Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  “Not before you give me satisfaction Yank.”

  “It was that South African bastard.”

  “I don’t suppose this has anything to do with him bustin’ your nose and stealin’ your girl?”

  “Do I look like a bigot?”

  “More sinned against than sinning I’m sure.”

  “Did you see him near the truck, with the dark guy who looked like a Kike?”

  “For Christ’s sake Malley, let’s lay off that Kike stuff here.”

  “Did you see him?” The photographer was quite unabashed.

  “Yes I did. We nodded to each other.”

  “Did you notice what his friend, the gentleman of wandering early Levantine appearance, was carrying?”

  “You mean the captain who was with him?” asked Pickett, trawling his memory.

  “The very same.”

  “No I don’t.” His mesh wasn’t fine enough. What had he failed to catch? What the hell was Malley on about now?

  “Reporters go about with their eyes shut unless they know they’re working.”

  “Guilty, guilty,” pleaded Pickett almost believing him.

  “So you don’t remember what he was carrying. You must have seen it. You just don’t remember it.”

  “No Hawkeye I don’t. There was a lot going on.” He was thinking of the dying nurse, hardly out of her teens. She was a Kike.

  “He was carrying a knapsack. You know, those things they call small packs.”

  “So what?”

  “You ever see a British officah carrying anything heavier than his hat and cane?”

  “Well, I once saw one trying to take on a Stuka with a Bren gun.”

  “Off the battle field I mean,” said Malley who was sober enough to indulge Pickett’s insistence that the British Army wasn’t all bad.

  “So what’s your point?”

  “After the bang I took a picture of that cop, the same pontificating bastard who would’ve thrown us all in the slammer the other night if his lady friend hadn’t been singing. He didn’t notice me because at the time he was examining what was left of a small pack.”

  “Okay. So it was on the truck and it was blown off.”

  “That’s what I thought at first. But when I got my pictures back from the Reuters dark room this morning one of them told me something else. It’s perfectly clear that all the cop is holding is one side of the small pack. It’s been torn apart. And that would only have happened if there had been an explosion inside it. Well, think about it. If that bag had been on the truck what would have happened? It would either have been blown clean off, a little scorched maybe but more or less intact, or it would have been burned to cinders. These are the laws of physics.”

  “Your erudition humbles me,” said Pickett. But he was listening.

  “The bomb was in the bag, there’s no doubt about it. And the bomb was planted by my old sparring partner Major De Wet, South Africa’s Fred Astaire. I’ll tell you something else too, that cop was thinking the same. I know he was.”

  “Well, let’s suppose you’re right and this knapsack contained a bomb. So what makes you think that the South Africans had anything to do with it? There were a lot of other small packs there.”

  “Elementary my Deah Watson,” said Malley holding his cigarette with his left hand and sucking at an imaginary Meerschaum with his right. “What was everybody doing after the explosion, those that had been around the truck and could still stand up. They were trying to help weren’t they? You got yourself covered in that girl’s blood. Do you remember seeing those particular representatives of General Smuts’ Finest around? I don’t.”

  “Aw c’mon. Maybe you just didn’t notice them.”

  “Did you see them?”

  “Not as far as I can recall but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. And even if they weren’t, so what?”

  “No officer was going to walk away from that mess until he had been seen to help. Until everything that could be done had been done. Bad form.”

  “So they left before.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? They had an appointment elsewhere.”

  “So why come at all? It had hardly started.”

  Pickett thought about this and for a few moments he began to toy with the idea that perhaps Malley might be onto something. He thought it over all again: the bag, the laws of physics, the officers who had not stayed to help, the cop Calderwell looking at the bag. Then it came to him, the clincher, why it was all wrong.

  “Mister Holmes,” he said, “there is just one snag with your theory. One thing that just doesn’t fit. You’d never get enough dynamite into a bag that size to make the kind of explosion we had there. I mean, people two hundred yards away were being decked by the blast.”

  Malley smiled. “That’s what I can’t figure out,” he said.

  ***

  Calderwell was having the same problem. He had brought the fragment of small pack back to his office in the Russian Compound and shown it to the Assistant Super who had shook his head and said, “Can’t be. Too small.”

  Then Calderwell had turned it over and shown him this tar like paste on the inside. “What do you think that is?”

  “Something unspeakable I should imagine. How about fried Gentleman’s Relish?” He held it to his nose and sniffed it. “Almost right. Perhaps a bit more like marzipan flambé. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we ask one of the Weird and the Wonderful to have a look at it for us? They know a lot about bangs.”

  “Davison?”

  “He’d do for a start.”

  Calderwell shook his head. “What about the Sappers? It’s easier to understand what they’re saying.”

  “You’re right. Never neglect the obvious.”

  That same afternoon they got a jolly looking, apple cheeked Royal Engineers Lieutenant-Colonel with a white moustache who explained he was standing in for Jerusalem’s Garrison Engineer now in Baghdad attending to a sewage problem. “Did a refresher on explosives just before I came out here,” he confided. “Gun cotton, nitro-glycerine and the new phosphorous stuff, very nasty. Did the lot and I can assure you that this -” he sniffed at a bit of the sticky stuff he had scraped off the bag with the nail of his forefinger “- is not an explosive. If I had to guess, I would say it was some sort of burned oil deposit from the truck.”

  So the Assistant Super thanked him for his time and stuck his head round the door and called for some tea. While they were waiting they talked about the explosion. It would, the Assistant Super assured him, have certainly done for the High Commissioner, not to speak of Assistant Inspector Calderwell here, if it had not been for the nasty and distracting accident during the demonstration. And the Sapper Colonel had said that it was perfectly obvious to those who knew about these things that it was a darn sight more than a petrol tank going up. And the Assistant Super said, yes, well, no point in exciting the natives with reports of bombs. But what kind of bomb? If the smallpack was nothing to do with it they had not found a trace of any explosive? And the Colonel, who had some of the same 1914-18 ribbons up as Calderwell, really did say that the whole business was “deuced odd”.

  After the old soldier had gone Calderwell told his boss about the South African officer he had spotted carrying a smallpack and why he found it unusual, a theory he would have been alarmed to find he shared it with a reprobate like Malley. The Assistant Superintendent was unimpressed. “Democratic lot these colonials you know,” he said. “Carry their own bags.”

  Calderwell agreed but said he was trying to trace the South Africans starting with De Wet so that they could at least be eliminated from inquiries. Trouble was the army in Palestine were at such sixes and sevens with the influx from Egypt . He was going to try and get a call through to the South Africans’ headquarters in Cairo. He had been given the name of a colonel in their records department. Trouble was, you usually had to wait hours for a line.

  And that is how they might have left it had not young Hare wandered in at
that point to tell them that the monitors at 9th Wireless down at Sarafand had not yet picked up anything untoward on any of the frequencies they had given him. It took Calderwell a moment to retune. This latest attempt on MacMichael’s life had pushed the Galilee parachutes right out of his head. The bomb at Sarafand was so obviously Jewish terrorists even down to their choice of South African uniforms. There were said to be quite a lot of Jews in the South African army. It had Stern Gang written all over it.

  Then Hare’s gaze fell on the fragment of smallpack. “What’s that?”

  So they told him and the Signals officer picked it up and looked at it and said he was on his way up to Haifa to see the people at Narkover and why didn’t he show it to them because they knew all about these sort of things?

  “Narkover?” asked the Assistant Superintendent. “You mean like Beachcomber’s school in the Express? Captain Foulenough’s alma mater? The one that teaches card cheating, horse nobbling and bribery?”

  Hare nodded. “That’s what people call it.”

  Calderwell also read the Daily Express when he could get hold of one but he had always found Beachcomber’s column very funny. “Does this Narkover have a proper name?” he asked.

  “I think they call themselves Special Operations Executive. Something like that.”

  “Part of the Department of Dirty Tricks I suppose,” said the Assistant Superintendent, a fan of the Beachcomber style in both fact and fiction.

  “Do they do much with explosives?” asked Calderwell who was trying to put it out of his mind that Mitzi spoke too often and too well about this young man.

  “Think so,” said Hare, conscious that he had probably already said too much. Narkover was very Cairo Cavalry insider. He had been showing off. But do much with explosives? My God! On his last visit there had been a bang like Armageddon followed by some angry bell ringing from a nearby monastery. “Bloody Carmelites, always complaining. We’re the target of hostile prayers, m’boy,” Narkover’s real headmaster - a full colonel who was rumoured to have royal connections - had confided. “Got some new stuff to play with and it’s noisy even in small helpings. Tried telling the Abbot there’s a war on but he doesn’t seem to think it’s anything to do with them.”

  Hare would have loved to tell them the hostile prayers story but the last thing he wanted to do was jeopardise his liaison work with the Narkover crowd; it made him feel as if he was on the sharp end of things. So he contented himself, “I know the neighbours are always complaining about the noise they make.”

  Neither of them looked all that impressed. Then the Assistant Superintendent sighed and said, “Well, why not? Take it. Another opinion won’t hurt.”

  Outside, the noon Angelus from Notre Dame reminded Hare of Narkover and its noisy new stuff again. Calderwell screwed up his eyes against the sun. Hare donned a neat pair of Italian made dark glasses with round frames he had picked up at Sarafand where there was considerable trade in looted enemy kit.

  A gang of Arab prisoners under lackadaisical guard were busy filling in sandbags so that the Russian Compound could feel part of Palestine’s new war footing. Calderwell picked an empty one up, placed the fragment of smallpack in it. Hare took it off him in the car park and threw it onto the back seat of his Bentley.

  “No justice,” thought Calderwell. Mitzi had never told him exactly how she had been delivered from exile in Egypt. “We’d like that back,” he said, pointing to the sack. You never knew. It might be evidence. Same as Muna’s knickers.

  “Righty ho,” said Hare. As he pulled away he gave him something that was half way between a wave and a salute.

  ***

  Next day, in the late afternoon, the Assistant Superintendent received a telephone call from a Major Black who said he worked for something called Forward Research and Analysis.

  “I think you’ve come to the wrong place,” snapped the policeman. He had been hoping it was the electrician. His propeller ceiling fan had broken down again. The air in his office felt as though it could be shovelled out of the window and he could hardly keep awake. A call like this shouldn’t have got past the switchboard. He was in no mood for wrong numbers.

  “Didn’t you send something up to us to have look at?” insisted Major Black.

  “I did?”

  “You and er, Inspector Calderwell. Sent something up with Captain Hare. Bit of smallpack I believe.”

  For a moment the fog in his head parted. “Ah, Narkover,” he said.

  This was greeted by what the Assistant Superintendent could only suppose was a pained silence. “You still there?” he found himself whispering.

  “Tomorrow afternoon, four o’ clock be all right for you?” said his caller. “In your office. Perhaps Inspector Calderwell could be there. I’ll bring Hare along.”

  Black turned out to be another Royal Engineer or at least that was the insignia he wore. He was a good twenty-five years younger than the Colonel they had seen, had a black patch over his left eye and was dressed head-to-toe in the suede and cords of the Desert Elite including a red neckerchief. Hare looked in awe of him though he was not all that much older than himself.

  The Assistant Superintendent had arranged for them to talk around the same long table in the same conference room where they had learned about the provenance of Muna’s knickers. A sentry had been posted outside the door.

  “Perhaps I’d better start at the beginning,” said Black. “About forty years ago, some time before the beginning of the last war, German scientists isolated two highly explosive mixtures. One is called Collinet and the other Pentaerythritol tetra nitrate. Don’t ask me how to spell them.”

  Calderwell thought, you know how to spell them all right.

  “They made a very nice bang but were considered inherently unstable, useless for military purposes. And that’s the way it stayed. But, as we all know, war has a way of speeding things up. A boffin doing some research work for Woolwich Arsenal had an idea. There is a fatty substance called Lecithin that is sometimes used in the manufacture of candles and cosmetics. This genius wondered what would happen if you mixed Collinet or some of the other stuff I mentioned with it. This is what happens.”

  Black fished into a patch pocket and slapped a book sized package in greaseproof paper onto the table which he unwrapped to reveal a soft beige block of something that might have been modelling clay.

  “We call it PE,” he said. “It stands for Plastic Explosive. Pound for pound it gives you the best bang on the market. It is far more powerful than the amatol filling you get in a high explosive shell. You can do as much damage with a cocoa tin’s worth of this stuff as you can with a dozen sticks of dynamite. Much more important, if you’re in a certain line of work, it can be shaped to look like something you wouldn’t mind taking home with you.”

  He pushed the block across the table towards Calderwell. “Go on, feel it, be my guest. It’s very safe. It won’t go off without a detonator.”

  Calderwell picked it up and gently squeezed it. He thought it felt like the plasticine children use and there was this faint smell of almonds. He remembered the Assistant Superintendent’s “marzipan flambé” when he sniffed the fragment of smallpack. Marzipan was made from almonds.

  “Have you brought that bit of smallpack back?” he asked.

  Hare looked embarrassed.

  “We’re doing some tests on it,” said Black. “We may have to send it to England.”

  “To England? That could end up as Crown evidence.”

  Calderwell tried to deliver this in a joshing tone. After all, they had a lot to thank Black for and he didn’t want to sound peevish. All the same, it was irritating. His lot weren’t above the law. Shouldn’t be anyway. Not here in Palestine. And he had stressed that they wanted it back. He glared at Hare.

  “I suppose it’s all right to smoke around this stuff,” inquired the Assistant Superintendent who was laying down his normal smokescreen.

  “Certainly,” said Black. “Be my guest. You can set fire
to it and use it to boil a kettle if you like. As I said, it won’t go off without a detonator.”

  “But why to England?” persisted Calderwell. “What are these tests?”

  “We want to know whether your sample is some of our own PE or whether the Germans have learned how to make it as well. Some of ours has gone astray.”

  “Gone astray? In Palestine?” Calderwell was thinking: my next question should be why didn’t you report it? But he knew why. It was a secret.

  “No, not here, nearby.” said Black.

  “Near enough for it to get back here easily?”

  “Greece,” said Black. “We think a drop to some friendlies there might have fallen into the wrong hands.”

  “How much?”

  “We’re not certain. A few pounds.”

  “A few pounds?” said the Assistant Superintendent. He picked up the sample Black had brought with him. “What’s this? Half a pound’s worth? How much damage could it do?”

  Black pursed his lips. It was difficult to tell whether he didn’t know or wanted to spare them the pain.

  “Could it destroy a car?” persisted the Assistant Superintendent.

  “Look,” said Black. “This stuff is a saboteur’s dream.”

  “And a policeman’s bloody nightmare,” said Calderwell.

  14 - Some Recent Templer History

  In those days this particular cemetery was well out of town. It lay just beyond the northern bounds of Haifa in marshy flat land near the coastline the city would later consume in its post-war boom. To get to it you took the road for Acre where the British jailed and flogged and hanged. Lang didn’t want him to go but the Templer said there were things he needed to see there though he didn’t elaborate. He made it plain that he intended to go alone.

  It was the fifth day after their attempt to assassinate MacMichael and shortly before they would return to Jerusalem to try again. In the late afternoon the Templer left the apartment Lang’s people had provided that happened to be quite close to the Narkover School on Mount Carmel and walked down the switchback road to the city centre. There he picked up an Arab taxi, a bullet-holed black Citroen with running boards the Australians had looted from Vichy Lebanon and sold off. Behind the wheel was a cross wearing Christian whom he spoke to in the kind of kitchen Arabic mixed in with bits of English used by Jews and British troops alike. It pained him to mangle the third language of his childhood like this but he didn’t want to display a memorable fluency.