The thin edge of a fingernail moon lingers above the roofline of the Hotel Baur au Lac. For an instant, Lionel recalls the last time he saw Zurich, my God, was it only the year before? It seems like another life, another Europe, another Lionel. He was just passing through. A few posh nights at the Baur, a few lavish dinners. There was a woman. She had dark hair and small, graceful breasts. A diplomat’s wife, a Russian, enthusiastic and not very useful.
But the golden windows now before him eclipse the recollection of that distant Zurich. That other epoch. For one thing, he has a job to do, a last and vital task. (He repeats that to himself: last. For such a small word, it has a heart-stopping sound, glittering, final, the word of the future.) For another thing, behind one of those golden windows breathes Violet.
He cannot think about Violet. Not yet.
The water slaps quietly against the canal walls. Lionel concentrates on the classical white facade before him, blue-luminous in the electrified Zurich night, and the exquisite creatures who stream in and out of its doors. Everyone is having a smashing time. Everyone is wearing black tailcoats or jewel-colored dresses. You would never guess that armies throughout Europe were mobilizing for war. A few bars of Strauss dance through an open doorway, and then the door closes again.
Lionel leans his shoulder against the tree, smoking, waiting. His muscles ache from the abuse of the day, overcoming guards and leaping aboard moving trains, and he knows there is more to come. He holds himself still, hoarding every packet of energy, every kilojoule remaining to him. There is no human test quite akin to the certain expectation of pain.
The last of the moon slips behind the rooftop. A dark figure crosses the porte cochère and enters the garden where Lionel waits.
Lionel doesn’t move. The profile, the gait, the carriage: it’s Henry, all right, carrying Violet’s valise in his left hand, down the gravel path to the Schanzengraben canal. His right hand is shoved in his jacket pocket, either casually or warily. The young fellow is still an enigma. Was all that awkwardness part of his cover, or not? When Henry has nearly reached him, when the crunch of his leather soles on the gravel is close enough to touch, Lionel steps from under the shadow of the tree.
“Good evening, young Mortimer,” he says.
Surprise, surprise. The satisfaction of a good ambush never dims, does it?
But Henry composes himself quickly. “Richardson! Thank God! You’ve made it!”
“Miracle of miracles. I suppose you’d given up hope.”
“On the contrary. I had every faith in you.” Henry’s hand moves in his jacket pocket.
Lionel nods at the valise. “I presume you’re on your way to the consulate right now?”
“Yes. Of course. I took it upon myself in your absence. Jane agreed I should be the one to do it.”
“You’re going by boat, I take it?”
“What’s that?”
“You’re headed for the Schanzengraben. I presume you have a boat waiting for you?”
“Oh, yes. Of course.” Henry’s weight shifts to the balls of his feet.
“Well, then.” Lionel tosses his cigarette on the gravel. “I’ll come with you.”
“There’s no need. You must be shattered. Go in and join the ladies. Let me handle this one.”
“What? Let you take all the credit, after all my hard work?” Lionel shakes his head slowly. Tsk tsk. He reaches for the valise. “I’ll just take it from here, if you don’t mind.”
Henry bolts with astonishing quickness, such quickness that Lionel, even prepared, loses a few precious instants as he turns and forces his twisted right ankle into pursuit. In the darkness, he can’t see Henry’s long black back ahead of him. He runs by instinct, by the shift in the shadows, by the certain direction of the Schanzengraben ahead of them, and the imperative that Henry must not be allowed to reach it.
Henry runs fast and unhindered by the battering Lionel has taken that day. But Henry is burdened in turn by the valise in his two arms, and Lionel, catching a glimpse of the younger man’s white collar, closer, closer, shoves his limbs past all limit of endurance and launches himself into the air.
He catches Henry by the waist and drags him into the ground with a marrow-loosening thud.
For a second or two, both men lie stunned, and then Henry rolls over and kicks himself free. Lionel lunges and catches him, and together they roll in the gravel, shoving and elbowing like schoolboys, flailing for a clear strike with a fist, a knockout punch. But while Henry is agile, Lionel is thicker and stronger, massive as a young ox, experienced in the brutality of hand-to-hand combat. On the third attempt, he catches the young man’s shoulders in an oak-armed lock and places his knee against Henry’s kidneys.
Dust fills his mouth. He spits it out and leans into Henry’s ear. “Now. I must beg you to satisfy my curiosity before we proceed.”
“What the . . . bastard . . .” Henry gasps. He strains against Lionel’s arms.
“Did you alert the police in Blumberg for the sole purpose of having me killed, or was it the papers you were after?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Lionel jerks back Henry’s head. He saws for air.
“I think you owe me an explanation, don’t you? I was put to considerable hardship today. Had to kill poor von Engel, and I do dislike killing a Merton man. My temper is not at its best. So tell me. Who are you really working for? The Germans? The British? Yourself?”
“Fuck yourself.”
“I would have suggested the Americans, but then we recruited you, didn’t we? According to my information, you agreed because you wanted to help Britain, because your own country was enslaved to German interests. So you said.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Now, there is another possible motive. Violet. I’ve seen the way you look at her. Not that I blame you.” He says, in a silky voice, provocative: “Trust me, lad, she’s even better than you’ve dreamed.”
A violent spasm of arms and legs. “Leave her out of this!”
“Ah! So we have a confession of something, in any case.” Lionel digs a little deeper into the small of Henry’s back, wanting to punish him for his thoughts, for the images of Violet that must lie in his male imagination. The anguish of Henry’s cry soothes his rage. Just. “So. Now that we have your hopeless yearning for Violet sorted out, let’s discuss your plans for her suitcase. You were intending to deliver it to the consulate as planned, were you not?”
“Of course!”
“Because we are all on the same side, here. Americans and British. We both want to prevent a war, don’t we?”
Henry mutters something into the dirt.
“What’s that, Mortimer? I can’t quite hear you.”
“I said, fucking pacifist.”
“Ah! That’s better. What I thought you said.” Lionel’s mouth tastes of copper. He must have bitten his tongue at some point, or else Henry’s elbow has knocked him about more firmly than he thought. His face is such a mass of bruises already, he can’t tell. “Let me guess. You’re among those civilians who have never worn a uniform, never seen a man tattooed by a Vickers machine gun, who believe war is inevitable, even desirable. That a—what shall we call it?—an Anglo-American showdown with Germany should be encouraged sooner rather than later, before she gets too strong. Isn’t that right, in a nutshell? Or were you playing a deeper game? Is it your preference that Britain and Germany and France and Russia all destroy each another, and leave the United States to pick up the pieces for herself?”
“You’re a dirty bastard, Richardson. A fucking traitor. Going off on your own like this, contrary to orders. We were supposed to stop Grant, that was all, not . . . damn it all . . . go off and interfere in matters of state!”
“We did stop Grant. Or you did, with that premature shot to the chest. Nerves, was it? Or had you meant to kill him all along? Violet’s husband?”
Henry bucks wildly, but Lionel holds firm.
“Not that it matters, really. I’m not a man who gives a damn about motives. What I care about is this: we recruited you for a single mission, because you were clever and American and could talk atoms and molecules, and you might simply have finished the mission and slunk back to your laboratory in peace, and have never heard from us again. And you had to meddle, Henry. Meddle in things that didn’t concern you.”
“Someone had to stop you, and Jane wasn’t going to do it—”
“Because Jane is on my side, Henry.”
“—and then you had the nerve, the fucking perversion, to use Violet to do it. Seduce her and use her, you loathsome dog, and then—”
Lionel places his lips next to Henry’s ear and growls: “Do not ever speak her name again. Do you understand me?”
Henry wriggles furiously in his grasp. A voice calls out in German.
Lionel swivels toward the canal, and a white flash explodes behind his eyes. Henry breaks free.
Knifed. The devil. He bursts forward after Henry while his flesh burns, while the blood runs down his ribs. His own fault. Henry’s hand moving in his jacket, Lionel’s distraction over Violet. Own fault. Damndamndamn. Get the suitcase. Get the fucking suitcase before . . .
Splash.
Lionel reaches the railing an instant later, in time to see Henry flailing in the black water of the Schanzengraben canal, ten feet below.
Help! he calls.
Suitcase! Where’s the fucking suitcase?
Lionel kicks off his shoes, tears off his jacket, and vaults over the railing in the wide gap between two moored boats.
The water is colder than he expects. He comes up gasping and dives back down in frantic strokes. Nothing. Black water. Nothing. An object strikes his cheek, a blinding second of hope, he grasps and tugs but it’s only a foot, Henry Mortimer’s shoe. He gives it a vicious jerk and shoots to the surface.
“Where is it?” He takes Henry by the shoulders and shakes him. “Where’s the suitcase?”
“Fuck you!” A weak gasp.
Lionel shoves his head in the water and holds it down—one second, two, three, four. “Where’s the suitcase?” he yells again, but Henry is coughing and choking, it’s hopeless. Something dark runs down the younger man’s forehead, not water.
Lionel lets him go and dives down again.
And again.
And again.
And
nothingnothingnothing
empty black water
it’s gone
Lionel puts his head back and howls to the Zurich night sky.
Someone shouts out: “Wer is da?”
An unbearable pressure settles about Lionel’s ears. Can’t be true. All that effort, all that strain, all that pain. Not possible. All lost. A slim hope, a last slim hope, but then the world was built of slim hopes, and this might have been one of them.
Lost.
This unforgiving pressure about his ears, it’s the weight of history. Of a million men in arms, ten million. More, if God, from His sacred distance, proved vengeful rather than merciful.
He strokes slowly back toward the canal wall, and something brushes against his arm.
Henry.
The faint light flashes against the back of his head. Lionel blinks, not quite comprehending, and then he wraps his arm around the young man’s chest and continues, a little faster, until the rough stones of the wall collide with his outstretched hand. There are stairs here somewhere. Lionel drags Henry’s inert body downstream, until the wall cuts away and his fingers find the first step.
He hauls Henry up the steps on his shoulder and pounds his back. No reaction, no vomiting of water, not even a spasm. Nothing more than a wet sack of flour, Henry Mortimer. He lays the young man out on the grass and checks his breathing, his pulse. Nothing. There is a deep cut on his forehead. How had the fellow managed to land himself in the canal? Swung the suitcase too hard, perhaps, and toppled over the railing?
Lionel stares for long moments at the shadow of Henry’s body, and a little pinprick of an idea flares in his mind, like the lighting of a cigarette on a cold night.
No. Surely not.
But the idea persists, winding together with that seductive word last, that dazzling possibility of a future outside the scope of his present life, that determination to build a Lionel outside the scope of his present self. The knowledge of Violet, waiting for him in her unswerving innocence, behind one of those golden windows set inside the pale and perfect facade of the Hotel Baur au Lac.
The two of them, primary suspects in the murder of Dr. Walter Grant.
The opportunity is too perfect, as if dropped by heaven, by a God turned merciful after all. As a consolation for his failure. An act of compassion he can never deserve.
Lionel lifts Henry’s jacket and finds the inner pocket, telling himself he must not hope, must not expect. His fingers encounter a packet of sodden papers, covered in leather. He pulls them out.
His heart bounds and rebounds against the wall of his chest. He feels its pulse in his ears.
He opens the packet, and inside, still damp but legible, protected by the leather binding of the notebook, is a United States passport for one Henry John Mortimer, birthplace Boston, Massachusetts, height six feet, weight a hundred and sixty pounds, hair dark brown, eyes gray.
Lionel tucks the papers in his inside jacket pocket. He removes the gold college ring from Henry’s left pinkie finger and smashes it down the length of his own. He empties all the remaining pockets and fills the trousers with gravel. He peels away the jacket and shoes, the shirt with its embroidered monogram, anything at all that might identify the body. He drags him as far as he can to the end of the park, where the Schanzengraben canal empties out into the spreading Zurichsee, and with a whispered prayer he releases Henry Mortimer over the side.
He stares for a moment or two at the shifting water, the flashing glimpse of skin and hair bobbing away in some unknown current.
• • •
VIOLET ANSWERS his soft knock at once. He looks at her astonished blue eyes, her round red O of a mouth, her pale and guiltless skin, and he cannot speak.
He steps inside, shuts the door, and takes her deep. As if he can somehow draw her into his chest and replace his soul with hers.
“Lionel, what’s happened? You’re all wet! My God! Your face!”
“Violet. There’s been an accident. We’ve been betrayed.”
A gasp from the other side of the room. Jane.
“Is it Henry?” she whispers.
Lionel lifts his heavy arms from Violet.
“Oh, God! You’re bleeding! Lionel!”
He reaches inside his jacket pocket and withdraws Henry’s passport. He fans out the pages, one by one, and lays it on the desk to dry.
“You’re mistaken,” he says. “I’m not Lionel. Lionel Richardson is dead.”
• • •
THE NEXT DAY, in the afternoon, the captain of a small tourist boat in the middle of the Zurichsee notices a small brown valise half hidden in a coil of rope in the stern. He holds it aloft. “Has anyone lost a piece of baggage?”
The passengers look at one another and shake their heads.
The captain shrugs. He will bring it to the town hall at the end of the day. They have a special department there for lost items.