For a week or so, when Hollywood’s labor war seemed to be drowsing, Jack and I made the long drive to Warners every day to pick Val up at the end of shooting. Several times I thought I saw the same black Buick Roadmaster dodging in and out of traffic behind us.
“We’re being tailed.” I twisted around to look out the back window when I saw it again one afternoon. “I’m sure of it. That Roadmaster is back there again.”
“I don’t see anything.” Jack gave a blasé look in his side mirror. “It’s probably just your imagination, which might be more hyperactive than usual because of excessive seminal retention. There are a lot of Buicks on the road.”
“Maybe it’s Fortunato.”
“Even if it is, which I doubt, Val and I are both free and white and twenty-one.” He was exasperated now. “We’re on a pretty good run and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t fuck things up with your dire imaginings.”
He must have felt bad because a few minutes later he told me that he’d rented a cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains for the weekend and I was invited.
“Myself, I’d prefer a twosome, but Val wants you to come with us. She’s worried that if we leave you alone again, you might decide to drop the electric heater in the bathtub. You can reprise your immortal role of Billings the chauffeur.”
“At your service, Sir.”
They had already taken off for a couple of weekends in Palm Springs, just the two of them, staying at the Hotel Del Tahquitz, which was run by Fritzi Ridgeway, an old-timer who had starred in silent horse operas with William S. Hart and had a bit role in Tomorrow.
Jack liked it there, particularly after he ran into Bob Hope one morning while buying a donut. Val liked it too, but wanted to experience something more “primitive.”
“She’s all fired up because she thinks this cabin will be like the Alaskan shack where Charlie Chaplin eats his shoes in The Gold Rush,” Jack said. “She says that all Italians love that movie.”
On the drive up into the mountains he congratulated himself that the place had cost him only seven dollars for the weekend, but when we got our first look at the cabin at the end of a rough dirt road, I heard him mutter, “I paid too much.”
It had one large room with two iron-frame beds and one naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling. The kitchen consisted of a sink with a pump handle and a small stove running off a propane tank standing near a gamy outhouse in the back yard.
Val bounced on one of the beds as Jack inspected the corners of the room for scorpions. By the time we had unpacked, I noticed that the two of them were locking eyes.
“There are lots of great hiking trails,” Jack said to me.
“You mean here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry?”
“Something like that.”
I put an apple in my pocket, filled my thermos with what we had been told was pristine spring water and took off.
Indian summer was on the warpath in early October, even at three thousand feet. Hiking up a steep path, I noticed that the forest floor was littered with deadfall and mentally audited the area for fire trails.
After about half a mile I crossed over the ridgeline and followed the trail down the other side of the mountain. Eventually I came to a shaded spot where a large pine had been felled sometime in the past and now lay in a decomposing column with tumors of amber resin beading up on the bark. Its stump served me as a resting place. A lizard skittered in the leaves near my feet. I heard a shrill piping overhead and looked up to see a hawk balancing on the thermals like a tightrope walker.
I had brought a letter from Kick that arrived a couple of days earlier to read again. She had taken a flat in London after feeling like “a ghost” for the last few months at Chatsworth, the ancestral Cavendish estate, where the wife of her late husband’s younger brother had now succeeded her as the Duchess-in-waiting of Devonshire and would someday be in charge of the manor’s 126 rooms.
“Today was wonderfully warm for a change,” she wrote in her backhanded scrawl. “I felt like a butterfly coming out of the chrysalis and decided to flutter off for some shopping. I bought the most cunning yellow sleeveless dress and put it on right there in the shop and then wore it all around Kensington for the next couple of hours. I felt like I was thawing after being frozen for the past year. Billy wouldn’t mind, would he, Lemmy?”
I sensed that she had begun the next leg of her journey, although I couldn’t have imagined that over the next couple of years she would become a leading member of the London smart set, featured in a picture spread in Life magazine that showed her heavily made up in a shimmering blue cocktail dress, drinking a sidecar and smoking a Gauloise in a holder as long as the one Audrey Hepburn later waved around in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Nor that she would embark on an affair with Lord Peter Fitzwilliam, Catholic but divorced, who, at a net worth of some 45 million pounds, was one of the richest men in England, although for Kick his attraction was his person, not his money. Shortly after they began seeing each other, she called me over the quavering transcontinental line and talked for a long time in a jaded, slightly drunken voice I’d never heard from her before about how she had been such a fumbling sexual naïf with Billy that when he asked her for a blowjob on their wedding night she had actually held his cock in her hand and blown on it. But now, she said, she had learned what love was: “repeated doses of Peter.” The pun on Freud was a sign of how far she had come.
But all that, and her troubling death with her priapic lord, was still in the future, and I sat there in the San Bernardino Mountains imagining her incandescent innocence as she walked past the Victoria and Albert in her new yellow dress.
I sensed rather than heard someone behind me and turned to see Niccolo Fortunato leaning against a tree about fifteen feet from where I was sitting.
This close he was an artifact: the blank eyes and long nose pointing down at a strong chin dimpled at its center came from Roman portrait sculpture; the features couldn’t have been more immobile if the face had been injected with curare. He was younger than I had assumed from the glimpse we’d gotten at the Warners party and later on his front porch—perhaps late forties; of middle height but seeming taller because of his lean dancer’s body. He was dressed in corduroy pants and a shooting jacket, despite the heat, and projected a languid bella figura as well as a coiled menace.
Watching me intently with raptor’s eyes, he picked a needle off a pine tree, stuck it in his mouth like a toothpick, and let the silence press down. Jack’s father got leverage by doing the same thing, and the fugitive thought flitted through my mind that the two men might be similar in other ways as well.
“Do you have a black Buick?” I blurted out.
“Yes.” His smile looked like dental pain. “You have seen me following you?”
I nodded.
“I haven’t been hiding.”
I couldn’t figure out anything to say, and sat there dreading what was next.
“I am concerned for my daughter. She is not a little girl any longer and I can’t tell her what to do, but she doesn’t know much about this country. In spite of her experiences, she believes that people are good and life is fair. But I know that evil is an active principle in the world and would have made sure she understood this too if things had been better between us.”
There was a rough candor in how he spoke as well as what he said. He struck me as a man who prided himself on not using emollients when he talked about himself.
“I’m not very trusting, which is why I keep an eye on your friend and you too, since you seem to be his Siamese.”
He took the pine needle out of his mouth and studied it. “Even if you don’t see me, I’m probably nearby, looking for one sign of insincerity, even one small indication that Valentina might suffer as a result of the attention your friend gives her.”
“Jack would never hurt her,” I stammered. “He loves her.”
“Love,” he mouthed the word as if tasting for an expiration date. “We’ll see. Anything’s possible, but I know something of his family. These are careless people. They use others and allow them to get hurt in the damage they create as they try to attain their objectives.”
I looked away, but he saw what I was thinking.
“Even those of us who don’t always live inside the lines of the law have principles in our private lives. You shouldn’t think of this as a contradiction.”
In the silence that followed, I heard the hawk again.
Finally he asked, “What do you know about Valentina’s past?”
“Just the little she told us.”
“Did she tell you about being taken by the Germans?”
“Yes.”
“And about how she got out of her prison camp?”
“She said you came in shooting.”
“I ask only because I want to make sure that you and your friend know what she has experienced and how far I will go for her.”
“She hadn’t heard from you in twenty years,” I frightened myself by saying this.
He blinked rapidly. “I’m not in the habit of explaining myself, especially to strangers, but it is true that perhaps I was not the kind of father I should have been. But I’m also not the kind of man who makes the same mistake twice. Know for certain that I watch over her now.”
I thought he had finished, but he didn’t move.
“My friend Jack would like to get to know you,” I finally said.
“Know me.” His look was like one I’d seen on Val’s face when she was secretly amused. “Yes, my daughter has told me he mentioned this. I said to her I would meet him only when I was sure that the two of us would not find ourselves at odds.”
“She put it differently to me—that you didn’t want to meet him before you were sure that you wouldn’t have to hurt him.”
“I did say that,” he admitted. “Like I told you, I do not have a good feeling about this friendship between them.”
“But why?”
“Given all the factors, it seems unlikely that he can benefit her. Leave it at that.”
It was quiet for too long. I knew he was playing a game of chicken with me, but I couldn’t keep from breaking the silence first: “Jack greatly admires what you did in the war.”
When he replied, the words were as devoid of emotion as his facial features. “I don’t ask to be seen as a patriot. I made contact with the people in Washington for one reason only: I needed a way to get into Italy and connect with the right people there so I could do what was necessary for my daughter. I am very far from what you’d call an idealist.”
He glanced down at the ground. “Being able to kill people without wondering if they deserve it: that’s the only good thing about war. Those I’ve killed ignore me during the day. It is only at night that they appear. This does not especially bother me. I almost look forward to seeing them.”
Then he came up so close to me that I could see the enlarged pores on his nose and smell the wintergreen tang of his breath. “Did Valentina tell you that I promised her she would be safe in America?”
I nodded as sweat slid down my sides.
“Even people who are not my friends say I keep my promises.”
His eyes released me and he stood back. “You don’t say much. Maybe you’re better at listening than talking. I hope so because I want you to tell your friend what has been said just now. This is serious business.”
He never raised his voice. He had a blemished dignity, even a certain finish, I thought, until he abruptly rattled off a burst of Italian: “E che non si cazzeggia piu!” He translated as if for himself, “We’re not fucking around here!”
He brushed off the front of his jacket, and just before walking away he slowly raised his right hand, made the fingers into a gun, smiled at me, cocked the hammer of his thumb and let it fall as he mouthed the word Bang.
When I arrived back at the cabin in a flop sweat, Jack was sitting at the kitchen table with a surfeited look. Val was on her side facing away in one of the beds, the sensuous curve of her rump edified by a flimsy après-sex negligee. She sat up and pulled a comforter over herself, and said she would cook dinner if we got bread and lettuce for a salad.
I wanted to drive to the little store we’d seen on the way in, but Jack said he preferred to take in the good mountain air. For the first quarter mile down the dirt road, both of us were quiet, for different reasons.
Finally I told him, “I saw Fortunato.”
That stopped him in his tracks. “You’re shitting me.”
“No, it’s true. He followed me on my hike. I was as close to him as I am to you right now.”
“Jesus!”
“He admitted he’s the one who’s been following us all this time. The dark Buick we’ve been seeing is his.”
“How long did you talk to him?”
“Several minutes.”
“What about?”
“About Val.”
“And…”
“And about you and your situation with her. He said to tell you that he’s got his eye on you and he’s ready to go to the mat if anything goes wrong. He even talked about how he’s not bothered when the ghosts of the people he’s killed come to visit him.”
Jack blanched, and then started forward again. “Like I told you, I’m happy, Val’s happy. There’s no problem here. If I could meet him, I’d take care of all the doubts.”
“He also said that he’s not fucking around. When someone like Fortunato says that, you need to listen.”
“Just gangster melodrama.”
“I think he meant exactly what he said.”
But Jack had already put my caution behind him.
Trekking back up the road with our supplies, he was sweating heavily and I could tell that he regretted his decision to walk instead of drive.
Val came to the cabin door to receive the groceries with her hair gathered in an up-do and a fey look on her face. She appeared to be wearing nothing but an apron and high heels. “My gift to you for walking all the way up from the market,” she pointed down at herself. “Now we have some fun.”
She turned and walked across the room to the tiny stove, naked in the back except for the apron’s thin drawstring around her waist. Her perfect ass cheeks jiggled as she shook a pan on the fire while prancing to silent music.
We were both mesmerized by the spectacle. Finally she turned to present a steaming pan with a magician’s flourish: “Ecco! Pasta all’amatriciana!”
She put it on the table and then looked at Jack and began singing “How Are Things in Glocca Morra” in a quavering soprano, with stylized hand movements and drawn-out syllables that made the song into a sort of homemade Neapolitan bel canto.
When she had finished a verse, she sensed that something was bothering me. “Why are you sad, Billings?”
“Don’t mind him,” Jack said before I could reply. “It’s that time of month.”
I smelled Val’s distinctive bouquet when she came over to ruffle my hair: “No matter what it is, Billings, good food cures all of our maladies.”
Then she pointed at the pasta and commanded, “Mangia!”
After dinner I drove the Zephyr home, leaving the two of them to spend the night at the cabin and return the next morning in a car that Warners had agreed to send. I replayed the encounter with Fortunato over and over during the nearly three hours it took to get to Malibu in heavy Sunday evening traffic.
By the time I arrived, a sudden squall had come up off the ocean and the wind was howling like a Greek chorus. Inside the beach house it smacked the bay window every few seconds like a fist. I secured all the doors and windows and then cowered on the sofa as I had done after seeing Mischa Auer in The Monster Walks when I was a kid. And like then, I suddenly panicked at the thought that I had not locked the monster out, but inside with me.
I slept badly, and the next morning I was wakened by the sound of the front doorknob being turned aggressively, followed by a loud pounding on the door. Rehearsing the hell I was going to give Jack about forgetting his key again, I got up and unlocked the door. Standing there, impatient as always to put his thumbprint on reality, was Joseph P. Kennedy himself!