“Not on a boat,” Stein said quietly.
“What?”
“He came on the Clipper. The boats weren’t running then.”
Something else he didn’t know. A meaningless detail with the same sharp end.
“So does it?” Ben said.
Stein thought for a minute, playing with his spoon.
“You ask his wife?”
“She says no. He didn’t tell her, either,” Ben said, including Stein.
“But you believe the other woman. The one who said he was.”
“She survived the camps. People like that don’t have to make anything up.”
“They could make a mistake.”
Ben shook his head. “Not her. It cost her to tell me.”
Stein looked at him, uncomfortable, then went back to his spoon. “Sometimes it’s better, keeping things quiet. Let’s say he gets here, first thing he sees is you don’t want to advertise. Lie low. We were never popular here, you know, even before this craziness began. So he goes unofficial.”
“Unofficial.”
“Part of a closed chapter.”
“You mean secret?”
“Don’t get excited. Not like that. Just off the books. To protect their jobs. Some places, this can get you fired. Flash a card at Hearst, see how long you last. You go unofficial to protect yourself.”
“There’s a chapter like that here?”
Stein shrugged. “You’re in pictures, you can’t afford to offend the public. My group, it was mostly writers-they don’t have to care.”
“But they must answer to somebody in the Party. They wouldn’t just be left on their own, would they?”
“No.”
“So who would it be here?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Ben looked at him. “Even if you did.”
“I left the Party. Not everybody did. And I don’t know you from Adam.” He paused. “Look, I liked your brother, so I’m telling you. Maybe he was unofficial. But I never heard that. And it doesn’t matter a damn now anyway. Leave it. You don’t want to get somebody else in trouble. They put me under oath? There are no unofficials. Never heard of them. The rest of us, the dues payers? — it’s open season on us. But we don’t have to give them anyone else. All right?”
“Take a look at this,” Hal said, head leaning over the Moviola viewer. His jaw, even in the morning, had traces of beard. “Birkenau-we haven’t seen this before.”
Ben looked with him. Silent film, with card titles in Cyrillic. Stacks of corpses. He felt his stomach slide, the way it always did. Open oven doors with mounds of ashes.
“Lasner won’t like using Russian footage.”
“Cut away from the soldiers. It doesn’t matter who’s holding the camera. We just want to see the place. Look, the guards are still there. This must be just after they went in.”
On the small screen, men in uniforms were being led away, hands up, their collars open, disheveled.
“What do they look like to you?” Ben said, watching them.
“Anybody.”
Ben nodded. “Anybody. You wonder what went through their heads. The ovens going night and day. The smell.”
There were people in bunks, too weak to move, hollow-eyed, and Ben realized, going down the line with the film, that he was looking for Genia. An outside shot now, prisoners standing around, disoriented, waiting for another roll call. The wire fence, the ovens again, bodies everywhere. What she must have seen every day, unable to turn away like the guards. He thought of her in the big Louis XV room, her dead eyes still seeing what was in the film. After a while, it would be the only thing you knew. And then you were here, in the sunshine with people drinking milkshakes, and you saw that it must have been going on at the same time, while the doctors made selections on the platform, and there was no reason at all why you were in one place or the other, reality itself become something random, inexplicable.
“This is pretty rough,” Hal was saying. “Worse than the other stuff. We’re going to have to be careful. You don’t want to chase the audience away.”
“We want them to see it. That’s the point.”
“Look at the Russians.” Soldiers carrying inmates to carts. “They’ve all got their heads turned. You don’t want the audience doing that.” He glanced up at Ben. “Let me work on it. You want anything back, we’ll put it back.”
“But keep the guards. The way they look.”
They watched the rest of the film, then another, absorbed, not even making notes, letting it run. A pan shot across bodies, the genitals just smudges, as if they had retreated inside, the women oddly neutered, without sex. Open mouths.
“Bastards,” Hal said, almost a whisper, and then neither of them said anything.
When it was over, they went outside for a cigarette, wanting distance, even a few feet. Hal leaned back against the wall, looking toward the Admin building on Gower.
“How’d you get him to do it?” he said. “Lasner.”
“He saw it-one of the camps. I didn’t have to do anything.”
“Well, whatever you did. I never thought I’d get to do something like this. At Continental. Piece of history. Fort Roach. Enemies to Friends. How to bow to a Jap. What not to say to the women. Put in your time, go home at night. That’s all I’ve done. Nothing like this.” He cocked his head, taking in Ben from a new angle. “What are you going to do after?”
“What, the Army?” Ben shrugged. “Maybe go back overseas. There’s a newsreel job if I want it.”
“Most people, they get on the lot, they never want to leave.”
“I just want to get this one done.”
“You saw it for real. That’s why?”
Ben dropped his cigarette and rubbed it out with his foot.
“I’m still trying to figure it out. The guards. How do you get to that point? When you can do that. What makes it all right? Do you know? I don’t.”
“You’re never going to know that. A wife shoots her husband, that you can know. This-”
“There has to be something. What makes them think it’s the right thing to do? There’s no money in it, nothing-personal. Like the wife. Some other reason.”
For ending up in a mound of ashes. Or in an alley with your blood running out. At least he could know the reason for that. As blameless as the ash heaps? The question that was always there. What had he done?
Riordan’s telephone voice was all business, as if he were sitting behind a desk.
“What kind of technical advice? For a picture?”
“No. Someone broke into the house last night.”
“So call the cops.”
“Nothing’s missing. I can’t prove anyone was there.”
“Then why do you think-”
“Some things were rearranged.”
“Rearranged.”
“Look, the point is it made Liesl nervous. I don’t want it to happen again. I figured you’d have some ideas. The Bureau must-”
“What? Train us in breaking and entering? I’ll tell you this much, somebody wants to get in, he’ll get in. Get better locks. Alarms will run you money, and anybody who knows what he’s doing can get in anyway. Get dead bolts. That’s for free.”
“I was thinking about surveillance.”
There was a pause as Riordan took this in.
“You’re asking me to babysit?”
“I figured you’d know somebody.”
“What makes you think they’re coming back.”
“They didn’t take anything. Even stuff just lying around. So they must have been after something in particular. If they didn’t find it, maybe they’ll try again. Look, I’m just asking you to recommend somebody.”
Another pause. “All right, I’ll have a look around. Anybody home today?”
“Iris, the housekeeper. Liesl probably. Tell whoever’s there I sent you, to check the locks. Got a pencil?”
“I know where it is.”
“That’s right. The funeral.”
“What was rearranged? So you knew somebody had been there.”
“A file. In the desk.”