Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens

by Michael Gilbert

  “What’s that about Ahmed?”

  “I said, you won’t have to bother about Ahmed. His father’s ordered him to come home.”

  “Ordered him home?”

  “Nothing to do with the university. The decision was taken on grounds of policy.”

  “When did you hear?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  “Policy? What policy? Look here, something’s up. Why wasn’t I told?”

  “I’ve been trying to make up my mind,” said Mr. Calder, calmly, “whether I’d tell you at all. Since it’s going to make you very angry, I thought I’d let you finish your tea before I did so.”

  “First we lose Pat, and most of the out-and-outers with him. They daren’t move hand or foot until the court case is decided. And now Ahmed. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.”

  It was the first time that Mr. Behrens had seen Alison near to tears. He said, “I think it’s time I gave you my well-known lecture on tactics. You made a mistake in offering the Rector terms. Never do that when your opponent thinks he’s winning. The time for offering terms is when you’re winning.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t see—”

  “When you have suffered a series of setbacks, when your front is pushed in, your flanks are under fire and your rear is threatened, there’s only one thing to do. You attack. The body of students are behind you. They all realise that the Rector is behaving vindictively. He’s never been more unpopular than at this moment. The press will be here in force when the Minister comes down on Wednesday. You’ve got a golden opportunity to show the world what you think of him.”

  “It’s all very well talking. Do you realise that almost every effective member of our organisation is out of action? You can’t build a new committee in forty-eight hours.”

  Mr. Behrens seemed not to have heard her. He said, “The speeches will take place in the assembly hall. There is some sort of loft above the dais. The ceiling, I noticed, is wood or plaster board. A trap-door cut at the right point—”

  “I could think up a lot of marvellous ideas,” said Alison, “if we had the people and the equipment. For one thing, do you realise that the assembly hall is locked at night?”

  “I have a friend who happens to be staying in Wallingford,” said Mr. Behrens. “He has a way with locks. He could also get hold of any equipment, in reason, that you want.”

  “Why should he help? Why should you, come to that?”

  “We’re both very angry with the Rector,” said Mr. Behrens, gently. “When we’re angry, we like to do something about it.”

  Mr. Fortescue looked over the top of his steel-rimmed glasses and said, in tones of cold disapproval, “Do I gather, Behrens, that you had some hand in this disgraceful episode?”

  “I organised it,” said Mr. Behrens, “with a little help from Calder.”

  “Suppose you are implicated?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “I’m glad you had that much sense.” Mr. Fortescue resumed his study of the report. “I see that the newspapers speak of an avalanche of soot descending on the Rector and on the Minister.”

  “It was soot mixed with flour, actually. It gave them a very odd appearance.”

  “Like the black and white minstrels,” said Mr. Calder.

  “Suppose this girl – Alison Varney – is charged with complicity and gives you away?”

  “Not a shred of evidence against her. She was seated in the third row of the audience, and could not possibly have had any hand in opening the trap.”

  “She didn’t throw tomatoes either,” said Mr. Calder.

  “Tomatoes?” said Mr. Fortescue. “There is no mention in the paper of tomatoes.”

  “About twenty of the students threw them. Oddly enough, they were students who hadn’t been particularly militant before.”

  Mr. Fortescue seemed to be visualising the scene. He said, “Soot, flour, and tomatoes. The Minister is a man who is rather conscious of his personal dignity. I can’t think he was pleased.”

  “He was far from pleased,” said Mr. Behrens, “and spent, I believe, the best part of half an hour telling the Rector exactly what he thought of him, and his lack of control over his students. The betting is strongly in favour of a new Rector being appointed.”

  “I have noticed,” said Mr. Fortescue, “that when you speak of the Rector, Behrens, you exhibit a most uncharacteristic spirit of personal vindictiveness.”

  “You know how he got rid of Ahmed?”

  “I wasn’t exactly clear about it,” said Mr. Fortescue. “I was so relieved that he had left without embarrassment to ourselves that I didn’t enquire too closely into the means.”

  “The Rector had a message conveyed to Ahmed’s father,” said Mr. Calder, “that his son was in danger of being debauched by a girl of Jewish parentage.”

  “My personal opinion,” said Mr. Behrens, “is that he was lucky to get off with soot and tomatoes. He deserved boiling lead.”

  Mr. Fortescue rocked silently on his chair for some seconds. His eyes had a faraway look. Then he said, “The experiment was tried, in the early twenties, in a Rectorial election at Aberdeen University. It was not an unqualified success.”

  12

  The Last Reunion

  A sharp, clear July morning had turned to a drizzle of rain, and Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens had retreated, with Rasselas, to the sitting room of Mr. Calder’s cottage. They had brought out the chess-board, but so little was Mr. Calder’s mind on the game that, within ten minutes of the start, he had allowed Mr. Behrens to manoeuvre himself into a position of impregnable advantage.

  He said, “I am thinking of resigning.”

  “You can’t think about resigning,” said Mr. Behrens. “Either you do resign, or you don’t.”

  “I’m not talking about chess,” said Mr. Calder crossly. “I’m talking about our work.”

  “Why?”

  It was fifteen years since both men had left the regular Intelligence Service, almost on the same day. Since then they had been on a retainer. If a job seemed to be suitable for their particular talents they had been assigned to it.

  “Enough is enough,” said Mr. Calder. “I’m getting old. My reactions are slowing down. Rasselas is as bad as I am.”

  The great dog looked up.

  “Yesterday, a rabbit ran rings round him.”

  Rasselas seemed to understand this. His expression indicated that he thought the criticism unjust. Rabbits? Who cares about rabbits. He could have caught it quite easily if he had wanted to.

  “It’s odd you should mention it,” said Mr. Behrens. “Because the same thought had occurred to me. I fired a refresher course on the police range at Croydon last month, and barely qualified. If you’ve made your mind up, we’d better get in touch with Fortescue.”

  As he said that, the telephone rang.

  “And that,” said Mr. Calder, “is probably more trouble.”

  His telephone number was not only ex-directory. It was changed every six months. He went out into the passage where the telephone lived. Rasselas followed him.

  Mr. Behrens fiddled with the chess pieces, trying one or two moves to see whether the attack he had mounted could be circumvented. He had decided that the position was irreversible when Mr. Calder came back.

  “Your instinct was correct,” he said. “That was Fortescue.”

  “And he has a job for us?”

  “Yes, and no. That wasn’t the main point. He rang up to tell us that he was resigning his post at the Bank. Did you realise that he would be seventy next month?”

  “I never thought about it. He could be any age.”

  “That being so, he has decided that it’s time he gave up his other jobs too.”

  “He’s the sort of man who’ll live to ninety. What is he going to do for the next twenty years?”

  “He plans to grow roses.”

  “He always was a stickler for tradition.”

  The two men sat for a minute, staring out at the rain, which w
as drifting across the top of the North Downs in a filmy curtain. What they had heard had underlined their own decision. They had enjoyed working for Mr. Fortescue, a man of intransigent realism who could be ruthless to his subordinates, but allowed no-one else, from the Prime Minister downwards, to interfere with them.

  “I suppose it will be Rowlandson who takes over.”

  “I suppose so,” said Mr. Calder. Since they were going themselves the matter was unimportant. “He’s all right. A bit Royal Navy.”

  Mr. Behrens remembered something. “You said ‘Yes and No.’ Is there something in the offing?”

  “There is a job. It sounds rather unusual. I said we’d go up tomorrow and discuss it.”

  “With liberty to say no if we didn’t like the sound of it. I’d hate to get nailed at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour.”

  “It didn’t sound like that sort of job,” said Mr. Calder. “In fact, it doesn’t sound like our normal sort of job at all.”

  “For the last forty-eight hours,” said Mr. Fortescue, “the Department has had possession of Rudolf Sperrle’s testament. Nearly five hundred pages of typescript. In that folder there.”

  He indicated a fat box-type folder on his desk.

  Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens looked at each other in astonishment.

  “Rudolf Sperrle?” said Mr. Calder. “Hitler’s personal aide- de-camp? I’d no idea he was still alive.”

  “He isn’t,” said Mr. Fortescue. “He’s been living – in retirement in Bonn for the last thirty years. After the decision was made not to prosecute him – and, indeed, there was nothing to prosecute him for – he slipped into obscurity. I’ve no doubt he was only too glad to forget his war-time experiences, and glad that other people should forget them, too. But there was a drawback. Obscurity declined into poverty, and poverty to near starvation. He was too well-known for any of the new industrialists to risk giving him a job. He had a minimum state pension and made a little money by doing other people’s typing.”

  “There must have been times when he regretted the high old days at Berchtesgarten,” said Mr. Behrens. “He was very close to the centre.”

  “He was at the centre. True, he took no part in decision making, but he heard the decisions being made. He accompanied Hitler everywhere. No-one was jealous of him, because he exercised no influence. An admirable position for a Boswell.”

  “And now he has written the Life of Johnson?”

  “It is not exactly a biography of Hitler. Rather a commentary on his command methods. Why he took certain decisions, and how he achieved his ends. You might call it the sequel to Mein Kampf. It is a document which will be of incalculable value to historians. To psychologists, too, no doubt. When I had read it, I came to two conclusions. The first was that it must be returned to the German Government. It belongs to them, not to us. The second was that I would have it photographed, which I have done. Both copies are in that file.”

  “How on earth did we get it?”

  “For that we have to thank the foresight and patience of John Corrie, our representative at the Bonn embassy. After the near debacle over the Bartz affair, I persuaded them to create the office of Assistant Trade Secretary as cover for one of our men. Corrie was my nomination. He proved an excellent choice. One of the things he did was to keep in discreet touch with Sperrle. In spite of the ridiculous stringency of our Intelligence budget, we were able to help him with money, from time to time. But it was more than money. It was sympathy. Corrie used to call on Sperrle in his puny roof-top apartment up in the Leopoldstrasse and drink coffee with him, and gossip about old times. About a fortnight ago, when he called on him, he saw quite clearly that Sperrle was dying. That was when he handed over the typescript. According to Corrie, he said, very solemnly, ‘I make this gift in the trust that no evil use will be made of it, and in the hope that our two great Anglo-Saxon nations will never again be in enmity.’”

  “Not a bad epitaph,” said Mr. Behrens.

  Mr. Calder, more practically, said, “You mentioned a job.”

  “I want you, first of all, to read the last chapter. Sperrle, you will recall, was in the Bunker during the closing weeks of the war. Along with Goebbels and Martin Bormann, he was one of the witnesses at the macabre wedding of Hitler and Eva Braun. It was then that Hitler gave him this last assignment. Read it for yourselves. One of you can use the original, and one the photocopy.”

  For half an hour there was silence in Mr. Fortescue’s dignified Victorian office where Millais’ ‘The Angel Child’, on one side of the chocolate-coloured porcelain overmantel smiled at Landseer’s ‘Tug of War’ on the other. At the end of it Mr. Calder said, “Jesus Christ,” an expression of feeling which drew a frown from Mr. Fortescue. “I mean, what an extraordinary story.”

  Rudolf Sperrle, making his way through the sector of the ruined city which was still held by the Germans, had reached the appointed rendezvous where a battered staff car awaited him. He was carrying with him two sealed and padlocked canisters, a harness having been fixed to them so that he could carry one over each shoulder. They were very heavy. The staff car had taken him south, through the narrowing gap between the Allied advance on one side and the Russians on the other. Its objective had been the Austrian Alps, in the heart of which Hitler had planned his mountain fortress, a fortress which was half built and never manned. The unexpectedly fast progress of the Americans in the south had driven Sperrle eastward. Petrol and oil were difficult to get, and the car was on its last legs.

  It had finally crawled into Straffelager Seven. It was clear that it could not go much further. There were reports that the Eighth Army, moving up from Italy, was already in Austria.

  Straffelager Seven was a camp for British other ranks who had attempted to escape from the regular camps or had made nuisances of themselves to their captors in some way. It was the non-commissioned equivalent of Colditz; not a castle, but a quadrilateral of barbed wire at the foot of the Bohmerwald near the village of Abendreuth. To the commandant of the camp, but to no-one else, Sperrle had confided the details of his mission. He had been entrusted with a large collection of letters, records and memoranda in the Fuehrer’s own hand, photographs, and personal mementoes, and a number of actual messages which had been recorded, on the somewhat primitive apparatus of the time, in the form of wire spools. “When the great German nation rises again, as it will,” Hitler had said to Sperrle, “these relics will be the Ark of the Covenant. They must never, never, never come into the hands of our enemies.”

  (As Mr. Behrens read the words he could hear the Fuehrer’s voice rising, as he had heard it once before, in a terrifying crescendo. “Never, never, never.”)

  Sperrle and the commandant had discussed the matter late into that night, and all through the next day, to the accompaniment, growing menacingly closer, of the Russian guns in the east. On the second night, taking only the camp adjutant into their confidence, they had buried the canisters in a bed of concrete under the floor of the commandant’s own office.

  “OK,” said Mr. Calder. “So we go and dig it up?”

  “With German co-operation. Yes.”

  “It doesn’t seem a very difficult assignment.”

  “The difficulty,” said Mr. Fortescue, “is that nobody now knows exactly where SL Seven was. Corrie will explain it all to you. I’ve arranged for you to meet him at Munich Central station at eleven o’clock, two days from now. You’ll need a little time to get ready.”

  Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens, who had grown used to being ordered to remote parts of the world at a moment’s notice, looked at each other in some surprise.

  “I should have explained,” said Mr. Fortescue blandly, “that you will need to take camping equipment. Sleeping bags and—ah—groundsheets, and that sort of thing.”

  This he said with all the relish of a man who had a comfortable bed of his own to return to.

  “It’s like this,” said John Corrie, as they drove north and east from Munich in Mr. Calder’s ro
omy Ford Escort, packed with camping gear. “SL Seven was a temporary affair. It was run up, in a hurry, at the end of 1944 when the camps in Poland had to be evacuated. The usual prison camp style. A double barbed wire apron, a watch tower at each corner, wooden huts for the prisoners, and something a bit more permanent for the commandant and the guards, who were second line SS. It was a naughty boys camp, and the guards were fairly tough, but there don’t seem to have been any particular atrocities.”

  “I expect it was too close to the end of the war,” said Mr. Behrens. “Most Germans had their chins on their shoulders by the end of 1944.”

  “Could be,” said Corrie. “Anyway, it was the Russians who got there first. The commandant and the adjutant stuck to their posts. Much good it did them. They were taken off to Russia, and I’ve no doubt were put straight underground. The SS boys scarpered. The prisoners marched out after them, in a rather more orderly fashion, made for the American lines and were repatriated. Sperrle got away into Austria. SL Seven ceased to exist.”

  “But, surely,” said Mr. Calder,” someone must know where it was?”

  “When we get there, you’ll understand the difficulties better. The Russians drew back a little at this point, for some reason, and the Iron Curtain runs about three miles east of Abendreuth, which was deserted by its few aged inhabitants and is now a ghost village. All the useful roads in that area ran east-west, and since the Iron Curtain chopped them off, there was no point in keeping them up. The nearest place of any size is Plattling, thirty miles away on the Passau-Nurnberg road. It’s got quite a decent gasthaus, incidentally. I’ve booked rooms for us there tonight and we’re meeting our opposite numbers, Police Captain Bruckner and Lieutenant Brunz, there tomorrow morning.”

  Mr. Behrens had been considering the curious problem of the vanishing prison camp. He said, “What about farmers? Someone must use the land.”

  “It’s open heath. There are two farms. One of them is about ten miles west of Abendreuth. The other twelve miles northwest. The owners share the grazing rights, such as they are. Their horses and bullocks have the run of the heath. They round them up twice a year, in spring and autumn. Like Dartmoor ponies. They’re pretty wild specimens, I believe.”