by Robert Ryan
Early in the war, after his internment in France, P.G. Wodehouse had made five broadcasts to America on German radio, intended to be humorous accounts of his trials and tribulations. Neave agreed he was naïve if he hadn’t thought the Nazis would use his celebrity to their own advantage, and there was a line in one of the talks that had been seized on back home. ‘Whether England wins or not.’ It sounded like defeatism.
That Wodehouse wouldn’t swing like that other radio propagandist William Joyce—christened Lord Haw Haw by the British listeners to his increasingly ludicrous rants from Berlin—was probably thanks to the author being associated in the public’s mind with his creation, the brainless Bertie Wooster, the best defence a man could have. That and old school friends in high places.
‘It’s Cole, isn’t it?’ asked Philby suddenly, knocking back the contents of his glass.
‘What?’ Neave asked.
‘You were saying about making someone pay. Harry Cole? It’s him you’ve come to see?’
‘Yes,’ Neave confirmed, surprised he knew, but then, these days, it was Philby’s job to know everything.
‘Ah,’ said Muggeridge. ‘Him. Well, that’s a foregone conclusion, isn’t it? Man’s a traitor.’
‘And an impostor,’ added Philby. ‘Went through the war pretending to be one of ours, didn’t he?’
‘Traitor and impostor,’ agreed Muggeridge. ‘Hang the bastard.’
They both nodded sagely, drink making their heads heavy, and Neave smiled to himself. Traitor and impostor. He wondered which they considered the worse crime.
After a week at the Paris Detention Centre, Harry’s knee returned to its normal size and he had finally managed to get his hands on a typewriter. He had even convinced the night shift that it was too cold to type in his cell, and they had cautiously allowed him to work on his deposition in the guard room, near the pot-bellied stove.
Eleven days after his arrest at Odile’s, he wrote the last page of his account, taking him up to his return to Paris, but stopping short of his arrest. He snatched it out of the typewriter and laid it face down on top of the stack on his left. There were well over thirty single-spaced sheets.
‘Finished?’ said the English guard.
The American put down a cup of coffee next to Harry. ‘Thank God for that. Maybe we’ll get some peace and quiet now.’
‘Completely,’ announced Harry. ‘So that’s that. He’s coming tomorrow, is he?’
The Englishman pointed at the wallchart showing the week’s appointments. ‘Major Airey Neave, ten o’clock.’
Neave. Airey Neave. Could he be a relation? Not that common a name, Neave. Anthony and Airey, they could be brothers or cousins. Would that work in his favour? Could he call the other Neave as a character witness? They’d got on well in Marseilles, after all. He’d find out soon enough.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ Harry said with a grin, ‘how about a game of cards before I turn in?’
Neave had left Fouquet early, still aggravated by Philby’s remarks about MI9, and returned to his hotel. He had tossed and turned for an hour before sleep finally took him. Had his own escape cost anyone their lives on his journey? Not that he knew of. How could he be sure? A denouncement might have happened days after he left a farmer or bank clerk who had been hiding him. Neave’s freedom might well have had a human price he simply didn’t know about and the thought troubled him mightily.
Later on, at Room 900, he knew all too well that his actions had cost lives—men, and women, who undertook missions for him who never returned. Even so, the arithmetic wasn’t that simple. If one person was caught for every airman returned, surely the combatants were more vital to the war effort … but no, he had trouble with that. He left the considerations of whether one life was worth more than another to people like Dansey.
It seemed he had only just nodded off when the telephone rang. He looked at the clock as he reached over for the receiver. Six thirty. On the other end was an alarmingly bright-sounding Muggeridge.
‘Neave? Have I woken you? Listen, just wanted to share something with you. Strangest thing. We had just left the restaurant when Philby said: “I know, let’s go to the Rue de Grenelle.” Do you know what’s there?’
‘Soviet Embassy,’ said Neave, suppressing a yawn.
‘Absolutely right. Well, I didn’t know that at the time. Should have, I suppose. So we go to Grenelle, and have a drink at this bloody awful place called, uh, The Blue Noon, I think. Kim talks about his new responsibilities and what a threat Communism is now and how we must prepare for the next phase of the war and how hard it is to penetrate a Soviet Embassy, how they keep a tight rein on everyone, right down to the lowliest porter. To make his point, he drags me out of this damned bar and carries on, talking far too loudly for my liking, and that’s when I realise we are standing outside the embassy itself. He is shouting at the top of his voice at a building chock full of Russians, yelling about this that and the other, not exactly shaking his fists, but, well, gesticulating at the building.’
‘Was he drunk?’ Neave asked, rather superfluously.
‘We both were, as you well know. But even so. With his job … of … well, I awoke this morning and thought: that’s irregular. Well, reprehensible really. I mean, they were bound to be watching, weren’t they? And bound to have seen me. What do you make of it?’
‘An aberration I dare say,’ said Neave flatly, wondering what he was meant to make of a bit of drunken idiocy. It was either that or Philby was deliberately showing Muggeridge off to the Russkies, but what would be the point of that? Unless he wanted to identify Malcolm Muggeridge, SIS’s new Paris intelligence co-ordinator, to someone inside the compound. That, though, was unthinkable. Philby’s appointed task was to fight the men behind those walls, after all.
‘An aberration, yes,’ agreed Muggeridge. ‘Sure you’re right. Sorry to trouble you. Good luck, Neave.’
‘What with?’
‘Good luck with that little shit. Good luck with Harry Cole.’
Neave thanked him and put the phone down and thought about the conversation for a moment before he crossed to the bathroom to run his bath. One day, decades later, he would wonder if, had he dwelt on it further, he might have come to the conclusion that the affable, clubbable Kim Philby was not what he seemed, that perhaps the previous night he had cracked the way all people living a double life seem to snap at some point, inviting discovery, just as men with both wives and mistresses often push the barriers between the two until they bulge and break.
That morning, though, Neave pushed the incident from his mind. He had bigger fish to fry.
Thirty-seven
IT TOOK NEAVE FORTY minutes to read the pages so laboriously typed by Harry Cole, during which time the author sat opposite him in the interview room, smoking his way through a pack of American cigarettes which he claimed to have won at cards. Funny how the man had distorted in his mind’s eye. The image he had carried of Cole was bigger, coarser, with a weaselly, untrustworthy gaze. This one was the chap he recalled from Calais and Marseilles, direct, polite, almost charming in an offhand way.
At certain points in the narrative, Neave would look up and feel like punching Harry, again and again. At other times, he had to laugh at the sheer audacity of the man. As he finished the last page, Neave stood up and walked to the window, gazing across to the metro station at Porte des Lilas. Dansey’s Red Ribbon was still in force on Harry, but it was difficult to execute once he had been brought to the Paris Detention Centre and formally charged. No, they would have to do this the old-fashioned way.
‘What happened to Tony?’
Neave turned. ‘Pardon?’
‘Tony Neave? Why the name change? To Airey’
‘I never liked the name Airey.’ Why was he discussing this with Cole? The reversion was because of his imminent secondment to the War Crimes Commission, which insisted names matched official papers, and so he had got back into the habit of using his given Christian name. ‘It’s of no cons
equence.’
‘What’s in a name, eh? Something else we have in common.’
‘We have nothing in common, Cole.’
‘Are you sure? I thought Tony and I understood each other.’
Neave shuddered at the very thought that he could be identified with this treacherous creature. ‘I doubt it, Cole.’ He put Harry’s manuscript down on the table. ‘I’m trying to understand from this where you went terribly wrong. Where you crossed the Rubicon, from hero to villain, chancer to traitor.’
‘Maybe you’re asking the wrong question. Maybe you should ask where it all went terribly right. At what point did I start working for the good guys. You should know, you were there. At Calais. At Marseilles.’
‘Marseilles?’
‘We had a drink, remember? We talked about escaping. You quite enjoyed it.’
‘I don’t remember enjoying it, Cole. We were just ships in the night.’
‘Heading in the same direction.’
‘Hardly, Cole, hardly. And anyway, your account varies somewhat from the facts there. By the way,’ Neave said with some relish, ‘Guérisse has volunteered to kill you.’
So Pat O’Leary, the Belgian who had adopted an Irish name, had survived the war. ‘He never did trust me.’
‘He was right not to, wasn’t he?’
‘Did you read that properly, Major?’ Harry nodded at his typing. ‘It doesn’t vary at all from the truth. Perhaps your memory is at fault.’
‘I don’t know where to begin, Cole. It is an astonishing document, I’ll grant you. Quite remarkable.’
Cole smiled.
‘I assume like all good liars you have stuck as closely to the truth as you dare.’ Harry opened his mouth to speak, but Neave’s look told him not to bother. Neave lit his own cigarette. ‘Do you know what happened to the priest from Abbeville, whom you fail to mention here, Sergeant Cole?’ He spat out the rank as if it was diseased. ‘Carpentier? Beheaded. Didry? Also decapitated. Dubois? Decapitated. I could go on. Shot. Strangled, gassed. How many? Fifty? A hundred? But some survived, Cole, oh yes, some survived. And they want to see you dead as much as I do. Guérisse …’
‘I had nothing to do with Guérisse or anyone else in Marseilles being caught.’
‘No, but he knew you were a bad sort from the start, Sergeant. And your explanation of working for this King fellow? For God’s sake, man. It’s like something out of …’ He struggled to find the appropriate book, then remembered The Confidential Agent. ‘Graham Greene.’
‘Look—’
‘And Odile … not a word of remorse for what you did. She’s worth ten of you, Cole. The baby died, by the way, Harry.’
‘Baby?’ The colour drained from his face.
‘Are you telling me you didn’t know Odile was pregnant when you sent her over to the Gestapo man with the list of safe houses? A man with your intuition, your way with the ladies, might have guessed. It was born prematurely, Harry, and it wasn’t strong …’ Neave took a breath and let it out slowly. ‘The things you’ve done, Sergeant Cole. How do you sleep at night?’
Harry held his hands out, pleadingly. ‘Major, I know it sounds bad. That’s why I wrote it all down. All these things you say … it wasn’t me.’
‘No, no, of course not. Possibly an evil twin brother?’ Sarcasm cracked Neave’s voice as he reached down into his case and brought out a thick folder, tied with a crimson ribbon. He undid it and flicked over a few pages. ‘Everything we have heard about you over the last few years is here, Cole. Every rumour, sighting, chance encounter. It would be interesting to compare the two accounts, don’t you think, Sergeant? For instance, you neglect to mention that in the case of the apartments you burgled in Paris, you had denounced the victims yourself, then ransacked the place while they were being tortured in the cells.’
‘Nonsense. That’s nonsense. You make me out to be a … a monster.’
‘What really puzzles me,’ said Neave, in control once more, ‘is why you told the evaders to give your regards to Scotland Yard or SIS when they got home, as if you were legit.’
‘I was legit.’
‘You must have known it would get back to the powers-that-be. That they’d know they had no Mason or Cole on the books.’
‘I was working for the powers-that-be. On the QT.’
‘So you keep saying. How many nipples do you have, Cole?’
‘What?’
‘How many nipples do you have?’
‘The usual. Why?’
‘Well, according to you,’ he indicated Harry’s writings, ‘they sawed one off in Montluc. Isn’t that right? And circumcised you with pliers? How is that wound? Should we take a look?’
‘What is the problem here, Neave? I told you—’
‘Of course. I was forgetting. Not your fault. It was this omnipotent Mr King, one of our agents. He set you up for everything.’
‘He bloody well did.’ The first trace of anger, perfectly judged, thought Neave. ‘Check the records in London.’
‘You think I won’t?’
Harry stubbed out his cigarette and said quietly: ‘I don’t know what you’ll do, Major Neave.’
Neave strode over and slammed a fist onto the pile of typed papers. ‘I shall take this pack of lies to London, Sergeant, that’s what I shall do. I assume this will form part of your defence?’
Harry nodded glumly.
‘In which case I will have it copied and returned. You will be assigned a lawyer, of course. Then it is a matter of formalities.’ Neave put the sheaf of papers under his arm.
‘What formalities?’
‘Whether we hang you here or in London, Sergeant.’
Claude Dansey grimaced as he reached over to the pile of documents on his desk. The pain flowed from his shoulder blade down his left arm. He slumped back in the chair, sweat on his brow, irritated. He didn’t have time for infirmity, not now. There were loose ends to be tied and long-term plans to be put into action.
He signalled by intercom for more tea and picked up the top folder again. It was a copy of Muggeridge’s report on Wodehouse, suggesting no proceedings be instigated against the foolish man. It was already ticked by ‘C’ and he scanned it quickly. The author was just too high profile, Dansey thought. Never liked his stuff himself, but any trial would generate too many column inches, here and in the United States. And Menzies was a fan. He found the rubber stamp, banged it down and initialled the blurred ‘No Further Action’.
The second document was a memo from Neave, and a file of perhaps thirty typed pages. After he had skimmed through it, he stoked a pipe, a rare treat these days, and lit it, before standing and walking with the file over to the fireplace behind him.
There was a knock and Maddy, his secretary, entered with his tea, placing it on the desk and looking over at him as he knelt before the grate. ‘It’s a little warm for a fire, isn’t it, Sir Claude?’ she asked.
Dansey watched the edges of the typed pages curl as the flames caught and he stood stiffly, his knees cracking as he did so. ‘Just getting rid of some rubbish, Maddy. Thanks for the tea. Oh, and when you get a minute ask Duty Ops to track down King, will you? I’d like a word.’
‘Certainly, Sir Claude.’
She closed the door softly and he watched the flames change from a feeble yellow to a more robust red as the paper blackened and flaked, particles of it spiralling off up the chimney. Too many column inches, he thought. Best deal with all this softly, softly. The war was all over for him now, he thought regretfully, it was time to pass the baton on to Philby and his cohorts, let them fight the next war, the one against the new empire in the East. All that was left for him was to tidy up the outstanding matters, like this fellow Cole.
Dansey suddenly found himself smiling as he sucked on the worn stem, amused at the thought of the man’s desperate version of events, now a small pile of flaking ashes. Cole. He felt something flicker inside as he considered the man. What was it? Pity? Guilt? But no, he couldn’t recognise it. Pe
rhaps it was just the feeling that, under different circumstances, Harry would have been a perfect agent after all. Some other war, maybe, but not the coming one. Cole’s time was at an end. Couldn’t Red Ribbon him in Paris Detention Centre, much too public, but King would find a way round that. Dansey reached for the tea and cursed as the blasted pain ran down his arm once more.
Thirty-eight
Paris, late 1945
HARRY WALKED FROM HIS cell to the guard room, cleared his usual space at the table for the typewriter, fed the first blank sheet of paper in and typed his name in capitals at the top. The English guard looked up and said, ‘You still at it?’
‘I think I need to be a bit clearer on some points.’ The American brought him a cup of coffee. ‘I heard they might be moving you on at last.’ Months had passed since the Neave interview. Messages filtered through about possible transfers to London, about further interrogations, but part of him was convinced he was being left to rot. Other prisoners had come and gone, leaving him to refine his version of events and to ponder what Neave had said about the baby. He should have asked what sex it was. It would have been nice to be able to picture him or her. And a name.
He reflected on his child breathing its last breath in an icy bedroom, Odile clutching the tiny body, trying to press some warmth into it. Another wasted life. He pushed the images away. He could not allow himself to get maudlin. Recriminations could wait.
Harry shrugged and said, ‘I heard that too. I’m in no hurry. I’m almost getting to like you blokes.’ He pecked at the keys, getting down the opening details about his time in Hong Kong.
‘Why are you still bothering to write the story over and over?’ asked the Englishman. ‘You must have done ten ribbons.’
‘He’s still inventing the truth,’ said the Yank with a smirk. ‘Aren’t you, Harry?’
‘I haven’t invented anything. That’s the thing I can’t get these bloody officers to understand. They seem more bothered by the fact I gave myself a bit of unofficial promotion than anything else.’