‘Not long.’
‘How long? Long enough to get me here and flush him out for you?’
Gelbroaster drew a deep breath, his pace and his manner altering not one jot.
‘I know this has been a hard time for you. You’ve lost something very precious to you. I don’t doubt that after two years there was some sort of bond between you and Stahl, and it seems from all I’ve heard that you and the English cop were good friends, but the biggest loss is the loss of innocence. I think that’s what you’ve been through. The loss of innocence. But son, the biggest loss of innocence has got to be a refusal ever to believe in coincidence again. I didn’t get you here to flush out Frank. If I’d known or even suspected Frank was working for the Germans I’d’ve busted him myself. Believe me, you did a great job in catching up with him, but neither I nor Deke Shaeffer had any idea that it was Frank you were after.’
Cal felt almost chastened-but not quite.
‘But I’m still being sent home?’
‘Fraid so, and there’s more. We’re fairly certain that your father had links with the Bund too.’
Cal whispered ‘What?’, his voice buried somewhere in the back of his throat.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t mince words, dammit. Son, he was a paid-up member, he donated funds, he fed them information. Now that’s about as plain as I can tell it.’
Cal found it hard to be outraged, but disbelief came readily.
‘My father supports America First, plenty of people do, patriotic people do-and even then he does it low key-he’s never spoken on their platform as far as I know. He writes speeches for Lindbergh. He gives the idiot the facts and the arguments he needs to address an audience and be taken seriously. General, that’s one hell of a way from joining the Bund.’
‘And he thinks there’s a conspiracy between Churchill and Roosevelt to bring America into this war by any reasonable pretext.’
‘By any reasonable pretext.’ The phrasing was too close, too accurate. It had stuck in Cal’s mind too.
‘You’ve been intercepting my mail?’
‘Fraid so. Necessity. But there you are.’
‘Sir, that’s just my father being cranky. He sees conspiracies everywhere. Given his opposition to the war, he’s bound to see one between the Prime Minister and the President.’
‘I agree,’ said Gelbroaster. ‘And he’s absolutely right. There is.’
‘What?’
‘I doubt they call it a conspiracy. Personally… if the cap fits wear it… in effect… what your father perceives is exactly what is happening. Right now we’re looking out for that reasonable pretext.’
‘You mean you want another Lusitania?’
Gelbroaster shrugged. ‘Something quicker, I’d hope. Took two years to get us into the war after the Lusitania. Something less drastic would do. We may not get that lucky of course.’
‘You know,’ said Cal, ‘I was getting ready to write to my father and tell him he’s nuts.’
‘You’ll be able to tell him in person. We can’t use this information publicly, you understand-but privately… well, your father’s career is over. If he so much as mutters that he’s thinking of running for any other office but the one he’s got, then someone will show him an FBI file and he’ll be quietly told to stand down. He’s an ambitious man, but any dreams he might have had of running for president in five or ten years…’
Gelbroaster didn’t bother to end the sentence. They both knew how it ended.
‘Why not?’ said Cal. ‘Why not reveal the names, just publish and be damned?’
‘Son, I was with Joe Kennedy when he picked up a paper knife and broke the lock on the Red Book-now do you know what that is?’
‘No-I don’t.’
‘It’s the membership list of the British Right Club. Bunch of Jew-baiting Anglo-Nazis. We got hold of it last year. The Right Club gave it to Tyler Kent, thinking diplomatic immunity was eternal. When MI5 blew the whistle on Kent we busted him and Joe busted the book. It read like a Who’s Who-members of parliament, dukes and earls-would you believe the Marquis of Graham, Lord Redesdale, the Duke of goddam Wellington? Publish and be damned is just about right. The effects would have been crushing on British morale if we’d let any of that out. Even Kennedy could see that. He threw Kent to the wolves and high-tailed it out of here before the next bomb could fall. The same’s true back home. We have our own morale to sustain. We’re going to war-it might last another two years or another ten. The press would be deadly-better by far to know who’s rotten in the barrel and let ‘em know you know.’
‘And the British still want me to go back to Washington? To the same city my father lives in? And they still expect me to tell no-one?’
‘I expect you to tell no-one. And I didn’t say it was logical. That’s too much to ask of the British at the best of times, and this is one of the worst. Besides, we have our secrets too. The British will never know how far the Bund penetrated into the Army or the Capitol.’
‘It’s still crazy. I’m a safer bet right here. In London.’
‘But you’re going home, all the same. First flight we can get you on.’
Cal knew he had lost. They lapsed into silence. Gelbroaster retrieved his cigar and lit up. For a minute or more all Cal could hear was the puffing and lip-smacking of the smoker’s ritual.
‘How long do I have? I mean, there are one or two things I have to do. Things I have to sort out.’
‘Three or four days. There’s a logjam of people trying to get out to Lisbon, but we’ll bump you up the list.’
Gelbroaster got up to leave. Dirty work done.
‘I want you to know that I personally could not be more grateful to you.’
He was heading for the door now, the last remark all but thrown over his shoulder. Too casual to be literal. ‘If there’s anything you need, anything at all…’
‘There is one thing,’ said Cal, being as literal as he could.
Gelbroaster turned back to him. Clearly he’d not expected Cal to want anything quite so soon.
§ 94
Troy was having a lazy day. There was a brilliant June sun in the sky, after yesterday’s unseasonal cold. He had been up to the urban ‘farm’ at Seven Dials, where a bloke he knew kept goats and hens not spitting distance from Shaftesbury Avenue’s theatres, and had haggled for half a dozen eggs. He offered to tip the nod to the local beat bobby to keep a close eye on the ‘farm’ at night and came away with four hen and two goose. Enough to let him indulge in a three-egg scramble for late breakfast, or was it early lunch? It was corruption, of course, but after what he’d been through lately it troubled that near-dormant organ, his conscience, not one whit. Besides, he’d paid more than twice the pre-war price.
The first egg fell into the pan and rose up proud as an orange jelly, a thick mass of albumen orbiting it as precisely as the rings of Saturn. He’d not seen an egg this fresh for the best part of a year. It seemed almost a shame to scramble it but scramble it he did-on toast with the meagre scraping of his butter ration.
Then he put a dining chair out in the courtyard, aimed it at the sun, and read in the western light of a London summer’s afternoon.
The Times ran an obituary for the late Kaiser. Troy glanced at it with a ‘so what?’ running through his mind. He was not, he realised, much in the mood for news, even the last word on a man not much heard of these twenty years. He was in the mood for fiction. He tried Ulysses by James Joyce, loved the opening bit about the fat bloke shaving-he always did-but then he sort of got lost-he always did. Then he picked up The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West and had read twenty pages before he realised he had read it before. At last he settled upon The Professor by Rex Warner-a book Rod had given him about the time of the Munich crisis. Dirty deeds in one of those Continental republics cobbled together at the Treaty of Versailles. Rod was forever giving him books. Rod read new books. Rod read topical books. Rod loved the idea of authors-he was forever saying he’d met ‘so and so’ at a ‘do’. This appeared to be the tale of one Professor A. Oh no, thought Troy, not initials, not like that bugger Kafka with his K bloke? He wasn’t sure about this, but he read on and was still happily engrossed an hour later when he heard Onions, police boots sparking on the cobbles, lumbering down the yard from St Martin’s Lane.