Smart Moves (7 page)

“Thanks,” I said, stepping in.

“Be careful with those,” she said, returning to her cart. “People pull ’em right out of your pocket, they do.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said, closing the door. And I meant to be.

6

Albanese was neat. According to the register, he had been at the Taft for almost two months. There was almost nothing in sight to show that Room 1324 was even occupied. I had been in the hotel only one night and my room was a war zone of broken doors, windows, clothes all over the place, tooth powder and shaving cream staining the sink. The one trace of an inhabitant in 1324 was a newspaper article taped to the mirror in the bathroom. The article indicated that Einstein and Paul Robeson would be performing at a benefit at the Waldorf in three days.

I checked the drawers and found out that Albanese didn’t have a gun, brass knuckles, or anything more dangerous than hotel stationery. He did have an assortment of clean clothes all neatly laid out in the drawers, most of it purchased in London. I also discovered that he wore size-32 underwear and shirts with a size-14 neck. Unless he was a Dingka tribesman, I outweighted Albanese, which gave me some comfort as I sat down to wait and continued to read my newspaper. There were a lot of plays to see with people like Eddie Cantor, Gertrude Lawrence, Danny Kaye, and Luise Rainer. Serge Koussevitsky even had the Boston Pops at Carnegie Hall a few blocks from the hotel, but what got me was the show at the Paramount in Times Square. The movie was
My Favorite Blonde
with Bob Hope. On stage, Tommy Dorsey, his trombone, Frank Sinatra, Buddy Rich, Ziggy Elman, Jo Stafford, and the Pied Pipers. If I didn’t get killed, I’d find time to get to the Paramount. I hummed “Moonlight on the Ganges” through twice before I heard the key in the door.

I shut up, got up, and moved into the washroom out of sight of the door. Albanese wasn’t singing when he came in. I reached over and took down the newspaper clippings. Then I quietly stood in the doorway of the bathroom and watched him walk to the window, look outside, and turn to the telephone next to the bed. He was somewhere in his twenties, thin, dark hair combed straight back. He had a thin mustache and not much of a chin. When he picked up the phone I also learned that he had an English accent, not quite Leslie Howard, but not far from it.

“Yes,” he said, “I’d like Ardmore six-five-oh-oh, please.”

I hoped I could remember the number. I couldn’t move enough to write it down and attract his attention.

“Ah,” Albanese said when someone came on the line, “Angela, would you be a good girl and cover for me? I’ll be a few minutes late for rehearsal. Tell him I had a call from my mother about the Blitz or something. Blame the Jerries.… I know … Yes, you are right, no more than half an hour. Promise.”

He hung up, his back to me, and said, “Did I sound persuasive? I mean, would you have covered for me with that call?”

“Hard to say,” I said, stepping into the room and gauging a leap over the single bed in case he turned with a handful of hardware. “Women sometimes go for that helpless, spoiled-little-boy act. The accent helps too. You really English?”

“Absolutely,” he said, turning to face me. “Family from Cornwall. Father’s an apothecary, mother’s a schoolteacher. We go back a hundred years when my great-great-great-grandfather came over from Naples to peddle pornography to the few literate Anglicans.” He looked me up and down and I held up the newspaper clipping.

“I’m an actor,” he explained, moving to the wooden chair near the window and sitting to face me. The light caught him from behind. Nice effect.

“You’re also a writer,” I said, watching his hands and stepping forward. I dropped the clipping on the dresser and pulled the threatening letters to Einstein out of my pocket. No reaction. I handed him one of the letters. “You wrote that.”

He glanced at the letter and nodded with an amiable smile.

“Indeed,” he said, handing the letter back. “Normally, I don’t write with quite so steady a hand, but I wanted to be sure the camera would pick up each letter, each word. I rather saw the letters as I see my performances.”

“Why did you write them?” I asked, hovering over him.

He looked up and the smile twitched. He also turned and lost the dramatic effect of the lighting. “Didn’t Connie put you up to this? This
is
one of Connie’s jokes, isn’t it? I mean, you look like a gangster out of … Conrad didn’t send you, did he?”

He tried to get up but I put my hands on his shoulders and pushed him back. The light had definitely failed him now.

“See here,” he said, his cheeks turning red, “if you’re from one of those collection agencies, I won’t put up with your breaking into my room. Just give me the bill and I’ll make partial payment and the rest when the show I’m in …”

“Why did you write those letters?” I said, ready to push him back down. He bounced as if to try again and sat back.

“I don’t understand.” He almost wept.

“Neither do I, but if you answer some questions, one of us may be able to figure things out. The letters?”

“For the movie,” he said.

“The movie?”

“Columbia Pictures,” he said with mock exasperation. “They hired me.”

“Columbia Pictures hired you to threaten Albert Einstein?”

I had dealt with actors before, all kinds, even looney ones who didn’t make sense and loonier ones who did, so I was prepared for a long morning, but I didn’t want it any longer than it had to be. I tried to look angry and impatient. Maybe I succeeded.

“Yes,” Albanese bleated. “I was hired to star in a two-reel short,
Axes to the Axis
. I was a deluded young American who threatens Albert Einstein. After meeting Einstein, I learn the error of my ways and turn in the Fifth Columnists.”

“That is a …” I began and then changed direction. “They actually shot this movie?”

“Yes, in a loft near the Village,” cried Albanese. “I say, I really can do an American accent quite well. I really can. Listen, ‘Can one of you guys stop talking and hand me the catchup?’”

“Yeah,” I said. The accent stunk. “Why did you actually have to write the letters?”

“Authenticity, verity,” he explained. “The camera actually filmed me as I wrote.”

I had a feeling Columbia wasn’t at the bottom of this, but it was damned hard to believe that Nazis or anyone else had actually gone through with making a movie, just to set up a simple-minded fall guy like Albanese. “How did the movie come out?” I asked.

“I haven’t seen it yet,” Albanese said, trying to stand up again. This time I didn’t stop him. “The editing takes time, but Mr. Povey said that as soon …”

“Who is Mr. Povey?”

Albanese walked over to the mirror in the bathroom and his voice echoed back, “The director, Gurko Povey. He came here to escape the Nazis. He’s done magnificent films in Europe.”

“Name one you’ve seen,” I said, following him to the bathroom. “No, I’ll make it easier. Just name one.”

Albanese paused in his examination of his hair but didn’t look away from his reflection as he threw his hands out and sighed with undigested contempt for my lack of knowledge of the European cinema. “I don’t remember exactly,” he said. “Something to do with Grungecht or Groomlicht or something like that. They’re all in German.”

“Was someone on Gurko Povey’s crew a big guy with close-cropped white hair?” I asked, watching him watch himself.

“That’s a reasonable description of Mr. Povey himself. I tried calling him Herr Povey but he preferred the Anglicized form of address.”

“Naturally,” I said. “So, how many people were involved in making this movie?”

Albanese finished his inspection of himself and turned to me. He thought he had had enough. “Look here, you break into my room, push me around, ask all manner of ridiculous questions about my career and explain nothing. I’m late for a rehearsal and I can’t be …”

But he could be. As he tried to walk past me on the “be,” the fingers of my right hand caught his neck.

“Actor, you are in trouble,” I whispered, watching him turn pink. “Those letters were sent to Albert Einstein. They are threatening letters. And you are an idiot. Now I’m going to let you go and you are going to answer my questions. Try to blink your eyes if you understand.”

His face was turning white but his eyes fluttered. I took my fingers from his throat and watched him go through the recovery-from-choking routine. He overacted. I felt sorry for him. He had no future in the theater. Movies, maybe.

“My God,” he gasped, staggering to the bed and flopping back. “My God, you’ve damaged my larnx.” Then something even worse struck him. He sat up, his mouth dropped open, and out came, “Then I’ll probably never see the film. No one will ever see
Axes to the Axis
.”

“There probably wasn’t any film in the damn camera,” I said, walking to the bathroom and filling a spotless glass with tepid water. I let the truth sop in and came back with the water. He took it and drank and then gave me the glass. I put it down and waited for more light to dawn in his feeble brain.

“Then you must be the police or the FBI or something,” he said.

“I’m ‘or something,’” I told him. “I’m something that wants answers.”

As it turned out, he was someone who was now quite willing to give me the answers I wanted. Ten minutes later I knew that he could take me to the loft where the film had supposedly been made, that he had a bone or something missing from his hip, which kept him from being drafted, and that he had a small role in an upcoming version of
Othello
, which was in rehearsal. He gave me rough descriptions of the camera operator and the sound man on
Axes to the Axis
and promised that he could identify them. In return I promised that Einstein wouldn’t give him the opportunity to play an extended engagement in prison. Albanese thought that was awfully good of me and agreed that when rehearsal was over at six I could meet him. He gave me the address and I let him go.

I went back to my room and put in a call to Einstein. He answered the phone himself with a “Yes?” and I told him what I had discovered.

“You believe this Albanese?” Einstein asked softly.

“Yes,” I said and tried out the description of Povey on him.

“Who knows?” the scientist said. “It sounds like so many people. Dreams, formulas, these I remember with clarity for decades. I can almost not erase them from my mind. They clutter, come back when I call for something else, but people I forget, faces I forget. They change too quickly. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll keep on this.”

“Without getting killed.”

“Without getting killed,” I agreed. “The name of that neighbor of yours, the one across the street, where the FBI is staying. You know it?”

“His name? No.”

“I want to get the phone number over there. Is there any way …”

“The number is Essex three-four-six-nine,” said Einstein immediately. “To me he was Essex three-four-six-nine. It was easier to remember than his name.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Your cold sounds better.”

“There is improvement,” he said, with a slight sniff.

We hung up and I called Essex 3469 and on the fifth ring got Spade or Archer. I couldn’t tell which. The line was bad. “Yes,” he said.

“This is Peters,” I said.

“His name is Povey,” came the voice. “He’s not German, he’s Hungarian. If he wanted to kill you, he would have.”

“First name Gurko,” I threw in.

“Not bad,” he answered appreciatively. “You’ve been talking to the actor. We thought it would take you a couple of days to track him down.”

The window was still broken and I had till midnight before Carmichael the house detective put up the
NO TRESPASSING
sign. I needed help.

“It’s been nice chatting with you, Peters,” the voice crackled.

“Hold it,” I shouted. “If you know about Albanese and Povey, why don’t you pull them in, lock Povey up? I could have been killed. Einstein could get killed.”

“Maybe half a million people or more can get killed in this war,” he said gently. “We pull in one Povey and lose a network, a whole bunch of spies. We’ve got our eyes on him, nearsighted though they may now be. Look, I’ve got to get back to Archer for lunch. We’re watching Einstein for you. Go ahead and chase Povey, maybe nail him. You’ve got no connection to the Bureau or the police. They’ll figure you for what you are, a private detective on a case.”

“I could get killed,” I repeated.

“Soldiers are dying every day over two oceans,” he said without sympathy. “Anything else?”

“What’s the name of the guy whose house you’re in?”

“May, Stephen P. May. Why?”

“Does Essex three-four-six-nine sound easier to you?”

“Goodbye, Peters,” he said and hung up.

I adjusted my shoulder holster, checked my .38, put on my jacket, and looked in the mirror. I looked like an extra in
Little Caesar
, one of Arnie Lorch’s boys. I took off the holster, put it back in my suitcase, and hid the pistol in the light fixture again. The hell with it. I had nothing I could think of to do before six, so I went to the Paramount matinee, ate popcorn and watched Bob Hope get chased by spies. I didn’t like the part where the big blonde in the movie gets killed with a knife hidden in a fake snowball while she sings, “Palsy-Walsy.” It wasn’t funny. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be. A lot of the jokes were lost. The Paramount was filling with girls in short skirts, who should have been in high school on a Thursday afternoon. The girls weren’t interested in Bob Hope. They were interested in talking.

When the movie ended, the girls, hundreds of girls, let out a scream. With the lights on I looked around. I was the only male in the theater. Hell, I was the only adult in the theater except for Gurko Povey, who sat absolutely still about ten rows behind me. He was wearing a white suit. He didn’t want to be missed. Our eyes met. It was not love at first sight. His hands were folded on his chest and I wondered if he was hiding a snowball with a knife in it. I smiled at him. He didn’t smile back, but the girl behind him, her hair done up in curls and a white ribbon, thought I was leering at her. She curled back her lip in distaste, nudged her sorority sister and they both looked at me. I shrugged and pointed at Povey. They looked at him while music started on the stage and Ziggy Elman trumpeted “My Little Cousin.” I kept looking back at Povey over my shoulder. The son-of-a-bitch didn’t blink. His hair looked even whiter in the theater light, especially with the white suit he was wearing. I was missing the show and the girls were getting restless. One girl on my right who was probably about thirteen but could have passed for sixteen, if she hadn’t been wearing so much makeup, shoved her elbow into my ribs and hyperventilated, “He’s coming. Oh, my God. He’s coming.” Then she looked at who she had poked and got a little frightened.