Letters for a Spy

by Stephen Benatar

  No, why was I even troubling to read it? Further down the page there was something of far greater import. The latest film reviews.

  (Mademoiselle France. Joan Crawford playing a selfish Parisian dress designer asked to help a stranded American flyer get out of Paris during the Occupation. This pilot was John Wayne so she obviously fell in love with him and became a very much nicer person. Bully for Joan.)

  And while I was on the entertainments page I looked to see what show Major Martin had taken his fiancée to (had presumably taken his fiancée to). It was advertised as George Black’s Strike A New Note. Starring somebody named Sid Field. I recalled that they had gone to the second house. Second house at five-thirty.

  Then I glanced back at the article on Canaris and acknowledged my debt to the writer: “At least you signposted the way to Joan and John and Sid. You mustn’t feel your efforts were entirely wasted.”

  I moved on to the Express of the following day, Easter Monday. But it carried no report of any air accident affecting the Allies.

  Nor did the issue of the 27th.

  On the 28th, however … if not an accident, at least an incident:

  “Three U.S. planes, flying from England to North Africa, force-landed at Lisbon airfield yesterday through lack of petrol. The crews were interned—Oslo radio.”

  Yet that was absolutely it. The closest thing you got. I even checked the 29th and 30th and then went back to the 24th … all of which was patently absurd. But I now felt obsessed, driven … quite incapable of giving up the search. And there was nothing. Not on any of those dates. Nothing—nothing—nothing!

  Amongst other things, though, I read that at the moment (if you were lucky) you could find a little liver in the shops; that the nation’s milk ration had lately been cut to half a pint per day per head; and that Clark Gable, without the slightest show of side, had been found drinking beer in a pub in Lincolnshire—“Just think of it, Clark Gable came to Scunthorpe!” was the proud comment of the publican. Said his wife: “I’d never seen a film star! Now I’ve seen the best!”

  But nowhere, nowhere, was there anything to do with any aeroplane—British, American, Lilliputian—which, between April 24th and April 30th 1943, had come down off the coast of south-west Spain. And at last I really had to face it—there was simply no alternative.

  That plane crash hadn’t happened.

  11

  So where in heaven’s name did that get us: a body floating in the sea without any apparent means of reaching it?

  It had to be a set-up.

  Yes, in some mysterious way, it just had to be a set-up.

  And I should have felt pleased. I should have felt exuberant. Discovering the truth—wasn’t that the very reason I was here? To sniff out duplicity and guile, to sniff out that one small unimportant detail which they might have overlooked? To show that the magnetically seductive music we had listened to was nothing but the song of the Lorelei, and that what we needed was a pair of earplugs, not a massive redeployment of troops?

  Therefore—a job well done; one that would maybe save my country a defeat, maybe even save it from the ultimate defeat, who knew? I should have been happy and excited and celebrating my pride-inducing moment of success.

  Why wasn’t I?

  Because, basically, I still couldn’t believe it; couldn’t believe I’d got it right. For if I had … what would it mean? That we were now back with some elaborate plot which had simply gone haywire. Needlessly and horrifically haywire. Back with that wildly botched compass reading; back with that situation where—surely after long weeks of preparation and refinement—no one had even thought to supply a life belt. Nor a Mae West. Nor a rubber dinghy. Nor anything to assist the survival of either the messenger himself or of the message which he carried. Nothing but a feeble expectation of complete aircrew accuracy.

  Yes. That was the crux of it.

  Back with the pilot incompetence theory. Pilot or navigator.

  And in all honesty it wasn’t much of a theory. I already knew that Mannheim hadn’t accepted it. I didn’t believe Canaris would, either.

  For they could hardly have wanted him dead. In no way would they have set out to betray him. Not the British! Any other nation … well, perhaps … but certainly not the citizens of the Land of Fair Play. Again, I agreed with my section head.

  Nor would they have allowed him (as the Japanese did, with their heroes) to choose to make a sacrifice of his own life, no matter how willingly he might have done so. Almost, they would have preferred to lose the whole war.

  No.

  I wasn’t—not in any way—celebrating my moment of success.

  Instead I went into a Lyons teashop near Lincoln’s Inn and had a cup of tea; also a slice of very dry and excessively yellow cake. I had hoped that these would help my brain to overcome that vital sticking point. Given the facts, what explanation could I find to fit them?

  But soon my brain had grown as stale as the Madeira cake. And it was informing me, reliably, of only one thing. That I just couldn’t risk, on my own, furnishing the wrong explanation.

  Therefore I saw only one course open to me: that same line of action I had refused to follow yesterday because it had appeared to contain such a shockingly feeble admission. Confess my inability to solve this riddle. Send home for assistance.

  Sherlock Holmes would never have countenanced such a course. Nor Hercule Poirot. Nor Sam Spade.

  But even so.

  It was my sole remaining option.

  12

  Paradise Street was a misnomer if ever there was one. A slummy side road running off Marylebone High Street, it was short, narrow, grey. Its single redeeming feature seemed to be the fair-sized recreation garden at its further end. This looked both tranquil and green when viewed from the corner halfway down, on the right-hand side, where the newsagent’s shop stood.

  The shop was run by an old woman dingily head scarved and cardiganed, with dusty smears across her forehead and a wooden leg (a detail disclosed to me towards the end of my briefing) concealed at present by the counter.

  I entered the place a minute after six and was immediately advised—as presumably anybody else would have been advised—that I could count myself lucky. Because, she said, if only she’d had sufficient energy to stir her stumps (an impressive bit of so-called cockney humour here) the door would have been bolted by now, the window shuttered.

  The woman and I were on our own in the cramped and murky interior. It couldn’t have been much murkier, I thought, even if the window had been shuttered.

  “Mrs Smee?” Before I asked the question, I removed my hat.

  She looked at me with dark suspicion and didn’t answer straightaway.

  “Yes, that’s right. And who’s enquiring?”

  But I took almost longer to identify myself than she had. Standing as I was within easy reach of the door, I slid the bolt home for her.

  “I’ve heard that Lady Precious Stream is being performed near here. Can you give me the details?”

  “No, I haven’t seen it,” she said, slowly. “It’s playing in the park.”

  “Queen Mary’s Garden?”

  “Open Air Theatre—yes.”

  I laughed. “What a load of nonsense this all is! I’m Erich Anders,” I said. “And I need to see your son.”

  By now she was on her feet, had put down the copy of Film Fun she’d been reading—Oliver Hardy gazed up at us reproachfully—and lifted the counter flap. We shook hands.

  “I’ll take you through,” she said, the inch of smoky cigarette still held between her lips.

  The room she took me into was divided from the shop by heavy curtaining. It was a surprisingly colourful room: attractive and comfortable-looking. To our right—rising discreetly out of the near corner—was a steep and narrow staircase. The woman stood at the foot of this and called up: “Visitor!” Which evoked a practically instantaneous response. “Coming!” Both words spoken in English: the former in a convincing cockney, the latter in so
mething much closer to received usage. I heard a door open.

  The step on the bare wooden stairs was light; the middle-aged man producing it, somewhat plump. But he wore slippers rather than shoes—tan leather slippers which toned in with his herringbone tweed suit, beige shirt and knitted yellow tie. Heinrich Buchholz had curly brown hair, striking blue eyes, a countenance you might have called cherubic. Yet his handshake was a long way from being cherubic—so far as one could guess.

  “Come upstairs,” he said. “Mother will be wanting to make herself presentable.”

  They seemed an unlikely pairing; I wondered what his father had been like.

  “Then we’ll go down later and you must stay and take pot luck.” He turned back, briefly. “Eh, Mutti?” From the minimal hesitation, I sensed that generally he might not have used the German.

  But the woman who was still standing at the bottom of the stairs gave him only a dour nod. In view of the dourness, I was about to decline, yet her son soon cut me short.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, after he had closed the door behind us. “It invariably takes her a while to readjust and to step out of character.”

  Also, he assured me, he always kept in his room an interesting bottle of some kind … God willing.

  “No, let me rephrase that, hastily. Not so much God willing, as Fred willing. I fear Fred dabbles in the Black Market.” He gave a tsk tsk.

  The current interesting bottle was Johnny Walker, which took pride of place on a chest of drawers that also bore a soda siphon. But for the time being I turned down his offer. “Because,” I said, “I want to keep a clear head to tell you why I’ve come.”

  I sat in the room’s only chair, by the grubbily net-curtained window (plainly meant to tone in with the neglected air of the façade), while my host reclined on the bed, his back supported by an array of large and brightly coloured cushions. Underneath the bed I could see part of a brown suitcase, and wondered if it were here that his transmitter was being stored.

  Which was what had brought me into Paradise Street in the first place. Naturally.

  “All right; you keep your head clear,” said Buchholz, sipping pleasurably at his own half-filled tumbler—but after those initial sips merely cradling it against his chest.

  I began: “I’ve just been paying a call on the Express newspaper office.” A delaying tactic. I obviously felt reluctant to come directly to the point.

  Buchholz said nothing.

  “And, incidentally, while I was there I chanced to be reading an article published on the Sunday before last. And how do you like this? That, on the orders of Himmler, Admiral Canaris had recently been dismissed. Wherever do they dredge up such a load of garbage?”

  “My dear friend. You mustn’t let it rankle. I saw that article and found it quite amusing.”

  “I admit—it does rankle.”

  “But why? There are always reasons for the things they put in their newspapers. And also for the things they leave out. I should have thought you’d be aware of that.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” I gave a shrug; and then, almost unwillingly, produced a smile. “Well, anyhow, you and I … we’re two amongst those hundreds of his handsomest agents sent out to corrupt and demoralize! In this case, to corrupt and demoralize all the most important in British society!”

  “Mmm, that’s something,” he agreed. “And Mother is, too, of course.”

  He made this addition without the slightest hint of irony. I half-wondered whether Buchholz saw it as some part of his mission to discourage vanity in freshly met young upstarts.

  Yet then his sense of irony did show through. Though not unkindly.

  “Yes, ever since reading that,” he said, “it’s inspired her to put on at least twice as much lipstick!”

  I smiled again—this time, ungrudgingly. But still I hesitated. Idly, I lifted a corner of the net curtain.

  Two little girls were drawing chalk marks in the road. On the further pavement a wiry black mongrel was sniffing at a paper bag. Nearer the High Street, a man was lounging against a barber’s shop, the sole of one shoe resting on the brickwork immediately below the window. He was holding open an Evening News. The smoke from a cigarette, partly obscured by the newspaper, trailed up beyond his hat brim. I turned my eyes back to the figure on the bed.

  “Have they told you anything of why I’m here?”

  “No,” he said. “And naturally I hope you’re not going to tell me anything, either. Clearly, the less I have to know, the better! For all of us.”

  For all of us, I thought, except for me—because firstly it would have been useful to give him my account and maybe clarify my own ideas concerning it, and secondly I should have welcomed the input of somebody new to the subject, somebody who might have noticed things which I myself had either overlooked or else been looking at too closely.

  But I was aware that if I tried to express this, he might have perceived it as a weakness.

  “Okay, then.” I took the plunge: I had to master my reluctance. “So what you’ll need to tell Berlin is this. It appears that no Allied plane was lost over the Atlantic on April the 24th or April the 25th. Nor yet on the 26th or 27th.”

  I glanced back at the man with the Evening News.

  “And then you’d better add that in the absence of a crash I haven’t been able to work out yet what happened, but in my own mind the whole situation is suspect and should be viewed with extreme caution.”

  It must have been clear I had finished. Yet Buchholz passed no comment for maybe as much as half a minute. And neither, stubbornly, did I.

  “Sounds intriguing,” he said, at last. He stared into his whisky glass and now gave himself the luxury of a further sip. “But am I to understand that the credence attached to this important matter, whatever it may be, finally rests or falls on the strength of whether or not a certain plane came down in a certain area on or around a certain date? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  I hesitated. “Yes. I suppose so. Basically.”

  “And that the occurrence or non-occurrence of this plane crash is really the prime factor? One that effectively provides either a veto or an all-clear?”

  It was essentially the same question but while he rephrased it he looked up from his tumbler and transferred his coolly contemplative gaze to me.

  “Yes,” I said again. “In this case—a veto, more like. But of course that’s for our superiors to decide.”

  “Yet do I get the feeling that otherwise the issue is clear-cut? And one in which nobody seriously foresaw any impediment?”

  I gave him a slow nod.

  He smiled.

  “Which is maybe why they sent an agent so relatively young and inexperienced?” This might have been rhetorical, yet his eyebrow remained raised and seemed to be demanding of an answer.

  The answer broke my series of affirmatives.

  “I think that’s uncalled for,” I told him, coldly—and if my words sounded pompous … well, then, too bad … so be it. “You know nothing about me.”

  But he didn’t seem abashed.

  “And, on all those days you checked, how many aircraft would you say were recorded as being missing—or destroyed—in toto? Even if such losses occurred in parts of the war zone not of any immediate interest to yourself?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I replied sulkily, “none.”

  “None?”

  “No.”

  “But, my dear boy, doesn’t that strike you as unusual?”

  “No, my dear boy, it doesn’t—not really.”

  Buchholz grinned.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you; but this is far too important for anything like that. I believe I’ve got tidings which should now compensate a little.”

  “All right,” I said. “Apology accepted.”But I still sounded sulky.

  “Fine.” He swirled his whisky gently round the glass. “So you told me you had checked through four whole days of news?”

  Now I did smile again. Ruefully. “Onl
y because I didn’t want to admit I’d actually checked through seven whole days of news!”

  “My word!” He returned the smile. “Seven?”

  “There are times when—just possibly—I do get a fraction carried away.”

  “Or else you simply don’t like having to give up?” Hereafter, he would probably treat me a shade more diplomatically. “Well, that’s altogether to your credit, plainly. But more to the point at present: are you honestly suggesting that no Allied plane, not one, was shot down anywhere over Europe during the course of an entire week? Not even one?”

  “There were three that ran out of petrol and had to land on Lisbon airfield.”

  Quite properly, of course, he ignored this.

  “Because I’m perfectly willing to bet,” he said, “that there were plenty of German planes which were. Shot down,” he added.

  “I honestly don’t know. That’s not what I was looking for.”

  “I’d still be willing to bet on it.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that such an omission might merely have been a question of keeping up morale. Evidently it should have occurred to me. Perhaps this showed him justified in declaring that I was young and inexperienced.

  “So…?” he continued, after he had briefly surveyed me once more in silence. “If previously you had reasonable evidence to suggest that a plane crash did indeed happen, then I’d be inclined to say you mustn’t stop believing in this, simply because you haven’t read about it in the British press.”

  “Nor yet the German.”

  “No, but it’s idle to pretend that every Allied plane which comes down does so as a direct result of enemy action. Accidents still take place, even in wartime. Why?” he asked, abruptly.

  “Why what?”

  “Why hasn’t it been in the German press … when the Abwehr obviously knows all about it?”

  “Not all about it. In fact, there’s very little that’s so far been confirmed. As yet, it’s nothing but guess work.”