XPD, Page 4

  ‘I’ll tell you what happens in six weeks, Billy,’ said MacIver, hitching his trousers at the knees and seating himself on the armchair facing the young man. ‘I get the money for the movie rights of my war memoirs. That’s what happens in six weeks.’ He smiled and reached across to the big china ashtray marked Café de la Paix – Billy’s father had brought it back from Paris in 1945. He dragged the ashtray close to his hand and flicked into it a long section of ash.

  ‘Movie rights?’ said Billy Stein, and MacIver was gratified to have provoked him at last into a reaction. ‘Your war memoirs?’

  ‘Twenty-five thousand dollars,’ said MacIver. He flicked his cigarette again, even though there was no ash on it. ‘They have got a professional writer working on my story right now.’

  ‘What did you do in the war?’ said Billy. ‘What did you do that they’ll make it into a movie?’

  ‘I was a military cop,’ said MacIver proudly. ‘I was with Georgie Patton’s Third Army when they opened up this Kraut salt mine and found the Nazi gold reserves there. Billions of dollars in gold, as well as archives, diaries, town records and paintings … You’d never believe the stuff that was there.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I was assigned to MFA & A, G-5 Section – the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives branch of the Government Affairs Group – we guarded it while it was classified into Category A for the bullion and rare coins and Category B for the gold and silver dishes, jewellery, ornaments and stuff. I wish you could have seen it, Billy.’

  ‘Just you guarding it?’

  MacIver laughed. ‘There were five infantry platoons guarding the lorries that moved it to Frankfurt. There were two machine-gun platoons as back-up, and Piper Cub airplanes in radio contact with the escort column. No, not just me, Billy.’ MacIver scratched his chin. ‘Your dad never tell you about all that? And about the trucks that never got to the other end?’

  ‘What are you getting at, Mr MacIver?’

  MacIver raised a flattened hand. ‘Now, don’t get me wrong, Billy. No one’s saying your dad had anything to do with the hijack.’

  ‘One of dad’s relatives in Europe died during the war. He left dad some land and stuff over there; that’s how dad made his money.’

  ‘Sure it is, Billy. No one’s saying any different.’

  ‘I don’t go much for all that war stuff,’ said Billy.

  ‘Well, this guy Bernie Lustig, with the office on Melrose … he goes for it.’

  ‘A movie?’

  MacIver reached into his tartan jacket and produced an envelope. From it he took a rectangle of cheap newsprint. It was the client’s proof of a quarter-page advert in a film trade magazine. ‘What is the final secret of the Kaiseroda mine?’ said the headline. He passed the flimsy paper to Billy Stein. ‘That will be in the trade magazines next month. Meanwhile Bernie is talking up a storm. He knows everyone: the big movie stars, the directors, the agents, the writers, everyone.’

  ‘The movie business kind of interests me,’ admitted Billy.

  MacIver was pleased. ‘You want to meet Bernie?’

  ‘Could you fix that for me?’

  ‘No problem,’ said MacIver, taking the advert back and replacing it in his pocket. ‘And I get a piece of the action too. Two per cent of the producer’s profit; that could be a bundle, Billy.’

  ‘I couldn’t handle the technical stuff,’ said Billy. ‘I’m no good with a camera, and I can’t write worth a damn, but I’d make myself useful on the production side.’ He reached for his anti-glare spectacles and toyed with them. ‘If he’ll have me, that is.’

  MacIver beamed. ‘If he’ll have you! … The son of my best friend! Jesusss! He’ll have you in that production office, Billy, or I’ll pull out and take my story somewhere else.’

  ‘Gee, thanks, Mr MacIver.’

  ‘I call you Billy; you call me Miles. OK?’ He dug his hands deep into his trouser pockets and gave that slow smile that was infectious.

  ‘OK, Miles.’ Billy snapped his spectacles on.

  ‘Rain’s stopping,’ said MacIver. ‘There are a few calls I have to make …’ MacIver had never lost his sense of timing. ‘I must go. Nice talking to you, Billy. Give my respects to your dad. Tell him he’ll be hearing from me real soon. Meanwhile, I’ll talk to Bernie and have him call you and fix a lunch. OK?’

  ‘Thanks, Mr MacIver.’

  ‘Miles.’ He dumped his cigarettes into the ashtray.

  ‘Thanks, Miles.’

  ‘Forget it, kid.’

  When Miles MacIver got into the driver’s seat of the Chrysler Imperial parked outside the Stein home, he sighed with relief. The man in the back seat did not move. ‘Did you fix it?’

  ‘Stein wasn’t there. I spoke with his son. He knows nothing.’

  ‘You didn’t mention the Kaiseroda mine business to the son, I hope?’

  MacIver laughed and started the engine. ‘I’m not that kind of fool, Mr Kleiber. You said don’t mention it to anyone except the old man. I know how to keep my mouth shut.’

  The man in the back seat grunted as if unconvinced.

  Billy Stein was elated. After MacIver had departed he made a phone call and cancelled a date to go to a party in Malibu with a girl he had recently met at Pirate’s Cove, the nude bathing section of the state beach at Point Dume. She had an all-over golden tan, a new Honda motorcycle and a father who had made a fortune speculating in cocoa futures. It was a measure of Billy Stein’s excitement at the prospect of a job in the movie industry that he chose to sit alone and think about it rather than be with this girl.

  At first Billy Stein spent some time searching through old movie magazines in case he could find a reference to Bernie Lustig or, better still, a photo of him. His search was unrewarded. At 7.30 the housekeeper, who had looked after the two men since Billy Stein’s mother died some five years before, brought him a supper tray. A tall, thin woman, she had lost her nursing licence in some eastern state hospital for selling whisky to the patients. Perhaps this ending to her nursing career had changed her personality, for she was taciturn, devoid of curiosity and devoid too of that warm, maternal manner so often associated with nursing. She worked hard for the Steins but she never attempted to replace that other woman who had once closed these same curtains, plumped up the cushions and switched on the table lamps. She hurriedly picked up the petals that had fallen from the roses, crushed them tightly in her hand and then dropped them into a large ashtray upon MacIver’s cigarette butt. She sniffed; she hated cigarettes. She picked up the ashtray, holding it at a distance as a nurse holds a bedpan.

  ‘Anything else, Mr Billy?’ Her almost colourless hair was drawn tightly back, and fixed into position with brass-coloured hair clips.

  Billy looked at the supper tray she had put before him on the coffee table. ‘You get along, Mrs Svenson. You’ll miss the beginning of “Celebrity Sweepstakes”.’

  She looked at the clock and back to Billy Stein, not quite sure whether this concern was genuine or sarcastic. She never admitted her obsession for the TV game shows but she had planned to be upstairs in her self-contained apartment by then.

  ‘If Mr Stein wants anything to eat when he gets home, there is some cold chicken wrapped in foil on the top shelf of the refrigerator.’

  ‘Yes, OK. Good night, Mrs Svenson.’

  She sniffed again and moved the framed photo of Charles Stein which MacIver had put back slightly out of position amongst the photos crowding the piano top. ‘Good night, Billy.’

  Billy munched his way through the bowl of beef chilli and beans, and drank his beer. Then he went to the bookcase and ran a fingertip along the video cassettes to find an old movie that he had taped. He selected Psycho and sat back to watch how Hitchcock had set up his shots and assembled them into a whole. He had done this with an earlier Hitchcock film for a college course on film appreciation.

  The time passed quickly, and when the taped film ended Billy was even more excited at the prospect of becoming a par
t of the entertainment world. He found show-biz stylish and hard-edged: stylish and hard-edged being compliments that were at that time being rather overworked by Billy Stein’s friends and contemporaries. He rewound the tape and settled back to see Psycho once more.

  Charles Stein, Billy’s father, usually spent Wednesday evenings at a club out in the east valley. They still called it the Roscoe Sports and Bridge Club, even though some smart, real-estate man had got Roscoe renamed Sun Valley, and few of the members played anything but poker.

  Stein’s three regular cronies were there, including Jim Sampson, an elderly lawyer who had served with Stein in the army. They ate the Wednesday night special together – corned beef hash with onion rings – shared a few bottles of California Gewürztraminer and some opinions of the government, then retired to the bar to watch the eleven o’clock news followed by the sports round-up. It was always the same; Charles Stein was a man of regular habits. A little after midnight, Jim Sampson dropped him off at the door – Stein disliked driving – and was invited in for a nightcap. It was a ritual that both men knew, a way of saying thank you for the ride. Jim Sampson never came in.

  ‘Thought you had a heavy date tonight, Billy?’ Charles Stein weighed nearly 300 pounds. The real crocodile-leather belt that bit into his girth and bundled up his expensive English wool suit and his pure cotton shirt was supplied to special order by Sunny Jim’s Big Men’s Wear. Stein’s sparse white hair was ruffled, so that the light behind him made an untidy halo round his pink head as he lowered himself carefully into his favourite armchair.

  Billy, who never discussed his girlfriends with his father, said, ‘Stayed home. Your friend MacIver dropped in. He thinks he can get me a job in movies.’

  ‘Get you a job in movies?’ said his father. ‘Get you a job in movies? Miles MacIver?’ He searched in his pocket to find his cigars, and put one in his mouth and lit it.

  ‘They’re making a movie of his war memoirs. Some story! Finding the Nazi gold. Could be a great movie, dad.’

  ‘Hold the phone,’ said his father wearily. He was sitting on the edge of the armchair now, leaning well forward, his head bent very low as he prepared to light his cigar. ‘MacIver was here?’ He said it to the carpet.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Billy Stein.

  ‘When was MacIver here?’

  ‘You said never interrupt your poker game.’

  ‘When?’ He struck a match and lit his cigar.

  ‘Five o’clock, maybe six o’clock.’

  ‘You watching TV tonight?’

  ‘It’s just quiz shows and crap. I’ve been running video.’

  ‘MacIver is dead.’ Charles Stein drew on the cigar and blew smoke down at the carpet.

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘It was on Channel Two, the news. Some kid blew off the top of his head with a sawed-off shotgun. Left the weapon there. It happened in one of those little bars on Western Avenue near Beverly Boulevard. TV news got a crew there real quick … cars, flashing lights, a deputy chief waving the murder weapon at the camera.’

  ‘A street gang, was it?’

  ‘Who then threw away a two-hundred-dollar shotgun, all carefully sawed off so it fits under your jacket?’

  ‘Then who?’

  Charles Stein blew smoke. ‘Who knows?’ he said angrily, although his anger was not directed at anyone in particular. ‘MacIver the Mouth, they called him. Owes money all over town. Could be some creditor blew him away.’ He drew on the cigar again. The smoke tasted sour.

  ‘Well, he sold his war memoirs. He showed me the advertisement. Some movie producer he met. He’s selling him a story about Nazi gold in Germany in the war.’

  Charles Stein grunted. ‘So that’s it, eh? I wondered why that bastard had been going around talking to all the guys from the outfit. Sure, I saw a lot of him in the army but he wasn’t even with the battalion. He was with some lousy military police detail.’

  ‘He’s been getting the story from you?’

  ‘From me he got nothing. We were under the direct order of General Patton at Third Army HQ for that job, and we’re still not released from the secrecy order.’ He ran his fingers back through his wispy hair and held his hand on the top of his head for a moment, lost in thought. ‘MacIver has been writing all this stuff down, you say, and passing it to some movie guy?’

  ‘Bernie Lustig. MacIver was going to introduce me to him,’ said Billy. ‘Poor guy. Was it a stick-up?’

  ‘He won’t be doing much in the line of introductions, Billy. By now he’s in the morgue with a label on his toe. Lustig – where’s he have his office?’

  ‘Melrose – he hasn’t made it to Beverly Hills or even to Sunset. That’s what made me think it was true … If MacIver had been inventing this guy, he would have chosen somewhere flashier than Melrose.’

  ‘Go to the top of the class, Billy.’ He eased off his white leather shoes and kicked them carelessly under the table.

  ‘What was he like, this MacIver guy?’ MacIver had now achieved a posthumous interest, not to say glamour. ‘What was he really like, dad?’

  ‘He was a liar and a cheat. He sponged on his friends to buy drinks for his enemies … MacIver was desperate to make people like him. He’d do anything to win them over …’ Stein was about to add that MacIver’s promise to get Billy a job in the movie industry was a good example of this desperate need, but he decided not to disappoint his son until more facts were available. He smoked his cigar and then studied the ash on it.

  ‘Did you know him in New York, before you went into the army?’

  ‘He was from Chicago. He was on the force there, working the South Side – a tough neighbourhood. He leaned heavily on the “golden-hearted cop” bit. He joined the army after Pearl Harbor and gave them all that baloney about being at Harvard. There was no time to check on it, I suppose …’

  ‘It was baloney. He as good as admitted it.’

  ‘They wouldn’t let MacIver into Harvard to haul the ashes. Sure it was baloney, but it got him a commission in the military police. And he used that to pull every trick in the book. He was always asking for use of one of our trucks. A packing case delivered here; a small parcel collected here. He got together with the transport section and the rumours said they even sold one of our two-and-a-half-tonners to a Belgian civilian and went on leave in Paris to spend the proceeds.’ Suddenly Stein felt sad and very tired. He wiped a hand across his face, as a swimmer might after emerging from the water.

  ‘What are you going to do now, dad?’

  ‘I lost five hundred and thirty bucks tonight, Billy, and I’ve put away more white wine than is good for my digestion …’ He coughed, and looked for his ashtray without finding it. In spite of all his reservations about MacIver, he was shocked by the news of his murder. MacIver was a con-man, always ready with glib promises and the unconvincing excuses that inevitably followed them. And yet there were good memories too, for MacIver was capable of flamboyant generosity and subtle kindness, and anyway, thought Charles Stein, they had shared a lifetime together. It was enough to make him sad, no matter what kind of bastard MacIver had been.

  ‘You going to find this Bernie Lustig character?’ said Billy.

  ‘Is that the name of the movie producer?’

  ‘I told you, dad. On Melrose.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘You don’t think this Lustig cat had anything to do with the killing, do you?’

  ‘I’m going to bed now, Billy.’ Again he looked for the ashtray. It was always on the table next to the flower vase.

  ‘If he owed MacIver twenty-five thousand dollars …’

  ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning, Billy. Where’s my ashtray?’

  ‘I’ll catch the TV news,’ said Billy. ‘Think they’ll still be running the clip?’

  ‘This is a rough town, Billy. One killing don’t make news for long.’ He reached across the table and stubbed his cigar into the remains of Billy’s beans.

  Chapter 6

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sp; The man behind the desk could have been mistaken for an oriental, especially when he smiled politely. His face was pale and even the sunshine of southern California made his skin go no darker than antique ivory. His hair was jet black and brushed tight against his domed skull. ‘Max Breslow,’ he said, offering a hand which Charles Stein shook energetically.

  ‘I was expecting to meet Mr Bernie Lustig,’ said Stein. He had selected one of his most expensive cream-coloured linen suits but already it was rumpled, and the knot of his white silk tie had twisted under his collar. He lowered his massive body into the black leather Charles Eames armchair, which creaked under his weight.

  ‘Mr Lustig is in Europe,’ said Max Breslow. ‘There is work to do there for our next production.’

  ‘The final secret of the Kaiseroda mine?’ said Stein, waving his large hand in the air and displaying a heavy gold Rolex watch and diamond rings on hands that were regularly manicured. When Breslow did not react to this question, Stein said, ‘Mr Miles MacIver is an old friend of mine. He promised to get my son a job with your film.’ Breslow nodded. Stein corrected himself. ‘MacIver was a close friend of mine.’

  ‘You were in the army with him?’ He had a faint German accent.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ said Stein. He stroked his sideburns. They were long and bushy, curling over his ears.

  Breslow picked up a stainless-steel letter-opener, toyed with it for a moment and looked at Stein. ‘It was a sad business with Mr MacIver,’ said Breslow. He said it with the same sort of clinical indifference with which an airline clerk comforts a passenger who has lost his baggage.

  Stein remembered MacIver with a sudden disconcerting pang of grief. He recalled the night in 1945 when MacIver had crawled into the wreckage of a German Weinstube. They were in some small town on the other side of Mainz. The artillery had long since pounded it flat, the tanks had bypassed its difficult obstacles, the infantry had forgotten it existed, the engineers had threaded their tapes all through the streets, and left ‘DANGER BOOBY TRAPS’ signs in the rubble. Stein remembered how MacIver had climbed down from their two-and-a-half-ton winch truck saying that goddamned engineers always put those signs on the booze joints so they could come back and plunder it in their own sweet time. Stein had held his breath while MacIver climbed over the rubble and across the wrecked front parlour of the wine bar. For a moment he had been out of sight but soon he reappeared, flush-faced and grinning in triumph, fingers cut on broken glass and sleeve dark and wet with spilled red wine that shone like fresh blood. He was struggling under the weight of a whole case of German champagne.