Secret of the Seventh Sons

by Cooper, Glenn

  Will squirmed through the half-open apartment door, Nancy following. He winced at the sight of too many cooks spoiling the broth. There were at least a dozen people in an eight-hundred-square foot space, astronomically increasing the odds of crime scene pollution. He did a quick reconnoiter with Nancy on his heels, and amazingly no one stopped them or even questioned their presence. Front room. Old-lady furniture and bric-a-brac. Twenty-year-old TV. He took a pen from his pocket and used it to part the curtains to peer through each window, a procedure he repeated in every room. Kitchen. Spic-and-span. No dishes in the sink. Bathroom, also tidy, smelling of foot powder. Bedroom. Too crowded with chattering personnel to see much except for plump dead legs, gray and mottled, beside an unmade bed, one foot half inside a slipper.

  Will bellowed, “Who’s in charge here?”

  Sudden silence until, “Who’s asking?” A balding detective with a big gut and a tight suit separated himself from the scrum and appeared at the bedroom door.

  “FBI,” Will said. “I’m Special Agent Piper.” Nancy looked hurt she wasn’t introduced.

  “Detective Chapman, Forty-fifth Precinct.” He extended a large warm hand, the weight of a brick. He smelled of onions.

  “Detective, what do you say we clear this place out so we can have a nice quiet inspection of the crime scene?”

  “My guys are almost done, then it’s all yours.”

  “Let’s do it now, okay? Half your men aren’t wearing gloves. No one’s got booties on. You’re making a mess here, Detective.”

  “Nobody’s touching nothing,” Chapman said defensively. He noticed Nancy taking notes and asked nervously, “Who’s she, your secretary?”

  “Special Agent Lipinski,” she said, waving her notebook at him sweetly. “Could I get your first name, Detective Chapman?”

  Will suppressed a smile.

  Chapman wasn’t inclined to get territorial with the feds. He’d rant and rave, waste his time and wind up on the losing end of the proposition. Life was too short. “All right, everybody!” he announced. “We got the FBI here and they want everyone out, so pack up and let them do their thing.”

  “Have them leave the postcard,” Will said.

  Chapman reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a white card inside a Ziploc bag. “I got it right here.”

  When the room was clear, they inspected the body with the detective. It was getting toasty in there and the first whiffs of decay were in the air. For a gunshot victim, there was surprisingly little blood, a few clots on her matted gray hair, a streak down her left cheek where an arterial gush from her ear had formed a tributary that tracked down her neck and dripped onto moss-green carpet. She was on her back, a foot from the floral flounce of her unmade bed, dressed in a pink cotton nightdress she had probably worn a thousand times. Her eyes, already bone dry, were open and staring. Will had seen innumerable bodies, many of them brutalized beyond recognition of their humanity. This lady looked pretty good, a nice Puerto Rican grandma whom you’d think could be revived with a good shoulder shake. He checked out Nancy to gauge her reaction to the presence of death.

  She was taking notes.

  Chapman started in, “So the way I figure it—”

  Will put up his hand, stopping him in mid-sentence. “Special Agent Lipinski, why don’t you tell us what happened here?”

  Her face flushed, making her cheeks appear fuller. The flush extended to her throat and disappeared under the neckline of her white blouse. She swallowed and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. She began slowly then picked up the tempo as she assembled her thoughts. “Well, the killer was probably here before, not necessarily inside the apartment but around the building. The security grate on one of the kitchen windows was pried loose. I’d have to take a closer look at it but I’ll bet the window frame is rotted. Still, even hiding in the side alley, he wouldn’t have gambled on doing the job all in one night, not if he wanted to make sure he hit the date on the postcard. He came back last night, went into the alley and finished pulling the grate off. Then he cut the window with a glass cutter and undid the latch from the outside. He tramped in some dirt from the alley onto the kitchen floor and the hall and right there, and there.”

  She pointed to two spots on the bedroom carpet, including one smudge that Chapman was standing on. He stepped away like it was radioactive.

  “She must’ve heard something because she sat up and tried to put her slippers on. Before she could finish he was in the room and he took one shot at close range, through her left ear. It looks like it’s a small-caliber round, probably a .22. The bullet’s still in her cranium, there’s no exit wound. I don’t think there was a sexual assault here but we need to check that. Also, we need to find out if anything was stolen. The place wasn’t ransacked but I didn’t see a pocketbook anywhere. He probably left the way he came in.” She paused and scrunched her forehead. “That’s it. That’s what I think happened.”

  Will frowned at her, made her sweat for a few seconds then said, “Yeah, that’s what I think happened too.” Nancy looked like she’d just won a spelling bee and proudly stared down at her crepe-soled shoes. “You agree with my partner, Detective?”

  Chapman shrugged. “Could very well be. Yeah, .22 handgun, I’m sure that’s the weapon here.”

  The guy doesn’t have a fucking clue, Will thought. “Do you know if anything was stolen?”

  “Her daughter says her purse is missing. She’s the one who found her this morning. The postcard was on the kitchen table with some other mail.”

  Will pointed at grandma’s thighs. “Was she sexually assaulted?”

  “I don’t have any idea! Maybe if you hadn’t kicked the M.E. out we’d know,” Chapman huffed.

  Will lowered himself onto his haunches and used his pen to carefully lift her nightdress. He squinted into the tent and saw undisturbed old-lady underwear. “Doesn’t look like it,” he said. “Let’s see the postcard.”

  Will inspected it carefully, front and back, and handed it to Nancy. “Is that the same font used in the other ones?”

  She said it was.

  “It’s Courier twelve point,” he said.

  She asked how he knew that, sounding impressed.

  “I’m a font savant,” he quipped. He read the name out loud. “Ida Gabriela Santiago.”

  According to Chapman, her daughter told him she never used her middle name.

  Will stood up and stretched his back. “Okay, we’re good,” he said. “Keep the area sealed off until the FBI forensics team arrives. We’ll be in touch if we need anything.”

  “You got any leads on this wacko?” Chapman asked.

  Will’s cell phone started ringing inside his jacket, counterintuitively playing Ode to Joy. While he fished for it he replied, “Jack shit, Detective, but this is only my first day on the case,” then said into the phone, “This is Piper…”

  He listened and shook his head a couple of times before he told the caller, “When it rains, it pours. Say, Mueller hasn’t made a miraculous recovery, has he?…Too bad.” He ended the call and looked up. “Ready for a long night, partner?”

  Nancy nodded like a bobble-head doll. She seemed to like the appellation “partner,” like it a lot.

  “That was Sanchez,” he told her. “We’ve got another postcard but this one’s a little different. It’s dated today but the guy’s still alive.”

  FEBRUARY 12, 1947

  LONDON

  Ernest Bevin was the link, the go-between. The only cabinet member to serve in both governments. To Clement Atlee, the Labor prime minister, Bevin was the logical choice. “Ernest,” Atlee had told his Foreign Secretary, the two of them seated before a hot coal fire at Downing Street, “speak to Churchill. Tell him I’m personally asking for his help.” Sweat beaded on Atlee’s bald head, and Bevin watched with discomfort as a rivulet ran down his high forehead onto his hawklike nose.

  Assignment accepted. No questions asked, no reservations tendered. Bevin was a soldier
, an old-line labor leader, one of the founders of Britain’s largest trade union, the TGWU. Always the pragmatist, prewar, he was one of the few Labor politicians to cooperate with the Conservative government of Winston Churchill and align himself against the pacifist wing in the Labor Party.

  In 1940, when Churchill readied the nation for war and formed an all-party coalition government, he made Bevin Minister for Labor and National Service, giving him a broad portfolio involving the domestic wartime economy. Shrewdly, Bevin struck a balance between military and domestic needs and created his own army of fifty thousand men diverted from the armed forces to work the coal mines: Bevin Boys. Churchill thought the world of him.

  Then the shocker. Just weeks after VE day, basking in triumphant victory, the man the Russians called the British Bulldog lost the 1945 general election in a landslide drubbing by Clement Atlee’s Labor Party, tossed aside by an electorate that did not trust him to rebuild the nation. The man who had said, “We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender,” limped from the grand stage in surrender, depressed and dispirited. Churchill moodily led the opposition after his defeat, but took most of his pleasure from his beloved Chartwell House, where he wrote poetry, painted watercolors, and tossed bread to the black swans.

  Now, a year and a half later, Bevin, Prime Minster Atlee’s Foreign Secretary, sat deep underground awaiting his former boss. It was cold, and Bevin kept his overcoat buttoned over his winter-weight vested suit. He was a solid man, thinning gray hair swept back and pomaded, fleshy faced with incipient jowls. He had chosen this clandestine meeting spot purposely, to send a psychological message. The subject matter would be important. Secret. Come now, without delay.

  The message was not lost on Churchill, who barged in, glanced about unsentimentally and declared, “Why would you ask me to come back to this godforsaken place?”

  Bevin rose and with a wave of his hand dismissed the high-ranking military man who had accompanied Churchill. “Were you in Kent?”

  “Yes, I was in Kent!” Churchill paused. “I never thought I’d set foot in here again.”

  “I won’t ask for your coat. It’s chilly.”

  “It always was so,” Churchill replied.

  The two men shook hands dispassionately then sat down, Bevin steering Churchill to a spot where a red portfolio with the P.M.’s seal lay before him.

  They were in the George Street bunker where Churchill and his War Cabinet holed up for much of the conflict. The rooms were constructed in the basement chamber of the Office of Works Building, smack between Parliament and Downing Street. Sandbagged, concrete-reinforced, and well belowground, George Street would probably have survived the direct hit that never materialized.

  They faced each other across the large square table in the Cabinet Room, where night or day, Churchill would summon his closest advisors. It was a drab, utilitarian chamber with stale air. Nearby was the Map Room, still papered with the charts of the theaters of war, and Churchill’s private bedroom, which still reeked of cigars long after the last one had been extinguished. Farther down the hall in an old converted broom closet was the Transatlantic Telephone Room, where the scrambler, code-named “Sigsaly,” encrypted the conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt. For all Bevin knew, the gear still functioned. Nothing had changed since the day the War Rooms had been quietly closed down: VJ Day.

  “Do you want to have a poke around?” Bevin asked. “I believe Major General Stuart has a set of keys.”

  “I do not.” Churchill was impatient now. The bunker made him uneasy. Curtly, he said, “Look, why don’t you get to the point? What do you want?”

  Bevin spoke his rehearsed introduction. “An issue has arisen, quite unexpected, quite remarkable and quite sensitive. The government must deal with it carefully and delicately. As it involves the Americans, the Prime Minister wondered whether you might be unusually well-positioned to assist him personally in the matter.”

  “I’m in the opposition,” Churchill said icily. “Why should I wish to assist him in any activity other than vacating Downing Street and returning me to my office?”

  “Because, you are the greatest patriot the nation has ever possessed. And because the man I see sitting before me cares more for the welfare of the British populace than he does for political expediency. That is why I believe you may wish to help the government.”

  Churchill looked bemused, aware he was being played. “What the devil have you got yourself into? Appealing to my patriotic side? Go on, tell me about your mess.”

  “That folder summarizes our situation,” Bevin said, nodding at the red portfolio. “I wonder if you might read through it. Have you brought your reading glasses?”

  Churchill fumbled through his breast pocket. “I have.” He wrapped the spindly wire rims around his enormous head. “And you’ll just sit there and twiddle your thumbs?”

  Bevin nodded and leaned back in the simple wooden chair. He watched Churchill snort and open the portfolio. He watched him read the first paragraph. He watched him remove his glasses and ask, “Is this some kind of a joke? Do you honestly expect me to believe this?”

  “It’s no joke. Incredible, yes. Fictitious, no. As you read you’ll see the preliminary work military intelligence has done to authenticate the findings.”

  “This is not the sort of thing I was expecting.”

  Bevin nodded.

  Before Churchill resumed reading, he lit a cigar. His old ashtray was still at hand.

  From time to time he muttered something unintelligible under his breath. Once he exclaimed, “Isle of Wight of all places!” At one point he rose to uncramp his legs and re-light his cigar. Every so often he furrowed his brow and hit Bevin with a quick quizzical stare until, after ten minutes, he had completed the file. He removed his glasses, tucked them away, then took a deep drag on his Havana. “Am I in there?”

  “Undoubtedly yes, but I would not know the details,” Bevin said solemnly.

  “And you?” Churchill asked.

  “I haven’t inquired.”

  Suddenly, Churchill became animated, as he had been so many times in this room, his blood boiling with conviction. “This must be suppressed from the public! We are only just awakening from our great nightmare. This will only plunge us into darkness and chaos.”

  “That is precisely our opinion.”

  “Who knows about this? How tightly can it be controlled?”

  “The circle is small. Besides the P.M., I am the only minister. Fewer than a half-dozen military officers know enough to connect the dots. Then, of course, there’s Professor Atwood and his team.”

  Churchill grunted. “That is a particular problem. You were right to isolate them.”

  “And finally,” Bevin continued, “the Americans. Given our special relationship, we felt we had to inform President Truman, but we’ve been given assurances that only a very small number of their people have been briefed.”

  “Is that the reason you’ve come to me? Because of the Yanks?”

  Bevin finally felt warm enough to remove his coat. “I will be completely truthful with you. The Prime Minister wants you to deal with Truman. Their relationship is frosty. The government wants to delegate this matter to you. We don’t want to be involved beyond today. The Americans have offered to take full possession of the materials, and after considerable internal debate our inclination is to let them have them. We don’t want it. They have all sorts of ideas apparently, but frankly we don’t wish to know. There’s serious work to be done to reconstruct the country, and we can’t take on the distraction, the accountability, should there be a leak—or the expense. Further, decisions must be made regarding Atwood and the others. We are asking you to assume control of this matter, not as the leader of the opposition, not as a political figure, but in a personal capacity as a moral leader.”

  Churchill had been noddin
g his head. “Smart. Very smart. Probably your idea. I would have done the same. Listen, friend, can you give me assurances that this won’t be used against me in the future? I plan on thumping you at the next general election, and it would be bad form to torpedo me beneath the waterline.”

  “You have my assurances,” Bevin replied. “The matter transcends politics.”

  Churchill got up and clapped his hands together once. “Then I’ll do it. I’ll call Harry in the morning if you can arrange it. Then I’ll deal with the Atwood conundrum.”

  Bevin cleared his throat, which had become dry. “I’d rather hoped you could deal with Professor Atwood speedily. He’s down the corridor.”

  “He’s here! You want me to deal with him now?” Churchill asked incredulously.

  Bevin nodded and rose a little too quickly, as if he were escaping. “I’m going to leave you to it and personally report back to the P.M.” He stopped for emphasis. “Major General Stuart will be your logistical aide. He’ll attend to you until the matter is resolved and all materials have been removed from British soil. Is that acceptable to you?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll take care of everything.”

  “Thank you. The government is grateful.”

  “Yes, yes, everyone will be grateful except my wife, who’s going to murder me for missing dinner,” Churchill mused. “Have Atwood brought in.”

  “You want to see him? I hadn’t thought that was entirely necessary.”

  “It is not a matter of wanting to see him. I feel I have no choice.”

  Geoffrey Atwood sat before the most famous man in the world with a look of utter bewilderment. He was fit and sinewy from years of fieldwork but his complexion was sallow and he looked ill. Although fifty-two, present circumstances made him appear a decade older. Churchill noted a fine tremor in his arm when the man lifted a mug of milky tea to his lips.

  “I have been held against my will for almost a fortnight,” Atwood vented. “My wife knows nothing of this. Five of my colleagues have likewise been detained, one of them a woman. With all due respect, Prime Minister, this is quite outrageous. A member of my group, Reginald Saunders, has died. We have been traumatized by these events.”