Riptide

by John Lawton

  ‘Er…’

  ‘OK. This is what it says. It says “Tell RG everything.-Gelbroaster”.’

  ‘”Tell RG everything-Gelbroaster”? That’s all?’

  ‘Yep.’

  General Gelbroaster was the head of US Army Intelligence, London. There were plenty who thought him nuts, but in London his word was little short of law. Even when his word was as terse as this.

  ‘I was curious about the R and the G. I checked it every goddam which way for mistakes but that’s the way it comes out. RG. Every combination I tried I still get RG.’

  ‘That’s OK. I know who he means.’

  ‘Fine. Look me up when you’ve finished.’

  Corporal Tosca slapped the paper on Cal’s desk and walked out. Buttocks sashaying in the tight skirt. Quite the shortest, rudest woman he had ever met. He wondered if Gelbroaster was now recruiting people as nutty as he was himself. They’d sent him some wackos over the last two years, but this one took the prize.

  Cal called the British Consulate and asked for Lt. Col. Ruthven-Greene. He heard the mechanical, ratchet rattle of the switchboard and then an unsurprisingly hearty English voice.

  ‘Calvin-dear boy. Just the chap I was thinking of. Tell me, do you think you could fit in a spot of lunch today? Here at the Consulate. A bit of a chat over beer and sandwiches, eh?’

  § 6

  Cal knew Ruthven-Greene fairly well. He had met him on his last London trip in ‘39, and on a dozen other occasions when the man had shown up in Zurich.

  Reggie was an affable man. Indeed, you might be fooled into thinking that affability was all there was to him. He cultivated the faintly raffish air of a man who knew where the good times were to be had, and all in all gave the impression of being a man who had just failed the audition for a Hollywood role that had gone to George Sanders instead. He was always in civilian clothes, and although Cal had heard members of the embassy staff address him as Colonel, it was pretty clear he was no regular kind of colonel. He was too young, at thirty-nine or forty, to have seen much of the last war-at best he’d’ve been a subaltern in the last weeks. It was possible he’d spent the long weekend between the wars on the reserve list, only to be called up at once when rain stopped play at Munich. It was possible he’d been promoted in the background. Much more possible, to the point of highly likely, was that Alistair Ruthven-Greene-known to his friends as Reggie-was a career spook. Nominally a serving soldier, but who’d not seen a parade ground in years, and wore his uniform only on occasions of state-whatever they were. The funerals of kings, Cal thought, and the British didn’t lose kings on anything like a regular basis. Still, who was he to quibble? There were states in the Deep South where colonels were dashed out as honours faster than the Pope created counts.

  Ruthven-Greene swept him into a large office-a partner’s desk, a low table framed by a couple of deep-cushioned sofas, made his own office look at best perfunctory. And on the low table sat a plate of roast beef sandwiches, a pot of strong English mustard and two tall bottles of pale ale. Ruthven-Greene was being literal, he had said beer and sandwiches so beer and sandwiches it was. Cal had learnt that when the British served beer with beef they meant to talk turkey.

  Ruthven-Greene flipped the top off a bottle and poured it into two half-pint tankards. Cal helped himself to a sandwich-minus the English mustard. What kind of a nation was it that could delight in so searing its taste buds?

  ‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Reggie?’

  ‘Codes, dear boy. Codes.’

  Codes? They didn’t share codes. We have ours and they have theirs. Never the twain…

  Ruthven-Greene took a small leather-bound diary from his inside pocket. A sheet of white paper larger than the book itself was sticking out. He extracted it and handed it to Cal.

  ‘I’m sure you’re familiar with this,’ he said.

  Cal took one look at it and hoped he had not turned white-or worse, blushed red. The note was preceded by several lines of numerical gobbledegook, but in the centre of the page, in capital letters, it read ‘TIN MAN DEAD’.

  ‘You’ve broken our code?’

  ‘Well. Yes and no.’

  ‘What’s the yes?’

  ‘We broke it last year. Best part of twelve months ago, in fact. We regularly monitor all your embassy transmissions from the Cape to Cairo, from Timbuktu to Tokyo. Sorry. But there you are. We’re not allies. Well, not yet at any rate.’

  ‘And the no?’

  ‘It isn’t taken from any communiqué of yours. We got it from a German radio transmission. We’ve cracked your code. And I’m lather afraid the Germans have too.’

  ‘Again?’ Cal thought, but said nothing. It was only a year since MI5 had caught a cypher clerk at the US Embassy in London passing the code to the Germans. The British had tried him in camera-they weren’t going to make the Americans look like fools-locked him up and thrown away the key, for the duration at least. It was beyond embarrassment. There was scarcely a word strong enough to describe it. As a result the Americans had tightened up their security, changed all the codes-which, it now seemed, the British had cracked immediately-and suffered an on/off, hot/cold relationship with their MI5 counterparts on the sharing of information. Sometimes it seemed they told you everything, at others as though they trusted you about as far as you could chuck a buffalo-and always they asked for more. Since the war began, and increasingly since Winston Churchill took over, the British had become a nation of Oliver Twists. There was nothing they wouldn’t ask for, whilst guarding and rationing anything you might reasonably expect from them. It was, he thought, a bit like being importuned by a beggar in top hat and tails. And-worse yet-it was only four months since an American magazine had printed the design specifications of the next generation of British warplanes, for no better reason than that it had not occurred to the War Department in Washington that they might be secret. Cal could readily see why the British might be touchy on the matter of secrets-and it required but a short leap of imagination to realise that of course they’d spy on the Americans. Why wouldn’t they? And if they spied upon the Germans as they in turn were spying upon the Americans to retrieve information third hand via two separate codes-well, scratch it if you can.

  Ruthven-Greene indulged himself in one of his teeth-sucking, airy pauses. ‘Now-about your man Stahl. They’re onto this bloke, I should think that’s pretty obvious by now. We must have him. Really we must. Sorry to insist and all that, but we really must.’

  Cal was startled, not by the juxtaposition of the names-if they knew his codename why would they not know his real name? But two and two were not making four.

  ‘Reggie-I think you’ve just crossed a wire. Stahl is the Tin Man. Stahl is dead. He’s dead, goddammit. They buried him ten days ago. Full military honours. Hitler was there. Heydrich was there. Half the papers in Germany carried the story on their front pages!’

  ‘No. That’s just my point. He isn’t dead.’

  It was not in Cal’s nature to seek confrontation-he did not enjoy confrontation-but it seemed inevitable that there would be one. Perhaps the best thing was to get it over with as soon as possible.

  ‘Reggie-are you going to talk in riddles all afternoon?’

  Ruthven-Greene dug around in his pockets as though searching for the last stick of gum or a book of matches. He handed Cal a typed sheet folded over several times. It was tight and grubby as though it had sat in his jacket pocket forgotten for days and could not possibly be of any importance. But, he knew, with the British that was often the way, the trivial stood on, perched upon with full blasting dignity, the world-shattering passed across as though it were an afterthought. Cal unwrapped the sheet of paper.

  ‘It’s a de-crypt of a message we received about a week after Stahl is supposed to have died. Very hush-hush,’ Ruthven-Greene explained.

  Cal read it-curiouser and curiouser.

  ‘This guy says he saw Stahl alive after the air raid. I don’t get it.’

 
‘He’s our man in Berlin. Well placed. Corporal in the Abwehr, as a matter of fact. If he says he saw Stahl alive after the air raid, then he did. You’ll note that he confirms from a source in Heydrich’s own office that Stahl didn’t die on the seventeenth. No two ways about it. I gather your sources, like ours initially, reported him as having died in the raid.’

  Cal let the paper fall. A web of loyalties and assumed alliances tearing themselves up and reforming in his mind even as he spoke.

  ‘Yes,’ he said softly.

  ‘Then I think we’ve reached the same point. Two questions. Why would Heydrich go to all this trouble to convince the Boche he’s dead?’

  ‘Perhaps because he thinks he is dead?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. Stahl was his deputy, well, one of his deputies, for seven years. I’d say he’s the one man Stahl could not fool. Whoever they buried, and I rather think they needed a body for that, it wasn’t Stahl; and, if there was a body, Heydrich would have torn it to pieces, and I do not mean that as a figure of speech, to be certain of his identity.’

  Cal looked around the room, as though seeking reassurance in the solidity of the furniture.

  ‘Two questions, you said. What’s the other?’

  ‘Much the same as the first really. Why would your Tin Man go to all this trouble to convince the Boche he’s dead?’

  ‘Reggie-I’ve been told to co-operate with you. Don’t play games with me. You haven’t come all the way to Zurich to have me tell you Stahl spied for us. You know that already or you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Quite. I saw General Gelbroaster the day I set off. He gave me the bare facts. Sort of wanted you to fill me in with the detail.’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘You know, first hand. Yon knew the blighter after all.’

  ‘Is this room secure?’

  ‘Secure?’

  ‘I mean,’ said Cal, ‘can we talk?’

  ‘My dear fellow, we are talking.’

  Reggie tucked into a sandwich. Cal found his appetite had vanished. He’d dreaded this moment ever since he got Gelbroaster’s ‘Tell RG everything.’

  ‘Stahl is Austrian. I’ve never been certain of his age but I’d think he was in his early thirties, say thirty-two or -three. He joined the Nazi Party in 1929, and a couple of months later he contacted the Polish Secret Service and offered to spy for them. You’ll recall, the Poles looked like bigger players in Europe at that time than they’ve done at any time since. It wasn’t such an odd move. They checked him out, and took the risk. They trained him. He’s not the kind of man you’d ever want to go up against without a tommy-gun in your hand. Stahl then joined the SS-must have been one of the pioneers, certainly in the first five hundred-and then moved sideways into the SD. Early on he met Heydrich and at some point in the mid-thirties Heydrich took him up, became, I guess, his patron in the party. At which point the quality of Stahl’s information became almost priceless. At least it would have been if there’d been the political will to evaluate it. He supplied the Poles with infrequent but accurate high-level information right up to the invasion of Poland.

  ‘About a year before this some bright spark in Polish Intelligence foresaw the outcome pretty clearly and offered Stahl to the British. If you’ve been honestly briefed by your own people, Reggie, you’ll know that your own side turned him down. There were plenty of people about that time, in the summer of thirty-eight, in any country you care to name, telling themselves the war was not going to happen. So the Poles offered him to us. We took Stahl. They flew me out about the time of the fall of Warsaw to run him from here. It’s pretty much what I’ve done ever since.

  ‘I met him half a dozen times, when he was part of some official delegation at our embassy in Berlin, the reciprocal visit in Zurich and at those dreadful Bierabends the Nazis used to organise for the foreign press and diplomats. I’ve heard him play duets with Heydrich, and I’ve seen him fend off questions from Ed Murrow and Bill Shirer, but I doubt I ever got more than fifteen minutes alone with him at any one time. Usually in the middle of Berlin. With Gestapo thugs all over the place. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so scared in my entire life. Everything else has come via couriers and codes. He rations what he tells us, and needless to say we ration what we pass on to you. We did nothing to draw attention to him as the source of our information. It worked well, until now. I don’t know what’s gone wrong. An air raid I could believe. Lousy luck, but believable. But if he’s faked his own death and vanished…’

  Cal had no idea how his sentence should end. Reggie finished it for him, half-eaten sandwich poised in the air, his voice not much above a whisper.

  ‘…And all he knows has vanished with him… We must have him. Really we must.’

  ‘I know. You already said that. What is it you think he knows?’

  ‘Anything or everything, it really doesn’t matter. That close to Heydrich for that long. Whatever he knows we must know too. I gather Heydrich is mad with frustration or grief-do these buggers feel grief? do they feel at all?-whatever, he has lost someone of immense value. That much is obvious. I rather think he’s up to something very clever in faking that funeral. He’ll have his men looking for Stahl. I pray to God we find him before they do.’

  ‘Find him? I don’t even know where to start looking.’

  ‘England, dear boy.’

  ‘England? Why England?’

  ‘Where else can he go? If he were coming to you he’d be here by now. He’s had more than a fortnight. He’d have been here in a couple of days, or so I should think. No, he’s heading for England. I know it in my bones. He’s heading for London. And so should we.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘You and me. You’re to accompany me to England. Gelbroaster’s orders. A spot of liaison.’

  Ruthven-Greene said ‘liaison’ as though it were lunch. A pleasant way to pass a little time, rather than a diplomatic quagmire.

  ‘I guess I don’t have a lot of choice, do I?’

  ‘No, you don’t. If I’m right and your Tin Man shows up in London, we’ll need you to identify him. Would you believe we don’t have a single clear photograph of the man?’

  Yes. Cal could easily believe that. He’d seen hundreds of shots of the Nazi hierarchy. He’d yet to see one in which Stahl had not managed to be in shadow or behind someone taller. Always the blur at the edge of the frame.

  Ruthven-Greene put a copy of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on the table. Last week’s big story. Stahl’s funeral. The photograph of Stahl had been blown up, magnified many times, from a crowd shot-so coarse was the grain it could have been anyone. Stahl’s own mother would not have known him. The 12-Uhr Blatt, the Beöbachter and the Borsen Zeitung had all carried the same picture-it was probably all they had.

  ‘Is that all? Just identify the man? I was his control officer for two years.’

  ‘Quite. I meant… help us find him… help us…’

  Ruthven-Greene thrashed around for the right technical term.

  ‘…Help us… de-brief the bugger. That’s it. De-brief him.’

  He smiled with satisfaction at having mastered the term. Cal half liked, half loathed this about the English-the dreadful affectation that they were all amateurs, that precise and specific was the sort of thing you paid someone else to be rather than bother with yourself. War as cricket-gentlemen and players. They had to be kidding.

  Ruthven-Greene showed Cal out.

  ‘You know, I’m still a bit puzzled,’ he said.

  He could not be half as puzzled as Cal felt.

  ‘Tin Man. Don’t you think it was a bit… well… obvious? For a codename, I mean. A bit close. Stahl, steel, tin? Geddit?’

  ‘I didn’t choose it, Reggie. Stahl did.’

  ‘All the same he’s damn lucky no-one put two and two together.’

  ‘Perhaps he was over-fond of The Wizard of Ozz.’

  ‘Ah… perhaps so… if he only had a brain, eh?’

  ‘That was the Scarecrow. The Tin Man wanted a he
art. You didn’t grow up reading Frank Baum, did you?’

  ‘Never heard of him. But then I don’t suppose you grew up reading E. Nesbit and The Railway Children, did you? Ah well. Toodle pip. See you in the morning.’

  Ruthven-Greene went away whistling the Tin Man’s song to himself. If he only had a heart. Blasé as ever. Toodle fucking pip.

  It was only in the staff car going back to the embassy that Cal pondered the truth of what Ruthven-Greene had said so casually, ‘We’re not allies, at least not yet.’ He had the feeling that he’d just given away his birthright. Ripped off the bloody bandage, thrown down the fife and drum. That in sharing with this not-yet-ally he had somehow diminished himself, wiped out his own raison d’etre. There were times when he felt not that he was Stahl, exactly, but that without Stahl he was, not nothing, exactly-but something other, something lesser, not quite Calvin M. Cormack III. His identity was bound up in Stahl’s identity. On the other hand he’d walked into the meeting with Stahl dead and come out with Stahl alive.

  Then the other thing Reggie had let slip-did Reggie let anything slip? Wasn’t every word planted to a measure and a stick? The British had cracked the German code. Not any routine traffic code, but the codes used by Intelligence and Counter-intelligence, by the very people who’d broken the US Embassy Traffic code. The British had broken the codebreakers’ own code. What, then, did they not know?

  § 7

  The outer office was empty when Cal got back. There was usually a cypher clerk stuck out front, nominally his assistant-his secretary if they’d both but been civilians. Janis-Sgt. Doyle-had reported sick two or three days ago, and he hadn’t seen her since. But the desk was neat, no mail unopened, no memo pad full of urgent messages. Somebody was doing the job.

  On his own desk, in his in-tray was the letter from his father. He tore it open. It was weeks old. The mail was taking longer as the war grew older.