The House of Special Purpose

by Paul Christopher

  Zarubin didn’t really know what she was talking about but it didn’t sound very positive. He shook his head.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘What do you think?’ he said, trying to buy some time.

  ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking.’ She remained exactly as she’d been when he walked into the room, open and vulnerable, completely without inhibition. He thought about the kind of life she must have led working at the bank all those years and wondered if that might not be the answer. After all that boredom and unchanging routine without relief, she would want a little excitement, close enough to the truth to be believed.

  ‘Have you ever heard the name Leon Trotsky?’

  ‘Sure. The commie who got an ice axe in the head last year in Mexico.’

  ‘He also has a safe-deposit box in your bank.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’

  ‘Not at all. In your records it will be under the name Lev Bronstein.’

  She tried to think, pushing out her lips. ‘It doesn’t ring a bell. We’ve got more than three hundred boxes, though. I can’t put a face or a name to all of them.’

  ‘The Commies have been trying to get their hands on the contents of that box for the better part of five years now.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Documents. Important ones.’ He went to his trousers, which were neatly folded over a chair in one corner of the room. He took out the key on the silver chain he’d retrieved from Harte and held it up in the dim light.

  ‘That’s one of our keys,’ she said, surprised.

  ‘Trotsky’s key. Lev Bronstein’s. The only problem is, I don’t know his password.’

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘I work for an organisation called the Coordinator of Information. COI. My boss is a man named William Donovan.’

  She straightened up from the wall. ‘I’ve heard of him.’

  ‘We need to get the contents of the box before the communists do.’

  ‘What are the documents about?’

  He had sunk the hook. He could get her to help him. ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Can you tell me your real name at least?’

  ‘I’m not supposed to.’

  ‘But will you?’

  ‘For you, yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  He tried to think of a name she would like, one that would appeal to this strange woman.

  ‘Daniel,’ he said quietly after a long moment. ‘I can’t tell you the rest. It would be too dangerous for you to know.’

  ‘Daniel in the lions’ den,’ she answered softly.

  ‘It looks that way at the moment.’

  ‘Maybe there’s something I can do to help.’

  * * *

  After one more dance in the safe-deposit officer’s bed, Vassili Zarubin showered with his new friend, dressed and had a cup of freshly percolated Chase and Sanborn in Karen Kristensen’s spotless kitchen, where they developed their plan of attack. By the time they had finished their coffee and climbed into Karen’s high-sided white 1936 Nash 400 coupé it was nine o’clock and darkness had completely fallen. With her high beams on she drove down the gentle hill on Church Street. She traversed the town, finally swinging the Nash into the alleyway that ran behind the First National Bank Building.

  ‘You’re sure you want to do this?’ asked Zarubin.

  ‘I’m sure.’ Karen nodded. She pulled out the parking brake and got out of the car, Zarubin getting out on the other side.

  ‘Don’t the police patrol the alleys?’

  ‘Sure,’ Karen said, ‘and they all know my car. I’ve been known to work late. Nobody’s going to get suspicious.’

  She locked up the car and they went down the alley to a narrow metal door. Karen brought a ring of keys out of her handbag, chose one and deftly placed it into the lock. The door opened and she stood aside, ushering Zarubin into the back foyer of the bank. She came in behind him and locked the door behind her before stepping across to a grey metal box mounted on the wall. She used a second key from her ring to open the box, reached in and pulled down a single lever, exposing a brass timer with a white enamel face that registered twenty-three seconds out of sixty.

  ‘Anyone entering the bank after hours has got one minute to get the box open and pull down the switch to turn off the exterior alarm after opening the door or all hell breaks lose. The police station is less than a block away. Probably why this place has never been robbed.’

  Well, thought Vassili Zarubin with a sudden chill, there is always a first time. He’d never had sexual relations with an American woman who wasn’t being paid for it and he’d most certainly never robbed a bank before.

  ‘Come on.’ Karen led him down a short, dimly lit hallway. She opened another door and Zarubin stepped out into the bank, which was flooded with light. The Venetian blinds on the front windows were closed. She crossed to her desk with Zarubin on her heels. Seating herself at her desk, she opened her left-hand drawer, pulled out her grey box of file cards and used another one of her keys to open it.

  ‘Baker, Bellman, Berman, Betinski – he’s a strange one, Polish, I think. Here we go. Lev Bronstein, M34. M stands for Medium, our midsize box.’ She wrote the number down on a slip of paper and put the box away, then stood up again. ‘This is pretty exciting for someone like me.’

  Vassili nodded. It wasn’t exciting for him; it was just nerve-racking to the point of nausea. If he was caught now, it wouldn’t be long until he was on his way home to Moscow, and within five minutes of his arrival he’d be in the back of a big old Zis 44 prisoner bus on his way to Beria’s chamber of horrors, or perhaps one of those insane asylums Beria was beginning to favour.

  Keys in hand, Karen crossed the marble floor of the bank and went down a flight of steps to the lower level, Vassili very close behind her. Using yet another key, she unlocked a steel gate, opened it and turned to the right, where she stepped through into the safe-deposit-box area. Zarubin stood by, feeling cold lines of sweat trickling down from his armpits. The safe-deposit room, with a smaller annex equipped with a viewing table off to one side, was only a little bigger than a prison cell at the Lubyanka. Karen checked the piece of paper in her hand, crouched down on her haunches and finally found the one she was looking for.

  ‘Give me your key,’ she said, holding up her hand. Zarubin handed it to her, chain and all. She fit her own key into the lock on the left and Bronstein’s key into the lock on the right. She turned them both and then slid the box out of its niche. Smiling proudly, she handed the box up to Zarubin.

  ‘I’ll just wait outside until you open it,’ she said.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘This was pretty easy, wasn’t it, Daniel?’

  ‘Pretty easy.’ He felt as though he was going to throw up. ‘I’ll just be a minute.’

  ‘Now that the alarm is off, take your time,’ Karen answered. She threw him a big smile, turned on her heel and left the room.

  Surreptitiously Zarubin gave the box a little shake. Something metallic shifted inside. He sighed gratefully, then took the box into the little annex. He threw open the lid of the box and stared inside. Resting on the bottom of the box was a small metal can about seven inches across. A strip of gummed paper with a Russian inscription in ink was pasted over an old-fashioned Kodak label.

  Dom Chegyaiihoro Nazhayehud

  The House of Special Purpose

  Vassili Zarubin lifted the can out of the box. A second piece of tape had been used to seal the two halves of the can together and then been shellacked over. The shellac had long since cracked and yellowed. The paper had also been slit, as though by a thumbnail or a pocketknife. Heart falling, Zarubin twisted the two halves of the flat can open to reveal its contents. The shellac on the paper tape cracked and crumbled, a small piece of it drifting down into the safe-deposit box.

  The can was empty. The film was gone.

  ‘Blyad’!’ he cursed softly.

 
* * *

  An hour later, the telephone rang in Moura Budberg’s bedroom. She was reading a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Mashenk’a, or Mary, his first novel in Russian. The newly released The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his first novel in English, lay on her bedside table. She was intending to compare the level of his writing in both languages. At the sound of the telephone ringing she turned the book over in her lap and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Yes?’

  The man who responded did so neither in Russian nor in English. Instead he spoke fluent and cultured Swedish. Moura Budberg responded in kind.

  ‘Levitsky emptied the box. The film is gone.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘According to the files at the bank, it was several weeks ago.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Levitsky’s house in Ventura has been ransacked. From the contents of his refrigerator it appears likely he has not been in residence for some time.’ There was a pause. ‘A body was also discovered in his house. A woman. Fresh.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Someone named Kristensen. An officer at the bank.’

  ‘Who did it?’

  ‘Probably Zarubin.’

  ‘How did he find out about the safe-deposit box?’

  ‘His contact in Donovan’s organisation, or one of them at least, was found dead. No doubt he gave up Pelham and Harte.’

  ‘Have you tried to contact them?’

  ‘Of course. No response so far.’

  ‘Perhaps you should check.’

  ‘Perhaps you should check, madam. It is much too dangerous for any of our people to get involved.’

  ‘This changes everything.’

  ‘I don’t see why. The venue remains the same. It has to for reasons you know quite well. There were enough questions in the Canal Zone as it was. I had to bribe everyone in sight and a few who weren’t. Get the necessary parties here and do it by the fifth. This thing must be done by the sixth, no later.’

  ‘I’ll call you when I’ve made arrangements.’

  ‘Please do.’

  The telephone went dead in her hand. She took a drag on her cigarette and thought about the people she would have to call. She smiled bleakly around the ivory cigarette holder. There were worse places to be than Hawaii in December.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Thursday, December 4, 1941

  San Francisco

  Commander Ian Fleming, acting alone and without any authority from either Donovan, Stephenson or his own boss, Admiral Godfrey of Naval Intelligence, met Jane Todd and Morris Black at San Francisco Municipal Airport shortly after nine.

  Jane was wearing a short-haired brown wig barely showing under her service cap. She was wearing the complete uniform of a navy nurse, right down to the half-length dark blue cape. Black, his eyes half hidden behind a pair of smoke-tinted spectacles, was sporting a moustache and wore the blue uniform of a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, complete with three stripes on the cuff of his jacket and an officer’s dark peaked cap. They both knew that it was unlikely anyone would notice that the eagle on his cap insignias had its beak pointed to the left, rather than the right, and Black didn’t intend anyone to get close enough to see the Dental Corps insignia that had come with the uniform from the wardrobe department at Metro. The naval get-ups had both come from the Wallace Beery clunker Thunder Afloat, which had been released a year or so before.

  ‘My, don’t we look dramatic,’ Fleming said with a smile. ‘I almost didn’t recognise you.’

  ‘Good,’ said Black. ‘We recently pirated an FBI vehicle and held one of their agents at gunpoint. I don’t think we’re in Mr Hoover’s good books.’

  ‘Been busy by the sound of it,’ Fleming said. ‘Look over my shoulder and you’ll see two men on the bench over there. One of them’s reading a newspaper; the other seems very interested in his fingernails.’

  Black looked and so did Jane. The two men might just as well have had FBI stencilled in blue paint on their foreheads. ‘They’re not paying any attention to us,’ said Jane. ‘I guess the disguises worked.’

  ‘Let’s not test that theory too strenuously,’ said Fleming.

  After gathering up their bags, they stopped briefly in the coffee shop of the Mission-style terminal building. ‘Who knows you’re here?’ asked Black.

  ‘Officially? Not a soul. As far as anyone in Washington is concerned, I’ve done a bunk.’

  ‘Unofficially?’ asked Jane. The Harvey’s waitress brought them coffee and a Danish for Jane, who was ravenous after the two-hour flight up from Los Angeles.

  ‘Unofficially Stephenson knows. I had to tell him or Godfrey would have had me cashiered the minute I set foot back on British soil.’ He paused and lit a cigarette from his case. ‘And quite rightly too,’ he added, puffing out a cloud of smoke.

  ‘What did you tell him?’ Jane asked warily.

  ‘Very little. He didn’t want to know, when you get right down to it. It’s more what he told me.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Apparently the two men on the train with you were FBI agents but not on the regular roster. Donovan thinks they were part of an old Red Squad that was disbanded in the twenties and just reorganised a year or two ago.’

  ‘Going through our luggage?’

  ‘Yes. Hoover doesn’t like Stephenson much and he absolutely loathes Donovan.’

  ‘I’m getting rather tired of playing politics, Ian.’ Black sighed. ‘We were brought over here for a reason. I’m beginning to think it was all a sham. There’s more going on here than meets the eye, isn’t there?’

  ‘It’s possible. I’m not privy to all the secrets of Colonel Donovan’s motives any more than I am of Mr Stephenson’s, our so-called Quiet Canadian. What I do know is that we tracked down the young man Harte and his minder in Santa Barbara. Both of them are dead. Murdered, but made to look like a suicide. Add to that the fact that our Mr Zarubin of the Washington NKVD has also disappeared and so has our erstwhile friend Popov.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Jane.

  ‘A double agent,’ Fleming explained. ‘A Slav of some sort who went to work for Canaris and the Nazis then turned himself over to our people in London.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure what any of all this has to do with your precious film,’ said Jane.

  ‘There was enough evidence in the house Harte was murdered in to tell us what bank that key of yours is for. The First National Bank of Ventura. It turns out there was a box there registered in the name of Lev Bronstein.’

  ‘Trotsky’s real name,’ said Black. ‘Cheeky of him.’

  ‘The only thing in the box was an empty film can. There was a label on it: The House of Special Purpose. The house where the tsar and his family were allegedly murdered. There was also a small house ransacked in the town, probably the same night as the box was broken into. A dead body was found in the house; the woman who was in charge of safe-deposit boxes at the bank.’ Fleming gave Jane a quick embarrassed look and then turned his attention back to Black. ‘She was autopsied. There were signs of very recent sexual relations. There were also more signs of such activity at the woman’s house.’

  ‘Any idea who was banging her?’ asked Jane flatly.

  Fleming cleared his throat. ‘She was seen with a man in a local restaurant early that evening. The Chinese Gardens Cafe. The contents of the woman’s stomach would also seem to verify that she had recently eaten Chinese food.’

  ‘Who was the man?’ asked Jane.

  ‘From the description it sounds very much like Vassili Zarubin.’

  ‘So he killed Harte and his minder as well as the woman in Ventura?’

  ‘It looks that way.’

  ‘Then who killed the two FBI agents on the train?’ asked Jane. ‘He couldn’t have been in two places at once.’

  ‘We have no idea,’ Fleming said. ‘He’s still at large.’

  ‘Along with Zarubin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what are we suppos
ed to do now?’ asked Jane.

  ‘That’s up to both of you. You can withdraw from the assignment or continue.’

  ‘That sounds like a trick answer,’ said Jane.

  Black made a snorting sound. ‘This is where I stepped onto this wretched roundabout two years ago.’ He looked at Fleming hard. ‘How much choice do we have in this matter?’

  ‘That’s hard to say. Neither of you has any official capacity in this situation at all. There is no record of Detective Inspector Black’s flight to the United States nor of his leaving the Special Operations Executive training school at Beaulieu Abbey. As far as United Air Lines is concerned, the return portion of the ticket purchased on Jane’s behalf by Mr Noel Busch was simply left unused. After the funeral of your late sister you simply disappeared.’

  ‘And if I reappear again is up to me, right?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘What exactly are we supposed to do?’ asked Black. ‘Other than be taken for fools?’

  ‘According to what you told me on the telephone about your meeting with Miss Budberg, and her follow-up phone call, you are now legitimate aspirants to the ownership of Mr Levitsky’s film. At one point it seemed to Colonel Donovan and Mr Stephenson that we might simply, er, appropriate the footage, so to speak. It now seems that such an event is unlikely so we wish you to take part in the auction for it.’ He reached into his inside jacket pocket and withdrew a business-size buff envelope. ‘To that end I have here a draft drawn on the Westminster Bank in London in the amount of two hundred thousand pounds.’

  ‘And if the price goes above that amount?’ said Black, secretly stunned by the amount.

  ‘You have the promise of matching funds from Colonel Donovan’s people.’

  ‘This whole thing has been moved to Hawaii,’ Jane said.

  ‘So you said.’ Fleming reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out a blue, white and red ticker folder with the familiar winged world symbol of Pan American Airways printed on it. He handed the folder to Black. ‘Two tickets on the Honolulu Clipper, as requested.’ He paused. ‘They were hell to get, believe me. Everything’s booked solid for the holiday season. Even the Matson Line ships are all filled right up until Christmas and New Year’s. Bloody lucky you two are.’