Chelsea Mansions

by Barry Maitland

  ‘This is nonsense,’ she said impatiently. ‘This has no relevance to you.’

  Kathy didn’t press the point. She asked Janice to recall later trips made by Nancy to the UK. There had been two that she remembered, both with her husband, staying at the Hilton.

  ‘And now I must ask you to leave,’ she said. ‘I have another appointment.’

  At the front door she added, ‘Your police must have a lot more time and money to spare than ours, if they can afford to send an inspector across the Atlantic just to check a few trivial details like this.’

  ‘Many thanks for your time,’ Kathy said evenly. ‘I’m sorry to have interrupted your afternoon.’

  ‘Dadgummed bitch,’ Emerson breathed when they got back into the car. It was such an uncharacteristic outburst from the gentlemanly Emerson, and said with such feeling, that Kathy had to laugh.

  ‘But that was Nancy and her parents,’ he protested, ‘and they were standing outside Chelsea Mansions. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘It’s possible. I could get someone in London to check.’

  ‘If Janice was right and this was Nancy’s sixteenth birthday, that would make it the twenty-sixth of April, 1956.’

  He slowly turned the car and began the long drive back to Boston. On the way Kathy sent a text message to John with the date and asked him to check the background to the photograph, then sat back to admire the well-maintained clapboard houses they passed in picturesque villages or set back among the trees of private acreages.

  ‘You know what I find so upsetting?’ Emerson said after a long silence. ‘The idea that Nancy might have kept it a secret from me. How could she have gone through that whole charade, choosing the hotel and all, and not told me the real purpose of the trip for her?’ Then he added, ‘Unless it was something shameful. Do you think that could be it? Might she have wanted to revisit the scene of something bad, something embarrassing? Might she have been abused there, perhaps? Was she revisiting the scene of a trauma she couldn’t confess to me?’

  ‘It needn’t be anything like that, Emerson. She may just have been a bit reticent about telling you that she wanted to revisit a happy memory from her past. Especially when she discovered that Chelsea Mansions wasn’t the splendid hotel she remembered.’

  He gave a rueful smile. ‘I guess you’re right. And if she was there in her teens it could have nothing to do with her murder, after all. Those other people in the old pictures are all dead and gone.’

  When they got back to Beacon Street he said, ‘Will you be leaving now?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes. I’ll have to check available flights.’

  ‘It seems a shame to have come so far and seen so little. Let me at least take you out to dinner at one of Nancy’s favourite haunts. Nothing fancy, just a very friendly little Italian place down in the North End where we often went on a Saturday night. What do you say?’

  ‘You’ve given me so much of your time already, Emerson, I’d feel guilty about taking more.’

  ‘Nonsense, it’d cheer me up no end. I’ll phone Maria. I’m sure she’ll squeeze us in when I explain. Shall we say eight o’clock?’

  So she agreed, and spent an enjoyable evening with him, talking about all the places she should have seen, and would have to return to one day.

  THIRTY

  The following morning Peter was already setting places in the dining room by the time Kathy came downstairs for her run. Today Tom was offering honeyed yoghurt with fresh berries followed by French toast stuffed with peaches. ‘He’s a star,’ Peter said, seeing the look on Kathy’s face.

  This time she headed down through the South End and then east into Chinatown. As she pounded through the empty streets she tried to clear her mind. It felt as if she’d been here for a long time, much more than two days. That’s what happened when you had a change of scene, she told herself, time expanded, became more generous. It had been a blessing to get out of London. It was absurd that she’d never been to America before—never been out of Europe in fact. Her work had constrained her, narrowed her focus. Was that why Guy’s invitation to go to Dubai had seemed so appealing? What a disaster that would have been. No regrets there.

  She returned to Beacon Street, skipping up the front steps, blood singing. After a quick shower she went downstairs and opened the dining room door. The smell of Tom’s cooking hit her and she said, ‘Wow,’ then stopped dead, staring at the figure sitting at a corner table. He lifted his head and she said, ‘It is you,’ and John Greenslade got to his feet with a cautious smile. There was a suitcase on the floor beside him.

  ‘Ah, you do know him then, do you, Kathy?’ Peter said from the door behind her. ‘I wasn’t sure whether to let him in. But he looked so forlorn, I thought I’d better give him something to eat.’

  She sat down at his table and asked what on earth he was doing there. He looked as if he hadn’t slept, which, as it turned out, was pretty much the case, his flight being a nightmare, through Newark.

  ‘There was something I needed to show you, Kathy, about the photographs,’ he said.

  ‘Oh really?’

  He registered her doubtful look and was rescued by the arrival of French toast and coffee, with Peter clearly trying to interpret what was going on. ‘Will he be requiring a room?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, I think so, Peter,’ Kathy said. ‘Do you have one free?’

  ‘We do. Next to yours as it happens.’ He arched an eyebrow and strolled off to talk to the couple from Iowa at another table.

  ‘Well, this is a nice surprise,’ Kathy said.

  ‘I’m relieved. I thought you’d be mad.’

  ‘I was talking about the French toast,’ she said, and watched his smile fade. ‘So what do you have to show me?’

  ‘I’d need to get out my laptop.’

  ‘I suggest a shower and a shave and change of clothes first,’ Kathy said. ‘And maybe a couple of hours’ sleep?’

  ‘Not the sleep, but the other things would be wonderful.’

  Peter led him away while Kathy had another coffee and caught up on the news in the Boston Globe.

  Later, in her room, John opened up his laptop and clicked to the image of the group in front of the building.

  ‘First of all, that is definitely Chelsea Mansions. Each of the doorways is slightly different, and I’m certain they’re standing in front of number eight, the present-day hotel, which in 1956 would have been the home of Toby and his parents. When I showed him the picture he had no idea who the people were, and thought they must have been staying at his great-aunt’s hotel next door, but I’m sure you were right about them being Nancy and her parents. So then I began to look more closely at the unidentified man and I felt I’d seen him somewhere before. I looked through the other photos, and I’m pretty sure that he appears again in this one . . .’

  He brought up the image of a couple standing in front of a long reflecting pool, with an Art Deco arch in the background. ‘I was struck by this picture when Emerson showed it to me in London. It’s undated, but it looks very thirties, don’t you think? The style of their clothes and hair, and the architecture. And that’s Maisy, looking twenty years younger than in the Chelsea Mansions picture, and I’d swear that’s the same man again.’

  Kathy stared at the two photographs, and at enlargements John had made of the two male faces. ‘I think you could be right,’ she said at last. ‘So, a long-time friend of Maisy and her husband Ronald.’ She shrugged. ‘Is it significant?’

  ‘Well, then I tried to work out where the older picture was taken. Emerson told me that Maisy worked for the American sculptor William Gordon Huff, and I looked him up. I wondered if the man in the pictures might be him, only it wasn’t. But I did find out that he did some monumental sculptures for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, held in 1939 and 1940. Here are some pictures of it. And there, look, you can see the arch, and the long pool.’

  ‘Well done. So the man’s probably American, but so what? The impo
rtant thing is that Nancy and her parents visited Chelsea Mansions in 1956. Surely their friend isn’t relevant?’

  John held up a finger. ‘Take a closer look at this guy. Doesn’t it strike you—the cut of his jacket, the haircut—that he doesn’t quite look American? Or English? Now look at the London picture, that suit he’s wearing. Look at the lapel. There’s something there, a badge or something. I enlarged it and sharpened it with Photoshop, see . . .’

  ‘A tiny star,’ Kathy said. ‘Five-pointed.’

  ‘What does that make you think of?’

  Kathy felt a pulse of excitement. ‘A Russian?’

  ‘Could be. I wondered if I could discover anything about Russians in San Francisco in 1939 or 1940. No luck. But I did find out that the main archive of material on the Golden Gate International Exposition is held here in Boston, at the Widener Library at Harvard. I thought we should go over there and take a look. So that’s why I’m here.’

  To Kathy it seemed a forlorn hope, but she was intrigued, and so they packed up what they would need—laptops, notebooks, a small camera that John had brought—and set off along Beacon Street towards the centre of the city. On the far side of Boston Common he led them to the entrance of the Park Street station of the T, the city’s subway system, where they caught a train out to Harvard. The other people in their carriage were mostly young—a bearded youth in frayed jeans trying to sleep off a hangover, a cluster of young women with heads down swapping notes, and a couple sitting opposite, pressed together in dreamy contentment, looking as if they’d just got out of bed. Kathy was aware of John watching them.

  The train emptied at Harvard Square and they made their way up into the sunlight, where John took her arm and led her across the street and through a gap in the older buildings on the other side and into Harvard Yard. A lane took them into a campus of treed lawns crisscrossed by paths and framed by simple four-storey brick buildings, some of which John pointed out as they passed—Massachusetts Hall, built in 1720 and the oldest building in Harvard, and Hollis Hall, where George Washington had barracked his troops during the American Revolution. They turned into the central courtyard of Harvard Yard, where the more monumental buildings of Memorial Church and the Widener Library stood facing each other across a green.

  John said, ‘Harry Widener was a Harvard graduate and book collector who died on the Titanic. The library was donated by his mother in his memory, and it’s now the major library in Harvard, which has the largest university collection in the world. It’s particularly strong in the humanities and social sciences, which is why we’re here.’

  They climbed the broad flight of steps to the colonnaded entrance, where John showed his Harvard ID from his research visit the previous year. For Kathy to get access they were directed to the Library Privileges Office, where John managed to have her issued with a day pass as his research assistant.

  The university was now in summer recess, and the library was relatively quiet. They found a couple of computers side by side in the Phillips Reading Room and began searching through the HOLLIS catalogue. Kathy started with online descriptions of the exposition, which had been built on reclaimed land called Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. It had been held to celebrate the recent completion of the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges, and was open to the public for a total of twelve months through 1939 and 1940.

  ‘Millions of people must have visited it,’ she said, peering over at John’s screen.

  ‘Yes . . . I’m looking for foreign delegations. It was supposed to showcase the culture of Pacific Rim nations, which would include Russia, I guess. They must have sent over an official party, don’t you think?’

  There was plenty of material in the catalogue, and it was hard to be sure from the brief entries what much of it might contain. They divided up the list of catalogue numbers they would have to investigate and set off for the stacks, up to American History which occupied the whole of level two, and began the long, slow task of skimming through every book, every leaflet and newspaper report, every photograph collection, every official document and memoir.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  Kathy looked up, taking a moment to focus. Her writing hand felt as numb as her brain. She had no idea of the time.

  ‘Two o’clock,’ John said. ‘Don’t know about you, but I need a break.’

  ‘Yes.’ She blinked and rubbed her face with a hand that felt grubby with dust from old paper.

  They went out, dazzled by the sunshine, and John took her to a café that he knew nearby.

  ‘We’re not getting anywhere, are we?’ he said after they’d ordered sandwiches and coffee. They had found dozens of pictures and references to William Gordon Huff’s statues, and to the Court of Reflections in which Maisy and the man had been photographed, but they’d come across no more images of her, nor glimpses of Russian visitors.

  ‘There’s all those Kodachrome home movies to go through,’ Kathy said. ‘And we haven’t finished the newspaper reports.’

  They returned to the library, slightly refreshed, and went on with their hunt. After another hour without result, John went over to a computer station and began another search through the catalogue. Eventually he returned to Kathy, her head bent over a collection of postcards, and said that he’d found some GGIE references in the Economics stacks in Pusey, an underground extension of the library, and was going down to take a look. Slightly mesmerised by the images in front of her, Kathy nodded and turned to the next page.

  There was a sign on the wall above Kathy’s carrel stating that cell phone and pager use was not permitted in the library except in designated areas, so she jumped and looked around in embarrassment when her mobile emitted a loud tune. She snatched it out of her bag and whispered, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Kathy.’ It was John. It took her a moment to remember that he’d gone some time before.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I may have found something. Come down and see.’ He told her how to find him.

  She took a lift down to the basement of Widener and came to the tunnel that John had described, leading to the Pusey extension, where she descended to its lowest level. He waved her over to his desk and showed her an ancient typewritten report by the GGIE Budget Committee on visitor numbers to the fair. At the back was a series of appendices, one of which listed international delegations.

  ‘There,’ he said, and pointed to a paragraph headed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, official visit of July 16–30 1939 of Deputy People’s Commissar of Culture, Varvara Nikoleavna Zhemchuzhina and 16 delegates.

  ‘So there were Russians there,’ John said. ‘For what it’s worth.’

  Kathy was skimming the list of delegates’ names, then said softly, ‘Oh, I think it’s worth something, John.’ She pointed at one of the names: Gennady Moszynski (Leningrad). ‘Mikhail’s father. That’s who was with Maisy in San Francisco in 1939, and again with Nancy and her parents at Chelsea Mansions in 1956.’

  ‘Mikhail’s father?’ John repeated, looking at Kathy in astonishment. ‘How can that be?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s important, isn’t it? Nancy had a reason not just for revisiting Chelsea Mansions, but for meeting Mikhail Moszynski. Their parents had once been close friends, even in the middle of the Cold War.’

  ‘You think Gennady might have been based in the Russian Embassy in London in 1956?’

  ‘It wasn’t in the biography I was given, but I suppose it’s possible.’

  ‘You have his biography?’

  ‘It was in a background briefing paper on Mikhail Moszynski that MI5 prepared for us when we were investigating his murder.’

  ‘Do you think his father was a spy?’

  ‘There was no suggestion of it.’

  ‘But anyway, that was over fifty years ago. What difference would it make now? What could any of that have to do with Nancy and Mikhail’s deaths?’

  Kathy didn’t know, but that name on an old report had given her a shiver of revelation, the sudden sens
e of discovering the truth among all the confusion. ‘I’ve no idea what it means, John, but I think we might have earned our crust today.’

  He smiled at her. ‘This is exciting, isn’t it? It’s like how I felt when I identified a verse by Ariosto.’

  She smiled at his idea of excitement, and yet it was true; she felt as if she had caught a glimpse of a ghost, the ghost that Nancy had teased Emerson with. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and celebrate.’

  He chose the place, the best seafood restaurant in Boston he said, down on the waterfront where she’d come on her first early morning run. From their table by the window they looked out over the harbour as dusk turned the scene from gold to turquoise, and far across the water the lights of the planes dropped like slow-motion meteors onto Logan’s island.

  As they talked, it occurred to Kathy how many things there were to like about John Greenslade. He was attentive, amusing and a good listener. He persuaded her to tell him about her childhood, and as he listened so sympathetically she found herself admiring little things about him, his slender hands, his thoughtful frown, and the wry, self-deprecating crease of his smile that reminded her a little of Brock. He was attracted to her, she could see that, and she liked the caution and restraint that seemed to be attuning itself to her own. He was too young, though; the ten-year gap between them might be refreshing but it was also a barrier. His openness and enthusiasm made her feel cynical and old.

  ‘Your turn,’ she said, wanting to return to safer ground. ‘Tell me about the Greenslades.’

  He looked suddenly serious, almost as if she’d said something to upset or offend him. Then he took a breath, a sip of wine and his face cleared. ‘There aren’t any,’ he said. ‘Just me and my mother.’

  She looked at him, wondering what he meant, and noticed a tension that had gathered in the way he sat.

  ‘The way she tells it, my father was in some kind of high-risk job. When she became pregnant with me she became afraid for her own and my safety, and ran away. She went to her sister in Toronto, and changed her name to Greenslade—“clean slate” was what she meant—and started a new life.’