But how?
With Resistance help he could have mounted an elaborate ruse, spring himself to the upper floors while the guards tried to deal with the unruliness beneath. But he had chosen not to go that way. In the networks somebody always talked, somebody always whispered, and nothing was really a secret. The Resistance could get him close, but it could also earn him an appetizer of strychnine L-pill.
The other, safer possibility was to develop contacts in the French underworld and hire a professional thief to come in from below or above, via a back entrance, and somehow steal the booklet, then replace it the next day. But that took time, and there was no time.
In the end, he only confirmed what he already knew: there was but one way. It was as fragile as a Fabergé egg, at any time given to yield its counterfeit nature to anyone paying the slightest attention. Particularly with the Germans knowing something was up and at high alert, ready to flood the place with cops and thugs at any second. It would take nerve, a talent for the dramatic, and, most important, the right credentials.
“Are you willing?” said Sir Colin. “Knowing all this, are you willing?”
“Sir, you send men to their death every day with less fastidiousness. You consign battalions to their slaughter without blinking an eye. The stricken gray ships turn to coffins and slide beneath the ocean with their hundreds; c’est la guerre. The airplanes explode into falling pyres and nobody sheds a tear. Everyone must do his bit, you say. And yet now, for me, on this, you’re suddenly squeamish to an odd degree, telling me every danger and improbability and how low the odds of success are. I have to know why. It has a doomed feel to it. If I must die, so be it, but somebody wants nothing on his conscience.”
“That is very true.”
“Is this a secret you will not divulge?”
“I will divulge, and what’s more, now is the time to divulge, before we all die of starvation or alcohol withdrawal symptoms.”
“How very interesting.”
“A man on this panel has the ear of the prime minister. He holds great power. It is he who insisted on this highly unusual approach, it is he who forces us to overbrief you and send you off with far too much classified information. Let him speak, then.”
“General Sir Colin means me,” said the professor. “Because of my code-breaking success, I find myself uniquely powerful. Mr. Churchill likes me, and wants me to have my way. That is why I sit on a panel with the barons of war, myself a humble professor, not even at Oxford or Cambridge but at Manchester.”
“Professor, is this a moral quest? Do you seek forgiveness beforehand, should I die? It’s really not necessary. I owe God a death, and he will take it when he sees fit. Many times over the years he has seen fit not to do so. Perhaps he’s bored with me and wants me off the board. Perhaps he tires of my completely overblown legendary wit and sangfroid and realizes I’m just as scared as the next fellow, am a bully to boot, and that it ended on a rather beastly note with my father, a regret I shall always carry. So, Professor, you who have saved millions, if I go, it’s on the chap upstairs, not you.”
“Well spoken, Captain St. Florian, like the hero I already knew you to be. But that’s not quite it. Another horror lies ahead and I must burden you with it, so I will be let alone enough by all those noisy screamers between my ears to do my work if the time comes.”
“Please enlighten.”
“You see, everyone thinks I’m a genius. Of course I am really a frail man of many weaknesses. I needn’t elucidate. But I am terrified of one possibility. You should know it’s there before you undertake.”
“Go ahead.”
“Let us say you prevail. At great cost, by great ordeal, blood, psychic energy, morale, whatever it takes from you. And perhaps other people die as well — a pilot, a Resistance worker, someone caught by a stray bullet, any of the routine whimsies of war.”
“Yes.”
“Suppose all that is true, you bring it back, you sit before me exhausted, spent, having been burned in the fire, you put it to me, the product of your hard labors, and I cannot decode the damned thing.”
“Sir, I—”
“They think I can, these barons of war. Put the tag ‘genius’ on a fellow and it solves all problems. However, there are no, and I do mean no, assurances that the pages you bring back will accord closely enough with the original to yield a meaningful answer.”
“We’ve been through this a thousand times, Professor Turing,” said the general. “You will be able, we believe, to handle this. We are quite confident in your ability and attribute your reluctance to a high-strung personality and a bit of stage fright, that’s all. The variations cannot be that great, and your Turing engine or one of those things you call a bombe ought to be able to run down other possible solutions quickly and we will get what we need.”
“I’m so happy the men who know nothing of this sort of work are so confident. But I had to face you, Captain St. Florian, with this truth. It may be for naught. It may be undoable, even by the great Turing. If that is the case, then I humbly request your forgiveness.”
“Oh, bosh,” said Basil. “If it turns out that the smartest man in England can’t do it, it wasn’t meant to be done. Don’t give it a thought, Professor. I’ll simply go off and have an inning, as best I know how, and if I get back, then you have your inning. What happens, then that’s what happens. Now, please, gentleman, can we hasten? My arse feels as if Queen Victoria used it for needlepoint!”
Of course one normally never went about in anything but bespoke. Just wasn’t done. Basil’s tailor was Steed-Aspell, of Davies & Son, 15 Jermyn Street, and Steed-Aspell (“Steedy” to his clients) was a student of Frederick Scholte, the Duke of Windsor’s genius tailor, which meant he was a master of the English drape. His clothes hung with an almost scary brilliance, perfect. They never just crumpled. As gravity took them, they formed extraordinary shapes, presented new faces to the world, gave the sun a canvas for compositions playing light against dark, with gray working an uneasy region between, rather like the Sudetenland. Basil had at least three jackets for which he had been offered immense sums (Steed-Aspell was taking no new clients, though the war might eventually open up some room on his waiting list, if it hadn’t already), and of course Basil merely smiled drily at the evocations of want, issued a brief but sincere look of commiseration, and moved onward, a lord in tweed, perhaps the lord of the tweeds.
Thus the suit he now wore was a severe disappointment. He had bought it in a secondhand shop, and monsieur had expressed great confidence that it was of premium quality, and yet its drape was all wrong, because of course the wool was all wrong. One didn’t simply use any wool, as its provincial tailor believed. Thus it got itself into twists and rumples and couldn’t get out, its creases blunted themselves in moments, and it had already popped a button. Its rise bagged, sagged, and gave up. It rather glowed in the sunlight. Buttoned, its two breasts encased him like a girdle; unbuttoned, it looked like he wore several flags of blue pinstripe about himself, ready to unfurl in the wind. He was certain his clubman would not let him enter if he tried.