The New Confessions

20 The Last Walk of Jean Jacques Rousseau

I believe that The Last Walk of Jean Jacques Rousseau has something of a cult following on the university film-club circuit. I saw a poll in a magazine once where it came third, equal with Juliet of the Spirits, after Un Chien Andalou and Last Year in Marienbad, in the category “Offbeat and Avant-garde.” It was the last film I made and far and away the strangest.

It was shot in three weeks, cost $128,000 and lasts one hour and ten minutes. Eddie financed it (“No more than one hundred grand for an art movie”) on the conditions that I use a pseudonym and that I direct a low-budget epic called Hercules and the Sirens afterwards. I agreed at once. I knew that Last Walk would be my last film.

The final years of Jean Jacques’s life were spent in Paris, in a tranquil enough state, apart from his occasional bouts of acute paranoia. He was famous and sought after but made no attempt to capitalize on his renown. He received many visitors, encouraging young people in particular to come and see him, and took up his old career as a music copyist. His great hobby was botanizing, or herborizing as he called it, and he knew no greater pleasure than to take long solitary walks through the countryside round Paris, frequently in the company of a friend. In the last two years of his life—1777 and ’78—he wrote his final piece of autobiography, the Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire. It is unfinished, but in the course of these ten promenades he surveys his life from the serene vantage point of old age. The Confessions is passionate and vital. The Rêveries is elegiac and sagacious. In the summer of 1778, feeling unwell, he and Thérèse went to live in a pavilion on the estate of the marquis de Girardin at Ermenonville, northwest of Paris near Senlis. There, he worked on the Rêveries, herborized and seemed to be regaining his strength.

On July 1, 1778, it was a warm day. Rousseau went for a long walk with the marquis’s son in the meadows of the park at Ermenonville. That night he dined extremely well in the company of the marquis and his family. He seemed amiable and vivacious. The next day, however, he felt ill. Thérèse assumed he had eaten too much. At ten o’clock, staring out of the windows at the gardens, he had a severe apoplectic fit. He fell to the ground, breathless and in agony, striking his head against the floor, causing a bad wound. He died almost immediately.

The Last Walk of Jean Jacques Rousseau opens with a shot of the dining room in the pavilion. Jean Jacques (Karl-Heinz) sits at the table eating his breakfast. The young Girardin comes to collect him and they set off on their walk. The pavilion, we then observe, is set in a meadow on the Monterey Peninsula near Big Sur. The sense of reality that the opening scene seemed to present so faithfully begins to fall away, never to be recovered.

When Jean Jacques had collected and examined a plant he used to tie a red or gold ribbon round one of the same type so he would know it was documented. On leaving the pavilion, he and Girardin find themselves in a prairie alive with red and gold ribbons. They enter a copse of trees and descend into a little wooded canyon through which runs a fast shallow river (the Little Sur River, in fact). Two girls are sitting beside it, one combing the other’s hair. In the background their horses graze. Jean Jacques watches them mount up and ford the river. We cut to the prelude to the cherry-orchard sequence idyll in The Confessions: Part 1. Color gives way to black and white. We see a young Jean Jacques help the girls across a similar river. Then we intercut the orchard sequence with the curious faces of old Jean Jacques and the baffled Girardin. Later, they botanize, Jean Jacques diligently tying red and gold ribbons on plants as they go. They come upon a hermitage. The monks offer them lunch. A lesson is read during the meal about how futile it is for man to complain about his lot. “God has brought man nothing, He oweth him nothing.”

After lunch they go into the garden of the hermitage. A group of contemporary Californians sit before a screen watching scenes from The Confessions: Part I. Old Jean Jacques observes his young self arriving in Annecy on his way to the house of Mme. de Warens.

Jean Jacques and Girardin leave for home. On their way back they cross the Pacific Coast Highway (completely unperturbed by the automobiles). They stop at a roadside diner, which is full of garish tourists. The owner recognizes Jean Jacques, sets up a table for him outside underneath a redwood and provides him with bread, wine and cheese.

GIRARDIN: He seems to know you well.

JEAN JACQUES: In fine weather my wife and I used to come here and eat a cutlet of an evening.

As they approach the pavilion they notice a huge Great Dane loping and bounding about the meadows. The dog sees Jean Jacques and races towards him. It leaps up and knocks him heavily to the ground. Unconscious, Jean Jacques has a vision of Mme. de Warens, her back towards him, about to enter the door of the church at Annecy. Then he sees a view of the lake at Annecy, which merges with the Pacific Ocean off Big Sur. He hears the monk’s voice saying: “All flesh is grass.… The grass withereth, the flower fadeth.…” We see the meadow with its fluttering ribbons through which they passed that morning dissolve into a smoking ashfield (a National Guardsman with a flamethrower was responsible for the transformation, supervised by the Carmel Fire Department).

Jean Jacques recovers himself and they make their way back home. We cut to the dinner scene, with the marquis, the marquise and their family present. Candles flicker; their gleam is reflected in the silverware. Jean Jacques talks with almost manic animation. Later, when everyone has gone, and Thérèse is upstairs in bed, he stands alone in the dark room looking out through the windows at the moonlit garden. For an instant we see the Great Dane lope across the lawns. Then the windows become white screens and upon them is projected the vision he saw earlier: Mme. de Warens about to enter the church.

“Julie,” he whispers.

She turns. And there is Doon.

Suddenly the image is shattered by a stone. Then dozens of stones are hurled through the panes. Glass breaks. Shards fly. We are back in Môtiers; the mob is stoning his house. A rock catches Jean Jacques on his forehead; blood flows. He clutches his chest in monstrous agony and falls to the floor.

Thérèse comes in. The room is exactly as it was. Exquisite moonlight floods the tranquil garden. Jean Jacques lies on the floor, dead. End. Credits.

My sources for the film were the Rêveries, a description of a walk taken with Rousseau, written by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, my own memories (which no doubt you will have spotted) and inspired pilfering of my subconscious. I assembled my sources and the narrative seemed to flow from my pen with an ease I had never before encountered. The one critic of any repute who noticed the film wrote, “The Last Walk exerts a beguiling grip on the viewer but remains in the end a maze of inpenetrable symbols.” Ah, but remember there is always a way out of a maze.

We shot the film in the late summer of 1958. For the three years previously, Academy Awards for the best screenplay had gone to blacklisted screenwriters using pseudonyms. Eddie was sure that 1959 would see the MPAA rescind its bylaws against those who had refused to cooperate with HUAC. The time was right, he said, but he still wanted my director’s credit to be pseudonymous. I chose the name John Witzenreid.

I enjoyed making that small film as much as I relished the scale of The Confessions: Part I. Our cast was composed of amateurs and bit-part players. We had a small crew, based ourselves in San Francisco and traveled out to whatever location took our fancy.

For a fortnight Karl-Heinz and I rented the small shack that we had used on our previous holidays. It had been refurbished somewhat; it had a shower now and the kitchen had been modernized. Karl-Heinz wasn’t well, after filming he was due to go into the hospital for another operation on his ulcer, but our time in that cottage seemed briefly to revive him. We reminisced a lot about the past, the forty years we had known each other. The fogs would come in from the sea in the evening, shrouding the spectacular sunsets like a Todd Soft-Focus Lens.

It was here I perfected the dry martini — John James Todd style. One: chill everything to just above freezing point — gin, Noilly Prat, lemon, glass and shaker. Two: fill a saucer with Noilly Prat and upend the cocktail glass in it. About half an inch of the rim should be submerged. Three: fill the shaker with ice and then add the gin. Do not shake, rotate gently a couple of times. Four: take the glass from the saucer. Five: fill with gin. Six: cut a piece of lemon peel and allow a few spots of zest to spray onto the surface of the gin. Seven: drink. This method is infallible. It is the only way (a) to guarantee the minutest addition of Noilly Prat to the gin, and (b) to taste it. Otherwise you might as well drink neat gin. The vermouth is a crucial ingredient. Those people who say “Show the gin the Noilly Prat” don’t know what they are talking about. It is a cocktail, not a draft of neat alcohol.

So I drank these dry martinis and Karl-Heinz swigged some white chalky liquid to line his stomach and we watched the earth tilt into darkness. Although I had to ignore it there was a valedictory note in these evenings. Karl-Heinz began, idly, ironically, to speculate about his death. For my part I was aware that my Confessions film was about to be as complete as it ever would be. Without Karl-Heinz there would be no point in persevering further.

While I was editing the film, Karl-Heinz went into the hospital. The operation apparently was a success, and he was soon back at the hotel. I visited him often. He said he felt well but he looked frail and elderly. We would take slow strolls along the concrete boardwalk, taking half an hour to cover a few hundred yards.

One day I was called from the editing suite of Lone Star to go down to reception. It was an urgent and confidential matter, they said. A tall man in leisure clothes stood looking out at the sunlit car park. He turned round.

“My God,” I said. “Two Dogs Running.”

“Mr. Todd. You’re looking good.”

We shook hands. I was pleased to see him.

“What’re you doing?” I asked him.

“Still selling,” he said. “But I’ve moved into shoes.”

We caught up quickly on the past. The last he’d seen of me was at St.-Tropez, 1944, my stretchered body being carried aboard an LCI at Tahiti Plage.… I asked him if he had time for a drink or a meal, but he pointed to an old convertible outside containing a young woman and three children.

“Vacation,” he said. “We’re going on up to Yosemite. I just wanted to talk to you about something, something strange.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, about a month ago a man looked me up. Said he was from a veterans’ organization. Started telling me all about the invasion. Then he got more specific. He started asking me about you. And then — listen to this — he started asking about that German.…”

“The one you—”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus. How did he know?”

“That’s what I wondered at first. But you see, I told those guys, those paratroopers, afterwards. They picked up his body and the dead guys at the villa. I guess, somewhere, some kind of report was written up. Some man from the provost marshal’s office interviewed me. You were badly wounded and they wanted to know what we’d been doing in that car. And I guess that old man at the villa — what was his name?”

“Can’t remember.”

“Well, I guess he would have been brought into it. I think he was pretty ticked off that his car had been totaled. You gave him that receipt and he turned up at Le Muy looking for his car. He wanted compensation. It’s got to be on the record somewhere.”

“Cavanaugh-Crabbe, that was his name.”

“Yeah. Well, this guy — from the vet organization — said the case was being reopened and that you were suspected of executing that German. Murder of a POW, he said.”

“But that’s crazy!”

“That’s what I told him.” Two Dogs lowered his voice. “I told him I had done it. The guy had made a run for it. I shot him and then we found the fingers.… Like we said.”

“Exactly. Christ, I didn’t even have a gun.”

“He said he was going to Europe to make further investigations. He got nasty when I said I had done it. Said there was no need for me to cover up for you.”

“What did he look like?”

“He had this kind of black wig on. Gaps in his teeth.”

I walked out to the car with Two Dogs and met his family. His wife looked Mexican, quite pretty. His eldest boy was ten. I was introduced as “Mr. Todd, the film director, the man I was in the war with.” I shook everybody’s hand. I felt very old, like a grandfather.

The eldest boy said, “Sir? Is it true you were shot by your own side?”

“Yes,” I said. I wished I could have bragged that I’d stormed a machine-gun nest or two. “It was bad luck. Sometimes it turns out that way.”

We said good-bye. I thanked Two Dogs and we made polite plans to stay in touch.

Back in the office I phoned O’Hara straightaway.

“I think Smee’s going or has been to Europe,” I said to him. “Can you check on that?”

“Pleasure, Mr. Todd. I should tell you, though, that since we last did business my rates have gone up to thirty-five dollars a day.”

A week later O’Hara called to tell me Smee had recently flown to London on HUAC business. I hung up. I felt a mad frustration knot my brain. My head ached. What was going on? What was the man after? Why wouldn’t he leave me alone? The phone rang.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Todd? This is Mr. Ashplanter from the Hotel Cythera. We’re a bit worried about Mr. Kornfeld. His door’s locked and we can’t get any answer from him.”

There was no expression on Karl-Heinz’s face. His eyes were slightly open, as was his mouth. I tried to read a peaceful passing in his countenance and almost made it. I touched his hand. It was stiff and cold. I wished I hadn’t seen him.… But how many dead people had I seen in my life? Hundreds upon thousands. Most anonymous: the drowned men at Nieuport, the burst mattresses and battered furniture of no-man’s-land. A few were acquaintances. But only two had made me quake and cower internally. Only two had led me down the cul-de-sac of my own mortality. My dead son Hereford and my dead friend Karl-Heinz.…

A weeping Mrs. Ashplanter called a doctor and the morticians. I wandered out onto the beach. From somewhere came a noise of tinny thumping music. A group of young men played volleyball, whooping and shouting with heroic energy. The waves creamed in, all the way from Japan, somebody had once told me. Some journey.… Maybe I’d go to Japan, next year. Who gave a damn, anyway?

We planned to open The Last Walk of Jean Jacques Rousseau at a small art-house cinema called the Rio in Westwood. The day we chose was July 2, 1960, 182 years to the day since Jean Jacques had died. Eddie approved the plan. He hated the film but he thought the anniversary might just attract some press coverage.

As I approached the cinema on opening night I was gratified to see a large crowd — over a hundred people — gathered outside. It was a warm smoggy evening, a smell of tomcat in the air. Then I saw they were carrying large banners. PASADENA WOMEN’S TEMPERANCE ASSOCIATION, I read, and BURBANK DIVISION: SECOND-DEGREE KNIGHT COMMANDERS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE.

Just my luck, I thought, we’ve got a convention in the next-door hotel. But as I drew nearer I saw they were clustered in front of the cinema entrance. I noticed some of the actors standing forlornly about in their evening dress, I tried to push my way through. A sharp-faced young man stopped me.

“This is an official picket, sir. This film is Communist propaganda made by a subversive.”

“Excuse me, please.”

“The director of this film has been named and listed as a member of the Communist party.”

I felt suddenly weak. I backed off.

Eddie got out of an enormous limousine. “What’s going on, John?”

“Some sort of maniac picket. Real esoteric weirdos tonight.”

“Jesus!” Eddie leaped back in his car. Through an inch of open window he said, “Let me know how it goes. Good luck.” As he drove off the crowd cheered. A man in a tuxedo came up to me.

“Mr. Todd? I’m the manager.”

“Sorry about this. Can we delay everything an hour or so? They’ll get bored and go away soon.” I noticed then that the man’s face was taut and pale.

“I’ve been threatened, sir. He said they’re going to torch the place if we show the film.”

“Just some crank. Call a cop.”

“I think he was a cop. He showed me a badge. I think it was FBI.”

“Who was it?”

The manager scanned the crowd. “That’s him, in the back. Just going round the corner.”

I saw a close-cropped black wig above the heads of the crowd.

“Smee!”

I started to run. I skirted the picketers and ran down the side of the cinema. Fifty yards away I saw a car pull out and drive off. A Cadillac Fleetwood.^*

I drove north. Back to our convict shack near Big Sur. I turned off the coast highway and drove down the narrow lane that led to the house. The shack had a new tar-paper roof and the hedge around it was full of dog roses and morning glory, the garden lush with lupin and poppies. I left the car parked in the lane and made several trips down the steps to the house with my luggage and provisions. Almost as soon as I arrived, I felt a calm descend on me. The fog over the sea was clearing but shreds of it still clung to the headland, like muslin snagged on the rocks.

I spent a pleasant four days alone pondering my future. Three times a week the mailman called. He honked his horn up on the highway and you clambered up to collect your mail and buy provisions from him. Like a steamer on an African river his arrival attracted the others living round and about, and we would gather like a tribe by his van and chat. This was my fourth visit to the cabin over the years and I was beginning to recognize the denizens: the solitude freaks, the failed artists, the cheerful bullshitters. When they asked me what I did and I said, “Film director,” I could see them relax. “One of us,” I could hear them thinking, “another fantasist.”

I resumed my old habit of walking the two miles down to the mouth of the Little Sur River for an evening swim. I changed in the rocky dunes and dashed out, naked, into the modest surf.

I think it was my fifth evening down on the beach. I waited for a rare car to pass on the highway before I made my nude run to the waves. I looked down at the gray wiry pelt that covered my body and beat out a short rhythm on my firm little potbelly. I checked the road — all clear — and trotted out into the sea.

Gasping and snorting I thrashed around in the waves for a while. I never went out far; I was happy to cavort oafishly in the breakers. I stood in the foamy water, waist deep, and let the waves surge and batter away at me. A particularly strong one knocked me over, and as I went down beneath the surface I saw a flash of light from the hillside. I stood up, spluttering. The next roller was heaving itself towards me and I stood in a patch of temporarily calm water, latticed with spume. About a quarter of a mile away I saw the small figure of a man emerge from behind a rock and vanish into a copse of birch trees.

I went under. I swam out, kicked sideways and surfaced for a second, guzzling air. I saw no more movement on the hillside. I swam vigorously north, trying to keep warm, before doubling back. The sun seemed to hang on the horizon forever.

When it was dark enough I crept out and found my clothes and towel. When I had dressed I waited an hour before going up to the highway. I hitchhiked for ten minutes before a car stopped. I got the driver to drop me at a roadside diner some miles away. I ordered coffee and some food and wondered what to do.

I thought first about ringing the police. But Smee was a G-man, or had been. He had some kind of badge, that was for sure. I knew Smee would be waiting for me at the shack. I called Sean O’Hara.

“Come up there now?” he said. “It’s got to be two hundred fifty miles. You crazy?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Smee’s here.… Hello, hello?”

The line was very bad.

“… expect me to do about it?” I heard O’Hara ask.

“I don’t care,” I shouted. “Just get him off my back. The man’s ruined my life as it is.”

“Your back is ruined? He shot you?”

“Off my back. Get him off my back. Off. Off.”

There was a long pause full of fizz and crackle.

“Hello?”

“OK, Mr. Todd. I’ll do it for you. But it’ll cost you.… Hello?… An out-of-town job like this.”

“I don’t care how much it costs. I don’t care! Just do it.”

“For you one thousand dollars. But five hundred down or I don’t move.”

I thought that was a bit steep for a special favor, but I was happy to pay anything to put the frighteners on Smee.

I told O’Hara to go to Eddie. Eddie would pay him the five hundred. I felt exhausted from my massive swim. I gave O’Hara the precise directions to my cabin. “He’s bound to be there,” I said, “staking it out. Waiting for me.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Todd, I’m on my way. Soon as I get the money. It’s as good as done.”

I told him where Eddie lived, and hung up. I offered up a prayer or two and phoned Eddie. He was in.

“Five hundred bucks? Are you in trouble?… What the fuck’s wrong with this line? Hello?…”

“I just need a job done quickly. This guy’s the only one who can do it. I’ll explain later.”

“OK, John. What’s his name?”

“Sean O’Hara.”

“Who?”

“Sean O’Hara!”

“How will I know him?”

“He’s Japanese.”

“Jesus Christ!”

He eventually agreed. I stayed in the diner until it closed. I bought a fifth of bourbon from the owner and began the long walk back to my cabin, ten or twelve miles south on the switchback, hairpin highway.

I reached home at about five in the morning. It was cool and there was a dense milky fog over the ocean, flat like a snowfield. I moved very cautiously down the lane. O’Hara was sitting on the hood of my car, smoking.

“Sean,” I said softly, “it’s me.”

“Hi, Mr. Todd,” he said. “Just like you predicted. He was waiting for you. I got here about an hour ago. I come down the road real slow, real quiet. I hear him taking a leak. End of problem.”

“Is he still here?”

“Sure. Up here a ways.”

I had walked right past him. Smee had been hiding in the bushes on the edge of the lane where he could overlook all approaches to the house. He lay quite still, a large pair of army-issue binoculars beside him. His wig was dislodged, tilted forward almost to his eyebrows. He looked stupid and ugly.

“He’s not dead, is he?”

“I should fuckin’ well hope so. For one thousand dollars Sean O’Hara gives you dead.”

“What?… Jesus Christ! Why the hell did you do that?”

“Because you said you wanted the guy offed.”

“I said I wanted him off my back.”

“Uh-uh. No. No, Mr. Todd. You said offed. I ast you to repeat it.”

“I said off my back. I didn’t want you to kill him. Bloody hell!”

“You said you didn’t care how I did it. Money no object. Get rid of him.”

O’Hara jabbered on, proudly justifying himself. I knelt shakily beside Smee. He seemed quite unmarked. I felt vainly for a pulse. I held a wet finger beneath his nostrils. No cooling breath.

“What did you do?”

“I crept up behind him. He couldn’t hear me, ’cause of his pissing, like, and I did this.”

I felt O’Hara’s hard blunt index fingers press gently in the cavities behind the lobes of my ears. I shivered.

“You press hard, they’re unconscious in twenty seconds. Then they die in a couple of minutes. Not a scratch.”

So that was that. For another five hundred dollars Sean agreed to help me dispose of the body. We loaded him into his car and I drove it south, O’Hara following, to a point where the highway ran along the edge of a cliff, high above the ocean. I couldn’t see the rocks or the surf; below me all was mist, swirling, dense, shifting. Smee’s car had been hired under a false name. O’Hara removed all other documents from his body and volunteered to dispose of them for twenty-five dollars. I agreed. We positioned Smee in the driving seat, released the hand brake and ran the car over the edge. I saw it cartwheel into the whiteness. Then I heard a splash. Sean ran me back to the cabin. I had six hundred dollars there, which I gave him. I said I would send him the remainder. He left. I went to bed. I slept until midday. Then I got into my car and drove to Los Angeles, to Eddie, and my salvation.

VILLA LUXE, July 2, 1972

Last night I woke at about 3 A.M. I heard footsteps outside. At first I paid them no attention. Fishermen often walk past the house at all hours on their way to the beach. But then, as I lay there, I realized that this person was walking round the villa. I lay stiff and still in bed, mentally rebolting and reshuttering every door and window. Yes, I was sure. I am compulsive about locking up everything at night.

I got out of bed, trying to catch sight of this night visitor. I crouched in the hall. I could hear him outside on the graveled forecourt. Then his footsteps walking away. A few minutes later the sound of a car starting.

In the morning I go outside. The sun shines down. The sky is pale blue. I can’t make out any footprints. Halfway up the track I find a cigarette butt. Lucky Strike. Does it mean anything in this day of the ubiquitous international brand?

The fact remains … the fact remains and I have to face up to it. Smee’s body was never found. The car was discovered some two weeks after O’Hara had pushed it over the cliff (all this was related to me by Eddie; I was already in Europe). It was assumed that the driver had been thrown out as the vehicle tumbled through the air before it hit the water. A search was made but no body ever turned up. Because Smee had hired the car under a false name, it was several weeks before he was identified as the missing man. His wife had reported his absence shortly after my departure. She thought he was away on HUAC business in Chicago. As far as Eddie was aware, no link had been established between him and me. He said no one from the FBI had come to question him. That part of the coastline was scattered with holiday cabins and campsites. It would be impossible to establish Who had been there at the time of the accident. And it was still regarded as an accident. The only hint of foul play was Smee’s alibi. He had told everyone he was going to Chicago. The FBI denied he was working on a case for them. As I had thought, Smee was pursuing his own warped vendetta by this stage. HUAC’s influence was on the decline; the blacklists were losing their power. I supposed that Smee thought there was only one way to get me before I was rehabilitated. The offices of Alert Inc. gave no clues, either. Their files were full of “Communists” and “subversives” whose lives they had ruined. Smee had thousands of enemies. At the inquest no verdict was returned. The case was left open.

I had gone straight to Eddie and told him everything. He said I should have come earlier. “I could have handled this, John,” he said sadly. “So much more neatly.” He was annoyed with me for my thoughtlessness. I realized that even after forty years there were aspects of Eddie Simmonette that remained completely opaque to me. And what was worse was that I had inadvertently implicated him too, by asking him to pay O’Hara. O’Hara had been to his house, had seen him and received money from him. He was not too concerned about O’Hara, however. His silence could be relied on. I was the problem.

Eddie sent me home and told me to settle my affairs in an orderly way, with no unseemly urgency. I sold the house. I said good-bye to Nora Lee (a real retrospective regret, this, but at the time I could think of nothing but my safety). Ten days after Smee’s death I was on the plane to London.

I followed Eddie’s instructions faithfully. I traveled to Paris, where I hired a car, and drove across several borders (ostensibly scouting for locations). Ultimately, after further trail covering, I arrived on this island and moved into Eddie’s villa. He gave me a selection of three houses he owned in the Mediterranean basin where I could hide up. I chose this island (the others were in Turkey and Beirut). It was almost unknown then; it had none of the vague notoriety it nowadays possesses. And so my exile began. Only Eddie knew where I was. He kept distantly, discreetly in touch; kept me reassured about the continuing absence of suspicion. Some months after I had arrived, Mrs. Smee went to the police, her memory jogged about my fight with her husband and our mutual threats (something tells me Mrs. Smee was not too unhappy to lose Monroe). A mediocre description of me was issued, but as Mrs. Smee claimed not to remember my name the investigation did not get very far. Eddie told me to give it a couple of years. Let everything blow over. I stayed put, quite happy in a strange sort of way. Eddie visited me sometimes on his yacht. He was my only contact with my old life. He tried to persuade me to come back. But I said no.

So why did I stay on and on? Guilt, fear, peace, seclusion, indolence, old age, apathy, the strange contentment I spoke of. All of these were true. But at the back of my mind I was profoundly frightened of being found out. Also, I have to say this: I was never wholly convinced that Smee had died. O’Hara’s killing technique seemed dubious to me. What if it had only sent him into some kind of deep unconsciousness, a coma? And what if he had been thrown clear of the tumbling car and the shock of hitting the water had revived him? You may laugh at my fears — I did too, most of the time. But these thoughts come back to haunt you. You lie alone in your bed at night and your mind is prey to stranger fantasies than these. I stayed because I felt safe. I was far away. Enough was enough.

I catch the bus into the main town and, once there, I start to visit all the tourist hotels. At the third hotel the register yields the name I am looking for. A receptionist directs me to the swimming pool.

I stand looking over the vast crowded terrace, thick with half-naked people. Beyond the pool is a strip of dirty brown beach, and beyond that a ruined tower on a small rocky island. I pass slowly among the tables, chairs and rows of sunloungers, looking for the face I saw on the bus that day. Eventually, I find him among four hefty middle-aged American couples. The remains of lunch litter the table. Blue smoke of cigars rises in the sunlight. Laughter. Bellies. Straw hats.

“Hello, Investigator Bonty,” I say.

Bonty looks round. No recognition at all.

“Sorry, fella?…” His funny lip. His half lisp.

“Todd. John James Todd.” I can see his brain turning over.

“Mr. Todd?… Yeah. Yeah! Got it. Mr. Todd. Good to see you, my God. This is incredible! After all these years.”

It’s convincing. He stands up.

“Listen. Hey, guys. Hold on. I want you to meet John James Todd. The movie director.… Martha, you remember.… John … ah, he and I met on a HUAC investigation. When did we subpoena you, John? ’Fifty-four?”

“ ’Forty-eight, the first time.”

“Great days. Great days.”

I am introduced to everybody. I shake seven hands. Smile at smiling faces. Bonty really quite proud.

“God, I remember your case. Brayfield — Christ, you got to that asshole like no other subversive. It was fantastic.” He starts telling his friends about Brayfield and me.

“… and then he says — this is in open court, Washington, D.C., for Christ’s sake! — ‘Sure, I’ll name a dangerous lunatic who is trying to destroy the Constitution of the U.S.A.’ ‘Who?’ says the chairman. ‘Representative Brayfield,’ says John here.” Wild laughter and applause. “I tell you, Brayfield practically shit himself, he was so mad.… John, sit down please. What are you drinking? Can you believe this for a coincidence? I’d never have recognized you. Gone native, eh, John?”

“Could I have a word, in private? Just for a moment.”

“Excuse us, folks. Be right back.”

We walk to the low wall that separates us from the thin beach.

I say, “Very good. You can drop the act now. Where’s Smee?”

“Who?”

“Smee. The man who gave you the dossier. HUAC Investigator Smee, you know.”

“Smee … Oh, yeah. He’s dead.”

“He’s here. On this island.”

“John, are you feeling OK? Smee’s dead. He drove off a cliff in Carmel somewhere, years ago.”

“He’s here, and you know it. You’re after me, working with him.”

“John, come and have a drink. You been away too long. That HUAC shit’s over now.”

“Don’t lie to me, Bonty. Was it you or Smee asking questions about me?”

“John, this ain’t so amusing.” He frowns. “In fact you’re getting to be a pain inna ass.”

“But I know. There’s no point in pretending.”

“What are you? Crazy? Some kind of paranoid nut?”

I back off. “Forget it. Sorry to bother you. Say good-bye for me.” I leave him standing there looking at me, hands on his hips.

It’s four in the afternoon by the time I arrive back at the village. I feel grubby and exhausted. But what’s worse is the confusion squirming inside me. I feel uneasy, frightened. I feel old. I can’t cope with what’s going on. Bonty’s right. Eddie’s right. Smee must be dead, surely … I can’t even ratiocinate. Who, what, where, when?

I try the café. Ernesto isn’t there, as usual. Lazy bastard! I walk down the track to my villa. Outside the front door three men are waiting. I sigh audibly with relief when I see they are locals, old men. Oddly, they are all dressed in dusty black suits.

“Gentlemen, can I help you?” I say.

They hem me in. Brown, gray-mustachioed, seamed faces. They start shouting. Pointing fingers. They talk in some fast glottal patois that I cannot understand. I feel a spray of spittle from their angry mouths. I can understand nothing except one word: “Emilia … Emilia … Emilia …”

Jesus Christ! Her husband and his brothers. I never expected them to be so ancient. No wonder Emilia was interested in me. Then one of the old codgers spits in my face. Another thwacks me heavily across the shoulders with his walking stick. I swing a punch at the spitter. He has gray greasy hair. I hope it’s her husband. I catch him in the throat. He falls back, hawking and gagging. I’m always game for a fight. Then my legs are kicked out from under me. I fall down.

“Bastards!” I yell, suddenly frightened. These old fellows wear prodigious boots.

I hear a woman’s scream. Cries of “Police! Stop it!” Emilia, I think. Bless you.

The old men back off. I shake my head and look up. Ulrike. She switches to German. Those harsh relentless consonants work like a whip. Suddenly cowed, the cuckold and his sidekicks shuffle off. Greasy hair turns and shouts at me. Revenge, no doubt.

Ulrike helps me up. I tell her it’s an absurd misunderstanding. She takes me into the house and looks after me. A cup of coffee. Some sticking plaster on a grazed knuckle.

“You shouldn’t be fighting at your age,” she says. She’s right. I feel terrible, jumpy, as if all my organs are overheating and malfunctioning. Lung popping. Heart shudder. Stomach heave. Like an old jalopy about to break down once and for all.

I stand up and take her hand.

“Here,” I say. “Come and see this.” I take her into my study. There, I pull the cardboard boxes filled with papers and documents aside and reveal the stack of dull-silver canisters.

“You can have it,” I say. “You and Tobias. Take it away, show it, do what you like.”

“What is it?”

“The Confessions.”

What takes me down to the beach that evening? I don’t know. I felt like a swim. Naked, I thought, in the sea, just like Big Sur. My back and legs were hurting where those old buggers had hit me. I imagined floating, my weight suspended in salty water. Cool. Relief.

I feel something has ended, or is about to end. Or else something new is about to begin. I go carefully through the pine trees. The path to the beach, although well worn, is narrow and meanders perilously close to the cliff edge on some occasions.

As I go I think about something I read once, about a certain kind of ant — a stink ant that lives on the floor of the West African rain forest. This ant goes about its ant business on the ground in an unremarkable way. It does not know the curious and bizarre fate nature has in store for it. For in this forest there is a particular type of arboreal fungus that flourishes at the top of the great forest trees. At certain times this fungus releases its millions of spores into the air. They blow here and there, driven by the softest breezes, eventually coming to rest somewhere on the ground. Some of these spores fall, by the law of averages, onto animals and reptiles and some on crawling insects. They are quite harmless except for one species: our stink ant. This one minute fungus spore falls on the stink ant and is absorbed into its ant system. It drives the ant mad. Remember the stink ant’s habitat is the ground, but the lethal poison of the fungus spore engenders in it the sudden desire to climb. So the stink ant, for the first and last time in its life, leaves the ground and begins to ascend. It climbs up and up, higher and higher, until it can climb no more. There, at the very top of the tree, it sinks its mandibles into the ultimate twig — fast, immovable — and abruptly dies. Inside the dead ant the fungus peacefully grows, nourished by ant meat, warmed by the sunlight at the top of the tree. The ant is consumed and a new fungus is born.

Sometimes I look back on my life and I feel like a maddened stink ant driven on by my one random fungus spore. Today, I sense, the time has come to sink my mandibles into the bark at the top of the tree.

* Last Walk finally opened in New York in 1961. It was unpicketed. A few months earlier President Kennedy had crossed an American Legion picket to watch a screening of Spartacus, script by ex — Hollywood Ten Dalton Trumbo. I owe JFK a vote of thanks.