‘Right,’ said Reggie. ‘If you chaps will excuse me for an hour or so…’
He scuttled out.
Stahl looked at Cal.
‘Is that it?’ he said. ‘So soon?’
‘I doubt he means to be rude, but I guess you told him what he wanted to know.’
‘There’s more,’ said Stahl. ‘Much more than dates and division numbers. There are ideas in this. And an idea of Russia so big that it would shock Mr Ruthven-Greene.’ ‘Try shocking me instead.’
§ 88
Reggie would not take no for an answer. He brushed McKendrick’s secretary aside and took the inner office by storm. McKendrick looked at him across the top of his glasses and said, ‘What’s so bloody important you have to barge in here like a gatecrasher? As if I couldn’t guess.’
He waved his secretary away and told Reggie to close the door.
‘Let’s hear it, Reggie.’
Reggie was almost breathless with glee.
‘Stahl is everything the Americans cracked him up to be. Memory like a Pathé newsreel. Marvellous stuff, sir, simply marvellous.’
‘Give me the edited version, Reggie.’
‘June 22nd, dawn. Luftwaffe attack precedes Panzer invasion and Infantry. He reckons three million men under arms, possibly more.’
McKendrick thought this important enough to merit taking off his glasses. ‘As many as that?’ he said flatly. ‘Oh well, it’s pretty much what I thought. Just the scale is a wee bit bigger. No matter…’
‘When do we tell the Russians?’ Reggie asked.
McKendrick thought this important enough to merit putting his glasses back on.
‘We don’t,’ he said.
‘What?!?’
‘We don’t tell them. But, to be exact… we have already told them.’
‘I do hope I’m not being dim, sir, but I don’t get it.’
‘Remember Reggie, I said all along that you were “confirming sources”?’
Reggie vaguely remembered.
‘Our ambassador in Moscow saw Vice-Commissar Vyshinsky at the Soviet Foreign Office on the twenty-third of April. He’d asked for a meeting with Stalin in person. A Vice-Commissar was all the audience he got. Nonetheless, he delivered our warning. We gave Stalin the date and the time of the German invasion six weeks ago, and as far as our sources can tell, Stalin’s only reaction was to dismiss the ambassador as some sort of agent provocateur.’
‘Six weeks ago? How did we know six weeks ago? Six weeks ago Stahl was still on the run.’
McKendrick said ‘Reggie, shut up. Don’t ask. Don’t tell’… and looked enigmatic.
§ 89
‘Imagine,’ Stahl began, ‘a German settlement as a series of concentric circles, like the rings on a target-but each ring is a layer in a racial hierarchy. At the centre, the pure Nordic stock-not just Germans, but Dutch and Danes and Norwegians. English too-the maddest of plans has planned for the eventual surrender of the English. As the circles fan out, ripples around a stone in water, the lesser races. Perhaps a circle of Estonians or Byelorussians, until you get to the perimeter, and beyond the perimeter are the races condemned to barbarism. The Slavs.’
‘And the Jews?’ Cal asked.
‘No. Not the Jews.’
‘Then where are they?’
‘Nowhere. The Jews are no more. Imagine a series of such settlements strung out from the Bug River to the Urals, from the Baltic to the Caspian, linked by new roads, roads made straight for soldiers and Panzers, or made high along every ridge to keep them clear of snow. And what you have is a map of the moon or Mars in some scientific romance. The Soviet Union has ceased to exist. It is occupied by the higher races as though in some atmosphere unbreathable by man; the colony is a bubble-the bubble civilisation. Enough barbarians have been left this side of the Urals to labour for us all-they sow and reap the Ukrainian wheat fields, they drill and pump the Caucasian oil – they are taught to sign their names but expressly forbidden literacy, and if they prove too fecund they are sterilised. But, being inferior they are happy in their inferiority. Does any of this sound familiar? Because this is what those madmen are going to do.’
‘It’s part Brave New World-“gee, I’m so glad I’m not an alpha”-but it’s Roman in its model,’ said Cal. ‘It reminds me of all those Roman forts scattered across Britain, linked by military roads. But the Romans at least absorbed the local populace eventually-they made Romans of some of them.’
‘The Germans won’t. Russia will know a new slavery beyond the bounds of the serfdom they shook off less than a hundred years ago. Beyond the fort, a new dark age. Within a new civilisation.’
‘They make a wilderness and call it peace. That’s what Tacitus wrote of the Romans’ first century in Britain.’
‘Exactly,’ said Stahl. ‘The Pax Germanica-a bubble of civilisation in a vast wilderness of their own making.’
‘And the Jews. They’re going to exterminate the Jews?’
‘Eventually. They have no scheme I know of as yet other than sticking them up against a wall and shooting them. Thousands of Polish Jews have died that way. But Heydrich will think of something. The Jewish Question long ago became the Jewish Problem. A problem requires a solution. Heydrich’s good at that sort of thing. And east of the current front line, the entire territory is already regarded as an SS fiefdom. The only law will be death’s-head’s law. Himmler sees himself as an Emperor for the East-but Heydrich is the smarter man. If they succeed, it will be Heydrich who rules this wilderness.’
§ 90
Crossing the lobby of Claridge’s, Cal heard a woman’s voice say ‘There he is now’, and turned to see the receptionist talking to an RAF officer.
‘Captain Cormack,’ she called out to him. ‘A gentleman to see you.’
A gentleman he might be-but he was the oddest-looking RAF officer Cal had ever seen. RAF blouse, with green corduroy trousers,-an open-necked shirt and gumboots.
‘I’m Orlando Thesiger,’ the scarecrow said, in a voice as posh as Reggie’s.
This meant nothing to Cal. It was hardly a name to be forgotten once heard.
‘Walter worked for me,’ he added. ‘It was me seconded him to your operation.’
‘I’m so sorry, Walter never did tell me your name. Always called you the Squadron Leader. Told me odd bits about all the fun he had out in Sussex.’
‘Essex, actually. Wot larx, eh?’
‘Yeah, that was pretty much how he saw things.’
‘Look, you must excuse the clobber-we’re a bit off the beaten track in Essex, and the walk to the station’s a trifle muddy… all the same, I was wondering if you’d care for a spot of lunch. A spot of lunch and a bit of a chat.’
Cal wouldn’t. He couldn’t face the off-the-ration champagne and foie gras diet of the English upper classes again. It seemed somehow to run against his current feelings. It seemed like pissing on the graves of dead men. He knew the time-there was a huge clock on the wall just above Thesiger’s head-but feigned looking at his wristwatch.
‘Won’t take long,’ Thesiger said. ‘I brought sandwiches.’
He tapped the side of his gas mask case.
‘I thought we could just sit in the park for quarter of an hour.’
‘Sandwiches?’ Cal said, warming.
‘Yes. In the park. Brought enough for two.’
Grosvenor Square was sunny. Thesiger slipped off his blouse and sat in his shirt and braces. With the last vestige of rank and service stripped from him he looked more like a pig farmer having a day in the city than a spycatcher. But, then, what did spycatchers look like? Cal carefully hung Kevin Stilton’s blue jacket on the end of the bench. One day he might have to give it back.
Thesiger flipped the lid on his sandwich tin.
‘Help yourself, old chap.’
Cal bit into an indeterminate paste. He knew he was pulling a face, but it tasted like nothing on earth.