Riptide

by John Lawton

  Dear son,

  Well-it’s done. The Lease and Lend is passed into law. It’s a bum’s charter-a licence for the English to come panhandling whenever they feel like it. I was not alone in this view, believe me, but such is democracy-or such is presidential arm-twisting. Not a day went by without one of us being summoned to the White House for an informal chat, and most of them came back shaking their heads and apologising. He sent for me last of all. All teeth and smiles. Told me he’d got the votes, didn’t need mine-made that perfectly clear-so why didn’t

  I roll with it and vote with the majority instead of looking like a ‘stubborn maverick’? I told the sonovabitch that if so much as a plugged nickel of that money got through to Communists in Russia I’d see him impeached…

  Cal skipped on-this kind of complaint usually went on aimlessly for paragraph after paragraph. Cal did not doubt the honesty of his father’s conviction-he’d fought the bill tooth and nail-nor the honesty of his actions-if he said he’d told FDR he’d see him impeached, then he’d done it. It had simply ceased to interest him long ago. He found the chat, what really mattered, the family news.

  Your Grandfather’s in a lot of pain from sciatica. I think he washes it away with bourbon… Your Mother’s worried about the house-we had a wet spring this year, the columns at the front are splitting open-cement and plaster over cast iron, would you believe, and the iron’s well rusted… Good God, is nothing what it seems?

  Cal loved the house-a modest mansion (if there were such a thing) on a hilltop in Fairfax County, looking out across the Potomac to Maryland, dating from the time of Andrew Jackson. It had stood a hundred years. In American terms it was old-and if it was splitting open it would not be the only thing in his native land to burst like rotten fruit before this war was over. It seemed all too symbolic to Cal. He knew this was no worry to his father. It was only a matter of money and they’d money aplenty-but it was change, and his mother hated change. He’d left home, for good as it turned out, when they sent him to a military school prior to West Point. His mother kept his room just as it had been in 1925. His childhood in aspic.

  A thump-thuddy-thump brought him back to the present world, the present continent. It was coming from his outer office. He pulled the door open and looked out. Corporal Tosca was bouncing a half-size basketball off the wall and occasionally dropping it into a half-size net tacked up above the President’s photograph. She bounced with it, breasts rising as she stood on tiptoe and pitched. It was all but impossible to balance well. Her next throw went wild, the ball roared back over her head and Cal caught it neatly. She turned to him. Snatched the ball back.

  ‘You can’t play,’ she said through a mouthful of gum. ‘You’re taller’n me.’

  Most people were, Cal thought.

  ‘Where’s Janis?’ he said.

  ‘Who’s Jams?’

  ‘My regular woman.’

  ‘You have a regular woman?’

  ‘I mean… I meant… my regular assistant.’

  ‘Oh. Her. She flew home. Pregnant. [Pause.] Wasn’t you, was it?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t!’

  ‘Guess not. You don’t look the type. Still, she’s gone now. I’m your regular woman.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘You bet.’ She chewed vigorously and bounced the ball off the floor with the flat of her hand. She dribbled better than she threw. ‘Tell you what, you can play if you take a handicap.’

  ‘Handicap?’

  ‘You have to stand on one leg.’

  Cal was a lousy player, but even standing on one leg he beat her five times out of five. Every time he dropped the ball through the net she chewed furiously on her gum. At six out of six, he said, ‘I have to go to England.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘I hesitate to say this, but if you’re my clerk you’ll be in charge of the office while I’m gone.’

  ‘Okey-dokey. I’ll dust your spook files and darn your spy’s outfit and knit little covers for your tommy guns.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Cal. ‘Is nothing serious?’

  Tosca stopped chewing, blew out a bubble of pink goo to the size of a cue ball and then burst it with her teeth.

  ‘Not much,’ she said.

  § 8

  It was a pity they could not run to a two-way mirror. Stilton had never seen a two-way mirror. The FBI had them in the flicks. A two-way mirror would really make him feel like a spy rather than just a policeman. Not that he was not utterly proud to be an officer of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch-it just lacked a whisper of romance, that dark hint of adventure.

  He sat in the next room with the lights out. Watching Thesiger and his quarry through the inch-open door. Thesiger was talking to a Dutchman-Jeroen Smulders. It was the third time he’d had him in since he was picked up in a dinghy off the coast of Essex. He was Dutch-Stilton was satisfied of that-and neither he nor Squadron Leader Thesiger had been able to find a codebook among his effects-a Dutch/English pocket dictionary, a Lutheran bible, a collection of half a dozen worn, well-thumbed love letters-but he was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a German spy. Thesiger had had the man checked out by the M.O. ‘Just for your own sake-no communicable diseases, that sort of thing.’ And the M.O. had confirmed everything Stilton had suggested. Smulders was nearer thirty than the forty his papers claimed-his hair had been taken up at the roots over the frontal lobes to age him-his sideburns treated with peroxide-two teeth pulled recently-and fifteen pounds of flab added by stuffing himself over a matter of a few weeks to disguise a hard core of underlying muscle. He could take it off as easily as he had put it on with a dash of will-power. Smulders was young, fit and probably trained.

  ‘Trained what?’ was the question Stilton had put to himself. Your run-of-the-mill spy (was there such a thing?) didn’t need to have the physique of a Spartan warrior. Your run-of-the-mill spy more than likely was a forty-two year old Dutch printer, hotfoot from Delft, telling you he was fleeing the enemy. The Germans had gone to a lot of trouble with this man. But too quickly, the new body, the new persona, sat atop the old too loosely.

  Stilton saw the two men rise. Saw Thesiger shaking hands with Smulders, wishing him good luck. Smulders gathering up his papers, walking out into his new life, safe in Britain, an island haven in an occupied Europe.

  Thesiger lit up a fag. Stilton took his hat and his mackintosh off the back of the door and pulled it wide. Thesiger perched on a corner of his desk, the epitome of calm. He was not one of those officers for whom ‘on duty’ required a stiff upper lip and a ramrod backbone, any more than it seemed to require a regulation uniform. Thesiger was frequently to be found in corduroy trousers or a rough woollen pullover or with a tatty old cravat tucked around his neck-the blue battledress with its insignia of rank the only concession he made. Most of the time he was to be found with his feet up-and on cold days this winter he’d sat with his feet in the bottom drawer of his desk for warmth, until the day a Wren came in without knocking and he’d stood too sharply in the presence of a lady and shot through the bottom of the drawer.

  ‘Have you got a few minutes?’ he said.

  ‘O’ course. He gets a lift to the station. One of my blokes gets on the London train with him. Another picks him up at Fenchurch Street. Routine stuff. Doesn’t need a Chief Inspector.’

  Thesiger held out a packet of Craven A.

  ‘No thanks, sir. I’ve given up. Strictly a pipe man from now on.’

  ‘Given up?’ Thesiger could not keep the astonishment out of his voice. People didn’t give up cigarettes. They either smoked or they didn’t. ‘Ah well… tell me, Chief Inspector. Do I detect a sour note in your use of the word “routine”?’

  ‘All I meant was that anyone could do it. I meant no offence.’

  ‘And I took none. But it does seem to me that you think all this is a bit beneath you.’

  ‘Not exactly. But it’s hardly using me to the full, is it? When I was seconded to the unit I thought it was because I’d fluent Ger
man, because I knew Germans… and I’ve picked up more than a smattering of Polish and Czech in the last four years.’

  ‘Anyone could do what you do?’

  ‘Doesn’t take what I know to tail a few blokes around London.’

  ‘Then we must see if we can’t make better use of your talents.’

  ‘It was the kind of remark Stilton had become used to from the toff’s. Three years a serving Tommy and almost thirty as a copper had rubbed in the deferential nature of the Forces. Merit had little or nothing to do with it. You were born to lead or you weren’t. And Stilton wasn’t. It all came down to class. Age-he was fifteen or more years older than Thesiger-and experience-he’d been in the last war, when Theisger was still a schoolboy-counted for little. It was the sort of thing that took a war to change. The first year of Walter Stilton’s war had been routine. The second year, since Dunkirk, had been one of the best of his life-working for Thesiger as a ‘spycatcher’. He and Thesiger got on very well. He’d rarely met a toff less strait-jacketed by his class. They understood one another very well. Thesiger could drop the upper crust habitual allusions and ellipses of speech to talk plainly when he had to. And still it left Stilton frustrated. Thesiger’s generosity of spirit was sincere, as sincere as his material generosity (he was the sort of bloke who’d share his flask and sandwiches with you), but it was unlikely to be followed up by any action. He’d interrogate Jerry-Stilton and blokes like Stilton would traipse after them in the pouring rain noting their movements in little black notebooks.

  Thesiger sat down again-stretched out his legs, heels resting on the edge of his desk, talked through a puff of smoke, the cigarette waggling in his lips as he did so.

  ‘While we’re on the subject, Walter, I wanted to ask you-what news of our Jerry in Derby?’

  This was a man professing to be a Belgian refugee. Thesiger and Stilton had spotted him at once and decided to turn him loose. Let him find his place in Britain and then use him to feed back misinformation.

  ‘He’s snug as a bug in a rug at the Rolls Royce works. We’ve got him making up parts for what he thinks is a new fighter engine. It’s about as likely to fly as a pig. Most of it’s made up from the plans for my wife’s sewing machine, blown up to twenty times the scale. At worst we might inadvertently give Krupps the idea for a two-ton Singer.’

  Thesiger grinned. Class notwithstanding, Stilton liked the man. It was largely thanks to him that MI5 could boast that there was not a single German spy in Britain they did not know about.

  ‘We can’t afford to lose Smulders. Not for a day. He’s not here to stay. He’s not a sleeper. He’s on something quite specific. If I knew what it was I’d not have turned him loose. As soon as we know you’ll have to pull him in. There’s a risk of course-if Jerry has some way of communicating with him, then the minute he goes active he’ll try and vanish. We must be ready for that, really we must.’

  ‘Do you mind if I stick in me two-penn’orth?’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘He’s a twitchy sort of a bloke. One of the nurses came up behind him a bit too quiet like during his medical, and he rounded on her faster than a ferret after a rabbit. He’d grabbed her by one arm before he checked himself. All smiles and apologies. She’d dropped her kidney dish. He helped the lass pick it up-was so charming to her he made the poor girl bright red with embarrassment. But it was enough. A dead giveaway. He’s what you’d call Commando trained. A bare-handed killer.’

  ‘Perhaps we are wasting your talent. An assassin indeed. I’m inclined to agree. Assassin of whom, one wonders? They’d hardly send him across and expect him to take a crack at Winston now would they?’

  § 9

  It took days to reach England. A hop across Vichy France in a Swiss plane to Lisbon, and a two day lay-up at the Avis Hotel while they waited for the irregular American Clipper service to Poole, on the south coast of England. It was a mark of how much things had changed since the war, how much they’d changed since the fall of Holland and the loss of the KLM planes. It had been a daily service, the flying boats had connected fairly neatly with the steamers-some of them even bounced on via the Azores to touch down in Bowery Bay NY, within sight and sound of Manhattan-and you got your mail on time. Now there were queues of passengers, often more than a hundred, waiting day after day to cross the Atlantic or to skim the waves to England. Ruthven-Greene argued their priority over anyone short of a general and bumped them up the list and on to the next available plane.

  Cal liked Lisbon. Its steep hills and streetcars put him in mind of San Francisco, its sidewalk cafes of Paris. It was the antithesis of Zurich. Zurich was polite and businesslike in its teutonic fashion. The factions made appointments to see one another and observed a diplomatic regularity. Lisbon was nothing if not irregular. Lisbon in May, Lisbon at peace, even if everyone else was at war, was warm and sunny and a little careless. The warring sides passed each other in the street, rubbed shoulders in the bars and cafes, murdered one another in the alleys. It was new to Cal, and visibly old hat to Ruthven-Greene. On the second afternoon he had rummaged in his pockets for a light, ignored the book of matches on the cafe’s kerbside table and nipped across the street to bum a light from a man smoking outside the cafe opposite. Reggie had chatted to the man for several minutes before he came back, scarcely suppressing a grin.

  ‘Someone you know?’ Cal asked.

  ‘Yes. Old Dietrich from the German embassy. Usually pays to have a bit of a chat with the old sod. His boastfulness always gets the better of his discretion. One day soon they’ll find his body floating in the harbour, and it won’t be because of anything our lot have done. He came out with an absolute corker. Asked me about this bunker Churchill’s having built under Glands castle in Scotland-courtesy of the Queen’s people, who own it-so he can hold the Jerries at Hadrian’s Wall after they’ve conquered England. I don’t know where he gets such twaddle, but I rather wish I’d made it up myself.’

  Cal loved flying. He felt safe in the fat body of the little Boeing Clipper. He didn’t get sick and there was something deeply reassuring about the throb of four robust-sounding piston-engined propellers close to the ear.

  He watched the Spanish coast fall away as they flew on to the Bay of Biscay, swinging westward to avoid the German-occupied French Atlantic ports-U-boat bases for the wolf packs that harassed shipping.

  An unsafe thought crossed his mind. An unsafe question passed his lips.

  ‘Supposing they fired on us?’

  ‘Eh?’ said Ruthven-Greene.

  ‘By mistake, I mean.’

  ‘Be the biggest mistake of the war so far. A diplomatic incident, old boy. It’d be like the last war-remember the sinking of the Lusitania? You and I would go down to the Jerry guns in the noble cause of bringing Uncle Sam into the war lickety-split.’

  § 10

  After planes, Cal liked trains. They brought out the boy in him. Memories of long journeys across the wet flatlands of Pennsylvania and Maryland as his father shuffled the family between New York and Washington. Fonder memories of backtracks in the heart of rural Virginia as his father indulged him rarely in pleasure trips on the Norfolk and Western-riding for the fun of it-where trains the size of mountains moved at the speed of a horse and wagon, snaking through the countryside and crawling down Main Street in little towns for whom Main was the only street.

  From Poole to Waterloo he could see nothing. The blackouts were drawn tight, and the compartments packed. Passengers sat four to a side.

  Soldiers in uniform sat on their kitbags in the corridors, and a group of weary, dishevelled NCOs played poker in the mail van. The station porters yelled out the names of the stations at the tops of their voices-still people missed them.

  He did not know what to say to anyone. Ruthven-Greene said it all. Cal had rarely seen a man quite so affable, quite so banal-a master of inane chat-and he talked without, as Cal heard it, telling a single truth. Years of practice, he assumed-since Reggie could not tell the truth abou
t what he did in the war he seemed to have achieved a believable cover so plausible he uttered it without any consciousness of it not being true. The fate of all spies, to believe one’s own lies. Reggie chatted to the district nurse, to the naval lieutenant going home on leave, to the rural archdeacon going up to town to meet the bishop, and told them all he was an oatmeal buyer for the Highland Light Infantry. An army marches on its stomach, he said, quoting Napoleon, but a Scottish army marches on porridge, he will, making it up as he went along. And then he asked them a hundred nosy questions, recommended a few nightclubs to the Navy nun, asked the nurse about her family and sang snatches of his favourite hymns for the clergyman. Cal nodded off to the sound of ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam…’

  At Waterloo Reggie nudged him and said, ‘Shall we share a cab? You could drop me at the Savoy and then take it on to Claridge’s.’

  Cal demurred. He’d trust to the cabman’s sense of geography. Reggie would tell him the Savoy was on the way to Claridge’s even if it wasn’t.

  In the back of the cab as they crossed the Thames Reggie handed Cal a card with his name and the Savoy’s address and telephone number on it and said, ‘We’ve got tomorrow off. I suggest you get some rest, see a bit of the town and report to your blokes at the embassy on Monday. I’ll see my chaps and give you a bell before noon.’

  ‘My blokes?’

  Reggie stuck his hand into his jacket pocket and brought out another of his many-folded bits of paper.

  ‘A Major Shaeffer and a Colonel Reininger. D’ye know ‘em?’

  ‘I’ve met Shaeffer. On my last visit in ‘39. I’ve known Frank Reininger all my life. When I was a teenager he was based in Washington. My father sat on one of the House Defence Committees-Frank liaised. I guess you could call him my father’s protégé. E pluribus unum.’

  ‘Well he’s the chap you report to.’