Jack 1939
Page 16
Her fingers went slack and her wineglass slipped out of her hand, shattering against a silver ewer of hyacinths in the center of the table.
A waiter sprang into action, mopping up the wine, but Diana said, “Never mind. I’ll have a whiskey.” Her expression hadn’t changed; she sat erect and elegant; but when the whiskey came, she tossed it back neat. “How?” she finally asked.
“Stabbed to the heart by the Nazi thug from the Queen Mary.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I saw the body.”
“You can’t know that it was . . . that man.”
“I saw the body.”
“What do you mean?” She shoved the whiskey glass aside and gripped the edge of the table. “Tell me.”
“He cuts a spider into the breast of each of his victims. Daisy got one this morning.”
She thrust her index finger between her teeth and bit down, hard. Her eyes welled but she did not cry. No tears ever trailed down Diana’s marble cheek.
No mercy, Jack thought. No quarter. “Did you tell him where to find her?”
“What?”
“The White Spider. That’s his nickname, isn’t it?”
“Jack, I—”
“Is he a friend of yours, Diana? Somebody to dance with, when you drop in on Berlin?”
Her face hardened. “I don’t dance with Heydrich’s killers.”
“Few girls do, and live to brag about it. So you know he works for Heydrich. We’re getting somewhere. Did you tell the Spider that Sister Mary Joseph would be alone this morning—she needed to get out of town fast and was taking the account books and the bag of cash with her? Is that why you went to see her Saturday, Diana—to get the details right?”
She stood up and tossed her napkin on the chair behind her. Without a word she slid past the table and made for the door.
Rage flooded over him suddenly, unexpectedly, at the way he could not break her—could not penetrate that sleek mask she kept wrapped around her body and mind. He shoved his chair away from the table, heedless of the shocked faces of the few diners scattered about the room, and ran after her.
He knew what they’d be muttering. Americano.
He caught up with her in the doorway and grabbed her arm.
She was wearing something light and silken; chiffon, probably. Kick would know. She felt as fragile as a length of birch. She drew back, resisting him.
“Sir,” a waiter attempted.
“You’re going to talk to me,” Jack muttered, “or I swear to God, Diana, I will hurt you. Understand?”
“It’s all right,” she told the waiter. “My little brother’s had too much to drink. May I have my coat and hat?”
Jack pulled her out into the Hassler lobby and across the marble floor. The waiter ran after them with her things. Jack grabbed them impatiently and dragged her out the door to the sloping pavement beyond, the sharp descent of the Spanish Steps. Dusk was falling. The scent of lime blossom filled the air. He dropped her coat and hat in the street and pulled her roughly into his arms, careless of the world’s gaze. He kissed her hard and viciously, biting at her mouth, lashing her with his rage. She was fighting him and he could feel her anger like a coiled spring, a punch she wanted to throw. He kissed her chin and her arched throat and pulled his hands through her black hair saying God damn you, Diana. God damn you.
Her breath was coming in faint sobs, of fury or fear or passion he couldn’t tell. She strained against him, arching backward, hands pushing against his chest. Her hip bones grazed his groin and, that quickly, he stiffened beneath her, his hand sliding to the small of her back. Holding her against the sudden hardness. She sighed into his mouth. He wanted to rip her dress from her body. He wanted to eat her alive.
“Jack.” She clutched his shoulders. “Are you going to take me right here on the street?”
“Hell, yes.”
They were exposed to every tourist mouthing papal pieties, every Fascist ready to beat them for indecency. Indecency. He could think of a hundred ways to practice it on Diana’s supple body.
He broke away, his breathing ragged, and saw the anguish in her eyes. Something to do with Daisy, he thought—not this vortex between them. She was grieving for the dead woman on the convent floor with the obscenity cut into her skin. Her knees gave way and she sank down with him, the two of them huddled on the Spanish Steps.
“Blimey,” she said shakily. “That’s how you get a girl to talk?”
He fingered her fragile neck. “Tell me I’m not your little brother,” he said.
* * *
HER STORY WAS SIMPLE AND CLEAR. Jack wasn’t sure he believed it—there were too many loose ends she refused to tie—but the bare outline was plausible enough. He did not expect Diana to trust him with the entire truth. He wondered if there was anyone she did trust. Whitehall Denys?
She’d never been to school with Daisy Corcoran, of course. Daisy had grown up in Boston and Diana in Liverpool. They’d met in the chorus of a West End musical when Diana was nineteen and Daisy was pretending to be. One of the principal actors got Daisy pregnant. Diana helped her get the abortion from a woman who operated illegally in Spitalfields.
“Daisy turned religious, afterward. Kept talking about mortal sin and the damnation of her eternal soul. She disappeared one day, without a word—and it was only after I married that she wrote. She’d seen something in the papers. The Honourable Denys. Has a taste for showy hoofers, has Denys.”
Hoofers. Jack thought of Diana’s long, luminous legs in fishnet and heels, and closed his eyes.
“Anyway, Daisy had turned into Sister Mary Joseph. She was working with a charity order, trying to atone for what we’d done. She told me she didn’t blame me for my part in it—good of her, I suppose. She said she prayed for me. Christ.”
“Did you write back?”
“Not right away.” She shrugged. “What was there to say, after all? Our lives were so different. I sent fifty quid to her charity. I suppose it was a lot of money, to Daisy.”
There were families in London that lived for months on fifty quid, Jack thought. It would be a lot to anybody.
“Anyway—she kept me in mind. Whenever her charity needed . . . help in some way.” Diana laughed bitterly. “It wasn’t exactly blackmail, but it wasn’t innocent, either. Daisy believed in Sin. Hers and mine. Asking for cash was a way to remind me. I found the abortionist.”
“She made her own choices,” Jack said. “Some women would have thanked you for what you did.”
“Not Daisy.”
He thought of Kick. Rose insisting that if she married Billy, she’d be damned forever. The desperate sadness of his sister’s expression, that first afternoon he’d arrived in London, as she adjusted her hat in the mirror. Jack knew there was such a thing as being too Catholic.
“Is that why you stopped by the convent yesterday? To give her cash?”
“The charitable works sort of . . . evolved.” Diana was looking at her fingers, which she’d laced through Jack’s. “By this time, Daisy was managing a relief network for refugees—Czechs displaced from the Sudetenland—and coordinating it out of Rome. The thought being that if the refugees aren’t miserable, they won’t make life difficult for the rest of us.”
“Chamberlain’s theory,” Jack mused. “Keep Hitler happy, and maybe he’ll go home.”
“Yes. I took up a collection among some people I know—Nancy Astor, Oswald Mosley, the Mitfords. Other people, in New York. It was enough cash that I thought I’d better deliver it myself. I went to Paris, but Daisy’d left. I might have sent her a check, I suppose, but I don’t trust Mussolini’s mails. So I came on to Rome.”
She gazed at him steadily, her black eyes serene; she had spoken her piece clearly and well.
No, he didn’t believe much of it
, Jack decided. The White Spider had no reason to kill a nun, much less steal her books. Unless the charity was funding something far different from Sudeten Czechs.
Did Diana know that?
How much had she lied to him?
The answers, he thought, were in Paris. Daisy had been packing for Paris when she died; and Göring’s banker might still be waiting there. It was time to conduct some thesis research, Jack thought. He would leave for Paris tomorrow.
He smoothed Diana’s black hair from her brow, then lifted her to her feet. Her coat and bag were still lying where they’d fallen, haphazardly on the Spanish Steps.
“I’ve made you conspicuous,” he said. “In the middle of Rome.”
“Good of you. I usually manage that all by myself.”
“Be careful.” He grasped her wrist and shook it lightly. “Daisy’s killer is still loose.”
“What could one of Heydrich’s thugs possibly want with me?”
“What did he want with Daisy, if it comes to that? What possible threat did a nun pose to the Gestapo?”
She stared at him, arrested. He had asked the unforgivable question, the one to which she had no answer. Her eyes narrowed. “We’ll never know, will we?”
“Oh, yes, Diana. We’ll know. I’m going to find out.”
The air between them chilled. She stepped back. “Don’t be a bloody fool, Jack. It’s nothing to do with you.”
“Sure about that?”
There would be no more confidences tonight.
She was definitely not going to invite him up.
Jack stood awkwardly while Diana smoothed her dress. He’d crushed it, kissing her, and the sight of the creases felt as intimate to him as the sheets of a tumbled bed. Desire twisted in his groin, unreasoning and overwhelming; but she was not for him, anymore. He was going to Paris. And he had no intention of telling her.
“Until tomorrow, then,” he said.
She waved a cool good-bye. Already thinking of something else. Or someone else.
The Hassler’s glittering doors closed behind her.
He walked back alone to the Hotel d’Inghilterra, looking for Spiders in the dusk.
TWENTY-EIGHT. GÖRING’S BANKER
THE MAN HAD LAID HIS HOMBURG and briefcase, his furled umbrella and decent coat on the seat beside him, so that nobody would sit down. It was his favorite corner of the Hotel Crillon lobby in Paris; he’d erected a copy of Le Monde like a shield in front of him. The newspaper was blessedly free of the disaster that blared from every radio—its presses had stopped before Hitler’s tanks rolled into Prague that morning. March 15, 1939. As he sat in the comfortable chair, scanning the racing columns and considering his dinner, he knew that people were dying all over Europe in senseless and hideous ways. He adjusted a cushion against the small of his back.
He could detect a change in the attitude of some of the Crillon staff: they no longer made eye contact. They pocketed his tips with distaste. It didn’t matter that his business was finance, the complicated relationships of debt and interest, gold reserves and loans, or that he had been educated in the United States and was an internationalist at heart. Helmuth Wohlthat was German—and therefore someone to despise. As of today, someone to fear.
A strange hand grasped his briefcase; his hat and coat were tossed carelessly onto an adjacent chair. Wohlthat crumpled his newspaper irritably and stared at the fellow who’d presumed to move his things.
“Qu’est-ce que vous faites?” he demanded. “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?”
The man answered in German. “I want to talk to you.” He sank down next to him. “Herr Wohlthat.”
“How do you know my name?”
The man smiled. It did nothing to warm his eyes, which were the color of the North Sea in winter; but it sharpened the inch-long scar that bisected his lip. Early thirties, Wohlthat decided; ex-military or possibly plainclothes security man. He was sitting far too close; a threatening move. Wohlthat tried to put some distance between them.
“I serve Reinhard Heydrich. He knows everyone’s name.”
Wohlthat’s throat constricted. “What does General Heydrich want with me?”
“You set up a certain network for your friend Göring, using your contacts in Europe and the United States. That network has been thoroughly and hopelessly penetrated. It is in the process of being liquidated, as I’m sure you know.”
Wohlthat’s mouth fell open. He tried to speak, but no sound came from his lips.
Heydrich’s thug put his hand on Wohlthat’s knee and squeezed. “You must see that as the architect of the network, you inevitably fall under suspicion.”
“Of what?” Wohlthat whispered.
“Betraying it, of course.”
The pressure of those blunt fingers increased. Wohlthat twitched irritably but the hand remained fastened around his knee. “Why should I betray my own network?”
“Why, indeed?” The thug’s smile widened. “We considered recalling you to Berlin to answer that question. Although it’s possible you would never arrive. The world is such a dangerous place—so many people die for stupid reasons.”
“Are you threatening me?” Wohlthat tried to stand. But those hard fingers pinned him to his seat. And suddenly he saw—with utter disbelief—that Heydrich’s thug held a knife in his other hand, as thoughtlessly as if it were a child’s toy.
Wohlthat drew a panicked breath. “I don’t understand.”
“There was a nun in Rome. She was supposed to meet you.”
“Sister Mary Joseph. Yes. I’ve been here three days and she hasn’t shown up.”
“You can stop waiting. She cut herself.”
He fingered the knife casually, and in that second, Wohlthat understood. He stared at the bland face before him, the blunt fingers rolling the deadly toy.
“Happily for you, the account book is safe.”
Safe.
Every detail of Göring’s network. In this man’s hands.
Which meant they would soon be in Heydrich’s.
Wohlthat’s mind darted hopelessly, a bird battering against a windowpane. All those names. . . . Donors, lists of funds, the people who’d trusted him on two continents. Vulnerable, now, to the deadliest man in the Gestapo.
“You understand that this is extremely serious,” the creature was saying. “Your entire network, penetrated by the American security forces—exposed and humiliated—liquidated one by one. Failure, Wohlthat. Failure. Someone must be blamed.”
The words were uttered so softly that they seemed like a vicious lullaby. Wohlthat was no fool. He remembered the Night of the Long Knives, when Heydrich had seized power for himself and taken the Gestapo—Göring’s vicious creation—under his sole control. The two men hated each other. Given half a chance, Heydrich would see Göring killed, and pop champagne as he died. Wohlthat knew he was being set up to betray Göring; but it didn’t matter. There was little to choose between the man and Heydrich. And he was alone with a killer who held a knife.
He swallowed convulsively. “So I’ll shoulder the blame. Return to Berlin immediately. I don’t tolerate failure either, Herr . . .”
“Too late.” The fingers gave his knee a painful squeeze.
“Then what . . . ?”
He would not put the thought into words. He would not betray his fear of death and particularly of the knife.
“Heydrich has a suggestion—if you want to make amends.” The blond head bent close. “You know Kennedy.”
Whatever he had expected, it was hardly this. “Of course. I—”
“Heydrich wants you to cultivate him. Tell him how badly the German economy is suffering. As only you, a banker connected to the Reichsbank, could know.”
“But the economy is not suffering—”
“You’ll
tell Kennedy, when you see him, that Hitler’s mad rearmament plans are crippling us. That financial disaster looms. That we can’t go on much longer.”
“But—”
Wohlthat reared back. The knife point was thrust against his abdomen; his abdomen tensed, recoiling from pain.
“Are you incredibly stupid, Herr Wohlthat?”
Wohlthat said nothing, his teeth clenched, fighting for control.
Heydrich’s man rose to his feet, the sinister blade disappearing into his sleeve like a conjurer’s trick.
Wohlthat touched his fingers to his starched white shirt. A drop of blood blossomed on the fabric. He looked up, aghast. He never felt the knife’s blade.
“Go on about your life,” the man said benignly. “I’ll find you when I need you. And try, Herr Wohlthat, to be a little smarter. The knife can always go deeper.”
TWENTY-NINE. THE EXPRESS
“BY ROLLING INTO PRAGUE, Hitler’s broken at least seven promises he gave Chamberlain at Munich,” Joe Kennedy said, “and you know what that means.”
“Yeah. Chamberlain’s an idiot.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Jack. You just mouth these . . . warmongering platitudes . . . you’ve picked up at Harvard.”
“You can’t negotiate peace, Dad, with a guy who wants to make war.” Jack threw a wrinkled tie into his suitcase.
“I’ve got to get back to London immediately,” Joe persisted, “and I’ve hired a plane. You’re coming with me.”
“I’m going to Paris.”
“You should be home.”
“London isn’t home. You just want to think I’m safe. But nobody’s safe anymore, Dad. You just refuse to admit it.”
His father spun him around by the shoulder. “I’ve pledged nine hostages to fortune, Jack—bringing you kids to Europe when it’s about to commit suicide. Just because Roosevelt conferred his goddamn honor on me and your mother decided it was the bees’ knees to swan around London. If I had a particle of sense I’d pack you all off to New York on the next ship that sails.”