London Match (30 page)

'You're becoming paranoid, Bernard,' Bret said. He smiled to show me how calm he was remaining. 'Even if he is an inexperienced kid from college — and I know kids from college are not high on your all-time Hit Parade — the messages he'll leave with maids, au pair girls and receptionists at country hotels won't explicitly describe our operation.'

He was a sarcastic bastard. 'For God's sake, grow up, Bret,' I said. 'Can't you see that a flurry of activity like that — messages being left in all sorts of non-departmental places for the urgent attention of senior MI5 staff — is enough to compromise your operation?'

'I don't agree,' he said, but he stopped smiling.

'Some smart newspaper man is likely to get the smell of that one. If that happens, it could blow up in your face.'

'In
my
face?'

'Well, what are those messages going to be saying? They are going to be saying that we're just about to go blundering into matters that don't concern us. They're going to say we're stealing Five's jobs from them. And they'll be right.'

'This isn't a hot tip on a horse; they'll be sensible,' said Bret.

'It's going to be all over town,' I said. 'You're putting your man into danger, real danger. Forget it.'

'Ml5 are not going to let newsmen get hold of secrets like this.'

'You hope they're not. But this isn't
their
secret, it's ours. What will they care if your Boy Scout comes a cropper? They'll be delighted. It would teach us a lesson. And why would they be so fussy about newspaper men getting the story? If it made headlines that said we were treading on their territory, it would suit their book.'

'I'm not sure I want to listen to this any more,' said Bret huffily. This was Bret getting ready for his knighthood — loyal servant of Her Majesty and all that. 'I trust MI5 to be just as careful with secret information as we are.'

'So do I, if it's
their
information. But this is not their information. This is a message — a message from you; not a message about one of their operations but about one of ours. What's more, it was given out on a Friday evening in what is a transparent trick to hamper any efforts they might make to stop us. How can you believe they'll play it your way and help you score?'

'It's too late now,' said Bret. He took two ice cubes from a container that was painted to look like a side drum from the band of the Grenadier Guards, complete with battle honours, and dropped them into his drink. Bret could make one drink last a long time. It was a trick I'd never mastered. He offered ice to me but I shook my head. 'It's all approved and signed for. There's not going to be any pussyfooting about trying to infiltrate them. There's an office in Cambridge which contains files on the whole network. It's coded, Stinnes says, coded to read like normal office files. But that shouldn't be a big problem. We're putting a man in there this evening. He's coming here to meet you.'

'Beautiful, Bret,' I said sarcastically. 'That's all I need — for your tame gorilla to get a good look at me before he gets rolled in a carpet and shipped to Moscow.'

Bret permitted himself a ghost of a smile. 'It's not that kind of operation, Bernard. This is the other side of the job. We'll be in England. If there's any interference, we'll be putting the handcuffs on those bastards, not the other way around.'

I weakened. I should have remained cynical about it, but I weakened because I began to feel that it might prove as simple as Bret Rensselaer said it would be. 'Okay. What do you want me to do?'

'Run him up to Cambridge and play nurse.' So that was it. I should have guessed that you don't get invited to Bret's for nothing. My heart sank into my guts. I felt the way some of those girls must have felt when they realized there were more works of art that lined the stairs all the way to Bret's bedroom. He saw it in my face. 'Did you think I was going to try to do it myself?'

'No, I didn't.'

'If you really think I can do it, Bernard, I'll try.' He was restless. He got up again and poured more gin for me. It was only then that I realized that I'd gulped the rest of my drink without even noticing that I'd done so. 'But I think our man deserves the best help we can find for him. And you're the best.'

He went back and sat down. I didn't reply. For a moment we both sat there in that beautiful room thinking our own thoughts. I don't know what Bret was thinking of, but I was back to trying to decide what his relationship with my wife had been.

At one time I'd felt sure that Fiona and Bret had been lovers. I looked at him. She was right for him, that very beautiful woman from a rich family. She was sophisticated in a way that only wealthy people can be. She had the confidence, stability, and intellect that nature provides for the first-born child.

The suspicion and jealousy of that time, not so long ago, had never gone away, and my feelings coloured everything I had to do with Bret. There was little chance I would ever discover the truth of it, and I was not really and truly sure that I wanted to know. And yet I couldn't stop thinking about them. Had they been together in this room?

'I'll never understand you, Bernard,' he said suddenly 'You're full of anger.'

I felt like saying that that was better than being full of shit, but in fact I didn't think that of Bret Rensselaer. I'd thought about him a lot over the past few months. First because I thought he was jumping into bed with Fiona, and now because the finger of treason was pointed at him. It all made sense. Put it all together and it made sense. If Bret and Fiona were lovers, then why not co-conspirators too?

I had never faced an official enquiry, but Bret had tried to make me admit that I'd been in league with my wife to betray the Department's secrets. Some traces of the mud he'd thrown had stuck to me. That would be a damned smart way to cover his own tracks. No one had ever accused Bret of being a co-conspirator with Fiona. No one had even suspected that they were having a love affair. No one, that is, except me. I had always been able to see how attractive he'd be for her. He was the sort of man I'd had as rivals when I'd first met her; mature, successful men, not Oxbridge graduates trying to hack a career in a merchant bank, but men much older than Fiona, men with servants and big shiny cars who paid for everything by just signing their name on the bill.

It was very dark in the room now and there was a growl of thunder. Then more thunder. I could see the clock's brass pendulum catching the light as it swung backwards and forwards. Bret's voice came out of the gloom. 'Or is it sadness? Anger or sadness — what's bugging you, Samson?'

I didn't want to play his silly undergraduate games, or sophisticated jet-set games, or whatever they were. 'What time is this poor bastard arriving?' I said.

'No fixed time. He'll be here for tea.'

That's great,' I said. Tea! Earl Grey no doubt, and I suppose Bret's housekeeper would be serving it in a silver teapot with muffins and those very thin cucumber sandwiches without crusts.

'You talked to Lange,' he said. 'And he bad-mouthed me the way he always does? Is that it? What did he say this tune?'

'He was talking about the time you went to Berlin and made him dismantle his networks.'

'He's such a crook. He's still resenting that after all these years?'

'He thinks you dealt a blow to a good system.'

The "Berlin System", the famous "Berlin System" that Lange always regarded as his personal creation. It was Lange who ruined it by bringing it into such discredit that London Central sent me there to salvage what I could from it.'

'Why you?' I said. 'You were very young.'

'The world was very young,' said Bret. 'Britain and the US had won the war. We were going to be arm in arm together while we won the peace too.'

'Because you were American?'

'Right. An American could look at what was going on in Berlin and be impartial about it. I was to be the one who went there and unified the Limeys and the Yanks and made them into a team again. That was the theory; the fact was that the only unification came from the way they all hated and despised me. The Berlin intelligence community got together just to baffle and bamboozle me. They led me a merry dance, Bernard; they made sure that I couldn't get to the people I wanted, get the documents I wanted, or get competent office help. I didn't even have a proper office, did you know that? Did Lange tell you how he made sure that no German would work for me?'

'The way I heard it, they gave you a big apartment and two servants.'

'Is that the way Lange tells it? By now he probably even believes it. And what about the Russian princess?'

'He mentioned her.'

'The real story is that those bastards made sure the only office space I had was shared with a clerk who went through my files every day and told them what I was doing. When I tried to get other accommodation they blocked every move I made. Finally I contacted a friend of my mother's. She wasn't young, she wasn't a princess, and she had never been in Russia, although her mother was distantly related to White Russian aristocracy. She had a big apartment in Heerstrasse, and by offering half of it to me she was able to prevent it being commandeered for use by some other Allied military outfit. I used that place as an office and I got her neighbour to do my typing.'

'Lange said she was a Nazi, your friend.'

'She'd lived in Berlin right through the war and her folks had been murdered by the Bolsheviks, so I guess she didn't go around waving any red flags. But she had close friends among the July twentieth conspirators. When Hitler was blown up in 1944 she was taken in for questioning by the SD. She spent three nights in the cells at Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. It was touch and go whether they sent her to a camp, but there were so many suspected persons to be detained that they grew short of cells to hold them, so they let her go.'

'There was a row about Lange's brother-in-law,' I said.

'Damn right there was. If Lange had learned how to keep his head down and his mouth shut, maybe it wouldn't have blown up like that. But Lange has to be the big man on campus. And he particularly resented me because I was a fellow American. He wanted the exclusive title of tame Yank, and he'd got a lot of leeway playing that role. The office let him get away with all kinds of tricks because they thought it was just another example of good old Yankee know-how and the unconventional American way of tackling things.'

'So he resigned?'

'It was tough for him, but he'd been told enough times about that woman he married. There was no way I could ignore an SS man living in Lange's parlour while I was lowering the boom on guys who'd done nothing more than joining the party to save their schoolteaching jobs.'

I didn't answer. I tried to reconcile Bret's version of these events with Lange's burning hatred. 'They were not good times,' I said.

'Did you ever hear of CROWCASS?' said Bret.

'Vaguely. What is it?'

'Right after the fighting ended, SHAEF started building a file of suspected war criminals. CROWCASS was the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Maybe it was a muddle, the way everyone said it was afterwards, but at the time CROWCASS was gospel, and Lange's brother-in-law had his name on that registry.'

'Did Lange know that?'

'Sure he did.'

'When did he find out?'

'I don't know when he found out, but he knew about the brother-in-law having served in the Waffen-SS before he got married. I know that because I found in the file a copy of the letter he'd been sent warning him not to go ahead. And all ex-members of the SS and Waffen-SS were automatically arrested unless they'd already faced an enquiry and been cleared. But Lange didn't care about any of that. He was playing the American card again. He let the British think he'd got special dispensation from the Americans and vice versa. He's a slippery one; I guess you know that.'

'Didn't you know it?' I said.

'I know that, and I knew it then. But everyone was telling me what a wonderful network he was running. They wouldn't let me see anything he was producing, of course — security wouldn't permit. So I just had to take their word for it.'

'He brought us some good people. He'd been in Berlin before the war. He knew everybody. He still does.'

'So what was I to do?' said Bret defensively. 'His goddamned brother-in-law was running around with a
Kennkarte
that identified him as a payroll clerk with a building company. It had a denazification stamp. He 'liked to tell everyone he'd been a Navy medic. He was picked up brawling in a bar in Wedding. He was stinking drunk and still fighting when they took him downtown and threw him into the drunk tank. They put these drunks under the cold showers to cool them off, and a cop who'd got hit on the nose began wondering how this Navy medic came to have an SS blood-group tattoo under his arm.'