Dateline Haifa

by D A Kent

  ‘Fetch us another pint, and we’ll work out what to do.’

  Watching his friend’s unsteady progress towards the bar, Louis turned a tattered beermat over in his hand, wondering not for the first time where his impulsiveness would lead him next.

  When Edward staggered through the door of Chepstow Villas just before midnight, having eventually been thrown out of the pub at closing time, his father was lying in wait for him.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ his father shouted, his face close to Edward’s. ‘Your mother and I have had the Andrews on the telephone twice, wanting to know where you were. Caroline was terribly upset. And you reek of drink. How dare you behave in this way? If the Andrews call it off between you, I will….’

  Edward ducked away and gave his father a hard shove against the wall. Get away from me,’ he shouted. ‘Piss off. Leave me alone.’ For once, his father was slack-jawed and lost for words. Edward had never dared speak to him like that before.

  Edward went up to his room, slammed the door and lay down on the narrow bed, which was still his from childhood days. His logbooks were in the drawers, his pilot’s uniform hanging in the wardrobe. Several cricket trophies were arranged on the shelf. His battered teddy bear was on the pillow beside him, along with clean, ironed pyjamas. Edward threw both to the floor with an oath. The room seemed to be rotating. His feeling of being off-kilter was not assisted at all by the stars his mother had painted on the ceiling for him when he was a little boy and afraid of the dark. However, he thought, in his befuddled way, at least he and Louis had decided on a course of action.

  Both had agreed that it was pointless involving the authorities, without evidence. George had successfully got himself off the Isle of Man in double quick time (using me, no doubt, Edward thought, with unusual bitterness). Louis, who followed these things carefully, had seen in the press that Mueller had been exonerated by a tribunal in Munich only last week. Convincing the authorities of their culpability, before they even had a clear idea of what they had actually done, or who else might be involved, would not assist at this stage. They would be laughed out of court. It would be better if they could see what Gunn and Sylvia brought back from France, before making a decision.

  The next morning, feeling rough, Edward tried to creep out of the house early, straightening his tie in the hall mirror downstairs. His father was waiting for him again. Trying to disguise his loathing, Edward called cheerfully:

  ‘Must dash; got a couple of exchanges to set up and some new instructions to read through.’

  He sprinted down the garden path, pausing to close the gate carefully behind him. George shook his head. What had got into the boy? He needed to be taught a lesson. That could wait; more important fish to fry. He went back inside to finish his breakfast, resolving to place a call to Mueller in a day or so. Surely there must be some news about that little bitch and those papers soon. Still, he was off for lunch at the Athenaum with His Honour Judge Arnold Peters, an old friend from Wellington. He wasn’t going to let anything spoil that.

  Edward and Louis were also out for a ‘hair of the dog’ lunch, leaving the secretaries to a busy few hours holding the fort. They were at the Agrippa Club, in a little street near the Ritz. A comfortable stroll there and back across St James’s Park, and it was one of their favourite haunts. It could be a little ‘school dinner-ish’ sometimes, although that bothered Edward less than Louis. Louis could never understand how anybody could refer to food as ‘fodder.’

  The Jones assignment was still troubling Edward. He was in complete shock about his father although certain pennies were finally beginning to drop. As far as he was concerned, everything was on Sylvia’s shoulders. He discounted Gunn as a beast of burden, nothing more. He said as much to Louis. Louis set down his fork and laughed out loud, disturbing the other diners in the club, who expressed their displeasure with long looks over glasses and several ‘harrumphings.’ Louis ignored them. He was starting to get too stiff in the bones to worry about the rules of the game anymore.

  ‘Gunn is a fine soldier,’ he growled. ‘He fought with Stirling in the Long Range Desert group. He fought Vichy in Syria and he spent ’43 and ’44 prior to D Day in and out of Europe, making a beautiful mess of things.’

  ‘I see.’ Edward’s temples were throbbing, the glass of wine at his fingertips seeming more of a threat than a balm, and his response was suitably stiff.

  ‘No, I don’t think you see at all.’ Louis jabbed a fork, heavy with fish, in Edward’s direction for emphasis. ‘He damn near got pinched by the Germans in Paris. He was wounded in Italy, took a bayonet in the shoulder and a bullet in the hip and landed in France on 5th June. Louis sighed. ‘I think you owe Gunn a little more respect, at least as a fellow officer.’

  They would have to differ on that score, Edward thought. Anyway, more people were starting to stare. If they got thrown out of here, his father was bound to hear about it and there would be hell to pay. He checked himself; he needed to stop being terrified of his father but old habits died hard. He changed the subject abruptly. Louis looked at him rather strangely but allowed himself to be steered into a discussion about the forthcoming squadron reunion.

  In Rome, Natalia Buonsignore took one last look at the empty flat on the Via dei Serpenti, where she had, until recently, been maintained by Guenter Voss. She had done well out of him. He had bought her some very expensive furs and jewellery. Truth be told, though, she was tired of him. She had taken advantage of his absence to start a new life in Toronto, or just nearby (her knowledge of Canada was scanty) to live with her sister who had settled there with her husband. The contents of the flat, some of which actually belonged to Voss, were now in her capacious suitcases, which she carried downstairs and into the waiting taxi. The landlord could whistle for the rest of the rent; she was only a week or so behind.

  In Bad Kaltenbrun, in Southern Bavaria, Friedrich Mueller took off his brown felt hat, arranging the feather carefully. He had just been to Mass, which he never missed, with his wife and some of their little grandchildren. It was a patronal feast day for one of the local saints, and an unofficial holiday in this part of Bavaria. He smiled at them all fondly. Lunch would be ready soon, and they would be joined by some friends and colleagues. Drinks were being served outside, overlooking the lake. The champagne was cooling, to celebrate his exoneration at the Tribunal. Life was good.

  He excused himself, and went upstairs to his study to use the telephone in peace. He thought he might make a quick call to Voss at the hotel in Naples. He frowned slightly when they told him that Voss had checked out yesterday. He wasn’t overly concerned; Voss had told him briefly the other night that he had the assets in his sights, although it might be tricky and they were evasive. Perhaps his enquiries had taken him further down the coast. He could always ring the number he had for him in Rome if he didn’t hear anything. He was off to the mountains tomorrow with his wife for a week. Things could wait until they were back. Lothar (he would never get used to ‘George’) would not, thank goodness, be able to contact them where they were going. Only a few trusted people (and the emphasis was on the word trusted) had the number. He went downstairs again to join his family and friends and sat with them, a veritable pillar of society and pater familias. His expression was that of a man at the centre of his own universe. He was in charge, and all deferred to him. Indeed, when he pulled an over-stuffed Havana cigar from his inside pocket, no less than three men stepped forward to do the honours. He chuckled. He could safely celebrate getting away with it. He was home and dry.

  Mueller had no compunction when it came to issues, a term he used so lightly, with the indifference of familiarity. If someone or something had become an issue, said issue would be removed and all connection severed and cauterised. Voss was the ideal tool for the job. His loyalty could not be questioned, he was deadly in action, and he had never been bested yet. Inevitably, he would be bested one day, but when that day came, he would be replaced.

  Now was not t
he time to dwell on ‘issues.’ Muller smiled indulgently instead, accepting the congratulations of his family, friends, his peers and those he knew loathed him but needed his approval and patronage. He enjoyed the champagne, a bottle from a case or two he had brought back from France in 1944. He also enjoyed the view of his niece’s cleavage as she poured him another glass.

  His mind drifted back to his boyhood, and Lothar’s, in Bad Kaltenbrun. The name said it all really. Lothar’s family had owned the small country estate that dominated the little village for thousands of years. Mueller’s mother was a servant at the big house. He never knew who his father was, although he had had his suspicions. Mueller was the name his mother had been born with. She never married or had more children.

  He and Lothar were exactly the same age. They were inseparable. Mueller let his mind run over idyllic, hot summers bathing in the cool lakes on the estate. Everything changed when Lothar was sent to boarding school in England. Lothar had been decidedly ‘distant,’ when he came home for his holidays, talking about things Mueller could barely comprehend. Really, they went their separate ways. He brought some ghastly boys over with him later in the summer, who had bullied Mueller unmercifully.

  Things never really come to a head; the boys simply went their separate ways. Lothar had gone to Cambridge and then taken solicitors’ exams, becoming articled to a firm in the City of London. He had completed his education just before the war broke out and, with things becoming rather ‘sticky’ over there, had arrived back in Bad Kaltenbrun. Mueller himself was in the middle of qualifying as a doctor; he had finished the hospital training and now needed to specialise. Recently he had wondered idly who had paid for his education and why a small cottage had been purchased for his mother when she became too old to work.

  The boys drifted apart again when the war started. Lothar was signed off as an asthma sufferer and given a desk job. ‘Trust him,’ Mueller had thought at the time. Mueller himself had joined up; the16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry regiment, no less. One of his fellow recruits had been the Fuhrer. Mueller had not come across him; the great man had been a message-runner while Mueller had been assigned to medical duties. He had heard a few disparaging remarks about his dear Fuhrer’s war service and had always been quick to put them down. Nobody was qualified to comment unless they had been in the thick of it.

  Lothar had returned to England after the war and married an English girl. He had then managed, through the old public school and Cambridge network, to buy his way into Cumberlands, a small, moribund practice in central London. He took its name for his own. Lothar’s wife did not like Bad Kaltenbrun or her in-laws, and the feeling was mutual. It was on a sunny evening in the late 1920s, just before Mueller set off to take up a new post in Berlin and when Lothar was on a flying visit to his family, that they had met and talked at length by the lake, as they had not done for many years. They had realised how many opinions they shared. That evening, it was as if they had never been apart. They had swum in this very lake, where dinner was being served now. The old Lothar had returned.

  Still, there was no point in being sentimental, thought Mueller. Sentimentality was too costly an emotion. It had cost Germany the recent war and her place in the world. Mueller was bitter. He was a believer. He had been a disciple since the beer halls and brawls of Munich. He hid his faith, had packed it away deep inside him, but he held fast to it. He had reached the conclusion that Lothar was a dabbler, not a true believer. He loved the British Establishment too much, although it was true he had done some good work for the pipeline. Anyway, he had made up his mind. Voss could deal with Lothar in London once he had cleared things up in Naples. There was no immediate rush. He had every confidence in Voss. He had this lovely party to enjoy, and the mountains tomorrow. He smiled at the assembled guests, who had just risen to their feet to toast his health. He stood to offer his thanks in a carefully-scripted speech. One had to be so careful nowadays.

  At the Athenaum, George Cumberland and His Honour Judge Arnold Peters had just finished a second vintage brandy. It had been a superb lunch, George thought; though not necessarily from the food perspective. He and Arnold went back a long way, to that terrible day when his parents had dropped him at Wellington. He had found the place incomprehensible, even though he had been learning English with his tutor at home, and brutal. Peters had been new too and, like George, slightly ‘lost,’ having not been through the preparatory school system either. His father had been an administrator on the North West frontier. For various reasons, he had never got around to sending Arnold to England to school before then. Arnold and George had immediately become firm friends and had remained so over the years.

  ‘Keep our discussions strictly entre nous for now, old boy,’ Arnold advised, as they went their separate ways.

  George was deep in thought as he walked across St James’s Park, occasionally aiming a vicious kick at a pigeon that came too close. Usually, he liked to watch the girls sunbathing, but not today. Over lunch, Arnold had suggested that the Presidency of the Law Society could be up for grabs and that George’s hat could be in the ring. A curious expression, George thought. He laughed out loud. He was in line for one of the finest prizes in the British Establishment, and he had played them like a dime a dozen piano player in a New Orleans cathouse. It was absurd and yet perfect at the same time.

  Flicking a pebble with an exquisitely shod foot, he considered further. Perhaps Edward should have an ‘accident.’ Nothing that could in any way be attributable to him, but a terminal event for a young man who had fought so bravely in the Battle of Britain. He could almost read the headlines now; grieving family and grieving fiancée. Think of the weight that would add to his candidacy. It would take some time to arrange, of course and would require some thought. He needed to find the little bastard meanwhile, place a well-aimed boot up his backside and make sure he proposed to Caroline. Provided, of course, Edward’s little stunt last night had not ruined things. Hopefully, that was not the case; his wife had made rather heavy weather of Edward having been taken poorly on the way home.

  His other priority was to get those Jones papers back. He would make sure Gunn was dead and then, having taken Sylvia across the desk, he would kill her as well. His fantasies about that little trollop were becoming darker and more and more graphic by the minute as he arrived back at Queen Anne’s Gate. This time, he would make sure nobody was around to hear her scream, he reflected, as he made his way unsteadily across the room to the cabinet. He stopped dead in his tracks. It was open and the drawers were completely empty. He screamed for his secretary, who arrived at the double.

  ‘Anything the matter, Mr Cumberland?’ she asked, rather unnecessarily. The corded veins sticking out of his neck and his bright red face were a giveaway. He asked, in a strange squeaky voice, what had happened to the files in the top drawer.

  ‘Oh, they’re here.’ She indicated a neat stack of files on the floor. ‘The electrician came in, to mend the switch by the window and we had to move everything. I was just typing that completion statement up for Young Mr Cumberland and then I was going to put everything back. It needed tidying, anyway. Are you all right, Mr Cumberland? Can I get you anything?’

  George just about managed to be civil; yes, please, a glass of water would be ‘just the ticket.’ That was it. The files were coming out of that cabinet now. These girls really were idiots. Did Edward and Louis recruit them especially? And why was she doing Edward’s work? She was meant to give his work top priority. He had conveniently forgotten, in his puffed-up vanity, that he produced so little actual work nowadays, that Edward sometimes borrowed his girl, as he called her, to help with the conveyancing,. He locked the Jones file carefully in his desk, where he kept certain photographs that he would rather nobody else saw, along with some magazines and membership cards to the type of ‘gentlemen’s club’ his wife would have been aghast at, and went down to the conference room to get a glass of brandy.

  He barely noticed the secretary coming back in
with his water; he was deep in thought. He placed a call to Meunier in Paris. Still no word, apparently. He then had a call put through to Bad Kaltenbrun, but was told that Dr Mueller and his wife had left for a week’s holiday. No, Dr Mueller had not left any messages for him.

  George tapped a pencil on his desk, pensively. It did seem a little odd, given that the last he had heard was that the ‘assets’ were in Naples. He trusted Mueller’s judgment implicitly in this matter; he had never let him down before. Nonetheless, with the narrow shave this afternoon, he could not afford to take any chances. Nobody else had a key to his desk but it could probably be smashed open with relative ease. It was nearly 5pm anyway. Louis had gone to Lincolns Inn for a conference with one of the few members of the Bar still in town, and Edward had gone over to Great St Peter’s Street to take some instructions from a little old lady about her will. He planned to go straight to the Tennis Club from there, according to the secretary. Idiot boy, George snorted; made far too much fuss of his clients. Why hadn’t he got the silly old bat to come to the office? Anyway, just as well he hadn’t.

  He shooed everyone off the premises. The secretaries were only too glad of an early finish. Mr Roper, the old boy who was their Conveyancing Clerk and part-time book-keeper, took some shifting. He had lost half a leg at Gallipoli and wasn’t one for moving fast. He liked a chat. George was beginning to find it hard to be polite, but eventually the wretched man shuffled off towards the underground station. Finally, with a sigh of relief, George turned the key in the lock and set off for the taxi rank with a set of files in two decent-sized suitcases.

  Soon, he was on his way to Wardour Street. He had a friend, a tailor, an Austrian who had a shop in St Anne’s Court, with a cat that drank good Scotch. For a reasonable fee, the tailor’s spare safe at the back of the shop could be hired for a time, which would give him some breathing space. After the afternoon he had had, he could do with some of the cat’s scotch too. The cat, nicknamed Galland, was a contrary bugger but George got on with him as well as anybody did. He was quite sure Galland would share the Scotch. In fact, he would make sure he did. The taxi drew to a halt on Wardour Street.