Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  “Mr. Kennedy,” he said, in excellent English—he’d been ambassador to London once—“what a distinct pleasure to welcome you to Prague. I have met your father, you know. Yes, indeed.” He ought to have bowed or thrown out the Nazi salute, but instead he shook Jack’s hand warmly. “Please, sit down—and tell me how I may serve you.”

  * * *

  IN THE END THEY TALKED for over an hour and a half, while the business of the Protectorate went unfinished outside Von Neurath’s doors. Jack started with lebensraum and the Polish Corridor and ended by simply talking to the man. He was reminded of Willi Dobler. The two Germans shared a certain quality of despair. They knew that they, and the country they loved, were doomed.

  “I have enjoyed our talk,” the protector said, “as I have enjoyed nothing in recent weeks. Remember me to your father.”

  “I will, sir.”

  There was a man waiting for him outside—not a soldier, this time, but one of Von Neurath’s aides, a nondescript fellow in civilian clothing.

  “I’d like to visit the men’s room before I leave,” Jack said.

  “The WC?” The aide hesitated. “Of course.”

  He led Jack to a small public powder room adjacent to the protector’s office. Jack locked the door behind him, dropped his trousers, and untied the Luger from his inner thigh. Having the thing shoved in his crotch for over an hour had been damn uncomfortable, but it had served his purpose; nobody would search him for a weapon on the way out of Prague Castle. There were five bullets left in the magazine. It would have to be enough.

  He snicked off the gun’s safety while the toilet flushed. He slipped the Parabellum into his breast-coat pocket.

  The sound of his heels echoed on the stones as he followed his keeper. They reached the sun of the First Courtyard. It must be nearly noon. Plenty of time for Armstrong to have reached the train station on the far side of the river.

  He thanked Von Neurath’s aide, who shook his hand, bowed, and turned briskly away. Jack moved toward Castle Square and the gate.

  No embassy car was there.

  But Hans Obst and his Mercedes were.

  “Your man came, Mr. Kennedy, but as you were detained past the designated hour, he did not stay,” he told Jack, with all the familiarity of long acquaintance. “I assured him that the Protectorate would be happy to deliver you to your embassy.”

  In a hearse, Jack thought. He stood on the step dividing the First Courtyard from the square and stared at the killer by the open car door. He could feel the presence of half-a-dozen uniformed figures behind him; another three in the black garb of the Gestapo flanked Obst. Blood throbbed thickly in his ears. Even with a gun in his pocket, the odds were not looking good.

  “I’ll walk, thanks,” he said, and stepped off the step.

  Instantly he was seized from behind and hustled, legs dangling, straight to the Mercedes.

  The Spider smiled as Jack hit the passenger side door, hard.

  “It’s no trouble, Mr. Kennedy,” he said. “Please—get in.”

  FIFTY-FIVE. THE HOP FIELD

  THERE WERE FOUR OF THEM in back: Jack and Obst and two others on the jump seats. The fifth man drove.

  The Mercedes shot out of the castle gates and hurtled down Loretánská Street. Jack was dimly aware of the Loreto Church flashing by and then the car wheeling around a curve past the Strahov Monastery and its grounds, the red tile roofs of the Lesser Town rippling past the windows. Somewhere to the left was the embassy and Armstrong packing his things, maybe whistling as he did it. Diana’s parcel sitting on his desk. Jack hoped to God it was on that plane tomorrow.

  The man opposite him slid a Mauser from its holster and casually unlatched the safety. Like Obst, he was probably in his midthirties, crows-feet at the corners of his blue eyes, hair beginning to thin; a police-state veteran indifferent to murder. He stared at Jack as he leveled the gun, as though he were counting down from a hundred before he pulled the trigger.

  Obst was turning his knife absentmindedly in his right hand, over and over, the way a drummer twirls a stick. He was lounging easily against the car’s cushions, thighs spread, black boots gleaming. The third Gestapo man was no older than Jack. He was stuck facing Obst, but kept glancing at Jack, then glancing away. He must have a gun, too, but he wasn’t playing with it. His pose was as rigid as Obst’s was relaxed.

  Nervous, Jack thought. Vulnerable.

  It helped to think of something. To pretend to plan. Yes, he had a gun and he might get off a shot and take at least one of them with him—but that would be the end. He’d figured on facing the Spider alone, and got the entire web instead.

  Waves of fear washed over him. He breathed shallowly as though he’d just returned a punt. He hated fear, hated betraying it to Obst. So he was going to die. He’d expected it for years. He knew it could come any day, even without warning. He just thought he’d die in a hospital bed, his white blood cell count trickling away. Not from a bullet to the brain.

  It was the knife he feared most. Something to do with Diana. So to shake loose his fear and take control of the situation—control of the situation?—he started to talk. See what the famous Kennedy charm could do.

  “I guess you boys passed my embassy about a mile back.”

  “The United States embassy is closed,” Obst said indifferently. “So is the Czech border. We closed it, Mr. Kennedy. But you ignored that, as you have ignored every attempt to save you.”

  “Save me?”

  “From yourself.” Obst glanced at him and smiled. “Smart men mind their own business. But I think you are not very intelligent. And perhaps not very much of a man.”

  “Because I don’t get my kicks carving up women?”

  They had left the city behind surprisingly quickly and the car was running south, beside the Vltava River. The road was lined with trees, and beyond them, open fields. Bohemia. The fields must be planted in hops. The place was famous for its beer. Pilsner. From Plzen. Did they use hops in Pilsner or just barley? He had no idea.

  “Diana was my business,” Jack said conversationally. “Did it make you feel like a man, Obst, when you cut into her body?”

  The boy sitting across from the Spider glanced imploringly at Jack. Don’t excite him, the look said. It’ll be worse.

  “Did it get you hard? Is that what it takes—sticking your knife in a woman while she screams? You couldn’t have her any other way, could you, Obst? Diana knew you were shit.”

  He was goading him deliberately; he wanted the Spider to lose control and make a mistake.

  “That whore,” the Spider said absently, fingering his knife. “She was no pleasure to kill. A Jewess, you know. Your black-haired bitch usually is. But yes, she screamed when she died. You know what she screamed, Mr. Kennedy? As I drove my knife into her cunt?”

  No. No—

  “She screamed for Jack.”

  His movement was involuntary—a convulsive clenching of the fists as he swayed toward the Spider—but the guy with the Mauser was ready and the gun was suddenly pressed against Jack’s right temple and his head was pinned to the cushions of the car. The circle of the muzzle on his skin was simple and cool.

  “Not in the car, Klaus,” Obst said, bored. “The mess.”

  The mess.

  That’s what he was to them.

  Not Jack Kennedy, failed choirboy; not the Black Sheep, or the kid lost in his brother Joe’s light; not the best friend Kick would ever have; not the wiry skeleton incandescent with energy, or the crack sailor tipping his keel in Nantucket Sound; not Roosevelt’s man with his own reckless brand of guts. Just the mess.

  He supposed that’s all he’d ever been, really.

  The big car slowed and then veered bumpily onto the verge of the road, turning into an unpaved track between two fields. Hops, Jack thought, as the gun
muzzle drifted away from his temple and hovered two feet from his face. The car pulled up between the tall rows of blond grain and the engine died there.

  In the silence, everyone seemed to draw breath.

  Jack looked at Obst. Fear surged through him. Why? He’d expected to die every day. But he wasn’t done, yet, with life.

  “An accident would be easiest to explain,” Obst was saying, “to the people at Schoenborn who will eventually look for you. A car crash, for instance, or a sudden fall from a height. But then we thought . . . how much more useful if you were an unfortunate victim, Mr. Kennedy, of the idiot Czechs who insist on fighting us? The ones who hide in the woods. The ones we will hunt down like rabbits and shoot once your body is found.—Because of course, the Führer will never stand for the murder of a neutral ambassador’s son. A price will have to be paid. And the Czechs will pay it.”

  Jack glanced around, as if a band of Gubbins’s partisans might materialize from the fields. But the hops remained inviolate and lonely.

  “You will have been tortured, of course”— Obst lifted his knife and smiled into Jack’s eyes—“and then dispatched by a bullet to the base of the skull. You’ll be begging for it, by the time we shoot.”

  The boy sitting opposite him made a faint sound, like retching.

  “Hubner, here, possesses a Czech pistol,” Obst said, glancing at the boy. “He took it from a dead partisan only yesterday. Now it will be found by your body. But Hubner has not used the gun yet. Have you, Hubner?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “This is to be your baptism, then. A baptism by fire. Get out of the car, Mr. Kennedy.”

  The man called Klaus waved his pistol toward the hop field and pulled at the passenger door’s latch. He slid out first, holding the door ajar with one hand, the other trained on Jack.

  Take one, he thought desperately. At least one.

  He bent double as he slid out of the car, right hand in his breast pocket, and came up with the Luger firing right into Klaus’s face.

  The man spurted backward, his head blooming hideously. He fell on his back. Jack dove for the ground and rolled clear of the car door.

  Obst was hurtling out of the other side of the Mercedes, his knife raised. Hubner would be behind him with his gun. They’d both come around the car’s back end any second. Jack crouched behind the open car door, using it for cover. But the fifth man—the driver—could exit behind him. If he stood up and made a run for it—tried to reach the cover of the hop fields—he’d be shot in the back.

  He was cornered. But he would die fighting, not screaming.

  His eyes darted frantically along the Mercedes’s body. The acrid smell of a rubber tire, overheated from the August road, filled his nostrils. He thought of Gubbins. The Art of Guerrilla Warfare. At least he could make the sons of bitches walk back to Prague. He stuck the Luger against the tire and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet shot through the rubber and into the Mercedes’s undercarriage.

  A jet of flame seared Jack’s face. The rubber was burning. He lurched back, right into the path of Hubner’s gun.

  He saw the kid’s terrified face and his shaking hand as he tried to aim. He saw Obst barreling right behind him. Jack scrambled to his feet and bolted for the hop field.

  A bullet sang by his left ear. He could hear Obst swearing and he waited for the knife in his back.

  Then there was a soft thump, like a cornice of snow folding in on itself. Jack was picked up off his feet and tossed into the hops, a leaf blown by the wind.

  He landed hard, stalks crumpling beneath his face and body.

  His conscious mind left him, on an echo of laughter.

  FIFTY-SIX. THE LAST LETTER

  A BAPTISM BY FIRE. Obst had been dead right.

  When Jack came to, the smell of roasting beer was heavy on the air. The hops were burning.

  He forced himself to his knees, trying to shake sense into his head. Stared at his hands, which were filthy and scratched. He was braced on a crushed bed of grain. He shook himself again and saw the Luger, lying where he’d dropped it. As he grasped the butt the memory of the man named Klaus and his bloody face surged into his brain.

  Obst cursing, and the boy with the gun.

  The Mercedes.

  He turned and saw it. A writhing mass of curling steel. The air around it shimmered with heat.

  He’d shot the tire, and taken out the fuel tank.

  There was another smell underlying the beer, now, the smell of burning flesh. He did not want to see what had happened to Hubner or Obst or the driver whose name he’d never learned. He wanted to get away. He stumbled forward into the hops, pushing blindly against the grain, driving himself deeper in a direction he vaguely thought paralleled the dirt track through the fields.

  An eternity later, he stepped onto asphalt. The river flowed beyond it.

  There were hops in his hair and his nose and his trousers were burned away at the ankles. His shoes were singed. His hands would not stop shaking.

  He pocketed the Luger and glanced to the right and left. They had come from the left. He started walking back to Prague.

  * * *

  HE HAD NO IDEA what time it was when he reached the crossroads. He could not read the signs and it wouldn’t have mattered if he did. It was simply a crossroads on the way back to Prague and there was an inn that served beer.

  Pilsner Urquell.

  For the rest of Jack’s life, the smell of beer would be the smell of death.

  He asked for water in English nobody could understand.

  The man and woman behind the bar looked apprehensively at his blackened trousers. He glanced around the pub; there were no apparent Germans, none in uniform. He took the publican aside and said one word: Gestapo.

  It required no translation.

  He was given water, and the publican himself put through the call to the American embassy.

  It was Armstrong, eventually, who came for him.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE TELLING ME they dragged you off for questioning? Right from Prague Castle? You’re a diplomat. From a neutral country.”

  George Kennan’s back was turned and he was staring through his office window at St. Vitus Cathedral. As usual he was angry, but it was a grim anger this afternoon, not a white rage.

  “The Gestapo didn’t check my passport,” Jack said.

  “What happened?”

  “There was a car accident.”

  “And?”

  “The car burst into flames. I managed to crawl out.”

  “The Germans?”

  “No idea,” he said.

  Kennan wheeled and stared at him.

  “How can you not know?”

  “Sometimes it’s preferable.”

  They studied each other for an instant.

  “Jesus Christ,” Kennan said softly. “Five Gestapo guys are dead in a field, and you don’t have a story?”

  “Sure I do. You just heard it.”

  “The Castle’s going to come down on us like a ton of bricks.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jack said. “It wasn’t an official interrogation. There won’t be a record of it anywhere.” He thought of something Willi Dobler had once said, and repeated it for Kennan’s benefit. “The Gestapo simply forget the people they torture and kill.”

  “Torture and . . .”

  Kennan was incredulous.

  “Look,” Jack said. “They offered me a ride to the embassy. Everybody at the Castle heard them. And I’m here, aren’t I? What happened after they dropped me off is hardly our business.”

  Kennan considered this. The doubt in his face was a lesson to Jack, one he was glad he’d learned early in the war. There were the Gubbinses of the world, who rode the wave of chao
s without questioning why it existed; and there were the Kennans, who were outraged by the wave, and filed official complaints even as it drowned them. Both had their place, Jack realized; and the war would decide who survived.

  Personally, Jack was sticking with the Gubbinses.

  “We’ve got to get you out of here,” Kennan said. “I’d send you on the plane to London tomorrow, but that means another twenty-four in Prague. It’s too risky, under the circumstances.”

  He glanced at his watch. “It’s just past three o’clock. If we leave now, we can reach the Hungarian border by six. You don’t want to go back to Austria—make for Budapest. I’ll escort you as far as the border.”

  “Thanks,” Jack said. Weariness flooded his body and he wanted nothing so much as to bathe and sleep and have a drink—but Kennan was right. He couldn’t risk the plane and he had to get out of Prague immediately. He’d be lucky to make Budapest.

  “Pack your things,” Kennan said, “and meet me in the courtyard in ten minutes. There’ll be hell to pay if I’m not back by curfew. And Kennedy—”

  Jack turned at the door. “Yes?”

  “Don’t ever darken my legation again. Any legation I happen to run.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  * * *

  HE STOPPED BY ARMSTRONG’S office to shake his hand, wish him well, and retrieve Diana’s parcel.

  “I thought it’d be bigger,” Armstrong said. “Your mother travels light. What’s so important about that envelope, anyway?”

  Jack pried open the gummed manila flap with a letter knife and slid the small black book into his hand. “Her address book. The lifeblood of every ambassador’s wife. She’s been completely hamstrung since she left this behind. Can’t write a thank-you note to save her soul.”

  “Seems an odd thing to leave at the Prague train station,” Armstrong observed.

  “Rose Kennedy is a very odd woman.”

  There was something else in the envelope—a single folded sheet in Diana’s handwriting. With a twist of the heart, Jack tucked the letter into his wallet. He would read it later, in Budapest, if he got that far.