The Sandler Inquiry

by Noel Hynd

  Then we go underground."

  Fifteen minutes later, three men slipped onto the tracks and moved quickly northward, then westward beneath the streets of Manhattan. When they came to the narrow crawl way it was apparent that the older Whiteside would only navigate with a certain difficulty. And Hunter insisted that Whiteside travel first, followed by Thomas, then Hunter.

  It took another fifteen minutes to arrive before the broken brick wall.

  Whiteside and Hunter stepped through the pantry, Whiteside vainly trying to wipe the dirt from his clothing. Hunter's gaze was all around him, nervously anticipating some sort of entrapment.

  They passed on to the dining room. There, in the room lit by flashlights and scented by the mustiness of furniture, Whiteside stopped short. His expression froze.

  "Well, Whiteside?" asked Daniels.

  "Yes or no?"

  Hunter, in front of him, acting almost as a shield, stepped to the side, glaring at Leslie, glancing back and forth between Hammond and Thomas Daniels as well as the woman. His own expression, shrouded by his beard, seemed to demand an explanation the explanation owed to his superior.

  "It's yes, isn't it?" asked Daniels.

  "Yes. Yes, of course it is" said Whiteside softly.

  "Hello, Peter," she said. She grinned.

  "I guess you didn't get a good look on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade," she suggested.

  "No" he said.

  "You made sure we didn't. I sensed it was the real Leslie when you turned out to be so elusive." He thought back.

  "That poor girl in London. We buried a girl who was the very image of you " "The very image' suggested Thomas, 'but not the original. That seems to be the type of game we're all involved in, isn't it? I may be slow sometimes, but I'm catching on."

  "Sir?" asked Whiteside turning.

  "A game of doubles," said Thomas.

  "Or double doubles, if you prefer. One side can play the same game as the other. And every bit as well " "Perhaps' Whiteside said. He looked back to Leslie.

  "I wish I could have' known what you were doing."

  "There were leaks all over. By arrangement with the Americans, British security was to think I was dead."

  Whiteside nodded pensively.

  "Perhaps now someone can explain how-' "Not yet," interjected Thomas.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "We're here to exchange information' said Thomas, 'not to give it away.

  We have one half of the Sandler story. You have the other half.

  Now we're going to put them together."

  "For what purpose?" buffed Whiteside with a certain hostility.

  "You want the man who was printing pounds? You want the man who killed her mother, tried twice to kill her, then killed another girl in her place, the girl you were kind enough to bury?"

  "I want him," said Whiteside flatly.

  "Then tell us everything" pleaded Leslie.

  "We'll tell our half of the story, then you tell us the rest of yours "

  "The part you always held back on, " said Thomas.

  "It's critical, isn't it?"

  "It's also classified British intelligence" said Whiteside with a sigh.

  "On my own, I have no authority-" "Within another day the man we both want will have escaped from within our grasp," Daniels said.

  "You have your choice. Help us or he escapes."

  Hammond looked nervously at Thomas, feeling left out of things.

  "There are official regulations about releasing information" said Whiteside.

  "Break them!" ranted Thomas.

  Please" Leslie begged.

  Whiteside could see the scar across her throat, the one which had never healed. He glanced to Hunter, who offered no opinion or change of expression.

  "All right' Whiteside finally said.

  "Let's be genteel about this. Let's sit down' Gradually the four men and one woman stepped toward an aged, dusty, dining table. The room was illuminated by a pair of dim kerosene lamps set up by Hammond.

  Shadows fell across the heavy, drawn curtains which dated from the 1920s. Three chairs at the oblong table remained empty. Whiteside seemed to study Leslie a final time, as if to test his senses.

  She began.

  "We finally all agree on whom I am' she said softly, looking from eye to eye.

  "Good" she said. There's no disagreement.

  She moved quickly over areas of common knowledge, her birth, the 1954 attempt on her life her relocation with the McAdam family, the subsequent attempt by the Italian in 1964, and her return trip to England in 1974.

  "It was at about that time' she said, gazing at Whiteside, "that British intelligence washed their hands of me! Her voice contained residual resentment, not at all tempered by the passage of years.

  "Decisions made higher up" he offered plaintively.

  "Leslie, dear, honestly, I had nothing-.

  "You'll have your opportunity to speak, Peter," she snapped brusquely.

  "Allow me. Please."

  He nodded. She went on.

  "I wasn't considered important anymore' she said.

  "There'd been no threat on my life for several years, the counterfeitings of the pound by my father had ceased many years previously, I was considered… expendable Whiteside shook his head sorrowfully. Not expendable, he was telling himself Merely lower priority. The Sandler case had been considered closed by M.I. 6. But Whiteside was too well-mannered to interrupt again.

  Thomas watched both of them. Silently. Hunter gazed at Hammond and Daniels steadily, his thick bulk wedged into the narrow dining chair once favored by Victoria Sandler.

  Sounds of concrete chipping rose from the basement. To Whiteside, for a fleeting moment, the sounds conjured up an image of Verdi's anvil chorus. He, too, was tired. Physically and emotionally.

  "It was about this time in 1974 " she said, 'that a man named Robert Lassiter approached me in London" Hammond's eyes came alive. He was the only one at the table who knew the name.

  "Lassiter said he was from the United States Treasury Department"

  Leslie explained.

  "He'd been dispatched by a man named Merritt, who was said to be the Director of U.S. Treasury Intelligence". Whiteside frowned, perplexed. Hammond nodded. Hunter was impassive, Thomas so intrigued that he hardly breathed.

  Leslie told her story.

  Lassiter was completely familiar with her case, he'd said. He approached her in a London restaurant near Cheapside. He'd asked if he could make a 'business" proposition to her, one which would guarantee her safety in the future.

  "After all" he'd said, 'your father is still very much alive " It had taken no more than those words, plus a convincing explanation of Lassiter's own identity, to move Leslie McAdam. The two memories of her father were like wounds which festered, pained, but never healed.

  There was always that threat, the deathly fear that he could always be standing behind her, going for the throat a third time.

  Leslie McAdam, hater of violence, expert on impressionistic art, devotee of Brahms and Vivaldi, was practically obsessive on the subject of Sandler.

  "What I'd like " she'd told Lassiter, 'is seeing my father dead. Can you provide that?" she'd challenged.

  His answer surprised her, astonished her, in fact.

  "With your help" he'd said simply, "yes. Can do."

  Already notified that she'd soon be losing her British protection, Leslie had little choice. She'd leaped from British arms to American arms, desperate for protection and willing to take it from whatever quarter offered it. And none too soon.

  The forces protecting Arthur Sandler made a rare mistake, but a fatal mistake for an innocent English girl. They thought that a stenographer who worked for the Foreign Office was Leslie under a different name.

  They came calling on her toward five A.M. one morning. The usual routine with the piano wire. They left her quite dead, her head almost completely severed.

  "They never knew their mistake," said Leslie, 'u
ntil I surfaced after Victoria Sandler's death."

  "And that other girl was the body we put in Leslie's grave in London" muttered Whiteside.

  "We knew we weren't burying the real Leslie. We didn't have any idea where the real Leslie was. Not until just now. But back then, back in 1974, we took the chance that Sandler and Company had thought they'd executed the right girl.

  We wanted as many people as possible to believe that she'd been killed "Including me," said Thomas, thinking back to the churchyard.

  "Of course' said Whiteside, his eyebrows raised.

  "We didn't know who you were. We only knew that you had bloody good information.

  No way in the world we wanted an enlightened stranger to think the real Leslie McAdam was still alive." Whiteside pondered it for a moment, then continued.

  "Similarly, Daniels, we've been following you ever since, which hasn't been easy. We wanted to look at your "Leslie' before anyone else got too close a look."

  "And equally you wanted me to think my'Leslie'was an impostor," said Thomas.

  "We didn't want you spreading the word that the real Leslie was alive," countered Whiteside tersely.

  .I was thinking of attending the interment," Leslie backtracked sourly.

  "I was curious who'd care enough to come. But Mr. Lassiter insisted.

  I left the country the night the murder was discovered. I went back to Montreal. As far as everyone was concerned," she said, "I was dead"

  She reflected happily.

  "It was marvelous. For once no one was looking for me. If you're already dead, no one bothers you."

  "Usually. Not always said Thomas, arms folded, looking her in the eye.

  He could hear the chipping downstairs. The dead would rise in more ways than one before the next sunset. He was c@in.

  "Perceptive, Thomas," she answered "You're catching on' "It's about time, don't you think?"

  Intense hammering and chipping rose from below.

  Leslie concluded.

  "Months passed. Mr. Lassiter told me to live as quietly and normally as I could. What they were waiting for was a natural and infallible way to smoke out Arthur Sandler. They were waiting for-" "Victoria to die" said Thomas triumphantly.

  "May I continue?"

  A portrait of Victoria from forty years earlier gazed down from the wall, a tart sneer of disapproval on her lips, the usual vacuity through the eyes.

  "Continue," said Whiteside, trying to calm Leslie.

  "They were waiting for Victoria to die said Leslie. They had a pretty good idea where these counterfeits were coming from, who was making the flawless engravings, and who had concocted a formula to provide the perfect paper. Sandler." She paused.

  "So when Victoria died, they asked me to come forward, to put in a claim against the will. That would force the Sandler estate, including this building, to be closed by the State of New York. And, they hoped, it would force Sandler to come forward' "In one form or another," said Whiteside.

  "Correct," she said.

  "I was to lure the fox from the thicket. That was one role. The other was to get as close to Thomas Daniels as possible' She looked at him.

  "I was to discover how much collusion there'd been between him and his late father."

  "And?" asked Whiteside, raising his thin white eyebrows, hoping for a revelation.

  "I haven't uncovered any. Yet" Whiteside appeared modestly disappointed. So did Hunter.

  The chipping downstairs intensified. Thomas was so engaged in what he was hearing that he nearly leaned forward out of his seat to push the conversation onward.

  "That brings her to the present, doesn't it?" he asked.

  Hammond nodded. So did Leslie. Thomas turned quickly to address Whiteside.

  "And it kicks the ball into your zone, doesn't it, Whiteside?"

  Again the raised eyebrows, accompanied by a nod.

  "You're going to have to cough up that one bit of the story that you've withheld so far, aren't you?" pressed Thomas, trying valiantly not to gloat.

  "You've got the one missing piece and you're going to have to put it in place for us now. Aren't you?"

  "It won't be so painful" allowed Whiteside.

  "Not if you keep your subsequent part of the bargain. I'll tell you anything you want if you provide the man were looking for." Whiteside wore the expression of a tournament bridge player about to reveal a championship hand, the cards he'd waited years to throw onto a table.

  "IT provide him," said Thomas.

  Whiteside eyed Hunter with amusement and looked at least once into each of the other three pairs of eyes at the table. The noisy excavation continued below them.

  "In that case," said Whiteside, the elegant man with a patch of soot on his cheek, 'please listen carefully." He smiled.

  "You'll like this. The story wears well."

  Chapter 35

  Whiteside cleared his throat. 'I've been in double-double games before, even a triple-triple ruse along the line." He shook his head and exchanged a cognizant grin with Hunter.

  "This one beats them all, however."

  He glanced around, seeing that he was center stage. He continued addressing Hammond, the emissary of U.S. Intelligence, as much as anyone. And, sir," he said,

  "I'll supply you with your bloody missing piece, all right. Your Sandler."

  "Our what?"

  Thomas inclined forward again, instantly baffled. He was going to point the. finger to Sandler. Not Whiteside.

  Patiently, Whiteside repeated, the silence at the table now given an extra dimension of stillness.

  "Well" Whiteside buffed with studied casualness, 'the man's been dead for thirty-one years. What I could never understand is how your Central Intelligence Service, sorry, Agency, never managed to learn that for themselves' The bastards probably did, thought Hammond, and never told anyone.

  Hunter sat back in his chair, his hands folded, one thick finger interlocking with another, glancing toward his own chest as if to indicate he'd known it all along also. Hunter did look like a bear, Thomas noticed. Whiteside's smugness enraged Thomas.

  Whiteside raised his eyebrows slightly, saw the stunned expressions around him, scratched his left cheek elegantly, and mused onward.

  "Yes," he said reflectively,

  "I suppose I do owe the present company an explanation. Correct?

  "I assure you" he began, 'it wouldn't change the current situation the smallest bit."

  He turned the calendar back to 1947, a year in which the British Exchecquer was still bedeviled by German pound-sterling notes, printed in Austria during the war. An investigation was in progress, yet doomed to failure. Someone was still printing pound notes. No one knew who. Or where.

  "It was April of that year, forty-seven, I recall," said Whiteside, 'when we were still fairly active in Central Europe. We, meaning M.I. 6, of course. We were recruiting Russians. The Iron Curtain had fallen and we wanted people who were behind it. We wanted Russians. But we took what we could get' What they got, what they managed to recruit, was just about anyone who could exchange a useful tidbit of intelligence for a one way ticket to the West.

  "Poles, Hungarians, Czechs" continued Whiteside nostalgically, 'we could have set up our own League of Nations in exile, we recruited so many "Why didn't you?" asked Daniels sarcastically "Afraid your Congress wouldn't want to join" Whiteside shot back.

  "Touche. May I go on?"

  Daniels motioned an open hand to indicate Whiteside could.

  "In forty-seven we recruited a Hungarian, man named Walter Szezic. He was a young man then, mid-twenties, and had been in the non-Communist resistance in Austria and Hungary during the war. Fine fellow, really!

  "They all are' Thomas intoned.

  Whiteside ignored the remark and dwelt on Szezic.

  "Szezic stayed in Hungary for three years, until being uncovered in 1950 and being smuggled out in one battered piece. But when recruited he had told several stories, all of which were later confirmed… except one.
>
  "There was no way of confirming that lone story. But since it wasn't important to Szezic that he deceive us on that point, and since all the more important information we received from him was true, we took this as the Lord's truth, also."

  The story concerned a spy, a man the Russians had planned to slip into the West since before the war. A man not identified by name, but rather by the identity he took.

  "The spy was run by Moscow," said Whiteside.

  "Years in the making; straight out of the KGB building on Dzerzhinsky Square.

  But he would have a control in New York, too. He'd be run in the United States and had been trained to assume the identity of a wealthy German-American industrialist" No one said it, but one name bolted into the listeners' minds.

  "Sandler," said Whiteside, though it wasn't necessary.

  "The spy had memorized every facet of Sandler's life; he'd been given the man's voice, the man's face, practically the man's mind, in that he'd memorized the faces and relationships of everyone Sandler had known before the war. An extraordinary undertaking by our friends the Reds," said Whiteside, not without deep admiration.

  Thomas fidgeted nervously, beginning to sense the inevitable implications and consequences of Whiteside's story. Leslie glanced back and forth between Whiteside and Thomas. Hammond spoke.

  "Why should we believe any of this?" he asked.

  "Perhaps you shouldn't. But proof is available." Whiteside held up a hand.

  "Not with me now, unfortunately. No. But I could provide it, if necessary."

  Thomas's mind was leaping ahead, to the identity of the spy, to the controlling agent in New York. The pieces were fitting together, gliding uncontrollably like the needle of a ouija board.

  "Just tell us what the proof is," Thomas interrupted.

  Whiteside told. Szezic, after his hasty departure from Hungary in 1950, led M.I. 6 agents to the confirmation of his story.

  The German-American industrialist, Sandler, had been instructed eastward after the war by his control, the 'patriotic American" There he was met by Russians and shot summarily. The double took his place.

  "Sandler's body was buried in Austria," said Whiteside wryly, 'in a manner fitting a man who'd led a double life. The local Reds built a special coffin for him, one with a false bottom. He was sealed within.