He awakened before dawn. He tried his best to make himself presentable and slipped out, locking the padlock behind himself. The early-morning streets were surprisingly well populated, as workingmen hastened to a first meal and then a day at the job. He melded easily, another anonymous French clerk with a day-old scrub of beard and a somewhat dowdy dark suit under a dark overcoat. He found a café and had a café au lait and a large piece of buttered toast, sitting in the rear as the place filled up.
He listened to the gossip and quickly picked up that les boches were everywhere today; no one had seen them out in such force before. It seemed that most were plainclothesmen, simply standing around or walking a small patrol beat. They preformed no services other than looking at people, so it was clear that they were on some sort of stakeout duty. Perhaps a prominent Resistance figure— this brought a laugh always, as most regarded the Resistance as a joke—had come in for a meet-up with Sartre at Les Deux Magots, or a British agent was here to assassinate Dietrich von Choltitz, the garrison commander of Paris and a man as objectionable as a summer moth. But everyone knew the British weren’t big on killing, as it was the Czechs who’d bumped off Heydrich.
After a few hours Basil went for his reconnaissance. He saw them almost immediately, chalkfaced men wearing either the tight faces of hunters or the slack faces of time-servers. Of the two, he chose the latter, since a loafer was less apt to pay attention and wouldn’t notice things and further- more would go off duty exactly when his shift was over.
The man stood, shifting weight from one foot to the other, blowing into his hands to keep them warm, occasionally rubbing the small of his back, where strain accumulated when he who does not stand or move much suddenly has to stand and move.
It was time to hunt the hunters.
A few days ago (cont’d.)
“It’s the trust issue again,” said General Cavendish, in a tone suggesting he was addressing the scullery mice. “In his rat-infested brain, the fellow still believes the war might be a trap, meant to destroy Russia and Communism. He thinks that we may be feeding him information on Operation Citadel, about this attack on the Kursk salient, as a way of manipulating him into overcommitting to defending against that attack. He wastes men, equipment, and treasure building up the Kursk bulge on our say-so, then, come July, Hitler’s panzer troops make a feint in that direction but drive en masse into some area of the line that has been weakened because all the troops have been moved down to the Kursk bulge. Hitler breaks through, envelops, takes, and razes Moscow, then pivots, heavy with triumph, to deal with the moribund Kursk salient. Why, he needn’t even attack. He can do to those men what was done to Paulus’s Sixth Army at Stalingrad, simply shell and starve them into submission. At that point the war in the East is over and Communism is destroyed.”
“I see what where you’re going with this, gentlemen,” said Basil. “We must convince Stalin that we are telling the truth. We must verify the authenticity of Operation Citadel, so that he believes in it and acts accordingly. If he doesn’t, Operation Citadel will succeed, those 300,000 men will die, and the war will continue for another year or two. The soldiers now say ‘Home alive in ’45,’ but the bloody reality will be ‘Dead in heaven in ’47.’ Yet more millions will die. We cannot allow that to happen.”
“Do you see it yet, Basil?” asked Sir Colin. “It would be so helpful if you saw it for yourself, if you realized what has to be done, that no matter how long the shot, we have to play it. Because yours is the part that depends on faith. Only faith will get you through the ordeal that lies ahead.”
“Yes, I do see it,” said Basil. “The only way of verifying the Operation Citadel intercepts is to have them discovered and transmitted quite innocent of any other influence by Stalin’s most secret and trusted spy. That fellow has to come across them and get them to Moscow. And the route by which he encounters them must be unimpeachable, as it will be vigorously counterchecked by the NKVD. That is why the traitorous librarian at Cambridge cannot be arrested, and that is why no tricky subterfuge of cracking into the Cambridge rare books vault can be employed. The sanctity of the Cambridge copy of The Path to Jesus must be protected at all costs.”
“Exactly, Basil. Very good.”
“You have to get these intercepts to this spy. However—here’s the rub—you have no idea who or where he is.”
“We know where he is,” said the admiral. “The trouble is, it’s not a small place. It’s a good-sized village, in fact, or an industrial complex.”
“This Bletchley, whose name I was not supposed to hear—is that it?”
“Professor, perhaps you could explain it to Captain St. Florian.”
“Of course. Captain, as I spilled the beans before, I’ll now spill some more. We have Jerry solved to a remarkable degree, via higher mathematical concepts as guidelines for the construction of electronic ‘thinking machines,’ if you will …”
“Turing engines, they’re called,” said Sir Colin. “Basil, you are honored by hearing this from the prime mover himself. It’s like a chat with God.”
“Please continue, your Supreme Beingness,” said Basil.
Embarrassed, the professor seemed to lose his place, then came back to it. “ … thinking machines that are able to function at high speed, test possibilities, and locate patterns which cut down on the possible combinations. I’ll spare you details, but it’s quite remarkable. However, one result of this breakthrough is that our location—Bletchley Park, about fifty kilometers out of London, an old Victorian estate in perfectly abominable taste—has grown from a small team operation into a huge bureaucracy. It now employs over eight hundred people, gathered from all over the empire for their specific skills in extremely arcane subject matters.
“As a consequence, we have many streams of communication, many units, many subunits, many sub-subunits, many huts, temporary quarters, recreational facilities, kitchens, bathrooms, a complex social life complete with gossip, romance, scandal, treachery, and remorse, our own slang, our own customs. Of course the inhabitants are all very smart, and when they’re not working they get bored and to amuse themselves conspire, plot, criticize, repeat, twist, engineer coups and countercoups, all of which further muddies the water and makes any sort of objective ‘truth’ impossible to verify. One of the people in this monstrous human beehive, we know for sure from the Finland code, reports to Joseph Stalin. We have no idea who it is—it could be an Oxbridge genius, a lance corporal with Enfield standing guard, a lady mathematician from Australia, a telegraph operator, a translator from the old country, an American liaison, a Polish consultant, and on and on. I suppose it could even be me. All, of course, were vetted beforehand by our intelligence service, but he or she slipped by.
“So now it is important that we find him. It is in fact mandatory that we find him. A big security shakeout is no answer at all. Time-consuming, clumsy, prone to error, gossip, and resentment, as well as colossally interruptive and destructive to our actual task, but worst of all a clear indicator to the NKVD that we know they’ve placed a bug in our rug. If that is the conclusion they reach, then Stalin will not trust us, will not fortify Kursk, et cetera, et cetera.”
“So breaking the book code is the key.”
“It is. I will leave it to historians to ponder the irony that in the most successful and sophisticated cryptoanalytic operation in history, a simple book code stands between us and a desperately important goal. We are too busy for irony.”
Basil responded, “The problem then refines itself more acutely: it is that you have no practical access to the book upon which the code that contains the name for this chap’s new handler is based.”
“That is it, in a nutshell,” said Professor Turing.
“A sticky wicket, I must say. But where on earth do I fit in? I don’t see that there’s any room for a boy of my most peculiar expertise. Am I supposed to—well, I cannot even conjure an end to that sentence. You have me …”
He paused.
“I
think he’s got it,” said the admiral.
“Of course I have,” said Basil. “There has to be another book.”
The Fourth Day
It had to happen sooner or later, and it happened sooner. The first man caught up in the Abwehr observe-and-apprehend operation was Maurice Chevalier.
The French star was in transit between mistresses on the Left Bank, and who could possibly blame Unterscharführer Ganz for blowing the whistle on him? He was tall and gloriously handsome, he was exquisitely dressed, and he radiated such warmth, grace, confidence, and glamour that to see him was to love him. The sergeant was merely acting on the guidance given the squad by Macht: if you want him to be your best friend, that’s probably the spy. The sergeant had no idea who Chevalier was; he thought he was doing his duty.
Naturally, the star was not amused. He threatened to call his good friend Herr General von Choltitz and have them all sent to the Russian front, and it’s a good thing Macht still had some diplomatic skills left, for he managed to talk the elegant man out of that course of action by supplying endless amounts of unction and flattery. His dignity ruffled, the star left huffily and went on his way, at least secure in the knowledge that in twenty minutes he would be making love to a beautiful woman and these German peasants would still be standing around out in the cold, waiting for something to happen. By eight p.m. he had forgotten entirely about it, and on his account no German boy serving in Paris would find himself on that frozen antitank gun.
As for SS Hauptsturmführer Otto Boch, that was another story. He was a man of action. He was not one for the patience, the persistence, the professionalism of police work. He preferred more direct approaches, such as hanging around the Left Bank hotel where Macht had set up his headquarters and threatening in a loud voice to send them all to Russia if they didn’t produce the enemy agent quickly. Thus the Abwehr men took to calling him the Black Pigeon behind his back, for the name took into account his pigeonlike strut, breast puffed, dignity formidable, self-importance manifest, while accomplishing nothing tangible whatsoever except to leave small piles of shit wherever he went.
His SS staff got with the drill, as they were, fanatics or not, at least security professionals, and it seemed that even after a bit they were calling him the Black Pigeon as well. But on the whole, they, the Abwehr fellows, and the 11th Battalion feldpolizei people meshed well and produced such results as could be produced. The possibles they netted were not so spectacular as a regal movie star, but the theory behind each apprehension was sound. There were a number of handsome men, some gangsters, some actors, one poet, and a homosexual hairdresser. Macht and Abel raised their eyebrows at the homosexual hairdresser, for it occurred to them that the officer who had whistled him down had perhaps revealed more about himself than he meant to.
Eventually the first shift went off and the second came on. These actually were the sharper fellows, as Macht assumed that the British agent would be more likely to conduct his business during the evening, whatever that business might be. And indeed the results were, if not better, more responsible. In fact one man brought in revealed himself to be not who he claimed he was, and that he was a wanted jewel thief who still plied his trade, Occupation or no. It took a shrewd eye to detect the vitality and fearlessness this fellow wore behind shoddy clothes and darkened teeth and an old man’s hobble, but the SS man who made the catch turned out to be highly regarded in his own unit. Macht made a note to get him close to any potential arrest situations, as he wanted his best people near the action. He also threatened to turn the jewel thief over to the French police but instead recruited him as an informant for future use. He was not one for wasting much.
Another arrestee was clearly a Jew, even if his papers said otherwise, even if he had no possible connection to British Intelligence. Macht examined the papers carefully, showed them to a bunco expert on the team, and confirmed that they were fraudulent. He took the fellow aside and said, “Look, friend, if I were you I’d get myself and my family out of Paris as quickly as possible. If I can see through your charade in five seconds, sooner or later the SS will too, and it’s off to the East for all of you. These bastards have the upper hand for now, so my best advice to you is, no matter what it costs, get the hell out of Paris. Get out of France. No matter what you think, you cannot wait them out, because the one thing they absolutely will do before they’re either chased out of town or put against a wall and shot is get all the Jews. That’s what they live for. That’s what they’ll die for, if it comes to that. Consider this fair warning and probably the only one you’ll get.”
Maybe the man would believe him, maybe not. There was nothing he could do about it. He got back to the telephone, as, along with his other detectives, he spent most of the time monitoring his various snitches, informants, sympathizers, and sycophants, of course turning up nothing. If the agent was on the Left Bank, he hadn’t moved an inch.
And he hadn’t. Basil sat on the park bench the entire day, obliquely watching the German across the street. He got so he knew the man well: his gait (bad left hip, Great War wound?); his policeman’s patience at standing in one place for an hour, then moving two meters and standing in that place for an hour; his stubbornness at never, ever abandoning his post, except once, at three p.m., for a brief trip to the pissoir, during which he kept his eyes open and examined each passerby through the gap at the pissoir’s eye level. He didn’t miss a thing— that is, except for the dowdy Frenchman observing him from ninety meters away, over an array of daily newspapers.
Twice, unmarked Citroëns came by and the officer gave a report to two other men, also in civilian clothes, on the previous few hours. They nodded, took careful records, and then hastened off. It was a long day until seven p.m., a twelve-hour shift, when his replacement moseyed up. There was no ceremony of changing the guard, just a cursory nod between them, and then the first policeman began to wander off.
Basil stayed with him, maintaining the same ninety-meter interval, noting that he stopped in a café for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, read the papers, and smoked, unaware that Basil had followed him in, placed himself at the bar, and also had a sandwich and a coffee.
Eventually the German got up, walked another six blocks down Boulevard Saint-Germain, turned down a narrower street called rue de Valor, and disappeared halfway down the first block into a rummy-looking hotel called Le Duval. Basil looked about, found a café, had a second coffee, smoked a Gauloise to blend in, joked with the bartender, was examined by a uniformed German policeman on a random check, showed papers identifying himself as Robert Fortier (picked freshly that morning), was checked off against a list (he was not on it, as perhaps M. Fortier had not yet noted his missing papers), and was then abandoned by the policeman for other possibilities.
At last he left and went back to rue de Valor, slipped down it, and very carefully approached the Hotel Duval. From outside it revealed nothing—a typical Baedeker two-star for commercial travelers, with no pretensions of gentility or class. It would be stark, clean, well run, and banal. Such places housed half the population every night in Europe, except for the past few years, when that half-the-population had slept in bunkers, foxholes, or ruins. Nothing marked this place, which was exactly why whoever was running this show had chosen it. Another pro like himself, he guessed. It takes a professional to catch a professional, the saying goes.
He meekly entered as if confused, noting a few sour-looking individuals sitting in the lobby reading Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and smoking, and went to the desk, where he asked for directions to a hotel called Les Deux Gentilhommes and got them. It wasn’t much, but it enabled him to make a quick check on the place, and he learned what he needed to know.
Behind the desk was a hallway, and down it Basil could see a larger room, a banquet hall or something, full of drowsy-looking men sitting around listlessly, while a few further back slept on sofas pushed in for just that purpose. It looked police.
That settled it. This was the German headquarters.
He moseyed out and knew he had one more stop before tomorrow.
He had to examine his objective.
A few days previously (cont’d.)
“Another book? Exactly yes and exactly no,” said Sir Colin.
“How could there be a second original? By definition there can be only one original, or so it was taught when I was at university.”
“It does seem like a conundrum, does it not?” said Sir Colin. “But indeed, we are dealing with a very rare case of a second original. Well, of sorts.”
“Not sure I like the sound of that,” said Basil.
“Nor should you. It takes us to a certain awkwardness that, again, an ironist would find heartily amusing.”
“You see,” said Basil, “I am fond of irony, but only when applied to other chaps.”
“Yes, it can sting, can it not?” said General Cavendish. “And I must say, this one stings quite exhaustively. It will cause historians many a chuckle when they write the secret history of the war in the twenty-first century after all the files are finally opened.”
“But we get ahead of ourselves,” said Sir Colin. “There’s more tale to tell. And the sooner we tell it, the sooner the cocktail hour.”
“Tell on, then, Sir Colin.”
“It all turns on the fulcrum of folly and vanity known as the human heart, especially when basted in ambition, guilt, remorse, and greed. What a marvelous stew, all of it simmering within the head of the Reverend MacBurney. When last we left him, our God-fearing MacBurney had become a millionaire because his pamphlet The Path to Jesus had sold endlessly, bringing him a shilling a tot. As I said, he retired to a country estate and spent some years happily wenching and drinking in happy debauchery.”
“As who would not?” asked Basil, though he doubted this lot would.
“Of course. But then in the year 1789, twenty-two years later, he was approached by a representative of the bishop of Gladney and asked to make a presentation to the Church. To commemorate his achievement, the thousands of souls he had shepherded safely upon the aforenamed path, the bishop wanted him appointed deacon at St. Blazefield’s in Glasgow, the highest church rank a fellow like him could achieve. And Thomas wanted it badly. But the bishop wanted him to donate the original manuscript to the church, for eternal display in its ambulatory. Except Thomas had no idea where the original was and hadn’t thought about it in years. So he sat down, practical Scot that he was, and from the pamphlet itself he back-engineered, so to speak, another ‘original’ manuscript in his own hand, a perfect facsimile, or as perfect as he could make it, even, one must assume, to the little crucifix doodles that so amused the Cambridge librarian. That was shipped to Glasgow, and that is why to this day Thomas MacBurney lounges in heaven, surrounded by seraphim and cherubim who sing his praises and throw petals where he walks.”
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