Life's a Scream Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Ingrid Pitt

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Epilogue

  Also by Ingrid Pitt

  Cuckoo Run

  The Peróns

  Eva’s Spell

  Katarina

  The Bedside Companion for Vampire Lovers

  The Bedside Companion for Ghost Hunters

  Bertie the Bus

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446441503

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  The title was suggested to me by Barry Langford.

  Published in the United Kingdom in 1999 by

  William Heinemann

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Ingrid Pitt 1999

  The right of Ingrid Pitt to be identified as the author of this work has

  been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

  Patents Act, 1988

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1999 by William Heinemann

  Random House UK Ltd

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

  Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

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  Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited

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  Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 434 00762 5

  for Steffanie and Tonio

  Prologue

  Las Vegas loomed out of the shimmering heat haze like a mirage. I tried not to do the touristy thing and lean forward to look out of the window but that sort of control is beyond me. As we circled to land I thought I could pick out the constantly flashing, glaring names hyping the star-studded hotels that have taken the place of whitening bones and tumbleweed in the cardboard-brown desert. The plane levelled up on finals and sank decorously to the painted black strip of tarmac edged by low-level buildings and washed-out palm trees. My excitement increased – this was it. Three days of the biggest press junket they’d ever seen in America. And I was part of it. I checked my make-up as well as I could in a pocket mirror and tried to think of scintillating titbits for the press. After all, this was the big one. When I left the States a few years earlier I had flogged my heap of automotive rust at the airport and taken the first available flight out with the proceeds. Now was the triumphant return. Ticker-tape, gold-chained mayors, counter-marching mayorettes and a gold key. Or is that only in New York?

  The doors opened and the heat hitting me in the face took my breath away. I shuffled out with the throng and looked for what, in those days, was the epitome of a status symbol – a stretch limo, preferably black, a Lincoln Continental no less. Zilch! Deflated, I followed the crocodile across the griddle-hot concrete into the ice shower of the reception buildings. Things started to look up immediately. A smartly dressed woman, with a clipboard welded to the crook of her left arm, gave a nurtured welcome smile and invited me to follow her. I had a moment of panic. What about my luggage? All that trendy gear I had spent hours trying on and visualising in action? Before I could communicate my secret horror of losing everything, my guiding light hailed a distant crumpled linen suit and told the wearer to pick up my bags and take them to the hotel. It wasn’t a scenario I was happy with but my misgivings were put on hold as I walked between rows of aggressive fruit machines, standing with arms at the salute like a well-trained band of military robots, into the sumptuous VIP lounge.

  Another suit, this time immaculate in blue, slobbered over my hand at the door, told me archly that he was the vice-president of something or other and was on call to make my every wish come true. I gushed back and was disappointed that it wasn’t the President of MGM himself, putting his body at my beck and call. I turned to meet the press. What’s the collective noun for pressmen? A ‘flash’? Maybe a ‘clutter’? Whatever, there were more hot shots sucking pencils and burning flash bulbs than I had ever seen in my life. And they all called me ‘Heidi’ – the name of my character in the film I was there to promote, Where Eagles Dare. Rather sweet, really. And surprising. My role in the film was pretty good but it didn’t deserve this sort of attention. I should have been worried. Where were Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood? Or even Mary Ure? Making other movies – that’s where. Leaving me to do the ego-stroking job of promoting the film while they moved on to pastures new and pay-cheques big.

  After half an hour of primping and posing the clipboard lady threw me a lifeline and suggested we move on to the hotel. I was torn between the thought that there might be someone who hadn’t captured my image on his emulsion and the knowledge that in spite of the ice-blast air-conditioning, the wedge of bodies had produced a temperature that was melting my make-up. I followed her out to the car. At least I rated a Cadillac. The short drive through the tawdry streets was a little depressing. Las Vegas was built and designed by a gang of vampires. Everything looks glitzy and expensive at night. The senses are overwhelmed by the millions of watts pumped out through the sparkling light from every ledge, roof-top and revolving door. Reality kicks in as the sun, a mephistophelean red, edges up over the hills and desert scrub. I tried not to notice the light sockets and angle iron, the paper blowing in the wind which carried sand in from the desert and coated everything in a dull layer of khaki. This was my day. I didn’t want to know about reality.

  The booking in at Caesar Palace, again saluted by rows of attention-grabbing fruits, was satisfactory. Another ‘vice’ something or other went through the knuckle-grazing ritual and assured me that his casa was my casa. I dimpled prettily. By now I had got the picture. If there wasn’t too much effort involved I would be in line for an underling in an expensive suit and all the pressmen I could eat. I was beginning to come down off the mountain. Then the door to my suite was thrown open and I was sparkling again. Wall-to-wall flowers and a note that suggested I wasn’t going to be confined for ever to the realm of vice-presidents and under-managers. I waited until my escort left with renewed promises of eternal servitude, then leaped on to the
flowers and shuffled through the wad of visiting cards: ‘For Heidi – welcome to Las Vegas – Bo Poke – President/MGM.’ ‘Welcome to America, F. Melnicker, President of Finance/MGM.’ ‘Knock ’em dead, kid! Luv – Alistair’ (MacLean). ‘Sorry not to be there with you, darling, Good Luck, Richard & Elizabeth.’ A sop, that one. Richard was much better off where he was making Staircase and knew it. I read the rest of the ritualised billets-doux and stored them carefully away in my little box purse that was all the rage in London but had also taken on a tackiness in my ostentatious surroundings. I considered a bath but rejected it in favour of crashing out on the luxurious charpoy, as big as a singles court, and buried myself under a heap of cushions and pillows.

  Bad move!

  My eyelids had hardly started to flutter when the telephone chirruped. Dazed after thirty hours with only a spine-snapping doze on the plane to fizz up the old batteries, it took me quite a while to realise that the one-armed bandit poised on the bedside table was doubling as a telephone. It was the lady with the clipboard whose name, if I remember rightly, was Soledad, and she had exciting news. El Presidente, Bo Poke, was already in the hotel and would like to meet me before the reception banquet – which, incidentally, was due to start in half an hour. I panicked. It would take me that much time to find a suitable frock. Never mind meeting the Poke bloke and doing all the things I should have done before diving into the pillows.

  I made my entry into the Titanic-sized banqueting hall twenty minutes late and hating everybody. I was reminded not to get big ideas about my part in the PR operation by the fact that all of them were already seated at their tables and, if they weren’t exactly at the cheese and coffee stage, they were prodding the bread rolls and had their napkins strategically placed to catch any dribbles.

  Bo Poke did his bit. After all, he was strapped into the chair that could become a throne or electric according to the international performance of the film that I was fronting. He massaged my ego into some sort of shape and made a big fuss of seating me beside him. I had been curious to meet him. There were so many stories going around the industry that I didn’t know what to expect. Someone pretty extraordinary, at least. You don’t get head-hunted by a super-conglomerate like MGM unless you are something a bit special. Only three months earlier he had been little more than a glorified grocer – well, president of General Foods, actually – but what had that to do with film? I asked him. He laughed. He had been given a crash course. It was, au fond, all the same thing. You buy a commodity, price it attractively, get a few dumb broads to waggle their butts suggestively and you are in profit.

  I looked at him and struggled with the concept that he saw me as a dumb broad wiggling my assets and went off him. It didn’t bother him. He came out with ‘present company excepted’ but I read that as ‘accepted’ and withdrew my favours. As if he cared. Everyone was talking to everyone, tearing down reputations and questioning what everyone else was worth. I painted on a smile and went to sleep behind it. Which was fine – until Bo Poke jumped up and launched into a spiel which ended in a fanfare for Clint Eastwood. Nobody had bothered to tell me Clint was going to be there. It turned out that he had a couple of days off filming and had let MGM fly him in. I was glad of the distraction, I had the distinct impression that the head of finance was about to make a take-over bid for my prime assets. Clint and his wife Maggie were wonderful. He sailed charmingly down the line of executives, who stood to give him a welcoming ovation, until he reached me. I didn’t know what to expect. Clint gave a big hello, gathered me in his arms and let the suits know that we were brothers under the skin. It got better after that. He sat on the other side of Poke and made a point of chatting to me across the President’s soup plate.

  I was beginning really to enjoy myself. Then Poke blasted out a corporate message about Where Eagles Dare, smarmed over Clint, threw me a titbit and thanked the Nazis for being the greatest source of entertainment since Nero burned down Rome.

  As if on cue some joker smashed through the double doors of the banqueting hall in Adolf Hitler gear: stupid little black moustache, SS hat and Führer uniform. Just in case anyone missed the allusion, he kicked his heels together, shot up his arm in the Nazi salute and shouted, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  Everyone laughed.

  I felt sick. I had to get out of there. I stalked from the room, leaving the laughter to fade in the distance, overwhelmed by the morass of memories of my nightmare childhood – a lifetime ago.

  One

  I had a strongly developed sense of the dramatic even before I was born. It has to be admitted that if you are trying to escape from your oppressors, having a baby in front of them is not a wise move.

  My parents were on their way from Nazi Germany to England via Poland when I decided to arrive. Grimly my mother tried to hold me off but when the train pulled in to Częstochowa station I was on my way out. My father managed to find someone who contacted a doctor and my mother was made more or less comfortable in a little room at the rear of the station. It was only just in time. I had already made my way into the world virtually unaided when the midwife arrived. I have a picture of smiling faces hovering above me and in the distance through the driving snow the sound of a train whistle welcoming me into the world.

  In haste and without much thought – and to my continuing distress – my mother called me Ingrid, which in Swedish means ‘victorious on horseback’.

  My father was a true-blue Prussian, a scientist and reluctant officer in the cavalry during the Great War. A man who knew how to live well. He was born in 1870 in Potsdam, although his family came from Torbetzkoy in the province of Kaluga, not far from Moscow, where they owned land until the Bolshevik revolution. The family was proud of its connection to the great Russian General Mikhail Larinovich Kutuzov, Prince of Smolensk, who stuck it to Napoleon pretty conclusively when he had designs on taking over Russia.

  My father was my hero. He’d been educated at Heidelberg and later Oxford where he took up rowing. When competitors were rounded up to enter the first Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens he was there. He won a medal and was received by the King. He could have gone anywhere to live but turn-of-the-century England suited him. My father’s immediate claim to fame was his invention of a special electrical battery which he patented in 1900. To prove that his battery was a viable product with a modern application, he took his battery-driven car on a London-to-Brighton run – and finished, which was enough to prove a point.

  Always looking for greater challenges, he worked on developing a purely British aeroplane. He also started on the design of a British airship. Then Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo and World War One became inevitable.

  After twenty years in England my father considered himself British in everything but birth and wished to stay there. Kaiser Bill wanted him back, since my father was one of the top designers of lighter-than-air aircraft, and he therefore had the negative choice of staying in England in a detention camp or returning to Germany. He closed up his house in New Maiden and served in the Prussian cavalry.

  The war over, my father tried to return to England but his initial overtures to old British friends and business acquaintances met with a less than enthusiastic response. The horror and futility of the Great War had left a psychological scar on the nation’s psyche which was not easily healed. He always said that the detention camp would have been the lesser of two evils – and he would have improved his cricket . . .

  He was a renowned engineer and inventor, a man of passion and intellect, of courage and conscience.

  It was a love of horses which brought my parents together. They’d met when he spotted her competing skilfully in a dressage event at a horse show in Treptow. She was thirty years younger than him and from a Lithuanian background, but their interest in horses bridged the gap. My father was never one to hang around and within the year they were married.

  External events were not to allow them much time to enjoy their newly wedded happiness in Berlin. The Nazis were ga
ining influence and their rhetoric was directed with growing ferocity at the huge Jewish section of the community. My mother’s Jewish blood put her in jeopardy. My father thought long and hard about the situation. He would probably have decided to sit it out and see what happened if he’d been able to continue to design non-military airships, but already the Nazi influence was beginning to show so he decided to leave his job. Despite the fact that he was over retirement age, he was ordered to stay on. It was time to leave.

  Reacting quickly, he sold whatever he could and left the rest with his friend and partner, Abe Mandelstamm. It wasn’t easy. The mounting number of attacks on Jews was turning the once elegant city into a hell-hole of racial discrimination and any Jew with a sense of history realised it was time to get out. This meant that the market was flooded with household goods and minor masterpieces. My family weren’t too badly off. In the good old days my father had bought a number of shares in British engineering companies. When times were hard, after World War One, he had been tempted to sell them. Now he was glad that he hadn’t. They would provide a nest-egg that would set him up in England.

  My parents decided to take the route favoured by most émigrés, via Poland. There was just one small difficulty – me. I was due to be born at any minute. My father initially wanted to wait until after my birth but the authorities were getting heavy about his refusal to work on their war machines. He was picked up one night by men from the SSD, the State Security Service, and taken to Sachsenhausen – one of the first concentration camps – where he was told in unmistakable terms what would happen to him and his Jewish wife if he didn’t co-operate. It was four days before they put him in a black SSD car and dropped him off at home. My father had learned his lesson. My appearance would have to be postponed until the family was safely out of the country.

  That might have been the plan but no one had consulted me. The train was crossing the Polish border when I made my untimely arrival. Once I was safely delivered, my mother begged my father to get back on the train and continue the journey. She would follow in a couple of days when she had recuperated. He should have listened to her. My arrival without a ticket hadn’t gone unnoticed and to ingratiate himself with an enquiring SSD man the station-master passed on the news. The SSD man checked with Berlin and my father was held for ‘further questioning’. They decided to take him back to the capital. At this point everyone’s attitude to us changed. Before, they had been almost happy that the small railway station of their medieval town had been turned into a makeshift maternity home. Once my father had been fingered everyone wanted my mother – and me – out.