by Robert Moss
It would take time, nonetheless. Faith was stronger than facts, and he had watched her faith in the Communist cause grow stronger in these weeks of playing hide-and-seek with the Nazis. It had been reinforced by Max, who had asked her to perform some minor chores — which she had accepted over Johnny’s protests. It had disturbed him to see the repulsion she had at first expressed for Max give way to a kind of fascination with the spymaster and his deadly games. Johnny had intimate experience of how that fascination grew, and where it led.
I want Max dead, he had told himself over and over, after Karl had come to him with the story of Heinz’s end. Even now, in the silence of the bedroom, beyond Sigrid’s shallow breathing, he seemed to hear the sickening crunch of bone under the executioner’s iron mallet.
Emil, too, the same voice said inside his head. Emil Brandt was more guilty than Max. He was the one who had denounced Heinz for crimes he had once been charged with himself. And I lied to Max’s people to protect that bastard.
Before he had walked in on Adam de Salis, he had deliberated how much he would offer the British. He had been ready to give them Max and Emil — those two had earned anything that might be coming to them — and the British network, which was riddled with cynicism and corruption. But there were large areas of his life that he would not betray, comrades who had fought with him and had given him their trust. And he would let nothing touch the two women who meant most to him. It troubled him that de Salis had asked about Helene.
He had chosen the British because the Intelligence Service — so his briefers in Moscow had never tired of repeating — was the most professional and most dedicated opponent of the Soviet cause. Also because, in his time in England, he had come to admire the unflappability of the English and their visceral distaste for the abstract reasoning that cloaked the crimes of a Stalin or a Max Fabrikant. Most of all because, if he and Sigrid were going to start over, they would need help — a place on which to stand.
Sigrid rolled over in her sleep, uncovering her back, and he pulled the sheet up to her shoulder.
He thought, I’ll give de Salis three days.
3
Colin Bailey liked to walk to the office. From his Mayfair pied-a-terre, three rooms above a French bistro, he would stroll down Curzon Street past Trumper’s — his barber’s — duck through Shepherd’s Market, deserted at that hour, into Piccadilly, and proceed down St. James’s Street to his club, where he would sometimes stop for bacon and eggs. Diana didn’t care for breakfast and, in any case, had taken to spending most of the week in Devon. Bailey’s club, the Senior, was largely patronized by retired army officers and colonial officials, to both of which castes he belonged. It stood across Waterloo Place from the Atheneum, much loved by Anglican bishops, and the Travellers, which most of his colleagues preferred.
The best part of the walk was across St. James’s Park. Following the winding path across the footbridge, he had a choice of views — the palace to the right, Whitehall to the left — and stood about equidistant from both, which was precisely where he placed himself in the invisible order of things. On the far side of the park, he waited for a troop of Life Guards to canter past. They were in full dress, horsehair plumes tossing, early light glinting on steel. It was a sight for the camera-toting Americans who descended on London in larger numbers every year, but Bailey was old-fashioned enough to find it comforting.
When he climbed Cockpit Steps and emerged into Queen Anne’s Gate, he found the street empty, apart from the milk cart making its stops. It was really absurdly early, and it was quite unlike C. to issue a dawn summons. But Bailey was not given to idle speculation; the cause would reveal itself soon enough. His mind turned on the party that had kept him up much too late. Over the port he had allowed himself to get into an argument with a languid viscount, one of Diana’s endless cousins, who was a prop of the Anglo-German Fellowship. The man refused to believe, of all things, that white men could possibly be descended from the ape. Bailey knew something of ethnology and had followed the debate over Raymond Dart’s discoveries in South Africa. He ventured to suggest that Herr Hitler and his admirers were proof positive that man not only had evolved from the killer ape Dart had dug up but was in imminent danger of reverting to his former condition. This remark was not well received.
From his homburg and his starched collar to the mirror-like polish of his shoes, Bailey looked the model of the army officer in mufti; he had swapped one uniform for another. But inside him was something that could never be regimented — a wild Celtic streak from his mother’s side of the family, mad Irish through and through. Try as he might, he could never keep it buttoned down for long. It had caused a minor scandal in Calcutta. It popped out at dinner parties after a bottle of claret. It delighted Diana, who called it his leprechaun, and his daughters, for whom he wrote nonsense rhymes.
The ferrule of his scrolled umbrella rang against the paving stones as he marched briskly past the weathered statue of Anne Regina and up the steps of number twenty-one. It was one of a row of elegant five-story townhouses, with gargoyle heads along the facade and carved foliage over the portico.
Bailey tapped the brass knocker, and a nuggety little man in a black coat opened it at once.
“Morning, Spooner.”
“Morning, Major Bailey. Bit early for you, is it?”
Spooner had been the chief’s orderly during the war and had stuck to him ever since. He treated all C.’s subordinates with the same cheerful insolence.
He helped Bailey off with his chesterfield and said, “They’ve just sat down to breakfast.”
“They?”
“Mr. de Salis is here from Berlin. Took the boat train, I believe.”
Bailey was mildly annoyed that he had not been fore-warned. De Salis presumed too much on his personal relationship with the chief. But then, the head of station from Berlin never had been one of Bailey’s favourites. There was an element of professional jealousy. For too many years de Salis had been allowed to run the most important SIS station as his own fiefdom. Predictably, he had started to go native. His Germanophilia seemed more pronounced since Hitler had taken power. His latest report provided arguments to sustain what, on the part of upper-class twits like the one at Diana’s party, was merely uninformed prejudice. Bailey was second to none in his detestation of Bolshevists. He had helped to frame the plot to sink Lenin and had accompanied the British expeditionary force that had landed at Murmansk. But he viewed the Hitler movement with equal suspicion and contempt, not solely because of the Nazis’ bad manners. Hitler, he was convinced, was no less of a revolutionary than Stalin and would prove to be no more of a dictator. Britain and the Empire must be ready to take on both. There were few men in England who understood this, fewer still in North America. Churchill was one of the few, and his reward was to find himself blacklisted by the BBC. De Salis’s reports did not help.
Bailey followed Spooner into the dining room and found C. sprinkling sea salt into his porridge.
“Ah, there you are, Colin. Good of you to come.”
C. made a habit of addressing men who were acting under orders as if they were doing him a personal favour. His diplomacy, like his comfortable, bluff exterior, could be misleading, as a Labour prime minister had discovered. C. had once called on Ramsay MacDonald and informed him that, unless he had his way, he would draw on the resources of friends in the City and set up an independent intelligence network, answerable only to the King. His bluff — if it was a bluff — had never been called.
De Salis made as if to rise from the table.
“Please don’t trouble yourself, Adam,” Bailey said. “How are you?”
They shook hands.
“Adam’s been traveling all night,” C. explained. “He washed up on my doorstep like a shipwreck.”
“I thought it best not to wait,” de Salis said, quite unruffled. “In view of the prime minister’s request.”
“Quite so,” C. agreed. “Colin, do have something to eat, will you?”
Obediently, Bailey set about slathering Gentleman’s Relish onto a piece of toast.
“Might I ask what request that would be?” he said, without looking up.
“It came up in December. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” C. looked mildly embarrassed, and Bailey immediately knew why.
The prime minister had asked the Secret Service to put together a paper on Comintern activities in Britain. The job had been assigned to Bailey’s department, and he had only just completed the draft report. The whole affair was hypersensitive because, in theory, the Firm was not permitted to embroil itself in domestic matters. Communist subversion in England was the preserve of its sister service, MI5. The government was looking for political ammunition, and C. — for reasons of his own — had decided to be accommodating. But the whole investigation was supposed to be kept under wraps. De Salis could only have heard about it from the chief.
Bailey felt his blood pressure rising. He set down his knife and played with the crumbs on his plate.
C. recovered briskly. “Adam, why don’t you bring Colin up to date?”
“I have a potential defector,” de Salis reported. “A walk-in, as it happens. He is a military specialist for the Comintern and was previously stationed in Britain. He knows all the Communist bosses here — Pollitt, Gollan, the lot. He has given me a digest of his activities in England. I don’t think I’m overegging it if I say it will enable us to destroy the most dangerous fifth column that is operating in this country. This is the best catch we’ve had in years.” He glanced at C., who did not contradict him.
“I’ve had a quick look at the material,” C. observed casually. “I think they’ll be quite interested at the Admiralty.”
“I take it this chap’s a Russian,” Bailey interjected.
“German. But he’s done the Red Army intelligence course in Moscow.”
“I assume you’ve checked his bona fides.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”
De Salis reported the traces that Johnny had given him — the cover name he had used to travel to Britain, the dates of his various postings, the identities of other agents and operatives he had mentioned.
Bailey made a few notes inside the cover of his check-book.
“We’ll need to check some of this with the Sisters,” he remarked.
“You won’t give them any inkling what it’s about, I hope,” de Salis said, in some agitation.
Bailey gave him a basilisk stare.
“Well, he is our property,” de Salis subsided.
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” Bailey said drily. As the man who handled day-to-day liaison with the Security Service, Bailey was well aware that there was no love lost among siblings. “I’ll go down to Cromwell Road myself.” He directed his words to C. “Max Knight owes me a favour.”
Bailey decided to indulge in a poached egg.
“Perhaps I could ask one or two questions, Adam,” he said, when he had deployed the egg to his satisfaction on top of a piece of toast.
“Of course.”
“What’s your chap like?”
“A rough diamond. Self-educated, but bright.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants out. I expect he’s in a bit of a funk, though he doesn’t show it. The Reds have been blown out of the water in Germany. There’s also some question of a girl. He wants a British passport for her.”
“Oh, he does, does he? I expect he also wants money.”
“He mentioned the figure of ten thousand pounds.”
Bailey snorted. This was more than a tenth of the budget for the whole Secret Service. “Did your chap also mention a knighthood and an audience with the King?”
“It’s not inconceivable something could be arranged,” de Salis suggested. “This man’s information could be worth a damn sight more than that to the government and certain sections of Fleet Street. I could talk to Bunny,” he added, using the family nickname of one of the most powerful and jingoistic of the press barons.
Only now did Bailey begin to appreciate the extravagance of de Salis’s ambitions. He wanted to ingratiate himself with the government by creating a tremendous splash — a red scare of the proportions of the Zinoviev Letter that would guarantee a Tory victory in snap elections. Perhaps de Salis even had his eye on C.’s job.
Bailey was by no means allergic to the use of propaganda, black, grey or even white. But his first instinct was operational. If the Berlin walk-in was genuine and not a fabricator or an agent provocateur, then he would be more valuable in place than fulminating against the Comintern in the pages of the Tory press.
“I’ll need a little time,” he said, looking at C. “I’ll want to examine all of Adam’s material. And of course Adam will want to put in an appearance at his newspaper.”
De Salis looked distinctly peeved.
“Very well.” C. drew back his chair, signalling that breakfast was over. “Why don’t we regroup next door later on. Shall we say eighteen hundred? I’ll have the lift waiting.”
Bailey’s designation on interoffice memos looked like the name of an old school form: Va. It meant that he was chief of Section V, the counterintelligence department. Some of his juniors called him the Fakir, a jocular sobriquet that could not be explained by his appearance; he was of middling height, wiry and compact, his wide, domed forehead capped by tight waves of dark brown hair that was just starting to grey. He had acquired his nickname because of his time in India in the intelligence branch of the police. His first experience of Russian intrigues, in those years before the war, had involved Tsarist plotters on the northwest frontier. On his first undercover mission, he had blackened his face and donned the flat turban and loose trousers of a Pathan tribesman to ride through the mountain passes to Kandahar, and found it was harder for an Englishman to pass for a native than it had been in the pages of his favourite story, Kim. His sojourn in Kipling country had ended when his family had learned of his romantic involvement with an Indian girl and brought pressure on his superiors to send him home. It had taken him the whole summer to recover from that love affair and a serious bout of malaria. By the end of that summer, there was no time for convalescence: Europe was hurtling over the terrible watershed of the Great War.
The colonial police was an odd career choice for a Scholar of Winchester, there were other oddities in Bailey’s make-up. His friend John Buchan, with whom he lunched occasionally at an obscure writer’s club that convened on alternate Tuesdays, described him as a model for the “practical mystics” who peopled his tales of adventure. His library, which had outgrown his country house on the borders of Dartmoor as well as the flat in town, ranged from ornithology to the occult.
If Bailey lived in a certain degree of comfort, it was thanks to Diana’s inheritance. Secret Service salaries were paid in cash and mercifully free of tax, but nobody could live on one without independent means, a military pension or an aptitude for embezzlement. Bailey had met Diana — Lady Diana Vavassour, as she then was, in the first spring after the war, on the day Mansfield Cumming, the original C., informed him that he had been accepted for the service. He was roaming the corridors of Broadway Buildings, looking for his section. It was lunchtime, and most of the rooms were deserted. He threw open a frosted glass door, hoping it was the right one — and found a tall, generously proportioned girl sprawled full-length on the rug.
“Good God!” Bailey exclaimed.
He had rushed to the girl and knelt over her. Her pulse was still beating. He tried to remember his first aid as he started to undo the top buttons on her high collar.
Suddenly he found himself looking down into two wide, china-blue eyes.
“Do you generally molest women, or just the ones you haven’t been introduced to?”
The girl sprang up. She was nearly as tall as Bailey.
“I’m sorry,” Bailey stammered. “I thought you’d fainted. Or something. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Oh
spilling, thank you.” She straightened her dress and smiled at his red face. “I like to take a catnap when I’ve been burning the candle at both ends.”
That was his introduction to Diana. At that time she was the secretary to one of the directors of the Firm, the kind it favoured then and since: a girl with good legs and equally good social connections. It didn’t take long for her to cure him of his lingering oriental infatuation. Within a year they were married, and she left the Firm to bear the first of their daughters. It was a pretty good marriage, as marriages went. They made space for each other. Diana spent a good deal of her time in the country, charging over the moors on her favourite hunter, tearing up the roads in the cheeky red Austin roadster he hadn’t wanted her to buy. That was no bad thing, Bailey thought. If she were in London more, she would exhaust the social scene and then be demanding to be sent off to overthrow some foreign potentate.
Bailey himself had tried his hand at overthrowing more than one such potentate. But he did not think of himself as “political.” Adam de Salis was political, and that was a defect in an intelligence officer; it corrupted his judgment. Bailey believed instinctively in a natural order of things that included the rule of law, civility, and the absolute right of Great Britain, as the principal custodian of both, to defend her interests, wherever threatened, by whatever means fell to hand.
What he most detested were political abstractions. Ideologies, people had taken to calling them — no doubt thanks to the Germans, who had invented the worst of them.
At the same dinner party where he had had to suffer the fool from the Anglo-German Fellowship, he had encountered another typical specimen of the times: the Trinity College Bolshevist. The boy had just come down from Cambridge, full of theories, and had proceeded to thrill his hostess with lurid accounts of what would happen to the ruling class when the inevitable revolution dawned.
