A Shadow on the Sun

by Francis Cottam

  In the spring of 1937, Bill deliberately severed his friendship with Martin and his wife. Then, in the autumn, he heard that Lillian Hamer had died at the wheel of her car in an accident. And he went to the funeral. He went because Martin had been the best friend he had ever known. He went because he knew it was the right and proper thing to do. He went because he had felt very fond of Lillian. He went mostly because he knew that his friend was in need of him.

  He was incredulous that someone so full of life as Lillian Hamer could have died so young and carelessly. When he and Lucy had first met them on the Côte, he had thought them the most beautiful couple he had ever seen. Lillian was tall and slender and colt-like then in the clumsy way of the young, but she was growing into grace. She covered her mouth shyly when Lucy made them laugh with line after line of imperious sarcasm delivered from her canvas throne aboard the boat. Lillian had skin that turned gold in the sun and eyes the dusty blue of mountain snow and hair that fell around her shoulders in ringlets when it dried on the boat in the wind off the sea after swimming. And she carried that beauty into her maturity. And so it was very difficult to imagine Lillian dead in a bloody car wreck in a ravine in a forest in the rain.

  Bill almost missed the funeral. He only had the time to travel the distance at all because an investigation surrounding the death delayed Lillian’s burial. There was much sneering anti-Americanism in those years in Germany. He had travelled by rented car from France and kept being stopped by petty officials manning arbitrary checkpoints on the autobahn to Berlin. There was an angry stand-off at one of these when, weary and grieving, he was ordered out of the car and told to deliver a Hitler salute. Acknowledging the führer, a functionary explained, was the key to further progress.

  ‘I honour only one flag, sir,’ Bill said. ‘And it isn’t yours.’

  A rifle was trained on him then. He spread his feet and crossed his arms and hawked and spat on the macadam and, he believed, came very close to being shot. ‘Fetch your superior,’ he said, in German.

  The superior was duly fetched. Bill’s passport and travel documents were examined. The salute was never given. But the delay amounted to ninety minutes and made him very late for the burial.

  When he got there, it was raining hard in the cemetery. Almost everybody in attendance seemed to be in some kind of uniform. The graveside smelled heavily of freshly turned earth and wet wool from sodden greatcoats. Cap badges and flashes of rank were dull in the leaden, rainy light and most of the men wore boots which had grass and mud stains now on their polished leather. Lillian’s father, Dr Stresemann, wept over the grave. One of the few mourners dressed as a civilian, Bill remembered he wore dark spats buttoned over his shoes. A Homburg hat covered his head and rain gathered like dew on the fur collar of his overcoat. There were women in cloche hats and League of German Maidens’ pins, and children like malevolent scouts and girl guides in their martial khaki drab, their swastika belt buckles and ornamental daggers.

  Martin was grey, ragged and bereft. His eyes were raw with weeping and focused only on the ground. Bill walked across to him and put a hand on his shoulder and Martin must have recognized the familiar shape and weight of it. He covered it with his own. Martin’s hand felt gritty, Bill supposed from earth thrown onto the coffin containing his wife. And he could feel the hard insistence, pressing on a knuckle, of Martin’s wedding band. There was a commotion at the graveside then as Stresemann slithered into the slit in the ground and tugged at the coffin, unmanned by the loss of his daughter, unable to accept its rainy magnitude and muddy finality. Bill saw strong young men in uniform pull the doctor free with disdainful looks on their faces. There was a protocol, after all. There were standards and disciplines to observe.

  He realized that Martin was saying something to him, asking him a question, repeating it. He could hear rain dapple on the leaves of trees and drip from them and the sound of Stresemann’s boundless grief at the side of the grave and the coughing and firing of engines from the nearby convoy of black saloons that would take them to whatever gruesome ceremony passed for a wake in a suburb of Berlin these days in the new Germany.

  ‘I said do you think it is true?’ Martin said.

  The skin was tight over his face and his eyes were bloodshot and his lips were pale and bitten. He was bareheaded and blond hair tumbled over his forehead in the rain giving him the oddly youthful look of a broken boy.

  ‘Do I think what is true, Martin?’

  Hamer patiently repeated what he must already have said. ‘I met a man recently. High ranking. Shrewd. He told me that no one knows anyone really, really well. Do you think it is true, Bill?’ He waited for his reply, blinking, innocent. He was a boy. He was not yet thirty and his wife had died and he was lost. Rain trickled from his hair down his face. This was very important to him. ‘He said it was a seductive theory.’

  Bill breathed, deeply. ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘That it was a vision of hell.’

  Bill looked around him, at the uniforms and the sleek black cars. At the sodden, khaki children. At the gravediggers leaning patiently on shovels with wet blades gleaming at their edges. At the grey ghost of Dr Stresemann. At the cemetery in the unrelenting rain.

  ‘You were right, Martin. You were right. And he was worse than wrong.’

  Bill drove back from the gym in Anaheim with his hands tender on the wheel of the Jeep, both of them bruised from the sustained beating he had given the heavy bag over six brutal rounds. He felt good. Or he felt good by his standards. Everything was relative. Just ask Albert Einstein, ho ho. But bad jokes apart, he did feel good. And his mood bettered when he got home and called his cashmere-clad secretary to see if there were any important messages he needed to hear.

  ‘Miss Smollen called.’

  ‘Miss Smollen Junior, or Miss Smollen Senior?’

  ‘Miss Julia Smollen. She didn’t leave a message.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Mr Sinatra.’

  Bill chuckled to himself. Miss Cashmere had given Frank second billing. He’d have been furious. ‘Any message?’

  ‘Mr Sinatra dictated it in the manner of a telegraph. Should I recite it likewise?’

  Bill thought it was true what they said about a little education. ‘Go ahead.’

  She cleared her throat.

  ‘Your original supposition correct. Stop. English guy proved total asshole. Stop. To err human, to forgive divine. Stop. Drinks Thursday? Stop by. Stop.’

  Bill thanked his secretary and hung up. He put a Sam Cooke record on the turntable and sat in a chair and started to look through the newspapers, laid out for him where he liked them by the woman who had come in the morning to clean for him and, today, to take away his suits. He took the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. He looked through the Hollywood trades, but didn’t scour every line of print on their pages like some people did. It was easy to become obsessed by the movie industry. He lived and worked on its periphery, and wasn’t.

  The real papers were full of the inauguration. A Post editorial opined that Kennedy’s was the most graceful and intelligent speech since the one delivered by that renaissance man of the republic, Thomas Jefferson. So JFK had won the comparison he had wanted so dearly. Bill thought it was the style of Jack Kennedy to set high goals and achieve them with an apparently effortless grace. He was a war hero. He was a Pulitzer Prize winner. He had achieved the highest office in the land at the age of forty-three and as a Catholic. Bill knew there was some manipulation in the image, a certain guile and craft to its construction and its maintenance. But he thought, too, that the new president had in him the promise to be authentically great.

  ‘The promise or the threat,’ he said, riffling through newspaper pages. Nuclear war was never further than a failed bluff away from destroying the world. And Bill did not think Kennedy would be the sort of man to blink first.

  He figured that JFK quite probably, if unwittingly, supplied the real reason for Frank’s olive branch, itself
graciously offered. There were plenty of people Frank preferred than Bill to drink with. What he probably wanted come Thursday night was a little confidential legal advice. His close association with the Kennedys had brought the affairs of Frank Sinatra under very close press scrutiny. Most of the rumours were ridiculous. Some of the more damaging Bill regarded as practically invited by Sinatra himself. He was a paradoxical, impulsive man and no stranger, in his rages, to the self-inflicted wound. He was the peerless performer and tireless lothario who could appear almost shy with Julia Smollen and goof around like a kid with ’Tasha, buying her ice-cream, taking her to a funfair for the afternoon. But he was useful as well as colourful to know. There was a pragmatic, even ruthless side to Bill’s nature where business was concerned. And Frank had proved over the years to be a profitable friend to have.

  Like almost all of Sinatra’s friends, Bill was also an unashamed fan, and he put Come Fly With Me on the turntable now, looking forward to hearing it again after deleting it from his domestic play-list for the duration of their silly feud. He laughed to himself at his pettiness in doing that, anticipating the look on his host’s face come Thursday when he refused the offer of a Martini in favour of fruit juice or iced tea. But that was what Bill sincerely intended to do. For the foreseeable future, he had taken his last drink. In a minute he’d make some tea, he thought, enjoying the record, listening to the rhythm swing through Nelson Riddle’s punchy, skilled arrangement. He’d drink it with his pinkie raised like the English playwright Noel Coward did. Bill practised raising his little finger and winced with the pain his bag-work of the morning had inflicted on his hands.

  There was a knock at the door then, and Bill got out of his chair thinking it probably a lost tourist looking for directions. His house was isolated. He would not hear the approach of a car through the concrete and glass of his walls, with the windows closed. His cleaning woman always closed and locked those of his windows that she opened after polishing their panes. And it was January and chilly after the Jeep ride back from the heat of the gym in Anaheim, so Bill had left the windows shut on getting home. He was relaxed, happy about the Sinatra resolution, in the grip of the album he was playing, totally off-guard. He opened his door with no trepidation at all, picturing a clueless, star-struck couple from somewhere in the midwest to be standing on the step outside. They would be looking for a real-estate bargain. They would be hoping to locate the property of a movie star to rubberneck. But instead it was Julia Smollen.

  She was wearing a grey coat with a sable collar and the coat was crumpled and a wilted bloom was still pinned, in celebratory style, from the inauguration ceremony of the previous day, to the fur on one of its lapels. She was bare headed and her hair hung uncombed down her cheeks. She was very pale. The knuckles were white on her hands, clasping a small dress bag in front of her and Bill could smell a sour, feral odour on her breath and her skin. She was shaking in the coat. Her legs were unsteady and one of her stockings was laddered, Bill saw, shocked, over a gashed shin. She stood there racked, shuddering in the bright, January sunlight, framed by his doorway. She was like an apparition, like a painting of despair. He stepped forward and put his arms around her.

  ‘He’s got ’Tasha, Bill. He’s taken my daughter,’ Julia said.

  ‘Julia. Julia. Come here.’ She shivered in his arms, against his chest. He could smell the feral odour strong in her hair, the secretion of fear.

  ‘He’s taken ’Tasha.’ Her voice trembled, her breathing reduced to gasps and sobs beyond her control. ‘Oh, God. Oh, God. I don’t know what to do.’

  He brought her into his house and took off her coat and found brandy in the drinks cabinet and forced some of it into her. He lit the kindling under the pine logs in his fireplace and switched the music off. She sat on the edge of her chair still gripping the clutch bag, absurdly chic and inappropriate, between both hands on her knees. Somewhere, she had lost her little pillbox hat. They all wore them now, those little hats made fashionable by the new first lady. Her hair was lank and her leg gashed and the bloom wilted on her best outfit. She’d got here like this, he thought, in this condition, flown from Washington and presumably come from the airport in a cab. She was the strongest woman he had ever known, easily the most self-possessed, doing everything she could to prevent herself from being overwhelmed by the shock and panic assaulting her. The love and the pity in him for her fought the concern. Julia was at least safe. What had happened to ’Tasha?

  ‘When?’

  Her head snapped around on her neck and her eyes were vacant with adrenaline. ‘Last night. She went shopping on the same block as the hotel. After an hour I was worried and went looking for her. I didn’t find her. When I returned to our suite I found this.’

  Julia fumbled with the clasp on her clutch bag. In her absence of composure, her accent had returned. She was speaking in a voice Bill had not heard Julia use since her time in San Francisco. And her fingers would not obey her and open the bag. Bill took it from her and snapped the clasp and emptied out its contents onto the table beside Julia’s chair where his newspapers still lay. Tissues and a Cartier lighter and a scent bottle spilled out. A little appointments diary with a tiny pencil in its spine. A pack of Gauloise. Woman’s stuff. And a long narrow brass cylinder flattened into a neat ridge at one end. For a moment, absurdly, he thought it a lipstick container.

  ‘You know what that is?’

  ‘A bullet casing.’ He picked it up. He coughed to disguise the growing dread he felt in his voice. His skin had gone cold and prickly though the fire had caught and the room was warm now with the scent of burning pine logs. ‘A high velocity round. I don’t know what calibre it is. And there are no case markings so I can’t tell you who manufactured it.’ He switched on a desk lamp and examined the casing. ‘It’s machine made, but it doesn’t look mass produced. There’s usually a stamp or serial number. I think the user may have made it. It looks like the sort of ammunition a sniper might use.’ The chill spread through him. He could feel goose bumps on his arms. He thought of lanolin and Old Spice. Sweet Jesus.

  ‘It’s the casing from the bullet that killed her father,’ Julia said. Her voice was inflected and flat. ‘Before he died Martin told me it was Landau who had killed him.’

  Bill nodded. Of course he knew the story. He smelled the casing, but it smelled of brass, of nothing. No powder residue. It had been fired a long time ago. Used lethally eighteen years ago, in the snow? Aimed at Martin Hamer, with Julia in his arms and Natasha carried in her belly?

  ‘You should not have picked it up. There might have been prints.’ He put the bullet casing into his pocket so she would not have to look at it. ‘Here, drink your brandy.’ He handed her the glass and she took it in both hands and it still wobbled as she gulped a mouthful down. Her leg was bleeding under the ladder in her stockings and fear came off her skin in sour waves. He saw that her shoes were new and scuffed, the patent leather worn with stumbling, the tip gone from one of their heels. In their moment of shining privilege. On their proudest day. Bill felt fury rising from his gut.

  ‘Have you called the police?’

  ‘No.’ Julia laughed. There was no mirth in the sound. ‘I read a book about the Lindbergh kidnapping.’

  ‘You have to call the police.’ Everyone knew about the blunders in the Lindbergh case. Bill knew that most kidnapped children were dead within hours of being abducted. But he had also encountered some very good cops in his life.

  The phone began to ring. Bill looked at it and Julia dropped her glass onto the rug and ran across the room and snatched the receiver from its cradle.

  ‘Yes?’ She listened. It was for her.

  Bill picked her glass off the rug and smelled brandy as he took it into the kitchen and put it into the sink. His brandy was five-star Hennessey and the smell was rich and powerful and Bill realized almost vaguely that the last thing on earth he wanted right now was a drink of anything at all.

  ‘Who was that?’

  She was of
f the phone, pacing the room and wringing her hands, when he returned.

  ‘Who was that?’ He tried to make his tone casual.

  ‘It was the Attorney General’s office. I asked Bobby Kennedy would he find something out for me and gave him this number as one I might be reached at.’

  ‘Did you tell him why you wanted the information?’

  ‘Not precisely. I told him about the orange grove. And he agreed to ask Hoover to see if the FBI had anything on Landau.’

  Bill remembered Lyndon Johnson’s remark when the Kennedy brothers had wanted to sack J. Edgar Hoover. About it being better to have the FBI chief inside the tent pissing out. Thank God for Texan logic. ‘And they did? They do?’

  ‘A man called Peter Landau worked at a hunting lodge in Colorado until three months ago. He sold Remington rifles and ammunition. He was an expert marksman.’

  ‘And he committed a felony offence?’

  Julia looked terrible, terrified, visited by a vengeful ghost. ‘He climbed to raid eagles’ nests and sold the eggs. He sold them to foreign collectors. There’s a black-market trade, apparently. He had no export licence.’ She smiled. Bill thought the smile very brave. ‘He did not declare the income in his tax returns. The lodge owner found out about the trading and he was reported. And he was fired.’

  ‘He won’t kill her, Julia.’ Bill knew he had to say this. He had to confront the possibility out loud or risk Julia’s breakdown and derangement. However facile the hope turned out to be, he needed to give it to her now. ‘He could have killed her, killed both of us, in the orange grove. He wants money.’

  ‘He wants revenge,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Martin took his life away,’ she said. ‘Martin took Landau’s world. Now Landau’s taking what’s left of his.’

  Bill looked at his watch. It was four o’clock. ‘I’m leaving for Colorado tonight,’ he said. ‘It’s where he’ll take her because it’s where he knows.’

  ‘Oh, Bill,’ Julia said. She started to cry. Her shoulders shook with grief and her eyes filled with tears and despair. ‘This isn’t strapping fishing rods to the sides of your Jeep and provoking fights in cowboy bars. This is not some silly trial of strength and manhood. What use will you be? A sixty-year-old man, wading through winter snowdrifts. This is my daughter.’ She sobbed. ‘He has ’Tasha.’