Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

  With a full belly again, he began to think more clearly. There were hours and hours available for thought, while his hands and arms did the work of a machine. Always his thoughts drew him to the same conclusion. He had killed the wrong person. Dr. Rosa Maria What’s-her-name could not have been Garlic. That explained the Abwehr’s silence. They had not responded to his signals in the Glasgow Herald because … Well, why hadn’t they?

  It had taken Laszlo a long time to work that out. He had been sitting on an upturned bucket, taking out eyes, when the truth, the enormously obvious truth, burst upon him so suddenly that he pronged his hand. The next few dozen potatoes were tinged pink. Laszlo was too absorbed in his revelation to notice. The Abwehr had not responded because they knew that Garlic was still alive. How did they know? Because they were still getting reports from Garlic! It was dazzlingly, blindingly obvious. By its silence, the Abwehr was sending Laszlo the loudest possible signal.

  Next day he quit his job. He had had it for nearly a week. He hated the sight and smell and feel of potatoes. He was operating the chipping machine when two drunken sailors standing in the queue began making fun of him. They made obscene jokes which he didn’t completely understand but he knew enough to be insulted. Nobody in the shop told the sailors to be quiet. Laszlo quit on the spot. He took his pay, he took his suitcase with his gun locked inside it, and he walked away.

  He kept walking until he reached Buccleuch Avenue. By then it was about four in the afternoon. He walked past 22A and gave it only the briefest glance. Nothing had changed. He walked to the end of the road, turned, walked back. Now that he had money he knew exactly what to do. He had to kill the other Garlic, the real Garlic, this one, and signal Oster via the Herald that Happy Days Are Here Again, Just You Wait And See. Or something like that.

  He had stopped at a public lavatory and taken from his suitcase the cavernous shoulder-holster and the pistol with the silencer like a beer bottle. He felt a different man with that comforting weight under his left armpit. He strolled up to the front door of 22A but ignored it and followed the path around the side of the building, glancing in at windows and also secretly watching the next-door houses for signs of life. Nothing showed, either way. He reached the back door and it was open. Only an inch, but so what? Open is open. Laszlo touched it and it swung wide. Creaked wide.

  Now that scared him. It was a weekday afternoon, he expected what’s-his-name … Coelho … to be at work or college or somewhere.

  Unless he’d gone out and forgotten to shut the back door.

  Laszlo took a pace inside so that he could bring out his pistol without the neighbors seeing it.

  The house was silent: no ticking clocks, no dripping taps, no simmering saucepans. It felt empty. Laszlo was convinced it was empty. He walked in.

  The first room was the kitchen. Half a loaf on the breadboard, a sink full of dirty cups and plates, spent matches scattered on and round the gas stove. Smell of kippers.

  Opposite the kitchen was a big bedroom-cum-study. Books and papers everywhere, desk, wardrobe, single bed by the window. The bed had been made and somebody had been lying on it. The imprint of a body was clear. Laszlo put his hand on the bed. It was still warm. That shocked him far more than the open back door.

  He searched the rest of the house in a rush of fright. Guest bedroom: only a camp-bed and a gaping cabin-trunk. Bathroom: empty. That left the front room. He kicked the door open and found no enemies to shoot. He looked behind the sofa and the curtains. Nothing. Nobody. Nil.

  Laszlo walked slowly back to the passageway that linked the rooms and he thought hard. He was very unhappy; something here was extremely wrong. Those bedclothes were warm. How long did bedclothes stay warm after someone got off the bed? Ten minutes? Two minutes? It made a difference. He was beginning to hate this house. He hurried back into the bedroom and felt the bedclothes again. They were cool. Damn it, they were nearly cold! So Garlic had been lying here only minutes ago. Now he was gone. Where could he have gone? There was nowhere to go.

  The bed was covered by a large quilted bedspread. It reached almost to the floor. Laszlo took a handful in his left fist and ripped the bedspread away. Papers fluttered in the breeze; a china lamp got knocked over and it shattered like a small bomb. Laszlo stood, legs apart, braced for action. No action offered itself.

  He kneeled and peered under the bed. Empty. Dark but empty. He sat on his heels and smiled in relief. The whole house really was empty. A silky slithering made him turn his head and he took a thunderous blow in front of his right ear, a blow that smashed his smile into a gaping, lopsided grin and lifted him off his knees and sent him skidding on his rump across the shiny linoleum and thudding into the wall. Pain flowered hugely, hotter and redder than any blast furnace, and it faded as fast to a wretched semi-darkness. When he could feel again there was a burning balloon inside his head and it was threatening to burst and split his skull. He had to open his mouth and let the balloon escape but his mouth was full of splintered rubbish. Whenever he breathed, he choked. When he choked, pain savaged his broken face.

  The blow came from José-Carlos Coelho. He had been lying on his bed, reading a pathology textbook, when he caught a glimpse of this stunted, bearded stranger in his back garden. At once he rolled off, landing softly on his hands and stockinged feet, and slid under the bed. Half a minute later the bed-springs above him moved as Laszlo prodded. Laszlo muttered and mumbled, and then ran from the room. Coelho took a chance, slid out from under the bed and hid behind the door. When Laszlo came back, Coelho saw the gun and knew he would probably have only one chance; so as soon as Laszlo sat back on his heels Coelho made two huge strides and punched Laszlo so hard that Coelho came away with bits of beard and skin on his knuckles, cursing at the pain. He had boxed as a heavyweight for the university for three years, but he had never hit anyone as hard as that, especially without gloves. When Julie Conroy socked Luis Cabrillo she was exasperated and she didn’t know how to make a proper fist. When José-Carlos Coelho punched Laszlo Martini he wanted to take his head off with one good shot. Laszlo’s head would never be the same again. His jaw was broken in three places and the splintered rubbish inside his mouth was bits of teeth.

  Coelho found the pistol and stuffed it in a pocket. He put on his shoes. He kicked Laszlo across the bedroom and into the bathroom. He closed the lavatory seat and dumped Laszlo on it. Laszlo wavered and moaned. He dribbled a mixture so foul that even Coelho the pathologist did not want to see it. Coelho got an old necktie and fastened Laszlo’s hands behind him; then he picked up Laszlo by his armpits. He made him stand on the seat and he knotted Laszlo’s hands to the ring in the end of the lavatory chain. “Don’t fall or you’ll break your arms,” he warned. He took the key from the bathroom door and locked it on the outside. He went in search of a telephone and the police.

  Laszlo did fall. He fainted. He did not weigh a lot but all that there was of him snatched at the chain with a sudden shock that was too much for the elderly plumbing. The cistern was already cracked; now it split, fell apart, dumping gallons of cold water on or around Laszlo’s body and then continuing to pump water over it.

  Laszlo recovered a bit. He crawled to the other end of the bathroom, dragging behind him the chain with a jagged chunk of cistern still attached. He knelt, and gripped the chunk between his heels, and began sawing at the necktie around his wrists. It was the sort of thing he’d seen done on the movies dozens of times. It always worked. The necktie was old and frayed. Laszlo didn’t care how much skin went with it. He hacked hard.

  When the police car arrived, water was pulsing under the bathroom door and Laszlo had gone. José-Carlos Coelho looked at the bathroom window in disbelief. It was the size of a shoebox. “Nobody could get through that,” he said. “Could they?” He was talking to himself. The police were off and running.

  “I don’t believe any of it,” the Director said. Freddy Garcia looked startled. “Not your stuff, Freddy,” the Director said, waving a thick typescript. “I b
elieve all this. You’ve debriefed the pair of them very well, it’s a model of its kind. I don’t believe what Canaris says. I think Canaris is lying. I think he’s got a racket going. That’s the only way this makes sense.”

  “What in particular is Canaris lying about?”

  “Well, his knowledge of the Double-Cross System, for a start. He wants Eldorado to believe that the Abwehr knows we’ve turned all their agents, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Most, not all.”

  “All right, most. But we know perfectly well the Abwehr has the greatest confidence in those agents. Has had for years. Many of their reports go straight to the top. We know that for a fact. Canaris wouldn’t let that go on happening if he knew the contents were counterfeit, would he? I mean to say, the man’s not a suicide.”

  “Could he be a peacemaker, sir? Eldorado says he rambled a bit, got slightly emotional, but the general drift was clear enough.”

  “I’m sure it was. Ceasefire in the west, keep up the good work in the east. Right? I’ve heard that song before. Altruistic Germans are constantly popping up in highminded places like Berne or Stockholm or the Vatican and offering us painless ways of avoiding an invasion of Europe. Dust in the eyes, old chap, dust in the eyes.”

  “But Canaris claims there is now a genuine anti-Nazi resistance party, or … Well, not a party, more of a group, or—”

  “Or two men and a dog. Listen: if they hate their dreadful Fuehrer so much, why don’t they simply shoot him?”

  “Canaris says he needs—”

  “Canaris says, Canaris says. Suppose we give him what he asks for. Suppose we use Eldorado to pump up the Allied threat. What will be the consequence? Militarily?”

  “They’ll reinforce their defenses in the west,” Freddy said.

  “We don’t want that. That’s the last thing we want. What chance will our invasion stand if Canaris persuades Hitler to stuff France full of troops?”

  Freddy flicked thoughtfully through his own copy of the debriefing. “Even assuming he was lying, sir, why on earth would Canaris tell Eldorado that he knew some of his agents had been turned? Where’s his racket?”

  “Of course he’s lying about it.” The Director put his feet on the desk: for him, a wildly extravagant gesture. “If Canaris isn’t lying then we might as well all shut up shop and go home. I’ll tell you what I think happened. Canaris got badly shaken by the Garlic affair. First, somebody on his staff persuades him that Garlic is unreliable and must be removed. When that’s done—or so he believes—Canaris has to face the awful possibility that Eldorado is crooked too. Then it turns out that Garlic’s death was an Abwehr blunder! So Eldorado is a splendid fellow after all. Well, Canaris can’t apologize, he’s incapable of that, so he goes to the other extreme. He brags. He lets Eldorado know that he, Canaris, is a masterspy! He knows of every double-agent being run by British Intelligence. In other words he tells a whopping great lie in order to cover his embarrassment over his little mistake.”

  Freddy had been listening carefully to all this. “Yes,” he said. “I see what you mean, sir. So Canaris knew he was lying.”

  “Well of course he knew.”

  “Yes … All the same, sir, he couldn’t be sure whether or not Eldorado knew he was lying, could he?”

  An ankle was getting stiff. The Director switched his feet around. “Couldn’t he?”

  “No, sir. I mean, for all Canaris knew, Eldorado might have been convinced that nobody had been turned. In that case Eldorado would have assumed that Canaris was lying to him.”

  The Director stared. “Canaris was lying. I thought that was the one thing we were all agreed on.”

  “Oh, absolutely. Except that I can’t help wondering what Canaris made of Eldorado’s response.”

  “What response? He made no response.”

  “Exactly, sir. Eldorado should have made a response if Canaris was lying. He should have told Canaris he was wrong, that no agent had been turned as far as he knew. When Eldorado failed to deny that suggestion, surely Canaris must have realized that he was telling the truth.”

  “Well of course he was telling the truth,” the Director said. “He was lying and he was telling the truth.”

  “Yes,” Freddy said. “Well, thank you for straightening that out, sir. I think we can put the whole business aside now, don’t you?”

  “Not that it matters,” the Director said. “From what I hear, nobody gives a damn what Canaris says anyway.”

  After their debriefing, Julie and Luis discussed the Santander expedition only once.

  “All that fuss,” he said. “And what difference has it made to anything?”

  “Absolutely none.”

  “Garlic’s dead. Christian’s dead. Doesn’t change anything, does it?”

  They were walking in the park. Luis clapped his hands to drive away some pigeons clustered in their path. “Bloody birds,” he said. “Tell me, which is worse? Pigeons or chimneys?”

  She stopped and leaned against a tree. He sat on the grass where he could get a better view of her legs.

  “I must have thought I was on some Commando mission,” she said. “Here goes the plucky gal Commando to rescue her trapped buddy. Straight out of the comic strips.”

  “At least you didn’t do any harm.”

  “Didn’t do any good.”

  “According to Freddy, half of all the war effort doesn’t do any good.”

  “That so? Which half?”

  “Ah, there’s the difficulty. He says you’ve got to win the war before you can decide.”

  “And by then it doesn’t matter,” she said.

  They walked on, and that was the end of it.

  Nobody could end the war. General Sir Stewart Menzies conferred with General William Donovan after their meetings on board the cruiser Barcelona; and they found themselves in broad agreement: Communism was the greater threat, and if Germany (without Hitler) could keep Russia at bay, then it would surely be possible and desirable to negotiate a ceasefire in the west. They reported all this to their respective masters and they walked into a pair of brick walls. The only ceasefire that Churchill and Roosevelt would consider was German unconditional surrender. The fact that Russia was Communist was, for the moment, irrelevant; what mattered was the way a succession of vast and violent land battles kept two-thirds of the German army tied down in the east. The western allies needed their eastern partner to help them get an invasion army ashore in Europe. In the face of that massive fact, all the hopes and plans of Canaris and his fellow-conspirators were just chatter.

  General Oster chattered too loudly. Canaris sacked him. The move came too late to save the Abwehr from constant scrutiny by Himmler’s Gestapo. It wasn’t just a matter of plotting to replace the regime. Down through the years, the Abwehr had been weakened by a whole series of acts of minor corruption, some of them linked with political attempts to bring the war to an end. For Abwehr agents who did a lot of traveling into and out of neutral countries—Switzerland, for instance—currency smuggling was an attractive sideline. There were all sorts of rackets in wartime Germany which could be hidden under the cloak of Abwehr activity. Inevitably, the cloak slipped and one or two rackets were investigated by civil or military police. The Abwehr did not come well out of these investigations. Canaris had to use all his political leverage to contain them.

  By February 1944 his organization had lost Hitler’s respect and Canaris himself was a tired and troubled man. The Gestapo missed no chance to point out the Abwehr’s failings, and when a senior Abwehr officer and his wife walked into the British Legation in Istanbul and defected, it was the end of Canaris and the end of the Abwehr. Hitler dismissed the head and merged the agency with the Gestapo under Himmler’s overall leadership, thus creating one wide-reaching national intelligence agency.

  The former Abwehr operations continued. Himmler had not coveted Canaris’s department in order to dismantle it. He valued its established networks of agents and the rich and various strands of military
intelligence which they reported. The Eldorado Network went on working and earning. Many of the reports which Himmler’s new organization took and paid for concerned preparations for the Allied invasion of Europe. Everyone knew it was coming; the great debate was about when and where it would go ashore. The possible landing sites stretched from the Belgian coast westward through the Pas de Calais and along the coast of northern France, around the peninsula of Normandy to Brittany and down to the Bay of Biscay: more than a thousand miles of shoreline to be defended.

  Not that there was any guarantee that the Allies would strike at any of it.

  They might invade the south of France. There were good arguments in favor of that, what with Allied control of the Mediterranean and a solid base in Italy. Or maybe the invasion route would be via Greece and Yugoslavia, where great help could be expected from Tito’s partisans and there was the promise of an early link-up with the Russian advance. This was the “soft underbelly” of Europe for which Churchill had such a liking, as if the Continent could be attacked like an animal; although anyone who had fought in or around Greece in 1941 could have told him (as some did) that there was nothing soft about that bit of Europe; quite the reverse.

  Scandinavia had its supporters too. Since the Wehrmacht had seized Norway so quickly and easily, perhaps it could be thrown out just as fast. Think what that would do to the German navy’s attacks on the Arctic convoys to Russia! And from Norway it was just a short hop into Denmark, and Germany was around the corner …

  The speculation was endless; but those who talked didn’t know, while those who knew didn’t talk. Luis and Julie didn’t know, but that didn’t stop them arguing the Second Front all around the coastline of Europe. It was a national sport, trying to second-guess the warlords. “No, it’s got to be the short route,” Luis said. “Damn it all, you can see France from the cliffs at Dover.”

  “But that’s exactly what Eldorado’s been telling Madrid,” Julie objected. For many months, the network had reported an accelerating build-up of troops and ships and aircraft in southeast England. Essex and Kent, Sussex and Surrey were so crammed with American and Canadian and British infantry and armor that—according to Knickers and Nutmeg—space had had to be found for a whole new American army group in the flatlands of Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire. “Why are we always pointing at the Pas de Calais if it’s the truth?” she asked.