A Star for Mrs. Blake (36 page)

“Yes,” Cora said, “she told me.”

“She
insisted
,” Florence went on. “Nobody could stop her.”

“Why would anybody want to try?”

“Well, because of her heart.”

“She wasn’t sick.”

“Oh, yes. Bobbie had a weak heart. Did have, for years.”

“Are you sure?” Cora asked, looking back and forth between them, but Reed just shrugged.

“Of course I’m sure,” said Florence with a shake of glossy black feathers. “I’ve known her a little bit longer than you.”

“She never said a word.”

“She wouldn’t have. That was Bobbie. In charge to the end.”

“So it was natural causes,” Reed said. “That should be a relief to everyone.”

Florence removed her gloves. “I suppose the medicine she was taking just wasn’t strong enough.”

“Bobbie never took any medicine.”

“Maybe you just didn’t—” Florence began.

Cora interrupted: “No, I would have seen. We shared a room, we were together twelve hours a day. She had no reason to hide it. I would have known.”

“This doesn’t make sense. Bobbie had congestive heart failure and knew she had to take her pills. She was always very good about it.”

“Are you saying she skipped them?” Reed asked. “Why would she?”

“She didn’t skip them,” Cora said. “She never got them. Everyone else had their medicine. The nurse gave it out each morning—”

“And none for Bobbie?”

“None for Bobbie,” Cora echoed, wondering why.

“Well,” said Florence. “That decides it. There will be a full inquest. It was the army’s responsibility, and they should have seen to it. I knew something was wrong.”

“Wasn’t it on her record?” Reed asked.

“Of course it was! Why wasn’t she supervised? You see? We were right to come here. If it wasn’t for me, they’d sweep this right under the rug. I’m going to insist that the American ambassador be involved! We owe it to Bobbie and her family,” she said, answering Reed’s skeptical look. “My poor mother will be devastated; she and Bobbie were sorority sisters at Radcliffe. I have to push this along, if for no reason other than Mother’s peace of mind.” She stopped to survey the castle decor of the Hôtel Nouvel. “Is this what the army considers first class? I don’t know how Bobbie could take it.”

“She didn’t care,” said Cora coldly. “She came here to see Henry.”

“Florence, why don’t you leave it alone?” said Reed.

“You look irked.”

“I am irked,” he replied. “It’s over and done.”

“Let’s not argue,” Florence said. “We’re all too tired. To be continued,” she promised Cora with a chummy smile.

They said their good nights. Reed and Florence were shown to an elevator in another part of the lobby and escorted to the room she’d reserved on the top floor. It was the best in the house—still not up to Parisian standards, but a far cry from the iron beds, contracted for the pilgrimages, that would have fit in with a hospital ward. From a frosted glass door they entered a passageway with mirrored closets that opened to a spacious suite with two twin beds, armchairs and a small couch, nicely carved oak bureaus. Clearly unoccupied for quite some time, the room was filled with dead air. The decor—headboards, bedspreads, bolsters, upholstery, heavy drapes—was done entirely in an orange japonaiserie fabric patterned with storks, which, along with
the stifling scent of fresh lilies in a vase on the dressing table, created the claustrophobic effect of being inside a candy box offered by a bellicose aunt.

“Dear God, please call down for a drink,” Florence said.

Reed picked the phone and ordered a bottle of Gordon’s gin, ice, and lime. Florence unpinned her black feathered hat and looked inside a drawer. “I don’t even want to put my clothes in there. Poor Bobbie.”

“Where’s my medicine?” Reed asked.

“In the traveling case. I’ll make you up a shot.”

“I can do it. How long are we in Verdun?” he asked, rummaging until he found a brown glass bottle containing fine white powder.

“I didn’t think more than a day, but now, with the inquest—”

“Really, Flo, what’s the point of making a fuss?”

“I’m standing up for Bobbie. I’d like to think she’d stand up for me. Let’s get the ball rolling, and then we can be out of this hellhole. No matter what, we can’t stay later than Wednesday because we’re booked for London.”

“And when is that?” Reed was preoccupied by mixing the powder with distilled water from another vial.

“We leave Paris Thursday and arrive in London Thursday night. You check in to London General Hospital on Friday—”

She was interrupted by the ringing phone.

“Oh, hell. What now?
Gin, lime, and ice
. How can they get that wrong?” She picked up the receiver and said in her public voice, “Yes? This is Florence Dean Powell.”

Reed liked it better when she did it because then he didn’t have to fool around with the rubber hose with the needle between his teeth like a tawdry jazz musician in the back room of a cellar club, but these days he couldn’t go very long without numbing the pounding ache that radiated from multiple points in his body, the problem being that the points kept changing and he had to keep chasing them like hounds after a cartoon rabbit, he was thinking, as the drug bloomed.

Flying with the Japanese storks that had lifted off the bed, he looked down from the ceiling to see that Florence was no longer on the phone and her habitual expression of superiority had abandoned her.

“What’s the matter, dear?” he asked.

“That was Dr. Szabo. Remember Dr. Szabo, who examined you at home?”

“Good old Dr. Szabo.”

“He’s gotten the results of the blood test back. Grif, they aren’t good.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve got a dangerously high level of lead in your blood. It’s—everywhere in your system.”

“All right,” said Reed, drifting.

“I told him we were leaving for London,” Florence went on rapidly, as if she’d been accused of something and had to defend herself, “and that you would get the mask replaced by Saturday.”

“Then everything’s fine.”

She stared at him and suddenly began to knead her hands together.

“Take it off!” she screamed. “Take it off right now!”

The cry caused his nerves to explode. He fumbled at the mask with shaking fingers until he’d lifted it away and the pressure on his bones and ears was less.

“Much better,” Florence was saying. “I can’t stand to think of you soaking in that contamination.”

“Better?”
Reed laughed silently in slow motion until his eyes filled with tears.

Florence watched as he slowly nodded out, envying such total intoxication. Dr. Szabo’s diagnosis had been more upsetting than she’d let on. “He has lead poisoning. People die from this,” he’d said. “Don’t wait a day longer.” She decided to quickly settle Bobbie’s affairs tomorrow and get them on the train to Paris, then straight on to the port of Calais. When she heard a knock she turned off the lamp at the side of the bed so that Reed’s naked face would be covered by darkness, then greeted the waiter at the door and asked him to leave the tray in the entryway. When he left she poured a large drink, went back into the bedroom, and sat alone in the dark.

The police station was a short walk from the hotel, behind a medieval fortress on the Pont Chaussée that once stood as the entrance to the city. It was a summer day to lift the spirits. Weeping willows anchored along the riverbank had finally turned brilliant green, proclamations of new growth despite the rubble. The air was calm and insects had not yet risen off the water, that crisp time of morning before the sun strikes, when it is still cool enough to work out solutions to sticky problems, like the Olsen crisis. The downtown streets that had remained intact were filled with summer visitors to the monuments and battlegrounds. Locals met in breakfast rooms or strolled along with fresh baguettes under their arms, as if everyone except General Reginald Perkins was carrying on the business of life without a care in the world, beneath lampposts festooned with baskets of excruciatingly cheerful scarlet geraniums.

“You’d better clean up this mess,” the American ambassador in Paris had barked over a bad connection at the hotel. “I just had a call from the Quartermaster General’s Office in Washington, D.C. They’re plenty sore about the demise of Madame Olsen, in case you haven’t heard.”

“I’ve already got an earful from Florence Dean Powell,” Perkins replied.

“I know Florence Dean Powell,” the ambassador said with some surprise. “She’s the artist, right? A socialite from Boston. She moves here and becomes a bohemian—you know, the serious artist type who never misses a party? I’ve seen her around with that journalist with the tin nose, poor bastard. What’s her interest in Mrs. Olsen?”

“They are all bosom buddies from Boston society, money coming
out of their ears. Florence Powell grew up at the old lady’s knee. She’s demanding an inquest and claims to speak for the family. Don’t worry, I’ll take her to dinner and she’ll calm right down.”

“It’s a squeeze play,” said the man in Paris. “The Olsen lawyers have already put army HQ on notice. The family wants a full explanation of where, when, and why Mrs. Olsen passed—on your watch,” he added.

“She was elderly, Mr. Ambassador. It was an act of God.”

“Then find out who is His servant on earth, because they want answers. The Olsens own a railroad, for Christ’s sake, as well as a couple of Senate seats.”

Perkins had held the receiver away from his ear. He already knew the drill.
Who can we pin this on?

“Someone needs to be held accountable,” the ambassador was saying with gratifying predictability. “We’ve shipped thousands of Gold Star Mothers overseas without a tragedy. Those are powerful people in the Beacon Hill crowd. The longer the family waits, the higher it goes up the ladder. If they’re unhappy, you and I will be personally hearing from the president. As long as the country’s in a depression, the pilgrimages are political gold and he doesn’t want them tarnished by scandal.”

“Then we can’t be scratching our balls hanging around for an inquest. You know the French. They’ll drag this out forever.”

The ambassador was silent. “Do we have any reason to suspect foul play?”

The general chuckled. “You mean like someone slipped arsenic in the old lady’s tea? That would be a pisser. The simple truth is, she had a weak heart.”

The ambassador sounded relieved. “So that’s the story.”

“Not entirely. Florence Dean Powell’s got a notion that we fucked it up somehow, that Olsen never got her medicine—and she’s up in arms about it.”

“Christ, they’ll say we murdered American motherhood.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Just get the body the hell back to the United States before this hits the press.”

“Right, but the body can’t be released without papers signed by the French police service.”

“You won a war, General,” the ambassador had said, inflating the facts to match what he knew to be the size of Perkins’s ego. “You can handle a local sheriff.”

The weather was changing rapidly. The air had become humid with the scent of rain. As Perkins left the city center and neared the police station, the cheeriness of downtown gave way to desolation. Weeds grew between the bricks in the sidewalk and most of the houses were shuttered and silent. It was hard to say if they were still occupied. The general passed a decrepit dwelling badly pocked by shells, with a pair of basement doors melded shut by rust. The family must have hidden down there during the siege—seven months of bombardments that could go on ten hours at a stretch.
Savagery!
Perkins thought, taken by a wave of war fever so passionate that his groin grew hot and his teeth clenched. The cocksucking Huns, to have the audacity to think they could destroy Paris and the civilized world. The cowardly abomination of their weapons—gasoline flamethrowers, poison gas, bombs that fell on London from silent zeppelins floating too high for airplanes—what lousy perverted minds invented these killing machines? They threw out the rule book on the order of combat, where armies faced each other fairly on open fields, and almost won by sheer drunken barbarism. But they did not. Win. Because here he was, an American commander, walking free on French soil, and up on a hill there was a monument overlooking the city that proclaimed,
They shall not pass!
It was an epic battle of wills to the very end, and he wanted the turmoil and intense concentration of it all over again, the elation of brotherhood, the colossal importance of it all, to be in the burning center of history, his mind inventing revenge scenarios of mowing down Germans with their own machine guns, at the same time picturing himself in the center of a heroic cavalry charge, cracking skulls with the satisfying smack of a polo mallet that had suddenly appeared in his hand, and he carried on like this, in a dream state of murderous rapture, until the street ended at the river and he found himself beneath the steely blue lamps of the police station.

One thing Perkins could tell right away was that the Verdun chief
of police was not a horseman. He was slightly built, with a sparse ring of brown hair, wearing a brown pin-striped suit with cuffed trousers. His round cheeks blended right in with his bald scalp, making his head look like a smooth granite egg. His office smelled of mold; it had bars on the windows, daguerreotypes of ancient police chiefs on the yellowing walls, and a cabinet that held a fake beard and a pair of infants’ shoes—artifacts of local crime.