Comes the War

by Ed Ruggero

  “Good luck with that,” Harkins said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Gefner said.

  “Until I tell you what happened, all you have is some typed-up bullshit. You’ve got no case, no evidence.”

  “How about a confession?” Sinnott asked. He seemed amused by the tension between Harkins and Gefner.

  “No confession, sir,” Harkins said.

  “Maybe he’ll talk when he’s sober,” Sinnott offered.

  “I’ll be sure to keep you informed,” Harkins said. He turned to Gefner. “Until then, how about you shove those papers up your ass.”

  Sinnott waited a few seconds, then said to Gefner, “Wait in the car for me, Captain. I’ll be there directly.”

  Gefner shot Harkins a dirty look, then turned and walked back to Sinnott’s staff car.

  When he was gone, Sinnott smiled at Harkins. “I heard you were a pisser,” he said. “Used to be a boxer, right?”

  Harkins ignored the question.

  “Why did you call that lawyer in so fast, sir?”

  “I had to let Eighth Air Force know that one of their guys was in custody. The lawyer just came running.”

  “So it was his idea to come out of the gate with charge sheets already written up, before I even had a chance to question the guy? Or did you suggest that he come prepared?”

  “Does it make a difference?” Sinnott asked. “If it was my idea or his?”

  “You asked me to keep you informed about the status of the investigation,” Harkins said. “I can certainly do that, sir, but I need something from you, too.”

  Sinnott looked slightly less amused. “I’m all ears,” he said.

  “I need you to give me a little room to maneuver here. Keep pains-in-the-ass like Gefner off my back for a while.”

  “I’m already doing that,” Sinnott said. “The reason you haven’t seen a CID agent is because I told them Cushing was at another drunk tank.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Let’s call it an honest mistake,” Sinnott said. “If CID takes over the investigation, we’re going to be cut out, and Colonel Haskell, not to mention General Donovan, they aren’t going to like that.”

  Harkins didn’t know the OSS well enough to know if that were true. Did the commanders really want to micromanage an investigation, or is that what Sinnott wanted?

  “I need you to keep me updated.”

  “Yes, sir, though I won’t waste your time giving you hourly reports,” Harkins said.

  Sinnott tilted his head back, arched one eyebrow.

  “I don’t like surprises, Lieutenant. Don’t let me get blindsided by CID or anybody else.”

  “Okay, sir.”

  “There’s already a lot of interest in this case, given Batcheller’s status,” Sinnott said. “It’ll look better for all of us if we wrap this up pronto, with or without CID.”

  “Murder is a hanging crime, so I’m not as interested in how it looks as I am in getting it right.”

  “Sure, sure. I can’t wait to hear what you learn from him when he’s sober,” Sinnott said, walking away.

  “Kind of curious myself,” Harkins said to himself.

  When Sinnott had gone, Harkins turned and signaled Lowell, who’d been waiting by the car.

  “What’s next, sir?” she asked as she approached.

  “Just a minute,” Harkins said, adding to his notes.

  After a few seconds of silence, Lowell said, “That lawyer got here quickly.”

  “How did you know he’s a lawyer?” Harkins asked.

  “Oh, I memorized the insignia American officers wear,” she said. “I like to know who’s in my car.”

  “You ever drive Major Sinnott before?”

  “No, sir,” Lowell said, with just a tiny bit of hesitation.

  “But?”

  “A few of the girls I know have driven for him.” She pressed her lips together, a tight, pale line.

  “Come on,” Harkins said. “You’ve got something to say. Don’t make me drag it out of you.”

  “It’s just that he drinks a lot,” Lowell said. “More than most Yanks. He’s a mean drunk, is what I hear.”

  Harkins closed his notebook and tucked it in his shirt pocket; then he waited. He’d been down this road the previous summer in Sicily, trying to help women forced to deal with shitty men.

  “He ever hurt any of your friends?” Harkins asked.

  “More like he made them uncomfortable. Commented on their appearance, asked if they had husbands or boyfriends, if they dated Yanks, that sort of thing.”

  In her first job, Harkins’ little sister, Aileen, had worked for a man—a married man named Dolan—who suggested that she could trade sex for a raise. Aileen had confided in the two other Harkins sisters, Mary and Saoirse, who told Patrick but tried to keep the secret from Eddie Harkins for fear of what their cop brother might do. Patrick had stopped by the man’s office wearing his Roman collar. The boss had been polite—Patrick, a big man, had also been a boxer and had some authority in their Irish-Catholic neighborhood—but Dolan scoffed at Aileen’s story, claiming that it had been a misunderstanding and that little Aileen, who was only sixteen at the time, was prone to drama.

  Harkins waited a few days before he stopped by to see Dolan, who was in his office with invoices spread across his desk. Another, younger man—Harkins would learn later he was the assistant manager—sat in a straight-backed chair next to the desk. Harkins had changed out of his police blues but still wore his heavy black work shoes.

  “Who are you?” the manager asked.

  By way of an answer Harkins had slapped him, open-handed, on the side of the head, knocking him to the floor. Harkins then strolled around the desk, put one of his shiny cop shoes on the man’s scrotum and applied pressure. The assistant manager scooted from the room like he was on fire.

  Harkins leaned over, because the man’s ears would be ringing and he might not hear the message.

  “You met Aileen’s nice brother the other day,” Harkins said, a conversational tone. “Big priest? A sweet guy, really.”

  He leaned over, put more of his weight on Dolan’s genitals.

  “I’m the mean brother. If there are any more little chats like this, they’ll be with me.”

  The following week Aileen opened her pay envelope to find a raise. Since she was too young to go to a taproom, she invited Patrick for an ice cream soda, sure that his talk with Dolan—the only one she knew about—had straightened things out.

  “So Major Sinnott wants this investigation wrapped up quickly,” Lowell said, snapping Harkins from his reverie.

  “Looks that way.”

  “Where would you like to go next, sir?” Lowell asked.

  “I want to take a look at Batcheller’s rooms,” he said. “See where she lived, maybe find her flatmate.”

  “Should be easy enough,” Lowell said. “And after that?”

  Harkins looked down at his notebook, at the underlined word “Russians,” the most intriguing piece of information he’d kept from Sinnott.

  “We’ll see,” Harkins said. “We’ll see what develops.”

  6

  20 April 1944

  1815 hours

  Colonel Sergei Novikov and his personal secretary, Senior Lieutenant Vladimir Gorodetsky, stood on the sparse grass at the southern edge of Kensington Garden, studying the hatbox shape of Royal Albert Hall, another of London’s famous landmarks.

  “I wonder why the Germans did not destroy this in the Blitz,” Gorodetsky said.

  “Because they believed they would launch a successful invasion,” Novikov said. “Probably wanted to use it for one of their big rallies.”

  “Do you think they were ever capable of crossing the channel?”

  Novikov looked at the young man, a tanker, like himself. Gorodetsky had spent a year in combat and had put in a formal request—two, in fact—for transfer back to the front and the fight with the Germans. It was really the only place for a
patriotic officer; Novikov would eventually have to let him go.

  “The last successful cross-channel invasion was in 1066,” Novikov said. “Back then, William did not have to worry about air cover. Now?”

  “Now, no amphibious operation is possible without mastery of the air,” Gorodetsky said. “The Americans and the British must be at that point by now, don’t you think, Colonel?”

  “Our allies have not shared everything with us, Vladimir; but I suspect you are right. I think they control the skies over France.”

  “So the invasion cannot be far off,” Gorodetsky said. “Do you think they will tell us ahead of time?”

  “Not a chance,” Novikov said, smiling. “But you and I will see the movement to the coast. With all these men and all this equipment, it will look like someone tipped the entire island up on edge, and everything will slide down to the channel. We will know.”

  A voice boomed behind them. “What will you know?”

  Novikov turned to see Colonel Yury Sechin approaching. Gorodetsky came to attention and saluted.

  Novikov touched the brim of his cap with the fingers of his right hand. His left arm had been amputated and the shattered remains of his left eye removed at a field hospital near Kursk the previous summer. He wore an eye patch, like a pirate in an American film. He’d once been handsome—his wife used to tease him, claiming he’d have made a successful gigolo if he’d been born in Paris—and now he was not; but he was alive, while tens of thousands of his former comrades had been plowed into early graves, like the remains of a failed crop.

  “Colonel Sechin,” Novikov said. “Thank you very much for meeting us out here.”

  Novikov smiled; Sechin did not. The rumor among the younger embassy staff was that the new NKVD colonel only smiled when he was torturing someone. Novikov wasn’t sure it was an exaggeration.

  “We were talking about the great fantasy,” Novikov said. “The second front.”

  “This spring,” Sechin said. “Even the fucking British would not dare delay it again. They are too eager to get all these whore-monger Americans off their precious little island.”

  “I am sure you are right,” Novikov said.

  It was all the Soviets could talk about, dream about, obsess over: When would the Allies launch their invasion of the western end of occupied Europe, which would draw German strength away from the Eastern Front? The great Soviet armies had the Germans on the run, but they had bled millions of men and it was still a long way to Berlin and the ultimate destruction of the Third Reich.

  “Give me a cigarette,” Sechin said to Gorodetsky. The aide reached into an inside pocket of his coat, pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes. He shook one loose and held it out to Sechin, who grabbed the whole pack.

  “Decadent American cigarettes,” Sechin said to Gorodetsky. “I will do you a favor and take them off your hands. Do not spend too much time with those butt-fuckers, Lieutenant. You will not be fit to return home.”

  Gorodetsky looked chastened.

  “Wait for me over there,” Novikov said to his secretary, pointing at the path to the Serpentine, the long comma-shaped lake that split the park in two.

  Sechin watched Gorodetsky go, then said to Novikov, “Has he asked to return to the front?”

  “Twice,” Novikov said. “I will have to let him go eventually.”

  “Best not to get too close to our young aides,” Sechin said. “So many of them wind up in shallow graves.”

  Novikov thought of the trenches the combat engineers dug for the dead of his brigade. Many of his men, the ones who died instantly when the German tank-killer rounds punched through their T-34s, did not leave behind enough of a corpse to need a grave.

  “You are in a cheerful mood, comrade,” Novikov said.

  “What the fuck do I have to be cheerful about?” Sechin said. “I spend all day talking to British snobs or American amateurs playing at being soldiers.”

  “How goes your work?” Novikov asked. He smiled when he said it, because he knew Sechin would never give him a straight answer.

  Sechin glanced sideways at Novikov, grunted, then lit a Lucky with a wooden match. Novikov thought about offering him a light from his always-reliable American-made lighter, but didn’t feel like being questioned about where he’d received the gift.

  Sechin came by his paranoia and skepticism honestly. He was the senior officer of the Narodny komissariat vnutrennikh del—the head spymaster at the Soviet Embassy, recently arrived from Moscow to recruit disaffected government functionaries from among the Americans and British working in London. All of the senior officers at the Soviet Embassy, both civilian and military, had been thoroughly briefed on the importance of finding spies. Stalin anticipated that the collapse of Nazi Germany would be followed by a war with the West, perhaps not a shooting war, but a struggle nonetheless, for dominance of Europe. With millions of dead Soviet soldiers and citizens, it surprised no one that Stalin wanted a deep buffer zone between the USSR and the west, even if that meant taking over eastern Europe.

  The time to plant moles in the British and American governments was now, while the three major powers were ostensibly allies. No U.S. embassy official, no British government employee was too inconsequential to be considered. Sechin’s job was to orchestrate a vast recruiting effort, and Novikov did not envy him. Sechin’s predecessor had not been successful enough to placate Moscow and had been abruptly recalled just a month earlier. That unlucky man was either at the front, in prison, or already dead.

  “And how goes your job?” Sechin asked.

  Novikov was a military liaison with the British and Americans. On paper, his role was to help the Allies share military techniques and ideas that had been successful against the Wehrmacht. In reality, he was supposed to take as much as possible and give very little in return.

  “We are learning a great deal about our friends,” Novikov said.

  “I can get you a replacement for that aide,” Sechin said. “I have a few very clever young men who could help you without being corrupted by contact with the westerners.”

  Novikov knew that anyone Sechin sent his way would be a spy, loyal only to Sechin. Novikov did not think of Sechin as an adversary, but he was certainly not an ally. Sechin was invested in his own success and, at a close second, that of the USSR. He might not want to see Novikov fail, but he would not hesitate to crush Novikov or any other Soviet officer if it meant advancing his own career and reputation.

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Novikov said. “I’ll keep that kind offer in mind when the time comes to replace Gorodetsky.”

  The two men stood just a few feet apart. With these intelligence types, Novikov felt, one was always being sized up, measured.

  Sechin was a big man, a true Russian bear stuffed into the uniform of an NKVD colonel. Famously foul-mouthed, bald, barrel-chested, with big arms and hands and an expanding waistline. He was a heavy smoker, even by Russian standards, and would probably be finished with the pack he’d taken from Gorodetsky in a few hours.

  Novikov turned away, admired the dome of Prince Albert Hall once again.

  “One of your American friends was killed this morning,” Sechin said. “Murdered, is what I hear.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman, an OSS analyst named Batcheller. I do not know her first name.”

  Sechin was perfectly still, and Novikov knew the spymaster was gauging his reaction to this news.

  “You knew her, yes?”

  “You know that I knew her, Colonel,” Novikov said. “I have reported all my contacts with our allies, as required.”

  “Did you ever work with her?”

  “No. We had some interesting discussions, that is all,” Novikov said. “We met at a cocktail party the Americans held at their embassy.”

  “To show off their food,” Sechin said.

  “Perhaps. They do have excellent food, though one has to bring one’s own vodka. But I think it was also to open up communications with us.”

&nb
sp; “What did you and this woman talk about while you were drinking shitty American whiskey?” Sechin wanted to know.

  “She was an economist, like my father,” Novikov said. “She had studied at a university in their California. Stanford.”

  “And?”

  “We talked about how much she missed the weather in California.”

  “What was she doing for the Americans?”

  “I have no idea,” Novikov said.

  “Some of the people now working in their embassy once belonged to the American Communist Party,” Sechin went on.

  “Some of them probably still do,” Novikov said. “I cannot imagine you would want to recruit them. Party members in the United States will be the first ones suspected and investigated. Their FBI and its head, this man named Hoover, see Communists everywhere.”

  “Hoover was the former American president,” Sechin said.

  “Different Hoover,” Novikov corrected. He wondered how good a spymaster Sechin could be if he didn’t know the name of his principal adversary in the United States.

  “Is that why you asked to meet me this morning?” Novikov asked. “To tell me about this woman’s death?”

  “I wanted to know—I want to know—what she was working on,” Sechin said. “I thought you might be able to shed some light for me.”

  Novikov shook his head. “Sorry.”

  Sechin leaned in just a tiny bit.

  “I want to know what she knew about my operation, my effort to recruit spies.”

  “What makes you think she knew anything at all?” Novikov asked.

  Sechin straightened up, tried to smile but wound up looking sinister, like he was trying to frighten a roomful of children.

  “I am just suspicious by nature, I guess,” Sechin said. “It’s kept me alive in this job.”

  “So far,” Novikov said.

  When Sechin’s eyes darkened, Novikov said, “Sorry, that was a joke in poor taste. I am sure you will do quite well in this assignment. It certainly is critical to the postwar security of the motherland.”

  Sechin waited, perhaps considering whether Novikov was being sarcastic.

  “You will let me know if you learn anything, Colonel,” Sechin said after a moment. “In fact, if you have contacts, I’d like you to use them to learn what this woman had been working on.”