In Secret Service

by Mitch Silver

  Amy started to take out her day planner to make a sketch of those shocked faces when she thought better of it and, instead, popped the little brass lock on her black computer case and pulled out her now slightly dog-eared copy of Provenance.

  Chapter 10

  PROVENANCE

  A thin membrane separated Wallis Warfield from the other professional Southern belles of good name and scant assets whose one purpose in life was to be married off to money. Even so, Wallis married for money. Twice. Once to Ernest Simpson, a middle-aged Anglo-American businessman who settled her into the middle tier of London society in the late 1920s. And later, to the Prince.

  But her first marriage was for love, to one Earl Winfield Spencer, a dashing airman training other reckless young men to pilot the “flying egg crates” that took off with regularity from Pensacola Naval Air Station in the years before the War. The Wright Brothers, having recently invented the thing, were still ironing out the kinks in airplane design. But that didn’t stop the Daring Young Men who took to the skies. And afterwards, at balls and cotillions throughout the South, they took to the ladies.

  From just looking at her picture, one might imagine that Wallis would have stood little chance in such a competition. And one would be wrong. Though she was anything but feminine—tall, with a flat chest, slim hips, and (something you couldn’t tell from the picture) a voice like a rusty gate—Wallis Warfield knew what men were interested in. Themselves. Whether it was the captain of the football team at the boys’ school across town, or the pick of Baltimore’s litter of young men from the right side of the tracks, Wallis boned up on them. She would ask her friends, and then his friends: What song did he favour? What drink? What play? What scent did he notice? And then, when she had cornered her prey at a dance or party, she’d spend the evening requesting that song, drinking that drink, and exuding that scent. She’d be totally taken with the man’s wit, or muscles, or shoe size, whatever was required.

  At her 1913 debut held at Baltimore’s Lyric Theatre, her presence was financed by her guardian, Aunt Bessie, and Bessie’s brother Sol. (Bessie was the paid companion to a newspaper heiress and Sol just happened to own a string of railroads.) Between dances Wallis rested in a theatre box-cum-bower, decorated during the whole of the previous night with hundreds of orchids, roses, lilies, gladioli, and her favourite white chrysanthemums, more flowers than are draped over the winning horse at the Preakness.

  And then there was the dress. While all the other girls wore the sort of dresses young girls were expected to wear, Wallis invested the enormous sum of twenty dollars in an exact copy of the white satin Worth gown made in Paris for the society dancer Irene Castle. Though its cinched bodice and modified hobble skirt would prove to be most uncomfortable, Wallis insisted on standing for hours while it was fitted to her wiry frame. And she spent hours more improving her waltzing and learning the new, sensational tango. And then, plain as she was, she was danced off her feet the entire evening. Years later, she would swear she had never allowed one of her beaux “below her Mason-Dixon line.” She didn’t have to. Good old American ingenuity had made her the twentieth-century Jezebel who turned every head and caught every male eye.

  Her love for Winfield Spencer and her marriage proved to be a disaster. Too valuable an instructor to fly in the Great War, he remained stateside, posted to the new naval air station in San Diego. Spencer had hours and sometimes days to kill between training sessions, and an unlimited supply of Officers Club alcohol to kill them with. With the liquor came dinners missed and women met. By the end of the War, Wallis discovered her husband had, if not a girl in every port, a dozen in the same town in which she was living.

  The years immediately after the Armistice found the Spencers cooped up together in government housing in Washington, D.C. Wallis took back up with her friends from Baltimore, leaving Win to his bottles. With every bottle came a battle. Before long, Spencer was bringing his bellicose attitude to work, arguing with his commanding officers for promotion and higher pay, alienating one Navy superior after another.

  Ironically, it was her husband’s insubordination, and not her own upward mobility, that set Wallis upon the road to the throne. Initially, though, it set her upon the deck of the USS Pampanga in the South China Seas in the late summer of 1924, a year before her thirtieth birthday.

  How she got there we’ll come to shortly. But picture, if you will, the arriviste belle from Baltimore climbing aboard the rusting ex-Spanish Navy relic with great holes in the hull, put there by the guns of one or the other of the warring Chinese factions. Described in a later newspaper account as “the least shipshape ship in the American Navy,” the Pampanga was the only vessel small enough to slip through the narrow marshes and estuaries of the Canton Delta. It had a bucket of water on a string for a shower, no proper toilet, and no ventilation at all. It was no place for a lady. Even if she was America’s newest spy.

  Chapter 11

  PROVENANCE

  The day, more than a year earlier, when Winfield Spencer’s CO had finally had enough of his drinking and complaining and signed the orders banishing him to a patrol boat in the Pacific was the day Wallis Spencer was liberated. Living in Washington on a husband’s pay without the husband, Wallis set out to ingratiate herself in the burgeoning diplomatic world of the post-WWI capital.

  With the German she’d been taught in school and a smattering of French, she gained entrée to the embassies and consulates of Massachusetts Avenue. Naturally, Wallis would settle for nothing less than an ambassador. Conveniently, the forty-five-year-old Prince Gelasio Caetani, representing Mussolini’s new government, returned her interest. Caetani, who had marched on Rome with Il Duce in 1922, was only too eager to believe that every Fascist word was music to Wallis’s ears. Next came the First Secretary of the Argentine Embassy, Felipe Espil. Rich, smooth, a classic Latin lover who danced the best tango in town, Espil was everything any woman could want. So what did he want with Wallis?

  As it happened, Wallis had already learned that her anatomical shortcomings gave her a double-barrelled advantage in the battle of the sexes: every man felt his endowment had magically tripled when he slept with Wallis. Added to her enormous gifts of flattery and seduction, and her willingness to forgo her own pleasure for the sake of the man’s, Wallis Simpson’s membrane had them lined up for miles along Embassy Row. Her second advantage was at least as powerful as her first. Knowing she could never become pregnant freed her to pursue her affairs with the independence and creativity of a modern midcentury woman. It left her peers, those post-Victorian “flappers,” flapping in the breeze.

  Soon, the “Wallis Grip” became the qui vive among the men of a certain set, whispered about in the clubs and described in the locker rooms. Word of it, though in garbled form, even reached President Harding, who asked the pro at Burning Tree Golf Club if he would show him the Wallis Grip. The man broke down in hysterics, leaving the President to hole out on his own.

  It came to the attention of the Navy Department, and more particularly, the Department of Naval Intelligence, that the wife of a cantankerous, low-grade officer had ingratiated herself in the upper echelons of diplomatic society. As it happened, they had a very real need for presentable Navy wives…in China. The Civil War there between Sun Yat-sen and the regime occupying Peking was boiling over into indiscriminate slaughter in the streets, Westerners included. Funded by Russian ex-revolutionaries and Japanese militarists, the war threatened not only life and limb but also the Chinese holdings of Standard Oil, which the American government had secretly pledged to protect.

  Telegraph lines were cut on a daily basis by one side or the other. And the only broadcast tower in the country powerful enough to reach American bases in the Pacific was in enemy hands. So the Navy had to depend on trusted couriers to get information into and out of the country. And who was more trusted, with better cover, than the Navy wives making conjugal visits to their husbands away at sea?

  When she was first approached about
going to China, Wallis demurred. Things were going swimmingly with a high-ranking Rumanian at the time. So a little pressure was brought to bear. The Navy merely started sending Win Spencer’s checks directly to him instead of his wife. With the money tree suddenly bare, and at the urging of her Aunt Bessie, Wallis had a change of mind.

  A four-month course in the basics of spycraft—in which Wallis learned how to encode messages and use lemon juice as invisible ink, and how to leave messages in “drops” for other agents to collect later—and she was on her way. Ostensibly Wallis would rejoin her beloved husband, but in actuality she was to rendezvous with Lt. Col. Jack Barnard at the American Legation in the Forbidden City.

  Chapter 12

  Miss Greenberg?”

  Amy looked up with a start. Was her flight boarding? She put the manuscript in her computer case. She’d lost track of the time.

  The man who had spoken was blocking her view of the monitor. “You have a few minutes, Miss Greenberg.” He indicated the seat next to hers. “May I?”

  She nodded. The man, very English and nice-looking in a dark suit, was balancing a cup of tea with lemon on a folded copy of the Financial Times. He managed to place the cup and saucer on the broad arm of the chair, put the paper down on the coffee table, and sit, all in one motion. He’d done this before.

  Amy could now see the monitor had DL 106 to New York leaving in thirty minutes but not yet boarding. She turned back to the man and saw that he had extracted a business card from a silver case and was holding it out to her. It read “Brian Devlin, Publisher” above the company name, “Glidrose.” At the bottom was a London address and several phone numbers.

  She took the card.

  “As luck would have it, Miss Greenberg—or is it Mrs.?” He paused, smiling.

  Hmm. Not your usual pickup line. Did engaged count? “Miss.”

  “Well, Miss Greenberg, as luck would have it, my business takes me to New York this morning, and I couldn’t help noticing we’re on the same flight.”

  How had he noticed that? And then she followed his eyes to the boarding pass that peeked out from the side flap of her handbag.

  It was a little early in the morning for an illicit romance. She smiled back. “Well, Mr….”

  “Devlin.”

  “Well, Mr. Devlin, as coincidences go, it’s pretty meager. This is the Delta lounge.”

  His smile broadened slightly. “But I don’t have business to discuss with them. Only with you.”

  “With me? I don’t—I’m a college professor. Educational business?”

  Mr. Devlin took a moment to return his card case to his jacket pocket and take a sip of his tea before saying, “Publishing business.”

  Amy’s brain struggled to play catch-up. “If you mean my thesis, I’m published by the Yale Press. You could speak to them about European rights or…”

  From the look on his face, Mr. Devlin didn’t mean her thesis. He was straightening the old-fashioned points of the white handkerchief in his breast pocket. “Actually, I’m referring to the manuscript you were just reading.”

  An impulse, something, made her touch the lock on the black case at her feet.

  Devlin turned his body to face her full on. “It’s a reflex, really. If someone is engrossed in a stack of pages, I’m interested.” Were his teeth capped? They were way too even. All these European men and their strange mouths. Was she developing an oral fixation? Devlin leaned in closer. “Entre nous, I’ve never heard of an Ian Fleming book called Provenance.”

  Amy’s radar went up. How did he know what she was reading? She studied his features. He was hardly bookish. About forty, tall, with combed-back dark hair and deeply tanned skin, Mr. Brian Devlin appeared more the very model of a modern global Eurocrat flying back from three weeks in the sun.

  She stalled with “What is Glidrose?”

  “We’re a closely held, um, marketing firm of a sort. Set up to exploit the, uh, possibilities of a select group of novels, screenplays, and films. And, naturally, defend those interests.”

  Where was this conversation going? “You said defend?”

  “Ensure the copyrights are adhered to, that all rights fees are remitted, that sort of thing. We can’t have some street person marketing Da Vinci Code backpacks or 007 perfume, can we?”

  Amy tried a girlish laugh. “I thought they did that all the time.”

  “About your choice of reading material…would you be interested in knowing that an original Ian Fleming manuscript, if that’s what you have, could with our help fetch in the five or possibly six figures?”

  For no earthly reason, Amy decided to derail the conversation. She remembered the title page had for some reason said “I. Fleming.” “Oh. You think the manuscript I was reading is by Ian Fleming.”

  Devlin did a kind of mini double take. “Is there another I. Fleming?”

  “Ira Fleming. He’s a…graduate student. Of mine. At Yale.” The way Devlin was staring at her, she thought, the word liar must be flashing on her forehead. What kind of stupid name was Ira Fleming? “Provenance is the working title of his dissertation proving the, uh, presence of the unapprehended deity in German Renaissance painting.”

  Devlin took out a cigarette and then, as if noticing what he’d done, he put it away. “Really?” was all he said.

  Amy regretted her lie. After all, fate had put her in this seat in this airport to be noticed by this man, who just might be able to help her evaluate her inheritance. But alarms had gone off in her brain. There was something about him. What?

  Devlin took a sip of what must be very tepid tea. “An art history thesis on, what did you say, the ‘unapprehended’? How stupid of me.” Something caught his attention. He reached into his jacket and withdrew a cell phone. Amy thought it was turned off, but she must have been wrong because Devlin spoke into it. “Yes?”

  He listened to the phone for a moment and then turned back to Amy. “I’m sorry. Change of plans.” He listened some more and then closed his phone. “Miss Greenberg, I’m afraid you’ll be flying to New York without me.” And then, “You’re boarding.”

  Amy looked at the monitor. She was. Mr. Devlin stood and held out his hand. “So nice to have met you.” And then he was off.

  In a minute, Amy gathered her things and headed out of the lounge for her plane, surprised at the pang the man’s sudden departure had caused in an “affianced” woman. What was it with her and Englishmen?

  Chapter 13

  PROVENANCE

  First, let me give you the “authorised” version of Wallis’s trip to Peking in late November of 1924. The railroad tracks had been so badly torn up by warring forces, the Blue Express couldn’t make the journey from Shanghai. Wallis had to take a freighter, the SS Shuntien, via Weiheiwei and Chefoo to Tientsin, where she changed for a train to complete her journey. The ship was constantly pitching and rolling, the heat was stifling, and the passengers all became seasick. And that was the easy part.

  Waiting for her connection at the Tientsin depot, a ramshackle collection point for typhoid victims, starving families, and deserting Chinese soldiers, Wallis found she was the only American civilian, and the only woman of any nationality, making the trip. The eight-car train, its windows shot out long before, slowly rolled in. It had been commandeered by the U.S. Army, but the tracks, lined on either side by 25,000 of his troops, belonged to Chang Tso-lin, one of the warlords besieging the capital. At Pei-Tsang and every whistle-stop thereafter, the Chinese boarded the train and paraded up and down the aisles, trying to provoke the Americans into a fight.

  The American soldiers were no better. Drunk and disorderly, they fought over whose turn it was to “protect” the lone female passenger. The winds of northern China blew through the unheated cars. The toilets were holes in the floor. A journey that should have taken ninety minutes lasted thirty-eight hours.

  Her unwashed protectors were such that Wallis took to dousing her handkerchief with perfume and holding it over her nose. It must have be
en a relief to see Commander Louis M. Little of the Marines and his grey armoured Navy car waiting for her at the station.

  The relief didn’t last long. Passing through the Hatamen Gate on their way to the fortified Legation Quarter, they drove beside a line of human heads stuck on thirty-foot bamboo poles, a none-too-subtle statement made by Chang’s enemy, the notorious General Feng Yü-hsiang, who held the city.

  Okay, now for the unauthorised story, my own blend of information from the files of British Intelligence and the lips of Winston Churchill. It’s much more fun. Wallis had left Washington in July and sailed through the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor and thence to Manila, arriving for her reunion with Win on the Pampanga in early September. She’s next seen in Peking the second week of December. What happened during those missing ninety days? Well, some of the time Wallis spent on the move. And some of it she spent on her back.

  Her reconciliation with her husband was a put-up job, a convenient cover story choreographed by Naval Intelligence. Ostensibly, Win agreed to once again turn over to her his Navy pay, in return for Wallis’s playing the role of Navy wife. But there was a secret codicil to their pact, one bought and paid for with money from the government’s “black funds.” For $10,000, Win would agree to provide her with two things: an eventual divorce and, to help the new spy get started with a bang, an introduction into the “singing houses” of Hong Kong.

  The singing houses, sometimes called “singsong” by Navy officers, were luxurious brothels. Women from the poorest sections of inland China, chosen for their looks, were trained from their teens in the arts of love. The client was entertained with stringed instruments, delicately erotic songs, and dances of sinuous beauty. I have no idea whether Wallis could dance or play the lute, but I gather her clients left singing her praises.