Suspects

by David Thomson

  He managed to be active without ever really doing anything, ubiquitous yet not there when a crucial question arose. His declared profession was stage conjurer, and he did manage the company that included Walter Little. He was sometimes quoted in the popular press, and he sold a few jokes to music-hall comedians of the second rank.

  It was soon after 1920 that he became caught up in the quest for the Falcon. The object had first drawn his attention in the coincidence of two of his interests—Levantine history and papal anecdotes. The death of his father (from a surfeit of éclairs) enabled him to sell the bakery to an emerging conglomerate, lodge his mother in a nursing home in Middlesbrough and be off, around the world, following the savage-claw trail of the Falcon. “Ah yes, sir, the Falcon!” he would sigh, the comment coming out of him like a sweet zephyr.

  Late in the 1920s, the search grew apace, crowded with competitors, not least Mr. Joel Cairo and Miss Arlene Wonderly. The lady was not anyone he knew, but Cairo and he had crossed paths before: a bridge problem that Gutman sold to the Daily Mail for a guinea had been solved by this same Cairo, writing from Tiflis. The trio had their meeting eventually in San Francisco in 1930.

  “We begin well, sir and madam,” said Gutman. “There is, as far as I can see, no trace of the ordinary among us.”

  Miss Wonderly began to tell the truth, and Joel Cairo said a modest “when” as Gutman poured jiggers of Wild Turkey.

  “Ah, sir,” creaked Gutman, “I trust a man who says ‘when.’ For isn’t timing the essence of polite behavior and a good kill?”

  Miss Wonderly again, blushing plum, begged to get something off her chest, but Gutman had spied a copy of Tristram Shandy in Cairo’s morocco briefcase. There followed a digression on the book and its author. For this was one passion that united Gutman and Cairo. They to-ed and fro-ed about Eliza, my Uncle Toby and so forth, their voices making an exquisite harmony: Cairo soft, snakelike and begging; Gutman as boomy as far-off thunder.

  A little put out, Miss Wonderly said, “I am afraid I do not know the book or its author.” Like gentlemen, they turned the discourse to her and, among other pretty confessions, learned that she had first seen the light in a small Irish town, Annamoe.

  “Oh, that is most remarkable,” thrilled Cairo.

  “Indeed,” said Gutman, “for you will be delighted to hear that Sterne as a child fell into the millstream at Annamoe.”

  Miss Wonderly went ruby with pride and consternation: “Of course, you gentlemen must understand that I had nothing to do with it.”

  Their laughter had scarcely died away when the San Francisco episode drew to its close. But Gutman and Cairo were well met, and not inclined to trust one another to continue the search alone. Put it another way, the Falcon was probably a pretext. They became a team, doing their best to endure the thirties and the war in travels through Asia Minor, the Orient and South America. When Gutman’s funds ran out, in Macao in 1945, he and Cairo took to bridge professionally. There and then, they whipped Bannister and Grisby in a challenge match for $3,000.

  As they grew older, they did not think of the Falcon for weeks at a time. The sedentary satisfaction of bridge became more appealing. They made seven spades, doubled, on the Q♣ lead in this hand at Caracas in 1949:

  Their last recorded hand was in 1951, in Marienbad. After that they fade away. But I am confident they went on to campfire soirées in the Matto Grosso, reading a little Sterne to one another, or yarning about the Falcon. It is possible that, independently, they had both reached the conclusion that the bird was too rare ever to be seen, let alone caught or plucked. Yet as I think of them, they would not have admitted that ultimate impossibility to each other. And so they would have gone to sleep blissful in their partnership, tricksters to the world but loyal to the game.

  I wish I had time to write a dozen Gutman and Cairo stories, all bravado and vulnerability. They might be a great success—erudite, rather inefficient villains. There is no warmer myth than that of ill-matched friendships that go on forever, so moved by their dream that transport becomes their nature. Such creatures might be no longer sure whether they were huntsmen or quarries.

  VICTOR LASZLO

  Paul Henreid in Casablanca, 1942,

  directed by Michael Curtiz

  Why does no one attempt a life of Victor Laszlo? Did he intimidate actors? He was a liar, of course, and a liar in life may be a bore to deal with. A sad abandoned bore. Every dishonesty betrays the fabric of discourse. We trust the cloth less, and perhaps we speak less when we remember lying. But put a liar in a framework that includes the pressures pushing him into falsehood, and he can become a whimsical hero. There is something redemptive in the honest portrait of a liar, and of why he tricked and cheated. His wretchedness falls away. As for being boring—he may reappear in magical hues.

  The life would have scenes in Eastern Europe and on the eastern edge of the U.S.; it would insist on romance taking priority over politics; and it would have the consummate fraud being taken seriously, but declining to fall for the world’s earnestness. It would be a black comedy and—as a now elderly but experienced moviegoer—I would like to see Robert De Niro and his freezing smile in the part.

  There is no way of telling when or where Victor Laszlo was born, nor whether that is the name he was born with. 1909 to 1911 probably covers the moment itself. As for place, there are Hungarians who claim their nationality not by birth or parentage, but in cast of mind. We know Laszlo was in Budapest in 1919, a child in a suburban orphanage, the star inside forward of their soccer team—all this from a group photograph and one action shot of Victor, billowing shorts below his knees, taking a ball on his tiny instep where it seems as heavy as a cannonball.

  By 1930, Laszlo was on his own in Horthyist Hungary, a land suspended in time, busy with its café life, with novels, gossip and theater, torn between old Hapsburg allegiances and the approaching Nazi blight. Laszlo had several occupations. He was an injury-dogged soccer player, written off as a sloucher in the sports pages, but as precious to some fans as Len Shackleton or Tommy Harmer, a man of languid brilliance and inspired passages. He was a cartoonist, a domestic ironist, his men having to balance harridans with gold rings against blondes in short skirts. He was an actor: small parts, handsome but unsound, seductive in the right role but not always audible.

  And so the 1930s passed, leaving Laszlo a little puffier, a smoker and the husband of Magda Meszaros. He was content at first. Granted regular surprises in his life, he was not deep or demanding. He never disliked Magda. But he could not stop falling for any other woman he noticed. There were affairs, lies about having to see a man about a car, wrong numbers, and sick cousins in the country. This wore him down. The indignity of so many furtive ploys nagged at him. He needed a nobler part and great lines.

  So, one day in 1939, he let Magda sniff out details of a liaison with Ivy Horvath, a journalist.

  “It is as I suspected,” said Magda. She always opened a conversation with drums.

  “Do not be hasty,” Victor advised her. He felt better already.

  “What do you mean, swine?” Oh yes, this was the ticket.

  “Have you noticed the state of the world?”

  “Cabbage is very dear.”

  “And why?”

  “There is a war coming?”

  “And what happens then?”

  “What?”

  “Spying.”

  “With that Horvath tramp?” He felt like a comic with a new routine.

  “She is a German agent—can’t you tell?”

  It struck home. “She is very jolly.”

  “I have been asked to see her. Required, really.”

  “For the country?”

  “The Admiral himself requested it.”

  “You have a letter from him?”

  “Would he put such things down on paper?”

  His wife went quiet. Who can say she fell for it? She may have swallowed hard and eaten poison. She was dead a year later. But that last ye
ar may have been the happier because she credited Victor with a high duty. He sang when he washed up.

  Wretched Hungary, leaned on by Germany. Unlucky Laszlo. For his wife could not keep quiet about his secret life. She was so proud, she talked, and talk spread as far as the Resistance. They reckoned this Laszlo must be an agent from another branch of the clandestine tree. So they employed him too, and had him run fearsome risks that he could hardly protest. The only benefit of this ironic plight was that fresh ladies flocked to him, all considerate of his “other” life.

  Early in 1941, the “movement” instructed him to make his way southwest, out of Hungary on a long quest for America. It was that or a concentration camp. And so he made his way to Casablanca with Ilsa Lund, fond of her but infatuated with his story.

  He arrived in America, and he spoke in large halls about the camps and the darkness in Europe. He went into antifascist raptures; he spoke with reverence about socialism. He thought this play would run forever, and wondered if one day he might be on a stamp. But after the war, he was ostracized. America was all fashion. In the late 1940s, the FBI came to him and said it would be easier if he talked of his own accord. If only they had known! Nothing now could stop his torrent. Still, the actor in him agreed to be reluctant. He let the perspiring government agents trap him in inconsistencies. He could make a cheek muscle flutter in panic. He was patient, letting them coach him into remorse and coming clean. Doctors told him he was ill, but Laszlo shone with the rapture of confession. He went before the House Un-American Activities Committee in a brilliant rendering of pierced shiftiness, correcting his deaf inquisitors on the spelling of names he was making up. Three years later, in 1952, he passed away, leaving as many mysteries as unpaid bills.

  We are as pleased to see a sham swing through life in a book or a film as we are ready to enjoy the screen’s smashing to pieces of one car after another. The wish to keep free from bumps and fibs in life is so nerve-wracking, do we need to let the forbidden force have a fling?

  RICHARD BLAINE

  Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, 1942,

  directed by Michael Curtiz

  We used to tell stories about Rick. He was only ten or so years older than this writer, but can’t you remember the luster that ten years has for a kid? Growing up near Omaha, I used to see him around the city. He seemed tall and unshaven, a wild fellow. But I find now that he never grew above five feet eight. In the few pictures I have of him later in life he seems to be making an effort to look dapper and impressive. In those early days, you heard stories about Rick “borrowing” someone’s car for a night drive and outrunning the cops. He had girls hanging around him a lot of the time. He looked bored with them, but he’d let them kiss him sometimes. It was a privilege to catch the dime he tossed through the sunlight and hear the “Hey, kid, get me a Nehi, will you?” I did that twice, and the second time he grinned at me. I thought I felt the sun beaming. Yet I saw Rick’s crooked teeth when his mouth bared.

  He had been born in Omaha in 1900, the son of a pharmacist. (Later, I know, he said he was younger, and from big tough New York; forgive him—no one in this book has managed without a few lies.) If I remember him as a kid out of school, the figure in the best adventures, older-seeming than his peers, a boy’s man, it wasn’t that he neglected his studies. It surprised me, on going into it, that his grades were steady and high. He had an A– average, and he kept on working, trying to be better. The more I look at his record now, the more clearly I see a short, diligent man, whose amiability and natural bravery must have furnished his legend. Or was the legend just something I and others like me required? Was he only the conscientious boy who had to act up to it? When you think about how he turned out, you have to wonder whether his disillusion had something to do with that early feeling of inadequacy. Maybe I helped urge heroism on him and it became his curse. But was I supposed to look at the world and not use my imagination?

  Richard Blaine went to Lincoln, to the university, in 1918. He majored in history, and he was especially interested in economics. He was one of the group that owed so much to Professor Wilson Keyes, though he and Keyes had heated arguments in class. Rick was already affected by radical ideas, and Keyes was a tough conservative who could never see past the sacrifices imposed in Russia in the name of communism. But that’s how Rick grew in our eyes. He was quarter-back on the football team his junior and senior years—which was a big thing in Nebraska then and now. But he had a reputation, too, as a red-hot debater and a guy who tried to read Lenin in Russian.

  All the same, in those days he still helped out in his dad’s pharmacy on Ames. He was generally ready to do a good turn for the old folks. He was best friends with Ralph Hunt, and he was godfather to Ralph’s second daughter, Laura, born in 1920. Here’s a picture of him outside the church, holding the baby. And Ralph’s next to him, holding Mary Frances’s hand. She’s gazing up at her younger sister with that fretful look on her face. So young, so worried. Rick looks as proud as can be.

  It surprised everyone when he went to Detroit to work in the Ford factory. Rick could have been in management, I’m sure, but he stayed on the assembly line because he said he wanted to get to know the working man. He was there for three years, and he came back a lot harder and a sight less cheerful.

  He lived in a room in Omaha then, full of books and Mitzi Glass. They had gone together a little at Lincoln, and she was the best-known radical in town. Because of her great red hair, and her severe looks, people used to call her “Red Mitzi.” Now, I’m sure there were some who hated what she believed in, or were afraid of it, but I think a lot of people were fond of her really. Rick loved her. They never got married because they said it was an irrelevance, and that made for a gulf between Rick and Ralph. But Omaha could take him then, without spitting him out. There was never any of the outrage that got talked up later.

  Anyway, in those years, Mitzi was organizing farm labor and Rick helped her; he was writing his novel about the automobile industry—Drums of Steel—and he was drinking. No one ever denied that. I know some people who’d admired him once gave up on him. They called him a layabout and a lush, and no one much liked his book: it’s awkward and high-minded, but the stuff in the factories is good, I think. It was what happened to Mitzi that moved Rick on. In 1930, there was a strike up near Bassett. Strikebreakers came in and Mitzi got hit on the head with a fence post. It took her five months to die but she never regained consciousness. The word was that Rick went into the hospital one night and smothered her. If so, it was merciful.

  He went out to California then and he did a lot of organizing with fruit workers. That was hard. The labor was poor, Spanish most of it, and itinerant, and the bosses were rough on union men. Rick stuck to it and that’s the period when he joined the Party. But he got pneumonia in ’thirty-three, a bad case. He was always weaker afterward, and drinking still. Then in 1935 he went on a trip to Moscow. It was for students mainly, but Rick managed to go on it and he was there two months. From all I can gather, he came back redder than ever. But he returned by way of Africa, having gone on from Moscow to Abyssinia on some sort of mission.

  It was no surprise in 1936 that he started speaking for Spain and the Republic and early the following year he was over there with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He fought all through the war, at Madrid and then in Barcelona. He was a captain, and his health was finally shot by the experience. Worse than that, I think, he was disenchanted. That war, he thought, could have been won. He despaired not so much at the free countries staying neutral, but at the dissension in Spain itself among the various branches of the anarchists and the Communists. In addition, he didn’t like anything he heard about the trials going on in Moscow. By the end of the war, he had given up the Party and he was looking for a different life.

  Rick was in Paris for a time doing not much, except trading on the black market and carrying on with Ilsa Lund. He was regarded as a cynic by then. The drinking was constant, and not even Sam, a guy who had come out of Spain
with him, could keep him cheerful. The affair with Ilsa was hopeless; she had all these causes, perhaps Rick used her to remind himself of all he’d lost. He wanted it to fail, he was dependent now on self-pity. So when the Germans came in, Rick got out. As I heard it from Sam, Rick was going anyway but later he persuaded himself that Ilsa had let him down.

  He got to Casablanca and he opened the Café Americain, where anything was possible. You could buy or sell whatever you wanted—jewels, drugs, papers, lives—it was a rat-race of a market. There were people of all nationalities and persuasions. The war was held down by money, greed and fear. It was an ugly place, and the movie they made romanticized it and Rick. He was as vicious as he had to be by then, just taking his cut on whatever happened, OK-ing every kind of deal and arrangement.

  The big new thing in his life was Louis Renault (1891–1964), the head of the Vichy police in Casablanca. Apparently he took one long look at Rick and knew he was homosexual underneath all the brooding and the sneers about women. He could see Rick was dying too, and he was decent enough to do what he could for him. After Strasser was killed and the weird but wonderful Victor Laszlo got away, Rick and Louis slipped off into the fog together. They went south, to Marrakech, and they lived there after the war, until Rick died in 1949. I can see him sitting out in the sun, slipping a coin in an Arab boy’s hand in return for one of those sweet cordials. Louis took the best care of him, and at the very end they were laughing together over reports of the red scare in America.