Sam Bourne - Pantheon

Murray kept the pleasantries short. He eyed the table, set for tea, and with a purse of his lips and barely perceptible shake of his head signalled that there would be no such time-wasting today. Instead, his coat still on, he said, ‘Let’s get on with it.’

Taylor tried to hide his disappointment. He was young and Murray was a busy man, he knew that. But he was about to hand over the Rosetta Stone and Holy Grail rolled into one; surely he deserved a bit of respect, if not outright praise and deference? Instead, he was being treated as if he were no more than the boy at a left luggage counter, his duty to hand over a stored parcel. He slipped into the bedroom with his head down.

There he performed the same drill he had already repeated four times that day, returning with the manila envelope he had removed from the cipher room of the United States Embassy just a few days earlier. As he walked back into the living room, he found Murray standing there tapping his foot, gazing at the ceiling, and he decided in that instant to assert his own power. After all, it was he, Taylor Hastings, who held the cards. The moment would not last long, but for now he would enjoy it.

‘Take a seat,’ he said, gesturing towards one of the armchairs.

For a moment, Murray hesitated, displeasure drawing down the corners of his mouth. Then he removed his coat and did as he was told.

‘What we have here, sir,’ Taylor began, still holding tight to the envelope, ‘is a series of top secret cables between-’ He lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a “Former Naval Person”.’

Murray’s brow creased, just as Taylor had known it would. He was milking the moment, but what the hell. ‘“Former Naval Person” is the secret codename of-’ He paused, letting the MP hang on his words, then dropped the volume another notch. ‘Winston Spencer Churchill.’

‘Good God,’ said Murray, his hand covering his mouth in an involuntary gesture of genuine shock.

There was something else in that movement too, though it took Taylor Hastings a second or two to work it out. It was indignation. Reginald Rawls Murray, for all his anti-war, anti-Churchill rantings, was indignant that a foreigner, a Yank, should have stolen the private papers of a British prime minister. It offended his patriotic sense of propriety. But, the younger man noted, that reaction did not last long. Murray reached out to take the envelope.

Taylor pulled his hand back, ensuring the documents were out of reach. ‘Good God is right. God has been very good to us, Mr Murray. It turns out that these two men, who for ease we’ll call R and C, have been corresponding for some time, long before C reached the top, as it were. The papers I have in my hand would cause great discomfort for R if they were to become public, especially now, with the election looming.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘But there is one letter that I think will prove decisive. I’ll let you read them for yourself.’ He removed the documents, representing six exchanges of messages between the two leaders, from the envelope, and gave them to the MP who took them with a hand that was, Hastings was delighted to see, trembling. At this angle, he could read along with Murray, though he all but knew the texts by heart. 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…

Hastings watched as Murray’s eyes scanned along the page, his thumb indicating where he stopped next: 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…

That got Murray excited. As expected, the Englishman turned the page, looking for Roosevelt’s reply to this direct appeal for US intervention. If the President bowed to Churchill’s plea, if he had secretly promised to deploy ‘the force of the United States’, then Roosevelt would be finished, his re-election in November doomed. He had repeatedly sworn before the American people that no such decision had been taken, that the US was still officially neutral. But if it could be proven that Roosevelt had, in fact, clandestinely committed the US to Britain’s defence, he would be exposed as a warmonger and, worse, a liar — ready to trick his own nation into a global and potentially disastrous conflict.

Murray was skimming the President’s reply, all of it exasperatingly non-committal. Taylor knew what the older man was looking for; he had been looking for just the same thing himself when he had first held these papers in his own grasp, his hands clammy with excitement. He wondered if he should put the Englishman out of his misery, but decided against it. He had worked hard for this moment; he had every right to savour it.

He let his guest turn over another sheet, so that Murray was now reading Churchill’s cable to Roosevelt of May 20, 1940, despatched at one pm, his eyes darting across the page at double speed. Taylor particularly liked this one: Excuse me, Mr President, putting this nightmare bluntly. Evidently I could not answer for my successors who in utter despair and helplessness might well have to accommodate themselves to the German will…

Taylor hoped the meaning of that passage had sunk in. Here was the British prime minister warning that, if no American military help was forthcoming, then his own administration would collapse and a pro-German regime would take its place. Wasn’t that proof, from the horse’s mouth, that he, Taylor Hastings, was about to make all the Right Club’s dreams come true? Once Roosevelt was discredited and ejected from office, the US would stay out of the war and Britain would either be defeated or make its peace with Germany: Churchill himself was saying it! Hitler would be master of all Europe, with only the Atlantic — no longer defended by Churchill’s precious Royal Navy — standing between the Third Reich and America. A new world was about to be born and he, young as he was, would be remembered as one of its fathers…

He could see a line of worry etched into Murray’s forehead. That did not surprise, still less concern, Hastings. He understood. The Englishman had only read Churchill’s increasingly urgent pleas; from Roosevelt, he had only seen a series of fence-sitting replies. The MP was fretting that these documents did not, after all, contain the lethal words that would unseat an American president and prepare the way for a new order in Europe and beyond.

He decided to employ a technique learned from Anna, Murray’s wife and his lover. She always knew when a striptease had gone on long enough. It was time to remove the last veil and show the man what he was aching to see.

‘June 13,’ he said steadily. ‘Turn to R’s letter from June 13, 1940. One pm.’

Murray’s fingers were shaking in their haste to turn over one sheet and then another.

As at last he began reading, Taylor’s eye accompanied him over each word, the pleasure of it now even greater than the first time he had read it. Your message of June 10 has moved me very deeply… this Government is doing everything in its power to make available to the Allied Governments the material they so urgently require, and our efforts to do still more are being redoubled. This is because of our faith in and our support of the ideals for which the Allies are fighting.

It began at the corners of his mouth, spreading slowly as if this were a delight not to be rushed. Reginald Rawls Murray read the words again, then sat back in his chair, at first relieved, then steadily — as the meaning sank in — elated. Colour was spreading across his face, brightening by the second.