Pantheon (39 page)

London

May 15th 1940, 6pm

Most Secret and Personal.

President Roosevelt from Former Naval Person

Although I have changed my office, I am sure you would not wish me to discontinue our intimate, private correspondence. As you are no doubt aware, the scene has darkened swiftly …

Hastings watched as Murray’s eyes scanned along the page, his thumb indicating where he stopped next:

If necessary, we shall continue the war alone and we are not afraid of that. But I trust you realize, Mr President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long …

That got Murray excited. As expected, the Englishman turned the page, looking for Roosevelt’s reply to this direct appeal for US intervention. If the President bowed to Churchill’s plea, if he had secretly promised to deploy ‘the force of the United States’, then Roosevelt would be finished, his re-election in November doomed. He had repeatedly sworn before the American people that no such decision had been taken, that the US was still officially neutral. But if it could be proven that Roosevelt had, in fact, clandestinely committed the US to Britain’s defence, he would be exposed as a warmonger and, worse, a liar – ready to trick his own nation into a global and potentially disastrous conflict.

Murray was skimming the President’s reply, all of it exasperatingly non-committal. Taylor knew what the older man was looking for; he had been looking for just the same thing himself when he had first held these papers in his own grasp, his hands clammy with excitement. He wondered if he should put the Englishman out of his misery, but decided against it. He had worked hard for this moment; he had every right to savour it.

He let his guest turn over another sheet, so that Murray was now reading Churchill’s cable to Roosevelt of May 20, 1940, despatched at one pm, his eyes darting across the page at double speed. Taylor particularly liked this one:

Excuse me, Mr President, putting this nightmare bluntly. Evidently I could not answer for my successors who in utter despair and helplessness might well have to accommodate themselves to the German will …

Taylor hoped the meaning of that passage had sunk in. Here was the British prime minister warning that, if no American military help was forthcoming, then his own administration would collapse and a pro-German regime would take its place. Wasn’t that proof, from the horse’s mouth, that he, Taylor Hastings, was about to make all the Right Club’s dreams come true? Once Roosevelt was discredited and ejected from office, the US would stay out of the war and Britain would either be defeated or make its peace with Germany: Churchill himself was saying it! Hitler would be master of all Europe, with only the Atlantic – no longer defended by Churchill’s precious Royal Navy – standing between the Third Reich and America. A new world was about to be born and he, young as he was, would be remembered as one of its fathers …

He could see a line of worry etched into Murray’s forehead. That did not surprise, still less concern, Hastings. He understood. The Englishman had only read Churchill’s increasingly urgent pleas; from Roosevelt, he had only seen a series of fence-sitting replies. The MP was fretting that these documents did not, after all, contain the lethal words that would unseat an American president and prepare the way for a new order in Europe and beyond.

He decided to employ a technique learned from Anna, Murray’s wife and his lover. She always knew when a striptease had gone on long enough. It was time to remove the last veil and show the man what he was aching to see.

‘June 13,’ he said steadily. ‘Turn to R’s letter from June 13, 1940. One pm.’

Murray’s fingers were shaking in their haste to turn over one sheet and then another.

As at last he began reading, Taylor’s eye accompanied him over each word, the pleasure of it now even greater than the first time he had read it.

Your message of June 10 has moved me very deeply … this Government is doing everything in its power to make available to the Allied Governments the material they so urgently require, and our efforts to do still more are being redoubled. This is because of our faith in and our support of the ideals for which the Allies are fighting.

It began at the corners of his mouth, spreading slowly as if this were a delight not to be rushed. Reginald Rawls Murray read the words again, then sat back in his chair, at first relieved, then steadily – as the meaning sank in – elated. Colour was spreading across his face, brightening by the second.

‘It’s not one hundred per cent definitive,’ Taylor said, ‘but—’

‘But it’s as close as makes no difference,’ Murray said. ‘If even one sentence of this were to become known on Capitol Hill. I mean, “our faith in and our support of the Allies”. What’s that, if not a commitment?’

‘That’s not exactly what he said, Mr Murray. The full quote is actually—’

‘Oh, don’t you worry about that, young man. This is politics, not diplomacy. He’s talked about “faith and support”, that’s what matters. No one cares about the small print. And look at this.’ The MP, his cheeks now filled with a ruddy flush that extended to his ears, rapped the paper in front of him. ‘“Our efforts to do still more are being redoubled”. Well, what the hell does that mean except war? He admits he’s doing everything else already, supplying materials and what have you. “To do still more.” It can only mean one thing. No, I’m afraid your Mr
Rosenfeld
has hanged himself with his own rope here.’

‘Not my Mr Rosenfeld, Mr Murray. I never voted for him.’

‘Of course not. Not yours and not America’s, if the truth be told. He works for the Jews, like they all do.’

The MP got to his feet and reached for his lightweight summer coat, which he had left on the couch – the same couch, Hastings reflected, where he had been thrusting like a locomotive piston into Mrs Rawls Murray not a week earlier. The older man extended his hand. ‘You may never get any recognition for what you have done, Mr Hastings. Your name may never be known. But people of good blood will always owe you a debt. On their behalf, I thank you.’

Taylor accepted the handshake and nodded gravely, the star pupil on prize day. He knew he should have left it like that, saying nothing more than bidding farewell. But between curiosity and decorum, curiosity was the stronger. ‘What will you do with it?’ he asked.

‘I shall put it into the hands of those who will make best use of it. And I shall do it tonight.’

It was dark and deserted on the platform at Union Station and, thanks to the cloudless sky, cold too. James had grabbed only what he could pack in thirty seconds from his room at the Elizabethan Club, received a warm shake of the hand and a ‘Good luck’ from Walters the butler, then run almost the entire length of College Street – past the couples sharing milkshakes in the drugstore and the medics drinking beer at the Owl Shop – until the neighbourhood got decidedly seamier. Once he had reached the railway tracks, he took a sharp left, sprinting until he could see the lights and hear the shunting and braking of the railway yard. Perhaps a cab would have been quicker, but he was too impatient to wait for one to appear. What was more, running meant there was no one he had to trust but himself.

It was nearly nine o’clock; the chances, he knew, of a train leaving for Washington just when he needed it were almost non-existent. And so it had proved. The next useful train was the Federal, the overnight service that would – if it were anything like the milk trains he knew from England – trundle through the small hours at horse-and-cart speeds, stopping and starting at every tiny little hamlet en route.

And yet it would be better than standing still. More to the point, there was little else he could do until morning and that, surely, was equally true of Preston McAndrew. As long as he reached Washington, DC, early tomorrow, and was able to get started right away, he would not be too late. That, at least, was what he told himself.

But as he paced the platform, his shirt sticky with sweat and clinging to his back, he could not escape the fear that the reverse might be true. Dorothy’s words had been clear.
He said he was off to have ‘the most important meeting of my entire life’. He said that he had to go right away
…

What if that meeting were tonight, even at midnight? What if McAndrew were travelling to the capital by motor car; would that mean he would get there later or earlier than by train? James cursed himself. If only he had understood earlier, he would have got to the Dean while he was still in New Haven. If only he had had the wit to put Lund at his ease. Florence would have known what to do: she’d have had Lund spilling his guts, the Assistant Dean explaining that the naked photos had merely acted as the signpost, pointing him to McAndrew’s larger, grander scheme, the one Lund had only truly grasped when he read the Dean’s lecture,
Cleansing Fire.
Somehow Lund had made the mistake of letting on to McAndrew what he knew, or at least what he suspected. That, surely, is why the Dean had decided his assistant had to die, so that no one else should have the same inkling.

James now understood the Dean’s aim well enough: the lecture had made that clear. He was determined to keep the United States out of the war, so that a great eugenic experiment might unfold. Let Britain suffer a catastrophic defeat and then watch the consequences, observing as the weak and the inferior were wiped out in their tens of millions while only the strongest would survive. Britain was to be a giant laboratory, its population mere lab rats, while McAndrew’s hypothesis was put to the ultimate test. And once it was done, once this cleansing fire had burnt through every corner of England, devouring the ‘runts’ from the British litter that were too feeble to save themselves, those still standing, stronger and better than the rest, would be reinforced by the return of one hundred and twenty-five of the fittest, cleverest children, safely incubated in New Haven.

It was a monstrous scheme. However much he loathed Bernard Grey and the rest of the Oxford circle that had connived in Florence and Harry’s departure – and he did loathe them – James refused to believe they could have collaborated in the entirety of such a diabolical plan. What they had colluded in was a plan to spare a special, privileged class of children, so that, in the event of catastrophic defeat, this elite might be sprinkled like top-quality seed into the soil of a devastated Britain. They doubtless believed they were saving the lives of a hundred and twenty-five innocent children who were, yes, more deserving than others because of their value to the English national ‘stock’. That was morally reprehensible enough. But there was a world of difference between planning for the
contingency
of a British defeat by the Nazis and positively
willing
that outcome. Whatever nonsense Grey and the other socialists, Fabians and do-gooding social reformers believed, they were still British patriots, firm in their support of the war effort and in their opposition to Hitler. They did not long to see German bombs flatten British cities and a jackbooted Gestapo gauleiter in every English parish hall. McAndrew must, surely, have hidden from them his ultimate purpose – that what they saw as a doomsday to be planned for, he saw as a dream to be desired. For the Dean actively yearned for calamity and slaughter, for the sake of his warped, repulsive notion of ‘science’.

But if that was the end the Dean was pursuing, James still had no inkling of his chosen means. Which meant he had no idea what he would do once he got to Washington, how on earth he would find McAndrew who would, after all, be one man in a capital city, a man who could be anywhere. If only he had understood all this yesterday or even earlier today, when there was still time. If only he could ask Lund, who might have known the answers, who might have uncovered the details of the Dean’s plan, thereby signing his own death warrant. If only, if only, if only. James kicked the gravel, the toe of his shoe sending up little clouds of dust.

Through the gloom he now saw a light, some distance away. It was getting larger and now came the first rumble of noise. He looked at his watch for the fifth time in twenty minutes. The overnight train was not due to pull in here for another quarter of an hour. Only as it got nearer did he realize that this was a train coming into the other platform from the opposite direction.

There was a sudden commotion and a flurry of colour on his own side of the tracks. James wheeled around to see a woman gesticulating at a station guard. All he could see clearly, picked out by the sodium lamps of the station waiting room – no blackout here – was a bright bulb of honey-blonde hair. And then he heard the voice and knew instantly that it was Dorothy Lake.

She saw him at the same moment and broke into an athlete’s sprint, running towards him with no restraint. She began shouting long before she had reached him. ‘You must get on that train! Quick! Get on that train!’ She pointed across the tracks at the small locomotive, drawing no more than three carriages, now slowing to a halt, hissing with steam.

James could hardly hear her. ‘What? That’s going the wrong way.’

‘No,’ she panted, catching up with him at last. ‘No, that’s the right way. That’s where you need to go. Take that train to Greenwich. Get off there and ask for Hope Farm. Harry and Florence are there.’

James felt his heart stop. For a second, he and everything around him froze. He stared at Dorothy Lake and knew in an instant – from the earnest, pleading urgency of her face – that she was telling the truth.

‘I don’t und—’ he started, but she cut him off.

‘Don’t say anything!’ she said, the glow of her cheeks visible even in the half-light. ‘Just get on that train. I can’t tell you how I know, but I know. Your wife is waiting for you. Your
son
is waiting for you. Go!’

‘I … I can’t.’

‘Yes, you can. The train’s right here.’

‘I have to get to Washington. There’s something I have to do before it’s—’

On the opposite platform the guard was marching through clouds of steam, inspecting both ends for any passengers still getting on or off. He had a flag in his hand.