The British Cross

by Bill Granger

  “You have an office here?”

  “No. Actually, we deal directly with the makers. Offices in Kensington Mews in London. Do you know London?”

  “From time to time.”

  “You’re in business?”

  “Everyone is in business.”

  The faintest frown. “Didn’t mean to pry.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “Beg your pardon.”

  “You followed me from the hotel this morning when I went to the train station. I took a walk to Upsala and you were behind me.”

  The other man darkened suddenly. His color might have meant danger but Devereaux did not stir as he talked. He did not look at Sims. He stared at the glass of Finlandia vodka on the wooden bar top in front of him.

  “You’re not very good,” Devereaux said at last.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This. The shadow this morning. You’re not very good. They must not consider this very important if they sent you. Unless you’re supposed to be bad. At the job, I mean.”

  “Yanks have a gift for giving insult,” Sims said.

  “And the English have the gift for coming back again and again for more of the same,” Devereaux said.

  Sims rose abruptly but Devereaux held his sleeve. The bartender, wiping glasses at the far end, turned to observe.

  “Just being here has told me more,” Devereaux said. “I never saw you before yesterday.”

  “Not terribly observant of you then,” Sims hissed. “I’ve had you watched for a week.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we know who you are.”

  “Who am I?”

  “Amnesia? Or merely perplexed.”

  “Tell your master to send someone a little more expert the next time.”

  “Let go of my sleeve.”

  “Sure.” Devereaux dropped his hand. “Tell them it doesn’t pay to send up someone dressed like a French pimp. He stands out.”

  “You might regret that.”

  “I doubt it.”

  The Englishman mustered some dignity and took his drink to the far end of the bar again and deposited it on the bar top. He pushed a five-markka note across the bar as a tip and turned and walked up the three steps to the lobby level where a middle-aged couple were playing the slot machines.

  Devereaux stared after him but the Englishman pushed through the front doors and left the hotel. Absurd, Devereaux thought. He’s wearing a suit coat and it must be zero outside. He smiled for the first time.

  “Trouble, sir?” asked the barman.

  Devereaux looked at him. “A queer.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  The barman frowned and looked away but stayed near Devereaux, polishing glasses that had been polished a moment before. Devereaux noticed this but there was nothing to do about it. Contact had been made; Hanley could not have expected to wait seven weeks and not have someone tumble to the fact that a special agent was in Helsinki. Even a clod like Sims.

  Good, he thought. Time to get out. Time to let Hanley know the game was over.

  He suddenly felt released as he had not felt for seven weeks.

  The game was in the open.

  If the British knew about him, everyone would know about him. Tartakoff could not get out now. Tomas Crohan, whoever he was, would stay a prisoner in the Gulag.

  “I’d like another vodka,” Devereaux said. The barman picked up the empty glass and replaced it with another.

  Time to let Hanley know that it was blown, that he was not the man for the job anymore. If they wanted to delude themselves, they could send someone else in.

  Hanley must have known seven weeks was too long in an exposed place like Helsinki. Hanley must have known.

  And then, with a sudden chill that capped his mood, Devereaux realized that Hanley had known all along.

  The old man lay beneath the thin covers and felt the coldness in the ward press against his exposed face. For a moment, he closed his eyes as though the utter darkness would warm him; he tried to think of the old dreams that always had sustained him. But the wind howled against the windows of the old hospital wing and the wind insisted on winter, insisted on penetrating his subconscious so that there would be no place left for pleasant dreams.

  The old man opened his eyes. He shivered and wrapped the blankets tighter against his thin frame.

  A single light shone in the hall that was outside the ward of the prison hospital. He stared at the light until he saw the halos around the light, shimmering and dancing like rings of a distant planet.

  He heard the moans of the sleepless in the darkness around him. The old man was waiting for the pill to take its effect, to remove him from the ward, from the moans of the others, from the howling wind pressing against the rattling windows, to lead him to the long dreams that occupied half his existence, that made the real part of his existence endurable.

  What did he dream? He could not even tell anyone, for fear the dreams would dry up and then there would be nothing left to make the other existence—the real existence—bearable for him.

  He could fall into the dreams unexpectedly, even during the day. These reveries would always protect him. Once, when they were building a barracks in the dead of winter in Siberia—it was so cold that wood shattered like glass—he was warmed for days by a dream that led him day and night. He never spoke during the days of the dream; he was scarcely aware of the horror and cold around him during the dream. The dream had been the only thing that was real.

  Now, because he was old and because he had lived with the dreams so long, he felt like an aged suitor who must court the dreams gently for fear they will fly to another. He had bribed the nurse for an extra pill tonight and the pill would eventually let him sleep and the sleep would—if all went well—lead to the dreams that were warm and bright and full of beautiful forms. He never had nightmares; the nightmares only came during the day in his other existence. The dreams were always beautiful visitations.

  Was he mad, as mad as the others?

  He closed his eyes. It was a question to ask himself tomorrow. After the dreams came.

  He felt himself falling, slowly, in the darkness of his mind and he did not struggle against the falling.

  And after a while, the howling winter wind outside the prison hospital in Leningrad could not be heard anymore by the old man.

  7

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “What do you know about a man named Tomas Crohan?”

  The question had first been asked that morning. It was repeated now to commence the conversation.

  “You mean, Hanley, what does Tinkertoy know?”

  Hanley made a face that was half grimace, half acceptance of Mrs. Neumann’s games with him.

  Mrs. Neumann ran computer search in R Section. She was the memory of the Section and, in some ways, the conscience of the operation when it required such. Computers provided Hanley data, past and present; Mrs. Neumann told him what the data meant.

  They sat at a table near the window in the special cafeteria provided on the third floor of the Department of Agriculture building on 14 Street.

  The day was bright and cold beyond the heroic windows. Inside the drab, government-green cafeteria, the food was usual and not very good, served up from stainless-steel steam tables with much banging of plates and plastic serving trays. Hanley regretted being here. He never missed lunch at the old-fashioned bar-and-grill north on 14—he always ate exactly one cheeseburger (without onions) and drank exactly one straight-up dry martini—but the circumstances were unusual today and called for a luncheon meeting with Mrs. Neumann. And Mrs. Neumann, in her way as much a creature of habit as Hanley, could never be persuaded to leave the environs of the old building before quitting time.

  “The stew isn’t so bad,” she said with the dedicated air of one who has to justify her eating habits. She speared a fork into the greasy brown mixture on her plate and retrieved a dried chunk resembling meat from the sea of
carrots and potatoes.

  Hanley poked at the salad in front of him. His stomach rumbled. He had not touched his food. His stomach did not understand that the pleasures of the single cheeseburger and straight-up martini would have to be foregone today. Hanley felt sorry for his digestive tract, as though it were an old friend fallen on hard times.

  “Yes, Mrs. Neumann. As you say. What does Tinkertoy say about Tomas Crohan?”

  “Actually, we shouldn’t eat this much meat. Not every day. Leo is on a diet now where he skips eating entirely every other day.”

  “I’m happy to hear it.”

  “You wouldn’t be if you had to live with him.” She put down her fork and called up Leo in her mind’s eye. “Leo is a sweet man but I’m going to have to convince him that this diet won’t work. It will ruin his stomach or ruin me. He sits around on the foodless nights and rumbles at me. In the living room. His stomach makes these terrible noises just as yours did now. I realize he can’t help it any more than you, but it is distracting. Especially when the foodless day falls on Saturday. We had people over to the house and Leo rumbles at them.”

  “Mrs. Neumann, I find the subject of your husband’s digestion amazingly interesting.”

  “All right, Hanley.” She put down her fork. “Let’s cut the small talk then.” Her voice had the rasp of an awl on old wood. She was very hoarse and never so much stated as whispered or rasped or seemed in a hurry to speak. Lydia Neumann was a middle-aged, handsome woman of big bones and large gestures who favored print cotton dresses. Her short, black hair was cut in spiky clumps at intervals by her husband, Leo, not because it saved money but because it created an intimacy between them that reminded them of when they had been young and very much in love. Both would be surprised now to hear that their friends thought they were still in love as they had been twenty-five years before. Leo vaguely suspected that his wife had an important role in an agency he knew very little about; he had treated her in a fatherly way about her job until the Paris matter two years before when she had been kidnapped right out of the agency. The incident had awed him and made him vow to lose forty pounds; the two matters were linked but difficult to explain to anyone who did not know the Neumanns. She was chief of Computer Analysis or CompAn in the slang of the trade.

  Tinkertoy was her pet, her primary computer.

  “Tinkertoy makes a cross reference of Crohan to the Competition.”

  “Langley?”

  “Yes. Archives section where they stored the trash before they went into business in 1947. All the old OSS stuff and some of Wild Bill Donovan’s meanderings before that. I rang up my opposite number over there.”

  “At Langley? Was that wise?”

  She glanced at him sharply. “You said this was routine, Hanley. Strictly routine. We do cooperate from time to time, you know. It is the same government.”

  “I’m not all that certain CIA is convinced, let alone NSA or the defense boys.”

  “I know what you mean. Remember the Hamburg business six months ago when Langley bollixed it?”

  “It’s still on my desk,” Hanley said, one bureaucrat explaining to another by a simple phrase showing how tedious it had become. “I can’t shake it off on anyone.”

  “Well, the interesting thing, Hanley, is that they claim to have absolutely nothing on the business. I didn’t talk with Mrs. Carruthers, though. She’s normally the one I talk to. She was off. Terrible speller. Isn’t that funny? She runs one hundred fifty people and two hundred machines and couldn’t spell her way out of a paper bag.”

  “Mrs. Neumann,” Hanley interrupted.

  “His name was Wallace, said he was filling in. He wanted to know why we wanted to know.”

  “About Crohan?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  Mrs. Neumann swallowed a bit of carrot in gravy and smiled. “What the hell do you think I told him, Hanley?”

  “I don’t understand this,” Hanley said, almost to himself. It was not the first time he had said it or thought it since he sent Devereaux to Helsinki.

  “Eat up, man. You’re the one who insisted on lunch,” Mrs. Neumann said. She was in good humor because she saw Hanley’s confusion.

  “I was hungry,” Hanley said with petulance.

  “So I see.”

  Hanley shoved his unfinished plate aside. “Inedible.”

  “The lot of the civil servant,” Mrs. Neumann said. She reached for Hanley’s salad and pulled it toward her. “I thought he was very interested in our business.”

  “Wallace.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you demand the file under rule thirty-eight?”

  “No.” Mrs. Neumann was silent for a moment. She held her fork against the remains of the stew as though contemplating either the act of eating or what she would tell Hanley next.

  She looked up. “There’s something funny going on, Hanley. With the Competition at Langley, I mean. I told this Wallace the name had come up in a routine cross reference and we had no file. It didn’t satisfy him, but he can go to hell. What could he make of it? For that matter, what do I make of it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You haven’t told me anything,” she said.

  “I know.” He had the secrets but he did not understand them and was reluctant to let them go until he knew what they really meant. Each secret was an unfired gun and when it was triggered, it demanded action. Hanley was frozen in the matter.

  “This is some business lunch,” she said.

  “I should tell you.”

  “Suit yourself, Hanley. It seems to be your pickle.”

  Mrs. Neumann was the only person in headquarters who addressed him flatly by his last name, save the Old Man himself. Mrs. Neumann meant no disrespect; she called any man by his last name and would not have been offended to be plain old Neumann in return.

  “We received a message from one of ours in Helsinki nearly a week ago. It came in the middle of a routine matter. It was not expected.” The words fell reluctantly and slowly. “It pointed to the existence of Tomas Crohan, still held by the Soviets in the Gulag.”

  “Who is Tomas Crohan?”

  “I remembered. Vaguely. Just after the war, when I came in, there was talk about an operation in Nazi Austria… some of the older hands at OSS. Then it was disbanded and we were all floating around from one establishment to another until Truman put the CIA together.”

  “Fascinating history of American Intelligence.”

  Hanley looked up sharply. “Damn it, Mrs. Neumann. I want to explain to you.”

  “Explain.”

  “I checked with some of our retired people after I ran his name through a routine comp search—”

  “You could have told me about it.”

  “Mrs. Neumann. You are in charge of a vast division inside the Section. It hardly seemed worthwhile to tell you about it. Not at the time.”

  “What did the retired spooks tell you?”

  “Enough to make it a puzzle.”

  She waited. Her plate was clean.

  “Crohan. He was Irish, suspected of being behind the continued existence of the Irish Republican Army in the late 1930s. Viciously anti-British and the bad feelings were returned. Also a bit of a Nazi.”

  “Sounds like a lovely fellow.”

  “Well, it was explained to me that the parts were all tied in to his absolute hatred of the British. Ireland came up neutral in the war—the Irish Free State—and the Nazis were all over Dublin. They curried favor with the De Valera regime and they were using the country as a listening post on our operations in the Atlantic. Not that we weren’t there as well, to do our bit. We worked on the Irish, pointed out our ties, and all that. This was the State Department, I mean, and the OSS. It was a delicate game. At the same time we were dealing separately with the Irish, holding off the Nazis in Ireland, we had to hold off the British. They were absolutely rabid when it came to the subject of Irish cooperation with the Americans. They
kept thinking we were cooking up deals behind their backs for American support for Irish unity after the war.”

  “Were we?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. Though I should think we were promising them anything under duress.”

  “And how did Crohan fit in?”

  “He was a perfect man. Irish neutral with valid visas to Nazi-occupied Europe. He could become our agent.”

  “How? When?”

  “I don’t know. Memories of old men just fade at that point. I hoped there would be something in Tinkertoy. And then I hoped you could somehow wring the information out of Langley since they have charge of all the old OSS files. It distresses me that this… this problem has come up, that nothing has come of your research.”

  Mrs. Neumann narrowed her shrewd eyes. “That’s the point, isn’t it, Hanley? Something did come of it. Absolutely nothing.”

  “I don’t want to be left in the dark on this,” Hanley said. Annoyance scratched at his plain Nebraska voice. Both were from the Midwest, different states at different times, and both had an annoying directness in their speech that offended others and attracted them to each other inside R Section, despite their separate temperaments. In that moment, Mrs. Neumann instinctively understood the lostness Hanley felt.

  “What happened to Crohan?” she said in a raspy whisper.

  “He was in Vienna when the Soviets marched in. He was trapped in the city but he wasn’t terribly concerned. After all, we were all on the same side. The Russians just arrested him and he disappeared. After a year or so, they acknowledged they had him but said he had died, too bad.”

  “Wallenberg.”

  “There are similarities,” Hanley admitted. “But what was his mission? And why does Langley want to play games about a file that is forty years old?”

  “How did his name come up?”

  “During a routine assignment in Helsinki. We got a flutter from our man that Crohan is still alive and that he can come out now.”

  “Is it valid?”

  “If it isn’t, I don’t think we’re at risk in the matter. But I just don’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is so unexpected.”