“I don’t have any idea! Maybe if you hadn’t kicked the M.E. out we’d know,” Chapman huffed.
Will lowered himself onto his haunches and used his pen to carefully lift her nightdress. He squinted into the tent and saw undisturbed old-lady underwear. “Doesn’t look like it,” he said. “Let’s see the postcard.”
Will inspected it carefully, front and back, and handed it to Nancy. “Is that the same font used in the other ones?”
She said it was.
“It’s Courier twelve point,” he said.
She asked how he knew that, sounding impressed.
“I’m a font savant,” he quipped. He read the name out loud. “Ida Gabriela Santiago.”
According to Chapman, her daughter told him she never used her middle name.
Will stood up and stretched his back. “Okay, we’re good,” he said. “Keep the area sealed off until the FBI forensics team arrives. We’ll be in touch if we need anything.”
“You got any leads on this wacko?” Chapman asked.
Will’s cell phone started ringing inside his jacket, counterintuitively playing Ode to Joy. While he fished for it he replied, “Jack shit, Detective, but this is only my first day on the case,” then said into the phone, “This is Piper…”
He listened and shook his head a couple of times before he told the caller, “When it rains, it pours. Say, Mueller hasn’t made a miraculous recovery, has he?…Too bad.” He ended the call and looked up. “Ready for a long night, partner?”
Nancy nodded like a bobble-head doll. She seemed to like the appellation “partner,” like it a lot.
“That was Sanchez,” he told her. “We’ve got another postcard but this one’s a little different. It’s dated today but the guy’s still alive.”
FEBRUARY 12, 1947
E rnest Bevin was the link, the go-between. The only cabinet member to serve in both governments. To Clement Atlee, the Labor prime minister, Bevin was the logical choice. “Ernest,” Atlee had told his Foreign Secretary, the two of them seated before a hot coal fire at Downing Street, “speak to Churchill. Tell him I’m personally asking for his help.” Sweat beaded on Atlee’s bald head, and Bevin watched with discomfort as a rivulet ran down his high forehead onto his hawklike nose.
Assignment accepted. No questions asked, no reservations tendered. Bevin was a soldier, an old-line labor leader, one of the founders of Britain’s largest trade union, the TGWU. Always the pragmatist, prewar, he was one of the few Labor politicians to cooperate with the Conservative government of Winston Churchill and align himself against the pacifist wing in the Labor Party.
In 1940, when Churchill readied the nation for war and formed an all-party coalition government, he made Bevin Minister for Labor and National Service, giving him a broad portfolio involving the domestic wartime economy. Shrewdly, Bevin struck a balance between military and domestic needs and created his own army of fifty thousand men diverted from the armed forces to work the coal mines: Bevin Boys. Churchill thought the world of him.
Then the shocker. Just weeks after VE day, basking in triumphant victory, the man the Russians called the British Bulldog lost the 1945 general election in a landslide drubbing by Clement Atlee’s Labor Party, tossed aside by an electorate that did not trust him to rebuild the nation. The man who had said, “We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender,” limped from the grand stage in surrender, depressed and dispirited. Churchill moodily led the opposition after his defeat, but took most of his pleasure from his beloved Chartwell House, where he wrote poetry, painted watercolors, and tossed bread to the black swans.
Now, a year and a half later, Bevin, Prime Minster Atlee’s Foreign Secretary, sat deep underground awaiting his former boss. It was cold, and Bevin kept his overcoat buttoned over his winter-weight vested suit. He was a solid man, thinning gray hair swept back and pomaded, fleshy faced with incipient jowls. He had chosen this clandestine meeting spot purposely, to send a psychological message. The subject matter would be important. Secret. Come now, without delay.
The message was not lost on Churchill, who barged in, glanced about unsentimentally and declared, “Why would you ask me to come back to this godforsaken place?”
Bevin rose and with a wave of his hand dismissed the high-ranking military man who had accompanied Churchill. “Were you in Kent?”
“Yes, I was in Kent!” Churchill paused. “I never thought I’d set foot in here again.”
“I won’t ask for your coat. It’s chilly.”
“It always was so,” Churchill replied.
The two men shook hands dispassionately then sat down, Bevin steering Churchill to a spot where a red portfolio with the P.M.’s seal lay before him.
They were in the George Street bunker where Churchill and his War Cabinet holed up for much of the conflict. The rooms were constructed in the basement chamber of the Office of Works Building, smack between Parliament and Downing Street. Sandbagged, concrete-reinforced, and well belowground, George Street would probably have survived the direct hit that never materialized.
They faced each other across the large square table in the Cabinet Room, where night or day, Churchill would summon his closest advisors. It was a drab, utilitarian chamber with stale air. Nearby was the Map Room, still papered with the charts of the theaters of war, and Churchill’s private bedroom, which still reeked of cigars long after the last one had been extinguished. Farther down the hall in an old converted broom closet was the Transatlantic Telephone Room, where the scrambler, code-named “Sigsaly,” encrypted the conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt. For all Bevin knew, the gear still functioned. Nothing had changed since the day the War Rooms had been quietly closed down: VJ Day.
“Do you want to have a poke around?” Bevin asked. “I believe Major General Stuart has a set of keys.”
“I do not.” Churchill was impatient now. The bunker made him uneasy. Curtly, he said, “Look, why don’t you get to the point? What do you want?”
Bevin spoke his rehearsed introduction. “An issue has arisen, quite unexpected, quite remarkable and quite sensitive. The government must deal with it carefully and delicately. As it involves the Americans, the Prime Minister wondered whether you might be unusually well-positioned to assist him personally in the matter.”
“I’m in the opposition,” Churchill said icily. “Why should I wish to assist him in any activity other than vacating Downing Street and returning me to my office?”
“Because, you are the greatest patriot the nation has ever possessed. And because the man I see sitting before me cares more for the welfare of the British populace than he does for political expediency. That is why I believe you may wish to help the government.”
Churchill looked bemused, aware he was being played. “What the devil have you got yourself into? Appealing to my patriotic side? Go on, tell me about your mess.”
“That folder summarizes our situation,” Bevin said, nodding at the red portfolio. “I wonder if you might read through it. Have you brought your reading glasses?”
Churchill fumbled through his breast pocket. “I have.” He wrapped the spindly wire rims around his enormous head. “And you’ll just sit there and twiddle your thumbs?”
Bevin nodded and leaned back in the simple wooden chair. He watched Churchill snort and open the portfolio. He watched him read the first paragraph. He watched him remove his glasses and ask, “Is this some kind of a joke? Do you honestly expect me to believe this?”
“It’s no joke. Incredible, yes. Fictitious, no. As you read you’ll see the preliminary work military intelligence has done to authenticate the findings.”
“This is not the sort of thing I was expecting.”
Bevin nodded.
Before Churchill resumed reading, he lit a cigar. His old ashtray was still at hand.
