Chelsea Mansions (35 page)

Kathy stared at the two photographs, and at enlargements John had made of the two male faces. ‘I think you could be right,’ she said at last. ‘So, a long-time friend of Maisy and her husband Ronald.’ She shrugged. ‘Is it significant?’

‘Well, then I tried to work out where the older picture was taken. Emerson told me that Maisy worked for the American sculptor William Gordon Huff, and I looked him up. I wondered if the man in the pictures might be him, only it wasn’t. But I did find out that he did some monumental sculptures for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, held in 1939 and 1940. Here are some pictures of it. And there, look, you can see the arch, and the long pool.’

‘Well done. So the man’s probably American, but so what? The important thing is that Nancy and her parents visited Chelsea Mansions in 1956. Surely their friend isn’t relevant?’

John held up a finger. ‘Take a closer look at this guy. Doesn’t it strike you—the cut of his jacket, the haircut—that he doesn’t quite look American? Or English? Now look at the London picture, that suit he’s wearing. Look at the lapel. There’s something there, a badge or something. I enlarged it and sharpened it with Photoshop, see . . .’

‘A tiny star,’ Kathy said. ‘Five-pointed.’

‘What does that make you think of?’

Kathy felt a pulse of excitement. ‘A Russian?’

‘Could be. I wondered if I could discover anything about Russians in San Francisco in 1939 or 1940. No luck. But I did find out that the main archive of material on the Golden Gate International Exposition is held here in Boston, at the Widener Library at Harvard. I thought we should go over there and take a look. So that’s why I’m here.’

To Kathy it seemed a forlorn hope, but she was intrigued, and so they packed up what they would need—laptops, notebooks, a small camera that John had brought—and set off along Beacon Street towards the centre of the city. On the far side of Boston Common he led them to the entrance of the Park Street station of the T, the city’s subway system, where they caught a train out to Harvard. The other people in their carriage were mostly young—a bearded youth in frayed jeans trying to sleep off a hangover, a cluster of young women with heads down swapping notes, and a couple sitting opposite, pressed together in dreamy contentment, looking as if they’d just got out of bed. Kathy was aware of John watching them.

The train emptied at Harvard Square and they made their way up into the sunlight, where John took her arm and led her across the street and through a gap in the older buildings on the other side and into Harvard Yard. A lane took them into a campus of treed lawns crisscrossed by paths and framed by simple four-storey brick buildings, some of which John pointed out as they passed—Massachusetts Hall, built in 1720 and the oldest building in Harvard, and Hollis Hall, where George Washington had barracked his troops during the American Revolution. They turned into the central courtyard of Harvard Yard, where the more monumental buildings of Memorial Church and the Widener Library stood facing each other across a green.

John said, ‘Harry Widener was a Harvard graduate and book collector who died on the
Titanic
. The library was donated by his mother in his memory, and it’s now the major library in Harvard, which has the largest university collection in the world. It’s particularly strong in the humanities and social sciences, which is why we’re here.’

They climbed the broad flight of steps to the colonnaded entrance, where John showed his Harvard ID from his research visit the previous year. For Kathy to get access they were directed to the Library Privileges Office, where John managed to have her issued with a day pass as his research assistant.

The university was now in summer recess, and the library was relatively quiet. They found a couple of computers side by side in the Phillips Reading Room and began searching through the HOLLIS catalogue. Kathy started with online descriptions of the exposition, which had been built on reclaimed land called Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. It had been held to celebrate the recent completion of the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges, and was open to the public for a total of twelve months through 1939 and 1940.

‘Millions of people must have visited it,’ she said, peering over at John’s screen.

‘Yes . . . I’m looking for foreign delegations. It was supposed to showcase the culture of Pacific Rim nations, which would include Russia, I guess. They must have sent over an official party, don’t you think?’

There was plenty of material in the catalogue, and it was hard to be sure from the brief entries what much of it might contain. They divided up the list of catalogue numbers they would have to investigate and set off for the stacks, up to American History which occupied the whole of level two, and began the long, slow task of skimming through every book, every leaflet and newspaper report, every photograph collection, every official document and memoir.

‘How’s it going?’

Kathy looked up, taking a moment to focus. Her writing hand felt as numb as her brain. She had no idea of the time.

‘Two o’clock,’ John said. ‘Don’t know about you, but I need a break.’

‘Yes.’ She blinked and rubbed her face with a hand that felt grubby with dust from old paper.

They went out, dazzled by the sunshine, and John took her to a café that he knew nearby.

‘We’re not getting anywhere, are we?’ he said after they’d ordered sandwiches and coffee. They had found dozens of pictures and references to William Gordon Huff’s statues, and to the Court of Reflections in which Maisy and the man had been photographed, but they’d come across no more images of her, nor glimpses of Russian visitors.

‘There’s all those Kodachrome home movies to go through,’ Kathy said. ‘And we haven’t finished the newspaper reports.’

They returned to the library, slightly refreshed, and went on with their hunt. After another hour without result, John went over to a computer station and began another search through the catalogue. Eventually he returned to Kathy, her head bent over a collection of postcards, and said that he’d found some GGIE references in the Economics stacks in Pusey, an underground extension of the library, and was going down to take a look. Slightly mesmerised by the images in front of her, Kathy nodded and turned to the next page.

There was a sign on the wall above Kathy’s carrel stating that cell phone and pager use was not permitted in the library except in designated areas, so she jumped and looked around in embarrassment when her mobile emitted a loud tune. She snatched it out of her bag and whispered, ‘Yes?’

‘Kathy.’ It was John. It took her a moment to remember that he’d gone some time before.

‘Yes?’

‘I may have found something. Come down and see.’ He told her how to find him.

She took a lift down to the basement of Widener and came to the tunnel that John had described, leading to the Pusey extension, where she descended to its lowest level. He waved her over to his desk and showed her an ancient typewritten report by the GGIE Budget Committee on visitor numbers to the fair. At the back was a series of appendices, one of which listed international delegations.

‘There,’ he said, and pointed to a paragraph headed
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, official visit of July 16–30 1939 of Deputy People’s Commissar of Culture, Varvara Nikoleavna Zhemchuzhina and 16 delegates.

‘So there were Russians there,’ John said. ‘For what it’s worth.’

Kathy was skimming the list of delegates’ names, then said softly, ‘Oh, I think it’s worth something, John.’ She pointed at one of the names:
Gennady Moszynski (Leningrad)
. ‘Mikhail’s father. That’s who was with Maisy in San Francisco in 1939, and again with Nancy and her parents at Chelsea Mansions in 1956.’

‘Mikhail’s father?’ John repeated, looking at Kathy in astonishment. ‘How can that be?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s important, isn’t it? Nancy had a reason not just for revisiting Chelsea Mansions, but for meeting Mikhail Moszynski. Their parents had once been close friends, even in the middle of the Cold War.’

‘You think Gennady might have been based in the Russian Embassy in London in 1956?’

‘It wasn’t in the biography I was given, but I suppose it’s possible.’

‘You have his biography?’

‘It was in a background briefing paper on Mikhail Moszynski that MI5 prepared for us when we were investigating his murder.’

‘Do you think his father was a spy?’

‘There was no suggestion of it.’

‘But anyway, that was over fifty years ago. What difference would it make now? What could any of that have to do with Nancy and Mikhail’s deaths?’

Kathy didn’t know, but that name on an old report had given her a shiver of revelation, the sudden sense of discovering the truth among all the confusion. ‘I’ve no idea what it means, John, but I think we might have earned our crust today.’

He smiled at her. ‘This is exciting, isn’t it? It’s like how I felt when I identified a verse by Ariosto.’

She smiled at his idea of excitement, and yet it was true; she felt as if she had caught a glimpse of a ghost, the ghost that Nancy had teased Emerson with. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and celebrate.’

He chose the place, the best seafood restaurant in Boston he said, down on the waterfront where she’d come on her first early morning run. From their table by the window they looked out over the harbour as dusk turned the scene from gold to turquoise, and far across the water the lights of the planes dropped like slow-motion meteors onto Logan’s island.

As they talked, it occurred to Kathy how many things there were to like about John Greenslade. He was attentive, amusing and a good listener. He persuaded her to tell him about her childhood, and as he listened so sympathetically she found herself admiring little things about him, his slender hands, his thoughtful frown, and the wry, self-deprecating crease of his smile that reminded her a little of Brock. He was attracted to her, she could see that, and she liked the caution and restraint that seemed to be attuning itself to her own. He was too young, though; the ten-year gap between them might be refreshing but it was also a barrier. His openness and enthusiasm made her feel cynical and old.

‘Your turn,’ she said, wanting to return to safer ground. ‘Tell me about the Greenslades.’

He looked suddenly serious, almost as if she’d said something to upset or offend him. Then he took a breath, a sip of wine and his face cleared. ‘There aren’t any,’ he said. ‘Just me and my mother.’

She looked at him, wondering what he meant, and noticed a tension that had gathered in the way he sat.

‘The way she tells it, my father was in some kind of high-risk job. When she became pregnant with me she became afraid for her own and my safety, and ran away. She went to her sister in Toronto, and changed her name to Greenslade—“clean slate” was what she meant—and started a new life.’

‘Oh. He was abusive to her, your father?’

‘No, no, not as I understand it. The danger came from some people he was dealing with, who wanted to get at him through my mother. She reached a point where she couldn’t stand it any more and just took off. He didn’t even know she was pregnant until her sister got in touch with him and told him. Her sister, my aunt, acted as an intermediary for a while, passing on messages and money he sent. But in the end my mother asked for a divorce and broke off all contact.’

‘Did she ever remarry?’

‘No.’