“Why’s he back, then? A man of resource such as you describe—he could have avoided the duty. Must have wanted to make the trip rather badly. He’s up to something.” James Bacchus gave Joe a very direct look. “And I think you probably know what it is.”
“Oh, he’s probably come back for his cat,” Joe said lightly. “Big ginger creature. Unpleasant biter. When Bill went off in a hurry, Superintendent Cottingham took it into care and he’s still caring for it, I believe. Yes—at the top of his list of things to do you’ll find: ‘a) Rescue Marmalade. b) Put a bullet in Sandilands’ head.’ ”
“Gawd!” Bacchus groaned. “You don’t give me an easy life, Joe! Are you telling me I’ve now got to provide a guard for the guard? You and this villain are both technically working together to protect the senator against …” He raised his shoulders, searching for a word. “… the world? Would that cover it? And Armitage is out to top you before he puts his gun back in its holster. What’s he using, by the way?”
“Great cumbersome thing. A Colt?”
“I’ll get that checked.”
“How …?”
“I’ll just ask my opposite number at the FBI what they’re ‘packing,’ as they say, offering supplies of ammunition and all that. We can be helpful when we want. They’re very grateful, especially since they discovered their own so carefully shipped stores had gone missing from the checkroom. We hint, loftily, that they’ve been mightily careless. The Italians actually believed us when we fed them the same codswallop and sacked their quartermaster. And the French! But the Americans—well, they play our game. They know we can’t tolerate a capital with armament of one sort or another loose on the streets for an indefinite time. They’d do the same.”
Bacchus, whose attention had hardly strayed from the headset, now picked up one earpiece and applied it casually. “Your bloke’s on the move. Armitage. Says he’s going up to their rooms … Senator’s calling for another pot of coffee. Thinks his girlfriend might pop in for breakfast. Are we sure Kingstone’s got a girlfriend, Joe? Haven’t seen hide nor hair of her … Ah! Here’s Cottingham strolling over to introduce himself. Here’s your chance! Get out into the corridor and trip up your pistol-packing sergeant.”
Joe was already sliding out.
“THERE YOU ARE, Sarge!”
“There you are, Captain!”
The cheerful calls rang out at the same moment across the width of the black-and-white tiled vestibule.
“I was wondering if …” Joe began.
“So was I!” Armitage grinned. “I was hoping you’d lingered behind, retying a shoelace.” He waved away the attentions of the footman. “Shall we take the elevator?”
The two men got out on the third floor, and Joe followed the sergeant down the thickly carpeted corridor.
“They’ve put you in here, 310,” said Armitage. “Got your key, sir? Senator Kingstone is directly opposite in 315. His friend is booked into 316 and I’m in 314.”
“Oh, good. We can all have a game of bridge if it gets boring,” Joe muttered.
“We’ll take a look inside.” Armitage took a ring of keys from his pocket and opened the door of Kingstone’s room.
A perfectly ordered, carefully decorated and furnished suite of rooms greeted them. Joe noted fresh flowers on low tables, easy chairs, a desk. The bed was in a separate room and enjoyed the luxury of an adjoining bathroom fitted out in white marble with silver taps.
“The staff has been in already,” Joe remarked, taking in the made-up bed, the neatly arranged toilet items.
“Any little surprises here?” Armitage asked, matter-of-factly.
“We’ve been here four days and I’ve checked thoroughly—you’re not the only man who carries a screwdriver about with him—but unless the Yard really has pulled itself into the twentieth century at last, I’d say the whole suite was clear. Wouldn’t want the senator’s romantic idyll being shared with your thugs in the Branch.”
Joe cut him short. “What do you take us for, man? Cads? Absolutely no intention of intruding. What did your”—he gave slight stress to the “your”—“Secretary of State say when he closed down your code-breaking section? ‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.’ A very proper sentiment! Gentlemen do not listen in to a chap’s private conversations with a lady friend either.”
Armitage listened to all this with a cynical smile. “Besides, the staff here is well trained and observant. Probably on the payroll. You can learn anything you need to know from their reports.”
“Exactly. You know our methods.”
“Yep! And that’s going to be a help. Siddown, Captain,” he drawled, indicating two easy chairs. “Time we got a few things straight.”
“The first thing you can straighten out is your accent,” Joe said, his expression mild and interested. “Do I detect Tennessee? I’m no expert but it does have a flavour of the catfish rather than the jellied eel, these days.”
“Trick I learned from you. I was never sure you knew you were doing it yourself, but I noticed all right. You could talk to a pepper-and-salt brigadier in his own accent one minute and then turn and sound off at the men in trench lingo the next. It gives people confidence if they’re talking to someone who speaks as they do. If you get it right, they don’t even notice you’re doing it because they’re hearing what they’re expecting to hear.”
Joe smiled. “Just as I’m hearing upper class London at the moment? You always did have a linguist’s ear, Sarge.” He went on talking as he set about a routine examination of the room, opening and closing windows, locating the fire escape, locking and unlocking the communicating door. “Tell me—anything else left over from the good old days? Your Communist sympathies are alive and well, are they? I hear the States are a hot bed of red-tinged societies these days.”
The sergeant’s handsome features had frozen into a noncommittal expression and Joe realised that his first barb had found its target.
“That was a long time ago. Mark it down as a young man’s folly and forget it.”
“Not quite ready to do that yet. We’ve kept the original reports the Branch presented on your activities and affiliations. It includes photographic evidence.” Joe decided to pin down Armitage with a second shaft. An underhand one he despised but which he feared might be his only restraint on this wayward and contradictory man. “One never knows when they might come in useful … You’re an agent in the FBI, I think Kingstone said?”
“Okay, okay! I’ll save you saying it,” Armitage said, his teeth clenched. “Blackmail isn’t—or used not to be—in your repertoire. But it’s no more than I expected. One word dropped to J. Edgar Hoover—my boss—and that’s my career, perhaps my life, finished. He’s been leading a cleanup of anything or anyone tainted by communism for years now. He doesn’t need proof. Suspicion is enough to land you in jail. You have me over a barrel. Happy with that?”
“Have you met him, this boss of yours? This latter-day witch-finding general?” Joe’s interest was clear.
“I have.”
Joe waited.
“Hoover’s effective, driven, ruthless and won’t be crossed.”
“How tiring,” Joe said with a sympathetic smile. “From that description, I’d say you and your boss were two for a penny. But—to save you saying it—there are less pleasant aspects to the man’s methods and character. I hear from one who knows these things that he is also egotistical, disloyal, vindictive and devious but, like many of his kind, seems always able to bob, unscathed, to the surface.”
“A piece of shit. You said it, sir.”
“Which makes me wonder why on earth you would have pursued a career with the FBI.”
“I’m a policeman. They are the force of law and order. But don’t be superior! Where do you think I learned some of the dirtier tricks of the trade? The Yard could give J.E.H. a few tips in skulduggery. ‘The boy who thinks ahead, gets ahead,’ my old headmaster used to say. Like in soccer—it’s speed and cunning you need. I just make sure
I’m faster on my feet than the men blocking my way. I trip ’em up and run. Whoever they are.”
“Bill, as one whom, in the past, you’ve left writhing on the ground clutching an ankle, I’m aware of your qualities. Always have been,” Joe said. “So I do ask myself why a clever, self-seeking bastard like you comes back and sticks his head in a noose?”
Armitage turned to him, face flushing with emotion. “It won’t come to that. But if it did—what’s one life? I’m no martyr—you know that—but we’re talking about millions of lives and you don’t even know it! You really haven’t worked it out, have you?”
“We all know Britain’s bankrupt, Bill. You don’t need to tell us. The weight of the war loan repayments to the States will sink the country. Some say it’s a calculated sinking by our cousins. Good of you to come back all this way to check the price of a loaf in the old country. We know just how urgent it is that the world sorts out its finances at this conference. Chaos, depression and starvation will ensue if we don’t. We could be facing a lingering decline. King George is about to make that very point when he speaks at the opening. We’re aware all right.”
Armitage groaned. “To hell with the finances! ‘Lingering decline!’ ” he scoffed and, putting on an elegant Mayfair tone: “ ‘I say, my dear, I really think, in the interests of economy, we must reduce our indoor staff to a dozen, don’t you agree?’ If only that was what you had to fear! No—you’re looking at a sharp, sudden, bloody defeat at the hands of a ruthless enemy. You’re looking at London in flames. A world in flames.”
“Indeed? Do calm down, Bill, and tell me when this Armageddon is about to break around our ears. Did I detect a note or two of the Götterdämmerung in that outburst? Do I have time to go out and get myself a gas mask?”
Armitage glowered. “No, you don’t. It’s started and you’re in the front line of the advance party. You’re not forty yet, Captain. In your prime, I’d say. I’d get myself measured for a uniform if I were you.”
Joe sighed. “Look, if it’s the thought of fighting the Germans all over again … I don’t think you need be quite so hysterical. Always worth watching, of course—the Hun—but the Versailles Treaty conditions really knocked them back. The controls on rearmament, in particular, were swingeing. It takes a devastated country longer than fifteen years to get up on its feet again.”
Armitage gave him a pitying look. “Controls? If there’s money involved, people will always get around them. Especially arms manufacturers. The French have just sold four hundred tanks to Germany. Did you know that?”
“Careless clowns! They shipped them via Holland, as if that’s going to fool anyone for two minutes!”
The pitying look hardened to withering. “Who the hell cares about dispatch dockets? Those tanks are on their way! And what about the sixty bombers they’ve had the bloody nerve to order from your own Vickers company in Birmingham?”
Joe didn’t give Armitage the satisfaction of questioning this piece of information although it was news to him.
“And our … your pathetic government will rubber stamp it and ship them off. The Luftwaffe will get their bombers all right. One way or another. German air aces—the bloody crew we were trying to shoot out of the sky—have been shopping in the States for dive bombers. They rather liked the performance of the Curtiss Hawk II. They were sent a cheque for a couple by their air chief, Goering—remember him? Bloody fat Hermann! He’s done well for himself. And these planes have been sent over to Germany. Where they’ll be taken apart and redesigned. Made more deadly.”
“Nice to know the new government values its war heroes. Even a defeated country has the right to defend itself,” Joe said mildly. He always squeezed information out of Armitage by quietly needling him.
“Defence! That’s the last thing their new Chancellor has in mind!” Armitage reacted predictably and rounded on Joe, his face unacceptably close, his voice low and forceful. “Adolf Hitler. Vicious little thug! All this materiel will be in the hands of a man who declared—even before he took office—that ‘We shall never capitulate. We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag the world with us—a world in flames.’ ”
“Ghastly sentiments! Cue Wagnerian clash of cymbals?”
“Yes,” Armitage snarled. “Bring ’em on! That was a statement of nasty intent if ever I heard one.”
“Hitler spooking you, Bill? Terrible man, as all agree. But, look here, we’ve had him thoroughly checked. The man’s an incompetent. He’s made a mess of everything he’s put his hand to throughout his life—and that’s not much seeing that he’s an incurable layabout! He’s not even German by birth. He’s an Austrian shirker who made the injudicious decision to dodge the draft by running off to Germany. Where he was promptly shoved into the army, kicking and screaming. He played an unwilling and undistinguished part in the war at a safe distance behind the front line in the capacity of military messenger boy, I understand. He’s since gone on to fail at architecture, art, music and all the rest of his butterfly interests. One wonders what we have to fear from a man who can’t get out of bed before noon.”
Armitage gave him a scathing look. “Well, he’s succeeded now, all right, hasn’t he? And how! Straight into the top job. He must be saying something the Germans want to hear.”
“According to our man in Berlin—one of our men in Berlin—who’s met him and been granted an interview, he’s quite mad. ‘Pop-eyed but friendly,’ was his first impression. Until someone mentioned Communism and then he climbed the walls and began to chew the curtains. He frequently goes off into a raging, spitting rant, they say. Most embarrassing. Our chap didn’t know where to put himself. Can’t be long before someone realises and calls for the men in white coats. In one of his sober moments, Hitler confided to our bloke that, in his view, there was room in the world for just three empires: the German, the British and the American.”
Joe remembered the MI6 man who’d been briefing him in European politics only the day before. Tall, sandy-haired and courteous, he’d been struggling, Joe sensed, to keep his alarm hidden under his outer shell of easy confidence. An ex-soldier like Joe, he’d sensed a sympathetic understanding and divulged more than he ought to have. And Joe was seeing here in Armitage the same unfocussed, dawning horror, hearing the same urgent need to inform and warn. Two Cassandras in as many days plucking at his sleeve and demanding that he listen to their blood-chilling message.
“And your agent believed him?” Armitage asked, one eyebrow raised.
“Yes, he did. I wouldn’t myself, but many do,” Joe replied lightly.
“Well, thank the Lord someone’s taking Hitler seriously. You should replay those words. They’re not the words of a maniac. Examine the meaning. ‘German Empire.’ There’s a million deaths in those two words. Such an empire would cover the whole of Europe. Bye bye France, Poland, Holland and anyone else who gets in his way. Knocked out. Italy, Austria and other satellites, gobbled up. The British? A tougher nut to crack. And it’s thought he has a sneaking admiration for the Anglo-Saxons. First cousins to the Prussians, most of them, he reckons. Though he’s got that wrong. You try feeding that idea to a Cockney sparrer and hear what he says!”
“We might expect him to try to do a deal?”
“He might try it on. Wouldn’t work. Your politicians, your aristocracy, your businessmen, plus a few nutcases might be showing him favour, but they’ll never convince the millions of ordinary folk that there’s any good can come out of an alliance with Germany.”
“The vote’s in the hands of a mass of people who still say, ‘Did my husband, my son, my uncle Alfred die in vain?’ ” Joe agreed. “We hate the French and I think we hate the Germans more. But it’s the American aspect of all this that’s got you in a lather, isn’t it, Bill?”
“Right. The American Empire. That’s the pivot.”
Pivot? An echo of his conversation with Kingstone came back to trouble Joe.
“Huge German immigrant population in the States. Considerable symp
athies for the old country and its post-war sufferings under the British boot.” Armitage was talking fast now, eyes flitting occasionally to the door. “All stridently anti-Communist. In fact, they have an affinity with Herr Hitler. Brown-shirt brigades have started marching through the streets of New York—so far unchallenged. And, running the country are politicians and money-makers who, if they’re even aware the British exist, either discount or loathe them. Many admire the control and order the new breed of right-wing dictators in Europe is exercising. ‘Just what we need,’ they’re saying, ‘a touch of the Mussolinis. Get the trains running! Build those autobahns! Fix the economy!’ ”
“It’s no secret that the Americans already consider themselves the supreme world power. Perhaps they’ll be gracious enough to take on some of the onerous duties that go with the title? Take a bit of weight off our shoulders?” Joe suggested, deliberately to provoke a revealing response. “Always supposing they don’t just pull the eiderdown over their ears when the guns start banging and retreat into isolationism again.”
Armitage was grim. “Don’t scoff! Isolationism may be the best you can hope for. Hasn’t it occurred to you that if the US were to come out in favour of—or at the very least, fail to condemn—German expansion, this little island, for all its naval strength, will be caught like a walnut in a pair of nutcrackers? Hitler will use the States to help him bring down Britain. And the States will use Hitler to the same end. And then what?”
Joe shuddered theatrically. “My God! We could well end up seeing you as puppet Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Bill, in a client state. I wonder what you’ll call it? The Forty-Ninth State of the USA or Neue Deutschland? Let’s not pursue that thought. Yet.”
A Spider in the Cup Page 5