HIS EYES HAVE SOMETHING COLD AND CRUEL ABOUT THEM
Most hospitality establishments can count on peak attendance on Fridays and Saturdays, especially at the start of the month, when people still have most of their salaries left. In that respect, the Grand Casino Estoril was an establishment unto itself. There was no way of even imagining how many people would be in the casino on any given night, what the atmosphere would be like, how high the stakes would be, or whether they would play into the early hours of the morning. Whether tomorrow was Tuesday or Sunday, or when their salary was due was of no concern to its clientele. Last Wednesday, for instance, the first day of the new year, when people were expected to be recuperating from the revelry of the previous night, the casino had a record number of guests, whereas today, 3 January, a Friday, attendance was poor, the stakes low, and time passed so slowly that both the customers and the croupiers were twiddling their thumbs in boredom. Outside it was drizzling.
Ivan would not have come if he had not had to. A message waiting for him at the reception desk after lunch said that Mademoiselle Maristela had phoned, and that meant that he was to appear at the casino that very same evening, at the appointed time. It was not yet ten o’clock but he had already taken up a strategic position at the bar and was waiting. Punctuality was important to the Germans.
He did not know how he could have missed her when she came in, but there was Elizabeth, bare-shouldered, standing by the roulette table. She was just looking, not playing. With glass in hand, Ivan began meandering around the room, looking at what was happening at the first table, then the baccarat table, until finally he joined the onlookers at the roulette table, right opposite Elizabeth. He did nothing to attract attention, he was languid and casual, like everybody else there. For a second their eyes met, and then she decided to play. She placed a chip on red – so, the Lisbon road – and lost. She let a round go by and then placed a chip on the number 4 – tomorrow, 4 January. Again she lost. Finally she played number 9. In other words, nine in the morning. She lost again. Having lost three rounds, the blonde beauty withdrew, a faint look of disgust on her face.
Ivan had received the message: the car that would secretly take him to his meeting would be waiting for him at the usual place on the Lisbon road the next morning at nine.
* * *
At nine o’clock, plus the few minutes claimed by the circular route taken to the handler’s house, Ivan stood face to face with Ludovico von Karstoff and Fraulein Leichner, who back home would have been described as fair rather than blonde.
Everything was the same as before, only a bit different. The first time they had done the talking; now it was his turn. He was impatient to share his impressions of the trip, his ‘baptism by fire’ as von Karstoff put it, though the only fire had been from the German bombing. Over a cup of coffee, he talked at random, informally, about who he had met and been with, the way a close friend would do after returning from his distant travels. Ludwig was amiably cordial. Elizabeth had softened slightly, helped by the box of chocolates he had brought her, a small gesture but a great luxury in wartime.
‘London is half-empty. They’ve sent the elderly and children away into the countryside. The only people who have remained in the city are those who have to, and many of them are sleeping in the tunnels of the underground. Quite a lot of buildings have been destroyed, but they clear away the rubble very quickly. Traffic is almost normal. There are ration cards for food, so they’ve dug up the lawns to plant potatoes and onions. There are no newspapers because there is no paper. People listen to the radio: a bit of light music, a bit of comedy...’
‘Are people panicking?’ Ludwig asked. You could see he was hoping for an affirmative answer.
‘The only sign of nervousness I noticed was that they have taken down the signposts. To make it difficult for anybody who lands to find his way. Other than that, nothing. They behave as if nothing is happening. The English are a strange bunch, very strange. One morning the warning siren sounded but I didn’t manage to get out of bed. Suddenly, a bomb fell close to the hotel and the whole room shook. I looked out the window and saw an overturned red bus in the street. I ran out to see what had happened... There was a large crater in the little park behind the hotel, water gushing out of the ruptured pipes, trees uprooted, the iron fence deformed as if it had been melted down, broken windows, open roofs, disfigured façades. I looked around; not a soul in sight, no fire brigade, just a few terrified quacking ducks. Suddenly, an old lady emerged from the cloud of dust. She was dressed up, replete with her hat, going out. I said: “Madam, the danger isn’t over yet!” And she said: “I couldn’t care less!” and off she went.’
*
‘Be careful now not to let your imagination run away with you,’ the German warned Ivan as they came to the official part of the visit. ‘Don’t tell us what you wished had happened, tell us how it really was. You’re not a writer, so don’t invent. Understand?’
The roles were now clear: von Karstoff stopped asking questions and listened, taking notes; his guest stopped chatting and concentrated on what he was saying; the German’s secretary stopped smiling and pedantically transcribed every word, like in court, occasionally interrupting the men to remind them that it was time to take a break or to eat.
Von Karstoff knew how to ask questions without making it sound like an interrogation. Under his guiding hand, Ivan gave a chronological account of his stay, from the moment he stepped off the plane in Bristol to the moment his plane landed back in Lisbon.
He slowly recounted every event he could remember: how he travelled, what the customs officers asked him, what he saw through the train window, what he said at the reception desk, whom he met work-wise and whom he met privately. He described the places he had stayed at, where he had travelled, whom he had spoken to and about what, how he had spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, whom he had flirted with, who had confided in him, what he had noticed. Von Karstoff was interested in every little detail, he went over every event several times. He seemed to believe Ivan and yet he kept tripping him up with follow-up questions, as if trying to catch him in a lie.
When asked, Ivan spoke openly about his love life in London. He had had three security-irrelevant encounters with a young lady in need of financial help (the first night she visited him in his hotel room, and the other two times she brought along her ‘sister’), and brief flings with two high society ladies: the daughter of a high-level naval officer who needed consolation after her fiancé was mobilized, and the obviously neglected wife of an often-absent aristocrat close to the party in power. Under different circumstances Ivan would not have talked about such things in front of Elizabeth.
‘Were you ever told anything of interest on these occasions?’ von Karstoff asked.
‘No... Not that I remember... We did more gymnastics than talking...’
Von Karstoff gave a conspiratorial laugh. The cold expression on Elizabeth’s face did not change.
That is how spies are debriefed; every story, every incident, anecdote and event has to be recounted several times and if a new detail should emerge in the process or one version diverge from another, they would have to stop and again go through the report with a fine-tooth comb until every piece of the story fell into place. That was the handler’s skill: it was his job to question, to doubt. And it was the agent’s job to remember.
Being with von Karstoff was like being in a cage with a tamed panther. An elegant, seductive creature, but one wrong move in his presence could cost you your life. Ivan could not for a minute relax. Anything illogical about his report, any inconsistency about the names, places, times, circumstances, the smallest detail, could automatically trigger suspicion, and if such suspicion were proved to be justified, then, however much the handler might like his agent, the Gestapo would step in, and, as Ivan knew even if he had not been warned, they could make a stone talk.
He had learned little from his contacts at the Yugoslav embassy. If they knew anything, which was unlike
ly, they were in no mood to tell him. The little he had managed to glean was rather general information about the British fleet, the distribution of its ships and naval forces. But von Karstoff was not particularly interested. He listened simply in order to check these facts against other reports he had received; once he had established that they all matched up, he moved on to another subject.
They had spent virtually the whole tiring day going over his stay in England, and for a moment Ivan thought that his debriefing was finished, but it turned out that this had only been round one. Ludwig had a new trick up his sleeve. This time he opted for an innovative method – to repeat the entire marathon exercise in another language.
‘Our conversation in German has tired me out. Please, repeat it all for me again, but this time in Italian.’
And so, Ivan started again from the beginning.
‘Sono arrivato a Bristol...’
Again, he talked about the Savoy hotel, the blackout, the fact that there was hot water, that there were power outages, where the nearest bomb had fallen, what people were complaining about. He described the city traffic and the damage he had seen from the bombing. He was particularly careful when talking about his conversations at the club he had frequented, where he had met a variety of London gentlemen. Von Karstoff listened closely and was so assiduous in checking the facts that he even questioned the spelling.
‘I’ve got a trick question for you. Is it spelled Whitchurch or Whitechurch?’ he asked Ivan. ‘You wrote Whit but here I’ve got White.’
‘I wrote it correctly. Whitchurch. You can check it on the map. The airport is just south of Bristol.’
‘You’re right,’ the German confirmed after checking. ‘This Dutchman got it wrong. And he’s been there any number of times. The dope.’
‘Dope?’
‘Forget it.’ Ludovico was not inclined to take the subject any further, but he clearly liked his Dutch informant far less than he did Ivan. He embarked on a fresh topic. ‘Tell us exactly what you heard about that new plane.’
‘I’ve told you five times already. I heard nothing reliable. Just rumours, and even then, just fragments. Allegedly there is a new fighter plane, an upgraded version of the Beaufighter. It was a Norwegian diplomat who first alluded to it, but he didn’t tell me where he got his information. Later, at the Naval and Military Club in St James’s Square, the In & Out, I was talking one evening to an officer and a clerk from the War Ministry. We were already in our cups when they boasted that they had this new deadly plane. Even they didn’t know much about it, but they thought that its mass production would mark a turning-point in the war,’ said Ivan. ‘My impression is that their expectations are too high. I didn’t manage to learn where the plane was being made, I just heard that it was in underground tunnels and that the first few planes would be flying soon. You probably know more about it than I do.’
‘I heard that they were being built somewhere in Scotland,’ the sceptical German said. ‘Maybe they don’t even exist, maybe it’s all propaganda. What do you think? Maybe it’s to raise people’s morale or to make us believe that they’re more powerful than they actually are.’
‘My friend, nothing would surprise me from such liars and cheats.’ Coming out of Ivan’s mouth, it sounded like a compliment.
‘And finally, one last question: what’s the London underground like?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How do the English feel about sleeping down there? What are the living conditions there like? What about their personal hygiene? That’s the sort of thing that interests me.’
Ivan had no answer.
‘I’m sorry, but did you instruct me to go down into that hole? It wouldn’t occur to me on my own...’
The handler changed the subject.
‘All that remains is for you to study this questionnaire.’
They spent the next half an hour in silence. Von Karstoff read the notes from the meeting and Ivan went through the nine single-spaced typed pages of the questionnaire, with its more than fifty questions and follow-up questions, mostly about things that Ivan had no clue about, especially the distribution of British land and air forces.
‘Is that it?’ he asked when he finished reading it. ‘I don’t suppose you want me to find out what Churchill has for dinner as well?’
Von Karstoff was in no mood for jokes this time.
‘That’s it. When do you plan to leave for London?’ he asked seriously.
‘It’s hard to find a plane ticket, and I don’t want to attract too much attention. I figure I’ll make it there in two to three weeks at most.’
‘Meanwhile, memorize the questions. Don’t take any notes with you, but if you do have to write something down, make sure you’re the only one who can understand what you wrote. Don’t contact me unless it’s absolutely necessary or you are specifically instructed to.’
They spoke no more about work. Ivan left just before midnight.
‘His eyes have something cold and cruel about them,’ Elizabeth said when he was gone.
‘You said the same thing last time,’ Ludovico observed.
‘So what? So what if I did?’ she snapped, walking back into the house.
THE GENIE FROM THE LAMP
‘A fine evening, isn’t it?’ Jarvis said to the man at the next urinal. Of course, an intelligence officer would never have acted so openly had he not first checked that all the booths were empty and that it was only the two of them in the men’s toilet.
During his trips to Lisbon, agent Tricycle had not really been on assignment and so had been in touch with the service only sporadically, in short encounters with Jarvis, almost always sudden, at the Englishman’s initiative, often in unusual places. Just like now, late at night, in the men’s toilet of the Grand Casino Estoril. Actually, except for once or twice in the park, Jarvis almost always waylaid him in toilets, which for some reason Tricycle found extremely annoying.
‘It’s almost morning,’ said Tricycle, still staring at the ceramic tiles on the wall in front of him. ‘You’re like the genie from the lamp. I take hold of my dick and you appear out of nowhere.’
‘Anything new?’ Jarvis asked, as if talking to the wall.
‘It looks as if somebody is singing to them,’ Tricycle said, speaking to the same wall.
‘Name?’
‘I don’t have one. Some Dutchman. Somebody maybe from KLM.’
‘Anything else?’ Jarvis asked.
Tricycle did not answer right away. He was concentrating on peeing; most men found it hard to do so when being questioned. In the end, he was successful.
Inspired by Tricycle’s tinkle, Jarvis started peeing himself, which did not stop him from asking:
‘Did you learn anything about the Argentinian?’
‘He’s not Argentinian, he’s Italian. A good guy. Plays an excellent hand of bridge. Doesn’t seem to have much money. He’s with a kid, she looks twenty but is actually sixteen. Twenty-six years younger than he is.’
‘And would you happen to have any relevant information about him?’ Jarvis knew when an informer was throwing dust in his eyes.
‘Aha, so you’re interested in the relevant? Why didn’t you say so to begin with? He often phones Rome and Vichy. I don’t know whom.’ He stopped talking and peeing at the same time.
‘That’s all?’
‘Considering how much you’re paying me, even that is too much,’ Tricycle said, tapping his last drops of pee into the urinal.
‘You’re right,’ the Englishman said, buttoning up his trousers.
It was only when they were at the sink that their eyes met in the mirror.
‘And you? Know anything I should know?’
‘Not really,’ the Englishman lied. Because there was a lot that he knew; for instance, that news had reached Berlin that agent Ivan was back in Lisbon, but he could not say that because then Tricycle would know that London was listening in on Berlin, from which he could deduce that the English had managed to dec
rypt the Germans’ secret Enigma code. As much as he trusted Tricycle, which admittedly was not a lot, he could not share that kind of information with him.
As if washing his hands reminded him of something, Tricycle added:
‘Oh yes... I wouldn’t be surprised if they were planning to infect the underground with some contagious disease.’
‘London’s underground?’
‘No, Moscow’s,’ Tricycle winked in the mirror, just to make sure that his colleague knew he was being ironic.
‘Where did you hear that?’
‘They’re asking too many questions about hygiene down there.’
Jarvis changed the subject.
‘The girl you’ve been going out with these last few evenings, she’s just an expensive call girl. A professional. You realize that, I hope?’
‘Ah, my friend. She’s not a professional, she’s way more than that. And you should see her girlfriend! Top class! Trust me,’ Tricycle laughed as he walked out of the marble toilet, past its soft towels, to join his tipsy pals lost in the smoky haze of the casino.
That was all that was said during their brief meeting and all that entered the official note sent by diplomatic pouch to London.
A STRANGE CHILD
In a remote corner of the card room, removed from sight and away from the bustle, two elegant men sat drinking their morning café mélange. The older, moustachioed man in his forties was sitting in a high-backed armchair perusing the Diário de Lisboa. It might lead you to believe that he was Portuguese, though he looked like a foreigner. And so he was. He was not actually reading the Portuguese newspaper, he was amusing himself by trying to guess what it said. And he was not bad at it. It helped that he was proficient in several languages. It also helped that the articles were about football, not metaphysics. It was an entertaining way to kill time.
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