Murder Under the Palms (31 page)

Then he beckoned to a waiter and asked him to bring them a bottle of pastis and some tumblers. “The drink of Marseille,” he announced. As an afterthought, he also asked the waiter to bring them some olives.

If he was going to be arrested, Charlotte thought, he clearly wanted it to be under civilized circumstances.

When the bottle arrived, René set tumblers before everyone and poured out the amber-colored liquid. Ever the attentive host, he then added water from a small ceramic beaker, which turned the aperitif a distinctive cloudy yellow color. Finally he passed around the saucer of olives. “Imported from southern France,” he said, as he popped one into his mouth.

“Miss Graham has a story she would like to tell you,” said Maureen, introducing the subject as they had previously agreed. She sat tensely at the table, her glass of pastis untouched.

“If you have a few minutes, that is,” Charlotte said, maintaining the pretense that this was a casual visit.

René gestured with his hand as if to say, I have all evening.

“It’s a love story,” Charlotte said. “About a man who was desperately in love with a woman. A woman of enormous beauty, grace, and charm. A woman sometimes of wit. A woman to whom the man had devoted his entire life.” She took a sip of the sharp-flavored anise apéritif. “Then one day, this woman’s life is prematurely cut down by a terrible tragedy.”

René also took a sip of his drink.

“It’s a common enough story,” Charlotte went on. “It’s the story of Juliet and Aïda and Madame Butterfly.”

“And Camille,” added René, picking up another olive.

Charlotte nodded. “Except for two aspects that make this story different. The first is that the woman doesn’t die as a result of suicide or from disease. She is murdered. The second is that the woman isn’t a human being, but a ship. A ship with sleek lines and beautiful decor, a ship that symbolized the greatest artistic achievements of France. As the man who loved her put it, ‘the world’s most perfect ship.’” She paused to gauge René’s reaction, but there was none. He removed the olive pit from his mouth, and set it on his napkin.

“The name of the ship was the
Normandie
,” she continued. “And her murderers were Nazi fifth columnists, fascist saboteurs whose goal it was to see to it that she would never carry troops to Europe to aid the Allies. At the time it occurred, the
Normandie
’s lover thought the magnificent ship’s death, which was caused by a fire, was just a tragic accident, but later on—as a fighter in the French Résistance—he found out differently.” She looked up at René, who stared directly back at her.

“It’s a very interesting story,” he said. He sat stone-faced, sipping his pastis. Then he turned to Maureen. “Don’t you agree, Miss White?”

Maureen returned his stare. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

Charlotte continued. “As fate would have it, the man who loved the
Normandie
was destined to come face to face with one of her murderers. Toward the end of the war, he was captured by the Nazis and incarcerated in the same prison where one of the
Normandie
’s saboteurs was working as a guard. The prison was in Fresnes, just outside of Paris.”

René nodded as if to confirm her story and then ran his thumb along the waxed surface of his dapper mustache.

“At this point, I’m not entirely clear how the story goes,” Charlotte said. “It may be that the man who loved the
Normandie
overheard a conversation among the guards, or it may be that the saboteur bragged about having started the fire that led to the ship’s death. In any case, our lover discovered that the tragic end of the ship he had held so dear was not an accident, but a murder for which the prison guard was one of those responsible.”

She glanced at Roberts, who was sitting next to her, hands in his lap. Though he looked relaxed, Charlotte could see from her vantage point that his right hand rested lightly on the grip of his gun.

“It was at that point that he vowed his revenge,” she continued. “He resolved to track down the men who had murdered the
Normandie
and murder them, in turn.” She leaned back in her chair. “A bit extreme, you might say,” she noted, looking around at her audience. “After all, the
Normandie
wasn’t a woman, she was a ship.” Charlotte had picked up a creamer from the table. It was from the
Normandie
. On its side was the CGT logo of the French Line. Setting the creamer down, she went on with her story:

“But as it turned out, the man had other reasons to hate the Nazis. Not only had they killed his ship, they had executed many of his colleagues in the Résistance. And they had murdered his mother and his relatives in the Oradoursur-Glane massacre, one of the Nazis most heinous war crimes. The SS shot all the men and locked all the women and children in a church, and then burned it down. He didn’t know who had killed the members of his family, but he did know, or could find out, who had murdered the
Normandie.
”

She looked up again at René. Tears were welling in his soft brown eyes, and he blinked them away.

“In this man’s mind, the saboteurs of the
Normandie
became the scapegoats for the loss not only of the
Normandie
, but of all he held most dear.”

René had refilled his glass, and he took a long swallow from it.

“After the prison at Fresnes was liberated, our lover was free—free to indulge himself in his determination to track down the
Normandie
’s murderers. It became a hobby for him, in the way that tracking down one’s ancestors might be for a genealogy buff. He started with the Nazi technical sergeant who had been the prison guard. He became a detective: making inquiries, looking into old records, following up on leads. What he didn’t know was that he had made his job much more difficult than it really was.”

“How is that, might I ask?” René interjected.

Charlotte explained. “He was like a genealogy enthusiast who does all the legwork himself—traveling to distant countries to study the records in libraries, churches, and city halls—when he might have consulted a genealogy database. He was an avenger who had yet to enter the computer age. Unbeknownst to our vengeance seeker, the Nazi hunters at the Jewish Documentation Center in Los Angeles had already done all his work for him; the information he needed was in their computer records, available for the asking.”

René shrugged.

“Eventually, he tracked the prison guard down; it took him nearly fifty years. The guard’s name was Wilhelm Roehrer, and he was living in Clearwater, Florida, using the alias William Roe. But there was no point in killing Roehrer, because he was terminally ill. Roehrer was useful in another respect, though. With the aid of a bribe, he was induced to reveal the name of his accomplice in the sabotage plan, Operation Golden Bird. The accomplice was a Russian fascist by the name of Paul Federov.”

There was a subtle shift in positions around the table as Charlotte drew near the dénouement of her story.

“With a little detective work, the man who loved the
Normandie
discovered that Paul Federov was the prominent Palm Beach jeweler, Paul Feder. He had tracked Feder right to his own backyard. Feder was to be a guest at a preservation association benefit with a
Normandie
theme, for which our lover would be the caterer. How fitting that the
Normandie
benefit should be the venue of the saboteur’s death! Especially when the party was taking place on the fiftieth anniversary of that very act of sabotage.”

“And so our lover planned the murder of the man who had killed the ship he had so dearly loved. He would wait until Feder was alone, and then stab him with a knife he had taken from the corpse of a Nazi during his days as a
résistant
—a knife he had saved all those years specifically for that purpose. On that fateful evening, he was able to carry out his scheme exactly as he had foreseen it. Our lover, you see, was a man who had devoted a lifetime to making certain that events unfolded according to plan.”

Charlotte continued, looking directly at René. “How satisfying it must have been for him to finally have taken his revenge! But the score wasn’t fully settled yet. There was a third man: the
Abwehr
agent who had masterminded the sabotage plot. His
Abwehr
code name was the Fox, after a character from the fairy tale from which the plot took its name. What our lover didn’t know was that the Fox was an imposter: he wasn’t really an
Abwehr
agent, but a counterspy working for American intelligence.”

René looked up in surprise.

Charlotte had risen from her chair, and now stood behind it, her hands resting on the top rung. “That’s right,” she said. “He was Lieutenant Commander Jack McLean, and he was the officer in charge of the
Normandie
conversion. The
Abwehr
had solicited his participation in Operation Golden Bird as a way of verifying his allegiances. McLean’s plan was to start the fire in order to demonstrate his loyalty to the
Abwehr
, and then to put it out and save the ship. But his plan went awry: the fire boats pumped and pumped until the ship foundered.” She turned and paced toward the fireplace on the opposite wall. “I don’t know if it would have mattered to the man who loved the
Normandie
that McLean wasn’t an
Abwehr
agent, but I suspect not. In his eyes, McLean would still have been accountable for the
Normandie
’s death.”

Reaching the fireplace, she reversed direction and returned to the table. “I have no idea how the man who loved the
Normandie
tracked McLean down, since neither Roehrer nor Federov knew his identity,” she said, standing once again behind her chair. “But track him down, he did. Like Feder, to his own backyard. And so Admiral John W. McLean the third became his second victim—stabbed in the heart with a Nazi dagger while walking on the Lake Trail.” As Charlotte spoke, it struck her that McLean had done penance with his life for the crime for which he had carried the guilt for most of a lifetime.

René had regained his composure and sat quietly sipping his drink. “But, madam,” he protested with his debonair little smile, “you have left out the most important part of the story.”

“And what is that?”

“The identity of this … man who loved
Normandie.
” His eyes had hardened, revealing the soul of the French Résistance fighter beneath the charming, pleasure-loving façade.

“I will leave that part of the story to my friend, Detective White,” said Charlotte, looking over at Maureen.

She resumed her seat, and the audience’s attention shifted to Maureen. In fact, Charlotte had turned matters over to Maureen because she had no idea where to go from there. She had expected René to admit to being the character in her story, but it was clear that his legendary savoir faire wasn’t going to crack.

“Before Detective White takes over, I would like to offer my guests a cigarette,” said René. Leaning back, he removed a cigarette case from the pocket of his navy blue blazer.

It was the $200,000 gold-enameled case from the
Normandie
collection, the case that Paul had said rivaled the artworks of Fabergé for its craftsmanship, the case that Paul’s murderer had removed from his body.

Opening the lid, René slowly and deliberately offered the case to each of those assembled around the table. Then he removed a cigarette for himself and lit it. Finally he picked up the bottle of pastis and refilled his glass.

The others sat in silence, mesmerized by his performance. As they looked on, René raised the glass of milky yellow liquid.

“
À la revanche
,” he said looking at them through the smoke of his cigarette. “
Douce revanche
,” he added, and proceeded to down the contents of the tumbler.

Then he threw back his head and laughed.

It was three days later, and Charlotte had spent the morning sweeping. Not sweeping exactly, but cleaning out. Not even cleaning out, which was her excuse for being there, as much as daydreaming. Once she had signed the purchase agreement, she had been eager to get into Château en Espagne, to get a feel for her new house. The real estate agent had indulged her whim, though the actual closing wouldn’t take place for several weeks. She had spent the morning sweeping up dead palm fronds from the courtyard with a corn broom that she had bought in West Palm Beach, and admiring the paving blocks of cut coral, which made the house seem like an organic part of the coral bedrock of the island. Because the courtyard was the part of the house that had first captured her heart, she had chosen to attend to it first. When she was finished sweeping, she cleaned the dead leaves and other debris out of the fountain, and then pruned and watered the lemon trees in the terra-cotta pots lining the entrance walk, and the potted gardenia plants in the courtyard. Then she tended to the neglected orchids in the slat house, immersing the pots in water to simulate a tropical rainfall, as directed in a book on orchids she’d picked up at a bookstore on Worth Avenue. After a ham sandwich eaten at the patio table in the slat house, she had spent the early afternoon in the empty house, sitting, thinking, wandering around. Ever since she’d decided to buy the place, she had been mentally running up and down the stairs, peering into empty rooms, and arranging the furniture. In short, building castles in the air.

Now she was sitting with Dede in a sling-back chair on the flat roof of the guest cottage, taking a break. They were eating pistachio nuts and drinking iced tea and enjoying the view, which was similar to the one from her tower (she liked that—
her
tower!), but even better because they were out in the open. The design of the flat roof continued the Moorish theme that had been established by the interior design of the cottage. Looking out over the barrel-tiled roofs of Palm Beach, with their various pitches and angles and shades of red, Charlotte felt as if she could have been in old Morocco.

“Does the fact that I’m soon to become your landlady mean that I’ll have the excuse to come up here and drink iced tea with you when I come calling for the rent?” Charlotte asked as she looked around at the roof garden, whose floor was covered with raffia matting, and which was casually decorated with beach furniture and gay pots of flowering plants.