He sat cross-legged, smoking, on the divan. She lay with her large head in his lap, ignoring the occasional ash that fell as she looked up at him, smiling.
“A girl is so terribly happy,” she said.
“A boy is terribly happy with his girl,” he said. “Otherwise he is quite cross. Where are the others? Why are they taking so long at dinner?”
They were alone in their suite, with only Runcie and a sailor, stationed just outside the door, to summon for company.
“We don’t need the others.” She reached and stroked his face. He brightened as a pet animal might, but it faded.
“I’m so tired of this voyage,” he said. “And we’ve scarcely been out two days. I’d rather be back in the Paris riots. We’d at least have something interesting to look at. When we get to New York, I’m going on a spree. We might even have Edwina take us up to Harlem.”
Wallis would certainly prevent that ghastly occurrence from happening.
“Darling,” she said. “I’ve an idea. Why don’t we have a dinner party?”
“In New York?”
“No, darling, here on the Wilhelmina. The sitting room is nearly as large as the dining room in my flat at Bryanston Court. We can make it a very special affair. I’ll have invitations printed up. We’ll get the ship to produce some chairs without arms, to accommodate all the guests. I would also have two sorts of cocktails and white wine as well as vin rosé. We’ll hire one of the ship’s chefs and extra servants for the night. Do say yes, David. I’ve been quite as bored as you, except for that horrible experience this morning.”
“A boy says yes. A royal yes. But there’ll be all the same old dull faces.”
“We’ll invite others, as well.”
“Fruity will forbid it.”
“We’ll select them carefully, for their discretion. I’ll make inquiries as to who’s on board. Chips will know. He knows everyone in the world.”
“All right, Wallis. We’ll do it! And I shall play the pipes.”
He was quite happy now. For once, she did not argue with him about the pipes. That would come later.
Somewhat breathless and amazed, Count von Kresse returned from his strange rendezvous the way he had come, slipping out of the other man’s cabin and retracing his steps up the ladders that led to the top of the ship and the sports deck. It was slow and painful for him, but much less public than the central corridors. In the gloom, as he passed along in the shadow of the aftmost funnel, he encountered only a couple at the rail near a deck tennis area, and he could barely see them. If they were aware of him, certainly they could not see the bulky envelope he carried.
There was no hiding it from Dagne on his return. She had apparently just come back from Lady Cunard’s, and was flushed and happy.
Erfolg, liebchen!” she said, lighting a cigarette and swinging a leg over the arm of her chair. “Despite your unspeakably rude early departure, they were quite taken with us. Pardon my exuberance. The nice Herr Channon told me at the end that he’d laced the cocktails with Benzedrine. He said it always made a party go.”
“I think also automobile engines.”
“But we’ve done it, liebchen bruder. They confided to me about the Prince of Wales, that he’s aboard. They’re going to introduce us tomorrow, if it can be arranged. If you can mind your manners.”
“My leg hurt. I just had to leave.”
“It didn’t hurt enough to prevent your going off for a midnight stroll.”
“The walk helped. I feel much better.”
“What do you have in the envelope?” Her happy expression was gone.
“Nothing. Just some airplane pictures. I met someone on deck and we fell to talking about flying. He let me borrow some pictures.”
“I thought you had put flying behind you.”
“I can no longer fly, but I am still interested in aircraft. I read aviation books all the time in Ortelsburg, which you’d notice if you ever left Berlin.”
She got to her feet and took the envelope from him. He dared not protest.
“These are very detailed drawings,” she said, pulling some out. “What aircraft is this?”
“A Messerschmitt 108 Taifun.”
“A German aircraft.”
“A sport aircraft, Dagne.”
“But German nevertheless.”
“The fellow I met has just come from Germany.”
“And who is the fellow?”
“Just a passenger. But don’t worry about sport aircraft secrets falling into the wrong hands. He was given these drawings by Reichscommissioner Hermann Goering himself.”
Spencer and Edwina separated from their embrace when they saw the figure of a limping man pass slowly by, but he paid them no attention.
There was a sea breeze, but it failed to dissipate the oily, acrid smell emanating from the funnel.
“You said we would be alone up on the sports deck,” Spencer said, his arms close around her waist.
“It’s that Prussian count. He’s a bit crippled, I think. Something’s wrong with him, though he doesn’t seem to mind creeping about the deck in the middle of the night. I don’t know why I’m worried about his seeing us. You know, I was out on deck completely naked last night. Well, dawn, actually.”
“Naked? Completely naked?”
She laughed. “Just an impulse, and a bit too much to drink. And frustration.”
“You must have startled the crew.”
“Actually, I did, rather. Two of them. A seaman and a maid.”
They fell silent, listening to the hissing rush of the ship’s passage. The breeze had become a head wind. As they were sailing into it at some twenty-five knots, it blew strong against their faces.
“There are no crew up here now,” Spencer said suggestively.
But she turned away from him, her face lifting toward the dark sky. “James. Look at that.”
Even as an aviator flying in all the eerie unreality of warfare at night, he had seen no phenomenon such as this before. The ship was below a mass of clouds, for they could see no stars or moon, and it had begun as a hazy moonlit night. But ahead of them, through a widening rent in the cloud cover, there appeared a fairyland. It, too, was a thing of cloud, but white and phosphorescent, curving away from them like a celestial highway. And it was filled with stars, sparkling brilliantly like diamonds on the soft cotton backing of a jewel box. Edwina was transfixed.
He put his hand gently around her breast. Just as gently she removed his hand, her eyes still on the starry path. “My God, it’s magic. A blessing from heaven.”
“It’s only a trick of the moon.”
“But it’s so lovely. I sailed on a copra boat this summer, as crew, in the South Pacific. There were many extraordinary nights, but never anything quite like this.”
He had lost her to this celestial apparition. Her eyes would not move from it.
“Moonlight is not always so lovely. There was moonlight in France, in the war.”
“This is true beauty.”
“Truth is not always beauty—especially in the moonlight. I know a French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, an aviator who flies in Africa. He told me once of a young woman in some Berber town. For some small crime she was stripped naked and taken out into the desert. They bound her to a stake and left her.”
“Please.”
“He wrote me about it, about a father and son who rode out to look upon her after a day in the sun, so the son would learn a lesson. The son wanted to help her, but the father forbade it. He said she was discovering that which is essential. That she was beyond suffering and fear, that she was discovering truth. It’s Antoine’s concept of religion—and mine.”
“Good God, James. How could you?”
Spencer reached for Edwina, but she was walking away, very quickly, making clear she did not want him to follow.
Standing at the forward bridge windows, Captain van der Heyden observed the starry phenomenon in the sky but paid it little attention. His years at sea h
ad been crowded with bizarre sightings, but he had early on learned to concentrate only on what was important to the ship. At the moment he was much more interested in the distant flashes just a few points off the starboard bow.
“Bring me the latest weather report,” he said to one of the junior officers.
Because he was so much in view on so social a night, he had confined himself to two glasses of wine with dinner and a small sip of champagne later. He had stopped by the bridge on the way to retiring. Now his quarters, and his nightcap, would have to wait.
The young man handed him the signal. “Deteriorating, sir. Force-five winds predicted.”
“Well, well,” said van der Heyden. “The North Atlantic is returning to her old self. An end to the idyll.” He folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket, as if it were a secret message. “Just as well,” he said, moving to the chart table. “I was beginning to forget I was aboard a ship.”
He pondered the map. They were far out to sea, but the pencil line marking their progress seemed to have barely intruded upon the vast white space of charted ocean.
“Sir? Do you want to alter course to the south?”
“No. The storm system’s too large. We’ll take it head on and endure the worst for the shortest possible time. The Wilhelmina is in for a real sea trial.” He looked about at the youthful faces on the bridge. “I’m going to my cabin now. Wake me when the storm hits.”
CHAPTER NINE
Reichscommissioner Hermann Goering rose early, his groggy stupor from the overlong party the previous night quickly banished with a large dose of one of his “medicines.”
His wife, Emmy, remained in bed, curled up in a protective bear’s den made of covers. She was not asleep, but trying to cope with the anger and humiliation she still felt from the night before. One of the women at the party, the wife of a party functionary at the Labor Ministry, had informed Emmy of the scurrilous jokes about the Goerings’ love life that continued to plague the Reichscommissioner in social Berlin. The woman even repeated the most current one in circulation, a vile tale in which Emmy came upon Hermann doing odd things with a marshal’s baton up his own backside. As the joke went, he explained he was conducting an official ceremony: “I am promoting my underpants to overpants.”
The woman likely thought she was being of some service, and thus ingratiating herself with the Goerings by relating this information. But Goering had been angry. He had managed to keep these terrible stories from Emmy for all the months of their marriage. Now this fawning, intrusive woman had let all the cats out of the bag. Just before retiring Goering had telephoned to order her arrest. He had had more than ten people arrested thus far for repeating these jokes, though this had failed to stem them. Their primary source, he suspected, was in high party circles beyond his powers of discretionary arrest.
Emmy had threatened to cancel the dinner they were hosting that evening for Rolf Rienhardt, the most powerful publishing figure in the Reich, but Hermann had insisted they go through with it. Rienhardt had been a friend of Gregor Strasser, a party rival of Hitler’s whom the Führer had had murdered in the “Night of the Long Knives” the previous year, but Rienhardt had many skills and other powerful contacts, and so had survived and prospered. Goering would not risk offending him.
Emmy had married Goering only the preceding April—in a mammoth wedding ceremony that was the most celebrated social occasion in Nazi Germany. She would have to learn to perform her official duty like the formidable stage actress she was, and soon. With Hitler unmarried, she was, as the wife of the Führer’s principal deputy, the First Lady of the Reich. Malicious gossip, however outrageous, was always attendant upon such high positions.
Still, he likely would have to have many more arrested, and perhaps a few shot or hanged.
He patted her ample backside, then reached to squeeze one of her enormous breasts. She cried out angrily. He left the bedroom feeling jolly.
Goering had two immediate tasks before him that morning. One was to read and approve the latest development report on the Heinkel III bomber, which was his answer to the costly, useless four-engined aircraft being pushed by the fools who were trying to persuade Hitler of the efficacy of long-range strategic bombers. The twin-engined Heinkel III was cheap, easy to produce in great numbers, and ideal for ground support missions, as well. The Great War had proved the long-range bomber to be militarily pointless. How many three-engined Gothas had bombed London to no result but to stiffen popular support for the British war effort? Britain was the only logical target for the four-engined monsters being proposed, and Britain could still be kept out of any continental conflict. Goering remained convinced of that.
The other task before him was to examine a new cache of paintings that had been confiscated from the property of a rich Jewish collector who had recently fled the country. It would have been a perfectly legal confiscation even if the owner had not been Jewish, for most of the works were by officially proscribed artists, including the notorious abstract artist Paul Klee, who had himself fled to Switzerland after Goering had denounced him as a Galician Jew. That had been a lie, but a useful and effective one.
The Reichcommissioner went through the Heinkel report quickly, pleased with the work of his subordinates. Then, pouring himself a morning schnapps, went on to his haul of paintings.
About half of them were by Klee. They had been officially proclaimed “degenerate” by the party and their public showing was forbidden. Goering would of course comply with that stricture, storing them in one of his basement vaults rather than burning them. That they were illegal made them all the more valuable. The Reichscommissioner was convinced he now possessed the most valuable collection in Europe.
The other works were also abstract but by less dangerous painters—Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Max Beckman, Max Ernst, and the nightmarish Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose garish green-and-red “German Street, Dresden” had been one of the favorite works of Goering’s wartime flying comrade von Kresse, himself a collector. Unfortunately “Dresden” had not been in the Jew’s cache.
Goering had his servants set the paintings up all around the walls of one of his larger viewing rooms, deciding he would spend an hour enjoying them before locking them away from official view.
He did not get his hour. As he stood staring fondly at the first from the stack, a brown-and-beige two-dimensional study by Egon Schiele reminiscent of the artist’s wonderful Portrait of Gerta Schiele, Goering’s adjutant came marching into the chamber. He clicked his heels so loudly the sound echoed down the corridor. Goering wondered if the man did this to impress him or to irritate him.
“Herr Reichscommissioner,” said the adjutant, a Luftwaffe colonel. “Reichsführer Himmler is here and wishes to speak to you.”
Goering glanced at his paintings. “Have him shown into my study.”
“He wishes to speak to you outside, Reichscommissioner. He is waiting in his car.”
“He is in his car? He expects me to come out and deal with him at curbside? He sees me as a filling station attendant, vielleicht?”
“He wishes to speak to you in his car, Reichscommissioner. I told him I did not think you would find that suitable.”
“You go back and tell him it is most unsuitable, and that if he wishes to speak to me he must come inside. Show him into the study.”
“He said he had instructions from the Führer, Reichscommissioner.”
Goering glowered. “The Führer instructed that I should go stand on Himmler’s running board? Tell him to come inside!”
“Jawohl, Herr Reichscommissioner!” There was another thundering click of heels.
Gesturing at his staff to gather up the paintings, Goering peevishly rubbed at his fat chin. Himmler’s impudence was becoming insufferable. As was his ambition. Though it was Goering who had first suggested concentration camps when he was virtual dictator of the state of Prussia, it had been his subordinate Himmler who won laurels from the Führer for so efficiently constructing and filling
them. Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and Hess had agreed that the rowdy S.A. brown shirts had to be smashed and their leaders eliminated if the new Nazi regime was to have the support of the army. But it was Himmler’s magnificently disciplined S.S. that had carried out the job and made such a success of the Night of the Long Knives. Since then Himmler had been ascendant. Goering feared to think where his climb would end.
The Reichsführer-S.S. eventually compromised to the extent of coming into Goering’s vestibule, but he would advance no farther. At length Goering went to join him.
“What is all this about, Heinrich?” Goering asked. “Why do you refuse to join me in my study?”
Himmler was dressed in a resplendant black “Death’s Head” S.S. uniform. The night before he had uncharacteristically worn evening clothes, with his receding chin, beaky nose, and round spectacles looking very much like what he was, a sniveling petit bourgeois would-be snob. On the rare occasions when he wore a business suit, occasions that were becoming rare as the party consolidated its power, he looked like the schoolteacher his father had been. In the forbidding Schutzstaffel uniform, however, he looked quite macabre, a figure from one of the hellish paintings by the mad Belgian artist James Ensor.
He stared coldly at Goering, his nose twitching like a rabbit’s.
“Because we have little time,” he said finally.
“Warum?”
“Because the Führer wishes to see us.”
“Wann?”
“At once.”
“What for?”
Himmler glanced around at the large number of Goering’s assistants, guards, and servants who were standing about the large, marble-floored chamber.
“All right, very well, I will come outside with you,” Goering said.
They walked down the bricked drive to a loudly splashing fountain.
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