by Mitch Silver
Chapter 39
The first thing Amy saw when she passed the Plexiglas barrier was her name spelled wrong. A limo guy in an ill-fitting suit jacket was holding a card with “Dr. Greenburg” printed on it. The second thing she saw was that Brian Devlin was no longer in the waiting area. She experienced the same little pang she’d felt that morning in the Dublin airport. Weird.
The limo guy approached her. “Dr. Greenberg?”
“Yes?”
“The car is right outside.” He started to reach for her rolling bag with the computer case.
Amy clutched it tighter. “I didn’t call for a car.”
He gestured vaguely beyond the exit doors. “It’s the gray Town Car.”
“But I didn’t call a car.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Greenberg, I should have explained.” His speech had an Irish lilt to it. “You were delayed on the ground for more than ninety minutes, so Delta provides this service for all the business passengers who were thus inconvenienced.”
Thus inconvenienced? Amy looked at him. He wore a pretty bad rug. The giveaway was that his mustache was a slightly different color. Don’t trust anyone. “A limo for every passenger? C’mon.”
Maybe he mistook her skeptical “c’mon” for “let’s go.” He put out his hand again, this time gently taking her elbow as if to lead her toward the door. “No, ma’am, a van took the other passengers about ten minutes ago. We didn’t want to hold them up waiting for you, so I brought my car around.”
Why was she being coddled by another son of the Auld Sod? Her antenna was up. “Okay, how did you know I was Dr. Greenberg? I didn’t tell you my name.”
The man smiled. Was there something else that was familiar about him? “You didn’t have to. The tag on your suitcase says flight 106, priority handling. That means business class. So you’re it.”
Amy looked down at the tag and snapped it off her bag.
The man gave a gentle tug on her suitcase handle, just below the point where she was holding it. “If we didn’t make an effort with our best customers, they wouldn’t still be our customers.”
Against her better judgment, Amy let the creepy man take her bag and lead her to the row of doors. Immediately outside was the taxi line. Leaning against the stanchion at the back of the line, smoking, was Brian Devlin. If she turned down this ride, she’d have to share a cab with him. But there was just something about the attractive Englishman popping up this way that didn’t feel—
The bus to Grand Central chose that moment to wheel around the car rental vans and hotel shuttles, pulling to a stop outside the row of glass doors. Amy followed the limo driver through the automatic door and then grasped the handle of her American Tourister before he could step into the crosswalk. She could see the Lincoln parked on the other side of the pedestrian island. A card in the front passenger window said City Cars/Dr. Greenburg. She broke the news. “Thanks but no thanks, Mr.—”
The man turned and looked at her in surprise. He didn’t offer his name or let go of her suitcase.
“I’ve decided to take the bus. Have a nice day.”
The man noticed the two military guys before Amy did. They were part of the beefed-up security at the airports these days, and they had guns. The man let go of her bag.
She rolled her suitcase over to where the bus driver was starting to collect tickets and cash from the small knot of people who were getting on. Amy jammed the extendable handle down into her bag so she’d be able to lift it up the steep steps by the strap. “How much?”
The driver didn’t look up. “Thirteen.”
Amy juggled a few things so she could get at her wallet. She found a ten and three ones. At the same time, the driver had produced a ticket perforated near the bottom. He snapped off the stub and gave it to her, never once making eye contact or thanking her. Welcome to New York.
Amy managed to get her luggage onto the bus and took the empty seat by the partition behind the driver. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake she’d made on the plane. Amy reached into her case and fished out Fleming’s pages. The ride would take up to an hour, knowing the Van Wyck. Maybe she could finish the thing.
She was watching the people who were boarding the bus, so she missed the gray Town Car with the misspelled name pulling out at high speed around them to the left and racing on ahead.
What she did see was the commotion outside at the taxi stand. Two older people with big suitcases were practically bowled over by someone jumping the line and grabbing their cab. A man with slicked-back hair and a deep tan: Devlin. Good thing she was safely here on the bus.
Chapter 40
PROVENANCE
By the end of the war, I knew of only six people for certain who had ever seen the complete text of the Duke of Windsor’s letter of Christmas 1939: the Duke himself, Charles Bedaux, Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, King George VI, and your humble correspondent. Once I had seen both halves of it, I was in no doubt of the ex-King’s treachery: he was ready and more than willing to assume the throne—and quite possibly liquidate his brother and sister-in-law—the moment Hitler and the Germans won. Nor did I doubt why his brother then, and his descendants to this day, believe suppressing the letter to be a matter of life and death for the Crown. In my painstaking way, I hope to have you convinced as well when I have finished.
That May Day of 1945 when we drove to the Friedrichshof with your grandfather, two of the six witnesses were already dead by their own hand: Adolf Hitler had killed himself less than twenty-four hours before, and Charles Bedaux too was a suicide, though in very different circumstances. When Paris fell, Bedaux revealed his true Nazi colours and was given the task of liquidating all Jewish businesses in Occupied France. Installed in a set of offices on the Champs Élysées with a hundred German clerks, it took him two years to finish the job. Then it was on to his next project for the Germans: overseeing the building of an oil pipeline across the Sahara from Ouagadougou to Algeria.
On Saturday night, 7 November 1942, he went to bed in a hotel in Vichy-controlled Algiers. But he awoke on Sunday morning to find himself in Free French North Africa, liberated overnight by the Allies. He also found himself in the custody of the Military Security section of the Deuxième Bureau, who held him for a year despite his protest that he was a naturalised American citizen. His claim was finally upheld in December 1943, and he was shipped to Miami for interrogation by the FBI. It was there, confronted with undeniable proof that he had aided the enemy in time of war, that he took his life by swallowing Luminal, a concentrated form of phenobarbital, on 18 February 1944.
So that left the two royal brothers, a naval commander (me) bound by the Official Secrets Act, and the man Winston Churchill had clapped in irons for most of the war, the Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party: Rudolf Hess.
Twenty years later, I’m beginning to understand why Rudolf Hess had to die. An unreconstructed Nazi who would have given the game away if allowed to speak freely, Hess certainly would have used his abortive “peace” mission as a defence against the charge of war crimes. That he was murdered on Winston’s orders—while the war was still on—I have no doubt. Nor do I doubt that the man who stood trial at Nuremberg was an impostor.
These days it’s a badly kept secret that MI5 and MI6 did a rousing business in doubles (in German, Doppelgängers) of both British and Nazi leaders. Our cover was blown in 1943 when our Churchill look-alike did such a good job of looking like Churchill that he fooled the Luftwaffe into blowing him out of the sky over Gibraltar, a flight that also cost the life of the actor Leslie Howard.
At the behest of a couple of us in room 39, the Empire had been scoured for people who looked like Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, and the rest. Pickings were especially good in prisons, mental wards, and the armed forces, where those chosen for the dubious honour of acting like Nazis couldn’t say no. It was our bright idea to undermine German morale by creating tableaux vivants of these men in sexually compromising positions, photographing them, and reproducing the photos by
the thousands, dropping them over German cities and countryside during our nighttime air raids. I know for a fact that we had at least two Hesses so employed by the middle of 1941.
Late last year, a well-placed acquaintance gave me (and my Minox camera) twenty minutes alone with Rudolf Hess’s complete medical file. The man we tried for war crimes was supposed to have been shot through the chest in the Great War. Miraculously, the scar from that wound no longer existed. The dental records were even more definitive: the gold tooth of the man we captured in 1941 had come back to life by ’43!
Hess knew too much. He had seen the entire letter. He knew the King’s brother, the ex-King, was a traitor. What would happen to British morale if word got out? Could Winston take the chance?
Of course, I knew none of this when the war crimes trials opened in late November 1945. I was back in London, having wangled the managing editor job with the Sunday Times. Assigning myself to the trial, I drove to Nuremberg to experience at first hand Rudolf Hess’s testimony. The place was nothing like the beautiful old European city it had been, or the Nazi showplace it became in the 1930s, when those huge exercises in fanaticism and mass hysteria—organised by the same Rudolf Hess—brought Germans by the millions. There was no water, no electricity, no telephone or postal service, and nearly no architecture: ninety percent of the buildings had been pounded into rubble by the eleven major air raids during the war. But there was a brand-new Palace of Justice and its adjacent lockup with cells for 1,200 prisoners, built on the site of the windowless, fire-blackened shell that had been the old central court of Bavaria.
There was no jury either, only an eight-judge tribunal—two each from Britain, France, America, and the Soviet Union. When it came time for the twenty-one prisoners to enter pleas, twenty chose “Not guilty” and one, Hess, simply said, “Nein.” It was to be the only official word he spoke for months. Behind the scenes, the talk was more revealing. The other prisoners agreed that Hess had radically changed. When Ribbentrop was told Hess was denying all knowledge of certain events crucial to the defence, he asked, “Which Hess? You mean our Hess? Or the Hess we have here?”
Before sentencing, the defendants were permitted twenty minutes to make a statement. On the morning Hess was to make his, Goering taunted him during a break in the proceedings. “By the way, Hess, when are you going to let us in on your great secret? I make a motion Hess tell us his big secret. How about it, Hess?”
As it turned out, Hess did reveal a secret. Not in what he said but in the way he said it. While using his time to praise Adolf Hitler and dispute the right of the Allies to have put him on trial, Hess betrayed none of the Egyptian-inflected German I had heard so clearly that night in Scotland. The other prisoners, certainly Goering, must have known it too. But before Fat Hermann could make his statement, he was found dead in his cell of cyanide poisoning. Suicide, they said.
Chapter 41
PROVENANCE
And so we reach the present. Or nearly so. Following the war, I took that job editing the Sunday Times, took a wife (the beautiful Ann), and took a vacation from the job with the wife in Jamaica, which I think of as a small part of paradise.
I began writing fiction, or what I call “faction” (as I like to use the actual places and procedures and brand names of guns and cars and liqueurs an agent like Bond would know) in the islands. By a stroke of good fortune, the Cambridge spies—Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean—had just flown the coop for Moscow. So the world of secret agents was on everyone’s lips just as I stuck my toe in the water with Casino Royale. But it was John F. Kennedy who made my career.
In 1961, Life magazine asked the new American President to list his ten favourite books, and JFK put From Russia with Love at number nine, just ahead of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. Joy. Rapture. Sales. Suddenly, all my books were best sellers in the States, and the orders for reprints and new translations were flooding in to my publishers from all over. Even one from the Workers’ Paradise itself.
I am proud to say I agreed to let a Russian-language version of From Russia be smuggled into the Soviet Union. It was then photocopied again and again: they call it samizdat, or self-publishing. One copy made it into the hands of Oleg Penkovskiy, a senior official on Khrushchev’s General Staff in the Scientific Section who just happened to be our A-Number One double agent, and the CIA’s as well. (How good was he? He was the one who told the Americans that the Soviets had missiles in Cuba.)
I’d set my book partly in Istanbul, and it seems Penkovskiy had worked there for Soviet intelligence in the 1950s. Before that, we had similar wartime jobs: reviewing material from whatever source and distributing it to the various comrades in charge.
I suppose he developed an unspoken bond (pun intended) with me, his parallel officer working the other side of the street, or should I say Curtain. (And, of course, my book has Tatiana Romanova developing feelings for 007 across the same Curtain.) At any rate, during one of his debriefing sessions with Greville Wynne, his MI6 cutout, he passed on a message for me. I still remember it word for word. “Tell Fleming that if he wants a really big secret to write about, he shouldn’t waste his time on decoding machines. He should write about the Nazi traitor in the royal family. I’ve seen the proof. In writing.”
Penkovskiy’s message had a galvanizing effect on me. Ever since that last assignment up the hill with your grandfather, I’d tried to keep what I knew (what you know now, as well) in a mental folder stored in the pigeonhole in my brain called Despicable Things That Happen in Wartime and Are Best Forgotten. There are so many, though, that my pigeonhole is crammed to the limit with folders: The Promises We Made to Poland but Didn’t Keep, Deliberately Blowing a French Resistance Network Because They Were Communists and De Gaulle Wouldn’t Have It, Well-Placed Friends of the Government Who Bought Their Way Out of National Service and Lied about It, How We Could Have Used the Pope to Save At Least Some of the Jews but Didn’t.
But if the Russians knew about the Duke, maybe it wasn’t best forgotten. Maybe they’d already done something with the knowledge. They’ve put up a wall in Berlin. Did we hesitate to act because Khrushchev has something to hold over us, some dirty secret that would undermine the monarchy? Free nations have gone missing behind the Curtain; there was a revolution in Hungary that went on without us. We occupied Suez along with the French in ’56 and then folded our cards. Nasser was a Russian client. Was the Windsor card played then?
I may be many things, Amy. A dilettante, an entertainer, possibly even a snob. A serial philanderer too, even though I wholeheartedly love my wife. But here’s the bedrock me, the thing I put right out in the open with every 007 book I write: I’m a patriot. Of the most disgustingly true-blue sort. In the balance scale, I owe much more to my country than my country owes to me.
It’s why I so willingly did all those chores for Winston, why I joined the Service. And it’s why I’m telling you all this. To root out a single evil. To right a single, continuing wrong. Like a maths proof, I’ve had to take you through all my thinking. So when we arrive at my conclusion, I’ll be able to say, “Quod erat demonstrandum.” I’ll have proved my case. And you’ll know what to do.
That’s why, for the past eighteen months, I’ve been telling people I’m researching a new 007 book when what I’ve really been doing is running to ground every possibility, every individual who could have told the Soviets about the letter (as I can think of no other proof of the Duke’s betrayal), both on our side and the German. (One person I can no longer go to for information is Penkovskiy himself. The Soviets caught him with state papers, held a quick show trial in Moscow, and shot him a few months ago.)
Thanks in no little part to the few friends I still have in the Service, I’ve read the files and interviewed everyone who had even the slightest opportunity to see or hear about one half of the letter or the other, and they’ve all come up Persil, save Anthony Blunt. The third chap in that jeep with Chief and me.
The rumour about Blunt, which I think he put abou
t, was that he was the illegitimate son of King George V and a woman in Queen Mary’s circle. Personally, I’ve never believed it. The only thing holding the improbable story together is the strong facial resemblance of Blunt and the Dukes Windsor and Kent. Of course, if it were true, the story would go a long way to explaining the otherwise inexplicable preference Bertie showed to Blunt throughout his life. Chalk it up to brotherly love. Or half-brotherly guilt. But George VI bestowed favour after favour, honour after honour upon this withdrawn, rather chilly man. The knighthood came after the King’s death, but I’m sure the list was drawn up while George was still above ground.
So what led me to Blunt? For starters, he knew Guy Burgess at Cambridge. Knew him in the carnal way that many people knew Burgess. What we choose in England to call a “confirmed bachelor,” Blunt was a young don at Trinity who seemed to have the run of Burgess’s rooms. And vice versa. Then, in 1934, he made what I think was a voyage of political discovery to the Soviet Union. Either he turned Burgess or Burgess turned him. But turn he did.
Think of it as a connect-the-dots picture. Burgess, Maclean, and the third Cambridge spy, Kim Philby (we’ll call them the Marx Brothers) are three of the dots among a dozen more. Draw a line in a certain way, and you’ve drawn a portrait of the Fourth Man, Anthony Blunt.
In the crime business, they say it’s all a matter of motive and opportunity. As a faithful follower of Marx and Engels, Blunt would have been looking for proofs that the decadent ruling classes of Britain had sided with the Fascists against the interests of the common people. I know from speaking with him that Blunt believed Edward’s interest in the plight of the miners and other workers in Britain to be a sham. To have been presented with the ex-King’s disloyalty to his country on a plate would have justified Blunt’s entire double life. So put a big red tick next to motive. As for opportunity, well, Chief was there to see me hand the torn bit of paper to Blunt.