Last Train to Paris (12 page)

“Here are my papers,” Vosberg said, and he leaned toward a table. When the police stepped over the threshold, Vosberg turned to them with a Mauser in his hand and fired several shots.

French police don't usually carry guns; neither officer had one. One officer was wounded in his left shoulder and the other had a scalp wound from a bullet that went through his hat. They wrestled with Vosberg. The policeman with the hole in his hat saw a hammer on a table, grabbed it, and cracked it on the perpetrator's head. Vosberg was momentarily knocked out. Covered with blood, his head was wrapped in bandages and he was taken to the police station. The police searched for, and dug up, Stella's body.

 

Inspector Pascal called a press conference for the next afternoon at the Préfecture. The inspector requested that I come to see him before the crowd of reporters appeared.

Pascal's office was a closed-in box, filled with the smells of cigarette smoke and old coffee. But it was tidy. The only things on his desk were a brown leather desk pad, a loud wind-up clock whose minute hand made a tiny ping each time it moved, and a green fountain pen that he nervously rolled back and forth.

‘Have a seat, Miss Manon,' Pascal invited. ‘I wanted to see you privately. I need you to do me two favors. The first is to identify Miss Mair's body. Do you think you can do it? Otherwise, I'll have to ask Miss Silverman or another family member to return to France, and by the time they get here, it won't be a pretty sight. What do you say?'

God, is this my new profession, I thought—identifying bodies?

“I'll do it,” I said. “When?”

“When we finish the next favor. Now come with me,” Pascal said. “I need you to identify the suspect. Besides your aunt, you're the only one who has seen him close up in the flesh. The shopkeepers were hopeless; none of their descriptions came as near as yours. By the way, his real name's Ernst Vosberg, not Bobby Hunter.”

“A German national?” I said, and Pascal nodded.

“But talk to him in English,” he said.

A scoop, I realized. But with Andy gone, I'd have to be careful how I handled this. I followed the inspector.

Vosberg was in a windowless room with two wooden chairs, but no table.

“Hello, Bobby,” I said in English as we walked into the room. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“I don't know you,” he answered in English.

I couldn't detect the American accent.

“Cigarette?” he said.

“No,” Pascal said in French. “Ask Miss Manon politely—or you won't get one.”

“I would like a cigarette, please,” Vosberg said in English.

Vosberg had walked into the trap.

I wasn't surprised. His voice was melodic, smooth as silk, just as I had heard it all those months ago. And his American English was clear as a prairie night. He certainly didn't sound like a killer. One of his police guards put a cigarette in Vosberg's manacled hands and placed an ashtray at his feet.

‘Now stand, Mr. Vosberg,' the inspector ordered. ‘Is this,' Pascal asked me, ‘the man you saw with Stella Mair at the Studio Hôtel on July 17, 1937?'

I stood in front of him. “Look up, Vosberg,” Pascal commanded.

Vosberg would not look at me.

I looked at him from the front and then the side, taking my time. I was trying to make him suffer.

“Yes, he's the same man I saw at the hotel with my cousin, Stella Mair,” I said in English.

Now Vosberg stared hard at me. “I've never seen this woman in my life.”

“Where did you learn English, Mr. Vosberg?” I asked.

“None of your damn business,” he replied in French.

Pascal opened the door and we stepped into the corridor.

“Thanks, Miss Manon. You've been a great help. We have the right man, and can formally charge him now.”

I watched as Vosberg was led downstairs, on his way back to his cell. When he caught sight of the photographers, he turned to his guard and said, “I would be perfectly willing to pose if I were shaved and dressed in a suit, but not in these clothes.”

 

It's a long time since I've thought about Stella. I think I've sanded down the sharp edges of how I perceived that tragedy. But because of these old notes, my memory's being rudely jarred. I realize that over the years, I've been unconsciously reshaping my history. Translating it. Sanitizing it. Transforming it into fiction. Although I must give myself a bit of credit: I did see that Stella's death was heralding a terrifying future.

 

I took a taxi to the mortuary. Here I was again, following death. As soon as I walked in the front door, I felt sick to my stomach from the smell of carbolic soap and a hint of rotting flesh. I wanted to put my handkerchief over my nose and mouth, but willed myself not to do it. Before I had seen Andy's body, the only dead people I had ever seen were when I had covered a couple of murder stories in Nevada, but I never saw the bodies close up. I had observed their corpses from afar, merely as curious illustrations of death—and was proud that I could stay emotionally uninvolved. But this was different. Stella had exuberantly represented the optimistic side of my family—the ease of being Jewish—her unlimited curiosity. It was eerie seeing her lifeless body. More than Andy, she reminded me of a figure in a wax museum. Her face was slightly changed. The once bow-shaped lips were now two long pale lines stretching across her yellowish face. Her nose had reverted to the long and thin Silverman shape—almost as if that hereditary characteristic on her mother's side had the opportunity to emerge at last.

Would I ever be able to get this image of her out of my mind?

“Yes,” I said to the official, “this is Stella Mair.”

 

I made it to the press conference at the Sûreté just in time. When it was over, I rushed back to the
Courier.
“So,” Ramsey asked, “what's the scoop?”

“Listen, Mr. Ramsey,” I said. “Back off! There's so many details that my brain's spinning.”

“Sorry, kid,” Ramsey said.

“Anyway, I can't write this, and you know it. How about Pete? He's back in Paris for the birth of his child.”

“Yeah, I know—the baby, the baby. Big deal! Because of this, we've had to hire a freelance stringer for the Berlin office, and he's costing loads of money.”

I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to create more problems.

“So, okay, your idea's good. You write—Pete will edit. But Pete will be given the byline.”

“No, I disagree. He writes, I edit, and he still gets the byline.”

Pete was under a seriously short deadline. It took us time to decipher my handwriting. I'd taken copious notes. Oh, how I missed Andy. He might have been impossible in some ways, but when it came to getting down the facts, he was a whiz. As Pete finished typing each page, he tore it out of the typewriter and passed it directly to me. I took a cursory glance, used my red pencil now and then, and handed the pages straight to the copyboy. The copyboy, rather than taking the chance of putting it in the brass tube that fed copy to the composing room, ran it downstairs to the Linotype machine operator. It took us until 3:30 in the morning to finish the work. The headline news of the expulsion of the U.S.S.R. from the League of Nations had been moved below the fold.

 

What an amazing day that was. My poor cousin's fate had shoved aside all the news of the world. I still remember the feelings of hubris. Heady stuff for me—a short faux cowgirl from the high mountains of Nevada. But today I question my lack of empathy—my shifting the tragedy to make myself a hero. The notes I'm going through remind me of Alice and the looking glass—what was real?

 

On my way home from the newspaper office I stopped at a café and had a bowl of onion soup, deliciously sizzling with Gruyère cheese. The warmth of the soup, and my enthusiastic consumption of freshly baked bread and red wine, assured me that I would have a good morning's sleep. I was sad about Stella, but had already become used to the idea of her death. Indeed, I felt relief that we finally had an answer.

As I turned onto the boulevard St. Michel, a newspaper truck pulled up to the curb in front of Monsieur Villières' newspaper kiosk. While I watched, Villières climbed his ladder and pasted up the banner: American Actress Found Dead.

When I went upstairs to my room, I cut out the photograph of Stella from the
Courier
and taped it to the wall above my desk, next to a photo of Andy. I wrote a letter to Aunt Clara while they both smiled down on me. Too much death.

 

Both photos are here with me today. They're taped onto a yellowed onionskin page. Stella was pretty, in an old-fashioned way. Thinly painted eyebrows—dark lipstick on a mouth shaped like an angel's wings—glossy-shadowed, deeply set eyelids. Both Stella and Andy were wearing fedoras pulled down at a rakish angle. The only difference was that Stella had a feather in her hatband and Andy had a sweat stain around his.

 

Stella's murder was being called “the murder of the century.” Her story was getting even more play than the 1919 story of Bluebeard—Henri Landau—and his slaughter of ten women and a young boy. The news media were taking advantage of the drama. And so were Pete and I. But Inspector Pascal had made it clear that he couldn't feed me any more scoops. Because of Ramsey, a few people (supposedly sworn to secrecy) knew that Stella was my cousin.

I was baffled by the fervor created by the story. There were many murders in Paris–why had this one become such a cause célèbre? Why, when the rest of Europe and Asia were teetering on the edge of an all-out war, had the murder of my cousin become front-page news? The only rationale I could see was that the urgency of the world's situation was beyond the control of the people; they felt helpless and needed to have their minds directed away from the dread of what might happen to their lives. I thought it strange that the psychopath Hitler, who was a bona fide threat, was seen as a vague menace–while Vosberg, simply an ex-con German psychopath, was raised to celebrity status. He was being called
le monster allemand.
The public was fascinated: that monster, who had no papers, crossed the frontier into France, killed a woman—and almost got away with it. It was a metaphor for what the German war machine was threatening across Europe—except that the Germans were indeed getting away with it. Adding fuel to the Vosberg fire were the insidious references in the tabloids to Stella being Jewish. Just as the consul, Clancy, had warned—anti-Semitism in France was percolating up to the surface. Even some of the major dailies were playing the Jewish card. It undoubtedly sold papers.

After the news conference, I returned to the office. Ramsey had moved our desks to a corner near the staircase, leading down to the typesetting floor. A new person had been hired to do nothing but wait next to us and then run our pages downstairs. This new employee was a woman, and a young and pretty one at that. But there was no time for wondering what Ramsey was up to. Pete wrote, passed it to me, I read, and she ran.

Three hours later, we were finished with another four-column lead story, Autopsy on American Jewish Actress: No Rape. It ran alongside 100,000 Chinese Ready to Die to Hold Nanking.

Stella had been strangled with a long white silk scarf—and another white silk scarf had been stuffed into her mouth with such violence that her upper gums were torn away and a tooth was knocked out. The coroner could find no indication that she had been sexually assaulted
.
Pete and I fought to keep the word “Jewish” out of the headline, but Ramsey was adamant: “Anti-Semitism's good for circulation.” We were soon both sick of the whole sordid story. We wanted to write with compassion. Ramsey wanted cold irony.

*

On Sunday I returned to the office. “Jeez, R.B., you're just in time,” said the now nattily dressed Ramsey, with his feet up on his desk, drinking a beer. “You won't believe what's going on. While Vosberg's in his cell staring at the wall, thousands of people are flocking to the scene of the crime. It's become a ghoulish tourist attraction.”

“Forget the villa,” I said. “What's going on with you? Broke down and bought yourself a new suit?”

And then I understood. The pretty young copyreader was sitting beside Ramsey, looking at him with adoring eyes while drinking a glass of milk.

“Gee whiz,” said the young girl, whose name was Gladys. “Why would they want to go to such a gruesome place? And who's Bluebeard? I keep hearing his name.”

‘Listen to her, R.B. Boy, it would be nice to be that naïve again.'

“Who's Bluebeard, Miss Manon?” she asked again.

“Please just call me R.B. Everyone else does.”

“Oh, no, Miss Manon, I couldn't. You're old enough to be my mother and from where I come from, that's considered downright impolite.”

My heart fell to the basement. I was only thirty-two, for heaven's sake. Gladys's remarks weren't just a stab at my pride—they were sobering. I tried to ignore her. So did Ramsey. Gladys looked perplexed. She was simply waiting for me to tell her the answers.

“Bluebeard's real name,” I said, “was Henri Landau. The press nicknamed him Bluebeard because of
The Legend of Bluebeard
by Perrault.”

“Did he really have a blue beard?” Gladys asked.

“No,” I said. “Actually it was very thick and very red. I'm surprised you've never heard this story. In 1919, it was a big deal in the news.”

“Well, golly Moses,” Gladys said, “in 1919, I was only four years old!”

 

* * *

 

I knew it was coming, but didn't expect it so soon. Madame Pleven, the concierge, handed me a cablegram.
ROSIE PLEASE ACCOMPANY STELLA TO CHERBOURG STOP CUNARD WHITE STAR BERENGARIA STOP SAILS DECEMBER 21 STOP CLARA
.

Hell, I thought, that's tomorrow. I went to the cable office on the boulevard des Capucines.
YES STOP LOVE STOP ROSIE
.