Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens

by Michael Gilbert

  “And it might have come off,” he said, “if I hadn’t been wide awake and, I admit it, had a bit of luck. I could have been in a very awkward spot.”

  “And now it’s them who are on the spot,” said Robin with a grin.

  “In the old days,” said Lady Docherty, “they’d have had their heads cut off.”

  “Even if they don’t lose their heads, I think we can ensure that the people concerned lose their jobs. I’m seeing the PM again tomorrow. I wonder who that can be?”

  “I’ll go,” said Robin. “The girl’s out. What if it’s the press?”

  “Invite them in. The wider the publicity this deplorable matter receives the better for . . .”he was going to say “my chances at the next election,” but changed it to “. . . the country.”

  Robin came back, followed by two men. “I don’t think it is the press,” he said. “It’s a Mr. Fortescue and a Mr. Behrens.”

  “I see,” said Sir James coldly. “Well, I’ve nothing much to say to you that can’t be said, in due course, in front of a tribunal of enquiry, but if you’ve come to apologise, I’m quite willing to listen. No, stay where you are, my dear. And you, Robin. The more witnesses we have, the better.”

  “I agree,” said Mr. Behrens.

  “Kind of you.”

  “It would be appropriate if your son were to remain, since most of what I have to say concerns him.” Mr. Fortescue swung round on the boy, ignoring Sir James. “I’ve just spoken to the ambassador’s private secretary in Paris. He tells me that you were away from the luncheon table for nearly half an hour. Making a long-distance call, you said. Why did you lie?”

  “Don’t answer him,” said Sir James. But the boy also appeared to have forgotten about his father. He said, in his pleasant, level voice, “What makes you think it was a lie, sir?”

  “I know it was a lie, because I’ve talked to the hotel manager, too. He tells me that no long-distance call, in or out, was recorded during that period. On the other hand, Behrens here saw you leave the dining room. He followed you up to the bedroom, saw you go in and heard you lock the door.”

  “And who do you suppose,” fumed Sir James, “is going to believe your tame agent provocateur?”

  “Well, Robin,” said Mr. Fortescue, “if you weren’t telephoning, what were you doing?”

  Sir James jumped up and forced himself between them. “I’ll deal with this,” he said. “If you think you can shift the blame on to my son, on manufactured evidence . . .”

  “Don’t you think he might be allowed to speak for himself?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “He’ll have to, sooner or later.”

  “Unless you can produce something better than the word of your own spy, he’s not going to have to answer anything at all.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty of evidence,” said Mr. Fortescue mildly. “Robin’s been a member of the action committee of your society for two years – that’s right, isn’t it, Robin? I would surmise that during all that time he’s been using your diplomatically protected luggage to bring back funds for the committee.”

  “Lies,” said Sir James in a strangled voice.

  “He has also taken a personal part in a number of demonstrations. He was up in the Midlands last week . . .”

  “Collecting information for me.”

  “No doubt. He also put in some time kicking a police superintendent. Have you the photographs, Behrens? The Mail shows it best, I think.”

  Sir James glared at the photograph. “A fake!”

  Robin said, “Oh, stop fluffing, Dad, of course it isn’t faked. How could it be?”

  There was a moment of complete silence, broken by Lady Docherty who said, “Robin” faintly.

  “Keep out of this, Mother.”

  Sir James had recovered his voice. He said, “Your mother has every right . . .”

  “Neither of you,” said Robin, silencing his parents with surprising ease, “have any rights in the matter at all. I’m twenty-one. And I know what I’m doing. You talk about violence and ruthlessness, Dad. But that’s all you ever do. You and your Peaceful People. Talk. I don’t believe . . .”a faint smile illuminated his young face,”. . . that you’ve ever actually hit anyone in your life. Really hit them, meaning to hurt. Have you?”

  But Sir James was past speech. “Well I have, and I’m going to go on doing it, because if you truly believe in something, that’s the only way you’re going to make it happen – in your own life-time anyway. By breaking the law and hurting people, and smashing things. The Negroes in America have seen it. And young people all over the world. They’re just beginning to see it. Don’t talk. Kick out.”

  Mr. Fortescue said, “I take it that includes kicking people when they’re on the ground.”

  “Of course,” said Robin. “It’s much easier to kick them when they’re lying down than when they’re standing up. Why not?”

  “I left that to Sir James to answer,” said Mr. Fortescue, some time later, to the Home Secretary. “He’s a politician and used to answering awkward questions.”

  5

  The Lion and the Virgin

  Mr. Calder first met Colonel Garnet in 1942 in the Western Desert.

  The colonel, who had commanded an Armoured Regiment with such dash that it had lost most of its tanks, was doing a stand-in job as GSO2 at Corps. He had acquired the reputation of turning up more often at the dangerous end than was usual with staff officers. Nevertheless it did surprise Mr. Calder to see him at that particular time and place; seeing that the Infantry Regiment to which he was attached was about to do one of the things which infantry regiments dislike greatly. It was due, in five minutes’ time, to advance over a stretch of open desert which was certainly registered by enemy mortars and was probably full of anti-personnel mines.

  Colonel Garnet had engaged Captain Calder in a learned discussion on modern theories of artillery support, whilst Captain Calder kept an anxious eye on his watch. When the whistle blew, and he climbed cautiously out of the line of slit trenches, he was staggered to observe that the colonel was climbing out with him. It appeared that there were some additional observations on artillery support which he had not had time to finish, and that he saw no reason that these contributions to military thought should be lost. “Just exactly,” as Mr. Calder said afterwards to his CO, “as though we were out for an afternoon stroll. And the odd thing is that the mortars didn’t open up, and if there were any mines we, at least, didn’t tread on them. In fact, we had remarkably few casualties. When we reached our objective, he said, ‘Well I must get back, I suppose. Can’t stand about all day gossiping.’”

  “He’s quite mad,” said the CO. “That’s why he’s collected two DSOs already.”

  Later on, Colonel Garnet went to Burma and finished up with a brigade and a second bar to his DSO. His rise after that was steady, if not spectacular, and it was generally felt that he had reached his limit as GOC Southern Command, when he was unexpectedly appointed Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff. This was not, normally, a very exacting job, but became so when his chief, Air Marshal Elvington, had to retire to a nursing home with a heart condition, brought on, it was rumoured in Whitehall, by his attempts to cope with a Government which thought that free wigs and dentures were more important than fighter aircraft.

  The career of Arnold Litman had been a good deal less exciting. A member of the merchant banking family, with offshoots on both sides of the Atlantic, he had entered politics in the late forties, had captured a marginal seat in the 1951 election, and had risen in his party’s counsels by a mixture of financial shrewdness and political tact. Why he should have been made Under-Secretary of State for War was far from clear. But once installed in office, he had delighted his master by abolishing several ancient and expensive regiments.

  His only known indiscretion had been his marriage to Rebecca, a dreamy girl, with a weakness for picking up fads and a habit of discussing them with the press. In a private citizen this would not have matte
red. In the wife of a public man it could, and did.

  Sue Garnet read the article, first to herself, and then to her father, over the breakfast table. It was headed, “The Lion and the Virgin” and started: “In a special interview given to Daily News man Frank Carvel yesterday, Mrs. Litman, wife of recently appointed Under-Secretary for War, Arnold Litman, gave it as her view that all great wars were likely to break out between late July and early September. She pointed out that it was at this period that the two most exciting signs in the Zodiac come into conjunction. Leo and Virgo, the Lion and the Virgin. It could hardly be a coincidence, she said, that every major war in history had started at this time. The Under-Secretary refused to comment on this remarkable prediction.”

  “Bloody fool,” said General Garnet.

  “Which?”

  “Both of them.”

  “What could he have done except refuse to comment?”

  “Not asked the brute into the house.”

  “I expect his wife did the asking.”

  “I don’t doubt it. She’s a stupid bitch.”

  “Daddy!”

  “He’s not stupid, though. I’m beginning to think he’s a crook.”

  Sue Garnet was hardened to her father’s methods of discourse and argument. These, as she had warned Terence Russel when he became her father’s military secretary and her fiancé, resembled a machine gun firing on fixed lines interspersed with casual grenade-throwing. But even she was taken aback by this last comment.

  She said, “You can’t really mean that.”

  “Can’t I,” said the General, decapitating his second breakfast egg with the same zeal and expertise that he had once decapitated a Japanese officer with his own Samurai sword. “What about that fight we had last month with the Americans over the ground-to-air ballistic missile? Our prototype was years ahead of theirs and a bloody sight cheaper. So why did we have to give them the contract?”

  “Well, why did we?”

  “If you want my guess it’s because Litman, or his associates, have got a big holding in the American company.”

  “If you can prove it,” said Sue, “you ought to do something about it. If you can’t you ought to be jolly careful about saying it. After all, he’s your boss.”

  “My boss,” said the General, “is the Queen, and not a jumped-up jack-in-office who’ll probably be Deputy Postmaster General next time they re-shuffle the Cabinet. Dammit, where’s Terence. I want to see those papers before the meeting.”

  “He’s your secretary. You ought to know where he is.”

  “He’s your fiancé. You ought to keep him up to the mark, the idle young beggar. What are you laughing at?”

  “I saw his last confidential report. You said that he was a keen and promising young officer.”

  “Are you aware, Miss,” said the General, filling his mouth with toast, “that you can be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for disclosing the contents of a confidential document?”

  “And did you know,” said Sue unrepentantly, “that you can be cashiered for leaving them lying about? You never lock anything up. Anyone could read them. Our char might be an agent of an enemy Secret Service.”

  The idea so tickled the General that he roared with laughter whilst trying to swallow the last piece of toast. In the middle of this complicated situation, the telephone rang.

  The General listened, spluttered, listened some more, and then said, “All right. I’ll be there.” And to Captain Terence Russel, who had hurried in carrying a briefcase, “The meeting’s postponed.”

  “I heard,” said Russel. He was a large blond young man, who wore his service dress with the swagger expected of a cavalry officer. “The emergency meeting’s at the Foreign Office. You’re to go in quietly by the Charles Street entrance, not the Downing Street one. I’ve laid on a car.”

  Mr. McAlister, the head cashier at the Westminster Branch of the London and Home Counties Bank, greeted Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens as old friends and explained that the manager, Mr. Fortescue, was engaged, but would be free soon.

  “What’s happened to the stockmarket, Mac?” said Mr. Behrens.

  “We’ve all been asking ourselves the same thing. Fifteen points down yesterday and twenty-five over the weekend. We haven’t seen anything like it since August 1939. Ah, there’s his light. He’s disposed of his visitor. Go straight in.”

  Mr. Calder had sometimes wondered how Mr. Fortescue disposed of visitors whose identities he wished to conceal. One never saw them come out. He concluded that there was either a hidden door in the chocolate-coloured pottery panelling behind his desk, or an oubliette in the floor.

  “I’ve not much time,” he said to them. “I have to be at the Foreign Office at eleven. If you have been reading your papers you must have seen what is happening.”

  “You could hardly miss it, could you?” said Calder. “What are we supposed to do about it? Soothe the shattered nerves of Lombard Street.”

  “The reactions of the City,” said Mr. Fortescue coldly, “are not a cause of alarm. They are a symptom of it. The real reason for their uneasiness is that Interstock has started selling heavily.”

  “Interstock?”

  “I’m not at all surprised that you haven’t heard of them, Calder. They take pains to avoid the limelight. They’re a group of people, based in Switzerland, who handle much of the floating money of the world. Their funds come mainly from Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, the Argentine, Greece and South Africa. They are very large sums of money indeed, and Interstock’s job is to keep them in an optimum state of investment. This means reasonably high interest rates. But above all – absolute safety.”

  “And they’re selling us short, are they?”

  “They’re not selling us short. They’re selling us out.”

  “Where’s the money going?”

  “Most of it to Canada.”

  “What on earth’s got into them?”

  “That is exactly what we have to find out. The most probable explanation is that someone has deliberately started a scare. There could be financial as well as political reasons for it. There’s a lot of money to be made on a falling market, if you happen to know when it’s going to stop falling.”

  Mr. Behrens said, “I have a war-time acquaintanceship with Grover Lambert. I understand he’s the London representative of Interstock. But it’s a fairly casual connection. Even if I could get in to see him, I can’t think I’d get much of an answer if I just said, ‘Why are you selling us out?’”

  “I’ve often found a direct question gets a direct answer.”

  “Only if backed by force. In some countries, no doubt, the authorities would string him up by his thumbs and prod him with a white-hot knitting needle until he volunteered the desired information. But we can’t do that here.”

  “No,” said Mr. Fortescue. “No.” His listeners thought they detected a note of disappointment in his voice.

  Arnold Litman said to his wife, “I don’t think you quite realise what you’ve done. I had to make a personal explanation to the Cabinet this morning. It was accepted. As far as they’re concerned, this particular episode is over. But people aren’t going to forget about it. In politics, it’s fatally easy to pick up labels. Look at Winston and Tonypandy. In a few months’ time no-one’s going to remember precisely what happened. But I shall be permanently labelled as an alarmist.”

  Rebecca Litman said, “I’m terribly sorry, my darling. But was I really to blame?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I told that young man that I thought war was coming, was it me talking? I did wonder.”

  “For God’s sake—”

  “Do you think someone was using me as a mouth-piece? Speaking through me. These things do happen.”

  “And who do you think was speaking through you?”

  “It’s a wild idea. But it did occur to me that it might have been you. After all, if war was coming, you’d know about it, wouldn’t you?”

  Litman had stopped
pretending to smile, and his blue-grey eyes were as cold as the snow-fed lakes of his fatherland. He said, “I suppose you haven’t by any chance passed on that interesting idea to the papers, too?”

  “Oh, Arnold. As if I would.”

  Litman said, “No. I don’t think even you would be stupid enough to do a thing like that.”

  Terence Russel and Sue Garnet were sitting on a bench in St. James’s Park, watching the ducks. They were discussing the crisis, too.

  “Daddy’s been very funny lately,” said Sue. “You know he promised me a month in Florence. The thing was practically fixed. Now he’s back-pedalling. It’s almost as though he doesn’t want me out of his sight. In case anything starts.”

  “Nothing’s going to start,” said Terence flatly.

  “Well, that’s a comfort,” said Sue. “If anyone knows, you ought to.”

  “I’m only a junior captain.”

  “Said he modestly. You also happen to be a military secretary to someone who is notoriously the least security minded officer in the three services. Daddy doesn’t just leave confidential papers in taxis. He discusses their contents with the taxi-driver.”

  Terence grinned, and said, “If you’re not going to go to Florence, why don’t we get married?”

  “Right away?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Have we got enough money?”

  “I’ve a feeling we shall manage all right.”

  “Well,” said Sue, “it would be rather nice.”

  Mr. Calder had not found General Garnet as hard to approach or as difficult to talk to as he had anticipated. The General had not pretended to remember him, but had greeted him as a former comrade in arms. He had also, clearly, seen his DMI file and was quite willing to talk.

  “What we really want to know, sir,” said Mr. Calder, remembering Mr. Fortescue’s dictum about direct questions, “is whether there really is a chance of someone pressing the button, or whether the whole thing’s a manufactured scare.”

  The General paused before answering. Then he said, “When I was a young soldier I was told that an ounce of demonstration was worth a pound of explanation. I was just about to make a visit of a routine nature. If you will come with me, I will try to convince you that, although a nuclear war could start at any moment it is extremely unlikely that it will do so.”