The Conduct of Major Maxim

by Gavin Lyall

  "If Blagg's got anything. This time he's going to tell the whole truth and nothing but. "

  "Good. We're running out of time."

  "I'd like to be able to convince him that it wasn'tthat mob that took a shot at him. "

  George shook his head emphatically. "Husband would never authorise gunplay in London. In fact, I don't know how hecould authorise it – he hasn't got the men. They just don't exist, not here. The Firm uses a few muscle-brains in the Middle East and so on, but they're employed at several removes and a lot's done to make sure theystay overseas. You can spend your whole life in The Firm without once meeting a pistol by way of business – in fact, you'd better, if you ever hope to be considered for Best of Breed. "

  Maxim made what might have been an agreeing noise. "All right, but what about Sims?"

  "He's more vulnerable than Husband. If he makes a cock-up of this, anything approaching a scandal, he's finished in a very final way."

  "Where did they get him from?"

  "East Germany, via West Germany. He Saw The Light seven or eight years ago, and went to work for the Verfassungschutzat Ehrenfeld. Counterespionage. Given his background, he built up a very effective little unit, then he offered the whole thing to us after the Flying Doctor business. Did you hear anything about that? – probably you were out of the country."

  "I know the one you mean. " Maxim had picked up the story from friends in the Intelligence Corps. A youngish doctor employed full-time to look after the health of the Verfassungschutz'sagents had been caught, by pure chance, passing on the details of those agents' medical histories and personal problems to the Other Side. He had, of course, been security checked and re-checked, and every time found to be clean. He was faithful to his wife – except for an occasional nurse, which she had to agree didn't count – and wasn't into drugs or gambling or politics. The security men had missed only one thing: the doctor didn't want to be a doctor, he wanted to be an airline pilot. They knew he spent his weekends at the flying club, but hadn't got around to totting up how many hours of blind flying instruction in a twin-engined Cessna he was buying, nor how much each such hour cost. And since the good doctor was a lousy pilot, it was a lot of hours and a lot of money, nearly half his government salary, and almost all paid for by sympathetic friends in East Berlin.

  "It just goes to show," Maxim's confidant from Int Corps had summed up, "that sex and drugs and gambling aren't everything. One shouldn't benarrow-minded when looking for a man's weakness. "

  The doctor wasn't the only security failure in West German intelligence, but he had been the last straw for Sims. Rather than see his unit rotted away by the disillusionment of constant betrayal, he had approached MI6 with an offer they didn't want to refuse.

  "Of course, it isn't the Done Thing to poach people – let alone a whole unit – from an Ally," George went on, "but our East German operations had completely fallen apart, the place had become a total black hole as far as The Firm knew, and they were desperate. Anyway, we weren't feeling too chuffed towards West Germany at that point: something to do with Common Market fishing policy, they kept sending their trawlers into the Hampstead Ponds or somewhere. So the Foreign Office turned a bland eye – nobody was exactly complaining out loud – and we took on the whole Sims organisation as a going concern. From desk bods right down to people in the field. Mrs Howard was one of his. "

  "Her? I thought she was supposed to be a sort of part-timer, an amateur."

  "That's the story when something goes wrong: 'Not our normal standard, just somebody we picked off the street, don't judge us by her blah blah.' But she was one of his, all right. And overall, they seem to be doing pretty well. If Plainsong actually comes off it'll be a big boost for the whole Sovbloc desk. Then they can go back to asking each other where they got their blow-drys and leave the rest of us in peace."

  After a minute or so, Maxim said: "Mrs Howard had a gun. Two, in fact."

  "And look what a power of goodthat did us all. "

  Chapter 15

  The doctor had been and gone by the time Maxim reached the little cottage on the hillside above Caswell's father-in-law's garage. Maxim suspected that the cottage belonged to the old man, too, and went with the job. He wondered how long Jim would stand that.

  "Said he's doing very well," Caswell reported. "Gave him some more shots, his temperature's well down. Told me to keep himstill for a couple of days. "

  "Is he awake now?"

  "Yes, he's listening to the radio. I'll shift the telly in there for him tomorrow, that might keep him quiet."

  "Has he heard about the one in the hospital?"

  "Yes. It doesn't seem to bother him."

  "Well…" But did they want it to bother him? Blagg's touching faith that Maxim would save him from murder charges in two countries might at least mean that he would stay where he was and do nothing – for once. Caswell led the way.

  Blagg was lying flat on his back but bulging out of a small single bed that itself crowded the tiny room. It was all very cottagey, the uneven walls papered with a tiny flower pattern and all filled with an odd green light reflected in from the hillside that sloped up just outside the window. Blagg pulled out the radio earpiece and struggled to sit up.

  "Lie still, you stupid little man!" Caswell thundered, all sergeant again. Blagg relaxed sheepishly.

  For a couple of minutes they made sickbed small talk while Maxim tried to decide just how Blagg was. The right side of his face was a mass of scratches, there was a sticking plaster on his ear, and his chest was heavily bandaged, but even in that sickly light he seemed bright-eyed and calm. Best of all, hewas talking long sentences without a hint of breathlessness. Maxim was fit enough himself but, he thought wistfully, there's no medicine like being only twenty-five.

  "Is this the first time you've copped one?" he asked.

  "Nah, I got one in Armagh. Smack in the arse, but it was probably just about spent. Bloody funny that was, for everybody else. Have you, sir?"

  "Years back, out in the Gulf." Maxim touched the outside of his right thigh; through the thin cotton trousers he could trace the hardedged crater that had come close to killing him, out in the desert hours from real medical aid. Instead, it had only taken away six months of his life – at a critical point that just might have foreclosed on his promotion hopes. If, of course, he still had any. Well, as they said, why didy oujoin the Army if you can't take a joke?

  "One thing," Blagg said; "I'm lucky I don't smoke." He grinned slyly at Caswell, who had already twice taken out and then put away his cigarettes.

  "Right, then," Maxim called the meeting to order. "I've talked to Six, and somebody in the Foreign Office. I'm sorry it took all this to get them out into the open – as far as they've come. They've said they'll do what they can for you, and I believe them. That wound might help with some fairy story… But you've got to tell me everything now. You hadn't remembered you had that gun, last time. "

  "Lucky I had, though, wasn't it?" Blagg said aggressively. "Who was they, those two at Dave's place?"

  "Supposed to be East German. They're involved, anyway."

  "How did they know where I was?"

  Maxim thought for a moment. "My guess – it's no more than that – is that somebody came around earlier and told Mrs Tanner that there'd be a couple of hundred quid in it for her if you showed up. She's out of work, and I don't suppose Dave makes a fortune…"

  "That littlescrubber," Blagg breathed. "I didn't think she liked me much, but I'm one of Dave's oldest mates and… when I get up, I'll bloody-"

  "You'll do nothing. She can still tell the police you were in that shooting and oncethey get you, you can forget you everhad any friends or were ever in the Army. All right? Why didyou go back to London in the first place? – why didn't you stay here?

  "Dave rang me, see, and he said there'd been some blokes asking around about me and he didn't think they were coppers at all, and I thought well, that could be The Firm -"

  "It was."

 
; " – and I wanted to get in touch with them, anyway, and… well…"

  "And I didn't seem to be doing much that was any use. Goon."

  "I thought I might get just to chat to one of them, but instead I suddenly found a whole bleeding pack of them behind me. Just following, but still…"

  Sadly, Maxim remembered how long – and how much luck – it had taken for him to spot his own pack.

  "So I thought bugger this for a lark and got rid of them, and the next couple of days I tried to ring you, but…"

  The two days Maxim spent ambushing his own followers and then kicked into exile by George.

  "All right," he said. "Problems all round us. Butnow let's hear the rest about Bad Schwärzendem."He sat down on a tiny painted nursery chair beside the bed.

  Blagg hesitated, or perhaps was trying to remember, and Caswell said in a firm voice: "The shooting was just after ten, you said. You left the car at Dortmund and caught an early morning train for Ostend – you said. Dortmund's less than a hundred miles, mostly by Autobahn, so you could have been there by midnight. And the first boat train's at half past six. Now don't tell me you spent the night sitting on the station, because they wouldn't let you, or parked in a stolen car, because you're not that stupid, not quite. Now…"

  Caswell hadn't only been doing some thinking, he'd been looking up maps and timetables.

  "Well," Blagg said slowly, "what it was, see…"

  George belonged to things. He liked to boast that, in central London, he was never more than a couple of hundred yards from some club, institution or association of which he was amember and which could provide, at the very least, a roof in a rainstorm. "You can'tlose a club, the way you can an umbrella," he once told Agnes. She had replied that it still seemed an expensive policy compared with even the dearest of umbrellas, and George had thought about that and said: "You can't piss into an umbrella, either. Not without attracting unfavourable comment anyway."

  This particular club faced across Green Park, which on that evening looked very green and crisp, the trees standing tall and full against the restless sky. It was probably something to do with the view that had convinced George he ought to be drinking a very large glass of dry sherry from the wood. Agnes had taken a smaller one; she had just got back from her service's registry.

  "You do appreciate," she was saying, "that all our material on Eismark is about thirty years out of date? We don't try to keep up with people like that. Really all we've got is what his sister told us when she came over."

  "We're supposed to be interested in his first marriage and that's more than thirty years ago, isn't it? What did she have to say about that?"

  "Well…" She was sitting in a very old overstuffed leather sofa and hiding a notebook behind her large handbag because she wasn't sure notebooks were allowed in the club; not much was. "Gustav's the younger by just over two years… he was nine when his father died… they moved away from Rostock, went to stay with relatives in the Harzmountains… mother married again and rather faded away, they were brought up mostly by grandparents and aunts. They don't seem to have been poor: she had all her piano lessons, Gustavhad a racing bicycle when he was still at school. Did you know he had a glass eye?"

  "Can't say I did. Why should-Ah, I see: no war service for young Gustav. Wasthat the bicycle?"

  "Yes, he got his face mixed up with the spokes of-"

  "Please: I get enoughofthatsortofthingfrom Harry. Go on with the non-bloody bits. "

  "He did well at school -Mina thought he was a genius -and actually got a year in college. At Bremen; he wanted to bea naval architect in those days. Then Hitler invaded Russia, everybody remembered old man Eismark had been a pinko, and Gustav washove into the night. "

  "He was lucky not to be in a concentration camp or the Todt Organisation."

  "He was lucky to have a talented sister. She'd already made a bit of a name for herself, only locally but you know what the Germans are about music, and the district party bosses liked romantic pieces so she became the star turn at their more respectable booze-ups. That was when she started using her mother's name, Linnarz, to get away from the Eismark stigma. And they tolerated Gustav- gave him a job on the land – as long as it kept Mina happy and she kept them happy. There must have been a lot of that sort of thing, when you come to think about it: tolerating ideological undesirables as long as it suited your own book – not that National Socialism had much ideology beyond being first at the trough. It couldn't last, of course."

  "What went wrong?"

  "The party got a new Kreisleiterwho didn't dig music and wasn't going to have any damned Commie subverting his cabbages, so he blew the whistle.Mina got the tip-off just in time and they became U-boats, went underground. Just who did it for them she didn't seem to know, it was all contacts of Gustav's. Probably he made some useful friends in Bremen;Mina said he was always asking her if she'd heard any interesting gossip at her musicalsoirées.Butone way or another, somebody came up with the fulltabled'hôte:safe havens, roadnames and the paperwork to back them up. Even money from time to time. This was November '43."

  George made a long thinking, grumbling noise, then said, mostly to himself: "The paperwork must have been good… if they were living on it for eighteen months… they weren't escaped prisoners of war trying to reach Switzerland on a hand-copied Fremdenpass… Could they have been in with the real Communist underground?"

  Agnes lifted her eyebrows in a facial shrug; George knew far more about that period of history than she did. "Could have been. I thought it was pretty badly penetrated, but…"

  "Oh, it was. The Gestapo was just about running the Communist party by 1944, but to do that they'd have to let some small fry run free, and from their point of view the Eismarks would be very small indeed. They didn't actually go in for sabotage or anything, did they?"

  "No, according to her theyjust stayed undercover-separately – in small villages and so on until the end of the war.

  George grunted and finished his sherry. "Thank God: now I can have areal drink. What about you? Same again?" He pressed a bellpush. "Come along, young Algar: what about this marriage? – when do we get to that?"

  "Very soon, " Agnes said patiently."Brigitte Krone: she was living with one of the families Gustavhid up with that winter. Parents had been killed in the Hamburg bombing, so perhaps she was feeling lonely. Anyway, all the other young men were away at the war, Gustavmust have been spending just about all his time indoors, young love wove its spell and… 'ow's yer father?" Agnes lapsed into stage cockney.

  George frowned, absent-mindedly gave their order to the servant who had appeared, and said: "I don't know… marriage seems a public sort of affair. I'd've thought that would be adding enormously to the risk…"

  "There was a growing need for marriage lines. "

  He looked puzzled.

  "Oh, for heaven's sake. The girl was in the club, knocked up, a bun in the oven – 'ow's yer father?"

  George stiffened into the Compleat Civil Servant. "If you intend me to infer that she was pregnant, then for the life of me I can see no reason why you don't actually say so. I don't find all two-syllable words either incomprehensible or, when comprehended, necessarily shocking."

  "She was pregnant," Agnes said, staring at the low coffee-table, not at George. "And marriage itself might have been a useful bit of insurance for Gustav: herrelatives or guardians would have been less likely to inform on her husband than on some passing stranger who could get his trousers open in Olympic time."

  "Is there something," George asked icily, "about the atmosphere of this place that causes you to come up with suchexpressions? If so, we can easily adjourn to Fred's Caff in Brixton where you might react by trying to speak the Queen's English."

  Agnes looked up. From over George's shoulder stared the portrait of a general whose handling of an attack in the South African war had caused so many casualties to his own brigade that he had immediately been promoted away to see if he could do the same thing with divisions and c
orps. In 1915 and '16 he had proved he hadn't lost his old touch, and so died in bed at a great age, garnished with colourful honours, many of them from grateful countries whose soldiers he hadn't got killed even on purpose. He was looking at Agnes with exactly the expression he would have chosen had he lived to see a woman in his club.

  "It must be something about the place, " she agreed meekly. "Must try harder. Where were we?"

  "Gustav wasjust getting married."

  "Yes. That happened in May 1944. The boy, Manfred, was born in the October. "

  George did mental arithmetic on his fingers. "That means around January… Gustavdidn't waste much time about…"

  Agnes didn't say a word. She looked very much like somebody not saying a word.

  "And the wife, Brigitte: when did she die, or was supposed to have died?"

  "April 1945, just before the end of the war.Mina said Gustavsaid she'd been killed by Allied planes. She hadn't been around herself at the time and said Gustavdidn't like talking about it much. Fair enough, I suppose."

  "Where did this happen?"

  "She didn't say."

  "Isn't that odd?"

  "She wasn't hiding anything. If our people had asked her, she'd have had to answer. It was her applying for asylum, not us inviting her. But they can't have asked: why should they? They weren't interested in her war story, they'd heard a million war stories. They just wanted to know what was going on in East Germany there and then. She only mentionedone place after they'd gone underground and that was where Gustavgot married: Sangerhausen. In East Germany, now."

  "So we can't get at the marriage certificate," George brooded. There was a burst of male laughter from the bar, which had suddenly filled up with men wearing MCC ties; the day's play at Lord's would have ended just about twenty minutes ago. The servant fought his way clear and delivered their drinks; George grunted, Agnes smiled and shifted carefully on the sofa. There was no way to be comfortable on it, and even movement was risky because the old leather was cracking like dry parchment.