They all sat silently while Ingrid read the verified complaint. After she had done so, she looked up at Cockran and smiled. “Do you have a pen?”
15.
Ted Hudson
The Cedars
Sands Point, Long Island
Wednesday, 11 May 1932
IT was a glorious morning in Long Island, a perfect day for flying. Mattie couldn’t wait to be airborne. The sun had been up for only an hour when Theodore Stanhope Hudson, IV, made his typical grand entrance in a chauffeur-driven maroon Cadillac Phaeton, its glossy surface sparkling in the sunshine as it pulled up the long driveway to the Cedars.
“Mattie, darling,” Ted’s voice boomed out. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes? It’s been too long,” he said as he embraced her and kissed her on the cheek.
Hudson was dressed in what was obviously a brand new leather flying jacket, holding an equally new leather helmet and flying goggles in his right hand. His khaki trousers held a crease so sharp you could cut your finger on it. Almost as tall as Cockran and somewhat stockier, his thick blond hair was slicked back from his forehead.
“It’s good to see you, too, Ted,” Mattie replied. “How’ve you been?”
“Never been better. Especially now that we’re going to be working on the same story. Just like old times.”
Just like old times. Right. Hudson was a military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Prague when they first met in 1924 and when she ran across him in Munich in 1925, he was working for the investment bank Goldman Sachs. Two years after that in London, he said he was with the State Department working on the Dawes Plan, negotiating with the Allies to ease the burden of reparations on Germany. And then, of course, there was Paris.
“Not exactly old times, Ted. We’ve never worked together. Just keep in mind I’m the senior correspondent on the team and the Chief made it clear that you’ll be assisting me.”
Hudson bowed at the waist. “And I’m yours to command. Still seeing that shanty Irish law professor of yours?”
“This is his estate, Ted. We’re flying to Pittsburgh in his aircraft. You were in military intelligence. See if you can figure it out.”
Hudson flashed his million dollar smile. “Well … you can’t blame a fella for trying. They say the Irish have the luck of the devil and that sure was true for Cockran when he found you. Just let me know if his luck ever runs out.”
“Things are fine with us Ted.” Mattie said, as she motioned for him to follow her around to the back of the house.
“But things weren’t so hot a year ago as I recall. Until there’s an engagement ring on your pretty little finger, a fella can dream, can’t he?”
Mattie sighed. And wouldn’t Cockran just love this conversation? “Get in the plane, Ted. The front cockpit. You can dream all you want up there. I’ll be doing the driving. It’s a good six-hour flight to Pittsburgh with two refueling stops in between.”
Hudson did a double take. “We’re going to fly in that? What in hell is it?”
Mattie chuckled. People usually had that impression once they saw a Pitcairn-Cierva autogiro up close on the ground. Aloft, it didn’t look quite as strange, like any other two-cockpit monoplane with a large rotary engine-powered propeller. What made it different was the shaft rising up from the fuselage above the passenger compartment in front. The shaft was a pyramid formed by three steel struts, each a yard long, on top of which was a large, four-bladed rotor, poised as if it were sitting atop a child’s beanie, each of the drooping four blades longer than the aircraft’s wings. In fact, they acted as the plane’s “third wing,” a rotary wing.
“It’s an autogiro, a PCA-2” Mattie said, “but most people call it a flying windmill. Cockran bought it last year to fly to his auto races. The Pitcairn Company in Pittsburgh manufactures it in America, but it was designed by a Spaniard, Juan De La Cierva.
“So you know how to fly this thing?”
“I do,” Mattie said. “Hop in and I’ll show you.”
Hudson settled wordlessly into the two-passenger cockpit in the front of the plane, while Mattie climbed into the pilot seat in back and fired up the Wright Whirlwind 420 HP radial engine. Slowly, the nose propeller spun into life and the rotor blades above her head started rotating, as a small amount of power from the engine gave the rotary wing a boost to get it going. Unlike the propeller attached to the engine, however, the large rotor blades on top were not powered by the engine once in the air. They auto-rotated — hence the name autogiro — as the aircraft moved forward, providing lift just as wings did. Unlike its propeller, the rotor blades on top of the autogiro were clearly visible to the naked eye once they were moving at speed.
Mattie opened the throttle and the propeller began to pull them forward in a modest acceleration. After ten yards, Mattie pulled the stick back as the autogiro topped fifteen miles per hour and began to rise in the air. The autogiro continued to accelerate and to gain altitude nearly as fast, climbing to about five hundred feet and on toward their western destination.
At cruising altitude, Mattie began to reflect on her “history” with Ted Hudson. It wasn’t something she was proud of and reflected a side of her that, until last spring in the Alps, she thought she had outgrown. She had to admit Ted was still one good looking guy which is what attracted her to him in the first place. But, she thought things would be fine between them on this assignment so long as he followed the two rules she had carefully explained prior to take-off. Rule #1: She was the boss on this story. He was her assistant. Rule #2: There was no chance he was ever again going to be back inside her knickers. Well, she hadn’t phrased it in just those terms but her meaning was clear. Paris had been the end of things between them.
Mattie had told Cockran she only had some dinner dates with Ted, which was true as far as it went. But those dinner dates happened each time she ran across Ted and, after their first three dates, had been followed by visits to his bedroom, Prague in ’24 and Munich in ‘25. They saw each other maybe twice a year. It wasn’t a serious relationship, at least not to Matttie, but that all changed two years later in London. Ted’s comments on that occasion made it clear he was planning a future for them and talked of taking her home to Stanhope Hall, his family’s estate on Long Island, to meet her parents. He hadn’t proposed but Mattie could see where it was leading and she didn’t want to go there. She liked Ted well enough but he definitely wasn’t “the one”. He just didn’t make her heart flutter as her fiancé Eric had done. She wanted that again.
Mattie had been struggling over how best to let him down gently when, during a seafood dinner at Wilton’s on Jermyn Street, Ted provided the answer. Despite their common interest in world affairs and related problems, Mattie was careful never to use Hudson as a source for any of her stories, even on background. She had a professional reason for doing so—she never slept with sources. Well, almost never. She had done so once, and only once, back in ’23 which led to a ring-side seat at Hitler’s failed Beer Hall putsch and the launch of her career. She vowed never to do it again. And she hadn’t.
At Wilton’s, Ted had proudly given her a copy of a classified State Department paper from its Division of Russian Affairs titled “Judaism and the Present World Movement” by DeWitt Poole to which Ted had authored Appendix “C” on Bolshevism in Russia. Mattie had glanced at it over cocktails and wasn’t impressed. The rationale for the study was to understand the involvement of Jews in so many world events and its thematic breadth encompassed Bolshevism, European affairs and Zionism. Ted’s Appendix “C” contained the unstartling revelation that many Bolshevik commissars were Jews, starting with Trotsky! Not exactly the Protocols of the Elders of Zion but it wasn’t news.
Mattie had been about to hand it back when she had a thought. “Is this for me? Can I use it as background for a story and share it with my colleagues?” Hudson assured her she could. “Are you entirely certain?” she had asked. He was, Ted replied. Later, when she declined an offer to join him in his hotel suite for a “night
cap”, a distraught Ted had been told of her strict policy not to sleep with a source of which Ted was now definitely one.
As a consequence, after London, Ted had ceased being one of her aventures. Mattie still continued to have dinner with him whenever their paths crossed over the next few years. But, Ted’s passes notwithstanding, only dinner and nothing more. Until Paris in early 1929.
Mattie had become seriously involved in 1928 with André, a painter she met in France who had formerly been in the French Foreign Legion. She really thought he might be the one. He made her heart flutter. Mattie had run into Ted in Istanbul late in the year and they had dinner, Mattie rebuffing Ted’s usual pass. But, while Mattie was being faithful to André in Istanbul by only having dinner with Ted and nothing more, André in Paris had broken her heart with a dancer at the Follies Bergère. When Mattie found out, she promptly dumped André and then Ted helped her even the score. He met her in Paris in early 1929 and it was for more than a few dinner dates. Mattie had taken him and his blond American good looks to every haunt she and André had enjoyed together. The payback had been delicious. They ran across André and his new girlfriend on five different occasions, André looking progressively less happy each time. Mattie’s smile at André’s discomfort could not have been sweeter.
Of course, nothing is free and there had been a price for her payback. In bed. With Ted. All week long. Ted made her admit it had been over two years since he had been a source and he made her admit that the statute of limitations had expired on her “no sleeping with a source” policy insofar as it applied to him. She agreed but, with her payback to her faithless French lover complete, Ted had served his purpose. The sex had been nice but that was all, nothing more.
You could have knocked Mattie over with a feather when, at the end of the week, Ted told her he was in love with her and proposed. Except for her late fiancé Eric, it was the only marriage proposal Mattie had ever received. She hadn’t declined immediately. Her friends would have considered him a great catch. He was third generation wealthy with a family estate on Long Island’s North Coast—Stanhope Hall—whose size literally made Cockran’s estate, the Cedars, look like a modest guest house by comparison.
Mattie had declined the next night over dinner. She told him she felt guilty if she had given him the wrong impression but she hadn’t healed from her break-up with André. More to the point, she didn’t love Ted. He just wasn’t the one. So she told him what she should have said in the first place—they could still be friends and occasional dinner partners but not lovers. Ted did not take it well. It may have been a line but he made a guilt-ridden Mattie believe that he had been in love with her all along. At the time, Ted had been back in MID as military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris but was looking for a new civilian cover. To console what he claimed was a broken heart, she had done two things for the crestfallen Ted.
First, she had arranged an interview for him with William Randolph Hearst himself. Then, out of guilt, she agreed to one last night. In bed. With Ted. The last night bothered her still. She had way too much liquor and couldn’t tell you all they had done. But her headache the next morning was monumental, her memory a virtual blank. It must have been a helluva night.
The next thing she knew, Ted was a European correspondent for Hearst and soon his London bureau chief. But no good deed goes unpunished, as Mattie learned at the Hearst Christmas party in 1929 where she and her new boyfriend Cockran had run into Hudson. If she hadn’t obtained that job for Ted with Hearst, Cockran would never have known about the two of them and Mattie would have had one less complication in her life.
THE flight to Pittsburgh was uneventful. They stopped only once for refueling in Harrisburg, rather than twice as Mattie had anticipated. An unexpected head wind helped. They landed in Pittsburgh at 12:45 p.m. Mattie placed a phone call to the offices of the Pittsburgh Examiner, the Hearst paper in town. Within fifteen minutes, a Hearst reporter arrived in a rented motorcar, a long blue Reo Royale. They drove into downtown Pittsburgh and checked into the William Penn Hotel. After settling in their rooms, they met in the lobby to plan their next move.
“Let’s visit the police station first,” Mattie said. “If we have time, I’ll go see the coroner after that and you can interview some of the victim’s neighbors before dinner.”
Hudson nodded as he topped his head with a gray fedora, running his finger along the brim. “That would be great. I’ve missed our dinners together these past few years, our nightcaps even more.”
Mattie shot him a disapproving look but Hudson only flashed his million dollar smile. “I know the rules, boss lady. You’re Hearst’s golden girl. Trust me, I’ll behave.”
Mattie sighed. Hearst really owed her for this one.
16.
Blood and Steel
Lake Constance, Germany
Wednesday, 11 May 1932
KURT von Sturm stepped out of a long closed Mercedes motorcar and smelled the fresh late afternoon air drifting from the shores of Lake Constance, hidden from view by the mansion that lay before him. He walked over the carefully combed stones of the driveway toward the entrance, feeling the oblong shape of a stamped and sealed envelope within his breast pocket. The letter weighed more on his mind than it did within his crisp, Saville Row tailored suit.
The butler led him into a large octagonal foyer and directed him towards the expansive Great Hall, a room with a massive, barrel-vaulted ceiling and an inner balcony lining all four sides of the room. Paintings and tapestries hung from the wood-paneled walls and a fire blazed within an enormous hearth at the end of the room, where four of the most powerful men in Europe stood talking over cigars and cognac. They greeted Sturm warmly.
These men were four of the five members who comprised the Executive Committee of the Geneva Institute for Scientific and Industrial Progress. The Geneva Group, as it was known informally among its members, was comprised of major players in the international arms trade. Raw materials, manufacturers, middlemen, financiers. They used their influence to promote violence throughout the world, then supplying the deadly tools to prolong it. Small conflicts. Little wars—controllable, profitable. Their business was blood and steel and business was good.
Each member of the Geneva Group had a code name representing the cities from whence they came: Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, Milan, Madrid, Munich, Manhattan, Stockholm and Zurich. It was an anachronism dating to the Group’s initial formation at the turn of the century. The cities and the men representing them changed over the years, as power and influence waxed and waned. Now, power was in full force for the four men in front of him, 4/5th’s of the Geneva Group’s Executive Committee: Amsterdam, Milan, Zurich and Berlin.
Zurich finished his snifter of cognac and placed it on a silver tray held by a hovering servant. “Well, gentlemen? Shall we proceed to business?”
Sturm raised an eyebrow. The fifth member of the Executive Committee was not yet present. “Aren’t we waiting for Manhattan?” he said.
“No,” Zurich said. “I spoke with him by trans-Atlantic telephone today. Manhattan has been experiencing some difficulties in America. He will not arrive in Europe until next week.”
The four men sat down at one end of the large mahogany table which dominated the center of the room. Sturm took his customary seat off to the side, sitting upright in a comfortable straight-backed chair and tuned out the opening moments of the meeting.
Zurich asked for a report from the Geneva Group’s Executive Director on his recent journey to Munich and Sturm was grateful for the early request. There were no smiles as Sturm methodically detailed the operation he undertook with Bruno Kordt to assassinate the rival arms dealer Pierre Reynaud in Munich. Zurich thanked him and Sturm moved back to his seat at the side of the room to listen. Their discussion typically did not include soliciting his opinion.
That suited Sturm. He did not share a major political goal of the Geneva Group — the replacement of the German Chancellor Brüning with Franz von Pap
en — which was the next item on the agenda. He listened with half an ear. He had heard it all before. The key appointment was not von Papen but rather making General Kurt von Schleicher the Defense Minister. That was but a prelude to lever the good general himself into the chancellorship. The unsuspecting von Papen would merely be warming the seat for him.
Sturm understood this and, at one time, he shared Geneva’s vision of Germany as a great nation led by a strong leader like von Schleicher whose appointment to the defense post would increase his public visibility. But all that was long ago, before Sturm met and was instantly captivated by the confident voice and piercing blue eyes of the man he knew was destined to become Germany’s true savior. Adolf Hitler.
There were others in the Geneva Group who agreed with him, Berlin prominent among them, but they were in a minority. That would change. It was only a matter of time. Brüning had ruled by presidential decree, his power coming from the 80 year old German President Paul von Hindenburg. Von Papen’s power and von Schleicher’s would come from the same source. Adolf Hitler’s power came from the people, the ones who had made his National Socialists the second largest party in Germany. He could not be kept much longer from the leadership role for which he was destined. His day was soon coming, the dawn of a new era for Germany.
Sturm tuned back into the meeting as the men of Geneva convinced themselves anew that democracy was not a good thing if it produced a dangerous man like Hitler. Geneva knew what was best for them and the German people would just have to accept it. They always had.
“The final item on the agenda,” Zurich said with a smile to Sturm “is a six-week holiday for our Executive Director.” Sturm was mildly surprised. He’d forgotten his request.
Zurich continued, “It has been nearly three years since his last holiday and, considering the future profits we all stand to enjoy thanks to his latest success, I fully endorse the request and cast my vote. All in favor?” The other three men around the table quickly added their consent.
The Gemini Agenda Page 9
