Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Hare looked at Mitzi and raised his eyebrows and turned the corners of his mouth down, which meant, “Here he goes again.” Then, as if to some secret cue, they began to sing it, Mitzi’s German accented English breaking through.

  “Run rabbit, run rabbit run, run, run...Here comes ze farmer wiz his gun, gun, gun. He’ll get by, wizout his rabbit pie...”

  Her voice was surprisingly jazz husky, not at all what one might expect from the bottle blond’s petite frame. For some years now she had picked up cigarette money performing Marlene Dietrich numbers with Tel Aviv dance bands. Her mother insisted Marlene was Jewish which explained why the singer had remained in America instead of returning to Nazi Germany. Mitzi liked to think this was true but sometimes she suspected that her mother missed Germany so much she was almost anti-Semitic.

  Südfeld joined in again where he could but, having made his point, Maeltzer’s eyes were already closed, perhaps more against the tail dust from the vehicles ahead of them than a genuine attempt to doze. Almost all the traffic along the road was military and most of it heading in an easterly direction towards Palestine, obviously bent on putting as much distance between themselves and the Afrika Korps as possible and spurred on by news of panzers sighted only sixty miles west of Alexandria. There were rumours that the retired British admiral the Egyptian government paid to look after that port and its famous lighthouses was absent without leave. “Not exactly the Nelson spirit is it?” an officer acquaintance of Maeltzer’s had whispered the night before in the Long Bar crush at Shepheard’s Hotel.

  And it was true. They appeared unable to stop the rot. Perhaps the Royal Navy’s decision to withdraw some of their warships to Haifa was prudent. But sometimes, thought Maeltzer, the British seemed to revel in defeat, be exhilarated by the bolting anarchy of rout, drunk on the Dunkirk spirit.

  “There’s a flap on,” a cheerful corporal clerk had announced shortly before they set off from the Kasr-el-Nil barracks. In the man’s arms was a cardboard box full of confidential papers he was delivering to the cut down oil barrels serving as makeshift incinerators. “Wouldn’t do for our Rommel to get his hands on this little lot.” Later Maeltzer saw Hare rescue a pile of processed German documents from the same man. “They’re not going on your bloody bonfire!”

  As far as the Cairenes were concerned, the great columns of smoke rising above the barracks were yet another indication that the Ingliz were much better at barroom fights in Sharia il Berka than they were at fighting Germans. Any lingering doubts they may have had about the nature of these fires were dispelled when some secret papers refused to yield entirely to the flames but rose in large charred fragments with the smoke then, caught by a capricious breeze, were distributed among the curious citizenry. Little wonder, thought Maeltzer, that several days running teasing mobs had taken to the streets chanting, “Advance Rommel,” then leapt for their lives to avoid the homicidal truck driving of the Royal Army Service Corps. “RASC - Run Away, Someone’s Coming,” Maeltzer had overheard a Rifle Brigade subaltern with one arm in a sling say to his companion at Shepheard’s.

  Maeltzer could not get over just how utterly ineffectual the British Army had been in this war. Apart from one short lived success against Rommel the previous December, their outright victories had all been against their old allies the Italians thus confirming Churchill’s little joke that Mussolini’s decision to side with Germany was only fair, “because we had them last time”. Yet not quite twenty-five years ago Maeltzer had watched General Allenby’s men ride into Jerusalem and been struck by the easy confidence they exuded.

  At that time, he was just out of hospital recovering from a fractured skull received in the Citadel’s condemned cell after he had fought off the hangman and his assistants with a smuggled in hat pin and bought enough time for a stay of execution to save him from the gallows. He had been convicted of spying for the Allies on charges trumped up by a German intelligence officer and saved by the intervention of another German, the brilliant Major Von Papen who was now Germany’s ambassador to Turkey. The experience had transformed Maeltzer from a very assimilated Swiss Jew, an admirer of all things German, to a determined Zionist settler.

  Even so, his respect for Germany, its culture, its military competence, lingered. He recalled how shocked he had been in 1918 to hear Allenby’s officers refer to the Austro-German contingent supporting the Turks, as “poor old Fritz”. Now “Fritz” was treated like the Superman Hitler had told the world he was. The British newspapers had started calling Rommel “the Desert Fox” though it was never admitted that, like most foxes, he was almost invariably outnumbered by the hounds. Sometimes the Eighth Army seemed to admire him as much as the Afrika Korps.

  “Runs rings round us doesn’t he?” the cypher clerks like to tell him during the NAAFI breaks, sucking on their Woodbines and drinking their disgustingly strong tea sweetened with condensed milk. And the truly maddening thing was that when he asked them whether this worried them, he almost invariably got the same sort of reply. “Nah. Not us mate. We always win the last battle don’t we?”

  So run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run. Such a silly song and here was Hare running away from the Germans, admittedly for the good of his Jewish passengers, bawling it out to his heart’s content. Yet he was not an unintelligent boy though a bit vain, trying in his suede boots and, when it was cooler, a sheepskin jacket with the sleeves cut away, to look like the Eighth Army’s ideal of the officer desert warrior. Maeltzer noted, that today he was even carrying a revolver, rakishly slung cross-draw style on his left hip in the kind of open topped canvas holster favoured by the Palestine Police. The costume did not fit. There was a softness about him that belied it. Maeltzer couldn’t really put a finger on it. Perhaps it was because his cheeks were a little too plump, the hint of a dewlap already there, the lashes around his hazel eyes too lustrous, his eternal schoolboy’s optimism so at odds with even the average twenty-eight year-old’s experience of things. He looked altogether too pleased with life to do anything so foolish as to put it at risk.

  Unless, perhaps, it was for Mitzi. Maeltzer was not certain whether he was sleeping with her yet but it was obvious that he badly wanted to. Was it reciprocated? Mitzi was a dreadful flirt and he had heard that she had some sort of an arrangement with an officer in the Palestine Police. He glanced at her now, cocking her head to the slipstream, her eyes covered with white framed sun glasses, her adorable little Auxiliary Territorial Service peaked cap with its badge and redundant chin strap, mock military millinery for a soldier girl, pinned coquettishly to the back of her head. When he occasionally leaned forward to speak to Hare he noticed that she was not wearing the stockings regulation required whatever the temperature and her skirt was rucked up to her bare knees and beyond so that the sun lit up the small golden hairs along the tops of her thighs.

  Maeltzer observed all this with a certain wistfulness. Things were so much easier for the young nowadays. They had none of the constraints that faced his generation. If lovers were careful, pregnancy was not the almost inevitable result of regular sexual congress. But if he envied Hare for anything it was his Bentley.

  Beneath its dirt the car was painted a British racing green. It had a leather strap across the bonnet and running boards almost wide enough for stretcher cases. It was prosperous rather than sporty and Maeltzer was convinced that, had he remained on his Zurich newspaper and got the editorship he deserved, it was the kind of transport that would have gone with the job. Who knows, he might even have learned to drive? It was certainly too good for young Hare who had acquired it, spoils of war, from a pool of such beauties abandoned two years before, on the eve of Mussolini’s belated entry into the world conflict, by the more prescient of Alexandria’s Italian community. No doubt they had all expected to be swiftly reunited with them in an Egypt that was no longer a British protectorate.

  The open car made a lot of dust on the unpaved road. Max Südfeld, who despite his attempts to sing along and put on a brave face found
it particularly hard to endure. When Maeltzer, who was more than twenty years older, once overhead somebody accusing Südfeld of rushing headlong into old age he had objected on the grounds that Max had never been known to rush anywhere. And it was true he seemed to have a pathological aversion to all physical exertion except perhaps for the occasional sex though, as his tastes were entirely homosexual, this clashed terribly with his admiration for bourgeois order and comfort. He dreaded exposure.

  Südfeld’s most obvious vice was gluttony. His body was an egg shaped monument to his appetite. Among the British clerks and cypher operators in the unit Hare helped to run his nickname was “Goering” and like the commander of the Luftwaffe he was a fussy dresser, bursting out of bespoke silk shirts as big as tablecloths. But, also in common with the Reich Marshall, he had other qualities his critics tended to overlook: intelligence and courage were two of them.

  This fat man had the kind of Semitic profile beloved by Nazi cartoonists. During the Anschluss festivities, when Catholic Vienna celebrated its betrothal to its most famous Austrian since Mozart, he had been among those Jews caught in the street by the Viennese version of the Hitler Jugend. Presented with a bucket of soapy water and a brush and invited, along with assorted entrepreneurs and the odd medical genius, to scrub the pavements around the Juden Platz he had emptied the contents of his bucket over their jackboots and received a terrible beating for it.

  After that he had been a marked man and, since his family had long had lucrative trading interests in Alexandria, it had been the obvious place to go. Now, after four years in Egypt, he was about to make his first visit to Palestine. Normally the British made it difficult for a Jew to get in even as a visitor and he was quite excited by the prospect though, unlike Maeltzer, Südfeld was by no means a Zionist. Vienna was his birthplace and, on that score, his only regret was that he had been born in 1901 and not half a century or so before and lived out his life as a loyal citizen of the tolerant Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Südfeld tried to doze, his right leg chaffing against his own padlocked trunk which was big enough to accommodate all the costume requirements of a long sea voyage. He had persuaded Hare that it was only fair that he should have the largest luggage allowance since he was domiciled in Egypt and had no idea when he would next see his house in Alexandria or the flat he rented near Cairo’s Gezira Club. Hare hadn’t got the heart to say no. Besides, Maeltzer’s venerable portmanteau, its stiff leather worn almost white in places, was not that much smaller.

  To everyone’s amazement, Mitzi had turned up from the flat she shared with two women ambulance drivers carrying no more than one small suitcase and a cloth bag containing the two empty hatboxes Hare had obviously been expecting. “Oh good. Well done!” Now they lay on top of the luggage pile, each one of them tied in a very determined fashion with several strands of string that were brought together in a series of neat reef knots.

  “No more rabbit songs. It’s treasonable,” said Hare.

  “Why?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “No.”

  “It’s because I’m a hare.”

  But Mitzi spoilt the joke because she had no acquaintance with split-lipped, long eared rodents and it was left to Maeltzer to explain it.

  “It’s the famous English sense of humour,” said Südfeld. “It is untranslatable.”

  “Impenetrable,” agreed Maeltzer.

  “Not like those Germans eh?” said Hare. “Laugh every minute.”

  “Don’t be silly Captain David Sir,” said Mitzi.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m mad, quite mad. Mad as a March Hare. Only my name is David.”

  “Of course it is,” said Mitzi, briefly touching his arm as if he really did need reassurance. “March is a stupid name.”

  Mitzi hummed something for a bit, occasionally singing a word under her breath. Then, while Hare concentrated on his driving, they all went quiet, lulled by the heat and the dust and the monotony of the journey. In the back Südfeld dreamed he had returned to the family home in Vienna only to find all the furniture, including the piano, covered in dustsheets and nobody at home. He asked one of their old servants where everybody was but his attitude was surly and he didn’t want to tell him.

  Mitzi, her eyes also closed, appeared to lose control of her right hand which landed so lightly on Hare’s lap it might have been blown there. He drove carefully, trying to avoid ruts in the road, as if he had something very fragile on board. When an hour later he pulled up at Rafah on the Gaza Strip, the border crossing between Egypt and British Mandate Palestine, all his passengers were asleep.

  Awakened by the creak of the handbrake and the lack of engine noise, Mitzi reluctantly opened her eyes to see a line of vehicles waiting to go through, almost all of them military, the exception being some civilian cars crammed with British women and children, mostly the families of diplomats and administrators. The nub of the checkpoint was not a very grand affair, an airless wooden hut with unglazed windows and a counter manned by both civilian and military police. Two of the latter, a sergeant and a corporal, were Australians. All the MP’s were on the lookout for deserters and soldiers trying to smuggle things into Palestine they could sell.

  “Eye-Deeze pleeze,” said Hare, springing out of the Bentley. Mitzi yawned, groped in her non-regulation shoulder bag and came out with an AB 64 pay book that the British Army also used as an ID document. Maeltzer handed over one of the brown coloured passports bearing the royal coats of arms issued to citizens of the British Mandate of Palestine and permitting them to visit, without let or hindrance, most of the neighbouring countries.

  Südfeld looked flustered. “I only have my old passport,” he said.

  “You were never given anything else? What about the pass you were issued to get into Kasr-el-Nil?”

  “I handed it back,” said Südfeld suddenly apprehensive. “The MP’s were asking for them on the way out.”

  Hare sighed. “Well, we better show them something.”

  “I will have to open up my trunk,” said the Austrian.

  Under the curious gaze of the Australian military policemen the hatboxes, Maeltzer’s leather suitcase and Hare’s kitbags were all removed and placed outside the vehicle. Südfeld fished in the pocket of his crumpled linen jacket and eventually emerged with a surprisingly small key. When he succeeded in opening the trunk he raised the lid only as far as he needed to peer inside and rummaged about inside with quick, furtive movements until his head re-emerged followed by his right hand clutching a thick brown envelope. Wordlessly, he passed the envelope to Hare. Looking at him Maeltzer wondered what on earth the fat sodomite was trying to smuggle into Palestine? Black market liquor? A small boy?

  With some difficulty, because it was a very tight fit, Hare extracted the contents of the envelope. It was a passport, a pre-Anschlüss Austrian passport with Südfeld hand written in large Gothic characters on its cover. Attached top it was a curious concertina document full of official stamps, some of the involving the liberal use of red sealing wax, which were mostly Egyptian rather than British and part of the continuing fiction that Egypt was ruled from Farouk’s palace and not Sir Miles Lampson’s embassy. All the stamps and the sealing wax said the same thing: that Herr Südfeld was technically an enemy alien but a friendly one and therefore allowed to walk the streets.

  When Hare opened the passport the first thing he saw was that the old Austrian crest had been partly obliterated by a swastika stamp sand beneath it the word “Juden”.

  “It was their way of giving me a one-way ticket,” explained Südfeld.

  “Well, it’ll certainly shake ‘em up a bit in there,” said Hare, striding towards the hut with the three uneven documents clutched in his right hand, the Austrian’s passport at the top.

  It was late afternoon, the time of day when middle-aged metabolisms can be low and tempers short. Behind the counter was a contemporary of Walter Calderwell’s named Dawney, a veteran of the trenches who like so many of his conte
mporaries had started his police career as a member of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Troubles. Dawney liked trouble.

  He had recently been transferred to Frontier Control from prison duties in Acre where it was rumoured that he sometimes volunteered to assist the hangman. Before that he had ridden alongside Calderwell in the Galilee as a member of the Mounted Police Striking Force. Despite their similar backgrounds Calderwell had ended up disliking Dawney, perhaps because he detected in him what he had been and what, if he wasn’t careful, he might regress back into. Dawney’s loathing of the public schoolboys in their ranks, regardless of merit, and other appeals to class solidarity irritated him. So did his drunken ramblings for he soon discovered that Dawney drank not to forget but to remember a litany of grievances.

  Lieutenant Dawney had been slightly younger than Hare, not quite twenty-four and commissioned from the ranks, a very temporary gentleman when he placed his Fourteen-Eighteen Victory clasp alongside the Distinguished Conduct Medal he won as a sergeant at Passchendaele and wondered what he was going to do with the rest of this life he had been allowed. Now here he was, Acting Assistant Superintendent Dawney if you please, and back into the commissioned ranks again just like that brown-noser Calderwell. But he had two pips on his shoulder and Inspector Calderwell only had one even if he did have a cushy number with CID in Jerusalem where he would be good at sucking up to all those toffee nosed bastards. Of course, he was only considered good enough for Rafah in June; truly the place God would insert the tube when the world got its much needed enema.

  And all day he had been watching the British Army running away from Fritz. He could carve better soldiers out of a bunch of bananas. Men, to use the word lightly, like this young captain he had watched drive up in the Bentley with the ATS bint besides him with her cap stuck on the back of her head as if she had just stepped out of some Yankee film. Why the hell wasn’t he up the Western Desert?