by John Gardner
‘And nobody thought to look under our noses?’ Farthing’s brow wrinkled, his eyes narrowing with anxiety.
‘Nobody even tried to get corroboration. Nat’s story is his own. No witnesses, no backup. They just accepted it, in Frankfurt and then here. He looked as if he’d been through hell and back, that was enough. No tears, no fuss, hooray for us.’
‘What do we do, sweat him?’
‘No, we watch him. Fishman’s had him corralled, so he sees nothing sensitive. But we watch him for possible contacts. That’s going to be your job. Quiet surveillance. I’ll point you and you do a report by the end of the month – habits, friends, chinks in the armour, all that stuff. He mustn’t be frightened off. If he is what Fishman thinks, then it could be years before we can pin him down. There’ll be a good safe team on him once you’ve done your report.’
‘Can I see his file?’
‘It’ll be with you tomorrow.’
‘What about the Brits?’
‘What about the Brits? No cause to tell them anything. If he is a “True Bill,” as the Brits would say, we don’t want them screaming damnation or knowing that our security’s screwed up.’
Arnie nodded sadly. There were many things he did not like about the business. In the far reaches of his mind he had already decided they should lift Dollhiem as soon as possible: lift him and sweat him. To hell with trying to bait a trap for some Russian controller.
He was even more certain on the following day, after reading the heavily restricted file on Dollhiem – identified, on paper, only by the cryptonym Screwtape. The story seemed watertight, even down to naming the various German units that picked him up and passed him on; identifying his interrogators; detailing the questions they put to him – mainly concerning SOE and OSS operations in train following the D-Day invasion; the types and strengths of units, and their orders regarding various Resistance groups.
His description of SS and Gestapo methods was vivid, but without actually saying it, Nat Dollhiem managed to convey that he had withstood the inquisitions and given nothing away. Certainly the medical evidence from those who treated him in Frankfurt was beyond doubt, but Arnie was intrigued to note that while he could give clear evidence of his captors, he made no mention of his saviours apart from the fact that they were Russian. No units, no names, nothing that could lead back in that direction.
At the end of the file he detected James Fishman’s most recent work, a fast but profound dig into the subject’s pre-OSS days. The head of Counterintelligence had turned over several stones, including the fact that Dollhiem had been a card-carrying member of the Communist Party during his last years at UCLA, and still apparently kept in touch with friends from those days.
So, Arnold thought, he was not going into the jungle blind. People from Counterintelligence had already been there before him: mail read before delivery, maybe they had even managed to listen in on his telephone conversations – after all, the technicians had come up with a number of small listening devices in the last few years.
Fry marked Dollhiem for Arnold – the two of them loitering near a bus stop as the stocky little man came out of his office on 6th Street. Naturally he now looked considerably older than the photograph. The face was puffy, while folds of flesh bagged under his eyes, and when he unbuttoned his jacked his gut hung over his belt in a sagging pot. Nobody would have taken Nat Dollhiem for an Office of Strategic Services hero. An out-of-town hick lawyer, possibly. He had a pasty dullness about his face, while the careless manner he appeared to adopt fingered him as a country boy trapped in error by a relentless city.
Dollhiem did not appear to use a car – cabs, buses, the railroad, but more often his feet, so Arnold Farthing found himself using street surveillance techniques. Within two weeks Arnie Farthing knew the strange outward pattern of the man’s life. Dollhiem with his desk job at Special Support was like any ordinary government employee: he worked regular hours; left home the same time each morning, and returned at the same time most nights. But outside that working routine, the man observed what they called field rules.
Arnie was 99 percent certain that Nat Dollhiem had no idea that he was under surveillance, yet he behaved like someone who could well be the subject of scrutiny. Over the two-week period, Arnold established that he went out, after working hours or on weekends, five times a week —on Saturday and Sunday with his wife, and alone for three evenings during the week. Tuesdays, between eight and ten, he would visit the bar of the fashionable Shoreham Hotel, along Rock Creek Park. Thursdays he dined at a small French restaurant in Georgetown – arriving at seven-thirty and leaving around ten. Friday nights he haunted a bar in the downtown shopping area, usually leaving late. He was mean with tips, as well as in using public transport, and he drank the cheapest beer, sometimes laced with raspberry juice. ‘That’s an old Berlin concoction,’ Fishman said when reading the report. ‘Nobody drinks it nowadays.’
The pattern was there, but Dollhiem took immense pains to evade anyone likely to follow him. Arnold, equipped as he was with a CIA cab always near at hand, was able to keep up with his subject. But Dollhiem would play all the tricks, sometimes on foot, as often as not by cab, changing cabs three times or more for a relatively short journey; doubling back; entering a bar or restaurant, then leaving within five or ten minutes; changing his mind about which direction he wished to go. These rituals were always different, using an infinite variety of imaginative devices, yet he always ended up in the same places, on the same evenings, at the same time.
In short, as Arnold wrote in his report, Screwtape behaves like an agent in place; we can only assume that is exactly what he is. There were no signs that he spotted me, but all the hallmarks are of a man taking great care.
Fry grunted at the report and said, ‘Old habits die hard.’
‘Not the way this joker goes about it.’ Arnold had peppered his paper with hints that Dollhiem should be given an enema straight away – cleaned out with a short sharp shock. He was quite prepared to join the inquisition and put certain half-sure facts to the man – that he had been in constant touch with Klaubert in Orléans after Tarot had been blown; that he had driven Klaubert away on the day the SS man had left for the last time. He would even lie and say there was indisputable evidence in London.
Farthing said all this aloud to James Fishman and Roger Fry during the following week.
‘You have nothing that’ll really stick.’ Fishman drew in on a cigarette.
‘If we go to the Brits we can stick it on him.’ Arnold was angry and out for blood. ‘They have at least one man – Buelow – who’s willing to identify our subject as an informer who visited SS HQ in Orléans many times after the fall of Tarot. I think he’ll also finger him as Klaubert’s driver when he left.’
Fishman gave a wry smile. ‘And you think we’ll get a confession out of him? If he’s the man I think he is, then it’ll take more than a former Nazi officer’s word to make him sing. This guy’s got a lot of guts. If your theory, which is probably the Brits’ theory as well, is correct, we’re dealing with one hell of a tough cookie. Dollhiem’s a man who allowed himself to be starved, beaten, have his ribs cracked and his fingers broken to establish bona fides and get back to America and into the Agency. You think he’s just going to do an about-face when we hit him with what we’ve got? Or what you say we can get, Arnie.’
‘But we might have to wait for years – ’
‘So?’ Roger Fry’s voice sounded more arid than ever. Fishman raised a hand in a gesture of protest. ‘You say there were no contacts while you watched him, Arnie?’
‘None. I’m sorry, I guess I’m bushed after the past two weeks.’
‘Sure.’ Fishman nodded. ‘We’ve got a twenty-four-hour surveillance on him now, and to tell you the truth, those teams were filling in for you when you went off at night. Some of them even worked with you, watching your back. They tell me there have been several possibilities of contact.’
‘When? Not while I was on station.
’
‘Yes. The same cab picked him up twice in your two weeks. You missed that, Arnie. There was also a girl he talked with at the Shoreham. Two minutes thirty-two seconds, my guys logged it. Nothing was passed, but they spoke. You came in a minute later – quite rightly giving him a chance to get settled. There’ll be someone on his neck the whole time now.’
‘Take a couple of days’ rest, Arn.’ Fry took on a protective tone. ‘I’ll sign you out of the office and call you when we need you back.’
Farthing’s irritation was worse now that Fishman had caught him out in some sloppy surveillance. He left with a nod and a grunt, driving back to the little house in Georgetown that his family had owned for almost a century and passed on to him for use now that he was in Washington.
It was comfortable but lonely. He thought of Naldo in London with his Barbara, realising he was jealous – not specifically of Naldo and Barbara, but of all lovers, irrespective of age or status. His last affair had been in London, before the D-Day invasion. She had been a Brit, a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer. It had been a roaring, passionate business which started over a weekend and went on until he left London after the last German offensive – the Battle of the Bulge. Weekends, telephone calls, letters, one whole seven-day leave together. Then just the occasional letter. They had not broken it off in any formal sense, but events overtook them, severing whatever had held them together. Now, as he paced his cosy living room, Arnold had to think hard to remember her name, and in the remembering of it – Faith Kirk – he realised that if you had to do that after a year or so, there could not have been much in it after all.
Drunk with fatigue, he went up to bed and dropped so deeply into sleep that when the telephone rang he knew it had been calling to him for a long time.
Fry’s dusty voice came into his ear. ‘Six o’clock at the Statler,’ Fry said.
Arnold nodded and almost replaced the receiver before he realised he had not even acknowledged. ‘I’ll be there,’ he grunted. Six o’clock at the Statler really meant three o’clock at a chosen point on the old promenade along the Potomac in southwest Washington. His watch told him it was already one-thirty. Outside, the sun shone and all was well with the world.
Fry had changed his vest. This one was light blue and matched his tie. ‘The Brits want you again,’ he said as they stood looking out over the river.
‘Who exactly?’
‘Their Chief of Service – C.’
‘And do I go?’
‘You go for us, Arnie. Jim Fishman and the Director want to brief you, and I’ll be handling things if and when you need me.’
‘Will they know I’m there in a covert capacity?’
Fry paused. ‘We’ll let them come to their own conclusions. You leave tomorrow and we start the briefings at six tonight.’
‘Can I refuse?’
‘On what grounds?’ Fry sounded startled.
‘On the grounds that I’m still damned tired.’ Arnie laughed. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll go on any terms.’
‘Want to nail Screwtape, huh?’
‘Yes, but there’s a girl I know in England, name of Faith Kirk.’ Arnie smiled, and the long-forgotten lines of a poem – he thought it was Tennyson – came into his head –
The shackles of an old love straiten’d him,
His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.
Chapter Nineteen
Arnold Farthing lifted the hideous pink imitation marble clock from the mantelpiece, cocked an eyebrow, and replaced the chunky elaborate timepiece dead centre, under the bevelled-edged pink-tinted mirror. ‘The old place hasn’t changed one bit.’ He turned to Naldo, who nodded.
‘So what brings us together?’ Arnold was tired from the flight, in TWA’s noisy, bumpy, and brand-new Lockheed Constellation. It had taken only sixteen hours from New York.
Naldo had met him and driven around for an hour before bringing him to the Northolt house. The door had been opened by a pretty young redhead, a girl of crisp efficiency who served him breakfast and showed him to a bedroom. Arnie slept for nine hours, waking to find Naldo and Herbie in the house. The redhead had disappeared.
‘Wait for C,’ said Naldo.
In the corner, Herbie Kruger, who had remained silent after welcoming Arnold with a great bear hug, began to sing quietly, the voice extraordinarily well developed for a boy of sixteen. ‘O glaube, mein Herz, es geht dir nichts verloren.’
‘Herb?’ Naldo queried.
‘This is part of the final chorus in Mahler’s Second Symphony.’ Herbie looked surprised, as though they should recognise both tune and words. ‘In English it means “Have faith, my heart, for naught is lost to thee.”’
Naldo looked at Arnold and raised an eyebrow, inclining his head toward younger Kruger.
‘I have become very interested in the music of Mahler,’ Herbie continued. ‘In Berlin I have a winding gramophone – it is old and the music comes from a big green trumpet – but there are few records of Mahler’s work available. I listen all the time to what I have. He was the greatest composer ever, I believe. The music helps me much. It helps me to remain calm – like a baby in the womb.’
‘In Berlin?’ Arnold looked first at Naldo and then Herbie. ‘So you put him in, Naldo?’
‘Wait for C, Arnie.’
‘Like hell. Come on, Naldo – what’s going on?’
‘Please wait for the Chief.’ Naldo sounded very British – the old school, trained for ruling an Empire which the Socialist Government appeared to be hell-bent on scattering to the four winds.
‘Well, you can at least tell me what happened to your Uncle Caspar. Did they shoot him at dawn or drum him out of the regiment? What did that damned silly Board of Enquiry finally decide?’
‘What did you expect it to decide? They did what everyone knew they’d do – left it all hanging in the air. The Board was dismissed until further evidence became available. Which means they didn’t want to make up their minds. Poor old Caspar wanted to resign from the Service but can’t do that now.’
‘Why? The dreaded finger of suspicion?’
‘Exactly. If he resigns they’ll all say, “No smoke without fire.” Thought you’d have known that in your super, modern, and efficient Agency.’
‘Look, Nald, the Agency has its own problems – security, inexperience, and the FBI to name but eight of them. Come on now, what’s going on here?’
Naldo Railton shrugged. ‘Symphony’s going on. C wants the whole team working together again.’
‘And you’ve been following up where we left off?’ Naldo nodded, a slow movement as if he was reluctant to admit anything.
‘Tell me, then.’
Silence reached out between them. Then –
‘When you went back to the States we put Herbie into the Russian Zone. I shuttled between Berlin and London. Both Herb and myself were invisible as far as your people, and our own Berlin Station, were concerned. At least we managed to do that, thank heaven. It’s not good over there. Things’re deteriorating fast, Arnie. You know that.’
‘Sure I know it. The foreign ministers’ conference in Moscow was just a long stream of stinking air. A fart. The Ivans and the West can’t agree about the German problem. I guess the Ivans’ll eventually draw a line somewhere.’
‘Or the shooting’ll start all over again.’ Naldo was serious.
‘Berlin is an island,’ Kruger said, but nobody took any notice, except perhaps Arnie who registered that the lad’s English had improved and he was starting to fill out, looking healthy and well-nourished. It would be difficult to pin down the boy’s exact age.
In London, Naldo had reported regularly to C. In Berlin he ran Herbie, who had successfully infiltrated into the East and carried documents which allowed him to move from zone to zone with little difficulty. Between them they searched for clues that might lead to Klaubert.
‘The Devil of Orléans could be in Russia by now, for all we
know.’ Naldo said. ‘Only common sense tells C that they’ll keep him near home, within East Germany – probably in Berlin. Me? I’m not so sure.’
Herbie had played a complex game – giving the impression that he was working in the West and living in the East, or, at other times, vice versa. He had a room in both zones, under the same name, and facilities to set up crash meetings with Naldo. Apart from that they met regularly twice a week – always on different days and at irregular times. Herbie knew the many faces for which he was searching; he was also starting to make new friends in the East.
‘Herb called for a crash meeting in early June. That’s why C asked for you to come back. He doesn’t want to bring anyone else into the circle. It’s still very much his op, and he seems to trust few people these days.’
Early June, Arnie thought. That’s just about the time Counterintelligence found Dollhiem in our midst. ‘He doesn’t want anyone else in on Symphony? What about the redhead, the luscious lady who made my breakfast?’
‘She’s a housekeeper. Keeps the safe house fiction going when it’s not in use. She’s one of C’s wise monkeys – hears nothing, sees nothing, says nothing. Answers to the name of Ophelia.’
‘So, about this crash meeting with Herb?’
‘I was thoroughly shaken with what Herbie had to tell me.’ Naldo fidgeted. ‘I think C should talk about it, not me. I’m biased. I came back to London immediately, talked long with C, and then returned to Berlin. Arranged things so that Herbie could be temporarily unzipped from his routine without people paying much attention. You’ll get the picture from C, but there’s a lot of danger ahead if C’s going to continue pursuing Klaubert.’