“She didn’t pretend to be innocent,” Hearst replied calmly. “She didn’t deny the circumstances of the death. She’s bothered by a third glass in a room with only two bodies.”
“The glass was broken,” Bullitt said dismissively. “What do you do, Hearst, when you’ve dropped a glass? Toss out the pieces and fetch another.”
“But why use the cut crystal at all? From the sound of things, the night was better suited to swigs from a bottle or puffs on a hookah. I agree with Miss King: The detail doesn’t fit.”
“Sally’s pretty enough,” Bullitt observed. “You want to lift her skirt?”
“I’d like to send her back to the States on the first available ship,” Hearst answered. “With the corpse, if possible.”
“I’m acquainted with Stilwell père. The Judge, I should say. It’s a damned shame. This fellow—the queer—worked for Sullivan and Cromwell, I understand.”
“Yes. That’s why it’s particularly interesting,” Hearst said neutrally. “The Dulles brothers.”
The Dulles brothers.
John Foster and Allen, one the highest-paid lawyer in the world and the managing partner of Sullivan & Cromwell—and the other a new-minted partner at the same firm. Both men were socially connected on several continents and had been educated at Princeton.
Bullitt was a Yale man. He despised the Dulles brothers.
“God!” he snorted furiously. “Have you seen the unremitting crap Foster’s pushing in the New York Times?”
“Yes, sir. I have.” The newspapers were sent by diplomatic pouch and generally arrived within a week of publication.
“Dulles calls Roosevelt a traitor to his class! Insists we’ve misunderstood the Nazis—and should elect his friend Lindbergh instead. Trumpets free markets and debt relief as the foundation of peace. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket and all Foster Dulles can think of is how to turn a buck. He was always a mercenary little shit, Foster.”
“I didn’t know you were acquainted, sir,” Hearst said woodenly.
“Years. The bastard showed up at Versailles in 1918—not as a delegate, mind you; not as a State department body. As a lawyer.”
Bullitt had attended the Versailles Conference, of course, as an official negotiator in President Woodrow Wilson’s entourage.
“Foster shipped out from New York on pure speculation and crashed the most important diplomatic conference since Waterloo.” The ambassador expelled a gust of smoke as though the taste were bitter in his mouth. “Eventually we all went home and left Foster to it. He made himself indispensable to the Allied Powers as an instrument of compromise. You know why he could compromise, Joe? Because Foster Dulles hasn’t a principled bone in his body. Now the Germans pay him by the hour to say we screwed them at Versailles. Dulles is the biggest Nazi apologist in New York—and the wealthiest. We should shoot him for treason.”
“But his brother—”
“Oh, Allen’s all right.” The cigarette tip waved in a glowing arc. “Fucks around on his wife, of course. I like a guy who knows how to live. Too bad he left State for S and C—but they say he needed the money. Buys his wife jewelry whenever he’s feeling remorse. I doubt a State department salary runs to Tiffany’s these days.”
Or to Balenciaga, or Cartier, Hearst thought with a nod to his own vanished wife. Bullitt was independently wealthy; he never thought about such matters as salary.
“Allen knows France’ll fall like a house of cards now the Germans are over the border,” the ambassador added bleakly.
This was not what he’d told the assembled ministers of French government only an hour ago; for them, Ambassador Bullitt had been disgustingly cheerful. Most of tonight’s partygoers had looked as gutted as a bunch of stockbrokers on Black Tuesday. Bullitt had tried to buck them all up with grand phrases about the fighting spirit of the French. Refilled their champagne glasses. Complimented the women. Reynaud and Daladier and the Minister of Armaments, Raoul Dautry, talked hopelessly of a street-to-street fight for the soul of Paris. Suggested that Winston Churchill, who’d been appointed prime minister of Britain only three days before, might send more troops. They planned an official delegation to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame—their defense of the country coming down to this: a prayer to God, who must certainly be French, to send the Germans home.
“If France falls, England’ll sink in a matter of weeks,” Bullitt continued. “We’ll have Oswald Mosley in number ten Downing Street and the Royal Family running for cover. The chief point is to get the British fleet to Canada, as I’ve told Roosevelt already—for his eyes only, of course. God forbid any real advice should be uttered in public! We have to look neutral, Chrissave us—because of people like Foster Dulles.”
Joe Hearst, too, had met Foster once, during a halcyon summer on Long Island in the early thirties: pipe-smoking, reserved to the point of distraction, as emotional as a dead fish. Hearst had been hired to teach Allen Dulles’s children to play tennis—and it was true the guy fucked around; he’d seduced a beautiful Russian tennis player that summer, the wife of a good friend. Foster was respected by most of New York, and the long-suffering Clover Dulles was commonly considered to be a saint, but it was Allen whom Hearst had instantly liked—Allen who was just as ruthless as his older brother but who masked his deadness behind a veneer of charm, enslaving children and adults with a single cock of an eyebrow. Hearst had stayed in touch with Allen all these years because a letter from the man made him feel like one of the Brahmin elite—My friend Hearst. He’s something at the embassy. The letters from New York had been coming thick and fast in recent months, and it was clear, Hearst thought, that Allen Dulles was worried. About the state of Europe. About the state of Sullivan & Cromwell. The state of his brother’s soul…
“How I’d love to stick it to Foster,” Bullitt mused wistfully. “Smear his pompous little firm all over the world’s papers. Sullivan Lawyer Dead in Sex Den, or something like that. But it can’t be done, of course. There’s the young man’s family to think of.”
Bill Bullitt might dismiss Philip Stilwell as a “queer,” but Philip Stilwell had the right money and connections behind him, and in Bullitt’s world such things were absolute.
“Miss King believes Stilwell was murdered,” Hearst observed.
“Bullshit,” the ambassador repeated.
“She showed me a note he sent her this evening. Had it tucked in her gas-mask case.”
“Pledging deathless passion? Undying love? Come on, Joe. Men have been lying to women since the first hour in the Garden. Especially when they’re queer.”
“ ‘Sally dearest I might be a little late for dinner this evening as I’ve an appointment with a member of the firm,’ ” Hearst recited. “ ‘This business of Lamont’s can’t be allowed to continue; it’s immoral, it’s illegal, and it’s going to sink us all.’ ”
The ambassador frowned. “Lamont. Lamont?”
“Rogers Lamont,” Hearst supplied. “Another Princetonian. Another S and C lawyer. He quit the firm back in September and joined the British Expeditionary Force. He’s probably retreating right now from Sedan.”
“What the hell’s Lamont got to do with two dead queers?”
“Miss King thinks Philip Stilwell stumbled onto something dirty in Lamont’s papers,” Hearst said patiently. “Something he shouldn’t have seen. She thinks Stilwell was dangerous to people in power. She thinks he was silenced.”
“By somebody at Foster Dulles’s firm?”
Hearst nodded.
Somewhere in the night, an air-raid siren wailed. Bullitt sank back into the shadows of the great car.
“Find out,” he said.
CHAPTER SIX
Emery Morris was nearly fifty years old. He had, by dint of discretion and steady labor, arrived at a certain position in life. If asked to describe the exact dimension and location of that position, the parameters it filled, Morris would have hesitated or demurred. He would have prevaricated. He was not a man who enjoyed being pinned do
wn. Although in matters of law Emery Morris demanded precision, in the personal realm he was tenaciously vague.
But his enjoyment of the position he had attained was predicated upon certain inviolable rules. One was that he be free of all personal entanglements. Entanglements were simply means to an end—in Morris’s opinion, the control of oneself by people one despised. His wife, whom he’d acquired as a necessary prop in the business of respectable existence, was included in this category.
A similar rule applied to his clients. Their legal matters might demand Emery Morris’s genius, and if he was well compensated for the devotion of his time and intelligence, so be it. The nature of the person who paid the bill—whether he was glamorous or repugnant, sympathetic or evil—was unimportant. Morris would do his job. The standards he set, and the manner in which he reached them, were his alone to decide.
Morris’s third law was that he required exactly eight hours of sleep each day. It was the violation of this law that had him twitching now with indignation as he paid off his taxi in the Rue Cambon, at twelve minutes past two o’clock in the morning. He was bone-tired and it was Philip Stilwell’s fault.
He waited until the taxi’s taillights diminished around a corner. The breathless precincts of Place Vendôme, the hushed portals of the Ritz, the jewelers’ shuttered vitrines, the base of the obelisk heavily sandbagged lest Napoleon’s statue should fall to a German bomb—were dead quiet at this hour. Elsewhere Paris stuttered in her sleep, but not here, where a single light pierced the blackout shades of the Ritz Hotel. Morris had never felt the pulse of Paris as a living thing and so he turned his back on the square and thrust his key in the office building’s outer door. Cursing Stilwell, who was dead, and Rogers Lamont, who might be retreating even now from the enemy at Sedan. Most people thought that Morris and Lamont were friends. The assumption would have surprised both of them.
He yawned cavernously as he mounted the uncarpeted steps. A second taxi in an hour’s time. There would be boxes, too heavy to handle alone. He would have to tip the driver.
Spatz had not watched Emery Morris go. The two men exchanged no pleasantries or clasped hands. They walked away from each other outside the Alibi Club, one toward the taxi idling in the street, the other with his fists thrust in his pockets, as though they did not know each other’s name. This indifference might one day be crucial.
Like everyone who chose to navigate the blacked-out city streets, Spatz carried a pocket flashlight with its lens painted dark blue. The night was moonlit, however, and he did not bother to switch on the torch as he walked. His bright bird eyes glittered and his blond head was thrust forward, as though he listened to an intimate conversation. Spatz liked this time of night in Paris, this freedom of the streets, the way the old buildings and all the lives they’d lived were his for the embracing. There had never been a kingdom he’d wanted more than this.
The German’s career was a series of entanglements, of leverage bought and sold, of blackmail and emotion and losses he never tallied. He was thinking as he walked of Jacquot dangling from a chandelier and of the way the American named Morris had failed to blink as he talked in a rapid undertone, the words peppering Spatz’s cheek like bullets. The crooning voice of Memphis Jones filtered through his thoughts; she would be furious in the morning at his desertion.
He walked for thirty-three minutes, an apparently aimless jaunt that looked like a series of concentric circles—narrowing, narrowing, on a target he had not yet defined. He could have returned to the palatial spread he’d appropriated in the sixteenth arrondissement, but the cousin who owned it was expected hourly and Spatz was not in the mood to see her. War had changed his indifferent relationships, put a price on their heads. For months he’d been coasting on the assumption that nothing terrible could really happen: The German army’s breakthrough at Sedan had forced the issue of his future. In a different way, so had Emery Morris.
Morris’s problem was a poker chip offered on a silver platter. The lawyer expected Spatz to pass the word about Philip Stilwell to his superiors in Berlin; but Spatz was in no hurry. Stilwell was dead. Much might be made of the opportunities the young man had left behind.
He fetched up thoughtfully in the Rue St-Jacques just as the bells of Saint-Séverin and Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre rang out two-thirty. The huge acacia tree in the Square Viviani was almost as old as the bells. He smoked a little, feeling the spring air tremble around him as though it had turned to deep water. In the silence that followed the churches’ clangor, he became aware that his eyes were fixed on a window in the apartment building opposite, two stories above the ground and to the left of the entrance. A blue glow suggested blackout lighting within. A silhouette paced, dark against the darkness of the shade. Stilwell’s woman was still awake.
Spatz smiled to himself—amused by the relentless imperatives of the unconscious, which had brought his feet to the very spot Emery Morris had suggested—and tossed his cigarette in the gutter. As he crossed the street he began to whistle a fragment of song—something, had he known it, of Memphis’s.
Three stacks of files teetered on the floor in front of Emery Morris: those that meant nothing, those he intended to keep, and those he must destroy.
He had searched every drawer in Rogers Lamont’s desk, had rifled the crates stacked neatly behind Madame Renard’s reception post, had even jimmied the flimsy lock on Philip Stilwell’s small office. The self-conscious diplomas mounted on the plaster wall, the framed black-and-white portraits of the parents, a publicity shot of the girl who’d shown up in the Rue de Rivoli a few hours ago—Morris had met Sally once at the Ritz Bar and disliked her on principle; no decent woman would allow her body to be outlined like that, day after day, would stand quietly before the photographers like a cow in an abattoir. Cow, he muttered under his breath as his white hands skimmed over the manila. Cunt. Whore. A faint odor of sweat and failure hung in his nostrils.
Forty-one minutes had passed and he understood now what was missing. The one file that should never have been opened. The file that should not exist.
He paused for an instant in the middle of Philip Stilwell’s office. The young fool had stolen it from Lamont’s things, of course—but what had he done with it?
Then it came to him, obvious as day.
“The girl,” he said.
She was leafing through every scrap of paper Philip had ever written to her over the past eight months—stray notes, unsigned fragments, the odd gift card he’d left on her pillow, as though the fine, careless handwriting were ephemeral, as though it might evaporate from her hands like his breath or the light in his eyes. She had kept most of his notes in the foolish belief that they would be cherishable one day, a bit of nonsense she could retrieve from some Connecticut attic with the vague words, Those are from when I knew your father in Paris, before the War.
She was drinking Pernod because it was what Philip preferred and she needed some way to reach him. Panic had swept over her like a frigid ocean wave the instant she’d closed the door of her flat, panic that might have come from the blankness of the hour, or from the image of Philip’s body she could not get out of her head, but which she thought had more to do with the absolute certainty that she was alone again, alone without prospects or money or anyone to help her and the Germans were marching steadily through Belgium. Sally was feeling maudlin and light-headed, weeping cross-legged on the floor in her bathrobe, because she had never eaten dinner after all and the licorice-flavored fire had gone straight to her brain. Panicking because she did not know how she could stay in Paris now and she did not want to go back—not to Denver or to the unknown house on Round Hill and the woman who would certainly blame her, simply because she, Sally, had been here in Paris and still Philip had died.
When the knock came on the door it startled her so much that she spilled the Pernod down the front of her robe. Then, Tasi, she thought—meaning the woman who lived next door, a Russian émigré by the name of Anastasia who made a dubious living as an escor
t at one of the nightclubs. Tasi worked all hours and never slept; her apartment was a fog of smoke and samovar fumes. She would know from the sound of pacing that Sally was up, and when she opened the door Tasi would be standing there with a cigarette in her hand, eyes lined perfectly with kohl, hoping for a shot of vodka. Sally opened her mouth to call out, shut it again. She could not face Tasi tonight.
The second knock was harder, peremptory, a summons that would not be denied.
“Mademoiselle King? It is the police. Ouvrez la porte, s’il vous plaît.”
The sigh that escaped Sally was almost a sob. They had figured it out, then. She wasn’t crazy. They understood at last that Philip had been murdered and the whole scene in the Rue de Rivoli was a macabre farce. Maybe the man at the embassy had told them: If the French cared nothing for justice, Americans did.
Sally drew the back of one hand across her wet eyes and bounded to the door.
The corridor was dark as though even the blue-painted bulbs had died, but she registered the man’s evening dress, the gentleness of his face and the way he seemed to smile as he reached for her neck with both hands. She gasped as the world went black, like a woman surprised by love.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Joe Hearst had not slept well since Daisy left him. It was possible he’d grown accustomed to the protective cover of his wife’s voice, had grown accustomed to receding into the stage set of her world, a bit of fifth business blending with the woodwork. There’d been a comfort in the way he’d moved, unnoticed. Now, in the echoing height of the stripped-down rooms off the Rue Lauriston, he was self-conscious, too aware of silence and his inability to fill it. He caught glimpses of himself unexpectedly in mirrors, furtive and unrecognizable. Took to walking the sixteen hundred square feet in his bathrobe and slippers, the hallways resolutely unlit, humming a jagged tune.
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