Artillery of Lies (32 page)

“I have an old friend who fishes the Tweed,” the Director said, “and he caught this fish on a Jock Scott, just below Norham Castle, yesterday tea-time, and he had it sent down by the fast London train for me, so you can relax and enjoy it, for you're not breaking the law. Bread and salad and bottled Bass are all off-ration, are they not?”

“Indeed they are.” Freddy tucked in. He had never before been invited up here and he felt a bit nervous.

“I have something of an apology to make,” the Director said. I must admit the legality of the mayonnaise is slightly suspect, it came from an American PX; however that is not what I wish to apologize about. I made an error of judgment concerning Matchbox, Teacup and Lampstand. It was obvious at a very early stage that they were
making for Liverpool, and the implication had to be that they aimed to meet Eldorado.' He concentrated on pouring the Bass correctly.

“Where did they land, sir?” Freddy asked.

“Galway Bay. It's an obvious place. We have a man in Galway. He says they came into town like a three-ring circus. They even bought him drinks. I made sure they got waved through at Dublin and Liverpool—excellent passports, by the way, well up to the
Abwehr's
high standards—and I thought it would be a clever idea to let them reinforce Bamboozle.”

“Ah,” Freddy said. “Eldorado meets
Abwehr
agents at every turn.”

“Exactly. Or perhaps I mean inexactly. I wanted the arrival of Matchbox, Teacup and Lampstand to be a genuine surprise to your people … What were they called?”

“Hammer and Anvil, sir.”

“Yes. Nicely Teutonic. The general effect I was hoping to achieve was of a railway station awash with German agents, all strangers to each other, thus generating a high pitch of tension all around and especially in Eldorado and his lady.”

“I think you achieved that, sir.”

The Director ate some salad. “Nevertheless, it was foolish of me not to inform you of those
Abwehr
agents. The danger in this racket is that one is tempted to play the stage-director a little too much.”

Freddy busied himself with his napkin and let the apology quietly fade away.

“What about the fourth agent, sir?” he asked.

“All I can tell you is he didn't get off the ship at either end. We've searched it three times. I don't think he's on board.”

“Curious.”

“Yes. However, the enemy don't seem particularly concerned, so I assume that Deckchair was expendable. I'll tell you what they
are
concerned about, highly concerned. They want to know where Bomber Command goes from here. We've just decoded a very urgent signal for Eldorado. You can almost smell the panic”

“This is because of Hamburg?”

“Probably.”

“It's rather flattering that they should turn to Eldorado.”

“Flattering and worrying,” the Director said. “They want to know the names of the next six cities on Bomber Command's list.”

“But that's absurd.” Freddy mopped a little mayonnaise with a bit of bread and examined the pattern revealed on the plate, as if it held
an answer. “They can't seriously expect Eldorado to find that sort of information.” He chewed the bread slowly. “On the other hand, we can't afford to damage Eldorado's reputation, can we?”

“Have some more salmon.” The Director nudged the dish toward him. “They say that fish is good for the brain.”

Christian woke up with a wild snort and the flies on his face took off in all directions as if they'd been scrambled to meet an incoming raid. His face felt strange: stiff and sticky. He raised a hand to touch it and at once his body began to slip. This frightened him and he grabbed something to stop the slide. It was wood; flat wood. He was lying on the open-step staircase that led to his flat at the top of
Abwehr
headquarters.

For several seconds he clung to the staircase while he worked out the difference between horizontal and vertical and just where he lay between the two. That was when he noticed the blood, a lot of blood, right in front of his face.
Explains the flies,
he said to himself, and felt quite proud of his quick thinking.
But the flies don't explain the blood.
There was something wrong with that. He worried at it for a short while and gave up. The stairs were hard and uncomfortable. He could either go down or go up. He was pointing up. He climbed on his hands and knees to the top of the stairs, got cautiously to his feet, wobbled into his flat and went to the bathroom mirror. He looked dreadful. Nose, lips and chin were thick with congealed blood and a bruise like a small plum was coming up on his forehead. The eyes that gazed back at him were dull as old pennies.

That was at 7 p.m. Next morning he called in at Domenik's office. “Know any good medical jokes?” he asked.

“Medical,” Domenik said. “Well, there's quite a ripe one about Goering and enemas that's going about, but it's a bit early in the day for that sort of thing. Why?”

“Funny thing happened to me last night. I was going up to my rooms, using the stairs, when I must have had a blackout. Fell flat on my face, banged my nose, severe nosebleed. Blood everywhere. Or so I assume. I mean, how do I know what happened? I was unconscious at the time.” Christian dropped into an armchair and put his feet on Domenik's desk. “What d'you make of all that?” He sounded jaunty. He wished he felt jaunty.

*

“How long before you came to?” Domenik asked.

“Oh … judging by the volume of blood, about a day and a half … I don't know. Two or three minutes, probably.”

“And is there any history of this sort of thing in your family?”

“Not that I know of.” Christian's fingertips were sending Morse on the armrest.

“Don't tell me if you don't want to,” Domenik said, “but did you bite your tongue? Or wet yourself?”

“Good God, no. No to both.” Christian swung his feet off the desk and stood up. “I fainted, that's all. I didn't disintegrate. I'm a fully house-trained adult, remember?”

“It crossed my mind that you might be epileptic, and don't look so damned offended. It happens in the best of households. Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, not to mention some of my smartest friends … Anyway, you're probably not clever enough to be epileptic. Are you worried?”

“Why should I be worried?”

“It might happen again.”

“Yes, of course I'm worried. Last night I woke up every hour on the hour, just to make sure I wasn't dead, I suppose. Mind you, I might as well be dead for all the good I'm doing here.” Christian prowled around the room, whacking the tops of filing cabinets with the flat of his hand.

“Don't do that,” Domenik said. “There are people trying to sleep in there.”

Christian stopped doing it, and looked out of a window. “It's not a joke to me,” he said.

“That wasn't a joke,” Domenik said a little wearily. “My files are full of insomniacs.”

Christian wasn't listening. “Last night, when I couldn't sleep, I kept thinking: maybe this is my last chance to do something for my country while I've still got a body to give. I'm forty-seven. Bits of my system are beginning to wear out. I'm not interested in medals or promotion, I simply want …” He sighed, and clenched his jaw, and fell silent.

“Would you do anything for Germany?” Domenik asked.

“I'm ready to give my life.”

“Would you commit treason? For Germany?”

Christian stared. “Is that another of your jokes?”

“Ah. So there are limits to your patriotism.”

Christian gave a brief, displeased grunt. “I'm afraid I'm not in the mood for your comedy today.”

“Look at it this way,” Domenik said. “Sometimes you have to turn things upside-down in order to stand them on their feet.”

“That's not funny either.”

“I know,” Domenik said sadly. “It's the way I tell them.”

Each flat had its own letter-slot and the postman delivered Dr. Rosa Maria Cabezas's mail while Laszlo was in the kitchen, eating a breakfast of toast with marmalade and sweet tea.

He opened her letters. Not much: a bill, a medical journal and a letter in Spanish from a passionate boyfriend in Edinburgh. Too passionate for Laszlo's liking. So much yearning for intimate physical contact with a stiff corpse struck him as improper, and he burned the letter in the sink.

The bill was from the gas company, and it gave him an idea. He found her checkbook in a little writing-desk and forged her signature, copying it from a hospital identity card, and put the bill and the check into an envelope, which he addressed and stamped, to be mailed later. Dead woman pays gas bill! Let the police pick the bones out of that.

He washed up the breakfast things and spent an hour searching the flat from end to end. Nothing hinted that Dr. Cabezas was a spy, let alone a disloyal spy, and of course that was exactly what Laszlo expected. He was dealing with professionals here. No doubt she had another place where she was Garlic. This flat was merely her cover. He knew the form; he had read about it a hundred times.

The body was beginning to smell. It was time to go. The lock he had picked yesterday in twenty seconds (that was one skill Madrid
Abwehr
had had no need to teach him) slammed solidly behind him, and he sauntered down to the street full of secret pride in a job well done, a nation well served. He even touched his hat to a lady he passed on the stairs. Why not? Courtesy costs nothing.

This was his third day and Laszlo was an old Glasgow hand. He jumped on the first tram he saw and told the conductress he wanted to go to the offices of the
Glasgow Herald
newspaper. She mothered him, put him off at the right stop, told him which street to go down. At the
Herald
offices he stood in line and placed an advertisement to
appear in the personal column for three days. It read:
King—Happy days are here again—Ace.
General Oster would know what that meant.

“Anyway, somebody's got to die,” Luis said bleakly. “I don't care who. I'm sick of the whole rotten gang, they're all creeps, let's dump the lot.”

“No, no. Certainly not,” Freddy said. “They're all quite splendid. I mean, Madrid loves them, doesn't it?”

“Madrid's dumb. Madrid's full of creeps, too.”

“But they pay well.” That was Freddy's ace. Luis had no answer to that.

It was a fine summer's day, and they were walking along Chelsea Embankment. The Thames was briskly going about its cocoa-colored business, the plane trees were greenly doing their stuff, and nobody in sight was being bombed, shelled, fried with flamethrowers or raked with machine-gun fire. For 1943, it could have been a lot worse, and Freddy wished that Luis would stop complaining; but they had a major problem to solve and he needed all of Luis's help, so he buttered him up yet again. That was part of Freddy's job and he did it skillfully. “And you know why they pay so well, of course,” he said. “It's because the Eldorado Network which you created, and which you conduct like a Paganini of the intelligence world, is simply the best there is. And the
Abwehr
knows it.” Freddy let that sink in for a moment. “OKW never takes a step until it has checked its plans against the latest Eldorado appreciation.”

“More fools they,” Luis muttered, but he had a slight smirk of gratification.

“That's not fair, Luis. They conquered Europe, remember. Nothing foolish about that.”

“True.”

They strolled in silence as far as a niche in the Embankment wall, where they leaned and watched the river traffic.

“Oh, by the way,” Freddy said, “Graham Greene asked me to give you his fond regards. He says he still recalls the literary style of your early reports from Lisbon with great pleasure.”

“
Really?”
Luis squared his shoulders. “Does he
really?”

“He was on the phone from Sierra Leone. Graham runs an office for the Secret Service in Freetown.” This last statement was
true. The rest was not. “He's fascinated by our latest signal from the
Abwehr.
He made me promise to tell him how you solved the problem. Eventually.”

Luis took a half-crown from his pocket and scratched a series of crosses on the masonry. “The
Abwehr's
mad. It can't be done. They want the next six target cities, and you tell me they mustn't know. Mustn't even begin to suspect. So that's that. Nothing left for Eldorado to do, is there?”

“Let's say there's no easy solution.” Freddy took the coin from him and tossed it in the river.

Luis stared. “Why did you do that?” he demanded in a high voice.

“Pure blind impulse,” Freddy said. He sniffed, and jerked his chin out defiantly. “No, it wasn't,” he said, “I wanted you to remember what life was like when you had no money. Back in Lisbon, setting up your system. You'd have worked all day and all night then to make the
Abwehr
happy, wouldn't you? Well, do it again, Luis. Make them happy.”

Luis looked from Freddy to the row of scratches, to the river where the coin had splashed, to the sky. “That was mine,” he said. “That was a really rotten thing to do.”

Oh, don't be so blasted stuffy,
Freddy thought. But he said, “I'll buy you lunch. Anyway, it was only half-a-crown.”

“Only. Only. D'you know how long it takes me to earn half-a-crown?”

“About … sixteen seconds.”

“I see. Sixteen seconds. Well, it doesn't matter, then, does it? Nothing matters.” Luis dragged the rest of his change from his pocket and flung it at the river, slashing the surface with a spatter of tiny cuts which healed immediately. “It's only money. It's only sweat, blood and tears. Plenty more where that came from.”

They turned back. Freddy was not especially worried: he had been through this sort of scene before. Luis responded to flattery and reassurance but every now and then it was necessary to put salt on his tail, or he stopped listening.