A huge cross burned in the yard. Grouped round it, with guns crooked in their folded arms, were at least fifty silently waiting Klansmen!
I sat down heavily in my chair.
‘Oh, my God!’ She was white with horror. ‘A swell idea, huh?’
A salvo of shots came from the yard. ‘They’re warning us to leave,’ I said. ‘This place is going to burn. We’re going to have to give them a good story. Come on.’ We walked to the exit and emerged onto the verandah. We had our hands raised. ‘What on earth’s going on?’ I demanded, hoping I sounded properly outraged.
One of the leaders whistled sharply. He said, almost in delight. ‘Looks like we’ve found the Commie bastards that’s been organising them, Sam.’ He offered me a mocking bow. ‘Welcome to the clambake, comrades. You’re the clams.’ They all laughed at this. Astrid raised her hand to her face, almost like a signal.
I shall never be quite sure if the actress, who claimed to be Danish, was actually a Chekist agent employed by Brodmann to frighten me away from Hollywood. The suspicion was there from the moment I heard the Klansman speak. I was appalled at my situation. To display too much knowledge of the Klan might alert them to my identity, whereupon I would almost certainly be killed. I had to prove that I was neither a Communist organiser (these rural areas became rotten with them) nor a Japanese sympathiser. Within the nightmare, I found myself moving towards them. Rapidly I explained how my wife and I were travelling to Los Angeles to board our liner which would take us home to Australia. Thus I identified our accents, making it clear we were innocent tourists. We had stopped at the roadhouse simply because we were hungry. I was relieved, listening to them discuss this amongst themselves, to learn they were all local people. Even as the debate continued, some were setting fire to the restaurant. Now of course the absence of customers was explained. I saw two of the squealing geishas being carried, wrapped in wire, to a nearby truck. I emphasised to the cold blue eyes that we of the outbacks and billabongs were equally aware of the yellow menace. We had solved our problem by banning all coloured races from our shores. This seemed to convince them. The whole time, however, even when they lowered their guns and gestured for us to get in our car, I feared that their apparent belief was a charade. I could not guess what Callahan had done (it might suit him to betray me), or what Brodmann intended. I did not know how much power Mrs Mawgan still possessed. She might only have temporarily resigned so as not be caught in the trap which ruined Clarke and the others. She rather than Brodmann could have paid or blackmailed Astrid into setting me up. It was certainly in Mrs Mawgan’s interest to have me killed.
I approached the car. After several attempts the starting handle finally kicked in my sweating hand and the motor was running. Astrid climbed in. Her face was whiter than the moon, which now, huge in a clear, black sky, framed her head like the halo on the ikons of our old Kiev saints. She seemed genuinely terrified, but that might merely mean she feared my revenge, or the punishment of her employers. The waving hoods surrounded us. Flames took hold of the building. Her silk screens burned first, leaving black holes in the wooden frame. Red fire gasped, smoke poured into the sky and the moon grew dimmer. I had thought to see the last of the Klan. I swore I would remain in cities for the rest of my life. The countryside had never been my friend.
The man addressed as Sam wore flowing purple: a Grand Dragon. ‘We’re neither bullies nor cowards,’ he said evenly, ‘but honest, simple people fighting for what belongs to us. The Federal Government seeks to deliver our birthright into the hands of aliens. You go home, my friends, and tell your folks they know what they’re doing. Take them and all other Anglo-Saxon peoples this message: Wherever white protestants are threatened, the Knights of the Invisible Empire will strike and strike hard. You can sleep safely tonight, wherever you stay, and know you are protected. Have a safe journey, now, and come back soon, y’hear.’
Never, in that last phrase, had a tone so clearly contradicted the sentiments it expressed. I think he had warned me. I could not expect a third reprieve. I said little to Astrid as we drove away from the hissing blaze. She was full of indignation. She said we should contact the nearest police force. Then she subsided. ‘I guess they’re all part of it.’ She began to speak of contacting someone in Los Angeles, perhaps a Federal agency. ‘They had those girls. What were they going to do?’
‘I think you should try to forget it all.’ I remained distant, for this could easily be one of her best performances. ‘Everyone, from locals, like those people back there, to the President, has made it clear Japs aren’t welcome in America. If you report this you could be kicked out as some kind of political agitator.’
This allowed her to think before she said anything more. I was glad, after a miserable journey, to see the lights of Hollywood’s hillside palaces on the horizon. I dropped her off outside her 3rd Street apartment house. She said, ‘Don’t you want to come in for a while?’
‘No, thanks. You never know what you’re going to catch these days.’ I was still angry. I had been put through too much. I had been forced to draw on mental and spiritual resources properly reserved for my gas car and for Esmé. I had almost lost her, even before she arrived in New York. I had been made to cringe and lie in front of someone who might now be delighting in my discomfort, reporting the news to an envious, revengeful Jew or amused Catholic, even to Mrs Mawgan. Possibly they were scheming a new means of destroying me. Not content with her initial betrayal she might now wish to wipe out all past associates. How could I warn those Klansmen that they were being used to exploit the petty personal ambitions of greedy, corrupt men and women? It would be a blow to all they cherished. And if they already knew, one had to face the alarming implication: that America now no longer possessed any organised means of defending herself against those millions of secret enemies already scheming her destruction. Whether they were called IWW, Labour Unions, Anarchists, the Organisation of this ‘minority’ or that ‘racial group’, whether they had any specific name at all, they were all agents of Carthage. This was thoroughly proved, of course, in 1941. Then America, by rounding up the Japanese, narrowly avoided defeat from within. Zey vein komen. They will surely come again.
I drove on to Sycamore until I reached Venice Boulevard. Often I was the only car on the road. Venice Boulevard passed through forests and parkland. A few lights were visible from little settlements, office blocks and private houses set wide apart: a tribute to modern ideas of what twentieth-century civilisation could be, if carefully planned. By the time I reached Venice the amusement park and pier were shutting down for the night. A Yellow Car rattled by, the last trolley bearing tired fun-makers back to the more sedate suburbs. I turned inland a few blocks until I was on San Juan, where I had my little, unpretentious house, deeply glad to be close to the ordinary human bustle, the familiarity of a town. No matter how fantastic her surface, Venice was ordinarily lively and cosmopolitan, sufficiently like old Odessa to bring a measure of tranquillity to my troubled mind. Nonetheless, I was cautious when I opened my front door, and would have been unsurprised to see Callahan, Brodmann, or a fresh assembly of pointed hoods, waiting for me. I went straight to bed, determined to be at my best for Esmé, and for the tests which we were due to run on the car we called Pallenberg’s Experimental Type I.
Next day was Sunday. I would rather have spent time in Long Beach, seeing how work was progressing, but had agreed to escort Mrs Cornelius to the pictures. She still had not received a result of her screen test. Hever had said it sometimes took a week or two. The studio was particularly busy. She was sure however she would not be offered a contract by Lasky. Hever was already making a further appointment with MGM. There, he was confident, she would ‘knock them all out’ immediately. He had suggested Lasky first, I suspect, because he did not want his friend Goldfish to think he was merely trying to find work for some ‘bimbo’. The tycoon remained very sensitive to such suggestions and could become surprisingly angry if Mrs Cornelius’s talents were ever questioned. His investment in her was by no means merely financial. We saw Orpheus of the Storm. As I watched, my longing for Esmé became physically painful.