The Duke and Duchess of Windsor lived out their lives together as objects of scorn in the eyes of the British establishment and, to some degree, the British people. Edward died in 1972; Wallis, in 1986. The Dukedom of Windsor was discontinued. Recently revealed 1933 film footage of Edward teaching the Nazi salute to seven-year-old future Queen Elizabeth renewed calls to release a secret cache of evidence documenting the Windsors’ wartime relations with Nazi Germany. Otherwise the files are expected to be unsealed in 2045.
Axel Wenner-Gren donated Southern Cross to Mexico to use as a Navy training ship. He returned to the Bahamas after the war and built the Lighthouse Club and Resort on the island of Andros. Wenner-Gren apologists declared that the Swedish industrialist’s ties to the Nazis have been overstated and that putting him on the Allies’ wartime blacklist had been an injustice. One wonders what they would have said, had the war gone the other way. Founded in 1941, the Wenner-Gren Foundation continues to support anthropological research.
7 July 1943: Late Night, Oakes House
She sat up startled. “Odelin, do you hear that? Mon Dieu, Monsieur Oakes and Monsieur Christie must be fighting.” Duvalier swung his feet over the side of the tiny bed and onto the floor and sat listening through open jalousie windows: More curses, the sound of pottery shattering, then silence.
“I must go see,” she said, as she rose and quickly slipped her blouse and skirt back on. “Wait here.”
But he did not. Duvalier dressed and crept out behind her. He walked quietly to the edge of the property and looked around the edge of the shrubbery. The security man was there again. He was sitting on the same bench as the night before but wearing rougher clothes. He must be too far back to hear, Duvalier thought. He crept back to the cottage just as the woman returned, clearly distraught.
“Monsieur has a gash in his head. I think he is dead.” She was trembling. Monsieur Christie is not moving either. I am afraid, Odelin.”
“I will go fetch the security man,” Duvalier said.
“What security man? We have no security man.”
“You have one now. I saw him watching the house last night, and he is out there now sitting on the bench in the park. I will bring him back. He will know what to do. No one can blame you.”
Duvalier approached Hemingway on the bench and hailed him with some of the few English words he knew. “Excuse, sir. You sécurité?” Hemingway recognized the accent as French—he had lived in Paris for five years in the 1920s. “Why do you ask, monsieur?”
“Something terrible has happened in the house. Please come. The side door is unlocked.”
“Do you work here?” Hemingway asked.
“No, no. I am a boatman from Haiti. Our boat lies in the harbor, and I am here because I am having an assignation with the maid, a woman of Haiti. She lives in the little house in the back. She thinks the Monsieur of the house is dead. I told her to wait in her dormitory.”
Hemingway and Duvalier passed through the kitchen and into the great room that now was in shambles. “Jesus fucking Christ…who is the guy on the sofa?”
“Laurete says he is an important man of the city. She says when he and the Monsieur drink together, he retires to a bedroom upstairs to sleep, rather than return home.”
Hemingway had gotten in plenty of drunken fights. In fact, he had a reputation for getting drunk and fighting. He knew exactly what had just happened in this room. He was reminded of a trial he had covered at his first newspaper. Two brothers—one, drunk, had killed the other, also drunk, with a fireplace poker. When the police asked their prisoner what the fight had been about, the horrified young man said he couldn’t remember a damn thing.
“Let’s wake this one up,” Hemingway said, slapping Christie’s face a few times, little slaps.
His eyes opened and Christie became energized at the sight of the big stranger with the moustache. Still too drunk to be frightened, he looked toward the soles of Oakes shoes amid the shambles and shards of pottery. “Isshhedead?”
Hemingway the ambulance driver of the Great War knew a dead man when saw one, and Oakes wasn’t there yet, but Hemingway the would-be assassin was improvising a new course of action. “Yeah tough guy, you killed him good, but tonight is your lucky night. We’re going to put you to bed…Monsieur, would you give me hand with this idiot please.”
Hemingway and Duvalier half-carried, half-dragged Christie upstairs to his room.
They rolled him onto the bed. Hemingway shook him awake. “Listen to me, asshole. If you have half a brain, you’re going to tell the police that you and Harry Oakes got shitfaced and that he was healthy when you went to bed. You slept all night without hearing a fucking thing. They just might believe you. Got it!”
“Nodafuckingshing.”
Back downstairs Duvalier had realized his error. “You are not really sécurité, are you?”
“No, I am an entirely different animal. But as I told the man upstairs, with me you and the woman are lucky. I am certain you understand that if the police were here now, they might try to blame you and your girlfriend for this. The smart thing would have been for you to flee back to your boat, but you went to get my help because of the woman. You would not abandon her.”
“It is true. I will not.”
“Go back to her now and give me a few minutes here alone. I think we can make this good for everybody, except of course Monsieur.”
Hemingway wanted to act fast and get the hell out, but he could almost hear Commander Fleming’s voice: “The death of Harry Oakes must be a mystery. There is no menace in a solved case, but there is great menace and dread in a bloody mystery, and that is the message we must send.”
Hemingway grabbed a fancy napkin and proceeded to wipe Christie’s fingerprints from the bloody candlestick. He sprinted upstairs to fetch a pillow from one of the bedrooms, not Christie’s.
Then, Standing over Oakes, he pulled the Colt pistol from his pocket and wrapped the feather pillow around the weapon. “You probably would die anyway, but I can’t take a chance. You picked the wrong friends, Sir Harry, and you are condemned.” Kneeling, Hemingway pressed the pillow against Oakes skull and fired three shots in rapid succession into the area just behind the right ear.
“What the fuck,” he said, and pulled the trigger a fourth time. “For the Bonkowskis.” He engaged the safety and slid the gun back into his pants pocket.
Hemingway dropped the pillow onto Oakes’ corpse, powder burns up. He raided the liquor cabinet and drained three-quarters of a vodka bottle onto the pillow. Then he went looking for matches. Using a fingernail to avoid leaving fingerprints, he lifted the lid to a fancy box with a dragon inlay, which he mistook for a cigar box.
“Swastikas? What have we here?”
Hemingway the trophy-hunter couldn’t stop himself. He examined the fancy Nazi medal then shoved it into his other front pocket. There was an unsealed envelope, too. He removed the letter within and began to read. Like many old reporters, he could read a page in seconds.
Treason autographed by Hitler? Ay Madre de Dios! This is better than a damn U-boat. Fuck you, Hoover. Fuck you, Fleming.
To a man who had borne witness to fascist evil in the Spanish Civil War, the discovery was like receiving divine forgiveness for his crime. Hemingway stowed the letter in the same pocket as the medal. He found a pack of matches by the kitchen stove, went back and lit the accelerant-soaked pillow. He took the vodka bottle and made his way to the cottage before the smell of smoke got into his clothes. “Deduce this, Sherlock, the mystery of the burning feathers,” he said.
The Haitian woman motioned for Hemingway to enter the cottage, where she waited with Duvalier. The three of them shared a sense of urgency. “Miss, you must trust me,” Hemingway said. “You must wait until morning, then enter the house before anyone else in the household arrives. You will ‘discover’ Monsieur’s body. Go upstairs and wake the other man… if you can. Tell him he must call the police, that someone has broken in during the night and killed Monsieur. When the police question you, say you slept and heard nothing.”
Hemingway took a big swig of vodka and handed the bottle to Duvalier. “Drink now. You must smell of liquor. You are going to pretend to be drunk and I will pretend to be even drunker than you. You will support me as we walk down to the harbor—two drunk sailors going back to their boats late in the night, conversing in drunk French. What could be more natural? Now let us go.”
Duvalier embraced the Ebalard woman. “This is not goodbye, Laurete. We will meet again before I sail, God willing. I will send word to you.”
She wept.
And then she watched them leave, one a spy for Germany and probably the only person alive pretending to be Haitian, and the other a novelist moonlighting as a secret agent. Arms around each other’s shoulders, the two men walked down the dark road, staggering occasionally for effect. They both shared an unlikely emotion, given the circumstances. They were happy.
8 July 1943: Mid-Afternoon, Oakes House
By the time the governor and his wife arrived, Sir Harry’s body had been removed to the morgue. A sympathetic constable had taken a distraught Harold Christie home in his police car. Lucky for Mr. Christie the killer had been unaware of his presence in the bedroom or he too might have been murdered, the constable said.
Constables guarding the scene stood aside solemnly as the royal couple and their Marine bodyguard came into the great room that was now a crime scene.
The Duchess tightened her grip on the Duke’s arm at the sight of the chaos. The pool of congealed blood was laced with charred feathers, and the place smelled awful. The constables later described the fear they saw on the faces of the royal couple, who had insisted on seeing for themselves. The Duke and Duchess were afraid alright, but it was only tangential to the death of poor Sir Harry. Their thoughts had turned to self-preservation.
The police sergeant later recalled something he found strange. Within moments of arriving, the Duke fixed his eyes on the side table next to the liquor cabinet. He walked to it, and gestured at a small wooden box with a dragon decorating the lid. “May I, sergeant?” the Duke asked, and sergeant nodded. Who was he to argue? The Duke took the box and opened the lid. He exhaled visibly and put the box down, a bit too abruptly, the sergeant thought. The Duke was taking his friend’s death hard.
“Sergeant, any idea who did this?” the Duke asked.
“We don’t know, sir. Not yet. No signs of robbery or a break-in.”
“This murder must be solved post haste. I want an arrest.”
“Yes sir. We don’t get too many murders that need actual solving, sir. In the Bahamas, we usually know who did it—everyone knows who did it. The guilty party is usually a husband who kills his wife or the ‘other’ man. Things of that nature.”
“Were there no witnesses?” the Duchess asked.
“No ma’am, in the sense that they were both asleep during the attack.”
“Both? Who was here besides Mr. Christie?” the Duke asked.
“There’s a maid, sir. She lives in the little house ’round the back. She’s a Haitian woman.”
“Is she here? Bring her to me, please.”
Laurete Ebalard had done what the white man had told her. She had coaxed Mr. Christie out of bed, and he had telephoned the police. The constables had questioned her and seemed satisfied that she knew nothing. After all, Mr. Christie had also claimed to have slept through the attack. Now the constable led her trembling before the governor himself—a man she knew had once been King of England.
“Does she speak English, Sergeant?” the Duke asked.
The woman nodded. “A little English, votre excellence.”
“Français, mademoiselle?” The Duke asked. French was mandatory among the royals. "Then let us speak in French. I can see that you are fearful.”
The sergeant later told his friends that the Duke questioned the Haitian woman in what sounded like French for more than a minute. He had no idea what they were saying, but it was damn curious.
Once the Duke had dismissed the Haitian woman, the sergeant gathered his courage to make a suggestion, something he and the chief constable had discussed while the latter attended the crime scene. “Sir, if I may, perhaps we should summon inspectors from Scotland Yard,” he said.
The Duke rounded on him. “Bloody nonsense, Sergeant. There’s a war on. We shall handle this case with our own resources. Make certain you pass that on to the chief constable. There shall be no call to the Yard.”
The Duke took his wife into the dining room for privacy. He fought back feelings of dread. “We need an arrest and we need a trial. We can’t have inspectors from London nosing around the island. Jesus, Wallis, that bloody medal has gone missing, that dreadful letter too. Not to mention, our dealings with Axel might be laid bare. This is a bloody nightmare.”
“Dear, what if you were to hire detectives from the States, sympathetic men who could be persuaded to get it right.”
“How would I go about finding ‘sympathetic’ detectives?”
“Do you remember those two Miami policemen assigned to our security detail when we went on our shopping trip last year?
“Those two poxy drunks? Brilliant! Wallis, you are a sly one. I will never stop loving you.”
“One more thing, dear…I think we should suggest a suspect to them. We should suggest they arrest Harry’s son-in-law. Harry and Freddy were not getting along, and now Freddy’s wife is about to inherit a fortune, so Freddy-as-killer has a veneer of plausibility. And as the sergeant said, Bahamians see homicide as a family affair, so a son-in-law accused of murder plays to their view of the world. Freddy is not popular in high circles here. He’s an unpopular foreigner with no relations on the island to rally behind him.”
“Horrible man. You don’t think Freddy really may have done it, do you?”
“Who cares, dear? Really. Let a jury decide. Guilty or innocent, our immediate problems will be solved.”
“Not entirely, Wallis. The German agent who delivered the package, Harry said he was a nigger from Haiti. Who knows? Maybe he’s the real killer and now has the goods on us. We must see that he’s eliminated regardless. We must get a message to Axel.”
Next: Hemingway disbands his “Crook Factory.” Sirpriz makes her escape. The Abwehr orders a killing.