The Secret Houses

by John Gardner

  Naldo had begun to feel tired in the hot, pink suburban room. Now, as C spoke, he came wide awake, his senses tingling, reacting to C’s story. For his chief began to reveal secrets, like a magician opening a nest of Chinese boxes – cross-referencing fragments of Buelow’s, and the others’, evidence with things buried deep in files within SIS Registry. He was clear and concise, and the story ranged across half of Europe, springing to the United States, then to Soviet Russia and back again.

  It was a complex tale, but the way in which C laid out each equation, and then provided each answer, finally made up a sinister and labyrinthine thesis. Ploy followed ploy, movement became action, and, at the end – if C had really followed the logic correctly – there could be only one answer.

  ‘You see what I’m getting at,’ he said in conclusion. ‘We have to put our own questions to the answer.’

  ‘Yes.’ Naldo could not completely take in the enormity of C’s thesis. ‘You’d claim, sir, that things which happened within Tarot, and were connected to the Gestapo in Orléans, are directly linked to our own Service – and, from there, to Russian attempts to gain atomic intelligence?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And we have to test this theory?’

  ‘Correct again.’

  ‘But you have diverse intelligence, from good sources, sir. How can we test its accuracy?’

  ‘An operation by stealth. Your operation, Railton – well, yours and mine.’

  ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘Here and there.’ C tilted his hand. ‘First, you’ll have to go through the files I’ve gathered under one classified heading. I have the one copy. Nobody else has seen them as they are – rearranged under one roof as it were. And of course you’ll have access to the Tarot Board of Enquiry transcripts as they become available.’ He gave yet another thin smile, as though passing a trust to Naldo. ‘After that? Well, we shall see. London. Berlin. Maybe Russia. Certainly the United States. You’ll have to go deep. You’ll need to run young Kruger into the Berlin Russian Zone for a start. I also think, bearing in mind what we know of the United States connection, you should have an American officer on detachment. I’d like to keep things in the family – your family, that is.’ He regarded Naldo with his solemn eyes. ‘I’m trying to get Arnold Farthing seconded to us. They’ve given him a desk job in Washington, but there are ways and means. I should know soon. Maybe in hours. Hang on until then.’

  He cautioned Naldo again. Nothing must be breathed, even to members of his own family, and certainly not to any of the SIS. ‘It’s an enclosed operation. My operation.’ His voice rose slightly, and he went on to arrange a further meeting.

  Thinking his Chief had finished, Naldo made to stand up, but C held out his hand, palm toward his agent’s chest as though to push him back. ‘There is one more thing, and it might just be your first key into all this.’ He leaned to one side of the chair, extracting a file from a briefcase on the floor. ‘Photographs I want you to look at. Tell me, do you recognise this man?’ He slapped an ageing print onto the table and Naldo nodded. ‘Yes, of course. I’ve seen it many times. My late Uncle Ramillies, Caspar’s brother.’

  ‘What about this young fella, eh?’ C tapped the photograph with a forefinger.

  ‘I think you know, sir. He was a member of this Service. Went on an operation into Russia in October 1918 – ’

  ‘At the instigation of your great-grandfather, Giles – ’

  ‘He was never seen or heard of again.’

  ‘No. There’s nothing on file. Of all the people we sent in during that time of revolution and civil war, we heard no more of Ramillies Railton.’ As he said it, C pushed another picture forward, and then another and another.

  Each photograph was obviously of the same man – taken over a passage of years. They were all blown up from smaller prints: each one with a grainy texture. Slowly Naldo emptied his mind of emotion; as the fourth and fifth photographs were passed in front of him, he realised what was coming. It was the answer to something that had troubled him for over a decade now.

  ‘How about him?’ C was not gruff in manner. You could even have said that he showed pity as his finger pushed the photograph closer.

  ‘Yes.’ Naldo heard the rasp in his own throat. ‘Yes, I recognise him. I also see now who he is.’

  During that fleeting flirtation with leftist politics while at Cambridge during the thirties, Naldo had gone one icy night to the rooms of a friend in Trinity College. There they had been given tips and invitations by ‘…a comrade… who has British origins, but has lived in the USSR for some time.’ On that evening, Naldo thought there was something familiar about the man, and the face of the man from Russia had stayed alive in his imagination ever since – like somebody he had met before that time but could not place. Now, he saw in the progress of photographs that it was his own uncle, his Uncle Caspar’s brother, Ramillies Railton.

  The SIS was also well advised about Naldo’s political shuttling during his Cambridge days.

  ‘Does my father know?’

  C shook his head. ‘Time enough. He will be told, and Caspar also. Ramillies calls himself Rogov nowadays. Gennadi Aleksandrovich Rogov. NKVD of course. Quite high in their scheme of things. Spends a lot of time in the Russian Zone in Berlin. Wouldn’t it be charming to arrange a meeting?’

  Bearing in mind the whole thesis upon which C’s conclusions rested, it was a breathtaking, daring, and very dangerous idea. Naldo’s heart leaped at it. He raised his eyebrows. ‘I wish I had thought of that, sir.’

  The Chief smiled back. ‘Maybe we’ll tell certain people that you did,’ he said as though sealing the bargain on the operation upon which they were about to embark.

  In the hall, he put a Yale key into Naldo’s hand. ‘My house is your house,’ he said. Then he made Naldo repeat the telephone number three times. ‘It’s unlisted and, as far as I can tell, the line’s secure. We will probably use this place a great deal.’

  *

  Naldo returned to the house near Kensington Gardens at five in the morning. Barbara stirred in her sleep as he slipped into the bed beside her, then she moaned and wrapped herself around him.

  Even though his mind reeled under the information entrusted to him, and the dangers that he knew must follow, Railton fell into a deep sleep.

  He was wakened only by Barbara’s kisses.

  ‘Oh, you didn’t turn into a frog,’ she laughed as he came awake. She had made toast and coffee and she waited, close to him as he drank, ate, and began to come alive again.

  ‘You got in very late,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Yes, and the last hours have been a short course in death.’

  She asked no more questions, and he made up his mind to put her name to Security for clearance. It was routine, but in standing orders when it came to possible wives. ‘When do I meet the mighty Railton clan?’ she asked.

  ‘When I’ve told my father about us.’

  As she leaned over him, he noticed that her hair, like her breasts, stayed in perfect order – the smooth, neatly cut black cap of hair which made her look vaguely like a page boy in some painting he had once admired. There was a boyish look about the way she walked also, though nothing boyish in the breasts, which remained the same whichever way she turned. They did not even seem to flatten when she was on her back, as some girls’ did.

  Suddenly the name – Ranuccio Farnese – returned to his mind, and he knew where it came from. When he was still very young, his mother had spent hours showing him coloured reproductions of the works of great classic artists. She had even taken him to galleries as a boy, for two of her great interests were music and art. Ranuccio Farnese was the name of a 16th-century boy, painted by Titian. The name, and the painting, had stayed, locked in perfect memory through all the years. The black cap of hair in the painting was identical to Barbara’s hair, re-created by God and a coiffeur.

  Naldo told her of his childhood and how his mother and father had a strange, almost telepathic symp
athy regarding music. ‘Father swears he heard my mother playing the piano when he was in prison – in Germany. She also claims to have felt him standing behind her when she played. Everyone else gave him up for dead, but Ma knew he was alive. Apparently they swapped times, dates, and pieces of music. They matched up. They still have experiences.’ Naldo said he could remember the day, as a small child, when his mother had played happy music and said, ‘Daddy’s coming home.’ – ‘And, sure enough, he did. A few days later.’

  ‘I think we could be like that,’ she said. ‘I knew the moment I saw you that I would fall in love with you.’

  He reached out, holding her close. They stayed like that, in bed, for most of the day.

  At five o’clock the telephone rang and Naldo went, naked, to answer it.

  He recognised Arnold Farthing’s voice immediately. ‘I only had to wait an hour for the call to be put through. I had to speak with you. I’ve been posted back to Europe and I don’t know why. They mentioned your name.’ Naldo asked when he was coming.

  ‘Hope to be there by the end of the week.’

  ‘Good. You can be my best man. I’m getting married. Nobody else knows yet.’

  ‘Does the bride know?’

  ‘I think she’s got the idea. I suspect we’re having the honeymoon now.’

  Chapter Nine

  Caspar spoke with controlled passion to the Board of Enquiry. ‘During the whole of the war I felt like one tiny piece of several living jigsaw puzzles that had been scattered across the floor of Europe. Some burned near me; some exploded; some I could see and touch; others I could not relate to at all.’

  Naldo read the latest transcript in the nauseating pink room at the little safe house as Northolt.

  If Caspar had the power to evoke pictures in the mind of the Board, this particular feat was even more apparent when read from the transcribed pages. He told of the thousands of jobs he had done, and the hundreds of decisions he had been forced to make during the war, as he travelled between Secret Intelligence HQ in Broadway Buildings, the SOE HQ in Baker Street, and his own office set well apart from both.

  The catalogue ran from recruitment and training to meetings with agents – not always in Britain – interrogations, briefings and debriefings, planning conferences, deals, and straightforward nail-biting waiting at Tempsford or one of the other Moon Squadron stations from which agents were flown out to occupied Europe.

  He also spoke of days in Cornwall, on the Helford River, dealing with seaborne agents, coming in or going out.

  Worse were the individual decisions made like any military commander with the added knowledge that, upon his orders, someone was going to certain death.

  ‘The rest of the war was there, somewhere,’ Caspar told them, ‘and I was conscious of it. But, like a soldier in battle who sees only the small arc of his field of action, everything else seemed insignificant compared to the job I was doing at any given time.

  ‘Tarot was but one of my responsibilities, so you’ll have to give me chapter and verse on any Tarot-connected operation; and, in turn, I’ll have to be given time to consult the files before I answer. You cannot expect me to give you off-the-cuff replies to the kind of questions I’ve just been asked.’ – The question concerned the sabotage of certain aircraft under test: the Messerschmitt 110s designated G-4 with special forests of radar antennae sprouting from their noses for the successful role they played as night-fighters.

  Over three days, Caspar had regaled them with an almost Arabian Nights’ tale concerning the setting up of Tarot. Now, the inquisitors of the Board had begun to question him concerning the network’s individual operations. What they actually said was that they wished to ‘consult you regarding certain actions.’ But, when it came down to it, Caspar was being interrogated, and he fought back like some snappy old general.

  Before they began this so-called consultation, another witness was called – a former FANY cipher clerk who had served at No. 53A Signals Station and, while there, was responsible for the major decrypts to and from Tarot. C had written in the margin, C. Railton did not appear surprised that the FANY was a relation. The transcript did not give her name, but Naldo knew it was Elspeth – only known living daughter of Richard and Sara from Redhill.

  She recited a string of signals en clair, including operational instructions they called ‘Action Demanded’ – mainly sabotage orders of some priority. These last concerned the derailment of specified trains, the sabotaging of military convoys, or electric pylons, and that oldest of tricks, the inserting of sugar into the gasoline tanks of various Panzer units which passed through the Orléans sector. The messages which had come in regarding ad lib actions ranged from the wounding of Wehrmacht soldiers to the detonation of explosives in key military installations.

  Now they had asked Caspar if he knew or suspected, at any point before the Allied invasion of Normandy, that a large number of the Action Demanded orders had not in fact been carried out with any success – though Tarot claimed in its messages that every single such operation had been pressed home with vigour, producing exceptional results. All of these actions were supposed to have taken place between the winter of 1942 and the late autumn of 1943, when plans for Overlord, the Allied invasion of occupied Europe, were well advanced.

  ‘Very well, Colonel Railton, could you tell us if you had any opportunity, between 1942 and the autumn of 1943, of getting first-hand evidence of the success, or opposite, of your people in Orléans and St Benoît-sur-Loire?’ one of the Board asked.

  ‘I’ve already said that I need to consult records myself!’ Caspar barked. ‘Do I have to spell it out to you, gentlemen? And do I have to remind you that the members of Tarot were not my people as you put it; they only came under my control from time to time.’

  ‘At least two were related to you by blood, Colonel Railton.’

  ‘That has absolutely nothing to do with it. I ask to be allowed to consult the records.’

  ‘Even about your own relations, Colonel? Very well, but we must defer to the chairman.’

  The chairman was quite willing to give Caspar time to examine the files, yet the whole passage of words troubled Naldo for two reasons. From what he had already read, in C’s special file, he knew Caspar would not need to look at any records. There was an incident in the summer of 1943 that could never in a thousand years have left his mind. On the other hand, there were certain things which Caspar had yet to discover. Things already in the thumbed pages of C’s special file.

  The chairman of the Enquiry Board on Tarot adjourned the sittings for ten days so that Caspar could ‘Read and revise all necessary documents.’ He also indicated that in his judgment three more of the witnesses should be heard before any further questions or cross-questions should be put to Caspar Railton. They would be an officer from the Government Communications Headquarters, the ‘pianist’ who had spent some weeks in St Benoît-sur-Loire, and Felix – Jules Fenice himself.

  The adjournment gave Naldo an opportunity to catch up on the mounting pile of paper, there in Northolt, for him to study.

  For Naldo, life was taking a new shape. A precise pattern was now laid over his waking hours. The evenings and nights were often spent with Barbara, but early each morning he would travel out to the Northolt house where he spent hours reading – the previous day’s transcripts from the Enquiry, and C’s reassembled file. The documents were brought to him each morning in a little red General Post Office van. The driver wore a GPO uniform, and the same man never knocked twice.

  At first, C’s File, to which they gave the name First Folio, appeared incomprehensible. Some of the documents were from recent days and showed only slight signs of wear and tear. Others reached back to the early days of the war, some even to the late 1930s. Many of these had the ring file holes heavily reinforced with little gummed eyelets; pages were patched together with tape – some already beginning to take on yellow marks at the edges where sun had beaten on their shelves through a Registry window.

/>   They also required a cross reference, yet there was none. Only on certain files had C marked in his neat green ink See XC105 or some such clue. Apart from that, Naldo found himself reading reports and dossiers which appeared to have no interconnection. It was a giant puzzle, and C relished it as an academic examiner would gleefully rub his hands on setting a particularly complex trick question.

  ‘Eventually, from the whole of the First Folio’ – C indicated the preliminary batch of the papers – ‘you will ascertain where the true nature of my problem lies.’ The Chief had said this during their second meeting in Northolt, which took place twenty-four hours after the first.

  Now Naldo, with only a fraction of the evidence as yet at his disposal, had already uncovered some of the more sinister aspects of what was to be his case – his and Arnold’s concerto: for C had given it a crypto. It was to be called Symphony – orchestrated by C, performed by Naldo and Arnie, with some solo playing by young Herbie Kruger, the child prodigy.

  Naldo’s mind became obsessed by the First Folio, not even wholly leaving it when he was with Barbara.

  One night they went to see Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V – Naldo had somehow missed it when it was first released. Afterward, all Barbara could talk of was the visual beauty and Walton’s score: the language had failed to move her – ‘Shakespeare didn’t write film scripts,’ she kept repeating.

  All Naldo could recall was the scenes when the king, disguised in a cloak, spied on his soldiers on the night before Agincourt. While watching Olivier skulk in the shadows, exchanging words with those who could not recognise him, Naldo realised that he was now an observer of those who had been his colleagues – a shepherd watching the shepherds.