Nina Berry - The Notorious Pagan Jones

Further proof A.A. was unnecessary. She was cool.

She tried to smile at the stewardess. The woman turned her own lips up with professional grace, then her gaze ran over Pagan’s face, and the smile faded. Her eyes widened in recognition. Her mouth, professionally lacquered in coral lipstick, parted, then closed, then parted again.

“How about a Coke, honey?” she asked, low and kind. “Or we carry Sprite now, too. It’s like 7Up.”

Pagan swallowed. The pity in the woman’s face came close to undoing her self-control. “A Coke would be great. Thanks.”

This time the stewardess’s smile was small and real. “Coming right up.”

She strode away, and Pagan took a tissue out of the beautiful black patent leather Chanel bag and quietly blew her nose. Very quickly, the stewardess brought the Coke in a bottle with a glass full of ice on the side, as well as some crackers and cheese.

“Eat a little something, too, maybe?” she said. “We won’t be taking off for another ten minutes or so.”

“Thank you.” It came out very low, almost a whisper.

The stewardess patted Pagan’s shoulder. “Just let me know if you need anything, mmkay?”

Pagan nodded, and the woman left her alone. She managed three crackers and a square of cheese before she set the food on the empty seat beside her, got up with studied composure, walked down the aisle, and locked herself in the tiny lavatory to cry.

* * *

By the time she hit Chicago’s Midway Airport, Pagan had full possession of herself again, but she kept her sunglasses on. Her skin was buzzing with the anxiety of being recognized, of how people’s reactions might undo her. She distracted herself by tapping back into her anger over the nerve of Devin Black. Maybe his failure to keep tabs on her would get him fired. Someone else would be assigned to be her minder. Anyone would be better than him, even if he was cuter than Elvis Presley.

She’d devoted far too many thoughts to Devin, so she forced him aside by finding a lonely seat in the first-class lounge at the airport and pulling out the files from Daddy’s safe for another look.

Looking again at the signature on the letters to her mother, Pagan drew a blank on the name Rolf von Albrecht.

She turned the paper over again and saw the date.

1952…

Something jolted from her memory. That had been the year the Renoir-giving German Doctor Someone had visited. Maybe Doctor Someone was Rolf von Albrecht.

The tall, skinny man with the squeaky, nasal voice had stayed with them in the winter of ’52 for a couple of weeks, barely speaking to anyone except for Mama, and then mostly in Daddy’s office with the door locked. He’d departed quietly the morning after a late-night, knock-down fight between her parents, never to be seen again.

Pagan focused on the unfamiliar language in the letter. She’d been pretty fluent in German once upon a time thanks to her early years speaking to Grandmama, but after many years away from it, the German-reading part of her brain stop-started like a rusty engine.

Fortunately, most of it was in simple language, and the more she read, the more German came back to her.

But the letter was weirdly benign and boring. Whole paragraphs consisted of sentences like As summer arrives, I find myself wishing it was November again .

Pagan had been braced for evidence that her mother had somehow betrayed her father with this Rolf von Albrecht guy. Instead, it was nothing but sunny days, back pain, and roast turkey.

All the letters were like that, stilted and dull, filled with memories of anonymous landscapes, walks in the garden, and purchasing tickets to the opera. The relentless banality was oddly chilling. No one would write letters this pointless every week for months.

No one would have kept something so meaningless in a safe.

Unless… The thought was ludicrous. But what if there was more going on, literally, between the lines?

She shoved away the memory of the taste of that champagne by plunging into an attempt to find some sort of cipher in the letters. But two hours later, safely ensconced in first class on the plane to New York, she’d found no obvious code or hidden message. If there was any truth to her instinct, finding proof was going to take a lot more work, and right now her stomach hurt. So she put them and her own boring file away.

She was doing the same with Ava’s folder when a photograph fell out of it into her lap.

Pagan threw her gaze up toward the airplane’s ceiling, not wanting to see her younger sister’s face.

Ava had been twelve when she died, blonder than Pagan, but people said she wasn’t as pretty because she was more serious and smiled less. The truth was that Ava had been beautiful because she didn’t smile when she didn’t feel like it. Pagan could only dream of being as confident as her little sister had been.

Pagan swallowed hard and looked down at the photograph. It lay sideways on her lap—a shot of Ava at age three seated next to seven-year-old Pagan on the piano bench. Pagan had both arms around her sister and was grinning ear to ear as she squeezed her tight. Ava, taking the hug for granted, stared down at the piano keys, chubby fingers already reaching for a chord.

Dang it, she was not going to cry again.

She hastily put the photo back into its folder and continued going through the others. She’d learned how to conjure tears on cue for her movie roles, and she could damn well do it in reverse now.

She came to the last folder, labeled Eva Murnau Jones .

Murnau. That had been her mother’s maiden name. Eva’s mother’s name was Ursula, her father’s was Emil. That was everything Pagan knew about that side of her family.

She opened the folder and paged past bank statements and the dull, posed pictures of Mama with her hair freshly done. Near the back of the file lay a white-bordered photo, smaller, grainier, and very different from the rest. In it a handsome blonde woman around thirty years old stood in front of a worn stone building. She was smiling, holding a swaddled baby in her arms.

Pagan flipped the photo over. In fading script someone had written: Ursula mit Eva, 1924 .

Grandmama and Mama had moved to Los Angeles in 1925, so this must have been taken in Berlin when Mama was an infant. Pagan scanned the photo for anything that might identify where it had been taken, but there was no street sign or building number, just a glowering winged griffin carved in stone over the door.

There couldn’t be more than one building with that design in Berlin. Funny how that’s where she was headed now.

Maybe it was nothing. But all of a sudden, more than anything, she wanted to walk the street where her grandmother had held her infant mother, maybe even explore the building where Mama had lived. She didn’t know what going there might tell her, but any tiny glimpse she could get into her mother’s life or her mother’s mind was precious.

All she had now of her family was the past.

As she plunged into reading the script for Neither Here Nor There , two people across the aisle began glancing over at her furtively, whispering. She sank back against the plane’s round window and lifted the script to block her face.

Fortunately, the script was smart and funny, mocking both capitalism and socialism at every turn. Pagan was slated to play Violet, a flirtatious teenage Southern belle who caused havoc wherever she went. She swiftly fell in love with a handsome young Communist and secretly married him, much to the horror of her family, particularly her rabidly capitalist father. Although James Brennan, former star of gangster movies and expert tap dancer, was the star, her role wasn’t far behind his in size. Jerry Allenberg had been right about one thing at least—this was a pip of a role, and she’d better not mess it up.