Artillery of Lies (37 page)

“Watch your step,” Oster warned. “He's as jumpy as a cat.”

It was midafternoon. Christian had lunched alone in the
Abwehr
restaurant; nobody seemed to want to share his table. Hardly anybody looked his way. Was it, he wondered, because he was known to be a friend of Domenik's? He sat too long, not drinking the cup of ersatz coffee, while the room emptied. The same furious question kept presenting itself:
Why Domenik?
It was like a bereavement. Christian had always been successful in keeping his personal emotions separate from his professional life. As an
Abwehr
officer he knew that agents were expendable and their loss never saddened him as, for instance, he had been saddened by the death of a cousin, a tank commander killed during the 1940 blitzkrieg. That loss had caused him great hurt. Karl was too full of life to die; it seemed all wrong. Now Christian felt much the same about Domenik: they had taken the wrong man.
But he's not dead,
Christian told himself, and got the answer:
He looked pretty dead, didn't he? He looked finished. Done for.

Oster's secretary found him in the restaurant and hustled him upstairs. Oster was waiting in the Admiral's anteroom. “I know, I know,” he said before Christian could open his mouth. “He was my friend too. But we've got more urgent problems to solve. Eldorado says he's got flu. Zurich's off.”

They went in. Canaris was sitting on a corner of his desk, tossing a paperweight from hand to hand. It was the nosecone of a small shell and every time it thwacked into his palm his fingers squeezed it. Christian had the impression that Canaris might at any moment fling the thing, just to release some tension.

“Those were not invitations to a garden-party,” Canaris said. “Those were orders to attend a meeting. Why is this man playing games?”

“Travel shouldn't be a problem,” Oster said. “He's a neutral. Money's no problem, heaven knows.”

Christian felt it was his turn to say something. “There may
be reasons why Berlin and Zurich are unattractive, sir. Reasons we don't know.”

“Unattractive,” Canaris said. “Unattractive.” He plainly disliked the word. “Where next? Monte Carlo? Biarritz? Do you think he might fancy a weekend in Venice?”

An idea came to Christian like a trained hawk to the glove. “I think he might find it very difficult to refuse to go to Spain, sir,” he said.

Canaris tipped his head back and examined the light fitting. “Yes,” he said. “Spain. If he won't go to his own damned country there's certainly something very wrong. Spain. Good. We'll do it.”

Christian left. Canaris tossed the nosecone to Oster and got off the desk. “Have you found out what it is yet?” he asked.

“Treason. Plotting to overthrow the state.”

Canaris winced. “What a fool.”

“A holy fool.”

“I didn't hear that,” Canaris said, “because you didn't say it.”

For Docherty it was a day out, the first time he had been released from detention in Knightsbridge. For Luis it was a day out and a day off, a holiday from the endless grind of ghost-writing for a dozen ghosts. It was also a chance to escape another ghost. Julie was always at the back of his mind, always a silent listener to his thoughts as he got on with his life. They had separated without parting. Or maybe parted without separating. Either way it was an absurd and unsatisfactory outcome and it often infuriated him that she would not go away and leave him alone, and he told her so. “Get out!” he shouted at the silence. “Buzz off! Beat it!” Sometimes that did the trick and he felt so much better that he wished she were there so that he could tell her that he didn't need her.

An MI5 officer called Fletcher took Docherty and Luis to Paddington station. They had a reserved first-class compartment on the South Wales express. The day was fine and hot and the long dash across southern England was a succession of idyllic calendar pictures: men harvesting with horse-drawn reaping machines; women and children stacking the sheaves; fat herds of milk-cows eternally converting green into white; even some early autumn plowing, looking fresher than brown corduroy ever could. And always there were glimpses of
airfields, army camps, mile after mile of military convoy on the roads.

Docherty was good company, full of chat, and Fletcher had bought a basket of food and drink. They lunched as the train sped between the coal and the steel of South Wales—coal coming down from the high valleys, steel being forged in the coastal mills and changed trains at Swansea, then again at Carmarthen for a brisk final clatter through the valleys of Pembrokeshire to a place Luis had never heard of: Milford Haven. The air was brisk with the tang of the sea, lightly spiced with the stink of petrol. An RAF car drove them around a bay that was busy with oil tankers and put them on board an RAF launch which immediately went out and carved up the sea like an avenging knife through silk. Luis was enormously impressed. The boat sped past some towering cliffs and then strolled between rocks to the stone landing-stage built on to an island the size of a golf course if you didn't mind losing a bucket of balls. “Skomer Island,” Fletcher said. “Bit of a walk, I'm afraid.”

The ground was springy with purple heather and the air was alive with seabirds. “What are those?” Luis asked.

“They might be puffins,” Docherty said. “Then again, they might not. What do you think, Fletcher?”

“They're either shearwaters or kittiwakes,” Fletcher said. “If they're neither of those they must be something else. Owls, perhaps, or buzzards. I haven't got my distance glasses on.”

“So much for British Intelligence,” Docherty said. “If you go on like this you'll lose India and never find it again.”

A man was waiting for them at the north of the island, a local fisherman. He led them across the rocks to where a yellow oilskin was held down at the edges with stones. “It's been in the water a long time,” he said, “and then the rocks knocked it about when it got washed up and the birds had a go at it too. Don't expect too much.” He peeled the oilskin back.

The warm stench of putrefaction arose and a dozen flies got sluggishly blown away by the breeze. The body looked broken and painful because the sea had jammed it between the rocks without consulting the joints and so everything was bent the wrong way. Half the face was missing. An ear had gone, and both eyes. The lower jawbone had become dislocated and this gave the mouth a yawning gape. Luis took one look and walked away.

“I think it's him,” Docherty said.

“Not much to go on,” Fletcher warned.

“The clothes are the same, the build, the hair. He had a funny little birthmark on his chest, just above the right nipple. Like an inkblot, it was.”

Fletcher got a piece of wood and used it to lift the remains of the shirt. “Just like an inkblot,” he agreed. “I'll take some photographs and then the medics can have him, and good luck to them.”

“Take a snap of the back of his head, why don't you?” Docherty suggested.

As they returned to the launch, Luis asked Fletcher: “Was that absolutely necessary? I mean, did we have to come all this way for that?”

“Yes we did. The body might have fallen apart if we had tried to move it.”

Luis had little to say during the long journey back to London. As soon as he was in his flat he telephoned Freddy Garcia. “Very funny joke,” he said. “You told me we were going to see an old friend of Docherty's. You didn't say how old.”

“Ah. A bit the worse for wear?”

“How should I know? Half the bits were missing. I can still smell the other half. Any more jokes like that, you bastard, and I quit.” Luis was so angry his voice was shaking. “You don't pay me enough to be pissed on like that.”

“It wasn't a joke, Luis. I thought it was time you had a reminder of how seriously the other side takes this business. You are accustomed to working with fictions. But the war is real, isn't it? Sometimes it pays to remember that death is a hard imperative and not just a collection of words on a page.”

Luis had been standing. Now he sat. “OK,” he said. “What's happened?”

“Another signal from Admiral Canaris. This time he wants you to meet him in Spain. Think about it. We'll talk tomorrow. Goodnight.”

Standing on a box in the narrow alley at the side of the shop, Laszlo slipped the blade of his knife under the window, found the catch, levered hard and snapped the blade. He could have wept. It didn't happen like this in the movies. That knife had cost him a shilling in Woolworths. They didn't buy their knives at Woolworths in the
movies but he had been down to his last shilling and now even that was wasted.

Think, think,
he told himself.
There's always another way.
The shop was right (a dingy little grocers on a quiet street) and the time was right (early-closing day) and even the weather was helpful (gray and drizzling). The big problem was that his brain was fogged with hunger.
Think, think. Forget this window. Look for another.

There wasn't another, but there was a door at the back and it swung open. Laszlo smelt food. He tiptoed in, holding his empty suitcase with both hands to avoid bumping into things. Brown linoleum flowed silently past a small stock-room and around a gloomy staircase, and took him into the shop. Food everywhere: beans, cheese, macaroni, marmalade, Spam, dried eggs … He took a tin of Spam off a shelf and the picture on the wrapper made his stomach leap like a puppy on a leash. Three tins of Spam went into the suitcase, four tins of Heinz beans, two jars of Keillers marmalade, six tins of Skipper sardines, two packets of dried eggs, a jar of plum jam, a tin of pineapple chunks. A man cleared his throat. Laszlo slammed the suitcase shut and caught a glimpse of a tall, gray-haired figure on the stairs, lifting an air rifle. It made a pop like a burst balloon as Laszlo dived behind a stack of packets of porridge oats, and the slug sang past his head. The man gave a harsh, guttural shout; the words were meaningless but the sense was obvious:
Surrender!
Laszlo couldn't get the pistol out of his pocket. The lining was ripped, the gun was trapped in the fabric. A second balloon popped and a packet fell on his head, leaking oats. Laszlo was suddenly enraged. The world was a conspiracy against him—Woolworths, his pocket-lining, this packet of porridge. He jumped to his feet and began hurling things at the man: tins, jars, bottles, more tins, whatever he could reach, a barrage of groceries so furious that his target cowered away. A tin of corned beef whacked the man's head and he went down in a heap. Laszlo discovered a row of bottles of tomato ketchup and flung them like stick grenades. The walls bled like a slaughterhouse.

Enough was enough. Laszlo took his suitcase, unlocked the front door and locked it again from the outside. Even then the shopkeeper came staggering toward him, one hand to his streaming head. A passer-by stopped and gaped. “Get the police,” Laszlo said. “I've caught a burglar.” The passer-by ran one way. Laszlo walked the other.

He walked for a mile and took shelter in a derelict bandstand in
an empty municipal park. The food looked splendid but he had no tin-opener, and today was early-closing day so he couldn't even steal one. The sardine tins had little keys attached to open them. He ate six tins of sardines and half a jar of plum jam. The rain got worse. That night he slept on the bandstand, very badly.

The third summons from Admiral Canaris worried the Director more than anything that he had faced since he took on the Double-Cross job. It worried him because the three signals had arrived in quick succession, each phrased more curtly than the last. Far from fobbing off the Admiral, Eldorado's delays and excuses had increased the pressure. There was no precedent for any of this, and now there was no way of dodging the third demand. The Director sought advice from senior colleagues in the intelligence field. They had none to give.

“Do what you think best, old chap,” one said.

The Director grunted. “And how do I decide that?” he asked.

“You treat the case on its merits. Just stop searching for subtleties. There aren't any.”

The Director repeated this to Freddy. “The man's absolutely right, of course,” he said. “If Eldorado sends a third refusal the
Abwehr
will smell a rat and then the whole network may go down the pan. If Eldorado meets Canaris in Spain it may well be the last we ever see of him. The Gestapo will take him apart, the network will be blown and what's more they'll suspect every other double-agent too.”

“Never mind the Gestapo, sir,” Freddy said. “The
Abwehr
has its own interrogators. Not as messy but just as effective.”

“So whether he stays or goes, it's potentially disastrous.”

“It's virtually certain to be highly damaging if he stays, sir. If he goes, and fails … End of story. That, of course, is not inevitable. He might go and return. We don't know.”

The Director took out a coin and flipped it several times. “Damn thing always comes down heads,” he said. “I can't decide this, Freddy. I can't
order
him to go. I'm not even going to suggest it. You tell him the facts and say that whatever he decides is fine by us. It's his neck. He's the one to risk it. Or not.”

Freddy found Luis in his flat, moodily deleting all the adjectives and adverbs from a report by Wallpaper. “Feel like a drink?” Freddy said.

“Just had one.”

Freddy sat down. “Admiral Canaris is extremely keen to meet you at a town called Santander in northern Spain as soon as possible,” he said. “Now here are the facts of the situation.” He went through the facts, neither exaggerating nor minimizing. “It's your decision, Luis. Do you want to think it over?”

“No. I want to go.” He screwed up the report he had been cutting and threw it away.

“Right. I'll go and organize the flight.”