On paper, it was no trouble. The market possibilities were limitless. Earlier, he had looked up the press clippings on the merchandising Norman Brokaw had set up for Mark Spitz in 1973. His recollection had been right; by May of that year the potential value of Spitz’s endorsements already under contract was reckoned at $5,000,000. He had been featured in every major magazine from Life to Stern, and made TV specials with Bob Hope, Bill Cosby and Sonny and Cher. His poster had sold more than any since Betty Grable’s, and he was pulling down $12,500 for every public appearance. It was good to read. Scale the whole thing up for inflation, the stepup in endorsement advertising and the built-in bonus for a gorgeous blonde, and there was no reason why Goldine should not top twenty million. The only figure she wouldn’t be able to match was the $25,000 Schick had offered Spitz to shave off his mustache on TV. To compensate for that, she would have the edge in the lucrative cosmetics, fashion and domestic goods markets.
It was like surfing: you caught the wave at its high point and hoped it kept rolling all the way in. The timing was crucial. Like it or not, he had to sell the Goldengirl idea to big business in advance of the Olympics. That meant trading on his reputation, pulling every string he knew. The two-million fee he had settled for as payment wouldn’t be easy money.
After lunch he drove out to Bakersfield. On the Golden State Freeway, he did some thinking about Serafin. The theory that he was conning Armitage and the others was out. You didn’t equip an Olympic training camp in the mountains and employ a team of coaches, a psychologist and God knows how many ancillary staff to hoist the kind of money the consortium were putting up. Nothing Dryden had learned from Goldine, the newspapers or the reference books conflicted with the story Serafin had told that first evening at Cambria.
There remained the question: What actually motivated Serafin? Earlier, it was safe to assume it was the prospect of a fat profit. The meeting on Sunday had disposed of that idea. Having masterminded the operation from the start, Serafin should have had a large interest in the proposed carve-up of revenue. What had shaped up as a bloodletting had passed off with less dissent than a Quaker prayer meeting. He had relinquished his right to a direct cut of the profits without a murmur. Anything he made out of the project would now be at Goldine’s discretion, and subject to the say-so of his fellow trustees. Yet he hadn’t protested, hadn’t seemed more than mildly interested. There had to be something else in it for him, more potent than dollars. A simple ambition to see his adopted daughter on the Olympic victory rostrum? Dryden doubted it. He was beginning to think along different lines.
According to the Directory of Medical Specialists, Serafin had been born in Salzburg in September 1920. He had received his M.D. from the University of Geneva in 1945. In March 1938, Hitler’s troops had annexed Austria for the Third Reich. Serafin would have been seventeen at the time, an automatic conscript to the Hitler Youth. Yet by the early forties, he was into his medical training in neutral Switzerland. How had he managed that when the Reich was committed to fighting on so many fronts? Either he had got out of Austria before the Nazis took over, or they had granted his exemption from military service to train as a doctor. To gain that concession, he would have had to convince them he was a committed Nazi.
The story of Gretchen in Hitler’s Germany had been rich with detail of the Napolas and the operations of RuSHA, but that in itself didn’t stamp Serafin as a former party member. Anyone who had lived through that era must have retained a vivid memory of the Nazi machine. And by implication at least, Serafin had more than once in his narrative expressed disapproval of the Third Reich. Its justification of racial elitism he had dismissed as a ‘crude philosophy.’
Still, the impression that had emerged most strongly from that evening in Cambria was Serafin’s fascination with Goldine’s heredity. He had not been able to conceal his pride in pointing out that she was the recipient of Aryan genes. His preoccupation with the child’s physique had been enough to give Mrs. Van Horn recurrent nightmares.
Then, there was the eccentric upbringing he had given the child, with the heavy emphasis on physical development: the home gymnasium, the exercises, the machine to expand her rib cage, the injections. And the cosmetic surgery, the bleaching of her hair. Was that to groom her for sporting and commercial stardom, or to create an Aryan ideal?
Thinking back to the Goldengirl film, its opening sequence had suggested Riefenstahl’s influence before anyone had mentioned Nazi Germany. Allowing that Serafin’s formative years were almost certainly dominated by Hitler’s propaganda, there was at least a possibility he might be planning a triumph for Goldengirl at the Olympics as a vindication of the master-race theory.
Fanciful? It fitted facts. Above everything with Serafin, there was a ruthless sense of purpose. If money was not the motivating force, there had to be something of real power in its place. This afternoon was dedicated to discovering what it was.
Bakersfield by California 99 presented an unpromising location for a neo-Nazi plot. South Union Avenue bristled with motels in landscaped grounds, with billboards boasting steaks and seafood. The Serafin address was in Alta Vista Drive, in the northeast residential section, well away from the oil installations. The house was brick, detached and large enough to suit an owner with the status of professor. It had a rose arbour and a lawn with a sprinkler working at full pressure. He drove past slowly, parked one block up, and walked back. The woman who answered his ring was blond and in her thirties. Her hair was tied with a blue chiffon scarf and she was holding a struggling three-year-old.
She wasn’t pleased at hearing it was another inquiry about Dr. Serafin. She had answered questions for a man on Sunday. Said he represented a San Diego newspaper. Now, what was a San Diego reporter doing asking questions to decent people in Bakersfield, she wanted to know, and how many more of these calls was she likely to get? She had never met Dr. Serafin, and knew nothing whatsoever about him. She and her husband had the house on a two-year rental due to expire in September, and they had fixed everything through Fox and Fox, the realty people on Truxton Avenue.
The senior citizen clipping his hedge two doors down was more forthcoming: ‘Would this be the CIA? Say no more, mister. I can keep my mouth shut. What do you want to know? Sure, I remember the Serafin people. Three of them, there was. A couple and their daughter. Used to drive a Buick. A professor, I heard. Not the college up the road, but the Human Science place, a couple of miles east, off Chester Avenue. I believe he threw up the job back in seventy-seven, or thereabouts. He was some years short of retirement then, I guess. Say, would that be significant? Yeah, he was five years my junior, I’m positive, and I got to sixty-five just eighteen months back. You thought I was younger? It’s the outdoor life, mister. Keeps me in shape. What else interests you?’
‘The daughter?’ prompted Dryden.
‘Didn’t see much of her. She didn’t hang about the street with the other kids, or I’d have talked to her for sure. I relate to kids. With me, the generation gap is nonexistent. But that kid never left the house except in the Buick. I never got what you’d call a face-to-face with her. Not sure I’d care to, candidly. She didn’t rate as a looker. Had some height on her, though. She was inches up on both of them, and she couldn’t have been much over fourteen. Is this helpful?’