The Hungry Blade

by Lawrence Dudley

  … with the great air raids of yesterday and last night only a few hours past, it is reported this morning that German bombers and fighting planes are again over southeast British coastal towns. Berlin says the renewal of attacks only awaits the clearing of mists over the Channel.

  “I’m sorry if I stepped on your toes back there, General,” Hawkins said. Houghton’s temper seemed to have settled.

  “It’s fine. I’m not a man to argue with results.” He looked and gestured at Blake. “I spent three years in the trenches trying to butt through. I think like a soldier. Guile doesn’t come naturally.”

  “Same here,” Blake said. “You saw Perez quite differently, Hawkins.”

  … now a report of Larry Lesseur from the British capital.

  A new voice spoke, this one higher pitched, less clear.

  This is London. I am speaking from a crowded air-raid shelter two floors underground. This morning large forces of German bombers are continuing their unprecedented attempt to bomb England. We do not know yet how many more planes the Royal Air Force have added to their record score of yesterday when the Air Ministry announced that the RAF had destroyed one hundred forty-four out of a German armada of one thousand planes for a loss of only twenty-seven fighters of their own.

  A cheer went up from the men working in the kitchen and finishing their tea, clapping and slamming their hands and mugs on the tabletops, voices bouncing off the shiny metal ceiling, magnifying into an ear-piercing din. A few other sailors drifted in to listen, keeping a respectful distance from their skipper and his guests.

  “You were looking at the crime, not the man,” Hawkins said.

  “He is a criminal,” Houghton said, “even in peacetime. Smuggling’s against the law.”

  “You go on the Continent these days, it’s full of people who only want to get along and go along. That’s Captain Perez. Looking for a few quick quid, get by, nothing more to it than that.”

  “Damn it, Hawkins. Those kind of people make it all possible!”

  … during last night the Midlands area of England was heavily bombed. One raid lasted three hours. Naturally, there were casualties, as yet undetermined. Two nurses were seriously hurt when their sanatorium in the Midlands was hit, but the three hundred thirty patients were taken safely to air-raid shelters.

  The mess crew and the sailors in back let off an angry howl, standing and shouting, “Bastards!” and “Bloody huns! A hospital!” and “We’ll make them pay!”

  “Yes. They do,” Hawkins said, “I know that. But that means they aren’t necessarily against us, per se, or for Hitler, either. We have to get those people turned around, make them get along and go along with us if we’re going to win.”

  “That makes them less culpable? I’d as soon take him out and shoot him,” the general said.

  The cook came out with a mess boy carrying their plates, tarrying a second, listening too.

  Yesterday the German Air Force launched eleven attacks along a five-hundred-mile front. When the sirens sounded in London I watched all traffic stop for a moment. Buses unloaded their passengers at air-raid shelters. But before the all-clear signal sounded the buses were running again and people stood in little knots on street corners watching the skies …

  “We will, won’t we, sir? Make them pay?” the cook asked.

  Blake sat up slightly, glancing back, speaking loudly so all could hear, “You can count on it, men! We’re going to hit them hard, very hard!” All the men cheered. The cook and the mess boy went back to the galley. Blake and his guests immediately began wrestling with the corned beef.

  “We can’t shoot him,” Hawkins said, “you know that. We may need him.”

  “Oh, I know. But do we have to pay him?” Houghton said.

  “Surely you admit that’s a rather obnoxious prospect,” Blake said, “rewarding him for what he was doing.”

  “Well, of course. What of it?” Hawkins said.

  “It’s just expediency?” Blake said.

  “Spying is nothing but expediency.”

  “Aren’t you angry? It makes me angry,” Houghton said.

  I was astonished by the number of people who walked around wearing a neat white bandage on their heads like a skullcap. The reason was apparent—the ones nearest the field had their shingle roofs holed by falling bricks …

  More howls of anger from the galley and the back of the mess room.

  “You happen to know I did kill three of them this afternoon … and several more back in New York last week,” Hawkins said. “And before that a couple in Portugal, or at least I assume they were Nazis.”

  “I’m sure they were,” Houghton said. He stopped sawing at the meat. “I’m sorry, Hawkins. Don’t mean to criticize. You’ve killed more of them than most of us will probably ever see.”

  … if they figured they could break the morale of the London populace, they have just as obviously failed, for even those people wearing the skullcaps, the white bandages, managed to grin very often …

  And yet, the air raid—it does seem rather remote, doesn’t it? Hawkins thought. Almost an entertainment, another diversion on the radio you might casually listen to in the evening, sitting in your easy chair, thinking tough luck for those people over there. To the general and the commander, it did seem more personal. Their homes, their towns, burning. They, the Dendrobium’s crew, they were simply mad as hell. No doubt they’d be happy to lynch Captain Perez and anyone like him and all the people who went along and got along.

  Hawkins closed his eyes, trying to see in his mind. Walking up the street to their family home on Ridgway Place in Wimbledon. The tidy old Victorian houses. Overhead, planes crossing above the trees, hundreds of planes, darkening the sky. Bombs falling, smoke rising, the street, the houses all vanish into the cloud. Only screams now.

  My mother, Hawkins thought. She still lives on Ridgway. Where is she now? In a shelter at this moment? My aunts and her people, my cousins? In one, too? Or under a pile of rubble? Do I not care? How can I not care? He began to feel the anger the others felt, at least a little. Bastards.

  “That man in the radio shack begging for his life, you said that’s not the way a real Nazi talks,” Blake said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Hawkins said.

  “You’ve spent a fair amount of time with these people? Do you know many Nazis?” Blake said.

  “Sure. Go undercover for any length of time, of course you get to know them. You have to, to understand them, find their weaknesses, see any opportunities. They’re people like people in any other place, there’s good and bad in them, even if the bad ones are running the show now.”

  “Don’t you get angry at them?” Blake said.

  “You can’t allow yourself to feel anger at them, ever, you have to guard against it all the time. Anger is the emotion that’s hardest to hide, one flash of it, and you’re done. You can’t give in to it. It’s a form of mental hygiene.”

  “It all sounds rather … risky,” Blake said, “if you know what I mean … Spend too much time around them, start to think like them … Sorry.”

  “Oh, I know that all too well,” Hawkins said. “It can be insidious, like a tiny spot of mold on a peach, and suddenly it’s all rotten, taken over.”

  “So, not you?” Blake said.

  “I’m not worried. There are dangers in my line of work, of course. But it’s easy when you have an enemy like Hitler. Know what you’re fighting, you can handle anything.”

  No—not the real danger, Hawkins thought. Yes, you have to numb up to chum up, not let your feelings about them give yourself away. But not giving in to anger, being numb to things gets to be a habit, that’s the real problem. I let—or make—myself go dead inside, a lot, Hawkins thought. But you have to present the facade that you want, or rather, must have merely to stay safe and alive. I don’t want to feel numb, though. But he hardly w
anted to admit any of that to Houghton and Blake.

  Now for news of the German capital …

  The roundup of yesterday’s daylight operations has been given out by the German High Command. In large-scale fighting virtually over all of England, the Germans claimed they shot down ninety-eight British planes and destroyed eight others on the ground, at the same time the Germans say they lost only twenty-nine planes. Also, the Germans say that five more balloons were knocked down in their attacks on the barrage at Dover yesterday.

  There was a terrible silence in the mess and galley. A sailor in the back flatly said, “Liars.”

  The broadcast, the others’ reactions, still felt quite distant. But I know what I’m fighting as clear as anything could be, Hawkins thought. He pictured in his mind the last time he saw Hitler. The Führer had been standing in the front of a black Mercedes parade car, his hand on the windshield at the head of a long convoy of gleaming cars. It was cold that day in Vienna, in early March. The crowd was enormous, excited, raising a huge roar far up the street as the car approached. Hitler’s cheeks were ruddy from the cold and he had the smirking expression of a man who knew he’d gotten away with something.

  But that wasn’t as disturbing as the first time Hawkins had seen him, at a business conference a year earlier, before Hawkins joined the SIS. Hitler had an unsettling quality. It was hard to describe, or define, but he seemed to react to those he met not as a person, but a representation of that person, looking at them, or perhaps through them, as if they were mere things. Wax dummies in Madame Tussauds. Or lifelike carnival automatons that shook hands. Not beings that had hearts or feelings. But there was also a blankness to the man in idle moments that allowed others to write onto his face whatever they wanted to see. The evil came as no surprise when it showed itself, like the day after seeing him parade into Vienna, when the SS rounded up prominent Jewish businessmen and made them scrub the sidewalks while they watched and laughed.

  I know who and what I’m fighting better than almost any man, Hawkins thought. He found comfort and certainty in that. Knowing so well what I am against keeps me safe, keeps me from straying, from losing myself.

  They’d finished up. The mess boy came and took their plates. All sat quietly listening.

  … the German paper for Occupied Holland reports that Joseph Simon, who is the German civil administrator for the tiny duchy of Luxembourg, has decreed that there is to be no longer, quote, a Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, unquote. The constitution of Luxembourg is no longer valid, he states in his decree, because the government has fled. The oath of public officials in the former government is canceled out and they are all to transfer their loyalty to the new German administration …

  That brought another long, brooding silence.

  “We’re next,” the general finally said. “If we let them.”

  Hawkins and General Houghton thanked Blake and headed ashore, walking past the Santa Lopez. Hawkins stopped, gazing up at it. Houghton paused, looking back.

  “General, I never asked. How did you know this was the ship?”

  -11-

  “We were intercepting peculiar and irregular messages to and from the old Abwehr drop boxes in Lisbon,” Houghton said. “Didn’t make any sense. Mainly a series of complaints coming one way and excuses going back. But it was clear the Germans were having difficulty selling something in New York because of the American Neutrality Acts. Could’ve been machine parts, bottles of aspirin, books about Hitler, who the hell knew, no details at all. Then this came in and all the pieces snapped together.”

  It was now very late and Hawkins had been continuously on the move for over twenty hours, flying into Bermuda in the wee hours of the morning. Exhausted, his body wanted nothing more in the world than to collapse face-first into bed the way logged trees fell. But his mind had insisted on rushing back to the general’s center at the Princess Hotel to see what had tipped them off about the Santa Lopez. He knew he’d never sleep if he didn’t see Houghton’s answer first.

  General Houghton clicked on the sloping light table, the glow in the dark basement room flooding their faces from below, then fumbled in his folder for the right transparency. Hawkins turned impatiently, tiredly waiting, uneasily watching the frenzied activity behind them. The room ran nearly the entire length of the big hotel, filled to overflowing with long rows of metal work tables staffed by a large force of young women—girls, really, barely out of their teens, mostly from Canada. At each table were several workstations composed of a steaming kettle, gooseneck lamps, tools, wire baskets and piles of letters fresh off the latest plane from Europe. The women were steaming open all the envelopes to inspect their contents, reading and puzzling over them, holding them up to the lamps for any markings. Occasionally they’d set one down and carefully scan it with a magnifier or douse it with chemicals in search of invisible ink. Then they’d seal it up without a trace, lightly toss it in the out basket and move on to the next. The mail had to be processed quickly. They needed to get it back on the plane and not interrupt its layover. Failure could tip Britain’s hand to both friend and foe as to what it was doing.

  Thanks to Britain’s blockade of the Continent and the parallel German U-boat war against Britain and the Commonwealth, the Atlantic was now partly closed. That meant virtually all of the mail between Europe and the Western Hemisphere went by air from neutral Portugal through the British colony of Bermuda, where all planes making the crossing had to land to refuel. When one did, the IPTCS covertly unloaded it, rushed it here and secretly opened it. Odd as it may have seemed, little Bermuda out on the edge of the tropics was Britain’s window on Europe, all from letters, magazines and newspapers going back and forth. The photoed document Hawkins was waiting to see came from this operation. Britain was utterly dependent on it.

  With the fall of France, the tardy Italian entrance into the war in June and the Nazi occupation of most of the Continent, the Secret Service’s networks on the Continent were shattered. Virtually all its sources of information on what was going on inside Europe were torn away. That was the greatest intelligence disaster in the Secret Service’s long history, all the way back to Elizabeth I and Walsingham. There were a few listening posts in places like Stockholm, Geneva or Istanbul, but they were small and closely watched—not only by the suspicious locals, who desperately wanted to stay out of the war, but also by the Germans and the Italians.

  Hawkins knew all that. And yet, what an appalling sight, he thought, the privacy and trust of so many so cheerfully violated. But … what else are we to do?

  He thought back a couple of months. The worst day of my life, the day I was ordered out of Paris. Same day the Wehrmacht marched in. That was bad. Got stopped on the street by the Wehrmacht twice. That was frightening. Thank god for my American passport. I got out. But my friends …

  Thanks to the steaming kettles the room was as overheated as a Turkish bath, the women covered with sweat, their clothes sticking seductively to their bodies. But Hawkins felt chilled by the memory of leaving Paris. Several nearby girls were eyeing Hawkins curiously. Most of the men on the island were either old, overweight or had their skittish wives surgically attached. Hawkins was a catch. But he was so tired and preoccupied that he never noticed.

  “Caused quite a flap when it came through, not that many celebrity letters. Or at least someone famous,” Houghton shouted over the din, gesturing at the large blowup of a letter in Russian, of all things.

  “Who?” Hawkins said.

  “Leon Trotsky.” The general laughed a little, as if to say, Can you believe it?

  “What? The Bolshevik leader? From the Russian Revolution?”

  “Yes, him.”

  “What the hell is he doing in Mexico City?”

  “On the run from Stalin. The Soviet Great Leader wants him dead.”

  “I know he got pushed out.”

  “Right. But he still has friends and supporters
back in Russia—the USSR, I should say. What you could call a holy war is going on inside Communism. What’s the true faith? Socialism in a single state—that’s Stalin—or wait for world revolution—that’s Trotsky. Absurd, the whole lot. Mexico’s a safe haven for people fleeing Stalin. Also the losing side in the Spanish Civil War.”

  “So this letter?” Hawkins said.

  “He apparently still has some surviving friends in the Red Army.”

  “I thought Stalin purged that.”

  “He did, but Trotsky created the Red Army,” the general said. “Whatever you think of his politics, the man’s a genius, won the civil war, saved their revolution. As a soldier, I have to tell you that was an amazing feat, maybe the greatest of the century. We have to conclude he still has friends tipping him off. Could be coming out through a military attaché, an agent in Istanbul, we have no idea.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “The sender is warning Trotsky the Nazis may have made a deal with Stalin to go after him—that a strange German shipment went through Russia to Romania and is covertly bound for Mexico.”

  “Probably right. If Stalin is doing Hitler a favor, he’s getting something valuable in return.”

  “Count on that.”

  “Going east through Russia makes sense, though. More secure than getting ten locked boxes through Hungarian or Romanian customs,” Hawkins said. “It wouldn’t have to leave the port to enter customs and be inspected, it could go from one ship to another.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But we’re the only ones that know the Germans want to sell something in New York.”

  “That’s it. The sender assumes it’s about Trotsky because it’s going to Mexico.”

  “But it’s actually merely being transshipped through Mexico to New York.”