The Hunt (aka 27)

  "So that's old ‘Will o' the Wisp,' " Keegan said. "I've been reading his trash for years."

  "He's given up trash. He's become a political soothsayer. ‘Will o' the Wisp' is now ‘The Willow Report.' Old Willoughby's been through it. His wife died two years ago and the daughter's husband was killed last year."

  "I remember that," said Keegan. "He got killed at the Cleveland air races."

  "Right. Tony Traynor, he was an ace in the war, knocked down twelve or thirteen kites. She's Willoughby's assistant now, goes everywhere with him."

  "And he's covering politics at Longchamp race track?"

  Rudman shrugged. "Maybe they're on holiday like me."

  "Maybe she's your type," Keegan said. "Why don't you give her a fling?"

  "Not that one. She's all iceberg," said Bert.

  "Well, you know what they say, only the tip shows," Keegan said with a wink. "Eighty percent is under the surface."

  "Believe me, this one is ice to the core," Rudman said. "The ultimate English snob. Come on, I'll introduce you. Let's see if he acknowledges my appointment."

  Rudman led Keegan through the crowd toward them.

  "Bonjour, Sir Colin, good to see you again," he said.

  "Well, Rudman, good to see you. Been a while," Willoughby said with a condescending smile.

  "These are my friends, Jennifer Gould and Francis Keegan," Rudman said. "Sir Colin Willoughby and his daughter, Lady Penelope Traynor."

  "A pleasure," Keegan said, shaking Willoughby's hand. Lady Traynor regarded Keegan with aloof contempt, as she might regard a train porter or restaurant waitress. At another time, Keegan might have been attracted by her aura of inaccessibility but now it annoyed him, as did Sir Colin. As in Bert Rudman's case, events had altered Willoughby's career, elevating him from a kind of society gossip to a political observer. But whereas Rudman dealt with the reality of Hitler, Willoughby pontificated, his rampant editorializing devoid of even a semblance of objectivity.

  "I see you've been to Africa and Spain," Willoughby said. "Very enterprising. Is it true you're to take over the Times bureau in Berlin?"

  "Yes."

  "Hitler is simply full of himself right now," Willoughby said dourly. "He's full of his success. In a few months he will realize he must conform to a more moral world viewpoint. I think the man thirsts for recognition and acceptance. I've met him, y'know. Did one of the first English interviews with him."

  "And we expect to interview Mister Roosevelt this fall when we're in the States," Lady Penelope said.

  "Well, you know what they say," Willoughby remarked. "In America, you elect someone to office and then sit back and wait for him to fulfill all the lies he told to get elected. In Europe, we elect a man and sit back and wait for him to make mistakes."

  "I'm really sick of politics, it's all anyone talks about," said Jenny. "This is Paris, not Berlin. Why don't we change the subject. Francis has a big race coming up today."

  "Right," Keegan agreed. "Anyone care to discuss horses?"

  Lady Penelope glared at him with a look of pure contempt.

  "I've heard your interests run to the mundane," she said.

  Jenny bristled. "That is ill-mannered and untrue," she said suddenly. "And I should think someone with your privileges would know better than to speak that way."

  The British woman recoiled in surprise. Jenny had surprised even herself with the outburst and her cheeks flushed.

  "There's nothing mundane about a good thoroughbred," Keegan said with a crooked grin, trying to overlook the exchange. "Isn't that why we're all here?" He turned to Lady Penelope. "What do they call you, Penny?"

  "You may call me Lady Penelope," she snapped back and, wheeling around, she walked away.

  Willoughby shrugged. "You'll have to forgive my daughter," he said apologetically. "Her sense of humor hasn't been just right since her husband's death."

  "Perhaps I was being a bit too familiar," Keegan answered. "Extend my apologies."

  "Of course. By the by, Keegan, should I bet on your horse?"

  "I'm going to," Keegan said as the stuffy Britisher left.

  "That's telling the spoiled brat," Rudman chuckled.

  "I am sorry," Jenny said. "It just burst out."

  "You sure let the wind out of her sails," Keegan said and laughed. "She looked like she'd been whacked with a paddle."

  "I say we have brunch at Maxim's on me and get back for post time," Rudman said.

  "We have to pass," Keegan said, wrapping his arm around Jenny's waist. "We have previous plans."

  "Oh?" Jenny said. "And can't Bert join us?"

  "Nope," Keegan said, leading her toward the Packard. "We'll see you in two hours at the post party."

  Rudman watched them walk across the parking area and get in the back of his car. He had never seen Keegan so excited and happy. It was the opening of the Longchamp racing season, a major social event in Paris, and they had been generous, sharing their days with him so he felt no slight when they decided to slip away for a couple of hours before the races started.

  Rudman was so absorbed in his good feelings for Keegan and Jenny, he didn't see von Meister cross the parking lot toward him.

  "Herr Rudman," the Nazi said. "It is nice to see you."

  Rudman glared at him. "That uniform seems out of place here," he said brusquely.

  "You will get used to it."

  Rudman started to walk around the tall Nazi but von Meister stood in his path.

  "By the way," he said. "You have an employee in your office, a photographer named Marvin Klein."

  "That's right."

  "Perhaps The New York Times did not receive Reichminister Goebbels's order. You cannot hire Jews to work in Germany anymore."

  "We didn't hire him in Germany. He's an American."

  "Well . . ." The German smiled. "Don't concern yourself." As Rudman started to walk away, von Meister said, "Your friend, the one who owns the racehorse, what is his name?"

  "Keegan."

  "Ah yes, Keegan. I believe his girlfriend—or is it his wife?—no girlfriend, I imagine . . . I believe she is German."

  "So?"

  "Just curious. I am always interested in German girls." The German chuckled. "So . . . tell him I hope his horse wins. I bet on him."

  NINETEEN

  "Poor old Bert," Jenny said as they got in the car. "We must find him a woman so he can share our happiness."

  "Old Bert'll do all right. His mistress is his job. If he gets too lonely, he'll go get his trenchcoat and he'll have to beat them off with a bat."

  "Stop that. You give him such trouble."

  "I'm showing my affection. It's the only way men can show affection for each other without getting arrested."

  She tossed back her head and laughed. "Sometimes you make me laugh and I am not even sure why." She snuggled against him. "I am so happy, Kee." For a month now they had been living in a dream world. The subject of Hitler and politics was rarely mentioned.

  "Someday we'll look back on these days and realize how special they are," Keegan said tenderly.

  "Promise?"

  "Absolutely. Falling in love is a magic time."

  "Are we falling in love, Francis?"

  "A fait accompli for me, my love," Keegan said softly. "I fell in love with you that night at Conrad's, the first time I laid eyes on you."

  "What a lovely thought."

  "You are a lovely thought," he said.

  "Oh Francis, it has been so wonderful it makes me nervous. I am so happy."

  He laughed. "That may be the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

  "Nicer than ‘I love you'?" she said, taking his arm in hers and squeezing against him.

  He looked down at her with surprise. "You've never said ‘I love you,' " he said. "Not to me."

  "I just did."

  "Very obliquely."

  "Then I will say it directly," she said looking up at him with tears in her eyes. "I love you. Je t'aime. Ich liebe dich. " She reached up
and barely touched his lips with her fingertips. "I do love you so, Francis. When we are together, my chest hurts but it is a good hurt. When we are apart, it is painful."

  She cupped his face between her hands and barely touched his lips with hers. They brushed their lips together, their tongues flirting with each other, as the chauffeur drove them away to a park he had selected near the Seine on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, where the track was located.

  They spread a blanket and he wound up the Victrola and put on "Any Old Time" by Lady Day and she leaned back and sang along softly.

  "I learned that song listening to Billie Holiday on the radio," she said. "Have you ever seen her?"

  "Once. A friend of mine, John Hammond, insisted I go up to Monroe's, that's a Harlem nightclub, to hear this new singer who turned out to be Lady Day. She was—I don't know how to describe her—heartbreaking and heavenly at the same time. I remember we stayed there until dawn. She could smile and tear your heart out. You've got the same quality, Jen."

  He sat up suddenly. "Jesus, what's the matter with me!" he said. "John Hammond is a good friend of mine."

  "Who is John Hammond?"

  "He's a top producer for Columbia Records, one of the biggest. He's put some of the jazz greats on the map. Listen, I'm sure he would flip out if he heard you sing. We'll call him from the hotel tonight. You can audition for him over the phone."

  "You are crazy . . ."

  "Crazy serious. I promise you, one song and he'll offer you a contract."

  "No, no. I couldn't . . . not over the phone. Long-distance like that."

  "Jenny, stranger things have happened. America's a funny place."

  "Do you miss it?" she asked.

  "I don't know, I guess I do," he said. "I think maybe I'll have to go home for a while. I've been gone a very long time." Then a moment later: "You'll love New York."

  She sat up suddenly. "What?"

  "I said you'll love New York. We'll go there on our honeymoon."

  "Honeymoon?"

  "Marry me, Jen. I adore you. I will devote my life to making you safe and happy."

  She seemed troubled and did not respond immediately. "I want to marry you, Kee. And I thank you for asking me. I don't know . . ."

  "Jenny, in one night you'll hear every great jazz artist alive. We'll do the Apollo and the Harlem Opera House, the Savoy, the Cotton Club . . ."

  "I don't think I'm ready to give up on Germany."

  Keegan barely missed a beat. "Okay, we'll stay over here. You'll be my wife, that makes you an American citizen. They can't touch you."

  "Oh Kee, for such a worldly man you are so naive. Don't you see, they can and will do anything they want to. Would you give up your citizenship and become a German? Stay here not knowing whether you can ever go home? Would you do that, Francis?"

  He didn't answer.

  "The difference between us is that you know you can go home anytime you want to. If I went to America I could never come back. Kee, my father fought for this country just as you fought for yours. He died in 1916 fighting for the Kaiser. I cannot walk away from Germany thinking I did nothing to try to make it better. Did you give up on America because things went badly? Did you do that? Is that why you live in Germany now?"

  "No," Keegan answered. "That's not why I left."

  "Tell me, I want to know all about you," she said softly. "Maybe it will help me."

  For all his adult life, Keegan had prided himself on never looking back. The past was the past, too late to change, so forget it. But in the last few months he had been forced into introspection, by Vanessa, by Vierhaus and now by Jenny. It all seemed far too complex to explain and even Keegan did not fully understand why he had left America to become a nomad in Europe. He had never discussed his past with anyone before, not even Bert. He didn't answer her immediately and when he finally started talking it came out like a flood as he tried to put it all in context. His mind drifted back to the terrible summer of 1932, to Washington, and a night that had changed his life forever.

  "I was in Washington," he began. "I don't even remember why. A hot summer night. I ran into an acquaintance of mine named Brattle from Boston and he invited me to dinner on his yacht. It was moored in the Potomac River, at the edge of the city."

  The night began with shock, shock at the sight of Bonus City, which they passed on the way to the dock. For three months, army veterans and their families, calling themselves the Bonus Army, had been camped in Washington, demanding a five-hundred-dollar bonus that had been voted them in 1924. Although it wasn't due until 1945, they desperately needed it now.

  Keegan was unprepared for the awesome spectacle of twenty thousand ex-soldiers and their families living in squalor around the Capitol and White House. For while this was the year of the Washington Bonus March, it was also the year the twenty-month-old son of America's greatest living hero, Charles Lindbergh, had been kidnapped and murdered. A shy and reclusive man, the "Lone Eagle," as he was known by everyone in America, had conquered the Atlantic Ocean alone in his single-engine plane. Lindbergh, his wife Anne and their new baby were as close to royalty as one could get in America and so the tragedy dominated the news from the night the child was stolen from his New Jersey home until his body was discovered seventy-two days later and then onward as the murder investigation intensified and became a national obsession.

  Other news had also overshadowed the march. In France, President Charles Doumer was assassinated in a Paris bookstore. The relatively unknown governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was challenging Herbert Hoover for the presidency. Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weismuller had become an instant movie star grunting "Me Tarzan, you Jane" and five other lines of dialogue in Tarzan the Ape Man. A machinist named George Blaisdell invented a cigarette lighter which he called a Zippo.

  Author Erskine Caldwell had shocked the country with Tobacco Road, his novel about life among sharecroppers in the Deep South and there had been threats of book banning in Boston and in the South. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World stunned everyone with its dismal science fiction view of life in the future while, on the radio, Buck Rogers was introduced, presenting a completely different vision of the future.

  In Oklahoma, where years of poor farming practice had depleted the land, a devastating drought finished the process, adding hundreds of thousands of farmers to the country's 13 million unemployed. There were two thousand hunger marchers in London; New York's Mayor Jimmy Walker resigned from office in the midst of a juicy scandal; young John Wayne was fighting for his life every Saturday afternoon in a matinee serial called The Hurricane Express; Herbert Hoover announced Prohibition a failure and encouraged state liquor laws; and Flo Ziegfeld, who had redefined the meaning of the term showgirl when he created "The Ziegfeld Girl," died in Hollywood with his wife Billie Burke at his side. Walter Winchell, radio's dark prince of gossip, commented in the Stork Club one night, "This is one helluva year," and there was no arguing the point.

  Little wonder these stories and others had crowded the veterans' march off the front page and finally out of the newspapers and off the radio altogether. Washington had become an enormous "Hooverville," a name synonymous with the temporary, ragtag villages all over the country that housed the millions of nomadic, dispossessed, jobless people wandering the land in search of lost dreams. As the weeks dragged into months, the plight of the veterans became just another footnote in this, the worst year of the Depression so far.

  The Bonus Camps were a ragtag collection of lean-tos, tents, cardboard shacks and crates, sweltering in one of the hottest summers in Washington history. Here and there, makeshift gardens struggled in the heat to produce stunted tomatoes and hard-eared corn. Women bathed their children in tubs with water from the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. The crowd was neither unruly nor threatening.

  As they drove past the miserable campsites, Keegan realized how easily he might have been one of them. Jocko Nayles, who had driven him down to Washington in the Pierce Arrow, had commented, "Jes
us, Frankie, these are our guys. We fought with them. Things bad as they are, why don't they pay 'em?"

  "Haven't you heard?" Keegan had replied. "Hoover says the Depression's over. He wants them to go home and starve to death so he doesn't have to look at them."

  The trouble was, most of them had no homes or jobs to go to. In this, the most dreadful summer in the nation's history, there were thirteen million people unemployed. The suicide rate was three times normal. And the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, continued to preach what was by then a warped and illogical litany, that the economic recovery of America was in full swing, that the greatest danger was from "Prohibition gangsters who've turned our streets into battlegrounds" and that the family would be the resurrection of America. Hoover, of course, wasn't talking about the families who had lost their jobs, their homes, and their dignity in a desperate and failed economy wrought by arrogant millionaires. He was talking about the "decent families" who still had jobs, who earned a living wage, sat by their Atwater Kent radios at night listening to Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy and Li'l Orphan Annie, and who drove to church each Sunday in their Fords and Chevrolets.

  Decency in the minds of Hoover and his ilk was directly related to those who worked, paid their taxes and made monthly mortgage payments, it did not relate to those forgotten men who had lost everything because of an orgy of indulgence promoted by the nation's captains of industry and championed by Hoover's predecessor, Calvin Coolidge, who had preached that "prosperity is permanent." It was a lie, of course, and Coolidge, foreseeing the coming calamity, had chosen not to seek a second term in 1928, leaving Hoover to become the fall guy for the worst depression in written history. Eight months after Coolidge left office, the house of cards had collapsed.

  "The country's in a helluva mess, Jocko," Keegan had said. "Count your blessings."

  Keegan had squirmed through dinner, listening to Brattle rave about the "Commies camped on the White House lawn" and spouting phrases like, "Why don't they get jobs like decent people," although he had inherited his money and had never worked more than half a day in his entire life. He had blathered on about conditions in the country in an arrogant sermon typical of the attitude of those who had actually benefited from the Depression.