Horse Under Water (23 page)

‘Marvellous,’ said Ossie, ‘absolutely delicious.’

It was true. The jam doughnuts in the buffet at Marrakech station are among the best I have ever tasted.

‘You’ve got it?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Ossie. He tapped the canvas bag on the table. ‘Went like a dream. Just like you said. A puny little thing. The people who make shoddy safes like that should be locked up.’

‘You sent the message?’

‘I sent “Phase one complete. Commence Phase two. Stop. Eliminate Baker”, then they sent an acknowledgement.’ He smiled. ‘You think that Baix will think Baker means Baix when he intercepts the message?’

‘Unless he’s a bigger dope than I think he is. I’ve used a simple one-part code. I don’t know what else I can do to make it easy for him.’ Ossie chuckled again. He’d taken an unreasonable dislike to
Baix and loved the idea of him avoiding a nonexistent assassin.

‘How did it go with you?’ asked Ossie. ‘You keep looking at your watch; you weren’t followed, were you?’

‘No. Train’s due in five minutes,’ I said; it was 2.55 p.m.

‘You won’t drag it in any quicker by quizzing the watch. Tell me about the talk you had with the old nut. And have a doughnut. You are sure you weren’t followed?’

‘I wasn’t followed.’ I took another doughnut and told Ossie about the conversation with da Cunha.

‘But that’s not true,’ Ossie told me at various places in the narrative.

‘If you are going to say “that’s not true” every time I say something that’s not true you’d better go and gargle now or wind up with a sore throat.’

‘Best liar I know, you are,’ said Ossie in great admiration. ‘And so that old blighter is really connected with the English Fascists.’

‘With English Fascists, French Fascists, Belgian Fascists and even German Fascists.’

‘So the Germans have them too,’ said Ossie, like he hadn’t been running his pork-sausage fingers through secrets for the last quarter of a century. ‘That stuff you invented about the message from London. I liked that. What did the message from London
really
say?’

I passed him the cable that Dawlish had sent me:

The long green modern train slid into the station. I helped Ossie with our luggage.

A man with a face like a half-eaten bar of Aero chocolate wanted money for showing us a seat on the almost deserted train. In exchange for my declining to play my part in this transaction he taught me some new Arabic verbs. The train pulled out of the neat little station of Marrakech. Ossie said, ‘That Baix, I’d love to see his face.’

‘That’s just what I’m trying to avoid,’ I said as I opened Ossie’s canvas bag. We both looked at the little radio transmitter that could talk to machines under the sea.

The long flexible blades cut the air above our heads. I tapped the pilot on the arm.

‘One more sweep,’ I said, ‘then we’ll return to the ship and try again tomorrow.’ He nodded.

We dropped towards the heavy sea and I watched the wave-tops, blunted by the downward thrust of air from the blades.

‘O.K., Chief,’ I shouted over my shoulder. Chief Petty Officer Edwards of H.M.S.
Vernon
leaned through the door and watched the ocean top.

‘Back a bit,’ Edwards shouted. It had always been a bomb-aimer’s joke, but now the pilot obediently brought the helicopter along a reciprocal course.

‘Just a floating piece of wood,’ Edwards’s voice said over the intercom. We moved on to the next square of the area search. Twelve miles away on the starboard side I could see the Portuguese coast at Cape Santa Maria. Through the grey sea ran black veins as the light fell across the contours of
the water. ‘Too dark now,’ I said, and Ossie switched off his radio and the cabin glowed with the green light of the instrument panel.

It was two and a half days before our effort was rewarded. Hours of ‘backing a bit’ over foamlashed pieces of flotsam and sliding over for a close look at a shoal of fish.

When we made contact the extreme long-wave radio set on Ossie’s knees – the one he had stolen from da Cunha’s safe – gave a ‘beep beep’ of response. The pilot held us steady. The wave-crests were inches under us.

‘Beep beep’: it was emitting a signal to us. Ossie was shouting over the intercom and I grabbed the diver’s rubber-clad arm and tried to go through his instructions all over again in thirty seconds flat. Edwards patted my hand and said, ‘It will be O.K., sir’, then like a demon king in a pantomime he was gone. Hands crossed, face lowered, he hit the water with a splash. Only now did I see the target he had dived at. The silver metal floating amid the waves shone here and there through the green vegetation. C.P.O. Edwards had the cable lashed around the big metal cylinder within ten minutes. The winch operator began to haul it up and brought it splashing and dripping into the cabin of the helicopter.

Dawlish had done his stuff. When the helicopter got back to the ship everything was ready and waiting – even a ration of rum for the still wet C.P.O. Edwards. I was in the captain’s day-cabin
with the cylinder; a Marine sentry was stationed outside and even the captain knocked before coming in to ask if there was anything more I required.

Two bolts had to be chiselled off, but that was only to be expected after more than a decade under the water. The light alloy panel came free to reveal a large compartment and give access for adjustments to the barometer, thermometer, hygrometer and the motors.

Every twelve hours this metal cylinder had surfaced and its voice had told da Cunha that it was still ‘alive and well’. Fernie Tomas had tried to ‘home’ on the signal, but failed to spot it before it descended to the sea bed again. Harry Kondit knew that his boat travelled twelve miles on each of da Cunha’s trips. ‘Down the coast’ he had said, because Harry Kondit thought he was the only man who kept rendezvous at sea.

I reached inside to where the instruments had once been, and found a slim metal tin with the Nazi eagle and the bright-red sealing wax. Before I opened it I sent for a jug of coffee and sandwiches. It was going to be a long task.

Christmas 1940

Dear Baron,

What a wonderful surprise to have your letter, it had taken nearly nine weeks to reach us. You may well wonder what the ‘state of mind’ is here in England. You would never recognize Number 20 now and it is like no other Christmas I care to remember. They have used the gardens for some sort of dump and five of the houses are full of Polish officers who are for ever shouting and singing. Gerald is in the Cameroons negotiating with the French, and Billy is with the Fleet, goodness knows where. We have only cook and Janet now to look after us and are ‘camping’ in the study and the gold room that you liked so much. We don’t go into London at all, as there is little petrol available and the trains are blacked out and quite filthy, and now they are talking about restricting restaurant meals. That Karl is having a wonderful time in Paris we have little doubt, how we all envy
him! You must send him my love when you next write.

How we agree with you about this dreadful war. The government here is completely dominated by these dreadful Labour Party people, and Sir B. is quite sure they are plotting with the Bolsheviks against the poor, gallant little Finns. At least, Daddy says, they are going to have the
Daily Worker
newspaper ‘put down’ next month. You say that if only we had an hour’s conversation together you are sure that we could help our countries in these days of internecine bitterness. You are right, and I must tell you that it is not as impossible as you seem to think. Lord C. is going to the United States in February and Miriam will be going with him. Surely it is not impossible that you should have to go to Lisbon on some pretence or other? You always were able to find excuses to satisfy Nanna at Goodwinds. Is Grandmama well? You know that Cyril is still at the same address in Zürich; I know I would love to see you again, it seems so long. Of course Helmut can use the house in Nice, the agent in the village has the keys, I only hope it hasn’t been damaged, but one never knows, the way the French have been behaving lately is past comprehension. Please write again soon, the news that you are well and still thinking of us has brought a breath of fresh air to our dusty old lives.

Your true friend,
B
ESS

Sunday, 26th January, 1941
London

Dear Walter,

I shall ask you to burn this the moment that you have read it. Tell K.E.F. that he will
have
to supply
anything
from the factory in Lyon that you ask. Remind him that it wasn’t the French Resistance that have paid his wages for the last ten months. I want the chimneys smoking again at the earliest possible moment
or I will sell the whole plant.

Would your Wehrmacht people be interested in buying the place? Should you be interested I will appoint you as the agent at the usual rate. Surely a factory in the Vichy Free Zone could be useful in the light of this ‘Trading with the Enemy Statutory List’?

I think these people here are beginning to realize which way the wind has blown and already a little of the bravado has disappeared. You can mark my words that should your fellows actually come into conflict with the Soviets we British will not be long in understanding what must be done.

Our plant in Latvia has gone down the drain now that they have been subverted by the Bolshies and I can only say how glad I am that the plans for the Bukovina place didn’t materialize.

I am forming a ‘Brains Trust’ (as they say these days) of people who see eye to eye with me on these points so that when the country finally comes to its senses we will be in a position to do something about it.

You are right about Roosevelt’s crowd; now that he’s safely in for the third time they will foment the spiteful retaliatory attitude of the socialist mob here. However, Roosevelt isn’t America you know, and as long as your people don’t do anything foolish (like dropping a bomb on New York) only a small number will be willing to pick up a gun if it means putting down a cash register.

Burn this now,

Yours,

H
ENRY

Perhaps they are not typical of the letters that I took from the cylinder. I spread them all out across the table. Some were written under engraved headings, some on paper torn from exercise books. What did they all have in common?

I shook the tiny tin of silica gel crystals that had helped keep the documents dry and I flipped through the yellow-paged, rough-printed book of names and addresses. I wondered if I would have reasoned that these things were among the great treasures of the modern world. I decided that I wouldn’t have, but then da Cunha was more than a little dotty. Da Cunha who could sit and lecture me about the sanctity of the middle classes.

When Nazi Germany was falling about its creator’s ears the bigwigs were busy making a grab for a souvenir of something they had known and loved – like money.

Some liked big pictures and they took old master paintings; some liked little pictures and they
took stamp collections; some liked luxury, they took gold; some liked
la belle époque,
they took heroin; but one had developed a taste for power. He took these letters.

When the Wehrmacht was straining its eyes to peer through the Channel mist, the order went out to form a British Puppet Government. German diplomatic circles were asked to contact likely sympathizers, using the individual approach as far as possible. So it was that earnest, charming, personal letters reached earnest, charming people who might be prepared to be a Member of Parliament in the Nazi-backed National Socialist Government that was to have its seat in the Channel Islands until London was made ready.

These letters were filed when winter set in. They were filed again at the end of the next summer, when letters about puppet governments were addressed to earnest, charming Bessarabians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. They had collected dust until, one day in 1945, a man realized that these letters from influential people might make life easier in an unfriendly world.

Fregattenkapitän Knobel, a scientific officer of the German Navy, took his packet of letters and his tin of heroin and went aboard the Type XXI U-boat at Cuxhaven. Da Cunha knew all about the meteorological buoys and he spent an hour sealing his package of blackmail ammunition into the canister and re-fixing the waterproof seal. Off Albufeira he ordered the commander of the U-boat
to drop the canister, and then da Cunha went ashore in a rubber dinghy. The U-boat captain lost a dinghy and very soon after he lost his life, for the U-boat foundered with all hands.

What happened will probably never be known. Few Type XXIs ever came into contact with water. Most of them were packed tightly together, half-completed, on the slipways of Northern Germany, when the Allied armies reached them. As far as I know there isn’t a whole XXI anywhere in the world, unless we count the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean just off Albufeira.

Tomas realized that a U-boat full of high-ranking Nazis would contain valuable loot – if you don’t mind probing around rotting bodies. How much Tomas minded is another thing we shall never know. When he removed the canisters of heroin he needed help in disposing of it. He couldn’t have found a more suitable helpmate than H.K., but they both stayed clear of da Cunha’s preserves.

Tomas never lost his respect for da Cunha. He stiffened when da Cunha came near and answered him in the short monosyllabic tones of the German Navy. Like all Germans, da Cunha was able to master accentless Portuguese. How much Tomas knew about the cylinder is difficult to decide, but he guessed enough to blackmail at least one person named therein – Smith. Although Tomas went with da Cunha to check the meteorology cylinder every six months, until our voyage
together he had made no attempt to retrieve the cylinder from the ocean bed. Tomas had only a radio receiver; from da Cunha we had stolen a transmitter which would
summon
the cylinder from the sea bed rather than just receive a signal every twelve hours. Tomas rushed to get the cylinder when he discovered that da Cunha had fled (as H.K. guessed he would).

Why did da Cunha keep the papers on the sea bed? He was a blackmailer. Smith was ‘persuaded’ to equip a research lab. for him. Smith was ‘persuaded’ to have me recalled from Albufeira. How many other people were persuaded to do things?

I took the file marked
OSTRA
. (An ‘oyster’: lying at the bottom of the sea with a pearl inside, that was da Cunha’s cylinder.) I added the letters I had taken from the buoy. They made a small mountain on Dawlish’s bright mahogany desk.

‘So this is the lot,’ Dawlish said. He sniffed contemplatively.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d guess that most of these people have donated money to the “Young Europe Movement” at one time or another.’

‘Jolly good,’ said Dawlish, ‘I knew you would manage.’

‘Oh sure,’ I said, ‘especially when you wanted to cancel the whole operation.’

Dawlish looked at me over his spectacles, which can get to be very irritating.

‘Furthermore,’ I said, ‘you knew that that girl was employed by the American Narcotics Bureau, and you didn’t tell me.’

‘Yes,’ said Dawlish blandly, ‘but she was a very low-echelon employee and I had no wish to inhibit intercourse among the group.’ We looked blankly at each other for two or three minutes.

‘Social,’ Dawlish amended.

‘Of course,’ I agreed. Dawlish disembowelled his pipe with a penknife.

‘When will Smith be arrested?’ I asked.

‘Arrested?’ said Dawlish. ‘What an extraordinary question; why would he be arrested?’

‘Because he is a corner-stone of an international Fascist movement dedicated to the overthrow of democratic government.’ I said it patiently, even though I knew that Dawlish was deliberately leading me on.

Dawlish said, ‘You surely don’t imagine that they can put everyone who answers that description in jail. Where would we find room for them, and besides, where would the Bonn government get another Civil Service?’ He gave a sardonic smile and tapped the pile of documents. ‘Our friends here are much more useful where they are – as long as they know that H.M. Government have this little pile in Kevin Cassel’s cellar.’

He opened the drawer of his desk and produced an even more enormous file of documents. Across the front it said ‘Young Europe Movement’ in
Alice’s fuse-wire handwriting, and was bulging with months of work that Dawlish had never even told me about.

‘You didn’t understand your role, my boy,’ he said in his smug voice; ‘we didn’t want you to
discover
anything. Somehow we knew that you would make them do something indiscreet.’