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“I know,” said Pagan. “But I’m not little anymore, and if I can make a difference now...”
“If you can right your mama’s wrong, you mean.”
“She was my mother!” Anger at her friend surged through her. How could she try to take away Pagan’s strong connection to her mother, good or bad? “Everything she did had a big effect on me! And if she was a bad person...” She stopped, not knowing where that sentence was going.
Mercedes leaned forward, dark eyes ferociously intent. She tapped her index finger on the table with every word as she said, “What she did is not your responsibility.”
A surge of emotion flooded up from Pagan’s chest. Her eyes filled with tears. “But what if Mama died because of me?”
Mercedes did not relent. She shook her head. “That woman had all kinds of things going on, way over your head. You could be risking your life here—again. Why are you doing that?”
Pagan got up and grabbed a kitchen towel, wiping her eyes. The cloth came away streaked black with mascara and eyeliner. “I don’t know, M. But even if I never find out why Mama killed herself, I want to help them get this guy. My mother aided in a Nazi escape. Isn’t that reason enough? Right now I’m the only one left alive who might be able to identify him.”
“Okay,” Mercedes said. “Let’s call it patriotism and justice for now and see what happens. But I’m going with you.”
Pagan’s mouth dropped open. “But school—that’s really important to you. I wouldn’t want you to miss...”
Mercedes considered this. “Okay, I’ll go for the first week, as long as I can get the reading assignments in advance.”
The corners of Pagan’s mouth turned up into a huge grin and she darted across the room to throw her arms around Mercedes’s neck.
For once, Mercedes didn’t grumble and pull away. She patted Pagan’s arm awkwardly. “Guess that’s okay with you.”
Pagan laughed and stepped back. “It’s great with me! I promise I won’t suck you into it too much. No violence.”
“We should review the self-defense moves I taught you back in reform school. And when we get back here, we should get a dog.”
“A big dog.” Pagan looked out the kitchen window at the backyard and switched off the lights. “And maybe some electric fencing, snares and booby traps.”
Thump!
Pagan jumped two feet in the air as something slammed into the front door of the house. Mercedes frowned. “They wouldn’t be stupid enough to come back.”
They walked side by side down the hallway to the foyer. Mercedes sidled up to the side window and peered through the curtains. “A man’s walking back down the driveway. Nobody I know. And there’s nobody else.”
“Well, then, what...?” Pagan unlocked the door and tugged it open a few inches.
A large brown envelope flopped down from where it had been leaning against the door. In black marker someone had printed Pagan Jones on it.
Pagan stooped to pick it up, pulling up the flap.
About a hundred pages of three-hole paper slid out, bound together with metal fasteners in the top and bottom holes.
The print on the front page said Two to Tango. A Universal Pictures Production.
Pagan laughed. “It’s the script for the Buenos Aires movie.”
“It better be good,” said Mercedes, and locked the door.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_1f03130e-230e-5752-a253-4db97d0a5293)
Hollywood, California
December 16, 1961
SEGUIDILLAS
Tiny, quick steps, usually seen in orillero style tango.
The script had been written by monkeys pulling random phrases out of a hat full of Hollywood clichés. After reading a few pages, Pagan had trouble forcing her eyes over the hammy dialogue and overwrought scene direction.
The plot was something she’d seen a thousand times—a girl on the cusp of womanhood from the US goes to exotic Buenos Aires on vacation, where she can’t decide between the two men vying for her affections. One was a tall handsome blond American—kind, but a little boring. The other was a darkly handsome Argentinean gaucho, their version of a cowboy, whose seductive tangos and moonlit serenades on his Spanish guitar were too much for the naive girl to resist.
Ten pages in, Pagan knew her character ended up with the American boy. It was too obvious that the “exotic” man was up to no good, and that his dangerous foreign ways and wandering hands would send the silly American girl scurrying back to the safety and security of the American boy.
Mercedes threw it down after five pages. “You’re going to have to tango and sing and say these terrible lines. You’re going to have to—” she grabbed the script and read from it out loud “‘—fall under the gaucho’s tropical spell.’”
“Is Buenos Aires tropical?” Pagan frowned.
Mercedes snorted. “Don’t you know? All dark-skinned people live in jungles.”
“I wouldn’t count on his skin being all that dark. They’ve cast a Broadway actor named Tony Perry as Juan, the seductive Latin man who—” Pagan grabbed the script from Mercedes “‘—tangos with the dangerous stealth of an enormous black panther.’”
Mercedes let out a scornful laugh. “And plays the guitar while riding a horse.”
“Excuse me, but don’t you mean—” Pagan read from the script again “‘—caresses the neck of his smooth wooden instrument with the consummate skill of a virtuoso’?”
Mercedes shook her head. “His instrument’s wood? Don’t let him get anywhere near you with that.”
Pagan gasped with mock horror. “Dirty jokes before breakfast! I better make us some eggs.”
After breakfast, Mercedes went back to studying for her exams, nose in her astronomy textbook, while Pagan called her agent, Jerry Allenberg. “Tell them I’ll do this Two to Tango movie,” she told him.
“I’m sorry, what?” Jerry said, speaking as if to an idiot or small child. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Maybe, but I’m doing it, Jerry. I’ll need to brush up on my tango before it starts shooting in January.”
“And dance your way right out of a career? No way, Pagan. I’m not letting you do it.”
Pagan took a deep breath. Jerry’s concern over her career went straight past paternal to pathological now that she was on the wagon and doing better. “You don’t get to decide what I do, Jerry,” she said.
“But you’re in the middle of a comeback!” Something in the background thumped, as if he’d dropped his feet off the desk to stand up and yell at her. “I never thought I’d say this after your disasters last year, but Bennie Wexler thinks you’re gold and Tony Richardson loved working with you so much on Daughter of Silence he’s talking awards at Cannes. Not for the movie, but for you. Did you hear me? You could be nominated for Best Actress at Cannes, Pagan! Somehow you’re moving away from movies like Beach Bound Beverly into A-list material with the best writers and directors. It’s a miracle! Don’t do this turd of a script and mess it all up. I’m begging you.”
“Most people don’t yell when they beg,” Pagan said. What he said made her uneasy. “You really think one mediocre movie could cancel out the good ones?”
“This could cost you the award at Cannes,” he said. “And, I didn’t want to say anything, but they’re talking about a possible Oscar campaign, too.”
Once upon a time, getting an Oscar had been Pagan’s biggest dream. But now, when she weighed that against the chance to find out more about her mother, to help her country, to catch a Nazi who probably escaped from justice? The awards seemed like Tinkertoys.
Time for the trump card. “Do you remember our friend Devin Black?”
Silence. Then a thump and a squeak of chair springs as Jerry sat back down. Jerry had caved in to Devin before, when he’d negotiated Pagan’s contract for Neither Here Nor There in Berlin in August. Pagan had never learned exactly what hold Devin had over Jerry, but it seemed to involve blackmail. Jerry probably didn’t know who Devin worked for, but he was no fool. “Devin Black’s involved in this tango turd?”
“He asked me to do it. And I want to do it,” Pagan said. And waited.
Another silence. “Okay. So. You’re doing it,” Jerry finally said. “But if at any point you or Mr. Black wish to extricate yourself from this awful picture, you let me know. It’ll be worth the penalties to your contract.”
“Thanks, Jerry,” Pagan said.
“Yeah, yeah.” He paused. “The studio’s going to owe you big for this one. Anything special you want during the shoot I can demand? Caviar every day, maybe? A personal masseuse?”
Pagan glanced over at Mercedes, who was underlining something in her book. “I want to bring my best friend along with me for a week. They could pay for a nice hotel suite for the two of us, and her airfare as well as mine. If you think you can manage that.”
“Best friend, airfare, hotel suite,” he pronounced, as if writing it down. Sharply, he added, “Is Devin Black okay with her being there?”
Pagan hadn’t thought of that. The CIA might not want her to have someone living in her suite with her, for secrecy’s sake. Well, that was too bad. “If anyone kicks back over her being there, you tell them she comes or I’m out.”
“If we’re lucky, they’ll kick back,” Jerry muttered. “When producers ask me about this horrible movie later, can I tell them you were back on the bottle when you agreed to do it?”
“Jerry!” Pagan scolded.
“Yeah, yeah, that would be even worse for your rep. I know.” He sighed heavily. “You really okay with this, kid?”
Which was as close as Jerry Allenberg would ever come to making sure Devin Black wasn’t blackmailing her into doing this movie.
“I’m great, Jerry. Really. If we’re lucky maybe the movie will be so bad they won’t release it.”
“Your lips to God’s ears,” he said.
“Have the studio’s dancing instructor call me so I can brush up on the tango, okay?”
“Sure, sure.” And he hung up.
“Jerry doesn’t think it’s a good idea,” Pagan said, setting the handset back in the cradle of the phone on the kitchen wall.
Mercedes didn’t look up from her astronomy book. “Too late. You’ve crossed the event horizon.”
“Is that a tango step?” Pagan grinned.
“It’s a boundary that surrounds a black hole.” Mercedes looked up from the book. “Do you know what a black hole is?”
“What Jerry Allenberg has instead of a soul?” Pagan shrugged off Mercedes’s look, “Oh, come on, you know I was either drunk or distracted between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. My high school diploma’s strictly ceremonial, thanks to Universal Pictures and all those lovely tutors fudging my scores.”
“A black hole is this area in space with gravity so strong it sucks everything, even time, into itself. Nothing, even light, can escape.” Mercedes wasn’t reading from her book as she spoke, and her eyes lit up as she went on. “This physicist, Finkelstein, discovered the event horizon, which is like a boundary around the black hole. Once you cross the event horizon, you can’t go back. You’re trapped forever.”
“So you’re saying I’ve been sucked into a one-way pit of darkness?” Pagan nodded. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Mercedes went back to reading. “The constellations are different in the southern hemisphere,” she said. “Maybe I can find a telescope while we’re there so I can see them.”
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_17c5951a-4dcc-52f0-baf7-c07788b1f79a)
Burbank, California
January 2, 1962
PATADA
A kick between the legs, usually executed by the follower.
The Warner Bros. studio lot lay shrouded in morning fog at the foot of the January-green Hollywood Hills. Pagan rolled down the window of the limousine as the guard waved them through the gate to inhale the crisp air and get a better view of the famous water tower perched like a long-legged heron over the blank-faced soundstages and trees still leafy for the California winter.
Pagan had always loved the bustle of the Warner lot, but she hadn’t been there since they’d shot exteriors on its Western street for Little Annie Oakley, when she was ten. It was 7:00 a.m., and the studio was abuzz, an uncanny small town all its own, but one populated by time travelers and circus folk.
Transferred from the limo to a golf cart driven by an assistant in a Yankee hat, Pagan watched an eight-seat electric vehicle hum past, carrying a flock of flappers in feathered headbands and spit curls.
Her cart zoomed by the commissary, turned left and nearly smacked into a clutch of cowboys, guns at the hip. Nearby, three ten-year-old girls practiced a soft-shoe in an empty parking space. Their mothers sat in folding chairs nearby, knitting or watching critically. “One and two and ba-da bam!” one woman shouted, smacking her hand hard on her thigh. “Do it again.”
Hang in there, kid, Pagan thought. She’d been that girl. Mama had been that woman. No tap dance had ever been good enough. No line reading was ever exactly right. That was how excellence was earned, Mama had said. She may have been right, but it was so very exhausting.
The cart purred onward. The soundstages loomed like windowless mausoleums on either side as grips and wardrobe assistants ambled along, paper coffee cups steaming.
“What are you shooting?” Pagan’s driver asked.
“Not shooting yet,” she replied. “We’ve been rehearsing at a dance studio since Christmas, but now we need a soundstage big enough to choreograph this big number before we head to Buenos Aires to shoot.”
“All the stages at Universal taken?” He shook his head. “Didn’t know they had such a busy slate.”
“Maybe yours are just better,” Pagan said. “But don’t tell anyone over there I said so.”
He laughed as they pulled to a stop in front of Stage 16 and she alighted from the cart. “But I’ll be sure to tell everyone here you said it.”
Smiling, she sailed through the door cut into the side of the soundstage with its Authorized Personnel Only sign, and stepped into the echoing dark of the stage. She stopped to let her eyes adjust to the spot of light along the back wall. A dusty piano crouched there. A wizened woman with a face like a walnut, her hair pulled severely back in a bun, sat on the bench smoking and flipping through sheet music.
“She’s here!” More lights flickered and came to life, illuminating the empty cavern of the space and a tall, graceful man she knew, the movie’s choreographer, gliding toward her. He wore flowing black trousers and a black turtleneck over his long, sinewy limbs, and he paused to extend one leg in front of himself, bowing with hands to his chest to her as if he were a courtier paying homage to the queen.
“Jared!” Pagan leaned in as he rose and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “You look marvelous. How was your New Year’s?”
“Busy, my beautiful. Busy and scandalous and everything New Year’s should be!” Jared said, taking her arm as they walked toward the piano together. “And yours?”
“Sober and boring and everything my New Year’s should be,” she said.
He laughed. “Which means you won’t have forgotten everything we practiced last week.”
“I better not,” Pagan said. She’d spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s with Jared at his dance studio, learning the steps to the dances for Two to Tango, with him standing in as whatever partner she had in the dance. Today was the first time she’d be dancing with one of her costars. That must be him in the T-shirt, trousers and scuffed dance shoes, stretching out his calf muscles by the back wall.
“Do you know Tony Perry?” Jared left her to take the man by the elbow and tug him toward her. “Tony, you’ve heard of Pagan Jones, of course! Your delightful and delicious dancing partner.”
“Miss Jones,” Tony said, taking her hand in a grip that was a shade too tight. “I’m a big fan.”
