Thesiger sat down again-stretched out his legs, heels resting on the edge of his desk, talked through a puff of smoke, the cigarette waggling in his lips as he did so.
‘While we’re on the subject, Walter, I wanted to ask you-what news of our Jerry in Derby?’
This was a man professing to be a Belgian refugee. Thesiger and Stilton had spotted him at once and decided to turn him loose. Let him find his place in Britain and then use him to feed back misinformation.
‘He’s snug as a bug in a rug at the Rolls Royce works. We’ve got him making up parts for what he thinks is a new fighter engine. It’s about as likely to fly as a pig. Most of it’s made up from the plans for my wife’s sewing machine, blown up to twenty times the scale. At worst we might inadvertently give Krupps the idea for a two-ton Singer.’
Thesiger grinned. Class notwithstanding, Stilton liked the man. It was largely thanks to him that MI5 could boast that there was not a single German spy in Britain they did not know about.
‘We can’t afford to lose Smulders. Not for a day. He’s not here to stay. He’s not a sleeper. He’s on something quite specific. If I knew what it was I’d not have turned him loose. As soon as we know you’ll have to pull him in. There’s a risk of course-if Jerry has some way of communicating with him, then the minute he goes active he’ll try and vanish. We must be ready for that, really we must.’
‘Do you mind if I stick in me two-penn’orth?’
‘By all means.’
‘He’s a twitchy sort of a bloke. One of the nurses came up behind him a bit too quiet like during his medical, and he rounded on her faster than a ferret after a rabbit. He’d grabbed her by one arm before he checked himself. All smiles and apologies. She’d dropped her kidney dish. He helped the lass pick it up-was so charming to her he made the poor girl bright red with embarrassment. But it was enough. A dead giveaway. He’s what you’d call Commando trained. A bare-handed killer.’
‘Perhaps we are wasting your talent. An assassin indeed. I’m inclined to agree. Assassin of whom, one wonders? They’d hardly send him across and expect him to take a crack at Winston now would they?’
§ 9
It took days to reach England. A hop across Vichy France in a Swiss plane to Lisbon, and a two day lay-up at the Avis Hotel while they waited for the irregular American Clipper service to Poole, on the south coast of England. It was a mark of how much things had changed since the war, how much they’d changed since the fall of Holland and the loss of the KLM planes. It had been a daily service, the flying boats had connected fairly neatly with the steamers-some of them even bounced on via the Azores to touch down in Bowery Bay NY, within sight and sound of Manhattan-and you got your mail on time. Now there were queues of passengers, often more than a hundred, waiting day after day to cross the Atlantic or to skim the waves to England. Ruthven-Greene argued their priority over anyone short of a general and bumped them up the list and on to the next available plane.
Cal liked Lisbon. Its steep hills and streetcars put him in mind of San Francisco, its sidewalk cafes of Paris. It was the antithesis of Zurich. Zurich was polite and businesslike in its teutonic fashion. The factions made appointments to see one another and observed a diplomatic regularity. Lisbon was nothing if not irregular. Lisbon in May, Lisbon at peace, even if everyone else was at war, was warm and sunny and a little careless. The warring sides passed each other in the street, rubbed shoulders in the bars and cafes, murdered one another in the alleys. It was new to Cal, and visibly old hat to Ruthven-Greene. On the second afternoon he had rummaged in his pockets for a light, ignored the book of matches on the cafe’s kerbside table and nipped across the street to bum a light from a man smoking outside the cafe opposite. Reggie had chatted to the man for several minutes before he came back, scarcely suppressing a grin.
‘Someone you know?’ Cal asked.
‘Yes. Old Dietrich from the German embassy. Usually pays to have a bit of a chat with the old sod. His boastfulness always gets the better of his discretion. One day soon they’ll find his body floating in the harbour, and it won’t be because of anything our lot have done. He came out with an absolute corker. Asked me about this bunker Churchill’s having built under Glands castle in Scotland-courtesy of the Queen’s people, who own it-so he can hold the Jerries at Hadrian’s Wall after they’ve conquered England. I don’t know where he gets such twaddle, but I rather wish I’d made it up myself.’
Cal loved flying. He felt safe in the fat body of the little Boeing Clipper. He didn’t get sick and there was something deeply reassuring about the throb of four robust-sounding piston-engined propellers close to the ear.
He watched the Spanish coast fall away as they flew on to the Bay of Biscay, swinging westward to avoid the German-occupied French Atlantic ports-U-boat bases for the wolf packs that harassed shipping.
An unsafe thought crossed his mind. An unsafe question passed his lips.
‘Supposing they fired on us?’
‘Eh?’ said Ruthven-Greene.
‘By mistake, I mean.’
‘Be the biggest mistake of the war so far. A diplomatic incident, old boy. It’d be like the last war-remember the sinking of the Lusitania? You and I would go down to the Jerry guns in the noble cause of bringing Uncle Sam into the war lickety-split.’
§ 10
After planes, Cal liked trains. They brought out the boy in him. Memories of long journeys across the wet flatlands of Pennsylvania and Maryland as his father shuffled the family between New York and Washington. Fonder memories of backtracks in the heart of rural Virginia as his father indulged him rarely in pleasure trips on the Norfolk and Western-riding for the fun of it-where trains the size of mountains moved at the speed of a horse and wagon, snaking through the countryside and crawling down Main Street in little towns for whom Main was the only street.
From Poole to Waterloo he could see nothing. The blackouts were drawn tight, and the compartments packed. Passengers sat four to a side.
Soldiers in uniform sat on their kitbags in the corridors, and a group of weary, dishevelled NCOs played poker in the mail van. The station porters yelled out the names of the stations at the tops of their voices-still people missed them.
He did not know what to say to anyone. Ruthven-Greene said it all. Cal had rarely seen a man quite so affable, quite so banal-a master of inane chat-and he talked without, as Cal heard it, telling a single truth. Years of practice, he assumed-since Reggie could not tell the truth about what he did in the war he seemed to have achieved a believable cover so plausible he uttered it without any consciousness of it not being true. The fate of all spies, to believe one’s own lies. Reggie chatted to the district nurse, to the naval lieutenant going home on leave, to the rural archdeacon going up to town to meet the bishop, and told them all he was an oatmeal buyer for the Highland Light Infantry. An army marches on its stomach, he said, quoting Napoleon, but a Scottish army marches on porridge, he will, making it up as he went along. And then he asked them a hundred nosy questions, recommended a few nightclubs to the Navy nun, asked the nurse about her family and sang snatches of his favourite hymns for the clergyman. Cal nodded off to the sound of ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam…’