The House of Special Purpose

by Paul Christopher

  ‘The reason for your presence here in Los Angeles and the reason I’ve come all the way from Paris by a very roundabout route to speak with you.’

  ‘You’re not making sense. The countess is a patriot, as I am.’

  ‘Of course, of course. You’re going to try and purchase the film with the help of your count and his pig-heiress wife. You and Vonsiatsky and the other bidders are supposed to meet her in Honolulu. The two of you are leaving on the Matson Line SS Monterey tomorrow evening.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Feodor whispered.

  ‘Because, you little idiot, I have been told all this!’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘The Abwehr in Berlin. They wish you to use Vonsiatsky’s money, and even some of theirs if necessary, to purchase the film for them.’

  ‘And why would I do that?’ Feodor asked. ‘And why are you doing this for them?’

  ‘They have put me under threat. And my family.’

  Feodor shrugged and shot his cuffs again, his thin chest puffing out. ‘That is no concern of mine.’

  The grand duke sighed. He thought about Haas and the Nazis and Admiral Canaris and wondered whether they really were an unstoppable force destined to rule the world. At the moment it seemed likely. What was that old quotation? ‘All evil needs to triumph is that good men do nothing.’ Something like that.

  ‘Feodor, it’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘Clean up your own mess, cousin. Not that I would have expected anything less from a Vladimirovich.’

  ‘Stupid and rude. Much like the rest of your family,’ said the grand duke. Before Feodor could speak out the grand duke continued. ‘You have six brothers and sisters as I recall.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Living in England?’

  ‘Some of them are here. The younger ones are with my mother.’

  ‘Do you think the führer is going to invade England?’

  ‘Eventually, of course. Hitler is many things but he is not a fool. England must fall.’

  ‘And when it does?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of the Black Book?’ asked the grand duke. He barely paused. ‘No, I can see that you have not.’ He took out a cigarette and screwed it carefully into the end of his holder, then lit it with a large silver Ronson that sat on the bar. ‘The Black Book was developed by the SS and the Gestapo. It lists everyone in England who might be a real or political threat. Those people are to be arrested as soon as England has been conquered. Some will be sent to camps, some will be put under surveillance, some will be tortured for information and some will simply be murdered out of hand. Your mother is listed and so are your brothers and sisters. They are listed among those who will be killed.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ said Feodor. ‘There is no such book.’

  The grand duke pulled open a drawer below the bar and took out a Bible-sized volume bound in black imitation leather. There was a gold swastika stamped into the cover. The book was almost two inches thick, the pages a pale blue colour. He tossed the book to Feodor, where it landed in the man’s lap.

  ‘Look under R, for Romanov,’ said the grand duke. ‘And then listen carefully to what I have to tell you.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Saturday, November 29, 1941

  Washington, D.C.

  After leaving the two men in the grill, Jane slipped off to the day room they’d taken and quickly packed the two newly purchased Streamlite overnight cases with their new clothes and toiletries. Ten minutes and a twenty-cent cab ride later she was at Union Station and a few minutes after that she was at the Pennsy counter buying two tickets on the seven o’clock Trail Blazer to Chicago. She dropped off the suitcases at the baggage office then caught another cab, this time to the National Press Building at Fourteenth and F Streets, directly across from the Willard Hotel. She took an elevator up to the ninth floor and the private office of her old friend and colleague John Franklin Carter.

  Carter, in his mid-forties, wrote a syndicated column called ‘We the People’ and had once been a speech-writer for Vice President Henry Wallace, then secretary of agriculture. Before that he had been a practising journalist for Liberty, Time and most prominently the New York Times, which was where Jane had met him back in the early thirties.

  Carter, one of seven children born to an Episcopalian minister from Fall River, Massachusetts, was a Yalie and had gone to school with the likes of Steven Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish and Henry Luce but he never pretended to any kind of superiority, intellectual or otherwise, and was just as happy shooting pool with Jane and her friends from the Daily News and the other city rags as he was hobnobbing at the Rainbow Room with poets who wrote for the New Yorker.

  Stepping into the large office, Jane found the man behind his desk machine-gunning away at a decrepit old Royal, one of the few journalists she knew who touch-typed like a secretary. He had an ancient, smoking Kaywoodie clamped between his horsey teeth and still looked like everyone’s idea of a small-town librarian: thinning dark hair behind thick glasses in plain, tortoiseshell frames and a large, kipper-style bow tie in bright red against a plain white shirt and striped braces. A pinstripe suit jacket was draped over the back of his high-back leather chair and an idiotic Tyrolean hat complete with feathered plume sat on the desk. The hat was a decade out of style but Carter insisted that it had been given to him by the Prince of Wales, now the Duke of Windsor.

  He looked up as Jane came into the room, popped the pipe out of his mouth and grinned, pushing himself away from the typewriter. Jane glanced around the big windowless room. The walls were covered in framed photographs of Carter with celebrities and pundits ranging from Gandhi to Gurdjieff and Hemingway with a tarpon to J. Edgar Hoover with a tommy gun. There was even one that Jane had taken herself of a broadly smiling Carter with his arm around Gloria Swanson’s waist while Sherman Billingsley, the owner of the Stork Club, stood on the other side with his arm around the actress’s shoulder.

  ‘Still got your trophy wall, I see,’ said Jane. She dropped down into a red leather chair in front of his desk and lit a cigarette, dropping the spent match into the freestanding ashtray beside her. The ashtray was filled with quartz sand that looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned in years. The container itself was made from the dull bronze casing of a howitzer shell from the Great War.

  Carter relit his pipe and stared at her across the desk, eyes blinking slowly behind the thick lenses of his glasses. ‘I don’t see any scars,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘Scars from what?’

  ‘From that little accident you had a year or so ago.’

  ‘You heard about that?’

  ‘I tend to hear about my friends having their darkrooms blown up by pipe bombs,’ he answered.

  ‘Hardly page one stuff.’

  ‘I hear about everything,’ said Carter, leaning back in the chair. ‘That’s my job.’

  ‘I never thought about you as a gossip columnist.’ Jane laughed. She leaned over in her chair and examined the photograph on the wall closest to her. It was an austere photograph of the present pope, Pius XII, hands clasped in pontifical seriousness, big hooked nose pointing at the prayer book in front of him on a reading stand. The inscription in ink on the portrait read: To Jay Carter, a Good Friend of the Church and a Good Friend of Mine, Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli/Pius XII. The lower third of the photograph, which included the papal signature, was embossed with a Vatican seal just in case no one believed the signature.

  ‘I bet Louella doesn’t have one of those,’ she said.

  ‘Louella Parsons is a vindictive power-hungry impossibly vain fat bitch,’ said Carter.

  ‘Well, isn’t it a good thing you’re not opinionated or anything?’ Jane said.

  There was a short silence and Jane watched as the smile on Carter’s face stiffened slightly. Playing pool a few years back was one thing but here he sat a syndicated columnist whose time was valuable. Maybe
too much power did that to you, just like it had to Louella Parsons, now universally hated from one end of Los Angeles to the other, a dark presence hanging over Hollywood like the black cloud hanging over that sad-looking character in the Li’l Abner strip.

  ‘Are you here to reminisce?’ he asked finally, his tone flat. ‘Or do you have something specific in mind?’ The columnist tapped his pipe out in the sawn-off bottom of a shell casing of a smaller calibre than the ashtray Jane was using.

  ‘What if I was here to give you a story. A big story?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Depends on the quid pro quo, I suppose.’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Jane.

  ‘I’d have to know a little bit about the quid before we got to the pro quo.’

  ‘Hypothetically, what if I told you I found the key to a safe-deposit box under a pile of rabbit droppings in Leon Trotsky’s garden?’

  ‘I’d say the pipe bomb did more damage than you thought.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘But hypothetical.’

  ‘For now.’ Jane nodded.

  ‘What’s in the box the key opens?’

  ‘Hypothetically it might be a reel of film that shows the entire Romanov family, including the tsar, being assassinated.’

  ‘Interesting, but not earthshaking.’ Carter reached into the right pocket of the jacket hanging over his chair and pulled out a leather tobacco pouch. A faint apple-and-rum odour wafted into the room. He began pressing wads of damp-looking tobacco into the bowl of the Kaywoodie. Interesting but not earthshaking, he’d said, but she’d seen something in his eyes that said it meant something more to the man across the desk from her. She stubbed her Camel out into the sand of the howitzer shell.

  ‘What if I told you a senior British diplomat at the time was somehow involved, on behalf of the king?’

  ‘Bruce Lockhart?’

  Jane was surprised. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Read a little bit of history sometime, kiddo. The Lockhart Plot is famous.’

  ‘The Lockhart Plot was supposedly a conspiracy to assassinate Lenin.’

  ‘It was anything the Reds wanted it to be, including some kind of plot between the tsar and the king of England to band their resources and friends together and “wipe out all the Jew conspirators,” Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and all the others.’

  ‘So the film’s a myth?’

  ‘Promulgated by that idiotic Budberg woman. She tried to peddle the same story to me a week after she got off the boat in New York. She even tried Winchell and he usually bites at anything, but not this.’

  ‘You know about her as well?’

  ‘Everybody does, at least in this town. She pretends she’s a Russian spy so she’ll be invited to parties. She’s eaten out at tables halfway round the world on those old stories. Trouble is, she can never prove any of them. It’s all just gossip and innuendo, and no matter what some people might think, I’m not a gossip columnist.’

  ‘Donovan thinks she’s got something.’

  ‘Wild Bill?’ Carter laughed. ‘You’re not working for him now, are you?’ He paused. ‘You don’t seem his type somehow – no Ivy League degree, for starters.’

  ‘Let’s just say I fell into the job.’

  ‘Like the thing with the pipe bomb.’

  ‘Something like that.’ She watched as the journalist took a match out of a small pewter holder on his desk. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  Carter put the fresh match to his pipe, blew out a huge cloud of smoke and settled back in his chair. ‘Let me tell you something about Washington, kiddo. This place is full of spies – Wild Bill’s just the newest one on the block. We’ve got Free French spying on the Vichy French, usually in restaurants. We’ve got Germans sniffing around Baltimore Harbour. We’ve got the Russians snooping everywhere. We’ve got the Brits with their silly Passport Control Office as a cover for the other Bill and his bunch and then we have our own people spying on each other.’

  ‘I think I’m being used as bait,’ Jane said flatly. ‘I’ve already been shot at. I’m in way over my head but I don’t know if I can get out.’

  ‘We’re back to pipe bombs?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘You’d better tell me about it.’ Carter sighed. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a Parker Vacumatic and took a pad and a bottle of Waterman’s blue–black out of his desk drawer. He sucked up enough ink to fill the pen and they began.

  An hour later, Carter had it all. Jane finished up by repeating Black’s theory about the money.

  The columnist nodded. He’d written half a dozen pages of small, neat script but now he stopped and put the top back on his pen, putting it gently down on top of the pad. ‘He’s probably right.’ Carter pursed his lips and used one hand to adjust his large, floppy bow tie. ‘I once even heard a rumour about a shipload of Russian bullion that came into Canada on the West Coast. Seventeen tons, I think, all of it hidden in ammunition boxes. It was supposed to go by train to the Bank of Canada in Ottawa, which is the equivalent of the Bullion Depository at Fort Knox. Except the Canadians say it never got there. It’s like Moura Budberg, your Russian countess. It’s all rumour and gossip. Wisps of fog you can never quite get your hands on.’

  ‘That person in Mexico wasn’t firing wisps of fog, Jay.’

  ‘Trotsky’s been dead less than a year. It’s still a volatile situation. I think you may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and got caught in someone else’s crossfire.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Jane. She checked her watch: five thirty. She stood up, using one hand to wave away the cloud of mixed pipe and tobacco smoke that had clouded the room over the past hour or so. ‘Or maybe there’s something to all of this.’

  ‘I still don’t quite know what you want me to do about it.’ Carter shrugged his narrow shoulders.

  ‘You’ve got connections, high and low. There’s a big fat leak in Donovan’s bunch and I want to know who it is. I’d also like to know what happened to Trotsky’s bodyguard, Harte. He wasn’t in that grave in Brooklyn, so where the hell is he?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ said Carter. ‘But I’m not making any promises.’

  ‘I don’t want promises, just a few answers,’ Jane responded. ‘And I wanted someone I trust to have all the details, just in case…’ She left it dangling.

  ‘I understand,’ said Carter. He stood up behind his desk. ‘Just be careful, Jane.’

  ‘I will,’ she answered. ‘Thanks for letting me bend your ear.’

  ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Keep in touch.’

  Jane gave him a smile, turned on her heel and left the office. Carter waited for a moment then sat down in his chair again. Instead of getting back to the typewriter, he picked up his telephone and dialled a number he knew by heart. It was answered on the second ring, the voice calm and slightly nasal.

  ‘White House switchboard. Who, may I ask, is calling and how may I direct your call?’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sunday, November 30, 1941

  Chicago

  A light snow was falling and the clock on the twelve-storey tower of Chicago’s Dearborn Station on Polk Street read exactly seven p.m, as the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe’s crack passenger express, the Super Chief, left the pink granite terminal and began to move west on its thirty-nine-and-a-half-hour journey to Los Angeles. Most of the passengers barely noticed the gentle tug as the train began to move, thumping through the complex throat of the station’s approach tracks and then coming out into the cool air of the early evening.

  The train was made up of two engine units painted in the Santa Fe’s traditional scarlet and yellow livery. There were no coaches, only Pullman sleeping cars, their interiors finished luxuriously and equipped with every modern amenity. Each streamliner car had a name, inscribed on panels on either side of the car as well as on the broad metal bars across each door leading to the ne
xt car in the train. Using Fleming’s money, Jane had thrown caution to the winds and booked herself and Black into double bedroom D in Oraibi – which contained six double bedrooms, two compartments and two drawing rooms – roughly in the middle of the train and only one car away from the diner.

  While Jane used a tube of Ipana and the brand-new Dr West Miracle Tuft she’d bought at the Fred Harvey news stand in the station, Black pulled his armchair close to the window and watched as the Super Chief crossed the X’s of the huge switching yard beyond Dearborn Station, heading south-west. As they rumbled over the train bridge that crossed the foul-smelling Illinois and Michigan Canal in the industrial wasteland around Thirty-first Street, Black saw a dozen slipways running off the main canal, scores of barges piled high with lumber moored neatly, waiting for their inland cargoes to be offloaded and taken to the harbour.

  Jane came out of the tiny bathroom, the tip of her tongue testing her freshly brushed teeth. She stopped when she saw Black, his nose virtually pressed up against the glass of the window as he peered out into the gathering darkness. ‘You look like a little kid.’

  ‘I always dreamed of this,’ the detective answered without taking his eyes off the passing scenery. ‘Riding a transcontinental train into the American Wild West and beyond. I used to read books about it. Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James, Buffalo Bill Cody. Sitting Bull and Geronimo.’

  ‘Cross the mighty Mississippi and all of a sudden there’s a bunch of Indians whooping it up, wearing war-bonnets and paint, shooting arrows at the train.’

  ‘And every horse a pinto,’ said Black, smiling up at her. ‘The first cinema I ever went to was showing Riders of the Purple Sage.’

  ‘You had it bad,’ Jane said. ‘Getting back to the present, Sheriff, look across the corridor and you’ll see the Chicago Sewage Canal running along on the other side of us.’ She laughed. ‘Good thing this train’s got air conditioning.’

  ‘You’re putting a blight on a child’s fantasy.’

  ‘I was never very good with kids,’ she drawled.