“I’d love to stand
on the platform, waving a handkerchief…” Lili forced a smile. “But I think that might be pressing our luck.”
It seemed like another person sitting behind the wheel of the car, dressed in an old gray sweatshirt, baggy slacks, and a faded scarf pulled over her head. But it wasn’t just the costume. I sensed that something had changed about Lili, as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
“But you can step out long enough to give me a hug,” Eva said. I stood back and watched as Lili got out of the car and the old friends fell into a long embrace. It was a clear, bright morning, the city’s air purified by the previous day’s rain, and life seemed almost normal as people made their way in and out of Lisbon’s main railway station. I checked my watch: 7:40. Twenty minutes to buy tickets and get onto the train.
“When all this is over,” Eva said to Lili as they separated, “don’t be surprised if I show up on the doorstep of that big mansion of yours.”
“I consider that a promise.” Lili smiled, then turned to me. “Take good care of her.”
“Count on it,” I said.
We embraced, then Lili got back into the car and drove away. Eva and I smiled when the arm came out of the driver’s-side window, madly waving a white handkerchief in the air.
I never saw Lili again after that. She went back to Hollywood, where she arranged another meeting with von Sternberg, but he’d already given the part to Gene Tierney. The picture, ironically titled
The Shanghai Gesture,
was interesting enough, but could’ve been a classic had Lili played the role of the decadent thrill seeker, Victoria Charteris. Over the coming years, Lili’s career steadily shrank and, eventually, disappeared. As most people know, she became something of a recluse, closing herself off in her Upper East Side penthouse, seeing no one but the small staff that looked after her. The only glimpse the world got of the aging actress was an interview she did for a TV documentary in the late sixties, and the kindest comment from the critics was that she came off as a “distracted eccentric.” A couple of years later, the papers made a big deal out of the fact that she died virtually penniless, but I happen to know that, over the decades, many good causes had received generous endowments from a mysterious organization called the Fallen Star Foundation.
T
he man at the ticket counter looked up and perused Eva’s face. The passport was a good forgery—it damn well should’ve been at those prices—but he looked suspicious, anyway. Maybe he always looked that way.
I’d realized pretty quickly that we wouldn’t get far traveling as Lisa Foquet and Jack Teller. Either the Brits or the Germans—probably both—would’ve had Catela put out arrest warrants, and they’d certainly be checking the trains. Eva thought we could buy our way out of Portugal, and then we’d be okay, but I wasn’t so sure. It must’ve been around three in the morning that I woke up with the words
“I get you big money for American passport”
ringing in my ears. It took a moment to place them with the waiter who’d propositioned me on that first morning in Lisbon.
Fortunately, Miguel—which turned out to be his name—started work early. When he showed up just after six to open the café, he found Lili, Eva, and me waiting on his doorstep. After getting over the initial shock of coming face-to-face with a Hollywood icon, his eyeballs lit up with dollar signs. He ushered us into the back room and within an hour he’d taken our pictures, developed the film, pasted the photos into two genuine French passports, made the necessary changes, and soaked us for two hundred bucks. He also picked up my American passport and an autographed picture of himself and Lili, which he said would hold the place of honor over the bar, which, unsurprisingly, he’d just purchased from his erstwhile boss.
Eva and I walked away as Henri et Joséphine Barreau, of 14 Rue Clément, Paris. Joséphine looked a lot like Carole Lombard, thanks to Lili, who’d cut and colored Eva’s hair the previous night. Henri, on the other hand, bore an unhappy resemblance to Harold Lloyd, thanks to a pair of round tortoiseshell spectacles that were requisitioned from the room-service waiter at the Palacio. The girls had disappeared into a twenty-minute fit of laughter when I’d first tried them on.
We’d spent an interesting night in the penthouse. Eva had waited in the hotel’s boiler room until the duke and Santo left, and when I returned with her, after reading the Roosevelt letter, Lili had uncorked a bottle of Mumms.
“If it’s to be our last night together, it might as well be a good one,” she’d said. An unscripted, buoyant mood took hold after a couple of glasses, and we’d laughed several hours away, acting like kids on the night before a big holiday. At some point Eva had gone off to curl up with Lili while I dozed on the sofa.
“Cem setenta três,”
the ticket man announced. Eva counted out the escudos and handed them over in exchange for two first-class tickets to Paris. One way, of course.
Our cover story was that Monsieur et Madame Barreau had been vacationing in Estoril when France fell, and were now on their way home to Paris. I was a successful businessman, and my wife, Joséphine, was a primary-school teacher. We wanted to keep things simple, but
because of my limited skills with the French language, we took Lili’s suggestion that I play a mute. It seemed a stretch, but I didn’t have any better ideas. We had Miguel put the condition on my passport, so if I kept my mouth shut—literally—maybe we could sell it.
I spotted Walter Engel—the Angel of Darkness—leaning against a wall opposite the platform entrance, pretending to read a Portuguese newspaper. He might have blended into the background better without the black eye and the bandage across his cheek, but as it was, he stood out like a sore thumb. I signaled Eva with an elbow to the ribs.
“Yes, I see him,” she whispered as we passed by, seemingly unnoticed.
I shot a glance his way and saw that he was peering over his paper at something behind us. Eva sensed what I was doing and tugged on my arm, pulling me along. We turned onto the platform and she started chatting away in French—nothing too obvious, just a wife fretting over something or another. I had no idea what she was saying, so I just nodded my head up and down, like any speechless husband would do.
The cabin was small and elegant, though a bit faded. A high-backed seat, which folded down at night to become the bottom bunk bed, was decorated in a lush burgundy herringbone material, and the walls were covered with highly polished teak and cherry-wood tiles. The furnishings consisted of a small table in front of the window, with just enough room for the lamp and the single rose that stood on it, a washbasin in the corner, and a narrow, curved closet with a full-length mirror on the door.
As the porter handed Eva the key and explained, in French, about the water closet down the hall, I hurried to the window and tried to locate Engel. I spotted him a bit further down the platform, following a few steps behind a middle-aged woman who was struggling along under the weight of a fairly large suitcase.
“Is that her?” I asked Eva once the porter had closed the door.
“You shouldn’t be speaking while you’re sitting in the window,” she said. “You can be seen even if you can’t be heard. Yes, that’s her.”
Madame Moulichon, who the duchess had called Marguerite, stopped in front of one of the carriages, placed her valise on the platform, and looked around for someone to help her heave it onto the train. For a moment, I thought she was going to ask Engel himself, but once she got a good look at him, she flagged down a harmless-looking young man instead. Eva and I simultaneously sat back from the window as Engel strolled past. He came to a stop a few yards away and lingered there until the train lurched to a start, when he quickly hopped aboard.
“You think they know what she’s up to?” I said.
Eva shook her head. “If they knew the documents were in Paris, they would have taken them already. No…I suspect they’re watching everyone who has anything to do with the duke. As far as they know, she’s going home to see her family.”
“He’ll figure it out pretty quickly when we get to Paris.”
She was about to respond when the door burst open and the conductor stepped in. I turned to gaze out the window as he punched our tickets. He and Eva exchanged a few words in French—something about dinner—then he disappeared with a polite smile. As the train pulled away from Lisbon, following the Tagus River Valley north through the peaks of the Serra da Montejunto, my eyelids felt heavy and I let myself drift off into a deep sleep.
“T
hat was quite a nap,” Eva smiled as I resurfaced. The sun was high in the sky and the train was sitting in a small station with a faded sign on the platform that identified our location as
FATIMA
.
“How long?” I yawned.
“A couple of hours.” She produced a small paper bag. “Are you hungry? I’m starved.”
I groaned and pulled myself upright.
“I was dreaming,” I said, trying to hold on to the images before they dissolved into the daylight.
“Good, I hope.”
“Uhhh…” I shook my head as it came into focus. “More like a nightmare. Involving the duchess.”
“Oh, really?” She removed two rolls and some hard cheese from the bag, unfolded a camping knife from her pocket, and started preparing sandwiches. “She made quite an impression, then.”
“She was wearing jackboots and had a little black mustache like you-know-who. I’ll spare you the rest.”
Eva threw her head back, exposing her long graceful neck, and laughed wholeheartedly. It was a wonderful sight to wake up to.
“Poor boy,” she said. “You’ve been traumatized.”
The train grunted a couple of times, rocked back on its heels, and heaved forward. Eva handed me a roll.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked, not yet ready for food.
“An enterprising young man on the platform. He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight.” She produced a bottle of unlabeled wine from the bag. I retrieved a couple of glasses from the sink area, cleared the table for them.
“See anything along the way?”
“Madame Moulichon is three carriages back, sharing a cabin with a family of four.”
“Better her than me,” I said.
“Our angel has the cabin two doors up.” She pried the cork out of the bottle.
“I’ll have to steer clear,” I said. “He’ll recognize me from the casino.”
Eva focused intently on the bottle as she poured. Keeping her hand perfectly steady as the train picked up speed, she managed to fill the glasses without spilling a drop. She replaced the cork, tamped it down, and slipped me a sweet smile.
“We’re going to have to kill him, Jack,” she said, as if I’d missed the obvious.
I handed her a glass, picked one up for myself, and tasted the homegrown tipple. It was thin, but drinkable. “Isn’t shooting people starting to get a bit routine for you?”
“I thought you could take a turn,” she said, sipping the wine.
“But you can’t use a gun. It would make too much noise.” Her eyes moved across to the table, and landed on the cheese knife.
“You want me to—” I drew my finger across my throat. “With that?”
“While he’s asleep. These locks shouldn’t be much of challenge for you.”
She was right, the lock wouldn’t be difficult, but to murder a man while he slept…Well, it gave me pause. Eva read my mind.
“You have to set any sense of fair play aside, Jack. It doesn’t exist any longer. Not with these people.”
She was right, of course, it had to be done. Once Engel realized what Madame Moulichon was up to in Paris, he’d raise the alarm and Hitler would have the duke’s papers on his desk by the end of the day. No, Engel couldn’t be on the train when it rolled into Paris, and if we were going to kill him, we might as well stack the odds of success and do it while he slept.
“It’ll be messy,” I said.
“Then we’ll have to clean up.”
“What about the body?”
Eva nodded toward the window. Fortunately, Engel was small enough that he’d probably just fit.
“The conductor’s going to wonder where he disappeared to,” I said, trying one last stall.
“Maybe that’s all he’ll do,” Eva said, adding, “After all, he’s French and Engel is German.”
“And if he raises the alarm?”
“Let’s take it as it comes,” she said, and I nodded.
“When do we get to Paris?”
“Tomorrow afternoon, at two-thirty.”
I picked up the knife, turned it over in my hand, and tried it on a piece of hard cheese. It would do the trick all right.
“Okay,” I said. “Tonight.”
We left it at that. I sampled the sandwich and, after a couple of bites, realized that I was hungry, after all.
A
fter lunch, Eva retrieved a pillow from the overhead compartment, stretched out on the seat, and fell asleep. I stared out the window for a while, then got up to check the lock on our cabin door. It was British-made, a simple five-pin tumbler design with a spacer that allowed for the conductor’s master key. Easier to open because once the master pins were lined up, the others would fall into place.
Like any decent hack, I knew where to find a pick, and sure enough, I found a bobby pin in Eva’s hair. After gently removing it, I straightened it out, pulled the plastic tip off one end, and bent it to a forty-five-degree angle. I used the cheese knife as a tension wrench, and after a half dozen attempts, I’d managed to get my time down to twenty seconds. I hadn’t lost the touch.
Getting in would be the easy part, though. I presumed that the setup in Engel’s cabin would be the same as ours, and being alone, he’d almost certainly sleep in the lower bunk, to the immediate right of the door. It would be too dark to see much of anything, and I didn’t want to start blindly stabbing at the guy, so I’d have to raise the window shade just enough to allow some ambient light in. I’d be at my most vulnerable then, with my back to him.
I’d never killed a man before. It was something to think about. Yes, it was war, like Eva said, and I certainly had no qualms about this guy coming to an ugly end. But it was one thing to justify killing him, another to plunge a knife into his throat as he slept. Would he wake up before he died? Would he know what was happening? Would he put up a fight, or would he try to cry out? Think it through now, I told myself, because there would be no room for questions, no time for hesitation, once I was standing over him. I’d have to be quick and clean, prepared for anything, with no peripheral thoughts to distract me from what I had to do. I’d have to be as cold-blooded a killer as my victim was.