Safe Houses

by Dan Fesperman

  “And you are?”

  “Henry Mattick. We’re interested in the Pond materials.”

  “You mean the Grombach archive.”

  “Grombach?”

  “Colonel John ‘Frenchy’ Grombach. That’s who started the Pond and ran it till its dying breath.”

  “In ’55?”

  “Well, at least you know that much.”

  “And not a whole lot more.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to navigate alone. For a few days, anyway. I’m working under a deadline, but I’ll be happy to authorize your records requests. Just bring them over when you’ve filled them out, you and your assistant here.”

  “I’m not his assistant. He works for me.”

  “Whatever you say, Ms….?”

  “Shoat. Anna Shoat.”

  He stared at her. For the first time since approaching him, they had his undivided attention, and when he next spoke his voice was almost reverential.

  “Any relation to Helen Shoat?”

  Anna reached into her jeans pocket for her mom’s research card and handed it to him.

  “I’m her daughter.”

  He shut the heavy volume and looked at her closely.

  “Yes. I see the resemblance. Let’s take this to my office.”

  Hilliard led them to a cubicle at the opposite end of the room. They sat facing him across a cluttered desk.

  “I’d offer coffee, but you know the rules up here.” He shook his head in amazement. “Your mother was an impressive woman. It’s always a pleasure working with people who have that much enthusiasm. I gathered she also had some sort of personal connection to the material. Then when I heard about what happened…” His voice trailed off.

  “It’s all right,” Anna said. “You can talk about it.”

  “I was just going to say how sorry I was. Shocked, too.”

  “We were all shocked.”

  Hilliard briefly bowed his head.

  “What can I do for you, then? Are you looking to pick up where she left off?”

  “Actually, we didn’t even know she’d come here until a few days ago.”

  “What we could use first,” Henry said, “is a little background on how this stuff even came to light. The story we saw said it was locked away in some barn?”

  “Yes. It had moved around from one place to another for years, mostly because Grombach never wanted any outsiders getting their hands on it. After he died in ’82, everybody pretty much forgot about it. Sort of like the Pond itself.”

  “I know I’d never heard of it,” Henry said.

  “That’s the way Grombach wanted it. Frenchy was a strange bird. Born in New Orleans, his father was French. West Point, class of ’23, although he got kicked out. A good boxer. Fenced, played football, polo. Commissioned into the Army as a second lieutenant, where, oddly enough, he ended up doing some work with the NYPD and FBI. Dabbled in coaching for the Olympics. Kind of a man for all seasons, and a big-time anticommie.

  “So, then. The war began. And in ’42 some general from Army Intelligence decided that he hated the brand-new OSS—the spy org that eventually morphed into the CIA—and wanted to set up his own intel network, even apart from Army G-2. He picked Grombach to run it. Not on his own, but hand in hand with a lot of big multinationals that kicked in money, office space, and commercial cover for agents and operatives. Companies like U.S. Rubber, American Express, Philips, Remington Rand, Chase Bank. The Pond was sort of a public-private hybrid, and Grombach liked that just fine.”

  “Were they any good?”

  “Depends on who you ask. Grombach would tell you they were the greatest, and once the war ended he wanted to keep the whole thing going. Of course, the OSS wanted to keep going, too, and a few years later it won the power struggle, and pivoted straight from fighting Hitler to fighting Stalin. But, if anything, Grombach’s people had started fighting the Cold War earlier. He was raising hell about commie infiltrators even before Hitler was dead. And not long after the war he set up a private channel of communication with Senator Joe McCarthy and some of the other big red-baiters on Capitol Hill.”

  “What finally put him out of business?”

  “The CIA. They signed up the Pond as a contractual contributor after the war. But Frenchy and the CIA never got along worth a damn, so in ’55 Allen Dulles pulled the plug on them. Grombach didn’t go down without a fight, and there was a lot of back-and-forth about trying to keep it going, maybe by taking it deeper underground, with more corporate support. That’s just a fraction of the material here, but I mention it because it was one of the angles your mother was most interested in. That, plus Grombach’s obsession for code words.”

  “Code words?” Henry said.

  “He had a mania for it. Not just for agents and ops, but for cities, countries, public figures, departments of the government. You name it, Grombach had a code word for it, and he used them all in his correspondence, which can make for pretty crazy reading unless you know what the heck he’s talking about. Which reminds me…”

  He raised a finger in the air and swiveled his chair toward a filing cabinet. He opened the drawer, rummaged around, and pulled out a stapled sheaf of papers that he tossed on the desk. The title was in caps: GROMBACH CRIB SHEET. It was a glossary for the code names and buzzwords Grombach regularly employed.

  “A historian who’s researching a book came up with this, and kindly let me make a copy. Nineteen damn pages, double-spaced. Boy, did your mother’s eyes ever light up when she saw it. In fact…”

  Hilliard paused to look down at the floor. Then he cleared his throat.

  “Yes?” Anna prompted.

  “I was just going to say you could keep this particular copy, because it belonged to her. To your mother. I kept it here so she wouldn’t have to check it in through security every damn visit. And, frankly, because for whatever reason she never seemed all that comfortable about taking any copies home with her. She never said why, and I never asked. So I ended up keeping quite a few items for her. Anyway…”

  He handed it to Anna.

  “As you’ll see, she circled the words that interested her the most. She also made a little list of her favorites, right up there at the top of the first page.”

  “Yes.” Anna began reading from it. “ ‘The Bay, the Lake, the Zoo, Effies, Jack, the Hump, the Vee People.”

  “That’s right. She almost laughed when she saw those. The Bay was the CIA, the Lake was the War Department, or Pentagon now. The Zoo was the State Department, the Effies were the FBI, and Jack was good old J. Edgar Hoover himself, another big-time buddy of Frenchy Grombach’s, partly because they both hated the OSS and CIA. The Hump was Capitol Hill. The Vee people was a reference to Philips, the company I mentioned earlier, one of Grombach’s corporate sponsors. It was Dutch, and I think its full name was Philips N.V.”

  “Why’d she zero in on those?” Henry asked.

  “She never said, but I got the idea they were something that had been bugging her for years.”

  “One thing I can tell you,” Anna said, “is that she used to work for the CIA. Way back in 1979.”

  Hilliard’s mouth dropped open. Then he laughed aloud, while shaking his head in amazement.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “You truly had no idea?”

  “None whatsoever. My guess was that someone in her family might have been involved with Grombach. But the idea that she was in the same business? Granted, with a whole different outfit, but still…” He shook his head again. “She hid it well.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I was more surprised than you were. Not a clue until the week after she died, when they called about a severance check for her two years of service.”

  “Still, you said 1979? That was decades after the Pond closed shop. Wonder what got her interested?
”

  “You said a second ago that you kept some other items of hers?”

  His smile turned sheepish.

  “We don’t offer that service for all researchers. But, like I said, she was always reluctant to take anything with her. So whenever she made copies, she left them behind.”

  “Can you show us?”

  “Be happy to. In fact, it’s funny you’d be here today at all. I was just thinking about that stuff, wondering if I should throw it out. So it’s all yours, if you want it. There isn’t all that much, so if you’d like I can guide you through it. Probably wouldn’t take more than an hour or two.”

  “That would be great,” Anna said. “Thank you.”

  Hilliard checked his watch.

  “It’s getting on toward one o’clock. Are you two hungry?”

  “Now that you mention it,” Henry said. The only thing in his stomach was the cup of coffee from early that morning, and he was already running low on energy.

  “We’ve got a pretty decent cafeteria. Why don’t we grab some grub and take her pages out on the patio. That’s where she liked to take her breaks, and it’s as pleasant a spot as any.”

  43

  “There were really only two main things she was interested in,” Hilliard began.

  He wiped his mouth with a napkin and shoved aside a plate with the last crumbs of his lunch. Then he dropped a file folder onto the table filled with maybe fifty pages of documents copied onto blue paper.

  Anna was still picking at a salad, with seemingly little appetite. Henry had devoured a double cheeseburger and was working his way through a pile of fries.

  A cardinal was singing cheery notes in the nearby woods, and their table was shaded by an umbrella. Nearly everyone else was eating indoors, so they had the patio to themselves.

  Hilliard opened the folder.

  “The first item was a group of individuals. A small one. This was her list.”

  He slid forward a folded sheet of white lined notebook paper, the only item in the folder that wasn’t a copied document. Anna’s mother had printed out three names:

  Clark Baucom (code name?)

  Edward Stone (aka “Beetle”)

  Cryptonym “Lewis”

  “That first fellow on the list, Clark Baucom, well, there was quite a bit on him, but that was hardly surprising. He’s one of the few personalities in this outfit who went on to bigger, better things elsewhere.”

  “We saw his obit in the Post,” Henry said.

  “My mother had a copy of it. We think that’s where she first found out about these archives.”

  “His Pond cryptonym, or code name, was ‘Joy.’ Based in Budapest. Joined up with the Pond just after the war ended and the Russians were taking over in Hungary. His big job in ’47 was to smuggle out members of the Hungarian aristocracy before the tanks rolled in. Baucom didn’t stay with Grombach very long, though. Joined the CIA in ’48, and that was the best way possible to burn your bridges with Frenchy, who hated the Bay, as he called it.”

  “Who’s this Stone guy, code name Beetle?”

  “His name is on the cheat sheet, some operative they hired fairly late in the game, in the early fifties, a fellow with commercial cover based in Vienna. But we couldn’t find more than a few mentions of him. Your mom seemed a little disappointed by that. The first was in one of Grombach’s personnel memos, when he was discussing some new hires in ’52.”

  Hilliard flipped through the relevant pages for them as he spoke.

  “Then, as you’ll see, there were a couple of Beetle’s field reports—one from Essen, in West Germany, the other from Salzburg, in Austria—but neither was anything special. They’re here, though, if you want to read them later.”

  He flipped through another few pages.

  “Okay, then. This was the stuff that seemed to intrigue her the most—any and all correspondence having to do with Grombach’s efforts to keep the Pond up and running past its shelf life. Officially it went out of business in ’55. But there are rumblings here and there of him looking for a more secretive way forward. Trying to line up support from his buddies in the business world, or on Capitol Hill. Shadowy references to certain Army generals and diplomatic types who might help. Here’s one example, a letter he sent to a bunch of folks in July of ’54, right after the CIA had made it clear they wouldn’t be renewing the Pond’s contract. Take a look. The money paragraph is down toward the end.”

  We are informing our people that this is really a security blackout, and that is definitely the truth. We merely don’t know how long it will have to last, but we do know that our association with the Bay must end. We hope that we may be able to reactivate under new and different auspices the first part of 1955. We hope to do so even if we must do it privately, entirely supported by private funds, and even if we have to go underground even further than we have so far.

  “Wow,” Henry said. “Is there a lot of that in here?”

  “Dribs and drabs. But the bulk of it is in a strange little collection that Grombach called the ‘Jewelry’ file.”

  “Jewelry?”

  “Partly because of all the code names he used in that correspondence—Tiffany, for the Department of the Army. Van Cleef and Arpels, with Van Cleef supposedly being some Hungarian. Nobody seems to have a clue as to who Arpels was. Then there are all these other names that no one has yet identified: Mr. S., Mr. N., the Shark. There’s a fellow Grombach calls the Bishop, who may have been a retired admiral. Another name, Durrell, was apparently an Army general. ‘Staying in the jewelry business’ became Grombach’s euphemism for staying in the intelligence game. But with some of this stuff, even if you know the code names it’s all so cloaked and convoluted that half the time you can’t really tell what he’s saying. Your mom loved it, I suppose because it’s so rich with the whiff of conspiracy, and of unresolved actions. Let me show you another typical paragraph, from June of ’55.”

  He flipped to another of the blue pages and tapped his finger on the third paragraph.

  The only thing I have to suggest as a brand-new idea, but I imagine our ecclesiastical friend would have to check with Mr. van Cleef, is to let Bishop carry the ball in a new and different approach on Durrell. My suggestion is to let Mr. Bishop approach Durrell and tell him he knows of the desires of Arpels and of the reasons for those desires, and of the efforts of Arpels to find out about the organization.

  “Now, skip down to this paragraph.” Hilliard poked a sentence farther down the page.

  As I see it with the Jones boys still in command here, the only possible chance of a resurrection is away from here and with great quiet, which is exactly the answer provided Durrell can be convinced.

  “Care to guess who Grombach meant by ‘the Jones boys’?” Hilliard asked.

  “The Dulles brothers?” Henry said.

  “Bingo. Allen Dulles was running CIA, John Foster Dulles was secretary of state. Frenchy despised them both, and the feelings were mutual.”

  Hilliard heaved with gentle laughter.

  “What became of all this?” Anna asked.

  “Nothing, obviously. The Pond went out of business right on schedule. The CIA let one or two ongoing ops proceed to their natural conclusion, but even those were wrapped up within a year. Grombach himself went into the corporate security biz. That’s when he must have stashed away all these papers.”

  “And what became of all this talk about staying in the jewelry business?”

  “It just stopped. He was mentioning it on one day, saying nothing the next. Like it never even existed.”

  They pondered that for a few seconds before Anna spoke up.

  “But isn’t that exactly what you’d do—clam up and get real quiet—if you’d managed to succeed by taking everything even deeper underground?”

  Hilliard smiled.

>   “Young lady, you think just like your mother.”

  He closed the folder and slid it forward for them to take. Then he leaned back in his chair.

  “Tell me, if you don’t mind me prying just a little. Any idea of why she found all this material so fascinating?”

  Anna started to speak, and then stopped, so Henry picked up the thread.

  “For one thing, Baucom was a former lover.”

  Anna blushed, making Henry wish he’d used a more delicate word.

  “Ah. So that was the personal connection.”

  “One of them, anyway,” Anna said.

  “You think there were more?”

  “Well, maybe these other two names, Lewis and Beetle, this Edward Stone guy.”

  “You may be right. Although I didn’t note any warmth or affection when they were mentioned. I was also a little surprised by her interest in the ‘jewelry’ material. I mean, that was in ’54, ’55? She would’ve barely been born, I’m guessing.”

  “Born in ’54,” Anna said.

  “Yet, it was almost like she believed the Pond was still a going concern. It was like she knew it. That was her whole approach.”

  “Did you ever ask what made her so sure?” Henry said.

  Hilliard shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because she told me she was going to take a break for a while to run down some other leads, and then she’d be coming back for more. I always figured I’d be able to ask her later.”

  Hilliard sighed deeply. A breeze ruffled the pages in the folder, and the cardinal again cried out cheerfully from the trees.

  44

  “You’ve been mighty quiet over there,” Henry said. They were halfway back to Poston, and she had spent most of the time staring out the window.