However, there was another face very similar to mine … belonging to Dr. Pan Rudo. Did Fisk have Rudo on his conscience?
Of course, Wally might have started screaming if I'd shown him a hand puppet, but I wasn't about to investigate Kulda, Fran and Ollie. Dr. Rudo, however, gave me the beginnings of an idea. A psychologist with a knowledge of drugs, especially psychoactive ones, might be able to brew a potion that would drive a man mad, but that would be undetectable with the standard blood panels.
Motive, however, was a problem. Dr. Rudo was Marilyn's psychiatrist, and if he wanted to kill the film, he had enough influence to make her quit and let it collapse on its own. And so far as hating wild cards went, Rudo showed no more disdain for Flattop than he did for anyone, and was actually kinder to Jack Braun than anybody should be.
Then again, maybe he was just currying favor with a potential client. If there was ever a man in need of a shrink, it was Braun.
As for the movie, Blythe was proceeding without a hitch. Trumbo had polished the script with Braun's input, the filming had begun, and I was becoming closer to Marilyn.
Maybe I wasn't quite honest about why I was around her — Welles was paying me, after all — but it hurt to see her with men who just wanted her for their own status. Bobby Kennedy wanted her because his brother had had her, Jack Kennedy wanted her because he was the President and could have anything, and Tom Quincey wanted Marilyn because he was a randy little bastard and wanted everything.
After one of the Lawford parties, he even propositioned me.
I didn't know what to make of it. I'd met boys who liked boys before, but I'd never met one who liked both boys and girls. To make things worse, I double-checked his school records and found that while he was a freshman at USC, he was also sixteen, not eighteen.
I didn't know if Marilyn knew. I hoped no one else did, or it could have been used to blackmail her.
And in addition to the boy genius with the non-preferential dating habits, there was Dr. Rudo. When I asked about him, Marilyn, in a more drunk than usual moment, confided that she'd slept with him as part of her therapy.
I'd seen the signs, but I'd refused to believe them. Rudo went to the top of my list of all-time bastards. I had half a mind to sic the AMA on him and get his credential revoked, but I knew the scandal would wreck Marilyn and wreck Blythe.
I also didn't want to betray any confidences. I may have been a spy, but if someone entrusted me with a secret, I'd take it with me to the grave.
I think I would have even kept it beyond that, if it weren't for the way things turned out.
But right then, things were turning out great. Now that main filming had begun, we stand-ins weren't quite as much in demand and I had more time to myself. Flattop held court in the cutting room, showing everyone the best of the dailies. They were the most powerful pieces of film I'd ever seen. Blythe would be amazing once she was complete.
I remember one day I was there with Josh Davidson, watching the scene where David Harstein was locked in HUAC's soundproof glass booth. In the flickery light of the projector, Jeff Chandler beat against the glass: "Alright, you Nazis! When are you going to turn on the gas? That's what you did before, isn't it?"
Josh's lips moved silently as he watched and there were actual tears on his face. "That's just the way it happened. It's just the same."
I gave him a pat on the back. "I know. They cut out the Envoy's silver tongue, clipped the eagle's wings, and shattered the mind of the woman who knew too much. They couldn't stand for anyone to be different from them."
Josh sighed. "And they put pressure on the strong man until he bent."
Flattop nodded as the clip came to an end, the impassive faces of Nixon and his cronies taken straight from the newsreels. "This is going to do great things for wild cards. People are finally going to get a chance to see who the enemy really is."
The lights came on and Josh stood up slowly, looking a little pale and shaken. "I don't know about you two, but I could use a drink right now. Anyone want to join me?"
Flattop smiled a bit shyly and held up his foot-long fingers. "Not many places take jokers."
Josh smiled. "Then we go wherever you go. My treat."
The Santa Monica pier was the closest thing L.A. had to a Jokertown. Everything was so spread out, and there were so few wild cards overall, it wasn't something that would come about. The few aces and jokers the city had to offer before the McCarthy witch hunts had set up in the old carnival booths and freak shows along the pier, though the mind readers and crystal gazers had long since been snapped up by J. Edgar, at least the real ones.
The jokers were the ones left, and after a day of entertaining the tourists, they mostly kicked back at the Menagerie, L.A.'s single joker bar. It was on the pier, next to the merry-go-round, and the few nats in the place were the fuzzy sweater set. That made me nervous more than anything else. The only things I liked Greek were the letters on my fraternity pin.
Flattop introduced Josh and me around, and I smiled and tried my best not to stare. The two I remember in particular were Richie, who the wild card had turned into a sort of human aquarium, and Panda Bear, who spoke bad pidgin like she was auditioning for a Charlie Chan movie. Her accent was Mexican underneath, not that I'd point it out to a lady, especially one with fangs and claws.
Josh and Flattop seemed to enjoy the beer, and I got by with soda water like I usually did. The conversation mostly went around Blythe — Flattop had told his friends about the project and they were all excited, especially with the prospect of being extras — and Hedda's latest column, where she'd called the Menagerie a "cess pit of freakishness" and said the city fathers should clear it and "all the other rubbish" off the public pier.
This went over like you'd expect it would, but you had to give it to Hedda, she was at least consistent — she'd never voiced approval for the Exotics For Democracy, even when they'd been making the cover of LIFE. And as she always pointed out, she'd disapproved of Hitler long before the war.
Sometimes I wondered whether I would have been as well disposed to wild cards if I hadn't been one. Somehow I don't think so.
Everyone swapped Hedda jokes and threw darts at her picture in the corner and there was a big laugh when Josh put on Panda's hat and got up on the table to imitate Hopper doing her "This is my town!" speech from her television show.
I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. Something had been itching me all the time I'd been in the Menagerie. How should I put this? I needed solid ground under my feet. My ace made me sensitive to the electromagnetic spectrum, and I could sense where things were: people, electrical wiring, metal, the ground. It wasn't anything really clear, not like sight or hearing. More of a prickling in the back of my neck and the hair on my arms. I was used to feeling the ground beneath me, both as a barrier and a sap to my power. It was gone, along with the clutter of metal struts and power lines, and I'd gone hypersensitive. The free ions were soaking into me like heroin into an addict.
And for the past hour, I'd felt something moving underneath me, under the pier. It moved too regularly for it to be coincidence, and it left metal behind, where there hadn't been any before.
Call me drunk or paranoid, it was probably some guys out crabbing, but I'd been twitchy around the studio with absolutely nothing happening that wasn't supposed to, and I couldn't figure out why crabbers would be hanging traps six feet above the waterline.