Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Which reminded Jessica that she had not put her sister’s letter away. As she dropped it into her handbag she thought Maurice would probably be amused to hear about Davina’s HUFOM. Bob had always thought it hilarious. That evening, he had promised to take her to the Villa Bernstein, a bar with a pool at Rishon LeZion just south of Tel Aviv that offered “moonlight bathing to a jazz band”. She was looking forward to showing him where the censor had run his nasty blue pencil through Davina’s letter too. As if what she was up to with her Canadian friends could be of the slightest consequence. Wasn’t freedom of speech something they were supposed to be fighting for? Absolutely outrageous, that’s what it was.

  16 - Some Inquiries

  “Major De Wet? “ said the elderly sounding captain in charge of pay and records at South African headquarters in Cairo.

  They had a good connection but the captain insisted on spelling the letters out phonetically. Calderwell had not realised that it was two words and the second one began with Double Yoo for William and not Vee for Victor but as soon as he heard it he realised that of course it was like that. “Hold the line,” said the captain. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  While he was waiting Calderwell took in the main headline on the Post’s front page and saw that another line was being held: BRITISH LINE HOLDS FIRM. ALL AXIS ATTACKS THROWN BACK.

  He wondered if this was true. Could Rommel be running out of steam? The other war news was mixed. In the Crimea it looked like the Wehrmacht was about to break through at Sevastopol. In the Pacific the American and Japanese navies were fighting a big battle. The inquest on Tobruk was over. South African troops had defended the place “to the last”, according to Field Marshal Smuts, lying bastard. Only on the home front was the British Army ignominiously defeated. They had lost to the RAF at Lords by seven wickets.

  “There’s only one De Wet I can put my finger on,” the captain was saying, “and he’s been listed missing believed killed since May last year. As far as I can see the only people we have in Palestine are wounded, either in hospital or convalescents.”

  “Many?”

  “Perhaps a couple of hundred, no more. We’re still waiting for some recent casualty returns to come in.”

  “I understand,” said Calderwell.

  They both knew that he might be waiting a long time before the Red Cross confirmed that “missing” meant prisoner. They had all gone into the bag, every man jack of them, and would probably spend the rest of their war spaghetti bashing in some Itie campo. Neither of them actually mentioned Tobruk. Unnecessary.

  Calderwell asked him for the names of hospitals and convalescent centres where the South African wounded were. “Thought you’d ask me that,” he said and he rattled off a list.

  Calderwell was impressed though there was only one he had not already checked, a place at Caesarea on the coast.

  “May I ask what this is all about?”

  “We think we’ve got a deserter, real gangster, masquerading as a South African officer. Probably Australian.”

  “Hmm.”

  He got in touch with an old pal at the police post at Caesarea, good lad, Mancunian, no frills on him. He asked him if he would check out the nursing home there for a tall South African major called De Wet. He spelt out the name very carefully and for good measure added, “That’s pronounced Vet. V as in Victor.”

  “Or Wehrmacht,” said his friend who was full of surprises. He would go up there right away though he would have to tread carefully because the matron was known to be a right Tartar.

  “Our age, more ash than blond in his hair mind,” said Calderwell and went on to explain that the gent he was after had recently attended an infantry demonstration down at Sarafand. He might have read about it. It was the one where HE and his party, which included as it happened yours truly, had come within a whisker of being thinly spread over a large area.

  “Thought it was summat to do with a petrol tank going up?”

  “Something like that,” said Calderwell. “But if you find him be careful, he’s a tricky bastard.” Then, before he asked any other questions, he told him he had to go. The petrol tank story had come from high up. Public morale was delicate enough without putting it round that someone had come that close to dismantling the High Commissioner.

  Afterwards, Calderwell lit up a cigarette and wished, not for the first time, that he had been a bit more heavy handed during that fight at the Europa Café, asked to see everybody’s identity card, jotted down a few names and addresses. But he had been there to be with Mitzi not to start playing the Village Bobby at some brawl. He remembered how the South African had sidled out. One moment he had been there and then he was gone.

  It occurred to him that the fight would not be a bad place to start. Before it started the American newsmen and the English girl had all been sitting with him over drinks. He’d seen the Yank photographer, the one Mitzi had been fussing over, down at Sarafand the next day. Then there was the older one who had got touchy when George the rugby coach had mentioned the padding American football players wear. Well, the Yanks shouldn’t be hard to find. They were most likely to be at the King David - these so called war correspondents were all on expenses. All he had to do was think of their names which, unlike De Wet’s, he did not find easy to recall. He wondered if Mitzi would remember but decided that she had been much too busy playing nurse.

  ***

  “Nobody of that name with us sir,” said the young Arab behind the reception desk at the King David looking Calderwell up and down. The policeman was wearing his houndstooth sports jacket and flannels with a white shirt and the regimental tie of the Warwickshire Yeomanry. He had to wear a jacket to hide the Webley in its shoulder holster under his left armpit for he was supposed to go about armed at all times. Like most of the CID, especially recent entrants, he was reluctant to dispense with the branch’s privilege to wear civilian clothes whenever possible though the shirt sleeved summer order of the uniform branch was undeniably more comfortable. In his present costume few local citizens would fail to recognise him as a cop.

  At least he wasn’t being garrotted by a collar stud. Mitzi had converted him to collar attached shirts; he used to think them rather sloppy. There was something admirable about the winged collar and pinned tie that completed the receptionist’s outfit of dark morning jacket and light grey pinstripe trousers. Calderwell decided he was probably Greek Orthodox.

  “Are you sure?”

  “We have no Mister Pickles listed sir.”

  “He’s a reporter, a newspaperman. American,” said Calderwell, thoroughly irritated. Half the time they had people listed by their first names. Arabs, even Christians, sometimes found it difficult to get the hang of first and last names even at the King David. Bloody infuriating.

  “Ah, you mean Mister Pickett,” he said.

  “That’s the one,” said Calderwell, glad of the correction. “Is he in?”

  “Mister Pickett checked out yesterday sir,” beamed the receptionist.

  “Where did he go?” He started to wind up again, couldn’t help it.

  “I believe he went to Cairo sir.”

  “What about his friend?”

  “Friend sir?”

  “Yes, friend,” sighed Calderwell. Was he trained to provoke or did it just come naturally? “Another American gentleman. Dark haired. Medium height. Younger than Mister Pickett.”

  “Would that be me you’re referring to Your Honour?”

  Calderwell turned and there was Malley with the looted Leica hanging over his right shoulder on its short strap.

  “I guess we were never formally introduced,” said Malley, who was entirely sober and as pleasant as could be. “Patrick Malley, painter with light, at your service.” As he spoke he picked up a room key the desk clerk had plucked from a pigeonhole and pushed across the counter towards him.

  “Do you think we could have a word? Somewhere quiet?”

  “How about the bar?” said Malley. “Even dedicated members of
the drinking classes are not up yet, with the possible exception of myself of course.”

  Calderwell looked at his watch. It was not quite 11 a.m.

  Malley suggested whiskey sours with plenty of lemon and Calderwell went along with it though he always thought sours a bit of a woman’s drink. Mitzi drank them. The only other customer, cross-legged on a high bar stool, was an eyebrow less subaltern from a Honey tank regiment, singed rather than fried but even after six weeks’ convalescence still a raw sight with dead skin on his face and his mouth set in an immobile rictus smile.

  They took the drinks to a corner table near the closed grand piano. The main doors to the terrace were open and a large wooden propeller fan on the ceiling was making sure everyone got their share of warm air. Malley politely accepted one of Calderwell’s Players Navy Cut though he much preferred the toasted tobacco in his own Lucky Strike.

  “I suppose it’s about Mister Jujitsu or whatever he was using?” the photographer said once they had settled.

  “I’m not with you,” said Calderwell, blowing smoke down his nostrils.

  “That South African major who tried to tear my arm off at the Europa the other night.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “First of all, are you going to tell me that the bang that was off the programme at Sarafand the other day was really caused by a gas tank explosion?”

  “No.”

  “Good. If you had I would have suggested that we should talk about the weather or the new girl at Frieda’s, Lebanese I’m told.”

  “But what makes you think you think I want to talk to you about Major de Wet?”

  “Like you I noticed that the guy with De Wet, a captain I think, was carrying one of those small packs.” Calderwell nodded and sipped his drink. “Then after the explosion I saw you taking a very hard look at what looked like the remains of one of those bags and I don’t remember seeing De Wet or his pal around. In fact, before I went off to make a few pictures, do the close up stuff, I think I saw them walking away from the truck and the way I remember it neither of them was carrying the knapsack or whatever you want to call it.”

  Malley stubbed out his half smoked Players in one of the King David’s large ceramic ashtrays. So what if he hadn’t seen them walking away? No harm in gilding the lily a bit for the greater good. But when he tried to work out how well Calderwell was digesting his words he saw that his gaze seemed to be fixed on the ashtray and it came to him that he had just committed one of those small acts of Yankee extravagance that so offended the Limeys.

  “Hmm. you’re an observant man Mister Malley,” said Calderwell who knew his reaction to the wasted cigarette had been noted. “I suppose you have to be. But we mustn’t jump to conclusions. All I’m trying to do is eliminate certain people from our inquiries.”

  “Sure,” said Malley. “Innocent till proven guilty? That’s what we say in America.”

  “That’s what we say in England too.”

  “No kiddin?”

  “Before the incident at the Europa that night I presume you and your colleague Mister Pickett were talking to Major de Wet. Did you learn anything of his background? What his duties are, where he might be found?”

  “Sorry, I can’t really help you there. I came on the scene later and by that time he had got enough booze inside him to start playing my lady friend too much attention.” About time somebody heard the right side of the story.

  “Bob Pickett and Carl Maeltzer, he’s his locally hired correspondent, were the ones who were talking to him. The way I understand it, and this I got from Bob afterwards, he told them he was convalescing after picking up jaundice in Alexandria where he was helping to run a transit camp. I believe Maeltzer was doing most of the talking. He knows South Africa well, rode with the Boers. It was his first war. Maeltzer live up in Haifa but he covers Palestine for Pickett when he’s not here and helps him out when he is. At least he used to. Lately he’s been working for one of your hush hush outfits in Cairo. He’s German speaking.”

  It came back to Calderwell then: he was the barrel-chested old boy Mitzi had introduced him to at the Europa before the fight started. The one who looked old enough to be his father.

  “Maybe you should speak to him,” said Malley extracting a leather covered pocket address book. “I’ve got a number for him. Got a pencil?”

  Calderwell also had a notebook, a small red one. Malley flicked his address book and located Maeltzer sandwiched between a Marie and a Mary, one in Cairo.

  “You were lucky to catch me,” said Malley as they left the bar. “I’m going to Cairo to catch up with Bob Pickett tomorrow. Then we’re heading for Alamein to see what’s slowing Rommel down.”

  “I think you’ll find it’s something called the Eighth Army,” said Calderwell. It was true. Auchinleck really did seem to be holding him. If he wasn’t the Post would be more ambiguous.

  “Must be doing something right,” agreed Malley. “Let’s hope it lasts.”

  “It has to,” said Calderwell with an emphasis that surprised the American. He was thinking of Mitzi and what would happen to her if the Germans got into Palestine. Not that he believed for one moment the stuff the Post had started carrying recently about the Nazis wiping out entire communities of Polish Jews. “Hogwash,” he had told her when she last raised it. “Propaganda. It’s the Jewish Agency and American Zionists making it up to try and get the immigration quota lifted. It won’t wash. Nobody is going to believe this shite. In my war they told us that the Hun had marched through Belgium bouncing babies off their bayonets.”

  But Calderwell did believe, though he hadn’t told Mitzi this, in the likely existence of Nazi labour camps surrounded by barbed wire, quite possibly commanded by sadists wearing high boots, where soft handed Jewish professionals were ritually humiliated with hard labour and where pretty girls were excused if they played their cards right. So even if the Afrika Korps broke through at El Alamein the British had to hold Palestine. They would have to fight like the reports in the newspapers pretended they always fought, “To the last bullet.” There could be no more coming out with white flags and their hands up. No more running away. At least he wasn’t going anywhere. He had promised Mitzi that. “I’m not going any further than the beach,” he had told her and she gave him the kind of hug she’d never given him before, not even in bed.

  17 - The Intercept

  Lang, shoulders hunched so not to knock his head, stood on a pair of step ladders with a small hammer in his hand and staples between his teeth for securing the aerial of his Siemens set around the old fashioned wooden picture rail. It ran just below the ceiling of the living room of th Bethlehem Road bungalow they had moved into and was as good a place as any to hide the aerial wire. While Lang tapped away the Templer sat in a cane armchair moving a pencil across a large notepad on which he had ruled a grid of the kind a crossword compiler might put down.

  A large woman of indeterminate years in a tent-like brown caftan and wearing, despite the heat, a black woolly hat shuffled in. The hat was a warning that she had a migraine, her equivalent of the flag run up by a plague stricken ship about to put into port. Over her right arm hung several khaki drill shirts. On her other, attached to her forearm by a loop of black elastic, she wore a pincushion and needles.

  “Shalom,” said the Templer but his greeting was ignored. Instead she hung the shirts one over the other on the back of an upright dining chair, revealing in the process that at least two of them bore red shoulder flashes with POLAND picked out in white cotton. While she was hanging the shirts the woman addressed Lang in a fast guttural Hebrew of which the Templer understood very little. One of the few words he caught was Yekke, the somewhat derogatory name that some Palestinian Jews had, in recent years, begun to use for their newly arrived German brethren with their stiff clothes and even stiffer manners.

  Without looking down, still tapping away with his hammer, Lang replied in the same petulant tones while the Templer, noting a nod in his direction, lis
tened in vain to a verbal avalanche of guttural displeasure. Hebrew always seemed to lend itself to arguments and he had been away from it for too long to pick up more than the odd word.

  “What was all that about?” he asked, closing the door behind her.

  “Well, first she was making what is probably the nearest she ever comes to an apology. She said she had stitched the Polish flashes onto two of our shirts but she hasn’t done the rest because she had run out of red cotton. So we’ve got the other shirts back with the flashes in the top pocket, plus a needle and some of the wrong coloured cotton in case we need to put them on in an emergency.”

  “Considerate of her.”

  “We are paying her,” said Lang who found her a poor ambassador for their cause and was relieved that the woman, a widow, had decided that during their stay in her bungalow, she would sleep at the nearby home of a married daughter. He wasn’t sure whether this was for the sake of her good name or fear of the police or both.

  “What about the Polish rank insignias to go on the epaulettes?”

  “She said she was still working on them.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to change costume in a hurry.”

  “That’s what I told her but she was too worried about what I was doing to her picture rail to listen. She kept reminding me that we hadn’t paid a deposit and she expected our organisation to pay for any damages to the place.”