“My husband gave me that necklace as a Christmas present in 1937, from the Cartier shop on rue de la Paix, because he could not find another jeweler in Paris who was skilled enough to satisfy him.”
Pepper makes a few rapid calculations, carries the eight, adds a zero or two. The old heart flutters again.
“True love, you said?”
“True blue, faithful and everlasting.”
“In that case,” Pepper says, “you’re on.”
4.
Annabelle asks if there is any more coffee. Pepper reaches for the thermos and gives it a jiggle.
“Not much.” She pours what’s left into the plastic cup and hands it to Annabelle.
“Thank you.”
“You’re not getting sleepy, are you? I can always take a turn at the wheel.”
“Not on your life.” Annabelle hands back the empty cup. “Not that you’re not perfectly capable, I’m sure. But I’d like to drive her myself.”
Pepper tucks the thermos back into the glove compartment and latches the polished wooden door. “Because you have history, don’t you?”
“Yes, we do.” Annabelle pats the dashboard.
“I’d ask how it happened, but I’d rather stay awake.”
“I can’t really tell you, anyway. Too many lives involved.”
“My God, what a relief. I bore so easily, you understand.”
Annabelle laughs. “Do you, now? Have you ever been in love, Miss Schuyler?”
“It’s Pepper, remember?”
“Pepper, then. Tell me the truth. I’m taking you home with me, so you’ve got to be honest.” She pauses, and when Pepper doesn’t speak, she adds: “Besides, it’s one o’clock in the morning. No secrets after midnight.”
“I don’t know.” Pepper looks out the side, at the shadows blurring past. “Maybe.”
“Were you in love with the father of your baby, or someone else?”
“I was very deeply in lust with him, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s not at all what I mean, but it can be very hard to tell the difference. Do you still want him?”
Pepper’s hand finds the neck of her cardigan. She thinks of the last time she saw the father of her baby, the day before she left Washington. “No. Not anymore. I’m cured.”
“If you say so. We’re very good at pretending, we women. And the heart is such a complicated little organ.”
A light flashes in the rearview mirror, and Pepper jumps in her seat. Annabelle glances into the mirror and slows the car a fraction. The light grows larger and brighter, resolving into two headlamps, and the drone of an engine undercuts the noise of their own car, their own draft. Annabelle glances again into the mirror and says something under her breath.
Pepper’s fingernails dig into the leather seat next to her leg. “What is it?” she says.
There is a flash of bright blue, followed instantly by red, and the shriek of a siren sails above their heads. Annabelle swears again—loudly enough that Pepper recognizes the curse as French—and slows the car.
“What are you doing?”
“What else can I do?”
The car drifts to the shoulder, and the siren reaches a new pitch behind them. The red and blue lights fill the air, throwing a lurid pattern on Annabelle’s cheeks and neck. She brakes gently, until the car comes to a stop. The siren screams in Pepper’s ears. She clenches her hands into balls of resistance against the authority of the roaring engine drawing up behind them, the unstoppable force that has found them here, of all places, in the middle of the night, on a deserted Florida highway next to the restless Atlantic. Two well-dressed women inside a car of rigid German steel.
The steel vibrates faintly. The lights and the roar increase to gigantic proportion, drenching the entire world, and then everything hurtles on to their left. The siren begins its Doppler descent, and the world goes black again, except for the flashing lights that narrow and narrow and finally disappear around a curve in the road, and the moon that replaces them.
“Holy God,” says Pepper, and she opens the car door and vomits into the sand.
Isolde • 1935
1.
The doctor arrived over the side of the boat just after I laid Stefan out on the deck and loosened the tourniquet.
“Why did you loosen this?” he demanded, dropping his bag on the deck and stripping his jacket.
“Because it had been on for well over half an hour. I wanted to save the leg.”
“There is no use saving the leg if the patient bleeds to death.”
At which point Stefan opened one eye and told the esteemed doctor he wanted to keep his fucking leg, and if the esteemed doctor couldn’t speak with respect to the woman who had saved Stefan’s life, the esteemed doctor could walk the fucking plank with a bucket of dead fish hanging around his neck to attract the sharks.
The doctor said nothing, and I assisted him right there on the deck as he dug into the hole and extracted the bullet, as he cleaned and stitched up the wound and Stefan drifted in and out of consciousness, always waking up with a faint start and a mumbled apology, as if he had somehow betrayed us by not remaining alert while the forceps dug into his raw flesh and the antiseptic was poured over afterward.
“You are a lucky man, Silverman,” said the doctor, dropping the small metal bullet into a towel, and I thought, Silverman, Stefan Silverman, that’s his name, and wiped away the gathering perspiration on his broad forehead.
The doctor asked for the sutures, and I rooted through the bag and laid everything out on the towel next to Stefan’s arm: sutures, needle, antiseptic. “What’s your blood type, nurse?” the doctor asked as he worked, as I silently handed him each suture, and I said I was O negative, and he replied: “Good, what I hoped you would say. Can you spare a pint, do you think?” and I said I could, of course, of course. I was glowing a little, in my heart, because he had called me nurse, and no one had ever called me anything useful before. And because I had brought Stefan Silverman safely to his ship through the dark and the salt wind, and the doctor was efficiently fixing him, putting his leg back together again, and the ball of terror was beginning to drop away from my belly at last.
The doctor stood at last and told me that he was finished, and I should dress the wound. “Not too tight; you nurses are always dressing a wound too tight. I will have to come back with the transfusion equipment. It may take an hour or two. Can you stay awake with him?”
Yes, I could.
“Then we will put him in his bed.” He signaled for one of the crew, who were hovering anxiously nearby, and somehow made himself clear with gestures and a few scant words of German. Two of the men hoisted Stefan up—he was out cold by now, his dark head turned to one side—and the doctor yelled at them to be careful. He turned to me. “Don’t leave his side for a second. You know what to look for, I think? Signs of shock?”
“Yes. I will watch him like a child, I promise.”
2.