by Nina Berry
The smile on Pagan’s face faded. She clasped her hands together to stop them from shaking. “I understand.” It was all she could think to say.
“Normally I don’t care what actors do off-set, but I know damned well you were high as the moon during shoots, for years. You’re also underage, on probation, and responsible for two deaths, so if I catch you taking even one sip of alcohol on or off the set…” Bennie jutted his chin out for emphasis. “Just one sip!” His finger stabbed up at the ceiling with each word. “I’ll fire you. Do you hear me?”
She was shrinking back, terrified. Not just of him, but also of how his anger sent a stab of need through her. The need for a drink. She shoved the desire back and made herself square her shoulders, to look him in the eye. “I hear you. And I promise you. It won’t happen.”
“We’ll see,” he said, unrelenting. “And don’t think your friend can protect you.” He gestured at Devin, over in the lobby. “I don’t care what the studio says, I don’t care how far into the shoot it happens, or how much it inflates the budget. One drink and you’re out.”
“I think you scared Bennie,” Devin said.
By the time Pagan had visited the costumer to try on dresses and shoes and let her take Pagan’s measurements, it was nearing lunchtime. They were in the Mercedes headed back to the Hilton. Pagan had withdrawn to the farthest corner of the black leather backseat and was staring silently out the tinted window.
Devin was, as usual, seated upright, long legs crossed, sunglasses hiding those all-too-perceptive eyes. They hadn’t spoken for the first few minutes, and she’d been grateful for the silence. She just had to concentrate. That’s all it took. If she put her mind to it, she’d stop fantasizing about asking the driver to take them to the nearest bar.
“I scared him?” She recoiled deeper into the seat. “So you heard what he said to me?”
“I was too far away to hear, but it was pretty clear from the look on his face.” As she stirred, agitated, he added, “Don’t worry. No one was looking.”
“Oh.” It was odd to be grateful to Devin. “Then you should know it was him who scared me.”
He shook his head. “You were so good at the table read, you gave him hope. Hope is terrifying.”
She uncurled a little at the compliment, but only a little. Sometimes people complimented you just to soften you up for the follow-up punch to the gut. “I can think of worse things than hope.”
“Not for Bennie,” Devin said. “He’s a cynic. Hope makes him, for a brief time, an optimist. And nothing scares a cynic more than that, because they’re so certain they’ll be disappointed. You made him think today that his movie might be great, that you’ll be great in it. And now that you’ve given him that hope, he’s petrified you’ll destroy it.”
She pictured Bennie’s squinty eyes. She heard again the venom in his voice. “Scared and angry is still angry,” she said. “If I make one mistake, Bennie said, if I drink, he’ll fire me, no matter what. He doesn’t care what you and the studio might try to do about it.”
“Then it’s simple,” he said. “Don’t make a mistake.”
“Maybe for you,” she said, resentment of him rising. Did he have any idea how lucky he was to be able to have a drink and not even give it a second thought? It wasn’t fair that she had to worry about it every second of every hour of every day.
“I didn’t say it would be easy,” he said. “The simplest things are usually the most difficult.”
* * *
Back at the hotel Devin stopped in the lobby to pick up his messages while Pagan decided reading boring letters was better than thinking about martinis, so she went upstairs and pulled out the letters she’d found in her father’s safe.
There it was again, the too-neat signature Rolf Von Albrecht, addressed to Liebe Eva, along with his relentlessly mundane remarks about his life.
She looked at every sheet again, becoming more certain that there was no way anyone would write twenty letters full of this drivel without a very good reason. Squinting, she held up the paper to the lamp, but no nearly invisible squiggles appeared between the even lines of script. She put the paper close to the hot bulb of her side table lamp to heat it, but no lemon juice ink manifested a secret message.
Then, on the last letter, dated 1 November, 1952, a week before Pagan’s eighth birthday, she found something written in smaller, tidier script.
Someone else had jotted down another date, 20 April, 1889, in the margin of the letter. It wasn’t easy to tell with just a few strokes of ink to go by, but it looked like her father’s handwriting.
April 20, 1889. The date had familiarity to it, as if something important had happened in history. Maybe she was imagining it because it was so long ago. Anything that had happened before the war seemed like ancient times. She ran through the little she knew about that era from her days being tutored on set—Queen Victoria, railroads, the Wild West. None of those things or April 20, 1889 had anything to do with the letters or with November 1, 1952. But then why had her father carefully written it there?
She heard Devin open the door to the suite and hastily hid the letters in her suitcase. A glance at the clock told her it was nearly 10:00 p.m. back in California, and if she was going to call Mercedes, she’d better do it now. She changed into comfier Capri pants and a sleeveless cotton top, grabbed the hotel phone and walked it on its long cord into her room of the suite. Devin was reading several slips of paper, probably messages he’d picked up at the front desk. She was dying to peek over his shoulder at them, but he was too smart to let her do that.
She shut the door to her room and dialed the international operator, hoping that Devin’s instructions to cater to her and Mercedes still held Miss Edwards in thrall.
A minute later, Mercedes said, “Hello?” in a puzzled voice.
“M!” Pagan shouted. “Didn’t the Bitch Queen tell you it was me?”
“Hereje!” Pagan’s heart swelled as she recognized one of her friend’s favorite nicknames for her. “How are you? How is the world?”
“It’s crazy, of course.” Pagan lay back on the bed, phone to her ear, completely happy for the first time in forever. “How’s your shoulder?”
“I’m out of the infirmary. So far the puta barata—” Mercedes’s favored cusswords for Miss Edwards “—just ignores me, so that’s okay. I have to keep my arm in a sling, but should be out of it in a week. Got the whole room to myself for now. It’s like having a mansion, so it’s like being you.”
“I know you miss me,” Pagan said, grinning. “I’m in a luxury suite in the Hilton in Berlin, if you can believe it. But—” she lowered her voice “—Devin Black is sharing my suite!”
“He’s in the same room?” Mercedes sounded surprised but not shocked. She wasn’t easy to scandalize.
“No, separate bedrooms and bathrooms. He says he needs to keep an eye on me.”
“Sounds slippery,” Mercedes said. “Can you lock your bedroom door?”
“Yeah,” Pagan said, lowering her voice even further. “It’s weird because he doesn’t scare me that way, exactly, but…”
Mercedes exhaled a skeptical laugh.
“Okay, so he’s hotter than Alain Delon driving a black convertible in Death Valley at noon,” Pagan admitted. “He’s like a combination of complete gentleman and devious scoundrel.”
“Have you searched his luggage while he’s out?” Mercedes asked.
Pagan smacked her hand on top of her head. “No, but what a great idea! I haven’t had a chance yet, but—”
Three quiet knocks on the bedroom door sent her leaping several feet in the air in surprise.
“Pagan?”
It was Devin, of course. Pagan put a hand to her hard-beating heart. “Hang on one second, M.” Louder, she said, “Come in!”
The door opened enough to a
llow Devin’s dark head to peer into her room. His restive gaze found her on the bed, and although his expression did not change, she became conscious of how she was half lying on her bed with him standing only a few steps away.
“I’m going to make a call from downstairs,” he said.
She nodded, as if impatient with his interruption, but secretly she was intrigued. “Okay.”
“After that we should get some lunch. I know a good place in the French sector.”
“Sounds great,” she said.
He started to close the door, then stopped and shot a glance back at her. “I’ll have an unobstructed view of the lobby,” he said. “Just in case you decide to take a stroll without me.”
Damn. He was thorough.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” She gave him a big fake smile.
“Uh-huh,” he said, dubious. And shut the door.
“That was him, right?” Mercedes said.
“Oh, my God, M, things are weird…” Pagan quickly gave her a synopsis of her suspicions of Devin—how he couldn’t be a studio executive, how he seemed to know about her long-dead grandfather, how everything he’d done had been to get her here, on this movie in Berlin, for who-knows-what reason.
“That city is dangerous,” Mercedes said. “Since I learned you were going there, I snagged a New York Times from the guard, and everybody’s worried the Commies will do something there that’ll start World War Three.”
“Yeah, but what’s that got to do with me?” Pagan asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“They’re gonna make me leave you any second now. Curfew at ten. So I’ll tell you what you do,” Mercedes said. “That Devin boy is gone now, so you search his room. You’ve got to be fast, so don’t look in the obvious places like the main compartments of his luggage or his suit pockets. Look for false bottoms in the suitcases, between the mattress and the box spring, and go all the way under the bed if you can.”
“Under the bed?” Pagan’s heart was beating hard. “Wouldn’t the maid find something if he put it there?”
“No, no. You get under the bed, on your back, like a mechanic checking a car, and you see if he slid anything between the bottom of the box spring and the bed frame. It’s a hotel, so he won’t be able to hide things behind false walls or under the floorboards.”
Mercedes was only seventeen, but growing up in the female clique of a Los Angeles gang had taught her some fascinating things. “Wow, okay. I will.” Pagan stared at the door to her bedroom, not wanting to get off the phone with this, the one person on Earth she trusted. “Thanks.”
“Okay, so, before I go. Did you go to a meeting like I asked you?” Mercedes’s voice was casual.
Pagan hesitated. It would be so easy to lie, and then M would be satisfied and she wouldn’t have to deal with her disappointment. She’d lied so often to Daddy, and it hadn’t bothered her once. But she’d never lied to M before, and that was a part of the unspoken bargain of their friendship. What if Mercedes found out she’d lied and stopped being her friend? She couldn’t imagine that. Mercedes was all she had.
“Pagan?” Mercedes said, tone sharpening.
“There hasn’t been time yet,” she said.
Mercedes exhaled in frustration on the other end of the line and she rushed to explain. “I flew out of LA early yesterday and had the table read for the movie today. We just got back. And we start shooting tomorrow. But I haven’t had a drink. I’m fine.”
“That’s great, but you need to go to a meeting,” Mercedes said.
“Why?” Pagan said. It came out angrier than she intended. She swallowed hard, pushing her voice down into a semblance of reasonableness. “I can handle this, M. I haven’t had a drink in ten months, and I’m not about to start now. Not when I’ve finally got a chance to act again, a chance to find more about Mama…”
“You can’t handle it,” Mercedes said, unrelenting. “And you telling me that you can, shows me that you have no idea what you’re doing.”
“But I am handling it!” she said. “You have no idea how hard this is, but I’m doing it, M. I’m doing it! Don’t you trust me?”
“I’ve been around addicts, Pagan. They’re only trustworthy when they’re sober.” Mercedes’s tone was harsh, and she broke off, as if reining in her feelings. “But at least you didn’t lie to me about going to a meeting. Listen to me, Pagan.” Her voice had gone dead serious. “Strange and maybe dangerous things are going on around you. You have to keep sharp. And that means no drinking. To make that happen, you have to use every resource there is.”
Pagan leaned into the phone, wishing her friend was there and also wishing she’d never made this phone call. “That’s what I’m doing.”
Mercedes was quiet for a moment. “No, you’re not.”
“Mercedes…” Pagan’s throat was tight. “I know you want what’s best for me, but you’ve got to let me figure this out myself.”
Another pause. Mercedes never spoke until she was ready. “You’re right,” she finally said. “It’s not up to me. I hope you figure it out, Hereje.”
Pagan bowed her head. She could do this. She would keeping powering through and make Mercedes proud.
A voice on the other line said something Pagan didn’t catch. “I’ve got to go,” Mercedes said. “And you need to go do what we were talking about earlier. You know I miss you, right?”
Pagan’s eyes got watery, but she choked it back. “I miss you, too.”
“Call me!” The words were a warning, and Mercedes hung up.
Pagan put the receiver on the cradle and walked the phone slowly out of her bedroom, back to its place on the side table in the suite’s common area. It was quiet, empty. The door to Devin’s bedroom was closed.
It would be locked. If she was going to do this, she had to do it now, fast, before he finished his phone call in the lobby and came up to get her for lunch.
Pulling two hairpins from her updo, she strode to his bedroom door and turned the knob. Yep. Locked.
She slipped one bent pin in as the tension wrench and quickly figured out which way to torque the lock. The second pin slipped out of her sweating fingers, and she had to fish it off the carpeted floor while keeping the tension wrench in place. Every second of delay could bring Devin in at just the wrong moment. She couldn’t help turning to stare at the door to the hallway.
Should she lock the security dead bolt on that door? If Devin came in unexpectedly, he’d be shut out, and it would give her time to look innocent.
Or would double locking the door just arouse his suspicions? She had no justification for doing it. Did she?
Damn it! Stop overthinking and just do it. She stuck the second bobby pin in the lock and found the most stubborn internal gear faster than she’d hoped. In thirty seconds the lock was open, and she was inside Devin’s bedroom.
She paused, running through Mercedes’s instructions in her head as she surveyed the place. It was annoyingly neat. Of course the maid had made the bed and refreshed the towels in the adjoining bathroom, but Devin had left nothing draped over the back of the chair or on the floor of the closet.
Her eyes lingered on the bed. So that was where he slept, just a few feet away from her. It was so strangely intimate, their arrangement in the suite, and even more so now that she had violated his trust and broken into this inner sanctum.
Stop it! Stop being distracted and get searching. But where? He’d closed up his suitcase. There were no papers, no money, no cigarettes or matches or anything on the side table.
Best to do the toughest spot first. Under the bed. She was glad she was wearing pants as she lay down next to the bed and poked her head under, just as Mercedes had said, like a mechanic under a car.
It was dark under there. She didn’t see anything immediately, and as her eyes adjusted, she ran her hands over
the underside of the bed. Her updo, rubbing along the carpet, started to come down. The dirt on the metal frame stuck to her fingers.
Muffled laughter and running footsteps in the hallway outside. She froze. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of her forehead, over her ear, and down her neck.
She looked down the line of her own body and saw her legs sticking out from under the bed like the Wicked Witch under Dorothy’s house. She curled up, pulling her legs from view. Then she told herself not to be stupid, shoved her legs out long again, and kept running her hands over the box spring above her. Hiding was no better than being found. If she wasn’t immediately available when Devin walked in, he’d start searching, and under the beds was the obvious first place to look.
The footsteps outside padded past their room, taking the laughter with them. She sent a mental thank-you to whatever gods took care of thieves and kept touching along the metal struts of the frame for anything that wasn’t the box spring.
When she hit something smooth and leathery, at first she didn’t believe it. But as she carefully ran her hands over it again, she realized it was some sort of briefcase, shoved between the metal crossbars of the bed frame and the wooden part of the box spring.
Throwing caution to the wind, she pulled the briefcase out of its hiding spot and scooted out, back into the light of the bedroom, then sat up next to the bed to assess.
It was indeed a hard burgundy leather briefcase, thinner than any case she’d seen before, with two silver clasps and a combination lock.
Damn. How did you pick open a briefcase? She tried to click the clasps, just in case he hadn’t set the lock, but no luck. Devin was thorough.
She didn’t have time to pick it. He could be back any second. But the fact that she had found it tucked in such a secret place was a strong indication that Devin Black had something—maybe a lot of things—to hide.
She slid her top half back under the bed and shoved the briefcase back where he had put it, adjusting its angle to what she thought it had originally been. Then she was up and on her feet, head spinning.