The Xanthe Schneider Enigma Files Box Set

by David Boyle

  “May I?” Xanthe looked at the paper he was carrying. It was the News Chronicle. Typical Turing, she thought. The Nazi advance appeared to be getting nearer to the outskirts of Moscow. There was a small item on a new prime minister in Japan, called General Tojo. Otherwise, the usual sports results from the day before. There was even an advertisement for Jeyes toilet paper, and Xanthe remembered how her wartime toilet paper article had offended the New Yorker editor, but had persuaded him to agree to her last, rather frightening mission in occupied Greece.

  They walked up through Station Road and Hills Road from Cambridge station and down Regent Street. The city smelled of cold and damp. How could she have lived here for a year, she wondered, as they passed the tiny front door of Simonetta College, the glorified finishing school where her father had sent her all the way from Cincinnati back in 1938?

  “I think I’d better do the talking with the man,” said Turing. “He is rather strange, and I do sort of know him, though he didn’t have much time for my contributions to his seminars.”

  “I don’t think that’s how I remember it, Alan. I think he needed your conversation to make them fly along. That was where we first met, just before the war?”

  “Of course,” said Alan. “You know, I’d forgotten that. We’ve got to know each other so well since. You and Joan are my closest female friends anywhere in the world.”

  “That’s nice, Alan. Only don’t treat me like you treated poor Joan.”

  Turing stopped in mid-flow.

  “Oh, come on, Xanthe – I just broke off our engagement. It wasn’t as if either of us were exactly in the throes of passion.”

  “Yes, but by phone? In the hut?”

  Turing was quiet for a time, and Xanthe was immediately sorry.

  “I’m so sorry, Alan. I was only teasing. You know we both love being your friends, and you’ve done so much for me. Without you I’d be starving in a garret somewhere with Indy.”

  “Well, hardly. Still, let’s cross fingers for the most important mission so far.”

  They crossed their fingers in front of them as they walked along.

  “It’s because of Indy that I can’t go gallivanting on active service to Nazi-occupied Europe anymore. You do understand, don’t you?”

  Turing ignored her as they reached the door of Trinity College and marched purposefully into the porter’s lodge, underneath the great four-turreted tower that acted as a gateway to the college.

  Xanthe felt the familiar nerves which she always felt when she was out of her depth – most of the time at work – creeping into her stomach. Well, she thought to herself, I’ve killed a Gestapo man with an Enigma rotor, I’ve crossed the Mediterranean in a smuggled yacht, but I’ve never gone and asked to see the foremost philosopher in the world before.

  “We are here to see Professor Wittgenstein,” said Turing, unfolding a letter of introduction from Commander Denniston at Bletchley but using an address at the Admiralty.

  What had Xanthe expected the reaction to be? Fawning agreement or self-deprecating support? Perhaps haughty snobbery. But whatever it was, she had hardly expected the nervous, almost panicky reaction they actually received. There was a great deal of whispering and consultation between ever more senior porters before they were led into a side room while they waited for a personage described as “the Dean”.

  He had evidently not been far away because, in a moment, a gowned figure like a huge crow, came into the room and greeted Turing like a long-lost friend.

  “Mr Turing, how excellent to see you. I do hope you are well.” He ignored Xanthe completely. She and Turing exchanged glances.

  “Now, you wanted to see Professor Wittgenstein. That’s right, isn’t it? May I ask whether you had been given an appointment?”

  “Well, I wrote twice but got no reply.”

  “You see, the thing is, Alan… this is a little embarrassing, but not only has he gone, but we are not sure quite where he has gone to. Of course, one is familiar with the patterns of wartime secret work and all that, but my feeling was that our friend was not exactly suited for that kind of thing. Temperamentally, I mean.”

  “How do you mean, exactly?” said Xanthe.

  “Too cross, I mean. Too emotional. But I do actually have an address – since it’s you, Alan: Nuffield Buildings, Guy’s Hospital, London SE1. Make of that what you like.”

  Turing’s face betrayed some confusion.

  “How strange. Is he doing war work of some kind? I don’t suppose it can be an easy time to be in Southwark, I imagine, with the bombs and blitz and blackouts.”

  “Well, that’s what I thought too,” said the Dean. “But actually, I find the address is a nurses’ home. For some reason, the greatest philosopher it has been my privilege to know, is working, just between you and me, in some secrecy as a hospital porter.”

  I

  London, October 1941

  It had seemed such a simple request, such a small favour to ask her, that Xanthe Schneider had hardly hesitated before she accepted. But the main reason she did so was that she was beginning to feel uncomfortable that the Admiralty was still paying her when all she was doing was looking after her baby, now six months old. Other people on active service – and on the payroll of the British government – were risking their lives every day. Her position was unorthodox, as an adjunct to naval intelligence when somebody needed to go abroad – it was certainly somewhat unofficial. She had felt for some time that she ought really to be a little more willing.

  Her handful of close friends at Bletchley Park knew her role – not very many of them, secrecy being what it was – and told her she was being silly. Had she not ventured into Nazi Berlin and German-held Athens in pursuit of elements of Enigma puzzles, some of them a little fleeting? She had certainly played her part and hardly needed to; she was an American citizen, and the sword of the United States remained resolutely sheathed.

  Somehow or other, the struggle against the Nazis had become her own struggle. She defended Roosevelt and her fellow country people in argument most weeks, as soon as somebody heard her accent, but in her heart of hearts she knew her priorities now: first to look after poor fatherless Indigo in his cot, then to help the Hut 8 team in any way she could and then, and only then, to help the Admiralty. They did pay her wages, after all.

  That was where the discomfort came in. She had visited Athens when Indy had been just a few weeks old, arriving only a few weeks after the German invaders, ostensibly as an American correspondent. Actually, she had been on a mission to trick the Luftwaffe into transmitting the direction the battleship Bismarck was sailing, still on the loose in the Atlantic, in a version of Enigma they could read back at Bletchley. By good luck or good judgement – more the former than the latter – she had survived. But she had returned so nervous, so exhausted, still not recovered from the birth six weeks before, that she had vowed it would be her last mission abroad.

  So when Alan Turing had asked her to join him she had said yes straight away. It was just a simple trip to Cambridge. There would be no pretence, nothing undercover, and then it would be done. Back to her old work at Bletchley Park and as an occasional editorial assistant in the tiny offices of the New Yorker, around the corner from the Bank of England.

  She had been a foreign correspondent in Berlin and Athens and she had loved the work, but she remained haunted by the idea that she had just been acting a role – on the instructions of the Naval Intelligence Division. She still had something to prove, but – oh well, she had tried, God knows.

  “We’re just seeing a philosophy professor,” Turing had said. “I would have gone by myself, but Fleming suggested you come too…”

  “What’s it all about? What’s he want us to say?”

  Turing’s face had clouded. He hated to be official.

  “I’m afraid I’m not allowed to say until you’re definitely committed,” he said. “You have to say yes first. You know what Fleming is like,” he’d added apologetically.

&nb
sp; Xanthe did. Lieutenant Commander Fleming, with his somewhat flashy arrogance and impatience, had sent her to Athens on what she feared had been faulty information.

  “Ok, ok, but why me? I can’t say I’m one of the world’s great philosophy students.”

  “Well,” Turing had said shyly. “I suspect that he thinks you would provide a little encouraging glamour for the meeting, being generally more attractive than I am. Actually, my suspicion is that this particular professor is less susceptible to feminine charm than most – but then, Fleming is apt to think that everybody is exactly like him.”

  He slapped his head.

  “What am I thinking of? You know him already don’t you? It’s Professor Wittgenstein…”

  “You mean the strange guy in the bedroom?”

  Dimly, Xanthe remembered the incident. She had been invited by an admirer, who had not shown up, to one of the professor’s unusual seminars and had bitterly regretted going at all. Turing had rescued her when she could find nowhere to sit except for the professor’s scrupulously made bed.

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Alan, I can’t! I mean, what would I have to say to him? I remember him as the most intense man I ever met, and I never really met him, did I? I don’t think he even looked in my direction. He was all Kant and cowboy films, as I remember rightly.”

  “Oh, come on Xanthe, be a sport. You’ve braved scarier things than Professor Wittgenstein before now. I don’t think he liked me much either. I don’t think he forgives people who disagree with him, even in private. It would help to have a more neutral face there. And it would be fun to work together. It’s just a trip to Cambridge, after all. I tell you what – I’ll lend you his book. It seems to me to be complete baloney, and those are the bits I understand. It’ll give you a little background – you don’t have to read it, of course.”

  *

  There was another reason why Xanthe agreed to join Turing on the Cambridge trip. She had an idea that meeting a renowned philosopher, who had famously escaped the Nazis from his native Vienna, might provide her with some material for the New Yorker, if she could think how she might package it. It would impress Bob in their London office, at least.

  But Bob was not impressed.

  “Sorry, honey, Joe’s got that one,” said Bob. It was Bob’s role to administer this distant outpost of the New Yorker empire. She had heard this infuriating sentence over and over again. Joe had got this one and Joe had got that one – he was covering pretty much everything around Europe, and those elements he was not covering seemed to be tackled by the indomitable Mollie Panter-Downes, down in Surrey. There hardly seemed to be a corner of the New Yorker where she could flex her journalistic muscles now that the great Joe Liebling had arrived back from occupied Paris via New York.

  Liebling was lovely. He had a big smile and a big heart. But he was also one of the big beasts in the world of journalism, and he tended to trample the undergrowth around him. Good image, Xanthe said to herself – like a rogue elephant – what a pity she had nowhere to use it.

  She could not help liking him and his large round face and huge round spectacles whenever he dived into the office in search of his expenses, which were prodigious. But even so, she wished she had more space to prove herself and her talent.

  Then, shortly after the trip to Cambridge, Liebling had, in fact, asked for her help. He wanted to write about Colonel Britton, the mysterious figure behind the BBC European Services ‘V for Victory’ campaign, which had begun that spring and really seemed to be blowing sparks from the embers of the defeated peoples of occupied Europe, nudging them into the state of mind that might persuade them to resist.

  “Say, Xanthe?” said Liebling one day when they had coincided in the office.

  Astonished that he even knew her name, she swung round. He seemed to have papers in piles across every working surface.

  “Bob says you might give me support on this Colonel Britton story. Can you see what you can find out about him? What kind of colonel is he? Where did he serve? That kind of thing. Oh, and the most important bit: will he meet me?”

  “Ok, Joe. Leave it with me…”

  It seemed, at first, that the identity and background of Colonel Britton was steeped in even greater secrecy than Enigma. Everyone she asked at the BBC either didn’t know, or clearly did know and was pretending otherwise. But now she was back in touch with the Admiralty directly, she tried asking Fleming for his help.

  Fleming claimed he was powerless but directed her to the Ministry of Economic Warfare at Electra House and gave her a contact name. But even that trail went cold, and she began listening to Colonel Britton’s ‘V Army’ broadcasts late at night on the English language channel of the European Service. He had a suave gravity about him which gave the impression that he had at his disposal a vast army of civilian volunteers, ready to rise up at any moment and carry out some light assassination work. This seemed unlikely.

  “Jeez, you know what,” said Liebling when they next met. “This guy Britton has about the same budget a small American toothpaste manufacturer has for advertising. Yet look what he’s doing!”

  Finally, the call came through to go to Electra House, and Xanthe dutifully made the trip. It paid off. Yes, Liebling could meet the colonel, who would talk to him behind a screen. He could also then talk to the BBC executive in charge, Douglas Ritchie.

  “Well done, you’re my kind of gal,” said Liebling expansively. “Tell him we’ll take him to lunch at the Savoy… You’ll come too, won’t you?”

  *

  There was also something that had been preying on Xanthe’s mind and which she felt she could hardly confide, even in Turing. Twice now, she had been convinced she had seen her friend Hugh Lancing-Price, an RAF officer killed rescuing a child, on the night of the big raid on Westminster back in May. She had seen him only from behind, and each time it was in the muffled crowds around Strand underground station on her way to the New Yorker office via the Central Line. She could not be certain – how could she? Her friend was dead – but she had still double-checked with Hugh’s friend, Tug Roberts, that there had been no unexpected return.

  And how could she be certain anyway, when she had been up in the night as much as she had with Indigo and was exhausted as a result?

  Nurse Agnes very kindly continued to mind the baby during the day when she needed to work in Hut 8 or down in London at the New Yorker. Even with the little work she did, she clearly had privileges as an American in British government service, at least for the time being. But she also knew that Fleming wanted her to maintain her links with the American press, in case they proved a useful cover once again. It was not generosity; it was hard-nosed calculation by the Naval Intelligence Department.

  She had not spelled this out, even to Turing, but she had pretty much convinced herself that she would resign from government service and find some way of going home to her father in Cincinnati. She had been held back from doing so, partly by the sheer luxury and comfort of having Nurse Agnes at hand to advise, by having her friends nearby at Bletchley and partly by her sense that she was – or at least had been – playing a useful role, when so many other young people her age were risking their lives every day. Partly also, she was nervous of irritating the man who had managed her career so far, Lieutenant Commander Fleming at the Admiralty.

  All of which left her even more confused about why she was apparently seeing Hugh. Was it because she had cared about him? Was it because he had looked so like, and seemed so like a more civilised version of Indy’s father, Ralph Lancing-Price, who she had first been sent to watch in Berlin as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune?

  Ralph. Whom she had fallen in love with and who had abandoned her for the Nazis late one night, the evening of Hitler’s last peace offer to Britain in July 1940.

  What had she actually been seeing? It could hardly have been Ralph, who had defected in no ambiguous way and was still, as far as she knew, in Berlin. It was he who had sent her on such a wild goose chase in
volving ciphers, that it had plunged her into the world of Bletchley. Perhaps she should have been grateful to the man for that at least.

  Nor could it have been Hugh she saw, because he was definitely dead, his body in one of those mass graves dug for air-raid victims in the Westminster parks. She was sure that neither of them had any brothers. So it could hardly have been a real person. It must have been her own exhausted mind, unstitching her fatal love for Ralph and her emergent love for Hugh.

  She knew that Fleming concealed a continuing nervousness about the psychological health of agents in the field, and any rumours about her seeing people who were not there might lead to some kind of discharge before she was ready and before she had made any arrangements to sail home. So she kept it to herself and brooded on these disturbing sightings, especially in the dead of night, when she was dragged, bleary-eyed from sleep, to comfort her crying child, rocking him gently and subtly as her mind wandered backwards and forwards over what might have been.

  She dared not wish her affair with Ralph had never happened because that would have meant no Indigo. But she wished she had understood a little more about Hugh’s growing feelings for her, and she wished she had felt able to confide the truth to him. As it was, he had gone to his death without knowing why she held herself back from him – or that her child was also his relation.

  *

  “Hey, you know what?” said Liebling when they met. “I just listened to the V campaign in Serbo-Croat, and our Colonel Britton was called ‘Pukonyik Britonia’. I like that!”

  Liebling was searching for notebooks and hats and spectacles, propelling himself around the room, upsetting books, papers and teacups in his wake.

  “I think I already know the basis of this piece. Imagine thousands of people huddled around secret wireless sets, in places I’ve never been to, listening to the voice of Pukonyik Britonia coming out of the darkness… Good huh?”