Von Kresse nodded. “My sister is fond of gossip.”
“We are all fond of such gossip. From Ribbentrop we get better than gossip. He has a well-placed woman friend, Lady Cunard. She is close to both the prince and this Mrs. Simpson. She provides a bed for them. Whatever else they want. Ribbentrop is certain he means to marry her.”
“He should marry whom he wishes.”
“Even a Polish music teacher, yes, Martin? Your own wife would be more suitable for Edward than this Mrs. Simpson. She’s American, a commoner, a married woman, a divorcée, a social climber, a fortune hunter, a woman with a past in China, and so on and so forth. She may be a Jew. Her family name is said to have originally been Warfeld, and her uncle’s name was Solomon. Ribbentrop thinks Edward’s marrying her will be marvelous, because of the influence he thinks he can wield over them through this Lady Cunard. Ribbentrop is an idiot. There is no political support in Britain for such a marriage. If Edward wishes to marry her, he cannot become king. If he waits until his father dies, he cannot remain king, if he marries this woman.”
Again the Reichscommissioner leaned forward, and again he touched von Kresse’s knee.
“If there is to be peace in Europe, Martin, Edward must be king, not his brother. If Edward is to become king, Mrs. Simpson must go. There must be no marriage, no romance. Someone must put an end to it.”
“His family is trying to do just that.”
“With arrogance, not cleverness. He is a fool, this Edward, but a stubborn one. Those who oppose Mrs. Simpson, he pushes away. Those who befriend her, he brings close.”
The markgraf looked steadily at Goering. “I must again ask the obvious question.”
“‘What has this to do with you?’ I have a simple answer. Everything. I want you to end this romance.”
Von Kresse laughed. “This is insane. You are crazy. All of you are crazy.”
Goering thrust himself out of his chair with such speed and anger that it tottered. He raised his hand as if to strike von Kresse, as the count had seen him strike enlisted men in the war. “Silence! Silence, silence, silence!”
The count’s face went blank, except for his gray eyes. They were ice. Goering’s were burning with anger.
“Damn you, Martin! You will not talk to me this way! No! No, no, no!”
Von Kresse looked away. He sat in silence, waiting. His mind filled with images of his waiting home and the flat, forested East Prussian countryside, its long straight roads, leading east away from Germany through the pine woods.
Goering was breathing heavily. His skin was discolored, a motley pattern of crimson splotch and a bloodless, blanched paleness. Slowly the colors began to blend together again.
“I cannot permit you to speak to me this way,” he said. “Do you understand that? Do you know why? Do you know what I must do if you persist?”
Von Kresse looked down at the sheen of his high black boots. His mother had talked repeatedly of moving back to America just before she died and had urged him to go there in her place. He had thought the notion silly. Now, once again, her wisdom was being dashed in his face. He could not escape this huge German country that his Prussia had become. He could no longer simply go home to his books and forests, his dogs and horses and occasional women, his private self, and ignore all politics. There was no longer refuge even in his nightmares and pain. Every day of his life now was like a day in Berlin, his nation a terrifying confusion of madness and genius, order and chaos. It had been fired with an unprecedented patriotic fervor marshaled to the most banal and despicable purposes. Its heritage was being sanctified yet drained of all its values. Germany was hurrying along to a destiny known only to the most cruel and capricious of the old pagan gods, and all Germans were being dragged along with it, including most especially Markgraf Martin von Bourke und Kresse.
“Very well, Hermann, but why me?”
“For all the best reasons, Martin. You are an aristocrat. Women are attracted to you. You speak English flawlessly. Your mother was an American, like this Warfeld woman. She is from Maryland, yes? A state next to your mother’s Virginia. You are clever and resourceful. You are a patriot who will do anything to spare Germany another cataclysm. You are an old comrade. You realize how important this is to me. And I trust you, Martin. You and your sister, Dagne, I trust you both.”
Cautiously Martin studied the jovial, malevolent face of the man who had once claimed his friendship. It had been in 1918 for the most part, in that brief time between the death of von Richthofen and von Kresse’s own bout of madness. It had been a friendship of the extrinsic qualities of war in France, of the intrinsic qualities of war in the air, of shared survival, of tents pitched on muddy ground. It was a friendship of rainy days and long, soul-chilling nights, drinking schnapps on Goering’s cot or cognac at von Kresse’s writing table, talking of Goering’s endless, nameless girls and of von Kresse’s wife, Lalka, who had by then ceased writing to him. This was a friendship of a mutual waiting for death, which is perhaps what all friendships are, though seldom are they so intensely measured.
Goering had been a reckless and erratic flyer, compulsive and relentless in his efforts to kill. His comrades had attributed this to the intensity of his fear of dying. But now here he sat, a monument to ease, comfort, and self-satisfaction, having returned to killing as if to an old vice. Hundreds must have died at his personal direction, thousands under his bureaucratic authority, if the stories were true. And here with him now sat Martin von Kresse, drinking schnapps, as if it were one of those cold, rainy afternoons between the killings in the sky, as if it were all just as honorable.
Honorable. On a day of no rain, a day of heat and dust in 1918, von Kresse had led his Staffel with dozens of others in a desperate aerial assault against the British forces that had broken through the German lines along the Somme and were streaming east from Cambrai. They had caught a regiment off their trucks taking a rest break in Marecourt and torn them up with machine-gun fire and bombs. Flying low in a steady turn, the count had led his men in a murderous circuit of the village, firing as they rounded every tree and rooftop. Skidding about the spire of the church, he caught sight of the village square and a line of small figures running across it. A flare of sunlight had filled his eyes just as he pulled on the firing bar, the instant’s perception of his target registering on his mind seconds and bullets too late. Among the soldiers, the dark, tiny, silhouetted figures were those of a woman and children. Many children.
He had then lunged his Fokker D VII into a wrenching turn around the church spire again, nearly colliding with some of his flight in the process, but on his second pass the reality had not changed, only worsened. They were on the ground, strewn and writhing, limbs flailing, flapping about like fish on a beach. He had flung the aircraft into another circuit of the church and, screaming rage at all deities to the limits of his voice and mind and strength and soul, had emptied his guns at his victims in the desperation of his remorse, the explosive clatter drowning his sense of their own screams, ending their agony, ending their war. But not his war. Or pain. Or guilt. And now, not his fear.
“We can have her in Ortelsburg for you tomorrow,” Goering had said of his wife, Lalka. They could also have her in Berlin, in one of the now so numerous police stations.
“What is it you want me to do, Hermann?” Martins said softly, wearily, and very sadly.
Goering smiled. “The prince and his Mrs. Simpson are in Paris with a large traveling party. They will probably be leaving soon because of all the troubles. There have been riots. There is a possibility they may sail for America. In any case, you are to join them at once. You must get near them and deal with this wretched romance.” He paused to pour more schnapps.
“No one else is to know of this, Martin. It would be very dangerous for us both. I will provide you with what help I can, but it will be your show. If things go bad, you’ll have to deal with them. I can take no responsibility.”
Von Kresse stared at him.
; Goering leaned even closer, the sweetness of the alcohol on his breath. “For the sake of the Fatherland, Martin, for the sake of all you value above the Fatherland, you must succeed in this. Edward of England must not marry this Jewess.”
When von Kresse had left, limping off into the labyrinth of echoing corridors and looking even more pained and troubled than usual, Goering summoned his secretary. The man, a longtime associate who had agreeably poisoned a colleague to demonstrate his loyalty and subserviance to the Reichscommissioner, came hastily and stood at quivering attention.
“I want Himmler on the telephone,” Goering growled. “I don’t care where he is. Find him. I need to arrange a meeting.”
CHAPTER THREE
Nora lay still and quiet in her bed after waking, luxuriating in its silken comfort as she listened to the morning sounds of Paris outside her window in the Place Vendôme below. They were wonderfully normal sounds—the doorman’s whistle, automobile traffic moving without urgency, two men shouting greetings to one another. It was all as innocent and cheerful as the clamor of the night before had been full of menace. It might at last be a happy day, as she had hoped all the days of her stay in France would be.
Closing her eyes, she remembered her small bedroom in the rear of the second-story apartment her family had occupied above her father’s saloon in Toledo. Its view had been of a cramped little yard, an alley with grass growing up from cracks in the concrete, and, beyond, the scruffy rear of a similar building. A block and a half farther had been railroad tracks. In the winter, when the trees were bare of leaves, a narrow space between buildings allowed her a glimpse of passing trains. She would often lie abed there and, when a train passed, close her eyes and imagine herself on it, speeding away to some far off magical place—Chicago, New York, London, Paris.
But then the train and time would pass, and she would at length open her eyes, and there would be reality. She could remember it all now perfectly, could hear the noisesome drunks and the thunk and clink of her father setting out garbage cans filled with empty bottles. They had later moved to worse places, after Prohibition had put her father out of business. But she kept no image of the bedrooms that followed, only that one in Toledo with the view of passing trains.
She opened her eyes now, noting in careful examination of every detail how much this was not Toledo. She would remember this Parisian chamber just as clearly as her childhood room—its spaciousness and elegance and extravagance. She had slept in bedrooms as pretty and pleasing in the days of her first real successes in California. The master bedroom of her house at Topanga Beach in California was twice this size. But this was Paris. There was no mistake. Nora Gwynne was at last where she belonged. And whatever might happen next, this morning in Paris would always be hers. She had been here. She had reached this far, and she could think of no farther to go.
The room was bright with the early sunlight. There were two huge windows, with doors that opened to a narrow balcony and the Place Vendôme below. She threw back her covers and ran to them, bare feet sinking in the soft carpet, her nightdress billowing behind her as she pulled open the doors and stepped forward to the railing.
It was indeed a wondrous, glorious, and special day. The sun was brilliant above the rooftops, the sky pure with blue bereft of cloud or haze, the breeze clean and cool against her skin. The street was full of people who seemed to have only agreeable concerns. She would be damned happy. She willed it so. On the following evening she would be sailing back to America, so she would make this day long and full of things to savor. She would go shopping in St. Germaine de Près and take a boat excursion along the Seine. She had been invited to a party that night at the home of a French newspaper publisher—Charles de Mornay. Ira Stein had not wanted to go, but now she would. She would dress fantastically and she would flirt. Possibly, she might even have a little to drink. She would have lots and lots of fun and it would all be very simply, wonderfully, and terrifically grand. Taking a deep breath of the Paris morning, Nora glanced along the horizon of rooftops, then whirled back inside, dancing over to the three-paneled full-length mirror. After slipping off the nightdress, she posed for herself, naked, tossing back her head. The haggard, fearful woman of last night had vanished, a splendid auburn-haired beauty taking her place. It would be a lovely day.
Spencer was late for his breakfast meeting with Laingen but, woozy, leaned a moment against a lamp post outside the entrance of the Crillon, gazing painfully over the remnants of the previous night’s rioting while he waited for his equilibrium to return. He had to keep his eyes on something. If he closed them, he feared he’d drop dizzy to the pavement. He could not remember when he’d been so pulverized by drink. He could not imagine how the rummies he knew—most notably the great writers Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford—had survived as long as they had, let alone functioned so brilliantly. Back in the bar at the Ritz, he’d told himself his own wretched indulgence was because of the woman who had died beside him on the balcony, that he needed to drown his memory of her. But the truth was he had filled himself with brandy in a demented attempt to keep that memory as intense as possible. In the distorted perceptions of his stupor, he’d been able to keep her alive, keep the curve of her cheek, the sheen of her hair, the scent of her perfume, vivid in his senses—until he’d passed out, killing her for good.
He’d awakened on a banquette in a corner alcove of the lobby of the Ritz, tolerated there because of the rioting. He’d still not changed clothes or washed. He rubbed his rough and scratchy chin. The vast, deserted square seemed surprisingly clean considering the carnage and mayhem that had rampaged over it for so many hours. There was some litter—torn banners and placards, broken paving stones, a fallen saber, a woman’s shoe—but it was visible only here and there, like the leavings in a public park following a Sunday’s picnics. There were no human bodies, only two mounds that were the carcasses of horses, one near and one far, flies buzzing loudly about the one closest. There was no sign of the cars that had been set afire. Spencer wondered at the sensibilities of a society that would hasten to remove useless burned metal while neglecting such heaps of dead flesh.
Squinting, he looked down at the sleeve of his jacket, the wool still matted and stained with the dead beauty’s blood. He recalled the touch of the warm skin of her back as she had fallen, dead or dying, through his grasp. He rubbed the palm of his hand gently, then dropped his hands to his sides. It was time to go inside and join Bill Laingen, to get on with his day, with the painful realities and terrifying mysteries of his life.
But first, an important gesture. He tottered out onto the paving stones, clumsily snatching up first the discarded saber and then the woman’s shoe. The blade of the sword was remarkably bright and shiny, without a hint of blood or violent use. The woman’s shoe was red only with dye, but scuffed and dirty. It had nothing to do with the woman who’d been killed on the balcony, and yet it had everything to do with her. Clutching these souvenirs tightly, he entered the Crillon’s lobby, looking something of a lunatic. A man started to leave the front desk as if to intercept him, but then thought better of it, perhaps recognizing Spencer from the night before. A moment later Bill Laingen was at his side.
“Jesus, Jimmy, you look a sight. Where’d you sleep, under a bridge?”
“Should have. Might have fallen in.”
“What?”
“Couldn’t find out her name, Bill. Nobody knew her name. There isn’t any story unless I can get her name.”
“Are you sober?”
“Not sure. Hungry, though. And I hurt.”
“Let’s get out of here. We’ll go to Floride’s. They’ll take care of you.”
Spencer would not surrender either the sword or the shoe to the dustbin, as Laingen asked, nor would he agree to a taxi, because of the noise. They walked away from the square past the Madeleine to the narrow side street off Boulevard Malesherbes that harbored Floride’s café. It was not open, but Floride’s husband, Pierre Hillion, saw who was at the green-tinte
d glass of the door and let them in. A handsome, balding man with a scar and a cigarette perpetually hanging from mouth, he’d been doing accounts at the bar. He abandoned that duty, bringing Laingen coffee and Spencer cognac, then picked up the saber.
“Fascist bastards!” he said, looking at the bloodied sleeve of Spencer’s jacket. He poured Spencer another cognac, as the first was already gone.
“No, Pierre,” said Laingen. “They didn’t hurt us. La tache de sang, c’est le sang d’une femme morte.”
He told the story of the woman on the balcony. When he was done, Pierre poured himself a cognac.
“That is the saddest thing I have ever heard,” he said. “To hold such a woman in the last moment of her life. And you’d not even been to bed with her. Mon Dieu.”
Spencer stared morosely at the cognac in his glass. The other two observed him silently for a long moment, then Pierre, leaving the bottle, returned somewhat reluctantly to the bar and his accounts. He appreciated Spencer and Laignen for their friendship but mostly for their conversations. He considered them almost Frenchmen.
“The official count is fifteen killed,” Laingen said. “I don’t know if that includes her.”
Spencer said nothing. His reddened eyes were wet.
“I’m going over to the ministry,” Laingen added. “I’ve got a source who will tell me everything they know. Maybe he can tell me who she was.”
“Bill,” said Spencer. “I’m scared.”
Laignen had been with Spencer in North Africa and knew of his war record and what the man had survived in China. Laignen was surprised by this remark. “It was pretty bad last night,” he said finally.
“That’s not it, Bill. I’m afraid they’re going to drag me back to Chicago. Paris is all I have and I think they’re going to take it away from me, the way the woman last night was. The reach of the hand of God.”
“What are you talking about? Why would they pull you away now? This is the biggest story we’ve had since we came to France. Hell, a few more days of this and La fucking République could go under. There’s trouble in Spain now. All Europe’s on the edge of the cliff.”
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