Page 19

Chapter Nineteen

It was just past a full moon and Tucker was dreaming about the Avallon’s four bathhouses.

He could hear his breath huffing out of him with each step down the hill. Rain drowned him; it was heavy enough that he could not tilt his head back or it would find its shrewd way into his nostrils. His hair was plastered flat to his head. He could feel water trickling down behind his ears and into his collar. Rainwater was nothing like sweetwater, though; it was deaf and innocent.

Avallon I, the closest to the hotel, was unlocked, and when he put his head in the door, the scent of bleach and metal came to him.

Avallon II was warm and scented with dirt, with growing things. The pools were perfectly still.

Avallon III smelled of sex and lilies, rank and strong. The pool leered at him; he left it behind.

Here was the Avallon IV. When he stepped inside the small building, his eyes took a moment to adjust to the lack of light. He saw curious symbols scrawled over the walls, none decipherable. The springhead was accessed via a rough square cut into the floorboards; in that dark hole, he saw a body. Back to him, arms lost to the deep; dead man’s float. Tucker’s feet caught on the floorboards as he hurried to the edge—was he barefoot before?—and heaved out the limp, naked body.

It was June Hudson, her eyes blank and white. “ June ,” he said, but she was empty of everything but the water.

···

Tucker came awake violently. He sat in his bed, hands linked behind his head, taking an accounting of his body’s physical sensations to drag himself from the dream. Sweat humid on his bare breastbone, the air cool against the damp between his shoulder blades. Left shoulder, the one he’d been shot in long ago, tight and uncooperative. Wool blanket scratching his bare feet.

By this point, he had contrived to stay in the cabin June had mentioned, the one with the rainwater cistern. Trillium House (a plaque on the porch railing named it) was not quite a cabin, not quite a cottage. The roof was green, and the exterior, including the porch, had been painted white. Thorned canes wrapped around the porch railings; in the summer, it must have been alive with rose blooms. Rockers slumbered beside the green door. It was pretending at being rustic, but it had little in common with the cabins that spotted these mountains outside the bounds of the Avallon.

Weeks ago, the man who had first opened the door for him was Woody Littlepage, head groundskeeper. Although he couldn’t have known exactly when—or if—Tucker might come down, he nonetheless seemed to be expecting him. Letting him in, he drifted silently after him from room to room, letting him look. Inside, the fixtures were simple: an unfussy table, workmanlike bunks, sturdy quilts, and plainly sewn curtains.

Woody spit onto the floorboard and then smeared the mouthful flat with the toe of his boot. “You prefer this to your room up in the big house?”

“There’s a cistern?” Tucker asked.

Woody gestured for him to step onto the viewing porch. Tucker looked first at the mountains, and then at the network of pipes leading to the concrete pad with its metal door. Tucker had seen setups like this before; this was the story of his childhood. But cisterns and rain barrels were normally for those who didn’t have the means to dig a well, who were scratching out a living on the side of a mountain, who didn’t have enough money to care that the cistern water was complicated with mosquitos and pollen. Running his fingers lightly over the place where the gutters joined, he worked the joint open. Inside was a carbon filter.

“Water keeps some of us up,” Woody said. “Hoss said you’re one of them.”

Tucker found himself grateful for the simple, pragmatic description. Yes. The water kept him up. “Tell me how to make it worth your while.”

“You Feds put me and Don and Marty up in Constancy ’til this has all blown over, you have the whole place to yourself.”

“I will make the call. Which motel?”

“Just give me the cash and I’ll set it up,” Woody replied.

Tucker understood. There would be no rooms in Constancy; the groundsmen would pocket the daily rate and disappear into the holler. The entire process was so seamless that he was certain June had facilitated it. “Acceptable.”

Hugh and Pony hadn’t had any interest in swapping their plush suites for the cabin, only using the kitchen for paperwork during the day, which meant Tucker had the place to himself. He didn’t normally mind the solitude, but tonight, after the disorienting dream of June’s corpse, he found it unpleasant to be alone, listening to the cistern thirstily and metallically drink the rain. He dressed; just slacks, a sweater. Here, he didn’t have to always look the Bureau part. Then he ducked his head against the slow drizzle and made his way out to the Bureau car. He did not start it, just sat in this more familiar dim, listening to the domesticated sounds of his own breathing against the close doors and ceiling. After a minute, his heart settled, and he collected the telegram he’d tucked under the driver’s seat the day before. By the light of the floodlights, he read it again.

SOG was still pleased with him, the telegram said. Could not answer his question about what it would take to guarantee his future employment, the telegram said. But strongly advised him to consider gestures that would look good in newsprint, the telegram said. Remember not to make an international incident, the telegram added.

Find them an incontrovertible but feeble bad guy, that was what it meant. A double-crossing flunky from one of the Axis legations—not a diplomat (Tucker was not allowed to arrest a diplomat), but perhaps a butler or driver or translator. Or a hotel employee with Nazi sympathies, a bedroom hung with secret swastikas. A local, maybe, smuggling letters under the seat of a delivery van. Anything that might provoke a line or two in The New York Times : Federal agents performed an arrest at the Avallon Hotel this was the sweetwater, working inside him. Tucker currently had his hands full chasing down a rumor of coded intel circulating among the German legation. Quite certainly anyone involved was too diplomatically protected for him to arrest them. But he hadn’t cared about that; he’d just been thinking that if he could manage to lay his hands on that intel before the diplomats were repatriated, it was information the US would have been unable to get any other way, and Tucker’s presence there would have been worth it. There was little valor in this sort of work, but Tucker had never needed commendations. He just wanted the justice.

But the telegram suggested he would need to change his thinking if he wanted to keep his job.

Through the drizzle, Tucker saw two figures stumble out of the little building they called the Winnet Cabinet. He recognized one of them: Pony Harris. The other was his latest hello girl, hanging on him. The young woman somehow managed to radiate the joyous disrepair of the unclothed while being completely clothed; Pony lightly squeezed her ass. Will it ruin the work? June Hudson asked. Pony, distracted by the switchboard girls, had still caught that sixth-floor cloakroom hang-up and recorded it dutifully in the call logs. The hello girls, distracted by Pony, were still presumably answering the phones. The work went on.

Tucker watched them slobbishly wind their way toward the hotel in the rain, feeling as he did the ancient combination of judgment and envy experienced by the loveless from the beginning of time. Impossible not to think of June Hudson in moments like these; guilty to think of June Hudson in moments like these. It was June who clung, it was Tucker who squeezed, it was them—hotel and Bureau—who stumbled messily up the hill after losing their minds in the Winnet Cabinet. God, her neck, her hands, her throat—

···

In the morning, everything felt washed clean. The sun was out again, illuminating each bright bud on every wick tree branch. Daffodils grinned along either side of the drive. Tucker’s frustration was washed clean as well, and the rest of the hotel seemed to be experiencing a similar, equally surprising renaissance. The Japanese were performing calisthenics on the front lawn. German children were enthusiastically engaged in some educational activity in the Conservatory. One of the Italians was giving piano lessons to a Bulgarian child in the pub. Waiters were sprightly; porters whistled; maids flashed smiles at Tucker in the halls. Magical. Eerily so.

Tucker asked after June Hudson at the front desk.

“She’s out today,” Basil Pemberton said, “but she left some information for you in the office.”

Out. Out where? He had not thought this hotel could manage without her.

In the office behind the front desk, he discovered the entire blotter was covered with notes in her handwriting, each addressed to a different staff member. The hotel couldn’t manage without her, but she had clearly done her best to stave the bloodshed until she returned. Tucker’s note read: TRM, talked to S, PB has info.

S had to be Sabine Wolfe. He had known June would be unable to resist talking to her—he could tell the moment she told him about the discovery that she had taken ownership of it. Or rather, the hotel had. She was so clearly used to everyone’s happiness falling under the Avallon’s jurisdiction.

He pocketed the note, got ready to go. An idea struck. He picked up the phone.

“Put me through to 411,” he said.

For weeks, he’d rapped on the door to room 411 to little or no answer. She was a staff member; she was supposed to be interviewed. It was the principle of the thing. The only reason he had not forced his way in physically or legally was because he didn’t expect there to be much purpose in a conversation with the long-term guest.

The phone clicked in his ear.

“They printed a photograph of that Goelet woman,” 411 said, not bothering with a hello. “I almost feel sorry for her. The copy says ‘doe-eyed,’ but is ewe-eyed a phrase? Is cow-eyed ?”

“Good morning, this is Agent Minnick,” Tucker said. He did his best to keep the satisfaction out of his voice.

“Oh, you fox,” 411 said, with grudging admiration. Her voice was sultry, just as it had been on the other side of the door. She didn’t need to show herself; her voice stood on its own. “Inside a Trojan horse.”

“This interview won’t take long.”

“It has been a very long time since I’ve suffered bureaucracy, Agent Minnick.”

“I need your full legal name and your position.”

She sighed, then told him.

“…The designer?” he asked, after a moment’s hesitation. Her disappearance had rocked society many decades before. Briefly, she had been considered a missing person—it was this that must have lodged her name in Tucker’s mind; they must have mentioned the case in the academy. The rest of the details were fuzzy. A great beauty, an almost supernatural muse, a two-time divorcée with a knack for persuading men to give up their wealth.

“Agent Minnick, you flatter me, but I accept it. What’s your next question? My city of birth, my father’s occupation?”

Idly, he pulled open a random drawer on the desk. It was filled to bursting with wedding invitations. A closer examination revealed that they each bore handwritten notes to June Hudson. Most were simple expressions of gratitude, but some were so personal that he closed the drawer, feeling intrusive.

“The only purpose of this interview is to determine if your presence in the hotel represents a security risk.”

“You mean, because Frank was morally flexible? Is that what this is about?”

“In what way was he morally flexible?”

411 laughed. It was an unkind laugh. “Don’t get flustered, Agent Minnick. I am not telling you he was a Nazi. I’m telling you the Avallon is for anyone who can pay for it. You don’t get any more morally bankrupt than unquestioning luxury. It’s the best of the best, for the sake of the best of the best. It’s why it was so exciting designing for him.”

“And your politics?”

“Darling, don’t you think you’d have a more useful time investigating who helped those journalists get the maids’ uniforms?”

He badly wanted to know how she had gotten this information, but he sensed that would only telegraph weakness to her. She’d hang up and it would be over. He needed to press on her own vulnerabilities. Not Francis Gilfoyle, not her career. She’d volunteered those already, so they wouldn’t do. He wanted to extract information about her relationship with June Hudson, but that would have been purely for his own curiosity. Instead, he asked, “Do you know why Sandy Gilfoyle fought with Francis before he died?”

A pause.

Then 411 asked the question he hadn’t: “How do you know that?”

“I’m a fox.”

“They disagreed about the war.”

“I already know that part.”

Another pause, full of reluctance. Finally, she said, “That is a private family matter, not for silly girls hanging on the line listening in. Come see me tonight, Agent Minnick. After you’ve asked the dining room staff about those uniforms.”

···

After curfew, the hotel felt like it was asleep, the light slumber of a predator. The font by the door trickled audibly. In the lobby, the night clerk looked sharply up as Tucker passed through; wordlessly, Tucker lifted a hand, letting him off the hook. A grateful nod.

With the diplomats all in their rooms, this was the staff’s time. Tucker heard clunking and scraping, uncouth, useful noises that would not be permitted during the hotel’s waking hours. He followed the commotion to the Magnolia Dining Room, where every chandelier was lit to bright-afternoon blaze. An army of whistling, singing, joking staff members carried chairs above their heads and moved tables. Gone were the gray-and-gold uniforms that made them all part of one smooth animal. They were in shirtsleeves and suspenders, ratty sweaters and holey trousers. The clockwork precision of their daylight moves was replaced with chaotic, cheerful disorder.

He let his eyes play over the group, paused when he spotted one of the young men who’d been making paper airplanes on the balcony. It didn’t seem possible that there was someone in this hotel that neither Hugh nor he had interviewed, but try as he might, he couldn’t conjure a name for him. Sensing his interest, the fellow came over, saying, with a slight German accent, “Agent Minnick, room service is supposed to come to you.”

Tucker said, “You never came in for an interview.”

“I’ve been far too busy running this place all by myself.” A winsome smile. The young man lifted one side of a table. “And I am still too busy. If you want to cross-examine me, you will have to wait or give me a hand.”

At the beginning of this, would Tucker have demanded this young man stop for an interview? Would he have demanded the waiters all stop, lined them all up against the wall and asked them one after another to either admit to helping the Axis journalists procure the maids’ uniforms or to nominate someone who had?

Yes, he would have. They had done wrong; he would make it right.

But now—

He was reminded of his post in Florida. Technically, the Bureau provided all the means necessary for agents to transfer, but practically, they offered meager moving expenses and brutal timelines. In Pensacola, navy families swiped all the pleasant low-hanging fruit, leaving Tucker going door-to-door at businesses to ask if he could rent a spare storage closet. At one of these, a dingy seafood restaurant, Tucker walked through the empty dining area, looking for the proprietor, and instead, pushing through a double door, found himself staring at a lot of guns. In the back of the restaurant—which he now knew was a front for some filthy enterprise—there were about eleven guns in various sizes set upon a table next to booze, cards, sandwiches. The owners of the guns were loading boxes into a truck. Standing there, frozen in their gazes, he’d felt his future forking away in several different directions depending upon his very next decision. Tucker had opened his jacket—eleven or so pairs of eyes watched him do it—and took his service Colt from its holster. He’d set it on the edge of the table, then, wordlessly, began to carry boxes into the truck alongside the other men.

That was how he’d gotten a nice room in one of Vince’s other properties, a beach house, all the while not paying too much attention to the merch that passed through the restaurant. While in Pensacola, Tucker put away two killers, a rapist, a car thief, and a dozen writers of bad checks.

He remembered every single compromise he’d ever made, and doubted them every time he did, from the largest to the smallest. Compromises were so much harder to carry than black-and-white justice.

But—

Tucker stripped his sweater, rolled up his sleeves, and lifted the other side of the table.

The waitstaff made noises of surprise and respect, like a sporting event was taking place. And Sebastian Hepp, the Avallon’s head waiter, gave him his interview. The amiable young man’s life story came out as they shifted tables, measured, shifted them again. He did a humorous impression of himself when he first saw the Avallon. Wow! Next room. Wow! Next room. Wow! Every time he said wow he made his eyes and mouth perfectly round, somehow managing to appear once more as the awed kid he was when he arrived. You know how it is.

Tucker didn’t, but he knew what Sebastian Hepp was talking about. He swiped sweat from his forehead. “What are we doing, by the way?”

“You do not see it?” Sebastian said. “It is the Rising Sun. The emperor wants his due. What do you think of that?”

“Democracy got sand under the Japs’ collars,” explained one of the other waitstaff helpfully.

Now that it had been said out loud, Tucker saw it. There was one table in the corner, an array of three tables around it, then five, then seven, then nine. The strict Japanese legation had been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the egalitarian nature of their stay at the Avallon: consul and servant alike enjoyed the same luxurious rooms, the same fine dining, the same entertainment. The Rising Sun was an attempt to restore some kind of national order and dignity, with the senior-most official and his family at the solo table, lesser consuls and support staff placed at increasingly subservient intervals. The other two-thirds of the dining room tables remained democratically scattered.

“I have been asked to do worse,” Sebastian remarked. “At least the Japs clear their plates. And their children are funny little mites.” It was funny to hear him say Japs and mites in his faint German accent; there was no doubt as to where he had been perfecting his English.

“As a German, do you feel sympathetic to the Germans here?” Tucker asked.

Sebastian’s expression was faintly betrayed and slightly complex; he’d forgotten they were performing an interview. He threw a chair onto his shoulder with ease; Tucker took one to match. Sebastian said, voice dry, “Hoss says they’re guests.”

“And what do you say?”

Sebastian looked at Tucker through the rungs of the chair, his expression complicated. “You asking me as you, or you asking me as G-man?”

“Which one do you want?”

The youthful head waiter considered this. Hesitated. Then asked, “What will happen to the journalists who want to stay? To Lieselotte Berger?”

The German journalist with the scars on her face. Please don’t send me back to Germany .

Tucker said, flatly, “You were the one who gave them the maids’ uniforms.”

The dining room had gone dead quiet.

Sebastian drew himself up, eyes worried but expression proud. “It was the right thing to do.”

Sebastian, cast as hero; Tucker, as villain. But those roles were only true here, in the dining room and Grotto. In a Bureau memo, in crisp, typed black and white, Sebastian had just admitted to treason.

“Do you know how serious this is?” Tucker asked. “They are considered enemies of the state. Imagine if you’d smuggled out Takeo Nishimura. The manhunt would have been the same for the journalists if they succeeded. People want someone to pay for this war, Mr. Hepp. The president’s signature put the Border Patrol here to keep them in this place. The president’s signature put me in this place. I am a federal agent.”

Sebastian’s eyes were round. Wow.

“Mr. Pennybacker is negotiating for them to be able to stay in this country, and criminal activity only jeopardizes those negotiations,” Tucker said. “We all want the same thing.”

“What do I want?”

“The devils in hell and everyone else living free.”

“And if the government cannot get it done for Lieselotte in time?”

Tucker had no easy answer. The truth was that the journalists were only three people in a war machine that no longer had time or interest in nuance. Three people? Three hundred people. The government had scooped up Lieselotte Berger and Erich von Limburg-Stirum and Lothar Liebe in the exact same swipe, hundreds of lives disrupted and stored in this mountain hotel, whether or not they earned it. Sebastian Hepp would be just another German. Tucker was just another agent. Individuals were being erased every day, in favor of broad, sweeping labels for enormous chunks of the population. But how could Sebastian comprehend such a thing? He’d practically grown up here at the Avallon, and now he was shaped like it. This was why he had confessed so easily; here, both rewards and punishments were child-sized. At the Avallon, it was impossible to imagine someone’s motives being ignored. Impossible to imagine bad faith. Impossible to imagine being made an example. To imagine dying unjustly, far from family, in an electric chair or a concentration camp, one of the irrelevant unnumberable many. The real world had so many ugly consequences.

That leaden weight inside Tucker grew heavier.

He said, “Let’s get these chairs up.”

He helped them place the last of the chairs and sweep up everything that the move had revealed beneath the furniture. He accepted their hands clapping on his back as he left, thinking about how he had entered the dining room as one thing to them and left as another.

Before he went back to Trillium House, he stopped by the fourth floor, although he no longer felt as interested in the answer to his question as he had before. 411’s door cracked open; she had been waiting for him.

He asked the single visible green eye, “How did you know?”

“I get room service.”

Because it hadn’t been a secret, had it? It was just a conversation topic. Something to pass the time, chatting up the long-term guest behind door 411.

“Ask your question, Agent.”

“Tell me what Francis and Sandy argued over.”

“Francis wanted to leave the hotel to Sandy, not Edgar. Sandy said that if he did, he’d close it down.”

“Why?” He was preoccupied, and he knew she could tell; the game had gone from her voice.

“There are better people to be asking that question,” 411 said.

The door closed.

When he got back down to the cabin, he found that someone had turned the porch light on so that he would not trip over a room service tray left on the mat. Funny to imagine someone walking down the drive, holding the tray level, squinting in the dark to find the gravel path to the cabins, climbing the porch stairs, debating leaving it inside on the kitchen table, where it might be missed until morning, or leaving it outside where it might be accidentally kicked by a tired agent’s shoes, deciding to open the door with the service key to turn on the porch light, returning to the hotel empty-handed.

Under the lid, Tucker found a single strawberry dessert, and a note:

The Grotto thanks you for your service, G-man.

Tucker thought about how he could arrest Sebastian Hepp for assisting the writers of Nazi propaganda, and Hoover would have one more public win, and it might be the concrete result that would give Tucker his career back. He thought about how the only cost would be Sebastian Hepp’s future. When he closed his eyes, the smell of sweetwater was overwhelming, even here.

He didn’t need to be liked, he thought.

He needed to get the job done.

Bureau-minded.