One Extra Corpse, page 17
‘A woman?’ he said, when Kitty introduced Emma and broached the subject of a mysterious amour and the fear Emma was certain she had heard in Zapolya’s voice. ‘Ernst wouldn’t put himself in danger for Helen of Troy and Cleopatra rolled into one. The man was a satyr but not a fool.’
His voice was firm and pleasant and his accent less than Nomie’s caricature had made of it. Like many film actors, he was small and seemed a little underweight in his riding breeches and neat tweed jacket. Close up, his cropped head – shaven at the sides, like the Polish Cossacks – and the monocle he affected gave him a military look, were it not for the wicked brightness, like an evil elf, of his sharp-featured face. He smoked Russian cigarettes, nearly twice as long as American, and gave the impression of a Teutonic nobleman about to summon his lackeys to have a peasant thrashed.
‘He never mentioned to you a woman whom it was dangerous to … to visit?’
‘He did,’ agreed von Stroheim. ‘But I can’t see him continuing such a liaison once he realized the danger. There are men who take pleasure in making love with a loaded gun on the nightstand. Ernst wasn’t one of those. For him, women were a pleasure, an indulgence – like too much ice cream …’ He cocked a dark, reproving eye at Kitty, who stuck out her tongue at him. ‘But not an obsession. Myself, I think it far likelier that what frightened him – that what he was trying to conceal – was his political views.’
‘Political?’ said Emma, startled.
‘He was a member of the Communist Party,’ said the director. ‘Not like Max Eastman and his pet socialists, but the blood-red Bolshevist side of the movement: men who regard Lenin’s smallest farts as holy doctrine. For some years now, the Russians have been trying to establish connections in the studios, with the intention of making films to showcase their view of how society should be organized.’
He exhaled a thin track of smoke. ‘They sent that fellow Plotkin here with a delegation a few years ago, supposedly to see how American films were made but actually to learn whatever they could about how to build cameras, lighting, editing equipment – and to raise money. They see – as Americans are only beginning to see – how powerful is the effect of a story, upon someone sitting in the dark for two hours, absorbing whatever the director of the piece chooses to tell them. There is nothing like it.’
‘Honestly!’ Kitty made a gesture like a woman shooing flies. ‘Next you’re going to tell me that Charlie Chaplin is responsible for a wave of disorderly butt-kickings spreading across the United States.’
Von Stroheim grinned, the sinister aristocrat vanishing, monocle notwithstanding. ‘Time to invest in pies, I suppose … No. But think about how long women’s frocks were before the war, before every woman in film – except those portrayed as silly and old-fashioned – started wearing hemlines three-quarters of the way up their calves. That’s ten years – not really very long. Or the way women drive cars now, or smoke cigarettes in public, something they see women doing in films all the time.’
‘I was certainly smoking ten years ago …’
‘When you were ten?’ He raised an eyebrow, and Kitty drew herself up to her full five-foot height.
‘I started early.’
He clicked his booted heels and bowed deep acquiescence, then turned back to Emma. ‘I think they’re imbeciles – well, you’d have to be an imbecile to believe that humankind is actually going to stop being greedy and selfish and willing to accept only what they need, so that others may have all that they need. But I can name you a dozen men in the studios who support the Wobblies and Sinclair.’
‘Oh, God, yes,’ agreed Kitty. ‘Dirk Silver is always passing out copies of Pravda and The Daily Worker to the camera crews and extras, when he thinks nobody’s going to report him to Frank. Chang, no!’ she added, yanking the leash as Chang Ming – clearly under the impression that the trees around them were genuine – attempted to treat the nearest one as such. The little dog looked at her reproachfully.
‘But Ernst didn’t believe any of that anymore for years,’ she went on. ‘He told me so … and told Peggy, too.’
‘And this was on the same occasion that he told you he loved you?’ Von Stroheim raised one brow again. ‘And Miss Donovan too, of course.’
She made a face at him again. ‘Ernst never told me he loved me. Well, except that time we were screwing on his desk in his office and he was kind of drunk. Oh, and that time in the prop room. I don’t think he ever said that to Peggy.’
‘Perhaps he became an advocate of unvarnished truth once the Bureau of Investigation began deporting Communists.’ Von Stroheim bowed again. ‘Particularly Communists from places like Russia and Poland. But the fact remains that since Lenin’s death in January, there has been a split within the Communist Party itself – indeed, before Lenin died. There are those who advocate keeping elements of European and American ways of doing things, like trade unions and private farms: Trotsky, and Zinoviev – and those who claim autonomy to Soviet daughter-states like Georgia and the Ukraine. Josef Stalin – who has been helping to run the country during Lenin’s illness – is working to consolidate his power, and there are a number of followers of Trotsky and others who have decided it might be a good idea to get places in the delegations that the Moscow Art Theater is sending to places like Hollywood and New York.’
‘I sure would.’ Kitty performed a theatrical shudder. ‘But why would he want help from me? Nobody in their right mind would.’
‘And he said nothing to you? Not on the day of his death, but earlier.’
‘Not so much as the filling in an ant’s back tooth. And why would anybody be trying to kill me and Emma, over something that Ernst wanted to tell us? And the cops just want to go along with Jesperson and sweep the whole thing under the rug – it’s enough to make you think Jesperson’s got something to hide.’
‘I would not be surprised to learn that he did.’
‘Do you have,’ asked Emma, ‘Mr Zapolya’s files still in your office on the Enterprise lot? His personal files, I mean. And might there be a chance that we can see them?’
‘You are welcome to them, of course, madame.’
At this point Black Jasmine barked gruffly, and the director turned his head as a sizeable army of peasants – led by a dirndl-clad Peggy Donovan clutching a petition for Peace and Justice in her hands – appeared on the edge of the orchard.
‘If you ladies will excuse me.’ Von Stroheim clicked his heels and bowed again, then reached down to scratch all three Pekes on the napes. When he moved to pat Buttercreme, the shy little dog approached him, then scurried a few feet away, then turned back, looking flirtatiously over her shoulder at him – advanced and retreated, as if doing a little fan dance with her tail.
The director grinned again: ‘A Hollywood coquette, that one. Myself –’ he straightened up – ‘I think that if Ernst was indeed involved with a woman who was a danger to him – or whose husband or lover was – he would keep no mention of it, unless it were in his checkbook, in the record of expensive little gifts from Arpels’s or Tiffany.’
‘Not even that,’ sniffed Kitty. ‘The pearls he gave me were straight out of the prop department.’
‘And any communication he had with the Communist Party,’ the Austrian went on, ‘he would keep hidden likewise, not for some script-girl or assistant director to stumble upon when seeking for notes concerning the Storming of Ravenstark or the Grand Entry of King Hubert to the Isle of Love. I will let you know,’ he finished, bowing again over Emma’s hand, then Kitty’s ‘when I return to town, and you will be welcome to whatever you can find. But I suspect that it will not be a great deal.’
And he turned, to marshal the some two hundred royal guardsmen, who had appeared hard on the heels of the peasants (If the war’s still going on why aren’t they at the Front? wondered Emma), while his cameramen skirmished on the edges of the crowd and glanced nervously at the slowly sinking sun.
‘Well, nertz.’ Kitty kicked at a stone as the two young women returned along the trackway toward the production camp. ‘And at this rate he’s going to be chasing his tail out here for another two weeks, and God knows who’s going to try to murder us in the meantime. I wonder if Lou Jesperson really is up to something? Or if he’d try to murder me just to put Hot Potato behind schedule, and then blame it on the Communists or Ernst’s gangster snuggle-bunny or poor Nomie for that matter? I wonder if Dirk Silver would know anything about the Reds?’
‘If he did,’ reasoned Emma, reining in Black Jasmine when the tiny dog attempted to pursue a jackrabbit twice his own size into the scrub, ‘I doubt he would admit it. I wonder how one would get in touch with the Bureau of Investigation?’
SIXTEEN
As events transpired, a search for representatives of the Bureau of Investigation turned out not to be necessary.
The following day Emma was at the kitchen table, patiently trying to transpose Miriam the beautiful Briton slave-girl into Marianne the beautiful country girl, newly arrived in Paris (Searching for a long-lost brother? Fleeing from a broken heart …?) and under the sway of the arrogant and commanding (arrogant and commanding what? General? Diplomat? Old-line aristocrat?) Jules Poilu, when all three dogs began to bark, and someone knocked at the door.
Drat it …
One of the men was tall and thin and bespectacled, rather resembling a poorly-made marionette. The other was short, stocky, and blue around his fleshy jowls. Both wore suits – one blue and one brown – so anonymous they could have come from the Foremost wardrobe department for use in a spy film. The Secret of Agent X …
They almost visibly skulked.
‘Miss Camille de la Rose?’ asked the short man.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Emma. ‘And your name is …?’
‘Or Mrs Chava Flint?’
The use of Kitty’s actual legal name took Emma aback. To her knowledge, only Frank Pugh, Conrad Fishbein, Zal, and the Foremost lawyer Al Spiegelmann knew the name under which Kitty had been born, much less that of her most recent husband.
‘I’m Mrs Blackstone,’ she said firmly.
‘John Peth.’ The man held up his wallet to display a buff card bearing his photograph and the legend: United States Bureau of Investigation. ‘Bureau of Investigation. Mrs Emma Blackstone?’
She said, ‘Please do come in. I was just going to telephone you.’
Chang Ming dashed up as the two agents crossed the threshold and flung himself ecstatically on his back to have his tummy rubbed. Both men looked down at him as if they’d never seen a dog before. Buttercreme ran and hid behind the liquor cabinet.
‘May I offer you some lemonade or Coca-Cola?’ Emma gestured them to the sleek chrome-and-black leather couch. ‘Are you here about the murder of Mr Zapolya on the third? Or the attempt on my own life and that of Miss de la Rose last week?’
The two men traded a glance that they tried hard not to look startled. ‘The Bureau was not aware of any attempt on yourself and Miss de la Rose,’ said the taller agent disapprovingly. ‘Perhaps you would care to give us an account of it after we’ve discussed Mr Zapolya’s death.’
‘I would love to,’ said Emma. ‘Please do excuse me for a moment …’
She descended the four steps to the kitchen, fetched ice and soda-pop, arranging the tray neatly as her nanna had taught her to do in the long-ago predictable peace of Oxford (How can that have been only ten years ago?).
As she re-entered the living-room Kitty said, ‘Darling, Coke? That’s very sweet of you, but would you boys like a real drink?’
Clothed in a kimono of burgundy silk embroidered with peacocks, her hair in fetching disarray but every square millimeter of her makeup camera-perfect, Kitty descended the stairs, stooped gracefully to lift Black Jasmine in her arms. It was past noon – Emma wondered whether she had already been making up when she’d heard the voices downstairs, or whether the sound of them had rolled her out of bed and galvanized her into this rapid cosmetic perfection. The task usually took her hours.
‘The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution expressly forbids the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors,’ reported the taller agent.
‘Oh, that’s perfectly all right.’ Kitty widened her kohl-dark eyes at him. ‘According to the label it was manufactured in Canada, and I didn’t buy or transport it. I found it on my doorstep. It was my birthday. There was a bunch of the most beautiful yellow orchids with it.’
Emma set the tray on the coffee table before their guests.
Agent Peth said, ‘Neither Agent Shardborn nor I drinks, Miss de la Rose.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she sympathized. ‘But I do, so would you be a darling, Emma, and fix me a highball? Thank you! Fix yourself something, too, sweetheart, if you’d care to.’ It was, as Emma had noted previously, only a few minutes before noon.
Kitty produced her cigarettes and fitted one to her amber holder. Both agents, with the air of men performing an unfamiliar task in which they have been rigorously rehearsed, produced lighters and struck flame for her, and she gave them a heart-stopping smile of gratitude. ‘Guess you want to hear all about what happened on the third?’
‘Thank you,’ said Agent Peth, ‘yes.’ Agent Shardborn took a notebook from his pocket; Agent Peth drew up the covered chinoiserie bowl on the coffee table which contained the assortment of candy to which Frank Pugh was deeply addicted.
Emma related her part of the story first: that Kitty had had an early call at the studio (Let’s not get into the issue of where her starting-point was that morning … ); that she, Emma, had answered Mr Zapolya’s call, and had relayed the information to Miss de la Rose when she herself had arrived at the studio an hour and a half later.
‘And he said that it was urgent that he speak to Miss de la Rose that morning?’ Agent Peth unwrapped a tootsie-roll, carefully folded the paper, and stowed it neatly in his jacket pocket.
‘He emphasized it several times,’ agreed Emma. ‘He said, “This is not some Hollywood intrigue”, that it was a matter upon which lives depended. Perhaps, he said, the future of this country.’
The two agents traded another glance.
‘He asked us to tell no one of the meeting—’
‘Well, that went without saying,’ put in Kitty, with another wide-eyed glance. ‘His wife’s the most jealous heifer in Hollywood.’
While her guest, with the deliberation of a maiden aunt, unwrapped and consumed five more tootsie-rolls, Kitty went on to describe their late arrival at Enterprise, their attempt to catch the director after the explosive chaos of the Storming of Ravenstark by the American Expeditionary Force, and their coming upon Zapolya’s body, with a distraught actress lying unconscious amid the debris nearby.
‘That would be Miss Naomi Crumm?’
‘Nomie Carlyle is her working name. Ernst had asked her to meet him, but I don’t know if it had anything to do with his meeting me or not. I mean, I was supposed to see him at eight about the future of this country, but she was only going to meet him after the filming was done – since his wife was on the lot that day. She said she saw a woman in a black dress come out of the set while the shooting was going on, and head away from her. She tried to follow her, when she saw Ernst was dead, but an explosion had jammed the doorway shut. That’s probably all in the police report, isn’t it?’
‘It is, miss. We understand that Miss Crumm – Miss Carlyle – is out of town filming and should be back tomorrow.’
‘Not with von Stroheim directing, she won’t.’ Kitty took a long draw on her cigarette. ‘You’ll be lucky to see her before Saturday. They’re out on San Clemente Island in the Channel – I hope you don’t get seasick easily.’
Both agents appeared alarmed at the thought, but Agent Peth went on bravely, ‘Thank you, Miss de la Rose.’ He popped yet another tootsie-roll into his tight-lipped little mouth, and folded up and bestowed the waxed paper in his pocket yet again. ‘You were well acquainted with Mr Zapolya?’
‘Not really.’ She frowned a little. ‘I mean, we’d screwed a couple of times when I was an extra on …’ She hesitated infinitesimally, as if calculating the date of the production in question against her purported current age. ‘That is, we had a little fling last year when he was doing Caribbean Bride, and we’ve met socially ever since …’
Emma recalled the pearl necklace under Zapolya’s desk and said nothing.
‘Did he ever mention belonging to a group called the Workers’ Liaison? Or a man named Plotkin, or members of his delegation?’
Kitty shook her head.
‘Francisco Castillo? I don’t know what name he’d be going by in the States. Dmitri Druganin? Or Mats Brochnow?’
‘Didn’t Brochnow used to write scenarios for Monarch?’
‘He did, miss.’ Agent Peth consulted a notebook of his own. ‘During and immediately after the war, a number of German and Russian socialists sought work in motion pictures, and more recently, the Soviet government in Russia has begun to nationalize and organize a film industry in Russia itself, for propaganda purposes. They’ve been trying to gain influence with the studios in this country, and a number of Communist actors and directors are active in Hollywood.’
‘Do you mean Communist, or socialist?’ asked Emma, and Peth gave her a fishy stare.
‘They’re the same thing, m’am.’
Emma opened her mouth to point out that the formation of labor unions did not inevitably lead to the nationalization of industry, and closed it. Argument, she understood – as with Madge Burdon and the first-century tiger population of the British Isles – would get them nowhere.
‘Many of these friends and supporters of the Soviet regime have offered jobs, financial assistance, and support to outright Communist agents,’ Peth continued. ‘For some years now the Bureau has been searching for a Mexican agent named Francisco Castillo, who was active in the uprising against General Obregón and disappeared across the border into Texas. Recently we’ve been given reason to believe he’s in Los Angeles. We know Castillo was interested in the use of films for revolutionary propaganda, and that he worked with Ernst Zapolya when Zapolya was at Azteca Films in Mexico City during the war. Does any of this sound familiar, Miss de la Rose?’
