The British Cross

by Bill Granger

  “You were in the De Valera government—”

  “Before I took the cloth,” the priest said. He sighed. “I knew them all. I knew Crohan. I knew Catherine Guilhoolie. All of them gone now. I knew too much—”

  “You were in the Intelligence branch—”

  “I might have been.”

  “Mrs. Fitzroy is certain you were.”

  “And what would a women be after knowing about it?”

  “All these years, she’s certain that Tomas Crohan was still alive and now you write her these letters, hinting about what you know.… We need leverage, Father, to use on the American government, to find out what happened to Crohan, to clear it up.”

  “And what leverage would ye be after using with the Reds then?”

  “You think he is a prisoner in the Soviet Union?”

  “I didn’t say a word,” the old man said. “Where are ye after staying in Dublin?”

  “The Buswell Hotel—”

  “Ah, good enough, good enough. I have in mind an outing for meself. I’m after thinking of a nice luncheon at the Shelbourne. D’ye know the Shelbourne?”

  “No, I don’t know this city—”

  “Durty Dublin,” the priest said. “Well, it’s a grand place just a block from your rooms, across from the Green, Stephen’s Green, y’see. I’ll be taking a table there I think about noon. And I’ll be looking for a lass with red hair and green eyes to be taking tea with me or something a bit stronger—”

  “Then you were going to see me?”

  “I’m an old man and I must be humored,” the voice said. “Ye can’t be too certain who yer talkin’ to these days. This Parker fellow. I know he’s a damned English spy, I can smell him. At noon, then.”

  And they broke the connection but Rita stood for a moment with the green receiver in her hand. She had pried open the door but the other side of the door was still dark and it was up to the old man to make a light. There was so much she didn’t know; the story had unfolded like an endless series of dark rooms, each with enough light to lead on to another dark room.

  She replaced the receiver and picked up her overnight bag and started across the terminal toward the taxi line. It was just nine A.M.

  Three years before, Rita Macklin had broken a story linking the secret journal of a missionary priest long thought dead in Asian jungles with the buildup of a Soviet missile ring in Asia aimed at China. The sensational story had prompted several job offers from newspapers and television.

  Rita Macklin had fallen in love with an American Intelligence agent named Devereaux and during the days of indecision that followed the completion of the assignment on the missile story, she had tried to make him understand that she loved him. In the end, he had turned her away; Rita still thought that he had returned her feeling for him but there was a cold, black reservoir of bitterness in him that smothered all emotions, all feelings except the will to survive.

  She had taken a job with the magazine at last for the mundane reason that it paid well. She had buried herself in work because that was the sort of reporter she had always been; naturally, following the story of the old priest named Tunney who had revealed the secret missile bases in Asia, she had been inundated for months with tips on stories involving other missing old men, on conspiracies involving the Church and the Communists, on stories about secret journals. They were no good and she knew it; journalists are always forced to fight through such “tips” and “off-the-record scoops”; in time, the stories faded and dried up and Rita Macklin went on to do other investigative pieces for the magazine, far removed from the world of espionage and international plots.

  Until an elderly woman named Catherine Fitzroy of Chicago was escorted into her cubicle at the magazine one afternoon by Mac. Mac was the managing editor/news of the magazine, a gentle and laconic soul who was a sharp contrast to Kaiser, the man who had first brought Rita to Washington to work for his small, grubby news service. Mac was a graduate of Yale, which everyone knew but which Mac never talked about; he had an accent that might have been Maine and might have been southern Virginia; he had become Rita’s rabbi in the intricate political organization of the magazine for no other reason than he thought she was the best reporter he had ever known.

  “I want you to meet Mrs. Fitzroy,” Mac had begun on that day nearly six weeks ago. “She wants to tell you a story about a fellow who might or might not be dead. At least he’s been among the missing for forty years. Mrs. Fitzroy, this is Rita Macklin—”

  “I wanted to see you,” Mrs. Fitzroy had said and grasped her hand with a strong grip. “I know about your work. You found the priest who had the secret journal. Three years ago, I remember the story was in all the newspapers in Chicago.”

  “Thank you,” she had said, holding the grip but giving Mac one of those “who the hell is this” looks.

  “Mrs. Fitzroy is a friend of Mr. Camper,” said Mac, explaining and introducing at the same time. Carlton Camper was the publisher of the magazine. “Mrs. Fitzroy said that she wanted to talk to you and so Mr. Camper thought it was a good idea and so do I, Rita.”

  “Oh, Miss Macklin, I know this is all dirty politics and clout,” Mrs. Fitzroy said suddenly, “I realize you think I’m an old lady who’s going to tell you some fantastic story, and I am. But you just listen to me and if you don’t think it is worth doing anything with, you can just tell me to get back on the plane for Chicago and I’ll leave you alone.”

  Rita had smiled then, suddenly and genuinely, and she had taken Mrs. Fitzroy to the interview room and sat fascinated for two hours as the old woman brought out her family photographs and old clippings about her cousin in Ireland who had disappeared suddenly in 1944 while on a mission for the Office of Strategic Services—the OSS that preceded the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  The story had been intriguing enough for Rita to follow up with a request to review CIA archives on the matter under the Freedom of Information Act. The file would be forty years old.

  That is when she met Mr. Wallace, a junior officer in the CIA who met her in Langley, Virginia, at CIA headquarters one bright winter afternoon, bought her coffee in the cafeteria, led her to a windowless and soundproof interview room, and then explained for four minutes why she couldn’t see the files.

  “I want to be perfectly honest with you, Miss Macklin.”

  “No. I think that’s exactly what you don’t want to be with me. This case is forty years old, it’s got mold on it. I’m asking to see historical documents related to the war. Even the British release their war stories after a forty-year wait.”

  “But there’s really nothing to release.”

  “Then release it and let me judge that.”

  “Why are you interested in this story, Miss Macklin?”

  “Why are you interested in covering it up?”

  And so it had gone.

  A search of the clippings morgue at the Washington Post turned up not a word about Tomas Crohan because the file had been stripped. By tediously going through public library copies of the paper from the critical months in 1944 and 1945, Rita Macklin was able to find out that Tomas Crohan was believed to have been arrested by Soviet authorities when they entered Vienna in 1945. But why was he there? And what was the American connection to it? And why was it important forty years later to keep the matter buttoned up at Langley?

  A clipping in the thin file at the magazine showed the Russians admitting capturing Crohan but that he had died in prison in 1946. The magazine had called Crohan “a prewar Irish hothead who had strong ties of friendship to the Nazi gang around der Führer” and who “championed Irish neutrality in the critical days of the war.”

  Bits of clippings and, of course, the extraordinary letters hinting at dark involvement of the Americans with Crohan sent to Mrs. Fitzroy by her childhood friend, Father Cunningham.

  It became intriguing enough to involve Rita’s attention day and night and when she had asked Mac for permission to pursue the story with Cunni
ngham in Ireland, he really had no choice. He had smiled and said, “This is blackmail, isn’t it? Just because it’s a Camper request, I’ll have to do it.”

  “Ireland is hardly a pleasure spot in winter.”

  “True. But some get their kicks out of masochism.”

  “Wrap yerself, ye’ll catch yer death,” said the housekeeper, Mrs. Ryan, who bustled around old Father Cunningham like a mother wrapping up a schoolboy for his daily trek to school.

  The old priest muttered and allowed her to fuss with his buttons and scarf and then gently pushed her away.

  “I’ll be back by two,” he said.

  “See that ye are,” Mrs. Ryan said, standing with her hands on hips. “And why couldn’t ye see this person here, I want to know?”

  “Ah, and would I get a better meal here than at the Shelbourne Hotel? And her to pay for it? Besides, she’s probably a pretty thing and I don’t want ye after scaring her out of her wits.”

  So they ragged at each other in loud voices to the front door of St. Adrian’s rectory. Mrs. Ryan opened it, held it and slammed it behind the old man who went down the cold, glistening stone steps slowly, his gloved hand on the railing.

  It had started raining and the rain blew gustily down the narrow, drab Dublin street. It began to glaze the walks with traces of ice.

  The old priest took a step off the curb between two cars and paused at the street, looking both ways though it was a one-way street. By nature, he was a cautious man.

  He stepped into the street and a small, black Ford Escort, which had been waiting for him in a double-park lane, suddenly bolted forward. The old man saw it out of the corner of his eye.

  He turned and stared at the car and realized what was going to happen to him; curiously, he did not feel panic; it was as though he had expected this from the moment he had decided to write the first letter to Catherine Fitzroy after all these years of silence.

  In that instant, he prayed for the soul of Tomas Crohan because he was certain that Crohan was dead. And then he realized, with something like calm relief, that he would see Crohan in a moment.

  He did not even feel the impact of the car.

  He felt he was flying; he felt removed from laws of gravity and chains of mortality.

  In fact, he was literally flying from the impact across the narrow street even as the car was beyond him. The driver had not stopped or braked. The priest’s body crashed heavily through the window of the fishmonger across the way, cut by a hundred shards of plate glass that ripped his ancient flesh and clothing even though he was dead enough. He was dead before his bones crumpled on the white tile of the fish store.

  At the far corner, Antonio braked, looked left and swung into the main street.

  In thirty-one minutes, he was inside the terminal of the Dublin airport. He boarded the plane for Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen about the moment the police removed the body of Father Cunningham from the fishmonger’s and about the time Rita Macklin learned from a sobbing housekeeper named Mrs. Ryan that Father Cunningham had been killed on his way to meet her.

  It was purely an accident, a dreadful thing, Mrs. Ryan told Rita Macklin when she called on the telephone.

  But Rita Macklin did not answer because she felt a heavy chill descend over her; she suddenly felt tired; she suddenly, for the first time since the time of the other priest three years before, felt afraid.

  She said nothing to Mrs. Ryan because there was nothing to say.

  Except that it had not been an accident at all.

  6

  HELSINKI

  Kulak stared at the body half buried in the snow of the construction pit. There had been too many policemen and he had chased half of them away and used the few left to screen the site.

  He bent down and lifted the blanket that covered her.

  She was absolutely white, absolutely frozen in a position of death. Her arms were sprawled like the arms of a broken doll. Her eyes were open, her mouth lolled open. She had been drained of blood.

  The cut had crossed between her breasts and driven down through her belly to her sex organ. She was naked.

  “Where was she killed?” Kulak said, still staring at the face.

  “We don’t know.”

  “How many places could there be? Look at the blood. Hardly a trace.”

  “He had wrapped her in plastic.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Natali Kkonhn. A prostitute. We knew about her.”

  “Where did she work?”

  “The nice hotels. She wasn’t so bad.”

  Kulak replaced the blanket and stood up. “Not so bad? You had her?”

  “I didn’t mean that.” The face of Ahakn was sullen, thin, and his black eyes never met Kulak’s when Kulak spoke to him. Kulak did not like him very much; Ahakn was ambitious, which made him a bad policeman.

  “Where was she working last night?”

  “Her usual spot was the Presidentti.”

  “Who did she work with?”

  “She had a pimp but she got rid of him. She was a lesbian. Her friend is in Stockholm; she had letters from her.”

  “They’re all lesbians. A lesbian isn’t going to do that to her.”

  “Is that right?” Ahakn said. A trace of a smile drew his dark face into a grimace.

  “Yes, Ahakn, that’s right,” Kulak said with tiredness in his flat voice. “Get her to the institute and let’s start working the hotel. Check the register, talk to the manager. Be discreet for a change if you think that is possible. This is a very important hotel, important to Helsinki, and I do not want any complaints from the management about a stupid policeman arousing the guests.”

  Ahakn thought to speak but clenched his fists instead. Kulak was built like a bull with thick neck, thick arms, thick hands. His face was curiously sensitive and even placid. His eyes rarely showed any emotion except contempt. He seemed like a man perpetually angry about something that did not involve those he was working with. He had been a chief inspector for twenty-one years.

  Natali. What a stupid waste. His mind addressed the corpse frozen in death under the blanket, on the snow at the floor of the construction pit. Are you the beginning or the end of something? Was it your pimp or one of your customers? What a stupid thing to do, Natali, to get killed like that. Stupid.

  He felt a smoldering anger in that moment directed at the dead woman but also at himself, as though he had caused her death by failing in some duty. It was nonsense and, on one level, he accepted that; but in his guts, he felt immensely guilty and he knew that he could not put the feeling of guilt away. Not even if they had found the one who had done this.

  He looked up at Ahakn, who was staring at him.

  “Well, should I make a written invitation for you? Or do you think you could find the hotel by yourself?”

  Ahakn made a face in response and turned.

  He knew better than to speak now. Kulak was angry, really mad; Ahakn could never understand why the death scenes affected him this way. Fortunately for himself, he never thought to ask Kulak either.

  Devereaux sat on the far side of the square-shaped bar off the lobby of the Presidentti. There were no windows here and no sense of the winter beyond the walls. The bar was nearly empty except for the man in a gray suit who had taken up a place across from Devereaux a half-hour before and had been watching him when not pretending to be reading a day-old copy of the Times.

  Contact was inevitable. Devereaux knew all the signs. He wondered what story the other man would tell him—whether it would be plausible on the face of it or so ridiculous that the deceit would barely have any credence.

  It was four days since he had seen Tartakoff. Nothing had happened and yet he had a sense that he was at the dead calm center of a great storm building somewhere over the defection.

  The name Tomas Crohan had been met with utter silence in Washington, a silence so frozen and complete that it was a profound answer in itself, like the silence that follows prayers.

  Hanl
ey and the Section had not responded; Tartakoff had not sent any signal.

  Devereaux picked up his glass of vodka and tasted it again. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the other man rise.

  Devereaux waited while the other man held his gaze and came around the bar with the drink in his hand. Like an American, Devereaux noted; but he did not resemble an American. His face was thin. His clothes too fussy in their evening neatness. He dressed formally, which was odd to Devereaux, considering the late hour of the afternoon and the deserted place they found themselves in. It was as though the other man hoped to make a good impression.

  “Beg pardon. I’ve seen you in here before. American? My name is Sims.”

  Devereaux did not speak. He stared at the other man in a silence that seemed as calm as an ice field.

  “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  “No.”

  “Sims. With British-Suomi Exports. I’m here on my annual winter holiday.”

  “So am I,” Devereaux said.

  The thin man frowned. What had he expected, Devereaux thought.

  “Didn’t mean to intrude,” Sims said.

  “No. Are you staying at the hotel?”

  “Actually, I am this time. That’s why I saw you. Talk to bloody Finns all day, I was looking for someone of my own kind.”

  “American,” Devereaux said.

  “Well, so. Cousins under the skin,” Sims said, moving quickly as though the threads of the conversation might be recalled at any moment. “Are you here on business?”

  “Pleasure.”

  Sims stared at him and then managed a smile. “Scant pleasures in winter in Helsinki.”

  “I like cold weather.”

  “Ski?”

  “No. Just the cold. It makes it easy to get ice for the vodka.”

  “I see.” The smile faded.

  “What do you export?”

  “Arabia dinnerware, glasses. Marimekko cloth. Quite a market, a nice little enterprise.”