by Nina Berry
“Why would any of them want to tail Pagan?” Mercedes asked. “For all they know she’s a harebrained movie star. Sorry.” She shot an apologetic look at Pagan.
Pagan grinned. “I drank a lot of martinis to give that impression. Glad they didn’t all go to waste.”
“Much as I’d like to discuss this with you in more detail, and much as I appreciate your sharp eye,” Devin said to Mercedes, “I can’t officially talk to Pagan about her job for us with you here.” He turned to Pagan. “Shall we adjourn to my room, perhaps? It’s down the hall.”
Pagan was on her feet. “You’re staying down the hall?” It was silly how that news made her pulse race.
“Don’t leave,” Mercedes said, getting up. “Pagan needs her steak, and it’s coming here. Send mine in when it comes.” And she sailed into her adjoining bedroom and shut the door.
Pagan was alone again with Devin Black.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Alvear Palace Hotel, Buenos Aires
January 10, 1962
CORTINA
Curtain. A brief musical interlude between dance sets.
“Alone at last,” said Pagan, echoing Devin’s words back to him as she sat back down with a thump. Devin took the chair beside the sofa with his usual careless grace, an arm’s length away.
Now that Mercedes was gone Pagan was free to notice how the long, powerful muscles in his shoulders pressed against the fine cotton lawn of his white shirt, and how narrow his waist was where the shirt was tucked neatly into his pants. She pulled her eyes away so he wouldn’t see her staring.
“Sorry it took me a little while to get in touch,” he said. “I had some background research to do before I talked to you and...”
He broke off, staring at her. His eyes, normally layered sapphire and indigo, caught sunlight coming through the hotel window and glowed nearly royal blue. His high cheekbones and long straight nose had tanned since she’d seen him at Sinatra’s house in December. He looked fit and coiled for action.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You seem agitated.”
She relaxed slightly. “I’m fine, but this morning wasn’t fun. The wardrobe is derivative, dated and way too tight, which is exactly how this whole movie’s going to be. The script is terrible. I keep hearing the director’s a jerk, and my costar thought dance rehearsals back in California were the right time to proposition me.”
He didn’t move, but something behind his eyes tightened. “Which costar?”
The protective note in his voice was strong, immediate. She looked down so he wouldn’t see how happy it made her. “Tony Perry. He’s...” She wanted to tell him how Tony’s assumptions about how “easy” she was had made her feel awful, to hear Devin’s reassurance that he didn’t see her that way, but instead she trailed off and finished, lamely, “He’s just a jerk.”
“I’ll have a word with him,” Devin said. “For all he knows, I’m still a studio executive.”
“Oh, I think I fixed that particular situation,” Pagan said. “But thanks. He’s finally able to walk around now without help.”
His eyebrows quirked together. “Ouch?”
She nodded. “You look like you’ve been lounging at a resort since I saw you back in Los Angeles.”
“Not unless you call staking out the home of a possible war criminal resort living,” he said. “The summer sun down here is relentless.”
“Where does Von Albrecht live?”
The astonishment in his face was gratifying. “How did you know his name? I never told you he goes by that name. Did I?”
“No, but in a way, my mother did.” She got up and went to the fancy mirrored desk in the suite’s living room, where she’d laid one of her smaller suitcases and pulled out an accordion file. She tossed it to Devin, who caught it easily. “Rolf Von Albrecht wrote to my mother in coded letters in the summer of ’52, a few months before Dr. Someone came to visit us. I assume they’re one and the same person. I found the letters in my father’s safe last August. I broke the code in Berlin.”
He looked up at her from the file. “In Berlin? When?”
“The night before I went to Walter Ulbricht’s little garden party, the night I saw Nicky with his wife and had a couple of drinks. You remember.” She paused, recalling it well herself. As Nicky had started playing on Pagan’s sympathy, trying to win her back, Devin had literally shoved him away and told him to go back to his wife.
Devin’s mouth curled at the memory, too. She continued. “It was something you’d said about Hitler’s birthday before that which helped me break the code. Take a look at the letter on top.”
Devin pulled Von Albrecht’s letters out of the file and untied the string holding them together. His eyes swept over the first letter, taking in all its innocuous phrases, until he came upon a notation in different handwriting. “Twenty, four, eighteen eighty-nine,” he read. “April 20, 1889. Hitler’s birthday.”
“That’s the code, in my father’s handwriting. I don’t know how he figured it out, but it worked. I used those numbers—twenty, four and the numbers in eighteen eighty-nine—and found the real message. In them, Von Albrecht says Mama was a ‘sympathizer.’ He asks her to help him—specifically to give him a place to stay and arrange to get him on a ship leaving the country.”
“Did he say anything about coming to Argentina?”
Pagan shook her head. “No destination is mentioned, and nothing concrete about exactly who he is, why he needs to leave or what my mother was a ‘sympathizer’ to, but given that the code is Hitler’s birthday...”
She trailed off. Director Bennie Wexler had made it clear Eva Jones was anti-Semitic. He’d experienced her bigotry personally. That was bad enough. But if this Dr. Someone aka Von Albrecht was the type of person Pagan feared him to be, her mother was something worse.
“Who is this man you want me to identify?” she asked, coming back to sit on the sofa. “What did he do?”
Devin set the letters and file aside. “Early in 1952, a Nazi war criminal named Rudolf Von Alt escaped detention in the United States and fled the country. We believe that he changed his name to Rolf Von Albrecht, keeping the two names similar to make it easier to respond to, and that he found help from sympathizers all over the country. A sort of evil Underground Railroad. They housed him, kept him safe, funded his journey across the country. The evidence indicates that he stayed at your house in the summer of ’52.”
Pagan inhaled sharply and nodded as Devin threw her a look. It was exactly what she’d feared after decoding the letters. Her mother wasn’t only a woman who hated Jews. She’d helped a Nazi war criminal escape justice.
“It’s okay,” she said, although it was far from okay. “But I feel a little sick.”
He got up and poured her a glass of water. “After his stay with your family, Von Alt left on a ship from the port of Long Beach. We don’t know his exact route from there, but we think we’ve tracked him down here, to Buenos Aires.”
“Tracked him—how?” She took the glass from him. Although none of this was a surprise, it was unsettling to hear the story coming from Devin, who was as close to an official government source as she could get.
“I don’t know all the details, but during the war, the FBI knew that your mother was a Nazi sympathizer and kept a file on her. They didn’t think she was dangerous and weren’t actively watching her in ’52, so Von Alt was able to get away. Later, I don’t know how, they learned that she had helped a man who resembled Von Alt. Meanwhile, I learned that Walter Ulbricht’s daughter was a fan of yours.”
She sipped her water. How could the FBI have known about Mama during the war when Pagan herself had just found out? Mama had been an excellent actress in her own right. “And you got me to Berlin, using my desire to learn more about Mama to get me there,” she said. “You knew by then she had
helped the Nazis.”
He nodded, eyes on her as if braced for a bad reaction. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you.”
She raised her hand briefly, waving off his apology. She’d forgiven him long ago. He’d been doing his job, and they’d had no connection then, no relationship, if that was the right word for whatever lay between them now. But could she trust him?
“Do you know anything else about my mother or father now that I don’t know?” she asked. She held her breath, not knowing if she would believe the answer, whatever it was.
“No.”
He looked right at her, brows steepled sadly, his eyes concerned, and warmth spread through her chest, like hot tears, melting away her uncertainty.
“All right,” she said. “I had to ask.”
He gave her a small smile. “Keep in mind, the CIA does know more. I can tell that the file they gave me on your mother was only part of the story they have on her. I knew she was the daughter of your grandmother Ursula, and that Ursula claimed to have married Emil Murnau and said he was the father of her baby.”
“But Emil Murnau wasn’t my grandfather,” she said. “He probably never knew Grandmama. He’s someone who died at the right time so she could cover up the fact she had a baby out of wedlock.”
“I wonder if your mother knew.”
Pagan considered this. “Grandmama would never have told her. She was too proud. And Mama was so sure of herself, of her place in the world...” She trailed off.
“Until the end.” Devin’s eyes were fixed on her, steadying her as the bleak, heavy thoughts about Mama’s death came over her. It was always like this, a smothering weight pressing the breath out of her. She’d started drinking to erase that weight, and it still made her long for the icy bite of vodka sliding over her tongue. She concentrated on breathing and pushed through it all.
“That’s not enough,” Pagan said, thinking out loud. “Mama wouldn’t have been happy if she learned that she was born out of wedlock, but it wouldn’t be enough to make her leave us. I know she wasn’t the best person in the world, that she helped this Nazi escape, that she pushed us hard. But she loved us. She loved me and Ava more than anything in the world. She wouldn’t have left us for that.”
She still couldn’t quite bring herself to say that Eva Jones had been a bad person. But maybe she had been. Loving your children didn’t absolve you of everything.
Devin was nodding, accepting her verdict. “So, if the Rolf Von Albrecht living and working here is the man you knew as Dr. Someone when you were a child, the same man who wrote those letters, then we can confirm we’ve found Rudolf Von Alt, Nazi war criminal, in Buenos Aires.”
“And I’m the only person who can connect the man living here to the one who wrote these letters?” she asked.
“We think so. I hope it won’t be too dangerous or difficult for you. Seeing him may not be enough to identify him because he may have had plastic surgery. And he will have aged since you saw him last.”
“I remember his voice better than his face,” Pagan said. “If you get me close enough to overhear him, I’ll know.”
“We’re hoping that won’t take very long. Once that’s done, you can wrap up your movie and go home.”
“But the US can’t prosecute him here in Argentina. If it’s the right man, do they plan to kidnap him like the Israelis did with Eichmann? Take him back to the US and put him on trial?”
Devin shook his head very slightly. “They haven’t told me what the long-term plan is, and they have to be careful. After the Israelis took Eichmann, there was a wave of anti-Semitic violence. The fascist gangs haven’t forgotten and are always looking for an excuse to lash out at the local Jewish population. But if this man is indeed Rudolf Von Alt, then he deserves whatever they have planned for him.”
“What did he do?” Pagan said, her voice quavering ever so slightly.
Devin hesitated. “He’s a doctor. A medical doctor with a second degree in physics. He started off working on the German version of the atomic bomb, but when that program collapsed, he started...experimenting. On the prisoners in the camps.”
Pagan pressed the palms of her hands against her closed eyes, trying to keep the images those words conjured from appearing in her mind. It didn’t help. She swallowed hard against her rising nausea. “He experimented on people.”
“With doses and implants of radiation, used without anesthetic, often combined with other typical Nazi experiments like limb transplants, using twins and pregnant women and anyone else he could get his hands on. Hundreds of them,” Devin said.
She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat. “A doctor,” she said stupidly. “Dr. Someone. My mother’s friend.”
“Your mother may not have known his crimes,” Devin said.
“Maybe,” Pagan said, remembering how her strong, stylish mother had laughed over dinner with the angular, balding Dr. Someone while her father sat stony-faced. Ava had been there, too, only four years old, piling her peas into the center of her mashed potatoes, seated on a booster next to a man who had done the unspeakable.
Pagan’s skin was going to shudder right off her body. She jumped to her feet, pacing over to the suite’s bar. It hadn’t been stocked with the usual welcoming bottles of Scotch, vodka and rum, and she was grateful. Nothing like Nazi atrocities involving your mother to make you want a good stiff drink.
“I’m sorry,” Devin said, getting to his feet. “I almost didn’t tell you.”
She leaned on the bar with shaking hands. “I don’t want to know, but I need to.”
Two sharp knocks on the front door made her pivot.
“Probably your steak,” Devin said. “You still up to eating?”
“Maybe in a bit,” she said, starting to move to the door.
“I’ll get it,” he said, and was at the door in one swift move, tipping the server right at the doorway and wheeling in the cart himself, pausing to knock on Mercedes’s door. “Steak’s here.”
Mercedes poked her head out. “Thanks.” She grabbed her plate and utensils off the tray. “Hey, do you know if they sell American comics here? I’m missing the second issue of Fantastic Four because Pagan’s a spy.”
Devin let out a surprised laugh.
Pagan smiled in spite of herself. “You can get it when you go home next week!”
“Might be sold out,” Mercedes said, raising her eyebrows. “It’s a whole new thing for Marvel, you know.”
“So you keep saying,” Pagan said.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Devin said. “No promises.”
“Thank you,” Mercedes said with a sly grin, and vanished once more into her room with her food.
“You do not have to get her a comic book,” Pagan said. “You’re not her butler.”
“I don’t mind asking,” he said, picking up a covered dish and a cold bottle of Coke off the tray.
Pagan walked up, hands out to take the food from him. “She is obsessed! Thanks.”
“Sit down,” he said, his lips softening. “I’ll serve.”
She bit down a smile and sat down in the chair by the suite’s desk as Devin set the plate down and opened the Coke bottle. He handed it to her. Her fingers slipped on the outside condensation and touched his. A brief touch, then his hand was gone.
“They don’t call it Her Majesty’s Secret Service for nothing,” he said, and lifted the cover off her plate with a flourish.
A cloud of fragrant steam rose from the large, beautiful steak lying there. Pagan leaned in to inhale, as Devin unfurled her napkin and laid it on her lap.
He leaned over her as he did it, and her shoulder brushed his chest. For a moment the heat from his skin enveloped her reassuringly. A whisper of his breath touched her temple.
She turned to him and looked up. He was looking down at her.
Their lips were inches apart. Any moment now he’d close the gap to kiss her, pull her close.
Then he stepped back.
“You don’t have to do this for us.” Devin walked over to stare out the window, his back to her. “I know you want to, but maybe it’s best.”
So they weren’t going to make out. Fine.
“I’m going to do this,” she said, and took a fizzy sip of Coke to settle her nerves.
“You’re not responsible for what your mother did,” he said. “You don’t have anything to prove.”
“Mercedes said that, too, but neither of you grew up loving your mother only to find out later she hobnobbed with war criminals. She helped them.” Pagan took another sip of Coke. The saturated sweetness coated her tongue, a memory of hot summer days playing tag with Ava in their terraced backyard while Mama yelled at them not to get too dirty before dinner. How could that woman be the same one who welcomed Dr. Someone into their home, who helped him escape?
“Do you think she regretted it?” Pagan asked suddenly.
“Your mother?” Devin turned from the window, puzzled, until realization eased the line between his brows. “You’re thinking that’s maybe why she committed suicide.”
“Is it strange that’s the answer I’m hoping for?” she said.
“No.” Devin’s voice was gentle. “But whatever else she did doesn’t cancel out the fact that she really did love you. And Ava.”
“Why do people have to be so complicated?” She didn’t expect an answer. “I want to understand why she did it, but if I do figure that out, what good does it do me?”
“You’re the only one who can figure that out,” he said. “Identifying Von Albrecht might not get you the information about your mother that you’re looking for. It might get you her file, and it might not. You could go through all of this and still not have any answers.”