Murder Under the Palms

by Stefanie Matteson

  She would be relieved when the pattern of life returned to something less complicated. Her life had never come even close to traveling in a straight and steady line, but a gentle arabesque might be nice.

  A few minutes later, they were sitting on barstools at a high wooden table chowing down on chicken wings with Chernobyl sauce (the sauce came in mild, medium, and Chernobyl) at a highway establishment called Hooter’s that was named after the ample endowments of its skimpily clad waitresses and possibly for the utterances emitted by the clientele in appreciation thereof.

  Yes, they were in the South, Charlotte thought.

  “Very attractive personnel,” said Eddie, with a sideways glance at the shapely young woman who had just set down their mugs of beer. She wore a tight orange T-shirt bearing a cartoon of an owl, the Hooter’s logo, and black short-shorts with slits up the sides.

  “Aren’t you too old to be gawking like a teenager?” Charlotte teased.

  “You’re never too old,” Eddie replied with a grin. He picked up his mug and took a long swig. “Well, what do you think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “The first question is, Are Paul Federov and Paul Feder one and the same?” he said, reaching into the serving bowl for another chicken wing.

  “I think they must be,” Charlotte replied and proceeded to tell him what the Smiths had said about Paul’s White Russian background, and what Dede had said about his lead soldier collection specializing in figures of the Imperial Russian Army. “But it should be easy enough to find out.”

  Eddie nodded. “So what now?” he asked as he munched.

  “Okay, let’s take this one step at a time,” Charlotte said. “Paul Federov, or Paul Feder as we know him, grows up in a Russian neighborhood in Queens where he becomes friends with a German named Wilhem Roehrer, who has fascist sympathies. By the way, did you recognize Roehrer?”

  “I don’t know,” Eddie replied. “He was the same type as the guy on the Normandie: the full, fleshy face. But I couldn’t say for sure. I didn’t see him that well at the time. He was looking down at the roll of linoleum.”

  “What about Feder? Do you remember him from the party?” Charlotte called up a mental picture of Paul. “He was very tall—six foot three or four—with very pale gray eyes, just like the eyes you remembered Roehrer’s accomplice as having.”

  Eddie shook his head. “I didn’t meet him, though I did see the photo in the newspaper. I couldn’t tell; it wasn’t a very good picture.”

  “That’s okay. We can get a better one from the police.” Charlotte remembered those same gray eyes, staring lifelessly up from the beach. “Okay, to continue. Roehrer and Federov attend a fascist summer camp in Connecticut, where, unbeknownst to them, they are singled out by an Abwehr agent, code name the Fox, to be operatives in a plot to sabotage the Normandie: Operation Golden Bird. The agent contacts a Bund member back in Queens, who recruits them for the sabotage caper. Have. I got it right?”

  “As I understand it.”

  “The Fox makes arrangements for them to work for the company that is laying the linoleum. He provides them with an incendiary device and sets up the circumstances in which they are to detonate it, namely the removal of the light stanchions in the vicinity of a stack of inflammable life preservers. Fifty years later, a man shows up on Roehrer’s doorstep and wants to know who his accomplice was. Roehrer, who is dying, and is concerned about his wife’s financial security, tells him to come back with money.”

  “Which he does, two days later,” Eddie added as he took another swig of his beer. “This sauce is really hot,” he said.

  Charlotte also took a swig of the cold beer, and then continued: “The next week, Paul Feder is murdered. The murder takes place on the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandie fire. Since the congruence of the dates is too improbable to be written off to coincidence, I think we have to work under the assumption that Feder’s murder was related to Operation Golden Bird. Especially since someone had just visited Roehrer the week before seeking to discover the identity of his accomplice.”

  “I agree,” Eddie said.

  “Which means that we can eliminate Lydia and the admiral as suspects,” Charlotte added. She thought of Occam’s Razor again: another unnecessary element in the subject being analyzed had been eliminated.

  It was odd how all the players in the drama had assembled in Florida, Charlotte thought. But then, Florida was a place where old warhorses came to die, if they weren’t dead already or living in California. She remembered once reading a quote to the effect that Palm Beach was a place where few things begin but many things end.

  Eddie looked up from his plate of chicken wings. “And from there?”

  Charotte shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you have any ideas?”

  “Only one,” he replied. “This is how it goes: the whole sabotage idea lies dormant for all these years. Then one day my memory decides to kick into gear, and I start looking into what happened on the Normandie fifty years ago. By coincidence, somebody else starts looking into the same event at the same time—somebody who wants the information badly enough to pay for it.”

  “Maybe the authorities are more interested in the Normandie fire than you thought,” Charlotte suggested.

  “For argument’s sake, let’s call the other party the FBI. I think this is what may have happened. I think Feder knew who the Fox was. I think the Fox got wind of the reopening of the investigation and killed Feder to prevent him from revealing his identity to whoever was looking into the case.”

  “Rubbing out the witness. But why wouldn’t the Fox have killed Roehrer? Wouldn’t he have assumed that Roehrer knew too?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Eddie.

  “What about the significance of the date—the fiftieth anniversary?”

  “Maybe the Fox is a murderer with a sense of style. Maybe he liked the irony of killing the person who might expose him on the anniversary of his act of sabotage. Or maybe he’s just a neat freak: someone who likes to have all his ducks lined up in a row.”

  Charlotte nodded thoughtfully. “How can we find out who the Fox is?” She asked, then went on to answer her own question. “I know! We could track down the party that was making the inquiries—the FBI, or whoever—and find out if they have any information about him.”

  “How would we do that?”

  “Contact the Jewish Documentation Center. Ask if anyone else has been inquiring about Oberscharführer Wilhelm Roerher. If that’s how you found Roehrer, it might be how someone else found him too. Eddie?” she said. But his attention was elsewhere.

  “I’m thinking about the Fox,” he said.

  “Yes?” Charlotte prompted.

  “He would have to be an American with a reputation to protect. If he was a former Nazi living in a foreign country, it seems unlikely that he would have gotten wind of the fact that investigators had reopened the Normandie case.”

  “Nor would he probably have cared,” Charlotte offered. “How likely is it that they would come after him after all these years?”

  Eddie nodded and then continued. “He would also have to have been one of the ten Navy officers supervising the conversion or an official with the Robins Drydock Company, in order to have arranged the circumstances as he did.”

  “Like Jack McLean?”

  “Or me. Or probably dozens of others.”

  “You said the Attorney General’s report gave the names of all the people who were aboard at the time of the fire,” she said. “We might be able to select a list of possible suspects from that.”

  “Here’s a possibility,” Eddie said as he tossed a chicken bone into the rapidly filling discard bucket.

  “Yes?”

  “Roehrer said that he and Federov came to the attention of the Fox through a Russian fascist summer camp in Connecticut. It shouldn’t be hard to find out more about this camp. Then we could see if any of the people on the list had a connection with the camp, or with the area.�
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  Charlotte was munching on her chicken wings.

  “Charlotte?” Eddie said. He waited a minute for her reply, and then said, “Charlotte, are you there?” He waved a hand in front of her face.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  She looked up at him. “Do you remember describing what happened to you when you walked into the Grand Salon at Villa Normandie? How the combination of the smell of the smoke, the song the piano player was playing, and the way it looked unleashed a flood of memories?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, something of the same sort has just happened to me. Except that the memories weren’t buried as the result of a head trauma. The door was just closed, the memories forgotten.”

  Eddie looked at her, puzzled.

  “What you just said about the summer camp triggered a memory,” she said. “Eddie, I know that camp.”

  She told him the story in-between naps on the long ride back across the desolate scrubland of central Florida, which lay baking under the tropical sun. The main character in the story was Aleksandr Andreivich Koproski, or as he had been known in the small town of Hadfield, Connecticut, “the count.” A minor Russian nobleman, he had fought with the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army in the Ukraine, where he was injured. After the collapse of the Whites, he escaped to Constantinople. From there he eventually made his way to Paris, where he met an American Red Cross nurse, Dorothy Welland, who was serving with the relief forces. She was an heiress, twenty years older than he. Captivated by the romance of helping a tragic, titled Russian aristocrat, she took him under her wing and nursed him back to health. Then she brought him back to Connecticut and introduced him into New England society. Eventually she married him, and they set up housekeeping at a dairy farm in Hadfield, High Gate Farm, that had been purchased for them by her father. The farm became the gathering place for White Russian emigrés, including Prince Theodore, who was a nephew of the czar and a pretender to the Russian throne.

  As Charlotte told the story, she found that she remembered more of the details with each sentence. It had been years since she had even thought about the count and his eccentric entourage.

  “Charlotte,” said Eddie, interrupting the flow of her story, “how do you know all this?”

  “I was a neighbor of sorts: a student at a finishing school in Hadfield, Miss Walker’s School for Girls. My father paid to send me there, which was about his only contribution to my upbringing. It’s no longer there, in part because of the count. But that’s another story. It was right next door to High Gate Farm.” She resumed her story: “But the count quickly became bored with the life of a country squire, and became involved in Russian monarchist politics. Eventually he founded a political organization whose goal was to overthrow the Soviet regime and restore the Romanovs to the throne. The organization was headquartered at the farm and funded by his wife’s money.”

  “Was that the Russian Fascist United Front that Roehrer talked about?”

  “I don’t remember the name, but it must have been,” she said, and then continued: “At first he was fairly rational about his mission, but as time went on he began to suffer from delusions of grandeur. He saw himself as the future White Russian führer. At one point, he even had postage stamps printed up with his image on them. He liked to think of himself as part of a world trio—Hitler, Mussolini, and Koprosky—who were destined to shape twentieth-century history.”

  “Was this guy for real?” Eddie said incredulously.

  Charlotte nodded. “He sounds crazier than he really was. A lot of what he did, he did in jest: he was a showman, a buffoon, an incorrigible romantic.”

  “In other words, a real character.”

  “To say the least,” she agreed. “He liked to dress up in storm trooper regalia: brown shirt, Sam Browne belt, jackboots, swagger stick, swastika armbands. Very Erich von Stroheim. He’d drive around Hadfield in one of his Pierce Arrows with swastika pennants flying from the fenders. He turned one of the cow barns into a shooting gallery. He would invite guests to take pot shots at photographs of Stalin and other Communist leaders. I managed to hit Stalin right on the nose once,” she added proudly.

  “What did the town think of this guy?”

  “Well, it was a pretty sleepy little town, and I think a lot of people appreciated the fact that he livened it up. As my housemother once commented, ‘He stands out in Hadfield like a Hottentot at a meeting of the DAR.’ I think they were amused more than anything else. New Englanders have always had a high tolerance for eccentricity. Also, he was a charming man and very well-liked. People thought of him as a romantic—a quixotic figure with the impossible dream of restoring the Russian monarchy.”

  “In jackboots?”

  “You’ve got to remember, this was early on. Hitler still wasn’t perceived as being the threat he later became. Also, despite the swastikas, Alex—”

  “Alex?” interrupted Eddie.

  Charlotte smiled. “We were on a first-name basis. That’s yet another story, which I’ll tell you sometime. Anyway, despite the swastikas, Alex forswore any Nazi associations. He would say over and over again that just because he was anti-Communist didn’t mean that he was pro-Nazi. It was the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-ally philosophy.”

  “What did his wife’s family think of him?” Eddie asked.

  “They destested him. He was an embarrassment to them. Once he came to a party they were throwing at the Waldorf Astoria in his storm trooper garb. But their politics were almost as extreme, though more subtly expressed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It may have been Alex who was parading around in jackboots, but the Wellands also had fascist sympathies,” Charlotte explained. “They were like a lot of wealthy families at that time. They respected Hitler for solving Germany’s unemployment problems and Mussolini for making the trains run on time. But to get back to Alex: as time went on, he became more and more deluded. He started gathering arms in preparation for the coming struggle against the Reds, and he started training troops. He converted his chicken coops into dormitories for a summer camp for Russian youths from New York.”

  “Youths like Paul Federov?”

  “Exactly. He looked on these young men as the nucleus of a volunteer army that would some day reclaim Russia from Stalin’s grip. You could think of them in terms of Hitler Youth.”

  “Koprosky Youth,” said Eddie.

  “Exactly. Loyal and obedient fighters willing to risk everything to advance the cause. I don’t remember much about the camp, actually, since I wasn’t at school in the summer. But there was a small coterie of these young men who lived at the farm year-round.”

  “Are you suggesting that he’s the Fox?”

  She shook her head. “He was arrested in January, 1942.”

  “For what?”

  “Espionage. I thought the charges were ridiculous, as did everyone who knew him. But it was right after Pearl Harbor; people were convinced there were spies under every bed. One of the Russian fascist satellite organizations to which he had sent money—Dorothy’s money, of course—had a remote connection with the Bund. He was prosecuted by a politician who was trying to make a name for himself. He served five years in a federal penitentiary.”

  “But someone who was associated with him could be the Fox.”

  “I think it’s a good bet. Someone who observed Roehrer and Federov, and thought they would make likely recruits for Operation Golden Bird. The question is, How do we find out who? Dorothy died in the fifties, and Alex died twelve years ago. But there must still be people in Hadfield who might remember Alex’s associates. Do you still have the list of the names of those who were aboard the ship at the time of the fire?”

  Eddie nodded. “It’s at my hotel.”

  “Then maybe we could take it up to Hadfield and show it around.”

  Eddie shivered. “Brr,” he said. “I’m a California boy. I’m not sure my blood’s thick enough for Connecticut in Fe
bruary.”

  “C’mon,” Charlotte chided him. “But first we have to make sure that Paul Federov and Paul Feder are the same person.”

  They got back to Palm Beach just after seven and headed directly for Château en Espagne in search of concrete evidence that Federov and Feder were one and the same. After parking on the street in front of the house, they opened the wrought-iron gate and walked down the path to the jungle-enclosed courtyard that had so intrigued Charlotte on her earlier visit, and which set the house apart from its carefully manicured neighborhood. On this visit, she noticed little things that she had missed the first time. The wood of the front door was pitted and old, and its cast-iron hinges looked as if they had been scavenged from a European monastery. Moss-covered statues were tucked away in niches that had been carved out of the lush tropical foliage at the edges of the courtyard, and old urns were planted with gardenias, whose sweet scent perfumed the air. The house had lost none of its appeal. If anything, the romantic quality that had captivated her on her earlier visit was enhanced by the fact that the house was no longer occupied. In the violet twilight, it had the air of an abandoned farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside.

  “Nice place,” said Eddie, looking up at the tower. He was clearly charmed as well. “I wonder what’s going to happen to it now.”

  “Dede says it will probably be put up for sale.” As Charlotte spoke, the thought passed through her mind again that she might buy it, and as it did, she felt a pang of nervousness. Was she ready to commit to the life of the lotus-eaters? she wondered. After all, she was at heart a Yankee ascetic, as at home as a puffin on the rock-bound coast of Maine, where her summer house was located.