Jack 1939 (18 page)

THIRTY-THREE.
CROSSING THE BORDER

WOHLTHAT WENT TO BED.

Jack sat up in the empty room and stared at the dying fire.

His father was a traitor to the president they both served.

There was written proof of it, and a vicious man would use that proof.

The room lurched crazily whenever he moved his head; blood pounded in his ears.

He could not choose whom to fail. Roosevelt, or Dad.

In Jack’s world, that was no choice at all.

He worried his lip until it bled, thinking of the man in the wheelchair and how much he’d yearned to live up to his expectations. To be
Roosevelt’s
man in Europe
. There’d been honor and purpose and excitement in the idea. He’d felt different, tapped by the President.
Valued.
An independent thinker—which was much more than the screwball his family usually thought he was.

There’d be no more ciphers from the roof, no confidential phone calls. And no explanation he could offer. He could not breathe a word of his dad’s treason to FDR, so his radio would have to fall silent. While he waited for the truth to blow up in his face.

Did Dad know what was coming?

He doubled over, hugging his rib cage, while pain scissored through his entrails.

He should have stuck some DOCA in his leg hours ago.

How could he possibly explain his silence to Roosevelt?

He could say he was ill. Jesus—he
was
ill! Nobody would think twice. He could take a boat home and check back into Mayo and write a bunch of crap for his senior thesis, and only Bruce Hopper would know what a failure he really was.

And himself, of course. He’d have to live with himself. While Franklin Roosevelt dismantled the Kennedy family in public, piece by piece.

Maybe Jack would be lucky, and die in the war.

“Jack.”

It was her voice, whispered behind him; the scent of her skin on the air. He turned and looked at her with hollow eyes.

“What is it?” she asked.
“What is
it?”

“Nothing you can fix,” he said, and walked away from the dying fire.

* * *

BECAUSE HE COULD NOT TRUST DIANA,
they played out their scene in the chilly hallway, the other men sleeping behind their bedroom doors.

Did you follow me
here?

Yes. No.

Desire. Despair.

The center had dropped out of his world. He hated to be touched but he needed to be held. He wanted this woman, whom he could tell nothing. It was too much, and in the end he left her standing in the upper hall, arms folded like iron bars across her chest.

He closed his bedroom door on his pain and lay down in the dark, knowing he should find the DOCA pellets and use them.

What had his father
done?

Treason—or murder?

Words and pictures whirled through his exhausted brain. A dead hatcheck girl in the alley behind the Stork Club.
I knew her people in Boston, Jack. Truth be told, I got her this job.
Sister Mary Joseph’s blood spilled at his feet. Spiders cut into pale flesh. Göring’s banker, the man who was afraid of knives. Roosevelt in his Pullman.
A hundred and fifty million dollars, Hoover says.
The thug with the scar on his lip.
Diana.

His door opened.

“Wohlthat’s upset you, hasn’t he?”

The door clicked shut. She came toward him slowly. The shiver of silk charmeuse in the dark.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and waited. Words were not safe. He could not trust himself to speak.

Her fingers slid through his hair. She was whispering something.
Poor jack poor jack poor
jack.

He pressed his forehead against the flat plane of her stomach and closed his eyes. She was cradling his head and murmuring softly but it wasn’t a nanny he needed now. He slid his hands beneath the silk and pulled her down against him. Covered her sudden gasp with his mouth. And then she was beneath him, that fragile birch-twig body and the hoofer’s legs, sleek beneath his hands.

He lifted the silk over her head. She wore a diamond solitaire at her neck. It flashed in the moonlight slanting through his window. He took the rock between his teeth.

She held his face in her hands. “We’ll have to be quiet,” she breathed. “The others—”

Because he hated to be touched, sex was usually something furtive and quick. It was more about release and triumph than anguish or need, but this was Diana, and he tried to remember she was no Radcliffe virgin. He tried to give as well as take. Circled her nipple with his tongue until she cried out and arched beneath him; swept his deft sailor’s hands along her inner thighs. He pinned her arms above her head and kissed the valley between her breasts, the dip of her navel. Traced each knob of her spine, delicate as a nautilus, and the sweet tendon behind her knee. As he buried his face in her sex, she gasped like a woman rising from deep water, legs pirouetting over his shoulders.

Somewhere in the night he found he was weeping as she surged above him, her head thrown back and that diamond glinting in the moonlight. Her flesh tightened around him like a current, some memory of the sea. He did not fear drowning. He feared loss, himself marooned on an empty stretch of beach. He clung to the jetsam of her body and took the wave.

“Why did you marry him?” he asked her near dawn. “Willi called it
cover
. Are you in love with either of them?”

She snorted into the crease of his elbow, her hair flung over his arm. “They’re in love with themselves. Ever since they met at Oxford. Denys and Willi. Willi and Denys. It’s been that way for years.”

He thought of Carmel Offie and his best friend Lem who’d made a pass at him at Princeton. Of the two men side by side in a black London taxi while he swayed alone on the jump seat. He thought of Dobler’s colleague at Number 8 Carlton House Terrace.
You’re one of
those
.
He should have seen it all before, but jealousy had blinded him.

He’d seen only Diana.

“In England it’s tolerated but still a crime,” she was saying. “In Germany they give you a pink triangle or hang you with piano wire.”

He lifted her onto his chest and she rested there like a sphinx. He shook her gently. “Why did you marry him?”

“Willi’s life is at risk. And I’ve grown fond of him. Denys is vulnerable to
politics
. Sheer bloody malice. They turn a blind eye at the Foreign Office as long as he does what he’s told—but he could be crushed at any time. They both
need
me, Jack. The sensational wife. The insouciant mistress. I’m plausible deniability. I draw enemy fire.”

“And what do
you
get out of that deal, Diana?”

Her eyes slid away. “A name.
Position.
More money than I could ever spend.”

“And a hell of a lot of loneliness.”

She pressed her body the length of his. “I seize my moments.”

* * *

HOURS LATER,
after she left him, he cut a DOCA pellet into his thigh and slept for a while. His dreams were tinged with fever and he tossed beneath sweat-soaked sheets.

When he awoke, it was after nine and the alpine sun was well into the sky. He knew now what he had to do.

* * *

HE FOUND WILLI DOBLER
at the breakfast table draining the last of his coffee. He was dressed in loose woolen pants, leather boots, a heavy sweater. A pair of skis was propped near the door.

“You’re up early,” Willi said. “Or didn’t you sleep?”

Jack ignored the jibe. He pulled out a chair and reached for the coffeepot. “If I wanted to find the White Spider, I’d have to find Reinhard Heydrich first. Right?”

“It’s a logical conclusion. But you don’t, Jack.
Want
to find the Spider.”

Jack took a sip of coffee. “Fair enough. I want to find something he stole. From a nun he knifed to death in Rome.”

There was a silence. “Sister Mary Joseph. Diana told me.”

“Did she mention the charity’s account book is missing?”

Dobler shook his head. “She was more concerned about the loss of her friend. I take it you talked to Wohlthat.”

“And he to me. Told me more than I wanted to know.”

“You scared him to death. He left this morning at first light.” Dobler eased back in his chair and studied Jack. “What insanity are you contemplating, my friend?”

“You said something once. About walking away from the mess Hitler’s made of Germany.”

“I told you I couldn’t do it. Because people would die.”

“Yeah.” Jack swallowed some tepid coffee. “There are a number of ways to die, Willi. One of them is a spiritual kind of murder. The body lives on, but the soul’s gone out of it. That’s what my family’s facing. A public humiliation. The ruin of all our lives. I can’t shrug off the problem, Willi—I can’t quit the game this time. I have to find the Spider before he gives Reinhard Heydrich the means to blackmail my father. And he has almost a month’s start on me.”

“Less,” Dobler corrected. “He was in Paris the middle of March. Wohlthat said so. It will take him weeks to work his way across Europe. Police
somewhere
must be after him.”

“He won’t waste time with the account book. He’ll take it straight to his master. So tell me, Willi—where’s Heydrich right now? Berlin? Prague? Danzig?”

“If I were near an embassy—I could answer you in five minutes. As it is . . .”

“Come on, Willi. You know everything. Before it happens.”

The German sighed. “Even if I
did
know, I’m not sure I’d tell you. I’ve no desire to send you to your death, Jack.”

“That’s touching, Willi. Thanks. But it’s not your decision to make.”

After an instant, Dobler nodded. “Then start with Berlin. It has the advantage of being closest. If Heydrich’s there, you’ll know soon enough. You can work your back channels. Ask the American chargé to arrange an interview for your . . .
thesis
.”

“And then rob the Gestapo chief.”

“If you want to put it that simply.” Dobler’s voice was flat. “You’re talking about the most dangerous man in Europe, Jack.”

“Including Hitler?”

“Including Hitler.”

Jack lifted his eyebrows and waited.

“Do you have a gun?” Willi asked.

He shook his head regretfully. “Roosevelt said I needed one.”

“—
And?
You couldn’t ask the little man in the lingerie shop to help you?”

Jack laughed out loud. “Is there anything you
don’t
know, Willi?”

“Not much. Wait a moment.”

He left the table and headed upstairs, taking the narrow wooden stairs at a bound, and Jack heard the sound of his boots tramping across the ceiling. When Dobler returned, he carried a flannel-wrapped package.

“Si vis pacem, para bellum,”
he said softly, and handed the thing to Jack.

It seemed there was a use for Jack’s Latin after all.

If you want peace, prepare for
war.

Jack unwrapped the piece of flannel. It had lovingly concealed a Luger P08 semiautomatic pistol, the Parabellum. The German army’s sidearm of preference for the past forty years. It was a thing of beauty, Jack thought, in the strangest of possible ways—with its slim barrel, elegant as a cigarette, and its grip canted at a fifty-five-degree angle. A semiautomatic, recoil-operated pistol, it had a toggle lock and took eight 9-millimeter bullets in its magazine. The bullet shells ejected once they were fired.

“Ever use one of these?” Dobler asked.

Ever? Jack had never used any kind of gun at all.

Dobler glanced out the window. “It’s high time we woke Val d’Isère. Get your coat.”

* * *

HE WORKED WITH THE PISTOL
for nearly an hour, under Willi’s patient tutelage. Learned to load it, and to steady it in both hands, held straight out like a shot-putter; to correct for the inevitable recoil; to correct for the vagaries of sight and nerve. He fired into snowbanks. He fired at trees. Purely by accident, he fired at Willi—and missed. For that he got a lecture on gun safety.

They drew a crowd of three silent Frenchmen, and as a gesture of goodwill Willi let them hold the Luger.

“De la guerre,”
one said. And the others gazed at Willi with sudden mistrust.

“Come along, old chap,” he muttered as he threw an arm over Jack’s shoulders and turned him toward the inn. “My father used this at Verdun. And the French have long memories.”

* * *

JACK SETTLED HIS BILL
and tucked his bags into the hired car. He would be driving higher on the Col d’Iseran, to the Italian border, then turning north to Germany.

“When you reach your embassy in Berlin,” Dobler said, “send Denys a telegram. He’ll be back at Whitehall the end of this week. We’ll all want to know how you are.”

Jack shook his hand. He got into the car and put it in gear. Dobler stepped back onto the steps of the Hotel de Paris and lifted his hand in farewell. It was an English gesture, nothing like the Nazi salute. Jack glanced over his shoulder as he wheeled the car around and caught a clouded glimpse of Diana’s face.

She had appeared out of nowhere and was standing at Dobler’s elbow. She was wrapped in furs. A suitcase sat at her feet.

“Jack,” she called.

He stopped the car.

Dobler stepped through the inn’s doorway and disappeared.

Diana leaned into his side window.
“Jack.”

She was fumbling at the door handle.

“Diana, I have to go.”

“Take me with you.”

“I have to
go.”

He was reaching for the passenger lock to slam it home when she opened the door and slid into the seat.

His hand fell instead onto her shoulder.

She stared at him, her black eyes unreadable.

“Don’t do this, Diana.”

Her lips compressed. She busied herself with settling her luggage. For a woman of fashion she had brought surprisingly little.

“This isn’t a vacation. It’ll be dangerous.”