Crossfire, p.8
Crossfire, page 8
She shook her head and told herself not to be silly. This was America, not the Netherlands. There were no SS here out to get her.
Saffron said goodbye to Dalton and was ushered into a lobby where the floor was patterned with different coloured marbles, polished to a mirror shine. The reception desk was marble, too, and the ceiling above it was painted sky blue and filled with flying cherubs.
As she absorbed the splendour of her surroundings, Saffron did not notice a small man in a dark grey suit stand and start to make his way towards her. He moved with a grace and lightness of foot that suggested he might once have been a dancer. Yet there was nothing flamboyant about him – quite the reverse. He seemed to glide effortlessly across the room, barely moving his arms or hands. And then, just as Saffron reached the reception desk, he appeared as if from nowhere beside her. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Courtney, my name is William Stephenson.’
She turned and looked at the man for whom Churchill had such a high regard. He was middle-aged, with neatly brushed dark hair, showing the first signs of grey. He had a prominent nose and chin, like a less exaggerated Mr Punch. But it was his eyes that struck her most. They were very dark brown, almost black, and they looked at her with a concentrated intensity which told her at once that Stephenson’s diminutive stature was misleading. This was a substantial, powerful man.
He turned to the receptionist. ‘We’ll go up to Miss Courtney’s suite now.’
‘Certainly, Mr Stephenson.’
The bellboy who had picked up Saffron’s bags appeared with them on a gold-coloured trolley. ‘Follow me please, sir, ma’am. The elevators are this way.’
‘Your father contacted me a few days ago,’ Stephenson said, as the elevator doors closed and they started to ascend. ‘We exchanged a number of telegrams and came to a mutually satisfactory decision about the funding of your stay here in the United States. You will be well provided for.’
‘Thank you, that’s kind,’ Saffron said.
‘Not at all. Your father feels that you have earned it, and I agree with him.’ Stephenson reached inside his jacket pocket and removed a folded telegram. ‘He asked me to pass this on to you.’
Before Saffron had time to read the message, the elevator stopped and the bellboy led them to the end of a short corridor, past the doors to two other rooms. At the end was a single door. The bellboy took out a room key, opened the door and led Saffron into a small hallway. ‘Your private dining room is just here, ma’am,’ he said, pointing in one direction. He turned the other way and, as he pushed the trolley before him, said, ‘Here we have your bedroom, bathroom and lounge. As you can see, this is a corner suite, so you look out onto Fifth Avenue and Central Park. Please follow me.’
Saffron entered a beautifully furnished drawing room with floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. Through one of them, she could see a balcony with a small table and two chairs and beyond that, past a line of skyscrapers, the green expanse of a park running up the middle of the city.
‘Oh, but this is magnificent,’ she said. ‘You really are too generous, Mr Stephenson.’
‘Read your telegram,’ he said.
MY DARLING DAUGHTER. HAVE INSTRUCTED STEPHENSON TO GIVE YOU NOTHING BUT BEST AND SEND BILL TO ME. ALSO TO PROVIDE ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS CASH. I ORDER YOU TO SPEND IT. YOU HAVE EARNED EVERY PENNY. YOUR MOTHER WOULD BE VERY PROUD OF YOU AS ARE HARRIET AND I. YOUR LOVING FATHER LEON COURTNEY.
Saffron burst into tears, caught unawares and overwhelmed as much by the mention of her long-dead mother as by her father’s generosity. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, scrabbling in her bag for a handkerchief.
‘Don’t be,’ Stephenson said.
As she gathered herself, Saffron was dimly aware of Stephenson quietly giving orders to the bellboy. By the time she had dried her eyes, her cases were in her bedroom, the bellboy had departed and Stephenson had reappeared beside her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got off to a very good start.’
‘Nonsense. You received good news from someone you love, who also loves you very much. Perfectly natural. Now, I’m afraid my diary is full for the rest of the day and this evening. I suggest you unpack, freshen up, maybe take a stroll in the park, and then take dinner in your suite, or downstairs in the Astor Court. My wife and I lived here at the St. Regis for quite a while at the start of the war. The food is excellent. I will see you at my office in the International Building of the Rockefeller Center at 10.30 tomorrow morning.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Saffron said, conscious that she was being given an order rather than an invitation.
‘You can’t miss the building. Just look for the statue of Atlas.’
‘Like our PM, with the weight of the world on his shoulders,’ Saffron nearly said, but instead she followed Stephenson out of the living room towards the front door of the suite. Stephenson was about to step into the corridor when he paused, and gave a half-smile. ‘I almost forgot . . .’
He reached into the same jacket pocket from which he had extracted the telegram and pulled out a bulging letter-sized envelope. ‘Your money,’ he said, handing it to Saffron. ‘Nine hundred and ninety-eight dollars in notes and . . .’ He pulled a small paper packet from a trouser pocket. ‘Two bucks in change. If you’re just out walking around, the change and a couple of five-dollar bills will be more than enough. There’s a safe in the room for the rest.’
‘Thank you very much, sir,’ Saffron said.
‘Don’t thank me, thank your pa . . . So, 10.30. Don’t be late.’
• • •
A
domas Petrauskas was a second-generation Lithuanian-American, a stevedore in the Brooklyn Docks. He had many grievances in his life, but the one that animated him the most was his hatred of the Russians who had invaded and annexed his country in 1940.
The Third Reich had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and within a single week expelled the Russians from Lithuania.
Inspired by the Nazis’ single-mindedness, Petrauskas had presented himself to the German consulate in New York in September 1941, when the United States was still a neutral country, and declared himself ready to help the Nazi cause.
Just as all nations place intelligence agents amongst their diplomatic and consular staff, so there was an Ausland-SD man at the consulate. He met Petrauskas and agreed to pay him fifty dollars a month to keep an eye on shipping movements in and out of the Brooklyn Docks. When America entered the war that December, the German consulate was closed, and all its staff were expelled from the United States, the SD man included. So now Petrauskas was controlled by a Nazi sympathiser in the Swiss consulate called Hartwig Meyer, who received his information and paid him in return. Petrauskas was more than happy to take the payments. He was married with a baby son, and he had recently bought an expensive motorbike that was his pride and joy. He needed every cent he could get.
It was Meyer who had come to Petrauskas with the offer of an extra twenty dollars for a task that, he said, ‘I think you will find quite agreeable.’
Damn right it was agreeable. Petrauskas had got a buddy to cover for him at work for a couple of hours. Then he rode his 1937 Harley Davidson UL into Manhattan, following a hot broad to her hotel. Meyer had told him, ‘Let her know that you are there,’ so he’d given her a wave while they were on the road and a wolf whistle outside the hotel.
Now he was in a phone booth on Fifth. He called Meyer and told him where the broad was staying. ‘Good work,’ Meyer said. ‘Now, there is a Jewish delicatessen, Goldwyn’s, on the corner of Bowery and East Houston Street . . .’
‘Yeah, I know the place.’
‘Good. Meet me there in one hour. I have one last task for you today. If you accomplish it successfully, I will pay you thirty dollars, not twenty.’
‘Thirty bucks? I’ll be there, Mr M. You can count on it.’
‘Excellent. Now, do you have a toolbox of some kind?’
‘Sure, for working on my bike.’
‘And a cap?’
Petrauskas’s voice sounded puzzled as he answered, ‘Yeah.’
‘Bring them both when you come to see me.’
Hartwig Meyer was sure that an attractive young woman, newly arrived in the most exciting city on earth, would not sit alone in her hotel room for the rest of the day but would want to go out and explore the town. There would therefore be a period of time, possibly several hours, when Miss Courtney’s room would be unoccupied. This would provide an opportunity to take further action against her.
He had a contact at the St. Regis: a fellow Swiss, Rolf Haecki, who worked as a concierge. Haecki had no allegiance whatever to Nazism, but he had an unfortunate fondness for betting on the horses at Aqueduct and Belmont Park, which left him almost permanently short of money. Ten dollars was all it cost to buy his unqualified assistance.
Haecki was standing at the concierge desk when Meyer called him. He held his left hand up to his mouth so that none of the guests or fellow staff could overhear him as he said, ‘You promise me that no one will be harmed? I won’t do anything that hurts the hotel or its guests.’
‘You have my word, Rolf,’ said Meyer. ‘No one will be hurt in any way. No damage will be done. Nothing will be stolen or borrowed. There won’t even be a crease in the bedlinen.’
‘So, what are you doing?’
‘Nothing you need worry about. Absolutely nothing.’
Meyer took a table at Goldwyn’s, close to the customers’ payphone. He ordered a cup of coffee – cream, two sugars – and a couple of rugelach pastries, which looked like croissants filled with chocolate, raspberry jam and chopped walnuts. He took a copy of the Wall Street Journal out of his briefcase and was pleased to see that the Dow Jones had reached its highest level since November 1940. Meyer smiled to himself. Whatever his political convictions, he couldn’t help but admire America’s astonishing capacity for economic regeneration. They will even manage to make a profit out of this damn war!
The phone rang. No one paid any attention when he picked it up. This was a neighbourhood joint. Plenty of regulars who didn’t have telephones of their own used this one.
‘Miss Courtney has just left the building,’ said Haecki. ‘She’s going for a stroll in Central Park. She asked for a map, and I gave her advice about what she should see there. She also booked a table in our main restaurant for seven o’clock. I imagine that when she returns from her walk she will freshen up in our ladies’ cloakroom, spend approximately one hour eating her meal, and then return to her room at around eight.’
‘Might she not go out to see a film, or go to a nightclub?’
‘No. I asked her if she wished me to book anywhere, and she replied that she had a very busy day tomorrow and so wanted to get an early night.’
‘You have been admirably thorough, my dear Rolf. Now, there is just one more thing I need you to do . . .’
‘For ten dollars, only?’
‘All right . . . I’ll add another five.’
Meyer gave detailed instructions, then added, ‘Please, Rolf, just promise me that the next call you make will not be to a bookmaker.’
‘I swear it won’t be,’ said Haecki.
Meyer smiled to himself. He knew the poor man was lying. He would keep betting and keep losing. And as long as he did, he would be easily and cheaply bought.
Meyer had drunk most of his coffee and polished off his first rugelach when Petruskas arrived. He bought the Lithuanian a coffee and offered him the other pastry. ‘It’s delicious, but one is quite enough.’
Petruskas demolished the rugelach with the glee of a fit, active young man who knows he can soon burn off any amount of calories. Ah, you just wait till you get a little older and your belly starts expanding, Meyer thought, watching the performance.
‘So, what do you want me to do, Mr M?’ Petruskas asked, once his plate was empty.
After Meyer had given him precise instructions, Petruskas frowned. ‘Is that it? I mean, it seems like . . . I dunno . . .’
‘Almost nothing?’
‘Yeah, exactly – almost nothing.’ Then he grinned and said, ‘But, oh boy, that dame is gonna go crazy.’
• • •
S
affron Courtney had seen the world, from the highlands of Kenya to the slopes of St Moritz. She knew Cairo as well as she knew London, not to mention Cape Town, Paris, Athens and Jerusalem. She spoke Swahili as fluently as English, could communicate in Arabic and in her local Maasai dialect, and had passable French and German. But when she stepped out of the St. Regis and onto Fifth Avenue and looked down a seemingly endless canyon of concrete and glass, filled with hurrying New Yorkers, hot dog stands, horn-tooting cars, trucks, buses and bright yellow taxis, Saffron felt like a naive, inexperienced ingénue, overwhelmed by the wonder and excitement to which no visitor getting their first taste of Manhattan was immune.
A burly doorman was whistling up a cab for another guest, a middle-aged businessman, who was standing on the sidewalk in a three-piece pinstripe suit and black homburg hat, impatiently glancing at his watch. The doorman couldn’t help but grin when he saw the happiness on Saffron’s face, and he touched his peaked cap in salute as she went by. Even the businessman spared a second of his precious time to observe her.
To Saffron, New York felt like a city untouched by war. In London, it was impossible to escape the looming shadow of death and destruction. The sky was filled with barrage balloons. The Luftwaffe had destroyed houses, shops and offices, leaving gap-toothed streets. Other buildings were damaged beyond repair, with their facades torn away, exposing joists and rafters, pipes, wires – even carpets and torn, bedraggled curtains – for all to see. Even those that had so far survived intact had been blackened by the dust, the smoke and the scorching flames that erupted with every exploding bomb.
London’s inhabitants had a grey, exhausted, underfed pallor. Their clothes were shabby, their shoes worn out. But here in New York, at 10.15 on a bright spring morning, every building gleamed with the light reflecting off the windows that rose towards the sun. Faces looked healthy and well fed. Women were dressed in the latest fashions, and men wore suits that looked newly pressed, with crisp, freshly laundered shirts.
There was, though, one thing that both sides of the Atlantic had in common – women had taken over the jobs left vacant by men who had been called up. As Saffron walked downtown, she noticed that a lot of the cabs had female drivers. She smiled as one of them, forced to a sudden stop by a car braking in front of her. The woman gave a series of furious blasts on her horn, then leaned out of the window, waved her fist at the offending driver and gave him a piece of her mind. Anything a man can do, we can do better!
The weather was what a New Yorker would consider pleasantly mild, but in England counted as scorching. Saffron was still at heart an African, born and raised in the tropics. As she headed uptown towards the park, she basked in the warmth of the sun on her face and the feel of the breeze fluttering the skirt of her silk summer dress. After five days at sea, much of it cooped up in her cabin, she was looking forward to a proper walk. A quick scan of the map that the concierge had given her suggested that a circuit taking in most of Central Park would cover about five miles and take around two hours, and so it proved.
Saffron stood on a stone bridge over a pond and looked back towards the hotels that ran along the southern edge of the park, and the skyscrapers that rose behind them. She was dazzled by the vivid pink cherry blossom beside the reservoir and on the aptly named Cherry Hill. She entered a passage beneath one of the streets that cut across the park and found herself in a fairytale grotto supported by colonnades of arches and decorated with beautifully patterned ceramic tiles. A solo violinist was playing ‘Danny Boy’, and as the beautiful, heartbreaking melody filled the air, she thought of Daniel Doherty, the US Navy officer she had met at the SOE training school on the west coast of Scotland, and smiled wistfully at the memory of being in his arms. Then she laughed as she asked herself why she was so mad about Americans. Talk about ‘One Yank and they’re off’! Except, as she reminded herself, her undies had not come off. As the song said, a kiss was just a kiss, and there had only ever been one man with whom she had actually made love.
All in all, I’ve really been remarkably well behaved!
A couple of times Saffron caught herself stopping and looking again as a man passed her by. At first glance, they bore some resemblance to the motorbike rider, and each time she told herself to stop being so silly. There really was no reason why anyone would want to have her followed. So far as she knew, the Germans had no idea that she had been Marlize Marais. She’d left Belgium without being identified. And anyway, she wasn’t in the Low Countries now. She was in America, and if she’d walked around London every day without the slightest fear of being followed by enemy agents, why should she worry here?
Saffron was just reassuring herself that her logic was sound when a man’s voice called out, ‘Hey, doll-face!’
She looked around and saw a thickset man, shaded by a blue and yellow umbrella, standing behind a metal chest perched on four small wheels. ‘Me?’ she asked, pointing to herself.
‘Yeah, you,’ he said. ‘You look toisty.’
Saffron frowned. ‘Toisty?’
‘Yeah, like you could use a drink.’
‘Oh, you mean thirsty.’
‘What I said.’
‘Well, now you mention it, I am rather. What do you have?’
‘Hey, what don’t I have?’ the man said, as Saffron walked up to his cart. ‘I got Coca-Cola, RC Cola, Orange Crush, cream soda, root beer, you name it.’
‘Hmm . . . Coca-Cola’s the only one I’ve heard of, so I’ll have that, please.’
‘You got it, sweetheart. That’ll be a nickel.’
Saffron was beginning to realise that America was a much more foreign country than she had imagined. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Five cents. So, where you from?’
‘London . . . England.’
