‘Queens,’ said Olive.
‘Los Angeles,’ said Marjorie, chewing.
‘Town girls, thank God,’ Eleanor said, sitting on the bed and testing the springs. ‘I was worried I’d be with some of our sisters from Ass-End, Nowhere.’
Olive’s laugh sounded like an old windscreen wiper. ‘So what’s it like singing?’ the girl asked. ‘With a dance orchestra, I mean.’
‘As a career I wouldn’t recommend it,’ Eleanor said, taking a Chesterfield from a tortoiseshell case and lighting it. ‘Late nights, loose ladies giving your husband the eye, and the perpetual disappointment of your father… But I guess it’s taught me to hold my liquor.’
Marjorie tittered behind her hand.
‘Your father opened my school,’ said Olive. ‘He doesn’t like the band?’
‘Senators tend not to get along with bandleaders. Especially when a daughter marries one and gets talked into playing nightclubs wearing a one-piece bathing suit and a pair of high heels.’ She exhaled a long plume of smoke, remembering the dismay on her dad’s face when she’d sung him her version of ‘Whoopee Ti-Yi-Yo.’
Whatever the excesses of her second career, she’d never let it interfere with her training. She recalled a night at the Century Club in Chicago, the place smoke filled and reeking of scotch. A hoodlum crowd if ever she’d seen one. After the show she’d stood drinks for the boys, but Herb went to bed, licked. And at two in the morning she was at the Lakeshore Pool, lap swimming, ploughing up the lanes as a mist billowed over the water. Her nose and throat were raw from the cold air, her every muscle honed to its purpose-not just to win, but to win spectacularly, with all the speed in her power.
A knock at the door, and a uniformed cabin boy entered with a bouquet almost as large as he was.
‘One o’ you ladies Eleanor Emerson?’
Eleanor took the flowers and opened the card. Good luck, Kid. No hard feelings? Herb.
A scent of lilies settled heavily in the confined space. But before she had time to dwell on Herb’s gesture, Olive was holding up a small sheet of paper.
‘Hey, who put this here? It was underneath my pillow.’
Eleanor and Marjorie lifted their pillows and found the same anonymous printed message. Eleanor read it out loud, her voice hardening as she realised what it was.
MEN AND WOMEN OF THE USA TEAM! GERMANY WILL SHOW YOU A SMILING FACE THAT HIDES ITS EVIL HEART. EVERY DAY CITIZENS WHO DO NOT THINK LIKE THE NAZIS ARE TORTURED AND MURDERED. PROTEST AGAINST THIS CRIMINAL REGIME BY REMAINING ON YOUR STARTING BLOCKS AT EACH RACE! DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELVES TO BECOME PAWNS OF NAZI PROPAGANDA!
‘Gee, those boycotters don’t let up,’ said Marjorie, who had picked up a copy of Vogue and began flicking through it. She held up a page with an airbrushed portrait of Hannah Liebermann posing with her foil. ‘Doesn’t she look like Myrna Loy?’
‘My mom got a letter from her union telling her I shouldn’t be going,’ said Olive. ‘That the Nazis have banned the trade unions… or something like that. Didn’t sound like such a bad idea to her. If the AOC says it’s okay for us to go, that was fine by her.’
Eleanor crumpled up her copy of the note and tossed it straight through the open porthole. A thought crossed her mind-that her father had arranged for these notes to be placed here, that he was aiming one final guilt-tipped arrow at her before she sailed. But equally, she supposed, they might have been left there by any hothead from the boycott movement. There were enough of them.
‘What I cannot understand,’ she said, opening a compact mirror and inspecting her lipstick, ‘is what the hell’s it to do with Olympic sport?’ She snapped the mirror shut. ‘Why would anyone think there’s something wrong with wanting to win gold medals for the USA?’
Two trombone blasts from the ship’s funnels reverberated through the floor, and they heard feet running along the corridor outside. ‘Come on,’ she said to the girls, ‘I think it’s time for bon voyage.’
T he American Olympic team members, all 384 of them, were pressed against the rails, waving to the thousands come to see them off, along with the ship’s other passengers-the reporters, diplomats, and socialites-on their way to the Games as supporters and spectators. Eleanor spotted Mary Astor and Helen Hayes standing on the first-class promenade.
On the pier, a high school athletic team unfurled a banner reading GIVE ’EM HELL, GLENN. Tugs, yachts, and liners tied up at the neighbouring piers began sounding their horns in a raucous medley, with each blast echoed by vessels farther up the Hudson. Overhead, a biplane circled. It seemed as though the whole of New York City was there to wish them luck. Every window in the towers of Midtown was filled with faces.
On the ship’s top deck five girls from the women’s high jump team hoisted a vast white flag emblazoned with the Olympic rings. The crowd roared and stamped their feet, breaking into a chant.
‘U-S-A! U-S-A! A-M-E-R-I–C-A!’
Eleanor basked in the happiness and goodwill of the thousands of faces, and felt their energy. Not a single protester as far as she could see. Not one angry face.
The funnels sounded their bass notes again, the companionways were cast off, and three tugboats pulled the Manhattan out into the harbour. The athletes waved and whistled in a frenzy. Some held paper streamers linked to the hands of parents and sweethearts on the pier, wept when the streamers broke, and hugged each other. Gradually the pier slipped away in a tumult of spray, foam, and engine noise. The band struck up ‘America the Beautiful’ and tears welled in Eleanor’s eyes. Who needs a damned husband anyway, she thought.
Chapter Two
‘Achtung…’
The ferry’s loudspeaker announced each stop along the shore as a U-boat might alert its torpedo room to targets.
‘Unsere nachste Halt ist Friedrichshafen! Friedrichshafen!’
Richard Denham was the only passenger to disembark onto the narrow quay. As the weather was mild and his luggage light he decided to walk the half mile up the high street towards the hotel. He carried a flaking leather case that contained his portable Underwood and a change of clothes. In his breast pocket was the letter of invitation, in case he should be obliged to produce it at the reception desk. He could imagine doubts about his liquidity at the region’s smartest spa resort when they saw his unshaven face and the slept-in flannel suit he’d worn on the long train journey from Berlin.
A breeze swept across the lake from the Alps, rimpling the glassy surface and dispelling the oppressive heat of high summer. Clouds and sky reflected.
The high street of Friedrichshafen, narrow in places, was a pretty, cobblestone affair, with baker, coffee shop, and butcher, all with window boxes in bloom and high-gabled roofs of red tiles. This could be any small town in southern Germany on a peaceful Saturday in summer. Even the sound of approaching drums, from some distance away, was depressingly normal.
The day after he’d received a call from his press agent in London, demanding more ‘human interest’ stories and less politics, Denham had cabled an old colleague of his father’s. To his surprise he received a response by return:
My dear Richard,
I am indeed very happy and pleased to receive a message from you. With the greatest pleasure I remember the visits of your father to us here in Friedrichshafen, and we Germans live in remembrances. It would be my pleasure to welcome you Saturday. I insist please that you stay at the Hotel Kurgarten as the guest of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. You shall of course have whatever access you require to our work and I promise to do my utmost to answer your questions.
I remain sincerely yours,
Hugo Eckener
The dismal boom of the drums was getting nearer, so Denham slipped into a shop out of sight. This was the second time in as many weeks that he’d taken refuge somewhere to avoid saluting some passing banner. He’d seen
