Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

  “Yes, it’s a fascinating idea, Luis,” Freddy Garcia said, “and we all love it madly, but it’s not convoys, is it?”

  “Boring bloody convoys,” Luis grumbled. “All I write about is convoys. Week after week, convoys, convoys, convoys.”

  “That’s in the nature of things, Luis. Convoys never stop. They’re always crossing the Atlantic”

  Julie said, “And you never stop eating the food they bring.”

  Luis scribbled furiously and deliberately broke the point of his pencil. “Look at that,” he accused. “Cheap and nasty. How can a chap write with such rubbish?” He flung the pencil in the fire.

  “You’re childish,” she said.

  He gave her a sideways look that was half-rogueish, half-loutish. “Let’s go to bed,” he said. “I’ll show you whether I’m childish or not.”

  “We just got out of bed.” It was mid-morning.

  “And was I childish last night?”

  “Shut up, Luis.”

  “What’s the matter? Embarrassed? I thought all you modern Americans were frank and free about sex.”

  “In your case there’s not a hell of a lot to say, is there? In and out, in and out.”

  “Just like the convoys,” Freddy said, and wished he hadn’t: at that moment, Luis’s slim, olive face was frozen with anger at Julie. Freddy hurried to distract him.

  “If you want to know what I honestly think, Luis, I think your Petrified Bog is too good an idea for this report. You’ve already given the Abwehr your splendid Very Low Level Extreme Delayed Opening Parachute and they’re always fascinated by secret new equipment, aren’t they? And Hitler … Didn’t you tell me that Hitler is obsessed with paratroops?” Luis nodded. “Why is that, d’you think?”

  “Oh … he likes to strike from the sky, it satisfies his god-like idea of himself.” Luis wandered over to the curtains and worked the drawstring, opening and shutting, opening and shutting. “And he likes to play with secret weapons, just to prove to his generals how clever he is.”

  “But surely Crete …”

  “Yes, I know. Crete gave me the idea.” By now Luis had forgotten about Julie. “Hitler sent his paratroopers to capture Crete and the British shot half of them dead while they were floating down.”

  “So they did. Perfect targets. And you thought—”

  “I thought … Well, I’ll tell you exactly what happened, Freddy. I remembered a movie I saw where one guy is going to throw another guy off a skyscraper, and the first guy says to the second guy, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only the last six inches that hurts.’”

  Freddy laughed. “Jolly good. Quite true, too.”

  “And I thought, why not invent a parachute that opens at the bottom of the jump instead of the top? Say, two hundred feet from the ground?”

  “And you’ve done it,” Freddy said. “Brilliant! I’m sure Jerry will be tickled pink, and that’s exactly why it would be a mistake to put your Petrified Bog in the same report. We mustn’t spoil the Abwehr, must we?”

  Luis said nothing. He was looking in a mirror and trying to waggle his ears. The harder he tried, the more his eyebrows fluttered. It was very discouraging.

  “Incidentally, I see you’ve made another reference to the delegation from Buranda,” Freddy said. “Where exactly is Buranda?”

  “On the Peruvian border. Very rich in manganese.”

  “Ah. Let’s add that, shall we?” Freddy wrote it in the margin. “Nice touch,” he said, “but it’s still not convoys, is it?”

  Luis slumped in an armchair. He was looking toward Julie but his eyes were not focused on her and he never blinked, so that he almost seemed blind. She knew this expression. Luis was dreaming again. After a while he hooked both legs over one arm of the chair. Freddy was working at his desk; the only sounds were the occasional crisp shuffle of paper, and the flicker of the fire, and the patter of rain on glass. Luis slowly raised his legs again until they pointed up and his head and shoulders hung down. Finally he blinked. “This position encourages the flow of blood to the brain,” he remarked.

  “A long and lonely expedition,” she said. “Pack sandwiches.”

  Luis slid further down and let his head rest on the floor. “I see a special convoy,” he said.

  Freddy waited. “What’s special about it?” he asked.

  “It’s upside-down,” Julie said.

  Freddy frowned at her, but Luis said: “Hey! I like that! Make a note of that, it’s better than what I had in mind.” He relaxed his legs and tumbled gracefully on to the carpet, head-first. “An upside-down convoy. See? You put the ships under the water! Isn’t that a terrific idea?”

  “No,” Freddy said. “Tell me what you thought of first.”

  Luis crawled over to Julie and rested against her legs. “Eldorado hears about a special convoy going to India. Much better target, right? For weeks and weeks we’ve been trying to sell the Abwehr a lot of phony routes and sailing dates for transatlantic convoys. I am fed up with all that. The Abwehr is fed up with it. It’s boring. Now Eldorado discovers there will soon be a special convoy sailing south, much closer to France, much easier for the U-boats to find. So the U-boats leave the transatlantic convoys! They go and lie in wait for … for … for a very special convoy with a very very special passenger.” Utterly delighted by his own invention, Luis hid his face in Julie’s skirt.

  “Oh, yes?” Freddy said. “Who?”

  “King George the Sixth,” Luis said, muffled but happy.

  “Why is the King of England going to India?” Julie asked.

  Luis emerged. “He’s Emperor of India. He can do what he likes.”

  “Not in wartime,” Freddy said.

  “Prince of Wales, then.”

  “There isn’t one. The King has no sons.”

  Luis thought about it. “In that case I shall send the Prime Minister,” he said. “And you can’t stop me.” He got up and left the room and went to the library and wrote until lunch. When he came out he handed the draft Eldorado report to Freddy and said: “If you don’t let me out of this dump I shall never write another word. How can I write about a country I never see?”

  “I’ve got a meeting with the Director this afternoon,” Freddy said. “I’ll raise the matter then, I promise.”

  The Director was a cheerful and energetic Scots widower aged fifty. He looked like the deputy headmaster of a prosperous boys’ school: lean, tweed-suited and easily forgettable. His wife Peggy had died, suddenly and inexplicably, a year before Britain went to war. His grief had soured to bitterness and even rage: there were times when he had found himself flinging the smaller bits of furniture around their silent house. Then he had a dream. He rarely dreamed. This was a powerful and dramatic dream, in which Peggy flew down the chimney of his childhood nursery and caught him refusing to get out of his bed because his porridge was cold. She said nothing; simply sat at the foot of the bed and looked at him. She was just as she had been when they first met. Soon he couldn’t tolerate her look any longer and he woke up. It was twenty to four. He couldn’t stay where he was but he felt utterly exhausted. It’s only twenty to four, he complained to himself. It’s too early to grow up. That didn’t seem right. He got up, had a bath, made some breakfast. It marked the beginning of the end of his bitterness and rage. When war came along and recruited him out of the publishing industry into the intelligence industry, he welcomed the work. It was something fresh and interesting to tell Peggy when he got home to the flat in the evening. Nobody else in the business could talk to his wife or his girlfriend about his job, and many couples were split by the strain of that silence, but the Director chatted endlessly—if silently—to Peggy. Often, when he had finished telling her about some new problem, he saw it (and sometimes even the answer) much more clearly than when he had begun. The dull, pragmatic side of him said that he was talking to a shadow, a memory. The funny side said: So what? I deal in ghosts all day long. What’s wrong with adding another? The Director was a balanced man.

&nbs
p; When Freddy Garcia told him that Eldorado wanted to be allowed to leave Rackham Towers, the Director said, “Well, he can’t. It’s out of the question. And if he tries to escape, you have my permission to shoot him. More than permission: orders.”

  “This is the same Eldorado whose network is going great guns, is it, sir?” Freddy asked.

  “The very same. The man is a marvel. And now you want to know why he can’t be trusted on his own.”

  “Um … yes.”

  “It’s because he knows, or thinks he knows, that the Double-Cross System runs every German agent in Britain.”

  This was news to Freddy. “Does it really?” he asked. “I knew we had a lot of them in the bag, and I assumed we’d turned a high percentage, but I never imagined we might be running the lot.”

  “And you needn’t exercise yourself over it now,” the Director said. “It doesn’t matter, not to you anyway. The point is, young Eldorado thinks what he thinks. Why? Because when he was in Lisbon, someone told him so.”

  “Very ill-advised,” Freddy said.

  “Well, to be fair, which is a habit I try to avoid, I suppose they reckoned the Eldorado Network would soon be wound up. Obviously the Abwehr wouldn’t trust it after they got cheated blind over the North African invasion, so it was only a short-term investment. As it happened the Abwehr did go on trusting it. And in all the consequent agonizing reappraisals, what with hustling Eldorado off to England and reshuffling our own men in Lisbon, nobody thought to tell me that Eldorado knows too much for anybody’s good, his or ours, until last night, when the relevant file reached me. Small bombshell, I can tell you.”

  A secretary came in with coffee and biscuits.

  “I was a Boy Scout,” the Director said, “back in the fourteenth century, and one of the things we were taught when pitching camp was to imagine how it would look in the worst possible weather. Well, we’ve pitched our camp. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “Eldorado escapes, goes back to Spain, spills the beans to the Abwehr, we lose everything.”

  The Director sipped his coffee.

  “I can do worse than that,” he said. “What if Eldorado gets nobbled by a passing Abwehr agent in this country, tells him everything and we don’t know he’s done it. We continue to operate the Double-Cross System but now the Abwehr sees right through it. In fact they read it backward and work out all our deception plans.”

  “Yes, that’s worse than nothing,” Freddy said. “Far worse.”

  “Oh, it’s unthinkable,” the Director told him. “It must be made absolutely and utterly impossible.”

  “What d’you want me to do, sir?”

  “I’ve no idea, Freddy. None.”

  “We could bung Luis and Julie inside the Tower of London, sir.”

  “We could, but we can’t. I need Eldorado. He’s indispensable.”

  “We can’t keep him buttoned up at Rackham Towers, sir. He’ll go potty. Equally obviously, we daren’t let him out. I mean, suppose he takes it into his head to do a bunk, and he vanishes. We shan’t know whether he’s done us any damage or not.”

  The Director nodded.

  “Golly,” Freddy said.

  “Golly indeed,” the Director said. “And I need a solution by this afternoon, if you would be so kind.”

  Much of Madrid had taken a beating during the Civil War and the damage was still there to be seen, especially in the poor areas: gutted houses, potholes, filthy streets, rusted sheets of corrugated iron that flapped and throbbed in the wind. It was wretched, and the weather was wretchedly cold, so Laszlo Martini had dressed suitably in calf-length leather boots, aviator’s fleece-lined jacket and astrakhan hat, plus a white silk scarf to protect his throat.

  His mission was to make his way across Madrid, noting what he saw at a dozen scattered points, and to report. As the area was unknown to him he had bought a street map. Even so, the twisting course was hard to follow and half the stupid street signs were missing. He was standing in the middle of an especially dreary, empty street, studying his map, when a man in a black raincoat came out of nowhere and said in English: “Identity card, please.”

  Martini stared. This was nobody he knew from the German embassy. He said, “Identity card?”

  The man stared back. Martini tried to fold up his map. The wind hampered him and he cursed. At least he remembered to curse in English. “Damn, damn,” he said. The map tore and he ended up folding it badly.

  “Anything wrong?” the man said.

  “Bloody weather.” Martini grinned, and glanced to see if the man showed any sympathy, while he stuffed the map in a pocket with one hand and searched for his identity card with the other.

  The man took his time examining the card. He chewed his lip, he briefly creased his brow, he sniffed once, compared the photograph with the real face, sniffed again. Martini watched, and wondered what it all meant. The man returned the card. “Where were you born?” he asked.

  “Birmingham,” Martini said.

  “Ah.” The man nearly smiled; certainly his face lightened. “A Scouse, eh?”

  Martini nodded. Now the man did smile, and Martini smiled back. Why not? “Mind how you go,” the man said.

  In the hills north of Madrid the weather was worse. The wind went hunting down the valleys, driving thin flurries of snow before it. Nothing else moved. The streams were frozen and the rocks were black with ice. There was absolutely nothing up there to interest anyone but a suicidal geologist.

  Otto Krafft drove an embassy Mercedes deep into the hills until he found a place to park. Stephanie Schmidt was sitting beside him, stoutly shod and warmly dressed. They had not spoken since they set out. Now he said, “You have the message?” She nodded. He said, “Carry on, then. Transmit as much as you can in the space of ten minutes.” She took a leather suitcase from under her feet and got out.

  At first the climbing was easy. The wind in her face was refreshing and the slope was nothing to worry a fit young woman. Still, before she had gone fifty yards, Otto noticed how the burden of the suitcase made her lopsided. He was not surprised; it weighed forty-five pounds. Then she reached a steeper gradient, studded with outcrops, and soon she was struggling. Struggling to keep her feet, and struggling to keep the suitcase from whacking against a rock.

  The car looked like a toy when Stephanie Schmidt stopped beside a flat slab, halfway up the slope. She had been determined to reach the top because she knew transmission would be better at height, but the hill was far worse ahead and her lungs were fighting for air like a couple of small wild animals and there was a widening pain around her heart. Also her right arm was one long ache. She placed the suitcase very carefully and peeled her fingers off the handle. Already the chill of the wind was working through her clothes; she knew she had to start transmitting soon, before the cold made her shiver; but she must get her breath back first.

  She opened the suitcase, switched on the transmitter, made all the checks. It was encouraging to see the little lights glow and to hear the soft buzz in her headphones. Good. Time to call up base.

  She made five attempts before she got an acknowledgment. By now the cold was attacking from all quarters, numbing her legs on the rock and bringing tears as the wind whipped her eyes. She slipped the message under the clips and began sending. Her wrist felt rusted and her fingers were stiff and clumsy. The message looked enormously long. She tapped and tapped and tapped. The wind rattled the message-sheet, blurring the words. Tiny pockets of snow gathered inside the suitcase.

  “Bang!” Otto Krafft said. “You’re dead.” He was sitting on a rock, higher up the hill. Stephanie Schmidt was so startled that she stuttered the key and made a nonsense of that transmission. “Sign off now,” he said. “Switch off. Pack up.”

  He carried the suitcase back down to the car. There was a flask of hot coffee for her. They said nothing on the way back to the city. She did not dare look at his face so she glanced often at his hands on the wheel—the manliest hands in the world—and w
orried because she had not reached the top. Why had he said Bang! You’re dead?

  No coffee for Ferenc Tekeli. He sat on a bench by a tramstop outside a factory in a part of Madrid the tourists never saw, and he worked his muscles, clenching and squeezing and pressing, to keep some of the cold at bay. The discomfort didn’t much bother him—he had suffered worse, and longer, in jail—and anyway he was well wrapped up in an ex-army greatcoat, so patched and dirty that its original color was lost. The trams came and went, screeching and sparking on the battered track. Tekeli had been sitting for an hour and his rump was numb, but if needed he could sit for another hour, or two. Jail taught patience.

  From time to time people came and sat until their tram arrived. Few spoke.

  The man Tekeli had been waiting for looked just like the others: stained overalls, scuffed boots, needed a shave. The difference was that when he sat he said in English: “More bloody snow on the way.”

  Tekeli scratched his forehead and yawned. “Bloody weather,” he said. “Freeze your balls off.”

  They sat hunched, facing the road, not seeing each other, while several trams went by.

  “Been waiting long?” the man asked.

  “Good bit,” Tekeli said.

  Another pause, before the man gave a snuffling chuckle and said, “Makes you laugh, doesn’t it? Spend all day making something that flies at four hundred miles an hour and then you have to hang about for a sodding tram.”

  Tekeli chuckled too and said, “What is it, a new fighter?”

  “Well, it’s not a lousy tank.”

  “Four hundred …” Tekeli sniffed. “Doesn’t seem possible, does it? Not on one engine. I bet it’s got two engines.”

  “Dunno. Not my job.”

  “Oh.” Tekeli rested his elbows on his knees, and waited. Nothing came. “Hasn’t it flown yet, then?”

  The man leaned away and blew his nose through his fingers.

  “What I don’t get,” Tekeli said, “is how do they know it can do four hundred if it hasn’t flown yet?”