Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  “No more than all of us are.”

  “It’s the girl, then. The painter.”

  Johnny did not dissent.

  “Is she in Copenhagen?”

  “She’s in Oslo.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Her sister told me. She works for the same people.”

  Johnny rubbed the corners of his eyes between thumb and forefinger. He added, “Helene and I are supposed to be traveling to Rio together.”

  “And this is the same Helene who went after de Salis in Berlin.”

  “We don’t talk about that.”

  Bailey let the Berlin episode ride. He asked, “Did Helene tell you why the other one went to Oslo?”

  “She’s doing a job with Max.”

  “Did Helene tell you the nature of the job?”

  “I don’t think she knows.”

  “But you’re planning to run off to Oslo and look for the girl, just like that — without knowing where she lives or what she’s doing.”

  “Oslo isn’t London or Paris,” Johnny countered with stubborn determination. “I have some friends. I’ll find her. With or without your help.” He was tired of the grilling.

  “All I need from you is the money that belongs to me. Thirteen hundred pounds.”

  “A bit more than that, with the interest accrued.” Bailey endeavoured to sound like a helpful bank manager. Johnny’s salary was deposited in an escrow account at Coutts’ in the City.

  Softly, softly, the Englishman told himself. In his hurry to get to his girl, Johnny may be starting to see me as the enemy.

  “You can have your money whenever you like,” Bailey announced. “But there’s something I ought to ask you. If your girl is in Oslo with Max, there’s obviously a sensitive job involved. Why would Helene court suspicion by running around asking all sorts of indiscreet questions on your behalf? Why would she tell you even if she knew before?”

  “I’ve asked myself the same things,” Johnny said. “Helene is an unusual woman.”

  “She is also a Russian spy,” Bailey responded, letting the steel show. “I don’t want to appear insensitive, but it must surely have occurred to you that Helene is putting you through some kind of test. Do you think she’d pack you off to Norway without telling Max?”

  “It’s possible,” Johnny conceded, remembering the episode in Moscow, when Helene had told the secret police about his talk with Emil.

  “It’s more than possible, in view of what’s going on in Oslo.”

  Johnny was startled. “Do you know something about it?”

  “We’ve had Max under observation for some time. He’s made several trips to Norway, sniffing after a well-known compatriot of his. A certain Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Am I making myself clear?”

  The shock of recognition showed in Johnny’s face.

  Of course, he told himself. The Norwegians had given Trotsky asylum. Everyone knew that Stalin would stop at nothing to see Trotsky dead — and Max was an expert at what the chekists tactfully described as mokrie dela, “wet operations.”

  “What sort of impression do you think it will make if you walk in on Max and your girl unannounced in the middle of a plot to kill Trotsky?”

  “I can’t imagine that Sigrid is involved.”

  “Why else would Max take her along?”

  Johnny said nothing.

  “If you go to Oslo,” Bailey pressed on, “they’ll nail you as a Trotskyite agent, or worse. You can see that, can’t you? What good would you be to Sigrid then?”

  “I’ll take her away,” Johnny countered defiantly.

  “Are you sure she’d go?” the Englishman said softly. “Have you done anything to prepare her? If you’ll forgive me for saying this, you have a way of picking women with minds of their own.”

  “It’s my neck,” Johnny said fiercely, clenching his fists. But a voice inside him said, Bailey is right.

  Later they walked by the lakes, accompanied by the scudding of oars and stifled giggles from lovers who were out there in dinghies. It reminded Johnny of an afternoon on the Wannsee, when Sigrid had blotted out the sun.

  He said, “I’ve thought it over. I’ll go to Rio.”

  “I think you’ve made the right decision.”

  Bailey heaved a sigh of relief. The stuff about Trotsky was a stab in the dark. His agents had lost sight of Max several weeks before. It was plausible enough, though, and had worked like a charm with Johnny, who was nobody’s fool. Now it would be interesting to check with the Oslo station whether his hunch about Trotsky was correct.

  Johnny stopped at the water’s edge. The wind had picked up, driving ripples across the lake. “I want you to understand this is the last job I’ll do for you,” he announced. “Afterwards, I want out. And I want Sigrid with me. You have to promise you’ll make that possible.”

  “Agreed.”

  “How are we going to stay in contact?”

  “That’s an easy one,” Bailey said decisively. “I’m coming out myself.” Now that he had convinced Johnny to carry on — not through deception, he told himself, so much as informed speculation — Bailey had no intention of leaving his man in the lurch. “By the way,” he went on, “what cover have the OMS chaps given you this time?”

  “I’m supposed to be an Austrian cigar importer, on a busman’s holiday with my sister.”

  “What name?”

  “Franz Gruber.”

  A smile flickered across Bailey’s face. He murmured, “‘Silent Night.’”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Franz Gruber is the composer of ‘Silent Night.”‘

  “I doubt whether the man who fixed my passport has much time for Christmas carols.”

  3

  There was nothing to compare with Christmas in England, Bailey thought. There were snowmen in the park, while Snow White and the Seven Dwarves revolved in Selfridge’s windows. He took the girls to see Father Christmas in the grotto behind the toy department, before he drove down to Odiham to see C. in his country retreat.

  He found the chief stomping around in plus fours and muddy boots in his tack room. The place smelled of leather and wet dogs. Three of the latter — a mastiff and two black Labradors — greeted Bailey with a show of teeth and voice projection that would have driven away all but the most determined visitor.

  C. announced that he had been shooting with the King. He congratulated himself that he had shot a dozen more birds than H.M. but had managed to fudge the count so as not to commit the sin of lèe-majesté.

  C. was startled when Bailey informed him that Johnny was en route to Rio. He wanted to know what Stalin hoped to accomplish.

  Bailey explained. He had done some homework and dwelled on the fact that sizable British interests were at stake. British companies owned the railroads and had a stake in other utilities.

  “Of course, we can’t rely on the Americans to do anything. Roosevelt doesn’t see that Communism is a danger. His ambassador in Moscow is hooked on Stalin. There’s really nobody we can deal with on this in Washington. Hoover is quite impossible. They don’t have anything that resembles a secret service. Their attitude is even worse than the Foreign Office’s.”

  This argument seemed to impress C. more than anything else.

  He agreed to sign a chit.

  On New Year’s Eve, Bailey was on platform eleven under the sooty arches of Waterloo station, boarding the train for Southampton. For two hours, ensconced in a cozy, cream-painted Pullman, he watched the home counties flash by, chartreuse watercolours under the rain. The steward brought madeira and cherry cake.

  At the docks the revels were in full swing. Young hearties whirled their noisemakers and kissed their girls while a band thumped out songs of farewell; “Good Night, Sweetheart” was the favourite. Nobody had eyes for the trim military figure proceeding up the gangway onto the deck of the R.M.S. Arthurian. The crowd was given over to the cheerful chaos of leave-taking, to last-minute packages and flowers and smuggled embraces, an
d champagne parties that spilled over from the staterooms onto the boat deck.

  As Bailey followed a steward below, a girl hopped, giggling, out of a nearby cabin, champagne flute in hand. He had a brief impression of dramatic violet eye shadow and a flying feather boa before she skated along the floor and landed in his arms. He caught her by the elbows, at the cost of getting the contents of her glass all down his shirt front.

  “Whoops!” the girl laughed up at him.

  “Rather a waste of champagne,” Bailey observed.

  “Perhaps you’ll let us make amends.”

  Bailey looked for the source of the new voice and found a young man brandishing a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. The stranger was tallish, strong-boned, not stocky, with the supple, wide-legged gait of a man who is equally at ease on a horse or a rolling deck. His hair was chestnut brown, his moustache a touch lighter. His face was flushed with good health, but his skin was the kind that freckles rather than tans. He was well dressed in an offhanded way, in country tweeds and a soft collar, above which a smudge of lipstick burned against the side of his neck.

  “Happy New Year!”

  “I hope it will be,” Bailey said, accepting the proffered glass of champagne. “In the meantime, I’ve always found this a rather good prophylactic—”

  The girl burst into another fit of giggles.

  ‘—against mal de mer.”

  “Harry Maitland,” the young man introduced himself. His handshake was firm, not bone-crushing. He was confident of his place in the world.

  “Colin Bailey. Maitland—” the older man brooded on the name. “I knew a Maitland at Winchester. Rather a keen batsman.”

  “That would have been my father, sir.”

  “Really?”

  “We’re having a little farewell party,” Maitland said, gesturing towards his door. “You’d be welcome to join us.”

  “I think not,” Bailey said, peering in at a crowd of bright young things. “But thank you for this.” He returned the empty glass. “How far are you going?”

  “To Rio.”

  “Then we’ll have plenty of time to talk.”

  In his own cabin, Bailey indulged himself for a few minutes in cozy memories of going up to Scholars’ Hall at Winchester at six of a winter’s evening to toast thick slices of bread on the end of a bamboo pole over the blast furnace of the hulking double stove the boys called the Simon and Jude.

  In the distance he heard the cabin boy pattering down the corridors, banging a gong and piping, “All ashore that’s going ashore!”

  He could summon up only a blurred image of Maitland senior, a bluff sportsman who hated bullies, one of life’s spenders. His face darkened as he reflected that Maitland senior was one of England’s missing generation, his name inscribed in stone along the cloisters that served as the school’s war memorial, on the roll call of those who had’ fallen in Flanders fields.

  Bailey stayed below until the ship’s siren howled, the last visitors were shooed onshore and the Arthurian, with the pilot’s tug at her bow, had completed her tricky passage round the bar and was steaming south across open water to Cherbourg on the green coast of Normandy. Then he made a leisurely ascent to the saloon, ordered whisky and soda and decided that he did not care for the public rooms. The designer had copied the grandiose style of the Cunard liners, but the chairs were jammed in together so that someone’s ear was at your neck, while the inevitable skylight, under the sodden curtain of clouds, submerged the whole scene in the cold penumbra of a fish tank.

  Seven times around the promenade deck, by Bailey’s calculation, made a mile. He shifted a florin from one pocket of his flannels to the other at the completion of each circuit. After three miles he returned to the deck chair he had reserved on the port side to take his morning bouillon.

  He was soon engrossed in a folder of cuttings from the Telegraph; his girl had dug out the old Kipling articles. Bailey was reading about the Brazilians’ passion for gambling when Harry Maitland loomed up.

  “May I join you?”

  “Please.” The deck chair next to Bailey was unoccupied. “You know Brazil, do you?”

  “I’ve lived there for four years, on and off.”

  “Do you know this game called—” he consulted the clipping “—The Beasts?”

  “Oh yes,” Bailey laughed. “The jogo do bicho. Everyone plays it. You bet on an animal — a lion, say, or an elephant. Each animal controls four numbers. If they come up in the daily lottery drawing, you’ve won. It started as the bright idea of a man who wanted to induce people to visit the zoo. It sprouted up all over the place. Everybody plays. It’s illegal, of course, but in my office the locals buy and sell tickets in full view of their supervisors.”

  “And what kind of office would that be?”

  “I work for Rio Light. That’s the power company.”

  “You’re an engineer, then?”

  “My job is public relations, mostly. Not awfully important, I’m afraid. But it gives me an excuse to live in Rio.”

  Bailey started to draw him out. Maitland had the endearing self-effacement of the sort of Englishman who sails the Atlantic single-handed and talks about it as if he were describing Sunday lunch at a pub. All that Maitland pere had bequeathed was a mountain of debt, so, when he came down from Bailliol, Harry had been urged to pay court to his senior aunt, a formidable dowager who controlled the family purse strings. Her most beloved possession had been a vicious Pekingese called Harold.

  “Things were going pretty well,” Harry reported, “until she asked me to tea to discuss her will. Naturally, this was an exciting occasion. I sat down on the blue sofa a bit too quickly. I heard something crunch, but I didn’t dare look to see what it was until Aunt Hermanie had gone off in search of the dog. I stood up and found I had squashed poor Harold flat. She was calling and calling in the other rooms. Inspiration seized me. There was a rubber plant by the windows. I pulled it out of its pot and popped Harold underneath. I left as soon as was decent, without being detected. But I am afraid my aunt’s suspicions fell on me in the end. I received a note from her lawyers, informing me that she had cut me out of her will. That was the end of my inheritance. And I must say, I feel I owe a debt to old Harold.”

  “How so?”

  “He drove me to Brazil, in a roundabout way. I was faced with the imminent prospect of joining the salaried class.”

  Maitland made this sound like a sentence to prison.

  “You could have taken a rich wife,” Bailey observed.

  “I gave it some thought. Then I picked up the Times and found an advertisement in the agony columns. They wanted an extra gun for an expedition to Brazil, to look for an explorer who had disappeared in the territory of the Xingu Indians.”

  “Major Fawcett.”

  “You read about it, then.”

  “You never found Fawcett,” Bailey pointed out.

  “No, but I found Brazil. It’s — well, it’s extraordinary. A country of gods and men.”

  “And Rio?”

  “Rio is simply the most beautiful place in God’s creation. The Cariocas say that when God took seven days to create the world, he spent six of them on Rio de Janeiro.”

  Bailey cocked an eyebrow at this gush of enthusiasm. “Not very Wykehamist,” he said with mock rectitude, alluding to their old school’s reputation for turning out dry logicians. “I believe you’re a romantic, Mr. Maitland.”

  Harry grinned and swept the hair off his forehead.

  “I’m told revolutions are as common in South America as elections in England,” Bailey remarked.

  “A revolution is their version of an election. That’s why they’re usually kind to the losers. The other party may get in next time.”

  “What about the Communists?”

  “There are Communists, of course. They don’t play by those rules. But I don’t think there’s much room for communism in a country where, if you’re hungry, you can pluck a banana off a tree.”

  “I do hope yo
u’re right.”

  Bailey had decided that he liked Harry Maitland. Some of the boy’s opinions were naive and superficial; that was to be expected. But he had a quality that appealed to Bailey. More than mere youthfulness, it was his air of constant, delighted expectation. While so many of his class and generation in England — the young men Bailey met at Diana’s dinner parties — were suppurating with world-weary cynicism or spouting half-digested nonsense from an unreadable dialectician, Harry gave the impression that he was one of those who would ride over the edge of the world for a dare, or just for the joy of the riding.

  Maitland began telling him about a Communist effort to spark a labour dispute at the power company. The Communists had tried to make a big issue out of the fact that foreign employees were paid much better than the Brazilians. Bailey was impressed with Harry’s account of how he had personally contributed to the failure of the strike by paying a left-wing journalist to write articles that had set the organizers at each other’s throats.

  But Bailey’s attention strayed with the appearance of a new face at the far end of the deck. He caught only a brief glimpse because the man whipped round immediately, giving them a fine view of his back. But Bailey was sure he knew him. He was young, even younger than Maitland, but his ravaged face was that of a much older man, leached and striated by what life had dumped on him. Bailey was sure that he, too, had been recognized. Neither he nor Karl Vogel would be likely to forget their last encounter at an Algerian dive in Paris.

  “Excuse me—” Bailey took Maitland’s arm, interrupting his narrative. “Have you seen that fellow before?”

  Maitland shook his head. “Perhaps he wandered up from below.” Harry inspected the object of Bailey’s curiosity more closely. The stranger certainly didn’t appear to belong on the first-class deck. “He may have boarded at Cherbourg, of course!”

  “We dock at Lisbon, don’t we?”

  “Why, yes. We’re due in a couple of hours.” Maitland was struck by the change in the older man’s manner. All his ease was gone; he had the aspect of a pointer that senses a bird is about to break cover. “Are you going ashore?”