Joseph Kanon - Stardust

“Maybe,” he said. “And maybe you’re having fun with me.”

“No.” She smiled, looking down at her glass. “Maybe the wine is.” She sat up, a drowsy stretch, gathering the robe. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be seemly, would it? Not yet.”

“No.”

“Not even cold. That’s what they’d say, yes? Well, I’m going in.” She picked up the bottle to take with her. “Have a swim if you like,” she said, moving off, then smiled at him. “I won’t look.”

He sat for a while, his mind drifting but then, like the water, lapping back. Schicklich. The inside of a marriage was unknowable, curtained off. He listened for sounds of her inside, but only the crickets broke the quiet. Maybe she was already in bed, not at all uneasy because she knew the way it would happen.

On his way in, he stopped at the screening room to pick up some of the office papers Republic had sent over. Scripts, drafts. What had been in his mind those last weeks? Not that Partners in Crime was likely to be revealing-formula stuff, two brothers having fun, as frivolous as Otto’s comedies.

He went over to an open film can. The film itself was still in the projector, not yet run through and put away, the last thing Danny had seen. Maybe a Continental picture with a young star, someone he wanted to watch over and over? Ben flicked the switch, half-expecting to see Ruth or Rosemary-any girl you’d want to spend an afternoon with at a residential hotel. Instead it was a Fox Movietone newsreel, men shaking hands right after Hiroshima. Ben rewound the film and started it again.

First, the usual opening montage with the water-skiers, then the airmen at Tinian Island, the ground crew loading the bomb, kneeling with the pilots in front of the plane, a picture everybody’d seen now, instant history according to the voice-over. But the camera had been there, too, recording it, making a movie. And in the plane, flying now through the clouds.

The flash and mushroom cloud, the whole city rolled up in smoke, the narrator excited by the scale of it, the most powerful thing the world has ever known. No voice, though, over the next segment, shot later, a silent sweeping pan of the charred, flattened city. A few figures picking their way through the landscape, otherwise no movement at all. More pan shots, the frame of a domed building by the river, the rest vaporized. Congratulations all around back home, scientists and generals shaking hands. They’d made a movie of it, sent cameras up, got flight crews to pose. But so had the Nazis, filming atrocities with smiling faces. That’s how they’d identified Wolf Breslau, caught on film on the rim of the mass grave, smiling, unable to resist one last close-up.

The newsreel went on to the surrender scene on the Missouri, but even the narrator, booming with victory, couldn’t lift the film from the streets of ashes. The voice wanted to celebrate, throw a hat in the air like the relieved sailors, but the words said one thing and the pictures showed another-this was the way it would be now, the way we would die. Kissing couples, the narrator announcing a world of hope. But it wasn’t, Ben thought. Not now. Just an endless dread.

Ben took the reel off and put it in its canister. Not frivolous. Maybe Partners wasn’t the whole of him, maybe the war had touched something deeper, just as Ben’s life had been upturned by the camps, both of them alike under the skin.

He turned off the light and went into the house. On the desk in the study, just as she’d said, he found the autopsy report. He glanced through it. Medical English, not English at all, nearly incomprehensible. He heard a sound from her room, a turning perhaps, something dropped, meaningless in itself except as a sign of life. Just behind the door. He smiled to himself. Schicklich. How do we decide what’s right? He looked down again at the sheet. Pulmonary-something to do with the lungs. But of course she was right. All it said was that Danny was dead.

• • •

“W AS THERE some problem?” Dr. Walters said, caught on the run in the hall, not sure why Ben had come.

“I don’t know the technical terms. I’m not sure what they actually mean.”

“Simple language? He stopped breathing.” He halted midstep. “I’m sorry. I know it sounds like a joke. All I mean is that there were no signs of stroke-that’s the usual cause after a head trauma, edemal bleeding flooding the brain.”

“But not in this case.”

“No. Or heart damage. There are only a few ways to die. Of course, these are all connected.” He paused, framing his hands, explaining to a classroom. “Think of the brain as a switchboard. The operator pulled a line connected to the lungs. Like being cut off on a call,” he said, looking up, waiting to see if Ben was following. “The board controls everything. The lungs don’t operate by themselves.”

“Is that common?”

“Yes. Mr. Kohler, with a head injury like this, the surprising thing is that he didn’t die instantly. I gather he was lucky in the response time- the ambulance got to him before he lost too much blood. So that bought him some time. I’m sorry.”

“But if he regained consciousness-”

“We don’t rule out miracles,” he said patiently. “But I’m a doctor, you know, not a priest. This is what we expected to happen.” He waited for Ben to reply.

“Was there anything-any sign that he may have been injured before he fell?”

“Before.”

“Knocked out, anything like that.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“By someone else. Before.”

Dr. Walters peered at him, disconcerted. “No. But I’m not a policeman, either. Is there any reason to think this happened?”

“I just wanted to look at everything. Every possibility.”

Dr. Walters nodded. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kohler. These things can be hard to accept.” He looked down at the paper in Ben’s hand. “Maybe that’s why we hide behind the language.”

He had stopped by the hospital on his way to lunch and now found himself running late, caught in the traffic west to Fairfax. Kelly had suggested the Farmers Market, somewhere away from the studio, a pointless Dick Tracy feint, but not worth arguing about.

The market had started as a collection of produce stalls for Depression farmers, but now had the look of a small studio-permanent buildings for the stalls and restaurants, table seating on patios and its own logo clock tower, looking over the parking lot like the RKO globe. Everything was painted cream and light green and maroon, what Ben thought of as leftover colors, the same ones Lasner had used at Continental, maybe even from the same cheap supply. Kelly was already at a table under the trees, nursing a beer.

“So what have we got?” he said as Ben sat down, his eyes darting over Ben’s shoulder.

“Not much. No matches from the building list.” He pulled out a paper. “These are the top contract players, the ones they might want to protect, but that doesn’t mean it’s one of them. And they’re not big names. Lasner doesn’t-”

“Yeah, I know, the loan-out king. Who’s he got borrowed, by the way. He’d want to take care of them, at least until the picture’s out. Listen,” he said abruptly. “You mention me to anyone? Tell them I’m looking at this?”

“No. You said-”

“You sure?”

Ben nodded. “Why?” he said, aware now of the look in Kelly’s eyes, his quick movements.

“Maybe my imagination. Except it never is, is it? Don’t turn around-no, don’t, I mean it. People always do that. Take a look when we get up for the food. There’s a guy over by the raw bar. I notice he’s casing the place, and he looks familiar and then it comes to me-he was hanging around Republic. When I’m there checking the talent. This is before I hear about Continental. Some coincidence, if you believe in that. So maybe he’s keeping an eye, you know? The guy’s a cop- everything about him-and I’m thinking, what the hell, the cops enforce for the studios, so maybe someone-”