by Gavin Lyall
The Conduct of Major Maxim
Gavin Lyall
Reviewed by Hilary Williamson
I've enjoyed all of Gavin Lyall's standalone thrillers – stories like Midnight Plus One, The Most Dangerous Game, and The Wrong Side of the Sky – but especially like his Major Maxim series. Ex-SAS Harry Maxim, the very model of a modern military gentleman, is straight as an arrow, which does not serve him well when involved with politicians and spies – which he is all too often. He gets into very serious trouble in every episode, but somehow always comes through with his integrity intact.
Harry's wife Jenny died in a bombed plane and his parents help him raise his son Chris – he's continually guilt-ridden when his job prevents him from spending time with his son. At this point in the series, Harry Maxim is seconded to 10 Downing Street, working for the lazy but very wily George Harbinger, and often in liaison (and in conflict) with the devious, somewhat amoral, Security Service agent Agnes Algar – of course, their prickly relationship slowly and steadily develops into something stronger, to the initial dismay of both parties.
This story starts with analysts monitoring East German news and speculating about a rising political star named Gustav Eismark. We see an old woman, a talented but damaged musician, who lives in the country and teaches piano. Then Harry meets an old army friend who asks for his help for a deserter, Ron Blagg, who got involved in a special op on the request of a woman, Mrs. Howard, he believed was a British agent. Two people died in Germany, Blagg fled, and now he wants in from the cold. Harry tries to help him. Agnes is called to a high level meeting 'To consider the conduct of Major H. R. Maxim'. His digging into Blagg's story has 'started a constitutional crisis'.
The plot quickly thickens, and the search is on for information obtained by the now dead Mrs. Howard. Harry heads to Germany, and then works under the radar, helped by Agnes. When Harry tells Agnes the secret that Eismark had been trying so hard to hide, she replies 'God Almighty' to which his answer is, 'He's seen worse in His time.' If you haven't met Major Maxim yet, then you really should start reading this thrilling military/spy series.
Gavin Lyall
The Conduct of Major Maxim
Chapter 1
High over London, a single aircraft trail was just beginning to glow like a hot wire against the steel-blue sky, picking up the sunlight that was still below the horizon to the ground. A lone cyclist in a track suit rushed down Kingsway at a speed impossible at any other time of day. An electric milk float whined around Aldwych and a baker's van was delivering French loaves, carried like big bundles of orange firewood, to the Waldorf Hotel. But most of the city was still asleep, its streets empty and at peace.
High up in Bush House, two men and a girl sat reading the newsflashes on a television screen, calling up fresh ones by tapping instructions on a computer keyboard. The shimmering green printout made the news seem unreal, like stock market prices, and they longed to hear the original broadcasts that the BBC monitors at Caversham Park had picked out of the air. Six hundred miles away, where it was already full day, an army was out in the streets of East Berlin.
The girl asked: "Why do they always use tanks?" She spoke German with the stiff Hanseatic accent.
"Just a reminder. " The older of the two men wore a shabby but once-expensive leather jacket and had a neat dark beard.
"But they aren't even practical," the girl persisted. "You can't send a tank into a building. They could do it all just with their soldiers. This way, tomorrow there'll be pictures of tanks in the Unter den Linden all over the world. It's become aclichéof Russian occupation, and it's so unsubtle. "
"Ivan isn't always trying to be subtle." His voice was unmistakably Bavarian and he didn't do much actual broadcasting himself. Mostly he built up analyses for the Political Unit and the weekly'Aspekte'round-up of East German affairs. "They don't mind people seeing a bit of armour plate every generation or so. I wonder if they'll call it an attempted Faschisischter Putsch like they did in 1953."
"A railway strike?" The girl stared at him, disbelieving.
"The Red Army takes railways seriously. No railways, then no petrol, no food, no bullets."
The second man was making quick notes. An announcer-translator, he would be reading the first of the BBC's German Language Service newscasts in three-quarters of an hour. He wasn't allowed to write it himself, just translate what the Central Newsroom sent up, and perhaps add a few non-controversial details – if he had them. He wasn't quite thirty and dressed neatly, by BBC standards.
"Heinz Manger?" he said suddenly. "As the new General Secretary? They can't be serious. I'd heard he'd got cancer."
"A caretaker, perhaps," the analyst said. "While they catch their breath and work out a real successor. If he's really dying, so much the easier when it comes to make a change." He leant forward as the story rippled across the screen. "Dear God, they've had a real harvest. "
In all, six names had been dropped from the ten-man Secretariat, including the old General Secretary, Spiesshofer. All the others had some connection with railways or the cities where the strikes had been most complete. Only four men had been raised from the Politbureau to fill the empty seats. The A-T man started searching desperately for the office copy of Who's Who In Eastern Europe.
"Gustav Eismark,"the girl read. "Do we know him?"
The analyst nodded thoughtfully. "Odd one, that. You might even say he's a bit of a liberal – in their terms. He was in shipping; he represented Rostock at one time."
"Are you sure of that?" the A-T man called, still unable to find the Who's Who.
"Oh yes. He went to Moscow after the war, then helped rebuild the Rostock shipyards. Then he dropped out of sight for a while." He tried to recall why but couldn't. "Then he started a comeback after the '62 economic shakeup."
"Who's in his tail?" the girl asked. No Communist politician – perhaps no politician anywhere – gets far without a 'tail' of well-placed friends and relatives, they pushing him ever upwards and automatically being pulled up after him.
"I don't know, except that his son's something in State Security. It's nice to have that in the family." A friendly link with the SSD was as vital as a Party card. "And the younger scientists and engineers like him, he talks their language. Probably he's been put up there to keep them happy… Ivan knows you can't do it all with tanks; you need the sugar-bread as well as the whip. And he's younger than most of them… it'll be interesting to see what happens at the Party Congress, probably not this year, but…" He was already working on his 'think-piece' for later in the week.
"I can't use speculation!" snapped the A-T man, angry at the mess in the office.
The teletype rattled and the analyst and the girl walked across to read what the authorised version was to be.
Russian tanks and troops moved early this morning to break the strike that has paralysed the East German railway system for the past two days. Our correspondent in Berlin reports that there has been some shooting, and casualties are…
"I still don't see why they use tanks," the girl said stubbornly.
"It was his sister," the analyst suddenly remembered. "It was something to do with his sister…"
"And why does it always have to be at dawn?"
"Just an old army custom."
At a quarter past five the sun was a lemon disc hanging low in the faint mist over the dale. On the far side, the gentle hills were a sequence of flat shapes fading paler and paler into the distance. It was just like the Chinese watercolour her grandmother kept in the hall at Herzgerode.
Last night, the weather forecast had been thundery showers; it was pleasant when they got the bad news wrong as well.
At that time of day, she was the only thing
alive, before the birds, before the roaring aeroplanes. She was the only thing that moved, even if every movement hurt in some way. She loved the loneliness of the dawn; the one thing better was sleep, and she longed for sleep from the moment she woke, but lying there pretending to sleep was the worst of all. Then her body, so difficult to make move, moved by itself in little twitches and jerks, as if it were trying to escape from her. So she had to get up and shuffle through to the little music room, struggling for control of the body that seemed to hate her as much as she hated it. Now she even bathed in the dark so as not to see who she was.
She swallowed one of the yellow tablets that made her dizzy and sent a buzzing in her ears, then two Disprin, turned on the radio and carefully filled the electric kettle. She listened vaguely to a review of new classical records, wondering with a flash of real bitternesswhy they let that Italian moron loose on Debussy, and mixed a mug of black tea flavoured with lemon juice from a plastic squeezer. There was a real lemon in the cupboard but it was too early for her to trust her hands with a knife. She put the rest of the hot water into a plastic bowl and cooled it from the tap until she could sit there soaking her hand in it.
Who was coming today? Thursday – that meant the younger Allison girl and after her the one who had cancelled on Tuesday because she had to go to the dentist in Pateley Bridge. Gillian something. That one could be good, if she kept at it. She at least had the advantage of parents who were totally ignorant of music, even the piano. When parents became convinced they had bred a genius, they were already halfway to turning the poor child into a nervous ruin.
Eismark, the radio said. Gustav Eismark. Or had it? She stood up suddenly and the first little twist of vertigo hit her and she clutched back at the table, spilling the bowl across the linoleum. But that was why it was plastic; any other she would have broken a hundred times over.
Had it said Eismark? Of course, now with the growing day, reception was getting patchy. She didn't know why; how did radio waves (whateverthey were) know the difference between light and dark? She left the bowl and water and sat down to listen very carefully to the crackling, wavery voice.
When the news bulletin had finished, she went back and refilled the kettle, picked up the bowl, and started to soak her hand again. She felt frightened but not sure why; perhaps it was just being reminded of the wide uncaring world beyondthe dale. Should she try and speak with Leni? She didn't even know if Leni was still alive; she had been meaning to get in touch for so long, and always putting it off. But maybe this time…
The water cooled. She stood up and walked carefully to the old upright piano by the window. Some of the feeling had come back into her hand, along with the tingling, but never the old flexibility and certainty. She stared at the flat muscles, waggling her fingers and willing them to belong to a 25-year-old girl again, and promising herself one – only one – glass of brandy before the first pupil arrived, and then only after she had done her own practice.
What had she set them to learn for this time? It would have been something from Kinderszenen; nowadays it almost always was. You came back to Schumann as you came back to the scenes of your own childhood that were like unbreakable toys, always bright and unchipped when the rest of your life had worn vague in the memory.
She sat down, and instead of the scales, her hands fumbled into the gentle nursery notes of Träumerei. The first aeroplane of the day rushed past up the valley, ripping up the dreaming and the loneliness with its crackling thunder.
Chapter 2
With a proper sense of His responsibilities, God had provided a vivid blue-and-white sky that quite obviously wasn't going to leak a single drop of rain on the crisp rows of Volvos, BMWs and Rovers parked around the playing-field in the valley. After all, as the vicar had argued in his prayers the previous Sunday, if thefêtewent well they should not only be able to pay off the final cost of re-roofing the vicarage, but have something left over to relieve famine in East Africa. It was the best bargain he had been able to offer God in months.
Harry Maxim knew nothing about the vicarage roof and not much more about starvation in East Africa, but he was reasonably familiar with the ceremony of the English county turning out in its best weekend clothes to buy cucumber sandwiches for a Good Cause. He drifted down the avenues of gossip between the stalls and marquees, a slim man in his middle thirties with shortish fair hair and a concave face that had hard lines running down around the hopeful smile that he had decided was the proper expression for the occasion.
To the experienced military eye – and there are usually plenty of those, both male and female, at a Kent villagefête- he didn't look particularly like an Army major, but nor did he look not like one. If they thought about it at all, theyjust concluded that, with his loose-cut olive blazer, he couldn't belong to one of the Very Best regiments and wondered who had invited him. It didn't occur to them – and why should it? – that if you sometimes have to wear a shoulder holster, loose jackets are very useful.
However, that afternoon Maxim was quite unarmed. He bought himself a cup of tea and miniature sausage roll, then thumbed through a stack of old 78 records, hoping for a black Brunswick label that could be an early Duke Ellington. He hadjust given up hope when the loudspeaker said somethingjovial about seeing the future defence of the country was in good hands and there was a volley of shots from the cricket pavilion. Maxim joined the tide as it flowed that way.
Two sections of Cadet Force schoolboys with long hair straggling from under their berets were attacking the pavilion across the cricket field; the actual wicket was roped off so that the attack had to split unrealistically around it. They moved in the classic pairs, one firing while the other lumbered forward in a zigzag run-at least when they remembered the boy sergeant's constant exhortation to: "Keep one foot on the ground!" He was aged about sixteen, with a dark angry face and a uniform that fitted.
Then somebody tried to throw a smoke candle while lying down, and sent it wild. Orange smoke billowed up from the bald but still sacred turf of the roped-off wicket and a unanimous gasp of horror came from all round the field. The battle stopped dead.
The boy sergeant stepped over the rope, kicked the candle clear and stepped back looking angrier than ever. "You stupid cunts," he raged in a penetrating undertone, "just lying there like stuffed pricks…"
"Roger,"said a lady in a wide hat just in front of Maxim, "did that boy say what Ithought he said?"
"Probably didn't know what it meant," grunted Roger, who had cropped grey hair and a deep tan. Then he caught Maxim's glance and smiled. "But he'll need to get his biology sorted out before he's much older."
"Roger,"Mrs Roger said.
The attack began again. The light machine-gun section waved a rattle from the flank, the pavilion fell to a frontal assault and two prisoners were roughed up with obvious sincerity. The loudspeaker congratulated the professionalism of the 'young warriors', the crowd clapped and wandered away, and the boy sergeant went on looking angry as he herded the platoon across toa Land-Roverparked at the corner of the field.
There, an adult sergeant in a Paratroop beret took over andinsisted on all the rifles being properly cleaned and all the unfired blanks handed in, including the ones that had been 'forgotten' so that they could be experimentally toasted on a kitchen stove.
Maxim hung back until the last cadet had scurried off to the tea tent, then the sergeant swung round with a sharp salute and a broad grin.
"Good afternoon, sir. Glad you could make it." He clinked the brass cartridges and shook his head, still grinning. "They think you were born yesterday. They never think you might have been a cadet yourself. "
They shook hands. "Jim, I didn't expect to find you cradle-snatching."
"Just part-time I'm working for my father-m-law. He's got the garage over on the main road." Jim Caswell nodded at the steep green slope behind the church "Goodjob?"
"It could be. Mostly desk work, but…" He was a solid-chested man, a little shorter and younger than Maxim,
but with the ageless middle-aged look that long-serving sergeants acquire. Caswell would be serving still but for a permanently stiff left arm that came from drivinga Land-Roverover a Claymore mine while 'advising' on anti-guerilla tactics in Abu Dhabi. The Army would have kept him on – but no longer with a Paratroop cap-badge.
"You seem to be getting across the language all right," Maxim commented.
Caswell chuckled and rubbed his moustache-a straight bar of dark hair-with his right wrist His left hand wouldn't reach that far. "That lad spent a week outm Germany with the Woofers, spent twenty quid of his own money and his folks don't have that much at all. He's all right I think we could get him." Maxim had guessed that the boy had picked up his style from real soldiers, but not that Caswell would be taking the cadets so seriously-or still calling the Army 'we'.
Alone in the corner of the field, they leant against the warm metal of the Land-Rover Caswell half-offered a packet of cigarettes. "You've still given up, have you'"
"I still dream about it."
"I've heard that. Funny." He took one himself and lit it deftly, but all one-handed "Your boy, young Chris, he's getting on okay7"
"Yes. He stays with my parents downm Littlehampton, he goes to school there. It would be impossible, just me and him in London…"
"Oh yes Nice lad "
"I think so."
The small talk petered out and Maxim braced himself for whatever the afternoon was really to be about.
"Did you know a Corporal Blagg, Ron Blagg7" Caswell asked carefully "He did a tour in Sass. I had him in Armagh. He was good with machinery, and pistols. Bit of a boxer, too, or had been."
Maxim and Caswell themselves had met on toursmthe Special Air Service. But Blagg?… You didn't forget people you'd worked with in the SAS, butit was scattered all over the world in handfuls. "Didn't know him."