by Steven Gore
Donnally heard his father chuckle, then lean over and say, “Most of the people in Germany who heard his speech were alive during the war, many of them were still in the government, some of them were standing behind him and in the audience as he spoke. Man, they must’ve thought he was an idiot.”
Donnally didn’t understand his father’s laughter, didn’t see the humor his father had seen. It was tragic and humiliating, not funny.
“And get this. The Christmas truce took place during World War I, not World War II. He only read about it in school. The Medal of Honor pilot going down with his plane wasn’t a real soldier, it was Dana Andrews in A Wing and a Prayer, and Reagan never left Hollywood during the war, never visited a concentration camp, he only saw them in newsreels.”
Donnally wondered whether his father understood the parallel with his own life, his delusion that the movies he had made for most of his career were for him more real than reality itself.
And Donnally found nothing humorous in Reagan’s delusions. It was that same president, in that same distorted frame of mind, who’d sent soldiers to Lebanon to be massacred like Donnally’s brother had been in Vietnam, who’d tried to provoke a war with Nicaragua, and who’d supported terrorists in Iran, Iraq, and El Salvador.
An actress playing the part of the president’s daughter then appeared on the screen, sitting on a couch in the White House talking to Nancy Reagan, her face flushed with rage, saying, “He makes statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless.”
Then Donnally realized that it had been his own mother who’d been speechless the night before, paralyzed by his father’s irrational behavior.
And the first lady, looking down at her fidgeting hands, acknowledged that the only way she had been able to protect the president from himself was to isolate him both from his advisers and from the press.
And Donnally thought of his mother upstairs, lying in her bed, terrified for weeks or months about being unable to care for his father.
“Doesn’t it all make sense, now?” Donnally’s father whispered to him. “And think how the man must have suffered not knowing what his mind was doing to him and then coming to realize that it was his deteriorating brain, and not his rational, deliberative self, that was responsible for the thousands of lives that were lost in the Middle East and Latin America.”
Reagan again:
First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior.
“But he did know. He agreed with it all and ordered it all. He just didn’t remember, and he never answered to the public.”
Buddy was wrong. It wasn’t that somebody had ripped out the last chapter. There wasn’t one, just an old man going to his death not remembering what he had done, that others had been convicted of in federal court for doing, afraid even to call the crimes by their legal names, referring to them only as “activities,” as if they had occurred on a school playground or, perhaps, in an arts and crafts room.
The image of the president faded and a refocused camera revealed a midwestern apartment kitchen, a Chicago newspaper on the table, a crucified Jesus affixed to the wall, looking down on a young Ronald Reagan staring out the window, alert eyes tracking trolley cars passing on the street.
Then Buddy again, as a ninety-year-old Reagan, sitting in an overstuffed chair in his home in Bel Air, California, covered by a blanket, staring out toward the back lawn, the same Jesus figure looking down at him, the old man’s vision fixed and eyes unmoving.
Donnally felt his mind shoved along the path his father had created by the film and imagined the figure on the wall above Regan speaking not, Forgive them, they know not what they do, but Forgive him, for he knows not what he’s done.
Then a jolt. Wasn’t that what Judge McMullin was asking?
What have I done?
Donnally slipped out as the actors rose in applause, as much in praise for the artistic aspects of the film as in relief that the story had made any sense at all.
He climbed the stairs to his mother’s room where he found her sitting in a recliner talking to Dr. Pose who was taking her blood pressure. Her jittering hands screamed at him that the Parkinson’s medications weren’t working anymore. He kissed her on the forehead, then sat down in the chair next to her.
“Sorry,” his mother said, “I should’ve guessed what your father was up to.” She smiled the forgiving smile she always offered when she was about to excuse his father’s selfish actions.
Donnally didn’t express the annoyance he felt.
“Remember when he wore a special forces uniform during the shooting of Last Man Out.” Her smile widened and brightened. “He was a fifty-five-year-old with a paunch dressed like a twenty-two-year-old marine.”
Donnally looked over at Pose who was removing the cuff from his mother’s arm.
“Do you really think it was an act?” Donnally asked her.
“What did you think of the film?”
“I think it’s probably as good as All the President’s Men and The First Monday in October.”
“You mean it hangs together?”
Donnally nodded.
“Then I guess we have our answer for the time being. Maybe we should consider this a test and conclude that he passed.”
“Unless it was his assistant who put the pieces together.”
“It could be his behavior was nothing more than a manifestation of worry about the film that grew into full-on depression.” Pose looked at Donnally’s mother and then back at him. “Only time will tell.”
Donnally wasn’t certain time would tell. Although testing was getting more proficient and proteins had been discovered that cause Alzheimer’s, there was no final and definitive diagnosis except by autopsy after death. But given that his mother’s failing medications put her own death on the visible horizon, Donnally didn’t say that aloud. In any case, it didn’t reflect where his thoughts were headed.
“Or maybe,” Donnally said, “he just needs to grow up.”
CHAPTER 33
Donnally’s cell phone rang as he drove up Mulholland Drive toward the Hollywood Freeway. He didn’t recognize the number displayed on the screen or the man’s voice or name, Alfredo Marin.
“I’m the assistant director on your father’s film.”
“Sorry we didn’t have a chance to talk. I need to get back north.”
“Do you have a couple of minutes to meet? I’d like to talk to you about your father.”
“Can’t we do it on the—”
“I think it would be better in person.”
“Where are you now?”
“I live in the valley. I was heading home, and it wasn’t until I was almost there that I gathered up the courage to call you.”
Knowing how his father reacted when he’d learned that people had discussed his condition without consulting him, Donnally was certain it had taken courage on Marin’s part to call.
Marin’s filmmaking career might end when Don Harlan found out about it.
“Meet me at the Burbank airport,” Donnally said. “I’ll be in front of Terminal B.”
Donnally disconnected and a half hour later he saw Marin approaching him, walking fast, his face intent, like a man late for a flight.
Marin took Donnally’s extended hand and shook it, then they walked down the sidewalk toward the rental car return and stopped next to some shrubs, out of the pedestrian traffic.
“This is a little awkward,” Marin said.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m glad you decided to call me.”
“And I don’t want you to think I’m trying to take credit for your father’s work.”
Donnally guessed that Marin had been thinking so hard about what he wanted to say
that he jumped ahead, anticipating Donnally’s response to a story he’d not yet told.
“You’ll need to back up a little.”
Marin reddened. “Sorry. It’s just that your father is—”
Donnally smiled. “I know, immortal.”
Marin rocked his head side to side as if to say, Not quite.
“I studied him more than anyone else in film school,” Marin said, “and his coming to see my work at Sundance and then calling me to help him on this project were the most astounding things that ever happened to me.”
“But . . .”
“But it was the worst experience of my life. Bad enough for me to quit filmmaking altogether.” Marin looked down and away, toward the shadows cast by the shrubs. “It was a dream turned to a nightmare.” Then back at Donnally. “The thing was a constantly moving target. Plot, characters, story line. And what he wanted was not an assistant director, but a substitute memory, and sometimes a substitute conscience.”
For a moment, Donnally felt like Marin was an actor playing him in a movie and McMullin was playing the part of his father. He had just begun to think that memory and conscience were what McMullin wanted out of him, too.
“Meaning he was counting on you to hold the thing together and be his memory if it failed, and his artistic conscience, too.”
Marin nodded.
“Except that he fought you all the way.”
Marin nodded again. “Especially during editing. We’d agree on something. I’d think it was done, then he’d go back to it a few days later as though he hadn’t agreed on anything. I finally had to have him sign off on each thing and keep kind of a log posted on the wall.”
No wonder the film was coherent in the end, Donnally thought. It wasn’t entirely his father’s anymore.
“Why did he trust you?”
Marin flushed again, this time in embarrassment. “He heard good things about me in the industry.”
“You mean brilliant things.”
Marin reddened further.
Donnally smiled, then reached out and gripped the young man’s shoulder for a moment. “You’ll have to take that ego of yours down to Gold’s Gym and pump it up a little if you’re going to make it in the movies.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Did you draw any conclusions about his mental state?”
“Not that so much as . . . as . . .”
“Go ahead, you can say it.”
“Whatever it is, he covers it up with lies. To me, to everybody.” Marin spread his hands. “And it wasn’t just that he was offering rationalizations. For a while I thought it was. But he knows he’s in trouble and knows he’s deceiving people to conceal it, and he’s worried. He kept asking, all through the filming and editing, what it must’ve been like for Reagan when he realized what was happening to him, the sheer terror of it.”
Marin fell silent for a few seconds. “And there was something else. Even after the tens of millions that had been committed to the film and all the work he and the actors and the crew put into it, he would wonder aloud what difference it made what anyone believed about what had occurred. That what happened, happened. Nothing would change that. He once asked, since it wouldn’t bring the dead back to life, what was the good of it in the end?”
It was a kind of fatalism that Donnally hadn’t expected from his father, a man who he’d long been accustomed to viewing as a child in the body of an adult, that he wasn’t sure what to make of it.
But of one thing Donnally was certain. At the heart of Don Harlan’s thinking when he talked of bringing the dead back to life weren’t the victims of Reagan’s foreign policy, but his oldest son.
CHAPTER 34
Instead of heading back to San Francisco, Donnally flew into San Jose and at 9:00 A.M. he was stationed along Senter Road in Little Saigon. He’d parked his rental car facing north, centered as much as he could among the stores he found listed on Rosa Gallegos’s credit card statement. He hoped to spot her as she traveled from one to the other.
Donnally was certain Rosa didn’t drive the sixty miles up from Salinas just to go shopping. Everything she might have wanted to buy could be found fifteen miles away in the malls of Seaside and Monterey. She had to be on a mission.
The fact that her activity was centered in a non-Hispanic district made whatever she was doing seem more deceptive and sophisticated than he’d expected.
But she hadn’t impressed him as shrewd. Instead, Donnally imagined her brother-in-law directing her from where he sat in his cell up in Pelican Bay in picking up or dropping off money or delivering messages to soldiers on the street.
And then another thought. Maybe Rosa was not only making pickups and deliveries in San Jose; she could also be receiving and handing off instructions as she refilled food warmers with fried chicken or cleared the tables in the Uptown Buffet in Salinas.
While she would be the means, the methods would have been created by others. The Norteños were ingenious at communicating with their outside members using code words formed from the ancient Aztec language, Nahuatl, and using microscopic lettering written in urine, the jailhouse version of invisible ink.
An odd thought came to him, an analogy with what he was doing. He was trying to find a way to apply heat to make the invisible, visible, and to do so without burning McMullin.
From where Donnally sat, it was hard to concentrate on the six lanes of traffic at once. Not just the relative motion of the cars passing one another, but the fact that they accordioned as the distant stoplights changed and that they all moved against a disorienting background of Vietnamese strip malls, a racket of oranges, greens, and reds, of fast-food restaurants and discount outlets and vegetable markets.
Donnally had learned from Navarro that Rosa owned an old Ford Taurus, but DMV records don’t indicate colors and, beyond the difficulty of spotting the license plate in moving traffic, there was no guarantee she’d even be driving it.
An hour in and he was already suffering from the surveillance officer’s delusion. If you’re looking for a Taurus, half the cars that pass you seem to be Tauruses, even the Camrys and Accords. And if you’re looking for a Camry, at times all the passing cars look like Camrys. And if you’re looking for an Accord, they all look like Accords.
The shapes seemed to merge into a generic four-door, just as Rosa became a generic Hispanic female out shopping.
Donnally watched cars pull into the driveway of Flaco Ortega Auto Repair. The drivers waited in their cars until a mechanic with a clipboard approached, then they got out gesturing toward the tires or the engine compartment or imitating a sound as the mechanic took notes. The drivers signed the estimates and then either got into the cars of those who’d come with them to give them rides back home or to work, or walked away.
At 10:15, after the morning rush was over, Rosa Gallegos appeared next to the driver’s door of a blue Chevy Malibu as a tattooed, midforties Hispanic male in a mechanic’s uniform walked up. Donnally snapped a photo with his cell phone and zoomed in on the picture to read his name tag. He was the owner, Flaco. His bald head rotated left, and then right as he looked up and down the road, then got into the driver’s seat. Rosa walked around to the passenger side and got in.
Donnally watched Ortega open an envelope, pull out a page, and hold it against the steering wheel as he read. Rosa stared forward as though not wanting to be seen as paying attention to the contents.
Or maybe she already knew them, either had heated the page to make the writing appear or had translated the coded message into English or Spanish.
Donnally was now certain his theory was correct. She was able to live beyond the means of an Uptown Buffet waitress because she also worked as a messenger for the Norteños.
And he knew she wasn’t alone in doing so. Countless women were serving time in federal penitentiaries around the country for having done the same thing, for delivering orders to move money, or execute rivals or snitches, or take over new territory. Each woman pretending
she had no more moral responsibility than a cell site moving signals from one block to another, one city to another. And always the same justification. If she didn’t do it, someone else would, so why not make a little money, or in Rosa’s case, a lot.
Ortega swung the car around to the exit from the garage property and drove out onto Senter.
Donnally eased into traffic behind them.
They’d only traveled a half mile before Ortega pulled into the parking lot of a market advertising Mexican and Asian foods.
Donnally spotted what appeared to be the motion of Rosa handing Ortega something, then he got out of the car, leaving her where she sat. He made a pretense of wiping a smudge from the roof as he scanned the street and the parking lot, and then walked inside. He returned ten minutes later carrying a small paper bag and drove back out onto Senter.
Donnally stayed four cars back as they traveled. Ortega slowed as he approached a yellow traffic light and the cars behind him bunched up—
Then he accelerated a second before it turned red.
Donnally felt his body go rigid, straitjacketed by what he was seeing and what he knew would come next.
Ortega cut into the parking lot of a city-block-sized mall.
There was no point in trying to follow them. Donnally had no doubt but that they’d be out the other side before the light changed to green again.
When it did, he drove on, eyes forward. For all he knew there was someone watching him from behind, trying to ascertain whether anyone was tailing Ortega and his messenger.
Donnally assumed Ortega would’ve made a move like that whether he’d spotted someone watching him or not, for all his moves were practiced, perfected, and disciplined by the suspicion that he was always under surveillance.
While Donnally didn’t know yet whether he’d been spotted, he was pretty sure when he’d find out.
Just after he was blindsided.
There were twenty thousand Norteños in California with something to keep buried in the past, and only one person, an ex-cop with a bad hip and an onrushing execution date, trying to find out what that was.