I staggered to a walk, preparing to dart from his path, but he stuck out his arms. “Arretez-vous, mademoiselle! Qu’est-ce que vous faites?”
A gendarme.
I fell forward, nearly striking him. Recovered myself at the last instant and pressed a hand to my chest, as if this action might somehow restore my breath.
The man was old, far past the age of soldiering, incapable of violence. Only his voice was forceful.
I gasped. “Please help! There’s someone following me!”
An electric torch sprang to life in his right hand. He held it high, aiming the beam first—briefly—at my face, and then at the pavement behind me. He interposed himself manfully between me and my pursuer, and his left hand went to his belt.
As he searched the sidewalk with his torch, lighting the doorways and the stacked café chairs and tables and the silent lampposts, I panted and rasped, following the slice of his torch through the darkness. Someone shouted faintly, from several streets away. Above us, inside one of the windows, a party of some kind seemed to be taking place; I could just hear the shower of glassware, the pitch of hysterical laughter. I could just see the glimmer of light on the sidewalk from behind the drawn curtains.
The gendarme turned. I could breathe now; my head was strangely light. My feet throbbed, hot and swollen.
“My dear mademoiselle,” he said kindly, lisping his way through a number of missing teeth. “There is nobody there.”
He walked me all the way back to the hotel, telling me of his two grandsons at the front, the four grandsons who had already died, one at the Marne and three at Verdun. C’est la guerre. Of his many granddaughters, some nursing the wounded and some running canteens in the railway stations. One had married in April. She was already expecting a baby at Christmas, the gendarme’s first great-grandchild, and her husband was dead, too. A shell had fallen precisely inside the reserve trench where he was trying to sleep, and had scattered him to pieces, mademoiselle, small and terrible pieces. Just a week ago.
But why did she get married, I asked, if she knew her husband was likely to die?
The gendarme shrugged his shoulders. Because they were in love, wasn’t it so? And it was war. And now the poor dead soldier would have a baby to live on after him, so it wasn’t for nothing. The two of them, his precious Berthe and her young man, they had experienced a small moment of happiness, and wasn’t that enough, when you thought of all the misery in this world? Better you had known that small joy than have gone to your grave without it.
By the time he told me about his days during the siege of Paris, and the rats he had shared with his children while the Prussians fired their daily rounds into the city, we had reached my hotel. The windows were dark. The gendarme made me a smart salute and opened the door for me to pass. I thanked him and hurried inside.
The old foyer was lit by a single lamp, but even so small a light, after so much darkness, was enough to blind me for an instant. I blinked. Rubbed my eyes. When I lifted my head to discover the stairs at the back of the hallway, I realized that someone was already there, rising from the straight-backed settee against the wall, stubbing out a cigarette in a small porcelain ashtray. Removing his officer’s cap to reveal a head of thick golden hair, tarnished with gray.
Captain Fitzwilliam.
Chapter 9
Miami Beach, Florida, June 1922
At night, the Japanese tea garden at the Flamingo Hotel undergoes a remarkable metamorphosis. Gone are the ladies in white dresses, the gentlemen in linen suits, the perspiring waiters and the lilting atmosphere of the orchestra in the corner. The clink of porcelain and glass, the routine murmurs of civilization. The strings of lanterns, so festive in the twilight, have gone dark. The speedboats have returned to port. The air is damp and salty and still, and Biscayne Bay slaps quietly against the stone. You might call it peaceful. I find it menacing.
But I don’t have much choice about being here, do I? This strange, hard-faced man didn’t exactly ask me where I should prefer to meet him, or when. Didn’t consider whether a simple telephone call or even a letter might serve as well. Anyway, he was probably right. Any operator can listen to your telephone call. The restaurant’s still busy, the lobby crawling with bellboys and clerks. No, it had to be the garden: convenient, private, devoid of prying eyes. Within screaming distance, if screaming’s required.
Still, as I navigate the warm, moist darkness, listening for some small disturbance in the air that might signal the presence of a waiting man, I begin to think this wasn’t such a terrific idea after all. That the joyous merrymakers in the hotel ballroom behind me won’t be listening for any trouble in the garden outside, and the night-blackened waters of Biscayne Bay make a discreet point of disposal for anything—or anyone—a fellow might wish to dispose of.
That, if this stranger really does have information about my husband, he’s not likely to be the kind of man you could trust with your life.
A scrape of metal interrupts the stillness to my left. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam?” asks a familiar voice, like the passing of velvet over stone.
And I guess it’s a good thing I’m standing near a garden chair of solid wrought iron, because even though I’m expecting this man, even though the weight of my small pistol hangs comfortably near my ribs, the sound causes my legs to buckle beneath me.
When the police arrested my father last February, right there in the middle of my sister’s engagement party, it was almost a relief. We’d been hiding for so long.
Sophie, of course, had no idea. My God, how shocked she was. All those years I had fought for her innocence, and now here I stood, holding her white and shaking body, explaining her true history to her as best I could. And it was terrible, just terrible, to see her world crumble around her, brick by brick, this careful storybook we had created for her, and yet it was still a relief. No more pretending. No more denying that a thing was so, when it wasn’t. Or maybe it was the other way around?
Anyway, the next weeks blurred by, lawyers and papers and police interrogations. I was living on my nerves, living in fear that I would say the wrong thing, reveal things I couldn’t reveal, and by March, Sophie and Evelyn and I had taken up residence at a suite in the Pickwick Arms Hotel in Greenwich, Connecticut, in order to be close to all these legal proceedings. So it was not until I received that brief, shattering notification from Mr. Burnside that I realized I hadn’t received any more. Letters from Simon.
Yes, Simon’s letters. I believe I mentioned them earlier. They arrived at regular intervals, at the beginning of each month, as reliable as if a machine had printed them out for the three years since I left him. Except it was not a machine who wrote them. It was Simon.
I hadn’t read any of them. In the beginning, when the pain of losing Simon was so fresh, I couldn’t bear the thought of reading his words again. Later, I suppose I was simply afraid: afraid of his powers of persuasion, afraid that he would convince me to set aside my convictions and return to him. Yes, I might have been living in a prison on Thirty-Second Street, but at least it was a prison I knew, a prison of my own making. A prison under my own command.
But the trouble was Sophie. In order to preserve Sophie’s innocence—to preserve this delicate fiction that Evelyn’s father and I were happily married, that Simon was only seeing to his complicated business affairs and would send for us in due time—my father and I had reached an unspoken agreement, by which I took each monthly letter from the hall table upstairs to my room and pretended to read it, and Father took the unopened letter from my dresser and—well, I didn’t know exactly what he did with those letters. But I knew he wouldn’t throw them away. Father was too meticulous for that. Everything in its place.
But Father had been held without bail in the Fairfield County Jail since the beginning of February, and as I lay in my sleepless Pickwick Arms bed that May night, tormented by the letter from Mr. Burnside, wrestling with the impossible notion that Simon had died, I realized that no new letters had arrived from my
husband. That inside the packets of mail dutifully forwarded each day from our housekeeper on Thirty-Second Street, Simon’s letters did not appear.
The next morning, cold with horror beneath a balmy spring sun, I left Evelyn in Sophie’s care and drove down to New York City. I thundered up the stairs to Father’s room and the locked secretary where he kept his papers, and I retrieved the key from the place I knew he kept it: inside the false bottom of a jar of threepenny nails resting atop the bookshelf.
The lock was stiff, because Father had been away so long, and even after I lowered the secretary’s polished front I had to hunt among the pigeonholes and the drawers, sifting through bills and patent applications, bank statements and legal agreements, until I found a small leather portfolio tied with a faded scarlet ribbon, labeled in the corner with a single word: fitzwilliam.
And there they were: thirty-odd letters, crisp and still white, my name written so familiarly and invitingly in Simon’s black spider scrawl that I could almost hear his voice caressing the words on our wedding day: Mrs. Virginia Fitzwilliam. I stood there next to the secretary, holding those envelopes, my blood beating through my veins and my breath jumping in my chest, caught between two opposing impulses: to hold these letters next to my skin and breathe in the scent of their ink, and to toss them out the window in a shower of poisonous white. But I didn’t make either one of those ridiculous gestures. I gained some measure of control over my jumping nerves and sat down on the corner of Father’s bed, and I stared at the first envelope, May of 1919, when Evelyn was only a tiny, fearful bud in the center of my womb, and the tulips were just beginning to wilt.
And it seemed to me, as I sat there, that someone whispered against my ear in a warm, English cadence.
Go on. Go on.
Everything you seek is here.
I reached for the stained silver letter opener in the jar on Father’s desk and ripped open that first letter like a glutton, prepared to read all the letters at once, one after another, month after month, gorging myself on the thin black lines of Simon’s handwriting. Ready to fill my lonely gut with the sound of his voice: reading them to me in my head, laying himself bare, dissecting each valve and channel of his heart for my amusement, while I pretended to believe him, to read those sentences as if they were true.
But the envelope was empty.
I picked up the next one. Empty. And the next, and the next. I didn’t need to open them; I felt their thinness, their lack of weight. Not one single envelope held anything inside. Just a thin slice of open air, addressed to me in my husband’s familiar handwriting.
And though I examined each envelope carefully, I could not determine whether my letters had been carefully opened and resealed or never opened to begin with. Whether this strange pantomime began with Simon or with my father, or whether some deeper mystery lay unfathomed beneath me.
As I replaced the last envelope in the portfolio, however, I noticed a curious detail. Curious, I say, because who really notices a postmark? I don’t, unless I have some particular, practical reason, and yet as the paper slid past my gaze, I caught sight of the figures feb 28 1922.
My hand went still, holding the envelope half in and half out of the portfolio. I stared for some time, but the letters didn’t change. miami fla curving around the top part of the circle, and feb 28 in the middle, and 1922 curving at the bottom.
I pushed the envelope the rest of the way inside the portfolio and fastened the latch, feeling in that moment as empty and dissatisfied as the letters themselves. Puzzled and unsteady. And I remember how, as I sat there in Father’s chair and stared at the multitude of cracks spreading across the dry leather skin of his portfolio, like the turning up of new earth in a dead soil, a thought came to me. Or maybe more in the nature of a revelation.
I knew there was no possibility that my husband was dead.
All of which has brought me to this point, agreeing so foolishly to meet this strange man, just because he’s drawn a picture of my daughter and claims to know something about Simon. I realize, as his voice reaches me through the darkness, just how very foolish I’ve been, how terribly reckless, all for the sake of a man who might or might not be worth the trouble.
“Please sit,” the man says, stepping forward from the shadows—or rather the depth of the shadows, because we’re still shrouded (as they say) in darkness. The glow from the hotel windows reaches only so far, and there isn’t much moon to speak of. A perfect night to run in a boatload or two of rum from Cuba. I point this out to my companion, by way of idle conversation, as I obey his instructions and settle myself on the edge of a wrought iron chair, trying to steady my vision without looking as if I needed to.
“That’s true,” he replies, taking possession of the neighboring chair, “but a mere shipment or two of contraband isn’t my chief concern, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, much as I deplore the activity.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you? I guess I should introduce myself, in that case. My name is Marshall, and I’m an agent for the Bureau of Internal Revenue.”
“You’re a Prohibition man?”
“Yes.” He reaches into the inner breast pocket of his jacket. “If you’d care to see my badge.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Forgive me, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, but I believe it is. In fact, you ought to insist on official identification. The nature of this business is such that any number of unscrupulous men will try to convince you they’re one thing, when they’re really another.”
“But badges can be faked, can’t they?”
He lays an object on the table between us. “That’s true. Still, I’m a fellow who likes to preserve the formalities. I imagine you’ve found it difficult to find men you can trust, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, and for what it’s worth, you can trust me.”
“Anyone can say that.”
“Yes. I guess I might be any kind of villain, as far as you’re concerned. God knows the bureau’s got enough villains of its own, badge or no badge. Still.” He lifts the object from the table and replaces it inside his jacket. He sits facing me, at a perpendicular angle to the hotel itself, so that one side of his face is faintly lit from the golden Flamingo windows and the other side is as dark as Biscayne Bay itself. His bones are just as solid as they appeared today on the beach, and across all the acreage of smooth, young skin covering that wide jaw, not a single particle of stubble dares to glitter above the surface. Mr. Marshall is the kind of man who shaves twice a day, come war or come hurricane, probably with an old-fashioned cutthroat blade instead of a modern double-edged safety razor.
“Assuming, then, you really are a Prohibition agent,” I say, “what exactly was your business with my husband?”
He straightens his jacket and rests one elbow on the table. “Before I answer that, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, I feel myself obliged to inquire after your own health. As I understand it, you’ve been through something of an ordeal, these past several months.”
“Oh? And what do you know about my ordeal?”
“It’s my business to know things. And even if it weren’t my business, I couldn’t help but read the story. You’ve been featured in every newspaper in the country, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, or didn’t you know?”
“I’ve been too busy to read the newspapers.”
He nods. “Well, in any case, I apologize for disturbing you during your . . . well—”
“Bereavement? Time of distress?”
“If you want to call it that. Although I don’t imagine you came down here to Florida for the purpose of relaxation.”
“My purpose in Florida is none of your business, Mr. Marshall. All I really need from you is your information about my husband, if you really have it. And you might tell me why you felt yourself entitled to draw a portrait of my daughter, without my knowledge or permission.”
“I apologize for the liberty. I only wanted to gain your attention.”
“You have it. For the moment. Now bring yourself to the point, pl
ease, before they miss me inside.”
Mr. Marshall tilts his head an inch or two, and I can’t help thinking what a torpid man he is, compared with Simon, who always seemed to be in motion—always in the middle of some emotion or action or complex puzzle of logic. Or maybe that was only for my benefit. Cool as January, Mr. Burnside called him. Maybe this expressiveness was only another one of Simon’s disguises, another of the masks he wore, each one custom-built for its intended audience.
“All right,” Mr. Marshall says, moving his lips only the essential minimum required for speech. “I guess I might as well start by observing that you didn’t seem a bit surprised, a moment ago, when I told you the nature of my work. Pursuing the illegal importation of intoxicating liquors into this country, I mean.”
“Maybe not.”
“Then it won’t surprise you, either, to hear that we—the bureau, that is, and I personally—believe your husband’s death, like the deaths of most men mixed up in the bootlegging business around here, was not a simple act of God.”
A good thing it’s so damned dark out here in the Japanese garden, because while I’m able to check the gasp in my throat as Mr. Marshall pronounces the words your husband’s death, I feel pretty certain my face betrays a flinch. You know the kind: that involuntary spasm that follows an unexpected slap.
You see, I was expecting something else. I guess I was expecting that Mr. Marshall was about to reveal to me some kind of startling secret. That Mr. Marshall was going to lean forward and take my hand and tell me, in a voice of terrible quiet, to prepare myself for a great shock, because by some miracle or some improbable contortion of known fact, Simon is still alive. Alive! Alive, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. It’s true. Because there’s been a mistake, an extraordinary mistake, or maybe even a strange and complicated business afoot. That another, anonymous man died in the fire on Cocoa Beach that night, and Mr. Marshall is about to tell me why.
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