Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens (24 page)

“Ah,” said Martin. “I’ve been waiting for you to put in an appearance.”

He was propped up in bed, in a private room in the Reading General Infirmary, and looked reasonably comfortable.

“I’ve brought you some grapes,” said Mr. Calder. “And some news. The police are holding Major Porter, on a charge of shooting at you with intent to kill. It’s a very serious charge. It’s his gun, registered in his name. If there are any prints on it, they’ll be his. And they found it in the drawer of his desk.”

“Of course they did. I saw you put it there.”

“I told them,” said Mr. Calder, without taking any notice of this interruption,” that I was a guest at the club. That I happened to be in the corridor, heard the sound of a violent quarrel, followed by shots and looked in. You were slumped in a chair with the blood dripping down your arm onto the floor. I saw the major hurriedly stowing the gun away in the drawer of his desk. His idea being, no doubt, to hide it before the police burst in.”

“And that’s your story?”

“That’s my story,” agreed Mr. Calder. “I’d be interested to know what yours was.”

“I haven’t told my story yet,” said Martin with a grin. “Too shocked to answer any questions. Anyway, as one professional to another, I thought I’d have a word with you first.”

“And what made you think that I was a professional?”

“When a man takes care to hit you in the one spot that doesn’t signify a lot,
and winks at you when he’s doing it,
I say to myself, he’s a pro. He’s planning a set-up. So I wait to see what it is.”

Mr. Calder said, “I’m relieved that I didn’t misjudge you. Here it is. If you tell the same story as I do, the major’s got no chance. He’ll get seven to ten years. And I’ll get the charge against your brother withdrawn.”

“I thought they were all bloody incorruptible.”

“So they are. But it’s sometimes possible to persuade the authorities that a certain course would be in the public interest.”

“You were taking a quite unjustifiable risk,” said Mr. Fortescue coldly.

“No risk, really, sir. I understand people like Martin Croft perfectly. We’ve got a lot in common, actually. Offer him a bargain which looks sensible all round and he’ll take it every time. Debit side, a bullet in the arm. Credit, his brother let off the hook. Credit for us, the major put away for a long stretch.”

“What will Martin do when he comes out of hospital?”

“I understand that he and his brother have been offered a job by a gambling syndicate in Mexico. Martin has already accepted. He says he finds England too dangerous.”

“The trouble with Intelligence work nowadays,” said Mr. Calder, “is that it has become obsessed with gadgets. In the old days, an operator who was told to obtain some piece of information went to the most likely source and, by the appropriate expenditure of cash or cunning—”

“Force or fraud,” agreed Mr. Behrens sleepily.

“Exactly. He brought home the bacon. But how does your modern operator work? He sits on his backside all day, in a huge room—” Mr. Calder demonstrated the size of the room by spreading his arms and knocked a tobacco jar off the table. Fortunately it fell on top of Rasselas who was asleep on the floor beside his chair. Rasselas looked reproachful. Mr. Calder replaced the jar.

“A huge room, crammed with machines. Screens linked to radar trackers and listening posts, wireless sets in touch with patrolling spy planes and submarines, and bank upon bank of computers to digest and analyse and classify the unceasing flow of incoming information, most of it pointless—”

“Talking of banks,” said Mr. Behrens who was listening to one word in ten of what Mr. Calder was saying, “I had a call from Fortescue this morning. He wants to see me tomorrow.”

“Both of us?”

“No. Just me.”

“Good. Rasselas and I have other plans for tomorrow.”

The great dog thumped his tail in agreement. The July weather was much too fine to make the thought of London attractive.

“He said that it was a problem which called for the intellectual outlook.”

“It’s probably a new and even more complicated computer,” said Mr. Calder.

Mr. Fortescue received Mr. Behrens in his sanctum, invited him to be seated, and said, “A fortnight ago the Home Secretary got a letter from Professor Wilfred Pitt-Hammersley of St. Ambrose College, Cambridge. It stated that Sir Boris Wykes is not Sir Boris Wykes at all, but an East German spy called Stefan Thugutt.”

When Mr. Behrens had absorbed this extraordinary announcement he said, “I suppose the Home Secretary does get a lot of letters from cranks and maniacs.”

“Would you describe Pitt-Hammersley as a crank or a maniac?”

“It’s at least ten years since I met him. We worked together on the Jansen Enquiry. I thought he was a little eccentric, but certainly not crazy. He must be getting on now—”

“Seventy-four next April. It is true that when senescence sets in at one of our great universities, it is apt to be overlooked.”

“You mean that a lot of the dons are a bit off-beat, so one more doesn’t stick out?”

“Do you know Sir Boris?”

“I know of him, of course. He’s the Government whizz-kid in charge of our Early Warning System.”

“Wykes,” said Mr. Fortescue, “is not a kid. He was born in 1927 and is now forty-three years old. He is one of the most eminent experts in the country in the fields of radar and applied electronics. At present he is in charge, under the Chiefs of Staff Air Defence Committee, of the chain of Early Warning Stations in East Anglia which we operate in conjunction with the Americans.”

“Then I can understand the alarm and despondency if there did happen to be any truth in Pitt-Hammersley’s statement. But there isn’t, is there? I mean, Wykes must have been doubly vetted before he was allowed anywhere near such a vital slice of our defences.”

“Trebly. Once in the normal way, when he came to this country from Poland. His real name, by the way, is Wycech. He changed it to Wykes when he was naturalised in 1952. He was positively vetted when he came into Government service three years later and rechecked under the special procedure when he started working in Early Warning in 1960.”

“Special procedure? That means that someone actually went to Poland and talked to relatives and friends?”

“Dick Raphael did it. It was one of the last jobs he did for us. He went to Sweden and Poland.”

“Sweden?”

“Wycech’s father was a Polish Army officer. He was one of the victims of the massacre at Katyn. Boris was sixteen at the time. His mother smuggled him away to Sweden. He spent the rest of the war working in the Nor-Jensen factory. The boy showed promise, even at that age, as an engineer and a scientist. As soon as the war was over he went back to Poland to look for his family, which consisted, as he thought, of mother, two older brothers and two nephews. It seems they were in Warsaw at the time of the abortive Bor-Komarowski rising. The four boys were shot by the Germans. The mother died of disease or malnutrition in a camp soon afterwards. Boris’ only surviving relative was in England. Squadron-Leader Andreas Wycech, holder of the Polish Order of Merit and the British DSO and DEF.”

“I thought the name rang a bell,” said Mr. Behrens. “Didn’t he lead the low-level raid on St. Nazaire?”

“He was a very gallant man,” said Mr. Fortescue. “He was shot down in the last months of the war, in Italy. When young Boris found he had no family left in Poland, and made up his mind to come to England – that was at the end of 1946 – he was well received on account of his uncle’s services to this country. He was awarded a visiting studentship at Oxford and produced a thesis on electronic detection which impressed everyone so much with its practical possibilities that it was at once put on the Restricted Index. The rest of Boris’ history is public knowledge. Apart from a two-year attachment at Columbia he had never been out of England since. Certainly he has never shown any desire to revisit Poland.”

So far Mr. Fortescue had been speaking without reference to his papers. Now he cast an eye down on the dossier in front of him.

“What else? He’s a bachelor. He lives in a converted farmhouse near Thetford, which is convenient for his work. His only close friends are intellectuals and scientists. His hobbies are punting and canoeing. He has no known vices, except hard work.”

“In fact,” said Mr. Behrens, “his life is an open book for all to read. And has been for a quarter of a century. Can anyone be taking this seriously?”

“We thought it right to inform the Americans. They have assigned one of their men to the job, Ebenezer Thom, who happens, fortunately, to be an expert in linguistics.”

“How on earth does linguistics come into it?”

“Pitt-Hammersley is also a linguistics man. He holds the Dexter Chair of English Language and Literature and has managed to combine it with a study of the modern science of lingual interpretation.”

“By computer?”

“Using a computer, certainly. Why?”

“Just a thought,” said Mr. Behrens. “Please go on.”

“In 1938 Pitt-Hammersley was a tutor at St. Ambrose, and this East German boy, Stefan Thugutt, studied under him. Pitt- Hammersley was so impressed by the quality of his work that he kept copies of everything Stefan wrote. The other day, he happened to be reading a collection of the scientific papers of Sir Boris Wykes, and says that he was immediately struck by certain stylistic and constructional similarities between them and the work of young Stefan. He submitted both sets of documents to a full computerised analysis, and decided that, without any doubt they came from the same hand.”

“Although one lot of papers was written more than thirty years before the other.”

“Your basic linguistic periphrases are, I understand, like your finger-prints. Once formed, they don’t change with age.”

“Didn’t I read somewhere the other day that these linguistic boys had decided that Shakespeare didn’t write half his own plays?”

“There are cranks at work in every scientific discipline,” said Mr. Fortescue. “I have mentioned your name to the Warden, Dr. Lovell. He is very willing to lodge you at the college. Being vacation time there will not be many dons or students in residence. Professor Thorn is there already. He will give you any necessary technical help. I understand, by the way, that he likes to be addressed as Ben.”

Mr. Behrens was as nearly speechless as he had ever found himself in his dealings with Mr. Fortescue. He said, “You want me to go and stay at St. Ambrose’s so that I can decide whether one of the senior dons is cuckoo?”

“That is, roughly, the position,” agreed Mr. Fortescue blandly. “It is not, of course, the only step we are taking in the matter. I intend to send one of our men to Sweden and Poland to recheck Raphael’s work.”

“Send Calder,” said Mr. Behrens. “He was telling me only yesterday that in
real
intelligence work legs were more useful than computers.”

Dinner at the High Table had been agreeable, and six of them were now gathered companionably in the Warden’s room cracking walnuts and sampling his port and madeira. On the Warden’s right sat the massive Mrs. Hebrang, Professor of Far Eastern Languages; on his left Ebenezer Thom, a solemn Bostonian. On Mr. Behren’s right was the stooping, grey-haired figure of Professor Pitt-Hammersley, and opposite him Michael Mitos, bald and cheerful and understood to specialise in Eastern European languages.

The conversation, so far, had not been as alarming as Mr. Behrens had feared. It had dealt with the ballistics of fast bowling, the Government commission on monopolies, the comparative power of Trade Unions in England and America, on which Ben Thom had had some enlightening comments to make, and on fishing.

Michael Mitos was talking about fishing now. He said, “It has been ruined by your English upper classes with their passion for exercise. Fishing is intended by nature to be a static pursuit. You visualise the heron at the pool, motionless as the branch of an old tree? Only the English could have turned it into a game, where you race up and down the stream, hurling in a fly with the action of an over-arm bowler—”

“You mean that you fish with
bait
?” said the Warden. He sounded slightly horrified.

“Certainly, Warden. Sometimes a worm. Sometimes a piece of fat bacon. I sit on the landing stage at the foot of my garden. I watch the river flowing by. I think long thoughts about life. Occasionally a fish attaches itself to my hook. I reel it in, cook it and eat it.”

“I agree,” said Mrs. Hebrang, “that fishing bores, with their pet flies, are almost as bad as golf bores with their pet clubs, but that is not a criticism of the sport. It is a criticism of their own limited mentality.”

Mr. Behrens had been devoting only half of his mind to the conversation. The other half was trying to work out how soon he could organise a private talk with Pitt-Hammersley without it appearing too obvious to the others. He was spared the trouble. As he rose to go Pitt-Hammersley said, “We were talking about Government commissions. You remember that affair we were engaged in together, Behrens?”

“The Jansen Enquiry?”

“Yes. I always wondered if anyone took any steps to implement our recommendations.”

“In a number of details only, I believe.”

“Perhaps you could join me in my room for a nightcap. I wouldn’t want to bore everyone with such a specialised topic. Right? Come along then.”

Pitt-Hammersley led the way to his room, lit the gas fire, emptied a chair by escalading a pile of books which were on it onto the floor, drew up a second chair and invited his guest to be seated. Then he said, “Of course, you don’t want to talk about Jansen. What a silly man he was! You want to talk about my letter.”

“Then the Warden has told you why I’m here?”

“No. But you’re more famous than you think you are. I had dinner not long ago at the Dons-in-London, and Sands-Douglas pointed you out to me. I suppose the Home Secretary has had you sent down to see if I’m mad.” Pitt-Hammersley emitted a cackle. “I’ve known Willie since he was up here himself. That was when he came back from the war. I’ve never had a high opinion of his mental powers, but I suppose a thick skin is more use in politics than a good brain. Right?”