Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘Why?’ Krag had roared, apparently delighted to discover this unsuspected vein of naivety in the Swiss. ‘Why? Because they needed the practice, I suppose.’

  ‘There was a shot. I heard a shot.’ There had to be a better explanation. He could not have set something like this in train.

  ‘Correct, Herr Maeltzer. You did indeed hear a shot. One of the fools almost killed one of his own. They’re much better with cold steel, you know. They don’t have to suffer this tedious business of co-ordinating the eye and the trigger finger.’

  After that Maeltzer had fled for the city and the security of his room at the Grand New Hotel, wiping the smile of greeting off the face of the Widow Shemsi as he rushed past her on the stairs.

  At first it had been his intention to send a cable – nothing less would do – to Zürich to be sent on to Buchan’s parents, which would at least relay the terrible news before their hopes were buoyed by his earlier message. But even as he began to write Maeltzer realised that any such telegram would be subject to military censorship, and the authorities were hardly likely to release the information before their own inquiry. And they might well take a dim view of his acting as a go-between for a captured British officer. It would be days, perhaps weeks, before he found somebody who was going back to Vienna or Berlin and willing to take mail. Not only had he been responsible for the boy’s death, but he had increased the anguish of his parents a hundredfold.

  In his own anguish, slumped on his desk, Maeltzer had demanded out loud, ‘My God! What can I do?’ And the desk with the half-written telegram lying next to the sardine-tin lamps, and the bed and the matching water jug and bowl, and the trunk he had covered with an embroidered bedouin saddle bag, and the stern looking wardrobe all answered: nothing, you can do nothing. What is done is done.

  For a man unaccustomed to heavy drinking it had taken the journalist some time to get drunk. The schnapps bottle, the one he had opened in Weidinger’s honour, was two-thirds full and he had almost finished it before he had dulled the pain to the point where he could distance his own involvement in recent events.

  But when he switched from drinking to pacing the room, mumbling to himself, sometimes pausing to stare unseeing out of the window before he at last closed the shutters and lay on the bed, he almost immediately felt nauseous. Twice he had to get to his washbowl and be sick until his stomach would allow him to sleep. And then his brain continued to conjure up new monsters, so that Maeltzer’s large head tossed on the pillow and the feathery fingers came to his throat.

  He gazed at the city below, neither hungover nor entirely sober. He caught the vomit stench coming up from his wash bowl, and decided that he had better do something about it. There was a lavatory in the corridor of the floor below – quite a modern affair, with a flushing water closet that worked as long as the head porter could be chivvied into organising a daily bucket chain to fill the tank on the roof that fed the cistern.

  Maeltzer was returning from the lavatory when he met Shemsi for the second time that day. Fearing another snub, she contrived to look distracted, staring down at her feet in order to avoid catching his eye. His pacing had been particularly heavy that morning.

  Maeltzer recalled the hurt expression on Shemsi’s face as he ran past her on the stairs a few hours earlier. ‘Good morning,’ he said, disorientated by his sleep. ‘I mean, good afternoon.’

  ‘Oh Herr Maeltzer,’ she said, as if she had had difficulty in placing him at first. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I am –’ he began. ‘I am most distressed, madam. An awful thing happened this morning. A young English officer who had tried to escape was killed. Bayoneted. A lieutenant. No more than twenty, I would guess.’

  ‘How awful,’ she said although her tone implied, ‘how odd’. How odd that one death, an enemy death when all was said and done, should move this man during a war when thousands were dying all over the world every day.

  ‘I grieve because I bear some responsibility,’ said Maeltzer who sensed her perplexity.

  ‘Responsibility. But why?’ She was genuinely intrigued.

  ‘I –’ But the journalist suddenly became conscious how odd he must seem standing in this corridor with his china wash bowl in one hand and his detachable collar askew, reeking of drink and stale sweat and God knows what else. He gave a curt nod and was on the second step of the stairs back to his floor before Shemsi was aware that the conversation had ended.

  It was the longest chat she had ever had with him, and she was a little hurt that it should have ended in her second rebuff of the day. She resolved that the next time she saw Maeltzer she would pretend that she had not and then became annoyed with herself for becoming concerned with such trivialities. She was acting like an adolescent. Perhaps it was those coal-black eyes of his, so unusual for a European.

  That night Maeltzer paced the floor of his room until well after midnight. Shemsi lay awake next to the slumbering Krag wondering whether this latest bout of insomnia was solely the fault of the dead Englishman.

  Krag, who rarely seemed to sleep much himself, was suddenly awake beside her. ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  ‘Herr Maeltzer. I’ve told you. He paces.’

  The intelligence officer lay with his hands clasped behind his head for a few seconds, listening. ‘A troubled man,’ he said.

  ‘He told me he is responsible for the death of an English soldier. A young officer. Is he responsible?’

  Krag considered this for a moment. ‘In a way he is,’ he said. ‘He spotted him trying to get away and told us where he was.’

  ‘And you? Were you involved?’

  ‘I was involved in a hunt for an escaped prisoner. When we caught him something happened and he died.’

  ‘It was an accident? Herr Maeltzer said he was bayoneted.’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t an accident,’ he snorted. ‘The swine murdered him. I have the man responsible in jail now. With luck he may face a firing squad.’

  His anger startled her. ‘You too? Why do you care so much about an English officer?’

  ‘I care very little about an English officer,’ sighed Krag who was not accustomed to explaining how he felt about things. ‘But I do care about the good name of Germany and German officers. And I happen to think that our gallant ally should behave in a manner which does not disgrace our cause.’

  Shemsi had never known Krag like this. He was sitting up in bed, his eyes bright. A livid scar just below his left collar bone seemed to pulsate purple.

  ‘You really hate the Turks, don’t you? You think they’re sub-humans?’ It had never occurred to her before, the man’s innate sense of racial superiority. She wondered how far down his scale she would be even if she was still a seventeen-year-old virgin.

  ‘Do you know when I first came to the East?’ he asked.

  ‘The East?’ She looked confused. To Shemsi the East was China.

  ‘To Turkey? Do you know when I first came to Turkey? I’ll tell you. It was in the spring of ‘96. Do you remember what happened in Constantinople a few months later, that August?’

  She shook her head. Why should she? She would have been ten years old at the time, in the stone house in her father’s village in the Chouf they went up to every summer to escape the heat of Beirut.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what happened. One moment.’

  She watched as he got out of bed, walked naked to the chair on which he had carefully draped his tunic and extracted Buchan’s cigarette case from the top pocket together with a box of matches. He was very thin and almost without bodily hair. The late Major Shemsi had had a belly on him, and the matt on his chest had extended around his shoulders like a cape. She imagined Maeltzer, who continued to pace, might look the same.

  ‘Would you like one?’ He proffered the open cigarette case.

  ‘No,’ she said, after a moment’s hesitation. There were occasions when she smoked, but never in public of course. A woman in her position had to be doubly sure to m
aintain all the outward respectabilities. It gave her a perverse satisfaction to deny Krag the intimacy of seeing her do it. God knows he wanted enough else.

  They’re English,’ he said, lighting up. ‘It was his case – the young officer who was bayoneted.’

  ‘So what happened?’ She had never seen Krag in such a forthcoming mood. She was fearful he would lapse back into one of his long silences or merely fall asleep. ‘What happened in ‘96?’

  ‘There were massacres of Armenians. Not the first and almost certainly not the last. They had started the summer before but these were in Constantinople itself. Some terrorists took over the Ottoman Bank and made various demands. While they pretended to negotiate the Palace encouraged the mob to take reprisals. They killed until they were tired of killing. It went on for three days and for months after that in the provinces. The Armenians were slaughtered. They ravished nine-year-olds before they dashed their brains out.’

  Krag paused to look for an ashtray. Seeing none, he used the inside of the cigarette case. ‘I was twenty. Newly commissioned and seconded to our military mission because I had passed out near the top in the artillery school. They wanted to teach them how to use our guns, you see. It was supposed to be a great honour, but I had wanted to go to South West Africa and fight the Herero. Unblooded young soldiers always like to fight you know – at least they would like to know what it’s like to fight.

  ‘So there I was, going to our mission overlooking the Bosphorus every day, an aide to a colonel whose task it was to try and teach some supercilious Turkish aristocrats masquerading as officers how to make proper use of all the good things provided by Herr Krupp. At least twice a week there would be some official reception to attend. They were often held at the homes of other foreign missions – the British and the French among others. These were not the most light-hearted affairs. Everybody was on his guard, anxious not to give anything away. You can imagine what a relief it was to be invited to the homes of the Greeks and the Armenians, who were always anxious to cultivate the resident foreigners. These could be truly enjoyable occasions. One could relax.’

  ‘I suppose they felt more secure having you around.’ Shemsi knew how it felt to be a besieged Christian rock in a Muslim sea. She had grown up on the tale of how the Druse of the Chouf had treated the Maronite Catholics. It was why she was born a Protestant.

  ‘I suppose they did, poor fools. We didn’t do very much to stop it. I think we “expressed our concern”, but most of the shouting was done by the British and the French. The American newspapers made more fuss than we did.’

  ‘So a lot of your Armenian friends were killed?’

  ‘Not a lot. I didn’t have a lot of Armenian friends. But, yes, there was one family I knew well who were already in mourning. They were beaten to death in their own homes.’

  ‘And ever since then you’ve hated the Turks?’

  ‘Not hated exactly. Despised sometimes.’

  ‘Strange,’ she said. ‘I’ve hated and loved them but never despised them.’

  ‘I said sometimes,’ he said. Krag’s tone did not invite further discussion, and shortly afterwards he slipped quietly out of her suite and returned to his own quarters – as he usually did.

  For some time after he had gone Shemsi lay awake listening to the steady tread above. She wondered at an anguish that kept Maeltzer’s mind whirring on like this, denying the body sleep. It was strange, she thought, that two men with so little in common should be so affected by the death of a young Englishman who was practically unknown to them. ‘I do care about the honour of Germany and German officers.’

  She noticed that Krag had left Buchan’s cigarette case on her bedside table and wondered whether it was meant to be a gift. She picked it up and caught her reflection in the polished silver. It felt heavy, valuable. She held it at arm’s length and tried to study her face in it but the light or the angle at which she was holding it must have been wrong for it seemed to give her a crooked nose and thick lips. ‘Despised sometimes’, she wondered how much he despised her – or she him for that matter.

  The Widow Shemsi was about to put the cigarette case down when she noticed the dark brown stain on one of its corners. She gave a little shudder, for it was quite obvious what it was, and resolved to give it back to Krag at the next opportunity. In the morning she could not remember whether Maeltzer had stopped pacing before she fell asleep or not.

  12

  It is forbidden in Islam for a fresh corpse to remain unburied for more than a day, but Buchan’s body was kept in a hospital mortuary for almost four because nobody got around to making the arrangements.

  For the first forty-eight hours it was surrounded by blocks of ice with one particularly large block resting on the gaping abdominal wound as a final barricade against the flies. By the morning of the third day the ice had melted and the Syrian in charge of the arrangements was too lazy to replace it. Eventually a stick grenade accident on a crowded troop train brought an Austrian doctor along to inspect the accommodation. He became highly indignant about the smell and got in touch with a friend at Kress’s headquarters. Buchan was buried the next day.

  The funeral took place at one of the city’s small Catholic cemeteries although Buchan was Church of England, as a proper examination of his dog tags would have shown. Nonetheless, the Germans put on a good show. There was a firing party for the coffin, which was draped with a Union flag, and a sweating Father Liebermann to remind everyone of the promise of resurrection. As the senior British officer among the prisoners the Yeomanry captain was allowed to attend. Buchan would have been surprised to see how obviously moved he was by the occasion.

  Krag had organised it. He put Weidinger in command of the firing party, the same collection of clerks and signallers whom the intelligence officer had press-ganged into the hunt for the British escapee. After the priest had finished, they delivered a volley while Syrian workmen took the strain on the ropes and the box was lowered into the flinty earth. Some Turkish officers were quite thrilled by it all. It had that chevalier touch they so admired; burying the English officer was even better than showing him around the holy places.

  Among the few civilians present was Maeltzer, who had come to punish himself and found to his surprise that he must have expiated his sin for it was not the mental scourging he had expected. He wondered if this had anything to do with the fact that Liebermann was officiating.

  Another was Mrs Vester, the pious Chicago woman who ran the American Colony and its increasingly popular soup kitchen. Maeltzer was glad to see that Doctor Vester had done the right thing and decided to stay away. Although Mrs Vester’s husband was a German, he was ostracised by the rest of the community because he had publicly stated his opposition to the Kaiser’s war. And his position was even more difficult now that his wife’s country had entered hostilities on the Entente’s side – though they had not got around to declaring war on Turkey, and were unlikely to do so.

  Also present, at least in body, was Magnus, who was seated with his back against the head of an old tombstone, his right leg cocked over his left knee and his great staff lying on the ground beside him. When the rifles went off he had given a little jump and put his hands over his ears. Weidinger, at attention with his sabre inches from his nose, caught the movement out of the corner of his eye.

  After the firing party had been dismissed and the gravediggers began to cover Buchan with the small mound of Palestine that had been displaced for him, people began to drift away. The Yeomanry captain spoke briefly to both the priest and Mrs Vester before he was led back to the Citadel.

  Weidinger looked around for Maeltzer. The journalist was crouched alongside the Swedish Messiah who was waving a finger in his face. The Oberleutnant returned his sabre to his scabbard and walked over to them. ‘Magnus wonders where you’re going to bury the rest of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force,’ said Maeltzer. ‘He thinks this cemetery is too small.’

  ‘We’ll leave them for the crows,’ said Weidinger. He
was thinking about the English sovereign. Perhaps he should confront Magnus with it now, in front of Maeltzer?

  Magnus continued to stare at the ground, and for the first time Weidinger became aware of how much the Swedish Messiah stank. He had obviously not washed for weeks. How could the journalist even bear to acknowledge the stupid swine?

  Maeltzer stood up, banging some dust from his tan suit with his panama. ‘I thought it went very well,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘He maketh the wars to cease unto the end of the earth,’ said Magnus in English. ‘He breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth –’

  ‘Now come along, Magnus.’

  It was Mrs Vester. Weidinger saluted. Maeltzer raised his hat. Magnus hauled himself to his feet by his staff and towered above them all, looking huge and mad. He reminded Weidinger of an illustration of John the Baptist which he used to stare at in his children’s Bible.

  ‘He raiseth the poor out of the dust and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill,’ responded the Swede as he followed her out, one pace behind. Mrs Vester did not look back to see if he was there.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ sighed Maeltzer. ‘It’s a long book, Psalms.’

  ‘He has a good memory,’ said Weidinger. ‘Very retentive.’

  ‘It’s part of his madness.’

  Magnus was walking alongside Mrs Vester now, talking to her. Weidinger noticed that Krag was staring after the Swede while pretending to listen to one of the garrulous Turkish officers.

  ***

  Magnus took his usual route down David Street, punting himself along by landing his great staff exactly in the cracks in the flagstones. He had eaten well at the American Colony – two bowls of soup and half a loaf – and he walked with the energy of a man who was trying to aid his digestion. In any case, there was only about an hour to go before curfew and most other people were hurrying. The only time people slowed up was to give as wide a berth as possible to the litters on which the typhoid and smallpox cases were being taken to die in the pesthouse. As summer approached the epidemics got worse.