A Bitter Field (8 page)

‘Are you sure you can get good enough papers without my help?’

‘One of these days I must introduce you to some of my more
low-life
contacts.’

‘One of these days I might need them, which is certain to be true if this goes wrong.’

‘There’s no other safe way. If you can’t trust the SIS people who provide false documents not to blab, neither can I, so I will set up a new identity and you and I will organise the method of communicating. But I stress it has to be secure, just you and me. No
SIS, no Quex, and if that person trusts you as much as I do, maybe we can do something useful.’

‘He will ask for some assurance that you can be that.’

Cal grinned. ‘With your charm, Peter, that should not be a problem.’

The remark failed to amuse. ‘And the other matter will be left to me as well.’

That was a statement not a question and judging by the look that accompanied the words it was not something Peter was looking forward to, for the other thing which had been discussed on the way home, and it could hardly be otherwise, was the level of contact which existed between certain people in SIS and European
right-wing
organisations.

‘I don’t see how I can help in that regard,’ Cal added.

The acknowledgement of that truth came with a sigh.

They parted company at the Gare du Nord, Peter going to Calais while Cal took another set of trains north through Brussels to the Hook of Holland, so landing at the port of Harwich instead of Dover, which was a precaution to avoid their arrival being connected. This, in terms of security was possibly excessive, but as Cal insisted, that was a commodity no one ever died of.

From there and by the boat train he went to his old London haunt, the Goring Hotel, a rather stuffy establishment behind Buckingham Palace, a place once frequented by the wife of a monarch and now used by a very respectable, rather conformist clientele, which suited him, since anyone not of the right type stuck out a mile.

That he arrived looking a touch grubby by comparison to his normal self did not raise an eyebrow, though there was bound to be
curiosity in regard to someone who tended towards the well dressed; Mr Jardine was a good and loyal customer, inclined to tip well, and he would soon be back to normal – his luggage was stored in the hotel basement and every room had a well-stocked en suite bathroom.

It was while he was lying in the bath, enjoying a good soak in the company of a bottle of Sancerre and cogitating on how to keep going and maintain arm’s-length contact with Peter Lanchester in a strange country, that he had what he considered a good idea. The best solution if a crisis blew up would be to have a trusted intermediary and he knew just where to find one.

‘Hello, Vince.’

Backed on to the boxing ring ropes in his Old Kent Road gym, covered in perspiration and with his head in a protective helmet, arms up to ward off the rain of blows being aimed at him, it was not the most apposite time for Cal to introduce himself, especially since the distraction made his situation worse and he got a blow to his ear that looked hard enough, had he been wearing them, to have rattled his false teeth.

Vince Castellano was no mug as a pugilist; he had been more than handy in his younger years, good enough to box for and win many bouts for the regiment of which both he and his company commander, Callum Jardine, had been part. It was that ability which had gone some way to mitigating his punishments for the many offences Vince had committed against King’s Rules and Regulations – the colonel did like a winner.

His problem now was the age of his sparring partner, who looked to be no more than twenty, tall, strong and muscular where it mattered, plus the fact that his blood was up and he was enjoying
himself so much that the call to back off went nowhere.

Thankfully Vince had guile to compensate for the differences and when he took the blow he fell away far and fast enough to regain some control, to parry what came next and get past his opponent’s guard. The short jab to the jaw stopped him dead and the shout to calm down finally registered.

‘Thanks a lot, guv,’ Vince gasped, hanging over the ropes. ‘Just what I needed, a clout round the ear ’ole.’

‘The boy looks good,’ Cal replied, nodding to his equally puffing partner.

‘He would be if he had any brains. Thick as a brick he is, ain’t you, James?’ The lad nodded as Vince pulled off his gloves, then his helmet, shaking his head and sending beads of sweat flying in all directions. ‘Is this a social call?’

‘Not really.’

‘I hope you ain’t come to get me into trouble.’

Cal knew to smile. ‘Would I?’

‘Let me get washed and changed.’

Vince was quick and within ten minutes they were sitting in a smoky pub, a fug to which Vince was quick to add with a lit cigarette, drinking pints of bitter, Cal not coming to the point right away but catching up with his old one-time sergeant, whom he had not seen since the fighting they had shared in Barcelona and the Catalan countryside. But curiosity was not long delayed and nor, it seemed, was Vince in any ignorance of what was happening in Czechoslovakia.

‘If my paper is right they are in a bit of shit. What do you need from me?’

‘I need my back covered and I might need a way of communicating
that does not involve telephones or bits of paper.’

‘With who?’

‘Your favourite companion, Peter Lanchester.’

‘Old snooty bollocks, eh,’ Vince laughed. ‘Not that I dislike the sod as much as I used to when he was an officer. We got on quite well on the last job. How long we talking about?’

‘I doubt more than a month.’ When Vince looked into his beer Cal quickly added, ‘Look, I know the gym is important …’

‘Runs itself now, guv, really, and as you just saw I am having a bit of trouble at the old sparring. Getting too old.’

Cal wondered if, in fact, Vince was bored. He had been a terrific if troublesome soldier, a good man in a scrap, bouncing from sergeant to private and back again at regular intervals, but whatever joy he took from his training of youngsters – as he often said, keeping them out of jail – seemed to have withered. He sensed something of the same in Vince as he had himself, an old soldier’s recklessness that came from never being willing to just settle back into Civvy Street.

‘Good money I hope?’

‘Same as before, Vince, twenty quid a week and all found.’

‘I don’t get a raise?’

‘Make it guineas.’

‘Done,’ Vince said, pulling out another cigarette. ‘When do we leave?’

‘I have a couple of things to sort out. I’ll ring the gym, but sort out your passport and pack a bag.’

The reply was a nod to the empty pint glass. ‘Another one?’

‘Things to do,’ Cal said, downing his beer and standing up, his hand waving. ‘I would leave you here to choke on the smoke but I need you to have your photo taken.’

‘What for?’

‘Safety. We might be going into Germany as well.’

‘That means danger money,’ Vince replied, with a laugh, ‘but I’ll waive that if I get a chance to chin a few Nazis.’

‘You can do that at Hyde Park Corner or the East End.’

And he had. Vince was not one to let folk like that do as they pleased. If Mosley’s Blackshirts came out, so did people like Vince to do battle with them. That got a loud and dismissive snort.

‘They’re not real Nazis, they’re fairies.’

Peter Lanchester had, as was required, made his report to Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, leaving out nothing about the dust-up outside La Rochelle and the suspicion that some kind of leak had come from London.

‘Is that a line of enquiry you intend to pursue, Peter?’

‘Only with your permission, sir.’

Quex nodded at what was the correct response, if not one he always got from his subordinates. It was in the nature of the game of which he was part that you needed to recruit mavericks and misfits – to Sir Hugh the man before him was of that stripe.

Some had mere harmless eccentricities, like his Berlin man’s insistence on rattling around the German capital in a very obvious Rolls-Royce. Yet others were subject to a variety of types of paranoia, seeking and seeing, even inventing conspiracies where none existed, though they were less harm to the aims of the country and the service than those whose caprices tended to allow them to miss what should have been obvious.

More dangerous still were those with an agenda of their own, and what he had been told tended towards that being the case
in La Rochelle, though the motives were mired in a great deal of conjecture.

Only three people had known the actual destination of those weapons, but there were enough folk under him who had strong views on events in Spain. Not that whoever had set that in train would necessarily have wanted to see anyone killed, but their personal ideology might have blinded them to the possible results of their actions.

‘Best left with me for the time being, Peter,’ Quex said, ‘though I am getting some grief from Noel McKevitt on the Central European Desk regarding you wallowing about in his patch. I think it would be best if you mended the fence there by having a little chat with him.’

‘I don’t know him well, sir.’

‘I’m sure you’ll find him charming,’ Quex responded, his tone wry enough to hint at the exact opposite. ‘Now let us turn to Jardine – is he in?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Did you talk to him about Kendrick?’

‘The subject never came up, sir.’

‘Good. Might make him nervous to know that our man in Vienna has been arrested by the Gestapo.’

The older man was looking at his desk, this while Peter wondered if he would be enlightened any further on what was a very strange case indeed. Captain Thomas Kendrick, acting, as did most SIS station operatives, under the guise of being a passport control officer, had not only been arrested, but also interrogated in what was still a baffling case to SIS.

He had been on station for two years, so it was a fair bet that the previous Austrian Government had known precisely his role and that
would have devolved to the Nazis when they marched into Vienna earlier in the year to effect their so-called
Anschluß
.

Why wait five months to act and then why, against all protocol, announce to the world in screaming headlines that you have arrested a British SIS officer for espionage when there was no evidence in London that Kendrick had done anything remarkable?

‘The Hun are sending us a message in this Kendrick business, Peter, telling us they can arrest who they like and whenever they like and use it for their damned propaganda.’

‘We could expel Kendrick’s German equivalent in London, sir, who is, after all, engaged in exactly the same kind of game.’

‘We should, Peter, but orders from on high tell me to stay my hand.’ The look Peter Lanchester got then was a hard one that silently told him not to pursue that remark. ‘But it may impact on Jardine. Perhaps he should be made aware that it is not just us who want him to take up the baton, which I suspect you could arrange.’

As a way of telling his man that he knew he still had his previous connections, Quex could not have chosen a better way without actually saying so. It was also by way of an order.

‘I can leave that with you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Peter replied.

‘On second thoughts, don’t drop in on McKevitt until I have had a sniff around. I still think you should do so, but perhaps when we are a little longer along the track.’

I
f the pub in which he had drunk with Vince was a smoky den, the Lamb & Flag in Covent Garden was equally bad, though the clientele tended to be better heeled. The walls and ceiling were dark and so nicotine stained they were near to the colour of the
dark-brown
wood of the bar, as well as the furniture that lined the outer walls.

Cal, being a non-smoker, was not much of a man for pubs because of that, but at least at the Lamb, in the summer, you could drink outside on the cobbled cul-de-sac and enjoy the warm weather. There was no piety in his being a non-smoker; he had, like every young man of his generation, been once addicted to the weed.

He had decided to give it up when he had seen a fellow officer on the Western Front take a fatal bullet in the side of his head a second after he lit up. Some people said cigarettes could kill; he knew they could, just as he knew that the desire for one was best
avoided when you could not be certain of a decent supply.

Snuffly Bower smoked like a chimney; he was also a man so enamoured of his expensive camel-coloured Crombie overcoat that he would wear it on what was a warm day. The rest of his clothing was of equal quality, if a little loud in the dog-tooth check. Again, as usual, he had on his brown bowler hat and was at a full table surrounded by fellow drinkers, all of whom, in too-sharp suits and shifty appearance, had the air of those who existed on the edge of the law.

An illegal bookmaker by trade and undoubtedly a fence, Cal had often wondered what Snuffly’s given name was, though he had no doubt how he had come by his moniker by which he was known. Snuffly’s lips never moved without the accompaniment of a twitch of his substantial purple hooter and a loud sniff, followed by a touch of his knuckle as, like that of a gloved boxer, it swept across the tip.

His illegal beat was the nearby fruit and vegetable market and in this locale it was well established that he was king. Anyone who wandered into his patch from nearby Soho or from south of the Thames would be welcome as long as they were not on the fiddle, for if they were, he could be brutal. The hail-
fellow-well-
met, which was his natural front, was just that; Snuffly was a villain to his toecaps and a very handy man with the knife he always carried.

‘Mr Jardine, as I live and breave!’ he cried when he spotted Cal in the doorway, before turning to his companion. ‘Move your fat arse, Freddy, old son, an’ let a real gent park his.’

Freddy slid out quickly, with Snuffly still beaming. ‘What can I get you?’

‘I’m on my feet, Snuffly, it’s my shout.’

‘Did I not say he was a gent?’ came the reply, aimed at those still sitting with him. ‘Pint of Bass then, Mr Jardine, if you don’t mind.’ The nose twitched, the air was inhaled and the crooked thumb moved. ‘You up west for a bit of fun?’

Cal just shook his head before moving to the bar to order a whisky and water as well as Snuffly’s pint. By the time he had been served and turned to go back the man was on his own and soon they were sitting side by side talking in subdued voices. To begin with it was small talk: business was bad, the coppers were bent and there were folk – ‘You would not believe it, guv’ – who did not see the need to make sure that his life was peaceful.

As soon as it got to the real purpose of Cal’s visit, Snuffly removed his brown bowler hat, put his elbow on the table and held it out so it covered their faces; he had, as Cal knew from past visits, a morbid fear of lip-readers.

‘I need two passports and driving licences to go with them.’

As Cal said this he passed under the table the set of photographs he had just had done as well as a slip of paper with the necessary details, names and addresses taken from the telephone directory, to cover himself and Vince.

‘One of these days you must tell me what it is you get up to.’

‘One of these days, Snuffly, I will,’ Cal replied, which was as good as saying, ‘In your dreams.’

There was no temptation to ask where Snuffly got his passports, not that he would have got an answer any more than he was prepared to provide one himself, but it had to be the case that some of his contacts were ‘dips’ working the West End and beyond: the theatres, hotels and, further afield, the train stations.

Either that or they were housebreakers; it made no odds – the documents he had provided for Cal in the past were of top-notch quality and, since he also obviously had a forger on tap, quick as well.

‘Need a few stamps on them too, Snuffly, to make them look used.’

‘Will be done, Mr Jardine.’

Cal reached into his jacket to fetch out his wallet, only to feel an immediate hand on his arm, surprisingly firm in its grip from a man he never associated with physical strength. ‘No need for a down payment, guv, is there?’ Sniff. ‘Not for you.’ Sniff. ‘You can pay when you collect.’

Cal smiled and nodded, pleased because he suspected it was a lot harder to get an account with Snuffly than it was to get one at Coutts Bank, just down the road on the Strand. He exited to streets full of the detritus of the nearby market: abandoned boxes, discarded paper blown on the wind and the odd drunk – hardly surprising in an area where the public houses, to cater for the thousands who worked and came here to trade, opened at six in the morning.

The taxi driver smoked too, so that by the time it dropped him in West Heath Road, and once he had paid off the driver, looking across to the heath under its canopy of trees in full leaf he was tempted to go for a stroll to clear his lungs. That had to be put aside till later; the man with whom he had an appointment was ever busy, and even if he considered him a friend, it was not a good idea to keep Sir Monty Redfern waiting.

The first surprise was to find a strange female answering the door when he had his hat raised and a winning smile on his face to
greet someone else entirely. Expecting a young lovely, what he was presented with was a rather dumpy woman in shapeless clothing, with untidy hair on her head and a great deal more of that on her face, none of it made more attractive by the guttural voice with which she enquired as to his reason for calling.

‘Where’s Elsa?’ he asked, once he had been shown into the large drawing room overlooking the garden that Monty used as an office.

If the furniture was as valuable as the substantial Hampstead house, which ran in total to some twenty-eight rooms, the man who owned it did not look the part of a Jewish millionaire. Careless about dress, Monty looked his usual scruffy self. For all his wealth he rarely polished his shoes or worried about the crumpled state of his clothing.

‘Our little beauty is in Prague, Callum, doing good work with refugees.’

The name of the Czech capital gave him pause, but Cal decided not to mention it as his destination for the moment. ‘How bad is it?’

‘As bad as it gets with that bastard Hitler breathing down people’s neck. Already they are moving away from the Sudetenland, and not just Jews, but those with eyes to see that the Nazis won’t stop at that. The Commies they will shoot and the socialists can expect a holiday in their concentration camps for some gentle education. Thousands are trying to get out, and if the Germans do invade you and I might have to do a bit of business again.’

It was Monty who had financed Cal’s work in Hamburg; the aforementioned Elsa had been part of the last family he had managed to extract – herself, her father, mother and her three brothers – and
it had taken the assistance of a reluctant Peter Lanchester to actually get them to England.

Elsa Ephraim was indeed a beauty, so unlike her successor: young, lithe and inclined to have her employer cursing his age as well as what his wife would do to him if he so much as let one eye wander in her presence; Mrs Redfern would be more than happy with the replacement.

‘If she safe there, at her age?’

‘Hey, Callum, am I safe here when she is walking around with those legs of hers? And that figure and those eyes, my God!’ He looked to the heavens before adding, in a less jocular voice, ‘Elsa is eighteen now anyway and can get out when she wants. I spread a few shekels and got her a British passport. And if she does get into trouble I will blame you. If you had not been so busy with those damned Bolsheviks in Spain I might have asked you to go and do the job.’

‘They were anarchists.’

‘And that is supposed to make me feel better?’

‘I can’t imagine Papa Ephraim was happy about her going to Prague.’

‘He was not and neither was I, ’cause she was good at her job. But that girl has balls, I tell you, and can she argue.’ Monty raised his hands to the heavens and grinned, the wide mouth under that prominent nose spreading in mischief. ‘Hey, maybe she told her Papa he would be my father-in-law to get him to agree.’

‘Or your wife.’

‘You want I should have a stroke?’ Monty replied. ‘I don’t have to tell you who chose Marita.’

‘The lady who answered the door?’ Monty nodded, gravely.

The talk of her attractiveness and any hint of impropriety with Elsa was, of course, an act; Monty might like the fantasy but he was more of a father figure than an old lecher, a man who, while he had a huge and very profitable business to oversee, was too preoccupied anyway for such a game. He spent most of his time running his various charities, as well as harrying his fellow Jews, both in Britain and around the world, to provide money, sanctuary or both for those in peril from the Nazis.

‘And the Government is being as stingy as ever with visas, I suppose?’

Jewish immigration was a hot political potato, not aided by a residual and far-from-disguised anti-Semitism in the upper reaches of British society, peopled by the kind of dolts who admired Mussolini and Hitler for bringing order to their countries, while blithely shutting their minds to the measures used to achieve it.

No Jew fleeing persecution could get residence without someone to sponsor and promise to support them; they would not be allowed in if they were going to be a burden to the taxpayer. So Monty spent as much time lobbying for those permits as he did seeking the funds to support emigration.

‘It’s like drawing teeth, the crooks,’ Monty cried, ‘and the Americans are no better, bigger crooks than us even, with the space they have.’

Time to drop the bombshell. ‘It so happens that I am off to Prague, as well.’

Cal was thinking that Monty hid his surprise well, just as well as he managed to keep off of his face that his mind was working to see if there was some connection.

‘You can look Elsa up, maybe?’

‘Maybe not.’

‘So it is not open-door, this visit to Prague?’

‘No.’

‘Does old Monty get an explanation, maybe?’

‘I was going to ask you to lend me some money—’

‘Boy, do you know how to spoil an old Jew’s day,’ Monty scoffed, cutting across him.

‘—or at least make some available. Quite a lot, in fact.’

The reaction was typical, but Monty did not make the obvious comment, which was ‘why?’ He knew very well that Callum Jardine had his own private income, just as he knew where it came from, the profits of his father’s successful trading in both France and Germany before the Great War, both countries in which the family had taken up residence.

With a blood connection to one of the great trading dynasties of the world, Jardine
père
had been in a position to make a great deal of money doing deals in a fluid market, buying and selling goods to ship between the Far East and Europe. His son could have done the same had he been so inclined and his cousins would have backed him; blood was blood to the Scots as much as it was to the Jews.

‘I can carry a certain amount of money and I will do so, but to conceal big sums is impossible, apart from being too risky. I did some business in Czechoslovakia recently …’

‘I won’t ask in what.’

‘The trouble I had in transfers, getting to Switzerland and back again, held everything up for weeks and that was before the Nazis marched into Austria. In what I am proposing to undertake, if I do need funds, and there is a chance I will not, I don’t think
I will have the time to put the arrangements in place, and I am certainly disinclined to travel the way I did previously now that Hitler controls both the borders and the route.’

‘Makes sense,’ Monty replied.

‘You do trade in Czechoslovakia, don’t you?’

‘A bit,’ he shrugged, ‘but maybe not much longer.’

‘Even if you still do business in Germany?’

That got Cal a hard look. ‘So, shame me. I have mouths to feed.’

Monty’s business was chemicals; he had built up an international trading empire over several years and, being Jewish, he would seek opportunities and profits wherever they could be had. If that included Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy so be it, though he no doubt salved his conscience by the way he used the money he made to aid those he saw as being in ideological peril.

Cal was one of the few people to whom he had been open about that; he had been obliged to in order to fund Hamburg and he was not ashamed of it. He had started out as the child of immigrants selling bags of bicarbonate of soda door to door in the East End of London as a youth, for pennies. That was also something Monty never forgot: he knew where he came from and he was never going to risk going back.

What his international contacts gave him was an ability to shift large sums from country to country, even to the notoriously difficult Nazi Germany, without anyone taking too much notice, while it also allowed anyone purporting to act on his behalf to withdraw levels of cash in foreign banks that would not raise an eyebrow. At the same time, with a phone call, he could raise credit in another country in a way denied to mere mortals.

‘I need access to an amount of money that is too open-ended to calculate, as well as a letter of credit and documentation saying I am representing Redfern Chemicals, and I will guarantee redress when I come back home.’

‘Cal, I know you are not on your uppers, but that could be a lot of lolly. I would hate to see you needing my charity.’

‘The loan is not to me, Monty, it’s to the British Government.’