The Golden Hour. Beatriz Williams

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      “How long were you married?” he asked.

      “Only a year.”

      “Then you were newlyweds. What a terrible thing, this war.”

      “What’s the war got to do with it?”

      “Oh, I beg your pardon. I assumed he was killed in battle.”

      I tried to speak and realized the muscles of my throat were paralyzed, that my pulse struck like a hammer in my neck. The familiar panic. You never knew when it might seize you, when it might sock your gut at any sudden noise, any bang of a window, any innocent question. When it struck, you had to remember to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, to disguise your terror as something else, like grief. When the panic receded, when the muscles softened enough to enable you to speak at all, you spoke haltingly, as if mastering your anguish, so that no one would suspect you were lying.

      “No,” I said. “He was killed in an accident. A terrible accident.”

      Now, though he was all of sixty years old, this Wenner-Gren was still an attractive man, a man of silver hair and elegant movements and perceptive blue eyes of the X-ray variety, if you know what I mean. He smoked his cigarette and stared at me, not at all moved by my widowhood, while I resisted the urge to cross my arms over my chest and ask him if the rumors were true, that he was really a Nazi, that he was friends with Goering and that his real mission here in Nassau was to persuade the duke to cast his fortunes with a triumphant Germany. After all, wasn’t that exactly the kind of worldwide exclusive the Metropolitan had sent me to the Bahamas to discover? Wasn’t Axel Wenner-Gren exactly the kind of man with whom I’d been desperate to sidle myself into profitable intimacy?

      He leaned his face toward mine. “This must be terribly lonely for you.”

      “Oh, I keep myself busy. Not as busy as you do, of course, with your yacht and your lovely estate.”

      “Ah. What do you know about my estate?”

      “Isn’t it right there on Hog Island? I can just about see it from my bedroom window.”

      “Can you, now?”

      “And your yacht, of course. There’s no mistaking her.” I paused to sip my drink. “Where are you headed next? I hear you’re much enamored of Mexico these days. You’ve started a bank there, haven’t you? The Banco Continental.”

      His eyebrows rose. He turned his face politely away to blow out a stream of smoke, and while he did so, breaking gaze for just that instant, his eyes flicked downward to appraise the sharp, deep neckline of my dress. “You seem to hear a great many things, Mrs. Randolph.”

      “Oh, one keeps one’s ears open. And Nassau is terrible for gossip. It’s the favorite pastime. Everybody seems to be knee-deep in each other’s dirty business.”

      “So my wife tells me. And what else have you heard about me?”

      “Oh, this and that.” I shrugged. “I can’t remember most of it. But tell me more about Mexico. I’ve always wanted to go.”

      He took a long, slow drag from his cigarette, examined the diminished end, and said softly, “Perhaps you might join us on our next voyage. We intend to make an archaeological expedition to South America, and then travel up to Mexico in time for Christmas.”

      “How kind of you. When do you cast off?”

      Wenner-Gren opened his mouth, but it wasn’t his voice that answered me.

      “Any day now, isn’t that right? I’d go myself, if I wasn’t already occupied.”

      The words came from somewhere near my right shoulder, causing us both to startle and turn to the doorway, where Mr. Thorpe stood in his white dinner jacket, long and wide-shouldered and lean as a wooden cross. His head was bare and the spectacles perched at the very end of his nose. He pushed them up and smiled.

      “My dear Thorpe,” said Wenner-Gren. “I thought you had disappeared, as usual.”

      “Merely counting my profits in the back office.”

      “Don’t tell me you’ve finished raiding all the pockets already,” I said.

      “Every shilling accounted for.” Thorpe held out his elbow. “Might I have a private word with you, Mrs. Randolph?”

      I suppose I gaped. He hadn’t shown the slightest sign of recognition earlier, and though I’d caught glimpse after glimpse of him during the course of the party, we had never come face to face, as if some contract had been drawn up between us, some agreement not to acknowledge each other. I thought he had probably forgotten me, forgotten the episode on the airplane, or at least my face in the middle of it. And now he held out his elbow to me.

      “Thorpe, old chap,” said Wenner-Gren, in the funny way that men of all nations will ape certain expressions of the English upper classes. “I didn’t know you were a friend of Mrs. Randolph’s.”

      “We met on an airplane,” said Thorpe, pronouncing the word in three syllables, air-o-plane, “and formed an instant connection. Didn’t we, Mrs. Randolph?”

      His face was grave, his fair skin pink beneath the freckles. I considered his eyes, which were blue and slightly hooded behind his spectacles, giving you an impression of great depth. I glanced back at Wenner-Gren’s face and discovered a cool, pale stare like a reptile’s.

      I set down my half-finished bourbon on the edge of the Duke of Windsor’s desk. “That’s a wonderful question, Mr. Thorpe. I guess we might as well find out.”

      WE DIDN’T SAY A WORD until we reached the center of the main hallway, right between the staircase and the front entrance, where the panic hit my stomach once more. I snatched my hand from Thorpe’s elbow. “Thanks very much for rescuing me in there. I won’t trouble you further.”

      “Now, wait just a moment, Mrs.—”

      But I was already pushing open the door, already hurrying across the portico. He caught up with me a few steps later and touched my elbow. I stopped and whirled to face him.

      “Did I say I wanted company, Mr. Thorpe?”

      “Look here. You can’t just fly off alone like that.”

      “You can’t possibly think I’d go off with you.”

      “Why not?”

      “Why not? I don’t even know you. For all I know, you’re a homicidal maniac. Or worse.”

      “Worse? What could be worse than that?”

      I lifted my chin and fixed him with a certain stare of mine. He gave my displeasure his full attention, while some bird trilled out a mighty evening song from the portico above. It takes a certain amount of strength, you know, to gaze without blinking into the eyes of a man you hardly know, a man as tall and dazzling as Thorpe, and to this day I don’t quite understand how I held firm, or why. From the windows of Government House floated the mist of some jiggly, dancing tune I didn’t recognize, the shadow of somebody’s braying laugh. The dark air lay against Thorpe’s skin. His eyes were narrowed СКАЧАТЬ