Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  “Aryan,” Dobler repeated evenly.

  “You know the type.”

  “I do,” the German agreed. “But are you suggesting he was German?”

  “No idea. He didn’t speak.”

  “Old? Young?”

  “Late twenties, early thirties, I’d say. And he had an inch-long scar through his upper lip, like he’d been in a nasty knife fight once.”

  Dobler went very still, his eyes fixed on Jack as he exhaled a thin stream of smoke. Then he leaned forward and discarded his ash. There was a silence that was not entirely comfortable.

  “Look—he probably was drunk,” Jack said harshly. “Or he’s just a thug who gets his kicks beating up complete strangers. It’s not that uncommon. In Tourist Class.”

  Dobler glanced at Diana. “Have you run into his kind before, my dear?—In Tourist Class?”

  She gazed at him blandly. “Give me a cigarette, Willi.”

  He tossed her a gold case and looked back at Jack. “You should be in bed. I’ll walk with you.”

  “I can manage, thanks.” Jack forced himself to his feet, pain creasing his abdomen.

  “Still—I’ll walk with you.” Dobler bowed to Diana and kissed her hand. “Good night, charmante.”

  Jack simply stood, aware of a slight, singing tension in the air because she breathed it. She returned his dinner jacket, neatly folded. Her dark eyes met his, and a line of fire moved from his gut to his throat. It was impossible to speak; and he was never at a loss for words.

  Dobler smiled faintly and steered him like a fractious child through the stateroom door.

  * * *

  “HOW DO YOU KNOW the Old Man?” Jack demanded abruptly as they made their way around the First Class deck toward his cabin. His was on the port side, Diana’s was starboard. He’d made a point of memorizing her cabin number.

  “Your father? I told you. I’m at the embassy.”

  “Not Dad. FDR.”

  There was a pause. “I do not think we should discuss such things out here in the open.”

  Jack laughed, then winced with pain. “It’s the middle of the goddamn night, Willi. You think anybody’s listening? Your Aryan friend with the ugly scar?”

  Dobler’s grip on his arm tightened. “If you hope to serve your president, Jack, learn when to shut your mouth.”

  “What do you know about my president?”

  The German halted in front of Jack’s cabin and waited while he searched for his key. When he’d found it, Dobler’s hand grasped the knob. “Allow me.”

  The German’s other hand was in his pocket, and with a sudden sense of unreality Jack knew he held a pistol. In sheer disbelief he stepped back as Dobler eased through the door.

  “Christ,” Jack muttered. “Who the hell do you work for?”

  “It’s all right,” Dobler said. “There’s no one here.”

  “I asked you a question.”

  The German smiled his thin smile. “I’ve already answered it. I’m with the German embassy. Come inside, Jack.”

  He obeyed. Dobler shut the stateroom door behind him.

  “Today is the first of March,” he said. “You know that we’re scheduled to make Cherbourg and Southampton tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  “I strongly suggest that you remain in your cabin until we do. Is someone meeting you at the dock?”

  Jack shrugged. “Maybe Dad’ll send a car. If not, I’ll catch the London train. I’m a big boy, Willi.”

  “The White Spider is bigger.”

  “The what?”

  “The man who punched you tonight. From your description, I think that’s who it is. Although there’s no one by his true name on the passenger list. I made sure of that before we sailed. Which means he’s traveling on a false passport.”

  “He’s a crook?”

  “No, no. He’s a killer.” Dobler’s gaze skimmed Jack’s face, and then he chose his words carefully. “You are fortunate it was a fist he jammed into your stomach this evening. Usually it’s a knife. I have seen a few of the bodies. He likes to cut his mark into his victim’s chest—a crouching spider.”

  Jack said nothing for an instant, taking it in. “Are you trying to scare me?”

  “Absolutely. Yes. You should be afraid of no one so much as this man.”

  “Then lock him up,” Jack said brusquely.

  “The White Spider has extremely influential friends. I could not touch him. I would die an unpleasant death if I tried.”

  Jack stared at Dobler, convinced he had stumbled into a movie. Something with Peter Lorre.

  “I’m not lying to you,” Dobler said gently.

  “Why’s he called the White Spider?”

  Dobler was examining the stateroom’s portholes, testing their bolts. He moved on to the door. “Because he survived it. It’s an ice field high on the North Face of the Eiger. Hitler is determined that an Aryan youth must be the first to conquer the Eiger’s North Face. It has never been done. He’s thrown any number of boys to their deaths because of it.”

  “I remember now,” Jack said. He slumped onto the end of his bed and unknotted his tie. “A whole bunch of Germans died on that mountain a few years back—in ’36, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. This man claims to have been with them, and to have reached the top. But as no one else lived to authenticate the climb. . . . Good night, Jack. Lock your door behind me. And do not open it until your steward comes in the morning.”

  “Where are you going?”

  He sounded young and belligerent, even in his own ears.

  “To find out why the Spider is on this ship. I thought he was in Poland.”

  * * *

  IF YOU HOPE TO SERVE your president, Jack, learn when to shut your mouth.

  So Willi knew Roosevelt had recruited him to spy. And when Jack pressed him about how he knew, he’d successfully changed the subject: telling bedtime stories about bogeymen in the mountains, who hid long knives up their sleeves.

  He was very good, Willi; he’d obviously been at this game a long time.

  Jack gave him ten minutes. Then he slipped through his cabin’s service door and moved noiselessly down the passage.

  TEN. ROPE

  THE SERVICE PASSAGES that Robbie and the other stewards used to move invisibly about the Queen Mary were well lit, and at this hour of the night, completely empty. Passengers never entered them, if they even knew they existed; but Jack and his brother were old hands at navigating the interior of transatlantic liners. Service passages were escape routes, from the stuffiness of First Class to great parties belowdecks. During a previous crossing on the Normandie, Joe Kennedy had taken to locking the boys into their stateroom at bedtime. He had no idea they simply exited by the service door as soon as he turned the key.

  Jack’s instincts told him to strike upward tonight through the interior of the ship, not down into its bowels, where the kitchens and laundries and storerooms were housed. His target was the captain’s bridge.

  He passed through a bulkhead marked Exit and emerged cautiously onto the Promenade Deck. He glanced to left and right, half expecting a man with a knife to be waiting in the shadows; and then shrugged off Willi Dobler’s warning. He’d meant to scare Jack silly; he wanted him cowering in his stateroom. Which was reason enough to leave.

  Jack vaulted over the chain that barred his access to the quarterdeck and bridge, and mounted the stairs two at a time.

  “Oy, mate,” said a caustic British voice as he attempted to slide through the bridge entrance, “Passengers not allowed.”

  “Evening. I’m Jack Kennedy.” He held out his hand.

  The sailor ignored it.

  “I need to send a Morse signal. It’s something of an emergency,” he persisted. “Could you help me out
?”

  “A Morse signal,” the sailor repeated in tones of disbelief. “You think the Mary’s bridge is a telegraph office?”

  “I said it was an emergency.”

  “And I said yer a passenger,” the sailor retorted.

  “Captain Storrer,” Jack called out. “Good evening, sir!”

  The white-haired man standing at the helm turned his head to gaze at Jack. The last time they’d met he’d presided over a dinner table. There was an instant of silence. “Mr. Kennedy,” he said. “Would you like to take the con?”

  * * *

  JUST SHY OF THREE O’CLOCK in the morning he descended the quarterdeck stairs. By seven, Storrer said, they would make Cherbourg. He’d allowed Jack thirty astounding seconds of guiding the Queen, all eighty thousand tons of her, through the North Atlantic winter—and then waved him off his bridge.

  Jack’s telegram was winging its way to Cunard’s London shipping office, and from there by transatlantic cable to Sam Schwartz, Roosevelt’s bodyguard. It was probable Schwartz would read the telegram in a few hours.

  Confidential to the President: Please advise background one Wilhelm Dobler, Third Political Secretary German embassy London. Also one alias White Spider, believed Nazi agent. Both men traveling Queen Mary and have made contact.

  It was easy to feel silly now that he’d sent the message, to imagine Willi Dobler laughing up his beautifully tailored sleeve. The whole White Spider tale could be just so much bullshit. Jack slouched toward his cabin without bothering with the service passages, suddenly exhausted to the bone. He was completely alone on the First Class deck, a vault of frigid stars overhead, a bitter wind keening from the bow. The DOCA he’d cut into his thigh before dinner was taking its own sweet time; he was cotton-mouthed, wavering, clammy with sweat.

  And then, as he neared his berth, he glimpsed the bent figure—a darker bulk in the night’s darkness. The gloved fingers were at the handle of the stateroom door, probing delicately at the lock. The man was so absorbed in his task that he did not catch Jack’s faint footfalls above the wind.

  The White Spider was breaking into his cabin.

  He’d looked into the man’s face only once, before the iron fist plunged into his gut; but he remembered the barrel chest, the broad shoulders. The thug’s silhouette.

  What the hell? Why is he after me?

  Jack began to retreat, one silent foot behind the other. The whole night seemed suddenly unreal—the frigid vault of stars, the loneliness of the deck, Willi Dobler and the gun he’d carried in his perfect English suiting. This man who liked knives, kneeling at Jack’s door.

  The President wasn’t kidding when he said Hitler wanted him out of power. That cultured, whipsaw voice on the telephone: We think the level of foreign interest in your work has shot up. Roosevelt had sent Jack off with a dangerous secret, German bribes for American votes. A secret somebody would kill to keep.

  He made it to the far side of the deck and felt his way by instinct to a door he’d only seen once. Her door. He had a fleeting thought that he might find Dobler there and embarrass all three of them, but he was past caring. There was safety in numbers and he had nowhere else to go.

  “Let me in,” he whispered when Diana Playfair answered his knock. “For the love of Christ, let me in.”

  * * *

  SHE WAS ALONE.

  She put him in a chair and poured him a glass of whiskey.

  “Scotch?” he asked as he took it.

  “Irish,” she said. “Suits you better.”

  The corner of his mouth crooked as he sipped; he liked a girl with a sense of humor. He liked everything about Diana, as a matter of fact: her silk charmeuse pajamas, and the way they clung to her body; her English accent, which fell somewhere between Robbie’s and the Queen’s; her black hair as shining and neat as though he hadn’t just dragged her out of bed; the startling youth of her face stripped of its makeup. She looked canny and cool, as though she’d apprenticed as a gangster’s moll and was accustomed to hysterics in the night.

  She slung a leg over the armchair next to Jack’s and clinked her glass against his. “Cheers.”

  And that quickly, the singing tension was back, the awareness of her throbbing in his veins. He fought the impulse to set down his drink and reach for her—slide the silk off her shoulders and his mouth along her collarbone—and remembered instead why he was there.

  “The guy showed up,” he said. “At my stateroom door.”

  “The chap who slugged you?”

  “He’s picking the lock. Probably inside by now.”

  “Then we must ring somebody.” She stood up briskly and went for the steward’s bell. “It’s a crime, you know, to burgle a fellow passenger. They’ll lock him up.”

  “Don’t.” He grabbed her wrist.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Call anybody.”

  “Why ever not?”

  He groped for an answer. “Because I’m giving this guy rope. Playing it out. Seeing where it leads.”

  “—Until there’s so much he hangs himself?”

  “Something like that. If he’s caught now, I may never know . . . what he was looking for.”

  She stared pointedly at the wrist he was still clutching. Her pulse was like a bird’s wing, fluttering beneath his fingers. He grazed his thumb lightly over the vein, blue beneath her translucent skin, and she drew a sudden breath. Snatched her hand away. “You are a dark horse, aren’t you?”

  “I’m scared witless, to tell you the truth.”

  She sank down into her chair again, and reached for her drink.

  “Does Willi know? About the man?”

  He hesitated. “I haven’t told him. I don’t know where Dobler . . . sleeps.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “As opposed to where his stateroom is, do you mean? Is that why you came here—because you expected to find Willi?”

  “I came here because I hoped you would open your door.”

  “Yes. I rather expect you did.—Hoped I’d open everything else, too, on the strength of it,” she said with acid amusement. “Arms, legs— How old are you, Jack?”

  He downed his glass of whiskey. “Twenty-two this May.”

  “Bully for you. I’m twenty-nine and I’ve been married for ten years. I don’t give party favors to children. And now, as it’s nearly half three in the morning, I’m going to bed. You can doss on the couch if you like—though it’s a bit short for your inches.”

  “Diana—”

  She turned and looked at him.

  Again, his throat constricted and it was impossible to speak; he swallowed hard, and managed it.

  “Do you know you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen?”

  “You suggested as much. But I’m not a thing, Jack. Good night.”

  * * *

  HE WOKE TO GRAY LIGHT seeping through a porthole, and an empty stillness. Diana and all her belongings were gone.

  ELEVEN. INTELLIGENCE

  “LORD LOVE YOU, MR. JACK, is this how you make yourself at home?”

  Robbie was standing in a chaotic heap of Jack’s clothes. Somebody had slashed all the upholstery, and a drift of white goose feathers covered the floor. A pungent odor of spilled aftershave and hair pomade permeated the room. Everything had been shaken, upended, torn to shreds—except the tray of coffee and eggs Robbie had carefully set down on Jack’s nightstand.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jack muttered as he gathered his shirts and ties at random. “Robbie, have you seen Diana Playfair?”

  “The Fair Diana got off at Cherbourg at least an hour ago.” Willi Dobler was standing in the doorway, with a charcoal wool coat over his arm. His hat was in his hand. A leather case rested at his feet. He looked every inch the diplomat.

  “Cherbourg?”

 
“She was bound for Paris, not London.”

  She’d never told him. He’d imagined breakfast this morning, the exchange of addresses as they waited for their trunks. The possibility of meeting in London.

  But she would not be in London.

  He felt a sudden blaze of desolation—utterly unlike the loss of Frances Ann Cannon, by at least an order of magnitude. It made no sense. He knew nothing about Diana Playfair. Except the quality of her voice. The darkness of her hair and eyes. That she did not give party favors to children.

  “What happened here?” Dobler demanded. “And how, I wonder, did you survive it?”

  “Our friend broke in last night.” Jack snatched at a pair of pajamas, slit from waist to knee. He began to pile the ruined clothes in the center of the room, saving what he could. Diana. Her air of weighing him, and finding him wanting.

  Robbie spluttered in outrage. “And you never rang for me, Mr. Jack?”

  “He had a knife, Robbie. I didn’t want to get you killed.”

  Dobler stepped gingerly through the doorway and glanced around. “You left by the steward’s entrance, I suppose, as our man came through this door?”

  “Actually, I wasn’t here at the time.”

  “Ah.” The German’s eyes drifted coolly to Jack’s face. “The expression, I believe, is that you got lucky?”

  He was too clever not to intend the double entendre. Jack might have grinned, and tossed off a ribald comment of his own—but he was feeling empty and orphaned this morning and he was wary of the German’s claims on Diana Playfair. It was none of Jack’s business, of course. He would never see her again.

  “Why Paris?” he demanded.

  “Why not Paris?” Dobler fished in his pocket. “Captain Storrer asked me to give this to you.”

  It was a telegram. Jack perched on the back of his ruined sofa to tear open the envelope.

  W.D. believed German Intelligence treat with caution STOP No information White Spider STOP Have ordered embassy car to Southampton do not take train STOP Schwartz

  “Good news, I hope?”