Touchstone (36 page)

Chapter Forty-Eight

S
TUYVESANT WENT THROUGH
the small rear door into the converted stables, moving with care across the rough grit floor. But the drunken boy seemed to have been stashed elsewhere, and Bunsen’s driver was not napping in his car, suggesting that, despite his size, his duties did not include those of guard.

Another small fact to tuck away.

Stuyvesant checked that the stables’ door was securely shut, then opened the car’s rear door.

The car was a Humber, large and remarkably staid for a young man with radical leanings, but one glance inside and Stuyvesant could see why the car had been chosen.

It was, in fact, a mobile office, the transportation of a man who did not wish to waste a minute of his life on the road. The left half of the back had been converted to contain a filing cabinet on the floor, a set of purpose-built wooden cubby-holes fitted across the seat, and a swing-out wooden desk complete with blotter. The entire structure would break down for easy removal, if the owner had a passenger he didn’t want to put up beside the driver or on the little fold-down seat in front of him.

There was even a reading lamp, fixed to shine on Bunsen’s lap, but Stuyvesant did not want to risk draining the car’s batteries, so he propped his flash-light in the empty crystal glass sitting in a holder on the door, and lowered himself onto the worn leather where Richard Bunsen sat. He breathed in the air Bunsen breathed, touched the edge of the glass, settled his shoulders into the seat back where Bunsen rested his shoulders.

How difficult would it be to put a triggering device into the seat below his trousers, he wondered, as Bunsen had done to the judge’s car back in November? Run a slow fuse from the trigger to a little flask of flammable liquid, let the car go up in flames. A touch of rough justice.

He shook his head: You’re a Bureau agent, not an assassin, he reminded himself. Get to work.

He started with the cubby-holes, Bunsen’s current projects. Most of the files there appeared to be speeches, some of which had the target audience written on the file. His eye caught on the word
Battersea,
and he opened that one, reading almost verbatim the speech that he’d thought Bunsen gave off the cuff. Even the two preliminary remarks that had been made to answer the audience questions were there—which meant that Bunsen knew the questions were coming. That he had arranged for them to be shouted aloud.

Stuyvesant shook his head in admiration. Sapper or politician, the man left nothing to chance.

He went through the other files, finding the speeches clever but the basic ideas repetitive, to be expected from a man who gave a dozen or more speeches every week. The handwriting was neater than he’d have thought, for notes written in a moving car. A few had been transcribed on a type-writer, although he also found a manila envelope containing scraps of paper with nothing but catchy phrases on them: “Tory toadies” “strike while the coal is hot” “brothers and sisters under the skin” “Black Friday and the domino action of capitulation.” And yes, “rouge on a corpse.” The phrases had been written by two or three different hands and half a dozen pens and pencils, indicating an ingrained habit of scribbling down inspiration.

He reached the bottom cubby-hole without revelation. Both filing cabinet drawers were locked, but the mechanism gave him no more problems than the car door had, and he slid open the top drawer and reached into its first file.

At four
A.M
., he was still on that first file of the first drawer: It had held a book, on the leather cover of which was stamped:

D
IARY
1926

Every day had its page, and every single page had something written on it, even if only the rare notation
Day off.
The top few lines Bunsen used as an appointments book, some days only one or two, growing to six or seven in the past weeks, all in pencil. The bottom part of the page had other notes, written mostly in pen; on some pages he had run out of room, and either spilled over to the next page or used adhesive tape to fasten on a loose sheet.

Stuyvesant turned to the beginning of the book. Five days in he found:

11:00 to S’hampton for NY

The next two weeks held only the penciled note:

NY

Nothing about meeting the hotel maid, nothing about building a bomb out of gelignite and nails to cripple a roomful of important men. Nothing at all until the appointments began again on the first of February.

Bunsen’s native caution kept him from incriminating notes.

Either that, or the man kept another diary, outside of the car.

In the end, although he copied names and dates onto the paper he had brought, there was far more here than he could possibly follow up. Some pages went a third of the way down with his dates. Looking at the past Thursday, for example:

9:00 Breakfast Laura

10:15 T. Bros (fitting)

12:30 Gibson’s (Chum, Riley, O’C.)

5:00 drinks (B., C., S.?)

7:00 Battersea hall

The 5:00 initials matched those of the other speakers, Stuyvesant noted, but in the end, he put down his pencil and skimmed over Bunsen’s notes, since he had no way of knowing who half these people were. Some of the names he recognized—there’d been a meeting with Baldwin ten days earlier, although the Prime Minister was just the first in a list of names, one of whom was Matthew Ruddle, Bunsen’s Union mentor and one-time employer. Stuyvesant figured Bunsen had done little more at the meeting with Baldwin than hold Ruddle’s hat.

Reluctantly, Stuyvesant closed the diary. At this rate, he would still be here reading away when Jimmy the driver came to get the car out. Short of stealing the book outright, he had to admit he wasn’t going to get any more from it.

He slid the diary back into its place, reached for the second file, and hit gold.

Death threats. Fourteen of them.

Chapter Forty-Nine

I
N THE THIN HOURS WHEN
S
ATURDAY GAVE WAY
to Sunday, Aldous Carstairs sat in his suite of rooms at the Truth Project, thinking. The building was utterly still, so still he could hear the scuffle of some small creature in the leaf mold outside the open window.

The American agent he’d spoken with that afternoon near the Peak was not the same man who had bumbled into his office two weeks before. This man had been sleek and intense and sure of himself, with nary a stumble or blank look in sight. Even his accent had grown sharper.

It was hard to credit, but it would appear that Harris Stuyvesant had been playing him along—him, Aldous Carstairs. Which was not only offensive, but troubling. What else had he missed, while distracted from the man’s true competence?

Before, he’d thought to make use of the man more for the satisfaction of crushing an insect than through any real need, but now, he had second thoughts. What he had seen as a minor amusement was, perhaps, a more urgent necessity.

He stretched out one arm for the telephone. “Mr. Snow? We may need to re-consider our strategy concerning Mr. Stuyvesant.”

When Stuyvesant laid eyes on Richard Bunsen Sunday morning, he thought, Funny, you don’t look like a man carrying around a file of death threats.

Instead, Bunsen looked like the cat who’d been at the cream. And when Laura came into the breakfast room a few minutes later and glanced at Bunsen with the same whisker-licking air about her, Stuyvesant knew why.

Had the man got an extra jolt of pleasure from the act by doing it while her father slept down the hall? Probably. Maybe he justified it as a form of the re-distribution of wealth. Bunsen stood at Laura’s entrance, poured her a cup of tea, took her hand, and turned it over to give the palm a lingering kiss.

Damn good thing her parents weren’t there to see that, Stuyvesant thought sourly; they’d have had little doubt about what had gone on under their roof last night.

He was grateful, too, that Bennett Grey had not been required to witness the possessive and sensual gesture, either.

The glow of self-satisfied energy from the other table made him feel very old and very tired; his shoulders and fist hurt from the fight, his spine ached from a night spent hunched over files, and his eyes felt as if someone had flicked sand in them. How long had it been since his last full night’s sleep?

But the game that he played had its own pleasures, and having Richard Bunsen in his sights was more invigorating than eight hours in the sack. He knew precisely where to step now; indeed, he’d already set things into motion.

The other people in the breakfast room were Gilbert Dubuque and his don friend Baxter, who had taken seats in the dimmest corner, muttering something to Stuyvesant about having to be in Oxford by noon: By the looks of things, they planned to float there on coffee. Dubuque had seen Bunsen’s bit with the hand and looked quickly away, but Stuyvesant finished his plate of bacon and eggs, picked up his half-full coffee cup, and headed over to the window table: big, blunt, a little pushy, but friendly as all get-out: Harris Stuyvesant, human Labrador retriever at your service.

“Ah, the merry warrior,” Bunsen said, not sounding altogether pleased at the intrusion.

Stuyvesant remained oblivious to the thread of rebuff. “You mind if I join you? Our friends over there are a little incoherent this morning.”

“Please,” Laura said, drawing herself into a hostess posture reminiscent of her mother.

“Can I get you anything, while I’m up? Your cup’s empty.”

“Thank you,” she told him, pushing it towards him.

He went to fill it, whistling a tune from the previous evening—“It Had to Be You,” he realized, remembering the honey scent of Sarah’s hair.

He placed the cup on the table in front of Laura Hurleigh, turning it by the saucer so the handle was pointing to her right hand. The swell of the thumb had a red patch on it, he noticed: Bunsen hadn’t just kissed the hand, he had given it a sharp little bite. But then, looking at those long, thin fingers picking up the little spoon, he reflected that hers was a hand he wouldn’t mind nibbling, himself.

“Haven’t seen Bennett yet this morning,” he told his companions. “He’ll probably be out ’til noon.”

“Laura tells me you’re a friend of Sarah’s brother?” This morning Bunsen’s eyes were a light olive color, and his shave was immaculate, his energy level undimmed by a long and no doubt energetic night. He looked at Stuyvesant with good humor and curiosity, as if he just couldn’t wait to see what this American would do next.

“That’s right, I met him a couple years ago, and I try to see him whenever I’m in the country. This is the first time I’ve known him to come out of Cornwall, however. He sure likes that place.”

“And you, you work selling motorcars?”

“Now I do, yeah. When I first started at Ford I was on assembly, then repairs, but after the War they had a fair number of vacancies, and I sure knew the cars inside out. So I bought a suit and interviewed for a job in one of their showrooms, and did pretty well there. I’d probably still be doing that except the English division was having some problems that lay sort of halfway between sales and service, and needed someone who knew both. I clean up good, so they sent me.”

The account he’d crafted sacrificed impeccable working-class credentials for a story that made his presence here believable—but Henry Ford wouldn’t have sent one of his dirty-handed mechanics over to England, so it had to be a compromise between worker and management. Like Bunsen himself, suspended between classes.

“But Sarah says that you’re considering a return to your beginnings.”

“My—oh yeah, as a mechanic. Nice to hear she’s been talking about me.” Bunsen’s complacency sagged just a touch, having had his dart turned back on him—he’d no doubt mentioned Sarah to illustrate how the young woman reported to him, not to suggest that she’d been gushing about a potential beau. “I like England, a whole lot. And I wouldn’t say this to everyone here, but I’m liking what your Unions are doing. The workers here seem to have considerably more clout than they do in the States. Between the Pinkertons, the cops, and the Feds, there’s little chance of getting together and presenting a united front. I hope our workers’re paying attention to what’s going on here.”

“Oh, I should think they are,” Bunsen said.

Stuyvesant lowered his voice. “Those kids last night, talking about being Strike volunteers for the O.M.S.?”

Bunsen’s face went dark and he drew his hands off the table and onto his lap, leaving Laura’s by themselves on the white cloth. “The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies,” he spat.

“I wanted to ask you—this is a government group of strike-breakers?”

“At root, that is its function, although it’s only semi-official. ‘Working with the government,’ they say.”

“Scabs, or vigilantes?”

“Both, and more. The O.M.S. is nothing less than legalized Fascism, prettied up by its ties to lords and retired admirals, all terribly respectable. It sounds as if you’ve had experience with strike-breakers.”

Now it was Stuyvesant’s turn to study his hands. He pulled out Helen’s cigarette case, and glanced up at Laura. “You mind?”

“Please do.”

He took out a cigarette and tamped it on the case a couple of times, acting hesitant as he prepared to play his card. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this—if it got back to my bosses I’d be well and truly done for. But you’re a friend of Sarah’s, and I think you’re on the side of the angels. So yeah, I know some things about strike-breakers. A couple years ago I took a few weeks off work to help out a buddy. I told my boss I’d broken a bone in my foot, but actually, I was standing in as a sort of bodyguard during a particularly, shall we say,
active
sort of a strike.”

“You mean a violent one?”

“It ended up that way. This was out in Washington State, logging problems that sound a little like what your miners are looking at now—profits are dropping, so take it out on the working man. This friend of mine was one of the organizers, and first he started getting death threats, then he heard a rumor that the owners had put a price on his head. His dead head, you understand? So I offered to stand around next to him and look big. I got him through the worst of it, but at the end he had to move on, because he had family and the owners were pretty upset. He didn’t need me any more, so I went back to Ford.”

“That must have seemed very dull,” Laura remarked.

He grinned. “Sure did. And it took some explaining how I’d managed to break my nose and get two spectacular black eyes while I was home nursing a broken foot.”

“Who was your friend?” Bunsen asked it mildly, as if the question was of no importance. However, Stuyvesant had felt the man tense up at the mention of death threats.

Stuyvesant told him the name, and Bunsen blinked. “You were involved in that strike?”

“Only at the end. And a few weeks later he got himself arrested anyway, so there wasn’t much more I could do for him.”

And it was true, pretty much every word, once you left the Ford company out of it. He’d befriended a prominent Union official and acted as bodyguard in a series of violent strikes in 1923; he’d spirited the man’s family out of harm’s way, taken a beating for him, and then been far away when the Bureau raid had picked the man up, right where Stuyvesant’s information had placed him. Bunsen could send a dozen telegrams to his American Union friends, and every one of them would confirm that this Wobbly leader had been protected for a while by a big, blue-eyed New Yorker named Harris Smith.

It had been one of Stuyvesant’s more successful operations.

And now Bunsen and Laura Hurleigh were both looking at him with speculation in their eyes. He gazed back at them, a large, friendly, competent man who’d just laid his cards on the table; the next move had to be theirs.

Bunsen’s move was to pick up his cup, drain the last drops, and stand, sticking his hand across the table at Stuyvesant.

“It’s been interesting to meet you, Mr. Stuyvesant, but I need to have a word with Lord Hurleigh, and after that, events are calling me to London. I hope to meet again, soon.”

Sooner than you imagine, bud,
Stuyvesant said to himself. “Are you going, too, Miss Hurleigh?”

“No, I won’t be going back until tomorrow morning, so I shall see you later today.”

He watched them leave the morning room, Bunsen striding in confidence, Laura following behind. He’d have given a lot to know what they needed to talk to the Duke about.

Since he couldn’t think of a way to find out, he wandered outside and, as he’d expected, found Bunsen’s motor standing in the drive. Jimmy the driver was resting his backside against the car, reading a newspaper—not, he noticed with amusement, the
Workers’ Weekly,
but a racing sheet.

“Morning,” he said to the man. “You Bunsen’s driver?”

The paper came down a fraction as the man scowled at him and grunted a response. Stuyvesant introduced himself, thrust his hand under the man’s nose so he couldn’t avoid shaking it, then asked him if he’d ever had any problems with his gas filters.

“Can’t say as I have,” the driver said. So Stuyvesant reeled off a long story about how the Ford company had received a number of complaints about their filter in England, and it had occurred to him that maybe the gas—or petrol—here was different, somehow, and he wondered if the driver had ever heard of that.

The man was patently less interested in fuel filters than the contents of his racing paper. After waffling on for a while, Stuyvesant let him get back to it.

Not a bodyguard, or even a guard in general, and for sure not much of a mechanic: Jimmy was a driver, period. Which meant he wouldn’t notice the little modification Stuyvesant had made to the wires from the spark-plug coil the night before, until it was too late.

As he walked back towards the barn, Gallagher emerged from the house with a folded note on a silver tray. “Telephone message for you, sir. The gentleman did not wish to wait for me to find you.”

Stuyvesant didn’t imagine he would, with a houseful of servants and half a dozen exchange operators listening in—he’d been pretty cautious, when he’d phoned Carstairs’ number early that morning, about his own end of the conversation. Fortunately, the voice on the other end of the line had understood the purpose of cautious wording, and merely said he would pass the message on. He took the precisely folded half-sheet of paper from the tray and read:

Yes
.

The bells of the Hurleigh chapel clanged at precisely ten o’clock. The doors closed against the spectacular spring morning, the small procession followed the cross up the aisle, and the assembled Hurleigh party, washed, polished, and in various degrees of hangover, prepared to meet their God.

Not Harris Stuyvesant. He was a Roman Catholic, after all, and no more expected in the chapel than if his name had been Jacob Cohen.

Instead, Stuyvesant walked up the path that led to the Peak, whistling softly. At the place where the path opened out, the place where Bennett Grey had stared into the woods the day before, he turned right, through the trees. He avoided as many of the soft, knee-high flowers as he could, although they were thick on the ground.