Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  “Orkney is their turf, that makes sense.”

  “But it looks like the British aren’t pressing too hard. They’re writing it off as a criminal case and even at that, there’s a lot of questions it seems they’re not asking.”

  Van Damm scowled. “I know a lot of people over at Brit MI. A lot of them taught me my stuff. They’re usually a pretty thorough crowd.”

  “Do you know who Sir John Duff is?”

  Van Damm thought for a few seconds, then made an odd groaning noise signifying the name was indefinably familiar.

  “He’s a big businessman over here,” Harry said. “A lot of defense contracts, very big with the local horsy set.”

  “Gee, I can’t believe I haven’t bumped into this guy in my circles. I should have him over for tea.”

  “They found Grassi near a place Duff owns in Orkney.”

  “You think because this Duff is like some Great Oz or something, maybe they’re backing off?”

  “I don’t know what to think. But I’d like to know why.”

  “So you’d want me to ask my MI pals what’s the skinny on this guy?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you were a bit less direct than that.” “Gotcha. Be discreet. Cards close to the vest. All that crap.”

  “All that crap,” Harry agreed.

  Van Damm nodded. “No biggie. I can do that. But you want something else,” he educed.

  “This CIC guy and I talked to Duff. That’s where we picked up that the British authorities were soft-shoeing. Duff has some houseguests, four that we saw. They say that they’re Swedes, that they’re from some steel companies Duff dealt with before the war. They say they’re just visiting for the holidays.”

  Van Damm’s expression was that of a man told the most incredulous story, something on the scale of Moon men or lost Inca treasure. “All this way to share some eggnog and Christmas cheer?”

  “They say they’re good friends.”

  “If Jesus had had friends like that he would’ve lived to be a ripe old man. Needless to say, you figure something stinks about these Swedish pals of the Great Oz. You figure it’s connected to what happened to Grassi?”

  “One of these Swedes seems awfully interested in how the investigation is going.”

  “And when I get caught stepping on the toes of my British colleagues, thereby causing disharmony between allies, what is it I’m supposed to use as an excuse when I get called out on the carpet?”

  “No excuse, Colonel. An American officer dies near a top British military installation, and a big British military contractor has got foreigners poking their noses into it. Now that screams security crisis, and yet the Brits don’t seem to want to do much about it.”

  “It doesn’t scream, Voss. But it is a voice raised in concern.”

  “Just find out if Duff’s houseguests are who they say they are. One of them gives the name Erik Sommer. The rest…” Harry shrugged.

  Van Damm puffed steadily on his cigar. Then he took it from his mouth and spat tobacco juice onto the ground. “I don’t know about finding out who they are, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out who they aren’t. That much I can probably do without drawing attention.”

  Harry stood and held out his hand. Van Damm rose and shook it.

  “I’m going to be out of town for a few days,” Harry told him. “I’ll come back to you then and see what you’ve got.”

  “If I come up with something hot, is there any way to get in touch with you?”

  “I doubt it. We’ve got to talk to somebody who’s off in Italy.”

  Van Damm’s lips pursed. “Where in Italy?”

  “Somewhere up on the front line. Listen, Colonel — if you don’t hear from me in a few days, you might want to save yourself possible headaches and just let this drop.”

  “I’ll hear from you, Voss. Just keep your head down over there.”

  Harry smiled a thanks and started walking away “Hey, Voss! How long are you going to be in Italy?”

  “Like I said, I’m guessing a few days.”

  Van Damm seemed to mull something over, then he nodded resignedly “Don’t dawdle.”

  *

  He was an intimidating figure, a wall of a man looming over my desk as I entered the newsroom that Monday morning. Though he was dressed in mufti, I knew only a veteran flyer would be in possession of such a well-worn leather flight jacket. He seemed amused at my reaction to his appearance. I guessed he was used to instilling such trepidation.

  “Mr. Owen? I’m Jim Doheeny.” He extended one of his enormous paws. “Harry Voss sent me.”

  “Ach, well, then,” I said, marveling at how my hand seemed lost in his, “Mr. Doheeny, won’t you sit? I’m supposed to meet with Harry this —”

  Doheeny wasn’t paying attention. He looked uncomfortably round the maze of desks and tables; the ebb and flow of my chatting colleagues, copyboys and their whiffling cargoes of paper, the jangle of phones, clatter of the telewire.

  “Is this something private?” I ventured.

  “Harry didn’t say But that was my sense.”

  I nodded for him to follow me. As we passed through the newsroom I saw Himself through the door of his office, peering up over his glasses in my direction, curious at this ursine thing trundling behind me. I smiled at him to let him know I was in no danger, then led Doheeny out to the tea room down the corridor, a small chamber where the serfs could rest weary eyes and wash down aspirin with tea from the pot always simmering on an electric stand in the comer. At present, the room was empty. I closed the door behind us, beckoned Doheeny to a seat, offered him tea, which he declined.

  “Harry’s gone,” he said bluntly. “He sent me to tell you that.”

  “Gone?”

  Doheeny handed me an envelope. Scrawled across the front in block letters was simply EDDIE. By the handwriting I guessed that the note had been written in great haste:

  E —

  after Coster.

  if not back cpl days let it drop.

  Thnx for evthing.

  u HAVE been a friend.

  — H

  I carefully folded the small square of paper. “When did he give this to you?”

  “I got a call in the middle of the night to meet him at an airfield down in Sussex. I got there just before him and these other two guys —”

  “Was Kneece one of them?”

  “They were just climbing aboard. They were on a C-87 — that’s a long-range cargo plane. Is Harry going to Italy?”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “They took off on a southern heading, which could mean North Africa. But I heard a lot of traffic has been going through that field lately heading for Italy And there’s this.” He took another envelope from his jacket pocket. “He told me if I didn’t hear from him by the end of the week to mail this.”

  He let me hold the envelope for a second. It was addressed in full to Cynthia Voss.

  “If I have to, I won’t mail that,” Doheeny said. “I’ll bring it to her. I think that’s, well…” He shrugged. “Why’s he going there, Mr. Owen? I mean, I know you can’t tell me about what he’s working on even if you know. If I was supposed to know, I figure he would’ve told me by now. But why him? He doesn’t belong out there.”

  “None of them do,” I replied.

  PART THREE

  TEETH OF THE THEBAN DRAGON

  Chapter Eight: Charybdis

  u HAVE been a friend.

  I’d lent a sympathetic ear. I’d gotten him to Sir Johnnie. I’d done nothing.

  But now, having been given the rank, I felt obligated to earn it.

  *

  “Daniel, you spry young thing, hop to it, laddie! Earn your keep!”

  One of the paper’s recurring bon mots was that they must have built the building up round Daniel Brooks. Only that could account for both Brooks’s decrepitude and his uncanny ability to locate any file, photo proof, clipping, and back-filed notebook amongst the rows and rows of stored mate
rial in the paper’s library/morgue. If you were wanting something obscure or obtuse, you prodded plump little Daniel from his torpid half-sleep and set him off on the hunt.

  “Daniel! Danny-boy!”

  He roused himself from his desk, his round form even more spherical inside its two sweaters.

  “Who’s that, then?” he said and pushed his glasses closer to his eyes. “Ah, Mr. O making all this noise, eh?” He moved with arthritic stiffness to the counter as I pushed the Sir John Duff folder across to him. “‘Danny-boy,’ eh? Afraid you were going to start singing, I was. What is it I can do for you, Mr. O?”

  “A return and a withdrawal, Danny. Here’s the return. Before you go lightning off, what I’m after is a picture that’s not in here.”

  He squinted at me through his thick lenses. “Not in there, eh? If it’s not in there, Mr. O, how do you know there’s a picture?”

  “I know that when the photo fiends descend on their prey they snap more than these few in the folder.”

  Daniel nodded. “If he’s a freelance, he’ll have all his proofs to himself, tucked home safe they’ll be. But if he’s staff… Let me check.”

  “Don’t go nodding off back there, Danny,” I called as he waddled off into the stacks. He may have appeared an old and doddering codger, but in his work he was as true as a magnetic torpedo. In seven minutes he was back with several manila envelopes of proofs from different occasions all featuring — as the marking on the envelope labels indicated — Johnnie Duff.

  But after twenty minutes of sifting through the various envelope contents, even old Daniel’s watery eyes could see the frustration on my face.

  “No joy then, eh, Mr. O? Are you sure there’s a picture to find?”

  “I was hoping.”

  “Ah, the wishful thought. It taunts us, eh?”

  “That’s most philosophical of you, Danny.”

  “The end product of spending one’s hours with history. It occurs to me there’s another possibility… You asked for Sir John’s file, and all those photo packets are for Sir John. It’s possible that the picture you’re looking for wasn’t an assignment concerning Sir John.”

  “I am intrigued, Daniel. Go on.”

  “What I mean to say is if the assignment was for some other subject, some other person, or for an event at which Sir John was in attendance, well, the material would’ve been filed by the assignment sheet.”

  “Danny, if something ever happened to you this paper would be doomed. Let me see what you have on Mr. Joseph P Kennedy.”

  *

  Daphne St. Claire had survived three marriages — one by widowhood, two by divorce — benefiting substantially each time. Her greatest acquired asset was the surname “St. Claire.” Daphne St. Claire made for a far better byline on our paper’s social column than her maiden Daphne Ruggle.

  We sat by the tall, arched window of a Mayfair restaurant whose finery was far beyond both my taste and means. But Daphne would not be denied, and she seemed to quite enjoy the idea of eating me through a week’s pay in an hour.

  Although in her fifties, she remained a strikingly handsome woman, with a deft sense of style, her only foible being a tendency to overapply her makeup. She was, at this moment, wearing one of those odd women’s hats, a wee impractical thing sporting a spotted veil that I presumed to be another attempt to shave a year or two off her appearance. She was also equipped with a dangerously long cigarette holder to which she was currently fitting a Gauloise, an affectation designed to give her a flavor of the exotic. The story went that she had a closet full of Gauloise packets hoarded in her flat, spirited out of France before Dunkirk and trotted out only for certain occasions in the hopes her cache would outlast the war.

  “Oh, yes, that was a lovely evening,” she was saying as I leaned over to light her cigarette. “Made all the more special by your intrusion.”

  “I didn’t intrude, Daphne. I was your guest.”

  “You were a fraud, Eddie. You asked that I take you as my escort, and the next thing I know —”

  “I apologized then, Daphne, I apologize now.”

  “I wasn’t invited to another ambassadorial function until Mr. Kennedy was replaced.”

  “Daphne, I don’t know how many times I can apologize.”

  “You may apologize, Eddie, but you hardly look apologetic. If you had warned me beforehand that you were going to take advantage of my largesse —”

  “It was a spontaneous impulse. Once Sir Johnnie made that bloody silly toast, how could I sit silent?”

  “Like this, dear boy.” She sat bolt upright and pinched her lips tightly closed. “See how easy it is? I’d always been under the impression you Scotsmen were a flinty, tight-lipped sort.”

  “A flaw in my character. Me mater was a gabby Englishwoman.”

  “Tosh. Englishwomen are not gabby. They’re conversational.” Her small smile hinted that her feelings were not completely venomous, but she was Daphne St. Claire and there was a protocol to be followed. “I intend for this to cost you dearly, Eddie: retribution. I’ll be ordering the priciest thing on the menu, darling, and I shan’t eat a bite of it. Not a nibble. Ah, here’s the waiter! First, I’ll have another of these divine champagne cocktails, my compliments to the wine steward, by the way. Considering the war and all that, you have an excellent cellar. And let me start with the prawns.” “Prawns?” I didn’t have to look at the carte to gulp at the cost.

  “Then we’ll see afterward. Off you go.” After the waiter left, she exhaled a jet of eye-watering Gauloise smoke in my direction. “This may even cost you another meal, Eddie. Perhaps tickets to the theatre.”

  “Good God, Daphne, I —”

  “Oh, am I so hideous, Eddie? It would be so unbearable to spend the evening in my company?”

  Daphne St. Claire was possibly the only middle-aged woman I knew who could still carry off the air of a young coquette. “Daphne, you could never be considered even mildly repugnant.”

  “That hardly has the poetry of some of your columns, but you are a dear. Now, what is it you want, naughty boy?”

  “Daphne, everybody at the paper knows you’re practically a living Burke’s Peerage: Sir John Duff.”

  “First you insult the man at his little soiree for Ambassador Kennedy, now this. You are beginning to seem positively obsessive about the gentleman. Any particular reason?”

  “I just go for a man with a title.”

  She made a face at my not sharing. “You are a dirty bird, aren’t you? All right, then — Sir John. Where to begin?”

  “Start with the general portrait. I know he rubs elbows with his ruling-class brethren. If I turned to his entry in Daphne’s Peerage —”

  She laughed at that. “Well, for starters, he’s not really of the blood, dearie, not a true baronet at all in the historical sense. Not to the manor born, as the saying goes. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he’s so well integrated into the club. I mean, Windsor, for God’s sake! None of that looking-down-the-nose at Sir John.”

  “That’s the respect a pile of loot can buy you.”

  “Oh, dearie, you think that lot gives a tinker’s damn about money? It impresses them, but they’d have more respect for a pedigreed earl without a copper in his pocket than someone who actually earned his money! Sir John has done a fine job of polishing the silver, if you get my meaning.”

  “I don’t get your meaning.”

  “You’ve met him, yes? A charming, personable fellow, knows which fork to use, a credit to the class.”

  “So how did he gain entry to the club? Was his title one of those trinkets the Crown gives away on the King’s birthday?”

  “Truth be told, Sir John was actually suggested for one but he turned it down. Politely, mind you, but those titles are not ancestral; they do not pass to the heirs. And that was what he wanted: something for his family they would still have after he was gone.”

  “He bought his title?”

  “One of the less savory aspec
ts of our monarchy The original baronet was one of those wastrel inheritors not unlike my second husband. Remember him?”

  “Albert?”

  “Allan. Mind, he wasn’t round long, I’m not surprised you’ve forgotten.”

  “Large front teeth?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Like a rabbit —”

  She gave me a cross stare and I let it go. The waiter returned with her second cocktail and the prawns. “I can’t wait to watch them shrivel and rot,” she said. “Will that pang poor Eddie’s pocket?”

  “Deeply.”

  “Good. Now, where was I?”

  “The original baronet.”

  “Oh, yes, one of those silly fools who frivols the family fortune away on gambling or women or drink or some other indulgence. I believe in this particular case, it was a bit of everything on the buffet.”

  “So John Duff acquired the title, the lands —”

  “The whole blue-blood birthright. It was some time ago, long enough that few remember, but it was one of the first pieces I wrote, sort of an introduction of the new baronet to the world.”

  “A first-class piece of journalism I’m sure it was.”

  She blew another puff of smoke at me to let me know what she thought of my opinion. “John Duff loved his sons, dearie. Positively doted on those two boys. Very working-class in that respect, betrayed his roots there. None of that 41 say, Junior, good show on the cricket field, well done, now off with you.’ Adored the whole lot, mother and children. Married her when he was still nearly a boy, you know, childhood sweets and all that. Miriam her name was, if I recall properly. Never a whisper of scandal about either of them. For his part, he was devoted to her like a priest to a church. It was absolutely brutal on him when he lost them.”

  I idly reached for one of her prawns and she rapped my knuckles with her cigarette holder. “Order your own,” she said.

  “I can’t afford to. Duff’s boys, he lost them in the war, didn’t he?”

  “Sir John didn’t want them to serve. What with all his contacts in Whitehall, all his factories making this and that for the Royal Army, the Royal Navy, it would not have been all that difficult to gain them some sort of exemption; vital to the war effort at home and so on. But those lads would have none of that. Wouldn’t even tolerate headquarters duties. The oldest boy —”