Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

  “Well, he’s alive, he’s out there somewhere. He may know you’re here. … We don’t know what the hell he’s going to do next—”

  “Kiss me, Lew. Please, just kiss me.”

  He held her and kissed her and when they stopped he said: “See, nothing has changed. …” Or had he only thought it? She murmured: “Kiss me again, kiss me twice.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CASSIDY WAS TOUCHING HER ELBOW, steering her through the crowd toward the table, when he noticed a rather bulky, shortish man standing behind MacMurdo, who was deep in conversation with Harry Madrid. There was something familiar about the man’s back, the slightly tight fit of his dinner jacket, the way he listed slightly to port.

  While Cassidy watched, the man, who had a cigar in one hand and a martini in the other, lurched unsteadily toward MacMurdo’s back, reached out to steady himself, and poured his martini on the Colonel. All over the Colonel. It seemed to be a very large martini, a trick glass, bottomless, a joke in questionable taste.

  MacMurdo leaped up, knocking over his own drink, turning, his face an empurpled mask of rage. Surprise. “What the fucking hell!” He was spinning around, tipping his chair over. People at nearby tables were noticing in a languid New York way, quietly, but beginning to stare. MacMurdo was grabbing his napkin and mopping at his coat front. “Jesus Christ, man, anything more you’d like to pour on me? A Thermos? Bottle of fucking wine? Goddammit!”

  Terry Leary was regarding the scene with an amused detachment, his narrow mustache giving the effect of a man with two simultaneous smiles, one piggybacking. The drunk tottered toward MacMurdo, reaching out to assist him in some unimaginable way, the result being to add a sprinkling of cigar ash to the sodden clothing. He wore a tux with a stiff wing collar, still clutched the empty martini glass. “Look there, old man,” he said, reached out and dislodged a large green olive from the breast pocket of MacMurdo’s jacket.

  “Get your hands off me!” MacMurdo bellowed. “Just back off, dammit.”

  “Well, really!” the drunk said, his back still toward Cassidy. Karin had moved away and taken her seat next to Leary.

  Leary looked up and smiled at the interloper.

  “Young sir,” Leary said, “did you spill your drink on my friend?”

  The drunk turned, drew himself up to his full five-eight, and composed his round pink face. He wore a shocked expression, his eyebrows arching toward the pale, straw-colored hair that drooped across his forehead. The light caught, flashed, reflected, in the circle of glass dropping from his right eye, dangling at the end of a black ribbon. …

  With an awesome dignity, fumbling his monocle back into his eye, he spoke.

  “Not me, most definitely not me! The fault is other than mine. Some other chap back there, a waiter d’you think? Some blighter bumped into me. …” He shrugged, the picture of slandered innocence.

  Cassidy advanced, threw his arms around the drunk in a bear hug.

  “Nicholson! You old bastard! So the Jerries didn’t get you after all?”

  “Jerries? Not me, not me! I daresay it was some other bloke they got. The good die young but Nicholson endures!” He blinked and the monocle dropped away again. “Why, Lewis, old fish! It’s you. … Lewis!” He stuck the monocle back in his eye.

  “The last time I saw you, Not Me, you know what you were doing?”

  “Well, the old gray matter isn’t what it once was—”

  “You and P. J. Pilkington were pinching that vase from the Metropolitan—”

  “Not me,” he said, shaking his head. “It was Pilkington, if you recall. Old Pilkers. Frightful ass.”

  “Jesus Christ,” MacMurdo muttered. “It’s you. Nicholson. The last survivor of a gaudy and unnecessary age. I might have known. You know this asshole, Cassidy?”

  “And we weren’t actually pinching the vase, Lewis. I mean to say, I worked at the Met, I was doing, you know, thing. Research, that’s the word.”

  “And I was driving the getaway car!”

  “Back in ’thirty-eight, was it, Lewis? By gadfrey, I think it must have been. Seven long years ago, Lewis. Lots of water under the bridge since then. It’s a different world, Lewis. A dashed different world, I’m sorry to say. We’ve entered the age of the extremely Common Man. Demoralizing and thing. Distressing. Both.”

  “Yes, Colonel, I do indeed know this man.” Cassidy looked at Not Me. “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”

  Not Me Nicholson had made a career, a life, out of being a friend in need, a pal in search of a party, an absolutely fatuous ass with deep pockets, a ready smile, and an infinite capacity for taking pains to ensure he knew from where the next drink was coming. From early on, as he told the story, growing up the son of an English father and an American mother in London’s Mayfair, he was a monumental fuck-up.

  “I think my overall performance may have given rise to the term actually,” he used to say. “I fucked up in my nanny’s arms. In the nursery, I was always the little tyke who managed to get his shit in his hair. I fucked up in St. James’s Park in my pram. I went on to fuck up at Eton, then further enriched my growing legend at Balliol—which is Oxford, Cassidy, you cretinous nit. It is not immodest, I think, for me to speculate that Oxford will eventually have my brain for scientific analysis. Assuming, of course, that it can be found. Well, there I was, always the one with the blotted copybook. Positively blackened was the old copybook, truth to tell.

  “Well, dash it all,” he would go on, “my sorry story is that I was quite naturally singled out for accusation every time the old souffle collapsed. By the laws of nature, by the beard of Zeus, I was not literally responsible for most of the cock-ups which, I admit, would occur in my immediate vicinity with alarming frequency. No one, I promise you, was more alarmed than I. The words most often heard on my lips were, ‘Not me!’ Thus the appellation which has clung to these weary shoulders of mine. I wear it like a badge of courage. My constituency is the army of the falsely accused.”

  Thus, early on, Archibald Grandison Nicholson became Not Me Nicholson. Through the years the moniker had served him well. As Nicholson said, “Not Me has been a dashed fine ice-breaker with the available crumpet. And let’s admit it, I can use all the ice-breaking assistance I can get.”

  Not Me was on the short side, impeccably tailored though he had a pronounced weakness for purple hosiery; he wore a monocle like his father and combed his dishwater blond hair with goo from Trumper. He was, on the whole, a bit of a toff though Cassidy had never actually seen him wear either a top hat or spats. He was well connected. He played polo with Royals, lost his share at Biarritz and Monte. Generally it could be said that Not Me Nicholson was a relic of another age.

  Cassidy met him back in ’37 at a party at the Metropolitan Museum where Not Me had somehow finagled a subcuratorial position thanks to his mother’s family’s longtime financial generosity. Opposites attracted, as it turned out, and the two young men had become good friends. Things had gone from bad to worse, culminating in the scavenger hunt that had involved the pinching of a Roman vase. All a lark, Not Me had explained to the proper authorities and, miraculously, with Terry Leary intervening, Not Me and Pilkers Pilkington and football hero Cassidy had escaped without making the newspapers. That had been in the summer of ’38, when Karin had been shooting a picture on the West Coast.

  Not Me returned to England in ’39 because somewhere along the way Pilkers had taught him to fly a plane. “Maybe I’ll become one of those fly-boy chappies,” Not Me had speculated. “I’m made of very stern stuff. Deep inside, y’know. Stuff of heroes, in point of fact. There was a Nicholson at Waterloo, for instance.”

  Back in ’40 or ’41 somebody had mentioned Not Me, a rumor went round that he’d been killed during the Battle of Britain. Somehow it made sense, it was the kind of romantic, quixotic end you might have prophesied for a fellow cut from the cloth that had produced Not Me. Cassidy had reflexively thought of Not Me when Tash Benedictus had spoken of his son’s d
eath in the skies over the Channel. It was just one of those sad things. He hadn’t expected ever to see Not Me Nicholson again.

  MacMurdo had calmed down, recaptured his good humor. He had draped one huge arm around Not Me’s shoulder and weighed him down into a chair Terry Leary had commandeered from another table.

  “Dammit, Gizmo,” MacMurdo was saying as Not Me smiled a trifle faint-heartedly, as if he half expected MacMurdo to turn violent at any moment, “it’s just like old times.” He looked from Terry to Cassidy to Harry Madrid, who seemed on the verge of having a snooze, said: “Not Me’s drunk as a duck and I’m all wet. Jesus, it takes me back. There I was out in the drink, trying to get from France back to fucking Jersey in a goddamn Brit dinghy—I mean a dinghy, some damn thing left over from Dunkirk, I’m all by my lonesome, the outboard motor conks out, I’m takin’ on water and I’m bailin’ with a coffee can, contemplating an early and watery grave. I’m dressed up in honest-to-God SS kit, lookin’ like the worst Nazi in creation, and it’s foggy as a bitch. … I’m a man whose jig was up yet again. …” MacMurdo looked around the faces again, then back at Not Me. “When all of a sudden, through the fog comes this wimpy little spotlight and I hear another outboard putt-putting along. And this voice like something out of a musical comedy says, ‘I say there … you drowning chappie … Is that you, Colonel MacMurdo? Oh, you, chappie … need a lift?” MacMurdo’s laughter boomed. Heads turned. “And it was old Not Me! He was running the operation for MI5, God only knows why, and get this—he’d drunk himself silly that night and got to wondering about two in the A.M. where the hell MacMurdo was, wasn’t he supposed to be back by now? So, drunk as a lord, he staggered off and found a little boat and set out in the general direction of France looking for me! Well, I was a goner without Gizmo here stumbling across me. … He was feelin’ no pain and I was frozen damn near to death, he pulled me into his boat and we watched mine sink, and then he looked at me, and he says, “Now, I set out from Jersey. You wouldn’t know where it is from here, I suppose?” MacMurdo grinned hugely at the memory. “We were so damned turned around, we didn’t know which way was up. So we hung on until morning and thank God the fog cleared off and there was Jersey, about three hundred yards away. … Nobody knew what the hell to make of us, Not Me with his monocle and flask, me in my SS getup. … By God, war is hell, Gizmo!”

  The evening broke up not long after that. Harry Madrid had given MacMurdo a thorough rundown on the Maine expedition. MacMurdo had said he’d talk to Cassidy about their next moves tomorrow. Grabbing Cassidy’s hand, pumping it, MacMurdo said: “Great work, pard. We’re gonna get our man, I know it, sure as shootin’.”

  Harry Madrid was tired and heading home. Terry Leary told Cassidy he looked like he was out on his feet. Cassidy felt funny about leaving Karin: it seemed to him that they should go home together, back to the apartment on Washington Square, that life would then be normal. It only went to show you how tired he was. She was still Manfred Moller’s wife. But … but he kept hoping that the Past was back there, trying to break through. …

  Terry read his mind. “Don’t worry, amigo. I’m taking care of her. We’re gonna get this figured out. Listen, you okay? Harry was telling quite a story.”

  “It was quite a time,” Cassidy said. “Is she all right?”

  Leary shrugged. “Physically fine. Otherwise, who the hell knows? I catch her looking at me sometimes, I wish I could just grab her and shake her, say Karin, for chrissakes, it’s me, Terry Leary, I was the best man when you married Lew—so cut the shit and tell me what’s going on here. … But I don’t, I know all about the rules. … But, Lew, why can’t we tell her the truth? Oh, I know, I know. Rolf and I have talked about it, he’s told me. … We’ve got to let her come to it herself, then it will be real, it’ll mean something. He’s the doctor. So I behave.” He smiled. “So I’m keeping her safe, amigo. Don’t worry.”

  “I want her, Terry.”

  “I know you do.”

  Cassidy leaned over her chair, told her he’d see her the next day. He kissed her cheek. She nodded. “I’m glad you’re safe,” she whispered.

  Not Me sauntered up as Cassidy was preparing to depart.

  “Got a bunk for me, old lad?”

  Not Me Nicholson sat on the couch that would be his bed and swirled brandy in his snifter, yawning. He’d slipped his jacket over the back of a chair but his tie and wing collar were still presentable and his purple braces matched his socks.

  “Awfully kind of you,” he said through the yawn.

  “I thought you were dead,” Cassidy said. He was sitting in one of the big chairs, slumped low, ankles crossed far away. The windows were open to a balmy, damp night.

  “Not me. It was Pilkers who died. He was flying off my wing. Gave me a big grin and a wave, silly old Pilkers. His cockpit was full of smoke then, I couldn’t see him anymore, the Hurricane just peeled off, down he went. ME 109 got him. I got all sentimental and went after the swine, chased him damn near to France.” He yawned again, shaking his head. The monocle came loose and he just let it hang there.

  “You get him?”

  “Not me. He got tired of my hounding him, he came after me with blood in his eye. We were both damn low on fuel so he put thirty or forty rounds into my fuselage, blew out the fuel line and all sorts of other things that are more or less imperative if you want to stay airborne. Well, I seldom knew what the hell I was doing. He finally tired of the sport and I went down out there somewhere … bloody cold and wet. Seems to me I spent the whole damn war cold and wet all the way through. Fisherman chappie picked me up. Turns out I was nicked up a bit. Ending the old dashing-airman routine for me. Somehow we still managed to win the war.” He laughed. “What a farce it all was. Too damn bad about old Pilkers, though. That’s the really shoddy thing about the war, I should think. All the good chaps dying that way.” He took a long, slow puff on his cigar. “One doesn’t cling to life quite so steadfastly any longer. So much of one’s old crowd is gone.”

  “Was MacMurdo’s story on the level, the way you found him in the fog?”

  “Oh, God! More or less, I suppose. It was much deeper into the war, the tide had turned, and I’d been pretty drunk for quite some time. Ever since Pilkers went down. After that the only sensible course seemed to be to stay well into the netherworld until I got the all-clear. But MacMurdo’s story had the ring of relative truth to it. He was a complete head case, of course. Psychotically brave, if you ask me, and lucky beyond imagining. The man actually believes he can control fate by thing, the power of his will. He talks more utter rot than anyone I’ve ever known. With the possible exception of dear lamented Pilkers who was, as I am myself, a coward. That’s what makes Pilkers so much more of a hero, don’t you see? He was always scared, shaking so he couldn’t speak, but he did what he thought he had to do. Fourteen kills, old Pilkers had. Paralyzed with fear the whole damn time. Fool like MacMurdo, he just keeps doing what comes naturally.”

  “You were really in MI5?”

  “Well, Lewis, I had to do something, didn’t I? Nothing much safer than being a spy behind a desk. Always the chance of tripping on the stair, I suppose, or getting eyestrain, but it’s other chappies out there doing the dying. The work suited me.” He sighed deeply, worked on his brandy. “Oh, what a beastly day I’ve had. By the way, I ran into your father in Vienna a couple weeks back. Top of his game, I am here to tell you.”

  “What were you doing in Vienna? Still a spy?”

  “No, it was all the art commission to-ing and fro-ing. Some twit noticed that my dossier mentions my less than distinguished career at the Metropolitan. Ergo, I must know all about art. Hopeless, isn’t it?”

  “You still in the service?”

  “I suppose so. Can’t wait to get out. My demobbing will be a red-letter occasion.” He yawned.

  “So what brings you to New York?”

  “Well, now that bit’s just a trifle murky. But officially I’m liaising with some blighter in Washington.
I’m sort of the lowest man on my totem pole and my chap in Washington has been off on the mountaintop communing and plotting. So I came up here to check on the old bunch, you and Leary, really. Now, Terry hinted to me that you are quite a story yourself. But he was exaggeratedly close-mouthed. Said you could tell me. … I gathered that he is no longer one of New York’s Finest, you are utterly washed up as a footballer, and that your life has been rich with tragedy these past several years. Now can any of this be true? You look fit, a model of rectitude and sobriety—now what’s been happening, Cassers. Do give us the word. …”

  Not Me wasn’t yawning anymore.

  The story came back to life for him as he told Not Me. He had to fight off the emotion, had to take a page from Not Me’s style book. Not Me listened, nodded, poured more brandy, slowly smoked his cigar. Finally Cassidy had come to an end, drained, and fell silent.

  Not Me stirred himself, stretched. “You’ve had a terribly … terribly … well, complicated time of it. And here she is, she actually can’t remember you? Extraordinary. Noel Coward could write a play, couldn’t he? Perhaps he already has. Well, what are you going to do? I mean, you’re trying to catch this appalling Nazi husband of hers … but if she’s still stuck on him, old bean, it seems to me you’ve made matters worse. And then there’s this fantastical minotaur! I mean, really. And you’ve actually met this Manfred Moller—”

  “Well, we weren’t introduced.”

  “Ah, Cassers, how true, how true. He was too busy trying to bury you alive. … My Godfrey, it is a thrilling story. And beautiful movie stars creeping into your bed—”

  “Just the one, Not Me.”

  “Principle remains the same, I daresay. I certainly do wish you all the luck in the world, Cassers. What’s your next move?”

  “There you have me. I’m curious about Benedictus’s role in it, why he lied to me, what he was doing playing the host to Manfred Moller—”

  “Lucky you ran into the downtrodden maid.”