“I meant everything I said, Vivian. This morning. Every day since I’ve known you.” He spoke as if Tibby weren’t there, standing half dressed in my bedroom entrance, where Paul himself had stood so often, and with even fewer clothes. He turned to the door and stopped. His hat tilted back, as if he were reading his next lines on the ceiling. “If you ever need me for anything, Vivian, just let me know. I know you don’t agree with what I did. I’m sorry. I guess I’m not as honorable as your kind of people, when the chips are down. When I see my dad’s ear in a box, wrapped in Kleenex. But just so you know, I’d do the same thing for your sake. I’d make a deal with fucking Khrushchev, if I had to. I’d do it a hundred times over.”
He left, shutting the door gently behind him.
Tibby was already shrugging clumsily into his old-fashioned waistcoat and jacket. “You know what I think?”
I settled my forehead into my palm. “I can only imagine.”
He picked up his marigold necktie from the sofa and went to the scrap of mirror hanging near the door. “I think you’ve been barking up the wrong tree. I don’t think Violet is the key to all this. I think it’s Lionel.”
“Lionel?”
His arms were moving in sloppy jerks. “Ah, women. You’re seduced by the affair itself, the evolution of adultery, the climax. Why she did it. When she did it. Every last loving pornographic detail.”
I thought of Dr. Grant’s handwritten diary and winced.
Tibby turned. The knot wasn’t perfect, but you had to be impressed he could arrange a necktie at all. “But think a moment. Does it really matter what happened in that Berlin apartment? She met another man. Her husband was a brute. She killed him—”
“We don’t know that for certain.”
“Vivian, the facts of the case are obvious enough. That story is always the same, everywhere, every time. It’s boring, frankly. What matters—what always matters, Vivian—is what happened after the crisis. Why they disappeared. Where they went. That’s the real mystery. That’s what we don’t know. That’s what gives this story zing.”
“Zing? We’re talking about real people here, Tibby.”
“You’re talking about real people. I’m talking about a magazine story. I need a hook, I need an angle, I need a man biting a dog. Zing. And for zing, you need to find Lionel Richardson. The English lover, the man she killed her husband for, the man in whose hands she placed herself afterward. He’s where the mystery begins and ends.”
“But Violet is the one—”
“She’s the one you care about, obviously. She’s your aunt. But Lionel’s the one who matters, historically speaking. The one who would have left the most tracks. Who was he? What sort of man? Why did Violet disappear after running away with him? He was a soldier, Vivian. An officer in the British Army. If he managed to get safely across the border, there must be some record of him. Desertion, at the very least, and some sort of official investigation into his whereabouts.”
Christ. Of course. Hadn’t I said the same thing, in no less a monument than the New York Public Library, to Doctor Paul himself?
It’s much easier to find out about the men.
He might not turn up in an encyclopedia, Lionel Richardson. But he must exist somewhere.
“Lionel.” I fingered the ends of my robe. “I’d probably have to fly to England to do that.”
Tibby took his overcoat off the stand and levered himself inside. He squashed his hat on top of his disreputable head.
“I think that’s the idea, Vivian. Don’t you?”
When he left, I rose from the sofa and rummaged through the kitchen until I found the brush and dustpan. I knelt on the floor and swept up the vodka shards, every last one, and let the whole glittering mess slide into the garbage can. I found a dishcloth and wiped down the wall and the floorboards, until there was no sign that anything had occurred there at all.
At which point. The telephone rang again, like it meant business this time.
Sally’s voice floated out from the other bedroom. “Could you answer the goddamned phone, Vivs?” A few more obscenities trailed behind. I’ll spare you the color.
I laid my hand on the receiver. No point in hiding any longer, was there?
“All right, Gogo,” I said. “Give it to me straight.”
But it wasn’t Gogo, after all. It was Mums, exasperated, telling me to hurry on up to Lenox Hill Hospital, because Aunt Julie had fallen down the stairs of her Park Avenue duplex and into a coma.
Violet
They reach the outskirts of Berlin just before dawn. Violet lifts her head from Lionel’s shoulder to see the pinkening rooftops, the transparency of air. “What day is it?” she asks. “I’ve lost count.”
“The twenty-fifth of July. Serbia’s reply to Austria is due today.”
“What does that mean?”
“Unless Serbia intends to grovel at Austria’s feet, I suppose it means war.”
But his tone is light. He drives down the empty streets, confident of the route, whistling softly. It takes Violet a moment to recognize the tune. “Stop that,” she says, laughing. “You’ll have us arrested.”
He breaks into his booming rich baritone, echoing from the stones. Send him victorious, happy and glorious . . .
“Lionel, you’re an idiot.”
But he doesn’t stop, and Violet sits up. Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light . . . she sings defiantly into the morning.
Lionel lifts his voice. Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks . . .
. . . Whose broad stripes and bright stars . . .