by Dora Benley
"The fifth floor?" Dora questioned him. That was a long way to walk. They might make themselves conspicuous on the way. Someone might even snap a photo. Then what?
"The farther away from the public areas the better," Edward directed her as they turned away from the front desk with all its gaudy souvenirs for sale. "We want to be some place where we can be all alone to make plans. We do not want anybody listening in either."
She nodded. She supposed there was some logic in it.
After hustling their scant luggage up to their room, Dora insisted on combing her hair and putting on fresh makeup even if she could not change her clothes before going to dinner. Edward had simply not given her enough time to pack her wardrobe from the hotel room in New York.
Finally they entered the hotel main dining room back on the ground floor. The waitress in her frilly white apron handed Dora a menu. They quickly decided on the meatloaf plate. Nothing fancy here.
Suddenly two men with big cameras were slipping into the restaurant. Dora thought, Oh no! She braced herself. So Michael's detectives had located them after all.
"Edward!" She hissed across the table. Edward was rapidly taking notes in his pocket notebook probably to remind himself what he wanted to talk to Churchill about. He was frowning down at the paper and looked as if he might spit he was so annoyed at being interrupted.
The Pittsburgh detectives with the cameras were headed straight for their table by the windows. Just as Edward looked up in an annoyed fashion, she grabbed the menu that the waitress had forgotten to take. She put it up over her face to hide herself. Edward read her lips and did likewise with his menu. She had to put her finger to her lips to keep Edward from swearing.
The two men sauntered down the aisle past their table indifferently as if they had not picked them out yet. But fortunately enough Dora could still make out their conversation. "What a job! Tracking some idle heiress who can't do anything except cheat on her husband."
The other exclaimed, "Who cares! We get paid, don't we? It's our job. We get an all expenses paid tour of the country, too. Wherever she goes, we follow." He seemed to be bragging.
Dora groaned. She hoped nobody in the restaurant heard her.
Clearly two distinct groups of trackers were following Edward and Dora. Michael's spies were looking for incriminating evidence of an affair with Edward so he could pursue his divorce suit. Hitler's Nazi agents were searching for the Lawrence maps. Neither was aware of the other. But Dora and Edward were becoming all too aware of both.
Luckily the waitress showed the cameramen to a table at the other end of the restaurant. Problem was Dora's back was to them. They might be able to make her out once they sat down and got situated, and she would not be able to tell the difference. She instantly leaped up and moved her table arrangement around including her silverware. She took another seat where she could keep an eye on them while still blocking their view of her with her menu.
"What do we do now?" she hissed at Edward. "These are Michael's detectives."
"Sit tight for now," he advised her. "If we run we will only attract more attention. I do not think they have recognized us yet."
She nodded. "They don't seem to."
"Sh-h-h-h-h!" he hissed. "Keep your voice down. Whisper! I don't want them to hear you."
"It might be better if you did not talk at all," she suggested. "You are probably the only person in the restaurant right now with an English accent. That will be a dead giveaway. Let me talk to the waitress for goodness sake."
"I have got to call Churchill tomorrow about something that involves the fate of nations, not some seedy game about gossip, headlines, and the celebrity news." He tapped his fingers on the table as he spoke very, very low.
Dora suddenly had an idea. She signaled to the waitress and whispered to her, "Please. We would like a vase of flowers on the the table, the biggest you have got. After all, today is our anniversary." She lied glibly.
"Oh, how wonderful!" The waitress brought the flowers.
The lady tried to take the menus.
"Oh no! Please don't!" Dora gushed. "My husband and I have to decide on the perfect dessert. We wouldn't want to miss that, would we? Give us the peach pie, that is after our dinners."
Edward kept hold of his menu, too, with a grip of iron.
"I'll make sure you get the biggest dessert in the restaurant!" the lady declared.
Dora smiled. She could not do much else right now. The peach pie with vanilla ice cream was the special for tonight. "We will keep our menus in case we want to indulge in anything else, too."
They finally got their dinners. Dora began to attack the food with gusto at least as fast as she could eat with one hand free while the other continued to hold the menu. She might not get another chance to eat until they arrived in Pittsburgh. She could not tell what was going to happen next. Would the German spies from Gettysburg arrive at the same time as the photographers Michael had hired? Knowing her luck lately they probably would.
"Maybe I should have come to London instead of you coming to New York." She leaned across the table and hissed so low that a passing ant could not have heard her.
"I thought we were safe in the United States." Edward cut his meat with his fork as if he were beheading it. "We have never had this trouble from your bastard husband before." He glared at her as if it were her fault. "I mean, Hitler is always following us, but not Michael. And even Hitler used to be more lax than this. As soon as I appear, the detectives do, too."
"Up until January Hitler didn't have the power." She tried to reassure him. "Remember, he just was appointed Chancellor on January 30, and the last time you came was right before Christmas."
"Was your husband appointed Co-Chancellor?" His gaze smoldered.
She sighed. "I don't know what Michael heard or saw to set him off." Meeting Edward on the sly at the Waldorf Astoria while married to Michael had been going on now since the late fall of 1919. This was the fourteenth year. True, her husband had never before thought to hire detectives to track her down. She had been coming to New York under the lame excuse that she was visiting her old Lusitania shipmate, Rita Jolivet, who was an actress there. All she could think of was that good old Michael had finally become wise to her sly ways somehow.
Then suddenly she remembered with a stab of fear. The last time she had gone to put one of Edward's love letters in the trove she was keeping in her dresser drawer stuffed way in the back underneath her silk stockings, she had found them moved to the other side of the drawer. She had thought this was odd at the time and had asked Viola, the housekeeper, about it. Viola had shrugged and apologized, thinking that she may have disarranged them a little (Viola was in on the secret about Edward) while putting her freshly laundered clothes back into the drawer. Dora had not thought about the matter anymore until now.
She and Michael kept separate bedrooms. They always had. Still she wondered if Michael might not have wandered over there on a hunch when she was gone from the house and read his fill of steamy revelations. She had thought he was busier with his business clients lately. But he seemed to use every excuse he could never to be at home, which suited her just fine and gave her more freedom. So she was rarely there either and spent increasing amounts of her time in Pittsburgh back in her parents' house in her old bedroom that she had slept in as a girl. She felt more at home there than with Michael in his austere, cold house that seemed more alien than Mars to her.
"I have to decide on a rendezvous point with Churchill's men which cannot be changed after tomorrow when I speak to him." Edward bit into his roll and then buttered it some more, gripping it tightly as if he were ready to defend himself with the knife if attacked. "And then have those jackass detectives of Michael's show up! What will I do? Rely on Hitler's agents to bump them off because they don't want to be photographed either?" He shook his head. "I am really going to have to try to think of a place
where no one would find us."
Dora had no idea where that would be. The moon? But she motioned for Edward to keep his voice lower as the waitress served the steaming hot peach pies with vanilla ice cream melted all over them.
Dora tried to remember to smile at the lady and whisper a thank you with her lips.
"God knows how I can put up with this sort of back country American cuisine, but I suppose duty calls." Edward looked askance down at what he considered the lamentable food.
One of the reasons she always met him in New York until the weird events of earlier today was that Edward, being an Englishman and a European, was snobby about cuisine and food. The closer he got to the interior of the country the worse it got. She supposed his temper would really be tried on the trip he was planning for the next week. They might be headed to Alaska for all she knew. But Edward being Edward did not somehow expect Gold Rush quality cuisine.
He was grumbling to himself about the food at the out of the way restaurant in the middle of "nowhere Pennsylvania". At the same time he was cussing out Michael Byrne "that bastard gold digger after big bucks", meaning he had married Dora for her money and nothing but. At the same time he was cussing out Adolf Hitler "that megla maniac who will stop at nothing to control the affairs of Great Britain and the rest of Europe over Churchill's dead body".
It was hard enough to deal with the situation at hand. But then she had to deal with Edward, too. Viola had once asked her why she wanted to put up with such a cantankerous British lord who the first time he had showed up at her house in Pittsburgh unannounced in the autumn of 1919 had frightened the housekeeper to death, not to mention Dora who had assumed he was dead up until that very hour. Later Dora joked with Viola that sometimes she wondered, too, why she put up with Edward. She guessed that Edward had always had her wrapped around his little finger. If Edward wanted to use her money for intrigues and preserving the Lawrence maps, key to world domination, of course that was different than Michael the gold-digger.
Naturally Viola was not present when Dora and Edward were in bed together. But that was another story. He made love to her as if there was no tomorrow. Michael had never been near her bed in his life.
"Hey," one of Michael's hired detectives pointed at their table with a loud, booming voice that made Dora cringe, "isn't that the hot-to-trot heiress we are supposed to follow?" He rose from his seat and pushed his wooden chair back noisily.
Dora had wondered how long it was going to take to reach this impasse. She dropped her fork and looked at her unfinished pie.
Edward did not wait. He rose from the table, threw down a wad of money, and yanked Dora behind him out of the restaurant to a flash of bright cameras. Dora turned away and put her arm over her face.
Chapter 6: Surprise Hotel Guest
Fortunately Edward and Dora had been seated at the end of the dining room nearest the exit. It was a hop and a skip to the hallway staircase leading up to their fifth floor room. Edward forced her up the stairs more quickly than she could run. She almost tripped. But Edward grabbed her arm and dragged her onward. No doubt her British lord wanted to reach the sanctuary of their bedroom before the detectives could figure out where they disappeared. Above all, Edward did not want Michael's detectives to learn their room number.
Dora could hear Michael's photographers coming after them. They must have been somewhat impeded by the crowded dining room.. No doubt the men were shoving their way past waitresses. She thought she heard glass breaking on the floor below as if cups or plates had gone flying off their tables or trays. She wished they could duck into the first room they came to. But their room was at the very top of the building, one of the suites on the fifth floor.
"Hey up there, wait for us!" One of the photographers had clearly reached the base of the staircase. He was yellowing up at them. "I thought I would find your type here. It's the most famous hotel on the Lincoln Highway after all."
"Yeah!" called his friend as they started to tromp up the stairs after them. She could hear their shoes making the wood creak. "The likes of Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Greta Garbo, and Tom Mix have been here for the view. People pour in here from foreign countries. But you come here to escape your husband."
If there had been any doubt before about the identity of these rogues, now there could be none at all.
Edward shoved Dora into their room and locked the door behind them. Not long after the creeps arrived on the fifth floor right outside their door after no doubt trying all the floors below them unsuccessfully. They paraded up and down the hallway calling, "Are you here, Mrs. Byrne?" making Dora wince. "We would like you to kiss that man you are hiding out with right now while we take your photo."
The other said, "Kiss him for us. We'll snap your picture. Then you won't see us anymore."
The first added, "You see, one photo of you kissing him is worth a lot of money to the likes of us."
Dora had never experienced anything so outrageous in her life!
Edward shoved her into the shower in the bathroom. He turned on the water and they waited it out until the men disappeared. Edward turned off the water after fifteen or twenty minutes. Everything was silent now. But they did not dare emerge from their room again for the rest of the night.
After such a harrowing day it was hard to sleep. Dora tossed and turned. Edward mumbled and cursed to himself in his sleep. And Dora had thought they were going to have a romantic time of it alone in their suite in New York making love!
She lay there gazing up at the ceiling from the double bed. She watched the shadows creep from one side of the wall to the other. There was a wind. Trees were blowing around outside. It set a certain ominous atmosphere of suspense. Every time she heard the building creak she jumped. At one point she thought she heard footsteps rushing up the stairs. It could be another guest. But she wondered if it was not simply those loud-mouthed detectives that Michael was paying.
"Edward!" She nudged him lying next to her.
"Is it time to get up?" He groaned.
"I heard someone in the hallway," she protested. "I hope it is not one of those detestable photographers still hanging around."
Alerted, Edward sat up in bed fully dressed. He had learned to do this in the military. He never wanted to be surprised in case action called him when he least expected it. He turned his head this way and now that, listening intently.
A very distinct, suspicious creaking could be heard outside their room door.
Edward leaped out of bed and put on his shoes.
"Edward, be careful!" Dora warned.
"I am always careful!" Edward informed her as he took his gun out of the nightstand drawer. He always went armed just in case.
Dora could not help it as she put on her own shoes sitting by the bed and crept after him. Edward put his ear to the room door and listened intently. The creaking was louder than before. He flicked on the room light and made Dora wince and rub her eyes. He opened the lock and edged the door open half inch by half inch.
Dora almost screamed. Rummaging around the hallway was a what looked like a small brown bear. Somebody must have left the front door open late last night, and he must have sneaked inside the hotel building. Maybe the front door was still open for all she knew. Always resourceful though not used to fighting off animals — just Nazis and spies, thank you! — Edward grabbed a picture off the wall and hurled it at the intruder. The brown bear stared at them in indignation and wonder. Then he scampered quickly back down the stairs and hopefully back to where he belonged.
"At least the black bear did not have a camera," Edward exclaimed as he locked the door and led Dora back to bed.
Dora wrapped her arm around Edward's waist and snuggled her head against his shoulder. She could feel herself trembling and shaking as he gripped her tightly against him.
"After all, these are the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania.
I suppose there are bears here, though I must say I have never seen one in Europe. I think they are extinct," Edward commented as she plopped back down in bed.
"Assuming that those camera men did not let the bear in just to scare me and make me come screaming out of my room in the middle of the night!" The possible trick suddenly occurred to her.
"Who knows?" Edward sighed as he climbed back into bed next to her. "That ghoul-like husband of yours seems to be capable of almost anything. He is all I need to worry about in addition to Hitler. I mean, really darling, I have far more important things on my mind than escapades like this!"
"Edward," she was surprised, "are you getting angry at me for what Michael did?"
"No, darling, no," he kissed her head and hugged her tightly. "I am just talking aloud trying to figure out how to juggle two things at once — your husband and Hitler."
"I am sure you will figure it out," she kissed him. "You are very good at it. That is why Churchill hired you. For all you know," she yawned, "it was the other goons from Gettysburg, you know Hitler's spies sent from Germany, who let the bear in to scare us. They are far more lethal. They would not want to take our photos. They would want to shoot you on the stairs."
She finally got to sleep and dreamed about Adolf Hitler and his pet black bear that he sent after anybody who caused him trouble. In her nightmare they were at breakfast downstairs at the S.S. Grand View Point Hotel. Suddenly the man reading a newspaper at another table four feet away put down the Wall Street Journal. Edward and Dora were so startled they froze for one second too long. A black bear wearing a dark suit and a black wool fedora hat was sitting there in the man's place. The giant black bear grabbed his pistol and fired at Dora and Edward. Dora ducked only at the very last minute. Then she woke up sighing.
Chapter 7:
Shortly after dawn the next morning Dora and Edward hurriedly packed up their few belongings and crept down the stairs before anyone else was astir. Even the dining room where they had eaten dinner last night and where they were supposed to enjoy a hearty country breakfast this morning was closed at this hour. Not even a single cook was banging or rattling pots around in the kitchen.
