Stardust

by Kanon, Joseph

  “When was this?”

  Stein glanced up. “Late, if that’s what you mean. It’s a funny thing. After the Hitler pact, ’thirty-nine, everyone here’s bailing, and I stick. Maybe stubborn. But I figure maybe there’s something I don’t know. Then it all turns around and I see there wasn’t. Just what’s good for Russia. It takes a while, you know, to see where it’s going. Then we get in the war, and now everybody’s friends again—some people here came back in, you believe it?—but it has the opposite effect on me. I don’t care anymore. The Party line, keep the movement alive. Help Russia. What about this country? What are we doing for us?” He shrugged. “Maybe it was all the patriotic movies, what the hell. Me, waving flags. I know what it’s like here.” He touched the top of his head. “I got the bruises. But I figure if we can get rid of the fucking golfers we still have a shot at something here.”

  Ben smiled. “But the golfers have the money.”

  “Yeah, they do,” Stein said, smiling a little. “Right on top, where they like to be. Now, anyway. You ever go across the street, see the Pits? It’s interesting. You see these bones, the dinosaurs, and you think, there they were, walking around, fucking owned the place, top of the world. And then the next thing—they’re gone. Just bones in a pit. It’s something to think about. You drive out to the Valley, past Warners, you see those big sound stages, sitting there like the whole thing’s theirs, and for all they know a tar pit’s going to open up on them.”

  “Then your pickets go, too.”

  Stein grinned. “Jack would like that. He’d throw them in first—buy a little time.” He looked down. “You want pie or something with that?” he said, a signal to wrap things up.

  Ben shook his head.

  “This is so important to you? Whether he was a Red?”

  “Did he ever talk about my father?”

  “Some big-time director over there, right? The Nazis killed him. He didn’t get out in time or something.”

  “Or something.”

  Stein waited.

  “That’s who Danny was working for.”

  “He used his own kid?”

  “What does that tell you?”

  “That’s a trick question?” he said, flustered. “Listen, I knew your brother. The family, that’s something else. He didn’t talk about that— just your father once in a while. Not the mother. He never mentioned you, for instance.”

  “No,” Ben said, feeling it anyway, a sharp point going in.

  “So I don’t know. What does it tell me? He must have thought it was important. To do that.”

  “It was. To them. They helped smuggle people out. Then, after they got my father, Danny kept doing it. Getting people out of France. Probably using the same network, wouldn’t you say? It’s not the kind of thing you can do freelance. You need some—comrades in place. So he still must have been a Red. And then he gets on a boat to come home and throws his card over the side. Does that seem like Danny to you?”

  “Not on a boat,” Stein said quietly.

  “What?”

  “He came on the Clipper. The boats weren’t running then.”

  Something else he didn’t know. A meaningless detail with the same sharp end.

  “So does it?” Ben said.

  Stein thought for a minute, playing with his spoon.

  “You ask his wife?”

  “She says no. He didn’t tell her, either,” Ben said, including Stein.

  “But you believe the other woman. The one who said he was.”

  “She survived the camps. People like that don’t have to make anything up.”

  “They could make a mistake.”

  Ben shook his head. “Not her. It cost her to tell me.”

  Stein looked at him, uncomfortable, then went back to his spoon. “Sometimes it’s better, keeping things quiet. Let’s say he gets here, first thing he sees is you don’t want to advertise. Lie low. We were never popular here, you know, even before this craziness began. So he goes unofficial.”

  “Unofficial.”

  “Part of a closed chapter.”

  “You mean secret?”

  “Don’t get excited. Not like that. Just off the books. To protect their jobs. Some places, this can get you fired. Flash a card at Hearst, see how long you last. You go unofficial to protect yourself.”

  “There’s a chapter like that here?”

  Stein shrugged. “You’re in pictures, you can’t afford to offend the public. My group, it was mostly writers—they don’t have to care.”

  “But they must answer to somebody in the Party. They wouldn’t just be left on their own, would they?”

  “No.”

  “So who would it be here?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Ben looked at him. “Even if you did.”

  “I left the Party. Not everybody did. And I don’t know you from Adam.” He paused. “Look, I liked your brother, so I’m telling you. Maybe he was unofficial. But I never heard that. And it doesn’t matter a damn now anyway. Leave it. You don’t want to get somebody else in trouble. They put me under oath? There are no unofficials. Never heard of them. The rest of us, the dues payers?—it’s open season on us. But we don’t have to give them anyone else. All right?”

  “TAKE A look at this,” Hal said, head leaning over the Moviola viewer. His jaw, even in the morning, had traces of beard. “Birkenau—we haven’t seen this before.”

  Ben looked with him. Silent film, with card titles in Cyrillic. Stacks of corpses. He felt his stomach slide, the way it always did. Open oven doors with mounds of ashes.

  “Lasner won’t like using Russian footage.”

  “Cut away from the soldiers. It doesn’t matter who’s holding the camera. We just want to see the place. Look, the guards are still there. This must be just after they went in.”

  On the small screen, men in uniforms were being led away, hands up, their collars open, disheveled.

  “What do they look like to you?” Ben said, watching them.

  “Anybody.”

  Ben nodded. “Anybody. You wonder what went through their heads. The ovens going night and day. The smell.”

  There were people in bunks, too weak to move, hollow-eyed, and Ben realized, going down the line with the film, that he was looking for Genia. An outside shot now, prisoners standing around, disoriented, waiting for another roll call. The wire fence, the ovens again, bodies everywhere. What she must have seen every day, unable to turn away like the guards. He thought of her in the big Louis XV room, her dead eyes still seeing what was in the film. After a while, it would be the only thing you knew. And then you were here, in the sunshine with people drinking milkshakes, and you saw that it must have been going on at the same time, while the doctors made selections on the platform, and there was no reason at all why you were in one place or the other, reality itself become something random, inexplicable.

  “This is pretty rough,” Hal was saying. “Worse than the other stuff. We’re going to have to be careful. You don’t want to chase the audience away.”

  “We want them to see it. That’s the point.”

  “Look at the Russians.” Soldiers carrying inmates to carts. “They’ve all got their heads turned. You don’t want the audience doing that.” He glanced up at Ben. “Let me work on it. You want anything back, we’ll put it back.”

  “But keep the guards. The way they look.”

  They watched the rest of the film, then another, absorbed, not even making notes, letting it run. A pan shot across bodies, the genitals just smudges, as if they had retreated inside, the women oddly neutered, without sex. Open mouths.

  “Bastards,” Hal said, almost a whisper, and then neither of them said anything.

  When it was over, they went outside for a cigarette, wanting distance, even a few feet. Hal leaned back against the wall, looking toward the Admin building on Gower.

  “How’d you get him to do it?” he said. “Lasner.”

  “He saw it—one of the camps. I di
dn’t have to do anything.”

  “Well, whatever you did. I never thought I’d get to do something like this. At Continental. Piece of history. Fort Roach. Enemies to Friends. How to bow to a Jap. What not to say to the women. Put in your time, go home at night. That’s all I’ve done. Nothing like this.” He cocked his head, taking in Ben from a new angle. “What are you going to do after?”

  “What, the Army?” Ben shrugged. “Maybe go back overseas. There’s a newsreel job if I want it.”

  “Most people, they get on the lot, they never want to leave.”

  “I just want to get this one done.”

  “You saw it for real. That’s why?”

  Ben dropped his cigarette and rubbed it out with his foot.

  “I’m still trying to figure it out. The guards. How do you get to that point? When you can do that. What makes it all right? Do you know? I don’t.”

  “You’re never going to know that. A wife shoots her husband, that you can know. This—”

  “There has to be something. What makes them think it’s the right thing to do? There’s no money in it, nothing—personal. Like the wife. Some other reason.”

  For ending up in a mound of ashes. Or in an alley with your blood running out. At least he could know the reason for that. As blameless as the ash heaps? The question that was always there. What had he done?

  RIORDAN’S TELEPHONE voice was all business, as if he were sitting behind a desk.

  “What kind of technical advice? For a picture?”

  “No. Someone broke into the house last night.”

  “So call the cops.”

  “Nothing’s missing. I can’t prove anyone was there.”

  “Then why do you think—”

  “Some things were rearranged.”

  “Rearranged.”

  “Look, the point is it made Liesl nervous. I don’t want it to happen again. I figured you’d have some ideas. The Bureau must—”

  “What? Train us in breaking and entering? I’ll tell you this much, somebody wants to get in, he’ll get in. Get better locks. Alarms will run you money, and anybody who knows what he’s doing can get in anyway. Get dead bolts. That’s for free.”

  “I was thinking about surveillance.”

  There was a pause as Riordan took this in.

  “You’re asking me to babysit?”

  “I figured you’d know somebody.”

  “What makes you think they’re coming back.”

  “They didn’t take anything. Even stuff just lying around. So they must have been after something in particular. If they didn’t find it, maybe they’ll try again. Look, I’m just asking you to recommend somebody.”

  Another pause. “All right, I’ll have a look around. Anybody home today?”

  “Iris, the housekeeper. Liesl probably. Tell whoever’s there I sent you, to check the locks. Got a pencil?”

  “I know where it is.”

  “That’s right. The funeral.”

  “What was rearranged? So you knew somebody had been there.”

  “A file. In the desk.”

  “That was careless. What’s in the desk?”

  “Nothing. Papers. Desk stuff.”

  “No idea what they were looking for?”

  “That’s why I called the Bureau.”

  “Yeah. All right. I’ll take care of it. Where are you, the studio? That’s Gower. You know Lucey’s on Melrose? By Paramount. Six? But I’m telling you now, it’s locks.”

  THE RED light was on so Ben waited, leaning against the sound stage wall, his head still full of the Artkino footage. In the street, two Japanese pilots were sharing a smoke, probably on their way to dive-bomb Dick Marshall. The casually surreal world Hal thought everyone wanted. “What, have you got a girl back over there or something?” he’d said, not able to let it go. No, here. Ben smiled to himself. A mermaid. Waiting at home. Danny’s home.

  The red light flicked off and he heard the buzzer inside, unlocking the doors. What would Rosemary say? Why would she say anything? A girl on her way up, dancing with Ty Power at the Mocambo. She’d want to shed Danny, any B-list affair, like molted skin.

  Ben stepped in, facing the backs of some painted flats, then walked around to the interior of the set, still drenched in hot light. A nightclub with an orchestra stage and a bar at the side, now being set up for a tracking shot. Gaffers were making adjustments in the overheads, angling away from the mirror behind the bar. The extras, in suits and evening dresses, were still sitting at the club tables, waiting to be told to start talking again. Rosemary, in a tight dress, was leaning back against a slant board to keep the skirt from creasing, while a makeup girl ran a comb over her hair, patting it gently into place. Rosemary didn’t move. When the girl stepped aside, leaving her alone against the board, she seemed for a minute like an oil painting propped on an easel.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, coming up to her. “We didn’t get a chance to talk at dinner.”

  “No,” she said, wary, but not surprised to see him.

  “Ready in two, darling,” the assistant director said, passing them.

  “We’re in the middle of a scene,” she said to Ben.

  “You all right with the gun?” the AD said.

  She nodded, glancing at the gun on the table beside her. Make a leap, before she can react.

  “Danny told me a lot about you.”

  Eyes cornered now, but meeting his, not backing away.

  “Yes?” Noncommittal, waiting.

  “We were close. He could tell me things,” he said, wondering if a lie showed in your face.

  She looked at him, still waiting.

  “Just me,” he said, a reassurance.

  She stared for another second, then raised her eyebrow. “Well, that puts you one up. He never told me anything. It turns out,” she said, her voice sarcastic but warm, as if bad behavior were a bond between them, something they should have expected.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I always believe it. I always think, okay, this time I’m not going to listen, and then I do. I guess you like to think—you’re the only one. So that’s what you hear.”

  “He never told me about anyone else,” Ben said, trying it, another fly cast.

  “Just me, huh? Well, so there’s that. Look, I don’t know what to say to you. Is there a script for this? I mean—his brother. It’s a relief in a way, I guess. That somebody knows. One day you think you’re—” She stopped, looking down. “And the next day you’re not supposed to exist. You can’t go to the funeral. Upset anyone. So what do I say? I’m sorry for your loss? Well, I’m sorry for mine, too, but nobody’s going to say it to me.”

  “I’ll say it to you.”

  “Thanks,” she said, stopped by this. “Well. So now what?”

  “I want to talk to you about him.”

  “Why? Warn me off? Before it gets out of hand? Before the wife finds out? A little late now. Anyway, she knows. I could tell. Was that you?”

  He shook his head. “Not Danny, either. A hunch, I guess. Maybe you told her, the way you acted with her.”

  “Yeah, and maybe it was that big A on my back.” She looked up at him, amused. “Your face. I played the part in stock. You’re right, though. I never read the book. So what do you want to talk about?”

  “Were you there the night he fell?”

  “What?” she said, a place holder, caught off guard.

  “With him.”

  “With him? You think he’d do that with me there? It’s the kind of thing you do alone.”

  “Somebody was there. Or expected. Maybe you were on your way?”

  She looked at him carefully. “What’s this all about?”

  “Nothing. I’m just trying to find out how it happened.”

  “Who to blame, you mean. You think I wanted this?” She shook her head. “Why would I? I thought we were— I was silly about him. Huh. That’s the first time I’ve said that. Even to myself.” She looked away. “Whatever it
means. He said it, and it turns out it didn’t mean much. No, I wasn’t there. Must have been somebody else on the call sheet.” She turned back to him. “You think it was because of me? Is that what you want to know? Maybe I should be flattered. But I wasn’t anything special to him. I know that now. What did he tell you, when you were so buddy-buddy? What did he say about me? Besides being an easy lay.”

  “Places!” the AD yelled.

  “He said you were nice.”

  “Oh,” she said softly, surprised, her eyes suddenly moist. “If you ruin this scene for me, I’ll kill you.” She got off the slant board, checking her dress, and picked up the gun, then turned to him. “Nice? That’s not a word he’d use.”

  “Maybe I said it.” He nodded to the gun. “Who are you going to shoot?”

  The makeup girl came back for a last brush of powder.

  “My lover. I’m jealous.” She met his eyes.

  “People! Are we going to wrap today or not? Places. Monica, stick that puff somewhere. All right, here we go.”

  The buzzer sounded. The director, looking through the viewfinder on the tracking camera, signaled for the clapper. Rosemary’s lover, an actor Ben didn’t know, turned from his drink and started walking down the length of the bar into the moving camera.

  “You think you can, but you can’t,” he said, looking from her to the gun.

  Rosemary’s hand shook, her eyes beginning to tear up.

  “You love me,” the actor said with a sneer.

  “I hate you,” Rosemary said, the words pulled out of her.

  “Then shoot,” he said easily, still coming toward her.

  He froze as the shot exploded, then grabbed his stomach in astonishment and dropped to the floor. Rosemary kept holding the gun out, then lowered her arm, her shoulders shaking.

  “Cut,” the director said. “Nice. Let’s get one for safety.”

  They did it twice more, then broke to change the set-ups for Rosemary’s reaction shots.

  “We’re almost there,” the director said to Rosemary. “The payoff shot. Remember, you still love him.”

  “Even while I’m plugging him,” she said wryly.