Annabel felt jittery as they went up the path to the hotel. Scott, who was carrying the Polish typewriter for her, said soothingly, “Just look at those stars above us tonight. I could reach out and pluck them right off that velvet sky and make a necklace for you.”
The screening party had been breaking up for some time, but there were still a few diehards lingering on the terrace, gazing out from the railing, chatting, and sipping drinks. The exhausted band was playing for the few couples who insisted on just one more dance.
Annabel saw Norma Shearer, seated there like royalty, laughing uproariously at someone’s joke. “Yoo-hoo, Scott!” Norma cried out, beckoning him. “Come over here, this minute! I want a word with you.” Scott actually blushed.
“Go ahead,” Annabel said, taking the valise from him, for she’d spied Oncle JP standing at the wide hotel door that was opened upon the terrace. Her uncle had stayed on very late tonight, to oversee Jack’s doomed screening party. Oncle JP gave the remaining guests on the terrace an appraising look; then he retreated inside, not having seen Annabel in the shadows.
“Okay, go ahead, but if you need my help, put a lantern in the window,” Scott teased. “One if by land, and two if by sea; and I on the opposite shore will be . . .”
Annabel bypassed the terrace and went to the side door that led directly to the staff rooms. She passed the general lost-and-found cupboard, where unclaimed hats and umbrellas or other such mundane items were kept. She knew she couldn’t leave the valise here.
But Oncle JP was not in his office. Where was she going to put the Polish girl’s strange contraption? Her uncle would probably say that it belonged in his special locked closet safe for valuables, but she didn’t have the key to his closet. She would have to wait for Oncle JP to return. She saw that he hadn’t gone home yet, for he’d left his hat hanging on the rack.
Annabel peered into the hallway, hoping to see him returning, and she realized that the outside door had not closed properly behind her when she’d just come through.
As she went back to shut it, she heard a faint, peculiar beeping sound, like a bird or a cicada chirping. Sometimes such creatures did find their way into corridors and chimneys and got trapped and had to be helped back out.
Sighing, and still carrying the valise, she followed the sound and opened a narrow door that led to a place she called her uncle’s “secret staircase”—the dimly lit, spiraling wrought iron stairs that had small landings and doors at each floor all the way up to the penthouse.
Oncle JP once told her, At the turn of the century, these stairs were used by kings and duchesses when they—or their lovers—wanted to come and go unnoticed.
Nowadays, no guests were allowed to use it, so the doors on each landing were kept locked from the staircase side. But her uncle used this secret place from time to time, when he wanted to slip upstairs and check up on the staff.
This was the very staircase Oncle JP had used the day that Annabel discovered the body of the tennis player. Remembering that now, she felt a faint shiver.
Annabel paused at the foot of the stairs to listen closely to the beeping sound, which was more distinct here.
Cautiously she followed the sound up the winding staircase. The lighting was very dim, and the metal steps got narrower and narrower, making for a dizzying, rather perilous ascent. Carrying a heavy valise only made it worse, but she was not going to leave this thing out of her sight.
Now she saw that on a small landing just below the penthouse level, there was a nondescript door, probably for a broom closet. And yet, the beeping noise seemed to emanate from there. She ascended and put her ear closer. Now she could hear a quiet male voice, urgent, staccato, and brief. She waited until she was sure that it was Oncle JP’s voice.
She knocked twice. There was a silence. “Oncle, it’s me, Annabel,” she whispered.
There was another pause; then the doorknob turned. Oncle JP peered out.
“What are you doing here?” he said in a rough tone.
“Please let me in; c’est très important,” she pleaded, glancing over her shoulder as if she feared—what? She didn’t even know; she just sensed evil forces lurking in the shadows of this entire hotel tonight.
“Go to my office and wait there,” he said tersely.
A part of her wanted to do just what he was telling her to do—scurry away like a naughty little girl, free from responsibility, not needing to hear any ugly truths of life. But she was not a little girl anymore. She would not allow anyone, even him, to treat her like one.
“No, Oncle, we must talk, here and now. Let me in, before someone hears us,” she said firmly. She’d never stood up to him like this, but by now she was prepared to leave him, the hotel, and France if he turned her away tonight. Her voice made this plain.
Oncle JP grabbed her by the arm and pulled her inside, then closed the door behind her.
They were in a tiny, windowless room with weak light coming from a bare bulb dangling overhead. This place was furnished only with a small card table and a single chair.
But on the card table was a machine, which beeped right now and gave off the sound of static, like a radio. Annabel gazed at it.
“Sit down and be quiet,” he said sharply as he went to the table. He put on a pair of headphones, listened as he leaned over a notepad, and wrote something down rather quickly. Then he responded with one word, which Annabel didn’t catch. Finally he shut it off, took off his headphones, and looked up.
His face looked so different tonight, the features sharper. Clearly her uncle had been keeping some very important secrets from her. She could see now that his mild, deferential attitude toward haughty or rude guests was a mask, disguising a much fiercer man. All along, this tiger had teeth and claws that he had simply not deigned to reveal to anyone.
“So you have discovered my little hobby,” he said with an attempt at lightheartedness.
Annabel gave him a hard stare. “Oncle—are you a fascist spy?” After all, she’d heard that all across Europe people were willing to betray their own countries.
“Non!” he said, looking momentarily amused at her guess.
She saw instantly that he was telling the truth, but still she eyed him intently. Now his tone became more scolding. “You should not have come up here. But now that you have, it’s better for you if you put it out of your mind and just go about your duties.”
“Did you speak to my father like that?” Annabel asked softly. “Perhaps that’s why he left. Don’t push me away, Oncle. You cannot ask blind loyalty from me. We are family. If you can’t trust me, who can you trust? I asked a reasonable question. What are you doing here?”
It was the first time she’d ever invoked their blood ties, but it indeed registered with him, as did her calm, rational tone.
He said in a low voice, “It is simply that my old colleagues in French military intelligence have asked me to take messages for them here.”
Annabel had always known that her uncle had such connections from his earlier years of service. But now she thought about Oncle JP’s daily jogs up to the Mound, that plateau at the top of the Cap, where there was a military observation post of some kind that everyone seemed to know about and yet spoke of in only the vaguest of terms.
She said, “Is that what you do when you go up to the Mound every day? Do you meet with your military contacts?”
Her uncle looked surprised at her perspicacity, then nodded and said, “Now I have given you your answer. You are not to discuss this with anyone. Go to my office and wait for me there—and put all this completely out of your mind. This truly does not concern you.”
“Oh, yes it does! I must show you something,” Annabel said quickly, then added, “I believe that you—and your contacts—will surely want to know about what I’ve found.”
She moved out of the shadows and said, “This is some kind of a typewriter that belonged to that Polish secretary who left so suddenly, right after the tennis player’s death. But it’s not like any typewriter I’ve ever seen.” She stood it on the floor.
He watched alertly but said nothing. She felt a little unnerved; her uncle was like a stranger to her tonight.
“Where did you find this object?” he asked sharply.
“In the old shed behind the tennis courts. It was hidden under some tarp.”
Oncle JP moved his radio over and gestured for Annabel to put the valise on the table. She unsnapped the metal latches and flipped open the cover.
“See,” she said, “it’s most peculiar. If you press one of the typing keys here, like so, it makes a completely different letter light up in one of those little round window buttons over there—the ones that can’t be pressed for typing.”
Oncle JP examined this closely, testing different keys to see what corresponding letters lit up.
“And look at this!” she said, opening the front panel beneath the keyboard, where all the plugs and wires were. “It’s like a telephone switchboard, isn’t it?” she said curiously.
Her uncle did not reply, only kept examining it from all angles. Finally he said, “Who did you say this belonged to?”
“The Polish secretary,” Annabel said. “You know, that mousy girl with the spectacles. Only, she didn’t look too mousy when I saw her in bed with the German tennis player!”
Oncle JP allowed himself a wry look. Annabel continued, “There was more to that man’s death than anyone was letting on, wasn’t there? Why was it hushed up?”
He fell silent. She persisted, “What are you doing up here? You must tell me the truth, now. People know we are family. They may already assume that I know more than I do. In that case, ignorance is dangerous to me. I’ve heard that there are Nazi spies up and down the Côte d’Azur. What’s really going on here at the Grand Hotel?”
He paused, then made a decision to tell her. “We know that some of our fascist guests have been receiving encrypted radio messages from Berlin, right here in their rooms! We are able to hear these radio messages, but we can’t decode them.”
Annabel nodded toward the Polish machine. “Is this a radio, too?”
He shook his head. “Non.”
“But this is very important, isn’t it? What is it?”
Oncle JP said with great seriousness, “Annabel, I am going to make you my deputy. This means that you cannot speak of these things you’ve seen and heard to anyone, not anyone at all, do you hear me?” His tone was more warning than inviting.
“Yes, Oncle,” she said solemnly.
“You swear that you will not reveal anything about this machine to a single soul?”
“The screenwriter has seen it,” Annabel confessed. “But he can be trusted.”
Oncle JP looked startled at first. Then, rather abruptly, he closed up the Polish case. “I will see if I can send a radio message to Paris tonight and find out what this is.”
Annabel, still watchful, asked, “But you have some idea about it, don’t you?”
He said only, “You say you found this near the tennis courts?”
“Yes, in that old shed that nobody uses anymore.”
“D’accord,” Oncle JP said slowly. “Oui, that fits.”
“Why? Did Hans put the machine there?” she asked softly.
“Perhaps. We have learned that the tennis player was working to stop Hitler. He is from an old, aristocratic family who does not support the Nazi Party and feels it will be the ruin of their country. But you were correct—the Nazis were pressuring him to join their party, because they didn’t want such a popular German sports figure to continue defying them.”
“Ah.” Annabel recalled that time when she took Delphine into the garden and they witnessed the argument Hans seemed to be having with his tennis coach and Herr Volney.
“And perhaps the Nazis even expected Hans to spy for them—because athletes have a legitimate reason to travel to foreign countries, where they can meet—and spy on—all kinds of people without being suspected,” Oncle JP said. “In any case, their pressure campaign seemed only to push Hans into total defiance and resistance, because he smuggled money out of Berlin. If we are correct, he was planning to give money and some documents to his courier. But perhaps someone got to him first.”
“Then . . . you do think his death was—?” Annabel still couldn’t say the word.
He said, “Oui, c’est un meurtre.”
It was the first time he’d allowed any speculation that someone else had taken Hans von Erhardt’s life. Annabel felt relieved to have this out in the open at last, yet she was frightened, too.
“What courage he had,” she whispered.
Oncle JP said, “Yes. And perhaps he managed to accomplish his mission before he died. But we fear it’s more likely that someone caught on to him—before the poor man could succeed at his task. At this point, I have more questions than answers.”