Boyd Stuart pushed open the door of the bedroom. It was the best room in the apartment in many ways: large and light, like so many of these rambling Victorian houses near the river on the unfashionable side of Victoria Station. That was why he had a writing desk in a window space of his bedroom, a corner which Kitty King liked to refer to grandiosely as ‘the study’.
‘Kitty!’ he called.
She came into the bedroom, leaned back against the door and smiled as the latch clicked.
‘Kitty. The lock of my desk is broken.’ He opened the inlaid walnut front of the antique bureau. The lock had been torn away from the wood and there were deep scratches in the polished surface. ‘You didn’t break into it, did you, Kitty?’
‘Of course not, Boyd. I’m not interested in your old love letters.’
‘It’s not funny, Kitty. I have classified material in here.’ Already he was sifting through the drawers and pigeonholes. He found the airline ticket, his passport, the letter to the bank, a couple of contact addresses and an old photo of a man named Bernard Lustig cut from a film trade magazine. There was also a newspaper cutting that he had been given by the department.
An all-expenses-paid trip to the movie capital of the world and the luxury of the exclusive Beverly Hills Hotel.
Veterans of the US Third Army and attached units who were concerned with the movement of material from the Kaiseroda salt mine, Merkers, Thuringia, Germany, in the final days of the Second World War are urgently sought by B. Lustig Productions Inc. The corporation is preparing a major motion picture about this historical episode. Veterans should send full details, care of this newspaper, to Box 2188. Photos and documents will be treated with utmost care and returned to the sender by registered post
Kitty King watched him search through the items. ‘Nothing seems to have been taken,’ said Stuart. ‘Did you leave the door open when you went down to the dustbins?’
‘There was no one on the stairs,’ she said.
‘Waiting upstairs,’ said Stuart. ‘The same kid who did the burglaries in the other flats, I’ll bet.’
‘Are you going to phone the department?’
‘Nothing’s missing. And the front door has no signs of forced entry.’
‘The papers for your trip were there, weren’t they?’
He nodded.
‘Then you must have known about going last Sunday-when you put the tickets and things in there.’ There was a note of resentment in her voice.
‘I still wasn’t sure until I saw the DG late this afternoon.’
‘I wish you’d discussed it with me, Boyd.’ He looked up sharply. This was a new side of Kitty King. She had always described their relationship as no more than a temporary ‘shack-up’. She was a career woman, she had always maintained, with a good degree in political science from the London School of Economics, and the aim of becoming a Permanent Secretary, the top of the Administrative Class grades.
Stuart said, ‘If I phone the night duty officer, they’ll be all over us. You know what a fuss they’ll make. We’ll be up all night writing reports.’
‘You know best, sweetheart.’
‘A kid probably, looking for cash. When he found only this sort of thing he got out quickly, before you came back upstairs again.’
‘Does your wife still have her key to this place?’ Kitty asked.
‘She wouldn’t break open my desk.’
‘That’s not what I asked you.’
‘It was just some kid looking for cash. Nothing is missing. Stop worrying about it.’
‘She’d like to get you back, Boyd. You realize that, don’t you?’
Boyd put his arms round her tightly and kissed her for a long time.
5
The Steins-father and son-lived in a large house in Hollywood. Cresta Ridge Drive provides a sudden and welcome relief from the exhaust fumes and noise of Franklin Avenue. It is one of a tangle of steep winding roads that lead into the Hollywood hills and end at Griffith Park and Lake Hollywood. Its elevation gives the house a view across the city, and on smoggy days when the pale tide of pollution engulfs the city, the sky here remains blue.
By Californian standards these houses are old, discreetly sited behind mature horse-chestnut trees now grown up to the roofs. In the thirties some of them, their gardens blazing with hibiscus and bougainvillea as they were this day, had been owned by film stars. Even today long-lost but strangely familiar faces can be glimpsed at the check-out of the Safeway or self-serving gasoline at Wilbur’s. But most of Stein’s neighbours were corporate lawyers, ambitious dentists and refugees from the nearby aerospace communities.
On this afternoon a rainstorm deluged the city. It was as if nature was having one last fling before the summer.
Outside the Steins’ house there was a white Imperial Le Baron two-door hardtop, one of the biggest cars in the Chrysler range. The paintwork shone in the hard, unnatural light that comes with a storm, and the heavy rain glazed the paintwork and the dark tinted windows. Sitting-head well down-in the back seat was a man. He appeared to be asleep but he was not even dozing.
The car’s owner-Miles MacIver-was inside the Stein home. Stein senior was not at home, and now his son Billy was regretting the courtesy he had shown in inviting MacIver into the house.
MacIver was a well-preserved man in his late fifties. His white hair emphasized the blue eyes with which he fixed Billy as he talked. He smiled lazily and used his large hands to emphasize his words as he strode restlessly about the lounge. Sometimes he stroked his white moustache, or ran a finger along an eyebrow. They were the gestures of a man to whom appearance was important: an actor, a womanizer or a salesman. MacIver possessed attributes of all three.
It was a large room, comfortably furnished with good quality furniture and expensive carpets. MacIver’s restless prowling was proprietorial. He went to the Bechstein grand piano, its top crowded with framed photographs. From the photos of friends and relatives, MacIver selected a picture of Charles Stein, the man he had come to visit, taken at the training battalion at Camp Edwards, Massachusetts, sometime in the early 1940s. Stein was dressed in the uncomfortable, ill-fitting coveralls which, like the improvised vehicle behind him, were a part of America ’s hurried preparations for war. Stein leaned close to one side of the frame, his arm seemingly raised as if to embrace it.
‘Your dad cut your Uncle Aram out of this picture, did he?’
‘I guess so,’ said Billy Stein.
MacIver put the photo back on the piano and went to look out of the window. Billy had not looked up from where he was reading Air Progress on the sofa. MacIver studied the view from the window with the same dispassionate interest with which he had examined the photo. It was a glimpse of his own reflection that made him smooth the floral-patterned silk tie and rebutton his tartan jacket.
‘Too bad about you and Natalie,’ he said without turning from the window. His voice was low and carefully modulated-the voice of a man self-conscious about the impression he made.
The warm air from the Pacific Ocean was heavy, saturated with water vapour. It built up towering storm clouds, dragging them up to the mountains, where they condensed, dumping solid sheets of tropical rain across the Los Angeles basin, close to the house, a tall palm tree bent under a cruel gust of wind that tried to snap it in two. Suddenly released, the palm straightened with a force that made the fronds dance and whip the air loudly enough to make MacIver flinch and move from the window.