Chapter 12

Light was spilling into my apartment around and between the curtains. It was a cooler morning, though still well above average for September. Lucy made us tea and under protest ate a mess of cornflakes and condensed milk, pronouncing them a poor breakfast even by Moscow standards.

By now I thought I had the whole of Lucy’s story. I couldn’t vouch for the truth of every detail, but the stakes were high enough that I had to pass her claims up to where they could be assessed and acted on.

“I want you to come with me to police headquarters this morning,” I said when she’d shoved her cereal bowl aside.

“Will they arrest me, Sergeant?”

“Not if I get my way. What time on Thursday did you check into the Beaconsfield Hotel?”

“Eleven in the morning. I went straight from the station.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“Then, after I have hotel room, I went shopping and bought two dresses that didn’t make me look like Edna. Do you believe me about Lipetsk?”

“Fritzi’s flying school, you mean? The test pilots, the warplanes?” I thought back to Lucy’s asking whether I thought Germans surrendered easily, and then back further to those pretty, unscarred German villages on the march from the Belgian border to the Rhine. “Yeah, I buy it — enough of it.”

Her grey eyes studied me. “I trust you — I think.”

“Don’t go overboard. Why me, Lucy? Why did you come to me with your story anyway?”

“How you touched me after the grenade exploded. Not gentle. Gentle I do not trust. But caring, like you wanted the best.”

“Recipe for disaster,” I said. “We’re going to put that padding back on you for the trip in.”

She let herself be strapped into the bulletproof vest for the streetcar ride to City Hall. I introduced her to Sanderson, then parked her in an interview room while I sparred with the old coot.

“You didn’t report back last night, Paul. Even after I had a constable sent out to your apartment.”

“Inspector, I worked Dominion Day in July and the Civic Holiday in August. The duty roster posted last week gave me Labour Day off.”

“Notwithstanding —”

“Notwithstanding, I did manage yesterday to prevent an attempted murder in my apartment basement and to apprehend the perpetrator. And to file a full typed report — which I am now, but was not last night, in a position to supplement.”

I dove straight into my updated story, one that attributed as little criminality to Lucja Grudzinska as possible. I saw no homicide charge arising from her having thrown the grenade back to John Doe’s side of the door. She’d had no other way in that confined hotel room of saving herself, whereas Doe could have run away down the hall and lived. What I impressed upon Sanderson was that Lucy was a Soviet defector with evidence that Russia was helping Germany to rearm illegally. To silence her, the Soviets had made two attempts on her life since her arrival in Toronto. We had to find their next assassin before he struck. That’s where I wanted Detective Sergeant Knight and Acting Detective Cruickshank to concentrate their efforts.

“Whoa, Paul.” Sanderson had his pipe going by now. “All the international cloak and dagger stuff makes this a case for the Mounted Police, not us. Besides, Knight’s off sick with pneumonia. He’s only two months shy of retirement, so I doubt that he’ll be back. I’ll get RCMP Inspector Lachapelle to send someone round to take the woman off our hands.”

Sanderson put the receiver from his stick phone to his ear and started dialing.

“Just a minute, sir.” I couldn’t stomach the idea of handing her over to men that might not care enough about her claims or her safety. Reaching across Sanderson’s desk, I pressed the switch hook down before he could complete the call. “Miss Grudzinska isn’t a criminal. She doesn’t need to be confined; she needs to be protected.”

“She would appear to incite violence.” Sanderson looked pointedly at the hand that had disabled his phone, then added, “Two assassination attempts in one long weekend.”

“Not her fault,” I said.

“What’s she doing in town anyway?”

“Running for her life.”

“Did she enter the country legally?”

“She was desperate.”

“No, in other words. Immigration fraud makes it a case for the federal authorities, Paul.”

“Suppose I arrest her for assault on the hospital nurse Daisy Bennett — a crime on our own turf.”

“I could still hand her over to Claude Lachapelle. We have other work for you to do.”

I was starting to choke on the pipe smoke. “Would you let me have a word with Inspector Lachapelle myself, sir? Keeping Lucy in our care in the meantime. In a cell to herself.”

“She’ll need a bail hearing if we keep her overnight,” said the inspector. “Here, open the door; that cough is filthy. I’ll let Claude know to expect you, God help him.”

I got Lucy’s suitcase out of the evidence locker. I took her everything but the stolen passport and the clothes and makeup she’d used for her Edna disguise. Her green dress was going to be a lot more comfortable and create a better impression on the guards than the shirt and slacks of mine she’d been wearing. When I opened the door to the interview room, Lucy turned from the view of the pigeons in City Hall’s courtyard. The bulletproof vest lay on the battered and wobbly wooden table.

“I didn’t get my way,” I announced. “At least you’ll have your own clothes in the lockup.”

She had nothing to say to that. She met my eyes with folded arms, still in front of the window. Her back was a dandy target for a sniper, I couldn’t help thinking.

“Jail’s as safe a place as any for you at the moment. Now we’ve got to make some prints to replace the ones you gave away in London. Let me have the negatives.”

“Someone asked me once before. Good thing I didn’t give them to him.”

“I’m different.”

“Not enough.”

“Did Harry North ever save your life?”

“Did you, or was it possibly a trick?”

“That was no trick knife I used on the gunman, Lucy. I can show it to you. His blood is on the blade.”

Lucy shrugged. Likely she was thinking that an OGPU agent would be capable of hiring someone to stage an assassination attempt and then killing him. She hadn’t seen how Ewart died.

“Suit yourself,” I said. I wasn’t going to prove what a true friend I was by prying the film out of her mouth. “Promise me at least not to break out, not till I see you again?”

“Of course — a Versailles promise, good until I change my mind. And what do you do while I stay in jail?”

“It would be easier if I had the documents to show them, but I’m going to see the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. That’s our version of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch.”

“Who will put you in power — in the power of some cute Russian spy.”

“Well, they say one swallow doesn’t make a summer. The more vamps the better.”

I left her to puzzle that one out while I put in a quick call to the Beaconsfield. When Frank Gabor picked up, I asked if he had been on the desk last Thursday at eleven a.m.

“Thursday?”

“The day before Friday — the day before the explosion.”

“Sure, Sergeant ... Thursday? No, I’m mistaken. Thursday morning I was sick. The night clerk had to cover for me till noon.”

“And Alex Horvath won’t tell me any different?”

“No, no. I asked Alex to keep mum, but he’ll level with you if you tell him I said it’s all right. We don’t want to hide anything from the police. Thursday morning I didn’t feel good at all.”

“Sorry to hear it,” I said, actually pleased as punch to get Lucy’s story squared with that of the clerks. “It’s the sickly sweet schnapps you put away, Frank. Straight whisky makes the mornings easier to take.”

On my way to see Lachapelle, I dropped by the Reference Library on College Street to read last Thursday’s New York papers. Enough strange things happened every day in that burg that there wasn’t room for them all on the front page, but sure enough buried somewhere in each was the tale of the gent that had had to be hauled off a dormer window on the spire of the Woolworth tower. Sprains, strains, and lacerations apart, he wasn’t hurt. He claimed to have climbed over the railing on his own. At the time of his rescue, a syringe full of strychnine had been found on the observatory platform, but he denied any knowledge of that. He wouldn’t give his name or place of employment and was being sent to Bellevue Hospital for a sanity check. New York police sergeant Dennis Mullaney was identified as the source of information. I looked over Friday’s papers too. By then, the scribes had Lucy’s grey man pegged as Manfred Krasny, a private detective with the Continental Agency, where his reputation as a tail was unsurpassed. The inference drawn was that he’d let his reviews go to his head and now thought he could follow birds.

No laughter of mine broke the hush of the reading room. I was thinking of the exhausting spasms characteristic of strychnine poisoning — fatally exhausting if paralysis didn’t asphyxiate you first. Lucy had dealt gently with Krasny under the circumstances.

Clearly Krasny’s opinion of what should be done to her didn’t include criminal prosecution, and Krasny was the only one in a position to testify against her. One paper did mention an Argentine sailor’s having spotted a woman in Krasny’s vicinity just before he went over, but no useful description could be got out of the lad, even with the aid of a Spanish interpreter. There was no mention of Lucy’s dropped handbag. Either it had gone over the edge or had been picked up by someone not willing to come forward.

Outside the library, I caught a streetcar headed towards Yonge Street. A sign under the window said KEEP ARM IN, so I stuck my face out instead to catch a bit of a breeze. After a cooler start, the day was heating up to where we’d been all week.

Many Torontonians, including Toronto cops, would have told you there were no Mounties in town. Where would they have stabled their mounts? And what work would there have been for them, after all, when we had our own municipal force, not to mention the Ontario Provincial Police? I don’t say the RCMP encouraged such ignorance, but I’m betting it suited them. Much of their work was undercover surveillance of illegal or suspicious organizations. For that, they didn’t need horses or publicity. The nineteen men of Western Ontario divisional HQ were, Sanderson had informed me, tucked into the top floor of Postal Station F. When I left the northbound Yonge car at Charles Street, I could see no stable attached — and when I looked up from the sidewalk, I saw no sign touting Canada’s official spycatchers in any of the third floor windows.

The building was grand enough with its pillars and balustrades and two shades of stone, still distinguishable under the soot of the twenty years since its construction. All the same, on climbing the two flights of stairs, I found the attic level just as stifling as my own low-rent apartment. A perspiring constable waylaid me at the head of the stairs and led me to Inspector Lachapelle, who was sipping from a tall glass of water in the southwest corner office and carefully not letting the condensation drip onto the papers spread on the desk in front of him.

The inspector shoehorned me into his schedule just before he went to lunch. A slender greyhound of a man, he looked as if he could use a bite. I wouldn’t know an expensive suit if I saw one, but Lachapelle’s was well-fitted, well-pressed, and well-brushed and gave this French-Canadian a Savile Row look. His neat moustache was white, his skin pale and unweathered, though not young-looking for his rank. His brown eyes impressed me as alert and impatient. I was dealing with the modern, urban, indoor Mountie.

“Well, Shenstone, was there something your inspector couldn’t deal with by telephone?” he said when we were both seated.

“It’s a situation our department’s not used to,” I said. “A woman has turned up with information that could shake up the whole continent of Europe. Specifically make the League of Nations change its mind about admitting Germany tomorrow.”

The inspector didn’t react to the drama of my announcement. “You’d better pass it on then to the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa, or maybe to the British Foreign Office.”

“Time is short, sir. I haven’t read the manuals of protocol, but it seems to me the RCMP Security Service would have a better chance of catching Prime Minister King’s ear in a hurry than a municipal cop.”

“What is this revelation?” the inspector asked.

“Germany’s building up an illegal air force. Can you direct me to someone in your outfit that would be of interest to?”

Lachapelle stroked his moustache. “You fight in the last war, Shenstone?”

“Start to finish,” I said. “48th Highlanders.”

“Royal Corps of Engineers myself.”

That explained why the few pictures on his office walls were of bridges. The office was larger than Sanderson’s, but spartan, with little distracting clutter. It looked as if its occupant liked to deal with one thing at a time.

“Served in South Africa,” the inspector went on. “A bit old for your show, so I never had to deal with the Germans. You went toe to toe with them for four years, and I wonder if you aren’t carrying a grudge. I don’t see Germans causing trouble these days.”

“They’re the ones with the grudge, sir. They didn’t realize they were beaten in 1918, so they’re preparing the next round. In Russia, I might add, to escape the notice of Allied weapons inspectors.”

“Ah! Russians are a different matter.” The Mountie looked at me with new interest. “Is this woman you mention a Russian Communist?”

“Polish and not a Communist.”

“But she lived in Russia after the Revolution?”

“After and before.”

“Did she enter Canada legally?”

“No, sir. But she entered Canada to escape Russian Communist assassins. She didn’t come to stir up the masses, and she doesn’t intend to stay.”

Lachapelle opened a folder on his desk and shut it again with a scowl. “My problem right now is that a number of unions are trying to form some Frankenstein monster called the All-Canadian Congress of Labour. She didn’t come to help with that, did she?”

“No, sir.”

“It’s bad enough having the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Employees involved. They could bring this whole country to a stop.”

Lachapelle paused, but I failed to show the consternation he was looking for. I was thinking of Beaconsfield guest Floyd Peters, young husband and railway union activist.

“Then,” said the inspector, “there’s the Mine Workers of Canada — a union run by Communists and making no bones about it.”

“She’s nothing to do with either of those.”

At this point, the overheated constable came by with a Thermos of ice water to refill the inspector’s glass. In his tightly buttoned tunic, he looked as if he could have used a drink himself; I wondered if I’d live long enough to see Mounties form a union. The Toronto Police had had one, which the men on top had busted up while I was overseas.

I picked up the thread with Lachapelle. “I understand that you’re worried about the spread of the Communist philosophy to Canadian workers. The case I came to speak to you about involves a new and different threat from Russia. Two threats, in fact. First, good old-fashioned militarism in concert with a remilitarized Germany. Second, the employment of Communist Party of Canada members to liquidate a defector that would alert the West to threat number one.”

“Are you saying, Shenstone, that there is no danger of Bolshevist revolution in this country?”

In fact, I never had lost sleep worrying over home-grown Bolshevist revolution — not because I thought it harmless, rather because I thought it impossible. I’d never been able to root out the conviction that too many of us since pioneer days have wanted to plough our own furrow and make our own voices heard on election day. That’s why I’d never got my tail in a knot about the Communist Party of Canada. The last three days had admittedly changed me. I now feared the CPC, but only insofar as Russia was using it to recruit assassins for non-Marxist ends.

Nevertheless, to keep things sweet with Lachapelle, I was willing to play the agnostic regarding the violent overthrow of capitalism.

“No, sir, I’m not saying that. The line the Soviets push today is that they’re keeping socialism inside their own borders, for themselves alone. How sincere they are would be for you to assess.”

“Not your field — correct? Well, a military buildup overseas is not my field. Was there anything else?”

“Yes, Inspector.” I took Edna Salisbury’s passport from my jacket pocket. “I can see you’re busy. I’m sorry if you can’t get your service to take Germany’s rearmament seriously. But I’d ask you not to waste your valuable time prosecuting the messenger. Here is the Commonwealth of Australia passport she travelled on. I’m giving it to you so the issuer may be notified, and so you know that no further fraudulent use will be made of it.”

The inspector had been sitting at attention since mention of the word Russian.

“All right,” he said at last, visibly relaxing, “so long as I don’t hear the woman has been attending union meetings or giving speeches.”

“There’s something else I’d like to ask you,” I went on. “I’m concerned about the potential for violence within the CPC. The last attempt to murder Lucja Grudzinska was made by a gunman named Dan Ewart, who committed suicide to avoid being questioned. How many more men of that kidney are we to expect?”

“Sergeant, I believe any member of the Communist Party capable of the vilest crimes. If we learn that any of these rascals is contemplating violence, we shall stop him in his tracks.”

“Can I assume then that you had no advance warning of the danger Ewart posed?”

“Personally, I had none.”

“And you have no idea who is most likely to be the next Dan Ewart?”

Lachapelle raised his arms and lowered them. “I have nothing to tell you at the moment.”

“Let’s hope a later moment won’t be too late. The Toronto attacks on Miss Grudzinska were made by Mills bomb and by revolver. Can you tell me if these weapons are acquired as the occasion demands or if the party is keeping a cache that could be seized?”

My question sparked a fleeting, startled look before the inspector got his mask of protocol back in place. “Information requests of the kind you’re making would have to come from further up the chain of command,” he said. “Would your chief constable be willing to call my superintendent?”

“Yes, sir.” A bold lie was what was wanted and what I gave him, though I hoped to make it true soon enough.

“Very well, Shenstone. Then I may be able to do something for you.” He dropped Edna’s passport into a drawer with no more than a glance.

I thought the conversation was over and was getting up to leave when I caught a look of irritation cross Lachapelle’s face. For the briefest moment, his mouth muscles tightened and a blood vessel stood out on his lean neck. I paused to see if he had more to say.

He did, and when he spoke, his tone was unexpectedly confiding. “It might surprise you as a detective sergeant to learn how little discretion an inspector has, how little influence — however well educated he may be. At the same time, those pilots whose stunts we read about in the newspapers every week can go anywhere and be listened to, even if they never graduated from grade twelve. Look at that Whitehead fellow — on a first-name basis with the whole federal cabinet, acquainted with the Prince of Wales. People make a fuss over him as if he’d won the war. Not really his fault, I suppose: he’s a perfectly sound and decent chap.”

“Is he, sir?” I asked, startled by how very English Lachapelle sounded. I could imagine he might like to chum around with royalty himself.

“Straight as a string, no political involvement whatever — I’ve checked. But you were on the ground, Shenstone. You know where the war was won. If I were you, I wouldn’t worry about a German air force. Airplanes will never be more than a sideshow, even if the daredevils that ride in them do get the attention.”

By the time I got out of the RCMP offices, I’d revised my estimate of Lachapelle’s age upwards by about twenty years. But I had got one unlooked-for benefit from our meeting: the idea that flyers had influence and that Kip Whitehead knew the heir to the throne. Who better to warn of a resurrected German air force than an air force expert like Kip? He’d understand that the next air war would be no sideshow — nor a joust of pilot officers, chivalrously saving each other from frostbite. It would be a war of death from the air, waged against soldiers and civilians alike with a thoroughness beyond old men’s imagining.

Before we could get to work on Whitehead, I had to spring Lucy. And before I could do that, I had a phone call to make. I made it from Uneeda Lunch on Queen Street, talking around a cheese sandwich — quite a chunk of which I got down while waiting for the folks at Toronto Western Hospital to figure out that Daisy Bennett had come off duty at eight a.m. and was likely sleeping off the effects of an overnight shift. By chance, it was Jane Sparrow that picked up the phone at the nurses’ residence. She remembered me all right, but that didn’t make her eager to oblige me at the cost of disturbing her friend’s rest. I said the matter was urgent and confidential. I repeated myself until I wore her down, and by the time I’d drunk a cup of coffee a drowsy voice was announcing that the speaker on the line was D. Bennett. She didn’t exact apologies for being woken, and I got to the point.

“Miss Bennett, have you suffered any ill effects from the attack on you last Friday?”

“A little notoriety in the residence.” She turned away from the mouthpiece to yawn and came back with a brisker voice. “Fully recovered otherwise.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said.

“I did have to pay for new glasses and a new uniform.”

“Just what I was thinking. Now if you were to receive full financial compensation for losses arising out of that attack, would you consider the affair adequately dealt with?”

“What do you mean, Sergeant?”

“Lucy Clarkson was admitted to Toronto Western Hospital because of a blow to the head. That blow may have diminished her criminal responsibility. Hard to say since no doctor ever saw her, but — practically speaking — it might be hard to get her convicted for what she did to you.”

“I see. You were afraid I might be clamouring for a pound of her flesh.”

“Set me straight.”

“That’s not the way the medical world works — not my little corner of it. We’re protective of patients, even difficult ones, and not really in the business of punishing. Besides, I’m inclined to put the blame elsewhere. If the hospital had been told that Miss Clarkson had been involved in a crime, we might have been more watchful.”

“So you won’t object if charges against her are dropped?”

“She’s been apprehended?”

“Yes.”

“No, I won’t object.”

“And you’ll accept the offer of compensation?”

“Was the money in her undergarment hers?”

“She won it in a legal game of cards.”

“Then she’s better off than I am. Financially, at least. I’d like to hear her story sometime when I don’t crave sleep quite so much.”

We left it there, and I returned to HQ thinking Daisy Bennett was a pretty good egg after all. Of course, it didn’t take much to make me like a woman.

When I reached my desk, I found Ned Cruickshank seated there drinking a glass of milk and shaking his head over my report on the Dan Ewart scrap.

“I’m wondering now if there might have been anything in Ewart’s war record to suggest a bloodthirsty streak. Clearly, Sergeant, I didn’t check into this character as thoroughly as I ought.”

“You can make up for it now. Find out where he got the gun, where he got the cyanide, where he got his training, and who else has them. If I can get Inspector Sanderson to put the request through the proper channels, you should get some help from the RCMP.”

“There are no RCMP in Toronto, are there?”

“I was talking to one of their inspectors less than an hour ago. But if the chief constable is of your opinion, we may not see Mounties speeding to our rescue anytime soon. Start without them.”

“But where do they —”

I told Ned to forget about the horses. Then I briefed him on Manfred Krasny’s attempt on Lucy’s life and asked him to draft a telegram to a New York cop named Dennis Mullaney.

“Let’s see if Mullaney can tell us anything about our John Doe. We believe Krasny and Doe followed Lucy from Chelsea Piers to Grand Central Terminal. There they split up, with Krasny tailing her to the Woolworth Building and Doe waiting at the station to see if she’d use either of the train tickets she’d bought. When she boarded the overnight to Toronto, Doe followed her. Oh, and, Ned — mail Mullaney a photo of Doe’s remains. The grenade didn’t leave much of his face. Still, something there might trigger a memory.”

“The attempts are quite different, aren’t they, Sergeant?” Ned commented. “I mean, Doe and Krasny both seemed clumsy — not at surveillance, but when it came to killing. Ewart appears to have been tougher. More professional, even in his choice of weapons.”

“Good point — and if Lucy hadn’t been wearing a bulletproof vest, he would have succeeded.”

It occurred to me that, while they had no trouble recruiting informers abroad through the various countries’ Communist parties, assassinations on foreign soil were something new for the Russians. Unluckily, they were learning fast. German agents would have been more efficient. But, unless the Weimar Republic had their own Harry North in MI5, the Germans still mightn’t know that their rearmament secret was out. Moscow wouldn’t be bragging to Berlin about Lucy’s visit to Lipetsk and subsequent disappearance.

I hadn’t time to give Ned the full story now. He’d have to pick it up as he went along. “Know what you’re doing?” I asked him. “Don’t be shy about getting the constables to give you a hand. One more thing, Ned: I need someone that can translate Russian into English. Someone reliable.”

Sanderson couldn’t see me just then, so I wrote him a memo regarding my interview with Lachapelle and my concern about a secret cache of weapons. I asked the office stenographer Eric Lindstrom to find out the fastest way to contact Wing Commander Christopher Whitehead of the RCAF. Then I did the paperwork necessary for Lucy’s release. As no charges against her were going to be pursued, either by our department or by the Mounties, she was no longer under arrest.

If the news pleased her, she didn’t let it show. I found her icy calm, and at the same time suspicious of me, as I guess she’d a right to be. I explained about laying her case before Kip Whitehead and the need to obtain prints and translations of her documents first. We had no facilities at City Hall to process film; the department always sent it down the block to Abbot and Stuart Quick Finish Photo, so that’s where we went too. Lucy insisted on standing in their darkroom all the time her negatives were in use.

On the other hand, she raised no objection when I mentioned using a portion of her three hundred dollars to square her debts.

“Of course. You pay and bring me what remains.”

“There’ll be lots left,” I assured her. “Fifteen bucks should re-outfit the nurse you choked and robbed. How much was the raincoat?”

“For the coat and hat, ten dollars.”

“Which shop?”

“La something — La Vogue. Give the nurse thirty: I scared her a lot.”

On my way out, I thumbed through the photo shop’s phone directory and found a Dundas West address for La Vogue Ladies Wear — just over a mile from the Western Hospital.

I left Lucy at Abbot and Stuart while I crossed the street to the Dominion Bank. A teller familiar with the scale of my usual transactions tried not to look surprised upon receiving three of Uncle Sam’s C-notes. After deducting a service charge, he handed me back almost as much in Canadian funds. I deposited forty dollars in my own account, then wrote cheques in the amounts Lucy specified to the clothing store and to Daisy Bennett. By the time I’d mailed these, Lucy was waiting for me at the photo shop with the prints. And back at City Hall, Ned had located a professor of Russian literature at the university.

Lucy frowned and clicked her tongue; she didn’t see why her own translation of the documents shouldn’t be good enough. I pointed out that she had no Canadian credentials or references — and that, while her Russian might be impeccable, her English was still hit and miss.

“What is impec — oh, very smart! But I will bet you all I have that your university professor does not use that word even once in his translation.”

“I can’t match all you have,” I said truthfully, having just looked at my bank balance. “And you’d better hang on to your cash. Anything you could do to make that much in short order is illegal in this town, gambling included.”

“And then you’d have to arrest me all over again. Always the good cop!”

“Not quite. They’re not paying me to report on German war preparations. So, if my inspector asks, this meeting with Professor Snodgrass was to get a lead on who gave the assassin in my apartment basement his orders.”