Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  “Afternoon,” said Hare, bounding up to the counter with the various proofs of his passengers’ identities. “Got some interesting ones for you here.”

  He put the ID documents down and watched Dawney pick them up. The policeman read each one slowly. When he had finished he held the three of them briefly together and then put Südfeld’s extravaganza to one side.

  “What about your own?”

  “Oh yes, of course.” Hare poked about the top pockets of his drill shirt until he found his psssport together with his officer’s identity card which would normally be all that was required. But Dawney ignored the card in favour of the passport, carefully turning each page and sometimes looking up to study the subject with the beginnings of a tight-lipped smile about his mouth. Hare became aware of some movement behind him and turned to see that one of the Australian MP’s, a sergeant, had left their little hut and was standing in the open doorway.

  He turned back. Dawney was now looking at his officer’s card, arms almost fully outstretched and squinting at its small print because he was too vain to wear his reading glasses..

  “Alright?” Hare asked.

  “Hmm,” said Dawney, putting it down with the other documents on his counter. “Where are you trying to take these people?”

  “Our first stop is Sarafand Inspector.”

  Dawney ignored his demotion; there would be plenty of time. Sarafand al-Amar, which was a few miles south-east of Jaffa, was the biggest military base in the Mandate. It was the obvious destination.

  “And after that?”

  “I’ve no idea. They work for a branch of military intelligence.”

  “I see,” said Dawney. “And do you have any documents to support this?”

  “No, I don’t. There’s a bit of a flap on in Cairo at the moment. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody to give me any. I’m afraid you’ll just have to take my word for them.”

  That, of course, was the start of it.

  “No I don’t,” said Dawney quietly. “I don’t have to take your word for anything. These two look all right,” - he held up Maeltzer’s Palestine Mandate passport and Mitzi’s paybook - “though I’ll want them out of that car to have a look at them with any baggage they have with them. But I can’t let the other one in. Mister Südfeld is also Jewish. It says so in his passport. But unlike Mister Maeltzer his passport is not a Mandate Palestinian one. It started out as an Austrian one that has become a German one as far as I can make out. I take it he has been living in Cairo as a political refugee.”

  “That’s right.”

  “In that case you should be aware, and if you aren’t your superiors ought to be, there is a procedure for Jewish people wishing to enter Palestine who are not already citizens. There is a quota. Yes, a qwotahh. Ten thousand a year are allowed in, men, women and children and the Jewish Agency gives us their names. If this gentleman wishes to enter he must notify the Agency. If he applies now he’ll probably be on it by about 1962. If he’s lucky.”

  “My God,” said Hare. “I don’t believe this.”

  “Well, if I were you I’d start believing it. We’ve been turning back windy Yids from the Cairo souk all week. I don’t know why they’re allowed to get this far.”

  Hare saw before him a stocky middle aged man, with a boozer’s broken veined face and what he imagined were the usual strip of 1914-18 campaign ribbons most of the middle ranking Palestine policeman had. What was this plodding numbskull trying to prove?

  “This gentleman is not a panicky Yid from the Cairo souk,” he said slowly, his anger rising. “He is a highly intelligent person who happens to be Jewish. He also happens to be working for us. Or let me put it another way. He’s working for those of us who are fighting a war against the Germans and the Italians. He has been sent to Palestine because it is felt that, should the Germans break through, his life would be in grave danger. He also happens to know a lot of things we would rather keep to ourselves.”

  “Dear me,” sneered Dawney. “So important but nobody can be bothered to give you some proper documentation for him or call ahead or send a message to Jerusalem telling us to expect him.” He held Südfeld’s passport. “And I’m supposed to accept him on this - an out of date Austrian passport tattooed in bloody swastikas. No, if your pal is so important I think he’d arrive with something a bit better than this.” And he slammed it back on the counter.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Hare. “It’s -”

  “Don’t tell me what’s ridiculous,” snapped Dawney. Only the day before they had picked up a much more plausible captain who turned out to be a bombardier from a 25-pounder battery reluctant to take on any more panzers over open sights. “The most ridiculous thing around here is you with your Tom Mix pistol outfit when the nearest Jerry is a thousand miles away, your brothel creepers where your boots should be, and your little blond bint.”

  Behind him Hare heard the MP sergeant titter.

  “Now if you want these two to come in” - and once again he held up Maeltzer’s passport and Mitzi’s paybook - “you’d better bring them out of the car. They can always get a lift to Jerusalem from here.” He tapped Maeltzer’s passport. “Methuselah here shouldn’t have any trouble if he sticks with the girl. As for the other one, you’d better go back to Cairo and get some proper documentation or tell him what we’ve told all the other Jews from Cairo and Alexandria we’ve had up here. Go home, Rommel isn’t going to hurt you. The British Army won’t let him.”

  “Can I use your telephone please?”

  “No, the field telephone to Gaza is down.”

  “Do you have a wireless transmitter?”

  “We do.”

  “Can I send a message on that?”

  “You may. The operator comes back on duty tomorrow morning.”

  “Wouldn’t he come back now for an emergency?”

  “He would for an emergency. I don’t consider this an emergency.”

  “For Christ’s sake, why are you being such a complete and utter bastard?”

  “I suppose it’s just the way I’m trained,” said Dawney.

  Hare turned abruptly on his heels, brushing aside the giggling military police sergeant as he went.

  Outside he was astonished to find that the entire luggage and his passengers were out of the Bentley. Maeltzer, who had just finished wiping his spectacles on his handkerchief, was peering back along the road into Egypt from whence a large dust cloud heralded the arrival of more vehicles. Max Südfeld was stroking his trunk in rather an apprehensive manner.

  “So you don’t know what’s in here eh?” one of the Australian MP’s was saying to Mitzi in a teasing voice. In his hands he had one of the hat boxes and was struggling to undo the string.

  “I have no idea,” said Mitzi with a pout. “You must ask Captain Hare.”

  “Yes, I think that would be a very good idea corporal,” said Hare. The MP turned towards him and gave a very casual salute which Hare, being hatless, could not return.

  “Our orders are to search everybody’s kit going into Palestine sir,” he explained in a conversational manner as he went back to untying the reef knot. “Too many souvenirs going astray. A Beretta automatic can buy you a damn good time in Tel Aviv.”

  “You certainly won’t find any Berettas in there.”

  “Then you won’t mind me looking into this will you,” said the corporal, pulling the string apart. No more “sirs” for jumped up little Pommie pricks now.

  “Yes I would mind. Give me that bloody box!” demanded Hare and got his hands to it.

  “He’s got a perfect right to search your luggage,” said Dawney who had emerged from his office to watch the fun.

  “Like hell he has,” said Hare, strengthening his grip.

  But emboldened by Dawney’s intervention the MP, who was probably a good four inches taller, gave Hare a push with his left hand while he curled his right arm around the hat box as if it was a rugby ball. For a couple of seconds Hare managed to retain his grip
. Then he was left holding no more than the torn lid as the MP jerked the box away and in doing so scattered most of its contents in a broad arc across the rutted road with its old sump oil stains holding down the dust.

  And there they all were: the letters, the diaries, the half-burned maps, the quartermasters estimates of ration strengths with sinister brown stains in the middle of the page. The upright letters in copper plate Gothic script from proud and worried fathers who had themselves met the English in Flanders. Letters from sweethearts who signed off, “Vergissemeinnicht”. Letters from women who wanted to be forgotten and hoped he understood. Real trophies such as the coded and decoded versions of a message pinned together because a wireless unit had been overrun before they had time to destroy them. Most of these treasures dated from almost a year before when the last swing of the pendulum in favour of the Eighth Army had occurred. Slightly scorched papers found in derelict tanks that had somehow escaped the flames that baked the eyes they were intended for. Papers fished out of the cockpit goo in downed aircraft by retching soldiers using old socks for gloves and finding it difficult to keep down the rum ration they had been given. Papers with runny ink scooped out of the Med by surfaced submariners who had returned to the scene of their crime. Papers stuck together by blood or oil or both so that they had to be carefully steamed apart. All of them valued because they might just fill some gap in the vast intelligence jigsaw and knowledge, as Hare’s superiors never tired of reminding him, strengthens the arm.

  A whisper of breeze, no more than a teasing rearrangement of boiled air, had one of the scattered pages playfully caressing Dawney’s left boot. He picked it up. Dawney couldn’t read German but there was no mistaking the SECRET stamp walloped in red ink on its right-hand corner. Beneath this was another one in black ink, a square marked “distribution” subdivided into eight oblongs with each oblong occupied by a set of initials which all had signatures and ticks beneath them.

  Dawney started to feel uneasy. “Can’t have this lot littering the place up,” he muttered and began to pick up one piece after another. The military police joined in and then Mitzi and Max Südfeld who forgot to bend his knees so that the blood rushed to his head and he began to feel a little faint. Hare, still clutching the torn top of the hatbox, was already rescuing the pages nearest to him.

  As they collected them they walked over to wherever the MP corporal happened to be and placed them in the box he still carried. When it seemed that everything had been picked up the MP gave the box to Dawney who gave it to Hare.

  “Fancy keeping stuff like this in a hat box,” said the policeman, trying to keep the ascendancy in a voice that had lost its edge.

  “Yes, I’m awfully sorry,” said Hare relishing Dawney’s obvious unease, “but Rommel wanted his mail bags back. We’ll try to do better next time.”

  “Do you want me to help you get your man across or not?” blustered Acting Assistant Superintendent Dawney.

  “Frankly, I don’t care. In fact in some ways I think I might prefer it if you continued to dig a great big hole for yourself.”

  “Listen,” said Dawney, before he could help himself. “I’m only obeying my orders.”

  “I expect they say the same in Berlin.”

  “He didn’t get some of that fruit bloody salad on his dickie in the last lot for just obeying bloody orders,” said the Australian corporal. The crimson and dark blue ribbon of the Distinguished Conduct Medal was only one below a Victoria Cross.

  “When I want your advice I’ll ask for it,” said Hare, conscious of an approving look from Mitzi who was standing behind the MP. “You’re in enough trouble already. Striking an officer.”

  “Eh?”

  “You pushed me and I have witnesses.”

  “Roll on court martial,” said the Aussie. “With any luck I’ll be transported to Botany Bay.”

  A vehicle pulled up, one of the new jeeps everybody wanted, and out stepped a lieutenant-colonel with Royal Army Service Corps flashes on his shoulders and red rimmed eyes despite the goggles which he had just pushed up onto his forehead. He was accompanied by a Warrant Officer who was holding a metal clipboard. Maeltzer deduced that they were the people leading a convoy of empty trucks they had passed hours ago. Dawney introduced himself. It turned out that the convoy comprised of fifty-two trucks and they were coming into Palestine to bring back part of an Australian division that had been terrorising northern Palestine ever since they had taken Beirut from the Vichy French the year before.

  Hare, Maeltzer and Südfeld started to put their luggage back in the car while Mitzi tied the broken hat box up, pausing now and then to shoot reproachful glances at the Australian military policeman who avoided eye contact. Dawney came over and handed Hare all the ID’s including Südfeld’s whose trunk had never been opened. Hare took them without a word.

  “You’d better hop it before you have this lot in front of you,” said Dawney. “And next time get some proper authorisation, that’s all you need.”

  “There won’t be a next time,” said Hare, getting into the car.

  “Amen to that,” said Max Südfeld. It was one of those English phrases he was rather proud of picking up. After their first few minutes in Palestine they all started singing again. Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run. Here comes the farmer wiz his gun, gun, gun. He’ll get by wizout his rabbit pie...

  9 - ‘It’s the tobacco that counts’

  Two soldiers, linesmen from the Royal Corps of Signals, were installing Calderwell’s first home telephone. These were new quarters, a small, brick built modern bungalow in West Jerusalem not all that far away from the Forsters’ place. It went with his recent promotion and was a welcome change from the senior NCO’s billets on Mount Scopus with their shared bathrooms and plywood walls that let in every fart and snore. There was even a bit of garden, full of the potted remains of parched geraniums abandoned by its previous tenant at the onset of the summer heat when he had been invalided home with suspected tuberculosis.

  The telephone was another symbol of his new status, a recent perk for Inspectors and above that came with the police being under military command. As a badge of office it was almost as satisfying as the inspector’s pip on his epaulets. The receiver was a modern one piece hearing and speaking model in shiny black Bakelite but instead of a dial it had a handle which, one of the linesmen explained, required no more than three forward turns to connect him with the military exchange at the King David. They would then put him through to any number he liked in Palestine, civilian as well as military. The linesmen had asked him where he would like the receiver set up and, after a decent interval designed to give the impression he had not given the matter much thought, Calderwell said that the small entrance hallway would do.

  While the soldiers stapled the last length of wiring along his hall skirting board Calderwell passed the time in his kitchen preparing his laundry for the Arab woman who washed and cleaned for him twice a week. It was then that the spent .38 rounds he had used to scare off the crows fell out of the grubby drill shirt he had been wearing on the Horns of Hattin together with the crushed packet of Players he had found there.

  Calderwell picked up the rare ten-sized packet and examined its contents again. He was confident that the packet had been dropped accidentally rather than discarded. No smoker he knew, and he hardly knew anybody who wasn’t a smoker, threw away a packet because it only contained two cigarettes, especially if they were Players. He opened it and saw that one of the cigarettes was now quite broken, its two halves held together by no more than a thin strip of paper.

  Calderwell pulled it out and, as he did so, the paper almost totally unravelled spilling a little tobacco on the floor. It didn’t look like a Players, far too loosely packed, which met his theory that somebody might have used the packet as a handy container for less exalted brands, even rollups. He rested these remnants in the palm of his hand and was about to consign them to an already overcrowded ashtray when he spotted the numbers written in pencil on
what would have been the inside of the cigarette paper. They were spaced in four distinct groups. Three had five digits and one six; then he decided that the odd one out began not with the figure four but with the letter ‘H’ written before another five-digit number.

  His first reaction was that they were the manufacturers’ serial numbers or something of that kind. Then he looked again and concluded that cigarette companies were unlikely to employ someone to write things in pencil on the inside of their products. They were even less likely to do it so that all the stems of the sevens would be crossed in the Continental fashion the way the German Jews who worked in the shops and cafés of Jerusalem did when they made out a receipt for you.

  He went to the bathroom, which also contained an indoors lavatory, an arrangement he was rather dubious about, and returned removing the paper from a new blade for the safety razor to which he had recently been converted. Sitting at the kitchen table he used the blade to slice the remaining cigarette down the middle. He emptied the tobacco onto a page from an old Palestine Post. As he did so, one of the linesmen came in to announce they had finished and saw what he was doing. “Short of fags sir?” he inquired.

  “Old habit,” grunted Calderwell, wishing the cheeky bugger would push off. “You get three for the price of one this way.”

  If the linesman noticed he did not have handy any fresh papers to reroll them he didn’t say anything. These colonial police were a strange breed; some were said to mix various oriental potions with their tobacco. When he had gone and Calderwell had knocked the last shreds of tobacco off the cigarette paper and held it up to the light he was not disappointed. More pencilled numbers were plainly visible.

  He went into the hall and made the first call on his telephone. “I’ll get the army to telegraph a copy down to young Hare’s people at Sarafand,” said the Assistant Super. “Regular Brains Trust down there. Times crossword in twenty minutes types. Crack codes in their sleep. Bring it in.”

  ***

  “We don’t think it’s a cipher,” said Hare the next morning. He had snapped up the chance to motor up in the Bentley in the company of Mitzi who had been granted a week’s leave and was going to Jerusalem to stay with her mother. “In fact, we’re pretty sure it isn’t.”