Bunny stood up, a willed change of mood. “My every move. I didn’t realize I was so fascinating. I still don’t know why. What do you want, exactly? Coming here.”
“Just following a name. I didn’t know.” He looked toward the bed.
“What, all this because he knew your brother?”
“I think somebody tried to stop Danny before he could-”
“Rat on them? I don’t blame him. I’d do it myself.” He raised an eyebrow. “Or did you think that I did? Ben,” he said, drawing the word out. “Well, sorry to disappoint. Dennis called me. At home. I may have picked up a phone from time to time, but my activities don’t extend to-oh, never mind. Think what you like. You might scratch Jack’s name off the list, though, don’t you think? He really wouldn’t have been up to it. Anyway, he was here. Ask anybody.” He waved his hand to the house.
“I had to be sure, that’s all.”
“Well, now you are. So fuck off.” He looked down. “Sorry. Not very nice, was it? What a hard case I have become,” he said, giving it a hint of a Southern accent. “You get that way when you stop telling yourself stories. You can’t change things. No matter how many stories. I remember standing in front of the mirror, looking at my hair go, just crying and crying because I knew everything was coming to an end, and my face just stared right back at me. There it was. Like it or not.” He turned away. “Like it or not.”
From the bed there was a soft rustling, Jack’s head moving slowly, still asleep. Bunny went over and watched for a second. The side of Jack’s face with the purple splotch was more visible now. He made a sound without opening his eyes, some fragment line in a dream. Bunny touched his forehead. “Ssh,” he said, calming him. Ben stood in the room, not moving, afraid any sound would wake him, watching Bunny’s hand stroking Jack’s hair. When he finally turned, satisfied Jack was still asleep, his eyes were squinting, in pain.
“Oh, go ahead and look,” he said, then glanced back at the bed. “He was a hero, did you know? A real war hero. He saved someone’s life. From that grenade. Just-not his. Well,” he said, raising his head. “Mustn’t grumble.” Then he looked at Ben, his eyes brimming. “Do you know what it’s like? When you feel everything slipping away?” He held out his hand, as if it were actually happening. “Like water, right through your fingers.”
There was no point going back to the Ambassador so he drove to the Cherokee to change and throw a sweater in an overnight bag. Weather was vertical here: Mt. Wilson would be chilly at night. First tea, an excuse to see the campus in Pasadena, and then by convoy up the mountain. An evening with the emigres, the last thing he wanted, his head filled now with Bunny and Danny and the unknowability of people.
He parked in back and was about to take the stairs when he remembered the key and went to the front desk instead.
“You have a mail key for me yet?”
“You 5C?” A new clerk, the staff as transient as the guests. He reached under the desk and handed Ben an envelope. “There’s a charge.”
“Put it on the bill.”
“Can’t.”
Ben, exasperated, put a few dollars on the counter and went over to the mailboxes, opening his. For a second he just stared. Empty. But there’d been something there, a flyer for Current Resident, something. The mailman wouldn’t have arbitrarily cleaned out the box.
“Mail’s late today,” the clerk said, helpful. “Should be here soon.”
“But I thought-” He closed the box. No white paper visible through the holes. But there had been.
Upstairs, he packed his small bag, then looked at the key again. If the box had been opened, then someone else must have one. From Danny. He noticed the script on the night stand. Bits of business about post office boxes, something that had been on his mind. Ben glanced at his watch again. Think about it in the car.
When he got to the lobby, he saw the mailman filling the tilted wall of boxes.
“Anything for 5C?” he asked.
The mailman flipped through the stack in his hand. “John Collins, that you?”
Ben held up his key, an ID tag, and took the envelope, staring at it. John Collins, what Danny had called himself here. He went out the back, threw his bag into the car and stood there, holding the letter. John Collins. A name for hotel registers, hiding out. Who knew him as John Collins? A San Francisco postmark. He opened it carefully, as if he were prying. But wasn’t he John Collins now?
Not a letter. A sheet with a list of names, grouped, not boxed like an organizational chart but arranged in clusters, some kind of order. He looked down the list. No one he recognized from the Continental list. Men, not starlets. But a list Danny evidently had wanted. Ben studied the names again, wondering whether any of them were already in Minot’s files or whether they were new. More names to feed him. At the bottom of the list there was a group of numbers, also arranged by some unknown scheme. Army serial numbers? He counted one off against his own-no, wrong number of digits. Some other number then, maybe file references. Sent by some friend in San Francisco.
He looked at the building, half-expecting to see people watching him. Why would Danny get mail here? Where he’d brought his women. Except he hadn’t. Stained sheets in the afternoon-but the maid hadn’t seen any. Rented months before Rosemary. Then used once. But why drive up to Santa Barbara when you had a secret place in town? Ben looked at the list again, then folded it and put the envelope in his pocket. Unless it hadn’t been used for that. No personal items in the bath, no toiletries or leftover boxes of powder. Maybe the point all along had been the mail, not girls. Ben saw him walking Jack MacDonald home, taking in the barely supervised lobby, the anonymous rooms upstairs. Ideal for sex, what everyone would think. Not noticing the boxes. But letters from whom? Not whoever had killed him-he’d have stopped sending them. Someone still unaware that Danny was gone.
Ben looked at the time. Minot’s office would be closed Saturdayshe’d need Riordan to let him in. And he was already running late. Anyway, why suppose the names were already in the files? Danny’s new list. Maybe with the one who’d thought he’d acted in time, before his name was in the mail.
He headed east on Hollywood Boulevard, storefronts slipping by in a blur. There had been a flyer in the box. So someone had opened it recently, maybe looking for the envelope now in his pocket. How long would he wait? And why set it up this way? Why not pass a list in a bar? Call from a pay phone. Unless the source couldn’t be too careful.
He cut down through Silver Lake then crossed the river and followed the winding road through the Arroyo Seco. The old commuter route from downtown, businessmen in starched collars driving home to their Midwestern houses and flowering gardens, what the city had been like before the movies came. Turn-of-the-century lampposts and rows of trees, the streets empty in the yellow afternoon light. He’d expected Cal Tech to be utilitarian, but the look was residential, cloistered quadrangles, the buildings larger versions of the houses down the street. The faculty lounge was even more traditional, dark wood paneling and oil portraits. Dieter was already pouring tea for Liesl and her father. To Ben’s surprise, Kaltenbach rounded out the table.
“I didn’t realize you were coming,” he said.
“Yes, maybe a last chance,” Kaltenbach said in German. “To see heaven.”
“English here, Heinrich,” Dieter said and Ben saw that the purpose of the party had been to show off the lounge, Dieter’s assimilated life.
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
“What happened?” Liesl said, not looking at him directly. “You left so suddenly.” Sprinting across a parking lot.
“I had to see someone in the hospital.”
“The hospital?”
“It’s all right. Just a long drive.”
“Everywhere is far here,” Kaltenbach said.
“A mission of mercy,” Dieter said. “So now you’re here. Some tea?”