Hammer to Fall

by John Lawton

  “Ah. The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime?”

  “Quite. No, we have something else in mind. Persereiikkä.”

  “Spell it.”

  “Er … P … something something lots of i’s … lots of k’s. And an umlaut thingie on the end. It’s in—”

  “I know where it is. I just wanted to be sure you’d got it right. You’re sending me back to fucking Finland?”

  “Yeees.”

  “It’s bollock-freezing.”

  “It’s summer. They have hours and hours of daylight.”

  “Persereiikkä is inside the bloody arctic circle!”

  “Which is why they get all that daylight.”

  “And in winter they get none.”

  “Really?”

  “Alec … it’s stuck where the sun don’t shine. Tell me you’ll get me out before winter.”

  “I can’t make any promises.”

  It was not, he knew, a take it or leave it. It was a take it. A stark choice between the midnight sun and the abominable Reg Thwaite. “So, what’s the mission?”

  “Well … simple really. Allied nation …”

  “Alec, Finland isn’t in NATO.”

  “Not all our allies are in NATO.”

  “Norway is. Iceland is.”

  “And Sweden isn’t, so what does that prove? As I was saying … allied nation … a thousand miles of border with the Russians, quite possibly the most heavily defended border this side of Korea … and …”

  “And?”

  “And that’s about it, really.”

  “A watching brief?”

  “If you like.”

  “Watching what?”

  “Watching a thousand miles of sensitive Russian border.”

  “Do I get wellies, a walking stick and a packed lunch with it?”

  “Joe. I’ll say one word to you, and if you persist in this line I will go on saying it—Thwaite!”

  “Nothing ever happens on that border and certainly not as far north as Lapland.”

  “Thwaite!”

  “There’s only one border crossing.”

  “Thwaite!”

  “The cordon sanitaire is about a hundred kilometres deep.”

  “Thwaite!”

  “On their side it’s considered a punishment posting!”

  “That’s as may be. If I wanted to punish you there are far worse postings than Finland. Nevertheless—Thwaite!”

  Not wishing a further “Thwaite,” Wilderness acquiesced.

  “OK. Finland? What don’t we know about Finland already?”

  “Wrong approach, Joe. Most of what we knew about Russia’s intentions towards Finland went belly-up eighteen months ago when Khrushchev got the boot. For a very unpredictable man Khrushchev was pretty consistent about Finland. If he made one statement on the matter of Northern Balance and Finnish neutrality, he made a dozen. I hate to say it, but with hindsight you knew where you stood with Khrushchev. The new chaps … completely unknown quantities. Probably itching for another scrap after Cuba.”

  “If we knew where we stood with Khrushchev, why were we all surprised by the Berlin Wall?”

  “Don’t try to muddy the waters. You know what I’m talking about. New men in the Kremlin. We can take nothing for granted, and hence we need to look again at things Finnish …”

  “You mean I need to look again?”

  “At last, on the same page, are we?”

  Wilderness had met Khrushchev—and had made an impression. In ’61 as the wall was going up. By pure luck—as Wilderness saw it, good luck—he’d been standing in Bernauerstraße when the man made a clandestine visit to see his handiwork. Emerging from an unmarked car, barely disguised by cap and muffler, he had recognised Wilderness at once as one of the myriad Western spies present at his meeting with JFK in Vienna—but, then, it was said he had a memory like an elephant. He had spoken civilly to Wilderness and Wilderness to him. He’d even landed an invitation to visit the Soviet Union … as if. He’d never put it in a report. He’d never told Alec. It might not be his ace in the hole, but it was a card to be played at the right moment, and this was not that moment.”

  “Take Sunday to pack. Have a quick word with Eddie on Monday and then …”

  “Bugger off to Finland.”

  “Quite. Coffee?”

  §14

  Part of him dreaded getting home. Judy Jones was the sort of wife who necessitated regular trips to Petticoat Lane for the cheapest crockery the stalls had to offer, as she threw so many plates and cups when angry. The scar on Wilderness’s forehead was as likely to have been caused by one of Judy’s spinning Bosanquet googlies as by anything that had happened in the field.

  But—she was on the sofa, red dress, a bottle of decent claret breathing, two glasses on the coffee table, one of his Brubeck LPs on the turntable, the lingering melancholy of “Blue Shadows in the Street.”

  “Alec told you?”

  “Yep. Said not to blame you.”

  He slipped off his jacket and sat next to her. She slumped almost at once, head in his lap looking up at him, a glass of wine resting on her sternum.

  “There’s more.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He said if this war were a hot war not a poached-egg war, you’d have got your medal. Parliament may think you’re a menace, MI6 quietly thinks you’re a hero.”

  “Quietly? More like silently. And I don’t want a medal. I never wanted a medal. I only said that to annoy the hell out of Reg Thwaite.”

  She held up the glass.

  He knocked half of it back.

  “Sweetest, dearest, husband mine … why did you let Bernard Alleyn go?”

  He set the glass back on her chest, took pleasure in the rise and fall of her bosom, watched her fingers twine around the stem, inhaled the familiar, provocative waft of Judy’s scent—L’aimant by Coty. The same scent he had given to Nell Burkhardt all those years ago in Berlin. He’d met Judy’s scent long before he’d met her—her room in her parents’ house being designated the guest room while she was at Cambridge, and Wilderness so often the designated guest. He’d fought his own memory to forget/remember and once acknowledged had installed barriers to compartmentalise his mind, the little Berlin Walls of the skull. Not always successfully. If needs be, he would remember and recite the list of books on her shelves … Jane Austen, L. M. Montgomery, Noel Streatfield … and see the red ballet pumps in the bottom of the wardrobe … the pile of Frank Sinatra 78s … the paraphernalia of an English schoolgirl in the 1950s … nothing to remind him of Nell. But all bound by the spell of L’aimant.

  “Joe?”

  “Sorry. What?”

  “You were daydreaming.”

  “Was I?”

  “Why did you let Bernard Alleyn go?”

  “You think I did?”

  “I know bloody well you did.”

  “I suppose … I suppose I liked him. Certainly more than I liked Geoffrey Masefield. Bernard was a family man. He cared about his wife and kids and just wanted to be left alone to be an Englishman. I gave him the next best thing. A place on John Bull’s other island. With any luck, if it all went in accordance with my lack of a plan, he’s living as an Irishman. Masefield? Masefield was a fantasist.”

  “A fantasist you couldn’t abandon to his fate?”

  “No. He didn’t deserve that.”

  A pause. He could hear Judy thinking.

  “Mum thinks the MPs are using what you did as a way of getting at Dad. She reckons someone in Six is ratting the two of you out to the greenarses.”

  Greenarse—Burne-Jones slang, handed down to the current generation. Slang for MPs who “do bugger all but polish green leather benches with their arses.”

  “It’s a pointless attack if that’s what it is. Your dad has less than eighteen months to retirement. But she may be right. The sins of the son-in-law. However, it will all blow over.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Their case—their nosin
ess—rests on two things. The supposed diplomatic incident at Invalidenstraße and the suspicion that I turned Bernard loose. That I took the law, their law, into my own hands. Neither amounts to anything. They admit the incident fell a tad short of the diplomatic—it would have taken a few bullets and a body to make it that—and Bernard … well, they set him free, not me. Wondering where he might be now is a pointless speculation. They’d already agreed to swap him for Masefield. That the swap didn’t take place is neither here nor there. Only the Russians have a right to whinge, but they’re not. It’s not as if I’d busted him out of the Scrubs. The English had already agreed to give Bernard his freedom. They turned the key and he walked out. That should have been an end of it, and it will be an end of it.”

  “In a month or two.”

  “Or three or four.”

  “Oh God. As long as that?”

  “Possibly. You could work on the old man.”

  “I’ll try, but there are times when I think he’s daughter-immune. I could always come and visit. I’ve never been to Lapland. The girls could get to see a real reindeer … on Dancer, on Prancer, et cetera.”

  “Well, it might be brilliant cover. A British agent with wife and kids in tow. Who would ever suspect me?”

  “OK, maybe not such a good idea.”

  “But …”

  “Yeeees?”

  “If you really wanted to go. The battle for Finland is a war of words. Neither East nor West is allowed a base there … more acutely I think neither East nor West would dare put a base there … so we swamp the poor buggers in propaganda thinly disguised as culture.

  “If you want a grant to stage Twelfth Night in your local village hall in South Bumstead, Hampshire, the Arts Council will likely as not tell you to fuck off … but say you want to put it on in a snowbound wooden hut in Saariselkä, then the British Council, that is to say the Foreign Office propaganda arm, will throw money at you. So if you want to visit Lapland, I reckon your best bet is to suggest putting on a nude ballet featuring the over-seventies, atonal score by Schoenberg, sets by Mark Rothko … Ken Russell can direct … all the easy, accessible stuff … and you’ll probably pick up a whopping great grant and an OBE as well.”

  Judy feigned thought. He heard no cogs.

  “Over-seventies? Nude? What would you suggest? Swan Lake?”

  “No. Far too Russian.”

  “You know what? I don’t think I’ll bother. But since I won’t be seeing you for three or four months, I don’t think we should waste another minute.”

  She handed him her glass.

  Stood.

  Fumbled a moment with the hook at the back of her neck.

  Stepped out of the red dress.

  And walked away.

  All he had to do was follow the trail of underwear.

  §15

  She slept. As so often, he didn’t. He stared at the red knickers hanging from the lampshade, a trick at which she never missed. The enduring lesson of years of netball and lacrosse.

  Overhead a plane descending into Heathrow … not a plane but planes … and for a moment he could hear the purring propellers of RAF Yorks and Lancasters … not the whine of jet engines … not London, not London … but Berlin.

  Odd thing, memory.

  §16

  Wilderness, being a field agent, had no desk at 54 Broadway.

  Eddie Clark had his office and was welcome to it. Eddie also had Wilderness’s former assistant, Alice Pettifer, and was welcome to her too. And as her well-honed sarcasm bounced off Eddie like chip fat off formica, the scope for tension was greatly reduced. She liked working for Eddie, and let Wilderness know it.

  “I need a bit of space, Alice.”

  “Well you’re not getting your office back. It’s Eddie’s. Try the library. Lots of space there.”

  “OK.”

  “Besides, I hear you’re off to the frozen north later today.”

  “Tomorrow, Alice.”

  “Boss says today.”

  “Have you booked a flight?”

  “No. Top of my morning list, though.”

  “Make it tomorrow. I need a bit of prep time. As you say, the library would be a good choice. And route me via Berlin, would you?”

  Telling Alice to do something was not always easy. Not a natural subordinate—one day, Wilderness thought, she might end up running MI6—she worked better if given reasons.

  “I want to read whatever is latest from Finland and there are a few loose ends in Berlin.”

  “Joe, don’t give the buggers in Parliament an opportunity to recall you. They’ll be in session tomorrow morning. Old King Thwaite will be calling for you louder than he calls for his fiddlers three. You really need to be unavailable to them.”

  “I will be. Tell everyone I’m flying out this evening, and I’ll spend the night at Eddie’s. Get me to Berlin by lunchtime and I can fly into Helsinki tomorrow night. Just don’t let Alec know.”

  She smiled. She could melt him with that smile. She loved a conspiracy—another reason she might end up running the place.

  The “latest” from Finland was thin. A file he could read in a couple of hours. His assertions to his father-in-law—“Nothing happens there”—and to his wife—“It’s a war of words”—had been precise.

  It hadn’t always been that way. When he’d last been to Finland in the late 1950s, if you threw a stone in the street you hit an Allied agent. It was … no better word … crawling with spooks.

  Under the terms of an international agreement between the USSR and Finland—the Finnish-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Co-Operation and Mutual Assistance 1948, a diplomatic mouthful usually abbreviated as FCMA—Finland was tied into a deal that necessitated neutrality, yet somehow defied neutrality. If Germany and its allies ever threatened either country, each would come to the aid of the other. A NATO in miniature. Two nations rather than fifteen. But therein lay the problem of neutrality. NATO, since the admission not of Germany but of a big bit of it called West Germany, a country unacknowledged by the USSR, might now be deemed to be the ally of Germany, a country that had only a theoretical existence but which in the minds of both Finns and Russians was still a potential invader. If in doubt one need only look at recent history.

  It was nonsense. Germany, at least the Western bit, was no threat—but if the heart has its reasons, so does paranoia.

  Hence, Finland’s neutrality was an uneasy one. It had fought the USSR to a standstill in 1940 but knew it could never do so again. It could only live within the shadow of the beast. Hence, again, the other beast, NATO, the West, the American sphere of influence … needed careful handling. The trick to remaining an independent, neutral country was not to provoke either side.

  Like Burne-Jones, Wilderness had a quiet admiration for Khrushchev. “As good as his word” might be overstatement, but in 1956 he withdrew Soviet troops from their base at Porkkala, just south of Helsinki—a base on which they still had a two-year lease—leaving Finland entirely free of foreign military bases. Norway and Sweden had none, Iceland just one at Keflavik—a US base Icelanders were willing to see closed until the Russian invasion of Hungary four months later gave them cause to change their mind.

  And so began the great Finnish foxtrot. One foot forward, one foot back.

  Finland, it was blithely assumed by all Western analysts, would like to be part of the West, it was “natural,” this in a political world where nothing was natural—yet it found itself obliged to decline Marshall Plan aid, to decline membership in the Common Market … all to foster what everyone knew to be an illusion—neutrality. Neutrality was a line drawn in water.

  Rather than neutral, Finland was the next great battleground-in-waiting. The next battle would not be a Stalingrad or an Iwo Jima … it would be swift annihilation. Wilderness had found it chilling when an old CIA chum, with too much Scotch inside him, had blurted out the real, if deniable, US policy: “We’ll nuke Finland rather than let the Commies have it.”

  To the north,
Lapland, home of reindeer—on Dancer, on Prancer, on Donner and Blitzen—and Father Christmas. Wilderness had never been that far north. He knew it had been left as “scorched earth” when the Finns drove out the Germans towards the end of the war—wooden towns reduced to ashes, bridges blown and roads mined. Twenty years later mines were still being unearthed. Even without such man-made devastation it was a scarcely habitable region, extending up into the arctic circle, that had the misfortune to be where NATO (in the shape, the peculiar shape, of Norway) and the USSR met. A land rich in resources, but a land of few people, that might well be the most photographed and mapped spot on Earth. Until 1944 Lapland had had a spur leading to the Arctic Ocean at the port of Petsamo, a thin strip of land, no more than fifteen kilometres wide in places, a Finnish thread dividing Norway from Russia. Now, the two countries wrapped around Finland like fingers making a fist.

  In the fifties there had been mad missions: Finnish veterans of World War II recruited to operate across the border in Murmansk and Soviet Karelia. Wilderness thought there must be a room at MI6 he didn’t know about—the Department of Silly Schemes, whose sole purpose was to think up suicidal spy missions. What idiot decided to have men fly over Karelia in a hot-air balloon? They might just as well send Noddy and Big Ears in their red and yellow car toot-tooting all the way. It was a looking-glass war from which few returned. And men being spent, technology took over.

  The USA and England photographed the entire border with the USSR in the late fifties, and then every inch of coastline. Sweden and Norway sent Intelligence officers into Lapland to photograph all they could—it was said they bought up all the glossy tourist postcards—and then mined east-west roads. Only a couple of years back the CIA had attempted much the same thing, and for once, Finland had retaliated and expelled them.

  Since then things had gone quiet. The spook numbers fell to tick-over levels. Finland quietly censored itself—Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was not welcomed in any language—and just as quietly supplied the British and Americans with what they asked for. Ostentatiously they staged war games, imagining not a Soviet invasion but a NATO one. Just as ostentatiously they welcomed not Wilderness’s over-seventies nude ballet, but things not much better or not much different: lecture tours by prominent English writers; the exquisite romantic, Dame Thora Ashby; the prince of the kitchen sink, Arnold Beeston; a tour by the Sheffield and Rotherham Sinfonia … and thousands of subtitled film shows devoted to the delights of the English stately home, life in the Shires, the British Commonwealth, Princess Margaret’s wedding … endless endlessness.