by John Gardner
“Then say away, Herb.”
He quoted—
“Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—”
“Herb,” she said, her eyes genuinely misting up, because big old, clumsy old, clever old Herbie Kruger had spoken with such passion, and sorrow. She went over and took his bulk in her arms, and was not to know that Kruger was thinking of a German girl and a shit of a KGB officer and, years ago, King Lear howling in his head because she had betrayed him and his adopted country, and the pair of them had been—like Louis and Rita—each other’s morning and evening stars.
“Herbie?” she said after a while, then realized he was weeping, and she had no way of knowing why.
(5)
ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Pucky was up and out of the house by the dawn’s early light. The previous evening, after the cuddles and a few expert kisses (“Kissing’s a lost art, Herbie,” she said. “I never lost it,” he whispered), she showed him her purchases. Three wigs, two dark, one auburn, in different lengths and cuts, plus some clothes which, in her real life, she would not be seen dead in. There was also the Macintosh LC computer, complete with internal modem and a pile of software.
She modeled the wigs and the clothes while, upstairs, Passau played music: Bruckner, the Fourth Symphony, The Romantic, which made Herbie think of medieval knights and maidens as depicted in illuminated manuscripts. It was certainly not what the composer intended, but that is what it did to Herbie.
As for the clothes, Kruger went for the Spandex silver though Pucky said it made her look like the Michelin Man. They cooked dinner and ate it upstairs with the Maestro, who insisted they all listen to Strauss—Richard, naturally—the Alpine Symphony which Pucky did not care for, though Herb sang along which irritated Passau enormously.
“This is only for orchestra, not for singing,” Lou cautioned.
“Who says is not for singing?”
“Richard Strauss wrote it for orchestra.”
“So? Actually he probably wrote it because his wife made him. Never was there a composer so henpecked. You ever read Alma Mahler’s letters?”
“Didn’t need too. I met Paula Strauss, and you’re right. The devil of a woman. Had a tongue on her would put a hornet to shame.”
After dinner, Herb went down into the kitchen with Pucky. There was a little more fooling around, but nothing serious. Then he sat her down at the table and told her what he wanted doing in Washington tomorrow. …
“You should be able to ferret this out in the National Archives. Federal Triangle. You can’t miss it,” he said, sounding very English. He made Pucky repeat the entire shopping list.
“Get lunch at the Old Post Office building. Food is okay. And while you’re at it, might be a good idea for you to return your car, then go somewhere else and get a Lincoln town car under different identity. Lincoln town car is good. Bit flashy, which nobody will expect. How many you got?”
“Identities?”
“I’m not talking noses.”
“Two and a bit.”
“Okay, use the bit.”
He gave her another kiss as they said good night, and this time things went a little further. Pucky lay in bed with her whole body wreathed in a large, happy smile, wondering if she really could hook Kruger, or whether he was simply going through a midlife crisis. As she fell asleep she realized that she was getting more and more serious about Herbie. Why else would she have visited Victoria’s Secret? More, why else had she bought alluring undergarments there? When lovely woman stoops to folly, she buys herself sexy underwear, she knew, even if T.S. Eliot had said something different. What was it?
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
Something like that. So Ms. Pucky Curtiss of the Secret Intelligence Service dropped into sleep and dreamed of a woman approaching her in the street and saying things like, “Isn’t the world so adorably Jewish? Isn’t it wonderful?” When she woke, only the face of the woman stayed with her, and she could not get it from her mind for a couple of days.
Herbie slept like a troubled teenager, and did not understand why, for his dream was the eternal one of Berlin in the days of the Dürer print, only now the girl was a teenager, like himself, and they sported on the grass and drank beer, laced with raspberry juice, at Grunewald.
Meanwhile Lou Passau spent the night tormented by dreams of Rita Crest and the reality of her death, which he could recall vividly. When he woke, Passau knew he had buried some secrets so deep that he had not thought of them for years, in case they slammed him into guilty madness.
While they all slept, back in England Art Railton left the so-called guest suite at Warminster. He was very tired, and also—having done a mammoth session with Ursula Zunder—utterly bewildered and concerned.
When he had heard her entire story, he asked why she had run for cover. “Things have changed so drastically”—he looked at her using his best innocent face—“so why leap over now, when it’s all over?”
“That’s exactly why.” Her voice still had the lilt of youth. “For heaven’s sake, they’re arresting people like me. They’re after Mischa Wolf, they’ve put Grepos on trial for killing wall-crossers. In England they’re howling for old John Cairn-cross to be publicly humiliated, and the Russians still talk of sending George Blake back to serve the rest of his sentence. With what I’ve got on my conscience, they’d eat me like a bowl of Zwiebelsuppe.”
Art reflected that he could go for a bowl of spicy onion soup himself.
“You might be selling Herbie down the river for the second time. You have done it before. After what you’ve told me, it would seem that the Americans would put him in a shredder—with Maestro Passau for company.”
The conversation continued, with Art using every trick he knew. “Then what?” became the two most important words in his vocabulary.
Before he drove back to London he saw Gus Keene, and his wife Carole, with whom Gus had been carrying on for years before he made an honest woman of her—not that female confessors could ever be called completely honest. Towards the latter part of the Cold War they had made a wonderful team. Between them they knew all the questions and most of the answers.
“Got it all on tape, have we, Gus?” Art was standing by his Rover, parked in the turning circle in front of the crumbling old house. There was a predawn chill in the air and he wanted to get going. Art found Warminster particularly depressing these days. Its ghosts were sad figures, like the lost souls of men and women who had died in an unnecessary war. The whole place felt seedy. Sad, but it would probably be sold off in the reorganization that now seemed inevitable.
“Would I do a thing like that, Art?”
“You’ve probably got video as well.”
Gus Keene raised his eyebrows, and gave Art a friendly punch on the shoulder as he got into the car. They watched as he drove away.
“You really got it all on tape? I hope.” Carole Keene looked up at him, her eyebrows arched.
“If the machines’re working properly. Lord knows how we’ve managed all these years. The equipment’s straight out of the ark.”
As they turned to walk back into the house, with the first streaks of dawn coming up behind them, Carole said she would like a peek at Herbie Kruger’s ex. “Quite a catch really.”
Her husband clamped his pipe between his teeth. “Yes, she’s a catch all right.” He looked grim for a second. “I also think Art’s playing some profound game linked with dear old Herbie. And as for Herb, I believe he would kill the Zunder women if he got within a mile.”
“SO, LOU, YOU confronted Rita, yes?”
They sat once more in the same room at the top of the pretty house in Virginia. Pucky had left at dawn, without saying hail or farewell to anyone.
“In a
manner of speaking, yes. I had to.”
“Sure you had to. How did she take it?”
“It wasn’t good, and I guess I didn’t handle it well. I told you what a beautiful woman she was?”
“Many times, Lou. Statuesque, you said, but she had bad skin from the makeup.”
“I think it was also the drugs. I found nothing in the house, you know. Addicts, alcoholics, whatever, are cunning about their supplies.”
“I’ve heard that. So, what did you do?”
“Funny, she was from Texas, but you wouldn’t have known it. She was third-generation Polish. Didn’t really find out until it was all over. Father struck lucky. She wanted to be an actress, left home to join summer stock at nineteen. The old man cut her from his will. Later, Crys told me she was amazed when she found he’d put her back in.”
“What then?” Herbie knew Passau was making detours.
“I figured she always kept the heroin in her case—what did they call those things, like damned great leather lunch pails … ?”
“Vanity …”
“… cases, yes. Vanity cases. She carried one everywhere, and kept it locked. That’s where she stashed the stuff.”
“So tell me, Lou. Get it out of your head.”
“I never told anyone before. Not a soul. It’s difficult.”
“This is confession time, Lou.”
“I never felt real bad about it before. What happened at the time was almost an accident. Damn, it was an accident. Why do I find it difficult now? It’s been over sixty years. …”
“Few love to hear the sins they love to act. This is Shakespeare, Lou. He knew which was which.”
“I don’t even know what was a sin.”
“Come on, Lou. Then what?”
Passau did not look at him. He did not fix his eyes on that point behind Kruger which had seemed to be his gateway to the past. He looked down at his soft slippers as though somewhere in the doeskin there was an answer to his dilemma.
“Okay, when I finally got around to asking her, I made her drunk first. Didn’t mean to. She just got drunk on top of the drugs.”
They were both working on the new picture, Nights of Lightning. By this time Passau was paying most of the house expenses, and they had done up one of the rooms as a studio for him, complete with a Steinway Grand and a plain deal worktable.
The movie had been taken from a popular novel and Rita played a shiftless girl drifting from job to job in the Deep South. She was arrested and wrongly charged with murder in a small Louisiana town. The courtroom scenes were going to be the best anyone had yet put on film, and Stefan Greif had already done wonders to clothe the protagonists in the hot steamy heat of a southern summer. He would damp down hair and clothes with water before a take and have heaters going so that the cameraman and technicians worked bare-chested.
Louis had seen some of the rushes, and Rita’s work was more than wonderful. She was turning in a performance which approached greatness, while he sat at his piano, at home, composing a score based on folk tunes from the Old South. He used spirituals such as “Lay This Body Down,” “We Will March Through the Valley,” and “I Know Moon-rise, I Know Star-rise,” entwined and plaited with melodies reminiscent of “Forked Deer” and “Mississippi Sawyer.” Years later, Passau had adapted the whole for a ballet titled Southern Storm. In all, things were going well until the night when he screwed up enough courage to confront his wife with the truth about her addiction.
She got back at seven o’clock. Louis heard the door slam and her usual shout, letting him know she was home. He came out of his studio and caught a glimpse of her, looking tired and drawn.
“I got some champagne on ice, hon,” he called. “And I’ve told Consuella to take the night off.”
She called out at the bathroom door, “Give me fifteen, sweetheart. I’ve gotta shower and freshen up.” The voice now seemed less bright and chirpy. “It was as if she had a problem with her larynx, Herb. I remember I wondered if she always sounded like that when she came in. Had I never noticed?”
She was out in less than fifteen minutes, in a terry-cloth robe, her eyes bright—too bright; her manner sparkling. It was as though her whole body was giving off energy. “You gave Consuella the night off? Why, for Chrissakes?”
“Because she has to see her brother. He has a problem,” he lied. “Anyway, I thought it would be nice to have the evening to ourselves. Just the two of us, huh?”
“Why not? I’ve had a bitch of a day.” She took the proffered glass of champagne, and drank it in three fast swallows. “Lou, I’m going to ask you a favor.” She sat next to him on the long leather settee. She felt clammy, to the touch, and he saw that when she moved her hands they seemed to jerk, in spasms. “I’m going to have to ask you to go to bat for me with Stefan.” She was all movement, as though her entire body was being devoured by a nervous tic.
“With Stefan? But …”
“Oh, yea, I know, Lou. He’s a nice guy and a brilliant director—could you fill that up again?—but he really has been riding me hard on this movie. I don’t seem to be able to do anything right for him.”
This was news to Louis. Stefan was never done telling him how well Rita was working. “What’s the problem?” He put up his hand to her face, gently pulling her head around, forcing her to look at him. “What’s the real problem, Rita?”
“Please, Lou. Give me another drink. The real problem is that Stefan wants too much. I’m giving him everything I’ve got. He wants more all the time. I can only do my best.”
He refilled her glass, and she again drank it quickly, almost faster than the first glass.
“Give me specifics, honey.”
She gave no hint, no warning. The change was in both voice and manner. “You doubting me, Lou? You think I’m making this up?” Her voice began to rise.
“Not at all, hon.” He felt his stomach roll over. This was not the Rita he knew. He never had spoken with her like this. “No, if I’m to talk with Stefan, I have to know some details. With Stefan you can’t …”
“Just go in with guns blazing? Why the hell not? You’re my husband, Lou. I don’t ask much of you.” She thrust the glass forward to be refilled. Passau had only taken one sip from his first glass.
“You sure?”
“Sure of what?”
“Sure you want another drink?”
“Of course I’m fucking sure, Lou. What the hell’s gotten into you? It isn’t as if I’m asking something difficult. Just give me another damned drink.”
He tried to make his smile look reassuring. “Hey, it’s me you’re talking to, not Stefan.” He poured her third glass.
“So, I give Stefan a hard time?”
“Rita, honey, I didn’t say that.”
“Well, it sounds like it. Just talk to him for me, would you? Tell him to lay off.” She turned away, then stretched over for the bottle. Louis grabbed her by the wrist.
“No, Rita, you’ve had three glasses of that stuff while I’m still on one. …”
“Well, that’s your fault, Lou. You deny me a drink now?”
“I never deny you anything. It’s just that you’re getting through the stuff very quickly.”
“Jesus, Lou Passau, it’s only champagne for Chrissakes. Babies could drink this. It’s not as though it was hard liquor.”
Reluctantly he let go of her wrist and she poured herself another glass, putting the bottle on the floor beside her. Then she turned, drank half the glass and looked him straight in the eyes.
“So, you gonna tell Stefan to stop making waves? Or are you gonna go back in your studio and write more tinkly little tunes they can play while I’m giving my fuckin’ all?”
It was as though the pupils of her eyes had turned to pinpoint lances. Their light was turned onto Passau, burning into his face like white blow-torches. “It seemed she was looking right through me, as if she couldn’t see me, Herb. I was really frightened, because Rita was obviously off somewhere else. Not with me, and not
even on this planet.”
“Where d’you keep the heroin, honey?” There, he had said it, and for a second he thought she had not taken in what he was saying.
Then the explosion. “The what? The WHAT?” Indignant and shaken at the same time. “What you fucking talking about Passau, you jig-maker. … You fucking tune-smith. … What’re you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about, Rita. The booze is one problem, the heroin habit’s another.”
She pulled herself upright, but her legs were out of control, buckling and making her stagger sideways. She grabbed hold of the settee and swayed, eyes unfocused with whatever cocktail of heroin and booze she had now topped up with fast-swilled champagne.
“Just what the shit’re you talking about, Passau? You tell me. Heroin? You think I’m dumb enough to take that muck. …”
“Rita, I know you are. I want to help you.”
She made a huge effort to pull herself up straight and stand without holding on to the settee.
“Never … never … never ever … insult me like that again. If you want to help me, call Stefan and tell him to stop fucking with me. Right, Louis Passau?”
She walked, her legs slewing left and right as she tried to hold a true course from the room.
“That was it, Herbie. That was all it took—well, there may have been some more talk. Yes, there was more than that; she flung insults at me. She went on for ten, maybe fifteen, minutes, but that was the basic line. I accused her, and she walked out—well, staggered out—and locked the bedroom door.”
“So, what then?” Herbie was not to know that Art Railton had been using the same words all through the English night.
“So, nothing. In the morning she was as though it hadn’t happened. She didn’t mention it again for a week. Things just went on as before.”
“She stonewalled you?”
“If that means she didn’t talk about it, yes.”
“No making up. No, ‘Lou, I’m sorry I was pissed last night? Sorry and all that’?”
“Nothing. Not for a week.”
“Not even about Stefan?”
“I called Stefan.”