‘I met him half a dozen times, when he was part of some official delegation at our embassy in Berlin, the reciprocal visit in Zurich and at those dreadful Bierabends the Nazis used to organise for the foreign press and diplomats. I’ve heard him play duets with Heydrich, and I’ve seen him fend off questions from Ed Murrow and Bill Shirer, but I doubt I ever got more than fifteen minutes alone with him at any one time. Usually in the middle of Berlin. With Gestapo thugs all over the place. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so scared in my entire life. Everything else has come via couriers and codes. He rations what he tells us, and needless to say we ration what we pass on to you. We did nothing to draw attention to him as the source of our information. It worked well, until now. I don’t know what’s gone wrong. An air raid I could believe. Lousy luck, but believable. But if he’s faked his own death and vanished…’
Cal had no idea how his sentence should end. Reggie finished it for him, half-eaten sandwich poised in the air, his voice not much above a whisper.
‘…And all he knows has vanished with him… We must have him. Really we must.’
‘I know. You already said that. What is it you think he knows?’
‘Anything or everything, it really doesn’t matter. That close to Heydrich for that long. Whatever he knows we must know too. I gather Heydrich is mad with frustration or grief-do these buggers feel grief? do they feel at all?-whatever, he has lost someone of immense value. That much is obvious. I rather think he’s up to something very clever in faking that funeral. He’ll have his men looking for Stahl. I pray to God we find him before they do.’
‘Find him? I don’t even know where to start looking.’
‘England, dear boy.’
‘England? Why England?’
‘Where else can he go? If he were coming to you he’d be here by now. He’s had more than a fortnight. He’d have been here in a couple of days, or so I should think. No, he’s heading for England. I know it in my bones. He’s heading for London. And so should we.’
‘We?’
‘You and me. You’re to accompany me to England. Gelbroaster’s orders. A spot of liaison.’
Ruthven-Greene said ‘liaison’ as though it were lunch. A pleasant way to pass a little time, rather than a diplomatic quagmire.
‘I guess I don’t have a lot of choice, do I?’
‘No, you don’t. If I’m right and your Tin Man shows up in London, we’ll need you to identify him. Would you believe we don’t have a single clear photograph of the man?’
Yes. Cal could easily believe that. He’d seen hundreds of shots of the Nazi hierarchy. He’d yet to see one in which Stahl had not managed to be in shadow or behind someone taller. Always the blur at the edge of the frame.
Ruthven-Greene put a copy of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on the table. Last week’s big story. Stahl’s funeral. The photograph of Stahl had been blown up, magnified many times, from a crowd shot-so coarse was the grain it could have been anyone. Stahl’s own mother would not have known him. The 12-Uhr Blatt, the Beöbachter and the Borsen Zeitung had all carried the same picture-it was probably all they had.
‘Is that all? Just identify the man? I was his control officer for two years.’
‘Quite. I meant… help us find him… help us…’
Ruthven-Greene thrashed around for the right technical term.
‘…Help us… de-brief the bugger. That’s it. De-brief him.’
He smiled with satisfaction at having mastered the term. Cal half liked, half loathed this about the English-the dreadful affectation that they were all amateurs, that precise and specific was the sort of thing you paid someone else to be rather than bother with yourself. War as cricket-gentlemen and players. They had to be kidding.
Ruthven-Greene showed Cal out.
‘You know, I’m still a bit puzzled,’ he said.
He could not be half as puzzled as Cal felt.
‘Tin Man. Don’t you think it was a bit… well… obvious? For a codename, I mean. A bit close. Stahl, steel, tin? Geddit?’
‘I didn’t choose it, Reggie. Stahl did.’
‘All the same he’s damn lucky no-one put two and two together.’
‘Perhaps he was over-fond of The Wizard of Ozz.’
‘Ah… perhaps so… if he only had a brain, eh?’
‘That was the Scarecrow. The Tin Man wanted a heart. You didn’t grow up reading Frank Baum, did you?’
‘Never heard of him. But then I don’t suppose you grew up reading E. Nesbit and The Railway Children, did you? Ah well. Toodle pip. See you in the morning.’
Ruthven-Greene went away whistling the Tin Man’s song to himself. If he only had a heart. Blasé as ever. Toodle fucking pip.
It was only in the staff car going back to the embassy that Cal pondered the truth of what Ruthven-Greene had said so casually, ‘We’re not allies, at least not yet.’ He had the feeling that he’d just given away his birthright. Ripped off the bloody bandage, thrown down the fife and drum. That in sharing with this not-yet-ally he had somehow diminished himself, wiped out his own raison d’etre. There were times when he felt not that he was Stahl, exactly, but that without Stahl he was, not nothing, exactly-but something other, something lesser, not quite Calvin M. Cormack III. His identity was bound up in Stahl’s identity. On the other hand he’d walked into the meeting with Stahl dead and come out with Stahl alive.
Then the other thing Reggie had let slip-did Reggie let anything slip? Wasn’t every word planted to a measure and a stick? The British had cracked the German code. Not any routine traffic code, but the codes used by Intelligence and Counter-intelligence, by the very people who’d broken the US Embassy Traffic code. The British had broken the codebreakers’ own code. What, then, did they not know?
§ 7
The outer office was empty when Cal got back. There was usually a cypher clerk stuck out front, nominally his assistant-his secretary if they’d both but been civilians. Janis-Sgt. Doyle-had reported sick two or three days ago, and he hadn’t seen her since. But the desk was neat, no mail unopened, no memo pad full of urgent messages. Somebody was doing the job.
On his own desk, in his in-tray was the letter from his father. He tore it open. It was weeks old. The mail was taking longer as the war grew older.
Dear son,
Well-it’s done. The Lease and Lend is passed into law. It’s a bum’s charter-a licence for the English to come panhandling whenever they feel like it. I was not alone in this view, believe me, but such is democracy-or such is presidential arm-twisting. Not a day went by without one of us being summoned to the White House for an informal chat, and most of them came back shaking their heads and apologising. He sent for me last of all. All teeth and smiles. Told me he’d got the votes, didn’t need mine-made that perfectly clear-so why didn’t
I roll with it and vote with the majority instead of looking like a ‘stubborn maverick’? I told the sonovabitch that if so much as a plugged nickel of that money got through to Communists in Russia I’d see him impeached…
Cal skipped on-this kind of complaint usually went on aimlessly for paragraph after paragraph. Cal did not doubt the honesty of his father’s conviction-he’d fought the bill tooth and nail-nor the honesty of his actions-if he said he’d told FDR he’d see him impeached, then he’d done it. It had simply ceased to interest him long ago. He found the chat, what really mattered, the family news.
Your Grandfather’s in a lot of pain from sciatica. I think he washes it away with bourbon… Your Mother’s worried about the house-we had a wet spring this year, the columns at the front are splitting open-cement and plaster over cast iron, would you believe, and the iron’s well rusted… Good God, is nothing what it seems?