After the Cabaret

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘And so to Sally. I think she was what they called a stay-behind. There was a secret service organisation, called Department D, as it had been since the days of the Fenians at the end of the last century. Even before the war began they started persuading people to stay behind in Europe – most important, of course, were those prepared to remain in Germany. I think Pym, who was well placed in intelligence at the time and who had known Sally in Berlin, was responsible for persuading her to stay in Germany. And report back. I think Theo Fitzpatrick, who was also up to his neck in the secret world, was in it too. I think Pym was “running” Sally, as they put it. Imagine how furious he must have felt when she turned up in London with Claudia and Simon’s baby instead of staying where she was sending information. The fact that remaining in Germany put her in a position of extreme danger wasn’t likely to worry Pym. That’s what I guess. It’s not what I know.

  ‘Anyway, Julia von Torgau knocked on Sally’s door one day and offered her money and the right papers to leave with the baby. Julia and Claudia knew that this was the last possible moment to get to safety. If Sally could go to France, which was still fighting, then she would be all right on her British passport, Julia thought. No one anticipated then how quickly the French Army would collapse.

  ‘And Sally agreed. She told me that in Germany she’d been getting more and more frightened. Julia’s offer came at the right moment for her. Claudia, poor woman, brought the baby one night and Sally left with Gisela.

  ‘As I say, Pym must have been furious when she turned up. He was a man who played chess using people as the pieces on the board. Sally’s arrival must have seemed as if a rook had got up and strolled off.

  ‘Sally claimed that Gisela was hers and Pym at first believed her but then he found out who Gisela’s parents were. He had another contact, a man in the same building in Berlin where Sally had lived. This man had seen a woman arrive with a baby the night Sally left. That led Pym to guess the baby wasn’t Sally’s but he would never have found out who the mother was if Claudia hadn’t broken down and prevailed on Pym’s contact to get a message to Sally to discover if she and the baby had arrived safely. Of course, the message fell into Pym’s hands.

  ‘He was delighted. Now he had a woman at the Kummersdorf research institute, right at the heart of the experimental work on rockets. And he had the woman’s child in Britain. So he could threaten Claudia with taking her baby from Sally if she did not send information through his contact. And he had Sally where he wanted her by telling her that if she put a foot wrong he would turn Claudia in. Whether he would or would not have done so, that is not the kind of bluff you call.

  ‘Blackmail – double blackmail – of two women and a helpless child. Pym must have thought his lucky day had come. And all the time he could feed a percentage of his information to the British Government and quite a lot to the Soviets, securing his position in both places.

  ‘He must have been happier still when he heard of von Torgau’s appointment to the German general staff in Paris. Here was the chance for more blackmail. Sally had to go to von Torgau because Pym threatened that if she didn’t he’d betray Claudia to the Germans. Von Torgau, Pym thought, would have to co-operate with Sally, to some extent, because if even a portion of the story between them came out he would have been ruined as a serving officer. All this was a triumph for Pym, there behind the scenes, pulling all the strings. What he didn’t know was that it had been Julia von Torgau who’d organised the removal of the baby. He was furious when he found out.

  ‘Meanwhile, poor Claudia was providing information on all the work at Kummersdorf and of the internal politics behind it, the decisions, the funding and so forth, and also the location of the rocket launching station they had built on the Baltic coast. All this she did for three years. I don’t know how she bore it. Then the entire project fell under the control of the SS and something went wrong. I don’t know what it was, but Claudia was caught, tortured and thrown into Dachau.’

  Bruno sighed and was silent for several minutes. Then he poured himself another brandy, sat down and spoke on.

  ‘You are amazed, aren’t you? But there’s more. Pym wanted Claudia to go to Russia – that was the point of the rescue from the camp. She was going to be a sort of present from Pym to the Soviet Union. She’d been working under von Braun for several years (and the Americans already had him, for their rocket programme).

  ‘The race was on between the Soviets and the Americans. Pym had to help the Soviets – yes? They needed the rocket launchers to launch atomic weapons, just like the Americans. They wanted to get into space too. This was a race to control the world. And Claudia had been in Dachau for only a year. She could still be useful. She knew the direction of the research, the problems, some of the solutions – oh, yes. She could still be useful in Russia. Pym was playing for high stakes, eh, Greg? Now you see what kind of a man you spoke to in Moscow. Who Pym is. Why, old as he is, people are still frightened of him.’

  ‘But before Pym made his next move Claudia and Sally went to see Gisela. Sally said the visit started badly.

  Chapter 58

  ‘Sally and Claudia arrived, very tired from the journey, and walked up the drive to the front of Glebe House to find a large furniture van parked in front. The Cunninghams were moving in.

  ‘Betty was addressing one of the removal men in harsh tones as he brought a box from the van. “For God’s sake, be careful what you’re doing, man.” Gideon Cunningham was outside with Harry Jackson-Bowles, while the Cunninghams’ two boys, Neville and Christopher, were chasing Gisela’s cat across the lawn. It climbed an ornamental peach-tree, which they shook to and fro to dislodge the animal.

  ‘At that point Gisela was holding Miss Trotter’s hand at the front door near Gideon and Harry, with an expression of intense confusion on her face.

  ‘Then up the drive came the two tired and shabby women – Sally and Claudia. By agreement Miss Trotter had told Gisela only that Sally was coming with another lady and the child had enquired no further, like the well brought-up child she was. But she had plainly suspected all along that the other woman might be her mother. After all, Sally had said they were looking for her. Therefore, the moment she spotted the pair she broke free of Miss Trotter and rushed to Sally and Claudia. Claudia looked pitifully down at her daughter’s bright little face and tears ran down her checks as she knelt, painfully, to be closer to the child. Gisela looked into that tear-stained, wasted face, shocked and half fearful. Claudia was not the happy, pretty mother a young child might have imagined. Yet, I suppose, when she looked into those eyes she saw a kind of love she hadn’t known before, for she smiled at the woman, kneeling there, and said, ‘Are you my mother? Did Sally find you?’ And Claudia just nodded and they embraced each other.

  ‘Betty came straight up. She just said, “If you’re staying, I hope you’ve brought your ration books.” Can you imagine it? She must have been keen to get rid of Gisela, who would have spoiled the image she was trying to present. She didn’t offer them a cup of tea, even. They only stayed an hour or so, and when they left, Miss Trotter went with them, saying that now Gisela had her mother back she would no longer be necessary. This didn’t please Betty.

  ‘Anyway, Sally, Claudia and Gisela, with the cat in a sack, got back to the railway station in the furniture van, by now in good spirits. Incidentally the arrangement at Glebe House didn’t last long,’ Bruno said. ‘Harry Jackson-Bowles couldn’t stand his home being taken over and full of Gideon’s political friends, and Betty was cultivating the county people, who rather looked down on him. He sold Glebe House and bought a small place in the village. Miss Trotter returned as housekeeper and they spent the rest of his life together. They went abroad a lot.’ Bruno observed, ‘He was a nice man. When he died he left Miss Trotter all his money. Betty wanted to challenge the will, but Sally wouldn’t. In the end Gideon Cunningham was not even elected. There was an enormous Labour Party victory that year and the Cunninghams, in disgust, emigrated to South
Africa. Betty and Sally never met again.

  ‘Anyway, for the time being Gisela, Claudia and Sally all lived together in Sally’s house. There was still no news of Simon. I don’t think there ever was.

  ‘Then one day – and here comes Pym again, like a stage villain – Sally came back unexpectedly to her house. The war against Japan was not over so she was still at the munitions works. But that day the power had failed. She found Claudia in tears in her room, trying to pack. It was just as well that Sally turned up when she did – a fluke – for in another half-hour Claudia and Gisela would have left the house.

  ‘Of course, Sally wanted to know what was going on. Then, to her enormous surprise, Pym emerged, saying, “Claudia and the child are going to the Soviet Union. All the papers are ready.”

  ‘There was, of course, a problem with Claudia. All countries were reluctant to take in sudden influxes of displaced persons. The war in Europe had just ended and millions were in transit, trying to get back to places that no longer existed, trying to find somewhere to live. There were procedures, health checks, investigations. Claudia had been through none of these. She had been abducted from under the nose of the American Army and smuggled into Britain.

  ‘They were starting to sort it out – it would all have worked in the end, but Claudia’s nerves were out of order. She had Gisela to worry about and was terrified that once again they would be separated. Imagine what she’d been through. So when Pym came along, with all the right papers, a job fixed for Claudia in Leningrad and many threats about how she would become a stateless person if she stayed in Britain, that she and her child would be flung back into the European tide of refugees, she believed him. Pym had fixed it with the Soviets. Claudia was going east.

  ‘What a row there was! Sally knew that what he was doing was wrong. All right, politically she sided with the Soviets, but instinctively she knew it was wrong for Pym to use Claudia, in the state she was in – and Gisela, of course – as pawns in his game.

  ‘Sally got a message to Ricardo and Antonia and they arrived. As anarchists they had no love for the Soviets, who had betrayed them in the Spanish Civil War. The row raged round the house, Claudia in tears, saying first one thing, then another, Pym threatening her, Gisela bewildered and frightened.

  ‘Sally phoned me at the hospital. Thinking the easiest thing to do was remove Claudia and Gisela from the house, at least until the plane left, she asked me to get hold of Briggs’s car. It was an emergency, she said. Well, I couldn’t get the car because Briggs had taken it to work. I didn’t know what was happening so I rang Briggs and said there was a crisis at Sally’s and he went round quickly. He didn’t know what Pym was up to and was surprised – horrified, I think, though he tried to hide it – when he found out what was happening

  ‘I arrived a bit later. Claudia was saying that no, she would not go to the Soviet Union, Pym was yelling at her that if she didn’t she’d be a stateless person, back in a camp with Gisela, did she want that? Gisela was huddled in the corner with her precious cat wrapped in a blanket and struggling to escape.

  ‘Now, theoretically Briggs ought to have been in favour of sending Claudia to the Soviet Union. He argued, weakly though, that she should go. The situation was shaping up for a scandal – Sally was ringing Winston Churchill, her old war-time supporter, out of office now but still powerful. And I think, to do him justice, Briggs disliked the whole thing – a woman in a nervous breakdown, a little child and Pym.

  ‘The doorbell rang and Sally ran for it, shouting to Pym, “That’s someone from Winston Churchill’s office—” But it wasn’t. She came back into the room, radiant, arm in arm with Eugene, in uniform and still carrying his kit-bag.

  ‘Explanations were made – shouted – and Eugene went over to Claudia. He said, “Wait. Don’t do anything now. It’s too soon.” That seemed to calm her.

  ‘Pym yelled into her face, “So you want to be a displaced person, without a nationality, a passport? You want your child to grow up in a camp?” He turned to Briggs, “You tell her.”

  ‘Eugene said to Briggs, “Are you going to let Pym bully this woman into going to Russia where we don’t know what will happen to her?”

  ‘“She shouldn’t go to America to assist their war effort,” he managed to bring out.

  ‘“Hell, Briggs, she doesn’t have to go anywhere,” Eugene told him.

  ‘“I’m surprised you’re backing a country where there’s no justice for your race,” argued Pym.

  ‘“I’m surprised to see you putting pressure on this woman to make decisions she’s in no state to make. I know where she was a couple of months ago,” Eugene retorted.

  ‘Pym, of course, guessed that after Sally’s phone call to Churchill back-up would arrive so he quickly put his hand into Briggs’s pocket, where he knew he always kept his car keys, and pulled them out.

  ‘Then he picked up Claudia’s suitcase, put it under his arm, went over to Gisela and grabbed her round the waist. Gisela screamed at being held and because Pym’s sudden move had startled her into dropping the blanket containing the struggling cat. Her scream was overwhelmed by Claudia’s. Claudia howled and leaped forward. She could not endure the sight of anyone about to lead her child away.

  ‘I was outraged. Eugene looked at me and our eyes found Ricardo’s. We all three moved forward in a group. Eugene grabbed Pym, who struggled a bit then gave up. Gisela ran back to her mother, who clutched her, sobbing. We bundled Pym along the passageway and out of the house.

  ‘And that was how Claudia missed the plane to Moscow. They went to Israel, eventually.’ Bruno sighed. ‘So that was Pym. What a devil that man was – is.’

  He continued, ‘Sally and Eugene married, you know. That was why you could find no records of her. She had changed her name again. I’m sorry, dear boy. There were reasons why I couldn’t tell you. But now you know everything and my story’s over.

  ‘I’m tired now,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get Fiona to take these tapes to your flat.’

  Chapter 59

  Greg drove fast back to London. Around him were silent, peaceful fields, farms, small villages with smoking chimneys, all places, he guessed where people – other people – were enjoying Christmas. While he himself was on the near-empty motorway, furious and humiliated. An innocent academic, with nothing more on his record than a few speeding tickets and a drunk-driving charge from his student days, under a deportation order. The might of the law of this strange little worn-out country had descended on his head. It didn’t seem credible. It was a joke – if he hadn’t been so angry he’d have laughed. Suppose he didn’t comply and just stuck around until he’d finished his work. Would they really arrest and deport him? Would they risk the international scandal, boosted by the return of Pym, that such an action would create?

  What wasn’t so funny was Katherine’s part in all this. How could she have sided with her uncle, with Sir Peveril Jones, with the whole, stinking rotten lot of them, against him? Just for a bit of promotion, if it came, and to keep their dirty names clean. And he’d believed in her. What a fool.

  In this mood he entered Everton Gardens and took the narrow stairs up to his flat.

  There was a package in a Jiffy-bag on the doormat outside. Bruno had been as good as his word. Thanks, Bruno, he thought, and here’s hoping the contents will be good enough to make up for all this.

  And he remembered, as he threw his travel bag into the clammy bedroom, that Sir Peveril had told him Sally was alive and that Bruno knew where she was.

  Shivering, he lit the gas fire, and turned on the recorder. For the next hour and a half Bruno’s voice filled the small room. When the tape ended Greg stood up, went to the window and stared out, sightlessly, over the bare trees of the square opposite. Then he hit his head, walked round the room, poured a whisky, sat down, stood up and shook his head. So that was it then, the whole story. What a book it would make, he thought. What a book! He was suddenly exhilarated. So what if he was under a deportation order? So
what if he’d been betrayed by his girlfriend? For all he knew the SAS, under the instructions of one of Sir Peveril’s minions, was about to raid the building, grab him, drive him to the Essex marshes and execute him. And he didn’t care now. He felt weak. Then he felt strong – he felt hungry. It was almost five and all he’d had since morning was a slice of toast and a glass of whisky. He needed to eat and he needed to see Bruno. There was no food in the flat. He’d go out, try to get something at a 7–Eleven, then go straight to Bruno’s. He called and left a message on his answering machine.

  Then he went to the bedroom to change out of the suit he’d put on for the drinks party that morning and noticed a page hanging from his fax machine. He read it. The Atlanta lawyers representing Mr Courtney Hamilton, the nephew of Mr Eugene Hamilton, about whom Mr Phillips had enquired, had been instructed to inform Mr Phillips that Mr Eugene Hamilton had died in London three years earlier. Mr Hamilton, wrote the lawyers, had preferred to live in Britain with his family and in 1950 in order to secure the privacy he desired he had handed over responsibility for dealings connected with his artistic work to his brother in the United States. Mr Hamilton’s brother had now died, so this responsibility had been assumed by his son, Mr Courtney Hamilton.

  The letter went on. On receipt of Mr Phillips’s enquiry Mr Courtney Hamilton had, as a matter of courtesy, contacted his uncle’s widow and to his surprise this lady, who had up to that time chosen to maintain a distance from anything connected with her late husband’s work, had stated that she would be prepared to meet Mr Phillips. Mrs Sarah Hamilton’s address in London was given below. A copy of this letter would follow by post.