Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

  “Can’t drop dead,” Luis said gloomily. “You’ve got me lying down already.”

  “Anyway, it’s too late for all that,” Freddy said. “The signal’s already gone to Madrid. You’ve got the flu. Now relax and enjoy it.”

  *

  Christian began to get giddy at the top of the bunker. It was four stories high, and the laborers were pouring concrete to make a fifth story. He clung to some wooden scaffolding and looked across the street at the roof of an apartment block, while behind him the site engineer explained the design of the bunker to Oster. A crane delivering buckets of fresh concrete swayed alarmingly. Christian had to look away. He found himself watching men with wheelbarrows running, actually running, along the scaffolding planks. He shut his eyes.

  “Have you seen enough?” Oster asked. Christian nodded. They began the long descent, one vertical ladder after another into deepening darkness until Christian had lost count of the stages. When at last he stepped off a ladder and saw blessed ground level through a doorway, Oster said: “Want to take a look at the basements? There are three levels. Or is it four?” Christian shook his head. “I want a drink,” he said.

  Oster’s driver took them to an officers’ club. It was not yet noon and the place was almost empty. Christian slumped into a deep leather armchair and let his eyes close. Oster ordered beer. The waiter’s shoes clicked away across the parquet floor. “Well,” Oster said. “Feel better now?”

  “I feel as if I just climbed the Matterhorn without ropes.” Christian squinted sideways at Oster. “Was that really necessary, sir? The doctor ordered bed-rest, not vertigo.”

  “You needed fresh air. Besides, I thought you ought to see what we’re building. Some bunker, eh? It fills a whole city block. The external walls are two meters thick. No windows, did you notice that? It’s designed to take five or six thousand people but I bet they pack in twice as many when Berlin gets what Hamburg got. Don’t you?”

  “Perhaps. Probably. I don’t know.” Christian was still trying to forget the slosh and surge of cement, and the uncertain lurch of the crane. “It’s none of my business anyway.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” The beer came, and Oster raised his glass. “Here’s to crime.” They drank. “Bunkers like that are going up all over Germany, you know. Indestructible, so that engineer told me. Apparently we learned a great deal about reinforced concrete from building submarine pens at Brest and St. Nazaire. The RAF bounced a lot of very big bombs off them and they never even cracked.”

  “Good.”

  “Yes, it’s reassuring to know that something will be left standing.”

  Christian thought about that, began assembling a remark about the enduring spirit of the German people, and gave it up before it was complete.

  Oster waved his tankard at the room. “I don’t suppose this place will survive. A single thousand-kilogram bomb down the chimney and half the street will be in the gutter.”

  “It may not be as bad as that.”

  “The bunker-builders seem to think it will.”

  They drove back to Abwehr headquarters. Christian was glad to get inside; he found being out with Oster vaguely alarming. The familiar buff walls and the polished mahogany, and the steady chatter of invisible typewriters, put him at his ease. Passing secretaries smiled as they walked along a corridor. Oster was repeating something he had been told by the engineer, something about the setting time of really hard concrete, but Christian was hardly listening; he was wondering if he ought to see a specialist about his head and also how it was that the Abwehr always got such very attractive secretaries. Domenik came round a corner. Christian slowed his pace; he wanted to hear today’s joke. Then Domenik did a curious thing: he stopped abruptly, so abruptly that the two men walking behind him stumbled. He knelt to re-tie his shoelace and they stood flanking him: medium build, average height, interchangeable apart from their suits, one dark blue and one dark brown. When he stood up, Domenik’s face was as blank as a board and he walked past Christian without a sideways glance. The blue and brown suits kept pace with him. Christian looked to Oster for an explanation and Oster was nowhere to be seen.

  For a few seconds he stood in the empty corridor, feeling slightly offended by these rebuffs, until four men in SS uniform appeared, carrying cardboard boxes full of files, and marched past him. The only sensible thing to do was to follow them, get out of the building, go for a long walk and have a quiet lunch. Christian went the other way. He went to Domenik’s office. More SS men were emptying the filing cabinets, collecting every scrap of paper from the desk.

  Christian tried to find Oster. His secretary, looking pale, said he was in a meeting with Admiral Canaris. “Domenik’s been arrested,” Christian told her. She knew already. “Why? What’s he done?” he asked. She didn’t know. “You mean they just walked in here and arrested him?” he said. “How can they do such a thing?” She looked at him. They can do anything, her look said. You know that.

  Laszlo thought too much and ate too little. The less he ate, the more he thought. One of the things he had too much time to think about was why General Oster did not respond to his signals in the Glasgow Herald. Oster must know he needed money. If he needed money he needed food. So Oster knew he was hungry. Laszlo brooded over this in the long bleak hours when he sat on a variety of park benches and watched the same grimy clouds drifting in from the Atlantic and tried to ignore his complaining stomach. Garlic was dead. The Abwehr must know that. How could they not know it? Six messages, six days, they must know. So why didn’t they answer? Tell him where to go, who to meet? They had agents, the agents had money, it was wrong to leave him waiting like this. Exposed. Isolated. In danger. Hungry. Poor.

  Laszlo couldn’t afford the cinema anymore. He had even given up buying the Herald; now he read the free copy in the public library. The seventeen pounds he stole from the farmer ran through his hands with frightening speed. Black-market clothing coupons bought in a pub cost him five pounds: far too much, Laszlo realized when it was too late to argue, the man had cheated him, had conned him blind; but he desperately needed these coupons, his socks were ruined and his underwear was foul. Then he went and spent too much on new socks and underwear and a shirt. His suitcase fell to bits in the rain and he had to get another. William Kenny’s identity card was good for two nights, maximum; after that the police were bound to be waiting for him to use it. Another man in another pub sold Laszlo a blank identity card for two pounds but it turned out to be useless because it had to be stamped with an official stamp, so he moved on and swapped it (plus a pound) for a very tattered RAF identity card that had once belonged to LAC Wallis, Peter John. It all cost money. Everything cost money. Even doing nothing cost money. Laszlo tried to save by not eating. He had the gun, he could always rob somebody. Trouble was he felt too depressed to be violent. He kept wondering where he had gone wrong. Maybe he hadn’t killed Garlic after all. The Abwehr had screwed up once already. They’d said Venezuela when it wasn’t Venezuela. How could it be Venezuela when there wasn’t anyone from Venezuela at the university? So maybe it wasn’t Bolivia either. Maybe it was really Brazil. Laszlo took out his scrap of paper. José-Carlos Coelho, 22A Buccleuch Avenue. Maybe this was Garlic. Laszlo thought about it all day every day until his poor brain didn’t know what to think.

  “Watch your step,” Oster warned. “He’s as jumpy as a cat.”

  It was midafternoon. Christian had lunched alone in the Abwehr restaurant; nobody seemed to want to share his table. Hardly anybody looked his way. Was it, he wondered, because he was known to be a friend of Domenik’s? He sat too long, not drinking the cup of ersatz coffee, while the room emptied. The same furious question kept presenting itself: Why Domenik? It was like a bereavement. Christian had always been successful in keeping his personal emotions separate from his professional life. As an Abwehr officer he knew that agents were expendable and their loss never saddened him as, for instance, he had been saddened by the death of a cousin, a tank commander killed du
ring the 1940 blitzkrieg. That loss had caused him great hurt. Karl was too full of life to die; it seemed all wrong. Now Christian felt much the same about Domenik: they had taken the wrong man. But he’s not dead, Christian told himself, and got the answer: He looked pretty dead, didn’t he? He looked finished. Done for.

  Oster’s secretary found him in the restaurant and hustled him upstairs. Oster was waiting in the Admiral’s anteroom. “I know, I know,” he said before Christian could open his mouth. “He was my friend too. But we’ve got more urgent problems to solve. Eldorado says he’s got flu. Zurich’s off.”

  They went in. Canaris was sitting on a corner of his desk, tossing a paperweight from hand to hand. It was the nosecone of a small shell and every time it thwacked into his palm his fingers squeezed it. Christian had the impression that Canaris might at any moment fling the thing, just to release some tension.

  “Those were not invitations to a garden-party,” Canaris said. “Those were orders to attend a meeting. Why is this man playing games?”

  “Travel shouldn’t be a problem,” Oster said. “He’s a neutral. Money’s no problem, heaven knows.”

  Christian felt it was his turn to say something. “There may be reasons why Berlin and Zurich are unattractive, sir. Reasons we don’t know.”

  “Unattractive,” Canaris said. “Unattractive.” He plainly disliked the word. “Where next? Monte Carlo? Biarritz? Do you think he might fancy a weekend in Venice?”

  An idea came to Christian like a trained hawk to the glove. “I think he might find it very difficult to refuse to go to Spain, sir,” he said.

  Canaris tipped his head back and examined the light fitting. “Yes,” he said. “Spain. If he won’t go to his own damned country there’s certainly something very wrong. Spain. Good. We’ll do it.”

  Christian left. Canaris tossed the nosecone to Oster and got off the desk. “Have you found out what it is yet?” he asked.

  “Treason. Plotting to overthrow the state.”

  Canaris winced. “What a fool.”

  “A holy fool.”

  “I didn’t hear that,” Canaris said, “because you didn’t say it.”

  For Docherty it was a day out, the first time he had been released from detention in Knightsbridge. For Luis it was a day out and a day off, a holiday from the endless grind of ghost-writing for a dozen ghosts. It was also a chance to escape another ghost. Julie was always at the back of his mind, always a silent listener to his thoughts as he got on with his life. They had separated without parting. Or maybe parted without separating. Either way it was an absurd and unsatisfactory outcome and it often infuriated him that she would not go away and leave him alone, and he told her so. “Get out!” he shouted at the silence. “Buzz off! Beat it!” Sometimes that did the trick and he felt so much better that he wished she were there so that he could tell her that he didn’t need her.

  An MI5 officer called Fletcher took Docherty and Luis to Paddington station. They had a reserved first-class compartment on the South Wales express. The day was fine and hot and the long dash across southern England was a succession of idyllic calendar pictures: men harvesting with horse-drawn reaping machines; women and children stacking the sheaves; fat herds of milk-cows eternally converting green into white; even some early autumn plowing, looking fresher than brown corduroy ever could. And always there were glimpses of airfields, army camps, mile after mile of military convoy on the roads.

  Docherty was good company, full of chat, and Fletcher had bought a basket of food and drink. They lunched as the train sped between the coal and the steel of South Wales—coal coming down from the high valleys, steel being forged in the coastal mills and changed trains at Swansea, then again at Carmarthen for a brisk final clatter through the valleys of Pembrokeshire to a place Luis had never heard of: Milford Haven. The air was brisk with the tang of the sea, lightly spiced with the stink of petrol. An RAF car drove them around a bay that was busy with oil tankers and put them on board an RAF launch which immediately went out and carved up the sea like an avenging knife through silk. Luis was enormously impressed. The boat sped past some towering cliffs and then strolled between rocks to the stone landing-stage built on to an island the size of a golf course if you didn’t mind losing a bucket of balls. “Skomer Island,” Fletcher said. “Bit of a walk, I’m afraid.”

  The ground was springy with purple heather and the air was alive with seabirds. “What are those?” Luis asked.

  “They might be puffins,” Docherty said. “Then again, they might not. What do you think, Fletcher?”

  “They’re either shearwaters or kittiwakes,” Fletcher said. “If they’re neither of those they must be something else. Owls, perhaps, or buzzards. I haven’t got my distance glasses on.”

  “So much for British Intelligence,” Docherty said. “If you go on like this you’ll lose India and never find it again.”

  A man was waiting for them at the north of the island, a local fisherman. He led them across the rocks to where a yellow oilskin was held down at the edges with stones. “It’s been in the water a long time,” he said, “and then the rocks knocked it about when it got washed up and the birds had a go at it too. Don’t expect too much.” He peeled the oilskin back.

  The warm stench of putrefaction arose and a dozen flies got sluggishly blown away by the breeze. The body looked broken and painful because the sea had jammed it between the rocks without consulting the joints and so everything was bent the wrong way. Half the face was missing. An ear had gone, and both eyes. The lower jawbone had become dislocated and this gave the mouth a yawning gape. Luis took one look and walked away.

  “I think it’s him,” Docherty said.

  “Not much to go on,” Fletcher warned.

  “The clothes are the same, the build, the hair. He had a funny little birthmark on his chest, just above the right nipple. Like an inkblot, it was.”

  Fletcher got a piece of wood and used it to lift the remains of the shirt. “Just like an inkblot,” he agreed. “I’ll take some photographs and then the medics can have him, and good luck to them.”

  “Take a snap of the back of his head, why don’t you?” Docherty suggested.

  As they returned to the launch, Luis asked Fletcher: “Was that absolutely necessary? I mean, did we have to come all this way for that?”

  “Yes we did. The body might have fallen apart if we had tried to move it.”

  Luis had little to say during the long journey back to London. As soon as he was in his flat he telephoned Freddy Garcia. “Very funny joke,” he said. “You told me we were going to see an old friend of Docherty’s. You didn’t say how old.”

  “Ah. A bit the worse for wear?”

  “How should I know? Half the bits were missing. I can still smell the other half. Any more jokes like that, you bastard, and I quit.” Luis was so angry his voice was shaking. “You don’t pay me enough to be pissed on like that.”

  “It wasn’t a joke, Luis. I thought it was time you had a reminder of how seriously the other side takes this business. You are accustomed to working with fictions. But the war is real, isn’t it? Sometimes it pays to remember that death is a hard imperative and not just a collection of words on a page.”

  Luis had been standing. Now he sat. “OK,” he said. “What’s happened?”

  “Another signal from Admiral Canaris. This time he wants you to meet him in Spain. Think about it. We’ll talk tomorrow. Goodnight.”

  Standing on a box in the narrow alley at the side of the shop, Laszlo slipped the blade of his knife under the window, found the catch, levered hard and snapped the blade. He could have wept. It didn’t happen like this in the movies. That knife had cost him a shilling in Woolworths. They didn’t buy their knives at Woolworths in the movies but he had been down to his last shilling and now even that was wasted.

  Think, think, he told himself. There’s always another way. The shop was right (a dingy little grocers on a quiet street) and the time was right (early-closing day)
and even the weather was helpful (gray and drizzling). The big problem was that his brain was fogged with hunger. Think, think. Forget this window. Look for another.

  There wasn’t another, but there was a door at the back and it swung open. Laszlo smelt food. He tiptoed in, holding his empty suitcase with both hands to avoid bumping into things. Brown linoleum flowed silently past a small stock-room and around a gloomy staircase, and took him into the shop. Food everywhere: beans, cheese, macaroni, marmalade, Spam, dried eggs … He took a tin of Spam off a shelf and the picture on the wrapper made his stomach leap like a puppy on a leash. Three tins of Spam went into the suitcase, four tins of Heinz beans, two jars of Keillers marmalade, six tins of Skipper sardines, two packets of dried eggs, a jar of plum jam, a tin of pineapple chunks. A man cleared his throat. Laszlo slammed the suitcase shut and caught a glimpse of a tall, gray-haired figure on the stairs, lifting an air rifle. It made a pop like a burst balloon as Laszlo dived behind a stack of packets of porridge oats, and the slug sang past his head. The man gave a harsh, guttural shout; the words were meaningless but the sense was obvious: Surrender! Laszlo couldn’t get the pistol out of his pocket. The lining was ripped, the gun was trapped in the fabric. A second balloon popped and a packet fell on his head, leaking oats. Laszlo was suddenly enraged. The world was a conspiracy against him—Woolworths, his pocket-lining, this packet of porridge. He jumped to his feet and began hurling things at the man: tins, jars, bottles, more tins, whatever he could reach, a barrage of groceries so furious that his target cowered away. A tin of corned beef whacked the man’s head and he went down in a heap. Laszlo discovered a row of bottles of tomato ketchup and flung them like stick grenades. The walls bled like a slaughterhouse.

  Enough was enough. Laszlo took his suitcase, unlocked the front door and locked it again from the outside. Even then the shopkeeper came staggering toward him, one hand to his streaming head. A passer-by stopped and gaped. “Get the police,” Laszlo said. “I’ve caught a burglar.” The passer-by ran one way. Laszlo walked the other.