Running Dog (12 page)

“Where’s your fucking glass?” Mudger said.

Lightborne stepped off the train and walked through a tunnel under the tracks. On the other side he entered the depot. Klara Ludecke was sitting on a bench near the newsstand. In her lap, for purposes of identification, was a copy of
Running Dog
magazine. Lightborne’s spur-of-the-moment idea.

He nodded and she followed him back out. Early evening. They walked toward the underground passageway he’d just come out of. The sole on Lightborne’s right shoe started flapping.

“I’m authorized,” he said, “to hand over the agreed sum in cash once the film is in my hands.”

“I’ll be happy to see it go.”

“Can I assume it was your husband who gave you my name?”

“My husband gave me three things. He gave me your name. He gave me an address in Aachen. And he gave me the key to a storage vault located at that address.”

In the passageway Lightborne lowered his voice, wary of the effects of echo.

“Have you seen the footage?”

“He wanted me to have nothing to do with it.”

“Did he tell you anything about it at all?”

“He only told me Berlin, under the Reich Chancellery, during the Russian shelling.”

On the opposite platform the flapping sole began to annoy Lightborne, and he suggested they sit for a while on one of the plastic benches.

“And so the film has been in a vault in Germany all these years.”

“Air-conditioned storage vault,” she said. “To preserve it properly.”

“I myself first heard of the item some thirty years ago.”

“When my husband was killed I knew that was the reason. He refused to sell at their price. At first they agreed on a price and when the screening was to be. Then Christoph demanded half payment in advance. This was turned down and he no longer wanted to talk with them. They put pressure in so many ways. He still refused. We see what happened.”

“Whose price?” Lightborne said. “Who put pressure?”

“I don’t think you want to know.”

“Do you know?”

The train from New York went roaring by, knocking them back a little in their seats, rippling the pages of the magazine she held once more in her lap.

“I know the name of a company in Virginia. I insisted to tell the police there is something to find there. They treated me as though I were a child. Sex crime. Obviously it could be nothing else. They were almost too embarrassed to discuss it with me. Only sex, it could be. The things sex killers do. One knife wound in the body, I reminded them. Where is the mutilation, the mess? So exact, this sex killer? No, no, they tell me. He picked up the wrong fellow. It happens all the time.”

Another train approached, heading south. They went down the steps near the taxi shack, fleeing the vibration and noise, and ended up strolling in little circles in the parking lot.

“After Christoph was buried, I went to Germany. It was done half in rage. I wanted the film, to possess it myself. I thought to own it would make my husband real again. As though it would give me power. As though the murderers would be taunted. Having it in my hands would make everything real. He died for something. Here it is. This round container with straps. Now I understand. Of course,” she said, “I’ve calmed down since then. Now I only think to sell it. I want to be paid for my husband’s death.”

“Yes, and it’s much, much better to conduct this kind of transaction in an atmosphere of mutual composure.”

She laughed wryly.

“All I want now is to see the last of it. They’ve put their listening devices in my house, they’ve broken in when I was not at home, they’ve made phone calls at all hours. I’m sick of this business. Deeply ashamed and disgusted. I know I’ll be cheated out of the movie’s true value. Still, I want to be rid of it as soon as possible.”

“There’s no question of cheating,” Lightborne said. “My client doesn’t operate that way. Once you hand over the film, you’ll be given a transferral fee. Then my client’s technical people will check to see just what we have. Is it a camera original, the master, as I’ve been hearing? Can we make a workprint for editing? Can we correct whatever defects? There’s a dozen questions like this, most beyond my own scope. If there’s no soundtrack, can we add one? What about final printing?”

“I only know Berlin, the Reich Chancellery, when the Russians shelled the city.”

“Then of course the ultimate question. The content itself. What is actually on film. Once this is looked into, you and I can discuss further monetary installments.”

“I know I’ll be cheated. It doesn’t matter. As long as you take it away.”

They crossed the street and walked slowly past a row of shops. Lightborne went into a paint store, just closing for the day, and asked if he might borrow a rubber band. He looped it twice over his right shoe to keep the sole from flapping. Then he and Klara Ludecke went back through the tunnel to the depot and sat on the bench near the newsstand.

“There is a single container,” she said. “It’s quite large, metallic. I think steel. I don’t know how many reels are inside. Meet me on Fifty-seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues. Two weeks from today, noon, south side of the street. I’ll place the object in your hands.”

“Where, exactly, on the south side of the street?”

“Walk up and down. I’ll find you.”

“I’d like to ask,” Lightborne said. “If you know anything about the history behind all this, I’d be interested in hearing.”

“You’re interested in the Nazis?”

“In the period, the era. The great collapse. People in overcoats listening to Bruckner. Hitler handing out vials of poison.”

“This is theatrical, the swastika banners, the floodlights.”

“The wedding banquet,” he said. “The execution of Fegelein in the garden. The burial of the wolfhound and her pups.”

“You respond to the operatic quality, the great flames.”

“Yes, the Russian guns in the distance, the strange celebration in the bunker when they mistakenly thought Hitler was about to kill himself.”

“The last meal was spaghetti,” she said.

The New York train pulled in, the 7:13. Lightborne decided he was sufficiently interested in the circumstances surrounding the movie to wait for the next train, assuming she could tell him something.

“Christoph’s father was an officer with a tank unit that defended against the Russian advance on the Oder.”

“Marshall Rokossovsky, maybe.”

“I was fond of him. Heinz Ludecke. A shy, humorous man. In the war he had a cousin—I don’t know his name. He was a stenographer attached to the Führerbunker in Berlin. The main task of this cousin was to record conversations between Hitler and Goebbels.”

“Yes, they liked to reminisce,” Lightborne said.

“In the confusion at the end, Heinz was taken prisoner by the Russians but managed to escape with false papers. Eventually he ended up in a British camp for refugees and foreign workers. Here he came across his cousin, who carried Belgian papers and a parcel which he obviously regarded with the greatest concern. It seems Hitler’s valet had been ordered to burn all of the Führer’s possessions and effects. This parcel
alone had been smuggled out of the bunker by Heinz’s cousin and he insisted that Heinz take possession of it on the theory that he was less vulnerable to interrogation and arrest.”

“They didn’t burn his portrait of Frederick the Great,” Lightborne said. “He gave specific orders the portrait was to be spared.”

“You hardly need me, Mr. Lightborne.”

“I’m sorry, go on.”

“It might be best if you produced your own movie.”

“Please continue, Mrs. Ludecke.”

“Heinz managed to resume a more or less normal life. His cousin vanished completely, never to be seen again, as in a fairy tale. Of course all this I learned from my husband. Whether or not Heinz ever viewed the film, even Christoph never found out. When Heinz died, not so long ago, Christoph went to Germany and took possession of the movie, something he could not do while his father was alive because Heinz would not relinquish it.”

“Why didn’t he destroy it, I wonder.”

“He was devoted to Hitler, and remained so all his life. If he saw what was on the film and if it is the filth some people believe it to be, I’m quite sure he would have destroyed it. Most likely he never saw the movie. I don’t know. Perhaps there’s another answer. The film itself may provide the answer. Or it may do nothing of the kind. In any case it was after my husband acquired the film that he started the fresh rumors of its existence.”

“To heat up the market.”

“To create a fever, yes. Not the happiest of strategies, was it?”

“A sad business,” Lightborne said with feeling.

“You know the circumstances?”

“Merely in outline.”

“He was wearing my clothes when he was killed.”

“To avoid detection. Those people were putting pressure.”

“It was something he did from time to time.”

“A preference.”

“He would go into the city.”

“I see.”

“He said it was only the clothes. He didn’t have relations with men, he said.”

“Was he telling the truth?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They knew him in that district. Truck drivers near the packing plants. They called him the Red Queen, for the dresses he wore, always red, my dresses. I knew. I permitted it.”

Lightborne sensed he was supposed to be touched by this. People with their enlightened attitudes. The best he could do was nod his head slowly, suggesting thoughtful consideration. Good time to change the subject.

“I’m forced to wonder, Mrs. Ludecke. Why a two-week wait before you hand over the container? Frankly I’d hoped to have it in my hands today or tomorrow.”

“I’m considering another offer.”

Lightborne grinned, a nervous reflex.

“Lovely,” he said. “All this talk about being so eager to get rid of it. That’s wonderful.”

“I had to allow the other party some time. The other party asked for time. It was common courtesy.”

“Common courtesy, that’s wonderful. I’m always charmed by alliteration. The child in me.”

She seemed amused by her own bold tactics. Caught in the midst of all these vortical energies, she’d found, at least for the moment, an approximation of calm, or perhaps it was objectivity, a view of herself uninfluenced by tragic emotion.

“It was funny about Heinz’s cousin,” she said. “Heinz said that people in the British camp asked his cousin over and over and over again: ‘What was Hitler really like?’ ”

Selvy sat on the roof of his building, eating a peach. There was a warm breeze from the west, where the sun hung on a tremulous rim, all ruddle and blood. When the metal door began swinging open, twenty yards away, he moved the peach to his left hand. It was Lomax, in his polyester knit trousers and white belt and shoes, trailed by three kids who lived in the building.

“How do I get rid of them?”

They followed him to the ledge where Selvy sat.

“What you supposed to be doing here?” one kid said.

“This ours, white.”

The smallest kid rubbed his sneaker against the side of Lomax’s shoe, scuffing it slightly.

“They followed me up four flights,” Lomax said.

“The limo’s been stripped by now,” Selvy told him. “Your driver’s long gone.”

“I came in a cab.”

“What is it, unofficial visit?”

“How long have you lived here? Have you lived here all this time? Why don’t you live where everybody else lives?”

All this time the kids had been crowding around Lomax, baiting him, ridiculing his clothes. Selvy noticed he was sweating, really irritated. The small one scuffed his other shoe. Selvy watched him clench his fists. He was very tense. He didn’t know what to do.

“It getting dark, white.”

“You’re being where you don’t live, man, and it getting dark.”

“Pizz on you, white.”

The small one scuffed his shoe again. One of the others ran his hand along the top of the ledge, coming away with ash and tar. He moved in now, feinting with the other hand, then
reaching out to smudge Lomax’s tartan slacks, a move half aggressive, half defensive, the kid drawing away quickly, his action comically stylized, head bobbing. Lomax pulled a Walther automatic out of the waistband holster under his jacket. He was shouting, waving the gun in their faces. They backed off slowly, eyes white in the dimness. The small one chewed gum. They didn’t know whether to be impressed or scared. They seemed to believe Lomax. He was riled enough to start shooting. As they got close to the door they relaxed a little. A trace of swagger crept back into their style. They went through the door strutting a little, shaking their asses.

Lomax was still shouting, calling them names. Selvy watched him holster the gun, his hand trembling a bit. He quieted down finally and took out a handkerchief and spat into it a few times. Then he put his right foot up on the ledge and began cleaning the scuff marks off his shoe. Selvy finished eating and tossed the peach pit over his shoulder into the air shaft.

On the 8:13 heading back to Grand Central, Lightborne considered two aspects of the situation. First, whoever held the footage had to contend with an element of danger. Second, Christoph Ludecke tried to sell the thing outright—half payment up front—without allowing the buyers an advance screening. Aside from being naïve, this attempt indicated that the movie wasn’t quite the commodity it was rumored to be. Ludecke wanted to get what he could and disappear. It also indicated there were huge sums involved.