Karl will be disappointed as well as confused. Nothing we can do about that. Come, that’s our five minutes.’
They walked through the wood-panelled booths, past a small staircase and then into a room no bigger than a first-class rail compartment. There was a fireplace, mercifully unlit in this moist summer weather. Doubtless, this town was full of rooms like this, where the business of power was played out.
Harrison placed his briefcase on the table, pulled out the white envelope and passed it to James. ‘Reporters’ code of honour. You reeled this fish in, Jimbo; you get to slit it open.’
James was surprised to see that his hands were trembling. He was nervous, he was excited; but above all he was exhausted. He had had next to nothing to drink, slipping most of his martinis into Moran’s glass, but he was light-headed. Taking a deep breath, he pulled out the wad of papers.
There were six separate documents, each consisting of two or three sheets paperclipped together. He read the first lines on the first 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…
It took him another paragraph or two to realize what he held in his hands. 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…
‘Good God up above,’ James said, covering his mouth. ‘Good God.’
Harrison read each sheet after James had finished, alternately gasping and swearing, swearing and gasping. When they had both read Franklin D Roosevelt’s secret message of June 13th, with its language of redoubled efforts to help because of ‘our faith in and our support of the ideals for which the Allies are fighting’, Harrison shook his head silently.
James looked over at the grizzled, world-weary American and saw that his eyes were welling with tears. Harrison extended his hand and said simply, ‘Dr Zennor, I think you may have just saved your country.’
Chapter Forty-two
The train was too bright and too full to sleep, but even if it had been dark and empty, like the one he had ridden in the opposite direction a matter of hours earlier, James would not have slept. His body might have been drained and yearning for rest, his mind utterly spent, but his heart would not be quieted. And it was aching for Florence and Harry.
It did not matter that Ed Harrison had continued to lavish him with praise. The journalist kept insisting that had the Chicago Tribune got hold of the Roosevelt-Churchill letters — cutting and editing them to support their own, fevered anti-war stance — then FDR’s hopes for re-election would have been doomed. The paper would have used those letters to cast the President as a liar and a deceiver, a man prepared to vow to the American people that he had made no promises to fight for Britain when in fact he had done just that. Roosevelt’s enemies would surely have seized on the correspondence to demand his impeachment, on the grounds of violating the United States’s multiple Neutrality Acts. One way or another, the single American most committed to the defence of Great Britain — Franklin Delano Roosevelt — would have been destroyed. The chances of the United States coming to Britain’s aid would have been reduced to close to zero: Britain would be abandoned, its defeat guaranteed.
Harrison had rushed back to the office, his first stop the darkroom, where he handed over the film from his camera, announcing it as a ‘triple urgent’ job to be done this instant. Next he conferred with his editors, skating over the precise subterfuge he had used to extract this story from the hands of the Chicago Tribune. They read the documents and held their breath just as he had.
The discussion was short but intense. The news editor believed the magazine could not possibly sit on a story this momentous. Yes, it was good that the cables would not be published and distorted by the Tribune. But surely they could not be complicit in the suppression of information — even if, as it happened, Time fully endorsed the sentiment expressed by Roosevelt in that June 13th letter and even if it was clear that publication would fatally undermine both the President and his pro-intervention stance. Harrison hit back that that might be true in the abstract, but not when these documents had come from the most tainted source possible, an official of the Third Reich. Hans Stoiber’s masters had wanted those letters — doubtless carefully selected to cause maximum damage to Roosevelt — to appear in print in America. If Time published them they would be doing the bidding of Adolf Hitler himself. The editor had listened to the argument and sided with Ed. ‘Besides, who knows what else Roosevelt has said to Churchill? For every letter like this,’ he tapped the June 13th document, ‘he may have written one leaning the other way. We’re not in business to help the Nazis play games with American politics.’
Harrison relayed all this to James, as they shared a taxi to Union Station. ‘But d’you know what your best work was today? The photos came out a treat.’ He passed James the pictures taken at the Washington Monument: grainy but unmistakable, they showed McAndrew receiving the envelope from Hans Stoiber. ‘That’s going to look very good in our magazine this weekend: “The Ivy League Dean and the Nazi”.’
Time had passed the photographs and the rest of their information to the White House. Within the hour, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had put out a warrant for the arrest of Dr Preston McAndrew on charges of trafficking in US state secrets obtained from a foreign power. Ed Harrison had been careful to extract a couple of concessions of his own from his best contact in the administration, including a promise that if ever the White House decided to release the full Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence it would give the exclusive to Edward P Harrison.
The two men said goodbye at the station, Harrison handing James another doughnut in another brown paper bag. James offered him his hand and Ed did what no Englishman had ever done before, hugging him warmly. ‘No one is ever going to know what you did, James. So you’ll just have to take it from me. Britain and every person in the world who believes in freedom owes you a very great debt.’
James waved away the praise, giving a shrug at the American bombast of it all. And yet he could not deny what had just happened: the Dean had been at the centre of a plot that would have consigned Britain to a bloody and terrible fate, that would have left Hitler as the master of Europe and perhaps the world. And that plot had been averted. The thought was so large, so daunting and impossible, it seemed easier to express in the passive. He could not bring himself to say that he, James Zennor, had averted it.
And now the pain in his heart returned, as he made the journey back to New York and from there to Greenwich, Connecticut, just as Dorothy had urged him to do last night. She had told him then that he had to go that very minute, that it could be his only chance.
I don’t know how much longer they’ll be there.
And yet he had not gone to them. He had put his family second. Florence had been right all those months — or was it weeks — ago, when she had condemned him for being ready to sacrifice his own two-year-old child, exposing him to bombing and invasion, out of his own misguided sense of duty. You made your sacrifice, James. You don’t need to do any more. And yet he had done it again.
If they were gone, he would not forgive himself. He would have condemned himself to a life of misery and loneliness. The glory of Harrison’s little encomium to him would be all he had to keep him warm at night. And it would not be enough.
At long last, the train pulled into Greenwich station. It was late, Harry’s ‘orangey time of day’. James walked over to the two cabs waiting for passengers coming off the New York train. Now that he was here, he felt his stomach knot at the finality that was looming. Up until this moment, he could always look forward, to the future possibility that he would see Florence and Harry again. But soon there would be certainty, a definite answer to the question of whether or not they were there. The idea of it terrified him.
He approached the first cab, the driver resting a tanned arm on the wound-down window.
‘Hope Farm, please.’
The man looked bemused. ‘Where?’
‘I’m looking for Hope Farm. I’m told it’s just outside Greenwich.’
‘OK, I know it. Get in.’
As James settled into the back seat, the driver eyed him in his rear-view mirror. ‘You a professor too, then?’
‘Sorry, I don’t think I understand.’
