Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

  Finally Stephanie squirmed away. “You don’t understand! I took an oath of loyalty and I am not a traitor.” She hit the word so hard that her voice cracked.

  “Of course you’re not. Nobody ever said you were. Traitors are garbage, everyone knows that. You think I’d be wasting my time here if I thought you were a traitor?” Julie went back to the bed, thinking That makes no sense, you’re talking baloney; but the important thing was to keep talking. “The only reason I’m here is I’ve got tremendous respect for you, Stephanie, and I know you want to do the right thing. I know you don’t want to hurt people. Innocent people.”

  “I took an oath,” she said stubbornly.

  “Sure you did. You gave your word. But you didn’t make any promises to Laszlo, did you? Did Laszlo take an oath of loyalty? How the hell could he? Laszlo’s Spanish, for God’s sake! Isn’t he?”

  Stephanie gave a weak, high-pitched grunt, and almost nodded.

  “Right! Damn right! The bastard’s Spanish! You think he cares about Hitler? About Germany? About you? Jesus Christ, Stephanie, he knew that Ferenc was your friend and look what he did to him. Blew half his brains out and tossed him in the Irish Sea!”

  Stephanie sniffed, and wiped her nose again. She picked up bits of torn photograph and blinked at them. “Why did he do that to Ferenc?” she asked.

  “Because he likes killing people. Listen, kid: you didn’t take any oath of loyalty to Laszlo. The guy is not your friend. He’s nobody’s friend. He’s scum. You’d better tell me where he’s gone and why, or I’m liable to come in here tomorrow with another set of pictures just like that only worse.”

  By now Stephanie couldn’t make out the details of the photographs because her eyes were blurred with tears, but she went on pretending to look.

  “Just say it,” Julie urged wearily. “You want to feel lousy about yourself for the rest of your life? Just say it.”

  “Glasgow. Laszlo went to Glasgow. He had to kill someone called Garlic. A student, a medical student from South America.” Stephanie crumpled the bits of photographs into a ball and kept squashing them as if she could reduce Ferenc’s memory to nothing.

  Julie took the brandy flask from her handbag and put it on the bed. She went out. Freddy Garcia was waiting. “Now we know why Canaris has been so keen to talk to Eldorado,” he said. His face was as stiff as cardboard.

  “It’s not possible,” she said. “How could Laszlo kill someone who doesn’t exist?”

  “In his usual way,” Freddy said. “Very, very clumsily, I expect. Incidentally, I thought you were quite brilliant in there.”

  “I don’t feel quite brilliant. I feel like I’ve blown all my fuses.” It was true. She looked totally spent.

  Sandy Hogg was fifty. He was a detective inspector in the Glasgow murder squad. Aside from the hours, which were brutal, he enjoyed his work. He would rather people didn’t murder each other, just as when he had been an ordinary policeman on the beat he would have preferred drunks not to become bellicose and try to punch him; but just as he had learned how to rap the drunks on their biceps with his truncheon, thus depriving their arms of the power to punch, so he had learned how to solve murders. Usually all it called for was common sense and persistence. Hogg had long since discovered that there is nothing clever about committing murder—anyone can do it: all you need is stupidity and selfishness—and there is certainly nothing glamorous about a corpse. Even when it hasn’t been disfigured or mutilated, its functions usually persist after death, in particular the work of the bowel and the bladder. Corpses soon stink.

  So Sandy Hogg was not impressed by murders or murderers. He put great faith in the statistic that most victims knew their killers. Unless there was evidence that pointed at a stranger, he made a list of all the friends and relatives and he questioned them, by the hour, by the day. He was good at this. Most people are bad liars and dreadful actors, especially when the howl of guilt is raging silently inside their heads. Most murders got cleared up fairly quickly. For the rest, Hogg accepted that some killers were never going to be caught: Glasgow was too big and too many people were just passing through: seamen, servicemen, deserters, derelicts. It was like a bad debt to a businessman: as long as there weren’t too many it didn’t bother him; after all the murderer might be in Nova Scotia or North Africa by now; might even be dead, killed in action.

  Nevertheless, the death of Rosa Maria Cabezas bothered him.

  There had been no reason for it. Or, at best, an absurdly inadequate reason if you accepted robbery because she couldn’t have had more than a few pounds in her purse, and even in wartime you didn’t shoot a woman in her own home for a couple of quid and then sleep in her bed (leaving some of your hairs to be found in her pajamas), take a bath, open her letters, make free with the kitchen (fingerprints everywhere) and finally send a check to pay her gas bill, a check that was so badly forged the cat could have seen through it. Not to mention the fact that he must have used a silencer, or the old lady in the flat below with the bad leg and the good ears would have heard the gunfire.

  A silencer. And he did the washing-up before he left. There were some funny folk in Glasgow but Sandy Hogg had never before met a murderer who stayed the night and did the dishes. When he was told that a fellow in MI5 was on the phone from London, asking about any recent death involving a South American medical student, he took the call.

  “There was a South American lady doctor shot dead a couple of weeks since,” he said. “Name of Cabezas. Used to be a medical student here and then she qualified. Is it her you want?”

  “Venezuelan?” Freddy Garcia said.

  “Bolivian.”

  “Ah.” Freddy flicked through his diary. Two weeks ago. That fitted. “May I ask what the motive was?”

  “I wish I knew. Not rape, and robbery’s unlikely. It was a very peculiar crime.” Hogg told him about it. “Does any of that ring any bells with you?”

  “The silencer speaks loudly. Tell me: was the ammunition foreign?”

  “It was.”

  “Then I think you should be looking for a man called Laszlo Martini, although he certainly won’t be using that name.” He gave Hogg a description. “Of course he may not be in Glasgow any longer … There’s something very wrong here. We know he was looking for a person from Venezuela, specifically from Venezuela. That’s all he had to go on—a medical student from Venezuela. I can see how he might think the student had become a doctor but not a Bolivian doctor. That must be a mistake, a blunder.”

  “You’re telling me that this man came to Glasgow to kill a Venezuelan student.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’d better look to see if we have any, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. Yes, indeed. Straightaway.”

  “Thank you for your help, Mr. Garcia.”

  Hogg telephoned the university and was transferred to Student Registration, where he got Mrs. Ogilvy. “Would you happen to know if there is anyone studying at the university who comes from Venezuela?” he asked.

  “There is not,” she said promptly.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “I checked it just the other day.”

  “Now why did you do that, Mrs. Ogilvy?”

  She suddenly remembered why, and stiffened with guilt; but it was too late, she was so deep in the mire that she might as well go on. “They asked me,” she said wretchedly. “What I mean is, he asked me … People are on the phone to us all the time, you know, it never stops ringing … He said the Ministry of Labor wanted—”

  “Stay there,” Hogg told her. “I’m on my way round.”

  Santander survived the Civil War more or less intact. Not important enough to be a serious port, like Bilbao, and not unlucky enough to be at a crossroads, like Guernica, it missed the worst excitement, the blood and the bombs, for which the city fathers were deeply grateful. Then, in 1941, the place had the sort of fire the Luftwaffe would have been proud of starting. Half of Santander was still gutted and blackened when A
dmiral Canaris and his staff landed in a Heinkel of the Spanish air force at the airfield across the bay. The fire was one reason that they moved into a villa a couple of miles outside town.

  It was backed by cool pinewoods and faced a beach that emerged newly scrubbed by the Atlantic twice a day. This was done for the benefit of the Admiral, who went riding on the beach and enjoyed the luxury of a clean track.

  On their second day at Santander, Oster and Christian walked down the sand as Canaris came cantering home. They met at the water’s edge. Oster handed him a piece of paper. “Just been decoded, sir,” he said. (Canaris had brought an Abwehr radio team with him.)

  It was a list of names—fourteen names. Canaris read them at a glance. “It had to be,” he said. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that they’ve been shot out of hand?”

  “Oh, they won’t be shot for a long time yet, sir, you can be sure of that. The SD will squeeze them until the pips squeak.”

  “In that case there will be more names.” Canaris nudged the horse into a walk and they strolled beside him. “I should have seen it coming,” he said. “I should have kept a closer eye on Domenik. Him and his damn filing cabinets. No doubt Himmler is thoroughly pleased with himself.”

  “It’s certainly a good time to be a long way from Berlin,” Oster said. “Shame about Domenik’s friends, but after all they are his friends. I mean, what Domenik got up to in his spare time is none of our business, is it?”

  Canaris laughed, and shook the reins. He took off at a gallop through the shallow water. The sun made tiny rainbows in the splashes.

  “He seems to be treating it very calmly,” Christian said.

  “Oh, well.” Oster skipped sideways to dodge the last lunge of a dying wave. “It’s out of our hands.”

  “But the Fuehrer’s bound to hear about it.”

  “I wonder. Himmler has ambitions too, you know. He may not like the Admiral, but if a vacancy occurs at the top, Himmler would sooner have Canaris inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” Oster saw Christian suppress his distaste. “Old Red Indian saying,” he explained. “I got it from Domenik, so it must be true.”

  All across London, air-raid sirens uncoiled their wretched noise and let it climb to a flat howl. “Not today, Hitler,” the Director muttered, “I’m too busy.” He was at his desk, reading a handwritten memo that Freddy Garcia had just given him. “This is dreadful,” he said. “I don’t suppose we can stop him?”

  “Too late, sir. From Lisbon onwards, we don’t know how he’s traveling or where he’s staying.” Freddy hesitated. “I suppose we might just conceivably grab him at Santander—”

  “No, no. The place must be crawling with Abwehr by now.”

  Gloomy pause. The sirens lost interest and sank, gently moaning, back into their shells.

  “If we can’t stop him, let’s face the consequences,” the Director said, “which are that Canaris asks a lot of ugly questions and Eldorado hasn’t got any beautiful answers. Bang goes the network. Bang goes Eldorado. Literally bang, very likely.”

  “That’s the worst that can happen, sir. It needn’t come to that if we can just get word to Eldorado about Garlic and what this blundering idiot Martini has done to him. Then maybe Eldorado can still talk his way out of it.”

  “Get word, you say. How? Use somebody from the Madrid office?”

  “Afraid not, sir. Wouldn’t work.”

  “He wouldn’t trust them?”

  “Not if he didn’t know them. He’s very suspicious.”

  “So who does he trust? Templeton? You?”

  “Templeton’s in Cairo, and we know that the Abwehr knows my face from long ago. If I show myself in a little spot like Santander …”

  “Yes, I see. So that’s that, is it? Those he trusts we can’t send, and those we can send he won’t trust. We’re snookered, or stymied, or whatever the word is. I never played tennis.”

  “Of course, there is someone we could send,” Garcia said.

  The Director got up and wandered over to the window. The glass was crisscrossed with anti-blast tape, and he picked at a loose end like a bored child. “What you are about to suggest smacks of all the second-feature movies I’ve sat through while I was waiting for the big picture. Hero ends up in deadly danger, and who should help him out of it but his trusty girlfriend.”

  “Ex-girlfriend, actually.”

  “It’s still a melodramatic cliché, isn’t it?”

  “Life is a cliché. War is a cliché. I mean to say, sir, clichés are clichés because they keep on happening, not because they’re unusual.”

  Away to the south, tiny black spots speckled the sky at enormous height. The Director stared and squinted, but he couldn’t make out enemy aircraft among the shellbursts. “Nuisance raid,” he said. “A couple of Huns, a brace of bombs, and more toil for the gravedigger.” The booming of the guns at last reached them.

  “There you are, then,” Garcia said. “Another cliché.”

  “What if she won’t go?” the Director asked. “Ex, you say.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Garcia said. “How best to present our case. Why she should care enough to go anywhere near an Abwehr reunion. There are three powerful arguments which I could put to her. There’s the military one: the network is a crucial weapon that could end the war more quickly and so on. Massive saving of life. A huge reprieve for tens of thousands of children as yet unborn—”

  “Hit that thought hard,” the Director said. “Remember the maternal instinct. Strongest force on earth.”

  “Right. Then there’s the idealistic argument. This is a turning-point in the crusade against Fascism.”

  “Too damn right it is.”

  “This is her chance not just to help win the war but to make the world a decent place to live in.”

  “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the Director said, and cleared his throat. “A land fit for clichés to live in.”

  “And finally there’s the personal angle. Eldorado’s not such a bad bloke and all that. Frankly, sir, I’ll have to play that one by ear.”

  The Director came back to his desk. “Why don’t you try the personal angle first? Tell her you know it’s all over between them. If that’s true, you’ve reinforced her independence. Americans are very keen on independence. If it isn’t, you’ve got a head start.”

  “I’ll go and see her now, sir.” Garcia turned to leave.

  “There’s one option we haven’t discussed,” the Director said. “Eldorado could be eliminated from the cast of characters before he comes up against Canaris.”

  “Killed,” Garcia said.

  “We’ve done it before. It has a certain logic: an Abwehr agent meets his death at the hands of who else but British Intelligence? That’s how the other side would see it. And with a bit of luck we might even be able to keep the network going. Perhaps Docherty could run it.” He shrugged. “It’s an option. But don’t tell the lady.”

  Garcia gave the bleakest of smiles and went out. He found Julie Conroy waiting in his office. “Are you going to Santander?” she asked him.

  “I can’t.”

  “Then I’d better go. The silly bastard isn’t going to trust anyone else, is he?”

  “No.” Freddy cleared his throat. “It really is worth the risk, you know. If we can save the network we can shorten—”

  “Sure, sure. Save the patriotic horseshit, Freddy. Just get me on a plane.”

  That process was relatively straightforward. Somebody important got bumped from the next commercial flight to Lisbon and Julie took his place. The airliner landed at dawn; an embassy official led her to a private plane, a de Havilland Rapide owned by a Portuguese millionaire whose family had sold port to England for centuries and who just happened to be flying to Madrid. Another embassy official met her at Madrid airport and drove her to the railway station. Nobody wanted to see her passport. Nobody even said very much. She was simply transported with all the speed and del
icacy of urgent medical supplies or perishable flowers. By early afternoon she was sitting in the restaurant car of the Santander express, watching the Madrid suburbs slide by.

  She saw the waiter’s reflection in the window, waiting for her to order, and she summoned up all the Spanish she’d forgotten. What was “hello?” Couldn’t remember. She smiled instead and he smiled back. “I’d like a really good steak,” she said. “Bistec, poco asado. Con una ensalada.” Amazing how the words came back if you didn’t try too hard.

  Five hundred and sixteen kilometers to Santander. Say three hundred miles. According to the timetable, just under nine hours. Obviously “express” was a relative term. But the bistec, when it came, was good; and without being asked he brought her a bottle of vino tinto that made English beer taste like a penance. Later there was torta and fruta and queso, and then un poco de café. Outside, the plains and prairies of Castile shivered under the heat. There were worse ways of traveling to Santander. The only problem was that, eventually, you arrived.

  “It doesn’t fit properly.” José-Carlos Coelho tapped his foot on a little pool of water on the linoleum. “It never did fit. It’s a cheap door, the rain blows in. You can see.”

  “Can’t you get the lock changed?” Sandy Hogg asked. “I mean, look at it …”

  “I agree, it’s pathetic. Useless. I’m not the owner, Inspector. I just rent the house. The owner’s in the army. Abroad, I think.”

  “At least put some bolts on the door. Top and bottom. Same at the back.” They walked through the house. “I’m not at all happy about these window-catches either,” Hogg said. “Anyone with a thin screwdriver or a strong penknife could …” He shrugged.

  “Let him try,” Coelho said. “I’ll help him through the window and then I’ll break his neck.”

  Hogg looked at him. Coelho was two inches taller and the floorboards creaked when he walked. “No, you musn’t do that, sir,” he said. “There are legal limits in this country. Reasonable force is all you can use. I have to tell you that.”