The House of Special Purpose

by Paul Christopher

  In the background he could hear the sound of the shower stopping. She’d be stepping out into her room now, wearing nothing but a towel… He stopped himself. Every time they came even close to intimacy it seemed to lead to some ghastly horror, like discovering the two bodies on the Super Chief. He looked at his watch instead. Time to phone Moura Budberg, not to think about the naked woman in the next room.

  He picked up the telephone on the night table and began to dial. It didn’t take him long to realise that he couldn’t dial out directly from the room. He heard a very tinny woman’s voice in his ear instead.

  ‘Switchboard.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘What I said, pal. This is the switchboard.’

  ‘I’d like to reach a number, please.’

  ‘Sure, pal. Give it to me.’

  ‘Granite 87791.’

  ‘Sure, pal. Just give me a second.’

  ‘Take as long as you’d like,’ said Black.

  ‘Right. Hang on.’

  Black hung on. He could hear the mechanical sound of a telephone being dialled, then a strange metallic noise.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘There you go, pal.’

  Suddenly, a little faintly, he could hear the ringing of a telephone. It was picked up on the third ring. Another woman’s voice, this one very slightly accented.

  ‘Granite 87791.’

  ‘I’d like to speak with Miss Moura Budberg.’ He refused to use the idiotic title she’d given herself – Countess Moura Zakrevskaia Benckendorff or whatever the hell it was. She didn’t seem to mind at all.

  ‘You have an English accent,’ the woman said with a little laughter in her voice. ‘You must be MI6.’

  ‘I’ve heard you referred to as an agent for the NKVD,’ countered Black.

  ‘Pah,’ said the woman, laughing out loud now. ‘A story to tell at parties. It excites young men.’ She paused. ‘Older ones too for that matter. They always seem to think they’re saving me from a fate worse that death.’

  ‘And were they?’

  ‘Only from boredom,’ the woman replied.

  She’s flirting with me, Black realised. It was either a natural talent or a skill she’d developed to the point of being an art. No more than a whisper but she could probably raise your body temperature simply by being in the same room with her. She’d told at least three of her lovers that she was an agent for the Soviets, vaguely denied it to Black a few seconds ago and now he was starting to doubt his own information, not to mention the file he’d read about her. He tried to shake the feeling off by bringing things back to the business at hand.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid the FBI might be listening? They may well be tapping your telephone line.’

  ‘I’m quite sure they are,’ said the woman. ‘As well as the British Secret Service, which I happen to know has several operatives in Los Angeles, almost certainly Colonel Donovan’s apparat and probably my old friends from Dzerzhinskiy Square as well.’

  ‘You don’t mind them listening to your every word?’

  ‘The idea is quite terrifying. That fat little bulldog Mr Hoover would have me arrested in a minute.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘Mr Hoover and Mr Donovan and whoever is running the NKVD in the United States may well be listening to the telephone in my apartment. They may even have microphones behind every painting on the walls of my bedroom but they will hear nothing slanderous, seditious or salacious, I assure you.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  The Budberg woman sighed. ‘They may be tapping the telephone line in my apartment. They are not, however, tapping this telephone line.’ She waited to see if Black would understand what she was saying. He did.

  ‘You have another apartment in the building.’

  ‘Well done, Mr Englishman. Very convenient as well. Right across the hall from the one I openly rent but which I do not occupy.’

  ‘Expensive.’

  ‘I have a great many resources, Mr Englishman, financial and otherwise.’

  ‘Nevertheless, it’s devious enough for Mata Hari.’

  ‘Pah,’ said the woman. ‘A highly overrated amateur at best.’

  ‘You’re sure this number isn’t tapped?’

  ‘Quite sure. I have a friend at one of the movie studios – a gaffer, I believe he is called. He moonlights for people like myself. There is a device attached to my telephone which I believe he described as being a voltmeter. Apparently there is a certain amount of electricity flowing through a telephone line, enough to carry the voice and make the bell ring. If one taps into the line the amount of the current is slightly drained, which shows up on the voltmeter. My gaffer friend also arranged for an extension from my formal apartment across the hall.’

  ‘Ingenious,’ said Black, meaning it.

  ‘I thought so.’ She paused. ‘What exactly can I do for you, Mr Englishman?’

  ‘My associate and I would like to have a preliminary meeting with you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘This evening if possible. Seven?’

  ‘Fine, but there is one thing you should know before you make your visit.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Black. And she did.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Monday, December 1, 1941

  Los Angeles

  Bryson Towers was a narrow fourteen-storey paean of praise to the art deco era when radios looked like rocket ships and buildings looked like radios. The concrete was stained a pale ochre colour and decorated along the top floors with dark bas reliefs of modernistic, industrial-looking human figures and motifs. The penthouse floors were decorated with more Edward Hopper-style men and women with bulging muscles and things that looked a lot like electrical coils.

  At seven o’clock a Ford delivery van drove up in front of Bryson Towers, parking on the street rather than under the cloth canopy of the building, which would have blocked any cabs or limousines delivering people to the apartment house. The truck was painted a dark blue and the name Star Catering was written across the side in gold script.

  A man and a woman climbed out of the van, the man dressed in full evening dress, the woman in a black-and-white French maid’s outfit replete with silk stockings and high-heel shoes. They went around to the rear of the delivery van and the man pulled open the double doors and climbed in. He let down two metal rails, forming a ramp from the rear of the truck to the ground, then proceeded to roll out a pair of large delivery carts covered with white linen cloths. The man pushed the rails back into the rear of the truck and closed the doors. He then pushed the larger of the two delivery carts up onto the sidewalk, down the broad walkway leading to the main doors of Bryson Towers, followed by the woman pushing the second delivery cart. They went through the doors and disappeared.

  The two caterers were met at the door by the uniformed doorman, who asked them where they were delivering to. The man in the evening clothes said the delivery was for the Countess Moura Zakrevskaia Benckendorff and also informed the doorman that the hors d’oeuvres were getting cold and that surely the doorman didn’t want to risk the countess contracting food poisoning from overheated caviar. He also slipped the man ten dollars, at which point he led them over to the brass-doored elevators, which were surmounted by the same sort of bas reliefs as the outside of the building. He used one white-gloved finger to press the UP button and the doors opened to reveal another man in uniform, this one extremely old, dozing on a small leather-covered stool.

  ‘Wake up, Sizlack.’

  The old man blinked and smacked his lips a couple of times. ‘What?’ he said blearily.

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘What?

  ‘Twelve,’ said the doorman. He turned to the man in the evening clothes. ‘Joe’s a little hard of hearing.’ He leaned into the elevator. ‘Take these nice people up to twelve.’ He added loudly, ‘The countess.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said Joe.

  The two caterers rolled the carts into the el
evator cage, filling it with an assortment of complicated cooking odours. Joe pushed the door-closing button, shifted his motor lever to the right and the elevator began to rise.

  Joe’s nose twitched. ‘Smells good.’

  ‘That it does,’ said the woman in the maid’s outfit.

  ‘Got any extras maybe?’ Joe asked, lifting a bushy grey eyebrow.

  ‘No,’ said the man in the evening clothes.

  ‘What about you, girlie?’ Joe said with a leer. ‘You got any extras of your own you might like to give an old man?’

  ‘Bet he doesn’t talk to the tenants this way,’ said the woman.

  ‘No,’ the man with her agreed.

  ‘Can’t blame a guy for trying,’ said Joe. ‘Didn’t get much for the first sixty-two years of my life so you might call this a last-ditch attempt.’

  ‘Good-looking guy like you, Joe?’ said the maid. ‘Can’t believe you weren’t a hot catch in your time.’

  ‘All I ever caught was malaria and yellow fever digging that son-of-a-bitching Panama Canal and the syph, the drips and a bad case o’ crabs from the fucking prossies in fucking gay Paree during the big war, pardonnez my French, girlie.’ As he apologised, he gave the woman in the maid’s costume a quick up and down over again. The woman laughed, reached down and hiked up her skirt a couple of inches, doing a quick back and forth like a chorus girl. Joe’s eyes almost dropped out of his head.

  ‘You’ve made an old man’s day,’ said Joe. They hit twelve and the grizzled elevator operator pulled back the lever and opened the doors. The man backed out with his cart first, followed by the woman. ‘Last apartment on the left,’ said Joe.

  The woman twitched her backside more than was entirely necessary as she headed away, figuring it was the least she could do for an old soldier, and it wasn’t until they reached the apartment door and knocked that they heard the elevator door clang shut behind them.

  The door opened and the two caterers found themselves facing a woman in her forties, dressed in a long silk gown, huge white flowers on a shimmering black background. She had an oval face, huge brown eyes and a largish nose all topped by a dark bobbed hairdo. Not beautiful perhaps but certainly striking. She ushered the two caterers into the apartment and shut the door behind her. The caterers rolled the carts into the middle of the dining room, where Moura Budberg gave each of them a twenty-dollar bill.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’ve been a great help.’

  ‘No problem,’ said the man. Budberg guided them back into the foyer and let them out of the apartment. By the time she’d returned to the dining room, Morris Black and Jane Todd had rolled out from their constricted hiding places under the draped carts.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Black, stretching, his limbs making small cracking sounds. ‘I was beginning to cramp up permanently. About to turn into the ruddy hunchback of Notre Dame.’

  ‘Ah, my poor Quasimodo. Perhaps I can massage those shoulders of yours.’ Moura Budberg stepped towards him but he raised a hand and glanced at Jane.

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ He’d noticed that the woman’s accent had changed completely. On the phone it had been faintly European, perhaps Czech or Hungarian. Now it was West End well-educated London, a perfect match for Black’s own speech. Jane was already giving her a sceptical look.

  ‘Did you see why all this was necessary?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jane answered. She had lifted the cloth covering her cart a little as they were being unloaded from her old friend Aldo’s truck. ‘A dark blue Dodge and the white Mercury. Two guys wearing hats in the Dodge, so they must be FBI, two more in the Mercury who look like they might be Russkies.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Moura Budberg. ‘I agree with you about the men with hats, and the two men in the Mercury are Alexandrovichi. Local White Russians who think the tsars will rise again.’

  ‘You don’t sound very positive about the idea,’ said Jane.

  ‘Just realistic. Stalin will not live forever but there are plenty to take his place, and when they are gone, plenty more behind them. It is a very rich country to pillage if you have the stomach for it or the madness.’

  ‘Comrade Stalin has enough of both,’ said Black.

  ‘Quite so.’ She smiled. ‘Perhaps we should be on a closer basis now that we have met.’

  ‘Doesn’t make sense until you know what kind of snake you’re dealing with,’ said Jane.

  ‘I am a snake?’

  ‘You might be.’ Jane shrugged. ‘According to what I hear, you’ve got a fair number of men charmed right out of their little minds, just the way a cobra hypnotises its prey.’

  ‘A little melodramatic, don’t you think?’

  ‘I like melodrama,’ said Jane. ‘I’m a sucker for movies with Greta Garbo in them.’

  ‘She was very good in Anna Karenina,’ answered the Budberg woman dismissively.

  ‘Perhaps we should get down to business,’ said Jane.

  ‘No. First I will show you around my home.’ The Budberg woman smiled. ‘It is the European way of things.’

  Black was astonished. The British accent was gone, replaced once again by the Eastern European but not quite Russian accent she’d put on previously, as though she was changing clothes. He knew from her file that the woman’s spoken Russian wasn’t very good either and as far as written language went her skills were well below par. Odd for a woman who was supposed to have been born and raised in Russia as well as presuming to have a successful career as Maxim Gorky’s translator. The file had held the facts but the reality of seeing the woman in action was quite disconcerting.

  Jane nodded. ‘Lead on, Countess.’

  The living room had a faintly Oriental look to it with lacquered beams set into the plaster of the ceiling and a Chinese scholar screen and scholar’s bench in front of the fireplace. A pair of identical dark green leather couches with channelled backs faced each other across another carved scholar’s bench that acted as a coffee table and the narrow-planked white birch floor was covered by a huge but plain Japanese carpet in taupe with a wide black border.

  The paintings on the walls were about as far from Oriental as you could get: What appeared to be a Rembrandt portrait or something very much like it hung on one wall and a massive Phillip Ferdinand de Hamilton hunting scene of bizarre-looking dogs, a pair of hooded falcons and a brace of very dead and exceedingly ornamental pheasant adorned another. In the hallway leading to the bedroom there was another portrait like the possible Rembrandt, this one of a seated woman in a dressing gown who was feeding a parrot.

  The bedroom itself contained a Constantin Brancusi oil-on-board portrait signed and dated 1918 and an etching that had to be by Picasso showing a very odd-looking woman with a nose like a carrot and huge crying eyes. In the dining room, filled with more Oriental and art deco furniture, there was another Dutch Master of ships at anchor by Jan van de Cappelle. On the other side of the eighteenth-century Italian cherry table there was something that advertised itself as a Claude Monet, Sailboats at Argenteuil, painted in 1882.

  ‘Very impressive,’ said Black as they came back into the living room.

  Very expensive too, thought Jane. She almost asked which one of her lovers was paying the tab but kept her mouth shut.

  The countess, as they now seemed to be calling her, smiled possessively and gestured towards one of the long leather couches. On the end tables were large, gleaming crystal ashtrays. Jane lit a cigarette without asking if she could as the countess sat down opposite her two visitors.

  ‘Now can we get down to business?’ asked Jane. ‘Or are there some more European things we have to do first?’

  ‘My, you are very American, aren’t you? No niceties.’ The British accent was back, flattened out a little as though she was practising an American persona.

  ‘I don’t feel much like a nicety these days,’ Jane answered. ‘I’ve been shot at, had dead bodies left in my train compartment, been forced to run for my life in a crapped-out old airplane and just now I h
ad to get one of my old friends from the movie business to sneak me in here crouched down in a catering cart. We’re here about the Levitsky film.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ the countess responded brightly. ‘Rudely or otherwise.’

  Black lit a cigarette of his own. The countess reached into a red lacquered box on the table, withdrew a black cigarette with a gold tip and inserted the golden end into an ivory holder she took from the same box. She leaned across the table expectantly and Black lit hers as well.

  ‘One thing we’d like to know is the part you’re playing in all of this. From what I can tell, you were the one who began spreading the rumour that the film was being offered for sale.’

  ‘Aigee told you that?’

  Who the hell was Aigee? thought Black, and then it struck him. Aigee was H. G. She was back in her Russian mode. ‘You mean Mr Wells.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I don’t see that the source is relevant at the moment,’ Black said.

  ‘Unless you really are a Red spy,’ said Jane.

  The accent seemed to become thicker, more Russian. Even the words became stilted, more theatrical. ‘But of course I am a Red spy, as you call it, my dear. I have never said I was anything else, not for many years. I have even told your friend Detective Black this. A story to be told at parties.’

  ‘I’d still like to know what your role in all of this is.’

  ‘There are a number of people who want my friend Alexander Mikhailovitch’s little film. There is not one of them who trusts the other, thus I am here.’

  ‘You’re a friend of Levitsky’s?’

  ‘We have come to know each other.’

  ‘He asked you to be his broker in this?’

  ‘He suggested it.’

  ‘Do you know who the other parties involved are?’

  ‘I have some idea.’

  ‘Some of them seem to be shooting at us,’ put in Jane. ‘Friends of yours?’

  ‘How unfortunate that you are being fired upon,’ said the countess, smiling benignly in Jane’s direction. She reached out and tapped the end of her cigarette into an ashtray on the Oriental coffee table, then sat back, curling her legs up underneath her. Jane had a strong urge to reach across the coffee table and rip the cigarette holder out from between the woman’s Max Factor lips. It didn’t take any woman’s intuition to know that this little viper lied as easily as she breathed.