But it had been relatively easy for the police, he had decided during the slow, late-night train journey through south and south-west Wales into empty, unbombed Pembrokeshire. He always went as far as Cardiff on his forty-eights, preferring it to Swansea, he always went to a show or the flicks, and he always got half-tight in one of half a dozen pubs at the back of Queen Street. One day he would change his routine, and they wouldn't find him.
Some of his crew had been on the train, all noisy and most of them angry; reluctant to believe that he was as ignorant as they as to the reason behind the summons back to the minesweeping flotilla. Gilliatt, amusedly considering that an officer's pleasures were less vivid than those of his men, had no great sense of being cheated out of leave, and therefore no great expectation of dire necessity attached to their sailing orders. The Jerries had probably sewn a new net of mines in the Bristol Channel or outside Swansea harbour either by minelayer or aircraft — nothing more or less than routine.
Milford Haven station was in complete darkness, and Gilliatt let his crew members roll and grouch ahead of him down the wet platform, curse their mislaid tickets and their officers, then go out into the light, soaking rain to find their way down to the docks. The ticket collector saluted as he took Gilliatt's ticket, and Gilliatt touched his cap. The Moulder's Arms and the other back-street pubs in Cardiff were no great loss. He liked being at sea — which was why he had resigned from the navy in "37, fed up with Naval Intelligence and a desk-bound life. And why he'd re-enlisted, in the RNVR, as soon as Hitler invaded Poland. He'd been quite well aware that there would be a war in Europe when he resigned, and he'd known he'd be trapped in Intelligence unless he temporarily broke his career ties with the Royal Navy.
He carried with him the constant satisfaction of having outwitted the Admiralty. Their Lordships had decided, it seemed, that his university background and his facility in French and German shaped him for only one role in the navy — in Intelligence. With the first hints of the reorganization of Admiralty Intelligence to prepare for another war, Gilliatt had gone to work for a small boat-builder in Appkdore until September 1939.
He was a happy man as he passed through the dusty-smelling booking hall of the station, his shoes clicking on the wooden floor, and out into the soft Pembrokeshire rain, insinuating and persistent. Pulling up his collar, he set off in the wake of Campbell, Howard and the others he had recognized. As he walked down the hill from the station, past the NOIC HQ and the Lord Nelson pub, he could see, through the rain, the harbour and bay laid out before him, across to the mouth of Angle Bay. Escort ships ready to fuss over their charges, and another convoy building up. Cardiff — and the less immediate past — faded behind him; he was a shallower, more contented man.
A D-class cruiser emerged from the wet, murky curtain of rain, a light high up on her superstructure the only spot of colour in the greyness. From the vantage point of one of the three British merchant ships, there was something piled and slabbed and sinister about the cruiser's bulk; and something worn, and tired — an air of making do, of potential defeat. The greeting in the signal-lamp's message was hollow, almost threatening. The American cruiser had already vanished back into the rainy mist, heading for the neutrality of Roosevelt's America.
They were fifty miles east of St John's, Newfoundland, sailing from Halifax, with two thousand miles of the North Atlantic between them and the Clyde or the Mersey. On leave in New York, before they sailed, the strangeness of a country not at war had seemed welcome, shallow, and even something to be despised. Women well-dressed, arms full of packages from early Christmas shopping at Macy's; taxis to be had by raising an arm; Manhattan garish and alive with light when darkness fell; the skies quiet. Now, as the British cruiser — their sole escort — emerged from behind the weather, heaving with the effort, it seemed, it brought with it the smell of war, of Europe.
The cruiser signalled each of the three twenty-thousand-ton merchant ships in turn. There would be complete radio silence except in the utmost emergency. All communication was to be by means of signal-lamp, as it had been with the American cruiser.
America was now impossibly distant, infinitely desirable, and incapable of being disdainfully looked down upon, veteran upon rookie. Between them and their destination, as they zig-zagged their way across the Atlantic, were the U-boats. Their imagined presence was more potent than the grey, unsubstantial bulk of the cruiser.
The cargo — grain, machine-parts, aircraft spares — was no longer important, nothing more than a futile gesture of help by the Americans, and a single drop in a bottomless bucket to the British. And the idea of it being a trial-run for new convoy tactics seemed now only the unenviable prerogative of the guinea-pig. Some of them knew the figures for shipping losses the previous month — 103 ships, 443,000 tons. Britain was, being starved to death. And that did not seem to matter so much now as the garish safe lights on Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the coffee-shops, bars, restaurants where they were a strange and welcome species.
McBride had agreed that Goessler should be paid the equivalent of five per cent of the advances and royalties of the book, when it was written — Swiss account, dollars or Swiss francs did not matter. McBride was gratified in discovering Goessler's motive for helpfulness, and accepted the demand without question. He was paying no one else, and the agreement was unwritten and conditional on the discovery of some striking and convincing new material.
It took the four students that Goessler had subverted temporarily from their postgraduate work two days to assemble a slim folder of evidence for the existence of Emerald Necklace. Goessler had only occasionally appeared in the room off the main university library that he had caused to be set aside for the work, like a nanny periodically checking upon her charges. He claimed — to McBride's anxious anticipation — to be tracking down some of the names that had been thrown up by the documentary material they unearthed. Five per cent had galvanized Goessler — he seemed slimmer, less jolly, sleeker of mind. McBride enjoyed the cupidity displayed by the East German Marxist academic. It made him feel more justified in despising those American professors guest-reviewing Gates of Hell as a bad, badly-written book.
McBride handled the collected documents with a reverent delicacy, and returned to them compulsively again and again — reading the German slowly, caressingly, and with a catch-breath anticipation that he might have misread, mistranslated, read into.
As the girl student, Marthe, brought his coffee in a lumpy brown earthenware mug, and he nodded his thanks, he was reading the movement orders of two infantry divisions, dated late in October 1940. The two divisions, XXXII and XLV, had not been stood down when Seelowe was canceled by the Führer — except very temporarily. A leave-pass record had survived with the movement order, and there had been little leave — unlike other divisions in France initially required for Seelowe — after the cancellation. A number of senior officers had been summoned to Berlin — regimental and abteilungen commanders — but for junior officers and other ranks only compassionate leave. After a very brief bivouac in the Cherbburg area they had been transferred to Brittany, to the Plabennec-St Renan area north of Brest. Here, they were to establish a temporary headquarters. The temporary nature of their headquarters was attested to by the surviving requisitions of building materials and billets.