Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

  “This isn’t the Wellington,” Julie said. It sounded foolish.

  “Perhaps,” Gomez said. He drove in.

  The moon had not yet risen when Luis was taken to the villa. The first thing that surprised him when Brigadier Christian came to fetch him was that Christian had a gun. It was perfectly obvious: he was wearing a lightweight linen jacket and the butt of the pistol was plain to see when he put his hands in his pockets and the jacket fell open. “Goodness,” Luis said. “Are we in danger?”

  “I’m not,” Christian said. “You might be.” And that was all he said. They drove to the villa without speaking. Luis did not enjoy the sight of the gates, or the walls. Too big, too serious. The car crunched along a gravel drive that looked as if it got raked smooth after every use and it drove into a garage big enough to play basketball in. Luis got out and met his second surprise. A man with fingers like a double-bass player searched him for weapons. Luis had been searched once or twice during the Civil War, when sentries at checkpoints patted him to see if he rattled. This man tested every part of his body except his head and his feet, and he probed the sensitive areas with professional vigor. “Don’t worry, they’re all there,” Luis said. “I counted them only this morning.” The man ignored him.

  Christian led him through the villa. It was built on several levels: they went down and then up, and up again, until they reached a large semi-circular room whose straight side opened on to a dark terrace that overlooked the sea. Here was the third and final surprise. The room was empty of furniture except for a high stool, standing in the center. The stool was spotlit. The effect was theatrical.

  Christian snapped his fingers and pointed to the stool. He went on to the terrace and was lost in the darkness. Luis felt irritated. He resented being ordered about like this. He picked up the stool and flung it into the fireplace. Then he sat on the floor, under the spotlights, crosslegged, and yawned.

  For three minutes nothing happened. He yawned again. The spotlights were pleasantly warm. Somewhere far away a gull made its high, querulous call. The terrace must overlook the sea.

  “Tell us about Garlic,” said a voice from the terrace, not Christian’s.

  “No,” Luis said, flatly but politely.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you don’t need to know.” He thought hard: Why should they be interested in Garlic? They like Garlic. They gave him a bonus. “Simple security,” he said.

  “Well, let me tell you something about Garlic. Garlic is a liar and a traitor.”

  “Uh-huh.” Luis tried to locate the voice, but the terrace was too black; he could make out nothing. “What has he lied about and whom has he betrayed?” He was quite proud of that whom.

  “We have identified six major reports from Garlic which are contradicted by other intelligence sources—directly and completely contradicted.”

  “Major reports,” Luis said. “Well, Garlic has certainly produced plenty of those. Convoys, troop movements, aircraft developments …”

  “Last September.” That was Christian. “Garlic sent some convoy sailing dates, out of the Clyde. But he wasn’t even in Glasgow, was he?”

  Luis braced his stomach muscles. “Wasn’t he?”

  “The medical school got sent to Newcastle while three unexploded bombs were dug out of their building. Six weeks, that took. The students were away for six weeks.”

  “Not Garlic” Stout denial, always the best defense. “Not Garlic. Garlic stayed.”

  “Really?” The first voice again. “Why?”

  “Mumps. He got mumps.” There was suppressed laughter. “I’m glad you find it amusing,” he said stiffly. “I can assure you that Garlic didn’t. Even so, it didn’t stop him working for us.”

  “Was he not confined to bed?”

  “There is such a thing as the telephone. And he had visitors. Garlic has a wide circle of friends.”

  “But he still got the sailing dates all wrong. And the convoy numbers.”

  “No, he got them right. Unfortunately … what with the strain of the work and the effects of his fever … Garlic made a simple error. He confused the dates with the numbers. He said Convoy 12 would sail on the twenty-first, instead of Convoy 21 sailing on the twelfth.” Luis shrugged. “An agent must depend on his memory.” Luis gripped his ankles to stop his hands trembling.

  “You should have reported the error,” Christian said.

  “I did. Madrid didn’t acknowledge.” Luis was afraid his poker-face might crack, so he looked into one of the spotlights. Now he could squint and grimace freely. “That happens quite often,” he said.

  “And then Garlic went off to the Scottish Highlands,” the first voice said, “presumably to convalesce.”

  “Is that what he said? I don’t remember.”

  “He said he saw a lot of Commando training.”

  “Yes, that sounds familiar.”

  “According to Haystack,” Christian said, “no foreigner is permitted to travel more than thirty miles outside his place of residence without an official pass.”

  “Well?” Luis raised his eyebrows and furrowed his brow like a schoolmaster trying to winkle a response from a dull class. He wrapped his arms around his legs and rested his chin on his knees and waited. Bloody Haystack, he thought, that was a damn-fool thing for Haystack to say. I’ll kill the bastard.

  “Well?” the first voice said.

  “You surprise me,” Luis said, and immediately surprised himself by inventing a good excuse. “Do you really expect Garlic to be frightened by that sort of regulation? He ignored it, of course. He took the risk and he came back with the intelligence.” That silenced them. “Garlic is a brave man,” Luis said. “You know, sometimes I think you have forgotten what courage it takes to be a good agent.” He felt himself developing an indignant pride, and shut up before he spoiled it.

  Christian said, “That’s not all we found—”

  “But it’s enough, I think,” the first voice said. “It’s all academic anyway. Was Garlic fit and well when you left?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still reporting regularly and fruitfully?”

  “Yes.”

  “As brave and resourceful as ever, in fact?”

  Luis began to feel like a rabbit dazzled by headlights: there was no way to turn. “Yes,” he said.

  “He certainly deserves a medal for resourcefulness,” the voice said evenly, “because we had him shot dead a couple of weeks ago.”

  *

  The same man who had searched Luis now searched Julie, using the same stiff and steely fingers. “Too late,” she told him. “I swallowed the stolen pearls an hour ago.” But a tiny stammer almost sabotaged the word “pearls.” The man ignored what she said and pointed to an open door.

  They walked along a silent corridor, across a small courtyard with a softly bubbling fountain, and into a long room that held little more than a refectory table. There was no sound apart from their footsteps. He showed her into another, smaller room and shut the door behind him as he went out. Shut it and locked it. The lock made a soft click, no louder than a broken neck. “Hey!” she shouted. “What’s going on? Where’s Cabrillo? Gomez brought me here to meet Cabrillo!”

  The walls soaked up her voice and gave back nothing.

  “That’s a dumb thing to say, dummy,” she said. “You’ve handled this all wrong and now you’re up the creek.” The outlook was fairly grim. What it all came down to was she had been dumb enough to take on the Abwehr singlehanded and she had lost. In fact when she thought of the way she had sought out defeat by trusting Gomez, disgust and despair combined to drain her of strength. She went and sat on the floor, in a corner, and waited for the world to do its worst to her.

  After a while she saw herself as if from the middle of the room, and she knew what she looked like: Stephanie Schmidt. One of nature’s failures. Soggy with self-pity. The image forced her to her feet. What though the field be lost? All is not lost. John Milton, a line from something she’d read
at school. It had stuck in her memory, waiting for an emergency to drag it out. Well, this was an emergency and a half. All was not lost; there was still a slim chance she could find Luis and tell him Garlic was dead. Two seconds: that was all she needed. Get out, find Luis, tell him. Now she had a plan, or at least a purpose. Now she felt better.

  The room was a bedroom. At least there was a single bed, maybe more of a couch with a yellow throw over it. She peeled back the throw and found sheets and a pillow. Might be useful. What else? No windows. Light hanging from the ceiling. Couple of upright chairs; small chest of drawers, all empty; mirror fixed to the wall; fireplace, big but empty. Strip of carpet. Wash-basin. And a piece of cord that looped around a brass shackle fixed to the wall and stretched up to the ceiling. She undid the cord from the shackle and experimented, tugging. High overhead a roller blind speedily rolled itself up and revealed the night.

  Skylight.

  Hope blossomed and withered. The skylight offered a possible way out except that it was impossible because it was too high, at least eleven or twelve feet above the floor.

  Julie walked around the room, studying the skylight from every angle. It was always out of reach. She put one of the chairs on the chest and climbed on to the chair. Shaky and short. Far short.

  Forget it. Try the fireplace.

  It was one of your typical, traditional Spanish fireplaces, wide enough at the base to roast a young American but tapering fast. She crouched, eased her head and shoulders under the granite mantel and cautiously stood upright. The air smelled thick and flavored with sulfur. She looked up. Black as a charcoal-burner’s hat. She felt upward with both hands. The chimney was wider than she was. A dusty dribble of soot tumbled on to her face.

  She got out, and put one of the chairs in the fireplace. The chair was too big: she couldn’t squeeze past it. She took it out, got back inside and hooked the chair forward with her foot. When she stood on it and reached up, she found that there were projecting bits of stonework to be grabbed. Even better, the chimney was narrow enough for her to press outward with her arms and almost take her weight on her elbows. Maybe if she did the same with her feet …

  She got down again. There was a lot of chimney to be climbed and it wasn’t going to be kind to her elbows. There was bound to be a lot of soot and her eyes weren’t going to like that. She was wearing a linen two-piece: skirt and short coat. Both came off. She tore a bedsheet into strips and bound them around her elbows. Tying the knots was difficult: she had to take one end in her teeth. She kicked her shoes off, got rid of her stockings, flexed her toes. There had been a boyfriend, back in her days at the University of California, who was a rockclimber. He had explained to her the technique for climbing a natural chimney in a rockface without using a rope. You pressed your feet against opposite sides, took your weight on your arms which were likewise braced and went up … how? Somehow. It could be done, that was the main thing. The boyfriend had done it, and he had failed archaeology and anthropology, a gut course so simpleminded that even football players sometimes passed. Climbing chimneys couldn’t be too difficult.

  She looked at the chimney and tried not to think of the filth and the blackness, the probably narrowing space, the possible spiders. Julie was not keen on things like cramped caves or tiny tunnels; in fact just thinking about them was like a free horror movie. Don’t stand there, she told herself, do it!

  She did the thing with the chair again. Standing on the chair she tied a broad strip of bedsheet over her eyes to keep the soot out. Then she reached up and fumbled until her fingers found a couple of hand-holds. She lifted herself off the chair and tried to press the soles of her feet against the opposite sides; she couldn’t. Her toes scrabbled against one wall and her heel scraped the other but the damn chimney was just too wide. Also it sloped too much. She had to let go, the chair rocked violently, panic attacked her, she ripped off the blindfold, lost her balance, banged her head, ended up straddling the chair and cursing as she waited for the pain to drain away.

  More height. She needed more height.

  She dragged a drawer out of the chest and placed it, upside-down, across the seat of the chair. Not enough. She laid a second drawer on top of the first. What the hell, she thought, and added the third. It made a shaky heap of wood when she dragged it after her into the chimney, but it still stood. Not for long, however. She got her feet on to the seat of the chair and tried to kneel on the top drawer but she could feel it slipping and suddenly everything overbalanced. It all went over in a clumsy crash.

  Cut lip. She sucked the blood as she picked up the pieces and worked out how to do it better next time.

  Turn the chair around so that its back was tight against the back of the chimney. Now at least it couldn’t tip over backward. Obvious, really.

  Julie stacked the drawers on the seat. She stood on the front of the seat. She got one knee on the top drawer and levered herself up until she was standing. She tied the blindfold. The thin wood under her feet creaked, and blood trickled down her chin and fell with a faint spattering. Her hands reached up and found something to grasp. Her arms took her weight. She swung her legs and this time the soles of her feet pressed hard against the chimney walls. It worked. She felt as secure as if she were clamped in place. She began to climb.

  *

  “Shot dead, you say,” Luis said.

  “Stone dead.”

  Luis’s mind was hunting back through what it could remember of the Garlic file, desperate for a hint of an explanation. “That was a curious way to express your thanks,” he said softly. “Didn’t you reward Garlic with a bonus quite recently?”

  “No. We asked you if Garlic deserved one.”

  “For the report on OWCH, which was excellent and it certainly deserved a bonus. I was pleased to see—”

  “Garlic was dead when we made the inquiry,” the voice interrupted. “We knew he was dead. We wanted to find out whether or not you knew.”

  Luis needed an answer, an explanation. He had nothing. His heart was jerking and jolting. His face was an old photograph, badly crumpled and flattened out. Surely the watchers on the terrace must see he was guilty as sin.

  “Did you know?” That was Christian’s voice. “If you knew, why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Excuse me.” Luis made a little show of getting to his feet. All he had to offer was the truth. If he told them that, they would send for their polished jackboots and kick him to death. “A touch of cramp,” he said, massaging his right calf. He strolled to the fireplace and picked up the stool. Stout denial would do no good. If they were wrong, he must come up with an alternative. He had about three yards, or ten seconds, to find a good, persuasive reason that they were wrong to say We knew he was dead.

  He trailed the stool behind him. Then he won an extra six or seven seconds by pretending the floor was uneven, seeking out a spot where the stool didn’t rock. But finally he sat on the bloody silly thing and cleared his throat.

  “Why are you keeping us waiting?” That was Christian again, with a hint of gloat in his voice.

  They knew he was dead, Luis thought and instantly saw the flaw in it as clearly as if it had been red-inked. “I operate on the principle of need-to-know,” he said. “It has helped me to survive. I have been wondering just how much you need to know. As little as possible, I hope.”

  “Get on with it.”

  Luis hooked his feet on the top rung of the stool and linked his hands around his knees. “You knew he was dead,” he told the darkness, “because you had him shot. Am I right?” He cocked his head. No answer. “Your killer deserves a medal for marksmanship,” he said, “because Garlic is a woman.”

  He was a magician. He had whipped his silk handkerchief off the birdcage and the canary was no longer there. The audience was in a slight state of shock. Their silence was total; he could hear, for the first time, the silky rustle of distant surf. By God, Luis promised himself, I’ll be an actor when this war is over and I’ll act the socks off all of you.
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  The shock wore off. There were murmurings in the night. Then the voice which was not Christian’s said: “Garlic’s sex is not relevant.”

  Luis allowed himself the luxury of a twisted grin, which they could see, to balance his twisted guts, which they could not. “Garlic would not agree,” he said.

  “Do you deny that Garlic is dead?”

  “She was very much alive last week. No sign of bullet-holes.” More murmurings.

  “May I ask a question?” Luis slowly drew the tip of his forefinger down the left side of his jaw and up the right. “Did your alleged assassin report that he had shot a man?”

  Oster told Canaris: “It was a coded message. Mission accomplished, that’s all it said. That’s all we needed.”

  “Correct me if I am mistaken,” Luis said. His fingers found an earlobe and stroked it, which felt wonderfully comforting. “You sent your agent to shoot a man, is that right? He claims to have shot Garlic, who is undoubtedly not a man. Yet your agent did not report this surprising information. Therefore it seems to me very likely that he did not shoot Garlic”

  “You are mistaken.” This was Christian, and from the tone of his voice he had recovered his confidence. “We did not send our agent to kill a man, we sent him to kill a Venezuelan medical student at the University of Glasgow School of Medicine. He signaled success.”

  “Then either he lied, or he killed the wrong Venezuelan medical student.”

  Oster had been waiting for that. “He killed all the Venezuelan medical students,” he said.

  “That’s … incredible.”

  “In war many things are incredible,” Christian said. “You, Cabrillo, are hard to believe. What does it matter if Garlic was male, female or hermaphrodite? We know that he, she or it is dead. So what is your motive in trying to persuade us the opposite is true? How does your behavior serve the Third Reich?”