Jack 1939 (11 page)

He could imagine FDR weighing Willi’s sincerity against the likelihood of a Nazi trap—one that would pull him into a war the country didn’t want, and scuttle his third term. Was Willi a threat? Or a gift in the battle against Hitler?

The cab had reached the southern end of Hyde Park and eased left into Regent Street; Jack could just see the lights of Prince’s Gate.

“Mr. Roosevelt thought it best if I passed my intelligence through friends, not government channels,” Dobler said.

Of course.
I can’t trust the State department with
this.

“Have you got any friends, Willi?” Jack wondered. “—Besides Playfair and that guy at work who watches your every move?”

“Friendships are born in surprising places.”

“Like back alleys,” he suggested. “Or foxholes.”

The cab pulled up before his door.

“Will you work with me, Jack?” Dobler asked quietly.

He weighed the German for a long moment. “Give me a reason to, Willi.”

EIGHTEEN.
TRAFFIC

“LOOKING FOR SOMEBODY?”

Jack paused in the doorway of the embassy’s telegraph room. There was only one code clerk there at 8:45 on Saturday morning: a slight man with hunched shoulders and hair as glossy as a mink’s. “I’d like to send a transatlantic cable.”

“Clear text or coded?”

“Coded.”

“Who do you want to reach?”

“A man named Sam Schwartz.”

“The President’s bodyguard?”

Jack handed him the sheet of paper he’d carefully printed.

PLEASE VERIFY DESIRED RELATIONS WITH W.D. STOP CHECK BACKGROUND ONE HANS OBST ALSO SR. MARY JOSEPH LITTLE SISTERS OF CLEMENCY ROME STOP BEST JACK.

“Thanks,” he said from the doorway, but the clerk was already tapping the keys of his machine, and didn’t answer.

* * *

SISTER MARY JOSEPH
of the Little Sisters of Clemency,
Dobler had murmured last night as Jack got out of the cab.

“Sister Mary Who?”

“Joseph. She runs a charity network in Rome. You’re attending the Pope’s coronation, I believe?”

“Next week.”

“She’ll be there. Ask where she gets her donations—and where they’re going. A bit of research for your
senior thesis
.”

It was Willi’s first tidbit of intelligence. Jack would have liked to ask some questions, but he was standing in the street, completely exposed. Dobler had chosen the moment for that reason. He’d thrown Jack a teaser, like a girl shimmying, her skirt high on her leg as she danced the big apple.

Jack pushed the German out of his mind now and knocked on the door of his father’s office.

“What are you doing here on Saturday?” Joe Kennedy asked. “You should be keeping an eye on Kick. She spends too much time with Billy Hartington.”

“He’s a nice fella, Dad. Kick could do worse.”

“She’s risking her immortal soul.”

Jack’s eyebrows shot up. “Sounds like Mother talking.”

“By trunk call, every day. From
Egypt
.” His father looked strained and mulish
.
Rose usually had that effect. “You know what she’s costing me?”

“I didn’t know Egypt had telephones.” He leaned casually against his father’s desk “Need any help around here?”

“You could drop my weekly report at the code clerk’s office.” He tossed some paper across his polished desk. “Not that Franklin reads it.”

“I’m sure he does,” Jack said absently.

“He never takes my advice.” J.P.’s voice was rough with resentment. “In my last cable, I
told
him Chamberlain’s stock was on the rise, and we needed to keep our distance from the Jewish lobby agitating about Munich. If Chamberlain says Hitler’s satisfied with the Sudetenland, who are we to argue? It’s not like we’ve talked to the Führer. Ever since Franklin recalled Ambassador Wilson to protest Kristallnacht, our relations with the Germans have gone straight downhill.”

“These cables,” Jack said. “Your secretary just hands them to the code clerk, whichever one happens to be there, and he sends them?”

“Sure,” his father said.

“And you don’t mind him reading your reports? Everything private about the British government—you’ve written for Roosevelt’s eyes alone?”

“I’m not sure those guys can read,” Joe said mildly. “Besides, I don’t have any choice. I can’t work a Morse key, much less an encoding machine.”

“What do you know about the clerks?”

“They’re vetted by State. That’s good enough for me.”

What had Roosevelt said?
Too many of my private conversations are finding their way into Hitler’s office.

Jack stared at his father’s report. He couldn’t send Willi Dobler’s intelligence through State department clerks. He might get Willi killed.

“
Some things you just have to take on faith, son,” his father said. “Now, could you run that report downstairs? I’d like Franklin to see it before bedtime.”

* * *

THE LONDON SOCIAL SEASON
didn’t truly begin until Easter, and most of the West End stage was still dark; but that night Jack dined with Kick at the Mitfords’ and then took in a musical called
Magyar Melody
at His Majesty’s Theatre. It was a sappy play about an Englishman in love with a wild Hungarian maiden, a romanticized vision of Eastern Europe that firmly ignored Hitler’s plans for it; the audience applauded when love triumphed, but Jack left feeling vaguely unsettled, as though he’d been treated to a child’s bedtime story. He glanced at every stranger’s face as they left the theater, looking for a man with the build of a halfback and a scar bisecting his lip. Killers like the Spider didn’t just give up.

“Coming to the 400, Jack?” Kick asked.

“I don’t feel like it tonight. How about we get up a dance back at the house? I brought some new records from New York. Dad’ll be out.”

“He always is.” Kick frowned at him in perplexity, and seemed about to ask why he was so reluctant to drink in their favorite watering hole, but Debo Mitford interrupted. “Oh, Jack—tell me you’ve got that new tune by the Ink Spots!”

“‘If I Didn’t Care’?
”
he suggested. “You bet. Sitting right there in the stack, on my bedroom dresser.”

“It’s supposed to be divine, but nobody in London has heard it yet.”

He raised his eyebrow at Kick, and she shrugged a little, reconciled. It took three cabs to get all of them back to Prince’s Gate.

* * *

A GREAT DEAL OF GIN WAS DRUNK
and the armchairs of Rose’s formal salon pulled back against the wall to make room for a game of touch football, but since only Jack and Kick fully understood the rules, the others danced the big apple in a ring around them. A girl named Sally Norton, rangy as a Thoroughbred and in love, Jack thought, with Billy Hartington, raced hilariously across Regent Street at two o’clock in the morning and plunged into Hyde Park’s frigid Serpentine.

It was Jack, not Billy, who dove in to save her.

He didn’t mind the shock of the water or the mess it made of his clothes. Sally and her games had kept Kick occupied for one more night, safe from the White Spider.

NINETEEN.
PRAYER

SUNDAY MORNING.
The Spider sat in the rear of the Brompton Oratory unmoved by the vastness of the dome, the way the light cascaded from its clerestory windows even in the depths of March. The exalted trebles of the choir reached his ears without penetrating them. He could command stillness from his body—it was his tool to use and he had mastered it long ago—but his pulse was throbbing chaotically. His eyes were fixed on a girl some distance in front of him, near the transept. She was kneeling there in the midst of her family, gloved hands folded like a dove’s wings. Her head was bowed. A lace veil covered her tumult of auburn hair. He could almost feel her breast rise and fall with each breath she drew, each prayer she murmured. So pure. So impossibly white. He wanted to take her there and cut his mark into her flesh—make her his own. But she was denied him. He closed his eyes and bit down on his lip until he tasted blood.

The Latin mass eddied around him. He did not move, though his rootedness in the pew was unusual, the mark of the unbeliever. It was only when the final benediction came and the congregation rose that he abruptly thrust his blunt body out into the side aisle, head down. The priest and his acolytes passed, crucifix high. He followed.

From a doorway across the Brompton Road he watched them leave the oratory. She was laughing as she slipped into the chauffeured car. Her brother did not even look in his direction. The Spider felt their indifference like a slap in the face.
What fools, to slap him.
His hand tightened lovingly on his knife.

TWENTY.
COLONEL GUBBINS

EVERYONE AT PRINCE’S GATE
ate dinner in their pajamas Sunday night—a Kennedy tradition when Rose was away—and the sight of Kick with her hair tied up in curl-papers, casually filing her nails, was a relief. Jack hadn’t realized how tense he’d become, waiting for the Spider’s next move.

He read about it after the fact, on Monday morning. In a small headline on a back page of the London
Times
.

East End Girl Murdered.

Her name was Sadie Mullins and she’d been found in an alley near the docks. A child, really; only fifteen. She’d been knifed in the heart, and a crude mark cut into her breast
.
It looked, the reporter said, like a carnival wheel—or a swastika. . . .

Jack studied the newsprint, remembering something Willi had said.
He likes to cut his mark into his victim’s chest—a crouching spider.

He tore out the article and stuffed it in his pocket.

* * *

HE ROAMED HIS FATHER’S OFFICE
after the ten o’clock staff meeting like a restless cat, leafing through books and a bundle of week-old newspapers from the States. He was waiting for an answer to the cable he’d sent Schwartz.

“Mr. Kennedy?”

He turned, dropping a stack of
Time
magazines, and saw the code clerk with the sleek black hair. “Yes?”

“Cable for you.”

“Thanks.” He took it eagerly from the man’s hands.

The clerk lingered, watching him. “The message is a little odd, I have to say.”

Jack glanced at him. So J.P. was wrong—the code clerks
could
read. And pass judgment on the cables they encrypted.

“What’s your name?” he asked the man suddenly.

The cool gray eyes held his own. “Tyler Gatewood Kent. Princeton ’32.”

“Good man. I spent some time at Old Nassau. Before I transferred to Harvard.”

“I know,” Kent said. His lips quirked in something that was almost a sneer.

Jack flushed. He didn’t broadcast the details of his Mystery Disease, so any number of people thought he’d flunked out of Princeton. Tyler Kent must be one of them. The clerk wanted to unsettle him. Suggest that he’d read Jack’s dossier behind his back. Have some fun with the ambassador’s son. J.P. was not terribly popular with career State department people—and a few took it out on his kids.

Jack grasped the edge of the office door as though he were about to close it. He wanted to read the cable and he had no interest in an audience.

“Thanks again,” he said.

Kent saluted sardonically and drifted away.

Jack shut the door and threw himself into one of his dad’s easy chairs.

IT IS RARE TO HAVE SNOW IN MARCH STOP BUT NOT ENTIRELY UNKNOWN IN LONDON STOP SCHWARTZ

What?

He read the infuriating phrases through a second time, and then a third. Nothing about Willi Dobler or Roosevelt’s desire for intelligence; nothing about the Little Sisters of Clemency. Was this Schwartz’s attempt at a joke?

* * *

“WHERE ARE YOUR NEW CLOTHES?”
his father demanded at lunch. “You’re still a mess. And that shiner’s taking its own sweet time to heal.”

“I have a fitting this afternoon.”

He could care less about his face or the state of his wardrobe. He was still annoyed about Schwartz’s cable. Didn’t the guy take German agents seriously? Maybe knives in the dark were all in a day’s work for the Secret Service.

His father looked him up and down. “Please, Jack. We leave for Paris in a week. Get your ass down to Poole’s right now.”

* * *

SAVILE ROW WAS A QUIET STREET
lined with what looked like gentlemen’s clubs. The tailors who ruled it didn’t need to advertise; their clothes spoke for them. There was Gieves, whose original founders had dressed Victoria’s court and military men for generations; Anderson & Sheppard, who specialized in Hollywood movie stars; Kilgour, French & Stanbury, who enjoyed a Mayfair patronage; and Henry Poole & Company. The latter was known for serving the diplomatic corps.

Benton, who greeted clients as they stepped into Poole’s foyer, remembered Jack from his previous visit. He took his coat and hat without commenting on their New York labels and led him to a leather chair by a gas fire.

“May I offer you coffee, sir? Or perhaps a sherry?”

“What I’d really like is a fitting,” Jack replied. “I’ve got an appointment for two o’clock, but I have to leave town Thursday morning and I’m worried my clothes won’t be done.”

“I’ll inform Mr. Rathbone,” Benton murmured.

Jack waited. He assessed his reflection in one of the tall mirrors. His cheeks were still too hollow and his skin too white. Except where it was bruised and green. Mother would not be pleased when she saw him in Rome. But he thought the DOCA was working. His nausea and diarrhea were diminishing. He’d written to Mayo to let George Taylor know.

“If you would come this way, Mr. Kennedy—”

He followed Benton into another room. More sumptuous carpet, glass-fronted cabinets displaying wool samples; Georgian side chairs. Rathbone, with a measuring tape and chalk.

He’d ordered three lounge suits at sixteen guineas apiece, an overcoat, a dinner jacket, morning dress, evening dress, court dress, and white tie at twenty guineas apiece. There were incidentals like shirts, ties, hats, and flannel trousers to add into the mix, but Jack had lost track of the total cost. Somewhere in the neighborhood of his Harvard tuition, he suspected.

Rathbone and his retinue led him to a fitting room and handed him a pieced version of one of his suits. He eased himself into it, trying not to strain the white tacking stitches. It hung baggily on his skeletal body, a pinstriped shroud.

“You’re remarkably slender, sir, for one of your height,” Rathbone commented. “A true whipcord frame.”

“We Americans like a lean and hungry look.”

The tailor’s gaze drifted impassively over Jack’s bruised cheekbone. “No doubt, sir.”

Much turning and chalking on a dais before a three-way mirror. The waistband of his trousers sagged. He had no ass to speak of. Deft fingers pleated and pinned the wool. At least his shoulders would never shame him.

An hour into it, they reached the court knee breeches. The tailors worked quickly and efficiently, in the process outlining his crotch in a way that fascinated and repelled him. He glanced at his thighs in the skintight breeches, a Regency figure straight out of Cecil’s
Young Melbourne
, and thought derisively of how his Harvard friends would laugh. Jack Kennedy as Lord Byron—if he could gain thirty pounds to pad his “whipcord” frame.

“Ah, Colonel Gubbins,” Rathbone murmured, with a nod to a short, trim, military man who strode briskly into the fitting room. “I hope you won’t mind sharing the mirror with Mr. Kennedy. He is somewhat pressed for time.”

“Not at all,” Gubbins said. “I came about that tweed jacket, Rathbone. Though I doubt I shall wear it soon; shouldn’t wonder if we have snow before the week is out.”

“Surely not in March,” Rathbone replied.

Jack glanced at the stranger. Gubbins wore a red carnation in his buttonhole; a black homburg dangled from his hand. The perfect clubman, indistinguishable from a thousand others. Why did talk of snow bother Jack?
Schwartz’s cable.
It sounded like Schwartz’s goddamn cable.

Gubbins met his gaze in the three-sided mirror.

Jack’s heart began to thud. “It is rare to have snow in March.”

“But not entirely unknown in London.” The colonel smiled. “What about that jacket, Rathbone?”

* * *

WHEN ALL THE POKING
and prodding was done, Gubbins politely held Poole’s door for Jack, who gestured him through it.

“Pleasure making your acquaintance, Mr. Kennedy,” the colonel said, offering his card. “Do look me up sometime—I should be honored if you’d join me at my club.”

“That’d be swell,” Jack said.

Ten minutes later, he stepped into the Lyons Corner House in the Tottenham Court Road, and took a table upstairs, near a window. The place was full of clerks and secretaries wolfing olive-colored peas and gray meat. The air was stale with the smell of boiled cabbage and wet mackintoshes. His gorge rose and he swallowed convulsively. He drew the card from his pocket.

Colonel Colin M. Gubbins, Royal Artillery,
it said. The address was a mews off St. James Street.

On the reverse, in a minute hand, was written
4 o’clock
.
Make sure you aren’t followed.

* * *

HE DROPPED DOWN INTO
the Tube at Victoria Station and rode it to Greenwich, where he strolled through the halls of the Maritime Museum. It had opened only two years before and this was Jack’s first visit. He was a passionate sailor and it was an enjoyable place to kill an hour. At a quarter past three he was back in the Underground. The station closest to Gubbins’s was Green Park, but Jack rode on to Oxford Street, and began a leisurely saunter among the shop windows. He studied his reflection as he browsed; no scarred lip leered behind him, no camel’s hair coat halted when he did. Perhaps the Spider’s latest murder had made him cautious.

The address in St. James was a second-floor walk-up. A girl in dark red lipstick and a cashmere sweater answered his knock. He paused a moment to appreciate her curves.

“Good afternoon,” she said coolly, and stepped back to admit him.

The room was filled with women’s lingerie.