Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  “Of course it’s watched,” Forsyte snapped. “Heydrich’s people did this for a reason, Jack. They’re waiting for all hell to break loose. We’ll have to hope they haven’t recognized our Polish friends entering the lobby, or they’ll know their dirty game has gone awry. This is still a sovereign country, so they can’t formally intervene—but I should not expect them to give up. As soon as you walk out of this hotel, they will be hunting you. I don’t want to know why.”

  He paused, then said diffidently, “Have you thought of what to do next?”

  Jack rubbed at his eyes. The lids felt dry and itchy, something to do with tears. He had failed to get the DOCA into his system this morning and he knew he would regret that later. But for now, he had to think. Forsyte had asked the critical question.

  How to get out of Poland—and take the Heydrich-Enigma with him?

  He had gone through too much—he had lost too much—to forfeit the prize now.

  He was tempted to ask for a seat on the plane that would carry Gubbins out that evening; but he was not a British subject, and Forsyte had already done enough for a relative stranger.

  He could hand over the brown carpetbag, and tell Forsyte to put it on the plane with Gubbins. But Forsyte had said he was Foreign Office, not “one of Gubbins’s people,” a deliberate distinction Jack could not ignore. Forsyte knew nothing about the Heydrich-Engima. He was part of Neville Chamberlain’s official apparatus, the creaking machinery of the British Empire—not the Baker Street Irregulars. If Forsyte opened the brown carpetbag and looked at its contents—what in God’s name would happen?

  Nothing good, Jack felt certain.

  Your baby now, Gubbins had said.

  Churchill was counting on him to succeed.

  So were the Poles, who were industriously covering his bloody tracks.

  He met Forsyte’s gaze. “It’s safest if you have no idea what I do next.”

  FORTY-NINE. THE RAILWAYS OF CENTRAL EUROPE

  WHEN HE REACHED THE BOTTOM of the six-storey stairwell, he exited into a narrow alley devoid of life. He was reminded, incongruously, of the Waldorf-Astoria and a freight elevator opening into a deserted garage. There was no Casey or Schwartz to offer Jack a comb. A car waited, rear door open—but it was not Jack’s blue Citroën. It was the tin can he’d occupied early that afternoon, and behind the wheel was Bird Man.

  “Lie down,” the gravel voice ordered, as he heaved his heavy bags into the car. “Do not move until I tell you.”

  He did what the man asked. The car swung away from the curb. To his surprise he felt it move at a leisurely pace, weaving sedately in and out of traffic. It was possible, Jack thought, that Bird Man thought speed would attract attention.

  “What will happen to my Citroën?” Jack asked the seat cushion. He was keeping his head down.

  “After it has sat for too long, someone will break into it and steal it,” Bird Man said indifferently.

  “Want the keys?”

  “Unnecessary. You will wish to report the theft when you reach home. The keys will be proof of your innocence, then, to those who care about such things.”

  From his tone, Bird Man cared about very little. That he bothered with Jack was due entirely to the brown carpetbag.

  Ten minutes, perhaps a quarter hour passed, the car turning and accelerating, the spans of bridges visible from the corners of his eyes. His head was spinning muzzily and he wondered if it was the car, or his illness. Had Gubbins’s friends packed his bottle of DOCA?

  “You may sit up now,” Bird Man said, “and tell me where you wish to go.”

  The casualness of the words was jarring. Jack had assumed he was in Bird Man’s hands, that he would be directed in his eventual salvation, as he had been all day.

  He sat up. “Where I wish to go?”

  “Indeed, yes. The aerodrome? The train station? Or your embassy, perhaps? I will undertake to deposit you on Mr. Biddle’s back doorstep.”

  He stared at the man’s head, narrow and bristling under its slice of newsboy cap; the harshness of the profile. Sallow skin and a hooked nose. There was no plan. It was up to Jack to save himself.

  He ruled out his embassy immediately. The United States was officially neutral—and Jack Kennedy, proud possessor of a diplomatic passport, had stolen a German cipher machine. He could not begin to explain the Irregulars, or his private act of war, to Roosevelt’s official envoy, however much he liked Tony Biddle, or yearned for a good glass of Bourbon in the safety of the man’s dining room.

  He would have to take this journey alone.

  “It’s a long flight from Warsaw to London,” he suggested. “Where would a plane touch down, do you think?”

  “Berlin, first,” the Bird Man said. “And your journey would undoubtedly end there. I do not advise flying west.”

  Trains, Jack thought, presented the same problem. The rails led to Germany. Or Austria. Or the Czechoslovak border. All bristling with gray uniforms. “You suggested Budapest this afternoon.”

  “Which is also west,” the Bird Man concluded tranquilly. “But from Buda one might get to Ljubljana. And from there, to Trieste or Venice . . .”

  Jack tried to think. Where the hell was Ljubljana? Croatia? No. Slovenia. He would have to look at a map. But it would not be a hub of air travel, wherever it was. He had a vague idea Trieste was a port. If he could reach it, he might board a ship. Sail the Adriatic. Make a tour of the Mediterranean. Forget that Diana’s butchered body was clacking home, by slow degrees, across all the train lines of Europe.

  He would never forget.

  “There is a night train to Budapest,” Bird Man said. “I have taken this train myself, several times. It departs Central Station a few minutes after nine o’clock. It is now half past five.”

  “That’s a long time to wait.” He could see it all: a lonely table in the station dining room. Himself, choking on the food. Watching as the wolves in uniform gathered and circled. He would never reach his compartment. They would slit his throat and toss his body from the train. Ambassador Kennedy, we regret to inform you that your son, John Fitzgerald . . .

  They would seize the Heydrich-Enigma. All the desperate cipher-breaking work would be lost.

  “You cannot wait so long,” Bird Man agreed. “So I will drive you to Katowice.”

  “Katowice?” Jack repeated, startled.

  “At half past eleven, the Buda train stops at Katowice. The Gestapo will never look for you there, at such an hour. We will take the back roads. It will require some time.”

  The man, Jack saw, was holding out a flask. A gesture of comradeship that reminded him of Gubbins. There was probably a section on “Flasks, Sharing of,” in The Partisan Leader’s Handbook.

  He tossed back a burning slug of vodka. Bird Man had a plan.

  * * *

  KATOWICE WAS THE CENTER of Upper Silesia, an industrialized, nineteenth-century town in a part of the world that, like Danzig, had changed hands too many times to count. Katowice had been Bohemian, Hapsburg, Prussian, and Polish; but many of its inhabitants spoke only German.

  Jack shrugged off his faint edge of panic as he stood on the deserted platform in the central train station. Many people spoke German. It was one of history’s occupational hazards. That did not make them automatic Nazis. But he glanced continually over his shoulder nonetheless, at the two silent men smoking cigarettes in the humid night. One leaned against a lamppost—the platform was flooded with light—and the other paced irritably, his hands in his pockets. Was he holding a gun? The Luger was still in Jack’s pocket. His suitcase and carpetbag rested on the platform, ready to be grasped if he had to run. Only: How to run and fire the Luger at the same time? He didn’t have three hands. He would have to leave the suitcase behind. Bird Man, he thought, would have been useful as a bag carrier; but Bird Man was already on h
is way back to Warsaw.

  He had dropped Jack at the curb fifteen minutes before, after a tortuous night journey through the winding roads of the Silesian Highlands. The Eastern Carpathians were not far distant, and the terrain was rugged. The tin can bucked and snorted up steep grades, threatening to stall and leave them at the mercy of any passing stranger. With a giddy sense of fatalism, Jack expected the car to break down—he ought to be marooned in a Carpathian Hell for the sin of Diana’s death. But in fact, the tin can rolled into Katowice later that night with time to spare.

  He shook Bird Man’s hand with awkward formality, aware that he would never know the man’s name.

  “Listen to me carefully,” Bird Man said. “The train stops again at Bratislava. A man will board there. English. He will enter your compartment. Although it will be the early hours of morning he will make conversation. He will use the word irregular. You are to answer something—it does not matter what—with the word Harvard. Understand?”

  “Bona fides.”

  “Correct. This man will have a brown carpetbag exactly like yours. He will place it on the rack above your head. When you leave the train in Budapest, take his bag. Not the one you carry now. That is clear?”

  Abundantly, Jack thought. The choices presented back in Warsaw had been mere distractions. There had always been a plan—Gubbins’s plan. Baker Street was happy to use Jack as a courier out of Poland, particularly as the colonel himself was hors de combat, but they had no intention of allowing the Heydrich-Enigma to reach an American embassy. Churchill wanted the device in British hands. They would take the prize from him before dawn.

  Jack didn’t mind in the slightest. After Bratislava, the only thing he’d have to save would be his own neck.

  The Budapest train chugged to a halt in front of him. Five carriages, one of them a dining car. He would sit in there, Jack thought suddenly, until the Englishman boarded. There would be comfort in the presence of waiters. Nobody would kill him with a fork in his hand.

  He reached for his bags, trying to disguise the effort it cost him now to lift the heavy Enigma. The men on the platform moved in behind. He waited for one of them to stick a muzzle in his back. But they ignored his existence and he was allowed to board.

  “How long to Bratislava?” he asked the waiter who led him to his table. Nobody was following him. Jack felt light-headed with relief. The waiter looked at him uncomprehendingly; he did not speak English. Jack asked the question again, in his bastard French.

  “Ah. Six hours.” The waiter glanced disapprovingly at Jack’s luggage. It ought to have been left in a compartment. Jack placed it on the seat beside him, instead. “You wish brandy? Cognac?”

  “Black coffee,” he said. He glanced at his watch. The Englishman would appear sometime around five-thirty a.m. He would need to stay awake. He would have to settle his stomach. “Have you got any ice cream?”

  * * *

  WITH POINTED INDIFFERENCE to the waiter’s annoyance, Jack stubbornly held down his table as the night hours passed. He slipped Young Melbourne from his suitcase and reread certain passages. Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron. The Ministry of All the Talents. Perceval’s assassination. Imagine that, he thought. A nutcase shooting down the Prime Minister, in broad daylight.

  When the typeface began to blur before his eyes, he called for more coffee. He badly needed to use the bathroom and he’d have liked to have gotten a DOCA pellet in his leg, but he couldn’t leave the carpetbag unattended or carry it everywhere with him. He would draw too much attention. Patrons drifted in and out of the dining car: a few couples, a few men, never a single woman. Diana, he thought. He could see her sauntering through these midnight cars alone, elegant and unapproachable. She’d have taken a table a few seats away, backlit by the hushed lamps, a cigarette holder in her gloved hand. He missed her acutely in the small hours of morning. The typeface blurred again.

  When a few early risers bound for Bratislava made their way down the aisle, calling for breakfast, Jack put his book away. He had already settled his bill. He gazed out the window through the gray light, seeing branch lines and switches, the detritus of rail yards, the hint of red tile roofs somewhere beyond. Abruptly they entered a tunnel, and the scene went black. In the flick of an eyelid, they emerged again. Bratislava station, lofty overhead, and the train slowing now to a halt.

  He shoved his window upward and leaned out, craning to glance down the platform. At least two dozen people disembarked from the train; dazed-looking women with hats jammed on their sleep-mussed hair, a few children clinging to their skirts; and men, all of them discernibly Mittel European. It was something about the clothes, Jack thought. Not just the quality, but the style and cut. That fellow, for example, in the worn heather tweeds and the soft hat, waiting to board the train, would never be mistaken—

  Would never be mistaken for anything but an Englishman.

  He was an island of calm in the milling crowd of disembarking passengers, content to wait until the platform cleared. He was smoking a pipe and twitching desultorily through a newspaper. Middle-height, middle-aged, as unremarkable a figure as Colin Gubbins. Which to Jack, fairly screamed Irregular.

  The platform gradually cleared. Few passengers were boarding the train for Budapest at such an early hour. Jack watched as the Englishman folded his newspaper, tucked it briskly under his arm, and reached for the brown carpetbag at his feet. In a leisurely fashion, he sauntered over to the train. The conductor mounted the steps ahead of him. Jack caught the sudden expulsion of steam and air from the locomotive; they would be moving in a minute.

  Then a pair of stragglers dashed down the platform and leapt for the train. They—and the Englishman—were lost to view as they pushed their way aboard. Jack withdrew his head from the window to collect his things, when a sudden flash at the edge of his vision drew his gaze around.

  The Englishman was down—curled on the platform in a fetal position, his arms clutched to his abdomen. His face was a rictus of pain. His hat had rolled off. He’d been pulled from the train car’s steps and tossed to the ground. And the train was already moving.

  “Hey!” Jack leaned out the window. “Stop the train!”

  There was something protruding from between the Englishman’s fists—the haft of a knife . . .

  And the carpetbag was gone.

  “Hey!” Jack shouted again. But the slow chug of the engine pulled the cars inexorably forward, the platform was slipping back, the Englishman was staggering to his knees, supporting himself with a single splayed hand, and nobody understood Jack’s English, or the panic that was driving him to grab his bags and thrust his way through the dining car. He was on the verge of running, fear screaming in his ears, but he knew that he must look natural, now; he must not be noticed. The waiter was taking a young girl’s order. She was speaking German. Was he surrounded by enemy agents? Was she glancing at him as he passed, taking mental notes for the use of a killer?

  The dining car was the train’s last—it was backed by a high-railed observation platform where passengers could take the air or smoke. He thrust through the door that led to it and stepped out on the swaying platform. They were still in Bratislava’s rail yard, clacking along at moderate speed, surrounded by branching lines, by signal lights he could not hope to understand, all the usual train traffic of a busy weekday in a largish city; but there was nothing for it—he would have to jump.

  He glanced ahead. A train was coming in the opposite direction, on the line immediately to Jack’s left. He calculated the distance and his own strength; tried to calculate the other train’s speed. Then he shrugged and hurled both his bags off the platform. They fell away behind. He imagined the lawn at Hyannis Port, a game of Touch, his brother Joe tossing a long pass a few yards away. He leapt sideways, body arcing like a diver’s, arms outstretched; and cleared the neighboring track with seconds to spare. He rolled over in a ball, gravel
railbed painful in his back and legs, and felt a whoosh of heat as the incoming train thundered past him.

  It would block his exit from anybody gazing out of the Budapest train.

  With luck, his hunters would still be looking for him. Compartment by compartment, car by car. Carrying the bogus brown carpetbag.

  The brown carpetbag.

  He vaulted to his feet and half ran, half stumbled, back along the tracks to where his luggage lay. Fell to his knees and scrabbled at the buckles. If the Heydrich-Enigma had been damaged in the drop—

  He pulled open the carpetbag and stared inside.

  A heavy wooden case, with a hinged lid. The case had splintered slightly at the corners from impact, but it was still intact. He pried off the top. The Enigma looked like a typewriter. For a long moment, Jack thought it was—thought they’d all been had, from Churchill to Gubbins to Bird Man on down. Then he saw the strange second set of buttons ranged above the typewriter keys and the drums at the back, and realized he would never be able to tell if it was damaged or not. That was a job for an engineer. He shut the lid, and snapped the carpetbag closed.

  A train whistle blasted in the distance. He glanced up, jolted into awareness of his surroundings. Gray light was giving way to the August dawn, and he was hunched like a beggar in the middle of the Bratislava train yard. With another train bearing down on his tracks.

  He stared into the single engine light as it grew larger, a bald and blazing eye, then he rose to his feet and grasped his bags. He began to pick his way across the branching lines, carefully and with great effort. His legs were trembling—from the fall or his sickness or simply because he’d been hunted—and his arms were aching. There was an embankment in the distance, perhaps a football field away. If his luck held, he would reach it.

  FIFTY. CLIFF-DIVING

  “COME ON, TEDDY.” Joe’s shout drifted up from the distant surf below. “Don’t be such a coward!”

  “What if you don’t catch me?” the little boy yelled back. His voice had risen an octave, as if he were close to tears. “What if I hit the rocks?”