We sat down in the bright diner. Young people laughed and chattered in the booths. Lori and her smiling waitresses patrolled the aisles. The merry lights of Malibu Pier stretched out languidly into the darkness. Mavrocordato chewed vigorously on his steak. I ordered him another beer.
“My God,” he said with some bitterness. “War is hell.” He looked round him incredulously. “You should see Europe.”
I felt an itch of guilt. “You’ll get used to it,” I said a little ruefully. “It’s quite easy.”
“Always in the right place at the right time,” he said. “You find your feet, eh, Todd?”
“That’s not how it looks from my angle,” I said, and added pleasantly, “You can’t possibly know what you’re talking about.”
“Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen?…” He had a sense of humor, had Mavrocordato.
“Something like that.”
“Well, I have to thank you for the meal. What do you want?”
“Where’s Doon? What happened to Doon?”
“I haven’t seen Doon for …” He thought. “My God, eight, nearly nine years. Nineteen thirty-four, Paris.”
I felt the strangest sensation in my body, an odd mixture of alarm and elation.
“But she was in Sanary with you.”
“For one week. Then she left. She went to Neuchâtel to look for you.”
“But we’d left.…”
Bafflement clogged my brain. I felt thick, dull, like a man with a heavy cold.
Mavrocordato told me that he had seen Doon for a week in Paris in January ’34, after our unhappy Christmas together. She seemed very depressed, he said. She was drunk most of the time. They left Paris for Sanary together; he thought the Riviera would do her good. But all they did was fight. She talked all the time about going to America. She left for Neuchâtel to tell me her decision, he said. That was the last he had seen of her.
We walked slowly back up the road towards the Cooper house. My mind was squirming with the revelations I had heard.
“So she must have gone … come here?”
“Yes. I always thought so.”
“I thought …” I was suddenly close to adolescent tears. “I thought she had gone off with you.”
“I asked her,” Mavrocordato said, with some of his old vehemence. “You know, I even asked her to marry me again.” He shrugged. “You know Doon. I always think she’s a little bit mad.” He tapped his head.
I was still thinking. “But if she came here, where is she?”
“If she’s drinking like Paris, she’s got to be dead. Or very sick.”
We stopped at the three flights of steps that led up to the Cooper house. Mavrocordato was sharing 361½ with two other destitute émigés.
“I’d better try and find her,” I said vaguely.
“Say hello from me.”
We shook hands.
“Listen Todd, if you are needing assistant on your film … bygones can be easily bygones.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll bear it in mind.” I felt only an immense gratitude towards Mavocordato. I derived no pleasure from this triumph,
I went home and drank half a bottle of Vat 69 as I thought about Doon and this news. She hadn’t betrayed me. She had simply run away. I felt peculiar: I should have been elated, my heart big with joy. But I wasn’t. If she had been in America since 1934, why was there no sign of her? No trace at all? All her old friends from Berlin were in Hollywood; why had she not once made contact?
Eddie said I should get in touch with the Bureau of Missing Persons.
“Where was she from?” he asked. “You know, her hometown?”
“I’ve no idea. My God.”
“Very useful.”
Eddie was married now, to a small dark woman called Artemisia Parke. It struck me that in all the years I had known him, this was the first time I had ever associated him with a woman. Somehow a lovelife, even a sex life, had seemed inappropriate for him, superflous to his needs. He was like one of those worms or amoebas, hermaphroditic, that can service themselves (and I don’t mean that unkindly). Like most facets of his life these days, Eddie’s marriage seemed a means to some mysterious end. He appeared unconcerned and incurious about the Doon mystery.
“She was a strange girl, Johnny, I told you so years ago. She could have suicided.” He snapped his fingers. “They break, these types, like that.”
“Not Doon.”
“You should know.”
He sighed. He was on his way to play golf, wearing an outfit patterned with lozenges of lemon yellow, burnt sienna and maroon. I had a slight headache resulting from my attack on the Vat 69—and the colors seemed to press against my eyeballs painfully. I took a pair of green sunglasses out of my jacket pocket and put them on. We were sitting in his vast Beverly Hills home.
“Anyway,” he said, “don’t go running off. I’ve got a new project for you. The biggest yet.”
“Oh yes? What?”
“A film about Billy the Kid. But listen, in color.”
I drove down to San Diego to see Ramón Dusenberry. Since he had been best man at my wedding we had become quite close friends. We would meet up from time to time when he was in Los Angeles on business. He was a great admirer of my Westerns. “Anytime you’re tired of movies, you can have your old job back,” he would joke. I liked Ramón and not just for his gratifying enthusiasm. He was older than I and I had unilaterally appointed him as surrogate older brother, now that Thompson had abandoned the role. I asked him what to do about finding Doon. He said he had a friend in the San Diego police force who might be able to help.
We sat in Ramón’s yacht club overlooking the marina. It was a clear day, the sky empty of clouds. A flying boat — a Catalina — flew past at a low level on the way to the naval base. Over in Europe the Red Army captured Kharkov on their advance to the Dnieper. The RAF bombed Cologne. The USAF bombed St.-Nazaire.
“So what’s the next movie?” Ramón asked.
“What? Oh, Billy the Kid,” I said.
“My God! Well, you’ve got to meet Garfield Barry.”
“I have?”
“Yes, old Garfield knew him, for God’s sake.”
After lunch Ramón drove me up the coast to Cardiff-by-the-Sea, to a retirement home called Bella Vista across the coast highway from the public beach. It was a series of attenuated bungalows in the English style linked by covered walkways. Here and there were palms and ancient pepper trees with wooden benches set beneath them. We found Garfield Barry sitting outside in a wheelchair rather too close to a lawn sprinkler. The back of his head and shoulders were quite damp from the spray. We wheeled him out of range.
Barry was a lively old geezer but physically incapacitated by a recent stroke. He had a big nose and bright watery eyes; an uneven skull beneath a thin floss of white hair. One of Ramón’s newspapers had run a long interview with him on his eighty-fourth birthday a couple of months previously, called “The Last Man Who Knew Billy the Kid.” (This was quite true, I believe. There were a couple of old ladies still living who remembered the Kid, but Barry was definitely the last male.)
Barry had been born in 1858. His father kept a saloon in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Barry himself had been postmaster there for forty years. In 1881, the year the Kid died there, Barry had been twenty-two, a year older than the desperado. It was strange talking to the old man. I realized that Billy the Kid himself could have lived as long, had circumstances been different. I felt an odd melancholy. Here I was, forty-four, born eighteen years after Pat Garrett killed the Kid, talking to their contemporary. Meanwhile the sun shone on San Diego and the Red Army pressed on towards the Dnieper. I felt a swooning disorientation of space and time, the present and the past. The objective and subjective worlds I occupied seemed to swirl and dance round me. I forced myself to concentrate on the old man.