Chapter 39
Chapter 39
She showed up at his door with the dawn the next morning. Lena hadn’t slept, and it looked like he hadn’t either. He was unshaven and wearing a pair of pajama pants and smoking a cigarette. His rooms were foggy with smoke.
He stepped back to let her in and wordlessly made a pot of coffee. She opened the drapes to reveal the city waking, Los Angeles in its morning glory, saffron and pink, and stood at the window staring out while the percolator bubbled. It wasn’t until he handed her the coffee that he said, “Who was she?”
For once, she could hardly hear Sunset Boulevard beyond the trees. It was so quiet. “What did she tell you?”
“That she was an old friend of yours. Julia. Not much else. She told me not to tell you where I took her in case they asked questions. Who would ‘they’ be?”
“The CIA, probably. Maybe the FBI. Anyone else who cared to ask, I think. She’s a Soviet spy.”
Paul choked on his coffee. “What?”
“It’s probably not a good idea to tell anyone that. Or that you know her. Or yeah, where you dropped her.”
“Christ, Lena—”
“I owed her. She’s an old friend, though she did get me kicked out of Rome, but she saved my life, too, so I guess I have to forgive her. She was the one who first suggested I try costume designing.”
Paul stared at her. “There are so many things in that sentence ...”
“I know.” She gripped her coffee cup tightly and turned to meet his gaze. “There’s so much I have to tell you. I couldn’t before.”
“Why? What changed?”
“She’s gone. For good, I think,” she said quietly. “I was advised to say nothing of what happened to me in Rome and it was good advice until I met you, but then I was ... afraid. We both had so much to lose and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. I ... I think we could have a future together—a good one. But only if I tell you the truth about everything, and then you can decide if you still want to be with me. So ... I knew you would help with Julia, and I knew you would want an explanation, and here I am, ready to tell you everything.”
Paul was quiet, his dark eyes serious. She waited. He could have said no, that he was done, and she thought she could handle that, but when he said, “Then I guess we’d better sit down,” her relief was stunning in its intensity.
They went to the couch. She wanted to curl up in his arms, but she didn’t, she kept her distance. It was easier than she’d thought, in the end, to tell him. It was as if the story had been waiting to come out, and she was just the conduit, as if she’d been unconsciously forming the tale in her head, all its disparate parts, and how easily it fit together, the story of her life, how one thing led to another. He already knew some of it, but she started at the beginning. Elsie Gruner and the pig farm in Zanesville and her parents who she didn’t hear from because she’d never given them an address to write back and never checked the post office to see if they’d sent a letter to her at General Delivery—and everything about Walter and Harvey and Charlie and Chouinard and then Rome.
Paul said nothing, only listened and drank his coffee as she described her friendship with Julia, and how she’d changed herself there. “She made me who I am. She gave me the confidence to be Lena Taylor. I suspected what she was, but the truth is that I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to see, not until I had no choice.”
Then the rest, the CIA and the shooting at Termini Station. How she’d thought Julia was dead and the carabinieri and the escort from Rome. Harvey and Charlie telling her to say nothing to anyone ever.
“You didn’t trust me,” Paul said quietly.
“They told me to trust no one,” she answered. “In the beginning ... I didn’t know what we would be to each other.”
“Yes, you did.”
Lena swallowed. “Even so, Paul, they were so insistent, and they were right. This business is a minefield. You know it yourself, and for a woman ... I’m sorry, but I believed what they told me, and then ... by the time I realized I loved you, I didn’t know how to turn it around. I was afraid for both of us. I was afraid it would destroy you too if my associations got out. And then, Walter showed up and ...”
“What did he want? Just money?”
“A job in the movies. A screenplay meeting with Marlon Brando.”
Paul let out his breath in a low whistle. “Not asking for much.”
“I was ready to send him to a film in Mexico, but it would never have been enough. Then Julia showed up and her people took care of him for me.”
Paul laughed in disbelief. “What?”
“Poison. I didn’t ask for it and I wouldn’t have. I wish they hadn’t done it. If I’d known, I would have tried to stop it. They felt he was in the way. Poor Walter. He was harmless, or ... well, he wasn’t. He would have made my life a misery, and he never would have given me a divorce. But I wouldn’t have wished death on him.”
“Do the police know this?”
“Michael Runyon put a stop to their investigation.” Lena explained the rest.
When she was finished, Paul sat there quietly. She said nothing for a few moments. It was a lot to take in, she knew. Her stomach was a tight knot. She had no idea what he would say or what he would think and so much depended on it.
He said thoughtfully, “When Runyon left the army and joined this new intelligence group, I told him he was crazy. I told him he would always be lying. I asked him how he could in good conscience take on such a job. You know what he said to me?”
Lena shook her head.
“That he’d seen enough suffering during the war, and he’d chosen a side, and that side was America. He said that when your adversary has no scruples, you shouldn’t have them, either, and if that meant he needed a dead conscience, then he was fine with that, and one day I’d be grateful he’d made that decision.”
Lena sighed. She supposed she should be grateful that there were men like Runyon who had made that choice so that other, softer people didn’t have to. But somehow she wasn’t. And she was glad Paul had decided not to join them.
“When word got out about Braxton threatening your job, I knew Runyon had put a bug in his ear. We had an argument. I quit the movie.”
“Paul!”
He shrugged. “I told him you and I were a team. I told him I was done playing his games.”
“Me too,” Lena said. “I’m sending Higgy my resignation.”
Paul looked at her in question.
“I don’t know exactly what I’ll do, but I’m not going to keep working for a studio that’s a member of the MPA. I won’t.”
Paul nodded slowly. “Well. My guess is you can get a job at any studio in town. You’re in demand, and the gossip can only help you.”
She had the feeling he wanted to say something else. She waited, but when he said nothing, she touched his wrist. Softly, she said, “But you can’t. Why do I have the feeling you’re about to tell me something I don’t want to hear?”
“I’m going to Madrid for a few months. Philip Yordan has a whole script factory there. Lou Brandt, Sidney Harmon, Frank Capra. He says there’s room for me if I want to go. I thought I’d try it out. Maybe write a new version of Medusa .”
Her heart squeezed. “Just keep writing it until someone makes it the way you want it.”
Paul nodded. “Good advice.”
“A few months. That’s not too long.”
“It’s pretty long to be away from you.” He twisted his arm to take her hand, twining his fingers through hers. “I wasn’t going to ask you to leave your job, but now ... maybe you could come with me. It’s up to you. I’ll come back to you, you know. I’ll always come back. But maybe we could start something new in Spain. Put the past behind us. Start over.”
Lena smiled. The past never went away; she knew that now. But she also understood, as she hadn’t before, that it made them both who they were; it had shaped them, it had taught them. “Or we could embrace it,” she said, squeezing Paul’s hand hard. “We could be who we’re meant to be. We could be something true.”
“We’re already something true,” he told her.