Famous Last Words (37 page)

her direction. She hoisted her fork in mine.

We were lunching in the new Imperial fashion, in which

one stands to eat. The “room”—if such it could be called—

was the size of a stadium, and was filled with what appeared to be virtually every foreigner of any significance currently resident in Rome. Whether transient, like myself, or more or less permanent, like the clusters of ambassadors with all their under-secretaries and aides. There were others as well: the press, a few film stars; athletes; opera singers; Fascists from abroad attached to Embassies; even a certain recent Nobel Prize winner. Our conversation had just hit its stride when,

“Herr Mauberley… .”

It was von Ribbentrop.

“You have not eaten.”

“No, I have not. Your Excellency. But…” And turning to my Nobel Prize winner, expecting him to protest, I was rather startled to see him withdraw of his own volition.

von Ribbentrop drew me through the crowds towards an

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alcove piled with little chairs, all spindly legs and backs; like children’s chairs, or angels’: gilded. Here we were—lit with the light from windows more than twenty feet high, which gave a view of gardens, fountains, soldiers, trees —

and I had wine in one hand, fettucini alle vongoie in the other, and nowhere to put down either my plate or my glass and no desire for the contents of either. The piles of little chairs would not support a toothpick, let alone a meal. So I stood there, hampered, while he drew his head down towards me and spoke without allowing me to trap his gaze.

“I’m sorry to draw you away from your interesting conversation, but the fact is we have very little time to talk and

I have some news to impart, which is why I especially requested your presence.”

I brightened, hoping to hear of how things stood with

Wallis. von Ribbentrop had promised her a crown, after all, and the crown had not yet been forthcoming. “News? Good.”

“No,” he said. “Not good, Herr Mauberley. Not good news.

But sad.”

I watched him.

Sad was a word I should have thought von Ribbentrop

incapable of uttering.

His eyes went on avoiding mine—avoiding everything, in fact, except his own enormous hands and his glass of wine.

“You will want to know—and need to know—” he told

me very slowly, “that Isabella Loverso is dead.”

I wish he hadn’t told me in a corner.

I was numb. I couldn’t move. The light was so vivid it was almost blinding and the little chairs were all so delicate and finely balanced. Ithought; if I breathe they will all fall down.

And the room behind me gave a roar that sounded like

approval. I tried to make von Ribbentrop look at me but still he wouldn’t.

“Why?” I finally asked.

He looked around the crowded room. He even paused

before he answered me, to smile at someone else.

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I waited.

Why?

“She betrayed us,” he said to the windows.

And all the windows shimmered.

It could not be so. And I said so, asking for proof.

“The proof is in the fact that she is dead,” he said.

And I waited.

“As to why…” he said, “.. .1 can begin by saying that she betrayed German secrets to the British.”

“Begin…?” I said.

“You must lower your voice, Herr Mauberley,” von Ribbentrop said. “You must lower your voice. And smile.”

“Smile?”

“Yes. Smile now.”

He was looking off at one particular figure. Whose? I looked and saw it was Julia Franklin.

I smiled.

von Ribbentrop continued. “Baronessa Loverso, as you

must have been aware, had been verging on a betrayal of the Fascist trust for many years.”

I could not deny it. I remember Luis Quintana.

“It came, at last, in July of this year, when you and she were in Spain.”

“But you saw her then yourself,” I said. “She sat with

you. She talked with you. I watched. There was no betrayal then. How can you say this, Excellency?”

“She sat with others, too, you know. She sat with them

and talked with them and whether you watched or not—

there was betrayal then.”

“Of whom? To what end?”

“As I said—of the Fascist trust. And also…”

“Yes?”

“Of us.”

I did not respond. It was all unreal.

“Did she not spend time—much time—with the Marques

de Estella?” von Ribbentrop asked.

“She did. Are you saying she told him about us, about

Penelope?”

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“No.”

“Your Excellency, please. This game—this corner—it is stifling. Tell me what it was she did.”

“You do not then know why she was forming this liaison

with de Estella?”

“No, Your Excellency. I have already said so.”

“The Marques de Estella was involved in a plot to kidnap your friends the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.”

I had not, till then, heard of this.

von Ribbentrop continued. “The Marques, in his cups—

as the English say—and thinking he spoke to a trusted friend, was careless enough to let some hint of the plot slip out in Isabella Loverso’s presence. And she played him into her charming net and caught him. He told her everything.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. And I didn’t.

von Ribbentrop then told me about the plot to kidnap the Duke and Wallis. And told me it had been Isabella Loverso who had informed the British. All of this while she and I were in Madrid only three months before. And then she had disappeared.

“So she did not disappear,” I said. “She was taken.”

“Yes.”

“By whom?”

I expected him to say by Mussolini. But he said; “by Schellenberg.”

Dear God.

“But why?” I said. “Why did she betray us?” I knew she

had been wavering, but—

“I can only have a theory,” said von Ribbentrop. “But I’m fairly certain it’s right.”

“Which is?”

“Which is that she despaired of all of us. Our Nazi friends—

our Italian friends—and, yes, even of us. And so to thwart us all, to stop us all, she handed the Windsors back to the British. She prevented their being detained in Europe by Hitler. But she also knew the next and vital step in our scheme was to establish the Windsors as our figureheads.”

“You said it was Schellenberg who took her.”

“Yes.”

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“And she is dead.”

“Yes. Dead.”

“Why couldn’t you save her?” I said. “She was yours. She was your agent. Surely you could have intervened.”

“You think so, Herr Mauberley?”

“Yes.”

I watched his eyes go cold. von Ribbentrop turned towards the windows, warming himself. “Let me just say this and do not interrupt. Within two days,” he said, “or three at the very most, Isabella Loverso would have told Schellenberg everything there is to know. Bang. It would all be over. And quite apart from that, Herr Mauberley, you have to understand Isabella Loverso was prepared to die—and I think you

must be prepared to know that.”

I was staring at the sky beyond the window. Brilliant. Limpid. Dazzling.

“You must always remember what it is we want,” said

von Ribbentrop. “And that some of us must fall before we can have it.”

He reached out to touch the little chairs as if they might respond with music. He was like that—always giving the impression he could evoke a breath from stone. Fingertips like magic wands.

“Every day,” he said; “I have to move through twenty

worlds, Herr Mauberley. Twenty different worlds or more, being German Foreign Minister. I have to get in—and get out alive: twenty times a day. But at least it is known I have the whole of the Reich behind me. When it comes to us, Herr Mauberley, to Penelope, all I have is me. And I have to get in and out alive: alone. Like you. And just like Isabella Loverso. Except…”

“You haven’t told me what happened,” I said.

He shrugged.

Finally, “tell me how she died?” I said. “I don’t mean the details…only how?”

He looked at me.

“You aren’t going to like my answer, Herr Mauberley,

except in one detail.

“Which is?”

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In the months between their arrival in the Bahamas and the events about to be described, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had been the house guests of Sir Harry and Lady Oakes, the Islands’ leading citizens.

It was not for lack of an official residence the Windsors made their home with strangers. Indeed, the Governor’s

Mansion had been dutifully modernized and repainted at

some cost in order to accommodate a Royal Duke and his

wife. But the Duchess had disapproved of the decor and she flatly refused to live in “all those rose-red rooms” and to walk on mildewed carpets of a questionable hue. There was dampness everywhere but in the taps. Every faucet opened, dribbled forth its rusty drop and started to bang and scream.

The house was undermined by termites and infested with

things that crawl. As for the Royal apartments, they must have been devised through the eyes of the one who saw the world by neon light alone and every counter at the local Woolworth’s store had been raided for a new idea. Consequently, the Duchess would be forced to undertake the redecorating of the entire establishment herself and, to this

end, the temporary accommodations with the Oakes were

arranged.

The job was precisely what the Duchess required. All her energetic ambition for von Ribbentrop’s scheme was nicely sublimated by this chance to show off her skills, her genius, as a manipulator of public taste. Her transformation of the Mansion was magical, and when the date was set to open

it for scrutiny it was she herself who chose the Fourth of July. This was her personal Declaration of Independence, her break with the provincial society of which she was meant to be the doyenne. Doyenne was a word she hated. Doyennes were mere ambassadors—not Queens.

So here it was—the day itself—when she and the Duke

would be unveiled on the lawns and her masterpiece unveiled behind her; with its new French papers and its Spanish

tiles and its shades of blue unheard of in these backward isles—to say nothing of her imported cuisine, embezzled

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from the kitchens of the Waldorf in New York and flown

down the night before. Packed in dry ice there was quail for everyone (five hundred guests), Boston lettuce garnished with truffles, pink champagne, lady fingers, raspberry sherbet moulded in the shapes of eagles and crowns, chocolate

medallions stamped with the Ducal crest, and huge glass bowls of peppermints and sugar dollars for the children. Her own mouth watered when s.he thought of it all: the sign of a perfect hostess being that she would make the perfect guest at her own buffet.

The press release—in words most carefully chosen—said the Duke and Duchess of Windsor “having decided to open their home to the leading members of Bahamian society,

wish to use this occasion to call attention to the desperate situation in the mother country of this colony. Therefore, donations will be called /or towards the purchase of a Spitfire Fighter Plane, to be presented in the name of the people of these Islands to the people of the British Isles. God Save The King.

Nassau, New Providence, July 4th, 1941”

Winding upward to the Mansion at the top of Mount Fitzwilliam the Governor’s Road was clogged with motorcars

and straggling people. Swing music drifted down through the groves of casuarina trees, mingling with the breathless chatter of new arrivals as they poured in through the gates and up the melting asphalt. The atmosphere was almost one of Carnival, but the Duke of Windsor’s personal guard of kilted Cameron Highlanders, standing at attention in their scarlet tunics along the drive, forced a note of sober grandeur on the scene.

On the lawns there were five marquees forming a candystripe horseshoe. At the open end stood the Mansion itself—

L-shaped, screened and shuttered against the heat, with its

‘“Sit

crowning widow’s walk looking out over Nassau Bay, Hog

Island and the Atlantic Ocean to the north. The Bay was full of American yachts and other pleasure craft, all blue and white and spangled with fluttering flags and pennants reflected in the pale green water. But the wharves and docks

and levees that served these boats and ships were practically deserted. Everyone had come up town to stand against the iron fence and watch the Five Hundred arrive. Impeccable policemen, dressed in white, had to hold the crowd back from the gates and from climbing up too high on the railings, lest a child be killed or an eye put out by the rows of iron lilies that decorated the top. And from climbing, too, on the statue of Christopher Columbus, whose back was to the proceedings and whose shoulders made the perfect roosting

place for little boys and birds. The explorer’s gaze was on the sea and the place—invisible—from which he had come so long ago. “What have I done”, he seemed to be saying, “to deserve this end? That I should be frozen here in bronze: in this of all places. Nowhere. And all these people at my feet, whom I cannot see.”

The crowds began to assemble at noon. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were not expected to appear till three. In the meantime there were games and raffles on which to throw one’s money away. “All in a good cause! All in a good

cause!” cried the movie-star celebrity barkers—the young Miss Lana Turner among them. “All in a good cause!” There was also a French Cafe, a Newsreel Cinema and a Fortune Teller’s Booth that featured Elsa Maxwell dressed as a gypsy sitting behind a crystal ball. But the main attraction remained the Windsors themselves. Everyone wanted to see