I went in the kitchen and poured myself a glass of lemonade from the pitcher in the icebox. Drank it outside, where a merciful cocoanut palm shaded the garden table. It was the time of day when you escaped your insufferable bungalow, when you made your way to your cabana at one of the beach clubs, Cable or Emerald or someplace, and took in whatever limp breeze the ocean offered you. That, too, was part of my job. People dropped the most delicious tidbits on the beach, when they were bored out of their skulls and halfway to sunstroke. Overhead, an airplane droned toward Oakes Field, louder and louder, some flyboy in training, the original cause of all our discontent, after all. At Oakes Field, at the airfield taking shape on the other side of the island, along Burma Road connecting them, the men had gone back to work under the terrible sun, five shillings a day plus lunch. Bay Street had repaired itself and returned to its ordinary rhythms. I finished my lemonade and rose to clean the empty glass in the sink. When I had returned the glass, clean and dry, to the kitchen cabinet, I went to the telephone and dialed the number on the scrap of paper Thorpe had given me last December.
“How’s the arm?” he said, by way of greeting, after only three rings of the telephone.
“How did you know it was me?”
“You’re the only one who knows this number.”
I fiddled with the cord and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, flushed with heat, halfway to sunstroke. “The arm’s just fine. Stitches came out all right.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Any nerve damage?”
“They didn’t say. What does nerve damage feel like?”
“You would know, believe me.”
I turned away from the mirror and looked out the window instead, the empty street outside. “Are you busy?”
“Immensely.”
“So if I packed a picnic basket and rowed myself over to Hog Island, you’d bustle me and my picnic right back?”
“That depends. Can you row?”
“Not really.”
“Then I suppose I’d better jump straight in the launch and pick you up from the harbor. Half an hour?”
The rush of blood in my veins was like electricity. I dropped the curtain and spun back to the mirror, and I was surprised to see that my face was no more than normal, a little sparkly around the eyes, pink around the cheeks, despite the thunderous pulse in my ears that just about knocked me flat.
“Done,” I said.
The launch, he said. What he meant was Axel Wenner-Gren’s motorboat, a long, beautiful blade made of polished wood, slicing the water in two. The tall man at the wheel wore a white shirt, khaki trousers, and no hat, and the wind flattened his bright hair against his skull. He pulled right up to the dock as if he owned it and tossed me a rope, which I wound around the nearest bollard. He jumped across the gap with a nimbleness that surprised me.
“How’s the leg?” I asked.
“Rather better. Is that your picnic basket?”
“It’s not much, I guess.”
“Never mind. I’ve got plenty of supplies at home.”
Thorpe pitched the basket in the stern, unwound the rope, and held out his hand. I grabbed the fingers. “Steady as she goes,” he said, passing me over, and while I was expecting some difference between shore and ship, the uneasiness of the deck alarmed me. Thorpe followed with the rope and took the wheel.
“Off we go,” he said cheerfully.
We landed on the eastern end of Hog Island, the private half, where Shangri-La sat at a graceful remove from the public landing that led to Paradise Beach. I had never been there, myself. Had not encountered Wenner-Gren since that Government House party in July, because of the blacklist, remember, the U.S. blacklist that kept him from the Bahamas. Why, just last month, the duke—reluctantly, it must be said—had signed an order impounding all Wenner-Gren’s commercial assets here, his bank and his dredging company and the Paradise Beach and Transportation Company, among others. So Wenner-Gren was not in residence, and the legendary entertainments at Shangri-La had come to a stop.
“Only a few caretakers left,” said Thorpe, leading me down the road, “and yours truly, of course. It’s rather ghostly, in fact.”
“But you’ve got all this to yourself!” I waved my arm at the cocoanut palms, the sea grapes, the glimpses of pure, liquid turquoise between the foliage.
“Still, it does get lonely, from time to time.”
In the course of our conversation, the road had begun to straighten, and the cocoanut palms to form orderly queues on either edge. I raised my hand against the sun and saw, about two hundred yards distant, a circular drive, a stone fountain—dry, I thought—and a large, shuttered building in the familiar colonial style.
“Lonely,” I said. “So what do you do when you’re lonely, Benedict Thorpe?”
He stopped and turned. “I work.”
“Oh, of course. You work.”
“It’s true.”
“No lady visitors?”
“No visitors at all.”
We stared at each other. Some birds twittered, the ocean stirred nearby. I returned my hand to my brow and peered back at the cottage. “Do you know what I think?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“I think I want to see all your botany collections with my own two eyes.”
The cottage was larger than I expected, but I suppose my expectations were to blame. Of course a man as wealthy as Axel Wenner-Gren wouldn’t put up his guests in some quaint, measly, tumbledown beach shack! Thorpe led me past the main house, down a wide, tended path surrounded by tropical plants—palms, bougainvillea, sea grapes, you name it—until the fronds parted and there it stood, made of white clapboard, in that bungalow style of the British colonies: enormous, low-hanging roof, porches all around, view right down the beach to the wide Atlantic.
“Be it ever so humble,” I said.
“I’m afraid it’s not well-suited to visitors. Collections and equipment everywhere.”
“Sounds like it could use a woman’s touch.”
“I’m afraid that would require a very ambitious woman,” said Thorpe. We had reached the front porch. He climbed the steps, a bit stiff-legged, the knee not quite bending so well as it should. I followed without a word, through the door he opened with a flourish of his cane, directly into a single, spacious room, no entry hall of any kind.
“My goodness,” I said. I stared up at the distant ceiling—there was no second story, just empty space, four electric fans hanging from the central beam, all still. The smell of wood, of trapped sunshine, of green things, of something else. Something chemical.
“As I said.” He picked his way around a few stacks of wooden crates. “I don’t entertain much.”
“Let’s be frank, Thorpe. You don’t entertain at all.”
“I have been away for half a year, remember, while my colleagues continued to ship me specimens and so on.”
I trailed my index finger through the layer of dust covering the lid of a pine crate. fragile—specimens—do not open. “And so on?”
“Mmm.” Thorpe had set the picnic basket on a table and opened it. “Let’s see. Apples. Sandwiches . . . what, ham?”
“Ham and cheese.”
“Lemonade, excellent. And is this . . . ?” He drew out a plate, wrapped in cheesecloth.
“Veryl’s rum cake.”
“You’re a goddess. On the beach, do you think? There’s a shady spot, at the edge of the dunes.”
I brushed my hands against my dress and turned in a slow circle to gaze around the room. I took my time. Such a utilitarian house, no paintings at all, no pictures, no mirrors, no decorative knickknacks. A rectangle, of which the front and back walls formed the short sides. On each of the two longer walls, a pair of doors stood snug. There was another door on the back wall, the swinging kind of door, leading presumably to the kitchen.
“Do you like it?” Thorpe said dryly.
I turned to face him. He was closer than I thought, had laid his cane on a crate and stepped right
next to me. I reached up with both hands and drew the spectacles from his face. He didn’t say a word. I held the glasses to the meager light and squinted through them. “Just as I thought,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
I tossed the spectacles on the crate. “Tell me something. Do you work for the Allies or the Germans?”
If Thorpe was startled by the question, he didn’t show it. He had these thick, straight eyebrows, a few shades darker than his hair, and they hardly budged. A line or two appeared between them, as if he were more puzzled than shocked.
“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you. Work for whom? I work for myself.”
“My dear fellow. Are you one of those Englishmen who thinks all Americans are stupid? Or just me?” I waved my hand at the crates. “Kind of reminds me of a film set. All these nice wooden boxes with their nice labels. specimens—fragile. Also untouched.”
“I beg your pardon. You’re suggesting I’m some kind of . . . of agent? A traitor?”
“I didn’t say that, exactly. I asked which side you were working for. That’s not the same as saying you’re a stinking Nazi, is it?”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Can’t I?”
“On what possible grounds?”
I held up my hand and ticked off the fingers. “One, you’ve taken up residence on a patch of ground that’s strategically placed for Atlantic communication, to say the least, and hidden nicely from prying eyes in Nassau. Two, that patch of ground happens to be owned by a man blacklisted by the U.S. government for possible Nazi ties, among other sins—”
“Not true. Wenner-Gren’s a meddling businessman, but he’s not a Nazi.”
“Three, you have a habit of disappearing for weeks on end, and then reappearing without warning—”
“Because I was attacked, Mrs. Randolph—”
“Lulu.”
“I’ll call you Lulu again when you cease hurling ridiculous accusations at my head—”
“Four, your eyesight is perfect.”
He opened his mouth and closed it again.
“Look at you,” I said. “You’re all pink.”
“You’re damned right I’m all pink.”
I stepped forward and clasped his chin, which was just beginning to stubble and had the delicious texture of a cat’s tongue. I turned his head to the left, so I could make out the short, thick scar there, still red. “And why were you attacked, hmm? Tell Lulu the truth, now.”
“I don’t know. Chap wanted my cash, I suppose.”
“And this thief. They never did catch him, did they?”
The muscle at the corner of his mouth made a slight twitch. He crossed his arms over his ribs. “Not so far as I understand.”
“What a terrible shame. I wonder if they’ll ever find him.”
“The Nassau police force, alas, is not known for its competence in these matters.”
“You, on the other hand. You know how to handle a fellow who needs a bit of a reprimand, don’t you? Like that fellow on the airplane.”
There wasn’t much light inside the walls of the room. The windows were all shaded, and Thorpe hadn’t switched on any of the lamps, wherever they were. The air had a dusky, dreamlike color that muted our skin, our faces, our hair. Thorpe stared at me through a million motes of dust, each one invisible by itself. To his right, a stack of crates ended just at his arm. He lifted his elbow and leaned against them. “You are the most confounded woman,” he said softly. “Did it ever occur to you that if I were some kind of—of agent, whatever they call them, I mean if you’re right, which you’re not, well . . .”
“Well?”
“Mightn’t I just simply kill you?” With his other hand, he waved at the room around us. “No one would ever know.”
“I left a note for Veryl, to be opened in the event of my disappearance.”
He lifted his face and laughed.
“Oh, believe me, you’d be a dead man if Veryl came after you,” I said.
“I don’t doubt it.” He moved away, toward the French doors along the back wall, through which you could just glimpse the ocean. He’d left his cane atop one of the crates, and limped his way carefully around the various obstacles. I found myself admiring the proportions of his back and legs, the easy way he moved, despite his injury. As he came within reach of the glass, the handles of the doors, he stopped and made a thoughtful grunt.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“I suppose I’m just working out how to answer you. You’ve clearly reached some sort of conclusion, and nothing I say could possibly sway you. So I find myself wondering what it is you want me to say. What you expect me to do with this accusation.”
“You might start by acknowledging the truth.”
He turned to face me. “What if I refuse?”
“You have that right. And I have the right not to believe you.”
“Fair enough.” He reached for his jacket pocket, patted, frowned. Missing his cigarettes, I guessed. “But then we’re just going around in tiresome circles, aren’t we? The point is, what do you want from this conversation, Mrs. Randolph? What do you intend to do with your suspicions? Print them in your column?”
“My God, of course not. I’m a patriot. I’d take my suspicions to the FBI, or something like it.”
“The FBI. For God’s sake.” He shook his head. “Tell me something. Hypothetically speaking, if I admitted to—well, whatever it is you’re accusing me of—if I said, Why yes, I am an agent for the British government—”
“Or the German one.”
“What difference does it make?”
“A great deal of difference. If you were a British agent, I’d ask to join you.”
“Join me?”
“Trust me, Thorpe, nothing goes on in Nassau without my knowing it. I’ve got contacts all over town. I’ve got the perfect cover. I’ve got nerve, you said so yourself—”
He held up his palm. “Stop. Please. This is absurd.”
“And if you’re a German agent, I guess I’d just have to kill you.”
“Kill me? By what means?”
“I might have something up my sleeve, so to speak.”
Thorpe’s gaze went to my right sleeve, my left. He said heavily, “Do you mind if we sit down? This leg.”
“Be my guest.”
He settled himself against a nearby crate, not so much sitting as propping himself up, and placed his hands on his knees, which was an altogether strange pose for an Englishman. They tended to hunch themselves up in this self-deprecating way, to make caves of themselves. Not Thorpe; he took a pose of readiness. “Let me tell you a little story,” he said. “I happened to be in Berlin one summer in 1936, a few years after the Nazis came to power. I was visiting a friend from university, who happened to be a Jew. I rather fancied his sister, if you must know, and since I spoke fluent German—no, don’t interrupt—since I spoke German, since I was familiar with Germany, having spent a number of hols there, visiting my brother—no, I said don’t interrupt—I thought perhaps I might try my luck with her. Lovely girl, terribly bright, brilliant at maths and also at music.”
His thumbs rubbed against his khaki trousers, over and over. My words died in my lungs. I found a crate of my own and perched on the edge, mindful of dust.
“Her name was Anke,” he said. “Anke Mueller. She was sensible enough to reject my overtures out of hand, and kind enough to do it so gently, I hardly felt the wound. We continued to correspond after I returned home to England. I urged my friend Mueller to emigrate, to encourage his family to emigrate, but he refused, because to emigrate meant to give up everything, all their wealth, their friends and relatives, the damned country they loved, despite it all. Everything they knew. And then one day, I had a letter sent back to me. It had been opened and rather crudely resealed, marked addressee unknown. Anke’s letters stopped altogether, and Mueller’s. I made inquiries. It turned out their father’s business, their beautiful apartment in Friedrichstra
sse, everything had been confiscated by the state. My friends themselves had disappeared. I went to Berlin, I searched everywhere, but nobody knew where they had gone, and eventually the authorities began to make trouble for me. Arrested me, confiscated my passport, interrogations, that sort of thing, until at last I was able to make contact with the British Embassy and get them to step in.”
“When—when did this happen?” I asked.
“January of 1939,” he replied. “Not long after the Kristallnacht. You know what happened then, don’t you?”
“Everybody knows about that.”
Thorpe stared down at his hands on his legs. “Anyway, I never did hear from the Muellers again. I tried, I searched. I was frantic. After Poland, after the war started, I asked certain friends of mine to—to do what they could. Find them and get them the hell out of Germany, somehow. But I haven’t heard. Anke . . .” He paused. His thumbs went still against his trousers. I couldn’t see his face. I thought he was hiding from me deliberately, that he’d said more than he planned, and now he couldn’t go back. But he could hide his face from me.
“Are you still in love with her?” I whispered.
Now he looked up, with an expression that seemed to regard me as if I hadn’t understood a word he’d said, hadn’t understood the point of it at all. “Lulu, that was years ago. I was a boy.”
“But she was that kind of girl, wasn’t she?”
“She was. But she told me it was impossible, and I—well, I suppose you could say I honored her enough to believe her.”
I couldn’t speak. I sat there mutely and stared not at his face, which was too much, but his hair, which had caught a glint of sunlight from the window, and looked sort of rumpled, as if he’d gone for a swim earlier and not bothered to brush it afterward. I’m sorry, I thought, and it seemed to me that I hadn’t understood the meaning of that word until now.
Thorpe rose from the crates and turned back to the French doors, to the ocean behind them. He stuck his hands in his pockets. “I can’t say what I believe in anymore,” he said. “A just God in heaven? I don’t know. But if anyone deserves mercy from the Almighty, it’s her.”
The Golden Hour Page 28