Blue Damask Read online

Chapter Twenty-Four

  They did not walk all the way back to Vienna. Or even to Konya. An engine pulling two cars and the tenders arrived the next morning and loaded the survivors and what belongings they had been able to keep away from the looters.

  Workmen with picks and shovels and welding gear stepped down from the cars as the passengers lined up to board. Soldiers with machine guns passed them as they stood in the queue. Elsa and Sonnenby climbed aboard with the others. No one asked for a passport, no one asked their names. They sat side by side on a bench with their satchels on their knees. They did not speak. At the Konya station they boarded another train for Istanbul.

  Elsa removed the bandages from his swollen and bruised hands. The right knuckles and the one cracked metacarpal were not healed, but the bandages bothered him. He spent the time on the train massaging the knuckles and rubbing the thumb muscle in his palm. He would shake out his hands, then splay the fingers and curl them and uncurl them, testing them. She watched him silently. He would look at her now and then, and his eyes held the kind of uncertainty that comes from trusting someone else to make important decisions for you.

  At the Istanbul station they stepped down from the puffing train onto the crowded platform. Elsa stepped confidently to the station window and asked, “Which way to the British Embassy?”

  Sonnenby followed her. She kept a brisk businesslike pace, clicking her heels on the pavement and holding her head high. She pushed into the office of British Foreign

  Affairs in Istanbul and marched up to the front desk with their passports and the power of attorney in her hands. She knew how she must look. She saw it in the mirror of the clerk’s face. His eyes opened wide and his face lost its bureaucratic boredom. His mouth fell open and he blinked.

  On the edges of her vision she could see the uniformed security men moving in to stand behind them. Her Mauser and its holster and stock and stripper clips were hanging prominently from the thick leather shoulder strap and bounced against her hip. She did not need to look at Sonnenby. She could feel him directly behind her, breathing hard but regularly. By now she knew exactly his state of mind by the rhythm of his breath. She had disarmed him on the train and his Luger was now safely in her briefcase. He would stand behind her, he would not speak. He would keep his hands to himself. It had been agreed.

  They both looked like they had been through a recent battle and a forced march over rough country. Not a single hair on her head was in place. The blonde lengths hung down in tangled mess to her waist, wads of it were striped black with dried Turkish blood. Her black skirt was splashed with mud and blood and horsehair. Her blouse was torn in places where the Mauser and flying shrapnel and bits of train had savaged her, revealing glimpses of a round white breast and half-healed scrapes and cuts when she moved her shoulders. The blouse was no longer a crisp professional white, but was spattered with every kind of filth and every variety of human body fluid. She relished that idea that she and Sonnenby must smell like a stable in the summer.

  Elsa raised her chin as she presented the passports and said, emphasizing her German accent, thick and heavy, “I am Elsa Schluss and this is Henry Sinclair, Lord Sonnenby. I believe you have been looking for us.”

  Vienna, March 1922

  Elsa took off her hat and hung it on the peg. She followed with her jacket and set her umbrella in the stand. She picked up her briefcase and made her way to the stairs, her heels clicking on the marble floors. Magda came out, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “Fraulein, there is mail for you today.”

  Elsa tipped her head, “Thank you, Magda. I will read it with my coffee upstairs.”

  Upstairs she glanced in the round mirror over the trestle table on the mezzanine. For the past ten months she had worked on achieving this triumph. She was renting a fine house in a good neighborhood. She had a position at the University in the College of Psychology. She had patients in her parlor four afternoons a week, referrals from Doctor Engel. It was good. Very good.

  Magda had asked Doctor Engle if she could keep house for her. Elsa welcomed the older woman’s help. She could not have focused so completely on writing her papers without the housekeeper’s support. She tilted her head to make sure every hair was still in place. One tendril touched her cheek and she licked her finger to put it back over her ear. Good.

  Her mail was stacked neatly in the table and tied with string. She set her house keys down in the glass bowl and picked up the many letters. There was also a shallow box, half a meter square tied with string. A longer oblong box was most likely filled with congratulatory flowers. She picked them all up and took them into her room and set them on her desk. She arranged them to make room for the tray, careful not to disturb the two opened silver pocket watches that told her the time in London and in Paris.

  Magda arrived with the tray of coffee and little keks. She set it down on the desk and began to pour, but Elsa said, “Thank you, no, Magda, I will pour after I have looked at the letters, but I think I will need a vase and water for this.” She touched the oblong box and Magda smiled.

  The housekeeper closed the door with a polite click behind her. Elsa opened the letter from the College of Physicians. It was a letter of congratulations on her dissertation and an invitation to a meeting next month. She had made her presentation to a packed house on a theme, “The Common Errors Perpetrated by Males when Underestimating the Abilities of Females in the Masculine Setting of War.” She enjoyed the absolute silence in the auditorium when she punctuated her research and analysis with anecdotes from her experiences in the field hospitals during the war and her adventures in Syria afterwards, but no mention of a specific patient. She especially enjoyed the collective gasp of fifteen hundred people when she recounted her attack by a Bedouin raider in the desert southeast of Baghdad, and the attack of Turkish rebels on the train near Konya. She suspected that many of them would not believe she had killed a man with her bare hands, but she was ready to demonstrate her technique. She glanced up at the wall over her desk at the Mauser, proudly displayed the way other women might hang a needlework sampler or a portrait.

  The next letter was from a colleague, also congratulating her on her triumphant presentation and careful research. One was an invitation to the opera next week. Madame Butterfly. She set that one aside to answer immediately. She loved Puccini.

  The others were not as important-looking, and most were from people she knew. She took the opportunity to pause and pour her coffee. She sipped with one hand and sorted the balance of the letters with the other. When it was time to pour the second cup, she set the saucer on the package while she adjusted the lid of the coffee pot and looked inside to see how much more there was. Plenty. At least enough for two more cups, though it was cooling.

  She would have to drink quickly if she were to avoid the unpleasant bottom-of-the-cup feel of coffee that had gone cold. She poured and drank, then poured again, setting the saucer aside. She had left a ring on the package that blurred her name written on the wrapping paper. She wiped it with her thumb and looked for the return address. Nothing.

  She opened the drawer of her desk and got out her little silver scissors and snipped the coarse burlap cord and freed the paper. Inside was a flimsy cardboard box which twisted with the weight of something substantial inside. It didn’t rattle. It was the wrong shape for flowers.

  She took the last drink of her cooling coffee as she lifted the top.

  “Fraulein!” Magda’s voice carried up the stairs, followed by her heavy footsteps moving quickly up as well. She knocked hard at the door and called breathlessly to her again. “Fraulein! What was that crash? Let me in!”

  Elsa had not locked the door and Magda did not wait to be invited. The old lady pushed in and knelt at her feet, “Ach, look at this fine china. Oh dear, and the pot too. Fraulein? What is that? What are you holding?”

  Elsa did not try to calm herself. She did not check to see if the falling coffee pot had stained her skirt or splashed her stockings or ruined
her shoes. She dropped the filthy and tattered blue damask gown to the floor where it landed in beaded folds on top of the shattered china. She lifted the old lady to her feet.

  She cried, “Who delivered that package!”

  Magda’s mouth opened. Her eyes were wide and she tried to stutter an answer. “A m-m-man, a man.”

  “The postman?” Elsa let her go and went to the window. The rain promised an overnight deluge. The streetlights reflected on the sidewalks and the gutters. Traffic was heavy with commuters returning to their houses and their own cups of coffee and little cookies and warm fires.

  “No, not the postman.” Magda stood at her shoulder and looked out the window too. “A tall man. A stranger. In a fedora and a raincoat.”

  Elsa saw many tall men in fedoras and raincoats on the sidewalk below. Most had umbrellas over their heads and were bent against the weather as they made their way home. He could have rung her in the telephone. Her number was in the public directory. He could have knocked at her door. He obviously had her address. But no. He was afraid. He did not want to hear her voice on the telephone tell him to go away, or see rejection in her eyes on a doorstep.

  He had been gone for ten months with no word to her. She nodded to herself. It was likely he had been in custody for a while. His presence implied that he was now free. She could barely wait to hear the story of how he had done it.

  She looked to the left and the right down below in the streets. If he were watching the house, he would not be among the men hurrying. He would be standing. If he didn’t have an umbrella he would be standing under an awning.

  He would not have an umbrella. She knew him that well. He would be standing where he could watch her window without his view blocked by the canopy of an umbrella. He would stand in the weather. He would challenge himself not to feel the wet, the cold or the stiffening breeze. And he would stand where she would be able to see him as soon as she came home from the clinic and read her mail. He would be watching her right now.

  Magda was picking up the china shards behind her. Elsa heard her gasp.

  “Fraulein! Look!”

  Elsa turned around to see Magda kneeling on the carpet, a plain gold ring between her finger and her thumb.

  “Fraulein, this was inside the dress.”

  Elsa took it from her. It was heavy and shone in the lights as she turned it to and fro. Inside the band there was a thin inscription in German, Siegfried’s dying words: “Brunhilde bietet mir Gruss”, “Brunhilde welcomes me”. The ring meant that he had been declared sane by a physician. She rubbed the corner of her eye and stepped to the window. He had his rights back. Now he wanted to know if he had her as well.

  Elsa scanned the sidewalk across the street. Stately houses rose three stories up from one corner of her street to the other; on the corner was a bistro and a newsstand, now closed against the dark and the weather. The only awning within a sightline to her window was on that corner. She turned to the housekeeper.

  “Magda, I need you to set the table for a guest tonight. Go now. Leave the broken china. I broke it, I will clean it up.”

  “It is sauerbraten tonight, Fraulein.”

  “Excellent. He will want that. Make sure there are plenty of potatoes, he will want potatoes. He is hungry. Gott im Himmel, he is famished. He will want supper.”

  “Who, fraulein?”

  “Go, Magda. Make sure there is dessert afterwards. Can you make a flan? He will want flan.”

  “Ja. It is a simple custard with syrup. What else?”

  Elsa looked out the window. The glowing electric globes that lit the streets were muted by the rain and cast their light in stingy circles, but she could see a still form under the leaking awning across the street on the corner. She saw in profile a tall man in a fedora. She saw a dark raincoat, broad shoulders, an aquiline nose and a strong jaw. She saw the glint of his eyes in the lamplight as he lifted his face to her second-floor window. The rain was growing heavier.

  Elsa stepped closer to the window and held her left hand to the glass. She slowly lowered the ring over her finger. The lights behind her would make the gesture clear to anyone watching. Especially to one person carefully watching.

  Magda cleared her throat to remind Elsa that she had not answered her question.

  “Champagne,” Elsa told her. “I will want champagne.”

  finis

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Vienna, March 1921

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four