Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  The Secret Service man compressed his lips. “I did, sir.”

  “And you found?”

  “A listening device in the portable phone.”

  The portable phone was an ingenious thing, developed at Roosevelt’s instigation. It drew power from the Pullman’s electrical system, and though useless while the train car rolled down the tracks, could be attached to a telephone cable by extension cords whenever the President halted at a station. As he had been halted, that Wednesday night when he’d chatted with Jack, beneath the Waldorf-Astoria.

  —As he had been halted a hundred times in the past year, immersed in secret conversations, the painstaking detail of which had undoubtedly landed deep in J. Edgar Hoover’s files.

  If you can’t trust him further than you can throw him, his wife’s voice argued in his mind, why not fire the dirty bastard?

  Dear Eleanor. Always so forthright and practical. Without a particle of political sense.

  The answer, quite simply, was he could not end Hoover’s reign without terrible risk. When he tried to tally how many secrets the man possessed—how many lives he could take down with him, in the ruin of his public career—Roosevelt’s mind boggled. There had been so many private conversations, on so many perilous topics, in the Pullman over the past several years; and it now seemed likely that Hoover had a record of all of them. He beat his hands futilely on the arms of his wheelchair while Sam Schwartz watched. He could not begin to calculate what Hoover’s files contained. Ignorance was mortally dangerous.

  For as long as Roosevelt held the White House, he would have to hold Ed Hoover at bay. And for now—even though it was patently clear the FBI knew he had recruited young Jack Kennedy, because they had listened to him do it—Roosevelt’s army of personal spies in Europe was his most useful weapon. They were beyond Hoover’s reach.

  He stilled his restless fists and glanced at Schwartz.

  “I want you to talk to your friends over at Treasury, Sam. Very quietly, mind.”

  “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “I need the tax records of a certain charity. The Little Sisters of Clemency.”

  THIRTY-TWO. THE ACCOUNTING

  MARCH THIRTY-FIRST, Neville Chamberlain took the first bold step of his life, and declared that Britain would stand with France to save the Poles if they were invaded.

  Nobody believed him.

  Hitler answered Chamberlain by annexing the Lithuanian port of Memel, on the Baltic Sea, without a shot being fired.

  The next day, April first, the Spanish Civil War officially ended—with another Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, in power.

  April seventh—Good Friday—Mussolini’s Italian army invaded Albania.

  The following Thursday, Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain would guarantee the borders of Rumania, Greece, and Turkey against possible Italian attack.

  As dark was falling on that spring afternoon, Jack pulled into Val d’Isère.

  It was the newest and most remote ski station in the French Alps, a tiny clutch of buildings with an octagonal stone church, one good hotel, and a single drag lift. The great Bellevarde peak dominated the lower valley. High above, near the Italian border, glaciers gleamed in the dying light. Somebody was attempting to build a cable car up a mountain face, but the work looked halfhearted and drifted in snow.

  Val d’Isère sat on the highest pass in France. The Col d’Iseran had opened only the year before and Jack had never driven anything so treacherous in his life. It was twisting and narrow and punctured unexpectedly by falls of ice and rock. It had taken him three days from Paris, and another two to crawl the last hundred miles.

  The valley was known for deadly avalanches, for ten-foot falls of snow, for the strange and brusque peasantry that had changed little in the past thousand years, and for ski terrain unmatched in Europe. Rose Kennedy might prefer the glamour of St. Moritz, and the Rothschilds had built Megève; but Jack stepped out of his hired car that night, gulped the bitter, clear air, and felt his heart soar. He was wrapped in absolute silence. The lonely cliffs held something he recognized, akin to blue water and a blowing gale—a challenge to the reckless, who sailed alone.

  He had no skis and his only experience of the sport was years ago, in Vermont. His memory of that country was gentle and rolling, but the ground he stood on now was harsh. Treeless. Corniced by wind. He remembered vaguely that his brother Joe had broken his arm at St. Moritz this past Christmas. But what the hell. He carried his bags into the Hotel de Paris. It had sloping roofs with flat stone tiles quarried from the living rock; a beamed ceiling blackened by wood smoke; a platter of bread and cheese melting on the hearth; and a dimpled young girl in blond plaits who spoke not a word of English. Nobody in the Hotel de Paris, it turned out, spoke English. But they gave him a room when he asked for one in his halting French. There were only a handful of people staying there, the girl said. Dinner was a fixed menu, in the room with the fire, in half an hour.

  Jack felt almost giddy as he followed her up the narrow wooden stairs. Perhaps it was the altitude. Or his sudden sense of invisibility. He was utterly unknown, lost in the high wilderness—and nobody in Val d’Isère would lift an eyebrow at the name Kennedy. Maybe he’d be snowed in and could trade skiing for a good book and mulled wine.

  But when he descended a bit later for dinner, in his flannel shirt and corduroys and heavy Nordic sweater, his plans changed. Somebody else had claimed the chair near the fire. A pale blond head with an aquiline nose and an expression of boredom in his green eyes.

  Denys Playfair. Beside him sat Diana.

  * * *

  DID YOU FOLLOW ME HERE? she would ask him later, in an accusatory whisper, as they shivered in the chill drafts of the upper hall at midnight; and he would tell her what she expected to hear because he did not trust her with the Wohlthat story, not yet, not after the butchery on the convent floor. He told her that he could not forget the feel of her hair clenched in his fists or the velvet of her tongue, that he would follow her to hell and back if she chose to take him. She kept a wary distance there in the hall, conscious of Denys sleeping in one room and Dobler in another. Because Dobler was with them, of course—the Playfairs never went anywhere without Dobler.

  What is he to you? Jack wanted to ask, but he said nothing then and had asked nothing earlier when Willi appeared at the dinner table, sleek from his bath and a day of wind on the pistes. He seemed unfazed by Jack’s sudden appearance in Val d’Isère. When Willi gestured with his head toward a gray-haired figure seated alone in a corner, engrossed by his pipe and his book, Jack understood why.

  “Helmuth Wohlthat,” Dobler said. “Near the end of his stay, I believe. Have you met before? No? I shall have to introduce you. Before he slips through your fingers.”

  Jack eyed Göring’s banker as he consumed his beef stew. An invisible man in his own right, nondescript and even boring. Jack had expected a criminal mastermind. Wohlthat disappointed.

  The Playfair table included him as a matter of course. It was no accident they were gathered here, Jack and Willi and Diana and Denys, in the remotest valley of Europe, while the logs settled and the frigid drafts of spring winds circled their ankles like hungry dogs. Secrets had drawn them. Tension, voiced and unspoken, ricocheted around the room.

  Jack felt certain that something violent was about to happen. Playfair had a trick of watching him sidelong and Diana would not meet his eyes. Only Willi was composed.

  Adrenaline sang in Jack’s veins.

  * * *

  “AND HOW WAS YOUR SPORT TODAY, Herr Wohlthat?”

  The phrase rang out in English, but Dobler switched abruptly to German as he strolled toward the middle-aged man seated alone in the corner. There followed a badinage in heavy consonants. Playfair’s eyes did not follow Willi but the bored expression left his face, to be replaced by one of alertness as he drew p
atterns on the jacquard tablecloth with the tip of his knife. Jack knew then that he spoke German and was listening.

  “Have you skied the French Alps before?”

  This, from Diana.

  “No,” Jack said. “You have, I gather.”

  “For years,” she murmured. “But never this station. Too remote. Too uncomfortable. Until the road went in. It brought electricity to the valley.”

  “You’ll want a guide,” Playfair said suddenly. It was the first remark he’d directed to Jack. “It’s unsafe to ski alone. Picard might find you one.”

  Picard was the father of the blond plaits.

  “I’m going to bed,” Diana said. “Willi,” she called. “Aren’t you tired, darling?”

  It seemed a deliberate provocation. Jack’s hackles rose. But he said nothing to her and looked instead at her husband, who merely discarded his ash.

  Willi was returning indolently from his chat with Wohlthat. He smiled faintly at the Playfairs, his dark eyes opaque and unreadable, as if he loved them both too much to choose.

  “Come along, children,” he said. “Until tomorrow, Jack.”

  And thus was Jack Kennedy left alone with Göring’s banker.

  * * *

  THE MAN SEEMED INCLINED to let him make the first move. He remained in his chair, tamping tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with sharp, erratic movements.

  Jack rose casually from the table and approached the fire; he held out his hands to the embers. Aware of the weight of cold beyond these walls; of Diana, undressing upstairs; of this silent man in his chair.

  “You are Mr. Kennedy,” the German said softly after a while. “The ambassador’s son.”

  “I’d hoped my name wouldn’t mean a thing here.” Strike the note of self-mockery. Two men of the world, who understand the value of honesty, stuck in the snow. What had Dobler told Wohlthat, in that short incomprehensible exchange? He possessed a smattering of French and he’d wasted years in compulsory Latin; neither of them was of the slightest use in hunting Nazis. Ignorance lay like a mortar in his path, but he’d come all this way. He’d have to risk something. The image of Daisy Corcoran’s brutalized breast rose in his mind.

  He offered his hand. “Jack Kennedy.”

  “Helmuth Wohlthat. Please, young man. Sit.”

  He drew up a chair. “I’ve heard your name somewhere before. You’re a friend of the Little Sisters, aren’t you?”

  “Gott im Himmel,” Wohlthat breathed, “what a disaster, no? Sister Mary Joseph! The account book! My God, the account book! Your father has some message for me?”

  Jack’s hands clenched but he managed to keep his expression vacant. Your father. Wohlthat could call him that, they were such pals. What to say to the guy? Nothing definite. Buy time. “He was hoping you had one for him, sir.”

  Wohlthat put his head in his hands. “What can I do but beg his forgiveness? An unmitigated disaster! All those names—your father’s, his friends, the most important people in England and America—in Heydrich’s clutches!”

  Jack sat back in his chair, staring at the banker’s face.

  Parsing out the words. Rejecting their meaning.

  Parsing them again.

  Sickness rising in his throat.

  Dad’s name was in the stolen account books. Joe Kennedy, ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Along with others—the power structure of two continents, probably. Men and women who’d tried to buy an election for Hitler. Who’d committed a crime. Roosevelt would call it treason—

  They executed for treason.

  “This’ll break him,” Jack muttered. “Destroy him completely. Everything he’s worked for.” He thrust his hands through his hair, kicked free of the chair, and began to pace before the fire. “Hell, this’ll screw all of us. Once the press gets wind of it—the whole world knows—Roosevelt’s ambassador on Hitler’s payroll . . .”

  And then a random thought stopped him dead.

  What if Roosevelt already suspected Dad of disloyalty? And had sent Jack himself out on the hunt?

  It was no secret the two men did not see eye-to-eye. Or that Jack’s father was considering a run for the White House in 1940. What if Roosevelt intended to destroy Joe Kennedy with the crime Jack was unearthing? He could simultaneously gut his rival, and use the evidence of Hitler’s plot to convince America to enter the coming war. Once the voters knew the Nazis had tried to buy an American election, it would be a patriotic duty to vote for Roosevelt—and do whatever he asked to halt the Fascist menace.

  But in that case, Jack’s flailing mind insisted, you’d be the very last person FDR would recruit. Your loyalties are too divided. Between Dad and the man you wanted to serve. God help you, the man whose respect you craved . . .

  He had to protect his father. Fail, and he’d bring his whole family down.

  He faced Wohlthat. “You’re sure Heydrich has the book?”

  “That creature took it. He told me so.”

  “The Spider? You talked to Hans Obst?”

  Wohlthat shuddered. “He never said his name. He merely delivered a message: Heydrich wants me to cultivate your father. I know what that means. He’s going to blackmail us both.”

  “But how can Heydrich blackmail you? You’re one of them.”

  Wohlthat shook his head. “I work with Göring. Heydrich hates him. He deliberately compromised my network to bring Göring down.” The bowl of his pipe glowed red. “I’m expected to betray my old friend—I’m afraid of knives, you see.”

  Jack stared at him numbly. “And my father?”

  “I think he’s meant for something special. Something involving money. And the embarrassment of your president, of course. Heydrich will hold the account book over Mr. Kennedy until he does what Heydrich says.”

  “No,” Jack said fiercely. “He can deny all knowledge of it. Call Heydrich a liar. Say the account book’s fake.”

  “Then both of us will die,” Wohlthat said simply. “In horrible ways. The Spider will hunt your father down, and your family also.”

  “No.”

  The banker studied him implacably. “Heydrich knows how to use fear, Mr. Kennedy. Vulnerability. There’s no escape, once his hand is at your neck.”

  Jack just stood there, thinking. This beaten man was of no use to him; he’d given up and given in. He would do whatever Heydrich asked. There must be some way he could get the account book back—

  “I’m sorry,” Wohlthat said.

  THIRTY-THREE. CROSSING THE BORDER

  WOHLTHAT WENT TO BED.

  Jack sat up in the empty room and stared at the dying fire.

  His father was a traitor to the president they both served.

  There was written proof of it, and a vicious man would use that proof.

  The room lurched crazily whenever he moved his head; blood pounded in his ears.

  He could not choose whom to fail. Roosevelt, or Dad.

  In Jack’s world, that was no choice at all.

  He worried his lip until it bled, thinking of the man in the wheelchair and how much he’d yearned to live up to his expectations. To be Roosevelt’s man in Europe. There’d been honor and purpose and excitement in the idea. He’d felt different, tapped by the President. Valued. An independent thinker—which was much more than the screwball his family usually thought he was.

  There’d be no more ciphers from the roof, no confidential phone calls. And no explanation he could offer. He could not breathe a word of his dad’s treason to FDR, so his radio would have to fall silent. While he waited for the truth to blow up in his face.

  Did Dad know what was coming?

  He doubled over, hugging his rib cage, while pain scissored through his entrails.

  He should have stuck some DOCA in his leg hours ago.

 
; How could he possibly explain his silence to Roosevelt?

  He could say he was ill. Jesus—he was ill! Nobody would think twice. He could take a boat home and check back into Mayo and write a bunch of crap for his senior thesis, and only Bruce Hopper would know what a failure he really was.

  And himself, of course. He’d have to live with himself. While Franklin Roosevelt dismantled the Kennedy family in public, piece by piece.

  Maybe Jack would be lucky, and die in the war.

  “Jack.”

  It was her voice, whispered behind him; the scent of her skin on the air. He turned and looked at her with hollow eyes.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What is it?”

  “Nothing you can fix,” he said, and walked away from the dying fire.

  * * *

  BECAUSE HE COULD NOT TRUST DIANA, they played out their scene in the chilly hallway, the other men sleeping behind their bedroom doors.

  Did you follow me here?

  Yes. No.

  Desire. Despair.

  The center had dropped out of his world. He hated to be touched but he needed to be held. He wanted this woman, whom he could tell nothing. It was too much, and in the end he left her standing in the upper hall, arms folded like iron bars across her chest.

  He closed his bedroom door on his pain and lay down in the dark, knowing he should find the DOCA pellets and use them.

  What had his father done?

  Treason—or murder?

  Words and pictures whirled through his exhausted brain. A dead hatcheck girl in the alley behind the Stork Club. I knew her people in Boston, Jack. Truth be told, I got her this job. Sister Mary Joseph’s blood spilled at his feet. Spiders cut into pale flesh. Göring’s banker, the man who was afraid of knives. Roosevelt in his Pullman. A hundred and fifty million dollars, Hoover says. The thug with the scar on his lip. Diana.

  His door opened.

  “Wohlthat’s upset you, hasn’t he?”

  The door clicked shut. She came toward him slowly. The shiver of silk charmeuse in the dark.