by Peter Golden
“What’re you looking for?” I asked.
“A bearded man in a sedan. From that night in Amsterdam.”
“Did you see him?”
“There was a bearded man in the car that just passed. Almost the same color as this car.”
“That was a Chevrolet Impala.” I preferred Yuli chatty and paranoid to silent and withdrawn, and despite her experience I doubted we were in danger. “C’mon, is it likely we were followed?”
“Misha, Americans love dopey Russians—like your Khrushchev routines on radio. And we have dopeys—”
“Dopes.”
“Dopes. In Soviet Union, there are millions of dopes. But not in KGB.”
“How could they know we’re here?”
“You buy airline tickets with your American Express, KGB could be bribing contacts in that company. Bashe could have mentioned it to someone she thought was safe and is KGB. Same with Taft Mifflin. You think the KGB has no moles inside CIA? Think more. And who is to say KGB or an agent from the East German Stasi has not been in Nuremberg to search for Hildegard? If Nate Falk can know about her, why not KGB or Stasi? This makes sense, da?”
“Da.”
The sky was dimming and streaked with crimson and gold when I turned into the driveway of the El Royale, a white high-rise grand enough for Paris, with carved gray stone archways over the doors. A valet with a wispy mustache and a crucifix on a chain dangling from his neck trotted over to the Mustang. I tipped him a dollar and gave him the key.
A prince and princess could have staged their wedding in the cavernous lobby, with its decoratively painted vaulted ceiling, old-fashioned iron chandeliers, and muted light glimmering on the inlaid-marble and parquet flooring.
“You capitalists know how to live,” Yuli said, her heels clicking on the marble.
At the front desk, the concierge, a silver-haired gentleman dressed as formally as a butler, stood over a leather-bound sign-in ledger and a phone.
“May I help you?” he asked.
“I’m Michael Daniels, this is Yulianna Timko, and we are here to speak with Mr. Nathan Falk. Bashe, from the watch store in Atlanta, sent us.”
“Mr. Falk is out. He lives with his daughter, and she and her husband are out as well.”
“May I leave Mr. Falk a message?”
“You just did,” the concierge replied. “I will tell him.”
When we were in the Mustang, Yuli said, “Can we take a ride?”
“We have to. Our hotel’s in Santa Monica.”
“Not to our hotel.”
“Don’t tell me the bearded guy’s around.”
“Not that I saw. But could we go look at the Hollywood sign?”
I checked a map in the guide, then drove north, crossing Sunset Boulevard and going up, skirting the edge of the hills and all the houses, with windows overlooking the city, filling the hillsides like space-age pueblos, and there it was on the slope of Mount Lee. I stopped on the shoulder of the road, and Yuli stood on the seat, staring at the letters glowing in the twilight as if each one had been cut from a harvest moon.
“I’ve been seeing pictures of this sign since I was teenager. I feel like I’m on a religious pilgrimage.”
“Do religious pilgrims get hungry?”
Yuli laughed. “This one does,” and she sat in her seat, and I drove down into Burbank.
“Misha, what are we eating?”
“Classic American.”
Bob’s Big Boy was a long glass rectangle lit in glary shades of orange and red. Going inside, we walked by a hand-painted statue of the chubby grinning Big Boy himself, with his overalls and high pompadour, and holding up one of his original double-decker hamburgers, which we ordered once we were seated. Around us were the melodies of waitresses taking orders, the ringing cash register, the murmur of teenage couples in Hawaiian shirts at the counter sharing root-beer floats, and the chatter of families wedged into booths, the two children behind us debating, in tones of conviction and ecstasy, whether the best ride at Disneyland was the Monorail or Davy Crockett’s Explorer Canoes.
Yuli’s appetite had improved, and we all but inhaled our hamburgers, and as we waited for our dessert, she scanned the restaurant, her expression beatific and faintly confused, as though Bob’s were swarmed by pixies and unicorns.
Yuli said, “This . . .”
“This?”
She tilted her head left, then right—her version of a shrug. “This is so different from Russia. The people. They aren’t . . . they aren’t waiting for something terrible to happen.”
“Because nobody can lock them up for cursing the government, and the Nazis never invaded Burbank and slaughtered fifteen million civilians.”
The waitress brought us two spoons and a plate with a scoop of vanilla ice cream between layers of devil’s food cake covered with hot fudge, whipped cream, and a maraschino cherry.
“And,” I added, scooping up a spoonful of the dessert and holding it toward her.
She cleaned off the spoon, then grinned. “And you get a cherry on top.”
“Yes, you do.”
48
We were staying at the Georgian, a charming old beaux arts hotel with a veranda across from the ocean, and in the morning I woke up with an arm around Yuli and a silken wave of her hair on my face and her legs enlaced with mine. I kissed her ear, her arms went around me, yet when I began kissing her neck, she responded with an exasperated sigh and stopped holding me. For the last couple of weeks, I had missed making love to her and began feeling as though I was a besotted hero in a Victorian novel discovering that his body could genuinely ache with desire—not lust, but an agonizing hunger to be joined to the only woman who could cure his agony. I felt a bit pathetic and, following a bout of self-pity, figured the best I could do for her was to keep quiet and order rolls and coffee from room service.
After we showered and dressed and ate, we walked in the shade of the palm trees along Ocean Avenue, where drunks were sleeping it off on the benches and elderly couples were out for a stroll, the men in straw fedoras and loud sport jackets and the women in floppy broad-brimmed hats and gaily printed dresses. The sidewalk was above a grassy slope that ran down to a broad sandy beach and the sun-sparkled sea, and Yuli paused to watch the surfers navigating the waves.
“I want to buy a bikini,” she said.
“You won’t get any argument from me.”
It was good to see her smile. “I didn’t think so.”
She took my hand as we went by the pier with its Ferris wheel and the winding elevated tracks of the roller coaster.
“Do I have time to shop?” Yuli asked.
“Sure. Nate Falk is retired. He’ll be home at some point during the day. We’ll keep checking.”
Beyond the pier, sailboats were cutting through the water, and we passed the white statue of Saint Monica in her habit, her eyes closed in prayer and her hands folded across on her chest.
“I’m sorry, Misha.”
“For what?”
“For—for this morning—for—”
“You have nothing to be—”
“For being so—so sad. I remember a few years after going to live with Papka. I was in bed one night, thinking about those dead children at Lake Bereza and crying on and off until morning. I promised myself that I would not be that sad again. And here I am. Just as sad. And wondering if it will ever go away.”
“It will.” That was an attempt to comfort Yuli, not a faithful reporting of my experience. My sadness about Emma and Dmitry hadn’t gone away. I just didn’t notice it as much. And it helped to be angry. Sometimes I was so angry about the shootings I scared myself, unnerved by my rage and visions of strangling their faceless murderers.
Yuli bought a bikini at Henshey’s, a department store that appeared to be constructed from beige Legos, and then we drove to the El Royale.
As we approached the front desk in the lobby, the concierge, the same courtly fellow from yesterday, asked, “Back again, are we?”
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br /> He dialed the phone and announced us. “I see,” he said, then hung up. “Mr. Falk isn’t in. Mrs. Cohen, his daughter, is home. Take the elevator to the penthouse.”
Mrs. Cohen was a birdlike woman with a pointy nose, a helmet of dark, curly hair, and a pregnancy swelling her mauve chiffon maternity blouse as if she were carrying a basketball.
“Hello, I’m Irma. I got your message from yesterday. Come in.”
She led us through rooms of Danish modern furniture, with artwork that looked as though an irate child had thrown buckets of paint against the walls, and out onto a roof deck with a champagne-colored awning and redwood couches arranged around a low glass-topped table.
Yuli and I sat next to each other across from Irma, who extracted a can of Fresca from a pail of ice. “Would you like a soda?”
Yuli shook her head, and I said, “Thanks, no. Bashe told us your father might be able to help us find a woman from Nuremberg.”
“I was born in Nuremberg. In 1938.” Irma stared past us, out toward the tree-studded hills. “My father isn’t here. I haven’t seen him in a week.” She was silent, her eyes fixed on the magnificent view, and she trembled, fighting to hold off tears until she lost the battle and began sobbing, her swollen belly going up and down, so that I thought her child must feel as if he or she were on a pogo stick. Yuli went to sit beside her, took the Fresca from her, pulled the top off the can, and held it for Irma to sip.
I said, “We didn’t mean to upset you. We can go and come back.”
Regaining control of herself, Irma sat back, touching Yuli’s arm to thank her. “No, no. I’m going crazy, the baby’s due in a month, I’m trapped between my husband and my father. I have to tell someone.”
Yuli gave her the soda. She sipped it. “The week I was born, the Nazis destroyed the Great Synagogue in Nuremberg. My mother’s sister had moved to Atlanta—her husband got a job teaching at a college there—but she was visiting us and offered to take me till things got better. My mother had a rheumatic heart—my father says it was a miracle she survived my birth—and they had my three older brothers at home. So I went with my aunt to Atlanta. My brothers died in Sobibór, my mother died in Ravensbrück.”
Irma drank some Fresca. “My father survived Buchenwald and found a new wife, Toiba, in a displaced-persons camp, and came to Georgia. My stepmother was the sweetest woman, and my father had just sold his car dealerships when she died. He was lost without her, and I asked him to live with us. He always liked my husband. Bert writes comedy for TV—Leave It to Beaver, The Beverly Hillbillies, My Favorite Martian—and then Bert’s agent made a deal for Bert to help develop a new show, Hogan’s Heroes. It’ll be on in September.”
Irma set the can on the table. “The show’s about American, British, and French prisoners in a Nazi POW camp.”
“And it is a comedy?” Yuli asked.
“The Nazis are supposed to be very stupid.”
“The Nazis were stupid?”
Irma extended her hands, palms up. “In the show they are. And when Bert told my father about it—we were in Hollywood celebrating with a dinner at Musso and Frank—my father starts shouting, ‘Why not Ozzie and Harriet go to Auschwitz? Or the Flintstones in the gas chamber?’ Half the restaurant is gawking at us, the waiter told my father to put a lid on it or he’ll call the cops, and my father leaves, comes here to pack a bag, and now he’s gone.”
I felt let down, imagining trying to locate a man I’d never met in a sprawling, traffic-clogged city that would’ve stumped Lewis and Clark. I asked, “No idea where he is?”
“He says Kaddish at eight in the morning for my stepmother at the Shul on the Beach. In Venice. Bert went to talk to him three days ago, and my father screamed at him.”
“You have a recent picture of your dad?” I asked.
“In the den. I could show you.”
Yuli said, “When we are done talking to your father, we will try and bring him home.”
Irma put her hand on Yuli’s arm. “Your accent—where are you from?”
Yuli patted her hand. “From a place where a lot of people feel just the way your father does.”
49
As we waited for the valet to bring us the Mustang, Yuli said, “Will Americans watch this comedy?”
“Depends on their memories, I guess.”
Yuli frowned. “Let’s go to the beach.”
The valet pulled up, I tipped him, and as we got in, Yuli asked, “Can you take a different route to Santa Monica?”
“Did you see the bearded guy on the way here?”
“I did not. But it doesn’t hurt to be careful.”
I removed the travel guide from the glove compartment, and from what I could see on the map, Sunset Boulevard could take us about anywhere we needed to go. I drove west into the sunny greenery and brilliant riot of flowers in Beverly Hills, past Mediterranean villas, French châteaux, English manors, Spanish ranches, and towering palms so impeccably barbered that I figured they were tended by gardeners levitating above the treetops with jet packs.
In the convertible, it was no sweat for Yuli to glance back to see if we were being tailed, and farther down Sunset, when I saw a sign for the Pacific Coast Highway and turned down a steep canyon road, she said, “I saw the car—what was it?”
“An Impala.”
“I saw an Impala, but no beard.”
Yuli let down her guard on the PCH, transfixed by the sight of the cream- and rose-colored buildings of Santa Monica rising up through the mist on the other side of the blue water. At Henshey’s, Yuli had shopped for her bikini alone—to surprise me later, she said—so I didn’t see the bathing suit until we were back in our room at the Georgian. And I was certainly surprised, because Yuli undressed and stood before me, one hand on her hip and the other holding the coral-pink bikini.
“Yes,” she said.
I kissed her. “Is that yes like a question or yes like permission?”
“It’s yes like I love you and want you to kiss me again.”
We kissed, longer and slower, and backed up onto the bed. Ordinarily, this was an event for us to savor, a chance to explore, to tantalize. Not now, though. Perhaps it was our romantic drought or that Yuli had shaken off the worst of her grief, but we proceeded with a delirious single-mindedness, nudging each other toward that darkness where we relinquished ourselves, that stretch of frozen time, complete stillness, then an exquisite convulsion, a spate of whispers and cries, and stillness again.
* * *
On weekday afternoons, the beach beside the pier wasn’t too crowded, and the sand was cold against my bare feet as Yuli and I passed the lifeguard tower and found a spot to spread our towels. Two children, a freckly redheaded brother and sister from the looks of it, were building a sand castle by the foaming edge of the water, down from where an elderly couple in sweaters had planted their web folding chairs and watched the children with smiles brightening their leathery faces. Sun-browned high school and college kids—lissome girls in colorful bathing suits strolling in threes and fours across the sand, their skin glistening with oil and their laughter like the ringing of glass bells, while sinewy shirtless boys in cutoffs and sunglasses sat in circles as if at a campfire, smoking cigarettes and pretending they weren’t checking out the girls.
Yuli glanced at the revolving Ferris wheel to our left, then back at the beach. “I’ve never seen this many happy people in one place.”
A breeze was blowing, carrying the odor of the sea and the coconut scent of suntan lotion. “You should see the Jersey Shore in the summer. Wall-to-wall happiness.”
With sadness seeping into her face, Yuli gazed beyond the water to the Santa Monica Mountains, a jagged purple shadow with white shoestrings of clouds laced around its peaks. I knew that grief had a habit of playing peekaboo with your heart, and I wondered if Yuli was missing Der Schmuggler or if something else was bothering her. That line from a TV game show was going off in my head—It’s not what you say that counts, it’s what you do
n’t say—and it occurred to me then that neither of us had spoken about her returning to Otvali since Taft had warned her that it would be dangerous for her to go home.
“Have you thought about what you’ll do when we’re done looking for Hildegard?”
Yuli poked her index finger into the sand. “Will we ever be done?”
“If Nate Falk can’t help. Taft told us he’d gone through the German records. Where else is there? She could be dead.”
“What about finding who shot your grandmother and Dmitry?”
“I’ve been getting used to the idea that I’m not going to—especially the guy who murdered Dmitry, now that Taft is dead. With Emma, it could’ve been an attempted robbery and the shooter got scared and ran off. I don’t believe that, but maybe all I can hope for is the cops will arrest a guy for sticking up another store and ballistics will match his pistol to Emma. But I asked if you had a plan—for you.”
Yuli scooped out a handful of sand. “I could keep digging, crawl into the hole, and live on this beach.”
“Or you could live in South Orange. Go to school, get work as a translator, do anything you want. I’m thinking of selling the candy store and going back to deejaying.”
Her face was expressionless, so I couldn’t judge her reaction to my offer. What the hell, I thought. There was no way I’d know without asking. “And we could get married.”
Yuli studied me. I watched her chest rise and fall. Then she grinned. “I can’t.”
I couldn’t match her grin to her reply. “Why not?”
She giggled. “Because you didn’t ask.”
“I’m asking.”
“Aren’t American boys supposed to take you to dinner, get down on a knee, and give you a ring when they ask?”
I knelt on one knee. “Pick out a ring in town, I’ll buy it, and we can walk over to the Galley on Main Street. The guide says it the oldest restaurant and bar in West L.A.”
Yuli was giving me one of her more complicated smiles, meaning that I didn’t have a clue about what was on her mind. Speaking so softly that I could barely hear her over the sea slapping and hissing on the shore, she said, “When we are together I feel happiness like I am exploding, and suddenly I am thinking about Papka, my mother, the children at Lake Bereza, all the things—the terrible things—I have done. I feel guilty and ask myself, ‘Who am I to deserve this happiness?’ And I answer, ‘You don’t deserve it.’ Then you make me laugh or we go for a walk, and the happiness returns, and I wonder how I would live without you.”