Page 16

Chapter Sixteen

It was a full moon and a mountain town and June was dreaming about the two ways to sabotage a coal mine.

To fire a mine, one lit coal cars filled with oil-soaked timber, then pushed them down the shaft into the belly of the beast. If one was lucky, or calculated, or both, the cars would bite down onto a coal seam. Such a fire wouldn’t cease until it had eaten the whole thing, even if it took years to swallow it.

To flood a mine, one had to shove explosives into a rucksack or strap them to one’s body, and creep down the shaft to the tunnel closest to a lake or pond. Hell, even a stream would do—didn’t have to be a lot of water, just water that wouldn’t quit. It was important to place the explosives so they would blow the rock holding the water at bay. Important, then, to begin to pray. The shorter the fuse, the longer the prayer. If the sudden gust of warm wind from the outside world didn’t blow out your lantern and leave you lost in the darkness, if the falling rock didn’t hit you, if the freed gases didn’t suffocate you, then the water would come for you, filling up every shaft, chasing you to the ladder, to the cage, roaring, rising, the sweetwater stinking like blood already, filling your mouth, blinding you—

June awoke, choking, coughing.

She had scrabbled to sitting before she had even properly realized she had. Her heartbeat was caterwauling in her ears. The room was dark but she saw sparks in the corner of her vision.

Breathe, breathe, breathe.

With effort, she took several long breaths, in and out, for the moment ignoring the dachshunds prodding at her. Slowly the sparkles went out of the darkness, and her eyes adjusted instead. The distant floodlights from the guard towers picked out the furniture in her room. She was awake.

June touched her face. It was soaked. Her cheeks, forehead, throat. Twisting, she touched her pillow, her sheets. Lifting her fingers to her nose, she smelled them. Sweat or sweetwater, she could not tell the difference anymore. She pressed a hand flat against her stomach, ruching her jamarette top, recalling Gilfoyle’s hand doing the same, skimming sweat from her ribs, flank, hip. She closed her eyes again, but she wasn’t tired.

That letter.

Miss Hudson, keep the old chin up, Gilfoyle.

June was a little angry at how confused she felt by—well, by all of it. By the letter from Gilfoyle, Sandy in a wheelchair, Hannelore Wolfe, the diplomats leaving, Agent Minnick’s coal tattoo, what people were saying about Mr. Francis . What were they saying about Mr. Francis? Was this because he knew Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, both of whom had met Hitler personally? Mr. Francis had once said something about President Hindenburg, the man who had appointed Hitler chancellor—she did not remember exactly what, only that she hadn’t liked it at the time. Something about Poland. The Jewish tradition. So on. So forth. She remembered it well enough that when Pearl Harbor happened, a small part of her had been relieved that Mr. Francis had not lived to see it, so that her love of him would not be ruined.

Perhaps she did know what they were saying about Mr. Francis.

She knew, after all, that Sandy had put an ocean of duty between himself and his father’s principles.

With effort, she recalled her Mr. Francis. Sandy hadn’t gotten this version of his father; he’d refused everything to do with it. This Mr. Francis stood with her at the edge of the Magnolia Dining Room, which sparkled with clever ripostes and jingling silverware.

Mr. Francis: It is your job to know these people better than they know themselves.

June: I don’t know the first thing about what these jaspers do outside this hotel.

Him: What they do outside this hotel is only a sheet covering the furniture. Anyone can see the sheet covering the furniture. You need to know what’s underneath, what their life is covering up. Do you know why I’m training you to do this job?

Her: Because I can hear the water.

Him: Because you’ve always cared more about what’s under the sheet. Most people don’t even know themselves why they do what they do.

Gilfoyle was one of these people, she thought. He didn’t know that he always ran away from conflict, like a gentle stream taking the easiest path around rocks. Every time he found himself on the other side of the state from an argument, he seemed surprised. Every failed relationship—all of them his doing—was nonetheless a shock.

Just tell him , she thought.

Just say: I want you.

Just ask: Do you want me?

But she knew she wouldn’t. Because she could not see the furniture beneath the sheet, she could not bring herself to tug the fabric away to find out for sure.

I think the world of you, June.

She let herself understand that she was angry at him. In the dream, the water had burst through the tunnel walls, pushing out every lungful of air, destroying the mine and everyone in it forever. Millions of pounds of crushing force finally set loose.

That was how she felt.

Keep the old chin up! That was something she’d tell Sebastian or Paul if they dropped a tray during service. All day she’d anticipated Gilfoyle’s letter, not knowing that every single gift and word she would receive all day long before opening it would be superior. Her room was full of little flowers and darned socks and cards with humorous or touching memories written in them by people who wrote far more slowly and had much less to their name than Edgar Gilfoyle. It was the overboots; they’d fooled her.

Maybe she was done waiting for him.

She could not lie in this bed any longer. She got up and checked the stairwell to see if her staff had already left the previous day’s updated guest ledgers. They had, so June stood there, halfway in, halfway out of the doorway, paging through them idly, reading about this diplomat’s dining preference and this secretary’s favorite card game, until one entry startled her enough that she dropped the book with a fluttery thud. As she picked it up, laughing a little at her foolishness and at the curious turn of events, a voice sounded from above.

“Oh, Hoss, you are awake.”

“Floréal? That you?”

Floréal, her swing chef (thirties, spry, single, likely to be drafted with the next round), appeared on the top stair. Tactfully averting his eyes from her pajamas, he asked, “Do you have your shoes on?”

···

It was three o’clock in the morning as Tucker stepped into the Avallon’s valet garage.

“Get the lights off outside the building,” he said. “We don’t need everyone to know our business.”

A handful of Border Patrol agents shared a single cigarette in the doorway, the red glow at the end flaring into being and then disappearing as it moved from person to person. Agent Pennybacker (PennyBAAAAAAACK!) was crouched in the cobblestone aisle, trying unsuccessfully to win the affections of the wiry dachshund. It was a peculiar garage. It had been a stable, and it still had both the stall dividers and the vital atmosphere of one; the horses had simply been swapped for Cadillacs. But it must have seemed slightly strange as a stable, too, because every inch was painted and carved with imagery of mountains, rivers, snails, and a repeating tendril motif that looked sometimes like roots, sometimes like branches, and sometimes like elongated horned figures. It looked like the sweetwater smelled.

In the closest stall, three people in muddy maids’ uniforms sat sullenly against the intricately painted stall divider.

And leaning against a support beam was GM June Hudson, hands in the pockets of a stylish overcoat, dark hair barely slicked back, observing Tucker with that knowing, pleasant smile that seemed her most regular wardrobe item.

“I should have been notified before anyone else,” Tucker told the Border Patrol guards.

“We sent for you and Agent Pennybacker at the same time,” said one of them, a man with upper arms so comically large he seemed burst from the comic strip Thimble Theatre . Tucker could tell he’d been drinking; they’d all been drinking. It was this guard’s turn at the cigarette, and he took a puff, smiling with the twin pleasures of the smoke and the absurdity. He followed Tucker’s gaze to June Hudson. “That’s the GM.”

“I know who Miss Hudson is,” Tucker told him. He was annoyed by them; they had only one job, and carousing wasn’t it. “Why was she notified?”

The guard sucked on the cigarette, passed it to the next. “She wasn’t.”

Tucker took the cigarette, dropped it, stepped on it. “Go tell Agent Calloway to get me the names of every staff member currently on duty. Can you do that? You can all go together, since you’re sharing a brain and a nut amongst you. Then get back to the perimeter. I catch you drinking on the job again, I’ll have you tossed out of this place faster than they can print your draft card. You hear me? Say yessir .”

“Yessir,” said Thimble Theatre.

“Get out of here.”

“Agent Minnick,” said Pennybacker, climbing to his feet. His hair stuck up in all directions, in need of a mother to tamp it down. “You served it cold to those men. They ran right out. Yessir! Off they scuttle to do their jobs. Top shelf.”

Tucker waved this off. “Have you questioned them?”

“I just got here. What do you think of this stable?” Pennybacker was obviously delighted. “Miss Hudson told me there was another quite similar to it on an island in the North Sea; the architect did some of the carvings for this heap over there and had them shipped, if you can believe it! He commissioned these paintings after going on a journey into the mountains here to spark his imagination. Wonderful! She said he also wrote some poetry on the blueprints but, sadly, she said it was no good. There really is nothing more valuable than a great poet and more useless than a bad one.”

“The Bureau has less interest in the stable than the people in it,” Tucker said. “So if you’ll excuse me.”

“Excused!” Pennybacker said merrily. “We like to see a man at work.”

Tucker faced the would-be escapees. Two men, one woman, all three dressed in Avallon maid uniforms. None of them had gone to the trouble of pulling on hose, which was just as well. The men were extremely hairy.

“Names,” he ordered. “If it helps, it’s a rhetorical question; I already know who you are.”

“Archie Boyle.”

“Géza Breznay.”

“Lieselotte Berger.”

Newspaper men (and woman), the three of them, an Irishman, a Hungarian, a German, who’d each earned a spot on the State Department’s detention list by writing propaganda for the German war effort.

Tucker gestured to the bramble-tangled uniforms. “Tell me, in your own words, what I’m looking at.”

“A fire on a distant hill,” said the Irishman. “You smell the smoke, but you can’t know what is burning; you were too far away when it all began and now it all looks the same against the sky.”

Tersely, Tucker said, “I have had three hours of sleep.”

Breznay, the Hungarian, interjected, “What is our crime? Being members of the free press. Our sentence? This prison.”

Tucker said, “It’s my understanding that twenty presidents have stayed here.”

“A prison’s not defined by the beauty of the gates,” the Irishman said.

Tucker waved this away. He turned to Lieselotte Berger. Her wrists weren’t bound, but she turned her hands palm up, heels pressed to each other, in a supplication that nonetheless gave the impression of captivity. Her otherwise unremarkable face was marked by two silver scars, one on either cheek, so identical that they must have been intentional.

He asked, “Who gave you those?”

She said simply, “Please don’t send me back to Germany.”

This set the Irishman off into a diatribe: they would all be killed by the Germans, who had blackmailed them into writing propaganda but knew they were not faithful to the Nazi regime. He started in on the various ways they could be murdered, until eventually Tucker said, “Mr. Boyle, please refrain from hyperbole.”

“I see why they bring in the FBI to do interrogation,” Pennybacker whispered to June Hudson, loud enough that Tucker shot him a look. Pennybacker pressed apologetic fingers to his lips, but spoke through them, “As you were, Agent Minnick.”

Tucker extracted the tale of that evening’s adventure: three journalists, frenzied to action by the looming repatriation, dressed in stolen maids’ uniforms, snuck into the darkness. At the scream of a mountain lion they realized they would not survive the mountains, detoured toward the road, were intercepted by the Border Patrol. A scuffle, a knife, no injuries. The mountain lion was still hungry, presumably.

“Go back to your rooms,” Tucker told the journalists. “You’re paying the Avallon for those uniforms. You now have an eight p.m. curfew. You don’t have to name any staff members who helped you, but if you don’t, I will put a letter in your files that means that, even if you do make your way back to America when this war is over, your life here will be dogged by federal agents. Is that clear? I don’t want any one of you getting me out of bed again. Now get the hell out of here while I have a word with Agent Pennybacker.”

Pennybacker mouthed some astonished word at June— wow or smokes or yowie —and then, after the three journalists had gone out into the cold, Tucker asked, “What’s the status of the negotiations?”

“They’ve been Bickenbached,” Pennybacker said. “Failing. Listless on its cot. Angela Bickenbach continues to be a thorn in my side. Bad numbers, bad faith. It has fallen apart entirely.”

June’s eyes flashed, but Tucker, who’d worked in a government agency for a decade, wasn’t surprised; he had never seen an affair wrapped up faster than it was meant to. These journalists had gotten themselves worked up for nothing; they could’ve taken a few more weeks to perfect their plan.

“And now, these journalists!” Pennybacker exclaimed. “I will either have to find another German to put on that boat in Lieselotte Berger’s place, or argue that she was most of the way through her citizenship process or some such nonsense, while also convincing the State Department they want her here in America, which I highly doubt they will.”

Tucker asked, “And the Irishman and the Hungarian?”

“Oh, we can just dump them over the edge of the boat off the coast of Portugal and they can swim the opposite direction from Germany,” Pennybacker said warmly. “It’s Berger who will be my problem. The Germans are always the problem. The entire thing will drag on; the last communication took nineteen days to get to my German equivalent, Herr Pennybacker, and I assume whatever he replies will take another nineteen. I hope the flowers are nice here in the spring.” There was a sob or a shout from outside and he said, “They’re singing my song. Thanks for the shakedown, Agent. Miss Hudson, don’t forget to ask me about Rudy and Rufey later. I think I have figured it out. Good night, goodbye.”

Tucker and June Hudson and the dachshunds were left in the stable alone.

He asked, “How likely is it that the journalists stole the maids’ uniforms during a dinner service?”

“Unlikely.”

“How likely is it that one of your staff members helped them?”

“Unlikely.”

“Those statements can’t both be true. Is it true 411 is still here?”

“Unless she got away in a maid’s uniform.”

The conversation was complicated by the weight of her attention, by the cleverness of her expression. Her voice was full of mountain twang; he wanted to put her words in his mouth. He was breathless; he stood on a porch and looked into the beautiful sunset of a dangerous landscape. She was toying with him, but she toyed with everyone. But she hadn’t been tucking her hair behind her ear and touching her neck when Pennybacker and the others were here; her cheeks had not been that flushed, had they? Surely he was not mistaken; she was regarding him as Tucker Minnick, man, in addition to Tucker Minnick, agent.

What would he do with this knowledge? Nothing. He was Bureau-minded as they came.

Without saying anything, June headed deeper into the building; he understood, with a pleasant buzz to his gut, that he was to follow. She turned on a light switch; two bulbs revealed a navy-blue Pierce-Arrow limousine. It was a fine-looking vehicle, perhaps ten years old, a little rough around the corners; there were some scratches in the paint and the rear cloth seats showed use. June set to work at once; in just a few minutes, all its doors and hatches and hood were open like a beetle drying in the sun.

She said, “Make yourself useful.”

Tucker did not make himself useful. He stood in the open door on the opposite side of the vehicle and watched her. She knelt to retrieve peppermint-soaked cotton balls from beneath the seats, sniffing them to see if they were still potent. On the back seat was a small wooden case; inside, a small, stained brush and jarred red liquid. Hot pepper sauce. Gingerly, she brushed the deterrent onto various bits and bobs beneath the hood. Her coat had come open, through accident or strategy; she did not hide away her ruched sleeping top.

He remarked, “How lucky the Gilfoyles are to have a general manager driving the mice away for them even at three a.m.”

June moved around the vehicle to paint the brake lines with the spicy fluid. “Oh, this is mine.”

“It’s what?”

“It was one of the house cars ’til five years ago. Once Pierce-Arrow went under, Mr. Francis reckoned it didn’t look good to have them as house cars. The other two were sold down the river; this one I got as a bonus for keeping the hotel afloat during the years all those men were jumping from windows. It’s meant for a chauffeur, of course. You see the front is leather, the back is cloth. The mice prefer the cloth, the little motherless bastards.”

This enormous car—it must have been nearly four thousand dollars new. What an odd and useless bonus for their general manager. A vehicle meant for two, master and servant. He asked, “Do you drive it?”

“I’d go hungry putting gasoline in it, and I could never get new tires for it now with rationing.”

“Sell it for a more practical vehicle?”

Snap went the case as she shut it and returned it to its place in the back seat. “They’d be right offended if I did that, and anyhow, where would I go?”

Tucker had been pressing a finger into the tires, judging their roadworthiness, and realized too late that she’d delivered the last question as a challenge, inviting him to reply with a suggestion. And then the moment had passed. Just as well. What did he think he would do with it? (He already knew what he would do with it—repeatedly reconsider its passing when he couldn’t sleep.) And then she said, “So all that boat business was just a rumor.”

“Seems that way.”

“I don’t want to think about how the diplomats will take the news. That’s a sunshine item, as Toad says; it’ll seem more doable in the sunshine,” June said. “Here’s a moonshine item for you, though: my staff—the ones you’re so quick to suspect of aiding the enemy—turned up an answer for your cloakroom caller. Don’t frown. You know what I mean. The sixth-floor cloakroom, the calls that never happened? It was in yesterday’s ledger notes. Maintenance saw someone go in there; switchboard reported another hang-up. Safe to assume the call was placed by the ghost haunting the room, don’t you think?”

“And the ghost was—?”

“Sabine Wolfe.”

Genteel Sabine, who thus far had only distinguished herself by calming the anxious Hungarians the first day, by having a tantrumming daughter, and by being married to a gregarious cultural attaché with unpleasant friends. But now she had an identity of her own: Sabine Wolfe, the woman who nearly placed calls from the sixth-floor cloakroom. The timing seemed important. When she’d placed the last call, everyone but Pennybacker had assumed departure was imminent. Why might she pick up the phone under those circumstances?

“Miss Hudson,” he said, carefully. “Bureau policy demands we observe subjects in place. Do not approach her.”

“Why would I approach her?”

He said, “You seem like the sort of child who ate bugs.”

“I was actually a very quiet child. More like Hannelore Wolfe.”

“I find that very hard to believe, Miss Hudson.”

“That’s because you’ve never met anyone like me before. And this Miss Hudson business is all over. Now that we’re stuck together for longer, it’s June.”

The thing between them, previously intangible, was acquiring mass. “Do not approach her, June .”

“I do my business, you do your business?”

“That’s right.”

June closed the hood of the car in a definitive sort of way. Then, suddenly, she grinned, and in the brilliance of that grin, Tucker felt every knot tying him to Bureau-minded loosen. She said, “I can’t promise that. Sometimes your business will be my business.”

Tucker quite suddenly had a very clear memory of his boyhood, getting underfoot as his father did the washing up. His father’s shoes, damp from wash water, made boot prints in the coal-dusted floorboards. Tucker did not remember anything important about his mother, but he remembered that during this memory, she was outside smoking a cigar his father had brought her. He still could not smell a cigar without remembering their porch with the six chairs jumbled on it, and someone else’s dog collapsed on the top step, so you had to step over him. Tucker remembered looking at the just-washed pot on the counter and realizing that it needed to be dried, and that, moreover, he could dry it. Such a small revelation, such a meaningless childhood revelation to remember out of an entire life, and yet he remembered pushing the stool close so he could reach. He remembered how his father had looked at him. Was this the first time Tucker had seen something that needed doing and done it, or was it just the first time his father noticed what he was doing? Tucker’s father had said, “You’re the marrying kind, Tucker.” Only he hadn’t called him Tucker, because no one would’ve called him Tucker then.

Tucker told June, “Pensacola.”

“What’s that?”

“Pensacola. I know a man who owns holiday cottages there. The beach is white,” Tucker said. “That’s where you could drive an automobile, if you had a reasonable one.”

June pretended to write the word down in the air. Then she closed the two car doors on her side; he closed the two on his. She looked at her little watch (her fine wrist, her long hands) and snapped her fingers at the ever-present dachshunds, who had made a bed of a folded tarp. They sprang to attention.

Outside, in the strange, deceptive light of the Border Patrol’s floodlights, just as they started on their separate ways, he said, “Miss Hudson—June.”

She stopped. She had holes in her earlobes that he hadn’t noticed before; she must have been wearing earrings when they first met. She was looking at his coal tattoo like she wanted to touch it.

He said, “Call me Tucker.”