Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  “I’ll talk to the captain at once. It might have been one of our people, or a servant, but why would they lock Wallis in the closet?” Fruity patted his royal friend’s shoulder. “Well, they’re gone now. It’s all right. We shouldn’t have left you alone.” He looked up at Inspector Runcie. “We won’t leave you alone again. Let me get you something for your nerves; at the very least, that stiff drink you wanted.”

  Metcalfe started toward the door to summon the visit, but stepped back quickly as Wallis came storming through, charging at the prince’s bed. “How dare you let this happen to me?” she said, her voice low, threatening and thoroughly intimidating. Metcalfe left quickly, wishing suddenly he were home with his wife.

  The captain nodded to Kees, who ushered Major Metcalfe into van der Heyden’s cabin. No one spoke until the young officer left.

  “Things are not going well? For our important guest?” the captain said finally.

  “No. Decidedly not,” said Fruity. He related what had happened to Edward and Wallis during the lifeboat drill, omitting only Wallis’s obscene language.

  The captain sighed, the sound concluding with a slight whispering wheeze. “I have already so many problems. Now this.”

  “You have to do something. It could have been someone trying to kill him. Think of that.”

  Van der Heyden sighed once more. “Major, forgive me. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this.”

  “You’ll have to do more than be sorry, Captain.”

  The Dutchman rubbed his badly shaven chin, then shook his head. “Let me think what to do. I’ll have all the ship’s personnel interrogated.”

  “Our Inspector Runcie found a maid just down the passageway. She said she’d seen nothing.”

  “We’ll talk to all of them. We have weapons aboard. Even two or three machine guns, I think. We can post armed sailors in the passageway. Seal off the area around the prince’s suite. But you had stressed that discretion was paramount.”

  It was now as imperative for van der Heyden as it was for the British party. Any word of this could ruin him and the shipping line. The Wilhelmina was as surrounded by potential ruin as it was by the sea.

  “I would suggest that the ship be thoroughly searched. Just to see who or what we might turn up.”

  “Again, discretion.”

  “Find some pretext. A repair crew. Something wrong with the ship.”

  Van der Heyden nodded, sadly. “Well. That could be done.”

  The captain rose. He needed to think. He needed to be alone again. Van Hoorn should now be told of the prince’s presence. He would be furious. Perhaps that could still be avoided, if Metcalfe and his people cooperated.

  “Discretion, Major. At all costs. I have an officer—the young man who showed you in. He is very trustworthy. I will put him in charge of this.”

  “Have him see me. As soon as possible.”

  “This afternoon. After lunch, when everyone is resting. I will assign him to be the shepherd of your traveling party—your lifeboat officer, everything. I rely on him very much.”

  “Thank you. We’d also like to look through the wireless messages.”

  “That would be an intrusion, Major. May I remind you once again that this is a Dutch ship.”

  “I understand our lack of jurisdiction, but I must ask you to be reasonable about this. We need to know as much as possible about everyone who’s aboard—and why.”

  “All right, Major. But please be careful. Guarding the secret of the prince’s presence here is nearly as important as guarding his life.”

  “Thank you, Captain. I think you and I understand the situation. We’re quite likely the only ones on board who do.”

  Chips Channon was the center of rapt attention. Edward had taken a sedative—and a drink—and was now asleep in his bedchamber. But the others had gathered in the sitting room of the prince’s suite—ostensibly to comfort Wallis, but mostly to have something to do. The news of the intrusion had alarmed them, but the incident was not so fascinating as what Chips was now relating to them.

  Edwina had asked the identity of the tall American who had come up to them during lifeboat drill. Channon, uneasy, had said something about an old friend from Chicago, uttering the words “Francis Parker School” with an emphasis that implied they should be impressed. This was of course absurd in such superior company and he had been embarrassed by his words as soon as he had spoken them. But he needed to give Spencer some stature—for anyone Chips knew perforce should have stature, especially someone from his Chicago past. So he had stated a fact that he guessed correctly would produce some respectful interest.

  “Jamieson Spencer is actually rather famous in his way,” Chips said. He paused to smile. He intended it to be a worldly expression, but it appeared as something of a smirk. “Jamieson is the one who first, well, relieved the Countess Alice de Janzé of her virginity.”

  He could not have produced keener interest if he’d said Spencer planned to kill Hitler. Alice de Janzé was one of the most notorious women in the British Empire.

  Edwina’s eyes widened. Lady Diana Cooper gave a start and then giggled. “Not sufficiently, it would appear,” said Lady Emerald. Mountbatten and Brownlow looked on intently, waiting for Channon to continue. Wallis Warfield Simpson, supposed sophisticate noted for her titillating conversation, stared blankly at him, her large fingers toying nervously with her jewels.

  “Who is Alice de Janzé?” she asked, regretting her ignorance. Once again she was the outsider.

  “Alice de Janzé is the most famous beauty in British East Africa,” said Diana, “if no longer the most beautiful beauty, though who of us is anymore?”

  “She’s certainly the most infamous beauty,” said Emerald. “The vamp of Nairobi. And vamps are all there are in Nairobi.”

  “I’ve never heard of her,” said Wallis. “How can that be?”

  She had quite recovered from her earlier fright. A bourbon and Vichy water had helped.

  “His Royal Highness met her, I think,” Diana said provocatively. “They danced together at the Muthaiga Club. Poor lamb. It’s said he trembled with apprehension. All those brave things he did in the war, but dancing with Alice de Janzé was the bravest thing he’s ever done. That any man could do.”

  “He’s never mentioned her,” Wallis said. She inhaled deeply, as if inflating her composure. She set her large hands flatly down on the arms of her chair. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me all about it. About this de Janzé woman.” It was spoken as a royal command.

  “She’s really quite beautiful,” said Diana. “She keeps a lion. She’s got wonderful dark hair and violet eyes, and wears corduroy trousers.”

  “Hypnotic eyes,” said Chips. “The most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.”

  “She’s had more lovers than most women have had dance invitations,” Emerald said. “Josslyn Hay, the Earl of Erroll? The handsomest man in Kenya? He’s been the longest. But I hear she lost him this year to a very common blonde, Diana Caldwell.”

  “Nouveau,” said Channon. “But I’m told far from riche.”

  “I don’t understand why Alice didn’t commit suicide,” said Emerald. “She usually does when a man leaves her. Her doctor must have the busiest stomach pump in East Africa.”

  “The poor dear,” said Diana. “I’ve heard she thinks thirty is the end of life, and now she’s thirty-five.”

  “And this friend of yours, Chips, was her first?” Wallis asked.

  Channon settled himself more comfortably in his chair, delighted to see how eagerly all the others waited for his words.

  “Alice is American also, from Chicago, don’t you know,” he said, “like many who’ve found a happier circumstance in the Old World. Bertha Palmer, for example, Potter Palmer’s widow and a friend of my mother—she became a favorite of Edward VII, His Highness’s grandfather.”

  “Get back to Alice de Janzé,” said Duff, “and this historic rogering of her.”

  “She was descended
from Scots’ felt textiles, through her industrialist father, William Silverthorne,” said Channon. “Her mother’s family was Armour meat. They were quite one of the wealthiest families in Chicago. But far from happy. Her father drank. Her mother was slightly crazy. Alice is altogether crazy. At her coming-out party, she pulled off her dress and danced on a tabletop in her undergarments and stockings. That was in 1918.”

  “Is that when your friend …?” Wallis began.

  “Oh, no. Jamieson’s denoument was much earlier. When she was just fourteen, and he but a year older.”

  “Fourteen?” said Emerald. “Isn’t that against the law, even in America?”

  “Of course. But it was her doing, not his. I was there. We had a dancing class at the Saddle and Cycle Club. She’d brought a bottle of liquor she’d taken from her father and shared it with us. Her chauffeur took them home. Jamieson lived on Astor Street, too. Apparently she had the driver stop near some bower in Lincoln Park on the way home, and, well, there you are. For all I know the chauffeur held her clothes.”

  “Scandalous,” said Wallis. “I never heard of such a thing. Good grief. In Chicago?”

  Channon said nothing but certainly could have. On his royal visit to Chicago in 1924, the prince had gotten drunk at the Saddle and Cycle Club himself, and rutted with a local society belle outside in the bushes. She’d become pregnant, the only woman known to have been made so by His Royal Highness. The husband moved the family to New York but there was no escape from the scandal, and they ultimately were divorced. Wallis doubtless knew nothing of that either.

  “Alice and Jamieson weren’t the scandal,” Chips said, pausing to treat them to an impish grin. “It was her father, a terrible drunkard and a lecher. His reaction to learning of her amorous proclivities was to take advantage of them. Her mother had died of consumption when she was five years old, you see. After one rather dreadful incident with Papa, Alice was made the ward of her uncle, but her father still took her to Europe on occasion. Dressed her up in lacy frocks and took her on rounds of Paris nightclubs when she was barely sixteen. She became keen on cocktails and animals. Used to walk along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice with her baby black panther.”

  “She met her husband in Paris, le Comte de Janzé,” Diana said. “He was a writer. Very, very rich.”

  “Wait,” said Wallis. “I think I know something about this. Didn’t she shoot him?”

  “No, no, no,” said Edwina. “She shot her lover, Raymond de Trafford, a man she met in Kenya while on safari. She had gone back to Paris to ask de Janzé for a divorce. Raymond followed after, trying to dissuade her. He refused to marry her, begging off because of Catholicism.”

  “Blew his bloody brains out, poor dear,” said Diana.

  “No, no,” Edwina said. “He lived. She caught up with him in a railroad car at the Gare du Nord as he was leaving Paris. I remember reading about it. She knelt down in front of him and then pulled out a pistol and shot him in the chest. Then she shot herself in the stomach. I don’t know how either of them survived, but they did. It was her fifth attempt at killing herself, and she was only twenty-seven.”

  “She abandoned her children,” Channon continued, trying to regain the center of attention. “Left them with Count de Janzé’s sister, saying she’d be a hopeless mother. Then she returned to Kenya for good. Took up with lions instead.”

  “Probably slept with them, too,” said Emerald. “She was quite the one for getting sex and death all mixed up.”

  “Not only lions,” Edwina said. “After her divorce from de Janzé—she abandoned him, as well—she actually got de Trafford to marry her. It was three years ago. They separated after three weeks.”

  Wallis looked down at her hands, sitting primly, knowing not what to say but fascinated with Channon’s story—though not so fascinated as Edwina, who seemed electrified. Lord Mountbatten appeared uneasy.

  “And she, this Alice from Chicago, loved your friend Spencer first,” Wallis said. The man’s name was jarring to her—not only the same as her first husband, Navy Lieutenant Earl Spencer, but in some vague way remindful of him—of something in her past.

  “Yes,” said Chips. “Nothing much came of him later, I shouldn’t think. He was a flier in the war and then traveled. His father was in publishing. Fairly rich, when I knew him, but that may have changed, what with this awful Depression.”

  “And now here he is with us on the Wilhelmina,” Edwina said.

  “Hardly, darling,” said Emerald. “He’s in second class.”

  Olga Maretzka sat in her new cabin with the lights off, concentrating her thoughts, angry with herself and bitter at her luck. She had proceeded without adequate knowledge of her hunting ground and had acted rashly, without certainty, without preparation, plunging into the luxurious upper-deck suite and finding herself in the wrong place.

  She put her face in her hands, saying “Glupi, glupi, glupi,” over and over. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” What had motivated her rashness? Her own contemptible fear. Her urgent desire to be done with this. She had allowed herself to become intimidated by the social stature of these sickening people and the strangeness of her circumstances. She’d become impatient, a deadly thing to do to herself.

  Rising, slipping her pistol beneath her pillow, she began to remove the maid’s costume she had stolen from the ship’s laundry. In the future she would make more prudent use of it.

  Spencer had taken a deck chair near the end of the second-class promenade, by the entrance to the aft lounge. Just above he could hear first-class passengers playing deck games, taking advantage of the still-warm weather and their high station. In Paris, Whitney and her husband might well be amusing themselves with games—tennis or croquet. Monsieur de Mornay was a great Anglophile.

  Slouched deep in the chair, Spencer was trying with some effort to read a book, wearing gray flannels and a tieless white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had brought a sweater, but the weather was too warm for it.

  His book was Evelyn Waugh’s just-published A Handful of Dust. On the deck beside his chair was a copy of Guy Chapman’s A Passionate Prodigality, which the Sunday Times of London had pronounced the finest book to have come out of the Great War, though Spencer preferred All Quiet on the Western Front. Both works had much intrigued him but he found he had no mind for them now, no more than he had for the notebook in his pocket.

  He had planned to begin scribbling his thoughts and observations, distilling from them some conclusion, some idea for action. Though his encounter with Chips Channon had ended embarrassingly, it offered a chance now for some access to first-class passengers, at the least for a more specific goal to pursue.

  But he could think of none. His notebook contained only two words: “Charles Lindbergh.” He’d become stupefied staring at them.

  He lifted his eyes to the horizon visible beyond the white-painted rail, watching it rise and fall with the gentle pitch and roll of the ship. Only the ship’s wake, a broad avenue of flattened pale-blue water stretching to the end of all thought and ken, gave evidence that they were not adrift. Their course was one away from all things yet seemingly toward nothing.

  He closed his eyes, trying to think of Whitney, but his mind refused her. Finally he slept.

  When dreams came they were of Nancy Cunard. Fighting them, he awakened to her presence. She was sitting sideways on an adjacent deck chair, hunched over, chin in hands, staring at him with her huge, mad eyes. Her arms were still encased in those African bracelets, but she had changed her dress. The new one was very fancy, and bright red. As Spencer sat up, he saw Henry Crowder at the railing a few feet away, looking on unhappily.

  “Good morning, gentleman of Paris. Did I tire you last night?”

  “Worse than that, your ladyship. You seem to have broken my mind.”

  She sat straighter, sharing a secret smile with herself. “Yes, yes. Quite, quite. You’ll find no need for it. Not on this ship. Shall we take luncheon together?”

  “Oh, n
o. I’m not at all hungry. I had an enormous breakfast. Full of sweets.”

  “Would you like some more screws? Have you had your screws today?”

  “Nancy, please. I’m not much good today, really, I’m afraid. I’m exhausted. Too much rioting back in Paris. Not enough sleep. Sorry.”

  She shifted, moving her legs up onto her chair and reclining, her face stark in profile, an outline of beauty, filled out with haunting signs of age.

  “Don’t sleep,” she said. “Tell me whether you think France is going to go fascist.”

  “Please, Nancy. I can’t talk politics. I can barely remember my own name.”

  “You don’t know if France is going to go fascist.”

  “France is already fascist. The whole world will shortly be fascist. It can’t be helped.”

  He recalled the face and hair of the woman in the blue dress who had died in his arms on the balcony of the Crillon.

  “Your mind is muck, O man of Paris. Go to sleep, then. We shall watch over you.”

  Despite her presence, he did sleep again. In time—a few minutes, perhaps hours—Nancy awakened him once more, with the rustling sound of her movement as she sat up and with the anger of her tone.

  “Damn her to hell,” she said. “Look who’s coming. My famous friend, the predatory bitch.”

  Henry Crowder had vanished. Spencer saw a smartly dressed and very stylishly attractive woman coming toward them along the deck, smiling in a very restrained British way. She wore a tennis skirt, white blouse, and pink cardigan sweater, with a large strand of pearls at her throat. Her hair was dark and perfectedly groomed. Her tanned legs were magnificent, her stride quick and purposeful. She had been among the lifeboat party with Channon.

  “So there you are, Nancy, darling,” she said crisply. “Why have you been keeping yourself from us?”

  “You all knew where I was, goddamn you to hell,” said Nancy. “You’ve always known where I was.”

  “Yes, quite. But whenever you were there, I was somewhere else. I was in Australia this summer. America, too.”