“You could bring Miss Graham with you to our Normandy dinner on Thursday evening,” René suggested. He turned to Charlotte. “It’s going to feature the food and wines of my native province in France.”
“Excellent idea,” said Spalding as he removed Connie’s and Charlotte’s wraps and passed them to a young man dressed in the white-jacketed uniform of a Normandie steward.
Behind the steward stood a stocky man in an ill-fitting tuxedo whom Charlotte took to be one of the plainclothes security guards hired to protect the guests from jewel thieves.
“How did you ever end up in Palm Beach?” asked Charlotte, turning her attention back to the former assistant purser.
“It’s a long story,” René replied.
“I’d like to hear it.”
He glanced up at the next group of arrivals and greeted them warmly. “Bon soir,” he said with his little bow. “Welcome to Normandie. The most perfect ocean liner ever to sail the seas.”
Clearly he had lost none of his flair, Charlotte noted.
Turning to the young steward, René asked him to take over. “I’m ready for a break,” he announced. Removing his cap, he gestured to a sitting room off the foyer. “Would you like to sit down?” he said to Charlotte and the Smiths.
When they replied that they would, he caught the eye of a passing waiter and asked him to bring them some champagne.
A moment later, they were comfortably seated in the art deco-style chairs of a small sitting room, flutes of bubbly French champagne in hand. They talked for a few minutes about the upcoming Normandy evening at Château Albert, and then, at Spalding’s urging, René began his story:
“I stayed with the ship until 1941. I was part of the skeleton crew. There were only a hundred and fifteen of us, compared to an original crew of one thousand three hundred and fifty, but we did as good a job as a crew ten times our size. She was our pride and joy. In truth, we had nothing else to do except worry about what was going on back home. We used to say that the ship was interned but we were marooned.” He smiled. “We wore out every deck of cards on the ship. Then, after Pearl Harbor, all the French ships in American ports were seized, as I’m sure you know.”
“Were you upset about that?” Connie asked.
He shrugged. “We would rather have given Normandie to the Americans than let the Germans have her. We volunteered to stay on. We were the ones who knew how to run the ship. The Americans knew nothing,” he added with contempt. “But they didn’t want us. They gave us two hours to pack up our belongings. For me this was the accumulation of nearly six years on board. I had come aboard just before the maiden voyage in June, 1935, when I was nineteen years old, and I had never left. Normandie was my home. Then they loaded us into a Coast Guard cutter, our sea bags on our shoulders, and put us ashore on Ellis Island. They treated us like stowaways.” His voice was bitter. “They could have learned from us, but they thought they knew everything.”
He paused for a moment to sip his champagne and then went on: “I still remember that day perfectly. December twelfth: it was cold, a gray sky, light snow. As we pulled away from Normandie, we stood up on the afterdeck, removed our hats, and sang ‘La Marseillaise.’ There wasn’t a dry eye among us.”
“Why didn’t they want to take advantage of your knowledge?” Charlotte asked as René refilled their glasses.
“They were afraid we were Vichy sympathizers, that we would sabotage the ship. Vichy!” He turned his head aside as if to spit. “To assuage their fears, DeGaulle even offered to crew the ship with Free French troops, but they weren’t having any of it. They were afraid that we would sabotage the ship, and they killed her with neglect within two months.”
“Did you go back to France then?” Charlotte asked.
“Not right away. I had no place to go back to. My native village was occupied. Besides, I couldn’t leave Normandie. She was my love, my life. I stayed at the Twenty-third Street YMCA. I would go down to Pier eighty-eight every day to visit her. Then she burned. It was the saddest day of my life.” He stared pensively into his glass of champagne for a few seconds, then drained it before going on. “There was nothing to stay for anymore, so I booked passage on a ship to Marseilles and joined the Maquis.”
“The Maquis!” Charlotte exclaimed. Centered in southem France, the Maquis had been the fiercest of France’s many resistance groups. They had specialized in blowing up railroads.
René nodded. “I fought the Boches for two years.” Lifting a finger, he pointed to the the red and black rosette pinned to his lapel. “The Médaille de la Résistance,” he said. “So much for my being a saboteur, eh? Then I was captured. I sat out the rest of the war in a Nazi prison.” He gave a world-weary Gallic shrug.
Charlotte thought back to the René of before the war: gay, charming, devoted to a life of pleasure. On the surface he still seemed the same, but the superficial gaiety cloaked a war-wounded soul.
He held up the empty bottle of champagne. “We have finished the bottle, but I have not yet finished my story. I warned you that it was a long one.” He glanced over at the staircase that led to the room on the third floor where the party was in progress. Newly arrived guests were still streaming upstairs. “I’m afraid I must excuse myself,” he said as he stood up. “I’ll have to finish my story another time. Perhaps when you visit Chateau Albert.”
“I hope so, René,” said Spalding, giving the former assistant purser a hearty thump on the back. “You can’t leave us hanging. I understand that you’re catering the party. That means the food is bound to be excellent.”
“Thank you,” René replied. “We are serving a duplicate of the chef’s menu suggestions for the one hundredth voyage in 1938.”
“We’re looking forward to it,” said Charlotte.
As she rose from her chair, René leaned over to look at her necklace. “I see that you are wearing the same necklace that you wore on the return crossing in 1939. It’s very beautiful.”
“I’m surprised you remember!” she said, raising her fingers to the ruby pendant.
“Every detail of that voyage is permanently engraved in my memory,” he said. “I think you will agree that it was a most memorable crossing.”
“Yes. Actually I wore it on the voyage over too, but as you point out, that trip wasn’t nearly as memorable. It’s not the same necklace, actually. It’s a copy of the Cartier original. It’s from the new Normandie collection that’s being previewed tonight.”
Connie held up her arm to display her bracelet. “Many of the guests will be wearing pieces from the collection, which was designed by my daughter, Marianne Montgomery, in collaboration with Paul Feder of Feder Jewelers,” she said. “We’re going to model them after dinner.”
Connie was an indefatigable promoter of her daughter’s creations.
“Ah, yes!” said René He had leaned over again to look at Charlotte’s necklace. “I remember noticing the necklace as you descended the grand staircase on our first night out.” He paused before adding, “If I remember correctly, that was the night that you met M. Norwood.”
The Normandie passengers had entered the dining room by way of a dramatic staircase, which allowed them to make a grand entrance. Charlotte remembered well the nightly challenge of descending those stairs into the cavernous room. “René, you have a memory like an elephant.”
He smiled. “The crew always takes delight in a shipboard romance, and yours was one of the most romantic. Such a handsome couple!”
And all the crew knew exactly what was going on, Charlotte might have added.
“Have you seen M. Norwood in the intervening years?” René asked.
“Not since August twenty-eighth, 1939. If you don’t count seeing him on television, that is.” She looked over at Connie, who wore the motherly smile of a matchmaker anticipating the imminent culmination of her efforts.
“Aha!” said René. “Did you know that he is here this evening?” he asked with a mischievous little smile that set the debonair mustac
he under his long nose to twitching.
Charlotte nodded and glanced up at the stairs.
“Well, you know what they say: ‘True love never dies.’” Stepping up to Charlotte’s side, René offered her his arm. “Shall we?” he asked.
4
The staircase was narrow and winding, with a low ceiling, like that on a ship. As they ascended it, Charlotte was beset by the same sensations that she used to have on the opening night of a Broadway play, which was to say that her legs felt like rubber and the back of her throat seemed to be locked in a vise. People who weren’t in the theatre had the mistaken idea that stage fright was an affliction of the inexperienced. Not true. It was like allergies or myopia: if you were unfortunate enough to suffer from stage fright at all, you would probably suffer from it your entire life. It had nothing to do with one’s level of experience or one’s ability. The best actors fell victim to it, as well as the worst. In truth, she was inclined to think that the best actors suffered from it more, because they put more of themselves on the line. But she was fortunate in that she had a cure, the secret of which had been imparted to her years ago by her friend the actor Larry Olivier. It was to think of your feet. She had once seen an article in which Larry was quoted to that effect, in response to a question about the secret to consistently fine acting. The reporter had treated the quote as if it were a flip remark, but in fact Larry had been quite serious. There was something about shifting the attention to your feet that served to anchor you to the earth. The negative energy was conducted downward, just as a lightning rod draws lightning downward into the ground.
The staircase her feet were ascending was magnificent—a gracefully curving spiral with a polished brass handrail—and Charlotte could feel her nervousness diminish with each step. But the staircase was nothing by comparison with the room at the top. As in many oceanfront houses, the public rooms were located on the top floor to take advantage of the views.
“Magnifique, n’est-ce pas?” commented René, as they paused at the top of the stairs to pose for the photographers who were covering the event for the local society pages.
“Oui,” Charlotte answered reflexively in French, too taken aback by the splendor of her surroundings to realize how dumb she must have sounded.
The room was a replica of the Grand Salon of the Normandie, but smaller. There were the same, chairs covered in red-and-gray floral needlepoint tapestry; the same twelve-foot-high ruffled glass Lalique light fountains, each with a circular settee at its base; and the same art deco glass murals, or one of them anyway. The Grand Salon had featured four of these striking murals; this room had one, at the south end. At the north end was a stage, at one side of which a piano player was seated at a baby grand. Seeing him, Charlotte’s heart skipped a beat before she realized that he was too young to be Eddie.
Once she had regained her composure, she scanned the room full of ladies with bare shoulders and gentlemen with starched shirt fronts, but she saw no Eddie Norwood there, either.
Turning back to René, she asked, “Is this an original Dupas mural?” She was referring to the French artist who had designed the famous glass panels for Normandie’s Grand Salon.
“The very same,” he replied.
“But how did they …?”
As she spoke, a woman detached herself from the party of guests that had immediately preceded them, and headed toward Charlotte’s party.
“I’ll let our hostess explain,” said René, as the woman joined them. “This is Miss Charlotte Graham,” he said to her. “She was a passenger on Normandie’s last crossing. And this is our hostess, Mrs. Harley Collins, chairman of the preservation association and noted collector of Normandiana.”
“Please call me Lydia,” said the woman as she shook Charlotte’s hand. In her other arm she cradled a tiny silky terrier. “And this is Song Song,” she added, introducing the dog, whose silver topknot was tied with a yellow ribbon that matched her mistress’s gown, “I’m very pleased that you could join us tonight, Miss Graham.”
Charlotte returned the compliment. Lydia was one of those women whose most notable physical feature was her bouffant platinum blond hairdo, which was worn in a style that had once been described by Charlotte’s acerbic hairdresser as “fried, dyed, and shoved to the side.”
Apart from her hair and the dog, there was little to remark about Lydia: she was fashionably thin; expensively, if a bit ridiculously, dressed in a yellow off-the-shoulder gown with pouf sleeves and a billowing skirt in which she looked like an extra for Gone With the Wind; and attractive enough if one discounted the facial skin that was taut from too many face-lifts.
Charlotte could see why she wasn’t Spalding and Connie’s type.
After their hostess had greeted Connie and Spalding with kisses to the air on either side of their cheeks, Charlotte said, “I was just commenting to Mr. Dubord about the Dupas panels. I didn’t realize they had been saved.”
“Most of the artwork from the Normandie was removed at the time of the conversion in 1941,” Lydia said. “But it still wasn’t easy locating the individual panels that make up this mural. A lot of the Normandie artwork has disappeared.” She looked up at the mural, which must have measured twenty feet high by at least as wide. “This is half of one of the four murals that originally decorated the walls of the Grand Salon.”
The glass panels showed silver gods and goddesses riding on the back of an enormous sea serpent which was swimming in a scalloped sea set against a background of puffy clouds and the billowing sails of golden ships. The back of the glass was painted with gold and silver leaf, which caught the light from the light Lalique fountains.
“The murals depict the story of navigation in mythological terms,” Lydia explained as she scratched the dog’s neck with a hand whose most conspicuous feature was a huge emerald-cut diamond. “This is half of ‘The Chariot of Poseidon.’ The other half is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
“That’s right!” Charlotte exclaimed. “I’d forgotten. It’s in the dining room, over the bar.” She had often admired it there.
Lydia nodded her bouffant head.
“My half consists of fifty individual panels. Harley and I bought the first twenty-six from an antique dealer in 1977, and seven years later, we bought another twelve at auction. But for eight years, I’d been missing the twelve panels from the center of the two bottom rows.”
“That must have been frustrating,” Connie sympathized as she gazed up at the shimmering mural. “To have all but that one section. The mural wouldn’t have made sense.”
“Yes, it was frustrating,” Lydia agreed. “There was a great big hole in the center, just where the sea serpent is.” She removed her hand from the dog’s neck to point out where the gap had been. “The missing panels finally surfaced at Christie’s, and I was able to complete the mural.”
“You were lucky you weren’t outbid,” said Connie. “Wouldn’t it have been awful if someone else had gotten them?”
“I made sure I wasn’t outbid,” Lydia replied. “They were expensive, but I just had to have them.”
“And the Lalique light towers?” Charlotte asked.
“The light towers aren’t original. I had them copied from photographs of the originals.”
“You would never know,” Charlotte said. “The mood is exactly the same.” Like a crystal box, she had thought then. The room even had the same tall windows as the Grand Salon, from which one could easily imagine an uninterrupted ocean view.
“Thank you,” said Lydia. “I’ve tried to make it as authentic as possible.”
Her escort had joined her, and she proceeded to introduce him. He was the Jack McLean of the table-seating card, and he was a retired rear admiral and another acquaintance of the Smiths’. Despite its veneer of sophistication, Palm Beach was at heart the kind of small town where everybody knew everybody else.
He was a formidable-looking man, with a square jaw and deep-set gray eyes shielded by craggy gray eyebrows. He was tall and
still very handsome, though he must have been close to seventy.
“I presume it’s the U.S. Navy that you’re retired from, and not the French Line,” Charlotte said, nodding at his flawlessly cut dress uniform, with medals and gold buttons and a black tie and a stiff, snow-white shirt.
“Oh, yes,” he assured her with a smile, his voice carrying a hint of a Southern accent. “It was Lydia who persuaded me to wear the uniform. I’m to play the role of the captain tonight. For the sake of verisimilitude.”
“It’s hard to have a captain’s gala without a captain,” Lydia trilled. “Lacking the real thing, we substituted a home-grown version.”
“Well, Lydia’s certainly done a wonderful job planning the party,” Charlotte said. “I especially liked it when the Normandie pageboy came to my hotel room with the menu.” She turned to her hostess. “That was a very nice touch.”
“Thank you,” Lydia responded. “Your necklace is lovely, by the way,” she added, obviously having been briefed on who would be modeling the pieces from Marianne’s Normandie collection. “We’ll be having the jewelry show right after dinner, just before the dancing.”
“Your brooch is lovely too,” said Charlotte. Their hostess was wearing another piece that was obviously from the collection, on the bodice of her flouncy gown: a diamond pavé brooch in the shape of the Normandie.
“Thank you,” Lydia said. “Paul has generously given it to me to keep.” Then, mindful of her social obligations, she glanced away to briefly scan the room, then excused herself and moved off to mingle with the other guests, the dog still cradled on the crook of her arm.
Following Connie and Spalding, Charlotte moved over to a table of hors d’oeuvres, the centerpiece of which was an enormous ice sculpture in the shape of the Normandie, filled with Beluga caviar. After heaping a cracker with the caviar, she stood back to survey the crowd.
She spotted Paul Feder right away. He stood out by virtue of his height He was talking with Dede, who looked like a princess in a long, simple white satin sheath with a crisscross back that fit her like a glove and which was a perfect complement to the simple elegance of the diamond choker.
Murder Under the Palms Page 5
