Goldengirl

There remained the question: What actually motivated Serafin? Earlier, it was safe to assume it was the prospect of a fat profit. The meeting on Sunday had disposed of that idea. Having masterminded the operation from the start, Serafin should have had a large interest in the proposed carve-up of revenue. What had shaped up as a bloodletting had passed off with less dissent than a Quaker prayer meeting. He had relinquished his right to a direct cut of the profits without a murmur. Anything he made out of the project would now be at Goldine’s discretion, and subject to the say-so of his fellow trustees. Yet he hadn’t protested, hadn’t seemed more than mildly interested. There had to be something else in it for him, more potent than dollars. A simple ambition to see his adopted daughter on the Olympic victory rostrum? Dryden doubted it. He was beginning to think along different lines.

According to the Directory of Medical Specialists, Serafin had been born in Salzburg in September 1920. He had received his M.D. from the University of Geneva in 1945. In March 1938, Hitler’s troops had annexed Austria for the Third Reich. Serafin would have been seventeen at the time, an automatic conscript to the Hitler Youth. Yet by the early forties, he was into his medical training in neutral Switzerland. How had he managed that when the Reich was committed to fighting on so many fronts? Either he had got out of Austria before the Nazis took over, or they had granted his exemption from military service to train as a doctor. To gain that concession, he would have had to convince them he was a committed Nazi.

The story of Gretchen in Hitler’s Germany had been rich with detail of the Napolas and the operations of RuSHA, but that in itself didn’t stamp Serafin as a former party member. Anyone who had lived through that era must have retained a vivid memory of the Nazi machine. And by implication at least, Serafin had more than once in his narrative expressed disapproval of the Third Reich. Its justification of racial elitism he had dismissed as a ‘crude philosophy.’

Still, the impression that had emerged most strongly from that evening in Cambria was Serafin’s fascination with Goldine’s heredity. He had not been able to conceal his pride in pointing out that she was the recipient of Aryan genes. His preoccupation with the child’s physique had been enough to give Mrs. Van Horn recurrent nightmares.

Then, there was the eccentric upbringing he had given the child, with the heavy emphasis on physical development: the home gymnasium, the exercises, the machine to expand her rib cage, the injections. And the cosmetic surgery, the bleaching of her hair. Was that to groom her for sporting and commercial stardom, or to create an Aryan ideal?

Thinking back to the Goldengirl film, its opening sequence had suggested Riefenstahl’s influence before anyone had mentioned Nazi Germany. Allowing that Serafin’s formative years were almost certainly dominated by Hitler’s propaganda, there was at least a possibility he might be planning a triumph for Goldengirl at the Olympics as a vindication of the master-race theory.

Fanciful? It fitted facts. Above everything with Serafin, there was a ruthless sense of purpose. If money was not the motivating force, there had to be something of real power in its place. This afternoon was dedicated to discovering what it was.

Bakersfield by California 99 presented an unpromising location for a neo-Nazi plot. South Union Avenue bristled with motels in landscaped grounds, with billboards boasting steaks and seafood. The Serafin address was in Alta Vista Drive, in the northeast residential section, well away from the oil installations. The house was brick, detached and large enough to suit an owner with the status of professor. It had a rose arbour and a lawn with a sprinkler working at full pressure. He drove past slowly, parked one block up, and walked back. The woman who answered his ring was blond and in her thirties. Her hair was tied with a blue chiffon scarf and she was holding a struggling three-year-old.

She wasn’t pleased at hearing it was another inquiry about Dr. Serafin. She had answered questions for a man on Sunday. Said he represented a San Diego newspaper. Now, what was a San Diego reporter doing asking questions to decent people in Bakersfield, she wanted to know, and how many more of these calls was she likely to get? She had never met Dr. Serafin, and knew nothing whatsoever about him. She and her husband had the house on a two-year rental due to expire in September, and they had fixed everything through Fox and Fox, the realty people on Truxton Avenue.