Fear Itself Read online

  ‘We have some good contacts in Switzerland. And they’ve spotted an organisation that has been looking for someone in Austria. We’ve got contacts of our own, who so far at least have managed to elude the Nazis. Perhaps they could be of use to you.’

  ‘Austria?’ Guttman asked, trying to sound bland.

  ‘If it’s any use,’ said Stephenson, as if it were a matter of indifference to him.

  Guttman thought hard. If he passed, would he be looking a gift horse in the mouth? Equally, if he took the bait, was he being drawn in like a sucker, co-opted by the people his Director had explicitly told him not to get close to? But he had already disobeyed the Director, in a manner far more culpable than this. In for an inch, he told himself.

  He said to Stephenson, ‘We’re looking for a man named Werner. Konrad Werner. He was born in Austria and came to America in 1920, according to our immigration authorities. He settled eventually in Detroit, but then in the summer of 1936 he travelled to Europe – or at least he said he did. His friends and pretty distant family thought he must be going to the Olympics, which of course were in Berlin. But we’re not so sure. It seemed likelier that he went home to the Tyrol.’

  ‘Can I ask why you’re looking for him?’

  ‘No. Not yet anyway.’

  Stephenson nodded evenly. ‘I was a bit surprised you had people working on your behalf in Switzerland.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Guttman, suddenly prickly.

  ‘How can I put it, Harry? The FBI is famous world over for its crime-fighting capabilities. I am second to no one in my admiration for your expertise. But America’s global prominence is a recent phenomenon – perfectly understandable, you’re a young nation after all. One can’t expect a sophisticated intelligence network abroad – we’ve had centuries to develop ours and it still has plenty of holes.’

  Guttman didn’t argue, for what Stephenson said was perfectly correct. The truth was, the Bureau didn’t have anyone working in Switzerland. Guttman had used personal contacts with a Jewish charity organisation, calling in favours he’d performed in a private capacity. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t got anywhere.

  ‘Anyway, let me see what we can find out. As I say, we have some Austrian contacts your Swiss friends might not have.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Guttman meant this, though he was puzzled by Stephenson’s unexpected offer. The set-up here was also curious – what kind of club only fed two people at lunch? It wouldn’t last long at that rate, he figured.

  He pushed back his chair and stood up awkwardly. ‘Is there a gents I could use?’

  ‘Of course. Down the hall and just around the corner.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Guttman went along the hallway, which was lined with landscape watercolours, and turned the corner. There was no sign of Jason. At the end of the hall he saw an open door. Ignoring the bathroom he walked silently towards it. From the open doorway he saw a girl with a blonde bun standing in a corner, her back to him, pouring coffee into big stone mugs. In the middle of the room four desks were pushed together, each occupied by a man. One was on the phone talking loudly, another sat at a Royal typewriter pounding away with two fingers, while the remaining pair stood poring over papers – newspapers, magazines, typed pages, a sea of print strewn over the desktops.

  The man on the phone looked up and spied Guttman outside the doorway. Eyes widening, he gestured to his colleagues and jabbed a finger at Guttman.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asked another man, swivelling from his desk. The voice was British, friendly but firm.

  ‘Sorry, I’m looking for the men’s room.’

  The man raised an eyebrow, then jerked his head towards the hall. ‘You’ve passed it.’

  Guttman found the bathroom, and tried to make a lot of noise, flushing twice and running the water at full blast in the sink. Club my ass, thought Guttman as he finished. How many British ex-officers could there be in Washington?

  Stephenson was running another kind of operation here, one which must involve lining up American contacts, influencing the American press, doing everything it could to sway American opinion towards the British side of things. Including spinning a yarn to a sympathetic FBI officer? Possibly, though Guttman was struck by the urgency which lay behind Stephenson’s relaxed facade.

  When he returned to the table, he found Stephenson had poured them both more coffee. This wasn’t over yet, thought Guttman as he sat down. But then he hadn’t really thought lunch would be free.

  ‘Relax, Harry. If you’re thinking I’m going to ask for a favour in return, you’re right. But it’s one I think could help us both.’

  Guttman waited. Stephenson had lost his airy detachment, if not all of his charm, and there was nothing mannered about him now. ‘We have some Nazi-lovers of our own in Britain. The most famous is Oswald Mosley, of course. He leads the British Union of Fascists – the Blackshirts as they’re known. He is not without sympathisers among fellow members of the upper classes. One of them is a man named Viscount Dugdale. He loathes publicity, and has never publicly come out in support of Mosley. But he has funded him to a worrying extent – we estimate he’s given fifty thousand pounds over the past few years to the BUF. That’s a quarter of a million dollars.

  ‘Dugdale is married to a woman who shares his views. But it’s his second marriage. Ten years ago, he was divorced by his first wife, a woman now named Dove, Lady Dove actually. She also remarried, and lives in Oxford. Her husband is head of one of the colleges there, an eminent law don, and, ironically perhaps, known for his left-wing views. He came to the attention of our services for the opposite reason that Dugdale has. We try and be even-handed in the people we persecute.’

  Guttman laughed out loud, and Stephenson seemed happy to see the American had a sense of humour. ‘But that’s not what really piqued our interest. It was Lady Dove. Despite a bitter divorce, and remarriage to someone decidedly on the Left, we have reason to suspect that she’s held firmly to her ex-husband’s views and supports the Nazi cause.’

  ‘What does her new husband make of that?’

  ‘He doesn’t know their real nature. On the surface, she shares his views – anti-Franco, anti-Hitler, mildly pro-Commissar.’

  ‘But in private …?’

  ‘Her views are very different. And she keeps them to herself. But we have evidence that she is effectively an agent of German intelligence.’

  ‘Effectively?’

  ‘She’s not drawing a salary. And possibly not yet doing that much for the opposition. But enough to indicate where her sympathies lie.’

  ‘What has she done?’ asked Guttman. He was starting to realise that Stephenson’s circumlocutions were precautionary; if you poked his rhetorical balloons, he was happy to talk turkey.

  ‘She importuned a young official in the Foreign Office. Bright chap, an aide to Anthony Eden the Foreign Secretary. A Prize Fellow of All Souls—’ he broke off as he saw the incomprehension in Guttman’s eyes. ‘Sorry, that’s a particularly rarefied college in Oxford. He had rooms there, and went up weekends. Where Lady Dove paid him a great deal of attention.’

  ‘You mean she …?’

  ‘Our intelligence didn’t extend to the chap’s pillow, I’m afraid.’ This time they both laughed. Stephenson said, ‘Whatever the lure on offer, she was clearly hoping for inside info about the negotiations during the Munich crisis. Fortunately this chap is no fool, and no fan of Chamberlain’s either.’

  A snore came from the sleeping Colonel at the other end of the room. Guttman said mildly, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but as Mr Hoover might say, what’s it to us?’

  ‘Perhaps nothing,’ said Stephenson, and again Guttman couldn’t help liking the man’s candour. ‘But there’s an American connection you may want to know about.’

  ‘What kind of connection?’

  ‘A correspondence between Lady Dove and an American woman here in Washington. They met in England a few years ago when Dove’s husband gave a dinner for Felix Frankfurter – he was in Oxford fo
r a year giving lectures. The American lady was visiting on holiday; she was invited to the dinner because she was a friend of Frankfurter’s wife.’

  Guttman wasn’t surprised. Frankfurter, famously, had married one of the goyim – just like me, thought Guttman. It had only been a few months since the Harvard professor had been confirmed by the Senate as a Justice of the Supreme Court, a controversial appointment – there were plenty of people who thought one Jew was more than enough on the court, and Brandeis was still there.

  ‘What’s the American woman’s name?’

  ‘Sally Cummings.’

  ‘I’ve heard of her,’ said Guttman. His wife Isabel followed the society pages of the Washington Globe zealously. She’d read out bits of it to Guttman in the evenings when they sat and had a drink after he got home.

  Stephenson said, ‘She was married to a senator from Carolina who died young. But he left her very well set up. And I gather she has since established a salon of the Great and the Good – senators, judges, senior members of the government. I believe even your President has graced her portal.’

  ‘Are you thinking she’s a Nazi, too?’ He couldn’t suppress a note of scepticism.

  ‘I honestly don’t know. All I can say is that about a year ago her letters to Lady Dove started referring to a project – “Our project” she called it. The letters after that read like progress reports – “Prospects look good,” “Our plan moves ahead,” that sort of thing. It’s always put very vaguely – and that’s what aroused our suspicions.’

  ‘What about the Dove end of the correspondence?’

  Stephenson shook his head, and Guttman suddenly understood. They were intercepting the letters from Cummings to Dove in England, but that would only give a view from one end of the telescope – they wouldn’t have any idea what Dove was writing to Cummings.

  Presumably Stephenson wanted him to supply the view from the other end. Guttman couldn’t see how he could do that. Mail intercepts were not unknown for the FBI, but almost without exception their targets were Communists or known criminals. You couldn’t do it willy-nilly, especially to a well-connected society hostess like Sally Cummings. He would need Hoover’s permission even to contemplate such a move, and chances of that were precisely zero, especially since the request for the intercepts came from Stephenson.

  He tried to explain this tactfully to the Canadian, but the man stopped him. ‘That’s not what I was asking for,’ he said.

  Bullshit, thought Guttman, but without resentment.

  Stephenson said, ‘I think you may want to look into this Cummings woman in any case. You see, something else has come up that seems pretty alarming.’ He took a sip of his coffee. ‘We keep an eye on Lady Dove herself, not just her correspondence. About two months ago she went to London for the day. Nothing odd there – she often goes for shopping, or to see friends. But this time she didn’t go to the West End or Regent Street or any place we’d expect. Instead, she walked to a churchyard north of Paddington Station. There she talked for a while with a couple. They all acted as if they’d never met before, and perhaps they hadn’t – but it still seemed quite peculiar to our chap watching.’

  Guttman was intrigued. ‘And?’

  Stephenson was too smooth to acknowledge Guttman’s interest; having hooked his fish, he was going to play him for a bit. ‘Fortunately our man had his wits about him. When the encounter ended he didn’t follow Lady Dove, but trailed the couple instead.

  ‘They went back into the middle of town to a small hotel off St James’s. They were guests there, though the next day they checked out and caught the boat train for the Continent from Victoria. We dug around a bit at the hotel, and it turned out they were posing as a Dutch couple over for a holiday.’

  ‘Posing?’

  ‘Yes. One of the chambermaids said she’d heard them speaking German to each other.’

  ‘Isn’t it easy to confuse the two?’ asked Guttman, wondering what a chambermaid would know.

  Stephenson ignored him. ‘We managed to get photographs of them in front of their hotel, waiting for their taxi when they were leaving.’

  Stephenson had planned for this moment, Guttman realised, for a Manila envelope suddenly materialised from under the table, which the Canadian handed to Guttman.

  Guttman took out a glossy picture, the size of a piece of typing paper. It was a good clear shot, and must have been taken from the inside of a car across the street. In the background was the canopied entrance of a hotel; a bellhop was lugging a suitcase down its carpeted steps. At street level a doorman in the usual absurd hat and tasselled jacket was turned sideways, staring down the street. Next to him a couple were waiting glumly. The woman was medium height and blonde, handsome rather than pretty. She was neat in a long trenchcoat, hat perched at an angle on her head.

  The man next to her was lighting a cigarette, and even with his neck craned down to catch the lighter in his hand, was much taller than his companion. He too had fair hair and wore a suit, well-cut but conservative, that made him look just like the Dutch businessman on holiday he claimed to be. There was something rigid in his demeanour; it was that of a man who never relaxed.

  Guttman passed the photo back to Stephenson. ‘I don’t recognise either one.’

  ‘We didn’t either at first. That may have been due to the presence of the woman, since we didn’t find anyone like her in our files. But we’re pretty confident about the man. His name is Walter Schellenberg. Ring a bell?’

  ‘Sorry, no. Should it?’

  ‘Not necessarily. But you might find it useful in the years ahead. He works for German intelligence. He’s recently been made head of their counter-espionage department.’ He looked with open amusement at Guttman. ‘You could say he’s your German counterpart.’

  ‘Counter-espionage. So what was he doing in England?’

  ‘That’s what we found alarming. It had to be something significant to get him there, don’t you think?’

  When Guttman returned to the office, he had Marie call down to Research, and ten minutes later a thin file on Sally Cummings sat on his desk.

  He noted the basic facts with only mild interest: Born in 1882 in Rutland Vermont, daughter of Franklin Ryerson, a local judge and merchant, her mother, née McHenry, came from a prominent Virginian family. Married 1907 T. Irwin Cummings, a wealthy businessman who after the war was elected senator from South Carolina. He died in 1927 and Sally Cummings remained in D.C., in the large house her husband had purchased in 1924 on the edge of Georgetown.

  There were also several newspaper clippings in the file, and gradually a more contemporary picture emerged. She was a society hostess, so he’d been right about that. Gave a famous summer solstice party and a New Year’s Day lunch, both attended by senior politicians and members of the executive, as well as by what passed for old society in this town.

  So far there was nothing remarkable in the file, and Guttman found himself wondering why this woman had one at all. Hoover loved files, it was true, but except for the higher echelon of elected officials – who automatically got a place in the filing cabinets downstairs – there had to be some past impropriety or ill-judged association (Communist preferably) to warrant the formal attention of the Bureau.

  And then he saw it: just a passing couple of sentences in another report, one that had been cross-referenced, copied and pasted here:

  Subject is known as a keen admirer of the Fairer Sex, and though discreet his conquests are legendary. Among the most notable are rumoured to be Mrs Sarah Tydings and Mrs Sally Cummings – widow of the late Senator from South Carolina.

  So who was this lothario? Guttman looked at the cross-reference to the subject’s file – XFE/35/G01/D1937. The filing system had its own nomenclature, impenetrable to Guttman – the system of acronyms and abbreviations might as well have been Ancient Greek. But he recognised the final ‘D’ – it stood for ‘defunct’. The file had been closed in 1937. He wondered why, even more curious about whose file it was.
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  Calling out to Marie, he sent her down to Research again. Five minutes later he was staring with astonishment at the file she’d brought back.

  Luther, Hans, the side tab read.

  An FBI file on the former German Ambassador to the United States of America, who had been suddenly recalled in 1937 just days after Bock had transcribed one of his confidential cables to Berlin. Where is Werner?

  He thought immediately of Agent Nessheim, working in Vermont for him. At a camp run by Max Schultz, the brother-in-law of … Konrad Werner.

  Suddenly the world seemed a lot smaller.

  16

  Late August 1939

  New York City

  THIS TIME HE got to see New York. One part of it anyway, since Nessheim’s activities were confined to Yorkville on the Upper East Side, where Schultz lived and the Bund had its national headquarters.

  The cadre of Ordnungsdienst had left Camp Schneider after two days. They had continued their manoeuvres in the high field, despite persisting rain, and taken their meals among themselves at the temporary trencher tables in the dining room. Nessheim had avoided them, though he saw them look him over with curiosity and no small contempt – he felt like a conscientious objector in a war, forced to spend time amidst soldiers.

  After their aborted encounter in her cabin Frances avoided him. Thank God Schultz and the O.D. had discovered them there before things had gone much further. They had been caught very embarrassingly (Frances had on even fewer clothes at that point than he), but he hadn’t had any choice.

  The morning after he had managed to sneak back into the cabin while Frances was giving tennis lessons, and retrieve the reel of tape, then make his way through the thick woods to the rendezvous point on the forestry fire road. Fedora was waiting in his Dodge. The agent had been there all night, Nessheim realised.

  He held up the tape, saying, ‘There’s not a lot on here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Fedora demanded. His eyes were nasty slits.