Traitor's Gate

by Charlie Newton

  CHAPTER 15

  October, 1938

  Eddie patted at his head for the spike that had to be in it. No spike. His eyes semifocused through the throb and blur—empty metal beds, white tile, blade fan rotating slowly overhead. Infirmary?

  “He’ll live, has a concussion.”

  Eddie refocused on the voice, then two shapes beyond the soles of his boots at the foot of the bed. MI6 Lieutenant Cornell Hornsby and a uniformed British officer. Eddie blinked. The officer was . . . Captain Orde Wingate? Eddie flashed on diagrams. Death-camp patents. The envelope. He gushed: “Brits have to stop the Nazis. Have to. Quit wasting time here; fly every Spitfire you’ve got to Berlin, and—”

  “Your orders”—the Captain Orde Wingate lookalike spit each word—“from the Palestine police were to detain Dinah Rosen where she stood at the Arab Market, where neither of you should have been.”

  Eddie’s head hammered. The explosion at the synagogue. Dinah Rosen’s body. Next to him. Then hands, searching his clothes . . . Eddie squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Mr. Owen!”

  Definitely Captain Wingate. Wingate had been in Iran six months ago.

  “Mr. Owen!”

  Eddie opened his eyes.

  “Your orders were—”

  “My orders?” Eddie lifted his left hand to point at his chest but couldn’t. His wrist was handcuffed to the bed rail. “Did I join the redcoats?”

  “You are in a Crown colony,” said Wingate, “the guest of H. MacMichael, high commissioner for Palestine. While here, you are subject to British colonial-mandate law in its totality; this was explained in Iran. You can, and will, be shot as a spy if I decide a spy is what you are.”

  “Spy?” Eddie looked to Lieutenant Hornsby, hoping for a sanity moment. Hornsby was MI6; he knew Eddie was no spy. Hornsby stared bullets. Eddie cut to Wingate. “Fuck you, Captain. I’m an American. I didn’t do anything. Took a walk with a Jewish girl that ended up at a synagogue. It was your goddamn job to protect her. Remember? You’re the big deal masters of British Mandate Palestine.”

  Hornsby said, “A bomb was planted, either by the Arabs or their Nazi benefactors. You were there; you alone survived.”

  “You don’t believe I planted the bomb. What’s this really about?”

  Captain Wingate turned his squarish head to Hornsby. New scars crisscrossed Wingate’s right cheek, extending to a now wilted ear. Wingate told Hornsby, “Mr. Owen wishes to emigrate to Tenerife, to assist General Franco’s Fascists with their refinery modifications.”

  Hornsby nodded, his mouth hardening at new “evidence.”

  Wingate returned to Eddie and continued. “Mr. Owen continues to associate with rabble who incite against the Crown. The Palestine police have documented trips through the Arab Market, questions Mr. Owen attempts to ask after ‘Calah al-Habra,’ a teacher he knows is no such teacher. Did you have a look under your teacher’s right eye? She had the wings.”

  Eddie’s headache hid his surprise. He’d never heard a British soldier, or anyone else, mention Calah’s tattoo, the sect she must belong to.

  Wingate read Eddie’s face for the answer, then spoke to Hornsby. “Have this spy-collaborator escorted to the brig. Show him the wall where we executed his fellow travelers. The charges will be along shortly.” Captain Wingate heel-turned and marched out down the aisle separating the beds.

  Eddie shouted at Wingate’s back: “I bombed the synagogue? That’s the best you can do? March your goddamn Marines to Berlin! That’s where the fight is!” The yell drove the spike back through Eddie’s head.

  Hornsby slapped the bed rail. “Button it up. Be pleasant marching to the brig and you might not be shot during the exercise.” Hornsby bowed his neck and added, “At best you are an American oil company pawn on loan to the Crown today, eating schnitzel tomorrow. At worst, you are a spy-collaborator.”

  “Spy? Me? If walking a Jewish girl to a synagogue is a crime on your watch, you and Hitler will get along fine.”

  “Your job, Mr. Owen, does not include—”

  “I am doing my job. Try doing yours . . . instead of pounding on these people in their own goddamn country. You’re MI6: Have you looked at the Nazis? I mean really looked?”

  Hornsby made his expression professionally unreadable. Eddie inhaled to scream “extermination camps” but the pounding in his head stopped him. Something here was out of sync. MI6 should know . . . if the extermination camps were true. MI6 would have to know, wouldn’t they? They really were spies. Maybe MI6 did know and didn’t care? Was MI6 part of the England who wanted to side with Germany?

  Hornsby stayed blank.

  “Fuck you, then. And your captain and the horses you two brave bastards rode in on.”

  Hornsby uncuffed Eddie’s hand. “On your feet.”

  Eddie semistruggled to sitting, his clothes scorched from the explosion, then hesitated. Tom Mendelssohn’s envelope wasn’t gouging into his back. Wingate and Hornsby hadn’t mentioned the envelope, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t taken it. Eddie started to ask—The wall, Eddie, where they execute spies. Spies deal in secret envelopes. Do not be a spy in British Mandate Palestine.

  The walk out of the infirmary went past the execution wall, one of four walls enclosing a twenty-by-twenty courtyard. Set out three feet from the wall was a post with metal cuffs. Bullet holes pocked the plaster behind the post. Eddie had the odd thought: How could anyone miss from seventeen feet? Did the firing squad play with the condemned? Like cats in the market did with the mice they ate?

  The brig was jail, but British, and hence lacked the noise and commotion associated with most jails. This jail was also empty, testimony to how serious the Royal Marines it was built to house took their mission. The silence left Eddie alone with the four-story ovens, railcar sidings, and conveyer belts. The plans were signed, for God’s sake. How do you tell that story without the envelope? Who’d believe it? And if MI6 didn’t have the envelope, who did? Eddie leaned back on the hard bunk. Man, D.J.’s gonna be pissed.

  Eddie’s first and only contact with the outside world arrived in the afternoon, an American, an angry one with a south Texas cowboy accent. The guard opened the cell door and allowed in D.J. Bennett. When the guard was gone, D.J. said, “Stupid don’t begin to explain your actions, Edward.”

  “You sent me, for chrissake—”

  D.J. patted the air to cut Eddie’s volume.

  Eddie’s jaw clenched. He lowered his voice. “I took a walk, pure and simple, like you fucking wanted. From here to there.” Eddie spread his index finger and thumb. “Talked to her about being a Jewish girl, and this hellhole blew her up.”

  D.J.’s lips remained flat under the horseshoe mustache. “What’d she say exactly?”

  “Say? The fucking maniacs blew her in half. She was a teacher for crying out loud. And a nice one, too. Like your fucking sister or girlfriend. I knew her an hour, maybe two. And this lice-lousy fucking country blew her up.” Tears rolled off Eddie’s cheek and he didn’t know why and that pissed him off as well. “That fucking captain comes in here alone, running his mouth about me being a ‘spy-collaborator,’ it’ll be his last fucking time.”

  D.J. stood and stepped back, staring like he was having trouble seeing in murky light. “You all right, Eddie? Saddling that white horse ain’t too hard; it’s ridin’ her that gets a bit lonely.”

  Eddie wiped his face and shrugged, not quite ready to explain. “Guess two years in the sand wears on a fellow. Hate sandwich for every goddamn meal.”

  “Haifa’s not the only spot on the planet where folks ain’t getting along.”

  “Only one I’m in.”

  D.J. nodded toward the jail’s main door at the end of the cell line. “Orde Wingate’s no piker. He’s running an outfit here called the ‘Special Night Squads.’ Half British, half Haganah. Goes out after dark, pulls Arabs from their houses, and executes ’em. Brits donned this suit a’ clothes once before, back in Jerusalem in ’29. Started a full-on revolt
, same as the one they got now.”

  “Wingate does what?”

  “He and his believe themselves antiguerrilla fighters and maybe they are. But for fuckin’ sure they’re no better and no righter than the boys they’re hunting.”

  Eddie looked away. There were no good guys here, only ovens and gas chambers and railcar sidings and pieces of Dinah Rosen on the sidewalk. Eddie wiped at his cheeks and inhaled to recount the horror diagrams he’d seen, horror that no longer had any proof.

  D.J. interrupted. “How ’bout I get you out of here? We go see a friend of yours in from Bahrain.”

  “Who?”

  “Hassim, his own self. New assistant to the foreman’s assistant here; he’s gonna help calm the Arabs.”

  “Bahrain’s finished?”

  D.J. nodded. “All fixed. Your section’s in the third round of retests; ol’ Bill was saying good things about you, same as the RAF pilots.”

  Eddie checked the brig bars behind D.J. “You can get me out of here? Wingate says I’m a collaborator, a spy. Showed me the goddamn post where he intends to shoot me.”

  D.J. shrugged. “Are you gonna calm down, tell me what the schoolteacher said?”

  Eddie frowned. “Somehow my bodyguard has the horses to override the lord high commissioner of Palestine and a captain of the British empire?”

  “Funny how I can do that, ain’t it?” Cowboy lean, adding nonchalant. “Lieutenant Hornsby and I can speak the same language . . . when it suits us.”

  Eddie liked that and didn’t.

  D.J. said, “It’ll help if you explain your Bedouin girl, this Calah al-Habra you forgot to mention to me.”

  Eddie balked. “Why?”

  D.J. waited. “Because I asked.”

  “You saw her. She was in the airport in Arabia. I sat next to her on the plane. We talked; I helped her in Iran and Wingate didn’t like it.”

  “It’s more than ‘didn’t like it,’ Eddie. Lieutenant Hornsby was surprised as I was that I didn’t know about her.” D.J. added concern to his creased face. “Your Bedouin friend ain’t who she said she was.”

  “So? Who do you know who tells the truth over here?”

  D.J. hardened his frown. “Your girl was in Arabia but not there with who she said she was. And not there legally. That’s a serious set of circumstances, Eddie. Only a special kinda woman can bounce around this part of the world AKA.”

  Eddie shrugged.

  “Your girl’s a musketeer, same as Dinah Rosen and that Nazi blonde sitting next to us back in Chicago.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I don’t?” D.J. paused. “Remember us discussing that the Nazi on your plane from Arabia had a serious interest in aviation? There ain’t no aviation in Arabia, but Erich Schroeder’s there three days after our aviation gas refinery explodes next door. Not too hard to imagine your Bedouin girl and the Nazi were debriefing after she’d blown Sitra-Bahrain for him.”

  Eddie’s eyes rolled to their limits. “Every bit of that could be coincidence or bad facts or just plain bullshit. There isn’t anyone over here who tells the truth about anything. Ever.”

  D.J. nodded. “That’s a fact, son. Tell me what the schoolteacher said, what else you saw, then get some sleep. We’ll cover your Bedouin girlfriend again in the morning. And don’t hit that fucking captain if he comes back. He’ll kill you. We’ll give MI6 your Bedouin’s particulars and I’ll take care of this if you don’t make it any worse.”

  Eddie’s jaw dropped. “I’m not giving these assholes anyone’s particulars. You just told me the Brits are killing Arabs in their houses. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s war, son, and you better get used to short life and fast death; gonna be a bunch of both.”

  “Trading Calah to MI6 is the only way you can get me out of here?”

  D.J. read Eddie. “Spy-collaborator carries a death sentence; you do understand that?”

  Eddie mugged. “The Brits won’t kill me.”

  “Yeah they will . . . if they think you’re arming the enemy.” D.J. curled the fingers of his good hand. “Talk, son. I don’t have the whole day to salvage your ass.”

  Eddie looked at both sides of his cell. “No. If they want a coward, the bastards can look in their own barracks.”

  D.J. frowned until his lips peeled and teeth showed. “Bowing your back, are ya boy?”

  Slowly D.J.’s frown quit and a smile crept across under the mustache. “Guess we’ll see if I can sell an accommodation—MI6 lets you out to me; we take a day or two by the beach before you leave; I get your white horse–ridin’ noble ass to give me your Bedouin’s particulars.” D.J. flashed both his hands. “I know you won’t, I know. We’ll cover the price for that later—and there will be a price.”

  Eddie’s jaw unclenched. “I hate this goddamn place.”

  D.J. replaced the smile with sarcasm. “Is it okay to ask what Dinah Rosen told you?”

  Eddie walked past D.J. to the bars, checked for the guard, then pointed D.J. to the back wall. At the wall, Eddie whispered, “Dinah wanted the USA’s help against the British. Said her people, the Jews, were being used to destabilize the Middle East, human bombs designed to die and drive the Arabs—and their oil—into England’s pockets.”

  D.J. squinted. “That ain’t news, Eddie; everybody’s playing everybody right now. She’s supposed to have something ‘life or death’ for us. What?”

  “Not her. A guy named Tom Mendelssohn, an American. He smuggles Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. He, he . . . It’s bad, D.J., bad like you can’t believe. Remember when you said ‘Erase’? Out front of the Biograph Theater in Chicago? How’d you know?” Eddie didn’t let D.J. answer. “I’ve seen the plans—full construction blueprints, schematics, build budgets, operational budgets, quotas—the whole nightmare.”

  This time it was D.J. who balked. “You saw actual plans?”

  “Government stamped. Signed by architects and engineers. A company named ‘Topf and Sons’ had trademarks on four-story ovens. Trademarks. And, and I.G. Farben, Standard Oil’s goddamn partner, is—”

  “I know about Farben, Standard Oil, and Ford Motor Company—”

  “Do you know it’s I.G. Farben that’s building the extermination camps?”

  D.J.’s eyes widened. “No. I didn’t. You’re sure, dead sure?”

  “Farben’s name is all over the plans and papers I saw.” Eddie detailed the envelope and papers Mendelssohn had given him and watched D.J.’s face fall when Eddie explained he no longer had the envelope.

  D.J. said, “Why you? Why give the papers to you?”

  Eddie explained Tom Mendelssohn’s blackmail plan to smuggle Jews via Tenerife with Standard Oil’s help. “Mendelssohn thinks I’m too valuable to kill as the messenger and for a year I’ll be in the Canary Islands when his Jews pass through . . . like that might reduce the chance his people don’t transit the islands alive.”

  “The out islands, maybe. Nobody’d be safe on Tenerife with no transit papers and ‘Jew-Communist’ in his or her history. Was Mendelssohn gonna transit the Jews here, to Palestine?”

  “Don’t know. He said I’d be contacted on Tenerife. I figured to find you and you’d know what to do . . . but I never made it that far.”

  D.J. frowned. “Awful lot of explosives to kill a schoolteacher and her boyfriend . . . when bullets would do. High-power explosives that are hard to come by. I could’ve leveled that building with one-tenth. Something was in there that someone did not want to see loose out in the daylight.” D.J. considered Eddie. “Tends to make me believe what you saw was the real McCoy.”

  “Mendelssohn said he’d made contact with the ‘targets’ of his blackmail plan and since then people had tried to kill him twice—he implied it was Standard Oil but didn’t name them. Mendelssohn said he couldn’t risk running the blackmail from Palestine or it might compromise his entire ‘network.’”

  D.J. nodded. “That explains the explosives. Somehow someone, m
aybe folks from Standard Oil, knew those papers were there; Mendelssohn and Rosen were just a bonus.”

  Eddie swallowed.

  “Either someone took that envelope off you in the rubble or the Brits have it. If the wrong Brits have it, they’ll bury the proof to protect the oil companies and their partnerships. If the right Brits have the envelope, they’ll use it on Standard Oil for Britain’s own purposes . . . which would be oil and AvGas. Neither bunch, good nor bad, will use it for this eon’s Exodus.”

  “The plans are a ‘how to’ that will murder eleven million people. Even these assholes couldn’t stomach that.”

  “War, Eddie. A million Jews and a million dollars is a lot today, but when what’s coming is over, it won’t be. Every country, including ours, will be protectin’ its own. Won’t be much budget for gallantry.”

  Eddie inhaled to argue, but D.J. waved him off, pointing to the sound of boots in the aisle outside the cell’s door. D.J. patted Eddie’s shoulder. “Careful, son. I know you’re hurtin’. But spilled secrets kill people out here. They surely do.”

  “Get me out. I ain’t letting this lay.”

  D.J. tapped his claw fingers to his lips and mustache. “For now.”

  A guard arrived, told D.J. his time was up, let D.J. out, and locked the cell door behind him. Eddie paced until the headache and pain faded the anger. The air was better by the small window. The execution post was below. How many people had died on that post? How many posts? All sides would have posts. Who was Eddie Owen to think he could stop entire armies—he couldn’t save one farm or one Jewish girl. Who the hell was Eddie Owen when D.J.’s dominoes began to fall?

  Eddie dropped to his metal bunk, head pounding in his hands. He rolled to the wall, his last thought a collage:

  Dinah Rosen’s dress, Topf and Son’s patented ovens, the ashes they spewed covering the farm in Oklahoma. And the eyes of a mysterious Arab princess-teacher-who-wasn’t.

  All of it on fire.

  CHAPTER 16

  October, 1938

  Erich Schroeder fought the urge to shoot Saba Hassouneh. Uncontrolled anger was not his trademark, but there was a point where even he could succumb. With great care and focus, Schroeder inhaled the seaside air of Beirut, then flattened both hands near his small cup of thick local coffee. Three weeks ago his brilliant strategy for dominion in the desert had been maimed and nearly destroyed by Saba’s assassination of the district commissioner in Janîn. The agreed plan had been to kidnap the district commissioner, then drag out the high-profile ransom. This would focus British resources away from the refinery while it was sabotaged, then Saba Hassouneh could kill the commissioner, capping a hugely powerful series of Arab victories.