The Second Assassin

by Paul Christopher

  His name was Francis Joseph Spellman, fourth-generation Irish, son of a grocery store owner from Whitman, Massachusetts, presently auxiliary bishop of Boston and soon, if all went according to plan, archbishop of New York, the single most powerful position in Catholic America. During his climb up the ecclesiastical ladder, the fifty-year-old Spellman had made a great many enemies but he had also made a number of strategically important friends, not the least of them being the newly elected Pope, his old friend and colleague at the Vatican State Secretariat, Eugenio Pacelli, now Pius XII.

  Spellman glanced over his shoulder. The huge white-stucco and red-tile mission revival mansion behind him belonged to another friend, Joseph Kennedy, the United States ambassador to the Court of St James and the first American Catholic diplomat to formally attend the crowning of a new Pope. Even though Spellman and Pacelli were old friends, both the new Pope and Kennedy had agreed that Spellman, not well liked by many of his peers in both Boston and Rome, should not attend either the convocation or the crowning, and as a small sop to the bishop’s ego, Ambassador Kennedy had offered Spellman the seclusion of his winter residence in Palm Beach. He’d eagerly accepted the invitation. Everyone in the Mother Church knew of Spellman’s close relationship with Pacelli and if he was to have any chance at all of being given the position in New York, it was key that he stay out of the limelight for the time being.

  Spellman took out his cigar case and lit one of the Juan Lopez Coronas he favoured, then turned back to the sea again. He sucked in a mouthful of the rich, aromatic smoke and smiled. Six weeks ago the world had been a different place. He’d been very much the dark horse for the New York archbishopric, well behind Donahue, the man groomed for the position by his late predecessor Cardinal Hayes, as well as John T. McNicholas, archbishop of Cincinnati. On top of that, his arch-enemy Cardinal O’Connell of Boston wasn’t above sabotaging Spellman’s career both in the United States and Rome. With the death of Pius XI on February tenth all that had changed and the tables were turned. With Pacelli’s ascendancy it looked as though all he had to do now was wait patiently and the New York job would be his.

  He glanced at the expensive gold watch on his wrist, a gift from his onetime friend, the Long Island socialite Genevieve Brady. Waiting was something that Francis Spellman was very good at, patience a virtue he shared with a rattlesnake poised to strike. And strike he would when the time came, at enemies who’d mocked and spurned him over the years since he’d first attended Rome’s North American College Seminary, enemies who’d lied maliciously about him, spreading rumours of his deceit and hidden lusts, would all be silenced, once and for all. The round-faced grocer’s boy would be the closest thing there was to a pope in America.

  The bishop turned at the dull sound of a car door slamming. A few moments later a hawk-nosed, balding man in a white shirt and tie appeared, framed in the French doors at the rear of the house, his suit jacket over his arm. He walked halfway around the swimming pool then seated himself at the umbrella-shaded table at the right, a few feet from the diving board. Spellman walked back up the sun-browned lawn and joined him. The man stood again as the bishop approached, making a gesture that was half a nod and not quite a bow.

  ‘Your Excellency,’ he said and seated himself again. His name was James A. Farley. He was presently postmaster general of the United States, a position he abhorred, as well as national chairman of the Democratic Party. He had been Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign manager for the last two elections and a high-ranking figure before that in the New York Democratic machine. Now in his mid-fifties, he felt he deserved something better than being the nation’s mailman but under Roosevelt’s administration it seemed unlikely that he was going to get it.

  A white-jacketed house servant brought out a tray holding a pitcher of iced lemonade and a pair of tall glasses, put the tray on the table and then withdrew.

  ‘No word yet?’ said Farley, pouring. He handed a glass to the bishop then took one for himself.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ said Spellman, shaking his head. ‘A telegram from His Holiness shortly after the election. A call from Joe every few days.’

  ‘And how is Joe doing?’ Farley asked.

  ‘Having the time of his life, I think,’ said Spellman. ‘An Irishman running about in Rome.’

  ‘And two more Irishmen in Palm Beach.’ Farley smiled, his expression sour. ‘Why is it that an Irishman can get nowhere in his own country yet thrives everywhere else?’

  ‘This is our country,’ said Spellman. ‘The Irish is only in our blood.’ It was true; the era of emigration was long over and few if any of Spellman’s or Farley’s peers had ever set foot on Irish soil. The bishop paused, took a small sip of his lemonade, then a puff on his cigar. He stared across the table at Farley, the sun flashing off the lenses of his spectacles, hiding his eyes. ‘You’ve had your meeting, I assume?’

  Farley nodded.

  ‘And the result?’

  Farley stared back at Spellman. ‘I’m assuming our conversation here is that of a parishioner to his confessor?’

  ‘As always,’ Spellman said. ‘I’m still really just a parish priest, after all.’

  Farley smiled. Calling Francis Joseph Spellman a simple parish priest was like calling Abraham Lincoln a country lawyer. ‘Everyone is agreed,’ Farley said. ‘If Roosevelt is elected for a third term he’s almost certain to bring us into war.’

  ‘A war that hasn’t started yet,’ Spellman cautioned.

  ‘It’s only a matter of time,’ Farley answered, shaking his head. ‘Hitler will play the hand out and Roosevelt will go against him.’

  ‘You’re sure the president will try for a third term?’

  ‘He says not, at least to me.’ Farley grimaced. ‘I don’t believe it, though. He’s already done his housekeeping. Anyone who’s not with him completely is against him – that’s his philosophy.’

  ‘Yourself included?’

  ‘He knows my feelings well enough. He’ll keep me on until after the election and then I’ll be gone.’

  The bishop heard the undertone of bitterness in Farley’s voice. Like Spellman, the man across the table from him had reached a point in life where the opportunity to leave a passing mark upon the world was beginning to fade. Historians rarely included postmasters in their texts.

  ‘What about Garner?’ Spellman asked. As far as he knew, Roosevelt and the vice president rarely talked, and it was well known that the only reason the ageing congressman from Texas had agreed to play second fiddle to FDR was because William Randolph Hearst had ordered him to do so.

  ‘He’d do anything to see Roosevelt out of the White House.’ Farley paused and let out a long breath. ‘The plan is that, once Roosevelt is gone, Garner will appoint Lindbergh as his vice president and finish out the term. Lindbergh will easily get the party nomination for president next year and that will be the end of it. John Nance Garner goes down in the history books as the thirty-third president of the United States and when you get right down to it, that’s all Cactus Jack really wants.’

  ‘Lindbergh has agreed to all of this?’ asked Spellman. ‘He knows about your… course of action?’

  ‘He agrees in theory,’ Farley said. ‘He knows we’re meeting here to discuss the situation.’

  ‘You’ll need a great deal of support.’

  ‘We have it. Hearst is backing us, of course. The Morgan Bank. Several members of the DuPont family. Ford. Pew from Sun Oil.’

  All natural enemies of the president, thought Spellman. ‘What about political support?’

  ‘Ten senators, including Byrd, Wheeler and Nye. A half dozen congressmen. Fish, Stratton, Jennings Randolph. We even have people with us at the War Department.’

  ‘Impressive.’

  Farley cleared his throat. ‘We were hoping for the support of the Church as well, Your Excellency.’ Spellman let out a small laugh. ‘A blessing on the greatest betrayal since Cassius and Brutus conspired to kill Caesar?’ He shook his head. ‘I think not.’<
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  ‘We were thinking along more practical lines than a blessing.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘In a few more days you’ll become Archbishop of New York – that’s almost certain.’

  ‘You flatter me,’ said Spellman, lifting a hand in a deprecating wave.

  Farley ignored the false modesty. He knew perfectly well that Spellman was fully aware of his present power within the Church and the greater power that would come to him as Archbishop of New York. ‘There are twenty thousand policemen in New York City, most of them Irish, most of them Catholic and most of them belonging to their own Holy Name societies. You would only have to reach out and every one of them would follow you.’

  Spellman laughed again. ‘I hardly see myself at the head of a column of New York’s finest.’

  ‘We only need their passive cooperation, not their active help.’

  ‘I see.’ Spellman thought hard and quickly. Farley was offering a simple, direct and violent solution to a problem that would have a direct influence on the Church, not only in America but everywhere else in the world. The priest who heard the confessions of the men involved in such a plot the way he was hearing Farley’s would wield an incredible amount of power, even if the plot failed.

  He smiled. There was even ecclesiastic precedent for what Farley and his people were suggesting. Tisserant, the dean of the College of Cardinals, was privately convinced that Pacelli’s predecessor had been murdered in his bed with an injection of poison, most probably for his dangerously violent views about Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascisti. It wasn’t so far-fetched when you considered that the daughter of the senior Vatican doctor was Claretta Petucci, Mussolini’s mistress, and that Pacelli’s last post outside the Vatican had been papal nuncio in Berlin. If the Vatican was capable of such a thing, then why not here?

  ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Farley said, confused.

  ‘An admonition on your labours from Sir Walter Scott.’ The bishop examined the tip of his cigar. A gust of wind rushed up from the sea and blew ash across the table and into the pool a few feet away. ‘Ten senators, a half dozen congressmen, assorted financiers and industrialists. A vice president. A national hero.’ He shook his head. ‘A great many disparate desires and philosophies.’ Spellman looked across the table at Farley. ‘Can you accommodate them all, satisfy them?’

  ‘It’s what I’ve done all my working life, Your Excellency. Bringing people together at the right time and in the right place. The same means to different ends makes common purpose.’

  ‘An interesting turn of phrase.’

  ‘Machiavelli,’ Farley answered.

  ‘Ah,’ murmured the bishop. He puffed on his cigar, recharging the smouldering end with each sucking breath until it was red-hot. ‘The means you refer to… are they still in the planning stages or have you proceeded to something more concrete?’

  ‘A man has been chosen. He’ll be approached within the next day or so. An offer will be made.’

  ‘Do you know who this man is?’ asked Spellman, a small note of worry in his voice. If Farley had used any of his God-given brains he would have distanced himself from any such close information, and by extension, distanced Spellman.

  ‘The actual execution of our decision has been left to… others. The fewer of us who know the details of it the better for all concerned.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Spellman agreed.

  There was a long silence. Farley finished his glass of lemonade, the ice cubes already melted in the Florida heat. He stood. ‘Well…’ he said, uneasily. ‘I should be on my way.’

  ‘Yes,’ Spellman said and stood. Farley stretched out his hand and the bishop took it.

  ‘We have your support then?’

  ‘Theoretically,’ the bishop said. ‘We’ll have to see how things unfold. Keep me posted.’

  Farley couldn’t tell if the pun was intentional or not. He kept his expression neutral. ‘I will,’ he said, then turned and walked away.

  Spellman stayed where he was, rolling the cigar around in his small mouth, watching the little freshets of wind from the shore riffle the surface of the pool, sending quick snaking shadows along the pale blue concrete of the bottom. Ten senators, a half dozen congressmen, the Lone Eagle – Charles Lindbergh – Henry Ford, Morgan and Hearst. Roosevelt had been given the Democratic Party’s nomination by Hearst’s decree, and then, at least in Hearst’s mind, the president had betrayed him. Lindbergh loathed Roosevelt on principle and both Ford and Morgan had enormous European interests that they could easily lose in the face of a Continental war with Germany under a dozen or more provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act.

  The vaguely stated collusion and condonement of the plan by the senators and congressmen were just as easily understood. The New Deal in all its octopus-like incarnations had eroded the long-held powers of patronage in their constituencies, and allowing an unchecked Roosevelt to push them into an unpopular war would be even more damaging. You didn’t vote for the man who’d been party to having your child killed in some place with a name you couldn’t pronounce, blown to pieces in some foreign trench, buried in a distant grave. The last war was only twenty years ago, half a generation gone, more than a hundred thousand American mothers weeping for their lost sons. Memories still painfully raw.

  The fat little man in his plain black suit stubbed out his expensive Havana and pursed his lips thoughtfully, staring out from under the striped canvas umbrella, watching the sea. Farley was right, even if his plans had more to do with his own political ambitions than the ultimate fate of the nation. If something drastic wasn’t done in the very near future, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would drag the United States into a war that could easily change the world forever. If Farley’s plan was the only way to stop him, then so be it, miserere Deus.

  * * *

  The postmaster general drove the big Buick convertible through the open gateway of the Kennedy estate, turned left onto North Ocean Boulevard and headed south, back to the Breakers. High overhead the endless rows of palms on both sides of the broad street filtered the late-morning sunlight, turning the boulevard into a cool green tunnel.

  He glanced into the rear-view mirror and picked up the green Ford Tudor a hundred feet back, making no attempt to conceal the fact that it was following him. Farley lifted his hand and waved at the two FBI men behind him in the government car. Two years before, he’d launched a campaign to have Hoover replaced, mostly because the FBI director refused to take part in any of the patronage games that were bread and butter to a man like the postmaster general. The top G-man had never forgiven him, even though the attempt to have him unseated had ultimately failed. He knew for a fact that both his home and office telephones were tapped and the two men in the Tudor, in various incarnations, had dogged his steps ever since. Virtually everywhere Farley went he was accompanied by his government shadows, presumably hoping to catch him engaging in some questionable activity.

  ‘If only the pie-faced bastard knew,’ Farley muttered to himself. He put his foot down on the gas, giving his watchers a run for their money. Mostly he found his constant companions a mild irritation but today they had served a useful purpose. Farley had little anxiety about the federal agents discovering the real reason for his visit to Palm Beach since they had no idea who he had met with at the Breakers. On the other hand he was absolutely sure the two men in the car behind him knew who was presently occupying 1095 North Ocean Drive, not to mention J. Edgar Hoover himself.

  Soon a file would cross Hoover’s desk, testifying to today’s events with neatly noted times and places, his meeting with the bishop written out in black and white, a bureaucratic fact. Eventually the file would be taken to some basement corner of that great grey, gloomy building on Pennsylvania Avenue, where it would remain, one small hidden jewel of proof. If by some terrible twist of fate the plan failed and he went to the mat, files like that one would break his fall
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  Farley found himself humming one of the Bobby Breen numbers from Way Down South, a movie musical he’d seen only the night before. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove, lifting his foot from the gas pedal, letting the Tudor catch up. There was an Eastern Airlines flight out of Anderson Field in an hour and he was already packed. If the weather held, he could be back in Washington before supper was served at the Mayflower, where he kept rooms close to the White House and the Capitol. He felt some of the tension of the last few weeks begin to dissipate. His part in these terrible affairs was over, at least for the moment. The rest of it was now in other hands.

  Chapter Three

  Friday, April 14, 1939

  Havana, Cuba

  The thin, red-haired lawyer sat in the forward compartment of the Pan American Airways flying boat and looked down at the glittering, ruffled expanse of the Florida Straits ten thousand feet below. He was thirty-eight years old and his name was Howard Raines, a junior partner at the law firm of Fallon and McGee in New York City. On the seat beside him the topcoat he’d worn against the harsh winds and rain leaving the city the previous night was draped over a bulging briefcase, his only luggage. In the seats across the aisle the newly-weds billed and cooed, the woman snuggling into the man’s collar, the man pulling her closer and nuzzling her ear, whispering promises he wouldn’t keep. The woman used her thumb to constantly twist the ring on the third finger of her left hand and Raines noticed that her red nail polish matched the colour of her lipstick perfectly. It was all too sweet and he turned away, looking out the window again.

  The lawyer grimaced, feeling the oily grumbling of his stomach. He’d had a fruit cup breakfast an hour ago at the Biscayne Bay terminal in Miami and it wasn’t sitting well with the three cups of coffee he’d been served since. He looked up at the clock on the compartment bulkhead above the newly-weds. It was 9:30. Another quarter hour before they reached Havana. The engines on the high-slung wing droned on monotonously and the air in the cabin smelled of stale cigarette smoke combined with the faintly disturbing scent of hot oil and gasoline.