The Bookworm

by Mitch Silver

  “For a show?”

  As Kennedy walked over to a little steel bar on wheels he said, “For a ‘production.’” He fixed us both brandies, which he brought over on a tray. “Mr. Coward …”

  “It’s ‘Noël’. ‘Mr. Coward’ is, was, my father.”

  “All right … Noël. It’s my father who’s the problem. As far as he’s concerned, Britain’s already lost the war, so he won’t lift a finger to help me. Even if he did, he wouldn’t be of any help, since the Prime Minister knows Dad’s a defeatist and refuses to see him. That makes me persona non grata as well.”

  “I shouldn’t worry. A lot of people are non grata with Winston.”

  “Well, my brother and I don’t share Father’s views. But the way things stand, this idea of ours will be dismissed out of hand.”

  I was thinking the brandy was very good and did it come with the suite when I sensed he was waiting for me to ask, “What idea?” So I did.

  “What idea?”

  Kennedy stopped to swirl a single ice cube in his liquor before going on. “We’ve come up with a way, my brother Joe and I, possibly to prevent the invasion of the United Kingdom.”

  He let that sink in before adding, “To be honest, most of the Irish over here think the fall of Britain is the best thing that could happen.”

  “And you don’t?”

  Right in the middle of his narration, Noël Coward sneezed. Not a little one either, but a great big honker. The recording clearly picked up the sound of a handkerchief being unfolded, used, and refolded again before the man continued speaking.

  I apologize, Dear Listener. I must be allergic to telling stories for which I’m not being paid. Now, where was I? Oh yes, Kennedy was about to tell me why he and his brother Joe weren’t pulling for a German victory like the other Irish.

  “Not if it means us here in America facing Hitler with all Europe behind him. So I thought … that is … well, I’ve heard you have the Prime Minister’s ear.”

  I shifted a little in my chair. “A gruesome thought, young man. And even if I did, and even if your government will stop being so dashed neutral, any ships or guns wouldn’t get there in time.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of arms. My idea is more of . . . a trick.”

  I didn’t take his point. “Meaning … what, precisely?”

  Kennedy looked into his glass and began. “Remember that story Marlene … Miss Dietrich … told, of being Hitler’s good luck charm? Of his getting a clairvoyant to predict the future? Well, what if someone prophesied that Hitler is going to conquer the Soviet Union within the year? And what if Hitler believed him? What would he do?”

  I went along. “I don’t know. What?”

  “We’re guessing he’d swing the Wehrmacht around and attack to the east.”

  My internal cogitator seemed to be running slowly that evening. “And just who would predict such a thing? Don’t you remember … they killed the fortune-teller back in ’34.”

  Jack leaned in a little, his eyes brighter than I had seen them before. “What if the greatest fortuneteller of all time said it would happen?”

  “And who, exactly, is—”

  “Michel de Nostradamus, a French prophet of the sixteenth century.”

  Kennedy got up and moved over to the bookcase on the far side of the bar. It occurred to me, did the books, too, come with the room? The young man kept talking. “Before FDR took him on, Father was something of a movie producer. In the ’20s, he sank some money into a picture with Gloria Swanson that was shelved when talkies came in. The Swami. He bought these books on Nostradamus for background material. Here, look for yourself.”

  He opened a small volume entitled The Prophecies of the Seer to a page with four-line stanzas running the length of it. Not poetry, exactly, and the English was rather stilted. I fancy myself something of an antiquarian, and I was more taken with the binding than the text. I do remember one bit: “The towers will be set ablaze and the river run red.”

  Not knowing what to make of it I said, “His English is rather Biblical, no?”

  The American flipped the pages back to the front. “See, it’s a translation. The original French is even more Biblical.”

  Alcohol doesn’t usually muddle my brains, but I couldn’t see where the conversation was going. I bought some time by getting up to stretch my legs and look out the window at the park and the city beyond it, a sleeping city at peace. “And people believe such rot?”

  “Some people do. The Greeks had their Oracle of Delphi. A seer warned Caesar to beware the Ides of March. Charlemagne and Napoleon … still, one person’s belief is all we need.”

  I turned to face him. “But did this Nostradamus really write that Hitler would defeat the Sovs four centuries before there were any Sovs? Or a Hitler, for that matter?”

  Kennedy looked down at his brandy. “Not in so many words. Not in any words, as a matter of fact.”

  “Then how—”

  “We’ll make it up. Create a false prophecy, make it look musty and old, like a prop in one of father’s movies. Don’t you see? That’s why I’m telling you. You make up things for a living, don’t you?”

  By now it was after three in the morning and my tolerance for the harebrained had expired, so I decided to let the boy down gently. “I write comedies. Drawing room stuff. And patter set to music. This isn’t my cup of tea at all.”

  Jack put down his glass on the metal tray with a rather loud noise for the middle of the night. “Noël, Marlene tells me you know everybody who is anybody over there and, most of all, you have access to Churchill. Couldn’t you at least produce this thing? I’m twenty-one; I have money in my own name now. Hire a writer, a scholar. Hire ten if you want and send me the bill. But it has to be done right away. Look at this.”

  He thrust that day’s Herald-Tribune in my face. “There. PÉTAIN NAMED NEW FRENCH PREMIER. Father has been talking to him right along, says he’s about to make a separate peace with Hitler. That means, in days, Britain will be all alone.”

  He took my silence for permission to continue. “Seriously, why couldn’t we? Right now, tonight, your country is just sitting there, with the Nazis twenty miles away, licking their chops. You think of yourself as a patriot, don’t you? I know if America was up against it and I could do what you can, I’d …”

  I tried to set him straight. “Even if we could convince them it was genuine, why would the bloody Nazis give a fig what some medieval crackpot dreamed up?”

  Instead of answering me, he lifted his eyes. For a moment I thought he was reconsidering the whole thing. Then, solemn as a mortician, he uttered the following words: “The young lion will overcome the older one/On the field of combat in a single battle/He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage/Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.”

  I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing.

  Kennedy looked back at me. “In 1559, a vision came to Nostradamus in the bath. He wrote it down afterward and sent it off to the king in Paris. Eight months later, Henri II died an agonizing death in a jousting accident when a lance ran through his helmet, the ‘golden cage’, and broke off, piercing his eye in two places. Catherine de Medici, the king’s widow, brought the man who’d foreseen it to Paris and made him the court prophet.”

  “And Hitler knows all this?”

  “I doubt he knows any of this. But when they tell him, and they will, he’ll believe it. Everything is destiny with him—you saw the way he begged Marlene, his good-luck charm, to come back to Germany.”

  Kennedy freshened my drink from the bottle on the rolling bar. “Look Noël, I have to go up to Cambridge and graduate from college next week. You’re the one who’s going over to raise morale. Not being invaded would raise their morale, wouldn’t it?”

  In my journal entry the next day I wrote, “Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, but I let myself get caught up in the idiocy of the moment. This boy could sell ice cubes to the Eskimos. I found myself saying, ‘Ummm, how woul
d this work, exactly?’”

  After ten more minutes, I promised to see what I could do. We hauled Marlene out without her face and I gave her a farewell hug and a kiss. But I still had my doubts. Turning back to the lovers at the door, I asked Jack how he knew so much about French kings and mystics: “What did you study up there at Harvard? History?”

  He wrapped his arm around the shoulder of the woman beside him, pulling her close to him, and grinned. “International Relations.”

  I sailed for Southampton in the morning.

  Chapter 15

  London

  The newsreader was beside herself, blond curls aflutter, positively quivering with the excitement: “The mysterious find at the Inns of Court has deadly consequences: family of three found shot to death in Brixton.” The News at Noon film editor had had a field day, cutting from the Gordon house in Brixton as the bodies were brought out to the file footage of Mr. Gordon at the work site the day before and back again.

  There was speculation as to the connection between the two events and the usual interviews with the shocked neighbors. Then it was back to the studio. “DNA testing has ascertained the wrist bone unearthed yesterday is approximately one hundred years old; Metropolitan Police have further determined the handcuff affixed to it is one couriers used in the war to secure attaché cases to their persons. In addition, the BBC have learned the building housing barristers that was originally on the site took a direct hit from a V-2 rocket in 1944.”

  Then it was back to Brixton for the stand-up with the police spokesman: “All right-thinking Londoners are shocked at today’s developments. We ask anyone who has information to come forward and assist the police with their inquiries.”

  The bear of a man trying to close an overstuffed suitcase grinned and told the screen, “Prostitye, chaps. We’d love to help, but the tin cans are long gone.”

  Chapter 16

  Moscow

  Lara was agitated. Excited and dismayed, both. John F. Kennedy and Noël Coward working together to keep Britain from invasion? And, instead, enticing Hitler to go to war with Stalin’s Russia? Her Russia? This was History with a capital H … if there was anything to the man’s story.

  If a few well-placed individuals could get together and rearrange world events … then her classroom interloper was right—the tins at her feet would sink Lara’s own book on the origins of the war, the one she’d just labored to finish in manuscript form in this very building. And it would go a long way to torpedo her “precious geohistory.”

  This story of Coward’s … “story” was the key word. He made them up for a living, didn’t he? Why couldn’t this all be an elaborate script for some film or play, complete with a fictional Sir Robert he was telling it to?

  Her mind raced ahead, like the chess player she once was, seeking the ways she could prove if it was real or not. Not, she hoped. But first, leaving her things where they were, Lara pushed through the double glass doors. She’d walk around the Arkhiv, making as many circuits of the floor as it took to get herself thinking clearly again.

  Chapter 17

  The half-hour bell rang throughout the Arkhiv just as Lara returned to the Listening Room after three full circuits of the place. Time for one more recording before she had to pack up and go.

  This is cylinder number three. Nigel, your faithful assistant stationed across from me on the other side of the glass, who is now frowning at the mention of his name, has given me the photocopies you obtained from the steamship people—does one have no privacy anymore, even in the middle of an ocean?—so, yes, I attest that these are the very cables I sent my secretary en route to the mother country after meeting with Kennedy in 1940. And yes, I will read them now into the record, to further attest to my state of mind at the time. As you bade me do, Robert.

  Twenty-three June/first day out. “Aquitania First Class service no better than prewar steerage . . . don’t think Cunards have got their hearts in it. We’re to be dumped in Liverpool instead of Southampton, thanks to U-boats; Lawrence my lamb, please arrange alt. shore transport. Also, get what you can on 16th C. French prophet Nostradamus. Ask around clubs for art historian, fluency in antique French and Latin required.”

  Twenty-four June/second day out. “Lawrence: Any luck with Nostradamus? Broadsheet slipped under cabin door this morning shows Hitler at Eiffel Tower whilst Nazi leather boys stand around, goggle-eyed to see actual culture. Must act before same toadies start taking snaps of Nelson’s column.”

  Twenty-seven June/fifth day out. “Cable received. Well done, my boy. Sure this chap from Courtauld has requisites? Hope so … thought of hitting Austrian paperhanger with ‘Blunt’ instrument too good to pass up.”

  So that’s how I came up with Anthony Blunt. It was his name, don’t you see? I’m sure I never laid eyes on him till that day at the restaurant. All right, you asked me to “re-create” my conversations with Anthony. Here goes, best as I can recollect.

  I arranged to meet him for lunch at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. Now, I’ve found you get two things when you ask for a “menu” in Simpson’s: a baleful look from the server and an oversized card headed BILL OF FARE. No Frenchy words and no Frenchy foods. Now that Pétain had capitulated to Hitler, I felt it only right, if we were to discuss ancien français, that we put on an Olde English nosebag.

  Blunt, when he arrived ten minutes late, was lanky, well turned out and unapologetic. “Mr. Coward? Anthony Blunt. Waiting long?”

  “Not overly. Join me.” I shook the hand he proffered, noting it was dead-fish limp. Right then and there I decided that, manners or no, we were going to get on. We had to.

  Blunt settled himself across from me in one of the high-backed booths that line the room. But not before extracting a handkerchief from his breast pocket and ostentatiously whisking the cushioned seat where his posterior would go.

  I plunged in. “I’m informed by impeccable sources, Mr. Blunt, that you are—”

  “Dr. Blunt.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “It’s Doctor Blunt. I have my doctorate.”

  It was all I could do to keep myself from saying, “And I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury, so you can kiss my bloody foot.” But I was determined, as I’ve said, that we get on. So, all meek and mild, I replied, “Then welcome to my humble abode, Dr. Blunt. Would you care for a drink?”

  The word “drink” had the same effect on Blunt that “Open, Sesame” had on Ali Baba’s cave door. It prised the thing open. Alcohol softened Anthony Blunt just enough so that fifteen minutes later, when a husky young waiter of pleasing mien—one of the tableside carvers who was presumably too young for the Army—moved past us pushing a silver dinner wagon loaded down with mutton for the party in the booth next to ours, something telling occurred. Rationing had been on since the middle of March, and I was amazed to see so much meat in one place. Blunt’s eyes, though, lingered on the youth’s athletic form. So we had that in common.

  “Anthony, let me get down to cases. As part of the war effort, I wish to engage a person such as yourself to create a seemingly ancient document, a ruse that must have impeccable bona fides.”

  “Are you with one of the services?”

  I had practiced my response. “Yes, a rather secret one, I’m afraid.”

  Blunt smiled for the first time and finished his drink. “Oh, don’t be afraid. I love secrets.” He held out his empty glass to the waiter, an old gaffer who had been hovering nearby. “Another of the same,” he said.

  I waited until Blunt’s eyes were back on me. “We require a man of your resources to help devise a medieval forgery.”

  “A simulacrum.”

  “Beg pardon?” I wasn’t sure what Blunt had said.

  “You want me to create a simulacrum, I hope, and not a forgery. Something that appears genuine in all respects but isn’t, as opposed to a faked version of something that actually exists. I don’t do fakes.”

  I don’t mind admitting that it seemed a distinction without a difference. �
��A simulacrum then, if I’m pronouncing it right.”

  “You are. And I will. If the compensation is appropriate.”

  “How much do you require?”

  “Oh, there will be expenses, to be sure. But I don’t expect coin of the realm.”

  “Then what—”

  “I wish to be taken into your service. To enlist . . . in the war effort.”

  I suppose now is the time to declare, for the record, that I had absolutely no knowledge Anthony was already working for the Soviets. That, in fact, he had been doing so ever since his Cambridge days.

  Your young Nigel here has put me “in the picture” as regards Anthony’s frequent rendezvous with Ivan Stoichkov, their sinister London Head of Station. Robert, you have specifically asked me who first broached the subject of his joining the Service. I now state, unequivocally, he did.

  As I wasn’t a talent spotter, I made no reply at the time. Or rather, I tucked into my leg of lamb, which another of the farm-boys-turned-carvers—this one with ginger hair—had just put on my plate. Anthony’s gaze was riveted just above another leg, on the boy. The conversation was, for the moment, over.

  Afterward, I redeemed from the cloakroom the Hamley’s shopping bag I’d got when I bought some electric trains for my nephews. In it was the material my man Lawrence had assembled on Nostradamus, as well as Kennedy’s little book of prophecies. I handed it to Blunt, who gave it a jaundiced eye and promised to “look at it over the weekend.”

  Oh, hold on, Nigel is tapping on the glass. I . . . I’m wanted on the telephone. I see there’s more room on the cylinder, so we’ll pick this up again in a few moments.

  Chapter 18

  Time for a little fact checking, Lara told herself. First step: learn if there was any truth at all to Noël Coward’s story—Coward, the playwright and songsmith, but definitely not the historian.