groceries delivered.”
“But Ada really wants to meet you. Before this weekend, I mean.”
Mitch immediately felt his pulse quicken. “She does?”
“Absolutely. She’s most insistent. After all, you’re the man who dubbed her The Queen of the B’s.”
“No, that wasn’t me. That was Manny Farber, years and years ago.”
“Ada’s very grateful to you, Mitch. She wants to thank you personally.”
Norma’s legendary ninety-four-year-old mother, Ada Geiger, was one of the twentieth century’s most illustrious, controversial and remarkable cultural figures. Also one of Mitch’s absolute idols. It was safe to say that Ada Geiger was the only person, living or dead, who had been a colleague of both Amelia Earhart and the Rolling Stones. The beautiful, fiercely independent daughter of millionaire Wall Street financier Moses Geiger, Ada had captured America’s imagination back in the Roaring Twenties when, at the age of sixteen she became the youngest woman ever to fly solo from New York to Washington. That feat earned her a charter membership in the Ninety- Nines, a group of daring young female pilots whose first president was Earhart. After brief stints as a socialite, fashion model and Broadway actress, the spirited young Ada bought herself a Speed Graphic and stormed the rollicking world of New York tabloid journalism as a crime scene photographer. Soon she was writing the news copy that went with her uncommonly lurid photos. By 1934, she’d moved on to penning politically charged plays that were being staged by a band of upstarts called the Group Theatre. Among the Group’s founders were Harold Clutman, Lee Strasberg and Clifford Odets. Among its discoveries was the brilliant young Brooklyn playwright Luther Altshuler, whom Ada would marry.
When World War II came, Ada Geiger served as a combat correspondent for Life magazine: Her collected dispatches and combat photographs, To Serve Man, became America’s unofficial scrapbook of the war. Practically everyone who made it home owned a copy. It was the top-selling book of the post-war era, an era that found Ada and Luther out in Hollywood raising a family and producing low-budget movies together. Ada directed several of the films herself, making her the only woman besides Ida Lupino and Dorothy Arzner to crash through the industry’s concrete gender barrier. Her films were reminiscent of her photographs-shadowy, gritty, and unfailingly bleak. And while they attracted only very small audiences at the time, she began to develop an ardent cult following through the years among critics and film buffs. Mitch stumbled on to her work at the Bleecker Street Cinema when he was a teenager and was totally blown away. For him, Ten Cent Dreams, her taut, twisted 1949 love triangle about a conniving dance hall girl (Marie Windsor), a consumptive bookie (Edmond O’Brien) and a crooked cop (Robert Mitchum) ranked right up there with Out of the Past as one of the greatest noir dramas ever filmed. And he thought that her seldom-screened 1952 melodrama about big-city political corruption, Whip-saw, totally eclipsed the universally overrated High Noon as a parable about the dangers of the Hollywood blacklist. When he became a critic, Mitch championed it as a lost American classic. And hailed Ada Geiger as “the greatest American film director no one has ever seen.”
She might have achieved genuine Hollywood greatness had it not been for that blacklist. Both she and Luther were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about their Communist Party affiliations back in their Group Theatre days. They refused to name names. Both were jailed for a year. Upon their release in 1954 they fled the country for London, where they wrote and produced plays, and where Ada went on to direct documentaries for the BBC, including Not Fade Away, her electrifying 1964 Rolling Stones concert film. Later, she and Luther moved on to Paris. Ada’s films had long been beloved there. Her work was a huge influence on Clouzot, Melville and Godard. Francois Truffaut called her his favorite American director. She acted in a pair of Truffaut’s films, scripted another with Luther, and spoke out loudly against the Vietnam War. When Luther died, she retired to a solitary villa on the Amalfi coast.
Now she was back in America for the first time in fifty years.
Back in Dorset, actually. It turned out that Ada had a local connection and that connection was Astrid’s Castle, the colossal, turreted stone edifice that had been erected back in the Roaring Twenties as a love shack for Ada’s father and his longtime mistress, Astrid Lindstrom, a leggy Ziegfeld Follies girl. Eventually, the mountaintop castle became an inn. Now it belonged to Norma and her second husband, Les.
Ada’s return was proving to be a triumphant one. America had “discovered” her. Steven Soderbergh had just finished the principal photography on his stylish remake of Ten Cent Dreams with Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey and George Clooney. A digitally re-mastered print of her original film was due for theatrical release in March. And a retrospective of her tabloid crime scene photos was slated for April at the International Center of Photography on Sixth Avenue, accompanied by a lavish coffee-table book.
It had been Les’s idea to host a small tribute for Ada at Astrid’s Castle upon her arrival. When the innkeeper had contacted Mitch about it a few weeks back, Mitch was thrilled to participate in the event. He’d always wanted to meet the great lady. And Les had promised him that it would be a dignified, low-key symposium for a select group of film scholars, critics and authors. However-and here was the really big surprise-Les hadn’t been totally straight with Mitch. It turned out that he had much, much bigger plans for Ada’s tribute. An entire delegation of Panorama Studios heavy-hitters was en route to Astrid’s Castle for a weekend-long blitz of cocktail parties and testimonial dinners, accompanied by Soderbergh, his starstudded cast and a bevy of celebrated Geigerphiles like Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and the Coen Brothers. The likes of Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins were coming. So were assorted supermodels, rap music stars and high-profile professional athletes. Camera crews from every media outlet in America would be on hand. This was going to be a major, major celebrity gala-everything short of velvet ropes, klieg lights and Joan Rivers standing at curbside, hissing at all of the skanky outfits.
And it was just the sort of event Mitch hated. He was furious. But he was also trapped. By the time he’d found out what Les’s true intentions were, it was too late to back out. Which was, without question, exactly what Les had counted on.
“Honestly, Mitch, this weekend completely got away from me,” Les apologized profusely. “The studio took control. It’s their money, their publicity machine and you know how they like to make everything splashy. I was powerless to stop them. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“Well, yes,” Mitch allowed, because it did sound plausible. Just not wholly true.
“You must let me make this up to you,” Les pleaded. The man seemed genuinely upset.
Mitch wondered why. Was Les afraid he’d bad-mouth him around town? Or was something else going on here?
“Norma and I would love to have you up for dinner this evening, if you can make it. Just a low-key family meal, word of honor. Ada will be there. And Norma’s son, Aaron, is up from Washington with his wife. They’re staying through the weekend. Do you know Aaron?”
“I know of him. Kind of surprised he made the trip.”
“As was I,” Les agreed, nodding his head of hair vigorously. “But I suppose family ties are stronger than their… differences. Shall we say six-thirty?”
“I’ll be there,” promised Mitch, who was not going to pass up this opportunity.
“That’s terrific, Mitch!” Les said excitedly. “And I hope you can bring your lady friend along. Any chance she can get free on such short notice?”
“A good chance, yes. Things are very slow for her right now. She was saying so just the other day.”
CHAPTER 2
When the raccoon let out a screech and came charging right at her across the garage floor, Des opened fire. Her first shot tore through the rabid animal’s chest. The damned thing kept right on coming, snarling with crazed fury, leaping at her as Des put two more rounds into its snout, her shots echoing loud in the enclosed space. It landed at her feet, where it scrabbled and twitched before it died, emptying its bladder directly onto her black lace-up boots.
Des kicked it aside, holstered her SIG-Sauer and checked herself over thoroughly to make absolutely certain the raccoon hadn’t managed to penetrate her uniform trousers. There was no torn material, no broken skin. Her thick wool socks were good and dry. She was fine, unless you counted her ruined boots.
She shoved her heavy horn-rimmed glasses up her nose and covered the dead animal with a tarp. Then
