Cheat and Charmer (4 page)

Dinah pulled the covers up over Lorna, sweeping her heavy blond hair away from her face. That hair came from her side, the Milligan side; her father had been blond as a child. Already it was beginning to darken to a honey-colored brown. Lorna stirred and opened her eyes. “Pretty dresses,” she mumbled. For a moment, it looked as if she were trying to decide whether to wake up and talk, as she loved to do, about the dresses at the parties her mother went to, but she closed her eyes, content, it seemed, with her mother’s presence. Dinah waited, listening to her daughter’s even
breathing, and then bent over and kissed her on a spot between lip and chin.

She walked softly through the children’s bathroom to Peter’s room, where she found him curled up tightly under the covers, his hair—black like Jake’s, straight like hers—framing his oval face. That afternoon, he’d said that he didn’t want to go to day camp this summer. He wanted to start clarinet lessons instead. She’d had to tell him, for the third time, “The clarinet teacher says you should wait until you’re seven. That way all your front teeth will be in, and you’ll be ready to start.” He had lost just one of the two front upper teeth; the other one was loose, though not very, and the bottom ones were still tightly in place. But the month before he’d been walking with her in Beverly Hills past a music shop where they’d paused to look at the instruments in the window. He’d let go of her hand and pointed to a set of separate pieces lying within the red velvet compartments of a hard black case. “What is that one?” he’d asked. “A clarinet,” she’d said. “I want to play it,” he’d announced. And to her surprise he’d said it again every day since then, so that she’d found a teacher and discussed the best time to start lessons. Meanwhile she’d taken out her Benny Goodman 78s and played them for him. “Yes,” he’d said thoughtfully, “I want to play the clarinet.”

Along the corridor between Lorna’s and Peter’s rooms there was another room, small and empty, but freshly painted in a pale green. Dinah had marked it out as the baby’s room the previous fall, when she and Jake had first looked at the house, into which they had moved three months later. Lorna would be four in a few weeks, and Peter seven in September; she herself was almost thirty-nine, and if they were going to have a third child the time to start was now. She went into the room and looked out the window at the backyard lights illuminating the big gaping hole where the pool was being built. Suddenly she imagined them—she and Jake, the two kids, and probably Jake’s mother—in a cramped stucco apartment in the Valley, stuffy and hot in 105-degree weather, Jake working in a butcher shop, as he’d done in college, she typing in an office somewhere. No third child, no clarinet lessons, no fencing lessons, no future for the kids, certainly no college, Jake’s mother beaming at her nervously and asking the children for kisses.

She felt Jake glide into the room and put his hands on her shoulders.

“Bet I know what you’re thinking,” he said. He had already changed into his slippers and bathrobe.

“I can’t do it,” she said.

“Of course not.”

“We’ll have to sell the house.”

“Okay, we’ll have to sell the house. So what?”

He squeezed her shoulders.

“They’ll throw me in jail.”

“So, we’ll visit you.”

“No b-b-b-baby,” she said.

“Wait a minute. Don’t I get conjugal visits?” He put his arm around her. “Come on, let’s have the hot chocolate.”

Back in their own room, she disappeared into her dressing suite to change into her pajamas. When she returned, the hot chocolate was cold, so they got into her bed, though they usually started out in his, and he stayed with her there throughout what little was left of the brief, uneasy night.

A
t eleven-thirty the next morning, Jake Lasker watched carefully as Irv Engel pulled the pipe away from his girlish mouth, and stretched out a long arm over stacks of scripts in colored binders to retrieve a gold lighter on the far end of the Art Deco desk. Jake let his eyes wander as Engel theatrically pondered, and duly noted again what he had duly noted many times before: the beige silk walls and the signed photos of Irv shaking hands with Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and other dignitaries; of Anya Engel handing an unwieldy bouquet of bird-of-paradise blooms to Eleanor Roosevelt; laminated citations from the guilds; and framed color posters of Marathon’s biggest hits—among them the old thirties blockbuster
Away in a Manger
(the
true
story of the journey of the wise men—with one of them played by Bill Robinson, considered a daring casting choice at the time), Stu Krieger’s thriller
Fat Chance
, with Art Squires, and, most recently, Jake’s own
Cousin Jonnycake
.

Another poster caught his eye. He and Dinah had the same one at home, carefully wrapped up in the attic. A beautiful young woman, Genevieve Milligan, stares in fascination and horror at a series of cards she holds in her hand. The face of the jack of clubs is that of Robert Montgomery, and he is wearing a gray Confederate uniform; the second—the queen of spades—has the face of Alice Brady, made up as an old woman, and she is dressed in a ball gown and has a tiara in her elaborately coiffed eighteenth-century wig, eyes glittering with demented malice; another, a joker, is none other than Emil Jannings. In the background an open window reveals a city at night, in flames—Richmond, Virginia. Across the top, in big letters, stand the names of the four stars and the title:
QUEEN OF
SPADES
. Below:
Produced by Willie Weil. Written by Dorshka Albrecht and Stefan Ventura. Directed by Stefan Ventura
.

On the office walls there also hung a small Klee, a drawing by Picasso, a Schwitters collage, and several portraits by Anya Engel of the two Engel boys with green noses, orange cheeks, blue chins, and purple hair.

“Frankly, I’m as puzzled as you are,” said the studio head, after lighting his pipe. “Why Dinah, of all people? Don’t tell me
she
was in the Party.”

“Actually, she was.”

Engel puffed and considered. “But why do they care about that? Was she important? Was she a big shot?”

“Hardly.”

“Then it doesn’t make any sense. Unless, of course, it’s you they’re after.
You
as a possible target I can understand. For you the Party would have been impossible to avoid.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Believe me, Jake, I know you better than you think I do. You’re one of those guys who joined the Party because you could only make it with shiksas, and you were looking for college-educated Communist blondes because they were easy and didn’t make trouble the next morning.” He grinned wickedly.

“Ordinarily, Irv, I’d say you know me
very
well,” said Jake with an obliging laugh. He pushed back his glasses. “But you’re only half right. I never joined the Party. I went to some meetings, the usual shindigs for Spain, the Anti-Nazi League, that sort of thing. I even spent a few evenings out here at workers’ school. After writing jokes all day for George Joy’s Crystaldent show, you can imagine how much fun it was to be instructed in the theory of surplus value by people of insufficient talent. I knew a lot of people in the Party, but somehow or other I just couldn’t take that step. I’m not much of a joiner.”

“Unless it’s your country club,” said Engel. “And the guilds.”

“You know,” Jake said with a perfunctory laugh, “I remember one time, at the University of Chicago, waking up in the apartment I was sharing with some guys and going into the bathroom and finding some fellow I’d never seen before sitting up completely dressed in the bathtub reading a newspaper. I was a little embarrassed, so I said, ‘What’s the weather going to be today?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. I never read the capitalist press.’ But joining? That I never did. Dinah—that’s a different story. Because of Veevi and Ventura.”

Engel’s eyes lit up. Very few people had the right to call Genevieve Milligan Ventura Albrecht by her nickname, and among those who did even fewer knew its genesis in the deep past, when Dinah, a stuttering child of three, unable to master the recalcitrant syllables of her baby sister’s name, Genevieve, had taken the third, and easiest, and turned it into two.

“By God, that was some world,” Engel said. “Tell me, Jake, I’ve always wanted to ask you this: when did she find out about about—?”

“Ventura? Right after the war, in Paris, when she and Mike had found each other again and he got his OSS pals to make inquiries.”

“So what’s the story? What really happened?”

“Maybe somebody sold him out, maybe it was just bad luck. I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody does for sure. He was involved with a group of foreign Communists, mostly Jews—Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians like himself, young guys, sometimes just teenagers. Their families were poor immigrants who’d come to France years before, and the Nazis had rounded them up and shipped them off to the camps. So these boys were desperadoes, they had nothing to lose, really, and they wanted to kill Nazis. Stefan was the same age as their fathers, had contacts in the French Party, and because he’d been a director he knew how to get people to do things—you remember him, don’t you? I only saw him once, before I knew Veevi and Dinah, but I’ll never forget that big calm man, with his intelligent, kind of amused-looking face. He was a lovely guy, a true mensch. Anyway, he was put in charge of these boys, told them their assignments, found them hiding places, helped them make bombs. He was a kind of Resistance scoutmaster, if that isn’t too grotesque a way of putting it, and carried out their actions with them. Through Willie Weil—”

“I know Willie,” said Engel.

“Ventura’d become a French citizen before he came out here, so he had a French passport, but he had an accent and a foreign-sounding last name, and—I don’t have to tell you—the other kind of passport, the one you get at your bris. So he was in real danger. They all were, really, and that includes Veevi. She was in on it from the beginning. I mean, she did fantastic things—carrying pipe bombs in her purse and handing them to one of the boys on the street, who would light the fuses and toss them into garbage cans just as Nazi officers were passing by on their evening constitutionals. Stefan and his boys did a lot of damage in Paris, and when it got too hot there and they went into the country they did railroad sabotage, blew up bridges—things like that. Heroic stuff—the real thing. Stefan had
a feeling the Gestapo was closing in, and according to Veevi he wasn’t so sure about the Party higher-ups. But he had friends from the old days—from after Berlin but before Hollywood—and he made sure they got Veevi a phony French passport that made her the American widow of a French aristocrat, and she and her daughter moved back and forth between a château belonging to a countess who was also a Communist and a farmhouse belonging to friends of hers. She sweated out the war there, terrified that someone would remember her from her American movies. But they got Stefan.”

“Who? The Gestapo?”

“Who else? Of course the Gestapo.”

“And?”

“First they beat him up, then they tortured him, then they decided they hadn’t had enough fun, so they brought out another guy who’d been arrested with him, cut off their balls, tied their legs together, and told them to race each other in the snow. Then they shot them.”

The words tore through the comfortable office, with its elegant appointments, like a savage smell, and Engel, always unshockable, never at a loss, swallowed, teared up, squeezed his eyes shut, and motioned with his hands for Jake to stop. “Please,” he said hoarsely. “I’m sorry I asked.”

Jake thought, Always a line. Even now there has to be a ready-made line. He felt overwhelming—but brief—contempt for the man and the industry to which they both belonged. Jake watched as Irv tapped the bowl of his pipe upside down on a crystal ashtray, and shifted his tall, lean body in his chair as if he could not get comfortable. “I’m afraid my father never did realize what he had in this man. He was a great artist. His fate”—Oh God, thought Jake, here it comes, another Engel-logue—“and his”—he searched for the word—“
contribution
should be acknowledged and commemorated in some, ah, appropriate way one day by this studio, while at the same time our”—he dug his pipe into a Dunhill pouch, packing it with the tips of his delicate fingers. “Our—um, not—um—help me out here, Jake—”

“Culpability?”

“No. Our, uh”—he scratched his head, which was, Jake noted enviously, as full of hair as a toupeed evangelist’s—“
difficulties
in giving him the wide berth his talent, I mean, uh, genius, required, did, regretfully, play a role in his, uh, decision to return to Europe on the eve of war.” He glanced around, and Jake saw that he wasn’t finished. “But that decision was his
own, and I have to believe he made it with open eyes. Let’s face it, Jake,” he said almost in a whisper, as if there were somebody listening under the table. “Who in their right mind went
back
to Europe in 1939? The man had to be suicidal.”

But you did nothing to stop him, Jake thought. You were in love with Veevi, and sore at her for marrying Ventura; you could have gone to your father and argued with him to keep Ventura on, but you didn’t do a goddamn thing. You let them both go.