by Joel N. Ross
Earl was in Antwerp, which was why Uncle Sam had tapped Tom for dinner duty. Tom said he was on maneuvers, but Sam scoffed at “skirt patrol,” and there Tom was, trying not to salute the waiters. Been as much fun as a toothache, until he’d seen her across the table, halfway down. Wearing a white traveling dress. She’d been seated next to a thin-lipped man who spat when he spoke. She fiddled with a silver napkin ring, and didn’t flinch. There was nothing but pleasant attention in her generous gray eyes, and maybe a hint of humor if you knew where to look.
She was hardly a beauty. She was an Englishwoman of the type who is drab five days out of seven and stunning the other two. Tom never understood it. She’d be mousy on Tuesday for dinner. Wednesday lunch, she’d be luminous. She had perfect glowing skin, purebred English accent. It didn’t matter. None of that mattered—what she looked like, what she sounded like. Harriet was Harriet. There was no standard against which to measure her.
After dinner, Tom rescued her from the thin-lipped man and they’d stood on the porch. It was chilly, but his fingers were hot on the silver napkin ring in his pocket—his first keepsake of her.
She and her father were on a three-month tour of the United States. She’d seen the sights—Boston, New York, Washington. Tom later learned that her father had been attending quasi-diplomatic meetings, enjoying long lunches with newspapermen and industrialists. Always wondered if Chilton had met Edward R. Murrow, who at that time was CBS’s director of Talks and Education—and whose coverage of the Blitz later swayed more Americans toward the British than anything else on earth.
Chilton had been a representative member of the pro-appeasement Cliveden set. He’d held firmly to the majority opinion: peace at any price. There’d been no shame in that then. Hell, it was still the opinion of the majority of Americans, despite Ed Murrow’s broadcasts during Nazi raids, with explosions and sirens in the background.
There’d been a different sort of explosion on that porch in the Washington evening. It took Tom three hours to fall in love with Harriet. Three months to woo her. Three days to lose her. To Earl, who had betrayed him . . .
SHE’D TURNED THE switches on two lamps as she’d approached—bathed in illumination, an onrushing radiance. Harriet didn’t wear perfume, but there was nothing Tom remembered so clearly as her scent. It engulfed him. He drowned. Years without seeing her, he knew every line on her face.
Her accent was so refined, there was nothing she could say that didn’t end up poetry. He’d once had her recite his filthiest army vocabulary, just to hear the words rendered pristine. She was speaking and she laid a hand on his arm. Her fingers were strong and firm. When she was angry or aroused, her face would go blotchy. It was blotchy now.
There’d been a hat behind the chair, Earl’s hat. Not a porkpie—he’d have expected a porkpie—but a good snap-brim felt fedora. This was the hat Earl wore. This was the chair he sat in. This was his table and this his wife.
Tom’s lips moved and his mouth made sounds.
“Oh, Tommy,” she said, and he wanted to believe it was kindness in her voice, not pity. “What shall I do with you?”
“Fox-trot?”
She removed her hand from his arm. “I ought to place that call.”
“You never visit.”
“I was told that would be best.”
“Would you come if I ask?”
“No. No.”
Tom nodded. He remembered her playing “Autumn in New York” for him on a glossy black piano somewhere, off-key and radiant.
“No, Tom. I will not visit you.”
“I’m getting the picture, Harry.” Why was he here? What was he doing? He needed information. He needed to leave before he lost himself. “Earl’s gone. You think I’m crazy, fine—but he’s gone.”
“That you believe it,” she said in her gentle polished voice, “doesn’t make it so.”
“It’s true.”
“And your squad on Crete?”
Earl had betrayed them. He’d known the Nazi gliders were landing in force at Máleme, six thousand Fliegerkorps. He’d done nothing. Tom’s men had died to lose a battle.
“I lost them,” he said.
“We heard you were recovering. The injury, the morphia . . .”
“I’m swell now. I’m four-oh. All I want is to talk to him. All I want is to ask. I can’t—I don’t sleep anymore, Harriet. The good news is, I finally have time to learn the clarinet.”
She said something, but he missed it. He wanted to take her in his arms.
“All I want is to look at him,” he said. “Look in his eyes and see what’s there.”
“No.”
“A peek at his papers, maybe I can find him.”
“No.”
“You owe me.”
Her eyes held no mercy. “I owe you nothing.”
“You owe me a quarter for that cup of chocolate.”
She brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. “The Waterfall.”
“What waterfall?”
“The Rapids. It’s what he calls the Waterfall.”
“It’s a club? A nightclub?”
“Of a certain kind. I’ve never been, myself.”
Ah. A nightclub with fan dancers and exotic nude tableaux. Women welcome, but wives not received. Many such clubs had closed during the Blitz, but they had reopened now. The solid dark of the London night was forbidding and inviting to different degrees. He pictured Earl in a nightclub, inspecting the girls on the stage, Earl in a nightclub while Harriet waited at home. . . .
“Earl’s a regular there?”
She gave a short nod.
“Regular lady-killer,” he said. “Regular Don Juan.”
“It’s work, Thomas. I trust my husband.”
“I trusted him, too.”
She didn’t respond. He would never rouse her to passion again. His touch would never please her. His breath would not catch in her hair.
“You don’t know where he is,” he said. “You don’t know what he’s done. He tells the embassy, ‘If my wife calls, I’m on business. I’m at the Rapids, a bit of charity sitting on my lap.’ Any sacrifice for the home team. You think he sleeps alone? He doesn’t recognize a bed unless it has a skirt attached. Does he come home smelling of perfume? Does he—”
She slapped him. “I haven’t time for your wretchedness, Tom. I’ll tell you this once. You’re not yourself. You cannot trust what you think. You’re exhausted and deluded. Listen to me. You know nothing—nothing at all. Go back to the hospital. Go—and don’t come back.”
She walked to the front and opened the door.
The imprint of her hand was raw on his face. He went.
OUTSIDE THE DOOR, the moon was feeble behind the sooty clouds. The city was flat black and Tom’s eyes couldn’t adapt. He couldn’t trust what he thought; he was exhausted and deluded and—
No. No, he was swell. He’d been hurt, he’d been doped, but then he’d recovered. He strained his eyes to catch the light, but he felt the looming buildings more than he saw them. He was fine. He was four-oh. Harriet was wrong. . . .
The streets were black and cold. He heard a cane tapping, hushed voices; the dark city swallowed noise like a grave swallows a coffin. There was the growl of a car engine, the faint glow of hooded headlights. Shapes rose before him—a bus stop sign, a brick wall, a surface shelter. He stumbled into a mailbox and excused himself, then said, “Shit.”
He heard the clanking of a cart and saw a tongue of blue light hovering in the blackness, caught the scent of something that made his stomach hollow. A man was selling fish and chips from a wagon, the covered flame burning to keep the food warm. Tom bought a serving, took three steps back, and the darkness engulfed the wagon, leaving nothing but the scent of fish and the clattering of the wheels.
Tom ate, then followed a man to a big Victoria
n pub with mahogany furniture and engraved glass. He sat at one of the three bars, ordered a brown ale, and asked his neighbor about the Waterfall. The man gave him a knowing grin and clear directions. Another man overheard, said the first man was off his head. They finally came to an agreement Tom didn’t understand, then started talking about Mr. Tanner and the AEU’s demands for wage increases for shipyard workers.
Tom finished his ale and returned to the black streets.
They’d said the Waterfall was half a block off Trafalgar Square or Piccadilly, or on Coventry, maybe down an alleyway. Not far from Hatchards—maybe between a cinema and Tudor’s Dry Cleaning. Tom blew into his hands to warm them. His right hand smelled of bandages and iodine. Harriet was wrong, telling him he couldn’t trust himself, when it was she who shouldn’t trust. If only he could prove Earl had betrayed—
There was a muffled squeal of protest, a woman’s voice, and Tom spun. She was sobbing, more violent than tears. He jogged across the street to an alley. There were shades of darkness—the glossy black of a raven’s wing, the dull black of soot—and the alley was a muddy gray. A diffused light picked over the walls and outlined a writhing shape, a Jack the Ripper shape. A blackout torch wobbled in the air.
Tom moved in, and the torch swiveled and a face sprang from the darkness. A woman’s face, oval and ivory against the velvet darkness. Her eyebrows were tweezed to nothing, her red lips a slash. She was keening. The black shape swarmed over her—an army greatcoat swinging loose like a cape. She was hidden but for her agonized face.
Tom took two steps. The woman screamed when she saw him; the man started to turn, but Tom was already there. He caught the man in the kidney with his left fist, swung him gasping away from the woman. The man fell to his knees, panting and swearing.
The woman said, “Bugger off!”
Tom kicked the man in the side and realized the woman was talking to him.
“Wait yer bleedin’ turn,” the woman said, rearranging her skirt. “You cracked bastard.”
Tom felt blood rushing to his face. The man was on his bare ass, pants around his ankles. No wonder he’d fallen so easy.
“Seven shillings sixpence,” the woman told Tom. “But first you learn to queue.”
A knee-trembler in an alleyway. Swell. Tom was recovered. He was fine. Sure he was.
HE WALKED TOO QUICKLY through the treacherous dark. Ought to be back at the Rowansea, cutting paper dolls. Ought to give MacGovern a jingle, have himself locked away, but his boys had died and the island had fallen. Earl was a turncoat and a killer and in bed with Sondegger. . . .
The sky lightened as Tom entered a square. There were voices, laughter. He smelled the chalky scent of the river, heard the jingle of a bell, saw dark patches of movement. A shape towered over him, resolved into a man not much bigger than King Kong.
Tom stumbled against him. It was like stumbling against poured concrete.
“Oi,” Kong said. “Bleedin’ berk.” His voice was high, almost womanish.
“Sorry,” Tom said, and stepped past.
Kong muttered and receded into darkness; then his high-pitched voice came louder: “The fook are you?”
“Here, wait, here,” another voice said.
“You speck that? Gotta be the . . .” Kong’s voice faded as a group of young people chattered past: “Wasn’t Miss Durbin smashing in Eve?” . . . “Hardly good as Lana Turner in Honky Tonk. . . .”
Tom made it across the square without breaking any laws. He stopped under an awning, lighted a cigarette. Enough glow leaked out to read the sign: TUDOR’S DRY CLEANING AND PRESSING. Tom checked next door—a cinema. And between them was a nondescript alleyway. Halfway down, under a hooded lamp, a set of double doors stood beyond a half moat of sandbags. A chalkboard listed half a dozen names—comedians—and a discreet sign said THE WATERFALL.
Tom opened the door and stepped into a handsome foyer with lofty ceilings, ivory walls, and red-and-gold carpeting that ran down a wide flight of stairs ten yards in front of him. A faint tinkling of piano and a murmur of voices ran back up. There were two closed doors on the left wall and a narrow stairway to his right with a thin chain across it.
There was a doorman at Tom’s elbow, halfway behind a polished wooden pulpit. “Member or subscriber, sir?”
“Earl Wall,” Tom said. “I’m his guest.”
“Have you an invitation?”
“He’s expecting me,” Tom said. “I’m his brother.”
The doorman’s eyes flicked at Tom. “Pardon me. I didn’t see the likeness at first. How is Mr. Wall?”
“Don’t tell me he’s not downstairs.”
“We haven’t seen him for several days now.”
“Said he’d be here.”
“It’s unlike Mr. Wall to miss an engagement.” The doorman stroked the gold braid on his jacket. “Perhaps Flight Lieutenant Inch might know. . . .”
“Inch?”
“Inch Rivere of the RAF. They often share a table. He’s downstairs now.”
Tom thanked the doorman and left his hat and coat with the cloakroom girl. Down the stairs was a landing that opened into a narrow balcony. A row of linen-draped tables followed the brass balustrade in a semicircle around the room below. Half the tables were occupied—men in uniforms or dark suits, and young women in velvet bridge jackets and silk dresses that whispered encouragement as they pooled around slender ankles.
Past the landing, Tom went downstairs to the parquet floor of the main club. Everything was dark wood and brass, except the high, arching ivory walls. The tables around the dance floor were set with silver and the same snowy linen as on the balcony. The customers were male, with the occasional flash of color showing a woman among them, like a spray of flowers on an undertaker’s tux. The women were more than one step above their sisters on the balcony—fast upper-class girls who couldn’t be bothered, and fast upper-class girls who could.
There was a big mahogany bar with a big mirror and a big bartender with a chin like a shovel. There were a dozen girls serving dinner and drinks, wearing long white gloves and what could pass for full evening gowns—if Mata Hari were doing dress inspection. There were cigarette girls wearing less.
One of the serving girls drifted past with a tray of food. She had the face of a mischievous child and the body of a bombshell. A tendril of black hair crept from behind her ear, caressed her neck, and headed south toward her décolletage.
Tom caught a whiff of grilled fish, another of roast mutton, and a third of something subtler, floral and light. It made him hungry, and he watched the girl walk away. She cast a lowered glance over her bare shoulder at him, and there was a devil-may-care swivel in her hips—but in her eyes was a kind of tomboy innocence. Or maybe he’d been away from women too long.
He stubbed his butt in an ashtray at the foot of the stairs. Across the room, there was a wide stage with a recessed bandstand and a fat man at a grand piano, hitting the right keys at the right time. A strawberry blonde in a red dress swayed next to him, singing from deep back in her throat, standing close to the microphone.
I’ve got a cozy heated flat,
There’s a rack to hang your hat.
Shrug on my chiffon negligee gown.
You know I know my stuff,
And if daddy that ain’t enough,
I’ve got the deepest bomb shelter in town.
Her voice was burnt honey. Tom walked through it to the bar and ordered a martini.
“On the slate this evening, sir?” the bartender asked.
“I’m a guest of Earl Wall’s. Put it on his tab.”
The bartender’s shovel chin grew an inch. “Today is the first, sir.”
“Wait a couple minutes if you don’t like it. It’ll be the second soon enough.”
“Mr. Wall generally settles his accounts several days before the new month.”
“He hasn’t been in?”
“Not this week, sir. Perhaps you’d care to . . .”
Tom laughed. “Nothing I’d rather do than pay Earl’s debts. But no, not tonight.”
“There are regulations, sir.”
“About a bar bill?”
The chin receded. “Only the martini, then?”
“Yeah. Hold the vermouth.”
Tom couldn’t figure what the problem had been. Didn’t matter. He let the martini and the music warm him. He was almost mellow, could almost let himself unclench. Not yet. Earl might still show. If he didn’t, Tom would talk to Flight Lieutenant Rivere, ask around. Walk back Earl’s treachery until he could walk no more.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
NIGHT, DECEMBER 1, 1941
AUDREY UNPINNED HER hair at the undressing room’s mirror. She’d thought the man was Earl—the way he’d stood at the foot of the stairs, running his eyes over the tables and the bandstand and bar; the way he’d lighted a cigarette; the way he’d waited, in no rush, quietly confident the room would offer itself to him.
She’d detoured around the back tables to get a closer look. Grabbed Margaret’s tray to serve, though she was meant to be onstage in twenty minutes. She’d simply wanted a closer look.
She laughed to herself as she removed her white gloves—she’d simply wanted to toss a glass of wine in Earl’s face. She would have been discreet about waltzing in her sling-backs on his handsome head, about accidentally breaking his spine in seven places.
“What evil are you intending?” Imogene asked, applying rouge.
Audrey’s hand paused on the top of her dress. “Thought I’d go starkers and prance about in public. You?”
“I’ve heard that evil chuckle before, Vee.”
