Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

Without warning, the figure of a man was silhouetted against the light.

  Cassidy, unseen, raised the .38, about to take a shot to wound. It was like a shooting gallery, an instant when the figures jerk to a stop.

  “Who’s there?” The man had sensed a presence. Something stayed Cassidy’s trigger finger. “Who is it? MacMurdo?”

  It was Rolf Moller.

  In the barest fraction of a second Cassidy shouted at the doctor to get down and heard an unidentifiable but very real sound, somewhere off to his left, somewhere over near the library liquor cabinet. He fell to his knees as a bullet whacked into the wall beside his head. A second shot shattered the glass front of a bookcase.

  Cassidy swiveled and fired in the direction of the muzzle flash, getting his shot off nearly between the other two.

  The man grunted. A side chair clattered over.

  The gunman leaped across the room, adrenaline making him almost airborne, and Cassidy snapped off a second shot that went astray as he slipped. The slug burrowed into the plaster of the ceiling, dust sprinkling like snow.

  The figure kept going, broke through the French windows, ripping through the wooden framework, carrying bits of wood with him, flailing his arms trying to get free, then sprawling onto the terrace.

  Cassidy was on his feet, trying to get a bead on him as he scrambled back to his feet, frozen for an instant in a shroud of torn curtain. Which way to go?

  Cassidy fired again just as he saw, heard, damn near felt the heavy sound of MacMurdo’s .45.

  The man was hurled sideways, somehow managed a few steps before tumbling forward like the man on the high wire losing his balance, plummeting.

  Cassidy went past the desk, saw Moller on his knees as if he might be praying. Past the obliterated window, the man lay huddled on the ground.

  All the noise was over. The wind in the trees, the drip and patter of rain, nothing else.

  MacMurdo’s voice rode on the wind: “We got him, pard—”

  The explosion caught them unaware.

  The crumpled body lifted off the ground, the clothing seemed to shred, the glass in another of the French windows blew back into the library, Rolf Moller ducked back under the desk.

  Cassidy felt slivers of glass nicking his face.

  Smoke drifted up from the remains of the corpse as if he were the victim of that most curious of fates, spontaneous combustion.

  Slowly Cassidy stepped out onto the fieldstones, glass crunching underfoot. He stepped on something soft and looked down. It was what had once been a man’s hand.

  MacMurdo hobbled up onto the terrace.

  His corduroys were torn at the thigh where a slug had removed a bit of the old piss and vinegar. He limped across toward Cassidy. “Gotta do more than get me in the leg to stop me. Nice shootin’, pard. I’m proud of you.” He grinned. Rolf Moller was venturing out onto the terrace, carefully opening one of the remaining French windows.

  MacMurdo stared down at the mess.

  “This dead fucker had a grenade, for God’s sake. Pin pulled, gonna just lob it back in on your head, my man.” He looked at Cassidy. “This, I’d say, was your lucky night.”

  They both began to laugh. Rolf Moller looked at them as if they had dropped in from Mars. Which made it all the funnier.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WALTER WINCHELL STOOD ON TOP of the wooden table, knees slightly bent. He leaped into the air, landed with a bang that shook the microphone near his feet, and began screaming at the heavyset man standing by.

  “The fucking eddie,” he howled, “it’s an ass-wipe, Herman! Shitting paper! You get me? Walter Winchell doesn’t give Mr. and Mrs. America this crap, Herman!” He kept jumping up and down, banging the table, face red, fists clenched, the mike bouncing.

  Herman Klurfeld was used to his boss’s outbursts as broadcast time approached. It was ten minutes to nine, Sunday evening, and most of the people in America were getting settled to sit down with their radios and Walter Winchell. Klurfeld looked at Lew Cassidy standing in the corner of the studio. Terry Leary was smoking a cigarette, grinning at the scene. Klurfeld passed them on his way out, the script flapping in his hand. “He doesn’t like the editorial.”

  “I got that much,” Leary said.

  “I’d better give it some mascara and pancake.” He smiled forlornly and left.

  Winchell’s mainspring began to wind down. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “What the hell am I doing up here, for chrissakes? I’m getting old. A man could hurt himself.” He muttered: “Gimme a hand. What the fuck am I doing on the fuckin’ table?”

  Lew helped him down. “Acting pretty much like an asshole.”

  Leary laughed.

  Winchell frowned. “Just a little artistic temperament, boy. Keeps ’em on their toes. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke, that’s what Winchell says.” He was puffing. “Shit, I’m getting so old I can’t take yes for an answer.” He peered around, looking for a laugh. “Just kidding, just kidding. That’d be the day, boys, right?”

  Leary blew several smoke rings. “That’ll be the day, Walter.”

  Winchell looked at his watch. “You can stay in here with me, boys. Get a good look at the best there is doing his job. Now where the fuck’s Herman? Herman!” He bellowed the name like an oath and an engineer behind the glass panel made a face, yanked off his headphones. Winchell gave his curious barking laugh. “Don’t worry, Lew. I got you all set up with a nest of Ratzis. I said I would, didn’t I?”

  Klurfeld came back in, pushing his glasses up on his nose, handed the script to Winchell, who put his hand on the writer’s shoulder and began reading through the editorial, two or three hundred words that always fell in the middle of the broadcast and that required, in particular, the Winchell touch. “Better, Herman, better. Always remember, Herman, Walter Winchell may be an asshole but we have to keep our little secret from Mr. and Mrs. America.”

  Klurfeld nodded.

  Cassidy said: “To say nothing of all the ships at sea.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Winchell said. Then he seemed to slip into a trance state. Two and a half minutes to nine. Everybody in the control room settled into place behind a haze of cigarette smoke. The director looked tense and sweaty, his tie worked loose and his shirtsleeves rolled up to his biceps. Klurfeld appeared in the control room and began chatting with the ad men representing the sponsor.

  Winchell carefully adjusted the plain wooden chair at the proper angle to the table. He placed the heavy mike in a well-worn spot. Very quietly a network vice president came in and sat down beside him, straightening a pile of script so he could feed it smoothly to the great man a page at a time. Near the mike was the telegraph key that Winchell pounded to give the show its machine-gun-like staccato sound effects. As the seconds ticked away he worked his tie loose and unbuttoned the collar of his white shirt. He slowly lowered the zipper of his fly a couple of inches, settling into a half crouch of anticipation, as if the chair were a launching pad. The opening commercial was nearing an end. Winchell tensed, about to pounce, eyes on the director’s arm, waiting for the pointing finger. With only a few seconds to go he looked up at Cassidy, flashed a quick wiseguy smile. “Lewis, I wanna die doing exactly this—it beats screwing!” The commercial ended. A nation of listeners, living rooms and kitchens and automobiles full of his fans at the end of another Sunday—they were all feeling the little squirting jolt of anticipation.

  “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea!” He snapped the words, precise, incredibly quickly, a volley across the collective consciousness of a nation. “Let’s go to press!” And he was off and running, Hollywood and Broadway and Washington and London and Berlin and Tokyo. He was racketing on about the capture of Tokyo Rose, the girl from Los Angeles who’d been visiting Japan and been trapped there at the start of the war, who’d become the seductive voice reaching out from the Empire of the Sun to the worn-out GIs slogging through the South Pacific. She’d been arrested in Tokyo early in September
and was being brought back to the States to stand trial and Walter was rapping out her story. Cassidy sat back, stretched out his long legs, and let the voice carry him along, a Niagara of words, dots and dashes, insinuations and accusations and plaudits, near slanders, sentimental appreciations, jokes, ironies, broad vulgar sarcasms, every word like a grenade. You could hear the explosions across the landscape of the nation he loved.

  Things at the house in Westchester had been smoothed over, at least superficially. When you’re Colonel Sam MacMurdo and you’re working for President Harry S Truman and Allen Dulles and your job is catching Nazis, you’ve got ways of taking care of things. By noon the day after the fireworks two civilians had arrived from Washington, bringing a complement of four soldiers in uniform. The bodies of Clyde and Minnelli had been taken away in an Army van, well before dawn. Plasterers and glaziers came in and repaired the damage to the house. Not a single police official had been notified. MacMurdo had taken care of it his way. The doctor who attended to his leg wound had been an Army man.

  MacMurdo, who seemed impervious to pain, and Cassidy had tramped through the woods that afternoon. MacMurdo used a cane so, together, they looked like a broken-down song-and-dance team, two men with canes staggering off on the road to nowhere.

  Near a dirt road half a mile from the house they found a mud-caked Harley Davidson motorcycle. It lay on its side. Nearby there was a set of tire tracks where another cycle had departed the scene, spraying mud across tree trunks and shrubbery. There had been two men, then, and one had escaped. MacMurdo took out his black pipe and dipped it into the oilskin pouch. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket. It was cracked and the wool was gray and old. A steady cold mist fluttered in the leaves. Cassidy stood looking down the dirt road, which was scrolled with muddy ruts. MacMurdo struck a kitchen match on his thumbnail and lit the pipe. He kicked the Harley. “You want a motorcycle?” Cassidy shook his head. MacMurdo delivered another kick. “Leave the damn thing here, then. I’ll have somebody collect it. Bastard won’t be needing it anymore.” He puffed a thick gray cloud into the mist and they walked back to the huge house.

  They stood before the damage the grenade had caused. The French doors had already been replaced. The cement was chipped and scorched, the stones themselves bore scattered whitened spots. MacMurdo ran his immense hand over the pitted surface.

  Cassidy said: “Karin isn’t a secret anymore. She has to be the point of all this. … You wouldn’t hold out on me, would you, Sam?”

  “She’s the point,” MacMurdo said, standing back and surveying the front of the whole house. “For me she’s the bait to lure Manfred Moller into the open. For you she is what she is. And she ain’t no secret no more, no how.” He applied another match to his pipe.

  “So where did your security fall apart, Sambo?”

  “Damned if I know.” He didn’t seem to take offense. “Could be anyplace; nothin’ I can do about it now. What bites my behind is who … who are these people that come here with grenades and start killing my people? No palaver, no bargaining, no talk about swaps—who are they?”

  They went into the study and stared into the space between them, warming themselves before the fire.

  “Well, pard,” MacMurdo said at last, “it could be some folks who hate Nazis and want to take some scalps. People who believe the government is working with Nazis—oh, hell, there are such folks, believe me. Then there are the Nazis themselves who wanted to rescue Karin and Rolf. … For all we know, this could be Manfred’s work … or Vulkan’s—”

  “But how could they know? Any of them?”

  “Listen, you can’t trust anybody anymore. Somebody on my team, somebody in Washington.” He shrugged the massive shoulders. “Hell, we don’t even have a clue as to Vulkan’s identity—could be anybody.”

  “Who knows? We gotta forget all this. From now on, our plans stay with us. Inner-circle stuff, okay?”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I don’t talk—”

  “You told Winchell—”

  “Look, I’m trying to do a job. For you. So don’t start with me—”

  “Lew, Lew, I’m just sayin’ the walls have ears, that’s all. You don’t have to get your game face on with me. Now, listen up, there’s another possible group who could’ve pulled last night on us. The Nazis who want Karin and Rolf to lead them to Manfred, the goddamn thingummy, the minotaur, the treasure …”

  “Or maybe the Radio City Rockettes,” Cassidy said.

  MacMurdo’s laugh rocketed off the portraits of the robber barons. “You can say that again, pard! The Rockettes!”

  There was another explosion of sorts over tea in the late afternoon. Later on MacMurdo called it a “real teacup rattler” but it wasn’t so funny at the time. Everyone was on edge and it didn’t take much to light the fuse.

  When Rolf brought Karin down for tea in the formal parlor she seemed to look at, then through, him, as if the time in his apartment had never happened, as if she’d never remembered standing by the ocean liner or the Christmas tree under the Washington Square archway. She spoke only when addressed directly and then her voice was soft and toneless. She ate some cakes mechanically, sipped her tea, stared at her cup. Rolf Moller was nervous, his comments clipped, terse. When Karin declined a second cup of tea he spoke to her; she nodded, rose, and took his arm. A shade unsteadily she left the room with him. Cassidy went to the doorway and watched them ascend the stairs. He turned back to MacMurdo. “She’s doped. He’s given her something.”

  “Keep your shirt on, pard. He’s the doctor.”

  “I don’t trust the son of a bitch.”

  When Rolf Moller returned to the parlor and poured himself more tea, Cassidy glared at him. “You might tell me, Doctor, what’s the point of keeping her shot up like a zombie?”

  Moller stirred his tea, the spoon clinking steadily, for a long time. He was wearing his brown suit and tie, neat as a pin. He slowly fixed his gaze on Cassidy, pursing his lips. He blinked behind the flat round spectacles. “She is in a very delicate state. Excitement of the sort we had last night could crush her. Like an eggshell. A simple sedative will keep her calm.”

  “Calm? She’s dead on her feet—”

  “Tell me, Mr. Cassidy, am I now answerable to you? Are you dictating the care of my patient?” He stared at Cassidy over the rim of the bone-china cup.

  “She’s not about to break. She’s a grown woman who’s lost a chunk of memory. You don’t have to turn her into a walking corpse!”

  “I?” Moller spat out the monosyllable like Helmut Dantine in a movie, the rotten Nazi in a Times Square theater. “I? Turn her into a corpse?” He stood up. His cup tilted in its saucer, spilled steaming tea across the tablecloth. “You say this to me after last night? With you incompetent imbeciles guarding her life, I’d say her chances of survival decrease with each passing day! Your laughable security was breached with ease, two of your men murdered … very nearly all of us blown to bits. … Listen to me, my American friends—if our aim is to reunite Karin with my brother, to uncover this Göring escape route, to find this fabulous Vulkan—who may or may not exist at all—I suggest you try to do it without killing Karin or destroying her mind. …” He was stalking about the room, lacking only a swagger stick to whip against his thigh. “And leave her medical care to me!” He snapped around on his heel and made one hell of an exit.

  MacMurdo leaned back and bellowed: “Go fuck yourself, kraut bastard!” He glanced at Cassidy from the corner of his eye. “Guess that’ll show him.”

  The broadcast ended. It was like pulling the plug on Winchell. He sagged in the chair, sweat stains spreading from his armpits. The network V.P. straightened the stack of yellow sheets. From the control room several other interested parties were filtering into the studio, fingering very sincere ties and shooting their cuffs. They stood around the star as if they’d been granted an audience. They were old hands at the New York sycophancy game, waiting for the star to notice them, waiting for him to validate t
heir existences, waiting for him to break the sepulchral silence.

  “The eddie,” he said at last. “Whattya think? Was it Winchell?”

  The V.P. said it was great, just great, and one of the ad men nodded enthusiastically, great, great, rubbing his little paws together.

  Finally Winchell stood up and signaled for a playback of the broadcast. He paced, his face intent as he listened for the touch of Winchell in the night. He always said that he more than anyone else knew how Walter Winchell should sound. “Hell,” Cassidy had heard him shout, “I invented the bastard!”

  He nodded abruptly at the end of the playback. It was okay. As was his custom, he placed a call to his wife up at the estate. He didn’t see her all that often and sex between them was a faint memory, but he depended on her judgment and approval. He never missed calling her once he’d survived another broadcast. He came back beaming. She’d liked the show. Standing in the middle of the studio he ceremoniously zipped his fly, buttoned his collar, cinched up his tie, and slipped into his blue serge suit coat. He winked at Cassidy. “You like the suit, kid? It’s new.”

  He led the way into the V.P.’s office, shooed him out, and closed the door.

  “Ratzis,” he said. “I got some for you. Big party, charity-ball kind of thing. Sag Harbor. Now, pay attention, you mugs, here’s the plan …”

  Harry Madrid sat at the kitchen table, his elbows resting on the oilcloth covering, and finished off the thick roast-beef sandwich with mustard and onions. Tom Hayes, a retired Boston cop he’d known since the days of the Blackwood mob back in ’22, reached over to the countertop and switched off the Philco.

  “That Winchell, he’s some talker, ain’t he?”

  “He’s full of baloney,” Harry Madrid said, patting his mouth with a napkin and reaching for the little pot of toothpicks. “Celebrity,” he snorted. “Ten pounds of manure in a five-pound sack.”

  Hayes laughed and slurped up the last of the milky coffee in the saucer. Mary, his wife, was cleaning away the leftovers from the early afternoon Sunday dinner that had provided the hearty evening supper. “He may be full of baloney, Harry,” she said, “but he helps remind us here in Tuggle, Maine, that there’s another world out there. Movie stars and politicians, and gangsters and those Ratzis of his.”