Riptide

by Lawton, John

When Cal was fourteen his father won a congressional seat in his home state – and he’d done it by declaring his independence of the Senior Senator for Virginia – on everything from the Silver Standard to the Pershing Expeditionary Force. Calvin M. Cormack Jr was nobody’s boy. No one, to his face, ever called him son of Catch, or dared to air the notion that he was riding the political high road clutching onto his father’s frock coat. To his own son he said, ‘I had to do it. I couldn’t live that plantation-owner gimcrack. There’s not a Cormack so much as plucked a boll, let alone jumped down, turned around and picked a bale. I appeased the old man with your name. Let him know I’d never betray the South – whatever else I did. Freed us to get on with being Americans the rest of the time.’

  But then, by then, Cal had worked that out for himself. He’d heard too many of the rows between his father and his grandfather. Ante-Bellum man versus All-American man. And he had little faith in either.

  The letter on the top of his in-tray was an airmail from his father. He’d know that copperplate script anywhere: ‘Capt. Calvin M. Cormack III, United States Consulate, Zurich’, written with all the pride a man could put into his son’s rank and address. He eased his glasses forward a fraction on his nose. Held the letter, not wanting to rip it open. Light as a feather. He could all too easily guess its contents. His father had been ranting at him for years now. Like father like son. It was enough to make you want to break the cycle. Fuck your life away and never marry – never, never, have children. If his grandfather flew the tattered flag of the Confederacy and talked sentimentally of the Rebels, his father flew the near-invisible flag of Isolationism and talked contemptuously of Europe. What was World War II to a beleaguered little island was ‘a European skirmish’ to Representative Calvin M. Cormack Jr of Virginia, Chairman of the all-powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and ‘little or nothing to do with any right-thinking, God-fearing American’. Not that his father feared God. His father feared nothing, as far as Cal had ever been able to tell, and certainly not an entity in which he did not believe in the first place. At least they had that in common, all three generations of them. Not much, and not enough.

  He’d read it later. He just wasn’t in the mood right now. He dropped it in his in-tray and slipped a brown cardboard file out of the top drawer of his desk. In it was the decrypted message he’d received from Berlin a little over two weeks ago: ‘TIN MAN DEAD’. A simple, too simple, conclusion to a complicated life. His assistant had filled the file with clippings – more than twenty snipped pieces from the German press. A hero’s funeral. He looked at them every day. Not disbelieving. Wanting not to believe.

  His office door opened. Cal was still staring at the clippings. He looked up slowly and found himself panning up from a pair of stiletto heels – albeit in army colours – the length of two short, shapely legs, across a non-regulation, over-tight, over-tailored skirt, an olive green blouse thrust out by big breasts, two corporal’s stripes on the sleeve, to a pretty face, red lips, nut brown eyes, under the shortest haircut he’d ever seen on a woman. She was clutching a single sheet of paper to her bosom. He’d no idea who she was.

  ‘Have we met?’ he said simply.

  ‘Sure, day before yesterday. Can I help it if you got a memory like a spaghetti strainer?’

  ‘You’re new?’

  ‘Cypher clerk. Whole bunch of us got in Friday. I guess you were too busy to give us the twice-over. I settled for the once-over. Hurts to know how big an impression I made on you.’

  Cal was dumbfounded – no corporal in the United States Army had ever talked to him this way – but he was a slave to his upbringing. He’d been taught to stand in the presence of a lady – even a New York loudmouth like this one – so he stood and offered her his hand.

  ‘Calvin Cormack,’ he said.

  ‘Larissa Tosca,’ she replied. ‘But you can call me Lara. Now you wanna read what I got or you just wanna flirt with me? You could read it now and if it’s nothing we could flirt some more, or we could flirt all morning and let the war go hang.’

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘OK. This is what it says. It says “Tell RG everything. Yrs Gelbroaster”.’

  ‘“Tell RG everything – Gelbroaster”? That’s all?’

  ‘Yep.’

  General Gelbroaster was the head of US Army Intelligence, London. There were plenty who thought him nuts, but in London his word was little short of law. Even when his word was as terse as this.

  ‘I was curious about the R and the G. I checked it every goddam which way for mistakes but that’s the way it comes out. RG. Every combination I tried I still get RG.’

  ‘That’s OK. I know who he means.’

  ‘Fine. Look me up when you’ve finished.’

  Corporal Tosca slapped the paper on Cal’s desk and walked out. Buttocks sashaying in the tight skirt. Quite the shortest, rudest woman he had ever met. He wondered if Gelbroaster was now recruiting people as nutty as he was himself. They’d sent him some wackos over the last two years, but this one took the prize.

  Cal called the British Consulate and asked for Lt. Col. Ruthven-Greene. He heard the mechanical, ratchet rattle of the switchboard and then an unsurprisingly hearty English voice.

  ‘Calvin – dear boy. Just the chap I was thinking of. Tell me, do you think you could fit in a spot of lunch today? Here at the Consulate. A bit of a chat over beer and sandwiches, eh?’

  § 6

  Cal knew Ruthven-Greene fairly well. He had met him on his last London trip in ’39, and on a dozen other occasions when the man had shown up in Zurich.

  Reggie was an affable man. Indeed, you might be fooled into thinking that affability was all there was to him. He cultivated the faintly raffish air of a man who knew where the good times were to be had, and all in all gave the impression of being a man who had just failed the audition for a Hollywood role that had gone to George Sanders instead. He was always in civilian clothes, and although Cal had heard members of the embassy staff address him as Colonel, it was pretty clear he was no regular kind of colonel. He was too young, at thirty-nine or forty, to have seen much of the last war – at best he’d’ve been a subaltern in the last weeks. It was possible he’d spent the long weekend between the wars on the reserve list, only to be called up at once when rain stopped play at Munich. It was possible he’d been promoted in the background. Much more possible, to the point of highly likely, was that Alistair Ruthven-Greene – known to his friends as Reggie – was a career spook. Nominally a serving soldier, but who’d not seen a parade ground in years, and wore his uniform only on occasions of state – whatever they were. The funerals of kings, Cal thought, and the British didn’t lose kings on anything like a regular basis. Still, who was he to quibble? There were states in the Deep South where colonels were dashed out as honours faster than the Pope created counts.

  Ruthven-Greene swept him into a large office – a partner’s desk, a low table framed by a couple of deep-cushioned sofas, made his own office look at best perfunctory. And on the low table sat a plate of roast beef sandwiches, a pot of strong English mustard and two tall bottles of pale ale. Ruthven-Greene was being literal, he had said beer and sandwiches so beer and sandwiches it was. Cal had learnt that when the British served beer with beef they meant to talk turkey.

  Ruthven-Greene flipped the top off a bottle and poured it into two half-pint tankards. Cal helped himself to a sandwich – minus the English mustard. What kind of a nation was it that could delight in so searing its taste buds?

  ‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Reggie?’

  ‘Codes, dear boy. Codes.’

  Codes? They didn’t share codes. We have ours and they have theirs. Never the twain . . .

  Ruthven-Greene took a small leather-bound diary from his inside pocket. A sheet of white paper larger than the book itself was sticking out. He extracted it and handed it to Cal.

  ‘I’m sure you’re familiar with this,’ he said.

  Cal took one look at it and hop
ed he had not turned white – or worse, blushed red. The note was preceded by several lines of numerical gobbledegook, but in the centre of the page, in capital letters, it read ‘TIN MAN DEAD’.

  ‘You’ve broken our code?’

  ‘Well. Yes and no.’

  ‘What’s the yes?’

  ‘We broke it last year. Best part of twelve months ago, in fact. We regularly monitor all your embassy transmissions from the Cape to Cairo, from Timbuktu to Tokyo. Sorry. But there you are. We’re not allies. Well, not yet at any rate.’

  ‘And the no?’

  ‘It isn’t taken from any communiqué of yours. We got it from a German radio transmission. We’ve cracked your code. And I’m rather afraid the Germans have too.’

  ‘Again?’ Cal thought, but said nothing. It was only a year since M15 had caught a cypher clerk at the US Embassy in London passing the code to the Germans. The British had tried him in camera – they weren’t going to make the Americans look like fools – locked him up and thrown away the key, for the duration at least. It was beyond embarrassment. There was scarcely a word strong enough to describe it. As a result the Americans had tightened up their security, changed all the codes – which, it now seemed, the British had cracked immediately – and suffered an on/off, hot/cold relationship with their M15 counterparts on the sharing of information. Sometimes it seemed they told you everything, at others as though they trusted you about as far as you could chuck a buffalo – and always they asked for more. Since the war began, and increasingly since Winston Churchill took over, the British had become a nation of Oliver Twists. There was nothing they wouldn’t ask for, whilst guarding and rationing anything you might reasonably expect from them. It was, he thought, a bit like being importuned by a beggar in top hat and tails. And – worse yet – it was only four months since an American magazine had printed the design specifications of the next generation of British warplanes, for no better reason than that it had not occurred to the War Department in Washington that they might be secret. Cal could readily see why the British might be touchy on the matter of secrets – and it required but a short leap of imagination to realise that of course they’d spy on the Americans. Why wouldn’t they? And if they spied upon the Germans as they in turn were spying upon the Americans to retrieve information third hand via two separate codes – well, scratch it if you can.

  Ruthven-Greene indulged himself in one of his teeth-sucking, airy pauses. ‘Now – about your man Stahl. They’re onto this bloke, I should think that’s pretty obvious by now. We must have him. Really we must. Sorry to insist and all that, but we really must.’

  Cal was startled, not by the juxtaposition of the names – if they knew his codename why would they not know his real name? But two and two were not making four.

  ‘Reggie – I think you’ve just crossed a wire. Stahl is the Tin Man. Stahl is dead. He’s dead, goddammit. They buried him ten days ago. Full military honours. Hitler was there. Heydrich was there. Half the papers in Germany carried the story on their front pages!’

  ‘No. That’s just my point. He isn’t dead.’

  It was not in Cal’s nature to seek confrontation – he did not enjoy confrontation – but it seemed inevitable that there would be one. Perhaps the best thing was to get it over with as soon as possible.

  ‘Reggie – are you going to talk in riddles all afternoon?’

  Ruthven-Greene dug around in his pockets as though searching for the last stick of gum or a book of matches. He handed Cal a typed sheet folded over several times. It was tight and grubby as though it had sat in his jacket pocket forgotten for days and could not possibly be of any importance. But, he knew, with the British that was often the way, the trivial stood on, perched upon with full blasting dignity, the world-shattering passed across as though it were an afterthought. Cal unwrapped the sheet of paper.

  ‘It’s a de-crypt of a message we received about a week after Stahl is supposed to have died. Very hush-hush,’ Ruthven-Greene explained.

  Cal read it – curiouser and curiouser.

  ‘This guy says he saw Stahl alive after the air raid. I don’t get it.’

  ‘He’s our man in Berlin. Well placed. Corporal in the Abwehr, as a matter of fact. If he says he saw Stahl alive after the air raid, then he did. You’ll note that he confirms from a source in Heydrich’s own office that Stahl didn’t die on the seventeenth. No two ways about it. I gather your sources, like ours initially, reported him as having died in the raid.’

  Cal let the paper fall. A web of loyalties and assumed alliances tearing themselves up and reforming in his mind even as he spoke.

  ‘Yes,’ he said softly.

  ‘Then I think we’ve reached the same point. Two questions. Why would Heydrich go to all this trouble to convince the Boche he’s dead?’

  ‘Perhaps because he thinks he is dead?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. Stahl was his deputy, well, one of his deputies, for seven years. I’d say he’s the one man Stahl could not fool. Whoever they buried, and I rather think they needed a body for that, it wasn’t Stahl; and, if there was a body, Heydrich would have torn it to pieces, and I do not mean that as a figure of speech, to be certain of his identity.’

  Cal looked around the room, as though seeking reassurance in the solidity of the furniture.

  ‘Two questions, you said. What’s the other?’

  ‘Much the same as the first really. Why would your Tin Man go to all this trouble to convince the Boche he’s dead?’

  ‘Reggie – I’ve been told to co-operate with you. Don’t play games with me. You haven’t come all the way to Zurich to have me tell you Stahl spied for us. You know that already or you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Quite. I saw General Gelbroaster the day I set off. He gave me the bare facts. Sort of wanted you to fill me in with the detail.’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘You know, first hand. You knew the blighter after all.’

  ‘Is this room secure?’

  ‘Secure?’

  ‘I mean,’ said Cal, ‘can we talk?’

  ‘My dear fellow, we are talking.’

  Reggie tucked into a sandwich. Cal found his appetite had vanished. He’d dreaded this moment ever since he got Gelbroaster’s ‘Tell RG everything.’

  ‘Stahl is Austrian. I’ve never been certain of his age but I’d think he was in his early thirties, say thirty-two or -three. He joined the Nazi Party in 1929, and a couple of months later he contacted the Polish Secret Service and offered to spy for them. You’ll recall, the Poles looked like bigger players in Europe at that time than they’ve done at any time since. It wasn’t such an odd move. They checked him out, and took the risk. They trained him. He’s not the kind of man you’d ever want to go up against without a tommy-gun in your hand. Stahl then joined the SS – must have been one of the pioneers, certainly in the first five hundred – and then moved sideways into the SD. Early on he met Heydrich and at some point in the mid-thirties Heydrich took him up, became, I guess, his patron in the party. At which point the quality of Stahl’s information became almost priceless. At least it would have been if there’d been the political will to evaluate it. He supplied the Poles with infrequent but accurate high-level information right up to the invasion of Poland.

  ‘About a year before this some bright spark in Polish Intelligence foresaw the outcome pretty clearly and offered Stahl to the British. If you’ve been honestly briefed by your own people, Reggie, you’ll know that your own side turned him down. There were plenty of people about that time, in the summer of thirty-eight, in any country you care to name, telling themselves the war was not going to happen. So the Poles offered him to us. We took Stahl. They flew me out about the time of the fall of Warsaw to run him from here. It’s pretty much what I’ve done ever since.

  ‘I met him half a dozen times, when he was part of some official delegation at our embassy in Berlin, the reciprocal visit in Zurich and at those dreadful Bierabends the Nazis used to organise for the foreign press
and diplomats. I’ve heard him play duets with Heydrich, and I’ve seen him fend off questions from Ed Murrow and Bill Shirer, but I doubt I ever got more than fifteen minutes alone with him at any one time. Usually in the middle of Berlin. With Gestapo thugs all over the place. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so scared in my entire life. Everything else has come via couriers and codes. He rations what he tells us, and needless to say we ration what we pass on to you. We did nothing to draw attention to him as the source of our information. It worked well, until now. I don’t know what’s gone wrong. An air raid I could believe. Lousy luck, but believable. But if he’s faked his own death and vanished . . .’

  Cal had no idea how his sentence should end. Reggie finished it for him, half-eaten sandwich poised in the air, his voice not much above a whisper.

  ‘. . . And all he knows has vanished with him . . . We must have him. Really we must.’

  ‘I know. You already said that. What is it you think he knows?’

  ‘Anything or everything, it really doesn’t matter. That close to Heydrich for that long. Whatever he knows we must know too. I gather Heydrich is mad with frustration or grief – do these buggers feel grief? do they feel at all? – whatever, he has lost someone of immense value. That much is obvious. I rather think he’s up to something very clever in faking that funeral. He’ll have his men looking for Stahl. I pray to God we find him before they do.’

  ‘Find him? I don’t even know where to start looking.’

  ‘England, dear boy.’

  ‘England? Why England?’

  ‘Where else can he go? If he were coming to you he’d be here by now. He’s had more than a fortnight. He’d have been here in a couple of days, or so I should think. No, he’s heading for England. I know it in my bones. He’s heading for London. And so should we.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘You and me. You’re to accompany me to England. Gelbroaster’s orders. A spot of liaison.’

  Ruthven-Greene said ‘liaison’ as though it were lunch. A pleasant way to pass a little time, rather than a diplomatic quagmire.