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“Damn Devin Black, anyway,” Pagan whispered back. “I know I’m single. Why don’t I feel that way?”
“Have you heard from him since Berlin?”
“Not a peep.”
She’d been kissed before. And more. So why couldn’t she stop thinking about him?
“I said, thanks!”
Pagan focused. Nancy was waving a 45 at her, the record Pagan had brought her as a hostess gift. Thomas had kindly carried the 45 in from their car, tucked under his arm, and she must’ve daydreamed about Devin Black right through him handing it over to Nancy. They were all now in the crowded living room with its white baby grand and Mark Rothko paintings.
“You’re going to love it,” Pagan said, gesturing at the record. “It hit the R & B charts earlier this year, but it should’ve been a huge crossover hit. She sings like nobody you’ve heard before.”
“Aretha Franklin, ‘Won’t Be Long,’” Nancy read off the label. “Let’s play this hot plate.”
She pushed through the crowd toward a huge console where they kept the record player. “Hang on, Sammy,” Nancy said to the slender man noodling on the piano. “Pagan says we need to check this out.”
Pagan shrank back a little. She hadn’t planned on her record taking over the party or interrupting Sammy Davis, Jr., at the piano. She was already infamous thanks to her drunken exploits. The last thing she needed was to upstage anyone.
But Sammy shrugged, took his hands off the keys and flashed her a grin. “Hey, Pagan, baby,” he said. “Looking good.”
“Same, Sammy,” she said, smiling back. “Sounding good, too.”
Nancy dropped the needle and stepped back. A jazzy piano riff and some cymbals ruffled over the conversational murmur in the room. Sammy nodded his head in time with the beat. Nancy followed suit.
“Baby, here I am...” A woman’s voice cut through the air like a preacher’s, lit with heavenly inspiration, except she was singing about how she couldn’t wait for her lover to return.
Nancy’s eyes widened. She elbowed her husband, and he nodded, his foot tapping. Three tipsy women sprawled on the couch stopped talking and sat up.
The beat was good, if conventional. The piano riff was catchy, and the woman’s longing for lovemaking was a tad scandalous. But that voice. It lifted everything higher and then tore it all apart, igniting a desire to move.
“Dig it!” Sammy said, and grabbed Pagan’s hand to spin her around. He had a light touch and lighter feet. Others watched as they danced in a low-key, exploratory way. The beat became familiar, and they picked up speed.
Nancy tapped her feet as she sidled up to Thomas, holding out her hand. He bowed and expertly swung her out. Her skirt fanned like a cape.
The piano rumbled with anticipatory joy as Aretha sang, “My daddy told me...”
Frank wandered in with Juliet Prowse and watched as the girls on the couch jumped up to jive. Juliet pirouetted, and Frank took her hand out of midair to do the Lindy Hop.
“Her voice—it’s like a lightning strike,” Thomas shouted to Pagan. “Or no, maybe my English isn’t good.”
“Sounds cool to me!” Sammy said, twirling Pagan as he brought her back in. They circled Nancy and Thomas, then crossed, changing partners in one smooth move on the beat. Nancy was laughing, waving at her husband, who grabbed a girl from the couch and jumped in to join the fray.
A few men in casual suits watched by the sliding glass doors, until the bikini girls from the pool noticed the crowd moving in time and stormed the living room to dance in their own wet footprints. The room filled with hoots and shimmying bodies. They were one now, connected by that clear, dangerous voice.
It reached a crescendo, crying out to her lover to hurry, hurry! The urgency convulsed inside Pagan’s heart. It became her voice, calling out to Devin Black.
The song ended and the girls in bikinis, Frank, Thomas—everyone was laughing, raising their glasses in salute, yelling at Nancy to play it again. Who was that?
But Pagan’s head was spinning. Her self-control was diffusing like cherry syrup in a Shirley Temple. She took a deep breath of the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke. The pungent scent pushed a pang of longing through her. When she drank, cigarettes and alcohol had been twin siblings in her hands. She had a vivid memory of Devin Black handing her a pack of Winstons, and the longing for the old days before she’d become a killer, for a drink, for Devin, all tangled up into a huge knot under her breastbone.
But Devin wasn’t here. She might never see his sardonic smile again, and the martini in Sammy Davis, Jr.’s hand would go very nicely with a cigarette instead.
Who do you want to be, Pagan? After four months of daily AA meetings, weekly therapy and gratitude for every sober breath. She could be the girl who didn’t drink. Or she could be the messed-up loser who did.
“Going to get some air,” she said to Thomas, and wound her way through the bodies, out into the clear air of the arcade. The swimmers and couples drinking and talking out there pushed her farther past the lounge chairs out onto the lawn.
Peace at last. She took a deep breath, removed her heels and sank her stocking feet into the damp grass. Above, the stars were startlingly clear, and the noise from the glowing glass mansion sank away into the night.
A shadow moved to her left. She startled, spinning.
“Well, if it isn’t the notorious Pagan Jones.”
Out of the darkness beside the arcade stepped a familiar form, tall, knife-thin, with dark hair and eyes like the ocean during a storm.
Her whole body wanted to open itself, to stretch out to him. Her pulse thrummed through her veins all the way down to her fingertips.
Devin Black was back.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_32ad6a84-470f-533a-acc7-7894724b9c7c)
Chatsworth and Hollywood, California
December 15, 1961
BAILAMOS
More of a statement than a question the man asks a woman: Shall we dance?
“Devin.” She breathed it more than said it. Had she conjured him with her thoughts? She took two steps toward him, on her tiptoes. “Are you real?”
“That’s a matter for debate.” He smiled at her with a delicious fondness that sent blood rushing to her cheeks. “You, however, look very real.”
The impulse to obliterate the distance between them, to throw her arms around him, was almost irresistible. The fierce way he’d kissed her the last time they met was imprinted on her body like a brand. But something made her pull herself up short.
His gaze may have been more than friendly, but he hadn’t walked up to her or taken her in his arms. He stood at a distance, all coiled grace in his custom-made suit, keeping a good six feet between them.
It had been four months and two days since they last saw each other. Anything could’ve happened. She needed to reverse the overeager impression she’d given him, and fast.
“Delighted to see you haven’t been slaughtered in the line of duty,” she said, keeping her tone light. Years of actor training came in handy at times like this. “Last thing I needed was to be haunted by your ghost.”
He took a step toward her. “It’s good to see you.”
His natural Scottish accent, which he could turn off or on, depending on which persona he needed to be, warmed as he spoke more personally. It fanned the tiny flames dancing inside her heart.
“Took you long enough, laddie,” she said, using her own deadly accurate Scottish accent. “I was in your neighborhood a little over a month ago.”
“Shooting Daughter of Silence in London.” His voice flattened into a flawless American accent, as if answering an unspoken challenge. “Becoming an emancipated minor, and turning seventeen. Happy belated birthday.”
“Thanks,” she said, dropping the accent. “I got the flowers you didn’t send.”
He winced. “I’m sorry. I was rather busy. I promise.”
It sounded like the truth, but with Devin you could never tell. “Oh, that whole ‘I was away serving my country doing unspeakable things’ excuse. Very handy.” She smiled.
“I hear that the director is so happy with the movie, and with your performance, that he’s submitting it to the Cannes Film Festival.”
“So you’re still pretending to be in the movie business?” she asked.
“I’ve stepped back in actually. That’s why I’m here.”
“And you’re keeping tabs on me,” she said. “Should I be scared?”
“Could you be scared?” His smile was knowing.
“Don’t ask me to drive a red convertible.” The only way to deal with the paralyzing anxiety brought on by memories of the accident was to puncture it with jokes. “Or wear something off the rack.”
“How’s your Spanish?” he asked.
It sounded like a non sequitur, but all at once she knew why he was here. It felt so good that it scared her. She took a moment before replying to steady her voice. “Why don’t you ask the real question you came all this way to ask me?”
Admiration shone in his eyes. “No more facade between us, is that it?”
Of course he’d understood her immediately. But she hadn’t been prepared for him to look at her like that. She clasped her hands to stop them from trembling. “We’ve pretended with each other enough for one lifetime.”
He dipped his head in acknowledgment. “I’ve come to ask you to help us out, one more time.”
“Us?” she asked. “Are you an American now? The last time I saw you...”
“I work for MI6, the British secret service,” he said. “The CIA has asked to borrow me for this particular mission. I’m on loan.”
“Because they think you have some kind of power over me.” It was half question, half assertion.
“To be fair,” he said with a smirk, “that’s only one of my many valuable skills.”
Her eyes fell to his lips. “I remember.”
It was hard to tell in the dark, but she could’ve sworn he flushed. “It would be better if you didn’t.”
Her throat tightened. He was pushing her away, all right. But she’d gotten a reaction, however much he might try to deny it. “Who is she?”
He glanced away from her briefly. His expression didn’t change, but it was enough to make her feel like someone had stabbed her in the gut.
Carefully, he said, “What matters is that I never should have...done what I did the last time we met. I truly thought I’d never see you again. I thought...” He broke off and tilted his head back, eyes heavenward, inhaling a deep breath. “I’m not here to renew our acquaintance.”
So after all they’d been through together in Berlin, after they’d shared a kiss that nearly burned down a hospital, he wasn’t here to be with her. It shouldn’t have surprised her, or hurt her. She should’ve been over him by now, on to some new sweetheart who didn’t come and go like a thief. But it hurt so bad she had to shore up her face with a sarcastic look she’d overused in Beach Bound Beverly.
“You mean the CIA didn’t send you all the way to Los Angeles to make out with me?” She raised her eyebrows. “But what better way to spend our tax dollars?”
He exhaled a small laugh. “If you’re interested in helping us out, then you should accept a starring part in a movie shooting in Buenos Aires, which will be offered to you very soon.”
“Argentina?” She knew very little about the country. Something about grasslands and cattle and Eva Perón. “I do all right in Spanish, but there’s no way I could pass for a native speaker, even with all of Mercedes’s coaching.” Her best friend, Mercedes Duran, had grown up in a Spanish-speaking house and was fluent. Pagan, who had learned some French and Italian during her lessons on set and grew up speaking German and English, had picked Spanish up from her fast.
“You won’t need to be anyone but yourself,” Devin said.
Argentina. Something in her memory was stirring about that country. “Why send Pagan Jones to South America?”
He shook his head, regretful. “I’ll tell you after you say yes.”
“So I’m going to say yes?”
He paused, lips twisting sardonically. “Yes.”
She eyed him. If he was that annoyingly certain about it, he was probably right. “Why?”
“Because you want to,” he said.
He was right about that. Even her disappointment at him keeping his distance hadn’t dulled the buzz in her fingertips, the lift to her ego at the thought that they wanted her back, that they needed her. No one before had ever thought she could make the world a better place, even in the smallest way.
“I am a glutton for punishment,” she said. Or maybe she was addicted to it.
He took a step toward her now, his eyes intent. “But mostly you’ll say yes because it has to do with the man from Germany who stayed with your family back when you were eight.”
A chill ran down the back of her neck. That man, her mother’s so-called “friend,” had come to stay with the Jones family for a few weeks and then vanished. She couldn’t remember his name, but he’d been some kind of doctor, a scientist, and this past August she’d discovered that he’d written letters to her mother in a code based on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. “You mean Dr. Someone?”
Devin nodded. “The same man who gave your mother that painting by Renoir. You told me you remembered what he looked like, what he sounded like.”
“Oh, yes, I remember.” She did easily recall the man’s angular height, shiny balding head, arrogant nose and sharp brown eyes draped with dark circles. His voice had been the most distinctive thing about him—high-pitched, nasal, commanding, speaking to her mother in rapid German behind closed doors.
Devin was watching her closely. “The Americans think they’ve found him in Buenos Aires. But photographs and living witnesses are scarce. They need someone to identify him. You may be the only one left alive and willing to help.”
“May be willing to help,” she said, but it was an automatic response. Her thoughts were a cyclone of questions and confusion. She hadn’t told Devin about the coded letters. They’d been signed by Rolf Von Albrecht, who had to be the same person as Dr. Someone.
“Why would they want to track him down?” She had her suspicions, but they were too horrible, too unproven. So she let them stay unexamined in the darkest recesses of her mind. She’d recently discovered that her own mother hated Jews, and that she’d helped this German Dr. Someone quietly leave the United States nine years ago. There were only so many reasons the CIA would bother to find such a man.
The thought of Mama, the bedrock of the family, hiding her bigotry and helping Germans illegally kept Pagan up late many nights, trying to untie the knot that was her mother. She’d kept it all from her family and then unexpectedly hanged herself in the family garage one afternoon while everyone else was out. Pagan still didn’t know why Mama had decided to die, and more than anything—well, looking at Devin she realized more than almost anything—she longed to find out.
“I’ll tell you why,” he said. “After you accept the job.”
She glared at him. “We said no more lies between us.”
“An omission,” he said. “Which I’m telling the truth about.”
Damn him. She was going to do it—because it made her feel good to be trusted, it was the right thing to do and because it involved Mama. It was Mama’s death that triggered Pagan’s alcoholic spiral, and it was Pagan’s decision to keep drinking for years after that which led to the accident that killed her father and sister.
Mama hadn’t left a note; she’d shown no sign of distress or depression. Pagan still had no idea why she’d taken her own life, why she’d left her two daughters without their fierce, controlling, adoring mother. A mother with her own dark secrets.
Thinking about it made it hard to breathe. But more than anything else, Pagan wanted the answer to that question. All the other terrible events had been her own damned fault. She couldn’t help feeling responsible for Mama leaving, as well. But maybe, if she found an explanation, one corner of the smothering blanket of guilt and self-recrimination would lift.
