Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

  Boulders and dungeon walls and castles. Nothing was the real McCoy out there, you couldn’t be sure of anything. You could lean against a castle wall in Verona and fall headfirst into a Dodge City saloon where Hoot Gibson was twirling a six-shooter.

  Cassidy put his hand out, touched the wall. He felt a faint pang of disappointment when it was cold and unyielding and unquestionably real. “It’s all a nice touch, Mr. Benedictus.”

  “And what does that mean, precisely?” He’d taken off his cap to reveal a thatch of thinning reddish hair. His one eye was green as an apple. He wore a well-tended sandy Guards mustache.

  “It looks like a movie set,” Cassidy said.

  “Ha! Top hole, old man! Most people come tottering on in and say something banal. Nice castle you have here, they say. But a movie set! And how bloody true … too bloody true. It is a movie set. I had Jeremy Frere design it. Right after he did that pretentious bit of rubbish for Korda. Lord Ugly’s Castle, happily chopped to pieces by Gainsborough and released in three small theaters in suburban Bucharest.”

  “My father hired Frere once. He’s a drunk.”

  “And that’s the best thing about him,” Benedictus said. “Just who the hell are you, Cassidy? And your father, too?” He turned to the huge Porter, who was proving to be the strong silent type. “Take their coats and things, Porter. Get a move on.”

  “My father makes movies, bounces around. Or he did before he started making movies for the War Department. I suppose he’ll get back to it eventually. His name is Paul Cassidy.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Why should you have?”

  “I’m Pinnacle Pictures,” Benedictus said. “That’s why.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “Alas, no.”

  “Alas?”

  “Oh, business is good. The business is a zoo. That is a bear, Mr. Madrid.”

  Harry Madrid was standing before a stuffed bear preserved forever reared up on its hind legs, front legs extended like the arms of a lethal lover, about to hug someone. Its glass eyes stared down at Harry Madrid from a couple of feet over his head.

  “I sort of thought that’s what it was.” The bear stood in a corner of the entrance hall. Its counterpart thirty feet away was a suit of armor. “What did it take to stop an animal like that?”

  Benedictus laughed and shook his head, his green eye reflecting for a moment the flames flickering in the wall sconces. “Damned if I know. My checkbook, I guess. I bought it from a taxidermist in Los Angeles. It’s a Kodiak, I think he said. I daresay it never saw Maine during its lifetime. Casts a certain spell, though, don’t you agree?”

  “More than a suit of armor,” Cassidy said.

  “Oh, that old thing. My wife did a picture with Fairbanks years and years ago and she kept the armor. Said it was better company than old Doug.” He turned to Tom Hayes, who seemed dumbstruck by the dimensions and nature of the surroundings, probably because he didn’t see enough movies. “Come, come, man. Your mouth’s open. You’re Mr. Hayes? Well, Mr. Hayes, what do you make of Last Bastion?”

  “Last what?” Hayes asked, lifting the knight’s visor with his forefinger, letting it clang noisily back into place.

  “Last Bastion. That’s the appellation I’ve applied to this great damp pile of rubble. It’s only twenty-five years old, with no expense spared to give it just the right medieval patina.”

  “Damnedest place I’ve ever seen.” Hayes stroked his chin in amazement.

  “Well said! You’ll do the part of the Local Rustic.” Benedictus turned back to Cassidy. “Shall we start the revels, then? I mean to say, you’re more or less captive to the Lord of the Manor. Though you’ll be a damn sight more comfortable here tonight than out there in the muck. I’m not such a terrible fate, after all.” He clapped Cassidy on the arm. “Come on, chaps, come in by the fire. We’ll tell stories and tie one on. I want to know who you are and what the devil you’re playing at in my back yard. I would be within my rights to plug you varmints. …”

  “You’ve seen too many movies, Mr. Benedictus.”

  “Ahhh, thrust home! Call me Tash, Mr. Cassidy. We’re going to be pals, I’m sure of it.”

  “What is this Tash business? Odd name.”

  “I was born in a remote part of the world called Tashkent, in the year of our Lord 1895. Turkestan ring a bell? Samarkand? Well, Tashkent is the leading city of the Uzbek region of what we must now think of as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Soviet central Asia. My parents were off on some grim sort of lark, I suppose, rather dim my parents, both of them, and they thought it would be romantic to name their baby son, me, Tashkent. It has not been an easy burden to bear.” He was leading the way through a thick keystone arch. “But enough about me. I want to hear about you, all about you. …”

  When Benedictus and Porter had rousted them out of their first sleep they had discovered they were only fifty yards from a road that Benedictus had laid out, one that did not appear on any map. Porter had noticed them earlier, had reported intruders to the Guv’nor, as he and most of the neighbors called Benedictus, who had decided to pick them up. It was, after all, good sport and made for an evening’s entertainment.

  On the way back to the castle in the truck it had begun to snow, a fine, almost sandy snow driven by an increasingly hard wind. Now as he settled into a deep wingback chair Cassidy heard the wind in the chimney, heard the rattle of the snow on the long windows. Harry Madrid sat closer to the fire, which burned, a conflagration, in a fireplace the size of a room with a mantelpiece big enough for a Busby Berkeley chorus line. Lions crouched on either side of the grate. The walls were hung with ancestral portraits in heavy frames. Harry Madrid stared at the painted faces, then looked back at the round face and red hair of his host, as if seeking a resemblance.

  “No need to look at me,” Benedictus said. “I don’t know who those blokes are. I bought ’em in a job lot at Sotheby’s. I daresay they’re somebody’s ancestors. But surely not mine.” His demeanor was boyish for a man of fifty, as if it all were a game of let’s pretend: the bogus castle, the jodhpurs and the empty sleeve and the eye patch and the hearing aid jammed into his right ear. He was five nine, must have weighed two hundred pounds, but he moved lightly on small feet, like a dancer. He somehow managed not to be dwarfed by the gigantic scale of the room, which must have been seventy feet long, forty feet wide and twenty-five feet high. Everything was out of any human scale, as if the place had been built to be committed to film with bubbling test tubes and a whirling cyclotron in the laboratory next door.

  Once they were all settled, spread out around the crackling fire, and Porter had supplied them with bottles of Irish whiskey and siphons of soda water, Benedictus stretched his booted legs out before him, crossed them, and fixed Cassidy with his sparkling pale green eye. “Now, tell us your story, old man. And don’t try to fob off some tedious poaching tale on yours truly. Let’s have a real story.”

  Half an hour later he scowled and splashed water on top of half a tumbler of Bushmill’s. He stood with his back to the fireplace and glared at his guests.

  “You mean to tell me that some damnable Hun, a Nazi, actually used my land—my land—as a point of illegal entry? Some bloody saboteur? Some swinish war criminal? An SS man?” The scowl deepened, his face flushed. “Is this what you’re telling me, sir? Well, let me tell you—”

  “That’s not exactly it,” Cassidy said. If he wanted Benedictus’s help, the continuing opportunity to search for the plane, to reconstruct Manfred Moller’s adventures, he had to level with the eccentric Guv’nor. “He’s not a saboteur, he’s not a war criminal so far as we know … he is a sort of advance man for escaping Nazi leaders, those who’ve slipped through the nets, those who’ll never stand trial, those who are making off with loot and art treasures and their own skins—in short, those who want to survive in a new world.”

  “But surely,” Benedictus said with a thick air of outraged propriety, “the point is this m
an’s a rotter, an emissary of an evil empire.” He fumed and stomped around in a circle, in the shadows of the flickering fire, like the dwarf or the troll in the story about Rumpelstiltskin. “We’d have known how to handle his sort at school, I promise you.”

  “And where was that?”

  Benedictus’s head snapped up. “What? What?” He tapped the hearing aid, stroked the wires. “Oh, school. Winchester.” He started to speak again and a tinny whine seemed to emanate from his chest. He banged on the pocket of his shirt inside the hacking jacket and pulled the hearing aid from his ear. “Bloody thing!” he shouted. “Goes off on its own—rogue, y’know—starts screeching in my ear. Bloody nuisance at the ballet! I’d be better off with an ear trumpet! Well, well? What’s supposed to have happened to this Nazi swine? By God, I’d have liked to get him in my sights, I’d have put paid to the bastard!” His voice sank to a whisper as he worked the earpiece back into place. “By God, I would.” He looked slowly from face to face. “And you chaps are seconded to the Secret Service?”

  “Not Hayes. He’s our guide. Madrid and I are, shall we say, draftees? Willing, very willing. We want to find this man, destroy his network.” Cassidy was beginning to feel like a righter of wrongs, a character from “Captain Midnight” or “Don Winslow of the Navy.”

  “Good for you, young Cassidy!” Benedictus took a long drink and shook his head vehemently. “My land, you say. You believe he landed his aircraft out there somewhere.” He swung his good arm around in an arc, indicating the estate beyond the walls. Whiskey splashed his hand. “But how could I not know? No, no, I would have known! Damn me, lad, you’re on a snipe hunt, I’m afraid. When do you think his plane went down?”

  Cassidy told him.

  Benedictus stared into space, calculating. “I wasn’t here!” he cried. “I was in Los Angeles. … It’s just possible, I suppose, the man could have come down where this poacher of yours says. … Well, blast! Who’d have thought such things could happen!”

  In the silence that followed the fire snapped, the huge logs settling in on themselves as the flames ate them away. The gritty snow tapped at the windows.

  “I want to have another look tomorrow,” Cassidy said.

  “Yes, old boy, of course, you must. Perhaps we can all go down there and beat the bushes.” He strode across the worn Persian carpet, which was landing-strip size, and stood staring out into the darkness. “Snow,” he mused.

  Harry Madrid heaved himself to a standing position and stumped stiffly across to join him. He was smoking a Roi-tan, carrying his heavy glass in his meaty right hand. “Not a damn thing we can do about that. No point in worrying about it.”

  Benedictus nodded. “Right you are,” he said. He swung back to Cassidy and Hayes, who seemed to have lost his powers of speech in the opulent surroundings. “Well, it’s time for a bit of chow, what? Perhaps my lady will join us if we are fortunate.”

  Cassidy stood up and drained his glass.

  Benedictus looked back out the window as if he’d heard a cry in the night. “My God, how I hate the bloody Germans,” he said softly.

  “I was just telling our guests, my darling, how much I hate the bloody Germans.” Benedictus was sitting at the head of the long table. The furniture in the dining room was so huge and so ornate, so laden with a kind of Grinling Gibbons carving, that it seemed to anchor the castle in case it began, like so many dreams, to float away. As Benedictus spoke to his wife, she leaned over his plate cutting his meat, several slices from the large roast leg of lamb. He finally grew impatient, shooing her away. She dropped her eyes, began to unfold his napkin for him. “Enough, for Christ’s sake!” He spoke sharply, the words stinging, bringing a flush to her almost artificially pale cheeks.

  Cassidy watched her walk the length of the table, like a banished countess leaving the presence. She carried herself straight, with grace, as if to say that she could take the spear in the back if it came. “Yes,” she said, her voice deep and slightly hoarse, a smoker’s voice. “Tash certainly has good reason to hate the bloody Germans.” She reached the end of the table, where Cassidy rose and held her chair. “Why, thank you, Mr. Cassidy,” she said. “How kind you are.” She looked up, her eyes black as an inquisitor’s sins, outlined in thick black paint, the lashes long, like tiny wings or whips. Her wide mouth made a faint smile. Cassidy felt as if he’d been blindsided out of bounds. He felt as if the breath had been blown clean out of him.

  It was all about the movies, because of the movies.

  Mona Ransom had made her first picture at the age of sixteen, in 1923. She was the flip side of Mary Pickford, her hair jet black and cut in a kind of gleaming helmet with Dutch-boy points curling beneath her ears and seeming on the verge of piercing her ghostly white cheek just above the line of her jaw. She was, professionally speaking, a Very Bad Girl. She was a vamp, a tramp, a golddigger, a whore with no heart at all; she sang a siren song in one movie after another and danced and kissed and put her nipples on display and made rolled stockings and low-waisted flapper fashions a symbol of sex and licentiousness and evil in every home across the land. She inevitably came to a bad end in the last reel, coughing her life away in a barren tenement or tied to a stake by the Indians or strangled by a jealous husband she’d taunted all the way through the picture or … Well, whatever she got she damned well deserved. She made the move to talkies without missing a beat, maturing into womanhood and giving the hairstyle that swept the country her name. The Ransom. A King’s Ransom, they said, or Pay the Ransom, it’s worth it. There were lots of lines about Mona Ransom and her hair and her style and the white face and the eyes burning like coal. Then, in the late thirties, when she herself was just past thirty, she was gone. It wasn’t something you sat up and noticed. Bad Girls weren’t quite the hot tickets they’d once been. They seemed a little corny, to tell the truth. The great comediennes were replacing them and by the time you’d lapped up Claudette Colbert and Myrna Loy and all the rest, Roz Russell and Carole Lombard and Norma Shearer, you tended to forget about a Mona Ransom. She’d been there for a long time and then she wasn’t there anymore. Now Lew Cassidy knew where she was. She was married to Pinnacle Pictures. She was Mrs. Benedictus.

  Tash Benedictus was staring at Cassidy as if he were privy to the quick biography playing a limited run in Cassidy’s mind, the rush of emotion that had come at the first look into her eyes, the first whiff of her perfume and the sound of her voice.

  “Are you two quite through down there?” The sarcasm was too thick for the provocation. Cassidy realized that Benedictus was losing the battle with the Bushmill’s.

  “I believe we are, my dear,” she said. She smiled at Cassidy. Hers was the widest mouth he’d ever seen. Everything about her was exaggerated. Her white, white shoulders were unusually wide, the black dinner dress unusually severe, the strand of pearls perfect, with a hint of pink. Her lipstick was so dark a scarlet that it was another color that didn’t have a name. Her fingers were extraordinarily long and delicate as they curled around the Baccarat stemware. He could imagine her touch. He realized that Harry Madrid was watching. When he returned the look Harry glanced at Mona Ransom, then slowly rolled his eyes heavenward. Mona Ransom’s gaze slid from Cassidy to her husband. “You were about to tell our guests why you hate the bloody Germans, weren’t you, dear?”

  “Ah,” Benedictus said, chewing on a piece of lamb, halving a roast potato with his fork, “was I, indeed? Thank you for reminding me, my darling. It’s odd, isn’t it? The way she thinks that because I’m physically crippled I’m mentally impaired as well. Ah, Cassidy, what’s one to do with women? Yes, I do hate the bloody Germans.” He ate the potato, then drained off half a goblet of a heavy claret. “Germans did this to me.” He reached across his thick chest and flapped the empty sleeve of his jacket. “In the Great War. Battle of the Somme. Same old story. Up to my arse in blood, death in the trenches, rats dining on my buddies, I’d have been overjoyed to die with them … make a rat’s dinner of old Tash. …
But I didn’t die. Great awful shelling, direct hit down the line … Lost my arm, lost my eye, made mince out of my ear, rattled my brain around like a pea in a bucket, but you know what damn near killed me? It’s a true story, I damn near drowned in Lance Corporal Hixon’s blood. They thought I was dead, see? And Hixon’s chest got blown out through his bung and he landed on top of me and I took a deep breath and drank about a gallon of his blood. …” He grinned across his plate, speared another slab of lamb, and began chewing. He lifted his glass. “I give you the bloody Huns, may we kill ’em until we run out of ’em!” He finished off his wine and poured the goblet full again.

  “But that’s not the worst thing they’ve done to me. Oh, not by a long shot. They killed my son. Not, let me add, Miss Ransom’s son—my son by my first wife. Battle of Britain, summer of ’forty. Over the Channel. Spitfire pilot.” Benedictus rubbed his nose, sniffed. “Watery grave. Asleep in the deep. Nineteen years old. I hate the bloody Germans. And, gentlemen, I wish you good hunting. If you catch the bastard, spill some blood for old Tash Benedictus.” He belched softly into his napkin. “And spill some more for his son, the late Crispin Anthony Benedictus.”

  He wiped his eye with the napkin, then looked around the table with a defiant expression on his round face.

  Then, later on, there was the unpleasant business of the serving girl and the teapot. Cassidy guessed that there was a staff of at least five. Porter, the chauffeur and jack of all trades; a kind of butler who had served the lamb, carved it, presented the wine, and supervised the two girls who did the rest of the serving; and somewhere there was presumably a cook. It was the younger of the serving girls, who seemed to be twenty at the most and probably just out of high school, she of the spotty complexion and the washed-out mousy brown hair, she of the starched gray uniform and stiff white apron—it was she who ran afoul of the teapot, which in this event contained the coffee.