Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  “He asks why you are here. An American. A stranger. A man in the holy convent of holy women.”

  “I came to see Sister Mary Joseph.”

  This time, the policeman didn’t wait for Immaculata’s translation. He grabbed the front of Jack’s sweater and twisted it menacingly.

  “To see her—or to kill her?” Immaculata supplied helpfully. “Il ispettore wishes to know who you are, immediatamente, and why we found you with the murdered sister.”

  “I told you—I’m Jack Kennedy. My father is the American ambassador to England. Joseph Kennedy. Look, here’s my passport.” He rose abruptly from the bench, shaking free of the inspector. He hated to be touched. Alarmed, the man pulled a truncheon out of his belt.

  “Easy.” Jack raised his hands in the universal sign of surrender. “I was just going for my passport. So you can see for yourself who I am.”

  The nun muttered to the policeman and after an instant, he nodded grudgingly. With careful slowness, Jack eased his right hand into the back pocket of his flannels and withdrew his passport. The inspector took it. His colleague seized the moment to frisk Jack in a style he could only have learned from a gangster movie.

  “You’ve got the wrong guy, mister,” Jack said. “No bloody knife in my pocket, I promise you. I didn’t even know the dead woman. And the murderer’s getting away while you’re wasting my time.”

  Immaculata frowned at him menacingly. “A little respect, if you know what is good for you, idiota,” she hissed. “The inspector asks why you came to the Via Giulia, asking for Sister Mary Joseph, if you did not know her?”

  “A mutual friend from the States asked me to drop by. She went to school with the sister many years ago.”

  “The name of this friend?” his translator demanded.

  “Eileen Dunne,” he improvised, his eyes on the inspector. “From Boston. I’m in college there. At Harvard. You’ve heard of Harvard?”

  The policeman was studying the photograph. Comparing it to Jack’s face.

  “He asks,” Immaculata said, “why you are in Rome.”

  “I’m working as my father-the-ambassador’s secretary in London,” Jack said swiftly. “My father is President Franklin Roosevelt’s official representative to the Pope’s coronation.”

  “Il ispettore wishes to know of your movements today. Did you go to St. Peter’s alone?”

  Jack frowned. “No, I was with my father the ambassador. And the rest of my family. There are ten of us. We swiped Count Ciano’s seats, if you want to know.”

  At the mention of Mussolini’s son-in-law, the policeman’s face hardened. He spat in the courtyard dirt. “Ciano!”

  Immaculata shrugged her contempt. “Ciano is a violator of women and of Mother Church. When did you leave St. Peter’s?”

  “At noon. I was driven in an official embassy car with four of my brothers and sisters straight to the Hotel d’Inghilterra, where my family is staying.”

  “And then you came here? Why?”

  “I told you—to pay a visit to Sister Mary Joseph.”

  “And you came alone? Nobody saw you?”

  Jack gave an exasperated sigh. “My cabdriver dropped me outside a minute before you found me at the top of the stairs. I doubt we’ll be able to find him. But I didn’t kill Sister Mary Joseph. How could I? I didn’t even know what she looked like!”

  “There is only your word for this.”

  The policeman conferred with his subordinate. Sister Immaculata yawned.

  “Look,” Jack suggested. “You can talk to my father. Ambassador Kennedy. He’ll tell you I was with him all day. Ask Ciano himself if I was at the Vatican, for chrissake.”

  Immaculata hissed again at his sacrilege.

  Unexpectedly, the police inspector said in perfect English, “You have something to tell us, signore?”

  “I do.” He eyed the man with renewed interest. “The mark cut into the nun’s breast.”

  “The . . .” the inspector halted, confounded by the word.

  “It looks like a spider,” Jack said helpfully. “There are a string of bodies from New York to London with the same mark. The killer’s a German named Hans Obst.”

  “How you know this?” the policeman demanded.

  “I read the newspapers. But you might want to call Scotland Yard. They’ll be able to help. Could I talk to the Mother Superior now, please?”

  * * *

  HE’D NEVER BEEN TAUGHT BY NUNS, as most Catholic boys growing up in America were. His father’s social and political ambitions demanded that Jack and his brothers fight for an equal place in America’s power structure—and that meant shedding the appearance of a Boston mick and graduating from the right WASP schools. Kennedy money bought them berths at Choate, and then Harvard, where the Irish was almost scrubbed out of them. Jack’s brother Joe was a rousing success at Choate and won its coveted Harvard Trophy; a football star with perfect features, he was always better at looking the part of Brahmin than Jack. But despite his privileged education, Jack was no stranger to convents; his sisters spent most of their lives in schools like this. Only J. P. Kennedy’s boys got the best education money could buy. The girls were simply expected to marry well—and marry Catholics.

  Jack followed Sister Immaculata’s swaying black gown along the colonnade to the far door—the one the screaming nun had vanished through—and into the heart of the building.

  It was probably several hundred years old. The stone walls were roughly plastered and the hallways smelled of wax. They smelled, too, of linen pressed under hot irons; disinfecting soap; and ancient drains. As Jack passed certain closed doors he thought he could smell sickness—of body or mind. It was not, after all, very different from Mayo.

  He hadn’t thought of the pain in his leg since he’d paid off the taxi. That was what the nuns would call a blessing. He wasn’t sure what he’d call it.

  Sister Immaculata stopped before a thick oak door and rapped sharply on it.

  “Entrato.”

  They went in.

  The Mother Superior was just rising from her knees. Had she been praying for the soul of the departed, or for herself?

  “Mr. Ken-ne-dy,” she said. “Please. Sit down. You may leave us, Sister Immaculata.”

  The nun bowed her head and vanished through the door—but not before throwing a malevolent look at Jack. She suspected him of something. If not murder, then every one of the other deadly sins in the book.

  “You have seen la polizia. You have told them what you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” She settled herself behind a handsome desk: a wide-hipped, large-featured woman of middle years, with liquid black eyes. She was studying him frankly, and Jack schooled himself not to look away. “It is a horrible thing, this kind of death. A violence without reason. She was a good girl.”

  “You have my deepest sympathy,” Jack said. “But how was she murdered? This place”—he glanced around the windowless room—“seems tough to break into. Did anybody see what happened?”

  “Nobody saw nothing,” the Mother Superior said with a grand indifference to English grammar. “She was alone. She must have opened the outer door to the one who killed her. Perhaps she tried to run away—she reached the upper floor—but after that . . .”

  He could imagine it: The Spider at the small entrance cut into the gate; the bell ringing as it had for Diana yesterday; the bulky shape forcing an entry—the terrified woman tripping in her long skirts—and then the knife. . . .

  “We found her when we returned from the coronation,” the Mother Superior said matter-of-factly, “and it was terrible. Sister Agnes Ruth had the hysterics. One had to slap her. And still she screamed. One cannot blame her.”

  “Why didn’t Sister Mary Joseph attend?”

  “She had much to
do. The packing of the baggage and the writing of letters. She was to travel to Paris tomorrow.”

  “Paris?” He was startled.

  “Certamente, Paris.” The Mother Superior scrutinized him. “The head of our charity is there. Herr Helmuth Wohlthat.”

  Göring’s banker. Helmuth Wohlthat, who liked to dine at the Tour d’Argent with men who were supposed to be elsewhere.

  “What is your interest in Sister Mary Joseph?”

  Jack fell back on his first lie, with variations.

  “I’m in Rome for a few days for the Pope’s coronation. A friend asked me to visit.”

  The Mother Superior nodded. “Mary Joseph had many friends, no? She came to us only a year ago, from Boston in America.”

  Jesus. He’d guessed right.

  And with the thought came uneasiness. The dead hatcheck girl had been from Boston, too. Little Katie . . .

  “Her body must be sent there,” the Mother Superior observed. “You will help us, perhaps?”

  “I could,” Jack said slowly. “My father’s dining with Bill Phillips—he’s our ambassador here in Rome—right now. I can make a phone call to the embassy. The consular section will have to get the paperwork rolling. But I’d need Sister Mary Joseph’s original name—before she took vows.”

  “That is most necessary, I comprehend.” The Mother Superior rose and went to a cabinet in the corner of the room, where she kept her files. A drawer slid open; her fingers shifted among the documents. “Such a strange and lovely name. Daisy. Daisy Corcoran. She was only twenty-seven.”

  Jack’s heart seemed to stop for an instant; then resumed its beating with a painful thud. The Corcoran name was common enough in Boston. But that wasn’t why it had sputtered his pulse. What had Diana said, after calling in the Via Giulia yesterday? Witness Daisy’s pending sainthood. I drop over from time to time in the hope she’ll save my soul.

  The murdered nun was Diana’s childhood friend.

  “What were Sister Mary Joseph’s duties, Mother Superior,” he managed, “for your charity organization in Paris?”

  “She was our contabile. How do you say? She made the accounts,” the nun replied as she closed her files. “And carried the money to Paris, of course.”

  “The money?”

  “Donations,” she corrected. “The Little Sisters of Clemency are in Rome, you see, because it is the center of the Catholic world. The Faithful bring alms for the poor. Sister Mary Joseph made certain it reached them. She took the money to Herr Wohlthat. It was all this she packed while the rest of us went to St. Peter’s this morning.”

  Jack rose. “Have you checked her baggage?”

  Something in the Mother Superior’s face changed. With swiftness surprising in one so large, she surged to the door.

  Jack followed.

  * * *

  THE POLICE INSPECTOR and his colleague were already in possession of Daisy’s room, which was so tiny and so painfully neat that it was obvious it contained little more than the narrow wooden bench on which she slept, the single small table and wooden chair positioned beneath the slit of a window, and three pegs at shoulder height in the wall. There was no mirror and no basin; but an earthenware ewer was half full of water, and a worn leather satchel rested near the door. The cell was so orderly, in fact, that Jack felt a spark of hope as he and the Mother Superior came to a halt before the open doorway: The White Spider couldn’t have been here. It looked nothing like the chaos of his stateroom, after the killer had ransacked it.

  The inspector was lifting a prayer book and what Jack guessed was a habit from the satchel with hands already encased in gloves. The Mother Superior uttered a sharp question in Italian and the policeman answered, his eyes on her face.

  “What is it?” Jack asked.

  She ignored him and strode instead into the center of the tiny room, glancing distractedly from one corner to the other.

  “Mother Superior,” he said gently.

  “There was another borsa.” She gestured frantically at the leather satchel. “A black one, you understand. With the account book and the donazione inside.” She threw up her hands. “Il dio mio, Mr. Ken-ne-dy! She must have died for it. The borsa is gone.”

  TWENTY-SIX. CRUMBLE TO BLACK

  THE JOURNEY TO THE ROOF of the White House was too painful for a man in a wheelchair; and it would attract the wrong kind of attention. Roosevelt kept the radio receiver Wild Bill Donovan had given him in his bedroom, on the lower shelf of the table that stood next to his white iron cot, with a heavy flannel shawl thrown over it. Eleanor had her own room down the hall and nobody disturbed his. The last thing he did before turning off his reading lamp each night was tune the radio to Jack’s special frequency, the whistling and static from the ether almost soothing to his fitful sleep. Schwartz had instructed the boy to transmit, when possible, between ten and eleven o’clock in the morning, European time. The signal would reach Roosevelt as he waited restlessly for dawn.

  When the click-clicking of the Morse keys broke into his sleep that morning, a few minutes past five, he awoke instantly. He’d learned Morse during the last war, when he was secretary of the navy, but it had taken Bruce Hopper nearly an hour to train him on the receiver and substitution code during the professor’s last visit. Hopper was an old army intelligence hand, and he knew some of the same people Wild Bill Donovan knew. Between them, the two men had arranged the secret session in the lingerie shop and Jack’s back channel commo link. Roosevelt was adamant: Nobody connected to the State department—particularly Jack’s father—must know about it.

  Ciphers intrigued and excited him. They were a foray into the lost country of childhood, a Rudyard Kipling world, and the President insisted on receiving Jack’s messages himself. He trusted Sam Schwartz; but he was selfish about sharing the fun—and the burden—of espionage.

  He dragged himself upright against his pillows and reached for a pad and pencil. His white bedside table was cluttered with several telephones, scraps of paper, pencil stubs, a bottle of nose drops, an ash tray, cigarettes, and a bottle of aspirin. He knew Jack was supposed to repeat his radio transmission until its receipt was confirmed. He’d missed the first few letter groups, but he could pick them up on the second round. He switched on his reading lamp and began to scribble down the Morse.

  Twenty minutes later, Missy tapped on his door and entered in her bathrobe, a cup of coffee in her hand. She set it on the bedside table. He reached for her, pulled her onto his lap, and held her there for an instant, the decoded message discarded at his side. She’d been with him as friend and secretary and lover for twenty years, through his failed vice-presidential campaign, his governorship, his polio therapy at Warm Springs, and now the White House. She was forty years old and her hair was turning gray in his service. Her face, however, was still as sweet and unlined as when they’d first met. She smelled of flannel nightgowns and linen-closet lavender and the warmth of nighttime. He thought of the wiretap on her phone and blasphemed violently in his mind.

  “You’re up early,” she said. “Did you sleep?”

  “Couple of hours.” He reached for his coffee and drank some. “Listen, Miss—you’re Catholic, aren’t you? Who do you know in the Church hierarchy?”

  She crowed with laughter. “Nobody at all.”

  “Do you know anything about the Little Sisters of Clemency?”

  “Never heard of them. What do they do—teach? Nurse? Or just pray?”

  “I think they do a bit more than that,” he said easily. “The order’s name came up in conversation a few days ago. I’d like to know more about them—where they’re based, how they’re run, who supports them financially, that sort of thing.”

  “Part of your drive to build community service?”

  “Exactly. So many small organizations have sprung up in this terrible Depression, and few of them g
et enough recognition. But I don’t want to flutter the dovecot with a premature call from the White House. Think you could ask around, and tell me what you learn?”

  “Eleanor’s much better at that sort of thing than I am.”

  “But everything Eleanor says or does is front-page news.”

  “And you’d like to sound out the Little Sisters before you burden them with presidential notice. I get it.” She sprang off his lap and padded in her slippers to the door. “You’ve got Henry Morgenthau at ten o’clock, don’t forget.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You might shave this time.”

  “I might.”

  When she’d gone, he picked up the discarded pad. Spider strikes in Rome STOP Sister Mary Joseph nee Daisy Corcoran American citizen killed STOP Little Sisters of Clemency records and cash stolen presumably by Spider STOP Suggest you investigate activity of Sisters stateside STOP Am proceeding to Paris STOP Jack

  And so it has begun, Roosevelt thought: the boy’s wandering. He thinks the Spider is following him. He’ll keep moving—keep asking questions—maybe even keep one step ahead of the killer. And what will he learn, in the end? Something worse than a stab in the gut?

  Roosevelt reached for his lighter, lit a flame under the deciphered note, and watched it crumble to black in the ashtray.

  TWENTY-SEVEN. CHARITY

  JACK SAT AND STOOD AND KNELT with the reflexive habit of ten thousand masses—Teddy was receiving his First Communion from Pope Pius XII this Monday morning. But Jack could not get the cloister in Via Giulia out of his mind. The sacred hush of the Vatican chapel echoed with a woman’s wailing.

  She’s dead, he’d told Diana when he’d found her last night in the Hassler’s dining room, seated unfashionably early at a table. She was eating alone.

  “Who’s dead?”

  “Your friend Daisy. The one who had the smarts to enter a convent. Marriage is looking better and better, isn’t it?”