Touchstone (39 page)

Chapter Fifty-Two

A
T
2:25 M
ONDAY AFTERNOON,
Aldous Carstairs sat at his desk eyeing the big American across from him. He wanted to murder the man. Personally.

How much effort over the years had he, Aldous Carstairs, put into Bennett Grey? How many hours, how much painstaking thought, had he devoted to penetrating Grey’s defenses, and he’d never come anywhere
near
what this man had in a handful of days. He’d positively
bled
to make Grey trust him, talk to him, and in all those months, what he’d been given would barely fill a page. And this great clumsy Yank, this idiotic thug of a Bureau agent, had come bumbling in and had Grey eating out of his hand.

The whole thing was so bloody unfair, Carstairs wanted to pull his automatic pistol from his desk drawer and empty it into the sneaky blue-eyed oaf’s manly chest.

But he sat calmly and listened, showing no indication of the sour burn of loathing, making the occasional note. He wondered what Stuyvesant was failing to tell him about the doings at Hurleigh House—and there was another source of indignation, that Harris Stuyvesant should be welcomed to that ancient place with open arms while he, the man working day and night to preserve the system under which the Hurleighs flourished, was left behind in London, knowing that if he turned up at the Hurleigh door, he would be sent around to the trade entrance.

He shook himself mentally and returned to what the man was saying: that he wished he’d been able to find out what business Bunsen had with the Duke.

Well, Carstairs thought, at least I’m ahead of you there.

“Did you get anything on the driver?” Stuyvesant asked.

Carstairs picked up a thin file and slid it across the desk for him to read. The American pulled out a pair of tortoise-shell reading glasses—thank God there was
some
weakness to the man!—and scanned the pages.

As he had begun to suspect on Saturday night, the American was indeed a better operative then he’d first appeared—either that or he was freakishly lucky. In the space of forty-eight hours, he had not only brought Grey over to his side, he had befriended the major players in their little drama, identified a path into Bunsen’s organization, and laid the groundwork for putting the plan into action. The list of Bunsen’s contacts, which Stuyvesant had retrieved that morning, included a number of important politicians, financiers, and newspapermen—to be fair, one could not fault a foreigner for not knowing all of them. Certainly, between the time the man had picked up the list and the time he’d walked back in a quarter of an hour ago, he’d done a good job of bringing himself up to speed regarding the Empire’s key players.

The man’s unexpected competence was both reassuring and worrying. He would need to be kept on a tight lead.

Carstairs tapped his pen on the blotter in a methodical tattoo, then caught himself, and reached instead for the ornate box, given him by Benito Mussolini, in which he kept his cigarillos.

“After we spoke yesterday,” he said, “I set enquiries under way about Mr. James Balham, born James Bosch. And just before you arrived, I received that report. It would seem although our Mr. Balham works for Richard Bunsen, he is not what one might call a pure revolutionary. He enjoys regular visits to one particular unlicensed house of chance. Gambling,” he clarified for the man on the other side of the desk.

“How regular?”

“Most weeks, when he’s in London. Generally Monday or Tuesday nights.”

“How close are your ties to the police?”

“I have ties.”

“Could you arrange to have the place raided, while Balham is there?”

“Given half a day, I could.”

“Do it.”

“If it’s tonight, it may be too late, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“But make it clear to your colleagues, Balham isn’t to be harmed. Like I said yesterday, we don’t want to kill the guy. And I should tell you, Grey won’t like it one little bit if his sister tells him that Richard’s poor driver had his skull cracked.”

“Keeping Captain Grey happy is not terribly high on my list of priorities, but in fact, there is no need to take a, hmm, physical approach to the problem. If nothing else, it lacks finesse. I shall speak to my city colleagues as soon as you have left.”

“Okay, another thing. I’ve been thinking about some letters I saw in Bunsen’s car. Threat letters.”

“Of what sort?”

“The usual thing, vague and badly spelled. We’ll bash your pretty face, you better shut up if you know what’s good for you. Generic, so although they have his home address and know where he’s been speaking, they don’t seem to know about his private life. There’s nothing about Laura Hurleigh, for one thing. But he’s kept the letters, which means he’s concerned. So I stuck another one in the post today, with similar sentiments, directly connected to the upcoming Strike. However, I think it would be a good idea to throw in an actual physical threat, some time in the next two days, preferably when one or the other of Bunsen’s circle is with me, so no one could possibly find me to blame. Could you arrange that?”

“I don’t imagine you want Mr. Bunsen actually to come to harm?”

“I was thinking along the lines of a brick through his office window or a rotten tomato thrown at his car. He’s cold-blooded enough that it might not scare him, but when Lady Laura hears about it, she’ll urge him to take precautions.”

“You being the precaution.”

“After yesterday, he’ll be convinced Balham’s useless as a chauffeur. If we can convince him that a bodyguard isn’t a bad idea, just until the Strike is past—hey, presto! Why not hire a man who can do both jobs at once? Okay, that’s all I needed. Are we all set, then?”

“I have something for you, Agent Stuyvesant. That meeting between Richard Bunsen and the Duke, yesterday morning? Would you like to know the purpose of it?” Carstairs examined the end of his cigar.

Stuyvesant paused, his body half lifted from the seat of his chair. “Okay, I’ll bite.”

“As you may know, ten days from now, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress are due to convene here in London, for the formal vote to approve the General Strike.”

Stuyvesant took his hands off the chair’s arms: another of Carstairs’ “oblique” responses.

“Before that, on Monday—a week today—Mr. Baldwin has set a tentative appointment with the Miners’ Union representatives—that is, if no settlement to the dispute has been reached in the interim. And before that meeting, this coming Thursday, the Miners’ Union and the owners will meet here in London, at the insistence of Mr. Baldwin.”

“Time is short; I get that.”

“Yesterday morning, Mr. Bunsen was asked to convey a joint message, from Prime Minister Baldwin and from Herbert Smith, president of the Miners’ Union, to the Duke of Hurleigh, asking if the Duke might both oversee and provide a venue for an informal and private—the emphasis being on private—conference between the Union and the mine owners, that they might talk like, hmm, reasonable men, outside the glare of the newsmen’s flash-bulbs.

“This is, I repeat, a private undertaking, about which very few people know. I need hardly add that were you to let this information out, you would find yourself asked to leave the country immediately. The entire purpose is to allow Mr. Baldwin and a few chosen representatives of both sides of the dispute to meet as gentlemen, without the need for speech-making and posturing.”

Stuyvesant slowly crossed his legs, staring at Carstairs. “I’ll be damned.”

“Quite.”

“Whose idea was that?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might. When do they propose to meet?”

“Friday afternoon. At Hurleigh House.”

“What,
this
Friday? Four days from now?”

“Correct.”

“It takes people in this country four days to decide to offer you a cup of tea. You’re sure about this?”

“Yes.”

“Shit. I don’t have a chance.”

“If you say so.”

The man wore a look of disdain, as if to say,
You never had a chance.
Bastard, Stuyvesant thought; I’ll show you up if it’s the last thing I do. “Well, I’ll certainly never get it done sitting here. I’d better get to work.”

“As had I. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

Stuyvesant stood before the desk, fiddling with the coins in his pocket, then cocked his head at the other man. “Yeah,” he said, flat-faced. “You could take care of this damned miners’ dispute. It’s making my life hell.”

The black-eyed man said, “I shall see what I can do about the matter, Agent Stuyvesant.”

Outside of the non-descript building that housed Aldous Carstairs, Harris Stuyvesant stopped and said aloud, “Finesse, my ass.” He hawked loudly and spat.

Feeling somewhat better, he headed for the Underground station that would take him back to the hotel.

Grey had not returned from his raid on the bookshops of London, so Stuyvesant, after eyeing the bottle on his dresser, sent for coffee and settled in with a copy of the
Workers’ Weekly
that he’d picked up from a street vendor. The Communist rag was nearing hysteria, trying to work its readers into a slavering frenzy of outrage.

From what Stuyvesant had seen on the London streets, it wasn’t going to take a whole lot more effort.

The coffee was gone and he’d worked his way through half a dozen other papers when Stuyvesant heard sounds from the next room. A few minutes later, there was a tap at the door.

“C’mon in!” Stuyvesant called. He pulled off his reading glasses to examine his visitor; oddly, Grey looked no more exhausted than he had that morning. “How’re you doing?”

“Books are restorative,” Grey said. “They’re honest, which is rare in life. I now have a year’s reading material on its way to Cornwall. And your meeting—no, don’t bother, I can see that it went about as you expected. I had lunch with my sister—who sends her greetings, by the way, and asked you to ’phone her tonight.” He smiled at Stuyvesant’s reaction. “Shall we adjourn for refreshment? I spotted one of the places whose owner kept a good bitter, about ten minutes’ walk.”

From the smell of him, Grey had paused for refreshment at least once already, and the air of deliberate good cheer seemed to go about as deep as a papier mâché mask. But as he’d told Sarah, alcohol was just a pain-killer, and if Grey wanted the pain deadened, Stuyvesant couldn’t hold him to blame. He shoveled the newspapers aside and grabbed his overcoat.

The rain was light, little more than a mist filling the street. They followed quiet side-streets, a zig-zag that kept them off the main thoroughfares, and the sidewalks were so sparsely populated that the two men could walk shoulder to shoulder most of the time.

“I liked London, when I came here after the War,” Stuyvesant said, breaking the silence. The moment the words left his mouth he wondered if they were a mistake, since the days after the War were hardly a sympathetic memory for his companion. But Grey nodded in agreement.

“Before the War, I had a friend whose family lived near here. The summer before he and I went up to Oxford, I spent a month with him, and we used to walk all over the City, letting ourselves be seduced by her charms. I don’t imagine New York to be at all like London.”

“There’s areas that feel surprisingly similar, but on the whole, it’s true, New York runs in a different gear. Although I was thinking earlier that London feels a little like downtown Manhattan on a hot day, this time around. You’ve got some angry people here.”

“The whole City seems to be standing at the edge of an abyss,” Grey agreed.

“And then some of those papers I was looking at make the whole thing sound like a lark, grown men playing at train drivers and dressing up as policem—”

He was cut off as Grey’s outstretched arm slammed across his chest, keeping him from stepping down onto the roadway. “What’s this madman up to?”

The madman in question was behind the wheel of a large, elderly motor lorry, and having a problem with its gears. The engine roared as the driver—the would-be driver—clamped down on the accelerator; it gave a horrible clash and strangling noise, leapt forward six feet to precisely where the American had been about to step, coughed, and died. In the quiet could be heard the sound of a young man cursing.

Stuyvesant walked around and yanked back the lorry’s rain-curtain. The startled driver looked like a schoolboy, no more than eighteen; his companion might have been twenty.

“What the hell are you two idiots doing?” Stuyvesant demanded. “You could have killed us.”

The boy stared at the two men, and Stuyvesant could see the sharp realization come into his eyes. “Lord!” he said in plummy accents. “I was so engrossed—I’m ever so sorry, I just, these gears, they’re like nothing under the sun.”

“So what are you doing with it? If this is a prank, I could think of better things to steal.”

“Oh no,” said the boy. “It’s no prank. We’re volunteer drivers. For the Strike? London will starve without help, and we promised we’d be able to drive this thing by the first of May.”

His passenger leaned forward. “We were just given the keys and told where it was. At this rate, when the Strike begins we won’t have got beyond Regent Street.”

“There appears to be something wrong with the gear-box,” the driver complained.

Stuyvesant ran his hand through his hair, replaced his hat, and glanced at Grey. “You mind if I sort this out so they don’t kill someone?”

“If one of Sarah’s crew spots you assisting a blackleg, it’ll be all over for you,” Grey pointed out with amusement.

“I’ll risk it. Move over,” he ordered the driver.

The two lads perched on the other seat and Stuyvesant climbed behind the wheel. The truck—lorry—was old but its cleanliness suggested it had been cared for, and indeed, when he pushed the starter, it caught readily enough, considering how violently it had died moments before. He worked the clutch, glanced around to make sure he wasn’t going to mow down any pedestrians himself, and gave it just a little gas. The lorry moved down the quiet street, smooth as cream.

He circled the block, showing the two would-be heroes what he was doing and describing the differences between the motors they were used to and the heavy-duty engine they faced here. He then traded seats to repeat the circuit, two sides with one lad at the wheel, the remainder with the other. At the end he climbed out and interrupted their thanks with the statement that they had a friend of the Miners’ Union to thank for their strike-breaking skills. They gaped at him, open-mouthed.