Mary took the tissue and, looking close in the mirror, found the red streak, wiped it off, and again considered her reflection, breaking into a dozen different smiles and expressions, as if testing each for its effect. Before the hairdresser arrives I just want to be certain that downstairs everything is ready. Would you mind if I left you my cases to get packed?
Not at all, darling Mary. Leave it to me.
And would you not tell Marsh about the cases?
No, of course not. You can trust me absolutely.
Yes, I feel that. Mary took her hand, squeezing it and smiling, and Nathalie knew she had seen the expression before, in one of Mary’s recent pictures, and that whatever flicker of genuine connection might have passed between them earlier had been replaced in an instant by the performance of feeling, what Nathalie thought to call its artful simulacrum.
Alone in John and Mary’s bedroom, the door closed, Nathalie began opening drawers and closets. If the order was to pack, then it was reasonable to conclude that everything had to come out, and who could say what might be hidden in the hat and shoe boxes, beneath the corsets and girdles and underwear, tucked away at the backs of cupboards or under the bathroom sink, in the trunks and suitcases themselves, even, perhaps, in the fireplace or behind the mirror or beneath the painting of Mary gazing down upon the room? Nathalie allowed herself to search such as she never had before, scouring for clues, hoping for a trace that Mary might have forgotten or clung to, a Communist Party card or a list of members or notes from a meeting or some other scrap of memorabilia that would tie her indisputably to the Reds and suggest, in its singularity, precisely the species of evidence that would be wholly new to Agents Leopold and Loeb. She piled clothes onto the bed, opened the cases, began packing what she thought Mary would want in Malibu, emptied shelves and reorganized, opened and tipped out, knocked against the closet walls and ripped the drawers out of the dressers until around her was a chaos of furniture and garments. Struck by how reckless she had been in this search, how careless about the placing and position of what she had removed, Nathalie tried to fathom what had compelled her into this frenzy, how it was that a search of this kind, in this place and time, should propel her into such haphazard methods, for if Mary walked in now, quite apart from anger and surprise, she would know that something was not right, for Nathalie had always, in folding and putting away, in packing and unpacking, in laundry and cleaning and household organization, ever since she had entered Mary and John’s home, demonstrated in all such matters the height of methodical precision.
And then there was the child Iris standing in the open door.
What are you doing? Iris, with the sole of her left shoe, pushed the bedroom door closed behind her as silently as she had opened it. Did Mother throw one of her nervous fits and leave you to clean it up?
I suppose you must think yourself so terribly clever.
I suppose I must.
You should know that clever girls have difficult lives.
I don’t think that’s a very intelligent thing to say in this day and age.
I was a clever girl like you.
You can’t have been that clever if you ended up a maid.
That is not a nice thing to say. People do not always have happen to them what they expect or deserve.
That’s what I’d call a fatalist attitude, said Iris. I believe in selfdetermination. Have you read Schopenhauer?
No.
But you’re German, aren’t you?
Not all Germans read philosophy.
That’s not what I heard.
Don’t you want to get married?
I don’t think it’s for me, said the child.
Then you will have to be very clever indeed.
My teacher says I read at a college level already and have done since I was eight, so I’m well on my way. But is this Mother’s mess or yours?
Never mind that.
Then I suppose I’ll have to ask Mother.
Nathalie looked at the girl and looked at the door and calculated the distance she would have to cover to block Iris from leaving the room.
That would not be very nice, Iris.
I guess that means it’s your mess.
Your mother asked me to pack some bags.
You didn’t pack like this when we went to New York or Hawaii or Havana, so I’m guessing either you’ve lost something Mother entrusted to you or you’re looking for something and you don’t know what it is. Which one?
Nathalie smiled and thought about what it would take to get rid of the girl. The latter, she said.
Well if you want to know where the bodies are buried you’re too late. She’s already burned them.
Excuse me?
I’m speaking metaphorically. You think I haven’t been snooping too? Grow up in a house of secrets and you have to spend all your free time figuring out what’s hidden. Mother burned a pile of letters and some other stuff, pamphlets and whatnot, in the fireplace.
Iris pointed at the hearth above which Mary’s portrait glowered down at them.
When was this?
A few weeks ago. She cleaned it up herself and flushed the ash down the toilet. She didn’t know I was watching.
Have you seen anything else?
Not so far. But I’ll keep looking until I find something incriminating. Should I tell you if I do?
You are a strange child.
Look at the parents, Iris said, and turned on her heel to leave the room.
August 20, 1955
King and Quisling
– At least we won’t need to eat.
– Just as well. The food at the Marshes is always terrible.
– That cook’s like something out of Hitler’s Madman.
– Straight from the bunker.
– Conrad Veidt in a dress.
King and Quisling sat in the living room of Professor Adelram Morrow, noted biologist, botanist, zoologist, everyman scientist, red-blooded American gainfully employed at the University of California Los Angeles, a prominent and vocal supporter of the university system’s contentious loyalty oath (students had been rioting all week and now subversive faculty members were joining the fray), member of the Native Sons of the Golden West (he was born in Bakersfield), and across-the-street neighbor of Mr. Philip Desmond Frank. King and Quisling were drinking black coffee served by Dr. Morrow’s wife, Phyllis, whose maid had baked a red velvet cake earlier in the day, decorated with cream cheese frosting and blue sugar sprinkles.
I told her it was practically a desecration but she gets these ideas in her head, Phyllis apologized, I hope you won’t judge us too harshly, gentlemen. You know the Morrows hold the flag in the highest esteem. Edna was only trying to be patriotic.
King and Quisling ate their cake and smiled, or rather Quisling smiled, for King’s hearing was impaired by the headphones connected to a wire that picked up the signal from the microphone placed in Desmond Frank’s living room by means of a hole drilled through the exterior wall. Recordings were being made, but it was important to have agents there during waking hours in case anything out of the ordinary happened. It was just a matter of time before a subpoena was issued.
– Dessert?
– I couldn’t, really, Desmond.
– Max?
– Yeah boss?
– Do we have any ice cream?
– All we got is sherbet.
– What flavors?
– Pineapple or orange.
– Sherbet anyone? Myles?
– I wouldn’t say no.
– You should watch your figure, darling, American girls don’t like their idols fat.
– Who’s fat? Myles isn’t fat.
– Not yet he isn’t.
King and Quisling had been monitoring the Frank residence every evening for the previous two weeks while another pair of agents covered the days. For the most part it had been easy, tedious work, no surprises. Frank was a bore when it came to his domestic life, except for the obvious perversions, altho
ugh the microphone was little use once people left Frank’s living room, so a fair amount of conjecture was involved in determining what might be happening elsewhere in the house.
For dinner, Mrs. Morrow’s maid had prepared steak with a dressing made from corn chips following a recipe printed in the Times earlier that week. She was trying to wean Edna off What Cooks in Hollywood since Adelram had grown tired of David Niven’s fishcakes, Eve Arden’s meatloaf, and Joan Crawford’s hot buttered bread, which was nothing more than an ordinary loaf minus the crusts smeared with half a pound of butter and put in the oven for a quarter of an hour. No one apart from the professor had been able to finish the corn-chip steak, so the cake, no matter its color, was received with relief.
King watched Mrs. Morrow lean over to cut her husband another slice. Professor Morrow was a fat man with a pink bald head who should not have been eating cake. Although better than the steak, there was something chemical about the cake’s flavor and King put down his fork, leaving half his piece uneaten as he transferred his attention to the sounds of Desmond Frank, Myles Haywood, and Helen Fairdale talking in the house across the street. It had been a dull evening so far, as if the targets of his surveillance almost suspected someone might be listening. The Reds were clever, and the pansy Reds cleverest of all because they had to hide being Red and pansy from the rest of the world and even hide being pansy from their hidden Red colleagues. It was a tortured little cell—
– I suppose we should go fairly soon.
– They never get started before nine.
– Are we even welcome?
– Of course we’re welcome. Have you told Helen about my suggestion, Myles?
– Listen, Des, maybe now isn’t the time.
– What suggestion? What are you two cooking up?
—and then all at once the room across the street went silent and King held his breath trying to discern if the shuffles and other movements picked up by the listening system might mean anything significant. Just when he decided he had heard whispering a jazz trumpet blared into the microphone. It was so loud he had to fling the headphones back from his ears.
Drink, Agent Quisling? Agent King? Professor Morrow asked from his reclining chair, second plate of cake balanced on the globe of his stomach. I couldn’t persuade you last night, but seeing as it’s a Friday, he droned, I thought perhaps you might join me in a nightcap.
Quisling glanced at King, who nodded. Two weeks with these people and they both felt the need of a stiffener, although Quisling knew he should not be drinking on duty. No telling when a situation might change without warning. There was a gas fire in the living room and although it had made it into the 70s that day, following the red rays of sunset the evening shrank into chill so Mrs. Morrow turned up the flame. Two red flares flashed in the faces of Professor Morrow’s spectacles and the fired red tiles around the hearth gave the room a cozy ambiance, radiating heat so that, within a few minutes, everyone’s cheeks had a healthy red glow that made the red of Mrs. Morrow’s lips look quite muted by comparison. On the wall above the fireplace hung a reproduction of an Italian painting of the Visitation of the Virgin to Saint Elizabeth, Mary leaning forward in a blue cloak over a scarlet gown that spilled out along the ground as the cousins necked. Light flickered across its surface and it was easy under the chemical influences of the dyed cake and the steak’s corn-chip dressing to imagine the Virgin martyred aflame. Mrs. Morrow’s mother had sent it to them after her recent stop in Italy, where she claimed to have seen its original in one of the Florentine galleries. Mrs. Morrow could not, herself, imagine traveling outside her own country, especially somewhere people did not speak English, and the fact of her mother’s incautious tourism made her worry that men like Agents King and Quisling might soon take an interest in her husband or herself. It was part of the reasoning behind allowing the authorities use of their home, believing that a certain candor would prove the Morrows’ willingness to cooperate as patriotic Americans trying to uphold the rule of law in such an age of darkness, when fifth columnists implanted themselves even in the best neighborhoods. She liked corn chips, but while it had sounded promising in print the reality just wasn’t very tasty. Tomorrow, she decided, they would go back to Lauren Bacall’s reliable beef stroganoff.
Professor Morrow poured fingers of the single-malt whiskey his mother-in-law had sent from Edinburgh, believing its equal could not be found in Southern California. There was a family rumor that his wife’s mother had fallen in love with a red-bearded Scotsman and would not return to her own country. It had driven his wife into such a red anger he felt forced to consult a friend in the new medical school about getting her a prescription for secobarbital. They first took samples of her blood – Professor Morrow had sat holding his wife’s pale hands as the blood, a terrible red, ran into vials – to see that her system could handle the effects of the tranquilizer because she had always been in fragile health. Even after starting the pills (small and red and so glossy they might have been shellacked with nail varnish), something, Adelram was convinced, was still amiss, for far from calming Phyllis the tranquilizers energized her, as though her body were scripted to respond in the opposite manner to that expected. A woman of the reddest blood would not be so highly strung, he was certain. Her ring flashed in the firelight, its band bright against tapering white fingers. Phyllis had inherited the ring as well as the fingers from her mother, who claimed to have inherited all her jewelry from a grandmother, who herself claimed to have been an intimate of the Romanovs, so Phyllis insisted on describing the ring as ‘pure Russian red-gold’ even though Adelram had told her there could be no such thing as pure red-gold because the substance was almost certainly at least half copper and to advertise its Russianness, however fictional, however pre-revolutionary, was ill-advised. Lately she had taken to calling it, simply, her ‘red ring’, which, with the ruby inset, it might justifiably be described, although the stone itself was likely synthetic, and the whole thing no older than twenty or thirty years. Pure it was not, and could never be. It had become one of the points of small disagreement that threatened to eclipse the ordinary happiness of Adelram Morrow’s domestic life. His mother-in-law, who on occasion practiced geomancy and had been a radical suffragist in her distant youth, jailed on two continents and given to pamphleteering, predicted some months earlier (and communicated this prediction by telegram from Cape Town) that Phyllis would evolve into her opposite: DEAR PHYLLIS RED AFRICAN EARTH REVEALS TERRIBLE FUTURE STOP YOU FATED TO BE AGORAPHOBIC STOP LEAVE ADELRAM NOW STOP RETURNING AMERICA NOT BEFORE CHRISTMAS STOP LOVE YOUR MOTHER. Adelram had burned the telegram before his wife could read it but nonetheless took note of his mother-inlaw’s prediction, and since then had become conscious of Phyllis’s giddiness each time she left the house.
Adelram sucked the crumbs of his cake. I’ve long been suspicious of that Mr. Frank, he said.
So you’ve told us, said Agent Quisling.
Don’t think I’m abasing him for my own advancement. I have nothing to gain from this cooperation with you gentlemen except the honor and satisfaction of serving my country in however small a way. Hospitality is a form of service, after all, I think you gentlemen must agree.
Quisling nodded and sipped his drink. Cooperative Professor Morrow and his wife might be, but they were a tiresome pair.
Is Mr. Frank a Jew? Do you gentlemen know? No? If he is, I suppose he must be what they call a Red Jew, red in more ways than one, of course, but I speak of the racial type, the redness of hair and complexion, as though, from a scientific point of view, biology had dictated ideology. My father always said the Red Jews will bring about the end of the world, Gog and Magog, the Ten Tribes and what have you. Worth considering when one encounters the type.
Quisling drank his drink and wished it were stronger. These people pushed him to the edge of his patience. If the Morrows were the kind of Americans who called themselves patriots and about whom nothing subversive would ever be suspected, he began to wonder if he might
be on the wrong side, politically speaking, or at least on the wrong side of his own conscience.
My father has red hair but he’s no more a Red than I. My dog is red, too, red as a chestnut, but your theory, I suppose, doesn’t hold for animals or vegetables or minerals that occur in the natural world. I mean, they can’t all be subversive, Professor Morrow, said Quisling.
Adelram Morrow chuckled so that his sphere of gut bounced and jiggled as though it might separate itself from his body and roll away to crush a path of ruin across the floor. I do not say that biology, or indeed chemistry, is the last word in loyalty, only that in the particular ideological perversion of Communism, a red complexion or red hair might, now that red has been elevated – or we might say denigrated – as the chosen color of the Soviets, incline the red-haired individual to sympathy with the ideology that celebrates red as the apogee of beauty. I have always preferred white myself, and beige, and blue. Red is not a color of calm or rational thought. Red is something that must be harnessed and controlled to keep its particular power from ranging unchecked.
My mother always used to call my father Red, though his name was Frederick. I told her she shouldn’t do that now. People might get the wrong idea. Quisling finished his drink. He wanted another and put the empty glass on the table hoping the professor would get the message.
Another whiskey for Agent Quisling, Phyllis.
Mrs. Morrow swept up the glass in one hand while the other poured from the open bottle of single-malt scotch. Whatever it was, unpronounceable name, older than Quisling was himself, it smelled like culture and was heady and warming and he wanted as much of it as he could drink because he was unlikely to be offered its equal again. There was bound to be a box of Cuban cigars somewhere, and if he waited long enough those other gifts of hospitality might emerge.
Of course it is not just certain races of Jews we might describe as red. There are the Red Indians of our own great continent, not to mention the red races of the Caribbean islands, no doubt the product of miscegenation, and again, as my theory holds, entities that must be carefully controlled and managed, put under the balancing yoke of whiteness. No, I think it is fair to say that except in the case of the Celtic, Scandinavian, Aryan, that is to say the Northern European Germanic races and their brethren, any other race exhibiting a red complexion has inherited this through the undesirable breeding between racial groups and ought to be regarded as fallen in a biological sense, prone to any number of infections. You notice how in the Germanic, northern-European red, there is always a balancing white complexion to keep the fire at bay – the purest of white skin, in fact. Like you, Agent Quisling, except you’ve no red hair. What is your family?
Night for Day Page 37