Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Calderwell glanced at his superior and guessed they were both asking themselves the same question. Why the hell had Hare bothered to put in a personal appearance if he didn’t have something exciting to tell them?

  “What do you think it is then?” said the Assistant Superintendent who saw a rocket coming his way for wasting the Brains Trust’s precious time. The three of them were sitting around a small table in one of the cool, high ceilinged interview rooms at the Russian Compound headquarters. They were all smoking and the flies had taken refuge in altitude.

  Hare paused to stub out his cigarette and when his head came back up he was smiling. “We suspect it’s something much better,” he said. “It looks like their Signal Plan. They’re wireless frequencies. It seems they’ve given them frequencies to receive on and frequencies to transmit on. All except the number with the aitch in front. We haven’t worked that one out yet but we will. Meanwhile, we’re monitoring the rest and as soon as pick one up we’ll try and get a fix on them, find out where they are.”

  “I wonder if this is what they were looking for on the Horns when they bumped into the boy? Nothing to do with waiting for another drop,” said the Assistant Super trying to keep his voice level and somehow control the rapid beating of his heart. (Not a rocket then. Commendations all round. That’s what it bloody well was!) Have you heard anything on the receiving frequencies yet?”

  “Well, one of them appears to be used by a Wehrmacht quartermaster’s unit in Athens for its traffic to Crete. But that’s a common Abwehr trick, mixing their clandestine signals with somebody else’s day-to-day stuff. Otherwise, not a dickey bird.”

  “Why write them down?” asked Calderwell. “Why not just learn them?”

  “They were probably given them at the last minute just before they dropped. And there are quite a lot to remember. The question is, assuming they’ve lost their only crib, what do they do now? The operator almost certainly remembers at least one frequency so sooner or later he’s going to come up with a message and then say, by the way, please can you give us our other frequencies again.

  “Our guess is that they’ll maintain radio silence as long as they can. How long depends on what they’re up to. Are they part of a military mission to the Mufti’s people, perhaps something that was interrupted last year when we invaded Syria and they lost a close base? If so they’ll want to do some gun running and they’ll have to use their wireless to arrange it. Or they might have a more specific target in mind and already have the wherewithal to do it. If that’s the case they’ll probably be very sparing in their use of wireless.

  “Then again, they might have a series of check calls and if they don’t come up with their call sign on the right frequency and the right time there’s always the chance somebody will get worried and try to raise them. Either way, knowing the frequencies must make things easier for us. We’re trawling through them around the clock with a team of special operators. When they come on air we should be onto them much faster now.”

  “How fast?” asked Calderwell. “How quickly will you be able to work out where they are?”

  “It depends how soon we get a fix. First of all we’ve got to find out roughly where they’re transmitting from. Is it Ramallah? Is it Nablus? Is it Tiberias way? Once we have found that out we can close in on them with a direction finding unit.”

  “And what does that depend on?”

  “Well, basically, how long they stay on air. The longer they’re sending the more time we have to get a decent bearing on them.”

  “What about an aerial. Wouldn’t they need a big aerial?” asked Calderwell. “Should we be looking out for something?”

  “Not necessarily. In fact, not at all. You can transmit on the set they probably have with them, which is no bigger than a medium sized suitcase, on not much more than the kind of indoor antennae you have for an ordinary radio receiver.”

  Before he left, Hare took both their home telephone numbers and said, night or day, he would inform them the moment there were any developments.

  At about six that evening, shortly after Calderwell got back to his bungalow, the telephone rang for the first time in his presence apart from a couple of short test calls the linesmen had got the communications centre at the King David to give them. The noise startled him. For a moment he couldn’t think what it was. Once he had worked it out he dashed into the hall and lunged for the receiver.

  “Calderwell,” he gasped in what he intended to be a brisk and officer-like manner but came out as a bit of a croak. He knew it must be Hare or the Assistant Super. Nobody else had his number yet unless it had already appeared on the bulletin board at headquarters.

  “Walter darlink, did I wake you up?” asked Mitzi. “Are you ill?”

  He assured her that this was not the case and hoped he didn’t sound too disappointed.

  She was back to Jerusalem she said. Terrible journey. All the Palestine Police’s fault too. She’d tell him all about it when they met which would be tomorrow. Tonight she was going to stay in with her mother who had cooked her favourite dumplings and God only knew the ingredients were difficult to get nowadays. All this rationing! You really knew there was a war on. Nothing like Cairo where you could get absolutely anything you wanted. It would be a week before they set up their unit again at Sarafand so they would have a lot of time together. Wouldn’t that be nice? She was singing at the Café Europa tomorrow night. Yes, with the band. Their regular singer had been impregnated by a giant Australian and could no longer hide it. Afterwards, they could have dinner on the house. Eight o’ clock at the Europa then? Good. Wiedersehen darlink.

  It was only when he put the receiver down that it occurred to Calderwell that she hadn’t explained how she had learned he was on the telephone let alone his number. Then she was a damn clever girl Mitzi. Bright as a button, could lie to you in three languages. Good at other things too. Enjoyed it. Not like those English girls who pretended they didn’t and wanted the lights out before you could unpeel as much as a stocking.

  He wondered what she would make of his bungalow. It was the first proper home he had had since he gave his mother the key to his front door in Coventry and told her to tell the landlord that the rent money was with her daughter-in-law and her fancy man if anybody could find them.

  Calderwell walked around the bungalow again, touching things, stroking walls. It was certainly one up on Ma Fendelbaum’s little flat with its tiny kitchen that always seemed to smell of boiled cabbage. He already had a wireless set and he intended to get a gramophone as well. In Tel Aviv or Haifa you could pick up a good second hand one nowadays because many German Jews had relied on remittances from home and were feeling the pinch. Mitzi might even get him to like one of those gloomy German composers she played when she was in one of her darker moods. To be honest, he wasn’t all that keen on some of the jazz she fancied either. And he had to admit his own weakness for George Formby and Gracie Fields she found almost imbecilic though he once caught her giving him a thoughtful look when they were listening to the Throstle of Rochdale imploring someone called Walter to lead her to the Altar. Their tastes coincided on Judie Garland and Vera Lynn and even more on the late Al Bowlly singing to Lew Stone’s band. She had been more or less brought up on that, British dance band records being more readily available in the Mandate than the American stuff.

  Inspired by thoughts of Mitzi and the late Mister Bowlly, who had been killed over a year ago in the London Blitz, Calderwell whistled a few bars from his You Couldn’t be Cuter as he entered his larder and extracted a reasonably cold bottle of Eagle beer from the crate he had placed in the darkest place at the back. When he returned to the kitchen, he knocked the top off on the table’s edge and started to drink it from the bottle then decided he had to keep up standards and found a glass.

  It was a pity he couldn’t see Mitzi tonight he thought, wiping the froth from his lips with the back of his hand, though it was only right that she was having the first night back with her mother. He
suspected Mitzi rather neglected her surviving parent, who had been widowed for several years now. She was not all that much older than Calderwell, slim and in some ways more elegant than her daughter. Nor was she the ardent Zionist her daughter was but her late husband had been so she had accompanied him to Palestine. In late middle age she still pined for Germany the way old lovers remember and sometimes hurt for each other. There were a lot like her. In the years since Hitler came to power there was more German than English spoken in some parts of Jerusalem.

  Calderwell sipped his beer, lit a cigarette, blew smoke down his nose, thought about what young Hare had been telling them and then what the Assistant Superintendent had to say after Hare’s departure. It had all been a bit startling. It seemed that there was considerable interest in high places about the parachutists and, as Calderwell had been the first to pick up the trail the Inspector General wanted to wheel him in to see the High Commissioner himself.

  “C’mon, have some self confidence. It’s a feather in your cap man,” the Assistant Superintendent had chided when he saw how discomforted Calderwell had looked at the prospect. “You’re the star of the show. First you find Siegfried hanging out his washing on Mother Muna’s line. Then you come up with their wireless frequencies. Of course, they don’t know about that yet but they soon will. I warn you, if you go on like this they’ll be giving you my job and then you’ll really have something to worry about.”

  But as they talked, so their initial elation subsided. They were still a long way from an arrest. At the very least the people they were looking for had to make a long enough transmission for them to pick up and get a fix on it. And even then they could miss it. It was easily done.

  Hare had explained how even a momentary lapse in concentration on the part of the monitoring operator, atmospherics, a disturbance in the ionosphere, might easily be enough for them to miss a short burst of Morse. Then, even if they did get a bearing, it didn’t mean they would locate the transmitter first time. And if he had the opportunity, the operator would change location as often as he could.

  The more they had talked the more convinced Calderwell and the Assistant Superintendent became that their best hope lay in something far more reliable than a wireless intercept. “We need a tip off,” Calderwell said. “An honest to God, good old fashioned bloody informer. Somebody who wants revenge for the boy’s death.”

  And the Assistant Superintendent had agreed and said that it would be flying in the face of nature if they did not get one soon. Then Calderwell had reminded him of what had happened in Lubia.

  The day after they got the boy’s body down to the police station at Tiberias, and smuggled in a Jewish doctor for a quick bullet-extracting autopsy before his God fearing parents could object, they had raided the Arab village near the Horns which the Palestinian sergeant had reminded him was a Mufti stronghold. Calderwell had organised it. A dozen police had gone there in two armoured cars and a small lorry and they had pulled the place apart. When they had finished they had summoned the Mukhtar and told him that they wanted the answers to some questions and they wanted them now or else they might start blowing up a few houses.

  The Mukhtar well knew that they would not blow up houses without a Magistrate’s order for, unlike the Turks, the Ingliz always produced written permission for their atrocities. But he was a shrewd old boy and protested his village’s innocence in such a piteous manner that Calderwell had been inclined to believe him. True the boy’s entrepreneurial flair had given the game away but no treachery had been intended. Why so harsh? These were close-knit communities. “Cousin fuckers,” the Jewish Special Constables liked to sneer.

  It was true that those who betrayed for police rewards would be killed, often with great brutality. Jewish gangs were becoming equally vicious to their own. But this boy wasn’t an informer. It had surely been no more than a chance encounter when he came back to get the second parachute only to find that they too had returned. For what? Another drop or to look for the missing cigarette packet? Did they kill him because they lost their temper when they realised that the boy had already disposed of the first chute in a way that the British would certainly discover sooner or later. But rage was an indulgence the Mufti’s agents must know they could ill afford. For by killing the boy they risked starting the kind of blood feud in which informing might be considered an acceptable act of revenge. Yet so far there had been no tipoffs. No Arab constable had sidled up to his superior and reported that a cousin of a cousin had a friend who knew something about the affair on the Horns of Hattin.

  Calderwell just couldn’t understand it. They still had no idea who they were looking for or what mischief was intended. He rather hoped this would not be the case by the time he found himself in the presence of the High Commissioner. He went to get another bottle of beer but decided to have a whisky and water nightcap instead. A poor substitute for Mitzi he thought.

  Yet they were not on the face of it well matched. He was fifteen years older than her and he preferred not to think about Mitzi when she was away. Cairo must be full of young officers looking for a good time. And whatever she did he could hardly hold himself up as a shining example. Of course, it was different for men and that was something the force recognised. At the Mount Scopus training centre here in Jerusalem there was a secluded medical wing known as "the college" through which many of them had graduated. It was the clap clinic. It had been a while since Calderwell visited the place. Whether he was becoming more fastidious about these matters or simply slowing down he wasn’t quite sure. He did not know that, over the years, he had woken up with too many sore heads in strange beds and the day’s remorse already looming.

  10 - An American Perspective

  In Jerusalem’s Zion Square Robert E. Pickett the Second, a grandson of the Confederacy with a Yankee flag beneath the war correspondent shoulder flashes of his British uniform, was sitting at the bar of the Café Europa. Behind him a Jewish quartet in white tuxedos and scarlet cummerbunds was setting up. In the bar’s long mirror he watched a drum kit was being assembled, a double bass stripped of its canvas cover, a standing pianist running an exploratory right hand down the keyboard of his upright. One man produced an alto sax, a clarinet and trumpet and extracted various warbles, whistles and groans from each. In the middle of them stood a petite blonde in a clingy lime green off-the-shoulder dress squinting through her cigarette smoke at what he assumed to be a song sheet.

  The American was waiting for Maeltzer to arrive. Meanwhile, he continued to stare fixedly into the mirror because it was the only antidote he could think of to the relentless monologue being poured into his right ear by the man sitting next to him. How the hell was he ever going to stop Malley going on about the British?

  “I wouldn’t waste another red cent on the useless bastards,” the photographer was saying for at least the third time, pausing briefly to chase down his beer with a shot of whiskey. “They’re all fuggin’ perverts. Fuggin faggots. That’s why they like pullin’ little boys’ pants down and whackin’ ‘em on the ass.”

  It had started because Pickett had happened to mention that Churchill had just been in Washington trying to persuade Roosevelt that all the Eighth Army needed to put things right were a few more American tanks, particularly the new Shermans.

  “And what good would they do if they got them?” Malley had exploded. He was big and black haired with the corpse white, tan resistant skin of the true Celt. “Shall I tell you what they’d do? Listen, I’ll tell you. They’ll put them all in a nice circle and then all get out and make some nice tea. And while they were trying to decide whether it should be two lumps or three Rommel will come up and put ‘em all in the fuggin slammer. I tell you, the only people they can beat are the Italians and that’s only because the wops aren’t really trying.”

  Malley was third generation Boston Irish and raised to relish the ancient enmity by Christian Brothers who could be as flagellant as any of those charged with enforcing His Majesty’s writ in Palestine. He w
as not quite thirty, more than ten years younger than Pickett, his good looks frayed by hints of paunch and dewlap. These glimpses of the middle aged Malley already peeping through his threadbare youth sometimes consoled Pickett for his own advancing years though at least his own lean frame refused to put on weight.

  But he wished he were making Malley’s kind of money. The photographer could afford to mix his beer with whisky because he was good at what he did which was supplying American and British glossies with well composed images of the desert campaign. Too composed for some of his colleagues who alleged that, thanks to the men and props provided by compliant escorting officers well behind the front lines, he was the greatest illusionist since Houdini. Pickett, preferring to take a charitable view, put this down to jealousy. Besides, for the first three drinks Malley was always good company. Then he tended to deteriorate.

  “Fuggin’ perverts,” the photographer said again, finishing his whisky. “They’re a bunch of goddam Fairy Nazis.”

  Pickett looked cautiously around to see how many of this exotic breed might be within earshot. A table of about eight cluttered with beer glasses and bottles was occupied by off duty Palestine policemen, two in uniform, the rest in their civilian uniform of grey flannel trousers with houndstooth patterned sports jackets.

  Sitting nearer to them, almost back to back with Malley, was another officer, tall and fair haired with a major’s crowns on his epaulettes. Pickett could make out a “South Africa” flash on his left shoulder and the orange bar that indicated he had volunteered for service outside the Union. Since the man was on his own and had nobody else to listen to Pickett figured that it was likely he had been listening to Malley for some time. He hoped to God that he considered himself more South African than British though, in his experience, this was rarely the case with the English speaking of the breed.