The Nostradamus Traitor: 1 (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

  In the back of the van, among the radio equipment, the two plainclothesmen watched him go. “Can’t see him turning nasty,” one of them laughed. “More a danger to himself. Watch him if anything happens though. Don’t want an old-age pensioner becoming an innocent victim.”

  “More a mugger’s mark,” said the other, returning to the night glasses with which he was sweeping the building and streets.

  George made the car without any trouble. He had rented it using his other spare licence and insurance, and a slightly younger age then his own. No trouble. Like there was no trouble giving the pair of special Branch leeches the slip. The old post-office trick—he knew all the public places with two entrances and exits within a couple of miles of Whitehall.

  He locked the car door from the inside, switched on the engine, and then the lights. Luger within reach on the passenger seat, into gear, and away slowly. He supposed the best bet would be some small hotel out of London. Somewhere near a station to leave the car, then a short train ride after phoning the rental people. No trace. The thin-air illusion. The only problem was that he did not want to go. Oh sod Herbie Kruger. God save him from women also. Bloody Hilde. If she’d only listened. After all these years. He might have known from the start that she would cling. The frighteners didn’t work, and heaven knew, he’d taken a risk with that—stealing the car, making certain he didn’t hit her with any of the shots on Sunday morning.

  He’d risked it trying to take out Herbie as well. That was a desperate act of panic if you like. Silly. Sudden loss of cool. Unlike him, after all these years.

  Funny, he thought, how life turns out. Maitland-Wood had only been a boy when he’d come to him with the proposition; and he was even younger than Maitland-Wood. A child, playing politics. You must sever all your connections with the Communist Party. Become a Nazi. Not overnight, but quite quickly. You’re ideal material for the SS and you’d be furthering your own political cause if you came in with us. We need you.

  Poor old M-W. He wasn’t to know, even then, that Heinrich Kuche was already severing relations on orders from the Communist Party itself: that he was already a member of the GRU—the Fourth Department, founded by Trotsky himself and kept intact within the military machine. The military eyes and ears of the U.S.S.R.

  But, then, Maitland-Wood—and Ramilies come to that—had a lot to learn about long-term situations. He’d liked George Thomas—liked him very much; they had been both of a generation—Kuche three years older—and to some extent had enjoyed the whole thing. Whatever else could be said, the conception of planting the Nostradamus quatrains had been a brilliant idea. Suicide, of course, but brilliant, and who could have foreseen the repercussions? Heydrich’s plot against Himmler. His own cover blown as well as George’s. It was an ill wind, though. It took them both to Berlin, though, naturally, he had never revealed that Jost and his Ausland SD had insisted on changes of name before they went. George became Hans von Tupfel and he, Claus Fenderman. When they went on Wermut who, on this side of the Channel, was to know that he had a pair of men with them called Schmitt and Braun. Christ, Smith and Brown, the classic dirty weekend names. He had bouts of remorse and guilt for setting up George’s death for a long time after that.

  The GRU had been on the ball then, as well—giving him a list of contact names, in Berlin. Hilde had been the first. Love? What did he know of love? Yes, they had loved—each other, each other’s political drive and ambition for the Party. Why, in the name of everything, had he married her? Sex? Companionship? A welding of the bond? All gone. He had tried to tell her that when he’d gone—in this very disguise—to her hotel: to reason with her. When? A couple of nights ago.

  “You have one duty now,” she said. “You must leave. Come quickly with me. We can be in Moscow in two days. I told you this when I came before. Your time of usefulness is almost over. Come home, Claus. Come home with me now.”

  She wouldn’t listen. He’d told her last year when she came—and he had not seen her for years until then: only on the old visit to the East to be rebriefed. She wouldn’t understand. Angelle he loved. His home was here. Hadn’t he done enough? Surely the Party would allow him this last request? All the help he had given to so many Soviet agents. Christ, even Kim Philby and that debacle. Aloud, against the hum of the engine, he realised that he was speaking aloud. “I supposed I was what the newspapers call the Fourth Man in the Philby business.”

  But Hilde wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not last year, and not now. Stirring up a mare’s nest by talking to the Yeoman Warder at the Tower because he, George, would not speak on the phone, or make any of the meets she tried to set up.

  The orderly German mind, he thought. Drop a hint to someone official (and what was more natural than doing it in the way he had done it with Gretchen, their go-between, for so long) and the facts would come to light. Normally not here in England. By all logic it would have remained unnoticed, unreported. Herbie Kruger. Bloody Big Herbie. Herbie’s new team for the East would probably have been the last piece of good information that George could send behind the curtain—except the big one, of course, the action taken to seal up the breaches in NATO defence which had been lifted over the years from the Bonn Ministry of Defence.

  With horror, he realised that he had been driving automatically: driving towards Hampstead and Angelle. Herbie would be at least a leap ahead of him.

  Depression swamped over George Thomas like water. He felt very tired and did not want to go on. What was it he had said to Herbie only a few hours ago? A day or so ago? I’ve become a con man. After a lifetime in the trade it’s what I’ve become—a hollow man, a stuffed man.

  He was driving up along Hampstead Heath now. Then, past his own house. Two cars in the drive. So they were there, and Angelle would know by now. Maybe even Hilde was there. He wouldn’t put it past Herbie Kruger.

  He stopped the car; checked the pistol, and got out with great dignity. George Thomas, who was Heinrich Kuche, felt very tired and almost disgusted with himself.

  Slowly he walked back along the road towards the house.

  55

  LONDON 1978

  BIG HERBIE HAD FINISHED telling what he called his fairy story. Angelle, still in shock, wept quietly, rocking her body to and fro like a child. She occasionally shook her head at Herbie in a gesture of disbelief.

  “In the main I’m afraid I’m right.” Herbie could not pull punches. “You knew about the switch of identity. Ramilies and Maitland-Wood went along with it. Most elaborate extremes—faking the dossier photographs—everything. A labyrinth of deceit that’s gone on for so long.”

  She went on shaking her head. “He was always so good—so loyal. I can’t…”

  Herbie thought she was going to say that she couldn’t believe it. “The other one. She’s in the car you heard just now. The car outside.”

  “She?”

  “Frau Fenderman. The woman I think he married in Berlin in 1941. The woman who has been running him as a Soviet agent since the early fifties.”

  “I don’t…”

  “No, Angelle. I know. Please try. and relax.” Herbie soothed.

  “The bitch is outside?” Her lips parted, almost vulpine.

  “In the car. We picked her up earlier. I think she’s been trying to lure him back East. She ran him—I’ve told you—mainly through her sister in the West. I believe she came over last autumn to try and take him back then. Not just for political motives. I think he resisted being recalled.”

  “Last autumn?”

  He detected a sudden tweaking of her memory: antennae picking up something, “You want to say…”

  “Last autumn,” she repeated. “He was most nervous. I’ve seen him like it before, but never as bad. The strange telephone calls I’m used to—it’s part of the business. But they were worse—September—October—sometime then.”

  Herbie’s large head nodded.

  “What will you do with her—outside in the car?”

  “Could you bear t
o see her? I’d like to get her inside, under cover.”

  She began to sob again. “Oh Christ. I don’t know. Herbie, it’s all so unreal. A man you’ve trusted for such a time…”

  He knew all about that, for Herbie was also facing a crisis. He had never been on close terms with George, but they were colleagues—the man he could never remember accurately—and they had met socially many times. Angelle, red-eyed and sobbing grief, he had always liked: she had been fun, always laughing—in public.

  A terrible hatred crushed into his bones and clawed his stomach. The game was always one of deceit, but George’s deceit went further than anything he had known. At that moment he would happily have crushed the man with his bare hands.

  “Bring her in if you like,” She sounded tired, living for a moment in a land where nothing made sense anymore. It must be like the bereaved, Herbie thought. No; worse than being bereaved. He asked if he could make a telephone call first and she gave a small noise of acquiescence.

  The phone was in the hall and Herbie dialled his own number. Vermin answered and gave him the news. “You think he’ll do anything desperate?” the SB man asked.

  Herbie said it was difficult to tell. Who knew what was in George’s mind. The facts were plain. He had resisted the offers to run back over the curtain with his bride from 1941. Resisted twice. Even been violent towards the Fenderman woman; and against Herbie also. Both Fenderman and George had broken all the rules of good field agents. They had allowed personal emotions to triumph. He suspected that George’s one aim had been to keep his cover safe, retire early, and disappear with Angelle, who had given him so much support. Hildegarde Fenderman, on the other hand, had probably loved him during their very brief marriage, and loved him even more while she was running him from the East. She had probably literally lived for the day when they could be together, either in East Germany or Russia—her whole working life held together by the hope that George had shattered.

  “I’ll get her under cover. Suggest you get out of my place. He may be waiting there still. You’ll lift him if he is. Otherwise? National alert?”

  “Softly, softly,” muttered Vernon-Smith. “Airports and all that. We may never get him. Those bloody people always have the damnedest way of slipping through. Come to think of it he could be out already.”

  “Doubt it. His state of mind would urge him to hang on. He’s banked on spending retirement with his wife—his wife here, I mean. He may not want to run.”

  He asked Vermin where he would go. Which station?

  “We’ll come over to Hampstead. If nothing’s shown by the time we get there, you’d better bring her over and we’ll keep her there. Your people’ll want to sweat her at Warminster, I suppose.”

  Herbie said it was most likely, and cradled the receiver. Opening the front door, he motioned to Schnabeln and Girren.

  Hildegarde Fenderman appeared quite calm now. She had been difficult to start with, Schnabeln said.

  She peered at Herbie in the darkening hall and Girren switched on the light. “Ah. Mr. Kruger.” She gave a little laugh. “So you are also a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Another laugh. “That’s melodramatic, no? A cliché?”

  “Apt,” said Herbie, looking around for a door other than the one to the main room in which Angelle Thomas still sat wrapped in her private misery. The one across the hall led, he presumed, to a dining room or study. His hand was on the knob when Angelle came out into the hall. She was shaking, her eyes fiercely red, lips trembling.

  “My husband’s wife?” she asked, the voice breaking.

  “We’ll take her through here. Just for a little while.” Herbie tried to step between them, but Angelle launched herself forward, nails clawing, her mouth twisted, pouring out a stream of obscenities in French. Herbie grabbed her wrists, and Schnabeln, with Girren’s help, bundled Hildegarde Fenderman through the other door.

  “I know. I know…” Herbie spoke like a lover—or a father?—in Angelle’s ear as he led her gently back into her sitting room.

  “I kill her. I kill both of them….” Angelle collapsed again.

  “Yes,” Herbie agreed. He did not want to leave her alone yet; he wanted someone to stay with her; afraid of what she might do. “Yes, I believe you would kill her—and George.”

  She looked up at him, the eyes large, just as George had first described them. She must have been stunning then, in the forties. “George,” she whispered. “My real George. There was so little time with him, yet—yet. I wish I could have died for him—instead of him. In some ways I suppose I have.”

  Herbie poured her a drink. Brandy. Forcing the glass between the long, trembling fingers. He went to the door and called for Girren, who came through. “Just stay with her. Be kind,” he told him. “Watch out for her while I have a quick word with the Fenderman woman.”

  Girren nodded. “I shan’t be a minute, Angelle,” Herbie called to her; but she did not reply.

  “I don’t have to say anything.” Hildegarde Fenderman sat at the polished oak table in the Thomas’ dining room, with Schnabeln watching the windows. “You want the curtains drawn?” Schnabeln asked, and Herbie said he thought that might be good.

  Then he turned to Frau Fenderman, who looked older than before—when he had seen her at the hotel. “There is nothing for you to say. We know it all—or most of it. That which we do not know can be guessed. Like, I presume you used the Nostradamus quatrains as a basis for ciphers.”

  She smiled, the secret smile familiar to the faces of most women.

  “You’ve got him?” she asked.

  “Not yet. But we shall get him as we got you.”

  “And you will put us both in prison.”

  “He will be in prison, Frau Fenderman. You, on the other hand, may well be returned to your masters.”

  She was good. He had to give her that. Only the most minute twitch of her right hand and a flicker of panic in the eyes. Hardly visible before the coldness returned.

  “They won’t be pleased with you, Hilde. Not at all. They’re never pleased with anyone who blows a colleague out of frustration, or pique….”

  “Or love?” she queried. She looked pathetic.

  “Love? Hate? What’s the difference? He wanted to stay. You’ve lived your life waiting for him to come back. You’ve pulled his strings for so long that you thought it would be easy. It wasn’t and your initiative went sour, Hilde. Moscow won’t like that. The DDR won’t like it. I wouldn’t like it much if one of my people did it.”

  She asked for a cigarette and he gave her one of his, bending over her to light it. As he did so, she whispered, “What will you really do with me?”

  Herbie straightened up, towering over her. “People will talk to you—perhaps for quite a long time….”

  “You’ll try to dry me out?”

  “If that’s how you want to put it. Maybe. Then there is a real possibility that you will be sent home. A lot depends on the authorities in Bonn—and the Americans. We all bear a little guilt—except, possibly your dead sister, Gretchen. Did she know what she was doing, or did she think she was being romantic—a go-between for lovers ripped apart because of the war?”

  “In a way that’s what she was doing. Love lasts, Mr. Kruger.”

  “So does hate, Frau Fenderman.”

  Herbie tried to gentle her into talking more, but she clammed up after that. Eventually he went back to Angelle and asked if she needed a doctor. If she had somewhere to go. Yes, maybe a sedative would be a good idea. Yes, she could go to a cousin. She would phone shortly. She kept asking if they had got him yet, and what they’d do with him.

  Herbie circled around it, asking seemingly innocuous questions: Had he ever been violent with her? Did he ever suffer from acute depressions? How were his powers of concentration these days? She answered in a vague manner, as though they were talking about someone she did not know well—not now anyway.

  Herbie waited, passing time with the questions, hoping that Vernon-Smith would call. He wa
nted Hildegarde Fenderman off his hands. At one point he suddenly realised that George—their George who was really Kuche—was older than his dossier showed. There was an age difference of three or four years between the two men.

  At last the call came. Vernon-Smith and the bait—the WDS—were at Hampstead Police Station. Would Herbie like them to come down and pick up the woman?

  “I’d better bring her up to you.” Herbie bit his lower lip. “Let me get someone here to look after Mrs. Thomas and we’ll come straight over. I think there’s enough for a circumstantial case, but I shouldn’t think we’ll get around to charging her. Once the Director’s back it will probably be the Warminster house for her.”

  “Your bloody confessors,” Vernon-Smith grumbled.

  In the end it was going to take Angelle’s cousin a couple of hours to get over. The doctor arrived, and Herbie explained the problems without filling in the picture. Girren would stay and sit in until the cousin turned up to take over. He then went back into the dining room and said they were ready to leave.

  “Where do we go?” Hildegarde Fenderman was terribly calm. Herbie wondered, late in the day, if she had been searched, and Schnabeln said she had—it was the main cause of her protests at Heathrow. They’d got a WPC to do it thoroughly. There’d been problems there as the policewoman had wanted their IDs double-checked.

  They went to the front door, and Herbie stopped them, always cautious about entering and leaving buildings. Schnabeln could drive. He was to go out first and start the engine; open the rear door. Herbie would have Frau Fenderman out and into the back of the car in a matter of seconds.

  She nodded—a woman who seemed at last to have accepted what had happened. As Herbie reached forward for the handle of the front door, she asked if they had taken him yet.

  “George?”

  She shook her head. “Claus,” she said with a small wry smile. Herbie told her to worry about that later, then opened the door and allowed Schnabeln out into the drive. There was a light, done up like an old carriage lamp, lit outside the door, and Herbie fumbled around for the correct switch, keeping the woman out of the doorway. He turned off the exterior light at last. Then the light in the hall, just as Schnabeln switched on the car’s headlamps and started the motor.