“Do you believe her?” Jean asked skeptically. “I don’t trust that bitch, pardon my French, any further than I can throw her. I guess you believe her?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, suddenly doubtful.
“Let’s put a hold on that story about III molesting her,” Jean said. “I don’t have a lot of faith in her word.”
I gave Jean my impressions of what it was like to be in Nazi-run Berlin and of the civil war between the brown shirts and the black shirts that Colonel Schulz-Horn had told me about.
“He thinks there’ll be a big bust-up by the summer,” I said.
“I can use that,” she said. “That dovetails with the stuff that’s going on in Paris and Rome and the growth of extremism in Europe. That’s my next ‘Paris Diary.’ Thanks a bunch.”
“I think I’d better move on, Jean. I have one more visit today. I’m going to see the Count.”
“How’s your old man?” she asked.
“Up to his neck in stuff that’s so nasty that you can’t imagine it.”
“Give him the regards of freedom-loving peoples everywhere.”
“Will do, Jean. By the way, one last scoop. I’m closing my private eye agency. I’m going to re-open my nightclub.”
“That’s great news. I’ll start drumming up publicity for the re-opening.”
I told her that I wasn’t planning to re-open right away and thanked her again for putting me onto Skip Oatman. Then I went to Honoré and asked him if he could get me a line so that I could make a phone call. He was all smiles as he handed the telephone to me. He waited for a beat longer than usual; I got the message and tipped him lavishly. He walked off whistling, as if sunlight had burst into the dim interior of La Coupole.
I left Jean to pay the bill and phoned the Count. We arranged to meet at his office in an hour. In the meantime, I started writing in my head the letters that I was going to send to Hannah, begging her to come back. I started throwing in words like “loving her” and “needing her” and “marriage” and “starting a new life together.” I whiled away the time brain-writing the love letters in the calm, peace, and freedom of a Paris Sunday.
I couldn’t concentrate, though. I kept seeing Buster dead in Stanley’s stables, my bullet taking his life away. I thought about the rage inside me and in the world that had brought me to France, and then to its killing fields in the Great War. War had not killed the Beast of Rage anywhere, though. Rage was flaming up again everywhere, not dying down. Maybe, with my music, I could calm that rage. But I doubted that anything would ever slake it, not even another war or the war after that.
CHAPTER 25
The Count listened to my Berlin stories carefully at times, as if learning something new, and, at other times, I sensed that Daphne, or Robinson III, had already told him parts of the story. I left out any mention of how Daphne and I managed to escape from Germany and the role played by Colonel Schulz-Horn and his officer friends because that would be like signing their death sentences. I sensed that Daphne had left that part of the story out, too.
“I know that you and Daphne and maybe Mr. Robinson were somehow involved in her fake kidnapping and the ransom demand. You will deny it, of course, and nothing can be proved one way or the other. Anyway, I’ve stopped working as a private eye.”
“That’s very good; it’s a vulgar job for a Count of the d’Uribé-Lebrun lineage.”
“Then you’ll be even happier to hear that I’m going to re-open my nightclub, Urby’s Masked Ball. That’s even more vulgar in your eyes. Don’t worry. I’m not planning to call it ‘Count Urby’s Masked Ball.’”
“You may call it what you like. I very much enjoyed hearing you play at the charity concert Saturday before last. I may even say I was proud of you that night. You are gifted, my son.”
That really amazed me; and he seemed sincere when he said, “If you need any financial help, please let me know.” Then he leaned forward and, with a wry smile on his face and his blue eye boring into mine, he said, “But then, I understand that you have been amply rewarded for your work on the kidnap and ransom affair of my colleague Bartholomew Thigpen and Miss Daphne Hohenzollern. One hundred thousand dollars, was it not? Curious how certain dollar figures repeat themselves in ransoms and fees. Pure coincidence, no doubt.”
The ransom from a bogus kidnapping had been returned to its rightful owner, Robinson III, who had Daphne turn it over to Stanley to “pay my fees.” Robinson III was perfectly within his rights to do so. It was, theoretically, his money. Daphne had blackmailed him into giving it to me, of that I had no doubt. I felt that I had earned the money, wherever it really came from, and I planned to hold onto it.
The Count got up from his chair, went to his bar, and poured us two snifters of Domfront calvados.
“Let us toast the successful conclusion of your investigation. I await the re-opening of your nightclub. Please invite me.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I waited.
“One day, you will see the light and I, like any father, hope that we can grow closer over the years. Especially because I am now the only family that you have.”
I waited, playing his words back again in my head. “What do you mean by you are ‘now the only family that I have’?”
He feigned surprise. “Did you not know that Bartholomew Lincoln Thigpen Junior was your brother? You had the same mother, my beloved Josephine Dubois. I understand that Bartholomew now lies buried on the floor of the Seine. Near Argenteuil.” He sighed and spun around in his chair to smile at me. I put the snifter of calvados on his desk and walked out of his office, with the Count close on my heels.
Daphne had given me a “poisoned gift.” The Count would want his cut of the “ransom”, which he could now demand thanks to Redtop, his eyewitness to Buster’s death and burial.
I saw Redtop’s frightened face again in my mind’s eye. She had sold me out to the Count in exchange for freedom from her greatest fear, being forced to leave France and return to America and Jim Crow. Once again, I saw Buster sink to the ground with my bullet in his brain and then, like a mariner buried at sea, into the icy waters of the Seine. My brother. Bartholomew.
“I need you, my son,” the Count cried out suddenly, as I hurried away. “You must tie your destiny to mine and to our lineage. Now!”
I remember brushing past Pierre on my way out, the Count’s plea ringing in my ears. Pierre and some other Oriflamme stood at attention like a guard of honor as I hurried out the door.
Outside, the air had grown colder as the winter night fell over Paris. I started sprinting down rue Boissy d’Anglas toward the Seine, but I knew that its waters would never mean freedom to me as they had before. I had killed one man too many.
The thing I most wanted to do was to get rid of my weapons for killing and maiming: my guns and my saps and, above all, my rage. I vowed then and there never to kill or harm anyone again. Ever. I was going to deep-six my Colt in the Seine.
The Count, Pierre, and two other Oriflamme had followed Urby out onto the street and watched him racing toward the Seine. The Count nodded to Pierre and his two colleagues.
“Follow him and make sure that he doesn’t do anything rash,” the Count ordered. “There are already enough of our cadavers in that river.”
CHAPTER 26
Le Havre, France, Saturday, 11 April 1936
Hannah Korngold strained her eyes to see if she could spot Urby in the crowd waiting on the dock as her ship headed for its berth at Le Havre. His last of many letters had finally convinced her to start her life with him all over again. She loved him and he loved her and it had been that way for a long time. As a Jew, she feared the terrible events that were occurring in Europe, especially in Germany, but she knew that life without Urby would have no meaning for her.
She saw Urby and waved excitedly, happier than she had been for a long time. He was waving at her with his clarinet, so she opened her violin case and waved at him with her violin.
EPILOGUE
“THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES”
Between June 30 and July 2, 1934, Adolf Hitler ordered a purge of the brown shirts of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and of its leader, the Führer’s former comrade in arms, Ernst Röhm. Hitler realized that the continuing recourse to violent street actions by his former comrades, who had supplied the muscle behind his rise to power in Germany, was incompatible with the image of respectability, which, at that juncture, he wanted to cultivate among bourgeois German conservatives. Above all, Hitler wished to mollify the regular army apparatus of the Reichswehr, who found the brown shirts and their leader, Röhm, repellent.
The death toll from the purge, which has come to be known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” may never be known with exactitude. The number of those killed, wounded, and summarily arrested no doubt ran into thousands.
The majority of the killings and arrests were carried out by the black-shirts(SS) and the Gestapo, or secret police. The purge helped Hitler to build support for his regime among the Reichswehr and provided a basis for it to carry out other extra-legal activities in the future, as long as these were deemed by the Führer to be in the interests of the German Reich.
Urby Brown received a telephone call from Colonel Schulz-Horn on July 4, 1934, Urby’s thirty-ninth birthday. After wishing him a happy birthday, the colonel told him that he and all of the members of his circle of “blood brother” officers had survived the purge. The colonel once again promised to be present for the reopening of Urby’s Masked Ball nightclub come hell or high water. Urby told him that he had not yet decided when to re-open the nightclub. It depended on the reply that he received to a letter that he had sent to a friend in America.
THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING AND ITS AFTERMATH
Acting on a tipoff, law enforcement agencies were on the lookout for expenditures in dollar gold certificates, a number of which had been marked and included in the ransom demanded and paid over for the safe return of the kidnapped and murdered baby, Charles Lindbergh Junior. In September 1934, a ten-dollar gold certificate was used as payment in a gas station, and the pump attendant noted the New York license plate number of the Dodge sedan concerned and turned it in to the police. The car was traced to one Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was put under surveillance and captured in New York City after a high-speed car chase by the police.
During his trial, which lasted from January 2 to February 13, 1935, Hauptmann, a carpenter by profession, became “The Most Hated Man in the World.” Hauptmann maintained to the end that he was innocent of the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Junior, but he had no satisfactory explanations for the presence of a shoebox containing $15,000 of the ransom money, partly in gold certificates, which had been found in his garage. It later transpired that Hauptmann had been sighted near Hopewell, New Jersey, where the Lindberghs resided, on the day of the kidnapping. He was also positively identified as the person who had collected the ransom money, and incriminating testimony was given by other witnesses who had seen him spending gold certificates on various items.
While the defense argued that, on balance, the evidence against Hauptmann was mainly circumstantial, and, even the governor of New Jersey had doubts as to whether Hauptmann had acted alone, he was finally electrocuted in New Jersey State Prison on April 3, 1936.
MURDER AND SCANDAL IN THE BARNET ROBINSON FAMILY
On April 4, 1936, the day after Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s execution, a homeless man was found strangled to death on a park bench in Battery Park, facing the Statue of Liberty. The victim was identified as Barnet Robinson III. He had once been a prominent businessman, educated at Princeton University. Notorious for his pro-Nazi sympathies, he had been forced to step down from the Board of Trustees of Smith College. His father, Barnet Robinson II, had fired him from his role as CEO of Barnet Industries in March 1934 and also disinherited him. His father had also divorced the mother of Barnet Robinson III in March 1934, after it came to light that she had had an affair with Kaiser Wilhelm II before the outbreak of the First World War which resulted in the birth of an illegitimate daughter by the Kaiser in 1913. She committed suicide one year to the day after her divorce, in March 1935.
According to informed sources, the suicide occurred two days after her former husband had re-married, this time to her illegitimate daughter by Kaiser Wilhelm II, known as Daphne Hohenzollern-Robinson. Among the controversies swirling around the marriage was the age gap of forty-two years between Barnet Robinson II and his erstwhile granddaughter: he was sixty-four years old and she was not yet twenty-two years old at the time of their marriage in March 1935.
Family members and associates of Barnet Robinson III cited his firing as CEO of Barnet Industries and his mother’s divorce from his father in March 1934, as well as his father’s re-marriage to his half-sister Daphne Hohenzollern-Robinson a year later followed almost immediately by his mother’s suicide, as the major factors that led to a total breakdown in his character and moral fiber and, finally, sent him spiraling into dissolution and vagrancy. The police have determined that the cause of his death was intentional homicide but have provided no leads regarding the motives behind the murder of Barnet Robinson III.
Barnet Robinson II, who had enjoyed robust good health all of his life and had been captain of Princeton’s undefeated national champion football team of 1893, died of a heart attack, on April 18, 1936, two weeks after his son was found murdered. He had specified in his will that, upon his death, his entire estate and full control of the management of Barnet Industries were to devolve upon his grieving young widow, Daphne Hohenzollern-Robinson. She thus became one of the richest and most powerful women in America before her twenty-third birthday.
ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF LÉON BLUM
On February 13, 1936, Léon Blum, leader of the Socialist coalition, was in a car on the Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Près, returning home from the National Assembly with friends, when, according to newspaper accounts, he was set upon by a large band of extremist youths belonging to various royalist, Fascist, and anti-Semitic groups. After smashing the car windows with blackjacks and iron bars, they dragged Blum from the car and nearly beat him to death as he lay prostrate on the sidewalk. He was saved from death by the timely intervention of workers from a nearby building and several policemen who came to his rescue.
Blum’s Socialist coalition won the legislative elections of May 1936, and he became the first Socialist and Jewish Prime Minister of France, leading the Popular Front Government from June 1936 to June 1937. During that period, the Popular Front initiated major reforms in France’s social and labor systems, such as the introduction of a forty-hour week, paid vacations for workers, and the widening of their bargaining rights.
During his time in government, Blum was showered with abuse by right-wing extremists and anti-Semites, the leader of the Oriflamme du Roi, Count René d’Uribé-Lebrun, being the most virulent of Blum’s detractors.
STORY ON FRONT PAGE OF THE PARIS-PANAME SOIR EDITION OF JULY 4, 1936
The renowned American clarinetist and long-time Paris resident, Urby Brown, will re-open his once-popular Montmartre nightclub Urby’s Masked Ball tonight on the occasion of his birthday. A stellar audience of American and French musicians, as well as international celebrities from the worlds of the stage, the screen, and the plastic and literary arts, are expected to be present for the re-opening. It is already being whispered that Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Stanley Bontemps, and Josephine Baker will be on hand to pay homage to the great New Orleans Creole clarinetist, Urby Brown.
Brown left America as a young man of nineteen at the start of the Great War to rally to the colors of his “adopted” country, France. His musical career is matched only by his military career. Serving at the rank of sergeant in the French Foreign Legion by the end of the war, he had beforehand been an ace in the volunteer American air unit of the French Air Force, the Lafayette Flying Corps, with six confirmed kills to his credit. He had been d
ecorated with a Croix de Guerre with Palm.
The re-opening of Urby’s Masked Ball will take place two months after the announcement of Mr. Brown’s engagement to Hannah Korngold, a distinguished classical violin soloist and, like Mr. Brown, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana.
The End
Copyright © 2014 Kirby E. Williams
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