City of Myths Read online

  “What was so special about these photos?”

  “There was one in particular. A girl resting against a column, smoking a cigarette, with her arms crossed. But this girl had a large bosom, so when she squeezed them together, it looked even bigger.”

  Marcus could picture the girl quite clearly. She was probably not long out of high school, but she balanced her cigarette between two long fingernails like a young Greta Garbo or Hedy Lamarr. Not in looks, but in the sort of attitude she projected: This movie-making game? I could take it or leave it.

  They skirted past the long Rome train station. Marcus asked, “The photo of this Sophia Loren—it caused a sensation?”

  “Suddenly everybody is saying, ‘Who is this beautiful vision?’ But nobody knew! Epoca said that they bought the photos from the Quo Vadis production office, but it closed down after the americanos went back to Hollywood. So the mystery became a puzzle. Eventually, they found the girl in Naples and her career makes the explosion. But still, everybody is asking, Who was the scattino?” Domenico clapped his hands out of sheer glee. “It is YOU!”

  The taxi came to a halt on a curving street, lined with trees whose thickly leafed branches formed a shady canopy. Domenico paid the driver and they unfolded themselves from the cramped cabin.

  Cafés spilled onto the sidewalk, filling every square inch with iron tables and stiff-backed chairs. One café had black-and-white striped tablecloths; another had red-and-blue checks. The nearest one featured long-stemmed carnations sitting in metal tubes, but Domenico headed for a place a little farther along whose ashtrays were shaped like the Colosseum. He asked the waiter for a specific table, second from the end, facing the street.

  “This is Via Veneto,” Domenico replied. “And this place has the best rum baba in the city.”

  They pulled out their cigarettes and lit up.

  “Why are we here?” Marcus asked.

  “I was at this table when the editor of Epoca sat down at the one next to me and pulled out an early copy of the magazine and showed it to his friend. He opened it to the page with your Quo Vadis photos and pointed to the bellissima young girl. They were very noisy about it and all the customers wanted to see. The editor passed around the magazine and everybody made their opinion.” Domenico pointed to himself. “Including me!”

  The waiter arrived with their order. A rum baba was a small tube of golden-colored sponge cake saturated in so much rum that it glistened in the sun.

  Domenico stubbed out his cigarette. “I pointed to the photo of Sophia Loren and told the editor, ‘This is the photo everyone will be talking about.’”

  Marcus had always been content to spend his days putting words in the mouths of the people who couldn’t leave their house without causing a commotion. For the very first time now, he felt the lure of fame. He hated to admit how appealing it was.

  Domenico jabbed at the rum baba with his fork. “Epoca sold the photos to other magazines. They were seen all over Europe—your photo of Sophia Loren is very famous now. You should stay in Rome and become a scattino!”

  Back at the pensione, Marcus had a stack of letters from Kathryn, Gwendolyn, Doris, Bertie, and Quentin confessing their jealousy of his Roman sojourn, but he felt cut off from everyone and everything he cherished. Being held at the whim of Darryl Zanuck was merely a temporary situation that would be fixed as soon as he found the right penthouse. Then he’d be free to head stateside. But stay in Rome? For an indefinite length of time? No thanks.

  Marcus took a bite of the cake. Slick with rum, it slid down his throat like a sweet oyster. “There are dozens of pensiones all over my neighborhood. Why did you come looking for me?”

  Domenico delayed his answer by lighting up another Gauloise. “I was determined to find you.”

  “What I’m asking is why?”

  Domenico’s sheepish grin dimpled his cheeks and revealed a row of teeth whiter than they should have been. “I was watching my mother try on comfortable old-lady shoes and thought to myself, Look at her. She was not even thirty when my papa died and every day she puts on her black dress and black stockings and black shoes. Every day she is reminded of how she lost him. Every day she mourns him. Thirty-five years! I looked at her and I thought, I do not want to become like her!”

  “I thought I was the one who took love too seriously. That’s what you said.”

  “Jacopo and I were together for nearly twelve years.”

  “Not so easy to let go, huh?” Marcus stubbed out his cigarette and crushed the empty packet. He dropped it into the Colosseum ashtray. “But you were right. Jacopo and Oliver have let us go. We need to do the same thing.”

  “Why do you think I knocked on eighteen doors until I found you?”

  For the first time since the Three Coins crew had left Rome, Marcus felt he wasn’t completely alone. “Because I made you realize that hanging onto the past does nobody any good, and you need some help letting Jacopo go.”

  Domenico nodded. “And you, Signore Marcus Aurelius? Do you need help too?”

  “My life is in Hollywood. I will be returning to it sooner or later. Could be next week, could be next month.”

  “We have only today.”

  A whirlwind of emotions roiled inside Marcus; fear battled hope while relief fought off guilt.

  Domenico rapped his knuckles on the back of Marcus’s hand. “If we spend the night together, will your proprietaria di casa throw us out in the morning?”

  Signora Scatena was a four-foot-ten fireplug who’d witnessed so much in her lifetime that Marcus doubted the prospect of a couple of queers sleeping together would rattle her.

  “I think we’ll be safe,” he said. “My bedsprings don’t squeak.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Kathryn wiped down her kitchen counter. It was already clean, but she’d run out of distractions while she waited for Dudley Hartman.

  She checked her watch.

  It was two minutes past eleven.

  She opened her front door and peered out. A new management team had recently bought the Garden and hired a contractor to repaint the entire place. The team of four men was working their way around, patching and painting each villa, and now they were working on Kathryn’s. She knew it was silly to think that house painters would have the slightest interest in her hushed whispers, but at some point during the past month, she had stumbled from ‘rational’ to ‘ridiculous’ and wasn’t sure how to get back again.

  She didn’t want to face Hartman alone. Nor did she want to involve Leo—should anything go wrong, she wanted to give him deniability. And Gwennie was working sixty-hour weeks at Fox and had enough on her plate.

  It was Marcus she wanted by her side today. She kept expecting a cable saying that he’d be arriving home in a couple of days, but no missive had arrived. She’d have to do this alone.

  Scanning the exit from the main house, she spotted a neighbor, Bertie Krueger, carrying a bag of Schwab’s bagels. She was probably looking for someone to share them with, and normally Kathryn would beckon her inside, but not today.

  She closed her door with an unambiguous thump.

  What was customary when entertaining a private eye? Surely not a drink? Not on a Saturday morning.

  She lit the gas underneath her coffee pot and pulled out a matching pair of cups from her cupboard. They rattled in their saucers as she laid them on the tiled counter. “This is where procrastination gets you,” she admonished herself. “A whole month to work yourself up like a dithering ninny afraid of her own shadow. What’s wrong with you?”

  Four weeks had crawled by since the Roman Holiday premiere, when the title of Hitchcock’s new movie had inspired her to catch a thief named Sheldon Voss.

  But she kept putting off placing that call to Hartman. I won’t need to if Voss resurfaces, she kept telling herself. When that didn’t happen, she decided to give it until Marcus returned from Rome. But after a month, Voss still hadn’t shown up and Marcus was still in Europe, so she’d had to put an end to t
his insufferable dilly-dallying and called Hartman.

  The three sharp knocks shook her.

  She pulled open the door and nearly laughed. It was the tension, of course, but unprofessional—not to mention cruel. She remembered now that Marcus had told her Hartman wasn’t the sort of private eye who resembled a character conjured from the pages of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Marcus’s description—“Moon-faced, with a blandly pleasant smile”—was close, but to Kathryn he looked like a cross between Porky Pig and S.Z. Sakall, with a dash of Peter Lorre thrown in for good measure.

  She hid her blush by turning toward her living room. “Mr. Hartman, come in, please. I’ve put on some coffee.”

  Hartman sized up Kathryn’s living room. “Black, no cream or sugar, thank you.”

  What details was he picking out? She pointed him to her dining table. “I thought perhaps sitting here might be more comfortable in case you want to take notes.”

  “Much obliged.” He deposited his black briefcase on the table and withdrew a pad and pen. He took a seat and waited silently until she set his coffee in front of him and took the seat opposite. “So, Miss Massey, exactly what am I here to take notes about?”

  “Sheldon Voss.”

  His eyebrows cleared the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. “I’d have thought you’d be happy he’s disappeared.”

  “I grew up without a father, Mr. Hartman, but recently I learned that during the war he was imprisoned for treason under the Smith Act.”

  Only a handful of people knew her humiliating secret. Sharing it with one more person increased the chances of it getting out—an especially dicey move in a town that ran on the juice of a thousand rumors. Confessing to a virtual stranger took considerable nerve; the coffee occupied her hands and prevented a severe case of dry mouth.

  “Conviction under the Smith Act is no small potatoes,” Hartman said.

  “I think about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg all the time.”

  “Is your father under the death penalty?”

  “No, but he’s in Sing Sing like they were.”

  “And what does this have to do with Sheldon Voss?”

  The lanky painter in the spattered overalls propped a ladder against the wall next to her kitchen window. The way he whistled “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun” as he scraped away the cracking paint grated at Kathryn’s nerves.

  “Voss and I got into a heated confrontation and he admitted that he had my father framed.”

  “That’s quite a confession to make in what I assume was a crowded backstage area.”

  “Imagine how I felt!” Kathryn gripped the delicate handle of the coffee cup and wished it held something stronger. “I was about to go on national radio in front of twenty million listeners.”

  “Do you recall precisely what Voss said?”

  “He told me, ‘I waited years to exact my revenge on your father.’”

  “But did he admit to framing him for treason? Did he say those specific words?”

  “Not precisely, no.”

  Kathryn watched Hartman jot down notes until it was too much to bear. She got up from the table and wiped down her counter.

  “What did Voss say?” Harman asked.

  The thought occurred to her that it might help if she didn’t start acting like Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful, but it was too late for that now. She slapped the rag into her sink.

  “He started raving about how premarital fornication is a mortal sin, and about my father’s wanton desires. My father got my mother pregnant without the benefit of marriage, so being the fire-and-brimstone preacher he is—or pretends to be—he jumped onto his moral high horse and—”

  “May I ask your father’s name?”

  Kathryn fought against the disappointment sinking through her stomach. Hartman wasn’t buying any of it. At least, not on her say-so. And if my own private eye doesn’t believe me . . . “Voss may not have made a clear-cut confession, but it was a confession nonetheless.”

  “I merely asked your father’s name.”

  A few feet away, on the other side of the wall, the whistling painter scratched and scoured, interrupting his tune with raucous grunts of effort.

  “Thomas Danford.”

  Hartman looked up from his pad. “The candidate for Massachusetts governor?”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “Purely by chance. My sister is married to a political science professor at Amherst. He’s a bit academic for my tastes, but an okay sort of chap. I only have to put up with him once a year over the Thanksgiving table so I sit and smile as he drones on and on about New England politics. One year it was all about the gubernatorial race and how some political neophyte was going to give the entrenched incumbent a run for his money. He seemed unstoppable until some sort of scandal blew up in his face and that was the end of that.”

  “The political neophyte was my father.”

  Outside, the irritating scraping and whistling stopped.

  Skepticism still filled Hartman’s face. “What do you wish me to do for you, Miss Massey?”

  “Find Sheldon Voss.”

  The scraping started up again, followed by a knock on her door. Kathryn answered it to find Bertie standing there, her button eyes bright with hope.

  “I guess you didn’t hear me when I called out,” she said. “Doris and I were going to have bagels and lox but she got called into the studio, so now I’m stuck with more bagels than—” She blinked. “Have I caught you at a bad time? It’s not Marcus, is it?”

  No, Kathryn assured her, Marcus was fine, but no, this wasn’t a good time. Perhaps later? I’ll call you. Bye-bye, Bertie.

  Kathryn returned to her living room and sipped her coffee; it had grown cold. “Where was I?”

  “You want me to find Sheldon Voss, but that’s easier said than done, Miss Massey.”

  “But with the resources at your disposal—”

  Hartman’s wide-open face took on a darker mien. “Men like Voss, they’re the slipperiest of snakes. They know how to cover their tracks, and if they don’t want to be found, it can be extremely difficult to do so.”

  “You mean ‘impossible.’”

  “Let’s call it ‘unlikely.’”

  “But I needed dirt on him, you came up with the goods.”

  “That was back when Sheldon Voss was in the business of ensuring everybody in America knew who he was. When an attention-seeking slippery snake hasn’t been seen for more than a month, it means that he has gone underground. Even for someone like me, that’s a tall order.”

  In the movies, a private eye contends with red herrings, a femme fatale or two, plus maybe a motive that turns out to be different from what it first appears to be. But the gumshoe always gets to the bottom of things, even if he has to take a bullet in the arm or a slug to the jaw.

  “You’re turning me down?”

  “What I’m saying is that it could take weeks, or months, and it could very easily result in nothing. Even on a retainer basis, my bill could stack up.”

  “How much are we talking here?”

  “Anything up to a thousand dollars a week.”

  Gulp.

  Kathryn had willingly paid Hartman’s fee back when she was digging around for dirt on Voss, but that had averaged out to less than fifty dollars a day. It was expensive, but he’d done the job.

  One positive consequence of Voss’s Sea to Shining Sea March was the huge boost in ratings it delivered to Kathryn’s Window on Hollywood radio show. The NBC execs were delighted with the blaze of publicity the evening had incited, but Kathryn and Leo knew the ratings bonanza was temporary. With television annexing more and more of radio’s territory, everything was temporary these days.

  “I don’t think I can afford that,” she told Hartman.

  “We can look at alternatives.”

  “What? That I go to Boston myself and—and—” She slapped her sides. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  For a few moments, th
ey listened to layers of old paint being scrubbed away. Kathryn could tell he was giving her defenses a chance to cool down, so she let him, and said nothing more.

  “From what I’ve been able to gather,” he employed a more measured tone now, “you are no stranger to the head of the FBI.”

  “That’s quite a butterfly net you’ve got there, Mr. Hartman.”

  “In my experience, it pays to be thorough with the subject of your investigations and your client.”

  Kathryn wasn’t sure if she was supposed to feel protected or violated. “My last encounter with J. Edgar Hoover was dicey, to say the least. I have no desire to tangle with him again.”

  Hartman poked his tablet of notes with his fountain pen. “Your father was accused of treason, which is more than enough justification for the FBI to start a file on him. Whatever evidence the prosecution employed to win a conviction, it must have been substantial.”

  “Or circumstantial.”

  “The two are not mutually exclusive. The FBI’s file on your father will contain everything: police reports, newspaper clippings, court documents, telephone conversation transcripts—both legal and illegal.”

  Between the painter and his scraping, Bertie and her bagels, and now mention of Hoover, Kathryn could feel her nerves unraveling at the edges. “What exactly are you saying?”

  “The reason my fee is so high is that I would need to close my office and take you on as my sole client. But if I could fly to Boston and gain access to Danford’s FBI file, everything I need would be right there in one place. Even if it’s thick as a phone book, I could be back within a week to ten days. Two weeks tops. Could you afford that?”

  Even if her radio show folded tomorrow, a couple of thousand bucks was within Kathryn’s means. She nodded.

  “Given that your father’s freedom and reputation are at stake, how do you feel about calling Hoover?”

  “You want me to stick my hand back into a fire that’s already burned me?”

  “I do.”