Murder Under the Palms (30 page)

Up close to the storefront, she was able to see that the greatcoat wasn’t the only item that had come from Château en Espagne. At the bottom of the window was a display of Paul’s toy soldiers. They were all there: the knight of Muscovy in the base of which Dede had found the key, the palace grenadier, the subaltern in the lancer regiment, the private in the Cossack regiment. There was even the photo of the doomed imperial family.

Nikolai must have sold Paul’s collection to this shop.

The door stood open to the pleasant air and the sound of the gurgling fountain. Entering, Charlotte found that it was a shop that dealt in military antiques, military artworks, and antique toy soldiers. This was probably where Paul had originally purchased most of his soldiers, she thought as she wandered around, noting the mock-ups of battle scenes that were displayed in glass cases.

She was halfway around the rectangular counter at the center of the shop when a display under the counter caught her eye. It was a collection of Nazi military antiques. There were armbands and helmets and medals, all with the swastika insignia. A sign in the case read: “Every item on display is certifiably authentic.”

“May I help you?” asked the salesman when he saw her eyeing a sword with a swastika inscribed on the hilt.

“Do you buy Nazi military antiques?”

“Yes we do.”

“I’m interested in selling a piece that I inherited. It’s a dagger with a six-inch blade. The hilt is silver, and it’s inscribed with a swastika and a lightning bolt. It’s very similar to this sword,” she said, pointing to the one under the counter, “but smaller, of course. Would you like to see it?”

“Very much,” he said. He nodded down at the case. “As you can see, we have a large collection of Nazi memorabilia.”

“Can you tell me anything about it?”

“Of course. Daggers of the kind you describe were usually awarded to members of Hitler Youth at the age of eighteen, when they were accepted as full members into the National Socialist Party. They were a symbol of the fact that the youths had become sword bearers for the
führer.
”

“It has an inscription,” Charlotte said. “
Blut und Ehre.
”

“The translation is ‘Blood and Honor.’ It sounds like it’s the kind of dagger that I’m talking about. I couldn’t tell you how much I would be willing to pay for it until I see it, though.”

“Of course,” Charlotte said.

“But I’d estimate that it’s worth at least three or four hundred dollars. The value depends on the condition.”

“Where would my relative have come by such a knife?” Charlotte asked. “I never really knew him, so I have no idea.”

“Probably from a dead Nazi. The Nazis who had been members of Hitler Youth usually carried them. The Allied soldiers in Europe took them from Nazi corpses as souvenirs, in much the same way as soldiers in the Pacific took samurai swords from dead Japanese soldiers.”

The image popped into Charlotte’s mind of the spiked German helmet that an uncle had brought back from the Great War; it had been a favorite item in her childhood dress-up trunk.

“They were particularly prized as souvenirs among members of the French Résistance,” the clerk added.

“Really!” said Charlotte.

“Yes. They were a status symbol. Having one demonstrated that you had proved yourself by killing a Nazi. Was your relative French?”

“As a matter of fact, he was,” she replied.

After thanking the clerk, Charlotte staggered out into the afternoon sunshine. For a moment, she just stood there, blinking. Then she sat down on the rim of the marble fountain. It had come as such a shock: a chance remark from a clerk in a shop that she had just happened to saunter into.

A chance remark that was a key to the puzzle of two unsolved murders.

Her mind was spinning as she walked the four blocks back to her hotel. Ordinarily she would have enjoyed this walk. Ever since her arrival in Palm Beach, the weather had been perfect—sunny, and in the seventies—and this was another perfect day. But her mind was too agitated to enjoy anything. That she had just purchased a house for an almost unthinkable amount of money was by itself enough to throw her off balance, but that had been superseded by the shock of what she had just discovered: the identity of the furtive figure in the dimly lighted corridor of her dream. She now knew why she had seen him in
that
corridor—the corridor on the
Normandie
. She also knew why his uniform was blue-black, though it should have been trimmed in gold braid. She knew what was behind the door into which he had disappeared. She had all the pieces: she had found the exit. Now it was a matter of fitting them together. As she walked, she tried the pieces this way and that and searched among the leftover pieces for the ones that would fill the gaps. It wasn’t that she doubted her conclusion, rather that she wasn’t sure of the path that led to it.

By the time she sighted the unassuming yellow stucco walls of her hotel fifteen minutes later, she had worked out a scenario for the sequence of events, and all it would take to confirm her conclusions was a couple of telephone calls.

The first was to Wilhelm Roehrer, alias Bill Roe, in Clearwater. She had no difficulty in getting the number from Information.

It was Mrs. Roehrer who answered.

“He died on Sunday,” she said.

Charlotte expressed her sympathies, thinking that if the person who murdered Paul and McLean had any intention of murdering Roehrer too, it wouldn’t be necessary now. Then she identified herself as the woman who had come to their door the week before with the white-haired man.

“I remember,” said Mrs. Roehrer.

“You said that another man had been there before us,” Charlotte went on. “You thought at first that we were connected with him. I believe you said you didn’t know his name. Is that correct?”

“
Ja
,” she replied.

“Can you describe him?”

Mrs. Roehrer thought for a moment, and then spoke in her heavily accented English: “He was of medium height, about sixty years old, very good-looking; dark eyes, gray hair.” She paused, and then said, “
Ein Franzose.
”

“
Franzose
?”

“
Ja
. Sorry,” she apologized. “I sometimes forget to speak in English. I mean that he was a Frenchman.”

Charlotte leaned back on the sofa in the sitting room of her neat little green and white suite and stared at the leaves of the banana tree outside the bay window. She was holding a Manhattan that she had picked up from the bar on her way in and thinking of a quote from Thoreau. “Simplify, simplify,” he had said when describing his life at Walden Pond. She and Eddie had concocted a complex plot filled with spies and counterspies and acts of sabotage when all along the murders had been committed for one of the oldest motives there was: revenge. More specifically, revenge for a murdered love. As Eddie had postulated to Maureen earlier that day, Feder and McLean had been killed in retribution for a death that had occurred as a result of Operation Golden Bird. Roehrer probably would have been killed too, had he not been dying already. But it wasn’t the death of a human being for which their murderer had taken revenge, but the death of a ship, a ship that he had loved like a woman—more than a woman perhaps—a ship that had been his whole life until that icy February afternoon fifty years ago. “I loved the
Normandie
with a passion one usually reserves for a beloved mistress,” he had said.

René Dubord had been one of the priests Weg had referred to, one of the attendants who had worshiped at the feet of the goddess. Even after his workday was through, he had paid her homage, documenting her every whim and passing moment in a series of scrapbooks that he collected over the years. Then she had died, leaving a vacuum in his life that he filled by fighting for his country. Later, he had somehow discovered that the death of his beloved
Normandie
wasn’t a tragic accident, but a coldly calculated murder, and he had vowed to track down his mistress’s killers and take their lives in revenge. He wasn’t a stranger to killing: he had killed in the Résistance—quickly, quietly, professionally. And he would kill again. He would take the lives of the hated Boches who had murdered his mistress, using a weapon he’d taken from one of them during the war. Over the years, he had doggedly hunted down his mistress’s killers. Until, one day, he found them—ironically enough—right under his nose. As it turned out, only one had been a Boche, but that didn’t matter. The second had been a Russian fascist and the third had been on the same side as he, but that didn’t matter either: in his mind, they were all murderers, no matter what side they had been on.

But, Charlotte asked herself, was love of a ship sufficient motivation to drive a man to spend fifty years hunting down her murderers? There must have been something more, she thought as she sipped her drink. Combing her memory for clues, she latched on to the photograph of the original Château Albert, which hung on the wall in the barroom at René’s exclusive dining club. The elegant family château, centuries old—lost as a result of debts incurred by René’s father in the high-stakes gambling salons at Deauville. He and his mother reduced to living in the bakehouse on their former estate, the mother no doubt obsessed with the lost glories of her past life. Later, the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, in which the SS had taken the lives of six hundred and forty-odd inhabitants of his village, including his mother and all his relatives. She realized now that for René, the
Normandie
had been more than just a beautiful ship, a ship that he loved as he would a mistress. It had been the symbol of—and the replacement for—the elegant Norman château and the acres of fields and woods that his father had so callously gambled away at Deauville’s felt gaming tables. It had been the symbol of a life of wealth and privilege which was his birthright, but which had been snatched away before he was old enough to claim it. It had been the symbol of the grandeur of France, which had been gambled away by a weak, collaborationist government as callously as his father had staked the family patrimony on the deal of a hand. The elegant
Normandie
had been a memorial to his past: his castle in the air. In striking down her murderers, René had been taking revenge for more than just the death of a ship: he had been avenging the loss of his family’s honor, the defeat of France, the shame of it all. He had been taking revenge for the Nazi savagery that had destroyed everything he knew and loved.

Setting aside her empty glass, Charlotte picked up the tulip shell on the lamp table, the shell she had found on the beach. With her finger, she traced the path of the narrow brown band as it coiled its way around the body of the shell in an ascending spiral. René had been coming back to the same spot for fifty years, but instead of circling upward, he had been stuck on the same plane. For fifty years, he had been going around and around in the same path, until a deep groove had been worn into his soul.

Sitting back, she found herself pondering the remaining gaps in the puzzle. How had he found his way to Roehrer’s tract house in Clearwater? she wondered. For that matter, how had he found out that the
Normandie
fire wasn’t an accident? Then her mind made one of those connections that is the serendipitous result of aimless daydreaming, or maybe the effect of a stiff drink. Reaching over to the table, she picked up the phone again.

The second call was to the Jewish Documention Center in Los Angeles. She explained to the person who answered that she was following up on an investigation that was being conducted by Mr. Edward Norwood into the career of Nazi
Oberscharführer
Wilhelm Roehrer, and was immediately transferred to someone else. After several more transfers, she was finally connected with a woman who was able to help her.

She told the woman that she was interested in the positions held by
Oberscharführer
Roehrer in the months immediately preceding V.E. Day. “I’m Mr. Norwood’s secretary,” she said. She didn’t want to get into an elaborate explanation as to why she needed the information, not knowing on what pretext Eddie had originally queried the center, or even if a pretext were needed.

But as it turned out, the woman asked no questions. “That should be easy,” she replied. “We have all that information on our computer.”

“Wilhelm Roehrer was his real name,” Charlotte said. “The alias that he used in this country was William Roe—Bill.”

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman said. “We have the information cross-referenced under all the aliases. Sometimes there are a dozen of them.”

Charlotte could hear the computer keys clicking. “I have him,” she said after a minute. “Born in Köln, emigrated to the U.S. with his parents in 1933 when he was fifteen; active in the German-American Bund; returned to Germany in 1942. What else did you want to know?”

“The position he held at the close of the war. Just before V.E. Day. It would have been in the spring of 1945.”

“He was a warder at a prison in France,” she said. “It was in Fresnes, just outside Paris. It says here that it was a prison for political prisoners, mostly members of the French Résistance.”

“Thank you,” Charlotte said, and hung up.

14

They arrived at Château Albert an hour later. There were three of them: Charlotte, Maureen, and Roberts, who, since his discovery of the dagger, had been promoted to the position of Maureen’s sidekick. After passing through the tall, clipped ficus hedges that concealed the club from the plaza, they made their way up the front path. Crossing the cobblestoned courtyard, they rang the bell at the door of the quaint half-timbered building with the steeply pitched roof. Standing by the French flag that hung from a flagpole, it struck Charlotte that this private dining club—so carefully constructed by craftsmen whom René had imported from his native province—was also a memorial to his aristocratic heritage and to the glory of France, just as the
Normandie
had been. He had spent an entire lifetime trying to resurrect his lost past.

The door was answered by a member of the kitchen staff who informed them that the club didn’t open until eight. Upon asking for René, they were escorted into the kitchen, where they found him hunched over a counter, going over the menu with the chef. He looked only moderately surprised to see them, but then, he was a master at maintaining his composure. As usual, he was elegantly dressed in a navy blue double-breasted blazer and gray flannel slacks, and as usual he wore the red and black rosette of the Médaille de la Résistance on his lapel. Excusing himself to the chef, he escorted his visitors to a private dining room with red and white toile wallcovering, where they all sat down on rush-seated ladder-back chairs around an antique table under a large painting of Normandy peasants in wooden shoes harvesting apples.