Warsaw concerto, p.29
Warsaw Concerto, page 29
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
And then what?
A new dark age would truly have fallen across the face of Europe for generations to come…
Obviously, they could not sit back and let that happen.
France had to be sustained, albeit at a level that did not drag the whole of the British Isles down into the mire with her. The comparisons with 1940 were not lost on the Prime Minister.
The nightmare was that if France fell to the barbarians worrying about the watch on the Rhine would be academic; the fate of continental Western Europe would be sealed.
“It strikes me,” Frank Waters declared, staring thoughtfully into the flames in the hearth as they danced and sucked every time a gust of wind ripped at the building, “that two or three armoured divisions would make all the difference on the Continent. The trouble is we don’t have them, or rather, we do but they’re spread out all over the bally planet because we’ve been the ones holding the line against the Soviets, and all the other troublemakers in a score of places you never get to read about in the papers.”
He smiled roguishly at the US Ambassador.
“If and when you do get to sit in the Oval Office, I’m sure you’ll do the right thing, old man, Walter.”
Chapter 25
Tuesday 13th December 1966
Happy Rest Motel, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Sixty-six-year old Clyde Anderson Tolson had had to persuade his boss, and his best friend for over three decades, J. Edgar Hoover, that he was up to the trip down south. He had suffered what had probably been a mild stroke back in February, a thing which had gone unnoticed, unremarked by the DC press corps because everybody had been preoccupied with the war in the Midwest. It was only later that one or two of the ‘real reporters’ – there had never been that many of those in Washington – had begun to ask what had happened to Tolson during the five-week period the Director’s right-hand man had been absent.
Edgar had tried to carry on as normal; not really succeeded and eventually, coincidental with the halting of the Legions of the End of Days in Indiana and southern Michigan, pressing questions had been asked. Fortuitously, around that time Tolson’s doctors grudgingly gave him leave to return to his duties as Deputy Director, and Associate Director overseeing personnel and disciplinary matters at the Bureau.
Right now, the Director of the FBI needed somebody to get a handle on the ‘Billy the Kid’ investigation before, horror of horrors, the press got hold of it.
And basically, there was nobody else he trusted.
Even so, the man many Americans viewed as a complete ogre, was torn, knowing better than anybody that his friend had never, really got over ‘the illness’ he had suffered earlier that year.
‘Look, the warmer weather down there will do me good,’ Tolson had suggested and reluctantly, it had been agreed that he would personally, take charge of the ‘Billy the Kid’ investigation. Once Richard Helms and the CIA had been brought in, the FBI had to be seen to be doing something, and historically nothing so reliably indicated that the Director had got a grip of a thing than when he put his most trusted lieutenant on the case.
It had been bitterly cold in Washington ever since Christmas. These days the winter did neither of the old men any favours: Tolson’s argument about the warmer weather in Louisiana had clinched the deal. Back in the good old days they would both have rushed down south, hefting Tommy guns with a pack of newshounds close on their trail…
Unfortunately, those days were long gone.
Dwight Christie was cuffed to an agent built like a Sherman tank. The last time anybody had given the punk the benefit of the doubt he had run off to join the crazies who seized the British Embassy at Wister Park. If that witch Gretchen Betancourt had not threatened to ‘ventilate’ the whole sorry saga of Agency ‘bungling and incompetence’ surrounding that affair, Edgar would never have signed up to the conditional deal which had saved Christie from the electric chair.
That said, against all expectations, the man had proved to be a veritable mine of information in the last couple of years. In fact, he had been so co-operative that his handlers had honestly believed, more than once, that they had wrung him dry.
Christie had been working for the Reds, and a shadowy conspiracy that he had not known, before the event, had tendrils linking it with the Battle of Washington fanatics and a score of people at the periphery of the rebellion in the Midwest. The latest estimation was that Christie’s intelligence and background briefings had led – directly or indirectly - to the arrest or the killing of as many as sixty bad actors.
Several of Christie’s interrogators had remarked that it was almost as if all the time he was working for the Soviets, and moving around the fringes of the various fanatical splinters of what he had always considered ‘the resistance’, he had been collecting, rationalising, organising and carefully filing away evidence. In that respect, at least, he had never stopped being a Special Agent; it was just that his loyalties had never been what they ought to be…
The Baton Rouge PD had taped off the parking lot outside the two-storey motel which straggled along the Airline Highway as it swept west towards the Huey P. Long Bridge across the Mississippi. Uniformed officers had been instructed to move onlookers well back from the tapes but these days, nobody was anywhere near as impressed by the FBI as they used to be.
“Take his cuffs off,” Tolson growled, gesturing at Dwight Christie. “All we need is for some local stringer to see him and the papers hereabouts will be saying the Bureau has already got its man!” He began to turn away, changed his mind. “Plug him if he blinks.”
The former Special Agent quirked a grimace of thanks to the old man, a gesture which bounced off him like a ping pong ball off a concrete wall. Christie was dressed in the same dark suit, tie and white shirt as the others, a Homburg crammed down on his cropped head, which he now removed to fan himself. Although the morning was not hot, the humidity was rising in the still, typically thick Louisiana air.
Obediently, he followed Tolson into the lobby of the motel and then along a corridor to the end room of the ground floor north wing of the shabby establishment.
Christie did not know much about Baton Rouge, or at least, he did not think he did until he started thinking about it. The new bridge being built across the river linking Interstate 10 would make a big difference: presently, the State Capitol was a poor relation, a Mississippi boom town that was not booming so much lately, over-reliant on the petrochemical industry, the wheeling and dealing in and around the Louisiana Senate, a sort of down-at-heel Las Vegas whose time had passed after the boom years of the Second War. The Happy Rest Motel was emblematic of all of that, the sort of place a weary traveller crashed overnight before moving on without wanting or needing to look back over his shoulder. The sort of place a guy brought a party girl, or a prostitute for a quick squeeze…
“Mikkelsen picked up the girl outside Sorrento. We think she had a fight with the other victim and hitched a ride.”
Dwight Christie had followed the old man into the room.
One double bed. Sheets on the floor. Blood on the mattress, the pillows, spatter on the wall near the door – that would be the man’s – and on the window drapes, which probably belonged to the woman. There was a wash basin in a grimy corner, blood-splattered, and discarded soiled towels on the floor.
They did not have names for the deceased yet.
The dead man and woman were both in their late teens or early twenties.
“Okay,” Christie mused out aloud. “They have a fight. The girl runs off. Mikkelsen picks her up. He brings her here. Then what?”
Tolson stepped over the pool of coagulated blood at the foot of the bed.
“They booked in and nobody saw them again. Until the second man turned up. The guy on reception says he was as angry as Hell, so he told him where to look for his girl, and kept out of it. A few minutes later Mikkelsen books out, gives the guy at the desk twenty bucks to leave ‘the young people to make up for a while’ and leaves. As cool as you like. They checked the room about ninety minutes later and…”
“Found this,” Christie sighed.
That was over twenty-four hours ago.
Billy the Kid could be one mile or five hundred miles away by now. He would have ditched the black Fifty-nine Dodge he was driving, got a new ride, or simply stepped onto a Greyhound or a train heading…any which way.
“Can I poke around?” Dwight Christie asked.
“The Baton Rouge PD trashed the scene,” Tolson complained, shaking his head.
Christie met the other man’s stare for a moment.
“Have a ball…” Tolson grunted.
Clyde Tolson had always been an enigma to Washington insiders which was why so many people made the mistake of believing he was J. Edgar Hoover’s make-weight sidekick. A Missourian hailing from Laredo he had worked as a clerk and then as a confidential secretary in the offices of three successive Secretaries of War - Newton D. Baker, John W. Weeks, and Dwight F. Davis in the 1920s, during which time he had studied law at night school at George Washington University, graduating in 1927 and applying to join the FBI in 1928.
Tolson had been at Hoover’s side – quite literally, they drove to work together, vacationed together, and ate together – ever since. Promoted to assistant director as long ago as 1930, unlike Hoover, four years his senior, Tolson forsook blacking his hair or wearing make-up to sustain a false air of youth and vitality, neither of which was present today.
The modern FBI, for all its faults, was as much Tolson’s as Hoover’s life’s work, although Christie suspected that many of his former colleagues would have raised a derisive eyebrow hearing that one of Richard Nixon’s first acts after his inauguration, had been to award J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, with a citation that read that Tolson ‘has been a vital force in raising the proficiency of law enforcement at all levels and in guiding the Federal Bureau of Investigation to new heights of accomplishment through periods of great National challenge.’
Presumably, knowing that sooner or later the Warwick Hotel affair was going to come back to haunt him, the President had decided that he needed to start circling the wagons as soon as possible!
“Okay, so we think he raped the woman,” Christie ruminated, his eyes quartering the killing room. “Or maybe not. Either way, he slept with her. Then he killed her. Maybe, she wanted to leave, threatened to make trouble for him. The guy must have cruised up Interstate 10; maybe seen the Dodge parked out front.”
He studied the blood spatter and puddle near the room’s door.
“The woman’s body was on the floor the other side of the bed, not directly visible from the door?”
Tolson nodded.
Christie made a reaching out movement, jerked his hand back.
“He grabbed the guy’s shirt, pulled him into the room, onto his blade. Cut his throat, dropped him on the ground and went over to the basin, cleaned up. Then he walked out.”
“And disappeared,” Tolson grunted, pushing back his Homburg.
“No, first he went to the dead man’s car and sterilised it.”
The older man shrugged. None of his people had briefed Christie about the old Ford with a turbocharged engine recovered from the parking lot.
Kurt Mikkelsen would have heard that beast coming miles away; would have been ready for the woman’s boyfriend when he hammered at his door…
“Don’t think I’m not grateful for a change of scene, Director,” Dwight Christie said, aware that there was not a great deal he could add to the investigating team’s conclusions, “but I don’t get it. Why do you want me down here, sir?”
Chapter 26
Monday 13th December 1966
Évrunes, Mortagne-sur-Sèvre, Pays de la Loire
Beneath his customary cheerful, business-like exterior forty-two-year-old Brigadier Edwin Bramall, the commander of the 2nd Royal Tanks Battle Group, was in a sombre mood as he clambered out of his radio car – a camouflaged Land Rover – ducked his head against the ferocious gale and stepped inside the relative calm of his forward headquarters in the ancient church of St Léonard.
Bramall was the younger son of a well to do Hampshire family. Although close, the two brothers had been politically, and to a degree, temperamentally, two sides of the same coin.
His elder brother – by eight years – Ashley, by far the more cerebral of the siblings, had inherited their mother’s socialist ‘leanings’, chairing the Oxford University Labour Club while he was at Magdalene College, and had been voted treasurer of the Union in 1939. After the Second War, Ashley had been called to the Bar of the Inner Temple and after losing the Parliamentary seat of Bexley to Edward Heath in 1950, divided his time between the courts and ‘local’ London politics. Ashley had gone missing in the October War, one of many personal losses that still weighed heavily on Edwin Bramall’s soul.
Within the family he had always been ‘Dwin’, the precocious one, whom his father, determined not to lose another son to socialism had sent up to Eton. Unlike his older brother the Second War had ‘saved’ him from the ideological quagmires of University life; he was commissioned straight into the King’s Royal Rifle Brigade in 1943, going ashore on the Normandy beaches with the 2nd Battalion and thereafter fighting all the way to Germany, acquiring a Military Cross in the process.
The profession of arms had been his life and his career ever since. Somehow, he had found time to get married in 1947. That of course, was all over. His wife Dorothy and their two children had been consumed, like his dear brother in the fires of the October War.
Bramall had commanded a battalion in the fighting to re-take the ruins of London from the gangs, riff-raff and insurgents, criminals and chancers who had infested the ruins of the sprawling metropolis, making it impossible to re-open the docks, to clear roads, rebuild railways and to begin the generational process of reconstruction. That had been a bloody, dispiriting affair; in common with most of the things a professional soldier did, a job that had needed to be done by somebody.
There had been countless raised eyebrows when he had gazetted his marriage to Miriam Pryor, the erstwhile Minister for London. She was at once the least likely spouse for an ambitious Army officer, a leftist-liberal interloper in the National Conservative Government, co-opted by the Prime Minister to begin to enact the ‘London Garden City’ vision she had so passionately proclaimed once the fighting was over; and yet, she was his soul mate in this brave new half-broken world in which they lived these days.
Realistically, the nation did not have the resources to rebuild, let alone recreate London as it had been, or a modern re-incarnation of the same but the reinvention of the former capital as a city of villages, separated by the ‘greening’ ruins of the post-war age, well, that was a dream which was not only achievable in their lifetimes but had particular found favour in the ranks of the Labour Party, whose leaders had feared the rest of the country would be bled white reconstructing the capital; and that the epoch of austerity would go on forever…
Miriam had hidden most of the purple streaks in her mane of raven-dark hair beneath a veil at their wedding last June, and bless her, got hold of a white dress.
They were simpatico, alike and attuned in that they never forgot the ones they had lost; however, life was for the living and each in their own way, they had vowed to use their lives well.
Miriam had been a teacher before the war.
‘I was never political. Well, apart from going on CND marches.’
They had agreed not to argue over which side of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament debate had been vindicated by recent, unimaginably horrible, history. Remarkably, there was little else they needed to ‘agree to disagree’ over.
It was a funny old World…
The sentry at the door snapped to attention and saluted.
Bramall returned the salute, and walked on.
At one level he hated taking over churches and turning them into command posts; on another, he was becoming inured to the old-fashioned ‘niceties’ sacrosanct in the years before the October War. Everything these days was either completely bloody, or not, and his brief trips back across the Channel to England were increasingly, blissful respites from the grim slog of campaigning in France.
Like many career soldiers Bramall was a keen student of history, only a fool ignored the lessons of the past and risked making the same – avoidable - mistakes his forebears in arms had made decades and sometimes, centuries ago. Lately, now and then, he found himself wondering what it must have been like in medieval times for the Englishmen campaigning year after year in the woods and valleys of the Poitou…
“Good morning, Mon General,” smiled the insouciant, handsomely gaunt, scarred former second-in-command of the leftist White Brigade, the raggle-taggle band of cut-throats led by a former Red Army general which had surrendered – under terms – itself and its territory to Bramall last week.
Bramall had seen Major General Sergey Akhromeyev and his ‘civilian’ deputy, a charming, flashing eyed lady of indeterminate middle years, Madame Vera Bertrand, off on the first leg of their journey to England earlier that morning. There had been a delay while the RAF Westland Wessex had waited for a lull in the storm before attempting the long haul north to the Cotentin where, weather permitting, the couple would transfer to a C-130 Hercules for the trip to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.
Bramall grimaced at ‘Colonel’ Sebastien Betancourt, the former Sorbonne academic, who had thrown his lot in with ‘whoever seemed to be winning at the time’ until he was captured by Akhromeyev’s ruffians at Vichy. Offered amnesty, he had signed up with the so-called White Brigade, thereafter, fighting, by all accounts ‘like a lion’ under Akhromeyev’s command.
