question is at the bottom of the sea.”
“I don’t care. I don’t care. Either way, it’s still the fault of that evil cocksucker. As Meyer Lansky was kind enough to remind me, I’m a Jew. I’m not going to sit back and let these Nazi bastards get away with murder.”
He was lighting up a fresh cigarette; he seemed vaguely amused, and that pissed me off.
“What the hell is so funny, Fleming?”
He waved out his match, twitched a smile, said, “Sorry. It’s just that Wenner-Gren is no more a Nazi than the late Lady Medcalf.”
“Well, what the fuck is he, then?”
“Among other things, he’s the architect of Swedish neutrality, Goering’s financial advisor, Krupp’s front man…and so much more. He’s just not a Nazi, per se. But he
“You mean Christie and the Duke and Wenner-Gren weren’t alone in their Mexican banking scheme.”
“To phrase it in the American argot: not by a long shot. Included, among various wealthy, respected Europeans, are some of the most prominent and influential American businessmen.”
“Backing Nazis?”
“Making money. Your General Motors poured one hundred million dollars into Hitler’s Germany, and they are hardly an isolated example. Heller, I would be content, were I you, with having dispatched the villains you’ve managed to dispatch. Aspiring to the shit list, as you might well put it, of that particular powerful consortium would find you rather on the deceased side, in very short order.”
I sat up sharply; it made my midsection hurt but I didn’t give a damn. “So Christie walks. And Axel Wenner- Gren…shit, I never even met the son of a bitch….”
“You should leave it that way.” He shrugged, drew in smoke. “The great villains of the world seldom get what they deserve.”
“Hitler will-Mussolini just did.”
He exhaled a blue cloud. “Possibly-but they are, after all, only petty politicians. And who’s to say Adolf himself won’t wind up in South America with all that bounty Wenner-Gren helped storehouse?”
“Do you believe that?”
Fleming’s smile was sadly ironic. “I’m afraid, Heller, the masterminds of evil only meet their due justice in the realm of fantasy. Best leave it to Sax Rohmer and Sapper.”
“Who are they?”
He laughed. “Nobody, really. Just writers.”
It had been a week and a half and I was, for the most part, healed. Certain wounds never heal, but I was getting used to that. I walked on the ivory beach under a poker-chip moon with my arm around Marjorie Bristol’s waist; she wore a white scoop-neck blouse with coral jewelry and the full blue-and-white-checked skirt with petticoats that swished.
“You saved my life,” I said.
“That British man, he saved your life.”
“He saved my body. You saved my life.”
“Not your soul, Nathan?”
“A little late for that.”
“Not your body?”
“That’s yours anytime you like.”
We walked some more; Westbourne was silhouetted against the clear night sky. The sand under our feet was warm, the breeze cool.
“Not mine anytime, anymore,” she said.
We turned back and walked until we were near the cottage. She removed the skirt, stepped out of the petticoats; she was naked beneath, the dark triangle drawing me. I put my hand there while she pulled the blouse over her head.
She stood, naked but for the coral necklace, washed with moonlight, unbuttoning my shirt, unzipping my trousers, pulling them around my ankles. I stepped out, barefoot; took off my shorts. I was wearing only the fresh bandage she’d applied about an hour ago.
We waded in, not so deep that I got my bandage wet. We stood with the water brushing our legs and embraced and kissed, kissed deeply, in every sense of the word. She lay in the sand half in the water and I eased on top of her and kissed her mouth and her eyes and her face and her neck and her breasts and her stomach and my lips brushed downward across the harsh curls stopping at wet warmth where I kissed her some more.
Her lovely face, ivory in the moonlight, lost in passion, was a vision I would never forget; I knew, as I was impressing that image forever in my mind, even as I pressed myself within her, that we would never do this again.
We lay together, nuzzling, kissing, saying nothing at all; then we sat and watched the shimmer of the ocean and the moon reflected there, breaking and reforming, breaking and reforming.
“Just a summer romance, Marjorie?”
“Not ‘just,’ a summer romance, Nathan…but a summer romance.”
“Summer’s over.”
“I know,” she said.
Hand in hand, we walked back inside.
29
I wrote my letter, although I mailed it directly to the Duke of Windsor with carbon copies to Attorney General Hallinan and Major Pemberton. In it I spoke of recognizing the Duke’s “deep concern for the welfare of the citizens of the Bahamas,” as I addressed him on a matter of “great importance.”
“During the incarceration and trial of Alfred de Marigny,” I wrote, “no adequate investigation was possible. Statements and evidence which failed to point toward the defendant were ignored.”
I closed by saying that “I, and my associate, Leonard Keeler, would welcome an opportunity to work on the Oakes murder case. We would willingly offer our services without compensation.”
I received a curt letter from Leslie Heape saying, thank you, no; and I heard nothing from Hallinan or Pemberton. Eliot later told me that at around the same time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had written the estimable Governor of the Bahamas to offer the services of the FBI in the case. FDR’s offer was declined, too.
I wrote Nancy, stepping aside from the case and enclosing copies of both my letter and the one from the Duke’s flunky, and my bill with itemized expenses. She wrote a brief note of thanks and enclosed full payment.
Fleming had been right about her: Nancy had other, more pressing problems. Within a week of the end of the murder trial, de Marigny and his pal the Marquis de Visdelou were convicted and fined one hundred pounds each for illegal possession of gasoline. Within three weeks, Freddie-appealing neither the gasoline conviction nor the deportation order-hired a small fishing boat and a crew and, with Nancy at his side, sailed to Cuba.
She didn’t stay at his side long, however-after only a few months she moved to Maine for dance lessons and sinus surgery. De Marigny had been denied a visa to the United States, and within a year his marriage to Nancy was over.
Nancy returned to the Oakes family fold, although she remained just as convinced of her ex-husband’s innocence as her mother was of his guilt. In fact, Lady Oakes was from time to time the victim of extortion schemes in which she traded money for evidence of Freddie’s guilt.
The entire Oakes family had a rough go of it. Two of Nancy’s brothers died young-Sydney (who I never met but over whose affections Sir Harry and Freddie had clashed), killed in an automobile accident; and William, of acute alcoholism before he reached thirty.
Only Nancy’s younger sister, Shirley, seemed to have a charmed life: a law degree at Yale; classmate and bridesmaid of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy; marriage to a banker who shared her liberal philosophies and worked in support of black businessmen and politicians in Nassau. But after her husband went into business with Robert Vesco, their fortune was lost, their marriage over, and Shirley herself was crippled in a car crash.
