Heavy clouds and rain brought darkness early that Friday. Dempsey parked under a bay of trees near the park. The body of Louise Scoby was propped behind the steering wheel, the stiffened fingers of one hand wrapped around the steering wheel, the other arm rested on the seat. He had pried open that hand and wrapped the fingers around the suit coat he was wearing during the robbery. He had torn the sleeve at the shoulder so it would appear that his body had literally been torn from her grasp. When he was sure nobody was watching, he threw the heavy lockbox and glasses into the river. He checked his watch:
five forty-five.
It was time. He started the car and sitting close to the body, he shifted into low and pulled out onto Highway 25. There were no cars in sight. He drove toward the bridge over the river. Just before the bridge there was a steep embankment that dropped straightaway into the raging river. He picked up speed until he was fifty feet from the bank. Then he slain med on the brakes and twisted the wheel. The car skidded onto the shoulder, veered back on the road, leaving heavy black skid marks. Then he steered the car toward the embankment, braking it down to ten miles per hour, opened his door, and as. the car rumbled onto the shoulder above the river, he jammed his foot on the gas and dove out of the car door.
He rolled as he hit the muddy shoulder of the road, felt the elbow of his jacket tear out and the sharp sting of pebbles burning the skin. As he rolled over on his back, he jammed both heels into the mud and slid to a stop.
The thrust of gas was enough to send the Buick over the bank. It rolled on its side, rocks and small trees tearing at fenders and doors, then hit the bottom of the bank, hung for a moment, and slipped front end first into the turbulent stream. The racing river carried it downstream, bobbing like a fishing cork, and then it twisted a half turn and vanished under the broiling, muddy water.
Dempsey jumped to his feet and swiftly erased his muddy tracks with his hands. He ran back to the train tracks and trotted toward the railroad bridge. The six o’clock freight would slow down as it crossed the span into the west end of town, a perfect place to jump aboard. When he got to the bridge he ducked down beneath the ties and waited. The train was five minutes late. It slowed down as it always did and headed over the bridge. As it rumbled overhead, the engineer blew a single, mournful blast on his whistle. Dempsey clambered up the bank and ran beside the train. He had to gauge his steps so his feet would land on the ties. He was gasping for breath as a boxcar clattered out of the darkness behind him, its door half open. As it passed, he reached inside, feeling desperately for something to grab hold of. As he did, his foot slipped on the wet ties. He gave one desperate shove with his other foot as he began to founder, grabbed the edge of the open door and twisted himself into the car.
BOOK THREE
“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
Joseph Conrad
Bert Rudman liked to write in a small reading room off the lobby of the Bristol Hotel, preferring it to his apartment, which was much too quiet and secluded, and his office, which was frenetic and intrusive. The room was subdued and quiet, its floor-to- ceiling brass lamps flared at the top and mounted against the walls, casting soft indirect light off the ceiling on scarlet-and- black-striped silk wallpaper. There were fringed lamps and brass ink wells on the half-dozen mahogany writing desks in the room. The sofas and chairs were leather and the people who sat in them usually whispered as they would in a library.
If he felt the urge for a drink, across the narrow lobby was the hotel bar, a subdued, intimate watering hole with a twenty- foot-long slate bar running the length of one wall, charcoal carpeting, glass-topped pedestal tables and deep-piled chairs. The bartender, Romey, played his favorite records on a Gramophone hidden in a storage closet, his eclectic taste ranging from opera and classics to the latest jazz recordings. Romey was perhaps the rudest bartender in Paris, greeting occasional musical requests from customers with a dour grunt, followed by ‘non.” He refused to indulge in casual conversation and muttered obscenities to himself when asked to make a drink he personally did not like. But if Romey was less than radiant he made up for it with phenomenal recall, remembering the drink preference of guests he sometimes had not seen for six months or longer.
For two years, Rudman had been keeping a daily journal o his activities, his viewpoints and impressions of the escalating crisis in Europe, a chronicle of his innermost thoughts and fear an evaluation of the gathering storm.
On this night he was writing an essay about the élan of the French who seemed, on the surface, to ignore the threat to the north and east of them. After all, they had the Maginot Line, a string of vertical, concrete buttresses backed up by bunkers that stretched the entire length of the border. That, with the French Army, was supposed to hold back Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Rudman thought it was a joke and had so stated in several of his columns, an observation which had hardly endeared him to the French government or the military.
Each night he sat in the writing room with a glass of absinthe and let his thoughts ramble, stretching his subjective viewpoint, adding unproven rumors and predictions on the future of the continent he could not use in his newspaper articles. He had been using the free time before going to work for the Times to update the journal, which he called Overture to Disaster, and trying to ignore a persistent inner voice that told him he was actually writing a book. Rudman was not ready yet to accept that responsibility as a reality.
The Bristol Hotel was a small but exclusive hotel catering to steady customers and celebrities who sought the kind of anonymity they would not find at the larger and more famous Ritz. Keegan always stayed at the Bristol. It was a comfortable hotel and because he was known there, he was treated especially well by the managers. The lobby was a long, narrow corridor leading to a small registration desk and an elevator, an open brass and ebony cage. The lobby was bracketed by the reading room on the left and the bar on the right. Keegan and Jenny always came by the reading room when they returned from their nightly forays in search of entertainment. That was Rudman’s sign to quit for the night. They always had a nightcap together.
But tonight they were running late. As Rudman, tired of his own nitpicking rewriting, decided to have another drink, he looked up to see von Meister, the German Embassy attaché, standing across the lobby in the doorway of the bar. Silhouetted by the back-lit glass shelves of liquor behind the bar, he was an intimidating figure, tall and erect, an almost satanic personification of the Third Reich. Von Meister was wearing a dark blue double-breasted suit instead of his uniform, yet Rudman still felt a sudden chill, as if he had walked past an open refrigerator.
“Bon soir, Monsieur Rudman,” he said. Then, nodding at the journal, “Letting your imagination run rampant as usual?”
Rudman smiled. “I prefer to call it truth.”
“Well, one man’s truth is another man’s lie, correct? I do not know who said that, certainly some astute poet.”
“I’m sure,” Rudman answered.
“I understand your American friend—what was his name again?” Rudman didn’t answer and von Meister waved his hand, as if forgiving the silence. “Ah, yes. Keegan. I understand he is going to marry that German girl.”