I thought of the photo we had seen in Queenie's apartment, in which she had posed with her child. Mike had learned from neighborhood talk that her son had died before his tenth birthday.
"I always wanted to meet the boy in the photographs-Fabian. Find out about my dad's childhood from him. So at the Schomburg, I came across these clippings from the 1940s and 1950s, with pictures of McQueen Ransome. Her name caught my attention, and four or five of her photographs had Fabian in them, too. I recognized him from my dad's album."
"How'd you locate her?"
"Pounding the pavement," he said. "She wasn't listed in the book, and there weren't many people around who remembered her from her glory days, but I eventually got word of the old lady who liked to dance for the kids who ran her errands."
"What'd she do when you showed up at her door?"
Logan smiled and stroked at his goatee with his hand. "Man, she just came alive. I think she was so hungry for a bit of family, so happy to have a connection to her son, she just embraced me like I was her own blood."
"She remembered your father?"
"Told me the best stories about him. Things I never would have known if I hadn't come across her. I'd drive down here from the Vineyard once a month, she'd put the music on-wouldn't have none of my tapes or CDs, just her old vinyl. I'd bring her favorite things-gumbo, rice and beans, monkey bread, key lime pie. We'd go on talking for hours, then she'd heat up the food and we'd have a long meal with more conversating, as she liked to call it."
"You write your paper? Your family history?" Mike asked. "Is it something we can get a copy of?"
"The one about my father? I never finished it. Queenie got me off on a tangent."
"About what?"
Logan looked at Mike. "I fell in love."
"With?"
"With her, man," Logan said, sitting back and slapping his knees with both hands. "These meetings? I convinced her to do a history with me. An oral history for the Schomburg, and then I could use some of it for my dissertation at school. Not her personal stuff-but things I learned that related to my own family-"
"Why? What about her did you like?" Mike asked, while I thought of the photographs in Queenie Ransome's bedroom, those of her in costume as well as the nudes.
"Queenie? Now that girl had a life." Logan became animated, gesturing with his hands as he told us what he knew about her childhood in Alabama, and how she ran away from home to come to New York City to become a dancer.
"In the legitimate theater?" Mike asked.
"That was her dream. But it didn't happen, Detective. There weren't a whole lot of roles on Broadway for colored girls in the forties."
"She knew Josephine Baker, though."
"Yeah, you've checked out those pictures in her apartment? I've never seen a more beautiful woman in my life. Somebody brought her to the attention of Baker, right at the beginning of the Second World War. Josephine was staging a revival of Chocolate Dandies, the revue that made her famous in the 1920s. She came to New York for auditions. Queenie tried out just hoping to be part of the chorus line, but she had real star quality. Rose right to the top."
Mike remembered the photographs that we had seen together. "She performed for the troops during the war?"
"Yeah. Went everywhere that Josephine Baker did at first, till she spread her own wings a little later on. You know about De Gaulle giving them each the Legion of Honor?"
"Nope. I'd like to hear it."
"I got it all on tape, the stories she told me. Queenie and Baker both worked as intelligence agents during the war. Celebrities were able to move around much more freely than anybody else. Claims she even carried secret military reports from England to Portugal that were written on her sheet music in invisible ink. She was a hot ticket."
"What did you say about De Gaulle?"
"Baker worked with the French Red Cross. She was very active in the Resistance. She got Queenie involved, too. They were especially good at using their various-let me say, 'charms'-to convince foreign dignitaries to issue visas to some of the young women who needed to get out of Eastern Europe. Between the two of them, they saved a lot of lives."
"That sounds fairly dangerous," Mike said.
"She seemed to thrive on hazardous duty. There wasn't much that scared her. That was probably the second most dangerous thing Queenie did."
"I'll bite. What was the first?"
"Gathering intelligence for the American government."
"Spying?"
"You got it."
"On whom?"
"The king of Egypt."
"Farouk?" I asked, sitting bolt upright.
"Yes, ma'am, Farouk. The Night Crawler-that's what she called him. McQueen Ransome was King Farouk's mistress, Ms. Cooper."
Josephine Baker, the Revue Nègre, the French Resistance, and General Charles de Gaulle. I thought of the letters R du R, the old Parisian label in the mink coat that Tiffany Gatts had stolen from the apartment, and I traced them with my fingertip against the green desk blotter.
"Ransome du Roi,"I said to Mike Chapman. "The King's Ransome."
21
Less than half an hour had elapsed since Battaglia had mentioned Farouk's name. Paige Vallis's father had tutored the playboy prince in the mid-1930s. Then Vallis had also been posted in Egypt later on, when Farouk's monarchy was deposed. I had not even had the chance to tell Mike about my talk with Battaglia before walking into the room to meet Spike Logan.
"These tape recordings you made with Queenie, where are they now?" Mike asked.
"In a bank vault on Martha's Vineyard."
Dozens of questions raced through my mind, and I needed to break in on Mike's interrogation. But I didn't want to interrupt the flow of Logan's answers by stepping out of the room and bringing Mike up to speed. I didn't want Logan to know that he might have hit on something of consequence.
"You mind turning them over to us?" Mike asked.
Logan hesitated.
"Ms. Cooper can give you a subpoena."
The slip of paper would have no authority in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and it might take me a few days to secure one via the local prosecutor, but Logan didn't know that.
"Let me think about it," Logan said.
"Why, what's on 'em that concerns you?"
"That's all the lady's private thoughts, Mr. Chapman. I signed a contract with her, through the Schomburg, that none of the stories of her intimate relationships would be made public until twenty-five years after her death. You know, it's got anecdotes about lots of famous people-some of them still alive today."
I stepped on Mike's toe, signaling him to lay off the issue of the tapes. I'd find a legal way to get them produced so we could explore them for any information of value.
"What can we tell you about Ms. Ransome?" I asked. Perhaps by making this process a two-way street, we could soften Spike Logan to give us more facts.
He asked questions about how she died, whether anyone had appeared to claim her body or her possessions, and what point we had reached in the investigation.
When we had satisfied his interest, I turned the tables again. "I'm fascinated about this relationship with the Egyptian king. Do you know how all that started?"
Mike Chapman stood and opened the door. "You and your girlfriends eat up all this crap about the royals. A commoner like me couldn't get lucky in your crowd if I was hung like a stallion. Either of you guys want coffee?"
"Yes, please. Get me two. Spike?"