by John Gardner
‘I see.’ The Father Guardian looked very serious indeed.
‘If you – ’ Curry began, but Brother Peter raised a hand once more. Even though the Father Guardian had taken the vows of strict poverty, chastity, and obedience, it was clear that he found great happiness in ruling, and overruling, those set below him.
‘We have one such man,’ Brother Peter said. ‘Strangely, he also comes from your country, Mr Kruger. Austria. Unhappily, he did not get out as soon as you did. He suffered much at the hands of the Nazis. He is also a man weighed down with a deep sense of guilt. I cannot tell why, but I suspect it has something to do with the struggle for survival in the death camps.’
‘He went through the camps? O Gott im Himmel!’ A piece of fancy acting from Herbie.
Brother Peter continued. ‘His personal permission will have to be sought before I can allow you to photograph and talk with our poor Brother. He has been with us for less than a year, so is still a novice.’
‘Can we see him?’ Curry put in flatly.
‘Even if he agreed, I fear not. He will not be returning to this priory – which is now his true home – for nearly a month.’
Curry asked why this novice Brother was not in the priory at the moment. He tried to sound as casual as possible.
‘He is here. In New York City.’ Brother Peter spoke as though forced to use great patience. ‘You see, my friends, our order bids us to go out among the poor, the sick, the lonely, and the despairing. We go to tend them, offer what assistance we can, pray with them, preach to them, and act as their friends. This is a hard, and sometimes thankless, demanding task. But we do it with joy, in Our Lord Jesus Christ.’
‘Yes?’ Curry was trying to push him along.
‘In New York alone we have several Refuges, where people can receive help – food, medicines, prayer, comfort. We rotate our Brothers as a good farmer of old rotated his crops. Each of our Refuge Houses is in the care of four Brothers. They do a month in one of the Refuges, then a month back here, in their true house. At the moment, Brother Clement – for that is his name in God – is serving for a month in our Refuge on the Bowery, which is possibly the most demanding of our Houses. The Bowery, my good friends, is a place of real despair. It will help him to see his own life from a different perspective.’
‘And he’ll be there for a month, Brother?’
‘He started but two days ago. So, yes, a month.’
‘You said his name in God is Brother Clement?’
‘That is correct. We have no male saints whose name begins with the letter K.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow – ’ Curry began.
‘Ah, no. Silly of me. I should have mentioned it.’ Again the almost smile on the Father Guardian’s lips. ‘Many of the Brothers, when they take their name in God, like it to start with the same initial as their surname in the world. Brother Clement’s name began with a K. It’s probably quite a common name in your country, Mr Kruger. Klausen. Brother Clement’s name in the world was Klausen.’
‘No, that is not so a common name in my country.’ Herbie’s voice appeared to have lost a great deal of power.
Curry prayed for the big German boy, prayed that he would not show any sign; while in his own mind, one thing was being repeated, again and again, like a gramophone record that is damaged so that the needle sticks in a groove: Got you! Got you! Got you, Klaubert, you lovely bastard! Got you!
Herbie remained calm. All he could think of was the way he had just missed catching up with Hans-Dieter Klaubert after he had changed his name to Klausen in the DP camps. He smiled up at Brother Peter: a warm, open smile, as though he would like to kiss the severe Franciscan.
Klaubert was here, in New York City. Klaubert was now.
Oddly, for the first time, Brother Peter seemed to unbend. He also opened his mouth in a wide smile, and his eyes lit up as though to show the true joy which he kept hidden from the world.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Under his breath Curry Shepherd sang, ‘I don’t know what street – compares with Mott Street – in July.’ He still carried his revolver, but the smart slacks and blazer had gone. Now, like Herbie, who shambled ahead of him, Shepherd wore a scruffy jacket over what looked like a filthy shirt. His denim trousers – cast-off army fatigues – were ripped and frayed. Gone were the handmade shoes – his family had patronised Lobb’s of St James’s for over a hundred years – and his feet were now shod in scuffed boots. The boots had no laces, and the sole of the left one had come away from the upper, so that it flapped like the opening and closing mouth of some strange beast.
Herbie, he thought, was more suited to this kind of disguise, but Herbie never seemed to care about clothes. Put him in something from Savile Row and the large German lad would look untidy within the hour, creased, rumpled, tie askew. In sartorial matters, Curry had given up Herbie as a lost cause. In fact, Herbie, dressed as a bum with a long, worn, shapeless coat over his rags and a strange, stained, black hat pulled down almost to his ears, just looked like Herbie.
This was the second time that the pair had walked up Mott Street, on the edge of Chinatown, their backs to the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge. They turned east now, into the Bowery.
The first time – two days ago – had been during the afternoon, a matter of hours after their conversation with the Franciscan Father Guardian.
‘We have to make a sighting,’ Curry had said firmly.
They had set up a temporary headquarters in Rockefeller Center, unknowingly using the same office that ‘Little Bill’ Stephenson – Intrepid – had inhabited when first initiating British Security Coordination, the secret cooperation between British Intelligence and the FBI, blessed by President Roosevelt and aimed, first, at catching Nazi spies in the United States before America entered the war.
It was here, in Rockefeller Center, that a hot-line telephone had now been wired in for instant communication with London – straight into the Northolt safe house, where the remnants of the Symphony team again kept a round-the-clock watch just as they had done during Brimstone. In Washington they had another facility, carefully guarded and ready to house Klaubert during the short, but inevitable, time between his arrest and journey back to England. Everybody was aware that it could take several days to move the former SS man.
On their first visit to the Bowery, Herbie and Curry were accompanied by Arnie. One of the CIA cars had taken them – on the day of their breakthrough with Brother Peter – down to a point near the Brooklyn Bridge. From there, the trio had made their way on foot into that area of New York where Chinatown merges with Little Italy.
Arnie had suggested they approach the Bowery from the river instead of the more obvious route, taking them down through Little Italy. It was quickly clear that Arnie had made a careful check on the Franciscan Refuge, for it lay hard by what claimed to be the oldest pharmacy in America – Olliffee’s at No. 6, the Bowery. Squeezed between two obvious flophouses was a green door, blistered by sun, scratched and cracked by more than normal wear and tear. Above the door hung a large board that had once been white. In faded black letters were the words REFUGE OF ST FRANCIS. In smaller letters was a text in English, Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. When Curry Shepherd saw it he reflected that there were very few who laboured in the Bowery, but a large number who rested – on the sidewalks or in doorways, mad, sad, bad, incompetent, alcoholic, drugged, or almost dead.
On the first occasion they walked this truly mean street for the best part of an hour, and hardly five minutes in that time passed without their being accosted, sworn at, or in danger of being manhandled.
A muttering woman, whose clothes seemed to be tied together with pieces of string, hung at their heels, even though Curry had dropped a few coins into her hand, misshapen and crusted with sores. ‘Fucking men… my ruination, men… men-men-men-men…’ she chanted through broken teeth.
A tall, gaunt figure, looking like a scarecrow, came close to
them, thrusting his face near to Herbie so that the German could see the great red blotches around his lips and smell the decay and cheap liquor on his breath as he threatened them for money.
None of the three would forget the younger woman – her face like that of a doll, rouged and plastered with makeup, her clothes, once good quality, now stained with God knew what. She offered them her body: ‘Honey? Honey? Ya wanna good time? We can go fuck in the alley over there. I’ll take the t’ree of ya for five bucks.’
It was the only time they were nearly assaulted, for Herbie – who had experienced things like this in the ruins of postwar Germany – harshly told her to ‘Fuck off!’ As he spoke, three men moved from the shadows – her protectors and self-appointed pimps. One had a bottle, and they had no doubt he would use it. Herbie’s hand went to his hip and the Smith & Wesson nestling in its holster.
‘No, Herb!’ Arnie shouted, throwing some quarters into the street. The woman and her guardians leaped after the coins, biting, scratching, tearing at each other to get to the money first.
Cars went past – some idling as people looked out, morbidly or with a song in their hearts, knowing that but for the grace of God, or man, they also might belong to this terrible, ghostlike army. Almost paradoxically, a few Chinese restaurants appeared to be doing a reasonable trade in spite of the degradation.
Curry thought it was the nearest thing he had seen to those descriptions of the poverty-stricken areas of Victorian London. Arnie thought about Gloria, for he knew the Bowery had once been a small country road within the original Dutch community of this part of Manhattan. ‘Bouwerie’ it had been called then, and he wondered if any of Gloria’s Van Gent forefathers – who were originally from Holland – had passed this way. Only Herbie showed neither fear nor disgust. But he had seen the inside of DP camps and other places he would rather hold in his own mind than talk about.
Yet there were people who worked to reduce the despair. About four o’clock on that afternoon, on their fourth or fifth pass near the Refuge, Herbie suddenly whispered, ‘It’s him. He’s here.’
Arnie and Curry looked up and saw the two friars, in their brown habits and sandals, leaving the Refuge. One was thin and red-faced; the other tall, straight, and with a scar visible down the right side of his face. His light hair had been shaved, but a soft down was beginning to form over his scalp. Under the monastic habit you could tell he walked erect, like a soldier, with his eyes moving warily as though he was crossing terrain which could house an enemy sniper or machine-gun nest.
They were the eyes of one who is always watching for danger, and they scanned Arnie, Herbie, and Curry, who all looked away quickly. Later Herbie said that Klaubert had seen them. Something had registered, fractionally, on the SS man’s face.
‘Fear?’ Curry asked. ‘Fear that we might have rumbled him?’
Herbie shook his great head. For once any comic – or buffoon-like – traces vanished from him. The future spymaster emerged, the probationer who was father to the shrewd handler of secrets – ‘I detected hope. He saw us as a danger, but that, I believe, is what he wants. Didn’t he leave a clue to where he would go? Isn’t it why we’re here, because he left a clue? I tell you that man feels he is lost. He wishes to pay some kind of penalty for his sins. Maybe he wishes even for death. In his eyes I saw hope.’
In the office high above Rockefeller Plaza, Curry picked up the telephone and dialled London. It was Caspar who manned the instrument at the other end.
‘He is in my father’s house,’ Curry said.
‘And there are many mansions?’ Caspar asked three thousand miles away.
In New York, Curry answered, in agreement, ‘Many mansions,’ and replaced the receiver.
By the next night, Caspar, Dick Farthing, and Naldo Railton arrived in New York.
Now, here, on the following afternoon, with the plan laid and the briefing over, Curry sang under his breath and entered the Bowery, Herbie ahead of him. Within the next half an hour, Hans-Dieter Klaubert, aka Brother Clement OFM, would be lifted from the streets and, perhaps, some of the mysteries would be revealed.
It had become cold, with an icy wind blowing off the East River funnelling up the streets. Curry felt miserable, silently cursing Herbie for choosing the torn, dirty, and long overcoat. He moved unsteadily across the street, waiting near the centre for traffic to pass, swaying gently, head down, but eyes moving to and fro.
Finally he reached the far side and stumbled into the wall, rolling his body so that his back rested against the stone. He was stationed right next to the green door with the sign above it telling all, drunk, sober, insane, or desperate, that it was the Refuge of St Francis.
The beat cops had been questioned subtly about the good brothers’ comings and going. They now knew that two of the friars left the Refuge at around ten in the morning, returning at three-thirty – sometimes with the odd vagrant or a person in dire need. The other pair left on their errands of mercy at about four o’clock.
It was three-twenty, so Brother Clement would either be returning or leaving during the next forty minutes.
Through his lowered lids Curry saw Herbie was in place, across the street and to his left. The cars were there also. Two were parked a few yards up the Bowery on Curry’s side – the Refuge side – and to his left. The nearest contained three FBI officers, the other car held Marty Forman and Naldo Railton. A third car was almost directly across the street from him. Arnie, another CIA man, Dick Railton Farthing, and Caspar Railton sat quietly inside.
They were all armed – ‘A precaution only,’ Dick had said – and knew that only the FBI men had any authority to take the Franciscan into custody. ‘We’re all really only along for the ride unless things get difficult or rough,’ Caspar told them in Rockefeller Center. Curry thought Caspar looked twitchy. He groaned and put his head back for a moment. He could see Caspar, sitting next to the driver in the car across the street.
*
Since he had left the Northolt house – after making the three obligatory telephone calls – Caspar felt uneasy. He had ridden the subway back into London, and went through antisurveillance routines twice – getting off at stations, turning toward the tunnels that led to the exits, then scurrying back onto the train.
Instead of getting a cab to Queen Anne’s Gate, he walked, stepping into doorways and doing several back-doubles.
Nothing. Only the odd feeling that he was not alone.
Once, passing down Northumberland Avenue, he turned abruptly and was convinced that a shadow had flitted into darkness behind him. He walked back to where he had seen it. Again nothing.
At C’s apartment he stationed himself near one of the windows looking down into the street. Again, he thought there was a darker patch among the blackness. One of the Special Branch baby-sitters went down to investigate. Nothing to report.
They had made an agreement to meet at C’s convenient quarters once a message came through. Each had packed a small bag and left it at Queen Anne’s Gate. There were seats booked and ready, spanning a whole week, so that when the message came – if it came – all three could leave on the earliest possible flight.
During the drive out to the airport, Caspar still felt uneasy. Finally he shrugged it off as the tension which comes toward the end of a long field operation. And, for Caspar, this had all started back in 1938. When they got Klaubert into the sweatbox, maybe he would relax, for the truth – whatever it was – could only act as a balm.
Yet, on arrival at La Guardia, on the journey into the city, and even at the office high over New York, the alertness returned, like a stomach ulcer burning and gnawing for a time, then receding, only to start again, unexpectedly.
He must have shown the stress, for Dick asked if he was unwell.
In honesty, Caspar said, ‘No. Touch of the horrors. Probably worried about what we’ll find at the end of the road.’
‘Understandable.’ Dick smiled at him, wondering if they would have been wiser to leave Caspar in E
ngland.
Now, as he awaited the final outcome, Caspar felt his nervous antennae come into action again, and this time all his long training and experience told him that something was very wrong indeed. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was there, out in this street, which could have been lifted straight from Dante’s Inferno.
‘Here they come.’ Dick’s voice was as calm and ordinary as those of the fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain, giving their ‘Tally-ho chaps, bandits at three o’clock above us.’ They really did speak like that, for some of the time anyway. There were recordings to prove it: the ones with the screams of fear, near-hysterical shouts of warning, and terrible agonising cries had been destroyed.
Two friars were coming down the Bowery, on the Refuge side. They had a couple of vagrants and a crying woman with them. From the corner of his eye Curry watched them, and saw that Klaubert – Brother Clement – was not one of them. Slowly Curry lifted his hand and scratched enthusiastically at his armpit.
‘Not him.’ Arnie was in the back of the car with Dick. His brother CIA officer sat in the driver’s seat, next to Caspar.
Dick said to watch the door. ‘He’ll be one of those coming out.’
Curry thought the same thing. Everyone now focused attention on the green door.
Traffic came by, in both directions. Some cars pulled in to discharge passengers, trucks stopped, and delivery men eased themselves out. A large boxlike van stopped directly behind the car containing Arnie, Dick, and Caspar, so they had no view of the black sedan which parked about three paces behind the van.