The Sandler Inquiry

by Noel Hynd

  Then when a local peasant died, the local was given the upper deck.

  They both went into the ground together. Clever, don't you think? Same principle as the London buses. Who'd think of looking for a missing body in a grave already occupied by another man?"

  "Jesus" mumbled Thomas to himself, almost disbelieving the fiendish ingenuity involved.

  "Anyway," said Whiteside. when Austria joined the West in 1955 we went to the cemetery. In the dead of night we brought up the coffin, abducted the half of the population whom we desired, and returned the other occupant to his eternal slumber. We took the body back to London. We obtained Sandler's dental chart from his New York dentist-a man who still practices, if' you care to confirm it with him. Or have a tooth fixed. No doubt, it was Sandler. You can even examine the body now, if you wish to come to London."

  "Where?" someone asked.

  "A churchyard in Earl's Court," grinned Whiteside. He turned to Thomas.

  "You've been there. The girl thought to be his daughter is buried right next to him. Wrong name on his tombstone, of course. Couldn't have a real name. But we did think it would be fitting to keep all the important bones in the same general area.

  Don't you agree?"

  "The parish minister puts up with a lot" grumbled Thomas, remembering the man in the presbytery who'd watched them so intently.

  "The parish minister," gloated Whiteside, 'is Szezic' He noted Thomas's surprise and drove home the point.

  "We wouldn't put celebrities in just any churchyard, you know."

  Whiteside grew deathly serious agaip.

  "But I'm off from the most important point" he said.

  "Szezictold us why the agent was inserted into Sandler's identity. The Russians, he said, had liked the German counterfeiting plans so much that they decided to launch their own scheme with their own master engraver. Undermine the currency of the West. Call into question the West's financial foundations, and you've gone a long way toward shaking the earth out from under our side. Don't you all agree?"

  No one disagreed.

  "And at worst," he added, 'theyd have a way to finance their postwar intelligence operations in the West' The first attack came on the pound, said Whiteside.

  "We had a pretty fair idea who was doing it. We asked for U.S. cooperation against Sandler, but. couldn get it," he intoned angrily.

  He looked at Hammond.

  "Correct or incorrect, Mr. Hammond? Your Treasury Department was never interested in helping' ' "Right, right," twanged Hammond tiredly.

  "Just go on."

  "So it continued for years'" said Whiteside, turning from Hammond and seeking an audience in Leslie and Daniels.

  "Until we had to take matters into our own hands. Trouble was' he added with an exasperated breath, 'the man in New York running the Russian spy during the war was still active. Frightful! He managed to warn the man in Sandler's identity. They put a second double in Sandler's place. And that's the man who was taken down' "Killed, you mean" corrected Thomas.

  "He wasn't living en we were finished shooting him, if that sounds better," said Whiteside crankily. He turned to Leslie.

  "But there remained a further problem. When Sandler had been recruited in New York, no one had planned on the human side of the man. No one ever imagined that Arthur Sandler would fall in love with a barmaid in Exeter, marry her, and have a child." His longest and most thoughtful pause followed.

  "After his 'assassination' the Sandler estate started receiving letters from Elizabeth Chatsworth. The escaped spy knew that she was a breach in the carefully secured plans; she could have called into open question the postwar Sandler identity. So he set out to Europe to kill her. He succeeded, but was witnessed by not his daughter, but the daughter of the man he was impersonating. Now the daughter became a witness. Years passed. And he kept trying to eradicate her, too' "But why did he wait?" asked a flustered Hammond.

  "Why did he wait almost eight years to strike at the woman?"

  "Silly," snorted Whiteside.

  "Sandler's wartime romance was a secret. It was the one facet of the man's life the Russians didn't know about." He cleared his throat slightly, then glared directly at Thomas Daniels.

  "And," he added,

  "I think by now everyone in this room knows the source of their elaborate background file on Sandler."

  Thomas Daniels felt everyone's eyes turn in his direction.

  "It was a grand, grand game for the Reds," Whiteside continued.

  "Masterful. They swapped their best engraver for our best engraver, inserted their man inside of one of ours. But they'd had the time, that was the crucial part. As early as 1941 they'd known whom they were going to replace. The only way to know that was to know who'd been recruited. And the only way to know who'd been recruited was to have the recruiter in their own control."

  Whiteside sighed.

  "Their own recruiting sergeant. Masquerading as an American recruiting sergeant."

  Thomas felt Whiteside's glare sizzling upon him. He averted his eyes and an image flashed before him of his father, flag pin on his lapel, campaigning for Eisenhower, Goldwater, and Nixon, and vociferously calling for the bombing of Hanoi. What crap, Thomas caught himself thinking.

  "I suppose," said Whiteside with sudden gentleness, 'that we needn't dwell on the point Whiteside pursed his lips slightly as the truth hung in the air. He seemed thoughtful, while Hunter sized up the audience.

  Hammond's face was a disgusted, why-wasn't-I-ever-told-before scowl.

  Leslie was transfixed, wanting to believe that the man who'd sought to kill her for so long was not her actual father. Thomas Daniels seemed off on another thought altogether, thinking more of the control, the man 'running' the Sandler impostor, in New York. William Ward Daniels; lawyer, super patriot Soviet spy!

  Then Whiteside was glancing around, his eyes making contact.

  "Well, gentlemen? Quite a story, isn't it? And true" He laughed, a short popping snort.

  "No reason to lie at this point, is there?"

  Hammond appeared pensive, not wanting to trust immediately.

  "The Department will want to see your 'confirmation material: he suggested weakly.

  "Of course' agreed Whiteside.

  "So much for Sandler," Hammond professed lamely.

  "But not so much for the man who tried to kill me twice," Leslie shot quickly and bitterly.

  "He's somewhere" Hammond scoffed.

  "But after twenty years?" He shrugged.

  "Could be in Manchuria by now."

  "I don't think so" said Thomas Daniels, distinctly and coldly.

  "Nor I," said Leslie.

  Whiteside's eyebrows were inquisitively upraised again.

  "Oh?" he asked, as if he were ignorant of the subject.

  "Not with all this counterfeit circulating," Leslie reminded Hammond.

  "Certainly not" Hammond was quick to agree.

  "In any case' Whiteside said in summation,

  "I think we now understand whom we're all looking for. Not Arthur Sandler. But a spy who inhabited Arthur Sandler's identity for nine years" Thomas was about to pursue the point. But the chipping of concrete was less in the basement now. One of the agents from below trudged up the cellar 'stairs and appeared, dusty and fatigued, but concentrating on his task.

  "We found a wooden box" the man said.

  "About nine feet by three feet ' The four men and one woman at the table looked at the man with mixed anxiety and expectancy.

  "Itll take another hour to chip it free' he said.

  "Then we can open it' He glanced from one face to the 'next, then added sardonically,

  "I suspect everyone'll want to be present for the unveiling" A beam of sunlight eased through a torn curtain. It was ten A.M. "Children of the cold war," thought Thomas.

  "That's what we are. She and I He was still at the table, looking across at her.

  "How insolent we've always been to think we controlled our own lives' "

  H
e considered the events which had brought them to that table, listening to the sinister chipping below. Not simply the events which had touched them directly, but the larger scheme of things.

  The Iron Curtain and the purge trials. Korea and McCarthyism.

  Hungary. Rudolph Abel. Cuba. U-2 Flights. The Berlin Wall.

  Vietnam. Czechoslovakia. He could see the Fifties and Sixties flashing before him like a nova. He and Leslie McAdam, the offspring of spies, were brought together not by anything they'd done themselves, but rather by the flow of history by the isms of the Twentieth Century, by the galloping paranoia of the postwar years.

  By the insanities and inanities which afflict governments The conference at the table broke. Nervously, sensing the advent of a major development, the five perused the interior of the Sandler mansion, wandering from bookcase to china case, inspecting filth-encrusted sinks and admiring 1890s clocks. Thomas was alone on the fourth floor, examining the walls and hallway panels, wondering what unexpected hollowness might be discovered.

  When he heard footsteps on the floor above him, heavy footsteps at that, he climbed the stairs and encountered a familiar face and shape.

  Hunter stood in the vast hallway and front corridor of the fifth floor.

  He'd looked all around him, found nothing of overwhelming interest on the other floors, and was now looking upward, toward a long wooden set of stairs which ran to a closed door leading presumably to an attic.

  "Top to bottom," he mumbled, to no one first, then to Thomas, who was standing nearby.

  "That's how we're to search this place.

  Top to bottom" His conclusion, unsaid, was clear. He'd start at the top and work his way to the bottom. Logic, always. He looked to Thomas.

  "Coming with me?"

  "Is that a return invitation for inviting you here in the first place?"

  Thomas asked.

  "Just being friendly," growled Hunter.

  "We were just looking after you, you know."

  The night at Suzanne's, the chemically induced unconsciousness, and the feel of strong arms on his body, came back to him.

  "Of course," he said.

  "So you got jostled a little. You're alive" "You can go on to the attic without me," he answered.

  "I'm going downstairs " "Have it' your way."

  Hunter put his foot on the first step as if to test it, then gradually shifted his entire weight onto the step. Then the next. Then the next. He eased his way up the long slatted stairs to the attic, a step at a time, but less cautious with each step.

  Thomas watched him halfway, then turned. He'd return to Leslie and Hammond, whom he seemed to trust just that much more, to see where their own progress was leading them.

  The first sound he could hear was a slow cracking noise, somewhat like the tearing of wood when a tree is about to fall. But the sound grew in intensity to a quickening clattering burst and Thomas spun around to see the stairs with Hunter collapsing.

  They flew apart as a deck of cards might, the underpinnings flying loose and relinquishing their support at the precise moment when Hunter had primed the trap on the tenth step.

  The weight of the bulky man intensified his sudden plunge. He collapsed as fast as the staircase, thundering into a pile of falling dust, beams, and steps, as the remainder of the staircase-the sturdy wooden steps he'd never reached-collapsed and crashed down upon him.

  Part of the attic floor followed.

  To Thomas, standing in safety thirty feet away, the moment seemed frozen in time, taking many seconds more to occur than it actually had.

  Seconds afterwards, having seen the burly, bear shaped Hunter collapsing with the real estate, Thomas had the sensation of having watched it in slow motion.

  The collapse had taken only three seconds, yet Hunter too had a similar sensation of slow motion, of seconds which seemed like minutes, though at- the first sound of the cracking wood he'd known. The stairs had been a trap, set for any outsider who ventured toward the attic.

  The pain was another matter. The pain was instant, recognizable immediately. Hunter lay beneath the crashing steps and beams and felt the unspeakable torment in his two legs, parts of which were crushed beneath him, pinned into impossible positions as the legs of a discarded doll might be. But unlike a doll's legs, Hunter's consisted of breakable bones, flesh, blood, and nerves.

  He howled in pain, bellowing like an animal caught in an iron claw trap. The bellowing didn't stop. It was a torrent of profanities, obscenities, and' help me even though Thomas sprang immediately to Hunter's aid and began digging him out from under the last steps to fall.

  Leslie arrived next, followed quickly by Whiteside and Hammond. They'd heard the crash. They'd heard the yelling. The beams of their lamps illuminated the room with strangely cast shadows and streaks. Thomas shouted,

  "The steps collapsed!" but it was apparent to anyone with two eyes.

  "We'll have to get him out of here' said Hammond, giving word to the obvious. Hunter's face was white, excluding the beard, of course, and the streaks of blood from forehead cuts and gashes.

  Thomas helped separate him from the wooden planks which had enshrouded him. Thomas could see the pain and pleading on the man's face, the anguish, and the very human blood that was pouring from his veins. And the two bloodied, horribly contorted legs which might never function properly again for the rugged Hunter.

  Thomas winced. For the first time he looked upon Hunter not as a brute, not as an adversary, but as another human being,"a man with feelings, blood, and beliefs. Hunter had believed strongly enough in an ideology to work for it as a career; just as Hammond did, just as the real Arthur Sandler had and just as other men including his own father in a different manner-had. And this, crushed legs in a crumbling house for a cause that would probably never be considered important, is where it had brought Hunter.

  Thomas looked at the fallen steps and wondered what he believed in, himself Could have been me on them, he thought. Could have been me.

  His thoughts were interrupted.

  Hunter had been extricated and was wallowing in pain a few feet from where he'd fallen. Hammond and Whiteside were fashioning a makeshift stretcher from sheets and a pair of strong boards.

  Hammond would arrange to get him out to an unmarked ambulance.

  But something was still falling. Leslie noticed, too.

  "What's that?" she said.

  There was paper drifting down like leaves in the wind. Peacefully and calmly, a draft in the attic was rustling a few papers from the great stacks which were upstairs.

  Small papers. The size of dollar bills.

  The same shape and texture of dollar bills. Some printed, some unprinted.

  All attention, even Hunter's, drifted to the spectacle. Money was floating earthward; not from Heaven, but very definitely from above.

  From the impromptu atelier in the attic.

  Money, drifting through the ripped-away floorboards.

  Dollar bills. Dollar bills with only one side printed, the other side magically bleached away. Blank sheets, having once been dollar bills but now with both faces bleached.

  And others, finished products, so to speak. Fifties. Hundreds.

  Crisp, clear, and perfect, the production of masters. Or at least one master. A small unspendable fortune drifting down on them, yet only the bottom tip of the large green iceberg.

  Hammond stood there awe struck, seeing the same bills that had been presented to him in the Treasury Department. He was onto the source, or at least very near to it, and his heart pounded in his chest. He watched the money drifting down, like snowflakes now, a piece at a time.

  "Yes," said Whiteside, kneeling by Hupter to comfort him, but angrily addressing the speechless Hammond.

  "Not so amusing now, is it? Not when they're your bloody dollars instead of sterling" He paused and bitterly snapped,

  "Help this man, confound it," he demanded.

  "Can't you see he's in agony?"

  Chapter 36
>
  The opening of the oak box was delayed by hours. The excavators, working with the caution of archeologists, chipped up the floor as carefully as possible, unwilling to destroy anything of potential significance.

  Meanwhile, Hunter's tormented body had to be removed. It was carried out through the pantry wall by Thomas, Whiteside, and Hammond.

  Whiteside telephoned a British doctor in Manhattan, one always on standby to treat emergencies of local agents in the field, emergencies which wouldn't be met with snooping questions.

  An ambulance was brought to the corner of Eighty-eighth Street and Park Avenue where, after a painfully circuitous route through dark underground sewer corridors, Hammond guided the injured man up to the street through a manhole.

  The massive body of Hunter, now useless, like a big crippled bear who'd been wounded by riflemen, was eased into the back of the ambulance. He had one arm across his face, in the effort of trying not to yield to the torment of his shattered bones. He writhed slightly, moaned though he tried not to, and bordered on a merciful unconsciousness which Thomas, watching him, wished would descend.

  Whiteside looked to Hammond and Thomas, then glanced back toward the house.

  "I should go with him Whiteside said. He also knew he should stay, finish the Sandler inquiry as best he could.

  "I'll keep you informed," said Thomas.

  "You can trust me' "I'd like to come back," he said.

  Hammond grimaced slightly.

  "We won't be there in another two hours," said Thomas.

  "I'll contact YOU."

  Whiteside looked at the groaning Hunter. He glanced back to Thomas and offered his hand.

  "All right" he conceded.

  "I don't know how much use an old man is in this, anyway.- "I'll never take an old man for granted again'" said Thomas. He offered his hand.

  Whiteside accepted. He then hopped into the back of the ambulance.

  Thomas's last vision of him was as he was placing his arm on Hunter's shoulder, as if to comfort his fallen associate.

  "He's almost sentimental, know that?" said Hammond with distrust as the ambulance pulled away.

  "There's something about him.. " He caught himself and changed the thought.