An American Spy

by An American Spy (retail) (epub)

  ‘Not at all,’ said Jane. ‘I’m in complete agreement with you ladies.’

  ‘Good,’ said Annabel.

  There was a long silence. Jane took another sip of her cooling tea. Alice Pottinger ate another wedge of liver sandwich. She chewed and swallowed then leaned forward, an intense expression on her face. ‘Have you ever heard of a place called Kut-al- Amara?’ she asked quietly. Her sister Annabel looked as though she was going to say something but in the end she remained silent.

  ‘No,’ said Jane, wondering if this was some kind of test. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘It’s in Persia,’ Alice continued. ‘On the road to Baghdad.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jane, not sure how she was expected to respond.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alice. ‘In September of 1915 a very foolish young officer named Townshend decided that capturing Baghdad would be a jolly nice Christmas present to give to the British people so he took fifteen thousand troops up the Euphrates to Kut-al-Amara in pursuit of that goal. He assembled his force and marched north to the ancient Roman ruins at Ctesiphon.’ Alice paused again. ‘I don’t suppose you know them?’

  ‘No,’ said Jane.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Alice. She continued. ‘At Ctesiphon, Townshend and his men met with the forces of a man named Nur-ud-Din, who was in league with the Turks and the Germans. He forced Townshend’s column back to Kut-al-Amara and laid siege to the fort there. This was the seventh of December. A Tuesday as I recall.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ murmured Annabel. ‘I still have the telegram.’

  Alice went on. ‘The siege lasted from December seventh, 1915 to the end of April the following year. Almost exactly five months. In the end, the men were reduced to eating their horses to survive. Almost three thousand died within the walls from dysentery, malaria and cholera. The conditions must have been appalling. When Townshend finally capitulated, the remaining men were marched off to a number of Turkish prison camps. Twelve thousand of them died, our husbands among them.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ said Jane.

  Alice Pottinger shook her head. ‘I didn’t tell you about Kut-al-Amara because my sister and I want sympathy. The story has a purpose.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It has only been twenty years since the end of the Great War, Miss Todd, and not one in a hundred schoolchildren could find Ypres or Passchendaele or the Somme on a map. I doubt that any could find Kut-al-Amara.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true,’ said Jane, flushing slightly, knowing perfectly well she couldn’t do it herself.

  ‘In twenty years the memories of that war have faded for all but a very few,’ Alice went on. ‘In fifty years it will be forgotten altogether. Remember that. Our war is over, Miss Todd, while yours is just beginning, but in the end all of it is dusty history and counts for nothing.’

  There was a sharp knock on the door and it opened. Polly Darling popped her head into the room, smiling brightly. ‘Hello, all,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Jane must be getting tired after all her travels so I thought I’d get her settled.’

  ‘Excellent idea,’ said Annabel Pottinger, obviously relieved that her duties as hostess had come to an end. She rose, steadying herself with her cane. ‘Off you go, Miss Todd. We’ll talk again another day.’

  ‘Pleasure to meet you,’ Jane replied. She gave the ladies a polite bow then followed Polly out of the room. She led Jane towards the front of the house then turned into a smallish room with French doors leading out onto the side lawn. From the paintings on the wall and the scattered furniture it looked as though it had once been a sitting room, but now it had been converted into a reception area, complete with a monstrously large, battle-scarred government-issue wooden office desk kitted out with a green blotter, inkwell and pens and a large black telephone. Off to one side was a tall pair of dark green filing cabinets.

  ‘My little kingdom,’ said Polly, dropping down into the chair behind the desk. She gestured towards a door on her left. ‘The major’s office is in there.’ She smiled. ‘You look completely ragged.’

  ‘It’s been a bit of a hike,’ Jane said, yawning.

  ‘Well, at least you survived the Potties.’

  ‘Just barely.’

  ‘Presumably they gave you the Kut-al-Amara speech,’ said Polly. ‘Alice gives it to anyone who’ll listen.’

  ‘You presume right,’ said Jane.

  ‘I should have warned you but there wasn’t really time.’ She smiled at Jane. ‘Don’t worry, they’re really quite harmless.’

  ‘They married brothers?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Better than that, they married twin brothers.’ She made a little giggling noise that Jane found oddly attractive. ‘George and Godfrey.’ She giggled again. ‘Sets all sorts of wheels in motion doesn’t it, the four of them all living under the same roof.’

  Jane yawned again. ‘I could sleep for a week. When do I get to see the mysterious Major Dundee?’

  The telephone on Polly’s desk gave a dissonant double rattle. Polly reached out and picked up the receiver before it could make the sound a second time. ‘Three-two-one-five-nine, Lance Corporal Darling speaking.’ She listened for a few moments without saying anything, then hung up the phone.

  ‘Himself,’ she said. ‘He was supposed to be coming back here tonight. Now he wants you down there.’

  ‘Down where?’

  ‘London,’ Polly answered. ‘There’s been a murder. The body’s being sent to Simpson, the Home Office pathologist. The major wants you there for the autopsy tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because the body is one of yours. United States Army Air Force. An officer. He thought you might be interested.’ She beamed. ‘Come along. I’ll drive you to the station.’ She reached down beside the desk and came up with a fat leather briefcase. ‘Pack a few things for overnight. I’ll meet you out at the coach house.’

  Five minutes later they were puttering down the long driveway between the monkey puzzle trees in the Pottinger sisters’ ancient Austin 7. They went out between the rusting gates and turned northward. Ahead, Jane could see the overcast tearing into long ragged strips, pink-lit by the lowering sun. She felt a strange tug at the dusky sight, mentally running the clock back. Breakfast time in L.A. The hoods would be having egg and beans at the Broadway Hotel and the vice cops from Hollywood Division would be divvying up the pad from the night before. The movie stars would have been up since dawn getting into their make-up. An alien world to her now.

  It took Polly less than ten minutes to drive from Strathmere up the road to the station at Leighton Buzzard and five minutes later Jane was on a local bound for London.

  Chapter Four

  Jane had a first-class compartment all to herself, the blackout curtains closed. Her long odyssey from Los Angeles was beginning to take its toll and she had a sinking feeling that it was far from over. From a few thousand miles, a continent and a cold ocean away, the war had seemed a clear-cut event, crisply detailed within neat paragraphs in Time and Newsweek, bleakly observed in Life pictorials, a chess game textured with people and places and bombs and blasted earth but a game nevertheless, with pieces playing by strict rules of conduct – so many moves in this direction, so many moves in that, until the noble resolution of a king tipped over on the board.

  She peeked out through the curtain over the window. The sky had turned purple and there was only a sharp sliver of light on the western horizon. West. The States. New York. L.A. Home. Once maybe but not now and perhaps never again. She dropped the curtain, blotting out the last of the sunset. Maybe she’d never go back at all. Maybe the war would go on forever. Jane sighed, reaching into the briefcase Polly had handed over and pulling out the file on Major Lucas Dundee.

  Son of Jack Dundee, sometimes referred to as Blackjack Dundee, a big-time L.A. land speculator, womaniser and said to sometimes be just barely on the right side of the law. Once in a while he even made the gossip columns, especially if he was bedding a starlet, which is where Jane had
heard about him. His son Lucas went to West Point, class of ’29, law degree from Stanford in ’32. Spent the next five years with the Los Angeles Police Department, three of them as a detective, which seemed like an odd choice of employment for a man with an honours law degree from Palo Alto.

  At this point he went to work for Burton Fitts. Jane leaned back in her seat and thought about Fitts for a moment. He hardly ran what anyone would call a ‘clean’ office. Burton Fitts had been district attorney of Los Angeles from 1928 to 1940 and it was widely rumoured that he was in the pocket of California’s rich and powerful, not the least of whom was Lucas Dundee’s father

  Jane remembered where she’d seen Dundee’s name before. Someone had sent her a clipping from the Los Angeles Times – according to the story Blackjack Dundee had been arrested on a charge of statutory rape. The girl was the daughter of a Warner Brothers extra and was fourteen. The article said that his father was being defended by the well-known ‘socialite’ lawyer Jerry Giesler and prosecuted by the recently elected D.A., Burton Fitts. Her friend Rusty Birdwell had called him up for a comment and his reply had been short and to the point: ‘If she’s old enough to take my money, she’s old enough to fuck. Forget about it.’

  Ironically, it seemed that Fitts, an assistant district attorney at twenty-four, lieutenant governor of California at thirty-one and Los Angeles district attorney two years later, had inadvertently planted the seed of Dundee’s career as a policeman and a lawyer. Even though the case against Lucas’s father was dropped before it came to trial – the result of a deal brokered by Giesler, Jack Warner and the girl’s mother – Dundee saw Burton Fitts as the shining crusader he was made out to be by Harry Chandler, publisher of the L.A. Times: a West Coast version of a young Tom Dewey, at that time Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

  Jane started reading between the lines of the skeletal file.

  Disgusted by his father, but deeply impressed by Fitts, Dundee applied to Stanford and was accepted. On his graduation from law school he immediately joined the Los Angeles Police Department, part of some overall plan to join the D.A.’s office not just as a lawyer but as a cop who knew the criminal justice system from both sides of the fence.

  Two years in uniform and three more as a detective out of Hollywood Division seemed to have taken some of the blush off the crimestopper rose. According to the corruption reports he’d filed as a patrolman, he’d seen low-level graft and bribery at every level from cops taking free meals to evidence mysteriously missing from precinct property rooms. As a detective it became even more apparent that corruption in the force rose throughout the ranks to the very top. Hollywood suicides turned into unfortunate ‘accidents,’ rapes and assault cases like his father’s were dropped for lack of evidence and the infiltration of Mob snitches on the force from one end of Los Angeles to the other was a cancer.

  The Thelma Todd case in ’35 was apparently the last straw for Dundee, one of the lead investigators on the case. Even the most basic investigation showed a relationship between Todd, Todd’s mother and both Meyer Lansky and Charlie Luciano, as well as a long-time relationship with Tony Camero, owner of the Rex and several other L.A. and San Diego offshore gambling barges. Thelma, a Mob hanger-on as far back as the early twenties, had been running her mouth a little too loudly and in the wrong places and Luciano had decided to shut it once and for all. Right from the start the investigation was a botched, Keystone Kops affair and, steadfastly refusing to believe that Fitts was involved in the mishandling of the case, Dundee went to the D.A. and asked for help.

  Instead of help, the district attorney offered the young detective a job, promising him that the D.A.’s office would quietly establish a secret police corruption committee to investigate his allegations. Dundee accepted the job, left the police force and became an assistant district attorney. The police corruption committee never materialised and instead the newly appointed A.D.A. found himself prosecuting an endless series of meaningless robberies, domestic assaults, suicides and other ‘B’ crimes, relegated to a backwater of second-rate felonies where his zeal wouldn’t get anyone, himself included, into any trouble.

  As the train rumbled into the blacked-out suburbs of London, Jane saw where all of it was going. The young Dundee had been sidetracked, a potentially bothersome fly stuck onto a piece of gummy paper in the back rooms of the D.A.’s office.

  According to the dates in the file it took almost six months for Dundee to track it all down, first running through his files from the Los Angeles Police Academy and then his police record, both in uniform and as a detective; at every step of the way he recognised the signs of his father’s influence and he could see it easily in his mind’s eye – a cocktail-party comment to one of the five police commissioners appointed by the mayor, all of them pals of his father, all of them more than happy to pay off a debt to their good friend Jack Dundee.

  The job offer from Fitts had presumably come to him the same way, and digging back through the dusty stacks in the basement of the D.A.’s Spring Street offices Dundee saw that Fitts and his father had been doing business as far back as 1919, when the young Fitts had been first appointed as a special district attorney to bust the so-called ‘labor radicals’ who were threatening the old man’s interests.

  Dundee’s humiliation must have been complete; since returning to Los Angeles his career had been stage-managed by his father like that of a bit part actor in a movie. Presumably he was destined for future starring roles. By that time the war had already begun in Europe. Unlike a lot of his colleagues, Dundee was reasonably sure the United States would ultimately become involved in it. He resigned from the D.A.’s office and enlisted.

  The train pulled into the booming confines of Euston Station with a chorus of whistles, steam venting and slamming doors. Jane stuffed the file back into the briefcase, crushed the unfamiliar cap over her hair and stepped down from her compartment. Surrounded by streams of people, all of whom seemed to know precisely where they were going, it suddenly occurred to Jane that no one in the world she loved or cared about had the slightest idea where she was right at that moment. It was the ultimate form of being lost – even she didn’t know where she was.

  She reached the gate leading out to the main concourse and found her way blocked by a tall man in uniform. She tried to sidestep him but he gently took her by the arm. He was a good six inches taller than she was, with dark, thick hair, dark brown eyes set deeply in their sockets behind wire-rimmed glasses and a pronounced stoop to his gangling walk. He looked like Ichabod Crane in uniform. He was wearing major’s oak leaves on his shoulder tabs and the wreath, sword and quill of the Judge Advocate General’s office on his chest.

  ’‘Lucas Dundee,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘You’ll be Jane Todd.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘How many other female correspondents with a California tan are there coming in on the local from Leighton Buzzard?’ He smiled. It was a nice smile, a little on the shy side. ‘Didn’t they tell you I used to be a cop?’

  ‘In other words, Polly called you.’

  ‘You found me out.’

  Jane took the offered hand and shook it. The grip was surprisingly strong.

  ‘I’ve got a car outside,’ said Dundee. ‘Hungry?’

  ‘Famished.’

  ‘I know just the place,’ he said.

  ‘Music to my ears. Lead on,’ Jane answered. They left the terminal and climbed into a nondescript olive green Dodge parked at the curb with a serial number stencilled on the fender. Dundee got behind the wheel, managed to find his way to the Edgeware Road and headed south into the blacked-out city.

  ‘I’ll take you to the Red Cross Club after dinner,’ said Dundee. ‘Find you a billet.’

  ‘Thanks but I’ve got a flat in Shepherd’s Market as a matter of fact,’ said Jane. ‘Brit friend I made back home offered it to me. He’s off in some out-of-the-way spot for the duration. Loads of room, I. think. But I’ve never even seen t
he place and I wouldn’t know how to find it.’ She gave Dundee an appraising look and then made up her mind. ‘You can stay there if you want. Save time in the morning if we’re under the same roof.’

  Dundee thought about it and then shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t be such a good idea,’ he said. ‘But thanks for the offer.’ Twenty minutes later Dundee turned into a narrow road a block away from the looming presence of Paddington Station and pulled to a stop. The ratcheting sound of the handbrake being set brought Jane out of a light sleep.

  ‘We have arrived,’ said Dundee. ‘Mrs Staines’s Restaurant.’

  Jane yawned and blinked and stared out the window. They were in a mews of two-storey brick town houses, one of which had been transformed into a Continental-style bistro by the simple addition of an awning, a sign made out of plain metal letters that said RESTAURANT and a few tables scattered around the front entrance. The doorway and windows were blacked out but through the gloom Jane could make out the firefly glow of cigarette ends flaring around the outside tables. Jane and the major climbed out of the car and crossed the cobbled street.

  ‘What’s the menu like?’ Jane asked as they stepped up onto the pavement.

  ‘I think it’s what’s generally referred to as “hearty fare,”’ Dundee answered. ‘Which means lots of things made from potatoes, long rolls with a bit of ham and a lot of mustard and the occasional pork chop if the black-market butcher’s been around. Not much in the way of variety these days, I’m afraid.’ He pointed. ‘Take that table and I’ll bring you out a plate of something.’ Jane nodded and dropped down onto one of the plain wooden chairs.

  She let out a long, sighing breath and closed her eyes, half thinking about the whispering men and women at the other tables. All the voices were young; flat, slightly nasal Canadian accents and something heavily European, probably Polish. The men’s voices were sly and the laughter of the women was charged with expectation and anxiety. Jane smiled to herself. It was like being at a high school dance. What was that joke the B-17 transfer pilot had told her? Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There.