New York Station
Page 31
“It’s Chet. His driver found him dead when he came to work early this morning.”
She acted slightly detached. Definitely not amused, more like lightly intrigued. “Chet’s dead? Really!”
“He was strangled. By a professional.”
“That’s awful. His poor mother.”
“You’re not upset? I’m so relieved.”
“I guess not. Was it Ludwig?”
“I’m rather sure of it.”
She studied his face for a long moment in a very measured way.
“You knew—”
His answer was firm, without hesitation. “Yes.”
She seemed lost in thought for a second. “You’re all done here.”
“Yes. Kelly wants me out of town for a while. I have to get back to Manhattan, anyway.”
Her expression began settling, resigned. “The FBI …”
“Not possible. Not anymore. I’m so sorry, Daisy. It’s all changed.”
She sighed, grimly looking down. “Oh, I guess I knew. Saw it coming when you two were listening in on Chet. Are you going back to Europe?”
“No. I’ve got a big job to do here. It doesn’t matter who signs my paycheck.”
“I’m glad.”
“Me, too.”
“You know I’ll be here,” she said.
“I do.”
There are miracles in life, Hawkins thought. Yes, she will be here.
She held the case out flat in front of her, pensively caressing it with her thumbs. “Here are the bonds.”
He gently reached up and gripped it, too, as if they were holding hands together. They stood there for a long moment, their eyes soberly locked on it.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to keep just one,” she said.
“Yes. Wouldn’t it be nice.”
She sighed and dropped her hands, leaving Hawkins with the case.
“Better go buy Mr. Churchill some destroyers.” She kissed him on the cheek again.
Hawkins nodded. “They’re expecting me at headquarters. This should take the curse off some.”
“I don’t understand. I thought they’d be happy.”
“Oh, they will be. But I didn’t blow the lid off the plot to steal the election. The US won’t be getting in the war. They’re going to take that very hard.”
Daisy nodded, took a long, slow, deep breath and squared her shoulders. They started walking back to the car. “Well! I have to get to work, too. Pulling a double shift tonight. Big stakes race today. There’ll be a helluva crowd.”
Kelly pulled up in his car, peered over and waved at Hawkins.
“Come on, come on, gotta go!”
Hawkins threw both arms around Daisy, lifted her up a bit, gave her a big kiss, then handed her a plain brown envelope.
“I’ll be back when things quiet down.” He hopped in the Cord, revved it and pulled next to Kelly in the slow summer traffic. Daisy opened the envelope. It was full of cash. She ran out into the street and alongside the Cord.
“What?”
“It’s from Chet’s tip. Pay off the mortgage.”
The light changed. The two cars accelerated down Broadway side by side. Daisy reached up on her toes, waving to Hawkins. At the last moment he turned back and smiled.
She watched the traffic for a moment, opened her purse, put the envelope in, then saw a small blue ring box. She took it out and flipped it open with her thumb. Chet’s huge diamond glittered. She smiled, snapped it shut, tossed it up in the air, caught it and rushed through traffic to the United States Hotel and Tiffany’s.
-EPILOGUE-
Hans Ludwig shut the door of a phone booth on Broadway in Yonkers. He dropped in a nickel. The phone rang three times.
“Spring came late,” he said.
The call was answered at a booth in the rear of a Slavic delicatessen near Avenue A on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A hand not so much large as meaty tightly gripped the handset in anger, as if it would twist it like putty, if it could.
“The supervisory committee is extremely upset.”
“I’m sorry about the three men. I realize their loss was costly but it was their inexperience that was at fault.”
“We’ll be the judge of that,” the man said.
“I will make it worth your while. I promise. Everything will be easier now that I don’t have to worry about my assistant filing reports behind my back.”
“Nonetheless, I intend to penalize you for your handling of this affair.”
“I assure you, the next payment will not be necessary.”
“Very well. It’s a shame the Nazi effort to manipulate the election has failed. A neutralist pro-business regime would’ve hastened the onset of the proletarian revolution. We may have to endure a longer phase of bourgeois democracy than originally anticipated.”
“I’m sorry, I know that.”
Colonel Gabentin Krylenko paused, thinking, his watery blue eyes darting from side to side across his wide, sunburned face. Ludwig’s been getting complacent, slacking off, he thought. I can sense it. It’s difficult in a country like the United States. So many decadent temptations, like trips to Coney Island. He leaned forward in the booth, easing his sunburned back away from the hard corner. Damn.
Need to prod Ludwig into tightening up. Have to be careful, though. Ludwig’s a proud, arrogant man, sure of himself and his judgment, competent acting alone. He’d had that quality years earlier in that Volga German community in the Ukraine. A dangerous quality on a collective farm. An indispensable one in a spy. Can’t afford to antagonize him.
Suppose he “went private” or defected to the other side? Ludwig had acquired degrees—some fake, but all credible—position, a little wealth. A few of the attitudes of the elite surrounding the Nazis had obviously rubbed off on him.
Penetrating not only the Abwehr but also tapping into the American defense establishment was extraordinary, perhaps unique. The copies of his reports to the Abwehr arriving regularly at the NKVD’s mail drops in Lisbon were outstanding.
“Despite this unpleasantness, which I trust will never be repeated—”
“Oh no, of course not.”
“I have been authorized to tell you that your promotion to major will be approved shortly. This affair should not affect your rating. We have great respect and confidence in your abilities.”
“Oh, good! Thank you, Colonel. Give my sincerest thanks to Moscow Center.”
“Of course. Congratulations.”
Ludwig hung up and quickly left the neighborhood.
Colonel Krylenko wiped his hands on his white apron, jammed his white paper cap back on his head and returned to the counter. A customer stood impatiently waiting for half a pound of sliced Lebanon bologna.
Ludwig’s lucky, the colonel thought. Got that call from the NKVD resident at the consulate with only hours to spare. What’s next on the agenda? A recommendation to SMERSH about this man named Hawkins, clearly. Three good Party comrades were dead, like a horrid cowboy movie. That could not pass.
“Can’t you hurry up?” The women’s pinched, irritated face poked out from underneath a worn old scarf. He waved the meat on the wax paper over the counter.
“Hey, we’re three men short. I’m doing the best I can.”
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel is based on real events.
In September 1940, at the Battle of Britain’s climax, shortly after the events of this story, Prime Minister Winston Churchill uttered one of his most famous quotes—“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
In today’s media-saturated age Churchill’s ringing words probably strike most as a politician’s empty, hyperbolic rhetoric. Nothing could be further from the truth. They were, and are, a very sober statement of the facts. He was speaking of the RAF, but he could’ve equally honored the men and women of British Intelligence.
In the summer of 1940 the civilization democracy represents hung by the thinnest
of threads. Only a handful of democracies remained. If Britain had fallen to a Nazi invasion humanity wouldn’t have regressed to the relatively benign despotism that prevailed before the American and French Revolutions, but would’ve instead leapt forward into a new Dark Age of incomparable savagery and duration, abetted by modern science and technology, the full realization of George Orwell’s 1984.
We now seem to believe the survival of democracy was somehow inevitable. Fifty years of hagiographic popular entertainment, indifferent public education, and, paradoxically, the legacy of wartime propaganda itself has blinded us to how narrowly the kind of society we cherish escaped complete extinction. Our very survival itself—to say nothing of victory—wasn’t at all certain until after the successive victories of Midway, El Alamein, and by far and most paradoxically the most important, the immense Soviet triumph at Stalingrad in February 1943.
When France fell in June 1940, Britain faced a terrible prospect. On the other side of Europe, Stalin was locked in a de facto alliance with Hitler. Across the Atlantic FDR was committed to aiding Britain and resisting Nazism. But a popular isolationist movement led by a powerful right wing sympathetic to Nazi Germany was rising, spreading hate and fear, cynically preying on public anxiety, paralyzing the US and locking it into isolationism and neutrality, menacing democracy in the land of its modern rebirth.
That threat to America was greater and more complex than we realized.
Historians have learned that in the spring and summer of 1940, over a year and a half before Pearl Harbor, the Nazi German intelligence service, the Abwehr, attempted to rig the 1940 presidential election. Hitler—and Nazi Germany—feared President Roosevelt so much they sent five million dollars to the US to block his renomination and reelection. This was an enormous sum coming out of the Great Depression, the cost then of one hundred Spitfire fighter planes or five naval destroyers. At one point it’s known that 160 thousand dollars was spent just to bribe the thirty-nine members of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Democratic National Convention not to vote for Roosevelt—that four thousand per delegate would’ve bought a large mansion in a prestigious suburban neighborhood. It was the most expensive espionage project in history until that time. By comparison the entire British Secret Intelligence Service in 1939 was only budgeted a mere seven hundred thousand pounds.
Britain, struggling to survive after the fall of France, created a covert organization based in Rockefeller Center called British Security Coordination, staffed mainly by Canadians and headed by one of Britain’s top industrialists, another Canadian, Winnipeg-born and -raised William Stephenson. If Britain fell to the Nazis as France had, Stephenson and BSC was to direct resistance inside Occupied Britain from the neutral US (a government in exile, what was left of the fleet and the royal family were to go to Canada). In the event Britain won the Battle of Britain and survived, at least for a while, BSC was to fight Nazi espionage in the US, the Western Hemisphere, and elsewhere in the world. Although the FBI did try to catch Nazi spies, the US was comparatively wide open, with no true intelligence or counterintelligence service. In 1940 Britain and BSC would provide much of that cover.
Stephenson and BSC later organized the US’s new spy agency, the OSS. BSC eventually occupied several floors of the International Building in Rockefeller Center with over a thousand employees.
Per its longstanding policy of never revealing intelligence operations, Britain still refuses to discuss BSC, other than to deny almost everything about it, but Stephenson has been described as the effective Supreme Allied Commander for Intelligence. Not well known in the US, he is one of Canada’s greatest national heroes. At his funeral in Bermuda in 1989 the USAF honored Stephenson—a Canadian citizen who had never been an employee of the US government—with a “missing man” flyover, not of the usual fighter jets, but U-2 spy planes, an unprecedented action in USAF history, and never repeated.
We will never know the full story of what happened or what was done. At the end of the war, Stephenson ordered BSC’s records destroyed while many of the records of the German Abwehr were lost in a bombing raid. But we do know that in the summer of 1940 British Intelligence was opening and scanning all the mail between the Western Hemisphere and Europe, as well as intercepting radio and cable traffic.
Is it credible that Britain didn’t know of the Nazi effort to intervene in the US election? The reader can judge for him or herself. It’s the author’s opinion that it is close to axiomatic they had to know, given the sheer scale of theirs and the Nazis’ operations. Equally, if they did know, is it credible Britain and British Intelligence would have sat passively by and just watched?
Attacks on democracy and, most important of all, our elections—which is what democracy is all about—were and probably will remain under threat as long as nations and democracy itself exists. There was nothing new about the Russian attack on the 2016 US election, and as James Comey said, they will be back.
We need to be equally aware of the real issue, the mentality, the motivation behind these kinds of attacks. This danger will continue as long as people believe in winning at all cost, that the world is inevitably divided into winners and losers, that we aren’t all in this together, and the kind of values and politics that thinking leads to. We must never again take democracy, and the willingness to play by its rules, for granted.
A final note: the venues and scenes in Saratoga Springs may seem exaggerated but they are (or were) all real. The United States Hotel and its slightly larger sister, the Grand Union—to this day the largest wood-frame building ever constructed—were astonishing, elaborate, and stupendous creations. But they were doomed in the new automotive age and were deteriorating as described. The States Hotel closed during the war and was demolished in 1946, the Grand Union in 1954. Riley’s Lake House was one of largest nightclubs in the nation. It was one of a tiny number that could be compared to the ultra-posh Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center, the only such clubs that actually matched the glamorized thirties and forties Hollywood movie image of nightclub life. (Most in fact were quite small. I was once in El Morocco, the favorite hangout of New York high society and movie stars like Errol Flynn, Marilyn Monroe, and Clark Gable. I was shocked at how small it was—a large row house or two, nowhere near the size of Riley’s Lake House. I looked around in wonder thinking, This is it?) The Saratoga Racecourse is a legend, of course, and banquets like Millicent Simpson-Saunders’ lavish dinner-dance were and still sometimes are for real. British Security Coordination really did set up shop in plain sight in Rockefeller Center. Ian Fleming was assigned to it for a time. The mail cover operation in Bermuda, again, mainly staffed by Canadians, was real as well. Finally, virtually all of Walter Ventnor’s attacks on the Roosevelts are either direct quotes from the time or minimal paraphrasings.
Table of Contents
-1-
-2-
-3-
-4-
-5-
-6-
-7-
-8-
-9-
-10-
-11-
-12-
-13-
-14-
-15-
-16-
-17-
-18-
-19-
-20-
-21-
-22-
-23-
-24-
-25-
-26-
-27-
-28-
-29-
-30-
-31-
-32-
-33-
-34-
-35-
-36-
-37-
-38-
-39-
-40-
-41-
-42-
-43-
-44-
-45-
-46-
-47-
-48-
-49-
-50-
-51-
-52-
-53-
-54-
-55-
&nb
sp; -56-
-57-
-58-
-59-
-60-
-61-
-62-
-63-
-64-
-65-
-66-
-67-
-68-
-69-
-70-
-71-
-72-
-73-
-74-
-75-
-76-
-77-
-78-
-79-
-80-
-81-
-82-
-83-
-84-
-85-
-86-
-87-
-88-
-89-
-90-
-91-
-92-
-93-
-94-
-95-
-96-
-97-
-98-
-99-
-100-
-101-
-102-
-103-
-104-
-105-
-106-
-107-
-108-
-109-
-110-
-111-
-112-
-113-
-114-
-Epilogue-
Author’s Note