The House of Special Purpose

by Paul Christopher

  ‘Would I lie to you?’ Without pausing she turned a little to her left and emptied the Smith & Wesson into a row of green boxes to the left of where Yurovsky was standing then hit the floor, praying that the heavy table between her and the film would protect her. A split second later the lab of Passport to Paradise turned into a Roman candle.

  * * *

  It took three hours for the Honolulu Fire Department to dig Jane out of the remains of the building and the only reason they looked at all was because Morris Black insisted. At one point, when they were about to give up looking, Black called in Richard Shivers from the FBI to add his weight to things and by four o’clock in the afternoon they finally reached her, angry, hungry, thirsty, covered in soot and stinking of 150-year-old whale sperm. According to the firemen who finally reached her, the only thing that saved her life was the heavy table between her and the exploding film, as well as the fact that the force of the explosion blew her down through the rotting floor and into the basement.

  When they finally had a hole in the rubble big enough to talk through, Black went down. Beside him a fireman crawled down into the hole to see if her legs were pinned or if she had any broken bones.

  ‘You think Napoleon really had three balls?’ she murmured, her ears still ringing.

  ‘You’d have to ask Josephine,’ said Black, wondering not for the first time at the strange intricacies of the American female mind.

  Jane spent a day in the hospital even though she insisted there was nothing wrong with her. According to the newspapers and radio, everyone was in shock at the sudden attack by the Japanese and horrified by how successful they had been. She actually heard Roosevelt’s ‘Day of Infamy’ speech over the radio and knew that the die was cast. It was a world war now, not just a European one. The United States could no longer hide behind its isolating oceans; yesterday had proved that.

  On Tuesday morning Jane was released and she and Black went immediately to the docks and boarded the Dutch liner Jagersfontein, inbound to San Francisco from Java and the South China Sea, where it had barely escaped without being captured or sunk by Japanese forces. It was now being used as a civilian evacuation transport and as a hospital ship for seriously injured soldiers and sailors.

  Standing by the port rail as the tugs took the Jagersfontein out into the channel, Jane could still see smoke pouring up from Pearl Harbor. ‘So I guess we’re more than just kissing cousins now, Morris. Full-fledged allies.’

  ‘Hitler’s declaring war on the United States today. I think he’d rather not have done it but the Japanese forced his hand.’

  ‘He’ll regret it,’ said Jane.

  Black nodded. ‘Yes, I think he will.’

  ‘Whatever happened to the Southern Cross and all those people?’

  ‘She’s gone now, of course. Probably limping down to Panama to see to her repairs. Presumably the duchess is still on board. Wenner-Gren and Budberg as well.’

  ‘The others?’

  ‘The German’s been arrested as a spy by Shivers. The Japanese fellow managed to make it back to the consulate. They’ll probably just deport him. Romanov and Vonsiatsky are being held for questioning but I don’t think anything will come of it.’

  ‘And Haas? The one who looked like a bookkeeper?’

  ‘They found a body in the warehouse. It was about Haas’s size but there’s no way to identify it. Might be Levitsky’s for all we know.’

  ‘Yurovsky was going to be on board that Russian freighter. What about him?’

  ‘The Stary Bolshevik? She’d already sailed before the Coast Guard could stop her. Immigration people said they’ll look for him at the San Francisco end but they don’t make any promises.’ He sighed. ‘The whole world’s turned upside down.’

  ‘He’ll kill us if he thinks we’ll divulge his dirty little secret.’

  ‘No, he won’t,’ said Black. ‘He knows as much about that film as we do. He’ll keep our little secrets and we’ll keep his and he knows it.’

  ‘What a mess,’ said Jane. They were out in the main channel now and if not for the men stringing barbed wire up and down the Waikiki beaches it would have looked like any Hawaiian Aloha.

  ‘What about us?’ Jane asked quietly.

  ‘We saw the film. We know what’s on it. That’s enough, I think. Give a letter to a lawyer and threaten to have it sent to the New York Times if anything happens to you. Maybe that will be enough. Other than that I’m sure I’ll be sent off to someplace obscure to sit out the war.’

  ‘I don’t think I meant that.’

  Black gave her a quick glance then carefully turned his face back to the sea. ‘Oh. You mean the other,’ he said, blushing as he always did when the subject of sex came up.

  ‘I don’t do it with everyone, you know. I didn’t just pull your name out of a hat.’

  ‘I know that but I don’t see what we can do about it. Right now we’re ships passing in the night.’

  ‘If Donovan keeps his promise, I’ll be in London as a war correspondent before you know it.’

  ‘And before you know it Stephenson will have me packed off to somewhere in Outer Uzbekistan for the duration. Counting enemy yaks or something.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jane, ‘at least we have a few days before we get to San Francisco.’

  ‘That we do.’ Black smiled.

  There was a long pause. ‘Who said, “War is hell”?’ Jane asked.

  ‘One of yours, actually,’ Black answered. ‘General William Tecumseh Sherman.’

  ‘Well, it still is.’

  ‘And always will be,’ said Black, reaching out to put an arm around her against the chilly breeze blowing in from the east.

  Epilogue

  Thursday, December 25, 1941

  New York City

  Jane Todd stood with her hands in her pockets, ignoring the heavy flakes of snow that were collecting on the shoulders of her coat and in her hair. It was cold and windy and the snow was blowing around noisily with that familiar distant howling sound it made as though this wasn’t New York City at all but somewhere out on the arctic tundra where the only other creatures around were wolves just outside your line of vision waiting to gnaw on your bloody bones.

  She stared down into the small square hole at her feet waiting for Marco, the man who took care of the cemetery, to reappear. Today Marco had been dressed in a boiler suit, heavy boots and a hat, exactly as he’d been six weeks ago when she’d buried Annie’s ashes here. Dear God, was it only six weeks? She felt as though she’d lived an entire lifetime since that day in the rain.

  Jane was already late for her appointment with Donovan but she knew that this had to be done first. She also knew that Black was gone, flown away into some unknown without a trace or a word the moment they arrived back in Washington, just as he had predicted.

  Fleming pled ignorance and wouldn’t say anything except to tell her quietly that, whatever her fears, Morris was safe and in his own way protected from friendly fire. Now it was her turn. Coming to New York, she’d had one of Donovan’s people visit her hotel with exactly what she’d requested: two suitcases full of top-notch photographic gear, a correspondent’s uniform and all the paperwork necessary to prove that she was legally allowed to wear it. She reached her right hand more deeply into her coat pocket and touched the cold metal of the two keys that had been Morris Black’s last gift to her – his flat in Shepherd’s Bush for as long as she liked since he’d have no use for it where he was going, if the Germans didn’t blow it to hell in the meantime.

  He’d given her the keys and kissed her, quite a nice kiss as a matter of fact, and then he’d gone away. She squeezed the keys hard in her pocket and tried not to think about any of it and tried very hard not to cry.

  Marco appeared again, climbing out of the hole, this time empty-handed. He smiled at Jane and tipped his hat and then got about the business of putting the capstone back down over the shaft.

  ‘Did you put it somewhere safe, Marco?’

  ‘Ye
s, yes, very safe.’ The man smiled. ‘With your Annie, where no one else will look or find.’

  Marco and Jane stood together silently for a moment, watching the snow cover up the capstone cover and what lay beneath it. Jane found herself wondering if it would have been any different if Levitsky had been rewinding the negative from head to tail rather than the other way around that day they met in the run-down building on Hotel Street. She decided that it probably didn’t matter a bit. A secret after all was only a secret because someone perceived it to be one. It was really just six feet of film from a long, long time ago.

  She shook Marco’s hand and he tipped his hat to her again and then she said a silent, final goodbye to Annie. When that was done she turned around and walked back down the path through the newly fallen snow, knowing that before very long those footprints would vanish, never to be seen again.

  Author’s Note

  Most of the facts, details and characters described in The House of Special Purpose are real. Alexander Mikhailovitch Levitsky was a real cinematographer and was the cameraman for several major feature-length movies made in Russia during the First World War. He was a friend of Alexander Beloborodov, the chairman of the Ural Regional Soviet, and Beloborodov was in turn a very close friend of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin as well as Lev, or Leon, Trotsky.

  It was Beloborodov who warned Trotsky that he had fallen out of favour and who helped him flee the Soviet Union. In all likelihood it was Beloborodov who got the assignment at the House of Special Purpose for Levitsky, under orders from Lenin. There have always been rumours that a group photograph of the tsar and his family was taken immediately prior to their assassination and given that film cameras and still cameras looked very much alike at the time it would have been easy to confuse the two.

  As far as Levitsky’s escape is concerned, he was last seen boarding the American tramp steamer SS Ida, which, ironically, was covertly taking a large consignment of tsarist gold to the National Bank in San Francisco. It is not known whether Levitsky disembarked in Hawaii or the continental United States but it is known that a Russian cameraman calling himself Mischa Levitt was employed by both Movietone News and Bellevue Pathe during the years 1922 to 1929. A company named Passport to Paradise existed in Honolulu between 1932 and 1941, manufacturing pornographic films and photographs for the local, mostly military market.

  The movements during the summer of 1918 of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, author of British Agent and a number of other books during his tenure as a member of both the British Secret Service and the Foreign Office, are extremely vague and no access is allowed to his correspondence between London and St Petersburg from June, July and August of that year. Equally vague are any references he makes to his relationship with Moura Budberg, even then a known NKVD agent.

  As to Colonel William Donovan, his own movements during that period, which supposedly place him on the Western Front with his men of the Fighting 69th, are as foggy as Lockhart’s. What is known is that Donovan, slightly wounded in the leg, was taken off the line and disappeared for almost two weeks with the 69th’s field chaplain, Father Patrick Duffy. It is also known that Duffy was a member of the State Department’s private secret service and both Duffy and Donovan were ‘special friends’ of the president. It is also a matter of historical fact that Donovan reappeared in Yekaterinburg the following year on a supposed fact-finding mission.

  During the first year of the Coordinator of Information Office more than eighty-seven known members of the American Communist Party were employed by Donovan. Also employed by Donovan in Washington were more than a dozen Soviet agents-in-place, all of them run by the local NKVD Rezident, Vassili Zarubin.

  Although Zarubin was never found on the Stary Bolshevik when it docked in San Francisco, he did reappear in Washington the day before New Year in time to attend the well-known New Year’s Eve party given at the White House.

  Zarubin maintained his position throughout the war and returned to Moscow in 1945. He worked for the KGB until his retirement in 1972 and died peacefully while on a Black Sea holiday in 1983. Between 1945 and 1972 he travelled to the United States on a number of occasions and even visited Disneyland. There is no record that anyone ever discovered his true identity.

  Moura Budberg, whose birth name was Maria Ignatievena Zakrevskaia, was a real spy working for the NKVD both before, during and after the war. She was also lover to Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells, sometimes simultaneously. She was also a close friend of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as well as Axel Wenner-Gren, the well-known Nazi operative. Wenner-Gren later set up a trust that is still in existence and still deals in the ‘anthropological’ aspects of race purity.

  Miss Budberg spent much of her later years in San Francisco and Los Angeles, working peripherally in the motion-picture industry and sometimes as a translator, although her spoken and written knowledge of the Russian language left something to be desired. This might have something to do with the fact that she was actually born in Estonia. She died in Tuscany at the age of eighty-one on October 31, 1974.

  There is no account of the whereabouts of the Duchess of Windsor between November 26 and December 19, 1941. According to the official record at Government House in Nassau, New Providence, the duchess was on a tour of the outer islands on those dates, while her husband the duke stayed home and dealt with official business, some of which involved a submarine kidnap plot against his person.

  The duchess had been forbidden by both Winston Churchill and the king himself from setting foot on Wenner-Gren’s yacht the Southern Cross so, officially at least, she did not travel to Hawaii. The yacht itself was registered as having arrived there on December 4, 1941 and on December 15 it is noted in the harbourmaster’s log that the Southern Cross put in to Panama City for ‘repairs to her superstructure caused by fire.’ Presumably the duchess returned to Nassau incognito, probably out of Mexico or Panama.

  Immediately following the war the Duke and Duchess of Windsor returned to Paris, establishing residence in a large mansion on the Bois de Boulogne. On a number of occasions various dignitaries, including Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Queen Mother, the queen herself as well as Prince Philip and Charles, the young prince of Wales, visited with the duke, pleading with him to either hand over or destroy what came to be called the Cousin’s Film. Their pleas were rejected, as well as their pleas for scores of letters that did nothing to discourage the idea that both the duke and the duchess were deeply involved in Nazi politics. It was even embarrassing to the royal family that both the duke and duchess maintained a friendship with Sir Oswald Mosley, the infamous British blackshirt, until his death. On May 28, 1972, the duke died, followed in 1986 by the duchess herself.

  Within thirty minutes of the Duchess of Windsor’s body being removed from her house in the Bois de Boulogne for trans-shipment to the chapel at Windsor Castle, where her husband already lay, a team of eight ‘cleaners’ from MI6 entered the now-empty house searching for anything resembling a reel of film. It took them less than fifteen minutes to find it in a small lead box hidden under one of the floorboards in the duchess’s bedroom. The lead box was removed, the floorboards replaced and the film taken to the chief archivist at Windsor Castle. It was duly logged into the archives and put away. Unfortunately, or perhaps otherwise if you are a member of the royal family, the film and a number of other unsavoury documents literally went up in smoke during the catastrophic fire at Windsor Castle on the night of November 20, 1992.

  In Hawaii there was a special agent in charge of the FBI unit in Honolulu named John Shivers and he sent repeated reports both to J. Edgar Hoover and the State Department regarding the possibility of a Japanese sneak attack.

  There really was a German spy in Honolulu named Rossler. He was caught on December 8, 1941, tried by a military tribunal and sentenced to death by firing squad. His death sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment in Oahu State Prison, where his only view was the giant pineapple-shaped Dole water tower. />
  One of the most often played songs interspersed between bombing alerts on radio station KGMB really was ‘Three Little Fishies (Itty Bitty Pool).’

  There really was a Dutch cargo liner called the Jagersfontein that put into Honolulu on December 7, 1941 and it was her single anti-aircraft battery that first fired on the Japanese aircraft coming into Pearl Harbor. The Soviet four-thousand-ton freighter Stary Bolshevik was also in port on December 7 but left on that evening’s tide.

  Of all the people who died in the Pearl Harbor attack, forty-eight were civilians, including the youngest, Yaeko Lillian Oda, six. Lieutenant Masaji Suganami, whose cannon shell fragment was responsible for the little girl’s death, was himself killed at 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945, while on leave in the city of Nagasaki. At the time of his death he was having breakfast with his wife, Yumiko, and his two children, Yoshio and Jitsuo, aged seven and nine.

  It is estimated that a total of $750 million in Romanov bullion, cash, stocks, treasury bills and jewels still rests in British, American and Swiss banks.

  As General William Tecumseh Sherman once said, ‘War is hell.’

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks are due to Wes and Lucia and their minions at Contact Editions for all their help in finding some of the more obscure material necessary to make this book work. Thanks also to Noah’s friend Eugene at Bruno’s Deli for supplying the dirty words in Russian; to several Romanovs who would rather remain anonymous; to the man who invented the KGB, STILL WATCHING YOU T-shirts available on most street corners in downtown Moscow; to the kind staff at the Trotsky Museum in Mexico City for supplying photographs of the rabbit hutches (and Trotsky’s favourite recipes for the little beasts); to Elaine and Patrice, who put us up in Paris; and once again with humble gratitude to my editor, Doug Grad, who relentlessly whips me onward towards perfection. And of course, most of all, to Mariea, who puts up with all the vicissitudes of a writer’s life.