Meanwhile, above the table on the surface, Nick smiled like a long lost friend.” That was very chivalrous of you, Seth. “My hat is off to you.” He lifted an imaginary chapeau off his head with his left hand. I wasn’t superstitious or chivalrous by nature, but this guy had brought both out of me in one night. Hat’s off to me, all right. Tomorrow it would be his head, if I had anything to say about it.
7. GARBO THE REDEEMER JAMES
I sat in my hospital bed and contemplated my next move. Sarah, my hot nurse, had to attend to other patients while I listened to Seth’s shaggy-dog story about how he got aboard the Athenia, was knocked in the head and ended up in a beautiful Swedish barmaid’s bathtub. Oh, and saw a mysterious, cloaked woman who may or may not have been Garbo, the movie queen.
Before she left, Sarah had muted the TV monitor on which Queen Christina still played. Meanwhile, Seth’s Garbo story was turning out to be anything but. Aside from the revelation that he had worked in Los Angeles at MGM, Garbo’s studio, we still weren’t any closer to placing the movie star on the ill-fated ocean liner. My head ached in the knowledge I had outmaneuvered Martin, my-ex boss, to Norfolk, Connecticut, only to get fired. All on the word of a delusional old man. I had to say something.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but where is Garbo in all this?”
Seth looked over at me, both arms in the air, gesticulating about how he had crawled back to life and into Ingrid’s willing arms. I knew he knew what I was asking. I gestured to Garbo on the TV.
“Garbo,” Seth said.
“Yes. You know, the movie star?”
Seth looked up at the TV and smiled. Garbo was sitting in her courtroom, abdicating her throne for love. I knew the scene by heart. Must have watched the movie over a hundred times with my mother when I was young. The local cable station wore out its copy playing it on the Late, Late Movie.
Toward the end of Mom’s life, when she was in too much pain to sleep, I’d stay up with her to all hours. I didn’t want to waste a precious minute of our time together snoring in the chair beside her bed. We both knew I’d have the rest of my life to catch up on my rest, after she was gone.
“You got somewhere to be?” Seth said.
“Ha ha. That’s a good one.” I stared at him stone-faced. “You haven’t told me one thing. Not one damn thing to prove conclusively Garbo was even on the Athenia.”
Seth put his hands down on the bed before him. His face flushed. I looked at him and held my tongue. I wanted to hear what he was going to say. We were stuck together in that room. I had no control over that. But I wasn’t going to let him lead me around by the nose anymore.
“Patience,” Seth said. “Have a little faith.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m fresh out.”
Seth reached over to his night table, grabbed the TV remote that Sarah had left there and turned off the monitor. I looked up in time to see Garbo’s face in close-up as she took off her crown, looked straight at Seth and me, then faded to black.
“Hey,” I said. “What did you do that for?”
“Why do you even care about my story?” he said and threw the remote back on the table. “Care about an old movie star who died when you were barely out of diapers.”
Without the TV on and Sarah gone, it was like Seth and I were back in his cold, dark apartment. The place had been like a crypt, and the hospital wasn’t much better. The twilight from the window beside my bed was the only thing fending off my claustrophobia. Seth was trying to box me in. Pushing me to confess something I didn’t want to say. Share feelings I hadn’t felt in a long time.
“What does it matter?” I said. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
I’d dodged the question, but for how long? Ironically, it was the same one Martin had asked me when I had to convince him to pony up a ticket to Norfolk, Connecticut, to come see Seth in the first place. But for him I just took a page out of his own playbook and lied. I told myself I needed to lie in order to come and find out the truth. The truth about Garbo.
I had walked into Adversary Productions and told Martin I had the story that would get him his coveted Emmy. I told him he was going to unveil a story on a Hollywood Goddess so sensational, so titillating and revelatory that he would have cable executives eating out of his hand for the next five years.
“What story?” Martin said without looking up from his breakfast burrito.
I hit Martin in the gutter where he lived. I told him Seth had proof of a lesbian romance between Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.
“That’s old news,” Martin said and laughed. “Rumors of Garbo being a dyke are as old as gospel.”
“Rumors,” I said. “But never proof.”
“What kind of proof?” Martin said, chorizo and scrambled eggs flying from his mouth in a chunky spray.
“What other kind is there?” I suggested boldly.
“You’re telling me,” he said, “that old man has been sitting on celluloid of Garbo and Dietrich carpet-munching? For the last seventy-five years?”
“Yeah,” I lied. Martin hadn’t given a damn about Garbo. To him, she was just fair game, famous and dead. Yet another bullshit cable mockumentary by the time he’d be done with it. But I knew better. I knew the world still cared about Garbo, even though they didn’t know it yet. And Martin was the dullard I needed to convince to get it out to the world.
Martin prided himself on being able to tell when other people were lying. And in all my years with him, I never had. Until that day. And I couldn’t believe how well the whopper of a lie had worked. Martin bought the whale of a tale hook, line, and sinker, and before I could even second-guess myself on what I’d set in motion, he’d authorized two tickets to ride. Unfortunately, I’d sold the idea of a world exclusive so well Martin hadn’t trusted me going it alone to get it.
So now I was alone, lying in a hospital bed next to the old man I’d lied through my teeth to see. The old tabloid reporter was insisting I tell the real reason I’d come. I glared at Seth and knew I couldn’t fib my way through this. The old man was too sharp. Too smart for me to pull the wool over his eyes. He wanted me to give him something personal to proceed. Something I hadn’t told anyone, ever.
“I came,” I said finally, “because of my mother.”
Seth looked at me and without saying a word, urged me to continue.
“She worshipped Garbo,” I said. Mom worshipped Garbo, and I worshipped Mom. “Would’ve loved to have learned why Garbo forsook the world for a life of isolation.”
I told Seth about the day Mom compared Garbo to Christ. It was a rainy fall day, and she had let me play hooky from school to stay home and be with her when she was having a hard time with chemo. We curled up together on the loveseat in our small living room and watched Mata Hari, another Garbo classic. During one scene, Garbo stood up and opened her arms straight out to accept her lover. Mom had grabbed the remote and paused the film. Then she’d turned and looked at me with a devilish grin.
Weak as she was, Mom found the strength to get up and walk over to the bookshelf across the darkened room. To stare at the shelf where she kept all her travel books of places she would have loved to visit but would never live to see. Mom brought back a book on Brazil. Opened to a picture of the famous Christ statue that lords over Rio de Janeiro.
“Look,” she had said. “They dedicated the statue the same year Mata Hari was made. Christ the Redeemer.”
I looked at the famous Jesus statue in the book, then back up at Garbo on the screen. I described to Seth how the gestures of statue and actress were exactly the same.
“You think she could have known?” I’d asked Mom as I scrutinized the TV screen.
“I think we’re onto her, my love.” Then Mom had leaned in and whispered softly out of earshot of Garbo frozen on the screen. “Let’s just keep her secret between the two of us. What do you say?”
I’d turned to my mother and smiled back. “Garbo the Redeemer,” I whispered and kissed her forehead while Garbo watched with op
en arms in my peripheral vision.
Then the silence brought me back into the hospital room, accompanied by a rush of blood to my face. I’d said that stuff out loud? Flushed, I sheepishly looked over at Seth. His eyes were closed, and his chin rested on his chest. Fuck, had the old man expired while I was reminiscing?
“Seth?” I whispered.
“Garbo the Redeemer,” Seth intoned. He opened his eyes, raised his head, and I practically jumped out of my bed.
“You got a haunted streak running through you, kid.”
Haunted? The idea never entered my head before. Places were haunted, but people were possessed. All I knew was that I spooked easy. Spooked by how easy it was to freak myself out in the presence of this strange old man.
Seth no doubt saw the confusion on my face.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Makes two of us.”
“Enough to tell me her story?”
Seth nodded in silent agreement.
8. OH, THE HUMANITY SETH
After I’d thrown one too many down the hatch on Nick’s dime, my hangover felt like an open head wound. I was lucky I hadn’t woken up with two black eyes and broken ribs from the verbal beating I’d taken at the hands of The Piano Man. Usually my mind functioned fine swimming in alcohol, but after being threatened by Toes, stowing away on an ocean liner, a day of sex, ominous shadows, beer, and paranoia, I came down with what the Italian grandmothers in Brooklyn called morte blanca. White death. A premonition of impending doom. But the morte blanca I experienced aboard the Athenia that morning was not of my own violent end, but Ingrid’s.
The only other time I’d had morte blanca was a month after watching the Hindenburg disaster. Later in my apartment in New York City, I dreamt I was aboard the airship when it exploded and became engulfed in flames. I threw myself overboard, an ill-fated phoenix taken flight. I’d awoken alone the next morning, wet with flop sweat, afraid for my life. This morning I awoke beside a beautiful woman I barely knew and feared for hers. If I had any sense at all, I’d be worried about my own skin and not the nude woman’s sleeping next to me. It was a solid bet Nick knew I was a stowaway. But Ingrid was the irresistibly sexy siren with perfect breasts and long legs who’d led me to her bed in spite of that fact. Was she a black widow? I still couldn’t decide.
Before, I always knew when to cut bait and run. But now, because of her, I was the one caught on the line, fighting whoever was topside reeling me in. On a ship of 400-plus passengers, I wasn’t sure I had even seen all the players. For a guy who couldn’t swim, navigating these emotional waters was not only going to be tricky but downright dangerous. My bedfellow began to stir.
Ingrid woke up. I hadn’t wanted to bombard her with questions the night before. But now that she was conscious, and I was reasonably sober, it seemed like the opportune time.
“Who is this guy, Nick?”
“Just a friend.” She wiped the sleep out of her eyes.
“What kind of friend?” My tone was more earnest than intended.
Ingrid sat up. The covers fell down, and her perky breasts rose up like pink balloons toward the sky. The gravity of the situation had no effect on them.
“We never slept together.” Her long fingers brushed the hair from her half-opened eyes. “If that’s what you’re implying.”
“Why not?” I said, a little too quickly.
Ingrid looked at me with disdain. I could tell it wasn’t the way she wanted to start her day. We were both big fans of morning sex, but I felt I needed to put some questions to her before anything else. It was one of the few instances when the newshound in me trumped the horny toad.
“I decide who I sleep with and don’t,” she said. “Nicky is just a friend.”
“Nicky?”
“Look,” she said, her back against the headboard, “I thought you’d like each other. Both being American.”
Like each other? I’d found when vying for the attentions of a beautiful young woman, American or not, men were generally fear-biters. Afraid of the competition, we’d sink our teeth into one another first and ask questions later. I was no different.
“Besides,” she said, “I wouldn’t have introduced you if I’d known you were the jealous type.”
“Jealous?” I said. “I’m not jealous.”
“Then what’s bothering you?”
It was a perfectly reasonable question. What was bothering me? I felt a turning point coming on and not just in our nascent relationship. Much as I hated to admit it, Ingrid had struck a nerve I didn’t know I had.
“What’s bothering me?” I said it more to myself than to her.
“Yes.” She said the word like a long-exhaled hiss.
“I juuuust,” I stammered. “I just can’t stand the thought of you with anyone else.”
Where the hell had that come from? I felt like a puppet with a ventriloquist’s hand up my ass, putting words in my mouth. Ingrid looked into my wide-open, shocked eyes. I expected the worst, but instead, she smiled.
“Thank you for being honest with me,” she said, turned and pressed her glorious, gravity-defying breasts into my chest.
Ingrid gave me a kiss that made me knock-kneed. Good thing we were in bed, because if I’d been standing up, I would have fallen over. Whatever questions about her drained from my head along with all the blood. Ingrid was teaching this salty dog some new tricks, and she put my body and mind in a perpetual tailspin that I didn’t have the power to pull out of, even if I’d wanted to. We made love that morning more passionately than I’d ever experienced.
Ingrid left me seeing stars when she went to work that afternoon. But the star I really needed to see was Garbo. Between the bar bet and the news exclusive the scoop would generate, I’d be set. The movie queen would be my salvation. But I’d have to act fast. Over the ship’s PA system, the Captain announced that our ocean voyage had officially reached its midpoint. Finding a needle in a haystack as large as an ocean liner wasn’t going to be easy. Especially when that needle was named Garbo, and she had made a career of playing hard to get.
The more exposure I had to famous people, the more I realized how much trouble they were. Take Clark Gable, for instance. Gable got juiced one night after Joan Crawford, his equally famous on-again, off-again slam piece, told him where to shove it. Driving his own car down Mulholland, high on sauce, he struck and killed a young woman. Her family cried out for blood. But Gable, valuable MGM property, got a free ride.
Louis B. Mayer, head of the studio, had one of his own executives take the vehicular manslaughter rap. The schmuck did ten years hard time, in exchange for guaranteed life employment. But Garbo made Gable look like a chump. When her two-year studio contract was drawing to an end in 1935, she went to Mayer’s office and told him she wanted to go home.
“Six hundred dollars a week is insufficient,” she told Mayer. “Especially for a star of my standing.”
“What would you consider fair?” Mayer asked, in a paternal tone, no doubt.
“Five thousand dollars a week will do,” Garbo said.
According to Hollywood lore, Mayer turned purple and began screaming. The studio mogul who disdained the use of profanity, went on a tirade and called the brightest star in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer firmament a bitch.
“Just who the hell do you think you are?” he yelled.
“Greta Garbo,” she said and quickly followed with the legendary, “I tank I go home now.”
True to her word, Garbo was on the next ship to Sweden. Months passed with no word from the star, and Mayer panicked. He didn’t even have her home address. He finally reached her through the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm and offered her $2,000. No response. He doubled it. Nothing. Garbo not only got her $5,000 a week, but the added proviso she would end her workday promptly at 5 pm. News traveled fast in Hollywood and New York: Garbo’s balls were bigger than the most powerful man’s in Tinseltown.
Garbo always got what Garbo wanted. And the world’s most famous and powerful movie star wanted p
rivacy more than anything else. Being a tabloid reporter, I knew that she traveled under several known pseudonyms. I needed a look-see at the ship’s passenger list. If I recognized one, it might just be my ticket to a grab-shot. And my ticket to the big time.
I asked Ingrid if she could sweet-talk her way into borrowing a copy of the ship’s manifest. She agreed to do it, but said it might take a couple hours. That was fine by me. It afforded me the time I needed to get my head straight. Or at least try.
A walk around the ship would get me my bearings. I stared out at the ocean, half-expecting to see another sinister shadow like the one I’d spied while on the Promenade Deck with Ingrid the day before. Instead, a school of bright blue fish jumped out of the water, racing the ship’s bow. I had no idea what the hell they were, until a steward informed a British family down the hall from me. Spinner Dolphins. I couldn’t help but watch and smile while my fellow mammals raced the Athenia in their natural element.
When I returned to Ingrid’s suite, she was waiting for me with the passenger list. I knew I only had to look at the First Class manifest. Garbo wouldn’t be traveling any other way. Sure enough, there she was. Not Greta Garbo but Harriet Brown, a more popular travel pseudonym of hers, in suite 437 A.
“Easy as cake.” A wave of excitement rushed over me.
“Cake?” Ingrid said.
“Yeah, cake.” I reached out for her hand and held it. “You did good, darling.”
Ingrid blushed and lowered her head in the way a shy schoolgirl might when being complimented. I still had so much to learn about this beautiful young creature.
“What now?” she asked, the arc of her long eye lashes mimicking her smile.
“Now,” I said, “I get to work.”
Darkness descended over the North Atlantic, and the floating city glowed with incandescent light. I would wait until night fell completely before engaging Miss Brown. I’d only have one shot at her, maybe two with my Bell and Howell. I practiced switch-loading the flash bulbs in my pocket.
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