Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  Kennan was honking.

  “See you in London,” he told Armstrong, and ran down the stairs.

  * * *

  KENNAN HAD BROUGHT CASES of Pilsner Urquell for the German soldiers working the checkpoint at the Austrian border—the kind of goodwill bribe that Jack would never have thought him capable of making. But it turned out to be useless. The same English-speaking guard who’d held him up for hours the day before ran his eyes over Jack and said simply, “We have received word from Prague Castle.”

  Kennan swallowed, his eyes flicking away from Jack. “Indeed? What kind of word, may I ask?”

  “Reichsprotektor Von Neurath sends his regards, Mr. Kennedy. He wishes that you may return to Bohemia in happier times.” The soldier handed him his diplomatic passport, clicked his heels, and thrust his hand in the air in the Nazi salute. “You may proceed.”

  The light faded as he skirted the hip of Austria and drove toward the Hungarian border; but nobody followed him and he met no resistance as he entered Hungary. It was, for the moment, an entirely sovereign state without the menace of German border guards. He pushed on, and reached the embassy a few minutes after ten o’clock that night. Kennan had wired ahead, so that they were expecting him in the grand old building on the Pest side of the river; a room and a plate of sandwiches was waiting. After he’d finished them, he drew a deep breath. He felt precarious and yet safe. He had nearly died today, but the account book was in his hands.

  So was Diana’s letter.

  My dear Jack,

  As you see, I’ve got the account book. I won’t bother with how. I’m about to take a train from Prague to Warsaw and have excused myself to the Ladies’. You know it’s the only place I’m allowed to go alone.

  I will hand this letter with the account book to the first likely girl who walks through the door—with enough cash to persuade her to leave my envelope at Left Luggage, and bring me back the ticket. Is there so much goodness in this bloody world, do you think?

  Heydrich has a plan for launching the war. He means to take a clutch of condemned criminals, dress them in German uniforms, and truck them across the Polish border. They’re to be shot in the lorries before they arrive, and their corpses strewn about to suggest they’ve been attacked by Polish forces. Hitler will claim the Poles started the war and he had every right to invade. Heydrich calls the plan Operation Canned Goods. He’s immensely pleased with himself.

  He means to tell the prisoners they’ve been freed, of course. Poor bastards. They’re due to die the first of September.

  I know you’re an honourable man, Jack, and will see that the information reaches the right people in England—before September 1st.

  I should like to tell you how dreadful it felt, to walk away from you that day in May, on the Charles Bridge; how bitter and brutal these months have been. I only hope you’ve found it in your heart to forgive your—

  Diana

  * * *

  HE SAT FOR A WHILE, in uncharacteristic stillness, on the edge of the bed that night. She had not escaped the train, and Heydrich had discovered her treachery far more quickly than she’d hoped. Ever the sadist, he’d toyed with Diana. Jack knew that now.

  He means to tell the prisoners they’ve been freed, of course. . . . Had Heydrich told Diana that Jack was in Warsaw? That she could return to her lover, no strings attached?—And then ordered the Spider to slaughter her in his bedroom at the Polonia Palace?

  Heydrich would enjoy the bait-and-switch; her farewell in utter ignorance; the promise of freedom that turned to murder. But even as Diana went off in her summer frock to the unimaginable horror of her death—part of her had known. Poor bastards. They’re due to die. . . . She’d brought that incongruous evening bag, with the Left Luggage ticket hidden inside.

  He refolded her last letter and placed it in his breast pocket, close to his heart. He was increasingly doubtful of the existence of any God; but he hoped it was a vengeful one.

  FIFTY-SEVEN. DIVIDING ALLEGIANCE

  TAP, TAP. TAPTAPTAP TAP.

  The man lying in the iron bed had no idea what had awakened him. It had been so long since Morse code had broken the stillness of the presidential bedroom.

  Tap. Taptap. Tap.

  Jack, he thought, as his eyes flickered open. Jack.

  He forced himself to a seated position and reached for his glasses. It was just after six a.m. on Wednesday, the twenty-third of August; the air was humid and still. Seven years in Washington, and still he could not abide the heat. His mind flew to Maine and the fog off Campobello, the fall that would already be coming into that country, the water temperature of the Atlantic hovering somewhere around forty-eight degrees; and then he reached for the wireless receiver he still kept beneath his bedside table, and set it on his knees.

  He picked up the pad and pencil at his elbow.

  The message would be repeated. He positioned his hand over the paper, and waited.

  * * *

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER His Majesty’s ambassador to the United States stood in the Oval Office. The President would have preferred to have spoken to Neville Chamberlain, but the man was unreachable during his holiday. And Churchill, he thought wistfully, was not even in the Cabinet. Lord Lothian—the British ambassador—was as close as he could get to the reins of British power.

  “You’re sure of this?” Lothian said. “It’s to happen in a week?”

  “So my information says,” Roosevelt replied.

  “You’re certain the man can be trusted?”

  Roosevelt smiled savagely. “The intelligence was obtained directly from a member of Reinhard Heydrich’s inner circle.”

  Lothian’s brows drew together. “May one ask by whom?”

  “One may ask,” Roosevelt agreed genially. “One is unlikely, however, to receive an answer . . . I attempted to reach Mr. Chamberlain earlier, but I was told he was unavailable. Fishing in Scotland. Can that really be true?”

  “It is August,” Lothian said fretfully. “One would think the Führer would be decent enough to respect the conventions.”

  “A man willing to murder several truckloads of convicts in order to launch a war has no interest in the standards of British decency.”

  “Still. A week. The first of September! Parliament won’t even be seated yet!”

  “You could recall your members today,” Roosevelt snapped. “Prepare them.” Good Lord, he thought. No wonder Hitler’s rolled Chamberlain. The man’s useless.

  “In the middle of August?” Lothian snorted. “No, no, Mr. President—the Führer may not understand the sanctity of the Long Vac, but we do things very differently in England. Very differently indeed.”

  “Ah,” Roosevelt said. He studied Lothian speculatively. He was the eleventh marquess of his line; a man about Roosevelt’s age, with a womanish air. Like Chamberlain, he appeared perpetually aggrieved. “I thought you should know.”

  “Obliged to you,” Lothian retorted.

  There was a soft knock at the door and Sam Schwartz stuck his head into the room.

  “Begging your pardon, Mr. President—”

  “What is it, Sam?”

  “A cable from Moscow.”

  Roosevelt took the single sheet of paper and scanned it. Then he glanced at Lothian, who was waiting to take his leave.

  “The Nazis and the Soviets have just announced the signing of a non-aggression pact.”

  Lothian’s face lightened. “Jolly good. At least someone’s renounced war!”

  “Hitler and Stalin,” Roosevelt said. “Allies!”

  It took a moment for this to register with Lothian. “—But Communists and Fascists despise one another.”

  Roosevelt looked at the nobleman in disbelief.

  “They both like Poland,” Sam Schwartz murmured, as if he were reminding Lothian of
a school lesson. “They’ll butcher it between them. One from the east, the other from the west. The country will cease to exist. Have you read Raymond Buell’s Poland—Key to Europe? It lays out the whole thing.”

  Roosevelt met Sam’s eyes over the head of the British ambassador. “And there’s not a damn thing I can do to help. Yet. Thank God your government has pledged to stand by the Poles, Lothian.”

  The ambassador reached for his hat. “Serves the bloody fools right, I say—starting a war in August! I shall urge Chamberlain not to lift a finger!”

  “That’s advice he’s always willing to take,” Roosevelt replied.

  * * *

  HE HAD SENT THE ENCODED MESSAGE from the roof of the American embassy in Budapest at lunchtime, borrowing a commo kit from one of the State department clerks who made a hobby of shortwave radio. He let the guy watch him work the Morse key, in return for the favor.

  “Who’s it going to?” the man asked.

  “Can’t tell you,” Jack said. “Don’t ask what I’m typing, either.”

  “Don’t have to,” the guy replied with amusement. “I know Morse. You’re sending complete gibberish.”

  Jack grinned ruefully and said it didn’t matter—he just wanted to see if a buddy at Harvard could receive his message, and it was a fine summer day up here on the roof, with a great view of the Elizabeth Bridge throwing her arms across the Danube.

  He’d made his choice of allegiances somewhere in a burning hop field. The evil Hans Obst so casually represented was impossible to bargain with. It could only be fought with every weapon he possessed.

  He slept better that night than he had in weeks.

  * * *

  A SENSE OF URGENCY, an awareness of the swift passage of time, propelled Jack across Europe to France, where he dropped his rented car in Paris and took a flight across the channel to England. He reached London on Monday, the twenty-eighth of August, and took a room in a cheap hotel near Victoria Station.

  Early on the morning of the twenty-ninth, he jumped a train rolling south into Hampshire and, after a brief taxi ride from Edenbridge, presented himself at Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s country house. Churchill received him in his bath.

  “You’re the only person I can give this to,” Jack said as he handed him Diana’s letter. “I’m sorry it took me so long to reach you. I couldn’t trust the news to anybody else.” Except, he thought, Roosevelt.

  Churchill pulled the stub of a cigar from his mouth. A bit of ash and a spurt of water trailed across the sheet of paper, instantly blurring the blue ink and Diana’s handwriting. Churchill was round and porcine in his tub. Jack kept his eyes fixed on the wall above his head as the statesman read.

  “Poland?” Churchill grunted. “The first of September? We’ve heard.” He returned the letter to Jack and sank deeper into the hot water. It spilled over the tub’s rim in a gentle cascade and pooled at Jack’s feet. “Your admirable president had some foreknowledge of events—and the sense to heed it. He spoke to our ambassador, and our ambassador sent a thick-headed cable back to Whitehall—which the right people as well as the wrong seem to have read. Parliament has been recalled.”

  “Good,” Jack said.

  Churchill scowled. “That’s from Denys Playfair’s lady, I expect.”

  Jack nodded, suddenly unable to speak.

  “Grand girl, Diana. Top-hole. I assume we owe our measure of preparation—lamentable though it may be—to you both.”

  “You owe it to Diana,” Jack said.

  Churchill growled. “Saw the notice in the Times. ‘Suddenly, in Warsaw.’ Knew what that meant. Hand me the whiskey and soda siphon—there’s a good chap.”

  Jack obliged, leaning awkwardly over the tub.

  Dripping, Churchill mixed two drinks in glasses waiting at his elbow, and offered one to Jack.

  “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” he said solemnly.

  It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. Wilfrid Owen had called it the old lie, and Jack knew in his heart that it was. But he drank to Diana anyway.

  * * *

  “BACK AT LAST,” his father said distractedly when Jack finally put in an appearance at the embassy in Grosvenor Square that afternoon. “All hell’s broken loose. Everybody’s talking war instead of sense. Poor Neville’s had to cut short his holiday. And if ever a man needed one—”

  “So I hear.”

  His father surveyed him irritably. “You look lousy. When’s the last time you cleaned that suit?”

  “Can’t tell you. My other one got . . . damaged.”

  “You seem to have given Kennan what-for, anyway. He’s been howling at Washington for the past week.”

  Jack smiled faintly. “He’s got no love for the Kennedys.”

  “Then the hell with him,” Joe said brusquely. “Did you find that account book?”

  Jack glanced around. At least four members of his father’s staff were darting in and out of the ambassador’s office with pieces of paper, phone messages, the latest rumors from Berlin. None of them seemed to be listening to the second son.

  “Yes,” he said quietly.

  “Give it to me.”

  There was a pause. His father’s eyes were very bright behind his spectacles. His expression offered no quarter.

  “I can’t.”

  “You damn well can, and you damn well will.”

  “I don’t have it anymore.”

  “What?” An unaccustomed panic in J.P.’s voice.

  “I sent it to Washington. In the diplomatic pouch from Budapest. It should hit Roosevelt’s desk in a couple of days.”

  His father surged to his feet, swaying slightly. “Tell me you’re joking. God damn you.”

  “I’m dead serious.” Jack walked deliberately to the door and turned. “You see, Dad—it was Roosevelt who asked me to find your network, months ago. And for maybe the first time in my life—I delivered.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT. A BLACKMAILER’S BARGAIN

  WHEN SAM SCHWARTZ USHERED Ed Hoover into the oval-shaped room on the White House’s second floor that rainy September morning, Roosevelt was busy with his new album—the one for stamps that would soon be obsolete. The State department had sent over some beauties from Poland. Along with the contents of the Budapest diplomatic pouch.

  “Mr. President,” Hoover said.

  Roosevelt glanced at the little man over his spectacles. “Edgar. Good of you to come. Please—make yourself comfortable.”

  Schwartz left them alone.

  Roosevelt concentrated on his tweezers. The delicate edge of the stamp. Patience was required, but also precision; a swift or clumsy hand destroyed the effort. He found that Jack Kennedy’s young face was hovering just beyond the range of his vision. The gift in the Budapest pouch, and the raw emotion in the letter that accompanied it, had taken Roosevelt’s breath away.

  Hoover’s high-pitched voice broke through his thoughts. “I have some information for you. About Hans Thomsen.”

  “The German chargé?” Roosevelt released the edge of the stamp. Perfect. “You’re going to tell me he plans to pay off the entire Pennsylvania delegation to next summer’s Democratic convention. Or is that William Rhodes Davis? No matter. The real point is the Philadelphia delegation. I suspect we can persuade them to take the German money, by all means—but vote their consciences. Which by next summer, will be mine to command.”

  Hoover was frowning at him. Roosevelt could discern the rapid movement of the FBI director’s mind: from surprise to disbelief to calculation. He had already figured out that the President had more than one source of information. He would move immediately to pinpointing it. Hoover did not tolerate rivals.

  “But I didn’t summon you here to discuss the Germans,” Roosevelt continued, pushing his wheelchair away from his stamp table. �
�I’ve found a curious thing in my Pullman, Edgar—or rather, Sam Schwartz and his people have. It seems I’ve been bugged.”

  “Is that so, Mr. President?” Hoover hunched slightly, his neck disappearing into his collar. He stared out from the carapace of his clothing like a turtle from its shell. “I’d like to send my boys over to look at it. Just to verify that Schwartz knows what he’s talking about. Where did he find the thing, and why does he consider it a . . . bug?”

  “In my portable telephone. And it’s a wiretap of some kind. But you needn’t verify it, Edgar. I know what your boys will say. Vincent Foscarello has explained that already.”

  The wheelchair rolled to a stop barely two feet from Hoover. Roosevelt’s knees were splayed directly opposite his guest’s. An enforced intimacy. An invasion of space. “We had to ask ourselves, you see,” Roosevelt continued, “who had access to the phone. No foreign government that we could think of. No obvious Bureau man, helpfully appearing on every train platform. So Schwartz and I were forced to accept that the device was installed—and maintained—by one of us. Someone we trusted. A friend.”

  Hoover pressed backward into his chair. His ruddy complexion had drained to chalk, but he was grinning still, like a death mask.

  “It’s terrible, that kind of knowledge,” Roosevelt said thoughtfully. “It eats away at trust and reason. One suspects every face. Schwartz, for instance. I actually took it upon me to suspect Schwartz. I suspected each and every friend, from Morgenthau to Hopkins to Berle. I suspected Miss LeHand. And my own wife. God forgive me, I even suspected my son.” He kept his gaze on Hoover. “I know, you see, how much Jimmy likes and needs money.”

  The Bureau chief’s eyes glistened a little.

  “But then Sam sat back and considered his own people. The ones who shadow me, day in and day out. He told me you’d attempted to buy them, Edgar. Sam’s a good leader of men. He makes a point of understanding the ones who work for him. Their troubles. Their passions. Their . . . vulnerabilities.”