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Chapter Twenty-Three

As June had expected, it took only a few days to track Hertha using the combined efforts of the State Department, the FBI, and June’s hotel contacts. She was working as a secretary, living in a nest of other secretaries in Glendale in Queens. A very small part of June was worried that Hertha would see reason and decline to join her fiancé in wartime Germany, but she needn’t have worried. Just as Erich had been pining in the hotel, she had been pining in New York, twisting in agony that she had been abandoned.

“The State Department is very happy,” Pennybacker told June. “Especially since they want to get married posthaste. It’s very tidy.”

“Wonderful,” June said. Pennybacker had forgotten to turn over a memo when she entered the Glass Room; she could see a report that Lieselotte Berger was alive, expected to survive, still unwelcome in America. “A wife. How’s your wife, by the way?”

“Funny you should ask,” Pennybacker said. He tried to pet one of the dachshunds; it evaded him. “I didn’t reply to the first letter, but she sent me another anyway.”

“I just can’t fathom that.”

“I found it less satisfactory than the last one. The contents were mainly a compilation of specific instances I fell short of her expectations. Highly detailed. She has always had a very sharp memory. If I were to describe the letter, I think I would call it an uncomfortable portrait of an unathletic career man.”

“Don’t you answer. Wait for the third letter,” June said. “That’ll be the one you frame.”

Hertha arrived at the hotel flanked by enough Border Patrol agents to carry her; she had dropped everything as soon as she got news of her pilot. Young Erich dressed in his finest to meet her in the lobby, and a not-insignificant number of legation and staff members (including Fortéscue) hung over the balcony to watch their reunion, in addition to Tucker, Hugh, and Pony, there to search her bags for listening devices, bombs, and any other wartime wedding gifts.

“Erich,” Hertha said, taking off her hat. “Do you recognize me?”

Erich von Limburg-Stirum was bright as the sun; his cheeks glowed.

He said, “Of course I remember what heaven looks like.”

“Gentlemen,” said Basil Pemberton, behind the counter, in his plummy voice, “that’s simply how it’s done.”

Wedding discussions were already underway; now that Pennybacker’s hostage math was better satisfied, repatriation was surely just around the corner. Who knew what fate would befall an excellent pilot once his boots were on German ground? Fiancées had no rights; wives did. June learned that Erich and Hertha’s ceremony was to be a short, brutish affair: guards would escort the anticipatory couple down the drive to the Constancy town hall to be joined in civic matrimony, then return them to the hotel after a cursory search to make certain they had not received any illegal communications during the process of becoming husband and wife.

June went to 411 to ask her for magic.

“I would like to plan your wedding,” 411 told June. “It would be daffodils, of course, and lily of the valley. A two-story trellis behind you, covered with blossoms and ivy. Nothing but harps and flutes; you’d be a mountain princess; men would weep that they hadn’t thought to ask you first.”

June sat against the doorjamb as she had so often, listening to the trickle of sweetwater in the fonts, thinking about how Lieselotte Berger had jumped from the window just a few rooms down. She was thinking about how, that morning, she had seen the harpsichordist sit at the piano in the lobby to play an effortless, merry tune, and had realized that he, at least, had become happy, which meant that he had not been when he arrived. His face had been incandescent. “I’m never getting married.”

“You’re very dull when you’re like this,” 411 said.

“You’re very dull when you’re like this.”

“I’m always like this. When will these diplomats leave so that I can have something real to do again?”

June was about to tell her there’s a war on, what sort of events do you think we’ll be throwing? But she realized even as she did that 411 wouldn’t believe her. People had been dying in the streets during the Depression while June spent the Gilfoyles’ money on new bedside lamps for the suites. It had seemed so important to be a beacon of happiness, to prove joy could still exist in that joyless time. Truth be told, June still thought it had been important back then. She just couldn’t find it in her to think it was important now.

“Did you ever wonder what the hotel would have been like if Sandy had taken it?” June asked.

“Sandy is the dullest of the family,” 411 replied. “It would probably be an airstrip or a dairy farm.”

“That’s not what he’s like.”

“He once knocked on my door, did you know? He said, ‘I just want to see what kind of a woman you are.’?”

“What kind of woman are you?”

“The kind who did not open the door. Now, look, how long are you going to be like this?”

Earlier that day, June had seen Sabine speaking softly to Hannelore in the shopping arcade as the girl peered blankly at other shoppers in her owlish way, and she had thought about how terrible it was that the happiest ending the Avallon could arrange for them was to be separated. June always spoke about her own abandonment in cavalier terms, but deep down, she knew that overcoming adversity successfully wasn’t the same as being unaffected by it. It had made her un nimble, hadn’t it? All these years, she had thought she was content, but now she realized she had been complacent, which was not the same at all. And now that she had felt the difference, she could not remember how long it had been since she had been happy. Incandescent.

“Good heavens,” 411 said, after June didn’t reply. “Go away and don’t come back until you can better please me.”

···

The day of Erich and Hertha’s wedding was a very pretty one, with the daffodils 411 had longed for emerging all along the drive and right into the still leafless forest. The caravan headed down to Constancy as planned: two house Cadillacs, one carrying Erich and half of the string quartet, the other carrying Hertha and the other half of the string quartet, two black federal cars escorting. The third house Cadillac, dressed in flowers, hung back in order to be a heartening reveal after the civil service.

It all went off as planned, and June thought the couple looked happy and durable by the time they sprang from the decorated house Cadillac. Violins shrilled Handel beautifully as the two strode down a path lined with dozens of multicolored strips of silk and dozens of neatly uniformed staff members. Staff snatched each silk strand out of the way just before the couple’s feet touched it, letting fabric flutter down behind them. The effect was as if the couple pushed through an undulating, waterlike tunnel to the hotel—411 had promised it would be magical. It was, of course.

Inside, Erich, comely in the suit altered by the hotel’s tailor, told June, “I am very grateful.”

“Thank you for everything, Miss Hudson,” Hertha said. “I made you a little card.”

June opened it, read: The Avallon is proof the world is still worth fighting for. Xoxo Mr. and Mrs. von Limburg-Stirum. A boyish hand had drawn a wobbly paper airplane.

It would go in the drawer with the others.

Erich counted off on his fingers three nice things to say to his host. “The ride down was very smooth; everyone was on time; the paperwork was straightforward.”

Pony and Hugh stepped in behind them. Both the agents looked a bit worn through, but Hugh put some real warmth in his voice as he told Hertha, “You’ve got a good, loyal man, Mrs. von Limburg-Stirum.”

“We should know,” added Pony. “He’s been under surveillance for weeks.”

This was what passed for romance at the Avallon now, June supposed.

Now that the couple was back on the Avallon’s turf, the reception expanded to include the rest of the diplomats. 411 had insisted the event take place on the lawn beside the children’s playhouse. The playhouse was a fanciful centerpiece, a folly the size of most houses in Constancy, designed with the silly, cartoonish properties of a dollhouse. The walls were butter yellow, the ceilings in periwinkle blue, the floors laid in Alice-in-Wonderland mismatched tile. Levers, wheels, and buttons jutted in each room; when operated, each would flip open secret panels, reveal walls of toy cubbies, or unfold a slide from the second-floor loft to the exterior. Even the landscaping was a childish wonder. Bushes trimmed into animals and pom-poms, flowers tipping from planters held by carved fauns, a sweetwater fountain spilling on brilliantly colored tile for warm-weather splashing.

The playhouse’s entire north wall opened up like the cover of a book, revealing a stage, and it was there that the Avallon’s chamber orchestra played now. It was there, too, that guests could participate in the complicated games 411 had devised for the partygoers, including a scavenger hunt that required one to get the middle names from as many people as possible; she had always been good at invisible party tricks designed to generate real conversation.

Everyone was masked.

This element in particular revealed 411’s touch. The youngest of the children were set at a mask-making station, crafting funny, horrifying, charming, innocent paper creations that staff members helped tie onto each arrival. The masks did not completely erase their wearers’ identities, of course, but the feeling of being masked was unmistakable. Everyone’s expression was hidden so they could dance while Lieselotte Berger convalesced and war raged.

The children gave June a mask with a childish yelling face drawn upon it. Yes, she thought. This was right. Ordinarily, the staff would have immediately sensed her in their peripheral vision. She would have heard Hoss more than once, and she would have felt someone reaching out to tap their fingers against hers. But instead she and the dachshunds made it all the way to the playhouse without so much as a whisper. In the main room of the playhouse, where the legation children giggled and played with the house’s delights, a man wearing a multicolored mask approached her. The mask’s grin was enormous, lopsided, and drawn in green, blue, and purple. The voice behind it said, “General Manager?”

June’s breath was hot against her face behind her own mask. “Agent.”

Without another word, she turned; Tucker followed. She led him to an unoccupied warm yellow hallway, where she knelt to press on a slightly raised carved snail on the baseboard. A door barely wide enough to admit her popped open in the wallpaper. Behind it were narrow, tall stairs, barely better than a ladder, each riser painted with stars, flowers, vines, suns.

“Stay here,” she told the dachshunds. “There ain’t room for you.”

Turning sideways, June and Tucker climbed, resting palms on the stairs above to balance themselves, eventually reaching a very small room with a window on each side and walls entirely covered with colorfully painted little drawers. At one time, the floor had been painted, too, but it was now mostly scuffed to bare wood.

“Do you know where we are?” June asked.

“The cupola?” Tucker guessed. “Beneath the weather vane. What’s in these drawers?”

She tugged one open to show him the contents: a small carved bear wearing galoshes. She opened another: a witch holding a broom. Another: a frog with a crown. Toys. Totems. Pocket-sized whimsies.

Tucker pulled open a drawer: a dachshund wearing a plaid jacket.

June pulled another: a knight with a frowning face.

For several minutes, there was silence except for the small scraping of drawers opening and closing.

Then Tucker said, “I flooded the mine. That was what the background check turned up.”

June took off her mask. He didn’t. She felt him studying her face behind the safety of his cartoonish grin, his expression hidden. Nothing in her Avallon experience had trained her for what to do in this moment, so she just did what she would have done before the hotel: listened.

Voice flat, Tucker told the story:

Tucker is sixteen.

His father works in the mines. It’s a typical tale. They begin in a cabin in the holler but migrate to the company town as the mines require their workers to live where they can keep tabs on them—and most important, where they can’t keep a garden, because workers who have easy years in the holler don’t come back to the mines. His father’s skin is always dark with coal, no matter how hard he scrubs. So are the floors and windowsills of their company house. From his father’s friends and his sisters’ husbands, Tucker learns all the ways people can die: explosions, gas leaks, water leaks, tunnel collapses, lungs giving way after years of dust. The miners have names for the different kinds of noxious gases that can kill miners. Stinkdamp. Firedamp. Whitedamp. Blackdamp. Accidents take out one, two, forty, sixty miners at a time, sometimes immediately, sometimes after being trapped for days.

There are little insults, too. Crushed hands, crushed feet. Mine bosses shorting the weight of coal carts to pay less. Immediate evictions of widows after accidents, of miners suspected of union activity. Corruption, intimidation, casual brutality. A sense of expendability, inevitability. There are always more men willing to go into the ground.

Where was I? In the playhouse, in the now, Tucker had gotten lost in his own past.

You were sixteen , June prompted gently.

I was sixteen.

As the roaring twenties get underway, the mine wars begin. Thousands of men, Tucker’s father among them, rise against the corrupt Baldwin-Felts detectives and local law enforcement, so many that the government sends in the military, with air support.

But this is not where Tucker’s story ends. Perhaps it would have been cleaner if Tucker’s father had been killed at the Battle of Matewan or the Battle of Blair Mountain. But what happens is that one million rounds of ammunition are exchanged, the full might of the US government presses ten thousand miners back to work, and the unions dissipate. Tucker’s father goes back to work like the rest. A month later, a tunnel collapses and he’s killed in a place glory can’t see. Tucker chokes on the injustice. Blair Mountain was supposed to have changed something. When people saw what was wrong and right, they were supposed to choose right.

Where was I?

You were sixteen.

I was sixteen.

All week after his father’s death, Tucker doesn’t sleep. The mine collapse has started to turn the sweetwater, and now it whispers an idea to him, one he can’t seem to put down. The idea is this: Tucker can flood the mine. He knows it is probably death. But he can’t put it down—heartbroken, flogged to madness by the unfairness, the injustice, can’t stop thinking about it. He does not want to die, but what if he did? Hundreds died at Blair Mountain. For his father to come back and go to work just as he had before, and for it to kill him, as he knew it would. If Tucker floods the mine, he takes something that matters from the coal companies. He would be a symbol, like Sid Hatfield. It is a dreadful idea, it is an immortal idea. It feels wrong, but everything already feels wrong.

The night he gets up to do it is a full moon. He wants the company to pay. He wants people to do the right thing. He wants someone else to do this for him. There is no one else. At the mine, he scratches himself several times to work himself up, to get himself into a stage of feral power. He feels coal dust settling into the lines of the wounds, but he doesn’t expect it much matters. He has left a note for his mother on the kitchen table: Do not cry for me, Mother, I do this for them, I lived a good life.

Tucker wears his father’s equipment as he descends into the mine. He has been to the mines before; he was taking a look at his own future. His father’s equipment is a familiar armor against the dark. For a time, as he navigates to where he knows he will need to blast, he feels quite powerful. He is a lone hero, he will be regaled in the town below, he is doing what other people were afraid to do. But by the time he gets to the tunnel’s end, tears run silently down his face. They do not stop as he tests the wall to be certain it is the one that lies the closest to the river. Nor as he sets the explosives. Nor as he runs, suddenly understanding, hideously, that first of all, he will not survive, and secondly, that this is a mistake, a terrible mistake, what he wanted was not to die but to have his father—

Tucker remembers the rocks falling, the blast of wind knocking him from his feet, the lantern going black. He remembers making it to the ladder, then the flood reaching him before he got far. He remembers when the air started being water.

The following morning, before dawn, Tucker is found far, far downstream, among the rocks and the snails and the wreckage of Casto Springs. The mine is done for. The sweetwater has turned, so Casto Springs is done for, too, the buildings soaked through with Tucker’s ugly feelings, snails thick on the ground. Everyone who can leave has gone already, and the rest will follow soon. But the mine company hasn’t yet found out they’ve lost it all. Tucker has not yet been arrested, tried, found guilty, has not yet spent the rest of his life paying for this night, but it is coming. He is not good at lying; he’s only ever managed the one, really.

What was the one lie?

I’m getting there. Where was I?

They had just found you. You were sixteen.

I was sixteen.

The thing was, Tucker had always been an easy boy for adults to like. A boy made to break the hearts of those who could not be as idealistic. And how he breaks them that morning, when the older men realize who he is and what he did. And then the wives and the sisters and the mothers find out—it does not take any time at all for them to fashion a scheme. He has a cousin, see, Tucker Rye Minnick, who died several years earlier in the holler. Who knew he died? No one. The holler keeps its business to itself. And he is close enough in age to pass. No reason for the brave, stupid boy to lose his father and his future at once, not when he was just trying to do the right thing. A handful of dollars from the sale of the property closest to the famous Golden Delicious apple tree funds his flight from the state, and the transformation is complete.

He entered the mines as Richard Monrow Minnick. He left them as Tucker Rye Minnick. Richard Monrow Minnick died to fight injustice. Tucker Rye Minnick lived to fight it.

“Where was I?” Tucker asked, dazed.

Outside, the chamber orchestra sprang into a piece by Saint-Saens. From here, June could see the grizzled Swiss conductor standing by the orchestra, his expression hidden behind a weeping red face, his knuckles pressed to his paper lips. The harpsichordist was beside him in a nervous green mask with a sketched bushy beard. His fingers brushed the conductor’s other hand.

June took off Tucker’s mask. “Here.”

At once they came together again. It did not matter that he had said he was trying hard to stay in the Bureau; it did not matter that she thought she had chosen the hotel. The kiss in the car—it was as if there had been no break at all between now and then; it had merely been preamble for this moment, instead. They could skip over all of that and go straight to her blouse on the floor, his tie hung on a drawer knob, his service weapon set on the floor beside the stairs. She freed him from his suspenders, tugged his shirt free of his waistband, and let her hands linger on his spine, his shoulder blades, not comparing him to Gilfoyle, but nonetheless considering all the ways he was not like him. Gilfoyle, soft and practiced, tricksy, like a wizard. Tucker, muscled and straightforward, precise, like an engineer. She pressed her cheek against his neck, next to his coal tattoo, and he pressed his cheek into her hair; such closeness, such indulgence. Tucker had run his hand down her belly and between her legs and now he let her hang upon him, gasping. Time was elongated and compressed, she both lingered in each warm second, color exploding in her vision, and urgently longed to surge forward. She pressed a hand on the front of his trousers and he said, very simply, “ Ah— ”

They froze.

There was something—

He blinked at her; she blinked at him, but neither of them were really looking at each other.

Both were tense with focus, listening.

The timbre of the party had changed. Out the window, June and Tucker saw that the revelry had paused as Agent Pony Harris confronted Sebastian Hepp. For once, Pony’s crocodile smile was missing; for once, so was Sebastian’s benevolent one. Beside her, Tucker radiated silent fury. June was fixed on the image of guests craning their necks to watch the agent handcuff her head waiter.

The episode was punctuated by the arrival of a vehicle, winding silently up the drive behind the commotion. Recognizable, even at this distance, in this state: endless yards of cream and chrome, an elegant and delectable Auburn sports car.

Edgar Gilfoyle had returned.