The Notorious Pagan Jones Read online

  The driver put the car into Park and hustled to get her door. Devin didn’t wait for him and let himself out. As she stared at his custom-made suit, his Italian race-car driver sunglasses, his perfect haircut, she realized that all of his actions—the blackmail, the manipulation, the flattery—it was all directed toward one goal: to get her to act in this movie.

  But why? Why tempt her with her mother’s mysterious past to get her on a movie? And why this movie? Neither Here Nor There was funny and smart, yes, but it wasn’t going to win any awards or break box office records. Why fly her out at the last minute to shoot a comedy in a divided city on the brink of nuclear war?

  “Come on now.” Devin was standing outside the car, ducking his head down to peer at her, still stewing in its air-­conditioned depths. “They won’t bite.”

  “The girl I replaced,” she said flatly. “The original actress slated to play Violet. Who was she?”

  He’d put his sunglasses on, and she couldn’t see his eyes, but his shrug looked natural. “Some nobody,” he said.

  “Did she really get pregnant?” she asked jokingly, but secretly half-serious. “Or did you have her killed to get her off this movie?”

  He smiled. “I’m a fan of yours, but even I have my limits.”

  “Never mind.” She scooted forward, putting those disturbing thoughts on hold for later consideration. Whatever Devin Black’s agenda, this was her chance to restart her career. She wasn’t going to let him or anyone else mess that up.

  * * *

  Pagan took his offered hand to help her out of the car, but released it as she stood and straightened the lapels of her green Givenchy dress. Its classic lines, along with her pearl necklace and gloves, made her look older and thus more responsible. Bennie Wexler had bad memories of their last time working together, but she’d been only eleven years old. Fashion was just one of the tools she planned to use to win him over.

  Another black Mercedes had pulled up. A tall, broad-­shouldered young man with thick blond hair and a broad-browed, high-cheekboned face that would break more than a few hearts stepped out and smiled at her. His teeth, even and white, flashed, and for a moment she thought she was back in Hollywood. Everything about him, limpid green eyes, powerfully built body, smoothly tan skin, dimpled chin, all screamed movie actor.

  “Miss Jones!” He strode over, holding out his strong right hand. “Thomas Kruger. I’m thrilled to meet you.”

  His English was excellent, but laced with a German accent. This had to be her costar, the boy who would play the Communist hunk Violet fell in love with. As her hand disappeared inside his, she found herself smiling back at him. No shadow of concern or judgment lay behind his sparkling eyes. He was dazzled to meet her, and his open friendliness came as an enormous relief. She hadn’t realized how worried she’d been about what her fellow actors would think of her. “The pleasure’s mine, Mister Kruger. I’m looking forward to working with you.”

  He bowed slightly and held out his arm to her, as if he were about to walk her into a ballroom. “Call me Thomas, please.”

  “And you must call me Pagan.” She hadn’t heard of him before, but given that he was from Germany, perhaps he was better known here than in the United States. As she slid her arm through his, they turned to walk stride for stride toward the glass door to the building together, as naturally as if they’d always been friends. “We’ll be getting to know each other very well, after all.”

  “It will be my privilege,” he said. “I’m such a big fan of yours.”

  “Thanks so much!” It never failed to tickle her when people said that, especially if they seemed as genuine as Thomas. Maybe this shoot wouldn’t be an exercise in humiliation, as she’d feared. If Bennie Wexler and her fellow actors were half as nice as Thomas, she’d get through it all just fine.

  She waved a desultory hand back toward Devin, who had fallen in behind them. “Do you know Devin Black?”

  Thomas glanced briefly over his shoulder, not really bothering to look. His voice was dismissive. “We’ve met, yes.”

  The obvious snub seemed to amuse Devin. “Hello, Thomas. How are you today?”

  Thomas didn’t turn his head again. He and Devin were of a height, but Thomas’s bulkier suit and muscular shoulders made Devin look knife-thin. “I’m well, Mister Black. Very well indeed.”

  Interesting that Devin had called Thomas by his first name, while Thomas resorted to “Mister Black.” Even Thomas Kruger wanted to keep the man at a distance.

  They were ushered to the elevator and up to the tenth floor, which housed the film’s production offices. A receptionist waved them into a large conference room. A magnificent view of the city gleamed through the windows.

  Pagan let go of Thomas and ran over to see as much as she could. “Oh, look, you can see the Tiergarten and the Brandenburg Gate from here. Which means that—” she pointed east “—must be East Germany.”

  “That is indeed my home,” Thomas said, walking to stand beside her. “We call it the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, of course. Or as you say, the GDR, the German Democratic Republic.”

  “You live there?” she asked, then realized how bad that could sound and said, “I’m sorry. I never thought Hollywood would’ve had enough sense to hire an actual Communist to play a Communist.”

  He laughed. “Please don’t be sorry. Sometimes it still surprises me that I live there.” He pointed at the Brandenburg Gate, easily spotted near where the trees of the Tiergarten ended. “If you go through the gate and take the Unter den Linden—see that street with the four lines of trees?—take that to Alexanderplatz, that more open area there, then go north—” he pointed left “—about ten blocks and you’re in my neighborhood.”

  “I’m sure your wife keeps a lovely home,” Pagan said, ignoring the amused presence of Devin Black, now lounging in a chair near the middle of the conference table behind them. It wasn’t subtle, but saying that phrase to a man never failed to get her the information she wanted. She didn’t really care whether or not Thomas Kruger was single, but it was fun to flirt with someone right under Devin’s nose. She slid a glance at him to assess his reaction, but he was busy putting cream in his coffee, a satisfied smirk on his lips.

  “Well, my mother does that for me now,” Thomas said, just awkwardly enough to show that he wasn’t a native English speaker. “I’m not married. I live with my mother and younger sister, Karin.” He smiled down at Pagan, eyes shining as he spoke of his sister. “She became eleven just last month, and she’s an even bigger fan of yours than I am. Don’t tell the Party Chairman, but I take her to the movies and buy her magazines whenever we are able to come to West Berlin.”

  “Don’t tell the Party Chairman, but we plan to corrupt you to our evil capitalist ways before the shoot is done.” Bennie Wexler burst into the conference room and opened his arms wide to them both, grinning. Although Bennie was six feet tall with a contented pot of a belly, his balding head, pointy ears, and mischievous eruptions of energy lent him an elfin quality. “There you are, my beautiful young movie stars! Come give your uncle Bennie a kiss.”

  Pagan and Thomas moved over to him as one. Bennie favored Pagan first, taking her shoulders firmly in his hands to kiss her lightly first on one cheek then another. He had large black-rimmed glasses over his small eyes, which missed little. A known clotheshorse, he wore an expensive gray cashmere sweater over a crisp white shirt and checked tie, and he smelled of coffee and turpentine. Bennie collected paintings and dabbled a bit in the art himself. She remembered the sharp odor well from the weeks she’d spent with him back when she was eleven, on the shoot for Anne of Green Gables. The shoot where Bennie and her mother had quarreled about something. Whatever it was, it had gotten Eva Jones banned from the set.

  “Wonderful to see you again, Bennie,” she said. “Thank you so much for bringing me onto this film. Really.” She
took a deep breath and smiled, not wanting to get too emotional. “It means a lot to me.”

  He patted her shoulders as his eyes darted over her, evaluating her. “I’m glad to have you, my dear.” He squinted at her slightly as he added with a bit more emphasis, “Be good for us, and we’ll be good for you.”

  Translation: Don’t start drinking and muck this up.

  The back of her neck got hot, and she hoped her cheeks weren’t burning. Bennie continued to stare at her, waiting.

  “I promise you have nothing to fear from me,” she said.

  “Good,” he said, his faint Austrian accent hardening the D at the end to a soft T. “Here, I will introduce you.”

  As he pulled her fellow actors over to say hello, it became clear that they all knew each other well. She was the newcomer. The rest of the company had been in town for a week, rehearsing without her.

  That, at least, was not her fault. She couldn’t be held responsible for the other actress’s pregnancy.

  But no matter whose fault it was, the other actors weren’t nearly as welcoming as Thomas Kruger. The movie’s star, pugnacious sixty-year-old James Brennan, with his excellent toupee and large white teeth, wouldn’t even shake her hand. He grunted at her, narrowed his eyes, and moved past her to sit at the head of the table.

  Brennan was notoriously cranky and a stickler for professionalism. No doubt he feared Pagan was still a drunken flake whose shenanigans would drag out the shoot.

  Indeed, Brennan’s fiftysomething costar, Adele Franklin, said it directly as she limply shook Pagan’s hand, fingering her diamond necklace with her other hand. “You won’t be causing any trouble on the set now, will you, my dear?”

  Pagan smiled with all the fake niceness she could muster, searching for the best way to respond. Luckily, Bennie interrupted, clapping his hands twice to announce:

  “All right, my cherubim and seraphim—the time has come! Take your seats! Adele, darling, you are here, of course…” Bennie steered her next to Brennan, placing the two biggest stars in their assigned seats. Coffee and croissants on little plates were dispensed.

  Matthew Smalls led Pagan to her seat. He was Bennie’s first assistant director, a short, slender, no-nonsense middle-aged man with teak-brown skin. He stood out in an otherwise all-white cast and crew, most of them local Berliners.

  But Bennie Wexler had fled the Nazis in the thirties and lost his parents to the concentration camps. He didn’t truck with prejudice or other “horseshit,” as he tended to call it. Matthew Smalls had been his assistant director for the past ten years because he ran the set with a calm competence and natural authority that kept things moving smoothly and allowed Bennie to do his job.

  Pagan made a note to befriend Matthew, since the first assistant director, even more than your costars or the director, could make your life comfortable or hellish during a shoot. So she smiled and thanked him as she found herself between Thomas Kruger and Hans Petermann, who played a Communist party official.

  “You, over there!” Bennie gestured impatiently at Devin Black, seated at an unassigned middle chair. “Studio flacks at the far end of the table, please.”

  Devin bowed his head and moved with good grace to the end of the room, where he took a seat that wasn’t even at the table but in a row behind.

  Next to Pagan, Thomas uttered a private, satisfied little laugh, even as he drummed his fingers nervously on his script.

  “I take it Devin Black’s annoyed you as much as he’s annoying me,” Pagan said, keeping her voice low so that only Thomas could hear.

  “He’s…” Thomas started to say, his voice full of some strong emotion. But then he caught himself and looked down, a muscle in his jaw tensing. “I’ve met worse.”

  So Thomas was afraid of Devin for some reason, too. Pagan was burning to find out more about her mysterious keeper and why he wanted her here, now.

  But that would have to wait. The last of the group was seating themselves, and Bennie was about to start the script read. Instead, Pagan took off her gloves and tapped her fingers next to Thomas’s, keeping time with his. Their fingers improvised a little dance around each other, and he grinned at her.

  “You’re going to be great,” she whispered. “But it helps to imagine everyone at the table naked.”

  Thomas chuckled, and his tanned skin flushed slightly as his gaze zoomed around the table at the Hollywood elite. “We have that trick in German theater, too.”

  “You’re a theater actor?” She shook her head as if that was a shame. “Then I’m afraid you’re overqualified for this.”

  He laughed softly again, casting her an appreciative but rueful glance. “I do wish that were true.”

  “And so we begin!” Bennie said, and silence fell over the table. Cigarette smoke rose in a gray cloud overhead as actors in their designer finery puffed nervously and fingered their scripts. Crew members in slouchier pants and rumpled shirts made notes in the margins of theirs. “We have at last the final piece of our puzzle with us today. She was gracious enough to come to us at the very last minute for this role, a role we are lucky to have her play—Miss Pagan Jones as Violet Houlihan.”

  Tepid applause greeted this introduction. Pagan smiled and nodded around the table as if it were a standing ovation. Traditionally at table reads, the director presented all the actors with speaking parts, but everyone else had met before, and Bennie was impatient to start.

  “We will begin with shots of the lovely town in which we find ourselves. A town divided by politicians, but not divided in spirit—Berlin,” said Bennie, his clipped voice taking on a more mellifluous, storyteller’s flourish. “The voice-over of American businessman L. T. Houlihan begins our tale…”

  James Brennan, barely glancing at his script, spoke his voice-over line. “‘For all that it’s a divided city, life in Berlin’s pretty normal, I guess. The Eastern side is still covered in rubble. But I had a plan to change all that…’”

  Violet didn’t appear until page twenty, so Pagan had time to sit back and react to the script as if for the first time. As James Brennan’s capitalist character blustered his way through the story, lying, swindling, and bamboozling everyone from the Communists he was selling to, to his mistress, to his wife—all so that he could get a promotion—she began to see just how clever Bennie had been.

  On the surface the film was critical of the Communists, showing them as backward, narrow-minded, hypocritical zealots, who longed for the luxuries of the West even as they decried them as decadent. But the main American businessman character L. T. Houlihan was the entertaining embodiment of Western rapaciousness, duplicity, and greed. No one escaped unscathed in Bennie Wexler’s cynical universe. Her own character, she was just now realizing, was the epitome of privileged American youth: blinded by lust; self-centered; and naive to the machinations of her double-dealing elders, which meant she’d grow up to be exactly like them.

  By the time her entrance came, she was truly excited to be playing the role. The movie was more than a fluffy comedy, deeper than a farce, and she was lucky to be in it.

  As her character flirted and sashayed her way into the movie, the people at the table begin to relax in relief. During her first scene with Brennan’s character, the chuckles began, and by page forty, when she first introduced him to her “fiancé from socialist heaven,” the laughs were coming with nearly every line.

  Thomas turned out to be better than she’d hoped. Actors with his kind of good looks usually relied too much on that to carry them through. But Thomas was bigger than life when he spoke, too, and perfectly in character—resentful of authority, crazy about her, and dumb as a stump. As the two of them idiotically discussed the “finer” points of relations between East and West, the room erupted in hilarity. By the end, with them married and Nicklaus the Communist completely compromised by the deceitful West, Bennie was beaming a
t her. As he read “‘The End,’” the room burst into applause. Pagan clapped, too, her blood humming with a high she’d forgotten about, the feeling of creative people coming together to make something great.

  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” Bennie said, and everyone stood, gathering their things. “Be sure you get a copy of the production schedule. We’ll see those of you in the scenes tomorrow on set. Pagan, my dear, come here for a moment.”

  “See you tomorrow,” Thomas said quietly, pulling back her chair to help her up. “And thank you.”

  “Thank you!” she said, smiling up at him as she put on her gloves. “We’re going to have so much fun.”

  The crew said “hello” and “great job” to her as she sidled past them toward Bennie. James Brennan and Adele Franklin nodded, still frosty but at least acknowledging her presence. Maybe, just maybe, she could pull this off.

  Bennie took her hand as the room emptied. Devin, subtle and sleek as a panther in the shadows among the glittering, chattering actors, took Thomas by the elbow as they left, pulling him aside in the lobby for a quiet word. From the expression on Thomas’s face, he wasn’t happy about it.

  “You are so very talented,” Bennie said to her. “I’m sorry the last movie we were on together was…difficult.”

  “That’s all right,” Pagan said, blushing at his compliment. “Mama wasn’t always easy to get along with. I just have to tell you, Bennie, this script is so smart and so funny—I know how lucky I am to be here.”

  “Good,” he said, releasing her hand, his eyes narrowing at her behind the thick lenses. “Good. Because there’s another thing I must tell you. You’re going to kill in this part, and you will be welcome to play it just so long as you remain sober and don’t cause trouble.”