I could hear my heartbeat in my chest. The men around the table were as still as a photograph.
Churchill asked, “Do you have a comment on this order from the president?”
Clay slowly moved his hand up from the table. He pointed at the sheet of paper and perhaps at the prime minister. He said in an iron voice, “I state this categorically. That document is a forgery. It was planted by England’s enemies, by those who want to destroy the Anglo-American alliance.”
The prime minister said calmly, “I never thought otherwise, of course. You might want to investigate it, General.” He passed the document along the table to Clay.
The meeting continued, but Generals Alexander and Douglas could not take their eyes off Clay. They may have been horrified by the audacity of the forgery. Or perhaps deep inside their minds, made fertile and distrustful by their island history, they suspected us Americans of diabolical treachery.
General Clay made no further comment during that conference. But the minute he and I were alone, he slammed the document into my hand and ordered, “You get to the bottom of this, Jack. Jesus H. Christ, I want someone hung by the balls.”
I never found anybody to hang by the balls, try as I did. But proof of the forgery came easily. I forwarded the document to the FBI in Washington. They readily proved that although the typewriter, the ribbon ink, and the paper had been manufactured in the United States, the ink on the printed White House logo at the top of the document had been made in Dresden by the Fascht Company, renowned in Germany before the war for the manufacture of printed wedding invitations. The FBI also found that the chemical breakdown of the ink indicated it had been made since 1940.
I gave this information to General Clay, who immediately forwarded it to the prime minister.
The next time they were together, Clay said, “Prime Minister, I hope you reviewed our FBI’s report on that forged document.”
Churchill waved his cigar. “I am offended you think I need proof it was a forgery.”
Clay said, “But you read the report?”
The prime minister put the cigar in his mouth, pushed it to one side, and said, “Closely, General.” He smiled at me. “Very closely indeed.”
A forgery, proven beyond a doubt. But the precise origin of the document, the implausible scheming by an unknown team in Berlin, may be cloaked in mystery forever.
Then there were the tiny household puzzles reported by English citizens. Randolph Deacon, an air raid warden in Ashford, fled inland on S-Day, leaving behind everything he could not carry on his back.
He told me after the war, “It broke my heart to leave my belongings. But I was an essential worker and couldn’t evacuate until the last minute. So I buried a few things under the floorboards, including the beautiful Black Forest cuckoo clock my father brought back from the Great War. It kept time well, but the cuckoo had never worked. My father said he broke it showing it off on the way back across the channel in 1918. And the only times I ever saw the little cuckoo bird was when I pried open the door to look inside.”
After Ashford was overrun, Wehrmacht troops used his home as a bivouac.
Deacon said, “I returned to my home after the Germans had pulled out. The place was in chaos. My furniture had been reduced to ashes in the stove. The plates and saucers were gone. Many of the windows were broken, with glass lying all about.”
Deacon was distraught, until he saw the clock on the wall. “I’ll never forget that moment. It was one minute to noon. Amid all the debris of my shattered possessions, there was my clock, in perfect running order, its Black Forest oak polished, its pendulum swinging. Someone had found it under the floor and placed in on the wall. Then, for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, the cuckoo shot out to call the hour. It chirped twelve times.”
I asked Deacon how this could possibly be.
“Some German clockmaker, drafted into the Wehrmacht, fixed my clock. How else?”
“Why would he have done that?” I asked.
Deacon shrugged. “That’s the puzzler, isn’t it? But I’m thankful to him, whoever he was. The cuckoo has worked ever since.”
Another small event, perfectly explained by the evidence of its own existence, is the painting John Bridgman found on his return home. Bridgman was an amateur landscape artist. After the war he said, “I had a better eye than I had a hand. I knew just enough about painting to know I’d never be much of a painter. Not for lack of trying, though.”
Bridgman lived in Horsham. His row house was given over to his passion for painting. Canvases, empty frames, easels, and tubes of paint and thinner filled it, often covering his bed and desk, cluttering his tiny kitchen. Bridgman escaped the town a few hours ahead of the Wehrmacht.
“My flat was filled with half-completed landscapes. I usually put my brush down intending to finish a canvas, but seldom did, once I looked critically at it.”
One of the unfinished paintings in Bridgman’s sitting room was of the Silent Pool near Guildford. Legend said that King John had watched a local girl bathing at the pool. When she discovered him, she drowned herself in a fit of shame.
“I had tried to capture her spirit in the green pond and in the trees circling the water. But I had failed and gave up on the project. I left the half-finished painting behind when I hastily departed Horsham and thought nothing further of it.”
Until he returned. Bridgman told me, “My building was the only one standing in the block. All the others had been reduced to rubble. I climbed the stairs, hoping against hope that the Wehrmacht soldiers had not destroyed my flat. The door lock had been kicked in, but other than that, there was no damage to my place. And standing in the middle of my sitting room was my painting of the Silent Pool.”
Bridgman showed me the piece. The canvas was now filled with paint. I asked, “So you finished the painting?”
He stared at me for a moment, then asked, “You know nothing about art?”
“Sorry.”
“This landscape was finished by another hand. You don’t need to know anything about art to see that.”
“I guess I know even less than that.”
Bridgman nodded. “Have you ever heard of Wilhelm Udet?”
“Sorry.”
The painter rubbed his forehead with frustration. His story was losing momentum due to my ignorance. He continued, “Udet is a seminal German painter. He joined the Dada movement right after the first war and then became a founder of surrealism. He is famous for his precise execution of fantastic visions.”
“That does ring a bell,” I granted, lying.
“Wilhelm Udet was in my flat right after S-Day, and he finished this painting. See for yourself.” Bridgman held the painting closer to me.
He explained. “I paint upper left toward lower right. The lower right half of this work is fully his. Notice the bold, decisive brush strokes, the immeasurably better use of the blues and greens.”
“Now that you mention it, I do notice it.”
“And look here, under the waters of the Silent Pool is a fish with Satan’s head. Nice touch, but nothing I would ever do.”
True enough, the fish, barely observable below the shimmering surface, had horns and was carrying a red trident in a fin.
He said, “Then he signs it in black. His signature reads, ‘One-slash-two Udet.’ Half Udet.”
Bridgman beamed. “That’s as close to a great painting as I’ll ever do. Half Bridgman, half Udet. But why he thought to finish my painting remains a mystery.”