by Paul Malmont
Episode Five
“HOW DID you know about my son?” he demanded.
“What?”
“Robert! How did you know I had that picture in my wallet?” he said to her later, back in his apartment. She was naked and glistening in sweat which had soaked even into her loosened hair, giving her a wild leonine look. He was naked too and lying on the floor, where he had landed after falling off the couch.
“The spirits,” she said, still trying to catch her breath. Litzka was beautiful. He thought so now as he looked at her in his apartment. How could he have helped himself? Of course she wasn’t an Oriental. She was from Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania. The makeup was a disguise, again created by her husband to play upon certain feelings he knew American men had toward Asian women, which ultimately served to further misdirect them. Without the stage makeup her Kewpie-doll face had an innocent, open, vulnerable appearance. Except for her eyes. Her eyes were wise and experienced.
“I don’t buy it.”
“I am a little bit psychic, after all,” she said, with a mildly offended tone. “Just last month the spirits warned me not to get on a train and it got trapped in the Rockies for three days because of an avalanche. And they were trying to tell me something about a friend of yours.”
“Litzka,” he said, sitting up. That was what most people called her instead of the mouthier Pearlitzka. Actually, her real name was Pearl Beatrice Gonser Raymond, but she hadn’t gone by that in years—not since the Great Raymond had anointed her Pearlitzka. “I don’t buy your psychic bit. I never have. I’m serious. Now how did you find out about my son?”
She sighed, finally—hating, as all magicians did, to divulge even the tiniest secret. “That’s easy. I went through your wallet when we were in Silver Springs.”
Silver Springs. Florida.
He had never meant to start an affair with a married woman. He had never wanted to make time with the wife of someone he knew. But he had. In Silver Springs.
Blackstone’s company was preparing a series of shows in Miami for the snowbirds, the rich New Englanders who traveled to the southland to winter. This yearly destination was always a lucrative engagement for the tour, so Blackstone’s customary demands for flawless execution were always greatly amplified. Among his many concerns: his backers spent the season in Miami and, despite their participation, this was the only time during the year when they took an active interest in the show that always reaped them a profit. Facing such myriad distractions, he was unable to spend as much time with Gibson as he had anticipated when he first suggested that Gibson come to Miami and cowrite a new book with him. So Gibson had spent much time watching rehearsals in the showroom of the Eden Roc Hotel and much more time at the hotel bar. He had spent so much time there, in fact, that the hotel had invited him to leave his typewriter on the bar so he could walk right in and begin his work.
He had met her once before at a Society of American Magicians meeting, when she had first appeared on the arm of Raymond, and he had agreed with the assembled brotherhood that the old magician was lucky to have found himself such a dish. But he hadn’t realized how that pale, pert face disguised her mischievously bright and clever spirit until they had spent time in Florida. She was new to Blackstone’s company and was having trouble breaking into the tight-knit group. Gibson was an outsider as well. And that was the first thing they had in common.
He had tried avoiding her for several days. But the attraction was too apparent to both of them, and so to make sure that he would not add any more pressure to his friend’s hectic production, he slipped out of town.
He had driven his Ford Tudor north, away from the coastal cities, toward the sparsely populated wet wilderness which lay inland beyond the swamps and Seminole Indian jungles until, late in the evening, when he could drive no farther, he discovered Silver Springs. A simple hotel sign had compelled him to turn off the road. He had never been to this oasis before, had never even known of its existence, but as he stood watching a heron rise over the waters bubbling up from deep beneath his feet to form the Crystal River, he felt as if this wild place were his very own.
Upon checking in he had discovered that a Hollywood movie crew was staying at the small hotel, which clung to the bank of the deep springs. Evidently the waters of Silver Springs were so clear that they were perfect for underwater photography, better than anywhere else in America. He spent the next day watching the crew film swimming scenes, and that night he spied on Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan as they dined at the Angebilt Hotel’s restaurant. They were sleek, sophisticated, glowing from their tans. Gibson knew many famous magicians, and theater and radio actors, but there had been something about being in the presence of bona fide movie stars that captivated his attention. He had watched their every move all evening long, fascinated to see them in color, and to hear Weissmuller speaking in complete, articulate sentences. O’Sullivan smiled at Walter more than once. She had a slight Irish accent. The chimp who played Cheetah had pissed on the dance floor and chased the singer from the stage.
That night there was a knock at his hotel room door. Litzka stood in his doorway, hair damp and wild from the tropical rainstorms that swept through Florida on a daily basis. Her eyes were filled with desperation and longing. Her lips trembled. The thought had crossed his mind to just close the door on her. She wouldn’t have spoken a word if he had; she would have just left.
“You chose the only woman in the world you can’t run away from,” she had said.
He had let her in.
“What would you have done if I had taken the picture out?” he said to her, casting off the memories of Florida.
She shook her head. “That picture has been in your wallet for years. I knew you wouldn’t.” She flung herself on him and he kissed her roughly. “Weren’t you surprised, though?”
“It’s not what we rehearsed!”
“That’s what you’re mad about? That I improvised? Really, Walter?”
“You were really improvising up a storm tonight,” he said. “Between that and your message from the grave, I just felt like I was out there flapping like a screen door in a twister.”
She looked down and seemed to be studying her red-lacquered fingernails. He heard a scratching from the other side of his living room. “China Boy is messing up my pulps.”
With a sharp cry meant to startle the bird, she leaped up and ran across his apartment to where China Boy was scratching the cover off a recent issue of The Shadow. He watched her strong, naked body with fascination. “Bad China Boy!” She picked him up and tucked his head under his wing. “Go to sleep.” She gently rocked the chicken back and forth and it stopped moving.
“That bird’s a pain in the ass!”
“He’s showing an interest in your work. I think you should encourage that.”
Gibson shrugged and pulled himself onto the couch, wrapping the blanket around himself. “I’m pretty hungry. If he does any more damage around here I might just fricassee him.”
She gasped with mock horror and put the sleeping bird in the basket she used to transport him from place to place. Everyplace to everyplace, Gibson corrected himself; she went nowhere without her lucky bird. The scraggly bantam had been part of her act until, at the height of their career, Raymond had decided that the psychic chicken act just didn’t suit the dignity of their status and had sidelined him.
“Sorry,” she said to Walter as she straightened up the damaged mags. “Why are they called pulps?”
“Well,” he said. “It all began with a wasp.”
“A wasp?”
“The kind that stings you, right?” He was still angry with her. But maybe she was right about him and he could share a little more of himself with her. “You see, paper used to be very expensive, much more like a cloth than what we have now. In fact, paper was made from the cotton fibers in rags and worn-out clothing. It was expensive and slow to make. Then one day a Frenchman, René de Réaumur, noticed wasps building a nest in the eaves of
his house. He studied the wasps as they chewed up wood. They were mixing it with chemicals in their saliva, which created a moist mass of fibers that, when it dried, resembled the paper made from cloth. He experimented with sawdust and chemical glues until he came up with a fairly good facsimile of what the wasp was spitting up. When he pressed it through a roller, it made a nice sheet of paper.
“Now a lot of people since have put their two cents’ worth in and come up with some pretty fancy ways of making paper nicer, and more expensive—adding bleaches, for example. But for our mags to be cost-effective they need to be cheap, and that means hiring the cheapest writers, using the cheapest ink, and buying the cheapest paper. The paper we use is pretty much like the original wood pulp process inspired by the wasp. Hence, the pulps.”
“Oh.” She brushed a loose feather from her arm. She came back to Gibson and stretched out along his side. “Pulps have a bad reputation. Like actresses.”
“That’s because they’re both fast and cheap but they look good doing it.”
“Hey!”
“I don’t aim to educate or enlighten, so by that measure I guess pulps don’t pass as literature. But if it’s entertainment you want, a little bit of showbiz, I got that over literature any day of the week. And as long as I can write and be read, and get paid for it, I’m a happy man.”
She snuggled her head into the crook of his arm and for some time they simply dozed. Hovering just above the place where dreams begin, he let the memories of Silver Springs swirl around him.
“What’s he like?” he heard her asking him now, and his consciousness raced up to meet her. Dawn light was burning away the night and made her gleaming eyes seem even more penetrating, as if she really could read his mind. And for all he knew, when it came down to it, maybe she could.
“Who?” He was groggy.
“Your son. Robert?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in years.”
“Why not?”
He tried to talk but couldn’t. His throat had closed up on him. He was only able to give her a mute shrug.
“Why not?” she said again, insisting.
“I can’t talk about it,” he managed to croak.
“No, Walter,” she said, “you won’t talk about it.”
And suddenly she was getting dressed, pulling on the garters and affixing the clasps to the stockings, the gold silk Chinese gown she had worn to the premiere party gliding smoothly over her body. “You won’t talk about it.”
“What do you want me to say? What do you need to know about me? Do you need to know that I’m a bad man? That I turned out not to be the man I thought I once could be? I’m just the man that I am. The kind of man who walks out on his wife and son and never sees them again? The kind of man who steals another man’s wife?”
“You didn’t steal me!”
“What more do you need to know about me? My desk is over there. There are some personal papers in the drawers. I’ll go back to sleep and you can sneak over and have a look! They’ll tell you all about my divorce. Look for the words ‘alienation of affection.’ What that means is that my wife stopped loving me because I wasn’t happy being a newspaper reporter and I made her life miserable because I was miserable.”
She stared at him in silence for a long moment. He thought she would say something, but she didn’t. He could see in her eyes that he was changing from someone she knew to someone she didn’t recognize and didn’t want to be in the room with.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Litzka! Honey! Wait!”
She was already at the door. The basket with the slumbering rooster swung from her hand. He went to the door to stop her.
“Hang on a second,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that, and just wait!”
But she stepped into the hallway. She turned to look back at him and for a moment he remembered again how she had looked in that doorway at Silver Springs months ago and how she had whispered, “I love you,” as she slid past him when he hadn’t closed the door on her.
“Do you believe I’m a little bit psychic?” she asked him suddenly.
“No.”
“Then I must be a complete liar,” she said and turned away. He slipped on his trousers and then ran down to the hall where she waited for the elevator. Then he stood there mute, dumb, as the cage rattled wearily down toward them. He kept searching for something to say, knowing that there were words in his head that could make things right. Where had his words gone?
She entered the elevator and refused to look at him even as the doors closed. He stood there and listened as it descended the shaft; he heard the echo of its doors as it opened onto the lobby of the Hotel Des Artistes, where he rented the biggest apartment.
He waited for a long moment hoping that the elevator would spring to life again and rise and the doors would open to reveal Litzka and she would listen to him. Because he knew what he would say to her.
He had the words now.
Episode Six
NORMA DENT held a martini in her hand as she hunted for Dutch Schultz’s lost treasure.
“Who shot you?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many shots were fired?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many?”
“Two thousand.”
Last year he had been gunned down at the Palace Chophouse in Newark. Sometime prior to that, his accomplices were now admitting in testimony, he had buried a steel chest full of, according to those same accomplices, stacks of thousand-dollar bills, jewels, gold, and stock certificates estimated to be worth millions of dollars. Stolen from the honest, decent citizens of New York, as well as some of its dishonest and corrupt ones.
“Please crack down on the Chinaman’s friends and Hitler’s commander. I am sore and I am going up and I am going to give you honey if I can. Mother is the best bet and don’t let Satan draw you too fast.”
“What did the big fellow shoot you for?”
“Over a million—five million dollars.”
Five million dollars in treasure.
He had been shot in the stomach. It took him four agonizing days in his hospital bed to die. Newark cops had been with him the entire time, writing down his ramblings and confessions as he slipped in and out of feverish delirium. The transcript had finally been published in the New York Herald, despite the best efforts of the police to keep it from the press. While they may have hoped his words would provide insight into the underworld, Norma knew they contained the key to his treasure.
“Control yourself.”
“But I am dying.
“No, you are not.”
“Then pull me out. I am half crazy. They won’t let me get up. They dyed my shoes. Open those shoes. Give me something. I am so sick. Give me some water, the only thing I want. Open this up and break it so I can touch you. Danny, please get me in the car. Please mother, you pick me up now. Please, you know me. No. Don’t you scare me. Please let me up. If you do this, you can go on and jump right here in the lake.”
The lake. Was that a clue? Norma wondered. His accomplice, Lulu Rosenkrantz, had claimed that he and Schultz had buried the treasure near a grove of pine trees near the town of Phoenicia in the Catskills. The atlas open on Norma’s lap indicated that an Esopus Creek ran between Phoenicia and Kingston, the only body of water directly in the vicinity that Lulu Rosenkrantz claimed to have visited. Schultz alluded to water more than once in his ramblings. Water was the key, she decided. The treasure was buried near the creek, which in the mind and on the lips of a dying man could become a lake.
“Police, mamma, Helen, mother, please take me out. I will settle the indictment. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up! You got a big mouth! Please help me up, Henry! Max, come over here! French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone.”
She felt her face flush with the thrill of discovery. She took another sip of her martini. The gin was crisp with the scent of juniper. The doct
or had told her it was okay now for her to drink occasionally, so she made sure to follow doctor’s orders.
Norma Dent loved treasure hunts and this promised to be a big one. It didn’t matter to her that she had never found any treasure; the thrill was in finding clues, tying loose ends together, trying to get into the mind of someone who could stash their secrets away. Together the Dents had embarked on a number of quests. They had explored the ingeniously booby-trap-rigged shaft on Nova Scotia’s Oak Island, presumably the resting place of Captain Kidd’s wealth; hiked the fields of Georgia’s Chennault Plantation in search of the lost gold of the Confederacy; and sailed the Albatross across the sapphire-blue waters of Cuba seeking the Spanish golden tablet. Each time she felt as if she had come closer than ever before to realizing her dream. Now here was a treasure practically in her own backyard. The winter had been long and heavy, so the creek might be frozen over, the ground hard. But it could be right there waiting for them. But then again, it was so much effort.
She sighed and laid the newspaper clipping across the atlas, then closed the old book. She swept an errant lock of her long blond hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear, feeling the surging treasure passion recede. Maybe in the spring she’d be ready. Or by summer.
A sharp metallic snap echoed through the apartment, interrupting the steady rat-a-tat-tat beat of Lester at his typewriter which was the daily background noise of her life. Suddenly she could hear the traffic from West Seventy-sixth Street below her, the distant hoot of steamships on the Hudson, and the ratcheting clank of the elevators in the hall. The apartment, which seemed so warm and alive while he was writing, instantly chilled. She waited expectantly, knowing what had happened. Lester had been typing so hard and so fast that one of the strikers had snapped off and whizzed across the room. Whenever this happened she always half expected, as she did now with a wince, that the flying sliver of metal would impale Lester. At least he wore glasses, so his eyes were protected. She waited, knowing for certain what was happening in his tiny office. Lester, still writing his story in his head, would remove the page he had been working on and place the broken typewriter on the floor to the right side of his desk. Then he would turn to the left side of his desk, where he kept several cases of new typewriters. He would open up a new box; place it on his desk; roll in the page of paper, which made very reassuring clicks; then begin to type again, trying to get his fingers to catch up with his mind, which was already racing pages ahead into its story. Or if he were out of typewriters and Elizabeth, his secretary, was around, he would simply dictate as she wrote in shorthand. But she was off today, and Lester would fend for himself. Norma listened for the sound of a new box opening. Instead, she was startled when Lester cleared his throat in the doorway behind her.