“You didn’t trust me.”
“No, I suppose I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine that you would still want me.”
I looked down at my hands, which were damp with my tears. But I wasn’t crying now. My eyes were dry. “Don’t be stupid. There was nothing I wouldn’t have forgiven you for, if you’d asked me. When did I ever deny you anything you asked for?”
He made a noise like an animal and kicked the thick wooden baseboard beneath the painting. The thump was catastrophic, like someone had fallen through a table.
I heard Nick Greenwald’s voice: It’s a damned thing. I wondered if Stefan’s shoe had actually splintered the wood.
Stefan said, “The perverse universe, you see. Didn’t I tell you? And now we are here in this room, and my hand that holds this cigarette is shaking, because I want to touch you so much, and I cannot.”
“But why not?” I said, and the door banged open.
“There you are,” Charles said. “What the hell was that noise?”
3.
The motor wouldn’t start, so Charles went to find one of the Ritz chauffeurs to help. I stood outside on the rue Cambon, inhaling the heavy night air, the dirty, warm smell of Paris. The sky was clear, but there was too much light from the city to see the stars. I thought of the August sky above the Isolde, and how Stefan and I would sit in our deck chairs and count the stars together, and Stefan would drink his martinis and smoke his cigarettes and the smoke would drift like a ghost in the space between us, like another person. When he finished the first drink, some member of the crew would bring him a second, but that was all. You don’t appreciate the third, he said, when I asked him why. It’s better to stop at two. Later, at our little house, the stars weren’t quite so plentiful because of nearby Monte Carlo. There were no martinis in the courtyard or the garden, just a shared bottle of wine and the smell of lemon and eucalyptus, and Stefan’s cigarettes, one by one, until I asked him to stop.
Then I will need something else to do with my mouth, he said, and I gave it to him. I always gave him what he wanted.
I wrinkled my nose, because I could smell someone’s cigarette now, but it didn’t belong to Stefan, whose cigarettes were a special Turkish variety and bore a particular odor that made my blood jump. I turned my head and saw a man leaning against the wall, in the shadow between two streetlamps. His body was long and lean, and I realized it was Nick Greenwald.
He had disappeared shortly after dinner, and the beautiful dark-haired woman, too. I realized it only now. When I hadn’t been observing Stefan from the corner of my eye, I had been picking out Stefan’s voice at the other end of the long table. I had been tracing his movements with some primeval part of my brain that detected such things without seeing them. I had been wholly absorbed in this man who was not my husband. I hadn’t noticed Nick Greenwald at all, once the necessary toasts had been made.
I called out to him now and asked if he needed a lift home. A silly question. Nick was as rich as Croesus, Charles had once said, or at least Croesus’s banker cousin. He was never in need of anything.
No, thanks, he called back.
I walked toward him and put my hand on his arm. “Is everything all right?” I asked.
“No,” he said. He lifted his arm, causing my hand to fall away, and put his cigarette to his mouth. “I just did a stupid thing, that’s all.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
He turned his head, as if he just noticed me there, and straightened from the wall. “Yes, there’s something you can do,” he said, and he took me by the ears and bent his head down and kissed me.
His lips were soft and tasted strongly of Scotch whisky, and I was too surprised to do anything but hold on and kiss him back. It lasted only a few seconds, five or six at most, though it seemed like forever, the way time warps in funny ways when you’re in shock.
Then he lifted his head and said he was sorry.
“What was that for?” I gasped.
He dropped the cigarette on the pavement and crushed it under his shoe. “I just didn’t want her to be the last girl I kissed, that’s all. Good night, Annabelle. Take care of my old buddy Stefan, will you?”
I wanted to tell him that Stefan wasn’t mine to take care of, but Nick Greenwald was already striding down the sidewalk to the corner, where a long, dark automobile reclined by the curb.
I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Good luck in New York!”
He waved his hand and opened the door of the car. The engine started without a hitch, and Nick Greenwald roared away down the rue Cambon.
4.
The old Renault was hopeless, and we took a taxi home. It was now two o’clock in the morning and I had been awake since the previous dawn. I leaned my head against the window, but my eyes wouldn’t close.
Charles eyeballed me from across the seat. “So, Sprout. Slap me if I’m out of line. Is there something going on with you and Stefan?”
I raised my head. “How could there be? He’s been in prison.”
“Well, I thought I noticed what old Papa would call a frisson in there.”
“You’re imagining things. I’m married, remember?”
He laughed from the bottom of his chest. “All right, all right. Whatever you like. Look, did he get around to talking about anything special?”
“Stefan? No, nothing in particular.”
“Thought he wouldn’t. And now I guess I know why.”
“Oh? And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Charles crossed one leg atop the other and wrapped one hand around his ankle. With the other hand, he reached inside his jacket pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes. He shook it open and held it out to me. I declined.
“Tell me, Sprout,” he said, lighting his cigarette, “what do you know about this husband of yours?”
I was still a little reckless from the wine at dinner, from the half hour in the salon with Stefan, from Nick Greenwald’s unexpected kiss. What a goddamned night, I thought, and now this. There was a distant rumble of thunder through the sultry air.
I folded my arms. “Johann? He’s a devoted father and husband, an expert in military history, and an unimaginative but enthusiastic lover with an organ the size of Gibraltar.”
“Christ, Annabelle!”
“You asked what I know about him.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then tell me what you mean, for God’s sake! I am so sick of all your innuendos, all of you, talking in your codes.”
“Innuendoes?”
I waved my hand. “All of you. Your secret club.”
Charles sucked on his cigarette, glanced at the driver, and rolled down the window an inch or two. He said, in a low voice, “Here’s the thing. We toss around this term Nazi, you and I, but there are Nazis and there are Nazis.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the point. I don’t know how much you know about your husband and what, exactly, he’s doing in that new position he’s got in Berlin.”
“He’s part of the Oberkommand.”
“Yes, but do you know what he does?”
Another crash, louder this time, and a wave of rain crackled suddenly against the window. The taxi had stopped; the driver was swearing under his breath.
“Not exactly, no. Whatever they do in the general staff. He doesn’t talk about his work.”
“No, of course not.” He tipped the end of the cigarette over the window’s edge, releasing the ash. “We’ll be printing textbooks one day about them, the Nazis, how to consolidate power. A few years ago they were the joke of Europe, and now look. Anyway, the old Prussian aristocrats hate them, have always hated them, but they’ve had to join the party or be shut out.”
“Like Johann, you mean?”
“Wel
l, that’s the thing, you know. These Germans, they put loyalty to Deutschland über alles, especially after what happened in the war and after it; I mean, you can’t blame them for closing ranks after Versailles. So these Junker barons, who should be leading Germany out of this madness, they just sit on their hands and say ja, ja, and now Hitler’s a goddamned emperor, he can do what he wants. And it’s nearly impossible to say who’s really behind him, or who’s just afraid of him, or who’s just keeping his mouth shut and hoping it all blows over. Do you know what I mean, Annabelle?” He blew an expert stream of smoke through the crack in the window and turned to stare at me. His face was lined and serious in the gloomy gray light, not at all the jaunty tennis-playing Charles I carried in my head, and I thought of the scene in the boathouse, and the blood, and the urgency, and I realized I didn’t know my brother at all.
The rain drove hard against the window. The taxi lurched forward and stopped again, and the driver released a torrent of vulgar French.
“Are you asking me to spy on my husband?” I asked softly.
“That’s an ugly word.”
“It’s an ugly thing to do.”
“Well, you’re the one who keeps insisting he’s on the right side. That he’s not a real Nazi. And if you’re right, and he’s not, well—” The taxi moved again, and he braced himself against the seat ahead, nearly dropping the cigarette.
“Well?” I said.
“Maybe you could help us out.”
“You? You and Stefan?”
“And a few others. A band of brothers, you might say. Trying to find a way in, trying to stop this thing at the highest level. Do you know what I mean?”
I didn’t say anything. The audacity of it.
“Come on, Sprout.” Charles nudged me. “What do you think?”
The rain picked up speed against the window. I thought about Florian, asleep in his crib upstairs, his cheeks flushed and a little damp. I knew exactly how he looked when he slept, exactly how he felt, his puppy-sweet smell. I knew every intimate detail about my son.
“And whose idea was this?” I asked. “Stefan’s?”
A slight hesitation. “Mine. Stefan was supposed to ask you about it tonight.”
I looked out the window and recognized the Café Maginot, where I sometimes still met Alice for lunch, when I could get away. The apartment on avenue Marceau was just around the corner. “I’m not going to spy on my husband for you. I’ll talk to him, if you like, the next time he’s in Paris, but I’m not going to spy on him.”
Charles straightened against the seat. “That’s all we ask,” he said eagerly. “Sound him out. Find out how he feels, really feels, not just the patriotic backwash they spit up to strangers. Groom him, if you can. Let me know what he says about everything, anything, the Jews and Nuremberg and Hitler and Weimar and the Treaty of fucking Versailles.”
“It’s a long way from privately objecting to the Nuremberg laws to betraying your country,” I said, full of acid.
Charles dropped the stub of his cigarette out the window. “Don’t worry,” he said, smiling at the corner of his full mouth. “If he bites, we’ll take it from there.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then you’d better the hell divorce the lousy Nazi bastard, or I’ll never speak to you again.” The taxi stopped. Charles reached forward to pay the driver. “I’m kidding you, Sprout. But think about it, will you?”
I sat back and let him pay, let him walk me swiftly across the sidewalk to the shelter of the building entrance, without once telling him that I already had. I already had thought about it.
5.
I went to see Stefan the next day. I had a hunch, based on his intimate familiarity with the Ritz, that he was staying there himself. I was right. I arrived in the lobby at half past noon, while Florian was taking his nap, and Stefan popped out of the elevator on his way to lunch at twelve forty-five.
I rose from the bench. “Hello, Stefan.”
At least I had the satisfaction of shocking him. “I was just going to find you,” he said, taking off his hat, and his face was pale beneath his tan.
“Then I’ve saved you the trouble, haven’t I? I have a question for you. It won’t take long. Is there somewhere we can be private?”
He cast an eye around the teeming lobby. “There’s my room.”
“I can’t think of a better place. You’re not in the Imperial Suite, are you?”
“God, no.”
“What a pity.”
In fact, the room was a standard box on the fourth floor, overlooking the Place Vendôme. The window was cracked open, but the air was still stuffy. I tossed my hat and my white cotton gloves on the writing desk. “You wanted me to spy on my husband?” I said. “That’s why you came to Paris?”
He stood edgily by the door. “That was the excuse, yes.”
“You do know how a wife gets information from her husband, don’t you? You do know how marital intimacy is achieved?”
“Yes.”
I threw my pocketbook across the room. It hit the wall with a bang, sending lipstick and compact and loose change flying in all directions.
“Annabelle—”
“To hell with you all!”
“Annabelle, calm down—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down. I’m tired of being calm. I’m tired of keeping every last little lousy thought inside. I’m tired of being moved about like a pawn on a chessboard—”
He closed his hands around my upper arms and forced me to sit on the bed. “Listen to me. Just listen to me for one moment, Annabelle.”
“I said yes.” I looked up at him mutinously. “I told Charles I would do it.”
His hands were warm and rigid on my arms, and his face was so close I could count the flecks of color around his black pupils. If I could have dropped my gaze to his mouth, I imagined his teeth would be bared.
“That is your choice, of course,” he said, and he released my arms and straightened.
“You don’t care?”
“I don’t have the right to care, do I?”
“So you just went along with the idea. Oh, yes, excellent, let us turn Annabelle into a whore with her own husband—”
“Stop this,” he said. “Just stop it. It wasn’t my idea, all right? I certainly did not want you to agree to it. But I went along with this plan, because it gave me an excuse to see you, Annabelle, to leave fucking Frankfurt and get you in a room and talk to you and just—my God—just to see you. That’s all. I wanted to see you, just once.” He turned away and went to the window, which he forced open another foot, and leaned down to take in the air.
“That’s why you left Frankfurt?”
“Yes.”
“But you might have been arrested again.”
“What the hell do I care about that? Anyway, it is much easier to avoid these chaps if you know they’re looking for you.”
I rested my palms on either side of my legs and stared at my knees. My dress had ridden up a few inches, and my stockings were bare to the sunlight that crept past Stefan’s body into the room. I turned around his words: “To see me, just once.”
“Yes.”
A horn sounded from an angry motorcar on the street below, and the sound was so distant it might have belonged to another universe.
I realized I should not have come here. Nothing could have been more foolish than this. Poor Johann, I thought, and then, I should leave.
I should leave now.
I lifted my face and saw my own reflection in the mirror above the desk: fair skin, wide American mouth, dark hair curling in the heat, dark eyes large with alarm. My red lips moved. “Well, what do you think?”
“About what?
“Do you think I could help? That Johann would help you?”
He stared quietly down at the street below. The br
im of his hat curled up against the windowpane.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “You could answer that better than I could, I suppose.”
There was a ceiling fan above the bed, stroking the hot air in long sweeps. It wasn’t much, but at least it was circulation. It was movement. I concentrated on the stirring at the back of my neck and said, “He almost never talks to me about politics, though. It’s two separate compartments in his mind: family and politics. I got him to talk about it once, last Christmas, and it ended rather badly.”
Stefan lifted his head from the window. “Did he hurt you?”
“No. God, no. He would never do that.” I smoothed out the creases in my dress. “I think it’s fair to say he believes in Germany rather than Hitler. But I don’t think he sees them in opposition. He thinks the worst aspects of Nazism will simply go away when times are a little better.”
“He’s wrong.”
“Well, I’m willing to ask him, if there’s the smallest chance.”
Stefan straightened and folded his arms against his white shirt. “I thought you were angry about our little plan.”
“I don’t mind talking to Johann, if it helps you. I just didn’t want you to want me to do it.”
“Did I ask you to do this, last night? Did I say one word about it?”
“No.”
“No, I didn’t, because it makes me sick to think of you with him, plying him for information. I don’t want to give you a single reason to go back to Germany and to be his wife.”
“Well, I am his wife.”
“I know you are.”
“And there must be some reason I’m his wife, instead of yours. It must have some purpose. So maybe this is it. This is why I’m married to Johann.”
“Ah, yes. Your continuing belief in a logical universe, despite all indication to the contrary.”
“Is it so wrong, to have faith?”
He stared at me for a moment, head tilted to the right, and then he walked across the room to the chair before the desk and sank into the seat. “All right, then. Let us suppose you were designed by God to lure the general to the just cause. What then? Let us suppose he takes your bait, and we formulate a plan to overturn Herr Hitler and his odious ideas. Let us suppose it is successful, and Germany is saved, maybe Europe itself is saved, hurrah. We are all heroes, we are all grateful to Herr von Kleist and his loyal wife, who helped him to see the justice of our cause.” He laid his arm on the desk and rubbed one finger against the polished wood, back and forth. His eyes held mine, narrowed and hard. “What then, my dear Frau von Kleist? Do you leave him in the lurch?”