Pantheon (34 page)

Still nothing. The building deserved its name; it was locked, empty and silent as a tomb.

James glanced at the copy of
Time
magazine he had picked up from a news-stand on his way over here. He had been drawn by the image on the cover of Lord Beaverbrook, first occupant of the newly-created Ministry of Aircraft Production. The magazine was full of praise for the man Churchill had brought in: ‘Even if Britain goes down this fall, it will not be Lord Beaverbrook’s fault. If she holds out, it will be his triumph. This war is a war of machines. It will be won on the assembly line.’

The magazine was clearly impressed and the overall assessment was upbeat, but the opening line made James’s heart sink.
Even if Britain goes down this fall …
Florence had not been hysterical to fear a Nazi invasion. It was a possibility, maybe even a probability
.

Looking up, he saw a white-haired man approaching. At that moment, James recognized his face: it was Theodore Lowell, the university chaplain and pastor he had seen preach at the Battell Chapel on Sunday. He froze, but Lowell did not even glance at him, just looked left and right to check traffic before crossing the road. Without altering his pace, he slipped in among the lawns and bushes leading to the Wolf’s Head’s building.

That was not in itself a surprise: Lowell’s was the only name James had recognized on the alumni list in Lake’s notebook. As a former member of the society, he had every right to pay a visit; as chaplain, he might even have been there on pastoral duty. (James imagined him counselling a wayward young man to drink a little less and pray a little more.)

But there was something about the way he walked, an urgency, that struck James. No, it was more than urgency – it was furtiveness. Lowell didn’t want to be seen. He looked quickly behind him and disappeared into the side door.

James had just resumed his position on the bench when there was another rustle of movement and someone emerged from the tomb, from the same concealed entrance. This figure was taller and, James guessed, younger; his hair was darker. Just in time, James raised his magazine so that he would not be seen.

This second man now reached the pavement and started walking north towards Elm Street. James waited five, six, seven seconds and then began to follow.

The voice of Jorge, the Spanish republican who had coached both him and Harry Knox in the art of shadowing suspected members of Franco’s Fifth Column in Madrid three years earlier, remained in his head throughout.
Remember, you walk at the same speed as the subject. Slower, and you will lose him. Faster, and you reveal yourself at once.

The pursuit was challenging, James having to part a large group that emerged from Davenport College when he had barely got into his stride – muttering apologies and ‘excuse me’s’ – having to shield his eyes from the afternoon sunshine, all the while keeping his gaze fixed on the man twenty yards ahead of him. He was walking with purpose this man, whoever he was, at a pace that suggested his destination was not far off.

The hardest part of any pursuit is the turning of a corner, when the risk of losing the subject is at its greatest. The temptation is to accelerate, but that too carries a risk: the subject, if vigilant, will notice that someone previously distant has come much closer. And once a pursuer has been noticed, he is useless.

James maintained his speed, but as he turned the corner, he looked to where he expected the subject to be – and saw nothing.

Damn.
Hurriedly, James scanned the other side of the street. Not there. He examined his own side of the road, and again saw nothing. He stared into the distance, to see if the man he had followed had cottoned on and broken into a sprint, but there was no sign of him.

There
. He had been searching for a moving target, and so his eye had passed over the static figure. His prey was just one building ahead, standing by the front door of what looked like a large Georgian house. His demeanour suggested he had no idea he had been followed.

James sucked in his breath, a predator trying to shrink into invisibility and avoid detection. Now, at last, he could get a decent look at the man. He was tall, impressively built, but much younger than James would have guessed, perhaps even an undergraduate. Was this a ‘junior’, and therefore a current member of Wolf’s Head? His right leg was vibrating slightly under his trousers, a sign, James decided, of impatience. The man knocked on the door a second time. A moment later the door opened.

Instinctively James stepped back, trying to recede into the street scene, as he watched the young man hand over a large white envelope. There was a brief exchange and then he appeared to be invited inside. The door clicked shut behind him.

James walked past the building, as naturally as he could manage. He glanced rightward once, noticing that mesh curtains blocked any view inside the windows. A brief flash of sunlight dazzled him: a reflection bouncing off the nameplate by the front door.

The least risky option would be to move fast, right now. Wait, and the young man he had followed might re-emerge. Wait, and he would eventually be noticed. James marched to the front door, his stride purposeful, as if he too were making a delivery. He pretended to ring the doorbell, instead taking a quick look at the brass plate just beside it. Then he looked again to make sure he had read the words properly.

What he saw there surprised and baffled him, but there was no mistaking what it said in clear, engraved letters.

AMERICAN EUGENICS SOCIETY, NEW HAVEN OFFICE

London

He remembered this feeling sharply. The same hot blend of nerves and pleasure, of fear and excitement. The last time he had experienced it had been in his junior year at St Albans. A few of the seniors had got hold of some ‘erotic’ pictures, a set of photographs rumoured to be utterly depraved. Everyone in his class was desperate to see them and it fell to young Taylor Hastings to get his hands on them.

He had done it through a series of negotiations, trades and promises – but he had done it. As he left the seniors’ dorm that night, his satchel containing the all-important ‘documentation’ slung over his shoulder, he had felt his face grow hot. He was aroused in anticipation of seeing those pictures, most certainly – indeed, he made a stop at the squash court bathrooms in order to have his own, personal private viewing – but he was also engorged with the thrill of the forbidden. His bag contained a set of photographs of women in a variety of poses, some acrobatic, others shocking – including one of a bare backside greeted by the smack of a cane – but all in violation of at least a half-dozen school rules and perhaps a couple of state obscenity laws into the bargain. What’s more, he had, through a rather smart sleight of hand, taken more pictures than the seniors had agreed to. The result was the pleasure of a deception, the kick of committing a small, but elegant crime – and that, he understood at that moment, was a sexual pleasure too.

He felt it now as he walked across Grosvenor Square, his bag once again weighty with illicit cargo. He had staged this heist with much greater sophistication than his little trick at the expense of the St Albans senior year. He had had to use his hands – switching papers from one pile to another with the panache of a magician producing the ace of spades from a handkerchief – but also his wits.

He had created a distraction, summoning his colleagues to huddle over an intriguing cipher that had just come in, asking them to pool their collective knowledge to work out what it could possibly mean. And, while they were puzzling over it, Cellucci scratching his ear with the eraser-end of his pencil, Taylor had salted away carbon copies of the key papers right there and then, inches away from their very eyes.

That, he complimented himself now, was the genius of it. At the moment he had chosen to strike, he had not ushered the dullards of the cipher room out and
away.
No, no, no. Nor had he done anything so cheap or pedestrian as wait for them to leave. On the contrary, he had beckoned his fellow decoders over to
his very desk.
As they gathered in a knot around the bait he had laid for them, he had taken one pace back before calmly and quietly taking exactly what he wanted. He had turned potential witnesses to his crime into alibis for his innocence.

As he walked back through Hyde Park on this bright summer evening, he felt the blood rush to his loins. He was hardening at the thought of what he had done. He pictured himself with Anna, looking at the papers together, tonight, in bed. He would read them out loud, impersonating the authors’ voices. He imagined her praising him, calling him ‘her clever little boy’, rewarding him with her tongue, starting at his chest and working steadily downward …

Or perhaps he would forego that particular delight, exquisite though he knew it would be. Perhaps he would show restraint and wait for the greater prize. It would mean going straight home now, stashing these documents where they would never be found – until he was ready to show them to the man who would understand their true power. The man, indeed, who had already entrusted him with his own great secrets, held together between the covers of the magnificent Red Book. Imagine what Rawls Murray could do with these papers. He would be overawed the instant he saw who had written them – but once he had digested their substance, well, he would fall to his knees.

Taylor Hastings would become an instant hero to Reginald Rawls Murray, that much was obvious. He would, of course, be a hero to the Right Club. But the young American dared dream of a greater accolade still. By his actions he, Taylor Hastings, would become nothing less than a hero to history.

Eugenics? James squinted at the sign to make sure he had read it properly. Eugenics? How on earth did the science of human breeding – improving the quality of the human race and all that that implied – fit into everything that had happened these last few days and weeks? Unless, of course, it didn’t. Unless he had simply followed a random member of the Wolf’s Head Society with a scholarly interest in eugenic ideas and no connection at all to Lund, the Dean and his niece or, crucially, Florence and Harry …

Reason told him to walk away and to think again. And yet he had learned since that early morning in Oxford that reason did not always deserve the last word, that there was more to him than the power to add up logical propositions, one following another. He was made of flesh and blood, with instincts and intuitions – as well as rages and sorrows – that he had tried to deny for too long. And so he listened to his gut as it told him to ring the doorbell and attempt to get inside the New Haven branch of the American Eugenics Society.

He did not have to wait long. A bespectacled man, his glasses misting up in the heat of this last day of July, answered the door. Judging from his expression, and the sound of voices coming from within, he had been letting people in for a while: it seemed a meeting was underway.

Once again, instinct intervened. Instead of offering his name, James simply nodded and stepped forward.

‘Are you on our list?’ asked the man with the foggy glasses.

‘I should be,’ James said, in what he hoped was a tone that was part supreme confidence, part lightness and affability. The man on the door pointed James towards a table where two women were taking names. James thanked him and headed in that direction, only to drift away the instant the bell rang, summoning the sweating man on the door back to his duties.

The interior was cool and bright, like a London townhouse. He was standing in the hall on a floor made of stone tiles of black and white, like a diamond-shaped chessboard. Off it he could see a meeting room, the door open, the chairs already set out in rows in a fashion that recalled similar sessions at Oxford. This, he guessed, was that peculiar creature, the early-evening seminar: glass of wine, a show-off presentation, more show-off discussion.

He milled around, noting a crowd that looked utterly familiar: men, most of them middle-aged, in the crumpled linens and tortoiseshell spectacles of the academic. He avoided eye contact, fearing to be drawn into a conversation that might require him to explain himself. Instead, he chose to linger by one of the display tables covered with material relating to tonight’s talk. The title was ‘Eugenics, the next steps’ and the speaker was a Dr William Curtis of Yale Medical School. Was he another of McAndrew’s protégés?

Also on the table was a neatly-stacked pile of copies of a thin red volume which James took to be a kind of manifesto for the society, apparently offered free of charge. All true believers did this, James had noticed: communists giving away Marxist texts, evangelicals handing out bibles to passers-by. He wondered if this would be a scholarly seminar or an exercise in evangelism.

He picked up the book and saw that it was, in fact, a primer on the topic:
What is Eugenics?
by Major Leonard Darwin. The book did not mention what James already knew: that this Darwin was the son of Charles.

Not that he knew much more than that. He had long been
aware
of eugenics; it would be impossible to be an educated man in the 1930s and not be aware of it. There had been a Eugenics Society at Oxford, though whether it was still in business he would be hard pressed to say. There was the occasional lecture on the topic as well as frequent letters and articles in the periodicals. And yet James had let it pass him by. The language of the subject did not appeal to him and its leading advocates he found especially grating: so often well-born, busybody types all too ready to condescend to a scholarship boy from the provinces.

Now James ran his eye over the contents page of the junior Darwin’s book, picking out the chapter headings.
Domestic Animals; Hereditary Qualities; The Men we Want; Inferior Stocks; Birth Control; Sterilization; Feeble-Mindedness; The Deterioration of our Breed, Eugenics in the Future; Selection in Marriage.

He glanced up to see that the room was filling up and for a while he eavesdropped on the greetings and handshakes taking place around him, with their talk of delayed trains from Boston and long drives from New York. This was, James understood, a meeting of scholars from beyond Yale, one that appeared to bring together colleagues from several Ivy League universities: Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and the like. When James sensed that someone was looking in his direction, he quickly ducked back to the book, reading the first line of the first page: