[Dorothy Parker 05] - A Moveable Feast of Murder

by Agata Stanford

  Our luggage was carted over to the boat train station, a few feet from the docks. It wouldn’t leave until all the passengers from the ship on their way to Paris were boarded. That gave us an hour to spare, so after sending off wires to friends and family back home, telling them we had arrived safely after an uneventful trip—we are such liars—and one to Heywood Broun at The World to check on the credentials of Richard Hartley and Mathew Hettinger, we all went into the crowded station café, inviting the Duchess and the Major to join us. We squeezed through the chatty crowd and settled them at a table for two, and Mr. Benchley fetched drinks from the bar. Soledad, Richard, and I stood beside the table; Woodrow was taken from my arms to be held by a very affectionate Major Arbuthnot. We talked “dog” while we waited for our beverages, the Duchess wistfully recalling the half-dozen wolfhounds of her youth in Russia, and the Major giving us a brief history and lineage of his family’s hunting bitches. While they spoke, I watched Richard, and followed his glance at the door of the café as new customers entered. I recognized a newlywed couple from our crossing and one of the men who had joined the card room fight. There were two young students who had travelled third class, but although we hadn’t seen them on the ship, their presence on it was marked by the luggage tags dangling from their duffle bags. After the redheaded Claude Dubois, wrapped in a trench-coat and sporting his usual beret and dark glasses, walked in, Richard seemed to lose interest in who else was coming into the café.

  So, it was the little redheaded Du Bois who was in league with Richard Hartley.

  No. His accent was French. The man talking with Richard was American. All I could hope for was that they were the good guys. And then a thought flashed through my mind: What if all the players were bad guys?

  The boat train journey from Cherbourg to Paris was an express train, and the fare was included in the cost of the crossing. It was to take fewer than seven hours, and according to the schedule we expected to arrive in Paris at around 5:30 P.M. if all went well and there weren’t any delays, cows on the tracks, that sort of thing.

  Richard had bought a compartment for an additional fee, which he insisted we share with the Duchess and the Major. Seven hours with Richard Hartley would be too much to bear, I thought, and I was glad when Hemingway and Mathew, travelling in a third-class car, came by and popped their heads in the door, after we’d been travelling for an hour, to ask if we wanted to join them for a bite to eat. I proclaimed that I was starving, even though I had little appetite, and I immediately rose to follow the boys. Mr. Benchley and Soledad decided to come, too, but Richard said he’d join us soon and remained behind. Outside in the corridor, Claude Dubois leaned against the wall smoking a Gitane, pretty much blocking the way and making passengers squeeze around him.

  I turned back to look at the Duchess, who appeared exhausted, the book she was reading now on her lap as she stared out at the rolling countryside.

  “Woodrow and I are going to the dining car. Would you like some lunch?” I asked. Just then the train lurched, and I had to grab the doorframe. I realized such a walk for the couple could prove injurious, so I added, “Better still, would you like for me to have a porter bring you something on a tray?”

  “That would be lovely, Mrs. Parker,” said the Duchess. “You are very kind.”

  The Major said, “Can Woodrow visit with us while you dine? He’s such delightful company.”

  “Yes, please,” said the Duchess.

  I left them in Woodrow’s care, and proceeded down to the dining car, where Mr. Benchley and Soledad had taken a table. I slipped into the banquette, across from Hem, Mathew, Daphne, and Ronnie, who was already pie-eyed and not very happy to be sharing his intended with the other men. The charged atmosphere around them was palpable. There was a growing hostility between Ronnie and Hemingway. I feared a cockfight brewing.

  We ordered lunch and wine was set on our table. Mr. Benchley had no need of his flask for the first time in six years, so he openly ordered a whiskey on the rocks with a great sense of freedom in the act, knowing the liquor would be of a good quality and, above all, safe to drink.

  He was expounding on the scientific fact that whiskey had to be served on ice in order for the flavor of the various herbs instilled in the liquor to be released when splashed over it, when Richard appeared and slid into the vacant seat next to me.

  “You are awfully quiet today, Dorothy,” said Soledad. “Ever since we left the ship.”

  This took me by surprise, and I looked across the table at Mr. Benchley and Soledad, avoiding Richard’s eyes, not knowing what to say.

  “Let’s count our blessings,” said Mr. Benchley.

  “That’s not a nice thing to say,” I replied with a fake pout, not taking it to heart. He was just babbling, reaching for something to say to relieve my discomfort at being around Richard. It is always difficult to make small talk when you feel at odds with a person.

  “Well, you know that old expression,” said my friend. “When you can’t say something nice about somebody, say nothing.”

  There was an implicit warning message in his voice: Watch what you say. We don’t know what kind of criminals we are dealing with.

  “I must warn you, my dear: Keep that up and your career will go down the tubes!” said Soledad with a spritely laugh.

  “You are right, Soledad, you are right. What will my public think now that I omitted to sprinkle a bit of verbal vitriol upon the inflated head of the customs official who sneered at Woodrow?” And then, to respond to Mr. Benchley’s warning, I added, “Well, dear Mr. Benchley, I am holding my tongue for the time being, as we are in rather close quarters, and I’d hate to see the innocent whiplashed.”

  “Dear God, Dorothy!” said Richard with wide-eyed concern. “What is the matter?”

  “Don’t look so shocked; I didn’t use the F word.”

  “Not yet, at least,” said Mr. Benchley.

  I reined in my words. “I didn’t get any sleep last night.”

  “Excited about starting your new life?” asked Richard.

  Hemingway’s voice boomed across the short aisle, which was followed by Daphne’s throaty laugh. I looked over at them and watched Ronnie fiddling nervously with his knife and fork. Forgetting for a moment my own dilemma, because I realized Ronnie’s behavior appeared more sinister as Hem’s and Daphne’s intercourse grew more animated, I called over, “Hey, you over there, who wants to play a game of gin in the lounge after lunch? Ronnie? Do you play cards?”

  He looked at me like I was mad.

  I was mad all right! I was angry, and it was for all the betrayals I had endured at the hands of men. I’d thought Richard was different, and, after last evening, after hearing the conspiracy in his voice as he whispered about some kind of plot, I now suspected him of being a criminal. And I have so admired Hemingway’s talent, and his dedication to his art, writing something fine and good while supporting his little family. Now that I could see that his attentiveness to and obvious fascination with Daphne was a betrayal of his wife and child, I realized that the only thing he was dedicated to was himself. I was mad all right, mad at men. And mad at myself, too. Through too many failed relationships I’d let my love for a man interfere with my work. At last I could see that now, and admit it, if only to myself.

  This would have to change; romance was fleeting, and what really mattered, all that was truly lasting at the end of your life, was the work you left behind.

  “Oh, Hem, there’s a little boy a few compartments down from ours who looked so familiar, but then I remembered where I saw him—in that photograph you showed us of Bumby. But, of course your little boy is with his mama, so it couldn’t be Bumby at all, now, could it? Will we get a chance to meet Hadley and Bumby in Paris, Hem?”

  “Let me see that photograph, if you don’t mind?” said Soledad. “If you have it on you.”

  “He always carries it, don’t you Hem?” I said as lightly as I could. “I wish I had a little one like him. Such a darling!”
/>   Hemingway opened his billfold and removed the picture to hand over to Soledad.

  “Oh, he is a little darling, isn’t he?” she exclaimed. “And is the woman with him your wife?”

  “Yes, that is Hadley,” he replied soberly. “They are vacationing in Schruns. I’ll join them in a week or so, after I show Dorothy and Bob the sights.”

  “Well,” I said, “as I will be staying on in Paris, I will have the pleasure of squeezing those pudgy little cheeks, I am sure!” I added, “I’ve a little gift for him in my valise, Hem. I couldn’t resist it—just a toy. All children should have a toy now and then, don’t you think? ’Cause when a boy grows up, he can’t have toys anymore.”

  The danger I’d felt had passed—Ronnie appeared calmer, even if he was staring out of the window at the rolling countryside; at least he no longer had a knife in his hand. I steered the talk to all things Paris: What best hotel in which to reside? Or should I find rooms in a house? Could I borrow his typewriter while he was away in Schruns? Until I bought my own? Will we get together with Scott and Zelda tomorrow? Oh! The Murphys will join us? “I can’t wait to meet them, Hem. He’s an artist, a painter, I know. And Sara Murphy is a great beauty, I hear.”

  Soledad said, “I’ve seen Gerald Murphy’s marvelous paintings.”

  Hem said, “He doesn’t paint anymore. He has given it up.”

  “What!” said Soledad, “But, why? Has he been ill?”

  “No, just come to his senses.”

  Daphne wanted to leave the table, so Ronnie had to get up for her to pass. She said nothing as she rose and walked out of the car. Hem slipped the photo of his family back into his billfold, and when he went to return it to his inside jacket pocket, I glimpsed the vial containing saltpeter he would make such a show of sprinkling on his food, and wondered if he had been so crude as to do so in front of Ronnie. For a moment, looking at Ronnie, sitting there slumped, drunk, and miserable, I empathized with him. But, only for a moment. For he had money, position, power. Much more than many thousands of wounded veterans had to return home to, whatever the injury. And then I realized that he was suffering something far worse than the physical pain and limitations of his war wounds—that he was consumed with love for a woman who didn’t love him, a woman he could never totally possess, and that is a kind of slow, wretched death.

  We had been walking back through the many passenger cars from the dining car when the train slowed to a crawl. As Mr. Benchley held the connecting door I heard Woodrow’s familiar bark of distress. I rushed past my friend toward the compartment. But before I could get there, Claude Dubois rushed the door and then Richard pushed me aside to follow him in.

  I could see a violent struggle through the glass.

  And then everyone involved became still. Two figures, men in brown overcoats and fedoras, their backs to the glass door, ordered the others in the compartment to stand back. I was unable to see their faces, but as I moved forward to enter I caught sight of the barrel of a gun, heard a strangled cry from the Duchess, and found myself frozen in place. I stopped Mr. Benchley’s progress with a firm hand to his chest, right before the brown-coated figures furtively opened the compartment’s exterior door. One man leaped out onto the tracks. Woodrow, having grabbed the other man’s trouser cuff, was doggedly clinging to him in spite of the man’s efforts to shake him off.

  The report of the gun shocked us violently and I heard a wounded cry.

  Had they shot Woodrow?

  I screamed as I watched the murderer jump out of the exterior door and onto the tracks.

  The train was picking up speed. All hell broke loose as Richard and Claude flew out after them. The fluttering tails of a brown overcoat flashed across the compartment window.

  And then, from outside the train more gunfire made our hearts jump.

  The Duchess’s cry rang out like a million shattered dreams. I rushed in and took her in my arms as Mr. Benchley pulled Woodrow out from his retreat under the Major’s legs, placing my shivering pup on the seat beside me. Woodrow was unharmed, merely startled and shaking, although there was a gaping hole in the floor. And then Mr. Benchley sprang into action, reviving the Major, who had been knocked cold where he sat, with a drag on his flask, as Soledad begged water from a porter for the Duchess. Several porters appeared to attend passengers crowded into the hall. Hysteria heightened with each round of gunfire. They feared for their lives, for their children, for their money and jewelry; the Americans envisioned a train robbery as in the days of the Old West. Was this still commonplace in the savage regions of France? Had anarchists put a bomb on the train? What fate awaited us all in Paris? The news spread quickly that the engineer had been fooled into stopping the train, which already had been travelling at a snail’s pace through a section of conjoining rails and signals on its way through Caen because of a stalled vehicle obstructing the tracks.

  I looked up to see that Richard had returned to the train and was standing over me; Claude Dubois was behind him in the corridor.

  “You have some explaining to do, Dr. Hartley, or whoever you are!”

  “They won’t try again soon,” said Richard Hartley. “Not too soon, anyway.”

  “But, why?” I asked. “Why kidnap an old lady?”

  “I suppose we were wrong to think the old gal paranoid,” said Mr. Benchley.

  “I just don’t understand,” I said. “The Tsar and his family are gone, and you haven’t answered my question: How is she a threat?”

  An hour after the attempted kidnapping, the Duchess was sleeping in the compartment, the shades drawn, thanks to a light sedative administered by Dr. Hartley; the Major’s injury was assessed as negligible. He sat with an icebag on his head with Claude Dubois and Soledad on guard, while Richard, Mr. Benchley, and I sat talking in the empty dining car. The men in the brown coats had escaped capture by means of a getaway car.

  After a moment Richard continued: “It’s complicated. And I don’t like having you dragged into this.”

  “Well, we are, and Mr. Benchley has had a few pretty close calls. Does what’s happened to him and this man Latham have anything to do with the Duchess?”

  “Nothing whatever to do with the Duchess!”

  “Then, for goodness sake, what the hell is going on, here?”

  “There are some things I cannot tell you that have to do with our country’s national security, do you understand?”

  Richard just looked at me, waiting for my response. I wondered what he was thinking, what he was trying to hide from us, what else he was going to reveal, and what he was not about to reveal.

  I couldn’t reply to his question, because I didn’t understand. There was a challenge in his eyes, I saw, when he wouldn’t look away. He was either lying to us or holding something back—something he’d decided from the beginning of our talk that we were not to know.

  And then Mr. Benchley soberly asked him, “Whom do you work for?”

  “All I can tell you is that I am who I say I am: a doctor and a medical researcher. I can tell you little more than that for now.”

  “And the man, Latham?” asked Mr. Benchley.

  “Give it up, Richard,” I said. “I heard your conversation with that man last night out on deck. Who was he?”

  “What do you think you heard?”

  “All of it.” I replied, and told him the contorted gist of the conversation.

  “Latham . . . was murdered.”

  “Yes, so I heard you say. I heard the whole conversation, out on the deck, under the stars, Venus and Jupiter, under the one-hundred-percent-full-moon. Who was he, and what did the man named Yahoo ‘walk into’?”

  “Yezhov,” he corrected. “His name was Yezhov, and he was a Soviet spy. Latham worked for us.”

  “Us?”

  “American and free-European interests. U.S. Intelligence, all right? Oh, Dorothy, Bob, you’ve really stepped in it!”

  “So now that we have stepped into the crap, you need to tell us what’s going on,” I said.<
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  “These things are dangerous for you to know!” said Richard, practically hissing a warning. “All right, but be careful and keep this to yourselves, for God’s sake. I don’t fancy finding your bodies stuffed in a trunk.” He took an impatient breath.

  “Latham probably discovered, somehow and too late, that Yezhov, who was supposedly working for U.S. Intelligence, was actually spying for the Soviets. Yezhov proclaimed he had escaped a labor camp through Persia. But there had to have been something more than just the discovery that Yezhov was a Soviet spy for Latham to have killed him. In most cases, a revelation like that can serve a purpose; rather than eliminate a mole, it’s better to keep a man like Yezhov close, feeding him false information to take back to the enemy.

  “As Latham had had contacts in the States and throughout Europe, he must have discovered more than Yezhov’s betrayal. I know not what. Latham and I were supposed to meet on the ship. I received a coded wire from my superior earlier on the day we sailed, which suggested a transfer of vital information, but as you know, unbeknown to us, he was killed before we could meet. Yezhov must have been caught out by Latham—by something he said or did that gave him away or threatened Latham’s plan. No doubt there was a confrontation, and Latham made the split-second decision to kill him. Whatever our man Latham discovered and planned to share with me is gone with him now. I thoroughly searched the luggage he sent to the ship—by the way, the rocks in the luggage were for show, to put weight in the bags, and so was the reserved stateroom for show. He never intended on sailing. It was all a diversion. He wanted it to appear that he was on the crossing. He was only to deliver to me whatever it was he had found before midnight, before we embarked, whether by word or through some physical exchange—as I said, I don’t know which—and then he intended to quit the ship before departure.”

  “Then you knew there was a body in the trunk when we went to the baggage hold?”

  “I was as surprised as you were. I had no idea about Yezhov, and when we found his body, I knew nothing about Latham’s having been murdered at that time. I had wired my man when we sailed to say Latham had missed our meeting, and to ask if there had been a change in my mission. I received no immediate reply until a return wire stated that Latham’s body was discovered in the East River. The coded wire came almost immediately after we discovered Yezhov’s body in the trunk. I knew nothing about who the dead man was. I’d never before seen Latham or Yezhov, so I really didn’t know who was in that trunk.