Stone's Fall

by Iain Pears

  But then I was less understanding. We were now enemies on the same side and I was merely glad to see the back of him. His treatment of me in the previous few weeks had been monstrous, and contemptuous. He had cruelly and unnecessarily exposed me to all manner of hardships and even danger, had dismissed my successes and laughed at my failures, had been insulting in every way he could imagine, and I hated him more deeply than any man I had ever known before.

  I refused to accept, even to consider, that he had been a very good teacher indeed.

  CHAPTER 5

  My investment was a success; over the next few months Virginie sent a steady stream of information—some useful, some not—which demonstrated that I had judged rightly. It reinforced my views of Lefevre and of myself. The system I had was this: each missive was forwarded from the Bank of Bremen to Barings, and so on to me. I read it, then passed it to Mr. Wilkinson, who bought those he considered useful—generally no more than a few hundred francs at a time, but on one occasion mounting up to a thousand. Small sums for a government, but large for a woman making her way on the borders of a foreign country. This money I paid into the account I had opened at a third bank to work off the opening deficit and cover interest payments back to Barings. Of such small details is the world of espionage truly composed. I had no direct communications with her except when the debt was finally discharged.

  But I did read her letters. In all she showed great intelligence and skill. She had an instinctive understanding of what was required, and expressed herself with dispatch. Judging by the quality of the information, I could guess that her plan to improve her standing in the world was going well. After a month, information began to come in that was supplied by a major in the cavalry, talking about exercises, and new formations that were being practised. Then came details of a new cannon, supplied by a lieutenant colonel in the artillery. And finally she achieved her goal—a whole stream of information supplied by an infatuated general of the Army of the East who had little else to do, as there was no intention of asking the army to do anything. In meticulous detail, she confirmed other evidence that France was currently determined to avoid war with Germany because of its pressing rivalry with England and a fear that it was nowhere near strong enough yet to renew the fight.

  This sort of stuff was the substance of her correspondence; of far more interest, in many ways, was the human detail she added to her narrative. She could have been the Jane Austen of France, had her life developed differently. She had an instinctive understanding of the human dramas she witnessed. The rivalry of one officer with another; the ambitions of a third; the causes of another’s vulgar behaviour. Money worries, thwarted desires for promotion, political aspirations. She saw and chronicled all and her little word sketches stayed with me—perhaps too much—when I later met many of the people who paraded through her letters. General Mercier, though one of the highest-ranking men in the military and a national force in politics, I could never see without remembering her description of him trying to get into his truss every morning. Dollfus the businessman’s drive for wealth came (she believed) from the imperatives of a hypochondriac wife whose presence he abhorred. Some dreamed of an aristocratic wife, others had vices so hideous that they were horribly, and potentially profitably, exposed to the threat of blackmail.

  Virginie saw it all, and condemned none of it. She sketched out an entire society and passed on such a vivid impression that I read her letters not only for the information they contained but also for pure enjoyment. I later learned that Mr. Wilkinson did the same, and made sure they were preserved in their entirety. Where they are now is a mystery, but the Foreign Office throws away nothing. It gives me some comfort to think that, somewhere in the bowels of that grim building, they survive, waiting to be discovered and read anew.

  They came to an end after a little over nine months. I was ordered to ensure that she continued in service, but did not. Our arrangement had been honourable on both sides, and I wished it to remain so. Accordingly, I wrote to her on bank letter paper to the effect that her debt was now cancelled, the full sum of the loan having been paid off with interest, and enquiring as to her future intentions. Naturally, the bank would welcome the continued patronage of such a reliable customer.

  The reply thanked the bank for its consideration, and said that, after mature reflection, she had decided to close her account. Her finances were now robust, and she no longer needed a loan facility of such a nature. Nonetheless, she remained grateful for its intervention and was pleased that the association had been so mutually profitable.

  After that, I never heard from Virginie again.

  That was the more cheerful side of my return to London; the less positive aspect was that I was in high disfavour with my employers, who were mightily annoyed at my disappearance. Lending me out for a few days was one thing; having me vanish for the better part of six weeks was quite another, and they saw no reason why they should pay for it. My stock had fallen so far that I was put into internal accounts for nine months, the purgatory of banking, where you sit, hour after hour, day after day, in a vast, gloomy hall, doing nothing but check columns of figures until they dance in your head and you feel like screaming out loud.

  Even worse, Wilkinson saw no reason why he should put in a good word for me either, as (he said) he had not intended me to do anything other than go to Paris and come straight back again. It was all my own doing. But at least no one audited the bank before I had paid off the debit created by my loan to Virginie. It occurred to me later that, had they done so, I would have been in quite serious trouble. A brief vision flashed through my mind of standing in the dock, trying to explain to a sceptical jury that I had paid, without any authorisation, five thousand francs of Barings’ money to a French prostitute. As a service to my country. Honestly, Your Honour. No, alas, I had no proof. Unfortunately my associate in France had disappeared, and the Foreign Office claimed not to know me at all.

  On the other hand, it did drive home to me that removing sums of money from the most reputable bank in the world was a remarkably easy thing to accomplish. And eventually my gaol sentence in the counting house came to an end and I was restored to favour, although not to the point where I was allowed to go off to France again. Over the next year or so my knowledge of banking increased, as did my level of boredom. I even began to think fondly of cold nights sitting under a bridge over the Rhine, although the image of Lefevre scowling and shouting some sarcastic remark soon brought me back to common sense.

  I hoped that I would be summoned to see Wilkinson again, but no word came, and I did not know where to find him; the Foreign Office denied having any such person in the building, and he seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. Eventually I decided that that particular adventure was over; I suspected Lefevre had been so scathing about me that, whatever the reason Wilkinson had had for choosing me, he had changed his mind. I was unsuitable.

  I had almost forgotten about the whole thing when it started all over again. Another summons, another letter, another meal.

  “I hope you’re not going to ask me to be your delivery boy again,” I said after the preliminaries were dealt with. “I’m still paying for the last time. They haven’t let me out of London for more than a year because of you.”

  “Oh, dear. I am sorry. But it really wasn’t my fault. It’s not as if I asked you to go off gallivanting around France,” he said. “Mixed messages, I’m afraid.”

  “Maybe. But before I met you I was a banker with a fine career in prospect, and a few months later I was spending my life in miscellaneous disbursements.”

  “A little bored, are you?”

  “Very.”

  “Good. Why don’t you come and work for me?”

  “You must be joking.” “I mean it. Your friend in Paris spoke highly of your skills, if not of your character.”

  “I would rather starve in the gutter,” I said disgustedly. “Besides, I was not impressed by the playacting of M. Lefevre, or whatever his n
ame is.”

  “Mr. Drennan.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Mr. Arnsley Drennan. That’s his name. He doesn’t use it much anymore, but there is no reason why you shouldn’t know it. He is an American. He came to Europe when his side lost in their war. You were saying?”

  “Playacting,” I repeated crossly. “Hanging around in bars, listening to tittle-tattle. A waste of time.”

  “You could do better?”

  “Easily. Not that I’m going to. I won’t have anything to do with Lefevre. Or Drennan.”

  “You wouldn’t have to. Mr. Drennan, ah, found a more lucrative post elsewhere.”

  “Really? Isn’t that…”

  “Difficult, yes. I’m afraid he was most awkward about it. He knows so very much about things, you see. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find him to talk things over.”

  “I can’t imagine he ever found anything very useful for you anyway. I thought his antics were quite ridiculous.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what would you do differently?”

  And this was the moment that changed my life forever, for with a few words I then took the first steps which made the imperial intelligence system a little more coherent—I would say professional, although that would be considered an insult. I should have kept my mouth shut and walked out. I should have decided that Wilkinson was someone with whom I would not associate. But I wanted to give in. Ever since I had seen Lefevre—or Drennan—deal with Virginie I knew I could do better, and I had found the whole business exhilarating.

  Besides, I had realised that Henry Wilkinson did not preside like a spider in the middle of a vast web of intelligence officers spread out across the Empire, constantly alert for dangers and opportunities, as I had assumed. Far from being all-seeing and all-competent, he was virtually blind. He had no department, no budget, no authority whatsoever. The safety of the greatest empire the world had ever known depended on a bunch of friends and acquaintances, crooks and misfits. The flow of intelligence depended on favours and requests. There was no policy, little direction and no obvious aims. It was amateurish and all but useless. They needed me, I decided with all the arrogance that a twenty-seven-year-old could muster. Far more than I needed them.

  So I summarised my understanding of imperial intelligence. Wilkinson seemed quite pleased with the description.

  “Yes, yes,” he said cheerfully, “I think that sums up the current situation quite nicely. And if I did not inform you of all this, I’m sure you understand the reasons why perfectly well. If I cannot have the substance of proper organisation, then the appearance of one is the next best thing.”

  “So how does all this work?”

  “As best it can,” he replied. “The Government does not believe such activities to be necessary, and in any case couldn’t persuade Parliament to provide money for them. Some sort of body might be set up using funds voted to the army or navy, but neither sees the need. For the last fifteen years I have been operating without any legal basis or funding whatsoever. We have people collecting information throughout the Empire, in India and Africa and in Europe, but there is no coordination at all. I have to ask to see anything they have. I cannot order them to comply or even say what they should be looking for. At the moment, for example, the Indian Army is not on speaking terms with us. I’m still not certain why. They won’t answer my letters.”

  “So you know as well as I do that all this running around in France, collecting gossip in bars is useless.”

  “Not useless, no,” he said judiciously. “We do the best we can, but we work despite our masters, not because of them. There is nothing unusual about that. Many Government departments feel the same. I think it might be a common condition of the civil servant. You find it all unsatisfactory?”

  “I find it pathetic.”

  “You could do better? Considering that Government policy is unlikely to change?”

  “Listen,” I said. “I work for a bank. It is a commercial operation which, in effect, buys and sells money. It is all I know, it has its weaknesses, but it works. If you want information—real information, not tittle-tattle—I am convinced you have to buy it. My arrangement with Virginie was organised on a purely commercial basis, for mutual profit. That is why it worked. Information is a commodity; it is traded like any other, and there is a market for it.”

  “How would you go about it?”

  “I would set up as a broker. Find people who wish to sell, and buy at a good price. And sell it on at a price as well.”

  “And that is all?”

  “In essence. The difference is that such an operation would need a substantial amount of money to get it going. You get what you pay for.”

  “You speak like a businessman.”

  “And you, I’m afraid, need to think like one. I’m not thinking about the cost of a battleship, you know.”

  “Even small sums of money have to be accounted for. You would be surprised how well the Government likes to look after public funds. Still, perhaps something could be done. Would you do me the great favour of writing down—confidentially, of course—what your proposal is, and how you would proceed? I can then, perhaps, present it to some friends to ask their opinion.”

  And so I became a writer of memoranda for governments. Do I bother to draw a contrast with the flights of fancy which illuminate the pages of our novelists? Do these heroes stay up at night penning budget proposals? Laying out routes for transferring money from one bank to another? Describing methods of accounting for sums disbursed?

  That is what I did. I began by describing the problem—which was to ascertain the intentions of France (although any country could have been inserted at this point), and then pointed out that we lived in an age of industry. Governments could not order armies into the field on a whim. They have to be amassed, and equipped. This takes time. I estimated that between deciding to go to war and actually doing so at least nine months was required, and that this could be monitored by watching the order books of armaments companies, the schedules of the train companies, requisitions of horses and so on. Was the Government putting in place new loan facilities with banks? Was it taking on increased powers to raise supplementary taxation? Which war was to be fought could also be estimated—was money going disproportionately to naval yards, or to the manufacturers of cannon? Technical details of how weapons worked (should such information be required) might also be better acquired by the commercial route rather than by trying to suborn officers in the armed forces. And what were the stockpiles of the opposing military forces? If they went to war, how long could they stay in the field?

  Much of this information, I argued, could be bought at the right price. In addition, I realised that many politicians were susceptible to a certain amount of coercion through exposure of their finances; I also proposed that money and time should be spent on obtaining detailed information about the bribes and other inducements politicians were known to accept. This could then be used to constrain unfriendly action, or to obtain any more specific information that was required. Finally, I recommended that all the money involved be channelled through German banking houses to make it seem that it was they, not we, who were indulging in this activity.

  It was, if I may say so, quite impressive. All but revolutionary in fact; however obvious all this might seem now, the application of commercial logic to what had up until then been a military and diplomatic enterprise caused some consternation. Of those who saw my note, some were outraged, others appalled and a few were intrigued. Many considered my arguments vulgar and distasteful—although most of those disapproved of any form of espionage at all.

  CHAPTER 6

  And some people were prepared to fund the operation. I received instructions from Mr. Wilkinson that friends would back me, and that I was to go to Paris, and that I was now to be a journalist working for The Times, a somewhat steep social descent after Barings. I should see the editor to find out how to do this o
nce the man had been informed that he was to employ me. Then I was summoned to another lunch. I was expecting Mr. Wilkinson; instead I encountered John Stone for the first time.

  “Your chief investor,” Wilkinson said, waving at him. “Potentially. He felt that before he put money into you, he should see if you are worth the effort.”

  I studied him carefully as Wilkinson slid out of the room to leave us alone. He was about fifty, and quite unremarkable to look at. Cleanshaven, with thinning hair that was touched with grey, and dressed in a fashion that was proper and yet entirely anonymous. The cufflinks, I noticed, were of simple design and inexpensive; he wore no ring; he had none of the sleek prosperity about him that men like Lord Revelstoke, the Chairman of Barings, managed to exude. No whiff of cologne, no sign of hair oil, expensive or otherwise. He could have passed as—anything he wished. Certainly, he drew no attention to himself.

  Physically, also, he was unremarkable. Not handsome especially, nor ugly. His eyes were attentive and held their subject with great fixity; his movements were slow and measured. Nothing hurried him, if he did not want to be hurried. His calm was one of confidence and—I would have said if the description wasn’t ridiculous—contentment.

  I had heard the name, but it had scarcely registered with me. Stone was not yet the force he has since become in British industry; his reputation as a sophisticated manipulator of money was growing, but not to the point where he could no longer hide his achievements. He was known as the man who had combined Gleeson’s Steel and Beswick Shipyards but there was still no reason to think he was anything other than an ambitious and competent man of industry. Accordingly, although I was polite, I was not overawed by the encounter.