by Ed Ifkovic
Yet Martha’s harsh eye was focused on Annabel, as though she were the Jezebel in the room. “I warned you,” Martha hissed into his ear as he passed by her.
He disappeared into the kitchen, past Martha standing straight, arms tucked into her chest. Next to her, rocking from one foot to the other, Peggy did her best to look bored with it all.
Ah, I thought, amused—a kitchen soap opera, spitfire intrigue among the Jersey hash slingers.
But my attention shifted back to the street as the babel of raised voices drifted into the room. A gust of wind blew a cloud of thin snow against the window. On the sidewalk, huddled against the cold, a group of men faced the street. Fists raised, their dark faces scrunched in anger, in unison they roared, “Kill Hauptmann. Kill Hauptmann.”
I started, so abrupt and fierce the shouting, so bone-marrow ugly. I strained my neck to see what they were looking at, but at first I saw nothing. From behind me Horace reappeared and with the waitresses peered across an empty table. A few of the reporters stood, and one, laughing, deliberately echoed, “Kill the baby killer. Burn the German.”
Nearby a jittery young man with huckleberry freckles and a cowlick grabbed a pad and jotted down something. I’d met him earlier in the lobby as he’d accosted Aleck Woolcott. “My name is Joshua Flagg. From out of the Indianapolis Hearst syndicate,” he’d said. “Not a reporter but an observer.” That made no sense. Like a show-off child, he introduced himself to everyone there, one after the other, though I noticed he avoided the large contingent of seasoned New York and New Jersey reporters from the Hearst newspapers. Now, like a neighborhood boy thrilled to be invited to a party, he rapped on the icy window and yelled to the men, “Kill Hauptmann.” He stood a few feet away from me, almost blocking my view.
“Sir,” I admonished, “you’re a journalist.” Then I added, “Or an observer. Whatever that breed of reporter is.”
He ignored me, a macabre smile on his face.
Horace Tripp spoke over my objection. “I fought against the Germans in the Great War, Miss Ferber. American infantry.”
“And what has that to do with Hauptmann?”
He waited a heartbeat. “Well, he fought for the Kaiser.”
“So what?”
He was ready to say something, but at the moment there was whooping in the street. I pressed my face against the ice-cold window. Joshua Flagg, swaying back and forth, sucked in his breath.
Charles A. Lindbergh was crossing the street, flanked by Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf and Colonel Henry Breckinridge, two of his advisors in the long investigation. Schwarzkopf headed the New Jersey State Police. Breckinridge was a Manhattan attorney, a close friend of Lindbergh. Behind them, in striking military precision, walked four state troopers, men in that curious New Jersey uniform of campaign hats, robin’s-egg blue field jackets, and flaring riding breeches with the orange piping down each leg, a Prussian look that took me back to my days wandering through the last breath of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, all that braid and pomp and authority.
Colonel Lindbergh strode in front, his legs moving quickly, obviously the leader, and he wore no winter coat, no hat. Rather, he wore a charcoal double-breasted suit, tightly buttoned, the icy wind rustling his blond, boyish hair. He walked so rapidly the other men struggled to keep up, although Schwarzkopf kept leaning into his side, as though confiding something. I’d never seen Lindbergh before, other than in Pathé newsreels in theaters or pictured on the front page of newspapers, especially after his magnificent 1927 solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, piloting The Spirit of St. Louis into Le Bourget Airport.
I recalled the Times’ headline: LINDY DOES IT! The new American hero, glorified, with the emperor’s middle name: Augustus. American royalyy, writ large. When he married the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the world, Ambassador Dwight Morrow’s daughter, Anne, the world applauded the man called Slim or Plucky. The Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of breathtaking aviation, the splendid couple, blond and beautiful. A couple that hid from the world, demanding privacy they could never have. A world that came crashing down when their little baby was snatched from his cradle one windy night.
So here he was, a brisk walker, long strides, a tall, lanky man, slight of frame. I studied his face. A farm boy, I considered: that Midwestern Scandinavian fairness, so pale in comparison to Bruno Hauptmann, the man who was his dark shadow—the brooding German with the deep-set blue eyes that never seemed to blink. A morality tale, this. Black and white, good and evil, the forces of light and the forces of darkness. A miracle play, a mystery play from the Middle Ages being played out on small-town American soil, the awful conclusion probably written in stone from the moment the police nabbed him on that New York street.
Lindbergh stopped in mid-stride in the middle of the street, and a passing car ground to a halt, waited patiently. Schwarzkopf and Breckinridge looked at each other, the four state troopers standing at attention. Lindbergh’s look swept the street and briefly focused on the Union Hotel. I was afraid to move my face from the window. Indifferently, his eyes caught mine and I thought: a hayseed, this brave Minnesotan lad, a barnstormer with wrenches and gadgets and propellers, who had lifted himself off the ground and into misery. His head shifted—a profile of a man who seemed helpless, his chin weak and stiff, but a man also, lamentably, callow. A good man who’d taken the wrong turn on the country lane and hated the sense of loss that quaked within him. Now a shabby man boldly approached him, but before one of the troopers could extend a forbidding arm, Lindbergh closed up his face, a look that demanded distance. An impenetrable mask. So the man, flustered, backed away, his face red.
Stillness in the café.
When I turned to look behind me, Annabel Biggs was laughing quietly to herself. Her eyes danced.
Chapter Three
That night I barely slept. What bothered me, other than the lumpy mattress and intrusive springs and the babble of drunk reporters down the hall, was that street tableau I’d observed: the conquering hero Lindbergh pausing in the winter street, a statue in place, but, worse, my startled realization that the sculptor had forgotten to fashion a face that was—well, heroic. A boy happy to perform airplane stunts at the country fair, surprised by the rapturous looks of the farm girl from one town over. That Lindbergh—not the heroic figure whose image now evoked such sadness in America. What did it all mean? I wondered.
But I supposed what also rankled was Annabel Biggs’ mysterious laugh, calculated and giddy, which followed her cryptic remarks as she served me tea and pie.
Five a.m., an ungodly hour to be sitting up in bed, especially in New Jersey. A vacuum of space and time.
A walk, I convinced myself. Back in Manhattan, snuggled in my penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side, I religiously walked each morning, though not at such an ungodly hour—my purposeful stride up Park Avenue, over to Lexington, down Madison, a mile or more, invigorating, thrilling, the streets waking up, the sanitation trucks washing the streets as the garbage men clanged their buckets. Here, in early-morning Flemington, the world was still frozen, time stopped. Here, in Jersey, the citizens slept and dreamed under homemade quilts. Bruno Hauptmann slept in his cell down the street in the jail behind the courthouse, guarded by a trooper, the shrill light always on, perpetual sunshine. Maybe not slept—I was told that he paced the night away. Back and forth in the six-by-eight cell. A cot, a toilet, a sink. Slippers. Perhaps, like me, he was haunted by the face of Colonel Lindbergh, the father of The Eaglet. Little Lindy. He paced his narrow cell as he waited to be told he was to die. Chain-smoking. A Bible on his cot.
Gazing out my window that faced a back lot of garbage bins and rusted cars, I shivered. The cold seeped through the sills, whistled against the hiss and shriek of the old cast-iron radiators of the room. Bundled up in my fur coat, I wrapped a scarf around my neck, pulled my mink hat over my hair, and tucked my gloves into my pockets. Tundra or not, I was h
eaded for a walk.
“Cold morning,” I mumbled to myself as I walked downstairs into the lobby. Flemington would always be one long cold morning for me—a frozen tableau of hoary ice and snow showers and the awful stillness on the landscape. An empty street at that time of day, but within hours impassable, clogged with cars puffing out exhaust, people streaming past, frantic, loud, anxious. The specter of death and judgment covered the trees like a fog. Cold morning: this was a town that could never get warm again.
The overheated lobby was deserted, not even the night clerk in sight. Perhaps he was napping on a cot behind the reception counter. Perhaps Bert Pednick, the owner, believed no one should be up at that hour. As I buttoned my coat, tightening the scarf, preparing to slip on my gloves, I heard a raspy sound from one of the overstuffed chairs in the small area of old couches and coffee tables and magazine racks by the front door. At first I saw no one, but that gurgle erupted again, a man sloppily clearing his throat. The acrid scent of tobacco from a cigar, raw and pungent, as a thin cloud wafted into sight. I stepped closer, and the man lost in the big chair yelped and dropped his cigar, then rushed to retrieve it.
“Christ, Miss Ferber,” he bellowed, “you do like to scare a man.”
“Ah, flattery so early in the morning.” I smiled.
He didn’t.
He banged the side of his head. “I must have dozed off.”
“Mr. Flagg, I believe?”
He stood and bowed. “Of course, Joshua Flagg. The one and only. I introduced myself yesterday.”
“Yes, in fact, you introduced yourself to everyone in the lobby.”
He looked around, sheepish. “Well, not everyone.” He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands.
“What does that mean, sir?”
He whispered, “I’m trying to keep a low profile.”
“That’s hard to believe.” To his puzzled look, I added, “You hurl your name into everyone’s conversations.”
He ignored that. “Why are you up so early?” He waved a hand across the empty lobby.
“I might just as well ask you the same question. Why are you in the lobby at five a.m., other than trying to commit arson on this old rickety structure?”
He glanced at the smoldering cigar resting precariously on the edge of an ashtray. Now he reached for it, tucked it into the corner of his mouth. “I never sleep. I don’t like to sleep. You miss things.”
“I assume your boss, William Randolph Hearst, demands constant vigilance from his lackeys. After all, this is the hour when all the spectacular news takes place.”
He squinted. “You’re mocking me.”
“Yes, I am. But more so the yellow journalism of your syndicate—and leader.”
“It’s a job.” He leaned in confidentially. “I’m on special assignment for the chief.”
“What does that mean?”
A tinny voice, which I immediately mistrusted. “I’m Hearst’s operative. I’m not one of the fifty or so reporters bustling around here. They got their job to do. My job is to…”
“To spy on them?”
He chuckled. “Of course not.” A sigh. “Well, maybe a little. But they don’t know me, that crowd of scribblers. I’m here to catch the story that no one thinks is worth talking about.”
“At five in the morning?”
“Well,” he grinned, “I am talking to Edna Ferber, author of…”
“Show Boat.”
Again the foolish grin. “Sooner or later you might have a story to tell me.”
“I get paid for my stories.”
“Not the ones you want to keep secret.”
“And I have secrets you want me to share?”
A long deliberate pause. “You will.”
This Joshua Flagg bothered me. At first glance he struck me as a young man, perhaps just in his twenties, with his gangly, slender teenage boy’s body, a long drawn face pocked with acne, a red blister on his forehead. A rumpled, out-of-fashion sports jacket, checkered and frayed at the cuffs. The high-school newspaper editor craving the Fourth Estate’s wonderful and revolutionary scoop. A simple man, harmless. But as I looked at him, I realized something that jarred me. He was not an eager, albeit nosy, boy—rather, he was much older, maybe even in his thirties. His was a good-looking face, but one that spent too many hours in closed rooms, a worm-whiteness to his cheeks. The deep lines around his weary eyes, the sagging lips, the hard-bitten cynicism in those blue-gray eyes. Suddenly I didn’t trust him. My trained nose for news, hammered into me from my days as a nineteen-year-old reporter back in Appleton, Wisconsin, told me something was wrong here. This ferret-like man was up to no good.
“And how do you get on with the other fifty Hearst reporters?” I asked him.
“I don’t,” he shot back. “I’m not supposed to.”
“Perhaps they don’t believe you’re working for the chief himself.”
“They don’t.” He slapped a grin onto his face.
“Neither do I.”
I walked away.
***
Outside a blast of cold wind slapped me in the face, and I shuddered. I persisted up Main Street, crossed toward the courthouse and the House of Records, maneuvered my way past Meyer’s General Store—with its life-sized cigar-store Indian outside, a carved wooden brave painted a stolid red and black, totally unthreatening—then past Lyman’s Barber Shop, Sussel’s Haberdashery, then past the quaint post office that also contained the small headquarters for the different livery services that sprang up for the trial. I noticed the long black Buick town car sitting in the parking lot, its windshield covered with an opaque layer of frozen ice slick. Inside the passenger side window, a placard, discreet and with familiar gothic lettering: New York Times. Doubtless the feckless driver Willie was in some boardinghouse nearby, most likely talking loudly in his sleep, annoying the other boarders. I assumed someone would eventually and justly smother him with a pillow, maybe the other driver—Marcus Wood, that fashion plate from Vanity Fair, who probably spent his nights in local taverns, his fingers running through his Bryl-creemed hair, as he dreamed of becoming the next Valentino.
Quiet, quiet, the morning streets said nothing at all.
Invigorated, feeling better now, my lungs swollen with chilled air, I turned back. It was just a little too cold to be sauntering along. I hurried down a side street, wended my way back, circling behind the county jail, walking alongside the imposing tombstone factory—how ghoulish!—and reached the rear of the Union Hotel. Finally, tired now and ready for a cup of blisteringly hot coffee in the café, I strolled past some untrimmed pale-green juniper hedges and entered the parking lot.
Loud voices assailed me, amplified by the still morning air. I stopped, but saw no one.
A woman’s voice blared from the side of a nearby storage shed. Immediately I knew it was Annabel Biggs, that feisty and curious waitress from the café. Her raised voice, thick now with venom, echoed off the metal sides of the shed. “Damn you, Cody Lee.”
A man grunted. The sound of spitting. He stepped back from the corner of the shed and came into my line of sight. A faint glow of sunrise silhouetted his large head. A burly man, thick-chested with a bushy moustache and longish hair that peeked out from a woolen pullover hat, he jutted his chin forward, furious. “I don’t get you, Annabel. I swear to Christ, I don’t get you.”
Then Annabel stepped out of the shadows and into the growing morning light, positioning her body inches from the man who towered above her. “I said you gotta stop following me, Cody Lee. I gotta work here, you know.” She pointed to the back of the hotel.
“And I ain’t got a job to get to?” A voice laced with sarcasm.
“Well, you can haul your truckload of timber to hell, for all I care.”
Cody Lee grunted again, swiveled around as if trying to decide what to do. He walked away and r
ested a hand on a battered pickup truck, a funnel of dark smoke escaping the muffler. I thought he’d open the door and slide in, but he changed his mind, rushing back to Annabel, who faced him belligerently, arms folded over her chest, her face set in a dark frown.
Both were dressed in uniforms. She wore the waitress outfit I saw yesterday, the blue-and-white gingham pinafore with the matching wraparound hatband tucked into her hair. She’d obviously been headed into work but was approached by Cody Lee, himself in a dark brown shirt and blue dungarees, with high work boots. She had draped a light winter coat over her shoulders. He wore a dark brown hooded parka, unbuttoned.
“So this is the brush-off then?” he squeaked out, hurt in his voice.
“I ain’t made you no promises, Cody Lee.” A trace of delight in her voice. “I got this new job for now. Yeah, we had ourselves a few dances over to Newark, we had fun, but”—she hesitated—“you want something from me you can’t have. I told you—let’s just have fun. I got other things on my mind now.”
“Yeah, things.”
“Things.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said in a mocking voice. “Your big plans. You know, Annabel, a little whiskey and you brag about money—big money coming your way. You think I ain’t heard you going on about that? That’s why you’re in town.”
She looked startled, tilting her head. “I ain’t said nothing about that.”
“I ain’t a fool, Annabel.”
“Hey, Cody Lee, we had a few laughs, you and me. Can’t you leave it at that?”