“Presumed missing in action.”
“Not at all. We don’t know that for a fact at all. All we know is there’s no sign or word of him after the war. He was supposed to be something special in the looks department.”
“Hitch! Do you suppose the disfigured face is Grieban’s husband?”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking, strangely enough.”
“And if he is, he came back and found her having an affair with Wagner and killed them.”
“In 1925, seven years after the war ended? That’s a terribly long period of procrastination, especially for a jealous husband.”
“Supposing he was in hospital all these years, getting his face patched up.”
“We’ve seen the results. He should sue.”
“Skip the levity and concentrate on the facts.” They were sitting on the stage of The Pleasure Garden, Alma having long since lost interest in her sandwich and now nursing her coffee. “He could have been sequestered in hospital for a good many years. We know of such cases in England. Let’s say three or four years.” She paused.
“I’m waiting.” The company was beginning to straggle back to the stage, and Hitchcock was anxious to get on with his job.
“Then he’s finally released. Looking the way he does and being the decent sort…”
“Decent sorts don’t commit murders.”
“They do in a fit of passion. Even decent sorts turn indecent when sex rears its inquisitive head.”
“How would you know, Miss Susy Prude?”
“I’ve read Elinor Glyn. Anyway, upon leaving hospital and being decent about it, he remains in the background.”
“Wouldn’t Grieban know he was in hospital?”
“It’s more than likely she didn’t know. The way his face was shattered, dear God knows what happened to the rest of his body. How the poor soul must have suffered.” She looked anguished for a moment and then continued her dissertation. “Probably everything or just about everything of his was blown away…”
“Oh, my dear, not everything!”
“… his identification tags… all that sort of thing…”
“But there’s one flaw in your theory.”
“And what’s that?”
“His fingerprints. From the brief glimpses we’ve had of him, his fingers appeared to be quite intact.”
“Hitch, must you be so tiresome?”
He got to his feet. “Time to get back to work.” Then he went strangely silent.
“What’s wrong?”
“You said this actor Hans Meyer helped carry Rosie Wagner to the doctor’s office.”
“Yes, he appeared quite concerned.”
“What was he still doing hanging about? I saw him early this morning. I thought I’d gotten rid of him.”
“Well, obviously you hadn’t.”
“I wonder if he’s still around. “
“No, he went with Rosie in the ambulance.”
“A total stranger accompanies the afflicted mouse to the sanatorium? How odd.”
“Perhaps he wasn’t a total stranger. You said the film community here was wholly incestuous.”
“I somehow got the impression that the unappetizing Rosie Wagner wasn’t the sort to be offered up on anybody’s plate. Farber shared that opinion too.”
“Oh, come now, Hitch, We know loads of men and women who dote on ugliness. What’s her name, that musical-comedy actress, the one who haunts the alleyways under the bridges in search of derelicts, and what’s his name, that strange playwright who absolutely goes ga-ga over women with deformities? And what’s his name, the author who left his wife to run off to Switzerland with a double amputee?”
“Why, my dear Miss Reville, I am thoroughly astonished at this revelation of the underbelly of your education.”
“Don’t play the innocent with me.”
“Well, I suppose Herr Farber—I find him a charming man, by the way—will be on to Hans Meyer. It’s not our problem. Our problem is right here…” which he emphasized with a wide gesture of his hands that seemed to encompass the entire stage, “so let’s get to work.”
La-la-la-la… la-la-la…
“Oh dear,” said Alma, as her voice choked on the last la, “poor Rudolf Wagner will never ever be published.” And to Hitchcock’s perplexed astonishment, she burst into tears.
In London, long past business hours, a light still blazed in an office in Whitehall. Sir Arthur Willing was a tall, solidly built, distinguished-looking gentleman in his midforties. Now slouched in a chair at a conference table, he seemed to his colleagues to have shrunk. The two men with him watched as Sir Arthur carefully applied a lighted match to the bowl of his brier pipe. The other men were undoubtedly subordinates because they sat patiently like subordinates, waiting for their chief to light his pipe satisfactorily and address them. The thin young man with sparse red hair was named Nigel Pack. Nigel was now two hours late for a supper date with a secretary, but she was so besotted with him that she had told him he could arrive at her flat at any hour of the night and be warmly welcomed. It was a flat she shared with two other girls, but fortunately, they had separate bedrooms. Sitting across from Nigel was another young man, whose name was Basil Cole. Basil’s sideburns and mustache met on his cheeks to give him the look of a perpetually inquisitive simian. Women sometimes weren’t sure whether they were expected to kiss him or feed him peanuts.
“Well, now,” said Sir Arthur, as he sat back with a discontented look on his face, “as my father would have said in a rare sober moment, we are in the shit.”
“It’s not all that bad, sir, is it?” asked Nigel.
“Oh, not all that bad,” mocked Sir Arthur. “We lose two of our best informants in Munich, which means God knows if the others are in jeopardy too, and the man says, ‘It’s not all that bad, sir,’ as though he were diagnosing a sprained ankle. And what do you think, Cole?”
Basil Cole folded his arms and spoke with authority. “I agree with your father. We’re in the shit.”
“And there’s nothing we can do about it either,” added Sir Arthur morosely. He turned to Nigel. “I suppose the others have been cautioned?”
“Duncan has gone to ground somewhere in upper Bavaria. The other one has chosen to brazen it out in
