A Simple Scale Read online

  “No call for profanity. I’m just doing my job.”

  “Yeah. Just following orders. We’ve heard that before. Is that all, Mr… I’m sorry, what was your name?”

  You remember his name. His name is Carmichael. Though, from his complexion and his build and that rat-a-tat accent, you’d guess it ended with a vowel before he moved out to the Coast.

  “Roy Carmichael,” he says.

  “Okay, Mr Carmichael. Are we done?”

  “We’re done. Thank you for your time.”

  With a gentle tug, Carmichael takes the pamphlet from you, rolls it up and slides it back inside his jacket. He leaves you with a smile and a nod and walks back towards the studio, whistling as he goes.

  **

  There’s a Buick parked up in the road at the end of Mary’s drive. In the front seats, two men in snap-brim hats. You can’t see their faces, only their silhouettes, and they hardly move, except to smoke.

  Aren’t they meant to disguise themselves as mailmen or maintenance men? Their presence is so obvious, so deliberate. They want Mary to know she’s being watched. That’s assuming, of course, it’s her they’re watching.

  You shower and change your clothes and you call on her, jumping over the fence with a half bottle of Scotch and two clean glasses. She’s already on the terrace, wearing a floral kaftan, a green silk headscarf and furred slippers. Though it’s only 6pm you can smell the alcohol on her breath as you lean in to kiss her on the cheek.

  “You know,” she says. “I ought to have quit Los Angeles a long time ago.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This place. The industry. It’s changed so much since I first came out here. Back then it was run by artists. Oh, sure, there were money men, but they knew art when they saw it, most of them. And they knew when to keep their distance. When to sign a cheque, and when to let the artists do their work. But now? Now it feels like the movies are being made by suits and politicians.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, exactly. You must know this already, working down there every day. Sometimes I think out here on the Coast is where this country of ours goes mad.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. The frontier. All those pioneers heading west. All America’s momentum pushing in this direction. But that drive, to head off into the wilderness, not knowing what was on the other side of the next mountain range, the next ridge… It must have taken some kind of madness.”

  “Or bravery?”

  “Oh no. Bravery has a nobility to it. Doing the right thing, even when you’re scared of the outcome. The pioneers, they were just crazy. They could have stayed at home and got along just fine, most of them, but they had to keep going. Driven by madness, or greed. Looking for gold, looking for oil. And by the time they reached the Pacific all they had left was madness.”

  She knocks back what’s left of her whisky and reaches for the bottle.

  “The trouble with this madness,” she continues, “is that it hits the coast and has nowhere to go but backwards, rolling over the country till it reaches Washington. And there it sits, and stagnates. Just you mark my words, Sol. We have become a people scared. Look at what’s happening in New York, with this Rosenberg character. They’ll crucify him for what he’s done. For what he’s alleged to have done. And they won’t stop there. One sacrifice begets another. They’ll crucify us all.”

  “But if you’ve done nothing wrong…”

  “You don’t have to do something wrong, Sol. You know, during the war I was a part of something called Bundles for Britain. You know what it was? A knitting circle. Sending clothes over to kids in London when they were getting all hell bombed out of them. Now they say it was a Red organisation, a Communist front. Can you believe that?”

  Is now the right time to tell her? Though she’s been drinking all day, or at least all afternoon, she sounds collected enough to understand.

  “There were men outside your house tonight.”

  “Oh, I know about them,” she says. “They been there all day.”

  “They looked so out-of-place.”

  “It was the hats, wasn’t it? You never see men wearing that style of hat out here. And they’re meant to be ‘undercover’. You know their best trick? They tie a white rag to your bumper so they can follow you through heavy traffic.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Wish I was. Did it to me, one of the last times I drove into Hollywood. I was meeting an old friend for lunch. Katy Rogers. You remember her? Hopalong Gals of ’36?”

  You remember it. You and your brother saw that movie at the Sunshine on Houston. Every boy in the cinema wolf-whistled whenever Katy Rogers appeared onscreen.

  “Well, it was Katy who saw it. And she said, ‘Laffy…’ That’s what she calls me. That’s what they all used to call me. She said, ‘Laffy, you got a white rag on the back of your car.’ I thought I must have just picked it up some place, just some rag left in the street got caught up in the bumper somehow. But no. That thing was tied on real tight. And they’ve been bugging my telephone calls.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Tapping sound. Beginning of every call. Tap tap tap. Not exactly cloak and dagger.”

  “Jesus. What’s happening to the world?”

  “You know what I don’t understand? During the war I believed, I truly believed, we were fighting against the Fascists. I thought that was the whole reason we went to war. Now I think we just took Fascism and gave it another name. Cleaned it up a little. But you think about it. These Feds, and that goddamn Committee… who are they chasing after? Oh, they may say they’re going after Reds, but look at the names, look at the people on that list. Jews, queers and unionists. Every last one of them.”

  **

  There’s little chance you’ll get much sleep tonight, and so you’re back behind the wheel, driving down the Canyon and into the city. Ella Fitzgerald singing Stairway to the Stars and the engine purring low beneath the music.

  No late night movies this time. No sitting at a bar making a single beer last an hour while you make up your mind about what it is you want. You drive straight to Pershing Square, coming in on the northwest corner, and you perform a single clockwise lap, slowing as you pass along Hill Street.

  He’s there. Nick. Talking to his friends. And as you slow the car he waves at someone – not you – and calls out, “Hey! Bill!”

  Impeccable timing. Was everything tonight timed just so you could witness this? Perhaps the night you met there was another man, like you, driving around the square or looking on from the side lines. And now Nick and this other ‘Bill’ are walking away towards the public restroom. In your stomach, a knot of envy and disgust. In your eyes, the vinegar sting of tears. You clear your throat.

  How does the poem go? Ron read it to you once. You read it and re-read it after he died. How did it go?

  For the world, which lies before us like a land of dreams

  Has really neither joy, nor love, nor light…

  It’s gone. Couldn’t even remember a single poem. You slam the ball of your hand against the steering wheel. As the immediate pain subsides you hit it three more times in quick succession. The lights of Downtown blur into coloured snowflakes. You wipe away the tears, wipe your nose with your wrist, and drive back towards Hollywood and Laurel Canyon.

  Chapter 7:

  MANHATTAN, OCTOBER 2001

  Rosa was back at her post that morning, with a small white dressing in the place where they’d removed her mole.

  “It was very quick,” she said. “I barely feel a thing. They say in five days they take this off and in a few weeks you will never know I had a mole.”

  She went back to the utility room and began loading laundry into the dryer. Natalie stayed at the kitchen’s breakfast bar, drinking coffee. From the laundry room, Rosa called, “Dolly tell me you were late yesterday.”

  Natalie made a face Rosa couldn’t see.

  “I slept lat
e.”

  “With a boyfriend, she tell me.”

  “It wasn’t a boyfriend. I stayed at a friend’s.”

  “You should find yourself boyfriend.”

  “Why would I want to do a thing like that?”

  “Pretty girl your age should have boyfriend. Should have husband. But start with boyfriend. When was last time you have a boyfriend?”

  Natalie took a deep breath as if it might help her to remember.

  “Not that long ago.”

  “How long?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Three years. That’s how long it had been. Tyler. Lovely Tyler. Even now, three years on, a twinge of remorse whenever she thought of him. There had been no good reason to let it fizzle out, and as time passed she found it harder to remember why she had.

  Sol was unusually mobile that day, shuffling from one room to the next, going through old papers and books, taking them down from their shelves and dropping them to the floor. Natalie spent much of her time chasing after him, picking things up and putting them back where they belonged. It became a kind of game between them. She sensed the mischief in him. When, finally, he rested, Natalie went through his mail; a royalties statement ($0.75) for a film she’d never heard of, an update from one of his charities. The box file of old paperwork was almost full. She would have to go through it someday soon, pick out the stuff no accountant would ever ask to see, and shred it all. The only thing holding her back was the worry that she might destroy something important.

  Sol began humming along to some piece of music in his head, and Natalie paused a moment to watch and listen to him. She felt an overwhelming desire to take him somewhere. Just bundle him into a hire car, swaddled in blankets. Drive him across the country. Never looking back.

  He knew – or, at least, had known – about the attacks. He and Rosa watched it all happening on TV, and he and Natalie spoke about it the following day. Four weeks on it was still all anyone could talk about, but Sol no longer mentioned it. She almost envied him.

  Pavel Grekov’s timing couldn’t have been much worse. First the attacks, now this. Sol needed routine. He needed calm. And every week seemed to bring with it more rupture. Perhaps it would have made more sense to ignore Pavel’s message. Tear up Dolly’s note, forget the conversation, pretend it never happened. If he was serious, let him pursue it through a lawyer. Yet all she could think of was the score. He had it with him in New York. And if she saw it, she would know. So she had to see it.

  She called the hotel and the receptionist put her through to Grekov’s room. He asked why she was calling and she told him that perhaps they’d got off on the wrong foot. Maybe they could meet again. Maybe this time he could bring along the score.

  “Then you come here. To my hotel.”

  “I’d be happier meeting somewhere more public.”

  “I won’t bring the score outside. You could take it, or your friend could take it for you. Run away. Steal it.”

  What was he picturing, exactly? That they’d meet somewhere outdoors and that some accomplice of Natalie’s would swipe the score from his hands and make off into the subway? Absurd. But still, she had to see it.

  “Alright,” she said. “We’ll meet in your hotel.”

  It was unseasonably warm; one of those early autumn evenings when summer splutters its last. The sunlight struggled its way through a thick haze and every city block seemed to have doubled in length.

  He met her on the ground floor of his hotel. Typical for Midtown. Fake marble lobby, beige corridors. He was on the fifth floor, so they had to take the elevator. She hadn’t used an elevator in weeks. Her hands grew clammy. The world dropped away beneath her, like a rollercoaster’s sudden descent. She breathed as deeply and as quietly as she could and closed her eyes. An automated voice said, “Doors closing” and the doors closed. She went through everything that might happen. Fire. Snapped cable. Both.

  “Floor 5. Doors opening.”

  She sprang out into the corridor, breathing in for the first time since the lobby. Another deep breath. The corridor went off in two directions, and Grekov gestured to the left. As they walked to his room she asked him how long he had been in New York.

  “Four days,” he said. “Before then, I was one month in Los Angeles. I knew Mr Conrad worked in Hollywood, so I went there. Sounds stupid, no? I wasted so much time in LA. And my visa was about to expire.” He lowered his voice. “It expired yesterday. So I come here.”

  His room was small, with a view of an adjacent car park and the grey-brown flank of the Empire State; too close to be immediately familiar, too immense to be anything else. He told her to sit, and Natalie took a chair next to the dressing table. The only other place to sit was his bed.

  Grekov opened the wardrobe and lifted out a suitcase in a washed-out shade of olive green. He laid it flat on the bed, opened it, and from beneath a layer of shirts and socks produced a manuscript; its cover made of faded purple card, the paper inside yellow with age. It looked authentic enough. At the very least, it looked old.

  “Here,” Grekov said, opening it on a particular page. “Marsh Pechorin. The Pechorin March.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Pechorin is the hero. He duels with his enemy, but before the duel there is a march. This piece.”

  She gestured to the score. “Mind if I…?”

  “No. You read it. That’s why you’re here, no?”

  He smiled. His manner, now that she was here and about to read the score, was transformed. She glanced at him just briefly before she began. His gaze was fixed on her and not the score. There was a lively, attractive mischief in his eyes. She looked away. She had come here to see the manuscript.

  And here it was, open in her lap. The paper, though stained by cigarette smoke and spilt coffee, was delicate and smooth to the touch. The ink had faded from black to a rusty shade of brown, but was still legible. Some of the notation was unclear, she didn’t recognise the Cyrillic script, but she could follow it well enough. She ran her finger gently across the first few bars and hummed the melody beneath her breath.

  There it was. The same tune that had kept her awake the night before. A melody any child could hum, if you asked them to. But not only that, not just the melody. The same intervallic progression on the same beats; the same starting note moving up to the same fifth. Identical.

  “You see?” said Grekov.

  Don’t nod.

  “The same, yes? Exactly the same.”

  “They’re very similar.”

  Don’t nod.

  “It’s the same.”

  She asked how he came to notice the similarity, and he told her it was his father who had noticed it first.

  “Ten years ago,” he said. “We start getting American television, and we have Battle Station Alpha. Boyevye Stantsi Alpha, we call it. And when the show begins they play the music. My father, he pointed at the television and said, ‘That is your dedushka… your grandfather’s music.’”

  Pavel’s father had only ever heard the Pechorin March played on a piano. Even so, he was convinced these two pieces were one and the same, and he passed on to Pavel the desire to prove it.

  “My father died six months ago,” said Pavel. “Cancer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It is okay.” He smiled sadly. “But I make a promise that I would come here and find Sol Conrad and speak to him.”

  Natalie looked again at the score.

  “There’s no way Mr Conrad could have seen this. This is the first time it’s been to the States, yes?”

  Pavel nodded.

  “And was it ever recorded?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s impossible. Or a coincidence. They say there are only so many melodies, only so many possible combinations…”

  “But you read it. You know it’s the same.”

  “Then how do you explain this?”

  “He must have heard it.”

  “Where?”

  �
�Russia.”

  “And I told you, he’s never been.”

  “I have to meet him.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I won’t upset him. I just want to speak with him.”

  Natalie laughed, a little more cruelly than she intended.

  “He struggles to remember what he had for breakfast most days, let alone events that happened fifty, sixty years ago.”

  “Then what harm is there?”

  Perhaps, all the harm in the world. Sol’s life was one of patterns, routine. But they could meet, Pavel and Sol. They could meet, and either it would be a Good Day or a Bad Day. And if it was a Good Day, Sol would have all the answers. And if it was a Bad Day Sol would have nothing and Pavel would leave empty handed, mystery unsolved. Natalie didn’t know which outcome she would prefer. Give Grekov the answers he was looking for and who knows how it would end? Deny him those answers, and he would just keep trying. But she had seen the score now. There might only be so many melodies, so many combinations, but this was something else. She had to know.

  “Okay,” she said. “But if he gets upset, or angry, you’ll have to leave.”

  Pavel smiled again; another half-sad, uneven smile. With her on the chair and him on the bed their legs were interlocked and almost touching, like the teeth of a zip.

  Chapter 8:

  LOS ANGELES, SEPTEMBER 1950

  Arthur J. Henderson, Assistant Producer of Music, is finishing a phone call; apologising for something that can’t possibly be his fault, and then apologising, it would seem, for his apology. He wasn’t expecting you, and for a moment after he’s hung up he just sits there, blinking.

  “Conrad? I didn’t ask to see you. Did I ask to see you? I didn’t ask to see you, did I?”

  “No.”

  “Then why… what are you… why are you here?”

  “Scarlet Letter.”

  “What about it?”

  “Did I get the job?”

  “Oh, well. Gee. Truthfully, I don’t know. I believe Mr Walsh is still weighing up all the options.”

  “It’s been three months.”