Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

  “Next time …” Luis began, and jumped at the crack-boom of an explosion that blew out the window of a compartment and sent red and yellow flames chasing into the gray of the day. The bang echoed three times around the station until it seemed to have flattened all other noise. Then the normal noises came slowly to life again. The Tannoy shouted. Whistles were blown. The clang of an ambulance bell began to hammer out. Men in uniform came surging down the platform. Most were military police. Laszlo saw the red caps and the white belts and did not stop to think. He flung open a door and leaped into the train and ran.

  “Smashing!” Freddy said. “Did you see Luis’s face? And Julie too … That’ll give them something to think about.”

  “I think they’re thinking about making a party of it, sir,” Gardener said. “Our pair is going off with their pair.”

  “Crikey. So they are.” Freddy’s satisfaction suddenly faded. “I hadn’t planned on that.”

  “They won’t get far, sir. Our security people will scoop them up. It’s all part of Bamboozle.”

  “Forget Bamboozle. I want those Abwehr agents to send their report to Madrid. And I’d like to know where they’re living, too. Go and tell security to scoop them up and let them all go. Then we’ll follow them.”

  As he left, Gardener said, “Don’t forget one got on the train, sir.”

  “That won’t do him any good. The bally train isn’t going anywhere, is it?”

  Laszlo had had very little sleep in the past two days and his nervous system had taken a beating from the strain of the landing in Ireland, the frustrations of the journey to Dublin, the high excitement of Ferenc’s murder, the anticlimax of hanging about in a rainy Liverpool. So his brain was not working well. If he wanted to hide in the train he should have gone toward the oncoming redcaps, in the hope of jumping out when they had passed. But he ran the other way, through the first open door he saw, ran away from the redcaps, and knew they were behind him, and so had to keep on running. This made no sense: he wasn’t going anywhere, he was just going; he pounded along the corridors and wrenched open doors that led to more corridors. Once he collided with a soldier who had been asleep when the train reached Lime Street and had been woken up by the blast. “Is it an air raid?” the soldier asked. Laszlo cursed him and kicked him and hammered his ribs with his elbow until the man staggered aside, and Laszlo ran on. But the shock had jolted him into realizing that he was running into danger: he was heading for the carriage where the bomb had gone off. So he dragged the pistol from its holster. Impossible to stop and fit the silencer; anyway, who needed silence after a bang like that?

  He smelled the bombed carriage before he reached it: a harsh stink, sucked into his throat and nostrils as he gasped for air. The last door was half-open. He kicked it wide. Three generals turned and stared at him. Behind them stood the RAF chaplain and his lady. From their various attitudes, Laszlo knew they had been examining the bombed-out compartment. The air was steel-gray with hanging smoke. Laszlo saw the compartment and it was not bombed-out at all; except for the shattered window it was scarcely damaged. In the instant that this took to explain itself to him he felt sick with betrayal and then frenzied with a lust for revenge. He shot the nearest general in the chest. The crash was stupendous, deafening. By a fluke the bullet hit a tunic button and punched it deep into the man’s body, smashing open a hole which bled so fast that his khaki tunic was a drenched and spreading red. The impact flung him against the other two officers. One stumbled and fell to his knees. The chaplain shouted and threw his zip-top bag: it struck Laszlo full in the face. The dying general slid to the floor. Now the corridor was blocked. Laszlo could not shoot them all and even if he did they would still be in his way. He heard the pounding clash of boots on the platform: no escape there. For a fraction of a second he wondered about suicide and rejected it. If he had to die it wasn’t going to be in a squalid railway carriage. He dodged back and ran until he found a door that gave on to the empty tracks. He swung it open.

  At once someone began shouting at him. Laszlo saw a railway official standing on the next platform, waving violently, and he jumped. It was only six feet but Laszlo had not fallen six feet since he was a boy and he landed badly, sprawling on his hands and knees on the oily stones and cinders. He was shaken, and shaking. He had dropped the pistol but it could not be far away so he stayed down, searching for it, and the shaking got worse. He could not keep his body still: the very ground seemed to be trembling. Laszlo looked up and saw a train bearing down on him, black and huge, with monstrous white sidewhiskers of steam jetting from the churning wheels. It was in no hurry and this grinding deliberation frightened him more than any speed: the monster was taking its time about killing him because it knew he could not escape. He dropped flat and pressed his face into the greasy rubble and shut his eyes. The trembling developed into a vibrant, shuddering rumble that became a lusty, clanking roar. It passed and faded, and Laszlo dared to look up. He was lying between the two trains. There was ample room. He saw his pistol, crawled toward it and stuffed it in a pocket. Brakes squealed. While the train was drifting to a halt he got up and ran. As he went past the carriage that contained the dead general a door opened and the RAF chaplain aimed a kick at his head, but Laszlo was too short and he ducked under it. Ahead, only thirty or forty yards away, the trains ended. Then he could cut across the tracks, get away, lose himself in the wet anonymous crowds of Liverpool.

  It nearly worked. He could see broad, rain-soaked daylight ahead, widening with every stride, when angry shouts broke out behind him. Why are they shouting? he wondered. Why aren’t they shooting? It made little difference: they would catch him, they must be younger and taller and stronger. He ran on, determined to make them work for their grubby little triumph, and out of the slanting drifts of rain came salvation.

  It was a locomotive—isolated and solitary—reversing cautiously toward the train standing at platform one, ready to hook up and haul it away. Laszlo sprinted hard and then checked as he got a grip of the grab-rails and went up the steps to the cab like a monkey in a double-breasted suit. The fireman was hanging out of the other side, guiding the driver. “Stop!” Laszlo shouted. He was black with the filth of the track.

  “Stop what?” the driver asked, disgruntled.

  Laszlo fired a shot wide of the driver. The bullet ricocheted three times and nicked the fireman’s arm. He yelped and fell out of the cab. The driver slammed the controls. Laszlo stumbled and nearly fell as the brakes bit and the wheels locked solid. “Go!” he bawled, pointing with the gun. “Go, go, go!” The brakes got thrown off, the wheels spun and gripped and the locomotive began to lumber forward. Laszlo glimpsed a face below and brandished his pistol at a military policeman who was trying to climb on board. The man gave up and vanished. “Faster, faster, faster!” Laszlo screamed. The driver did things. They accelerated. There was shouting alongside but they soon left it behind. The driver dragged down a chain and the steam whistle whooped with gusty joy. Laszlo grinned. He seized the chain and blew and blew until he remembered that he was on the run, and he stopped. By then they were well away from Lime Street and traveling at a fine clip. Everything was perfect.

  “You’ve got your wheels on the curb again, honey,” Julie said.

  “Have I? Sorry.” Stephanie Schmidt steered to the right. The taxi suffered a couple of bad jolts and then ran smoothly.

  “Couldn’t you tell the difference?” Julie asked.

  “I thought the tires were flat. Put my hand on the gear-lever, please.” Stephanie hated taking her eyes off the road in order to look for anything. She was always using the wrong hand, on the wrong side. Everything in this country was on the wrong side. She had a noisy fight with the gear-box, and won. “Which gear is that, please?” she asked.

  “It sounds like two but it feels like three,” Julie said. “Have you thought of using the wipers?” The windscreen was pebbled with rain.

  “I lost the switch. I turned it off when I used the horn and now I can�
��t find it.” Stephanie sat on the edge of the seat and squeezed the wheel until her fingers hurt. There was too much traffic and the road was narrow and full of bends, that was the trouble. It had been the trouble ever since they recovered the taxi from the railway porter (another fiver from Docherty) and left Lime Street station. She was very brave to drive the taxi. They all said so. None of them had ever driven on the left, not even Docherty, so Stephanie had volunteered to drive to London. It was a time for courage: look at what Hammer and Anvil had done. Even Laszlo, in his way, was daring. “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Hard to tell, but I think this place is called Ormskirk,” Julie said. There were no signposts. All the signposts in England had been taken down to help frustrate German invaders in 1940. “There’s a pub called the Ormskirk Arms, anyway.”

  “Where the dickens do they think they’re going?” Freddy Garcia asked.

  “Could be Scotland,” Gardener said, wiping condensation off the windscreen. “Could be anywhere … By the way, sir, the police say they stole that taxi.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser. Maybe they’ll stop for lunch. I’m starving.”

  “Ormskirk doesn’t sound right,” Docherty said. “Hasn’t anybody got a map? We need a road map.”

  “I can’t stop,” Stephanie said. “There’s a bus behind me.”

  “Where is it going?” Julie asked.

  Docherty wiped the mist from the rear window. “Skelmersdale,” he reported. “Is that near London?”

  “Just outside,” Luis said.

  “Follow that bus behind you,” Docherty told Stephanie. “Don’t let it get away.”

  But the bus soon disappeared and Stephanie got lost at a crooked five-way crossroads. By now Julie had found the wiper switch, and the way ahead was clear, and clearly wrong: they were splashing along a narrowing farm lane. Soon they had to slow to a crawl behind a herd of sodden cows. Docherty got out and walked with the small boy who was in charge of them. When he came back he said, “His advice is to go back to Liverpool and start again. He says there’s nothing at the end of this road but the biggest heap of cow-shit you ever did see.”

  “I can’t stop here,” Stephanie said. “There’s a tractor behind me.”

  She went on and turned in the farmyard and came back. They drove for an hour, seeking the London road but never finding it. Julie managed to buy a loaf of bread in a village. “They told me that if we stay on this road we’ll get to Wigan,” she said. “Eventually.”

  “Is Wigan near London?” Stephanie asked.

  “On the outskirts,” Luis said, stuffing bread into his mouth. He had given up trying to alter events, and he guessed that Julie felt the same. The bomb blast—even after Hammer’s warning—had come as such a shock, and the consequences had been so swift and overwhelming—squads of military police, three ambulances, two fire engines, barriers thrown up, nobody allowed to leave, the station Tannoy barking order after order—that he had simply done what he was ordered and allowed authority to control him. Authority put the four of them (nobody knew where Laszlo had gone) into a small office, scrutinized their identity cards and asked what they were doing on platform one. Docherty said he and Stephanie had come to see the other two off. Everyone else agreed that that was so, and amazingly, after ten minutes, authority let them go, and they walked away. That was the good part. The bad part was that these two Abwehr agents still clung to them. “I expect you’ve got a train to catch,” Julie said brightly.

  “We might, if we had anywhere to go,” Docherty said. “As it is, we’re in your hands.”

  “You must have a safe house we can use,” Stephanie said. “I need a hot bath and a change of clothes. Can’t we go to your safe house?”

  “Of course,” Julie said. She knew nothing about these Abwehr agents except that they were reckless and probably ruthless, which meant they might be murderous if crossed. Two Abwehr agents had just killed three generals. This was no time to be awkward. “We can go to Freddy’s place,” she said quickly. “Freddy will know what to do.” That was when they learned about the taxi. “What a perfect solution!” Julie said. “Aren’t we lucky, darling?” She put her arms around Luis’s neck and kissed him. “Act tough, for Christ’s sake,” she whispered. “Or they’ll shoot us both.”

  The taxi ran out of fuel at the worst possible place: in the middle of a stretch of moor, with nothing but gorse and rain in sight. By now Stephanie felt that she had done her bit. “One of us should go for help,” she said, looking at the men.

  “What help?” Docherty said. “We’ve no petrol coupons. I doubt there’s a tow truck within ten miles. I vote we all go or nobody goes.”

  A gust of wind rocked the car on its springs and the rain began a long drumroll on the roof. For a while they sat in silence.

  “Couldn’t you go and telephone someone?” Stephanie said to Luis. “Someone in your network, I mean.”

  “That’s exactly what I intend to do,” Luis said. “As soon as it stops raining.”

  “Is it a big network?”

  “Not bad. Two hundred and sixty-three agents, last time I counted.”

  She sucked her breath in admiration. “All working toward the triumph of the Third Reich.”

  “Mind you,” Julie said, “we lose one or two from time to time. The British are not complete fools.”

  “What happens to them?” Stephanie asked.

  “The usual,” Luis said curtly. “They know the risks.”

  “Of course they do,” Docherty agreed. “We all do. It’s like climbing mountains. Nobody would do it if it wasn’t bloody dangerous, now would they? We know the odds.”

  “They are heroes,” Stephanie said. “Their names will be on the roll of honor. The Reich will always remember them.”

  “I wonder what the odds are,” Julie said.

  “Fifty-fifty,” Docherty said promptly. “Mind you, it’s far worse in Germany. The typical British spy has a ten-to-one chance of being caught. That’s why so many of them give up.”

  Brief pause.

  “No, you lost me there,” Julie said.

  “Well, it’s obvious. If they give up and agree to work for the Abwehr they don’t get shot. They keep on reporting to the British Secret Service, of course, only what they report is what the Abwehr tells them to report.”

  “Traitors,” Stephanie said.

  Docherty clicked his fingers. “That’s the word I was trying to think of,” he said. “I don’t suppose you have any trouble with that sort of nonsense in your network.”

  “None,” Luis said.

  “Our guys are like crusader knights,” Julie said. “You know, incorruptible.”

  “I met the Fuehrer once,” Stephanie said. Her head was back, her eyes were looking at the roof but her mind was seeing Nuremberg. “At a rally. He touched my arm. I thought my heart would burst.”

  “If I so much as suspected a man’s loyalty,” Luis said, “I would strangle him with my own hands.” He held them up for display. Stephanie reached back and took one in her own hands and kissed it. “We are all pledged to the cause of the Fatherland,” she said.

  “Fifty-fifty,” Docherty said. “That’s not so bad, is it?”

  “Who wants to live forever?” Julie asked.

  “Well, exactly,” Luis said. “That’s the key question.”

  “On the other hand …” Docherty sniffed, and kept them waiting. “Who really truly wants to die tomorrow?” There were no immediate takers. “Or even later this afternoon?”

  “For the Cause—” Stephanie began.

  “Indeed, indeed. That’s our great advantage over the poor, treacherous British agents who give up so easily. We have the Cause to fortify our souls, whereas they’re just spying for a ramshackle Imperialist-Capitalist-Communist alliance. No wonder they swap sides!” Docherty chuckled at the thought.

  “It couldn’t happen here,” Luis said. “MI5 are too stupid.”

  Someone knocked on a window. Luis wound it down. “Are you all
right?” Freddy Garcia asked. “You look abandoned or marooned or something.”

  “About bloody time,” Luis said. Suddenly all the doors were being opened by armed policemen in streaming oil-capes. “Those two are spies,” he said. “He’s Teacup and she’s Matchbox.”

  The policemen took them out and searched them. Standing in the rain, with her arms out sideways like a scarecrow and the wind making a mess of her hair, Stephanie Schmidt was crying like a child being bullied on her first day at school. “Here, here, it’s not as bad as all that,” Docherty comforted her. “One door closes and another opens. Now you can turn your coat and work for the British. That’s what I’m going to do.” She tried to kick him and lost her balance. The policemen helped her up. “I hear the food’s OK,” Docherty said. “And nobody’s going to thank you for dying, you know. There’s no future in death. As a goal in life it’s highly overrated.”

  Freddy was looking inside the three suitcases. “You never sent any messages,” he said. “I was waiting for you to send messages.”

  “Forgot,” Luis said. “Sorry.”

  “Lovely to see you again,” Julie said. “It seems like only yesterday you went off to buy some rail tickets.”

  “Long queue,” Freddy said.

  “Those radio valves are all bust,” Docherty told him. “Bloody Abwehr rubbish. It’s an absolute scandal, so it is.” They watched Stephanie being put in the back of a police car and driven away. “She’s in love with a man in Madrid called Otto Krafft,” Docherty said. “That’s another scandal, in my opinion. War is bad enough without love to make it worse, wouldn’t you say?” Julie’s eyes flickered toward Luis, who was staring down at a puddle, and she gave a small and skeptical smile. “My apologies,” Docherty said. “Sometimes I think my own valves are all bust too.” Another police car pulled up and he got in.

  Operation Tombstone pleased almost everybody.

  It pleased Madrid Abwehr when they got a signal indicating that their agents had successfully infiltrated and made contact with Eldorado. The report of the Lime Street bombing was an unexpected bonus, and led to much speculation. Evidently there was a sabotage and assassination unit operating over there. “Ask Eldorado to find out who they are,” Brigadier Wagner told Richard Fischer.