The New Confessions (71 page)

It was here I perfected the dry martini—John James Todd style. One: chill everything to just above freezing point—gin, Noilly Prat, lemon, glass and shaker. Two: fill a saucer with Noilly Prat and upend the cocktail glass in it. About half an inch of the rim should be submerged. Three: fill the shaker with ice and then add the gin. Do not shake, rotate gently a couple of times. Four: take the glass from the saucer. Five: fill with gin. Six: cut a piece of lemon peel and allow a few spots of zest to spray onto the surface of the gin. Seven: drink. This method is infallible. It is the only way
(a)
to guarantee the minutest addition of Noilly Prat to the gin, and
(b)
to taste it. Otherwise you might as well drink neat gin. The vermouth is a crucial ingredient. Those people who say “Show the gin the Noilly Prat” don’t know what they are talking about. It is a
cocktail
, not a draft of neat alcohol.

So I drank these dry martinis and Karl-Heinz swigged some white chalky liquid to line his stomach and we watched the earth tilt into darkness. Although I had to ignore it there was a valedictory note in these evenings. Karl-Heinz began, idly, ironically, to speculate about his death. For my part I was aware that my
Confessions
film was about to be as complete as it ever would be. Without Karl-Heinz there would be no point in persevering further.

While I was editing the film, Karl-Heinz went into the hospital. The operation apparently was a success, and he was soon back at the hotel. I visited him often. He said he felt well but he looked frail and elderly. We would take slow strolls along the concrete boardwalk, taking half an hour to cover a few hundred yards.

One day I was called from the editing suite of Lone Star to go down to reception. It was an urgent and confidential matter, they said. A tall man in leisure clothes stood looking out at the sunlit car park. He turned round.

“My God,” I said. “Two Dogs Running.”

“Mr. Todd. You’re looking good.”

We shook hands. I was pleased to see him.

“What’re you doing?” I asked him.

“Still selling,” he said. “But I’ve moved into shoes.”

We caught up quickly on the past. The last he’d seen of me was at St.-Tropez, 1944, my stretchered body being carried aboard an LCI at
Tahiti Plage.… I asked him if he had time for a drink or a meal, but he pointed to an old convertible outside containing a young woman and three children.

“Vacation,” he said. “We’re going on up to Yosemite. I just wanted to talk to you about something, something strange.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, about a month ago a man looked me up. Said he was from a veterans’ organization. Started telling me all about the invasion. Then he got more specific. He started asking me about you. And then—listen to this—he started asking about that German.…”

“The one you—”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus. How did he know?”

“That’s what I wondered at first. But you see, I told those guys, those paratroopers, afterwards. They picked up his body and the dead guys at the villa. I guess, somewhere, some kind of report was written up. Some man from the provost marshal’s office interviewed me. You were badly wounded and they wanted to know what we’d been doing in that car. And I guess that old man at the villa—what was his name?”

“Can’t remember.”

“Well, I guess he would have been brought into it. I think he was pretty ticked off that his car had been totaled. You gave him that receipt and he turned up at Le Muy looking for his car. He wanted compensation. It’s got to be on the record somewhere.”

“Cavanaugh-Crabbe, that was his name.”

“Yeah. Well, this guy—from the vet organization—said the case was being reopened and that you were suspected of executing that German. Murder of a POW, he said.”

“But that’s crazy!”

“That’s what I told him.” Two Dogs lowered his voice. “I told him I had done it. The guy had made a run for it. I shot him and then we found the fingers.… Like we said.”

“Exactly. Christ, I didn’t even have a gun.”

“He said he was going to Europe to make further investigations. He got nasty when I said I had done it. Said there was no need for me to cover up for you.”

“What did he look like?”

“He had this kind of black wig on. Gaps in his teeth.”

I walked out to the car with Two Dogs and met his family. His wife looked Mexican, quite pretty. His eldest boy was ten. I was introduced
as “Mr. Todd, the film director, the man I was in the war with.” I shook everybody’s hand. I felt very old, like a grandfather.

The eldest boy said, “Sir? Is it true you were shot by your own side?”

“Yes,” I said. I wished I could have bragged that I’d stormed a machine-gun nest or two. “It was bad luck. Sometimes it turns out that way.”

We said good-bye. I thanked Two Dogs and we made polite plans to stay in touch.

Back in the office I phoned O’Hara straightaway.

“I think Smee’s going or has been to Europe,” I said to him. “Can you check on that?”

“Pleasure, Mr. Todd. I should tell you, though, that since we last did business my rates have gone up to thirty-five dollars a day.”

A week later O’Hara called to tell me Smee had recently flown to London on HUAC business. I hung up. I felt a mad frustration knot my brain. My head ached. What was going on? What was the man after? Why wouldn’t he leave me alone? The phone rang.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Todd? This is Mr. Ashplanter from the Hotel Cythera. We’re a bit worried about Mr. Kornfeld. His door’s locked and we can’t get any answer from him.”

There was no expression on Karl-Heinz’s face. His eyes were slightly open, as was his mouth. I tried to read a peaceful passing in his countenance and almost made it. I touched his hand. It was stiff and cold. I wished I hadn’t seen him.… But how many dead people had I seen in my life? Hundreds upon thousands. Most anonymous: the drowned men at Nieuport, the burst mattresses and battered furniture of no-man’s-land. A few were acquaintances. But only two had made me quake and cower internally. Only two had led me down the cul-de-sac of my own mortality. My dead son Hereford and my dead friend Karl-Heinz.…

A weeping Mrs. Ashplanter called a doctor and the morticians. I wandered out onto the beach. From somewhere came a noise of tinny thumping music. A group of young men played volleyball, whooping and shouting with heroic energy. The waves creamed in, all the way from Japan, somebody had once told me. Some journey.… Maybe I’d go to Japan, next year. Who gave a damn, anyway?

We planned to open
The Last Walk of Jean Jacques Rousseau
at a small art-house cinema called the Rio in Westwood. The day we chose
was July 2, 1960, 182 years to the day since Jean Jacques had died. Eddie approved the plan. He hated the film but he thought the anniversary might just attract some press coverage.

As I approached the cinema on opening night I was gratified to see a large crowd—over a hundred people—gathered outside. It was a warm smoggy evening, a smell of tomcat in the air. Then I saw they were carrying large banners.
PASADENA WOMEN’S TEMPERANCE ASSOCIATION
, I read, and
BURBANK DIVISION: SECOND-DEGREE KNIGHT COMMANDERS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE
.

Just my luck, I thought, we’ve got a convention in the next-door hotel. But as I drew nearer I saw they were clustered in front of the cinema entrance. I noticed some of the actors standing forlornly about in their evening dress, I tried to push my way through. A sharp-faced young man stopped me.

“This is an official picket, sir. This film is Communist propaganda made by a subversive.”

“Excuse me, please.”

“The director of this film has been named and listed as a member of the Communist party.”

I felt suddenly weak. I backed off.

Eddie got out of an enormous limousine. “What’s going on, John?”

“Some sort of maniac picket. Real esoteric weirdos tonight.”

“
Jesus!
” Eddie leaped back in his car. Through an inch of open window he said, “Let me know how it goes. Good luck.” As he drove off the crowd cheered. A man in a tuxedo came up to me.

“Mr. Todd? I’m the manager.”

“Sorry about this. Can we delay everything an hour or so? They’ll get bored and go away soon.” I noticed then that the man’s face was taut and pale.

“I’ve been threatened, sir. He said they’re going to torch the place if we show the film.”

“Just some crank. Call a cop.”

“I think he was a cop. He showed me a badge. I think it was FBI.”

“Who was it?”

The manager scanned the crowd. “That’s him, in the back. Just going round the corner.”

I saw a close-cropped black wig above the heads of the crowd.

“
Smee!
”

I started to run. I skirted the picketers and ran down the side of the
cinema. Fifty yards away I saw a car pull out and drive off. A Cadillac Fleetwood.
^*

I drove north. Back to our convict shack near Big Sur. I turned off the coast highway and drove down the narrow lane that led to the house. The shack had a new tar-paper roof and the hedge around it was full of dog roses and morning glory, the garden lush with lupin and poppies. I left the car parked in the lane and made several trips down the steps to the house with my luggage and provisions. Almost as soon as I arrived, I felt a calm descend on me. The fog over the sea was clearing but shreds of it still clung to the headland, like muslin snagged on the rocks.

I spent a pleasant four days alone pondering my future. Three times a week the mailman called. He honked his horn up on the highway and you clambered up to collect your mail and buy provisions from him. Like a steamer on an African river his arrival attracted the others living round and about, and we would gather like a tribe by his van and chat. This was my fourth visit to the cabin over the years and I was beginning to recognize the denizens: the solitude freaks, the failed artists, the cheerful bullshitters. When they asked me what I did and I said, “Film director,” I could see them relax. “One of us,” I could hear them thinking, “another fantasist.”

I resumed my old habit of walking the two miles down to the mouth of the Little Sur River for an evening swim. I changed in the rocky dunes and dashed out, naked, into the modest surf.

I think it was my fifth evening down on the beach. I waited for a rare car to pass on the highway before I made my nude run to the waves. I looked down at the gray wiry pelt that covered my body and beat out a short rhythm on my firm little potbelly. I checked the road—all clear—and trotted out into the sea.

Gasping and snorting I thrashed around in the waves for a while. I never went out far; I was happy to cavort oafishly in the breakers. I stood in the foamy water, waist deep, and let the waves surge and batter away at me. A particularly strong one knocked me over, and as I went down beneath the surface I saw a flash of light from the hillside. I stood up, spluttering. The next roller was heaving itself towards me and I stood in a patch of temporarily calm water, latticed with spume. About a quarter
of a mile away I saw the small figure of a man emerge from behind a rock and vanish into a copse of birch trees.

I went under. I swam out, kicked sideways and surfaced for a second, guzzling air. I saw no more movement on the hillside. I swam vigorously north, trying to keep warm, before doubling back. The sun seemed to hang on the horizon forever.

When it was dark enough I crept out and found my clothes and towel. When I had dressed I waited an hour before going up to the highway. I hitchhiked for ten minutes before a car stopped. I got the driver to drop me at a roadside diner some miles away. I ordered coffee and some food and wondered what to do.

I thought first about ringing the police. But Smee was a G-man, or had been. He had some kind of badge, that was for sure. I knew Smee would be waiting for me at the shack. I called Sean O’Hara.

“Come up there now?” he said. “It’s got to be two hundred fifty miles. You crazy?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Smee’s here.… Hello, hello?”

The line was very bad.

“…  expect me to do about it?” I heard O’Hara ask.

“I don’t care,” I shouted. “Just get him off my back. The man’s ruined my life as it is.”

“Your back is ruined? He shot you?”

“
Off
my back. Get him
off
my back. Off.
Off
.”

There was a long pause full of fizz and crackle.

“Hello?”

“OK, Mr. Todd. I’ll do it for you. But it’ll cost you.… Hello?… An out-of-town job like this.”

“I don’t care how much it costs.
I don’t care!
Just do it.”

“For you one thousand dollars. But five hundred down or I don’t move.”

I thought that was a bit steep for a special favor, but I was happy to pay anything to put the frighteners on Smee.

I told O’Hara to go to Eddie. Eddie would pay him the five hundred. I felt exhausted from my massive swim. I gave O’Hara the precise directions to my cabin. “He’s bound to be there,” I said, “staking it out. Waiting for me.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Todd, I’m on my way. Soon as I get the money. It’s as good as done.”

I told him where Eddie lived, and hung up. I offered up a prayer or two and phoned Eddie. He was in.

“Five hundred bucks? Are you in trouble?… What the fuck’s wrong with this line? Hello?…”

“I just need a job done quickly. This guy’s the only one who can do it. I’ll explain later.”

“OK, John. What’s his name?”

“Sean O’Hara.”

“Who?”

“
Sean O’Hara!
”

“How will I know him?”

“He’s Japanese.”

“Jesus Christ!”

He eventually agreed. I stayed in the diner until it closed. I bought a fifth of bourbon from the owner and began the long walk back to my cabin, ten or twelve miles south on the switchback, hairpin highway.

I reached home at about five in the morning. It was cool and there was a dense milky fog over the ocean, flat like a snowfield. I moved very cautiously down the lane. O’Hara was sitting on the hood of my car, smoking.

“Sean,” I said softly, “it’s me.”

“Hi, Mr. Todd,” he said. “Just like you predicted. He was waiting for you. I got here about an hour ago. I come down the road real slow, real quiet. I hear him taking a leak. End of problem.”