'Yes, I suppose you are right,' I said.
'I went to Prince Arthur at Brighton and became a naval officer in four months. I loved it. You spend a long time with the same people inside a small ship. You set to know every nut and bolt of the ship and every nut and bolt of the crew. When the boat is sunk it's worse than being divorced after a happy marriage. You lose your home, your personal gear, your friends are dead, wounded or posted. You have nothing left. After the second time in the drink I wandered around the London pubs for twelve days hoping to see a face I recognized. I decided that I couldn't go through that again. I volunteered for the submarine service. If you get sunk there you stay down. But before I ever got near a submarine I found myself in Scotland, messing around with frogman gear.'
Tomas asked for a cigarette. After lighting it he said, 'You don't want to hear about frogman training?'
'Just tell me what you think is interesting.'
'You are a funny sort of bastard.'
'Touche,' I said.
'I had orders to report to the depot. Everything had gone wrong that Thursday; the bank manager was gunning me for a lousy œ12 and the MG had plug-trouble on the Great North Road - you remember what motor spares were like during the war - and this fat swine in the garage where I stopped was riddling some petrol for two blokes with Boston haircuts and a van full of tinned fruit. I hung around fuming, but he told me I should be grateful for one of his precious spark plugs. "I reckon it all goes to you blokes in the services nowadays," he said, as though we were living on the fat of the land. "Yes," I said to him, "it must be a tough war back home, listening to Itma and knitting socks," and then these other two got nasty and after some words he said he didn't want any money for the plug, so I left. I can remember every minute.
'It was from that time that I began to feel afraid of the deep water. I was quite O.K. diving in daylight or near the surface, but I couldn't bear working with the thought that under me there was just darker and darker depths of water until you were just swallowed up.'
Fernie Tomas shouted to Augusto to make sure he didn't forget the engine temperature, and Augusto said he wouldn't.
'You don't know what it's like on a midget,' said Tomas. It was a plain statement of fact. I didn't. 'Imagine that you've crossed the North Sea inside the bonnet of a motorcar, jammed against the engine. You dress yourself in underwater gear. Much more incredible and inefficient than modern equipment. You dress in a space much smaller than a telephone booth, and then clamber through the flooding chamber, which has a nasty habit of going wrong and leaving you jammed in a tight-fitting coffin. But you may be lucky; the hatch cover isn't jammed or fouled so you can crawl out into the ocean. You walk along the top of the midget submarine - it's not much wider than a plank and getting narrower and narrower as you move forward. The pointed bow upon which you are finally balancing is bumping with great metallic crashes against a vast anti-submarine net which stretches as far as you can see in every direction. The rungs of the net are nearly as big as a steering wheel and you hold on to one to steady yourself as you wield the cutting tool. All the time the skipper keeps the motor running so that the bow will continue to nudge the net, but the deck grinds and grates and perhaps a flow of fresh water throws the buoyancy out, or rain makes it even darker than before. Your metal boots slip off the tightrope you are on.'
Tomas rubbed his arm and shivered. 'I had a recurring nightmare hi which I slipped off the deck and fell into the bottom of the sea.' He shivered again. 'So of course it happened. I grabbed the net as the submarine slid to one side. The motor had failed and the current swept it back out of control. I was alone in the sea hanging on to the net.'
Tomas rubbed his forehead and took a stiff drink. I poured him another. He said nothing until I said, 'What did you do?'
'I climbed up the net rung by rung.' Tomas's white hands clasped the blanket. 'I held on to the top of the net until a German boat came along in the morning to check it. They told me afterwards that they had to prise my fingers away from the metal to get me into the boat. I was the only survivor of the force that attacked. They gave me food and I slept the clock round in the local navy barracks. I could only speak schoolboy German, but it was enough to hold a conversation. On the second day I had dinner in the German officers' mess, and I supposed I'd had a few extra drinks to celebrate being alive. In the normal way I would have been sent to a P.O.W. camp and there the matter would have ended, except for something one of the officers said at dinner that night.
'Two bodies had floated up under the port screws of the big cruiser. They had tried to move them but there was no diving unit within a hundred miles. He said there was no option but to run the screws. He hoped I'd understand. It wasn't a thing a sailor liked to do, he said.'
Tomas sniffed and swirled his whisky around in his glass. 'I said that if they would give me my equipment back and recharge the oxygen cylinder I'd have them up in a jiffy. Everyone in the mess said what a sense of comradeship that showed - that I would do that to retrieve my friends' bodies for a ceremonial burial, which the German Navy would be honoured to give them.'
Tomas looked up at me; I hadn't smiled.
'It's easy to be cynical now and see it as a put-up job, but at that time the propaganda pundits had got us all acting like the cast of a British film. You know what I mean?'
'Don't I just,' I said.
'Anyway, they had a couple of Kriegsmarine officers accompany me and they said could they use the apparatus. I wasn't keen about that. They didn't press it. They were professionals, just as you're a professional. They knew what sort of process getting information really is.'
'Yes,' I said, 'collecting information is like making cream cheese from sour milk. If you squeeze the muslin bag to force it - it's ruined.'
'Yes, that's the way it went; they collected their information drip by drip, and all the while I was living in their officers' quarters and had a servant and good food and they were telling me not to hurry and perhaps I would like to be sure that there were no other bodies near by. After they'd had a big funeral with lots of stuff about fellow-sailors challenging the mighty ocean deep and all that, I was sent down to Cuxhaven to a P.O.W. unit. The food was ghastly and I was treated like a convict. One night, when I was feeling as low as it's possible to get, one of the German officers that I'd stayed with in Norway visited me, together with a man named Loveless.'
'Graham Loveless?' I asked. It was Smith's nephew.
'Yes,' said Tomas. 'I told them that I had been a member of the British Union of Fascists. They said that if I joined the Legion of Saint George (what was later called the Britische Freikorps) they could arrange that I lived with German naval officers. They said that I would only be called upon to use the underwater equipment to save life or property or against our mutual enemy - the sea.'
Tomas looked at me and shrugged.
'And you fell for it?' I said.
'I fell for it,' said Tomas.
'Then you met Giorgio Olivettini?'
Tomas didn't fall into the trap; he walked into it slowly and deliberately. He looked at me and said, 'Yes, I saw him soon after that. He told you?'
I tried a simple lie. 'I guessed,' I said, 'when I saw you on the U-boat the night Giorgio died.'
'That was you, was it?' said Tomas. 'Yes, I sometimes did a night swim for pleasure.'
I knew he was lying. He had obviously been out doing his heroin-delivery service that night, but I said nothing.
I poured a drink for both of us; the whisky helped Tomas to relax. He finally said, 'It was a Moray eel.'
I offered him some ice from the refrigerator. 'It was a Moray,' he said again. I put a cube into his glass and two cubes into my own. 'It was a Moray,' Tomas screamed as loud as he could scream, 'a Moray, do you hear?'
'O.K.,' I said.
'They tear you to pieces. Huge Moray eels as big as pigs, they have teeth like razors. They terrify me. There are thousands along this coast, many of them eight feet long.
They live in the rocks as a rule, but these were living in the cracked pressure hull.'
I remembered the gashes across Giorgio's body. Perhaps it was true. Tomas began to speak quickly. 'He was a lieutenant when I first met him. The Wehrmacht had a pretty low opinion of the Italian armed forces, but these frogmen were different. Everyone hung on their every word. It was funny really. Giorgio was the only person that understood what a farce the whole bloody war was. We both fought on both sides. He had a German medal and an American medal.'
'I didn't know that,' I said.
'Yes, I saw him presented with a German Eagle Order of Merit 'with star.'
He picked up his drink and sipped at it 'He was a fabulous underwater man.' He drank some more. 'Kill him, I couldn't have killed him. You can't imagine a trapeze man pushing another trapeze man off the wire, could you? Well, it's like that.'
'Tell me about the period immediately before V.E. Day,' I asked him.
'You know my real name, so you have read the court martial?' asked Tomas.
'It doesn't give a clear idea,' I said.
'Loveless was a big man with the Germans,' Tomas said. 'People said that when the Germans won the war they'd make Loveless the Prime Minister of England. When Loveless said to me that it was all up, I knew it was all up. It was his idea to go to Hanover. I wanted to go farther south to the sector where the Americans were advancing, but Loveless said if we went to Hanover we wouldn't have to worry any more, so I went There was a Wehrmacht Archive Unit in Hanover and Loveless had got permission to examine certain of the documents.
'He went to the Archives and photographed the "Weiss List".' I nodded, hoping that Tomas would explain further.
'It was about the size and shape of a paper-back novel. It had thick grey card covers. Inside were the names of British Nationals and their addresses. They were in alphabetical order. Between each section there were plain pages with pink ruled lines for additions. Each name was that of a person who would actively assist the Germans when they invaded Britain.'
I said, 'Did Loveless think that these people would be best to negotiate a German surrender through?'
'Perhaps you are not following the story,' said Tomas. 'Loveless didn't give a damn about the Germans and the sort of surrender that they were likely to get'
Outside it was blowing a Force 5 and hi the warm, well-lit cabin it was easy to think that we were back again hi that world of 1945.
Tomas poured himself another drink and shouted to Augusto to cut the engine revs, and told me that we were just wasting fuel. We agreed that Augusto was a bright boy and that the Portuguese were natural sailors, and Tomas took a generous throatful of H.K.'s firewater and continued.
'Loveless photographed the "Weiss List" (it was called that as an antonym for black list) and buried the prints in a garden hi a badly bombed part of Hanover. We were held hi a German prison for some time. The lights were on all the time, day and night, everything was white, tiles shining like false teeth and slamming doors that would echo like a thunderclap and the constant jangle of bunches of keys that the warders carried. Now and then the spyhole hi the cell would flip open and the psychiatrist or the quack would be spying on you and you knew he was writing everything down and attributing reasons. They thought everyone was nuts except themselves. Apart from the odd eyeball the prisoners seldom saw a sign of any other human hie. But now and again I would hear Loveless's voice asking the guard some foolish question hi order to let me know that he was still there. I finally got a chance for a short talk with Loveless when the R.N. sent two C.P.O.s to escort us back to the UK. He was a Commander R.N.; they were very impressed and got us cabins on the Harwich ferry. Loveless told me that he intended to go into the witness box and reel off the name of every Englishman on the "Weiss List".'
'That must have made him popular,' I said.
'They didn't want that at any price. They told him that if he would quietly plead guilty to the five charges they would do a deal with him.'
'A deal?' I said.
'That's right,' said Tomas. 'He was told that if he pleaded guilty he would be sentenced to death but that it wouldn't be carried out They would declare him mentally sick.'
'Why did he believe that?'
'That's what I asked him,' said Tomas. 'I make it a point of honour never to trust anyone.' If he intended it as a joke he gave no sign; I nodded. 'After sentence,' Tomas went on, 'the President of the court martial signs the sentence of death, seals it and it's conveyed to the prisoner. But before sentence can be carried out the confirming officer examines the proceeds of the trial and ensures that no irregularities or illegalities have occurred. As you know a court martial isn't like a civil trial. Most of the people present have never had legal training or even seen a trial before. It's a shambles.'
'Luckily I'm in no position to contradict your first-hand experience,' I said, 'but continue about this deal.'
Tomas said, 'One of the things the confirming officer checks is the mental health of the prisoner. Under Section Four of the Lunacy Act of 1890, a J.P. and two medical certificates are all a confirming officer requires to remove the record of the conviction and send the prisoner to a civil mental hospital. Admiralty Instructions are that after one month the Admiralty shall discharge him from the service.'
'And Loveless believed that this would happen to him if he pleaded guilty?'
'He did; you see, someone brought his daily medical reports and let him burn them. He was told that they would post-date others to show a symptom of mental trouble.'
'You didn't ask for the same treatment?' I asked.
'No,' said Tomas, 'the officer preparing my summary of evidence before the trial mentioned the "Weiss List", but I pretended that I didn't know what he was talking about'
'Was Loveless tried before you?' I asked.
'Yes, he pleaded guilty, was sentenced to death and came down to his cell. They weren't ready to start my hearing, but next day they began. Then that night, the night of the first day of my trial, it happened.'
'What happened?' I asked.
Tomas wiped his hands on a handkerchief with a dozen darns in it, sipped his drink and eased his shoulders back on the pillow as though about to doze off. I went closer and leaned across him.
'What happened?' I said again. Tomas had his eyes closed, he winced from the pain either of arm or memory.
He said very quietly, 'I heard Loveless screaming, he was shouting, "help me Bernie, help me," and then there were the footsteps and jangle of a guard running and I heard a low voice that I think was the chaplain, I couldn't hear what he said. Then I heard Graham's voice again. It was high-pitched and more distinct than the others. "They're going to hang me, Bernie," he shouted, then he shouted "help me" again. There was a jangle of keys and a door clanged and it was all quiet.'
'Did you shout to him?' I asked.
'No,' said Tomas. 'I've thought about it, perhaps every day of my life since. But what could I say - "I told you so", or "hold on I'm coming", or "it's all for the best" - what could I have shouted at him?'
'That's right,' I said, 'there wasn't much you could say, they hanged him anyway.'
Somehow I knew it was all true.
46 Little else to give
Tomas and I sat looking at each other for a long time. When I finally said it I let it come as casual as can be. 'So when you came out of prison you took a trip to a suburb in Hanover and bought a spade?'
'I'd have needed more than a spade,' said Tomas. 'When I got back there I went to the house where Loveless had buried the "Weiss List". The whole place was one great twelve-storey block of workers' flats.'
'So how did you get it?'
'You make me laugh,' said Tomas. I found it difficult to believe. 'Don't you realize even now that we have been outsmarted by a man who is cleverer than both of us put together?'
'Go on,' I said.
'One man has access to that "Weiss List", to the only copy that remains in existence. One man went to a lot of trouble to get it a
nd even more to putting it somewhere where only he can get it.' He paused; after a long silence he said, 'The papers are inside a German Naval meteorological buoy on the sea bed. [These buoys were dropped into the ocean by German ships and planes during World War 2. Every twelve hours they came to the surface and transmitted a radio message. The message was a reading from the meteorological gear inside it. In this way the German met. service prepared forecasts based upon a large number of weather reports without sending ships or aircraft anywhere- near.] To service the buoy one needed to have a radio recall unit which "called" the buoy to the surface by transmitting a radio signal to it.'
'And that's what you were trying to do just now.'
'No,' said Fernie, 'that unit that da Cunha gave me was only a listening unit. We heard the buoy on the surface just as Senhor da Cunha heard it and gloated over it every evening. He had given me the listening unit.' Tomas's voice went very quiet. 'He'd tricked me again.' He looked up at me sharply. 'It's back on the bottom of the ocean now!'
Len Deighton - Harry Palmer 02 - Horse Under Water Page 19
