Truman's Spy: A Cold War Spy Thriller Page 7

  "So what did he do?" Buchanan asked.

  "No one knows exactly. This was sometime in 1947. But apparently he took his show even further on the road. Went to Europe, if our sources are straight. There was even a pair of rumors. One said he had taken off for South America with what remained of the cash assets of the bank. The other tale had it that he had killed himself. Neither was entirely credible. He showed up again after an absence of a few weeks. He was all bright and chipper. And the next thing anyone knew, Commonwealth Penn was rolling in money again. How did he do it?" Roth opened his hands and arms in a wide dramatic gesture of wonder. "I don't know. That's for you to find out."

  The summation suddenly finished. Buchanan held Roth in his gaze for several seconds.

  "Any theories?" Buchanan finally asked. Roth motioned to the stack of files.

  "It's all in there," he said. "The bank is awash in unidentifiable corporate accounts, holding companies that only have initials, transactions that may or may not be coming from Europe and Asia, and letters of credit from London and Zurich used to generate loans from Commonwealth Penn. All this for a remote, struggling suburban bank? You tell me something's not wrong."

  "It sounds like a textbook example of money laundering," Buchanan said.

  "It's more than that. You'll see when you go through those files. Whatever happened, wherever the money came from, it caused Garrett's wife to leave him and his daughters to move far away. We assume they're alive, but we can't locate them. To give you a further example of what you're getting into," Roth said, "we can't even locate Garrett from day to day. He's a recluse. Works out of his home when he's in the area and disappears for the rest of the time. An invisible man running a bank with millions in assets from phantom sources." Roth blew out a long stream of smoke and fiddled with his cigarette. "Now factor in the political angle. If Garrett is a Red and his bank is unaccountably solvent, what’s going on? You'd have a better insight than any man in the Bureau. You knew the family.”

  "Years ago," Buchanan said evenly.

  "At least that's somewhere to start. Make your own good luck.”

  Buchanan said he would.

  "Here's something else," Roth said. "You worked in the Chicago office for a time,

  didn't you, Tom?"

  "In 1946. For about ten months. My first assignment."

  "Did you know a special agent there named Mark O'Connell?"

  Buchanan's attention perked. "Yes," he said with mild surprise. "Of course. I knew him quite well."

  "He resigned from the FBI two or three months ago. He was working on something that may have touched upon the Garrett case. I don't know. He quit in anger over something petty one day. Took a job as a local police chief somewhere out west. The location is in one of those manila folders," Roth said, pointing with an index finger, "along with the reports he wrote of his final cases."

  Roth cleared his throat, a rasping, guttural sound. "No one knows for sure if O'Connell turned up anything that touched on Garrett," Roth said. "But you might consider…"

  "Taking advantage of the friendship and looking O'Connell up?" His tone suggested his annoyance.

  "Exactly. Even if you have to travel. I'll authorize the expense."

  Roth paused for a moment, then moved to the point.

  "Look, Tom. You know how things work here. J. Edgar himself is going to be glaring over our shoulders. And I think you know that failure - real or imagined - is not tolerated very long in this agency."

  Buchanan nodded. Roth managed a sympathetic smile.

  "I better let you get reading," he said.

  An inch and a half of gray ash tumbled from his cigarette onto his shirt, not for the first time judging by some of the stains on the clothing. He made a show of brushing it off. But he was finished talking.

  Then, "Good luck," Roth concluded.

  It sounded like a benediction as he departed.

  Outside, it was night.

  Thomas Buchanan walked slowly down a long corridor from the office of Special Agent in Charge William Roth. In his arms he carried the Bureau's complete files on John Taylor Garrett.

  Buchanan entered his own office, the one to which he had been newly assigned. With a sigh he set the files on his desk. Near them was a small reading lamp with a green glass shade. Thomas turned it on and sat down.

  A thousand questions besieged him. Where had Garrett's new solvency come from? To where have his daughters disappeared? What about Garrett's wife? A terrible emotion was upon Thomas when he reasoned that all three women could be dead. Why was foreign money pouring into a remote bank headed by the heir to a department store fortune? And whose money was it? Was this the repayment of a wartime favor? Or was this just good, aggressive business by John T. Garrett at a time when Commonwealth Penn needed it most?

  For a moment Buchanan brooded on it without touching any of the files. Garrett had been an intelligence officer during the war, he reminded himself. Frank Lerrick had told him that much. What kind of intelligence work? And for whom? Was this an angle, or a trail leading off into darkness? Could the FBI get Garrett's wartime record from the United States Army or the State Department? Or would one of these files currently on his desk be able to guide him?

  There was a night porter in the office, an illiterate old Negro named Charles who would run long errands for a fifty-cent piece. Buchanan sent him up to Broad Street to retrieve a sandwich and some coffee. Then, while still waiting for Charles to return, his interest gradually heightening, Buchanan drew toward him the stack of files on John Taylor Garrett.

  He noted the time on his watch. Nine fifteen. He opened the nearest of the files and diligently set to work, attempting to reconcile his own memory of Ann Garrett's father with the man whose life the Bureau now wanted turned inside out.

  CHAPTER 13

  Laura Garrett, John Taylor Garrett’s other daughter, turned off the shower in her London flat. She stepped out of the stall onto the plush carpet on the bathroom floor. She reached for a towel from the heated rack. She ran the towel over her skin until she was dry.

  Her stomach churned with anticipation. She had two hours to get ready. At six that Saturday evening a man named Henry Walters would call on her. It would be their first date. He would take her to dinner, then to the theater. It remained to be seen how the evening would go. But Laura had already made a decision about Henry. He was the man whom she wanted to marry. Laura Garrett was twenty-nine years old. She worked as a buyer for an expensive jewelry store named Pace's in one of the fashionable arcades near Savile Row. She maintained a comfortable flat on Brook Street in Mayfair. Like her younger sister, Ann, Laura was of considerable beauty, though with dark brown hair and greenish-blue eyes, she looked little like Ann.

  Beauty was a funny thing to Laura. She knew how to show it and how to hide it and made conscious decisions when to do either. Tonight she had decided to show it. Two months previously, in early November 1949, she had first met Henry. It had been at a gallery opening for an expatriate American artist in residence in Knightsbridge. Henry was a thin, bookish man of thirty-one with glasses and short brown hair. Henry, who was also an American, was in a party of people from the United States Embassy in London. He was not the type of man who habitually turned the heads of beautiful women. But Laura found out his name and who he was. She also learned he was unmarried. He was, in short, just what she was looking for.

  Meeting him directly, and getting him to ask her out, was more difficult. She began taking her lunch at the Audley Pub on the street of the same name. The Audley was around the corner from the embassy and not far from Pace's. By early December they had "met," by what he considered chance, when she had asked him to save her place on a banquette during a crowded noon hour.

  Obviously he was aware that she was American. But Laura could always tell when her beauty intimidated a man. Henry was too shy to talk to her. So next, while allowing him to think that he had initiated the conversation, she asked him where she might catch a bus that would take
her to Kensington.

  He explained how to catch it.

  "I'll never find the bus stop," she said helplessly. "Maybe you could show me."

  It was a four-block walk, during which their conversation continued. She said she had graduated from Smith College at the end of the war. She was from Pennsylvania, she told him, and had worked for her father's bank briefly, then had moved to New York and worked as an assistant buyer at Tiffany & Co. Now she planned to work in London for a year.

  "Where are you from?" she asked next.

  "Shaker Heights, Ohio," he answered, explaining that it was a suburb of Cleveland.

  "I knew a girl at Smith College who was from Shaker Heights," she said.

  They exchanged names but had no mutual friends. Henry had a degree in international politics from Amherst College, he said, further elaborating that he was assigned to London for two years on business. But when she inquired what sort, he evaded the question. Then they arrived at the bus stop.

  More lunchtime meetings followed. Over sandwiches of Scottish beef, accompanied by Spanish sherries and English ale, much small talk followed. Henry revealed that there was no woman in his life, either in London or back home. Laura let it be known that she sat home in her flat most evenings. Shortly after Christmas, Henry worked up the nerve to ask her out. Much to his amazement, she accepted.

  Laura finished drying herself in front of the full-length mirror on the wardrobe of her bedroom. She studied her own body. She perfumed her neck and breasts. She was proud of herself. She had seen how childbearing, the drudgery of housework, and sedentary life-styles had taken their toll on many women of her age. But not Laura. She stood before the mirror for a few extra moments and looked at herself approvingly. She had the flawless figure that could turn a strong man into a bumbling fool.

  She dressed carefully and was ready by the time her doorbell rang at a minute after six.

  Henry brought her flowers. She invited him in. He sat patiently in the living room while she returned to the bedroom to put on a final piece of jewelry. Eventually he stood up and walked around, examining, as she knew he would, the appointments of the living room.

  From where she was dressing, Laura could tell where in the room he was. She knew he had stopped at the mantel above the fire grate and was more than likely examining the photographs upon it. Then she was ready and came out to the living room. "I like your apartment," he said.

  "Thank you. I share it," she answered.

  She nodded toward a color portrait in a silver frame on the mantel. She knew Henry couldn't have missed it. "The other girl in the picture is my sister," she said. "Her name is Ann. It's her apartment too."

  She pointed to another portrait on the other end of the mantel, this one black and white and very prewar. "Those are my parents," she said.

  Henry took her first to dinner at a small French restaurant in Whitfield Street, then to a production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives that played to a capacity house in the West End. As it turned out, it was an altogether pleasant evening.

  He brought her home by taxi. Laura made two cups of tea, as she always did when she brought someone home. She expressed surprise, however, that her sister was not home yet. Laura played shy, attentive, well spoken, and chaste. She let Henry lead the conversation. They revealed more about each other. Her father owned a bank back in America, she said. She had grown up with riding lessons, country clubs, and private schools. His own background was thoroughly middle class, he told her, and his father was an insurance executive back in Ohio. After Amherst, he said, he had taken a civil service exam just to see where it might lead. He had tested well and had gone into the state department.

  "That's where I am now," he revealed for the first time. "My first tour of duty was Havana. I was in Washington for my second. London is my third."

  "So you're a diplomat?" she said with some surprise. "For all the times we've had lunch, you never told me that."

  "You never asked," he joked, loosening up.

  "You said you were in business," she said.

  "I am. Political business."

  They shared another laugh. She was cautious about not asking him too much. But he did venture the information that he was a political officer.

  "Well, I think that's very patriotic," she said at length, "working for the United States government. More people should serve their country instead of just finding ways to make money."

  "It's not terribly exciting," he said modestly. "It's a job like anything else."

  They talked for a while longer, enjoying each other's company. Forty-five minutes later she began to yawn and said that she really must be getting to bed soon.

  He picked up his cue and rose to go. Laura let him kiss her at the door. She did not wish to proceed too quickly with him. But as he kissed her, she leaned to him in such a way that he knew her superb body might be his to enjoy someday.

  He called her the next day and asked her to attend a party with him. She accepted. It was a private black-tie affair at the Savoy Hotel, sponsored by the United States Embassy. The evening was complete with Persian caviar and Dom Perignon champagne, courtesy of their wealthy Uncle Sam, who had ignored the California champagne, at least for this evening.

  Another date followed after that.

  Toward the middle of January 1950, the relationship had turned serious. One Friday evening, after drinks at the Café Royale, Laura told Henry that her sister was away for the entire weekend. She let him think about this while they watched a drama at the Duke of York Theatre. Then Laura invited him back to her flat.

  This time she never made the tea. Instead, Laura fell into his arms. He clumsily began undressing her and, after a few token gestures of resistance, she reached to the light, turned it off, took Henry's hand, and led him to her bedroom.

  There she slipped out of the rest of her clothes. She pulled a satin robe around her and sat down on the edge of her bed. Henry sat down next to her. She took his hand.

  "I'll sleep with you only if you love me," she said.

  "I do," he answered.

  "Then let me hear you say it."

  "I love you," Henry said. He kissed her as if he really did.

  So began their affair. Henry, on the threshold of a great romance as well as a glamorous diplomatic tour in the English capital, felt like a man of the world.

  Laura, for her part, kept her innermost thoughts to herself, nurturing her new lover and her career, knowing that she was completely in control. It seemed to both of them, a magnificent time to be young and American and making limitless plans for the future.

  CHAPTER 14

  Seven thousand miles west of London, and slightly less than a thousand miles south of Peterton, Oregon, the actress known as Lisa Pennington lay in a nightgown on the bed of a garishly decorated Los Angeles apartment.

  Lisa’s apartment overlooked Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, a few blocks from UCLA. A paperback book of true crime stories titled Prescription: Murder lay across her lap. About an hour earlier she had lost interest in reading, although homicide was much on her mind.

  It was three AM, several evenings into the new year of 1950, and her only companion was the nearly empty glass of bourbon and water that sat at her bedside. Her eyes tried to close, but she resisted sleep. Lisa was one-third drunk, one-third depressed, and one-third out of her mind with anger. She was, in other words, waiting for her errant husband to stagger home.

  In her mind she spun wild fantasies about smashing him over the head with the Jack Daniel's bottle when he came in the door. And as he lay dying, she would calmly step over him carrying her bags. Then off to another country she would run with a younger, different man. One who would love, respect, and appreciate her. Not a man who stayed out nights whoring like her husband did.

  Whoring.

  She held the term in her mind and wondered about its vagaries. Was it whoring if he did not pay cash in exchange for getting laid? Was it whoring if he was working his way through the meat rack of will
ing starlets, just like every other two-bit film director in Hollywood? From the opposite viewpoint, was it whoring for a woman to sleep her way into a film?

  Her mind drifted.

  It was midnight back East. It was too late to call any old friends. It was too late to try to find a friendly voice on the telephone and admit that, yes, with her ambition, her abuse of drugs and alcohol, her misjudgment of the character - or lack of it - of certain men, she had maneuvered herself into one hell of a mess. There really wasn't any possible retreat into the past. No longer, it seemed, did she have any hope of reclaiming who she had been or what she wanted to be.

  She cursed to herself. The sound of her own voice jarred her in the empty room. She reached for the glass of bourbon and water. She drained it with one long, loud, self-pitying gulp. She returned to the thought of running off with another man. She came back to it increasingly these days. There was, after all, no contract in Hollywood so ironclad that a sharp lawyer couldn't break it. Marriages were small stuff compared with some of the things she had seen.

  Again her thoughts drifted. Here she was staggering through her twenties wondering how she could have allowed things to get so far out of control. Growing up, she had always been the prettiest girl in her class. In college she had moved easily into acting. She had left college for two years during the war, but then as a student at Northwestern University she had done exceptionally well in the college's dramatic productions. In 1944 she had gone to New York to test her aspirations on a professional level.

  She took a single room at the Barbizon, went to several auditions, and played around with a stage name. Within three months she found herself in a small six-character comedy off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theater. It was the first play by a young man from Michigan. Lisa might have fallen in love with him. He was handsome, sandy-haired, and sensitive. But he was also gay. Nonetheless, Lisa had the only female role in his play. She made the best of it and she and the writer became close friends.