by Nina Berry
Chatsworth and Hollywood, California
December 15, 1961
BAILAMOS
More of a statement than a question the man asks a woman: Shall we dance?
“Devin.” She breathed it more than said it. Had she conjured him with her thoughts? She took two steps toward him, on her tiptoes. “Are you real?”
“That’s a matter for debate.” He smiled at her with a delicious fondness that sent blood rushing to her cheeks. “You, however, look very real.”
The impulse to obliterate the distance between them, to throw her arms around him, was almost irresistible. The fierce way he’d kissed her the last time they met was imprinted on her body like a brand. But something made her pull herself up short.
His gaze may have been more than friendly, but he hadn’t walked up to her or taken her in his arms. He stood at a distance, all coiled grace in his custom-made suit, keeping a good six feet between them.
It had been four months and two days since they last saw each other. Anything could’ve happened. She needed to reverse the overeager impression she’d given him, and fast.
“Delighted to see you haven’t been slaughtered in the line of duty,” she said, keeping her tone light. Years of actor training came in handy at times like this. “Last thing I needed was to be haunted by your ghost.”
He took a step toward her. “It’s good to see you.”
His natural Scottish accent, which he could turn off or on, depending on which persona he needed to be, warmed as he spoke more personally. It fanned the tiny flames dancing inside her heart.
“Took you long enough, laddie,” she said, using her own deadly accurate Scottish accent. “I was in your neighborhood a little over a month ago.”
“Shooting Daughter of Silence in London.” His voice flattened into a flawless American accent, as if answering an unspoken challenge. “Becoming an emancipated minor, and turning seventeen. Happy belated birthday.”
“Thanks,” she said, dropping the accent. “I got the flowers you didn’t send.”
He winced. “I’m sorry. I was rather busy. I promise.”
It sounded like the truth, but with Devin you could never tell. “Oh, that whole ‘I was away serving my country doing unspeakable things’ excuse. Very handy.” She smiled.
“I hear that the director is so happy with the movie, and with your performance, that he’s submitting it to the Cannes Film Festival.”
“So you’re still pretending to be in the movie business?” she asked.
“I’ve stepped back in actually. That’s why I’m here.”
“And you’re keeping tabs on me,” she said. “Should I be scared?”
“Could you be scared?” His smile was knowing.
“Don’t ask me to drive a red convertible.” The only way to deal with the paralyzing anxiety brought on by memories of the accident was to puncture it with jokes. “Or wear something off the rack.”
“How’s your Spanish?” he asked.
It sounded like a non sequitur, but all at once she knew why he was here. It felt so good that it scared her. She took a moment before replying to steady her voice. “Why don’t you ask the real question you came all this way to ask me?”
Admiration shone in his eyes. “No more facade between us, is that it?”
Of course he’d understood her immediately. But she hadn’t been prepared for him to look at her like that. She clasped her hands to stop them from trembling. “We’ve pretended with each other enough for one lifetime.”
He dipped his head in acknowledgment. “I’ve come to ask you to help us out, one more time.”
“Us?” she asked. “Are you an American now? The last time I saw you...”
“I work for MI6, the British secret service,” he said. “The CIA has asked to borrow me for this particular mission. I’m on loan.”
“Because they think you have some kind of power over me.” It was half question, half assertion.
“To be fair,” he said with a smirk, “that’s only one of my many valuable skills.”
Her eyes fell to his lips. “I remember.”
It was hard to tell in the dark, but she could’ve sworn he flushed. “It would be better if you didn’t.”
Her throat tightened. He was pushing her away, all right. But she’d gotten a reaction, however much he might try to deny it. “Who is she?”
He glanced away from her briefly. His expression didn’t change, but it was enough to make her feel like someone had stabbed her in the gut.
Carefully, he said, “What matters is that I never should have...done what I did the last time we met. I truly thought I’d never see you again. I thought...” He broke off and tilted his head back, eyes heavenward, inhaling a deep breath. “I’m not here to renew our acquaintance.”
So after all they’d been through together in Berlin, after they’d shared a kiss that nearly burned down a hospital, he wasn’t here to be with her. It shouldn’t have surprised her, or hurt her. She should’ve been over him by now, on to some new sweetheart who didn’t come and go like a thief. But it hurt so bad she had to shore up her face with a sarcastic look she’d overused in Beach Bound Beverly.
“You mean the CIA didn’t send you all the way to Los Angeles to make out with me?” She raised her eyebrows. “But what better way to spend our tax dollars?”
He exhaled a small laugh. “If you’re interested in helping us out, then you should accept a starring part in a movie shooting in Buenos Aires, which will be offered to you very soon.”
“Argentina?” She knew very little about the country. Something about grasslands and cattle and Eva Perón. “I do all right in Spanish, but there’s no way I could pass for a native speaker, even with all of Mercedes’s coaching.” Her best friend, Mercedes Duran, had grown up in a Spanish-speaking house and was fluent. Pagan, who had learned some French and Italian during her lessons on set and grew up speaking German and English, had picked Spanish up from her fast.
“You won’t need to be anyone but yourself,” Devin said.
Argentina. Something in her memory was stirring about that country. “Why send Pagan Jones to South America?”
He shook his head, regretful. “I’ll tell you after you say yes.”
“So I’m going to say yes?”
He paused, lips twisting sardonically. “Yes.”
She eyed him. If he was that annoyingly certain about it, he was probably right. “Why?”
“Because you want to,” he said.
He was right about that. Even her disappointment at him keeping his distance hadn’t dulled the buzz in her fingertips, the lift to her ego at the thought that they wanted her back, that they needed her. No one before had ever thought she could make the world a better place, even in the smallest way.
“I am a glutton for punishment,” she said. Or maybe she was addicted to it.
He took a step toward her now, his eyes intent. “But mostly you’ll say yes because it has to do with the man from Germany who stayed with your family back when you were eight.”
A chill ran down the back of her neck. That man, her mother’s so-called “friend,” had come to stay with the Jones family for a few weeks and then vanished. She couldn’t remember his name, but he’d been some kind of doctor, a scientist, and this past August she’d discovered that he’d written letters to her mother in a code based on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. “You mean Dr. Someone?”
Devin nodded. “The same man who gave your mother that painting by Renoir. You told me you remembered what he looked like, what he sounded like.”
“Oh, yes, I remember.” She did easily recall the man’s angular height, shiny balding head, arrogant nose and sharp brown eyes draped with dark circles. His voice had been the most distinctive thing about him—high-pitched, nasal, commanding, speaking to her
mother in rapid German behind closed doors.
Devin was watching her closely. “The Americans think they’ve found him in Buenos Aires. But photographs and living witnesses are scarce. They need someone to identify him. You may be the only one left alive and willing to help.”
“May be willing to help,” she said, but it was an automatic response. Her thoughts were a cyclone of questions and confusion. She hadn’t told Devin about the coded letters. They’d been signed by Rolf Von Albrecht, who had to be the same person as Dr. Someone.
“Why would they want to track him down?” She had her suspicions, but they were too horrible, too unproven. So she let them stay unexamined in the darkest recesses of her mind. She’d recently discovered that her own mother hated Jews, and that she’d helped this German Dr. Someone quietly leave the United States nine years ago. There were only so many reasons the CIA would bother to find such a man.
The thought of Mama, the bedrock of the family, hiding her bigotry and helping Germans illegally kept Pagan up late many nights, trying to untie the knot that was her mother. She’d kept it all from her family and then unexpectedly hanged herself in the family garage one afternoon while everyone else was out. Pagan still didn’t know why Mama had decided to die, and more than anything—well, looking at Devin she realized more than almost anything—she longed to find out.
“I’ll tell you why,” he said. “After you accept the job.”
She glared at him. “We said no more lies between us.”
“An omission,” he said. “Which I’m telling the truth about.”
Damn him. She was going to do it—because it made her feel good to be trusted, it was the right thing to do and because it involved Mama. It was Mama’s death that triggered Pagan’s alcoholic spiral, and it was Pagan’s decision to keep drinking for years after that which led to the accident that killed her father and sister.
Mama hadn’t left a note; she’d shown no sign of distress or depression. Pagan still had no idea why she’d taken her own life, why she’d left her two daughters without their fierce, controlling, adoring mother. A mother with her own dark secrets.
Thinking about it made it hard to breathe. But more than anything else, Pagan wanted the answer to that question. All the other terrible events had been her own damned fault. She couldn’t help feeling responsible for Mama leaving, as well. But maybe, if she found an explanation, one corner of the smothering blanket of guilt and self-recrimination would lift.
“By taking the job,” Devin said, “you’ll help persuade the CIA to let you see that file they have on your mother. It may be the thing that does the trick.”
“‘Help persuade’?” she quoted, voice arching with skepticism. “It ‘may’ do the trick? You’re the one who told me to be cautious if they asked me to help them again.”
“Glad to see my warning sunk in,” he said. “And I stand by it. But I know how badly you want to know more. And I’ll be going with you, so I can be a buffer.”
She lifted her head to stare up at him, her heart leaping into her throat. “You...”
“I will act as your liaison to the agency while you’re in Buenos Aires,” he said.
So that was why... “And there’ll be no fraternizing because you’ll technically be my supervisor,” she said.
“It’s not technical,” he said. “I will be your boss while we’re down there, and it’s important that nothing get in the way of that. Your life might depend upon it.”
“You’re such a rule-follower,” she said. “What if the rules are wrong?”
“You’re such a rule-breaker,” he retorted. “What if you’re too blind to see why the rules exist?”
“That’s what rule-makers always say,” she said. “Rules are made to be broken.”
“Rules are made for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men,” he said in an exasperated tone that secretly delighted her. “Guess which one you are?”
She paused. “Was that Shakespeare?”
“Douglas Bader, fighter pilot,” he said abruptly. “Those are the terms of the deal. If you say yes, a script for the movie will be sent to you tomorrow. All you have to do is call your agent and tell him you want the part. The movie starts shooting after New Year’s. When you get to Buenos Aires, I’ll contact you.”
“Hmm.” Two could play at being distant. And it might help keep her sane while she was working with him.
With her heels still dangling from one hand, she stepped carefully around him in her stocking feet, making it clear she was keeping at least an arm’s length between them as she headed back toward the mansion. “I can’t make decisions when my toes are wet and cold,” she said. “Send me the script.”
She paused, turning to look over her shoulder at him. “Maybe I’ll say yes.”
“Very well.” He nodded curtly. The English accent was back, and a veil of formality fell between them. “Say hello to Thomas for me. I look forward to seeing you again soon.”
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
“There you are!” a voice called through the moist night air.
Pagan whirled to see Thomas’s golden blond head bright under the low lights of the poolside arcade, moving toward her. “I’ve been wondering where you went,” he said, striding over the grass now. “Are you all right?”
“Remember this old friend?” Pagan gestured toward Devin.
But Devin Black was gone.
Again.
* * *
“Typical Devin,” said Thomas as they sat in the back of their limousine on the way back into town. “How did he look?”
“Amazing.” Pagan shot Thomas a knowing glance. He’d developed a crush on Devin back when Devin was recruiting him to be an agent for the West in Berlin, a crush Devin hadn’t discouraged until the hook was set. “You know how it is when he’s wearing one of those perfect dark suits...”
“His hair gelled back except for that one lock of black hair that falls just so over his eyebrows. Ugh!” Thomas threw himself back into the deep leather seat. “Good thing I’m seeing Diego or I’d be jealous.”
“You’re seeing him tonight?” Pagan had known about Thomas’s preference for men since Berlin, but few others did. He was a handsome young actor trying to make it in Hollywood as a leading man. Pagan thought he was good-looking and talented enough to get to the big leagues, if no one discovered his secret. It was horrible, him having to live like that. But it was a fact of life. Even Thomas’s mother and sister, with whom he shared a small bungalow in West Hollywood, didn’t know.
Thomas nodded. “I’m going to his place after we drop you off. Mother doesn’t expect me until late because of the party.”
“You are...over Devin after what happened in Berlin, aren’t you?” she asked.
Pagan harbored hopes, which she shouldn’t still be harboring. But she tended to do things she shouldn’t.
“Occasional flare-ups of resentment and memories of lust past,” he said. “Don’t worry. I won’t mind if you fly off to paradise with him. You deserve it.”
“Well, it’s better to date a man who’s actually, you know, around. I probably won’t see Devin again unless I take the job,” Pagan said.
Thomas shook his head. “He is the worst tease. But I bet he still likes you.”
Pagan frowned. “He did look very happy to see me. But he made it very clear there won’t be any of that on this trip.”
“The two of you, working together, facing danger in a beautiful city far from home?” Thomas grinned. “There’s absolutely no chance he’ll change his mind.”
Pagan smiled over at him. “I can be persuasive.”
“And you said he knew all about your movie shoot in London, knew you’d been legally declared an adult, had a birthday... None of those things are connected to this new mission of his. He’s probably foll
owing us right now.” Thomas turned to look out the back window of their big-finned limousine, half in jest, and froze. “I was joking, but I think the same white Plymouth Valiant was behind us on our way to the party, as well.”
“Very funny,” Pagan said, frowning out the back window. It was hard to tell in the dark, but the 1960 Valiant behind them did look familiar. “There must be a million cars like that in LA.”
“There’s a million of every kind of car in LA,” Thomas said. He’d frequently remarked on the ridiculous number of vehicles populating the city’s roads, but of course anywhere would appear jammed with cars compared to East Berlin. “But how did he know where you’d be tonight?”
“It wasn’t exactly a state secret,” Pagan said without conviction. Devin had posed as a studio publicity executive when they first met, and he’d exercised some kind of power, probably blackmail, over Pagan’s agent, Jerry. He’d also somehow persuaded the judge who convicted her of manslaughter to let her out of reform school more than a year early. “He is a man with a lot of powerful connections.”
“So it’s probably not him following you personally,” Thomas said, turning back to settle into his seat again. “It’s someone working for him.”
“Or it’s just another car heading home on a Friday night.”
She changed the subject to the party—Thomas was still agog at having met Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin—and the white Plymouth Valiant stayed behind them all the way through the Valley and up Laurel Canyon. But when they turned up the tiny side road leading to Pagan’s house in the Hollywood Hills, the Valiant kept going down the hill toward the city. Pagan saw Thomas eye its red back lights with relief before it vanished around a curve.
“Don’t worry, no one would be following you,” she said. “No offense, but you’re not famous enough yet.”
“I’m sorry,” Thomas said. “I shouldn’t be so paranoid. But if anyone ever found out about me...”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry that you have to worry about that.”
The limo had stopped in front of the house. The porch light illuminated the big wooden front door and part of the slightly ramshackle two-story building that climbed up the hill behind it.