by Mitch Silver
Falling back on my training, I set about to work through the puzzle: the Duke had written Hitler a letter. It had been torn in half. I had taken the right half from Rudolf Hess in a farmer’s field and given it to my godfather, Winston Churchill. Then Blunt and I had “liberated” the left half from a German castle at the end of the war. All right, if Anthony Blunt communicated the text of the left half of the Duke’s message to his supposed masters in Moscow, how did he do it? I thought of three ways: One, he could have memorized it or shown it to his KGB controller before handing it over to the King. Two, he could have made a copy, which he would have “posted” in one of the many drops the Soviets maintain in London. Either way he was home free. But I thought Blunt would have been more enterprising than that. I thought he did the third thing: make an exact copy and give the copy to the King, passing the original left half of the Hitler note on to Moscow. This third option would have the advantage of denying the British Crown possession of the damning article, burying it for safekeeping in the vaults under Lubyanka. It’s what I would have done.
If I were right, Blunt would have needed something more than opportunity. Time, for one thing. It would take at least forty-eight hours to somehow conjure up an exact replica of the fragment so it would appear to “marry” with the half I had so obligingly given to the authorities four years before. And he would need a facility nearby to manufacture such an item. There was no way of confirming or denying any communications Blunt might have had, short of torturing it out of him. But there was an easier way of telling whether we had the authentic left half or a clever copy. It ought to be covered with fingerprints—the Duke’s, the Führer’s, Bedaux’s, and who knows how many more. All I had to do was locate it and fingerprint it.
This line of reasoning supposes that Blunt really did have at least a couple of days after our arrival back in London on 2 May 1945, before he had to hand the fragment to the King. I did a quick check at my local library of the Court Circular—at one time a broadsheet of limited circulation that described events at Court and in later centuries a daily record of royal lives, published in the Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Scotsman—for the weeks before and after 2 May. Beginning 30 April, the King was at Caernarvon Castle in Wales, marking the tenth anniversary of his father’s last visit there during his Silver Jubilee of 1935, and did not return to Buckingham Palace until the evening of the fifth. So there was enough time for Blunt to pull off the presumed switch.
But wouldn’t King George have simply destroyed the offending letter as soon as he had it in his possession? I didn’t think so. Knowing what I know of their sibling rivalry, and the likelihood that Bertie and his family would not have survived a German occupation with Edward back on the throne, I thought the King would have kept the letter to hold over his older brother. Their mother, Mary, was still alive after the war, and I think the Duke would have done anything so that his mother (former German princess though she may have been) would never learn of his treason.
While I couldn’t be sure at the time what had happened to the Hess half of the Führer letter I had come up with four years earlier, I was working on the assumption that the King had the Blunt half and hadn’t destroyed it. I made it my business to get my hands on it and authenticate it.
Chapter 42
The bus lurched away from its last stop at JFK, the American Airlines terminal, even as a young couple struggled to hoist an immense duffel bag into the overhead rack. The girl sat down in the seat next to Amy and her boyfriend took the one across the aisle. It looked like they’d be engrossed in each other for the rest of the trip. Good. No small talk.
Behind the slowly accelerating bus, two limos from City Cars had been stopped at the curb. Amy was starting to notice these things. In the oversized side-view mirror of the bus, she watched three very tanned children in shorts get into one of the black cars along with their equally underdressed parents, back from a Florida vacation. Then their car pulled away into traffic. Immediately, the second limo started up too. Strange. No one had gotten in. Amy kept looking, but there was too much glare to make out the driver’s features.
And another strange thing. Amy’s subconscious mind must have been putting in overtime, because now she remembered that weird, stilted phrase of Scott’s on the phone, that “if the story’s true…truly written by Ian Fleming” thing. He doesn’t talk like that.
Amy caught herself. She was seeing, and hearing, things. An empty Town Car. A turn of phrase. Get a grip, Amy Greenberg. You have miles to go and pages to read before you sleep. She twirled Scott’s engagement ring around her finger, praying for the restorative powers of jewelry to kick in.
PROVENANCE
How do you “case the joint” when the joint you want to burgle is a palace? The only thing I could think to do was to be invited there. As you know, I was playing a long shot: that King George VI had kept the damning evidence we had retrieved from that German castle. So I went back to my connect-the-dots thinking. The King has been dead since 1952. Who would have his most personal effects? That was easy: Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. If the King had wanted something to hold over his brother, his wife would have wanted it twice as much, if only to throttle Wallis with.
All right, it’s 1963. The Queen Mum has long since moved out of Buckingham Palace and gone across the street to Clarence House, a three-storey town house made over for William IV in 1830 and the home of some royal or other ever since. Here’s where my 30 Assault Unit training comes in again, that art of getting documents from people who have no intention of letting them go. I equipped myself with plans for the upper storeys of Clarence House—the first floor being all public spaces—and I did some reading in the back numbers of women’s magazines, home and garden stuff. And lo, after an hour or so, I found a picture of the Queen Mother in her third-floor sitting room. Beneath it she says, “I’m never without my box of keepsakes.” Another photo shows her holding a polished walnut box given to the King on his visit to Bechuanaland in 1938. While the article is all about the Regency furnishings in the room, the caption quotes her as saying, “I keep the King’s ring, a lock of his hair and other cherished mementos from that happier time in this room. I’m quite fond of sitting here and going through them.”
I managed to have an acquaintance of mine with a locksmithing background—gained mostly by a lot of late-night work on other people’s locks—study an enlargement of the photograph. He told me that the box, though handmade in Africa, looked to have an imported English lock. And that Swindon & Cowles were still making similar ones. For a small fortune, he gave me three different keys for Swindon & Cowles prewar locks and told me my odds were sixty percent of opening the box with one of them. (I knew my odds of finding something besides rings and locks of hair were far lower.)
Access to the house would be easier to obtain. The Queen Mother Elizabeth has for years been holding gatherings at Clarence House, garden parties in the summer months, dinner parties the rest of the year. The guests are always a mix of the famous and the talented. After writing eight best sellers, I’ve made it into the former group, if not the latter. So it was merely a matter of bruiting it about, in the English way, that I was available to attend one of the Queen Mother’s evenings, and I was duly invited for the soiree to be given on a Friday evening November last.
I arrived for the cocktail hour promptly at seven, fully prepared to bide my time and wait for a chance to excuse myself (a trip to the gents’, perhaps) so I could explore upstairs. But events overtook me. A half hour earlier in Dallas, Texas, President Kennedy had been shot. He had been taken to hospital by the time I walked in the door, and all the anticipated formalities had gone by the boards. The Queen Mother and her guests, including the actor Peter Sellers and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz, were crowded around two television sets on the first floor—one of which had been brought in from the servants’ quarters. I’m a little ashamed to say that I did not greet my hostess or observe any of the usual niceties. Instead, as soon as I was over the ini
tial shock of the news, I made my way up the back stairs to the third floor, passing two liveried gentlemen on their way down with a large colour television set.
The sitting room looked as it had in the magazine, and I immediately recognised the walnut box, about twelve inches by ten inches, sitting on a long-legged marble-topped table near the window. The second key I tried opened the lid. To make what is already a very long story a little shorter, under some other articles that included an ornate man’s ring and a lock of grey hair in a folded-over piece of paper, I discovered an acetate envelope on the bottom of the box. Inside the acetate I could see a sheet of notepaper with handwriting on it. My anxious brain thought I detected the sound of the servants coming back, and I used my handkerchief to take the acetate envelope from the box and put it inside my dinner jacket, in the widened pocket I’d rigged up for the occasion. I closed the box and made my way back down the stairs without anyone’s stopping me (I still had my alibi of “looking for the gents’ ” if anyone had done).
It was strange watching the news of the President’s death alongside Peter Sellers without having spoken a word to him or the other guests or even my hostess. It was stranger to do it with what I hoped might be a purloined artefact of great historical importance in my pocket. I had no way of knowing that I had scooped up not half the letter but all of it. Two torn half sheets of notepaper—the Hess half and the Blunt half—had lain one on top of the other in the clear envelope since the war.
In any event, less than an hour after I had arrived, Elizabeth asked us to take a moment to pray for Mrs. Kennedy and the new American President, Mr. Johnson. And then she graciously, regretfully, suggested it was not an appropriate evening for the merriment she had planned and asked us to take what you Americans call a “rain check.” And so I made my escape through the front door of Clarence House with the others.
Chapter 43
PROVENANCE
Q lives. The real-life counterpart of the quartermaster in the Bond books is alive and well and counting the days to retirement in the basement of Whitehall. The forensic laboratory there rivals what anyone other than the Americans has built. It is easily the latest, most up-to-date government facility in the United Kingdom. I lifted it in toto—adding only a few small touches—and gave it to my fictional Q. The factual Q (who shall remain nameless) heads a team of highly competent technicians who can equip an operative for the field, eavesdrop on a bedroom in Karachi, or, more to my purpose, tell you who handled any object over the past thousand years.
While I no longer have any formal standing in the game, I have from time to time rung up a couple of the chaps left over from the war and bombarded them with queries for use in my “factions.” Effective killing zones of firearms, the half-life of secret inks, that sort of thing. And they have become used to my bringing all sort of invented matter to them for “probability” vetting: could such a thing be put to such a use and, in all probability, work?
I was reasonably sure Q would view my request to analyse a torn piece of notepaper as another one of my put-up jobs. But just to be sure nobody but me saw the complete text of the letter, I only gave him the left-hand fragment of my lucky find. I gave the right-hand side to another of the forensics boys. All right, the results, right side first: In the presence of certain chemicals and viewed under a particular kind of light, the side I got from Rudolf Hess revealed the fingerprints of many individuals. Facsimiles of the prints were fed into the massive UNIVAC computer full of government files that sits in its own temperature-controlled glass room. The names of the owners of the matching prints were spit out on a long white computer tape, and among them were Charles Bedaux, Adolf Hitler, and the former King Edward VIII. The right half also bore the thumb and index fingerprints of Winston Churchill, near the upper right corner, and my own fingerprints, put there when I had taken the fragment from Hess. (Strikingly, no prints were found which matched those of Rudolf Hess—at least according to the official British records. Hmmm.) While I trust the man who did the testing not to discuss my request, I thought it best to be rather generous in “reimbursing” him for his time and trouble before swearing him to secrecy “until the book comes out.”
The left half of the note yielded no such treasure trove. Only two men had ever handled it: Anthony Blunt and the then King of England, George VI. Not the Führer and certainly not the Duke of Windsor. The results of Q’s tests couldn’t be denied. The right side was authentic and the left side was not. And the culprit, Sir Anthony, had been caught red-handed, or red-fingered, if you prefer. But definitely Red.
I recently read an article reprinted from an American business journal that described what they’re calling “decision trees.” If, to reach a decision, one has to make choices among a number of competing possibilities (or branches)—and if following any branch leads to more branches and more choices—one can literally plot on a piece of paper a tree with all its attendant branches for any decision one must make.
My current decision tree would look like this: If the wrong people know about the Führer note, how do they know? Blunt. Of Blunt’s options, which did he take? Stealing the original and substituting a copy. Next branch: How did he do it? Before I edged out onto a branch that wouldn’t hold my weight, I asked myself how one could make a lightning-fast facsimile of something one had only just obtained.
The results of my cogitation: the King must have shown him the Hess half of the letter before the mission ever left England. Otherwise, how would he have known what we were looking for? If that were the case, Blunt might have been able to research the Duke’s notepaper of the period (or have someone do it for him) and find the proper pen and ink for his forgery.
The actual reproduction of the letter would have been right up Blunt’s street. Before the war he had been tipped to head the Courtauld Institute of Art and had been given the flat on the top floor of the Institute at 20 Portman Square, the best Adam house in London. All the pictures had been evacuated to the country for the duration, and Blunt had the run of the place. Though it manifests the discreet, well-mannered air of a London club, the Courtauld is one of the world’s preeminent centres for the study of art history, sending its experts hither and thither to appraise and authenticate all manner of objets d’art. Right from its start in the early 1930s, the Courtauld established a technological department for the scientific examination and restoration of artworks. Indeed, Anthony Blunt had told me on the plane back to London from Germany that he saw himself as an archaeologist of paintings.
I have managed to ingratiate myself with the Courtauld’s technology director, Stephen Hyde-Jones, and his assistant, Maggie Brown, who were good enough to give me a tour when the Director happened to be on the Continent. Back in its place of honour is the Van Gogh self-portrait with a bandage covering his severed ear, just inside the door to the palatial study adjoining Blunt’s top-floor rooms. And though I didn’t see it myself, as his bedroom is kept locked while he’s away, I’m told the late fifteenth-century masterwork Botticelli’s Holy Trinity hangs on the wall over Sir Anthony’s bed.
One floor down is a laboratory that houses dozens of samples of paints, canvas, inks, and paper used through the centuries. I think Blunt had merely to come downstairs from his flat and use this facility to create his forgery. Then, possibly on the same night the King returned to London, he would have handed the fragment over. Blunt would have had little fear of the sovereign’s independently authenticating the paper. The King wanted as few people to know of its existence as possible and, after all, he had just received it from the man he would have chosen to authenticate it!
Chapter 44
PROVENANCE
Nothing in this narrative so far explains how I have been able to obtain for this time capsule one of the most valuable scraps of paper—save a Magna Carta or two—I have ever laid eyes upon. The actual, honest-to-God half of the Führer letter that I have included at the end of this dossier should have been tucked safely away in a vault on Dzerzhinsky Street ever sin
ce V-E Day. And it would have been there, had Anthony Blunt been a heterosexual.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the practice of homosexuality in Great Britain was a crime, punishable by an extended gaol term. Though gentlemen of influence and/or means were usually able to avoid prison, the threat of a public trial was enough to drive the practice, and the practitioners, underground. I mean that literally, as the men’s rooms in the Underground and the subway passages that take pedestrians under our traffic circuses became the most frequented rendezvous points for pickups.
There is a dossier at New Scotland Yard, maintained by Special Branch, called the Pink File. Unlike the ordinary police files kept in each English borough and shire, the Pink File details the indiscretions of men whose position or title would leave them vulnerable to blackmail—and, by extension, would leave their Government vulnerable as well. More secrets have, after all, been betrayed by sexual blackmail of adulterous husbands and homosexual lovers than have ever been obtained by “spies.”
The maintenance of the Pink Files is not a hit-or-miss affair. Should an individual come to be regarded as “notorious,” defined by Special Branch as someone with at least three arrests for the euphemistically named loitering or cohabitation, his mail and telephone can be “entailed.” Entailment means intercepting (without opening) the pieces of mail he receives, recording the return addresses and post offices of origin, and logging in the telephone numbers of calls placed to him. This furnishes the basis of further inquiries into the lives of his correspondents. It’s a filthy business.
