I forced myself to meet his eyes and accept the bad news head-on. It was only appropriate, I thought. It was what I deserved.
But then he grinned and said, “It’s perfect, Jun. It’s almost too good to be true. This story’s going to make our movie the hit of the year!”
I must have looked bewildered, for now he hit both palms on his desk excitedly and spread his arms out wide.
“We’re going to make it public, Jun! We’ll leak it! The whole damned thing! Don’t you see how brilliant it is? There’s an unsolved murder from the early days of Hollywood, plus a mystery child, and it all involves some of the biggest stars of the silent era! And now, forty years later, we’ve finally solved the murder. Because this is what else I found out, old man. I found out that the police and the District Attorney knew damned well who did it, and that they took payoffs from Harriet Cole for years! Travis Crittendon didn’t give a shit about clearing you or Elizabeth Banks; he hated Japs and he thought Elizabeth was a slut. I’m sure you heard that he killed himself twenty years ago, after he lost his last race for D.A. But did you know he did it with a pearl-handled .38 just like the one that Harriet Cole used to own? He probably got it from her and kept it as insurance, to keep the payments coming. She probably worried every day that he’d expose her.” He pounded on the desk again, closed-fisted this time. “Yes, this is a hell of a story, Jun. And the man who was at the center of it all—the man who got the actress pregnant and who should have been the target of the murder—is starring in a new film from Perennial!”
I was speechless. I stared at Dreyfus in complete disbelief.
“The press is going to eat it up,” he said. “And the public! Oh, we’ll make it sound like you and Nora were secretly engaged so we don’t piss off the church ladies in Iowa. But it’s going to be huge, and there’ll be such a tremendous buzz that they won’t be able to sell the tickets fast enough. We’re going to be a hit, Nakayama! You’re going to be a hit! If you think you were big before, that was nothing compared to how big you’re going to be now. Money, women, all kinds of attention. You’ve waited years to regain your glory, and now you’ve finally got your chance. You’re going to blow them away. You’re—”
“Mr. Dreyfus,” I interjected as my stomach sank, “I do not wish to revisit that particular time. If the film does not succeed on the basis of its artistic merit, then I’d rather that it not succeed at all.”
“Oh, it will, it will, don’t worry, old man. This other story will just make people pay attention.”
“I don’t want people to pay attention to that aspect of my life. I don’t want them to reduce our careers to a lurid scandal.”
He waved his arms, stood up, and then sat down again. “Oh, I know you’re shy about it, but really, Nakayama, don’t be such a prude. It’s a great story, actually, and it makes you kind of a rogue. It gives you a dangerous edge, a sex appeal.”
I swallowed hard. I wasn’t sure what kind of man this story made me, but it wasn’t a man I liked or wished for others to know. “Mr. Dreyfus, that was a very painful time. I don’t care to dredge it up, for any reason.”
“I’m sure it was difficult—but what better way to come to terms with it than by turning it into something productive?”
I felt like the walls were closing in around me; like the air was being sucked from the room. I felt an overwhelming urge to be out and away—not just from that room and that distasteful young man, but from his knowledge of my past and from the past itself. I couldn’t believe what he was proposing and I couldn’t stand to be in his presence, not for a moment longer. “Excuse me, I have to leave,” I said abruptly, and then I stood and turned to go.
“Well, call me in a day or two,” said Dreyfus, who was clearly nonplussed by my reaction. Perhaps he was accustomed to making awful proposals that people were first offended by and then ultimately accepted. I would have left the room without looking back, but then he added, “Don’t you want to know about your child?”
This froze me in my tracks, and I half-turned toward the desk. Of course Dreyfus would have tied up this final loose end; of course he would have followed that part of the story. On the one hand, if I stayed ignorant of the fate of my child—if I could hold on to the possibility that there hadn’t been a child—it was easier to deny the whole episode. But part of me desperately wanted to know, and now that he’d revealed that there’d indeed been a birth, I didn’t want Dreyfus to have more knowledge of my life than I did.
“It was a boy,” he said, almost gently. “You have a grown son. He lives in Seven Acres Residence in Pasadena.”
This little bit of knowledge made my entire body shake. I managed to ask, “What’s his name?”
Dreyfus smiled now, a nearly genuine smile. “Charles Riley. Charles Chaplin Riley.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
December 10, 1964
Until this morning, I hadn’t been to Pasadena since 1947, when I attended an exhibit at the Huntingtonton. The city looks surprisingly unchanged—the Craftsman bungalows are still in pristine condition; the public buildings are all stately and well-kept.
