Jack 1939 (24 page)

FORTY-THREE.
ON CHARLES BRIDGE

JACK WAS THE LAST OF
the Kennedy children to arrive back in London that third week in June. The younger girls were set free from their schooling at Sacred Heart, and Rosie was done with her Montessori course. Teddy pounded up and down the stairs in short pants and stout shoes, his knees perpetually muddy. Kick was consumed with a round of race meetings and country-house parties, debutante balls, and fittings in Paris—the high tide of the London season.

And Joe was finally home, fresh from one of his “fact-finding missions,” this time in Vienna and Berlin. It had been a year since Jack had seen his big brother, and he felt a simple rush of relief as he grasped Joe’s hand. There was confidence and authority in every line of his brother’s muscled body, a vigor that followed him through a room. Whatever Willi Dobler might say about the simplistic thinking of the
quintessential American
, Joe slept well at night, untroubled by doubt. He rarely second-guessed his decisions. Jack envied him that basic certainty. He realized he’d missed it—and Joe—over the past few months.

“I hear you saw the war,” he said, as they stood together in Rose’s salon.

Joe handed him a drink. “Better than that. I saw Madrid fall.”

It was easy to listen to his brother talk about the weeks he’d spent in Spain, from the Republican internment camp he’d visited on the border, filled with depressed and defeated Loyalists, to the cellar of the Franco safe house he’d camped in during those last days in Madrid. The Spanish Civil War had collapsed into partisans of every stripe fighting their old comrades, the cause and the goals equally confused, the desperation to survive reducing political theories to so much blood on the ground. Franco, to hear Joe tell it, had won in the end because of discipline—in the chaos of the final battles, a strong leader would inevitably prevail.

“All those Italian and German warships bombing Barcelona didn’t hurt either,” Jack commented.

“They certainly did not,” Joe agreed. “Fascists hang together. And they aren’t afraid to pull a trigger.”

Irony was lost on Joe.

He didn’t ask much about Jack’s recent trip through Europe and Jack was profoundly glad of his brother’s disinterest. He’d decided to ignore the immediate past as he did his perpetual illness. If he could suggest to his family that he was in high spirits and had never felt better, maybe even he’d begin to believe it. And because of the flurry surrounding Eunice’s debut party, his luck held: He barely saw his parents. This, too, was a relief; he was afraid of what he might say to J.P. and he had nothing at all to say to Rose.

There would be dinner for thirty in the dining room that night, a dance for two hundred in the ballroom upstairs. The Duke of Marlborough was coming. Baroness Ravensdale. Nancy Astor. The Duchess of Northumberland. Jack dug out his tails and white tie, immaculately pressed and ready, and put them on. Around five o’clock he found Eunice seated before her dressing table, in a peach-colored dress designed by Paquin; it was her first couture gown and she wore it like a newborn she was terrified of dropping. Eunice was shy and nervous, ardently Catholic; she slept badly, and if awakened in the night, could wander sleepless for hours. They all handled Eunice like a piece of blown glass.

He set a square florist’s box on the dressing table. It held a white rose corsage. She smiled at him uncertainly.

“Is that for me?”

“Who else, kid?”

“You’re so good to me, Jack. I don’t deserve it.”

“Sure you do. It’s your night.”

“I’ll probably spend most of it in the bathroom.”

She blinked and looked stoically at her reflection, her fingers struggling with a string of pearls she was trying to put on.

He was disturbed by the tears in her eyes. He pulled up a chair, flipped the tails of his dinner coat, and sat down next to her. When he touched her back the skin was goose-fleshed. “Scared?”

“Terrified,” she breathed. “I’m not like Kick. Nobody’ll want to dance with
me
. You have a dance card, you know, and you have to check to see whether it’s filled for each dance. If it’s not, you go up to the bathroom so nobody knows. Mother will
die
if I’m a flop at my own come-out.”

He made a mental note to fill up her card. “Here—let me help you with those.”

She gave him the pearls and he slid them around her neck, suddenly aware of the childish jut of her shoulder blades, emerging from the back of her dress. “You eighteen yet?”

“In three weeks,” she said glumly. “But you turned twenty-two, didn’t you? Where’d you spend your birthday?”

“Prague,” he said, remembering the twenty-ninth of May. “I was in Prague.”

“Good party?”

“I’ve had better,” he said with effort. “Heck—
you
weren’t there, kid.”

She smiled brilliantly and dove into a drawer of the dressing table. “I didn’t forget your present.”

It was a Sacred Heart medal, strung on dark blue ribbon she’d chosen herself. “Wear it beneath your shirt, Jack,” she urged. “It’ll help.”

“With what?”

“Whatever it is you’re hiding.”

His fingers twitched convulsively, and the medal skittered to the floor. He bent to retrieve it. Combing the carpet was preferable to meeting his sister’s eyes.

“I’ve never seen you so sad,” Eunice said. “You look like someone died. Is Prague a terribly lonesome place?”

* * *

FROM MOSCOW HEYDRICH
had turned south to Bucharest, then Turkey, where he spent nearly a week in Istanbul. It made sense, Jack thought: the Turks controlled the Bosporus—which meant access to Russia’s Black Sea—and they’d held it against the British in the last war. Heydrich would have to buy Turkish friends before the next war started.

Jack radioed Roosevelt again from the roof of the Istanbul consulate the morning after he arrived. Although Kitty Walker had never heard the tantalizing date of Heydrich’s planned invasion, she insisted it was to begin with the seizure of Danzig, throttling the Polish navy before a ground attack from the west. Then Russia would strike from the east, and Poland would be forced to fight on two fronts. Without the promised help of Britain and France, the Poles would fall fast and fall hard. Jack figured Roosevelt needed to know.

He gazed at the bridges of Istanbul for twenty-three minutes before the President replied. He spent another sixteen minutes decoding the message.

Is this Nazi-Soviet deal signed?
Roosevelt asked.

Jack had no idea. Rather than disappoint FDR, he packed up his radio. The following day, he was on the roof again. He’d seen Diana and had news for the President.

* * *

REINHARD HEYDRICH AND HIS
entourage traveled in a fleet of black cars, his personal favorite being an open black Mercedes with a long, sleek bonnet and a prominent chrome grill. The license plate was instantly recognizable—SS-3, the letters elongated and sharp like the Nazi insignia. Heydrich swanked in the backseat, his arm thrown royally over Diana’s shoulders, while a minion drove. In a hired taxi, Jack found it easy enough to follow this spectacle through the narrow streets of Istanbul. That day, a little before three o’clock in the afternoon, the Mercedes pulled up in front of the Beyazit Gate of the Grand Bazaar.

Jack had wandered alone through the vast market complex the previous day, hands in his pockets, the curtain called Boredom or Death rustling stealthily behind him. He was heartsick and restless; he hadn’t come within touching distance of Diana for weeks. The memory of their encounter at the Metropol haunted his sleep. By night, he yearned for her; by day he feared for her. He distracted his darting mind by conducting interviews with the earnest functionaries at the U.S. consulate. But of what use was a senior thesis if he failed to secure the stolen account book? In late afternoon he abandoned his work and found his way into the bazaar.

The ancient souk sprawled over fifty-eight streets and held thousands of shops; traders had bargained beneath its arched ceilings for five hundred years. It was, Jack thought, a postcard from Byzantium, the lost world of Suleiman the Magnificent, and for a while the colors and scents transported him: cardamom and bitter orange blossom; tobacco bubbling in hookahs; the mustiness of rolled wool rugs and the brown coal smell of open braziers. The bazaar stank of goats and unwashed humanity and occasionally attar of roses. A man gestured at carpets and a boy offered alabaster; when Jack ducked down a quieter path through the labyrinth, an aged crone tried to sell him her daughter.

He hunched now in the back of his taxi, wondering what Reinhard Heydrich was buying this morning.

The Gestapo chief handed Diana down from the Mercedes and a phalanx of guards closed around them, their uniforms black as night. The Spider was not among them; presumably he still suffered the effects of his gunshot wound. Jack paid off his driver while the group passed through the Beyazit Gate; then he got out of the car and strolled slowly after them.

It was easy enough to keep the party in view—they attracted a swarm of hagglers young and old, a bobbing circle of fezzes that impeded Heydrich’s progress and brought his pace to a crawl. Jack hung back fifty yards as Diana and her pack progressed through the bazaar. He was careful to keep a scrim of bodies—tourists and locals, bewildering in their array—between himself and those Nazi eyes.

They passed bustling
hans—
courtyards given over to a single trade—and a mosque, one of two within the market. They passed fountains trickling water over cerulean tiles, stalls filled with fanciful glass lanterns, and cloying piles of Turkish Delight. Jack watched as Diana stopped short before a display of embroidered silks, murmuring as her fingers stroked them; Heydrich was unmoved. He grasped Diana’s arm—Jack could almost feel the imprint of his thumb on her flesh—and she was borne along in her lover’s tide. As she turned away from the silks, however, her gaze swept back along the way she had come—and caught him.

He went hot, then cold. All his senses screaming.

Nothing in her face betrayed her. Nothing but the quick duck of her head, the same movement she’d made once in a restaurant in Moscow. Would Heydrich feel her sudden awareness through his fingers on her arm? He was making, Jack saw, for a particular
han—
a private rug dealer whose name was emblazoned in gold-leaf Turkish script over his caravansary doors.

Jack came to a halt near a coffee vendor. Heydrich and his coterie walked into the rug-dealer’s courtyard and were momentarily lost to view. Jack pointed to a cup and motioned with his hands; the vendor nodded and began to prepare his brew, steam hissing through a copper vat. Jack’s nerves were jumping. He dropped some Turkish coins in the vendor’s lined palm.

How to talk to Diana?

She was surrounded by Heydrich’s palace guard. But she would be thinking of him. She would be thinking—

Jack drained the last of his cup and handed it to the vendor. Then he wandered toward the rug-seller’s
han
and glanced into the courtyard
.
There was no sign of the Germans, who had presumably gone inside the dealer’s showroom. Jack had watched the drama played out before: the offer of tea or coffee, or for the lady, a sweetened fruit juice; the unfurling of precious carpets before the buyer’s discerning eye. Heydrich was known as a connoisseur—of food, of music, of violence. He might be engaged some time, fingering the knots and patterns, bartering down his price.

Jack scanned the old wooden buildings that lined the courtyard. They were as closed and secretive as Ali Baba’s cave. He could not get near her. But Diana would be thinking—

He walked back to the silk vendor’s stall. Bolts of brilliant fabric overrun with twisting vines and flowers were propped against the walls; a narrow aisle between led deeper into the shop.

Twelve minutes later she found him there.

“How did you get away?” Jack breathed. His hand was on her elbow but the fabric seller was watching them. He could not draw attention. Could not take her in his arms in the middle of the bazaar—

“I told him I felt faint. It’s bloody hot in that rug shop, darling. Like a Turkish bath! The man has a fire going in May. I threatened to swoon, so Heydrich sent me into the courtyard with his lapdog Ernst.”

Jack glanced around. “Where’s your leash?”

“Hopelessly lost somewhere in the bazaar. I sent Ernst in search of ice. That should buy us a quarter hour.”

He clutched her wrist urgently. “Run away with me. Right now. We’ll lose them in this labyrinth.”

She shook her head. “You’re wasting
time
. Now listen to what I must tell you.”

* * *

HEYDRICH NOT AUTHORIZED
to sign Nazi-Soviet Pact,
Jack radioed to Roosevelt from the consulate rooftop.
Ribbentrop to negotiate further details with Molotov, but delayed by pressing business in Italy. Ribbentrop has signed Pact of Steel, repeat Pact of Steel, with Count Ciano. Pact furthers German-Italian alliance and includes secret side agreement requiring both countries to defend each other in time of war. Expect disclosure soonest. CRIMSON

The next day, May twenty-second, Jack took in the headlines over his breakfast of fruit and pastry.

Count Ciano and Joachim von Ribbentrop had just announced their cozy pact. With Mussolini as ally and Stalin waiting in the wings, Hitler’s snare around Europe was pulling tighter.

* * *

FROM ISTANBUL HEYDRICH
made for Vienna, with its Gestapo network firmly in place and its glorious opera house where
Tannhaüser
played. It was obvious even to Jack that Heydrich had descended on the city solely for
Tannhaüser
—he stayed four days, and went to the opera each night. Jack went twice just so he could see Diana across the expanse of the theater. She was ethereally thin, and there were lines running from her nose to the corners of her mouth.

He debated invading the ladies’ room in the hope of finding her, but there was no Kitty Walker in Vienna to bar the entrance. He walked right up to Diana in the opera house bar instead, as Heydrich was handing her a coupe of champagne.