by Daniel Kemp
On the emigration site I found a description for Mr A. Berman, but no photograph as was the case with other entries on that and subsequent pages. Just height, weight, build and a far from detailed account of his facial features. There was a date of birth; 14 April 1893, but it had not been authenticated. On the Government Accountability page there was less information. Date of entry; 29 March 1948 and then, in the end margin; US citizenship granted 3 April 1948, repatriated to The State of Israel 14 May 1948. Underneath that entry it was heavily encrypted with the seal of the FBI and the words: Further Access Denied!
“Did you find my sister to be pleasant company, Shaun?” Leeba was standing behind me looking over my shoulder and I hadn't heard her come in. “Was she alone?” she added.
“Apart from a creepy old man dressed all in black who showed me through to where she was then yes, Leeba.” I closed the opened computer page before she had a chance to see exactly what I was researching.
“He was old Baxter-Clifford's man. I was never able to discover much about him. Penni told me his name was Dieter Chase but I never looked at that site you're on. Maybe you'll have better luck. Who is it you're looking for?”
“One of Weilham's staff, but I'm getting nowhere. Richard has a meeting at an outside office of the UN on Saturday and I wanted a bit of background on who Karl predominately works with.” I lied at first but then told the truth.
“I'm pleased we've all now shortened Penina's name to Penni. Although not as beautiful, it's certainly easier on the tongue to pronounce.” Leeba was sitting on the edge of my desk. Her thighs had my full attention.
“Penina was our mother's middle name. Penni told me that she had allowed you to use the abbreviated version. Personally I prefer her given name, but it's her choice of course. Talking of adopted names, try Dieter Chase in your search,” she suggested.
When she left, I did that and found an entry dated October 1945 of his admittance into America from, of all places, Vienna. I was beginning to wonder if all of this country was inhabited by Austrians. His age then was given as thirty-one and religion Catholic. The description fitted him exactly: black hair, black eyes, five foot nine inches tall, slight build with a curved scar on his forehead. I entered Leeba's office and told her of my discovery.
“Earlier I found a Jewish emigration site registered in Vienna, but originating from Tel Aviv. It listed all those who fled Austria at the end of the war. If you had a photo of Dieter, I could fax it to them and we could check if it is his real name or not, Leeba.”
“I'm sure Penni said she had one, with both Haynes and Earl together when they were all much younger. Why don't you ask her yourself? Penni seldom does what I ask her to do, but from you it might be different.”
“By that I take it that you think I'll be seeing her again.”
“I would think so, Shaun. She was very, how can I say, pleased to have made your acquaintance. I wasn't indelicate, asking for the details of why that might have been, but I'm allowed to guess.” She smiled, but I'm not sure if it was a sincere smile or one meant to castigate me slightly.
Midday Monday In London
The Travellers Club on London's Waterloo Place was always busy on Monday's. A favourite haunt of those who sought adventure or a comfortable seat to watch others exchange warm greetings and honest recounts of past achievements. Dicky Blythe-Smith listened patiently to Barrington Trenchard in anticipation of his main meal.
“The official line was that Prince George, Duke of Kent, with fourteen of his staff members, had left from the Mountbatten's estate at Mullaghmore in Ireland en route to Sweden with suitcases stuffed full of one hundred Krona notes to bolster Swedish resolve to stay neutral in the war against the Nazis who were occupying their neighbours of Norway and Denmark. During the flight over the Highlands of Scotland the pilot lost his way due to bad weather and crashed into a mountain. No one survived that crash. The crash site was sealed off as soon as was humanly possible with members of what then was called the Internal Security Department taking over the scene. Apart from the initial headlines in the press nothing was allowed to be further printed. The full notes of the inquiry are not scheduled to be released into the public domain until 2038 and I doubt the whole truth will ever see the light of day.”
“But you know the real reason for that flight, Barrington, because at the time you were sitting at a desk of a Privy Counsellor acting as his secretary, were you not?”
“I was, yes, and you know his name, no doubt?”
“I do! Shall we address the reason now?”
“But I never found out from him.”
“Immaterial at this stage, old chap. Can you address the subject, please?”
“The real reason for the flight was to secure a base for the Duke of Windsor, the abdicated King Edward VIII, to use under the auspices of King Gustav V of Sweden. It was the intentions of the Windsors to wait for Hitler's victory in Europe then to return to this country, setting up court here with Oswald Mosley as the prime minister and followers of the Mountbatten clan forming the government alongside our German conquerors. As Sweden was populated by more German sympathisers than Allied ones the plan had some merit, attracting financial support from Hitler himself.
The wartime coalition government heard about it in a very strange but fortuitous way. Most of Mountbatten's money was inherited from his wife's grandfather, Sir Ernest Joseph Cassel, a friend and private financier to the previous king, George V. Cassel was one of the richest, most powerful men in Europe. He had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in order to marry, but lost his wife early into that marriage. Later he lost his only child. His entire wealth was left to his granddaughter, Edwina who, by the time she married Louis Mountbatten was a millionaire in her own right, owning large estates in England and Ireland. The marriage ceremony in 1922 attracted all our own royalty and many from Europe. Edwina's father, William Ashley, 1st Baron Mount Temple, was a German appeaser, admiring Hitler for his anti-communism. He was the founding member of the Anglo-German Fellowship, visiting Hitler several times; however, he baulked at the anti-Semitism and broke off ties to that ideological side of fanaticism. After his first wife died he remarried and had a son. I went to the same school as that son, Dicky. It was he who told me of the plot. I immediately, of course, reported it.” Trenchard sat back in his chair awaiting Dicky's applause, but none came his way.
“Go on,” Dicky ordered.
“I reported the matter to Meredith Paine, then head of your section at Military Intelligence, who along with the Secretary for War, Oliver Stanley, and Churchill agreed that the plane had to be shot down. Now I don't know that as a cast iron fact, of course, as someone as lowly as I was never in the loop, but two and two was four when I learned arithmetic and I doubt that's changed.”
“So, in essence you have nothing but a conspiracy theory, albeit one that sounds intriguing, Barrington. Nothing substantial with written evidence and all the interested parties privy to your friend's allegations being now buried in the ground. I very much doubt the old telephone service between here and Helsinki could have been sufficiently adequate to arrange such a convoluted plan as this. Do you think that perhaps Hitler used a direct private telephone line to organise it all?” Dicky asked sarcastically.
“I was told that most had been planned at meetings between the Duke of Windsor and Hitler in Vienna shortly before the outbreak of war. The Duke of Kent was known to have visited Stockholm around the same time as Hitler walked into Austria, with cohorts of both the royals travelling widely throughout Europe and America before and during the war years. But there was something else that my ex-school chum told me. Your written evidence was on the plane. A sealed letter of the agreed proposals was carried by Prince George. It was signed by his brother and countersigned by Adolf Hitler. Not a letter that anyone would want printed in any newspaper, Dicky. Not that suitable, one would have thought?”
“Would such a lowly office-wallah as yourself have been included in the circle of knowledge as
to the whereabouts of this piece of evidence after the event?”
“Surprisingly enough, no, Dicky. Never filtered down the lavatory as far as me.”
“I've noticed over the years that all manner of things get stuck in the U-bend and in my experience all best left unspoken of. The reason that most people never bother to delve too closely into our sewers is that we give them other things to care about, Barrington. Like the cost of these new-fangled washing-machines, their new car and who's posing half naked on page three of The Sun newspaper. Only wish I was involved in their selection policy on that one.” There was the faintest of grins across Dicky's face before he continued.
“We trade on the tacit understanding that love of one's country without the knowledge of what the figureheads of this country get up to in their spare time is the fundamental nature of what we refer to as democracy. That's what guided the populace to war on behalf of our erstwhile leaders. Shit floats if it's stirred around too often. A lesson seldom taught at the refined schools of this sceptred isle, but learned quickly by those of Jack's ilk who were confined inside the less perfumed.” Dicky leaned forward across the table, speaking in a quieter tone.
“Correct me if I'm wrong, Barrington, but you only have a year before you reach retirement age, is that right?” Trenchard nodded his acceptance at that estimation.
“Then I expect you're looking forward to the full ministry pension. I'm told that a dependable, index-linked income makes such a difference in the latter stages of life. Somewhere in my memory I believe that you and Jack Price had a falling out that almost cost old Jack his pension. I think, and do correct me if I'm wrong, it was sometime in the 1940s at an outstation of 5's at Harrow. Are you ready to order the crumble and have a nibble on Jack Price, Commander Trenchard?”
Chapter Twenty
Late Tuesday Afternoon in New York
Parked Cars
I had not thought of Fianna since first meeting Leeba and then, perhaps more significantly, her daughter Penni. I think the girl at the Tat & Tail had acted like the buffers at a train station, stopping my thoughts of her as I had walked along the platform in a trance. The easy availability of Jack's friend had concentrated my mind on only the one thing, whereas Leeba had opened it far wider with her sexually attractive maturity and then Penina with her pure exciting intellect coupled with a kind of liberal sensuality I had never thought existed outside of dreams. It was Penni who now stood framed in my office doorway.
Some men that I'd met found most of their gratification in the female form when only naked. I had seen Penni that way and could perfectly understand that view, but for me the woman who is immaculately dressed, whether provocatively in the accepted sense, or in a style that accentuates her femininity, holds an equal appeal, and if coupled with intellect then more so. My philosophy relied on there being as much delight in the chase as in the capture, but overall it was how one acted with the prize that mattered. As I sat and looked at her I honestly considered her to be a prize well worth the chase. However, had I known the full complexity surrounding the Stockford family I would have caught the next plane to central Africa and hidden in a cave.
“You look divine, Penni,” was my dumbstruck opening line.
“I'm in a blue and orange cloud, Shaun, hence the colours of this outfit. I need music and a recording contract. I want to go through the EMI one with you. I think it will need a deliciously thorough seeing to!” I was trembling in anticipation, but held myself in check.
“And I need a photograph, if you would be so kind as to provide one.”
“Of me?” she asked.
“I have your elegance embedded permanently into my mind. I have no need of a photo to remind me of your beauty but I'll keep one close to my heart if you have one. No, it's that man at your house who introduced me to you. Leeba said that you might have one of him? I have a friend back in Ireland who had a German grandfather he lost touch with in the war years. The way he described him to me matched your man to a tee.”
“Not my man nor my home, Shaun. Both belong to Haynes, as I'm sure either my sister or my brother would have mentioned. I believe the man you refer to was born in Serbia. You're wrong on two counts! It's not me that has that photo but Leeba. If she's lost it then why don't you just ask him for one yourself?” I wondered why Leeba would make that up.
“Maybe he'll think I have a fetish for older men like you do, Penni,” I replied, trying to diffuse the situation.
“I don't think he'd be confused, but I am. I reckon it's older women that you fancy, Shaun,” she replied, tantalisingly biting that lower lip of hers, before adding, “and not just me. I have a new apartment overlooking the Hudson River that I haven't seen yet. My car's parked outside. Want a ride and see the reflected colours from my new bedroom whilst we investigate EMI?”
“Have you parked Haynes up somewhere as well? On hold, is he, whilst I'm around?”
“I have no problem sharing you with my sister, if that's what you want, so why be judgemental of me. I'm too creative to be fenced in by any one man. I'm surprised that you would expect that when you clearly would not practise it yourself. You need to exercise that lust of yours for my sister, Shaun, and then decide if only one of us would satisfy you sufficiently. You cannot ban the liberty you wish for yourself from others who wish the same.”
“I wasn't suggesting that you stop seeing Haynes, Penni. I was just wondering where I stood,” I replied.
“The world is built on self-doubt, Shaun, it's how we are controlled by the state. Imagine the independence one could enjoy without fear of the uncertainty. Take it one step further in your imagination and visualise your own future built with no regard to the consequence to others. Wouldn't that be something?”
“Hasn't that already been dreamt of by the Stalin's and Hitler's of this world , and look what became of them!”
“Neither of them were women, Shaun.”
“Do you want to rule the world, Penni?”
“I want the power to rule my world, yes. After I've achieved that, then who knows where I'll end up.”
“Haynes is a powerful man, I'm given to understand. Do you think he will provide you with that power?”
“He is, and those who advised you of that are not incorrect. But we all have an inner power. I won't be waiting for him to decree any of his power in my direction. Mine comes from the belief in superiority. I like to think of this world being akin to a colony of ants with rulers and workers. The queen is the dominant creature. It's she who makes the rules. She is serviced by the males, fed by the unproductive females and controls the whole of the kingdom. I would make a few changes to that system. Obviously I won't be giving birth as many times as she does, nor would only infertile females do the work, that would the prime role of those men not privileged by me. I have some work to do on that, but it's coming along. Your present power and influence comes from your previous ability to satisfy me; sexually. Was that to be a one-only-night performance, or are there to be many encores in answer to my cries of bravo? The invitation is still unopened lying on the car seat, Shaun,” she stated as she stood.
“I can only hope that the repeats are as good as the original,” I replied hopelessly, joining her and taking a ride.
Late Monday Afternoon in London
“Before we begin with Jack, Barrington, fill me in on what seems to be a temporary loss of memory on my part.” Dicky began the dissection of the crumble of his apple dessert with the embodiment of any myth surrounding Jack Price.
“Why were our abdicating king and the Führer so close on ideas around that time in history? Where was their common ground precisely?”
Barrington, on the other hand, although also staring on his dessert, had Price on his mind and was finding both hard to swallow.
“Difficult if not impossible to be specific in that matter, Dicky, as most of where they overlapped were simply ideals and philosophy. There was a lot of empathy over here for how Germany had been treated at the end of World War One,
stripped naked and hung out to dry, as it were. Then up springs this corporal full of rhetoric about restoring pride to a nation once so close to us and doing away with the Bolsheviks. Our royalty were of German descent, remember. King George V was of the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha house and related to the Schleswig-Holstein dynasty. The whole of European Royalty were inter-married at some point. The revolution in Russia, culminating as it did in the murder of the Russian Czar and his family, sent our lot into convulsions. The ease and the severity of his punishment had fatally disturbed their ambivalence towards the working man. Hitler truly believed that we were not his enemy, having no appetite for a war so soon after the first one that destroyed most of Europe's young men. His foes lay to his east and north with the Communists. The seeds from the Russian 1917 Revolution were still falling on fallow ground, if you can recall. Apart from a few radicals and trade unionists, practically the whole of this country agreed with Hitler's anti-Communist stance and wanted peace on any terms.
We, remember, were financially devastated after that first war both in armed service personnel and money. There was recognition of a Jewish problem with us attempting to set up the Protectorate in Palestine for a future home for the Jews, but his anti-Semitism hadn't fully evolved into what it later became. Quite frankly the liberal intelligentsia wanted to turn a blind eye in that direction and to the possibility of another bloody war. There was another voice in the ring at the time, faint, but nevertheless significant. That of Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh and future husband to Queen Elizabeth. Philip's family are more royal than the Windsors, Dicky. Our Queen Mother, bless her heart, although an aristocrat is not of Royal lineage. It was Edward VIII, as David, the Duke of Windsor, now he'd abdicated, who finally persuade Neville Chamberlain to visit Hitler at his Bavarian home and smoke a peace pipe. Dear old Neville came back singing Hitler's praises all the way from Heston airport to the rafters in the House of Commons, telling stories of Adolf's wall painting depicting English private Tommy Taddey's heroics in saving German lives at the Mennin Crossroads in 1918!