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Chapter Two

Special Agent Tucker Rye Minnick wasn’t allowed in the front door.

None of the agents were. When they arrived at the Avallon Hotel, the Feds had just a glimpse of the hotel’s wintry facade, perfect as a postcard, before uniformed, gloved attendants directed them away from it. The trip seemed interminable. They’d driven from Washington at forty miles an hour, the speed Roosevelt was supposedly about to propose to save rubber and gasoline, and now it felt as if they were being sent farther into the gray mountains. Around their vehicles, snow fell in unmotivated, meditative circles; mist rose from the ravines. January in West Virginia was raw, spare, objectively beautiful.

Tucker wondered why it was that humans were drawn to natural beauty. It wasn’t for them. Here, in fact, it actively opposed them. Everything that made the landscape beautiful—the remote location, the steeply pitched slopes, the rushing rapids—was dangerous. And yet, like mice before snakes, deer before hunters, a certain type of gentle woman before a certain type of brutal man, humans pined and longed for these vistas. Even he, with all his life experience and his training, saw loveliness in these surroundings. Everything logical in him was unnerved; everything else swooned.

His last post had been like this, too, albeit with vastly different aesthetics. Albino Ridge, Texas, a little border town with the poor fortune to serve as a point of operation for “Singing Joey” Puglisi, who ran opium through Mexico up to New York. The dry landscape outside the town had been barbed and venomous, ready to kill a man in a day or two…but the first few months of his post, he’d stood on the back porch every evening to watch the sunset glaze the Chisos Mountains red and then black. He’d reminded himself over and over that this brutal place wanted him dead, tried to talk himself out of being moved by the beauty.

But he was still out on that porch every night, wasn’t he?

Eventually, the track around the Avallon led to a staff entrance, where a gloved porter in the Avallon’s gray-and-gold uniform waited.

“Hello, hello, hello. Hello, young fellow, we have arrived.”

Thus entered Mr. Benjamin Pennybacker, the State Department representative leading the mission. The State Department was not exactly a rival agency to Tucker’s FBI, but they were not bosom colleagues, either. Technically the Bureau men were to refer to him as Agent Pennybacker or, even more appropriately, Special Agent Pennybacker , but in private, the three agents, by unspoken agreement, called him Mr. Pennyback, the first half said quickly, like winding up the pitch, and the second half thrown into the mud with energy. PennyBAAACK. Give me my PennyBAAACK. Currently, Pennybacker was greeting the porter while balancing on one foot, the better to flick gravel from his opposite shoe as he nattered on about the weather, golf, the local wildlife, the problem of stuck typewriter keys, fifteenth-century Welsh uprisings, each topic carrying the conversation’s participants further from the matter at hand, not closer.

The State Department! They weren’t agents. They were schoolboys who didn’t notice their shirts were untucked in the back, coming of age in a file cabinet while the Bureau men trained in the field.

Tucker broke in. “I was led to believe our meeting was in the main hotel.”

The porter replied, “We’ve been asked to park your vehicles back here to avoid disturbing the guests.”

“The guests are still here?”

“Sir?”

At this reveal, Pennybacker’s eyes beseeched first the porter and then Tucker. He did not seem to have the words for his disappointment; he was a kid pummeled for his candy.

Tucker asked the porter, “Is Mr. Gilfoyle here to meet us?”

“Oh yes, sir.”

Well, then it would be made right, thought Tucker. He glanced over his shoulders at the other two FBI agents. “Wipe your shoes, fellas.”

With the mountains at their backs, they entered the hotel, scuffing the January slush off their soles. Benjamin Pennybacker, his jaw squared with brave new optimism; Special Agent Hugh Calloway, graceful as Astaire; Special Agent Pony Harris, grin like a crocodile. Special Agent Tucker Minnick, tight as a piston. Heads down, hats in hand. Scuff scuff scuff.

The porter asked, “Would you like to hang your coats?”

Pennybacker immediately relinquished his, revealing a rumpled shirt. The Bureau men, however, looked to Tucker. They all wore Bureau-issued .38 Colts beneath their jackets.

Tucker said, “We’ll keep them.”

Inside, the hotel was a gilded rabbit warren. Halls branched from halls. Stairways tunneled into the dark, some of them just six or eight stairs, younger stairways that seemed to be still growing. Doorways upon doorways in no predictable orientation. On the walls, stone bears and cougars, eagles and deer, choked mineral water into basins, their mouths stained dark. And still Pennybacker prattled on. Cruise ships, competitive harp playing, wool dyeing, saints in America.

Tucker interrupted, “Did you request the blueprints?”

“A good thought,” Pennybacker said. “An exemplary thought. Secret passageways. Men jumping from holes in walls. Women disappearing in the night. This place stirs the imagination.”

Tucker crooked a finger at one of the Bureau assistants behind them. “Make that happen.”

“I’ll do what I can, sir,” replied the assistant.

“No,” Tucker said. “Not good enough. Make it happen.”

“Yessir.”

Better.

Unlike Tucker, the assistant would head back to Washington after this meeting, free as a bird. The assistant, a young man so junior he probably still had pulled muscles from the academy, had years of grunt work in front of him before he’d earn any status, work Tucker had been eager to put behind him. But now he envied those days of surety, ambition, the feeling that the only way was up. Hoover had sent Tucker here as special agent in charge, two agents underneath him—on paper a lateral step, if not an upward one—but both he and Hoover knew it was an exile. He’d earned it.

Staff flowed in and out of the agents’ view to open and close doors, seeming less like employees and more like an extension of the hotel itself, a helping hand for those who faltered. Unsettling, yes, but not as unsettling as the hotel’s complicated odor: perfume, blood, fruit, dirt, caves, blossoms. The smell of the mineral springs.

He remembered that smell well.

You won’t be here long , Tucker thought. Just get the job done.

The staff were stealing discreet glances at Hugh. He wasn’t the only Black man there, but he was the only one starkly visible; every front-of-house staff member was White. Perhaps they were just curious; a G-man was unusual in this place, and a Black one even more so. Or maybe their attention signaled something darker. There were plenty of ugly things dressed in nice uniforms, weren’t there?

“Your pop never teach you to blink?” Pony asked a porter, who ducked his head swiftly.

Hugh told Pony, “You’re just jealous of my admirers.”

Pony tapped a salute off his forehead at a second staring staffer, showing them all his teeth.

“Hey,” Tucker said. “Tighten up.”

Admonished, the two other agents slunk into the library, leaving Tucker feeling even more unpleasant. He was perfectly at ease with the authority he wielded over the assistant, many years his junior, but he was less certain of how to approach his peers, Hugh and Pony. Hugh could have led this mission himself, except that Hoover would have never put a Black man in charge. And Pony…young Pete had informed him when they met that he’d gotten his nickname for a pony of whiskey, as if Tucker might have been impressed by the autobiographical note. Pony was a red-blooded young man in a way Tucker had never been, and the only role Tucker knew how to play with him was disappointed father. None of them were typical Bureau material, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine the other two agents were meant to be another part of Tucker’s exile, or he part of theirs.

Taking ahold of Pennybacker’s arm to stop him in the doorway, Tucker said, “We won’t be so informal again. The Bureau men, I mean.”

Pennybacker nervously straightened his bow tie, as if he were the one who’d been rebuked. “Ah, it’s all right, it’s just a hotel.”

“If it was only that,” Tucker replied, “we wouldn’t be here.”

In the Smith Library—the most formal of the hotel’s three libraries, according to the staff, despite holding thousands of stiff-jacketed titles—the meeting began. In addition to the FBI and State Department, there was also local law enforcement, a mayor, two immigration officers, and Edgar David Gilfoyle, society playboy, seated at the head of a large executive table, the latter looking more professional than his reputation suggested, his tawny hair coifed and respectable, his long nose speaking of good breeding. The harsh winter light cast a keen-edged shadow behind him—behind everything, in fact. The huddled green leather chairs, the brass-shaded floor lamps, the brass whippet statuettes, the agents lowering themselves into their seats: everything had its dark mirror version. While Gilfoyle and Pennybacker conducted the sort of elliptical small talk that powerful, indirect men performed to take each other’s measure, an impeccable little cake, sticky with strawberry glaze, appeared before Tucker, a fairy gift. He frowned at it mistrustfully.

A waiter materialized at his elbow. “Agent Minnick, what would you like to drink?”

What a magic trick! Agent Minnick. Absurd that the hotel somehow knew Tucker’s name and yet had not completed the most essential prerequisite for this meeting: expelling its guests. He asked, “What do you have that’s not water?”

“Coffee, tea, lemonade, juice, Coca-Cola.”

Coffee brewed with water from the tap, tea steeped in water from the tap, lemonade made with water from the tap—he couldn’t avoid the sweetwater forever.

“A Coke will do me fine,” Tucker said.

He could avoid it for now.

“As you like,” the waiter said, and Tucker was interested in the—not the equality of it, because this man was taking his drink order, after all—but the dignity of it. All the waiters carried themselves with a good-humored bearing, as if only a stray turn of events had led to these elegant men being the ones delivering the food rather than receiving it, and that they did not in any way begrudge this fate. In this life, they served, in the next, perhaps, the seated men would. The atmosphere was not subservient. Instead, they were invited to play this guiltless game of luxury together.

Gilfoyle raised his voice. “Ah, here she is.”

The latecomer was the first woman they’d seen in the hotel. She was somewhat unconventionally dressed—slacks, wool jacket, short hair slicked back darkly—and she was followed by three dachshunds who, when she twitched a finger, sat themselves against the wall, as obedient as the staff. She was not outrageous, but she was confident, and in this room, the two concepts felt the same. It caught one’s gaze. Or perhaps just Tucker’s.

She asked, “How are you men enjoying your cake? Your drinks? You finding what you need?”

Her accent was as out of place here as her appearance, her woman-ness. It was a local mountaineer accent, voice high, vowels and verbs clipped short. Enjoyin’. Findin’ . Not a house cat like Edgar Gilfoyle, but a mountain lion. A mountain lion ess .

“This is June Hudson,” Gilfoyle said. “Our general manager.”

The room stirred palpably.

June Hudson wore a knowing expression that suggested she was used to the stir she caused.

“It’s very—it’s, ah—it’s very good!” Mr. Pennybacker was first to lead the charge out of the silence. He prodded his cake with a fork. “Swell, really. I will miss treats like this when rationing arrives!”

June Hudson asked, “Would you like to know how that sweet little cake is accomplished? I have a whole squadron of young women who fly over the hotel and the town, collecting jam jars folks think they’re done with. Then the kitchen boils them, you see? Not the women, the jars. In a great big vat, all those jars give up that little bit of jammy goodness trapped in the bottom. Then another squadron of young men extracts the jars, and another still simmers the water right down to that glaze. Not an ounce of new sugar in those cakes, just sweetness others forgot. We might be a luxury hotel, but like everyone else, we learned a thing or two the last decade.”

She smiled. It was a cowboy’s smile, a crinkle of the eyes, a quirk of the mouth. Tucker felt he was once more standing on the porch of a Texas cabin, looking at the sun blazing a deadly landscape to gold.

But he could not afford to be fascinated.

Get in. Get out.

“That’s just neat as can be, Miss Hudson,” Pennybacker enthused. “Just the sort of innovation I like to see, exactly why the Avallon is the perfect choice to serve our great country.”

The January chill crept into June’s voice. “Mr. Gilfoyle only informed us last night that our great country had taken an interest in the Avallon.”

Gilfoyle studied the fireplace.

An old tension hung in the air, strong as the odor of the mineral water. Quite suddenly Tucker realized this was why the staff was ignorant of the mission; Gilfoyle wanted the Feds to break this news for him. Like meeting an informant in a public square. One rarely got gutshot in front of onlookers.

“Ah yes, that. There must have been a misunderstanding about the security needs!” Pennybacker was a child inserting himself between fighting parents. “We’ve lost a bit of time, but we do appreciate his discretion!”

Benjamin Pennybacker, State Department, slid a file across the table.

June Hudson, General Manager, did not open it.

“No,” she said.

It was a no with some real heft, a no you could put ham and cheese on. The room went silent to appreciate its substantiality.

“…no?” echoed Pennybacker. “You haven’t even looked.”

“No,” she repeated. “The Avallon ain’t equipped to accommodate special requests right now, but there’s several hotels between here and Washington that would be glad to give you a hand. I’m owed favors up and down these mountains; I can make some calls.”

The fireplace popped. A pipe in the walls groaned. A staff member’s sharp heels tapped down the hall outside the closed door. Pennybacker cleared his throat three times, considered a fourth. His throat remained unclear.

Gilfoyle said, “It’s not like that, Miss Hudson.”

God save us from men like them! Tucker thought. There was always someone like him ready to put a dustless shoe on West Virginia’s neck. Schooled men with soft hands and unmarked knuckles, men with stammering, wise voices, telling a ferocious, capable woman like this what to do. This was not what Tucker’s job was supposed to be. This state, this hotel, her accent, his past, these people—

“It’s not like what?” June asked.

Just get this done , Tucker thought. Get your life back.

But—

Pennybacker craned his neck. “Agent Minnick, are you standing? Are you speaking?”

Tucker saw himself as if from the outside, arms crossed, fingers hooked on the strap of his shoulder holster. He saw June looking at him—more specifically, at his neck. Her gaze had found a mark nearly hidden by his collar, one most people didn’t notice and, if they did, didn’t identify: a coal tattoo. Children who played in houses powdered with coal and miners who survived tunnel collapses got them when coal dust permanently settled into their wounds. Already he was doubting this action of rising, of speaking; he was a man who found the unspoken word vastly more valuable than the spoken. But her gaze on his coal tattoo kept him on his feet, taut as a marionette.

···

The FBI agent was standing. He was speaking. This was the dark-haired agent June had noticed the moment she arrived. If she were asked, she might have said the coal tattoo had drawn her eye, but that was untrue; she hadn’t seen it until he stood. It was his face that snagged her. There was a place on the property where the hot springs and the cold springs were so close that, lying on the moss between them, one could touch them both, marveling at the opposites. The agent’s face was like that: hard eyebrows, soft eyes, hard expression, soft mouth. Federal agent, coal tattoo.

He said, “I am Agent Tucker Rye Minnick of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Miss Hudson, I think it’s clear no one has been straight with you or your staff. You’re not happy with the state of affairs; let me assure you the FBI is also unhappy. You would like this to be a decision-making meeting—it isn’t. Its only purpose is to tell you what needs to be done and let you alone to do it.”

“Now, that’s overstating a bit. I don’t think that’s the only purpose—” Pennybacker started.

Agent Minnick continued as if the State Department man hadn’t spoken, counting points on his fingers. “One. The current guests will need to go, immediately. The hotel must only contain staff, agency representatives, and the individuals listed in that file.

“Two. Forty Border Patrol agents will assemble temporary guard towers and provide perimeter security.

“Three. A Swiss liaison will act as a neutral intermediary between governments.

“Four. Agent Pennybacker and I need updated lists of current employees. We will interview each and perform rigorous background checks. The staff must be advised that a failure to cooperate will result in termination of employment.

“Five. Three hundred foreign nationals will arrive at the station on Wednesday and will stay until the State Department negotiates a return to their home countries, estimated at the twenty-first of April.

“Six. Agent Calloway on my right, Agent Harris on my left, and I will remove all phones, radios, and newspapers from the guest areas and, on behalf of the Bureau, monitor all communication through the switchboard and mail room.”

Gilfoyle looked a little angry; Pennybacker was in a state of high distress. The latter sputtered, “Agent Minnick, I really think you’re making Miss Hudson feel—”

Agent Minnick held up his hand. He finished, “These internees are coming; the clock is ticking; it began ticking before we arrived. You can’t say no , Miss Hudson. Someone with more rank already said yes .”

Stretching across the table, he flipped open the file to the first document. He said nothing as June scanned it, all the way down to the bottom, to the president’s signature.

Several years before, June had accompanied Mr. Francis to a meeting with the dignitaries of Constancy, the closest town, to discuss a deal the Avallon had struck with the railway for local infrastructure improvements. She’d been young then, unpracticed, and she’d laid out the requirements for the project just as Agent Minnick had. Bullet-pointed. In order of necessity. After she’d finished, uncomfortable silence bruised the room. Mr. Francis had smoothly rescued her, making the list sound like it had mostly been the board’s idea and easing wounded egos. She knew better now, but she also knew, unlike the others, that Agent Minnick wasn’t being cruel. He was just boiling a jar down to the dregs.

“Turn the page,” Agent Minnick advised.

She turned the page. The next document shouted everything Agent Minnick had not. Minnick had called them foreign nationals , but these were no ordinary foreign nationals. They were diplomats.

Nazi diplomats.

Well, not all of them.

Another turn of the page revealed lists of Japanese names. Then Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian. Many languages, one unspoken word: the enemy. There were a lot of unspoken words in the file. Here was one that was never used: detention . Instead, the hotel was to be an assembly point for Axis diplomats and their families. The foreign nationals were held , contained , safeguarded . Border Patrol agents would be provided , like one might provide towels and robes. Communication would be tastefully managed , like a cocktail party. Diplomatic reciprocity: you feed them caviar on one side of the ocean, we’ll feed them caviar on the other.

She could hear Sandy Gilfoyle’s gently mocking voice: Welcome to the thin, rarefied air of high international law, Goon.

Protests pressed against her lips. Her head of housekeeping’s son had just been killed at Pearl Harbor. She could think of three Polish Jews in her dining room staff just off the top of her head. The draft was due to harvest brothers, husbands, sons. How grotesque to ask this of them.

Young Sandy was in uniform and she hadn’t heard from him for weeks.

How grotesque to ask this of her .

But Agent Minnick had said this wasn’t a decision-making meeting.

June lightly touched the words Takeo Nishimura . He was the Japanese envoy frequently seen in the company of Saburo Kurusu and Ambassador Nomura, who had promised peaceful solutions right until Pearl Harbor. Then Friedrich Wolfe , cultural attaché for Nazi Germany. Finally, Erich von Limburg-Stirum , a trick air-show pilot famous enough for even her to recognize his name. Not just diplomats, then. Journalists. Businessmen. Air-show pilots.

She murmured, “These fellas are all being run out of Washington?”

“Run out of,” Pennybacker repeated, and laughed a little, to ease the sentiment. “It’s an issue of protection from an overexcited American public. Any negative event would be, as you imagine, an international incident. It’s important to have the—what do you call it?—the high ground. We’re talking diplomatic reciprocity. Precedent. Excellence. The Avallon is one of the very best luxury resorts within arm’s reach of Washington. Look, Miss Hudson, the Greenbrier already took an initial group just before Christmas, and if they’re taking part, you—”

The Greenbrier! Was this why she hadn’t heard from Loren, the Greenbrier’s manager? It was strange to imagine that her only other real competitor in luxury had also wrestled these ethical questions. She asked, “How many do they have?”

Pennybacker shook his head ruefully, as if he’d caught her trying to trick him. “It’s best if we don’t share details from the other hotels.”

Hotels , plural. Gilfoyle must have known about this for days, possibly weeks. He’d robbed her of her most valuable asset, time, although it was hard to tell if he understood how grand a theft it was. For years, he’d made his home in other people’s homes, flitting from friend to friend, party to party, blazing through three countries’ society pages. Black tie and champagne, women and nightlife; for Gilfoyle, the twenties had never ceased their roaring. What was the Avallon to him? A building.

“Mr. Pennybacker, I’ll find out one way or another. What other hotels are we talking about?”

“The Homestead,” he said.

The Greenbrier and the Homestead were both grand hotels, capable of housing hundreds of guests. She regarded the list with new eyes. It had seemed enormous, but now she understood that it was abbreviated, partial. It was perfectly sized to fill the Avallon nearly to capacity because it was part of a much longer list cut into hotel-sized pieces. For the first time, June really believed the country had gone to war a month before.

She stood up. The dachshunds stood up. Agent Minnick nodded, satisfied in some way.

Gilfoyle was a man electric, his eyes wide and alarmed. He said, “Miss Hudson—you’re not going?”

Of course she was going. He had placed her in an elevator car with the cables cut. While she had been Mr. Francis’s general manager, he had allowed her to forget this wasn’t really her hotel. Every decision had been her decision. But it was Gilfoyle’s now, which meant he could say yes when she would have said no . Without calling her first. If she was waiting for a sign of whether their time together meant anything, she had it. The elevator car plummeted.

“As you just heard, Mr. Gilfoyle,” June said, “we have a lot of work to do.”