Running Dog (28 page)

“I don’t know what to think.”

“You know who it could be? Magda Goebbels.”

“The first woman?” Moll said.

“Those could be her children. I’m saying ‘could be.’ I’m trying to supply identities. Make a little sense out of this.”

“Do you think it’s the bunker?”

“It could be the doctor’s former room. Hitler’s quack doctor was allowed to leave. Goebbels took over his room.”

“The three others,” Moll said.

“I don’t know. They could be secretaries, the women. The man, almost anything. A chauffeur, a stenographer, a valet, a bodyguard.”

“Magda Goebbels, you think.”

“I’m saying ‘could be.’ This isn’t what I expected. I wasn’t looking for this at all.”

Nothing much had happened thus far but Moll found something compelling about the footage she was watching. It wasn’t like a feature film or documentary; it wasn’t like TV newsfilm. It was primitive and blunt, yet hypnotic, not without an element of mystery.

Faces and clothing were immediately recognizable as belonging to another era. This effect was heightened by the quality of the film itself, shot with natural lighting. Bleached grays and occasional blurring. Lack of a sound track. Light leaks in the camera, causing flashes across the screen. The footage suggested warier times—dark eyes and fussy mouths, heavy suits, dresses in overlapping fabric, an abruptness and formality of movement.

Four adults and five children, all seated, fill the screen. They face the camera head-on. Time passes
.

“What’s that jump?”

“It could be the shelling,” Lightborne said.

“That’s the second time.”

“The Russians are a quarter of a mile away. Nuisance fire. In an all-out bombardment, they wouldn’t be able to film. Aside from the steady concussion, the place would be full of smoke and dust.”

The blond woman slowly rises and walks off camera
.

“She knows what happens.”

“What do you mean?” Moll said.

“The children.”

“What happens?”

“Goebbels has them poisoned.”

Another room
.

This one, although small and narrow and with an incomplete look about it, contains a writing desk, sofa and chairs. The walls are paneled. There’s a picture in a circular frame over the writing desk
.

A woman sits in one of the chairs, facing an open door that leads to another room. She turns the pages of a magazine. There’s a trace of self-consciousness in the way she does this. Finally she decides to look directly at the camera, smiling pleasantly. This puts her at ease
.

From her next reaction, it is clear that someone in the adjoining room is speaking to her
.

She sits with her legs crossed, paying no attention to the magazine pages she continues to turn. A light-haired woman in her early thirties, she wears a dark tailored suit, a bracelet, and what appear to be expensive shoes. She has a small worried mouth
(
even in her present good humor
)
and a somewhat shapeless nose. Two distinct shadow lines make her cheeks look puffy
.

She gestures toward the open door
.

“Where are we?” Moll said.

“Still in the bunker. It’s not inconsistent, the two rooms. See that picture over the desk? If we could see it from a better angle, being in a circular frame, that could be his portrait of Frederick the Great, which would make this room his living room.”

“Whose living room?”

“It’s a possibility. It could be. And through that open door, that’s his bedroom. Whoever’s shooting this film, it could be he’s shooting one room, he’s stopping, he’s walking over to the next room.”

“Editing in the camera,” Moll said.

“We’re getting everything. What do you think? We’re getting the one and only take of each scene.”

“It’s certainly unprofessional. But I can’t say I mind.”

“Those kids and those others are sitting in the first room waiting for the camera to come back. Maybe that’s why the thing seems so real. It’s true. It’s happening. I didn’t look for this at all.”

Another woman enters the room. The blond woman from the first sequence. Magda Goebbels—if Lightborne’s speculation is correct
.

She hands the younger woman a flower. Expression of delighted surprise. It’s a white boutonniere. The woman takes it into the next room
.

Visual static. Flash frames
.

“What are we looking at?”

“I don’t know,” Lightborne said.

“If that’s Frau Goebbels standing there, who’s the woman who just disappeared?”

“That shouldn’t be hard to answer.”

“I want to hear you say it.”

“You know as well as I.”

“Who is she?”

“It’s real,” Lightborne said. “I believe it. It’s
them
.”

The routine persisted.

In the late morning sun, Selvy placed the bolo knife on a bench in the littered compound. Seating himself on an overturned crate, he began working with oil and whetstone on the base of the blade. A snowy tom rolled in the dirt nearby. Directly ahead the spare land extended to the bottom of an enormous butte, its sloping sides covered with rockfall.

He saw it as memory, as playback. The border of appearances. Within is perfect color, the sense of topography as an ethical schematic. Landscape is truth.

When he looked up, ten minutes into his sharpening, he saw Levi Blackwater approaching from the southeast. Had to
be him. There had always been something physically off-center about Levi. Nothing so distinct as a limp or even an ungainliness of stride. The right shoulder sagged a bit. Maybe that was it. And the head tilted. And the right arm hung slightly lower. All apparent as he drew nearer.

He was a tall man, balding, and wore the same old field cap with ventilating eyelets. He was pale, he was sickly white, as always. Soft baby skin. A little like skin that’s been transplanted from another part of the body. He stood smiling now. That knowing smile. Dust devils spinning fifty, sixty yards away.

“I came in to feed the cats.”

Only Levi could speak of traveling to this remote site as “coming in.”

“Where are you when you’re out?”

Levi kept smiling and stood in profile, turning his head left toward the barest stretch of desert. He came forward to shake hands. It was the right hand that lacked two fingers, severed by his captors. Selvy had forgotten the directness of Levi’s manner of looking at people.

“I always knew if anyone came back, Glen, it would be you.”

“Not much left, is there?”

“Everything you’ll need.”

“I won’t be staying, Levi.”

People use names as information and Selvy believed the use of that particular name, Glen, indicated that Levi was deeply pleased to see him and wanted to suggest a new level of seriousness. In the past he’d often called Selvy by his rarely used first name, which was Howard. A teasing intimacy. It had amused Levi to do this. His eyes would search Selvy’s face. Those fixed looks, curious and frank at the same time, were irritating to Selvy, even more than hearing the name Howard. But he’d never complained, thinking this would put a distance between them.

Levi had been tortured, had spent extended periods of
time in a dark room not much larger than a closet, and consequently had things to pass on, knowledge to impart, both practical and otherwise. He’d found tolerances, ways of dealing with what, in the end, was the sound of his own voice. He’d come out stronger, or so he believed, having lived through pain and confinement, the machine of self.

“This is a stop then? On a longer trip?”

“You might say.”

“A way station,” Levi said.

The phrase seemed to please him. His liquid eyes peered out of the shadow cast by the visor of his hat. He wore a soiled fatigue jacket, torn in places.

“I see you’ve brought along some metal.”

“An antique,” Selvy said.

“We were just getting started when you left.”

“I know.”

“We were beginning to see results, I think. I’m happy you’ve come back, even for a while. It’s gratifying. You’re looking well, Glen.”

“Off the booze a while.”

“You ought to stay, you know. There are things you can learn here.”

“True. I believe that.”

“The less there is, Glen, the more you’re tested to find the things that do exist. Within and without. It works. If you limit yourself to the narrowest subject, you force yourself to concentrate to such an extent that you’re able to learn a great deal about it. You already
know
a great deal about it. You find you already
know
much more than you’d imagined.”

“I believe that.”

“With no limits, you wander back and forth. You’re defeated at the outset.”

“That’s why you’re here, Levi.”

“Both of us.”

“Tighter and tighter limits.”

“To learn. To find out what we know. When you left, we
were just starting out. Damn shame if you didn’t stay for a time. I’ve learned so much. So very much of everything.”

He was squatting on the other side of the bench where the knife lay on several old newspapers, the only things Selvy could find to soak up the honing oil. Levi let a fistful of sand gradually spill to the ground. The sky was changing radically. Dust rising in the wind. Darkness edging across the southwesterly wheel of land.

“I’m born all the time,” Levi said. “I remember other lives.”

Staring.

“Creature of the landscape.”

Smiling.

“Gringo mystic.”

The wind lifted dust in huge whispering masses. Toward Mexico the mountains were obscured in seconds. The butte in the middle distance still showed through in swatches of occasional color, in hillside shrubs and the mineral glint of fallen rock.

“I feel myself being born. I’ve grown out here. I know so much. It’s ready to be shared, Glen.”

“I’m on a different course right now.”

“You were making real progress.”

“I’m primed, Levi.”

“Yes, I can see.”

“I’m tuned, I’m ready.”

“I don’t accept that.”

“You know how it ends.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know what to do, Levi.”

“Have we talked about something like this?”

Sand came whipping across the compound. Above and around them it massed in churning clouds. Wind force increased, a whistling gritty sound. Levi took off his field cap and jammed it in his pocket. His jacket had a hood attachment,
tight fitting, with a drawstring around the face and a zippered closure that extended over the mouth. Levi fastened this lower part only as far as the point of his chin.

Selvy recognized a sound apart from the wind. He got to his feet and took off the Sam Browne belt. He threw it in the dirt. Damn silly idea. He had to admit to a dim satisfaction, noting the confusion in the other man’s eyes.

“There’s no way out, Glen. No clear light for you in this direction. You can’t find release from experience so simply.”

“Dying is an art in the East.”

“Yes, heroic, a spiritual victory.”

“You set me on to that, Levi.”

“Tibet. Is that the East? It’s beyond the East, isn’t it?”

“A man chooses a place.”

“But this is part, only part, of a longer, longer process. We were just beginning to understand. There’s so much more. You think you’re about to arrive at some final truth. Truth is a disappointment. You’ll only be disappointed.”

Selvy went into the long barracks and started ripping apart a bed sheet, planning to fashion some kind of mask, basic protection against the blowing sand.

Levi followed him in. Selvy watched him detach the hood from his jacket. He moved forward and put it over Selvy’s head, slowly fastening the drawstring. His eyes, always a shade burdened with understanding, began to fill with a deep, sad and complex knowledge. He raised the zipper on the lower part of the hood. Selvy, feeling foolish, turned toward the door.

Outside he went to the bench and picked up the bolo knife. He heard the sound again. There it was,
color
, black and bright red, a small helicopter, bearing this way, seeming to push against the wind.

Little bastards must be serious, out flying in this weather.

He walked about a hundred yards beyond the compound. The sand stung his eyes. He heard the motor but kept losing
sight of the aircraft. Then he saw it again, off to the left, shouting distance, touching down near a gulley, trim, vivid in the murky gusts, its spiral blades coming slowly to a halt.

Inside the projector the film run continued noisily.

The first room
.

There are now six children and five adults, all seated, facing the camera. Among the adults are the two women from the flower sequence in the furnished room
.

The smaller children are restless. Several adults wear rigid smiles; they look like victims of prolonged formalities. Two children trade seats. A woman turns to whisper
.

For the first time the camera is active
.

In a long slow panning movement, it focuses eventually on a figure just beyond the doorway. A man in costume. After an interval of distortion, the camera, starting at the mans feet, moves slowly up his body
.

Oversized shoes, turned up slightly at the points
.

Baggy pants
.

Vest and tight-fitting cutaway
.

A dark narrow tie
.

A wing collar, askew
.

A battered derby
.

A white boutonniere in the lapel of the cutaway
.

A cane hooked over his wrist
.

This footage has the mysterious aura of an event that cuts across time. This is because the man, standing beyond the doorway, is not yet visible to the audience of adults and children in the immediate vicinity. The other audience, watching in a dark room in New York in the 1970s, is aware of this, and they feel a curious sense of preview. They are seeing the man “first.”

“Is it?” Moll said.

“It could be.”

“Jesus, it’s almost charming.”

“But do I want it?”