Get Lenin

by Robert Craven

  What she was witnessing was a series of high-level meetings happening sub rosa to the sound of an orchestra.

  ‘Who are those men, Donald?’ she enquired, proffering a cigarette to be lit. Kincaid fumbled around his pockets and found a lighter, gold plated with a swastika embossed on it. He cranked it a couple of times, swaying through the booze.

  ‘Those? Bankers, financiers, heads of pharmaceutical companies. We’re all looking for a piece of the action. Once Hitler and his boys start taking their Lebensraum, there’s going to be a lot of money to be made out of it. I have several of my people here negotiating newsreel, film and publishing rights.’

  Kincaid’s expression altered momentarily, his eyes glazing over like the night he first spotted her. It was a look of unbridled lust.

  She made a note of the men’s faces before he took her by the arm to dance. Despite being six sheets to the wind, Kincaid was an accomplished dancer which surprised her.

  His moves were assured and she could suddently see how he was a successful womaniser — rich, funny and charming. She looked back at Unity and Diana. Unity was holding court with several SS junior officers, enjoying their attention. Further back, Diana stared out miserably as Mosley and Joyce leaned in close, drowning their sorrows.

  The piece came to an end and everyone applauded in a mannerly fashion. Kincaid turned to Eva, planting a wet whiskey-smelling kiss on her cheek. ‘Come to America with me tomorrow. Let me show you around my studios. I could organise a screen test for a motion picture I’m planning to produce.’

  Eva was taken aback at the suddenness of the request. She stared into his magnified eyes behind wire lenses, dropped her eyes and, in a voice Madame Yvette would’ve been proud of, breathed, ‘I’d love to.’ She then excused herself.

  Kincaid was in an ebullient mood, mingling with his associates and filling glasses. Mosley and Diana had left earlier. Diana touched Eva's arm in concern when she told her she’d be flying out to America with Kincaid.

  ‘Don’t worry, Diana. I can take care of myself,’ Eva assured her with a wink.

  Diana hugged her and told her to mind herself and stay in touch.

  Unity had met an SS officer and was remaining behind, waving to the three of them that she was in control of the situation. This was indicated with a jolly thumbs-up.

  Eva produced her camera, and catching Kincaid’s eye, held it up asking would they like to have a photo taken. Never missing an opportunity for his face to be on film, Donald T Kincaid lined up with a group of drunken men who posed for the shot. Pretending to be drunk, Eva tried several times to take the photo to the jeering shouts of the men. Shrugging in apology, she squeezed the shutter just as the group broke apart, the men reeling toward the bar, capturing them perfectly in profile.

  Now she had to think of a way to get the camera to Chainbridge before she left for California.

  Diana answered almost immediately after the second knock. Eva whispered into the gap of the hotel door that she was staying at Kincaid’s place in Berlin and his car was waiting outside. Eva handed the camera to Diana, telling her she’d dropped it, it had broken and could she drop it into a camera shop in Leicester Square, the address written down on a piece of Kincaid’s stationery? The shop would repair it.

  ‘Of course, dear,’ whispered Diana. ‘Are you sure you’re ok?’

  ‘Yes,’ grinned Eva. ‘He’s out cold. How’s Oswald?’

  ‘Despondent,’ said Diana looking back into the darkened room. She had a careworn air about her but seemed to pull out of it. She turned to Eva. ‘You be careful, dear… Promise me?’

  Eva touched the delicate hand, marvelling at the length of Diana’s finger tips. ‘I promise.’

  Eva turned and headed back to the car waiting outside.

  Oswald flew back to London the following day, his limousine calling by Eva’s camera shop. His meeting with Hitler had been brief but unsuccessful. The Reich was not prepared to fund the BUF and Mosley had left empty-handed and out of options.

  Unity had remained on as a guest of Eva Braun and Hitler, planning to travel Germany for a few weeks. Diana handed the camera over and the man in the shop coat accepted it with a smile.

  Within a few hours, the photograph of Kincaid’s associates were sitting on Chainbridge’s desk. He spread the photograph and intelligence out across his desk and made phone calls to Kell and Liddle. Looking up at De Witte sitting in the shadows feeding lengths of Braille correspondence through his fingers, he informed them that Eva had established contact and had photographed a veritable rogues' gallery; including British Nazi sympathisers.

  De Witte stopped feeding the intelligence through his fingers momentarily. ‘Good.’ He started feeding the information again, his face showing no emotion. He was impressed with her.

  Eva had developed her friendship with Kincaid through the Goebbels’ screen-test reels. It had taken a while, using the auspices of a bogus London casting agent to feed her details through the Hollywood system. Once headshots and film reels were requested, the agent had contacted Berlin.

  Kincaid’s staff in Burbank, California, saw the reel can with the German Eagle stencilled onto it and jumped at the opportunity. A meeting in New York followed and Kincaid took the bait like a greedy schoolboy.

  Chainbridge, along with the F.B.I., had a substantial dossier on him. Kincaid’s influence was enormous. Apart from a private film studio in Hollywood, he owned a mansion in Martha’s Vineyard and numerous European properties. Although married and a father of nine children, he boasted openly about having several high-profile mistresses.

  In Boston circles he had the Chief of Police, the Attorney General and various teamster organisations in ‘his pocket’. A fervent anti-communist, he and a number of American anti-communists had arranged functions for Hitler and Mussolini in Berlin in the 1930s. Grandiose with his largesse, he had written large cheques for their fledgling political parties, all in the glare of the media.

  This wealth had come allegedly through boot-legging during prohibition. He used this money to help break a Boston longshoremen’s strike and take control of the docks. His pay-off from City Hall was under-the-counter and siphoned offshore into various trusts. This money reappeared as armament sales to the Fascists in Spain. He was spotted in Madrid in 1936 along with German ‘advisors’ shipping in guns, bombs and gold bullion to fund Franco’s forces.

  His campaign for Mayor of Boston two years earlier ended abruptly after three weeks without explanation. His campaign manifesto used the longshoreman’s strike as an example of Communism creeping into ‘Freedom-loving America’. Rumours of a young actress overdosing on cocaine at his mansion had clung to him like a smell. Nothing was proved and the story buried, the girl’s family dropping a law suit within days of it being issued. The journalist who broke the story was sacked and his card rescinded after pressure from Kincaid’s attorneys.

  It was this same self-made man that Eva flew with from Berlin to London on a German diplomatic flight, collected by his private chauffeur and stopping at his studio offices near Piccadilly Circus.

  Eva remained in the office’s reception area as Kincaid presided over several production meetings. She attempted a few times to strike up a conversation with the dour receptionist, a very pretty but disappointed looking brunette. After a while Eva gave up. Glancing around the room, she noted the offices' windows were small. Poor light filtered in on framed photographs of actors and actresses. She spotted the receptionist’s head-shot amid them with a hopeful twinkle in her eye.

  The other thing she noticed was the phone hardly rang during her time there and the receptionist turned the pages of a magazine slowly, occasionally letting out a sigh. She was no doubt a conquest recently discarded, thought Eva.

  By 3pm Kincaid was finished. He swept out into the reception, donning his beige cashmere coat and chomping on a cigar. He barely acknowledged the receptionist who seemed to come to life at the sight of him striding by. ‘Let’s go, Eva,’ he barked. The recep
tionist almost seemed to slump into her chair in pain.

  They descended the stairs, and as she stepped into the limousine, the afternoon bustle of the city was split open by the sound of air-raid sirens. It chilled her to the bone. She had been caught up in a bombing raid by Franco’s air force in Valencia in 1937. She flinched involuntarily,

  ‘It’s fine, honey, they’re just practice drills. Mind you, once Goering throws his bombers at them, we’ll be glad we’re in California.’

  They flew by flying boat from his private jetty at Chelsea Reach along the Thames, banking out over the city; the metropolis flowing below them in a constant motion. Waiting on board for them was a silver service dinner with champagne, American magazines and newspapers.

  A young already care-worn male assistant was waiting for Kincaid with documents, among them the schematics of an aeroplane. Kincaid chuckled when he folded out the aircraft's blueprints. It looked like a warehouse with wings to Eva. She noticed that when he was concentrating, he would produce a golf tee from his jacket pocket and chew on its tapered point. If he was stressed, he would move it around his mouth with his teeth, gnawing on it. If he became furious, it would be hurled at his assistant.

  Kincaid authorised by telegram money transfers as down-payments for the aircraft to the tune of ten million dollars. He tipped her a wink as he said it aloud to his assistant. She in turn pretended to be dazzled by this amount, opening her mouth and blinking.

  He enjoyed that reaction.

  The rest of the flight he was signing off paperwork, contacting his lawyers in Boston via the aircraft’s radio, and then putting his long legs up on the facing seat and sleeping. Eva felt a pang of isolation which she decided suited her. She was just a trophy ready for polishing and putting up for display, but otherwise disposable.

  She accepted the situation. It gave her the necessary leeway to watch everything and report anything useful. She felt for the receptionist she met a few hours earlier. That girl had probably been sitting on this flight a few months earlier.

  The assistant, O'Dowd, went back to the rear seats and sat up writing reports and chewing on a thumb nail the way a dog worries a bone.

  They landed in a small cove near Martha’s Vineyard which was overlooked by Kincaid’s faux-Georgian mansion. The flying boat turned around and departed back to Europe, its vast wings glinting in the morning sunlight.

  It had been two days since they arrived and Eva had exchanged no more than three or four words with Kincaid before they retired to bed. She was standing in the dining room drinking coffee, watching a seal bobbing its head up through the waves. The room had large bay windows that gave a panoramic view of the bay. Apart from a few pleasure yachts further up the cove, the scene probably hadn’t changed in millennia.

  Her eyes tracked the seal’s sleek back as it dipped and slid through the waves like a playful dog. The sun was struggling to penetrate the cloud cover that had parked itself over the cove. Fitful beams shone further out to sea past landfall like veins of a fan; rich blue waves danced like an electric shock over the grey waters.

  The mansion was deserted apart from a maid who appeared at random during the day and, to Eva’s displeasure, the house was bereft of anything to read. Somewhere in a room upstairs Kincaid’s voice boomed out a stream of invectives at some poor minion on the end of a phone. He slammed the phone down with such force she could hear the device clatter off the floor of the room above. She looked around. The room was decorated like an English hunting lodge — heavy curtains, mahogany panelling, various oils depicting fox hunting scenes and an enormous elk’s head over a black marble fireplace.

  On the mantel piece was a series of framed photographs, children at various ages grinning or frowning with a young Kincaid and plain Shaker-looking Mrs Kincaid. As the family increased in size, she seemed to age at a faster rate than Donald until her last image made her look like an embittered old crone.

  A log fire sputtered and spat sparks out and yet seemed incapable of heating the room. She could hear doors banging and the heavy footfall of Kincaid descending the staircase. He strode in and, without breaking his stride, swept her up in his arms planting a kiss on her lips. ‘Your screen test is the day after tomorrow.’

  They flew into Los Angeles from the bleak North Atlantic weather into the shimmering heat of California. Again, like Martha’s Vineyard, she found herself alone, staying in his immense secluded villa overlooking the glittering azure Pacific Ocean. The Philippine staff ignored her and for most of the time she sat on the veranda reading magazines and watching the surf spill over the rocks below to the music on the radio.

  Kincaid started his day by quaffing his first shot glass of whiskey and taking her to his private screening room in the basement. To get her up to speed on the role she was being tested for, they watched the first reels of his latest epic about a knight from the court of Richard the Lion Heart taking refuge in a forest and avenging his fall from grace. 'Sounds like Robin Hood,' Eva observed. Kincaid had merely scowled. 'Yeah, well our leading man's a leap ahead of that drunken whoremonger Flynn! '

  Kincaid's studios — Liberty Belle Studios off Sunset Boulevard — were a cavernous warren of sound stages laid out in all manner of guises, South Sea islands, mediaeval castle interiors, an English forest and a Wild West fort. Powerful lights lit up the sets and actors lolled on tables and chairs, smoking or reading scripts, waiting for their cue. Two Sioux Indians, resplendent in war paint, were playing Texas-hold-'em with three knights. The Indians were winning.

  This morning was her screen test and despite herself she was nervous. She was being screen tested for the role of a 'plucky handmaid who helps the knight return to favour' — or so the top of her script read.

  She was dressed for the part in a shimmering silver gown nipped in tight to her waist with a virgin white wimple framing her perfect cheekbones. The cameraman gave a thumbs-up. Lighting and Make Up made their final adjustments. The director, a rotund man with a horrific greying comb-over, yelled, 'Action!'

  Eva immediately slipped into character, taking her naturally husky tone up in pitch and getting some 'pluckiness' into her risible dialogue. The extra, posed where the hero knight would stand, had his back to the shot and openly gawped at her breasts. When she finished her lines, he looked her in the eye and winked.

  And that was the end of her test. The lights went off and the sound stages began to hum to the production teams preparing for the days filming.

  Kincaid had spent most of his time during the day on the phone in his study, in meetings or hunched over his ticker tape machine. He would turn the air blue with his outbursts should a stock value drop several points. On particularly bad days he would sit sullenly at the dinner table drinking heavily. On more than one morning she would find him sprawled across the table at breakfast in a stupor, clutching ribbons of ticker tape.

  Eva was wheeled out when it was party time, which meant every night, dressed in stunning gowns from plush studio wardrobes off set. Her hair and make-up was professionally done by studio staff and she was carefully hidden amid his entourage. In the media glare she would stay three of four paces back from him on the red carpet.

  The parties in the villa were wild and Eva, inured to the cabaret life of Germany, was unfazed by the antics of Kincaid and his cronies, the night always ending up with someone overdosing on cocaine or some other substance. Kincaid’s personal physician, Dr Harry Gold, would be summoned in the dead of night and either administer a cure or load a body into his car.

  Despite his chaotic lifestyle, she always felt safe on Kincaid's arm. He never let her out of his sight when the younger dashing actors milled around her at the parties and, to his credit, could always hold his drink when he had to. She kept her own drinking to a minimum and within a fortnight she had met an intimate circle of men about Kincaid's age. Some were oil men in California here to enjoy the pleasures of starlets; others were clearly military men in civilian clothes and Eva recognised another man from the party in B
erlin. He was a large wheezing man, a pharmaceuticals magnate, full of bonhomie with an unbridled lust for skinny actresses. She only caught a glimpse of him coming into the villa and he hadn’t seen her. She didn't catch his name, but Kincaid was in thrall to him and almost a little fearful.

  During the long empty afternoons in the mansion, she would write letters to Diana Mosley, knowing full well they would be intercepted and read. Eva, keeping the correspondence as light as possible, would slip in names, descriptions and the status of the men she met. Despite her best efforts, Kincaid refused to give her the name of the big man; he was simply known as ‘The Big Fellow’.

  Four weeks into her stay, Kincaid burst into her room one morning with a telegram. 'I told you doll, I told you! It’s all starting to fall into place. Start packing. We're flying to Berlin tonight!'

  Chapter 6

  Berchtesgaden 1939: The Kehlsteinhaus

  The Tea House sat 183 metres at the top of the Kehlstein mountain, accessed either by the 131 metre elevator bored into the mountain or the specially commissioned road. Hitler chose the road. As the motorcade swept up through the winding tunnels, its progress was observed by Martin Borman and Albert Speer from the sun terrace,

  The head of Hitler's security detail strode up, 'He wants to look around.'

  ‘Let’s hope he likes it,’ said Speer, taking in the view. The clouds danced beneath them around the peak of the nearby Hochter Goll,

  ‘He’d better,’ replied Borman, his eyes never leaving the road. ‘It cost enough to build.’

  The motorcade, all black with red flags fluttering, pulled into the main driveway. Hitler’s Mercedes was flanked by SS outriders on powerful motorbikes. Borman rose from leaning against the terrace balcony. They walked through the lavishly decorated main dining area to the reception. An SS honour guard was preparing to greet the entourage. The head of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, Schaedle, strode up to them.