The Notorious Pagan Jones

by Nina Berry

  Devin didn’t reply, just looked away from her out the window.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” God, he was infuriating. So he wasn’t going to talk to her? Well, she’d see about that. “Am I irritating you? Are my petty concerns no longer of interest? Well, excuse me for not being made of stone.”

  “You live and work in Hollywood,” Devin said. His voice was flat, brusque. “So does Nicky. Did you not think that you might see him again?”

  “No!” she said. “Sue me, but I didn’t think about that! As of last weekend my thoughts were all about climbing over barbed wire and heading for Mexico, for crying out loud. Since then life’s been a little full with memorizing a script, shooting a goddamn movie without a drink for the first time in four years, and making sure you haven’t drilled any peepholes in the walls. So excuse me if I didn’t make contingency plans for seeing my ex and his wife! Maybe I should draw up a response in case they ask me to babysit their firstborn.”

  “Nicky is nothing,” Devin said. “He’s a fool, and he’s the past. He doesn’t deserve one moment of your time or attention.”

  He was right, dang it. But that only enraged her more. “Deserve has nothing to do with it,” Pagan said. “I’m human. I have feelings. I’m not perfect. God knows, I’m the opposite of perfect.”

  “You can’t control where other people go, or what they do or say,” Devin said. They’d passed through the Brandenburg Gate and were zooming along the edge of the wooded Tiergarten. “All you can control is your reaction.”

  “This is my controlled reaction!” Pagan said. “It’s taking everything I’ve got not to scream!”

  “You mean not to have a drink?”

  It was only the second time he’d mentioned drinking to her, and it stung. She wished she still had her broad-brimmed hat so she could tilt it down and hide her face. Instead, she looked away and did not reply.

  “You’re such an excellent actress,” he said, his voice unexpectedly kind. “It’s easy to forget the battle going on inside.”

  The kindness nearly undid her. She stared at her gloves, wanting to tell him that she knew he was probably here to steal something. She wanted to hear from his own mouth exactly what he was doing, and why she was mixed up in it.

  But what was she thinking, wanting reassurance from him? Cold reason told her that was stupid. This man was her legal guardian. They shared a suite. He was involved in something criminal and dangerous. If she showed him her hand, he’d win this round, and maybe the whole game.

  Maybe her whole life.

  First coldness, then anger, then kindness. She and Devin fenced with words, with secrets and lies. What was really going on between them?

  Maybe it didn’t matter. She was still stupidly in love with Nicky. The past few minutes had proven that.

  “Are you going to be able to manage dinner with Thomas tonight?” he asked. “He knows not to order you any alcohol, but—”

  “You’re so kind to be concerned,” she said, her voice dripping acid.

  He considered her through the opaque lenses of his sunglasses. She braced herself for an explosion. She craved it—anything to pull her out of the pit she was drowning in.

  “I think it’s best if you go up to your room to rest before your date.”

  She uttered a short, derisive laugh. “You have a lot to learn if you think you can order me around.”

  He removed his sunglasses and studied her again with a clinical detachment that made her itch. When he spoke, his tone was reasonable but touched with steel. “You’ll do as I ask, in this instance, because it’s what’s best for you. I realize that you’ve had a difficult morning, a tough week, and a terrible year. But you’re not the only person with troubles in the world. The more you think about others and less about yourself, the easier your life will be.”

  He was right again, damn him. She hated him for being so right. She hated everyone and everything, particularly herself. She had to move, to escape, to find a way out of this car before she suffocated.

  They were pulling up to the front of the Hilton. Thank God.

  “I’m going to take your advice,” she said, gathering her skirt around her knees as the doorman opened her door. “Instead of thinking about myself, I’ll think about you. I’ll think about how you, a complete stranger, took control of my life just five days ago, how you nearly killed me in a dark bathroom, and how you’ve now arranged for me to have dinner with another man so you can slink around West Berlin tonight the same way you crept around East Berlin this afternoon. I’ll think about your burdens, my friend. Your troubles. Of which I am clearly the smallest one.”

  His clear, handsome face was a mask, but behind the unquiet blue eyes she saw speculation, and, strangely, respect.

  The door clicked open, and she stepped smoothly out of the car, thanked the doorman, and swept up the steps.

  The phone in their suite was ringing harshly as she entered, alone.

  “Hallo,” she said, using the German greeting.

  “One moment for Albert Dorskind,” a nasal woman’s voice said. Other phone lines buzzed in the background.

  “But…”

  The woman put Pagan on hold. Albert Dorskind was the head of Universal Pictures, her very own studio, and the man who must have approved her costarring in Neither Here Nor There.

  “Devin, my boy!” Dorskind boomed through the receiver, sounding like he was next door instead of thousands of miles away. Pagan recognized his voice instantly. “How did shooting go yesterday?”

  The head of Universal Pictures was calling Devin personally? How could that be if Devin was actually an art thief, a poser, a fake?

  “Devin’s not here, Mister Dorskind,” Pagan said, and cleared her throat so that she didn’t sound so small. “Can I take a message?”

  “Pagan, is that you?” Dorskind’s voice softened from male bonhomie to a condescending tone reserved for starlets. “How are you, my dear? We’re all thinking of you here back at the studio.”

  “I’m great, Mister Dorskind.” Pagan had met the man many times over the years, and he never failed to treat her like she was still eight years old, although that hadn’t stopped him from ordering the costume designer to make her bathing suit in Beach Bound Beverly more revealing. “The movie’s going to be brilliant.”

  “Well, that goes without saying, my dear! We all know how gifted you are at comedy, and with Bennie to guide you, you can’t go wrong. What?” he shouted, confusing her for a moment, until she realized he was yelling at someone in the room with him. “All right, all right. Pagan, just tell that rascal Devin I called to check in.”

  “Of course, sir,” she said, stifling a desire to ask if Dorskind knew how much of a rascal Devin had been in his earlier life, that he might be more than a rascal now. The studio head wasn’t likely to respond favorably.

  “Be good, Pagan,” he said, his mouth moving away from the receiver as he hung up. “Do what Devin says now.”

  Click. He was gone. Pagan put the receiver back in its cradle and stared at it, hands on her hips, for a solid minute.

  Albert Dorskind, millionaire chairman and CEO of Universal, sure didn’t sound like a man being blackmailed. And if he was happily calling Devin Black, that meant Devin was a legitimate studio executive, and that his role in the film had been approved at the highest levels by the studio.

  What, then, had he been doing in disguise in East Berlin? Had she somehow imagined there was more to him than met the eye?

  After double locking her bedroom door, Pagan changed into comfortable clothes and had a tall cool drink of water to calm herself down. Do something, anything, other than think about Devin Black, and Nicky and Donna Raven, so happy, so married… So she pulled out the envelope with the letters to her mother in it.

  Okay, so the letters contained some kind of code, but wh
at? She examined the first letter. All the sentences made grammatical sense, and all of the word spellings were, as far as she could tell, the proper German spelling. Which eliminated some kind of single-letter code, exchanging A for Z or some variation.

  She took out a pencil and a blank sheet of hotel stationery and tried writing down every other word, then every third word, then every fourth. Nothing. She took the first letter of each word, then the first and last letters of each line of handwritten text, but they spelled out nothing remotely like actual words in any language.

  Pagan didn’t know much about codes, but she knew she was missing something. Some kind of key or clue that would help her figure out which words were significant in the letters and which were not. The key to the code could be anything from the two correspondents using pages and text from the same edition of a book, to a random series of numbers.

  Or she could be reading too much into this innocuous stack of mind-numbing letters.

  Why, then, had her father kept them locked in his safe, even after Mama had died?

  At 6:00 p.m., Pagan called the Lighthouse Reformatory for Wayward Girls from the suite’s phone, dragging it into her bedroom and carefully relocking the door behind her. It was eight in the morning in Los Angeles. Mercedes would be at breakfast. It took the secretary a few minutes to get her on the phone, but whatever instructions Devin had left behind remained in effect, and after a minute, her friend was there, listening closely to every word she said. Pagan kept her voice low.

  “You think he’s really some high-level art thief?” Mercedes asked when Pagan was done telling her everything.

  “That call from Mister Dorskind makes me think he can’t be. Maybe he’s secretly a Communist or something,” Pagan said. “He knows East Berlin pretty well.”

  “Either way, no offense, but what would he want with you?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s going out of his way to push me and Thomas together, and Thomas is the son of a high-ranking Communist official who was probably killed off by the current leader of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht, because they were rivals for party leadership.”

  “Why would Devin want Thomas to date you?” The question was rhetorical. Pagan could practically hear the wheels turning in Mercedes’s head. “You’re a film star, a convicted killer, with a history of drinking.”

  “Convicted of manslaughter, thank you very much,” Pagan said, half joking.

  Mercedes had no time for equivocation. “I’m just trying to see you how they see you. Are you a distraction while he steals something? Or are you a tool for some Communist propaganda? If people in East Germany learned Thomas was dating you, what would their reaction be?”

  Pagan shrugged, trying to think. “The government says the West is corrupt, so I guess they’d think I was corrupting him.”

  “So it would make Thomas look bad.”

  Pagan frowned. “You think they’re using me to discredit Thomas, to keep him from maybe following in his father’s footsteps as a leader of the Party?”

  “I don’t know,” Mercedes said. “It’s all I can think of. But the more I think about it, it seems a long way to go, to get you out of Lighthouse, get you cast in a movie, and bring you there just to make him look bad? They could just plant evidence on him and lock him up in half that time. It’s not hard to frame people when you control everything.”

  “They could just kill him, like they killed his father,” Pagan said.

  “Way simpler than dealing with you, eh?” Mercedes said, her tone lightening.

  Pagan laughed. “Poor Devin. Seeing that photo of Nicky with that stupid wife of his made me mental, and I took it out on him.”

  “Don’t waste your time feeling sorry for Devin,” Mercedes said. “He’s lying to you, using you, too. We just don’t know why.”

  “Yet,” Pagan said.

  “Exactly. Nicky’s the sad one. He lost you and ended up with a washed-out, boring old copy instead. It’s his loss, Hereje,” said Mercedes. “If you do run into him, tell him from me that desperation’s not a good look on him.”

  Pagan lay back on her bed, soaking in the pleasure Mercedes’s words brought. It was petty, she knew, to want to hear bad things about Nicky. But right now it was giving her more comfort than a shot of tequila. “So I’m not crazy thinking Nicky’s not over me,” she said.

  Mercedes exhaled a contemptuous grunt for Nicky. “He’s showed the whole world he’ll never get over you by marrying that girl. She’s gotten the worst if it, chained to a guy who doesn’t love her for the rest of her life because she kind of looks like you.”

  Pagan laughed. She wanted to believe that Nicky didn’t really love Donna. She wanted to be able to feel sorry for Donna, to feel compassion. And maybe Mercedes was right. But for now Donna had the life Pagan had always wanted. The life she could never have because always the specters of her father and her sister were there, haunting her. And always the pressure not to drink.

  “But if Donna’s got problems, how am I supposed to hate her?”

  Mercedes laughed shortly. “Hating her would be too easy. Since when did you ever do things the easy way?”

  “How about never?” Pagan said, a bit sheepishly. “How’s your arm, M?”

  “It’s no sweat,” Mercedes said, her voice taking on a trill of excitement. “Hey good news. I’m up for parole in a month.”

  Pagan sat up. “What? But I thought you had to wait till you were eighteen to get out, which is, what, nine months, right?”

  “Got a notice in the mail,” Mercedes said. “The judge reconsidered my case. I have to go in and convince them I’m staying on the straight and narrow, but at least it’s a chance.”

  “Which you will do, no sweat.” Pagan was on her feet, bouncing like a pogo stick around her bed. “Holy cats, M, I’m gonna bust!”

  “Don’t get bunched up yet,” Mercedes said. “No hay garantías. But I was wondering, if you’re not too busy, you know…” She cleared her throat. Asking for favors came to her hard. “Would you come to the hearing? Maybe say a good word for me?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Pagan practically yelled into the phone. “I’m hiring you the best lawyer in town. I’m bribing everyone I meet to come be a character witness for you. You are going to nail this!”

  Mercedes was laughing wholeheartedly now. “Okay, okay!”

  Pagan stopped bouncing as a thought hit her. “It’s an awful big coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “What is?” Mercedes asked. “My parole hearing?”

  “Coming so soon after I got out,” Pagan said.

  “Hmm.” Mercedes exhaled. Pagan could almost see her, sticking her lips out in thought, eyes narrowed. “Not even a week since Devin Black took you out of here, and I get this letter.”

  “But why would Devin get you out, too?” Pagan’s heart had begun beating loudly, unevenly.

  “I’m no use to the Reds, if that’s what he is,” Mercedes said. “And I’m never stealing anything again. If he is behind my hearing, it probably means he’s not a Commie, after all. He just wants to keep on your good side, for whatever he wants you for.”

  Pagan gulped. Whatever he wants you for. The phrase evoked more than one image that made her face hot. She rallied. “Maybe he just wanted to mess with Miss Edwards.”

  Mercedes laughed. “In that case, you have my permission to marry him.”

  * * *

  Pagan pulled out a black Givenchy cocktail dress and her mother’s vial of L’Heure Bleue perfume for dinner that night. Devin was reading the evening paper as she walked out of her bedroom on a puff of spicy-sweet aniseed resting on a dusky base of powdery violet, rose, and sandalwood. The perfume was a bit softer, more adult, and more romantic than she was, but tonight she would be softer, more adult. Tonight she would dance with a tall, handsome boy and put aside all
thoughts of Nicky, of Devin, of the ghosts in her past.

  It was nearly 8:00 p.m., and the full skirt of the dress swishing just above her knees put Pagan in a good mood. She hummed a little Ray Charles to herself as she emerged from her bedroom and headed for the door, arcing past Devin in his armchair.

  “You look lovely.” He’d put down the paper, hands quiet in his lap, long legs crossed, his jacket and tie gone, shirt unbuttoned to show that smooth line of collarbone she’d glimpsed before.

  She turned toward him, catching a glimpse of herself in the hallway mirror, and paused to smooth a stray hair near her temple into place. The sleeveless dress had a low square neck and wide shoulder straps, and nipped in tight at her waist before blooming out at the hips. The back was cut even lower, also square, and featured a bow right at the valley where her shoulder blades flexed. Short white gloves, a patent black leather clutch from Chanel, matching black patent heels from Dior and her mother’s double strand of champagne-colored pearls and diamond earrings completed a very elegant ensemble, if she did say so herself.

  But to her own eyes, Pagan didn’t look like Pagan. Who was she tonight? Actress or drunk? A movie star, or a villain? She’d hoped to be sophisticated, adult, if only just for this moment when Devin saw her.

  “Thank you,” she said, making sure her red lipstick wasn’t smudged. Her nose was perfectly powdered, the black winged eyeliner exquisitely even on each eyelid.

  “Give Thomas my best,” he said.

  “Better than that, I’ll give him mine,” she said, turning from the mirror finally to catch his expression.

  His gaze traveled slowly up her legs, and he cocked one eyebrow in appreciation. It was as if he was sliding his hands unhurriedly up her calves, pushing aside the hem of her skirt to explore even higher. Her cheeks flared with heat. He swung his gaze up to her face, lips suppressing a smile, as if he’d been caught, but he didn’t mind all that much.

  “What disguise will you be donning tonight?” she asked airily, hoping to slap that smirk off his face and restore her own equanimity. “I can see you as a sailor, or maybe an organ grinder.”