Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  Churchill rolled a cigar between his lips, set down a glass of champagne, grunted, and touched Jack’s fingers. “Indeed. You’ve kicked about the world since we last met, eh? A year ago, I believe. Your father’s Independence Day celebration.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “M’mother was American, you know.”

  “Jenny Jerome. The toast of New York.”

  Churchill glanced at Gubbins. “The colonel tells me great things about you. He says you’ve got nerve and intelligence, and your heart’s in the right place. Glad you fell in with Gubbins; couldn’t do better in a tight spot.”

  “He’s landed me in a few,” Jack said.

  Churchill grunted again. “Sit down, sit down.”

  Jack sat. So did Gubbins and Playfair. Churchill paced instead, his words directed at the floor. “Danzig. You were there, Gubbins tells me. When the Heydrich-Enigma, as we’re calling it, was lifted by the Poles.”

  So it was Churchill Gubbins reported to; Churchill who ran the shadow world behind Neville Chamberlain’s back.

  “Lifted is an understatement, sir. Half the woods and most of our hair were on fire.”

  Churchill glowered at him. “The colonel’s friends in Polish Intelligence have informed us the new machine is damnably complicated, and the codes it produces virtually unbreakable. Moreover, they are well aware that time is short—that Hitler is likely to invade in the next few weeks—and the whole cipher-breaking effort will be buggered by the Nazis. They’ve asked us to get the Enigma to London. To you from failing hands we throw the torch, what? It’s entirely down to Gubbins’s work with the Polish Intelligence johnnies, of course.”

  The Partisan Leader’s Handbook, Jack thought idly. He’d asked Gubbins that night in Danzig what the Baker Street Irregulars got out of ambushing a Gestapo truck. The colonel had suggested it would eventually be the machine itself.

  “So when he suggested you, Mr. Kennedy,” Churchill concluded, “naturally I listened.”

  Jack’s thoughts came back to the fire-lit room with a start. “Suggested me for . . . ?”

  “Fetching the thing,” Churchill barked. “From Warsaw. Gubbins will go along, of course, although not with you. Just in parallel, as it were, to keep an eye on it all.”

  “I’m headed to Paris in a few days,” Jack attempted. “Not Warsaw.”

  “You have two weeks to get yourself to Poland,” Churchill ordered, as if Paris had not been mentioned. “Take a friend along, for cover—but lose ’im before you cross the frontier. It could get tricky there. Place is filthy with Germans, our Polish friends say.”

  “You want me to lose my friend,” Jack repeated, thinking of Torby. “Just open the car door and hope he rolls clear?”

  “Kinder, surely, to put him on a train,” Playfair murmured.

  “Gubbins will manage the actual exchange of the machine with the Poles,” Churchill continued, as though neither of them had spoken, “but you’ll carry it out. You’re American and you’ve got a diplomatic passport. Can’t do better than that, where Germans and borders are concerned.”

  I’ve heard this before, Jack thought.

  He wanted to ask Churchill if he’d sent Diana to watch him, on his previous journey through Europe, just in parallel, as it were, or whether Churchill knew that his own name was on a certain Gestapo list. But the curtain called Boredom or Death had suddenly vanished, and for tonight, that was all Jack needed.

  “Tell me,” he said, as Churchill poured him a glass of champagne, “what you want me to do.”

  FORTY-SIX. YOUR BABY NOW

  TWO WEEKS LATER JACK checked into the Polonia Palace Hotel, at the intersection of two fashionable streets with—to him—unpronounceable names. Nobody knew Jack was in Warsaw except Torby, whom he’d sworn to silence and then abandoned in Paris. Torby was a thoroughly nice guy who played football at Harvard when he wasn’t sprinting around a track. Like all of Jack’s friends, he’d fallen in love with Kick, and he’d spent his final days in London alternately proposing marriage to her and glowering at Billy Hartington whenever he appeared at Prince’s Gate. It was a relief, therefore, to hustle Torby by boat train across the Channel, where he could drown his passion in a good Bordeaux. Within two days they had met some friends from Harvard on a summer tour of Europe, and Jack could leave Torby in their hands without much guilt.

  He rented a small blue Citroën and made his way slowly through the woods and fields of Bavaria, beguiling his nights at beer halls in Bayreuth and Nuremberg and Regensburg. Bavaria was Hitler country but far less intimidating than Berlin, which Jack avoided. It felt like Heydrich’s turf, and he dreaded seeing Diana.

  As he drove, he tried his father’s case in his mind—and found the man guilty. But so what? Did his terrible knowledge require him to expose Dad to Franklin Roosevelt? Or merely to confront J.P. with the truth? What if Jack made it clear to his father that he expected him to act with honor, not cowardice?—To stand up to Heydrich’s blackmail, and damn the consequences?

  Dad would snarl and call him insane.

  A half hour before he crossed the Polish border, Jack came to a decision. No matter what kind of man his father was, no matter how traitorous his behavior, Jack could not be the one to destroy him. All his life, Dad had taught him that he was a Kennedy—and they stood together, the Kennedys, against all comers. If Dad caved to Heydrich’s pressure, and did whatever the man asked in order to save his skin, Jack would keep silent. While Dad sold out the President.

  Never mind that his decision disgusted him. He didn’t have much future anyway. The intervals between his bouts of sickness grew shorter with every passing week; he’d just been buying time with George Taylor’s pellets. Not even the new box from Mayo he’d found waiting for him in London could keep him going forever. He wouldn’t live with the disgrace very long.

  And with luck, he’d never see Franklin Roosevelt again.

  * * *

  TEN DAYS AFTER LEAVING TORBY, he reached the outskirts of Warsaw.

  The Polonia was the city’s most glamorous hotel. To stay anywhere else would look suspiciously unlike a Kennedy. Gubbins arrived separately and took a room under the name of Harris; his card proclaimed him a dealer in Scottish tweeds. Jack applauded the man’s mordant humor.

  They studiously ignored each other in the Polonia’s breakfast room and its nightclub, where blond Polish girls danced for a glass of champagne. Jack bought the prettiest a drink and watched her mentally weigh his American passport against the wallet of a German Luftwaffe colonel sitting alone in the corner. An exercise in geopolitics. The Aryan flyboy left with the girl on his arm.

  Jack killed three days waiting for some sort of sign from Gubbins, walking in the Old Town and drinking vodka at night, listening to turgid Polish jazz and trying not to think about what would happen when Heydrich put the screws on his father. Roosevelt’s voice was constantly in his head, cajoling and nudging him—the voice of conscience. He’d brought his radio in its special suitcase but he’d left it in the boot of the car. He had nothing further to encode. Or to communicate.

  He wished he’d been a better spy, the kind Roosevelt had wanted—an independent thinker with his own brand of guts—but in the end he’d failed at this job, too, not because of his lousy body, but because of his divided soul.

  * * *

  TUESDAY MORNING, THE TWENTY-FIFTH of July, he woke with a jolt from a dream of Diana. He lay breathless under the single sheet, heart racing and penis erect, hating her for owning him so completely. There was a film of sweat on his brow and he knew it wasn’t from summer heat. He was feverish again. An infection, probably, in the latest gash he’d cut in his leg. He’d gone through both thighs and one calf and was rapidly running out of muscle.

  What was the time? What had wakened him? Some spectral sound. He glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it was only a fe
w minutes after five. Light was seeping through the sheer curtains, the early dawn of a north European summer. The damp from the Vistula rose from the streets and clung to his curtains, which bellied exhaustedly against the open window. It would be a hot day. Jack, however, had chills.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it.

  The strange sound came again; a faint dragging and bumping.

  Someone was in the corridor outside his room.

  He sat up cautiously and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was dressed only in boxer shorts. He slipped his hand under the pillow and grasped the butt of the Luger.

  He crossed the carpeted floor as silently as possible and hesitated by the door. Whoever was beyond it tried hard to control his breathing, but it emerged in short, violent gasps. Jack positioned the Luger as he reached for the doorknob, prepared for somebody to kick his way in.

  “Jack.” A soft, insistent whisper.

  He stopped dead, recognizing the voice; then as quietly as he could, he opened the door.

  Gubbins was crumpled in the hall, his face dead white and his trousers soaked with blood.

  Jack shoved the Luger into his boxers and dragged the colonel inside.

  * * *

  “NOT THERE,” Gubbins gasped as Jack tried to help him sit down on the bed. “Bathroom. Tile. Easier to clean.”

  They hobbled to the bath and Gubbins sank down onto the toilet. Jack thought for an instant he was going to faint—the man’s eyes rolled back in his head—but then Jack slapped him hard on the cheek and he came round, grinning like a drunkard.

  “Good show. Whiskey?”

  “None in the room.”

  “Flask,” Gubbins muttered. “Breast pocket.”

  He reached into the man’s jacket and found the flat silver bottle. He unscrewed the cap and tipped it to Gubbins’s lips.

  “Where are you hurt?” Jack asked. His own head was swimming and he shook it again, damning himself for weakness.

  “Leg.” The colonel motioned to his left thigh. “Didn’t hit the femoral. Flesh wound. But . . . lost a spot of blood.”

  There was a black hole in the fabric of Gubbins’s trousers, just visible among the welter of dark brown stains. Jack was familiar with blood and shit and wounds and pain, but the colonel’s customary neatness, his perfect tailoring, made this carnage more alarming. “You need a doctor.”

  Gubbins shook his head violently. “Wrap a tourniquet around it.”

  He was speaking more clearly; the short-term effect of alcohol, Jack thought. He glanced again at the oozing hole in Gubbins’s leg. How much blood did a man have in him? Tourniquet. One of his shirts. . . .

  Hurriedly, he set the Luger on the floor and dashed to his closet. Like all his clothes, the shirt could do with a laundering, but he figured it was better than nothing. He tore at the seam with his teeth and managed a single long strip of fabric. He knelt down on the cold tiles and began clumsily to help Gubbins out of his clothes.

  He was a swart, muscular, hairy little devil. He leaned heavily on Jack’s shoulder and stumbled for balance. Lifted one foot clear of his trousers, then the other, more difficult because the leg was sticky with blood. Jack thrust the trousers away and eased Gubbins back onto the toilet. He began feverishly to wrap the tourniquet above the wound.

  Gubbins was drinking again. Jack waited until he’d swallowed and said, “What happened?”

  “Gestapo. No business being here. Polish sovereign territory. Tell that to Heydrich.”

  “They shot you? Where?”

  “Bit of woods south of the city. Don’t think they knew it was me, per se. Fired at random on our little party.”

  Fear knifed through Jack. “They knew about the Enigma?”

  “Shhhh,” Gubbins muttered. He closed his eyes, as if he were about to swoon.

  “Did they get it?” Jack grasped the man’s shoulder, his mind filled with shadows, darting through flames. “Colonel—the Enigma. Where is it?”

  “Poles.” Gubbins’s eyes opened again and he concentrated on Jack. “Handoff aborted. Nothing else to do. Sauve qui peut and devil take the hindmost. I think we all got clear. Hope to God the machine did.”

  Jack stared at him. “You don’t know?”

  Gubbins shook his head slightly.

  “Is there someone I can . . . contact? Somebody who can tell us?”

  Gubbins scrabbled for his hand and gripped it hard. “Over to you, old son. You’ll have to manage it.”

  Jack, with his blurred vision and his spiking internal heat and a body no one could depend on. He reached for Willi’s Luger. Focused on the narrow steel barrel. He must focus.

  “Your baby, now,” the colonel said. And fainted.

  * * *

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Jack opened his door and admitted the British embassy, in the form of a man named Forsyte. It was nearly six o’clock in the morning and the hotel was quiet.

  “We’ve told the front desk you’re a bit of a fusspot, Colin, with chronic heart trouble,” Forsyte said briskly, “and being a British national unacquainted with Polish doctors, you called your embassy for help. Reynolds and Magnus have a stretcher waiting in the hall. We’ll load you on, cover you to the chin, and carry you right out the Polonia’s front door. Seven minutes by van to the embassy and Dr. Graham.”

  “Splendid,” Gubbins whispered. He had opened his eyes when Jack doused his face with water, but they could all see he was fading fast.

  “Mr. Kennedy—you’ll collect Colin’s kit from room 617?” Forsyte was holding out a key. “There’s a good chap. Leave it with the bellman. We’ll send for it later.”

  Jack took Gubbins’s key and watched as Forsyte quietly opened the door to the corridor and admitted the two other men, who quickly lifted Gubbins onto the stretcher. It was done with a faint air of disapproval, as though the colonel was a tiresome schoolboy being forcibly returned to his Sixth Form Master. How like the British, Jack thought. Even the Irregulars.

  As they were about to leave, Gubbins reached for Jack’s arm. “Listen,” he said.

  Jack leaned close.

  “74-39-51-00. Do whatever they tell you.”

  FORTY-SEVEN. ESCAPE AND EVASION

  HALF AN HOUR LATER Jack went downstairs and ordered breakfast, as though he’d never heard of a fusspot named Harris who dealt in tweeds. Fortified with coffee and some sort of Polish sweet roll made with currants, he went out into the street and found a public telephone.

  He dialed the number he’d memorized. 74-39-51-00. A male voice, heavy with cigarette smoke, answered in Polish.

  “My name’s Kennedy,” he said. “Gubbins told me to call.”

  There was a pause. Then a series of metallic clicks. Then the same voice said, “You are where, Kennedy?”

  Jack glanced through the phone booth’s windows. “Three blocks from the Polonia Palace.”

  “You will walk to Castle Square. You will find taxi stand. You will take number 52 taxi, yes?”

  “Why—” Jack attempted, but the line had gone dead.

  He stood for a second in the protective womb of the booth. Could the voice be trusted? What if Gubbins’s friends were in the hands of the Gestapo? What if he was walking into a trap?

  The Luger in his blazer pocket felt heavy. He patted it twice and, taking a deep breath, stepped out into the street.

  * * *

  CASTLE SQUARE WAS IN the Old Town, the medieval heart of Warsaw not far from the river. The streets running within the fortified walls were abrupt and narrow and all led to the same place; a few cars heaved past St. John’s Cathedral and loitered in Queen Anna’s corridor. The castle itself was massive and magnificent, a big-shouldered building that suggested Paris rather than Poland. Uniformed guards stood at attention near the entrance; Jack wondered idly if they we
re armed. A raised flag announced that the President was in residence.

  He ambled diagonally across the square toward the marketplace, conscious that it was summer and that half the population of the city was gathered among the vendors’ stalls, prodding beets and potatoes with blunt fingers. The taxi stand was near the market. Five black cars were huddled against the curb, leaving a narrow space for traffic to pass; a market truck blared its horn.

  Jack let his eyes drift casually over the taxis, looking for number 52. It was fourth in line.

  He’d draw attention if he walked right up to it. He turned his back and examined a display of cheeses set out on a table. The names scrawled in Polish with a bit of chalk meant nothing to him, but he grinned at the white-haired woman who offered him a slice of something pungent and hard, and slipped it into his mouth. He glanced over his shoulder at the taxis as he chewed. Number 52 was now third in line. That’s when he saw him.

  The Spider.

  He was dressed in plainclothes, a light summer suit, leaning against one of the vaulted arches that formed Queen Anna’s corridor. He was turning the pages of a newspaper, but Jack doubted Hans Obst could read Polish. How long had the Spider been following him? From the moment he left his hotel?

  And then he understood. Obst was there because Jack had been set up. He was the fallback plan if Jack did not get into the taxi. Blocking the most obvious direction Jack would run.

  He turned to the old woman and fished in his pocket for coins. She took her time wrapping the cheese in a sheet of newspaper. Jack’s belly roiled with the familiar disease. Chills ran up his legs and fluttered in his fingertips. He smiled idiotically at the crone and felt the Spider’s eyes bore into his back. He could not get into the taxi. He could not run. There would be other men in other suits with other newspapers, posted around the marketplace; but he must somehow get back to the Polonia. He needed his car and his radio lying hidden in the boot.

  The Enigma, said a voice in his head. Not Roosevelt’s, this time, or Gubbins’s—but Winston Churchill’s. To you from failing hands we throw the torch.