The Bookworm

by Mitch Silver

  Ian Fleming, Peter’s brother and the “fill-in” at table for Marlene’s party that evening in 1939, is, as you know, serving in Naval Intelligence with the rank of Commander. He heads up a little group called 30 Assault Unit, a band of what they’re calling “commandos” these days. When I was writing In Which We Serve, I thought I might use Ian’s bit of stealth as one of the officers’ flashbacks whilst the men from the torpedoed ship were in the water, so I prevailed upon him to set down in detail those first few days of September 1940. Here is what he sent me:

  “Noël, for several weeks after I agreed to pass as Oswald Mosley, I began cultivating a moustache like his. Now, the day before departure, I darkened my hair with dye, brilliantined it, and brushed it straight back instead of giving it my usual part. We had the passport chaps take a few snaps and do their usual magic with stamps and visas and lo!—I was now Sir Oswald, fresh out of Holloway.

  “At least I was a fair enough approximation of the man—about the same height and weight—that I might hope to pass under the eyes of some functionary at the Wehrmacht checkpoint. Especially if I should have Lady Mosley with me in the flesh.

  “What did they call her in the papers when the bastard was courting her? ‘Diana, Goddess of the Chase.’ But a black-and-white photo fails her … the blond hair, the small, rosebud mouth, and those eyes, the colour of perfect star sapphires.

  “Of course she refused to do it at first. I mean, the woman is every bit the Fascist her husband is; married in the home of Joseph Goebbels, weren’t they? With Hitler in the wedding party! But she had to be my laissez-passer through the German lines so, as you suggested, I told her we’d hang Mosley if she didn’t go along. Winston would have done it too.

  “Anyway, once we did get through German security at Antwerp, it took us three days to make our way down to the Ardennes, doubling back every so often to make sure we weren’t followed and staying each night in some out-of-the-way auberge. I insisted Diana keep up the pretense of my being Mosley, acting affectionate during the day and sharing rooms with only one bed at night.

  “Speaking man to man, she adjusted quite well to the part. She was trapped and she knew it. Another thing we both knew: Diana was no debutante. She’d left her first husband in the lurch to take up with Mosley. And she’d spent the last two months in prison. Sorry, Noël, if I’m being rather indelicate, but you asked how it really was, didn’t you?

  “I was thinking, afterward, standing there in the clearing amid the towering birches and pines with the monastery behind me and the moon overhead, a man could make a very nice life for himself in wartime, provided he wasn’t actually killed. There was, first and foremost, the adrenaline rush of the operation itself, the release that a few minutes or hours brought after long, boring days and weeks of planning and rehearsal. Almost as good as sex.

  “Speaking of which, I’d brought a perfume sprayer with me, filled with Blunt’s age-old dust and dust mites, that I’d sprayed all over the place—the books, the shelves, but mainly on myself. I began to have this fit of sneezing standing there in the clearing, loud enough to wake the old boys just up the road. Diana was very good about using her hands to work the dust off my monkish robe. And then under my robe, where I don’t think there was any dust.

  “It was quite dark under the trees, and I have this mental picture of her, later, shaking two cigs out of her box of Benson & Hedges. She lit the match and, when we put our heads together for the flame, it came back to me again how amazingly beautiful she is.

  “Exhaling, she blew out the match, casting us both back into darkness, and we stood there smoking in the night, the glowing tip of Diana’s cigarette barely coming up to my chest. Now that the job was over, I was thinking of the name you once called me. “Shamateur,” remember? I can’t shoot straight or operate a wireless set but I get to run my own operations behind enemy lines because I’m the PM’s fair-haired boy.

  “You were right too: You don’t get to pluck the wife of ‘Britain’s most dangerous man’ out of gaol so you can travel incognito with her on his passport unless Winston Churchill gives you the high sign.

  “In my own defense, this whole business—Dietrich to the American to you to Blunt to Winston to me—none of it would have been worth a farthing if I hadn’t been the perfect one to take the ball, the winger who cut back inside when they weren’t expecting it and went in, untouched, for the try.

  “So I’m asking you now, Noël, to think of me not as a ‘shamateur’ but as a true English amateur, a lover of the game. I believe I’ve earned it.”

  There you have it, Robert old man. As I watch your man Nigel prepare to put this final cylinder in the valise and lock the whole business onto his wrist for the long journey home, I’m at a loss over what to make of it—several magical California evenings wasted, so I might help you defend a man who would cut me dead in the street.

  Ah well, what do they say? “Bedfellows make strange politics.” Or is it the other way round?

  Chapter 50

  It had been a long day and it was only going to get longer. The G20 session had gone well, everyone said so. Now he just had time to take a quick shave and get ready for the state dinner. The protocol officer had carefully instructed him to toast the Russians every time they toasted him, tit for tat. Did that go for the French, too?

  The call came in on his wife’s Samsung Galaxy. No surprise; he’d thrown his own phone against the wall and the backup governmental one with the scrambled lines was next door with his chief of staff. He walked over to where she was reading the Wall Street Journal and took the call.

  “Carl! What’s up?”

  He listened for about thirty seconds before saying, “Carl, two things. One, it’s your problem. Two, you’re fired.”

  When he handed the phone back, she gave him the one raised eyebrow thing. He said, “Anger management in action: If I threw yours too, how would I tweet?”

  Chapter 51

  An hour later, on the other side of Red Square from her flat, Lara was standing before the lemon-yellow façade of the Moscow Botvinnik Chess Club, familiarly known as the Central House of Chess. In the 1920s it housed Russia’s Supreme Court; now a few aging kibitzers lounged on the raised bench, gazing down and judging the play. Strange, the places you go to have questions answered.

  In the ’50s, back in Botvinnik’s day, the House of Chess would have been packed to the rafters to watch a world champion play. Or tie his shoes, for that matter. Even an ex-champion like Garry Kasparov. Chess then was a Russian obsession.

  Lara remembered the Russian Girls semifinal she played here. It wasn’t her home club, so she’d been given the side of the table closer to the door. The place was so full of patzers and gawkers, every newcomer who arrived pushed the crowd more tightly up against her back. She distinctly remembered going for a quick mate so she could get away from the guy with greasy, unwashed hair, leaning over her shoulder and whispering dumb moves into her ear.

  Today, what with kids playing video games and texting all day, Russian chess is in such a sorry state the current world champion is Norwegian. Imagine. This all-comers match tonight against the retired fifteen-time champ was, sadly, just one more proof of the game’s decay. Twenty-two players were arrayed in a circle, and the only people pressing up against the challengers’ backs were one or two of the younger girlfriends.

  Kasparov was in the middle of the circle, still going on about Russia’s need for closer economic ties with the U.S. to his captive audience of uncaring pawn pushers. Lara congratulated herself on missing most of his speech. When The Other Russia’s motley group of parties had been unable to agree on a Presidential candidate, it had rendered them irrelevant on the political landscape, Kasparov the most irrelevant of them all. But that didn’t keep him from bloviating.

  Lara’s hundred-ruble entrance fee entitled her to stash her stuff in a cubbie and take down a shopworn set from the shelf by the door, under the “net mobilnykh” reminder. She dutifully turned off her mobile
and passed by the jumble of clocks on a table; these games wouldn’t be timed.

  Kasparov finished his talk to a smattering of applause. Waiting for the matches to start, Lara fingered a rook where one of the little turrets on top had broken off the castle. In public, in private, Russia was decline and fall everywhere you looked.

  Garry was older than she remembered, of course, with gray mixed into his thick black hair. To make it just that much harder on himself, he was playing Black on every board, so he would be dealing with twenty-two opening moves from twenty-two eager beavers. Even so, when the bell rang, he took no more than five seconds to size up a board and push a piece ahead before taking three steps to his right and repeating the process. The twenty-two of them were like twenty-two roses and he was the only bee, going flower to flower.

  She needed to do something unorthodox to get his attention, so Lara moved her knight forward. He was across from her now. Without looking up he moved his queen’s pawn up one space. Then he was gone to deal with the pimply boy on her left.

  If you simply tried to defend against a great player, you’d be sliced to ribbons. L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace. Lara wanted to open up the center before she lost the advantage of playing White, and brought her own pawn out. The situation called for a flanking maneuver, a discovered check, anything to make him think a little about this game, this opponent.

  By his eighth circuit of the boards, he’d already mated over half the players. With fewer competitors, he was coming around faster, leaving her barely enough time to plot a move. Here he was again. He looked at the Botvinnik Fork she was lining up and said, eyes still on the board, “Haven’t we played before? I remember your hands.”

  “Yes, we played when my hands and I were a lot younger.”

  He stopped and looked up. “You beat me that time, didn’t you? With the same fork.” Without waiting for her to answer, he interposed his bishop.

  Five more players on the next go-round conceded defeat, either toppling over their king or reaching out for a handshake. Kasparov was practically running around the circle now that there were just the four of them left.

  Lara had seen his bishop coming. She abandoned the fork and, instead, took the exposed pawn, the one the bishop had been defending, en passant. This nicely opened up the long defile for her own bishop.

  She looked around the circle. One of the players on the far side was up and walking away from his board in defeat. Sore loser. The other guy on that side looked for several minutes at his position and finally stuck out his hand.

  And then there were two: the history prof and the kid with the pimples who couldn’t be more than fifteen, sitting next to her. The other players and onlookers were now congregating behind them five deep. One was even standing a little too close. Just like old times! She looked over at the kid’s board. He had a nice modified Caro-Kann going. Would he castle now and bring his rook into play?

  She hadn’t noticed Kasparov standing in front of her board, studying it. He startled her by saying, “I like your inventiveness,” before moving his queen out, threatening a number of nasty possibilities.

  She put her hand on her queen’s bishop. Moving it she said, “There’s something I want to ask you.”

  His face took on a quizzical expression. In the old Soviet days, when there were no rock stars, starry-eyed nymphets propositioned chess champions all the time. Now there was no Soviet, and she was no nymphet. He looked down and moved his other bishop forward, offering to exchange pieces. It was a simplifying move for both of them. Without speaking, he sidled over to the boy.

  The teenager had castled. The great Garry Kasparov took his time before moving his king away from the square threatened by his opponent’s newly emboldened rook. Then he stepped back to Lara.

  She waited for him to refocus on the board before taking his bishop. She too desired a simplifying move. He smiled a little and said, “So ask.”

  She could feel the other forty people in the room press forward in anticipation. What did this woman with the Asian eyes want from the celebrity? To have her picture taken with him? Something more? Her question was not what they expected. “What would you pay to get your hands on the Bible?”

  Kasparov raised a bushy eyebrow before taking her bishop. Then, without replying, he moved to his right, where the whiz kid had him in a pickle, having developed a nice three-pawns-to-two thing on the left-hand side. Lara looked back to her own board. She could retake his piece with her queen, the way he wanted her to. But she could look down the road and see only bad things if she did. Or she could do the spectacularly flamboyant thing and sacrifice her queen right now, giving him an enormous edge in material but denying him the tempo he needed for his attack. It might just be her winning line.

  He was back. After a silent minute that they both spent studying the position in front of them, he said, still looking down, “This Bible you speak of. If I have to bid for it, Larissa Mendelova, then you’re not your father’s daughter.”

  Lara sat there and studied the man’s face. Nothing in the room was moving—not the pieces, not the players, not even the onlookers. But tumblers were turning in her mind, over and over, back and forth. And then a mental something dropped into place, one tiny cog in a much larger mechanism, and Lara knew what she had to do.

  She reached out her hand and took Kasparov’s chess piece with her queen, the move he wanted her to make. It would be over soon. Let the kid be the last man standing. Or sitting. She had things to do.

  Chapter 52

  Obersalzberg

  Ulrike Preisz had a sixth sense about people and desserts. Which customers would order straight off the menu and which ones had to be coaxed with the rolling trolley brimming with the Sacher tortes and apfel kugels and all the pastries mit schlag.

  The two businessmen at Table 23, closest to the entrance, would need the cart. Not the musclebound fellow whose clothes were straining at every seam; he looked like he carried a fork and napkin around with him in a jacket pocket. No, the other one, tall and bony; he’d just have coffee if Ulrike didn’t bestir herself soon into a little tableside selling. No wonder the previous leaseholders hadn’t made a go of it. You couldn’t just sit up here and let the scenery do all the work. Always be selling.

  The proprietor scanned the room. Nineteen tables occupied on a Thursday! You couldn’t tell her Hitler didn’t sell. The heavy one was still going at it, working the last of the veal off the bone. The one with him, Mr. Johnson, appetite long gone, was looking at his watch. Better get the trolley from Inge.

  Chernuchin knew the hostess had been looking at him. At them. Was she suspicious? Out of the corner of his eye he watched her tap a young waitress on the shoulder and take the rolling dessert wagon from her. He looked at his watch and thought, two more minutes. What did it matter if she was suspicious? What could she do?

  If the next 120 seconds went as scheduled, they’d write this one up in a training manual some day; a book, even. That is, if the KGB ever started up again as an aboveground organization. Step One: Drop malware, literally, into a motherboard to locate a desired object. Step Two: Snatch that heavy object while it was on display in a public place, when the only escape route is a single elevator leading to a long tunnel inside a mountain. Added Difficulties: do it speaking another language in another country, with less than half a day to organize, execute, and escape. Ha! It would take the CIA two weeks, minimum.

  He looked at the dessert menu, but his mind wasn’t on all the heavy pastry. In fact, he was full up to here. His stomach was definitely upset from all the flying and the time zones. They’d hardly unpacked after London before being shoved back onto the flight to Munich. No time to plan, just adapt something you’ve done before and slide down the pole into your boots like firemen.

  Still, he had to admit there was real satisfaction when a plan came together, even one as straightforward as Find the Tins, Grab the Tins, Follow Where the Tins (and the Professor) Ultimately Led.

  He looke
d over at Suslov, the bottomless pit. Two old farts they were, one tall and one wide. He chuckled to himself: what if the positions were reversed and they were the ones down there in the valley, while Alexei and his flamethrower was up here in the Kehlsteinhaus dining room … Alexei, whose thing for pretty girls was exceeded only by his love of guns and high explosives? By now, fifty innocent people would be fried to a crisp. No, better the sane ones are up here. He chuckled again.

  Without looking up from the worried-over veal bone, Suslov said, “Care to share the joke?”

  “I was just thinking of the kid. Like a bull in a china shop.”

  Suslov gave him one of his looks. “There are no china shops anymore. Everything’s online.”

  “It’s an expression.”

  The woman who had seated them now glided over to the table with a cart full of fattening German sweets. She said, “How was everything?”

  They made the appropriate noises, so she went on. “And for dessert? What may I get for you gentlemen?”

  Chernuchin, trapped, was about to order the strudel, not that he’d have to eat it, when Suslov said, “I’ll have the cookies.”

  The woman was puzzled. “Cookies? We don’t—”

  Suslov said, “It was the cookies that brought us here. Isn’t that right, Mr. Black?”

  Chernuchin gave him a withering look, a flamethrower look, and said to the frowning woman, “My colleague will have the apple strudel, as will I,” even as the last five seconds were ticking off his watch.

  Boom!

  The detonation of the first old truck going off in the valley far below reverberated all the way up the mountain. Had bright boy used too much kerosene?

  Another crash, louder, as the second, bigger truck exploded, sending metal fragments thirty feet into the air.