Chapter 38
Chapter 38
After that, what was there to do but drive to Larry’s? When Lena got there, she saw no parked cars but for Larry’s own, and no evidence of Michael Runyon or his CIA agents, but then again, he’d said they would be hidden. She supposed it was possible that they hadn’t arrived yet. It had been a very last-minute plan, and maybe the agent hadn’t got the news to Runyon.
It didn’t matter now. All Lena could hope to do was give Julia time. Lena took a deep breath and went up the walk to Larry’s house. She heard music from inside. The porch light was off or out, the porch cast in darkness. When she knocked, she heard a rapid back and forth of talk, and then footsteps, but the music didn’t stop. Larry opened the door and peered out.
“It’s Lena. Lena Taylor.”
“Lena Taylor?” He couldn’t have sounded more surprised. “What are you doing here?”
“I . . . um . . . I know it’s late—”
“Yeah, it is.”
“—and I’m sorry to disturb you, but I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important.”
Larry frowned, but he stepped back to let her in. As he shut the door behind her, she caught sight of his wife, Nettie, sitting on the couch, her forehead furrowed.
Lena waved. “Hello, Nettie. I am so sorry. I don’t know if you remember me? Lena Taylor?”
“She came with Harvey Chesterfield and left with Paul Carbone,” Larry provided helpfully.
“Ah,” Nettie said.
“What can we do for you, Lena? As you said, it’s late,” Larry asked.
“Well, I gave something to Harvey—a record by Duke Ellington? It turns out he gave it to you.”
“Duke Ellington?” Larry looked perplexed. He put his fingers to the bridge of his glasses. “Hmmm, I don’t—”
“Yes, you do,” Nettie provided. “It was so scratched up we couldn’t listen to it. Remember, Larry? I wanted to throw it out, but you insisted on keeping it.” She looked at Lena. “The Duke was always one of his favorites.”
“Oh, I’m so glad.” Lena didn’t hide her relief. “It belonged to my father, and he recently died. My mom was looking for it.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Nettie said. “Of course you must have it. Larry, give it to her. It’s at the end of the first shelf.”
“If you don’t mind,” Lena put in.
“Not at all, man, not at all.” Larry puttered to the shelves of records and began flipping through those at the end of the first shelf. “Happy to, if it will comfort your poor mom—ah, here it is.” He drew it out, and Lena was flung back to the day she and Harvey and Charlie had put it on the record player and winced at its damage, the clothes she’d packed for Venice piled on the floor.
Larry handed it to her. “Here you are.”
She clutched it to her chest. “Oh, thank you so much, Larry—”
The knock on the door was not a knock, it was a blow, loud and thunderous. Bang bang bang.
The CIA, Michael Runyon. Lena’s mouth went dry with fear.
Larry looked to Nettie, who half rose from the couch. “What the—?”
“So late. Are you expecting someone?” Nettie asked.
“Open up! It’s the CIA.” Bang bang bang.
“The what?” Larry hurried to the door. “Who?”
The doorknob rattled, the door opened to reveal Michael Runyon and three other men behind him.
“Hey, man, you can’t just do that!” Larry protested. “I’m a US citizen!”
Runyon held up his hands. “We’re not looking for you, sir.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“They won’t need a warrant.” Lena stepped forward. She held out the record. “They’re looking for this.”
Runyon snatched it from her hand. “That’s not all we’re looking for.”
“She’s not here,” Lena said.
“I got the message,” Runyon said. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
Michael Runyon turned to Larry, who watched them with an astonished and bewildered expression. “Did this woman come here alone?”
“Look, man, I’m not answering any of your questions without a lawyer.”
Lena sighed. “It’s okay, Larry. Please tell them before they tear apart your house.”
“Yeah, she came here alone.”
“There wasn’t another woman with her?”
Nettie said, “No, there was not.”
Runyon took Lena’s arm and smiled at Nettie. “We’re sorry to trouble you both so late. We’ll take this elsewhere.” He turned to the men behind him. “Jones, Davis, check the house perimeter.”
“You won’t find her. She didn’t come with me.” Lena stumbled after Runyon as he pulled her onto the porch and down the stairs to the narrow lawn. “She was going to, but then ... I don’t know, she caught on that something was going on. She told me to get the record and she’d meet me tomorrow.”
“Meet you where?” Runyon asked, brutally intense. He didn’t sound like the censor she knew, but the hunter she’d imagined him as when they’d first met.
“At the Chapel.” It was the first thing that popped into her head.
“What time?”
He’d bought it. She fought to hide her relief. “Two o’clock.”
“Really? She didn’t want to meet first thing?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t open until eleven. I said two and she said okay.”
Runyon frowned. “That’s odd.”
“Why?” A cat screeched in the bushes. Lena jumped. “Sorry, I’m a bit jumpy. Why is it odd?”
“Her contact was growing very impatient.”
“Maybe they caught on to something.”
Lena felt Runyon’s contemplation, though she couldn’t see his expression in the darkness.
The two men Runyon had sent to search the yard returned.
“Nothing,” one of them said.
Runyon nodded. He pulled apart the cover of the record, revealing the false one beneath. Lena watched curiously as he drew out a flimsy x-ray sheet. He surveyed it too quickly for her to get a good look at it—it was round, there might have been a hole in the middle, she had only a fleeting impression of a gray image upon it—before he slid it inside again, apparently satisfied. “Let’s go back. She’s not here. You two go on. Get someone to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Someone else at the airport. I want someone at the Chapel in Culver City tomorrow as soon as it opens, but”—a quick glance at Lena—“Somehow I don’t think she’ll show up. I think Miss Taylor is right, and our target has caught wind that we’re on to her.”
Lena assumed an expression of guilelessness. “Is that it, then? Do you need anything else from me, or am I free to go?”
“You’re free to go. But you’ll let me know if she attempts to contact you again?”
“Of course. What is that really?” she asked. “Why does the CIA want it so badly?”
“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” he said, and then laughed at her startled expression. “No, really, Miss Taylor, it’s best if you don’t know.”
“It’s just going to disappear, then?”
He exhaled heavily. “It’s better this way. Trust me.”
“Trust the government, you mean,” Lena said.
“Don’t you? In times of crisis, we all must decide what to believe,” Runyon said. “It’s our job to point the right direction.”
“You sound so certain you know what the right direction is,” Lena said.
Runyon walked her to her car. “I’ll put in a good word for you to Braxton. I’m sure he’ll understand your latest ... transgressions. See you on the set?”
Lena got into her car and watched Runyon and his men walk down the street to wherever they’d hidden theirs. The fog had started to stretch its fingers into the neighboring streets; she started the car and turned on the headlights, and the dashboard lit her against the hazy gloom of the night so that she caught her reflection in the windshield, brown tones that highlighted the shadows in her face, her cheekbones, and the slope of her nose, and for a startling moment she remembered another night when she’d looked at her reflection in the windshield just like this, in the light of a pool hall sign, when she’d been Elsie Gruner, and when she’d been so sure that she could take the world in her hands and it would give her what she wanted and ... She’d done that, hadn’t she? She had, and here was another face staring back at her now, the same in some ways, but otherwise changed, just as inside she was a different person entirely. She knew now something she hadn’t known then, that it wasn’t only what you believed, as Runyon said, but also who believed in you.
Her parents hadn’t. Walter hadn’t. But Harvey and Charlie had and so had Julia. Flavio had and so had Paul. And now here were Runyon and the CIA saying it was their job to point her beliefs in the right direction, and the rest of the world’s, too, and asking her to help them do it.
Paul had been right when he’d wondered if his career was worth having if it required so much compromise.
Now she understood, as she hadn’t then, what that compromise truly meant. It wouldn’t be hard to tell one more lie. God knew she’d told plenty. But Julia had said enough when she’d chosen prison over helping to murder Terence Hall, and she’d said it again when she chose to save Lena instead of leaving her to take the fall in Rome. Even with the bone music, Julia had chosen truth.
Now, Lena wanted that too. Runyon wanting her to use her talent to keep telling a story she didn’t believe was a lie she didn’t want to tell. Continuing to corrupt Paul’s story ... she no longer wanted to do it.
She was done with lies.
What would happen, she wondered, if she just said no?
No to the CIA’s Psychological Warfare Workshop and their propaganda machine? No to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals? No to Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and all the others?
“I didn’t lie to you, you know, Lena. You do shine.”
She knew someone else who did too.