Her hands were trembling when she started to rip the inside pages of the passport into little pieces. With a pair of curved toenail scissors from her makeup kit, she began to cut the heavy red plastic cover into strips. It was hard work. A blister formed on her thumb.
When she had finished, she heaped the shreds into an ashtray, struck a match, and held it first to the black-wigged photograph of Helga Renate Hughes. “Auf wiedersehen, Helga …”
Acrid smoke filled the room. Flakes of burning paper wafted into the air and settled slowly to the floor. There was a heavy pounding on the door, the murmur of voices in the hallway, and a woman cried shrilly, “Fire! Are you all right in there?”
Edith opened the door. Worried faces peered from doors on both sides of the corridor and the chambermaid stood nervously, holding a bucket of water and sniffing at the smoke.
“It’s nothing,” Edith said, ready to weep. “I was just trying to burn a photograph — a photograph of a man.” She buried her face in her hands. “I … I’m …”
The chambermaid clapped her hands together. “Oh, forgive me! It was the smoke …”
A light rain was falling in Zurich. The headlights of passing cars dazzled Edith’s eyes, the neon signs blinked blue and red and green. The ball of fear in her stomach made her feel nauseous. In the left-hand pocket of her coat she carried the bundle of shredded papers, some of them charred. She descended a short flight of stone steps beside a bridge until she reached a cobbled path by the edge of the River Limatt.
The Limatt is Zurich’s river, famous for its swans. The lights of burghers’ mansions were reflected in dancing yellow and white patterns on the black surface of the water. A wastebasket hung from a low stone wall by the water’s edge. Stepping through the gloom, Edith reached into the pocket of her coat. She began to stuff the torn documents into the basket. Half of her task done, she looked up. A man in a trenchcoat, the collar pulled up around his neck, hands buried deep in his pockets, loomed from the mists that twined along the path. It was the man of her forebodings, the man whose hand would tighten on her wrist and whose hard voice would say: “Come with me …”
The man peered at her for a long moment, then walked to the parapet. He reached into his pocket and took out a paper bag. It was filled with chunks of bread, which he tossed one by one into the river. The swans and other waterfowl appeared suddenly out of the darkness, paddling to the floating bread and feeding noisily. The man emptied the bag of bread and left, vanishing toward the bridge.
Edith quickly shoved the rest of the torn papers into the wastebasket. But then: what if the garbage collector is curious when he dumps them out? What if he pieces them together? What if the man in the trenchcoat is more clever than I realize, and is waiting, watching?
A woman with a small boy in tow walked up to the parapet. She lifted the boy to the top of the wall and handed him a bag of bread. “Hurry up, Hans,” she snapped. “It’s cold. Your father is waiting.”
The boy flung double handfuls of bread into the water. More swans swarmed to the foot of the wall, beating the black water with their wings, churning it to froth. The squawking and honking and cawing of the birds was loud enough to drown the sound of traffic on the boulevard above.
As soon as the woman and child were gone, Edith pulled her bundle of papers from the wastebasket, wincing as her hand encountered bits of wet orange peel and a half-eaten sandwich. The swans honked and swarmed. Edith sighed, understood, then smiled with delight. Moving to the wall, she flung out her arms. The papers and strips of passport fluttered and fell toward the outstretched beaks. The beaks opened wide, gobbling up the passport and bank documents of Helga Renate Hughes. Whatever still floated on the surface of the water was gone in a minute, snapped up greedily by the swans of the River Limatt.
Edith lowered her arms, pirouetted like a ballet dancer, and slowly walked up the stone steps to the boulevard and back to the hotel. In the hotel restaurant, free from fear for the first time in days, she ate smoked salmon and venison, and drank a half bottle of dry white Johannisburger.
Then she went upstairs, fell on to the bed and began to shiver. She drew up the thick eiderdown. When the tremors stopped, even before she had time to take off her clothes, she sank into a deep and dreamless sleep, as though she had been drugged. The lights burned all night in her room.
Part Four
May you live in interesting times.
— an old Chinese curse
Chapter 17
Enter Howard Hughes (or a Reasonable Facsimile)
This time the bundles of Swiss francs, dollars, and deutsche marks that Edith brought back to Ibiza were dispersed both inside and outside the house. Some went up on the hidden edge of the beam, some were taped to the back of a sliding door to a wardrobe, some I slid into the folds of a heating pad that lay in a box on the bedroom bookshelf. A small stone woodshed stood outside the house. On the first moonless night I pried loose one of the stones, whiter in color than those surrounding it, and shoved the bulk of the cash — some $50,000 worth of various currencies — deep into the wall. I had double-wrapped it in plastic and silver foil to keep out both the damp and any marauding field mice. With a hammer, I tapped the stone solidly — I thought — back into place.
All that remained for me to do was write the introduction to the book. That would run, I reckoned, between 10,000 and 12,000 words. I would let Life’s editors excerpt their 5,000-word article from it. The problem in writing the introduction was to make it as richly detailed as possible and yet be skimpy on specifics that might give the Hughes Tool people targets to shoot at. With that in mind, there had been some nervous talk in New York about the possibility of Life’s publishing the article after, rather than before, their three 10,000-word excerpts. Whatever the order of publication, I had promised delivery by January 15th.
The weather on Ibiza was wintry and I worked in the studio with both heaters blasting away, trying in vain to combat the cold, wet wind that blew off the sea through the cracks surrounding the balcony doors. My feet were freezing and I took off my shoes, plugged in the heating pad, and placed it under the desk on the tattered old Mexican serape.
It was the home stretch and I vetoed all social activity other than a New Year’s Eve party, where I nursed two light gin and tonics throughout the entire evening, and one small dinner party two nights later at home. That same night, Robert Kirsch of The Los Angeles Times arrived on Ibiza.
During the day, Barney had come down with a high fever. It was no lower at nine o’clock, when the guests had gathered, so we decided to drive into town for the doctor. It was gloomy and cold, with a light rain falling. Just as I was backing the Mercedes out of the garage the headlights of a taxi blazed into my rearview mirror and it pulled up into the dirt driveway. A bulky, bearded figure stepped out of the taxi, carrying a suitcase. It was Kirsch, and I whooped with pleasure.
“Jump in,” I yelled, “before you get soaked! I’ve got to find a doctor and then you can join the party. And stay with us, too. Jesus, it’s good to see you. What are you doing here?”
He had flown down from Switzerland. He was still reviewing books for The Los Angeles Times, but he wanted a cheap place to live and write his own novels. “You’ve been singing the praises of this island for so many goddam years I finally decided to see for myself.” His wife and daughter would follow, he said, if he found Ibiza to his liking.
“But that’s great. Bob. We’ll find you a house.”
“And the Times is paying for the trip,” he said.
“How the hell did you manage that?”
“Come on … don’t be naïve. They sent me here to interview you. You’re on the map, man. And what I want, if you’ll agree to it, is to read the Hughes manuscript.”
Kirsch stayed the night with us and we talked the following morning at breakfast. He understood now why I had lied to him that past June in Los Angeles, when I had said I was doing a book on four millionaires. He brushed that aside — but now he wanted the f
ull story. It was more than selfishness on his part, more than the newsman’s desire for a scoop. He was a highly respected book reviewer in America, and he felt sure that if he read the material — transcript and manuscript both — he could put the stamp of authenticity on the book and perhaps end the debate that was rising toward manic proportions back in the States. He had known me for ten years and I thought of him as a good friend. He never doubted for a moment — or at least never voiced any doubt to me — that I had met Howard Hughes and interviewed him.
“I can really help you.” He added only one warning: “But I’ll have to call it as I see it. If I do have any doubts, I’m going to say so. What I’ll offer you in return is my word that I won’t leak any of the material to anyone.”
“I take your word for it, Bob,” I said.
It was the most difficult decision I had ever to make concerning the hoax. Kirsch was a self-taught speed reader; he could glance at a page and digest its contents in two seconds, then flip to the next. He could read through both transcript and manuscript in twenty-four hours and remember everything. I was certain that if he read them he would be convinced, as had everyone else up to that point, that the material was not only genuine but sensational. And he would say so in print. He would be the only one outside of McGraw-Hill and Life to have read the book. His article would be a coup for him and a plus for me, but I would be using him and conning him, and that made me more than uneasy. What I had done with McGraw-Hill had been necessary; as Dick had pointed out when we began, that was the name of the game. But to bring Bob Kirsch into it was unnecessary. And yet if I refused to show him the material he would have good cause to be suspicious. He was a friend but he was also an honest newsman, and if he smelled a hoax he would say so.
“I’ll let you read it,” I said. “But I’ve got to get McGraw-Hill’s permission for you to write anything about it.”
“Why the hell should they object?”
“Let me call them, Bob.”
I left him reading the manuscript at the house, and went up to the studio to call Beverly Loo in New York. As soon as I announced Kirsch’s presence, and his mission, she said: “No! He’s a newspaperman first and your friend second. You are so goddam naïve! He’ll leak that material all over The Los Angeles Times, and the wire services will pick it up and there goes Life’s exclusivity to the story. Ralph Graves will be furious.”
That annoyed me and I found myself arguing for Kirsch’s proposal even though I had been hunting for a way to reject it. “He’s not interested in how I met Hughes,” I explained. “He only wants to read the book.”
“And write a review of it? That’s the worst thing that he could do! Every other newspaper in the country would be furious. And don’t trust him,” Beverly repeated.
I reported this to Bob, who shook his head with mild dismay. “They’re crazy,” he said. “I’m only trying to help you — and them in the bargain. And I’m not going to review the damn book. I’m only commenting on whether or not I think it’s authentic.”
A flurry of transatlantic telephone calls followed, and that night Bob wrote a background piece on me and the Ibiza milieu, telephoning it in to John Goldman, The Los Angeles Times correspondent in New York. The next day, when I went to work at the studio, Robert Stewart called with the request that I had expected but had been dreading. McGraw-Hill was rushing headlong toward March publication, the galley proofs were ready, the Legal Department had made some changes and had dozens of questions — and I had to fly to New York.
“Robert,” I groaned, “is it a must?”
“We’ve got to make that printer’s deadline and if we airmail the galleys to you we’ll be two weeks late.”
“What else is new? How’s everyone bearing up?”
“It’s quiet,” he said. “No bomb yet, and Chester Davis seems to have retreated. But we need you here.”
I agreed. “But on your head be it if Edith sues for divorce.”
When I got back to the house to break the news to her, Bob Kirsch was waiting for me with his piece on the Hughes autobiography. I read it carefully. “If your publishers object to that,” he said, “they should have their heads examined.”
“I’ll talk to them. Let’s just hold up a while on it. It’ll be just as good next week as it is now, and I … I don’t know .…”
“What’s your worry?” he asked, puzzled.
“I just don’t want to screw things up with McGraw-Hill.” It was a weak argument but I held on to it.
That night, Kirsch telephoned again to John Goldman in New York. When he hung up, he told me that Goldman had heard a rumor that on the following evening, a Friday, Howard Hughes was going to hold his first press conference in fifteen years — by telephone from the Bahamas to seven newsmen in Los Angeles. All reportage would be embargoed until six o’clock on Sunday evening, January 9th. The further rumor went that he was going to deny the authenticity of the autobiography.
“I’ve got to tell McGraw-Hill,” I said.
“You can’t.” Bob shook his head solemnly. “Goldman gave it to me in confidence and I’m giving it to you the same way.”
“But they’ve got to know. They’re like sitting ducks!”
“What you can do,” Bob said, “is let me release what I’ve written. The Times will sidebar it in print with whatever Hughes has to say. If he stabs you in the back, then at least you’ve got my story going for you.”
“All right,” I said wearily. “Go ahead and do it.”
He telephoned his story to Goldman and on Saturday morning — with David Walsh, who had done a new portfolio of Hughes sketches and wanted to deliver them in person to Life — I was driven to the airport by Edith and flew off to Barcelona to catch the Iberia jet to New York. It was the last confrontation, and the last chance for the bluff, and I had no idea what I was going to do. All I had was that same dumb faith that it had been all right so far. I had hit the pavement twice already in New York, first with the McCulloch telephone call and then with the lie-detector test, and I had bounced and landed on my feet. I would bounce again — and again, and again if I had to. There was simply no other direction to go.
David and I drove straight from Kennedy Airport in a rented limousine to Marty Ackerman’s house in Lakeville, Connecticut. The time change had made us groggy and we dozed on and off as the car sped through the cold winter night, taking an occasional slug from a pint of Scotch that David had bought on the plane.
A few minutes after we reached the house I took Marty aside. “I’ve got the inside word. On Friday night there was a press conference from the Bahamas …”
“… To seven newspapermen in Los Angeles. I know. McGraw-Hill called me about it. They’re already preparing a press release,” Marty said. “They figure that Hughes is going to deny the autobiography.”
I took a deep breath. “What are they going to say?”
“They’re going to publish. They’ve got the goods — the contracts, the letter to Harold McGraw, the Osborn report, and the canceled checks. Those checks are like three aces in the hole.”
In five-card stud, I thought. But that was all I needed to know, and on Sunday evening, before dinner, when we gathered in front of the color television set in the living room, I had made up my mind what to do. We had expected to see the first reports on the seven o’clock news, but suddenly in the midst of Mike Wallace’s “Sixty Minutes” news show, there it was: a bleak room in a Los Angeles television studio with seven men sitting eagerly behind a semi-circular table, popping questions at a disembodied voice that came quivering and rasping through a small amplifier.
The key question came quickly, from the UPI correspondent. “Did you cooperate or did you know a man named Irving who claims to have taped this biography with you?”
“This must go down in history,” the voice replied. “I only wish I was still in the movie business, because I don’t remember any script as wild or as stretching the imagination as this yarn has turned out to be. I’m not talking
about the biography itself, because I haven’t read it. I don’t know what’s in it. But this episode is so fantastic that it taxes your imagination to believe that a thing like this could happen. I don’t know him. I never saw him. I had never even heard of him until a matter of days ago when this thing first came to my attention.”
“If you recall,” I said to Marty Ackerman, “the voice that spoke to Frank McCulloch said exactly the same thing. He’d only heard of Irving ‘a few days ago.’ But the McCulloch call was on December 14th — almost four weeks ago.”
The voice was hard, and nasal. Whether it was Howard Hughes or not, I had no idea. One of the newsmen, who had not talked to the billionaire in almost twenty years, said: “… He hadn’t spoken two words and I knew it was Howard Hughes. I’m thoroughly convinced.”
I snorted. Marty looked at me, waiting for The Word. “That’s not him,” I said. “It’s a damn good imitation of what he might have sounded like a few years ago, when he was healthy — but it’s not him.”
That was my story, and I would stick to it. A voice without a face to go with it wouldn’t turn the trick. You’ll have to come out in the open, Howard. You’ll have to show yourself. And I was betting all my chips that that was the one thing he would — or could — never do.
The executive conferences at McGraw-Hill began on Monday morning and lasted all week. One seemed to bleed into another for me. Most of the men at McGraw-Hill and Time, Inc., whether or not they were willing to state so publicly, believed that the real Howard Hughes had spoken to the world on Sunday night. But it made no difference. They had their book, they had their proofs. They were going ahead with publication. In a quiet, dignified television interview immediately following the Hughes TV circus, Harold McGraw said:
The Hoax Page 34