Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  “Didn’t you read the paper this morning, Dad?”

  Joe looked at him, perplexed.

  “There was a murder out back in the alley last night. A hatcheck girl—stabbed to death.”

  “Murdered? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—”

  “Her name was Katie O’Donohue.”

  “I knew her people in Boston, Jack.” His father looked white and shocked in the foyer’s gentle light. “Truth be told—I got her this job.”

  Jack fished awkwardly in the pocket of his overcoat. “Here,” he said, handing his dad the Simon Templar novel. “I got you this today. For the crossing.”

  Joe stared at the stick drawing of the haloed Saint. “Thanks. I haven’t read this one.”

  “I didn’t think you had.”

  “Little Katie,” Joe murmured, his gaze sliding past Jack, to the shadows around the door. “It’s a terrible world, you know that?”

  “I’ll get us a cab,” Jack said.

  FOUR. LOOSE ENDS

  “TAKE A LOOK AT THIS.” J. Edgar Hoover passed a folded square of newsprint to Roosevelt, who adjusted his glasses and peered at the black-and-white image of a Manhattan alley, police in the foreground. A shrouded form, humped and miserable, bisected the shot.

  “That’s the girl we were tailing. She was murdered the other night while you were in New York.”

  “Really?” Roosevelt glanced over the edge of the newspaper. “And your tail never saw me plunge my knife into her heart, Ed? You’re slipping.”

  Hoover grimaced. “Mr. President, I never meant to imply—”

  “Just a joke, Ed.”

  “The girl was murdered, Mr. President.”

  “Yes. Very sad. And she was how old?”

  Hoover shrugged, unsettled. “Twenty-five, twenty-six. I don’t know. She was just a hatcheck girl.”

  Typical, Roosevelt thought. Sanctimonious and callous in the space of a heartbeat. Hoover was an odd fellow—emotionally unstable, in Roosevelt’s opinion; paranoiac and a hypocrite and quite probably a liar; but wickedly intelligent. He saw wheels within wheels. The trick lay in knowing when to stop listening.

  “The point is,” he was saying, “that Katie O’Donohue was a lead in this German money case. And now she’s gone. The mick she was dealing with has done a bunk, too. Nobody’s seen him for days.”

  “Then he probably killed her and took the cash.” Roosevelt sighed. “And your tail saw nothing?”

  The FBI chief moved restlessly in his chair. “He was stationed in front of the Stork Club, waiting for her shift to end. She left by the back alley instead.”

  “Your tail would have recognized the . . . mick, as you put it? If he had entered the club by the front door?”

  “Or even the alley. Sure. Hammond’s a good op—he’d have picked up Jimmy Riordan right away. But the only guys Hammond saw were the usual types who hit the Stork. Well-dressed. Respectable. Walter Winchell and his crowd.”

  “And the cash hasn’t surfaced?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What about a personal motive? Love gone wrong?”

  Hoover shook his head. “The wound’s not the work of an amateur. It was a trained thrust, straight through the ribs to the heart. Military, one of our forensic boys said. And there’s another thing: a swastika was cut into her left breast.”

  Roosevelt whistled faintly. “Hardly subtle.”

  “We think it’s a deliberate warning.” Hoover dropped his voice. “From the Germans. We think they know we’re onto them—and they’re rolling up the network.”

  “If German agents came all the way to New York to kill this girl,” Roosevelt pointed out gently, “then someone at your shop has talked too much. This man Hammond, perhaps?”

  “No.” Hoover was emphatic. “Or he’d be the one with the knife through the heart. Maybe Katie talked—or had light fingers. A girl doesn’t make much these days, checking hats.”

  “So what will Hitler do?” Roosevelt mused. “Silence a few more bagmen? Find another Katie? Or concede my third term?”

  “Hitler’s got eighteen months before the next election and plenty of cash to spend, Mr. President. He won’t concede.”

  Roosevelt set the newspaper clipping on his desk. “Poor child. Why did you even notice her in the first place?”

  “Because of the company she kept.” Hoover smiled wolfishly. “She was one of Joe Kennedy’s girls.”

  * * *

  AFTER THE FBI CHIEF LEFT the White House, Roosevelt sat for a while staring at nothing. There were issues on his plate—he’d asked Congress for $525 million to buy planes and train pilots, but the Hill was taking its time. Nobody wanted to vote for defense and look like they were voting for war. He wanted to amend the Neutrality laws this term, so he could help France and Britain if Hitler turned west, but it was risky—the isolationists would eat him alive. And then there was Eleanor. His wife was demanding repeal of Jim Crow laws segregating blacks and whites in the South. He couldn’t push the issue now and win reelection next year. He needed too many Southern Democratic votes.

  So why, with so much to handle, was he obsessed with Hoover’s parting words?

  He rolled irritably across the uncarpeted floor. His study was oval in shape and next to his bedroom. By the connecting door was a table where he worked on his stamp collection—he was concentrating on Central and South America at the moment, but he was thinking of starting a special war album. Stamps of countries annexed by the German Reich, countries that would cease to exist by the end of the summer. How rare those stamps would be!

  He had just picked up the envelope full of foreign mail the State department saved for him each week, so he could cull the stamps, when there was a knock on the door.

  It was Sam Schwartz, the head of his Secret Service detail.

  “Tell me something, Sam.”

  “Mr. President?”

  “Did I, at any time, to the best of your recollection, require J. Edgar Hoover to investigate Joseph P. Kennedy, the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s?”

  “Investigate him, sir?” Schwartz looked puzzled. “You mean his manipulation of the stock market years ago? Our boys over at Treasury have turned that inside and out. We couldn’t touch Kennedy. There weren’t enough laws on the books then to cover what he did.”

  “Poking around in his private life, Sam. Following him off-hours. Checking up on the people he chooses to . . . entertain. That sort of thing.”

  “No, sir,” Schwartz replied with distaste. “To my recollection, you have never asked the FBI to investigate Mr. Kennedy in that way. Perhaps Mr. Hoover . . . fell into it, when you asked for the background report on Mr. Kennedy’s son.”

  “Charitable of you, Sam. But they’re different people, surely? Edgar keeps files, you know. Secret ones. Full of scandalous information. He’s very diligent in compiling them. A bit of blackmail will always be useful.”

  “That’s not right, sir.”

  “Edgar doesn’t waste time on what’s right—he concentrates on what’s legal. And in my experience, that’s whatever the FBI decides is legal. Makes you wonder,” Roosevelt added, “whether he has a file on you. Or my children. Or me.”

  “I doubt that, sir!”

  “Why?” He eyed his bodyguard. “If he has the dirt on one of the wealthiest men in America, why not the President?”

  Schwartz’s stolid face was shocked. “Because you’re the president!”

  Roosevelt laughed mirthlessly. “I bet he tapped Kennedy’s phones in Palm Beach. God, those transcripts would make some reading! Sam, I think it would be as well if you and Casey and Foscarello swept my bedroom for whatever it is that taps phones. Hell, sweep the whole White House for the damn things.”

  “Bugs, sir?”

  “Bugs.” The word delight
ed him; it suggested something telling about Hoover’s mind.

  He turned his wheelchair toward his desk and rolled slowly across the study floor. “Edgar thinks the Germans know we’ve discovered their secret cash network. And that they’re shutting it down as a result.”

  “Hitler doesn’t shut down, Mr. President.”

  “Agreed. You think Edgar’s too eager to declare victory, Sam?”

  “It’d serve his purpose.”

  “Which is?” Roosevelt demanded.

  “To make himself indispensable. First he threatens you with a plot, then he blows it sky-high and calls himself a hero. Remember General Butler?”

  “How could I forget?”

  Major General Smedley Darlington Butler was a man Roosevelt admired. Once the youngest major general in the Marine Corps and twice a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, he’d been forced to retire by Roosevelt’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, for publicly denouncing Benito Mussolini as a “mad dog.” When the Italian ambassador complained, then-president Hoover threatened the general with court-martial. Butler stood by his words—and was forcibly retired.

  In 1934, Butler came to J. Edgar Hoover with a bizarre story: He’d been tapped by two prominent American Legion officials to lead an armed march of half a million veterans on Washington, protesting the New Deal. The men in question had just returned from Europe, where they’d been studying the formation of Germany’s Nazi Party, the Italian Fascisti, and the French Croix de Feu. They were struck, Butler said, by the critical role army veterans had played in the founding of these political movements—and felt there was a place for such an organization in the United States. It would save America from the Communist Menace. If Roosevelt opposed them, he’d be removed by force, along with his cabinet.

  Butler wanted no part of any plan to overthrow his own democratically elected government, but he played along with his contacts in order to learn who was financing them. They told him confidentially they were backed by a new organization: the American Liberty League.

  The ALL’s professed purpose was to oppose “radical” political movements. Among its members were the directors of some of the country’s largest corporations—U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Montgomery Ward, Goodyear Tire. Alfred P. Sloan was a member, as were the Du Ponts. E. F. Hutton had joined. So had Elihu Root. Together, they controlled more than $37 billion in assets.

  And they were gunning, Butler explained, for the overthrow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  Hoover refused to investigate the American Liberty League; he told Roosevelt they’d violated no federal statute. The real reason Ed sat on his hands, Roosevelt knew, was that he would never cross the wealthiest men in the country. He handed that thorny problem directly to Roosevelt. The President tossed it to a private congressional subcommittee charged with investigating Nazi propaganda in the United States. In a closed session, they listened to Major General Butler and others who’d been offered leading roles in the putsch. Word of the plot leaked from the session and circulated in Washington and New York. Somebody wrote a news exposé about it. By the time Roosevelt ran for a second term in 1936, the American Liberty League was totally discredited. Most of its prominent backers had quit.

  But the lesson remained. J. Edgar Hoover had prevented a conspiracy to overthrow the United States government. And he’d come to Roosevelt again, five years later, with evidence of the Nazi money network.

  “The way he sees it, Boss, you owe him something now,” Schwartz surmised.

  “Spies,” the President said thoughtfully. “That’s what he wants, you know—his Bureau boys opening secret files all over the world. And a few spies would be useful in this coming war, God knows. But I hesitate to concentrate all my eggs in Edgar’s basket, Sam.”

  Schwartz’s lips compressed. Hoover’s power grabs were old news. He even wanted Schwartz’s job, and fought an ongoing battle with Henry Morgenthau, the treasury secretary, over Roosevelt’s security detail. By hallowed tradition, guarding the president was the Secret Service’s duty. Hoover thought his Bureau boys should take over the job, and he trotted out the slightest threat to the President as ammunition in his war. If Hoover could convince Roosevelt to place his life in the FBI’s hands, Hoover’s eyes and ears would be right there in the White House: recording the President’s every thought and move. But to Schwartz’s relief, Henry Morgenthau had crushed Hoover’s bid. For now.

  “I think we have to assume that Herr Hitler is as devoted as ever to removing me from office,” Roosevelt was saying. “He’ll barely break stride for the death of a hatcheck girl. Or an ambassador’s son, if it comes to that. Could you get Jack Kennedy on the phone?”

  * * *

  JACK WAS IN THE HANDS of the bellman, his bill settled and his Boston train departing in half an hour, when the President’s call came through. His hat was on his head and his coat slung over his arm; he was feeling well enough this morning to eye the girls walking through the hotel lobby. There was a real looker waiting demurely on a sofa, gloved hands folded over her handbag; a typist for hire, probably, with great legs beneath her narrow business suit.

  “Long-distance call for you, Mr. Kennedy,” the bellman said.

  Jack dropped his hat and coat next to the typist, and walked over to the switchboard operator’s desk. She offered him an earpiece.

  “Jack? Roosevelt here.”

  His pulse accelerated. “Good morning, Mr. President.”

  “I guess your father sailed today?”

  “He did, sir.”

  “We’ll hope for fair winds and following seas, then. About that thesis research of yours . . . Sam and I were just saying that we think the level of foreign interest in your work has shot up.”

  Jack’s fingers tightened on the black earpiece. “Is that so, Mr. President?”

  “I want you to cable Sam if you need to talk things over. Your theories, for instance, or anything interesting you may find. Sam could be a great help.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Mr. President.”

  “Better yet, Jack, take down this telephone number. Do you have a pencil?”

  Jack fished frantically in his breast pocket. Fuck. He could never find anything when he needed it. He gestured wildly at the hotel operator, and she whipped a pencil out of her hair. The wood felt warm in his palm.

  Roosevelt was dictating already. Jack scribbled numbers on the cuff of his dress shirt, hoping he’d got them right.

  “That rings at my bedside. Call any time you’d like to chat. Just try to remember the time difference between Europe and Washington, all right?”

  “I certainly will, Mr. President.”

  “And Jack?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  There was the slightest of pauses. “Take care of yourself, son. The Atlantic’s rough this time of year.”

  FIVE. A HERO OF THE LAST WAR

  JACK CAUGHT HIS TRAIN NORTH. There was a man he needed to see.

  Bruce Hopper’s office was in the Old Yard, but he was rarely there—too busy giving lectures to undergraduates or radio interviews on the Fascist threat. Jack tracked him that morning to a quiet bay in Widener Library. Hopper had commandeered an entire oak table, littered with books and papers in Cyrillic. He glanced up as Jack’s thin shadow fell over him. Then he tossed aside his pen and eased back in his hard chair.

  “Cheers, mon brave.”

  It was Hopper’s classic greeting, reserved for the select group of souls he respected. As a freshman Jack had thought mon brave must be easier than attempting to remember a thousand names—but he learned quickly it was a prize to be won. He hadn’t earned it until this year.

  Hopper had flown aerial combat missions in France during the last war and all the Harvard men secretly idolized him. He’d won the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor and some other decorations he did
n’t bother to mention; he’d been hurt badly in one crash, but lived to fly another day. When the war was over he’d stuck around Europe, studying at the Sorbonne and Oxford with the rest of the generation they called Lost. He didn’t even look like a Government professor. His neat figure was pared down, stripped for action, ready for a fight.

  Jack loved Hopper. He loved his stories of bumming around Burma and the Middle East during the twenties, stringing for newspapers. He loved listening in the lamplight of Hopper’s seminar while he talked of samovars and cold and the hidden viciousness of Moscow, where he’d lived until the Crash of ’29 put an end to his fellowship money. Hopper had come back to Harvard and settled down to teach. There was a Mrs. Hopper now. But in moments of abstraction, Jack saw how the professor’s eyes searched the sky unconsciously for airplanes, the slightest hope of combat.

  He shook Hopper’s outstretched hand.

  “Thought you’d sailed.”

  “I’ve still got two weeks.”

  “Then what the hell are you doing here? There must be a girl you could chase.”

  “I saw Roosevelt,” Jack said quietly. “He told me he talked to you.”

  Hopper grunted. “So he did, mon brave. I’ve never had a telephone call from a president before. It caused quite a sensation. The switchboard operators chatter. Nothing in the Yard is private. Now the Dean wants to know when I’m leaving for Washington and what I possibly think I could add to FDR’s Brain Trust. I told him Roosevelt couldn’t care less about me. Shall we walk?”

  * * *

  THEY PULLED UP THEIR COLLARS against the wet cold of a Cambridge February and strolled down to where the crew shells were putting out into the Charles.

  “What did he want?” Hopper asked.

  Jack did not answer for a moment. He had come all this way for help because Hopper was the only man he really trusted, and now that he was here, the whole fantastic night—the Pullman hidden beneath New York, the Nazi funds, FDR’s third term—seemed like a hallucination. Maybe it was the pellets he kept thrusting under his skin. Maybe DOCA made a guy crazy.