Prince of Spies
Page 9
‘I do this journey twice a week and it’s a long time since I’ve known it as bad as this. I’m surprised we left port, to be honest. I’ll tell you what: I’ll swap a cigarette for some of that chocolate.’
As Prince broke off a chunk of the chocolate, he noticed the man opposite him looking around before leaning closer and speaking more quietly.
‘You’re going to Copenhagen?’
Prince wasn’t sure how to reply. He assumed he was going to Copenhagen, but he was no longer the master of his own destiny and he didn’t know if he could volunteer that information. The man lit a cigarette and handed it to him. Prince paused as a German plain-clothes officer stopped at their table.
‘Legitimationskort.’ He was talking to Prince, ignoring the other man. Prince handed over the card, relieved he’d checked the year of his birth. The German looked at it, angled it against the light, glancing back at Prince.
‘Name.’
‘Olsen. Hans Olsen.’
‘Place of birth?’
‘Aarhus.’
The German nodded; another look of disappointment as he tossed the card back on the table. ‘I’d better see your card.’ He’d turned to the man opposite. He gave the card a cursory glance, said nothing and moved on.
‘I wonder why they picked me out?’
‘There’s no method to their madness. Look, I have a van on the deck full of cheese, which I’m taking to Copenhagen. I like to have company. If you give me some more chocolate, I’ll drive you there.’
Prince told him that sounded like a good idea, even though he wasn’t sure it was. Had he made a mistake? Seeing the boy who reminded him of Henry, and all the legitimationskort checks, could well have affected his judgement.
‘That’s a deal then. By the way, my name’s Egon.’
* * *
Copenhagen. Richard Prince – or Marius, as his Danish relatives insisted on calling him in memory of a great-grandfather he’d never met – had never been fond of the city, though of course he knew better, even as a young child, than to express such feelings.
He’d first visited the place when he was three or four, and he and his mother would spend the whole of August there every year, so by the time he was sixteen, he’d been there a dozen times, becoming quite fluent in the language. His memories of the city were predominantly of the interminable train journeys to and from the country across northern Europe, the stifling formality of his grandparents’ house, and Sundays spent at a series of services in the local Lutheran church. The smell of mothballs surrounded his grandfather, while his grandmother appeared to have sprayed her clothes in especially pungent lavender.
His grandfather had been a clerk at the enormous Carlsberg brewery in the centre of the city, but as he had worked his way up in the company, the family had moved in a similar direction through the more middle-class suburbs to the north of city. For most of Prince’s childhood they’d lived in Hellerup, and his grandmother – not someone given to any obvious displays of emotion – found it hard to conceal how thrilled she was to be resident in such a smart area.
But the atmosphere in the house was a difficult one. Prince was forced to drink sour milk, which his grandmother insisted was good for him, and his grandparents were forever criticising both him and his mother. Nothing she did was good enough, and behind closed doors there were muffled arguments most evenings. She would often come to check on him in his bedroom afterwards, her eyes moist with tears, and occasionally she would make a remark along the lines of ‘Maybe now you can understand why I left Denmark.’
The visits ceased in 1925 following his grandparents’ deaths from influenza within days of each other. Prince’s mother barely managed to disguise her relief. The last time he’d been to Copenhagen was in 1928, when he was twenty and already a sergeant. It was his cousin’s wedding, and he and his parents flew from Croydon Airport to Amsterdam and from there on to Copenhagen on one of Danish Airlines’ new four-engined Farmans. And now he was back.
For someone who claimed he liked to have company, Egon had been surprisingly taciturn during the two-hour drive to the city. Prince reckoned he must be nervous; it was something he’d picked up with other members of the resistance since he’d arrived in Denmark. As benign as the German occupation was, helping a British agent was still punishable by death.
At no stage in the journey did he say where they were going. As in England, there was an almost complete absence of road signs, but eventually Prince recognised where they were, passing through Brondby and entering Copenhagen through its southern suburbs, heading towards the centre. It was getting dark when they reached Vesterbro, which he remembered well: it was where the Carlsberg brewery was based, and where his grandparents had lived until they started to climb the social ladder.
Despite her obvious snobbery, his grandmother could never quite leave Vesterbro entirely behind her. Although it was a working-class area, with factories and tiny cottages, it was the place she knew best and, he sensed, the area where she felt most comfortable, where she didn’t need to put on airs and graces. Most Saturdays they would take him to the Enghaveparken: if he was well behaved and sat still as they listened to whatever was being performed on the bandstand, not only would he then be allowed to visit the play area, but he would also be bought an ice cream.
Egon drove past Enghaveparken and on to Carstensgade. They were now in the north of Vesterbro and he was clearly having difficulty finding his way around. Prince was worried they were driving too slowly: nothing looked more suspicious than a vehicle crawling along, pausing too long at junctions. As they passed the street where Prince’s great-aunt had lived, and then the school his grandmother had gone to and which she always made a point of showing him, he was tempted to ask Egon what he was looking for, but thought better of it. He was, he remembered, the blind man being shepherded by others.
Egon let out a sudden and triumphant ‘Ah!’ and turned the van sharply into a narrow entrance, driving into the centre of a neat courtyard surrounded by identical white-painted apartment blocks, each eight storeys high, with heavy wooden doors. From under his seat he removed a small package and handed it to Prince.
‘These are your keys. The big one opens the main door to that block there – block D. You’re to go to the top floor, to apartment 30, understand? If there is a newspaper tucked under the door of the apartment, under no circumstances enter it. Leave the building immediately. But if there’s nothing under the door, use the smaller key here to enter. Lock the door when you’re inside but don’t bolt it. That is important. Understand?’
Prince said he understood, but Egon, whose nervousness was now all too obvious, made him repeat his instructions.
‘You go in now. I have to leave.’
He had restarted the engine and reached over to open Prince’s door. Prince hesitated; he wanted to ask Egon what he should do if there was a newspaper under the door. It was all very well being told to leave the building immediately, but where should he go? It was clear that Egon wasn’t going to hang around to give him a lift anywhere.
‘Please, you need to go in – now!’
* * *
When the trawler docks in Esbjerg, you will be in the hands of a Danish resistance cell we trust implicitly. Do as they say, don’t ask questions. When the time is right, they will get you to Copenhagen. When you arrive there, that resistance cell will have no more to do with you. They will have done their job. From that moment, you become Agent Laertes. Once you are there, you wait. Don’t be impatient. Agent Osric will find you. You may have to wait a week in the place you are taken to, maybe even longer. Agent Osric will identify themselves with the quote and you will respond with yours. I’m sure you won’t have forgotten them.
The apartment block was silent, as if abandoned. Prince stood for a while trying to get a sense of the building. As he climbed the stairs, he began to hear some muffled signs of life behind the apartment doors: a baby crying in one, a piano being played in another, voices on a radio…
* * *
You may have to wait a week in the place you are taken to, maybe even longer.
Prince was reconciled to having to wait for at least a week. If it was going to be less than that, he assumed they would have said so. He’d decided he would not start to worry for ten days. He was like that: not setting his sights too high, avoiding being unrealistic.
It was a small apartment, but perfectly comfortable, even quite cosy. No one had said anything about whether he should disguise the fact that he was there, which he thought was odd. He took precautions nonetheless, walking around in his socks, keeping the curtains drawn as they had been when he entered the place, not making much noise. The kitchen was well stocked: plenty of tins of fish and meat, potatoes and a box of vegetables, biscuits, even a large cake in a tin with a picture of a castle on the lid. In the bedroom someone had laid out clothes more or less his size on the bed.
The first thing he did after looking round the flat was to unpick the lining of his rucksack and remove the Jesper Holm identity that had been sewn in there. He then stood by the kitchen sink trying to gather his thoughts. Hans Olsen felt reliable: he’d got through four identity checks and he was reluctant to confine him to ash. But his instructions had been clear, so he cut up the legitimationskort he’d used since Esbjerg, and all the papers that went with it, and dropped them in the sink before setting light to them.
He was now Jesper Holm again, an accountant from Copenhagen. The fact that he’d always been bad at mathematics felt like the least of his concerns.
Doing nothing for hours on end in the half-light of the day and the dark of the night had a strangely relaxing effect, especially for someone who was always on the go and hated wasting his time. He ought to have been on the edge of his nerves: a British agent in enemy territory, on his own in an apartment with papers unlikely to fool the Gestapo for very long. He must have been through the hands of a dozen members of the resistance since landing in Esbjerg – plus the men on the trawler – and all it needed was for just one of them to be arrested to bring the rest down like dominos. He didn’t like the fact that the plainly nervous Egon knew where he was, though Hendrie had given him a long talk about how he mustn’t look for flaws he could do nothing about, because no espionage operation was ever flawless.
But the isolation had the opposite effect: he felt calm, able to sit for long periods of time in the large armchair doing little more than allowing his mind to wander in no particular direction. Inevitably it often wandered in the direction of his family. On the second afternoon he was convinced Jane was sitting opposite him, but he didn’t feel any pain – not even when he saw little Grace next to her – just the warmth of Henry sitting on his knee, his head leaning back against his shoulder.
On his fifth night in the apartment, he woke in the early hours of the morning, wondering if he’d heard some movement outside the bedroom. He checked his watch, which showed it was just after three, and listened carefully, his ears so attuned he imagined he could hear all kinds of noise. He thought about getting up, but it was so cold he decided against it, and after ten minutes or so he fell back into a doze, still in the half-sitting position he’d hauled himself into.
He was still in that position when the bedroom door opened, the person framed in the doorway barely lit by the light from the kitchen.
‘Who is it?’ Foolishly, he spoke in English. He quickly repeated the question, this time in Danish. He could hear the fear in his own voice, his mouth and throat dry.
‘Your lordship is right welcome back to Denmark.’
He found himself breathing fast and realised he was gripping the sheet, as if to prevent himself from falling off the bed. This was the first line of the code Agent Osric was to use, the code he was meant to respond to. But hearing the voice had shocked him, and in his confusion, he had to think carefully about his reply, despite having rehearsed it a dozen times each day.
‘I am satisfied in nature, whose motive in this case should stir me most to my revenge.’
It was like being back at school, forced to the front of the class to reluctantly recite Shakespeare.
Osric took a step into the room. ‘How is it, Laertes?’
He was ready now with his response, the final part of the code. ‘Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric. I am justly killed with mine own treachery.’
Agent Osric turned on the bedroom light. ‘Let’s hope not.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That bit about your own treachery. He wouldn’t approve, would he?’
‘Who?’
‘Oh, come on – your William Shakespeare. He wouldn’t approve of us changing Hamlet round like that, would he?’
Prince was out of bed now and putting on his dressing gown. He couldn’t take his eyes off Osric. ‘I think Shakespeare would approve; he’d understand the circumstances.’ He realised he was talking too fast.
He followed Osric into the small lounge, where they sat facing each other, working out what each was about.
‘But I’m not sure,’ said Prince, ‘Shakespeare would have wholly approved of the part of Osric being played by a woman.’
She laughed, tossing her head back and allowing her long dark hair to fall on either side of her shoulders.
Prince had assumed Agent Osric would be a man: nothing they’d told him in England had given him cause to believe otherwise. He was worried his obvious surprise might be seen as disapproval. She was perhaps in her mid-thirties, more or less the same age as him. She had dark eyes, which darted around, a noticeable turn to her lips, and jet-black hair. She spoke with a cultured Copenhagen accent, and as friendly as she appeared, there was an almost familiar authority to her voice. She was, unquestionably, someone who was accustomed to telling people what to do.
Chapter 6
Copenhagen, November 1942
‘We need to have a proper talk.’ Agent Osric leaned back in her armchair, relaxed but alert, her eyes carefully working him out. She’d propped her right elbow on the arm of the chair, holding it upright so her lit cigarette pointed to the ceiling, a spiral of grey-blue smoke looking as if it came from her forefinger.
Prince leaned forward, ready to concentrate on what she was about to say.
‘Not now,’ she continued, ‘it’s far too late. Or too early: I never really know whether four o’clock in the morning counts as early or late.’ She looked at Prince as if she half expected him to decide for her.
‘But there’s a curfew, isn’t there? How could you get here during the curfew?’ Prince hesitated, worried he might be sounding anxious.
‘We’ll talk about all these things in the morning, or at least later in the morning. I need to get some sleep before then. I’ve been up since six o’clock; that’s getting on twenty-four hours.’
‘How come?’
‘Work.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Later: we’ll talk about all that later. There are two things I want to say before I get some sleep. Firstly, this is the last time we speak in English. It’s too risky and I’m told your Danish is excellent. You need to be speaking it all the time, though. You must get out of the habit of speaking English. Understand? Forsta?’
Prince nodded and said he understood. What was the second thing she wanted to mention?
‘How about you sleep on that couch and I take the bed?’
* * *
When Richard Prince had joined the police as an enthusiastic eighteen-year-old, he’d spent the first few months after his initial training on the beat. He didn’t last long walking the streets of Lincoln: early on, his superiors spotted him as a very bright grammar school boy who could easily have gone to university and clearly was destined for greater things. Before he’d completed his first year in the police, he was already a detect
ive.
Life on the beat, as brief as it was, had a pre-ordained quality to it. Pinned on the inside of his bedroom door in his lodging house was his rota: he knew weeks in advance whether on any given day he’d be on a shift starting at six in the morning, two in the afternoon or ten at night. And when he arrived to start his shift at the police station in Church Lane, in the lee of the cathedral, the large board by the duty sergeant’s desk informed him which beat he’d been allocated to: West Common; South Commons; Castle & Cathedral; Station and St Mark’s; Canwick; Washingborough, or one of half a dozen others. And then there were the carefully drawn maps of each beat he’d tuck inside his notebook, showing a suggested route, which streets to pay special attention to, and the pubs to keep an eye on.
As his career progressed, he was pleased he’d moved on from the regimented life of being told where to go and when to go there. But in recent years he’d had more mixed views: perhaps having your life carefully mapped out weeks in advance was not such a bad thing. Being moved around Lincoln like a piece on a chessboard had its attractions.
Now he felt like a chess piece in Copenhagen.
He was woken at seven thirty by the noise of running water in the kitchen and crockery being moved around. He hauled himself up from the sofa and caught a glimpse of Agent Osric wrapped just in a large towel. Moments later she came into the lounge, still draped in the towel, her hair wet, a lit cigarette sticking out of her mouth and a tray in her hands, which she placed on the small table by his sofa.
‘This coffee isn’t bad; it’s about as good as you’ll get in Denmark these days. Drink it while I get dressed. Then we can talk.’
When she returned, she was dressed but her hair was still damp. She ran her fingers through it as she relaxed in the armchair, her legs casually folded under her. She lit another cigarette, then paused briefly to drink her coffee in one go, all the while watching him and sizing him up in a manner that felt familiar but which he couldn’t quite put his finger on. She didn’t say a word, and when she’d finished her cigarette, she dropped the stub into the remains of her coffee and lit yet another. Only then did she speak.