by John Gardner
‘And then?’
‘Oh, marching many miles. Camps. Interrogations. More camps. Intensive interrogation, until someone told me I was to be taken to England.’
‘Were you badly treated?’
‘No worse than I would have expected. To be truthful I expected to be shot immediately. Instead, I was fed and given warm clothing. Many of the interrogators were, naturally, hostile. Sometimes there was no food. Sometimes it was hard, but not as hard as I thought it would be.’
They thanked him, saying he might well be recalled later.
Naldo and Arnold handed over the transcripts to Cherub, who nodded, leaving without a word to either of them, the briefcase locked and still chained to his wrist.
‘Cheery little fellow, isn’t he?’ Arnold gave Naldo a wry smile, as though doing his best to repair whatever damage had been done by his confessed intention of passing on the Dollhiem connection to his American colleagues.
‘Life and soul of the party.’ Naldo hesitated. Then – ‘Arnie, I know you’ve got to tell them, but later might be better than sooner. I’ve a job to do for C. Let me tell you about it – two, three days more, eh?’
‘I’ll wait for C’s blessing.’
‘Good.’ If Arnie had wanted cheers and applause, Naldo wasn’t giving any. ‘The enigma of Klaubert,’ the Englishman said. ‘Death on his shoulder and in his pen; a mistress who disappears; a man who might have been sleeping with a daughter of the Resistance; a lover of Mendelssohn; ruthless, but a breaker of laws by listening to the music of a Jew – music that was verboten – and who meets an informer who was part of Romarin.’
‘And drives away, maybe with him, and maybe with the mystery woman as well.’ Arnold spread his hands. ‘Then turns up as a Waffen SS man recruited in Norway. Sounds true to form, but I wonder what happened to Triangle? And the woman? If there ever was a woman.’
‘“A wilderness of monkeys,”’ Naldo quoted.
‘What?’
‘Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice.’
‘You Railtons should have been in the business in Shakespeare’s day.’ Arnold gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder.
Naldo looked serious. ‘We were,’ he said.
They had the use of a car, without driver, for a couple of hours each day, and took turns in going out to DPW-14 to look for a sign that Kruger wanted pulling out – a simple arrangement: a chalk mark on a wall.
There were no signs that Kruger wanted to get out by the time the fourth day arrived, and Naldo was ready for his meeting with Joubert, the police inspector.
He got to the bar where they had arranged to meet at five minutes after the appointed time. Joubert was a tall, thin, sad-looking man. He sat at a corner table with a newspaper laid exactly as their arrangements prescribed. At the moment Naldo arrived, he was balancing a piece of lump sugar on a fork and dribbling water through it into his Pernod.
‘My old friend, how long has it been?’ Naldo spoke the code in French and Joubert stood, letting his fork drop into the yellow cloudy mixture with a clatter.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘You haven’t changed at all. It must be six years – the entire war.’ This last meant everything was clear and there was nobody watching them.
Naldo ordered a Pemod for himself and followed Joubert’s example with the sugar. ‘This is a great treat,’ the policeman said. ‘We now have sugar in quantity. When the Boche was here we had to hoard it – when we got any, which was not often.’
They spoke in French, Naldo rapidly telling Joubert what he required.
‘Yes.’ The inspector looked interested. ‘Yes, we found a few bits and pieces in the offices when we took over again. The entire place is to be renovated. You speak French with no English accent – more like someone from Paris. It’s good.’
‘I had good teachers.’
‘I think you could pass for someone official – a civil engineer, come to survey the building. But the timing must be correct. If you come right at five minutes past one tomorrow afternoon, I shall be there, and the more senior officers will be away. But it gives you half an hour, no more. Can you do that?’
Naldo nodded, and they discussed the minutiae, taking their time. At the end the Frenchman left first. ‘Give my regards to your Chief,’ he said, as though his relationship with C went back a long way – which it could well have done.
The following morning Naldo said he had things to do, would Arnie check DPW-14 for any signals? Arnold asked no questions.
At noon Naldo went looking around the shops that sold old remnants left by families who had disappeared, or worse. In France you could buy a lot of second-hand goods in 1946.
Within half an hour he found the right thing – a very large, battered, and scuffed leather suitcase. At five past one he arrived at the Prefecture in the Rue de Bourgogne. A sergeant was at the desk, a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth.
‘Yes?’ The sergeant did not sound friendly.
Naldo explained that he was the civil engineer from Paris. ‘A preliminary survey,’ he said as though that explained it all.
‘I know nothing about surveys.’ The sergeant eyed Naldo and the case which he carried as though it weighed a ton.
‘I have had correspondence with an inspecto…’ Naldo carefully put down the case and took out a notebook, licking his finger and turning the pages briskly. ‘An Inspector Joubert.’
‘Then you’re in luck, he’s the only officer here.’ The sergeant cranked a large, old-fashioned telephone and got through to Joubert, who appeared in the entrance hall a minute or so later. Police in uniform came in and out – one with a suspect. Nobody paid any attention to Naldo, who greeted Joubert as a stranger, explaining his business.
Joubert looked at his watch. ‘Paris did not make it clear you were coming today.’ He spoke in a brusque manner as though there was no time for people from Paris.
‘My boss comes next week,’ Naldo explained. ‘I need only a few minutes. I have to check the roof area.’
‘Nobody’s been up there for years,’ the sergeant muttered. ‘There’s a trapdoor on the fourth floor. I don’t think they bothered when we took over again. You’ll probably find skeletons, or SS officers hiding up there.’ He cackled as though this was a great joke.
‘I’ll have to risk it. You have a ladder?’
Joubert ordered the sergeant to see that a ladder was brought up to the fourth floor, then led the way, Naldo following, heaving the case as though it was almost too much for him.
A gendarme brought an old wooden ladder and propped it in the space between wall and trapdoor. Then Joubert sent him away. ‘You’ve got about fifteen minutes,’ he said softly. ‘No longer. I must get this ladder returned before anyone comes back.’
Naldo nodded, asking him to steady the ladder for him. At the top the trapdoor was easily moved, as though it had been in regular use.
He looked down at Joubert and asked him to pass up the suitcase. ‘It’s light. Nothing in it.’
He pushed the suitcase up through the trap, slid a small flashlight from his pocket, and heaved himself into the low area under the roof of the building. The first thing he saw was a switch. He threw it, and three bulbs, hanging shadeless from the rafters, came on. Looking around, Naldo found he was in an Aladdin’s cave. It took him ten minutes to load up the suitcase and another five to pass it down to Joubert, who had become edgy. Now the suitcase was very heavy.
As they went down the stairs again, Naldo talked loudly, saying it looked in reasonable condition up under the roof, and that he would submit his report. The real survey would be done during the following week – as Joubert had told him it would be, the day before in the bar.
It took Naldo almost an hour to get back to the Tower of Pisa.
Arnold sat in the main room with young Kruger.
‘Missed him,’ Kruger offered. ‘The bird has flying.’
‘Has flown,’ Arnold corrected.
‘Last night I saw him. Today, gone.’
> Naldo dumped the case on the floor. ‘Is it Klaubert?’
‘No question. Like there’s no question he’s gone, and no question about where he’s gone. We missed him by a week. The “Norwegian” got his wish. They sent him to a camp in the Eastern Zone – the Russian Zone. Berlin.’ Kruger smiled and laughed. ‘They were really thinking the Russians would give him a very bad time of it. It was done with great malicious.’
‘Malice, Herb.’
‘Yes, done with great malice. They say that now he will be dead. Very slowly.’
‘I doubt it.’ Naldo sprang the locks on the case. Inside was a Paraset transmitter, used by SOE ‘pianists.’ ‘It was in the loft at what used to be SS headquarters,’ he explained. ‘And the “one-time pads,” giving him and his “home” operator a different cipher for each day. Descartes’ pads, I believe.’
‘The Orléans Russians?’ Arnie asked, expecting no answer. Then – ‘There’s only one thing to do.’
‘Yes.’ Naldo was a long way ahead of him. ‘Herbie, how would you like a trip into the East? Into the Russian Zone – Berlin?’
‘Depends on what I have to do.’
‘C will tell us and we’ll tell you.’
Kruger nodded his big head like a young Buddha. ‘Okay by me if the Chief says I go.’
‘Oh, he’ll tell you to go.’ Naldo looked hard at Arnie, who also nodded and said, ‘We can only hope for a quick result.’
But there was no quick result.
C closed down Symphony a few days after the team got back into London – on the day following a private interview with Naldo, who told him of Arnold Farthing’s determination to report the Dollhiem business to his superiors.
‘For the time being, Naldo, Symphony’s finished – as far as young Farthing’s concerned anyway.’ He gave Naldo a slow wink. ‘Let the Yanks do some of our work for us, eh?’
Naldo opened his mouth to speak, but C continued – ‘You and Kruger’ll carry on. If we need Arnold again I can tug at the odd string. In the meantime we brief the Kruger boy in a couple of days. He can be in the Eastern Zone next week. Then all we can hope for is that he’ll hit his mark with some speed.’
But Kruger’s work in the Russian Zone took twelve months before it bore any fruit, and by that time many things had changed – for instance, the CIA was born, out of the CIG, by the OSS.
As was the reorganisation of what was to become the KGB, out of blood, by the NKVD.
Part Two
The German Houses
Chapter Eighteen
By the summer of 1947 Arnold Farthing was well established as part of the embryo Central Intelligence Agency, based at that time in a confusion of offices scattered across Washington, D.C. The word ‘Central’ was almost a joke with some operatives of the Agency, because people had trouble finding out who occupied which office, and where.
Arnie boasted a room only slightly larger than a walk-in closet, situated within one of the old prefabricated huts which had stood throughout the war near the Reflecting Pool and alongside the Lincoln Memorial. The view from the window was spectacular – part of the pool and the whole stone finger of the Washington Monument – but this did nothing to relieve Arnie’s irritated feeling that his time was being wasted.
Technically Arnie was a field agent. Yet all he had done so far was sit in the little office studying confidential documents, or walk the streets and parks of Washington, being put through his paces by Roger Fry, the agent who had wooed him in Munich and was now his case officer, and who insisted on practising all the arcane routines of tradecraft by staging meetings, running little surveillance operations, and acting out scenarios similar to the ones they had used in training during the war.
It was early June before Arnie found himself in tenuous touch with Symphony again, and almost July before he actually got back into the field.
For Arnie, the hanging around was more than normally frustrating, for he had been welcomed into the Agency with an open-armed, back-slapping show of pleasure and, in an attempt to cooperate, he had talked a great deal about Nathaniel Dollhiem and his suspicious part in the Romarin – and Tarot – business.
First he spoke, long and openly, to Fry; then to the tall, thin, academic-looking man who ran Counterintelligence. Together, the three of them went through the evidence – first in general, then later in great detail.
‘And how did you come by all this interesting information, Arnie?’ the head of Counterintelligence asked him.
‘Family connections, mainly.’ Arnold explained his links with the Railtons and hinted that it had been ‘hard intelligence talk’ within the Railton family.
James Xavier Fishman, head of Counterintelligence, nodded, giving him a sidelong look indicating he did not believe a word of it. ‘You picked it up when we loaned you to the Brits, didn’t you, Arnold?’ It did not even sound like a question; more a statement of fact. ‘There was an investigation into the Romarin debacle, wasn’t there? You saw or heard it all, then some. Am I right, Arnold?’
Farthing heaved a sigh and nodded quickly, unwilling to tell too much.
‘That wasn’t hard, was it?’ Fishman smiled. ‘No need to be shy. We appreciate your loyalty, particularly family loyalty. But we have to be sure of our ground.’
Arnold nodded again, then began to talk. Altogether he thought he had probably helped them a great deal. Nat Dollhiem had been known to a lot of people in the old OSS ranks. Now, through Fishman, some of those people had verbal evidence that he was probably a Communist, and worse – he was a Communist who was somehow mixed up with a particularly brutal Nazi war criminal. All this added up to a great contradiction, but the head of Counterintelligence was used to such things in the labyrinth of mirrors that was his work. Somewhere, Arnie figured, there were people out tracing Nat Dollhiem’s movements from the Tarot connection to Orléans and onward. They might even be looking for Dollhiem himself.
On the first Friday in June, Fry sent a coded message by courier to Arnold Farthing’s little office. They would meet, that afternoon, at a prearranged spot – in East Potomac Park, near the Jefferson Memorial.
While Arnold was built like a football player, with a nose to match and a walk which could sometimes be called aggressive, Roger Fry was of a very different build: slim and lithe, with a manner that made you think of an unleashed charge of electricity. He was a good three inches shorter than Arnold, and favoured a style of clothing which marked him as a dandy. He had long discarded the steel-rimmed spectacles sported in Germany, and this year he had taken to wearing colourful vests, even in the hottest weather. He was wearing a bright yellow one with brass buttons that afternoon as he waited in the park, one hand behind him, the fist clenched hard against the small of his back – the body language which told Arnold that he could be approached safely.
Arnie slid a hand into his right jacket pocket: his sign that he was not being followed.
‘Let’s walk,’ Fry said after they had gone through the formality of shaking hands – two friends bumping into one another by accident. Roger Fry set great store by these little rituals and, to tell the truth, Farthing was slightly in awe of him.
Though Fry was Farthing’s senior by only three years, that trio of summers was important in the Agency’s pecking order. Roger Fry was second-in-command within CA, which made him one of the ‘Knights Templar,’ as the top Agency brass were know. Most the Knights Templar were also the ‘Founding Fathers.’ The Agency was already working hard to build its own mystique.
Fry had a leathery face with a small white scar running down his right cheek and another at the base of his chin, tracing down the throat, legacies of close combat while with a ‘Jedburgh’ team of OSS guerrillas in Nazi-occupied Norway. His hair was short, brown, and curly close to the scalp, giving him an odd, womanish appearance from the back, but there was nothing feminine about him, as his current girlfriend – assistant to a high-powered legal adviser at State – could attest.
Now, as they walked along the p
ath in the heat of the afternoon, Fry looked up at Farthing with cold grey eyes. ‘Jim Fishman’s run friend Dollhiem to earth,’ he said quietly.
‘What? Where?’
‘Where do you look for an ear of corn, Arn? He’s here.’
‘In Washington?’
‘In Washington and in the Agency, both.’ Fry stopped talking as they passed some kids flying a kite.
‘But he was reported missing – ’
‘Wrong.’ Fry’s voice was dry, as though he was coming down with a throat infection, another permanent reminder of his wartime throat injuries.
‘Everyone assumed he was missing.’ Fry spoke of Dollhiem again. ‘Fishman’s run his eyes over the documents. Dollhiem’s got a good story, Arnie. No wonder the politicians and the FBI have a beef about our security. The old OSS security was bad enough, and we’ve inherited it. Jim Fishman’s doing a war dance; thinks he can shoot Dollhiem’s story full of holes. He’s convinced the guy’s Red as they come; that he’s a penetration agent.’
‘The story?’ Arnold asked. He realised that he was sweating heavily in the heat. Fry, complete with vest, appeared cool and unruffled.
‘He was liberated by the Russians, would you believe? Told all about Romarin and how he walked away from Tarot. Covered himself nicely – said he’d considered staying on at St Benoît, then changed his mind.’
Apparently Dollhiem claimed that he had worries about the security within Tarot – also wanted to go it alone, saying he mistrusted Tert Newton. He walked off and was captured by the Germans within two days. In the report he said that he had expected to be shot, but they thought he was worth interrogating when they looked at his dog tags.
‘Should have been shot.’ Fry cleared his throat. ‘He was in civilian clothes. But they moved him East. Liberated in March ’45 by the advancing Russians, who sent him back. If he is doubling, the cover’s good. Medical reports show he was in a bad way. They broke his fingers during the interrogation, and his body was well bruised, under-nourished, cracked ribs, the usual kind of thing. He was flown to Frankfurt, then home – repatriated, debriefed, and released from the Service. In January – this year – Administration recruited him again. He’s been working in Special Support, on the German Desk, since then. Got a neat little house near Mount Vernon Square. Even brought his wife here. Nat Dollhiem’s a little hero.’