The Carpetbaggers (39 page)

The nurse appeared almost instantly in the doorway. She walked quickly to the bed and stood next to Ilene, looking down at Rina. "Are we awake?" she asked with professional brightness.

Rina smiled slowly. "We're awake," she said faintly. "You're a new one, aren't you? I don't remember you."

The nurse flashed a quick look at Ilene. She had been on duty ever since Rina was checked into the hospital. "I’m the night nurse," she answered calmly. "I've just come on."

"I always get a headache when I sleep in the afternoon," Rina said. "I was wondering if I could have some aspirin?"

"I'll call the doctor," the nurse said.

Rina turned her head. "You must be exhausted," she said to Ilene. "Why don't you go home and get some rest? You've been here all day."

"I'm really not tired. I grabbed forty winks myself this afternoon."

The doctor came into the room just then and Rina turned toward the door. He stood there blinking his eyes behind his shining glasses. "Good evening, Miss Marlowe. Did you have a good rest?"

Rina smiled. "Too much, doctor. It's left me with a headache." Her brows knit. "It's a peculiar kind of a headache, though."

He came over to the side of the bed and put his fingers on her wrist, finding her pulse. "Peculiar?" he asked, looking down at his watch. "How do you mean peculiar?"

"It seems to hurt most when I try to remember names. I know you and I know my friend here" — she gestured to Ilene — "but when I try to say your name, the headache comes and I can't remember."

The doctor laughed as he let go of her wrist. "That's not at all unusual. There are some types of migraine headaches which make people forget their own name. Yours isn't that bad, is it?"

"No, it's not," Rina answered.

The doctor took an ophthalmoscope from his pocket and leaned over. "I'm going to look into your eyes with this," he said. "This makes it possible for me to see behind them and we may find out that your headache is due to nothing but simple eyestrain. Don't be frightened."

"I’m not frightened, doctor," Rina answered. "A doctor in Paris once looked at me with one of those. He thought I was in shock. But I wasn't. I was only hypnotized."

He placed his thumb in a corner of her eye and raised the eyelid. He pressed a button on the instrument and a bright light reflected through the pin-point hole. "What's your name?" he asked casually.

"Katrina Osterlaag," she answered quickly. Then she laughed. "See, doctor, I told you my headache wasn't that bad. I still know my name."

"What's your father's name?" he asked, moving the instrument to the other eye.

"Harrison Marlowe. See, I know that, too."

"What's your name?" he asked again, the light making a half circle in the upper corner of her eye.

"Rina Marlowe," she answered. She laughed aloud. "You can't trick me, doctor."

He turned off the light and straightened up. "No, I can't," he said, smiling down at her.

There was a movement at the door and two attendants wheeled in a large, square machine. They pushed it over to the side of the bed next to the doctor.

"This is an electroencephalograph," the doctor explained quietly. "It's used to measure the electrical impulses emanating from the brain. It's very helpful sometimes in locating the source of headaches so we can treat them."

"It looks very complicated," Rina said.

"It's not," he answered. "It's very simple, really. I'll explain it to you as we go along."

"And I thought all you had to do was take a few aspirins for a headache."

He laughed with her. "Well, you know how we doctors are," he said. "How can we ever justify our fees if all we do is recommend a few pills?"

She laughed again and the doctor turned toward Ilene. He nodded silently at her, his eyes gesturing to the door. He had already turned back to Rina by the time she had opened it.

"You'll come back later, won't you?" Rina asked.

Ilene turned around. The attendants were already plugging in the machine and the nurse was helping the doctor prepare Rina. "I’ll be back," Ilene promised. She walked out and closed the door gently behind her.

It was almost an hour later when the doctor came out of the room. He dropped into a chair opposite Ilene, his hand fishing in his pocket. It came out with a crumpled package of cigarettes, which he held out to her. She took one and he struck a match, holding it first for her, then for himself.

'Well?" she asked through stiff lips.

"We'll be able to tell more when we study the electroencephalogram," he said, dragging on his cigarette. "But there are already definite signs of deterioration in certain neural areas."

"Please, doctor," she said. "In words that I can understand."

"Of course," he said. He took a deep breath. "The brain already shows signs of damage in certain nerve areas. It is this damage that makes it difficult for her to remember things — simple, everyday things like names, places, time. Everything in her memory is present, there is no past, perhaps no today. It is an unconscious effort to recall these little things that causes the strain and brings on the headache."

"But isn't that a good sign?" she asked hopefully. "This is the first time in almost a week that she seems partly normal."

"I know how concerned you are," he said cautiously. "And I don't want to appear unduly pessimistic, but the human mechanism is a peculiar machine. It is a tribute to her physical stamina that she's holding up as well as she is. She's going through recurrent waves of extremely high fever, a fever that destroys everything in its path. It's almost a miracle that when it abates slightly, even for a moment, as it just has, she can return to a semblance of lucidity."

"You mean she's slipping back into delirium?"

"I mean that her temperature is beginning to climb again," he answered.

Ilene got to her feet quickly and crossed to the door. "Do you think I can speak to her again before she slips back?"

"I'm sorry," he said, shaking his head. He got to his feet. "Her temperature began to rise about twenty minutes after you left the room. I put her in sedation to ease the pain."

She stared at the doctor. "Oh, my God!" she said in a low voice. "How long, doctor? How long must she suffer like this?"

"I don't know," he said slowly. He took her arm. "Why don't you let me drive you home? There's nothing you can do tonight, believe me. She's asleep."

"I’d— I'd like to look in on her just for a moment," she said hesitantly.

"It's all right, but let me warn you. Do not be upset by her appearance. We had to cut off most of her hair to make the electroencephalogram."

* * *

Ilene closed the door of her office and crossed to her desk. There were some preliminary sketches of the costumes for a new picture waiting for her approval. She flicked on the light and walked over to the built-in bar.

She took down a bottle of Scotch and filled a glass with ice cubes. Covering the ice with the whisky, she went back to her desk, sat down and picked up the sketches. She sipped at the drink as she studied them.

She pressed a button in the arm of her chair and an overhead spotlight set in the ceiling shone down onto the drawings. She turned her chair toward the pedestal on her left, trying to imagine the dress on the model.

But her eyes kept misting over with tears. The sketches seemed to disappear and all she could see was Rina standing there on the pedestal, the white light shining down on her long blond hair — the white-blond hair that still hung in angry clinging tufts to the pillow under her shorn head.

"Why did you have to do it, God?" she cried aloud angrily at the ceiling. "Why do you always have to destroy the beautiful things? Isn't there enough ugliness in the world?"

The tears kept blurring in her eyes, but through them, she could still see Rina as she stood on the pedestal for the first time, the white silk shimmering down over her body.

It wasn't long ago. Five years. And the white silk was for a wedding gown. It was just before Rina's marriage to Nevada Smith.

It started out as a quiet wedding but it turned into a circus, the biggest publicity stunt ever to come out of Hollywood. And all because David Woolf had finally made it into the bed of the redheaded extra who had a bit-role in
The Renegade
.

Though he was a junior publicist, just one step above the lowest clerk in the department, and made only thirty-five a week, David was a very big man with the girls. This could be explained in one word. Nepotism. Bernie Norman was his uncle.

Not that it did him much good. But the girls didn't know that. How could they know that Norman could scarcely stand the sight of his sister's son and had only given him the job to shut her up? Now, in order to keep his nephew from annoying him, he had given his three secretaries orders to bar David from his office, no matter what the emergency.

This annoyed David, but right now it was far from his mind. He was twenty-three and there were more important considerations at hand. What a difference between the broads out here and those back home. He thought of the usherettes back at the Bijou Theater in New York, the frightened little Italian girls and the big brassy Irish, and the quickies that took place in the deserted second balcony or out on the empty stage in back of the big screen while the picture unfurled itself over their nervous heads. Even back there, Bernie Norman's name had been a help to him. Why else would they take an eighteen-year-old kid off a junk wagon and make him an assistant manager?

The girl was talking. At first David didn't hear her. "What did you say?" he asked.

"I’d like to go to the Nevada Smith wedding."

Her position may have been oblique but her approach wasn't. He recognized it. "It's going to be a small affair," he said.

Her voice was clearer now as she looked up at him. "There'll still be a lot of important people there who'd never see me any other way."

"I’ll see what I can do," he said.

It was a little while later, when he was making his third greedy attempt to grab the brass ring, that the idea came to him. "Yeow!" he yelled suddenly as the far-reaching implications unfurled in his mind.

Startled, the girl looked up at him and saw a blindly rapt expression on his face. "Take it easy, honey. You'll wake the neighbors," she whispered softly, thinking he had reached his climax.

And, in a manner of speaking, he had.

* * *

Bernie Norman prided himself on being the first executive in the studio each day. Every morning at seven o'clock, his long black chauffeur-driven limousine would swirl through the massive steel gates of the executive entrance and draw to a stop in front of his office building. He liked to get in early, he always said, because it gave him a chance to go through his correspondence, which was at least twice as voluminous as that of anyone else in the studio, before his three secretaries came in. That way, the rest of his day could be left free for anyone who came to his door. His door was always open, he claimed.

Actually, he got there early because he was a born snoop. Though no one ever spoke about it, everyone in the studio knew what he did the moment the front door closed behind him. He would prowl through the silent offices, executive and secretary alike, looking at the papers lying on desks, peeking into whatever desk drawers happened to be unlocked and examining the contents of every letter and memo. It got so that whenever an executive wanted to be sure that something got to Norman's attention, he would leave a rough draft of his message lying innocently on his desk when he went home.

Norman justified this to himself easily. He was merely keeping his finger on the pulse of things. How could one man control so complicated an organization, otherwise?

He arrived at the door to his own private office that morning about eight o'clock, his inspection having taken a little longer than usual. He sighed heavily and opened his door. Problems, always problems.

He started for his desk, then froze with horror. His nephew David was asleep on his couch, sheaves of papers strewn over the floor around him. Bernie could feel the anger bubbling up inside him.

He crossed the room and pulled David from the couch. "What the hell are you doing sleeping in my office, you bum bastard!" he shouted.

David sat up, startled. He rubbed his eyes. "I didn't mean to fall asleep. I was looking at some papers and I must have dozed off."

"Papers!" Norman yelled. "What papers?" Quickly he picked one up. He turned horror-stricken eyes back to his nephew. "The production contract for
The Renegade
!" he accused. "My own confidential file!"

"I can explain," David said quickly, awake now.

"No explanations!" Norman said dramatically. He pointed to the door. "Out! If you're not out of the studio in five minutes, I'll call the guards and have you thrown out. You're through. Fired!
Fartig
! One thing we don't tolerate in this studio — sneaks and spies. My own sister's son! Go."

"Aw, come off it, Uncle Bernie," David said, getting to his feet.

"Come off it, he tells me!" Norman roared. "Half the night his mama keeps me up with telephone calls." His voice unconsciously mimicked his sister's nasal whine. " 'My Duvidele didn't come home yet, all night he didn't come home. Maybe he vass in a accident.' Accident, hah! I should tell her her little Duvidele was fucking all night the redheaded
shiksa
extra from the studio, hah! Get out!"

David stared at his uncle. "How did you know?"

"Know?" his uncle roared. "I know everything that goes on in this studio. You think I built a business like this fucking in furnished rooms all night? No! I worked, I tell you, I worked like a dirty dog. Day and night!"

He walked over to the chair behind his desk and sank into it. He clasped his hand over his heart in an exaggerated gesture. "Aggravation like this, from my own flesh and blood first thing in the morning, I need like another
luch im kopf
!" He unlocked his desk and took out a bottle of pills. Quickly he swallowed two and leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed.