The Bookworm

by Mitch Silver

  They’d stopped him an hour after he’d begun, but the damage was done. To make matters worse, a second numbnut, covering for the first, hushed the whole thing up, pretending it never happened. So he was just hearing of it now, more than a week after the incident. And only because the inspector at the other end in Valdez was making a stink about something wrong with the oil.

  There was only one thing to do. “The Valdez guy, buy him off. Make up a cover story and pay him whatever it takes. Just shut him up.” Can’t have any more screwups now, not when we’re so close.

  If ever a deal had to get done, it was this one. Executive Order Number One back in January made good on his campaign pledge to open the wildlife refuge and to drill, baby, drill—even if he hadn’t coined the phrase—right where the geologists told them to. Seven disappointing seismic tests later, all he had to show for it were twenty thousand stupid caribou who couldn’t come up with a new migration route, at least one angry Eskimo for every caribou, and a couple million fundraising letters filling the wallets of the guys he beat last time around.

  This deal would buy him time; buy America time, that is. Had to be done, simple as that.

  The follow-up call from Alaska found the President in a black mood. The afternoon papers were spread out on the bed in their suite overlooking Red Square, and one of them, the leftover Communist daily Pravda, had decided to pick up all the old tabloid lies about the women, pictures included. It was starting to rain and, as it turned out, you could have more screwups.

  “Yes?” he shouted into the encrypted cell phone. The thing was great at scrambling your voice so no one else could listen in, but lousy at being an actual phone. There were thirty seconds in which the President listened to whoever it was explain Downer Number Two, and then his wife, freshening up in the bathroom, heard him explode. “Damn it Carl, if you had half a brain you’d be dangerous! When I said ‘Do what it takes” … Christ Carl, I’m a little busy right now, getting our country’s future straightened out. Do I have to fly back there and fire your sorry ass? Take a little initiative, that’s what I’m paying you for. DO … WHAT … IT … TAKES!”

  He slammed the cell phone down on the dresser. She hurried out of the bathroom to find him grinning that grin she knew wasn’t a smile.

  “When we get back, there’ll be a new regime, honey. A whole new regime.”

  Chapter 13

  From the restaurant Lara took the Metro, intending to cross over to the Number Seven line and home. But then she thought she would get off at Revolution Square and look for something to wear in the designer room upstairs at TsUM. Did she have enough to cover it? Lara thumbed through her checkbook. No, not for anything nice. All right, maybe she could borrow something from Vera. Her friend was the original clotheshorse, and on a teacher’s salary too.

  Lara was still plotting her fashion moves when her brain picked up on the fact that it wasn’t the disembodied inbound male voice of the Metro system but the outbound female announcing the next station. She’d missed her stop and was instead, like some kind of mixed-up homing pigeon, heading out to the Arkhiv, where she’d spent the entire summer.

  By the time the woman announced they were approaching Vodny Stadion, or “Water Station”—named for the old pumping facility that once supplied drinking water from the Moskva River—Lara decided that fate or kismet or who-knows-what wished her to listen to the Dictaphone recordings in the shopping bag on the Osobyi’s ancient machines. She’d have to call Vera that evening. Lara got out and mounted the Metro steps, amazed to be back at the place she thought she’d left behind for the year.

  There are truckloads—make that trainloads—of German World War II documents stored all over Moscow. Hundreds of trainloads. Through a bit of geographical luck it was the eastern half of Berlin, the half of the city Russian troops occupied in 1945, where most of the important Nazi government offices were located, like the Reichskanzlei and, of course, the underground Führerbunker. Government offices, naturally, meant government files. After the war, East Berlin eventually became part of the German Democratic Republic, and the city’s Communist puppets were only too happy to ship anything of value or interest back to Big Brother in the Soviet Union.

  For decades, the most secret Nazi papers, the so-called “Osobyi” files, were kept under lock and key in the middle of town near the Kremlin. Then, in the last days of Gorbachev, when everything was breaking down, they were opened up to Russian scholars like Lara. Under Yeltsin, even more of the boxes, the monthly yashchiks, were brought out into the light. Lara could walk over from the flat, flash her plastic ID card on its chain, and immerse herself in the Third Reich.

  Putin put an end to all that. The ex-KGB man ordered the Osobyi section moved to the Russian State Military Archives out past the airport. A twenty-minute drive along the outer ring road when Lara had the car, it was nearly an hour on the Metro from the University, requiring a change in the middle of town.

  The clock over the entrance said it was after 3:00 when Lara swiped her ID through the updated card reader. Two hours was all she had before the place shut up tight. She nodded, as usual, to Leonid, the guard, and opened the shopping bag to show him the tins. Without a word he affixed six white stickers on the six cans to indicate she’d brought them in with her.

  Lara hurried toward the double glass doors of the Listening Room. Finding it unoccupied, she parked her things against the far wall before seating herself at one of the three 1940s-era Dictaphone machines.

  Okay, in for a penny, in for a pound: If the long-dead Englishman Noël Coward knew something that could blow a hole through her life’s work, she wanted to hear about it before someone else trumpeted the fact.

  On top of the tins inside the shopping bag was the cardboard shipping tag she’d seen before. Lara could make out the words, preprinted in English: OFFICIAL MAIL OF THE MILITARY COURT OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. DO NOT OPEN. Underneath, in smaller type, it said, “The contents of this bag are vouchsafed proof from inspection by order of His Majesty, Directive 31.2.”

  “His” Majesty. Interesting. She took the tin marked “Number One” from the shopping bag and, breaking the seal, allowed the wax cylinder inside, as pristine as the day it was recorded, to slide out. Lining up the machine’s lever with a guide on the side, she dropped the recording in and pushed the lever back. Because the original hand-held listening tubes were tiring to use over long periods, they had been modified to accept modern over-the-ear headphones. So, with her iPad powered up and ready to take notes, she lifted one of the Bose QC15s from the shelf above the machines, plugged it into the old contraption and settled down to listen. It was a man’s voice that began:

  Now that I’ve figured out how to work this infernal device, I suppose I should start by saying this is Dictaphone cylinder number one. Fair warning, Robert, old friend—oh, sorry, it’s Sir Robert now, isn’t it? Well then, Sir Robert, your man has given me a half-dozen of these thingies, and I intend to fill them up over the next six evenings.

  Lara typed “Sir Robert?” on her computer pad. Over the next two hours, she would make dozens of entries.

  For the record, my name is Noël Peirce Coward and I was born in Teddington, Middlesex, as a Christmas present to my parents in 1899. The date today is the second of October 1944, which makes me not quite forty-five, still in the full flower of manhood. I don’t know how you swung it, Robert, tracking me down in the city of palms and swimming pools from five thousand miles away for something as inconsequential as a war. But here I am in a little soundproofed room off La Cienega Boulevard—which, I’ll have you know, in Spanish means The Cienega Boulevard—“thoroughly documenting” an incident from the early days.

  “Tattling” is more like it, and during the cocktail hour, too, after slaving all day over a hot movie studio, trying to pry a few dollars for my next production out of some tight American fists. Still, if it will help poor Anthony …

  So, I have consented to do as you ask and prattle into this microphone whilst your e
arnest assistant on the other side of the glass takes notes, disgorging everything I know about the matter for you and your colleagues to use in his defense before the Court of Inquiry.

  It’s quite a lot, actually. And I’m going to tell every scrap of it, because Anthony may be a lot of things, but of one thing I’m certain: he’s no enemy of his country. The government perhaps, but never the country … of that I’m sure.

  Then too, given the Military Secrets Act, this will be the one and only time the story will be told, so I intend to do it justice. No editing myself, no euphemisms for the naughty bits—I’m trusting you to see to all that when you come to have this typed up. For now it’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing left out.

  It all began with Celia Johnson’s toothache. Well, to be honest, even earlier than that, four years before Celia’s tooth ever thought of becoming inflamed. In 1935, one morning out of the clear blue, Marlene Dietrich rang me up to say how much she’d liked my performance the night before in The Scoundrel. We’ve been best pals ever since, in keeping with my firm practice of fawning on every admirer.

  The party for Marlene in ’39 is where Celia’s tooth comes in. Or rather, out. I had prevailed upon her and her husband, Peter Fleming, the travel writer, to motor down from Oxfordshire right before the war to take a villa in Cap Ferrat, next to where I was staying with Willie Maugham. I was thinking of her for Private Lives, and I wanted to twist her arm a bit. Sadly, she decided to take Pride & Prejudice instead. We wouldn’t actually work together for three more years, until she played my wife … imagine … in the picture, In Which We Serve.

  Anyway, Peter had his younger brother Ian join us all for the fortnight, ostensibly to get in some golf but really as a sort of unpaid nursemaid for their newborn baby, Nichol. Which freed Celia and Peter to pop over to our place next door to celebrate Marlene’s U.S. citizenship, which had just come through. Are you getting all this?

  Then that blessed molar made its presence known and they had to call in a dentist from Villefranche. Peter was gallant enough to stay with his wife and Ian was sent over to us in their stead. Ah well, the best-laid plans …

  Because Dietrich’s new citizenship was the pretext for the party, Willie and I commandeered the Americans who had taken the villa on the other side for the month: Joe Kennedy and his two grown sons attended while the Ambassador’s wife was back with their younger children in America.

  Lara lifted the lever that was playing the cylinder. This couldn’t be right, could it? Dietrich? Maugham? The Kennedys? What did any of it have to do with a long-lost book?

  Lara looked around. Through the glass of the Listening Room door she could see one or two scholarly types, nearly buried behind the piles of books they were using for their research. She let out a huge sigh. What the hell—she was all the way out here already. So she lifted the lever and put it back on the cylinder.

  The evening was a strange one, even for me—one woman and seven men, Marlene having in tow the writer Erich Maria Remarque, an inconvenience as they were both married to other people back in Germany.

  Over dinner, I found the eldest Kennedy son, Joe Jr., to be as smart as he was strapping and obviously his father’s favorite. Sorry to say, he was killed when his plane went down on a training run over Suffolk last month. The younger boy, John, slightly built and somewhat unwell-looking with his suit hanging off him, was “doing Europe” before beginning his last year at university. John, who insisted everyone call him Jack, was as taken with our guest of honor as his father, who never took his eyes off her as she regaled the table with stories of the well-known and the well-off.

  The topper came over coffee, when Marlene produced from her evening bag a telegram she’d received that afternoon, forwarded from Berlin by the German consul in Nice, or was it Monte? She passed it around for our viewing and Maugham prevailed upon Ian as the “new boy” to translate it aloud for the Kennedys and me, lest Marlene have to do all the work.

  “My Dear Blue Angel, Your fleeting presence in Europe compels me to request the pleasure of your company at the Berghof at a time of convenience to you. I again implore you to return to the country of your roots, for your artistry is all that is lacking for the new Reich to be gloriously complete. I await your reply. Your most ardent admirer, A.H.” This last bit he did looking straight into Dietrich’s eyes, as if the words were coming from Ian Fleming and not Adolf Hitler, a nice bit of stagecraft if I say so myself.

  Marlene smiled. But all she said was, “This is the third cable from Hitler this year. What he refuses to understand is that he is the reason I’m not coming back.

  “You see, he considers me his good luck charm. Years ago he went to a movie theatre in Munich and saw Die Blaue Engel. The following day the National Socialists won ninety-five new seats in the Reichstag. Then, when Dishonoured was playing in Berlin two years later, they won another one hundred twenty-three.

  “As luck would have it, nothing of mine was available next time around and he watched a Bette Davis picture instead, with subtitles. For the first time, they lost votes.” She laughed and lit a cigarette. “So now I’m his ‘Blue Angel.’”

  She took a pull on her cigarette and exhaled. “At least Roosevelt doesn’t think I’m a human rabbit’s foot.” Marlene was putting the telegram back in her evening bag when she said, “He had an astrologer, did you know that?” Sitting next to me, Maugham rose to the bait. “I thought that sort of thing went out with Louis Quinze.”

  She said, “Apparently not. This one called himself a clairvoyant.”

  Joe Jr.’s laugh must have sounded like disbelief, for her companion, Remarque, leapt to her defense. “No, it’s true. His name was Hanussen. When they lost those ‘Bette Davis’ seats in ’32, the Bavarian corporal was worried and he called the man in for a private reading.”

  Marlene interrupted. “Let me tell it, Ricky.” She got up so she could pantomime the action. “So this Hanussen comes to Hitler’s place and seats him in the exact middle of the room. The man examines his hands, counts the bumps on his head or some such rot and sinks into a mystical trance. Then he declares, ‘I see victory for you. It cannot be stopped.’ Can you imagine?”

  Remarque added, “And here’s the best part. The faker was a Jew! Erik Jan Hanussen began life in Vienna as Hermann Steinschneider. Everybody knew he was Jewish except the Führer.”

  I thought what Jack Kennedy said next was just to prove he was listening. “So what became of this astrologer?”

  Dietrich told him. “After the Nacht der langen Messer, they found his body in a field on the outskirts of Berlin. You see, he was the one man who had seen the Führer worried. They couldn’t have that.”

  As Maugham and I were getting ready for bed we talked over the evening, and I don’t recall either of us mentioning the bit about the clairvoyant. It was only when I again saw the younger Kennedy boy that the episode took on a different aspect.

  Chapter 14

  The wax cylinder had come to the end and was making a little hiccup every time it revolved past the machine’s lever. Lara stopped it, grateful for the chance to get up and walk around. She found it tiring to take notes, especially when you don’t know what you’re listening for. Besides, was any of it real, or merely a long-dead playwright’s imaginings?

  She performed a few knee bends and back twists, and flapped her hands in the air to get the kinks out and the blood circulating. Then she reached down for the second recording, wondering not just what Coward would say next, but what any of it had to do with the origins of the Great Patriotic War.

  This is Dictaphone cylinder number two. I saw Jack Kennedy again by chance (or so I thought) the next June at a club in Harlem, New York, the kind of place where they keep bringing out extra tables and chairs for the crowd until everyone is sitting in the laps of everyone else.

  I had just taken French leave from running our propaganda office on the Continent, having concluded that, if his Majesty’s Government aimed to bore the Germans to death, we di
dn’t have the time. I was working directly for Winston now, attempting to charm the Americans with song and dance into supporting our cause despite a little thing called Dunkirk.

  My last night in the States, I went to see Marlene perform after hours with Cab Calloway’s band, and visit backstage after the show before returning home to sing for the troops. Earlier in the day she had made a personal appearance at Radio City, where Destry Rides Again was doing wonderful business. Now, fourteen hours later, she was still fresh as a daisy, warbling her tunes through the blue haze of a thousand chain-smoked cigarettes, when I looked around and saw the manager, Patrice, carrying a chair over his head and leading someone in evening clothes through the throng.

  Patrice shoved the chair down in the two inches next to mine and a tuxedoed Jack Kennedy was saying, “May I?” even as he was peeling off bills for the tip.

  Capping an evening that must have included some formal affair, he appeared to be over the jaundice or whatever it was the previous summer. We sat together, entranced by La Dietrich. I didn’t know then that Jack and Marlene were already lovers … she hadn’t breathed a word.

  In her dressing room afterward, she introduced me to Calloway, the man with the largest set of incisors I have ever seen. Eventually I tried to take my leave, explaining I was sailing in the morning, but Jack insisted I join them for a nightcap in his hotel room. “I have a car outside.” Don’t they always.

  Riding down Fifth Avenue I was in a rotten mood watching this boy, not yet graduated from Harvard, nibble the ear of one of the world’s most desirable women. I mean, he hadn’t earned it, as far as I could see. Worse, this stripling’s room proved to be, in fact, the Carlyle’s best suite, with a panorama of Central Park beyond the balcony.

  It was just going 2:00 A.M. when Marlene excused herself to “take off my face.” On her way she said, “Noël, Jack has a wonderful idea I think you should hear.”