Warsaw Concerto, page 13
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
He had a thin gold wedding band on his finger, his nails were manicured, ‘clean like a doctor’s’, she was later to recollect. She thought his shoes were black, although she could not be sure about that. No, she could not really remember the colour of his eyes. Dark? Greenish, but she was not sure about that, either. He had a Southern drawl. Oh, and he was very courteous. His hair was ‘dark’. A toupee? No, I do not think so…
The customer, a Benjamin J. Sherman junior, had produced a letter and a supporting affidavit, the latter document the teller could have sworn she retained and filed in the appropriate cabinet later that morning – but after exhaustive searches it could not actually be located - confirming his identity and authorising him to access safe deposit box no. 1776.
The box was removed, its key handed to Mister Sherman who subsequently took it into the confidential room in the vault. He was alone for about five minutes before he returned the locked box to the vault supervisor. He stopped by the teller’s position on the way out, to thank the young woman he had first spoken to, and then he left the bank. It had been subsequently estimated that he was on the premises about fifteen minutes in all…
Needless to say, when the – empty - deposit box was examined it appeared to have been wiped clean of all fingerprints, inside and out - most likely with a solvent of some kind - excepting those prints of the Bank of America employee who had handled it immediately after Mister Sherman had handed it back into his custody.
Therefore, the Federal Bureau of Investigation Agents who had been waiting over ten months for somebody to access box no. 1776, due to a mix-up at the bank – the teller ‘Sherman’ had approached was new, and that day’s duty vault supervisor normally worked at the bank’s nearby, Locust Street branch, was standing in for a colleague who had reported sick over the weekend – there was a twenty-four hour delay before the local FBI Field Office discovered ‘the box’ had been ‘opened’, and several further lost hours before the news filtered back to Washington DC, and eventually, Quantico.
Every member of the bank’s staff on duty that Monday morning was shown a folder of photographs and artist’s sketches in an attempt to identify ‘Sherman’, to no avail. The teller, increasingly distraught, was adamant that none of the pictures were ‘at all like him…’
None of this came as any surprise to former Special Agent Dwight Christie when, eventually, over seventy-two hours after the event, he was briefed.
The existence of the deposit box had been among the disclosures made by two ‘End of Day’ agents detained in the first big round ups of last January.
The security of the Rebels’ radio and wire communications had been of the ‘schoolboy’ variety, and was swiftly compromised and penetrated, in detail, by the National Security Agency and the CIA’s codebreakers. This, allied to appallingly sloppy fieldcraft, had meant that most of the men and women ‘The Kingdom’ tried to send, or already had in place behind Union lines, had fallen into US hands within weeks of the outbreak of the Civil War.
Box no. 1776 at the Memorial bank of Pennsylvania was one of dozens of such clumsily prepared and poorly protected dead drops. By December 1966, the reason it was of particular interest to the FBI was that it was one of only three boxes whose owner had not been arrested, or turned up to claim it. Moreover, by coincidence – or not, one never took anything for granted - the name ‘Sherman’ had once been one of the handles of a missing, presumed deceased, CIA asset. Given that recent experience with the End of Dayers indicated that none of them seemed to have a great deal of imagination, or for that matter, personal initiative, nobody had ruled out the possibility that Langley’s mislaid ‘asset’ might actually be the same ‘Sherman’, who just happened to be at the top of the Company’s secret Most Wanted List.
Which was where, it seemed, Former Special Agent Dwight Christie came in.
He had been held at Quantico, the FBI’s high security complex located in the heart of the surrounding Marine Corps base, since he was transferred from the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia the best part of two years ago.
At first, he had been a little fazed by the naivety of his interrogators. Then the college boys had been replaced by old cops, grizzled in mind and body who had started taking him seriously when he began to explain that ‘the Reds’, ‘the Resistance’ and ‘Organised Crime’ had from time to time, in his experience, ‘been the same thing, with interests in common.’
The college boys had not got it; the old-timers had.
Spies, traitors, fifth columnists. the so-called ‘enemy within’ operated on the same side of the tracks, the wrong side, as the Mob. Loyalties got blurred, motives twisted and if you survived any length of time – Christie had lived sixteen years in exactly that in-between land in which a man never knew who to trust or when he was going to be betrayed, before he finally got caught – it was hardly surprising that after a while you started to forget what you had been so angry about in the beginning.
So, he knew a lot about other people’s business, how they operated, their bottom lines and where the holes in their organisations, networks, families were to be found and exploited. There was no difference between a Mob hitman or a Company assassin, the good ones, the real professionals, tended to be of a recognisable type: psychopaths of one shade or another, often with military backgrounds, exclusively men in his experience, leastways until he had met that woman at Wister Park…
When they transferred him from Philadelphia, Christie had known he was swapping one prison for another, he was beyond caring. He had heard that Mary Drinkwater, but for whose campaigning and truly astonishing ‘connections’, he would probably have fried – a-la electric chair - long ago, had moved on. He had no idea if she had tried to write to him or asked after him, or cared either way. All he knew was what one of his minders had told him, probably to screw with his head: that Mary had taken up with a Brit, and gone abroad to Australia.
Good for her!
Very little else filtered into his closed little world at Quantico. His life had been spared, that was all. The days when his life belonged to him were over. He had murdered fellow agents in cold blood, conspired against everything which ought to have been sacred to a man like him who had taken the oath to uphold the constitution of the United States and to defend all the other…good stuff.
Worse, the first time he had been caught he had made a deal with the Agency and then, broken it. It did not matter why; it was simply another oath violated, trodden underfoot and the guys at Quantico were not about to make the same mistake twice. He had had his one chance and these guys were not about to give this sucker a second one!
Another, not inconsiderable consideration, was that there were a lot of people ‘out there’ who would shed not a single tear if somebody filled him full of bullets.
So, he had his life – that was something - and conditions here in Virginia were by Marine Corps standards, luxurious. He got three square meals a day, exercise, sometimes a walk in the woods, books but not newspapers to read, a radio tuned to public service stations, no TV. The deal was he was allowed to write to his attorney, Gretchen Betancourt, but that was it.
Once a month Gretchen turned up – variously pregnant, she was late this month; ‘it depends when junior decides to make his bow’, she had explained at the end of the last visit - they talked, usually for about twenty minutes or half-an-hour and then he was alone again with his minders.
In recent months the interrogation sessions were few and far between.
Often, like today, he was being used as a reference book.
The photographs did not help.
“Show me the witness statements, please.”
He was always the one man at Quantico who was never in a hurry. That day his minders put up with his lack of urgency with unusual patience.
Presently, Dwight looked up.
“I’ve never met this guy,” he confessed.
He did his best to deal only in the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth these days. He owed Mary, and all the other people who had died at Wister Park that, at least. However, there was often something, or other he neglected to mention unless somebody pressed the right button.
“But I think I’ve heard of him. The trouble is a lot of the low-level gossip out in the field is myths and legends, strictly for the birds.”
His minders listened closer because whereas they had heard the rumours they heard, Dwight Christie had been inside – and outside – their hermetically sealed environment ever since the end of the Second War.
“But this guy, yeah,” he had decided, his brow furrowed with reflection. “I definitely heard about this guy. Not ‘Sherman’, I think he was ‘Farrow’ or ‘Kowalczyk’ or maybe, ‘Kowalski’, yeah, something Polish. Nobody could say if he was Mob or, whatever. The Cubans down in Florida were on his case just before the war. But that’s not the thing…”
He had his minders leaning forward, not quite but almost drooling with expectation.
Dwight Christie waited for somebody to punch the right button. When it did not happen, he held up a hand.
“Don’t take this wrong but all this is what some guy heard someplace before he told the next guy, I have no idea how legit all this is and I’m only remembering it now because back in the day when the Company was supposed to be heavily into black ops in South America, the story was this guy was working with a Polish broad. That’s where I reckon the Kowalczyk or Kowalski legends came from. Him and this Polish broad were moving around like old-time emigres, you know, as if they’d had to escape from the Reds back home in Europe and they were in bed, figuratively, that is, with all the wackos who’d been thrown out of Cuba and other places down south…”
Dwight Christie could tell they though he was selling them a line. Okay, he could see their point of view. He needed to get to the punchline before they lost interest.
“You know that dame the Marines had to goddam near beat to death to stop her carving up those maniacs at the end of the Wister Park siege?”
Christie’s listeners were stone-quiet, holding their breaths.
“Rachel,” he went on, “Rachel Piotrowska. Jesus, she was something. The scariest woman I ever met…”
The others had all read the transcripts of his account of ‘that woman’s’ rampage. What little of it that Christie himself had seen with his own eyes still gave him nightmares.
He had been chained – his face bust up – to a radiator when half-a-dozen men had gang-raped Rachel Piotrowska and left her for dead. Later, she had risen, like a wraith, and with near silent, eerily ballet-like violence killed several of their captors with her bare hands and a…scalping knife. That had been only the start of the bloodletting…
“What about her?” Demanded a minder.
“Back in the day they said she worked for the CIA in South America. She was buddied up with one of their guys. Rumour was that when they were done down there, they stayed ‘buddies’, went into business for themselves in Europe.”
“Did this guy have a name?”
Christie shook his head.
“You’d have to ask the people at Langley. Legend has it they called him Billy the Kid. Because he wasn’t too bothered who got caught in the crossfire.”
Chapter 12
Thursday 8th December 1966
La Séguinière, Maine-et-Loire Department, France
Vera Bertrand had still been in a daze by the time the British ‘scout convoy’ had transported her back to the village yesterday afternoon. ‘The scouts’, hard-faced but generally amiable special forces soldiers sitting on top of enough machine guns and high explosives to demolish whole towns, had briefly reconnoitred the environs of La Séguinière and the ruins of nearby Cholet, snatched a few hours of sleep overnight and moved on. Now the ‘real cavalry’ as Brigadier Edwin Bramall, the dapper, courteous, masterfully competent commander of the 2nd Royal Tanks Battle Group – the White Brigade’s would-be nemesis until a couple of days ago – had promised was rolling into the village.
Specifically, a column of tanks, armoured cars, Land Rovers and three- and five-ton Bedford lorries. The tanks, a squadron of three Centurion Mk Is – the version that was still armed with the old 84-millimetre 17-pounder rifle, had rumbled onto the open ground in front of the half-ruined Town Hall. Several infantrymen had been riding on the top of each of the behemoths, most of whom had jumped down to stretch their legs and to start handing out sweets and chocolate to the handful of children, teenagers and women who had hesitantly emerged from the surrounding buildings as Vera and Sebastien Betancourt had walked out to meet the ‘liberators’.
That the newcomers came in peace was obviously a thing that Edwin Bramall had drilled into his men; in no time they were unloading boxes of canned meat and soup and liberally distributing packs of cigarettes. Within minutes there were dozens of conversations in progress in faltering French and English, and people around Vera were beginning to risk smiles and laughs behind wary hands.
A number of the soldiers who spilled from the big trucks wore the badge of the British Parachute Regiment, to a man they wasted no time replacing their ‘hard hats’ with their red berets. Vera wondered if that was just to seem less threatening to their new ‘allies’? If so, it helped, although not as much as the boiled sweets and cubes of hard, dark chocolate and American cigarettes the other troops were cheerfully dispensing as the crowd in the square grew.
“Captain Charles Guthrie, of the Welsh Guards, Ma’am,” the commander of the British column reported, marching towards Vera and Betancourt smiling broadly. To her surprise he saluted crisply and extended his right hand to her, and then to her somewhat scarred, scarecrow companion.
Twenty-eight-year-old Guthrie had been selected for this first, ‘confidence-building occupation of the ground’ mission by his commanding officer because it was realised this initial major contact needed to be handled with sure-footed élan, and those were demonstrable qualities which had already marked out Guthrie as a man destined for high command.
Guthrie had been in that notorious colonial hotspot, Aden, at the time of the October War, he had since seen service in Cyprus and in the battle for Abadan, this latter while on detachment to the Special Air Service. He had collected a Military Cross in the desert fighting, and been mentioned in despatches twice in the four months he had been in France.
“I am delighted to make your acquaintance,” Guthrie declared in passable French. “I’m jolly glad to be meeting you in good fellowship, not arms!”
“Likewise, Mon Capitaine,” Sebastien Betancourt grimaced.
The one-time Sorbonne academic knew that Sergey Akhromeyev and Vera Bertrand, his closest and most trusted friends in this insane post-October War World, had agonised over the compromises they understood that had to be made if they were to save their people.
Such ‘compromises’ were easier for him, of course; he had never had any particular political or ideological convictions, having been agnostic to the core in his frankly hedonistic career in Paris at the Sorbonne. Cushioned by his family’s wealth his life had been one of parties, lovers and periodically, drinking himself into oblivion to shut out the dissonant voices in his head. Before the Cuban Missiles War, he had never taken responsibility for anything, not even the bastard child whom he assumed must have been consumed in the fires of the French capital. He had lived as a privileged, feckless, free man toying with an academic career which if nothing else, gave him access to an endless stream of beautiful young women ripe for seduction…
“Betancourt?” Guthrie was asking. “I believe that the American Ambassador in Oxford’s daughter-in-law is a Betancourt?”
Only the English would make polite conversation at a time like this!
“Oh?” Sebastien murmured wearily.
He actually felt even worse than he knew he must look.
“Yes, Greta,” Guthrie’s brow furrowed. “No, Gretchen. Gretchen, that was it!”
Sebastien shrugged apologetically, might have fainted but for Vera Bertrand’s firm, sisterly hand on his arm.
“I have a cousin called Gretchen in Massachusetts,” he recollected. He had not met the girl since she was in her late teens; Sebastien was not one of the favoured European – relatively poor in ‘family terms’ – relations who received regular invitations to New England to visit for high days, holidays or any other kind of filial occasions.
“She’s married to Ambassador Brenckmann’s second son, Daniel,” Guthrie told him cheerfully. “He’s clerk or some such to the Chief Justice of the American Supreme Court, and the chap who was, presumably still is, carrying out the American’s inquest into the Cuban Missiles cock-up!”
Sebastien tried to remember Gretchen.
A tall, plain, rather gawky teenager with auburn hair; always in a hurry, driven even as a kid, very different from her idle, complacent older brothers and reputedly, by far the closest of all the many US-side siblings to the patriarch, that old rascal Claude Betancourt…
“That might well be Gretchen,” Sebastien admitted reluctantly. He smiled wanly. “You must understand that I am of the, er, distaff side of the family, as you would say in England.”
Guthrie chuckled.
He turned to Vera.
“My chaps need to get their bearings and, with your permission, Madame Bertrand, to re-establish a new, ideally extended defensive perimeter. The moment we’ve done that we’ll start properly setting up the soup kitchens.” At this point Guthrie frowned in unambiguous concern. “Forgive me, it is my information is that some of your people are so far gone a square meal would do for them?”
Vera nodded disconsolately.
Guthrie forced a tight-lipped smile.
