The House of Special Purpose

by Paul Christopher

  Black continued. ‘Money again, access to the Romanov bank accounts through Prince Theodore. Maybe propaganda.’

  ‘Sounds thin. What about the Russian NKVD man? Zarubin. The one who had our professor’s goose cooked, not to mention his friends in Santa Barbara? Where the hell does he fit in? And why would he want the film? It doesn’t put our Russian allies in a very good light, especially since your present king was cousin to Nicholas the Second just the way his father was.’

  ‘We’ve been over this before,’ said Black. ‘I don’t really think logic has much to do with it at all. I think it’s all perception. The film has been a secret all these years and people always covet secrets, even if the secrets don’t matter.’

  ‘For a secret that doesn’t matter much it’s managed to see a lot of people killed,’ said Jane. ‘And I still think we’ve been played like fish on a line ever since this started. There’s been too much water under the bridge for any of this to matter any more, just like you said, but it obviously does matter. Lockhart was an agent in St Petersburg and blew some rescue mission, so what; it doesn’t seem to have affected his career any and the only people Donovan could blackmail with the footage are his own allies. Where’s the sense in that?’ She shook her head. ‘We’re missing something.’

  ‘Well, I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘Feels a little bit like Daniel and his friends going into the lions’ den,’ grumbled Jane as they turned right down Tusitala Street and reached the Ala Wai Hotel.

  The Ala-Wai Hotel was a misnomer since it was a row of small one-room cabins, eight in all, with a small office building at the entrance to the crushed coral compound. Still, it was cheap, private and totally anonymous. When they’d checked in, the man in the office, a huge, big-gutted Polynesian type named Howard, had been a little suspicious of a couple who slept in separate cabins and had no car but he’d taken their money anyway. The Ala Wai was out of the way and didn’t get much of the hot-sheet trade from army and navy boys the way the motor courts on Kalakalua did.

  They reached the entrance to the cabin court and Jane stopped in the office since there were no telephones in the cabins. On a shelf behind Howard the radio was tuned to KGMB and playing Glenn Miller doing ‘High on a Windy Hill’ with that dishy crooner Ray Eberle providing the vocals. He had the kind of smooth just-old-enough-to-be-legal voice that did very unladylike things to her.

  ‘Any messages, Howard?’

  The motel owner shook his head. ‘Nope.’ He went back to reading the newspaper and after listening to Ray for another few seconds Jane turned with a sigh and went out the screen door, letting it slap shut behind her.

  ‘No messages,’ she reported as she walked over to where Black was standing. Parked on the far side of the office was a Two Bit cab, the driver asleep with a copy of the Honolulu Advertiser over his face, snoring loudly.

  Jane looked carefully and saw that both its headlights were intact. ‘What do you want to do now?’

  ‘Change clothes and then get something to eat,’ Black answered promptly as they walked across the open space towards their cabins. ‘I thought I might try another one of those hamburger sandwiches at that stand by the canal.’

  ‘God, do we have to?’ Jane asked. ‘Street meat can be dangerous in hot climates.’ It also didn’t fit into her plans for a slightly more romantic evening.

  ‘Street meat?’ said Black.

  ‘Forget it.’ She sighed.

  Of the eight cabins it looked as though only one was occupied other than their own or at least there was only one car parked, an old, slightly rusty rumble-seat Reo with a St Louis College pennant hanging from the radio antenna. The name St Louis probably meant it was a Catholic school and Jane grinned, musing about what kind of venal and cardinal sins had been committed in the rumble seat, let alone the cabin the old car stood beside. It didn’t surprise her in the slightest that the curtains of the cabin were tightly drawn even though the sun hadn’t set yet.

  ‘Ah, youth,’ she said to herself as she walked up the short path to her cabin. She took out her key, wondering if losing your cherry at the Ala Wai wasn’t some sort of rite of passage for the boys of St Louis College.

  After opening the door, she stopped and gaped. The room had been completely tossed, furniture thrown from one side of the room to the other, the mattress slashed and the bedside lamp thrown against a large plate-glass mirror above the bureau. Her suitcase had been hacked to pieces and a wooden chair had been smashed to splinters. She quickly checked the remains of her suitcase and saw that the Minox and the film Fleming had given her were gone. For a short minute Jane had a nauseating vision of the compartment on the Super Chief and the two corpses in it. There were no bodies here and she didn’t intend to be the first.

  She backed slowly out the door, took a deep breath, turned and sprinted to the door of Black’s cabin next door, bursting through it without a knock. Once again she was stopped in her tracks. The room was neat and tidy, nothing out of place – except Black sitting stiffly on the edge of the bed while the two men who had travelled with them on the Clipper stood on the other side of the bed, Colt .45 Automatic pistols drawn, one pointed at the back of Black’s head, the other one at the front of Jane’s. Neither man moved or spoke. Their expressions were as bland and uninterested as they’d been on the aeroplane.

  ‘I think this is our invitation to the ball,’ said Morris Black.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Saturday, December 6, 1941

  Kewalo Basin

  The ill-mannered man from the Clipper took them up the broad stairs from the cabin deck to the main deck, then down a long, very narrow, windowless interior corridor to the forward section of the ship. They passed an open doorway and Jane spotted a brightly lit galley and two male cooks preparing food. The wonderful odours wafting out through the doorway were almost enough to make her faint and she realised that they hadn’t eaten anything all day. Their jailer led them inexorably past the paradise of smells and into a narrow, wood-panelled vestibule that led into the yacht’s dining area.

  At first Jane thought they’d been called to dinner but she quickly realised something much more serious was going on in the large room. Most of the space was taken up by a long, brilliantly polished table that gleamed richly in the overhead lights.

  The three portholes on either side of the room were drawn. The carpets on the floor were Persian. The ceiling was coffered oak. At the far end of the room was a tall mahogany sideboard. Instead of a silver service on display there was an old-fashioned French Debrie 16 millimetre film projector and a pile of bright yellow Kodak Safety Film boxes. Moura Budberg, a sequined cap over her dark hair, was standing beside it. A white collapsible screen had been set up at the other end of the dining room.

  Most of the Russian demi-courtesan’s guests were already at the table but she made no attempt at introductions as Jane and Black were shown to their places. At the end of the table closest to Budberg sat Axel Wenner-Gren, trying to look as Aryan as possible with his close-cropped hair, his uniform-styled blue-grey suit and a powerful build that at the same time managed to look dissipated.

  Every few seconds he looked back over his shoulder and smiled at Moura Budberg. Black had no doubt at all that the Swedish vacuum cleaner inventor was just as smitten as the British agent, the Russian writer and the English journalist and historian had once been.

  On Wenner-Gren’s right sat Emil Haas, sitting quietly, his perfectly manicured fingers clasped together. Beside Haas sat Feodor Romanov, dressed in a very expensive double-breasted suit, leaning to his right, whispering into the large ear of the taller man beside him, Count Anastase Vonsiatsky, the fascist married to the Connecticut pork heiress.

  The seat beside him was where Jane had been placed, with Black directly across from her. On Black’s right were only two chairs, one for Julius Rossler, the German spy Shivers was sure worked for the Japanese, and the other for Rossler’s Japanese contact, the supposed consular office
r, Tadashi Morimura. Rossler had the flat peasant features and thick neck Black associated with beer halls and bullies while Morimura looked much more refined, his long rectangular face set in the placid expression of a Buddhist monk but with a hardness in his eyes that couldn’t be disguised.

  ‘We have one more guest to arrive,’ Moura Budberg said quietly from her end of the room. ‘And while we wait it might be of some interest to some of you to know a little bit about the film you are about to see. There is no doubt in my mind that it amounts to being the single most important “document,” if you will, of the twentieth century.

  ‘There is also no doubt in my mind that the events and people you are about to see represent a pivotal moment in the direction the entire world has taken over the last quarter century and will almost certainly affect the next quarter century with equal power. The film in question is some twenty-three years old now and has travelled the world for a great deal of that time, searching for the moment best suited for its revelations. This, indeed, is the fulcrum Archimedes was talking about when he proposed a theorem to move the world.’

  ‘Bit florid, don’t you think?’ asked Jane in a melodramatic whisper. ‘Levers, fulcrums, Archimedes.’

  ‘Oh, quite, quite,’ Black responded, putting on the plummy airs of an Oxford don.

  ‘You two have less reason to mock me than anyone else at this table,’ said the Budberg woman.

  Wenner-Gren was less polite. ‘You will shut your mouths and listen to what is being said,’ barked the man, his accent thick as cheese.

  ‘I think I’d rather ask questions.’ said Jane, uncowed. ‘Like how did Miss Budgie down there get the film in the first place? Levitsky gave it to Trotsky, didn’t he?’

  ‘This is true.’ The woman nodded, smiling. ‘I applaud you on your knowledge, Miss Todd, and I can also assure you that your bad manners only reflect on yourself, not on me.’

  ‘I was born with bad manners,’ Jane answered back. ‘So answer the question. How did you get the film?’

  ’Gospodin Levitsky was given a sum of money for it.’

  ‘Paid for by your Swedish friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So he gets a cut of the proceeds.’

  ‘He knows a moment in history when he sees it,’ Budberg answered. ‘He simply rose to the occasion.’

  ‘How much choice did Levitsky have?’

  ‘Very little.’ Budberg smiled. ‘He had little to barter with.’

  ‘He had the film,’ said Jane.

  ‘And we had him, so to speak. My old comrade Iron Feliks is dead these many years but I can assure you his spectre still haunts the thousand rooms of the Lubyanka. There are those who say that Lavrenti Beria is his reincarnation and without a doubt his legitimate heir.’ She paused, her smile broadening. ‘We knew where Levitsky was and what he was doing, which was making – how do you call them? – “stag movies.” His papers were also false. He knew he would be deported back to Russia if anyone found out. Confronted, he capitulated. His memory goes back to the Ohkrana and the Cheka before the NKVD was even created. He knows precisely how relentless they are and that once they have found the spoor of their prey they never give up, no matter how long it takes. Without our protection he was a dead man and he knew it.’

  ‘Did he know you worked for the NKVD as well?’ put in Morris Black.

  ‘I’m many things to many people, Detective Inspector. I’m like most people, I wear many masks.’

  ‘So he didn’t know.’

  ‘There was nothing for him to know,’ said Budberg. ‘Or that he needed to know.’

  ‘Is he still alive?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘But you have the film.’

  ‘And there you have the meat of the matter.’ The Russian nodded. ‘I have the film.’

  A door opened at the far end of the room and Moura Budberg’s smile broadened even more. Wenner-Gren got to his feet and bowed deeply. Jane turned in her seat. The woman was tall, reed-thin and wore an ankle-length silk cheongsam in a shimmering deep jade colour. Her features were sharp and birdlike, her hair rigid with lacquer, her thin lips a slash of blood red across her face.

  ‘Your Royal Highness,’ said Wenner-Gren, using the title that had been denied to her by her brother-in-law, the present king of England. His Queen Consort, Elizabeth, hated the woman with an unrelenting passion.

  The Duchess of Windsor, née Wallis Simpson, American divorcée, stepped into the room and took her place at the head of the table.

  She lifted one imperial, haughty hand. ‘You can begin now.’

  Wenner-Gren stood up from his place at the near end of the table and went to the light switch on the wall. Moura Budberg flipped the little toggle on the side of the Debrie projector as Wenner-Gren simultaneously doused the lights.

  The film began abruptly with a shot of a small empty room. The first few seconds were blurred as the gate of the whirring, chattering projector came up to speed. The blurring eased and Jane saw that the walls were covered with broadly striped ornamental paper. The floor was planked, probably with birch, and a single bulb burned hotly, hanging on a piece of wire from the ceiling. There was a false arch across the centre of the room and to the right a barred curved window. It was obviously night, the window uncurtained and dark. At the far end of the room were a pair of wide panelled doors.

  A shadow crossed in front of the lens, probably Levitsky, and a moment later the aspect of the film changed entirely as a pan light came on, throwing long shadows to the right. The shadow crossed the lens again and a second light came on, cancelling out the shadows thrown by the first. A slight movement on the right side of the frame indicated that the shadow – presumably Levitsky, the cinematographer – had taken his place behind the camera.

  For a full minute nothing happened and the film showed nothing but the blank stretch of wallpaper, the archway and the barred window on the right. Then the wide doors beyond the archway suddenly opened and a young dark-haired man with a dark moustache and beard stepped into the room. He was wearing a thick jacket and heavy trousers, seemingly an odd choice for midsummer.

  ‘The Jew, Yakov Yurovsky,’ supplied Moura Budberg. ‘The chief executioner.’

  Behind Yurovsky came the imperial family and as they appeared Moura Budberg identified them one by one.

  ‘Nicholas the Second.’ The tsar, looking like the twin brother of his cousin, George V, King of England, was carrying his son in his arms. ‘Alexei, the tsarevitch and heir, his son.

  ‘Alexandra, the empress.

  ‘Her daughters, Olga, twenty-two, the oldest.

  ‘Tatiana, twenty-one.

  ‘Marie, nineteen.

  ‘Anastasia, seventeen.’

  Anastasia was carrying her pet King Charles spaniel, Jemmy. Olga and Tatiana were both carrying pillows.

  All were wearing simple white underdresses and their long hair was informally down without so much as a ribbon. Following the daughters came several others.

  ‘Dr Eugene Botkin, the family physician. Trupp, the tsar’s loyal valet, Demidova, the empress’s maid and finally, Kharitonov, the cook.’

  At this point in the film Yurovsky and the empress seemed to be in conversation. The tsar nodded and Yurovsky left the room for a moment, apparently going through a doorway that must have been somewhere behind the camera. A few moments later he reappeared carrying two ordinary wooden chairs.

  The chairs were set down close to the back wall of the room and the tsar, who had continued to hold his son in his arms, gently put Alexei down in the nearest of the chairs while his wife, the empress Alexandra, took the second chair, which had been set down a little closer to the window. Tatiana and Olga took their pillows and placed one behind their mother’s back and the other behind their brother’s. Yurovsky then spent a few moments arranging the rest of the people in the room, forming up two lines against the far wall. With that done the tsar and Yurovsky had a brief conversation.

  ‘Yurovsky is telling the
tsar that the film is needed to prove to St Petersburg that the tsar and his family are still being held safely and that they are still alive. You can see Nicholas nodding in agreement as he goes to stand beside his son.’

  With everyone lined up peacefully, waiting without any look of fear or panic, Yurovsky looked from the camera and back to Nicholas as he pulled a small, torn piece of paper from his pocket.

  ‘This is Yurovsky reading the indictment from the Ural Executive Committee, ordering their execution.’

  The look on the tsar’s face changed, his eyes widening. He turned to look at his family and then back at Yurovsky. The dark-haired man reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out a Colt revolver and fired a single shot, point-blank into the tsar’s face. The tsar’s head burst open, spraying blood and brains over his daughters behind him, and he crumpled to the ground. The single shot must have been a signal of some kind because Yuroveksy quickly stepped off to one side, positioning himself just out of camera range as almost a dozen men surged into the room, at least one of them knocking against the camera, the picture suddenly shaking.

  ‘Yurovsky’s killers. Eleven of them. They had all been given their own specific targets.’

  Silently the eleven men lifted their pistols and began to fire, Yurovsky firing as well from slightly offstage. In the room the noise would have been deafening. The empress and the tsarina Olga each tried to make the sign of the cross but they did not have time. Alexandra died instantly, several bullets striking her in the chest, midsection and head, tearing her apart. A single round took Olga in the head, her forehead disappearing beneath a veil of gore draining down over her face. Botkin, Trupp and the cook died quickly as well, the wallpaper behind them shredded down to the plaster and lath, blood spraying everywhere.

  Alexei and the three younger sisters and Demidova the maid were still alive, although they’d all been hit. Any round fired at their chests seemed to ricochet off, bouncing around the room like lead hailstones. There was so much smoke in front of the lens that there was almost nothing to see except bodies crawling across the floor while others remained inert.