cocoa.’
It was an unlikely promise. Kitty was a young busty blonde who attracted men, young and old, as surely as picnics bring wasps. She looked up, saw the look on Stuart’s face and gave him a kiss on the end of his nose. ‘I’m a child of the sexual revolution, Boyd darling. You must have read about it in Playboy?’
‘I never read Playboy; I just look at the pictures. Let’s go to bed.’
‘I’ve made you that roasted eggplant dip you like.’ Kitty King was a staunch vegetarian; worse, she was an evangelistic one. Amazing, someone at the office had remarked after seeing her in a bikini, to think that it’s all fruit and nuts. ‘You like that, don’t you.’
‘Let’s go to bed,’ said Stuart.
‘I must turn off the oven first, or my chickpea casserole will dry up completely.’
She backed away from him slowly. In spite of the disparity in their ages, she found him disconcertingly attractive. Until now her experiences with men had been entirely under her control but Boyd Stuart, in spite of all his anxious remarks, kept her in her place. She was surprised and annoyed to discover that she rather liked the new sort of relationship.
She looked at him and he smiled. He was a handsome man: the wide, lined face and the mouth that turned down at one side could suddenly be transformed by a devastating smile, and his laugh was infectious.
‘Your chickpea casserole!’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘We don’t want that to dry up, darling.’ He laughed a loud, booming laugh and she could not resist joining in. He put out his hand to her. She noticed that the back of it was covered with small scars and the thumb joint was twisted. She had asked him about it once but he had made some joke in reply. There was always a barrier; these men who had worked in the field were all the same in this respect. There was no way in which to get to know them completely. There was always a ‘no entry’ sign. Always some part of their brain was on guard and awake. And Kitty King was enough of a woman to want her man to be completely hers.
Boyd Stuart pushed open the door of the bedroom. It was the best room in the apartment in many ways: large and light, like so many of these rambling Victorian houses near the river on the unfashionable side of Victoria Station. That was why he had a writing desk in a window space of his bedroom, a corner which Kitty King liked to refer to grandiosely as ‘the study’.
‘Kitty!’ he called.
She came into the bedroom, leaned back against the door and smiled as the latch clicked.
‘Kitty. The lock of my desk is broken.’ He opened the inlaid walnut front of the antique bureau. The lock had been torn away from the wood and there were deep scratches in the polished surface. ‘You didn’t break into it, did you, Kitty?’
‘Of course not, Boyd. I’m not interested in your old love letters.’
‘It’s not funny, Kitty. I have classified material in here.’ Already he was sifting through the drawers and pigeonholes. He found the airline ticket, his passport, the letter to the bank, a couple of contact addresses and an old photo of a man named Bernard Lustig cut from a film trade magazine. There was also a newspaper cutting that he had been given by the department.
An all-expenses-paid trip to the movie capital of the world and the luxury of the exclusive Beverly Hills Hotel.
Veterans of the US Third Army and attached units who were concerned with the movement of material from the Kaiseroda salt mine, Merkers, Thuringia, Germany, in the final days of the Second World War are urgently sought by B. Lustig Productions Inc. The corporation is preparing a major motion picture about this historical episode. Veterans should send full details, care of this newspaper, to Box 2188. Photos and documents will be treated with utmost care and returned to the sender by registered post.
Kitty King watched him search through the items.
‘Nothing seems to have been taken,’ said Stuart. ‘Did you leave the door open when you went down to the dustbin?’
‘There was no one on the stairs,’ she said.
‘Waiting upstairs,’ said Stuart. ‘The same kid who did the burglaries in the other flats, I’ll bet.’
‘Are you going to phone the department?’
‘Nothing’s missing. And the front door has no signs of forced entry.’
‘The papers for your trip were there, weren’t they?’
He nodded.
‘Then you must have known about going last Sunday – when you put the tickets and things in there.’ There was a note of resentment in her voice.
‘I still wasn’t sure until I saw the DG late this afternoon.’
‘I wish you’d discussed it with me, Boyd.’ He looked up sharply. This was a new side of Kitty King. She had always described their relationship as no more than a temporary ‘shack-up’. She was a career woman, she had always maintained, with a good degree in political science from the London School of Economics, and the aim of becoming a Permanent Secretary, the top of the Administrative Class grades.
Stuart said, ‘If I phone the night duty officer, they’ll be all over us. You know what a fuss they’ll make. We’ll be up all night writing reports.’
‘You know best, sweetheart.’
‘A kid probably, looking for cash. When he found only this sort of thing he got out quickly, before you came back upstairs again.’
‘Does your wife still have her key to this place?’ Kitty asked.
‘She wouldn’t break open my desk.’
‘That’s not what I asked you.’
‘It was just some kid looking for cash. Nothing is missing. Stop worrying about it.’
‘She’d like to get you back, Boyd. You realize that, don’t you?’
Boyd put his arms round her tightly and kissed her for a long time.
The Steins – father and son – lived in a large house in Hollywood. Cresta Ridge Drive provides a sudden and welcome relief from the exhaust fumes and noise of Franklin Avenue. It is one of a tangle of steep winding roads that lead into the Hollywood hills and end at Griffith Park and Lake Hollywood. Its elevation gives the house a view across the city, and on smoggy days when the pale tide of pollution engulfs the city, the sky here remains blue.
By Californian standards these houses are old, discreetly sited behind mature horse-chestnut trees now grown up to the roofs. In the thirties some of them, their gardens blazing with hibiscus and bougainvillea as they were this day, had been owned by film stars. Even today long-lost but strangely familiar faces can be glimpsed at the check-out of the Safeway or self-serving gasoline at Wilbur’s. But most of Stein’s neighbours were corporate lawyers, ambitious dentists and refugees from the nearby aerospace communities.
