by John Gardner
“Then what?”
“Well, you know Stefan … no, you didn’t know Stefan. …”
“Hardly.”
“For a minute I was back there. You ever do that? Think you’re back in some other place?”
“Only when I want to be. Or when I dream.” Herbie frowned. “And I don’t ask to dream.”
“Funny, since we been doing this, Herb, sometimes I’ve almost regressed, gone back to live it again. Only in the emotions, of course. …”
“Of course. But that’s what it’s coming to these days—our old trade. Now is changed. A lot of the work will be just old men sitting in a room doing time-traveling. Going back to find out why.”
Passau grunted. “What trade?”
“You’ll get to it. What then, Lou?”
“What when?”
“When you spoke to Stefan.”
They met at Stefan’s house in the Hollywood hills.
“Louis, we all thought you knew,” he said, eyes open wide showing innocence. The place had been redecorated, and workmen were outside. Stefan told him he was enlarging the house. Said it was getting too small.
“What d’you mean, you thought I knew?”
The director touched his cheek with a forefinger. Then he touched the tip of his nose. It was as though he was going through some kind of arcane signaling. Finally—
“You are the only person I’ve ever known with whom Rita seemed natural. Crys said she’d warned you.”
It puzzled Passau. “Maybe that’s what she meant. She didn’t spell it out. Am I very stupid, Stefan?”
“Louis, you’re not stupid at all, but I thought you realized. Everyone in the business knows. Rita can only function as an actress when she is hopped up with booze and heroin. She’s a brilliant actress with the help of these things. Hell to work with, but brilliant.” He sat back and took a deep breath. “The problems are really very serious. She can only work for a certain amount of time every day, and that time is getting shorter and shorter. It’s running out for her. She has to have music on the set. She also has to have a certain dosage of heroin, which she tops up with alcohol to keep on a high. As it starts to break down, she goes to pieces. A little too much booze on top of the drugs and she’s incapable. She does a maximum of three hours work a day—that is three hours good work. Lou, I don’t think she’ll be able to do that much longer.”
“But she always seems …” “Of course,” he thought. “Of course she always seems fine in the evenings. Another quick shot, maybe a glass of something to get her charged up, and she would be fine for the five or six hours spent most nights with her husband, or out at dinner, maybe a party.”
“They’re cunning, Louis. Addicts are cunning, and she’s been very clever to keep the truth away from you for so long.”
“Either that or I’m naive.”
“Or you didn’t want to see it.”
Passau, now in the present, lifted his head and locked eyes with Kruger. “You know, I think Stefan had the final answer. I didn’t want to see it. Story of my life.”
“It happens, like shit happens. They call it self-delusion.”
Passau nodded. “I certainly deluded myself, because, after that night, everything fell into place—that’s an old cliché, I know, but it did. I saw she was distanced from life when she came back in the evenings, and I realized the things I thought so wonderful about her were simply the removal of all her self-respect, a breaching of her moral scruples.”
He had marveled at Rita’s eroticism, then wondered at her modesty at other times. Now he saw these were the two sides of the whole woman, and one aspect was being eroded by the crutch of drugs and drink.
Stefan Greif had said, “She’s going to die, Lou, if someone doesn’t do something.”
“So you did something, Lou?” Herbie asked some sixty years later.
“Oh, sure. Sure, Herb. I did something for her. I killed her.”
Herbie nodded. “You going to tell me about it?”
“Why not? I haven’t told anybody before.”
Rita behaved naturally in the days that followed her outburst. It seemed to Louis that she had also given up any pretense. She came in from the studios each night, disappeared for a while and emerged as her bright self. Twice she initiated Olympic bouts of sex, during which she floated away from him and spoke obscenities. “It was like devil possession, Herb. You think that’s what possession really was? Drugs?”
Once she even made a joke, saying she had to retire to the bathroom so she could get herself back to normal.
Max Ebius had invited them to a party two weeks after the original showdown and, on the night before, Rita finally broke down and told him the truth.
He woke, suddenly, in the middle of the night, knowing something was wrong. It was not just her absence from the bed, but a sense of danger that appeared to filter from the darkness. For a second or two, as he came from sleep, Passau thought maybe there was a fire, or intruders.
She was in the bathroom, naked, leaning over the washbasin, dry heaving, her whole body running with sweat, urine coursing down her legs, wild-eyed and barely able to stand.
He helped her. Made her drink coffee, washed her down and got her back into the bedroom. She seemed to go off to sleep immediately but, after a couple of minutes, her eyes popped open wide and she began to cry, great racking sobs shaking her body. It obviously hurt her each time she shook. “Lou,” she sobbed, “I’ve tried to be good, Louis. Haven’t you noticed? I’ve cut down on the drink. I know I’ve got to change. Something’s got to happen. You were right. …”
After the scene when he had first confronted her, he had made some inquiries and found a doctor with a private clinic, up near Arrowhead. He told her that he would do all he possibly could and she should spend time in the clinic.
“As soon as the movie’s over. As soon as we wrap it, I’ll go in, but only if you promise to stay with me, Louis darling. I can’t do it alone. I don’t know if I can do it at all, but I’ll have a better chance if you’re with me.”
He promised her, there in the bedroom, reeking of her sweat and urine. He said he would be with her for every moment, each step of the way. There he made a pact with her. A pact he should not have made.
That was the problem. There were two weeks left to run on the picture, and exactly two weeks before Louis had promised to stand in for Maestro Rodzinski. The great Boris Androv, arguably the most famous and flamboyant conductor in the world, was to visit Los Angeles with his privately funded Manhattan Symphony Orchestra. Rodzinski had been ordered to take a rest. Though he did not want to be out of town when the famous Androv would be performing, he felt if he did not get away now, he would not find another space until next season. Against his better judgment, Rodzinski had asked Louis to oversee Androv’s visit, to deputize if need be.
“Naturally I jumped at it. Who wouldn’t? As it turned out …”
“I know how it turned out, Lou. Keep telling me about Rita.”
Max had arranged for the studio set dressers to erect a marquee on the lawns in front of his huge showplace house. “This was a dream house, Herb. You ever seen pictures of it? No? Incredible. Like a fairy-tale palace. But Max had it designed by the people at the studio and built by them as well. That way he didn’t pay any extra for the construction. The party was really to celebrate his move to the new place. The only problem was that Max had no taste, and the studio people were doing a castle one week and a museum the next—sets on the sound stages. Max’s place came out half castle, quarter deluxe New York apartment, and quarter English country house.”
Rita had taken a shot before they left, but had promised to stay off the drink, except maybe a glass of wine. They had been at the party for only an hour when he realized Rodzinski was there. Rita stuck to Louis as if they were welded at the hip, and he tried to avoid the Maestro. All the arrangements had been made by letter and over the telephone. Boris Androv was set to arrive on September 14, the day after shooting of Night
s of Lightning was due to finish. Rita was booked into the Arrowhead clinic on September 14.
Inevitably, Rodzinski caught up with them.
“Artur, how lovely to see you.” Rita had seen him bearing down on them.
They exchanged pleasantries, then Rodzinski said he would have to be going. “I don’t like these functions much, and I am very tired.” He gave each of them a smile. Then—
“Mrs. Passau, you’ll never know how indebted I am to your husband. Standing in for me during Androv’s visit is a lifesaver.”
“Really? Oh, I’m so glad.” She turned to Louis, happy, not yet having grasped the significance. “You didn’t mention it, darling. You’re going to look after the great man?”
“Oh, it’ll be a privilege.”
“Will I get to meet him?”
“Of course,” from Rodzinski. “I presume you’re going to be hostess when Louis greets him on the fourteenth.”
There was a pause, long and full of noise, a background of chatter. Far off across the lawns, on a specially constructed stand, a band played “What Is This Thing Called Love?”
“The fourteenth?” she said. Her voice was jagged ice. “The fourteenth of what?”
“We can talk later, Rita,” Louis tried.
“No we fucking cannot talk later.” Her voice rose and, sensing the obvious, Rodzinski backed off into the crowd.
“I’m still coming with you, Rita.” Passau knew his voice held no conviction.
“You’re going to be in two places at once?” Tears started at her eyes. “Don’t play games with me, Lou. I thought you meant it.” She turned and walked off into the crowd.
It was fifteen minutes before Louis found her, but in that short space of time Rita had managed to get the best part of half a bottle of Scotch down her.
“This was the start of the famous ‘scene.’ You know about that, Herb?”
Big Herbie nodded. “Sure, but let me hear it from you.”
“If you read the books, they got it right. Practically every word. I had to allow my biographers to print it. After all, half Hollywood heard it that night. It was given word for word in evidence at the inquest. Greenbriar has it all in his book about Rita. She screamed at me. Told me exactly what I was, in front of every big name in the business. Then she said she was going home. Said she was leaving me.
“I followed, and it’s all true about her insisting that she was capable of driving. Saying she wouldn’t be driven by me. What she actually said was, ‘I won’t be driven by you, or ridden by you, or anything more by you, you bastard.’
“It was Coop—Gary Cooper—who calmed her down and said she should let me drive her home. I told her she’d got it wrong. That I would be with her on the fourteenth.”
“You lied to her, Lou.”
“Sure I lied to her. I was trying to gain time. I had every intention of taking her to Arrowhead. All I had to do was make her see that I was putting it off for a couple of days.”
“Which is not the best of things with an obsessive addict, Lou. In fact it’s criminal.”
“I know that now. I tried to reason with her in the car. …”
“I’m taking you to Arrowhead, honey,” he said as the car rolled out of Max Ebius’ driveway.
“You think you’re going to take me there and dump me. I know what you’re going to do … you … you …” She was very drunk.
“No. Just listen to me, Rita.”
The bend ahead was long and tight. The car settled nicely into the turn; white wooden palings defined the edge of the road. With a shriek of exasperation she reached over and jerked the wheel out of his hands.
(“She was so quick. It was unexpected. I could do nothing to save us,” he told Kruger as the afternoon began to bleed away outside.)
They hit the white posts. Seven of them, ripped away as the car went broadside into them, then tipped and swayed over fifty yards of steep incline.
After they hit, Passau had heard a terrible crack and, from the corner of his eye, saw Rita become a rag doll, flung against the windshield. Gingerly he opened the door and the interior light snapped on.
“She was looking up at me. Glazed, staring. I’m certain she was dead, Herb, certain.”
A thousand pieces of blind panic shot through his head. He had a bruised arm, that was all. Yes, he had been drinking, but it was Rita who had caused this. There would be people who would believe him, and others—maybe the police, almost certainly the studio—who would not.
He leaned into the car, and dragged her over, so that she draped across the steering wheel. (“I hardly stopped to think, Herb. I just knew I had to make people believe she did it. I remember her skirt was all fucked up. I pulled it down out of modesty.”)
Passau went to the back of the car. It only took a light push to send it over. It rolled three times, hitting the rocks with a trio of crunching bangs. When all was still again, Louis Passau hurled himself over the edge and rolled down. He got up, bruised and cut, six or seven paces from the wreck. Then he began to scream for help.
Rita Crest had gone straight through the windshield, on the driver’s side, and was half decapitated. Lou Passau walked away. That was what people failed to understand. The car looked like a truck had hit it so, by all the rules, Lou Passau should also have been dead.
“A freak, Herb. A freak. I should have died there with her.”
“Is the truth, Lou?”
“I swear it’s the truth.”
“She was dead after the first impact?”
“She was dead.”
“You’re one hundred and two percent certain.”
“I’m … I’m pretty certain. Live people move when they have their eyes open.”
“You checked her pulse?”
“She was dead, Herb. Dead like a doornail after we hit the palings. Stupid bitch.”
“People said you’d rigged it. You said to me that you killed her.”
“’Course I killed her. I should’ve leveled with her. I should have told her from the start that we couldn’t go until the sixteenth. The woman was desperate. She had taken that plunge into the unknown by saying she would have treatment. Of course I fucking killed her, Herbie.”
In spite of the underlying emotion, Herbie felt that Passau had not allowed him to see Rita Crest with any clarity. He had visualized Sophie Giarre but not the Maestro’s first wife. Either Louis Passau was holding back or he had ceased to see her in true focus. Perhaps the years had blurred her edges and made her as two-dimensional as an old snapshot.
Kruger opened his mouth to speak and, as he did so, the telephone rang.
Out of habit, Herbie counted. Five. Five rings and Naldo was coming in. But Naldo had discontinued, and the code no longer applied to Pucky.
“You stay here, Lou. Stay quiet like a mouse. Don’t know what to make of this one.”
The pistol was in his hand as he went downstairs and waited, out of sight behind the back door.
He heard the car pull into the rear of the house. Footsteps, and the door slowly opened.
“Herb?” Naldo called softly.
“Jesus, you give me fright of my life, Nald. What’s up?”
“Sit down, Herb. Sit down and please don’t kill the messenger. Electra’s surfaced. Art called and I got back on some secure line they have. Art spent last night with her at Warminster.”
For a moment, Big Herbie did not take it in. “Electra? Which Electra? Christ, Nald, she’s dead.”
Slowly, and a little sadly, Naldo shook his head. “No,” he said, and again, “No, Herb. She’s alive and reasonably well. She asked after you.”
Suddenly, for Herbie, it was as though his whole life was enveloped in pain, groaning and shrieking from an agony he thought would never return. It was like some ghastly war wound, healed and forgotten, now reopened and pumping gouts of sorrow from his system.
“I kill her,” he said softly. “If she’s alive, I kill her personally. Make her wish she’d never been born.”
/> (6)
THOUGH ELECTRA SEEMED LIKE someone from another person’s life, she had haunted Big Herbie Kroger down the years. It happens with great loves and great treacheries. A snatch of some tune; a laugh, or the sound of footsteps on a dark street; a familiar smell, or taste; the memory of a restaurant, or place, shared with the lover or betrayer, and the entire episode leaps into the mind. In Herbie’s case, hardly a day went by without some reminder, even though eleven years had passed since Ursula had revealed herself as his personal traitor. She remained his constant dream, as though she still had him under surveillance.
Electra—Ursula Zunder—had come into his life in the ice age of the Cold War, the early 1960s, before the Berlin Wall cracked that extraordinary city in two. That was the time he ran the network called the Schnitzer Group.
Even now, Herbie could remember, in every last detail, how Ursula had entrapped him, and how he had fallen. “Love, the whole business. Love, the magician. Love and death. Love like I never knew, and have never known since,” as he described it later to the hard men at Warminster. He should have known that it was a honey trap but, oaf that he considered himself at the time, he had not spotted it.
“A man led by his dick,” one of the confessors had said, and Herbie almost flew at him in rage.
“Not like that, idiot! It wasn’t just the sex! Don’ you know about anything? You ask me the questions and you don’ fucking understand. You don’ deserve to be confessor. Jesus, get me Gus, at least Gus Keene knows what it’s all about. I don’ have to answer the questions of schoolboys, or put up with the adolescent jokes.”
As it happened, Herbie was right. That particular inquisitor was just out of training. He disappeared the next day, like so many people in the Service. His colleagues could not even ask where he had gone—on some sensitive op, or booted out, signing the Official Secrets Act again for the insurance? In this case he had been fired. Years later, Herbie spotted him in a Swiss hotel, in charge of a school trip, and thought it was tough luck on the children.
Still, after living so many other lives, he remembered his first sight of her face: the gray-flecked eyes, Italianate nose, and the laugh lines which bracketed her mouth. She was incredibly young but, then, so was he.
