Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

  “My fault,” Freddy said quickly. “This has nothing at all to do with Luis. I do apologize. It’s about agent Matchbox, the girl called Stephanie Schmidt. She wants to talk to you.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake …” Julie ate the last bean, went into the kitchen, threw the tin into the bin. “Why me?” she called.

  Freddy looked amiably baffled. “Beats me. But she won’t talk to anyone else, so … Would you mind awfully?”

  Stephanie Schmidt was locked in a simple, almost spartan room with beige walls and no windows and every piece of furniture bolted to the floor. She was wearing a gray boilersuit that zipped up the front. It was far too big for her, and the sleeves and trouser-legs were doubled back; this made her look more girlish than she was. The first thing she wanted to know was whether or not Julie was married to Luis.

  “Not on your life.”

  “Ah.” Stephanie was disappointed. “So you are friends?”

  “We work together, that’s all. No we don’t. We work as far apart as possible.” Julie saw Stephanie looking wistfully at her wedding ring. “I’ve got a legal husband somewhere,” she said. “You can have him if you can find him. I wear this to keep the wolves at bay.” Stephanie didn’t understand that. “You know: the gropers and pinchers,” Julie said. Stephanie frowned. “Jeez,” Julie sighed. “You don’t know anything, do you? How long have you been out of the convent?”

  That touched a nerve. “I am not a Catholic,” Stephanie said stiffly. “I am a good Lutheran.”

  “Slice it where you like, it’s still baloney.” Julie looked at the room, at its bareness, and finally at the sad German girl with her greasy hair and slumped shoulders and hands hidden inside the opposite sleeves of the drab boilersuit. “So tell me,” she said. “What’s a dump like you doing in a nice place like this?”

  “I met a man. His name is Otto Krafft and I love him.”

  “Oh boy. Tears before bedtime. I can see it coming.”

  “But I do love him.” She started to cry. Julie let her get on with it while she found a towel. This looked like turning into a major weep.

  Stephanie cried for ten minutes. Julie knew what to do (others had done it for her) and she merely held her hand until she had exhausted her tears. “Blow your nose,” Julie said. Stephanie snorted into the towel. “Wash your face,” Julie said. Stephanie obeyed. “Now tell me about this schmuck Otto,” Julie said, and Stephanie laughed at the lovely rude word which her father had always forbidden.

  “He has beautiful blond hair,” she began.

  Forty minutes later, Julie left. Freddy was waiting. “Now we know all about Otto Krafft,” he said. “Except the size of his whatsit.”

  “Assume it’s on the heroic scale. Everything else is.”

  “Sorry to be so crude. It’s been a long day.”

  “That’s OK, Freddy. After all, love is a pretty crude arrangement, wouldn’t you say? What’s all this talk about affairs of the heart? Affairs of the whatsit would be a lot closer the truth. Not so nice, maybe, but a damn sight more accurate.”

  “Not in this case.” By now they were in his office, and he was pouring whisky. “From what she said they were never lovers. Krafft never even kissed her.”

  “Sure. He got her for nothing. So what’s new? The world is full of women like that. Gave everything, got nothing. I should know, I’ve done it twice. We never learn.”

  “Perhaps you might mention that to Matchbox next time,” Freddy said.

  Her left eye felt scratchy. She pulled down the lid and looked at him with the right eye. “I’m not one of your interrogators. Give me one good reason why I should go back.”

  “We really ought to know what’s become of those other two agents. Deckchair and Lampstand.”

  “Not a good enough reason.”

  “And if she doesn’t cooperate soon we shall have to hang her,” Freddy said. “The public expects it, you see.”

  It took twenty-four hours for the Double-Cross Committee to consult its various representatives from the intelligence bodies and give Eldorado’s draft report its approval. Luis had a second look at it, tightened it and polished it, and Julie cross-checked it with other reports to make sure there were no anomalies or contradictions. Then it was encoded and radioed to Madrid Abwehr, nominally by Docherty. (The story was that Eldorado, who Madrid knew to have poor radio skills, was still trying to recruit an operator for his sets, so Teacup—Docherty—was sending his messages. In reality an MIS man operated the set.)

  There were only two changes of any significance in the report. Air Ministry suggested using B-24 Liberators instead of B-17 Fortresses in the OWCH item, since the Liberator had a long square fuselage which could transport more explosive. The other change was prompted by Freddy. “OWCH is a very big secret,” he said. “Who found it?”

  “I did,” Luis said. “Says so here. Eldorado’s many contacts in the ministries and embassies and so on.”

  “It might be even more convincing if you shared the credit, made it a team effort. Don’t you think? OWCH is really big. It needs support.”

  “Maybe.” Luis thought it over. “How about this?” he said. “Eldorado picks up rumors of OWCH. He tells Pinetree, and Pinetree gets half the story from someone in the American embassy. He also tells Nutmeg, who picks up the other half by chatting to American aircrew in pubs around Cambridge. Then Eldorado puts the whole story together. That way, there’s no total breach of security, which is as it should be for a big secret.”

  Freddy wrinkled his nose. “Not happy about Nutmeg, to be perfectly frank. Nutmeg loathes Americans, doesn’t he? Ex-Indian Army and all that. Thinks they’re a lot of cowboys. We’ve said as much.”

  “OK. Somebody else can go to Cambridge. Garlic can go to Cambridge. Garlic goes to Cambridge to be interviewed, he wants to study his medicine at Cambridge, he is sick of Glasgow, and he meets lots of Americans in lots of pubs. Why not? He is American himself. South American. Garlic likes Americans.”

  The report caused a small sensation in Madrid. Wagner had everybody in his office on the double. “Berlin tells me that Garlic is dead,” he said. “Now Eldorado tells me that Garlic is not only alive but supremely active. Somebody’s lying, which means somebody’s made a cock-up, which means somebody’s ass is going to get kicked from here to Smolensk. It is not going to be mine but it could be yours. So—any bright ideas?”

  The controllers had plenty to say but none of it was comforting. The trouble was that Eldorado was precise about the timing of Garlic’s trip to Cambridge. The visit spanned the date of his reported death. No amount of discussion could alter that. In the end Richard Fischer suggested forcing the issue by sending Eldorado a signal asking if Garlic was dead or alive.

  “Why not ask about the state of his health?” Dr. Hartmann said. “It’s a little more subtle. If he’s dead, let Eldorado say so.”

  “No. Ask about them all,” Wagner said. “Send a signal now, asking Eldorado for a health check on all of his sub-agents. Let’s not give anything away at this stage.”

  Freddy and the Director discussed this curious signal and could make nothing of it. “Luis was thinking of pushing Haystack under a bus,” Freddy said, “but we never did it. Everyone is perfectly fit.”

  “Then I suppose we might as well say so,” the Director said.

  That reply brought a further signal from Madrid. It referred to the recent OWCH report and asked whether Garlic merited a bonus payment for his work. It seemed a harmless question. The answer had to be yes.

  “That clinches it,” Wagner said. He took all the documents and flew to Berlin. He went straight into a meeting with Canaris, Oster and Christian. There was little to discuss: the facts were clear, the implications were obvious, the possible consequences serious.

  “A preposterous thought occurs to me,” the Admiral said, “but then the preposterous seems to happen all the time nowadays … Our man Ace has killed a Venezuelan medical student at Glasgow University. Just suppose there are two such s
tudents?”

  “I briefed Ace on that possibility,” Oster said. “If there were two he would have shot them both.”

  “Just a thought.” Canaris glanced at the others. Nobody had anything further to say. “There’s only one thing for it, then. I’d better meet Eldorado. I’m certainly not going over there, so he’ll come to me, won’t he?”

  After his first blackout Christian had not gone to the Abwehr HQ doctor. When he suffered the second he had no choice: the doctor came to him. The first thing Christian saw as he woke up was the man’s smooth, pointed face framed by his stethoscope. “Welcome back,” the doctor said. “Can you feel that?”

  The steel of the stethoscope slid across his chest. “Yes,” he said. His fingers moved and touched carpet. He was stretched out on the floor.

  “Can you see my mustache?” the doctor asked.

  Christian searched his face. “No,” he said.

  “That’s good. I shaved it off last year. All your senses seem to be working satisfactorily. How do you feel?”

  “All right. Hearing’s a bit funny. Everything sounds sort of fuzzy. Trashy.” It was the wrong word but Christian couldn’t find the right one.

  “It’s the rain, old chap. It’s pelting down.”

  Christian raised his head and saw Domenik standing in the doorway to the balcony. The sky was charcoal. Now he could hear grunts of thunder behind the rush of rain. “What happened?” he asked.

  “You tell me,” the doctor said. He was busy reading a pulse. Christian’s memory cleared, slowly, like solids settling in a liquid. Another blackout. Another bloody blackout. What a curse.

  Domenik came over. For the first time, Christian realized that the room was empty: he had ended the party. “No prospect of the Russian Front for you,” Domenik said.

  “Was I going there?”

  “Probably not. It was just talk. I’m afraid my tedious conversation was too much for you.”

  Christian felt his nose. No blood. Well, that was an improvement, anyway. “I can’t remember a single word you said,” he told Domenik. “Not one.”

  “Just as well, I expect.”

  “Can you sit up?” the doctor said. His fingers worked their way over Christian’s skull. “Hello, hello,” he said. “When did that happen?”

  “Months ago. Someone hit me with a bottle. You weren’t here then. Another doctor took the stitches out.”

  “Must have been a nasty bang,” the doctor said. “Very nasty indeed.”

  For a couple of days Glasgow was enjoyable. The weather was mild and dry, the city was crowded and bustling, Laszlo liked hanging about and watching others work. He had earned a holiday. It was pleasant to be near the docks when a big American troopship was unloading and to watch the big army trucks with their massive engines and air-brakes come growling and gasping on to the cobbled streets. Many of the trucks were full of troops, and they always cheered and waved when they came through the dock gates. Often they were still cheering as they went out of sight. The Glasgow people waved back, or some did; they had seen and heard it all a hundred times before. “Why do they cheer so?” Laszlo asked an old man sitting on an empty fish-crate stenciled STOLEN FROM JOE GROAN.

  “They didnae get torpedoed,” the old man said, “an’ for that they each got a wee medal.”

  “Thatafack?” Laszlo said. He was picking up the lingo.

  “Och, aye. The Yanks gi’e their sodgers dozens a medals. Fire yer rifle, ye get a medal. Go to the lavvy, ye get a medal. Wipe yer bum, ye get a bar.”

  Laszlo strolled on, secretly counting the trucks. When he reached a hundred it seemed pointless to go on. He had some vague thought of informing Madrid, but how? He could do nothing until General Oster arranged for someone to contact him. Each day he bought the Herald and searched the personal column. So far nobody had inserted any message for Ace. Laszlo was beginning to feel a tiny bit impatient.

  On the other hand he had mastered bits of the local dialect. He could order simple food and drink, although he slipped up once by asking for a fried egg, which brought a startled glance. “Fried bread, ye mean?” the woman said sharply and Laszlo agreed at once. He could get a bed for the night. Sometimes they looked at his identity papers; sometimes they didn’t. He had wrinkled the Lascar’s photograph and rubbed it with an oily thumb but he couldn’t change the name. What if the police had told hotel-keepers and the like to look out for A. J. Lakram? Whenever he registered he kept his hand on his gun in his pocket, ready to fire through the cloth if necessary. It always worked for James Cagney. It meant writing with his left hand, so the signature was a mess. Nobody cared. Everybody’s signature was a mess.

  He never stayed more than one night in the same place. He now owned a second-hand suitcase, very old, very empty, to lend a touch of respectability when he was asking for a room. All the case contained were several copies of the Herald, a piece of soap and a razor. He needed clothes—his socks were ragged—but his clothing coupons were in his wallet and Stephanie had that, the little shit.

  Laszlo settled into an easy routine. In the morning he took his suitcase for a walk and saw the sights. When the pubs opened he had a pint or two. In the afternoon he bought a Herald and went to the cinema: Bombs Over Burma, followed by Random Harvest, with Ronald Colman and Greer Garson. Fish and chips came next, and another pint, and another film. He liked lots of action. Randolph Scott was good in The Desperadoes but James Cagney was wasted in Yankee Doodle Dandy, which turned out not to be about gangsters. Alan Ladd wasn’t bad in Lucky Jordan but best of all was John Wayne in Flying Tigers. Then it was time to find a bed. The daily routine was pleasant and undemanding. There was only one problem. He was running out of money. An awful thought occurred: maybe Oster had missed the message, God knew how or why, but maybe it had never reached him? Laszlo went to the Herald office and ordered another insertion. This time he made it more urgent: Happy days are really here again. That cost money too.

  “Dear me, no. What? No, no, no. It’s a ludicrous suggestion, quite absurd. What has got into their little heads? I’m amazed.” The Director handed the piece of paper to Freddy Garcia. “They can’t be serious.” He took the paper back. “It’s mistranslated. Not properly decoded. Garbled in transmission. All three.” He screwed it into a ball, tossed it in the air and tried to head it, soccer-style, and missed. His glasses fell off. “Buggeration,” he said.

  Freddy picked up his glasses and found the paper and flattened it. The Director put his glasses on and read it again. “Double buggeration,” he said brusquely. “Just when things were going so well … I assume you’ve double-checked the decoding and everything?”

  Freddy nodded. He said, “It’s so short, sir, that there’s not much room for error, is there?”

  “No, I suppose not. ‘Eldorado to proceed to Berlin earliest opportunity. Authority: highest.’ That has to be Canaris.”

  “He’s as high as you can go.”

  The Director cleaned his glasses, and brooded. Freddy stood on the fireplace fender and made it rock, until the Director frowned. “Don’t fidget,” he said. “I was never allowed to fidget when I was a boy. Did your parents let you fidget?”

  “All the time, sir. My mother positively encouraged it.”

  “Lucky devil. Mine gave me a good skelp around the lugs. The result is what you see before you. A man in a virtual catatonic trance.” The Director stopped gesticulating. “What d’you think is going on over there, Freddy?”

  “Possibly another medal. He only got the Iron Cross second-class last time, sir, so there’s scope for advancement. Or … I can’t imagine why, but we shouldn’t exclude it … they might want to give him the chop. Kill him.”

  “That was my thought. But they’ve just awarded Garlic a fat bonus.” The Director sat on the end of a sofa and fidgeted, tapping his feet, plucking at the upholstery. “It’s such a frivolous request. Fancy wanting to take your chief agent out of the field at a crucial stage in the war! It’s irresponsible. I’m most surprised a
t Canaris, I really am. Berlin, of all places. Eldorado could get hit by a bomb. What then?”

  “So I take it the answer’s no, sir.”

  “Deep regrets, of course. Pressure of work. Pile it on. If we fob him off maybe Canaris will forget all about it.”

  After a day and a half of isolation, Stephanie Schmidt was ready to run off at the mouth when Julie came through the door.

  She was painfully homesick: for Bavaria, for Wasserburg, for her family, for Emil the spaniel and Coco the cat, who might or might not have had her kittens by now. In Madrid she had preserved a comfortable selection of warm memories of home and had tinted them with all the sentimentality of the exile. Now she turned them out again: the beautiful garden, all roses and honeysuckle; the romping pets; her mother’s delicious cooking; trusty schoolfriends with swinging plaits; favorite cousins in uniform; the awful night when the big beech tree got blown down and just missed Emil but all the neighbors came around with saws and …

  Julie lay on the bed and grunted occasionally. Two things became obvious. Not much about the father, and zero about boyfriends. Otto Krafft was probably the first love.

  Stephanie was trying to remember the words of a pokerwork poem that hung above the kitchen sink when Julie interrupted. “What d’you think about men, honey?” she asked.

  Stephanie was flustered. “I think … I think that God, He created men and … and so we—”

  “Forget God. You can’t take His word for anything, can you? He’s another man, for Christ’s sake. They’re all out for what they can get.”

  “Not all. My father—”

  “You hate your father. He’s a miserable son of a bitch.” For a second their eyes met, and then Stephanie turned away, defeated. “And if God made men, He did a bum job. Have you seen a man with his clothes off? Gross. Not a bit like those Greek statues. Fat and flabby and covered in hair.”