An American Spy

by An American Spy (retail) (epub)

  ‘There was four. One of them was in charge; you could tell that by the way he was dressed. Sharpish like, and modern, not from around here. Two of the other three were Irish, you could tell that, clear as glass.’

  ‘How?’ asked Dundee.

  ‘Because of their fookin’ accents, mind?’ said Gaffney, giving Dundee a withering look. Then he continued, ‘Like I said, two was Irish but I don’t rightly know about the third fellow. He looked English enough, or maybe American like you, but you can’t tell these days and he never once opened his mouth, don’t you know, to speak like.’

  ‘That’s it?’ asked Dundee.

  ‘No lad, not by half.’ He repositioned his pipe, magically brought a kitchen match into view and struck it on the edge of one yellowed, talon-like thumbnail. He sucked, wheezing, and then tossed the match away. The pipe stayed lit for a few seconds and then went out again. Gaffney didn’t seem to mind; he put it into the corner of his mouth again and continued his narrative. ‘Now, Maggie had a garden, lovely dafs in the spring, jonquils she called them. Always fookin’ daffodils, you arsk me, but what does an old grinder like me know about such? At any rate, Maggie had a garden, so you was expectin’ dirt, but those men – dirt! Shovels, picks, a wheelbarrow and all going in the front door, mind. Made no sense at all. Wrong kind of dirt, too. Dark stuff, not the dirt you get in a garden at all, at all.’

  ‘Ever talk to any of these gentlemen?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Oncst,’ said Gaffney. ‘The fourth man as I just recounted to you. Just to say good-day and nice weather for fishing. Tried to get a look inside the cottage, see what they were doing to old Mag’s place. One of the Irish stood in front though, wouldn’t let me see past him and Robbie Burns in the fancy suit – never any dirt on his hands, mind! He took me by the elbow, he did, all nice as you please, asking me all about the eels, and were they lampreys or were they true eels, but I knew what he was doing, he was leading me away from the cottage so I couldn’t see past him.’

  ‘Robbie Burns?’ said Jane.

  ‘Sure,’ said Gaffney. ‘Did I tell you he was a Scotsman?’ He paused, looked into the bowl of his pipe. He looked up again. ‘I forgot to tell you,’ he said. ‘Why it was he did no work, other than his fancy suit.’

  ‘Yes?’ prompted Dundee.

  The old man spit down into the dirt at his feet. ‘He only had one arm.’

  * * *

  A little more than twenty-four hours later in London’s King’s Cross Station, Dennis Patterson, a baggage hauler, was waiting for customers on that evening’s Robbie Burns to Glasgow and wondering if he’d get enough in tips to buy a single Guinness at McGillicuddy’s pub around the corner, let alone the three or four he craved. Not likely he thought, flipping through the pages of someone’s Daily Express, left behind on the bench outside the WC. He didn’t know who to blame – the Germans for starting the war or the Brits for using it as an excuse not to pay for a poor man’s beer.

  ‘You taking bags onto the Robbie Burns?’ said an American officer.

  ‘I am, I am,’ said Patterson, putting on his best Irish lilt.

  ‘Dundee, bedroom C, the Glasgow Express car. Miss Todd’s bag goes in bedroom D.’

  Patterson nodded. ‘Sure enough, sir. With pleasure.’

  He glanced at the pair. He was handsome enough but she was a bombshell, for sure and all, all legs and hair and eyes you could drown in. Everything his sainted mother would have found dangerous in a woman. A blonde Maureen O‘Sullivan you might say but one you could actually screw, not just look at like she was a painting in church, or one of the nuns too pretty for her habit but still a nun. He’d dreamed about a few of those in his youth, that was for sure. The Irishman took the luggage and stacked it on his cart, then tipped his hat. The officer handed him a pound note, smiled and turned away, taking the woman’s arm. They headed for the station restaurant.

  Patterson glanced up at the ancient clock suspended from the station ceiling. A little less than an hour until departure. More than enough time for the couple to have dinner and for him to make his telephone call. He pocketed the pound and went off whistling towards the telephone kiosk close to the main doors. His unit chief would be pleased with the news that Dundee was finally on the move. Patterson jammed his hand into his pocket and grasped the pound. A good evening after all. A good evening indeed.

  * * *

  Anthony Blunt – art connoisseur, Cambridge graduate, ardent though discreet homosexual, MI5 agent and communist spy in order of importance – led Colonel Charles Danby through the labyrinthine basement rooms of the Tate Gallery on the Thames Embankment while a desultory bombing raid took place overhead.

  ‘You enjoy art, Colonel Danby?’

  ‘Never really thought much about it.’

  ‘What do you think about?’

  ‘Money, mostly, and how to get it.’

  ‘Seems like a somewhat extraordinary line of thought during a war.’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘Nothing would surprise me anymore, Colonel.’ They stopped in front of an enormous painting propped up against one wall and covered with a huge tarpaulin. Blunt gripped one corner of the tarp with a long, delicate hand and pulled. The tarp slid off, revealing a giant canvas in a heavy, ornate frame. Danby stared at it in the dim light. Overhead, the ceiling shuddered as a bomb fell nearby. A faint sifting of hundred-year-old dust floated down over them. Blunt paid no attention. He stared at the painting and so did Danby.

  ‘The Great Day of His Wrath,’ murmured Blunt. The painting’s subject, in minute detail, appeared to be the end of the world, complete with tiny freight trains careening into bottomless pits, flares of primordial lightning, boulders the size of asteroids tumbling down from a boiling sky onto unfortunate hordes of terrified people below. ‘This is the kind of thing you say your people are working on?’

  ‘And yours,’ said Danby. ‘In the States they call it the Manhattan Project, even though it’s no longer confined to New York, and over here they call it Tube Alloys.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘You work for the Commies, Mr Blunt.’ Blunt raised his eyebrows. ‘My people have already figured that out even though yours haven’t… yet.’

  ‘That sounds rather like a threat.’

  ‘Not at all. Just a fact, Mr Blunt. Why don’t you cover up the crazy painting and go off to your commie bosses or whatever you do and find out how much Stalin will be willing to pay for something that would do that.’ He nodded at the picture, as he surreptitiously slipped a piece of paper with an outrageous sum of money written on it – the asking price. Blunt pocketed the paper without acknowledging its receipt.

  ‘He was mad, you know,’ Blunt murmured. ‘He eventually learned how to paint this sort of thing on glass, from behind. Inside out painting. He used to tour them across America. Mad John Martin. His brother was England’s foremost arsonist.’

  ‘Forget the history, Mr Blunt. Just get me an answer and soon. You’re not the only one who’s interested.’

  ‘Of course,’ said a nodding Blunt, never taking his eyes off the painting. Above them another bomb exploded. ‘Of course.’

  Danby looked at the slight, fey man with his long, delicate fingers, wondering if Blunt was as crazy as the painter or if he was simply looking into some terrible future.

  Chapter Twelve

  At 7:10 p.m. precisely, the Robbie Burns, pride of the Glasgow and South Western Railway, ‘The Golfer’s Line,’ moved off from the smoke- and steam-filled caverns of King’s Cross Station and began weaving its way through the blacked-out city of London, heading for the northern suburbs and the final freedom of the English countryside, its massive wheels thundering over the rails with a satisfying, monotonous sound that was so familiar to Jane. The train was the late-night version of the much more famous Flying Scotsman and covered much the same route, travelling almost due north to York, then veering slightly west and then north again, crossing into Scotland over the seventeenth-century arches of
the Tweed Bridge in the early hours of the morning, before steaming even farther north into Glasgow, arriving at eight thirty in the morning.

  The exterior of the train, famous for its striking, high-gloss red-and-black colour scheme, was now covered in a dull, non-reflective grey-green, the wheels and all other visible metal work coated with a black shine retardant. It was doubtful that any German bomber had either the range, the fuel or the interest in bombing a passenger train on its way to Scotland but the G&SWR wasn’t taking any chances.

  The interior of the train had been dealt with in much the same way. Every window was covered with thick, jet-black felt curtains to blot out any light and corridor illumination was dimmed by half during the hours of darkness, giving the public areas of the train a sombre, almost sinister look that kept most of the sleeping car passengers in their bedrooms or the dining car. Although the menu wasn’t as varied as it had been during peacetime, it was still possible to get a half-decent late dinner and an equally decent early breakfast.

  Jane sat in her bedroom, smoking a cigarette and enjoying the gentle, lurching movement of the train. She had her eyes closed, taking in the dozens of squeaks, rattles, sighs and groans that made up the background symphony of a train’s motion. Her father had worked the main line between New York and Boston and had enough seniority to bring along his kid every once in a while, and Jane had enjoyed every minute of every trip, thrilled by the gruff man’s attention and by the surging power of the train itself. This was different, certainly – she’d never ridden in a sleeping car back then, but if she kept her eyes squeezed shut and breathed deeply she could almost smell the faint tobacco-whiskey scent of her father’s skin and hear the gentle rasp of his laughter. Gone for over twenty-five years now, dead on the bloody, blasted wasteland of Passchendaele but still alive and echoing in the smells and sounds of another train, three thousand miles and an ocean away.

  The Robbie Burns lurched heavily over a set of points as it switched to a different line and Jane came out of her reverie. She took a puff on her cigarette and surveyed the room. A little on the old-fashioned side but nice. It was compact and snug, panelled in wood with most of the fittings in gleaming brass. The small sink and tap fitted into one corner were porcelain and there was actually a silk-tasseled bell pull by the pillow of the ship-style bunk that ran along the adjoining bulkhead wall. It occurred to her briefly that Dundee’s bed was only the thickness of that wooden panel away, a thought which she quickly banished; the last man to share her bed had disappeared into the never-never land of the British Secret Service, while almost getting her killed in the bombing of Pearl Harbor less than a year ago. The one before that had turned out to be a cold-blooded killer hell-bent on killing the king and queen of England and anyone else who got in his way. If this were the Brooklyn Dodgers, she would have been traded long ago with a batting average like that.

  She sighed and sat back in her chair, wishing she could take off the blackout curtains and look at the passing landscape. They’d be moving out of the city by now and the night before, in Swan Hill, she’d noticed that it was a full moon.

  Bomber’s Moon.

  Wasn’t that what they called it? So much for that idea. She didn’t much care for the idea of some train borne air-raid warden giving her hell in front of all the other passengers; not good for the American image, which was about to get a pie in the face if news of His Majesty’s bijoux getting scarpered got out.

  For the past twenty-four hours, virtually since leaving Shepton Mallet, she’d tried to get Dundee to discuss the theft and its implications but he’d barely talked to her. She sighed again; for the first time since that one freezing night in the Eskimo village in Greenland she was regretting her trip to England and her decision to become a war correspondent and a part-time OSS agent for Wild Bill goddamn Donovan.

  Sitting there in the swaying railway carriage, it suddenly occurred to her that it was Donovan who had put her onto Lucas Dundee in the first place. Maybe he’d known something about the possibility that the crown jewels might be in jeopardy and, if that was the case, that Lucas Alexander Decimus Dundee might be involved. She sighed for a third time and stubbed out her cigarette in the ornate silver ashtray fitted into the arm of the chair. She hadn’t heard anything directly yet but she knew that, one way or another, Donovan was going to expect a report pretty soon. She was damned if she knew what to tell her contact, or even who her contact was for that matter.

  She made a little snorting sound under her breath and lit another cigarette with her brand-new PX Zippo. She’d always thought of war as a black-and-white business with good guys and bad guys ranged against each other on opposite sides of a muddy field, the way it had been in her father’s day, but times had changed since she was a little girl; war was now a modern affair of lies and secrets and subterfuge, filled with skulking soldiers of the darkness and knife-in-the-back betrayal. She ached to tell Dundee about her job for Donovan and ached equally knowing that she couldn’t. She heard a light tapping at her door over the clatter of the wheels.

  ’‘Come in.’ Dundee at last. Maybe she could take him to the lounge and ply him with drink, get him to open up about the case.

  The fair-haired lawyer let himself into the little room, leaving the door slightly ajar behind him, and looked around for somewhere to sit. The only place was a small pull-down seat on a hinge under the window. He pulled it down, locked it in place and sat down gingerly, his hands on his knees. He kept his eye on the partially opened door.

  ‘You’re looking a little nervous,’ said Jane.

  ‘I’ve had the feeling we’ve been followed since Shepton Mallet,’ he said bluntly.

  Jane frowned. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Just a feeling.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Occleshaw’s people. Who else could it be?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Danby?’

  ‘Danby’s long gone,’ said Dundee. ‘Anyway, why would he be trailing us?’

  ‘To see if we’re on his tail?’ Jane shrugged. ‘You thought that matchbook was a plant; maybe he wants to see if it worked.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Dundee. He took out his Luckies, tapped one out of the pack and lit up, never taking his eyes off the cracked open door.

  There was a little silence then Jane said, ‘What took you so long?’

  ‘I went through the train. I wanted to see if there was anybody familiar.’

  ‘Was there?’

  ‘No. A bunch of Army types on leave or rotating back to the States and flying out through Prestwick. Some golfers, business people, but not many. The train’s three-quarters empty.’

  ‘Maybe you’re worrying for nothing.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, shaking his head. He looked around for an ashtray, didn’t find one and finally leaned over and used the one on the arm of Jane’s chair. ‘And it wasn’t one matchbook cover, it was two. There was the one for the surveyor, what was his name?’

  ‘Satchell.’

  ‘Satchell, that’s the one.’ Dundee nodded. ‘Gold under the dead man’s fingernails. All very neat and tidy, pulling us along.’

  ‘So you said before. I think you’re giving Charlie Danby and his pals too much credit. People do make mistakes and they do leave matchbook covers behind.’ She grinned. ‘And anyway, where would a cop be without a clue or two?’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ said Dundee. ‘We’ve got nothing else to go on.’ There was another silence. The train creaked and moaned, lurching over another set of points. There was a sudden, massive shrugging sensation and Jane could feel the train begin to accelerate; she looked towards the blackout curtain, imaging the landscape beyond it – the city and its endless suburbs giving way at last to the bucolic countryside of old oaks and rolling fields, hedgerows and woodlots, all of it shrouded in inky darkness. She put out her second cigarette, half smoked, and climbed to her feet, suddenly finding the sleeping compartment claustrophobic and uncomfortable with two people in it.
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br />   ‘Let’s go to the bar car,’ she said. ‘It’s getting a little stuffy in here.’ Without waiting for his agreement she headed out of the bedroom and into the dimly lit corridor. Wisps of smoke from other passengers’ cigarettes hung like a torn curtain of fog in the narrow walkway as they made their way towards the rear of the car, swaying like sailors to keep their balance in the train, which was now moving even faster than before. Jane turned for a moment to make sure Dundee was behind her then turned back. She gave a startled gasp as a man appeared out of thin air in front of her and then realised that he’d come around a sharp bend in the corridor directly ahead of them. He was slim, elegantly dressed in a black suit that was surprisingly well cut and a dark blue tie with an oddly sinister motif of tiny black doves on it. He had piercing, intelligent eyes and fair hair going grey at the temples and for a fleeting instant Jane was sure that she’d met him somewhere else. He smiled politely as he edged past Jane and Dundee and then he was gone.

  The lounge car, located three cars back behind a pair of second class carriages, was almost empty. A civilian in a pinstripe suit with a bowler on the seat beside him was drinking from a stemmed glass and reading a newspaper, a pair of flight officers from the newly formed Eighth Army Air Force were drinking at the bar and halfway down the car a group of privates and one corporal from the First Infantry Division were playing cards, laughing loudly and drinking warm beer while the lounge car steward looked on from behind the bar, wiping out glasses with a cloth, giving each one a methodical twist of his wrist and looking terribly bored with it all. Like most of that kind of worker you saw these days, the steward was in his late fifties; anyone eligible for duty had been called up long ago.

  Jane dropped down into a seat beside one of the blacked out windows closest to them and Dundee followed suit, sitting across the small polished table from her. The steward appeared a moment later, took their orders and disappeared again, moving easily with the movement of the train.