by William Boyd
The first drawer revealed cleaning equipment – bleach, wire-wool pan scourers, scrubbing brushes of various sizes. In the second drawer he found the knives – no shears – but they were sharp enough. He looked under the sink and found a bucket – a bucket would be a good prop, as if there would be blood to mop up, that might add to the conviction of the whole charade, he thought. He stopped and stood up.
He was thinking. An idea had come to him – from nowhere. He opened the first drawer again and took out the two pan scourers and held them in each hand – a coarse steel mesh shaped into a squashy sphere. He began to think further – no need to shed a drop of blood at all . . . Then he ran them under the tap, shook the water from them, slipped them into his pockets and wandered back into the sitting room.
‘Last chance, Herr Glockner. Give me the key to the code.’
‘I tell you I don’t have it. I pass the letters on to Berlin where they’re decoded.’
‘Last chance.’
‘How do you say it in English? Fuck your mother, fuck your sister, fuck your wife, fuck your baby daughter.’
Lysander stooped over him.
‘You’ve just made a terrible mistake. Terrible.’
He pinched Glockner’s nose shut with two fingers and, as he reflexively opened his mouth to breathe, Lysander rammed the first of the kitchen scourers deep into Glockner’s mouth – and then the second.
Glockner gagged and heaved. The bulk of the two scourers had forced his jaws wide apart, belling his cheeks. He was trying to force them out with his tongue but they were too firmly wedged in behind his teeth.
Lysander strode over to the armchair and unplugged the standard lamp, ripping the flex from its base. The flex was a simple, wound double-cable, covered in a fine gold-coloured thread. With his fingernails he picked the ends clear, exposing the wires and bending them into a rough Y-shape.
He dragged Glockner and his chair closer. Then he plugged the flex back into its socket and held the now live ‘Y’ in front of Glockner’s eyes.
Suddenly the thought came to him that he might not be capable of going through with this. But then he argued with himself – it would be just a touch, after all, no severing or cutting, nothing unseemly, no blades gouging flesh, just something that occurred as a matter of unfortunate consequence on a doubtless daily basis in dentists’ surgeries the world over. Glockner was going to the dentist – no one liked it particularly, no one knew what pain would be associated with the visit. It was a risk.
‘You look like a man who’s taken good care of his teeth. Admirable. Unfortunately all that expensive dental work is now going to cause you intense, unspeakable pain. Every tooth in your head is in contact with the wire mesh of the scourer. Your copious saliva – look, it’s already dripping from the side of your mouth – is a very efficient electrolyte. When I touch this live electric wire to the scourers in your mouth . . .’ he paused. ‘Well, let’s say you’re going to remember this agony for the rest of your life.’
He waved the wire right in front of Glockner’s eyes.
‘Just give me the key to your code, then I’ll be out of here in five minutes. Nod your head if you agree.’
Glockner made some grating sound in his throat but it was clear from the way his forehead buckled and his crazy eyes glared that he was trying to swear at him again.
Without thinking further, Lysander touched the exposed live wires to the scumbled edge of the kitchen scourer visible between Glockner’s bared teeth. Just for a second.
Glockner’s inhuman throat-tearing roar of pain was hugely disturbing, made him flinch and wince in sympathy. It was the aural representation of his awful torment. He whipped the wires away and, in some disarray himself, watched Glockner writhe in his bonds, banging the back of his head against the parquet, his eyes weeping, overflowing. My god. Jesus.
Lysander fetched a pad-cushion from a chair and slipped it under Glockner’s head. He didn’t want anyone coming up from down below to see what the noise was. He held another cushion in his hand to muffle Glockner’s eventual screams.
‘Now, Herr Glockner, that was just a split second. Imagine if I apply the wires and count to ten.’
He didn’t give him time to make any response – get this over with – he jammed the wire into the scourer and slammed the cushion over Glockner’s face. One second, two – no, he couldn’t go on. He pulled the wire away and kept the cushion in place. Glockner’s screams died away to rhythmic sobbing sounds, almost like a kind of animal, panting. He felt himself trembling as he removed the cushion.
Glockner’s face was slumped as if the muscles weren’t working, had gone terminally slack. His eyes were half-closed, blinking frantically.
‘Nod your head if you agree.’
He nodded.
Carefully, quickly, Lysander picked out the scouring pads from his gaping mouth with his fingers. Glockner dry-heaved, turned his head and spat on the parquet. Lysander rose to his feet and carefully placed the live wire on the desk top, securing it with a paperweight.
‘See?’ he said accusingly. ‘If you’d just told me when I asked you first none of this would have happened – and you’d have been a rich man. Where’s the key?’
‘Central bookcase . . .’ Glockner coughed and moaned.
Lysander walked over to the central bookcase and opened it. It was full of German literature – Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Schopenhauer, Liliencron . . .
‘Second shelf from the top. Fifth book along.’
Lysander ran his finger along the spines. The classic book-cipher. The PLWL code, as it was also known, so Munro had told him – page, line, word, letter. Unbreakable unless you had the book.
Fifth book along, there it was. He drew it out.
Andromeda und Perseus.
Andromeda und Perseus. Eine Oper in vier Akten von Gottlieb Toller.
He felt a coldness grip him as if his organs had been suddenly packed in ice. He felt his bowels turn and flex with a powerful urge to shit.
He stopped the questions screaming at him. Not now. Not now. Later.
He turned back to Glockner. He seemed to have passed out. His eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. With an effortful heave, Lysander righted the chair and Glockner’s head lolled, a length of thick saliva falling from his mouth and dangling there, swaying like a lucent pendulum.
Lysander untied him quickly and dragged and laid him back on the rug again. He unplugged the flex and wound it round his palm before stuffing it in his pocket. He found Glockner’s attaché case on the floor by the desk and flipped it open, sliding the wad of 25,000 francs into an internal pocket. He closed it and replaced it on the floor. He gathered up the lengths of rope and the scouring pads and threw them in his grip along with the libretto of Andromeda und Perseus. He had a final check of the room and the kitchen. He smoothed some ripples in the rug and straightened the books on the second shelf from the top so there was no noticeable gap. He closed the glass door. An unconscious man on his back, with not a mark on him. 25,000 francs inside his attaché case. A standard lamp without a flex. Solve that mystery.
He stood for a moment in the hall, running through everything for a final time. Thank you, the Hon. Hugh Faulkner, thank you. He felt himself beginning to shiver. It was terrifying how easy it had been – no blood, no effort, even – just some logical thought and the application of electric current. Stop. Concentrate. From his grip he took a light Macintosh and a flat cotton golfing cap and put them on. The man leaving the building wouldn’t look like the man who entered. He pulled the door to behind him, leaving the key in the lock on the inside. He went down the stairs calmly, meeting no one and was glad to note that the concierge was still at church and the little boy had left his post. Lysander stepped out on to the street and strode away. He looked at his wristwatch – 10.40 – he hadn’t even been in Herr Glockner’s apartment for an hour.
4. The Fiend
He spent the afternoon painstakingly decoding the Glockner letters – it ke
pt his mind on the job. As the contents slowly revealed themselves – it was laborious work – it became obvious to him that what was being detailed in them was the movement of munitions and matériel from England to various sections of the front line.
On one page: ‘Fifteen hundred tons HE six inch to St Omer to Béthune.’
On another: ‘Twen five thou coffins to Allouagne.’
And more of the same: ‘One mil five thou three oh three Aubers Ridge sector’; ‘Six field dressing stations villages behind Lens’; ‘Ammo railheads St Venant Lapugnoy first army Strazeele cavalry’; ‘Sixteen adv dressing stns Grenay Vermelles Cambrin Givenchy Beuvry’; ‘Fourteen trch mortar La Bassee canal’.
The list grew in astonishing, minute detail as he worked steadily through the close columns of numbers in the six letters. Assuming that the dates were recorded when these letters were intercepted, he reasoned, then this data would give a very intriguing picture of the focus of an impending attack. Artillery shells, small arms ammunition, food and rations, signalling equipment, field hospitals, pack animals, transportation – it seemed almost too random but anyone who knew what was involved in a ‘push’ would be able to read the signs and narrow the sector down with remarkably precise accuracy.
It was also clear to him that this information must have been generated far behind the lines – the scale and the quantities applied to armies and brigades, not regiments and battalions. Battalions drew their supplies from dumps that these movement orders fed. And even further away – there was mention of ten batteries of 18-pounder guns being shipped from Folkestone to Havre and then entrained for Abbeville; a loco shop was being established at Borre; a new forage depot at Mautort; summary of shunts at the Traffic Office, Abbeville; total of remounts sent from England to the First Army in May. Some of these facts and figures would be known to senior supply officers in France but the range and the scope of the knowledge displayed in the Glockner letters spoke instead – as far as Lysander’s ill-informed mind could determine – of a far greater overview of the whole movement and ordnance operation for the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. The writer of these coded letters wasn’t in General Sir John French’s high command in St Omer, he reckoned, but safely at home in the War Office or the Ministry of Munitions in London.
He put his pen down and, with some unease, picked up the source text – Andromeda und Perseus. He turned to the title page, noting with some relief that this edition wasn’t the same as the one he had. It had been published in Dresden in 1912, a year before his trip to Vienna, and had the title and author as simple text on the cover with no illustration. He knew that the fatal Viennese performances of Toller’s opera were not its premiere, so he assumed that must have taken place in Dresden, whence this copy originated . . .
Malign coincidence? No, impossible. As obscure texts went, Andromeda und Perseus was about as recherché as you could find. But the more questions he asked himself about the conceivable provenance of this, the key text in the PLWL cipher, the more confused and troubled he became. Why this particular, forgotten opera? And how come he was the one to discover it? The unwelcome thought came to him that the only other person he knew who possessed a copy of this libretto was one Lysander Rief. And what did that imply? . . .
He decided that it was pointless speculating further. He had to return home and, with Munro and Fyfe-Miller, thoroughly analyse all the ramifications of this discovery. There was nothing much he could do on a Sunday afternoon in Geneva – the Hôtel des Postes closed at midday so he’d have to wait until tomorrow to telegraph Massinger in Thonon. It opened at 7.00 in the morning – he would be there. He sealed his transcripts of the six letters in an envelope and wrote his name and the Claverleigh Hall address on the front. Best for the precise details to be kept out of everyone’s hands for the moment, he reckoned, at least until he had decided what to reveal – or not – about the key to the cipher.
He went out for a stroll in the late afternoon, thinking that perhaps he would have liked to have talked over the matter – discreetly – with Florence Duchesne but he realized that he didn’t know where she lived. Then again, perhaps it was best that she knew as little as possible.
He took a tram across the Arve River and disembarked at one of the entrances to the Bois de la Bâtre on the far bank from the city. He wandered into the thick woods and left the pathway to find a secluded spot – far from any picnickers or strolling families – and patiently burned Glockner’s copy of Andromeda und Perseus a page at a time. He kicked the small pile of frail ashes here and there, stamping them into the turf as though they might somehow be reconstituted and read once more. He was beginning to think that the crucial course of action was to keep the cipher text a secret that only he knew – he wasn’t quite sure why, but out of the jabber of questions and answers that raged in his mind an instinctive way forward seemed to be emerging. Make himself the only keeper of the secret – who knew, in that case, what others might inadvertently reveal? The minute he saw Massinger he would be asked for it – he was fully aware of that – still, he had plenty of time to concoct a plausible story.
He ate an omelette in a brasserie by the steamer jetties and checked the departure times of the express steamers that did a round trip of the lake in a day. He drank too much wine and found his previous clarity of purpose begin to cloud as he wandered the streets, as if suddenly cognizant of the fact that, this Sunday morning in Geneva, he had tortured a man and extracted information from him. What was happening to him? What kind of fiend was he becoming? But then he thought – was ‘torture’ the right word? He hadn’t bludgeoned Glockner’s head to a bloody pulp; he hadn’t mangled his genitalia, or torn out his fingernails. He had given him every warning, also, every chance to speak . . . But he was disturbed, as well, he had to confess – disturbed by his own swift ingenuity and resourcefulness. Maybe it was the very absence of blood – and of mucus, piss and shit – that made his own . . . he searched for the word – device – that made his device so distancing and therefore easier to live with. What he had done seemed more like an experiment in a chemistry laboratory than the wilful inflicting of pain on a fellow human being . . . But then another voice told him not to be so stupid and sensitive: he was under orders, on a mission and the knowledge he had gained by his clever, robust and admittedly brutal actions had been vital for the war effort and, conceivably, could save countless lives. Of course it could. He had been told in no uncertain terms – do your duty as a soldier – and he had.
The night porter at the Hôtel Touring sleepily and grudgingly opened the main door for him after midnight. Lysander went up to his room, feeling tired but sure he would be denied even a minute of sound sleep, such were the relentless churnings of his thoughts. They were added to, considerably, when he saw that a note had been pushed under his door. It was unaddressed but he tore it open, knowing who had sent it.
‘Your brother Manfred is gravely ill. Leave for home at once. People are very concerned.’
It could only be Florence Duchesne. Manfred – how did she know about Glockner? And what was the significance of that underscored ‘concerned’? . . . He lay on his bed fully clothed, running through the possibilities for the following day – what he should try and do and what he absolutely had to do in his own best interests. He was still awake, waiting and thinking, as the sunrise began to lighten the curtains on his windows.
At seven o’clock in the morning Lysander was third in the queue at the main door of the central post office on the Rue du Mont Blanc. It was a huge grand ornate building – more like a museum or a ministry of state than a post office – and when it opened he strode to a guichet in the vast vaulted vestibule and immediately sent a long telegram to Massinger in Thonon.
HAVE THE KEY COMPONENT STOP AS SUSPECTED THERE IS A SERIOUS MALFUNCTION IN THE MAIN MACHINERY STOP STRONGLY ADVISE NO EXCURSIONS IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE STOP ARRIVING EVIAN LES BAINS AT 440 PM STOP
The last Glockner letter had been intercepted little more
than two weeks previously. It was reasonable to suppose that its detail of ordnance supply would be relevant for any attack due towards the end of the summer. The autumn offensive, whatever and wherever it would be, was well advertised now as far as the enemy was concerned.
He then posted the six transcribed letters to himself at Claverleigh and left the post office at 7.20. The first express steamer making the round trip to Nyon, Ouchy, Montreux and Evian left at 9.15. Madame Duchesne’s note the night before seemed to imply that steamer points and railway stations might be watched – he had almost two hours or so to make sure he wouldn’t be apprehended.
5. Tom O’Bedlam
He locked the door of the below-deck gentlemen’s lavatory and placed his sack and seatless chair to one side. He sat on the WC and, with a sigh of relief, removed his shoes and shook the pebbles out. Then he washed the Vaseline off his upper lip and raked his fingers through his chopped hair trying to flatten it into some vestige of normality. Looking at himself in the mirror he could see he had gone a bit too far with the scissors.
After he’d left the post office he had made his other essential purchases as soon as the relevant shops on the Rue du Mont Blanc opened. First, was a coarse linen laundry bag into which he’d stuffed his raincoat and his golfing cap – he had left his cardboard suitcase and his remaining clothes in his room at the hotel – Abelard Schwimmer had no further use of them. Then he bought a glass jar of Vaseline and a pair of hair-scissors from a pharmacy before going on to a furniture shop where, after some searching, he found a cheap pine straight-backed kitchen chair with a woven straw seat. Any chair would have done – it was the straw seat that was important. By 8.30 he had re-crossed the river to the Jardin Anglais and in a quiet corner, sitting on a bench, he had unpicked and unravelled the lengths of straw-raffia that made up the seat of the chair. He then looped and wound the straw into a loose figure-of-eight that he hooked on to the chair-back. He had his prop – now he just needed his costume.