Double Cross Blind

by Joel N. Ross

  She said it with such pleasure, he smiled again. The Eagle Corps was composed of American pilots who’d volunteered to serve in the RAF, in defiance of the Neutrality Act—and to hell with the isolationists back home.

  “Just regular army, miss,” he said. “Camel corps—infantry.”

  “An army of one, are you? Unless the States declared war last night.”

  “I drove to Canada and signed on the dotted line. I’m part of the Commonwealth now.”

  “So much for the American Colonial Uprising, then!”

  “The Revolutionary War,” he corrected sternly, and they all laughed, and his sense of dislocation was complete. The day was crisp and bright. The breeze was fresh on his face. He smiled at the girls and couldn’t hear what they were saying. He had nothing but urgency left, and even that was fading. At least he was able to pretend normalcy, to pass without suspicion. At least they’d not raised the alarm. They told him to take the number 16 bus to the 88, or the 12 all the way in. They told him they couldn’t buy Woodbines at the local tobacconist—he only sold to men—so they had to go twenty minutes in the morning for their Woodies.

  They explained what they’d been giggling about, an article in the newspaper. “Thirty-five girls in the City went through their hatboxes and keepsakes,” the brunette said. “And dug up all their old—”

  “Dig for victory!” the other girl said, giggling again.

  “—all their old love letters and donated them to salvage, and how many letters and how many masses of admirers must you have, even if there are thirty-five of you, before you’re able to make a dent in the war effort? Why, even Daph here wouldn’t be able to collect more than four or five. . . .”

  Daph shrieked a protest and Tom smiled, disconnected. He watched from a spot ten feet above as the girls led him five blocks, then pointed to a bus stop.

  “There’s your bus now,” the brunette said. “But it’s traveling away from the Rowansea. Are you sure that’s not where you’re going?”

  TOM GOT ON the train at Tooting Broadway. Someone suggested he change to the Piccadilly Line, so he did. There were crowds of mothers and children in the stations—ten thousand evacuees leaving London every week, and two thousand returning on the same tracks. They looked almost festive, and Tom caught himself smiling at a fresh-scrubbed face, a red ribbon tied in an elaborate bow.

  Instead of schoolbags, they held cardboard gas-mask boxes. Already there were fifteen thousand dead in London, twice that in the rest of England. First the day raids, then the night. Hunger and fear and mothers sending their children to live with strangers, and it was nothing more than everyday life. But there were traces of desperation in the fond farewells. The stiff upper lip was quavering—it made Tom fonder of the Brits; he saw Harriet’s strength in them, in their preference for the polite stupidity of courage.

  He was back beneath the same ocean gray sky under which he’d arrived in London last year, shipped from Canada with the better part of his company. He remembered the air-raid sirens, the Moaning Minnies, the distant German bombers flying straight and slow, leaving hazy trails in their wakes to expand and disappear. He remembered the streaks of white caught by an interlacing cloud, the diving and climbing night fighters of the defending RAF. Faint blueprints sketched in smoke and exhaust, hanging above London’s glow of fire. The distant geometry had seemed delphic, scribed in metal and moxie five thousand feet above the earth.

  Tom had said as much to his squad, and they’d laughed with an edge of unease, and called him “Quiz Kelly.” They preferred “Tommy Gun.” When Manny from Montreal had responded to an eruption of flatulence by shouting, “Gas mask,” that was the pinnacle of humor. They’d laughed like children.

  It had been November when he’d last seen this gunmetal sky. Was it November again? December? He bent forward in his seat to read the date on an old woman’s newspaper. Monday, December 1, 1941. There. One solid fact: December 1, 1941.

  He heard someone say, “Hyde Park Corner,” and he was suddenly standing, swaying with the motion of the train. He was in the city proper now. The last time he’d been here, Harriet’s hand had rested softly on his arm. He could still feel her fingers.

  He walked up Piccadilly. He knew where Earl lived. Knew his home address.

  He passed Apsley House. Passed a stately mansion with its windows blown out, roof gone, walls blackened and truncated. Beyond it, the In and Out Club was bloodied but unbowed, its structure shored up with wooden scaffolding. Tom paused. He felt a certain kinship. Then he took a left on White Horse Street, the tension back between his shoulder blades, his bandaged hand throbbing.

  Shepherd Market was a narrow tangle of lanes. Between Curzon Street and Piccadilly, it was a cramped and shabby maze, with creaking old buildings and humble shops. The house was a pretty little redbrick mews, one step better than its neighbors. Two stories, with an angled roof, and no shop downstairs—two stumpy chimneys. His and hers. The front door sported a neat pile of sandbags for a welcome mat. The windows were crossed with sticky white tape against explosions. The blackouts were open, and the curtains were light and feminine.

  The house sat behind a low iron fence. He swung the gate open. Just knock and enter? He didn’t have a gun. It was knock or break a window, or go through the garden—he knew there’d be a garden, well tended, well loved. He lifted his left hand, and a woman’s voice sang out from the patch of shrubbery next door. “Nobody home, I’m afraid.” She was an elderly, elfin woman with a red kerchief tied round her hair and a tin watering can swinging in her knobby hands.

  “Yeah.” Of course nobody was home. Did he think Earl would be taking the day off? “He must be at the office.”

  “That would be the American embassy, then,” the woman said. “He’s second assistant to the undersecretary of piffledoggery, I believe. And she a FANY, of course.” That was the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, women who drove ambulances and supply trucks—and worked at the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, though few knew it existed. “Lovely young lady, and I use the term advisedly. Neither is here at the moment. She may be staying with his lordship. Lord Chilton has a— Pardon?”

  “No. Did I say something?”

  “I should think you did.”

  “Well, Chilton.”

  “Indeed.” She set the watering can at her feet. “And he—I mean her husband, not her father—often travels on business. I’ve been keeping an eye out, because one can’t be too careful in these days—except of course one can, don’t you agree? Too much care is as dangerous as too little. God bless the king for refusing to retreat to Windsor—and the queen, too. They told her to leave, you know.”

  “Nobody tells me anything,” he said, backing through the gate.

  “Oh!” she said in sudden recognition. “You look quite like him. I’d have seen it before, but my eyes aren’t what they once were.”

  “Nothing is,” Tom said.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  MORNING, DECEMBER 1, 1941

  RUPERT DAVIES-FRANK was sitting in the office of the governor of Rowansea Royal Hospital, trying not to kill the messenger. “He’s gone?” he asked. “Between the time I rang last night and arrived this morning?”

  “He was washing up for your visit,” the governor said. “He accosted a nurse.”

  “How long ago did he escape?”

  “Escape?” The governor’s bushy eyebrows rose. “Not at all. Prisoners escape. But one’s patients? Surely not.”

  Davies-Frank waited, his expression unchanged. If he didn’t find Sergeant Wall today, the whole thing would come tumbling down.

  “However,” the governor said, “he did, hrm, depart. Or decamp.”

  “Exactly how long ago did he depart or decamp?”

  “Not thirty minutes.”

  “Did he mention a destination?”

  “Not that I’m aware. I h
aven’t spoken with Mr. MacGovern, however—the nurse.”

  “His injuries aren’t severe, I hope?”

  “More startled than injured. He’s under observation now.”

  “I’ll need to speak with him. And with anyone else in Sergeant Wall’s recent company.” A thought occurred to Davies-Frank. “Did the news of my visit trigger his departure? He didn’t leave until he’d heard I was coming?”

  “It seems he simply took advantage of the break in routine. Your visit wasn’t the cause, so to speak, but the opportunity. The last time Mr. Wall left us, he—”

  “The last time?” That bit of information hadn’t been in the hastily compiled report Davies-Frank had skimmed at midnight. “He’s done this before?”

  “Mr. Wall had a time of it in Greece. Rather torn up when he arrived, and not just physically.”

  “And he decamped?”

  The governor nodded. “Not long after he arrived. He had six months of combat. Mr. Wall was a squad leader and the only surviving—”

  “How long was he gone? No—where was he found?”

  The governor opened a tabbed file on his desk. “Have to check. There was talk of returning him to the States after the general evacuation of Crete. But he’s governed by the Army Act, and—”

  “Governor.” Davies-Frank’s tone was mild. “I need to know where he went, and I need to know it now.”

  “Almost have my finger on it.” The governor flipped through the pages. “You’re aware of his fixation?”

  Davies-Frank shook his head, but before he could speak, the governor prodded the file with a thick finger. “Ah! He was apprehended outside Burnham Chase. Lord Chilton’s home. He’d already visited Shepherd Market, where—”

  Davies-Frank didn’t need to hear more. Wall’s fixation, of course. Tom Wall was hunting Earl. Well, he wasn’t the only one.

  “I need your phone, Governor. Your office, as well . . .” Davies-Frank eased the governor from the room and placed the call. “Is Highcastle in? . . . Find him and tell him Wall’s gone. Escaped less than an hour ago. . . . Yes, in fact I do know—he’s after Earl. No, catching Sergeant Wall shouldn’t prove difficult. But using him . . .” Davies-Frank shook his head. Using Wall against Sondegger was using a housefly against a spider. “We need to get him to Hennessey before our guest changes his mind. Bring Mr. Tipcoe in. Tell him to jolly the guest along until we— What?”

  The case officer explained. More news. More nightmare.

  “Tipcoe did what?” Davies-Frank’s stomach turned sour. “When?”

  Good God. Sondegger was inhuman. Davies-Frank pressed the heel of his hand to his temple. The Nazi’s only trick was convincing them of his power; the rest was guile and artifice. Still, the artifice was murderously effective. Though it shamed him, Davies-Frank always spent two minutes in silent preparation before entering the room in which Dietrich Sondegger was chained, steeling himself to face the pale blue eyes and rhythmic droning voice.

  “Tell Special Branch to go easy on Tipcoe,” he said. “Extenuating circumstances . . .”

  He exhaled and loosened his white-knuckled grip on the phone. He was a man who heeded his instincts, and his instincts were telling him that everything was falling apart.

  The call had come last night: Sondegger would reveal his secrets, but only to one man. Davies-Frank had stood from dinner, put the phone to his ear, and turned from a husband and father into a dark priest in search of a virgin sacrifice. He tried to keep family time sacred; he treasured his evenings with Joan and the twins, not only for them but for himself, as well. Duplicity was his job, but the instant he let it seep into his home, he was lost. Sitting at dinner and listening to his family squabble was what enabled him to go on. Then the call came, and with it came the shrill, unsettling instinct: The center would not hold.

  No. It would hold. He’d hold the bloody thing together with his own two hands. He told the case officer to forget Tipcoe. “We need Tom Wall. Inform the Yard, the Home Guard. . . . Just bring the bastard in—it’s urgent. I’ll stay here. I’ve a file to read.”

  He’d need to speak to the patients, too, and the staff. He was grasping at straws—and of all possible straws, Tom Wall seemed the most brittle, the most inclined to burst into flames at the touch of a spark.

  TOM RECOGNIZED the buildings. Grosvenor Square—they called it “Little America,” in honor of the U.S. embassy. He knew what he had to do, but he didn’t have a gun. He could close his eyes and remember the weight of a weapon. He could feel the heat pounding off his BAR, scorching his face and his neck, his arms aching and sweat burning his eyes.

  He zigzagged slowly toward the embassy. He knelt, and when he stood again, he was holding a shattered brick—three-quarters of a brick, with one edge sheared off. It was a red stone knife. He liked its heft.

  He sat on a bench. He had to clear the cobwebs from his mind, but the cobwebs were the only thing holding it together. After a long, blank pause, he stood and headed for the embassy. He nodded to the guards and glanced at the register. He couldn’t find Earl’s name, but he found his department. A frontal assault? Yeah. All he could manage was simple, and simple was always best.

  Things turned complicated fast. He achieved the second floor without trouble, his ID a combination of counterfeit confidence and authentic accent. A woman was sitting at a long desk beside a flight of carpeted stairs. Tom said he was there to speak with Earl.

  “Have you an appointment?” she asked.

  “No—it’s family business.”

  Something changed in her face. “You’re his . . .”

  “Brother.”

  She waved him toward an upholstered bench. “One moment.”

  “It’s urgent,” he said.

  “Please. If you’d take a seat.”

  “Could you— Which office is his?” He tried an apologetic smile. “I’ll be in and out before you know it.”

  She pulled a binder from her desk. “I’ll ring up and—”

  “That the embassy directory?” He grabbed the binder and found Earl’s name as the receptionist loudly protested. Assistant to a special consul named Bloomgaard. Sure he was. Third floor. At least that was probably true. Tom touched the brick in his pocket, turned to the stairs.

  At Bloomgaard’s office, the girl said he was expected. It would’ve bothered him, but all he needed was five seconds alone with Earl. Five seconds, and for the sharp edge of brick to fall true.

  “Go right in,” the girl said.

  Bloomgaard’s office was plush for wartime. There was a red flower on the desk in a green glass vase. The flower had shed petals, like drops of blood, onto the glossy dark wood.

  “Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin.” Bloomgaard gestured Tom into a seat. “Senators Wheeler, Taft, Nye, and Vandenberg. Square-shooting patriotic Americans, every last one against U.S. intervention in the war. Would you like to hear more?”

  “I’d like to see Earl.”

  “How about a simple majority of Americans? And senators, too—even if they are too lily-livered to stand against Roosevelt. Hell, even he couldn’t get reelected without his pledge: ‘No American boys will fight in foreign wars.’ That’s what your President Rosenfeld promised. My job, the job of every thinking person in the diplomatic service, is to keep that pledge from being a lie.”

  What the hell was he saying? Did Bloomgaard think they were arguing politics? “I told your secretary I wanted Earl,” Tom said. “Not a civics lesson.”

  “You wanted him before, and you know what it bought you.”

  But he didn’t know. It was a distant blur. Had he wanted Earl before? When he’d returned from Crete, had he gone after Earl? He couldn’t draw a line around his thoughts—the battles, the surgery, the hours spent praying for sleep. He remembered a bread knife with a serrated blade. If he’d come, he’d failed. Earl had walked awa
y.

  Maybe Tom should tell Bloomgaard what he knew. The airfield on Crete, Earl’s treachery. The squad wiped out in a spray of blood, killed by a betrayal deadlier than the Nazi enfilade. Hanner the croot, Manny from Montreal. Rosenblatt and camp-happy Lifton and O’Rourke and Tardieu.

  Should he tell Bloomgaard? He knew the man was stalling, talking about President Rosenfeld and Charles Lindbergh, but didn’t know why. Was it in preparation for Earl’s arrival, or to cover his escape? More likely than not, Bloomgaard was in it with Earl. You didn’t have to cast a wide net to catch a fascist in the U.S. embassy. The rich appointed men in their richly appointed rooms, old-fashioned American patriots, pro-Franco, pro-Mussolini, pro-Hitler.

  “. . . least you fight your own battles,” Bloomgaard was saying. “I’ll give you that. Britons, Jews, and Rosenfeld, that’s who want our boys in this war. Listen to William Regnery, listen to the America First Committee—hell, listen to the fucking polls. Seventy percent of our fellow countrymen say keep the hell out of the war.”

  “What was the question?” Tom asked. “‘Do you want your son to die in Europe?’”

  “That’s not me; that’s Gallup—this June. Seven out of ten. Now, one out of five say Hitler’s doing a fine job. One in three say the Jew gets what he deserves, and one in ten say we ought to give it to him, too.”

  “You’re a dumb fuck,” Tom said conversationally from behind a veil of fatigue. All he wanted was Earl. “You work for Winant, or Kennedy?”

  Joe Kennedy, the previous U.S. ambassador, had denounced “Polish intransigence” against the Nazis and called Britain “doomed” and a “lost cause.” Democracy was finished in England, he’d said, and probably in the United States, too. Roosevelt fired his ass, and none too soon.

  “I’m a lifer,” Bloomgaard said. “I work for lifers. Roosevelt can’t lead America into a war nobody wants, so he drags us kicking and screaming. Unlike some, so eager to fight that they slip into Canada to serve in a foreign army, like a spade escaped from a plantation. Except spades are black—these men, they’re Red.”