He walked into the kitchenette and started making himself a drink.
“You were at the Field this morning? I didn’t see you,” he said from there.
“I didn’t want you to see me.”
“I hope you were suitably impressed.”
“I was,” Martha said. “You had those kids hanging on your every word.”
“I was talking about the flying.”
“I was talking about Lieutenant Pickering, the Marine officer. You weren’t that way when you left. You’ve changed. You reminded me of my husband today.”
“He’s dead.”
“Why did you have to say that?”
“Because sometimes I think you think he’s coming back.”
“I guess I did for a while. No more.”
He finished making his drink and went back into the sitting room. Martha hadn’t moved from the window.
“So now you get on with your life, right?” Pick asked.
“Right.”
“And does that include me?”
She turned, carefully put her glass on the windowsill, and then pushed herself erect and looked at him.
“I’m sorry I brought you here, Pick,” she said. “Sorry I put you through this.”
She touched his cheek with her hand, then stepped around him and walked across the room and out into the corridor. She stopped and turned.
“Take care of yourself,” she said, and then she was gone.
Pick exhaled audibly. Then he put his untouched drink on the windowsill beside hers, waited for the sound of the elevator to tell him that she was gone, and walked out of the apartment.
At the door he turned, went into the kitchenette and picked up the bottle of scotch, took a last look around the Penthouse, and left.
[TWO]
Belle-Vue Garden Apartments
Los Angeles, California
1325 Hours 4 November 1942
When the door buzzer sounded, Dawn Morris was at her card table, autographing a stack of eight-by-ten-inch photographs.
Actually, they weren’t real photographs, run through an enlarger; they were printed, like the cover of a magazine, but on heavy paper with white borders, so they looked like photographs. And this disappointed her just a little when she first saw them.
Dawn managed to talk herself out of that little disappointment, however, after it sank in that there were two thousand of them, and that not just any old photographer took them, but Metro-Magnum Studios’ Chief Still Photographer himself, and that Mr. Cooperman, who was Jake Dillon’s stand-in as publicity chief, told her they would order more as necessary.
They’d printed up all those photographs so she could pass them out on the war bond tour. The picture showed her in something like a military uniform, except that she wasn’t wearing a shirt under the jacket, and you could see really quite a lot of her cleavage.
Mr. Cooperman said they were going to start calling her “The GI’s Sweetheart.” And just as soon as she came off the tour, they were going to start shooting her first feature film. She would play a Red Cross girl who breaks the rules and dates a GI. She falls in love with him and gets caught, and gets in trouble. They hadn’t resolved that yet-how she was going to get out of trouble-but they would by the time she came off the war bond tour.
Anyway, she was under contract to Metro-Magnum Studios. And they were paying her five hundred dollars a week. While that certainly wasn’t nearly as much money as they were paying some star like Veronica Wood, for example, it was a lot more than she ever made in a month, much less a week.
Mr. Cooperman said they wanted to take advantage of the war bond tour publicity, so they were going to make the movie just as fast as they could. They would get it out right away, not let it gather dust in the vault. Dawn wasn’t sure how she felt about that. You obviously couldn’t make a high-quality movie if you did it in a hurry. But on the other hand, it was better to be the star of a movie made in a hurry than not to be in any movie at all.
When the doorbell rang, Dawn had no idea who it could be. Somebody she didn’t want to see anyway, probably; so she didn’t answer the door at first.