The House of Special Purpose

by Paul Christopher

Arnie turned to Black. ‘You really a Cherryknob?’

  ‘Corporal. Spent a great deal of time in Belgium directing traffic.’

  ‘You’re a real cop now?’

  ‘Was.’

  ‘Dearie me, now that sounds like another long story.’

  ‘You have no idea,’ Black answered, grimacing. Even from the rear seat, distracted and frightened as she was, Jane could see a terrible dark look cross Black’s features. Death, pain, madness maybe? Was it nothing more than the face of war or was there something more to it than that?

  ‘Well,’ Arnie drawled, ‘we hold our breath we can just about make Brownsville.’ He paused. ‘That’s on the assumption that you’d like to get across the border undetected, as they say.’

  ‘You’re not going to turn us over to the police?’ said Jane, astounded.

  ‘Now why would I go and do a thing like that?’ Arnie answered, equally surprised. He turned and gave Jane a broad smile. ‘It’s not like I’m absolutely lily-white when it comes to slipping across the line.’

  ‘You’re a smuggler?’ asked Black.

  ‘A small businessman making his way through an uncaring world is more like it. Not to mention the fact that we were allies during the last war and right now I’m ashamed that we haven’t come to your aid sooner.’ He took one hand off the wheel and patted Black on the shoulder. ‘Just doing my bit for my English friends and here’s hoping I can fool them into thinking I’m young enough to fight again, even if you people do serve your beer warm.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Wednesday, November 26, 1941

  Paris

  Emil Haas sat at a small pavement table outside the Cafe St Michel, ignoring the grimly cold weather and the late-afternoon traffic on the famous boulevard for which the cafe was named, keeping his attention on the rue de la Huchette instead, particularly on a tall, narrow four-storey building halfway down the block, Le Panier Fleuri. Ostensibly a flower shop squeezed in between a newsagent and a dry-goods store, Le Panier Fleuri was the only enterprise of the three that seemed to be flourishing under German occupation. Le Panier was what the French called a lupinar, or rabbit hutch, the Germans called das Bordell and Americans called a whorehouse.

  Haas had been sitting at the table for almost an hour, freezing his knackers off, sipping some ghastly wartime excuse for coffee and reading a reasonably current copy of Time magazine given to him by Canaris’s props department. The magazine offered him instant cover at the cafe, as did the U.S. dollars he had used to pay the proprietor, Monsieur Trevise, putting the man eternally in his debt since any kind of hard currency was almost impossible to get in Paris these days. In his heart what Haas really wanted was a Braunschweiger sausage sandwich and a stein of Löwenbräu.

  Keeping his eyes looking over the top of the page as he leafed through the magazine, Haas was finally rewarded by the sight of his quarry emerging from the front door of Le Panier. The man was well dressed, if a little old-fashioned, in his early sixties and bore a striking resemblance to the late King George V of England, who had in fact been his cousin, as had Tsar Nicholas II before his untimely murder twenty-three years previously. The man was Boris Vladimirovich Romanov, Grand Duke of all the Russias and his particular favourite at Le Panier was an eighteen-year-old woman named Bibi, who was perfectly happy to do anything the old Russian wanted, even some of the stranger vices he occasionally requested.

  Since Le Panier was also a designated brothel for use by any German officer above the rank of Leutnant, it came as no surprise to Haas that Bibi also worked for both the Abwehr and the Gestapo. Thus, for every coupling in her small room, the young woman was being paid three times: once by the client, once by Lieutenant-Colonel Rudolf, head of the Abwehr in Paris, and once by Walter Boemelburg, the Parisian Gestapo chief. The French, if nothing else, were enterprising in the face of defeat.

  As Vladimirovich jauntily made his way down the pavement, then crossed the cobbled street, Haas dropped another dollar on the table and got to his feet, rolling up the magazine. He put it into his jacket pocket and took a package of American Old Gold cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and tapped one out into his hand. Reaching Vladimirovich, Haas paused.

  ‘I wonder if you might have a match, Tovarishch Vladimirovich?’ Haas asked in fluent Russian, purposely using the Soviet-adopted word Tovarishch, which was certain to offend if not actually frighten any right-thinking tsarist. It stopped Grand Duke Boris dead in his tracks. When he replied, it was in French.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said mildly. Yet a nerve in his cheek twitched, betraying him.

  ‘A match, Your Highness,’ said Haas. ‘For my cigarette.’ He lifted the cigarette in his hand. ‘Would you like one?’ He took out the package and offered it to the frightened man standing less than two feet away. Hand shaking, Vladimirovich took the package and shook one out. He reached into the pocket of his own jacket and took out a slim gold lighter that had almost certainly been made or at least cased by Fabergé, the Russian imperial jewellers. He lit Haas’s cigarette and then his own.

  ‘Keep the package,’ said Haas, this time speaking in flat, Midwestern English.

  The Russian put the package into his pocket along with the lighter. Cigarettes, especially American ones, were virtually impossible to get in Paris, like almost everything else.

  ‘Who are you?’ Vladimirovich asked, also speaking English.

  ‘Perhaps we should walk as we talk,’ Haas said, taking the grand duke by the elbow.

  The Russian shook him off. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you!’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ Haas responded. ‘And keep your voice down,’ he added quietly. He reached his hand into his jacket pocket and half revealed a tiny Mauser m1910 vest-pocket pistol. It was only a .25 calibre but it was capable of a great deal of bodily harm at close range. ‘Come along,’ said Haas. He gripped the man’s elbow again, turning him around and heading him towards rue des Deux Ponts, a hundred yards away.

  ‘What do you want?’ Vladimirovich said, voice tight. ‘There’s a police station just along here, you know. All I have to do is shout.’

  ‘The two fat flics in there have been drinking cheap wine for most of the day,’ said Haas. ‘They’ll be half asleep by now. I could put a bullet in your ear and be sitting in a pew at Notre Dame before anyone noticed.’

  Vladimirovich looked around wildly. The narrow street was empty. There was no one to come to his aid. ‘You’re a Chekisti, aren’t you?’ said the man. ‘You obviously know who I am.’

  ‘I’m not anything of the sort,’ Haas answered, laughing. ‘But I do know who you are.’ They reached the tiny little police post. ‘Down here,’ Haas ordered. He guided Vladimirovich down a tiny alley on the left. A small metal street sign was riveted to the wall of the police building: RUE DU CHAT QUI PÊCHE. Street of the Fishing Cat. Local mythology had it that a hundred years or more ago the Seine, which lay at the end of the street, had regularly flooded in the spring, sending the overflow up the alley, where cats would come and paw the river carp out of the rising water.

  Their footsteps rang and echoed in the narrow confines of the little street. ‘Are you going to kill me?’

  ‘Not if you tell me the truth.’

  ‘The truth about what?’

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

  They reached the end of the alley, which emptied out on the Quai St Michel. Somewhere nearby Picasso had his studio. Haas smiled, thinking about the mad Spaniard. To the prudish führer he was a man as decadent as the Aryan Cafe in Berlin and just as dangerous.

  Haas led Vladimirovich across the quai and they sat down on a bench looking across to the Île de la Cité and the Conciergerie. ‘Somewhat like the Lubyanka, don’t you think?’ said Haas, referring to the NKVD prison housed in the basement of their headquarters in Moscow’s old State Insurance Building on Dzerzhinskiy Square.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Of course you do.’ Haas laughed again. He fli
pped his cigarette butt over the iron railing in front of them and out into the turgid waters of the river.

  ‘Why don’t you just tell me what you want?’ said the grand duke. Even under threat he still had the arrogant bearing of a prince.

  ‘First I’ll tell you what I know.’

  ‘As you wish,’ said the Russian. ‘After all, you are the one who has a gun.’

  ‘You are Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich, one of Tsar Nicholas the Second’s four first cousins. With the death of your brother Kyril a number of years ago, you are now the eldest of the remaining Vladimirovichi. There are also the children of Grand Duchess Zenia, the eldest of which is Feodor, or Theodore, as they call it in English. I believe he lives in England but recently went to America because of the bombing.’

  ‘He is only forty or so. My age gives me the more direct claim.’

  Haas ignored the comment. ‘The only other remaining surviving male close to the tsar was Grand Duke Dimitri, the son of Nicholas the Second’s youngest uncle, Grand Duke Paul.’ Haas shook his head. ‘A grand number of dukes, I’m sure you’ll agree.’ He smiled at his play on words. The grand duke did not.

  ‘Is there any point to this lecture concerning my family tree?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Then perhaps you might do me the kindness of getting to it.’

  ‘Again, certainly.’ Haas nodded. ‘The point is simply this: under the Russian imperial rules of succession and under the old Salic Law, the crown is only passed to males, through males, until there were no males left.’

  ‘You continue to tell me things which I already know.’

  Haas ignored the terse interruption. ‘When the tsar died and neither a son nor a brother was available, the eldest eligible male from the branch of the family closest to the tsar would succeed. In the case of Tsar Nicholas, this was your elder brother Kyril. Since your brother is now dead, this means that you are next in line to become tsar emperor of all the Russias.’

  ‘History,’ said the grand duke. ‘And unlikely to be repeated under the present regime in my country.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You have spent the larger part of your life playing the wastrel, “Russia’s Greatest Spender.” There are some people who think that you are only playing a part. They think that you would do almost anything at all to regain the throne of imperial Russia.’

  ‘Now who is the fool?’ the grand duke asked. ‘I am an old man with few illusions left. Do you really think I have the means necessary for such an end?’

  ‘To regain the throne and title of tsar emperor you would need an enormous amount of money, a great deal of which is being held in a number of foreign banks simply because those banks have chosen to agree to disagree. To claim the money you must have indisputable proof that the tsar and his family are in fact dead.’

  ‘Something which it is patently impossible to do.’

  ‘I asked you to be truthful,’ said Haas.

  ‘You accuse me of lying?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Haas. ‘Everyone lies. Isn’t it a lie when you visit a slut like Bibi at the Panier Fleuris?’

  ‘It is discreet.’

  ‘It is wise. You know as well as I do that if your wife discovered your infidelities, not to mention some of your more outlandish “requirements,” she would divorce you without a second thought. She might do worse. That kind of humiliation might cause her to do violence.’ The threat was clear.

  ‘Get on with it!’

  ‘In the winter of 1925 you and your wife the Grand Duchess Zinaida travelled to New York. While there you had a brief meeting with a man in your suite at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. The man’s name was Alexander Mikhailovitch Levitsky.’ Haas let it sit for a moment, then spoke again. ‘He showed you a piece of film.’

  ‘Milyj Kristos!’ the grand duke whispered.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Wednesday, November 26, 1941

  London

  Colonel Stewart George Menzies – his last name pronounced Mingus for some perversely British reason lost in the mists of Scottish Highland time – took a staff car from his offices at MI6 in Broadway Buildings to Piccadilly and Bond Street, stepping out into the full dark of the evening. There was a light raid on tonight, a few dozen bombers toppling what small buildings were still left standing in the East End after the blitz of last year, the crumping sound of the explosives like distant, grumbling thunder. Menzies nodded to the pair of top-hatted porters standing guard at the front door, then went to the desk and identified himself as a member of Whites and a guest of Robert Lockhart. He purchased a packet of Sullivan cigarettes from the clerk behind the desk and asked if Lockhart was in.

  ‘Yes, Colonel. He’s in his rooms. Top of the stairs…’

  ‘I know the way.’ He dropped a few pence in the small tin tray at the end of the desk and went up the gloomy carpeted stairs to the second floor, turning left and walking to the end of the hall. He knocked on a door marked 8 and waited. He heard Lockhart’s voice telling him the door was unlocked and Menzies let himself in. The flat was relatively small but it seemed to suit Lockhart perfectly, at least when he was in town and not out standing up to his hips in the Itchen or the Avon trying to land himself a trout or two. There was a full bathroom, a small cell-like bedroom and a larger living room looking out over Piccadilly that Lockhart had transformed into an office, complete with half a dozen bookcases, a large desk in front of the window, a smaller table for his typewriter and several institutional-looking filing cabinets. The only concession to company or the pleasure of it was a small leather couch and a matching club chair set before a gas fireplace full of cast-iron logs.

  Lockhart looked more like a country squire than he did a diplomat, let alone a spy, which of course is what he really was, and if he did look anything like a spy it was one of the old sort, Richard Hannay from The Thirty-Nine Steps, searching out secret codes and the kaiser’s submarines whilst wearing tweeds, smoking a pipe and fly-fishing in between bouts with his adversaries. The man was in his mid-fifties, square-faced with brownish red hair and a pale complexion. While in Malaya trying to make his fortune in rubber he’d contracted malaria and had been left in perpetual bad health, especially his heart and circulation.

  He got up from behind his desk and crossed the room to shake Menzies’s hand. The two men, only a few years different in age, couldn’t have been more different in bearing. Lockhart was slightly stooped and inevitably looked tired and slightly rumpled. Menzies, even when not wearing his Guards uniform, had the look of a military man, his back straight, his eyes bright and his expression invariably cold and removed.

  ‘Drink?’ asked Lockhart.

  ‘Please.’

  Lockhart went to a small cupboard by the fireplace and removed a pair of glasses and a bottle of fifteen-year-old Highland Dalwhinnie single malt. He put the glasses down beside the club chair and poured two inches into each of them, neat, without soda, water or ice. He handed one glass to Menzies and sat down in the club chair, Menzies opposite him on the couch. Menzies sipped and smacked his lips appreciatively.

  ‘That’s extremely good Scotch.’

  ‘I’ve become a bit of an expert over the years.’

  ‘That and fishing.’

  ‘Without women in my life what else is there?’ Lockhart laughed.

  ‘The day there’s no women in your life is the day they lower you into the ground, Mr Lockhart.’

  ‘They do make life more interesting.’

  ‘And more dangerous.’

  ‘Are you putting yourself in the way of telling me something I should hear?’ asked Lockhart, his voice drifting home to a faint memory of its original Scots accent.

  ‘It would appear that our Russian friends have taken the bait.’

  ‘You have some information concerning the film?’

  ‘Black and the American woman appear to have found something at the Trotsky estate in Mexico City.’
r />   ‘Found what, may I ask?’

  ‘The key Mercador talked about.’

  ‘You’re sure of this?’

  ‘Not entirely. The Russians set a trap for them. It would appear they were aided by at least one member of the local state police.’

  ‘The trap was unsuccessful?’

  ‘Yes. They seem to have escaped. We have no idea where they are at the moment but they’ll turn up eventually.’

  ‘Do they have any idea what they’re after?’

  ‘Only in general terms, only what we and our American counterparts have told them.’ Menzies handed over his empty glass and Lockhart filled it again. Menzies lit one of the Sullivans he’d purchased at the desk. He offered the package to Lockhart, who declined with a wave of his hand.

  ‘What about the king?’

  ‘The king?’ said Menzies. ‘For God’s sake, man, I haven’t even told Churchill about any of this.’

  ‘They’ll both have to be told,’ said Lockhart wearily, leaning back against the comforting leather of the heavy chair.

  ‘Not until a number of problems have been worked out. According to our friends at Coutts and at the Bank of England, there is the small matter of three hundred million pounds. Three hundred million pounds that is no longer covered by specie or anything else at either bank. We are speaking of fraud here, Lockhart. Fraud and complicity in the de facto assassination of a head of state, condoned by a head of state. If any of this, and I mean any of this, gets out to the public it will make the Duke of Windsor’s abdication from the throne seem like a garden fete.’ He paused. ‘There is another, perhaps more personal question which must be dealt with.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your relationship with Moura Budberg.’

  Lockhart bristled. ‘She is a friend.’

  ‘You no longer have an intimate relationship with her?’

  ‘I don’t see how that is anyone’s business but my own.’

  ‘It is most definitely my business if she is an active agent for the NKVD.’

  ‘That’s never been proven.’