“But Buster said that you were like a father to him!” she interrupted him, angrily. “If the French police get their hands on him, I’m sure my father will arrange for him to spend the rest of his life in a French prison. Or even worse, he’ll get him extradited to America to spend the rest of his life in an American prison. He wouldn’t last very long. I don’t know if you have any idea about the racial situation in America . . . ”
“I know the situation,” the Count replied, before continuing, “and Bartholomew is like a son to me. I would like no harm to come to him in France or America.”
Daphne thought to herself that she was now ready to spring her trap on the Count. She knew that Buster was dead and that, as she had overheard, Urby and the woman, Redtop, had taken him away to “deep six” him. Daphne had killed the black man they called Baby Langston, so she was the sole witness here to Buster’s death.
“I think that you should look for Buster,” Daphne finally said. “Buster has told me a lot about your political movement. I agree with your ideas. I’m in no hurry to go back to America. Under President Roosevelt, socialism is gaining ground every day. At least, that’s what my father says.”
“I have a question, my dear, and please don’t take offense.”
“Shoot,” Daphne said, sensing what the question would be.
“Assuming that the one hundred thousand dollar ransom came into your hands, and not Bartholomew’s, what would you do with it?”
Daphne pretended to mull things over and then fixed the Count’s blue eye with her violet-blue eye, beauty and innocence radiating from her face and her soft red mouth.
“I would give half of the money to a movement like yours and spend the rest getting myself set up in Germany. I have relatives there. Germany is the coming country, and I would like to meet Herr Hitler, the coming man,” she said.
As if in reply, the Count picked up the gold-framed color photograph of himself and Reichskanzler Hitler from his desk and handed it solemnly to Daphne. She took the photograph, held it lovingly, and then smiled winsomely at him.
“You know him? If I went to Germany, would you give me a written introduction?”
The Count put on his best smile. “Of course. But there is the matter of the ransom. And Bartholomew. And your father.”
“You and I could arrange for the ransom to be paid over. While you continue to search for Buster, of course.”
The Count pretended to be taken aback by her proposal. “But, surely, my dear, your father would expect your immediate safe return as a counterpart to paying the ransom.”
“I have read that there are such things as multiple kidnappings in France. Where a ransom is paid and the person doesn’t turn up, being kidnapped by another party for a new ransom.” Then she added, seemingly as an afterthought, “Buster asked for my father to pay a hundred thousand dollars in untraceable banknotes in small denominations and in gold, fifty-fifty.”
“So you . . . ”—he hesitated and corrected himself—“we would collect the ransom, you would turn half of it over to me, and you would use the other half to visit relatives in Germany and use my introductions to make contact with my dear Adolf, while I and my associates search for Bartholomew? Is that a fair résumé of your proposed course of action?” He arched his fingers under his chin while he awaited her answer.
“Yes. I think that you have the means to find Buster quickly. As to yours truly, I’d like to go to Germany and meet Herr Hitler as soon as possible,” she said with conviction.
The Count was impressed by the sheer audacity of the young woman, by the boldness of her vision, and the diamond-like hardness at the core of her being.
“An interesting proposition, young lady. Intrepid, even. But, as a gentleman, though not, unfortunately, a father, I feel that you should know that a beautiful young woman like yourself—may I be bold enough to say, the very portrait of Aryan beauty—might easily fall prey to overexcited German men. Even men from Herr Hitler’s disciplined ranks. You would be safer with a male . . . companion to watch over you. I would strongly advise it.”
“I couldn’t agree more. I know just the person for the job. I didn’t mention to you that Mr. Urby Brown is a private investigator. My father hired him to track me and Buster down. If I go to Germany and my father got word that Buster and I were there, he would surely ask Mr. Brown to run us to ground, wouldn’t he? I’m sure that Mr. Brown would do everything possible to protect me until he can bring me back.” She paused before continuing, “Except I don’t intend to come back right away, so he’ll have to protect me until I decide to leave Germany.” She said it in such a way as to convey to the Count that she would be irresistible to Urby Brown.
“Urby Brown?” the Count asked, seeming to search his memory for the name. “Oh yes, I have dealt with him in another affair.”
“He bears an amazing resemblance to you, you know,” Daphne said. “Who knows? He may become a pal of Herr Hitler’s, like you have,” Daphne said, picking up the gold-framed photograph.
The Count suddenly realized that the girl had come up with the perfect solution to many of his problems. His son’s exposure to the workings of the Nazi party and to Herr Hitler would surely convince him that Adolf and his ideas and Germany were irresistible. Germany would be a training ground for him. Afterward, he would return to France and invest himself in the Oriflamme cause and, one day, become the rightful heir to his name and his movement.
The beautiful, clever, and ruthless girl sitting in front of him was obviously sexually drawn to his son, and she appeared certain that he reciprocated. Their eventual marriage would produce legitimate heirs to the d’Uribé-Lebrun bloodlines.
In the meantime, the Count would set Pierre and his colleagues the task of finding Bartholomew Thigpen so that he could be assigned the mission of assassinating Léon Blum.
As for the girl, his complicity in helping her to carry out her plans gave him power over her. He would know how to make her and “Urby Brown” do his bidding, when the time came. All of these thoughts pleased him, and he smiled warmly at the dangerous young beauty sitting opposite him.
“Young lady, I think that your ideas are sound. We shall proceed as you desire.”
“Great. I think that when Mr. Brown returns to the stable and discovers that it’s burned to the ground and that I’m gone, he’ll need to find me, thinking that afterward he’ll return me to my father at the Ritz Hotel. I’ll have to disappear again when my father gets Buster’s ransom note. That’s when you step in, whisk me off to Germany, collect the ransom, and get my father to set Mr. Brown on my trail. You can wire me my share of the booty while I’m in Germany.” Daphne smiled, eager to get on with her plans.
The Count marveled at the girl’s sangfroid. She was acting as if she were heading off to the French Riviera or to the casinos of Monte Carlo for a holiday.
“All is agreed, my dear,” the Count said finally.
She clapped her hands, leapt to her feet, and came around the desk to envelop him in her soft, beautiful body. He smelled the faint hint of incense of Hélène’s favorite perfume, Poiret’s Nuit de Chine. The girl had dabbed it on her earlobe and her graceful neck; the scent of it on her body made all of his senses come alive again. He desired the young Daphne as much as he had ever desired Josephine, but the pain in his groin brought back the memory of the loss of his manhood at Verdun.
“I will prepare the necessary introductions to my dear Adolf Hitler for you. You will leave for Berlin in a few days. Pierre and his assistants will give you all of the details of your arrangements for the coming days. Don’t worry, my dear, everything will go well. You may stay here meanwhile.”
Daphne felt that she had played the Count expertly and that she had taken a giant step toward achieving her goal of getting to grips with the Führer.
When Daphne left his office to retire to Countess Hélène’s bedroom, the Count sprang to his feet and rushed to open a safe concealed behind the seventeenth-century portrait of Count Max
imilien d’Uribé-Lebrun, Marshal of France under Louis XIII. The Count rummaged around in the safe for a minute, extracting the three gold-colored box files bearing his family crest and numbered from one to three in Roman numerals. The Count had written the name “Le Comte Charles-Emmanuel d’Uribé-Lebrun” on each file in his precise French copperplate script.
File I contained written reports about “Urby Lebrun,” which he had jotted down after conversations with Pierre on his return from dsicreet visits to New Orleans over the years to check on Urby, the Irish priest, and the Jews Urby frequented, namely one Hannah Korngold and her family of lowly rag-and-bone merchants. There were also masses of information about Urby and his frequentations from the time of his arrival in France twenty years ago up to the present. This material had been provided by the Count’s network, which included functionaries in the police and the Paris Prefecture, waiters at restaurants and barmen, including Fabrice Lourmel at the Hôtel Lutetia.
File II held information on Urby’s military service in the French Foreign Legion and the American-volunteer Lafayette Flying Corps of the French Army, with evaluations of his performance and accounts of the deeds of heroism, for which Urby had received his military decorations. It held a copy of the Count’s letter to Capitaine Lacroix, ordering Urby’s transfer from the French Foreign Legion to the Lafayette Flying Corps. The Count deemed that service in the air army posed less of a risk to Urby than fighting in the trenches with the Legion. Lacroix had also intervened, on the Count’s orders, to avoid Urby’s expulsion from France after the incident with the American soldiers before the Victory Parade in 1919.
The file also contained newspaper clippings about Urby’s career as a musician and the rise and fall of his Montmartre nightclub, “Urby’s Masked Ball,” which closed following the departure of Hannah Korngold to America. The Count smiled, remembering the temptations that he had arranged to place in Urby’s way until he succumbed to cocaine, as he had in Harlem.
As the Count had anticipated, the Jewess had left his addicted son to return to America. Fortunately, the Count reflected, his son had overcome his addictions, once again showing the strength of character imbued in him by his d’Uribé-Lebrun lineage.
The Count smiled wryly to himself, remembering that he had also played a further role in the closing of Urby’s nightclub and crippling the growth of American black jazz in Paris. Acting behind the scenes, he had successfully manipulated the French musicians’ union into agitating for the enforcement of an old law imposing a 10 percent limit on the number of non-French musicians employed in a jazz band or orchestra in Paris.
His son was now reduced to running a private investigation agency, which the Count conspired to keep on the edge of bankruptcy. However, he had ordered his agents in the Prefecture of Police not to close it down because its precarious existence enabled him to keep tabs on Urby’s doings. At the same time, the continual menace of a deportation order hanging over his son’s head kept him in line, although there was no danger of his being deported. The Count intended to keep his son in France at all costs because he intended to make him his successor.
The Count mused upon his son’s destiny: Urby had been living under the illusion that he was a free man from the moment he had “escaped” New Orleans after Pierre had put the torch to the Colored Waifs’ Home and destroyed the Irish priest. But, that had been the Count’s opening gambit in a match whose endgame was his son’s arrival on French soil.
File III was entirely devoted to the correspondence with which the Irish priest from New Orleans had deluged him. It was in this file that the Count searched for the priest’s first letter, which he had reread countless times over the years.
The letter, yellowed with age, was dated July 10, 1895. In it, Father Gohegan wrote that the Count’s quadroon lover, Josephine Dubois, had confessed to him that the Count had fathered her son, making the boy an octoroon, of one-eighth African blood, by the race laws prevailing in the South. She had pleaded with Father Gohegan to let the boy be raised as white. When he refused, she had fallen at his feet and begged him to send the baby son to his father in France. The Count had told her, she said, that they weren’t so harsh about race there.
A week later, the priest had written to announce that Josephine Dubois had hanged herself. The priest felt guilt over her death. Afterward, the priest had sent the Count letter after letter, imploring him to send money so that he could finance the boy’s travel to France to join him, as his mother had wished.
Some twenty years had passed since his son had arrived in France after the Count’s various machinations. He had kept track of his movements and, unknown to Urby, had intervened a number of times to shape the direction of his life. But the Count had resolved never to meet with him face to face, unless the vicissitudes of his own life left the Count no other option.
The February 6 debacle with the failure of the Fascist and monarchist coup d’état against the French government made him realize that the moment had come for him to reclaim his son and chain him to his destiny as heir to the lineage of the d’Uribé-Lebrun. He had been considering how to do that when his son had appeared in his office of his own accord, requesting permission for Bartholomew to play in tonight’s charity concert.
Urby Lebrun, to whom the Count had assigned the name Charles Emmanuel d’Uribé-Lebrun, in keeping with the traditions of his family, was the only child that he could ever have because his grave wounds from shrapnel to the groin at the Battle of Verdun had precluded him from ever having another heir to his own d’Uribé-Lebrun bloodlines.
Now sixty years old, the Count felt that his hours on earth were dwindling and that he must now prepare his son for his predestined role.
CHAPTER 11
Paris, Saturday morning, February 10, 1934
Disposing of Buster had taken its toll on me and Redtop, physically and emotionally. We had finally found a secluded stretch of shore just outside Argenteuil near a jetty with a rowboat moored to it. I had had to drag the sack with Buster and the anvil inside out of the car and manhandle it into the rowboat. I had boarded the boat and rowed out into the Seine as far from the shore as I felt I could swim back to if the rowboat swamped. The hardest part was casting the body overboard. It had taken me an hour to inch the body over the side. I had to struggle to keep the boat from capsizing and plunging me into the icy water with Buster.
When I was near my breaking point, I gave one last heave and Buster was gone. I had drifted out so far that it took me another hour to row back to the jetty and catch the rope that Redtop threw me to moor the rowboat.
Dawn was breaking by the time we finished. My clothes were soaking wet, so I took them off and wrapped myself in some blankets that Redtop kept in the trunk of the Hispano-Suiza. I shivered all the way back to Paris, although Redtop had turned the heat up to full blast.
When I woke up, we were back in Paris. I looked at my watch: it was nearly 7:00 a.m. The streets were emptier than usual for a Saturday morning, so I was able to slip out of Redtop’s car, wearing the blankets and carrying my clothes. Redtop was so frightened that she had gone mute. I told her that I needed to catch a few hours of sleep and asked her to tell Stanley that I would meet him at his place at ten.
I dragged myself up the flight of stairs to my office. I fumbled the keys out of my waterlogged pants pocket and looked in on my office on the first floor. Things looked the same, but nothing would be the same again I said to myself, remembering the sight of Buster’s head jerking from my bullet to his ear. I climbed another floor to my apartment, locked the door behind me, walked quickly to my bedroom, and threw myself into my unmade bed. I started to set the clock but I must have passed out . . .
I wonder if I’m dreaming that I can hear a loud knocking, like a club smashing against a door. Suddenly, I’m surrounded by poor white toughs in the white neighborhood beyond the Battlefield. They walk around me, as if I’m invisible, although it’s broad daylight. Crowds flow past me, drawing me along in their wake. Shouts of “
lynch the nigger!” grow louder. An old white man with a bright red beard smiles at me and grips me by the shoulders, staring into my eyes.
“How old are you son?” he asks.
“Nearfifteen,” I answer.
“You ever seen a lynchin’?”
“No, sir. ”
The man gives out a loud whoop of joy and pushes me to the front of the mob. “You a virgin, boy. Time to lose your cherry!”
An old black man, blood gushing from his nose, lies on the ground, books strewn around him. He has been thrown out of a police van by a group of policemen and men dressed in Klan robes. They throw more books out of the van, rip them up, and add them to a bonfire started by the mob. A cheer and rebel yells rise from the crowd. A stern-looking woman, standing beside her pretty blonde daughter, pokes me in the chest as I turn my head away. The daughter, who is a few years younger than me, rubs a hand over my ribs. She has long, white-blonde hair, which covers one of her eyes. The one that I can see is violet-blue. Her mother looks at the two of us and smiles.
“That darky a teacherman,” she says. “The police heard him teaching ’bout Yankees freeing the darkies. They always gonna be slaves, whatever them Jew Communists say. ”
Around me, children chant “lynch the nigger!” in high-pitched voices, as though they were singing in a children’s church choir. Her daughter joins in, but I remain silent. The woman eyes me suspiciously and says, “You deaf and dumb? Join in, boy!”
“No, ma’am, I can’t say them words,” I answer.
“You a nigger lover, son? You sure had me fooled. Thought you was one of us.” She cups her hands around her mouth, ready to call the mob onto me.
“Lynch the nigger! Lynch the nigger!” I shout, singing along with the others. The woman beams, hugs me.
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