Touchstone (7 page)

Kowalsky was blown to pieces and The Padre took a bullet through the helmet when he poked his head over the parapet, and Tim…

The memory-moment held him, and his men were there, all of them whole and safe and immortal, while he brewed up coffee, in a calm moment, in the trenches.

Chapter Eight

S
TUYVESANT BLINKED.
The sandbagged walls vanished, replaced by a clean, dry, old-fashioned kitchen in the south of England. Boy, he thought, haven’t had a visitation of the past that strong in a long time. He pushed away the inevitable creeping sensation down the back of his neck and glanced at his companion, but Grey hadn’t noticed that his visitor was briefly out of the room. Where had the conversation got to? Oh yeah—work.

“Like I say, most of my cases have to do with Unions. This last year, I’ve been trying to run to earth rumors of what you might call outside consultation among the agitators. I mean, radicals are always a pain in the ass, but lately it’s more than that. You get to know your enemy, don’t you? How they think, what they can and can’t do. But recently our home-grown troublemakers have been coming up with things they’ve never thought of before, clever and politically savvy and ruthless—terrorism, planned and targeted, not just their usual outburst, hitting out at authority.”

“For example?”

“Okay, for example. Two months ago last week we just happened to foil a bomb plot. Absolute blind luck, checking a hotel room that’d already been gone over when the lead guy happened to notice one of the bottles on the drink stand was in a different place from the night before. And very fortunately, he used his eyes before he used his hands, and saw a tiny stub of freshly cut copper wire sticking out from under the edge of that bottle. If he’d picked it up, several ounces of gelignite—you know what that is? Nice, stable, simple-to-use form of nitroglycerine?—anyway, quite a wad of it, packed inside a couple pounds of roofing nails that might’ve gone off at knee level. If he hadn’t spotted it, the bottle would have been picked up about an hour later, when a Senator offered a drink to a couple of bank presidents, three Congressmen, two other Senators, and the Bureau Director.”

No need to mention that when the bomb squad had gotten there, they’d found the device was a dud, that with the last push of the wires into their housing, one small connection had come awry. The bomb was real, the gelignite active: so what if later it was anticlimactic?

“They were there to discuss ways to infiltrate Bolshevik groups in factories. The meeting had been written about in the papers, but the hotel they were meeting in was only announced three days before. That’s damned fast work.”

“Lucky man, to spot the bomb.”

“Boy, you’re right there.”

“That was you, wasn’t it?”

Stuyvesant’s jaw dropped. “How’d you guess that?”

“Did you find who put it there?”

“The Bureau is hunting for one of the hotel maids who didn’t show up for work the next day and—” Stuyvesant broke off, realizing that, chatter or not, he had gotten enormously sidetracked here. “You don’t really want to know all this, do you?”

“Not particularly. Although I think you want to tell me.”

It was such an odd thing to say, Stuyvesant could only stare at him. But damn it, the man was right. It was dead stupid to dump the whole story on a perfect stranger, but yes, he did want to talk. He’d always found it easier to see the details of a case when he’d hashed it over with someone. But the nearest thing to a partner was on the other side of a lot of ocean, and who was this guy going to blab to, anyway, the pigs? Simpleton Robbie?

Not that he was here because of anything resembling a case. This trip Carstairs pushed him into was going to be a complete waste of time anyway, he knew it. Hell, the whole English venture was nuts; he’d have been better off setting a match to so many dollar bills and waiting for The Bastard to return to New York, when he could just plant some evidence on him like any sane man would. But instead he’d done it right and he’d played along, and now he was stuck with four hours to kill until Carstairs came back. Why not throw up his hands and talk about it? It might help him think, and it was better than sitting here staring at the walls.

“Okay. Well, like I said, the maid had vamoosed—packed her bags and left her apartment, and the Bureau has a call out for her across the country.”

“They think she did it?”

“No—for one thing, she’d worked there over a year, too long just to set this up. It looked like the girl was only a maid, with nothing about her to suggest she could build a thing like that—the device was a real work of art: well thought out as to the timing, enough gelignite to make sure nobody in that room walked away. But the girl had been seen at one or two Communist meetings, and we figured someone had to open the door for the bomber.

“One witness said she’d been talking with a man, earlier that day. The description the witness gave was pretty useless—slim, slicked-down hair, smoky glasses, thin moustache—but one of the girl’s neighbors had seen her a day or two earlier with a man who fit the same description, guy with an English accent. We figured she’d let him in to set the bomb, then either ran away with him, or heard what he’d done and got scared and took off on her own. She was foreign—Mexico, maybe Central America.

“Now, in and of itself, an English accent doesn’t tell us much—half the men in New York have an accent of some kind—but it was a thing I’d heard before, an Englishman in the vicinity of a clever device. So I took the description and I—”

“What were the other devices?” Grey interrupted to ask.

Again Stuyvesant hesitated; again he shrugged, and told him about the fire that had started it all.

“Last summer, a number of us Bureau agents were in Chicago, helping the local force with some agitators, when somebody had the bright idea of holding a raid. And not just a raid, but they thought it would be good to give the Reds warning, to give them time to clear out. Make ’em look like cowards, you know?

“Of course, Reds are more likely to want martyrdom than to save their skin, and what the warning gave them was time to summon a mob. However, the cops had said they were going to do a raid, so they did the raid, broke down the door and started hauling people away. And it would have been okay, since there were plenty of cops on hand to keep the mob under control, but before they got the house cleared, a fire broke out in the kitchen, on the middle floor. And unfortuantely, one young woman had gone back upstairs to get her coat, and when the whole center floor went up in flames, she had no place to go but up, and finally off the roof. Margery Anne Wallingford was her name. She died. The mob watched it happen, blamed the cops, a riot started up, half the city began to beat on each other’s heads.”

Stuyvesant kept his voice even, but it took some effort. He took a steadying breath, and went on.

“When the riot was over and the coals were cool, we went sifting through them for evidence that they’d been assembling bombs and set one off, on purpose or by accident, but we didn’t find any other equipment. Which may have meant they’d just had the one that they’d intended to set elsewhere, but when I talked to the Reds they’d arrested, one of them happened to mention a box of groceries that had been delivered earlier that day. He’d just carried it up and left it on the kitchen table, because who had time for groceries when a raid was coming?

“Tell you the truth, the whole thing was damn confusing. I might’ve thought there was some rival group, except that this bunch had so many internal disputes they were beginning to break into factions, anyway. I spent a long time digging around to see if this particular crew had stepped on the toes of some Comrades, but I couldn’t find anything. But if not rivals, why would the Reds burn down their own house? It couldn’t have been an accident—if the bomb was intended for elsewhere, they had all the time in the world to get rid of the thing before the raid. And if they’d meant it as a trap to kill cops, the timing and the location were both rotten.”

“You don’t entertain the thought that the girl chose deliberately to go into the fire?”

“Martyrdom to rally the cause? If there’d been more noise around it, I’d have wondered, but there wasn’t, not even a letter.

“My nasty suspicious mind even began to wonder if it had started as a fake, designed to play on public sympathy—you know, evil cops setting fire to honest Communists’ headquarters. In that case, only the leaders would have been in on it, and once they were in the paddy wagon there was no one to stop the girl from going up for her coat.

“The one thing I did find was the kid who’d delivered the box of groceries. He’d been stopped on the street and given a quarter to take it to an address, that was all he knew. By an Englishman with a moustache.

“Okay, that was last July. Then in November, a hard-guy judge in Cranston was about to present a key ruling on a Union dispute, and he got in his car to drive to work one morning—driving himself that day, as his driver had called in sick—and half a mile down the road, the car burst into flames. He was quicker than you’d guess, looking at him, and scrambled out with nothing worse than blisters all up his back, but it was a close thing. We figured that one was in a china doll sitting on the back seat—he had a granddaughter, no doubt thought it was hers until
whoosh,
up it went.

“We had no reason to think it had anything to do with the July bomb, you understand, except they were two incendiary devices, which may have been placed inside everyday objects.

“And in January, my bottle bomb, as nice a piece of death-dealing as you could ask for. Three
booms,
three innocuous settings, two Englishmen, nothing to tie them together but one agent’s suspicious mind.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

Stuyvesant glanced over his shoulder. “Sorry?”

“Mr. Stuyvesant, your voice drips with the memory of blood. Why is that?”

“Bombs are bloody things.”

“There is a personal element in your intonation.”

Stuyvesant went to the cupboard for two cups, came back to the sink, and set them beside the coffee. “I don’t talk about my personal life.”

“If you want my help, you had better change that policy.”

“It’s nothing to do with the investigation.” Not really.

“Nonetheless.”

Son of a bitch. Damn Carstairs, anyway. Stuyvesant leaned both hands on the tiled surface and spoke to the window.

“That riot, last July? My kid brother got caught up in it. Tim’s fourteen years younger than me and our dad died when he was five, so I’ve always been more like a father than a brother. He’s followed on my heels since he could crawl, enlisted when he was still just sixteen—lied about his age—and showed up on the Front six months after I did. I didn’t even try to get him sent home, just tucked him under my wing and kept him from doing anything too stupid. After the War, I made him go to college. And when he graduated and wanted to follow me into the Bureau, I kept an eye on him there, too. Just…not close enough.

“He was off duty when the riot started up, but he knew I was out of town so he went to help out and got caught up in it. Nearest doctors could figure, he got knocked down and someone kicked him in the head. He lived, sort of. He can sometimes remember his wife’s name.”

Stuyvesant turned around to look at the other man.

“So yeah. I’d say there’s a personal element in my goddamned intonation.”

Chapter Nine

T
HE SILENCE HELD
for a minute, then Grey said, “I’m sorry.”

Sorry about Tim or sorry to have asked? “Yeah, well, these things happen.”

“And you say you feel that bomb was linked to the others.”

“I did.” Stuyvesant shook off the guilt and grief that rode his days, and gave the coffee a stir. “Where was I? Oh yeah, the Englishman. I took the description we had and compared it to passenger manifests, to and from England, at the dates involved. And eventually I narrowed it down to one man.”

“Sounds like a lot of work.”

“Understatement of the year.”

It had been a ridiculous amount of work, and of the kind Stuyvesant was least suited for—his forte was fists, not files. The worst of it was, because his boss thought he had a bee in his bonnet, most of it needed to be done in his off hours. First combing through what seemed like a thousand manifests covering the periods before and after the three incidents, poring over fine print by his desk lamp, looking for men with British passports traveling alone.

And he’d found them—a lot of them, but he’d gradually eliminated the possibilities down to a small handful of names, and then one, who had traveled in a first class cabin in July and January, and by second class in November. It took him another two weeks to track down the pursers for all three voyages, but when he did, the July employee gave Stuyvesant his first slim break: a group photo from the passage in July that included a man who more or less matched the description.

When he’d taken that photo to the January ship’s purser, the man had said yes, it looked like the same man. The November purser disagreed; however, it turned out that crossing had been rough, and the man in the second class cabin had stayed in bed most of the time, groaning and ill. The hotel maid’s friend said maybe, could be, hard to tell. The boy who’d carried the groceries in Chicago had been positive.

The passenger’s name was Richard Bunsen. A few phone calls, and he’d decided it was The Bastard’s real name.

The Director needed more than that to set an international investigation under way. But when Stuyvesant gave him more, when he described just who Bunsen was, Hoover had practically laughed him out of the office. And J. Edgar had a point: Why would an Englishman cross the ocean to bomb Americans, anyway? Were they talking about some international mastermind?

Stuyvesant had to admit it was unlikely. But he was haunted by that easy, self-satisfied face in the shipboard photo, and he’d been an agent long enough to know that motive was often the last piece of an investigation that fell into place. Hoover wasn’t convinced, but in the end he’d given way, and the Bureau had shelled out fifty bucks for the ticket, though nothing more. So here was Harris Stuyvesant, at the end of the world, listening to the sound of his savings going up in smoke.

“I couldn’t find much about him, but enough to suggest that one of the names he’d traveled under had been his own, and he was indeed English. So, long story short, some of us talked it over and decided it was high time for our two countries to pool our knowledge, and I drew the short straw to—”

“Mr. Stuyvesant,” Grey broke in, the cold edge back in his voice. “If you can’t give this to me straight, leave. Now.”

Stuyvesant felt a surge of anger, but the look in those green eyes had him turning his back to stir the coffee again. Okay, fine, more white lies, but what was he supposed to say? That he’d set himself on Bunsen’s trail because his pretty young sister-in-law had cried all over his shirt-front until he’d sworn to find the man responsible? That he’d come because he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing Tim’s slack features? That every time he looked at the scars zig-zagging over the kid’s head, he saw Helen’s features beneath them?

That it should have been him, there in that riot, not Tim?

“Okay, yeah. Carstairs doesn’t know this, but it’s true, my presence here is not a hundred percent official. You see, the Bureau’s Director and I, we had a little falling out about where the investigation was going. He’s got what you might call a personal interest, since it was him who would’ve got blown up in that room.

“I know what you’re thinking—that he ought to be kissing my feet that I saw the wire. And he is, or he’d have fired me flat instead of buying me a ticket for a little vacation. He thinks I’m going the wrong way with it. That I’m following…chance coincidences.”

Grey raised his head, distracted from the headache by that tiny pause. He listened to the echoes and saw the sudden rigidity in the man’s neck: The American was hiding something.

“Tell me about those chance coincidences.”

“There aren’t any.”

“Stuyvesant—”

“No.”

Grey sat slowly back, trying to ignore the throb of his pulse inside his skull. With that one flat word, the tension had gone clear out of the big man.
Kick me out if you must,
the American might as well have said aloud,
but I’m simply not giving you that.

It would do Grey no good to press, that he could see. The line was drawn in the other man’s mind, and he would not cross it, not if Grey offered to serve his enemy up on a platter.

Open refusal was a thing Grey could live with.

“So, you and your Director had a falling out.”

Stuyvesant blinked. A clear lie, and Grey hadn’t caught it. After a moment, his stirring arm began to move again. “Yeah, we agreed to disagree. Of course, the Bureau’s got exactly no authority overseas anyways, so even if I
was
here officially, it wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel. But over the years I’ve made low friends in high places, and one of them arranged for me to be attached to the ambassador’s office here as a kind of advisor, for when I need some kind of official status. I’ve still got no weight to throw around, but at this point I’m after information, not an arrest.”

“The coffee sieve’s in the drawer.”

Stuyvesant found the sieve he hadn’t realized he was looking for, and set it over the first cup. “I arrived in London on April 1—which turned out to be appropriate, considering the fool’s game I’ve been playing—and spent last week working my way through one office after another, but nobody’d heard of any bombs set in clever containers, and nobody wanted to listen to my ideas. Of course, I didn’t exactly choose the best time for it, considering how every pencil pusher in the country has his eye on the Strike and nothing but the Strike.” He hesitated with the coffee pot suspended over the cup to glance at Grey. “I assume you do know about the Strike?”

“‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day.’ The coal subsidy expires on the thirtieth, and the mine owners swear they will lock the workers out. Churchill’s ministry want revenge for being forced to give way last summer, the miners demand a living wage at their present hours, the Bolsheviks threaten blood running in the streets, and the right-wing are maneuvering to outlaw the Left entirely. Both sides are dug in and obstinate, both sides hate the other. If all the Trades Unions go out as they’re promising, there will be no trains; no buses; no coal dug, moved, or delivered; no newspapers; limited electricity; and only the most basic of foodstuffs. Do I have the gist of it?”

“That’s the picture that I have,” Stuyvesant agreed.

“The newspapers have tried to appear sanguine, but reading between the lines, and listening to the voices on the wireless, there is already considerable disruption.”

The understatement startled a laugh out of Stuyvesant. “You ain’t kidding, Jack. London feels like some fire-and-brimstone preacher’s End of the World, like there’s a volcano building under the city and everyone’s tip-toeing around on the crust. Half the people think the Army will shove the miners back into their box at bayonet-point; the other half expect to see children starving on the streets and politicians dangling by their neckties from Westminster Bridge.”

“It’s been coming for years,” Grey said. “When the government agreed to extend the coal subsidies in August, the press heaped fury on their heads. At this point, the two sides are implacable enemies: The working class wants to topple the governing class to its knees, while the ruling class wants nothing short of utter defeat and demoralization of the worker. The middle classes could go either way—one compelling act, or one repellent outrage, and the battle is won.”

Stuyvesant shook his head. “And two weeks ago on the boat over I was thinking this Strike would be a tempest in a teacup, that I’d be in and out before the deadline came anywhere near. Instead, I’ve had to fight to see the assistants to the assistants, and even then they gave me distracted hums and haws and a cup of tea and here’s your hat—I’ve drunk more tea in the last ten days than in the forty years before. When I stumbled across Carstairs on Friday and told my story for what seemed like the hundredth time, I’d begun to think maybe this idea of some international conspiracy was just a brain-wave and everyone was too damned polite to tell me I’d gone crackers.”

He laid the sieve in the sink and looked around for an ice-box, finding instead a zinc-lined box with a jug of milk in it, which he took out, smelled for freshness, and put on the table.

“Now, I don’t know what agency Carstairs is with, since he didn’t exactly have a brass plate on his door, but it doesn’t much matter because nobody in law enforcement or Intelligence ever wants to share information—and for sure with someone from another country. What, admit we got problems? No, sir, everything’s just hunky-dory on
this
side of the Atlantic, thank you very much, and if you’ve got troubles, you can’t blame us, now please go away.

“So with Carstairs, I went through my speech, like I said, for the umpteenth time and waited to be shown the door with that English politeness that’s like a stiletto in a bouquet of roses, but he just looked at me with those black eyes of his, and then he said, ‘I might know what you are looking for.’ I nearly fell over backwards.” The big man carried the two cups to the table, along with the sugar pot and a couple of (yes, silver) spoons. He sat down, spooned in the sugar, stirred, and sipped: almost cold, what with all the gabbing.

“’Course, even then nothing happened too fast. He sent me away, told me to meet him in Hyde Park the next morning, and seems to’ve spent the hours in between checking my
bona fides.
And the next day, instead of telling me what I’d asked about, he said he wanted me to meet a man who could tell gold from gilt at a touch. His words. Which was just about all he’d say, except that you might be a link in the chain, and he’d give me more details after I’d met you. Oh, and like I said, that you weren’t a mind-reader.”

Grey stirred milk into his cup and said thoughtfully, “Gold from gilt.”

“Yeah. Frankly, I don’t know what that’s got to do with anything, although I imagine it would be a handy skill.”

“Not a mind-reader,” Grey said, still stuck on Carstairs’ words. Stuyvesant couldn’t tell if Grey was surprised because he would not have expected the judgment from Carstairs, or because he couldn’t believe he was discussing the subject at all. Whichever it was, it seemed to help him make up his mind. “On the other hand…” he said, and stretched his arm across the table, palm up. “Let me have your cigarette case.”

Obediently, the American took the slim silver object from his breast pocket and placed it on the callused palm. Fingers stained and rough with labor closed over it.

Not that hard use had made the hands clumsy. The fingers turned the object over and over twice, like a bar of wet soap, then worked the fastening at the bottom. The lid popped open, revealing the cigarettes, all but one of which were from a packet Stuyvesant had bought at the train station in London the day before. Grey ran the contents under his nose, then closed the cover. He flipped the case over and his work-thickened thumb-nail sought out the invisible, hair’s-breadth seam along the back. Stuyvesant raised an eyebrow as the back of the case came open. Grey glanced at the folded white paper tucked within, then pinched the cover shut without touching the contents and laid the case on the table.

“A woman gave this to you, ten or twelve years ago. A short, blonde, intelligent young woman with a quirky sense of humor. You loved her. She died. The hidden compartment holds her photograph, although she didn’t give it to you. You took the case to war with you, carrying it over your heart then as you do now. When you left New York you were in a hurry, and did not think to bring a supply of your favorite cigarettes. You have just a few left. You bought these others in London, probably at the train station.

“Shall I go on?”