The Garden of Weapons (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

  Vascovsky had said Pavel was not to worry. The Telegraph Boy had been given detailed instructions. If anything happened to Vascovsky the asset was to close all contact. To wait. New contact would be made. “That Telegraph Boy, you must understand, imagined every report was going straight through to Moscow. You know what you do with doubles, Herbie. You make them feel they are indispensable. They become reliant.”

  “They also become difficult, Pavel. Did the Old Man hint that his tame Telegraph Boy was difficult?”

  There were occasional difficulties. Doubles like to try it on; but it paid Vascovsky to keep the asset happy. “He was storing up goods to help in our journey to the West.”

  “It is better to store up treasure in heaven.” Herbie spoke in a whisper. Then: “In your statement to me you said that Vascovsky had neutralised his asset—the Telegraph Boy. Told him to wait for a new contact, if he disappeared.”

  “Or if anything happened to him, yes.”

  “Those were his words? The Old Man’s words?”

  “His words to me.”

  “And he actually gave you the new contact sentence, Pavel?”

  Mistochenkov was puzzled. Yes, the Colonel-General had told him the words passed on to the asset. “The lines from Gorky. They were to be the signal that the asset had a new handler.”

  Herbie quoted again from The Lower Depths: “A man can teach another man to do good—believe me.” Mistochenkov said, yes, those were the words. Put into a conversation, the asset would know they came from someone trusted, or sent by Vascovsky.

  “And there was no answer-back?” Herbie gave a snort. “Why do you think he told you, Pavel? Why you? You were going into the West, whatever. With the Old Man, or, if something went wrong, without him. In the end you came alone. But why did he tell you?”

  Insurance, Pavel presumed. “If I was caught. If you tried to double me back I would have a bargaining point.”

  Herbie laughed at the nonsense, then shook his large head. “No, little Pavel—that’s what the Old Man called you, didn’t he?—little Pavel? Vascovsky gave you the words, the cipher, so that you would tell me. Don’t you think so?”

  Mistochenkov did not know. He did not see the point.

  “Then there are other points you should try to see, little Pavel.” The laugh had left Herbie’s face; not even the trace of a smile. Worboys thought he had never seen the big man’s eyes go so cold. “The Telegraph Boys, as you call them; you were never given proper names, only cryptos?”

  Pavel said yes, of course: again repeating they had already gone over all that.

  Herbie ploughed on, oblivious to the Russian’s remonstrations. “And these cryptos? Vascovsky gave them to you: told you? When did he do that?”

  “Christ in heaven,” Mistochenkov raised his hands. “March 1965. I told you.”

  “Repeat the cryptos, Pavel.”

  “Repeat the …?”

  “Yes. Repeat.” Herbie moved in closer, towering over the Russian, who took a step back, then, opening his mouth twice, rattled off the six names. “Priam-Hecuba-Electra-Horus-Nestor-Gemini.”

  “And where did your good Colonel-General Vascovsky get those names, I wonder?”

  Pavel Mistochenkov shrugged. From the faithless Telegraph Boy, he presumed.

  “Really?” Herbie gave the Russian a friendly push with his huge paw, smiled, then cocked his head at Worboys who followed him, like a sheepdog, from the room.

  Herbie’s smile camouflaged mental confusion. The puzzle split, divided itself, the parts chasing around his brain. The Telegraph Boys had, from their inception, been carefully segregated: no one member of the six had knowledge of the other five—either by true name or cipher. Certainly during that long period of sporadic, and poor servicing after the Schnitzer Group left town, their faces might have been identified by dedicated surveillance. Yet no single Telegraph Boy could have given Vascovsky the cryptonyms; and it would be harder still to marry the ciphers with the true names.

  Luzia Gabell could have given neither true names nor cryptonyms to Vascovsky: even if she had been able to let him see any of the material. In the days of the Schnitzer Group the Telegraph Boys’ handling was so tight you could not move.

  Until Herbie’s Berlin Quartet moved in, some eighteen months before, only half a dozen people were even aware of the cryptonyms, and only two could have married them with real names—the Director and Herbie Kruger himself. The Director was like Caesar’s wife; while Herbie’s store of secrets was endless, and locked away deep in the cradle of his memory.

  So, Vascovsky’s asset within the Telegraph Boys could not have passed the names in the March of 1965. Nor could Luzia Gabell. Yet Pavel Mistochenkov claimed to have had them—via Vascovsky, via a Telegraph Boy—at that time.

  Herbie’s brow creased as the anxiety blossomed. Could Vascovsky have pieced the six cryptos together through radio intercepts? Unlikely, for only a small portion of the Telegraph Boys’ traffic had gone through radio in those days.

  With freezing logic, Herbie considered the alternatives: that all six of his Telegraph Boys had been turned from the outset—odds heavily against; that by some wizardry, Vascovsky had obtained a spectrum of intercepts, revealing the ciphered names as early as 1965; that Pavel Mistochenkov was deliberately misleading him about the dates. If this last was true, it could mean that the Russians had only recently learned of the six ciphers: from one of the new Berlin Quartet.

  It was this last possibility which struck a chord of anguish within Herbie Kruger. Already he was discredited through the Schnitzer Group and the Telegraph Boys. If one of the Quartet had also gone, then his whole status collapsed: his reputation was triple-shattered. More, it threw a new hazard of horrifying dimensions into the ploy he was about to play.

  Worboys got no hint, as they left Warminster, that the slump of Herbie Kruger’s shoulders signalled the fear of complete defeat. Herbie said little on the drive back to London. His head buzzed with the permutations, and his mind constantly slid on to the technicalities which the Trepan operation posed. He hoped that Tiptoes and Scoffer were as good as Tubby Fincher claimed. Certainly they seemed to be efficient; but the testing time would be from Saturday night onwards.

  He visualised a room he had yet to see—high on the top storey of the apartment block near the Mehring Platz. The transmitters and screens: the small, high-powered dish antennae hidden on the roof, seeking for the homer blips from Schnabeln. The pair of technicians picking up the blips, doing their sums and pinpointing, tracking, the man on a large scale map: following him invisibly down streets, into buildings. Charting his progress; waiting for the screech. He had taken Worboys through the screech cipher. “Just to be on the safe side. In case I’m called away, or anything happens,” he told his assistant, without the hint of a betraying smile. “It’s always better to double up on this kind of thing. That screech has got to be slowed and deciphered on the spot.”

  Worboys felt elated. Herbie was, perhaps, starting to trust him at last. The screech, when it came, would give them the name of the person they were after. The blip, charted by the progress of the homing device, would provide the exact location. Big Herbie must have something up his sleeve—some method of communication with his man in the East; so that action could be taken straight away. But Worboys had enough sense not to ask about that.

  They went straight back to the Annexe where Herbie spent half an hour with the Director and Tubby Fincher. He put in requisitions for two more small pieces of equipment, then went to look at the paperwork in his office.

  At just after four Herbie instructed Worboys—who was due out to Berlin on the last flight—to do a final minding job: once more cautioning him to silence.

  “I’ve got to pack …” Worboys began.

  “An hour at the most. Quick in and out. Just let me know Tubby’s boys aren’t watching; okay?”

  Tony Worboys saw no surveillance on his boss. Herbie was quite clean all the way, he told him, back in the St. John’s Wood
apartment. They had gone out to Camden Town High Street again. Taxi-cab and bus, this time: Herbie clutching his fat briefcase. Underground and taxi back.

  “Okay, young Worboys. Have a good trip to Berlin. I see you Friday night. Look after the others; and I’m not to be disturbed unless there is genuine danger.”

  Worboys understood, and left Herbie alone with his thoughts, and the package he had collected from the shop in Camden Town.

  Herbie spread out the newly collected material on his table, examining it with care. The American and East German passports were really high grade merchandise; as were the various pieces of ID, the permits and passes. He would get by with this stuff; unless he was expected, which was always a possibility.

  Later that evening Herbie sat back in his favourite chair and went through his plan again. He had to be word-perfect with Schnabeln, and the timing was critical. The whole thing would have to be completed by Sunday night. Twenty-four hours was the maximum. Otherwise there really would be problems. Herbie knew he would return either a hero or in disgrace. There was a third possibility—that he would not return at all. For a second he wondered if either Tubby or the Director had seen through his innocent requests. Well, he’d know that soon enough.

  Mahler’s songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn—The Boy’s Magic Horn—played softly in the background. The composer had dipped again and again into this massive anthology of German folk art—which so enchanted poets, musicians and philosophers—using, or altering, poems and songs to include in his symphonies and cycles. The twelve-song cycle Herbie was playing contained a whole range of subject matter from the military to the blatant sensual overtones of Verlor’ne Muh—Wasted Effort, a dialogue suggesting adolescent seduction, the girl making the moves and the boy rejecting her—

  All right, shall I give you my heart?

  Will you always remember me?

  Take it, dear little boy, take it, please!

  Crazy little wench, I certainly don’t want it.

  Herbie nodded to himself. He knew the poem, the song, by heart. Ursula had spoken the dialogue with him: part of their love-play. She, trying to titillate, where no arousal was needed. He feigning disinterest: a verbal chase-me-round-the-bedroom.

  As though suddenly recalling something from the past, Herbie wound the tape back to the first song—Serenade of the Sentry, or, more accurately, The Song of the Night Sentry.

  Trumpets, joined the strings for the first verse, in which the sentry bemoans his lot. He must stay awake; he must be sorrowful. His lover answers. There’s no need to be sad; she’ll wait for him—in the rose garden: in the green clover. Then—

  Zumgrunen Klee geh ich nicht!

  Zum Waffengarten

  voll Helleparten

  bin ich gestellt.

  Yes, Herbie thought. That’s exactly it—

  I am not going to the green clover!

  The garden of weapons

  Full of halberds

  Is where I am posted.

  4

  TONY WORBOYS LEFT HEATHROW on a Lufthansa flight. Charles, with Tiptoes Corn, went earlier, by British Airways. Miriam Grubb was on Worboy’s aircraft. He spotted her in the terminal building. On the aircraft he saw the back of her head, and the curve of one shoulder, some six rows in front of him in an aisle seat.

  The familiar devil of lust rose in Worboys. At his first sight of the elegant, attractive girl—in the Jermyn Street house—he had fancied her: and this in spite of the deep sexual involvement in which he was entangled with Noel Richards of Registry. Herbie Kruger had hit a confused but raw nerve during the drive to Warminster.

  Worboys was an only child: a loner since he could remember, and prey to all the parental blackmail prevalent in one-child families. “You’re all we have, you know, Tony,” his mother would often remark wistfully, seated in the drawing room of her well-appointed Surrey mansion, among the antiques and silver passed down by young Worboys’ grandfather, together with a large and healthy portfolio of stocks and shares.

  Both parents set a high store on what they called “the purity of the body”, by which young Worboys understood to mean, at first, washing. Later he realised they were referring to the more pleasant duets of the body—disapprovingly. Naturally he rebelled, but still occasionally found himself twitchy with inlaid guilt.

  That guilt was present now, in double portions, because of Noel Richards, who had opened some novel doors to Worboys. She was small, blonde, wore long skirts, sandals, and an expression that suggested butter would not melt in her mouth.

  Two days after an initial meeting—while Worboys was running messages between Big Herbie and Registry—he had lured her to the cinema, and, in turn, Noel lured him to her little flat in Maida Vale. There his eyes were opened. Unlike Miriam Grubb, Noel had short legs which she would wind tightly around him, like a wrestler. He also discovered that, though Noel looked prim, she wore nothing under her outer clothes, used graffiti language as they made love, and was a sexual glutton. It was all new to Tony Worboys, whose former conquests had been as inexperienced as himself.

  Now, as the aircraft trembled in a small pocket of turbulence, he allowed himself to wonder at the potential of Miss Grubb, and struggled with fantasies in which the slender nubility of Miriam vied with the muscular tensions of Noel Richards.

  At Tegel—West Berlin’s civil airport since Tempelhof had become a United States military base—Worboys loitered by a bank of telephones until he was certain Miriam Grubb had safely left the terminal. He emerged after fifteen minutes, heading straight for the taxi rank.

  He took a cab to the intersection at Mehringstrasse and Yorckstrasse, walking the rest of the way; lugging his suitcase, and going through interminable stops, checks and window reflections to ensure he was not under surveillance. Trying to memorise car numbers and passing faces is not easy when humping luggage through city streets. Hence the School’s dictum that a street man should always travel light.

  The building was just south of the Mehring Platz—a modern, concrete slab, built obviously for the use of multinational companies with their head offices in New York: no soul, and precious little to please the eye. There was a security man in the lobby, who nodded, showing no sign of interest when Worboys asked for “Mr. Calder’s offices”.

  Herr Calder had made arrangements on the top floor. Number Twelve-twenty-two, the guard said. Twelfth floor; the right hand elevator.

  It was a large suite on the top floor corner, so that the balcony gave them spectacular views, back across West Berlin, and angled to look out towards the East. Miriam Grubb let him in, cocking her head towards the main room, furnished like an office, but cluttered with crates and heavy cardboard boxes, half unpacked. They had pushed two large tables against the longest wall, between windows which opened out onto the balcony. Some of the equipment was already set up on the tables.

  Charles and Tiptoes struggled with a ladder, making final adjustments to wire grilles around portable electronic bafflers which they had just installed.

  “Not clean?” Worboys asked.

  “Clean as a whistle, squire,” Tiptoes leered down from the ladder. “Swept it myself; but it’s best to be on the safe side. Never can tell what the buggers’ll try on. We ordered bafflers, so we use bafflers. Cuts the odds.”

  Worboys nodded. Electronic eavesdropping was a complicated art, and one sweep did not a summer make, nor rule out devices operated from a distance. The electronic bafflers, like humming fans, would do the trick.

  “Where we sleep?” He put down his suitcase. Miriam Grubb laughed.

  Tiptoes leered down again, assuming an American accent, “We go to the mattresses; like the Mafia wars.”

  “Bedrolls,” explained Miriam. “Tiptoes insists on staying with the equipment in here; Charles has already allocated the best of the other two rooms for himself and Max—when Max arrives. That leaves one room; one kitchen, and a bathroom.”

  Worboys nodded. He would doss down in the kitchen. Miriam Grubb smiled. Almost
casually she said they could share the other room. “I won’t eat you. Unless that’s what you want. I’m certainly not staying in here with Tiptoes; and Charles wouldn’t appreciate me.”

  “Why don’t you get us some food, Scoff?” Mr. Corn shouted down from the ladder, trailing a cable through the final grille.

  “Just ’cause I’m the only woman doesn’t make me a galley slave. You want food? You get food—yourself.”

  “I’ll get the food.” Worboys felt it was the best, and least, he could do. At the door, in search of the kitchen, he asked where Big Herbie would sleep when he arrived.

  Charles nodded towards a large leather armchair. There was a table beside it with a Sony Stowaway machine, a set of headphones and a box of tapes. “You don’t think the old love’ll sleep, do you? Maybe he’ll listen to music, but I expect he’ll spend his time pacing like a lion, and leaning on Tiptoes and Scoff.”

  Worboys felt suddenly depressed. He could be tucked up, cosy, with Noel now; instead of here in this bland set of offices, high above Berlin. He found the kitchen and looked at the stocks. Plenty of tinned stuff; and a refrigerator crammed to the door.

  He was opening four tins of soup when Miriam Grubb came up behind him.

  “Take no notice of the lively banter,” she grinned. “It’s always like this with Tip. You wouldn’t think it, but he’s a repressed old closet queen. Bloody good with the magic boxes though. Here. I’ll give you a hand.” She took a saucepan and began to pour the contents of the tins into it, switching on the electric stove with her free hand.

  A smile moved in Miriam’s eyes, though her mouth remained solemn. Worboys decided she was an enigma: he would never be able to tell when she was joking.

  He said she was pretty good on the magic machines herself—“So I’ve heard.”

  Miriam claimed it was a challenge. “This kind of thing’s quite easy, really. In a few years it’s all going to change. We’ll be filching stuff straight out of the Centre’s computer banks; and they’ll be trying to do the same to us. Big Herbie’s wrong, you know.”