by Mitch Silver
Anthony Blunt appeared prominently in the Pink File. His name is mentioned on at least five occasions, the last in 1952 when he was discovered with a motorman’s assistant in a bar in Cheapside that was raided by the local police. The irony is that Blunt really couldn’t be blackmailed. His preferences were already so well known, there would be no advantage an evildoer might gain in threatening to disclose them. But eighteen months away from his beloved, rent-free Courtauld and his pictures…that was something he could be influenced with.
In any event, Blunt’s five arrests were all dismissed for a variety of reasons that add up to “insufficient evidence.” This despite the fact that being caught in a “queer bar” was, at the time, all the evidence necessary to prosecute. Did Blunt have a Get Out of Gaol Free card? And was it torn on one side?
The Pink File revealed something else about Anthony Blunt, something I didn’t expect. The last entry noted, “Married, 2 September 1963.” I was baffled. Anthony Blunt is the least likely man I know, including Noël Coward, to marry.
In my perplexity, I decided to ignore the facts and return to the problem. What could have happened to the original left side of the Duke of Windsor’s treasonous note to Adolf Hitler? Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes say something to the effect that, once you’ve eliminated every other possibility, what you’re left with must be the truth. The Fleming Corollary: if there’s no way of knowing a thing, forget it and work on a thing you can know. Penkovskiy’s message made it clear Moscow had at least a copy of the Führer letter. Blunt’s charmed life since the war suggested that he had “an ace in the hole.” Was it really true that he was the King’s brother from the other side of the blanket? I saw a more straightforward explanation. He had to have made two copies, one for the King and one for the commissars. And if he had, the original would be tucked away safely somewhere right here in London. The trick was to make Sir Anthony lead me to it.
Chapter 45
It was approaching four in the afternoon, and the bus had just turned onto the Long Island Expressway, headed for the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. Amy looked out at the springtime sky over New York, grateful to see the Manhattan skyline stretched out to the left and right ahead of them like a big banner reading Welcome Home. Twenty more minutes and she’d be with Scott.
New York was Amy’s second home. Though she’d grown up on the enclosed quadrangles of a small city’s college campus, her grandparents had taken Amy to the plays, concerts, and museums they themselves had loved. Chief had had some kind of faculty membership in the Yale Club of New York on Vanderbilt Avenue and Forty-fourth Street. For a special treat, the three of them would stay there overnight after a particularly late dinner or show, and then return to New Haven in the morning. Most of the time, Amy was the only child in the place, like the fictional Eloise at the Plaza Hotel, and the staff became used to her racing up and down the corridors, squirreling herself away somewhere with a pencil and sketchpad, or pressing the staff into elaborate games of hide-and-seek.
The bus picked up speed as it merged onto the expressway. Maybe thirty pages to go.
PROVENANCE
The fact that Anthony Blunt had been declared notorious suited my research down to the ground. I had merely to avail myself of his microfiched files, starting with the most recent years (in exchange for a prewar Cheval Blanc I was loath to part with) to discover that he received an annual missive from Coutts Bank. As Sir Anthony regularly banks elsewhere, the once-a-year entreaty from Coutts could have been the bill for a rented safety deposit box.
Safety deposit boxes have a worldwide reputation they do not deserve. The iron bars, the hardened steel, the dual keys all lend an intended air of invulnerability. It’s no surprise banks seek to reassure their clients by publishing photos of their vault areas. They really ought not to.
Another thing: the Swiss make a very nice business of preventing themselves (and, thus, anyone else) from knowing the identities of their clients. By way of contrast, British banks are mercifully free of scruples about divulging clients’ names. Without boring you with the details, I wangled the location of Sir Anthony’s box out of a comely miss in the records section at the Coutts head office at number 440 the Strand.
Depending on their size, banks may have as many as six rows of boxes stacked bottom to top, or as few as three. I was hoping the target box would either be in the top row or along the bottom, so I could use water. An inside location would have necessitated fire, which is much trickier. I had between a one-in-three and a two-in-three chance of a favourable position, et voilà: Blunt’s box was a top.
The fire sprinkler system was invented in the United Kingdom by a Major Harrison a century ago. But like so many of our inventions, it was improved upon by an American, Henry Parmelee, who wanted to protect his piano factory. To set off a typical automatic sprinkler system today takes a flame no hotter than that produced by the average cigarette lighter (about 68ºC), held just below one of the nozzles in the ceiling. The heat causes a solder link to melt or the liquid in a glass bulb to expand and shatter the bulb, activating the sprinkler and sending a controlled amount of water over a deflector plate, which diffuses it in a wide pattern to put out the fire.
One fine Tuesday I entered Coutts and asked to rent a particular safety deposit box. When I had done so, a guard escorted me to the vault and helped me open my newly rented box, which “happened” to be close to Blunt’s and, more to the point, was located directly under one of the older sort of video security cameras that sweeps the room in a fixed pattern.
I removed my empty box to one of the two confidential viewing rooms nearby. While these booths are also equipped with sprinklers, privacy requires that no surveillance equipment may be installed in the rooms themselves. Thus, with the door closed, I was able to place one of the upholstered chairs atop the sturdy wooden table in the centre of the room. Then I opened the attaché case I had brought with me. James Bond would have been disappointed: when turned, the locks emitted no deadly gases, and the lining concealed no gold sovereigns. In fact, all the case held were some adhesive and three fire sprinkler heads identical to the ones in the ceiling of the viewing rooms and vault. Or rather, similar to the ones in the ceiling, as each of mine had a tiny radio-controlled Minox camera where the glass bulb should have been.
By climbing onto the table and then onto the chair—and extending my lanky frame and arm to their fullest—I was able to affix one of the counterfeit nozzles with adhesive to the ceiling overhead. Then I climbed down and replaced the chair in its customary spot and picked up my attaché before taking the still-empty box back to the guard, a nice Mr. Turley.
He was just about to lock my box back in place with my key and his when I had a second thought. Had I left my wallet in the box by mistake? Mr. Turley took pity on me. “First time for everything, sir.” Overacting terribly, I carried my box back to the viewing rooms, only this time I entered the other one. Once inside, I went through precisely the same procedure: chair on table, faux nozzle on ceiling, and then everything back where it was. I called for the guard again, grinning what I hoped was an upper-class-twit-to-end-
all-twits grin. “Can’t drive without one’s driving licence, what?”
Mr. Turley was more than accommodating. “That’s what we’re here for, sir.” He took my key again and this time locked the box in place with our two keys. Of course, two keys require two keyholes. And that’s where the boxes are vulnerable.
I have to hand as I write this a souvenir: one of the three “funny cigarettes” Q had furnished me with. Not the kind they sell on the beach at Ocho Rios, but a cigarette-shaped compound of rubberised plastic with a double core: an outer layer that conducts heat and, when that burns off, an epoxy inner layer that melts and eventually hardens into a new shape. A kind of wick extends out a quarter inch from where a real cigarette’s tobacco would be.
On my second trip to Coutts, I ostentatiously jingled something in my pocket—what? coins?—that seemed to require urgent storage. Mr. Turl
ey recognised me and, believing I now knew what I was about, sauntered off after inserting the keys. When he was out of view, I waited for the video camera on the wall to sweep past before I opened my cigarette case and fished among the real smokes for two of Q’s “cigarettes.” Stepping over to Anthony Blunt’s box, I slid the first one into the upper keyhole, the one the bank guard uses for his key. Then I did the same for the lower, client keyhole. I took out the Dunhill lighter I’d inherited from my father and set fire to both wicks. While each cigarette was melting into the shape of its keyhole and then beginning to stiffen in that shape, I opened my trusty attaché and extracted the remaining counterfeit sprinkler head. Then I stepped into my own empty box and used it like the rung of a ladder to stick the nozzle directly over the spot where Blunt’s box would be if it were open. Finally I took out my Dunhill again and reached for the nearest working nozzle, all the while keeping clear of the camera. The downpour ruined a perfectly good Club tie.
Chapter 46
PROVENANCE
The really wonderful thing about the British Isles is the miniature scale of the place. A century ago, the sun never set on the Empire. Today, a single time zone suits us nicely. You could plop the whole business, including Northern Ireland, down inside one of those anonymous American states like Oregon.
As small as it is, the UK is broken up further into counties, cities, shires, and boroughs, all with their ministers, departments, mayors, Lord Mayors, councilmen, et al. What power there is is sliced and diced into tiny spheres of influence the size of your pinky finger. Is it any wonder then that peacetime Britain resembles nothing so much as wartime France? It’s always just after D-Day here. No one knows who’s in charge. Lines of command are blurred and chaos would be the order of the day—if orders weren’t regularly countermanded. So the mischief maker with a little attitude has the run of the place.
It’s amazing what you can get a Briton to give you by acting superior. I mean, I flooded a rather large bank and was asked, in future, not to smoke. Naturally I was sternly rebuked by the Assistant Manager for smoking in a prohibited area and setting off the fire system. But as I hadn’t actually deposited anything in the only open box in the place (except my foot), nothing seemed to have been damaged in the indoor rainstorm. And as I had withdrawn my manufactured keys from Blunt’s box during the downpour—with no one the wiser—I was allowed to leave on condition it wouldn’t happen again. (Though, looking back, I saw the withering look Mr. Turley gave me for my idiocy.) All because I was determined-looking or wearing the right tie or something.
It must have been dismaying for Sir Anthony to read the letter from the Assistant Manager of Coutts Bank. Mandated by the Borough of Westminster’s Fire and Safety Code, it is sent to all clients whenever there is an “irregular discharge” of the sprinkler system. The wording tried to make light of the inadvertent soaking all the top row of Coutts boxes had received, even as clients were urged to inspect the contents for water damage. From my stakeout in a teashop on Gloucester Place, I watched Blunt leave for the bank immediately after the postman had arrived.
Now it’s time to give my dear Ann the credit in this narrative that she deserves. While our domestic bliss has not been unadulterated (and I choose my words carefully), our professional association has been a complete go. To help things along, Ann had agreed to loiter inside the bank the day Blunt received the flood letter. She followed him down to the vault before retiring to the call box near the elevators. After a minute or so she started our cameras going with the little radio device I had given her. With thirty-six shots to be taken five seconds apart, we had a window of about three minutes to capture whatever Blunt did. (As I had no way of knowing which viewing room he would use, we were photographing them both.)
Bright and early the next morning, I introduced Ann to Mr. Turley. As this was my third visit to the bank in a week—and having decided I was the family nitwit—he chose to curry Ann’s favour. So while she chatted animatedly with him under the video camera near my box, I was able to remove the pseudo nozzles with the cameras from the two viewing rooms. And when she idly wandered over to the rooms to inquire about the maker and quality of the chairs and their upholstery, I could snatch the third sprinkler head and camera just before they ambled back. The adhesive left a slight mark, but Ann made sure Mr. Turley was looking at her.
As the former wife of the publisher Lord Rothermere, Ann Fleming knows her way around a newspaper’s city desk, printing plant, and photographic darkrooms. The Sunday Times keep quite a nice darkroom actually, where Ann developed the negatives from my three cameras and then the three series of pictures from them.
All thirty-six photographs of viewing room 1 produced the same still life I choose to call Wooden Table with Chair. So it was a great relief to see that the twenty-fifth snapshot of viewing room 2 revealed an open safety deposit box on the table, with a single envelope inside the box. Picture number 26 captured a good likeness of Anthony Blunt picking up the envelope, on which his own name was discreetly embossed. Number 27, a little alarmingly, showed him using his handkerchief to dab at the envelope (the boxes are water-resistant, aren’t they?), and my blood pressure shot up almost as high as Blunt’s. By picture 29, he had extracted the torn piece of notepaper I’d hoped for, holding it at a very good angle for my purposes. Picture 31 had the satisfied art historian returning the envelope to the box, and the thirty-fourth shot showed him leaving the viewing room with the box under his arm. Finally, the camera in the vault area caught him handing his key to the indefatigable Mr. Turley, who then locked the box in place and gave Sir Anthony back his key. If you’re going to blackmail someone, the pictures you use should be crisp and clear. I don’t honestly know if they would have come out any better had Blunt posed for them.
The next day, Ann made a show of depositing a quite nice pearl necklace in what must have been the most frequently visited storage box in London. When poor Mr. Turley was forced to tear himself away to attend a client in another part of the vault, that “nice Mrs. Fleming with the awful husband” waited for the video camera to swing away and then quickly put the two now hardened keys into Blunt’s box. I was apprehensive they might snap off in the locks when turned, but Ann said they worked like a charm. She pinched the small white envelope with its prize inside, getting away scot-free (a very good thing when you’re married to a Scot named Fleming).
Chapter 47
PROVENANCE
And now, my dear Amy, this is the part where the magician reaches into the top hat. If there’s a rabbit in there, it’s made quite a journey. A scrap of paper penned by the former King of England and signed Edward P (for Prince—even the Duke felt “Windsor” wasn’t grand enough) to Der Führer that made its way to Winston Churchill and King George VI, not to mention the Queen Mum, the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, a Hesse, and a Hess. Oh, and Yours Truly.
I hereby bequeath it to you, the granddaughter of Dr. Robert Greenberg of New Haven, Connecticut. His, as you know, was a cameo role. Small, but extremely well played. While my job was to get us to the document and Blunt’s to put it safely in the hands of George VI, your grandfather’s was to drive the bus and know nothing more about it.
To make amends for all the secrecy, I’m enclosing the article in question and an English translation.
Paris, 25 December 1939
My Dear Herr Hitler,
I have recently returned from an eventful trip to the North and over a week’s time I have managed to hear some interesting opinions. I have since taken the liberty to describe my holiday in great detail to my friend and your acquaintance Mr. B. I cannot stress enough the strategic significance and importance of the information, which is why I have taken pains to go into such great detail in explaining all of it to our friend. As I have stressed already, I find your ideas for the future welcome and I am of the same opinion. I will make myself available to resume on a moment’s notice the interrupted stewardship of my people upon the end of hostilities and the success of Sea
Lion. As always, our mutual friend Mr. B. acts for me in this matter.
Edward P.
Such a small piece of paper for such large consequences.
Chapter 48
The New York cab with the Englishman in the back seat slipped in behind the bus as it slowed a quarter mile from the automated tollbooths guarding the tunnel. Ahead of them, the limo from City Cars was already through the tunnel and a couple of blocks from Grand Central. The mobile phone rang, and the man in the vehicle briefly fumbled with it before answering. “Yes?” It was half question, half bark.
A strangely unemotional male voice, given the context, overenunciated in a clipped Oxonian accent. “This is a priority call. It will be terminated in exactly forty-five seconds.”
A woman came on the line. “Do you recognize my voice?”
The cars and trucks outside created a low rumble that made it difficult but not impossible to recognize her. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You have indicated that the material is not yet in our possession. Is that still the case?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then I hereby authorize you now to do whatever is required to retrieve the material. Is that clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Whatever is required.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The military network operator was as good as his upper-class word. At the forty-six-second mark, the connection was gone.
Chapter 49
PROVENANCE
I ambushed Anthony Blunt after a lecture he gave at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His subject was “From Humanism to Mannerism” (as if Bolsheviks give a fig for either humans or manners). I needed to get him in a public place where he couldn’t easily turn me down, and the V&A is as public as you can get in London, short of Wembley.