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“I do appreciate your problem,” he said with the reassurance of a dentist about to make his fortune. “Being officially nonexistent has its handicaps as well as its benefits. For example, there could be no public outcry should your Bureau cease to exist: disbanded or, in more typical fashion, quietly starved of funds until its nominal functions were absorbed by some larger and more stable institution.”

Such, the Commander assumed, as the Foreign Office. It didn’t really disapprove of spying – it had its own secret budget – but merely of spies it didn’t control. Meanwhile, the Army and Navy would be just as happy to regain undivided command of espionage in their own areas. And that would be the end of Lord Erith’s vision of a Secret Service as a Broad Church with secret missionaries anywhere and everywhere.

But it wouldn’t happen yet, not unless he made some terrible mistake. He might be new to political dinner parties but he had learnt a lot about political timing. Erith and others who had sponsored the Bureau were still at large, still with influence. Their successors might decide it had all been a mistake, but not they.

Did Corbin know that he knew that? He struck another match, breathed smoke, and said mildly: “Aren’t we looking rather far ahead?”

“Then let me suggest what one might call ‘spheres of influence’. That your agents concern themselves solely with the engines of war – the Zeppelin airship, Krupp’s cannon and the like – and, at the very most, such matters as mobilisation timetables and the order of battle. And leave all political and diplomatic issues severely alone – this to apply with the utmost particularity to the Balkans. If we are to persuade the other Powers that we are disinterestedly seeking a peaceful outcome there, the very last thing we can risk is the revelation that we are conducting a spying campaign in parallel.”

The Commander was feeling rather Balkan himself, so recently liberated, so beset by hungry empires. Well, well, he thought: first he threatens to annex me, now he merely wants a treaty. Now there’s a true diplomatist at work. He said: “And you see military matters as less sensitive?”

“Oh, the public gets inflamed about somebody stealing the plans of a new warship – the concept’s so easy to understand – but it passes, it passes. And they accept muddy morals along with muddy boots as natural consequences of military life. But while our ambassadors may have to live with the risks inherent in that form of espionage, it is quite unthinkable that an ambassador should know a spy may be reporting on the same matters as himself, behind his back and beyond his control. Quite unthinkable.”

The Commander chewed this over and found the unswallowable bit. “But what about journalists?” he asked politely. “If a report in, say, The Times contradicts what an ambassador has been saying?”

“That happens far less often than you might think. An experienced ambassador cultivates any serious journalist who appears on his doorstep. Invites him to embassy functions, passes him titbits of information, flatters him by asking his advice. That way, the journalist winds up reporting to the ambassador before his own editor and his articles reinforce the ambassador’s own views. Diplomacy can be applied to any misguided person, not just foreign-born ones.”

The Commander grinned widely, delighted at any deviousness. He also saw, in this “treaty” the very faint hope of something he had long wanted. Putting on a worried frown and hoping it showed in that light, he said: “It may be that an agent will stumble across something of political or diplomatic significance. Would it then be his duty to tell the nearest ambassador or consul-general?”

“It would be his duty,” Corbin said firmly, “to have no contact whatsoever with our people. He should report as usual to you, and I assume you would pass the information on to … to an informed and sympathetic ear in the Foreign Office for proper assessment.”

It was a grandiose way of saying “me”, but Corbin clearly believed that particular me deserved it. He went on: “You are, one might almost say, in trade. A very poor way of putting it, I fear,” but he wasn’t withdrawing the slur. “You collect intelligence and you pass it on, it has no intrinsic value to you since your Bureau cannot act on it. That’s for others to do – the Navy, Army, our humble selves at The Office.”

“Perhaps we should be negotiating a trade treaty. You do have such things, don’t you?”

“I believe so,” Corbin said coolly. “Do you feel we have reached an understanding?”

Distantly, someone was tactlessly checking that the piano had been tuned by playing a series of scales. Their hostess came zigzagging down the hallway collecting her guests with a smile and a gesture.

The Commander said: “It may also happen that one of my agents needs to send a very urgent and secret message. In such very rare circumstances, in the interest of the nation as a whole, would you agree …”

Corbin understood perfectly and disagreed totally: the Commander wanted to use embassies as postboxes, since the only truly secret codes accepted by the cable companies, or the governments that licensed them, were the diplomatic codes. But from there it would be but a step to embassies becoming, or being assumed to have become, which was worse, nests of espionage. Not in my time, he thought, nor in the time of any successor – unless the Foreign Office controls that espionage.

But he was too much of a diplomatist to say “No”. “An ambassador is in the same position as the captain of a warship: he accepts total responsibility for each and every message sent from his embassy. It follows that any such decision would be entirely up to the individual ambassador.”

“But you want me to forbid my agents from going anywhere near your ambassadors.”

“We think that would be most advisable.” Corbin stood up. “I repeat: do we have an understanding?”

“Oh, I understand all right.” The Commander banged his pipe on the pot of a flowering shrub, sprinkling it with hot ash. “I suppose now we’d better go and listen to this Leon. Who is he?”

The diplomatist shrugged. “Just some dago.”

THIS FAITHLESS TIME

38

Two bowler hats for Mr O’Gilroy?” the Bureau’s accountant said, politely mystified. “I quite see that when posing as your manservant he would need a bowler hat, but two, both purchased within the space of two weeks?”

“The first one got a bullet-hole in it at Kiel,” Ranklin said evenly. “He happened – quite properly, in my view – to be wearing it when he was helping incite a patrol of German troops to open fire one night.”

“Oh, quite, quite.” The accountant seemed used to such explanations. “But if the second hat was a replacement, then you should have stated that, along with a brief outline of the circumstances leading to its loss or irreparable damage. Until then, I’m afraid …”

He laid the bill on the growing pile of rejected claims and picked up another paper. He was a small, affable man in his forties who smoked one cigarette an hour and wore a Norfolk jacket because, to most Englishmen, Paris was a permanent weekend. He would not have minded in the least being told that he looked like an Englishman in Paris; that, he would have said, was what he was.

“You seem,” he said, “to use motor taxis a lot. Do you find the motor-omnibuses and underground railway inadequate?”

“We use those too. It just doesn’t seem worth writing down the fares.”

“Oh.” The accountant put down his pencil to think about this radically new approach to life. Then he said: “I think you should,” and began doing sums on his pad.

Ranklin sipped his lemon tea and stared up at the little square of blue sky that showed above the hotel courtyard. Then, his eye followed one of the many trickles from the hotel plumbing, down to a despondent potted tree in a damp corner, to the rusty metal table with its load of papers, and the accountant again.