“I can’t, Leon,” I whispered. “I love you. What if—”
“No ‘what if’s,’ dear Rosie. Just go.”
I turned, left the room, not even pausing for a drink, and fetched my coat. Halfway down the street, I realized that my feet were wet from the snow. I had forgotten Ruby’s galoshes.
I was genuinely rattled. What was going on? I couldn’t figure anything out. But Leon appeared to have forgiven my atrocious behavior at the Hotel Aldon’s bar.
On my way home I became conscious of my hunger and stopped at Gillotte’s for dinner. The bistro had sawdust floors and generations of dead flies piled on the windowsills. It was a kind of home to many of the unmarried reporters, along with prostitutes and pimps. I liked the joint, but that night I felt out of place in my fancy clothes. I looked around, expecting to see Andy, but he wasn’t there. No matter. I had to figure all this out. But the more I thought, the more confused I became. Nothing made sense. I ate quickly and left.
When I got back to the Hôtel Espoir, I changed my clothes and went immediately to Andy’s room. It was dark inside and I sensed that Andy still wasn’t there. I was alarmed. I went back down to the street to the telephone at Henri’s Café. Calling the Courier, I got Ramsey on the phone.
“Can I speak to Andy?”
“He’s not here, R.B. Didn’t show for work. Any idea what’s going on?”
“None,” I said. “None at all.”
“Well, he’d better get it together. If he’s not here tomorrow, he’s going to be sacked.”
I went back to my room. I didn’t know what to do. Andy skipped around from bar to bar. Finding him could be hopeless—and I already felt hopeless enough for the evening. I went to bed.
The next thing I was aware of was a loud knocking at my door. It was opened, and Monsieur Pleven, the concierge’s bald, asthmatic husband, stepped inside.
“Mademoiselle,” he said wheezing through a cigarette, “your boss sent a messenger and said you’re to get to the office immediately.”
“This is my day off.”
Monsieur Pleven shrugged. “It’s still night, Miss Manon,” he said, and closed the door.
It was a mess outside. While I was sleeping, there had been more snowfall. No wonder everything was so quiet and I had slept so well. Taking the Métro to the George V station, I walked across the snowbound Champs-Élysées in my old Nevada boots, waterproofed with lanolin. There were no cars, no trams. The street lamps cast a soft haze upon the new snow. It felt eerie, not at all romantic–and I felt a stomach-churning trepidation.
The newsroom was gloomy. Ramsey was sitting at his desk, staring out the window. There was no clattering of typewriters, no chattering of copyreaders. It felt as if the world of news had died. Of course it had not, but Andy Roth had.
He had been on a very long drunk and was wandering the Paris streets, incoherent, barely able to walk. Witnesses said that they observed him trying to balance himself on the icy stone railing of the Pont-Neuf and that he had appeared to fall accidentally into the Seine. People tried to help, but he had filled his pockets with small pieces of rubble.
I felt a deep invasion of sorrow, but I knew my grieving had to wait.
“His body’s at the morgue waiting to be identified,” Ramsey said. “Would you go?”
“Why don’t you?” I shot back angrily.
“Too squeamish, I have to admit. Please.”
“But what about his wife?” I asked. “Let her see what she did to him!” I was furious at Ruby.
“She’s in London,” he said, “and the police want him identified as soon as possible. And you know Ruby. She’ll take her own goddamn good time.”
Andy was waiting on a cold slab of grayish white marble. His hands and face were the same cold white. His wonderful red hair had faded to a nauseating pink. His eyelids were closed. He was frowning.
I legally identified my good friend, Andy Roth.
A week later, I heard a knock at my door. “Come in, it’s open.”
“Hi, Rosie,” stage-whispered Andy’s wife Ruby, and she stepped into the room in all her red-headed glory.
Before I knew what had happened, she flung herself into my arms and began to weep. She almost knocked me over. I’d forgotten what a large, strapping woman she was—not at all fat, but substantial and very tall. I led her to the chair and invited her to sit. But she wouldn’t let go and began to wail even louder.
“Ssh,” I said. “You don’t want the entire hotel coming in the door, do you?”
Ruby sat in the chair, brought her knees together, smoothed out her skirt, and tried to pat her unruly curls into some semblance of propriety. “Okay, luv, let’s talk about plans to ship the body home. His parents are hysterical and I want to get all the rituals over with as quickly as possible.”
“Don’t you feel for him at all?” I asked. “You’re so removed—even your crying seems fake. Dammit,” I said, getting angrier. “Don’t you care?”
Ruby shrugged her shoulders.
And I swallowed bile.
The British consul arranged to ship Andy home. Ruby played the bereft widow like a professional. She wore a black veil and carried a black lace-trimmed handkerchief. I rode in the embassy’s car with her, following the hearse to the boat at Le Havre. We hardly spoke. When we arrived, the longshoremen, traditionally honoring the dead, stood at attention, holding their caps. The driver opened the car door and Ruby got out. I waited a moment, thinking he would come around and do the same for me. It didn’t happen. I got out by myself and walked around the car to where she was standing. The hearse backed up to the edge of the dock and the casket was lifted out by eight men. She began to walk up the gangplank behind the coffin.
“Wait, I’ll go with you,” I said, trying to be kind.
“The hell with you,” she said. She took an obvious breath and—like a movie star—walked slowly, and with great deliberation, up the gangplank. Ruby was well aware that all the men were watching her, and when she reached the hold of the ship, she gave an extra swish of her hips as a final good-bye.
* * *
My personal toll of dead people grew. On a bleak and snowy day, Stella Mair’s body was found buried under the doorstep of a small villa on the periphery of Paris. Because the soil was primarily clay, she was well preserved. But it was obvious that the murderer had trouble digging in the clay; her body was buried jack-knifed in half at the waist, her head wedged between her knees. Although fully clothed, she was barefoot. Stella had been strangled. A rosebush was planted on her grave.
The alleged murderer was a German national named Ernst Vosberg. With blood on his clothes, a swollen lip, and a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, he was brought shackled to the police station. After being tended to by a doctor, he stood before the bench and was booked for the murder of Stella Mair.
That afternoon, Inspector Pascal said that despite what reporters had thought, this wasn’t a cold case. “We check every tip that comes into headquarters, no matter how small.
“Due to a conscientious citizen, we found our answer.”
On the day of the murder, the accused murderer’s neighbor, Illario Sandro, had been in the process of vacating his house and moving back to Rome. He hadn’t read about the missing actress, but many months later a friend told him the story. He wrote to the police in Paris and told them about having heard screams from the next house. Assuming it was a lovers’ quarrel, he didn’t want to interfere. But those sounds had continued to haunt him.
They finally had an address and set off immediately. When the police arrived, no one was home.
Five minutes later, a man came through the garden gate while playing with another neighbor’s dog. The police began to question him. Ernst Vosberg, who gave his name as “Robert Hunter,” asked to see their credentials.
The policemen showed him their identity cards.
Vosberg went into the villa.
“Here are my papers,” Vosberg said, and he leaned toward a table. When the police stepped over the threshold, Vosberg turned to them with a Mauser in his hand and fired several shots.
French police don’t usually carry guns; neither officer had one. One officer was wounded in his left shoulder and the other had a scalp wound from a bullet that went through his hat. They wrestled with Vosberg. The policeman with the hole in his hat saw a hammer on a table, grabbed it, and cracked it on the perpetrator’s head. Vosberg was momentarily knocked out. Covered with blood, his head was wrapped in bandages and he was taken to the police station. The police searched for, and dug up, Stella’s body.
Inspector Pascal called a press conference for the next afternoon at the Préfecture. The inspector requested that I come to see him before the crowd of reporters appeared.
Pascal’s office was a closed-in box, filled with the smells of cigarette smoke and old coffee. But it was tidy. The only things on his desk were a brown leather desk pad, a loud wind-up clock whose minute hand made a tiny ping each time it moved, and a green fountain pen that he nervously rolled back and forth.
‘Have a seat, Miss Manon,’ Pascal invited. ‘I wanted to see you privately. I need you to do me two favors. The first is to identify Miss Mair’s body. Do you think you can do it? Otherwise, I’ll have to ask Miss Silverman or another family member to return to France, and by the time they get here, it won’t be a pretty sight. What do you say?’
God, is this my new profession, I thought—identifying bodies?
“I’ll do it,” I said. “When?”
“When we finish the next favor. Now come with me,” Pascal said. “I need you to identify the suspect. Besides your aunt, you’re the only one who has seen him close up in the flesh. The shopkeepers were hopeless; none of their descriptions came as near as yours. By the way, his real name’s Ernst Vosberg, not Bobby Hunter.”
“A German national?” I said, and Pascal nodded.
“But talk to him in English,” he said.
A scoop, I realized. But with Andy gone, I’d have to be careful how I handled this. I followed the inspector.
Vosberg was in a windowless room with two wooden chairs, but no table.
“Hello, Bobby,” I said in English as we walked into the room. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“I don’t know you,” he answered in English.
I couldn’t detect the American accent.
“Cigarette?” he said.
“No,” Pascal said in French. “Ask Miss Manon politely—or you won’t get one.”
“I would like a cigarette, please,” Vosberg said in English.
Vosberg had walked into the trap.
I wasn’t surprised. His voice was melodic, smooth as silk, just as I had heard it all those months ago. And his American English was clear as a prairie night. He certainly didn’t sound like a killer. One of his police guards put a cigarette in Vosberg’s manacled hands and placed an ashtray at his feet.
‘Now stand, Mr. Vosberg,’ the inspector ordered. ‘Is this,’ Pascal asked me, ‘the man you saw with Stella Mair at the Studio Hôtel on July 17, 1937?’
I stood in front of him. “Look up, Vosberg,” Pascal commanded.
Vosberg would not look at me.
I looked at him from the front and then the side, taking my time. I was trying to make him suffer.
“Yes, he’s the same man I saw at the hotel with my cousin, Stella Mair,” I said in English.
Now Vosberg stared hard at me. “I’ve never seen this woman in my life.”
“Where did you learn English, Mr. Vosberg?” I asked.
“None of your damn business,” he replied in French.
Pascal opened the door and we stepped into the corridor.
“Thanks, Miss Manon. You’ve been a great help. We have the right man, and can formally charge him now.”
I watched as Vosberg was led downstairs, on his way back to his cell. When he caught sight of the photographers, he turned to his guard and said, “I would be perfectly willing to pose if I were shaved and dressed in a suit, but not in these clothes.”
It’s a long time since I’ve thought about Stella. I think I’ve sanded down the sharp edges of how I perceived that tragedy. But because of these old notes, my memory’s being rudely jarred. I realize that over the years, I’ve been unconsciously reshaping my history. Translating it. Sanitizing it. Transforming it into fiction. Although I must give myself a bit of credit: I did see that Stella’s death was heralding a terrifying future.
I took a taxi to the mortuary. Here I was again, following death. As soon as I walked in the front door, I felt sick to my stomach from the smell of carbolic soap and a hint of rotting flesh. I wanted to put my handkerchief over my nose and mouth, but willed myself not to do it. Before I had seen Andy’s body, the only dead people I had ever seen were when I had covered a couple of murder stories in Nevada, but I never saw the bodies close up. I had observed their corpses from afar, merely as curious illustrations of death—and was proud that I could stay emotionally uninvolved. But this was different. Stella had exuberantly represented the optimistic side of my family—the ease of being Jewish—her unlimited curiosity. It was eerie seeing her lifeless body. More than Andy, she reminded me of a figure in a wax museum. Her face was slightly changed. The once bow-shaped lips were now two long pale lines stretching across her yellowish face. Her nose had reverted to the long and thin Silverman shape—almost as if that hereditary characteristic on her mother’s side had the opportunity to emerge at last.
Would I ever be able to get this image of her out of my mind?
“Yes,” I said to the official, “this is Stella Mair.”
I made it to the press conference at the Sûreté just in time. When it was over, I rushed back to the Courier. “So,” Ramsey asked, “what’s the scoop?”
“Listen, Mr. Ramsey,” I said. “Back off! There’s so many details that my brain’s spinning.”
“Sorry, kid,” Ramsey said.
“Anyway, I can’t write this, and you know it. How about Pete? He’s back in Paris for the birth of his child.”
“Yeah, I know—the baby, the baby. Big deal! Because of this, we’ve had to hire a freelance stringer for the Berlin office, and he’s costing loads of money.”
I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to create more problems.
“So, okay, your idea’s good. You write—Pete will edit. But Pete will be given the byline.”
“No, I disagree. He writes, I edit, and he still gets the byline.”
Pete was under a seriously short deadline. It took us time to decipher my handwriting. I’d taken copious notes. Oh, how I missed Andy. He might have been impossible in some ways, but when it came to getting down the facts, he was a whiz. As Pete finished typing each page, he tore it out of the typewriter and passed it directly to me. I took a cursory glance, used my red pencil now and then, and handed the pages straight to the copyboy. The copyboy, rather than taking the chance of putting it in the brass tube that fed copy to the composing room, ran it downstairs to the Linotype machine operator. It took us until 3:30 in the morning to finish the work. The headline news of the expulsion of the U.S.S.R. from the League of Nations had been moved below the fold.
What an amazing day that was. My poor cousin’s fate had shoved aside all the news of the world. I still remember the feelings of hubris. Heady stuff for me—a short faux cowgirl from the high mountains of Nevada. But today I question my lack of empathy—my shifting the tragedy to make myself a hero. The notes I’m going through remind me of Alice and the looking glass—what was real?
On my way home from the newspaper office I stopped at a café and had a bowl of onion soup, deliciously sizzling with Gruyère cheese. The warmth of the soup, and my enthusiastic consumption of freshly baked bread and red wine, assured m
e that I would have a good morning’s sleep. I was sad about Stella, but had already become used to the idea of her death. Indeed, I felt relief that we finally had an answer.
As I turned onto the boulevard St. Michel, a newspaper truck pulled up to the curb in front of Monsieur Villières’ newspaper kiosk. While I watched, Villières climbed his ladder and pasted up the banner: American Actress Found Dead.
When I went upstairs to my room, I cut out the photograph of Stella from the Courier and taped it to the wall above my desk, next to a photo of Andy. I wrote a letter to Aunt Clara while they both smiled down on me. Too much death.
Both photos are here with me today. They’re taped onto a yellowed onionskin page. Stella was pretty, in an old-fashioned way. Thinly painted eyebrows—dark lipstick on a mouth shaped like an angel’s wings—glossy-shadowed, deeply set eyelids. Both Stella and Andy were wearing fedoras pulled down at a rakish angle. The only difference was that Stella had a feather in her hatband and Andy had a sweat stain around his.
Stella’s murder was being called “the murder of the century.” Her story was getting even more play than the 1919 story of Bluebeard—Henri Landau—and his slaughter of ten women and a young boy. The news media were taking advantage of the drama. And so were Pete and I. But Inspector Pascal had made it clear that he couldn’t feed me any more scoops. Because of Ramsey, a few people (supposedly sworn to secrecy) knew that Stella was my cousin.
I was baffled by the fervor created by the story. There were many murders in Paris–why had this one become such a cause célèbre? Why, when the rest of Europe and Asia were teetering on the edge of an all-out war, had the murder of my cousin become front-page news? The only rationale I could see was that the urgency of the world’s situation was beyond the control of the people; they felt helpless and needed to have their minds directed away from the dread of what might happen to their lives. I thought it strange that the psychopath Hitler, who was a bona fide threat, was seen as a vague menace–while Vosberg, simply an ex-con German psychopath, was raised to celebrity status. He was being called le monster allemand. The public was fascinated: that monster, who had no papers, crossed the frontier into France, killed a woman—and almost got away with it. It was a metaphor for what the German war machine was threatening across Europe—except that the Germans were indeed getting away with it. Adding fuel to the Vosberg fire were the insidious references in the tabloids to Stella being Jewish. Just as the consul, Clancy, had warned—anti-Semitism in France was percolating up to the surface. Even some of the major dailies were playing the Jewish card. It undoubtedly sold papers.
Last Train to Paris Page 9