Rage in Paris

by Kirby Williams

  “This is very bad,” Schulz-Horn said calmly. The headline says, ‘Spy Plot of American Mata Hari unearthed by Prime Minister of Prussia, Hermann Goering.’” He spoke in a low, steady voice. “It tells Elsa Herbst’s story of a young American woman who had introduced herself into the Goering residence as ‘Daphne Robinson’ after Chancellor Hitler’s reception on Wednesday night.” The colonel read from the newspaper again. “Fraülein Herbst then remembered where she had heard the name before; she had been present at the birth of a baby girl so named in 1913 when she was a nurse at Kaiser Wilhelm II’s private clinic in Bavaria. The baby was the illegitimate daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II and, thus, a Hohenzollern. She had aroused Elsa’s and Minister Goering’s suspicions by her constant attempts to see the Führer alone. It seems that the girl wished to assassinate the Führer, like a modern-day Charlotte Corday, no doubt a spy acting under the express instructions of the Jew Franklin Roosevelt and his Washington cabal of Jews and Negroes. All forces of order have been mobilized to capture the American Mata Hari before she escapes from the Fuhrer’s righteous wrath.”

  As he read out the article, Daphne went pale, and she fell to the floor, weeping, as if her whole world had been ripped apart. I ran to her and held her in my arms. She was trembling so badly that I could hardly hold onto her.

  “But I am Daphne Robinson,” she cried. Then a sudden realization seemed to come over her, and she looked first at me and then at Schulz-Horn.

  “That awful Herbst woman kept calling me ‘Ihre Hoheit,’ Your Highness. This is all Goering’s doing. The man assaulted me and he’s trying to deflect blame from himself.”

  “Assaulted you?” Schulz-Horn thundered. “The swine!” I helped Daphne get to her feet, trying to steady her and keep her from falling again. Her heartrending sobs gripped all of us.

  “It must all be lies,” she wailed.

  “No, my dear, I’m sorry to say it, but it’s the truth,” Schulz-Horn said. “You are the daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II and a Hohenzollern. You were born in a private clinic in Bavaria. The records exist, I have seen them with my own eyes.”

  “But what about my mother? She died in the torpedoing of the Lusitania with her parents when I was a baby. And father?”

  “He is, in fact, your half-brother. You have the same mother.”

  Startled, she said, “You mean grandmother’s my mother?”

  “I’m afraid so,” he said. “You are the victim of a cruel masquerade.” Daphne crumpled into my arms and wept as if she were going to go crazy.

  “We must change our plans,” one of the officers said. “The Fraülein and Herr Brown cannot leave by train.”

  “No, Georg,” Schulz-Horn agreed. “They must leave Cologne under escort, and then two of the outriders will take them across the French border on motorcycles at a point where it is rarely guarded. I suggest that you head for Metz, going through Luxemburg. From there, Mr. Brown, I expect that you have friends who will help you get to Paris with Fraülein . . . Hohenzollern.”

  “We can make it,” I said. “If you can get us to Metz, I’ll have Mr. Robinson—”

  “No!” Daphne shouted. “I refuse to see him until I’ve had a chance to think things through!”

  “We’ll find a hotel in Metz and stay there until you’re ready to go to Paris, all right?” I asked. Daphne nodded her agreement, and the colonel’s men sprang into action. They escorted us to the limousine. Daphne and I climbed in, and Schulz-Horn tapped on the car’s opaque window. I rolled it down, and he shook hands with me.

  “Good luck,” Schulz-Horn said. “Daphne, you are a gifted singer. Mr. Brown, it was an honor to play . . . ”

  “We’ll do it again, at Urby’s Masked Ball.”

  “What’s that?” Daphne sniffled.

  “My old nightclub in Montmartre. I’ll tell you about it on the way to France,” I said. The other officers shook my hand and bowed over Daphne’s.

  “Thank you for everything,” one of them said to me. “I speak for all in saying that we will never forget this evening.”

  The limousine, flanked by the four outriders, sped off. As it passed through Cologne, I could see, in the light from burning bonfires of books, brown-shirted mobs smashing shop windows, daubing Stars of David and swastikas on shops, and stomping on people lying on the sidewalks.

  Daphne shuddered and said, “I feel like I’m inside a nightmare.” She laid her head on my shoulder, and she slept until we reached the French border. I woke Daphne up and we climbed onto two of the motorcycles. One of the officers handed me a knife, and I cut off the bottom of Daphne’s silk evening gown and wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl.

  I smiled at her. “It’s going to get chilly on the ride.”

  “Thank you,” she said and kissed my palm. “I love you. Whatever happens, remember that.”

  “I’ll remember,” I said. Then we roared off into the darkness. The officers turned on their headlights briefly when we saw road signs on the border, and then we hurtled along the French road toward Metz in pitch darkness.

  CHAPTER 23

  Paris, Saturday, February 17, 1934

  They left us and our luggage at the Hotel de la Poste in Metz, saluted, and then roared off back to Germany. We booked ourselves into a simple room under the name Mr. and Mrs. John James, amazingly with no questions asked. It was well past midnight. The hotel’s owner, Monsieur Félix, sat us down at the kitchen table, made us ham and cheese omelets, and plunked a baguette and a bottle of red wine before us. We were both starving, only having had time to gulp down a glass of champagne in Cologne before we escaped to France.

  After finishing off the meal with some homemade pâtés, we took the rest of the bottle to our room.

  “Dormez bien, mes enfants,” Monsieur Félix said. He kissed Daphne on both cheeks and shook my hand until I thought that he would yank it off. Daphne had bowled him over; he looked at her as if she were an angel on divine visitation to his small hotel.

  “We’ll sleep well, thanks to you,” I said. He winked knowingly, and Daphne and I climbed the steps to our room.

  We sat on the bed, both of us drained by the events of the day—our narrow escape from the Nazis and the long rides in the car and on motorcycles. We sat in silence, drinking the last of the wine.

  We should have gone to sleep then, but we both had an urge to clear things up.

  “I guess we’d better talk,” I said. “We won’t have much time when we get back to Paris.”

  “All right. More wine? It’s really good, isn’t it?”

  “That would be nice,” I said. She gave me a long, lingering kiss, and then she walked over to the table. I had to have some answers to set my mind at rest, and she did, too, I felt.

  I stared at the cheap chandelier hanging from the ceiling. It was covered in the grime of days and nights and years, like I was. Daphne looked clean and shining, like newly minted gold, but I suspected that she had an old soul, and that it was even more scarred and dirty than my own. I heard her coming back to the bed, and the look on my face drove the smile from hers. She sat down next to me. We clinked glasses.

  “We’re alive, at least,” she said, tentatively.

  “Why did you do it, Daphne?”

  She feigned not to understand.

  “Do what specifically? I’ve done so many bad things in the last ten days that you have to tell me which ‘it’ you mean.”

  “Let’s start with the phony kidnapping. Why did you go through all that pretense that Buster had kidnapped you?”

  “When Mr. Bontemps got in touch with Buster and said he wanted him to be his drummer at the charity concert last Saturday, he was happy at first. Then he started worrying if he would be good enough, and that got him back onto his drugs. Then he got angry at everybody, but mainly Count d’Uribé-Lebrun and Mr. Bontemps. He said they had kept him down, kept him from becoming a star like Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington. He was really going off his rocker. Only the drugs kept him on it.”


  “So, he needed more cash to feed his habit. Was the idea of the kidnapping his or yours?”

  “He said that we could fake a kidnapping and pin it on Stanley. I saw the chance to get away from my father . . . ” She stopped and finished her glass of wine and got up shakily to get more. I could hear her trying to stop herself from crying. She came back to the bed and continued, “Get away from my brother. Urby, now that I know the story about my grandmother and the Kaiser and that he’s my brother and she’s my mother, I can understand some things I didn’t before. When I got older . . . ”—she hesitated—“and prettier, he would put his hands on me, and he started threatening to cut my allowance if I didn’t let him feel me up. I was going crazy until I met Buster at a nightclub in Harlem on a date with a boy from Williams College. I was a virgin, and when Buster wasn’t taking drugs he was good to me.”

  “How did you and Buster make it to France?”

  “He told me that he had come into some money from France. He didn’t tell me anything else for sure, but he hinted there was more money for the taking, so I figured he was blackmailing somebody. He said that he already had enough in hand for us to book passage on the Ile de France and live the good life in Paris for a while. I told my grandmother—” She stopped and went on, “Anyway, I told her that I wanted to see what was going on in Germany firsthand and visit our relatives there. We often talked politics; she convinced me that the Nazis were a good thing. I told her what her son was trying with me, and she was horrified. She promised to give me enough money to travel around Europe while she had it out with my . . . brother. I had to promise her that I would go to Germany and keep it secret from . . . her husband. Of course, I didn’t tell her about Buster, and I didn’t tell her that I planned to stay in Europe and not finish my degree at Smith. So, I had money of my own, and she promised to wire me more.” Daphne searched my face to see how her story was going down with me. I didn’t give anything away.

  She continued, “Buster’s money ran out quickly, and then he joined Count d’Uribé-Lebrun’s bunch out of the blue. The Count paid Buster wages like his other Oriflamme troopers. But Buster ran through his money like it was water, and whenever he found money in my purse, he stole from me, too. Then Buster came up with the idea that I should send my brother a cable asking him to come to Paris to rescue me from him. Once he was here, Buster figured that he could fake a kidnapping and get enough ransom money to ‘hit the jackpot.’ That’s what he called it. He didn’t stop to think that my brother would hire a private eye to track us down, Urby. Sorry.”

  “So, the fake kidnapping and ransom ploy was Buster’s idea at first, and then you filled in all the blanks.”

  “That’s right. Now it’s my turn to ask you some questions. Who kidnapped Buster and me at La Belle Princesse when Buster and I came for the rehearsal? Was it the owner of the club, Hambone Gaylord?”

  “No, it was Stanley’s idea, and I went along with it. But it wasn’t a kidnapping. When Barnet Robinson hired me to find you and Buster, he paid me in gold dollar certificates, and President Roosevelt had taken America off the gold standard. So, trying to use those gold dollars could have gotten me into big trouble,” I paused, “in more ways than one. We were going to turn you over to your brother later the same day, if he coughed up what he owed me. In real money.”

  “So, you and Stanley were going to hold me and Buster for a few hours, teach my brother a lesson because he tried to cheat you, and then turn me over to him the same day? Before the charity concert? When you’d use another drummer?”

  “Yeah. That’s it, more or less.”

  Daphne rocked with laughter, spilling some of her wine on the bed.

  “That’s rich,” she said. “You and Mr. Bontemps were going to make a monkey out of Buster. You never wanted him to be the drummer at the concert. Stanley did want to keep him down. Buster was right about that all along.”

  “Look, Daphne. Buster was once the best jazz drummer in Harlem. But the drugs took it all away. They changed him into Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.”

  Daphne got up and filled our glasses again. I didn’t like the sound of her laughter.

  “You really use a lot of big words for an oldjazzbo. ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde’? What were you, a lit major?” Daphne was beginning to turn nasty, for the first time since I met her. Her angel wings were slipping.

  “I like to read, yes. I’m not just a dumb private eye. Or a dumb ‘old jazzbo.’ That’s insulting, you know.”

  “You killed Buster,” she suddenly hissed. “Then you and that woman Redtop deep-sixed him in the Seine.”

  There it was. Daphne had faked being unconscious at Stanley’s stables.

  “He had Redtop’s shotgun pointed at her head. He was going to blow her brains out.”

  Daphne calmed down. “I know. I heard her thanking you. I’m sorry for shouting at you, Urby. I must be getting tired. It’s been a long day. I’m sorry for the stupid things I’ve said.” She kissed me on the cheek and laid her head against my shoulder.

  “What happened to Baby Langston?” I asked. She sat up and the way she answered made me think she was lying; it was all too well rehearsed.

  “I don’t know. I must have fainted and, when I woke up, the Count and that man of his, Pierre, were there. They took me away, and I saw Pierre set fire to the stables. Maybe he was inside.”

  “He wasn’t inside. I talked to a fireman and checked those burned stables myself. There was no sign of human remains.”

  Daphne shrugged her shoulders and drank some more wine. “You’ll have to ask the Count, then. Sorry, but I can’t help you.”

  “What happened to the ransom money? You dictated the ransom note, didn’t you? The one in Buster’s handwriting?”

  “Guilty,” she said. “The Count said that he would deal with what my brother passed to him to pay the ransom. He gave me money from his own funds to get to Germany.”

  “But you made him think that Buster was with you?”

  “No, that was his idea to lead my brother on. He and his men were going to hunt for Buster in France.”

  “Was going to La Pérouse his idea, too?”

  She looked uncomfortable and then smiled. “It was the Count’s idea for us to have lunch there, yes, but what happened at La Pérouse was real. Making love to you was real. You’re the first man who’s made me come alive inside. Buster made me do things that I don’t want to tell you about, that I don’t even want to think about. But with you, what I felt was real. I meant it.”

  “Real enough for you to slip a Mickey Finn into my champagne?”

  She looked shocked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You passed out and I couldn’t wake you up. I panicked and rang for the waiter and gave him the Count’s phone number. The next thing I knew, he had arrived and one of his men hustled me down the backstairs.”

  “And then he arranged for you to go to Germany. And to send another SOS to your brother, mentioning that Buster was holding you.”

  “Yes. I wanted my brother to send you after me, and the Count thought it was a good idea for you to be there to protect me. He was right, I guess.” She smiled and kissed me again. “You saved me, Urby.”

  “Daphne, a friend of mine in Berlin told me that you wanted to be Hitler’s bride. You were driven to Berlin by two men from the German embassy and Elsa Herbst.” I noticed that Daphne shivered at the name. “My friend said that Hitler’s a madman. You have everything—beauty, wealth, and, I discovered, a beautiful singing voice. You can do anything you want in America, become anything. Why Hitler? If you believe in all that Aryan racial stuff he spouts, what were you doing with Buster? Or me for that matter?”

  “It all has to do with what my grand . . . my mother told me when I was growing up. Now I realize that she was awestruck by the fact that as a German princess by birth, she had not only had an affair with the Kaiser, but had a child by him. A little Hohenzollern for a daughter. A real German royal, echt Deutsch. I would be the mothe
r of the ‘Thousand Year Reich.’ Now that I’ve seen it up close and been manhandled by that pig Goering, I don’t want any part of my mother’s Grimms’ fairy tale.”

  “Daphne, I think it’s time you went back to America. You’ll have to work a lot of things out with your brother and your mother, and it won’t be easy for you. I hate your brother for what he’s done to you.”

  “He’s messed you up, too,” Daphne said.

  “I’ll get over it,” I said. “He gave me a job to do; we made a contract and when I take you back to him, I’ll have honored it. And paid a debt I owe to a friend from the war.”

  “What about us, Urby? I love you. What’re we going to do?”

  “I think that I love you, too, Daphne. Loving you has brought my music back. I want to play jazz again, and you made my hunger for it come back. But staying together wouldn’t be good for either of us. I’m too old to keep up with you.”

  “In Cologne, you told the German colonel that you’re going to reopen Urby’s Masked Ball. Do you need a singer?”

  We laughed at that, and she went on. “I’m afraid that you’re right, though. I’ve had enough of Europe to last me for a while. I’ll regret it forever, but I guess we’re not going to stay together.”

  She picked up our empty glasses. “One last one. For the long road ahead to Paris? And after?” she asked.

  I nodded and she filled our glasses, while I thought about how hard it was going to be to lose her. I took my glass and looked at her beautiful face again.

  “Be happy, Daphne. You’ve got it all. Your brother can’t boss you around anymore. You should talk to your grandfather. I mean, he’s not really your grandfather but your brother’s father. He’ll straighten him out.”

  She suddenly smiled. “What a great idea!” she said triumphantly. We clinked glasses, undressed, kissed once more, and fell asleep naked in each other’s arms.