Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) (5 page)

‘We?’

‘You and me. You’re to accompany me to England. Gelbroaster’s orders. A spot of liaison.’

Ruthven-Greene said ‘liaison’ as though it were lunch. A pleasant way to pass a little time, rather than a diplomatic quagmire.

‘I guess I don’t have a lot of choice, do I?’

‘No, you don’t. If I’m right and your Tin Man shows up in London, we’ll need you to identify him. Would you believe we don’t have a single clear photograph of the
man?’

Yes. Cal could easily believe that. He’d seen hundreds of shots of the Nazi hierarchy. He’d yet to see one in which Stahl had not managed to be in shadow or behind someone taller.
Always the blur at the edge of the frame.

Ruthven-Greene put a copy of the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
on the table. Last week’s big story. Stahl’s funeral. The photograph of Stahl had been blown up, magnified many
times, from a crowd shot – so coarse was the grain it could have been anyone. Stahl’s own mother would not have known him. The
12-Uhr Blatt
, the
Beobachter
and the
Börsen Zeitung
had all carried the same picture – it was probably all they had.

‘Is that all? Just identify the man? I was his control officer for two years.’

‘Quite. I meant . . . help us find him . . . help us . . .’

Ruthven-Greene thrashed around for the right technical term.

‘. . . Help us . . . de-brief the bugger. That’s it. De-brief him.’

He smiled with satisfaction at having mastered the term. Cal half liked, half loathed this about the English
– the dreadful affectation that they were all amateurs, that precise and specific was the sort of thing you paid someone else to be rather than bother with yourself. War as cricket –
gentlemen and players. They had to be kidding.

Ruthven-Greene showed Cal out.

‘You know, I’m still a bit puzzled,’ he said.

He could not be half as puzzled as Cal felt.

‘Tin Man. Don’t you think it was a bit . . . well . . . obvious? For a codename, I mean. A bit close. Stahl, steel, tin? Geddit?’

‘I didn’t choose it, Reggie. Stahl did.’

‘All the same he’s damn lucky no-one put two and two together.’

‘Perhaps he was overfond of
The Wizard of Oz
?’

‘Ah . . . perhaps so . . . if he only had a brain, eh?’

‘That was the Scarecrow. The Tin Man wanted a heart. You didn’t grow up reading Frank Baum, did you?’

‘Never heard of him. But then I don’t suppose you grew up reading E. Nesbit and
The Railway Children
, did you? Ah well. Toodle pip. See you in the morning.’

Ruthven-Greene went away whistling the Tin Man’s song to himself. If he only had a heart. Blasé as ever. Toodle fucking pip.

It was only in the staff car going back to the embassy that Cal pondered the truth of what Ruthven-Greene had said so casually, ‘We’re not allies, at least not yet.’ He had the
feeling that he’d just given away his birthright. Ripped off the bloody bandage, thrown down the fife and drum. That in sharing with this not-yet-ally he had somehow diminished himself, wiped
out his own
raison d’être
. There were times when he felt not that he was Stahl, exactly, but that without Stahl he was, not nothing, exactly – but something other,
something lesser, not quite Calvin M. Cormack III. His identity was bound up in Stahl’s identity. On the other hand he’d walked into the meeting with Stahl dead and come out with Stahl
alive.

Then the other thing Reggie had let slip – did Reggie let anything slip? Wasn’t every word planted to a measure and a stick? The British had cracked the German code. Not any routine
traffic code, but the codes used by Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, by the very people who’d broken the US Embassy Traffic code. The British had broken the codebreakers’ own
code. What, then, did they
not
know?

The outer office was empty when Cal got back. There was usually a cypher clerk stuck out front, nominally his assistant – his secretary if they’d both but been
civilians. Janis – Sgt. Doyle – had reported sick two or three days ago, and he hadn’t seen her since. But the desk was neat, no mail unopened, no memo pad full of urgent
messages. Somebody was doing the job.

On his own desk, in his in-tray was the letter from his father. He tore it open. It was weeks old. The mail was taking longer as the war grew older.

Cal skipped on – this kind of complaint usually went on aimlessly for paragraph after paragraph. Cal did not doubt the honesty of his father’s conviction – he’d fought
the bill tooth and nail – nor the honesty of his actions – if he said he’d told FDR he’d see him impeached, then he’d done it. It had simply ceased to interest him
long ago. He found the chat, what really mattered, the family news.

Cal loved the house – a modest mansion (if there were such a thing) on a hilltop in Fairfax County, looking out across the Potomac to Maryland, dating from the time of
Andrew Jackson. It had stood a hundred years. In American terms it was old – and if it was splitting open it would not be the only thing in his native land to burst like rotten fruit before
this war was over. It seemed all too symbolic to Cal. He knew this was no worry to his father. It was only a matter of money and they’d money aplenty – but it was change, and his mother
hated change. He’d left home, for good as it turned out, when they sent him to a military school prior to West Point. His mother kept his room just as it had been in 1925. His childhood in
aspic.

A thump-thuddy-thump brought him back to the present world, the present continent. It was coming from his outer office. He pulled the door open and looked out. Corporal Tosca was bouncing a
half-size basketball off the wall and occasionally dropping it into a half-size net tacked up above the President’s photograph. She bounced with it, breasts rising as she stood on tiptoe and
pitched. It was all but impossible to balance well. Her next throw went wild, the ball roared back over her head and Cal caught it neatly. She turned to him. Snatched the ball back.

‘You can’t play,’ she said through a mouthful of gum. ‘You’re taller’n me.’

Most people were, Cal thought.

‘Where’s Janis?’ he said.

‘Who’s Janis?’

‘My regular woman.’

‘You have a regular woman?’

‘I mean . . . I meant . . . my regular assistant.’

‘Oh. Her. She flew home. Pregnant.
[Pause.]
Wasn’t you, was it?’

‘No, it wasn’t!’

‘Guess not. You don’t look the type. Still, she’s gone now. I’m your regular woman.’

‘You are?’

‘You bet.’ She chewed vigorously and bounced the ball off the floor with the flat of her hand. She dribbled better than she threw. ‘Tell you what, you can play if you take a handicap.’

‘Handicap?’

‘You have to stand on one leg.’

Cal was a lousy player, but even standing on one leg he beat her five times out of five. Every time he dropped the ball through the net she chewed furiously on her gum. At six out of six, he
said, ‘I have to go to England.’

‘Lucky you.’

‘I hesitate to say this, but if you’re my clerk you’ll be in charge of the office while I’m gone.’

‘Okey-dokey. I’ll dust your spook files and darn your spy’s outfit, and knit little covers for your tommy guns.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Cal. ‘Is nothing serious?’

Tosca stopped chewing, blew out a bubble of pink goo to the size of a cue ball and then burst it with her teeth.

‘Not much,’ she said.

It was a pity they could not run to a two-way mirror. Stilton had never seen a two-way mirror. The FBI had them in the flicks. A two-way mirror would really make him feel like
a spy rather than just a policeman. Not that he was not utterly proud to be an officer of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch – it just lacked a whisper of romance, that dark hint of
adventure.

He sat in the next room with the lights out. Watching Thesiger and his quarry through the inch-open door. Thesiger was talking to a Dutchman – Jeroen Smulders. It was the third time
he’d had him in since he was picked up in a dinghy off the coast of Essex. He was Dutch – Stilton was satisfied of that – and neither he nor Squadron Leader Thesiger had been able
to find a codebook among his effects – a Dutch/English pocket dictionary, a Lutheran bible, a collection of half a dozen worn, well-thumbed love letters – but he was, beyond a shadow of
a doubt, a German spy. Thesiger had had the man checked out by the M.O. ‘Just for your own sake – no communicable diseases, that sort of thing.’ And the M.O. had confirmed
everything Stilton had suggested. Smulders was nearer thirty than the forty his papers claimed – his hair had been taken up at the roots over the frontal lobes to age him – his
sideburns treated with peroxide – two teeth pulled recently – and fifteen pounds of flab added by stuffing himself over a matter of a few weeks to disguise a hard core of underlying
muscle. He could take it off as easily as he had put it on with a dash of will-power. Smulders was young, fit and probably trained.

‘Trained what?’ was the question Stilton had put to himself. Your run-of-the-mill spy (was there such a thing?) didn’t need to have the physique of a Spartan warrior. Your
run-of-the-mill spy more than likely was a forty-two year old Dutch printer, hotfoot from Delft, telling you he was fleeing the enemy. The Germans had gone to a lot of trouble with this man. But
too quickly, the new body, the new persona, sat atop the old too loosely.

Stilton saw the two men rise. Saw Thesiger shaking hands with Smulders, wishing him good luck. Smulders gathering up his papers, walking out into his new life, safe in Britain, an island haven
in an occupied Europe.

Thesiger lit up a fag. Stilton took his hat and his macintosh off the back of the door and pulled it wide. Thesiger perched on a corner of his desk, the epitome of calm. He was not one of those
officers for whom ‘on duty’ required a stiff upper lip and a ramrod backbone, any more than it seemed to require a regulation uniform. Thesiger was frequently to be found in corduroy
trousers or a rough woollen pullover or with a tatty old cravat tucked around his neck – the blue battledress with its insignia of rank the only concession he made. Most of the time he was to
be found with his feet up – and on cold days this winter he’d sat with his feet in the bottom drawer of his desk for warmth, until the day a Wren came in without knocking and he’d
stood too sharply in the presence of a lady and shot through the bottom of the drawer.

‘Have you got a few minutes?’ he said.

‘O’ course. He gets a lift to the station. One of my blokes gets on the London train with him. Another picks him up at Fenchurch Street. Routine stuff. Doesn’t need a Chief
Inspector.’

Thesiger held out a packet of Craven A.

‘No thanks, sir. I’ve given up. Strictly a pipe man from now on.’

‘Given up?’ Thesiger could not keep the astonishment out of his voice. People didn’t give up cigarettes. They either smoked or they didn’t. ‘Ah well . . . tell me,
Chief Inspector. Do I detect a sour note in your use of the word “routine”?’

‘All I meant was that anyone could do it. I meant no offence.’

‘And I took none. But it does seem to me that you think all this is a bit beneath you.’

‘Not exactly. But it’s hardly using me to the full, is it? When I was seconded to the unit I thought it was because I’d fluent German, because I knew Germans . . . and
I’ve picked up more than a smattering of Polish and Czech in the last four years.’

‘Anyone could do what you do?’

‘Doesn’t take what I know to tail a few blokes around London.’

‘Then we must see if we can’t make better use of your talents.’

It was the kind of remark Stilton had become used to from the toffs. Three years a serving Tommy and almost
thirty as a copper had rubbed in the deferential nature of the Forces. Merit had little or nothing to do with it. You were born to lead or you weren’t. And Stilton wasn’t. It all came
down to class. Age – he was fifteen or more years older than Thesiger – and experience – he’d been in the last war, when Theisger was still a schoolboy – counted for
little. It was the sort of thing that took a war to change. The first year of Walter Stilton’s war had been routine. The second year, since Dunkirk, had been one of the best of his life
– working for Thesiger as a ‘spycatcher’. He and Thesiger got on very well. He’d rarely met a toff less strait-jacketed by his class. They understood one another very well.
Thesiger could drop the upper crust habitual allusions and ellipses of speech to talk plainly when he had to. And still it left Stilton frustrated. Thesiger’s generosity of spirit was
sincere, as sincere as his material generosity (he was the sort of bloke who’d share his flask and sandwiches with you), but it was unlikely to be followed up by any action. He’d
interrogate Jerry – Stilton and blokes like Stilton would traipse after them in the pouring rain noting their movements in little black notebooks.