Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  His voice was so thoroughly amiable that Jack ignored the warning implicit in the words and turned obediently to the left, from one unlit road to another. Ahead lay a darker smudge that might be a storm or a mountain. He could not see beyond his headlights. No other beams knifed through the black.

  Perhaps ten or twelve minutes passed. There were fields and the occasional glow from a lone farmhouse window. And then the looming smudge resolved itself into woods. Jack plunged into them.

  The road bucked and curved through the trees. He slowed to a crawl. And then suddenly one of the trees was lying directly across the road and he could go no farther. It was a massive thing. It appeared to have been blown directly in his path by an epic storm; an entire canopy of roots loomed to the left.

  “I suggest we stop here,” Gubbins said.

  “Or turn around and go back to the hotel.”

  “And miss all the fun? No, no, dear chap. It’s almost time.”

  Jack threw the car into reverse.

  “Perhaps a little farther from the tree,” Gubbins murmured. “I should leave at least a hundred yards.”

  Jack did as he was told and killed the engine.

  “Well, come on,” Gubbins said, and shoved his door. “Chilly in the Baltic region in May, what?”

  Jack got out and went around the hood of the car. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  “What the hell are we doing?”

  “Pulling Herr Heydrich’s leg.” Gubbins glanced at his watch. “You were rather slow over that last bit of ruts they call a road. Hurry.”

  He sprinted toward the fallen tree and began to haul himself over the trunk. Jack could just see, through the tangle of branches, the pale glow of approaching lights. Gubbins ignored them. Jack ran after him, grasped a branch, and climbed upward, wishing he was wearing anything but evening clothes. Gloves, for instance, would’ve been nice. He vaulted over the tree, looking for Gubbins. Landed hard on his left leg, the thigh throbbing viciously in protest. He could hear the approaching vehicle now; a heavy engine, whining with speed, probably some kind of truck.

  “Over here!” the colonel hissed.

  He was crouched in the brush at the road’s inner curve.

  Jack joined him.

  They waited. The sound of the engine grew louder. Twin beams arced suddenly over the trees, sharp as searchlights, and then the monster was upon them.

  Jack drew a deep breath. There was a hideous squealing of brakes. A crash of gears as the truck tried to avoid the massive tree directly in its path. The engine howled. And then an enormous shape, square and shrouded in tarpaulin, seemed to double over on itself—somersault past them—in a shriek of gravel as Jack clutched Gubbins’s arm. It hit with a violence that shoved the fallen tree trunk sideways, as easily as though it were a discarded broom, branches and roots catapulting over and over with the truck somewhere in between. The whole tangled mess skittered down the dark road and Jack suddenly found his voice.

  “My car!”

  “Should be all right,” Gubbins said, rising to his feet and pulling Jack along with him.

  At that moment, the smashed truck burst into flames.

  They both ran toward it, Gubbins drawing a gun. Other figures emerged from the woods—dark figures, unidentifiable, in shapeless clothes. A dozen? Half a dozen? They moved so swiftly it was impossible to know. They ignored the cab, where there was certain to be men trapped by fire, maybe dead already from the crash; Jack hoped so. Gubbins made a dash for the rear of the truck and somebody fired a gun at the hasp that secured the doors. They swung open.

  Gubbins was shouting in a language Jack recognized as Polish and two other men vaulted into the rear of the truck, canted crazily on its side. They tossed boxes out into the road in a kind of frenzy. Everyone ignored the boxes. Two limp figures in gray uniforms hung halfway out of the truck and Jack knew suddenly that they were German soldiers—this was a German army truck—and he wanted to ask whether the soldiers were dead or just unconscious, and what would happen to them now. But there was no one to ask. He stood in the middle of the road, feeling the heat of the burning engine and aware that the gas tank could explode in a matter of seconds. Gubbins was shouting and waving everyone back to where Jack stood, but the men wouldn’t move. And then a figure appeared in the canted truck doorway—stepped over the bodies lying there—and jumped to the ground. He was sprinting toward Gubbins.

  There was a sucking sensation in the night, as though a giant had drawn breath, and then the concussion.

  Jack was blown backward, falling hard to the surface of the road. Flames shot above him as he struggled to his feet. Men pounded past through the darkness. One of them was Gubbins. He was shouting in Jack’s face.

  “We’ll have to work our way round to your car. Quickly.”

  He plunged into the brush at the side of the road and Jack followed jerkily, his legs almost refusing to obey his screaming mind. Gubbins was scrambling up the bank, reaching for low-hanging branches, hauling himself into the cover of the trees. Jack stumbled after the colonel as he flitted among the trunks. Then down the bank and out onto the road, the burning truck with its charred human flesh behind them.

  His car was still sitting where he’d left it.

  He pulled open the driver’s door and almost fell behind the wheel.

  “Shall I drive back, then?” Gubbins asked anxiously.

  Jack shook his head. He fumbled in his jacket for his keys. They were still there.

  Gubbins reached into his coat and withdrew a flask.

  “Here,” he said, passing it to Jack.

  The word had all the force of an order.

  Jack took a swig, and felt the liquor burn its way down his throat. He closed his eyes on the rawness of it.

  Then he shoved the keys in the ignition and the engine coughed to life. He backed down the road blindly, a sheet of flame from the burning truck soaring in front of him. He found room to turn the car. And sped away from the place as though the Gestapo were on his tail.

  * * *

  “IF ANYBODY ASKS WHERE we were tonight,” Gubbins was saying calmly as they reached the turning for the Sopot road, “I should use the story about that party at your legation. And losing our way. Forget the punctured tire; that’s something that can be checked.”

  “One of them already has a repaired puncture,” Jack said mechanically, “so that’s all right.”

  “Oh, you noticed that, did you? You’re starting to think like a saboteur, Jack Kennedy. Been reading my manuals, haven’t you? The Partisan Leader’s Handbook. Jolly good. Changing a tire might explain the wreck of your clothes.”

  Jack turned the car toward Sopot, a glow on the horizon. “Those men were Polish.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the truck was German.”

  “Got it in one.”

  “What were they stealing?”

  Gubbins sighed. He smoothed his mustache with one hand, as though listening to internal argument.

  “You borrowed my car,” Jack pointed out. “Hell—you borrowed me.”

  “So I did,” Gubbins agreed. “And I’m damn grateful. You’ve got diplomatic immunity, d’you see. They wouldn’t prosecute you, Jack, if we’d been found at the scene. A Painter in Oils has less pull than Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s son.”

  “Christ,” Jack said tensely.

  Gubbins was willing to toss him to the Gestapo.

  Christ.

  “They were stealing a wireless transmitter,” the colonel was saying. “Heydrich’s latest model of something called the Enigma. The Polish Intelligence service has been breaking German codes for years, Jack, but Heydrich has tumbled to the fact and changed the game. The Germans are perfecting a new machine, far more complex, and rumored to be un
breakable. The Poles badly wanted one so they can take it apart, figure out how it works. They’ll need as much advance warning of Hitler’s invasion as they can get—and the Führer’s orders will be transmitted through the Heydrich-Enigma.”

  “He found it,” Jack said suddenly. “The guy who jumped out of the truck, right before it blew.”

  “Yes. We’d learned a model was being sent from a factory on the Czech-Polish border straight to a Gestapo unit embedded near Danzig. There were several routes it could take from the border, but only one into Danzig itself—so we advised the Poles they’d best sabotage the truck here, under Heydrich’s nose. And make it jolly well look like an accident,” Gubbins added reflectively. “I think they succeeded.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “We. You keep saying we learned and we advised. Who’s we? You and the partisans in the woods back there?”

  Gubbins shrugged. “I’ve learned a lot from the Poles. They’re clever chaps and exceedingly resourceful—that’s what comes from being sandwiched forever between Russia and Germany. But no, Jack—my employers, such as they are, are known informally as . . . BSI.”

  Jack thought about it. “British Secret Intelligence?”

  Gubbins laughed out loud. “Hardly so exalted, my dear chap! It’s for Baker Street Irregulars. After Sherlock Holmes’s gang of boys. Our offices are around the corner from Baker Street, in fact.”

  “I thought Britain had military intelligence. MI being the acronym.”

  “That would be Mr. Chamberlain’s service,” Gubbins said comfortably. “And I’m afraid, Jack, he’s not inclined to use it. Has more faith in his ability to reason with the enemy. He thinks spying isn’t cricket. We’ve had to work around him.”

  We, again.

  “Nobody ambushes a Gestapo truck for the sake of friendship,” Jack said, “no matter how much you’ve learned from the Poles. The risks are too high. What’s in it for BSI?”

  “The Enigma, of course. Our friends in the woods have a few months, perhaps, to tinker with the model we helped them nick—but if Hitler rolls the Poles as easily as he’s rolled the Austrians and Czechs, their work will be shut down. And then we shall have to undertake it.”

  “Figuring out how the Heydrich-Enigma works? Breaking the German codes?”

  “Yes. We’ll have to smuggle the machine out of Warsaw—it’s already on its way to Polish Intelligence headquarters there—and carry on the work in England. You realize, Jack, that once Poland falls, Hitler’s encrypted communications will be directed against us. England has pledged to defend Poland, after all, and that will mean war once Hitler invades.”

  “England can’t save the Poles?”

  Gubbins sighed. “With Mr. Chamberlain in office? We shall hardly save ourselves.”

  “He knows nothing about what happened tonight, does he? Or this Enigma machine?”

  “Really, Jack. Would you tell him?”

  Jack had a haunting suspicion he’d thrown in his lot with a gang of extragovernmental criminals, and for an instant he wanted to stop the car and kick Gubbins out. But he remembered, then, the cable sent by Sam Schwartz with the curious bona fides, and the unquestioning assistance he’d received in the cupboard beneath the trapdoor in Gubbins’s office.

  Roosevelt knew the Irregulars existed. Jack had been deliberately handed to them.

  “One more thing,” he said. They were back in Sopot now, and the Kasino-Hotel loomed before them.

  “What’s that?”

  “Our deal. My quid for your quo.”

  Gubbins smiled. “The Spider sleeps in room 5101, directly next door to Heydrich. Have you got a gun, dear boy?”

  THIRTY-NINE. THE DUMBWAITER

  AS THEY DREW UP UNDER the portico of the hotel they saw a crowd of German officers waiting in the night. One of them was Reinhard Heydrich.

  Gubbins said under his breath, “They’ll have heard about the truck. Whatever happens, don’t argue.”

  And then Jack’s door was flung open and he was pulled from the car. A Nazi with a death’s-head patch on his collar—which meant that he was SS—jumped behind the wheel. Another held open the rear door for Heydrich to get in; apparently an Obergruppenführer never sat in front. Gubbins was already standing on the pavement with a sardonic look on his face. The motor gunned. Jack’s car sped off.

  “Hey!” he shouted after it furiously.

  “I gather we’ve been commandeered, old chap,” Gubbins drawled. “Wonder what’s got these chaps in such a snit? Two o’clock in the morning, no less! A man can’t even have his nightcap in peace.”

  He strolled nonchalantly through the crowd of officers and into the lobby. As Jack followed, five cars roared up to the entry. The Germans piled into them with a barrage of orders that fell on his ears like machine-gun fire.

  In a few seconds the cars had disappeared in a line of red taillights, and the portico was silent again—but for the panting breath of a valet, who’d run for a car and been punched by an irate German for his efforts.

  Jack stood there a moment as quiet descended, taking deep breaths to calm his erratic pulse. Heydrich was racing to the scene of the ambush. He’d figure out pretty quickly it wasn’t a simple accident—wouldn’t he? Gubbins was insane to think a handful of crazy Poles could pull off a stunt like that, under the very nose of the Gestapo. The Nazis would return in a few hours and start rounding up the innocent. Shooting people. And it was Jack’s fault because he’d driven Gubbins in his car. Heydrich would remember that—the two of them driving up to the entrance with exquisite timing. They’d be interrogated, of course. Their story about a legation party and a flat tire, a pathetic joke under the circumstances.

  Jack was swept with a wave of exhaustion so profound he swayed where he stood. He pulled a handful of Danzig currency from his pocket and gave it to the only other person still lingering by the hotel entrance in the waning night—the valet who’d taken a punch in the gut. He was a slight young man in a dark uniform who looked as spent as Jack felt. Jack figured he wouldn’t need much cash, once Heydrich was done with him.

  * * *

  THE CASINO WAS EMPTY and there was no sign of Diana. He let the elevator carry him to the third floor, and hesitated outside her door. There was no light or sound within. He glanced down at himself. His evening clothes were a mess. Dirt and gravel were smeared along his trousers and he smelled of creosote and fire. He’d have to get rid of the suit. These were the evening clothes he’d had tailored at Poole’s, but he couldn’t risk keeping them.

  He let himself into his room and stopped short, appalled.

  It had been so thoroughly ransacked it rivaled the chaos of his Queen Mary stateroom. Obst and his picklocks, again.

  “Fuck.” He slammed the door. Torn books, spilled shaving kit. The contents of his suitcase dumped on the floor.

  He crossed immediately to the room’s sole window, a tall, imposing affair heavily draped and canopied against the wind off the Gdansk Bay. The drapes had been drawn at dusk by the maid. Jack twitched them aside and reached up with his right hand, feeling along the interior wooden frame of the canopy. He’d hidden Willi’s Luger there.

  And the Spider had missed it.

  He pulled the gun from its hiding place and looked at it, gleaming blue in the overhead light.

  If you want peace, prepare for war.

  He glanced around the savaged room. What else was precious? The books could be replaced. He’d had his passport and money with him. No letters from the family, nothing that could—

  And then he went cold. His radio.

  He sank down onto the carpet and huddled there, cross-legged, his head in his hands. He’d left the suitcase with the radio set locked in the trunk of his car. He had no real use for it, now that he was ignoring Roosevelt, and it seemed silly
to lug the thing into every hotel along the road from Val d’Isère.

  But Heydrich himself was riding in the car and either he or his driver might just use the trunk key Jack had left behind when they’d tossed him to the curb.

  His first impulse was to get to the American legation and hole up until he could be sent home by plane or boat.

  His second thought, which seemed saner than the first, was to find Gubbins.

  He changed his clothes, stuffed his acrid-smelling dress suit in the hotel’s linen laundry bag, and slipped out of his room. At the far end of the silent corridor there would be the inevitable service pantry: shelves piled with linens, butler’s carts, supplies of soap and towels. He prayed the door was never locked and that nobody was awake at this hour of the morning.

  He was lucky on both counts. The pantry door opened at his turn of the knob.

  A dangling string grazed his face—the light switch. He shut the door behind him and reached for it in the dark. The sudden electric glare revealed what he was looking for: the trash chute leading directly to the hotel incinerator. It ran alongside a much larger shaft that accommodated a dumbwaiter. There would be openings for both on every floor.

  He dumped his damning clothes down the trash chute. There was a faint roar as the incinerator yawned far below, then closed on Savile Row’s finest tailoring.

  * * *

  “I SHOULDN’T LEAVE JUST YET, old chap,” Gubbins said thoughtfully as he offered his hip flask to Jack. It was nearly three, now, and Gubbins had clearly enjoyed a bath while Jack was burning his evidence; no hint of what the colonel would call petrol lingered in the room. He wore a correct navy dressing gown that would not have been out of place at a Pall Mall club, and his face shone pinkly from his ablutions. “Might put the wind up the Gestapo. Turn their thoughts in an unpleasant direction. Best appear at your table this morning and tuck into a tidy breakfast of bacon and eggs. Engross the attention of that charming mistress of yours. Ten to one Heydrich will think the truck met with an unfortunate accident—and friend Death Head will never have opened your boot.”