“That Clown film,” she said. “I checked it up with Howie.”
“Did you?” She was decked out in a shiny pantsuit and her big hoop earrings swayed as the limo swerved. Her inexact English was so charming it made me want to cry. I managed to restrain myself.
“It gave me an idea.”
“Lots of people would like to own it,” I said.
“I don’t know about the owning. I am thinking more of Thor.”
I followed the thin gold necklaces that cascaded in concentric circles from her neck. They reached the opening of a silk blouse that was virtually unbuttoned. She was as lean as a boy and several inches taller than me, even, it seemed, sitting down. It was all, as the kids say, good.
“Is it about the taxes?” I asked, recalling her husband’s problems.
She gave a shrug that meant yes. “Thor needs something now besides the tennis. That’s kaput.”
“You could have fooled me. I played him.”
“Yes. I’m so sorry about that.” She seemed sincere, and it appeared that I’d been even more humiliated than I’d thought. “Those shorts, especially.”
I only nodded. I knew she represented the height of fashion, in a European pantsuit sort of way. And, suddenly, that made her seem weirdly familiar.
“Weren’t you—”
She nodded. “I posed for the perfume. With the ocelot.”
A tiny gasp escaped my lips. Marthe had once been the centerpiece of a big ad campaign in print and on TV. She had been photographed in exotic locations with a dangerous animal. How could I not have recognized her? I guessed, after Thor left Gratey McBride, I’d simply stopped following his life.
“But that’s over now,” she said, quietly. “No more modeling. That’s another reason … well, that I thought of this.”
Being asked to assist a broke sports star and his supermodel wife was high cotton. Still, how would Jerry Lewis come into it?
“This Clown, I think,” she said, “would make a good vehicle for Thor.”
I almost laughed. She wanted Thor Ludwig to be a movie star. The idea was, I’m sure, on many people’s minds back in the seventies. Today it seemed a much more dubious proposition.
And a remake of a film that had never even been completed? It was certainly a new concept.
I thought of an aborted eighties film version of Jeffrey Archer’s novel Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less. George Segal, Rod Steiger, and George Hamilton had gotten off the plane in Europe to start shooting and found there was no money. It was done later with different actors in 1990 as a TV miniseries.
I told Marthe this, and she was attentive, as always. She was also a bit impatient. So, blushing again, as we reached the airport, I got to a more pertinent concern.
“Who’s going to help us find it?” I asked.
“You’re going to see,” she said, as the driver opened the door.
She kicked my foot a little, with her boot, the same way she had her husband. I watched the chains shift on her chest as she rose.
I knew now this had never been a pure flirtation or even friendship. Someone always needed something and someone else got used. For a trivial man, it was nice to be needed and good to be used. I didn’t tell her that someone was willing to kill for the movie. I just let Marthe pull me from my seat with her impossibly warm hand.
—
Marthe said virtually nothing more on the plane going over. Despite her strapped circumstances, she sprang for first class. Then she took enough pills to sleep, squirmingly, throughout the entire flight. At one point, she flung a silky leg over mine and muttered something sweet. But I knew she was sedated and her eyes covered by a mask.
Restless, I pulled out the book she had placed in the netting of the seat before her. It was the autobiography of the infamous film producer Troy Kevlin, The Boy-O Keeps Ringing the Bell! An innovative, jet-set executive in the seventies—producing, among other things, Gratey McBride’s Oscar-winning vehicle, Macaroon Heart—he’d been derailed by drug charges in the eighties. He couldn’t get projects off the ground anymore, and so had written a tell-all memoir. Just as the truth dawned on me, Marthe whispered, her accent even thicker in her sleep,
“Troy will be helping to finding it.”
—
Howie had apparently told Marthe that Troy Kevlin might have information about Clown. This was more, of course, than the comic had ever told me; he had just said he met the producer during a tennis match. But I would take my leads where I could get them.
Troy had once lived in Bel-Air, in a famous mansion built by Charlie Chaplin. Now, his circumstances much reduced, he occupied a modest house in Burbank, on a nondescript residential block. With three floors and a backyard, it looked pretty good to me, coming from a one-room walk-up with no counter space.
Marthe put me in a bright room on the ground floor, next to hers and Thor’s. I’d brought my laptop and passport but not Abner’s gun. I might need to use the first two things; I didn’t want to use the third.
I couldn’t see much of the house. I hadn’t been to California since I’d pursued The Magnificent Ambersons, and the sudden assault of sun made me need to lie down with a cold compress. I had plenty of room on Troy’s leather couch, which came from his old mansion and now spanned three quarters of his small living room.
“Can you open your eyes?” Marthe asked, replacing the compress, taking good care of me.
“Not yet,” I said, squinting.
This was how Troy and Thor found us: me lying down, Marthe sitting at my side. The two men had walked in from what seemed a long day of shopping. I realized then that the Ludwigs were Troy’s permanent houseguests; the couple had lost their own digs to creditors. All three of them had squandered their fortunes, and today the men’s bags were from Target, CVS, Subway, and other cost-efficient chains. We were all losers now.
As usual, Thor looked prematurely wizened. He wore a white running suit, his stringy blond hair hit his shoulders, and the sun had turned his face into a pistachio nut.
Beside him, Troy’s own skin looked more like the pecan on a praline cookie I had had on the plane. Still lean at sixty-five, he wore a black turtleneck, gray slacks, and a glittery medallion around his neck. His dark sunglasses were the size of dinner plates I’d seen at my mother’s house. He was a little piece of seventies Hollywood: a broken piece.
“Here we are,” he said, in a gravelly baritone, “the Boy-O and the Strudel.”
As I would soon learn, Troy gave tough-guy nicknames to everyone: Strudel referred to Thor’s Germanic heritage. Troy himself was, of course, the Boy-O. The habit had started as a charming trait; it became a necessity after a series of small strokes addled Troy’s memory. He otherwise seemed unimpaired, frisky, even. Thor was in worse shape.
“Marthe says I played this dude at tennis once,” Thor said about me, vaguely, though pleasantly.
“It was just the other day, in New York, sweetie,” Marthe said, adjusting my compress, “don’t you remember?”
Thor just shrugged, smiled, and didn’t respond. Then he reached into his Subway bag, unwrapped a turkey hero and, with two hands, started to eat it, vigorously.
“That’s the Strudel,” Troy said, watching him. “He wants what he wants when he wants it. First a turkey sandwich, then he takes Poland.”
The fifty-year-old joke went down easy for Troy, and he winked at me, as if sharing a hipster’s secret. He hobbled over to the couch, showing a little stroke-related stiffness, and shoved in close to Marthe.
“Move over, Legs,” he said, fondly.
We were now one big happy family—except for Thor, who sat on a chair opposite, eating and staring off, occasionally making a slight “backhand” gesture.
“I see the setup with Day the Clown, and it’ll get fannies into seats,” Troy said, already planning the remake. “The minute the Spaetzle comes on the screen, dames’ hearts will go pitter-pat.” Thor had now gone from a dessert to a noodle dish but didn’t even know. “We change the plot, of course. Jerry was a clown, Thor will be a tennis player. We’ll even get in a little court action.”
“In a concentration camp?” I finally opened my eyes, but my head throbbed from more than the light.
