When a friend comes to Lotte for help she finds herself involved with Government corruption against which she needs all her erotic whiles.
That day in the Spring of 1920, Lotte enjoyed a very acceptable lunch at a hotel near Pall Mall and then she and her companion, a captain in The Blues, went upstairs for an extended dessert. After all, Lotte accepted that a chap is going to want a return on his investment.
She then took a cab back to Dolphin Square for a shower and a lie down before reporting for her evening shift at the club but her sleep was disturbed by a banging upon her front door. Lotte opened the door in her Parisian dressing gown, which you may think a strange place to have a door. Her visitor was a very agitated Victor Grayson who said that he had taken a circuitous route to her door to ensure that he was not followed.
Victor, as queer as a mincer full of monkeys, was one of the Leninist chums whom Lotte had cultivated as part of her work for Claud, her handler from an unnamed Government Department. Lotte was a very unlikely civil servant but her relationship with Claud operated strictly on the basis of nice fat wads of untraceable cash in brown envelopes.
Lotte gave Victor a stiff drink and sat him down in her lounge where he poured out his tale which concerned a theatrical producer by the name of Maundy Gregory. Lotte had heard of Gregory but never met him as he was, “Not our kind of people, Dahling”. It was an open secret that Gregory worked as a fixer for Lloyd George, the Liberal Prime Minister. Despite being part of the ruling coalition Government, the Liberal Party was very short of funds so Maundy Gregory was selling titles to raise money for Lloyd George. In addition to this shady enterprise, Gregory owned the Dornford Hotel in Sussex which has been described as the biggest brothel in England.
Grayson, extremely unwisely, had made a speech in Liverpool about the selling of honors and he now believed that his very life was at risk.
Lotte, as an impoverished aristocrat, disapproved of Gregory on the grounds that the definition of Aristocracy is “Rule by the best” and one cannot become an aristocrat simply by the application of money which may have come from running steam ships or even simply making garments. She also realized that helping Victor, as a fellow Leninist, would strengthen her cover and defeating Gregory would practically be a public service.
“Right Dahling, the first thing we must do is to get you safely out of London where the forces of evil can’t reach you. I was at school with Dolly Thetford and her family owns most of Norfolk. She must have a cottage on her estate where we can put you for now. After that, you will need a new name and a new life and that will take money which I am sure we can find a way to raise. Let me phone Dolly and then we can put you on a train to Norwich and Dolly can have you met at the station.”
Gracie nearly swallowed her cigarette when Lotte arrived early for her evening shift at the club. Lotte sat down beside Gracie’s desk almost like a schoolgirl in the Head’s office and mentioned that she had come across the name of Maundy Gregory and wondered if Gracie knew him at all.
Gracie very firmly said that Lotte needed to keep well clear of Gregory who was the worst slug ever to crawl out from under a stone. Apart from being mixed up with some extremely shady people, Gregory had microphones and cameras in every room at the Dornford Hotel which meant that he made a huge income from blackmail. When Lotte gently pressed a little further, Gracie said that two of her girls had previously worked at the Dornford and Lotte made a note to talk to those girls in the near future.
You need to understand, Gentle Reader, that the club is not some cheap, “Pay by the half hour brothel”. It offers the best service in the business so an evening shift could involve just one or perhaps two fares. Lotte went from Gracie’s smoke filled office to the small bar where she knew that her first client would be waiting for her. He was a banker who stayed in town during the week and went home to his wife and loving children for the weekend. Lotte and her banker drank champagne in the bar while his hands roamed over pretty much her entire body and then they ascended the grand staircase to a first floor room. Lotte knew what was required and she gave her very best performance as secret lover; she listened to his complaints about his wife and his bosses at the bank and she gently stroked his brow as they slowly shed clothing and climbed beneath the covers. She rated the sex at around five out of ten but he seemed to enjoy himself and, as the dutiful lover, Lotte was still naked beside him when he awoke after about an hour. They exchanged a few more meaningless sweet nothings and then, by common consent, she left him alone to sleep.
Lotte showered in the girl’s bathroom and adjusted her hair and makeup before reporting to the office. Gracie and Bobby were working the telephones and Bobby handed Lotte a little pink card with her next assignment.
Sadly, I am not permitted to write about Lotte’s second fare of the night. It would be just too scandalous but I can tell you that a cab deposited her back at Dolphin Square at around 3am.
The next morning Lotte slept until around 10am and then took a cab to Uncle Charlie’s latest hiding place which was a houseboat moored beside the Thames. If anyone knew how to raise an untraceable sum of cash in a hurry it would be the confidence trickster who had brought Lotte up and kept her in a good school until the age of seventeen.
Lotte always loved being with Charlie and she knew that the feeling was reciprocal. It was something which could only be described as, “warm and nice”. Charlie had always been vague about his actual relationship with Lotte and for pretty much all her life she had strongly suspected that he could be her father. But, for as long as they could both pretend this was not the case, there was no harm in expressing their love for each other in the most fundamental way. On this occasion, they stuck to the matter in hand.
They discussed the old ruse of the Honeytrap but that would be unlikely to raise the kind of money which Grayson would need for a whole new life. Maudy Gregory was known to be obscenely wealthy so it would be almost impossible to completely ruin him which Lotte would like to have done. However, there was a sort of poetic justice in the prospect of extracting from Gregory the funds to enable Victor to escape from Gregory. Losing a large sum would not bankrupt Gregory but no rich man likes to lose money so they could certainly hurt their target.
Maudy Gregory was of the same sexual inclination as Victor which was, technically, an imprisonable offence in 1920 but society generally made allowances for persons above a certain net worth. Gregory’s preferences would make him immune to most of the weapons which Lotte usually deployed but Charlie asserted that the man was still vulnerable.
“It’s always easy to con a greedy man. Once you have dangled a figure with lots of zeroes, he is hooked and he can’t let go.”
In January of that year the United States had made alcohol prohibited and Charlie, always quick to seize upon a new income stream, had inveigled himself into the British end of smuggling illegal booze across the Atlantic ocean in the hold of the RMS Aquitania. This meant that he had a few US contacts who could transmit trans-Atlantic cables to make a business transaction look genuine.
Another part of the tools of Charlie’s trade was a set of, “off the shelf” dummy companies which could be activated at short notice. When the opportunity for a con arose, it was important to have a company ready go immediately. Most of Charlie’s companies had impenetrable names like “FJ Enterprises” or “Ocean Investments” which could mean almost anything. So, the two conspirators laid their plans.
It was not until a frustrating two days later that Lotte was able to meet Carole from the club to ask her about her former employer. They met in a discreet little cocktail bar where all the tables were wood and cane.
Carole had left the Dornford stable because she wanted to live in London with its vibrant social scene but also because she wanted to get away from Maundy Gregory. Although the man was obviously homosexual, it was well known that he would play the films from his cameras and ogle the girls. He was not able to even glance at his girls, even in the corridors, without leering and making very evident the pleasure which he derived from his sense of “ownership”. When any girl left, as Carole had done, she was taken into the office where Gregory would berate her and make very plain that, if she so much as spoke his name, he would have her cut into small pieces and cast into the sea. His web of vice and blackmail was so wide that he had Members of Parliament, judges, policemen and others who would do his bidding and turn a blind eye to whatever Gregory might do.
But Carole did supply Lotte with a couple of names. Many of the sort of men who frequented the club were unable to exist without constant sex so they may live or work in Sussex and frequent the Dornford but, when they were in town, they would come to the club.
Bruno Webber (pronounced Vebber) was a theatrical agent who had a lot of business dealings with Gregory. He was aged in his mid-fifties, overweight and over sexed. He had a regular booking at the club on Thursday afternoons and it was easy for Lotte to arrange to take the fare.
Because Bruno had a regular booking, Lotte did not need to meet him in the bar so she waited for him to arrive in an upstairs bedroom where she introduced herself as Mitzi who was new at the club and, “Hadn’t really done this sort of thing before”.
I am sure you can imagine how willing Bruno was to introduce poor little Mitzi into the subtleties of her new profession and Mitzi obediently followed his every order and praised his skill as a lover. Bruno guided her into every little stroke which fired up his nerve endings and he showed his own deep knowledge of how he could pleasure a girl (Lotte was very experienced at faking admiration and responses).
During the course of this interaction Mitzi shared the story of how she had come to be at the club on a purely temporary basis until she could get her big break as an actress. Men love to talk about themselves and to boast about their connections (no pun intended) so Bruno soon revealed that he was an agent and he knew pretty much everyone in the acting profession.
Mitzi promised him that he could do whatever he liked if he could give her a contact to a producer who may be able to help her in her quest to enter the West End and she came away with the name of a bar where Maundy Gregory could often be found holding court.
When Lotte entered the bar, she soon recognized Gregory from his de***********ion and she humbly presented herself as a struggling young actress desperate for her first big break. She explained to Gregory that she knew of a fantastic coup which was being planned for the West End and, hopefully, Broadway. And she, Lotte (who was still calling herself Mitzi) had a really good shot at a leading role which would not come to pass unless the Production Company could raise the necessary funds to stage what was bound to be the hit of the year.
That year Mrs. Agatha Christie had published her first successful novel which was the absolute talk of the whole publishing world. The work was a detective story by the name of The Mysterious Affair At Styles and the authoress had been besieged by producers wanting to stage a play of the story. Mrs. Christie, who did not want her genius taken out of her hands by some stage writer, had steadfastly refused all offers.
But Mitzi, and a very small number of individuals, knew that Mrs. Christie had been persuaded to write a new work especially for the stage. The play would center around Hercule Poirot, the hero of “Styles”, and, in the wake of the novel, was bound to smash box office records.
A British Production Company called Starlight Incorporated had secured funding from an American consortium but the Americans would not fund the entire venture which is what made it so urgent to raise extra funds within Britain.
Mitzi knew that Maudy Gregory was “high up” in the theatre and she gave him, “in strictest confidence” the business card of Charles Montgomery who was fronting things for Starlight.
“He’s a bit hard headed and he will try to keep most of the profits for himself. He will probably offer you about 2% of the profits but he doesn’t know that you know how desperate he is to raise the investment. If you stand firm you can probably squeeze 10% out of the old skinflint.”
Lotte was observing the man’s eyes and she knew that she had him. Even if he was not hooked by the massive profits which would come from an Agatha Christie play, he could not resist the chance of “putting one over” on Charles Montgomery by squeezing him for 10% of the box office.
Charlie and Lotte spoke on the telephone but they did not meet again until Lotte went to the houseboat after Charlie had made his pass at Gregory. Charlie was feeling amorous and Lotte swiftly disrobed and squeezed onto the narrow bed in the cabin. They made love passionately and urgently the first time and then settled down to a much slower and gentler repetition with much whispering and kissing of faces and lips and nibbling of ears and necks.
When they both returned to wakefulness, still with their bodies entwined, Charlie spoke triumphantly of his meeting with his mark.
They met in the Reform Club on the south side of Pall Mall where Charlie was a member under one of his aliases and Charlie was deliberately low key as if to give the impression that he had plenty of backing and was not sure that he wanted to share his profits with yet another investor. Gregory, confident in the knowledge which Mitzi had given him, became more and more aggressive and Charlie allowed his defenses to fall away. Charlie said that his absolute limit was 5% of the takings as a return for Gregory but, when Gregory rose to his feet to leave, Charlie finally broke down and admitted how much he needed he extra funds.
Gregory stated that he wanted 10% and Charlie reluctantly agreed but, in order to save face, he said that he would only agree if Gregory could have his bankers walk a draft over to Charlie’s bank that same afternoon.
The full sum was placed in the account of Starlight Incorporated and the company was folded up later that week with all funds being paid out in a “To Bearer” draft. Maundy Gregory was never able to trace Charles Montgomery.
Lotte never told me where Victor Grayson went nor what his new name was but it was easy for her to spread a rumor about Victor’s fate by breathing in a few ears.
“Did you hear, Dahling? There was an artist, George Flemwell, painting by the Thames and he saw Grayson and Maundy Gregory in a boat together. He saw them go into No 6 The Island (which happened to be owned by Gregory).”
The thing about rumors is that they get repeated and no-one can quite recall where they began but, eventually, they pass into fact.
Author’s Note:
In 1933, when Lotte would have been aged 31, Gregory was convicted of selling honors. He was fined £50 (not a small sum at that time) and jailed for two months. There is no record of the name of the informant or of the names of those who bought titles. In that same year, Gregory was declared bankrupt and he changed his name and moved to Paris. You may ask what he lived on in Paris and the answer is that he had a very fat pension of £2,000 per year paid by, “sources close to the Conservative Party”.
In 1940, when the Germans occupied Paris, they sent Gregory to a labor camp and he is reported to have died on 28 September 1941. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission left him off their list of British civilian deaths.