Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  But Hare was determined to look on the bright side. “One thing in our favour,” he said. “They’re using a very simple code. I’ve got some of my German speakers working on it now.”

  “Yes, it’ll be interesting to know what they’re saying,” said the Assistant Super evenly. “Even more interesting to know where they’re saying it from. I suppose we’ll just have to hope they feel talkative again before your wireless wizards have to go to the war.”

  “Well thanks to Inspector Calderwell, we do have their signals plan,” said Hare, who thought a little flattery wouldn’t hurt. “They were sending on that Athens quartermaster’s net `I told you about.”

  He waved one of the red inked intercept forms on the back of which he had scrawled in pencil the numbers Calderwell had discovered on the inside of the cigarette paper. “And we still can’t raise anything at all on the one with the letter H in front. We suspect it may be some sort of emergency frequency. Anyway, they’re all monitored.”

  “Well, you’ve been lucky once. Let’s hope you’re lucky again,” said the Assistant Super. He was anxious to have ten minutes alone with his coffee and the Palestine Post in which the main story, that cloudless blue August morning, again had Rommel unable to break through Auchinleck’s defences which had launched counter-attacks. There were even pictures of Axis prisoners and not all of them were Italians.

  “I’m trying to trace a South African major called De Wet,” Calderwell said just before Hare left. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever come across him?”

  “Should I have done?”

  “No, but don’t you use a Jewish journalist called Maeltzer sometimes?”

  “Yes, he’s one of our German speakers. He was with us in Cairo.”

  “Well, he seems to know this De Wet. I saw them together in the Europa café.” Calderwell decided not to go into details though it did cross his mind that Mitzi might have said something.

  Hare shrugged. “If you want to talk to Maeltzer he’s back down at Sarafand.”

  “Ah, that explains it. I tried to call him in Haifa a couple of times and got a woman whose Hebrew didn’t sound much better than mine.”

  “Probably his wife,” said Hare. “She’s a Ladino speaker from Salonika. I think her son, Maeltzer’s stepson, speaks good English. He’s a schoolteacher. Do you want me to arrange for Maeltzer to call you?”

  “It might be useful if he did.”

  Back in his own room Calderwell lit up a Players, pushed his chair back, put his left boot on the corner of his desk and blew smoke towards the place where a corner of large wall map of Mandate Palestine ended and a large spider’s web began. Had the cleaner fallen in love with it?

  He’d be willing to bet it was the same sort of slackness that had ruined Hare’s interception. He had given them the right waveband on a plate and then the bloody generator goes down. Why? Bad maintenance? Some idle bugger failed to keep the dust out? He should be spending the next three months doubling around a parade ground in the noonday sun with his pack full of house bricks. But he doubted anything like it would happen. Not in this army. He’d be writing to the Daily Mirror.

  And the De Wet business was equally infuriating. He had drawn a blank at all the convalescence centres in Palestine. In Cairo the South Africans were still unable to confirm whether they had an officer of that name alive and out of captivity but Calderwell was pretty sure he was a bad ‘un. Either a deserter working with Jewish criminals or a Jewish terrorist masquerading as a South African officer. And if that was the case how on earth had they got hold of this special explosive, this plastic stuff, if the only batch that had gone missing had been lost in enemy occupied territory? Didn’t make sense. Obviously the Narkover crowd must have lost some more of it locally and were too embarrassed to admit it. It certainly wouldn’t surprise him. From what he’d seen of these Funnies, as he was learning to call them, they were too clever by half and as truthful as it suited them to be.

  Calderwell decided he had better make a note to get someone to ask them - perhaps his Super would do it - if they had had mislaid any more of the stuff. Even they might draw the line at a barefaced lie. He picked up a pencil and looked for something to write on. The first thing his eye fell on was the intercept form young Hare had scrawled the frequencies on the back of. Then he remembered his notebook and extracted it from behind his warrant card in the left hand pocket of his bush shirt. On the page across from the one he had used to jot down the number Malley had given him for Maeltzer he wrote: “Narkover. PE. More lost? Must be.”

  Calderwell closed his notebook, dashed the last life out of his cigarette and sighed. Another attempt to murder MacMichael; parachutes on the Hattin. Talk about it never rains but it pours. You’d think by the law of averages they would only have one serious investigation on at a time.

  And they had got nowhere with the parachutes either. Bloody brick wall. They weren’t even getting the usual bad tips from Arab informers hoping to make a few bob or land some blood enemy in the shit. A request by the Assistant Super to advise the public that the chief suspects for the boy’s murder were enemy parachutists, and offering a reward for any information which led to their capture, had been rejected on the grounds that it would excite the populace. In vain they had pleaded that the interrogation of the Forsters’ maid and her relatives had already started the rumour that Alleman Djinn were drifting above the Galilee on their silken umbrellas like dispersing dandelions in spring.

  Tidying his desk Calderwell again picked up the intercept form with the frequencies scribbled on the back and noticed the one that had aitch before it. Aitch as in Harry or Hare. Aitch as in Haifa. Haifa as in telephone number. That was it. Five digits. It was a telephone number. Furthermore, there was something familiar about it. He put the paper down and flicked through his notebook until he got to the page where he had written Maeltzer’s number. It was the same one. Impossible. Couldn’t be. They must have given Maeltzer some sort of security clearance before he started working for Hare’s lot. But hadn’t Hare said there was a stepson? They had a good mob in CID in Haifa. There was a Jewish detective-sergeant up there, sharp lad. Calderwell reached for his telephone.

  ***

  He was a Mummy’s boy and easy to work on. They had hardly had to hit him at all. Just shake him about a little and threaten to send him up to Acre and let the Arab lifers there get to work on his arse.

  “I can’t believe you’re saying that,” Haratvi had said through his tears, full of self loathing. He had always known in his heart of heart that he wasn’t a tough guy but he had thought he might have done better than this. “I can’t believe any Jew would threaten another with something like that.” Really he was glad of it. Surely not even Lang would expect him to remain silent threatened with that?

  “David, I’m trying to stop them doing it.” He was alone with the detective sergeant Calderwell had remembered, sitting opposite him across a desk. He was whispering to him as if they were part of the same conspiracy.

  “I don’t want the English to send you there. I know what it’s like. I’m trying to help you. But I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself can I? I can’t help you if you won’t tell me the truth. Don’t you trust me? You have to trust me. Now tell me, has Josef Lang reappeared from the dead?”

  The sergeant and two uniformed constables had picked him up at an outdoor café where the schoolteacher was talking to an adoring gaggle of his senior pupils and waving his arms about a lot. As Haratvi spotted the approach of his Nemesis he had begun to wind down like a clockwork toy. Even before they got him to his feet the Jewish sergeant noted how fear had drained the blood from his face and knew there was no mistake.

  By the time they were ready to let him try and sleep the sergeant was confident that they had everything Haratvi knew which was not all that much though he thought he would let Walter Calderwell be the judge of that. Haratvi spent an uncomfortable night in the basement lock up where the mosquitoes had learned to live with the cold. Cal
derwell eventually got his Austin up to Haifa shortly after midday, much of the journey spent eating dust as he threaded his way in and out of military convoys. By then Haratvi could hardly wait to lead them in person to the now empty apartment above Haifa Bay where he had met “this mad Pole with a pistol”.

  Calderwell and the others went in with the landlord, a Rumanian Jew who lived in the top flat. As soon as he entered the living room the Rumanian almost instantly became indignant about the marks Lang had left in the ceiling plaster with the insulating clips for his aerial. Calderwell guessed exactly what they had been for because he recalled Hare’s briefing on indoor antenna but he didn’t say anything to the others. Instead, he watched Haratvi closely and decided that either he was a very good actor or he didn’t know what the marks signified any more than the Rumanian.

  Nor had he told the Detective-Sergeant, when he called him from Jerusalem, of numbers written on the inside of cigarette papers or parachutists in the Galilee. It was not something he wanted to go into, especially with a Jewish policeman however much he was trusted. Things changed. People were under tremendous pressure. He had simply asked him, almost holding his breath as he did so, if anything was known about Carl Maeltzer or David Haratvi? Maeltzer was as clean as a whistle.

  Only when Calderwell was told of the friendship Maeltzer’s stepson had with one Josef Lang, missing schoolteacher, former Wingate night squadder and Acre jailbird, did he realise that this was much better than anything he had dared hope for. It was then that it had come to Calderwell in a great blinding flash that the reason they had not had a single tip off from any of their Arab informants about the business on the Hattin was that it had nothing to do with Arabs apart from the dead goatherd who had simply stumbled into it, poor boy. All the way up to Haifa on that long and tedious drive he had been nagged by the extraordinary thought that the brief description the sergeant had given of Lang - “tall, stringy type, tougher than he looks” - might well match De Wet’s companion at Sarafand when he and the High Commissioner had almost been killed by the plastic explosive.

  ***

  “When I asked Haratvi what this mad Pole with the gun looked like he described De Wet to me to a tee,” Calderwell told the Assistant Super when he was back in Jerusalem.

  Later that afternoon they had a meeting with Hare. “Oh no,” he groaned. “A telephone number. So bloody obvious. Why didn’t I think of it?”

  “Good job one of us did,” said the Assistant Super with a nod towards Calderwell who tried to hide his delight at Hare’s discomfiture by lighting a cigarette.

  “Unbelievable,” Hare said. “Jews and Nazis.”

  “Not really. There are precedents. My enemy’s enemy and all that,” said the Assistant Super. “Desperate times, desperate measures. And in the heart of every true Zionist there’s always that splinter of ice, which welcomes a pogrom somewhere. What’s curious is that just after Hitler came to power, the right wing Zionists, the Jabotinskyites, assassinated a man like Chaim Arlosoroff for suggesting a deal for a common interest in a Zionist state. It seems there’s been a change of heart.”

  “So De Wet is a German agent and this one” - Hare picked up a police photograph of Lang - “is a Palestinian Jew who used to fight for us when Wingate was here.”

  “I don’t know about fight for us,” said Calderwell. “They fought for themselves.”

  “Wingate liked to believe British and Zionist interests coincided but some of us weren’t so sure,” said the Assistant Super. “Not by a long chalk. He was a bloody menace. More Zionist than the Zionists and the same with Lorna, that crazy Jewish wife of his. His gunmen used to go out at night killing Arabs, some of them might even have been rebels, and then pile their bodies outside a police post. You can imagine how well that went down with our Arab constables. He was thrown out in the end with a note in his passport saying this officer must never be allowed to re-enter the Mandate.”

  “He got his first DSO though,” said Calderwell who had known Wingate well enough to understand where the facts ended and the myths began. Lorna Wingate, for instance, was no more Jewish than her husband.

  “Yes, he did. Bloody disgrace,” said the Assistant Super and Calderwell let it ride. He had been here before. The attitude of senior Palestine policemen towards Wingate was entirely reciprocated by the man himself; it was pointless getting caught in the crossfire.

  Hare was rather shocked at the Assistant Super’s outburst. “Didn’t he get another DSO for what he did in Abyssinia?” he asked.

  Like most civilians in uniform he had never heard of Orde Wingate until the previous year when all the British newspapers had carried photographs of this bearded, patrician figure in his Victorian sun helmet surrounded by the fuzzy-haired guerrillas he had led against the Italians to restore Haile Selassie to his throne.

  “Yes, he did,” conceded the Assistant Super. “But here he was a bloody menace. After he left Palestine these so called Special Night Squads he started - all of them Haganah by the way - were supposed to have disbanded but most of them wouldn’t accept it and insisted on parading about the place with rifles they should have handed in. Wingate had utterly spoilt them. Some ended up in Acre jail, Lang among ‘em. Then last year they were all pardoned but not all of them were willing to let bygones be bygones.”

  Hare had only ever seen the outside of the Acre fortress but he felt for these Jews, ditched once their services were no longer required and wondered how forgiving he would have felt. “So are we going to see Lang’s face on some wanted posters?” he asked.

  “No, we’ve decided it would not be a good idea,” said Calderwell which was true but only just. It had taken Calderwell and the Assistant Super the best part of the morning to persuade the Inspector General’s office not to do just that.

  “If we put some posters up it would alert them,” explained the Assistant Super. “It would tip ‘em off, show ‘em that we’re onto them. Once that happened they’d go to ground faster than you can say fox. We’ve put out a general alert asking foot patrols to check the identities of any South African officers they come across up to Colonel and if any of them are calling themselves De Wet to hold them for further questioning. The Military Police are being asked to do the same.”

  “But what about this chap in Haifa - Haratvi? Won’t they guess something is up when they learn we’ve picked him up?”

  “He’s been picked up before and we’ve let him go before,” said Calderwell. “This time he’s been released into the custody of his stepfather.”

  “Maeltzer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah that explains it,” said Hare. “Just before I came up here he told me he had to go home on urgent family business. I arranged a travel warrant for him so at least he won’t have to pay his own rail fare. He couldn’t tell me how long he would be gone.”

  “I think the answer to that is as long as it takes,” said Calderwell blowing smoke through pursed lips. “Haratvi thinks we lifted him because we had a tip off that Lang was back and involved with illegal immigrants. We’ve told him if any of Lang’s people contact him he’s to get in touch with us through his stepfather.”

  “Do you think Haratvi will play ball?”

  “Yes,” said Calderwell. “He’s a frightened young man, way out of his depth and I think he may be almost as frightened of his stepfather as he is of us.”

  “I wouldn’t blame him,” said Hare. “He’s not an easy man. But what happens now?”

  “We wait,” said Calderwell. “The High Commissioner has got extra bodyguards and he’s promised to cut down on outside appointments. Now all we can do is bide our time and hope De Wet bumps into us. Either that or he gets on his wireless again and all your generators are up and running this time.”

  As Hare walked out of the Russian Compound he told himself that he was not really hoping that Calderwell would fall flat on his face somewhere and De Wet would get clean away. After all, they were on the same side weren’t they? Thank God they had not aske
d him if they had deciphered the “simple code” he had told them about. Südfeld and Maeltzer - who strictly against regulations he had allowed to take the message home with him to work on - had yet to crack a single word.

  Without telling his best German speakers, he had slipped a copy to Narkover’s code breakers and they hadn’t come up with anything either. And yet everyone agreed it looked like a simple Playfair code. It was all very disappointing. Meanwhile, he had given Mitzi a three day leave for the wonderful job she had done on that intercept, despite the disadvantage of starting it covering two wavebands while her companion was collecting her tea. He supposed he should stop them doing that but the chances of the intercept coming up then must have been a million to one. She was spending her leave in Jerusalem with her mother. Or so she said.

  18 - On The Beach

  “We’re late and it’s all my fault, “ said Mitzi. “I can hear it now, Maafish hassaki el yum. I think he likes to run out of canoes, especially if you’re with a Jewish girl. What you bet me?”

  “It’s mid week and there’s a war on,” said Calderwell. “There’ll be enough canoes and I don’t suppose he minds who his paying customers are. And you’re with me.”

  Calderwell’s tone was reproving, an Englishman among warring Semites. He had got a day off and enough petrol to drive the Austin 6 Tourer down to the Police Beach Club a few miles south of Jaffa. They were both in uniform though since they had the hood down neither of them were wearing their service caps. Mitzi’s was lying beneath the wide brimmed straw beach hat on her lap and behind her white framed sunglasses her eyes were closed.

  They had spent the night at Calderwell’s place and before they set off downhill from Jerusalem to the coast they had called at her mother’s apartment so she could collect her beach things. Mrs Fendelbaum, who chose to put all of Mitzi’s unslept beds down to the secret nature of her war work, was a clever and opinionated woman who enjoyed practising her English on Calderwell and preferred not to waste it on small talk.