Along the Infinite Sea (34 page)

“Oh, that was the easy part. Everyone knew that the Baron von Kleist had made a fool of himself over a young French wife named Annabelle.”

Across the road, the cows were on the move, wandering slowly across a tender green pasture. “I don't understand,” I said. “What does my husband have to do with any of this?”

Wilhelmine straightened her lean body away from the fence and turned to me. “Are you serious? You are this ignorant?”

I looked up at her helplessly, into the full glare of her contempt. The air around us seemed to be cracking into pieces, preparing to shatter. “Yes,” I said. “I am this ignorant.”

Her small dark eyes traveled over my face, taking my inventory: forehead, brows, eyes, mouth, chin. “I suppose that is why he fell in love with you, of all of us. You are so fucking innocent. It must have been a relief.” She laid her thumb against my cheekbone, like a lover's caress. “Sweet thing. Look again at the paper. Tell me if there is any other name that springs from the page.”

I lifted the paper and stared at it. The gothic script had always confounded me; I had learned a great deal of German during my marriage, but I seemed to lose the meaning when I saw the words written in that dense medieval lettering. But now my eyes, as if knowing what to look for before my brain did, traveled down the page and fastened on the words
Johann von Kleist
.

“You do not know that the two of them, they are like Javert and Valjean? They are immortal enemies. It all made sense to me, when I saw that Annabelle von Kleist was Stefan's lover. Why your husband
would not let him go, like the bloodhound tracking down the fox. Why there is now no possibility of Stefan's release.”

I slid down the fence post and came to rest in the dusty grass. “It's not true.”

“You know it is. You are ignorant but not foolish.”

“But Johann's a general in the army, not Gestapo.”

She snorted. “This is Hitler's Germany, Frau von Kleist. No one is what he seems. Do you know what your husband did in Berlin last year? He oversaw the reorganization of the prisons, the prisons in which they put the people who do not agree with the Nazis, so that now they go to the rehabilitation camps, these beautifully designed camps, even bigger and better than before.”

“My God.”

“But it is more than that. There has always been a grudge. I believe Stefan pinched his nose a few years ago, intercepted some papers or some matter like that. And then there was this murder of a police agent, who was sent to catch him and put him in the prison. And I think you understand your husband, Frau von Kleist. I think you understand he is a man of rules and consequence. He is dogged in pursuit of his goal.”

“Yes, I understand that.” At the word
understand
, the shattering began at last. The fatal tap on the cracked grass. Stefan and Johann. Johann denouncing Stefan, having him arrested and thrown into Dachau to be tortured, and then going home to our Paris apartment and playing horses with Stefan's son. Taking Stefan's lover to bed, the final stroke.
We are man and wife again.

I wanted to crawl out of my revolted skin. I wanted to vomit again, but there was nothing left in me. I took off my hat and let the sun bake into my hair.

Wilhelmine sat down next to me, Indian-style. A wooden slat creaked as she leaned her back against it. Her knee was sharp and bony against my thigh.

I whispered, “He never said anything. Stefan never said a word.”

“No, I am not surprised. Stefan has his faults, but he plays fair. He does not turn women into pawns.”

I tilted my head back into the fence post and stared at the hot sky. A few small clouds sat against the blue, not moving. I waited for them to splinter and break apart with the force of my shock, but they did not. The sky stayed in place, the clouds stayed in place. The sun kept burning, white and distant. The same objects, except the world was now utterly changed, a different universe from the one in which I had existed an hour ago.

“So, then, Frau Himmelfarb,” I said. “What do you propose we do to save him?”

7.

When I returned to Schloss Kleist an hour later, the house was in uproar. Frieda flew across the entrance hall and wrapped her arms around me. She was my height now, almost taller. “Oh, Mother! There you are! It's so awful!”

“What's happened?” I touched her blond hair and my ribs ached.

“It's Papa! They were playing tennis, and it was so hot, and he must have had a dizzy spell. He fell and hit his head.”

I stepped back. “Where is he now?”

“He's upstairs in bed. The doctor is coming. Oh, Mother, will he be all right?”

I was already climbing the stairs. “I certainly hope so,” I muttered.

The bedroom was dark and smelled of lemon and vomit. Someone had closed the curtains. Hilda sat by the bed, holding a cloth to Johann's forehead. His eyes squinted open when I entered.

I let out a sigh. At least he was awake.

“Thank you, Hilda,” I said. “I'll take care of him until the doctor arrives.”

“But Frau von Kleist—”

“Don't worry, I've had some training as a nurse.”

She rose from the chair and handed me the cloth, which was cool and damp and lemon-scented. I lost my breath, thinking of Monte Carlo, and dropped into the chair.

Before me, Johann tried to smile. “Hello,
mein Liebling
. Not quite so heroic a pose, I am afraid.”

I picked up his hand and tried his radial pulse. A little rushed, but steady and sharp. I placed the cloth against his forehead, where a large purple bump had already risen. “You'll be all right, I think. A concussion.”

The door closed behind Hilda.

Johann whispered, “You were right about tennis—”

“Never mind the tennis, Johann,” I said crisply. “I am leaving you this afternoon. As soon as the doctor comes, I'm packing my things and Florian's, and I'm leaving with a friend.”

Johann's eyes flared. He tried to raise his head from the pillow. I pushed him back.

“Don't. You'll hurt yourself. There's nothing you can do. Stefan's former wife came to see me today, after lunch.”

“Stefan?”

“Yes, Stefan. My lover, Florian's father. But you knew that, didn't you?”

“
My
son.”

“No, he's not. I spent three days with Stefan in Monte Carlo, the three happiest days of my life, and we made Florian there. And then you had Stefan arrested, and you gallantly married me while he was safe in prison, and you never said a word.” I paused. “What a triumph, to take Stefan's lover and his baby, too. You must have felt so triumphant.”

Johann struggled against his foggy brain. His head moved from side to side. “No. No. This is not true. I love you, I saw you first, I loved you
first
, before I even knew—before he—” He made a grunting noise.

“Don't upset yourself, Johann. You'll only make your injury worse.”

“No. No. I love—love you both. Not because—Stefan—”

“Don't lie to me.”

“True. Stefan is a criminal.” He said that clearly, at least. “A murderer. Broke the
law
.”

“If you weren't hurt, I would smack you. I would bloody murder
you
. Do you know what you've done?”

“He broke the law!”

“Stop it. Just stop it. He may have broken the law, but his cause was just. At least he was
doing
something about this horrible situation, while you sat back and said,
Ja, ja, the people will come to their senses.
You had him arrested and thrown in prison, and then you went home and tucked Stefan's baby son into his crib, and then you took me to bed and you screwed me good and hard, didn't you? What a goddamned thrill that must have been for you.”

He removed the cloth from his head and dropped it on the rug. He said, in his thready, stunned voice, “What is this? What are you saying?
You.
You went back to him. My heart broke.”

“No, I didn't. We hardly even touched each other, did you know that? I admit, I went to see him, but we never even kissed. I loved him so, and I never so much as kissed him. And then I thought about running away with him, and I came home and you were there with Florian and darling Frieda, and I knew I couldn't do that to you. You asked me to forgive you, and I was so full of guilt and shame. I thought it wasn't your fault, and you had tried so hard, you had given me so much when I needed you, and now you needed me. So I gave him up and went back to you. My God, what a fool, what an utter fool. I actually said to myself,
It's not his fault, he's a good man, I have to find a way to love him.
To
love
you!” I was crying now, beating my fist on the counterpane next to Johann's beefy leg. “I am such a fool.”

“Annabelle. Please.” He started forward and I jumped back from the bed, wiping my face.

“Don't you dare. It
is
your fault. It
was
your fault, and I'm leaving
you. I'm taking Florian and going to find a way to get Stefan out of prison, and if you dare to stop me, I'll find a way to ruin you. I'll tell Frieda what you did. I will blacken your name across Europe. Florian will curse you all his life. Do you understand me?” I shouted.

Johann's head fell back. The door rattled with a loud knock, and an instant later it flung open to reveal the shocked doctor. “Frau von Kleist!” he hissed.

“I'm sorry.” I swiped my cheeks. “I will leave you to your examination, Herr
Doktor
.”

A1A
•
1966

1.

The backseat of a Ford Thunderbird isn't designed for a heavily pregnant woman to lie back and take a nap, plaster-wrapped foot and all, but Pepper's too pooped to care. Besides, up front are Florian and Susan, and Susan's resting against Florian's shoulder, and that's really not a sight for sore eyes, is it?

So she curls on her side, facing the slick leather back of the front seat, and enjoys the disembodied rush of the automobile as it consumes forty miles an hour of the black highway, the old faithful A1A that connects the extreme barrier coast of Florida with the rest of the Eastern seaboard. Florian looked at the map and said they should be there by morning, and Pepper believes him. He said they could pick up the interstate in Daytona Beach, save a lot of time. Pretty soon the interstate would reach all the way down to Miami, imagine that. You could drive the length of Florida in less than a day.

Florian's voice drifts over the seat. “How are you doing back there? Asleep?”

“I'm all right.”

“Comfortable?”

“I've slept in worse places.”

He laughs, nice and throaty, and Pepper just closes her eyes and enjoys the male sound. The car hums underneath, a reliable American engine, eating the open road. If only she could fall asleep.

“Is Susan awake?”

“Nope. Out like a light. My arm went numb a few miles back.” He pauses. “You should try to sleep.”

“Can't. You know how it is.”

Another handsome chuckle. “Yeah, I guess so.”

The leather sticks to her cheek. She licks her lips and thinks about telling him the whole story. Getting this fear off her chest and onto his. After all, she's concerning herself in
his
beeswax, isn't she? It's only fair.

Because it's not as if his opinion of her morals can sink any lower.

But her lips remain closed, and it's Florian who speaks into the midnight quiet, almost as if he heard her regardless.

“I've got another personal question for you, Schuyler.”

She sighs. “Some men never learn.”

“Is everything okay with you?”

Pepper licks her lips again. “Peachy keen.”

His shoulder has apparently had enough of its tender burden. He shuffles about, adjusting Susan's weight to a more convenient location. She murmurs protest and then goes quiet. “I've been thinking,” he says.

“Not that again.”

“Pepper, if you're in trouble of some kind . . .”

Pepper laughs.

“I mean other than the obvious. Are you?”

Her foot hurts. She forgot to take the painkiller before they left, and now there's a dull ache that surrounds her like a bandage right at the arch, and is now starting to creep its way into her ankle. She tries to
move the foot more comfortably, but the cast is too heavy, and she's too tired. “What makes you say that?”

“Oh, I don't know. The letter I gave you. The way you changed your mind about coming along with us.”

“Oh, that? I just decided the two of you needed a responsible chaperone.”

“So listen,” says Florian quietly, so she has to strain her ears to hear him. “I'm going to make a little confession here, because I want you to trust me, all right? That's how it works, according to the shrinks. An exchange of trust. I tell you something I'd rather keep secret, and then afterward you maybe feel like you can do the same.”

“What if I don't trust shrinks?”

“That's all right. I'll say it anyway.” He pauses, and Pepper guesses they're passing someone, because his dark head moves and his profile appears as he checks the road behind, and then the engine roars happily and the car makes a lateral shift. He continues, when the machine returns to its ordinary purr: “I guess you could say I had a little thing going for you, this past year.”

As declarations go, it's a simple one. Once, when Pepper was in college, a boy sent her a bouquet of roses attached to a love sonnet attached to a diamond bracelet. She sent back the flowers and the poem but kept the diamonds. (No, she didn't! But she was tempted.) This is no bouquet, no handwritten sonnet, no string of costly jewels. But the clean and simple lines of
I had a little thing going for you,
spoken in Florian's assured voice, achieve what no passionate paragraphs did before: they make Pepper cry. Just a little, from the corner of her left eye, dripping past the bridge of her nose and into the no-man's-land of what-might-have-been.

“Only a little one? I must be losing my touch.”

“Look, considering you didn't know I even existed, you should be grateful for what you've got.”

“Fair enough.”

“Anyway, that was my fault. The thing is, you knocked me off the rails when I first saw you. I'd heard about you before—everyone was raving about Pepper Schuyler—and to be honest, I take a little pride in not falling for the girl that everyone else is falling for. But
you
.”

“But me?”

“You. You have a way of casting a spell. I guess you know that. You're like one of those attractor beams.”

“Oh, that's right. Leading all you poor helpless men to your doom.”

“No, but it wasn't just that.” A pause. “You know, the thing about sirens, they make you think there's this extraordinary creature behind the lights and music, but when you yank away the drapes there's nothing to see. But you were the opposite. You were at a party, holding court, and I swear I heard you quote two or three different Enlightenment philosophers in a single fucking sentence, and not one of those idiots listening to you had any idea what you just did.”

“Well, you know what they say. Law is wasted on the lawyers.”

“Yeah, well, that's what I thought. That you were wasted on that crowd.”

Pepper doesn't reply. Susan stirs a little, maybe at the animation in Florian's voice, and then drops back off. When he speaks again, his tone is softer.

“Did you ever think about going to law school yourself?”

She lets out a sharp laugh. “Daddy wouldn't let me. Well, specifically, he wasn't going to pay for it, and I didn't want to have to earn my degree on my back.”

“Neanderthal.”

“Now, now. That's my father you're maligning.” She props her head up on her elbow and studies the back of his head, a round silhouette in the glow of the headlamps ahead. “So if you were so crazy about me, why didn't you try your luck?”

He shrugs. “Because you were already in love with someone else. But I
was
crazy about you. I admit it. I thought, That girl is throwing herself away. She could do so much better if she just . . .”

“Just what?”

“Slowed down for a moment. Realized there's more to life than sex appeal. More to
you
than sex appeal.”

“Well, you're wrong there. Not much inside.”

“The hell there isn't,” he snaps, and Susan grunts. He repeats it more softly. “The hell there isn't, Pepper.”

The car finds a bump on the road, and Pepper's heavy body jolts against the cushion. She puts out her arm and braces it on the front seat.

“Sorry,” says Florian.

“No harm.”

“Anyway, I guess I'm just trying to say that I know a little more than you think. That maybe I could help you, if you let me.”

Pepper asks, “What made you stop?”

“Stop? Stop what?”

“Being crazy about me.”

Florian drives silently, without replying. Pepper reaches for the crank and rolls down the window a couple inches. The breeze is chillier than she expects, but it's a small price to pay for some goddamned air. The draft ripples loudly in her ears, but she still picks out the words when Florian finally speaks, maybe because her ears are a little bit in love with the sound of his voice.

“I don't know. Maybe I didn't.”

2.

At one point, they stop for gas, right about the time Pepper has finally managed to drift off to sleep. She wakes in terror, heart smacking, breath choked, and sits up to the anemic glow of a pair of streetlamps leaking through the blackness, exposing Florian as he stands underneath, leaning against the pole, watching the sleepy attendant as he pumps the gas.

There's no sign of Susan. Pepper peeks over the edge of the seat and there she is, the little darling, still sleeping, a tiny smile suspended on her rosebud mouth. Pepper crawls out on the driver's side, so as not to disturb her.

As she approaches Florian, she realizes she's dying for a cigarette. She hasn't smoked since the third day in Cocoa Beach, when the carefully rationed pack ran dry, and she misses not so much the delirious hit of nicotine but the smell, the taste, the lazy ceremony of lighting up and drawing the smoke down your throat and into your lungs. The curls of white billowing upward, like your own thoughts traveling to heaven for inquisition.

“I don't suppose you have a smoke,” she says.

His face is sallow under the lamp, his eyes deep-set and hollow, and his hands are shoved into the pockets of his dungarees. “Sorry. I quit the day my dad got diagnosed.”

Damn it, Pepper thinks.

“You were pretty close?”

“Yeah. Best friends. I could tell him anything, things I couldn't say to Mama.” He pauses. His eyes haven't shifted from the pimply young attendant, as if he's making sure the kid doesn't take off in the shiny blue T-Bird himself, sleeping Susan and all. “I have this memory of him, my earliest memory. I think it must have been when we were still in Germany. We're making paper airplanes and flying them into the fireplace, and they burst into flame. I thought it was the greatest. I thought he was the greatest.”

“How old were you?”

“I guess I couldn't have been more than two.” He shakes his head. “It's just a brief memory, like a flash. But vivid, you know? I can still see that fireplace. The puffs of flame.”

“Pyromaniac.”

“That's what boys do. Make stuff and then destroy it.” He laughs.

“You must miss him. Your father.”

“Every second.” He pushes away from the lamppost and digs his wallet out of his back pocket. “Looks like he's done. Is Susan awake?”

“No. I'm beginning to think that woman can sleep through an artillery bombardment.”

“You can stretch your legs for a bit, if you want.”

“No, I can't.” She gestures to her foot.

An outraged look fills his face. “Wait a minute. Why aren't you on your crutches?”

“They're in the trunk.”

He swears and reaches down to pick her up, and Pepper doesn't complain. She just holds her head virtuously away from his shoulder and thinks, This is the last time ever, scout's honor.

Hardly worth mentioning, really, but the Girl Scouts kicked Pepper out after a month. Something about sassing the scout leader.

3.

They are headed to Cumberland Island, off the southern coast of Georgia. Pepper's not quite sure what Florian expects to find there. That last letter from Harris, P.I.—the one dated November 6, three days before Pepper arrived in Cocoa Beach—informed Annabelle Dommerich that she might find the contents of the enclosed newspaper article of interest as a possible lead, and he would be happy to travel to Cumberland Island to investigate in person, with her written authorization, expenses billed according to the usual arrangement.

The article itself had been removed, though the small silver paperclip remained, attaching the letter to nothing.

“It's not exactly proof,” Susan said doubtfully, but Florian said it was the way the facts fit together. The only logical conclusion.

So here they are, climbing onto the brand-new interstate highway near Daytona Beach at half past two in the morning, while the
Thunderbird's three hundred horses whinny in unison. Susan wakes up suddenly, lifting her head against the glow of the streetlights on the onramp. She asks where they are, and Florian says they're heading onto the interstate, they'll be in Georgia around sunrise.

All right, she says, and her head disappears again, behind the flat ledge of the front seat.

4.

When Pepper wakes up a few hours later, she's aware of two facts, and that's all: she's lying on the backseat of a car, and the car has stopped.

Her hand goes straight to her belly and finds—with relief—the strong little ball, still in place. Still there.

And then she remembers there's nothing to fear. She's escaped into the night again, just in the nick. She's headed for Georgia. A vagabond. Pepper on the run.

She sits up and looks out the window at a salmon-pink sunrise rising above the distant marsh grass. On the other side of the car lies a wide street, silent as the grave, studded with tombstone cars. Beyond, a pilloried white building glows hopefully in the dawn. The Riverview Hotel, the sign says.

“I guess we're in Georgia,” she says, to no one in particular, because the front seat is empty. Which rather offends Pepper, because who leaves a pregnant woman asleep on an unknown street at dawn?

She stretches, runs her fingers through her unkempt hair, and opens the door.

Outside, it's chillier than she expected, as if they've crossed some invisible line from the endless summer of Florida into a world in which seasons existed. Pepper tucks her cardigan about her shoulders and inhales the Georgia morning. A suggestion of smoke lingers in the air, mingling with the fishiness of the nearby sea, and Pepper realizes she's standing at the edge of a glassy tidal river, that the distant marsh is
actually the opposite shore, and that a modest white boat lies moored to the railing, next to a sign that reads
CUMBERLAND ISLAND FERRY
. A figure leans back against the rightmost edge of the ferry sign, covering the last three letters. One arm crosses beneath a round bosom, while the other operates a cigarette in short and furtive strikes.

Well, well. Not so squeaky-clean after all.