Joseph Kanon - Stardust

When she’d gone, Ben looked at the other pictures, more wrong notes, as jarring as the pool. Danny and Liesl on a picnic blanket. With another couple around a nightclub table covered with glasses. Hans Ostermann, unintentionally comic in his somber European suit, surrounded by Danny and a few other young men in tennis whites. A croquet game. A pool party. Danny smiling in all of them. A happy life. But everybody smiled for the camera.

He went over to the desk, intending to start on the drawers, but Liesl came in, carrying flowers. “Oh good, you found one,” she said, nodding to the bathing suit. “I’ll be right down. As soon as I deal with these. I have to put them where she’ll see them. She’ll ask otherwise. Now what?” she said, as the phone rang. “Why does everybody want to talk?” But she picked it up anyway, not waiting for Iris, and immediately switched into German. She had the rich, fluid German he remembered from before the war, before all the coarse shouting, and her voice sounded relaxed, at home in it.

“Salka wants to drop off a cake,” she said wryly, hanging up. “But she wants to know if Alma’s here. They’re not speaking to each other.”

“Alma who sent the flowers to Danny?”

Liesl nodded. “Mahler. Well, Werfel now, but if you leave out the Mahler she puts it back in.”

“And Salka?”

“Viertel. Berthold’s wife. Well, when he’s around. Everyone goes to her on Sundays-like a real salon. So of course it makes Alma crazy. Two queen bees in one hive. I suppose they’ll have to see each other, if there’s a funeral. For five minutes anyway. They’ll all come. It’s like a village. They’ll come to see who doesn’t come. So, you’ll be all right?” she said, gesturing again to the trunks, then glanced at the desk. “Were you looking for something?” She met his eyes, her face suddenly soft. “He didn’t leave a note. You can look, but he didn’t.”

The drawer was a mess of papers: letters, odd pages of scripts with margin notes, bank statements with canceled checks, more private than clothes. An envelope with a doctor’s return address. He pulled out the letter. An annual physical, boxes checked in columns, blood pressure, heart rate-everything had been fine in January, perfect in fact, except for the lazy eye that had got him a 4-F. He put the form down, suddenly embarrassed. What exactly was he looking for? An explanation? An apology? He looked at Danny’s handwriting againswooping caps and then tight, closed letters. Which meant what? Would he even have given it a thought a few days ago? This was like looking at tea leaves or chicken entrails. He shoved the paper back and closed the drawer.

Downstairs, sliding glass doors led out to the pool. There was a wet bar, some bright patio furniture, and a galley kitchen with a serving window that opened to the terrace. Ben imagined parties with platters of food, umbrella tables by day, the million lights by night. To the side was a closed door. The garage? No, a screening room with red plush seats and musty velvet drapes, so dated it must have come with the house. He turned up the lights. Except for the sound speakers, it was the kind of room Lasner might have used to run Two Husbands. Maybe even for Chaplin, a lifetime before Paulette. Did Danny still use it?

The projection room, at any rate, was functional, the equipment newer than some he’d used in the Signal Corps. A few cans of film lay next to the projector, waiting to be put back on the metal shelf lined with hexagonal storage boxes. Ben went over to look, expecting a row of Republic serials, but they were Ufa films, titles on the boxes inked in German. Drei Madchen, Ein Tag in Berlin, Sag Mir Adieu — all the silly comedies and shopgirl dramas their father had made out in Babelsberg, a kind of shrine to Otto Kohler. All here, even the ones from the thirties, when Otto still thought he’d be safe. Ben ran his fingers across the boxes. Films he hadn’t seen, then never asked to see later, all faithfully collected. The father’s son. Even Two Husbands, probably moldering away now in its canister.

He moved from the shelf, his eye caught by a wall of framed photographs. Another Kohler homage. Otto on the set with Marika Rokk. A group picture with Jannings, Lorre, and Conrad Veidt. Dietrich showing him her leg, a gag shot. A formal premiere, probably at the Zoo Palast, in gowns and white ties with-yes, Goebbels at the end of the row. Otto on a crane. Otto blocking a scene. A wall of Otto. And finally, at the end, a picture of the family, all four of them in Lutzowplatz, his mother smiling broadly, her hand on Ben’s shoulder. Danny making a face.

He took the picture from the wall and stared at it, suddenly moved. His life, too. How old had he been? Eight? He remembered the day it had been taken, Frau Weber telling Danny to stand still and then not finding the shutter button so he’d laughed at her again, making another face, the whole afternoon still so real that Ben felt he could touch it, right through the glass frame. His face flushed, a warm surge of recognition. Not someone else.

“There you are. I saw the light. I’ve been looking-” Liesl stopped, seeing his face. “What?”

“Why would he do it,” Ben said flatly.

She had put a terrycloth wrap over her bathing suit and now pulled at one of the lapels, a nervous drawing away.

“I’ve been acting for days as if he’s someone I don’t know.” He held out the picture. “But I do know him. It’s not something he would do.”

“Don’t,” she said softly. “It makes it worse. I know. I did it, too.”

“But it doesn’t make sense.”

“You want it to make sense?”

“It does to them, somehow. He wasn’t sick-I saw his physical. He wasn’t depressed, either. Iris said he was the same as always.”

“Oh, Iris.”

“You did, too. You said you didn’t know he was unhappy. But why should he be?” He waved his arm to take in the house, Danny’s life.

“We don’t know what was in his mind. We don’t.”

She turned and headed out toward the pool. He glanced down at the picture again, then followed.

“But to do this-”

“What, then? Do you think his girlfriend pushed him out? Like some cartoon?”

“Somebody could have.”

Liesl shook her head. “No one else was there. The police talked to the night clerk. No one went up. No one. The door was locked.”

“There has to be a reason.”

“So what could it be? Maybe his marriage. Is that what you think? The others do. You can hear it in their voices. How could he do such a terrible thing? And then they look at me.”

“I didn’t mean-”

“Ouf,” she said, cutting him off, then tossing the robe on the chair. “Enough.”

“Liesl-”

But she turned away, stepping over to the edge of the pool, and dove in, a perfect arc, slicing into the water, then streaming under the surface, out of hearing. When she came up she swam the rest of the length in fast, efficient strokes, a quick, sideways turn for air. Someone who swam every day. He watched her as she turned for the second lap, hair flowing, the long, golden legs scissoring effortlessly, at home in it. The kind of girl everyone noticed, pretending not to, but imagining the smooth body without the suit, beads of water running off the tan skin, all anyone could want. But not enough for Danny. The father’s son in every way. That same careless urge for the next thing, not expecting any damage, until families were broken up and what should have been held close had been let down.

He turned his head away, flustered. Not just some girl in a pool. There were cigarettes on a side table, and he lit one, looking away toward the hazy city. Behind him he could hear the regular splashes of her strokes, then a pause and a noisy gathering of water as she lifted herself up the pool stairs. She came over to where he was standing, toweling her hair.