Jack 1939 (12 page)

TWENTY-ONE.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE

“I MUST BE IN
the wrong place,” Jack said.

“Depends what you’re looking for.” The girl was fair-haired and delicate, but for the crimson mouth. “A gift for a lady friend, perhaps?”

He wanted to ask if she knew Gubbins, but something stopped him. If he was
not to be followed
to the place, he shouldn’t ask stupid questions either. He said tentatively, “I doubt you’ve got anything warm enough. The weather’s getting nasty.”

“It is rare to have snow in March,” the girl observed.

“But not unknown in London.”

She turned abruptly. “We keep all the flannels back here.”

He followed her between displays of girdles and brassieres, garter belts and negligees. A mental picture of Diana flitted through his mind, in silk charmeuse, her sharp fall of black hair. He should have kissed her that last night on the
Queen Mary
, when he had the chance.

The girl knocked twice on a door, then once more. A buzzer sounded and he heard a bolt snap back.

“The door’s wired?”

Her mouth quirked at the corners but she said nothing.

“Thank you, Matilda,” Gubbins called.

The door closed behind him.

* * *

GUBBINS WAS IN
his shirtsleeves.

“Ah, Jack,” he said warmly, rising from a desk to extend his hand. “I value punctuality in a man. I may call you Jack?”

“Everybody does.”

“—Unless they call you Ken.”

Jack’s brow rose slightly; only a few people in the world used that nickname. He’d met most of them at Choate when he was thirteen.

“Quite the black eye you’re sporting, lad. I understand you acquired it at the 400?”

“Forgive me, Colonel—but who are you, and why the hell am I here?”

“Because you chose to come,” Gubbins said crisply. “As for myself . . . I’ve given you my card. My name is quite genuine, I assure you.”

Jack glanced around the room. It was windowless. But the fact of the wired door made him realize that other things could be wired as well. “Can we talk freely here?”

“Of course.”

“And I should trust what you say because . . . ?”

“You received a cable from your president this morning. I received a similar one. Not, I may say, from Mr. Roosevelt. Both cables contained phrases intended for mutual identification.”

“It is rare to have snow in March.”

“Exactly. We call those
bona fides
in my current line of work.”

“You’re a spy?”

“No, no, dear chap—just an old artilleryman.” Gubbins smiled bracingly. “I putter about on odd jobs for the Foreign Office now and again. I’ve been asked to help you with your thesis research.”

“My
thesis
?” Jack repeated incredulously.

“Yes. Please—do sit down.”

Jack took the only available chair.

“I understand you’re traveling about Europe in the coming months. Interviewing sources for your . . . study.”

“Well—”

“And given the uncertainties of travel, the general upheaval caused by the sudden incursion of Panzers, the potential for wholesale destruction of various electrical grids, and so forth—you will require a secure and portable means of communication.” Gubbins paused. “One that is independent of embassies and code clerks.”

The colonel reached under the desk and produced a black suitcase. He turned it neatly to face Jack, and snapped open the lid. Silk slips, panties, a corset or two. Beneath them was a tangle of electronics and wire. “Our latest model of shortwave wireless radio. With a Morse key.”

Jack leaned closer and examined the thing. Knobs and dials, like the cockpit of a plane. Wires and tubes. All chockablock in a leather case eighteen inches by twenty-four.

He poked a tentative finger at a dial, then looked up at Gubbins. The colonel’s brown eyes were exuberant. A Santa who’d just dropped a splendid toy in Jack’s stocking.

“Ever had a go?”

Jack shook his head.

“I’ll show you, of course. This kit only has a range of five hundred miles, so the transmission must be relayed—but don’t worry about that; our network will take care of it.”

“Your network?”

“Our shortwave relay network. Your man Schwartz is familiar with it. Are you acquainted, by any chance, with General Donovan? Wild Bill?”

“I’ve heard the name. You want me to encode and transmit my own messages?”

“No, no, dear chap,” Gubbins protested. “
I
don’t come into it at all. It’s your president who’s requested this back channel. He broached the matter to my superiors. And they contacted
me
. Back channels being rather a specialty of mine.”

“Got it.” Jack eyed the colonel dubiously.
Was
he a colonel? Was he even British? Handing Jack a shortwave radio and the code to use it would be a brilliant way for the Germans to capture everything he sent home. But there was the fact of the bona fides . . . and no harm in prolonging the conversation. Provided, of course, that he could exit the room quickly. His glance strayed to the door Matilda had pulled closed behind her. It probably locked automatically. . . .

“Nothing could be easier or more efficient,” Gubbins was saying with pride. “This little chap runs on batteries. You charge them with a simple lead from your car. Only
think
how useful, in the wilds of Poland or Latvia!”

“With my kind of talent, I’ll fry us both.”

“Not once I’m done with you,” Gubbins said cheerfully, and clapped Jack on the back. Jack felt the blow through his entire frame. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

He began to shove his desk toward the rear wall. Jack took the other end and helped him. Set into the floorboards beneath the desk was a trapdoor.

Gubbins lifted it. A set of stairs led down into darkness.

* * *

THE COLONEL’S WORKSHOP
held a number of secrets.

There was a kind of paper he’d made from rice instead of cotton, so his men could eat their instructions; and invisible ink. The words appeared when heat was applied.

“Useful if you’d like to jot down the odd note for Hopper,” Gubbins observed, as he presented Jack with one of his pens. “And you can use your own urine, in a pinch.”

“You know Professor Hopper?”

“Met him in the last war,” Gubbins said briefly. “First-rate man. You’re fortunate to work with him. I should assume anything you send him, Jack, no matter how academic, will be intercepted by the enemy and read. He’s being watched.”

“Because of
me
?”

“Because of your president’s interest in you. And Hopper’s supervision of your . . . thesis. Both facts are known—the world’s really a very small place, my dear fellow. And at the moment, ridiculously crowded with
Germans
. Try to bear that in mind.”

He proceeded to teach Jack the rudiments of frequencies, Morse code, call signs, and five-letter group transmission. Jack found that the shortwave radio and its Morse key demanded intense concentration on his part. His face was beaded with sweat after the first half hour and after the second, his hands shook; but Gubbins pronounced him
good enough to go on
with
.

“Send your first burst tonight, to let your contact know you’re up to speed. Don’t forget the call sign, to signal you’re live, and repeat the transmission every fifteen minutes until it’s acknowledged. Given the distance your message must travel, acknowledgment will take a while. In the field, you’ll want to move about a bit between repeats—confuses the enemy and keeps them off your back. Tonight, however, I should use the roof of number 14. The house runs to six storeys, I believe?”

“Yes, but . . .” He had no idea how to get out on the roof.

“And this,” Gubbins added, “is the poem you’re to use as your encoding key.”

“The
what
?”

“Old college cheer. Mr. Roosevelt chose it.”

He was handing Jack a sheet of paper with “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard” typed on it. Including the dog-Latin first verse. Jack skimmed the words, a familiar tune humming through his mind.

Illegitimum Non Carborundum;

Domine salvum fac.

Illegitimum Non Carborundum;

Domine salvum fac.

Gaudeamus igitur!

Veritas non sequitur?

Illegitimum non Carborundum—ipso facto!

Ten thousand men of Harvard want vict’ry today,

For they know that o’er old Eli

Fair Harvard holds sway.

So then we’ll conquer all old Eli’s men

And when the game ends, we’ll sing again:

Ten thousand men of Harvard gained vict’ry today!

“I have no idea what to do with this.”

Gubbins frowned. “It’s a simple substitution cipher, Jack. Choose a phrase from the song, write it down, and then string your message beneath. Substitute the song’s letters for yours, and you’ve got a
code
. You must number each word in the song
first
, of course. Before transmitting the encoded message, you must send the
numbers
that correspond to your cipher words. Understand? Your receiver will have numbered his copy of this charming little ditty as well, and will know that 3, 7, 12, 18, and 24 are the words he must use to
decode
your transmission.”

“You’ve thought of everything.”

“I try,” Gubbins said modestly. “Sticking one’s head in the sand won’t stop Hitler. I’ve written a few manuals, you know—
not
in general circulation. If you’d care to have them.”

“I would,” Jack said. “Very much.”

“You won’t need
The Housewife’s ABC of Home-Made Explosives
, I imagine,” Gubbins mused, “but
The Art of Guerrilla Warfare
should be dead useful.”

“Give me the
ABC
, too.”

“Really?” He shrugged. “Best have
The Partisan Leader’s Handbook
as well. We expect that one to do very well in Poland in the coming months. Very well indeed.”

Jack managed to fit the pamphlets into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. His fingers grazed a torn edge of newspaper; the article he’d found in the
Times
that morning.

It seemed as good a way of testing Gubbins’s bona fides as any.

“Would you do something for me?” he asked.

“Something
else
, you mean?” Gubbins asked drily.

Jack handed him the article. “The man who knifed this girl is a German agent. Hans Obst, alias the Spider. That mark he cut into her skin—it’s not a swastika. It’s his calling card. Scotland Yard should be told.”

Gubbins raised shrewd brown eyes to Jack’s own. “I won’t ask how you know.
Right.
I’ll pass the word to my friends at the Yard.”

TWENTY-TWO.
NIGHT

HE KNEW THEY MUST BE LOOKING
for him, but he lingered in Wapping anyway, a blunt shadow in the alleys running down to the river. He felt at home among the gasworks and power generators and heaps of coal slag, the chandlers’ shops and whorehouses and pubs. The smell of blood was lost in the reek of the East End.

He systematically rifled the dead merchant seaman’s pockets, his mind focused as it had not been for days. The pain he’d inflicted on the fragile child last night had eased his need, but he awoke to the knowledge that he’d risked too much. He had to get out of London. For that, he needed a passport.

A seaman was the obvious mark. Not a navy man, because sailors were accountable to their commanders and pursued when missed. What he wanted was an ordinary vagabond, a rat of the world’s shipping. Somebody who slipped into the Port of London one day, the Port of Marseille the next. Who was cursed and forgotten when he failed to report for duty.

He wandered the streets near the river with his hat pulled down and his hands shoved into his pockets, fingering his knife. It was after eleven before a squat Pole, hair the color of straw, reeled drunkenly into the alley where the Spider waited.

He nearly laughed aloud now as he fingered his new papers.
Jan Komorowski from Danzig.
Heydrich himself might have sent this tarred angel to deliver his man from evil.

He sliced a vicious spider into an exposed pectoral, then cleaned his knife on the corpse’s trousers. In the act of turning away, he stopped suddenly and considered the Pole’s clothes. No merchant seaman wore camel’s hair.

He shrugged himself into the dark wool peacoat, which smelled not unpleasantly of tobacco, and closed the wide lapels around his throat. He glanced up at the starless sky. A ship’s horn blasted in the distance. The Spider began to move.

* * *

HE TRUSTED HIS LEGS MORE
than trains or automobiles. His legs would never lose an engine or run out of petrol miles before the border. He’d walked the breadth of Germany in his day and the distance from Wapping to Westminster was nothing to it. He was carrying only the clothes on his back and some cash in his pocket. He was
Jan Komorowski of Gdansk
. He would make his way to Dover and cross the Channel in the morning—just another Pole headed in the wrong direction.

The white face of a clock tower rose above him, the peaked mass of Parliament below. He stood on Westminster Bridge and watched as Charles Atwater’s passport and papers floated down the Thames.

The clock hands met at twelve. Big Ben boomed. He should have left London hours ago, but his desire for the girl with the auburn hair was suddenly overwhelming. He’d tried to slake it on the one he’d snatched from the shadows last night, but it hadn’t worked. He still saw the Kennedy girl in his mind whenever he closed his eyes.

He reached for his knife, stroking the shaft. Then he walked deliberately away from the train he should be taking, and toward Prince’s Gate.

* * *

THERE WERE LIGHTS
burning in the house’s third-floor windows.

He stood on the lawn sloping down from the back terrace. Behind, Kensington Road and Hyde Park. In front, a row of French doors. He walked noiselessly toward a pair of these and paused, his eyes straining in the darkness. A house with so many servants would be careless about bolting every door. Careless, too, about investigating noises—there were too many children, too many comings and goings, for anybody to care.

He tried the handles of three pairs of doors before one gave beneath his hand. He eased it open, felt the panel push back against heavy drapes, and slid through the space into a ground-floor reception room.

The house was still as a tomb.

His heart raced. That pale perfection of a girl was somewhere above, in her dressing gown, maybe, as she brushed her hair before a mirror. Or she might be sprawled in bed with a book, breasts softly outlined in silk—

He crept noiselessly around the dim furniture, just visible in the glow from the French windows, to the darker passage beyond.

* * *

“WHERE ARE YOU GOING,
Jack? Can I come?”

Teddy’s voice piped through the silence of the upper hall. Jack jumped, nearly dropping the suitcase he carried.

“Jesus, Brat,” he said. “You scared the hell out of me. What’re you doing up?”

Teddy, sturdy as a caboose, was standing before the elevator door in his bathrobe and slippers. His hair was tousled and his full cheeks flushed. “I’m hungry,” he said.

“You’re always hungry.” Bobby emerged, scowling at the light, from the room the boys shared. There were basset hounds with red bows all over his flannel pajamas.

“That’s because I’m
growing
,” Teddy protested.

“Sideways, maybe. Get back in bed.”

“I want some milk. And some of Banksie’s custard.”

“Okay by me,” Jack said, eyeing them both. “Can’t sleep if you’re hungry.”

“Mother wouldn’t like it,” Bobby said.

“Mother’s not here.”

“What’s the suitcase for?” Bobby’s attention was suddenly focused; he stepped tentatively forward. “You running away?”

“To Rome,” Jack said soothingly. “Remember? Dad and I leave before you do. I’m packing now.”

He was not about to admit to Gubbins’s radio transmitter. Or tell them he’d just come down from the roof. It had been chilly work and his fingers were numb, but he’d managed to find the frequency Gubbins had specified and send something like an encoded transmission. He’d been agonizingly slow. An hour of work with the Harvard fight song, for a few bursts of Morse code.
Special to Schwartz. Have received radio and cipher. Will cultivate WD as instructed.

He’d waited twenty minutes in the freezing attic for an answering burst, but none had come. He’d try again tomorrow.

The elevator door opened and Teddy skedaddled into it, intent on the kitchen and food. With a shriek of protest about raids on the pantry, Bobby followed. Jack waited until the elevator door closed before heading for his room. He was faintly exhilarated at having dodged the kids’ inspection. Nazis had nothing on Bobby.

* * *

THE SPIDER STOOD MOTIONLESS
in the shadows of the staircase as the conversation between brothers played out above.
Children
.
Custard.
He could hear the elevator car descending and for an instant he considered waiting for it to open, the boys emerging one after the other straight onto his knife. Then a key was thrust into the front door’s lock and his head turned swiftly. The sound carried across the octagonal marble foyer; someone had come home.

He raced past the elevator door just as the car bumped to the ground floor. He skittered down a back passage, the sound of his running feet masked by the iron rattle of the elevator sliding open, the fluster of arrival in the front hall. A girl’s rich laugh drifted to his ears
. “
Oh, come
on
, kid. It’s not like I’m moving in with Mussolini. I’ll see you when I get back from Rome.”

It was she. He would know that voice anywhere. But he could not have her tonight—she was too exposed, he would not risk it.

He slipped through the salon’s French doors, which gave out onto the north-facing terrace, and ran pell-mell down the lawn to the Kensington Road.

Rome,
she had said
.
It was as good a destination as any.

* * *

FROM HIS THIRD-FLOOR
bedroom window, Jack glimpsed the dark shape of a man pelting from the terrace across the lawns. He did not need to ask himself what sort of predator fled the dreaming ranks of Prince’s Gate in the dead of night; he could trace the Spider’s outline in his sleep. His eyes strained to follow the figure until the deep black of Hyde Park swallowed it whole. Impossible to give chase at night. He slammed his window frame with his fists in frustration.
The killer had entered his house. Where his family slept.
This could not be allowed to continue. He sprinted down the hallway to the telephone closet, and put through a transatlantic call to the United States.

He’d memorized the number he’d scrawled on his shirt cuff in the Waldorf-Astoria weeks ago. It should be close to dinnertime in Washington.

* * *

“ROOSEVELT HERE.”
The connection was very bad, with a constant swooshing sound as of wind or water, the sea washing over the transatlantic cable. But the President’s voice was high and thin and clear, familiar from a hundred fireside chats.

“Mr. President. It’s Jack Kennedy, in London.”

“Jack! How are you, my boy? I received your message. Well done.”

So it was Roosevelt, not Schwartz, who was decoding his bursts. There was no one between the President and himself. The President and
his man in Europe.
Jack’s pulse accelerated. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. President—”

“Not at all. I’m free as a bird.”

“—but I thought you should know—or Mr. Schwartz should know—that the White Spider broke into our house tonight.”

“The Spider?” Roosevelt repeated.

Was that complete ignorance, or mild concern? Did he think Jack was babbling nonsense?

“He’s a very dangerous fellow, Jack,” Roosevelt said.

A wave of relief washed over him. “You know.”

“Indeed. He’s got two victims this side of the Atlantic to his credit, and I assume he’s killed a few more on yours. He cuts a spider into the corpse. But you know this. He crossed with you, didn’t he, on the
Queen
Mary
?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sam and I have been talking to Ed Hoover. He thinks the Germans are rolling up that network we discussed. The girl who was killed in New York a few weeks ago, at the Stork Club—”

“Not Katie O’Donohue?” Jack said, his bowel twisting.
Little Katie. I knew her people in Boston.

There was an infinitesimal pause on Roosevelt’s end. “You’re familiar with the name?”

“She was murdered the night we met on the Pullman,” he said quickly. “I saw the papers the next morning. But I didn’t know the Spider killed her.”
Shit.

“Ah.” Roosevelt digested this. If he thought it strange that Jack should remember a name from a minor article read nearly a month ago, he refrained from questioning it. Roosevelt ignored tangents, Jack realized; he kept to the facts. It was probably the only way to organize the flood of information constantly sweeping over him.

“We think it’s possible this man is after
you
,” he continued. “That he knows what I’ve asked you to do, and that he means to stop it. You must be very careful.”

“I realize that, sir.” He’d been lying to his father for weeks, saying nothing about his job for Roosevelt, and now he was lying to the President of the United States, too—keeping Dad and the hatcheck girl to himself, the fact that his father had gotten Katie the job at the Stork Club. She was dead and the Spider had killed her, which could look pretty lousy for Dad if the FBI found out. And they were bound to find out.

“Do you think,” he said, clutching wildly at straws, “that under the circumstances of the break-in tonight, I ought to tell my father?”

There was a pause. “About the Spider?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Jack . . . do you consider your father . . . a man of considerable courage?”

He took a deep breath to calm himself. Joe Kennedy was a born gambler. His risks and his instincts usually paid off. But was he
brave
, exactly? He’d refused to enlist for the last war, in 1917. If told that a Nazi assassin was prowling around, he’d mount full-time guards or move his kids into a Mayfair hotel. Joe was no warrior, no Bruce Hopper scanning the sky in the hope of enemy fire.

“Not really,” he said.

“Then let’s keep this between ourselves. We don’t want to alarm your dad—his work’s too important right now. We need Joe firing on all Chamberlain’s cylinders.”

“Yes, sir,” Jack muttered. So he would go on lying to them both. “What do you want me to do?”

“Research your thesis,” Roosevelt said. “If you leave London—perhaps the Spider will follow. And then you won’t have to worry anymore about putting your family in danger.”

Jack thought of Kick—of Teddy and Bobby—with rising hope. If he could lure the Spider to Europe . . .

“And Jack?” The distant voice was speaking again, very faintly in his ear. “A suggestion from Professor Bruce Hopper. We spoke the other day.”

“How is he, sir?”

“Quite well. But he thinks you ought to buy a gun.”

“A gun?” Jack repeated, startled.

“And learn how to use it,” Roosevelt said.