reaching for a chord.
Dang it, she was not going to cry again.
She hastily put the photo back into its folder and continued going through the others. She’d learned how to conjure tears on cue for her movie roles, and she could damn well do it in reverse now.
She came to the last folder, labeled Eva Murnau Jones.
Murnau. That had been her mother’s maiden name. Eva’s mother’s name was Ursula, her father’s was Emil. That was everything Pagan knew about that side of her family.
She opened the folder and paged past bank statements and the dull, posed pictures of Mama with her hair freshly done. Near the back of the file lay a white-bordered photo, smaller, grainier, and very different from the rest. In it a handsome blonde woman around thirty years old stood in front of a worn stone building. She was smiling, holding a swaddled baby in her arms.
Pagan flipped the photo over. In fading script someone had written: Ursula mit Eva, 1924.
Grandmama and Mama had moved to Los Angeles in 1925, so this must have been taken in Berlin when Mama was an infant. Pagan scanned the photo for anything that might identify where it had been taken, but there was no street sign or building number, just a glowering winged griffin carved in stone over the door.
There couldn’t be more than one building with that design in Berlin. Funny how that’s where she was headed now.
Maybe it was nothing. But all of a sudden, more than anything, she wanted to walk the street where her grandmother had held her infant mother, maybe even explore the building where Mama had lived. She didn’t know what going there might tell her, but any tiny glimpse she could get into her mother’s life or her mother’s mind was precious.
All she had now of her family was the past.
As she plunged into reading the script for Neither Here Nor There, two people across the aisle began glancing over at her furtively, whispering. She sank back against the plane’s round window and lifted the script to block her face.
Fortunately, the script was smart and funny, mocking both capitalism and socialism at every turn. Pagan was slated to play Violet, a flirtatious teenage Southern belle who caused havoc wherever she went. She swiftly fell in love with a handsome young Communist and secretly married him, much to the horror of her family, particularly her rabidly capitalist father. Although James Brennan, former star of gangster movies and expert tap dancer, was the star, her role wasn’t far behind his in size. Jerry Allenberg had been right about one thing at least—this was a pip of a role, and she’d better not mess it up.
She let everyone else get off first at Idlewild Airport. She stepped out the door onto the metal bridge under the vast, saucer-shaped overhang, and the warm humid air was enough to make her remove her gloves and unbutton the top of her dress. The metal rungs clattered beneath her heels as she walked toward the gleaming terminal.
It was past eight o’clock at night, and she was hungry again. Time to catch a cab to the Waldorf and order some room service. Maybe a big juicy steak. She could get the concierge to mail the stack of magazines to Mercedes at Lighthouse, with a note to say hi. Maybe it wasn’t too late to call M. She had to tell someone about Nicky and that Donna woman.
Thinking about Nicky being married again literally made her heart ache. As she entered the terminal, Pagan pressed one hand against the painful spot. She was too young to have a heart attack, wasn’t she?
“Hello, Pagan.”
She jerked her head up, hand clutching the fabric at her throat.
A slim figure in a perfectly tailored black suit detached itself from the shadows and stepped into a pool of light.
Devin Black was in New York, waiting for her.
The maître d’ swept his narrowed gaze over Devin and Pagan. When he looked up, he was smiling. They had passed some unspoken test. “Welcome to the Panorama Room,” he said. “Do you have a reservation?”
“Do we need one?” Devin stepped closer and slid a folded bill into the man’s ready left hand.
“Not at all!” The maître d’ slipped the money into the interior pocket of his suit jacket. “This way, please!”
He led them across the polka-dot carpet around the perimeter of the dimly lit circular lounge, to a table overlooking the restaurant’s sweeping view of the curving interior of the Pan Am Terminal. Taking hold of one of the transparent Lucite chairs, the maître d’ slid it back and bowed a little toward Pagan. “Mademoiselle.”
Pagan sank down on the cushioned seat as Devin sat opposite. Below them the white expanse of the new terminal spread like some adult version of Tomorrowland. On a Tuesday night, the place was quiet, the baggage check-in empty. Ladies in Pan Am blue rested their elbows against the white seat-selection counter, talking in low voices. A few waiting passengers smoked in rows of square padded seats, feet up on coffin-shaped tables. Beyond the outer wall, or rather, a curtain of glass, skycaps waited for arriving passengers on a wide concrete porch.
A white-coated waiter arrived to turn their water glasses over and give them menus. Devin waved him away. “I’ll have a salad with vinaigrette and a flank steak, medium rare.”
Pagan’s simmering frustration and anger at being tracked down nearly boiled over. That was exactly what she wanted to order. She pondered snatching a menu and making them both wait for a good long time while she pretended to decide, but she was hungry. “I’ll have the same,” she said.
The waiter put the menus under his arm with a flourish. “And to drink?”
She looked Devin dead in the eye. “Water.”
Devin smiled. “As the lady said. And please let the cook know we have to catch the flight to Berlin in an hour.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll put your order at the top of the list.” The waiter gave a little bow and hustled off.
Pagan kept staring at Devin. “I know how you did it.”
He stared back. “And I know how you did it.”
That almost threw her, but she plowed on. “Somehow you arranged for every seat on every direct flight to New York to be sold out, which forced me to do a stopover in Chicago. That delayed me long enough to let you get here first.”
His blue eyes narrowed. “Your father had a bunch of cash in his safe, and you knew the combination.”
“And you have your own boatload of cash—enough to buy up every empty seat on every plane to New York,” she said. “The benefits of working for a big movie studio.”
“You know every creaky board in your house,” he said.
She shrugged. “The benefits of a misspent youth.”
He opened his hands as if releasing all control. “Perhaps all this was meant to be.”
“Nicky used to say that all the
