The Company of the Dead (11 page)

“We need him like a hole in the head,” Hardas muttered.

Kennedy cut him off. “Keep a sharp eye out, Martin.”

Hardas rose to join Kennedy as he made for the doorway.

“If things go our way, we’re going to need somewhere close by to complete Lightholler’s recruitment,” Kennedy said, closing the door behind them. “Somewhere the CBI doesn’t know about.”

“I can think of a place,” Hardas said as they descended the stairs.

Outside the building, the afternoon sun assailed their eyes. Hardas lit up, then turned his face away to exhale before speaking. “Maybe we make for Neverland.”

“I thought that was what you had in mind.”

“It’s underneath the radar, Major, and it’s a day away from Red Rock. We fly in, turn Lightholler, fly out.”

Kennedy, silent, seemed lost in thought.

“A ranch in Arkansas is the last place anyone will be looking for us.” Hardas sensed Kennedy’s uncertainty and added, “If you think we can take Lightholler straight to Nevada, that’s what we’ll do—you’re the boss. But if you think we need a place to sort him out, where else did you have in mind?”

“Neverland,” Kennedy said after a moment. “Where else would lost boys go?”

Hardas had only visited the ranch once. He tried to picture a younger version of Kennedy playing pirate around the coves and thickets of Lake Hamilton.

“We’re not lost, Major. Just a little shook up is all.” Hardas tried to muster a smile. He took a drag on his cigarette and waited for a reply.

“Go down to the pier. Find out what the hell is going on. I’ve got a call to make.” Kennedy checked his Einstein. “We’ll meet back here at four.”

Hardas watched Kennedy leave. He thought about what he had to do and where he had to go. He thought about what he’d set in motion, all those years ago. He frowned and tossed his cigarette onto the pavement and made for the pier.

The twin towers of the Krupp Corporation rose above the plaza where Fifth Avenue ended at Waverly Place, casting lengthy shadows across Wilhelm Square.

Standing at the entrance to the park, Kennedy caught a glimpse of the statue that had fascinated him in his youth. Age-worn and mistreated, the Kaiser’s effigy still held on to his stallion’s bridle with a firm grip. Under an Uhlan’s helmet, his fiercely moustached face glared down at the communist hordes who cowered beneath his mount. Streaks of rust smeared the high cheekbones of his grim visage with bloody tears. The plaque at the pedestal’s base, commemorating the Kaiser’s victory over the Soviets and the reinstatement of the Tsar in 1945, was barely decipherable.

The monument’s condition was symptomatic. “Little Prussia” was finally falling apart. In the brief interim between the Great War and the Second Secession there’d been a vast migration of war-weary Germans to the East Coast. The majority had settled around this neighbourhood, but what had been a thriving community nearly a century ago had been reduced to a few streets around the square. The ink had scarcely dried on MacArthur’s offer of unconditional surrender in 1948 before the first wave of Japanese settlers had arrived, and they’d been coming ever since.

All that remained were the Krupp towers and the park. Despite growing anti-German sentiment during the Cold War, the city’s new masters had thought it imprudent to change the square’s name. It remained an enclave to those Germans who were too old or too poor to leave.

Kennedy shook his head and strode past the statue across the park, to the southwest corner. He was greeted by a familiar sight beneath the spread of wide-branched trees. Men sitting on benches, hunched over the chessboards that had been carved into the tables. The youngest of them had to be at least sixty. They wore a variety of shabby greatcoats; the litany of a dozen German campaigns documented on the faded crests of their lapels.

Of all the places I could have chosen
, he wondered,
why come here
?

In 1947, just prior to the Japanese Occupation, Joseph Patrick Kennedy I, his great-grandfather, had moved the clan south. The Secession may have been ratified in ’32, but for many Americans the country’s fracture was an ongoing process. A considerable number of New England families had gone on to form a Union enclave in New Orleans. While the Rothschilds and the Roosevelts maintained a ghetto-like existence in the fledgling nation, the Kennedys, with their new money and political connections, were readily assimilated into the burgeoning Confederate “aristocracy”. At least until 1963 and the bloodshed of Dealey Plaza.

Kennedy’s grandfather, Joseph Patrick II, was appointed the Confederate ambassador to the Union. He returned to the North in the late fifties with his youngest brother, Edward, while his brothers John and Robert stayed to pursue their interests in the South. Kennedy’s grandfather relinquished his post in ’63, when the circumstances of his brothers’ deaths laid to rest any desire he might have had for a future in politics. He’d stayed in the North, however, maintaining a residence on Fifth Avenue.

Nearly every winter up until the age of thirteen, Kennedy could recall accompanying his father to New York. His earliest memories were the journeys through old battlefields and towns, little more than smudges along the railway tracks. The sweet musk of the rocking carriages, the vacant stares of the border guards as they changed trains prior to entering the Prefecture of New York. Once he’d even made the long journey by airship.

Between visits to museums and galleries and quiet evenings at the mansion, his father would take him to the park. They would bring sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. They would stand and watch the men play chess in silence. Occasionally his father would lean down, whispering a soft explanation of the intricacies being played out before them, and Kennedy would nod between bites of his sandwich in what he hoped passed for understanding. Despite many offers, Kennedy’s father had always refused to play with the old soldiers.

One time, however, Kennedy himself had been asked. An elderly man with wild white hair had offered him a game. Gaining his father’s approval, he’d clambered up to the high table. He had to squat on the bench to gain a good vantage of the board.

The man placed two different pawns, one in each hand, behind his back. Kennedy had stared at the man as if his gaze could burn through his skin, as if he could see the very pieces themselves. The man had laughed when Kennedy sat unmoving as the bronze and orange leaves spiralled onto the untouched board. Eventually he shrugged his left shoulder.

“That one,” Kennedy had called out. “The left.”

“Not all choices will come to you so easily,” the man had said, smiling. “No matter how long you deliberate.” He opened his hand to reveal the black pawn rolling in his palm. “Chess is not a game of trust.”

Kennedy had frowned and turned to his father, who said nothing. The man set the board up with a briskness that belied his age, his elbows sweeping away the accumulated leaves, his fingers darting over the pieces as he positioned them.

“We start,” he said, advancing his king’s pawn with a flourish.

Kennedy responded by mirroring the move.

The man brought forwards a knight to threaten the pawn.

Kennedy advanced his own to offer protection.

The man advanced his bishop to threaten the exposed knight. He pointed a wavering finger at Kennedy’s pawn. “I think you like this piece too much.”

Kennedy had leaned back on his haunches, examining the board.

The man sat watching Kennedy’s face with a thin smile. “What to do? Threaten my bishop, thus imperilling your defences? Retreat your knight ignominiously and lose your much-loved pawn?”

Kennedy felt a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Either way, Joe,” his father said, “you have to lose something.” He knelt down and added, “Eventually you have to lose a piece. Just make it worthwhile.”

Kennedy had gone on to lose piece by piece, the man drawing him out in exchange after exchange until the board was sparsely populated by isolated pawns and other lower pieces. The two kings stood warily at opposite sides of the board.

“Remember, young man, you start the game with all of your pieces. An infinite number of possibilities await your decision, await the revision of a thousand decisions. But at the end of the day, and at the end of the game, it all comes down to this.” He gestured absently with an arthritic hand.

“I don’t understand,” Kennedy had said.

The man nodded at him solemnly. “But one day you will.” He placed his finger on a bishop and slid it down the length of the board. “Check...”

Kennedy studied the barren board.

“...and mate in two.”

Kennedy sullenly flicked over his king and glanced up at his father, who gave a gentle shake of his head. Kennedy remembered his manners and thanked the old man for the game.

“The pleasure was mine,” the man had said. “You show promise. Perhaps, next time, victory shall be yours.”

There had never been a next time. Although he’d visited the park several more times that winter, Kennedy never saw the elderly man again. Soon afterwards, his grandfather had travelled to the German Mideast on family business. When he failed to return following the Sinai Crisis, the rest of the family had returned to the South for good.

Thirty years, Dad. It’s been thirty years.

Kennedy thrust his hands into his coat pockets and walked up to the chess players. He stayed to watch a few games. Standard openings gave way to combinations that varied from the familiar to the bizarre. Slashing attacks and fierce sorties triumphed in sudden raids or ended in futile sacrifice. The boards emptied. Robbed of vicious queens and unpredictable knights and surrounded by a lean detail of pawns, the kings moved ponderously and grandly across desolate battlefields.

He sauntered from table to table, looking for some portent to guide his way.

An infinite number of possibilities
.

He left the park by the corner entrance and wandered a block over to Sixth Avenue, then turned downtown. The late morning traffic was swarming downtown in tides that broke at each traffic light, swelling and reforming to thunder down to the next intersection. He found a phone booth outside a tavern on Bleecker and punched in a number. He triggered the stopwatch on his Einstein and said, “Director Webster, please.”

“Identification?”

“201166; watchword, Pendragon.”

“Confirmed. One minute, sir. You’re calling unsecured—I’ll put you through the scrambler.”

There was a dial tone, the click of a recording device, and then, “Well, well, well. Speak of the devil. Good afternoon, Joseph.”

“Good afternoon, sir.”

“How’s the weather treating you up there? I find that New York is always lovely in April.”

“The weather’s fine, sir,” Kennedy replied, cursing inwardly.

“So you’ve been in touch with our Mr Lightholler? He strikes me as a practical sort of fellow. Granted he sounded a little anxious on the phone tap this morning, but that’s understandable, isn’t it? How did you find him, Joseph? More to the point,
why
did you go looking for him?”

“The same reason I look for anyone, sir. Information.”

“I’m feeling a little inquisitive myself, so indulge me,” Webster replied. “Why are you in New York trawling for information from the captain of an ocean liner? Are you considering a new occupation for yourself?”

“No, sir. I’m just—”

Webster cut him short. “Well, perhaps you should. The role of delivery boy seems to suit you well, and bearing a letter from the palace at that. And, as you seem fond of saying, you are ‘owed some favours’. But for what services, I wonder?”

Kennedy offered no reply. Clearly Webster was well aware of his earlier conversation with Lightholler. Shine had confirmed that the captain’s phone line wasn’t tapped, but that didn’t account for anyone he might have spoken to after they had left.

Who the
hell
had Lightholler called in the Admiralty?

He pictured Webster hunched at his long, wide oak desk. Would he be wearing the eye patch or had he taken it off for the call?

“Yes...” Webster stretched the word out painfully. “Let’s see now. Information. Tell me, Joseph, why were you in contact with Captain Lightholler?”

“I thought we’d benefit from his take on the peace talks.” He decided to keep it simple. “Their failure affects our timetable.”

“Since he arrived in New York, Lightholler’s sat with representatives of the Shogun, the Tsar and the Kaiser,” Webster purred. “I suppose you felt esteemed enough to join their ranks.”

Kennedy didn’t bite. “I valued his point of view, sir.”

“Valued it enough to recruit the man.”

“Yes, sir.”

“For my Bureau.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But why do so via British intelligence? If indeed there is such a thing. And while we’re at it, remind me, just when did I authorise this?”

“I approached him via the British in order to secure his full and rapid cooperation. As for your authority, with all due respect, I thought I had a sanction to deputise for the project.”

“Subject to my final approval, you do. And I don’t recall giving you that.”

“That’s why I’m calling in. I wanted to have his answer before bringing you into the picture.”

Webster’s silence was an accusation. Kennedy found he was gripping the handpiece knuckle-white. Drawing a deep breath, he decided to play it through.

“Frankly, I have some questions of my own. I‘m wondering where all this is going. I’m wondering why the Bureau has him under surveillance. Why have you sent
another
team across the border?”

“All good questions, Joseph,” Webster answered calmly. “What was Lightholler’s answer?”

Kennedy wished he knew.

“He said yes.”

“Did he now. You must be as pleased as punch, Joseph.” Webster said the name like he was sucking on a lemon. “I don’t know what exactly went on in that hotel room, since for
some
reason our recording equipment malfunctioned during your interview. Given that fact, I want a complete record of your conversation.”

“I’ll send it down today.”