Death Order

by Jan Needle

  At the flat that evening, lying thinking in the bath, he was aroused by the telephone. In case it should be Hannele, he had to answer it. It was not. It was a woman’s voice, though, one he did not recognize. It had an American tinge, and it was light and pleasant.

  ‘Hallo. This is Erica Lucas. I’m just nearby. Can I come up?’

  His mind was blank.

  ‘Erica Lucas?’

  ‘Your landlady. I own your apartment. I have a key, but—’

  ‘Good God. I’m in the bath.’

  ‘Ten minutes, then? Is that OK? I’ve just got into England from the States.’

  Fifteen minutes afterwards, the doorbell rang.

  Edward took quiet pride in his modernity. The British, he felt, for all their supposed superiority, were marked by insularity, and were by European terms quite backward, culturally. Their class system was hidebound, their rulers unjustifiably smug, their attitude to rising talent blinkered. He recognized these things and hoped he was above them. But Erica Lucas took his breath away.

  The view he had of her through his spyhole was distorted. She looked undefined, the sides of her face slipping to infinity, her body woolly, soft. Feeling foolish, he jerked the door open to the reality. It was completely different.

  Erica Lucas was five feet six, with a thin, strong, intelligent face. Her hair was black, but streaked dramatically with silver grey. It was not her age – she told Edward within minutes that she was twenty-seven – and it was not the effect of cares or worry, the lines around her eyes were laughter lines. It was nature that had turned her grey, she said, and she did not give a damn. Her clothes proclaimed the message. Her skirt was short, above slim, silk-stockinged legs, and her peach-coloured rayon blouse was open almost indecently low upon her well-formed bosom. She was carrying a lightweight jacket and a travelling bag of solid leather. She behaved as if she owned the place.

  ‘Come in,’ said Edward. ‘I hope it’s not too much of a pigsty. It lacks a woman’s touch, you know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Erica, and Edward jumped as if he had been stung. ‘Why should a woman keep it any different? Anyway, it’s yours, it’s no business of mine at all, I shouldn’t really be here. You don’t have to let me in, you know, Mr Carrington. May I call you Edward? Or is it Ted? Call me Erica.’

  She walked in as she was talking, so he assumed the offer to be turned away was her form of politeness. She dropped the heavy bag, the jacket on top of it, and looked around. She opened doors, walked up and down, inspected rooms. Edward’s dirty clothes were in a pile beside his bed but his embarrassment did not interest her. He was sweating slightly, overheated from the bath, his shirt open at the neck.

  ‘Very nice,’ was Erica’s verdict. ‘No complaints here about the way you’ve kept it. It’s an enormous place for one, however, I always thought so. Would you consider a sub-let?’

  She moved past him to the kitchen, where she put the kettle on the gas. She rooted through the cupboards, turned her nose up at the dishes in the sink, selected tea cups and located the caddy. Edward took up a position at the door-post. A defensive one.

  ‘It’s against the rules of the lease. The agents have always been most strict with me. More to the point, it suits me.’

  ‘I’d be a model lodger. I’m quiet, I have few dirty habits that would trouble you. Economically, it makes perfect sense.’

  ‘Oh. You.’

  ‘Of course me. Naturally. I wasn’t expecting to come back to England, not for years, maybe never. But since I’ve had to, and since the old place is so empty, how about it? You weren’t thinking of anybody else? I see only one bed is used.’

  ‘But … well, if it doesn’t sound ridiculous – what would the neighbours think?’

  Erica laughed expressively.

  ‘Screw the neighbours. I used to live here in the old days, before my mother left, then my father died. They know me well enough. They never said a thing, they never dared.’ She moved to the stove, poured water in to warm the pot. ‘It’s not that sort of place, Teddy. They’re not that sort of neighbours. Do you talk to them? There, then. Besides. Times have changed.’

  The pot was ready. She put it on a tray with the cups and saucers, sugar, milk. Edward still watched from the doorway.

  ‘Still, if you’re adamant. There’s the gutter if I can’t find a cheap hotel. Why should you care? You heartless bastard!’

  Over tea in the front sitting room, overlooking Bedford Square, she filled him in on her background. She had lived in America for more than two years this time, and had grown up there, basically. Her father had been an economist, who had come back to Europe with Woodrow Wilson to try to hammer something workable out of the ruins of the Great War, and after that the family had divided themselves between the USA and Britain. She had been born in this apartment – in the bedroom that he slept in, maybe the very bed, she grinned – and she loved the place. Not as much, perhaps, as New York or Washington.

  ‘Why did you come back? It seems a strange time to choose. Most people are rushing off the other way. There’s been a mass exodus of Americans in the last few weeks.’

  ‘Am I American?’ She sighed. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m here for the reasons that they’ve gone back there, I guess. It’s a pull. Not rational. I worked out for myself that there’s going to be a blow-up. London’s going to be bombed, invaded, over-run, who knows? So I booked my passage. Also … well, there’s an awful fascination. I worked with journalists in New York, I worked in radio. They’re pouring over here, the last contingents, to see the fun. War as a spectator sport, you know? There were eighteen of them on the boat with me. I guess I got infected.’

  They drank tea. Erica lit a cigarette, and Edward refused one. He had been trying a pipe recently, but was not making much progress. Smoking, he had found, gave him a headache.

  ‘Are you a journalist?’

  ‘Hell, no. I studied politics, economics, like my Pop. But I thought I might be able to earn a crust by it, you know? Offer my services to some of the magazines, a “gal’s eye view” of Little England’s struggle. That’s the angle over there, believe me. The gallant fight against the last barbarians. They’re pushing it like crazy. I guess I’ll find a better job. Something I can believe in.’

  She blew smoke in a pale blue stream through rounded lips. She smiled easily. She was not attempting to be provocative.

  Edward, provoked, said: ‘Don’t you think Hitler’s a barbarian?’

  She was surprised.

  ‘They’re all barbarians. Good God, Teddy, the US arms industry has been praying for this war for years. The British too, surely to God? Woodrow Wilson nearly tore his liver out trying to get a reasonable settlement at Versailles, a settlement that would last, and look what Europe did to him. A blind man with his head tied in a sack could see this one coming, couldn’t he? The Germans aren’t insane. They were screwed. Twenty million of them dispossessed, twenty million told they now lived in a foreign country and they could never be Germans again, for ever more. You would have fought, if you’d been them. If somebody had told you Wales was part of Poland. Come on, Teddy!’

  He was beginning to feel uncomfortable. This was heresy, or at least beyond his comprehension. Erica could see the effect her words were having, but it only made her smile.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Have I become too much? We see things differently over there, you understand. There’s a pretty powerful body of opinion that thinks Germany and Britain will link up one day soon and turn on the States. You don’t believe that? I’m telling you, it’s true. You heard of William Bullitt? Sumner Welles? Nah, you’re English. You have heard of America, I suppose? Have you heard of Nancy Astor? Cliveden? Of course you have. Well, Stateside lots of people think they lead a group of aristos and bankers and industrial giants who see Mr Hitler as the future. You know Joe Kennedy? US Ambassador here in London? A Boston-Irish gangster. He swills champagne with Lord and Lady Astor, so they say. He’s one of the set.’

>   ‘They can’t believe it’s true, though? You don’t believe it? It’s insane.’

  ‘Why insane? A different perspective. Europe is Nemesis for America. The devouring myth. Americans sprang from her and she always calls them back. Europe’s always dying and Americans can’t leave her alone to die. They go back, they interfere, they try to save her from herself. And they get slaughtered in the process. Without thanks or understanding.’

  Edward had a sudden, uncomfortable memory of Hannele. ‘Your Rich Uncle,’ she had called the States. This woman apparently saw Americans as wandering children, unable to break with a bloodstained, hopeless parent.

  ‘You won’t need to help this time,’ he said, lamely. ‘Against France and Britain, Hitler hasn’t got a chance. Poland might fight him to a standstill on her own. The Poles beat Russia in the 1920s.’

  She crushed her cigarette out in an ashtray. The butt still smouldered.

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ she answered. ‘But I hope you’re right. There’s a lot of Americans this time round who’d rather die than die for Europe. Like I said, it’s a spectator sport. The good ole boys’ll sell you tanks and planes aplenty, but if you hit the canvas, Uncle Sam won’t pick you up and dust you off. Roosevelt might want to. Rumour has it Roosevelt’s already making secret moves, although he’s too damn fly to let anybody in on it. It’s against the US law, Teddy. The Neutrality Act has got a lot of watchdogs. There’s a man called Borah. There’s senators whose families came from Germany and Italy and Ireland. And there’s cash. Industry invests in Germany as much as it invests in England, maybe more. If they fought for one side or the other, Standard Oil would be fighting Standard Oil. And the loser? Standard Oil. Forget it!’

  Carrington was silenced. Erica took another cigarette and lighted it. The ignition of the match made a significant roar in the quiet room. She inhaled deeply.

  ‘Am I too much of an American for you, or can I stay?’ she said. ‘And if I can, here’s another question. What do we do about sex?’

  Smoke was rising from her nostrils as from a pantomimic devil’s mask. Her smile was growing. She moved her head from side to side.

  ‘Teddy,’ she said. ‘You are just priceless.’

  Ten

  Edward, with heavy heart but great determination, threw himself into his training as an agent. Like any bureaucracy given a green light, the Secret Intelligence Service grew like mushrooms in a wet field overnight. It was riddled, in his opinion, with old and stupid men, most of whom had been recruited by word of mouth or by membership of a certain club or school society, but to give Menzies his due, he did bring in new blood of a different order. Carrington learned Dutch under a young lecturer from Manchester who was brilliant, and his radio and cipher training was handled by men whose accents were extremely low, while their skill levels were precisely the opposite. He was taught unarmed combat by a former plumber, and was later told that the famous novelist Gerald Kersh gave lessons in how to kill a man in total silence using only a handkerchief or a bunch of keys. In other classes, learned men told him about the economic infrastructure of the Low Countries and Germany, and the Burmese rubber nexus. He often found his thoughts, unfortunately, turning to Hannele’s face and body, and to the economies and peoples of Scandinavia, both of which he knew quite intimately.

  The other intelligence services also proliferated, and there were dark tales in the clubs and messes of rivalry and hatred. Many MI6 officers made no pretence at co-operation as a desirable aim, instilling in some of the newer men a conviction that MI5 saw its main purpose to encroach on MI6 domains, and suggesting that all such moves should be pre-empted. Vernon Kell, Carrington was told, was not only an incompetent head of MI5, but possibly a traitor and almost certainly a homosexual. He recruited from the ancient universities, and many of his agents were believed to be Russian sympathizers. Carrington knew only one of them by name, Lord Victor Rothschild, with whom he had played cards occasionally. His views were certainly of the left, but one of his houses, in Bentinck Street, was always full of pretty girls, which redressed the balance. Kell, his back exposed to many knives, was bizarrely blamed by Churchill for the ‘skill and daring’ of the submarine that destroyed the Royal Oak, and after a couple more botched jobs was summarily dismissed. But in MI6 itself the rivalries flared and smouldered. Colonels Valentine Vivian and Claude Dansey, theoretically the right and left hand men of ‘C’, fought each other bitterly, and their colleague Felix Cowgill, head of Section Five, with even greater vigour. There was MI(R) in the question, first one then two ‘D’ departments added to SIS, plus military intelligences attached to each armed service, PWE and the EH group. The Ministry of Economic Warfare hung on the periphery and stirred the witches’ brew.

  Carrington, a colonial, possibly in love, detached, watched all this with a definite slight unease and hoped the battle in the field was conducted with more competence and panache, not to say goodwill. His target, when he should be considered fit and ready, was the European centre of SIS operations, a house in The Hague disguised as the ‘Continental Trading Corporation’, where he was to join the staff of agents run by Major H. R. Stevens and his deputy, Captain Payne Best. From there he was to work up his cover as a rubber man and make the contacts that would get him into Germany. In theory it sounded plausible enough. In practice, luckily for him, it never happened. On November 9, Britain’s two top agents were lured to the border town of Venlo by some Germans, and simply kidnapped. A Dutch intelligence officer, Lieutenant Daniel Klop, tried to save them but was shot and later died. Stevens and Payne Best spent the war in prison and in camps, and almost every SIS man in place in Germany, the Low Countries and France had to return to England. Carrington’s adventure in Holland was over before it had begun, by two short days. Unlike Sir Vernon Kell, Menzies had a talisman. He carried on.

  That night, Edward took Erica to dinner at the Savoy Grill in the Strand and explained that he would not be leaving after all. The dinner had been arranged as a farewell, but never mind. The food was still good, he could afford it, the table was booked. Erica, who had been dressed to kill when he got to the flat, had agreed. She would relish it the more, she said, knowing that it was not a wake, and who knew how much longer such restaurants would still be open, such food and drink available?

  ‘Except for the rich, of course.’ She ironically raised a glass of whisky and water, her aperitif. ‘To the Black Market.’

  When they were shown to their table, Erica asked the sixty-four dollar question. Why? Carrington was prepared.

  ‘The project’s been delayed. As far as I know, the boffin in control has had second thoughts about some calculation. I doubt if I’ll be off the hook for long. But it’ll be an excuse for another farewell binge.’

  To Erica, Edward was a metallurgist, a researcher into alloys at the leading edge of science. It had occurred to him that simply to refuse to discuss his movements would have led Erica inevitably to his real job. And science, she had revealed the day after they had met, was a total mystery to her.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’ll be around. But I may be working soon myself. I’ve come out of the woodwork. I’ve declared myself. I’m going for a job.’

  ‘Well congratulations! You’ve saved me the embarrassment of having to turn you in! What are you hoping for?’

  Erica, in all the chaos of her arrival back in Britain, appeared to be on no one’s files. She had turned up, been noted as arriving, then forgotten. Had she been a foreign agent, she could not have done it better.

  ‘Ministry of Information. I know a man there, so I thought I’d see if they could use my services writing leaflets, or propaganda or something, I don’t know. I used to do scripts in the States. I know radio. They’re seeing me tomorrow.’

  He tried to hide it, but Carrington was surprised. She caught the rogue expression, and grinned.

  ‘I’m not a fifth columnist, you know! Just because we disagree on everything! I thought you’d be amused, me telling lies t
o bolster up morale. I’ll be very good at it, as good as Churchill. You can tell me what to think!’

  He made a rueful face. Their views on everything, from what to have for breakfast to the course and conduct of the war, had remained diametrically opposed. Churchill had been the latest bone of contention, as he had begun to make public speeches which Chamberlain clearly found embarrassing. They were violently anti-Nazi, patriotic, jingoistic some would say. Erica, for instance. She called him rabble-rouser, windbag, fraud. Everything he said or wrote was calculated for posterity, in her view, he sounded like a sheaf of notes looking for a history book.

  ‘Well, the very best of luck,’ he said. ‘But for God’s sake don’t tell them what you really think, will you? About anything. Otherwise you’ll end up in the Tower, not writing leaflets.’

  When the meal was over they went for a late drink, then for a dance. Although they were not lovers they stayed together, sought no other partners. When they reached home, happy and a little tipsy, they drank cocoa in the kitchen, then went to separate rooms. The ‘sex arrangement’ she had joked about had been about other people, and their attitude to strange bodies cluttering up the place. They had agreed that each of them should have carte blanche, no questions asked nor opinions given, unsolicited. But Edward had lost interest in easy conquests for the present, and Erica hinted at the ending of an affair when she had left the States. They liked each other, they rubbed along quite well. It was enough for both of them.

  It was several months before anything significant happened in Edward’s life, by which time he was so sick of the stagnant war that he would have been prepared to be parachuted into the heart of Germany wearing a kilt and purple sporran. His training had benefited from the extra time, he was assured by any superior who could spare the energy to talk to him, and indeed he was an expert radio operator and cipherist, who could also – in theory – kill, survive, and use a parachute. He knew the details of identity laws and rationing for every country in Europe, he had mastered Dutch and French, and he still could not get a pipe to burn for more than three minutes at a stretch.