by Lawton, John
It was an old one but a good one. Tell the truth and defy belief.
§170
And so, on this day in the early August of 1955 Wilderness was to be found making his way from Notting Hill Gate Underground station to Campden Hill Square to test the line to destruction. It might resist like concrete and tungsten, it might vanish in a puff of smoke, when he asked Lt Colonel Burne-Jones for the hand of his eldest daughter in marriage.
Burne-Jones said, “What kept you?” as soon as Wilderness had asked.
Madge said, “I think I’ll leave the two of you to it” and headed for the kitchen.
Wilderness had not thought that it would be otherwise.
A quarter of an hour later with a couple of shots of Burne-Jones’s 1939 Laphroaig single malt inside him he went in search of Madge and found her indulging in one of her bad habits—smoking a king-size cigarette and knocking the ash off into the saucer of a half-drunk cup of tea.
“Well, Joe.”
“Well, Madge.”
“I don’t know whether to read respect for tradition or a bit of a mickey-take into your rather old-fashioned way of doing things, but I can guess at Alec’s response. He met you word for word, tit for tat, and asked if you could ‘keep Judy in the manner to which she is accustomed,’ didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you say?’
“I told him that what I was paid was known to him to the last farthing, as it was set by him. I’m on a sergeant’s pay, plus some. But I’m unencumbered by debt, everything is paid for, and he knows that because he’s been privy to my house buying since the day I first saw Perrin’s Walk. I was slightly better off when Judy paid me rent, almost needless to say. But what’s mine is hers.”
“And what is yours, Joe? Quite the question to be asking a professional thief you will agree. But I don’t think the answer matters all that much.
“Joe, if I were to say to you that you were not what I wanted for my daughter it would be because one never ceases to want, to yearn, to dream on behalf of one’s children. One learns early on that it is impossible not to make plans but also to bend when they don’t work out. Not to bend is to invite frustration.
“And if you were to ask me what it was I did want for Judy, I doubt I could answer you. My mother did what her parents asked of her, expected of her. Married well. Married into the aristocracy. Married an absolute shit. And the fact that my father was a shit became a family shibboleth. It was never mentioned. But if I’d brought home a prospective who was an habitual drunk and far too free with his fists, I think Ma would have shot him dead. I was not to do as she had done.
“Perhaps all I want for my daughter is for her not to marry a shit. I didn’t marry a shit. And I know you’re not a shit. But I also know what you do for England. What you do for England is legitimised by the fact that you do it for England—but tell me, what else do you do that might not be for England?”
He’d expected this, not perhaps expected it to be phrased so well, for the private and public lives to be intertwined so neatly, but sooner or later she would be the one to ask the questions Burne-Jones couldn’t be arsed with.
“I haven’t pulled a private job in years. Not since Cambridge in fact, and even then it was matter of vengeance rather than profit. My rather peculiar talents are, for the time being, at the service of Alec and Her Majesty. Many things are tempting. I still size up opportunities, I mentally ‘case the joint’ rather a lot. It’s almost impossible not to walk into a room and look for the safe or tot up the value of the silverware. But that’s just a hobby, keeping my mind sharp. And of course it’s all temptation, but I’m not Oscar Wilde. I can resist temptation.”
Madge smiled at this.
“Can you resist temptation, Joe, can you really? And why do you say ‘for the time being’?”
“I won’t be doing this for ever. Sooner or later Secret England will be through with me or I with it.”
“And then, what will you do then?”
“I don’t know. That’s the risk I take, and the risk Judy shares.”
“And Berlin, Joe. What was Berlin all about?”
At last.
“Oh . . . that wasn’t thieving . . . that was . . . that was like watching a horse race and knowing it wouldn’t be interesting without a bet on the side . . . Alec had left me on my own for a year . . . it was simply the only game in town.”
“A game that ended with you getting a bullet in your belly.”
“Don’t worry about that, Madge. No one will ever get the drop on me again. From now on I shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Is that Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy you’re quoting?”
At that they both burst out laughing.
Madge stood up.
“Joe, give your new mother-in-law a hug.”
And not once had she asked about his “people.”
§171
He bought a ring from a Piggy-wig—they took it away and were married next day by the Turkey who lives on the hill. That was the way it seemed to Wilderness—they had set sail for unknown shores, young lovers in a pea-green boat, and landed as Mr. and Mrs. Holderness. It was all dream-like, too dream-like to be quite believable as real.
§172
The honeymoon was brief. A single weekend.
On the morning of Monday September 5, the telephone at the side of the bed, installed at Burne-Jones’s insistence, rang until Judy picked it up and shoved it at Wilderness with a muttered “Pa,” and sank back beneath the sheets.
“Get out to Heathrow, you’re booked on the eleven o’clock to Orly.”
“What’s up?”
“Karel Szabo got out of prison last week. He got on a ferry to Calais on Saturday. No problem with that. Full remission after all. From there he caught a train to Paris. French lost him at the Gare du Nord. Silly sods at the Deuxième were looking out for a single man—and he’s travelling with a woman.”
“What woman?”
“All in the file. There’ll be a courier on your doorstep in five minutes. Chop-chop, old man.”
Wilderness leaned over Judy and dropped the phone back into its cradle. Whispered in what he thought might be her ear, hidden by the sheets.
“I think we might really be married after all. He just called me ‘old man.’”
“Well,” said in an irate if muffled voice. “Perhaps one old man ought to give a bit of a break to another old man and leave him alone on his fucking honeymoon!”
“There’s worse. He’s sending me to Paris.”
He headed for the bathroom, just as she threw back the sheets and yelled, “Well, fuck you . . . old man!”
He read the file in the back of a cab, on the way to Heathrow.
He knew a lot about Szabo. Thanks to Rada. He, and the other creators of “the bomb”—Fermi, Szilard, Oppenheimer, Teller, Borg, et al—had fascinated Rada. They had, she said, made the world anew in unleashing the power to unmake it. Their lives and deeds had formed the bulk of the fattest file she had given him: the one marked “Armageddon.”
Marte Mayerling was less known to him. Hardly even a name. Just the hint of a memory and the appeal of coincidence. Her file, like Szabo’s, had several photographs, group and solo. Marte in middle age, a blurry photograph from a shaky surveillance camera told him next to nothing, but Marte in her twenties . . .
He called Judy from the airport. A security risk he thought, but a small one.
“Would you go into my study —”
“That pit you laughably call a study.”
“And dig out one of my old folders. One of those Rada Lyubova gave me.”
“Now. There’s a name we haven’t heard in a while. You used to talk about her so much I almost felt I’d met her. Which file?”
“Armageddon.”
“OK. Might take a couple of minutes. Just hang on?”
She took more than five.
“Really Wilderness, you must learn to be tidy, just
a bit more ordered.”
“But you found it?”
“Yes. What is it in particular?”
“A photograph Rada clipped from the New York Times. 1937. The Bohr Institute Particle Physics Conference. There should be an identical photograph I added myself. But the text on that will be in Danish.”
“OK. Got ’em.”
“Front row centre. Niels Bohr, seated. Am I right?”
“That’s what it says on the card, so to speak.”
“And Bohr being a bit of a gent, he has the only two women in the photo seated either side of him?”
“Yep. Old-fashioned manners. The blokes stand and the ladies get to sit. And no one gets to put their foot on the tiger’s head.”
“On his right . . . a woman of about sixty. Lise Meitner?”
“Nothing wrong with your memory so far.”
“And the woman on his left? Much younger, about twenty-five or so? Seated in front of a skinny young man called Peter-Jürgen von Hesse. What’s her name?”
A long pause he found all but intolerable.
“It’s really rather worn. Folded, faded . . . you know . . . but it looks like Mayerling. Let me check on the Danish one. Yes. Marte Mayerling. Name rings a bell. Does it do that for you too?”
“Oh yes, the whole Nine Tailors clanging in my ears.”
“Jolly good. Now, how am I?”
“Eh?”
“Just ask me, Wilderness. Go on, try!”
“But I saw you not three hours ago.”
She put the phone down on him.
§173
It meant nothing. It was coincidence. He was flattered that his memory had been good enough to spot her, annoyed that he had never quite bothered to learn her name.
Nothing in her file told him why she had set off for who-knows-where with Szabo. Like him she was a naturalised British citizen and Wilderness could not see the necessity to flee or the profit in it.
Burne-Jones had said, “It’s just a tail. Follow. Observe. Make no approach. You’re not out to arrest them. We have no power to arrest. For all we know they’re off to Monte Carlo for the roulette or Klosters for the skiing. Just stop the French from making more hash of it than they usually do. Oh, and take your gun.”
He’d packed his .25 Baby Browning—a gun Burne-Jones told him wouldn’t stop a dopey rabbit—successor to his Sauer 38H. The Browning tucked neatly beneath his jacket, more so than the Sauer. A generous cut by his tailor and you’d never know he was wearing a shoulder holster with the Browning in it. And then . . . he’d never had to fire it. He kept in practice—service regulations demanded that—but he’d never had to shoot a dopey rabbit or anything more vicious than a cardboard target.
The flic who met him at Orly in an old black Citroën had good news.
“They’re in a small hotel in the Marais. Rue du Temple. Third arrondissement. Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt, would you believe?”
What was it Groucho Marx had said? Smythe is just Smith with a Y and fooled nobody? Surely the same applied to Schmidt? But if they had seen fit to bluff their names, then it was indicative—they were running away, not sauntering on. And if they had fake passports . . . then someone was assisting.
He spent a dull Monday afternoon watching Szabo and Mayerling play at being tourists. Sat outside Le Mistral bookshop for an hour while they browsed. Made himself inconspicuous behind a copy of Paris Match, half a dozen tables away in a barn-sized restaurant in Montparnasse.
By the time he had gumshoed them back to their hotel, the flic was waiting for him in the black Citroën. He’d been inside and questioned the proprietor.
“They’re only collecting bags. They’re booked on this evening’s Orient Express to Venice. They’ll probably just get a cab to the Gare de Lyon.”
“What time?”
“Leaves at ten thirty. They’re in compartment twelve, coach four.”
“I’ll get a cab there now. You follow them.”
“Way ahead of you.”
He handed Wilderness an envelope with a Wagon-Lits reservation in his name. Held up a receipt for him to sign.
“Who do I bill?”
“I don’t care,” Wilderness replied. “So long as it’s not me.”
“I need a name for the chit.”
“Winston Churchill.”
“Ah . . . that will annoy everyone very nicely. Sign here, Winston.”
“Were you followed today?’
“No. And you?”
“Not that I could tell. But if they are travelling as Smith or Smythe, or whoever next, sooner or later someone, the someone who provided the passports and made the bookings, is bound to show up. Watching his investment after all.”
“Perhaps he will put in an appearance in Venice?”
“Perhaps. But I doubt very much whether Venice is their final destination.”
Observation work had always bored Wilderness. So often it led nowhere. Too often it meant a dusty, disused flat, a tape recorder and a pair of binoculars. First-class sleeper on the Orient Express was at least a step up. Just a touch of Graham Greene or Agatha Christie . . . “and ze murderer is . . . all of you!”
Long before they reached Milan he was bored stiff.
Szabo and Mayerling were all but unfathomable. As fleeing spies they seemed not to know how to play the game. They had neither caution nor suspicion. Noddy and Big Ears could have trailed Szabo and Mayerling. As runaway lovers they seemed not to know the game was even afoot—they neither canoodled nor did they smooch. Not so much as a stolen kiss or a peck on the cheek. Paris was made for lovers, arguably so was the Orient Express. Instead they talked intensely in German, and they talked shop—physics, physics, mathematics, mathematics, physics. He longed for Charles Boyer or Margaret Lockwood to enter stage left and put a cat among the pigeons, strike love to spark among the particles.
In Venice they boarded a vaporetto, heading clockwise along the top curve of the Grand Canal’s lazy S. It was slow enough for him to follow on foot, but the Grand Canal was hardly the Seine with a walkable bank—yet the vaporetto was big enough for him to board the same vessel and lose himself at the back.
The boat stopped within sight of the Accademia Bridge and suddenly he knew where they were heading, it made sense and nonsense. He’d heard that the old Russian embassy had been turned into a hotel—he’d not set eyes on it since his one visit towards the end of 1949. Another fleeting, inconsequential Burne-Jones mission. But as the vaporetto glided past he knew the building at once. A beautiful piece of faded glory. Too nice to be an embassy, and far too nice to be a Russian embassy. An iron-fenced canal frontage and a leafy courtyard of climbing vines that simply cried out for little round café tables and a beaker full of the warm south. Someone in the KGB had a sense of humour.
To follow them into the hotel would be a gamble. He found a café and thought through his options over a couple of shots of espresso—would there be anyone watching at this stage, what chance that whoever it was would spot him for what he was, and who should he be? He riffled through his collection of passports. Concluded his best fake was to be a colonial. No hammy accent, just a bit of plum in his voice and a South African passport. He phoned the hotel and booked a room. Assuming they were still playing the tourist, he’d give them an hour or so to clean up and get out into the warmth of a Venetian summer evening.
The signature above his in the book as he signed in read “Prof. Heinrich Behrmann & wife,” and gave Dresden as a home address. He handed over his South African passport. As the desk clerk looked through it, Wilderness scanned the pigeonholes looking for the blue cover and yellowy-gold lettering of a DDR passport, paler than a British one, as flimsy-looking as an American. There it was. Room number 4. The paper trail had been set up rather well. A new identity with every change of hotel, and the latest told him where they were going next. He’d no idea why such a roundabout route had been chosen, when there were trains that went direct—perhaps for no better reason than pleasure, after all Szabo had
spent seven years in prison—but without doubt, tomorrow or the day after Professor and Mrs. Behrmann would be on a train for Vienna, via Villach and Graz, and he’d put his money on them crossing the Iron Curtain at Bratislava. Bratislava was spook paradise. Austria and Czechoslovakia met there, a bridge across the Danube—Hungary was a short drive away—it was a jumping-off point for the Soviet bloc.
A quick search of their room confirmed most of this—two tickets for Vienna the day after tomorrow and a reservation at the Imperial. Time to fade into the background. He’d leave a day ahead, follow from the front, call Burne-Jones from the embassy in Vienna and be at the Imperial by the time they arrived. Anyone looking out for him in Vienna, and he was fairly certain that that was where their man would show up, would not be expecting him to arrive first. He’d spend just the one night in Venice and keep as far away from them as possible. A night off in Venice would scarcely be a hardship. All he had to do was lose Szabo and Mayerling for a few hours.
He crossed over to Cannaregio, to the old Jewish ghetto. It was the last place anyone seeking the sights would ever go. It no more got tourists than the Mile End Road, and with any luck the food would be much the same. Kosher food wasn’t a mystery—he’d eaten at Blooms in the East End of London countless times. You could keep your champagne and caviar, he was happy with chopped liver and matzoh ball soup.
Over the menu pasted to the window of a small restaurant, past the knishes and the pastrami, he caught sight of them, seated at a table along the back wall. All he had to do was lose them for a night.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
He lingered a fraction too long, long enough to be intrigued by the fact that Mayerling’s habitually sour puss was approaching something that resembled a smile. For a moment they were looking straight at one another. Then her head turned away, one hand reached out and covered Szabo’s, and he realised that he might have misread them all along, might have mistaken the nature of their tangible intensity, that logic, argument, and discourse whilst lost on him might in themselves be expressive of feeling—the romance of formulae—and that rather than defecting they might simply be eloping.
