He kept her under observation all the morning. She was shopping for a few clothes and necessary trifles that she could much better have bought abroad. But she didn’t know that. Alexia visualized the outside world as seething with unemployment and economic distress. Of course she did, of course she did, exclaimed Theotaki, defending this absurd shopping. Even when you are aware that all your news is tainted, you have to believe some of it. For all Alexia knew, the shops of Stockholm might well have been looted by starving rioters or bought out by dollar-waving American troops.
She was obviously happy. Well, why wouldn’t she be? She was a tense and luminous woman in her middle twenties escaping to her lover and doing a bit of buying to please his eyes. When, however, she sat down, alone, in the huge barren hall of a cheap café, she was ashamed of herself. Theotaki guessed it from her bearing, from the uncertainty of her eyes. He was clever as any woman at guessing mood when not a word had passed. To be ashamed of yourself for being happy was, he explained, one of the most damnable, minor, nagging aches of political tyranny. Your personal tastes and joys could not be altered by the common discontent, yet you felt they should be. Love and the flighting of duck at first light and the relish of wine to a man and the feel of dress to a woman – they don’t come to an end because your country is enslaved and terrorized.
So that was the position – D 17 sitting in a café, thinking of her beloved with one half of her mind, and with the other her duty to hate; and Theotaki moving behind her to find a table, not too far away, where she couldn’t see and greet him.
He took one of the café’s illustrated papers in its cane frame, and began abstractedly to write a poem across the blank spaces of an advertisement. When he had finished his drink and his casual scribbling, he paid his bill and sent the waiter to Alexia with the paper. He then vanished from his table and stood talking to a casual acquaintance by the door, whence he could watch in a mirror the effect of his inspiration.
The waiter suspected nothing. It was a quite normal act to send a paper to a customer who had asked for it – especially if the customer were a pretty girl. At least it appeared quite normal when Theotaki did it. That he was alive at all was largely due to his naturalness of manner.
Alexia received the paper as if it were expected. Theotaki approved her presence of mind, and well he might. Any gesture of surprise could have led – if the waiter earned a little extra money by giving information to the police – to prolonged questioning of both of them. He admitted that he had been apprehensive. He hadn’t been able to arrange much training for her and her like.
She glanced idly through the coarse rotogravures of factory openings and parades, and found the doodling of some previous reader. There were girls’ heads, and jottings for a very commonplace love poem to sweet seventeen. Among the half lines, the blanks to be filled in, the notes for promising rhymes, was a phrase your garden at three in the morning continually repeated, toyed with and crossed out because no order of the words could be made to scan. Then came a row of capital D’s, as if the lovesick doodler, failing to succeed as a poet, had tried to design the most decorative letter with which to begin his work,
D 17’s garden at 3 A.M. – the message would have been instantly clear to Theotaki who never read anything that was misplaced, even a printer’s error, without wondering why it was misplaced. But he didn’t expect the same alertness from D 17; he only hoped. As a man of imagination he had, he insisted, the keenest sympathy for romance, and therefore thought it more than likely that Alexia would be too absorbed by justifiable dreams to notice his vulgar scribblings. He was very pleased with her indeed when her hand began to fiddle with ashtray, saucer and saltcellar, arranging them into a group of three to show, if there were anyone watching her, that she had read and understood.
D 17’s garden – or rather her parents’ – was a reasonably safe spot for a rendezvous. A high but climbable wall separated its overgrown shrubbery from the state-disciplined bushes of a public park. In happier days Alexia and her sister had been very well aware of its advantages.
High-spirited young ladies, said Theotaki. Yes, and they had had their own uproarious methods of discouraging unwelcome suitors. When he dropped over the wall that night, for the second time in his life, he remembered that ten years earlier there had been a cunning arrangement of glass and empty cans to receive him, and a crash that woke the uneasy summer sleepers in four blocks of flats that faced the park.
This time there were only silence and soft leaf mold. Theotaki in a whisper reminded the darkness of his last visit and of the two excitable policemen who had burst with Alexia’s father into the garden. Even in those days he had been skilled at evading policemen.
The darkness did not answer. Very rightly. This might be a trap. D 17 had not received her orders through the usual channels.
Theotaki sat down with his back against the wall and waited. After a while he again addressed the dark shapes of the bushes. He warned them that if they were not alone they had better say so, for he was about to speak of the relationship – the 1951 relationship, that is – between himself and Alexia.
Alexia detached herself from her background, and assured him that she was alone. As proof of his authority, he told her the names and numbers of the other members of her cell and what their recent activities had been.
“Will that do?” he asked. “Or do you want more details, D 17?”
She murmured that she couldn’t know … that she would never have believed it possible … that never in all her life had she respected him – or anyone – so much. …
Theotaki apologized for being desperate. Caution – caution, he told her, was the only road to success. There was no hurry, no room for either risks or enthusiasm. Still, sometimes – regretfully – one had to improvise. Where was it safe to talk?
She led him away from the wall into a tunnel of green darkness, and begged him to say what he wanted from her. Always that dangerous feminine enthusiasm. Yet it was a little forced. Theotaki could tell by her voice that she was uneasy at the unexpected mixture of her social life – such as it was – with her very secret service.
He apologized again for his inefficiency, for the urgency – there should never be any urgency – which had compelled him to appeal to her directly.
“It isn’t fair to any of us,” he said.
“Whatever happens to me, I shall not talk,” Alexia assured him in a passionate whisper.
Theotaki considered the eager, small-boned body with the pitying eye of a professional. It would be capable of exquisite suffering, but he was inclined to share Alexia’s faith in its resistance. Torture had little effect upon a flame. Better technique was to confine it closely and have patience until it went out. He reckoned that about three months would be enough to draw out full confession from an Alexia who by then would be Alexia no longer.
Three months. Or much less, if she were caught without possibility of blank denials. Good God, when he thought, afterwards, how nearly it had happened, how but for the most amazing luck. … .
“You are in love?” he asked.
“Doesn’t it stand to reason?”
Theotaki quickly answered that he hadn’t doubted it for a moment. Nor he had. She wasn’t the type of woman to marry, just to escape from the country, without love. No, he wanted to know what she would answer – to hear, as it were, the worst from her own lips.
He remembered the man who taught him his trade. He liked to remember him very carefully, for, since the man was dead, there was no other method of consultation. This teacher of his used to say that a female agent was every bit as good as any male. What she lacked in attack, she made up in human understanding. But never, the dead man had insisted, never choose a woman in love!
Something of this, by way of warning, he repeated to D 17.
“I think your friend did not understand women,” she answered.
Theotaki explained that his friend had been talking only of women of character, who worked for patriotism, n
ot money. He had not implied that such a woman’s devotion would be any less because she was in love, nor that she would be likely to sacrifice the cause to her private happiness. No, he had only meant that any woman of outstanding intensity was, when in love, Love Itself. She became possessed by hormones and happiness, and ceased to bother with details.
“And I wouldn’t choose any woman but a woman in love,” Alexia laughed. “Because until she is, she’s only half alive.”
Theotaki admitted there was something in that. The will of a woman in love dominated her environment; though it couldn’t, perhaps, burn its way through armor plate, it would certainly try.
“But don’t forget my friend’s experience,” he warned her. “He was a man of very wide experience. And so be a little more careful over details than you would be ordinarily. Just to compensate.”
He gave her the precious sheet of foolscap, closely typed over with the positions, the strengths, the armor of corps, divisions and independent brigades.
“Learn that by heart,” he said, “and then burn it. Burn it and crush the ashes. When you get to Stockholm, make an excuse, as soon as you reasonably can, to be alone, and go straight to the address you will read at the bottom of the sheet. Say you come from me, and recite your lesson. That’s all. Then you can be happy with a good conscience. I, your leader, tell you so.”
When she had vanished silently into the house, Theotaki flowed, inch by careful inch, like the battered tomcat he resembled, back over the wall. He walked from the park to his flat through streets deserted by all but the police. Several times during the journey he showed his papers. He was a privileged person, kept rather contemptuously by the Ministry of the Interior for the sake of his general usefulness. Nobody could possibly have suspected Theotaki of any idealism.
D17 – well, what D 17 did when she was alone in her bedroom could only be reconstructed from his knowledge of her and the story that reached him weeks later. She had a quick, reliable memory, and in the gray hour before dawn she learned those dull military numerals as conscientiously as she had learned poetry for school examinations. She would remember, said Theotaki – who had practiced, earlier in his career, the same exact and desperate memorizing – every fact and figure for the rest of her life. That done, she would have been relaxed and beautifully at ease. The last service had been asked of her; she had an honorable discharge. She could give her whole attention to dreaming of the joy that would begin next day.
She must have sat down about sunrise, in the last of her spare time, too excited to sleep, to write to her fiancé. That was like her. She was rich in forethought and expedients. Her departure might still be delayed by some incalculable change in the official mind. If it were, her lover would have a letter to comfort him. If it were not, they would read the two pages together, and laugh for relief from their common fears which had not come true.
Then, when the letter was in its envelope and stamped, came all the fuss of leaving, the weeping mother, the insistence that she should have enough breakfast, the last-minute closing of her four suitcases, the drive to the station.
At the frontier Theotaki took up direct observation again, for, if D 17 should walk into trouble, he wanted to have first news of it. He was astonished at the ease, the gallantry of her departure. The Roumanian officials searched two of her cases and left the rest unopened. It was the starry-eyedness of her and youth and her own infectious certainty that no one could stop so innocently blissful a girl which carried her through. A perfect example, Theotaki pointed out, of the woman in love dominating her environment. That grim frontier post, on both sides of the line, was all bows and smiles.
Theotaki could go no farther. That he had been allowed to come so far, and on the flimsiest of excuses, was a severe test of his nuisance value to his Ministry. He hastened back to Bucharest, very relieved but unable to get rid of an aching nervousness. He put it down to his dislike of breaking the rules of the trade. By short-circuiting his own organization, he had hopelessly committed its safety to the hands of D 17. He assured himself that she could have no further difficulties, but she had still to cross a frontier between Budapest and Prague; and at Prague, before she took the plane to Stockholm, there would be a last, thorough and envious examination of her papers and her baggage.
Theotaki spoke of Alexia’s journey as if he had been on the train with her. In thought, hour after hour, so he was. He knew to the minute – though that of course was mere calculation of schedules – when the blinds of the train would be pulled down so that no passenger might see the possible presence and activities of Russian troops. Thirtieth Assault Division, she would say to herself, and inevitably her mind would run over the bare details of its strength and its experimental bridging equipment. She wouldn’t be able to help this silent recitation, and would try to stop herself forming the mental words lest they might be magically overheard.
All that was true enough. Nevertheless Alexia, as he heard afterwards, had passed most of the journey in a dream of romantic confidence. It had been broken, while she sat in the train, by moments of vague inexplicable worry; but whenever she and her baggage were in contact with the enemy, she treated officials as if they were as gay and careless as she herself, in twelve hours more, hoped to be. She turned the future into the present with an audacity that no mere man could have imitated and which she didn’t even recognize as unreal – with the result that when police and customs and their informers on the train gave her a look, they saw only a girl neither immorally rich nor suspiciously poor, and much too happy to have anything in their line of business upon her conscience.
At Prague, however, the solid and bad-tempered Czechs turned her inside out. They flung the upper layers of her bags aside and angrily rummaged the bottom for antisocial contraband. They interrogated her. They gave her a fresh batch of forms to sign. And when they had punished her so far as they could for wanting to leave the Russian orbit at all, they had to allow her to leave it.
After that it was all plain sailing. She was met by her fiancé on arrival, and Swedish smiles passed her straight into their country, and let her loose in a blue and white Stockholm which sparkled like her mood. No, not sentimentalists, Theotaki explained. They had merely done their investigation of Alexia at the proper time, and once her visa had been issued there was no further point in annoying her. That was the mark of a civilized country. Communists hadn’t yet learned to make up their minds and stand by the decision.
It must have been very difficult for D 17 to shake off fiancé and future parents-in-law and the odd score of hospitable friends who were determined to cherish her; but she did it. She had, after all, long experience in concealing her intentions. Somehow she established her right to a moment of privacy, and claimed it. She delivered her message, word perfect, and kept the taxi waiting and was back in her bedroom in half an hour.
Then she started, said Theotaki, to unpack. He heard of that unpacking when he met his Stockholm correspondent in the quiet course of their business, and even then they couldn’t laugh. He was right. He had never come nearer to sending an agent to certain death. On the top of the first case Alexia opened was her writing pad, just where she had hastily thrown it in the unworldly light of dawn, after finishing that last letter, that all-absorbing letter, to her fiancé. The bag was the only one of the four that had never been examined by Roumanians or Hungarians, and the Czechs had gone like burrowing dogs for the bottom while scattering out the top between their legs. In the writing pad, hidden only by its flimsy cardboard cover, was the sheet of foolscap, gloriously forgotten, not crushed at all to ashes, not even burned, which Theotaki had given her with such delicate precautions.
Brandy for the Parson
MY PARTNER, Tony, says that only an Englishman could be as crazy as this. He is English himself, but it pleases him to be amused by the simple reactions of his own countrymen. Of course I am not a good citizen – I don’t like being a good citizen – but because, strictly speaking, I swindle my country, it doesn’t
mean that I am prepared to see her landed in international trouble when I could get her out. That is why Petronilla and I must convince the suspicious that the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society never existed at all.
In the second year of the war I transferred to Commandos, and was appointed skipper of a native schooner operating in the Aegean. They only gave me a six months’ course in navigation, but never once did I scrape the bottom. So I took to the sea for a hobby, and when I was demobilized, and had married Petronilla, I bought from the Army the ketch Antigua for us to live in.
On the Disposals Board which sold the Army craft there were two chaps who wanted their girl friends shipped to England from occupied territory – so I got Antigua cheap. They wrote off her Diesel as seized up – which it wasn’t – and saw no reason to mention to busy inspectors that her missing spars and sails had been properly laid up and cared for during the war.
I sent for a couple of hard cases from my old crew, and we all went to work on Antigua. Then we sailed away on our maiden voyage, brought home the Disposal Board poppets and landed them on the Essex marshes without bothering the immigration authorities at all. The job was so easy that it gave us ideas for our future. Antigua could provide a living, as well as living quarters.
We fell in with Tony when he was exploring the commercial possibilities of a deserted wharf up Restronguet Creek. He had been in the Navy as a Port Control officer. He never went further to sea than two miles from his office, but he had learned all there was to know about the habits and routine of Coast Guards, Customs and Port Police. So a firm of importers gave him a swell civilian job. They weren’t anxious to fill out forms in quadruplicate for everything they wanted to import, and Tony was just the man for them.
Tales of Adventurers Page 12