Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

  Popescu gave Karin her tea, made sure she could reach the cookies, then reached up, sank his fingers into the thick curly hair and pulled it off with a thwupp sound. A shining bald dome was revealed, startling to behold, as if Hitchcock had lit it from within by means of a hundred-watt bulb. “Voilà!” he said softly, flipping his hair onto the end table next to Terry Leary’s hat. “You like the cueball look? Well, I went through a spell of hard times couple years back, I took up the wrestling game. Shaved my head so they could call me Barak the Turk. Now I keep it shaved just in case Barak gets a gig.” He stroked his long mustache which curled up on either side of his nose, nearly touching the nostrils. It was strange, the way he didn’t look laughable—even with the absurd mustache and the bullet head. He simply wasn’t a laughable man. He believed in himself, much in the way that Winch believed in himself. Laughter was thereby short-circuited. His hands were hairy, as if to balance the gleaming head. His muscles were huge. Beneath the cape he was wearing a tight T-shirt with horizontal stripes.

  He sat down on the chair across from Karin, who sat on the davenport, watching, transfixed. He sketched out in a few sentences what he understood the position to be regarding her memory loss. “Now, my dear, you’ve had some shock and some cranial damage.” He took her hand and patted it. A wizard, all right. “Either of these, or both, may have occasioned your memory loss. You do want a peek at that past of yours, Karin, is that right?”

  She nodded.

  “Because if you don’t, if you resist this experience, we’re all just wasting our time, right?”

  “I do want to know,” she said. “I’m not afraid, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Good. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I know.”

  “So, I understand you’ve been having dreams, dreams or memories, we don’t really know which. Is that about right?” He sipped his tea, looked at her expectantly with eyes as black and gleaming as Mona Ransom’s.

  “Yes. I have had dreams. Standing by an ocean liner on a pier. I think I recall a man I’m with in the dream.” She was looking down at her hands folded in her lap. “Walking down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square. There’s a huge Christmas tree under the arch, snow falling, I hear children singing carols. …”

  Popescu nodded, stopping her. “All right, fine. Is the tea all right? Cookie? Are you comfortable, Karin? Are you feeling relaxed?”

  “Yes. I’m fine.”

  “Good,” Popescu said. “Well, this is all lovely, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. She wanted to get on with it.

  “I’m just going to ask you to look at the old wall clock over there. An old Regulator. Schoolroom clock. Just relax, Karin. Don’t worry about getting hypnotized, don’t try to get hypnotized, just keep watching the pendulum and listen to my voice, listen to what I’m saying, I’m going to describe some of these scenes of yours, the way the gulls swoop down and float back and forth, back and forth, like the pendulum, swooping and gliding, think of the arcs of their flight, the sound of the waves lapping at the hull, just steadily lapping and slapping at the liner’s hull … and the lights of that huge Christmas tree under the arch, the way the lights twinkle through the falling snow, the sound your boots make crunching in the snow, you’re so happy, it’s Christmas, a brisk night, a clear night, the snowflakes drifting slowly down and they catch in your long eyelashes, the snow is so cold and clean. … Do you recall that night, Karin?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, sounding very tired. “The snow, yes, I remember that. Yes.”

  “And were those happy times? Very happy times?”

  “The happiest days of my life, yes, they were, so very happy. … The Christmas tree …”

  “That’s fine, Karin. That’s a lovely happy memory. Was it nice being in New York? Were you alone? With somebody? What made you so happy, Karin?”

  “I was with someone. … That’s why I was so happy. … Someone I loved …”

  Cassidy squatted on the sidewalk and pushed a rusted toy car back and forth, making a road in the mud. It was a cast-iron car with chipped green paint. It was going to last longer than the Chevy Cliff Howard was working on at the Ocean View Motor Court. Terry Leary leaned against the rented Plymouth smoking one cigarette after another. The evening thunder was rolling in off the Pacific and you could almost feel yourself corroding from the salt on the wind. A bottle of beer dangled from Terry Leary’s free hand. A train rattled along the tracks somewhere, a clattering, lonely sound just like in a movie. The lights of Los Angeles had turned the sky pink to the east but it was dead quiet in Santa Monica.

  War criminal …

  The idea was like a drop of acid, burning at his brain. And Terry Leary’s insistence that she was a fake, that she wasn’t his Karin anymore. And the empty, blank look in her eyes when she looked at Manfred Moller. It was as if she’d dropped him by parachute into an arctic waste and flown away, never to return. War criminal … What had she done at the clinic? What? Or didn’t it matter in the brave new postwar world?

  And who killed Rolf? The thought that had crossed his mind earlier …

  One of the survivors of the little clinic in the Hartz Mountains.

  Some POW who had survived.

  Who’d have a better motive?

  He looked up at the sound of the screen door creaking open. He’d lost track of time and there she was.

  Karin stood on the porch with the rips in the screens and looked out at him, stood staring as if she were trying to memorize the night, the moment, his face. She held on to the railing, came down the two steps to the sidewalk. Behind her Popescu loomed up, took shape in the doorway to the house. He was still holding his teacup.

  She came toward him, looking at his face with an expression he couldn’t immediately identify. But he knew he’d seen it before. Then she touched his face, ran her fingertip down his cheek.

  “Lew,” she whispered. “You should have told me. What is it they say? You should have refreshed my memory?” She smiled. “We’ve got to start making up for lost time. Another movie cliché.” She took his hand. “You should have told me. Someone should have told me.”

  “You remember?”

  “More will come back to me now. But I remember what I was doing on that pier … who I saw the Christmas tree with that night in New York. …”

  She blinked at the tears streaking her cheeks.

  “My husband.” She leaned forward, pressing her face against his chest. “Lew Cassidy.”

  “Karin.”

  “It all makes sense now, Lew. Everything I’ve been feeling about you … it’s natural, it’s the way it used to be. I’ve fallen in love with you, I’ve been falling in love with you all over again. …”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I want to start living my life again.”

  “When do you want to begin?”

  She grinned and took his arm and Terry Leary held the car door.

  She lay in his arms for a long time before they finally made love. First they talked in low whispers and lay quietly and shared a sense of wonder at what had happened, how they’d been brought together, how she’d survived the war, how something like Fate had led them to this moment. She was full of questions about details of her past, of their life together, and now he was free to tell her everything. And with every story she came further toward him through time, everything he said triggering more memories in her, until she was completing sentences for him. He told her of how he’d heard of her death during the raid on Cologne. She said her memories of that event were mostly a jumble of impressions, vague pictures of fire and heat and crumbling walls and a steady cascade of incredibly racketing, overpowering, calamitous noise. And heat. It was all a blur and she whispered that she hoped to God it stayed that way. She talked about their wedding up at Lake Placid, the banks of flowers Reichsminister Goebbels had sent, the movies she’d made … the life they’d lived.

  “It was all so close to the surface of my mind,” she said. She
rested her head in the crook of his arm, stroked his fingers while she talked. “It was right there, waiting, and that strange, gentle man just let it come out. Remember how I got in the car that day and somehow knew the way to your apartment? Well, it was all just sitting there waiting for me to reach in and get it. … Lew, I remembered where you lived because I lived there, too, I knew that place. … Do you know what that means to me? I remember you, I remember everything about you, everything we did together. Now we have the whole world before us, Lew, we’ve got another chance, we get to live our life together again. It’s hard to believe, I don’t even begin to grasp it yet, but we’re both here, together … a miracle.”

  “And the war is over,” Cassidy said. “Karin, I lived with the fact that I’d never see you again. Night after night I felt the panic, knowing you were gone forever … and now here you are.”

  “But the war isn’t over yet,” she said. “Our war won’t be over until MacMurdo’s war is over. … We’ve got to get him out of our lives. We won’t be free until he’s gone—”

  “What is it he has of yours?” He couldn’t bring himself to ask more than that.

  “Later, my darling. Later.”

  She was ready to make love and they took a long time, an act of love and of cherishing, of thanksgiving. You knew that you never got a second chance. But sometimes the laws of nature went awry. Sometimes you did get a second chance. There was nothing more valuable in life than a second chance.

  And when she slept, her hips pushed against him, her face calm and untroubled, he lay back and watched the light of morning come. When it was over, when MacMurdo had wrapped up Moller and Benedictus, when he could stop thinking about Karin working in Rolf Moller’s clinic—then he had an emerald he wanted to give her, green and full of their new life.

  It was amazing how Popescu, the Great Magnetico, had done it.

  His gentleness had brought it all back so easily.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  HARRY MADRID DIDN’T LOOK RIGHT in Los Angeles. Almost impossibly he’d looked much better, much more at home, in Maine. Now he was squinting in the hazy sunshine, his skin pale and parchment dry. He was digging in his ear with a little finger trying to dislodge wax. He needed some work done on the crop of white bristles in the ear. He was glad to be off the train at last but he wasn’t happy about being in Los Angeles.

  Cassidy was filling him in on Mona Ransom and the party and Manfred Moller and the way the deal was working out. He told him about Ray Chandler seeming to know what was going on and Benedictus seeming to have notes regarding V, which would make you think that Benedictus might be Brian Sheehan all right but he certainly wasn’t Vulkan, which left them back in familiar territory—not knowing who Vulkan was. He told him about the Englishman Benedictus was waiting for and he told him what they were waiting to find out—the details of the auction.

  And finally he told Harry Madrid about Terry Leary’s warnings about Karin, told him about Popescu and the results of hypnotizing Karin. Harry’s seamed, impassive face cracked into a broad smile. “That’s swell, son,” he said, “that’s just damn fine news. So she’s all right, she’s back … damn fine news, Lewis. Now you’ve got something you’ll fight to keep from losing. That’s the way life should be. You lost that after Miss Squires got killed. Now you’ve got it back.”

  “Harry, I fought to keep from losing Cindy. I did what I thought I had to do. … Hell, Harry, it just wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stop her from dying …”

  “Well, you got a second chance at that, too.”

  “I don’t want to lose her,” Cassidy said.

  “I know, son, I know.”

  When the telephone rang that afternoon it was Mona Ransom at the other end. She was whispering, her voice insistent, edged with the filigree of something like hysteria. She was teetering and he had to strain to keep her coherent, to keep her under control. He heard it all in her voice: it was all beginning to come apart. Or maybe it was all just beginning. Sometimes you couldn’t tell if the signs were good or bad. You just found out later.

  “I’m afraid,” she whispered. “It’s Tash, he’s so tense, and I think he’s onto something. He knows something is going on that he doesn’t know about. He hates that. He’s very suspicious of me, he accused me of having an affair with you. … I acted halfway guilty, I’d rather have him believe that than the truth. Now he’s getting ready to head up to the place in the mountains.” She stopped and took a drink of something.

  “The mountain place,” he said. He knew the story, how Tash Benedictus had killed the men who were using Mona, had burned down their lodge, and had built one of his own on top of the ruins. “Go on.”

  “He’s loading the car now. We’re all going. Your German, Tash, and me. He’s making the German do the driving.”

  “How’s Moller? Has he given any of it away?”

  “No, he’s the same as ever.” Ice cubes rattled in her glass. “He hasn’t even mentioned his meeting with you to me. He’s a solitary man. He acts like he doesn’t need another living soul.”

  “Well, it’s an act. There’s one person he needs.”

  “And the Englishman Tash has been waiting for, I think we’re expecting him tonight. At the mountain place.”

  “Mona, this Englishman, could he be Vulkan? Have you picked up any hints?”

  “Look,” her voice with that sharp edge of fear, “I don’t have any idea about that—”

  “It’s okay, Mona. Now, when is the auction taking place? And where?”

  “It’s not decided yet. Listen to me, Cassidy, listen—I’m afraid. Once Tash gets me up in the mountains I don’t know what he’ll do. He’s worried, he’ll be drinking, I’m afraid of what he might do to me. … Do you hear me? I’m afraid he’ll kill me. I’m afraid he’ll get loaded and start thinking about my screwing Moller. … He doesn’t trust me, he never did trust Moller. … What if he kills me? Or Moller, if he’s the one you care about? What then?”

  “Calm down, Mona—”

  “No, no, don’t tell me that. You’ve got to come and get me, you have to.” She was almost in tears. “I held up my end, I did everything you wanted, I got Moller for you. … Now I’m afraid, I don’t want to die, I know Tash, I know what he can do when he gets crazy. … You’ve got to come and get me tonight, I can’t wait any longer, he’s going to be waiting for the Englishman, he’ll be thinking about the auction. … He can be taken by surprise, you can kill him, you said you would—”

  “Mona!”

  “The Englishman is coming tonight.” She began repeating herself, working herself up again. She was almost out of control. “They’ll all be busy looking at what he brings, the loot, oh, Christ, come and get me, kill him, kill him. …” She was sobbing. “Kill him!”

  “Mona,” Cassidy said. “Tell me how to get there.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE RAIN THAT FINALLY BURST out of the days of threatening thunder was already washing out some of the canyon roads by the time Terry Leary and Cassidy left for the mountains. The rain blew across the highway east of San Bernardino and the shoulders were running muddy and soft. The radio said that a storm was building up in the higher mountain elevations. Terry smoked quietly, staring past the thumping windshield wipers. Finally he said: “I’m glad about Karin, amigo. I’m glad I was wrong. … She’s the real thing. She always was. No hard feelings?”

  “Without you we’d never have gone to Popescu. I might never have gotten her back.” He grinned at his partner. “No hard feelings.”

  “Are we crazy to go after Mona?” Leary laughed shortly. “Not that it makes much difference now.”

  “We owe her. Anyway, maybe you don’t, but I do.”

  “Whither thou goest,” Leary said. “But I don’t much like it. These are crazy people. You know that?”

  “I know it. Benedictus, anyway.”

  “Come on, Lew. They’re all nuts. They’re the kind of people who use up other people’s lives. They make their
problems and their craziness everybody’s problems. People die when that goes on.”

  “Nobody’s going to die. We’re going in under cover of the storm, we’re going to rescue Mona because …”

  Leary said: “Why?”

  “Because we’re the heroes, dammit. Then Tash won’t be able to go look for her because the meter’s running on him and his little enterprise. He’s got the auction to run. And then MacMurdo and the Feds take over. They put Tash away, recover the minotaur and the art, Moller either goes over to our side or he disappears, Mona makes her movie, and Karin goes home with me. Music swell, up and out, roll credits.”

  “Sounds easy. We’ll do it blindfolded.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. It doesn’t suit you, cutie.”

  “I’m not a hero,” Terry Leary said. “That’s my problem.”

  “You’ll always be my hero.”

  “Shut up.”

  The storm had finally broken all along the coast and in some ways it was worse than the snow in Maine. This was rain but rain with teeth in it. It blew, it stung, there was nothing of the peace of Maine in it. It soaked through his clothes, drenching and freezing him, as he climbed the rocky, slippery, steep mountainside toward some dim lights glimpsed through the trees.

  The road surface had been on the narrow dividing line between-bad-and worse. The rain was turning to slushy ice when they stopped to take on oil at a wide place in the road called Delmer. The station’s REO tow truck was just pulling out to fetch somebody from a ditch. The afternoon had landed with a crash at about five o’clock. Night came on hard, like part of the storm. The road clung to the mountain, winding upward through the black firs and pines, a black ribbon disappearing in the night.

  Mona had given good directions and he spotted the lodge a couple of hundred feet above through the rain and heavy foliage. Lights were showing dim yellow. They seemed very far away. There were six or seven cars already stuck in mudslides and abandoned on the road below. From where they stood, on a clear night you could probably have seen the glow of Los Angeles, a premiere at Grauman’s Chinese.