Soldier Spies

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  “Well—before he sees Stars & Stripes himself—he’ll have to be told that she’s here. In the meantime, you and me will pray that he doesn’t want to see her.”

  Stevens nodded.

  “Anything else?” Canidy asked.

  Stevens shook his head. “Good luck, Dick,” he said.

  Canidy picked up Stars & Stripes, folded it so that the front page was not visible, and left Stevens’s office.

  He found Fulmar in Fine’s office. He was sitting at a table with Fine and Master Sergeant Ed Davis, the sergeant major.

  “Ali Baba, I presume,” Canidy said,“and the two thieves.”

  Master Sergeant Davis, a stocky, jowly man in his late thirties, was Regular Army. He had once been in a battery of Coast Artillery commanded by then Lieutenant Edmund T. Stevens. Stevens had bumped into him in the PX. Two days later, Davis had reported for duty at Berkeley Square.

  Eric Fulmar, his jacket unbuttoned and his tie pulled down, stood up, smiled warmly at Canidy, then walked to him with his hand extended. But the intended handshake turned into an embrace.

  “Has he been checked for clap and other social diseases, Davis?” Canidy asked.

  “They wouldn’t let him out of Morocco before they checked on that, Major,” Davis said. Davis was privy to the fact—he was, among other things, the London station finance officer—that Canidy was not a major, but was in the employ of the United States government as a “Technical Consultant, Grade 14.”

  Even so, he treated Canidy with the regard of a longtime professional noncom for an officer he respects.

  “Then it’s okay to kiss him?” Canidy asked innocently.

  “I wouldn’t go quite that far, Major,” Davis said.

  “How’s the paperwork coming?” Canidy asked.

  “Give me another ten minutes, and we’ll be finished,” Davis said.

  Canidy nodded, sat down at the table.

  He went through the stack of forms that seemed to be completed and picked up the Application for National Service Life Insurance. As the beneficiary of the $10,000 the government would pay on his death, Fulmar had put down “Rev. George Carter Canidy, D.D., St. Paul’s School, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” In the relationship block he had entered “Friend.”

  The Rev. Dr. Canidy was Canidy’s father. Canidy thought of Eldon Baker’s conviction that he and Eric were too close emotionally.

  What was too close?

  Finally, Davis was through.

  “He’s got a bunch of dough coming, Major,” Davis said. “Both Army pay and OSS pay. Colonel Stevens said to pay him as a Technical Consultant, Grade 10, from the time of the first contact.”

  That was, Canidy thought, a nice gesture on Stevens’s part.

  “And you didn’t even know you’d enlisted, did you?” Canidy said.

  “More than I’ve got in the safe,” Davis said. “I’ll have to go over to SHAEF finance and get the money.”

  “Well, Captain Fine is rich,” Canidy said. “We’ll just sponge on him until you get it.”

  "I’ve got money,” Fulmar said.

  “Then I’ll sponge on you,” Canidy said. “Has this room been swept lately, Davis? We have deep secrets to discuss with the Sheikh of Araby.”

  “Yes, sir,” Davis said. “The Signal Corps was here yesterday.”

  “What kind of secrets?” Fulmar asked as Davis cleared the table of the forms and other papers.

  “We thought we’d start with your sex life,” Canidy said,“and then go on to other, more interesting things.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Fulmar asked, exasperated.

  Canidy shrugged, a signal that he would not go on until Davis, who did not have the need-to-know, had left them alone.

  When he had gathered up all the papers, Davis said, “Any time after lunch tomorrow, Lieutenant, come by and I’ll have your money.”

  “Thank you,” Fulmar said. He waited until Davis had left, then turned to Canidy. "On the subject of money, is my bank account still blocked?”

  “I don’t know,” Canidy said. “But I’ll find out.”

  He walked to Fine’s desk, picked up the telephone, and called Colonel Stevens.

  “Eric wants to know if his New York bank account is still frozen,” he said,“and if so, why. Could you send a cable and find out?”

  “Thank you,” Fulmar said.

  "What’s all that about?” Fine asked. “Or can’t I ask?”

  “Not that Eric wasn’t willing to risk his all for Mom’s Apple Pie, et cetera, and the American Way of Life,” Canidy said,“but Donovan promised him that if he joined up and did good, he would get both the IRS and the Alien Property people to take their hands off the money Eric has in the National City Bank.”

  “What money?” Fine asked.

  “I made a few bucks in the ‘export-import’ business, Stan,” Fulmar said, just a little smugly.

  “Right, at a hundred and twenty grand,” Canidy said. “It is one of the reasons he’s not too popular in Germany. The export business he’s talking about is smuggling cash and jewels out of Occupied France under the noses of the Germans. For a percentage.”

  “I didn’t know about that,” Fine said. “That you made so much money, I mean.”

  “And you are now going to learn some astonishing things about his sex life, Stan,” Canidy said.

  “You keep saying that,” Fulmar said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Gisella Dyer,” Canidy said.

  Fulmar looked at him out of eyes that suddenly turned cold.

  “That fucking postcard!” he said. “I wondered what the hell that was all about. Are you doing Baker’s dirty work again, Dick?”

  “What I’m doing is my job,” Canidy said. “At the moment, I’m keeping Eldon Baker out of it. How long I’ll be able to do that depends on you.”

  “Stop beating around the bush,” Fulmar said. “Let’s have it.”

  “We are, through your friends Shitfitz and Müller, establishing contact with Gisella Dyer.”

  Fulmar thought that over a moment before replying.

  “You mean with her father,” he said. “That was on Baker’s postcard.”

  Canidy nodded.

  “You sonofabitch!” Fulmar said. “Dick, if I’d known you were going to involve her in this OSS shit, I never would have told you about her.”

  “OK, let me handle that first,” Canidy said. “The first thing is that all’s fair in love and war.”

  “Fuck you,” Fulmar said. “I told you about her as a friend.”

  “And the second thing is that it would have come out anyway.”

  “How?” Fulmar snorted derisively.

  “There is interest in Professor Dyer,” Canidy said.

  “What kind of interest?”

  “I don’t know,” Canidy said. “We have a file on him, and so do the English. They—‘they’ being the powers that be that don’t confide in me— want to get him, and his daughter, out of Germany.”

  Fulmar looked at him suspiciously.

  Canidy raised his right hand to the level of his shoulder, three fingers extended—the Boy Scout’s salute.

  “Boy Scout’s Honor,” Canidy said. “Cross my heart and hope to die. Okay?”

  Fulmar chuckled.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “They would have made the connection,” Canidy went on. “He’s at the University of Marburg. You went to Marburg. That connection would have come out on the punch cards.”

  "On the what?”

  “The IBM cards,” Fine explained. “Little oblong pieces of cardboard. They punch holes in them, and then stab them with what looks like an ice pick. They can sort them that way. Understand?”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Stan,” Fulmar said.

  “It would have come out. You would have been asked if you knew Professor Dyer.”

  "And I would have said ’No,’” Fulmar said.

  “Oh, goddammit, no, you wouldn’t have,
” Canidy said.

  “Yeah, I would have, Dick,” Fulmar said.

  “Okay,” Canidy said. “So I would have been asked if I had ever heard you mention the Dyers, and I would have said: ‘Yes, Fulmar told me he was screwing his daughter.’”

  "That’s what I meant when I said, ’Fuck you, buddy,’” Fulmar said.

  “We’re kicking a dead horse,” Canidy said. “We know about you and the Dyer girl. It has been decided to use that connection.”

  "Shit!” Fulmar said.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Canidy said.

  “Do you? When was the last time you were in Germany?”

  Canidy happened to be glancing at Fine when Fulmar said that. Their eyes locked for a moment.

  “I don’t want to come across all sweetness and light,” Canidy said. “But since the intention is to get the professor and his daughter out of Germany, I suggest that we’re the good guys.”

  “What makes you think you can get them out?”

  “There are ways.”

  “What I see is Gisella waving bye-bye to the airplane, or the boat, or whatever. The way you and I waved bye-bye to the submarine off Safi,” Fulmar said.

  “So long as I’m running this,” Canidy said,“that won’t happen.”

  “But you can’t, or won’t, tell me why they want him out?” Fulmar asked.

  “Can’t,” Canidy said. “And if I have to say this, Eric, you and I both got out of Morocco eventually.”

  “What do you think would happen to her if her father suddenly disappeared? ” Fulmar asked. “And what makes you think she’ll go along with this, anyway? What’s in it for her? And don’t wave the flag. That won’t wash.”

  “Getting out is what’s in it for them,” Canidy said. “He’s still considered dangerous, I’m sure. Sooner or later, they’ll arrest him. The both of them. They know that.”

  “So long as she’s ‘being nice’ to Peis,” Fulmar said, “or his successor, they’re probably reasonably safe.”

  “Peis?” Fine asked.

  “The local cop,” Canidy said. “Gestapo.”

  “No,” Fulmar said,“SS-SD. There’s a difference.”

  “What about Peis?” Fine pursued.

  “What I thought was my irresistible charm in wooing the fair Gisella,” Fulmar said,“turned out to be this Peis character telling her to be nice to me.”

  “I don’t suppose he’s still there, but it should be checked out,” Fine said. “Have you got a first name, Eric?”

  “Herr Hauptsturmführer,” Fulmar said. “He’s not too bright, but he’s a real prick. Think of a stupid Eldon Baker in a black uniform.”

  Canidy laughed.

  “You haven’t told me what you want me to do,” Fulmar said. “That would be nice to know before I tell you to go fuck yourself.”

  “What we want to do right now is prove to Gisella (a) that you’re in England, and (b) in a position to send messages over the BBC.”

  “‘Pigeons are pissing in the Seine,’ that kind of message?”

  Canidy nodded.

  “And something only I could know, right?” Fulmar asked, and when Canidy nodded again, asked, as if he had just thought of this, “And what makes you think she’ll be listening to the BBC? That’s a sure way to get sent to a Konzentrationslager.”

  “We’re taking care of that,” Fine said.

  Fulmar looked at him curiously.

  “Müller’s going to get her a radio,” Canidy said.

  Fulmar’s look turned incredulous. Then Canidy nodded.

  “Jesus,” Fulmar said, impressed.

  “Think of something, Eric,” Canidy said gently. “Something intimate, something she would remember, something they would not, of course, connect with her.”

  “In other words, something happened in bed, right?” Fulmar snapped.

  “Anything that will do the job,” Canidy said. “Sex is intimate and private. That’s why I got into that. And for obvious reasons, we’re going to need more than one message. But we need one now.”

  Fulmar shrugged.

  “I don’t really know why I’m going along with this shit at all,” he said.

  He had thought of something. Just before he’d left Marburg, they’d had a picnic on the Lahn. They’d rented a canoe, floated downriver with the current, and stopped and picnicked on the riverbank. He had been debating that day whether to tell her he was going. In the end, he decided it would be better if she didn’t know.

  He closed his eyes and exhaled.

  “Eric wants to paddle Gisella’s canoe again,” he said.

  “What?”

  “‘Eric wants to paddle Gisella’s canoe again,’” Fulmar said. “With your filthy imagination, you figure out what it means. She’ll know.”

  “Don’t be too clever. You’re sure she’ll know?”

  “I said, she’ll know it’s me.”

  “What’s it mean?” Canidy asked.

  “None of your fucking business, Richard,” Fulmar said.

  “What about a pet name?” Fine asked. “Something that would at once further identify you, and not use your real name. Or hers.”

  Fulmar gave him a withering look.

  "Bübchen,” he said finally.

  " ’Boobchin’?” Canidy quoted. “What the hell is that?”

  “Little boy,” Fine made the translation. “With overtones of affection that don’t come across in English.”

  “And what did you call her?”

  “Fuck you, Dick!” Fulmar said. And then, a moment later: “‘Bübchen would like to paddle Gisella’s canoe again.’ And that’s it, Dick. If that doesn’t satisfy you, stick the whole thing up your ass.”

  Canidy stood up.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. “Let’s go get something to drink.”

  “Are you sure that’s all, Dick?” Fine asked.

  His eyes moved, just perceptibly, to the Stars & Stripes.

  “Christ, I forgot about that,” Canidy said.

  Fulmar misunderstood him.

  “Whatever it is, it’s going to have to wait,” he said. “I need a bath and a drink. I have had enough of this shit for one day.”

  Canidy unfolded the newspaper and handed it to Fulmar.

  Fulmar read the story about America’s Sweetheart’s arrival in England.

  “What do you want to do about it, Eric?” Canidy asked gently.

  “You weren’t listening, Major,” Fulmar said.

  “Huh?”

  “I just said,‘I need a bath and a drink. I have had enough shit for one day.’”

  “Captain Fine,” Canidy said. “If anyone should inquire, Lieutenant Fulmar and I will be in the bar at the Dorchester. When the press of your duties permits, feel free to join us.”

  “Give me three minutes,” Fine said,“and I’ll go with you.”

  [FOUR]

  As Canidy, Fulmar, and Fine walked up from the direction of Tilney Street and crossed Deanery Street, there were half a dozen official limousines and staff cars parked in the small lot between Park Lane and the door to the Dorchester. Their drivers stood, smoking, in a knot by the front fender of a Rolls Royce.

  “Excuse me,” Canidy said, and walked toward them.

  They all came to attention, and one of them stamped her foot, saluted, and barked,“Sir!”

  “Would you come with me, please, Sergeant?” Canidy said as he crisply returned the salute.

  “Sir!” Sergeant Agnes Draper barked and stamped her foot again. When Canidy marched in a military manner toward the sandbags around the door, she marched in a military manner after him.

  Making him more than a little uncomfortable, Sergeant Draper relieved Lieutenant Fulmar of his luggage. Staggering a little under the weight, she followed the three officers across the lobby into the elevator.

  They rode to the fourth floor. At the entrance to one of the corridors there, a man wearing an American uniform with civilian technician insignia dropped his Star
s & Stripes to the carpet beside his upholstered chair and rose at their approach.

  “This is Lieutenant Fulmar,” Fine said. “He’ll be staying here on and off.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said as he pulled his olive-drab jacket over the snub-nosed Colt Detective Special on his belt.

  “And you know Major Canidy and the sergeant?” Fine said.

  “Oh, yes, sir,” the American said.

  “They also serve who sit in hotel corridors reading the Stripes,” Canidy said.

  “Better this, Major,” the CIC agent said, smiling,“than standing around in the snow guarding the castle.”

  “Virtue, doubtless,” Canidy said,“is its own reward.”

  Fine unlocked a door. As he pushed it open, the CIC agent called, “The Signal Corps swept it this morning, Captain.”

  “Thank you,” Fine said, and motioned the others into the suite ahead of them.

  “I wondered where the hell you were,” Canidy said to Agnes.

  “Commander Whathisname dismissed me,” Agnes said. “I think he suspected I was going to carry Commander Bitter off before he got to cocktails with Ike. And you told me not to take the Packard to Berkeley Square. I knew you would show up here eventually, so I came here.”

  “Good thinking, Sergeant,” Canidy said,“you are a credit to the noncommissioned officer corps.”

  “Oh, I’m so pleased you think so,” Agnes said. “Do you think I’ve earned a drink of your whisky?”

  “Fix us all one while the Sheikh of Araby has his bath,” Canidy said.

  “No one,” Fulmar said, beaming at Agnes, “has seen fit to introduce us, Sergeant. My name is Fulmar.”

  “Rein it in, Lone Ranger,” Canidy said. “The lady is spoken for.”

  Agnes Draper blushed. Both Fine and Fulmar looked at Canidy in surprise.

  “I thought Ann was here,” Fulmar blurted.

  “Indeed she is,” Canidy said. “She’ll be here, with Eddie Bitter, about five-thirty or six. That’s one of the reasons I am being so . . . indelicate.”

  "Dolan told you?” Agnes said. Canidy nodded. “Damn him!”

  “I’m sure you’re a big girl, Agnes,” Canidy said. “I’m not so sure about Bitter. ”

  “You make me sound . . . predatory, Dick,” Agnes said.

  “I didn’t mean to, honey,” Canidy said gently. “I don’t think that. I just wanted to be sure you understand what you’re into. Eddie is liable to erupt in paroxysms of regret. He’s an Annapolis man, you know. And officers and gentlemen—”