The Right Thing to Do (2 page)

Another reason to be positive was simple consideration: He sensed that his big brother would never grow up completely. Would always need praise.

Now, seven years later, with Steve past his thirty-fourth birthday, planning to marry Ramona, and owning a house in the Hollywood Hills above the Sunset Strip, Malcolm was sure he’d been right: Steve Stage’s film persona might be that of a rock-jawed, steely-eyed hero, but there’d always be something of the kid about him.

Malcolm, on the other hand, barely twenty-one, his Harvard diploma gilt-framed, the sole decoration of an entire wall of his parents’ living room, with nothing to do this summer but bide time before starting law school at the same institution, sometimes felt like an old man. Worse than that, a disabled old man, being pushed through life rather than establishing his own pace.

The three-bad-guy scene over, Steve needed his makeup reapplied for the next one, yet another shootout taking place in the dead of night. During the lull, burly grips moved scenery in and out and set up lights. There was fake blood to be cleaned up, dirt raked smooth, rocks and rubble rearranged to satisfy the set designer, a nervous, skinny man with shiny hair named LaMar. Finally, there were the horses, penned up for hours and now released and requiring some limbering up before they could be used. They came with a trainer, a blond woman in jodhpurs who looked icy and put upon and didn’t seem to like the animals.

With the entire set a mass of activity, Malcolm felt like the outsider he was. Steve had said there’d be no problem with his visiting but when he was introduced as “my genius brother from Harvard” to the director, an obese Italian named Carciofi who sported beard stubble and a long silk scarf around his neck, the guy had given Malcolm the stink-eye.

So Malcolm resolved right away to keep a low profile. Not easy for someone six foot six, 258 before breakfast. Extra inches added by thick, wavy black hair that defied taming.

He’d long learned to ignore the stares and giggles. But sometimes he felt more like an edifice than a person. A suite-mate at Harvard had called him Gulliver, but fortunately the sobriquet hadn’t stuck.

Still, the guy had a point.

Now Carciofi was barking orders at a script girl who appeared on the verge of tears. Backing away from the hubbub, Malcolm left the set and continued walking toward the periphery of the shoot. At the outermost border, an assortment of randomly positioned, grubby-looking rental trailers served as dressing rooms.

“No fancy getups, not on a job like this,” Steve had informed him, sitting and having his makeup done by an older woman named Florence.

She slathered on orange gook that would come across as sun-burnish on film and said, “Ain’t that the truth, handsome. We both deserve better.”

Steve grinned but to Malcolm’s eyes, he looked embarrassed by the rusting Airstream he’d been assigned to. The cramped space reeked of old cat and too-sweet cologne and even the haze of cigarette smoke provided by Steve’s nonstop puffing couldn’t change that.

Self-doubt wasn’t something Malcolm was used to seeing in his brother. In general, he had to admit, Steve seemed a bit less jaunty, this time.

Maybe working in films did that to you, especially when you weren’t Gary Cooper. Or just plain living could wear a guy down as he got older.

Beyond the mobile quarters were flat, open acres of desert punctuated by scrawny Joshua trees, the western tip of the Mojave bleeding into a slash of horizon that seemed unattainable. Tongues of salmon and blue and lemon yellow streaked the sky, competing with the burgeoning charcoal of approaching evening.

Malcolm’s experience of the desert had been limited to photographs in
National Geographic
. Faraway places like the Kalahari, the Gobi, the Sinai. Dunes clumping like taffy, exotically dressed tribal people riding camels.

This was different. Scruffier, far less majestic, but strangely beautiful, those trees like something out of a cartoonist’s vision, that whimsical author, Seuss, whose books were so popular at the Roxbury child center where Malcolm volunteered ten hours a week during his senior year. Fifteen, when he had the time.

His job was reading to little kids from poor families. Children with no books at home but they sure responded when you gave them a chance. Loving Seuss’s gangly drawings and clever rhymes and after a while Malcolm was pleased to see some of them grasping the fundamentals of reading.

Hop. Pop. Top.

The kids’ gleeful reactions to the Grinch and the Lorax made Malcolm laugh along, the whole volunteer thing turning out better than he’d expected. He’d done it at the request of Distinguished Winninger Professor of Psychology and Human Development Aaron Fiacre, Ph.D., D.Sc. The elderly, soft-spoken man opining that Malcolm had people skills, he might consider putting them to use.

For some reason Malcolm had yet to discern, Professor F. had taken to the enormous senior sitting in the back row of the lecture hall, smiling approvingly at Malcolm’s questions about abnormality versus the normal gamut of human behavior, encouraging further comment even as he discouraged students he deemed showboaters or just contentious.

Malcolm supposed his scoring ninety-eight on the midterm didn’t hurt, apparently the highest score on that essay ordeal in years. But really, what was the big deal? Harvard was full of smart people. Wasn’t that the point?

For whatever reason, Professor Fiacre had summoned Malcolm to his office, where they’d talked for a while and sipped port. A few more repeats of that and the old man was suggesting Malcolm apply to the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at Harvard and working with him on a longitudinal study of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children and its predictive value for socially and economically disadvantaged youngsters.

When Malcolm told him about the law school acceptance, the old man blinked and smiled. “Well, that could work out for you, too.”

“I hope so.”

“Whatever you do, son, you’ll do well. Another glass?”

For all Professor F.’s expressions of support, Malcolm couldn’t help but feel he’d disappointed the old man.

Himself, too, because let’s face it, he hadn’t a whit of interest in practicing law. But it guaranteed a good job and his parents had taken out loans to supplement his merit scholarship and everyone said even if you eventually left the profession it was a good foundation for other pursuits. Whatever they were.

With a month to go before the first semester of One L, he was dreading the return to Cambridge.

An old man, pushed along…

At least his parents were happy. A “professional man in the family. Finally.”

The delay before the last scene stretched on; a camera needed tinkering.

Malcolm’s long gait had taken him farther than he’d intended and by the time his head cleared of memory and he realized the sky was nearly black, he’d drifted well into the desert and landmarks were beginning to vanish.

Pivoting, he squinted, made out the distant flicker of the portable lights, and used them to navigate his return, tripping a couple of times on unseen rocks and growing strangely edgy.

The lack of context was unsettling.

This place could easily become a trap.

Finally, he reached the clot of trailers and headed toward Steve’s Airstream. But before he got there, the door to another aluminum module opened and a man stepped out hurriedly, wiping his brow.

The actor who played the cartoonishly corrupt mayor of El Diablo, the badlands town where Steve Stage assiduously and stylishly vanquished evil. Sixtyish and florid, the man was named Randolph Eddowe and he was rarely around. Flitting onto the set in order to portray venality, then retreating.

Eddowe’s walk was a pigeon-toed mince, comically rapid, as if to make up for short steps. When he heard Malcolm’s footsteps, he startled and stopped. Malcolm waved and kept going. As he passed Eddowe, their eyes met, and what he saw in Eddowe’s was kind of odd.

Glassy and frozen in place. Anxiety?

No, more than that—furtiveness.

The guy couldn’t wait to get out of there. Breathing hard. And Malcolm had noticed a sheen of sweat on his pink pouchy face.

Textbook prose resounded in Malcolm’s head, the way it often did, this one from a physiological psych book.

Increased respiratory rates and perspiration are indicative of
sympathetic nervous system activation in response to stress, what is commonly called Fight or Flight.

The guy was in trouble? Malcolm’s impulse was to help. (“Your altruistic gene,” Professor Fiacre called it.) He said, “Evening, sir.”

Randolph Eddowe turned, eyes saucered wide. Tugging at his string-tie, he scurried away, slipping into the narrow alley created by two other trailers before becoming one with the darkness.

That
was sure different.

Then again, the guy was an actor and Steve had warned Malcolm he’d encounter some “oddball-types. People uncomfortable with their own personalities. Goes with the territory, kid.”

Malcolm continued toward Steve’s trailer and came upon someone else, heading his way.

The horse-trainer, whatever her name was. Grim, the way Malcolm had always seen her, and moving fast enough to churn up dust with her riding boots.

No eye contact, here. She brushed past Malcolm without a word, catching him on one side with a jab of elbow.

He watched her enter the same trailer Randolph Eddowe had just exited.

The night shoot dragged on and by the end, everyone looked tired, except for the leading man. Steve never seemed to flag and Malcolm watched with brotherly pride as “Monte Starr” did his save-the-day thing with effortless white-hat bravado.

What the Radcliffe girls liked to call “élan.”

This film didn’t allow much in the way of dialogue to Steve but that was compensated for by lots of physicality, which had always been Steve’s thing. In the night scene, he ended up single-handedly saving a classroom full of children and their schoolmarm from a new battalion of marauding louts. Who the bad guys were and what motivated them remained unclear to Malcolm. This morning he’d asked Steve about it and his brother had said, “Search me, kid. Doesn’t matter, it’s all about the bang bang bang.”

Malcolm also couldn’t figure out why kids would be in school at night and hazarded that question to one of the cameramen, a friendly seeming type named Clyde who smoked a pipe between takes.

He tamped and puffed, blew a smoke ring, and pointed to Carciofi. “Don Dago, there, wants chiaroscuro and noir.”

Malcolm restrained the impulse to say,
With a side of garlic bread.

Coaxing smiles of gratitude from half a dozen exhausted child actors took a while. Malcolm wondered about the wisdom of subjecting kids to twelve-hour workdays. Without parental supervision, and only a production assistant to look after them.

Finally, sufficient baby teeth had been flashed to satisfy Carciofi and the shoot ended with Steve receiving a backlit borderline sexual hug from the actress playing the teacher, a gorgeous black-haired woman named Annette Fondelline, barely able to recite her lines. Malcolm noticed that each time she consulted her script, her lips moved laboriously, like the learning-disabled kids he’d worked with as part of his ed-psych seminar. After a dozen takes she managed to get out the two lines.

Cut.

Randolph Eddowe hadn’t been in the scene and Malcolm wondered where he’d been hurrying off to.

Furtive.

He soon forgot about Eddowe, about anything related to films, during the long ride back to L.A. Barely able to keep his eyes open as Steve pushed the blue Caddy through the desert.

His brother, of course, was morning-fresh at eleven p.m. Chain-smoking and bobbing his head to doo-wop on KFWB and swigging from bottle after bottle of Coke. Lowering the radio from time to time to hoot about how great life was.

Slapping Malcolm on the back, telling him, “Man, it’s
so
great to see you. You’re just making my day by being here, kiddo, you absolutely are.”

Doing all that sometimes required taking both hands off the wheel, as the big blue car shot through utter darkness at breakneck speed.

Malcolm couldn’t understand how his brother knew which way to drive, let alone turn. All he could see through the windshield was a mass of black. But Steve’s foot remained heavy on the gas pedal, apparently unfettered by reality.

It could’ve been a terrifying journey had the driver been anyone else. But Steve obviously knew where he was going. He always had.

This was a person who’d hadn’t spoken a word of English until he was seven but betrayed not a trace of accent.

Other than the Texas drawl he invoked at will in order to earn a living. Steve Stage ruling the Wild West by way of Brooklyn.

Berlin.

In Germany, Wilhelm “Willy” Blaustein hadn’t been a rich man but he was comfortable. Trained as an electrician, he worked hard and saved and eventually acquired his own small electrical supply house, furnishing fixtures, wires, and bulbs to the merchants of Berlin.

In the beginning, his clients were any merchants, but that range had been narrowed to Jewish businesses after the mustachioed lunatic piece of shit who ran the country had made things different.

By the twenties, Jews had integrated into German life, working to achieve acceptance by being as Teutonic as possible. All that, gone in a flash. Maybe it had never been real.

Willy’s forebears and those of Sabina, his wife, had lived in Berlin for three centuries. They’d served in the German army and the navy, in some instances, with distinction. The Blausteins and the Sellingers considered the Fatherland the ablest, most intelligent, most creative civilization the world had ever witnessed and had no problem rationalizing the current financial mess as foisted upon Germany by its enemies in revenge for the Great War.

For three hundred years, the Blausteins and the Sellingers nurtured themselves with the milk of patriotism. Neither Willy nor Sabina nor their parents and grandparents spoke a language other than German, if you didn’t count Sabina’s semi-familiarity with the English she’d learned at gymnasium.