I stepped off the curb and darted across the street, up the long avenue—I now saw it in my head, yes, superimposed against the map of Paris, an important spoke in the wheel that sprang from the Arc de Triomphe, the Porte Maillot near which our hotel stood—up the long avenue at a flat run. The heel of my right shoe caught against my foot. The five toes screamed into their narrow triangle. Just another corner, I thought, just another street and I’ll stop.
But when I reached the next corner, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t hear the footsteps pounding behind me, but I felt them in my ribs. I felt the stare of someone’s omnivorous eyes on my spine and my skull, scouring out the secrets inside, and I thought my lungs would burst from my chest. The thick Paris air choked my throat. On I ran, aiming only at the next street, at the next corner, at the curbs that caught my ankle as I crossed them, and my mind turned white, my scalp burned, my limbs went numb.
A shadow appeared ahead, detaching itself from the long, irregular row of buildings and café awnings. Shaped like a man, broad and slope-shouldered, wearing a peaked cap.
I staggered to a walk, preparing to dart from his path, but he stuck out his arms. “Arretez-vous, mademoiselle! Qu’est-ce que vous faites?”
A gendarme.
I fell forward, nearly striking him. Recovered myself at the last instant and pressed a hand to my chest, as if this action might somehow restore my breath.
The man was old, far past the age of soldiering, incapable of violence. Only his voice was forceful.
I gasped. “Please help! There’s someone following me!”
An electric torch sprang to life in his right hand. He held it high, aiming the beam first—briefly—at my face, and then at the pavement behind me. He interposed himself manfully between me and my pursuer, and his left hand went to his belt.
As he searched the sidewalk with his torch, lighting the doorways and the stacked café chairs and tables and the silent lampposts, I panted and rasped, following the slice of his torch through the darkness. Someone shouted faintly, from several streets away. Above us, inside one of the windows, a party of some kind seemed to be taking place; I could just hear the shower of glassware, the pitch of hysterical laughter. I could just see the glimmer of light on the sidewalk from behind the drawn curtains.
The gendarme turned. I could breathe now; my head was strangely light. My feet throbbed, hot and swollen.
“My dear mademoiselle,” he said kindly, lisping his way through a number of missing teeth. “There is nobody there.”
He walked me all the way back to the hotel, telling me of his two grandsons at the front, the four grandsons who had already died, one at the Marne and three at Verdun. C’est la guerre. Of his many granddaughters, some nursing the wounded and some running canteens in the railway stations. One had married in April. She was already expecting a baby at Christmas, the gendarme’s first great-grandchild, and her husband was dead, too. A shell had fallen precisely inside the reserve trench where he was trying to sleep, and had scattered him to pieces, mademoiselle, small and terrible pieces. Just a week ago.
But why did she get married, I asked, if she knew her husband was likely to die?
The gendarme shrugged his shoulders. Because they were in love, wasn’t it so? And it was war. And now the poor dead soldier would have a baby to live on after him, so it wasn’t for nothing. The two of them, his precious Berthe and her young man, they had experienced a small moment of happiness, and wasn’t that enough, when you thought of all the misery in this world? Better you had known that small joy than have gone to your grave without it.
By the time he told me about his days during the siege of Paris, and the rats he had shared with his children while the Prussians fired their daily rounds into the city, we had reached my hotel. The windows were dark. The gendarme made me a smart salute and opened the door for me to pass. I thanked him and hurried inside.
The old foyer was lit by a single lamp, but even so small a light, after so much darkness, was enough to blind me for an instant. I blinked. Rubbed my eyes. When I lifted my head to discover the stairs at the back of the hallway, I realized that someone was already there, rising from the straight-backed settee against the wall, stubbing out a cigarette in a small porcelain ashtray. Removing his officer’s cap to reveal a head of thick golden hair, tarnished with gray.
Captain Fitzwilliam.
Chapter 9
Miami Beach, Florida, June 1922
At night, the Japanese tea garden at the Flamingo Hotel undergoes a remarkable metamorphosis. Gone are the ladies in white dresses, the gentlemen in linen suits, the perspiring waiters and the lilting atmosphere of the orchestra in the corner. The clink of porcelain and glass, the routine murmurs of civilization. The strings of lanterns, so festive in the twilight, have gone dark. The speedboats have returned to port. The air is damp and salty and still, and Biscayne Bay slaps quietly against the stone. You might call it peaceful. I find it menacing.
But I don’t have much choice about being here, do I? This strange, hard-faced man didn’t exactly ask me where I should prefer to meet him, or when. Didn’t consider whether a simple telephone call or even a letter might serve as well. Anyway, he was probably right. Any operator can listen to your telephone call. The restaurant’s still busy, the lobby crawling with bellboys and clerks. No, it had to be the garden: convenient, private, devoid of prying eyes. Within screaming distance, if screaming’s required.
Still, as I navigate the warm, moist darkness, listening for some small disturbance in the air that might signal the presence of a waiting man, I begin to think this wasn’t such a terrific idea after all. That the joyous merrymakers in the hotel ballroom behind me won’t be listening for any trouble in the garden outside, and the night-blackened waters of Biscayne Bay make a discreet point of disposal for anything—or anyone—a fellow might wish to dispose of.
That, if this stranger really does have information about my husband, he’s not likely to be the kind of man you could trust with your life.
A scrape of metal interrupts the stillness to my left. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam?” asks a familiar voice, like the passing of velvet over stone.
And I guess it’s a good thing I’m standing near a garden chair of solid wrought iron, because even though I’m expecting this man, even though the weight of my small pistol hangs comfortably near my ribs, the sound causes my legs to buckle beneath me.
When the police arrested my father last February, right there in the middle of my sister’s engagement party, it was almost a relief. We’d been hiding for so long.