So he had gotten to Gilda.
But her position had to be merely an accidental observer’s.
Gilda, if Gilda, was an opening to an avenue opened only through other openings. Your vehicle passes at speed and one slot open shows another slot beyond so long as you glimpse at the instant your vehicle comes into line.
What opened Gilda to Graf?
All right, I said before summarily hanging up, you yourself said I was in trouble. So I need someone I can trust.
I phoned the florist’s at the accident corner hoping Gilda would answer.
She said little except she’d drop up on the way home after work. I didn’t think the florist was her husband.
I could no more have asked Graf how he’d arrived at Gilda (as I was sure he in fact had) than I could quite explain why we’d put off processing our exposed film except that we’d tacitly wanted to get it all together first (maybe worried too about how good it was, though to judge from the rush the focusing and light were right), and twice Dagger’s man in Soho whom I’d not met and who was going to give us a break on price had said Hang on till Monday week, and then besides we were on the move a bit, and on our own respective businesses in addition to the film, Dagger part-time teaching for the University of Maryland at the U.S. base at Bentwaters, I among other things arranging for five seven-foot leather chesterfields to be made and shipped to the States, my price only a little more than a third the New York retail for the same sofa — and all this made the delay in processing the film seem natural enough.
In the diary pages I’d packed for the trip there were only the two references to the Unplaced Room. One was the last-minute thought that lavalier mikes round the neck might give more presence to each speaker and even be easier to hide. But Dagger borrowed an omnidirectional and we stuck it behind an earthen ewer, ran the cable off the back of the table and around the outer legs of the deserter’s chair, which took the evidence pretty well off camera. We told our principals please not to pour.
The other reference was in my record of an explanation some weeks later to my son Will the night before our climactic Stonehenge; he’d asked how the Nagra sound unit kept in phase with the Beaulieu and I told him — albeit with mere terms — that the camera has in its motor a sync pulse generator whose output frequency is exactly proportional to the camera’s optical record. But finding this second reference on a diary page I found also something else and it was in my head, not on paper: it was something I remembered: that in the midst of this clear abc given to my serious son — in fact I believe exactly between reflecting on the banality of what was said in the Unplaced Room and on the other hand wondering (a) what even Will whose electricity puts mine to shame would be able through these technical terms to know in the moist isobars of his fingertips, and (b) if my own idea for the Stonehenge scene would survive on film — I had seen again (and now for more than that instant of actual glimpse) a thing that the featured hands in Suitcase Slowly Packed had slipped between the black V-neck sweater and the green-and-white plastic bottle of shampoo which Lorna and I use: the thing was a face, a snapshot of a man’s face which had been apparently a bookmark in a paperback that had been knocked off the adjacent chair when the hands picked up a pair of red-white-and-blue beaded moccasins and the snapshot had fallen out. I’d been close enough to glance but not really look, for I was holding a mike just off camera close enough to catch the voice of the hands. The actor from Connecticut arrived just as we finished shooting and I forgot to ask Jenny about the snapshot — for it was Jenny whose hands packed that immemorial suitcase and who decided what to pack. Later when Dagger was praising her for a steady but unrehearsed-looking naturalness, I thought maybe he was thinking how when the book dropped the hands casually picked up the snapshot and packed it, then the shampoo, then the book. And days, weeks later the eve of Stonehenge the picture came back with Will in our garden and the technical explanation I reeled out for him as we both stared down at our tortoise in the twilight, its claws and snake-head withdrawn into the stone of its shell — for that afternoon Dagger had said we’d use the Suitcase Slowly Packed not on its own but as a cut-in shot in the middle of the following scene, the Marvelous Country House. I hadn’t liked the idea, I guess partly because it subordinated Jenny’s role, but I figured we could negotiate when we came to the editing. It was a dark snapshot but I wouldn’t swear it wasn’t color.
Gilda came early. Before she came I phoned Outer Film. I couldn’t get Phil Aut and I passed on the message that one of his employees had broken into a friend of mine’s apartment and I was getting the police on it through an influential person of my acquaintance named Monty Graf. The secretary said Mr. Aut was flying to London tonight.
I phoned the charter man at four and just as he was saying What else do you do to keep busy at that end? the doorbell went and before I could shelve the receiver I said, If I wanted to could you get me a charter-rate flight sooner than the return I’ve got?
Gilda wore a flowered raincoat. She looked all around her.
Back on the phone I said, I mean like a charter within a charter.
The charter man said, You could get to be my best customer.
He gave his home number and I said I’d be in touch.
Gilda’s green-flowered mac lay between us on the brown couch which concealed inside its folded day bed mattress my blanket. I knew the blanket to be the same magenta as the fitted carpet Rose had paid a lot of money for. Gilda stared at it. Upon the carpet’s magenta ground was a fine labyrinth of apricot lines that gave a kind of Moslem chic.
I don’t have much time, she said. She was different today. We looked at each other’s knees. I thought I was at last at the beginning, and I thought of the Unplaced Room which, if our film had not been destroyed, would have come first.
Listen, I said. I know.
She turned to me and when she spoke the rust-colored enamel butterfly glinted: You want to know what the insurance man asked me?
Yes.
He was insurance like you’re the family doctor.
She described him.
She was talking about Monty Graf, who I’d thought must have found the accident scene through Claire but who Gilda said had come with a couple of plainclothesmen and a uniformed sergeant. Monty Graf had identified himself as an insurance investigator but not in the hearing of the policemen. Gilda had offered nothing about me at first and her brother-in-law the proprietor didn’t recall me. But Monty Graf had asked if a bearded man in a trenchcoat with a small mole in the middle of his forehead had been at the accident and Gilda added to this that the man had come back again after lunch. She didn’t know why she answered nor why her questioner had bothered to identify himself, she liked his soft voice, it seemed to be telling her things but afterward she knew little more that was new than the name Cartwright. She’d said I was concerned about the stabber, what he looked like, what happened to the car, and it sounded as if her questioner wanted to make sure I had not spoken to the stabber.
Did he tell you anything else besides my name?
What name?
Cartwright.
Oh, she had thought that was his, for he’d said so. She put her raincoat across her lap. She wasn’t the same person as before in the florist shop and on the street corner. She wasn’t amused, though not against me either.