by David Nickle
She flicked the umbrella open and closed the door, then set the umbrella on the floor of the entry hall to dry. It was in so doing that she noticed something she might otherwise have missed.
She had set the umbrella down in a pool of water.
Annie stepped away from it and turned on the hall light.
The water made a trail, down past the stairs and toward the kitchen.
Annie put her hand on the doorknob back outside, and cracked it open—so that if need be, she might run.
“Hello?” she called. “Who’s there?”
Through the kitchen doorway, another light switched on and bathed the hallway in a yellow square.
“Nurse Rowe?”
Annie shut the door again. “Been a long time since anyone called me that name.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes, Ruth,” said Annie, sighing. “I’m alone.”
And there was a shadow down the hall, and then stepping into the hallway . . . there was Ruth Harper—soaked through and through . . . hair streaking down her face like she’d been pulled afresh from the Kootenai River. And then she was walking down the hallway—running down the hallway—right toward Annie, and before Annie could get her hand back to that doorknob, she had wrapped her arms around Annie’s waist.
“I can’t be alone,” said Ruth Harper, and she was sobbing: “Please. Please.”
Annie got Ruth back to the sitting room, started up a fire in the hearth, and ordered Ruth to strip off her clothes.
“I’d like to get you in a hot bath,” said Annie, “but that’ll take time to draw. So we’ll get you out of those soaking clothes. Do you need help?”
Ruth shook her head no, but she did need some help with the fasteners on her blouse, her hands were shaking so badly. Annie crumpled up paper, lit it underneath the pyramid of logs she’d made, then got Ruth started with the top two hooks.
“I’m fine,” she said after that, so Annie opened up the trunk and selected a thick woolen blanket. By the time she brought it over Ruth had stripped to her undergarments. Annie draped the blanket over Ruth’s shoulders and led her to the sofa.
“Now sit,” she commanded, and when Ruth obeyed, Annie poured brandy from a decanter that Andrew had left on the mantelpiece. Two generously filled glasses. Ruth accepted one of them, but didn’t drink.
“No one saw me,” she said.
Annie sat beside her on the sofa. You didn’t see anyone see you was what Annie thought, but what she said was: “Well that’s good. Even if they had, in this rain I don’t think they’d have gotten enough of a look. . . .”
“No one saw me,” said Ruth again. “I’m sorry I left my room. I know it created a risk. But I couldn’t stay there. In that quarantine . . .” She looked into her glass, and then lifted it to her lips. “Where’s Andrew?” she asked.
Annie explained, and Ruth listened carefully.
“Andrew doesn’t do surgery, still?” she asked.
“No,” said Annie. “Not when he can avoid it. Which is pretty well all the time. Doctor Thomas is able enough.”
“Not able enough to keep that poor woman safe,” said Ruth.
Annie sipped her brandy, and Ruth finished hers.
“It’s the damned quarantine,” she said. “It has me . . . seeing things.”
Annie rose to get the decanter, but Ruth took hold of her arm, so Annie sat back down.
“I know that this isn’t a quarantine. But do you remember when we decided on this place? We joked.”
“I remember,” said Annie. Ruth had made a joke that the Harper Foundation was long overdue to pay for a proper quarantine, after botching it so badly in Eliada. It wasn’t properly a joke—but they’d laughed at it, loud and long, all the same.
“Do you know,” said Ruth, “that I had only ever been in the quarantine at Eliada the once? And that time—that time . . .” She lifted her feet from the floor to the lip of the sofa, and let go of Annie’s arm to wrap her own arms around her knees.
“You know, all these years, I’ve had such a hard time remembering that night. I remember it began as a lark: Jason, that sweet, handsome, and very sad boy . . . an outlaw’s son . . . had told me stories of that quarantine. Quite fanciful. I didn’t really believe them at the time. But oh, I liked stories. And I liked a mystery.
“I remember that we had just gone through his hateful aunt’s things, to solve a bit of that mystery . . . and sure enough, found a mysterious letter. In French. We left that with my friend Louise, the only one who had a hope of understanding it. I think she was cross about that. She had teased me about Jason. He was interested in me, that was very clear. And I was interested in him.
“I was, by that point, attempting to seduce him—that’s really what I was doing . . . creeping off with Jason Thistledown, to find a quiet place in that quarantine . . . and seduce him. Make love with him. I kissed him on the way there. Made my feelings plain as I could.” She smiled wanly.
“What a dreadful girl I was.”
Annie protested that she was not, and to that, Ruth held out her glass.
“For a long time, my last reliable memory of the quarantine was as we approached. I remembered seeing some activity around it—men in white robes and hoods. I remembered seeing a scurrying thing. . . .
“After that . . . my recollection was . . . sensual, I suppose. I had always understood there to have been a gap, a time when I was inside the quarantine, that was simply lost to me. Because if I were to make a sequence of it, I would say that I next recalled Jason’s touch. His handling . . . his penetration of me. We joined together, in the cellar room at the hospital. That sounds like awful poetry, but it is how I remember it. . . .
“I am sorry. I’m being very frank, Annie.”
Annie reminded her that she was a nurse and appreciated frank talk. She poured another finger of brandy into Ruth’s glass and sat back down.
“I was fond of that memory,” said Ruth. “It was a memory I’d often return to, even after Jason . . . well after he left me, left all of us, at that farm in Canada. Really, it was never far from my mind.”
“That boy leaves an impression,” said Annie, and at that, Ruth laughed bitterly.
“I’ll agree with you on one point: an impression was left,” said Ruth. “The question is, what left it?”
The fire dimmed a moment as the last of the paper burned out, but the logs had caught well enough, and announced combustion with a pop and a geyser of sparks that made Annie start.
“I know this sanatorium isn’t a quarantine, or it isn’t that quarantine,” Ruth said. “But hiding in it, alone through much of the day and all of the night, as I have been . . . it offers up something of a portal, do you understand?”
Annie didn’t, so Ruth elaborated.
“The hours I spent in the quarantine at Eliada . . . they weren’t a blank time. I didn’t forget. As I think of it, I can recall precisely how that went. Jason had sighted a woman, in the woods. He motioned to her, and I saw her . . . she was on the ground, in the dirt, in the embrace of something small but strong . . . like a raccoon but without any hair on it . . . and with jaws that were very different. If that makes any sense. Or even if it doesn’t. That’s what I remember seeing. And it frightened me! Oh, it gave me such a terror. The poor woman writhed underneath it, as though she were in terrible pain. Which no doubt she was.
“I ran. I turned and ran, left Jason to face that . . . I ran toward the light, the torchlight from the guard around the quarantine. There were men guarding it, but I managed to find my way to a door before any came round a corner. And I slipped inside, and shut the door behind me . . . and I remember, now, feeling such the fool. Here, I’d goaded Jason into this dangerous adventure. Only half-believing the whole of it. And I’d abandoned him. So what did I do? I called out for him, in that pitch black space within my father’s quarantine. ‘Jason!’ I said. ‘I’m sorry!’ I said. And although I didn’t know what that word meant—I still don’t, not really—I cal
led out that I loved him. And do you know, Annie—do you know what happened?”
Annie shook her head.
“He came to me,” said Ruth. “He came to me, in a halo of golden light . . . tall, and so beautiful. He . . . he reached out a hand to caress my face, and he smiled . . . he smiled. And he said that he loved me.”
“Jason came to you.”
“Yes,” said Ruth. “And he loved me.”
“Oh, Ruth.” Annie put a hand on Ruth’s shoulder. But she shook it off so violently as to nearly cause Annie to spill her brandy. Ruth apologized.
“I was thinking about his touch,” she explained. “Recalling it. In such vivid detail. Your touch . . . was too much.”
“I’m sorry,” said Annie.
“Don’t be,” said Ruth. “You were offering comfort.”
“When did you start remembering this way? So vividly?”
“I can’t pinpoint it,” she said. “For some time I think. It is possible . . . it’s possible that I’ve been remembering the Juke, from the beginning. I wonder if I wasn’t remembering it when Jason and I finally did make love to one another. I’m wondering if it’s not the Juke that I remember, when I recall Jason.”
Annie didn’t understand and said so.
“I think,” said Ruth, “that on one level or another, I’ve been remembering that . . . that rape, my whole entire life. Although it’s not precisely a rape, is it? It’s an infection.”
“In a way,” said Annie, “I guess it is. But the way that infection’s delivered . . .”
“It makes quite an impression,” said Ruth. “And do you know what that impression is? Not revulsion. Rather the opposite.”
Ruth clutched the blanket close around her and stood. She walked close to the hearth, and finally, let the blanket fall so she stood nearly naked before the fire.
“Jason was a very handsome boy,” she said. “But the world . . . it’s filled with handsome boys. Do you not think it odd, that after twenty years, he is the man that I think of, when I think of men? My first lover, it’s true . . . who left me, two decades ago. Who came back to me, so briefly, after the war . . . and left again.
“Isn’t it strange, that when I receive a letter from him—the simplest, most hastily written letter—that I should follow its instructions without question?”
Annie had always thought it was love that made a girl do that sort of thing. But she thought about it again.
“Oh,” she said.
And Ruth looked over her shoulder and echoed:
“Oh.”
She knelt down and lifted an iron poker from the rack, poking it into the embers at the heart of the fire.
“I’d intended to go with Doctor Waggoner, with Zimmermann, to Germany. To rescue my love Jason Thistledown from the Juke. Or from Orlok. Because of course, Jason had written me. He had professed his love for me. And I do want to go. More than anything. I want to go to him.”
She pulled the poker from the fire. Its tip was glowing a faint pink, and she brought it close to her left hand.
“I wonder,” she said, “if I would feel the same if I burnt my palm, right now. The pain worked for Jason, when he wanted to get out from under the spell of a Juke. What do you think it’d do for me?”
Andrew returned to the house just past three in the morning, and found Annie dozing on the sofa beside Ruth Harper, back in her blanket and curled up there. Annie, a light sleeper, awoke as he stepped into the room. She put a finger to her lips, and indicated that they should meet and talk in the hall.
“How is Madame Pierrepoint?” asked Annie, before Andrew could question Ruth’s presence, and Andrew explained the news was good.
“She came to an hour ago,” he said. “She did suffer a stroke—there’s partial paralysis, on her left side, and her speech isn’t back yet. Though part of that’s the plombage. We’ll keep a close eye on her for a couple days. I think there’s a good chance she’ll come back. Now what—” He indicated with a thumb toward the sitting room.
Annie guided Andrew into the kitchen as she thought about what to say.
Finally, as they sat down at the table, Annie took Andrew’s hands in hers and looked him in the eye and told him straight up: Ruth Harper was in no shape to go to Germany, and neither was Albert Zimmermann.
Four
Bobby Grady knew some musicians in Paris—jazz men who played the Liberty some nights, just drank there others—and some of them he trusted, so he called on those ones. Just a few of those were not ill-disposed to the idea, as he explained it. So it developed into a plan.
Annie thought it was idiotic when she heard it first, but she warmed to it.
Certainly she was convinced of Grady’s assertion that she and Andrew wouldn’t be able to travel in Germany together, and surely not to Munich. Not into a city of brownshirt thugs, rallied around a leader who dined out on the disparagement of lesser races, and fomenting terror of miscegenation. Travelling there absent his white wife, Andrew would be safer, but still not safe. Not on his own.
Bobby’s plan rested on his friend—a Negro trumpet player name of Ozzie Hayward—and Ozzie was up for it. Ozzie had come to Paris by way of Louisiana, eventually fronting a jazz quartet known in Europe as Le Noir Qui Danse: The Dancing Negro.
It wasn’t a particularly descriptive moniker: not Ozzie, nor his drummer Pete Norland, nor piano man Bill Colbert, nor sax player Charlie LeFauvre did more than tap toes in time to their music. They were all noir, though, and unlike the general run of Negros, Germans—at least the class of German that listened to jazz music—liked them well enough.
“Tolerate’s a better word,” said Ozzie, swirling a glass of whiskey in the ground floor barroom of the Liberty, where Andrew and Annie met him for the first time on a bright Tuesday afternoon, before the crowd showed up. “They like the tune well enough . . . hum along, cut the rug with the Fräuleins, all that. German folk need that now—happy songs, sad songs. Any kind of song. Maybe they need the Negro too. But not for nothing but someone to whip, you dig?”
There wasn’t much whiskey in his glass, and Ozzie drained it.
“They need nice music more than a Negro to whip, and we sure do make nice music. So we’re all right.”
They were sitting around the table with Bobby, Ozzie, and Dominic Villart, the Italian boy who had driven the ambulance and inherited Molinare’s seat at the table upstairs. To Annie’s eye, both Dominic and Ozzie were nearly children—smooth-cheeked boys, wet about the ears. But not really; olive-skinned Dominic was quite muscular, his hair creamed back, a shadow of beard across a well-cut jawline. Ozzie used cream too, more of it and probably a different brand, to plaster his kinked hair nearly straight and flat against his scalp. A part like an arrow ran along the right side of his skull, back past the crown. Ozzie was rail thin, so Annie didn’t think he’d be any good at all in a fight, but maybe that was all right. She liked him. She thought others might too, especially sad German boys, deciding whether to whip or sing along. And that was good for Andrew.
“It sounds like you know a lot about the Germans,” said Andrew.
“We been through Germany four times now,” said Ozzie. “Couple times in Berlin. One time up in Frankfurt. One time down where you want to get to, Doc: Munich. That was two years back. We accompanied a heeler show, naked ladies being part of that. Scooped some heavy sugar over five nights, but I’m guessing half of that was for the ladies. More than half. Different crowd than Berlin.”
“How is that?” asked Annie.
Ozzie shrugged. “Berlin’s different than everywhere, and that’s something. But Munich . . . Munich especially. Not a jazz town. More a beer hall town. Oom pah pah . . . Wouldn’t have thought we’d ever be back there. But here we are, thanks to my man Bobby. . . .”
Now Bobby shrugged. “It was high time,” he said. Bobby knew musicians, and the people who booked the musicians too. And he’d pulled some strings with the manager of a little cabaret he knew, along the Isar. . . .
“Time indeed. So here we are, booked for a week, less’n a week from now. And lo ’n’ behold, my quartet got itself a fifth.” He grinned and tapped the table in front of Andrew.
“Afraid I’m not much of one,” said Andrew, “but I’ll try and pass.”
“Don’t do that,” said Ozzie. “They might ask you to play a tune, or dance. And you can’t do either of those things I’m guessin’.
“Just keep your hat low when anybody asks anything, particularly one of them brownshirts. They ain’t police but they act like they are, and that makes ’em worse. And they’re all over Munich. One of them asks you anything, you don’t speak German, even if you do. You’re just a dumb Neger. You know what that word means?”
“It’s German for Negro.”
Ozzie shook his head. “Not when they say it to you. They mean ‘nigger,’ then,” he said. “Important distinction. That’s what we are there, Doctor. Just like back home.”
Andrew would meet up with Ozzie and Le Noir Qui Danse at Gare du Norde station two days hence, packed for a roundabout trip to Munich. Dominic would meet with Dr. Lewis and board the same train but in First Class. It would take a day and a half, and they would need to change trains once, in Stuttgart. Thus Andrew Waggoner, the chief physician at the Sanatorium de Vire, would enter Munich as a tone-deaf jazz man who couldn’t so much as make eye contact with anyone until he was well away from the München LFF station, and safe at Dr. Kurtzweiller’s rooms.
The absurdity of it all came up several times that evening at home, in Andrew and Annie’s Paris flat.
“You know, I could probably get away with it,” said Andrew. “Just buy a first-class ticket, sit up front with Lewis and Villart, and tell the stationmaster I’m a doctor. In German! Ich bin Arzt! Who’d be bothered?”
