Light of the Desert

by Lucette Walters

  CHAPTER 62

  ICE MELTS

  I am now an American, Noora thought, landing at the Los Angeles airport. Out of habit, she brought a strand of hair down to her right temple, where the scar from her father’s ordeal was still a reminder. But it was barely visible, especially with the concealer and foundation she religiously applied every morning. Her hair had grown a little longer than she wanted, and her blonde streaks had faded. But she still looked like her passport picture, so she knew there would be no problem. She was Kelley Karlton.

  Her passport stamped, Noora took the shuttle to the nearest hotel. The Hilton on Century Boulevard was huge and crowded. The odds of running into anyone who would recognize her should be very slim.

  She took a cab to the Beverly Center and had her hair cut and streaked—the same style as the evening with Ian Cohen and the Japanese family, and the first night she met Kennilworth. Kennilworth! The thought of that man made her cringe. She would handle Kennilworth quite differently if she ever ran into him again.

  The real challenge was Ian. She wanted to talk to him without risking another unpleasant confrontation.

  In her hotel room, she sat most of the night with a cup of hot cocoa from the all-night café in the lobby and stared blankly at the television screen. Saturday Night Live was on, but her mind was on the next night. How would she handle that situation? Certainly she was not going to call Ian Cohen and invite him to join her. She had to think of a clever way to run into him.

  The next day, hoping Ian would arrive sometime after 7:30 in the evening at the Hamburger Hamlet, Noora made reservations supposedly for two, at 7:15 PM. When she arrived at the restaurant, she was shown to a booth. Perhaps she should have thought of hiring a lady companion, just to sit with her. Noora had made no friends while in Los Angeles. Her focus had been on Ian, and his Bel Air mansion had been a sanctuary for Noora during the three years and four months she had spent with him. Time had flown. Her sorrow had gradually eased until that dreadful afternoon when he ordered her out … She could not think about that now.

  She had brought two extra copies of Ahna’s manuscript with her, professionally translated into both French and English, thanks to Alain’s generosity. He would not tell Annette how much the translations had cost. It was a gift for his wife and for Noora as well.

  Noora spotted Marj picking up drinks at the bar. The waitress who usually waited on Ian would certainly recognize her. Marj worked the bar area in the rear of the restaurant, and Noora sat keeping her back to that section. Sipping a tall glass of Coke with lemon and munching on chips and salsa, Noora began to feel anxious and even a bit nervous. Perhaps it was not the right way to approach the situation. That’s when she heard his voice. She picked up the menu and held it an inch or two higher than eye level, her heart starting to pound. But why should she feel so vulnerable? If she were smart, she would put twenty dollars on the table and leave.

  “Hellooo …”

  She glanced above the tip of her magazine.

  “Oh … Hello.”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “I came for the chocolate cake,” she was quick to reply.

  His eyes were bright and there was a smile forming from the corner of his lips. “I came for the caesar salad,” he said.

  “Caesar salad?” She knew he didn’t like salads, called that dish “frog food for rabbits.”

  “I try not to eat rare hamburgers and fries anymore,” he said with a wink.

  “Ian, they have our table,” a man said, farther away.

  “I’ll be right there, Max,” he said, but remained planted there, looking down at Noora. An awkward moment passed.

  Noora noticed he had lost weight and looked fitter.

  “Looks like you’re waiting for someone,” he said.

  “Yes … Uh, no … ”

  “Well, it’s nice to see you again,” he said.

  She nodded and smiled, and then he left.

  She set the tall menu down beside her. She hoped he had not noticed her hands were trembling.

  He made his way toward the booths by the bar—his usual table. They had made contact. She looked down at her hands. Stop shaking! Just because he was a big-shot Hollywood producer and she needed something from him did not mean she should feel intimidated. They had been through too much together for her to feel awkward or embarrassed. She had a serious mission.

  “May I join you?”

  To her surprise, he was standing less than three feet away. “What about … ” She pointed toward the opposite side of the restaurant.

  “Oh, Max? He’s busy with a friend at the bar. Where’s that chocolate cake?”

  “I was wondering the same thing …”

  “Mind if I sit for a bit?”

  “No … I don’t … mind.”

  “Kennilworth isn’t working for me anymore,” he announced as soon as he took a seat opposite her.

  “What you saw that afternoon was not what it appeared …”

  “I know,” he said, shifting his weight.

  She wanted to shout You know?! but she remained silent. Another awkward moment passed. “There was something I left in your house.”

  He dug in the pocket of his suit jacket. “You mean this?”

  By the candlelight on the table, the blue bead with the copper chain glowed brighter than she remembered. He handed it to her.

  She held it in the palm of her hand. “It was given to me by a dear friend,” she revealed, staring at Um Faheema’s necklace.

  “I kept it in my pocket …” he said, then added in a lower voice, “In case … I should run into you again.”

  She wanted to cry. Of course, she would not allow herself. How she wished she could have shown it to Ahna. She looked up. What did he say? Surely she could not have heard him right. She couldn’t bring herself to ask him to repeat it.

  “Where are you living now?”

  “France,” she said, pronouncing it the way the British do: “Frauhnns.”

  “Are you visiting friends? You don’t have to answer.”

  “I came for two reasons. Now I have one left.”

  CHAPTER 63

  IAN COHEN’S DECISION

  Noora sat in the tastefully decorated alcove not far from Roz’s huge desk piled with scripts, stacks of mail, and two computer screens. She busied herself reading the Hollywood Reporter, but found the featured articles dry and boring. What else was there to do? She checked her watch. A half hour had passed.

  Roz appeared genuinely happy to see Noora when she arrived at eight o’clock sharp for the meeting scheduled with Ian Cohen. But now he was late, and Noora had waited long enough. The office phones rang, one after the other, incessantly.

  “The receptionists downstairs pick up after the first couple of rings,” Roz explained, but when another phone rang with a different chime, Roz immediately picked up.

  At least ten minutes must have passed, and Roz was still on that particular phone, listening attentively while taking notes. When she finally glanced up with a look of apology, Noora rose and motioned a little hand wave. She was leaving. She had come to get her necklace back—Um Faheema’s necklace. This much she had accomplished. She had left Ahna’s translated manuscript with Ian. Hopefully, he would take the time to read it, so if she were to return to France that day, she would not consider her Los Angeles trip to have been in vain.

  “She’s leaving …” Noora heard Roz say. “I’ll tell her,” Roz concluded before hanging up. “He wants you to wait,” she said, quickly adding, “We missed you, you know.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I missed you.”

  “I missed you too, Roz. Thank you. Obviously, Mr. Cohen is too busy … Perhaps I should come back another time.”

  “He’ll be crushed if you go, but you didn’t hear it from me.” She turned her attention to one of her computer screens and began clicking away at the keyboard.

  “I didn’t mean to sound rude. I know he’s a very busy man �
� Wait a minute, Roz, what do you mean, he’ll be crushed …?”

  The keyboard stopped clicking. “Is that what I said?”

  “What’s going on?” Noora asked, taking another glance at her watch. Mr. Cohen was almost an hour late.

  Roz motioned to Noora to come closer, and whispered above her computer screen, “He stayed up last night reading your manuscript and he overslept.”

  “It’s not my manuscript. I … just added the introduction about the writer.”

  “Can I read it?”

  “Can you read what?”

  “The manuscript.”

  “Of course. But … if I remember correctly, you didn’t read the scripts they sent to his office because they were too violent. This story is heart-wrenching.”

  “He said it almost brought him to tears. That, I gotta read.”

  “Wait a minute … You mean he read the whole manuscript … last night?”

  “Traffic was the pits,” was Ian’s way of apologizing. He walked Noora to his office. “Sit down.” He made his way around his desk, slumped in his leather armchair, and reached for a fat cigar from a carved wooden box.

  Kelley Karlton gave him a disapproving stare.

  Ian closed his eyes and ran his nose along the length of the cigar, slowly inhaling its aroma. “You’re not my nurse anymore,” he said, but still replaced the unlit cigar in the box. “Sit down. We need to talk.”

  She sat.

  “Regarding that manuscript … Ahna’s Coat.” He picked up a legal-sized yellow pad next to his three phones. “I decided to green-light it,” he announced without looking up, busy writing something.

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “The foreword you wrote was good. Well-written. Good description of the woman, and since you knew her, I’d like you to co-write the script … And you can be the associate producer,” he said, words pouring out of his mouth like the wind. “First I’d like you to move back with me … and …” He stopped, looked up and into her eyes. “Say yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Good.”

  “No, wait. I didn’t mean to say yes … I need to think … I couldn’t just …”

  “I never went to your room. Cessi’s the one who gave me your necklace. That was your room. Still is.”

  For the next six months, Kelley Karlton immersed herself in Ahna’s story, while Ian Cohen was busy in his studio, working on the development of a feature film titled The Battle of Mefisto.

  Noora hardly left her room, except for an occasional swim in Ian’s pool, or Sunday nights, when they had dinner at the Hamlet restaurant.

  The journal contained more than five hundred handwritten pages about survival and the human spirit—the true account of the heroic woman who managed to outsmart Nazi officers in order to save children. But Noora was still not satisfied with the screenplay adaptation. Something was lacking. Somehow, the essence, the life of Ahna’s story was lost in the translation.

  To make matters more difficult, Ian Cohen urged Noora to find the key people who could project Ahna Morgenbesser’s story to the screen. The key is to find “the right director,” he had said. How could she tell one from the other? And David Lean was dead. How about finding the actress who would portray Ahna?

  Noora knew nothing about the art of moviemaking, let alone the process itself. Didn’t Ian realize that? Just the night before, he had made a comment that surprised her: “I’m not a writer. That’s why I hire them. The truth is, I’ve always been a better businessman than an artist.”

  Noora screened everything from D.W. Griffith to Charlie Chaplin to the latest modern-day directors known for their different styles.

  The more she learned about the making of movies, from pre-production to post-production, the less she knew, and the harder it seemed. A crash course in film school would certainly not do it, and she wanted to get the project off the ground without constantly asking Ian for advice.

  The possible directors she had interviewed had major egos. The men regarded her as a sex object—even though she was careful about her appearance, always dressing in conservative business suits. As for the women directors, to Noora’s surprise, there was a sense of resentment. They each scrutinized her and tested her knowledge of moviemaking, even asking trivial questions about the history of movies, as if they were interviewing her. She knew they wondered how she had gotten so far in Hollywood.

  But of all the men and women she had met, the last potential film director had to be the worst. He had not read the screenplay version of Ahna’s Coat, because he said he waited for his story analyst to finish reading it. Why didn’t he read it himself? According to Ian, before committing to anything, or even wasting their precious time to take a meeting, famous directors did not have time to read.

  “That’s what readers are for,” Ian said.

  “Readers?”

  “In my days, they were readers. Now we have to give them fancier titles. But a good reader will write a good synopsis. Then the ‘key’ people decide if they want to take on the project or not.”

  “But you read all the scripts that come to your office,” she said.

  “I’m from the dinosaur era,” he replied sadly.

  As time flew by, all her efforts proved fruitless.

  On another restless night—one of many—Noora woke again at 2:00 AM feeling she had to let go of her dream of making a movie, a venture that became more overwhelming with each passing day—and night. If Ian Cohen tried to convince her that making a movie was much more difficult than she had imagined, he succeeded.

  One morning during the first week of August, Noora woke up with a dream song. Ahna used to hum a specific German melody when they took their afternoon walks around the little garden square across from her apartment in Paris.

  Something about that melody ignited a certain feeling in Noora. If she could find a composer who would come up with that melody… Ahna, I wish you could guide me…

  By the seventh month of Noora’s attempt to write a screenplay adaptation, she thought she might have something to show Ian.

  “It’s a rough draft, very rough,” she told him one Sunday morning, after spending the entire night worrying about what he might say. She was sure he was going to laugh at her, and advise her to stick to reading scripts, or forget about this project. But instead, he took the “property,” as he called it, to the professionals, who broke it down and came up with a budget.

  When Noora read the numbers, all she could do was sigh. “Obviously, too expensive.” Ahna’s manuscript was not the movie genre his company invested in. It was not only a World War II story, it was also a love story. The third act was about Ahna finding her husband, the man she had believed the Gestapo had killed.

  “We’re not shooting high-tech special effects,” he said, to her surprise. “Ian Cohen Entertainment can raise the money. I know I gave you the responsibility of finding a director, and that wasn’t fair.”

  She was about to object and say it was all par for the course, part of the learning, but he continued.

  “I may know someone. He’s German or something. Unfortunately, he retired from the film biz a long time ago. He wrote a couple of the best scripts I’d ever read. He was a film director too. That kid was a talent … back in the seventies. A real visionary. But then one day, he quit. Just like that. I don’t know if he’d ever want to direct again. He hated Hollywood. I’m sure he loathed me. I think he’ll love you.”

  CHAPTER 64

  CASTING CALL

  Eight o’clock in the morning was the first audition for the part of Ahna Morgenbesser. The casting director Ian recommended was a large, no-nonsense woman in her early forties who, strangely enough, went by the name of Twinkie. When Noora arrived at the small stucco structure on Cahuenga Boulevard, only minutes from Universal Studios, she was shocked. The hallway and waiting room were packed with young women holding “sides,” a few copy pages of a script. Were they all there to audition for the part of Ahna? None of them was r
ight for the part.

  In the office, Noora sat near Twinkie on a leather couch and checked the piles of eight-by-ten glossies and attached résumés that were stacked on the coffee table in front of them. There had to be at least a hundred candidates. “They’re all modern California girls with a tan,” Kelley Karlton remarked.

  “That’s why we have directors, to tell the costume designer to tell her people how to make the actress look like Morgenbesser. That’s why they’re actresses,” Twinkie said, rolling her eyes. “We’ve got a big day ahead,” she added hurriedly. She turned to her assistant, who approached timidly, carrying a manila folder.

  “Ginger! Where’s the coffee and doughnuts?”

  “On their way. Here’s the list you wanted,” she said, placing the folder in front of Twinkie.

  “Next time, don’t send no gofer. Go for it yourself. By the time we get our breakfast, it’ll be lunch.”

  “I’m sorry, Twink. I’ll see what I can do,” Ginger said, rushing out and closing the door behind her.

  “I don’t drink coffee, and I would rather not eat doughnuts at this time,” Noora said, feeling an immediate distaste for the casting lady.

  “I’ll get you tea. Ginger!” she yelled. Her voice thundered like a bear’s growl.

  The young assistant popped into the office immediately.

  “Thank you Ginger, there is no need …” Noora started to say.

  “Well, whatcha want? A latte?”

  “Nothing, thank you,” Noora said, rising. She went around the table and extended her hand. “How do you do, I am Kelley Karlton.”

  It was obvious Ginger did not expect the friendly gesture from a person attached to a big Hollywood name. She immediately turned to Twinkie, as if to ask her boss’s approval to shake hands.

  “How do you do, Miss Karlton,” she said, shaking her hand uneasily.

  “Okay, let’s start already!” the casting agent said.

  By the day’s end, an exhausted Noora had interviewed some forty girls. None was right for the part of Ahna.

  Twinkie, however, was very excited. “I like this one and this chick. Callback pile … Ginger! Oh, that one, if she accepts the offer … What’s her name? Ginger! Get in here.”