Letters for a Spy

by Stephen Benatar

“In what way?”

  “The major may have made his jump before he was supposed to. Much too far from land.”

  Mannheim thought about this. “And what became of his parachute?”

  “Well, naturally he didn’t die at once. He had time in which to sink it.” I added: “For all the point there would then have been to that.”

  “The pilot having just gone off and left him?”

  “But what else could he have done?”

  That was true—I didn’t see what other choice the pilot might have had—and I may even have sounded fairly calm whilst allowing it. But I was still a long way from feeling calm. The idea of Martin struggling to stay alive, then finally realizing he hadn’t got a chance, that even the plan he was about to die for would probably prove abortive, the briefcase entirely lost … all this made me practically as angry, inwardly as angry, as if the scene I was envisaging had been an actuality, not merely a hypothesis.

  Strangely, it was Mannheim who now employed that word. Albeit in German.

  “Interesting hypothesis,” he said. “Although I would suggest not really a practicable one. You’re forgetting something. If the jump you propound had been successful, how would our sympathizers ever have got hold of that briefcase … with a live major most tenaciously attached?”

  “The live major could easily have feigned unconsciousness. Could have come to, maybe, only after they had got him into hospital.”

  “Having given them enough time to duplicate documents, write out inventories, take photographs, reseal envelopes and get the briefcase comfortably back into his possession before he did come to? Hmm. I don’t know why but perhaps that does strike me as a shade optimistic.”

  “Yes, sir—in all honesty—it does me, too.” It also struck me just how little I really knew my section head. His response had been pleasant … humorous … not in the least judgmental.

  “Though I admire your inventiveness. So does the Admiral, plainly.” In fact, it was well known that Canaris and Mannheim were friends.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “But only think of it!” He absently reached for his cigarettes; then presumably remembered that smoking on duty was officially discouraged. “My God! Only think of it! If what appears to be the case actually turns out to be the case…”

  “That’s why I can’t accept it, sir. That’s why I won’t accept it.” I felt almost guilty. I had never seen him so expansive.

  “Explain,” he said.

  “Well, it’s simply too good to be true.”

  “And aren’t things ever allowed to happen that seem simply too good to be true? Is there some ordinance, or law of nature, which categorically forbids it?”

  All expansiveness now shrivelling up—fast.

  “But anyhow, Anders, I feel this is hardly the moment to be comparing our philosophies.”

  We set aside those philosophies.

  Set them aside in favour of a brisk and exceedingly businesslike summation.

  “So, then, Sicily or Sardinia? Sardinia or Sicily? That’s the crux of it. And I can’t say this to you too often. Sheer speed is henceforth of the essence. For it’s unquestionably a complex, a colossal operation—the work of the very devil—to stop concentrating on one place, start concentrating on another. Making plans, laying minefields, setting demolitions, building defences—moving armies—none of this can be accomplished, you understand, in the odd free hour or so. Moreover, the enemy won’t just be standing still all the while, even if he does think that he’s caught us with our pants down!”

  He said this as if my agreement, or disagreement, might radically alter the circumstances.

  “Well, then,” he went on, abruptly—no doubt to illustrate that time was truly of the essence. “What further questions do you have?”

  I felt I should have had a hundred further questions, all of them probing and insightful. Instead, the relatively few I could muster appeared more or less inept and had mainly to do with practicalities.

  So it was little more than a half-hour later when he shook my hand—wished me Godspeed—and solemnly acknowledged my salute.

  6

  I left Berlin that night. A lone passenger in a Fiesler Storch. We flew over Belgium and France, avoiding the English Channel and avoiding, equally, any English fighters. The trip was uncomfortable but passed without incident—not even any turbulence to speak of. I was deposited in Dublin in the small hours; then slept fitfully until about six on a wooden bench in a garden of remembrance—mercifully, a garden both unlocked and empty. Afterwards, a little bleary-eyed, I sailed on the first crossing to Holyhead. In Holyhead I was conscious of committing a transgression. (“You need to concentrate on the essentials, Anders! And the essentials are plain.”) For it would never have occurred to me to visit Mold if one of my fellow passengers on the crossing hadn’t mentioned that she’d been born there. She now lived near Holyhead but still saw her parents every fortnight, catching a train to Chester at 7.30a.m., and—barring holdups—making a first-rate connection: Mold at two minutes past eleven. Prior to this I had been planning to travel straight to London.

  So, to some extent, it was only a spur-of-the-moment thing. Mold had no real relevance to my mission; was merely the small Welsh town where the major’s father had been staying when he had written to his son. I didn’t even think of this as a coincidence: consulting my atlas during the flight I had noted that Mold was close to Holyhead—noted it, but certainly not lingered over it.

  Yet the very fact of my having been sitting beside this woman on the boat made me feel that I was being guided; that I had just been offered a sign—along with a timetable. The major’s father had written:

  “My dear William,

  “I cannot say that this hotel is any longer as comfortable as I remember it to have been in pre-war days. I am however staying here as the only alternative to imposing myself once more upon your aunt whose depleted staff & strict regard for fuel economy (which I agree to be necessary in war time) has made the house almost uninhabitable to a guest, at least one of my age. I propose to be in Town for the nights of the 20th & 21st of April when no doubt we shall have an opportunity to meet. I enclose the copy of a letter which I have written to Gwatkin of McKenna’s about your affairs. You will see that I have asked him to lunch with me at the Carlton Grill (which I understand still to be open) at a quarter to one on Wednesday the 21st. I should be glad if you would make it possible to join us. We shall not however await luncheon for you, so I trust that, if you are able to come, you will make a point of being punctual.

  “Your cousin Priscilla has asked to be remembered to you. She has grown into a sensible girl though I cannot say that her work for the Land Army has done much to improve her looks. In that respect I am afraid that she will take after her mother’s side of the family.

  “Your affectionate

  “Father.”

  It had been addressed from the Black Lion Hotel, Mold (telephone number 98), North Wales.

  And dated April 13th, 1943.

  I didn’t think I should care much for Mr Martin. ‘We shall not however await luncheon for you, so I trust that, if you are able to come, you will make a point of being punctual.’ This, to a man who had been commissioned in the Royal Marines and, on top of that, had been so warmly endorsed by Lord Louis Mountbatten. And there was nothing like: ‘How is everything? I hope you’re well. This comes with lots of love.’ No best wishes, even. No mention of Sybella. To me, he sounded both pompous and imperious.

  Cold.

  And the enclosed copy of what he had written to the solicitor—although of course that was a business letter and couldn’t be so readily assessed—did little to soften this impression.

  “My dear Gwatkin,

  “I have considered your recent letter concerning the Settlement that I intend to make on the occasion of William’s marriage. The provisions which you outline appear to be reasonable except in one particular. Since in this case the wife’s family will not be contributing to the
Settlement, I do not think it proper that they should necessarily preserve, after William’s death, a life interest in the funds which I am providing. I should agree to this course only were there children of the marriage. Will you therefore so redraft the Settlement as to provide that if there are children the income is paid to the wife only until such time as she remarries or the children come of age. After that date the children alone should benefit.

  “I intend to be in London for the two nights of the 20th & 21st of April. I should be glad if you could make it convenient to take luncheon with me at the Carlton Grill at a quarter to one on Wednesday 21st. If you will bring the new draft with you we shall have leisure to examine it afterwards. I have written to William & hope that he will be able to join us.

  “Yrs. sincerely,

  “J.G. Martin.”

  Addressed to F.A.S. Gwatkin, Esq., McKenna & Co., 14 Waterloo Place, London, SW1. Written on the 10th of April and clearly marked ‘Copy’.

  I could almost hear the man saying: “I should be glad if you could make it convenient…!”

  And what a fibber! It had occurred to me yesterday, on my second reading of these letters, that in fact he hadn’t written to William—and wouldn’t indeed be doing so for a further three days. But, again, this had appeared to me such a piffling point that I hadn’t even mentioned it to Mannheim. At twenty-five, I had no wish to sound as fussy as the old fellow I was finding fault with. (I assumed Mr Martin to be well into his sixties.)

  But now, come to think of it, wasn’t it perhaps slightly surprising that he had allowed himself this small inaccuracy? Small, yet so unnecessary. Didn’t it seem to go wholly against type?

  And I didn’t much like the way, either, that he referred to ‘the wife’ both times, rather than attempting to personalize things by using Sybella’s name—although maybe this was more or less standard practice between a client and his solicitor.

  But would it have been standard practice, I wondered, even when the client and the solicitor were on sufficiently friendly terms to be meeting each other for lunch?

  On the other hand, however, at least he had written William’s marriage, William’s death. (Which succinct phrase, ‘after William’s death’, repeatedly gave me pause. The sanguine expectation would have been of something approaching forty years. The cruel reality had turned out to be a mere fortnight. That made me feel—but only temporarily each time—almost as sorry for the father as I had felt for the son, and for Sybella too. I had the idea that Mr J.G. Martin was a widower, and that William must have been his only child. The old man became less cold and imperious, therefore, and more simply a suffering human being, whenever I paused for a moment to think about the full picture.)

  The hotel in which these letters had been written was Georgian. It stood in the High Street and had an ivy-covered portico. On coming out of the railway station, I had found myself in New Street, which was only a short distance from the Black Lion.

  There, I pressed the bell on Reception, put down my suitcase—a large blue leather one of my mother’s—and rested my trilby near the handle.

  The woman who answered my summons had greying hair pulled back in a bun. She wished me good morning and asked if she might help.

  “Yes. Thank you. I’m wondering if you have a Mr J.G. Martin staying with you at present?”

  On the way, of course, I had worked out what line I would follow if she answered yes.

  “No, I’m afraid we haven’t. Nor are we expecting anyone of that name.”

  I smiled. “Well, I recognized it as a long shot. But he stayed with you last month, you see, and therefore I was hoping…” My query petered out when I noticed her expression.

  “Really?”

  Before this, I had been tired, aware of how very little sleep I had procured either on the plane or in the garden of remembrance.

  But now—suddenly—I was awake.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I think, sir, you’re mistaken. I don’t recall any Mr Martin staying with us last month.”

  Just then, not even the Admiral at his most mistrustful could have considered me too articulate.

  She added: “This isn’t a large hotel and I’m thought to have a good memory.”

  “But I mean…”

  She waited.

  “I mean, it just never occurred to me. I felt so certain that…”

  “You’re sure it was the Black Lion?”

  “Yes. Quite sure. Positive.”

  The hotel register lay on the counter. I watched her run her finger down the two appropriate pages. Even at such a time as this, it struck me that her pink nail polish seemed at variance with her scraped-back bun and with her lack of make-up.

  “No,” she said. “No, I’m afraid not. Nothing.”

  Naturally I had facsimiles of the two letters Mr Martin had written. Facsimiles of the facsimiles. I reached through my raincoat and extracted these from a pocket of my suit. The woman studied them.

  “Yes, this stationery is certainly ours. And April 10th, April 13th—there’s no mistaking the dates. But just the same … I really don’t understand it.”

  “Perhaps you could take a look through March? Maybe he simply got the month wrong? Wrote April when he meant March.”

  “What—and did it twice? With a gap of three days in between? I’ve never done that. Have you?”

  “No.”

  “And in any case,” she repeated, “I should be certain to remember him; we’re not quite the size of Claridge’s, you know.”Nevertheless—though with a faintly disapproving air—she did turn back a further page.

  “You don’t suppose, do you, he might have been travelling incognito?”

  She answered me in the same dry tone. “Well, if he was, one can only hope his ration book was also travelling incognito.”

  I bit my lip; abandoned all flippancy.

  “But there’s another thing. He’s clearly stayed here in the past.” I read out the sentence about the hotel’s being less comfortable than he remembered it from pre-war days. “I’m sorry about that,” I said.

  “No need to be. The same must be true of almost anywhere.”

  “May I ask: were you here in pre-war days?”

  “Yes, I’ve been here since ’thirty-two.” Frowningly, she absently scratched at some imperceptible mark on the counter before she looked up. “You know, there’s bound to be a very simple solution to all of this. Do you mind waiting here a moment?”

  Thereupon she went into an adjacent office to check through the hotel’s filing system. On her return she enquired whether I actually knew the person we were searching for.

  I slowly shook my head. “Why?”

  “I was only wondering if you might have misread the signature … is there any chance of that, do you think?” There was a note of apology in her tone which further belied her appearance of severity. “We have a Mr Barton who visits us regularly—also a Mr and Mrs J.Wharton. And on several occasions we’ve had a Miss Martin staying here.”

  But when I again handed her the Gwatkin letter she smilingly conceded the surname couldn’t be anything other than Martin; and that the initials J.G. couldn’t really be twisted into standing for Edith Mary Rose.

  Indeed, for a couple of preposterous seconds I had actually played with the notion that we might have got the sex wrong. Could we only have assumed the major’s parent was male? But Edith Mary Rose, although she might well have sent her son a little more in the way of love and tender reassurances, would scarcely have signed herself ‘Your affectionate father’, nor would she—in all probability—have registered as ‘Miss’.

  I asked: “How hard would it be for someone to acquire samples of your stationery?”

  “Not hard at all. There’s always a supply of paper and envelopes on the writing table in the lounge—as well as a few sheets in each of the guests’ bedrooms. Even now,” she added, with some pride.

  “And the firm of printers which you use? I suppose that virtually any one of its empl
oyees…?”

  I hoped I wasn’t alarming her. But her reaction was to laugh.

  “Oh, the plot thickens! I can see we’ll have to call in Scotland Yard!”

  “Absolutely!” I thanked her and picked up my hat and suitcase before it could occur to her to pursue her own line of enquiry.

  Out in the street again, however, my bonhomie vanished. I reflected on how unfortunate it was that already I was faced with an obstacle of this size. Hell, it looked as if I’d need to get in touch with Berlin a lot sooner than any of us had expected. The Abwehr hadn’t used me a great deal up till then. Wouldn’t it seem a little unimpressive to have to go running back at such an early stage in search of further guidance? Please help me, Uncle Franz.

  And rather more important—no, altogether more important—I didn’t mean to go calling into question the Martin papers until I knew that such an act could be fully justified. Even if my superiors had sent me over here to play the devil’s advocate I’d still have to be extraordinarily cautious with regard to that. Obviously.

  Although, on thinking about it, how much justification did I reckon I was going to need? It was a truism, surely? If you couldn’t trust the messenger you couldn’t trust the message. End of story. Nothing more to say.

  All right. I understood that. But … oh, for Pete’s sake! The father of the messenger?

  I knew it was inconsistent of me to be feeling so frustrated by this odd behaviour of the parent. I had come to Mold entirely of my own volition and practically despite my section head’s instructions—and if it hadn’t been for that woman on the boat I should never have set foot inside the Black Lion.

  But all the same.

  From now on, was our trust in the messenger truly going to have to concern itself with genealogy?

  I hurried to the public library.

  7

  There was no J.G. Martin included in the Cardiff telephone directory. No J.G. but certainly no shortage of others—which would be relevant if I had to ring them at any stage to enquire about unlisted relatives. So I went between two high and well-stacked bookshelves to tear out the requisite pages (coughing to cover the sounds of my defacement) and told myself I shouldn’t be surprised that William’s father wasn’t on the phone: in Germany there’d been extensive waiting lists even before the war so why should it be different here? Anyway, he sounded very much a fellow of the old school who might still regard this modern means of communication—well, relatively modern—as just some new-fangled nonsense, loud and peremptory and often inconvenient.