Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  “I’ll try and pull rank,” said De Wet. “Even passed over South African majors have their uses. What do they usually have there? Police or army?”

  “It might be mixed but I think it’s usually police.”

  “Good. They have more respect for us colonials.”

  She gave his hand a squeeze. Then she gave him a quick kiss.

  “I wish we could tell that roadblock why I have to get to work.”

  “Well, they must know there’s a flap on. They know that Rommel is a lot closer to Tel Aviv than he was a month ago.”

  “Oh it’s much more than that.”

  “Really,” he said, staring out of the window at the rocky terrain still just visible in the gloaming. He had learned that Jessica responded better to silence than direct questioning when she tended to tease. For thirty seconds or so she said nothing and De Wet began to think that this time it wasn’t going to work. Then, just as the driver slowed again with a great grinding of the gears and more curses, she raised herself slightly and whispered into his ear. He could feel her breath.

  “Say again,” he said.

  She did.

  “Do you know who?”

  “Definitely Smuts,” she said. “We’re not quite who’s coming with him. Some people think it could even be Churchill but he’s only just been to America and it seems a bit soon to do another trip. Smuts is coming up to Cairo from Cape Town and there’s a chance he might come to Jerusalem circumstances permitting. We’re having to get everything ready just in case. Facts, figures. Haven’t you heard anything? He’s your prime minister.”

  “I’ll complain to my superiors. Smuts is practically family and nobody had the decency to tell me. He once helped an important relative of mine fight a war against the British.”

  “Against the British?”

  “You remember the Boers?”

  “A bit before my time.”

  “I forgot, you’re a child. Do you know when he’s coming?”

  “Any day I think.”

  “Well, the sooner the better. With any luck I might be able to wangle a trip to Beirut on the tenth. I was hoping I might be able to take you up there for a couple of nights. Should be able to arrange the paperwork.”

  “That would be nice,” said Jessica, giving his arm a squeeze.

  “Will it be over by then?” His eyes were on the twilight again.

  “Oh I think so,” she said. “We’ve been told they could be in Cairo tomorrow.”

  ***

  Mitzi normally found Agatha Christie unputdownable. But several times during the last few minutes she had found her mind wandering off the book as she recalled what Calderwell had told her about a German agent working with Jews. It was unbelievable. She wished she could tell her mother.

  Even so, she might have been able to pay Hercule Poirot’s deductive genius more attention if beach fatigue wasn’t rapidly setting in. It was almost six o’clock yet even under her straw hat and umbrella there was still a lot of heat in the late July sun. Furthermore, the sand flies were becoming unbearable. One seemed fixated by the contents of her nostrils and the follow through of a back hand swipe had almost knocked her sun glasses off. As she readjusted them, Mitzi felt a tiny tear of sweat start in the thinned foliage of an eyebrow then begin its remorseless journey into the corner of an eye. She stood up, removed the sunglasses and dabbed at it with the back of her hand. Another swim to cool off and she would tell Walter she was ready to go.

  Mitzi walked towards the sea. Calderwell was nowhere in sight. Then she spotted a head that might be his bobbing about in the breakers, much too far out for a weak swimmer. No doubt he was trying to impress. Mitzi began to beckon him back to the beach with fast, urgent hand signals but if it was him he didn’t seem to be paying much attention. Then she became aware of some movement besides her, turned and saw the old man who rented the canoes and a small boy in a white jellabiyya running barefoot towards the surf at each end of one of the hassaki boards. The old man, who had a double-bladed paddle in his free hand, shouted something to her as he went by but Mitzi didn’t catch what it was. She watched them wade into the surf, the old man hitching up his dusty grey jellabiyya as he got astride the board and the boy pushed him off. She could see the silver in the spray falling off the blades of his paddles as he dug furiously into the breakers, his broad back turning with the board, his keffiyeh headdress, miraculously in place, trailing in the wind.

  ***

  “God, I’ve never been this late,” said Jessica as their taxi inched its way forward, part of the traffic jam before the Jerusalem checkpoint. She had been killing time rearranging her clothes, brushing her hair, and, as a last resort, applying lipstick - always risky in poor visibility. It was almost dark and there were at least a dozen vehicles ahead of them. Military and Palestine Police with dimmed torches were telling the drivers to put their bloody headlights off. Didn’t they know there was a war on? Hadn’t they heard of the blackout? Ever since the start of hostilities it had been sporadically enforced in Jerusalem where, unlike Haifa and Tel Aviv, not a single aerial bomb had fallen, not this war anyway.

  “I’ll try having a word,” said De Wet. He got out of the car and, setting his cap square, walked purposefully along the line of traffic towards the pole resting on a brace of forty gallon oil drums which blocked their lane. Behind it he could just about make out the bulk of an armoured car, one of the locally built ones the police used. In the gloom dancing red dots from the crew’s cigarettes indicated they had dismounted.

  De Wet headed towards them. Before he got there he almost walked into a red capped military police sergeant, his white stripes clearly visible on his arm, who was talking to a Palestinian policeman whose rank he could not make out in the failing light. “Sorry to bother you gentlemen,” he said. “But I’ve got a bit of a problem. There’s a young lady in a taxi back there who does important work at the Secretariat and should have been starting night duty about ten minutes ago. I’m quite happy to wait with the taxi. But is there any chance you could let her through. She’s got her Secretariat pass with her as well as an identity card. I dare say she could pick up another taxi somewhere near the Jaffa Gate if not before.”

  “If you’d like to go and pay off your taxi sir and bring her along you can both go through,” said the military policeman who was a sucker for officers who asked nicely.

  De Wet escorted Jessica, who was clip clopping along in her high heels, back towards the checkpoint. Hanging by its straps in his right hand was an army small pack containing their towels and damp swimming costumes.

  The military police sergeant was waiting for them. De Wet handed over Jessica’s rather grand Secretariat pass that included her photograph and was signed by Sir Harold himself. On top of it he placed his own rather more modest affair issued in Pretoria by the Union of South Africa which did not have a photograph but simply gave his name and rank, his height (six feet, two inches), the colour of his eyes (blue grey), the colour of his hair (fair), his build (tall), and special peculiarities, (nil).

  The sergeant produced a pencil torch from the hip pocket of his shorts, briefly examined the documents, pausing to place one under the other as he did so. When he got to Jessica’s Secretariat pass he briefly lit up her face, then her pass, then her face again. “They haven’t done you justice here have they miss?” he said though the card clearly declared Jessica to be a missus. He was about to give the documents back when the Palestine policeman, who was Jewish, joined him and, out of politeness perhaps, the redcap passed them to him and played his torch on them while the policeman squinted myopically at the small print while trying to locate his reading spectacles in the top pocket of his drill shirt.

  “Major Dewer?” he said when he got to the South African identity card.

  “No, De Wet,” said the sergeant, pronouncing the W as in whisky.

  “De Vet,” corrected De Wet gently. He was holding the small pack loosely in his right hand, towering over everybody.

 
“South African are you?” inquired the policeman, who allowed his spectacles to remain in his breast pocket and dropped his hand towards his belt.

  “That’s right,” said De Wet.

  “Would you mind stepping this way sir,” said the policeman and there was a faint click as he thumbed the hammer back on the Webley .38 he was drawing from an open holster.

  The tall man did not step his way. Instead, he flung the small pack at the policeman’s head and ran off into the night. As he ran his service cap fell off but he did not pause to retrieve it. He ran past the armoured car where the uncomprehending cigarette ends still danced their chatty patterns and proceeded with great loping strides towards the Jaffa Gate and the rabbit warren of lanes and passageways that is Jerusalem’s Old City. There was a shot followed by a scream. Jessica? He heard somebody shout, “Drop him!” There was more shooting, two shots close together and then a third.

  ***

  By the time his rescuer had got his paddle to him Calderwell had swallowed a lot of water and scarcely had the strength to hang on. Once he was pulled, coughing and spluttering alongside the board, going down once more in the process, the Arab did not try to get him onto it. Instead, he got him to rest his head on the back, hang onto the sides and kick while he paddled them both through the surf, his strokes slow and deliberate now, an old man conserving his energy. Twice on the way back Calderwell was swamped by waves and stayed under water to the point where he felt he would have to let go of the hassaki and surface or drown. The third time, despairing, he did let go only to feel the first slap of the sand beneath his milling feet.

  Mitzi and the boy helped him out. “Thanks. Bit rough out there now,” Calderwell gasped, furious at himself. The effort to speak brought on a coughing fit in which he parted with some of the less digestible bits of the Mediterranean. But humiliation was soon mitigated by Mitzi’s obvious concern.

  “What on earth were you doing?” she demanded, rubbing him down with a towel. “Going to Cyprus? It’s just as hot there.”

  “Undertow,” croaked Calderwell. “Couldn’t get back through the surf.”

  At one point he put a heavy arm around her bare shoulders and almost instantly withdrew it because he had not yet thanked his rescuer properly and he remembered that Mitzi’s costume was as provocative as all the houris by his standards.

  ***

  Lang heard the front door latch go, glanced at his watch, and turned back to Jabotinsky’s autobiography. The great exponent of the armed Jew was explaining his attachment to Zionism to his own assimilated Jewish elite in Odessa.

  ...I have no doubt that I am a Zionist because the Jewish people is a very nasty people, and its neighbours hate it and they are right; its end in the Diaspora will be a general Bartholomew Night, and the only rescue is general immigration to Palestine.

  In the sixteenth century the French had celebrated Saint Bartholomew by massacring their Protestant minority. Well, if the Polish reports were true now the Germans were starting a Bartholomew’s Night with the Jews. And there would be no general immigration to Palestine because there was a war on and, in any case, the British had closed the gates.

  Yet now there were men he respected who were no longer convinced by the argument that the only way to redeem Zion was to ally themselves with their enemy’s foe. He had just had a very bad afternoon with some of them. Things had changed so much since he went away. Stern was dead and others under arrest. Some had pointed out how embarrassing it might be for them if Rommel didn’t break through. How vital it was not to lose support in America.

  As they were speaking he had looked closely at the set faces of these Slavic Jews, for most of them like his own parents had been born in Poland or Russia. But they lacked his father’s cultivated, gentle face. The genesis of their cruel features had, he felt, been hammered on the anvil of centuries of persecution. These were men who would stop at nothing to accomplish what they believed to be right, who made even his own commitment seem almost frivolous. It was not that words like “expendable” and “eliminate” came easily to their lips but once pronounced were rarely retracted.

  “You’re a cool one, “ said the Templer who had drifted into the room like a cat. “Or didn’t you hear the door?”

  “The police would have broken it down,” said Lang.

  “They may yet.”

  Reluctantly he closed his book and looked up at him for the first time.

  He was wearing an Australian slouch hat with the brim turned up at one side and Lang saw that his shirt had large and fresh looking sweat stains under the arms though the night was beginning to cool down.

  “I see you’ve deserted South Africa,” Lang said, hoping that there was going to be an amusing explanation for the new headgear, sensing there was not.

  The Templer told him what had happened at the roadblock. “I’m a lucky man. Only the black out and police marksmanship saved me. I think Major De Wet better be laid to rest,” he said, dropping the Digger hat on the floor and pulling his shirt over his head. “He’s far too popular. Known to every policeman in the land. Time to change costume. At least you make a better Pole than you do a South African.”

  Lang chose to ignore this. Instead he asked, “Is there any chance you were followed here?”

  The German tossed the sodden shirt into an empty armchair and gave his former star pupil a withering look. “Would I be here if there was the smallest chance of that?” Lang was thinking he had never really noticed before how few hairs some of these Northern Europeans had on their chests.

  “No. I lost them easily in the Old City. They were all over the place, flashing torches, blowing whistles, shouting to each other. Typical unimaginative policemen. I went in by the Jaffa Gate, hid up by the Latin Patriarchate, waited for them to pass, and exited the same way. Then I got a gharry to take me down to Bethlehem, had a glass of tea in a café next to one of those olive wood emporiums selling nativity sets. The place was full of noisy Australians drinking beer and admiring their purchases.”

  “And being careless with their hats?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Took another gharry back into Jerusalem. There was one roadblock but Tommy was looking for an officer without a hat going in the other direction. I got the taxi to drop me off at the station and walked from there. Then I circled the house twice to make sure it wasn’t being watched. Satisfied?”

  “Impressive,” said Lang and he meant it. But the Templer refused to be mollified, picked up his shirt and hat and strode out of the room. Presently Lang heard a shower running.

  When he returned he was carrying a tray bearing whisky, water and two glasses. His fresh shirt had POLAND shoulder flashes.

  “Want one?” Lang took a glass, relieved he had got over his pique. The German lit a cigarette and they sat there in silence for a long few seconds. Then he asked, “Do we have transport yet.”

  “No. They haven’t got anything for us.”

  “Do you think they will?”

  “I don’t know.” Lang was looking down into his glass. Suddenly he drained it and poured himself another one. This time he also added water from the little pottery jug the Templer has brought in.

  “Something the matter?”

  “Times have changed.” Lang struggled to put it delicately. “Among some circles, there is not the same enthusiasm for your presence here.” He took one the Templer’s Players and lit up.

  “Sixteen months ago, when I got to Beirut and contacted your people, the world was a very different place. America was neutral, Germany had not attacked Russia and the Jews of the Stetl lived in peace. Even in Poland the worst we had heard was that Jews were being herded into ghettos and made to wear yellow stars. And we thought that was bad enough.” The Templer sipped his drink, flicked his cigarette and let Lang have his say. It was hardly unexpected.

  “And the British, the only people still fighting Germany, were not doing well. They had been kicked out of Greece and Crete and it looked like Malta would not last m
uch longer. Where next? Cyprus? Then, within weeks of arrival, Rommel had ended all those easy victories over the Italians. How long before he got to Palestine? By now everybody knew the British army was no match for the Wehrmacht. And a year later, just after I left you in Athens and got back here, people said the same thing. Panzerarmee Afrika was going to break through. No doubt about it.”

  The Templer now had his head cocked slightly to one side, the start of a smile on his lips.

  “But it hasn’t happened has it? Perhaps Russia is taking up too many men. Perhaps the British army has got better. You play good chess players, you get better at chess. And now they’ve got some new American tanks. Whatever the reason we have a stalemate and the British are reinforcing. There are ships full of men and equipment arriving at Port Said almost every day. Is Rommel getting reinforcements? The British still have Malta. The submarines and aircraft based there sink his petrol tankers…”

  “You forget, Herr Doktor Clausewitz, we have captured Tobruk with enough petrol to keep our panzers going until they get to Baghdad,” The Templer had heard enough. These Jews went with the wind. No backbone at all. “I thought better of you. Really, I hoped this shit hasn’t infected you. Do your friends really believe everything they read in the Palestine Post? The situation on the El Alamein front is nothing like as good as the British pretend. Only this afternoon I had it confirmed that contingency plans for a withdrawal into the Palestine Mandate are well advanced.

  “They’ll probably try to make a stand on a line running from Gaza to Beersheba. That’s where Von Kressenstein managed to hold Allenby until the end of 1917 and all he had was a rabble of Turks and Arabs stiffened by a few Germans and Austrians. MacMichael will shortly be going to Auchinleck’s forward headquarters to learn about the details of the 8thArmy’s withdrawal into Palestine. It’s unbelievable. For all their men and equipment the British don’t have the will to resist. There’s even talk of Churchill himself is coming out here to try and raise morale. Smuts is definitely due. We must tell Athens. It will be a great morale booster for Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika. One more push and they’ll be through. One more push.”