The House of Special Purpose

by Paul Christopher

  Without wasting any time, the Abwehr agent used his folding knife to cut open the two small suitcases, satisfying himself that neither contained the elusive film. The beds still hadn’t been let down and there were few places anything could be hidden except for the narrow locker on the left of the door and the shoe compartment above it. Both were empty. There was nothing in the narrow toilet cubicle. He checked his watch: He’d been in the bedroom for six minutes and he knew nothing more than when he’d entered. He had changed the playing field, however. Black and the woman would be confronted by the two bodies when they returned to their compartment and what they did in response to finding a pair of corpses in their room would decide Haas’s next step.

  Methodically he stripped the two men of their wallets and the identifying rings they wore. No sense in letting Black and the woman know who the men were. He dropped the wallets and rings into the pocket of his jacket to be disposed of later. That done, he eased open the door and looked up and down the corridor. Empty. He slipped out into the corridor and walked back two cars to his own compartment in the Albuquerque. He carefully washed his hands in the small sink, dried them, ran a comb through his hair and stepped out of the bedroom. Turning left, he went back one car into the tail end observation–lounge car to see how events unfolded. Ordering a Scotch and water, he sat down on one of the comfortable banquettes and lit a cigarette.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sunday, November 30, 1941

  Kinsman

  Their Thanksgiving dinner went by in a haze for both of them, incipient exhaustion after their headlong escape, first from Mexico and then from Washington, tempered with relief at having managed to actually accomplish the manoeuvre. All of this was complicated by the fact that there was definitely some kind of undeclared situation rising between them and the tacit understanding that the means to resolve it were only just down the corridor.

  Both Morris and Jane made a courageous attempt to finish their meal, from the complimentary glass of tomato juice all the way down to the pumpkin pie. The waiter came by asking them if they wanted coffee or a liqueur and both Morris and Jane answered no almost as one voice. Black paid and they headed back to their compartment. Reaching the corridor, they were left with the problem that the two of them couldn’t reach the bedroom side by side, meaning that one of them would have to lead the way. In the end, working on the same rule that applies to who goes first in a movie theatre, Jane went on ahead with Black a few steps behind her. They passed two couples on their way to the dining car and Jane was mortified, sure that the couples knew exactly where she and Morris were going and precisely what they were illicitly going to do there. Gritting her teeth, Jane continued on; a little bit of mortification never hurt a girl and it wasn’t as though she’d been raised a Catholic.

  It suddenly occurred to her that as a Jew Morris might be breaking some holy rule or something but she didn’t really care. She didn’t think Morris did either.

  Jane reached the compartment, took a deep breath and put her hand on the door. Black covered it with his own.

  ‘Look, Jane… I’m not very good at this but…’

  ‘Bad form to tell a girl you’re no good before the event. Just relax.’ She smiled. ‘I’m as nervous as you are.’ She pulled open the door and stepped inside.

  The closer man was lying on his back, his left eye already filming over, his mouth open and his tongue lolling back into his throat like a fat, darkening slug. His right eye had collapsed in on itself, leaking a trail of blood and clear tissue down his cheek.

  Jane felt her turkey dinner rising in her throat in a sour rush of bile but she managed to keep it down. She grabbed Black by the sleeve of his jacket, pulling him into the compartment and jerking the door closed. She twisted the locking knob below the handle and sagged back against the metal wall.

  ‘Good Christ,’ said Black, staring down at the two men and the spilled contents of their suitcases. Jane pulled one of the two armchairs away from the bodies and dropped down into it.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘They were looking through our things.’ The detective bent down and quickly checked the pockets of both men. A packet of Lucky Strikes, a Ronson lighter and some small change in the clothing of the shorter man as well as a .38 calibre pistol in a worn holster clipped to his trousers at the small of his back. There was a through ticket to Los Angeles in his inside jacket pocket. The taller man had more spare change, no cigarettes and his own ticket. Both tickets were for the same compartment in Iselta, located towards the head end of the train. The taller man had a .45 calibre automatic pistol in a sling shoulder holster hidden by his jacket. He had been stabbed once in the neck. The spinal ganglia at the base of his skull had been severed, killing him instantly.

  ‘Both armed, both without any kind of identification, both killed very professionally.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘They were going through our things. They were interrupted and they were killed. Left for us to deal with.’

  ‘Russians?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘They don’t look like Russians.’

  ‘What does a Russian look like?’

  ‘Not that well dressed for one thing,’ said Jane. She pulled cigarettes out of her bag and lit one, her hand quivering. ‘Shit,’ she whispered. ‘Shaking like a leaf.’

  ‘Quite rightly so.’ Black knelt down and flipped back the short man’s jacket. ‘Brooks Brothers. New York.’

  ‘Pretty high-toned for a Russian.’ Jane took a deep drag on her cigarette. ‘Donovan’s people, keeping tabs?’

  ‘Or your Mr Hoover’s FBI.’

  ‘Not my Mr Hoover.’ Jane shook her head. ‘Right now I don’t think it matters much anyway. We’ve got two dead bodies in our bedroom; that’s going to take a lot of explaining.’ She glanced at her watch. It was just after nine. ‘The porter’s going to be coming around to put down the beds any minute.’

  Black frowned. ‘What’s the next stop on the line?’ Jane turned slightly and pulled the full schedule out of the leather pocket on the wall behind her. She flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for, running her finger down the list. ‘Galesburg.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Ten o’clock. According to this the train stops for fifteen minutes.’

  ‘After that?’

  ‘Nothing until Kansas City. Two forty-five in the morning.’ She moved her finger across the schedule. ‘Almost five hundred miles from Chicago.’

  ‘And Galesburg?’

  ‘One hundred and seventy-seven miles.’

  ‘How long would it take us to get back to Chicago?’

  ‘Greyhound it might be six or seven hours unless you got an express. You could drive it yourself in three and a half, maybe four.’

  Black gestured at the bodies on the floor of the compartment. ‘Whoever did this is still on board the train.’

  ‘So the sooner we get off the better, is that what you mean?’ She was still staring down at the two dead men, horrified.

  ‘Yes,’ he uttered slowly, a sick look on his face.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Presumably we could get a flight to Los Angeles.’

  ‘If these are Donovan’s boys, or the FBI, they’ll be watching the airport.’

  ‘Perhaps you can suggest something else,’ said Black. ‘If so I propose you do so as quickly as possible.’

  She gestured at the corpses. ‘One way or the other we have to hide the bodies. Once the porter puts down the beds, no one is going to bother us for the rest of the night. It might be smarter catching that flight out of Kansas City rather than Chicago. Less likely to be spotted.’

  Black thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘All right,’ said the detective, ‘I defer to your better grasp of American geography.’

  There was a hard rap on the compartment door and Jane let out a startled yelp.

  A muffled voice from the corridor announced, ‘Porter. Put down your be
ds?’

  Black stared at the door in dread. Jane answered, trying to make her voice light. ‘Can we have another few minutes, Eli?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. You take your time.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Jane held her breath. They both heard the sound of the porter moving down the corridor to the next compartment. Jane stabbed out her cigarette in the narrow steel ashtray riveted to the wall close to where the lower bunk would rest. ‘So how do we manage this?’

  Black nodded to himself. ‘We’ll prop the bodies in the toilet stall. I’ll be in there with them. You head for the bar car. If the porter wants to come in after he puts down the beds, I’ll tell him it’s occupied. We’ll meet in the bar.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll tell him to do our beds next on my way out.’

  ‘That would be lovely,’ muttered Black. He bent down and began shifting the deadweight of the short man’s corpse.

  * * *

  The thing Vassili Zarubin enjoyed most about the United States was its slow but steady corruption of the entire world’s culture, beginning with her food and usually for a remarkably low price: the hot dog in a bun, sold at every baseball game and once a very different concoction sold on the streets of Frankfurt; lox on a bagel with cream cheese, which no Jew except one from Brooklyn would so much as look at; the pizza slice, stolen from the Sicilian workingman’s lunch bucket; and the french fry, picked off the plates of Parisian gourmands having their bifteck bien cuit avec pommes frites. And these things in front of him, thin squares of sizzling fried meat garnished with onions fried along with them to the point of being caramelised, daubed with liquid mustard, then garnished again with round slices of pickle and packed between two fluffy halves of a puffy white bun – nothing at all like the things sold in Hamburg, their city of origin. On the other hand, perhaps he was thinking all this because there was no food of any kind available in the perfection of the Soviet Union these days.

  He sat in the tiny shiny interior of the White Castle restaurant at the bottom of State Street in Santa Barbara, between the railroad tracks and the beach, and bit into the last of his three burgers, augmenting the meat packet with the fries in the box on his left. On his right was a bottle of Coke with a straw floating around in it, which he took occasional sips from. The Coke was thick as blood, sweet as candy and ice cold. His old grandmother, tasting it, would have choked loudly and died screaming. So would the great Comrade Stalin and perhaps that was what Uncle Joe feared: that it would be things like hamburgers, hot dogs and Coca-Cola that would insidiously convert the world rather than his stern and steel version of Marxist–Leninism.

  Zarubin turned on his stool and glanced out the window. It was just past seven in the evening and the sun was nothing more than a few purple and orange streaks on the Pacific horizon above the Channel Islands a few miles offshore. To his left he could see the occasional flare of the lighthouse at Santa Barbara Point.

  It had been a simple, easy day. First a shower in his motel room at the Ocean Palms only a few blocks away down the beach, then a drive around the city in the rental car from the airport to acclimate himself, including a visit to the public library on Anacapa Street, where Harte supposedly worked, as well as the state college campus where Rupert Pelham worked, according to the late Professor Maddox. Finally he’d gone on a leisurely drive up to have a quick look at his objective, a small house in the foothills just off Stanwood Drive. He was back by one in the afternoon and had more than enough time to take in the double feature showing at the Fox-Arlington farther up State Street: The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi followed by Man Hunt, with Walter Pidgeon playing a big-game hunter who tries to assassinate Hitler and then has the tables turned on him. He took a last bite of his hamburger, crunching through a thin slice of acidic pickle. Zarubin wondered if Hitler would have a screening of the film in his eyrie in Berchtesgarten.

  Zarubin lit a cigarette and drank from his bottle of Coke. How much would it take to give up the workers’ paradise of the Soviet Union and the potentially fatal climb up the rickety NKVD ladder of success that could have you falling into the basement dungeons of the Lubyanka? Behind the high Kremlin walls Comrade Stalin and his cronies were in a constant frenzy of list making, counting and recounting their enemies, sending them to the gulags or to the mental hospitals or simply burying them in the ground. How much would it take for him to give all that up for a few hamburgers at White Castle and a job threading the film projector at the Fox- Arlington motion picture theatre? Or one of those little houses up in the hills, a car of his own to drive and a job teaching elementary Russian to the children at the college. All of that in such nice weather by the sea. My God, he could even take up sailboating if he wished.

  In the end, of course, he knew he would not, for he didn’t care who governed. Vassili Zarubin loved the country itself. A hard country, to be sure, but a people as hard and as loving as the land with a history stretching back to the beginning of time. Cossack blood still sang in his veins after a thousand years, always reminding him of who he was and where he came from, a legacy the Americans could never understand. Cowboys and Indians, Pilgrims and plantations indeed. A dozen Stalins and Lenins and Trotskys could come and go, just like the dozen tsars who came before them, but the Rodina, the Motherland, would go on forever.

  He brushed the maudlin Russian thoughts from his mind, stubbed out his cigarette and climbed off his stool. Enough of this. He was in California for the time being and he had a job to do.

  The Russian spy climbed in behind the wheel of the rented dark blue Hudson Six, started it up and pulled out onto State Street. Heading back towards the harbour, he followed the beach then turned again, this time to the left onto the Coast Highway, moving along to Salinas, then beginning his climb into the foothills along the Sycamore Canyon Road.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Sunday, November 30, 1941

  Santa Barbara

  Professor Rupert Andrew Pelham’s house was located high in the heavily treed foothills at 122 Crest Road off Stanwood Drive, just below the Sheffield Reservoir, one of Santa Barbara’s most important sources of fresh water. The area was only sparsely populated but it was a favourite among Santa Barbara’s ‘artistic’ community, mostly for its privacy and isolation.

  According to the administration office at Santa Barbara State College, Pelham taught both English literature and American history and had done so for the past seven years. A quick check by telephone with his own people in Washington revealed that, while not an active member of CPUSA, Pelham had been an ‘adjunct agent,’ code- named Whitefish, for the International Liaison Department since 1936. The ILD was made up of hundreds of men and women who had wanted to be members of the Communist Party but instead became so-called sleeper agents, ready to be used at a moment’s notice and with no possibility of their affiliations being recorded by the FBI or any other agency. It was, in effect, a covert amateur spy ring and while it couldn’t be trusted its members were there to serve whenever necessary.

  Easing the Hudson up the winding narrow line of Sycamore Canyon Road, Zarubin eventually reached the top and swung the heavy car north on Stanwood Drive, riding the upper ridgeback of the foothill with the Los Padres National Forest on his right and the twinkling lights of the city of Santa Barbara now far below him. He kept a careful watch and a few minutes later reached the turnoff for Crest Road and turned left, one foot hovering over the brake as he rode the steep, narrow road downward in a series of S turns without benefit of guardrail or signpost.

  He finally reached his destination and pulled the car off onto the side of the road, the passenger side brushing against the thick stand of trees beside it. He’d checked earlier in the day and knew that there were only two other houses on this part of Crest Road, the nearest one several hundred yards away. It was unlikely that his car would be spotted.

  Before he got out from behind the wheel, he took out the government-model Colt he’d picked up at Tembler Arms on D Street and checked the magazine again, even tho
ugh he knew the weapon was fully loaded. The laws were comically lax about such things in the capital city. A weapon could be carried concealed if the cartridges were kept separately and having a fully loaded weapon in the glove compartment of your car was deemed to be part of your residence and therefore not concealed. Not to mention the fact that a search warrant was needed to look for any weapon, concealed on your person or otherwise. He could have used the Radom but in this case thought it wiser to use a domestic firearm. He dropped the pistol back into the pocket of his jacket, climbed out of the car and locked it behind him.

  Pelham’s house was half screened by more fir trees at the top of a curving, gravel-covered lane. The house itself was small, really no more than a cottage. It was a plain clapboard stained a deep brown with a roof of cedar shakes, all of it blending into the slope of trees rising behind it. Cosy enough for two people and quiet. Nothing but wind in the trees and maybe some raccoons up here.

  Zarubin approached the house without any particular care; he wasn’t trying to sneak up on them, after all. Since Maddox had become fish bait before he’d had time to warn his friend and his ex-lover, they had no idea of his fate and no reason to question Zarubin’s motives for seeking them out.

  Zarubin paused at the foot of the path and lit a Camel. The Russian walked up the path and saw a Thanksgiving wreath on the door. Very festive. He rang the bell. Somewhere from deeper inside he could hear Glenn Miller doing ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo,’ which he seemed to have heard a thousand times in the past few weeks. There was no answer to the bell so he rapped his knuckles across the wood instead. Someone turned down the music and a few moments later he could hear soft slippered footsteps whispering towards the door. The porch light went on above his head and the door opened. The man standing there was wearing a red silk bathrobe, smoking a pipe and had dark hair and tortoiseshell glasses. His cheeks were pinched and his Adam’s apple seemed too large. ‘You must be Professor Pelham.’