An American Spy

by An American Spy (retail) (epub)

  ‘You know him?’ asked Jane.

  ‘I had the unfortunate experience of going to the same private school with him in California. His old man and mine were in bed together.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Satchell, his bushy little eyebrows disappearing into his forehead.

  ‘Just a saying,’ said Dundee.

  ‘I’m assuming the Army is going to pay for the damages here,’ said Satchell. It wasn’t a question.

  Dundee shrugged. ‘Put in a requisition,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’ll get lucky.’

  ‘Requisition to whom?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Dundee, shrugging again. ‘I’m just a lawyer.’ He went to the tables lined up against the back wall and ran his hand across the smooth wooden surfaces. Jane used the Leica. Dundee lifted his hand and held it palm up towards Jane. ‘What does that look like to you?’ he asked. Jane took several photographs of the shiny grit on his hand.

  ‘Gold,’ she said.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Colonel Charles Danby, First Infantry Division, First Quartermaster’s Company, dressed in the uniform of an Army corporal, the stripes removed from the sleeves and a large white P for ‘prisoner’ stitched onto his back, sat on his haunches and stared at the large vegetable patch he was tending. The patch had been laid out against the west wall of the old prison and got plenty of sun on the days when there was any sun in this godforsaken country. The carrots seemed to be doing especially well. Tending the vegetables was rated highly as far as jobs in the prison went, since it got him out into the fresh air more than the standard two hours a day, but it was also an indulgence on his part since he was officially only a corporal and new to the place at that. It was the kind of thing that would make others at Shepton Mallet suspicious, staff and inmates alike. On the other hand, he wasn’t planning on being here much longer. He fished around in the pocket of his shirt, pulled out a cigarette and a book of matches, and lit up, dragging deeply. A shadow suddenly fell across the vegetable patch. Out of the corner of his eye he noted a highly polished boot with a brilliantly whitened high-top gaiter attached. He kept smoking his cigarette and stared out at his vegetables, balancing himself lightly on the small trowel in his hand. There was a faint thudding sound as a large cast-iron key hit the ground by the trowel. Danby used the trowel to cover it.

  ‘It’s all set,’ said a voice. ‘Anytime after the shift change at midnight. The key will get you into the old women’s section.’

  ‘Lot of old women in the old women’s section?’ Danby joked.

  The voice ignored him. ‘People who need to be paid off have been given the word… sir.’

  ‘Good,’ said Danby. ‘What about transport?’

  ‘Ready and waiting, just the way you ordered.’ The gaitered boot swivelled and the shadow disappeared from the vegetable patch. Danby put down the trowel and picked up a handful of the loamy soil, the key hidden within his fist. He let the soil trickle through his fingers until all that was left was the key. He climbed to his feet and slipped the key into his pocket.

  Danby looked around at the bleak, stone perimeter of the prison. It had been an interesting experience but not something he’d like to repeat. He thought about having a nice glass of single malt. By this time tomorrow he’d be able to have his fill. He looked out at the rows of vegetables and thought about the Okie stoop labor he used to pick his fields back home. They might as well be prisoners here; at least that way they got to eat what they grew.

  He dropped the butt of his cigarette and ground it out with the toe of his scuffed brown shoe. He turned then and walked towards the high oak door that led back into the prison. There were half a dozen MPs in the yard. All of them with polished boots and chalk white gaiters. He wondered which of them had given him the key; they all looked exactly the same. He smiled. That was one of the best things about armies and soldiers and wars. Everything and everyone looked the same; you could hide a million trees and no one would see anything but the forest.

  Chapter Nine

  Jane stood in the mill-race stream a little down from where she’d fished before. Dundee was ten feet behind her, perched on a large boulder, smoking a cigarette. They’d been back in Swan Hill for an hour but had spoken little about the day’s events. Dundee’s face had been dark as a storm cloud all the way back from Letchworth and his expression hadn’t done much to encourage anything but the lightest and most inane of conversations. She was surprised when he offered to accompany her down to the fishing stream; keeping her company didn’t seem as though it would be high on his list of priorities.

  She was using the Granger reel again, with a light line and a small-hooked Coachman fly, not much bigger than the midge it was designed to imitate. She flicked the line with a bare twitch of her wrist and watched as it sailed out into the current and began moving downstream, the line trailing behind it almost invisible in the dusky light. Jane finally decided it was time to do some fishing in Major Lucas Dundee’s thought processes.

  ‘So who’s this Danby guy?’ she asked. ‘You went white as a sheet when Satchell mentioned his name.’ She paused and looked back over her shoulder. ‘He a friend of yours?’

  Dundee flicked the butt of his cigarette into the stream and Jane watched, astounded, as a fish rose to take it, then spit it out. It occurred to her that she could invent a wet fly and call it a Du Maurier and probably do pretty well with it.

  ‘I’d hardly call him a friend.’ The major took out another cigarette and lit it. Jane reeled in the Coachman. ‘Do you ever actually catch anything?’ he asked. ‘We’ve been here for almost an hour and you haven’t had so much as a nibble.’

  ‘Fly fishing is about patience or at least that’s what my friend Birdwell says. And you’re trying to change the subject.’ Carrying the rod and reel high she waded out of the hip-deep water and sat herself down on the boulder beside Dundee. He handed her a cigarette and lit it for her. They both stared out over the placid, quietly burbling water. In the fading light she could hear vespers chiming from the church at the edge of the village.

  ‘Charles Danby,’ Jane said. ‘Any relation to the Danby with his name all over everything?’

  Dundee nodded. ‘Charles Danby. Son of Cornelius Danby, owner of the Danby Trust Bank, owner of Danby Oranges, owner of Danby Cartage, owner of Danby Lines, with twelve cargo ships and god only knows how many freight cars in its fleet of vehicles. What my old man doesn’t own in California, Cornelius Danby does and Charlie is his only son and heir. Corney’s wife died early on of some kind of mental disease, which everyone knew meant she drowned herself in the ornamental goldfish pool. The daughter, Grace, didn’t make it much past eighteen. She drank like the fish her mother drowned with and drove her car off a cliff an hour north of Los Angeles near a place called Castaic.’

  ‘Where the Saint Francis Dam collapsed.’

  ‘That’s the place.’

  ‘So Charlie was the only one left.’

  ‘One too many for Cornelius, at least if you believe Charlie. He sent him off to the Bain Academy about the same time my old man sent me to the same place. We spent four years learning how to ride horses and beat the living hell out of each other in the boxing ring.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘He did, mostly. He was a couple of inches taller and he had longer arms. Not to mention the fact that he took it all seriously.’

  ‘Took what seriously?’

  ‘Competition. He had to be the best, no matter what it was and no matter what it took.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Hit below the belt if the referee wasn’t watching. He cheated if it suited him, which it usually did, lied all the time, blamed things on other kids, beat up kids smaller or weaker than him. Bullied.’

  ‘And he got away with it?’

  ‘The library at Bain is called Cornelius Danby Hall.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jane. She flipped her butt out into the stream but nothing rose. Maybe it was in the flicking, not the butt itself.
‘Go on.’

  ‘We both went to West Point. At the end of it all he took a commission rather than go back to work for his old man. I went to Stanford Law. I was a cop and an assistant D.A. in Los Angeles for a while and then, when it looked like there was going to be a war, I enlisted and joined the Judge Advocate General’s office. I guess Charlie had been in long enough to make lieutenant colonel. Either that or his old man bought the rank for him.’ Dundee shook his head. ‘Quartermaster. Jesus! That’s like giving a kid the key to a candy store.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s probably hip-deep in some kind of black-market deal and that poor son of a bitch by the railway tracks got in his way.’

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘He’s a legitimate part of my investigation now. I’ll track him down, see where all this leads.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  ‘You don’t have anything to do with it,’ Dundee said abruptly.

  ‘I don’t get you,’ said Jane. ‘It sounds as though you’re brushing me off.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m doing.’

  ‘Why? Because I fly fish?’

  ‘Because you’re a journalist. A correspondent. You take pictures and you write stories. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing JAG wants and I don’t think it’s the kind of thing the Army wants, period.’

  ‘You think if this gets out it’ll be too embarrassing for the generals?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Look, Major, I’ve been involved in a couple of very sticky stories when it comes to things the big guys would like to sweep under the rug. That’s why they sent me to this little bucolic backwater, complete with trout streams and moo-cows. They’re trying to sweep me under the rug, or at the very least put me in a place where I can’t do any damage. I think they did the same thing to you. Like you said, your old man might have had something to do with it as well.’

  ‘That doesn’t have anything to do with it.’

  ‘Then you’re not thinking, Major. You need me.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You said this Danby owns the half of California your old man doesn’t.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what happens if you do track him down and you do prove he was part of this guy getting murdered, or that he’s behind some blackmail ring or gold smuggling operation or whatever it is. He has power. His old man can pull strings. He’s going to get away with it unless you have someone like me to independently blow the whistle. I’m your guarantee.’

  Dundee looked at her for a long moment as the shadows continued to gather over the stream. Dark against the fading light of the sky overhead, a nighthawk swooped and boomed, chasing some invisible insect.

  ‘Call me Lucas,’ he said.

  She took another smoke out of the pack and he lit it for her. She took a long drag then sighed. ‘Call me an idiot for getting involved in a crazy stunt like this.’

  ‘It could get even crazier,’ Dundee warned. ‘Danby’s no angel.’

  Jane shrugged the warning off. ‘Crazy makes a good story,’ she said. ‘Better pictures too.’

  * * *

  Together they walked up the hill to the gates of Strathmere. Jane had her hip waders half jammed into her empty fish creel and carried the leather tube holding her reel across her back like a quiver. She paused at the columns and looked up at the mad-eyed horse that capped each one.

  ‘So I guess this is what we’re fighting for,’ she said quietly. She shook her head and quoted the inscription over the front entrance of the main house by rote: ‘Quaesita Marte Tuenda Arte. A dying way of life lived by people like the Potties and a dead language on top of that. I mean, who needs Latin?’

  Dundee pushed open one of the squeaky, rusty old gates to give them space to pass through. ‘Louis B. Mayer for one.’ He grinned. ‘Ars Gratia Artis. Art for the sake of Art. And you’d be surprised how alive it is. The law is full of it. Habeas corpus, corpus delecti, modus operandi, ex parte. Its value is in its absolute precision. Each word has a specific and singular meaning so no one gets confused or says they got confused at some later date.’

  ‘Thank you, Professor Dundee.’

  ‘And if it hadn’t been for people like the Potties the Germans probably would have won the First World War.’

  ‘And if it hadn’t been for people like the Potties a couple of hundred years ago we wouldn’t have gotten so pissed off and we might not have started the American Revolution.’

  ‘Touché,’ said Dundee. They slipped through the gates and headed up the overgrown track that led to the main house. A few minutes later, after a look of extreme consternation directed towards Jane’s rubber boots, Bunter the butler let them into the house.

  ‘There is a visitor, sir,’ said Bunter softly as Jane took off her boots and hung her creel on the hall hatstand.

  ‘Anybody interesting?’ asked Dundee.

  ‘He says his name is Occleshaw, sir. Roy Occleshaw. A chief inspector from Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Where have you stashed him?’ Jane asked.

  ‘He is in the drawing room, madam. The Mrs Pottingers are giving him tea, I believe. Miss Polly is also in attendance.’

  ‘How nice,’ said Dundee. ‘Lead on, Bunter old man. Let’s see this policeman of yours.’

  ‘I can assure you, sir, he is not one of my policemen,’ the butler responded haughtily. ‘In fact, I would go so far as to say that he is of the… lower classes.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Jane sighed. She winked at Dundee and muttered under her breath, ‘Like I said, this is the kind of thing that starts revolutions.’

  They followed the butler up the short set of steps to the vestibule, then across the open area with the staircase. Finally, Bunter theatrically swung open the high, ornately carved double doors, then took two steps forward and one to the left.

  ‘Major Lucas Dundee and Miss Jane Todd,’ he announced, his voice booming. Everyone in the room looked up, including a thick man in a brown suit. Spotting Jane, he stood up. He was in his late forties, his dark hair slicked down with some sort of oily tonic like Wildroot. He’d been using it for so long it had stained the collar of his suit jacket as well as that of his shirt. The man was wearing a bright blue bow tie underneath a broadening chin. His mouth was small, with unfortunate, cupid-like lips and he had a drinker’s slightly bulbous nose. The small dark eyes matched the mouth and, even without looking for a ring on his finger, Jane knew he was unmarried. No man’s wife would let his eyebrows, nose and ear hair go untrimmed or sew on a brown middle button for his white shirt and too small for the buttonhole to boot. She hated to think it but maybe Bunter hadn’t been so far off the mark after all.

  ‘This is Chief Inspector Occleshaw of Scotland Yard,’ said Alice Pottinger. She flashed a brief smile at Jane and Dundee then nodded towards the tea tray on the table in front of her.

  ‘There’s biscuits as well,’ said Annabel.

  ‘Not as many as there were before the arrival of the chief inspector,’ Polly grumbled, seated on the far side of the room, a stenographer’s notebook in her lap.

  ‘Nothing for me thanks,’ said Dundee, keeping his eyes on Occleshaw. ‘What can I do for you, Inspector?’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector,’ Occleshaw corrected.

  ‘Then you must know my friend Morris,’ said Jane, sinking into one of the drawing room armchairs. She was liking Detective Chief Inspector Occleshaw less by the minute.

  ‘Morris?’ said Occleshaw, a little sourly. ‘Sounds like a Jewish name.’

  ‘Black,’ said Jane, ignoring the aside. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Morris Black, Scotland Yard C.I.D. Same rank as you.’

  ‘’Fraid I don’t know him.’

  ‘Odd.’

  ‘Yard’s a big place, madam. Not surprising really.’

  ‘I suppose not. He was chiefly involved with murder cases.’

  ‘I see, ma’am,’ Occleshaw answered, although clearly he didn’t. In fac
t, he was looking quite uncomfortable.

  ‘Maybe we should see your warrant card,’ said Jane, a faint suspicion stirring.

  ‘What’s a Yank like you know about warrant cards?’ Occleshaw asked. Alice Pottinger eased a small dark biscuit from the plate on the tea tray and bit into it.

  ‘Hardly polite to call her a Yank, Detective,’ said Alice Pottinger. ‘Rather like calling you a split or a copper, don’t you think?’ She turned around in her seat and gave Jane a broad wink. ‘Or a Limey for that matter.’

  Occleshaw stared at the old woman, astonished. Alice took another bite of her biscuit and then smiled, sweeping invisible crumbs from her lap. ‘Dear me, Detective, my sister and I may be old but our lives haven’t been as sheltered as one might think.’

  ‘By no means,’ her sister Annabel put in.

  ‘Maybe Jane’s right,’ said Dundee. He sat down and lit a cigarette. ‘Maybe we should see some identification.’

  ‘Not with civilians about,’ Occleshaw answered.

  ‘Why?’ asked Dundee. ‘Are you about to divulge state secrets?’

  ‘I need to speak with you alone.’

  ‘Well, you’re not going to.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist, Major. And I will have to ask that young lady to put away her notebook as well.’

  ‘Insist away then,’ said Dundee. ‘I’m a member of the United States Judge Advocate General’s office. You have neither authority nor jurisdiction over anything I do. A fact you are well aware of.’

  ‘Nevertheless…’

  ‘Nevertheless nothing. Spit it out or go away,’ said Dundee.

  Alice Pottinger finished off her biscuit and went through her brief crumb-brushing routine again. She chewed and swallowed. ‘I believe he’s telling you to bugger off,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Annabel. ‘I believe the appropriate American colloquialism is “piss or get off the pot.”’