Lies And Consequences Collection

Chapter 10

Celluloid Characters

I made my first contact with the Stockford Pharmaceutical Company just after ten-thirty on Monday morning, New York time.

“Good morning! You have reached the office of Mr Richard Stockford"s private secretary. My name is Sandra. How can I assist you today?”

“Good morning, Sandra, I"m Shaun Redden. I have a message for Mr Stockford from a mutual friend of ours, Sir Horace Butler. If he is available could you put me through, please?”

“I"m afraid Mr Stockford is engaged with other members of the board, but I can pass on a message if you"d like me to?”

“That would be fine, thank you. Tell him that the identity of the person involved in the accident with a Mr Aberman has been discovered and Sir Horace is eager for the two of us to meet. I"m staying at the Metropolitan Hotel, on Fulton Street, in Brooklyn, but I don"t know the phone number here. I"m over from the UK with my sister Fianna for a few days. Room number 306. It is quite important that he gets the message, Sandra.”

“I"ll certainly see that Mr Stockford receives it, sir. Your name was Mr Redden, I believe?”

“Yes, it is, Sandra.”

* * *

In 1936 the two brothers of Gregor Sternberg rolled up their film production and distribution company in Vienna, relocating in the fast expanding Hollywood area of California where they began all over again. It was not only the love of celluloid that took them, but also the rapidly growing anti-Semitism in Europe.

Alain Aberman, although Jewish by birth, believed that his position as first secretary to the Chancellor of Austria would safeguard him through what he described as a passing phase in history. That was the belief he held and the one he told his good friend Gregor until, that is, Gregor was arrested for assisting not only his brother and their families to escape from Austria, but also fellow wealthy Jews. All allegedly for money! Gregor was never dishonest. Such an act of opportunism would have been abhorrent to the Austrian-born captain in the Fifth Rifle Brigade as much as it was to Alain. When Gregor Sternberg was shot for that alleged crime Aberman hastily altered his religious convictions and all the records of him being of the Jewish faith.

During the hours of the debauchery that Gregor"s daughter and the other women and girls suffered, Alain forged Schuschnigg"s signature on the documentation Mayanna and her two children would need for their diplomatic covered escape from Vienna aboard a flight to the East Coast of America in the name of Stockford. He then contacted Father Finnegan, asking for help. He never told Finnegan any of what he told Jack. That had come straight from the horse"s mouth one Wednesday afternoon at the end of the war over coffee in the Cafe Landtmann. Nowhere in Jack"s report did it say that Schuschnigg had killed Aberman. What it did say, however, added up to a plausible reason.

On release from his last concentration camp, Schuschnigg was repatriated to Austria and invited by the Americans to join the then fledgling Austrian government. He was, according to Jack"s story, waiting in the American Embassy in Vienna when Alain Aberman made his own personal travel application. He could not check the documents that Alain had submitted, but he could have him followed when he left. It was the following day that Aberman was killed. Kurt Schuschnigg refused the invitation offered him to serve in government, preferring to emigrate to America and start a new life. According to Jack"s report that"s what he did. The fear of his betrayal of innocence and the wish to survive a revengeful witness can be written convincingly into any good conspiracy and that was what Jack was relying on.

* * *

The phone rang in my hotel room twenty minutes later. It was Richard Stockford.

* * *

Whether or not it was the truth that Fianna told me on our flight to New York I had no way of knowing, but that wasn"t of primary importance, the fact that she was convincing was. She and the younger Shaun had been taken into the orphanage when their parents had perished in a fire that destroyed their home above the bakery in which they worked in the small town of Carrick-On-Shannon, when Shaun was seven years old and Fianna two years his elder. Their mother, Rebecca, had been overcome by the smoke fumes and their father, Michael, had died from the burns he suffered when rescuing his two children. Fianna had a burn on her upper arm as a remaining legacy of that fateful night, but Shaun was spared any injury. He was to face agony later.

Father Finnegan had already established his place at Athlone by the time the two children arrived, but his penchant for n***d boys dancing before him was unknown by anyone else connected to the home. At each of his weekly dancing sessions the male selections were made to recite the initials of Schuschnigg in a song he composed:

I know a devil called S c h u s c h n i g g, who once killed a man that he could clearly see.

I know a devil called S c h u s c h n i g g, who once killed a man that he could clearly see.He ran him down in a big fat car, so the story he could have told would never go far.

He ran him down in a big fat car, so the story he could have told would never go far.If you close your eyes then maybe you will see, that the murdering devil of S c h u s c h n i g g still lives in me!

If you close your eyes then maybe you will see, that the murdering devil of S c h u s c h n i g g still lives in me!Shaun told Fianna of the song, and she too had nightmares.

Jack"s version of the story now deviated from the truth. Whereas the real Shaun was murdered by Finnegan, I, as Fianna"s brother, simply ran away in fear. The name and the song stayed branded onto my subconscious as though put there by a scalding iron, only to come alive again when reading that name in the London evening newspaper. Fianna stayed at the orphanage for a few more months after my disappearance then she was placed in a normal home owned by a family called Gleeson who lived in Dublin. She had a list, compiled by Jack, of positions she took as employment which she assured me she had memorised.

The murder of Father Finnegan was carried by many publications with speculation being kept to the minimum that his murderer, Bridget Slattery, never added to. Fianna, under that assumed name, was deemed to be psychotic and committed to a variety of mental institutions before playing a leading role in Henry Acre"s death. Why Finnegan had only murdered Shaun from all the others was not known nor commented on. Like Fianna, I had a separate letter from Jack that was for only my eyes. I believed every word.

He confirmed my suspicions over the father of Leeba"s child, along with my supposition that the once King, Edward VIII, of the British Empire, was guest B at the Chancellery. The reason for that meeting was to discuss the new order of things when, as all three men expected, Britain was overrun by the Nazis. Hitler had a daughter and the world knew nothing of it. Jack implied that would change if Schuschnigg ever opened his mouth. As I read on I understood why he had not, but also why now he might.

The atrocities that the Nazis inflicted upon the Jews is a well-documented subject, often in graphic detail, but one programme that I had never seen mentioned was the propagation of Jewish children by at least one Jewish parent. The Nazis were nothing if not pragmatic. They knew the extermination of the Jewish race, although taking time, would inevitably lead to its extinction. The babies born in the concentration camps were to be the future; human beings bred solely for medical experimentation. Ideally they wanted pure Jewish bred children from fine ancestral stock!

One of those used in this programme was Kurt Schuschnigg. He descended from a very distinguished Austrian family, having traceable roots back many centuries, including attachment to the Habsburg monarchy. No precise records of births were kept by the Nazis, therefore no exact number of children fathered by Schuschnigg could ever be known, nor their names and s*x. Perhaps, Jack suggested, the Gross-Rosen concentration sub camp complex-born thirty-two-year-old chief executive of the German chemical company in talks with Richard Stockford was not one of them, but he wanted no chance to be taken over Schuschnigg involvement. Loose ends, as he called them; ones that need to be tied together, he added. I wondered why it was necessary for Fianna to help in connecting those loose ends.

By now you"re entitled to accuse me of being stupidly naive and I will plead guilty to that offence. I cannot even offer youth and inquisitiveness as a just defence, as having studied psychology I should have been asking more questions than I had. On self-examination I could say that Jack had replaced the father I had known so little of, and it was in his reports I"d found the purpose I was searching for. But I very much doubt anyone would fall for that one. Jack was like a smooth pebble in my mouth, helping me to keep my aspirations moist whilst travelling through the dry desert of life.

* * *

Fianna was starting to conduct her own examination of motives on boarding the plane.

“Is it not bothering you, Shaun, that you"re here at all?” she asked, to which I answered, “Should it?”

“If I was you then, yes, I would,” she replied before continuing, “and a bit quicker than yourself. Before you say a thing that you might be ashamed of, let me put a few pointers your way. You"re a policeman who just happened to shoot dead an Irish army brigade commander and then fell into the path of the mysterious Jack Price. How convenient was that for the both of you, huh? I"ve had me ups and downs with the police in my time but I"m more used to the ones like the Scarface I met and told you of than handsome burly ones like yourself. I reckon your man Jack turned your head, with you falling in love with the adventure stories he told of a hero rescuing some dumb maiden in need of a good seeing to. I hope I"m none too vulgar for you, Shaun, but it"s the way of the world nowadays. I have a couple of questions you might like to chew on as we take to the air,” she said, her eyebrows raised in a questioning fashion.

“Why pick you to shoot a Republican Army man? You"re young and a bit too inexperienced for my thinking. I would have thought there must be loads of coppers better qualified and already tested in killing. While I"m on the subject of shooting people dead, you seem mighty cold about it all. It"s as though you do it every day of your life. Like making a cup of tea first thing in the morning, or tying your shoelaces. It"s not natural, Shaun. Did you not feel anything when you shot him dead?”

“Not a thing! I knew he wouldn"t hesitate firing his own g*n and killing that guard. He had a history of violence that stretched back many years, plus someone in the g**g had told me that he intended this hold-up to be more of a political statement than just a robbery. I had my orders and followed them. That"s what people like me do, Fianna. We uphold the law.”

She looked away and laughed, more mocking me with derision then scornfully, then she asked, “So, doing away with this old man Schuschnigg is lawful, is it, Shaun? Is that what you"re telling me?” She never waited for any reply.

“Scarface is the killer type, he could easily do Schuschnigg anytime, come to that so could Jack. Why use us to load the bullets? Another question for you while I have your attention.”

If the truth were known, neither of us were paying full attention to what was being said. We had been airborne for a few minutes and for at least one of those minutes staring at the "Do not Smoke" light. As soon as it was switched off we both reached for our cigarette packets. It was Fianna who exhaled first.

“Why this story of us being brother and sister and Finnegan being the piggy in the middle who connects us? It seems too complicated and unnecessary just to bump someone off. Where"s the need to tell the Stockfords anything? There"s been an undisturbed secret for thirty-five years. With the proper names being changed it"s nigh on impossible to link any Sternberg to a Stockford. Why rock the boat now, Shaun?” I had no answer to her puzzlement and in actual fact her worries were my own.

“I"ve got a question for you, Fianna. Who turned you into a lesbian?”

“Get away with you, Shaun me boy. Save the masculine flirting for the girls that care. Tell them of your talents and I"ll say no word of your windy habits in that camp bed of yours last night. Sounded like you had a machine-g*n up your back-side. I blamed myself, by the way. Should have made allowances for a soft, half-baked Irishman from London town and not Londonderry! I would have done better ordering a mild Chinese curry and not a hot Indian one as I did for me brother"s tea. Are you next going to tell me what I"m missing out on, Shaun, because believe me; I"m not missing a thing!”

“There either speaks the voice who experienced disappointment, or…” I was not allowed to finish.

“Or the experience of male incompetency that you could more than adequately replace, Shaun? Was that roughly what you were about to say?”

“Actually no! I was going to be somewhat derogatory and ask if they really were men you"d been with. But your assumption about my long term motives were correct though.”

“So you fancy me then, Shaun, do yer? Is it the challenge of the spiritual conversion that I represent or just the physical pleasure that you"d be after?”

“Would it be immodest to say the only conversion that would follow the s*x would be a conversion to the enjoyment of that s*x? But that"s something we"ll never know, will we?”

“You"ll never know, but I do, and no mistake. I was almost r***d when I was fourteen by three boys, but then fully r***d days after.” Her sarcasm had turned to anger. “Don"t bother to tell me you were about to offer the mystical awakening of love for a man instead. That really is bullshit! All men are animals.” Abruptly her brief denunciation stopped, but I wouldn"t leave it alone.

“What made you fall in love with an animal, Fianna?”

“There was nothing that made me, Shaun. It"s just there was no one to stop me.”