Dreams Bigger Than the Night (7 page)

In the morning, the ship’s captain alerted the passengers to an attempted robbery of the purser’s office. Everyone should take special care to guard his valuables. A malefactor was afoot.

The dumbwaiter shaft ran from the kitchen to a cabin on the top deck, four levels above. Room 218 was on the second deck. If he could gain access to the shaft at level three or four, he could effect his purpose. He would have to discover who occupied Rooms 318 and 418. But first he had to gain entrance to the dressing room of the cabin crew responsible for changing linen, making beds, and cleaning berths. He confidently opened the door and confronted two young men. Before either man could speak, he flashed his leather identification case with its SS badge. Asking where the uniforms were kept, he removed a jacket and pants from the supply cabinet. Later that morning, he knocked on the door of Room 418. No answer. In Room 318, he could hear people stirring. An elderly couple were just preparing to go on deck to read. Rolf introduced himself as the new attendant in charge of preparing their room. When they asked what happened to their regular cabin boy, Rolf dangerously said that he’d taken ill. If the couple, having left the cabin, ran into the lad, Rolf knew he’d have some explaining to do. He therefore had to work quickly. With his Swiss penknife, he removed the small screws from the dumbwaiter panels. He could smell the food being prepared down below. But what if the man in 218 didn’t eat lunch or had decided to forgo it today? Rolf was unlikely to have another chance like this one. He heard the sound of wheels. A trolley in the hall. Seconds later, a polite knocking on the door. The cabin boy with his supplies had arrived to make up the room. Muffling his voice, Rolf requested that the boy return after lunch. He waited. The trolley moved on.

Several minutes passed, while Rolf opened and closed each blade in his knife. Then he fingered the vial in his pocket. He peered into the shaft and contemplated whether he had the space to lift himself, hand over hand, up the ropes. Strength was not a problem. He had excelled at rope climbing during SS training exercises. Suddenly, he heard the ropes moving. As soon as the platform passed the opening he had made in the shaft, he seized one of the ropes and stopped the dumbwaiter. Reaching for the vial, he could hear the cook’s complaint coming from the kitchen. But Rolf took less than a few seconds to empty half the vial into the cup of steaming coffee. He then released the rope to exclamations of relief from the cook.

Once he had replaced the panels, he removed his uniform, opened the room’s porthole, and threw the clothes into the sea. He then went in search of the Brundages. Avery was in the gym using a treadmill. Rolf stripped to his shorts and entered the weight room. As he cradled the dumbbells, he imagined the following scenario. The elderly couple would see the cabin boy and ask about his health. The boy would say that he was feeling fine. “But another fellow showed up to clean our room with the excuse that you were ill.” The boy would say, “But you asked me to return after lunch.” The couple would say that no such conversation ever took place. “Perhaps it has to do with the attempted robbery,” the cabin boy would say in an effort to clear up the confusion. The captain would be summoned. He would ask the couple if they could identify the man if they saw him again. “Yes, of course.” The captain would then ask the couple to attend both sittings for every meal and scrutinize every person they passed. Rolf could not afford to hide himself lest he leave Avery Brundage unguarded. A second assassin might still be on the loose.

When Room 218 stopped taking meals—first dinner and then breakfast—and had neglected to return the dishes from lunch the day before, the purser entered Room 218 and found the little-known, blonde Swedish actress Ingrid Paiken dead in a parlor chair, wearing only a dressing gown and a string of expensive pearls. A tray of rancid food stood on the tea table, and a coffee cup lay on the rug.

The news electrified the ship. A promising movie star had been on board, had been traveling incognito, and had been found dead. No one knew the reason for the secrecy or the cause of death. But gossip, which is like a choir, gives rise to all manner of voices. The explanation most often repeated was that Ingrid had been traveling to America to meet a lover, and in fond expectation of falling into his arms, had suffered a heart attack.

But the shipboard tragedies didn’t end with the young woman’s death. Less than a day before docking, the elderly couple in Room 318 had been reported missing. The only clue was traces of blood found on the frame of the porthole. Nothing of value was stolen. The man’s wallet and the woman’s purse were still in the room. Their passports were untouched. The few valuable pieces of jewelry the woman owned had been safely stored in the ship’s safe. When the question of motive arose, the cabin boy told his story of someone having replaced him to clean the room, and the cook related the trouble he’d had with the dumbwaiter. On close inspection of the shaft, a ship’s mechanic declared that the screws to the panel had been tampered with and suggested that possibly the same person responsible for the disappearance of the elderly couple was responsible for the death of the Swedish actress. The captain, aghast, wired ahead to New York requesting that a squad of detectives meet the boat.

Sitting down for dinner with the Brundages the night before docking, Rolf was introduced to a pretty, dark-haired woman whom Elizabeth had become friendly with on the crossing. Her name was Elspeth Botinsky, an émigré from Ruthenia. As Rolf listened to the conversation between the women, he heard in Elspeth’s speech a few pronunciations that led him to speak to her in German. When she responded, he could hear in her Deutsche a Yiddish inflection. It was then that he realized his error. The commandos sent from Palestine were not men, but women. One was now dead and the other sitting across from him. Before the ship docked, would he be able to get Elspeth alone? If not, she would disembark in New York, lose herself in the crowd, and stalk Avery Brundage. For the moment, she was sitting just a few feet from him. He couldn’t squander his chance. Excusing himself, he returned to his room and took the vial of cyanide and a dental pick. Back in the dining room, the passengers were eating their desserts. He would have to wait.

Later that evening, before the passengers retired to their rooms, the captain distributed champagne to toast the ship’s safe arrival, albeit under trying circumstances. The orchestra played some mood music, and several people took to the dance floor. As Elizabeth and Elspeth sipped their champagne—Rolf and Avery were teetotalers—Rolf asked Elspeth to dance. The Brundages followed. Rolf deliberately spun Elspeth around several times, until she pleaded dizziness, and he helped her back to the table, where she pushed away her champagne glass. Rolf eyed it hoping that she would take a last sip. When she lowered her head to the table, he spilled the remaining contents of his vial into the glass and urged her to finish it off—for good luck.

“No, no,” she said, “I couldn’t. My head is spinning.”

Lest anyone accidentally drink the poisoned champagne, Rolf leaped to his feet and tossed the glass over his shoulder.

“An old German custom,” he said, apologizing to the waiter who came running to mop up the broken glass and champagne.

After this public episode, Rolf decided that he would have to act below deck. With Elspeth feeling ill, he accompanied her back to her cabin. The next day, as the liner entered New York Harbor with all the expectant passengers crowding the railing and most of the steamer trunks and baggage neatly arranged for the handlers to move them by hand and by dolly to the dock, a coast guard cutter brought the ship to a halt short of its berth. Several policemen boarded and summoned all the passengers to the ballroom. Here each person was questioned as to the unhappy events that had occurred during the crossing. One person was missing, Elspeth Botinsky. Although her luggage had been brought to the deck, she was nowhere to be seen. The police made careful notes and then allowed the boat to dock and the passengers to proceed to passport control.

Rolf showed his black-covered diplomatic passport, which allowed him to carry his luggage through customs free of an inspection that might have discovered his pistol and knife and dental picks. He then waited for the Brundages. When they arrived, they asked him if he had seen Elspeth.

“One minute she was there,” said Elizabeth, “the next, gone.”

“Strange, very strange,” said Avery, and turned to Rolf. “You saw her to her cabin. Did she say anything? Did you have any inkling of something amiss?”

Rolf put his palms up gesturing innocence and said, “I saw nothing.”

A redcap carried their luggage to the curb. The cabstand was crowded. As Rolf and the Brundages waited, Francesca Bronzina also waited, out of sight. When the next vacant cab pulled up, Rolf embraced Elizabeth and then Avery, promising to ring them at their hotel. If he was needed, or if they heard from Elspeth, he could always be reached through the German consul in New York. The Brundages bundled into the backseat of the taxi, which immediately turned into the flow of traffic. Rolf waved. The Brundages never saw him again.

On leaving the pier and reaching the street, Rolf waited. Moments later, Axel Kuppler drove up, identified himself, introduced Rolf to the beautiful woman in the passenger seat, Arietta Ewerhardt, and opened the back door of the sedan for Rolf, who was delighted to learn that Axel had saved him the trouble of locating Fräulein Ewerhardt.

Once Rolf had left, Signorina Bronzina stepped out of the shadows, waited her turn for a cab, and handed the driver a piece of paper with an address in West Orange, New Jersey: the home of Abner Longie Zwillman.

After all the passengers had disembarked, an unclaimed steamer trunk remained on the dock. When the customs officials forced the lock, Elspeth Botinsky tumbled out. Her killer had left behind the dental pick used to pierce her jugular vein.

3

A line of cabs waited to pull up at the curb to disgorge women in furs and men in camel-hair coats, fedoras, and mufflers. When Arietta and Jay stepped out of the Checker hack, a hatless, yellow-haired young man, wearing black jodhpurs, polished knee-high boots, and a swastika armband, shoved a flyer into his hands. “A Call to Aryans! The nigger ‘art’ of the Kinney Club is so barbarous and depraved that many a Negro would justifiably refuse to see his own race on stage or acknowledge any part in the performance of such filth. Do not enter!!!” Jay crumpled the flyer and tossed it, inciting the young Nazi to call them “Jew-Communists” as they brushed past and greeted the doorman.

According to Puddy, Newark’s answer to the Cotton Club attracted underworld figures ranging from swaggering gunmen, gorillas, and gangsters to syndicate bosses and high-class pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, and hustlers. One look around and Jay knew that the joint also drew gawkers who came to see the demimonde. They paid no admission charge, climbed up a long flight of stairs, turned right, and walked back toward Arlington Street into a large dimly lit hall crowded with tables sporting red-and-white-checkered cloths. Jay slipped the headwaiter a buck, and he seated them near the door. Maybe for a fiver, thought Jay, he could have been seated at a table next to the stage. The club served no food, only booze, with beer going for fifteen cents a glass. Jay gathered, from the number of bouncers, this was a rough place, even though sprawled at a table were four uniformed cops, no doubt on the take. A dozen waiters and waitresses, who also sang, darted among the tables as deftly as ballet dancers. An emcee introduced skits and a small band accompanied the vocalists.

They had come to see Clara Smith, the Queen of the Moaners, second only to Bessie Smith. Clara and Bessie had been close friends until, one night, Bessie got drunk and assaulted Clara. That event, eight years before, and a brief romance with Josephine Baker gave Clara a reputation for living on the wild side. Round faced with a large tipped nose that flared at the nostrils, she had sparkling eyes and glowing hair that she wore parted down the middle and looped over her forehead and ears. She made her wide mouth function as an incomparable musical instrument, mournfully singing “Shipwrecked Blues,” “Look What You Done Done,” “Cheatin’ Daddy,” and “Tell Me When.” She followed her blues routine with several gospel numbers and then teased the band with her sassy and sardonic wit.

“Leon,” she said to the trumpeter, “you is so black that I reckon lightning bugs follow you around in the daytime.”

Leon ran up and down the scale on his horn.

“Sketch,” she said to the saxophone player, “I hear you’re colored blind.”

Sketch played an off-key note and replied, “Heavens, Clara, I hope you is wrong, because I just got married last week.”

“Clara,” asked the drummer, “do you keep all your old love letters?”

“You bet I do, Henry, ’cause some day I expect them to keep me.”

She continued this repartee, to the boisterous delight of the audience. If laughter is an outward sign of an inward state, then these partygoers were enjoying the night.

As she left the stage, Jay heard a man at the next table say, “Clara’s on her way down. At thirty-nine, she don’t have the power to moan the blues the way she used to.”

“But her stories are still sharp as a tack,” said his companion.

Arietta had struck a contemplative pose.

“What’s on your mind?” Jay inquired.

“I was just thinking of my father and the grand piano we used to own. We even had an eighteenth-century violin from Cremona, until we had to sell it.”

“Times are bad for everyone.”

“Except the rich. Clara’s gospel numbers reminded me of Papa’s singing. He wanted a career in opera.”

A waiter hovered over them expecting an order for another round of drinks. Jay would have ignored him had not one of the bouncers begun staring. Requesting two more beers, Jay heard the waiter grumble, “The last of the big spenders.”

“The opera,” Jay said, trying to pick up the thread of Arietta’s conversation. “Where?”

“In Rome . . . after he left the priesthood.”

Jay blinked and tried to tell himself that he had misheard. Arietta, seeing his expression, continued. “He was a Jebby. My mother and her two sisters bumped into him on the steps of St. Peter’s . . . they came from Germany . . . on a pilgrimage with a group from Stuttgart.”

“Your father was a Jesuit
priest
?”

“Once. But he loved women more than God, or so he says.”

To step back a moment: The evening had begun with Jay being grilled by Mr. Magliocco. After having called Arietta no fewer than six times—where women were concerned, he believed in the adage that success is nine-tenths persistence—he dropped by to see her at Castle House, where she worked as a part-time dance instructor when the school needed an extra coach. As he sat on the sideline watching the klutzes shuffling across the polished wooden floor, she told one, a rotund fellow no taller than she, “Don’t shake the hips or twist the body . . . don’t flounce the elbows or pump the arms.” At the end of the lesson, she took a break.

“What are you doing here?”

“You wouldn’t say yes on the phone, so I thought if I made a personal appearance, I might persuade you.”

She looked around furtively. “It’s that nasty business at Dreamland. My father wants me to cut all ties to it and anyone associated with the place. But I did ask him to make an exception for you.”

“Maybe I should speak to your parents and show them I’m okay.”

“Mother’s dead.”

“Sorry.” Pause. “Well, what do you think?”

Removing her black patent leather shoes and rubbing her feet, she gave him a gnomish smile and said, “All right, but if he doesn’t approve, you’ll just have to understand.”

He shook her hand. “I accept your terms. How about Saturday night . . . about eight?”

“Where?”

“The Kinney Club.”

“Not
the
Kinney . . .”

“Why not?”

He took a taxi to her house on Littleton Avenue, a two-story brown-brick dwelling dwarfed by big trees that left the interior dark. Arietta opened the door and stopped him in the foyer, which had framed photographs of famous opera stars, mostly Italians, like Enrico Caruso and Amelita Galli-Curci.

“Don’t mention the club to my father. Say we’re off to a movie.”

“Which one?”

She thought a moment. “
Bombshell
, with Jean Harlow.”

“You won’t believe this, but I met Harlow once and we became friends.”

She smiled skeptically and said, “Be sure to admire his plants.”

In the living room stood a stunted piano covered with faded photographs in silver frames. The mission-style furniture, with its dark wood and Dick Van Erp hammered copper lamps, casting warm yellow shadows through the vellum-like shades, bespoke a time when arts and crafts design was all the rage. Now it all looked dated and dreary. Only a profusion of houseplants mitigated the sense of decay: spider and rubber plants, a Boston fern, a large philodendron, and a plant that Jay had never seen before. Mr. Magliocco sat in a parlor chair with rimless spectacles perched on the end of his nose. Jay’s arrival had interrupted his reading. Arietta introduced them. Mr. Magliocco placed his book face down on his chest, invited Jay to take a seat, and asked Arietta to pour them each a glass of Strega. Extending his hand, her father said, “Piero Magliocco.”

“That plant?” asked Jay curiously, failing to introduce himself.

“An ornamental monkey-puzzle tree. It’s native to Chile and Argentina. The name comes from an Englishman who thought that the tree would be a puzzle to climbing monkeys. Ironically, monkeys are not native to the areas where this unique specimen comes from.”

“It looks prehistoric. By the way, my name,” he said belatedly, “is Jay Klug.”

“Klug . . . what kind of name is that?” Before Jay could answer, Mr. Magliocco left his chair and insisted on showing him the framed photographs on the piano. Mostly prewar, the pictures of his wife and her blond wealthy family had been taken on terraces, in formal gardens, on picnics, on pleasure boats. Mr. Magliocco pointed to his wife posed in her First Communion dress and coming-out dress, the latter inscribed on the bottom: “Silvesterabend 1911.”

Turning to Jay, the older man observed, “You could pass for a German . . . the blond hair,” pointed to two chairs, and said, “Let’s sit.”

“I’m Jewish, sir. My father comes from the Ukraine.” To curry favor, Jay added, “He speaks Italian.”

“And do you?”

“I wish I could. It’s a beautiful language. My father sings Puccini and Verdi arias.”

“Does he?” Mr. Magliocco exclaimed. “I studied opera in Rome and even appeared in
Tosca
at the Teatro della Pergola in Firenze.”

“Do you still sing?”

“For my own pleasure. Arietta accompanies me on the piano. These days most opera companies have folded. No one has the money to stage a production. How do you support yourself?”

“Journalism. The
Evening News
. I do movie and theater reviews.”

“Under your own name?”

“I just started.”

“You’re lucky to have a job. Until recently, I worked all the time . . . as a truck driver . . . hauling liquor.” Piero chuckled, remembering. “Kristina never approved.”

Jay took Kristina to be Arietta’s mother. “My dad says Prohibition was a full-employment act.”

Arietta brought the drinks. They clinked glasses and toasted each other’s health. Mr. Magliocco sipped his drink and expounded:

“He’s right. It took thousands of law-enforcement officers to police it and even more people to break the law: shippers, sailors, smugglers, truckers, bodyguards, warehouse watchmen, nightclub owners, bankrollers, bribers. The guys who brewed their own had to buy barrels, malt, brewing machinery, cooperage coating, air compressors, cleaning compounds, kettles and pipes, hops and yeast. If they repaired their beer barrels, they needed heads, shooks, and rivets. Those who did their own delivering had to buy a fleet of trucks, gasoline, oil, tires. Yeah, Prohibition created a lot of jobs and brought good times. Even Kristina had to admit it.”

Jay gathered that his wife’s upper-class background made it difficult for her to countenance his illicit work. Suddenly, Mr. Magliocco changed the subject.

“Arietta is all I have,” Piero said, leaning over and taking her hand. “She’s my support. Without her . . .”

How could she have supported him on a part-time job as a dancer? Surely, instructors didn’t earn that much.

“Your plants are magnificent. I particularly like the monkey-puzzle tree. You must have a green thumb.”

“Gardening and opera: my two passions.”

Jay walked to a flowering geranium resting on a window sill and made a point of cradling the orange bloom in his hand.

“That one comes from a trash can. I found it on a walk in the neighborhood. A little pruning and plant food and
ecco
!”

“Lovely.”

“You’d better hurry or you’ll be late for the movie.”

Whew, what a relief! The father had approved of Jay’s dating his daughter. “I hope in the future to see a lot more of Arietta,” he replied gaily. Oops, would Mr. Magliocco hear the double entendre? Jay decided that he would take Arietta and her father to dinner just as soon as he could afford it.

Between acts, two familiar-looking toughs, wearing black homburgs and white silk scarves, entered with a couple of whores. It took Jay a minute to realize that these were the men he had watched from his Prince Street window. They worked for Dutch Schultz. The headwaiter seated them next to the stage. Jay would have ignored them except that one of the women in their company removed her hat and he recognized Margie Smith. Before Jay could say hello—he had been woefully delinquent in not sending her flowers and inquiring about her health—Johnny Fussell, back from Europe for a short tour, tapped out onto the floor for his specialty number, dancing while seated on a chair. His bow tie and white shirt quickly lost their starch as his face and neck ran with sweat from the furious beat: tap-a-tap-tap. Swinging his arms and skipping, Johnny swept from one end of the stage to the other with a fluency and rapidity that left the audience breathless.