by Philip Kerr
He handed me a large manila envelope containing the Russian codebooks. I smiled thinly. But Donovan was too busy looking around for his staff car to notice the probably insubordinate look on my face. Deakin noticed it. Deakin noticed a lot. I decided it was probably why he was in intelligence.
“Don’t worry, sir,” Deakin told Donovan. “I’m sure the professor and I can crack it.”
Once Donovan was gone, Deakin lit a pipe and indicated the way. “It’s not far,” he said. “Just around the corner. Bit of luck really. That we didn’t have time to send him back to BTE last night.”
“What and where is BTE?”
“British Troops in Egypt. They’re in the Citadel. Bit of a hike getting over there, so those prisoners we do get for interrogation, we try to do it here. In Garden City. I say, can I help you with that case?”
“No, it’s okay. This is my cross. I can manage it.”
“You know, it’s a lucky break, you turning up like this, Professor.”
“Please. Willard.”
“My name’s Bill,” said Deakin. “Pleased to meet you. Actually, we’ve met before. In London about six weeks ago. I was with SIS before joining SOE. I’m a pal of Norman Pearson’s. Professor Pearson? The Yale professor of English? The two of you breezed into Broadway Buildings one afternoon while I was there and had a chat with old Kim Philby.”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry I didn’t remember. I met a lot of people on that trip. It’s kind of hard to remember all of them.”
“Anyway, as I was saying, it’s a lucky break, your turning up like this. I mean, your having been the president’s special representative and whatnot.”
“That was then, Bill. Now I’m just a liaison officer between Donovan and FDR. That’s code, you know. For house parlormaid, assistant stage manager, and general dogsbody. I’m not even required to go to the Cairo Conference.”
“Yes, but you know the president. That’s the point. And you are an accredited member of his delegation.”
“That’s what it says on my security pass.”
“So I was rather hoping you might help me at the same time as I help you. It’s rather strange, really. You and Major Reichleitner both having been investigating the Katyn Forest massacre for your respective governments.”
“Yes, that is a coincidence.”
“Of course, that’s what he was doing then. He has told us quite a bit about himself, but he won’t tell us what he was doing so close to Tunis. Where he was going. What his mission was. At first he said he was on his way to Ankara when his plane hit some bad weather and they were forced to go south around it. Which was when he was shot down by your people. Only we checked the weather reports and conditions over the south of Europe and the northern Med were perfect that day. When I said as much to our Jerry—and this is where you come in—he went all stiff on me and told me that it was imperative he speak to someone close to President Roosevelt. That he had an important message he could put only into the hands of a member of FDR’s delegation. So, as you can see, it’s a stroke of luck your needing our help, too. Once he’s got whatever it is off his chest, I don’t see how he can fail to cooperate with your request.”
“Yes, that is good news.”
“If you don’t mind, we’ll play it the way I outlined it. I’ll wear the black hat and you can wear the white one.”
“I get the picture.”
Grey Pillars was a stately-looking building at number 10 Tolombat Street. British officers called it “number ten,” but it was better known to almost everyone in Cairo as Grey Pillars, because of the four Corinthian colonnades that enclosed its stately foyer. It was the headquarters of the British army in Egypt, although GHQ had long outgrown the original building and now occupied the whole street. Beyond the glass doors, things were less like a military HQ and more like a large Swiss bank, probably because Assicurazoni, a Trieste-based insurance company, had occupied the building before the British.
Deakin led the way down a plain marble staircase to a makeshift series of prison cells guarded by a bespectacled lance corporal reading a copy of Saucy Snips. Seeing Major Deakin, he hurriedly put the obscene magazine aside, snatched off his glasses, and sprang to attention. Despite a large fan on the ceiling, the heat in the cell area was almost unbearable.
“How’s our Jerry?” asked Deakin.
“Claims he’s sick, sir. Wants the khazi all the time.” The khazi was a British army term for lavatory.
“I do hope you’re taking him, Corporal. He is an officer, you know. And, as it happens, a damned important one right now.”
“Yes, sir. Don’t you worry about the Jerry, sir. I’ll look after him.”
The lance corporal unlocked the cell door and there, on an iron bedstead, wearing just his underwear, lay the German officer, apparently none the worse for his recent experiences. Major Reichleitner was a heavy-looking man with shortish fair hair and cornflower blue eyes. His jaw was as big as a sandbag, and his lips were thick and pink. He reminded me a little of Hermann Göring, the Reich’s air marshal. Seeing his two visitors, he swung his legs off the bed. They were pink, with lots of short fair hair, like a breeding pair of Chester White pigs. They didn’t smell much better, either. He nodded affably.
I leaned against the cell wall and listened patiently as Deakin spoke in a coarse, chewed-up, oatmeal kind of German. Probably it was the kind of German that the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V employed when he was famously speaking to his horse. Only the French spoke worse German than the English. I lit a cigarette and waited for a verb.
“This is Major Willard Mayer. He is with American intelligence, the OSS. He has come to Cairo as part of President Roosevelt’s delegation. But previously, when I met him in London, he was the president’s special representative.”
For all of the lance corporal’s assurances about Major Reichleitner’s welfare, I thought he could have used a shave and a comb. There was a burn mark on one cheek, presumably received when his plane had been shot down, and it lent a belligerent cast to his face.
“What can I do for you, Major?” I asked.
“I’ve no wish to insult you, Major Mayer,” Reichleitner said. “But have you any way of proving you are what he says you are?”
I showed Reichleitner the Cairo Security pass given to me at the airport. “Do you speak English?”
“A little.” Reichleitner handed me back my pass.
“So what’s this all about?”
“Have you heard of the massacre in the Katyn Forest?” asked Reichleitner.
“Of course.”
“I was part of the investigating team,” said Reichleitner.
“Then I’ve read your report,” I said, and explained the circumstances of my having been appointed FDR’s special representative. “Is that what you wanted to talk about?”
“No. Not directly, anyway. Something similar. Murder on a massive scale.”
“Well, that’s worth some cigarettes, at least.” I handed Reichleitner a cigarette and lit it, before tossing him the packet. Then we all sat down at the table as if we were about to play a game of cards.
“Your report was very thorough,” I told him. “For what it’s worth, I agreed with your conclusion. That, on this particular occasion at least, the German army was not responsible for mass murder.”
“Your German is very good,” said the major.
“It should be. My mother always read fairy tales to me in German.”
“Is she German?”
“Kind of. You know, the American kind.” I threaded my cigarette between my lips and sat back in my chair, my hands in the pockets of my trousers. “You were telling me a story yourself, weren’t you?”
“The suitcase you found when I was picked up,” Reichleitner said to Deakin. “Where is it, please?”
Deakin stood up and shouted through the judas hole. Reichleitner said nothing until the case was open on the table in front of him. It was empty.
“The clothes that were in here are at the laundry,” explai
ned Deakin.
“Yes, I know. The lance corporal explained. Have you a pen-knife, please?”
This time Deakin hesitated.
Reichleitner shook his head and smiled. “It’s all right, Major. I give you my word as a German officer, I will not attack you with it.”
“We’ve already cut the lining,” said Deakin, handing over the knife he used on his pipe.
“It has a double lining,” said Reichleitner. He unfolded the blade of Deakin’s knife and levered it inside the leather lid. “Also, you have to know where to make the cut. This has been stitched in with very fine wire. With one cut you might remove the first lining, but not the leather underneath.”
It took Reichleitner several minutes to remove the leather lid of his suitcase. He laid it flat upon the desk and then opened it like a large portfolio to reveal a waterproof package containing several neat piles of paper and a small roll of photographs.
“Very clever,” said Deakin.
“No,” said Reichleitner. “You were careless, that’s all.” He made one pile of pages out of the several smaller ones and then pushed the documents toward me.
“After Katyn Forest,” he said, “this was the next investigation. Hardly as thorough, but just as shocking. It relates to a place in Russia called Beketovka. The largest POW camp for German soldiers captured at Stalingrad. The conditions described here apply in all Soviet POW camps for German soldiers. Except those for the SS. For the SS things are much worse. Please, read this file. Several men died to bring the information and these pictures out of Russia. I shan’t detain you with the precise figures now, gentlemen. Instead I shall merely give you one statistic. Of the two hundred fifty thousand Germans captured after the surrender at Stalingrad, about ninety percent are now dead from cold, starvation, neglect, or just plain murder. My mission here is simple. To deliver this file to your president with a question. If the deaths of twenty-seven thousand Poles are not enough for you to break off your alliance with the Soviet Union, then what about the deaths of two hundred and twenty-five thousand German prisoners?”
“Only four thousand Poles have been found. So far.”
“There were other graves,” said Reichleitner. “In truth we had no time to examine all of them. However, our intelligence sources in Russia have indicated that this may be only the tip of the iceberg. Of the million or more Poles deported in 1941, perhaps as many as a third of them are now dead, with many more unaccounted for in Soviet labor camps.”
“Bloody hell,” breathed Deakin. “You can’t be serious.”
“Had I not seen what I have seen, then I might have agreed with you, Major Deakin,” said Reichleitner. “Look, this is what I know. But what I suspect is much, much worse. There are terrible things that Germany has done, too. Dreadful things to the Jews in Eastern Europe. But we are your enemy. The Russians are your friends. Your allies. And if you do and say nothing of these things, you will be as bad as them, for you will be condoning what they have done.”
Deakin looked at me. “These figures he mentions, they’re impossible, surely.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But three hundred thousand Poles?”
“Men, women, and children,” said Reichleitner.
“It doesn’t bear thinking of.”
Reichleitner threw himself down on his bed. “Well, I have done my duty. Everything is explained in the file. I can tell you no more than you may read for yourselves.”
Deakin tapped the bowl of his pipe against the heel of his hand and, catching my eye, nodded.
“Actually there’s quite a lot you haven’t told us, Major,” he said. “Such as who sent you on this mission. And who you were to make contact with when you arrived in Cairo. You don’t expect us to believe that you were going to make your way to the American legation and hand this dossier over to the president in person. To whom were you intending to entrust this?”
“Good point,” I said.
“You might not be a spy yourself, but the person with whom you were supposed to make contact in Cairo almost certainly is.”
“I was sent on this mission by Reichsführer Himmler,” admitted Reichleitner. “My orders were to check in to Shepheard’s Hotel posing as a Polish officer. I speak Polish and English. Better English than I led you to believe earlier. And I’m afraid that I was planning to do exactly as you have said. To deliver the dossier to the American legation. Number twenty-four Nabatat Street, is it not? Here in Garden City.”
Deakin threw a nod in my direction. “That’s the address, all right.”
“I was to place the dossier in a parcel marked for the attention of your American minister, Alexander Kirk. I had a covering letter addressed to Mr. Kirk, but I lost that when I bailed out, along with my Polish passport.”
“Very convenient,” said Deakin.
Reichleitner shrugged. “Can you think of a better way to deliver a dossier into the hands of the Americans than simply to hand it in at the legation? I know Cairo. I was often here before the war. So why would I need a contact? A contact might only have compromised me and my mission.”
“A contact might help you to escape from Egypt,” I suggested.
“That’s not so difficult, with money.”
“He had several hundred pounds on him when we picked him up,” explained Deakin.
“A ninety-minute train ride to Alexandria,” said Reichleitner. “Then a ship to Jaffa, in Palestine. From there it’s easy enough to get passage for Syria and then Turkey. I’m often in Ankara.”
“Nevertheless, I still think we will have to try you as a spy,” said Deakin.
“What?” Reichleitner leaped off the bed and pointed to the papers he had brought from Germany. “I came to bring you information, not to spy. What kind of spy brings papers and film with him? Answer me that?”
“These might be forgeries,” said Deakin. “Disinformation designed to drive a wedge between us and our Russian allies. We call that sabotage. Same as blowing up an oil refinery or an officers’ mess.”
“Sabotage? But that’s idiotic.”
Deakin collected the Beketovka papers from the table. “These will have to be evaluated. And if they don’t check out, you could find yourself facing a firing squad.”
The German closed his eyes and groaned. “But this is preposterous,” he said.
“Major Deakin,” I said, laying my hand on the German’s papers. “I wonder if I might be allowed to speak to Major Reichleitner alone for a moment? It’s all right. I don’t think the major will try to injure me, will you, Major?”
Reichleitner sighed and shook his head.
“All right,” said Deakin. “If you’re sure.” He knocked on the door to summon the lance corporal, and a moment or two later Reichleitner and I were alone.
“I don’t feel so good,” groaned the German.
I helped myself from the packet of cigarettes I had given the major. “I can get you some medicine when I leave this cell. If you like.”
Major Reichleitner nodded. “It’s my stomach.”
“I’m told everyone gets stomach trouble in this country. So far I’ve been lucky, I guess. But then, I don’t think you can catch much from cigarettes and scotch.”
“I don’t know if it’s something I ate, or just nerves. Do you think that English idiot really means to charge me with spying?”
“I could probably persuade him not to. If you were to do me a small favor.”
It was a dangerous game I had decided to play. But now that I had met Major Reichleitner, it was a game I felt I could control. I had decided that it would be better to know what the Bride material actually contained, rather than live in fear of mere possibility. If Reichleitner did manage to decode Bride, I’d decide what to do about it afterward. Controlling a man like Reichleitner, a prisoner of war, with the aid of some cigarettes and scotch and some medicine would be a lot easier than trying to deal with an Allied officer in SOE.
“What kind of a favor?” The German frowned suspicio
usly. “Look here, if it’s information you want, there’s nothing I can tell you. I can’t imagine that the work of the German War Crimes Bureau is of much interest to American intelligence.”
“It’s my understanding from Deakin that before joining the bureau you were with a signals and communications battalion on the eastern front.”
“That’s right. At Heinrich East, the Regimental HQ in Smolensk. My God, it seems like a hundred years ago.”
“Why did they assign you to the Katyn Forest massacre?”
“For one thing, my languages. I speak Russian and Polish. My mother is Russo-Polish. And for another, before joining the army I was a detective in Vienna. Cryptology was always a sort of hobby of mine.”
“A few minutes ago—what you were saying about the Russians. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Deakin, but there are an awful lot of Americans who believe that Russia is the enemy, not Germany. My boss in the OSS, for one. He hates the Bolsheviks. So much so that he’s set up a secret section inside the OSS to spy on the Russians. A while ago, we started monitoring Soviet signals traffic in Washington. It seems that our ally is spying on us.”
The German shrugged. “When you lie down with dogs, you catch fleas.”
“More recently, we came into possession of some Soviet onetime cipher pads. For political reasons, it’s been decided we’ll have to return these ciphers to the Russians. But until this happens my boss wants to make whatever use of them he can, in the hope that we might get some idea as to the identity of these Russian spies in Washington. The British aren’t being of much help. Frankly, they’re overstretched just trying to deal with German signals. But it occurred to me that you might have had some experience with Russian ciphers because of your work on the eastern front. And given your obvious and quite understandable desire to drive a wedge between us and the Russians, I wondered if you would like to cast your eye over what we’ve got.”
“And in return you’ll persuade Deakin to drop these spying charges, is that it?”
“Yes.”
Reichleitner took one of the cigarettes, lit it, and regarded me through narrowed eyes. “Did you bring the material with you?” he asked.
