The House of Special Purpose

by Paul Christopher

  Jane had noticed a sign in Chinese over the narrow street door into the warehouse. ‘What does the sign say?’

  ‘Passport to Paradise,’ Zarubin explained. ‘It is supposed to be for the taking of photographs for passports and for men to send back to China to their picture wives. Most of his market is for Orientals. They like to see one of their own schtupping a white woman.’

  ‘Schtupping?’ laughed Black.

  ‘Screwing,’ said Jane.

  ’Schtupping I already know.’ Black smiled.

  ‘Yes, yes!’ Zarubin nodded ‘Ebala, eb Tvoyu Mat!’

  ‘I think we understand now, Vassili,’ said Jane.

  The Russian shrugged. ‘Khazdy drochit kak on khocet.’

  Black flushed bright red.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Roughly translated, it means everyone has his own way of masturbating. In this case I think he is referring to Comrade Levitsky’s films. Let’s go and see if we can catch Levitsky in his bed,’ said Black.

  ‘If I was him I’d be long gone. If he’s been living here I think his incognito status just came to an end.’

  ‘We’ll check anyway.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do, knit?’

  ‘As you said, he’s probably already fled. We’re just checking.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll just sit in the stolen getaway car and wait for a cop to come by and start asking me questions.’

  Suddenly her words were ripped away by an ear-splitting roar as an anti-aircraft shell hit the empty street half a block away, blowing a six-foot hole in the asphalt. It was enough to burst a water pipe and a fountain erupted in the middle of the street. Jane realised that the closer you got to Pearl Harbor, the more likely you were to be hit by friendly fire. The AA shells would be firing almost straight up and when they missed their trajectories would be pretty short.

  ‘We won’t be long,’ said Black, grinning. ‘Maybe you should put the top up.’

  ‘Funny fellow.’

  Black stepped out of the car, the automatic in his hand, and pulled the seat forward. Zarubin got awkwardly out of the car, throwing his leg straight and hanging on to the body of the car as he hauled himself onto the street. They went across in front of the car, crossed the street and headed down the alley. It took a full five minutes for the two men to climb the outside stairs to the second floor and slip through the door leading into the apartments.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Sunday, December 7, 1941

  Honolulu

  No sooner had they gone than Jane was out of the car and heading into the warehouse. Reaching the door, she reached into the beach bag and pulled out the Smith & Wesson .32 calibre Police Special she’d discovered behind the pharmacist’s counter when she’d gone looking for Zarubin’s penicillin powder. She bumped her hip into the door and turned the knob. The door opened and when it did she slipped inside. The immediate impression was sex, even before she’d seen anything. It was in the air, a thick, dark smell that burned into your nostrils. It seemed quite a fall, the man who’d filmed the murder of the Romanovs now filming men and women rutting like dogs or.

  Directly in front of her was a door with a frosted glass insert that read OFFICE. She pushed through it and found just that, a small outer office with a coffee table, a small couch and a dwarf palm drooping in one corner. The coffee table had half a dozen magazines and newspapers on it, all of them in Chinese and Japanese and Tagalog. There was also, obscurely, a Gideon Bible that someone must have stolen from a hotel somewhere.

  Right in the middle of all the magazines was the most recent copy of Life, Douglas MacArthur all over the cover, oddly missing his sunglasses and his corncob pipe. There were ashtrays at both ends of the couch and one in the middle of the coffee table. Jane did a quick check; most of them had filters and lipstick stains. More women than men here.

  Two doors led out of the office other than the one she’d come in through, one behind the receptionist’s desk and another one beside the dwarf palm. Jane went behind the desk and tried the door there. It opened into an inner office, empty except for another desk, a leather chair behind it and a very old-looking leather couch on one wall. There were three battered filing cabinets against the other wall. Above them were framed movie posters: Big Girls on the Beach, Sluts for Dinner and Honolulu Moon. All the posters featured big, oversized Oriental men overpowering much smaller white women.

  Trying to ignore the posters, Jane went for the filing cabinets, going through the drawers quickly and carefully. They all carried eight-by-tens of naked and semi- naked women, all striking what they assumed were provocative poses. All the pictures had been taken with the same three different backgrounds. A studio palm tree, a backdrop of Waikiki Beach and a backdrop of the Aloha Tower. On the back of every picture was stamped COPYRIGHT MICHAEL LEVITT. Like most people on the run he wasn’t wandering too far from his real identity.

  Jane abandoned the rear office and went back to the front reception area. She went over to the door on her right, turned the knob and stepped through. She found herself in a maze of fibreboard cubicles, all of them connected, creating half a dozen corridors. The cubicles were eight feet high, leaving lots of space between them and the high old tin ceiling. She wandered up and down the aisles, checking out the three-sided rooms. Each of them was a permanent, roughed-in set. Four-poster romantic bed with a mosquito netting canopy and a fake window that looked out onto an alpine meadow made out of a travel poster; a stall in a barn complete with a saddle; a dungeon with whips and chains; even an ordinary kitchen. It wasn’t hard to imagine what went on in each of the rooms; this was the stuff of nickel peep shows and five-dollar reels you bought for your home movie projector.

  So far she’d counted twenty of the little rooms; Levitsky or Levitt or whatever he was calling himself was putting out a lot of product and making a lot of money. He probably paid the girls nothing, bribed the cops to stay out of his hair and had connections all over the islands for distributing what he made. Maybe if she’d looked harder she might have found a few reels of Levitsky’s hidden in the Rexall she’d gone into.

  She jumped as she heard another crash from outside and then she heard something else, the familiar whirring squeal of someone rewinding a reel of film. She moved through the corridors bending her ear towards the sound, getting closer every few seconds, her nostrils filled with the acrid smell of developing baths. Levitsky was running his own lab and processing his own film. Before long she found what she was looking for, a long room in the centre of the warehouse floor, the only one with a door and a ceiling. She kept the gun in her hand, turned the knob and stepped into the film lab.

  Levitsky was a man in his middle forties, stocky, with a dark shock of hair only just going grey at the temples. As Jane had assumed, he was hand-cranking a rewind, transposing film from a metal ‘core’ onto a full reel. He looked up when Jane stepped into the room, scowling, his heavy brows coming together angrily.

  ‘We’re closed, you stupid bitch. There’s a war on out there or can’t you tell?’ There was barely any trace of an accent in his voice.

  ‘You’re Alexander Mikhailovitch Levitsky?’ Jane asked blandly, pointing the gun at the film-maker. Levitsky let go of the rewind crank and the film continued to spin on for a few seconds then stopped. Behind Levitsky was a wall of shelves with hundreds of silver cans lined up behind a simple wooden dowel restraint. There was a cutting table with more shelves above it, these filled with new stock, and the third wall was taken up by a pair of large developing tanks. Hanging in front of the editing table were dozens of strips of films, each with an ordinary bulldog clip attached to it, the squeezes on the clips looped over nails. Not the most attractive set-up in the world but it looked reasonably efficient for a man who made stag films for a living.

  At the sound of his real name Levitsky took a step, bumping into the chair that stood in front of the editing table. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Moura Budberg isn’t going to let you get awa
y alive,’ said Jane. Somewhere in some part of her brain that Albert Einstein or Sigmund Freud had forgotten about or never discovered, she’d been putting it all together and now she was pretty sure she had it. ‘In fact, she’s hired a top-notch assassin to kill you.’

  ‘You’re insane. I’m worth a fortune to her!’

  ‘No, the film is, and when she’s got what she wants, you don’t have any value at all but your silence does. His name is Emil Haas and he’s probably on his way over here right now. Haas gets a copy of the film for his superiors and this is how he pays for it.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Levitsky demanded.

  ‘Probably more of a friend than you deserve right now. I’m an American and I work for one of the men in that film.’

  ‘Donovan.’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘I want political asylum!’

  ‘You won’t get it. Not today, pal.’

  ‘But I have committed no crime!’

  ‘I know. I’ve been thinking a lot about that.’ Jane nodded. ‘You shot the film you were ordered to shoot and then, being a smart guy, you saw what would happen to you once you delivered so you went on the lam, ran away. Kept the film for insurance, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Levitsky visibly sagged. ‘If I brought it to Lenin he would have killed me. So would Beloborodov or any of them. The only one I could trust was Trotsky and even that turned out to be a mistake.’

  ‘You sure led everyone on a merry chase, though. Half a dozen people or more have been killed because of that little piece of film.’ She paused. ‘Since I’m pointing a gun at you, why don’t you tell me where the original is, the negative? Then we can get this whole thing over with.’ She saw the frightened man’s eyes flicker to the small reel of film on the rewind.

  ‘You will shoot me.’

  ‘I’m not the shooting kind, comrade. I’m just tired and I want to go home. Like you said, you committed no crime except stealing a piece of film from Lenin. If you haven’t heard, he’s dead. Give me the negative and you can do whatever the hell you want.’

  ‘They will hound me to the ends of the earth.’ Levitsky moaned.

  ‘Not if you don’t have the film,’ said Jane. ‘Nobody’s going to care once they know it’s gone. It all becomes meaningless, a myth, like discovering Atlantis or Napoleon having three balls or Hitler just one.’

  ’I’ll hound you, Alexander Mikhailovitch,’ said a quiet voice from behind them. Levitsky stared and Jane turned and looked over her shoulder. It was Zarubin and he was carrying Morris Black’s automatic.

  ‘Where’s Morris?’ She cocked the Smith & Wesson, swinging it away from Levitsky.

  ‘Calm yourself,’ said Zarubin, smiling. ‘He’s resting. A slight error in judgement on his part. He’s in the car. You’ll see him in a moment.’

  ‘He’s lying. For him lying is like breathing – it always has been. He’s going to kill you.’ Levitsky shook his head. ‘You don’t know this man.’

  Jane stared at Zarubin then the truth came to her in a rush as the last pieces fell together. She remembered the file Morris had given her to read and knew that it was the only explanation that fit.

  ‘Jesus, I know who you are. You’re Yurovsky.’

  ‘Of course he’s Yurovsky!’ screamed Levitsky. ‘Who did you think he was!’

  ‘All this time,’ said Jane. ‘You disappeared and changed everything about yourself. Used what you knew to find a job in the NKVD and settled in to your new identity. Until Moura Budberg came along. Release the film and if even one person recognises you it’s all over. You’re Yakov Yurovsky again and one big embarrassment to Uncle Joe. His little torturer Beria would have you dead and buried before you could take another breath. How many people have you killed to keep your secret, Vassili?’

  ‘As many as was necessary,’ Yurovsky answered. ‘Almost all.’

  ‘And poor old Levitsky here was going to be the last, thanks to Morris and me.’ She shook her head. ‘All you had to do was follow our trail.’

  ‘There has been too much talk,’ said Yurovsky. ‘Alexander Mikhailovitch I will kill here in his sordid little premises. You and Mr Black will come to the docks with me as hostages.’ He smiled. ‘We have a boat to catch. Her name is the Stary Bolshevik and she’s en route to San Francisco.’

  ‘Not that we’ll ever get there.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, no.’

  Emil Haas came through the doorway, the high-powered Beretta rifle cradled in his hands. ‘Neither will you, Comrade Zarubin or Yurovsky, whichever you prefer.’ The rifle was aimed directly at Yurovsky’s chest. Jane realised that one shot at this range would rip his heart out and blow it into the next room. ‘Or perhaps Squirrel Cheeks,’ said Haas, continuing to bait Yurovsky. ‘Isn’t that what your colleagues at the embassy call you behind your back? The cheeks you used to hide behind that beard and ridiculous moustache you sported twenty-three years ago.’

  I still don’t see what the Abwehr’s interest is in all of this,’ Yurovsky said with a calm smile. ‘I am assuming that you still work for the admiral.’

  ‘The Abwehr’s interest should be obvious,’ said Haas, shifting the heavy rifle in his arms. ‘We’ve been hearing rumours about your real identity for some time. The film is proof of it. To have the man who murdered the Romanovs living in Washington, supposedly an ally, simply wouldn’t do. The film has the added bonus of undoubtedly causing some perturbation and consternation among the royal family. A benefit to Germany and of course to the duke and duchess.’

  ‘I only commanded a firing squad,’ sneered Yurovsky. ‘When you kill it is in cold blood.’

  ‘All blood spilled is the same temperature.’

  ‘Shoot him! Shoot him! Before he kills us all!’ Levitsky screamed frantically.

  Jane tried to ignore him but the man was adding a hysterical edge to everything, not what you wanted when there were three weapons cocked and ready to fire.

  Eventually someone’s trigger finger would get too itchy to bear and the shooting would begin. Bad enough under any circumstances but in this room it would be like committing suicide.

  ‘I’d advise you to shut up for the moment, Mr Levitsky,’ Jane said. ‘And if we all keep our heads, no one’s going to shoot anyone.’

  * * *

  Several miles away, berthed for general repairs to its engines, the United States heavy cruiser New Orleans was caught completely unprepared both for the first- and the second-wave attacks by the Japanese forces. The anti-aircraft directors were not aboard the ship. More than forty percent of the crew had no gunnery experience at all and what experience they did have came from their most recent practice session, which had taken place in June. By the time more experienced gunners from the nearby heavy cruiser San Francisco, the minelayers Tracey, Preble, Sicard and Pruitt, and men from the West Virginia motor launch rallied to the New Orleans, the first attack was over.

  As the second wave began, Corporal James Atkins Sloane of the Pruitt was manning one of the stem AA guns on the New Orleans, screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs, lining himself up on an Aichi D3A1 torpedo bomber that had swung into view. At eighteen Sloane was more enthusiastic than he was accurate and he emptied a whole box of unfused 40 millimetre shells at the retreating torpedo bomber. At least ten of the shells were duds, a further dozen went off course and landed harmlessly in the entrance to Honolulu Harbor, half a dozen more impacted on the outskirts of the city in the cannery district but the remaining shells, each twice the size of the ones used by Second Lieutenant Masaji Suganami, fell between Hotel Street and Kekaulike Road. Real fire and brimstone had come to Honolulu’s red-light district at last.

  The shells rained down over a three-block area, two of them completely demolishing the building containing the White Orchid Restaurant. The sleeping marmalade cat, whose real name was Charlie, was blown out of the window and across the street. Amazingly the creature survived, minus half its tail, which had been scorched off as cleanly as if it had been cauterised
. Exactly 12.3 seconds after being fired by Corporal Sloane, the last of the forty millimetre shells exploded three feet in front of the main doors of Passport to Paradise.

  The doors were blown off and every window on the front wall was blown inward by the concussion from the explosion. The entire building was shaken down to its minimal foundations, swaying back and forth like a tree in a high wind. In the lab it was enough to throw everyone to the ground and pour hundreds of film cans down from the shelves. In addition, the explosion sent almost a hundred years of dust into the air along with the mixed, stale odour of spermaceti oil, which the warehouse had once been used to store.

  Jane scrambled to her feet first, coughing and blinking in the thick air, and found that somehow she had been blown over the cutting room counter. She’d managed to hang on to the Smith & Wesson she’d taken from the pharmacy. In front of her, on the other side of the counter, Yurovsky stood up, wobbling, the automatic held loosely in his hand. There was no sign of either Levitsky or Emil Haas except for the splintered stock and ruined action of the hunting rifle he had been carrying. Most of the spool of film Levitsky was winding was gone along with him. The only thing left was a few feet of negative stock still on the original core. ‘Better hit me with the first shot,’ she said to Yurovsky, not feeling anything like as confident as she sounded. ‘Half the film in here is old. Nitrate stock. You hit the wrong can and one of two things is going to happen. Either this place is going to get lit up like a Christmas tree or we’re all going to be blown to Kingdom Come.’ It was true enough; she’d seen half a dozen of the old pale green boxes that marked nitrate emulsion film. Despite its popularity, however, nitrate film had always been chemically unstable. Not only did it decompose easily under adverse conditions but it was also highly flammable and potentially explosive, as one of its component parts became nitroglycerine.

  ‘You are lying,’ said Yurovsky. ‘Throw down your gun.’