The Second Assassin

by Paul Christopher

  Bone checked the weapon with care. ‘Custom work,’ he said after a moment then handed the rifle back to Lavan. ‘Chambered like an elephant gun. I’d say a .375 Holland and Holland Magnum.’

  ‘You would be quite correct, sir,’ Lavan answered, glancing down at the bills on the counter. ‘You know your weapons, sir.’

  ‘You retooled the barrel yourself?’

  ‘Ah, no. I’m afraid my eyes are no longer good enough for such things. The barrel is from Harry Pope’s shop in New Jersey.’

  Pope, Bone knew, was one of the half dozen true master gunsmiths living in the United States. ‘You have others?’

  ‘With Pope barrels? Unfortunately not.’

  ‘Griffin and Howe?’

  ‘You do know your rifles, don’t you, sir?’

  ‘Do you have any?’

  ‘I have a dozen or so of their barrels, yes.’

  ‘I’d like to see them.’

  ‘They’re in the shop,’ said Lavan. He looked down at the fifty-dollar bills. ‘In the basement.’

  ‘Is there a problem with me seeing them?’

  ‘No, no, of course not, but I will have to close the shop while we are down below.’

  ‘Then close the shop,’ said Bone.

  ‘It will take some time for me to show them to you. I of course have no objection as long as you are seriously interested…’

  ‘Take the money,’ Bone answered, nodding at the currency on the counter. ‘We’ll call it a deposit.’

  ‘Very good, very good!’ Lavan scooped up the money, came around the end of the counter and threw the bolt, locking the door, then pulled down a dark green roller shade. ‘There we are, sir! If you will follow me.’ He went in behind the counter and Bone went with him, following the man down to the far end of the store and through the curtains. There was a doorway leading down to the basement and an open arch to the left that opened into what appeared to be a small kitchen. Bone could smell soured coffee.

  ‘You live here?’ Bone asked.

  ‘Yes. We had an apartment when Frieda was alive but when she died I moved here. A kitchen, a bath, a room at the back. It is all I need.’

  ‘Frieda was your wife?’

  Lavan shook his head. ‘My sister.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. She fell in love with some Jew and when he left her she drank herself into the grave.’

  Lavan opened the door leading down to the basement, flipping on a light switch as he went down the steps. ‘How long have you lived in America?’ Bone asked.

  ‘From 1920,’ the gunsmith answered, looking back over his shoulder. ‘There was very little need for gunsmiths such as myself in Graz after the war.’

  ‘Then you are Austrian?’

  ‘Yes.’ The wet little smile. ‘You know Graz?’

  ‘I’ve been there, yes.’

  ‘You know the Leugg House? Very beautiful.’

  Bone nodded. ‘At the corner of the Sporgasse. Yes.’ Some kind of silly test.

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and Lavan stepped into the shop with Bone close behind him. Like the store upstairs the space was narrow, and even longer, with a single-lane firing range stretching out under the rear of the building.

  The shop itself was rectangular, lit from above by a series of dangling lights, individual machines lit by their own gooseneck lamps. Overhead pulleys running off a single large motor operated a trio of old, cast-iron barrel lathes. Behind the lathes were racks of barrel blanks, waiting to be bored out. Farther down the shop was the woodworking area with more pulleys operating several mechanical saws, another, smaller lathe and a drill press. A large table running down the centre of the room was littered with parts for several different types of handguns.

  ‘You sell a lot of revolvers to the police department?’ Bone asked.

  ‘Some,’ the man answered, his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets, pulling on the braces. ‘They come here only because I am close and their own Equipment Bureau is too dear. They must purchase their own weapons and uniforms so they bring me old sheisse pistols they have found in the Jew market on Orchard Street and expect miracles from me for two dollars.’ He shrugged. ‘Often I cannot do anything for them. Sheisse ist sheisse, ja?’

  Bone looked down to the end of the shop and saw an enormous safe, almost as high as the ceiling, its heavy door slightly ajar. ‘A safe?’

  ‘There was a jewellery store here before I took the place over,’ Lavan said with a laugh. ‘I use it to keep my beer cool when I am working.’ He waved Bone back to the foot of the stairs. ‘Come, try the range,’ he said.

  The firing range was brightly lit and at the far end of the tunnel-like alley Bone could make out three targets pegged to a makeshift clothes-line return mechanism. One target showed an unflattering caricature of a rabbi complete with long greasy hair, hooked nose and faintly Asian eyes. The second target was a Russian in a fur hat, charging forward with teeth bared, a rifle in his hand, and the third target was FDR, a cigarette holder cocked between his lips.

  Lavan picked up a handgun that was lying on a small wooden loading table at the head of the firing range. He handed it to Bone. ‘Would you like to try?’

  Bone looked at the gun. It was a battered old Hopkins & Allen .32 revolver. ‘Which target?’ he asked.

  ‘Your choice.’ Lavan shrugged. ‘A lot of people like the Jew. I get them from a printer friend of mine in Germantown. The communist and Franklin Delano Rosenfeldt as well.’

  ‘You don’t like Jews?’ asked Bone.

  ‘We lost the last war because of them.’

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘All that communist talk. Marx, he was Jewish you know.’

  ‘Yes, I knew that.’

  ‘They are all the same: stealing money and jobs away from the real working man. It won’t happen again, believe me. We won’t let it.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘America First. You know them?’

  ‘Heard of them.’

  ‘Lindbergh spoke to us once. It was very inspiring. He should be president here. If he was, there would be no talk of fighting another war in Europe, believe me.’ He nodded. ‘A perfect world. Hitler in Europe, Lindbergh here, no Jews anywhere.’

  Bone lifted the handgun, checked the cylinder to make sure that it was fully loaded and then shot Lavan through the left eye, knowing that the calibre was low and there would be very little blood. The eye disintegrated wetly and the bullet continued on through the orbit and into the brain, where it then dug a ragged channel towards the back of the man’s head, eventually coming to rest at the top of the brain stem. Lavan was dead before his ruined brain had a chance to process the fact that he’d been shot.

  Bone dropped the pistol on the firing range counter and managed to catch the dead gunsmith under the armpits before he hit the floor. He dragged Lavan back down through the machine shop, managed to ease the door of the safe open with a cocked elbow and then proceeded to place Lavan inside the steel vault, tucking up his knees and bending down the head to make him fit. When Lavan was completely inside Bone pushed the heavy door closed, turned the locking handle and spun the combination dial. The vault was made out of steel that was at least two inches thick and unless someone had the combination it was going to be a long time before Lavan was released from his makeshift tomb.

  The gunsmith’s shop was now Bone’s, to do with as he pleased.

  * * *

  The Claremont Inn was a well-preserved green-trimmed mansion located on a sloping greensward overlooking the Hudson River at Riverside Drive and 124th Street close to Grant’s Tomb. The Claremont, in business as a restaurant and hostelry since before the Civil War, was a popular summer resort that had been owned and operated by the City of New York for many years. Usually closed until the Fourth of July, the Claremont was sometimes used by city officials for important functions or meetings that had to be held out of the public eye, such as the Dewey vice sweep two years prior when the Claremont had been
used as an interrogation facility for more than seventy men and women involved in the New York numbers racket. A discreet word in the parks commissioner’s ear had given Sam Foxworth access to the inn for as long as he needed. Within hours of meeting Jane Todd, Foxworth had installed the photographer in a room there, along with Thomas Barry and Sheila Connelly, already in residence since their return from Detroit and the Sean Russell disaster.

  On the evening of June 7 Jane, Barry and Sheila Connelly were eating a make-do dinner in the main dining room when Sam Foxworth appeared carrying a briefcase and accompanied by a small, dark-haired man in his mid-thirties. The two men sat down at the table, Foxworth introducing his companion as Avra Warren, special assistant to George Messersmith, the man at the State Department who had been instrumental in seeing Sean Russell arrested.

  ‘Apparently we’ve all been played for fools, right from the start,’ said Foxworth. ‘The conversation Miss Todd here had with Wolf and Ed Flynn would seem to confirm it.’ The FBI man opened up the briefcase in his lap and took out a pale yellow cablegram form. He held it up, nodding towards Thomas Barry, seated across the table. ‘This came in from your Colonel Holland this afternoon. He remembered something that was said when you interrogated this Hayes character in Ireland. Hayes said something about Russell telling a joke. It was all a “case of foils,” according to him. Hayes didn’t know what he meant.

  ‘I remember that. I didn’t know what it meant either. It didn’t seem very important.’

  ‘Well,’ Foxworth drawled, ‘the phrase popped into Colonel Holland’s head so he decided to find out what it meant.’ Foxworth cleared his throat. ‘This is a quote from a book he dug up called Foil and Sabre, the Grammar of Fencing, written by someone named Louis Rondelle and published in 1852. “A Case of Foils, an archaic variation on the sport in which a foil is used in each hand. The use of two foils in a match.”’

  There was silence around the table as the meaning of the phrase began to sink in. ‘Shit,’ whispered Barry. ‘There’s two of them. A second assassin.’

  ‘That about sums it up.’ Foxworth nodded. ‘Holland did some more checking and found out that a foil is also the word they use in fox hunting for laying a false scent. That fits too.’

  ‘Fencing?’ said Sheila Connelly. ‘What in the name of God would Sean Russell know about such a thing?’ She snorted. ‘Bit of wood with a nail in it maybe, but a sword? I don’t think so.’

  ‘He spent some time in Germany in 1936, just before he came here for the first time,’ said Foxworth. ‘While he was there he had an affair with a woman named Helene Mayer. She was the Nazi silver-medal winner for fencing in the Olympics that year.’

  Avra Warren spoke for the first time. ‘We also found out that the man arrested with Russell in Detroit was Joseph McGarrity, head of Clan na Gael in New York. They knew Inspector Barry was no New York cop and they certainly knew he wasn’t there on behalf of the Clan and that means they also knew Miss Connelly had been compromised. As you surmised, Detective Barry, you were supposed to see and hear what you did. It was bait and we all swallowed it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And now we’ve got the makings of an international incident on our hands,’ said Foxworth. ‘Every Irish congressman and senator is screaming for Russell’s release or they’ll boycott the reception for the king and queen.’

  ‘To hell with that,’ said Jane hotly. ‘There’s another assassin out there. The second foil. What about him?’

  ‘Officially our hands are tied,’ said Warren, the man from the State Department. ‘Attorney General Biddle is so angry about all of this he denied our request for an FBI investigation into anything to do with Russell or the king and queen.’

  ‘Unofficially?’ Jane asked.

  ‘That’s why I convened this meeting,’ said Foxworth. ‘To see if we could come up with an answer before it’s too late.’

  ‘What about some pressure from the Yard?’ Barry asked.

  ‘Already tried it,’ said Foxworth, shaking his head. ‘Your man Kendal wired Hoover and the director had to turn him down because Biddle refused to authorise it. Politics.’

  ‘What is the politics of having the King and Queen of England murdered on our front doorstep?’ Jane asked. ‘These people are serious.’

  ‘Do we know exactly who “these people” are?’ Barry asked.

  ‘According to Miss Todd, Flynn named Farley,’ said Foxworth.

  Warren sighed and lifted his shoulders. ‘There are a lot of people out there who don’t want the president running for a third term and even more people who don’t want him to take us into another war.’ He nodded in Barry’s direction. ‘Your king and queen represent exactly that.’

  ‘There has to be something we can do,’ said Jane.

  ‘Such as?’ Foxworth asked, a note of bitterness creeping into his voice. ‘Director Hoover isn’t about to defy the attorney general and I for one am not going to defy Director Hoover. Mr Messersmith and Mr Warren here played out their hand with Russell. They won’t get a second chance.’ He shook his head. ‘According to you we can’t even approach Commissioner Valentine for help.’

  Sheila Connelly spoke up. ‘Could it be that it’s all a hoax, like Sean and his tempest in a teapot? Something to get everyone in a lather and bring attention to the Cause?’

  ‘Tell that to Howie Raines,’ said Jane. ‘They didn’t put two in his ear or blow me out of my shoes just to get people into a lather.’ She looked at Sheila coldly. ‘Who knows if your people weren’t involved in this somehow as well?’

  ‘They’re not her people,’ said Barry. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘You taking her word for that?’ asked Jane. ‘Pardon me, guys, but I’m from Manhattan. Think about it. She led you to Russell and McGarrity and now they’ve been turned into holy innocents and caused all hell to break loose in Congress.’

  ‘We were set up,’ said Barry.

  ‘And maybe she was part of that as well,’ Jane offered.

  Avra Warren put up a placating hand. ‘I think we should all calm down a little. Recriminations and accusations will get us nowhere.’

  ‘None of it matters anyway,’ said Foxworth. ‘I’ve been told specifically not to investigate anything having to do with plots to assassinate Their Royal Highnesses.’

  There was a long silence, finally broken by Thomas Barry. ‘I seem to remember you have something called the Lindbergh Law in America?’

  Foxworth frowned. ‘That’s right but I don’t see how it applies here.’

  ‘Well, when Jane told us her story she mentioned that this Howard Raines fellow lived in New York, yes?’

  ‘Right,’ Jane said.

  Barry turned slightly in his chair and gestured out the window. ‘But his body was found on the other side of the river, in New Jersey. I doubt that Mr Raines went with his killers of his own free will so that would constitute kidnapping, would it not?’

  Foxworth stared across the table at the Scotland Yard detective. ‘By God, Inspector, you really are a piece of work. A Limey telling me the law.’ He slapped the table hard with the palm of his hand. ‘I’ll be double damned!’

  ‘I’m not quite sure I understand,’ said Avra Warren.

  Foxworth quickly sketched an explanation. ‘If Howard Raines was kidnapped, transported out of New York and into New Jersey and then killed, his murder becomes a federal crime that I’m authorised to investigate without any other authority. Officially we won’t be looking for Russell’s second foil. We’ll be looking for the people who kidnapped and then shot Howard Raines to death. A simple case of murder.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it that,’ said Jane. ‘I’d call it looking for a needle in the biggest haystack in the world.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Thursday, June 8, 1939

  Washington, D.C.

  At 10:30 a.m. the royal train backed into Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, arriving on track twenty, which offered the shortest walking distance from the rear of the train’s first ca
r to the president’s blue-and-gold reception room one floor above. The queen muttered something sharpish about President Roosevelt not coming down to the train to greet them formally, which was the norm in England and Europe, but the only ones other than the king and Lascelles who heard her were Lindsay, the British ambassador, and Cordell Hull, the American secretary of state, both of whom had the good grace to ignore the comment. Abiding by the protocols set down by the president’s office, Lindsay and the Canadian prime minister accompanied the king and the queen was escorted by Cordell Hull.

  While relieved that Sean Russell was safely behind bars, Lascelles was still acutely aware that the honour guard on either side of the red carpet leading to the president’s reception room was all armed U.S. marines and that the four plain-clothes Secret Service agents who’d boarded the train in Niagara Falls were never more than a few yards away.

  In the main floor reception room the king, dressed that day as Admiral of the Fleet, and the queen, wearing a frothy pale mauve confection and matching hat, were greeted heartily by Roosevelt and his entire cabinet, all of them dressed in formal cutaways and almost visibly melting away in the hot, soupy air. Roosevelt, standing, was wearing heavy steel braces beneath his overlong trousers, his left arm hooked through the bent arm of a dress-uniformed aide-de-camp chosen specifically for his powerful heavyset body. Roosevelt leaned on a cane in his right hand, transferring it smoothly to his left when he shook hands with the king and queen, beaming widely as he did so.

  With the formal introductions over, Roosevelt was lowered into a waiting collapsible wheelchair by Gus and Earl, his two long-time bodyguards. Roosevelt used the wheelchair until they reached the main entrance to the station then stood up once again. With his ADC and the cane supporting him the president stepped out into the open air between the massive columns of the portico with the king on his right hand. A crowd of almost seventy thousand people filled the square in front of the station and, as Roosevelt and the king appeared, they broke out into a massive, rousing cheer. A military band struck up ‘God Save the King.’ The king paused to take the salute and then they moved down the broad flight of marble steps to the waiting cars.