by Wes Davis
But show business turned out to be an unreliable source of income. At one point in the late 1920s, Maskelyne had been forced to take work as a motorcycle messenger. When he ran into financial trouble again in 1935, he hired a ghostwriter and cobbled together a potboiler autobiography.
Soon after the war began, he found his way into the Royal Engineers. Since then he had been busy conjuring up illusions to help mask the British army’s movements in North Africa. Maskelyne still wore the thin matinee-idol mustache he had sported onstage, and he was still known to put on a show from time to time. He had even launched into a performance on the back of a truck in the middle of the desert. But his real magic was now worked behind closed doors. He had a workshop off Soliman Pasha Square where he developed ingenious devices and tactics for SOE agents and other servicemen, such as bomber crews, whose missions put them at high risk of capture by the enemy. He conducted courses on escape and evasion in which the men learned strategies that might well save their lives one day. They frequently found themselves treated to a magic trick or two in the bargain.
When Leigh Fermor and Moss dropped by the workshop to inquire about the latest advances in the spy trade, Maskelyne led them to a small, poorly illuminated room off the main office, which was crammed with what looked at first like everyday objects. As the former magician began to lay out his wares, the character of the room seemed to change. “The air of sorcery,” Moss sensed, “emanated from every shelf in that dim cell.”
Maskelyne’s stock included clothing buttons that could be screwed apart to reveal a working compass, and boots that hid everything from hacksaws and wire cutters to minuscule silk maps. He had specially magnetized pencil clips that would swing around to point north when you balanced them on the tip of the pencil. There were pistols disguised as pens, cigars, and cigarettes, as well as brushes and braces that concealed hidden compartments. Moss was impressed by the air of routine Maskelyne brought to his job, as if these astonishing devices were perfectly ordinary and there were nothing resembling a war going on. Nevertheless, he felt swept up in the sorcery of it all when he gathered up the gadgets Maskelyne selected for him, “as though I were a witch’s bowl into which were being thrust the ingredients of some devilish brew.”
Moss and Leigh Fermor picked up a few of Maskelyne’s “toys,” as he liked to call them. Officers in the field had found that some of these items came in handy in unexpected ways. The ether knockout drops, for example, could be popped open and used to start a fire under wet conditions. Maskelyne also furnished them with supplies from his medicine cabinet, which held the various elixirs involved in the modern alchemy of war. These included Benzedrine stimulants. Most unnerving were cachets of poison designed to be sewn into a lapel and bitten in the event of capture by the enemy. The mere sight of these suicide pills lent an ominous note to the start of any covert mission. But Moss and Leigh Fermor gathered them up with the rest of the toys and made their way back out to the street, leaving Maskelyne to potter in his cave.
JUST WHEN THE operation looked set to begin, an unexpected hitch arose. Days before the scheduled departure, a wireless transmission crackled through to headquarters revealing that the weather on Crete was not cooperating. Sandy Rendel, who was now operating in the Lasithi district, had climbed up to the plateau on the southern flank of Mount Dikti several days earlier to check conditions at the “Sodom” drop zone Leigh Fermor had selected following the successful arms drop to Bandouvas in the autumn. At first it looked feasible. But when Rendel returned to prepare for the actual drop, he found that the situation was rapidly changing for the worse.
By the time he reached the hut where he and his men were planning to wait for Leigh Fermor’s arrival, it was clear that there might be problems with the location. Winter had swept in with a vengeance, and it turned out in addition that the Germans had unwittingly done their part in foiling the plan. “Most of the day it had rained, sleet or melting snow, but now it became colder and the snow set steadily in for the night,” Rendel noted as he approached the hut. “Crunching up to the door we realized that what should have been a flat roof of branches, bracken, and peat sods, had been stove in, and that the hut was one of those which the Germans had demolished in the summer in the reprisals against Bandouvas.”
Rendel and the young Greek who was with him spent a wet, cold night huddled under an intact section of roof. By morning Rendel could see that the deepening snow would make it impossible to wait here for Leigh Fermor’s arrival. He made his way back to the wireless station, where it was agreed that the mission should be postponed until the following month.
Meanwhile he would search for an alternate location, though he knew finding a suitable spot might prove difficult, since it had to be remote, which pointed to the mountains, but also open enough for a parachute landing. And it must be within reasonable striking distance of the Villa Ariadne, where General Müller lived.
While Rendel scouted a new site, Leigh Fermor and Moss bided their time at Tara. Both felt attached to the villa—not least because Moss was growing more and more fond of Sophie—but with progress on the mission suspended, the leisurely pace of life in Cairo began to feel burdensome. Manoli and George sometimes came for dinner, and Leigh Fermor and Moss made trips out to their camp to visit them. Time crept by, and all four members of the team were chomping at the bit as the first of December came and went. At last a message arrived from Rendel. He had been forced to expand his search beyond the area around Bandouvas’s camp. Skirting farther and farther northeast, he had finally settled on the Katharo plateau, a vast open plain on a northeastern shoulder of the mountain range, roughly ten miles west of the small village of Kritsa. Here the coming of winter weather was an advantage, since the area was accessible to German patrols during the summer. At this time of year it would be relatively safe. It looked like the best option for the airdrop. There was cover nearby, and it would not be difficult to reach Heraklion from here. Rendel signaled that he would soon move his radio station to a spot near Kritsa, on the eastern fringe of the plateau.
Once the details were worked out at headquarters, however, there followed further postponements. Then at last a new schedule was set for the drop. If all went as planned, Leigh Fermor, Moss, and the others would leave Cairo early in January.
WHILE THE DELAY was disappointing, it also meant that the Tara inmates could ring in the new year together. On the evening of December 31, the whole crew trooped to the palatial town house of Princess Shevekiar, an eccentric Cairo luminary, to attend her annual ball, one of the city’s biggest parties of the year. To Leigh Fermor and the others the princess’s story was even more enticing than the ball itself. Now in her seventies, she had married Prince Fuad in 1895, when she was nineteen and he had not yet ascended to the Egyptian throne. But the royal couple quickly found they had different ideas about marriage. When the future king tried to confine the young Shevekiar to the haremlik, she packed her bags and left, setting in motion a family struggle that within a matter of months exploded into violence. Shevekiar’s elder brother cornered Fuad in the Khedival Club on al-Manakh Street and opened fire with a pistol, striking him in several places. Doctors were later able to remove bullets from his chest and legs, but one that had lodged dangerously close to an artery in his throat would remain there for the rest of his life. He soon agreed to a divorce. Since those days, Princess Shevekiar had gone through a string of husbands, and she was now married to a considerably younger man, who was said to powder his hair in order to appear closer to her age. Fascinating as the princess’s story was, however, the Tara residents did not have high hopes for the ball, which despite its splendid setting had developed a reputation as a monotonous affair.
What they found when they arrived surprised everyone. From outside they could already hear that the music was not what they had anticipated. Instead of some staid waltz, the dance band was belting out what Moss called “le Jazz Hot.” And the scene inside turned out to be even more astonishing. Beneath one of the spark
ling chandeliers that swung over an immense ballroom, the elderly princess herself perched next to her younger husband, looking to Moss like “a stately old hawk in a high chair, chain-smoking, surveying the scene as from afar.”
All around her swirled a crowd of young revelers. Moss recognized the sons and daughters of the Egyptian aristocracy, princes and princesses, rubbing shoulders with their Western friends. King Farouk, Fuad’s successor, had shaved his beard for the event, so that he too looked younger and more amiable. On the fringe of the dance floor, where a ring of chairs had been set up, a stiff contingent of conservatively dressed women had alighted with their daughters, all of them looking on at the melee in postures that reminded Moss of a Jane Austen novel. The party was clearly not going as they had expected either. But the new arrivals from Tara dove happily into the fray. There was hardly any need for the Benzedrine a few of them had borrowed from their mission stores to keep the evening going.
The scandal of the night involved Billy McLean, who disappeared with the beautiful younger daughter of a prominent Coptic family. When their absence was noticed, it stirred up an immediate reaction among the older guests. It was widely known that the young lady had vanished with McLean in a similar fashion during a party at Tara a few weeks earlier. On that occasion her elder sister had set out with a group of nervous cousins to find them, but half an hour of frantic searching had failed to turn up any sign of them. Then out of nowhere McLean and the girl had appeared, looking as if nothing had happened, both of them completely composed, except for their faces, which were smeared with lipstick. She had also lost an earring, which later turned up in the henhouse. This time, at Princess Shevekiar’s ball, the two lovers slipped away from the crowd and were drifting toward a private-looking cluster of rhododendrons, Leigh Fermor told a friend later, “but before they had made a dozen paces in the garden, a group of Nubian retainers materialized from nowhere and escorted them back to the bright lights, urbanely but firmly, with flashing smiles and, no doubt, apt snippets from the Koran.”
AT LUNCHTIME ON January 5 word came that the departure was on for that night. In the afternoon McLean helped Leigh Fermor and Moss as they scrambled about trying to ready their gear. They were scheduled to depart at two thirty in the morning, which, once they had done the worst of the packing, left time to celebrate their last night in Cairo.
By Tara standards the farewell party was a quiet affair. A half dozen friends remained as midnight passed. Sophie was taking their departure hard. When someone mentioned that SOE officers operating behind enemy lines could be shot as spies if they were caught out of uniform, she began looking in wardrobes for army insignia to sew on their Greek clothes. All through the evening Moss noticed tears welling up in Sophie’s eyes, and after a while the two of them disappeared upstairs to her room, where they lay on the bed with their clothes on, holding each other and at last falling asleep.
When Moss crept back downstairs sometime after 2:00 a.m., he found everyone in the drawing room, which was illuminated by candles. Leigh Fermor sat on the sofa drinking kümmel—a send-off like this called for something better than three-day-old vodka—and singing “Stormy Weather” in a voice that sounded a little tipsy. He was flanked by two lovely women, and he had an arm around each of them. On one side lounged a woman named Diana; on the other was a woman dressed in something that reminded Moss of a Hungarian peasant costume, except that the neckline plunged lower than any dress he had ever seen. This was Inez Walter, the fiancée of a secretary from the British embassy. Denise Menasces, whose father had been president of the Alexandria Jewish community, sat curled up in an armchair across the room. To Moss she looked as sleek and willowy as Kurka.
David Smiley had been asleep earlier in the night and now sat blinking as if he had not quite managed to wake up. He still wore pajamas and a robe emblazoned with small figures of horse guards at Whitehall. Gertie Wissa reclined nearby in a stately pose. She reminded Moss of a battleship at anchor. Alexis Ladas, a young officer in the Anglo-Hellenic Schooner Flotilla, was singing along with Paddy. Tall, handsome, and just twenty-three, Ladas had served in the Resistance and spent two years in an Italian prison, escaping on the day of the Italian capitulation. After a while, Sophie came down from her room wearing a voluminous borrowed coat with sleeves that engulfed her hands and perched on the arm of Moss’s chair. “Stormy Weather” gave way to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Moss sang a song in Russian, with Leigh Fermor singing along. Then Ladas and Paddy tried a song in Greek.
A little before four o’clock the doorbell rang, and someone let in a man who identified himself as the conducting officer. Moss recognized him as a second lieutenant named John something whom he did not particularly like. The obviously agitated lieutenant explained that Moss and Leigh Fermor were over an hour late for their departure. He looked awkwardly around the room, realizing he was interrupting. Just then Pixie, who had been sleeping on his back with all four paws sticking up in the air, leaped to his feet. A small mongrel dog had slipped into the house behind the lieutenant, and Pixie now tore off after it, and the two animals went careening around the room.
Leigh Fermor and Moss hauled themselves upright and headed to their room to retrieve their gear. What had not already been packed lay in a state of disarray. They filled a large cloth sack with their travel papers and four thousand pounds’ worth of gold sovereigns, which had been strewn across the floor. Dragging the sack back through the drawing room, Moss noticed that the lieutenant was busy with the dogs, while the others sang “Auld Lang Syne.”
He and Paddy could take a moment to say good-bye to McLean, who had gone to bed early with a toothache. They slipped upstairs and found him asleep in his room and woke him. Propped up in bed, he smiled at them as they talked. Then he pulled out two handsome leather books, explaining that he had carried them with him in Albania. One was Shakespeare, the other an Oxford poetry anthology. He wanted Moss and Leigh Fermor to have them, for luck. When he had inscribed them, they said a last good-bye and went out to the landing where Sophie waited.
When Leigh Fermor disappeared downstairs, Moss folded his arms around Sophie. “Is this the last time?” she asked him. He told her yes, it was time to go, but the mission would be over quickly and he would be back. He could tell she was crying again, and she could not seem to find the right words to say good-bye. Finally, she told him she would take good care of Pixie.
Downstairs the conducting officer was finishing a glass of beer. Leigh Fermor and Moss moved their things to the hallway and kissed everyone in turn. Moss noticed Diana standing close by, “staring wistfully at Paddy, saying ‘goodbye darling.’ ” Denise stood pensively in the background. Smiley and Sophie accompanied the two travelers down the stairs to the gate, where a staff car was parked. They heaved their gear into the trunk and fell into another round of good-byes that went on until Smiley’s teeth began to chatter from the cold. A wave of affection for his housemates and the good times they had enjoyed at Tara swept over Moss. He would miss them all, not least Pixie. At last, he and Leigh Fermor piled into the car, pulled out onto the street, and steered toward the Bulaq Bridge on their way to pick up Manoli and George.
AFTER A LONG DRIVE, which passed with Manoli and George singing hoarsely in the back of the car and Leigh Fermor occasionally indulging a spell of kümmel-fueled wistfulness, they finally arrived at the Cairo West Airport. When all the gear had been weighed in, they found their way to the canteen, where they ordered coffee and sandwiches and waited for their departure to be called. Sitting at the table surrounded by their equipment, Moss felt conspicuous, and with good reason. “Everyone in the canteen stared at us—understandably,” he admitted, “for we must have looked a strange party. Two Greeks and Paddy and I, all dressed like something out of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls,’ with a cargo of Marlin sub-machine guns, a sack of gold, covered in revolvers and other strange gear.”
Before long they were told that the plane would be taking off soon. Gathering the rifles and other gear, t
hey climbed aboard a trolley, which carried them out to the plane. The sun was just beginning to rise. A few minutes later, when the aircraft lifted off the runway and banked into its climb, they could see the Giza pyramids in the distance, looking “like triangles cut out of a sheet of transparent paper,” Moss remarked. When the plane leveled off a little while later, there was nothing to see but the red, white, and green signal lights flickering beyond the windows. The thrum of the engines soon lulled them all asleep.
John Pendlebury takes target practice. Col. Stephen Rose, courtesy of Imogen Grundon
Patrick Leigh Fermor. © Imperial War Museum (HU 98922)
Leigh Fermor in civilian disguise on Crete. © Imperial War Museum (HU 66084)
Manoli Bandouvas and two of his andartes. © Imperial War Museum (HU 66051)
Xan Fielding sights a Lee-Enfield rifle. © Imperial War Museum (HU 66049)
Sandy Rendel in uniform. Rendel Family Archive
Sandy Rendel in civilian disguise on Crete. Rendel Family Archive
Manoli Paterakis. © Imperial War Museum (HU 66057)
William Stanley Moss. © Imperial War Museum (HU 66053)
Sophie Tarnowska. Photograph © The Estate of William Stanley Moss—reproduced by permission
Billy Moss on Crete. © Imperial War Museum (HU 66085)