‘Despondent,’ said Diana looking back into the darkened room. She had a careworn air about her but seemed to pull out of it. She turned to Eva. ‘You be careful, dear… Promise me?’
Eva touched the delicate hand, marvelling at the length of Diana’s finger tips. ‘I promise.’
Eva turned and headed back to the car waiting outside.
Oswald flew back to London the following day, his limousine calling by Eva’s camera shop. His meeting with Hitler had been brief but unsuccessful. The Reich was not prepared to fund the BUF and Mosley had left empty- handed and out of options.
Unity had remained on as a guest of Eva Braun and Hitler, planning to travel Germany for a few weeks. Diana handed the camera over and the man in the shop coat accepted it with a smile.
Within a few hours, the photograph of Kincaid’s associates were sitting on Chainbridge’s desk. He spread the photograph and intelligence out across his desk and made phone calls to Kell and Liddle. Looking up at De Witte sitting in the shadows feeding lengths of Braille correspondence through his fingers, he informed them that Eva had established contact and had photographed a veritable rogues' gallery; including British Nazi sympathisers.
De Witte stopped feeding the intelligence through his fingers momentarily. ‘Good.’ He started feeding the information again, his face showing no emotion. He was impressed with her.
Eva had developed her friendship with Kincaid through the Goebbels’ screen-test reels. It had taken a while, using the auspices of a bogus London casting agent to feed her details through the Hollywood system. Once headshots and film reels were requested, the agent had contacted Berlin.
Kincaid’s staff in Burbank, California, saw the reel can with the German Eagle stencilled onto it and jumped at the opportunity. A meeting in New York followed and Kincaid took the bait like a greedy schoolboy.
Chainbridge, along with the F.B.I., had a substantial dossier on him. Kincaid’s influence was enormous. Apart from a private film studio in Hollywood, he owned a mansion in Martha’s Vineyard and numerous European properties. Although married and a father of nine children, he boasted openly about having several high-profile mistresses.
In Boston circles he had the Chief of Police, the Attorney General and various teamster organisations in ‘his pocket’. A fervent anti-communist, he and a number of American anti-communists had arranged functions for Hitler and Mussolini in Berlin in the 1930s. Grandiose with his largesse, he had written large cheques for their fledgling political parties, all in the glare of the media.
This wealth had come allegedly through boot-legging during prohibition. He used this money to help break a Boston longshoremen’s strike and take control of the docks. His pay-off from City Hall was under-the-counter and siphoned offshore into various trusts. This money reappeared as armament sales to the Fascists in Spain. He was spotted in Madrid in 1936 along with German ‘advisors’ shipping in guns, bombs and gold bullion to fund Franco’s forces.
His campaign for Mayor of Boston two years earlier ended abruptly after three weeks without explanation. His campaign manifesto used the longshoreman’s strike as an example of Communism creeping into ‘Freedom-loving America’. Rumours of a young actress overdosing on cocaine at his mansion had clung to him like a smell. Nothing was proved and the story buried, the girl’s family dropping a law suit within days of it being issued. The journalist who broke the story was sacked and his card rescinded after pressure from Kincaid’s attorneys.
It was this same self-made man that Eva flew with from Berlin to London on a German diplomatic flight, collected by his private chauffeur and stopping at his studio offices near Piccadilly Circus.
Eva remained in the office’s reception area as Kincaid presided over several production meetings. She attempted a few times to strike up a conversation with the dour receptionist, a very pretty but disappointed looking brunette. After a while Eva gave up. Glancing around the room, she noted the offices' windows were small. Poor light filtered in on framed photographs of actors and actresses. She spotted the receptionist’s head-shot amid them with a hopeful twinkle in her eye.
The other thing she noticed was the phone hardly rang during her time there and the receptionist turned the pages of a magazine slowly, occasionally letting out a sigh. She was no doubt a conquest recently discarded, thought Eva.
By 3pm Kincaid was finished. He swept out into the reception, donning his beige cashmere coat and chomping on a cigar. He barely acknowledged the receptionist who seemed to come to life at the sight of him striding by. ‘Let’s go, Eva,’ he barked. The receptionist almost seemed to slump into her chair in pain.
They descended the stairs, and as she stepped into the limousine, the afternoon bustle of the city was split open by the sound of air-raid sirens. It chilled her to the bone. She had been caught up in a bombing raid by Franco’s air force in Valencia in 1937. She flinched involuntarily,
‘It’s fine, honey, they’re just practice drills. Mind you, once Goering throws his bombers at them, we’ll be glad we’re in California.’
They flew by flying boat from his private jetty at Chelsea Reach along the Thames, banking out over the city; the metropolis flowing below them in a constant motion. Waiting on board for them was a silver service dinner with champagne, American magazines and newspapers.
A young already care-worn male assistant was waiting for Kincaid with documents, among them the schematics of an aeroplane. Kincaid chuckled when he folded out the aircraft's blueprints. It looked like a warehouse with wings to Eva. She noticed that when he was concentrating, he would produce a golf tee from his jacket pocket and chew on its tapered point. If he was stressed, he would move it around his mouth with his teeth, gnawing on it. If he became furious, it would be hurled at his assistant.
Kincaid authorised by telegram money transfers as down-payments for the aircraft to the tune of ten million dollars. He tipped her a wink as he said it aloud to his assistant. She in turn pretended to be dazzled by this amount, opening her mouth and blinking.
He enjoyed that reaction.
The rest of the flight he was signing off paperwork, contacting his lawyers in Boston via the aircraft’s radio, and then putting his long legs up on the facing seat and sleeping. Eva felt a pang of isolation which she decided suited her. She was just a trophy ready for polishing and putting up for display, but otherwise disposable.
She accepted the situation. It gave her the necessary leeway to watch everything and report anything useful. She felt for the receptionist she met a few hours earlier. That girl had probably been sitting on this flight a few months earlier.
The assistant, O'Dowd, went back to the rear seats and sat up writing reports and chewing on a thumb nail the way a dog worries a bone.
They landed in a small cove near Martha’s Vineyard which was overlooked by Kincaid’s faux-Georgian mansion. The flying boat turned around and departed back to Europe, its vast wings glinting in the morning sunlight.
It had been two days since they arrived and Eva had exchanged no more than three or four words with Kincaid before they retired to bed. She was standing in the dining room drinking coffee, watching a seal bobbing its head up through the waves. The room had large bay windows that gave a panoramic view of the bay. Apart from a few pleasure yachts further up the cove, the scene probably hadn’t changed in millennia.
Her eyes tracked the seal’s sleek back as it dipped and slid through the waves like a playful dog. The sun was struggling to penetrate the cloud cover that had parked itself over the cove. Fitful beams shone further out to sea past landfall like veins of a fan; rich blue waves danced like an electric shock over the grey waters.
The mansion was deserted apart from a maid who appeared at random during the day and, to Eva’s displeasure, the house was bereft of anything to read. Somewhere in a room upstairs Kincaid’s voice boomed out a stream of invectives at some poor minion on the end of a phone. He slammed the phone down with such force she could hear the device clatter off the floor of the room above. She looked around. The room was decorated like an English hunting lodge — heavy curtains, mahogany panelling, various oils depicting fox hunting scenes and an enormous elk’s head over a black marble fireplace.
On the mantel piece was a series of framed photographs, children at various ages grinning or frowning with a young Kincaid and plain Shaker-looking Mrs Kincaid. As the family increased in size, she seemed to age at a faster rate than Donald until her last image made her look like an embittered old crone.
A log fire sputtered and spat sparks out and yet seemed incapable of heating the room. She could hear doors banging and the heavy footfall of Kincaid descending the staircase. He strode in and, without breaking his stride, swept her up in his arms planting a kiss on her lips. ‘Your screen test is the day after tomorrow.’
