Chapter 36
The previous night, Max had helped Eve locate several more octopuses and another clock for the list. There were just eleven octopuses and four clocks to go now.
During their search, Eve had shown Max the octopus sculpture she’d told him about too, the one with the hook on its head that he had apparently travelled through time to deliver to her himself.
There was something maddeningly, infuriatingly familiar about it, as if he had seen it many times before, yet he couldn’t place where.
And although they searched the hotel together, they found no place where it might conceivably belong.
They’d made no firm arrangement about where they would meet the next day, so Max found himself heading to the Music Room—a place he had returned to several times since his arrival.
It contained a gramophone and a vast number of records, but he was more interested in the music boxes.
They lined the shelves in every conceivable design, from enamelled musical powder compacts and Reuge singing birds to golden ormolu musical clocks and shimmering Bakelite boxes in geometric panels of ruby and pearl.
As with the hotel walls, there was a great deal of empty space on the shelves.
Some items in the collection were clearly missing.
Max had listened to all the music in the boxes that remained, and none could claim to be the most beautiful in the world or even come close to such an absurd standard.
But there was one that he’d returned to several times now.
All gleaming golden wood, it was an Italian musical lipstick box by Lador.
Once wound, the six glossy doors opened out and spun around the core in a slow circle, showing off the brass lipstick holders nestled into their red velvet linings.
At the very centre was a small ornamental mirror.
He wound this music box now and marvelled at the perfect grace of the mechanism as it opened out and started to spin.
The box played a rendition of “Valzer delle candele”—or “Auld Lang Syne” as it was better known back home: For the sake of old times.
Max loved the tune, but it made him ache inside as well.
There were too many old times that were gone, and gone for good, and it hurt to remember them and the friends and family he’d never meet again.
He took a deep breath as the song played on.
Some days Max didn’t want to forget, but there were times when he couldn’t bear to remember either.
Yet this was the music box that he had wound over and over again.
The tiny mirror at the centre reflected back a small fragment of the room, but the image was permanently interrupted by the revolving carousel of doors.
Max saw Anna, though, when she appeared behind him, her scarlet dress catching his eye in the glass.
“That was one of my mother’s favourites,” she remarked. “She always kept it on her dressing table.”
“Did she mind?” Max asked without turning around.
“About?”
He shrugged. “All of it, I suppose. The fact that she was hidden away in Nikolas Roth’s shadow. The fact that her husband was sending flowers to another woman.”
“What other woman?”
“The VAD who took care of me when I was last in the hotel.” He deliberately did not mention her name. “Your father sent her flowers, every week.”
Anna lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t suppose any wife would much like her husband sending flowers to another woman.” But there was something oddly smug in her gaze that set his teeth on edge.
“No, I don’t suppose they would. You told us that night that it was Nikolas Roth who suddenly wanted to see Eve, but that was a lie, wasn’t it? It was his wife who sent for her.”
“It was time for her to check out.”
“And you’re angry that she came back, is that it? Is that the reason for the charade?”
Anna slowly shook her head. “Why should I be angry? I wanted her to come back. It’s what I’ve been waiting for my whole life.”
“Then why did you pretend that you didn’t know her?”
“Well, I don’t,” Anna said with a shrug. “Not really.”
I desperately need your help….
The words from Eve’s postcard were burned into his mind.
Please come to the White Octopus at once….
He saw Anna as a girl back in 1918. The snow melting on her boots, that strange expression on her face as she summoned Eve back to the hotel, and that was it—the last time he saw Eve Shaw until she walked into the Palm Bar seventeen years later in that extraordinary black-and-gold dress.
His brain ached with the riddle of it all, of trying to assemble all the pieces in the correct order to work out what happened to Eve, and when it happened, and what could be done about it.
Could he force or frighten the truth out of Anna?
The question appeared unbidden and unwelcome in his mind.
But, after all, why not? He already knew that he was a violent man; he must be to have killed so many people.
He was much bigger and stronger than Anna and they were alone in the room.
What other options were there? He’d searched every corner of the hotel, questioned every member of staff, even found Eve herself. Yet still hadn’t found her—not really.
He turned around from the music box. Took a step closer to Anna. “Tell me the truth,” he said in a low voice. “What happened to Eve in this hotel? And why are you lying about it?”
“Maybe it isn’t me who’s lying,” Anna replied, watching him carefully. “Maybe it’s Eve. Maybe that postcard she sent you was a fiction. A ruse to bring you here. Maybe I have done nothing wrong at all.”
He felt it, then, that urge to grab her, to hurt her and scare her and break his way through to the truth, no matter the consequences.
“You’ve got it all wrong, you know,” Anna said softly. She really did look so very much like Eve. They could almost have been sisters.
“I won’t check out,” Max said. “Not until I’ve done what I came here to do.”
Anna smiled, just slightly. “Mr. Everly,” she replied, looking him right in the eye, a hint of sadness in her voice. “You won’t be checking out of the White Octopus at all.”
Behind them, the Lador music box skipped a note; “Auld Lang Syne” stuttered to a halt and was replaced with a different song—one Max knew very well because he was the one who had composed it.
In fact, he’d written the song right here, when he was nineteen and recuperating in 1918, a song called “Afternight.”
He turned from Anna, walked over to the box.
He’d wound it several times while he’d been here, but it had only ever played “Auld Lang Syne” before, never this tune.
He looked into the small mirror at the centre, and with each turn of the doors it suddenly seemed to him that his reflection became a little older and a little older—just a trick of the eye to begin with, but then, no, it was more than that because his hair was thinning and turning white too until there was a very old man staring at him out of the glass with watery eyes.
Max jerked back, stumbling into the armchair behind him.
When he looked around at the doorway, he saw that Anna had gone, so she didn’t see the birds when they came out of the music box.
Sleek, and black, and glossy, a great flurry of dark wings that filled the room, and when Max put his face in his hands he could feel the icy bite of snow beneath his bare feet, and the warmth of Eve’s fingers as she reached for his on that wall, and the smoothness of the flailing white tentacles that dragged him back from the abyss so roughly that they left bruises on his skin.
Put all the devils into the music. That’s the best place for them….
The music stopped and he heard the soft click of the doors on the box closing. When he looked up, the birds were gone, and the Music Room was just as it had been before. He reached for his handkerchief, wiped away the sweat that had formed at his hairline.
Music can…it can make you feel a lot of things at once, Eve had said that day in the Fountain Room.
That was true anywhere, but Max thought it was nowhere truer than at the White Octopus Hotel.
He swept his eyes around the room one final time, looking for beaks and wings and the beady eyes that never stopped watching him, but there wasn’t so much as a feather.
He shouldn’t be here, he realised. He should be wherever Eve was.
He went out to the corridor and walked quickly through the various reception areas, eventually finding her looking at old photographs in the Reading Room.
Today she wore a bottle-green velvet dress, belted at the waist, with nude stockings and heels.
It occurred to Max then that whether she was wearing a silk evening gown or a starched nurse’s uniform, there was something effortlessly elegant about Eve Shaw.
In fact, she was elegant even when she wore no clothes at all… .
The memory flashed into his mind, unbidden and unwanted, of his hands gliding over her bare skin, her voice low and husky as she whispered his name in his ear.
Max…
He forced the image away, deliberately turned his attention to the walls instead, desperate for anything he might find there that could distract him from that day seventeen years ago.
Sometimes, a person did not think of you the way you thought of them.
Sometimes you forgot yourself for a while and entertained wild notions about happiness and love and family and home—even though you knew well enough that those simple joys were for other people and not for you.
Eve was currently looking at a photograph on the wall that had been taken of that final dinner in the Gatsby Room.
Twenty-year-old Max was there, third from the right, dressed in his lieutenant’s uniform.
Also at the table were the other servicemen who’d been interned with him.
And, finally, there was Mrs. Jones, the matron.
Everyone was there, except for Eve. Everyone was looking at the camera, except for Max.
He was staring down at his plate instead, eyes fixed upon the octopus crest on the lavender-grey porcelain as his mind blazed with the memory of what had just happened in the steam baths.
He remembered how, throughout the meal, he’d kept glancing at the door, hoping that Eve would appear.
But, of course, she never did, and the role of fourteenth guest was assigned to Cleo.
Matron’s voice echoed down the years to him: I can’t think what’s keeping Eve.
It’s my fault, Max wanted to say. I crossed the one line I wasn’t supposed to cross….
He’d glanced at the other men, wondering if they could tell that something had happened, but all anyone wanted to speak of at that dinner was the music box and that melody that spilled from it, the most beautiful song in the world….
“There you are,” Eve said now, looking at him with the different-coloured eyes that he had always found so bewitching. She pointed at the photo. “This is the dinner you talked about, isn’t it?”
Max nodded. “That’s it.”
He turned away from the photos to look at the opposite wall.
This, he saw, was occupied by a framed collection of old cigarette cards.
He recognised most of them and had many of these same cards back home in his London flat.
There was the Famous Escapes series from Carreras.
And over there the Ships’ Figureheads from John Player & Sons.
On the other wall, he saw Old Inns from Lloyds.
And beside that was the Women at War Work set from Black Cat cigarettes.
He recognised the porter, the lift attendant, and the tram conductor from his own collection.
Then he spotted the VAD. He’d never managed to find that card himself, although he’d searched for it.
The closest he’d come was the Red Cross nurse, but he’d always hoped to find the VAD one day.
Eve joined him. “There’s one missing,” she said, pointing at the single empty square at the bottom of the frame. The label beneath read: The Angel.
Max frowned. “That’s not right,” he said. “There wasn’t an angel. There were fifty cards in this set, not fifty-one. Someone got it wrong.”
“Maybe they did. Well, shall we head to the steam baths?”
“Breakfast first,” he insisted. He wasn’t especially hungry but felt the cowardly urge to delay the return to the steam baths for as long as possible.
“I heard one of the guests talking about an angel on a cigarette card earlier,” Eve said as they walked to the restaurant. “They said it was the object they were hoping to win in the scavenger hunt. Apparently, it has the power to save a person’s life.”
Max shrugged. He was thinking of the retreat from Mons and how the press had reported that there must have been angels protecting the British troops.
He thought of Hugo, the inventor of the Aviator, swearing that he’d once seen an angel beside him in no-man’s-land.
But it was not real, and life didn’t work like that.
“There are no angels,” he said. He spoke with more force than he’d intended to and glanced at Eve, hoping she wouldn’t think he’d snapped at her.
But she only shook her head and said, “No. I suppose there aren’t.”
After breakfast, it couldn’t be put off any longer and they made their way to the steam baths.
Max tried to suppress a shiver as they passed through the grand arched door.
They were provided with bathing suits and robes and shown to the wooden changing cubicles.
Regret prickled beneath his skin, but he did his best to keep his face neutral as he joined Eve outside and followed her into the frigidarium.