The Corners of the Globe

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Hell and damnation,’ he muttered to himself.

  Max returned to the Ayre Hotel cursing Fontana for being right. This was all his own fault.

  But there was work to be done. ‘Have a pot of tea sent up to my room, please,’ he instructed the young man behind the reception desk. ‘And a jug of hot water. Very hot. I like my tea piping.’

  ‘The kitchen’s closed, sir.’

  ‘Just tea and hot water. No milk.’ He slipped half a crown into the young man’s hand. ‘There’s a good fellow.’

  Max headed straight upstairs, relieved to reach his room without encountering Susan or Selwyn, or, worse still, the pair of them. Once inside, he took the letter out of the copy of the Orcadian Fontana had given him.

  The name was written on the envelope with an italic pen in a neat, brisk hand. Fregattenkapitän L. Schmidt. Was it Lemmer’s writing? Max had no way of telling. He had seen no examples. But it seemed to him the sort of writing Lemmer might have.

  Fritz Lemmer. The boss. The man who had sent him to Orkney. Max remembered him standing with his back to the sunlight flooding through the French windows in the eerily unfurnished chateau near Paris where they had met three weeks before.

  A grey-bearded, bespectacled man of dignified bearing, learned, you would have said, expert in some esoteric field, yet light on his feet, square-shouldered, physically as well as mentally alert. The doors were half-open behind him. Birdsong drifted in on the breeze. There was something hypnotic in his tone of voice, something infinitely persuasive. The soundness of his judgement, it implied, was unassailable.

  ‘How gratifying to have your allegiance, Max. I am impressed you grasped the logic of accepting my invitation. Your first task is uncomplicated, though that does not mean there will be no difficulties. There are always difficulties. Do not resent them when they arise. They will harden you. They will expand your capabilities. I want you to travel to Glasgow. Yes, Glasgow. Wait there for further instructions. Nadia will deliver them. Arrange with her how she can contact you. I assume I do not need to tell you not to use your real name. But stay Max. First names stick. Last names are . . . flexible. It may be a long time before you hear from Nadia. That will be your first test. To wait – patiently and inconspicuously – until you are needed. If you perform the task well, when the time comes, I will have more interesting work for you. More challenging. More rewarding. The future, Max. That is where we are going. Others falter. Others stand still. We go forward.’

  Max was part of Lemmer’s team from that day on. The realization was chilling, even though he had chosen to take on the role. His motive was his defence, a motive he could only pray Lemmer had no inkling of. As for Nadia, there too came a chilling realization. She was not merely one among who-knew-how-many operatives Lemmer deployed for his purposes. She was close to him. She was someone he relied upon, someone who might know more about him than most.

  Max had ample time to dwell on such issues while he kicked his heels in Glasgow. He found a gymnasium where he could work off some of his frustration on the punch-bag and dumbbell. He took walking trips around Loch Lomond. He killed innumerable hours lying on the bed in his hotel room reading Sax Rohmer stories. He prowled the city. He lingered in cafés. He waited it out.

  Nadia eventually made contact, as agreed, through the personal column of the Glasgow Evening News. They met amid the seventeenth-century Dutch masterpieces in Kelvingrove Art Gallery. Nadia, with her glossy dark hair and pale complexion, looked exotically mysterious in an elegant coat and dress. She evidently saw no need to blend with the background. After more than a fortnight of Glaswegian dourness, Max was at once reminded of how powerfully alluring she was. But it was vital never to forget how treacherous she could also be.

  They were both working for Lemmer now, though. And Nadia for one was not about to betray him. ‘How are you enjoying Scotland, Max?’

  ‘It’ll be no hardship to leave it.’

  ‘Ah, but you are not leaving. You are being sent north. To Orkney.’

  ‘Orkney?’

  ‘The German fleet has been held at Scapa Flow since the Armistice. It is uncertain what will happen to the ships under the peace treaty. He cannot wait until then.’ She habitually referred to Lemmer by the personal pronoun rather than his name. It reminded Max, as perhaps it was meant to, of the respect she had for him. ‘The captain of one of the ships has something he wants. You will collect it.’

  ‘I imagine the Royal Navy’s keeping a close eye on those ships. Collection won’t be easy.’

  ‘An American officer called Fontana will assist you. He is with a US minesweeping fleet working there. You are to meet him in Kirkwall next Saturday.’

  ‘What am I collecting?’

  ‘A file. Grey. With the letters NBM on the cover. You have that? NBM.’

  ‘I have it.’

  ‘The captain’s name is Schmidt. Lothar Schmidt. He will know what you want.’

  ‘Which ship does he command?’

  ‘I do not have that information. Fontana will know.’

  ‘I’m to be drip-fed, am I?’

  ‘You are on trial, Max. Concentrate on doing what you have been told to do.’

  ‘I will.’

  She smiled tightly. ‘Good.’

  They adjourned to the gallery tea-room. Nadia appeared to feel Max needed reminding of the seriousness of what he was about to embark upon.

  ‘Mistakes can be costly in this work, Max. You understand?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘He rewards success. He punishes failure.’

  ‘Of course. It’s his nature.’

  ‘Yes. It is.’

  ‘When did you first meet him, Nadia?’

  She looked at him narrowly. ‘You should not ask me that.’

  ‘You know when I first met him.’

  ‘Still you should not ask me.’

  ‘If not when, then where? St Petersburg? Berlin?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want me to go on guessing?’

  ‘No.’ She tapped a finely sculpted fingernail against her teacup, pointedly, as if it was a clue.

  ‘China?’

  ‘Almost. Korea. Chosen, as the Japanese call it.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Not all of us who left Russia started by heading west, Max. I went east. I found work with a Japanese businesswoman in Keijo.’

  ‘A Japanese businesswoman in Keijo. That sounds interesting. What sort of business was she in?’

  ‘Many kinds. And one kind involved him.’

  ‘What took him to Korea, I wonder.’ Max smiled at Nadia, inviting some further disclosure.

  But there was not to be one. ‘I have said too much already. I will say nothing more.’ And nor did she.

  There was a knock at the door. Max took the tea-tray from the young man and sent him away with his thanks. A boiling kettle was what he really needed. But he was confident the steam from the jug and teapot combined would do the trick. There was no time to be lost. He held the envelope above their open lids and began prising gently at the flap.

  MOST SECRET Paris, 27th April 1919

  MEMORANDUM – Attention of C only (in cipher) HQ London

  I exercised my discretion by enrolling James Maxted (known as Max), formerly a lieutenant in the RFC, as a special off-books operative on 5th April. I considered that logging a report of the arrangement at the time would risk attracting hostile attention.

  The extraordinary opportunity Max’s engagement represented was the reason I proceeded on my own initiative. He first came to my attention following the death of his father, Sir Henry Maxted, in an unexplained roof-fall in the Montparnasse district of Paris on 21st March this year. Sir Henry was attached to our delegation to the peace conference as an adviser on South American affairs.

  It appeared at first that Sir Henry had committed suicide. The French police believed he had discovered that his lover, Corinne Dombreux, who lived in an apartment in the building from w
hich he fell, had been unfaithful to him with an Italian artist, Raffaele Spataro. But some of the circumstances were distinctly suspicious. Mme Dombreux’s status as the widow of a traitor also gave cause for concern – Pierre Dombreux, a diplomat serving at the French Embassy in Petrograd, is believed by le Deuxième Bureau to have acted as a Soviet, and possibly also a German, spy before his death by drowning in March of last year.

  The French authorities were happy to record Sir Henry’s death as an accident, as was his eldest son, and heir, Sir Ashley. Max, on the other hand, was convinced from the first that his father had been murdered and set about proving it. I tried initially to dis courage him, in order to avoid a scandal that might embarrass our delegation. As you know, however, Max’s investigations unearthed a possible connection with Fritz Lemmer, whom Sir Henry had met while serving with our embassy in Tokyo in 1889/91.

  Max contacted Travis Ireton, an unscrupulous American who peddles titbits of information about the conference. It appeared likely Sir Henry had tried to sell information through Ireton in order to fund a golden future for himself and Mme Dombreux. One of the pieces of information, culled from a list of potential sources of money in Sir Henry’s handwriting (I explained the background to this to you and the heads of department at an HQ meeting on 26th March), related to Lemmer’s current whereabouts. Max concluded that his father had been murdered to protect Lemmer. I was inclined to agree with him.

  Max’s attempts to discover who had betrayed Sir Henry revealed the presence of a network of spies maintained by Lemmer within more than one delegation to the conference, including ours, working actively despite the collapse of the Imperial German government whose cause they originally served. Shortly after Max identified one of those spies as Walter Ennis of the American delegation, Ennis was murdered. Spataro was also murdered. In Spataro’s case, attempts were made to fasten responsibility on Mme Dombreux. The killings of Sir Henry and Spataro were well managed. They bore Lemmer’s hallmark. The killing of Ennis was hasty and public. It smacked of panic. We also lost one of our own men, Lamb, which was another reason I allowed Max to bear most of the risks of the investigation. Max was shot and quite seriously wounded at the time of the Ennis killing. That did not discourage him in the slightest, indicating to my satisfaction that he has what it takes. His war record confirms he is strong-nerved and fearless.

  I cannot be sure Max has told me everything he has learnt. He has had dealings with a high-ranking Japanese police officer, Kuroda, who is attached to their delegation. Kuroda evidently knew Sir Henry quite well. He was a senior member of the team that investigated the attempted assassination of the late Tsar (when he was Tsarevich) in Japan in 1891, in which Lemmer was implicated. Ireton, we must assume, knows more than he is telling about Lemmer. His number two, Schools Morahan, is a resourceful fellow. And I am struck by the fact that Ireton’s secretary, Malory Hollander, lived in Japan for several years as a young woman.

  There is the additional complication that Sir Henry first met Mme Dombreux while serving with our embassy in Petrograd. He and her late husband are said to have been friends. I suspect there is much more to be learnt about Dombreux’s activities, in particular who exactly he was working for. It follows there may also be much more to be learnt about Sir Henry.

  Max mistakenly believed Lionel Brigham of our delegation to be one of Lemmer’s spies. His mistake had the effect, however, of drawing into the open the assassin Tarn, who I now believe murdered both Sir Henry and Spataro. Tarn’s killing by Max – the incident in Mayfair on 1st April that Special Branch dealt with for us – removed a probable threat to the lives of other participants at the conference.

  The activities of Max’s RFC friend, former sergeant Samuel Twentyman, never sanctioned by me, led fortuitously to the unmasking of two members of our delegation who really did work for Lemmer, Herbert Norris and Alfred Dobson. It also forced into the open Lemmer’s White Russian henchwoman, Nadia Bukayeva. She killed Norris and Dobson to prevent them revealing any of Lemmer’s secrets under interrogation. Twentyman’s life was saved by the intervention of Morahan, who appears to be more scrupulous than Ireton.

  I know queries have been raised about the role of an Arab youth nicknamed le Singe (real name, we believe, Seddik Yala, a Tunisian) in the killing of Tarn and a spate of burglaries at the hotels and offices of various delegations, including the Japanese. There is a lack of reliable information about le Singe. I am optimistic we may yet be able to benefit from whatever secrets he has succeeded in stealing. There is reason to believe some of those secrets concern Lemmer. He is therefore worthy of our attention.

  Tarn worked for whoever paid him. I believe Norris, acting on Lemmer’s behalf, hired him to eliminate Sir Henry and to kill Spataro in order to cover his tracks and incriminate Mme Dombreux. Later, it appears, the Japanese hired Tarn to find Lemmer, presumably in order to neutralize a threat Lemmer posed to them.

  This threat seems likely to have been something contained in the documents stolen from the luggage of Lou Tseng-Tsiang, head of the Chinese delegation, when he stopped in Tokyo on his way to the conference – referred to on Sir Henry’s list as the Chinese box. We originally assumed those documents were stolen by the Japanese, but Kuroda told Max he thought they had actually been stolen by Lemmer. The suggestion is that one of the documents was a letter sent in early 1917 by Japanese prime minister Terauchi to German foreign minister Zimmermann, agreeing terms for Japan to switch to the German side in the war. We know the Americans feared such a development. Their intervention in Mexico at that time confirms they believed a sneak attack by Japan was a genuine possibility. Fortunately, Zimmermann overplayed his hand by making overtures to the Mexicans which we were able to use to push the Americans into declaring war on Germany, at which point the Japanese naturally denied they had ever dreamt of switching sides.

  If Lemmer has proof the Japanese were willing to betray their allies in 1917, the threat he poses to them is grave indeed. But the decision to deal with it by sending Tarn after him misfired badly. The question now is what they will do next: move against him again or try to strike terms with him.

  As ever, we are in the dark about who within the Japanese government is in the ascendant. Their power struggles, and the outcomes of those struggles, remain opaque. I would conjecture last month’s uprising in Korea has strengthened the militarist wing. But how they would propose to deal with Lemmer is hard to judge.

  Aside from his entanglements with the Japanese, Lemmer remains a serious and direct threat to us. We know now, as I am on record as suspecting since I first encountered him in Rotterdam in 1915, that he recruited spies in all the Allied countries. What we do not know is who they are and how many they are. The best chance we have of finding out is to plant a spy of our own in Lemmer’s camp.

  This he has inadvertently enabled us to do by seeking to recruit Max as an agent. Why he is so eager to have Max working for him I do not know. It may be he simply admires his determination and ingenuity. Or it may be there is something only Max is qualified to achieve for him.

  There was insufficient time for me to seek sanction for such a step. If he was to take up Lemmer’s offer, Max had to make contact with Lemmer’s representatives a matter of hours after we first discussed the idea. Otherwise he would not be engaged. I concluded, in view of his willingness and suitability for the task, to give him the Service’s blessing.

  I have heard nothing from Max since then. But I am confident that if and when he lays his hands on information enabling us to close the net around Lemmer and his organization – the full extent of which we cannot presently gauge – he will do whatever is necessary to bring it to us.

  I acted as I did because of the extreme importance I know you attach to pursuing Lemmer. I recommend we await word from Max and respond appropriately when it comes.

  If you require further details of any of the actions of mine alluded to above, please advise and I will supply them.

  This is a comprehensive summary of
the current state of affairs in this matter, subject only to normal operating limitations.

  H. Appleby

  MAX WISHED HE had concentrated more during German lessons at Eton; he also wished he had brushed up his command of the language during his spell as a prisoner of war, although it was true few of the camp guards were what anyone could reasonably call chatty. As it was he gleaned little from the letter to Commander Schmidt, aside from the fact that it was not written by the same person who had addressed the envelope.

  It was signed Anna, though what she was to Schmidt was unclear. There were no mein Liebers to suggest she was his wife or lover. But no surname was supplied either and she called him Lothar. They were obviously close in some way.

  As to the content of the letter, Max made little progress, thanks in part to the jaggedness of the handwriting. It looked as if it had been written in a hurry. There were several blotches and crossings-out. But one phrase caught his attention: die graue Akte. The grey file. And the word wichtig was used several times. Something was sehr wichtig – very important.

  Max made as fair a copy of the letter as he could for later translation, then resealed it in the envelope. The tea was stewed by now. He poured it down the hand basin in the bathroom. Then he turned in.

  He woke already irked by the knowledge that he would have to spend the day with the Hentys and maintain a façade of amiability towards Selwyn. The prospect was grisly. But crying off, tempting though it was, might make Selwyn fear he and Fontana planned to defy him.

  He headed out for a brisk walk before breakfast, hoping the clear air and sparkling sea views would lift his spirits. They did not.

  When he returned to the Ayre, he was surprised to find a burly walrus-moustached police constable talking to the hotel manager. Susan Henty was with them. She looked worried – very worried.

  ‘Max,’ she called to him as he entered the reception area. ‘Have you seen Selwyn?’

  ‘This morning? No. What’s wrong?’