Dance on a Sinking Ship Page 2

  He invented a name for her—Mathilde—and a husband—wealthy, attractive, and boring—like Whitney’s. They would have a grand residence in Passy, or on the Île de la Cité, he imagined, and a country place on the coast between Honfleur and Deauville. She would be a patron of galleries and concerts, disliking Picasso but fond of his friend Erik Satie. She would smoke and drink only occasionally, but she would love to swim and ride, love dancing, love tea, love small pastries, love making love in the afternoon. She and Spencer would become lovers on an afternoon, and would lie sleeping quietly in each other’s arms afterward, in a cool breeze from an open window. She would be impressed by his record as an aviator in the war but not want to hear about the combat. She would have a small blond daughter, whom she would favor with pink-and-white dresses. She would buy Spencer books as presents—modern French poets. She would make him forget Whitney.

  Her eyes flickered. It was almost a glance, not quite in his direction. He was so close to her she would have to turn her head to see him. In an anxious passing of seconds, he alternately wished and feared she would, but a distraction led her gaze elsewhere. Another car had been set afire and its gasoline was burning brightly, a beacon of hatred in the gathering night.

  Some people on the other side of the blond woman were speaking. He could not follow the words, but their accents were English. Many around them looked English. As he thought about it, so did she. This was a hotel much favored by the British rich. Had he led his imagination into error?

  Another necklace of gunfire appeared. Ignoring it, he sought some measure of this moment with her, this extraordinary intimacy with a woman whose eyes had never looked upon him, into his, but in this infinite instant, their oneness needed only a touch to complete—or shatter.

  The aimless bullet, soundless in the cacaphony, created a large, red, round hole in her forehead just above her left eye. Spencer felt the horror of wetness splattered against his cheek and neck as her head snapped back, life vanishing from her gaze before her eyes could focus upon him. He reached to catch her, as if keeping her from falling to the balcony floor could somehow undo what had happened. But he moved too late. She slipped through his grasp, her elbow knocking the glass from his hand, and landed twisted on her back. Her light hair was spread out all around her white perfect face, a madonna’s halo. Slowly the hair began to darken.

  He stood stupidly, staring down at her as might someone who had accidentally broken something in a store. It suddenly became very important to learn her name, her identity, this woman who had lived and died without him in her now-erased memory. But he didn’t think to ask anyone. He simply stood as some men in hotel uniforms knelt over her and then took her away, leaving nothing but a shadowy stain on the tile floor.

  It was only then that he heard the shouting and shrieking around him. Everyone on the balcony was fleeing for the Crillon’s interior. Spencer could hear the gunfire now.

  Laingen gripped his shoulder.

  “Let’s get inside!” he shouted. “I’ve got to file! You want to file?”

  “File?”

  “The story! This is a hell of a story! It’s got to go out on cable!”

  “That woman …”

  In the square, firemen were trying to drag hoses through the melée to get at the blaze in the Ministry of Marine, but the arcs of water sputtered and fell. The mob was cutting the hoses. A machine gun stuttered, and then others. Masonry rained on them from a suddenly fractured cornice.

  “Goddamn it, Jim! We’ve got to get inside!”

  Spencer knelt and touched the stain, feeling grit and stickiness, then ran to catch up with his friend.

  The crowded lobby contained a madhouse’s disparity of moods and demeanors. There were the frightened, the drunk, the bored, the bold, the hysterical, the hilarious, the weary, the asleep, and the perfectly content. One extremely well-dressed woman sat holding a small lapdog while drinking decorously from a magnum bottle of wine. Next to her a barefoot girl in a nightgown huddled and whimpered. There were a great many police in the lobby, all looking dutifully concerned but without discernible purpose. The danger was outside. Unless some hapless cabinet minister had taken refuge in the hotel, the policemen’s duty was elsewhere.

  Laingen had somehow gained possession of a telephone at the hotel’s main desk.

  “Twelve dead? They said twelve dead?” Laingen saw Spencer and cupped the receiver’s mouthpiece. “The police are saying there are only twelve dead!” He turned to speak into the receiver again. “There must be a hundred dead, damn it!” he said to the credulous person on the other end of the line. “I tell you they’re using machine guns!”

  Machine guns in Paris. Nazis in Berlin. Mass executions and government-mandated starvation in Russia. And in Africa, Mussolini was trying to butcher his way into mastery over the Abyssinians. There was no need of the great new war many said was now coming. The world was disintegrating quite handily without it.

  Spencer gestured that he would probably return and went back to the bar. By the time he emerged, carrying two large whiskies, Laingen had finished filing his story but was holding the telephone for Spencer. He surrendered it quickly in return for one of the drinks, gulping from it quickly. “I’ve got to get back to the office,” he said finally. “If you can stay alive, I’ll see you in the morning. Breakfast? Here?”

  Spencer nodded and took up the phone. The Press-Bulletin’s bureau was an office flat not far distant in the Boulevard Haussmann. Denise, his French assistant and secretary, was still there, as he had requested but not really expected. She was not alone.

  “Jim,” she said, pronouncing it “Jeem.” “Monsieur Carlson is here.”

  Carlson was the Press-Bulletin’s chief of correspondents. Based in London, he had been traveling through Europe. Spencer had thought he was still in Berlin.

  “Spencer? Where are you?”

  There was an uncharacteristic excitement in Carlson’s voice. He was a settled man, full of small and careful habits. He often complained to Chicago that Spencer was too impetuous.

  “I’m dodging bullets at the Hotel Crillon. There’s a hell of an insurrection at the Place de la Concorde. The army’s here. They’re shooting at everything. I was standing next to this woman—”

  “I want you to come into the office, Jim. I have a really swell story for you.”

  “I already have a really swell story! Here, listen to it.” He briefly held the receiver out toward the lobby entrance. “They’re shooting up the town! There’s a civil war in the city of light! The right wing are once again trying to overthrow the French government and the communists are helping them!”

  “Don’t be so overwrought. We’ll let the wires cover it tonight and McGuire will be up from Rome tomorrow. You have too much to do. You have to get ready and make arrangements. You’re going on a trip, a voyage.”

  “There may be hundreds dead, Carlson! It’s going to go on all night! I was going to dictate a few paragraphs to Denise for a cable dispatch and then get back out there!”

  Laingen was nowhere to be seen.

  “Dictate to Denise and then get back here. This is important. Your story is Lindy.”

  “Lindy?”

  “My dear boy.” Carlson had spent too much time in London. “Lucky Lindy. The Lone Eagle. Charles Lindbergh. You’re going to cross the Atlantic with Colonel Lindbergh.”

  “How can I do that? He’s in the States.”

  “No, he’s here. In Paris. Just a few blocks from you.”

  “Why would he leave America? They haven’t juiced Hauptmann yet. In fact, I read in the Herald that Lindbergh’s in New Mexico. Rocket experiments or something.”

  “A deliberate untruth. He’s been in Europe for at least a week. He’s just been in Germany. Did you know that? No one did. I was on the same plane coming back from Berlin. He’s staying at the Ritz. The day after tomorrow he’s sailing for New York on the Wilhelmina from Le Havre. I’m betting he comes back with his wife and son. Now that the Supre
me Court has turned down Hauptmann’s appeal, there’s no reason for them to stay. They certainly don’t want to be around for the execution.”

  “What’s the Wilhelmina?”

  “It’s the newest liner of the Lage Lander Line, just out of the shipyards. It will be a maiden voyage.”

  “Why don’t you go?”

  “My dear boy. You know Lindy doesn’t talk to mere reporters.” Carlson paused. “Not even chiefs of correspondents. He hates us all. But I’m betting he’ll talk to you, an aviator in the war. You could have the first interview since Hauptmann was convicted!”

  “But he won’t talk to me!”

  “You were a combat pilot.”

  “Lindbergh wasn’t in the war. He was just an army mail pilot.”

  “You flew airplanes. There’s a chance he’ll talk to you, and I think it’s worth a try. Spencer, this is the best story you’ve ever had, that you’ll ever have. This is Lindbergh! Among other things, I’m sure he’s been with some very high-level Germans. And in secret! Now, dictate your paragraphs to Denise and then come in and we can talk some more.”

  Spencer hesitated. “I’ll be in when I can. Traffic’s rather bad tonight.”

  When he was done with Denise, he bid her an affectionate good night and hung up without speaking further to Carlson. A Times of London correspondent snatched up the telephone immediately. The noise outside had diminished, though he could still hear sputters and crackles. The hotel manager appeared before him, complaining to one of the desk clerks about some matter.

  “Pardon, monsieur,” said Spencer. “La femme morte … the woman upstairs who was killed, la femme en bleu: can you tell me her name?”

  “Tragique. Si tragique. Ces communistes!”

  “Sa nomme, s’il vous plait. Do you know her name, who she was?”

  The manager shook his head. “The police took the body, monsieur. I do not know if she was a guest. So many injured, morts.” He shrugged. “Perhaps we may know more in the morning.”

  Spencer nodded. Back out on the street, he decided he would not return to his office that night. He would start work on Carlson’s really swell story. He would go to the Ritz.

  He never got farther than the Ritz bar, where, amazingly, the great hero never made an appearance, never sat down on a stool to slap hand on back, buy a round, and tell amusing stories about his new flying friends over in the German Reich. Spencer agreed with himself that he owed it to Carlson to spend much of the night on this really swell story, here in the bar, waiting for Lindbergh.

  He ordered another brandy and returned to brooding on his memory of the woman’s face. Europe had begun to devour its own. It had started with the most beautiful. He drank to her. Drinking was what he did when he wanted to cry instead.

  On an upper floor of the Crillon, just above the balcony fronting the Place de la Concorde, in a suite absurdly registered to a Mr. and Mrs. Edward Prince, a smallish man with an unusually handsome if feminine face and beautifully brushed blond hair stood calmly in a dressing gown at windows overlooking the mayhem. Smoking a cigarette, he watched as a final charge by the Gardes Mobiles began to break up the mob.

  “Please, sir,” said a man overdressed in tweed hovering nearby. “It’s not safe.”

  Because of the rioting, only one small lamp had been turned on in the large room, its pale glow contributing little more than a softening of the darkness.

  The man in the dressing gown cocked his head slightly. He was deaf in the left ear. “Now, now, Inspector Runcie. This isn’t the French Revolution, after all. I was considerably more exposed during the war.”

  “For God’s sake, David,” she said, calling him by the name that only his intimates used. “Please do as he says.”

  The words came from a woman, herself in a dressing gown and heavily jeweled, reclining on a deeply plush sofa set against the opposite wall. In the dim light she looked comely. Her dark hair was pulled back tight to accentuate her aristocratic forehead. In the darkness her outsized mole was not visible, nor could one fully see the largeness of her nose and hands. She held a glass of bourbon and water that was in need of ice. She drank from it by way of punctuation. David kept his back to her, biting his lip and frowning. Finally he turned to the man in tweed.

  “Runcie, hand me your revolver.”

  “Sir?”

  “Your revolver. Give it to me.”

  Startled at first, the man remembered his place and quickly did as commanded. The pistol was a heavy-caliber Wembley, an officer’s sidearm from the war. The man in the dressing gown took it clumsily at first, then aimed it firmly at the window, at the crowds below.

  “There you are,” he said. “Now I’m ready for them.” He looked back at the woman, giving her his what-a-bright-boy-am-I smile. She scowled in reply.

  “They’re moving them off the square,” he said. “I wonder if our Horse Guards could manage that if called upon. I must ask Duff or Fruity. It’s all in the sabers, I suppose.”

  There was a polite rapping at the door. The woman hurried to it, grateful for the interruption, especially when she saw who was there.

  “Sorry for the intrusion,” said one of the two men who entered, a dapper, amiable, and quite tall man named Major Edward Metcalfe, better known as “Fruity.” After Lord Louis Mountbatten, he was probably Edward P.’s best friend, and now he was a good friend of the woman as well.

  “It’s quite important, sir,” said the second man, Lord Perry Brownlow, one of Edward P.’s principal aides.

  Edward greeted them both with happy enthusiasm and, cigarette in mouth, hurried to pour them whiskies. Each discreetly winced at the taste of bourbon—her habit, now his.

  “No intrusion at all,” he said. “We’ve been so bored, bored, bored up here. Get Kitty, why don’t you, Perry, and we can have a little party.”

  “She’s gone back to London, sir,” Brownlow said. “I’m afraid all this rioting has completely unnerved her. And she’s not been well. She sends her apologies.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you.” He frowned.

  “David,” said Fruity. “Sir. We’ve been talking to the French authorities and a few of our own. They think you ought to leave Paris. They can’t guarantee your safety, certainly not with the casual way you’re traveling about. They’ve got the rioting under control for now, but the situation’s deuced bad.”

  “Why did you talk to the French? I’m supposed to be incognito.”

  “I’m afraid the Crillon is not a good place for a masquerade, sir,” said Brownlow. “It’s now widely known you’re here.”

  “We should have gone to the Hotel Meurice, just as we always have,” said the woman, returning to the sofa.

  Fruity Metcalfe smiled. The prince was extremely well known at the Hotel Meurice, and it was just down the street. They had come to the Crillon supposedly to escape public attention.

  “There’s trouble all over Paris,” he said. “Bolshies. Black shirts. Anyone with a brick. It’s worse than that bloody dust up they had last year over the Stavisky scandal. I’m sorry, David, but staying here simply won’t do.”

  Edward P. sighed. “I just wanted a bit of fun, Fruity—for all of us. Wallis is so tired of the weekends at Fort Belvedere, though I don’t know why.”

  “Oh, sir,” she said. “I’d be so happy to be back there now.”

  “If anything were to happen to you here, sir,” said Brownlow. “If you were to be injured in any way, the international complications could be quite serious. As it is, your father will be furious.”

  Edward Prince frowned. “My father is in a perpetual state of fury. He’s not forgiven me yet for that trip to America years ago. Well, damn and blast. I’m not going to arrange my private life to suit my father. I perform my public duties. My private life is my own.”

  “He’s ill, David. Seriously ill.”

  “I’m well aware of that!”

  He turned his back to them, puffing on his cigarette. The woman arched her brow.

  “Sir,
” Brownlow said, finally. “We simply cannot stay in Paris. We must leave at once, if only for the sake of the ladies.”

  “Oh, all right, blast you,” said Edward. “But not tonight!”

  “As you wish, sir, but no later than tomorrow. Please.”

  Edward wheeled about to face them. With his cigarette stuck at an angle in his mouth and his hands in his dressing-gown pockets, he began to walk about the room.

  “I jolly well won’t go back to London,” he said. “Not yet. Baldwin has everyone caught up in that Abyssinian crisis. He’ll use the situation against me. And no one in London’s having the slightest bit of fun at all. I’m so tired of the damned Abyssinian crisis. It just goes on and on. Why don’t those wretched niggers give it a rest?”

  “You know what Chips says, sir,” said Brownlow. “‘A crisis a day keeps the war away.’”

  “I’ve already done my bit to keep the war away,” said Edward. “I made that speech back in June to the British Legion. I was damned conciliatory to the Germans. I don’t know what more Baldwin could ask. I really shouldn’t be involved in foreign affairs. I really shouldn’t.”

  Brownlow glanced at Fruity, who responded with the slightest of smiles. Edward’s “Germany is our friend” speech to the Legion was viewed by many in the Commons as a signal encouragement for the Italians to have their way with Haile Selasse.

  “Sir,” the woman said quickly. “If you don’t want to return to London, where would you like to go?”

  “Why not the South of France?” Fruity said. “There’s not much civil unrest at Cannes at the moment.”

  “No. We were just there. And there’d be reporters.”

  “Biarritz?” said Fruity. “Kitzbühel?”

  “Sir,” said the woman, “we haven’t been there since February.”

  “Yes. Remember how angry Father was when he found out? He forbade me to go there again. And anyway, there’s no snow. I’ve a dozen invitations to Germany just now, but that would not be appropriate, I suppose.”

  “Sir,” said Brownlow, weighing his words with great care. “Your father is very unwell. I really do think it would be best if you returned to London.”