Suspects

by David Thomson

  He banked on the war. He had no family ties, he’d go anywhere, and this was going to be the first war really photographed in action. Not just rows of Brady corpses and the generals smoking pipes under the trees, but the moments of action. He got Life to send him to London in 1940 to cover the Blitz. While he was there, he met some RAF boys who talked about photoreconnaissance. They took him up on a couple of the early bombing raids and he learned about the special cameras.

  So he got into the air corps and was promoted and assigned to help set up the photorec. teams. That’s how he met Tom Doyle, the best unblinking, blue-eyed pilot he ever knew, the man who was flying when Jeff got the D-Day stuff, the Arnhem pictures and the Dresden night-raid spread. All the while he was flying Jeff was selling pictures to magazines too. Life kept hold of him throughout the war, and just assumed he’d be on staff afterward. It was a pinnacle for Jeff, and he realized later that he should have had some other goals so he could keep moving.

  From 1946 onward, it was one trouble spot after another: the fighting in India, the Berlin airlift, Trieste, Vienna, Perón in Argentina, Malaya, Korea, sweating with fever, freezing your butt off. Traveling, living in hotels, eating when he could, knowing every journalist in the world but having hardly any friends, except for Doyle, who’d become a New York City detective. No long relationships with women, but the political reporter in London, a translator in Buenos Aires, the hotel manager in Singapore. Women who were there when he passed through, women who didn’t want explanations.

  Then, in 1953, he’d met L. C. Fremont. She worked for a fashion house and she’d had this idea to pose six models in silk nightdresses up in the Bronx, and she’d wanted a “gritty, realistic” look to it, so she’d asked for Jeff, and as luck would have it, bad luck he told her, he’d been between planes. So he took those weird shots, and there’d been that secretive smile on Lisa’s face, and the pictures were sensations. People were that foolish. He got a lot of the credit for them. They were exhibited in museums and later on Susan Sontag had written a piece about them in the New York Review of Books—which never had photographs anyway!

  Lisa was after him. Not just for more assignments—she said they had to keep on with that “adventure”—but marriage. He liked her. But she was perfect, and he wasn’t used to career women, not as people to know or go to bed with. If she came over to his place, she had her calls forwarded and tied up the phone. He wasn’t the settling type, not even at forty-two. He’d be active for years yet.

  Then the racing car hit him. In the picture it stayed stuck in midair, but in life a wheel had broken his leg. So, just as Lisa wanted, he was laid up, at her mercy. But he was lucky, or so it seemed to Jeff. For out in his own backyard something started to happen. The guy at 125 West Twelfth, Lars Thorwald, murdered his wife. Jeff saw it, or enough bits of it to piece the story together.

  But that was what got him in the papers, and it killed his nerve. It had never happened before, but when Lisa was in the apartment over the way, and Thorwald found her and started in on her, Jeff didn’t want to look. He wanted to go to the window and shout out to Thorwald, “Stop! I can see you!” But he hadn’t done that. He’d covered his eyes, and then looked through his own fingers. He’d lost his confidence, and gotten a wife instead.

  It changed his life. Everything else, up to the day he was killed in the Tet offensive of 1968, had come from that. He married her, and he stayed in New York. The fall had been bad. One leg was never as good again. He wasn’t as mobile. Lisa said it was all for the best. She helped him open a studio in Manhattan. He did a lot of fashion work. She got him to call himself Lionel Jeffries, which he hated until LBJ came along and Jeff saw some remote benefit in it.

  They got divorced in 1962, when he had an affair with a model. Damn it, how could you look at those broads all day without screwing them? Then when Vietnam got hotter, he came to a decision. He left his studio to his assistant and he went out there as a freelance. But he was fifty-six, and he limped, and the war he’d known before had fronts, fixed targets, things to photograph. In Nam, he was slow and the war was water running all around you. One day he got caught. He started to take a picture of a woman trying to stop the bleeding from her leg, but the woman took out a pistol and shot him. Jeff’s last picture showed the flash of her gun, caught in midair. But the flash came all the way and got him.

  LARS THORWALD

  Raymond Burr in Rear Window, 1954,

  directed by Alfred Hitchcock

  He was the son of Swedish dairy farmers who had come to Minnesota on their honeymoon with an intention of staying never divulged to parents back in Sweden until the young couple had their homestead and their first cattle. Lars, their oldest child, never met his grandparents, but he lived with their pictures on the wall, honoring them, and writing to them once a month until they died. He was born on the farm in 1902.

  As a boy, home from school, he would go out to the fields and count the cows as they lumbered in heavy with milk. He learned to milk them himself and he walked among them when he was very small, his head no higher than their sad, bashful eyes. Lars liked the simplicity of those creatures, he liked the smell of their dung and the warmth of their milk. He gave the cows names, and he knew them all, so that he grieved if one of them died.

  At sixteen, he left school and, without thinking about it, started to work for his father on the farm. He was twenty, when he went to St. Cloud and met Gunnel Strand, the daughter of another farmer, people who had come to America a year after his parents. He courted her and they were married in 1923. He and his father built another room onto the Thorwald farmhouse so that Lars and Gunnel could live there. As the oldest son, it was taken for granted that Lars would have the farm one day. He and Gunnel tried to have a child of their own, but although their love filled their resting hours, no child came.

  Then, in 1928, on a winter night, Lars was driving Gunnel home from St. Cloud in a snowstorm. He would blame himself later for one glass of beer too many. But there was ice on the road. The car locked in a skid and the passenger’s side struck a tree. Gunnel was killed by the force of the impact, and Lars had to walk the rest of the way home carrying her body.

  He never recovered from that loss, he might have stayed happy all his life if Gunnel had lived. He had been brought up to live in slow, calm steadfastness, for good or ill. He remained on the farm until 1932, but then he left. Times were so much harder, the farm could not support as many people. His younger brother, Gunnar, was married with children of his own, so Lars left and wished him luck.

  He went first to Chicago (who knows if he and L. B. Jeffries didn’t look at each other from opposite sides of the street?), and he worked as a guard at the Art Institute, slowly putting on weight as he sat for so much of the day. Then, in 1939, he decided he would go to New York. He had a second cousin there who worked at Macy’s and got Lars a job: a store detective. But it only lasted a year: Lars was not observant enough.

  In 1943, he answered an advertisement for a traveling costume jewelry salesman. His beat covered lower Manhattan and Staten Island. With a suitcase of samples, he went on foot, calling at stores and those houses where previous customers had lived. It was a wearying job, but he reckoned he couldn’t be choosy. He got used to it, he learned a little about the cheap costume jewelry he carried, about how to get a sale from being stubbornly boring. He learned shortcuts, he worked out the best places to eat, he passed the time of day with Moe Williams and bought a tie or two from her. And he picked up Anna Bryant as a customer.

  She was a widow who lived near Willow Brush Park on Staten Island. He met her in 1948, when she bought a brooch in the shape of a rose. She was quite a handsome woman, he thought, and so talkative that his reticence didn’t show as much. They went on a date, to see Sorry, Wrong Number, and when she had finished explaining its plot to him over their supper, she said, “You know, we could get married. We might do that. We both need someone to look after us.”

  He consented; he could think of nothing
else to say. They married and moved into an apartment on West Twelfth Street. It was a little expensive, but he was ready to walk rather faster and she said she could probably get a job. But her health was not good. Not that doctors could put a finger on what was wrong, but Anna spent more and more time in bed. Lars would make dinner for her when he came home, yet she scolded him for being late.

  Lars did all he could to interest or divert her. He told her stories about his day, but she said they were too mundane. He read cookbooks to make the dinners more appealing. He said he had heard that L. B. Jeffries, the famous photographer, had moved in across the way. And he used to sit in the dark smoking cheap cigars watching the life in the courtyard. There was a dazzling woman (she reminded him of Gunnel) living in the apartment above Jeffries. Lars decided to kill his wife. It was worth a try and he never appreciated that the whole world thinks of it.

  Later, a lot later, when he was on death row in Sing Sing, Jeffries came to visit him. They were surprised to discover that they had been born within three hundred miles of each other. Jeffries had known several Swedes in his youth. He took some photographs of Thorwald and, before he died, Lars saw them printed in a magazine. He had not realized how heavyset and forbidding a man he was. No wonder Jeff had been suspicious.

  This Thorwald is the best example I know of an unexceptional, downtrodden man, one of the quietly desperate, sucked into a drama against his will, and never acquiring the confidence or panache it requires. It was as if a mistake had been made.

  ALICIA HUBERMAN

  Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, 1946,

  directed by Alfred Hitchcock

  Only children cannot help but see themselves as central figures in what is going on—even if they are outcasts. This is not to charge them with vanity. They may be passive observers or helpless victims, hubs of numbness, a vacancy around which all things revolve. Equally, the contest in large families may spur on remarkable self-centeredness in children. But the one among many is in competition. No matter how narcissistic, he or she regards life as a group performance, an ensemble. The only child has an intimation that he or she is the only person alive. His and her portrait of the world is an illusion that regularly taunts the solitary consciousness. Is it possible that the only child finds it harder to believe in things? Does he see all life as a mystery only he has noticed? And what of an only child born to an only parent?

  Alicia Huberman was born in Vienna in 1919. She was the daughter of Reinhold Huberman (1889–1950), the physicist, and of his wife, Charlotte, who died when Alicia was two weeks old, of blood poisoning incurred in giving birth. Disappointed by the city, Professor Huberman left Vienna with his child and took up a position at the University of Göttingen. While there, he contributed to the experiments of Gustav Hertz and James Franck, involving the electron bombardment of gases to stimulate light emission. This won them both a Nobel prize for physics in 1925, from which Huberman’s exclusion always rankled.

  The professor doted on his daughter and was sufficiently alarmed by vulnerabilities in her health to take her to a doctor for a checkup every three months. No serious maladies were found, but the close scrutiny kept Alicia wary of her own constitution. She grew up timid, diligent and successful at school, yet threatened by the way her father, her everyday housemate, the god of her needs, assured her that his work was too complicated to talk about.

  In 1934, when Alicia was fifteen, her father told her they were going on a trip to America. She asked why, and he said times were changing in Germany, several other scientists were departing, so why not? After all, he could probably get a respectable position in America. They might be glad to have him there. Alicia did not argue or think of the loss of friends. Her father had been her closest companion. She intensified her study of English and worried about the voyage and the chance of seasickness.

  It was as her father had said; it always was, like being told a story. Soon after arriving in America, he was invited to join the faculty of Georgetown University, and they were helped in finding a pleasant apartment close to the campus. In due course, the professor told her, she would become a student at the university. Alicia’s English developed very well; it made her more conscious of German being spoken in the house. Her father had colleagues in. They would shut themselves in his study and talk till the early hours of the morning, eating a cake she had made.

  In 1938, Alicia entered Georgetown. Her father was still teaching there, and he surprised her by forbidding her to take any of his classes—she was not drawn to them, the subject seemed beyond her—and not to acknowledge him if their paths crossed on the campus. They were to behave “professionally.” It seemed like a game, to ignore her father, and it perplexed Alicia. She had a dream in which he no longer spoke to her at home and then one morning asked her, politely, “Who are you, young woman, and why are you living in my home?”

  It was in 1942 that Professor Huberman went away. She was not to be alarmed, but he could not tell her where. They could write to each other, of course, but not directly. There was an address in Washington they were to use as a clearinghouse. Alicia had the apartment to herself, and several of her friends from Georgetown made use of it as a place for parties. Sometimes they talked about her father, and one of them guessed that he must be in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the hush-hush research place in the desert. Alicia wrote to the professor asking if this was so, but he ignored the question. Then, when he came home for Christmas in 1943, he was more suntanned than she had ever known him to be. His health was garish.

  In 1945, a man called on her with news. He said her father had been arrested as an enemy agent. A random watch on his movements had amassed much incriminating evidence. He would be tried secretly, and was already in detention in Washington. But they would arrange for Alicia to see him. She went, and her father was impenetrable. He talked of the old days in Vienna and what she would do with her life now. He never discussed the accusation, and she lacked the courage to refer to it.

  A friend said Alicia shouldn’t mope. Parties were arranged, and she learned to drink whiskey. In a few weeks, she was a drunk. Her apartment was one long party. Her father was given a ninety-nine-year sentence. She saw him the same day, and he said it was not unreasonable. She was not to be concerned. Her old fears about this sole relationship being lost were realized. One day a dark man, aloof and cold, was at her party. His name was Devlin. His air of anonymity seemed sultry to her. She let him make love to her. He didn’t like her, she knew; so she fell for him.

  He asked how she felt about her father. She didn’t know the answer. He thought it was a shame and said she could help America. The government needed to know her father’s contacts. There was a man in Rio de Janeiro, Alexander Sebastian, whom they suspected. As far as they could ascertain, she had met him once when she was a child. Would Alicia gain his confidence? Was that too much to ask?

  They went to Rio together. Devlin would kiss her and then, between kisses, urge her to get closer to Sebastian. She felt like an instrument, without a will of her own. To please Dev she would do it. And Sebastian was kind. He asked her about things, and gave small, attentive laughs if she tried a joke. She relaxed in his company. She began to trust him. Then she remembered he was an accomplished deceiver like her father, someone who could do one thing but not refer to it, just like Dev in their contorted embraces. Then Sebastian asked her to marry him.

  She reported this to Devlin, assuming he would overrule it. But he stayed professional, and said why not? To Alicia, it was not horrifying to marry Sebastian: he was entertaining and considerate. It was worse to betray what she felt herself. A spy had to be promiscuous, and she could not manage that. She didn’t have the energy to lie. Her health began to deteriorate, and she hated the gloating way Sebastian’s mother said, “My dear Alicia”—such a hiss there—“marriage seems to agree with you.” The old woman, the authentic Mrs. Sebastian, made “agree” sound like the effort to gulp down something unpleasant.

  Alicia had Devlin invited to a
big party at the Sebastian home, and that’s when he found the earth in the wine bottle. But to deflect discovery of his real search, Dev let Sebastian see him kissing Alicia. Every kiss was calculated. Of course, Sebastian was not fooled. He and his mother began to poison her, very slowly, at the frightful evening coffee rituals. She had claustrophobia. She felt sicker as the slow days passed. She could neither sleep nor concentrate. Something in the lethargy of the poison seemed to suit her fallen state. She accepted it.

  Then Devlin came to the house one night, while Sebastian was in conference with the other Nazis. He went up to her room, picked her up and carried her down the stairs. Her weakness let her feel like a leaf swept forward by the wind. To be rescued, we need an inkling of death wish. In Alicia it was now a chain inkling. She went mad—she was not saved—and Devlin was able to go back to business thinking love was a pill.

  ALEXANDER SEBASTIAN

  Claude Rains in Notorious, 1946,

  directed by Alfred Hitchcock

  The parents of Alexander Sebastian planned to meet on the island of Madeira, at Reid’s Hotel, for the birth of their child. The mother, Grazina, went there three months ahead of her time to be in the best health. The father, Lorenzo Sebastian (“The Coffee King”), on business in Europe, set out from Lisbon in ample time. But his schooner foundered, with the loss of Sebastian and the crew of six. So Alexander was born in 1893 to a mother actually just widowed, yet unaware of the loss.