Noel Hynd - The Sandler Inquiry

Intense hammering and chipping rose from below.

Leslie concluded.

"Months passed. Mr. Lassiter told me to live as quietly and normally as I could. What they were waiting for was a natural and infallible way to smoke out Arthur Sandler. They were waiting for-" "Victoria to die" said Thomas triumphantly.

"May I continue?"

A portrait of Victoria from forty years earlier gazed down from the wall, a tart sneer of disapproval on her lips, the usual vacuity through the eyes.

"Continue," said Whiteside, trying to calm Leslie.

"They were waiting for Victoria to die said Leslie. They had a pretty good idea where these counterfeits were coming from, who was making the flawless engravings, and who had concocted a formula to provide the perfect paper. Sandler." She paused.

"So when Victoria died, they asked me to come forward, to put in a claim against the will. That would force the Sandler estate, including this building, to be closed by the State of New York. And, they hoped, it would force Sandler to come forward' "In one form or another," said Whiteside.

"Correct," she said.

"I was to lure the fox from the thicket. That was one role. The other was to get as close to Thomas Daniels as possible' She looked at him.

"I was to discover how much collusion there'd been between him and his late father."

"And?" asked Whiteside, raising his thin white eyebrows, hoping for a revelation.

"I haven't uncovered any. Yet" Whiteside appeared modestly disappointed. So did Hunter.

The chipping downstairs intensified. Thomas was so engaged in what he was hearing that he nearly leaned forward out of his seat to push the conversation onward.

"That brings her to the present, doesn't it?" he asked.

Hammond nodded. So did Leslie. Thomas turned quickly to address Whiteside.

"And it kicks the ball into your zone, doesn't it, Whiteside?"

Again the raised eyebrows, accompanied by a nod.

"You're going to have to cough up that one bit of the story that you've withheld so far, aren't you?" pressed Thomas, trying valiantly not to gloat.

"You've got the one missing piece and you're going to have to put it in place for us now. Aren't you?"

"It won't be so painful" allowed Whiteside.

"Not if you keep your subsequent part of the bargain. I'll tell you anything you want if you provide the man were looking for." Whiteside wore the expression of a tournament bridge player about to reveal a championship hand, the cards he'd waited years to throw onto a table.

"IT provide him," said Thomas.

Whiteside eyed Hunter with amusement and looked at least once into each of the other three pairs of eyes at the table. The noisy excavation continued below them.

"In that case," said Whiteside, the elegant man with a patch of soot on his cheek, 'please listen carefully." He smiled.

"You'll like this. The story wears well."

Whiteside cleared his throat. 'I've been in double-double games before, even a triple-triple ruse along the line." He shook his head and exchanged a cognizant grin with Hunter.

"This one beats them all, however."

He glanced around, seeing that he was center stage. He continued addressing Hammond, the emissary of U.S. Intelligence, as much as anyone. And, sir," he said,

"I'll supply you with your bloody missing piece, all right. Your Sandler."

"Our what?"

Thomas inclined forward again, instantly baffled. He was going to point the. finger to Sandler. Not Whiteside.

Patiently, Whiteside repeated, the silence at the table now given an extra dimension of stillness.

"Well" Whiteside buffed with studied casualness, 'the man's been dead for thirty-one years. What I could never understand is how your Central Intelligence Service, sorry, Agency, never managed to learn that for themselves' The bastards probably did, thought Hammond, and never told anyone.

Hunter sat back in his chair, his hands folded, one thick finger interlocking with another, glancing toward his own chest as if to indicate he'd known it all along also. Hunter did look like a bear, Thomas noticed. Whiteside's smugness enraged Thomas.

Whiteside raised his eyebrows slightly, saw the stunned expressions around him, scratched his left cheek elegantly, and mused onward.

"Yes," he said reflectively,

"I suppose I do owe the present company an explanation. Correct?

"I assure you" he began, 'it wouldn't change the current situation the smallest bit."

He turned the calendar back to 1947, a year in which the British Exchecquer was still bedeviled by German pound-sterling notes, printed in Austria during the war. An investigation was in progress, yet doomed to failure. Someone was still printing pound notes. No one knew who. Or where.

"It was April of that year, forty-seven, I recall," said Whiteside, 'when we were still fairly active in Central Europe. We, meaning M.I. 6, of course. We were recruiting Russians. The Iron Curtain had fallen and we wanted people who were behind it. We wanted Russians. But we took what we could get' What they got, what they managed to recruit, was just about anyone who could exchange a useful tidbit of intelligence for a one way ticket to the West.

"Poles, Hungarians, Czechs" continued Whiteside nostalgically, 'we could have set up our own League of Nations in exile, we recruited so many "Why didn't you?" asked Daniels sarcastically "Afraid your Congress wouldn't want to join" Whiteside shot back.

"Touche. May I go on?"

Daniels motioned an open hand to indicate Whiteside could.

"In forty-seven we recruited a Hungarian, man named Walter Szezic. He was a young man then, mid-twenties, and had been in the non-Communist resistance in Austria and Hungary during the war. Fine fellow, really!

"They all are' Thomas intoned.

Whiteside ignored the remark and dwelt on Szezic.

"Szezic stayed in Hungary for three years, until being uncovered in 1950 and being smuggled out in one battered piece. But when recruited he had told several stories, all of which were later confirmed… except one.

"There was no way of confirming that lone story. But since it wasn't important to Szezic that he deceive us on that point, and since all the more important information we received from him was true, we took this as the Lord's truth, also."

The story concerned a spy, a man the Russians had planned to slip into the West since before the war. A man not identified by name, but rather by the identity he took.

"The spy was run by Moscow," said Whiteside.

"Years in the making; straight out of the KGB building on Dzerzhinsky Square.

But he would have a control in New York, too. He'd be run in the United States and had been trained to assume the identity of a wealthy German-American industrialist" No one said it, but one name bolted into the listeners' minds.

"Sandler," said Whiteside, though it wasn't necessary.

"The spy had memorized every facet of Sandler's life; he'd been given the man's voice, the man's face, practically the man's mind, in that he'd memorized the faces and relationships of everyone Sandler had known before the war. An extraordinary undertaking by our friends the Reds," said Whiteside, not without deep admiration.

Thomas fidgeted nervously, beginning to sense the inevitable implications and consequences of Whiteside's story. Leslie glanced back and forth between Whiteside and Thomas. Hammond spoke.

"Why should we believe any of this?" he asked.

"Perhaps you shouldn't. But proof is available." Whiteside held up a hand.

"Not with me now, unfortunately. No. But I could provide it, if necessary."

Thomas's mind was leaping ahead, to the identity of the spy, to the controlling agent in New York. The pieces were fitting together, gliding uncontrollably like the needle of a ouija board.