“My name is Harry Levine. I’m in the Trade Section, sir. It’s a great honor to meet you, Sir Anthony. And I’m a lawyer. Like yourself.” He added that as if it might be a comfort to this old man. Harry stood, reached down and carefully shook the outstretched hand. Such an incredibly old and special hand, he thought. Meeting celebrities came easily with the Foreign Service, the worldwide adventure that was embassy life. Harry had met, and on occasion even worked closely with, a number of famous people. And, of course, there was his Aunt Chita. But this old hand, shaking his own, had known the shake of Kings and Queens, dictators and saviors. It held in its frail and aged palm almost all the history of the twentieth century. “How did you know,” asked Harry, “the Ambassador would not be coming himself?”
“Yes, well, we do know your Mr. Brown attends to certain matters of a personal nature most Saturdays.”
Harry was truly puzzled. “Then, why did you . . . ?”
“I had no choice. Which brings us right to the private matter for which I’ve asked you here.” Again the old man seemed to drift away, somewhere far off. For a moment he was no longer Sir Anthony Wells. He looked like any frightened, old man. Harry was struck with his use of the term “private matter.” What could the American Ambassador or, in his place, what could he, Harry Levine, possibly do for Sir Anthony Wells? And whatever it might be, in what way could it be called private?
“For many years,” said Sir Anthony, once again himself, “I have been the lawyer for Lord Frederick Lacey. You may be familiar with Lord Frederick.”
“Yes, I am of course,” Harry said. “Everyone knows . . . I mean he died just a few days ago.”
“Indeed,” said Sir Anthony. “Tuesday last.”
“I’ve read a few things about Lord Lacey. In fact, I assisted a client, an American company I mean, a few years ago and I had to do some research on Lord Lacey. A remarkable man.”
“Yes,” said Sir Anthony. “Remarkable.”
“I never associated his interests in any way with this firm, Herndon, Sturgis, Wells & Nelson.”
“Quite right. Quite right. Never did such an association exist. I, however, have been, or rather—was—the private lawyer for Lord Frederick going back many years before he was Lord or anywhere near it for that matter.” Sir Anthony paused a moment, a small but warm smile crossing his aged lips. “We were young together.” He reached across his desk to his right and removed a stack of file folders that covered a large metal box, a box with a lock, a box more than a foot high and three feet long, a box of the sort found in a safe deposit vault. He needed to stand to open it, turning it sideways to make room on his desk for the long top which he promptly raised up and folded flat back. From inside it Sir Anthony withdrew a packet of legal-size papers which Harry took to be a will, plus a second thick document, which looked at first sight to be handwritten on regular size paper or perhaps personal stationery. Sir Anthony needed both hands to lift it.
“Lord Lacey liked to keep his varied interests separate from each other.” Sir Anthony went on. “And he treated his private affairs likewise. I never handled any of his business work and I saw to his personal affairs apart from my duties and obligations in this firm. Family things, from time to time. His wives. His daughter. Audrey, poor Audrey. And his will. I did his will. You know, Lord Frederick Lacey’s was the largest non-royal fortune in the whole history of Europe.” Sir Anthony’s voice, weak and frail like the man himself, cracked and wavered. The old man stopped and Harry didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.
“I was twenty-five and he not much older when he first came to me,” Sir Anthony continued. “He had a great deal of money even then. Of course it wouldn’t be quite so much now, but it was an awful lot for 1930. I did his will then and every change since. I don’t do much now, surely you know that.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.”
“I’d never hand over his work to another lawyer. And, of course, he wouldn’t have allowed it either. With that in mind, you should know the last time I did anything for him was many, many years ago, not since June 1968. That spring Lord Frederick instructed me to make some changes in his will. He came in, signed it, sealed it himself, in this envelope.” He held it with two hands. “Right here in this office. He sat just where you are now. Rather strange, but I recall it quite clearly. He placed my document, the will, together with his own, wrapped in a large, sealed package, in this very lockbox, shook my hand and clasped my shoulder rather like an old friend bidding farewell. Then he left and never set foot in this office again. I saw him, from time to time after that, but never again professionally. Given the enormous size of his estate, I did wish to certify the continuing validity of the will and, over the course of time, I would have him sign a letter simply stating there was no other will. It was all done by post. The last such letter is right here, signed by him, dated eight months before his death.” He stopped. Harry had the feeling Sir Anthony did not want to continue. What he had said Harry found fascinating; however, he had yet to say anything even remotely relevant to the American Ambassador, or his personal representative, who Harry was.
“When Lord Frederick Lacey died,” Sir Anthony resumed, “he left a will, a copy of which you see before you. While it serves to distribute an amount of money even some modern heads of state are not used to dealing with, his wishes are really quite uncomplicated and frankly not very interesting at all, not titillating, if you know what I mean. Lord Lacey lived to be a hundred and seven years old. Quite old, indeed. He’d outlived his brother, his sisters, his wives and his only child. He did not involve any of his relatives in any of his business interests. Although he leaves substantial sums of money to the surviving members of his family, no matter how distant, their share represents a tiny fraction of the real value of his estate. The bulk of his personal fortune will go to various foundations and charitable organizations. Its disposition will be private and, I assure you, lacking in any controversy. I suspect the news media will take no interest. For all his youthful celebrity, in the last half-century of his life Lord Frederick was really not well known. Private as were his financial affairs in life, he had no wish for them to be otherwise in death.” With that, Sir Anthony pushed aside the will and once more put his hands on the handwritten pages in front of him.
“Now, you do need to know why you’re here, don’t you? Lord Fredrick was quite plain. My instructions have been clearly conveyed. I was to open the sealed package that contained this document exactly four days after his death. That I did this morning, with the document as I said, still within its sealed envelope, its contents totally unknown to me until today, only a few hours ago. I knew he liked to write his thoughts down. Many more people of our generation did that than do today. He’d make notes, even in the midst of conversation. You got used to it. I suspected he kept a private journal of some sort.” Sir Anthony pushed the loosely gathered, handwritten document across the desk in Harry’s direction. It was, Harry could make out, written on personal stationery paper and looked more like the first draft of a manuscript than anything else.
“A document of substantial weight, as you can see. There’s no doubt it’s the work of Lord Frederick Lacey. The handwriting is his. I attest to that. From start to finish. There’s a cover page, also in his hand, and it instructs me to read this document, which as lawyers,” he said to Harry, meaning the compliment quite sincerely, “we understand is to make public.” Sir Anthony said that, lightly tapping the pile of handwritten pages. “I am to do so in a public forum, on the first business day following the fourth day of his passing. As today is Saturday, that would be Monday, the day after tomorrow.”
Harry looked at the top page of the document, only inches away from his fingertips. He read only the first few sentences. He read them again, then a third time and yet again once more.
“Quite shocking,” Sir Anthony went on. “Indeed, a great deal more than that, isn’t it? I haven’t read it all, by any means, but the page I have given you here is more than
enough. I’m sure you’ll agree. God only knows what else is in here. There are so many things he did in his life, so many places, so many prominent people, famous and infamous. God only knows, Mr. Levine.”
“Why,” asked Harry, “would he do such a thing? What possible reason . . . could there be?”
“Frederick Lacey was a special man, Mr. Levine. A very special man. Not like you and me. He came as close to real power in this world as one can get and you will find his mark in many places. Yet still, his legend—rumor, innuendo—true or false, as you have it—challenges if not exceeds the reality of his remarkable life. Only he knows why. Only he knew. I can’t answer why any more than you can. Under our law, however, I’ve no alternative but to make this document public not later than about fifty-nine hours from now. You understand I have no choice other than to continue as faithful servant to my client, even in his death. Especially in his death. I do think, however, the Prime Minister has the ability to intercede and authorize postponement of such a reading for a period of time to be determined by Her Majesty’s Government. I, however, am rendered helpless in this matter, unable to ask the PM, or anyone else, even the Queen, whom you shall see may have ample reason herself to keep this journal in darkness. For me to do that would create an unethical conflict of interest. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister could be appropriately approached, and he might take the necessary action, at the special urging of the American President. The ramifications of Lord Frederick’s unfortunate disclosures—that which we see here and now, with our own eyes, and others I’m certain a careful reading will discover—appear quite unacceptable. And who knows?” he said, tapping the pile of pages he had yet to read as if they were some sort of bomb. “This is why I called your Ambassador, why I’ve no choice but to share this with you, allowing for your country’s appropriate obligation and response, and why I suggest you get this document to your President without delay. Otherwise . . .”
Harry’s mind raced. Sir Anthony’s words faded to background buzz. He stared, in disbelief, at the page Sir Anthony had put before him. It began . . .
I killed the Son Of A Bitch. Goddamn him to Hell forever, so far away from my sweet, dearest Audrey.
After Conchita Crystal had gone back to her hotel, Walter remembered sitting alone on the deck. The rain had stopped. The late afternoon sun was high and hot again, like it had been earlier that morning on the dock. Sailboats were afloat, drifting calmly off the shore of St. John, some of them headed out toward St. Thomas. Others gently rode the breezes in, out, and around the small, uninhabited, hilly islands that lay off in the distance to the north. The intense humidity, that always hugged the rear end of a rainstorm, was the best part. Walter knew some people didn’t like it that way, but he was not one of them. The moist, heavy air was like dessert to him, something sweet and delicious. It was a faithful reminder of how much he loved the Caribbean and it was something he missed when work took him much farther north. A good sweat was always satisfying, especially if it took no obligation, no commitment in the way of exercise to bring it on.
She told him quite an amazing story. Conchita Crystal, the Conchita Crystal herself. She said her nephew, Harry Levine, had called her from London. He was frantic. He had come into possession of something—“evidence,” he called it. She said that to Walter. She called it evidence. She said that powerful men would kill to get their hands on it, to prevent it from seeing the light of day. The nature of the “evidence” was explosive. Harry had the confession of the man who assassinated JFK. She named the killer—a Frederick Lacey—but it made no difference to Walter. He’d never heard of the guy before. He grilled her about why this man Lacey might have done it, but Chita had no idea. If Harry knew, he hadn’t told her. Where did Harry get this confession? brought the same reply. She said she didn’t know. Who gave it to him? How did Harry Levine come into possession of such a startling, original document? Again, Chita pled ignorance. What she did know was that Harry had left London, taking with him whatever it was that put him on the run. “He’s afraid,” she said. “He knows they’re after ‘it’ and that means they’re after him.” She told Walter where Harry lived, where the Embassy was located in relation to his flat, and she mentioned Harry’s well-known dislike for official transportation. “He’ll be on his own,” she said. “He walks. He has a bicycle and, if I remember, he had one of those little scooters in France. I’m pretty sure of that.”
Again, Walter questioned her. “What’s he going to do about this? He can’t simply hide forever.”
“I don’t know,” Conchita said. “But I do know they’ll find him. That’s why you must find him first.”
This was the story she told him on the dock, and she had nothing more to offer later that afternoon, no more details of the confession that had put Harry Levine in mortal jeopardy. When Walter realized she either didn’t know any more or—for some reason he had yet to decipher—wouldn’t tell him more, he encouraged her to talk about Harry’s life in general.
That was his way. Move quickly from generalities to specifics. Don’t linger on speculation. Concentrate on facts. Gather information. Walter worked on instinct more than method. It had always been so. His mother told him that as a youngster he was the one she turned to to find her car keys when she’d misplaced them. He never lost things the way other kids did—socks, shoes, homework. And when his friends, even into high school, forgot where they parked their car, plunked down their wallet or put the beer they’d hidden from their parents, it was always Walter Sherman who found these things. In Vietnam, he found people because . . . well, just because. Sure, there was a reason why he did it, but no real method or system to guide him. He seemed to sense the direction he had to move in. When he began doing the same thing for a living, he found many similarities among his targets—that was the word he came to use for the people he was hired to find. He used it unemotionally and without any hint of violence or aggression. No judgment was attached. Those who hired him were clients. Those for whom he searched were targets.
In forty years, Walter’s instincts were highly developed. He refrained from pointless guesswork. He tried to deal exclusively with evidence. That didn’t mean he didn’t think about things, didn’t project his target’s future actions. It just meant his conjecture required a rock-hard foundation of existing fact. Talking to Conchita Crystal about Harry’s life and personality, he hoped to begin constructing that foundation. That’s how he began with most of his clients, usually a photograph, a sad tale of despair and woe, a plea for help. And always, in the background, the unspoken monster, the client’s fear of failure. Because the rich, the famous and the powerful face possible disaster from the goings-on of almost anybody close to them, his clients often told Walter far more than he needed to know, burdened him, in fact, with details so personal and so irrelevant to his pursuit. Walter saw it as an indication of their vulnerability and it frequently showed him things about them they had not meant to reveal. He looked for those qualities, those hidden secrets, those unintended disclosures in Conchita Crystal. It worried him that he found none. But he listened to her. After all, he needed to start somewhere.
Europeans drink more tea than coffee. While in Turkey and Egypt, Harry had a hell of a time finding a decent cup of coffee, American coffee. How he loved it. After smoking since he was a teenager, he quit at 30, but never cut back on coffee. Some addictions were better than others. The six-cup electric percolator he bought in Philadelphia his first year in law school sat in his London kitchen, still working.
Finding the right beans, the kind needed to make a cup of coffee like Harry could get in any of a thousand roadside Waffle House restaurants scattered throughout the South, was a challenge in Europe, even in London. This was so despite coffee’s long history in England. As best Harry could determine, Edward Lloyd opened London’s first coffeehouse, in Tower Street, in 1637. It was still a famous establishment today, albeit while keeping its founder’s name, it long ago stopped selling coffee and began instead arranging c
ommercial insurance. Other coffee shops played an important role in England’s industrial revolution. The once popular Jonathon’s Coffee Shop eventually became the London Stock Exchange. Harry knew that, just as he was aware that today coffee was the second most traded commodity in the world, surpassed only by oil. When he finally discovered exactly the blend of beans he was looking for, at Monmouth’s Coffee House, he bought in bulk and stored it in his freezer. Harry was like that. His pantry always had a month’s supply of things like toilet paper, napkins, garbage bags, toothpaste, the sort of stuff people might run out of if they weren’t careful. And, he also had an extra supply of socks and underwear, dress shirts, flashlight batteries, shaving cream and those little things people dropped in their toilets to make the water blue. He kept it all stashed away, neatly stacked, ready to use when needed. He was very careful, very neat, very thorough.
He thought about his meeting with Sir Anthony as he prepared the coffee. The gurgling noise his percolator made was a sound he’d grown familiar with, a sound as real to him as language. He anticipated, as if by some mysterious feel, when its silence would announce the coffee was ready. Once done, he reached for the sugar bowl putting it down next to the milk he had already taken out of the refrigerator. After inhaling a deep smell of the fresh brewed aroma, he poured the coffee into his mug, adding the milk first, then the sugar, and stirred. From the living room he heard a Vivaldi violin concerto playing on the BBC.
Before taking a sip he reached across the small table in his kitchen and pulled the document toward him. I killed the Son Of A Bitch kept running through his mind. He closed his eyes and said it to himself—“I killed the Son Of A Bitch.” He was amused by his awareness of the cultural divide separating Frederick Lacey and himself. No American, certainly no modern American, would have written Son Of A Bitch. It would be sonofabitch! Then he said it, out loud, softly, slowly with his eyes still tightly closed, both hands clutching the warm mug. “Sonofabitch! Lord Frederick Lacey killed President John F. Kennedy.” A shiver crossed his shoulders. Harry opened his eyes, took a long drink of his coffee and let the idea, fantastic as it was, settle in his mind. Lord Frederick Lacey killed President John F. Kennedy. “Holy shit,” he added aloud. Then he began reading the document, shuffling pages, searching for the ones about Kennedy.
The Lacey Confession Page 10
