The Best That Ever Did It - Ed Lacy

“I've told you the truth—except that Ed and I didn't hit it off. It wasn't that we were unhappy, we just weren't happy. Can you understand that?”

“Maybe, after I think about it.” I got up and walked toward the door. “Shall I report tomorrow night? It's Saturday.”

“You work union hours?” she asked harshly. “Another thing, I demand some respect—comb your hair when you come to see me.”

“Don't think I will, Mrs. Turner. That's my hair, and I don't consider combing or not combing my hair having anything to do with respect.”

Her face turned pink with anger and as I opened the door I said, “Sorry I upset you, Mrs. Turner. Only did it as part of my job.” I don't know why I had to say that, almost made me gag.

“Get out.”

Out in the hall, as I was waiting for the automatic elevator and feeling lousy, I heard a small crash in her apartment. It hadn't been much of a lamp anyway.

SAM LUND was a hustler long before he enlisted. Orphaned when he was six, Sam was raised by an aunt and uncle who had a small hardware store in Boston. They were childless and adored Sam, but when he was thirteen his aunt had a change-of-life baby and after that Sam was merely somebody around the house.

He grew up tall and strong, an all-around athlete with the grace of a dancer. When he was sixteen he hitched a ride to New York City and landed a job as a chorus boy in a Broadway musical that staggered along for five weeks. After that Sam worked at whatever odd jobs would pay for dancing and dramatic lessons and in his off hours made the rounds of casting agents, lived in Times Square drugstores.

By the time he was nineteen he had danced in several shows, had bit parts in off-Broadway little theaters, and was trying to break into radio. Sam was crazy about the “theater,” but it kept him broke. He was lucky to work two or three weeks a year as an actor or chorus boy and his other odd jobs never lasted, for as soon as he heard a show was casting, Sam would drop his bus-boy or stock-clerk job, to try his luck.

One afternoon he was in a dingy rehearsal studio on West Forty-sixth Street reading for a play due to open in the fall— if seventy-five thousand dollars could be raised. The producer was a middle-aged dapper ex-actor whose bleached-blonde wife took an interest in Sam. A day later she offered to set him up in a small Village apartment. Being supported by women wasn't anything new to Sam, but the lady was in her fifties, strapped her flabby body in a strait-jacket corset so she could wear a twelve dress, liked flashy jewels, and when she got drunk she thought it was tremendously funny to suddenly push her upper plate half out of her mouth and yell, “What's cooking, doc?”

Although Sam turned her down he let her buy him supper several times a week. She'd been around the theater all her life and she told Sam to really get among the people, study and understand them, instead of hanging around drugstores... if he was serious about becoming an actor.

He took a summer job as a barker for a sightseeing bus and a week later nearly died from scarlet fever. The fever left him completely bald. At first his bald dome was a great joke, but he soon found bald-headed young men were not considered for juvenile or lead roles, and that a decent toupee cost hundreds of dollars. He decided to take the apartment in the Village—till the play opened.

Sam admits the elderly blonde did a great deal for him. He told a reporter:

She really wasn't a bad sort, when sober. She bought me a remarkable toupee, a really terrific piece of hair, she had a custom tailor outfit me, sent me to a fine dramatic coach. But she would bust into the apartment in the middle of the night, drunk as a goose, then prance around in the nude under the illusion she was still a gay young thing.

Lund couldn't take this, but there was another reading of the play in a ritzy Park Avenue apartment and he was assured of a feature role. By October the show was still thirty-two thousand dollars short and the opening postponed till January. Sam was angry. While he had clothes, hair, and a charge at the corner grocer, he had no money. In November the producer signed to make a quickie picture in Hollywood and the play was postponed again, but Sam didn't mind, for the blonde went to the Coast with her husband and Sam had some peace and sleep. But she sent him a plane ticket, suggested he try the movies, and before Christmas Sam was rooming in a run-down house in Laurel Canyon. There was a vivacious nineteen-year-old red-headed singer also rooming there and Sam began sharing her room.

Aside from working in two mob scenes, nothing happened in Hollywood and Sam didn't care much for the place. He was glad to follow the producer and his wife back to New York in February, where he lucked up on a steady part in a daily radio soap opera. The play seemed almost certain to start rehearsals any day and things were breaking for Sam—especially when the redhead came East for night-club work.

But there was trouble finding a theater and in April the main backer switched his money to another play; the producer lost his option and announced the whole deal was off. The redhead was going to a Baltimore night spot and asked Sam to come along. The radio soap opera having folded weeks before, he was flat broke. When she was drunk the old blonde was careless with her jewelry, would often phone Sam the next day and ask him to look for a ring or pin she'd left in his place. So Sam hocked her earrings for two hundred and sixty dollars and went to Baltimore, where two detectives picked him up the following day.

Sam wasn't too alarmed. He begged the wife not to press charges, then threatened her with publicity about their affair. The lady merely stuck her false teeth out at him, said her analyst had told her that sort of publicity bolstered her ego. There was a line about the robbery in one of the columns, and Sam's picture made the tenth page of a tabloid when a judge gave Sam two to five years.

In the beginning prison drove Sam crazy, but for the first time in his life he read a lot, studied the men around him, and knew he'd really be an actor when he was released. Sam was finishing his twenty-second month in prison when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Several months later, when he came up for parole, he was told he would be set free if he enlisted.

After prison life the army was a snap for Lund, although the army didn't know exactly what to do with an actor. He was sent to a motion unit at Wright Field which was soon disbanded. Then Lund was assigned to special services and spent several months taking tickets at a Topeka air base theater. From there he was sent to England where he did guard duty, permanent K.P., and drove a truck. Lund spent some time with a touring G.I. show, asked to be made an aerial gunner and was turned down for some unknown reason.

Toward the end of the war Sam was working behind a PX counter at a bomber base in France. It was easy to smuggle out a few cartons of cigarettes now and then and he began doing some minor black-marketing. However, when the war in Europe was over and the bomber outfits were being rushed back to the States, on their way to the Pacific, the bookkeeping was snafued in the general confusion and Lund sold cigarette cartons by the case. At his trial Lund admitted once selling an entire truckload of supplies, working with the driver and another soldier. Lund was fast becoming an “operator.”

There wasn't anything waiting for him in the States, so Sam signed up for the army of occupation, went to Germany. Here he put on camp shows and engaged in various “deals.”

The new soldiers arriving in Germany were mostly kids, [Lund stated], all of them eighteen or nineteen years old. They thought it was a big deal to sleep with a Fraulein for a pack of butts. Me, I was now an “old army man.” I didn't bother much with those kids. I put on a lot of corny shows—any blue line or raw joke had them in the aisles with laughter. I had plenty of time to look around. There were plenty of things worth looking into in Germany then, the black market was amazing, wide open, everybody was hustling. It was sensational.

He worked his angles carefully and when he suspected things were getting too warm, Staff Sergeant Sam Lund took his discharge in 1950 and headed for Paris. He had a new Dodge car, five thousand dollars in cash, and some jewelry said to be worth fifteen thousand dollars and which he was only able to sell for nineteen hundred dollars. Sam also had three cans of film he had stumbled upon in a bombed film office in Bavaria. He had vague plans about using the reels as the core of a full-length adventure picture about an OSS man parachuted into Germany during the war—the main role to be played by Sam Lund, of course. He felt this would not only make money but establish him as an international actor.

During his first week in Paris Sam stopped at the George V Hotel, went to Maxim's, the Lido, and Monseigneur nightly-only to find at the end of the week that he had spent eight hundred dollars. He quietly moved to a small hotel in the Pigalle section, where he met Gabby.

Gabby was twenty-two, small and trim, with a cute face and a jutting bosom. She was a movie actress, but her only roles were those of an artist's model, a native girl, or any brief part featuring nude breasts. She thought Sam the greatest man in the world: he was handsome and tall, considerate of her, and he had money and an American car. Sam liked her because she worshiped him and because she was a part of the French movie crowd. Only, as he soon found out, acting jobs were few and the unions strong, and it was impossible for him to get a work card—a role—although as a result of living with Gabby he soon spoke French like a native.

One evening, after he had been in Paris four months, Gabby introduced to him another American, a quiet-spoken fellow named Martin Pearson, and his horse-faced girl, Therese. Sam was suspicious of Martin, couldn't see the percentage in letting anybody else in on the picture deal. But Martin was helpful. When Sam told him, “My ninety-day tourist stay is running out and I'm having trouble getting a carte d'identite. How have you worked it all these years?”

Martin told him, “Go to a school, under the G.I. Bill, then you'll get a student identity card. Be careful with this identity-card business. You may think the French police are slow, but they're good and they're sharp.”

Lund became a student and in time became rather friendly with Pearson, although he still wouldn't let him in on his picture idea. Sam became a student in more ways than one—he learned there are angle men in every country and it's difficult for a foreigner to outsmart the native talent.

He lost five hundred dollars as the “manager” of a French boxer. After Sam had purchased a complete gym outfit for the pug, fed and housed him while the fighter got back into shape, he learned that a manager had to be a member of the French Federation of Boxers—which didn't admit foreigners. Then he paid six hundred and fifty American dollars under the table for the rent of a large house on the outskirts of Paris, only to find when he tried to move in that he hadn't paid the money to the owner; no one seemed to know exactly who Sam had dealt with.

He was swindled out of a thousand dollars in a black-market money deal—they slipped him counterfeit francs, and another American touted him out of several hundred dollars at the race track. But Paris was Paris and Sam was enjoying himself. In the summer of '52 he and Gabby, with Martin and Therese, drove down to Nice for an August vacation.

The main thing Sam disliked about Martin was the man's tightness with a franc—Pearson always let somebody else pick up the tab. In Nice when Sam wanted to play big shot and stop at the swank Negresco Hotel, Martin and Therese found a cheap pension in the center of town. At the casino Sam dropped a hundred and fifty dollars while Martin never gambled a franc.

One day as they were sunning themselves on the beach, the girls wanted ice cream. Martin didn't reach for his wallet. Sam gave Gabby a five hundred franc note and when the girls left, he asked, “The francs glued to your mitt, Marty? You never even offer to share the gas for my car.”

“How much of your original bundle have you left, Sam?”

“What the hell business is that of yours?”

“Stop acting, Sam, how much?”

“About three grand. I hear you have something in your mattress, too.”

“I have over six thousand,” Martin said softly. “Sam, before you throw away the rest of your money, let's make that picture. We've already wasted two years. I'm off the G.I. Bill, need a source of income if I want to get my identity card, stay here. Therese and I have formed a picture company—in her name. I can trust her.”

“And where do I come in?”

“You invest your three thousand and those reels of Nazi film. I'll put up six grand. I figure we can shoot most of the picture outdoors, around here, within the next two months. I've talked to a Paris writer who is willing to do the story and screenplay for a percentage. I'll help with the camera, Therese will cut and edit, you and Gabby will be the main actors. We won't have to hire too many people.”

“About got everything figured, haven't you?”

“I think I have. Sam, I know you can sell the reels to one of the picture companies for about a thousand dollars, although Hitler is kind of old hat now. But you'll spend that and in a few years from now where will you be? Either back in the States grubbing for a job, or just another broke American in Paris. If you're serious about living here, about being an actor, let's get started.”

“I'll think about it.”

“Think all you want, Sam. Only remember the war is over— and so is the gravy train.”

The next morning they all sat down in Sam's room and formed a partnership—in Therese's name with Gabby as treasurer, and Sam and Martin owning one-tenth of the company, as allowed by French law. They called in a lawyer to draw up the papers and Sam sent for champagne, but Martin said vin ordinaire would do. Sam got a little high on wine and decided it was time to try his luck at the casino. Martin told him to save his money.

“Let's get one thing straight. I don't like being ordered around,” Sam said. “It's my money.”

“No, it's the firm's money now,” Martin said softly, and when Sam laughed and headed for the door, Pearson belted him in the stomach, stood over him and said, “I'm not playing rough, or telling you what to do, but it's time you wised up, Sam. Cut the overgrown-boy act.”

At the trial Sam said he was afraid of Pearson. The transcript reads:

Q: You claim you didn't want to go through with the killing? Why did you? You're bigger than Pearson, knew he wouldn't shoot you?

Lund: I was afraid of Martin. I'm not trying to shift the blame on him. We're both in this. But I was afraid of him. Don't know exactly why, I'm not a coward, but there was something about the cold way he did things that scared me.