The Secret Families

by John Gardner

  2

  Another month or two and the car would have probably disappeared for good, broken up by the early storms of 1965 and washed away, as though the vehicle had been neatly dismantled by experts. But, as so often happens, a small team of very hearty young men who had recently formed a scuba diving club in Falmouth, chanced to choose that tiny stretch of beach, below the acute drop of the cliffs, to practise some inshore diving.

  They had made several dives that morning, travelling along the coast in a small boat equipped with a powerful little engine. In spite of the cold weather, the four men decided this Saturday might well be the last chance of the year. The fact that the water was icy made things more of a challenge. When a pair surfaced and reported the car was down there, giving an accurate description of its colour, make and registration number, they acted liked responsible citizens and reported the matter to the police.

  By five that evening the local law had retrieved the vehicle, discovered its registered owners and made contact with the hire firm. In turn, the hire firm told them it had been taken out at Heathrow Airport, by a Frenchman called Michel Provin. The information was circulated and a sharp-eyed sergeant at Special Branch had reported the matter to his superior officer who boosted it over to the shop because Maitland-Wood had sent out one of those catch-all memos regarding strange movements.

  At nine o’clock, the girl who had handled the paperwork on the car was interviewed, and failed to identify Naldo’s photograph. But the same picture had already gone off on the wires through that little office at Scotland Yard which deals with all Interpol movements. In the meantime, Curry Shepherd was given a brief to check through files. He was looking for any possible cross-fertilized Railton contact within a twenty-mile radius of the spot where the car had surfaced. Late that evening, Shepherd took the most likely name to Maitland-Wood’s home, an expensive service apartment near Victoria Station.

  ‘Better drive down there, then, young Shepherd. See the fellow and report directly to me. Be careful if you telephone. You never know who’s listening.’ Maitland-Wood kept a framed Second World War poster on the wall of his office. It depicted two women chattering away on a bus. Behind them, all ears, sat Hitler and Goering in full regalia. The shout-line read Careless Talk Costs Lives!

  ‘Thank you,’ Curry said to himself. ‘All I need is a trip into the wilds of the West Country. Bugger bloody Naldo Railton.’

  When he telephoned the shop from St Keverne the next day his news was that Barzillai Beckeleg was not at home. Locals said he often popped over to France.

  ‘With Naldo Railton I’d bet a penny to a pound.’ By now Maitland-Wood’s entire conversation was studded with dark intonations. Carole and Martin were cloistered with Ambrose Hill in Registry, while the entire Credit committee busily read copies of Caspar’s missing years.

  He told Curry to come home. He would send a permanent pair of lion tamers — his words — down to bring Mr Beckeleg up to town for a chat on his return from foreign parts.

  While all this was going on, the cunning Gus Keene was having his private bit of tea and sympathy with Barbara, who, quite unknown to herself, was the subject of much discussion at the Villa Carlo in Ascona.

  3

  Gloria had been a Washington society beauty when she married Arnold Farthing. She was also that rare type of society beauty who worked for a living. She had held down a job of some importance at the State Department and met Arnie almost by chance, even though they had been, to use the argot, interconnected. The connection was that Arnie’s case officer at the time, a brave though snobbish career officer called Roger Fry, had been involved with Gloria Van Gent, as she then was. Arnold got her on the rebound, claimed a new case officer and even won over Gloria’s father and mother who were both Navy to the bone.

  She had taken pains with her looks and body over the years, and Naldo, who had always fancied her, after the manner of most men who want to find out how their best friend ticks, realized that she now looked more stunning than ever, standing in the doorway of the drawing room inside the Villa Carlo.

  Any familiar desire was immediately quenched by her news of Arnie’s apparent defection to Moscow.

  ‘You mean that was for real?’ He felt slightly tipsy, and presumed it was because of the fatigue followed by a long sleep.

  She laughed, throwing her head back. Not a forced, melodramatic laugh, but a spontaneous melodic burst, as though something had really amused her. ‘He said your face would be a picture. Come on in, Nald. You’re in the second bedroom. Hope you don’t mind. I pinched the big one.’

  ‘Be my guest.’ Naldo felt things seemed so bad that he had no option but to go along with them and show amusement. He put his bag near the hall table, threw his coat across a chair and followed Gloria into the drawing room, which had huge French windows that led onto a stretch of lawn sloping casually down to the lakeside. A pair of beautiful willows hung low over the water. In summer their leaves would trail in the lake and caress the reflection of the mountains, ripping them apart into a million fragments at the first sigh of a breeze. Naldo looked at the damp greyness now and remembered lying out on the grass, drying from a dip in the lake on some perfect summer day which seemed a million years ago. Arnie had been there, and Caspar. The three of them like children in their private hiding place.

  He turned to Gloria. ‘Arnold told you about this place?’ He heard the surprise in his voice, realizing that for some reason Arnie had violated his friendship and trust with Caspar, Herb, and himself, by breaking his vow and telling his wife.

  ‘There was a reason, Nald.’ She was wearing a very short, sheath-like dress which made every movement a challenge to any man’s eyes, sitting on the long settee that had been in the house since Tiraque’s time. She patted the cushion, bidding Naldo to sit next to her, but he remained standing, offended by her action which, to him, seemed like someone coaxing a pet dog.

  She nodded. ‘If it helps, I’ve only known for a week. Arn said it was too dangerous for him to call you or Herbie. You are the only people who know about this place, right?’

  Naldo did not speak. His mind was like a wasp’s nest, angry at this woman’s intrusion.

  ‘Arnold said you would know the lines that followed these.’ She quoted:

  ‘Cypresses dot the lakeside, waiting,

  Watching, for the day of judgement.’

  Naldo answered automatically, speaking as though in a trance:

  ‘When all God’s beauty here will turn.

  Changed into a view more lovely, as we chant the Dies Irae.’

  He still did not altogether trust her, for he recalled an old talent of which Gloria was proud. She only had to see a play, read a book or listen to an unfamiliar piece of music and it became imprinted on her mind. She had a knack that some would call a photographic memory, and she could even recall sentences spoken casually years after the event. The lines were from a poem which Naldo had tried to write, here at the Villa Carlo one lazy morning. He read it to Arnie, in a somewhat embarrassed fashion. Ever since, Arnie had used the one remembered verse as a sign between them, usually carried in the heads of agents that Naldo had never met before. Gloria could have got the verse from several people.

  ‘Arnie gave you those words?’ Every syllable had suspicion ground into it.

  ‘The night before he left. He told me of this house. Said you’d arrive here. Gave me the poem.’

  ‘How long has Arnie worked for the Sovs?’

  Her face puckered, as though she was about to weep. For a second, Naldo’s emotions clicked into play. He wanted to comfort her.

  ‘I don’t know if he really does work for the Sovs,’ she began.

  ‘You knew he’d gone to Moscow.’

  ‘Please, Nald. Please sit down. You’re making me very nervous, just standing there. Sit down. Anywhere. Sit down and I’ll tell you what I know.’

  Naldo seated himself in one of the three high-backed leather armchairs which matched the settee, realizing as he s
ettled that this had been his late Uncle Caspar’s favourite place when they came here. ‘Tell it then.’ He used the manner of a hostile interrogator.

  ‘You know what it’s like being head of station, particularly somewhere like Berlin. It’s like being a doctor always on call.’

  It was a good description, and Naldo nodded.

  ‘The signal from Washington came in during the morning. He called me. We had a kind of safe telephone thing, just a few key words. Wagner meant he had to go away for a few days; Browning was to let me know he would be back late that night, a coverall really because it also meant he was dealing with an operation. If he said “running late” it simply told me the truth, that he would be late but there was no need for me to be concerned. No operation involved. We had flash signals like Bluebird. That was the one he used if he got a sudden recall. He had a Bluebird a few days ago and came back agitated.’

  ‘I know about that, yes.’

  Arnold had called her with Bluebird in the morning. He had also said tomorrow, and to end the conversation he added Sacred which told her that he expected to be home early. ‘I felt he had been expecting the recall,’ she said.

  Arnie had returned, at around three in the afternoon, to the house the agency rented for them, and told Gloria that he thought this was it. The end of his Berlin tour. At about six that evening there was a call from the military headquarters where the agency had all its cipher facilities. There was an urgent flash from Washington, in a cipher only the head of station knew. Arnie had told them to bring it to the house and, half an hour later, two of his people arrived.

  ‘He took the signal into his den and came out with the paper in his hand: the paper on which he had transcribed the signal en clair.’ According to Gloria, Arnold had looked like a ghost. ‘His face was grey. I’d never seen him that frightened before. He said he would have to go out for an hour or two. I remember telling him not to be late. He still had to get some paperwork finished and do his packing. He was due to leave at nine the next day.’

  ‘You didn’t get a look at the signal?’

  ‘No, not the whole thing. I saw the last word and the sender’s initial.’

  ‘Which were?’

  ‘The last word was “caution” it was signed with one letter, X. Arnold immediately went back into his den and burned everything before going out.’

  He was away for an hour and a half, and looked better when he came back. They ate. Then Arnold had taken her into his den. ‘It was swept regularly, and he’d got the office to line it with those tiles, the ones that absorb sound. I think he had some kind of electronic baffler in there as well. He once said they’d fitted a babbler.’

  Again Naldo nodded, and Gloria came to the crunch. Arnold had told her he had been instructed to bypass Washington. ‘You’ll have to know,’ he said. ‘I’ve lived a triple life for the past seven years, but I’ve lived it under discipline.’ Gloria asked Naldo if he knew what that meant, and Naldo nodded again.

  ‘You’ll hear that I’ve defected,’ Arnold had said. ‘I’m leaving tonight, and I want you out.’

  ‘He said I should send the boys home, quickly. First thing in the morning. Then he gave me instructions about what I should do. Where I should go. I was to say nothing about this place, or you and the poem, if I didn’t make it.’

  There was a definite possibility that members of Arnold’s staff would catch up with her before she got out of Berlin. He had given her detailed instructions on how to leave what he called a paper chase. She was to book a flight to Rome, but take one to Bonn instead, then make her way into Switzerland. Arnold had told her that a search would begin almost immediately they found he was missing. In the event, Gloria got the boys away to her sister, and herself to Ascona with no difficulty at all.

  ‘And he gave you the poem? That’s all?’

  ‘The poem and some messages. He sent an apology to you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘He asked me to say sorry about the Russian team in London. It was meant to cause some alarm among your superiors. To prepare for what had to be done. That make sense?’

  ‘Yes.’ Naldo thought of Maitland-Wood putting him to the question after the incident with the boyevaya near Trafalgar Square. Again he saw the men in his mind, and heard BMW’s voice. ‘You deny having worked as a double agent for us, and the Soviet service? You deny any complicity in running, or servicing any Soviet agent in place? You deny having any preliminary meetings with Russian officers to discuss your own defection?’ Naldo forced his mind back to the present. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘Arnold said he’d gone ahead to deal with the matter of which you’d talked. He meant something you’d spoken about to each other.’

  The figure of Alex, and the photographs. The ones of Oleg Penkovsky at the Black Sea resort of Sochi, all travelled through Naldo’s mind. He saw the snow and felt the raw cold on the night Arnie had put that to him in Berlin. ‘Yes,’ he again nodded to Gloria.

  ‘He said you were to be very cautious indeed. Naldo, Arnold advises that you should keep moving. He said that he might have to give you to the Ks as a bonus. He said you’d understand. The bit of business in London was to set you up, to make your superiors think twice about you. That’s what Arnie said. Does it still make sense?’

  Naldo nodded yet again. It made excellent sense. He felt that everything was now out of his control. He was baulked, not free to return and not knowing which way to go.

  ‘Nald, does that mean we’re in danger here?’ Gloria sounded apprehensive.

  He thought for a moment. ‘Arnie only said he might have to give me as a bonus?’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t definite. He said that, if it had to be, he would try and get a warning to you here.’

  ‘How in the name of Nathan Hale, would he do that?’

  ‘He wasn’t specific. You know Arnie, always one to ad lib on the hoof. He said if he could call, he’d use a special ring. Two rings and then a cut-off. The next call had to be picked up.’

  ‘Like illicit lovers, yes.’ Naldo raised his eyebrows. ‘I can just see Arnie making a telephone call like that from Moscow. I think we can write off anything by way of a warning call from Arnie.’

  ‘Well, that’s what he said.’

  Naldo rose and walked over to the windows. On the lake one of the ferry steamers was churning the grey water into white as it turned sharply away from the pier. The ferries always did their turn away in front of the Villa Carlo. ‘Then we might or might not be in danger.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘Who does a fellow have to grope here to get food?’

  ‘Preferably me.’ Gloria seemed to relax for the first time.

  ‘He tell you where the money was hidden?’ Caspar and Naldo had placed various items, including several thousand Swiss francs in cash, under a false floorboard at the top of the house. Gloria said no, and that she had used her own money for food and necessities. Naldo asked about the safety precautions. Arnold had told his wife about these so she could get into the villa. Three years before, Naldo and Herb had come out for a couple of days, it was by way of rest and relaxation for Herb, and set up an electronic alarm system, most of which had been filched from Bonn and Berlin.

  All the windows and doors were equipped with sensors, and there were several panic buttons, used to set off a house alarm. The whole property, including the lakeside, was ringed with infra-red eyes, some of them set neatly into the bark of trees. They were placed at knee height to avoid the beams being broken by small animals, and the width of a human leg was needed to activate them so that flying birds could go through the linking rays without causing damage. When the eyes were switched on, a small red light would blink in every room of the house if an intruder stepped through the beam. The main control box, in an understairs cupboard, would indicate which area had been breached. Naldo thought it best not to go into details with Gloria.

  While she was getting the meal finished, he crept up to the master bedroom and deactivated the alarm there. His
would be on, as would all the others throughout the house.

  Gloria had bought plenty of food and they lunched on a soup she had made from ham stock and vegetables. The ham, she said, would do for a light evening meal. There was also veal, thin escalopes, fried in butter, with slices of lemon, potatoes and a salad. During the meal they talked of old times, Gloria asking after Barbara, and the pair of them reminiscing of years long gone. Gloria had been to see Sara and Dick at Redhill twice in the past year. She had been shocked to find them so frail, and asked who would inherit the Manor when they could not go on.

  ‘My father by rights.’ Naldo thought of the strain there would be when Dick and Sara had to leave Redhill. Unless special instructions were left in their wills, a lot of family feuding would follow.

  The day went by peacefully. Naldo set the alarms that evening, and, when he bade Gloria goodnight, she tried to kiss him on the mouth, thrusting the conjunction of her thighs at him in an explicit offer, and running her tongue across his lips. Naldo held her off at arm’s length, telling her gently that it was a kind and pleasant thought, but they should abide by field rules.

  The night passed without further incident.

  The next day, Naldo went out and bought chemicals and an enlarger from a local photographer’s shop. There was a small bedroom, a box room really, with a sink and water supply. It was at the top of the house, off the landing which contained the false floorboard under which the cache of equipment and money was hidden.

  Naldo draped blankets over the window and doors, replacing the naked overhead bulb with a red one. Time, he thought, to develop the photographs Big Herb had taken of the Blunt interrogation material, Hypermarket. He had yet to go through the hefty wedge of papers from Caspar’s box as well.

  It took several hours to develop and enlarge the many frames Kruger had taken of the documents, and the whole job was not completed by dinner time, though all the prints were pegged and drying in the makeshift dark-room.

  On their second night, Gloria was even more pressing in her demands, and when Naldo again told her it was not wise, adding that he did not really want to cuckold his friend, she became angry. ‘I’m not thinking about you and Arn!’ she screeched. ‘I’m thinking about me. Christ, Naldo, neither of us might ever see Arnie again.’