The Looking Glass War (22 page)

Silently he performed the brief ritual of tuning the aerial until the meter obediently dipped to the final reading.

‘And Bob’s your uncle!’ he declared triumphantly. ‘Now it’s Fred’s turn. Here, your hand’s sweating. You must have had a weekend, you must. Wait a minute, Fred!’ He left the room, returning with an oversized white pepperpot, from which he carefully sprinkled French chalk over the black lozenge on the key lever.

‘Take my advice,’ Johnson said, ‘just leave the girls in peace, see, Fred? Let it grow.’

Leiser was looking at his open hand. Particles of sweat had gathered in the grooves. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘I’ll bet you couldn’t.’ He slapped the case affectionately. ‘From now on you sleep with
her
. She’s Mrs Fred, see, and no one else!’ He dismantled the set and waited for Leiser to begin. With childish slowness Leiser painfully reassembled the equipment. It was all so long ago.

Day after day Leiser and Johnson sat at the small table in the bedroom tapping out their messages. Sometimes Johnson would drive away in the van leaving Leiser alone, and they would work back and forth till early morning. Or Leiser and Avery would go – Leiser was not allowed out alone – and from a borrowed house in Fairford they would pass their signals, encoding, sending and receiving
en clair
trivialities disguised as amateur transmissions. Leiser discernibly changed. He became nervy and irritable; he complained to Haldane about the complications of transmitting on a series of frequencies, the difficulty of constant retuning, the shortage of time. His relationship to Johnson was always uneasy. Johnson had arrived late, and for some reason Leiser insisted on treating him as an outsider, not admitting him properly to the companionship which he fancied to exist between Avery, Haldane and himself.

There was a particularly absurd scene one breakfast. Leiser raised the lid of a jam-pot, peered inside and, turning to Avery, asked, ‘Is this bee-honey?’

Johnson leant across the table, knife in one hand, bread and butter in the other.

‘We don’t say that, Fred. We just call it honey.’

‘That’s right, honey. Bee-honey.’

‘Just honey,’ Johnson repeated. ‘In England we just call it honey.’

Leiser carefully replaced the lid, pale with anger. ‘Don’t you tell me what to say.’

Haldane looked up sharply from his paper. ‘Be quiet, Johnson. Bee-honey is perfectly accurate.’

Leiser’s courtesy had something of the servant, his quarrels with Johnson something of the backstairs.

Despite such incidents as this, like any two men engaged daily upon a single project, they came gradually to share their hopes, moods and depressions. If a lesson had gone well, the meal that followed it would be a happy affair. The two of them would exchange esoteric remarks about the state of the ionosphere, the skip distance on a given frequency, or an unnatural meter reading which had occurred during tuning. If badly, they would speak little or not at all, and everyone but Haldane would hasten through his food for want of anything to say. Occasionally Leiser would ask whether he might not take a walk with Avery, but Haldane shook his head and said there was no time. Avery, a guilty lover, made no move to help.

As the two weeks neared their end, the Mayfly house was several times visited by specialists of one kind or another from London. A photographic instructor came, a tall, hollow-eyed man, who demonstrated a sub-miniature camera with interchangeable lenses; there was a doctor, benign and wholly incurious, who listened to Leiser’s heart for minutes on end. The Treasury had insisted upon it; there was the question of compensation. Leiser declared he had no dependants, but he was examined all the same to satisfy the Treasury.

With the increase in these activities Leiser came to derive great comfort from his gun. Avery had given it to him after his weekend’s leave. He favoured a shoulder holster (the drape of his jackets nicely concealed the bulge) and sometimes at the end of a long day he would draw the gun and finger it, looking down the barrel, raising it and lowering it as he had done on the range. ‘There isn’t a gun to beat it,’ he would say. ‘Not for the size. You can have your continental types any time. Women’s guns, they are, like their cars. Take my advice, John, a three-eight’s best.’

‘Nine-millimetre they call it now.’

His resentment of strangers reached its unexpected climax in the visit of Hyde, a man from the Circus. The morning had gone badly. Leiser had been making a timed run, encoding and transmitting forty groups; his bedroom and Johnson’s were now linked on an internal circuit; they played back and forth behind closed doors. Johnson had taught him a number of international code signs: QRJ, your signals are too weak to read; QRW, send faster; QSD, your keying is bad; QSM, repeat the last message; QSZ, send each word twice; QRU, I have nothing for you. As Leiser’s transmission became increasingly uneven, Johnson’s comments, thus cryptically expressed, added to his confusion, until with a shout of irritation he switched off his set and stalked downstairs to Avery. Johnson followed him.

‘It’s no good giving up, Fred.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Look, Fred, you did it all wrong. I
told
you to send the number of groups
before
you send the message. You can’t remember a thing, can you—’

‘Look, leave me alone, I said!’ He was about to add something when the door bell rang. It was Hyde. He had brought an assistant, a plump man who was sucking something against the weather.

They did not play the tapes at lunch. Their guests sat side by side, eating glumly as if they had the same food every day because of the calories. Hyde was a meagre, dark-faced man without a trace of humour who reminded Avery of Sutherland. He had come to give Leiser a new identity. He had papers for him to sign, identity documents, a form of ration card, a driving licence, a permit to enter the border zone along a specified area, and an old shirt in a briefcase. After lunch he laid them all out on the drawing-room table while the photographer put up his camera.

They dressed Leiser in the shirt and took him full face with both ears showing according to the German regulations, then led him to sign the papers. He seemed nervous.

‘We’re going to call you Freiser,’ Hyde said, as if that were an end to the matter.

‘Freiser? That’s like my own name.’

‘That’s the idea. That’s what your people wanted. For signatures and things, so that there’s no slip-up. You’d better practise it a bit before you sign.’

‘I’d rather have it different. Quite different.’

‘We’ll stick to Freiser, I think,’ said Hyde. ‘It’s been decided at high level.’ Hyde was a man who leant heavily upon the Passive Voice.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

‘I want it different. I don’t like Freiser and I want it different.’ He didn’t like Hyde either, and in half a minute he was going to say so.

Haldane intervened. ‘You’re under instructions. The Department has taken the decision. There is no question of altering it now.’

Leiser was very pale.

‘Then they can bloody well change the instructions. I want a different name, that’s all. Christ, it’s only a little thing, isn’t it? That’s all I’m asking for: another name, a proper one, not a half-cock imitation of my own.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Hyde said. ‘It’s only training, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t have to understand! Just change it, that’s all. Who the hell d’you think you are, coming in here and ordering me about?’

‘I’ll telephone London,’ Haldane said, and went upstairs. They waited awkwardly until he came down.

‘Will you accept Hartbeck?’ Haldane inquired. There was a note of sarcasm in his voice.

Leiser smiled. ‘Hartbeck. That’s fine.’ He spread out his hands in a gesture of apology. ‘Hartbeck’s fine.’

Leiser spent ten minutes practising a signature then signed the papers, with a little flourish each time as if there were dust on them. Hyde gave them a lecture on the documents. It took a very long time. There were no actual ration cards in East Germany, Hyde said, but there existed a system of registration with food shops, who provided a certificate. He explained the principle of travel permits and the circumstances under which they were granted, he talked at length about the obligation on Leiser to show his identity card, unasked, when he bought a railway ticket or put up at an hotel. Leiser argued with him and Haldane attempted to terminate the meeting. Hyde paid no attention. When he had finished he nodded and went away with his photographer, folding the old shirt into his briefcase as if it were part of his equipment.

This outburst of Leiser’s appeared to cause Haldane some concern. He telephoned to London and ordered his assistant, Gladstone, to go over Leiser’s file for any trace of the name Freiser; he had a search made in all the indices, but without success. When Avery suggested Haldane was making too much of the incident the other shook his head. ‘We’re waiting for the second vow,’ he said.

Following upon Hyde’s visit, Leiser now received daily briefings about his cover. Stage by stage he, Avery and Haldane constructed in tireless detail the background of the man Hartbeck, establishing him in his work, his tastes and recreations, in his love life and choice of friends. Together, they entered the most obscure corners of the man’s conjectured existence, gave him skills and attributes which Leiser himself barely possessed.

Woodford came with news of the Department.

‘The Director’s putting up a marvellous show.’ From the way he spoke, Leclerc might have been fighting an illness. ‘We leave for Lübeck a week today. Jimmy Gorton’s been on to the German frontier people – he says they’re pretty reliable. We’ve got a crossing point lined up and we’ve taken a farmhouse on the outskirts of the town. He’s let it be known that we’re a team of academics wanting a quiet time and a bit of fresh air.’ Woodford looked confidingly at Haldane. ‘The Department is working wonderfully. As one man. And what a
spirit
, Adrian! No watching the clock these days. And no
rank
. Dennison, Sandford … we’re just a single team. You should see the way Clarkie’s going for the Ministry about poor Taylor’s pension. How’s Mayfly bearing up?’ he added in a low voice.

‘All right. He’s doing wireless upstairs.’

‘Any more signs of nerves? Outbreaks or anything?’

‘None so far as I know,’ Haldane replied, as if he were unlikely to know anyway.

‘Is he getting frisky? Sometimes they want a girl about now.’

Woodford had brought drawings of Soviet rockets. They had been made by Ministry draughtsmen from photographs held in Research Section, enlarged to about two foot by three, neatly mounted on showcards. Some were stamped with a security classification. Prominent features were marked with arrows; the nomenclature was curiously childish: fin, cone, fuel compartment, payload. Beside each rocket stood a gay little figure like a penguin in a flying helmet, and printed beneath him: ‘size of average man’. Woodford arranged them round the room as if they were his own work; Avery and Haldane watched in silence.

‘He can look at them after lunch,’ Haldane said. ‘Put them together till then.’

‘I’ve brought along a film to give him some background. Launchings, transportation, a bit about destructive capacity. The Director said he should have an idea what these things can do. Give him a shot in the arm.’

‘He doesn’t need a shot in the arm,’ Avery said.

Woodford remembered something. ‘Oh – and your little Gladstone wants to talk to you. He said it was urgent – didn’t know how to get hold of you. I told him you’d give him a ring when you had time. Apparently you asked him to do a job on the Mayfly area. Industry, was it, or manoeuvres? He says he’s got the answer ready for you in London. He’s the best type of NCO, that fellow.’ He glanced at the ceiling. ‘When’s Fred coming down?’

Haldane said abruptly, ‘I don’t want you to meet him, Bruce.’ It was unusual in Haldane to use a Christian name. ‘I’m afraid you must take luncheon in the town. Charge it to Accounts.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Security. I see no point in his knowing more of us than is strictly necessary. The charts speak for themselves; so, presumably, does the film.’

Woodford, profoundly insulted, left. Avery knew then that Haldane was determined to preserve Leiser in the delusion that the Department housed no fools.

For the last day of the course, Haldane had planned a full-scale exercise to last from ten in the morning until eight in the evening, a combined affair including visual observation in the town, clandestine photography and listening to tapes. The information which Leiser assembled during the day was to be made into a report, encoded and communicated by wireless to Johnson in the evening. A certain hilarity infected the briefing that morning. Johnson made a joke about not photographing the Oxford Constabulary by mistake; Leiser laughed richly and even Haldane allowed himself a wan smile. It was the end of term; the boys were going home.

The exercise was a success. Johnson was pleased; Avery enthusiastic; Leiser manifestly delighted. They had made two faultless transmissions, Johnson said, Fred was steady as a rock. At eight o’clock they assembled for dinner wearing their best suits. A special menu had been arranged. Haldane had presented the rest of his burgundy; toasts were made; there was talk of an annual reunion in years to come. Leiser looked very smart in a dark blue suit and a pale tie of watered silk.

Johnson got rather drunk and insisted on bringing down Leiser’s wireless set, raising his glass to it repeatedly and calling it Mrs Hartbeck. Avery and Leiser sat together: the estrangement of the last week over.

The next day, a Saturday, Avery and Haldane returned to London. Leiser was to remain in Oxford with Johnson until the whole party left for Germany on Monday. On the Sunday, an Air Force van would call at the house to collect the suitcase. This would be independently conveyed to Gorton in Hamburg together with Johnson’s own base equipment, and thence to the farmhouse near Lübeck from which Operation Mayfly would be launched. Before he left the house Avery took a last look round, partly for reasons of sentiment, and partly because he had signed the lease and was concerned about the inventory.