Harrison lifted his head. ‘And the awful thing is that I am cursed with total recall. That,’ he added irrelevantly, ‘was why I was so good at passing exams. I can remember every word I said in that stirring speech about patriotism and duty and loyalty and myopic idiocy and – I can’t go on, I can’t.’
‘You mustn’t reproach yourself, Jamie,’ Petersen said ‘Think what it did for our morale.’
‘If there was any justice, any compassion in this world,’ Harrison said, ‘this floor would open up beneath me at this very moment. A British officer, I called myself, thereby meaning there was no other. A highly skilled observer, evaluator, analyzer. Good God! Total recall, I tell you, total recall. It’s hell!’
‘I’m sorry I missed that speech,’ Crni said.
‘Pity,’ Petersen said. ‘Still, you’ve heard about Jamie’s total recall. He can repeat it to you verbatim any time you want.’
‘Spare the vanquished,’ Harrison said. ‘I heard what you said to Sarina, George, but I remain bitter. Fooled, fooled, fooled. And doubly bitter because Peter didn’t trust me. But you trusted Giacomo, didn’t you? He knew.’
‘I told Giacomo nothing,’ Petersen said. ‘He guessed – he’s a soldier.’
‘And I’m not? Well, that’s for sure. How did you guess Giacomo?’
‘I heard what you heard. I heard the Major telling – suggesting rather, to Captain Crni that his intention to rope us up before descending that cliff path was dangerous. Captain Crni is not the man to take an order or suggestion from anyone. So then I knew.’
‘Of course. I missed it. So you didn’t trust any of us, did you Peter?’
‘I didn’t. I had to know where I stood with you all. Lots of odd things have been happening in Rome and ever since we left Rome. I had to know. You’d have done the same.’
‘Me? I wouldn’t have noticed anything odd in the first place. When did you come to the decision that you were free to talk? And why did you decide to talk? My God, when I come to think of it, when have you ever been free to talk? My word, I can’t imagine it, I just can’t. Can you, Sarina? Living the life of a lie, surrounded by enemies, one false move, one unconsidered slip, one careless word and pouf! And he spent almost half his time with us!’
‘Ah! But I spent the other half with our own people. Holiday, you might say.’
‘Oh, God, holiday. I knew – and I haven’t known you long – that you were something different, but this – but this – it passes my comprehension. And you, a man like you, you’re only the deputy chief. I’d love to meet the man you call chief.’
‘I don’t call him “chief.” I call him lots of other things but not that. As for loving to meet him, you don’t have to bother. You’ve already met him. In fact, you’ve described him. Big fat clown, naïve and illiterate, who spends his time floating around in cloud-cuckooland. Or was it the groves of academe? I don’t remember.’
Harrison spilled the contents of his glass on the table. He looked dazed. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Nobody does. I’m his right arm, only, in charge of field operations. As you know, he seldom accompanies me. This mission was different but, then, this was an unusually important mission. Couldn’t be trusted to bunglers like me.’
Michael approached George, a certain awed incredulity in his face. ‘But in Mostar you told me you were a Sergeant Major.’
‘A tiny prevarication.’ George waved his hand in airy dismissal. ‘Inevitable in this line of business. Tiny prevarications, I mean. But I did say it was a temporary not substantive rank. Generalmajor.’
‘Good God!’ Michael was overcome. ‘I mean “Sir”.’
‘It’s too much.’ Harrison didn’t even notice when George courteously refilled his glass. ‘It’s really too much. Too much for the reeling mind to encompass. Maybe I haven’t such a mind after all. Tell me next that I’m Adolph Hitler and I’d seriously consider the possibility.’ He looked at George, shook his head and drained half his glass. ‘You see before you a man trying to find his way back to reality. Now, where was I? Ah, yes. I was asking you when you came to the decision you were free to talk.’
‘When you told me – or Lorraine did – about your Jenny.’
‘Ah, yes, of course. Jenny. I see.’ It was plain that Harrison was quite baffled. He suddenly, physically, shook himself. ‘What the hell has Jenny got to do with this?’
‘Nothing, directly.’
‘Ah Jenny. Lorraine. The question that Captain Crni asked me through there.’
Lorraine said in a quiet voice: ‘What question, James?’
‘He asked me if I knew Giancarlo Tremino – you know, Carlos. Of course I said yes, I knew him very well.’ He looked down at his glass. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have answered. I mean, they weren’t torturing me or anything. Maybe I don’t have such a mind after all.’
‘It wasn’t your fault, James,’ Lorraine said. ‘You weren’t to know. Besides, there’s been no harm done.’
‘How do you know there’s been no harm done, Lorraine?’ Sarina sounded bitter. ‘I know it wasn’t Captain Harrison’s fault. And I know it wasn’t really Captain Crni who asked the question. Don’t you know that Major Petersen always finds out what he wants? Are we still to regard ourselves as prisoners in this room, Captain Crni?’
‘Good God, no! As far as I’m concerned the house is yours. Anyway, you don’t ask me. Major Petersen is in charge.’
‘Or you, George?’ She smiled faintly. ‘Sorry. I’m not used to the Generalmajor yet.’
‘Quite frankly, neither am I. George is fine.’ He smiled and wagged a finger at her. ‘Don’t try to spread dissension in the ranks. Outside my head office, which at the moment is a disused shepherd’s hut up near Biha, Peter is in sole charge. I just point in the general direction and then get out of the way. If you know you’re not in his class, as I’m wise enough to know, you don’t interfere with the best field operative there is.’
‘Could I speak to you, Major? In the hall?’
‘Ominous,’ he said and picked up his glass. ‘Very ominous.’ He followed her out and closed the door behind them. ‘Well?’
She hesitated. ‘I don’t know quite how to say this. I think –’
‘If you don’t know what to say and you’re still at the thinking stage, why waste my time in this really melodramatic fashion?’
‘It’s not silly. It’s not dramatic! And you’re not going to make me mad. What you’ve just said sums you up. Superior, cutting, contemptuous, never making allowances for people’s faults and weaknesses: and at the same time you can be the most thoughtful and kind person I know. It’s not just that you’re unbearable. You’re unknowable. Jekyll and Hyde. The Dr Jekyll bit I like and admire. You’re brave, George thinks you’re brilliant, you take incredible risks that would destroy a person like me and, best of all, you’re very good at looking after people. Anyway, I knew last night that you couldn’t belong to those people.’
Petersen smiled. ‘I won’t give you the chance of telling me again how nasty I am, so I won’t say you’re being wise after the event.’
‘You’re wrong,’ she said quietly. ‘It was something that Major Metrovi said last night about Tito’s Achilles’ heel, his lack of mobility, his three thousand wounded men. In any civilized war – if there is such a thing – those men would be left to the enemy who would treat them in hospital. This is no civilized war. They would be massacred. You could never be a party to that.’
‘I have my points. But you did not bring me out here to point those out.’
‘I did not. It’s the Mr Hyde side – oh, I don’t want to lecture but I dislike that side, it hurts me and it baffles me. That a man so physically kind can in other ways be so cold, detached, uncaring to the point of not being quite human.’
‘Oh, dear. Or, as Jamie would put it, I say, I say.’
‘It’s true. In order to gain your own ends, you can be – you are – indifferent to people’s feelings to the point of cruelty.’
<
br /> ‘Lorraine?’
‘Yes. Lorraine.’
‘Well, well. I thought it was axiomatic that two lovely ladies automatically disliked each other.’
She seized his upper arms. ‘Don’t change the subject.’
‘I must tell Alex about this.’
‘Tell him what?’ she said warily.
‘He thinks you detest one another.’
‘Tell Alex he’s a fool. She’s a lovely person. And you are tearing her to pieces.’
Petersen nodded. ‘She’s being torn to pieces all right. But I’m not the person who’s doing the tearing.’
She looked closely at him, her eyes moving from one of his to the other, as if hoping that would help her find the truth. ‘Then who is?’
‘If I told you, you’d just go and tell her.’ She said nothing, just kept up her intense scrutiny of his face. ‘She knows who is. But I don’t want her to think that it’s public knowledge.
She looked away. ‘Two things. Maybe, deep down, you do have some finer feelings after all.’ She looked at his eyes again and halfsmiled. ‘And you don’t trust me.’
‘I’d like to.’
‘Try.’
‘She’s a good, honest, patriotic British citizen and she’s working for the Italian secret service, specifically for Major Cipriano and she may well be responsible, however indirectly, for the deaths of an untold number of my fellow countrymen.’
‘I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!’ Her eyes were wide and full of horror and her voice shook. ‘I don’t! I don’t! I don’t!’
‘I know you don’t,’ he said gently. ‘That’s because you don’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to believe it myself. I do now. I can prove it. Do you think I’m so stupid as to say I can prove a thing when I can’t. Or don’t you believe me either?’
‘I don’t know what to believe,’ she said wildly. ‘Yes, I do. I do. I do know what to believe. I don’t believe Lorraine could be like that.’
‘Too lovely a person, too honest, too good, too true?’
‘Yes! Yes! That’s what I believe.’
‘That’s what I believed, too. That’s what I still believe.’
Her grip on his arms tightened and she looked at him almost beseechingly. ‘Please. Please don’t make fun of me.’
‘She’s being blackmailed.’
‘Blackmailed! Blackmailed! How could anyone blackmail Lorraine?’ She looked away, was silent for some seconds, then looked back again. ‘It’s something to do with Carlos, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Indirectly.’ He looked at her curiously. ‘How did you know that?’
‘Because she’s in love with him,’ Sarina said impatiently.
‘How do you know that?’ This time he was openly surprised.
‘Because I’m a woman.’
‘Ah, well, yes. I suppose that explains it.’
‘And because you had Captain Crni ask her about Carlos. But I knew before that. Anyone could see it.’
‘Here’s one who didn’t.’ He thought. ‘Well, hindsight, retrospect, yes. But I said only indirectly. Nobody would be stupid enough to use Carlos as a blackmail weapon. They’d find themselves with a double-edged sword in their hands. But, sure, he’s part of it.’
‘Well?’ She’d actually arrived at the stage where she had started shaking him, no mean feat with a person of Petersen’s bulk. ‘What’s the other part of it?’
‘I know, or I think I know, the other part of it. But I haven’t any proof.’
‘Tell me what you think.’
‘You think because she’s honest and good and true that she has led a blameless life, that she can’t possibly have any guilty secrets?’
‘Go on.’
‘I don’t think she’s got any guilty secrets either. Unless you call having an illegitimate child a guilty secret, which I don’t.’
She took her right hand away from his arm and touched her lips. She was shocked not by what he had said but because of its implications.
‘Carlos is a doctor.’ He sounded tired and, for the first time since she had met him, he looked tired. ‘He qualified in Rome. Lorraine lived with him during the time she was Jamie Harrison’s secretary. They have a son, aged two and a half. It’s my belief that he’s been kidnapped. I’ll find out for sure when I have a knife at Cipriano’s throat.’
She stared at him in silence. Two tears trickled slowly down her cheeks.
EIGHT
At nine o’clock the next morning Jablanica looked so much like an idealized Christmas postcard that it was almost unreal, untrue in its breathtaking beauty. The snow had stopped, the clouds were gone, the sun shone from a clear pale blue sky and the air on the windless slopes, where the trees hung heavy with snow, was crisp and pellucid and very cold. It required only the sound of sleighbells to complete the illusion. But peace on earth and goodwill to all men were the last considerations in the thoughts of those gathered around the breakfast table that morning.
Petersen, his chin on his hand and his coffee growing cold before him, was obviously lost in contemplation. Harrison, who showed remarkably little after-effects from the considerable amount of wine he had found necessary to drown his chagrin and bring himself once more face to face with reality, said: ‘A penny for them, Peter, my boy.’
‘My thoughts? They’d be worth a lot more than that to the people I’m thinking about. Not, may I add hastily, that they include any of those sitting around the table.’
‘And not only do you look pensive,’ Harrison went on, ‘but I detect a slight diminution in the usual early morning ebullience, the sparkling cheer. You found sleep hard to come by? The change of beds, perhaps?’
‘As I sleep in a different bed practically every night in life that would hardly be a factor, otherwise I’d be dead by this time. Fact is, I was up nearly all night, with either George or Ivan, in the radio room. You couldn’t possibly have heard it, but there was a long and violent thunderstorm during the night – that’s why we have cloudless skies this morning – and both transmission and reception were close on impossible.’
‘Ah! That explains it. Would it be in order to ask who you were talking to during the long watches of the night?’
‘Certainly. No secrets, no secrets.’ Harrison’s expression of disbelief was only fleeting and he made no comment. ‘We had, of course, to contact our HQ in Biha and warn them of the impending attack. That, alone, took almost two hours.’
‘You should have used my radio,’ Michael said. ‘It’s got a remarkable range.’
‘We did. It was no better than the other.’
‘Oh. Then perhaps you should have used me. After all, I do know that equipment.’
‘Of course you do. But, then, our people in Biha don’t know Navajo which is the only code you are familiar with.’
Michael looked at him, his mouth fallen slightly open. ‘How on earth did you know that? I mean, I’ve got no code books.’ He tapped his head. ‘It’s all up here.’
‘You sent a message just after Colonel Lunz and I had been talking to you. You may be a good radio operator, Michael, but otherwise you shouldn’t be allowed out without a minder.’
Sarina said: ‘Don’t forget I was there also.’
‘Two minders. I’ll bet you never even checked to see if the room was bugged.’
‘Good God!’ Michael looked at his sister. ‘Bugged! Did you – how could you have known we were going to stay –’
‘It could have been bugged. It wasn’t. George was listening on the balcony.’
‘George!’
‘You talked in plain language. George said it wasn’t any European language he’d ever heard. You had an American instructor. The Americans labour under the happy delusion that Navajo is unbreakable.’
‘Now you tell me,’ George said. He seemed in no way upset.
‘Sorry. Busy. I forgot.’
‘Peter’s expertise in espionage is matched only by his expertise in codes. The two go hand-in-glove. Makes u
p codes all the time. Breaks them, too. Remember he said the Germans had twice broken the etnik code. They didn’t. Peter gave them the information. Not that they know that. Nothing like spreading dissension among allies.’ Harrison said: ‘How do you know the Germans didn’t monitor and break your transmission last night?’
‘Impossible. Only two people know my codes – me and the receiver. Never use the same code twice. You can’t break a code on a single transmission.’
‘That’s fine. But – not trying to be awkward, old boy – will this information be of any use to your Partisans? Won’t the Germans know that you’ve been kidnapped or disappeared or whatever and might pass this message on. If they did, surely they would change their plan of attack.’
‘Don’t you think I have considered this, Jamie? You simply don’t even begin to know the Balkans. How could you, after less than a couple of months? What do you know of the deviousness, the plotting and counter-plotting, the rivalries, the jealousies, the selfseeking, the total regard for one’s own power base, the distrusts, the obsession for personal gain, the vast gulf between the Occidental and Byzantine minds? I don’t think there’s even a remote chance of the Germans finding out.
‘Consider. Who knows I’ve got the plans? As far as the Colonel is concerned, there are only two plans, he’s got both and I’ve never seen a copy. Why should he think so? Metrovi will have given him the name of Cipriano but I’ll bet the Colonel has never heard of him and even if he has what’s he going to tell him? Even if he did tell him Cipriano would be too smart to believe it was the Murge division – a commando unit like Ivan’s never discloses their true identity. Again, apart from the fact that the Colonel’s pride would probably stop him anyway from letting anyone know that his defences have been breached, he could be Machiavellian enough to want the Germans to be taken by surprise, not, of course in order that they should be defeated but that they should suffer severe casualties. Sure, he wants the Partisans destroyed but, when and if it happens, he wants the Germans out of the country. Basically, they’re both his natural enemies.
‘And even if the Germans did eventually find out, so what? It’s too late to change plans and, anyway, there are no other plans they could make. There is no alternative.’
Partisans Page 19
