I woke up and the wall clock showed it was 22:00 hours (10:00 p.m.). I’d been in a drugged sleep for over twenty hours. Daphne was gone. She’d lied to me about giving me the knockout drops at La Pérouse. I’d let my guard down, and she’d promptly slipped me another Mickey Finn. Feeling like the world’s biggest sucker, I wondered what else she’d lied about.
Panicking, I threw on some clothes and rushed downstairs.
“Madame James took the 11:00 a.m. train to Paris this morning, Monsieur James,” Mr. Félix said. “She told me that you were very tired and not to awaken you under any circumstances.” He rummaged through some papers behind his front desk. “She left this note for you,” he said, passing it to me. I read it, my head spinning:
Darling, I wanted to wait for you, but you were sleeping so peacefully that I didn’t want to disturb you. I’m going to the Ritz to have it out with my brother. Don’t worry, I’ll tell him that you brought me back alive from Germany. After the way he cheated you with those gold certificates, I’ll make sure that he gives you a bonus that will be big enough for you to re-open Urby’s Masked Ball and still not have to worry about money for a long time. I’ll have your treasure trove delivered to Mr. Stanley Bontemps. If my brother balks at the amount I’m going to squeeze out of him, I’ll tell his father what my big brother and my fake grandmother have been up to with Kaiser Bill. That will put the fear of God in him! (Smile).
Try to forget us Robinsons and, especially, me. I love you with all my heart, but I don’t deserve your love. Maybe our paths will cross again someday. Don’t ever hate me, please. I couldn’t bear it. Your Daphne (Hohenzollern?!).
Mr. Felix was watching me as I read the letter, a smile on my face.
“There will be another train to Paris tomorrow morning at eleven,” Mr. Félix said.
“I’ll be on it.”
“Monsieur James is hungry, perhaps? I have a nice beefsteak in the icebox, and I can make you frites. Would that suffice?”
“It would more than suffice,” I said. I gave Mr. Félix a hug, and he blushed with surprise.
“Vive La France,” I said, overcome with happiness for the first time since I arrived in Le Havre nearly twenty years ago, as a boy about to face a world of killing and mayhem.
“Oh my,” Mr. Félix blurted out. “This calls for something special for your apéritif. A little concoction of the late Mme. Félix.” He scurried away and returned with a clear liqueur.
“It is my late wife’s special plum eau-de-vie.”
“Schnapps?” I asked.
“It is called that on the other side of the frontier. We are in France now. Let us just say, ‘eau-de-vie.’”
Then I thought of something that might spoil Daphne’s homecoming to Hopewell, New Jersey, if her “ex-grandfather,” Robinson II, got wind of it. I had to know tonight, so I asked Mr. Félix, “Can I make a long-distance phone call to Berlin? It’s urgent and concerns my wife, Mrs. James.”
“Sans problème, Monsieur,” he said. He rang through to the international operator himself, and I gave him Skip Oatman’s telephone number.
When Oatman came on the line, I thanked him for his help and told him that we’d reached France safely. I asked him if there’d been any diplomatic incidents between America and Germany about the “Daphne Robinson affair” and summarized the article about Daphne in the Nacht Angriff propaganda rag.
“That’s a dead story, Mr. Brown. It didn’t even appear in any morning newspapers, and there’s no word of it on the radio. That one’s dead as a doornail. By the way, Martha Dodd told me that Ambassador Dodd will grant that emergency visa to America for your hotel porter pal, Gunther.”
I thanked him again.
I reckoned that Robinson knew too much for the Nazis to attack Daphne or himself, maybe because he had insider knowledge of the Abwehr’s rumored role in the kidnap-murder of Baby Lindbergh.
I was determined to stop Robinson III and his Nazi pals from dragging colored people into that kidnapping and making things a lot worse for us than they already were in America. When I got to Paris, I knew who would help me stop them in their tracks.
CHAPTER 24
Paris, Sunday, February 18, 1934
After I arrived back at my apartment from the Gare de l’Est, I first collected my mail; anyone snooping through it would conclude, correctly, that my private eye services were not highly in demand.
The only case that had come my way recently had landed in my lap because of my friend Tex O’Toole. If Daphne had returned to her brother, as she said she would in the letter she left for me in Metz, I had just closed my last case, whatever happened.
I unlocked the door of my office on the way up to my apartment and checked that nothing had been moved in my absence. I was delighted to find that the electricity and the heating were working. I had paid my bills and back rent, thanks to Robinson III. Then I went upstairs to my apartment and stowed away the suitcases Robinson had lent me. I decided to unpack them later, since I had a lot to do in the afternoon.
I didn’t know where to start—with Stanley, Robinson III, or by catching up on Paris gossip with Jean Fletcher and then giving her some big scoops as a repayment for her getting Skip Oatman to help me out in Berlin. There was also the Count. I decided to save him for last because I felt that he was, finally, one of the masterminds behind the whole affair, and I wanted to know his motives for sending me into the lion’s den of Germany from which I had only narrowly escaped.
I didn’t plan to go along with his making me his heir and giving me his name, even if it smoothed my path to French nationality. Still, I wondered at his methods for making a “son and friend” of me. Blum’s Le Populaire had an article about Hitler and his followers being inspired by some German philosopher called Nietzsche who’d said, “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Maybe the Count was using me to test whether this Nietzsche had it right.
I got off the metro at Concorde and walked to the Ritz.
Even on a wet Sunday in February, it was great to be back in Paris, breathing its air and its familiar scents as a free man after the horrors of Berlin and Cologne. It was a particularly peaceful Sunday, and things seemed to be calming down in Paris for the first time since February 6, which now seemed months, not weeks, ago.
I walked along the rue de Rivoli on the Tuileries garden side, looking through the railings to see families walking in peace in their finery and children running free and wild, playing games. People of every color and every religion filled the gardens. There were no brown shirts or black shirts attacking people who looked different, destroying Jewish-owned shops, painting swastikas on them, or burning books in the street. Paris felt even more like home to me than usual.
At the front desk of the Ritz Hotel, a man in a black suit, wearing a white shirt and a black bow-tie sat enthroned in the lobby like Louis XIV. I asked him to call Mr. Barnet Robinson and, without looking up, he said, “I am sorry, Monsieur, but Mr. Robinson left yesterday evening. I understand that he has returned to America.”
That really knocked me for a loop.
“Could you tell me if he left alone? Was there a young lady with him, a very beautiful young lady?”
He rose up on his high horse and looked down his nose at me.
“You must appreciate, Monsieur, that I am not allowed to divulge . . . ”
I reached into my pocket and laid a fifty franc note on his desk. The lobby was practically empty. The man looked around, passed his hand over the note, and it disappeared.
“Yes, Mr. Brown, he was accompanied by a beautiful, blonde young woman. Very beautiful, indeed. His daughter, I presume.”
I thanked him and left; then the memory of smelling ammonia and waking up in Robinson’s suite early last Tuesday morning made me remember how he knew my name.
Stanley answered the door and gave me a French-style hug.
“Welcome back, mon petit,” he said, flashing me his biggest smile. “I known you safe, ’cause my man Colonel Schul
tz done phone to say his friends brung you and goldilocks back into France. I nearly had Redtop drive me up to Metz to fetch you,” he said. He ushered me in, and I saw that Stanley had company.
A beautiful, chocolate brown-skinned woman sat in Stanley’s favorite tiger skin-covered modern chair.
There was something familiar about her, but my mind didn’t stop to take it in, I was so dazzled by the woman. She wore a lavender-colored dress and had a white magnolia in her hair. Her lips were painted to match her dress; the woman gave off heat like a Bessemer furnace.
“This be Urby Brown,” Stanley said clumsily. “And Urby I wants to introduce you to Miss Magnolia Swilley; she be Baby Langston mama and Hambone sister.”
She held out her hand and I shook it, although I felt that she expected me to kiss it.
“Pleased to meet you, Miss Swilley,” I said. I went to remove my hand but she held onto it. She was strong and I couldn’t break her grip. Stanley hovered behind her nervously, gesturing for me to sit down, until she turned around to glare at him.
“I got somethin’ to ax you, Mr. Brown,” she said. She had the same deep voice as her brother, Hambone. She finally released her vise-like grip and I sat.
“Baby Langston,” Stanley began.
“Darius,” Magnolia corrected him, looking at Stanley as if he had better not use that nickname again.
“Darius be missing over a week now,” Stanley continued. “Magnolia here got a wire from one of her friends in Paris and she done catch a fast boat to come look for him. Hambone done flew the coop, and they both missin’.”
I knew that Magnolia wanted to hire me to track down Hambone and Baby. Just as I was getting out of the private investigation trade, new business was coming my way.
“I send my drummer boy Lonny Jones to bring that Hambone back dead or alive, and he ain’t find him,” Magnolia said. “I put a thousand-dollar bounty on Hambone head. He s’posed to look after my baby, Darius, while he be writin’ his poetry in Paris, and now Darius missin’.”
Stanley spoke up then. “Urby, Magnolia want to hire you as private eye to track Hambone down and reel him in. Where Baby at? That be what she want to know. Ain’t that right, Magnolia?”
She ignored him.
I knew that this was a job too far because only three people could know what happened to Baby. One of them was Daphne, and she was on her way back to America, probably already at sea. The other two were the Count and Pierre because Daphne had told me to ask the Count about him. As for myself, I reckoned that Baby was dead because he had no reason to be alive.
“There’s only one place that Hambone would go to hide and that’s to Chez Red Tops,” I said. “Redtop’s got a big cellar, and Hambone has holed up there before when the heat’s been on him.”
Magnolia stared at me and then looked at Stanley without saying a word. Stanley looked cowed and went over to the telephone. He picked up the receiver and dialed a number.
“Hello, Redtop. Yeah, Stanley,” he said. “Lonny Jones be there? Put him on, girl.” Stanley lit up a panatela while Magnolia studied him, her jaw muscles working.
“Lonny,” Stanley continued, “I hear tell that Hambone hidin’ in Redtop cellar. She don’t like that man, why she be hidin’ him? Tell her Baby Langston . . . ”—he looked at Magnolia and corrected himself—“Darius mama here, and she want to grill Hambone ’bout where Baby at. Sho’, I’ll wait.” Stanley nodded toward the liquor cabinet and then toward Magnolia.
“Could I offer you a drink while you wait, ma’am?” I asked.
“Rye whiskey, straight, no chaser,” she answered without taking her eyes off Stanley.
I went to get our drinks, and we waited for a few minutes. Finally, Stanley said, “Magnolia, it be Hambone.” She leapt to her feet and snatched the receiver.
“Rawlston,” she screamed. “What has you done with Darius? Don’t you lie to me that you don’t know. I can hear it in your voice you lyin’. I be your sister, you remember? I know you lyin’ now so ’fess up. Else I’m goin’ to tell Lonny Jones to yank out yo’ fingernails one by one, make you chew them up, and then shoot you in yo’ big fat head, you hear? You tell me the truth and I spare you yo’ life, I swear on our mama head.”
Magnolia Swilley was a terrible sight to behold in her rage. A beautiful woman transformed into a killer who would make some of the brown shirt and black shirt thugs I had just seen in Berlin quake in their jackboots. Suddenly, her face became a tragic mask.
“You say what? He dead? You find him dead in the cellar of my club and then you bury him ’cause you scared of me? Don’t you lie to me, Rawlston. It’s you done kill him. Don’t you go tellin’ me he be dead when you find him in my cellar. You done kill him to get at me. Now you wants to save yo’ hide. You gone show Lonny where you done buried him, right now. Put Lonny back on the phone, Rawlston.”
While she waited, she tossed down half a tumbler of neat rye, and then her face, hands, and body started trembling as if struck by the Saint Vitus Dance. She put down the tumbler and gripped the receiver with both hands, the tears running down her cheeks. We could hear a squawking at the other end of the line.
“You go find Darius, Lonny. Say what? Hambone say his head all bash in when he find him?” She ran her hand through her hair, and then she turned her face to us and stared at us coldly before saying, “Lonny, you listen to me. I wants you to get that nigger to dig Darius up, and then you gone shoot Hambone dead and put the same dirt back over him. I’m goin’ back to my hotel. You know the place. Yeah. You phone me there when you done finish, and then we gone find us a funeral parlor to bury my baby Darius right and proper here in France. Then I be goin’ back to Harlem.”
Magnolia put down the receiver and threw Stanley’s crystal tumbler against the wall, sending shards of glass flying around the room. She stormed out, a killer’s look in her eyes.
Stanley and I really needed some booze after that, and we sat, drinking in silence, our hands trembling.
“Lord have mercy,” Stanley finally said.
I told Stanley about what had happened in Berlin, although I was sure that Colonel Schulz-Horn had already filled him in. Then Stanley went into his bedroom, and I heard the clinking of the combination lock on his safe. Stanley came back into the room hardly able to drag along the floor the brown leather satchel I had last seen when I stowed it in a locker in the Gare du Nord.
“This be yours, Urby. Goldilocks got my address at La Belle Princesse and had a chauffeur deliver the satchel here yesterday evening. It’s locked, but there’s an envelope here with a key inside it.”
I opened the envelope and took out the note and the key. The note said,
Contribution to Urby’s Masked Ball’s re-opening
fund, as promised, and payment
of final investigation fees. Love always,
Daphne Hohenzollern-Robinson
Robinson III had scribbled,
Many thanks for a job well done, Mr. Brown.
I will tell Mr. O’Toole how helpful you’ve been.
Best regards,
Barnet Robinson III
I opened the satchel with the key and found inside a mixture of greenback dollar bills, gold francs, and three heavy gold ingots. There were no US dollar gold certificates. Stanley counted the bills, hefted the gold ingots, and scraped at one with his switchblade. He brought a small bottle with a dropper in it, squeezed the liquid on the scratch, and checked its color.
“This be real gold, Urby. Times three bars with that paper money, there be nigh on to one hundred grand of value in this satchel.”
“Can you hold onto it for me, Stanley? Until we decide what to do with it?”
I dragged it back to his safe and hefted it in.
“Ain’t no ‘we,’ Urby. This be yours, to the penny. I be glad to hold onto it for you, but goldilocks right about somethin’ this time. You can buy you a club and re-open Urby’s Masked Ball. They sho’ be space openin’ up. Magnolia told me she own La Belle Princes
se, and it don’t look likely to me that Hambone be gladhandin’ nobody there no time soon.”
“Thanks, Stanley. I need to think things over a while. But my private eye days are done forever. I need to play some music.”
“Now you talkin’ righteous, mon petit. And you get Hannah back here, tout de suite.” He was really excited, and there we were, two ageing Creole waifs from St. Vincent’s Colored Waifs’ Home in New Orleans, Louisiana, hugging each other like real Frenchmen, in Paris.
I asked Stanley if I could use his telephone to phone Jean Fletcher. We made a rendezvous to meet in the La Coupole bar in a half-hour.
She promised to pay for drinks on her “expense account” when I told her I had some big scoops for her “Paris Diary.”
I told Jean what Colonel Schulz-Horn had said to me about the rumors of a plot that Robinson III, the Abwehr, Goebbels, and Himmler had cooked up to fan the race hatred in America into a full-scale race war by pinning the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby on a colored man. Jean got so angry that she knocked her whiskey glass over, and the waiter had to bring her a fresh one. I told her about the belief held by some high-level Nazi officials that there was an Abwehr agent named Bruno Richard Hauptmann who had committed the kidnapping and murder of Baby Lindbergh and was going to fund and lead an uprising of the colored people against Uncle Sam on behalf of Adolf Hitler. I also told her how Robinson III had nearly nailed me as a potential Lindbergh baby killer by paying me with marked gold certificates.
“I’ll get the word about this Bruno Richard Hauptmann to a contact of mine who works with J. Edgar Hoover. I’m sure that, by now, Hoover will be satisfied with a white German kidnapper. Congressmen are beginning to grumble about how long it’s taking his famous G-men to catch the perpetrator.”
Jean was very interested to learn that Daphne was definitely the illegitimate daughter of Kaiser Bill and that the story had already appeared in a German newspaper. She said that she could do Skip Oatman a favor by giving him some ideas on how to break the story for his own American newspaper. She would also use it, but she wanted to break it in a way that more heat would fall on Robinson III and his mother than on Daphne. She felt that Robinson III’s days were numbered. If the Germans or Hoover didn’t get him, then Robinson II would. As for Daphne, I told Jean that Robinson III had started molesting her when she was a kid. Jean, to my surprise, was totally unsympathetic.
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