“Yes, dear. Of course, dear.” He returned to the problem of filming the movie.
“I saw him,” said Alma to no one in particular, and would remember the chill that suddenly overtook her in the smoke-filled and overheated stage.
Two
In her sadly furnished bedroom in Frau Schumann’s guest house, Alma sat at the dressing table staring at her image in the mirror. The face was attractive, but it was also pale and troubled. Her mind was as overcast as the skies had been all day, and she did not like this feeling of uneasiness that had enveloped her like a dark shroud at the studio that morning and continued to worry her. She could not stop thinking about the man with the strange face, the mutual hatred of Rudolf Wagner and his odd daughter, Rosie, or the lovely melody Wagner had presumably composed that morning and kept playing and playing throughout the day. She was now humming it under her breath and wished she could stop, but it had captured and possessed her.
“Alma!” Hitchcock was banging on their communal wall. “We’ll be late!”
“Almost ready!” shouted Alma as she hastily rouged her lips lightly and then dusted her face with powder. She heard him leave his bedroom and lock the door. He tapped lightly on her door. When she told him it was open, he came in, shut the door, and leaned against it with his arms folded. La-la-la-la… la-la-la…
“Oh, for God’s sake, Alma, have done with it! That tune’s becoming as boring as ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas!”
“I fell in love with it this morning, but falling out of love with it is twice as difficult.” She was examining the contents of her handbag. “It is pretty, though, isn’t it? He should be composing film scores and operettas, don’t you think?”
“I think we’re going to be late for dinner with the Langs if you don’t stop ferreting about in that handbag. “
She snapped the bag shut, stood up. “Ready.”
“What’s troubling you?”
“Oh, dear, is it all that obvious?”
“You’re whistling between your teeth. That always sets me on edge. That means Miss Alma Reville is on edge. Did something happen today to upset the balance of your usually admirable equanimity?”
“Oh, stop being so pompous!” She sat down again. He sat on her bed, which was uncomfortable and lumpy. “My uneasiness is absolutely unexplainable, but it’s there and I’m not quite sure how to cope with it. Maybe after a glass or two of wine…”
“You’ll still be uneasy, and in addition tipsy, and then ill. Was it the man with the face? The fact that he wasn’t there when you insisted he was there?”
“Oh, he was there all right. I don’t hallucinate. Half hidden behind a piece of scenery, staring at Rudolf Wagner at the piano repeating that lovely melody. Tin sure he noticed me trying to draw your attention to him and did his flit.”
Hitchcock shrugged. “Well, so what? It isn’t as though we’re in the midst of some spy melodrama, you know.”
“Then there’s Wagner’s daughter, Rosie. She said something very strange to me.”
“Rosie is a very strange child.”
“Her father detests her.”
“Full marks for Wagner. She’s perfectly detestable. She looks like an unbaked pudding.”
Alma told him about her conversation with Wagner, his detestation of both wife and daughter. “And then later, when Rosie heard me humming Wagner’s melody, she challenged me.”
“To a duel?”
“Can we skip the asides, Hitch, and let me get on with it?” He looked as though he was about to fall asleep, which he wished he could do instead of going out to dinner with Fritz Lang, the director, and his wife, Thea von Harbou, a talented scriptwriter. He heard Alma say, “Rosie asked me if I thought the melody was all that good, and I said of course I did and it was too bad it didn’t have words. And then she said the strangest thing. She said, ‘Perhaps it has words.’ Then she gave me a very strange look and then Anna Grieban called her away and—oh, the hell with it—let’s not keep the Langs waiting.” She was standing and stealing one last look at herself in the mirror. Hitchcock was at the door holding it open.
“And all this is what’s been disturbing you?” She motioned him to precede her out the room so she could lock the door.
“It isn’t so much disturbing as nagging, you know what I mean?”
He took her arm and led her to the staircase. “Of course I do.”
A wicked smile appeared. “Somewhere in all that there lies a MacGuffin.”
“Oh, Hitch, for crying out loud, you and your bloody MacGuffins!”
Anybody who was anybody in films and theater in Munich frequented the Altes Hackerhaus on Sendlinger Strasse, one of the oldest restaurants in the city. Hitchcock loved it for its generous servings of its heavy German cuisine. Alma liked it because the string quartet had a large repertoire of American and British popular songs. The Langs were already sitting at the table when Hitchcock and Alma arrived.
“Sorry we’re late,” said Alma, as the maitre d’ assisted her onto her chair. “It’s been one of those days.” Hitchcock ordered a bottle of wine and felt Thea von Harbou’s penetrating eyes.
Hitch looked at Thea, “Yes?”
“Something about you puzzles me, Alfred.” She was jamming a cigarette into a holder, and Lang held a match which he was poised to strike the moment his wife was ready to light up. Alma studied Thea’s almost attractive face and waited for the verbal shells to explode. She didn’t like the woman and hadn’t liked her from the moment they had met a few weeks earlier at a studio cocktail party to welcome the visiting company. At the party she and Hitchcock had been subjected to von Harbou’s perorations on the political and economic future of Germany, which she believed lay in the hands of the burgeoning National Socialist party under the leadership of someone named Adolf Hitler. Alma hadn’t liked the sound of
