Between Silk and Cyanide (51 page)

'Try not to make too much of a nuisance of yourself, old chap…'

Old chap stood up. 'Brigadier, if you don't believe that your agents' traffic is wide open to cryptographic attack, could you please provide me with a blackboard, risk wasting an hour of your valuable time, allow me to prove to you how vulnerable it is.' End of meeting.

Twenty-four hours later I was too tired, torpid and listless to care about anything. Nor did I need to worry any more about making a nuisance of myself. I simply didn't have the energy. I attributed the improvement to the change of climate, and to Cairo's infectious attitude of 'What happens will happen'.

It was only when I could no longer distinguish a WOK from a LOP or a coder from a code-book that I realized that I'd picked up a bug, and that it was making itself at home in its new accommodation.

I was given an injection by a medically qualified pig-sticker and an even sharper one by a bespectacled lady who approached the desk as if about to claim alimony. She informed me that she was Brigadier Keble's secretary, and that I was to report to him in an hour to give a demonstration. She didn't say of what, but added without much enthusiasm that she would return and collect me.

I managed to encode two messages and must have dozed off because when I opened one eye the coders were tittering and the bespectacled lady was beckoning to me from the doorway.

Trying to keep pace with her as she strode down the corridors was like crossing the Gobi Desert carrying a camel. She escorted me into what she described as the 'lecture room', where twenty or so uniformed tribesmen were clustered around camp-fires which turned out to be desks. I glimpsed Keble's red tabs shining like traffic lights signalling stop. A blue blur on one side of him crystallized into a naval commander, and a brown one on the other side into Dansey and Chalk. The haloes at the back were groups of coders flanked by their supervisors.

Mounting a mile-long platform an inch at a time, I confronted a large Nubian with crossed arms, which turned out to be a blackboard. He had coloured chalks on his person where lesser men had testicles and I wrote my messages on his chest in block capitals which were twice their normal size as I had half my normal confidence.

I then left the room completely. I was in the Quirinale with Mallaby, in Peenemünde with Duus Hansen, in Duke Street with Tommy and in Park West being cosseted.

I had no idea what I said. I heard the phrase 'You cairo-practitioners' and knew I was accusing them of something but wasn't sure what. I also heard someone who sounded like me saying, 'No agent must stay on the air a second longer than necessary,' and thoroughly agreed with him.

A few hundred bewilderments later I heard suggestions being called out from all around the room which either meant I was being told to fuck off or that I'd reached that point in the lecture where I invited the audience to become cryptographers.

I found myself replacing the chalk, and realized that the messages had been broken and that I must have given the congregants some help or they'd still be floundering. I knew that I was, but they were clearly waiting for me to build to a climax.

But with what?

Remembering past successes, a sure sign of ageing, I told them about the first agent I'd briefed who'd been as frightened of going into the field as I'd been of meeting him, who was convinced that he'd make mistakes in his coding, and who'd recited his poem to me if it were a personal appeal to his Home Station.

I spoke on his behalf. It began:

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow…

I'd ended:

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day,
Be near me.

The final 'Be near me' was mine, and I hoped that Tennyson would forgive me.

I stumbled off the platform, and suddenly found myself in Keble's office, wondering who'd carried me there.

Giving me no indication of whether the past hour had been a disaster, he instructed me to write a full report on agents' cipher which must be presented to him no later than forty-eight hours before I left Cairo (my departure was set for 3 September, five days away). His secretary would type the report but I must allow her time to finish it as she was extremely busy with important correspondence. He then returned to his own.

When I staggered back to the code room expecting to be greeted with titters, the girls ignored me altogether.

They were far too busy trying to break an indecipherable.

The pig-sticking doctor must have been better than I thought because a third of the way through the report I understood what I was writing. It was finished on the 29th, and typed on the 30th by the bespectacled lady. Despite my conscientious attempts to cut it (if an author's ever are), it was thirty-five pages long.

It contained a list of security precautions which should be introduced immediately, and cited twenty examples of traffic which must be considered blown if the enemy cryptographers' commitments allowed them to attack it. The case for adopting WOKs and LOPs took up most of the space.

I'd made no attempt to criticize the coders or the Signals Office staff as I'd misassessed their lassitude, and what I'd diagnosed as 'gyppy-head' was really 'gyppy-tummy'. I'd also failed to understand the complexity of Cairo's traffic.

Keble's secretary instructed me to submit the report to him the following morning.

He was alone and offered me a lunchtime drink, which was a bit early for me so I imagined I was Father.

The atmosphere changed when he saw the length of the report. Weighing it in his hand, he said he'd hoped to discuss it with me before I left Cairo but there was little chance he could read 'a damn encyclopaedia' before the 3rd. However, he'd do his best.

I thanked him for his drink and stood up to go, but he called me back. 'There's something I've been meaning to ask you.' He pointed at my solar topi, which always seemed to magnetize him. '"What are you hiding in that damn thing? A miniature recording machine?

'Yes, sir. My head.'

He seemed about to crown it with the 'damn encyclopaedia' but changed his mind at the last moment.

He was reading the report as I left.

Late that night I was pacing up and down a deserted lounge in Shephard's wondering whether I'd said too much in my report or not enough when someone fell into step behind me, and an unmistakable voice asked a question which was seldom addressed to me.

'Mind if I join you?'

It was the world-famous American who'd witnessed my striptease.

Without waiting for an answer, he kept pace with me for the next few miles. He then expressed concern for the carpet, and invited me to join him in a drink. Knowing his reputation for meanness, I checked that I had enough cash on me to pay for it, and sat down beside him wishing I could tell him that amongst his many admirers in London was one called Yeo-Thomas.

A group of American officers waved to him from the doorway and he waved back at them without inviting them to join us. They gave me the kind of look which said, 'What the hell's he doing with that little pisspot?'

It puzzled me too until I remembered he had a reputation for enjoying the company of oddballs.

By the time we were sharing a bottle of what was possibly wine he was calling me Leo but I insisted on addressing him by his surname (with a Mr attached), partly because I respected his talent but mainly because his surname was Mother's pet-name for Father. He'd probably charge her if he knew.

He elicited that I'd flown in from London, and I was certain he realized that I might expose a long list of things to him but not why I'd come to Cairo. He also elicited that my father had a bookshop called Marks & Co. in Charing Cross Road. 'I've heard about it from Charlie,' he said. 'He's the only friend I have who can read.'

'Charlie who?'

'Chaplin.' He looked at me apologetically as if he'd been caught cheating. It was one of his most famous expressions.

The fact that we were both Jews was no help in establishing a relationship between us (contrary to a widespread belief amongst the less fortunate), and as communication was his speciality Uted for him to explain what we had to share apart from a table.

With the timing that his 'friend Charlie' had publicly described as 'the best in the business' he told me that he'd be interested to hear from an Englishman what English Jews felt about the war, and what their main contribution was to the downfall of Hitler. His was making the troops laugh but I was being offered his serious side.

I told him that English Jews were well represented in the armed forces although many of us had branched out in certain other directions.

He leaned forward expectantly as I produced two examples of our diversification.

We'd created the best black market in the whole of Europe and those of us who were anxious to avoid military service, which I estimated to be not much more than 99 per cent, were responsible for a major scientific discovery. "With the help of two Harley Street doctors we'd found a way to deceive our medical examiners by producing sugar in our urine when ordered to pass water. And when we were told to wait two hours in the presence of an orderly and then pass some more, our urine retained its sugar! This ensured a medical certificate which guaranteed exemption from military service.

Although incredulity was his speciality, his disbelief was genuine, and he said that a small proportion of draft-dodgers could give the rest a bad name. He was sure the majority of Jews realized that this was their chance to fight the greatest anti-Semite of all time.

I agreed that Jews certainly recognized a chance when they saw one but pointed out that centuries of persecution had given us an atavistic instinct for self-preservation which was never more in evidence than in the First World War, which was also against an anti-Semite known as 'Kaiser Bill'.

'But you weren't even born then. Or is the light bad in here?'

Sensing I had his interest, I told him about my uncle, a distinguished bookseller who pretended to be deaf to avoid military service. He managed to fool the doctors but was called before a military tribunal for his final examination. While he was busy saying, 'Eh?' to whatever he was asked, someone fired a revolver. But he'd been warned about this and didn't flinch. As he turned to go, someone dropped a coin. He still didn't flinch. But when he reached the main hall someone quietly said, 'Got the time on you, Guv?' and he looked at his watch.

He then ran for his life, chased by two military policemen, he rushed into a nearby delicatessen. Although the owner didn't know him, he must have been familiar with his plight because he raised the lid of a herring-barrel, and uncle jumped in. He hid there for several hours until it was safe to emerge, and managed to avoid conscription but he stank for the rest of the war and on warm nights still does according to my aunt.

There was a long silence while he looked at me with his famous dead-pan expression. 'What was that line your uncle fell for?—"Got time on you, Guv?"'

I confirmed that he was word-perfect.

He then treated me to a display of mime thousands of his admirers would buy black-market tickets for. Appearing to stand up without moving from his chair, he recreated the entire proceedings for an invisible audience, giving uncle and the delicatessen owner lines they'd have been proud of. He was still in the herring-barrel when the door he lounge opened and his wife walked in.

He introduced me to her as his friend Mr Marks, and she examined loosely. 'I'm his wife,' she said. 'Mind if I ask you something?'

I could only nod. She was far more attractive at close quarters than when she appeared in public as her husband's stooge.

'Are you Groucho in disguise? No one else makes him laugh like that'

He held his nose as she pulled him from the herring-barrel, and I hoped she didn't take it personally.

I then witnessed a transformation which I found hard to believe. He began walking like Uncle as she led him away! But I hadn't told him that he affected a limp or that he leaned on a stick or that his right shoulder was lower than his left, though I'd seen it all in my mind when I'd described his examination.

I watched him stop suddenly in the middle of the room, though I couldn't see why, and heard her ask what he thought he was doing.

'Pissing sugar.'

He waved to me over his shoulder, and was still laughing as she led him away to perform elsewhere.

I knew he'd given me an experience which I could dine out on for the rest of my life if anyone would believe it. And if I had anyone to dine out with…

Thank you. Jack Benny, for giving me a month's holiday in the hour that we spent together. I shall be ready for Keble if he sends for me tomorrow.

Thank you for letting me be Groucho, though I'm a Marks without brothers and for listening with an inner ear when I spoke about Uncle.

It may help me with my briefings.

Thanks for not being ashamed of being proud of your race. I wish I had the courage to be one of the troops you're here to entertain but even you can't work miracles except on the stage.

Goodnight, Mr Benny. I hope we'll meet again, though I doubt if I shall know what to do for an encore.
[28]

And just for the record, the drinks were on him.

Brigadier Keble couldn't find time to discuss my report with me, and was unavailable when I called in to say goodbye to him (perhaps he didn't like breaking down in front of strangers). But as I left, the girls were tackling a batch of indecipherables, and presented me with some unsnappable braces, so my visit to Cairo wasn't a complete waste of time.

On the night of 3 September I returned to London and went straight to the HQ Signals Office to find out what had happened to Mallaby. By 29 August the silks still hadn't reached him, and he sent his message in his old poem confirming that he was safely installed in the Quirinale, and was ready to start operating his old set, which the Italians had returned to him. Massingham replied giving him his new poem, and he began using it at once.