The Second Assassin

by The Second Assassin (retail) (epub)

  ‘A problem?’ Lascelles asked, pointing to the pile of telegraph forms.

  ‘Possibly. As you know, the FBI and a Scotland Yard representative have been keeping tabs on Sean Russell.’

  ‘The IRA chief?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Supposedly he’s in the United States to raise money.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that. There’s information that would lead us to believe there is an assassination plot against Their Royal Highnesses, with Russell as the plot’s chief conspirator.’

  Lascelles shrugged. ‘If there’s evidence then surely he can be arrested.’

  ‘It’s not that easy by the looks of it.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The FBI has orders to keep Russell under surveillance only.’

  ‘Whose idea was that?’

  ‘Believe it or not, the orders would appear to come from Mr Roosevelt.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ Lascelles shrugged. ‘Next year is an election year for him. Russell may be a thug in England but in Ireland and America he’s a bit of a hero. Roosevelt doesn’t want to alienate the Irish vote. He’d lose New York, Boston and Detroit and they’re key to his winning the presidency for another term.’

  ‘You seem to know a great deal about American politics.’

  ‘When I was secretary to the Canadian governor general I had to learn Canadian politics too.’ Lascelles offered up a baleful grin. ‘Once upon a time all you had to do was count the number of gun ports on a navy’s ships. Now it’s all done with voting booths and expensive campaigns. The point is it’s unlikely Roosevelt will allow any action to be taken against Russell unless it’s absolutely necessary.’ Lascelles made a small face. ‘Anyway, he does seem rather an unlikely assassin. He’s far too much in the public eye.’

  ‘Even more so now,’ said Wood. ‘Someone named Dr Dinsley gave a press conference in Los Angeles telling a gathering of reporters that he was a British Secret Service agent with an F10 designation who was there to announce that Sean Russell was in the United States for the express purpose of assassinating the king and queen.’

  Lascelles frowned. ‘There’s no such Secret Service ranking as F10.’

  ‘No, there isn’t, as the next day’s editions of the newspapers were quick to point out. This Dinsley person was utterly ridiculed in the press and so was his idea of Russell as an assassin.’

  ‘What happened to Dinsley?’

  ‘Disappeared without a trace, the damage done.’

  ‘Who organised the press conference?’

  ‘A man named Lechner from the American Legion Los Angeles Public Relations Committee.’

  ‘And the FBI?’

  ‘Russell no longer has any priority. I cabled Hoover asking for photographs and descriptions of Russell in the event that he tries to cross the border but I’ve had no reply.’

  ‘Do we have any idea where Russell is now?’

  ‘Not the faintest.’ The commissioner paused, stroking his moustache for a brief moment. ‘Does the king know anything of this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps he should be told.’

  ‘I think not. For the moment it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.’

  * * *

  The king sat in a large, partially upholstered Adirondack chair on the open porch of the small cabin smoking another of his never-ending supply of Players. There was a large tin ashtray built into one arm and a holder for a glass built into the other – which he thought was a fine idea – and which now held a double gin and tonic, even though it was only just past noon. In the meadow below the cabin Buffy and one of her ladies-in-waiting, the Lady Nunburnholme, were busy gathering up bouquets of wildflowers and laughing together.

  On the king’s lap was a copy of one of Grey Owl’s books, given to him as a gift by some dimly remembered official at a whistle-stop in the north of Ontario. He smiled, remembering how the leathery old fraud, whose real name was Archie Belaney, had visited Buckingham Palace two years before and how he and Buffy had tiptoed into the nursery unannounced as the soft-spoken man with a feather in his braided hair instructed the two enthralled and wide-eyed little princesses in the secrets of woodcraft. For days afterward none of the Corgis was safe from Lilibet and Margaret Rose with their makeshift bows and arrows, war-whooping up and down the corridors and terrorising the little creatures, insisting that they were wolverines whose pelts would fetch ‘big dollar’ at the Hudson’s Bay Post.

  The king lit another cigarette from the hot end of the previous one – a habit Buffy found ‘perfectly disgusting’ – and then took a small sip of his drink. He was supposed to be working on the breathing and relaxation exercises he’d been taught by Logue, his Harley Street speech therapist, but today he just couldn’t be bothered. The techniques were tedious, most of them involving endless repetitions of convoluted, childish sentences like ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’ and learning how to breathe with his diaphragm rather than his throat. Since he wouldn’t be giving any long-winded speeches for a little while yet, he’d decided to abandon the exercises, at least for today. Logue had been very insistent that he give up smoking as an aid to his breathing, if not his general health – not an untoward suggestion since his father, George V, had died of respiratory complications – but Bertie had refused, insisting that other than Logue’s exercises, the only thing that calmed him enough to speak without too much of a stammer was the cigarettes. And the gin.

  The king picked up the book in his lap and stared at the cover. On it an Indian – Archie, no doubt – was paddling a birchbark canoe along the margin of a lake, tall pines rising in the background and high above in a cloudless sky a hawk or eagle circled. If you looked very closely and carefully you could see the shy, sleek head of a young deer looking out from between the trees. Archie, born into some ghastly slum in Birmingham or Manchester or wherever it was, transformed himself into an Indian, and a famous one at that, and was now a famous fraud with his secret made public.

  Both of them frauds. The king for the fact that he knew nothing of kingship and wanted to know nothing, for his petrifying fear of women, even his own dear Buffy, his secret left-handedness, virtually beaten out of him by his father and his tutors as a child, but secretly indulged whenever he could manage it, like a child sucking at his thumb. He stared at the cover of the book and felt the first sting of angry tears. A street urchin like Archie Belaney could come and go as he pleased, glide over lakes and rivers, live off the land, be something for himself, entertain, do good works even if that good work was nothing more than putting a gleam of another world into his daughters’ eyes. And yet a king, an emperor could do nothing, be nothing. Nothing at all. Talent, desire, want and need, all of it was nothing, the bloodline was all, a proper heir the object. When you came right down to it all the King of England could do well was hit a tennis ball and shoot grouse. Hardly a reason for existence and less of a reason for being on what was beginning to feel like an endless tour of this gigantic country that only served to make him feel smaller and more useless than he usually did.

  Buffy came up the steps in one of her blue dresses, her arms laden with flowers. Lady Nunburnholme was still in the meadow. ‘Have we been doing our exercises?’ asked the queen.

  The king managed a smile and a nod. He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Just getting to them now.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Friday, June 2, 1939

  Chicago, Illinois

  Thomas Barry stood at the window of the eleventh-storey suite he had been sharing with Sheila Connelly for the previous three days and looked across Michigan Avenue to the immense pewter-tinted lake that ran out to the horizon. A few sailboats had ventured out beyond the harbour breakwater but the grey waters, the spume-edged chop and a stiff onshore breeze didn’t make the thought of a day on the lake very inviting. It was only three in the afternoon but the overcast skies and an intermittent gusting rain made it seem like dusk.

  Barry turned away from the window
and looked across to the couch where the Connelly woman was sitting reading Time, a cigarette in her other hand and a cup of tea on the coffee table in front of her. She was dressed in tweed slacks, a white blouse and a pair of soft leather slippers, all new since her arrival in the United States. Beyond her, on a broad shelf below a large mirror by the door, Barry could see the copy of The Mask of Dimitrios she’d been given by Ridder. The ammonia-induced writing had faded weeks ago but would come up again without any adverse effect; the FBI lab had made sure of that before they left New York.

  It had taken the first week with Sheila Connelly to get her to even talk to him and another week after that to grant him the most limited kind of trust. By the third week they’d come to understand each other well enough but only for their own alienation from the rest of the world. Barry was a British policeman born and raised in Catholic Ireland, fated never to be fully accepted by either country, and Connelly was a woman who fought for a cause she’d long since lost her passion for and belief in. By standing apart from the world at large they stood together for themselves, at least in some small way, although even now Barry still saw himself as her minder as much as her companion. Compounding that was the shoulder rig and holster for the Smith and Wesson .38 Special Sam Foxworth had insisted that he wear while he was with her.

  ‘She’s bait,’ the FBI man had reminded him before they left New York. ‘Try to remember that, Barry. She’s not some heroic figure fighting for her beliefs no matter what she says or what you think. She’s a piece of tail we’re using to snare Sean Russell with.’

  The woman dropped her copy of Time onto the coffee table, took a sip from her teacup and puffed on her cigarette. ‘All very domestic, aren’t we? The happily married couple on a visit to Chicago.’ Barry could feel himself blushing. They’d been living in close proximity for the better part of a month now and she was forever reminding him of it, just to see him squirm. She smiled up at him from the couch. ‘Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Except that you’re pacing up and down like an expectant father and you’ve got that great bloody gun hanging off you. Russell sees that and he’ll do a runner, you can be sure of that.’

  ‘You just do your part and I’ll do mine.’

  ‘You don’t have a part,’ she answered. ‘It’s been made up and that’s going to make him suspicious enough.’

  ‘Not if you calm him down.’ He pushed his hands into his pockets to keep from fidgeting. ‘You remember the story we agreed on?’

  ‘Your name’s Tom Sullivan and you’re from the New York City branch of Clan na Gael.’ Clan na Gael was a semi-secret society of American Irish who supported the IRA, Isolationism and the fascist America First organisation.

  ‘And what do I do for a living in New York?’

  ‘You’re a New York City policeman.’

  ‘Which should explain the revolver, especially since I’ve taken leave to act as your bodyguard while you’re in America.’

  ‘I told you and your FBI friends from the beginning: that was never part of the plan and for a man like Russell if it’s not part of the plan, it’s not to be trusted.’

  ‘That’s a chance we’ll have to take.’

  ‘I still don’t see the point of this.’

  ‘You know exactly what the point is. The contact name you were carrying lives in Detroit, this Dr Doyle, whoever he is. In a few days from now the royal train arrives in Windsor, Ontario, just across the Detroit River. If Russell is going to make an attempt either in Windsor or a few miles along the way at Niagara Falls, he has to be caught red-handed with bombs or bomb-making materials in his possession. According to Foxworth it’s the only way to make any charges stick.’

  ‘You really think he’ll be stupid enough to let us come along?’

  ‘He won’t know where to go at all until you give him the book, will he?’

  ‘I still think it’s all foolishness.’

  ‘Perhaps, but what do you have to lose?’

  ‘My life for one thing.’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

  ‘No. You’re here to see that I keep my side of the bargain. I give you Sean Russell and I get a new life here in America.’ That was the bait Foxworth had dangled in front of her – a way out, a new life without the organisation. Freedom.

  ‘Seems a fair trade to me.’

  She lit another cigarette and sat back against the cushions, making Barry uneasily aware of the roundness of her breasts against the fabric of her blouse. ‘Fair trade? You really think your friends are going to give me a new life in the Holy Land here? Don’t be daft, Thomas. Once they have what they want they’ll let the organisation take care of me and you know they’ll do just that. They’ll find me eventually and when they do they’ll put a bullet in my brain, just like they’ve done with all the other traitors who’ve gone before.’

  ‘A traitor being anyone who doesn’t believe in the Republican ideal – is that it?’

  ‘We’re arguing like a pair of Irishmen.’ She smiled.

  ‘That we are.’ He laughed, feeling the tension ease slightly in one direction and increase in another. He reached down to take a cigarette from the package on the coffee table and she sat forward, her hand wrapping around his wrist.

  ‘You’ve not much experience with women, have you? Political or otherwise.’

  ‘Experience enough.’ He eased out of her grip and lit the cigarette. He walked back towards the window and stood there, looking out at the squalling lake again.

  ‘You’re a liar, Thomas Barry. What would the monks say about a sin like that?’ He could feel her standing just behind him and to one side, the side away from the revolver in its holster.

  ‘Really,’ he said. ‘And how would you know that?’

  ‘A woman knows these things, Thomas.’ She put her hand up onto his shoulder and even though she wore no scent he could smell her faintly – soap and talc and something else beneath it all.

  She was right, of course. For him women were a mystery – the brothers in Cork had seen to that. Later, in the army, the only recourse for unmarried men were prostitutes, a direction also tainted by graphic tales of horror from Brother Emmett and his brown-robed, rope-belted colleagues.

  Living in a succession of police station section houses for bachelor coppers eventually turned circumstance into habit, and no matter how often his married friends at the Yard like Morris Black or Bob Fabian tried to set him up, nothing ever seemed to really take. The few times anything had gone much farther than a goodnight kiss had been fumbling, red-faced disasters.

  The woman moved a little closer and now he could feel the firm curve of her breast pushing into his arm. He tried to move an inch or two away but she kept her hand on his shoulder, keeping him where he was.

  ‘What are you afraid of?’ she asked. ‘Some Jesuit bastard in a collar who caught you with your hands inside the blanket? Told you all women except your mother and the Holy Virgin were riddled with disease?’ It was close enough to the truth to make him blush again. He managed to pull himself away.

  ‘They were Dominicans and I was the bastard,’ he answered, keeping his eyes fixed on the great grey expanse of the lake. ‘They sent my mother to the laundries. I never knew who my father was.’

  ‘Jesus,’ she whispered. She came and stood in front of him, reached up and laid one hand flat against his chest. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I.’ She left her hand where it was, against his heart, and came up on her toes to kiss him softly on the lips. Her mouth tasted of smoke and of sugar from the tea. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked when she moved her mouth away.

  ‘It’s all a plot to convert you to the Cause.’ She smiled. ‘Or perhaps I’m seducing you to get my hands on that revolver of yours.’

  ‘No. Tell me.’

  She kissed him again, her lips softer now, one hand remaining on his heart, the other coming up to brush against his cheek. ‘I’m lonely,’ she said softly. ‘And so are you.’

  ‘That’s r
eason enough?’

  ‘For people like us, I think so, yes.’

  ‘We’ve a rendezvous with Sean Russell in the park.’

  ‘Not for more than an hour yet. We have time.’

  They lay in bed together when they were done, the Scotland Yard detective simultaneously embarrassed and excited by being nude in bed with a woman, bemused by it all, especially since even the nakedness of the locker room in a public swimming bath had always been cause for acute self-consciousness. At the orphanage in Cork, in the showers, Father Emmett had noted that he’d begun to develop hair on his body and had beaten him soundly for it on the off-chance he’d begun seriously to abuse himself.

  Sheila Connelly appeared not to be even slightly disconcerted by the situation, lying on one hip, sharing a cigarette with him, rolling away from time to time, flicking the ash into her tea saucer on the bedside table and that was almost as exciting as the act itself, though not as dramatic in its consequences.

  ‘You probably think I’m some kind of slut, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  She smiled. ‘At least you’re honest about it.’

  ‘Most men aren’t?’

  ‘There haven’t been that many.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to suggest…’

  She smiled again. ‘No offence taken. Not really.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Nothing to be sorry for. To answer your question, the men I’ve known have generally been more concerned with themselves than anything else and when they have wanted my opinion it’s generally been questions about the size of their organ and their virility.’

  ‘And what do you tell them?’ Barry asked, taking the cigarette from her again and drawing on it.