance salesman from Strawberry Point. That’s Iowa, y’know. Boy, that man truly did look like Alan Ladd. Little short guy. Did you know that, Mr. Sheehan? Alan Ladd is about knee-high to a grasshopper. Lotsa people don’t believe that when you tell ’em. But he is, little short guy.” He blotted the signature with an advertising card that proclaimed that loose lips could sink ships. A grinning Japanese admiral with teeth the size of cakes of Palmolive watched an American battleship going down. There was a calendar for 1942 printed beside the slogan.

  Cassidy had taken number 7 and he was heading toward the third night wondering if he’d been a sucker. He ate his meals at the celebrated eats cafe presided over by Alma Howard. He gassed up his rented Plymouth at the pumps in front of the cafe and Cliff checked his plugs and oil and swiped ineffectually at the windshield.

  “You want to drive down to the water,” Cliff Howard said, “you gotta go down about half a mile, take a sharp left, park the jalopy, and walk down them wooden stairs to the beach. Watch them stairs, they’re all crumbly. This climate plays hell with anything metal or wood. Which don’t leave a hell of a lot else, now I think of it.”

  Cliff spent most of the time bent over the fender of a rusted-out Chevy that had last seen better days in the Coolidge Administration. Right about now, the fall of ’45, it looked a lot like Field Marshal Rommel had personally driven his tank over it. Cliff didn’t seem to mind. He’d brought the Chevy out from Grand Forks in ’39 when he and Alma had inherited the old El Dorado from Alma’s late sister and he said the Chevy had whatcha-call your sentimental value. It was the only way he was ever going to get out of Grand Forks unless it was to move to Rapid City where his brother had a hardware store, so—what the hell—he took it and lit out for Sunny Cal. “Grand Forks, Rapid City,” he sighed, “that whole part of the world. You ever go see the faces at Mount Rushmore? We used to see ’em once a summer at least. Pretty boring after the first twenty-five years or so. California, I says to Alma, that’s the place to be! Damn right.” He sucked a toothpick. His face was bright red—as if the sun had dyed it permanently—until you got to the middle of his forehead and then it had that fish-belly whiteness you saw in farmers and ball players. He’d put in his time in the fields, all right. Years and years of it. He’d never lose the look.

  During the days Cassidy sat outside in the metal lawn chairs watching the stucco bubble, watching Cliff bent over the Chevy fully as intent as a brain surgeon trying to restore George Brent’s sight or Bette Davis’s whatnot. Cassidy finally caught up with the Los Angeles Times and learned that the Cubs had been demolished by the Tigers in the final game of the Series. Newhouser had gone the full nine in the 9-3 win. The Cubs had gambled on Borowy yet again, with only a day’s rest, and the Tigers had shellacked him in the first. He hadn’t gotten anybody out and at the end of an inning it was 5–0 and the Series was over. It was just as well he’d been flying to California and hadn’t heard the stupid game.

  His third dinner at the cafe consisted of meat loaf and mashed potatoes and a Coke and peach pie and coffee and Cliff Howard sat in the booth across the table and ate a Velveeta-on-white sandwich, washed down with about a quart of milk. “It’s my ulcers,” he said. “Bet you didn’t know I got me part of a sheep’s stomach. No lie, can you believe that, Brian?”

  “Well, it’s hard to believe,” Cassidy said. “How long have you had these ulcers?”

  “The war, man, the war. I got so goddamned worried ’bout Jap attacks along the coast here, I got me my ulcer. Used to go down and patrol the beach looking for those little two-man subs … kept hearing planes, thought every damn one of ’em was a Zero coming off a carrier out there. Silly damn fool that I was! Real dumb clodbuster from Grand Forks, I guess you could say. … And now we’re gonna have a real war, Brian, you wait and see—”

  “Didn’t we just have a real war?” />
  “Just a preliminary, Brian. It’s the Communists we’re gonna wind up fighting. The Russians. They’re the ones. They’re coming after us, Brian. And you know what else? We’re gonna rue the day we whipped the Nazis because we’re gonna wish we had some of those old boys to help us fight the commies. My ulcer gives me a helluva time when I get to thinking about them commie bastards; are we tough enough to beat ’em? Old George Patton is tough enough, you can count on that. Those Nazis—well, they had their faults and I ain’t sayin’ they didn’t, but they were tough, they saw the Russkies for what they were—”

  “But the Russians beat the shit out of the Nazis,” Cassidy said.

  “Well, young fella, you can be pretty damned sure of one thing. Russians would of been nothing but a slick spot on the highway if the U.S. of A. had marched in arm-in-arm with the German army. Bet on that, young fella. Money in the bank.”

  After dinner Cassidy sat on the stoop outside the door to his cabin and waited in the fog. He heard gulls squawking above and Fred Allen on the radio from one of the other occupied cabins and he watched while the fog thickened and blurred the lights on the gas pumps, the lights in the cafe windows and glowing on the sorry sign.

  He sat in the fog and thought about things and he waited for Mona Ransom.

  Sam MacMurdo, eyes gleaming in anticipation of the kill, had been overjoyed at Mona Ransom’s telegram. “This is it, pard,” he said. “The balloon’s gone up.” He sounded as if Rolf Moller and his killer were all but forgotten.

  He’d gotten on the phone to Washington and in an hour the word had come through that a DC-3 was laid on for the afternoon. MacMurdo would be serving as copilot and they’d leave from LaGuardia. MacMurdo had grinned widely. “Allen Dulles himself set this one up.” He looked a little as if he expected applause for having the spymaster’s ear.

  The plane had been outfitted for the transportation of military VIPs. Cassidy thanked God for that, having imagined a naked interior and a ride of endless discomfort, three thousand miles across America.

  MacMurdo was up in the cockpit. Back in the cabin Cassidy, Terry Leary, and Karin made themselves comfortable in padded seats with heavy olive-drab blankets, Thermos bottles of coffee, packets of sandwiches. They were scheduled to set down for fuel three times; at least that was what Cassidy thought he heard. It didn’t really matter. Harry Madrid refused to join them. He wouldn’t fly and that was all there was to it. On the other hand, he didn’t want to miss the fun. He was off on the noon train after arrangements for what MacMurdo called “billeting” had been made through one of Dulles’s contacts in Los Angeles. They would be staying at a house in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard that had been used by the Army intelligence people since mid-1941. All of them, that is, but Cassidy, who would be waiting for Mona Ransom at the Ocean View Motor Court.

  During the night with the engines throbbing and the air in the cabin thin and cold Karin had leaned against him, two army blankets over them, and he’d asked her what kind of man Manfred Moller actually was. She had sniffled and burrowed her fists against his chest and thought for a moment before she spoke.

  “He likes jokes,” she said. “That’s what appealed to me at first. He was anything but the fearsome SS man, though he looked very nice in his uniform. He never talked about the war except to tell funny stories about himself and the other soldiers, the kind of stories that come out of any war, I suppose. People making funny, stupid mistakes … He always tried to cheer me up and tell me that soon the war would be over. He used to say that the Americans and the English were our natural allies, not our enemies. He would say that once we’d lost the war we’d join with America and face the Russians together. … He wasn’t a monster, Lew. He thought about things, he tried to see what lay beneath the surface.

  “He loves amateur theatricals, used to joke about playing Hamlet in German though he could easily have done it in English.” She spoke with real affection. There was no denying that, no way around it. “He came back at Christmas and played Saint Nicholas for the village children, somehow made sure that there was a party, something to make everyone forget the war for a day or two. And he made me forget—odd for me to say, since I’d forgotten so much already, but you know what I mean. … He made me forget that I’d forgotten, he made me feel that I could still be happy sometimes. I’m explaining all this very badly. He was so good with children, they truly believed he was Father Christmas … all padded. … They loved him, he’d lead them singing with little Elisabeth bouncing on his knee. …” She seemed to drift away, lost in the memory of wartime Christmases.

  “You mentioned Elisabeth once before,” Cassidy said. “When I first saw you again—”

  “Again?”

  “You know what I mean. A few weeks ago.” He looked down at her face tilted up, solemn. He kissed her forehead, near the scar at the temple. “Tell me about Elisabeth. What was her story?”

  “Oh, no particular story. Just another war story. A sweet, lovely little girl, beautiful … no father, you see. And Manfred was so good with her, almost as if she were his own daughter. It makes me so sad, thinking about him now, hiding, running, afraid. …” She bit her knuckle. In the dim reddish light of the darkened cabin he saw the tears on her cheeks. The tears were never far away.

  “I wouldn’t worry about him too much. He’s quite good at taking care of himself. He’s already killed the man who flew him into the States, an art dealer in Boston, and quite possibly his brother—”

  “Please, believe me,” she sighed. “That’s impossible.”

  “And so far as Manfred himself knows, he killed Harry Madrid and me up in Boston. You’d better face it, Karin, he may have been a helluva Father Christmas, but when it comes to murder the man is running up the score.”

  As the plane droned on he heard her crying softly in her sleep.

  Middle of the night. An Army airbase in Kansas.

  Karin was sleeping soundly and they left her under the blankets on the plane. MacMurdo went off to talk with a mechanic while the refueling was carried out. Terry Leary and Cassidy headed for the canteen where there were doughnuts and strong, brackish coffee. They stood by the window in the Quonset hut and watched the floodlit tarmac, the airplanes at rest casting shadows like sleeping pterodactyls.

  Terry Leary wiped confectioner’s sugar from his thin mustache and set the coffee cup down. He was wearing his serious face, which was on view less frequently with each passing year. The more serious life got, he’d decided some time ago, the more you needed to retain your sense of life’s essential absurdity. It was all a comedy in the end and life was so short and nobody would remember you’d been here, anyway. He wasn’t given to thinking too deeply because most of the things people worried about seemed beyond their control. The more they thought the worse things seemed to get. So he tried not to take it all quite so seriously.

  But it was the deepest, darkest hour of the night. He was out in the middle of a place no man had ever gone before—Kansas was off the edge of Terry Leary’s map—and he was worried. He had a tendency, against all his better judgment, to take Cassidy’s life seriously. Cassidy’s life in the years since Karin had disappeared into Germany had been just about the only thing that Terry Leary worried about. His own life he was content to deal with as a roll of the dice. Cassidy’s life was something to worry about. Terry Leary wanted to make sure Cassidy’s life turned out right, whatever that meant. And right now Terry Leary was wishing that Karin had died in the bombing of Cologne. The way God had probably intended.

  “You’re not going to like this, amigo,” he said.

  “I’m not?” Cassidy watched MacMurdo in another of his elements, shooting the breeze with the pilot and the mechanics. The moon was full and silver and they were laughing like kids getting to stay up all night.

  “You listening?”

  “Sure.” Cassidy yawned. “Shoot.”

  “It’s about Karin. I’ve been thinking.”

  “Me, too. What am I
not going to like? I’m pretty realistic about her, Terry. It’s all kind of a mess.” He grinned tiredly. “You’ve been through a lot with me. And women. What’s on your mind?”

  “There’s something wrong with Karin. I can feel it.”

  “Well, sure. That’s not exactly a stop-press scoop.”

  “There’s something all wrong with this memory-loss thing of hers.” He took a deep breath. “I think maybe she’s faking it … or faking some of it. Or it’s different than we think. Jesus, I’m screwing this up. I’m sorry, amigo.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” He smiled wearily at Terry. “Faking it? You can’t fake amnesia, not over a period of time. And if you tried you’d have to have a hell of a reason. It seems to me she hasn’t got much of a reason. Hasn’t got any reason, so far as I can see. You’d better give this some more thought. What makes you think such a crazy thing?”

  “Okay, okay. I don’t know. But I had an idea, something that might help her. It could bring her back. It might be worth a try.”

  “She’s in a delicate condition—” Cassidy stopped. “No, scratch that. That was Rolf’s idea. I think she’s about as fragile as cast iron. Aside from thinking she’s faking it, what’s your idea?”

  “Omar.”

  “Omar?”

  “Omar Popescu. Ring any bells?”

  Later on, in the unreal white light of the dawn over the Rockies, Karin stretched and woke up and said that never in her life had she ever had such drastic need of a bathroom. He sent her off and when she came back her hair was combed and her face rubbed pink and shiny with cold water. She sat down, stared out at the thin strips of halfhearted clouds that lay like knife blades across the hazy pale sky. She leaned back against him and said: “What will happen in Los Angeles?”