Jack 1939 (19 page)

“And I know everybody in the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin, Prague, and Poland,” she snapped. “You’ll find I’m useful, Jack Kennedy. You’ll find you can’t manage without me. You’ll wonder how you ever
dared
.”

“I thought Willi could be trusted.”

She shook her head. “Don’t blame him. I know nothing, really. It’s all a guess. But you
need
me, Jack.”

He did not ask what she needed from him.

Her lips were swollen from his urgency the night before and the mere sense of her beside him made his head swim.

“Denys,” he muttered.

“—Has other distractions. And he has been left before.”

He leaned into the fur collar and kissed her.

THIRTY-FOUR.
RESEARCH

THEY LURCHED UP THE COL D’ISERAN
toward the Italian border and did not look back.

Later, Jack would remember these days imperfectly, the way he remembered dreams. Fragments of images slid through his mind, some heavy with meaning and some inexplicable. The way the country spread like an antique map at their feet as they descended from the mountains. The way April turned green again as they left the snows behind. Lambs in the fields. Lamb for dinner. Diana lying naked on a bed, a glass of red wine in her hand. Diana stalking angrily through an olive grove, clutching her suitcase, while he drove alongside, urging her back into the car. He could not remember what they had argued about. Something trivial. Nothing compared to the blood sports that would divide them later.

He admitted her to the secret of DOCA and she revealed herself as a competent nurse, swabbing the gash in his thigh with iodine. Somewhere she bought gauze and insisted on dressing the wound. After that, she studied him covertly for signs of fever, and strangely Jack did not mind. With every passing hour he let her further into his life, and this was part of the dreamlike quality of those days. He never let women come so close.

“Tell me,” he urged, running his hand up her silk-clad leg to the garter’s clasp. “Tell me who you are. Where you come from. How you got here, Diana.”

She would not look at him. She was annoyed. His fingers slid beneath the garter and caressed her thigh. Slid deeper, to the wet heat between her legs. She drew a sharp breath, her knees convulsive. With his other hand he held the steering wheel of the small French car and the road was very narrow and very fast. Diana liked it dangerous.

“Tell me.” His fingers fluttering.
“Tell
me.”

But she refused, her head thrown back, taking her wordless pleasure from his hand and the speed. He pulled the car to the verge beneath a tree and rucked her skirt to her waist and thrust himself between her legs. He meant to punish her for all she refused to say but instead felt only this passion, the certainty of losing himself, the conviction that he would never come to the end of Diana. She was too strong. She held too much back. He wanted all of it, forever.

“She was in service,” she said finally, as he sprawled in the wreck of her stockings and clothes. “My mother. She was a cook. Her fingers smelled of onions. My father was an actor who came through town. He left, of course, and went on to the next one. She boarded me with her sister and worked her fingers to the bone. At night, after I’d gone to bed, she’d come in and stroke my hair. All I remember is the onion smell. I ran off when I was fifteen.”

He waited until he was sure she was done talking. Then he said: “My mother never sat by my bed in her life. Or stroked my hair. Not even when I was supposed to be dying.”

She gave a bark of laughter. “You’ve nothing to envy, Jack.”

Diana was her daddy’s girl, a wandering trouper, her roles so fabulously layered it was impossible to know what was real and what was legerdemain. Jack took the fables she told as warnings. She could not be trusted. Only admired for her perfect pitch.

Three days out of France they reached the American consulate in Milan. Jack presumed upon his diplomatic status long enough to send two telegrams: one to Offie in Paris explaining where he’d gone, and another to his father in London.
Getting some interesting thesis material,
he wrote.
Headed east over next few
weeks.

Before he left Milan, the consul sent Joe Kennedy’s reply to Jack’s hotel.

Get your ass back here by 22 June for Eunice’s debut
party.

From this, Jack concluded his father had no idea their lives were as good as over.

* * *

“WHAT IS IT YOU’RE AFTER?”
Diana asked him as they drove north toward Lake Como. “If I’m to help you, I should know.”

He’d been agonizing over exactly this point throughout the journey. From selfishness and desire he’d allowed her to join a hopeless quest. He might have to use her Fascist contacts to locate Heydrich, once they got to Berlin. But he could not trust her
because
she had Fascist contacts.

How far did this “cover” of hers extend? Was Diana’s Nazi pose purely personal, for the better protection of Denys and Willi—or was it political, too? Was she a Fascist by convenience—or conviction?

“Tell me who you’re working for,” he suggested. “Then I’ll decide what I can share.”

She glanced over at him, her eyes invisible behind dark glasses. “Can’t,” she said.

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“Both, I suppose.” Her gaze drifted back out to the landscape. “The less you know, the safer we both are.”

“That cuts both ways.”

“I don’t doubt it. But the fact remains: You’re hunting something. I’m offering you my help. The offer’s useless unless I know what to look for.”

What if you’re nothing but a beautiful lie?
he asked himself.
The most beautiful lie I’ve ever wanted to believe?

He had been asking this question about women, more or less, all his life.

He drove on toward the Swiss border.

Their lovemaking that night was a pitched battle. Neither took prisoners.

They climbed north through Switzerland and crossed into Germany a week after leaving France.

Jack’s diplomatic passport drew immediate attention from the border guard across the river from Stein am Rhein, the picturesque Swiss hamlet they’d abandoned for the Reich. The boy in the field gray uniform—he was years younger, Jack guessed, than himself—was immediately suspicious and uncertain, as though advance notice of an American’s official travel should have been wired to every German checkpoint. The guard had no instructions regarding Mr. John Kennedy. No real proof that he was a diplomat at all. And he claimed to be driving to Berlin, on official business? Why had he not traveled by train, with a secretary, like a proper American? The fact that Diana, a British subject with entirely different papers, was traveling with Jack was even worse. How to account for such a companion, other than by scandal? Diana sat in the open car doorway, her long, silk-clad legs crossed at the ankles, smoking a cigarette with obvious boredom. Jack peppered the tight-lipped boy in ever-louder English, all flattened vowels and drawling consonants, his Boston patrimony, of which the guard understood perhaps one word in ten.

When the boy moved to his pillbox, determined to call Berlin, Diana barked out a few phrases in German.

The guard froze. His expression, Jack saw with fascination, was abject when he looked at her. Diana made a business of crushing out her cigarette and dusting ash from her fingers. The passports were suddenly stamped and returned, the crossing bars lifted from the lonely roadway.

“What did you say to him?” Jack demanded as they drove past the rigid boy. “And where did you learn to say it?”

Diana blew the guard a kiss. Waggled her fingers. “I told him when his call was done I wished to borrow his telephone. I had come expressly from London to introduce
Herr Kennedy
to my esteemed friend, the Führer—and I felt he ought to be warned of our delay.”

* * *

THREE DAYS LATER,
they were standing in Berlin’s Adlon Hotel on Pariser Platz.

Jack booked two rooms. The U.S. embassy was across the square, to the right of the horses topping the Brandenburg Gate, and he was afraid a well-meaning diplomat might cable his dad about the gorgeous woman he’d shacked up with.

The embassy was old General Blücher’s palace, he of Waterloo fame. The staffers hated the location because the Nazi Party paraded through Pariser Platz whenever they needed to whip up a frenzy. Noise was a constant irritant. Roosevelt had recalled his ambassador the year before, to protest the atrocities of Kristallnacht, and relations between the two countries were deteriorating. Roosevelt had rebuked the Germans for seizing Czechoslovakia and Hitler had snarled in reply.

A chargé d’affaires named Alexander Kirk ran the embassy, a suave and elegant friend of Carmel Offie’s who seemed to share La Belle Offlet’s sexual proclivities. He cared deeply about antiques, entertaining, and food, in that order, and assured Jack that while he did his best to keep his finger on the Führer’s pulse, he had no idea whether Reinhard Heydrich was in town. Kirk personally made it a point, he confided, to keep out of the Nazi security chief’s way.

“Scary fellow,” he said. “
Odd.
Just looking at him gives me the heebie-jeebies. That incredibly high forehead. Those close-set eyes. The
nose
. You might talk to the commercial attaché, Sam Woods. He knows a good deal about friend Reinhard.”

Kirk leaned conspiratorially toward Jack. “Woods reports directly to Roosevelt. Bypasses State completely. The President had him transferred here from Prague, before the Czech show blew up. Knows everything there is to know about this new physics business.
Atoms.
Woods is the man you want.”

But Sam Woods had already left for the day, so Jack carried Diana off to a cabaret. She wore the nude chiffon with the black velvet bows that had entranced him on the
Queen Mary
. Her eyes were narrowed and her lips half parted and her foot tapped as she watched the dancers; and Jack sensed a bit of what she’d lost to her respectable marriage. Diana was dying to be on stage, shoulders bared and pelvis thrusting. She craved risk the way other women craved affection.

This was something they had in common, Diana and Jack: They didn’t care if they died, or how. They were simply determined to
live
first. He’d never known a woman so much like himself and the knowledge made him hungry for her. He devoured Diana that night in her sanctified separate hotel room, his mouth roaming over her thighs, her breasts, her sex, until she knotted her fingers in his hair and swore.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING JACK
knocked on Sam Woods’s door.

The commercial attaché worked in a windowless room deep in the Blücher Palace, surrounded by posters of smiling American housewives and glossy American Buicks. He glanced up as Jack hovered in the doorway and said, “You’re the Kennedy boy. Kirk said you were in town. College junket?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Jack agreed. He shook Sam Woods’s hand. “I’m researching my senior thesis. ‘Security in the Age of Fascism.’ It’ll be embarrassingly incomplete without the Reich Main Security Office. I was hoping you could get my foot in the door. Mr. Kirk says you follow Heydrich.”

“Oh, I follow him, all right,” Woods said drily. He tossed a packet of what looked like financial data to one side of his desk. “Through half of Europe, these days.”

Jack was tempted to ask why a commercial secretary was interested in the head of the Nazi secret police, but he stopped himself.
Woods reports directly to Roosevelt . . . knows everything there is to know about this new physics business.
Jack was looking at another of the President’s spies.

“I can’t get you in to talk to Heydrich,” the attaché was saying, “but I can find somebody who’ll give you an hour. Got your dip passport with you?”

Jack showed it to him. Woods made a few phones calls. He spoke impressive German. Not for the last time, Jack wished he did.

“I’ve got to go send a cable to the White House now,” the attaché said, “but I’ve gotten you into Heydrich’s shop. Be outside the embassy in ten minutes. You won’t need pen or paper for notes, by the way. The Gestapo give nothing away.”

* * *

JACK WAS DRIVEN IN
an official car to Prinz Albrechtstrasse 8, a five-story Beaux Arts building, the Gestapo’s home. Hitler’s security services took up most of the block, stretching around the corner to Wilhelmstrasse. If Jack could just get inside, he’d figure out what to do next.

“Could you begin,” he asked the bland figure in the perfectly tailored SS uniform who’d ushered him into an office, “by explaining the difference between these forces—the Kripo, the Gestapo, the SD? None of them existed before the Nazi Party came to power, right?”

“The degeneracy of recent governments, and the chaos in civil society they encouraged, led to a general lawlessness that required a firm response,” his handler said in dispassionate English. His name was Storck. “The German crisis demanded innovative methods. Disciplined personnel and clear penalties. Examples the general populace could understand. We are now a model of civic order envied throughout Europe.”

“It’s pretty confusing,” Jack said. “All these police groups, all run by the same person—General Heydrich. He has quite a grip on the reins of power, doesn’t he?”

Storck smiled thinly.

“I don’t suppose he’s around? Willing to talk to a visiting American?”

“The
Obergruppenführer
will be desolated when he learns he has missed your visit, Herr Kennedy,” Storck replied, “but he is occupied with pressing duties. There is never so much time as the
Obergruppenführer
would wish. Your question is an excellent one, however, and I shall attempt to answer it.
Kripo
is the name of the Reich criminal police . . .”

Jack listened to a disquisition on Nazi repression for roughly twenty minutes before Storck deemed he’d said enough. Then he was turned over to a pair of Gestapo men and marched to the entrance of the Albrechtstrasse building. The corridors were wide and vaulted like a church and populated by SS and Gestapo uniforms. Guards were posted every few feet. They eyed Jack as though he were a prisoner bound for interrogation. There was no chance of finding Heydrich’s office in this fortress. If the White Spider had already delivered Göring’s account book, Jack would never retrieve it. He felt like a fool.

He bought himself a drink in the Adlon bar and stared moodily through the plate-glass window at Pariser Platz. He rolled the whiskey around his mouth and thought about his final year at Harvard, once his dad was exposed as a traitor. He’d be shunned. A pariah. Could they kick him
out
of Spee Club? His brother Joe would be furious—he was starting Harvard Law in the fall, and his whole life was about running for president one day.
That
plan wasn’t looking good. Kick’s romance with Billy would come to a screeching halt as well. Eunice’s debut would end in a public shaming. At least he, Jack, only wanted to wander the world as a foreign correspondent. There were still remote places where nobody’d ever heard of the Kennedys.