Jack of Spies

by David Downing

  Jatish shook his head. “Not now. The Ghadar people keep close watch for informers. You must have two party sponsors to join, and you are not told any secrets for first six months, so any informer must wait and wait. We had these people, but now they are gone, and most of them are probably dead. That is Ghadar punishment for telling secrets, and the Irish are same. It was Irishmen who killed the man found in the bay, and no one will want to be next.”

  McColl asked Jatish what he would do in his place.

  The Indian shrugged. McColl would stand out “like a sore thumb” at a Ghadar meeting and learn nothing useful. He wouldn’t be so noticeable at an Irish gathering, but the Indian found it hard to believe that anything illegal would be broached in a public forum. McColl’s best hope lay in intercepting messages between the two, but that would require a great deal of groundwork, identifying sources and their lines of communication. “These things take many months,” the Indian concluded. “More time than you have, I think?”

  McColl asked him whether he actually considered the people he’d been watching a threat to the empire.

  Jatish wouldn’t or couldn’t say. The Ghadar membership was already divided between those craving action and those who believed it wiser to wait, and if they lost Har Dayal—a likely development, if the BOI had its way—the movement might just splinter and collapse. On the other hand, if the Germans increased their support—if they backed someone like Khankhoje, with enough money and weapons to make a real splash—then Ghadar’s influence could grow, particularly in India. A European war would make all the difference, Jatish thought. That was what Har Dayal and de Lacey were waiting for. That would be their chance.

  McColl thanked him for the briefing and offered his hand. Jatish took it, smiling for the first time. “The best of British luck,” he said, without a hint of irony.

  As he started back down the corridor, McColl heard the lock click behind him and hoped that the Indian was safer than he imagined. The elevator eventually arrived, and both passengers stepped out, leaving it free. The door was almost closed before he realized how Irish the faces had seemed, and his hand reached the button a second too late to abort the downward journey.

  At the lobby desk, the day clerk was talking to a woman in a fur coat. McColl barged in front of her. “Those two men who just went up,” he demanded, ignoring the woman’s angry protests, “did they ask for Chatterji?”

  “Yes, but—”

  McColl strode back to the elevators, acutely aware of his lack of a weapon but knowing he had to do something.

  He was still waiting when he heard the scream. It came from the street, and people were rushing out to see what had happened.

  McColl followed, already knowing.

  Jatish was lying in the road, a few feet from the sidewalk. The body shuddered once as McColl walked toward it and then fell still. Blood was trickling down the camber, pooling in the gutter.

  A beat cop was approaching as fast as his girth would allow, and McColl hung back, one eye on the hotel doorway. What should he do if the two men came out? Follow them? Point them out to the dumb-looking cop? He’d probably just get the poor bastard killed.

  In the end it was all academic—by the time more cops arrived with the mortuary wagon, it was obvious that the two men had made use of another, less public exit. McColl watched the corpse hauled aboard, one arm dangling loose. It was less than half an hour since he’d shaken that hand, felt the life in the Indian’s grip.

  Walking toward the ferry terminal, he remembered how close he had come to stopping the elevator. A little bit quicker and Jatish might still be alive.

  Or both of them dead.

  As he watched the hills of San Francisco draw ever closer from the bow of the ferry, McColl tried to shake off the numbness that seemed in danger of immobilizing him. Jatish was dead, and that was that—he had no time to mourn a man he’d known for only an hour. But was he himself in danger?

  He had been for the briefest of moments, but merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jatish’s killers probably hadn’t even noticed him, and if they had, there’d clearly been no recognition. The Indian had been punished for his undercover role in an operation that predated McColl’s own arrival in the city.

  He’d been shown how ruthless this enemy was, and he would have to be more vigilant. Disembarking, he scanned the waiting travelers with more concern than usual, double-checking several faces that instinct told him were innocent. In this job, he realized, paranoia could become second nature.

  Keep moving, he told himself, take a tour of the enemy encampments. He would cast his eye over the ashram’s two addresses and the Shamrock Saloon and check out the surveillance possibilities. If a serious operation looked feasible, he would need to hire some help, which might turn out to be expensive. He could apply to Fairholme, but it would probably be safer to cable Cumming, now that the enemy had the consul’s number.

  When it came to the Germans, perhaps he could make use of von Schön. The engineer had told McColl where he was planning to stay, and they had vaguely discussed meeting up for a meal. Von Schön might know someone in the consulate, perhaps even von Brincken.

  Before getting started, McColl dropped in at the showroom. Mac was out with a possible buyer, Jed extolling the virtues of the vehicle to two more awaiting their turn. He sounded enthusiastic enough, but it had not, Jed told his brother in private, been a very good morning. A lot of people had turned up and duly admired their beautiful vehicle, but most had left when they heard the price. “They all trot out what Henry Ford is charging for the Model T,” Jed said disgustedly, “as if it’s in the same league.” And those who hadn’t left, he added darkly, just felt like a drive.

  The motor business had been fun while it lasted, McColl thought as he walked back up Market to a bookstore he’d noticed earlier. Jed might be right in thinking that Ford and his Model T were no threat, but someone would start making luxury automobiles on a production line before too long.

  The bookstore had a street map for sale, and the woman behind the counter was willing to let him use their telephone directory to look up addresses. It was hard to tell where the numbers fell on the long streets, but the ashram’s two properties and the saloon were probably not that far from each other, a mile or more to the southwest. The German consulate was one of the official addresses listed on the back of the map; it was a mile to the north and west, facing Lafayette Park.

  He thought for a moment about hiring an automobile but realized he had no idea how noticeable one might be in the districts he planned to visit. And the electric streetcars seemed frequent enough. He took one up Market, was pleased to find that it eventually veered south down Castro in the direction he required, and got off at the first stop beyond the junction with Hill Street.

  The neighborhood looked less than prosperous, and Hill Street was badly enough in need of repair to deter any motorized traffic. There were not many more pedestrians, and the few residents sitting on their stoops seemed remarkably reluctant to return his smiles. The address in question was a three-story house with yellowed stucco walls and a yard full of rotting mattresses. There were no signs of any inhabitants and none that it served as a political headquarters. Walking past, McColl mentally compared it with the Admiralty building in London. He knew who he’d put his money on.

  It was a ten-minute walk to Valencia, a busier, wider street with tramlines running down its center. The ashram office was another three-story building, but much more modern, with double doors onto the street. There was a large apartment building opposite, which might provide a window for surveillance and photography.

  There was a convenient coffee shop on the far side of the block, and McColl found a booth with a view across the street. He’d been there about five minutes when an Indian in a turban walked out through the double doors and stood on the sidewalk, gazing up and down the street. McColl was wondering whether the man was on the lookout for watchers when a woman and a small boy followed him from
the building, and the threesome walked happily off together, looking more like a family out for a treat than agents intent on sedition.

  McColl was struck—not for the first time—by the inherent absurdity of it all. He paid for his coffee and started working his way north and west across the Mission District toward Twentieth Street. There were signs of Irishness everywhere, from green flags to bars that looked more like pubs, from Blessed Virgins carved in alabaster to the Kellys and O’Learys that proliferated on the store and workshop signs. The Shamrock Saloon was at the bottom of Potrero Hill, a large, well-kept building with green velvet curtains drawn halfway across the windows and a wide room inside striped by beams of sunlight. Few of the tables were occupied, and only one pair of eyes seemed to notice his arrival.

  He was confident he could manage an Irish accent but changed his mind at the last moment and ordered a beer in the Scottish tones of his youth. He might have abandoned the idea of bringing Caitlin here, but there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t walk through the door in the next few minutes—she was probably staying somewhere in the area.

  The barman asked him what he was doing in San Francisco and expressed no further interest when told he was here to sell automobiles, leaving McColl with the distinct impression that all strangers were asked the same question. There was a copy of the Irish Leader on one of the tables, which he brought back to the bar and sat with, slowly drinking his beer and eavesdropping on the other patrons. There were framed drawings of Wolfe Tone and Edward FitzGerald behind the bar, but the two conversations he could hear concerned the coming weekend’s horse racing and a woman named Niamh who had thrown out her drunk of a husband.

  “Nice place you have here,” he told the barman, who didn’t bother to reply. “But a bit on the quiet side,” McColl added. “Does it ever liven up?”

  “There’s a crowd on Saturdays,” the barman conceded.

  “Maybe I’ll come back then.”

  Back on the street, he realized how much walking he’d done when his wound—which he’d hardly noticed since Honolulu—suddenly began to throb. A cab, he decided, and stood leaning against a convenient stop sign until one came along. The driver’s license bore the name O’Leary, but the man himself had no trace of an accent and no apparent interest in his homeland’s affairs. Instead, he spent the entire drive railing against the city’s politicians and developers and the profits they had made from reconstruction. “At least some of the bastards are in jail,” was his parting remark as he dropped McColl off at the corner of Lafayette Park.

  The German consulate was easy to spot, the black, white, and red tricolor of the imperial flag floating above a tall mansion on the northern side. Any comings and goings could be observed from the comfort of a nearby park bench, but the observer would be visible to anyone watching from the consulate’s windows, which wouldn’t do at all. There were several automobiles parked on each side of the road, so another wouldn’t look out of place, and a motorized watcher could follow anyone leaving.

  At least McColl knew where everything was, where the various kingpins held their courts. Now he needed helpers, to follow the courtiers home and start the process of sifting through their lives for a point of weakness, a point of entry. Helpers who could take photographs and get all these people’s faces on file, which was half the battle when it came to foiling their plots. Cumming liked photographs and didn’t mind paying for them.

  A light went on in one of the consulate’s upstairs rooms, and a woman briefly appeared in silhouette as she pulled the curtains together. Night had fallen with almost tropical swiftness, McColl realized; he felt both hungry and tired, and unusually reluctant to spend the evening with Jed and Mac. But he needn’t have worried—arriving back at the hotel, he was handed a note in Jed’s childlike writing: The two of them had tired of waiting and gone out “gallivanting” without him.

  Feeling relieved, he ate in the hotel restaurant, retired to his room with a pint of whiskey, and spent an hour encrypting a request for additional funds, which he planned to send off the following morning. After completing that task, he found himself revisiting the two issues of Ghadar that Fairholme had loaned him. One statement in particular attracted his attention: That Englishmen were never punished for killing Indian men or dishonoring Indian women. He remembered Caitlin angrily mentioning her recent discovery that Europeans enjoyed a similar immunity in China during their day trip out to Longhua.

  It never paid to demonize an enemy, McColl thought. People like Har Dayal—people like Caitlin—had every right to demand change. It was the former’s penchant for bombings that rendered him fair game.

  McColl drained the last of the whiskey and tried not to feel sorry for himself. His side was still aching, and he really missed her. He was lonely, in a way that he hadn’t been before she danced into his life.

  A boisterous knock on the door snapped him out of his reverie and heralded the return of his companions. They had been to the nickelodeon, watched two comedies and a dramatic short called The Mothering Heart, and Jed had fallen in love with an actress called Lillian Gish. They had also imbibed a large quantity of alcohol and taken a walk through Chinatown. “It’s not China,” was Mac’s considered opinion. His report on their workday was almost as succinct—after adding three hundred miles to the Maia’s clock and suffering a badly scratched head lamp, they had added no new entries to the order book.

  “How was your day?” Jed asked his brother.

  “I walked up more hills than I could count,” McColl told him. And I watched another man die, he thought.

  Thursday morning McColl picked up a copy of the Bulletin on his way to the Chicago & North Western freight office and stopped to read it over a coffee. He was glancing through the pages in search of Har Dayal’s friend John Barry when he noticed a more familiar name above a feature piece titled “The Changes in China”—one Caitlin Hanley. He had never doubted her journalistic credentials, but seeing her name in print was still a bit of a shock. So, to his shame, was the high quality of her writing, which somehow balanced an enthusiasm bordering on passion with a cool command of the facts. McColl was absurdly pleased to see that a couple of his own observations had been included and credited to “a friend with long experience of the Orient.”

  After arranging the Maia’s shipment, he walked back to the hotel, borrowed the telephone directory from reception, and made a list of promising-looking detective agencies. Excluding Pinkerton’s and Mundell’s, there were seven in the downtown area.

  Given the nature of his business, auditioning agents and explaining what he required would have to be done in person. And given a choice between walking for miles, relying on trams, and hiring an automobile, his shortness of funds seemed almost incidental. The hotel gave him the name of a reputable firm only a short walk away, and after several minutes spent in reassuring the nervous agent that some Englishmen did know how to drive, he was allowed behind the wheel of a brand-new Model T Touring Car. The vehicle was certainly lacking in frills but, as he quickly discovered, it ran and handled remarkably well.

  He had three requirements when it came to choosing an agency: It shouldn’t be run by Anglophobic Irish- or German-Americans, it should have enough operatives to run a two-person surveillance throughout the daylight hours, and at least one of those operatives had to be well acquainted with the most up-to-date photographic equipment. The first agency failed on the second and third counts, the owner a one-man band who could hardly hide his contempt for gimmicks like the Kodak Brownie. McColl wondered how he got any business, but then again, if the state of his office was anything to go by, he probably didn’t.

  The second and third agencies were too busy to take on the sort of work McColl required, the fourth was run by an Austrian Jew with an anglicized name. When the fifth turned out to be defunct, McColl began to lose heart, but salvation was soon at hand. The sixth address was on the eastern side of Nob Hill, the agency run by a hook-nosed Hispanic named Juan Palóu, who claimed that his great-gr
eat-grandfather had led the first Spanish expedition to reach the site of the present city overland. He worked with his two sons and was a photography enthusiast. “Though not like my older son,” the detective added. “He has all the latest equipment. He calls each camera an investment, but if he doesn’t stop spending money, there’ll be nothing left to invest in.”

  When McColl explained what he wanted, Palóu’s first reaction—that he needed to see the house on Valencia for himself—was exactly what McColl wanted to hear. They drove there together in the Model T, Palóu lamenting the fact that his younger son was demanding one of his own, and parked in a convenient side street. From the same booth in the coffee shop, McColl pointed out the windows of the Ghadar center. “Any white man seen in there, I’d like his picture, name, and address—or as many of them as you can get. I’m particularly interested in Catholic priests.”

  Palóu raised an eyebrow at that but only asked how long McColl wanted the surveillance to last.

  “Let’s say five days to begin with.”

  “That won’t be cheap. I’m going to have to rent one of the rooms across the street, and none of them look empty—someone will need paying off.”

  “So how much?”

  “Ten dollars a day, plus expenses.”

  It didn’t seem extortionate to McColl, and Cumming would just have to pay up. “I’ll have half for you on Monday,” he promised, hoping he’d be able to deliver.

  The detective shrugged his acceptance, as if money were the least of his worries. Perhaps, like Sherlock Holmes, he had a private income. “We’ll start as soon as we can,” he said. “Do you want a daily report?”

  “No,” McColl decided. “I’ll come and see you on Monday. Say nine in the morning?”

  “Okay. I don’t suppose you want to tell me what this is all about.”

  “The office you’ll be watching is the headquarters of an Indian political group—”