Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  “If you would come this way, Mr. Kennedy—”

  He followed Benton into another room. More sumptuous carpet, glass-fronted cabinets displaying wool samples; Georgian side chairs. Rathbone, with a measuring tape and chalk.

  He’d ordered three lounge suits at sixteen guineas apiece, an overcoat, a dinner jacket, morning dress, evening dress, court dress, and white tie at twenty guineas apiece. There were incidentals like shirts, ties, hats, and flannel trousers to add into the mix, but Jack had lost track of the total cost. Somewhere in the neighborhood of his Harvard tuition, he suspected.

  Rathbone and his retinue led him to a fitting room and handed him a pieced version of one of his suits. He eased himself into it, trying not to strain the white tacking stitches. It hung baggily on his skeletal body, a pinstriped shroud.

  “You’re remarkably slender, sir, for one of your height,” Rathbone commented. “A true whipcord frame.”

  “We Americans like a lean and hungry look.”

  The tailor’s gaze drifted impassively over Jack’s bruised cheekbone. “No doubt, sir.”

  Much turning and chalking on a dais before a three-way mirror. The waistband of his trousers sagged. He had no ass to speak of. Deft fingers pleated and pinned the wool. At least his shoulders would never shame him.

  An hour into it, they reached the court knee breeches. The tailors worked quickly and efficiently, in the process outlining his crotch in a way that fascinated and repelled him. He glanced at his thighs in the skintight breeches, a Regency figure straight out of Cecil’s Young Melbourne, and thought derisively of how his Harvard friends would laugh. Jack Kennedy as Lord Byron—if he could gain thirty pounds to pad his “whipcord” frame.

  “Ah, Colonel Gubbins,” Rathbone murmured, with a nod to a short, trim, military man who strode briskly into the fitting room. “I hope you won’t mind sharing the mirror with Mr. Kennedy. He is somewhat pressed for time.”

  “Not at all,” Gubbins said. “I came about that tweed jacket, Rathbone. Though I doubt I shall wear it soon; shouldn’t wonder if we have snow before the week is out.”

  “Surely not in March,” Rathbone replied.

  Jack glanced at the stranger. Gubbins wore a red carnation in his buttonhole; a black homburg dangled from his hand. The perfect clubman, indistinguishable from a thousand others. Why did talk of snow bother Jack? Schwartz’s cable. It sounded like Schwartz’s goddamn cable.

  Gubbins met his gaze in the three-sided mirror.

  Jack’s heart began to thud. “It is rare to have snow in March.”

  “But not entirely unknown in London.” The colonel smiled. “What about that jacket, Rathbone?”

  * * *

  WHEN ALL THE POKING and prodding was done, Gubbins politely held Poole’s door for Jack, who gestured him through it.

  “Pleasure making your acquaintance, Mr. Kennedy,” the colonel said, offering his card. “Do look me up sometime—I should be honored if you’d join me at my club.”

  “That’d be swell,” Jack said.

  Ten minutes later, he stepped into the Lyons Corner House in the Tottenham Court Road, and took a table upstairs, near a window. The place was full of clerks and secretaries wolfing olive-colored peas and gray meat. The air was stale with the smell of boiled cabbage and wet mackintoshes. His gorge rose and he swallowed convulsively. He drew the card from his pocket.

  Colonel Colin M. Gubbins, Royal Artillery, it said. The address was a mews off St. James Street.

  On the reverse, in a minute hand, was written 4 o’clock. Make sure you aren’t followed.

  * * *

  HE DROPPED DOWN INTO the Tube at Victoria Station and rode it to Greenwich, where he strolled through the halls of the Maritime Museum. It had opened only two years before and this was Jack’s first visit. He was a passionate sailor and it was an enjoyable place to kill an hour. At a quarter past three he was back in the Underground. The station closest to Gubbins’s was Green Park, but Jack rode on to Oxford Street, and began a leisurely saunter among the shop windows. He studied his reflection as he browsed; no scarred lip leered behind him, no camel’s hair coat halted when he did. Perhaps the Spider’s latest murder had made him cautious.

  The address in St. James was a second-floor walk-up. A girl in dark red lipstick and a cashmere sweater answered his knock. He paused a moment to appreciate her curves.

  “Good afternoon,” she said coolly, and stepped back to admit him.

  The room was filled with women’s lingerie.

  TWENTY-ONE. TRICKS OF THE TRADE

  “I MUST BE IN the wrong place,” Jack said.

  “Depends what you’re looking for.” The girl was fair-haired and delicate, but for the crimson mouth. “A gift for a lady friend, perhaps?”

  He wanted to ask if she knew Gubbins, but something stopped him. If he was not to be followed to the place, he shouldn’t ask stupid questions either. He said tentatively, “I doubt you’ve got anything warm enough. The weather’s getting nasty.”

  “It is rare to have snow in March,” the girl observed.

  “But not unknown in London.”

  She turned abruptly. “We keep all the flannels back here.”

  He followed her between displays of girdles and brassieres, garter belts and negligees. A mental picture of Diana flitted through his mind, in silk charmeuse, her sharp fall of black hair. He should have kissed her that last night on the Queen Mary, when he had the chance.

  The girl knocked twice on a door, then once more. A buzzer sounded and he heard a bolt snap back.

  “The door’s wired?”

  Her mouth quirked at the corners but she said nothing.

  “Thank you, Matilda,” Gubbins called.

  The door closed behind him.

  * * *

  GUBBINS WAS IN his shirtsleeves.

  “Ah, Jack,” he said warmly, rising from a desk to extend his hand. “I value punctuality in a man. I may call you Jack?”

  “Everybody does.”

  “—Unless they call you Ken.”

  Jack’s brow rose slightly; only a few people in the world used that nickname. He’d met most of them at Choate when he was thirteen.

  “Quite the black eye you’re sporting, lad. I understand you acquired it at the 400?”

  “Forgive me, Colonel—but who are you, and why the hell am I here?”

  “Because you chose to come,” Gubbins said crisply. “As for myself . . . I’ve given you my card. My name is quite genuine, I assure you.”

  Jack glanced around the room. It was windowless. But the fact of the wired door made him realize that other things could be wired as well. “Can we talk freely here?”

  “Of course.”

  “And I should trust what you say because . . . ?”

  “You received a cable from your president this morning. I received a similar one. Not, I may say, from Mr. Roosevelt. Both cables contained phrases intended for mutual identification.”

  “It is rare to have snow in March.”

  “Exactly. We call those bona fides in my current line of work.”

  “You’re a spy?”

  “No, no, dear chap—just an old artilleryman.” Gubbins smiled bracingly. “I putter about on odd jobs for the Foreign Office now and again. I’ve been asked to help you with your thesis research.”

  “My thesis?” Jack repeated incredulously.

  “Yes. Please—do sit down.”

  Jack took the only available chair.

  “I understand you’re traveling about Europe in the coming months. Interviewing sources for your . . . study.”

  “Well—”

  “And given the uncertainties of travel, the general upheaval caused by the sudden incursion of Panzers, the potential for wholesale destruction of various electri
cal grids, and so forth—you will require a secure and portable means of communication.” Gubbins paused. “One that is independent of embassies and code clerks.”

  The colonel reached under the desk and produced a black suitcase. He turned it neatly to face Jack, and snapped open the lid. Silk slips, panties, a corset or two. Beneath them was a tangle of electronics and wire. “Our latest model of shortwave wireless radio. With a Morse key.”

  Jack leaned closer and examined the thing. Knobs and dials, like the cockpit of a plane. Wires and tubes. All chockablock in a leather case eighteen inches by twenty-four.

  He poked a tentative finger at a dial, then looked up at Gubbins. The colonel’s brown eyes were exuberant. A Santa who’d just dropped a splendid toy in Jack’s stocking.

  “Ever had a go?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “I’ll show you, of course. This kit only has a range of five hundred miles, so the transmission must be relayed—but don’t worry about that; our network will take care of it.”

  “Your network?”

  “Our shortwave relay network. Your man Schwartz is familiar with it. Are you acquainted, by any chance, with General Donovan? Wild Bill?”

  “I’ve heard the name. You want me to encode and transmit my own messages?”

  “No, no, dear chap,” Gubbins protested. “I don’t come into it at all. It’s your president who’s requested this back channel. He broached the matter to my superiors. And they contacted me. Back channels being rather a specialty of mine.”

  “Got it.” Jack eyed the colonel dubiously. Was he a colonel? Was he even British? Handing Jack a shortwave radio and the code to use it would be a brilliant way for the Germans to capture everything he sent home. But there was the fact of the bona fides . . . and no harm in prolonging the conversation. Provided, of course, that he could exit the room quickly. His glance strayed to the door Matilda had pulled closed behind her. It probably locked automatically. . . .

  “Nothing could be easier or more efficient,” Gubbins was saying with pride. “This little chap runs on batteries. You charge them with a simple lead from your car. Only think how useful, in the wilds of Poland or Latvia!”

  “With my kind of talent, I’ll fry us both.”

  “Not once I’m done with you,” Gubbins said cheerfully, and clapped Jack on the back. Jack felt the blow through his entire frame. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

  He began to shove his desk toward the rear wall. Jack took the other end and helped him. Set into the floorboards beneath the desk was a trapdoor.

  Gubbins lifted it. A set of stairs led down into darkness.

  * * *

  THE COLONEL’S WORKSHOP held a number of secrets.

  There was a kind of paper he’d made from rice instead of cotton, so his men could eat their instructions; and invisible ink. The words appeared when heat was applied.

  “Useful if you’d like to jot down the odd note for Hopper,” Gubbins observed, as he presented Jack with one of his pens. “And you can use your own urine, in a pinch.”

  “You know Professor Hopper?”

  “Met him in the last war,” Gubbins said briefly. “First-rate man. You’re fortunate to work with him. I should assume anything you send him, Jack, no matter how academic, will be intercepted by the enemy and read. He’s being watched.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Because of your president’s interest in you. And Hopper’s supervision of your . . . thesis. Both facts are known—the world’s really a very small place, my dear fellow. And at the moment, ridiculously crowded with Germans. Try to bear that in mind.”

  He proceeded to teach Jack the rudiments of frequencies, Morse code, call signs, and five-letter group transmission. Jack found that the shortwave radio and its Morse key demanded intense concentration on his part. His face was beaded with sweat after the first half hour and after the second, his hands shook; but Gubbins pronounced him good enough to go on with.

  “Send your first burst tonight, to let your contact know you’re up to speed. Don’t forget the call sign, to signal you’re live, and repeat the transmission every fifteen minutes until it’s acknowledged. Given the distance your message must travel, acknowledgment will take a while. In the field, you’ll want to move about a bit between repeats—confuses the enemy and keeps them off your back. Tonight, however, I should use the roof of number 14. The house runs to six storeys, I believe?”

  “Yes, but . . .” He had no idea how to get out on the roof.

  “And this,” Gubbins added, “is the poem you’re to use as your encoding key.”

  “The what?”

  “Old college cheer. Mr. Roosevelt chose it.”

  He was handing Jack a sheet of paper with “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard” typed on it. Including the dog-Latin first verse. Jack skimmed the words, a familiar tune humming through his mind.

  Illegitimum Non Carborundum;

  Domine salvum fac.

  Illegitimum Non Carborundum;

  Domine salvum fac.

  Gaudeamus igitur!

  Veritas non sequitur?

  Illegitimum non Carborundum—ipso facto!

  Ten thousand men of Harvard want vict’ry today,

  For they know that o’er old Eli

  Fair Harvard holds sway.

  So then we’ll conquer all old Eli’s men

  And when the game ends, we’ll sing again:

  Ten thousand men of Harvard gained vict’ry today!

  “I have no idea what to do with this.”

  Gubbins frowned. “It’s a simple substitution cipher, Jack. Choose a phrase from the song, write it down, and then string your message beneath. Substitute the song’s letters for yours, and you’ve got a code. You must number each word in the song first, of course. Before transmitting the encoded message, you must send the numbers that correspond to your cipher words. Understand? Your receiver will have numbered his copy of this charming little ditty as well, and will know that 3, 7, 12, 18, and 24 are the words he must use to decode your transmission.”

  “You’ve thought of everything.”

  “I try,” Gubbins said modestly. “Sticking one’s head in the sand won’t stop Hitler. I’ve written a few manuals, you know—not in general circulation. If you’d care to have them.”

  “I would,” Jack said. “Very much.”

  “You won’t need The Housewife’s ABC of Home-Made Explosives, I imagine,” Gubbins mused, “but The Art of Guerrilla Warfare should be dead useful.”

  “Give me the ABC, too.”

  “Really?” He shrugged. “Best have The Partisan Leader’s Handbook as well. We expect that one to do very well in Poland in the coming months. Very well indeed.”

  Jack managed to fit the pamphlets into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. His fingers grazed a torn edge of newspaper; the article he’d found in the Times that morning.

  It seemed as good a way of testing Gubbins’s bona fides as any.

  “Would you do something for me?” he asked.

  “Something else, you mean?” Gubbins asked drily.

  Jack handed him the article. “The man who knifed this girl is a German agent. Hans Obst, alias the Spider. That mark he cut into her skin—it’s not a swastika. It’s his calling card. Scotland Yard should be told.”

  Gubbins raised shrewd brown eyes to Jack’s own. “I won’t ask how you know. Right. I’ll pass the word to my friends at the Yard.”

  TWENTY-TWO. NIGHT

  HE KNEW THEY MUST BE LOOKING for him, but he lingered in Wapping anyway, a blunt shadow in the alleys running down to the river. He felt at home among the gasworks and power generators and heaps of coal slag, the chandlers’ shops and whorehouses and pubs. The smell of blood was lost in the reek of the East End.

  He
systematically rifled the dead merchant seaman’s pockets, his mind focused as it had not been for days. The pain he’d inflicted on the fragile child last night had eased his need, but he awoke to the knowledge that he’d risked too much. He had to get out of London. For that, he needed a passport.

  A seaman was the obvious mark. Not a navy man, because sailors were accountable to their commanders and pursued when missed. What he wanted was an ordinary vagabond, a rat of the world’s shipping. Somebody who slipped into the Port of London one day, the Port of Marseille the next. Who was cursed and forgotten when he failed to report for duty.

  He wandered the streets near the river with his hat pulled down and his hands shoved into his pockets, fingering his knife. It was after eleven before a squat Pole, hair the color of straw, reeled drunkenly into the alley where the Spider waited.

  He nearly laughed aloud now as he fingered his new papers. Jan Komorowski from Danzig. Heydrich himself might have sent this tarred angel to deliver his man from evil.

  He sliced a vicious spider into an exposed pectoral, then cleaned his knife on the corpse’s trousers. In the act of turning away, he stopped suddenly and considered the Pole’s clothes. No merchant seaman wore camel’s hair.

  He shrugged himself into the dark wool peacoat, which smelled not unpleasantly of tobacco, and closed the wide lapels around his throat. He glanced up at the starless sky. A ship’s horn blasted in the distance. The Spider began to move.

  * * *

  HE TRUSTED HIS LEGS MORE than trains or automobiles. His legs would never lose an engine or run out of petrol miles before the border. He’d walked the breadth of Germany in his day and the distance from Wapping to Westminster was nothing to it. He was carrying only the clothes on his back and some cash in his pocket. He was Jan Komorowski of Gdansk. He would make his way to Dover and cross the Channel in the morning—just another Pole headed in the wrong direction.