The Nostradamus Traitor: 1 (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

  Less than ten minutes later, he was outside the address Angelle had provided; panting a bit, but without company. She had said the fourth floor. Sure enough, after George had knocked and rung for five minutes, he found Balthazar by forcing the lock. He was there in the flat—what was left of him.

  They had done it in his living room. The girl was in the bedroom. Not much of the gypsy about her now. A lot of blood. Natural enough when throats are cut.

  Oddly, the place had not been rifled. The Mark I transmitter was intact, crystals and all, under the bed.

  He made it back to Downay’s apartment very quickly, in spite of the case weighing like a ton of lead. The Rammer had told him that you should always calculate the risk and then add some. George added double and then some. It still did not come out right, but he figured that one message sent out on the memorised frequency, around nine that night, should bring a response by nine the following evening. Twenty-four hours, then he would have to ditch the wireless.

  Angelle looked relieved and did not seem to notice the suitcase. George asked to be left alone He had a lot of work to do, but could they, perhaps, eat together at about nine-thirty? She looked pleased and reminded him, yet again, that Michel would not be back that night. He nodded, then locked himself into his room and began to sort out the message, dredging what he could from the RT and cipher sessions. He remembered Maitland-Wood spending the day at the Strength Through Joy camp and saying they would probably want him to do a bit of cipher and wireless. Good for them.

  He prayed that nine o’clock was one of the times the Rammer had scheduled for transmission and listening out. He found the crystals, hung the aerial from the old wardrobe, and went through the complicated RT procedure. Ham-fisted with the key, but he reckoned they would spot him quickly enough. In all, he repeated the message three times. Twenty-eight groups of letters. When they’d put it through the machine it should come out as

  STOP PRESS FOR MARS. BALTHAZAR WIPED. CASPAR’S MOTHER IDENTIFIED ON TOKEN. PLEASE ADVISE. UNCERTAIN MELCHIOR. WILCO ALL ORDERS. CASPAR.

  Mars was Ramilies.

  After three minutes came the “message received” letters. Then silence.

  Angelle looked radiant. She had put on a plain frock, blue, and a little make-up. Also silk stockings—her last pair, she said, implying it was a special occasion. From somewhere she had obtained ham and potatoes, and some beans and fruit. There was no bread.

  “Your mother is a tough lady.” Munching an apple.

  “Yes, tough as old boots.” He told her that Maman had been brought up in a hard school, then went on to make careful, and subtle, enquiries about Michel’s habits and friends. Whether Maman had ever visited before. The answers were reasonable enough. Angelle knew some of it; but, if she told the truth, not all.

  He went on to ask what Michel really thought about doing this work for the Boche, and the dazzle went out of her face.

  “He says you will both be moved to Berlin before long.” She paused, but it was more of a shudder. “Then I shall be alone again.” Like it was the end of the world; then a deep breath, the tears not far from the surface as she struggled to replace them with the laughing side of her personality.

  George knew how she felt. Tough, cold George Thomas from Lockhill Terrace had been through it too many times himself. When you drag yourself up and work at being something you are not, there are times you feel so lonely and insecure that you might just as well be the last and only person in the world.

  There had been moments at Oxford when it was hard for George to even walk into a room, let alone look people in the eyes. But you brace yourself and carry on, leading the double life and knowing where you’ve come from. Pretending. Living fantasies and not letting the truth about yourself intrude.

  “Insecurity” was a good word, and George could have taken a First Class honours degree in being insecure at that time. You learn to live with it. Ramilies knew that. Why else, George thought, would he have been picked? Maman was right. People like himself, good at living out their fantasies, were the best kind for jobs like this. The official view, he knew, was different.

  He reached over the table and took her hand, saying she need never feel alone because there were plenty of people around just like them.

  Michel, she replied, was cold and distant. For a long time she had felt that she was in the way; that he did not trust her. Yet he used her from time to time. She spat out the word “used.”

  It all happened then, of course.

  The ways of love, for George, were all secondhand, learned from Hollywood movies. Yet he liked to think that it went beyond that as they lay naked in her bed afterwards.

  It had not been like you read in books, nor the erotic imaginings of his own mind. Not lust nor craving, but giving and receiving. Pleasure—yes.

  It went on and on. She was not a noisy lover, and lord knew if they were any good together, but George—young and inexperienced George Thomas—felt that first coupling was like a sacrament. If ever I am to love, he thought as dawn crept into the room, it is here and now, secure with this girl.

  They were up and dressed by the time Michel got home. He looked tired and winced with pain a couple of times when he moved, as though his leg was playing him up.

  George knew what Angelle meant about his coldness. He was distant and awesome now, sitting sipping coffee by the stove, going through everything: from the moment George had left the apartment for the meeting with Balthazar until the time of his return. George kept up the fiction about being arrested in error, and how Kuche and Wald had bailed him out.

  Michel had seen the SS officers, of course, and it seemed that they had kept to their side of the bargain, but he held something back which did not come out until Angelle retired into the kitchen with the empty cups and plates.

  It was only then that Michel told George about Balthazar and the girl, Lucie. The police were there now, and all hell was breaking loose because some Gestapo man had been found dead—a plainclothesman. “Expertly killed. His back broken.” He looked accusingly at George and asked if he had been to Balthazar’s apartment.

  George already had a pact with Angelle. He had not left the place after returning on the previous evening.

  “Liar.” A fine spray covered George’s cheek. “Georges, you are a liar. I had a man watching out for you. The cretin lost you, but I suppose you were leading him a dance.”

  “Okay, so I went out and there was a tail.” Thank Christ, George thought, he had got the right footpad. “Better a donkey without a tail than dead meat with one.”

  “Okay, George, we break for lunch now.” Herbie stretched and went into the kitchen, calling back over his shoulder, “Have a drink. Help yourself.”

  He had unfrozen a quiche, cooked last week, and only had to make a dressing for the salad. There was soup, once more out of a tin.

  Strain lines showed around George’s eyes. As they ate, Herbie said that he found it very difficult to think of the man sitting opposite him as the younger man who went through the whole Nostradamus business in 1941. Yet the two were the same, distanced and intertwined. “Are you the same man you were thirty years ago?” George tilted an eyebrow.

  As he said it, Big Herbie realised the major reason for his difficulty. It was hard to see George at all. True, he was tall, but even now he had about him a chameleon facility. He recalled that, when they were apart, he always thought of George as a thin, bald, angular man—which he certainly was not. He also remembered once seeing him at an official function, dressed smartly in a well-cut suit. He had not recognised him.

  George Thomas had one of the greatest natural attributes of a field man: the ability to merge into his background. George was a different person sitting in his own office than the George who sat eating Herbie’s quiche here in Herbie’s flat.

  He did not have to try. The ability was natural and would probably have been even more acute when he was younger—in ’41. If George did not want you to see him, he could be almost invi
sible.

  As for the story he told, that was alive and vivid enough. Truth ran through every nuance.

  “Is it what you want?” George asked, slowly coming back into the present.

  “Exactly. You have a very good memory—very good.”

  “Can’t vouch for all the conversations. Not exactly, you know. But they’re near enough. It’s odd, Herbie, but now I’ve got going; it’s like watching an old movie. You remember things. Little details; words; conversations; even people and places. You know, I’ve been back to that building where Michel Downay lived. Once. I didn’t even recognise it. Yet I can see it plainly now. There were so many odd things about that whole business—mental things that I’ll tell you about when we get to them—things not in the report.” He gave a deep sigh. “Ah well, that’s the job, isn’t it? Memory.”

  “Remembering.” Herbie nodded his big head. “Or forgetting, George. We all want to forget some things.”

  George forked up a mouthful of quiche and chewed, slowly as if he was thinking it over. “Just now, I was talking about what Angelle felt like then. About being alone and insecure.”

  Herbie made an affirmative grunt. He was pleased with the quiche. There would be enough of it left for him to eat for supper. Supper and the Mahler Sixth.

  George said that he did know how she felt then. “I know it even more now.” Back in the forties, he supposed, there were times when being a piece of fraudulent currency really hurt. He remembered thinking, during one episode, that if he ever came through to the other end of the war, he would probably end up as a con man.

  Big Herbie laughed. “And you did.”

  “Yes.” George’s face became troubled for a second. “Yes, I’ve become just that. Like you, Herbie. After a lifetime in this trade it’s what I’ve become—living a dozen different lives and each one of them as phoney as a lead silver dollar. Like T. S. Eliot says, I am a hollow man, a stuffed man. Know how old I am, Herbie?”

  Herbie said he had seen the file. George looked fifty in the right light; he would have put him at around fifty-eight, knowing the background circumstances. He was fifty-nine, going on sixty.

  “Stuffed and hollow. At my age? And if I had kids I couldn’t tell them much about what I’ve done. It’s a relief to talk it out with you. Stuffed and hollow. It’s a great profession, Herbie. Let’s get this stuff out of the way. I want to tell you how I conned Michel Downay—conned him into thinking I was a genuine seer. A prophet in my own right. Shook the bugger rigid.” He fiddled with his briefcase, set down within reach beside his chair, and pulled out a small, worn, leather-bound notebook. “Chapter and verse for the difficult bits.” He brandished it in the air. “Can’t trust my own memory with the fake stuff. Funny, ’cause I can remember the real prophecies well enough.”

  “I’ll get coffee. Can’t wait to hear it.”

  In the kitchen, Herbie turned the tape reel on the machine, then took the coffee through, entering his own living room and, at the same moment, travelling back in time to Michel Downay’s Paris apartment on that crucial morning in 1941.

  29

  PARIS 1941

  MICHEL DOWNAY EASED HIMSELF into a chair, stretching his leg painfully. The Gestapo man, he explained, was killed not far from Balthazar’s hole-up. He said that his man thought there had been someone else in the circuit when he lost touch with George.

  George shrugged and said he had not killed anyone. He looked Downay straight in the eyes (another thing they taught at the Abbey: If you’re going to lie directly, look them straight in the eyes and do it without smiling.) He did not smile. “Yes, I went to Balthazar’s place. I wanted to check out something about procedure. Found them there—him and the girl—with their throats cut. You got any ideas about who’d have done a thing like that?”

  Downay shook his head. It wasn’t the style of the occupying power. Maybe Lucie had a jealous bloke on the side. He didn’t know. He also changed the subject smartly. There was work to do. Kuche and Wald had been on at him. Very soon now they would have to take some comments to their General Frühling. The general was shouting; so was the Reichsminister.

  Box clever, George told himself.

  They got into a huddle, side by side at the table, Michel bringing his books and papers from the desk. He had made a list of the most obvious quatrains, together with his own personal comments: all written out like a ledger, in columns, showing the various interpretations which could be made of individual quatrains. The ones that might most satisfy the Propaganda Ministry were done in red.

  The obvious ones were things like

  The fortress on the Thames will surrender

  And the king will be confined within:

  Near the sea there will be seen one in great distress

  Facing his mortal enemy, who will assume power.

  That was quatrain number thirty-seven from the “Eighth Century.” There were others, many of which George had on his own “good” list.

  Downay talked a lot of technicalities, mainly about the horoscopes which had been cast for Hitler. In particular, one that was actually published in the early twenties: A man of action born on 20 April 1889 with the Sun in 29 degrees Aries at the time of birth. It did not mention Hitler by name, but spoke of a destiny to play a Führer-role, giving an impulse to a German Freedom Movement.

  Caution. Play him, Ramilies whispered. Let him come to you.

  George mentioned that current horoscopes predicted disaster. “London’s got a man doing them full-time.”

  Downay smiled and gave him the eyebrow treatment. “They won’t want any of that,” he said.

  “Depends.”

  “On what?” As cautious as George. You could see it in those cool eyes, which must have held such a fascination for women.

  “Depends on the ‘Seventh Century.’” George said it with a dead-drop face. The “Seventh Century” in those shuffled prophecies was incomplete. Incomplete by over fifty quatrains. Nostradamus had recorded only forty-two instead of his normal hundred.

  Michel relaxed. Muscles sagged, and the taut lines on his face smoothed out; the eyes brightened and the mouth lifted into an attractive smile. “For a while I thought the English had sent me a dedicated astrologer.”

  “They have.” George thought he sounded just about as casual as a tart on the make, so he followed it up by pointing out that he had certain talents and was a confirmed practitioner. “The people who sent me didn’t want you lumbered with any old rubbish.”

  Michel looked concerned again, his right hand going up to his throat and then running down the side of his face, a gesture of nervous distress.

  George held out a hand, fingers splayed, to calm him.

  Michel opened his mouth to speak, but George slipped in under his guard, quietly quoting the first quatrain of the “First Century”:

  “Sitting alone at night in secret study;

  It is placed on a brass tripod.

  A slight flame comes out of the emptiness

  And makes successful that which should not be believed in vain.”

  Downay leaned forward. In the kitchen something clattered, and Angelle came through to say she had to go out. There may be bread down the road. Yesterday someone told her there might be bread and she was going to join the queue.

  George and Michel waited, making polite, monosyllabic conversation until she had put on a hat and coat and left the apartment. As she went, Angelle gave George a shy, almost conspiratorial, smile.

  “You slept with her last night, yes?” Michel had lived in the place with her for some time, so was certainly tuned to her moods.

  People read people like books when they share lives, so there was no point in George denying it.

  Michel shrugged as if to imply that she was nobody’s property—or anybody’s. There was something unpleasant about it. Aloud he said there were plenty of women. Enough to go around.

  A bastard with women, Angelle had said.

  Cold silence for a moment while Michel l
ooked down at his ledger of prophecies. Then he repeated that first quatrain, and added the one which followed it:

  “The wand in the hand is placed in the middle of the tripod’s legs.

  With water he sprinkles both the hem of his garment and his foot.

  A voice, fear; he trembles in his robes. Divine splendour; the god sits nearby.”

  Both of the quatrains referred to the ancient rites of divination, the ritual through which the seer got his pictures of the future.

  “So.” Downay tensed again. “So we have the methods of prophecy. The Egyptian mysteries. The tripod and the bowl of water. The forbidden books. Night. Fear. All the standard paraphernalia of the oracles. You propose we should sit here in this apartment and bring forth visions to fill up those empty spaces in Nostradamus’ incomplete ‘Seventh Century?’”

  George knew he hadn’t played Michel for nearly long enough, but there was a time squeeze, and the moment might never be bettered.

  “I’ve already done it,” he said quietly, just as Ramilies had instructed; just as they had planned on that dark night behind the shuttered windows of the Abbey.

  Michel did not laugh, though interest was mingled with predominant amazement on his face and, especially, in the eyes.

  “When did you do this?”

  George told him in England, and that was one of the main reasons he had been sent to Michel.

  The way Michel sat, still and immobile, reminded George of a hunter waiting for his prey to approach a waterhole. You could see the scepticism and hear it in his voice as he spoke:

  “Georges, I am a psychologist. I deal with the behaviour of human beings—what makes them work—the machinery of their thoughts and subconscious, and how that machinery is conditioned by society, politics, family backgrounds, tradition, religion—yes, and by their dreams and superstitions—by their strange conceptions of the occult in some cases; and by the stars. At least communism is honest, Georges, it mistrusts religion as an enemy of the state and of the mind. These brigands we’re dealing with are feudal in their outlook. The soul must be owned by the state, so the state has to provide a mysticism. They tolerate the Church, but would prefer the mumbo-jumbo of legends and astrology. That is one of my motivations for writing about astrology and prophecy—its connection with human behaviour. But you really believe in mystic prophecy?”