Riptide
Page 37
Alexei Troy
‘Bloody hell,’ said Reggie. ‘I mean to say it’s a bit steep. New ally? Talk about jumping the gun!’
Churchill took out his cigar, trailing spittle. ‘He knows,’ he said.
‘Surely, Prime Minister, he’s just guessing. He’s picked up on the speculation-he’s a pretty poor excuse for a press baron if he didn’t-and he’s heard what everybody’s heard about troop movements in Poland…’
‘He knows,’ Churchill said again. ‘Look closely at the final paragraph. Lift out the figures he gives, the odd ages he says he was at such and such an atrocity.’
Reggie scanned the paper, wondering what he’d missed. As he found them, eyes down, scarcely daring to look up, he could hear Churchill growling out each number in turn.
‘Twenty-two, six, forty-one. June 22nd 1941. The only thing he’s missed out is the time, but since we all know that Hitler calls at the same time as the Metropolitan Police making a raid, he need hardly spell out the word “dawn”.’
The truth dawned on Reggie. ‘Oh bugger,’ he said softly.
‘Oh bugger,’ said Churchill back to him. ‘I looked him up in Who’s Who. Alex Troy’s propensity for being coy with the truth about himself notwithstanding, he gives his birth date as 1862-which would make him nineteen when the old Tsar was assassinated, not twenty-two. He knows, and he’s letting me know that he knows. I’ve known him for thirty years or more. In all that time he has only ever signed about half a dozen editorials. When he signs one it’s a mark of the importance he attaches to the issue and it inevitably means he’s talking to just one person-the editorial becomes an open letter. All that’s missing is “Dear Winston”. He came to the briefing I gave only yesterday. A rare enough appearance in itself. He heard what I had to say, and then he went home and wrote his “Dear Winston” letter.’
Churchill uttered the words ‘Dear Winston’ with a dash of sarcasm, much as Americans used the phrase ‘Dear John’.
‘Prime Minister. I’m most frightfully sorry. But I’ve no idea how he found out.’
‘The American?’ McKendrick asked.
‘He’s been sent home, as requested. And he was as green about England as it’s possible to be. I shouldn’t think he’d even heard of Alex Troy. He’d be as likely to write to The Times as anything. The obvious but naive gesture. He was nothing if not naive.’
Churchill waved the argument away with his cigar hand, a trail of pungent smoke filling the air.
‘We’re not here to dissect the corpse, Reggie. We’re here to decide what needs to be done.’
Reggie was silent in the face of this. McKendrick’s look told him to stay that way.
Churchill inhaled deeply, blew a smoke ring or two at the ceiling.
‘And I think there is only one thing to be done.’
He blew another smoke ring, head well back puffing out a perfect O. Reggie watched it float up to the ceiling, feeling as though he was on the carpet in front of the world’s most eccentric headmaster^.
‘We shall take Alex at his word. We shall tell Stalin just one more time. He won’t believe us, but we shall tell him just the same.’
§ 100
When Troy got back to his office in Scotland Yard, a tall, impossibly young, young man with the palest blue eyes he’d ever seen was snogging a uniformed WPC in front of his desk.
The woman blushed red, smoothed down her skirt and dashed past him. The man straightened his old Etonian tie, stuck out his hand, a smile on his lips, as though nothing had happened and said, ‘Jack Wildeve. You must be Sergeant Troy.’
Troy did not take the hand so proffered. Silently he cursed Onions that his revenge should be to stick him with an English public school, totty-chasing twerp. He was going to hate this bloke. He knew it in his bones.
§ 101
Over breakfast in the Avis Hotel, Lisbon, waiting for the Pan Am Transatlantic Clipper, Cal whispered to Mrs Cormack, as he did every morning, ‘I love you. Did I tell you that today?’ Kitty said nothing.
§ 102
In the month or more that Cal had been gone Corporal Tosca systematically went through the entire contents of his Zurich office a few pages at a time, noting anything that she thought important, whether she understood it or not. When it was clear that Cal would not be returning, she sent a coded message to Moscow, on June 9th: ‘Stahl is US agent. Not dead. Probably escaped to GB. US and GB very anxious to find him. Can only conclude vital information at stake. No idea what. Cormack posted to Washington. What am I supposed to do now? Any ideas?
On the afternoon of the same day Reggie’s number two, Charlie Leigh-Hunt, used a dead letter box in London to send a message to his controller at the Soviet Embassy: ‘Hess mission authorised. H not mad. GB were expecting him. GB pressed him to confirm invasion of USSR. H did not. Talked incessantly of “common cause
against the Bolshevik menace”. Conclude GB now thinks invasion imminent.’
Churchill issued his last warning on June 10th.
When this news reached Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, he did not wish to know. He had just dispatched the Artillery Corps tractors eastward, away from the front line, to help with the grain harvest-besides, he’d been warned already. Not only by the British Ambassador Sir Stafford Cripps, but also by Count Werner von Schulenberg, the Reich ambassador to Moscow, who had risked treason to warn the Soviet Union-nor would his treason be the last.
On June 18th, a Wednesday, Private Gunther Bruhns, recently demoted and posted to the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front by Heydrich for one cheeky remark too far, fearing that there was yet worse to come, chose a rash means of escape. He crossed the German lines into the Soviet Union, offering to trade information for sanctuary-his father had been a good communist and he’d always had some sympathy for the cause himself.
‘You’ll be invaded at dawn on the 22nd,’ he said. ‘If you don’t believe me, and the tanks don’t come, you can shoot me.’
Stalin did not wait for the tanks and had him shot at once.
On June 22nd, the shortest night of the year, 2,700 planes, 3,600 tanks and three and a half million Axis troops poured into Russia.
Barbarossa.
Historical Note
What have I made up? Most of it-that’s what fiction’s for. But there is a brick foundation to this. Umpteen people tried to warn Stalin, and Churchill issued warnings on April 23rd and June 10th 1941. I found out about the first from an English translation of A. Rossi’s Deux Ans d’Alliance Germano-Sovietique, published in 1949, the source for which was the collected papers of the Nuremberg trials. I’ve forgotten where I found the second noted, but it was at that point that I started to think of a story that would end with and ‘explain’ that second warning. Until fairly recently it had, I think, been assumed that the source of the British information on Barbarossa had been Rudolf Hess, but as Hess did not land until May 10th the warning given to Mr Vyshinsky by Sir Stafford Cripps on April 23rd must have been perplexing if not actually fatal to the theory. However, the role of Enigma has since become if not clear then somewhat clearer. It is the most likely source.
The battle plan of Barbarossa is taken from Alan Clark’s (1966) book of the same title (Penguin), the German scheme for the subjugation of the USSR from the essay ‘What If Nazi Germany Had Defeated The Soviet Union?’ by Michael Burleigh in Counter-factuals (ed. Niall Ferguson, Picador 1997).
The principal written sources for life in London at this time are The London Observer: The Wartime Diaries of General Raymond E. Lee, the London head of US Intelligence (Hutchinson 1971), and the Diaries of Sir John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary (Hodder & Stoughton 1985). Also fairly useful were Berlin Diary by William L. Shirer (Knopf 1941) and Hess by Peter Padfield (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1991). Backs to the Wall by Leonard Mosley (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1971) was indispensable.
I’ve bent a few bits of history. Clothes rationing was not introduced until June 2nd, after the sinking of the Bismarck-Churchill thought a major vic
tory might soften the blow of clothes rationing and held it off until he’d got one. Food rationing was more severe than I’ve suggested-I doubt any restaurant would have served Reggie with the meal he orders at the Dorchester as late as June 1st 1941. And to the best of my knowledge the US Embassy never supplied coffee beans for the exclusive use of its officers billeted in London hotels. I made that up too. Al Bowlly did die in a German air raid in the small hours of April 17th 1941, but the reciprocal raid on Berlin did not begin until after midnight and lasted nearly three hours (which wasn’t quite as useful for this fiction) and I’ve no idea whether the raid, targeted on the Alexanderplatz, hit any building in Kopernikusstrasse, a mile or so to the east-I just liked the name.
Lastly, Robert Churchill really existed and his life and work were recorded by MacDonald Hastings in The Other Mr Churchill (Harrap 1963). I’m grateful to my brother Frank, who knows more about guns and bullets and things that go whizz or bang than most people alive, for reminding me of Robert Churchill’s shop in Orange Street, and for a wealth of knowledge on the Smith and Wesson.35.
John Lawton
***
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