Stardust (16 page)

“Except you.”

Bunny nodded. “I keep things running.”

S
HE WAS
in the pool when he got home. He followed the faint sounds of splashes through the quiet house and out onto the terrace, stopping for a second by the lemon tree near the door. Only the pool lights were on, a grotto effect, with blue light rising up, not spilling down, and he saw that she was naked, her body gliding through the water with a mermaid’s freedom, alone in her own watery world. He knew he should make a sound but instead stood watching her, the smooth legs, the private dark patch in between when they opened out. When she became aware of him, a shadow at the end of the pool, she swam toward him without embarrassment, faintly amused at his own.

“I thought I was alone,” she said smiling, glancing toward the crumpled bathing suit on the edge of the pool.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean—” Still looking, only her head above water, but the rest of her clear in the pool lights.

“That’s all right. I was getting out anyway.” She reached for a towel, more of her out of the water now, her nipples hardening a little as the air touched them. “Quiet as a mouse.”

She looked at him, still amused, then began to climb the shallow end steps so that he finally had to turn away, a show of modesty. Behind him he could hear the towel rubbing, another rustling as she put on a robe, watching her now by sound.

“Have a drink.” She moved to the open wine bottle on the table, tying her belt. “Iris left something in the fridge, if you’re hungry. I didn’t know—”

“I should have called.”

“No, don’t feel that. Come and go as you like.” She poured out two
glasses from what he saw was an almost empty bottle. “Did you have a good day?” she said, handing him one.

He laughed, a reflex.

“What?”

“That’s what people say in movies.” What wives said.

“So how do I say it then?” She sat down on a chaise and lit a cigarette, turning to sit back but keeping one leg up, poking through the folds of the robe.

He shrugged. “Same way, I guess.”

“Ha, art and life. Like my father’s lectures. So, was it? A good day?”

He leaned back on the other chaise, taking a sip of the wine. “This is nice.”

“Mm. Maybe I’ll take to drink.”

But he hadn’t meant the wine: the warm night, the liquid light of the pool catching her bare leg, Danny’s wonderful life. Is that how it had been? Comparing their days, listening to night sounds, the soft air rubbed with hints of chlorine and eucalyptus.

“Did you go to your father’s?”

“No. He says it’s too soon.” She took another drink. “How long do people sit at home anyway? Do you know?”

“A week, I think.”

“Two more days. Then what? Ciro’s. Ha. Every night.
Das süsse Leben
.”

“How about dinner at Sol Lasner’s? Saturday.”

She turned to him, eyebrows raised.

“He said to bring someone,” Ben said. “Who else do I know?”

She sat back, smiling. “Such an invitation. But you’re in luck. I’m free. Every day, in fact. Well, not Sunday.”

“What’s Sunday?”

“My father’s birthday. Salka makes a big lunch. Dieter comes and makes a toast—he writes it out before, a real speech. My father thanks him. Then
he
says something. It goes on like that, every year. Then chocolate cake.”

“The one Danny liked.”

“Yes,” she said, a sudden punctuation mark. She stubbed out her cigarette, then got up and poured more wine in their glasses. “They sent the medical report you asked for. It’s on the desk.”

“What does it say?”

“He died,” she said, sitting back down.

“I’ll look at it later.”

“Why?”

He said nothing for a minute, listening to the pool water hit against the drain flaps.

“I don’t know. How he died. It’s something we should know—it’s part of it all.”

She looked over at him for a second, about to speak, then let it go.

“If you say so,” she said wearily. “So what do we wear to Lasner’s? They dress up?”

“I’ll ask Bunny.”

She turned, a question.

“His right hand, his— I don’t know what you’d call him. He used to be a child star.”

“That’s what happens to them? I never think of them grown up.”

“Neither do they. Then they are and they have to do something else. But they look the same. Just older. Remember Wolf Breslau? The little boy in the Harz Mountain films? He became a Nazi. They put him on trial. For killing Poles. In open pits. The same baby face.”

She was quiet for a minute. “Someone you saw in the
Kino,
” she said to herself. “How can anybody go back?” She shook her head. “My father says Heinrich’s making plans. To go back to that.” She took a sip of wine. “And what about you? What are you going to do? Now that you’re grown up. Make pictures?”

“No.”

“No? Lasner must like you. Inviting you to dinner.”

“He likes me this week. One in the family’s enough.” Was. “My father always expected Danny to—”

“But not you. So.” Another sip, thinking. “Did you like him?”

“My father?”

“No. Daniel.”

The question, never asked, took him by surprise, something tossed in the air that hung there, incapable of being answered.

“I mean, families, people don’t always— So many years, you didn’t see each other. I just wondered.”

“That was the war.”

“Ah,” she said, the sound floating up to join the question, still suspended.

He looked out toward the city. “I wanted to be him,” he said finally.

“When you were boys.”

“Yes.” When did that stop? Does it? He smiled, moving away from it. “He was good with girls.”

“And not you?”

“I got better.”

“They say in Germany now you can get a girl for a pack of cigarettes. One pack.”

“That’s not all you’d get.”

“So it’s not for you, the easy ones. I can see that. It wouldn’t be— how do you say
schicklich
?”

“Proper. Seemly.”

“Seemly,” she said, trying it, then took another sip of wine. “The first time I met him—he’d undress you. Look right at you. He wanted you to know he was doing it. So people are different. You look at me from the side. You don’t want me to know you’re looking.” She waved her hand at him before he could say anything. “It’s all right. It’s nice, someone looking. Don’t be embarrassed.” She paused. “I like you looking.”

He turned to her, not sure how to respond.

“If it makes you uneasy, my being here—”

She shook her head. “No. It doesn’t matter. That’s not the way it would happen. I know you a little now. You look from the side. You’d wait. You’d wait for me to say. To start it. That’s how it would happen.” She looked at him. “Don’t you think?”

A direct look, not from the side, holding his. He felt blood rise to his skin, as if she had touched him. Danny’s wife.

“Maybe,” he said. “And maybe you’re having fun with me.”

“No.” She smiled, looking down at her glass. “Maybe the wine is.” She sat up, a drowsy stretch, gathering the robe. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be seemly, would it? Not yet.”

“No.”

“Not even cold. That’s what they’d say, yes? Well, I’m going in.” She picked up the bottle to take with her. “Have a swim if you like,” she said, moving off, then smiled at him. “I won’t look.”

H
E SAT
for a while, his mind drifting but then, like the water, lapping back.
Schicklich
. The inside of a marriage was unknowable, curtained off. He listened for sounds of her inside, but only the crickets broke the quiet. Maybe she was already in bed, not at all uneasy because she knew the way it would happen.

On his way in, he stopped at the screening room to pick up some of the office papers Republic had sent over. Scripts, drafts. What had been in his mind those last weeks? Not that
Partners in Crime
was likely to be revealing—formula stuff, two brothers having fun, as frivolous as Otto’s comedies.

He went over to an open film can. The film itself was still in the projector, not yet run through and put away, the last thing Danny had seen. Maybe a Continental picture with a young star, someone he wanted to watch over and over? Ben flicked the switch, half-expecting to see Ruth or Rosemary—any girl you’d want to spend an afternoon with at a residential hotel. Instead it was a Fox Movietone newsreel, men shaking hands right after Hiroshima. Ben rewound the film and started it again.

First, the usual opening montage with the water-skiers, then the airmen at Tinian Island, the ground crew loading the bomb, kneeling with the pilots in front of the plane, a picture everybody’d seen now, instant history according to the voice-over. But the camera had been there, too, recording it, making a movie. And in the plane, flying now through the clouds.

The flash and mushroom cloud, the whole city rolled up in smoke, the narrator excited by the scale of it, the most powerful thing the world has ever known. No voice, though, over the next segment, shot later, a silent sweeping pan of the charred, flattened city. A few figures picking their way through the landscape, otherwise no movement at all. More pan shots, the frame of a domed building by the river, the rest vaporized. Congratulations all around back home, scientists and generals shaking hands. They’d made a movie of it, sent cameras up, got flight crews to pose. But so had the Nazis, filming atrocities with smiling faces. That’s how they’d identified Wolf Breslau, caught on film on the rim of the mass grave, smiling, unable to resist one last close-up.

The newsreel went on to the surrender scene on the
Missouri,
but even the narrator, booming with victory, couldn’t lift the film from the streets of ashes. The voice wanted to celebrate, throw a hat in the air like the relieved sailors, but the words said one thing and the pictures showed another—this was the way it would be now, the way we would die. Kissing couples, the narrator announcing a world of hope. But it wasn’t, Ben thought. Not now. Just an endless dread.

Ben took the reel off and put it in its canister. Not frivolous. Maybe
Partners
wasn’t the whole of him, maybe the war had touched something deeper, just as Ben’s life had been upturned by the camps, both of them alike under the skin.

He turned off the light and went into the house. On the desk in the study, just as she’d said, he found the autopsy report. He glanced through it. Medical English, not English at all, nearly incomprehensible. He heard a sound from her room, a turning perhaps, something dropped, meaningless in itself except as a sign of life. Just behind the door. He smiled to himself.
Schicklich
. How do we decide what’s right? He looked down again at the sheet. Pulmonary—something to do with the lungs. But of course she was right. All it said was that Danny was dead.

• • •

“W
AS THERE
some problem?” Dr. Walters said, caught on the run in the hall, not sure why Ben had come.

“I don’t know the technical terms. I’m not sure what they actually mean.”

“Simple language? He stopped breathing.” He halted midstep. “I’m sorry. I know it sounds like a joke. All I mean is that there were no signs of stroke—that’s the usual cause after a head trauma, edemal bleeding flooding the brain.”

“But not in this case.”

“No. Or heart damage. There are only a few ways to die. Of course, these are all connected.” He paused, framing his hands, explaining to a classroom. “Think of the brain as a switchboard. The operator pulled a line connected to the lungs. Like being cut off on a call,” he said, looking up, waiting to see if Ben was following. “The board controls everything. The lungs don’t operate by themselves.”

“Is that common?”

“Yes. Mr. Kohler, with a head injury like this, the surprising thing is that he didn’t die instantly. I gather he was lucky in the response time— the ambulance got to him before he lost too much blood. So that bought him some time. I’m sorry.”

“But if he regained consciousness—”

“We don’t rule out miracles,” he said patiently. “But I’m a doctor, you know, not a priest. This is what we expected to happen.” He waited for Ben to reply.

“Was there anything—any sign that he may have been injured before he fell?”

“Before.”

“Knocked out, anything like that.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“By someone else. Before.”

Dr. Walters peered at him, disconcerted. “No. But I’m not a policeman, either. Is there any reason to think this happened?”

“I just wanted to look at everything. Every possibility.”

Dr. Walters nodded. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kohler. These things can be
hard to accept.” He looked down at the paper in Ben’s hand. “Maybe that’s why we hide behind the language.”

He had stopped by the hospital on his way to lunch and now found himself running late, caught in the traffic west to Fairfax. Kelly had suggested the Farmers Market, somewhere away from the studio, a pointless Dick Tracy feint, but not worth arguing about.

The market had started as a collection of produce stalls for Depression farmers, but now had the look of a small studio—permanent buildings for the stalls and restaurants, table seating on patios and its own logo clock tower, looking over the parking lot like the RKO globe. Everything was painted cream and light green and maroon, what Ben thought of as leftover colors, the same ones Lasner had used at Continental, maybe even from the same cheap supply. Kelly was already at a table under the trees, nursing a beer.

“So what have we got?” he said as Ben sat down, his eyes darting over Ben’s shoulder.

“Not much. No matches from the building list.” He pulled out a paper. “These are the top contract players, the ones they might want to protect, but that doesn’t mean it’s one of them. And they’re not big names. Lasner doesn’t—”

“Yeah, I know, the loan-out king. Who’s he got borrowed, by the way. He’d want to take care of them, at least until the picture’s out. Listen,” he said abruptly. “You mention me to anyone? Tell them I’m looking at this?”

“No. You said—”

“You sure?”

Ben nodded. “Why?” he said, aware now of the look in Kelly’s eyes, his quick movements.