The House of Special Purpose Read online

  ‘Prospect Hill?’ said Jane. ‘Not much in the way of prospects here.’

  Hennessy put the car in gear again and slowly moved forward as Jane unfolded the map. The main roads of the cemetery were lit like city streets.

  ‘Sounds like a bunch of neighbourhoods in Boston,’ said Jane, reading from the map. ‘Hickory Hill, Tulip Grove, Greenwood Shade. Beacon Hill, Pleasant Hill, Oak Hill. Lots of Hills.’

  Fifty feet beyond the administration building rose a low hill thinly planted with trees and heavily planted with headstones. A one-lane pea-gravel road ran around the base of the hill. On their right was a sign that read CELESTIAL HILL #2 even though there was no visible hill. The stones here all had Chinese characters on them.

  Coming around the wall side of the hill they saw their destination. Halfway up the low rise several lights had been set up and there was the sound of a generator running. Half a dozen men were gathered around a single grave site watching as two heavyset workers, already dug down to their waists, were digging up Robert Sheldon Harte.

  They climbed out of the Saratoga and headed slowly up the hill, Hennessy and Jane in the lead, Fleming and Black behind them.

  ‘We’re going to need pictures,’ said Fleming.

  ‘You should have brought a camera, then,’ Jane answered, looking back over her shoulder. Fleming reached into his pocket and handed her something that looked like a small silver ingot.

  ‘A Minox Riga,’ she said, surprised. She’d wanted one of the little cameras since they were introduced in the United States two years before but she’d never thought of a good enough reason to lay out the eighty bucks.

  ‘F three-point-five with a fifteen-millimetre lens. Shutter speed from half a second to one one-thousandth. I’m particularly interested in his teeth.’

  ‘Do I get to keep the camera?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fleming. ‘I want you to take it with you to Mexico City. I’ll give you some extra cartridges of film and the name of a place where the film you shoot tonight can be developed. It might be useful in dealing with Mercador.’

  Jane nodded. ‘All right.’ She took the subminiature camera and slipped it into the pocket of her now rather wrinkled blazer. She stared up at the group of men and the bright lights set up around the grave. Her seafood dinner began to protest a little but she swallowed hard and kept pace with Hennessy.

  They reached the top of the hill, the generator puffing and popping away, the two gravediggers still throwing up clods of earth. Jane tried not to think about her sister but it was hard not to. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath of the cool night air. Including the gravediggers, there were seven men at the gravesite and three men with her. Ten against one. There was no way in hell she was going to sick up in front of all that maleness.

  The men around the grave were introduced. Two were uniforms, one was the local precinct captain for the district, while the fourth man was Dr Potts, Robert Sheldon Harte’s dentist, who was carrying a small black doctor’s bag and scowling. The last man was an appropriately cadaverous figure dressed entirely in black whose name was Hiram Smelkhurst, one of the cemetery trustees, there to see that his helpless client wasn’t put to any more distress than was necessary.

  ‘Utter foolishness,’ said Potts, his hands jammed into his overcoat pockets. ‘Known the family for years.’

  ‘He’s been going on like this for an hour,’ Morrison, the precinct captain, commented. ‘Sadly, there’s no law against running your mouth in the middle of the night.’ He glanced at Jane. ‘Who’s the bimbo?’

  ‘The bimbo, as you call her, is with me, Captain,’ said Hennessy, his jaw tightening. ‘And she deserves a little respect if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Morrison grinned brightly. ‘I didn’t know they were going in for carpet munchers downtown.’

  Hennessy looked ready to launch a fist into the man’s face but Jane knew how much damage something like that could do to his career, no matter how many strings he was capable of pulling. She put a hand on her friend’s arm.

  ‘Forget it, Dan. The mutt’s harmless.’

  Morrison started to go red in the face and Jane turned away to look at Harte’s headstone.

  Robert Sheldon Harte

  April 12, 1915–May 29, 1940

  Died for His Beliefs

  Above the inscription was a deeply carved hammer and sickle.

  ‘Only twenty-five,’ said Jane.

  Fleming sneered. ‘If I’m right the little bugger’s already celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday. Probably somewhere in the Kremlin, being toasted by Stalin and Beria with some cheap Bulgarian version of champagne.’

  From deep within the hole came a hollow thump and then a scraping sound as the gravediggers cleared away the last of the earth from the top of the coffin. A few more clods of earth were tossed up onto the pile. Jane stepped forward and peered into the open grave. The two men were pushing a pair of worn canvas straps underneath the plain varnished box. When they were done, they flipped the four ends of the straps up out of the grave and climbed up themselves.

  Morrison gestured to the two uniforms. ‘Jiggs, Kelly, grab an end.’

  The two men stepped forward and grabbed one end of a strap while the two others picked up the other pair. At a nod from one of the gravediggers the four men began to pull and step backward at the same time, raising the casket out of the ground with a faint sucking noise. Straining, they brought the box up to the surface and then at another command from the gravedigger they began shuffling sideways, bringing the casket to the far end of the grave, then lowering it to the ground.

  Everyone instinctively moved back from the earth-clotted box except for Smelkhurst, who stepped forward and used some kind of universal key to undo the half dozen wing nuts that kept the lid screwed down. When he was done, he gestured to the gravediggers, one of whom stepped up and took a long-handled chisel out of the back pocket of his overalls. Using the heel of his palm he rammed the thick blade between the lid and the casket proper, then pushed up, repeating the motion half a dozen times as he moved slowly around the casket.

  ‘Done,’ he said. The second gravedigger came around the other side of the box and both men grabbed the underlip of the lid and pulled upward. The top of the casket came off and they laid it aside. ‘All yours, gentlemen,’ said one of the gravediggers. He looked across at Jane and grinned broadly, showing a three-toothed gap in his face. ‘Lady.’

  Nobody moved so Jane stepped forward, taking the Minox out of her pocket, cocking the camera like an automatic pistol to advance the film. She looked down into the coffin, bringing the viewfinder up to her eye, knowing that seeing the body in the coffin through the viewfinder of a camera would somehow reduce the horror a little.

  But not much. What was inside the box was little more than a few bones swimming around in a grey-green gelatinous soup made up of rotted maggots and other insect castings mixed with rotted clothing, jutting sticks of reddish bone and a hank of hair to mark where the head had been. Most of the teeth had been eaten away along with the major part of the jaw and the skull itself. Gruesomely, winking brightly in the harsh white light from above, was the flashing shape of a gold molar.

  The smell coming from the box was foul but nothing more than that of some animal dead through the winter and revealed in the spring. Jane held her breath and clicked off one exposure after another, both close up and from a distance, panning from the ruined head down to the non-existent toes to get a complete array of the casket’s contents. Finally she was done, the camera empty.

  ‘Are you quite done?’ asked Potts, the dentist.

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Jane, stepping back out of the way. Potts shuffled up to the coffin, glanced in and frowned.

  ‘There is a great deal more decomposition than I would have expected.’

  ‘Jewish law forbids embalming,’ said Black.

  Smelkhurst gave a sombre nod. ‘Although the young Mr Harte was not a regular practitioner of his faith, his father insist
ed on a traditional burial. As that tradition requires, the headstone was also kept covered for the requisite nine months. I must say we were quite surprised at the, um, decoration on the headpiece.’

  ‘Well, this damn headpiece is all wrong.’ Potts opened up his little black bag, pulled out what looked like an ordinary pair of long-nosed pliers and got down on his knees beside the coffin, first covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief. He reached down with the pliers, dug around in the glutinous remains of the mouth and brought up the glittering gold molar. He held it up so everyone could see.

  ‘What do you see?’ he asked.

  ‘A gold molar,’ said Jane.

  ‘Third lower right to be specific,’ Potts instructed. ‘The crown suggests that it was designed for a tooth with two roots rather than three.’

  ‘So what?’ said Hennessy, keeping his eyes on the gold rather than the contents of the coffin.

  ‘So what?’ said Potts, indignant. ‘Because I was Robert Sheldon Harte’s dentist for the last ten years and I certainly never put a gold third lower right molar into the boy’s jaw, or any kind of gold tooth at all, and I have the X-rays in my bag to prove it.’ He used the pliers to point down at the suppurating mess beside him. Reaching into the bag again, he brought out a jeweller’s loupe, removed his spectacles and screwed the loupe into his right eye socket. He held the tooth up to the loupe and examined it for a moment, then popped the loupe out and put his glasses back on. ‘The workmanship is quite poor and the gold has a distinct red cast to it. I would say the gold is Mexican. I saw Sheldon less than two weeks before he went off on his adventures. There was nothing wrong with his molars then. At any rate, this is definitely not the remains of Robert Sheldon Harte. That headstone is a fraud.’

  Chapter Ten

  Monday, November 24, 1941

  Portland, Maine

  Vassili Zarubin sat at the bar in the Falmouth Hotel Cocktail Lounge and listened to a tired-looking sextet trying to imitate Glenn Miller doing ‘In the Mood.’ Before that it had been ersatz Tommy Dorsey doing ‘All the Things You Are’ and a very pale version of ‘Dream Valley’ by Sammy Kaye. The four sleepy couples out on the small dance floor were mostly in their late thirties and dressed for a night out. Apparently in Portland, Maine, the Falmouth Cocktail Lounge was the best there was on a Monday night.

  The Russian espionage agent scrubbed at his face with both hands, yawned and lit another cigarette. He waved a finger at the tuxedoed bartender and pointed to his empty glass. A few moments later the silent man appeared with a fresh Maker’s Mark on the rocks and whisked away the empty all in one motion. Zarubin took a small appreciative sip and reminded himself not to drink too much; the night was far from over and he needed his wits about him.

  Watts, his contact at Donovan’s supposedly top secret training school in Fairfax, had called him at the embassy that morning, giving him the single code word Shakespeare, which meant that his cover had been blown and that he was in need of assistance. Zarubin gave the appropriate response and then hung up. From that point on everything became automatic.

  Zarubin’s response to Watts, or James Maddox, was one of seven different possibilities. This particular plan, ‘Pencil,’ called for Maddox to fly out of Washington on the first available flight to either New York or Boston, whichever came first. A car would be waiting for him at both airports, which he would then drive north to Portland. When he arrived he was to book himself into one of the tourist camps on the outskirts of the small city. At midnight he was to drive into the downtown area, park in front of the Falmouth and wait for Zarubin to appear.

  Immediately after receiving the call from Maddox, Zarubin had begun making his own preparations for the trip north; Maddox knew far too much, including the names of several other illegals within Donovan’s group and more than one of Zarubin’s people in New York. Worse, his capture could easily upset the trail he was following to capture the elusive Comrade Levitsky and his damning evidence.

  He had to be whisked away before there was the slightest chance of his being quizzed. Only the day before he’d received a coded cable from London advising him that Morris Black, the ex-Scotland Yard detective who’d suddenly appeared with Fleming and the unidentified woman, had previously headed up the Interrogation Division of the SOE training school at Beaulieu Abbey.

  Zarubin checked his watch. Ten to twelve. If he knew Maddox, the man’s nerves would be wire taut and he’d be in place outside on Middle Street. The Russian shook his head – a nervous-looking man sitting alone in a car at midnight. The first policeman passing by would be instantly suspicious. He waved for the bartender again, paid his tab and drained away the last of the Maker’s Mark. Taking a last puff on his cigarette, he stubbed it out in the ashtray and climbed off his bar stool. He shrugged on his overcoat and his favourite hat, a battered centre-dent Panama. The little group squeezed onto the tiny bandstand did a jerky swing into Jimmy Dorsey’s ‘Green Eyes’ and Zarubin left the cocktail lounge with no regrets and a slight headache.

  Stepping out in the cool night air, he saw a pair of headlights flashing at the end of the block. He walked down the sidewalk to the corner of Cross Street and the lights flashed again. It was Maddox, sitting behind the wheel of a big Roadmaster Trunkback in a nice unobtrusive banana yellow. He’d have to have a little chat with whoever had arranged that.

  Zarubin opened the passenger-side door and slid into the car. Maddox looked as though he was about to have a heart attack. Beads of sweat glistened in the thinning hair at his temples and his face was the colour of old cheese.

  ‘You look nervous, Watts.’

  ‘Of course I’m nervous. They’re on to me. It’s all ruined.’

  The other man’s voice was cracked and dry. Usually the epitome of enlightened superiority, he now sounded like his new persona, the fleeing criminal at his wits’ end and terrified, willing to grasp at any straw.

  Zarubin was unperturbed by the man’s broken emotional state. He’d inherited this man from the previous Rezident and had never trusted his stability. ‘Tell me how you know this but first tell me if you were followed at any time.’

  ‘No. I took all the usual precautions.’

  ‘You saw nothing out of the ordinary?’

  ‘No. I did exactly what I was supposed to do. The first flight out was to New York. The car was waiting by the time I arrived and I drove the rest of the way.’

  Zarubin knew the first flight out was to New York because he’d checked it himself before leaving Washington. ‘And nobody followed?’

  ‘No, I’m sure of it.’

  He was wrong, of course. Maddox had been picked up by two of Zarubin’s own people even before he left the terminal at La Guardia. Had he been followed or otherwise interfered with Zarubin’s men would have dealt with the situation. As it was they were now down at the boat, waiting with the woman.

  ‘All right. Now tell me why you think they were suddenly “on to you”?’

  ‘Because the Englishman and the woman were all wrong. Since I’ve been there no one has ever taken a one-day course and certainly no women. The only women in COI are secretaries and cryptographers. No one who’d need training for overseas assignments. They were sent in looking for someone. I couldn’t take the chance.’

  ‘You don’t think you acted a little precipitously? It might have been nothing. What do you Americans call it, “a fishing expedition”?’

  ‘I couldn’t take the risk. I’m too high up in the party to be caught.’

  The possibility that anyone in the Communist Party of the United States, including Browder, its leader, was too high up was laughable but as an NKVD asset Maddox was right. A problem, however, that was about to be solved by his swift removal.

  Zarubin changed course suddenly. He didn’t want Maddox to think too long or too hard. ‘The woman with this Morris Black, the Englishman. Do you have any idea who she really is?’

  ‘No. Her accent is New York but she was tanned, as though she’d spent time i
n Florida or perhaps California.’

  ‘A professional. Police?’

  ‘No, I’m almost sure of that.’

  ‘All right,’ said Zarubin. ‘It’s none of your concern now.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ asked the frightened ex-professor.

  ‘We’re going to chop you up and feed you to Comrade Beria in little pieces,’ said Zarubin.

  Maddox looked horrified, the cheesy caste of his complexion turning an almost pure white.

  Zarubin clapped Maddox on the back. ‘Relax, old friend, a joke only.’

  ‘Not funny.’

  ‘No, perhaps not.’ The Russian took out his cigarettes and offered the package to Maddox. The man shook his head. Zarubin lit one for himself and blew a stream of smoke at the windshield of the big car. ‘It amazes me how you Americans can build such wonderful things as this automobile.’ He reached out and stroked the dashboard appreciatively. ‘Hopefully they will not build tanks so well or aircraft when the time comes.’

  ‘We were talking about what was going to be done,’ Maddox snapped.

  Zarubin reached into the deep pocket of his overcoat and brought out a medium-sized manila envelope folded over and sealed with a broad strip of masking tape. The Russian pushed his index finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. Inside was a Canadian passport in a stiff cardboard slipcase and a well-worn Buxton man’s wallet. Zarubin held up the passport.

  ‘A valid Canadian passport in the name of Philip Andrew Groman, otherwise known as Skip and sometimes Skippy. It lists you as being born in Ottawa, the capital city. You are unmarried and your occupation is listed as schoolteacher. You teach at a place called Lisgar Collegiate Institute, a local high school. You are forty-one years of age, born March 11, 1900, which of course is your real age and real date of birth to keep things simple if you are ever questioned. Your address is 492 Somerset Street West, apartment six. Any mail sent to that address will be dealt with by our people there.’ He handed the passport to Maddox, who took it, flipping through the pages cautiously.