Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

  “You ask too many fucking silly questions,” the man said, “and for that you will be hanged by the neck until you are dead.” He got up and trudged away.

  Two miles outside the Estacion del Norte the railway lines passed under a major road, and Docherty was painting the bridge. To be strictly accurate he was preparing to paint it: chipping away old bits of flake, cleaning off any rust, covering the patches with red lead. It was a long bridge, made of many girders, and clearly he had weeks of work ahead. Docherty, in paint-stained overalls and with a torn beret pulled down over his ears, just got on with it. Even when a policeman paused and remarked that it was about time someone did something, this whole damn bridge was rusting away, Docherty only grunted and kept chipping. At 1 p.m. he collected his pots and brushes and left.

  The postmortem began at 3 p.m. in a large room at the German embassy. All four Abwehr recruits were present, plus their controllers and several instructors. Brigadier Wagner sat at the back and watched.

  Dr. Hartmann spoke first. “The mission involved visiting six locations on foot and gathering intelligence,” he said. The agent was caught and shot.’ He looked at Laszlo Martini. “Is that right?”

  Martini had turned very pale. “No, it’s not,” he said, too loudly. “I followed my orders, I found three locations and I have absolutely no doubt—”

  “Why were you dressed like that?” Hartmann asked. “Flying jacket, expensive hat, silk scarf?”

  “It was damned cold. Did you want me to freeze?”

  “An agent should be inconspicuous. You walked down the center of the street, dressed like a peacock and waving a street map.”

  “What should I do? Knock on doors and ask the way?” Martini was trembling with indignation.

  “You should have studied the map and mastered the route before you set out. And when Joachim here asked for your identity card you reacted very badly.”

  “He surprised me, he made me jump.”

  Joachim stood up and said, “You repeated my words, which made you look nervous. Then you panicked when you folded the map and tore it. Worst of all, you looked straight at me when you gave me your identity card and continued to look at my face, my eyes.”

  “We have told you,” Hartmann said, “at a checkpoint, when you have to show your papers, always look away. Look indifferent. Look bored. It’s a routine, you have shown your papers a thousand times, it’s not important, you don’t care.” By now Martini seemed crushed with shame.

  “And finally,” Joachim said, “a man from Birmingham is not known as a ‘Scouse.’ That is for Liverpool.”

  “Failed the test,” Hartmann said, and sat down.

  Otto Krafft stood.

  “Simple task,” he said. “Morse transmission by short-wave set. The agent was probably captured and shot.” He looked at Stephanie Schmidt. “Why did you climb the hill?” he asked.

  It was the last question she expected. The longer she stared at him the more foolish she felt until the silence became an intolerable ache and she blundered into speech. “I didn’t climb it all,” she said, “I only climbed half of it.” Even to her, that sounded feeble. Worse than feeble: stupid.

  “In that case,” Otto said, “why did you climb only half of the hill?” He pitied this poor young woman and he hated her mute adoration, but nobody except Franz Werth would have guessed it from his manner.

  “The wind and the cold,” she said. “The radio was so heavy that …” She rubbed her right arm. “I’m sorry. I’m sure I’ll do better next time if only—”

  “Not a chance,” Otto said. “No next time. You’re dead, I shot you. The British have detector vans. You know that. The longer you transmit, the greater their chances of finding you. You were on the air for nearly twenty minutes. I said ten.”

  “I forgot.” That sounded dreadful. “I mean I remembered at the start but it was hard to use the Morse key, I couldn’t get any speed and some mistakes happened so … so I had to … to correct …” Her voice dried up.

  “Your wrist was stiff because you carried the case in your right hand,” Otto said. “That’s an elementary mistake. You’ve been told a dozen times. It was freezing cold up there so your fingers were numb. There was no need to climb the hill in the first place. You could have transmitted from the back of the car; the signal would have been perfectly strong. I didn’t tell you to go up there. It was your idea. And supposing it had been essential, you could always have asked me to carry the set.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “What’s more, the message was needlessly long.” Otto produced the paper and read aloud: “In response to your previous communication dated last Thursday … You could have cut all that.”

  “It wasn’t my message,” she said, pleading.

  “It was your life,” Otto said. “You lost it and you bungled the message too. Failed the test.” As he turned away he looked briefly at Franz Werth, a look that said Don’t blame me, it was your lousy idea in the first place.

  Richard Fischer came forward. “The mission required the agent to hang around an aircraft factory and gather intelligence about a new fighter. The agent was probably arrested, in Bruno’s opinion.”

  Bruno stood up. “You pressed too hard,” he said to Tekeli. “I gave you an opening and you charged into it, demanding further detailed information. Is it a new fighter? How many engines? Has it flown yet? Bang-bang-bang. It wasn’t a chat at a tramstop, you were kicking the door down.”

  “That’s prison for you,” Tekeli said. “It destroys the art of civilized conversation. What should I have said?”

  “The trick is to talk to the man about the man,” Bruno said. “Leave the airplane aside, you’ll get to it eventually. Flatter him, get him relaxed, let him chat about the most important subject in the world: himself.” He turned to Fischer and adopted the workman’s accent. “I wish they made bloody trams that go at four hundred miles an hour.”

  “You said a mouthful, chum,” Fischer said. “That’s the best idea I heard all week.”

  “Sooner I get home, sooner I get to bed.”

  “I expect you’ve earned it,” Fischer said.

  “Too bloody true.”

  “I couldn’t do your job, and that’s the honest truth,” Fischer said. “All that responsibility. I’d be scared to death.”

  Bruno smirked. “You’ve got to have broad shoulders, I suppose. Strong eardrums, too, come to that.”

  “Eardrums?” Fischer looked quaintly puzzled. “Strong eardrums?”

  “Engine-testing,” Bruno explained. “Bloody deafening it is. Still, you got to expect a bit of noise from two thousand horsepower, haven’t you?”

  “Two thousand …” Fischer rolled his eyes.

  “And that’s just the one engine,” Bruno said. “You should hear both of them going! Blast the laces out your boots, it would.”

  “You see?” Fischer said to Tekeli. “He wants to boast a bit. All you need to do is make admiring noises and wait. Don’t press. Pressing annoys him. He gets suspicious. You failed the test.”

  He gave way to Franz Werth. “The mission was to sabotage a road bridge by planting explosives under the central arch. The agent survived but so did the bridge. No explosives were planted.”

  “They will be,” Docherty said. “Give me another five days.”

  Everyone laughed. After three depressing failures, Docherty was an entertaining flop. “Five days?” Werth said. “I was rather hoping for five hours.”

  “You didn’t say five hours. You didn’t say any time.”

  “I assumed that urgency was implicit in the order.”

  “Well, now. D’you want it fast or d’you want it good?” said Docherty. That silenced Werth. “It takes time and care to destroy a great big bridge like that. The police come and go on top. The trains come and go underneath. Suppose a driver suddenly sees a strange man crawling in and out the steelwork. What does he think? But if a man starts painting that bridge on Monday, by Friday
nobody even sees him anymore. Him and his big pots of paint. Which are really full of dynamite. Am I right?”

  Werth nodded. “You’ve done it before.”

  “I’ve done it before,” Docherty said. “And never failed.”

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” said Brigadier Wagner. “And, of course, Fraulein Schmidt.” They all turned to listen. “I have one thing to add. At the end of this course, only two agents will be sent to England. Obviously they must be the two best qualified. As for the other two …” Wagner smiled like an undertaker. “A painful decision, a very painful decision. And now I think we might have some refreshments.”

  The four recruits came together into a defensive huddle. “Why do they humiliate us?” demanded Laszlo Martini, softly and savagely. “I offer them my life and they treat me like an idiot.”

  “You behaved like an idiot,” Ferenc Tekeli said through half a chocolate biscuit. “They seem to like you,” he told Docherty. “How do you do it? The rest of us are hopeless failures.”

  “Oh, it’s easy.” Docherty waited until they were all listening. “Fake everything,” he said. “Lie, cheat and swindle at all times. Never let an honest word pass your lips.”

  Martini was disgusted, Schmidt was startled, Tekeli was intrigued. “Really?” he said.

  “It’s the honest truth. Would I lie to you?”

  The controllers were grouped around Brigadier Wagner, who was saying: “No, no, no. You haven’t been listening, Fischer. I never told you they were ready to go. Any fool can see that such is not the case. Ready to go? Two of them couldn’t find the menu in a restaurant, for God’s sake.”

  “But you said they were going in, sir.”

  “And so they are.”

  “All?” Krafft asked.

  “Probably. When I said only two would go, that was to buck up the other two, make them train harder.”

  “The woman is a born victim,” Krafft said. “She can’t win, ever.”

  “Maybe, maybe. It’s surprising what resources people discover inside themselves when they are tested to the full. In any case I’ve found that it boosts the morale of the rest of the group if they regard one member as a loser. No winners without losers. And besides, Berlin is anxious to get some radio sets into Eldorado’s hands.”

  “Ah,” Fischer said. “I begin to understand. We send the sets in with our new agents.”

  “Through Ireland, probably,” Wagner said. “Rendezvous with Eldorado one week from next Tuesday.”

  This was startling news. It meant doing a ton of work in a great rush. It also meant the training course would be cut very short.

  “Two of them stand a chance,” Dr. Hartmann said. “The Irishman and the Hungarian are natural survivors, I think. The other two … I’m not so sure.”

  “I am,” Franz Werth said. “The British will shoot them within forty-eight hours.”

  “Maybe, maybe,” Brigadier Wagner said. “It makes little difference. If they don’t go we should have to shoot them here. I can’t risk allowing a couple of chumps like Martini and Schmidt to run free in Madrid with all their knowledge of the Abwehr.”

  Otto Krafft said, “But you don’t mind if they tell it to the British?”

  Wagner was getting bored with the discussion. “Betrayal to the enemy is an everyday hazard. I can cope with that. Local gossip is worse. It’s like dry rot: it spreads back up the system. The only solution is to cut it out.” He fell silent as Laszlo Martini approached them.

  “I am a crack shot with a pistol,” he announced harshly. “I can shoot Winston Churchill for you from fifty yards. I can do it now, I need no further training. I shot for Italy in the Olympic Games.”

  “Churchill,” said Brigadier Wagner. “What an interesting idea. Of course, Churchill is not Stalin.” Martini’s mouth twitched: he was not sure what that remark meant. “I understood that your main concern was to aid the anti-Bolshevik crusade,” Wagner explained.

  “Churchill is Stalin’s puppet in the west,” Martini said.

  “How true. Well, why not? Of course, you will have to lose your beard.” Wagner glanced around him. The others nodded.

  “Is it essential?”

  Fischer said, “The English think that anyone with a beard has a bomb in his back pocket.”

  Martini hesitated. “I see … When may I have a pistol?”

  “Now, if you like. Bruno! Bruno, kindly escort Mr. Martini to the armory, would you? Thank you so much.”

  They watched him go. “According to Eldorado, Mr. Churchill is on a warship in a convoy to India,” Otto Krafft said.

  “Oh well,” Wagner said. “Maybe he’ll shoot Sir Stafford Cripps instead. Cripps is, I believe, the Minister for Aircraft Production, a much thinner man and therefore a more challenging target.”

  “Martini never shot for Italy,” Fischer said.

  “Nor did Inocencio Slonski,” Dr. Hartmann said.

  “Slonski, Slonski,” Werth said. “That name sounds unfamiliar. Why have I never heard it before?”

  “Because our tame assassin hates it. He calls himself Martini-Hoffman-de-Seversky-Danacek but his real name is Inocencio Slonski. Russian father, Spanish mother. I gave his fingerprints to the Spanish police and they gave me a dismal list of convictions for minor fraud.”

  “Explains a lot,” Otto Krafft said. “He’s living in a dream world.”

  “Aren’t they all?” Wagner asked; but nobody answered.

  Later, Richard Fischer came to the Brigadier’s office with a small problem. “I’m trying to draft the signal to Eldorado for the rendezvous with our new agents, sir,” he said. “We don’t know where Eldorado lives, of course. He’s always insisted on that and it’s good policy. What we don’t know can’t slip out. All our communications with him are via the Spanish diplomatic bag. Now, I’m very reluctant to send him details of the new agents—photographs and so on. It’s tempting providence. One leak and we lose the lot. On the other hand, how are they to meet?”

  Wagner said, “We have pictures of Eldorado?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then this is what you do. The new agents memorize his face. You signal Eldorado to be …” Wagner strolled over to a wall map of Britain. “To be in Liverpool at the railway station, platform one, at noon. Don’t say anything to him about the agents. Let them find him.”

  “He’ll think it odd if we don’t give any sort of reason, sir.”

  “Oh, tell him …” Wagner thought about it for ten seconds. “Tell him Winston Churchill will be there.”

  “But Churchill is on a convoy to India, sir.”

  “Exactly. That is why it is essential for Eldorado to check out a report that he’s going to be in Liverpool.” Wagner took Fischer by the shoulders, turned him round, and gave him a gentle push toward the door. “Forget about the truth, Richard. Do what works.” He watched Fischer leave. “Sometimes I think you’re too pure for this job,” he called after him.

  Define the problem, Freddy Garcia told himself as the soup was served. How can you get an answer until you’re sure what the question is? Very well. The problem is in two parts. Luis Cabrillo won’t work unless we let him out, and we daren’t let him out because he knows too much. Ditto Julie Conroy. OK. Nothing we can do to alter Part One. He’s got to work, we can’t drop him, far too valuable. So the only variable has to be Part Two.

  The simple solution was to provide total round-the-clock protection for the pair. Hugely expensive and they would rapidly grow to loathe it.

  For a wild minute of utter fantasy Freddy considered plastic surgery. Make Luis unrecognizable and the Abwehr could never find him. The fantasy disappeared with the soup plate.

  Over some sort of mackerel pie—Freddy disliked mackerel but there was a war on—he wondered whether it might be possible to persuade the Abwehr that Eldorado, while generally sound and reliable, was neurotic about the possibility that the British might have turned a few German agents. Immunize the Abwehr against the truth by injecting them with a drop o
f it.

  No, no, no. Rotten idea. Highly dangerous and it might raise suspicions that didn’t at present exist. Forget it, forget it.

  The rest of the mackerel pie produced nothing but fishbones.

  The steamed currant duff contained very few currants. Freddy thought of convoys torpedoed in the heaving, freezing mid-Atlantic and told himself he was lucky. A small panic squeezed his lungs: he was running out of variables. Couldn’t change the protection. Or the appearance. Or the Abwehr’s preconceptions. What was left? Hypnosis? Brain surgery?

  A five-watt lightbulb flickered feebly in a dim corner of his mind and went out. He shut his eyes and worked very hard at making it come on again.

  An hour later he was standing in front of the Director.

  “It seems to me, sir, that our whole difficulty arises because someone told Eldorado about the supposedly universal scope of the Double-Cross System,” Freddy said. “Someone told him we run every German agent in Britain, and he of course believes it. Therefore the solution is to make him un-believe it.”

  “Tell him he was misinformed? Think he’d swallow that?”

  “No. It’s got to be a lot stronger. Eldorado’s got to convince himself that we don’t control all the Abwehr agents. I can think of only one way to achieve that. He must meet some Abwehr agents who are quite obviously not under our control.”

  The Director blinked rapidly for about four seconds and then laughed. “Nasty shock for young Eldorado.”

  “It could be made into quite a dramatic occasion.”

  “Do it,” the Director said. “Bamboozle him. Scare the Spanish pants off him. This is a serious business, Freddy. It deserves a codename.” He opened a folder and ran his finger down a list. “Shoelace,” he said. “That’s the next allocated word. Operation Shoelace.” He wrinkled his nose so that his spectacles bounced. “Shoelace …” He stared across the desk. “Bit feeble.”

  “How about ‘Bamboozle?’” Freddy suggested.

  “Operation Bamboozle.” The Director let the sound hang in the air. He liked its punch and rhythm. “Bamboozle,” he repeated. “Yes.”