Murder Under the Palms (19 page)

So, Charlotte thought, Eddie’s memory—the memory that had been resurrected at Lydia’s dinner party—was accurate. It had been perfectly embalmed for fifty years.

Roe continued: “They weren’t supposed to be able to put the fire out,” he said. “But in the end, it didn’t matter that they succeeded in putting it out. The
Normandie
was finished anyway.” He said it with the air of a man who was talking about a deed well done.

Charlotte remembered how the fire hoses hadn’t worked, the fire alarm hadn’t gone off, the blaze hadn’t been called into the fire department until it was well underway. Those events had been blamed on carelessness, but maybe it had been deliberately orchestrated carelessness.

“And the name of your accomplice, the friend who you ordered to throw the incendiary pencil?” she asked.

Roe’s voice had become weaker. “He was a Russian, a member of the Russian Fascist United Front. The Russian fascists were our allies. We had the same goal: to defeat the Bolsheviks. But their reasons were different; they wanted to restore the Romanovs to the Russian throne.”

“His name?” Charlotte prompted.

“His alias was Paul Fahey. Another Irishman, like me.” He chuckled weakly at the irony. “But his real name was Paul …” Roe gasped for air. “Paul Feder …” His voice trailed off.

Charlotte sucked in her breath.

Then he finished saying the name: “Paul Federov.”

“Whew!” said Charlotte once they were back in the car, which had been baking in the sun. She leaned back against the hot seat and took a deep breath. “Where can we go to talk?” she said. “We have to think this one out.”

Eddie turned the key in the ignition and then raised his fists in an expression of triumph. He turned to Charlotte. “I think that information was well worth two grand,” he said with a big grin. “What do you think?”

“Definitely,” she said. “The question is, What do we do with it?”

“There was a chicken wings place back on the highway,” he said. “Are you hungry?” He checked his watch. “It’s already past one.”

“Very,” she said.

9

It was the pattern theory of life again, Charlotte thought as they headed back out to the highway. Here she was, back in the loop, but on a different plane. There had been the René spiral and the
Normandie
spiral and the Eddie spiral, and now there was the Paul spiral. The difference was that this was a much more complicated pattern. The earlier patterns had been like sofa springs: life simply coming around again. The Paul pattern was like a double helix that was held together by molecular building blocks in a structure so complex it would take a Nobel laureate to decipher it. They had come to Clearwater to investigate the sabotage of an ocean liner fifty years ago and had instead uncovered a possible clue to a murder that had occurred only last week. The only thing that all these spirals had in common was the
Normandie
: it was as if Lydia’s decision to create a replica of the Grand Salon on the third floor of her art deco house had caused a chain reaction that sent streamers shooting off in all directions, like the streamers that departing passengers throw from the deck of an ocean liner.

She would be relieved when the pattern of life returned to something less complicated. Her life had never come even close to traveling in a straight and steady line, but a gentle arabesque might be nice.

A few minutes later, they were sitting on barstools at a high wooden table chowing down on chicken wings with Chernobyl sauce (the sauce came in mild, medium, and Chernobyl) at a highway establishment called Hooter’s that was named after the ample endowments of its skimpily clad waitresses and possibly for the utterances emitted by the clientele in appreciation thereof.

Yes, they were in the South, Charlotte thought.

“Very attractive personnel,” said Eddie, with a sideways glance at the shapely young woman who had just set down their mugs of beer. She wore a tight orange T-shirt bearing a cartoon of an owl, the Hooter’s logo, and black short-shorts with slits up the sides.

“Aren’t you too old to be gawking like a teenager?” Charlotte teased.

“You’re never too old,” Eddie replied with a grin. He picked up his mug and took a long swig. “Well, what do you think?” he asked.

“I don’t know what to think.”

“The first question is, Are Paul Federov and Paul Feder one and the same?” he said, reaching into the serving bowl for another chicken wing.

“I think they must be,” Charlotte replied and proceeded to tell him what the Smiths had said about Paul’s White Russian background, and what Dede had said about his lead soldier collection specializing in figures of the Imperial Russian Army. “But it should be easy enough to find out.”

Eddie nodded. “So what now?” he asked as he munched.

“Okay, let’s take this one step at a time,” Charlotte said. “Paul Federov, or Paul Feder as we know him, grows up in a Russian neighborhood in Queens where he becomes friends with a German named Wilhem Roehrer, who has fascist sympathies. By the way, did you recognize Roehrer?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie replied. “He was the same type as the guy on the
Normandie
: the full, fleshy face. But I couldn’t say for sure. I didn’t see him that well at the time. He was looking down at the roll of linoleum.”

“What about Feder? Do you remember him from the party?” Charlotte called up a mental picture of Paul. “He was very tall—six foot three or four—with very pale gray eyes, just like the eyes you remembered Roehrer’s accomplice as having.”

Eddie shook his head. “I didn’t meet him, though I did see the photo in the newspaper. I couldn’t tell; it wasn’t a very good picture.”

“That’s okay. We can get a better one from the police.” Charlotte remembered those same gray eyes, staring lifelessly up from the beach. “Okay, to continue. Roehrer and Federov attend a fascist summer camp in Connecticut, where, unbeknownst to them, they are singled out by an
Abwehr
agent, code name the Fox, to be operatives in a plot to sabotage the
Normandie
: Operation Golden Bird. The agent contacts a Bund member back in Queens, who recruits them for the sabotage caper. Have. I got it right?”

“As I understand it.”

“The Fox makes arrangements for them to work for the company that is laying the linoleum. He provides them with an incendiary device and sets up the circumstances in which they are to detonate it, namely the removal of the light stanchions in the vicinity of a stack of inflammable life preservers. Fifty years later, a man shows up on Roehrer’s doorstep and wants to know who his accomplice was. Roehrer, who is dying, and is concerned about his wife’s financial security, tells him to come back with money.”

“Which he does, two days later,” Eddie added as he took another swig of his beer. “This sauce is really hot,” he said.

Charlotte also took a swig of the cold beer, and then continued: “The next week, Paul Feder is murdered. The murder takes place on the fiftieth anniversary of the
Normandie
fire. Since the congruence of the dates is too improbable to be written off to coincidence, I think we have to work under the assumption that Feder’s murder was related to Operation Golden Bird. Especially since someone had just visited Roehrer the week before seeking to discover the identity of his accomplice.”

“I agree,” Eddie said.

“Which means that we can eliminate Lydia and the admiral as suspects,” Charlotte added. She thought of Occam’s Razor again: another unnecessary element in the subject being analyzed had been eliminated.

It was odd how all the players in the drama had assembled in Florida, Charlotte thought. But then, Florida was a place where old warhorses came to die, if they weren’t dead already or living in California. She remembered once reading a quote to the effect that Palm Beach was a place where few things begin but many things end.

Eddie looked up from his plate of chicken wings. “And from there?”

Charotte shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you have any ideas?”

“Only one,” he replied. “This is how it goes: the whole sabotage idea lies dormant for all these years. Then one day my memory decides to kick into gear, and I start looking into what happened on the
Normandie
fifty years ago. By coincidence, somebody else starts looking into the same event at the same time—somebody who wants the information badly enough to pay for it.”

“Maybe the authorities are more interested in the
Normandie
fire than you thought,” Charlotte suggested.

“For argument’s sake, let’s call the other party the FBI. I think this is what may have happened. I think Feder knew who the Fox was. I think the Fox got wind of the reopening of the investigation and killed Feder to prevent him from revealing his identity to whoever was looking into the case.”

“Rubbing out the witness. But why wouldn’t the Fox have killed Roehrer? Wouldn’t he have assumed that Roehrer knew too?”

“Not necessarily,” said Eddie.

“What about the significance of the date—the fiftieth anniversary?”

“Maybe the Fox is a murderer with a sense of style. Maybe he liked the irony of killing the person who might expose him on the anniversary of his act of sabotage. Or maybe he’s just a neat freak: someone who likes to have all his ducks lined up in a row.”

Charlotte nodded thoughtfully. “How can we find out who the Fox is?” She asked, then went on to answer her own question. “I know! We could track down the party that was making the inquiries—the FBI, or whoever—and find out if they have any information about him.”

“How would we do that?”

“Contact the Jewish Documentation Center. Ask if anyone else has been inquiring about
Oberscharführer
Wilhelm Roerher. If that’s how you found Roehrer, it might be how someone else found him too. Eddie?” she said. But his attention was elsewhere.

“I’m thinking about the Fox,” he said.

“Yes?” Charlotte prompted.

“He would have to be an American with a reputation to protect. If he was a former Nazi living in a foreign country, it seems unlikely that he would have gotten wind of the fact that investigators had reopened the
Normandie
case.”

“Nor would he probably have cared,” Charlotte offered. “How likely is it that they would come after him after all these years?”

Eddie nodded and then continued. “He would also have to have been one of the ten Navy officers supervising the conversion or an official with the Robins Drydock Company, in order to have arranged the circumstances as he did.”

“Like Jack McLean?”

“Or me. Or probably dozens of others.”

“You said the Attorney General’s report gave the names of all the people who were aboard at the time of the fire,” she said. “We might be able to select a list of possible suspects from that.”

“Here’s a possibility,” Eddie said as he tossed a chicken bone into the rapidly filling discard bucket.

“Yes?”

“Roehrer said that he and Federov came to the attention of the Fox through a Russian fascist summer camp in Connecticut. It shouldn’t be hard to find out more about this camp. Then we could see if any of the people on the list had a connection with the camp, or with the area.”

Charlotte was munching on her chicken wings.

“Charlotte?” Eddie said. He waited a minute for her reply, and then said, “Charlotte, are you there?” He waved a hand in front of her face.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Well, what do you think?”

She looked up at him. “Do you remember describing what happened to you when you walked into the Grand Salon at Villa Normandie? How the combination of the smell of the smoke, the song the piano player was playing, and the way it looked unleashed a flood of memories?”

He nodded.

“Well, something of the same sort has just happened to me. Except that the memories weren’t buried as the result of a head trauma. The door was just closed, the memories forgotten.”

Eddie looked at her, puzzled.

“What you just said about the summer camp triggered a memory,” she said. “Eddie, I
know
that camp.”

She told him the story in-between naps on the long ride back across the desolate scrubland of central Florida, which lay baking under the tropical sun. The main character in the story was Aleksandr Andreivich Koproski, or as he had been known in the small town of Hadfield, Connecticut, “the count.” A minor Russian nobleman, he had fought with the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army in the Ukraine, where he was injured. After the collapse of the Whites, he escaped to Constantinople. From there he eventually made his way to Paris, where he met an American Red Cross nurse, Dorothy Welland, who was serving with the relief forces. She was an heiress, twenty years older than he. Captivated by the romance of helping a tragic, titled Russian aristocrat, she took him under her wing and nursed him back to health. Then she brought him back to Connecticut and introduced him into New England society. Eventually she married him, and they set up housekeeping at a dairy farm in Hadfield, High Gate Farm, that had been purchased for them by her father. The farm became the gathering place for White Russian emigrés, including Prince Theodore, who was a nephew of the czar and a pretender to the Russian throne.

As Charlotte told the story, she found that she remembered more of the details with each sentence. It had been years since she had even thought about the count and his eccentric entourage.

“Charlotte,” said Eddie, interrupting the flow of her story, “how do you know all this?”

“I was a neighbor of sorts: a student at a finishing school in Hadfield, Miss Walker’s School for Girls. My father paid to send me there, which was about his only contribution to my upbringing. It’s no longer there, in part because of the count. But that’s another story. It was right next door to High Gate Farm.” She resumed her story: “But the count quickly became bored with the life of a country squire, and became involved in Russian monarchist politics. Eventually he founded a political organization whose goal was to overthrow the Soviet regime and restore the Romanovs to the throne. The organization was headquartered at the farm and funded by his wife’s money.”

“Was that the Russian Fascist United Front that Roehrer talked about?”