A Shadow on the Sun

by Francis Cottam

  Julia carried her purchases to a coffee shop and took off her coat and hat and scarf and flicked through the magazines. There was a basement in the coffee shop and from the steps leading down she could hear plangent chords and a young, female voice. Curious, she gathered her things. It was properly dark now; she looked at her watch. It was a quarter to seven in the evening. Outside, people were picking a careful path over the frozen pavement, bright with purchases, bright with expectation of the season’s joy and the rich colours of their scarves and coats in the falling snowflakes and the yellow pools of light that bathed them from under shop awnings. With her coat and her bags in her arms, Julia descended the stairs and found a table against a wall with a view of a small platform. It wasn’t a stage, didn’t qualify for so grand a description. It was just a raised dais barely big enough to accommodate the performer, seated on a stool with her guitar under a single spotlight. Julia looked around. There were perhaps thirty people in the basement. Most were self-consciously clothed in the monochromatic style started by Juliette Greco and her clique on the Left Bank a few years earlier. Some of the men wore beards. The women wore their hair flat and brushed with a centre parting.

  The singer tuned her guitar with her head bowed over the instrument and her face hidden by a glossy veil of perfectly straight blonde hair. With the tuning accomplished, she lifted her head and smiled without engaging the audience. The smile was for herself. And Julia smiled, reminded of a cocktail bar a few years ago and a world away with Bill, discussing a Bogart movie among cigarette girls in red corsets and berets like the one worn by Veronica Lake. America was so many different places. And it was changing with such accelerating speed.

  The girl began to sing. Her voice swooped histrionically between octaves and the lyrics of the song were, to Julia’s ears, far too self-indulgently confessional. But she was young and the young were self-indulgent, weren’t they? And anyway, her playing was brilliant. Her acoustic guitar filled the space with fresh chords and phrases under the gifted command of her fingers. And sitting there, Julia enjoyed the novelty and sensation of it and the freedom to choose just to be in a place by choice. It was not a freedom she had always enjoyed and it was one she did not believe she would ever take for granted.

  She did not get to see Jack Kennedy that day. She would not get to see him again until the day of the inauguration speech, sitting among an invited audience on Pennsylvania Avenue in a moment frozen by bitter cold and warm with pride and historic promise with her daughter at her side. Late that night she took a flight back to the West and spent almost the entire duration of it worrying about Bill. She had worried about his drinking and his weekend fishing trips for years. There were far too many desolate places now in Bill’s diminishing life. But there was something else to worry about. Something specific and strange and still unexplained.

  The wings of the aircraft were heavy with ice and Julia sat in a lounge and smoked and endured the delay while they chipped off the ice in stubborn black chunks and deliberated in the control tower about whether the flight would take place at all. While she waited, she read an article in one of the magazines she had bought on her shopping trip to Greenwich Village. The magazine was Harper’s Bazaar and the article was about organized crime in Las Vegas. It mentioned two people Julia knew to be clients of Bill’s. The article was flattering about neither of them. She ordered a Bloody Mary from a waitress in the lounge and looked out of the window to where the aircraft stood, weighted by its unwanted freight of ice on the wings. It was a four engine plane and stood floodlit, as men in overalls and sheepskins toiled to ready it for flight and snow spilled from the sky in vicious white flurries. Other passengers sat or paced in the lounge and smoked and drank and watched this ritual through the glass.

  Someone had followed Bill and had observed him as he picnicked with ’Tasha in an orange grove in the San Fernando Valley. Bill seemed convinced that the man had been armed with a rifle. And Julia was sufficiently knowledgeable about Bill’s instincts and prowess as a hunter himself, that she believed him. But Bill seemed genuinely baffled as to who might want to frighten or kill him. As he said himself, he had made far more influential friends over the years, than he had enemies. He had asked around, though. He had done his own research and he had come up with nothing. And then he had asked Sinatra for help.

  ‘Come on, Bill.’

  ‘You know some people, Frank.’

  There was a silence. This was a face-to-face conversation. It took place not over a telephone line but on a golf course, halfway along a fairway to the lush soundtrack of sprinklers. ‘It’s truer to say I know people who know people who know people,’ Sinatra said. He swung his club absently. He looked at the lie of his ball. ‘Anyway. I’ll ask.’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘You should.’

  But nothing.

  So Julia had asked Robert Kennedy. Something very sinister had happened involving the two people she cared about most in the world. And organized crime was Bobby Kennedy’s enduring fascination. She had asked him on the beach at Hyannis Port and he had stared at her for a long moment as the wind off the sea tugged at his thick hair where he wore it long, over his forehead. She began to wonder if he had heard her correctly. She began to wonder if he had heard her at all. He drew a curve in the packed sand they stood on with the heel of a shoe. Then he smoothed over the impression he had made with a sweep of the sole.

  ‘We vetted your known associates when we vetted you, Julia,’ he said. ‘Your friend Bill is clean. He has no gambling debts and no history of narcotic abuse. He does not resort to the services of call girls. I wouldn’t vouch for the scruples of any Hollywood lawyer. Anyone in Hollywood, come to that. ’This was a dig at her. Maybe also subtly at his brother. Even at his father.

  ‘He plays hardball, your friend Bill. But he plays by the rules. And I’m sure he’s right about this. It’s a one off. A crank.’ Bobby had smiled then. ‘Tell me, Julia. Are you still cycling?’

  But she couldn’t just dismiss it.

  The aeroplane bumped on weighted wings through the frozen sky. The cabin grew sour with groans of trepidation and the smell of vomit expelled into sick bags. The cabin crew in their chic pencil skirts and pillbox hats sat strapped in their seats and hugged themselves. It was dark and cold at 6000 feet and the passengers were humble all around her in their helplessness and mortal fear. At least there were no children aboard. At least, that was, none that she had seen. Maybe I should stop worrying about Bill, she thought, and start to worry about myself. In the seat behind her, a man was weeping into a series of paper tissues. She had recognized him in the lounge as a star of one of those buddy cop series that had suddenly and inexplicably become popular on the television. He was an ex-soldier or an ex-surfer or something in the show. An ex-priest? An ex-something. She didn’t watch TV very often. She found it shrill and unengaging.

  She could not dismiss in her mind the danger the incident with Bill had presented to ’Tasha. If the man had been intent on murdering Bill, would he have left a bright, seventeen-year-old potential witness to the crime? You went to the electric chair if you were convicted of murder in the state of California. The voltage didn’t differ whether that was one murder or two. And would a professional killer really care about a pretty teenage victim? Wasn’t it just business to them? ’Tasha had been just as vulnerable as Bill in that sunny October orange grove. She was in Austria. She was skiing in the mountains above Innsbruck, God bless her beautiful, innocent soul. But she had been in danger of her life. Julia knew she had.

  The aeroplane pitched and stuttered then and lost height suddenly and she could hear the groan of the wings and the superstructure and the roar of the engines struggling to churn the icy propellers and keep their human load aloft. But she did not think of crashing. She thought of Innsbruck and of Martin Hamer carrying her over the pass to Switzerland and safety in the partial success of their escape. He had put her down and sat in the meadow and died a short time later convinced t
hat his killer had been Landau, the sharpshooter from the camp.

  ‘Why Landau?’

  ‘Vanity,’ Hamer had said, drowning in blood in the meadow.

  And she had not understood.

  Landau. The aeroplane shook and Julia shivered. The reporter with the yellow smile skulking in the Carlyle lobby had reminded her of him, of Landau, hadn’t he? The camp’s vigilant killer. The lethal sharpshooter in his watchtower, seeing everything.

  She had one more stubborn, uninvited recollection. What a day it had been for memories. And it was not yet quite at an end.

  Through her window, on the wing, Julia could see a propeller blur their path through air and snow, powered by an engine with a coughing, reluctant sound. All four engines were coughing, she thought. And three hours into their flight, they sounded as though they all shared the same, frozen reluctance. She remembered a night-shoot in a fog-bound Pacific bay with the English actor, David Niven. Two boats had collided in the mist and Niven and a stuntman had gone into the sea. The stuntman had drowned. Niven had been hooked, semi-conscious, onto the deck of a rescue craft by his pea-coat collar after several hours in the water.

  It had not been a happy shoot, even before the accident, which was why Julia was there. The success at the box office of The Magnificent Seven had made ensemble pictures suddenly all the rage. But they were a happy illusion, ensemble movies, with their democratic billing on the posters and the idea fostered among their audiences of onset camaraderie. What they actually involved was much squabbling between six or seven principal players all competing to be the real star. Julia’s role, on this occasion, was to make each of the principals believe they shone at least in a crucial scene or two. And then Niven went into the sea.

  Julia had shared a drink with him after dinner a few days later. He was quiet and kept looking up at the stars, immense above the bay, above the ocean. The fog, with them for a stubborn, opaque week, had finally lifted. He was playing a commando in the movie. It was a role she remembered he had played successfully in life. She asked him had he feared he might die in the sea.

  ‘Not feared, darling,’ he’d said. And he’d smiled. He had this English remoteness, Niven, under the charm. Julia thought him a man of enormous calculation. When you spoke to him he would look at you as though seeing and appraising you for the first time in his life. But on this occasion something shattered the charm, for once breached the remoteness, darkened and troubled his face. And he spoke. ‘I should have died in ’43, in France, to tell you the truth,’ he said. His voice was flat. ‘To this day, I don’t know how I got out of that.’ He sipped his drink. ‘Everything since then has rather been icing on the cake. So the answer to your question is no. I don’t fear death at all. I feel I’ve rather lost the right to.’

  Ages ago in a forgotten place on the coast of Mexico, Bill had called David Niven a man possessed of qualities that he considered remarkable. He was another, wasn’t he, marked by the war and its memories? Julia knew what he meant, too. Life owed her nothing, either. She needed to share a truth still untold with her daughter and she wanted to see her daughter raised to adulthood. What parent didn’t wish for that? There was much that she feared. But she did not fear for her own life. Everything since Martin Hamer got her out of the camp had been a life beyond her expectation. Julia Smollen did not fear death in the slightest.

  She yawned; she was tired. It had been a day too much occupied with her own irredeemable past. ‘Icing on the cake,’ she said out loud. She would keep her promise. She would do it after the inauguration. After the inauguration, she would tell her daughter everything. She put her head to one side on her seat. And to the frank astonishment of the passenger seated next to her, she fell at once into a deep and restful sleep.

  Seven

  Bill watched the inauguration on the television as he worked his way through a bottle of vodka taken from the freezer. The freezer had turned the liquor in the bottle viscous and slow. The contents looked almost clumsy departing the neck for his shot glass when he tilted the bottle and poured.

  There was nothing clumsy about the broadcast on the television, though. He thought the whole pageant splendidly elegant. The day in Washington was raw with cold. You could see it knife through the troops of majorettes trying their hardest not to shiver on Pennsylvania Avenue. Plumes of breath played and flared in it from the nostrils of the horses drawing the carriage and carrying the mounted police officers. But the sun was bright in the cold and light shone and bristled on the polished stone and on the proud countenances of high office. And Bill was glad the occasion made such a handsome and ornately detailed spectacle. Julia was there with his god-daughter and he wanted it to be memorable for them. Julia had earned her invited seat and Natasha would be thrilled for her mother, seeing it all herself with the crystalline precision of bright young eyes witnessing history being made.

  The young president looked as natural as a man ever could in a morning coat and a stiff white collar and tie. Ceremony suited him, even with his clean looks and Florida tan. Johnson, next to him on the podium, managed a lean, altogether Texan dignity. Robert Frost was every bit as patrician as they had no doubt planned him to be, reciting the difficult rhythms of his great poem. But the young president looked born to his trappings and to the moment, so nakedly charismatic it was an effort, watching him, to remember to blink, let alone to tear your eyes away from his composed and compelling performance.

  He’s playing himself, Bill thought, awed. But of course, he can afford to. What was that line poor old Scott wrote? The very rich are different from you and me. And he was right, Bill thought. They are. They are easy with the world as their audience and do not flinch without a topcoat in the chill January of their destiny. They more resemble John Fitzgerald Kennedy than they do anyone we might be inclined to know.

  Bill sighed and raised his vodka glass and toasted the television screen. He had known Scott. And having known him, he thought Scott might have enjoyed this august moment of vindication. On the other hand, he’d probably have been too drunk to appreciate it properly. Irony had been beyond his reach by the end. By the end, everything had been pretty much beyond his reach, except for a bottle. That, and a particular quality of maudlin nostalgia which the terminal drunk accepts and welcomes because of the anaesthetic qualities it happens to possess.

  There had come a moment in Scott’s work at which the style had overtaken the substance. He had written about those to whom the same thing tended to happen in life. Bill thought there had been much style at one time about his own life. It was certainly true that his life had glittered, at one time, among a glittering fraternity. But there had never been all that much substance. Certainly there had never been enough of it to make the moment when the substance was subsumed by style a tragic one.

  Bill drank.

  No substance, then. Or not enough substance to count. And not much style, either, these days, to compensate. He had committed too many sordid indiscretions lately to be termed a man of style.

  Bill drank.

  Take the lie he had been obliged to tell Julia. He had told her that Sinatra had looked into whether the weird business in the valley had any wise-guy implications. For the record, Bill didn’t for a moment think it did. But he could not have asked Sinatra to check the matter out for him, one way or the other. Frank had stopped returning his calls months ago, after Bill became abusive towards a favoured guest at one of his house parties. Bill couldn’t even remember why he’d been rude or to whom. But Frank surely could. He always could. Frank was an Italian American who feuded with the bitter obstinacy of a bog Irishman. Since their spat, a lot of party invitations had dried up.

  Bill drank.

  Speeches were being made on the television. Former presidents looked on, statesmanlike and benign. Truman was there. Eisenhower was there, who had won the war in Europe for America. Good old Ike. Plenty of substance there, Bill supposed. You wouldn’t even have to search very hard to find it.

  When it came to po
etry, Bill preferred Eliot to Frost of that now venerable generation of poets he had once in his life taken the time and the trouble to read and even to try to understand. Jesus, he had even met Ezra Pound once, before the war in Italy. What was the line from Eliot? I’ve measured out my life in coffee spoons.

  Not quite. Not quite coffee spoons. I’ve measured out my life in poolside gossip in eternal sunshine. I’ve measured out my life in worthless bouts of profitable litigation. I’ve measured it out in incremental grief and self-pity whilst championing the causes of the habitually worthless and the pointlessly corrupt. He pictured oceans of chlorinated water rippling and dappled over mosaic tiles and servile troops of canapé waiters on swishing lawns and he closed his eyes to try to keep from his mind the low murmur and tumult of his years of futile confidences shared.

  Bill drank down his vodka and refilled his glass and raised it to the television.

  ‘Here’s to you, Scott,’ he said. ‘Here’s to maudlin nostalgia, Old Sport.’

  He drank down his drink and refilled the glass. The curtains were drawn against the glare of afternoon sunshine to give the picture on the television screen a greater contrast and clarity.