EQMM, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Back then, the spies congregated in the Quadrilateral district, bounded by the rue Marc-Anton Prattmann, the railway yard, and the slant of the Marius Aqueduct, an area of dark-cornered bars and establishments catering to every espionage need. Shop windows displayed inconspicuous menswear and daring ladies’ fashions, ingenious canes fitted with deadly contrivances, delicate parasols which if properly spun created a hypnotic pattern to captivate the heart of the dullest military attaché, and lethal fountain pens and encoding and decoding devices so small they could be concealed in finger rings and smuggled over borders in boxes of breakfast cereal.

  This spy idyll ended when the Spanish-American War and the Boer War sent invisible-ink prices soaring. Some saw this as just a bit of profitable mischief on the part of Fong Chemical Industries, founded by descendants of Dr. Ludwig Fong, the Eurasian evil genius who had matched wits with the first Ambrose Ganelon. Others thought the Fongs were playing a darker game.

  Since the spies of Europe paid for supplies out of their own pockets, a particularly steep winter increase sent them marching angrily through the Quadrilateral with blank banners to protest the rising cost of invisible ink. Ordered to disperse, they broke up into rioting gangs and rampaged through the district, looting shops and searching for the invisible-ink factory said to be there, though no one had ever seen it.

  Just before dawn, San Sebastiano's little army entered the Quadrilateral from several directions. The spies resisted with sword canes and spinning parasols before falling back across the cobblestones with a clatter of looted hollow heels.

  They made their last stand on a spot marked today by the Monument to the Unknown Spy. There, sword canes bent and lethal fountain pens gone dry, the spies waited, a brave little band ringed by bayonets. As an army officer ordered his men to advance, the spies bit down on the cyanide capsules issued by their governments to be used in case of imminent capture.

  Those who saw the hand of the Fongs in all of this insisted the First World War might never have happened if those seasoned intelligence agents had lived to direct the wheels of diplomacy along the correct path.

  When Ganelon's father died in 1937 everyone assumed his son inherited the counterintelligence service. In fact, the Slyboots had been disbanded in an economy move when General Garrigou retired. But at Prince René's request, Ganelon went along with the deception, walking around sporting his father's cryptic smile, which told San Sebastiano all was well counterespionage-wise. On the street men calling themselves the Friends of the Slyboots whispered to him out of the corner of their mouths, reporting any unusual occurrences in their neighborhood.

  Well, Ganelon was used to pretense. Despite his battered, hangover-haunted face set with eyes that had to follow any attractive woman who passed, his womanizing had ended with his marriage and he'd sworn off drinking on the birth of his son because he needed to put the detective agency on a solid footing for the boy to inherit. As for the two-fisted part, he still visited low bars whose barmen knew to serve him cold tea in a whisky glass and where any young punk could try taking him on. Ganelon found a good barroom brawl got the cobwebs out of his head.

  On the afternoon of his lecture Ganelon entered the Cloak and Dagger Museum auditorium, whose ranks of seats and desks rose steeply on three sides in the academic style. The audience was small, a few veterans of the Slyboots, some young men and women who perhaps dreamed of being spies, and men like the Russian Anton Bibikov and Ganelon's friend Nigel Haverstick, late of Scotland Yard and now of MI5, who actually were.

  Franz Von Rummel, the German spy, was busy elsewhere, as Ganelon knew. In his place was Heinz Dorn, a tall young man with blond hair and blue eyes, the German cultural attaché. Dorn walked with a rolling limp, the result of an adolescent soccer accident.

  And there in the front row sat Todd Wainwright, the American cultural attaché, an earnest young man, a chewer of gum to a snapping degree. Ganelon had only seen him without his gum once. At the annual Talent Night Gala thrown by the diplomatic community to support Entente Cordiale, the international retirement village for diplomats who break under the pressure of constant tactfulness and discretion and turn grumpy or shrewish, Wainwright had accompanied himself on the banjo for a folk song about a big rock-candy mountain, a place with cigarette trees, soda-water fountains, and police with wooden legs. Afterward the young man had retrieved his gum where he'd parked it under his chair.

  To Ganelon, this big rock-candy mountain sounded a lot like the Land of Cockaigne, where roasted larks flew into your mouth and the streets were paved with pastries.

  He suspected Wainwright was with the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence. After the Quadrilateral Riots the powers of Europe signed the Protocols of London restricting spying in San Sebastiano to one agent per embassy and required they register with the principality's counterintelligence service. But America had not signed the Protocols, meaning its spies did not register with him. If Wainwright had, Ganelon might have repeated the information passed on to him by a Turkish spy that the recent final examination at the Japanese war college had asked for a plan to attack a port facility looking very much like Honolulu, Hawaii.

  Ganelon began his lecture by describing a future where sublunary space had become so crowded with orbiting espionage vehicles, jerry-rigged tin-pot and bamboo contraptions, that crashes and collisions were commonplace as nations jockeyed for the best vantage points.

  Finally the World Council of Nations built Avalon, a manned space island to serve the spying needs of all with the most up-to-date surveillance equipment calibrated to show the people below as insects; your nice, beneficial ones, your enemies, vermin. This facility was self-sufficient, for its turbo-converters could change stardust and moonbeams into food, water, and power.

  Avalon soon made war a futile exercise. But it did not bring world peace. Famine and pestilence brought civil unrest. Soon Avalon's people were refusing their regular rotations back to earth. Homesickness, an early problem, became unknown among them. Then someone remembered reading that in Heaven there would be no homesickness. After that, as Avalon watched the tiny creatures fighting and dying down below, its sense of righteous joyfulness grew just as an early Father of the Church had predicted it would for the saints in glory on Judgment Day when they saw the doleful state of the damned.

  At last, Avalon cut the tractor beams binding it to Earth and drifted off into the galaxy seeking more amusing worlds to observe, leaving tales of flying saucers in their wake and evil-doers and do-gooders equally certain they were being watched from on high.

  Ganelon ended his lecture to mild applause. There were no questions. His audience rose from their seats and drifted away. He was gathering up his papers when the Russian Bibikov scowled his way over to the podium.

  "Ah, Comrade,” said Ganelon, “I hope you are enjoying your stay in San Sebastiano."

  "One place is as good as another to wait for the withering away of the state,” muttered Bibikov.

  "If you say so,” said Ganelon pleasantly. He was in the Russian's debt. Customarily new spies made some gift of information when they registered. Bibikov's had been a particularly handsome one, the deployment schedule for the Scampi, Italy's fleet of miniature submarines.

  Pointing at Dorn as the man limped from the lecture hall, Bibikov demanded, “Why wasn't his name on the list?"

  Ganelon had continued his father's custom of giving each registering spy, as a courtesy, a list of the other spies who had also done so. “Herr Dorn's a cultural attaché."

  The Russian shook his head. “I'd know that limp anywhere. He cost me these.” He held up a hand missing three fingers. “Cultural attachés don't wander around the Carpathian Mountains on the Ukraine side."

  Bibikov told Ganelon about that late October afternoon when he'd looked down from the underbelly of the Pasternaki bomber, saw the line of men struggling through the snow far beneath him, and knew he'd chanced on a band of partisans come down late from the mountains for winter supplies. More good luck, the
bomber had just flown over a small chapel that, spring and summer, served a local shepherd community from the village of Chorny. Chorny, he was sure, was where they were heading. Crawling forward through the fuselage, Bibikov ordered the pilot to change direction and land the plane near another village in the district where he had soldiers billeted. The pilot protested that he liked to sleep in his own bed in Lvov. He only obeyed when Bibikov threatened to have him shot.

  Here Bibikov interrupted himself. “That pilot is what we call a radish,” he told Ganelon. “Red Russian on the outside but white Russian on the inside. Aviation was a hobby of the damned aristocrats before the war."

  The next morning, Bibikov continued, he and his men reached Chorny by truck. But the storekeeper told him no partisan would find anything to steal. Just after dawn some Germans had woken him up and bought out most of his supplies, paying in gold.

  So they were Germans he'd seen from the air. Excited, Bibikov led his men out after them. If they'd walked all night through the snow they'd probably stop to sleep up in the shepherds’ chapel.

  But when Bibikov reached the chapel he found signs the Germans had rested there but moved on. When he urged his men forward they refused, claiming exhaustion, and pointed to signs of an approaching storm.

  Pushing on alone, Bibikov discovered the Germans, burdened down by supplies, were not that far ahead, with Dorn limping in the lead. He followed as close as he dared.

  When the Germans reached the base of the mountain ramparts Bibikov knew their hideout must be nearby, for there was no shelter higher up. His plan was to return with the Pasternaki. As he marked the location, the threatening storm struck at last, with heavy snow and a raging wind. Before turning to go back Bibikov took one last look at the Germans. The vague shapes up ahead had lit lanterns, perhaps, he thought, so as not to lose each other in the whiteout. But suddenly they and their lanterns were framed in a large black rectangle. Then, in an instant, the Germans, their lanterns, and the rectangle were gone.

  Mystified, Bibikov struggled back through the storm, reaching the shepherds’ chapel exhausted and with a frostbitten hand, for he lost a mitten in a fall during the descent. His superiors thought his story a sick man's fantastic ravings.

  "But I saw what I saw,” Bibikov told Ganelon over his shoulder as he walked away.

  The detective shook his head and gathered up the last of his papers. Then he heard a snap coming from the front row desk where Todd Wainwright had been sitting. He went over and, looking down, he found the young American on one knee behind the desk. When Wainwright saw Ganelon he pretended to be re-tying his shoelaces. “Good talk, sir,” he said through his chewing gum. “Good talk."

  Ganelon nodded and left the hall, telling himself that all Wainwright got for his eavesdropping was Bibikov's wild ravings. But then he remembered that Dorn had been away on home leave from last August to November.

  As he left the Cloak and Dagger Museum, Ganelon noticed the motto carved over the door. “UMBRAS SUMUS,” it read. “We are but shadows.” The words were coincidental, for at that moment Ganelon was preparing the lesson on shadowing for his correspondence school. He was also designing equipment for the school to sell, including a rearview mirror that fitted on the hat brim so you could follow a subject while walking ahead of him and a telescoping ear-trumpet device for listening in on second-floor conversations.

  He decided he'd better speak to Von Rummel, the German spy, about Dorn and headed for the rue Olivet, a narrow side street near the French Embassy. On the way he passed the Cinema Chapdelaine, where the latest Canadian films were shown. When business was slow Ganelon sometimes hung a sign on his office door—"Back in five minutes"—and took his wife to an afternoon movie. They often went to the Chapdelaine. The final scene of a recent film there had touched them both. It was set at the Toronto airport with snow falling out of the darkness and an airliner loading for departure in the background. A beautiful woman dressed in a coat with a fur-lined hood is saying a tearful goodbye to a scarlet-tunicked Mountie. Admitting her love for him, she says nevertheless she is leaving for the States to aid her husband, a famous humanitarian, in his work. The Mountie nods. He understands. As she walks away he shouts after her, “We'll always have Casa Loma.” The End.

  Whatever Casa Loma was, Ganelon and his wife decided it must be a wonderful place. Afterwards, whenever he complained about the life of pretense and lies he lived in San Sebastiano, his wife would say, “We'll always have Casa Loma.” Ganelon shook his head and marched on.

  He knew where to find Von Rummel. One of the Friends of the Slyboots, a horsemeat butcher on the rue Olivet, had informed him that every day for a week now a German embassy limousine had had a flat tire right opposite his shop.

  During the Crimean War, Russian agents in San Sebastiano had started to tunnel into the French embassy basement from the Cloaca Maxima, the principality's main sewer line. But peace came before the job was completed. Recently Von Rummel found the tunnel entrance and started digging again. Five days ago, as he emerged into a small dead-end collector, the tunnel collapsed behind him, trapping him where he was. While the Germans worked with muffled picks and shovels to reach him, they kept him alive by lowering narrow sandwiches and stirrup cups of beer through a sewer grating in the curb on the rue Olivet.

  Von Rummel, the left-wing black sheep of a well-known Junker family, joined Hitler's Nazi party after several years in the trenches during World War I. Maybe it had to do with what end of the National Socialism stick you grabbed hold of. Some believed Hitler's ultimate agenda was to nationalize the banks and the holdings of the war profiteers. The Nazis called his sort “beefsteaks,” brown as brownshirts on the outside but socialist red on the inside. But talk of a German-Russian nonaggression pact had sent Von Rummel's stock on the rise.

  Ganelon did a Wainwright. Bending down as if to retie a shoelace at the sewer grating in the curb, he tapped on the grating with his cigarette lighter. Immediately two hands, knuckles white with effort, for the man was holding himself some three feet off the ledge that ran along the side of the sewer, grabbed the upright bars. Von Rummel's face appeared behind the hands, an unlit cigarette between his lips. “Thank God,” he said, eying Ganelon's lighter. “The idiot chauffeur with my morning supplies forgot the matches.” When Ganelon lit the German's cigarette he thought he heard the sound of grateful heels clicking in midair.

  "Was Dorn a spy?” he asked.

  Von Rummel shook his head.

  "Then what was he doing wandering around on the Ukrainian side of the Carpathian Mountains?"

  Von Rummel frowned thoughtfully. Then his face brightened. “Ever heard of the ‘Happy Handicapped Wanderers for Hitler'?” he asked. “It's a hiking club Dorn started to prove his kind could still do good work for the Party. Maybe Dorn and his club-mates were hiking the Carpathians and wandered over from the Rumanian side.” Then he added, “If you ask me, when the time comes Dorn and his lot will be sacrificed for the good of the race."

  Before straightening up to go, Ganelon slipped Von Rummel his lighter and heard another midair click of heels. As he walked away, Ganelon wondered if Von Rummel had heard the Junkers were also on Hitler's list of people to disposed of when the time came.

  * * * *

  Nestled in among the Old Port's crumbling warehouses and fish-oil distilleries, the Café d'Aerodrome stood just across from the Imperial Airways flying-boat hangar at the harbor's edge. Ganelon's friend Haverstick, who'd come down by train that morning to hear Ganelon's lecture, was about to leave by air on his way to the Middle East on MI5 business.

  The café was hung with balsa wood models of Imperial Airways airplanes. Seated at tables beneath them were a middle-aged English couple with a teenaged daughter, two French Foreign Legion officers, and three Egyptian businessmen.

  Haverstick sat at a table off in the corner. When Ganelon joined him the Englishman said, “Have to say, old man, I found your talk rather fantastical. Too much stardust and moonbeams for me."


  Ganelon made no reply. Actually, he'd approached “Espionage, Whither?” with some trepidation, remembering a story his father once told him about dining out in London in 1889 with a party consisting of his friend Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde the dramatist, an American magazine editor, and two members of Parliament. When talk turned to the future of warfare Wilde suggested the next one would begin with a chemist from each side approaching the frontier with a bottle. Everyone laughed. The man's paradoxical humor was legendary. But Ganelon's father saw a Fong Chemical vice-president, his ear cocked at a nearby table, go pale and hurry from the restaurant.

  Soon afterwards the attacks on Wilde's character began in the Fong-controlled press, culminating with Wilde's trial and imprisonment. The author died in French exile in 1900 without seeing his prediction of chemical warfare come true.

  With Wilde in mind, Ganelon had decided to treat the future of espionage in a way no one could take seriously.

  A waiter Ganelon didn't recognize came to take his order. The detective looked around the room, saw a familiar waiter, and said, “My usual. Maurice over there will know."

  Then Ganelon slid an envelope containing Bibikov's Scampi deployment schedule across the table. (He could have given it to the French but their foreign minister had recently referred to San Sebastiano as a festering sore on the backside of La Belle France.)

  As he glanced inside, Haverstick's eyes grew wide. When he'd been invited to the lecture the Englishman suspected Ganelon had some information for him and he had asked MI5 for something to give Ganelon in return, for that was the way things were done. They'd given him something called The Ethiop's Ear, an Abyssinian plan to tap into Italian underwater cable lines in the Red Sea, a quite inadequate exchange.