Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  “Those Spitfire boys we used to watch could fly all right but they sure weren’t fairies,” Pickett said in a voice he hoped might carry to any enraged eavesdroppers. He could swear the South African captain’s back had visibly stiffened.

  “Ah the Spitfire boys.” said Malley. “Weren’t they the ones Mister Winston Churchill - bless his poor father’s syphilis - called the Few? Leastways, that’s what I heard. He called them the Few not the Many didn’t he? And half of them were fuggin’ Polaks who wanted to kill Krauts so badly they would have gone up on hot air balloons. They didn’t even mind if the Limeys let ‘em go first. So that was the fuggin’ Few but where are the Many, that’s what I want to know. Where are the fuggin’ Many? I tell you were they are. Sniffin’ each other’s assholes and waiting for us to come over and rescue them again. That’s what they’re doing.”

  “Well we’re taking our time about it,” said Pickett. “We’ve six months into this war and all we’ve got to show for it is an over staffed military mission in Cairo and a few flyboys about the place.” This was something that both of them found immensely irritating. They longed for more American troops to report on. “And what about the Micks? What are they doing? Sitting out their neutrality and allowing the U-boats a little home porting between trips? Must be helping to drown a helluva lot of Americans that way.”

  “Leave the Micks out of it,” said Malley.

  “Yes, you’re right,” said Pickett evenly. “We mustn’t mock the afflicted.”

  “Goddam Limey lover.”

  “Not Cromwell though,” offered Pickett.

  “We could drink to that,” said Malley.

  “We could indeed,” said Pickett. “I’ll have no truck with burnin’ churches. Not even Fenian churches.”

  “Jasus, Joseph and Mary! May God luv your small kindnesses surr,” said Malley who was still in that part of the evening where he didn’t confuse stage Irish with reality.

  Pickett looked at his watch. Maeltzer was due any moment and it couldn’t be soon enough as far as he was concerned though he would prefer not to have to share him with Malley. Maeltzer was supposed to be Pickett’s stringer in Palestine, his paper’s correspondent when staff men like himself were not around. But for the past few months, apart from a few days leave to see his family in Haifa, he had been in Cairo doing some kind of secret work that he could only assume had something to do with his stringer’s first language being German. Pickett wasn’t sure whether he’d been pressed or volunteered into the British war effort. All he knew was that the last time they met, which had been at Maeltzer’s home in Haifa, he had been very tight lipped about whatever it was he was doing.

  He was rather surprised he wasn’t in Haifa now. If he was on leave Jerusalem was a bit of a detour. But he was obviously steamed up about something.

  “I’ve got a very good story for you,” Maeltzer had told him after getting a call through to the King David Hotel where Pickett had been sharing a room with Malley. Jerusalem was full of Cairo refugees. “It’s something that has to be appear in your newspaper.”

  At the time Pickett had been trying to finish a long overdue feature on some American fliers getting combat experience with an RAF squadron and he had asked if it would wait until he had filed when they could meet for a drink in the Europa. Whatever it was, the American hoped it might justify prolonging his own stay: not that he could really bring himself to believe that Rommel was about to check into Shepheard’s but because there was no denying that, with or without the Afrika Korps, midsummer Jerusalem was much more pleasant than dusty old midsummer Cairo.

  The trouble was that, since the collapse of the Vichy French in neighbouring Lebanon, editors had little interest in Palestine. Pickett was there convalescing from a recurrence of the malaria he had picked up in Iraq a year ago covering Rashid Ali’s rebellion that had collapsed despite German attempts to give it air support via French airfields in Syria. Damn glad he was of it too. He had had quite enough of the Libyan and Egyptian deserts. Pickett had made his last trip to the front at the beginning of May shortly before Rommel launched his offensive against the Gazala - Bir Hakeim line and considered himself lucky to get out alive.

  For Malley it was different. A successful freelance, he didn’t need to be sick to justify being in Jerusalem and had enough pictures with his New York agent to satisfy demand. Even so, he had insisted to Pickett that he had left Cairo when it became obvious that it was it was going to be some time before he found an escort officer willing to take him to the front.

  “You know what they told me in that Goddam press office of theirs? ‘Give us a few days to sort ourselves out old boy - wait ‘til the dust has settled.’ Can you imagine waiting ‘til the Limeys sort themselves out? Hell would freeze over, the desert bloom. I told him, ‘Mister. The only way you gonna sort yourselves out is when you get American crews to go with your American tanks.’ He was not a happy bunny.”

  ***

  For a few more minutes Malley continued to revile the Saxon foe and Pickett began to fear a drift towards the rebel song book for he not only knew all the words but could deliver them in a baritone of startling clarity. Then, quite suddenly, the photographer excused himself, explaining that he had a date with a girl called Jessica who worked in the Mandate’s Secretariat which was housed in a wing of the King David Hotel where Pickett was staying.

  “Jessica?” Pickett queried. “An English rose for a broth of a boy? What happens if this leaks out in Boston?”

  “It would break me dear auld mother’s heart so it would. Break yours too if you could see her. Maybe I’ll bring her back here for a nightcap. Her husband was one of those fly boys you admire so much. Disappeared over the Lebanon last year. A rose is a rose but this one has lost her thorns. Hot for the pot she is.” And draining his glass Malley waltzed out of the front door only seconds after Maeltzer stepped through it.

  “Was that young Malley I saw leaving?” he asked when he joined Pickett at the bar. “He looked drunk.”

  “It was and he was,” said Pickett, dismounting his stool to shake hands.

  “That boy is always drunk,” complained Maeltzer, declining to take the photographer’s vacated seat so they both stood. “Does he have some sort of personal problem?”

  “Yes, being Michael Joseph Malley. It’s a heavy cross to bear. Anyway, I’m a bit drunk myself. It’s my first drink in three weeks. Beer and malaria don’t mix.”

  “Well, it’s been a bad week,” said Maeltzer. “Another bad week. Tobruk was bad enough. The Australians held it.”

  “For two hundred and forty-two days to be precise,” said Pickett who six months before had covered the relief of Tobruk - a story that would have been worth risking his neck for if the Japs hadn’t chose the same day to visit Pearl Harbour. “The Diggers were veterans. And they had a lot of Britsih regulars with them too with artillery that was allowing the panzers to get close enough to blow them to pieces.”

  “You see there are Afrikaners among these South African troops,” said Maeltzer. “They may all be volunteers but I know them. Forty-two years ago I was reporting their war from Pretoria. I suspect their hearts aren’t really in it. From the Cape to the Transvaal there are people my age and younger with good reason not to love the English. And even if they wanted to forget the English speaking won’t let them. Some popular Boer politicians are back behind barbed wire for liking the Germans too much. And I bet none of them want to believe these stories about thousands of Jews being killed in Poland. ”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know what to believe.”

  Pickett shook his head. “Even the Nazis wouldn’t be crazy enough to do that,” he said. “Round ‘em up, confiscate their possessions, use ‘em as forced labour, sure. But not kill everybody. I mean they wouldn’t have time. There’s a war on.”

  “I find it hard to believe too,” said Maeltzer. “The Germans aren’t stupid. Far from it. Yet we keep hearing these stories. And the top Nazis, t
he ones who live in this Wagnerian dream world, have been talking for years about a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem.”

  “I thought they wanted to ship them all out to Madagascar or here?”

  “A faction of the Party did,” said Maeltzer. “I was the Palestine correspondent for their newspaper. They particularly liked pieces about the new Super Farming Jew on his kibbutzim breeding sturdy children, hair bleached blond by the sun. No more goggle-eyed, flour faces, squandering their youth on the Torah and growing up to stab Germany in the back and devalue the Mark. Almost Aryan in fact.”

  “Isn’t the kibbutz movement a bit left-wing for the Nazis?”

  “But you forget,” said Maeltzer. “They’re the National Socialist Party.”

  Pickett was pleased to see Maeltzer again. They had first met shortly before the war started during the last months of Palestine’s sad and bloody Arab rebellion. Some British officials were concerned about the activities of the Jewish auxiliaries Wingate had trained and leaked him stuff that should have caused a bigger stir than it did. Maeltzer thought that some of the Arabs were getting what they deserved. Most of the Palestinian Jews did. But he didn’t let it get in the way of his reporting and he confirmed it was true. Some bad things had happened. He respected him for that. “Well, it doesn’t look like any kind of Nazis are interested in Jews for Palestine right now,” said Pickett. “They’ve put their money on the Mufti.”

  “That ingrate! First, with a little help from us, the British defeat him then they give him almost everything he wanted. They pretty well stopped Jewish immigration just when Jews never needed a sanctuary so badly. But he wants it all and he’s popular. And it is not just the Palestinian Arabs who love the Mufti. A lot of the Egyptian officer corps listen to his broadcasts.”

  “That so.”

  “The British are very worried about it. Remember, last year they only just put down that rebellion in Iraq. The Egyptian army is twice as big. Probably more.”

  Pickett filed this away, wondering if there was any chance of getting it past the censor. As for the Mufti of Jerusalem, it had taken Pickett a while to adjust to the idea that the softly spoken Haj Amin el Husseini, descendent of the Prophet and spiritual and political leader of the Palestinian Arabs could no longer be considered one of the good guys. Leastways, not while he was in Berlin hobnobbing with Hitler when he wasn’t visiting the radio station Goebbels had put at his disposal in Athens.

  “All the Arabs are against the British in this war,” said Maeltzer. “The Egyptians want Rommel to win and they’re sure it is going to happen. Last week I saw plaster-of-Paris busts of Mussolini and Hitler on sale in the Cairo souk. They are convinced that the Germans are going to win.. Of course, the British, in their blindness, are still trying to be impartial. As a result both sides hate them. You tell me that the Germans wouldn’t be crazy enough to start killing all the Jews in the middle of a war. You should hear what the British are doing to the Jews in the middle of a war and they’re losing it!”

  Considering how angry he was Maeltzer told Pickett what had happened at the Rafah checkpoint with commendable brevity.

  “It’s a damn good story,” said Pickett when he had finished. “But we’d never get it past the censor. Not at the moment. Apart from anything else it would be the first real indication that the British are already beginning to evacuate Cairo.”

  “I know,” said Maeltzer. “It is one of those stories that may have to wait for the history books.”

  “Not if I can help it,” said Pickett. “The British will have to learn that they can’t have Sherman tanks and a muzzled American press. Besides, when the dust has settled on this latest flap they’ll probably want it to get out, show the Arabs, Nazi pogroms or not, they’re still enforcing the quota.”

  “My friend, by the time the dust has settled on this you could be reporting the fall of Jerusalem,” said Maeltzer, sipping his beer.

  “Defeatist talk gentlemen.” The tone was bantering, the smile lopsided, engaging.

  Pickett turned and found himself looking up at the South African major who had got to his feet. Pickett was just under six feet and this man had a good four inches over him and was broad with it.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Rude of me to interrupt but I couldn’t help overhearing what you were saying. My name is De Wet, Maurice De Wet.” He held out his hand and Pickett shook it and introduced himself. Then Maeltzer did the same.

  He was in his early forties Pickett guessed, with the kind of regular good looks that were not especially memorable: straight nose. a touch of grey about the sides of his short blonde hair, blue-grey eyes and the kind of clipped moustache favoured by the less extrovert regiments.

  “I must admit,” he said. “Things don’t look too good at the moment do they? I take it you’re both newspapermen?”

  “That’s right,” said Pickett.

  “De Wet,” mused Maeltzer aloud, pronouncing the ‘W’ as a ‘V’ in the same German-Dutch manner as the South African had. “Any relation to Christian?”

  For a moment Pickett thought the South African looked as nonplussed as he was, then his face lit up. “Distant and very dilute,” he said. “My mother was born in England. But my Afrikaner side makes me kin of Christian De Wet.”

  “A great man,” said Maeltzer. He meant every word of it. He also wanted to make up for anything De Wet may have overheard him say earlier about some of the Boers being unwilling to fight. “General Christian De Wet,” he explained to Pickett, “was probably the greatest commander of guerrilla cavalry who ever lived.”

  “That so,” said Pickett who was thinking one day he might acquaint his stringer with the services Mosby and Forrest had rendered the Confederacy.

  “Unfortunately, he was on the wrong side,” said Maurice De Wet. “By which I mean the losing side.”

  "It’s often a good man’s fault,’ observed Pickett.

  “He ran circles around Kitchener,” said Maeltzer, who had no idea what the American was talking about but was pleased to get back to his favourite war. “And if he’d been at Tobruk he’d have done the same to Rommel.”

  “I doubt it. He would never have allowed himself to be pushed into that sort of devil’s cauldron in the first place,” De Wet pointed out.

  “That’s true, “ said Maeltzer. “He liked movement and the English left their flanks exposed - just like now.”

  “But my relative might not have been as good with tanks as he was with horses though I suppose they both have fuel problems.”

  Pickett noticed that De Wet had hardly a trace of the South African accent he had sometimes found so impenetrable when he went out with one of their reconnaissance units in their Marmon Herrington armoured cars. He could tell his English wasn’t quite English but without the South African shoulder flashes he would have been hard to place. “Are you stationed in Jerusalem?” the reporter asked him.

  De Wet laughed. “No such luck,” he said. “I’m recovering from a bout of jaundice I managed to pick up helping to run a transit camp in Alexandria.”

  Picket told him about his malaria and, the convalescent bond established, asked what he would like to drink. “I’m on soda water,” said De Wet. “Doctor’s orders.” Then: “What the hell, I’m practically cured. I’ll have a beer.” The American ordered two Eagles and an arak and water for Maeltzer who heavily diluted it.

  As the drinks were delivered the band indicated they were about to start up by blowing into the microphones they had erected. Maeltzer thought the singer in the figure hugging green dress, who was sipping something from a small glass, looked like a nervous Mitzi if you could imagine a nervous Mitzi. Then, to his astonishment, he realised it was Mitzi.

  It was the first time Maeltzer had seen her out of uniform. As he watched one of the Palestine policeman walked over to her, took the glass away, and said something to her, which caused her to laugh before he returned to the table he occupied with his friends.

  “If she can sing as well as sh
e can wear that dress this ought to be good,” said Pickett.

  It turned out that she could, most of the time anyway, and she never slipped so badly that the band couldn’t cover up for here. If Over the Rainbow was a bit too breathy she could do a good Dietrich and the lights were dimmed for her smoochy Allein in Einer Grossen Stadt and Wo Ist Der Mann.

  The Europa was filling up with British and locals, the latter Jews and a few mostly Christian Arabs of the mercantile class.. The crush around the bar was becoming uncomfortable and after they got their next round the three of them, for Maeltzer insisted that De Wet join them, moved to a recently vacated table. The air was blue with cigarette smoke and most of those who had arrived in jackets were now draping them over the backs of chairs and loosening their ties, one of the exceptions being Maeltzer who would have felt quite naked and in any case had got an Egyptian tailor to run him up a good light weight linen suit. Those men who had been dancing could feel their shirts sticking to their backs while their partners, several of them Palestinian Jewish nurses, had retired to the ladies to extract the pocket hankies they wedged between their breasts and dab their glowing parts from the small bottles of scent they carried in their handbags.

  Once they had settled at their table De Wet asked them a bit about their work and said he couldn’t help overhearing what Maeltzer had been saying about the trouble Jews who wanted to leave Cairo ahead of Rommel were having at the border. “Even people who are working for us if I understood you right?”

  Maeltzer nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I translate captured documents. They need German speakers.” This was not a full job description but about as much as Maeltzer was prepared to admit.

  “Is it interesting? Somebody once showed me part of a Boche training manual they’d found in a tank. It turned out to be guidance for personal hygiene, how to prevent foot and crotch rot, that sort of thing.”