The Second Assassin

by Paul Christopher

  ‘What would you know about it?’ the woman answered hotly, her own accent broadening. ‘I live in a country that’s been torn in two and lies bleeding for no good reason except for the fact that men like your Sir James want it to be that way.’

  Foxworth smiled. ‘We fought our own civil war a while back, Miss Connelly, and by and large we’ve come to terms with the results of it.’ He paused. ‘You have the slightest idea what your friend Russell is up to in this country?’

  ‘Fundraising, the same as it was when he came before.’

  ‘Not this time, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Mr Foxworth…’. Paget cautioned.

  Foxworth ignored him. ‘The information passed along by Ridder is a complete schedule of the movements of the King and Queen of England while they’re in the United States from the time they cross at Niagara Falls until they leave again, as well as several contact telephone numbers for people who can help him get hold of what he needs in the way of making bombs.’ He nodded across the table to Holland and Barry. ‘These people also have information that leads us to believe that Russell intends to assassinate the king and queen and if our president happens to be standing next to them well so much the better.’ Foxworth paused. ‘As you well know, Mr Roosevelt is no friend to your precious Cause.’

  The woman sat there, a stunned expression on her face, already ashen. ‘You’re lying,’ she whispered after a long moment.

  ‘Why would I do that?’ Foxworth asked gently. ‘What would I have to gain?’

  ‘And what do we gain by giving her this information?’ Paget snapped.

  ‘Perhaps her cooperation,’ Foxworth suggested.

  ‘Not from the likes of her.’

  She picked up the Ronson and lit another cigarette. Holland leaned towards her. ‘He’s going to kill them, Sheila, and probably some others as well. Russell and his lot are working with Hitler’s people to keep the Yanks out of the war. They think somewhere along the line there’s going to be a quid pro quo. You’ve got to believe me.’

  ‘That’s what you all say. Even them,’ Connelly answered, drawing hard on the cigarette. ‘“You’ve got to believe us, Sheila, for the Cause.” “Sean died for the Cause.” My poor bloody parents died for the Cause.’ She stabbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘Well may the good Lord Himself curse the fecking Cause. I’ve had enough. I’m done. Put me in one of your jails and let me rot because it’d be better than a life fighting for the Cause.’ She looked around the table. ‘I’m just so bloody tired of it all.’ Tears were streaming down her cheeks and the fire in her eyes had fallen to dull embers.

  Watching her closely Barry realised that this was no sudden, miraculous conversion. It wasn’t the first time she’d questioned her life in the IRA and her reasons for living it, nor the hundredth. It was something that had haunted her half her life, a wound that never had a chance to heal. At that moment his only thought was that he was that chance for her and would be willing to do almost anything for it. Madness!

  Foxworth gave Agent Ellesworth the nod. The FBI agent stood up, gently eased Connelly out of her seat and led her out of the room. Foxworth tapped a pencil on the table in front of him.

  ‘I’m not sure I see the purpose of the little drama we just witnessed,’ said Paget.

  ‘Intelligence gathering,’ Foxworth answered.

  ‘And just what is it that you think we’ve all learned?’

  ‘That she’s human,’ Barry said tightly, ignoring Paget’s sour look. ‘That she’s vulnerable.’

  ‘And what possible difference does that make to the situation at hand?’

  Foxworth smiled. ‘It means that she can be used.’

  * * *

  It was getting dark by the time Jane climbed up out of the subway. Most of the shops were closed and the street lights were already flickering on. It was the weekend so the Flatiron Building was dark but the Walgreens was still open and lit up. She crossed Fifth, ducked under the striped canopy and went into the drugstore.

  She ignored the leers from a couple of cab hacks having dinner at the lunch counter, picked up a tin of Golden Bear cookies in case she got hungry later on and then asked Ricky the soda jerk to make her up a Dixie of coffee. Ricky had a heart-rending crush on her and she always tipped him double and gave him her best smile, even though he had a farmer’s field of pimples on his forehead and God knew where else. Let the kid have a few furious dreams – if she could boost his confidence a little, why not? She carried her purchases back across Fifth and let herself into her own, dark building, juggling her keys, the coffee container and the bag with her fattening can of bridge assortment inside.

  Riding up in the cranky, clanking elevator she tried to put the puzzle pieces together once again, trying to keep the sadness down and concentrate on the facts. Howie the low-end Mob lawyer led to Shalleck the high-end Mob lawyer, who in turn led to one of Joe Kennedy’s companies and that in turn fit in with Bushy’s proposition that the Democrats were involved in whatever was going on, which also fit in with a Democrat police commissioner warning off one of his homicide detectives from anything to do with Howie. Full circle but what a far-reaching circle it was and even with the pieces all put together what the hell was the picture she was looking at?

  The elevator came to a thumping halt and Jane made her way down the gloomy corridor as much by habit as by sight. Reaching her office door she put the paper bag and the coffee cup down on the floor, took her keys out of her shoulder bag and unlocked the door. She bent down, retrieved the paper bag and the Dixie full of coffee, turning sideways to push open the door with her shoulder.

  As the door opened the string wrapped around the inside knob took up the slack, tightening through the small eyebolt that had been screwed into the jamb, the taut string in turn jerking the pull ring out of the homemade spring-loaded striker that had been pushed into a half-pound charge of safecracker’s explosive left on Jane’s desk. The striker, jury-rigged from a piece of copper tubing and the firing pin of an old Remington automatic pistol, smacked down onto a .38-caliber percussion cap, which in turn set off the main charge.

  Jane’s brain barely had time to register what was going on before she was mercifully knocked unconscious. The massive concussion from the explosion blew the door back into her face, throwing her forcibly across the corridor and slamming her into the far wall, the Dixie of coffee and the contents of the ruptured can of Golden Bear cookies spattering Jane, the ceiling and the corridor wall with a sugary yellow-brown paste that acted like glue on the cloud of bloody, iridescent blue and green feathers that filled the air like a whirling blizzard of multi-coloured snow. Her skirt was torn to shreds, her Real-Silks actually vaporised off her legs and her eyebrows were singed off along with half an inch of her hair.

  A few seconds later the remains of Ponce de Leon the parrot began to settle to the floor and the ear-splitting thunder of the exploding bomb was replaced by the rising crackle of small flames. Beyond the demolished office there was the distant, tinkling echo of shattered window glass striking the Belgian-block pavement on the street half a dozen floors below.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Thursday, June 1, 1939

  Jasper, Alberta, Canada

  As far as the king’s assistant secretary, Tommy Lascelles, was concerned, the royal tour across Canada had been an unqualified success from almost every perspective, at least so far. In the end, rather than using a Cunard vessel, it had been decided that a Canadian liner, the Empress of Australia, would be used as the royal yacht on the outward journey while its sister ship, the Empress of Britain, would be used for the return trip. The day after the Empress of Britain arrived in Montreal carrying Barry, Holland, Herr Ridder and Sheila Connelly, it went back down the St Lawrence to Halifax for a month-long refit to royal standards.

  The tour began in Portsmouth on May 6 as the king, queen and the royal retinue boarded the white-painted ship to begin their journey, their leave-taking witnessed from the royal family enclosure on shore by Q
ueen Mary, the king’s mother, the dukes of Kent and Gloucester and their duchesses, the Princess Royal and her husband and members of the royal household and local dignitaries and officers. Neither Princess Elizabeth nor Princess Margaret was accompanying their parents on the tour, although both children were there to see their parents off.

  Although the original reason for using a commercial liner had supposedly been to save any fighting ships of the line from leaving England’s defence, the cruisers H.M.S. Repulse, H.M.S. Glasgow and H.M.S. Southampton accompanied the Empress out into the Atlantic. After the third day at sea the Repulse turned back for England but the other two cruisers remained as a royal escort.

  Shortly after reaching the mid-Atlantic the weather began to worsen, first with dense fog, then with roving ice fields and bergs, all of which the king recorded on the new Kodak movie camera he’d purchased for the tour. Eventually though, after eleven days rather than the scheduled six, the Empress of Australia reached Wolfe’s Cove and Quebec City.

  After a gruelling day of sightseeing, presentations and processions, the royal entourage enjoyed a lavish banquet at the Chateau Frontenac Hotel and then made an early night of it, even though thousands of well-wishers kept a cheering vigil around the hotel until the early hours of the morning. After a simple private breakfast the king and queen then travelled by car to the royal train, which was waiting for them at Quebec Station.

  The train consisted of twelve cars, five of which were coaches, all painted royal blue and silver. The two rear coaches each bore the royal crest and were designated Car 1 and Car 2. Both coaches were usually used by the Canadian governor general, Lord Tweedsmuir, better known to the reading public as the thriller writer John Buchan, whose novel The Thirty-nine Steps had been made into an exciting and popular film by Alfred Hitchcock several years before.

  Car 1, at the very rear of the train, contained the two main bedrooms, the king’s decorated in blue and white chintz, the queen’s in blue-grey with dusty pink damask chair covers and curtains to match. There was also an oak-panelled office for the king, dressing rooms, a private bath for both royals, a sitting room with a radio and a small library. In Car 2 there were two bedrooms for senior staff, as well as offices, dressing rooms and bathrooms.

  Farther forward there were living and working quarters for MacKenzie King, the Canadian prime minister.

  The remaining cars were given over to accommodation for roughly fifty people, including members of the royal entourage, the prime minister’s staff, stenographers, railway workers, maids and valets, as well as the king and queen’s personal bodyguards, a contingent of Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the commissioner of the entire RCMP, Stuart Wood. Two baggage cars were filled to overflowing with literally hundreds of wardrobe changes for Their Royal Highnesses.

  Pulling the train was the enormous Canadian Pacific Locomotive 2850 equipped with a massive stainless-steel Hudson engine refitted for the occasion. The locomotive had been dressed in royal blue, silver and gold with imperial crowns attached to the running boards and the royal coat of arms emblazoned over the headlight. Although rated and tested at over eighty-five miles per hour on the tracks it would utilise, the train would rarely exceed thirty-five miles per hour on the outward leg of the trip from Quebec City to Vancouver, except during the night.

  Running half an hour ahead of the royal train at all times was the very ordinary-looking pilot train that housed the radiomen, extra RCMP officers, post office, telegraph and telephone officials, a special darkroom for photographers and film crews and accommodations for more than sixty-five correspondents. Most of the newspapermen were also aware that the pilot train itself was a safety and security precaution for the royal party, which was pointed out in a story filed from the train to the New York Times:

  If a bridge fails, if a freight train gets shunted onto the main line or somebody leaves a bomb on the track it will be 30 minutes before the train bearing King George VI and Queen Elizabeth across Canada this week comes upon the wreckage of its pilot train and the mangled bodies of the correspondents and photographers who are covering Their Majesties’ trip.

  For the next two weeks, with the royal train as home and refuge, the royal couple rumbled across the country, avoiding controversy with the fascist-loving mayor of Montreal, exhausting their bodyguards and the RCMP protective contingent by breaking every security rule in Ottawa when the queen suddenly decided to mix with the crowd around the new war memorial they were dedicating, meeting the Dionne quintuplets and dedicating a new horse race, the King’s Plate at Woodbine racetrack in Toronto.

  In Winnipeg they endured a downpour, soaked to the skin in their open Packard limousines, and a daunting radio speech of eight hundred agonisingly enunciated words on the occasion of the king’s grandmother, Queen Victoria’s birthday. In Manitoba the king and queen received two elk heads and two black beaver pelts in lieu of the ancient rent demanded by King Charles II of the Hudson’s Bay Company and it was estimated by one of the newspapermen that the king had shaken three thousand hands and would shake ten thousand more before the tour was ended.

  Somewhere along the way the king was made Great Chief Albino of the Blackfoot Duck Clan and then they were into the mountains, eventually reaching the small resort town of Banff with its huge, chateau-style hotel, the Banff Springs, where they listened to a fifteen- hundred-voice children’s choir sing ‘Springtime in the Rockies,’ walked alone briefly by the banks of the Bow River and then had buffalo steak for dinner. Several quiet comments were made that the king seemed to be exhausted.

  After a day’s rest in Banff they continued west to the Pacific and by first light on Monday the twenty-ninth they were out of the mountains and into the Fraser Valley. By ten in the morning the royal train reached the Canadian Pacific Railway station by the docks in downtown Vancouver. There was a brief welcoming ceremony at the new and faintly totalitarian Art Deco City Hall, a visit to a veterans hospital and the University of British Columbia and then a luncheon at another one of the CPR’s chateau-style hotels, the Hotel Vancouver. Then they crossed the newly built Lions Gate Bridge, where they joined the CPR vessel Princess Marguerite docked at the foot of the bridge on the opposite shore. By the time the small ship, briefly transformed into the royal yacht, reached Victoria, the king had rested sufficiently to attend to his duties, enduring another round of receptions and gatherings, including yet another lavish luncheon in yet another lavish CPR hotel, this time the ivy-covered Empress.

  Given the king’s speech problem, even the briefest addresses given at these receptions tended to be nerve-racking, especially for Tommy Lascelles, who did most of the speech writing. When a newsreel crew suddenly appeared in the Empress dining room, bathing the head table with their hot lights, Lascelles was furious, terrified that the king would be seized by one of his attacks of nerves, especially since this particular speech was being broadcast by radio. In fact the king carried the speech off without a single moment’s stuttering and was quite proud of his performance, demanding a recording of it for a souvenir, which was promptly made for him.

  The following day they left Victoria, travelled back to Vancouver and drove by motor car to New Westminster, where they boarded the royal train again, this time travelling on Canadian National Railway tracks and drawn by a Canadian National locomotive. Travelling through the remainder of the day and all the next night they arrived for a day of rest in Jasper, Alberta, early on the morning of Thursday, June 1.

  A general order for privacy was published, restricting the newsfilm operators and photographers from following the royals, who, by noon, were firmly ensconced in Outlook Cabin, an adjunct to the much larger Jasper Park Lodge. While the king ran off a few hundred more feet of home movie film, the queen picked flowers and the rest of the party from both the pilot train and the royal train generally took a day off, occupying themselves with fishing or swimming or tennis or golf.

  Sitting in his drawing room compartment on the royal train, Tommy Lascelles was far from
relaxed, even with a majestic mountain view to be seen in every direction. In his mind the Canadian portion of the tour was almost without interest; the country was a loyal dominion, bound to England by hundreds of ties and treaties, not to mention, with the exception of Quebec, popular favour and patriotism.

  Lascelles was well aware that England was on the verge of war but throughout the tour so far it had been the wee Scots girl from Glamis Castle who’d dominated everything, deciding which speeches ‘Dear Bertie’ should give and where, stepping forward into the limelight, supposedly in an attempt to combat her husband’s shyness and often making naive statements about the present political situation around the world.

  There had already been a few reflections of this in the American press, including a pair of inflammatory articles in Time and Newsweek saying that the whole purpose of the visit was to draw first Roosevelt and then the people of the United States into what was clearly going to be an unpopular war with Germany. The king and queen would only be in the United States for five days but that could easily be enough time for opinions to polarise, especially if there were mistakes made by one royal or the other.

  For the past hour he’d been trying to put his thoughts down in his journal but the entry was bleak, with the possible exception of the rumour going up and down the train that he was on the King’s List and up for a knighthood. After all the years he’d put in to the Windsor family it seemed like a fair enough exchange.

  There was a short, rapping knock on the door to his compartment.

  ‘Enter.’

  Stuart Wood, the tall, powerful-looking commissioner of the RCMP ducked into the room. It was one of the few times Lascelles had seen the man out of his scarlet, heavily medalled uniform. The commissioner had what appeared to be a sheaf of yellow telegraph tear sheets in his hand. Lascelles gestured to the banquette on the other side of his portable table and Wood sat down, letting out a long breath. Lascelles offered his tin of Senior Service and both men lit up.