“I’ll catch you, for Pete’s sake.”
“You didn’t last time!”
“Just jump already!” Joe was fed up.
Jack rolled over on his towel and squinted into the sun. His baby brother was silhouetted at the top of Eden Roc in a half crouch, his bare toes gripping the gravelly edge. As he watched, Bobby ran up with a war-whoop, arms outstretched to push. Teddy gave a shriek of terror and ran back to Jack.
Bobby grinned. “Baby.” He jumped over the edge.
There was a splash far below and the sound of Joe cursing. Bobby’s drowned laughter.
Teddy buried his head in the towel between Jack and Kick, who was propped on her elbows above the Hotel du Cap. She was sunning herself while the boys hurled themselves into the Mediterranean. Girls didn’t attempt suicide in a two-piece in the South of France, but Jack suspected Kick would give anything to dash herself on the rocks, just to know she could still feel. She was in exile this August, torn from Billy as he was about to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. The Marquess of Hartington’s Coming of Age. A party for five hundred at Chatsworth. Three days of ceremony and fireworks, fetes and champagne. Every debutante in England was at the ancestral home of the Dukes of Devonshire—except Kick. The Irish Catholic American upstart.
She was heartsick and furious and didn’t bother to hide it. While Jack had been in Poland, rumors of Kick and Billy’s engagement blazed through the London papers—and the New York Times. The Kennedys issued denials on both sides of the Atlantic, but the Duke of Devonshire issued his first. Rose took this as a deliberate insult to her daughter; it was well-known the Duke despised Catholic girls on the catch for wealthy peers. Billy apologized for his father, but Rose was implacable. She declined Billy’s invitation to Kick, carried her off to France, and said she would never see Billy again.
Kick stopped eating. She moped around the Domaine de Ranguin, the Kennedys’ rented château, with its rose gardens and olive groves and glorious views of the sea. She was wan and listless and hollow-eyed. The threat of war was nothing compared to the threat of losing Billy.
Joe was still yelling from below the cliffs. Jack grabbed Teddy by the shoulders and swung him high. “Let’s cannonball right over him,” he whispered. “Promise I won’t let you go.”
Teddy crowed. Jack ran for the edge. He soared out into air with his kid brother’s body held tight against him.
Waiting to feel something.
Anything.
* * *
HE’D KEPT THE DIANA RECKONING at bay during the crazed twenty-four hours after her murder. As he stumbled across the train yard in Bratislava, he’d thought only of surviving. It was clear to Jack that the Germans had learned, somehow, of the existence of the brown carpetbag and the Englishman intending to receive it. Had one of the Polish partisans talked? Had Bird Man been arrested and tortured? Jack couldn’t know. He could only think frantically about how to get out of Bratislava before his killers learned he wasn’t on their train.
He might have contacted the British consulate and turned over the carpetbag. He might have walked back to the station and waited for another train to Buda. But he was shaking with fever and adrenaline and so he chose the most obvious path. He hailed a taxi and said, “Airport.”
It turned out to be the one word of English even a Bratislavan knew.
The field had a wind sock and a single runway and a shelter that might as well have been a bus station. No planes had yet landed, Jack guessed, that morning. Three people were waiting inside, their gazes uncomprehending when he tried to ask them about flights. He dragged his heavy cases into the single john, locked the door, and camped on the toilet for a quarter hour, his trousers down around his knees and a DOCA pellet in his shaking fingers. He felt like a hunted animal run to earth.
When he left the bathroom, a red-headed girl in a sober dirndl had taken up a position by a desk and was stamping tickets. She spoke French. When he asked, she agreed that there was a flight to Budapest. It would leave at noon.
Jack glanced around. “What are all these people waiting for?”
“The flight to Ljubljana,” she said. “Eight o’clock.”
It was already seven-thirty.
He bought a ticket to Ljubljana.
By lunchtime, he was dozing in a second-class compartment of the Ljubljana–Trieste train.
He dined on the ferry from Trieste to Venice: some sort of fisherman’s stew pulled from the Adriatic, dotted with garlic and what he suspected was squid, washed down with raw red wine.
He found a room in Canareggio not far from the Santa Lucia train station, and the following night he slept in Rome. It was easy enough from there to fly to London—if you were a Kennedy, with cash in your pocket and a diplomatic passport. He had not seen a German soldier in days.
Seventy-two hours after he’d thrown himself off the Bratislava train, Jack walked into the lingerie shop off St. James and handed the brown carpetbag with the Heydrich-Enigma to an unflappable Matilda. She told him Gubbins’s leg was mending nicely.
It was only later, as he made his way exhaustedly with Torby to his parents’ summer idyll in the South of France, that the misery of Diana’s murder broke like a massive wave in his mind.
* * *
HE AND TORB HAD ARRIVED in Cannes a few days ago, and found the whole family pretending to have a fabulous time. The air of gaiety was murderous. News bulletins came hourly over the radio his brother Joe kept tuned to the BBC: Czechoslovakia was in lockdown, with nobody but Germans allowed across the borders; Czech political figures were rumored to be dead or in hiding; Hitler was accusing the Poles of ever more fantastic atrocities against Germans in the Polish Corridor. They’d heard this kind of talk before. Everyone in Europe knew it was a prelude to invasion.
Jack noticed his dad snapped off the radio whenever he passed through the salon. He played golf relentlessly; he was on vacation. He was determined to have a good time. Nothing was happening in London—Chamberlain had adjourned Parliament, despite Hitler’s rising frenzy, because the British Parliament always adjourned in August. Hitler could keep until September.
“You look like hell, Jack,” Kick said when she ran down the limestone steps in a halter dress to meet him when he arrived. She pecked Torby on the cheek, utterly destroying him. “What did you boys do in Paris?”
That’s right; they were supposed to have been in Paris all this time.
“Burned the candle at both ends, kid,” Jack said lightly; but he recognized the haunted look in his sister’s eyes. He guessed she saw it in his own. They were both heartsick.
They both smiled for Torby.
When they went into the house, his mother was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “You’re so pale, Ja-ack,” Rose declared. “You look ill. Get over to Eden Roc and lie in the sun.”
So he lay in the sun. It didn’t matter what he did anymore. Diana was dead, her martyrdom meaningless, because the account book was still in Heydrich’s hands. Jack’s father was faithless. Jack had failed Roosevelt. He’d failed himself. He might as well dance the night away and lie to his friends about the way he’d spent his summer. Anything to avoid thinking.
“Fuck the thesis,” he told Torby drunkenly one midnight as they lingered on the château’s terrace long after everyone else had gone to bed. “Fuck Harvard. I’m gonna drop out and wander the world. Write for a living. Beholden to nobody.”
“Except your old man,” Torby said drily. “Costs a lot these days, to wander in the style you do.”
Torby knew Jack pretty well and he figured something bad had happened in Poland—but he thought it was about some girl. Torby was twenty-one and could imagine nothing worse than being kicked out of a warm bed. He waited for Jack to tell him about it, and when Jack said nothing about blood or knives or a secret machine smuggled off a train, Torby kept his distance. It wa
s the chief reason Jack loved him. That studied Yankee indifference.
* * *
HIS SKIN FIERY WITH SUN and the salt of the ocean still stinging his eyes, Jack moved through the evening crowd at Eden Roc. He wore light linen trousers and a summer jacket Rose had brought from his closet in London. His hair had turned gold in places; the leprechaun bones were flecked with freckles. His mouth wore the usual grin; it kept people at arm’s length, now, instead of drawing them in. He held a gin and tonic in his hand.
He jitterbugged with Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, who interested him less than Marlene herself; but the star’s household was already crowded and he lacked the energy to compete. She’d taken several suites at the Hotel du Cap, as she did every summer. She talked loudly in French about how much she hated the Nazis, whirling her cigarette holder and glaring through the smoke with slitted eyes. Her legs were tanned and gleaming and crossed at the knee; her self-presentation superb. Her husband formed part of her entourage and so did her lover, the writer Erich Maria Remarque; she moved, it was said, between the two men’s suites. Amid so much glamour the daughter was wasted—a shy girl with dark hair who looked nothing like her mother. Jack had trouble remembering the daughter’s name and so did everyone else, who perpetually called her Darling. He kept glancing over her head at the shifting group around Marlene.
His brother Joe was talking to her. So was his father. J.P. could never resist the pull of a star. But it was the third man in the group that grabbed Jack’s attention: a dark-haired figure with perfect tailoring and beautiful hands.
Willi Dobler.
Not in London, but in Cannes. He was lighting Marlene’s cigarette, and the mere sight of the flame spilled a cascade of memories through Jack’s brain. It seemed years since the conspiracy of taxis, the exchange of brittle confidences.
The music ended in a clashing blare and Jack took the Dietrich girl in hand, piloting her through the crowd to her own people. Marlene exclaimed over them, in English this time, as though the script required her to act like a mother. Jack bowed and muttered something to Remarque about All Quiet on the Western Front, but his eyes were on Dobler. When he moved toward the bar, he knew the German was following.
He took his drink away from the dance floor, out toward the rocky shingle that ran down to the water. He needed space and the sound of waves if he was to talk to Willi.
“Hello, Jack,” Dobler said as he came up with him. “You’re looking well. Perhaps it is impossible to look anything else in the South of France, during Europe’s final summer.”
He stood at his ease as Jack sipped his drink, the tonic cool in his throat. It was choked and stinging again, as it was whenever he thought of Warsaw.
“I failed her, Willi,” he said. “It’s my fault and there’s nothing I can do. I have to live with it for the rest of my life.”
Dobler smiled faintly. “Since when did you take up knives, Jack? I know who’s responsible. So does Denys.”
Jack took another pull on the tonic. “Bullshit. We’re all responsible. My father, who sold his president for thirty pieces of silver. You and Denys, who let her do your dirty work for you. Me, of course—I beat it out of Prague when she needed me most. And Heydrich—fucking Heydrich, who decided to teach me a lesson, and used Diana to do it.”
“Is that what you think?” Dobler said slowly. “That Diana died . . . to teach you a lesson?”
“Heydrich set me up. That was the point.”
“More a case of killing two birds with one stone. I thought you knew that. Forgive me—I didn’t realize you believed it was all about you, Jack.”
Jack drained his glass and tossed it viciously onto the rocks. “What the hell do you mean?”
Willi frowned at him. “You’ve allowed guilt to cloud your judgment.”
“You bet I have.” He laughed hollowly. “Let me tell you about Catholics, Willi. Nobody does guilt like us—nobody. We’ve made a cult of the thing. We fall on our knees and let it bleed us dry. I could confess all day long about the sins of Diana—but there’s not a priest on God’s earth who could absolve me, and none I’d listen to if he tried.”
He stared past the German to the Hotel du Cap, the terrace with its string of lanterns, the swirling couples on the floor. He imagined it in flames, a doomed truck in Danzig. He did not want to go back inside. He walked farther down the beach in his stiff shoes, his hands clenched in his pockets.
“There’s been a lot of talk about Diana’s murder around the Abwehr,” Dobler said. He was following him. “People are trying to make sense of it. Heydrich lost his temper. We think Diana crossed him—that she caused him so much damage he killed her. Tell me, Jack: What kind of damage could Diana do?”
Jack stopped short and stared at the ocean. He could feel Dobler halt several paces behind him. The sheer simplicity of Willi’s words settled in his mind like stones dropping through a pool of water.
“The account book,” he whispered. “She got the account book.”
“Very good.”
“You actually think she stole it from Heydrich?” Jack asked.
“I think it’s certain.”
“That’s insane.” Jack twitched impatiently. “If she did, where is it?”
“Heydrich must not know. It’s clear he hasn’t used the list of names. There’s been no arm-twisting or blackmail.”
It was true; Jack had been watching his father, waiting for the unmistakable signs that the Old Man was caving to Nazi pressure. He’d seen nothing but golf. And more golf.
“Given that we’re mere weeks from hurling all of Europe into war,” Willi mused, “I’d have expected Heydrich to act. He should be forcing your father, for instance, to secure those American loans. Or approaching Mr. Churchill with the demand that he stand idly by while Neville Chamberlain stumbles. But I understand even the effort to thwart Roosevelt’s third term has faltered completely. Why, Jack? Can you explain it?”
Jack turned to look at Willi, waiting for his next words.
“The account book is gone. And with it, Heydrich’s greatest weapon. Diana took it.”
A surge of feeling swept through Jack’s gut. Emotion so ragged, he clenched his jaw against it. She was still gone. Her blood all over his hands.
“She died without telling him where it is,” Willi persisted. “Not even the knife got the truth out of her.”
Screaming. She died screaming.
“You thought it was to punish you.” Dobler grasped his shoulder and shook him. “Let yourself off that hook. She died in pain—because she made the choice.”
The lights from the lanterns wavered and blurred. The damn salt in his eyes, again.
“We’ve got to find it, Willi,” he whispered. “The account book. We owe her that much.”
“Wouldn’t it be safer, Jack,” Dobler said gently, “to let sleeping dogs lie?”
FIFTY-ONE. SLEEPING DOGS
HE HAD NEVER PARTICULARLY CARED about what was safe.
He left Kick and Joe and Torby and his father at Eden Roc and grabbed a taxi back to the château alone. He needed silence between himself and the momentous things Willi Dobler had said. Silence to consider this faint hope: that Diana had died for something much more important than a sick college kid from Boston. Jack wanted to believe it. It would ease the guilt he carried in his pocket. Fingering it like a piece of the true cross.
High up in his bedroom, he watched the night slip past without the comfort of sleep. Moonlight paved a road through the open French window as the hours wore away. Diana might just walk down that glimmering path and sit beside him on the bed, her cold fingers tugging at his hair; so he stayed alert, watching the moon as it shifted across his floor. When it slid up the far wall and disappeared, he turned restlessly under the single sheet, his nude body damp with fever.
Dobler was right. She’d taken
the account book. Where was it now?
If she’d left it among her things, it was lost to them—Heydrich had probably dumped her clothes and luggage in a trash bin weeks ago. But no: he’d have searched Diana’s belongings first; he’d be desperate to recover his prize. And he hadn’t. As Willi said: There was no hint of behind-the-scenes blackmail in these last crucial weeks before war.
“Come on, Diana,” Jack muttered. “Tell me the truth. Where’d you hide Daisy’s records?”
It’s the only place I’m allowed to go alone, she replied.
A bathroom?
He could not begin to search the women’s lavs of every gilded cage she’d used over the past three months.
She was still trying to steal the book when he deserted her in Prague; he was certain of that. She would never have stood by and watched the Spider kick him in the teeth if it was already in her hands. She’d have run to Jack that day, instead of walking deliberately across the Charles Bridge.
So she’d lifted Daisy’s records from Heydrich’s special strongbox sometime between Jack’s birthday, the twenty-ninth of May, and the day he’d found her dead in Warsaw—the twenty-fifth of July. As soon as Heydrich discovered her treachery, he’d turned on her. The interrogations and the manipulations began.
He thought of Diana’s sightless eyes on the bed in Warsaw and shivered.
Where’d you hide it, sweetheart?
She’d taken her last clues with her, into the silence of that final scream.
And yet—had she?
He sat up in his airless room.
There was one thing she’d left behind.
The evening bag he’d bought her in Danzig.
Steel and platinum, and totally inappropriate to carry in the daytime. Even as he’d stumbled toward her body, obscenities streaming from his mouth, his mind had snagged on that minor detail. He was enough Kick’s brother to know the purse was all wrong, that it should never have been in her hands, much less lying on his hotel-room floor. He’d dismissed his doubt as soon as he’d tucked the bag into his pocket. Grateful to have something, anything, of Diana to remember.
Jack 1939 Page 30
