Smart Moves

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “See here,” he said, his cheeks turning red, “if you’re from one of those collection agencies, I won’t put up with your breaking into my room. Just give me the bill and I’ll make partial payment and the rest when the show I’m in …”

  “Why did you write those letters?” I said, ready to push him back down. He bounced as if to try again and sat back.

  “I don’t understand.” He almost wept.

  “Neither do I, but if you answer some questions, one of us may be able to figure things out. The letters?”

  “For the movie,” he said.

  “The movie?”

  “Columbia Pictures,” he said with mock exasperation. “They hired me.”

  “Columbia Pictures hired you to threaten Albert Einstein?”

  I had dealt with actors before, all kinds, even looney ones who didn’t make sense and loonier ones who did, so I was prepared for a long morning, but I didn’t want it any longer than it had to be. I tried to look angry and impatient. Maybe I succeeded.

  “Yes,” Albanese bleated. “I was hired to star in a two-reel short, Axes to the Axis. I was a deluded young American who threatens Albert Einstein. After meeting Einstein, I learn the error of my ways and turn in the Fifth Columnists.”

  “That is a …” I began and then changed direction. “They actually shot this movie?”

  “Yes, in a loft near the Village,” cried Albanese. “I say, I really can do an American accent quite well. I really can. Listen, ‘Can one of you guys stop talking and hand me the catchup?’”

  “Yeah,” I said. The accent stunk. “Why did you actually have to write the letters?”

  “Authenticity, verity,” he explained. “The camera actually filmed me as I wrote.”

  I had a feeling Columbia wasn’t at the bottom of this, but it was damned hard to believe that Nazis or anyone else had actually gone through with making a movie, just to set up a simple-minded fall guy like Albanese. “How did the movie come out?” I asked.

  “I haven’t seen it yet,” Albanese said, trying to stand up again. This time I didn’t stop him. “The editing takes time, but Mr. Povey said that as soon …”

  “Who is Mr. Povey?”

  Albanese walked over to the mirror in the bathroom and his voice echoed back, “The director, Gurko Povey. He came here to escape the Nazis. He’s done magnificent films in Europe.”

  “Name one you’ve seen,” I said, following him to the bathroom. “No, I’ll make it easier. Just name one.”

  Albanese paused in his examination of his hair but didn’t look away from his reflection as he threw his hands out and sighed with undigested contempt for my lack of knowledge of the European cinema. “I don’t remember exactly,” he said. “Something to do with Grungecht or Groomlicht or something like that. They’re all in German.”

  “Was someone on Gurko Povey’s crew a big guy with close-cropped white hair?” I asked, watching him watch himself.

  “That’s a reasonable description of Mr. Povey himself. I tried calling him Herr Povey but he preferred the Anglicized form of address.”

  “Naturally,” I said. “So, how many people were involved in making this movie?”

  Albanese finished his inspection of himself and turned to me. He thought he had had enough. “Look here, you break into my room, push me around, ask all manner of ridiculous questions about my career and explain nothing. I’m late for a rehearsal and I can’t be …”

  But he could be. As he tried to walk past me on the “be,” the fingers of my right hand caught his neck.

  “Actor, you are in trouble,” I whispered, watching him turn pink. “Those letters were sent to Albert Einstein. They are threatening letters. And you are an idiot. Now I’m going to let you go and you are going to answer my questions. Try to blink your eyes if you understand.”

  His face was turning white but his eyes fluttered. I took my fingers from his throat and watched him go through the recovery-from-choking routine. He overacted. I felt sorry for him. He had no future in the theater. Movies, maybe.

  “My God,” he gasped, staggering to the bed and flopping back. “My God, you’ve damaged my larnx.” Then something even worse struck him. He sat up, his mouth dropped open, and out came, “Then I’ll probably never see the film. No one will ever see Axes to the Axis.”

  “There probably wasn’t any film in the damn camera,” I said, walking to the bathroom and filling a spotless glass with tepid water. I let the truth sop in and came back with the water. He took it and drank and then gave me the glass. I put it down and waited for more light to dawn in his feeble brain.

  “Then you must be the police or the FBI or something,” he said.

  “I’m ‘or something,’” I told him. “I’m something that wants answers.”

  As it turned out, he was someone who was now quite willing to give me the answers I wanted. Ten minutes later I knew that he could take me to the loft where the film had supposedly been made, that he had a bone or something missing from his hip, which kept him from being drafted, and that he had a small role in an upcoming version of Othello, which was in rehearsal. He gave me rough descriptions of the camera operator and the sound man on Axes to the Axis and promised that he could identify them. In return I promised that Einstein wouldn’t give him the opportunity to play an extended engagement in prison. Albanese thought that was awfully good of me and agreed that when rehearsal was over at six I could meet him. He gave me the address and I let him go.

  I went back to my room and put in a call to Einstein. He answered the phone himself with a “Yes?” and I told him what I had discovered.

  “You believe this Albanese?” Einstein asked softly.

  “Yes,” I said and tried out the description of Povey on him.

  “Who knows?” the scientist said. “It sounds like so many people. Dreams, formulas, these I remember with clarity for decades. I can almost not erase them from my mind. They clutter, come back when I call for something else, but people I forget, faces I forget. They change too quickly. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll keep on this.”

  “Without getting killed.”

  “Without getting killed,” I agreed. “The name of that neighbor of yours, the one across the street, where the FBI is staying. You know it?”

  “His name? No.”

  “I want to get the phone number over there. Is there any way …”

  “The number is Essex three-four-six-nine,” said Einstein immediately. “To me he was Essex three-four-six-nine. It was easier to remember than his name.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Your cold sounds better.”

  “There is improvement,” he said, with a slight sniff.

  We hung up and I called Essex 3469 and on the fifth ring got Spade or Archer. I couldn’t tell which. The line was bad. “Yes,” he said.

  “This is Peters,” I said.

  “His name is Povey,” came the voice. “He’s not German, he’s Hungarian. If he wanted to kill you, he would have.”

  “First name Gurko,” I threw in.

  “Not bad,” he answered appreciatively. “You’ve been talking to the actor. We thought it would take you a couple of days to track him down.”

  The window was still broken and I had till midnight before Carmichael the house detective put up the NO TRESPASSING sign. I needed help.

  “It’s been nice chatting with you, Peters,” the voice crackled.

  “Hold it,” I shouted. “If you know about Albanese and Povey, why don’t you pull them in, lock Povey up? I could have been killed. Einstein could get killed.”

  “Maybe half a million people or more can get killed in this war,” he said gently. “We pull in one Povey and lose a network, a whole bunch of spies. We’ve got our eyes on him, nearsighted though they may now be. Look, I’ve got to get back to Archer for lunch. We’re watching Einstein for you. Go ahead and chase Povey, maybe nail him. You’ve got no connection to the Bureau or the police. They’ll figure
you for what you are, a private detective on a case.”

  “I could get killed,” I repeated.

  “Soldiers are dying every day over two oceans,” he said without sympathy. “Anything else?”

  “What’s the name of the guy whose house you’re in?”

  “May, Stephen P. May. Why?”

  “Does Essex three-four-six-nine sound easier to you?”

  “Goodbye, Peters,” he said and hung up.

  I adjusted my shoulder holster, checked my .38, put on my jacket, and looked in the mirror. I looked like an extra in Little Caesar, one of Arnie Lorch’s boys. I took off the holster, put it back in my suitcase, and hid the pistol in the light fixture again. The hell with it. I had nothing I could think of to do before six, so I went to the Paramount matinee, ate popcorn and watched Bob Hope get chased by spies. I didn’t like the part where the big blonde in the movie gets killed with a knife hidden in a fake snowball while she sings, “Palsy-Walsy.” It wasn’t funny. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be. A lot of the jokes were lost. The Paramount was filling with girls in short skirts, who should have been in high school on a Thursday afternoon. The girls weren’t interested in Bob Hope. They were interested in talking.

  When the movie ended, the girls, hundreds of girls, let out a scream. With the lights on I looked around. I was the only male in the theater. Hell, I was the only adult in the theater except for Gurko Povey, who sat absolutely still about ten rows behind me. He was wearing a white suit. He didn’t want to be missed. Our eyes met. It was not love at first sight. His hands were folded on his chest and I wondered if he was hiding a snowball with a knife in it. I smiled at him. He didn’t smile back, but the girl behind him, her hair done up in curls and a white ribbon, thought I was leering at her. She curled back her lip in distaste, nudged her sorority sister and they both looked at me. I shrugged and pointed at Povey. They looked at him while music started on the stage and Ziggy Elman trumpeted “My Little Cousin.” I kept looking back at Povey over my shoulder. The son-of-a-bitch didn’t blink. His hair looked even whiter in the theater light, especially with the white suit he was wearing. I was missing the show and the girls were getting restless. One girl on my right who was probably about thirteen but could have passed for sixteen, if she hadn’t been wearing so much makeup, shoved her elbow into my ribs and hyperventilated, “He’s coming. Oh, my God. He’s coming.” Then she looked at who she had poked and got a little frightened.

  “He’s coming,” I said.

  She pulled away from me into the corner of her seat and looked at the stage. From the reaction in the crowd one might have expected the second coming of the Messiah. The girls stood up, hundreds of them, but Povey didn’t. I lost sight of him in the mob. In the noise he could have shot me with a machine gun and no one would have noticed or cared. I turned around, slouching to protect my back but not my head, and listened to Frank Sinatra sing “You’ll Never Know.” The kid next to me was crying. It was a religious experience. When a group in front of me parted for a second like the Red Sea, I caught a glimpse of Sinatra. He was wearing a grey suit with big shoulders. He looked skinny and the big bow tie on his neck made him look even skinnier. He held on to the microphone and sang, his eyes darting around at the wave of fluffy-sweatered response to each line. He looked as puzzled by the crowd as I was. Then the sea closed. I crouched and made my way down to the aisle, excusing himself as I went, catching knees in the face, clunks on the head, and comments like “Dirty old …,” “Some kind of …,” “Masher.” The girl who said “Masher” actually screamed it, but no one could hear her over the roar of applause and other shrieks as Frankie ended his song and said “Thank you.”

  When I made it to the aisle, I stayed low. A few girls glanced at me but they weren’t going to miss a second of Frankie, who launched into “The Continental.” I scuttled to the back of the theater and stood up looking for the seat where Povey was sitting. In this game, I wanted to be behind him and I wanted him to know it. The problem was that I didn’t have a gun and I was sure that he did. I spotted his head of white hair when Sinatra finished his fifth song, thanked us all, and left the stage. The crowd called for him, screamed for him, wept for him, but Tommy Dorsey adjusted his glasses, cradled his trombone, and tried to explain that they had a schedule and two more shows to do that day. The girls were not sympathetic, but after a while they calmed down to whimpers. When Dorsey began to play, Povey turned and looked directly at me, no hesitation. I would have felt better if he had smiled. I would have felt angry, but he didn’t smile. He just stared at me unblinking. It scared hell out of me, but I smiled at him, turned, and went through the exit door as Buddy Rich went mad on the drums and distracted the female teen army.

  It was raining on Times Square, raining and dark. Thunder clapped and I went over my choices. I could try to follow Povey, but he would be ready for that, probably even wanted it. I could get away from him if he was going to keep following me, that wouldn’t be a problem. Or I could hide in some doorway or alley and jump out at him and have it out in front of two or three thousand people running past in the downpour. None of the possibilities appealed to me. I decided to go get that shoulder holster and then have the meeting with Povey. I turned left instead of right in case Povey was not alone. Left took me away from the direction of the Taft. I ran down a street, I think it was Forty-fourth, and looked back over my shoulder. No one was following me. The rain had cleared the street of most pedestrians, though there were a few with umbrellas. No one was running behind me. I kept running and made another turn. The sky went mad and I ducked, soaking, into a small delicatessen.

  The place was packed with people nibbling the minimum and waiting for the rain to let up. I spotted a stool open at the counter and went for it, just beating out a mailman who muttered something under his breath. I pretended not to hear him and straddled a stool that faced the door. There was no wall behind me but I wasn’t Wild Bill Hickok either.

  “Shoot,” came a woman’s voice. I looked up at the scrawny waitress, who had her pencil and pad poised as she waited. I grabbed the menu and ordered the chopped liver on rye and a Pepsi.

  “Check,” she said and shuffled away.

  I watched the door, smelled the food and bodies seeping from the rain, and felt sleepy, but I had miles to go before I slept and a promise to keep. Besides, I was starting to get angry, damned angry. I was angry at the FBI for not helping me. I was angry at the Nazis for everything, and I was angry at myself for that moment of fear back at the Paramount. I wrapped it all together in my gut and got it ready as a present for Gurko Povey. When the sandwich came, I bolted it down fast, keeping my elbow in to avoid knocking over an asthmatic woman on my right and a short guy on my left who grunted every time he took a bite. The chopped liver was terrific. I ate it, my pickle, and all the fries, finished my Pepsi, burped appreciatively, and sloshed my way back to the street after paying my bill.

  The rain had let up but somewhere over Jersey the thunder roared. The sky was still dark, maybe even darker. I trotted up Fifth Avenue and turned west again on Fiftieth. Thunder had decided on a return visit to Manhattan when I ducked under the Taft’s canopy and ran up the steps and into the lobby. I was breathing hard as I looked around for Povey. He wasn’t there. I went to the desk to check for messages. Sudsburry was on duty. We acted as if we didn’t know each other as he checked my box and handed me an envelope.

  “Life gets tedious, don’t it,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said and turned to another customer.

  I tore open the envelope and read: TRY TO FORGIVE ME. PAULINE. I stuffed the letter into my damp pocket and went for the elevator. I had a gun to get, an actor to meet, and a scientist to save. I felt like telling somebody but there wasn’t anybody to tell except the little woman operating the elevator. What the hell. Maybe this was a lifelong resident of the big city who would be happy to cluck a little sympathy for a visitor. The elevator came to a stop and the doors opened.

  “You wa
nt to hear something?” I said to the woman as I stepped forward into the corridor.

  “Sure,” she said, looking up at the flashing lights of her elevator panel, her yellow hair piled high and stiff, her dreams someplace else. “How about a few bars of something from Die Fledermaus?”

  The doors closed and I was alone in the hall with the last echo of New York sarcasm to keep me company. I left a trail of wet prints on the way to my room. Thunder shook the building as I opened the door and stepped into the darkness. A crack of lightning turned the hotel across the street white for an instant, and I thought I saw or felt something in the room. The room went dark. I was a target against the hall light. I kicked the door shut and tried not to breathe. I thought I heard someone else breathing. It might have been someone in the next room or my own breath echoing from some corner. But it wasn’t, and I knew I didn’t have a chance in China of getting to the .38 in the ceiling light before Povey took target practice on my bouncing body. I sensed a figure on the bed. I didn’t have time to wait for my eyes to adjust. I took a chance—a step forward and a leap onto the bed. I felt flesh and smelled something like a men’s locker room.

  The guy beneath me let out a yowl of pain and twisted to his right, breathing cigar-stale breath in my face. His elbow caught my jaw and I rolled onto the floor. He gurgled and went off the bed, but didn’t get more than a step away toward the door when I scrambled over the bed and caught him from behind. I had my right arm around his neck and a look of pure delight on my face, which I was happy no one could see. A look like that can get ten years at the coo-coo farm.

  “No, no,” he cried, and recognition pulsed through me. I let him go and reached for the light switch. It clicked on.

  “Shelly,” I said, looking at the crumpled, chubby figure on the floor. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Being assaulted, assaulted,” he told the wall as he adjusted his thick glasses, realized he was looking the wrong way, and found me. “Assaulted,” he repeated, reaching up with a pudgy right hand to straighten the hair he did not have on top of his head. I’d seen him do that before, which had led me to the conclusion that Shelly had once not been bald. There he sat, panting and patting. He wore a dark suit, properly rumpled, and a tie coming loose at the collar. He waved my hand away and tried to get up by himself. He grunted, failed and reluctantly let me help him. Shelly Minck belonged back in Los Angeles with his dental office in the Farraday Building. I rented a small room off of Shelley’s office and maintained a cooperative arrangement. He messed up messages to me and I complained about the unsanitary conditions of his dental practice.