World War 2 Thriller Collection

  And yet, for Douglas Reid-Kennedy and the Deans, the events of that week in Berlin were traumatic. Hank Dean knew he would never again be given a job so important and so sensitive as the one he lost. A couple of times fellow officers snubbed him. He drank. When Hank Dean’s drinking became bad enough for the army to send him to a special military hospital near Munich to dry out, Marjorie took the newly born son, Henry Hope, back to her parents in New York. She met Douglas. The first time it was by chance but eventually the relationship became serious and then permanent.

  It seemed as if the nightmare were over, but in fact it was only just beginning. At college Douglas had been a heavyweight boxer of considerable skill. He had been well on the way to a State championship when by an unlucky blow he severely hurt a fellow contender. Douglas never went into the ring again. It was the same sort of bolo punch that he used to fell the Steiners’ bogus brother-in-law. The fact that the man was a blackmailer and an East German spy persuaded the inquiry to skirt round that happening. But the Russians were not prepared to kiss and make up. Three years after the incidents in Berlin, Douglas was visited by a baby-faced young man who presented the card of a Polish company that made transistors. After the usual polite small-talk he said that through nominee holdings, the company for which he worked now owned 37 per cent of Douglas’s company. He realized that 37 per cent was not 51 per cent – the baby-faced man smiled – but it was enough for them to have a real control over what was going to happen. They could pump money into the company, or turn it over to making razor-blades or tear it down and go into real estate. The young man reminded Douglas that he had killed one of their ‘employees’ and Douglas realized that his company was now owned by the KGB. They offered to pay Douglas off each year in his own shares, if he would work for them. They would tell him exactly which US Government electronics contracts to bid for, and their agents would be able to discover exactly what his business rivals were bidding. In return, they wanted a steady supply of technical information about the whole US electronics industry. If Douglas refused to work with them, the young man told him, they would bankrupt his company and ‘execute’ all of the people implicated in the events of that night: Marjorie, the Steiners, the Steiners’ daughter and Douglas himself. Douglas asked for a week to think it over. They agreed. They knew the answer must be ‘yes’.

  As she finished her story, she poured herself another large brandy and sipped some. Major Mann went over to the air-conditioner and moved the control from medium to coldest. He stood there letting the cold air hit him. He turned round and gave her his most engaging smile. ‘Well, it’s great,’ he said. ‘I want you to know I think it’s just great. Of course, you’ve had about twenty years to goose it up, and work in some interesting details, but then so did Tolstoy – thirty years Tolstoy had, if I remember correctly.’

  ‘What?’ she said, frowning hard.

  ‘That story,’ said Mann. ‘My buddy here is crazy about all that kind of spy fiction.’

  ‘It’s true,’ she said.

  ‘It’s literature,’ said Mann. ‘It’s more than just a lousy collection of lies and evasions; it’s literature!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Douglas Reid-Kennedy joined the Communist Party when he was still at school. I guessed that as soon as I knew that his two closest buddies joined the CP and he remained aloof from that gay group of fun-loving raconteurs – am I pronouncing that right, Mrs Dean? … raconteurs. That’s what your friend Corporal Douglas Reid-Kennedy was on his days off with these Gestapo guys and film stars? Well, as soon as I hear about a guy at school who doesn’t go along and sing “The Red Flag” with his closest buddies, I think to myself either this guy isn’t the kind of young amusing raconteur that everybody is cracking him up to be, or else the Communist Party have given him a secret number, and told him to keep his mouth shut. They do that when they spot a kid who has a job in the State Department, or a trade union, or has a father who makes electronic equipment for the US Army.’

  Mann walked across the room and picked up the photo of Douglas being nursed by his father. ‘Great kid you got there, Pop, but just watch out for that bolo punch.’ He put the photo down. ‘Yeah, you were right about Douglas’s boxing career at school … too modest in fact. See, Douglas crippled three kids with that body punch – a bolo is an upper cut to the body, I guess you already knew that, Mrs Dean, or you wouldn’t have used that exact technical word – and Douglas didn’t give up as easy as you say he did. He was forbidden to box again, not only by the school but also by the State boxing authority. And don’t let’s imagine that our Douglas was the kind of guy who didn’t develop his natural talents. He graduated from crippling people to killing people. The KGB spotted that more quickly than the US Army spotted it; they knew that he’d like assignments to kill people. Those murder assignments were his rewards, not his work.’

  ‘No!’ she screamed.

  Mann looked at her as she poured herself another drink. I had watched her drinking all this time and thought that she was using all her willpower to avoid getting drunk. Now I realized that it was just the reverse of that; she wanted to be drunk more than she wanted anything else in the world, but in her present state of mind no amount of drink seemed to do the trick for her.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mann softly. ‘While you went on your round trip to Paris, your Douglas stayed in the Emerald Isle. He went to a little farm off the highway, and hacked a German family to death with a spade. Three of them; we dug them up from the garbage. It was a wet day in Ireland, so if we’re pressing decomposing tissue into your wall-to-wall pile carpet, I apologize, but you’ve got Douglas to blame for it.’

  ‘No,’ she said again but it was softer this time, and not so confident.

  ‘And all that crap about that police report. In the middle ’fifties, the East Germans were using their “barrack police” as a nucleus of their new army. Let’s define our terms. Those police we’re talking about had tanks and MiG fighter planes, Mrs Dean. The police desk was just about the most important work the CIA did in Germany at that time. That’s why Hank Dean was assigned to it and that’s why he gave it everything he’d got, until he was mentally, and physically, exhausted.’

  Mann paused for a long time. I suppose he was hoping that she would argue or confess or simply blow her top but she did nothing except sink lower in the soft furnishings and continue to drink. Mann said, ‘Douglas Reid-Kennedy was a Communist agent, and he was wearing that cheap blue suit because he’d just come over from the East where he’d been talking to his pals about putting your husband on the rack. And your cock-and-bull story about Steiner’s argument was disregarded because the man who pretended to be Steiner’s brother-in-law wasn’t an East German agent, he was one of Dean’s best men. He was one of the German Communists who fled to Soviet Russia in 1938. Stalin handed him back over the frontier to the Gestapo in 1940 as part of the deal of slicing Poland down the middle and sharing it with the Nazis. That’s the man who had his blood spattered over your rose-bushes by Corporal Douglas Reid-Kennedy. He had important things to tell Hank, and when he was delayed Hank was so worried that he went across there to help him. The agent got back but Hank went into the bag.’

  ‘The inquiry didn’t know anything about his being an agent for the Americans,’ she said.

  ‘You think the inquiry is going to blow a network because an agent is murdered. No, they let it go, and were happy not to inquire too far into it. And that was a lucky break for Reid-Kennedy.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘And you tell us that the inquiry reprimanded Major Dean, and exonerated you. Why do you think they did that? They did it because Hank stood up and took all the shit that they were throwing at you. Sure he was reprimanded for leaving the papers unsafeguarded, because he wouldn’t tell them that you and your goddamned boyfriend opened his safe and betrayed him in every possible way …’

  ‘No, they said …’

  ‘Don’t argue with me,’ said Major Mann. ‘I just got through read
ing the transcript. And don’t tell me you believed Douglas Reid-Kennedy and all that crap about returning the papers to the police authority. You saw that the file numbers were blacked out. That’s the first thing an agent does with secret papers, so that they can’t be traced back to the place where they were stolen. And even the police chief of East Berlin is going to have a hard time explaining why the papers in his safe have got all the file numbers blacked out. And you know that as well as anyone, so don’t give me any of that stuff.’

  He walked up to where she was sitting but she didn’t raise her eyes to him. His face was flushed and his brow shiny. It would have been easy to believe that he was the one being interrogated, because the woman seemed relaxed and unheeding.

  ‘But it wasn’t anything to do with the papers,’ said Mann. ‘This was all a carefully planned caper designed in Moscow solely to compromise Hank Dean. I’d bet everything I own that he was offered every kind of chance to hush this thing up. Both when he was in the East Berlin prison, and after he got back. But Hank Dean knew that it was just the first step into being doubled, and Hank Dean wasn’t the kind of man who ends up a double agent. He’d sooner end up an alcoholic. At least a lush keeps his soul. Right, Mrs Dean? It’s your husband we’re talking about, remember him?’ He walked away from her. ‘Or maybe you’d rather not remember, after all you did to him. Because, wrecking his career wasn’t enough for you, was it? You had to go screwing your way through the barracks. And you were no snob. You didn’t stop at the officers’ club, did you. You even had to screw the little creep who came delivering the official mail. Of course you didn’t realize then that Douglas had drawn you as an assignment from Moscow …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And Reid-Kennedy eventually got orders to make his relationship with you as permanent as possible: a wife isn’t permitted to testify against her husband, right?’

  ‘Hank would never give me a divorce.’

  ‘And I think we know why. He suspected the truth about Reid-Kennedy and was not going to give him that final bit of protection.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘You think it was your good breeding, or all that old-fashioned etiquette you gleaned from those cheap novels. Douglas Reid-Kennedy took the high ground – your bed – and he didn’t have to fight all the way. I’d guess that that little conversation over the coffee and Süssgebäck took place, not in the kitchen, but in Hank Dean’s bed. That’s where you first heard that those bastards were holding your husband.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘And I’ll tell you something else that Hank Dean kept to himself …’

  He paused. She must have known what was coming, for she lowered her head as one might if expecting a blow about the ears. ‘Henry Hope is Reid-Kennedy’s child.’

  ‘He is not,’ she said. ‘I swear it! You say that in front of witnesses and I’ll sue you for every penny you possess. I’ll make you pay!’

  ‘Yeah, well, I can’t prove it, but I looked up Hank’s army records to find his blood group. And Henry-Hope was easy because he donates blood at the local hospital …’ Mann scowled and shook his head.

  ‘Did you tell him?’ she asked. ‘Did you tell Henry-Hope that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t, Mrs Dean, because it would be nicer for your son to grow up thinking that a great guy like Hank is his father than that a murderous creep like Reid-Kennedy might be. So we’ll keep that to ourselves, Mrs Dean. On that you got a deal.’

  ‘Poor Henry-Hope,’ she said softly. Her voice was slurred: at last the alcohol was getting to her.

  ‘You entertained on the boat last week,’ I said. ‘Who was it who came aboard on Monday?’ She gave me a venomous glare.

  She said, ‘So he speaks, your friend. I was beginning to think he was one of those inflatable dolls they advertise in the back pages of the sex magazines.’

  I passed to her the piece of paper on which I noted the dates of the pages missing from the boat’s visitors’ book.

  She scowled at it and said, ‘You get a tax deduction for the days when you entertain businessmen on a boat. Douglas always made people sign, so he could claim his proper deduction. He was obsessional about that.’

  ‘Who was it?’ I said.

  She scrabbled to find the spectacles tucked down the side of the armchair. Having put them on, she read the dates with studied concentration. ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ she said. ‘My memory isn’t so good these days, Douglas was always ribbing me about that.’

  I said, ‘I’d hate you to make a mistake about how important this is to us.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mann. He pointed a finger down to the boat moored beyond where the palm trees were whipping about in the wind. ‘You got a time bomb down there, Mrs Dean. At ten thirty I’m going to have to blow the whistle on you. This place will be filled with cops, reporters and photographers, and they will all be yelling at you – right?’ He looked at his watch. ‘So you got just eighteen minutes to decide how you play it – and the decisions you make are going to decide whether you live out the rest of your life as a millionairess, or spend it upstate in the women’s prison with a “no parole” sticker on your file.’

  She looked at Mann for a moment and then looked at her own wrist-watch just to check him out.

  ‘Seventeen minutes,’ Mann said.

  ‘Douglas ran a legitimate business,’ she said. ‘You start thinking it was all mixed up with the other business and you will never unravel it.’

  ‘You let us worry about that,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t get these big government contracts by sitting on your butt, waiting for the phone to ring. Douglas went out of his way to look after his contacts, and they expected that.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘People from some Senate Committee.’

  ‘Which Senate Committee?’

  ‘International Scientific Co-operation – or some such name. You must have heard of it.’

  ‘We’ve heard of it,’ I said. ‘So who came here?’

  ‘Only for fishing trips, and you wouldn’t get me on that boat when they are fishing. I didn’t get to meet any of them. They were just fishing cronies of Douglas. Like I told you, it was just social. Douglas only put it down as business so he could get the tax deductions.’

  ‘Names!’ said Mann. ‘Names, goddamnit!’

  She spilled her drink. ‘Mr Hart. Mr Gerry Hart. He’s helped my husband get other government contracts.’

  ‘Mind if I use your phone, Mrs Reid-Kennedy?’ said Mann.

  17

  They are made of marble, steel, chromium and tinted glass, these gleaming governmental buildings that dominate Washington, DC, and from the top of any one of them, a man can see half-way across the world – if he’s a politician.

  The buildings have no names; only numbers and initials. fobs are Federal office buildings and hobs are House office buildings. This rent-free luxury office suite, in which Senator Greenwood could sip Martinis and trim his toenails while watching the home-going traffic building up on the Potomac River Freeway, and still keep the other eye on the White House, was a Senate office building – a SOB.

  The heavy silk curtains had been fully opened to reveal the cityscape through the picture windows. I could see the river Potomac and, farther away, the Washington Channel. Mirroring the sky, their waters were colourless, like two icy daggers sunk into the city’s gut. Greenwood stood with us admiring the view for a moment.

  ‘About this time I usually have a bourbon and ginger,’ he smiled, and flicked a strand of hair from his eyes. A senator with enough hair to flick off his face has something to smile about, even without the palatial office, imported furniture and the rosewood cupboard full of hard stuff. ‘So what will it be for you boys?’

  ‘A tonic water,’ I said.

  ‘A bourbon and ginger would suit me nicely, sir,’ said Mann.

  ‘Thought you were going to say you didn’t drink while you were on duty,’ said Greenwood. He tossed som
e ice into glasses that were cold enough to whiten, and snapped the crown corks from three bottles in a row: they gave three little gasps.

  ‘I’d never get a drink if I pursued that kind of policy,’ said Mann.

  ‘Right. Right!’ said Greenwood in an absent-minded way, as if he’d already forgotten the beginning of the conversation. He set the drinks down on the antique side tables that were carefully arranged for each of the Barcelona chairs that faced his desk. It was a modern design: no more than two stainless-steel trestles supporting a sheet of armour glass. He walked round the desk, and sat in his Italian swivel chair. There was no front to the desk, and the papers arranged on the glass-top seemed to be floating in the air. Perhaps it was Greenwood’s way of proving he didn’t have a Derringer in his lap.

  ‘Mr Gerry Hart,’ said Greenwood, as though announcing that the courtesies were over.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mann.

  ‘I’ve got the report,’ said Greenwood.

  ‘It’s not a report, Senator,’ said Mann. ‘It’s just a private memo to you.’

  ‘Well, I’m not very conversant with the jargon of the CIA,’ said Greenwood, in such a way as to discourage instruction. He smiled. Greenwood’s smile used very even, very white, teeth. Like his attentive eyes, his sincere nods and pensive silences, Greenwood’s smiles were those of a man who was thinking about something more important. He was a handsome man, urbane rather than backwoods, but some women like that better. He’d have to lose twenty pounds before he’d win admiring glances at the poolside, but in his carefully tailored light-grey mohair and hand-made brogues, with his manicured hands, and face talced like a freshly-baked cottage-loaf, I saw in him a possible ladies’ man. Coming over here in the car we’d played ‘One-word Who’s Who’: Mann’s entry for Greenwood was ‘bullshit’, mine was ‘showbiz’, but no doubt, Greenwood’s entry for himself would be ‘boyish’.