The room went triple hot. Dudley fluffed his napkin and wiped his face. Constanza leaned in and undid his necktie.
“Much of this dates back to a fire in Los Angeles. Kyoho and Comrade Gelb were burned there. Gelb lays the source of his wounds on the Spanish Civil War, which is rubbish. Kyoho tells a similarly self-serving lie. My brother and I know all of this — but no more.”
“And you don’t know who has the gold now?”
“The alliance that I have described to you has many layers of buffering. The top few men surely know the status of the gold. My brother is just a minor cog, who tells me things. I am a woman, and no cog at all.”
Dudley cracked their window and roused some gulf air. Constanza opened her clutch and removed a vial of perfume. She daubed her left wrist and held out her arm. Dudley took her hand and kissed the scented spot.
“And the Kameraden’s ultimate plans for the gold?”
“The establishment and implementation of a strategy of escape, resettlement, and credible exoneration. Select members of the world’s great totalitarian regimes, collaborating toward that end. Beyond that end, I know only of plans to hoard the gold and invest in U.S. defense industries, to further induce gratitude in our presumed conquerors, and to increase the likelihood that the new identities of our comrades will not be revealed.”
Dudley said, “Darling, you are recklessly impolitic. However much your revelations excite me.”
Constanza said, “I know something about you. The gold would be incomplete for you without a woman.”
Dawn broke bright and warm. Ensenada looked drab. La Paz creamed it, hands down. Ensenada was T.J. South. La Paz was Saint-Tropez for Irish arrivistes.
Dudley elevatored up to his suite. He was dead bushed. He closed that harborside haunt with Constanza and caught a late Army flight back.
He yawned and saw fatigue spots. He unlocked the door and saw Beth asleep on the couch.
The bedroom door stood ajar. Overhead lights snapped on. He heard radio hum.
He walked in. The fatigue spots made him blink. Claire threw herself at him.
She hit his chest and spit in his face.
She clawed at his mouth.
She ripped the buttons off his coat and tore the captain’s bars off his shoulders.
She beat at his face.
She defamed his redheaded whore and hexed her in Hell.
She called him a “fascist insect.”
She called him a “cowardly killer.”
She hurled herself up at him and bit off a piece of one ear.
It’s Dublin again. It’s 1919. He’s out sniping British soldiers. He comes home to Maidred Conroy Smith. She wields her razor strop.
84
Kay Lake’s Diary
(Los Angeles, 9:00 A.M., 3/4/42)
I waited on my front porch. I was to be Otto’s goodwill ambassadress and accompany him to Union Station. We would greet four Austro-Hungarian string players, late of Nazi concentration camps. A cryptically defined relief organization had secured their release and brought them here via steamship, transport airline, and overnight train trek from Baja. The extravagantly generous Maestro had secured them courtyard apartments in Santa Monica. My contribution was good cheer and a grocery bag stuffed with two-dollar champagne and paper cups.
The day was bright and cool; I glanced across the street and down to the Strip. A PD prowl car was parked at the curb, just above Sunset. I had no doubts as to the occupant. This is what Captain Bill Parker does. He perches outside the homes of provocative young women and plots his next move. He intrudes, he entraps, he blunderingly seduces. Ask yours truly and the late Joan Conville.
Bill had something on his mind now. Provocation abets provocation. I had sent Joan’s diary special delivery. He’d received it, read it, and wanted to talk.
Otto’s big Chrysler turned left on Wetherly and headed up to me; the chauffeur wheeled a clumsy U-turn and bumped the curb in front of my house. I walked over and hopped in the back. The Maestro kissed my cheek and wrangled me in. We passed the prowl car, southbound. Bill slept behind the wheel. Incident recalls incident. Joan returned home from a party at the Maestro Manse and found Bill parked outside. She wrote her first diary pages with Bill passed out on her bed.
It was a half-hour drive downtown, and Otto wanted to yak. I positioned myself on his good side and played to his vanity. The brain tumor had constricted his facial muscles and marred his fierce good looks. It made conversation difficult and frustrated a man born to yak at great length. Otto is six-foot-seven and disposed to yak and command. When Otto yaks, one listens.
We lit cigarettes. Otto settled in to run discourse. Dr. Saul Lesnick had diagnosed the tumor. Otto credited Dr. Saul with saving his life; I credited Dr. Saul with the array of damning mischief exposed in Joan’s diary.
The Maestro held forth. He was composing a nightmare tone poem in the Richard Strauss — Elektra mode. The piece would depict events that had occurred in his own haunted house. Declining chords would portray a murderous occurrence in Nazi Germany’s past and sequentially link it to a rumored reenactment in his own home. The orchestral part would subside to a hush then. Low-register piano chords would announce the first of his brain-tumor blackouts.
The Maestro yakked orchestral structure, and paused only to light cigarettes. I squeezed in a few questions about our goodwill mission and how our exile chums had escaped Europe. Otto cited vague rumors. Exoneration-minded Nazis had bounced for their repatriation. They were moved out on a transport flight to Mexico; the airplane was loaded up with precious mercury ore for the return flight. Our exiles comprised a first refugee wave. Otto said it seemed like a ruse to him; exoneration-minded Russians were purportedly releasing prisoners to establish their own humanitarian credentials.
The blithe hypocrisy stunned me. I asked Otto where he picked up the “vague rumors.” He said, “A chatty Communist named Meyer Gelb told me. The man impressed as fraudulent, so perhaps the rumors themselves are just propaganda or idle schmooze of some sort.”
Meyer Gelb appeared in Joan’s diary. Joan met him at the Maestro Manse. His Communist cellmates Jean Staley and Saul and Andrea Lesnick attended the same party. The cell was scrutinized in the Griffith Park fire inquiry. Joan considered the cell germane to the welter of cases that had so consumed her and Hideo Ashida. I asked Otto how he came to meet Meyer Gelb. Otto said, “He’s Saul Lesnick’s analysand. Saul invites him to my parties.”
We found our chums by the taxi stand outside Union Station. They stood by a large mound of luggage and stringed-instrument cases. It was an up-to-the-moment Ellis Island snapshot. They weren’t quite the huddled masses. They looked exhausted and apprehensive and exhibited not one ounce of relief.
Sandor Abromowitz fell into Otto’s arms; they were former comrades from the Berlin Opera. The Koenigs were heavyset, frail, and proud. I carried their luggage, but they refused to take my arm for support. Magda Koenig gave me the stink eye. She figured me for a party-crashing dilettante and Otto’s young whore. Ruth Szigeti was thin and wobbled on brand-new high heels. She took my arm and wasted no time bumming a cigarette. Her flat, straight hair and hollow cheeks were straight out of Brecht and the horror musicales of Weimar Berlin. She had schizophrenic gray-green eyes and warmed to the notion of brushing against me. I pegged her as a lezbo or at least an avant-garde creature who veered any and all ways.
The gang piled into Otto’s imperial-sized auto. The chauffeur pulled down the jump seat, but we were still strapped for room. The Maestro yanked fat Abromowitz up on his lap; the frail Koenigs scrunched in side by side. The jump seat was narrow and built for one only. I staked my claim and hopped onto it. Ruth Szigeti staked her claim and hopped onto my lap. She said, “Do you mind, Liebchen?” I said, “Given your ordeal, how could I?”