Flight from Berlin (2 page)

Directly ahead, the bow of the SS
Manhattan
towered above the crowd like a sheer rock promontory, shimmering in the haze of heat. Cranes lifted cargo to the top deck, where the United States Lines had painted the liner’s two funnels red, white, and blue, and festooned the rails with bunting in honour of the team.

The cab pulled up as close to the boardwalk as it could get and was mobbed.

‘Will you break the world record for backstroke again, Eleanor?’

‘I’m going to Berlin with no other aim,’ she said, stepping into the fray, long legs first, and posing briefly in the bias-cut skirt and tilted cream hat she’d chosen with this moment in mind. Flashbulbs popped.

‘Is Senator Taylor mad at you for going?’

‘My father wishes me well in whatever I do.’

‘Will your husband be joining you?’

‘No, my husband will be on tour with his orchestra.’ She pointed in the direction she wished to go, and the reporters moved aside. ‘Take it easy, boys.’

‘Say, if you meet Hitler what’re you going to say to him?’

‘Change your barber.’

The reporters laughed, and scribbled.

She pushed her way into the crowd, swatting aside an autograph book.
Will your husband be joining you?
They sure knew how to ask a sore question. She was still raw from her fight with Herb last night. Since she’d qualified for the team he’d acted like he’d lost his top dog status in life, one minute spilling her the sob stuff, the next, a real asshole. Same story every time she achieved something. Then this morning he’d claimed some phoney engagement as an excuse not to wave her off. Hadn’t her dad been enough to handle? What was it with men?

Nearer the barrier to the pier a group of her teammates were sitting on steamer trunks and talking in high, excited voices. Some had never been out of their home state, let alone on board an ocean liner. A few veterans, like Eleanor, had competed at Los Angeles in ’32, but most were doe-eyed college kids, plucked from the boondocks. All wore their USA team straw boaters, white trousers or skirts, and navy blazers embroidered with the Olympic shield.

‘Hey, you guys,’ she said. ‘Who’s up for a little first-night party on board later?’

Just then, the sound of screams was carried on a wave of applause from near the entry to the pier, where another cab was inching its way into the dense mass of people. Jesse Owens’s coach jumped out, followed by the man himself in a pinstriped navy suit, and the press jostled to get a word from America’s star athlete. Photographers shouted his name.

‘Make way for the golden boy,’ she said. Her teammates stood on their steamer trunks to wave and whistle.

Eleanor and Owens were the same age, twenty-three, and both were world-record holders. She’d never figured him out. The less winning seemed to concern him, the more effortlessly he won. The more courtesy he showed, the farther he left his rivals behind. For her, winning required a dedicated mean streak—and a desire above all else that the others should lose. She watched him ponder each reporter’s question, brow furrowed, and answer as though to his father-in-law, nodding and grinning modestly.

The heat on the pier was rising, and the noise and the wafts of diesel oil and dead fish were making her feel nauseated. She decided to board and made her way up the gangway.
So long, New York,
she thought.
When I set foot here again it’ll be with shame or glory.

At the entry to the deck stood a stout, middle-aged matron wearing the team uniform and hat. She was holding a clipboard.

‘Welcome aboard, Mrs Emerson,’ the woman said with a faint, whiskery smile. ‘You’re on D deck, sharing with Marjorie Gestring and Olive McNamee. Your trunk’s in your cabin.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Hacker. D deck sounds delightful.’

‘If it’s luxury and glamour you were after, you should have booked your own first-class fare.’

‘You think I didn’t try?’

The woman ticked her list. ‘Count yourself lucky, my girl. The Negroes are sleeping below the waterline. You’ll wear your uniform at dinner, please. Bed is at ten o’clock.’

Eleanor walked on before her irritation showed. She’d had enough evenings ruined by chaperones.

‘Old drizzle puss,’ she muttered.

‘I heard that, young lady.’

S
he found her two cabinmates unpacking to shrieks of laughter and felt herself tensing slightly. At school she’d stood out from the other girls in so many ways that she’d learned to endure their frequent unkindnesses. Swimming had often been her way of escaping them.

‘Hi there,’ said the nearer, a broad-shouldered blonde chewing gum. ‘I’m Marjorie, and this is Olive.’ The second girl, who wore oyster-thick eyeglasses, grinned at her. ‘It’s a privilege to dorm with you.’

‘Likewise.’ Eleanor smiled, embracing them both in turn, and suddenly realised that she recognised them from the trials. ‘Jesus, you can rely on old Hacker to put swimming rivals in the same cabin.’

‘I’m a diver,’ Marjorie said, a little crestfallen. She looked about fourteen.

Eleanor didn’t want to be a bad sport. She’d been green, too, before her Olympic debut at age nineteen. Her gold medal at Los Angeles had made her the belle of the press corps, celebrated on the covers of magazines as an all-American beauty. ‘Your body’s a head turner,’ Sam Goldwyn had told her, ‘and you’ve got a lot of class.’

She wanted to say something friendly, but Olive spoke first.

‘I heard your husband’s band at the Harlem Opera House.’

‘You’re from New York?’

‘Queens,’ said Olive.

‘Los Angeles,’ said Marjorie, chewing.

‘Town girls, thank God,’ Eleanor said, sitting on the bed and testing the springs. ‘I was worried I’d be with some of our sisters from Ass-End, Nowhere.’

Olive’s laugh sounded like an old windscreen wiper. ‘So what’s it like singing?’ the girl asked. ‘With a dance orchestra, I mean.’

‘As a career I wouldn’t recommend it,’ Eleanor said, taking a Chesterfield from a tortoiseshell case and lighting it. ‘Late nights, loose ladies giving your husband the eye, and the perpetual disappointment of your father . . . But I guess it’s taught me to hold my liquor.’

Marjorie tittered behind her hand.

‘Your father opened my school,’ said Olive. ‘He doesn’t like the band?’

‘Senators tend not to get along with bandleaders. Especially when a daughter marries one and gets talked into playing nightclubs wearing a one-piece bathing suit and a pair of high heels.’ She exhaled a long plume of smoke, remembering the dismay on her dad’s face when she’d sung him her version of ‘Whoopee Ti-Yi-Yo.’

Whatever the excesses of her second career, she’d never let it interfere with her training. She recalled a night at the Century Club in Chicago, the place smoke filled and reeking of scotch. A hoodlum crowd if ever she’d seen one. After the show she’d stood drinks for the boys, but Herb went to bed, licked. And at two in the morning she was at the Lakeshore Pool, lap swimming, ploughing up the lanes as a mist billowed over the water. Her nose and throat were raw from the cold air, her every muscle honed to its purpose—not just to win, but to win spectacularly, with all the speed in her power.

A knock at the door, and a uniformed cabin boy entered with a bouquet almost as large as he was.

‘One o’ you ladies Eleanor Emerson?’

Eleanor took the flowers and opened the card
. Good luck, Kid. No hard feelings? Herb.

A scent of lilies settled heavily in the confined space. But before she had time to dwell on Herb’s gesture, Olive was holding up a small sheet of paper.

‘Hey, who put this here? It was underneath my pillow.’

Eleanor and Marjorie lifted their pillows and found the same anonymous printed message. Eleanor read it out loud, her voice hardening as she realised what it was.

MEN AND WOMEN OF THE USA TEAM! GERMANY WILL SHOW YOU A SMILING FACE THAT HIDES ITS EVIL HEART. EVERY DAY CITIZENS WHO DO NOT THINK LIKE THE NAZIS ARE TORTURED AND MURDERED. PROTEST AGAINST THIS CRIMINAL REGIME BY REMAINING ON YOUR STARTING BLOCKS AT EACH RACE! DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELVES TO BECOME PAWNS OF NAZI PROPAGANDA!

‘Gee, those boycotters don’t let up,’ said Marjorie, who had picked up a copy of
Vogue
and began flicking through it. She held up a page with an airbrushed portrait of Hannah Liebermann posing with her foil. ‘Doesn’t she look like Myrna Loy?’

‘My mom got a letter from her union telling her I shouldn’t be going,’ said Olive. ‘That the Nazis have banned the trade unions . . . or something like that. Didn’t sound like such a bad idea to her. If the AOC says it’s okay for us to go, that was fine by her.’

Eleanor crumpled up her copy of the note and tossed it straight through the open porthole. A thought crossed her mind—that her father had arranged for these notes to be placed here, that he was aiming one final guilt-tipped arrow at her before she sailed. But equally, she supposed, they might have been left there by any hothead from the boycott movement. There were enough of them.

‘What I cannot understand,’ she said, opening a compact mirror and inspecting her lipstick, ‘is what the hell’s it to do with Olympic sport?’ She snapped the mirror shut. ‘Why would
anyone
think there’s something wrong with wanting to win gold medals for the USA?’

Two trombone blasts from the ship’s funnels reverberated through the floor, and they heard feet running along the corridor outside. ‘Come on,’ she said to the girls, ‘I think it’s time for bon voyage.’

T
he American Olympic team members, all 384 of them, were pressed against the rails, waving to the thousands come to see them off, along with the ship’s other passengers—the reporters, diplomats, and socialites—on their way to the Games as supporters and spectators. Eleanor spotted Mary Astor and Helen Hayes standing on the first-class promenade.

On the pier, a high school athletic team unfurled a banner reading
GIVE ’EM HELL, GLENN.
Tugs, yachts, and liners tied up at the neighbouring piers began sounding their horns in a raucous medley, with each blast echoed by vessels farther up the Hudson. Overhead, a biplane circled. It seemed as though the whole of New York City was there to wish them luck. Every window in the towers of Midtown was filled with faces.

On the ship’s top deck five girls from the women’s high jump team hoisted a vast white flag emblazoned with the Olympic rings. The crowd roared and stamped their feet, breaking into a chant.

‘U-S-A! U-S-A! A-M-E-R-I-C-A!’

Eleanor basked in the happiness and goodwill of the thousands of faces, and felt their energy. Not a single protester as far as she could see. Not one angry face.

The funnels sounded their bass notes again, the companionways were cast off, and three tugboats pulled the
Manhattan
out into the harbour. The athletes waved and whistled in a frenzy. Some held paper streamers linked to the hands of parents and sweethearts on the pier, wept when the streamers broke, and hugged each other. Gradually the pier slipped away in a tumult of spray, foam, and engine noise. The band struck up ‘America the Beautiful’ and tears welled in Eleanor’s eyes.
Who needs a damned husband anyway,
she thought.

Chapter Two

‘A
chtung . . .’

The ferry’s loudspeaker announced each stop along the shore as a U-boat might alert its torpedo room to targets.

‘Unsere nächste Halt ist Friedrichshafen! Friedrichshafen!’

Richard Denham was the only passenger to disembark onto the narrow quay. As the weather was mild and his luggage light he decided to walk the half mile up the high street towards the hotel. He carried a flaking leather case that contained his portable Underwood and a change of clothes. In his breast pocket was the letter of invitation, in case he should be obliged to produce it at the reception desk. He could imagine doubts about his liquidity at the region’s smartest spa resort when they saw his unshaven face and the slept-in flannel suit he’d worn on the long train journey from Berlin.

A breeze swept across the lake from the Alps, rimpling the glassy surface and dispelling the oppressive heat of high summer. Clouds and sky reflected.

The high street of Friedrichshafen, narrow in places, was a pretty, cobblestone affair, with baker, coffee shop, and butcher, all with window boxes in bloom and high-gabled roofs of red tiles. This could be any small town in southern Germany on a peaceful Saturday in summer. Even the sound of approaching drums, from some distance away, was depressingly normal.

The day after he’d received a call from his press agent in London, demanding more ‘human interest’ stories and less politics, Denham had cabled an old colleague of his father’s. To his surprise he received a response by return:

My dear Richard,

I am indeed very happy and pleased to receive a message from you. With the greatest pleasure I remember the visits of your father to us here in Friedrichshafen, and we Germans live in remembrances. It would be my pleasure to welcome you Saturday. I insist please that you stay at the Hotel Kurgarten as the guest of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. You shall of course have whatever access you require to our work and I promise to do my utmost to answer your questions.

I remain sincerely yours,

Hugo Eckener

The dismal boom of the drums was getting nearer, so Denham slipped into a shop out of sight. This was the second time in as many weeks that he’d taken refuge somewhere to avoid saluting some passing banner. He’d seen them beat up people who didn’t salute. As his eyes adjusted after the glare of the street, he saw that he’d entered a post office and remembered the stamps his son, Tom, had asked him to find.