He graduated in 1912 and was sent to Stanford by his proud father to study business. With what seemed to everyone an equable temperament, Wilson Keyes adapted to his first experiences of California and maintained his high academic standards—but for the spring of 1913, when he suffered a breakdown of indeterminate nature. However, his recovery was as thorough and convincing as all of his performances, and no one had reason to worry about him. “All the worry goes inside with Nebraskans,” as my father used to say. “Goes inside and builds, like a twister with no way out.” I have seen Mary Frances, standing straight and thin against the sky, just leaning perhaps, and known she was curled and tortured, unable to cry out.
Keyes took his Master’s at Stanford in the summer of 1915, by which time he had had several offers from San Francisco businesses. Instead, he took a trip to Paris. It was true to his sensible nature to admit the need for some relaxation, and a part of his conscientiousness to want to visit a city whose treasures were threatened by war. During the fall of 1915, Keyes explored the museums and galleries of the city, while renting a small room in Montmartre close to the Moulin de la Galette. He saw wonders and wounded soldiers, but Bonnard was his greatest discovery.
Not long after he returned to America, Keyes enlisted in the army, and in May 1916 he was commissioned as a lieutenant. Fourteen months later Keyes was in France, a captain. For five months he was in the front lines, playing a prominent part in the design and construction of trenches. The American claim to have drainage superior to that of the French or the British owed much to the resourcefulness of Wilson Keyes. Lives must have been saved in that more hospitable dryness. Elsewhere, some drowned in mud. They are still digging up skulls and bullets.
From 1919 to 1923, Keyes was restored to Nebraska, and to the university, where he taught Introduction to Business, Insurance and Actuarial Theory. He made some of those courses into institutions. Though his time at Lincoln was short, his influence there both as teacher and as friend to those not much younger was considerable. He was loved there, and it was hurtful when he moved away, to Los Angeles, to take up a position in the General Fidelity Insurance Company. People couldn’t understand how he was not satisfied by teaching.
He served General Fidelity until 1940, becoming head of the claims department, famous for his instinct in detecting frauds. The Diedrichson case may have been his most secret success, for General Fidelity chose not to take legal action. It may also have been a crisis in Keyes’s own life.
He was forty-five, he had been married ten years, he had a home in Glendale and two children. All seemed settled and normal. His co-workers assumed he was content. But Keyes worked hard. He had too little time for his family or his hobby of painting. Moreover, the realization that his trust in Walter Neff had been misplaced was a greater blow than Keyes ever indicated. Perhaps the last angry words of Phyllis Diedrichson lodged in his excellent memory and turned bad there:
“So what’s in it for you, Mr. Keyes? You’re not an empty man. You’re not a machine. You go pale when I attack you. Your damned pipe goes out, and your mouth clamps down on it. So you caught our trick. You saved General Fidelity money. Does that satisfy you? Or tell me, Wilson Keyes, do you sometimes wonder what it’s like to step out of line, to give up the rules for someone like me? Don’t you wonder, Keyes, you liar? Know how you’re a liar? Because you’ve such a busy little imagination locked in your briefcase. And someday it’ll have to come out. Or kill you.”
In 1940, Keyes was fifty. He had served his country well. Yet he heeded the invitation from Washington to serve again. Going east ended his marriage, but Wilson Keyes accepted a post in the secret service. He had an aptitude for decoding and his old skill as a detective. By 1944, he was attached to that section of the service tracing war criminals. He was in Europe late that year, and present at the liberation of Belsen in 1945. Keyes did not return to America until 1947, so extensive was his work for the Nuremberg trials.
It was no easy retirement. He came back a roundabout way, chasing Franz Kindler, one of the more brilliant of Hitler’s young disciples. Under the name Charles Rankin, Kindler had begun a new life at Harper College in Connecticut where he was masquerading as a teacher and had married the daughter of Judge Philip Longstreet. Keyes was dogged in unearthing Rankin’s true identity and in saving his new wife, Mary. Rankin/Kindler died, falling from the tower of the town church, and Keyes’s mission was concluded.
Nearing sixty now, divorced in 1945, Keyes found that General Fidelity had no more use for him. A new generation had risen to power. And so he went to New York with a small government pension. He found work as a cashier, and he was picked up by a widow. Remarried, humiliated in his job, he resumed painting: his smothered life spilled out on the canvases.
Then, in 1950, he fell in with a floozy, Kitty Bennett, the kind of woman the insurance investigator had once recognized in an instant. He embezzled for her, he gave up everything for a night or so, and then he learned she was betraying him with her pimp. He painted her and killed her. Yet the pimp was executed, and Keyes became a derelict. He died on the Bowery in 1953, the first year in which his paintings began to climb in value. Today, a good Keyes—of Kitty or Phyllis, lounging in exultant carelessness—can sell for fifty thousand dollars.
DEBBY MARSH
Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat, 1953,
directed by Fritz Lang
Kenport was the only world Debby Marsh knew. It was like so many of the cities in Ohio—dark gray in winter, pale gray in summer, solid by day, glamorous at night. Then the windows in the tower buildings could sparkle; the streets had a rosy wash, with traffic lights going red and green at every intersection. The night sky was an old mauve cloth draped over the buildings. In the dark, the towers and the streets seemed illusory. You did not have to feel the layer of scum waiting on every touch; you could believe the city was a creature from the lake, still damp and alive. Debby preferred the romance of the night, and she settled for it whenever she could, along with several other lies and half-truths.
She was born in the city in 1930, in the Woodland section. That was a joke, because there were no trees, just block after block of housing for the workers in the auto industry. Debby’s father was a fitter and there were six children in the three-bedroom house, built to one of the two patterns available in Woodland—the two- and the three-bedroom units. There were houses where couples lived, without kids, who had a spare room and no use for it. And others where three kids had to share one room, growing up without privacy. Debby pretended to be sick a lot, so she could have days at home and be alone in the room, dreaming in the quiet and the space. Neither her parents nor the school took the illnesses or the truancy it veiled seriously. There wasn’t time, or the hope. In the thirties, her father was out of work a lot, waiting around the house, getting drunk. To Debby’s mind, it just showed you that people couldn’t get along without money. Didn’t it follow that they’d manage better with more money?
Then, in the war, Kenport grew rich again. There were military contracts. The factories needed more men, and as the city became more popular there were new, cheap apartment buildings out beyond Woodland. They went up so fast that one of them fell down. So they built it back up again. The feeling of war brought energy back. A lot of gangsters came into the city. They seemed to have a great life, going out every night, eating at the Lakeside Manor, having cars in pretty colors. The women with them wore fur coats, even on warm nights. Debby liked to be out at night to watch them all go by.
That’s how she got to know them. One night in 1948, outside the Blue Gardenia, a nightclub on Wisconsin Avenue, she talked to a group of them. There was one called Vince. He had a girl with him, but he just let go of her, and came over to Debby and asked how old she was. She lied, and he grinned. He gave her a pair of nylons right there on the street, and asked her if she knew how to put them on. Then he pinched her cheek, real hard, and went on into the Gardenia. The woman who’d been with him looked at Debby as if she were a rainy da
y.
His name was Vince Stone, and he worked for Mike Lagana, one of the most important people in Kenport. Vince took Debby over. He bought her new clothes and sent her to a hairdresser’s where they made her look older. He took it for granted she was moving into his apartment, and he fucked her all the time like she was a heavy box he was moving upstairs. It was all right. Her mother had told her to expect this, and the clothes were more than she could have dreamed of.
One night Vince told her to go over to Lagana’s house.
“What for?”
“Whatever he wants.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Go on. Hurry.”
So she went over to the house, and Lagana introduced her to his mother—who only spoke Italian—and then he took her upstairs and made love to her. “Very nice,” he said. “Really quite nice.” And he told her if she ever wanted a little more just to give him a call. When she got back, Vince beat her up, as if he’d never guessed. So the next day she called Lagana, but he reminded her that he was very fond of Vince and couldn’t take her away. Loyalty was everything.
It could have been worse. Vince hit her some, and he had these foul tempers when he’d curse Lagana—until Mr. Mike phoned, and then he was sweetness, which was not pleasant in Vince. Debby shopped a lot. Sometimes she got to go to Chicago on business, and stay in the hotels. She preferred that: it was nice to stay in, order up cocktails and pastries, instead of having to cook, or go out the way they always did. She got her mink, though, and she liked to snuggle in it. Vince liked her best naked beneath the coat, so she had a struggle watching it didn’t get torn or stained.
Then all you heard from Vince was Bannion, some detective who was trying to shake up the world. It had to do with Tom Duncan’s suicide, and how Bannion kept pestering the widow because maybe there was more to it. Then Bannion’s wife got blown up in the family car. Debby ignored things like that. It was the only way.
But one night in the Retreat, Bannion was there when Vince put his cigarette out on the hand of the girl who was shaking dice at the bar. Bannion took her side and Vince backed down like a coward. He left the Retreat without Debby and on the spur of the moment she offered to buy Bannion a drink. But he said not on Vince Stone’s money, and that stung. Debby never liked to realize none of the money was hers. So she went after Bannion, to be friendly. She knew straightaway she’d got to him. Because he stopped and grinned, a guilty grin. Why? His wife was dead, wasn’t she?
They went back to his hotel, and Debby sat on the bed in case he was shy. But all he did was give her a drink and ask questions. So after a while she called it a night and returned to Vince’s place.
He was there playing cards with a gang, including Higgins the police commissioner. She had blown him one night out of boredom. But Vince came after her about her being friendly with Bannion, and before she knew it he picks up a pot and throws scalding coffee in her face.
Higgins took her to the hospital. The doctors gave her something for the pain, but they said it would get worse. What about the scars? she asked. Some, they said, but not bad, and plastic surgery would handle it. So they put a bandage on half her face and the neck, which looked cool. So she went back to Bannion’s hotel, since she’d got it for him. The two things throbbing in her mind were dread of the damage in her own face and desire for Bannion.
The detective took her in, and got another room in the hotel for her. So much for the allure of half a face! He talked about the case, how he’d realized that Duncan’s widow had her husband’s last letter—the dirt on Lagana—and how she had it in a safe deposit, where it stayed as long as she was alive, getting $500 a month from Mr. Mike.
Debby worked it all out. She took the gun Bannion had left her as protection. She went over to the Duncan house. Mrs. Duncan was about to go shopping. She was wearing a fur coat just like Debby’s—“We’re sisters under the mink, Bertha.” Debby liked that line and then she shot Bertha. She went back to Vince’s place and put a pot of coffee on. By the time he got back she had watched two pots boil away. But the third was ready to go. It slapped him in his ugly face, and he screamed. She had never known him so moved.
She told him about Bertha being dead, about how the heat was going to start. And he took out his gun and shot her. It surprised her. She reckoned that he would only whine and collapse. There had always been something more to Vince. Hadn’t he noticed her and liked her on the silky street?
HARRY LIME
Orson Welles in The Third Man, 1949,
directed by Carol Reed
For someone shot in a sewer, there has been such romancing of Harry Lime. I can never hear the name without thinking of that caustic compound in which English domestic murderers reckoned to have corpses devoured. But if you look at the Harry Lime stories—in their magazine originals, or in the long-running television series—why, Rollo Martins, their author, has made our urbane Lime out of the green fruit.
In fiction, he is tart but refreshing. Whereas, in life, he was poison. How are such tricks worked? It must be that we are fascinated by evil. The most horrible thing is how the world has turned out so close to Harry’s cynicism about the ghost of decency having been given up some time ago. “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings.” Always with an “old man,” the lie in his own bland council. Maybe Harry wanted to think he was lying, so he pushed that fake bonhomie into every other sentence.
He was born in Balham in 1916, the only child of Constance Lime, the widow of George Lime, killed on the first day of the Somme, twelve weeks earlier. George was a subaltern from a well-to-do Streatham family that owned a number of electrical shops in South London. Married in 1914, George and Constance had been able to buy a small house in Balham thanks to money from his father. When George died, the Limes assumed that Constance and the child would move into the large house on Tooting Bec Common. But Constance was the daughter of a bus inspector from Brixton, convinced she would be uncomfortable in the big house with people whose distaste for her was allied to the condescension that falls on poor relatives. With a friend, she opened a ladies’ hairdressing shop, Conita, at the top of Brixton Hill, and made a go of it.
It was a brave stand, by a cheerful young woman, so brisk at business that she was able to send Harry to Dulwich College in 1927. Some sons would have been proud. But Harry tended to side with his grandparents in thinking that a mistake had been made. He preferred the large house, the maid who brought him tea and the chauffeur outside the college in the afternoon to run him back to Streatham. He deferred to his grandmother, a petite snob with only three fingers on one of her hands, abhorred by his mother and cold to the child, but a model of odd learning, superior diction and polite sarcasm. Although a small woman, she did everything as if from a height.
Harry and his grandmother played a game in his childhood with a large collection of toy soldiers. It had belonged to his father, and his grandmother had kept it when George grew up. With Harry, she restaged the battles of Marlborough and Wellington. They deployed troops on the Persian carpets, and Harry marveled at how she would tip over the killed lead creatures with the cane she carried. Conferring death seemed so easy. Harry was left to guess how the Battle of the Somme had been managed.
He had too little of his mother’s energy, and too much of his own cunning to need it. At school he got by, cheating or stealing others’ knowledge, so glib in class it was hard for many masters to recognize his ignorance. He disdained his mother’s shop; at least until he was fourteen, when he suddenly seemed to appreciate the bantering girls his mother employed who were always comparing themselves to pictures of Myrna Loy or Constance Bennett. Often with them, he put on fatherly airs, and talked to impress them.
Harry’s strength at Dulwich was in theater. He seemed to lose his puppy fat on stage; he came to life, and gave his voice a walnut resonance. In truth, it was a very mannered way of speaking, as if his mother had tried to imitate his grandmother. But it carried in a theater; i
ts bogusness seemed mellifluous. He played Romeo (with Rollo Martins, a pet crony, as his Juliet), the Chorus in Henry V and, in his last year at school, a Falstaff who seemed to have the genuine dropsy of alcoholic old age. Never quite a child, Harry was fascinated by the elderly; at the time no one realized how far this bred in him a premature insight into death and decay.
At eighteen, he was a hypnotic hulk: his charm matched his size. He was flat-footed and clumsy physically, but a hummingbird in chat and badinage. He liked to hide the one with the other, so he was often at Conita after school, slumped in a velvet-covered armchair, flirting with the girls or the customers in that languid, elaborate way of his that thrilled anyone with an insecure education.
His grandparents said he could go to Oxford. But armchair talk had made him lazy, and he needed underlings, people easily impressed with him. So he hung around the area and got a job as a salesman for H. O. Motors. He was very winning. He could rattle off a fine line of pastiche poetry about the cars, while his pinched breathless girth was a subtle suggestion that all movement should be by way of limousine.
This was 1935. Harry got a reputation in South London. He became a wrestling impresario—he discovered and promoted “Man-Mountain” Dean. He had a hand in the automobile business and he advised his mother and several other people in hairdressing. The police kept an eye on him, and Harry watched their attention with a mixture of pride and wonder just as, when on the stage, he had paused in a speech and felt suspense and need in the audience running like lucre into the palm of his hand. He knew some bad elements: he mixed with the Elephant & Castle gang, and he was on drinking terms with Moseley’s assistant, Hamm. He was what was known as a “wide boy,” and no one was a more amused model for the term, opening his fine coats to show that stretch of white shirt. He dressed fastidiously, and he usually had some dolled-up sharpie on his arm, a working girl to whom he was giving his quick shampoo-and-set Svengali act.
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