The Second Assassin

by Paul Christopher

  ‘The company represents large business interests that might be hurt if the United States becomes involved in a foreign war. Several of the larger oil concerns have contracts with Germany, as does International Telephone and Telegraph.’

  ‘Is this man Dulles directly involved himself?’ asked Barry.

  ‘We won’t know until we talk to the clerk.’

  ‘Well,’ Jane said, ‘at least it confirms that the killer is going to make his attempt at the fair.’

  ‘Was going to,’ answered Warren. ‘I doubt he’ll even make the attempt now. He’ll know he’s been compromised. We’ve got the contact, it won’t be long before we have him.’ Warren smiled confidently. ‘That is, if he’s foolish enough to remain in New York.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Jane. ‘Call off the dogs? This guy’s a professional killer. What makes you think he’s going to give up so easily?’

  ‘Common sense,’ said Warren, lighting his pipe. ‘A fox doesn’t run towards the hounds, he runs away.’

  ‘This is no foxhunt,’ said Jane. ‘I don’t see what’s changed. He had to know the security around the king and queen was going to be tight from the minute he took on the job but that didn’t seem to stop him. How much tighter can you make it?’

  ‘I’m afraid I agree with Miss Todd,’ said Barry. ‘We may have deflected his method of getting into the fair but that’s all. The only thing we know about him is his name, and that’s probably phoney as well.’

  ‘That’s not quite true,’ said Jane. ‘According to Foxworth all three of the cars mentioned in that telephone call belong to night-shift workers at the fair. The Hamner guy is a janitor with the fair administration office, Wurts is a watchman at the National Cash Register exhibit and Benuki has some kind of job sterilising the equipment in the Borden Building, the one where the cows go around in a circle all day.’

  ‘Not much to go on,’ said Warren.

  ‘Better than nothing,’ Jane replied.

  ‘Do they have anything in common other than being night workers?’ Barry asked.

  ‘Not that we can tell,’ said Warren, shaking his head. ‘Two live in Queens, the other lives in Brooklyn.’

  ‘Cars,’ said Jane, snapping her fingers. ‘It’s the cars.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Warren asked.

  ‘All three of them have cars. Our killer had their plate numbers.’

  ‘I still don’t see what you’re getting at.’

  ‘Think about it. This guy isn’t wandering around New York idly jotting down the licence plate numbers of random cars. He saw those plates at the fair. That means all three of them drive to work and park on the grounds. They don’t take the subway.’

  ‘So what?’ asked Warren, obviously irritated.

  Barry nodded to himself. ‘He needs a motor car because he’s taking something into the fair too large or too heavy to bring with him on the Tube.’

  ‘A weapon,’ said Jane. ‘It has to be.’ She turned to Warren. ‘Get Foxworth on the horn. We have to get out to the fair now.’

  ‘Even if what you say is true Their Royal Highnesses won’t arrive until noon tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re missing the point,’ said Jane.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The guys he was interested in are night workers. One way or the other he’s going to be on the grounds tonight. He’s not going to be going through the turnstiles with all the rubes tomorrow.’

  ‘He’s setting up a hide,’ offered Barry. ‘We used to do it all the time in the trenches. Find your vantage point the night before, dig yourself in, wait for the target to appear in daylight.’

  ‘These aren’t the trenches, Inspector Barry. This is New York City.’

  ‘The same rules apply,’ Jane insisted. ‘We’ve got to get out there, find out where he’s lying up.’

  Warren stood up from behind the desk. ‘The same rules do not apply, Miss Todd, and no one is going out to the fair tonight. You in particular.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind.’

  ‘No,’ said Warren bluntly. ‘I’m following procedure. Inspector Barry and Miss Connelly have already put us into a terribly embarrassing position regarding Sean Russell – we’re not about to make the same mistake twice. Not you, Inspector Barry or Miss Connelly has any official status at all. Assistant Director Foxworth and I are in agreement. You will remain here until the king and queen are safely back on their train and leaving the country, is that clear?’

  ‘If we don’t have any official status you don’t have any jurisdiction,’ said Jane.

  ‘I really wouldn’t try and test that hypothesis if I were you, Miss Todd.’ The dark-haired diplomat came out from behind the desk. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me.’

  Jane moved back a step and let Warren go past and leave the room.

  ‘Well,’ said Barry, ‘that would appear to be that.’ He slumped down into a chair in the corner of the office.

  ‘Like hell it is,’ Jane said. She went around behind the desk and picked up the telephone. ‘Let me make a call and see what I can do.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Friday, June 9, 1939

  New York World’s Fair

  With the coming of darkness the fair became something more than the gaudy, primary-coloured exhibition of the daylight hours. As night fell the crowds thinned dramatically, the broad walkways and avenues almost empty, the soaring architecture of the buildings and exotic temples becoming more like the strangely lit and oddly serene ruins of some future age mysteriously brought back into the past. Strangely, for a fair that presumed to encompass the entire world, there was a sameness to it all, as though it came from the vision of a single mind, colours seen by a single eye.

  Nothing seemed real. Fountains lit from within turned water into white, liquid marble; trees were bathed with light from invisible miniature spotlights at the base of their trunks that turned their bottoms rich green, their leaves and branches deep blue. Aircraft warning lights blinked on the Trylon, four on each face and one at the summit. Strangest of all, cloudscapes projected on the face of the Perisphere slowly revolved while ethereal otherworldly music played, a single amplified length of piano wire vibrating in an almost ominous cosmic wind.

  From one side of the fair to the other it was the same: Big Joe, the stainless-steel worker on a seventy-nine-foot-high tower in front of the tomblike Soviet pavilion, was bathed in light as red as blood; the zigzag lightning bolt spire of the General Electric Building flashed hugely in yellow and white, while the flared, Venetian blind fins of the triangular Petroleum Building glowed sapphire blue in the deepening night. The scale of everything was overwhelming; the human visitors were reduced to small strolling shadows in the darkness.

  It was the darkness John Bone craved. Dressed in the dead FBI agent’s suit and driving his Ford instead of Leo Hamner’s Dodge, the assassin drove north through Brooklyn and then east along Horace Harding Boulevard to the fair. Turning off Horace Harding at the newly built cloverleaf he drove a few hundred yards along the Grand Central Parkway extension, following the amber lights that took him to the entrance gate at Fountain Lake. He showed Agent Gordon’s badge and identification to the guard, explaining that he was on official business.

  ‘This king thing tomorrow, right?’ said the young man, smiling.

  ‘Can’t really talk about it,’ Bone answered but he smiled and gave the guard a wink.

  ‘Gotcha,’ the kid said and winked back, holding up his thumb and index finger like a gun and clicking his tongue. He waved Bone on through the gate. The assassin turned left onto Orange Blossom Lane, dark and deserted now, then turned right into the small parking lot to one side of the Florida Exhibit a hundred yards farther on. The Spanish-style building with its palm trees and carillon tower was one of the fair’s orphans, an exhibit placed out of its theme area, in this case a state exhibit in the Entertainment Zone rather than with its sister states on Rainbow Avenue or Lincoln Square.

  Working swiftly in the
darkness, Bone stripped off the FBI agent’s clothes, revealing Leo Hamner’s dark blue overalls underneath. He reached back behind the driver’s seat, pulled out Leo’s tall gumboots and slipped them on. Changed, he climbed out of the car, unlocked the trunk and took out the canvas duffel bag from Lavan’s gun shop. He locked the car, pocketed the keys then headed back along the wide sidewalk to the maintenance workers’ dock at the edge of Fountain Lake. There were a half dozen wooden flatboats tied up, each one powered by a small Electrol twelve-volt outboard.

  There was a security guard dozing in a canvas deck chair at the end of the dock, a thermos and a lunchbox beside him. ‘Who’s that?’ he called out without bothering to get out of his chair.

  ‘Leo,’ Bone answered, keeping his voice low.

  ‘You’re early,’ said the guard.

  ‘Yeah,’ Bone answered, and that was all there was to it. The guard slumped back into his chair and Bone eased the canvas bag down into the nearest boat, undid the line then stepped down into the boat, positioning himself in the transom seat. Using Leo’s keys he found the one with the Electrol lightning bolt, turned it in the ignition slot of the motor and headed out into the lake. Had the guard questioned him more closely Bone would have used the silenced Browning again and taken the body with him across the lake to be disposed of later.

  Three hundred yards ahead of him were the glittering lights of the amusement area midway, with everything from the gigantic roller coaster screening Frank Buck’s Jungleland with its chicken-wire-and-stucco volcano to girlie shows designed by Salvador Dali and bare-naked ladies frozen in giant blocks of ice. Even from the far side of the lake Bone could hear the rumble and roar of the roller coaster and the raucous come-hither music from the sideshows.

  As he neared the middle of the artificial lake he veered slightly to avoid the jutting pipes of the fountain jets and the fireworks barges waiting for the midnight show. To his left, on the western shore, he could see the amphitheatre of the Billy Rose Aquacade, dark now until the eight thirty performance, while to his far right there was only darkness. Somewhere over there was the fair’s end, vacant spoiled ground, old drainage pipes and construction materials, a tall fence and beyond that the real world and streets of Queens County. He was getting close to the opposite shore of the lake and he made some small adjustments with the rudder lever, aiming the blunt prow of the flatboat at a rectangle of darkness that marked the entrance to the lake’s outlet into the concrete floodway of the Flushing River. Letting the boat find its own way for a few moments he pulled open the drawstring of the duffel and took out the shapeless U.S. Rubber raincape he’d purchased at Macy’s sporting goods department after choosing the lie. He dropped it over his head, pulled up the hood then took hold of the engine tiller once again.

  Silently the flatboat slipped under the bridge that led from the concert hall to the amusement area and Bone found himself gliding down the narrow waterway, music and screams from the roller coaster and parachute jump on the right mixing with the chatter and bang of the chained rifles in the shooting galleries on the left. A shadow on the water loomed and he steered around it – the permanently moored canal boat beside the outdoor Heineken beer garden with its electrically operated windmill and its clog-footed waitresses in full Dutch dress. No one seemed to notice as he passed by on the dark water. Another hundred feet and he reached the second bridge spanning the river.

  * * *

  ‘I gotta be out of my mind doing this,’ said Dan Hennessy, pulling away from the rear entrance to the Plaza. He was driving an unmarked police department Chevrolet instead of his own car, with Jane Todd and Thomas Barry sitting beside him on the wide front seat.

  ‘Out of your mind if you don’t,’ Jane answered. ‘I’m going to make you into a hero, Danny boy.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a hero. I just want to get my pension and I’m about to lose it because of a weird broad who wears pants half the time.’ The New York cop checked the traffic, then swung up Fifth Avenue. Reaching Fifty-ninth Street he turned right and headed for the Queensborough Bridge approaches. ‘What about the Irish dame we left back at the hotel? She going to run out on us? Leave us in the lurch?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Barry. ‘She could have done that any number of times over the past days.’

  Jane lit up a Lucky and handed the pack to the Scotland Yard man. ‘She’s our hole card, Dan. But it’s a good thing you got a man on her. Our British friend here thinks the world of her but he’s thinking with something other than his brains, if you know what I mean.’

  Barry shifted in his seat but Jane could feel the heat coming off him. She knew she’d taken one step too far and could have kicked herself.

  ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Barry quietly.

  ‘She’d better hang on to the affidavit you all signed,’ Hennessy warned. ‘If things screw up, that’s all we’ve got.’ It had taken the New York detective the better part of an hour to get things organised and drive up to the Claremont. In that time Jane had banged out a ten-page affidavit on the battered old Royal typewriter in the Claremont office. She, Barry and Sheila Connelly had all signed it; then Jane had sealed it in an envelope and dripped red candle wax over the flap for good measure. In the event that they were arrested or otherwise detained over the next thirty-six hours, Sheila, with the help of Pelay and Bill Hartery, the Plaza house dick, was to see that the affidavit was put into the hands of Noel Busch at Newsweek. As extra security Hennessy had left a cop with her in the room.

  It was a rough document without a lot of detail but what detail Jane had written down was damning. In effect it said that there was a high-level conspiracy to assassinate the king and queen, involving people in business as well as government, and that for various reasons the conspiracy was being not only ignored but covered up for the sake of political expediency.

  ‘Who knows?’ Hennessy said and shrugged. ‘Maybe she’s already torn the stupid affidavit up and is setting sail for the old sod even as we speak.’

  ‘I seriously doubt that,’ said Barry, holding his temper. They hit the bridge, the wheels thrumming noisily. ‘She’ll never go home again. There’s nothing for her there now except a bullet in the head.’

  ‘Unless she was part of it right from the beginning. Christ, they’ll give her a medal for leading you people around by the nose like she did.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Barry answered flatly.

  ‘You think that just because you’re dizzy for her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He means you’re infatuated with her and she’s maybe pulling the wool over your baby blues,’ said Jane. ‘Think that could make some sense? Any other ideas on why someone who looks as good as her would fall for someone like you?’ They were passing over Welfare Island, the asylum dark below them, its central tower darker than the air around it, like a black hole in the night. She still hadn’t gone to see Annie since the bombing, telling herself there hadn’t been any time, knowing it was a lie, knowing she was more concerned with herself and her fears than with her sister. She knew she was a complete mess because she’d also been wondering about what Wolf the lawyer had said. How much of this was really for her memories of Howie and how much was for the brass ring she’d grab if she managed to get an exclusive on the story unfolding around her?

  They reached the end of the bridge and drove through the bright lights and bustle of Queens Plaza before heading down Northern Boulevard into the deeper darkness of the semi-rural area, their headlights grazing the sides of tumbledown farm buildings and roughly made greenhouses.

  ‘I thought I saw a sign back there written in Chinese,’ said Barry, looking back over his shoulder. ‘Is that possible?’

  Hennessy laughed. ‘This is New York, pally, Anything’s possible.’

  ‘There’s a lot of Chinese farmers out here,’ Jane explained. ‘They grow special vegetables for the restaurants on Pell Street.’

  ‘I still don’t know what it is we’re going to
accomplish with this little jaunt,’ said Hennessy a moment later. ‘Other than me losing my job, that is.’ He shook his head wearily. ‘Every cop on the force is going to be lining the parade route tomorrow, you have to get a special ticket to go into your own building if it’s on the way and they’re putting shooters on every roof. On top of that the feds have everything else covered while this king guy and his wife are there.’ He turned to Jane. ‘You said yourself that Foxworth put a plug in the guy’s plans with that phone tap.’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ said Jane. ‘Warren from the State Department and Foxworth think they’ve scared our man off.’

  ‘And you don’t believe it, right?’

  ‘No. He’s supposed to be the best in the world. He’s got to have some other plan to go to if one doesn’t work out.’

  ‘And you don’t have the slightest idea what that plan would be, do you?’

  ‘We know he needed to get in there at night. All three of the people he asked about were night workers.’

  ‘What else?’

  Jane nodded towards Barry. ‘Our Limey friend says he’ll be within a couple of hundred yards of the British pavilion.’

  ‘Because you figure that’s where he’ll make the hit?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Barry. ‘From what I understand there are no speeches or presentations planned, nothing out in the open anyway. The only time he’ll have a stationary target is outside the pavilion.’

  ‘If the killer is there at all.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Barry, ‘if the killer is there at all.’

  ‘Is he going to be there?’

  ‘I think so.’ The Scotland Yard man nodded. ‘He may assume that Foxworth and Warren will do exactly what they have done – stand down their alert.’ He shrugged. ‘As far as they’re concerned, Russell has been dealt with and the second assassin’s plan has been compromised. From the killer’s point of view it may be a very different story. Presumably there is a great deal of money at stake. He won’t give up if he thinks he stands a reasonable chance of completing his assignment and getting paid.’