Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) (6 page)

Thesiger sat down again – stretched out his legs, heels resting on the edge of his desk, talked through a puff of smoke, the cigarette waggling in his lips as he did so.

‘While we’re on the subject, Walter, I wanted to ask you – what news of our Jerry in Derby?’

This was a man professing to be a Belgian refugee. Thesiger and Stilton had spotted him at once and decided to turn him loose. Let him find his place in Britain and then use him to feed back
misinformation.

‘He’s snug as a bug in a rug at the Rolls Royce works. We’ve got him making up parts for what he thinks is a new fighter engine. It’s about as likely to fly as a pig.
Most of it’s made up from the plans for my wife’s sewing machine, blown up to twenty times the scale. At worst we might inadvertently give Krupps the idea for a two-ton
Singer.’

Thesiger grinned. Class notwithstanding, Stilton liked the man. It was largely thanks to him that MI5 could boast that there was not a single German spy in Britain they did not know about.

‘We can’t afford to lose Smulders. Not for a day. He’s not here to stay. He’s not a sleeper. He’s on something quite specific. If I knew what it was I’d not
have turned him loose. As soon as we know you’ll have to pull him in. There’s a risk of course – if Jerry has some way of communicating with him, then the minute he goes active
he’ll try and vanish. We must be ready for that, really we must.’

‘Do you mind if I stick in me two-penn’orth?’

‘By all means.’

‘He’s a twitchy sort of a bloke. One of the nurses came up behind him a bit too quiet like during his medical, and he rounded on her faster than a ferret after a rabbit. He’d
grabbed her by one arm before he checked himself. All smiles and apologies. She’d dropped her kidney dish. He helped the lass pick it up – was so charming to her he made the poor girl
bright red with embarrassment. But it was enough. A dead giveaway. He’s what you’d call Commando trained. A bare-handed killer.’

‘Perhaps we are wasting your talent. An assassin indeed. I’m inclined to agree. Assassin of whom, one wonders? They’d hardly send him across and expect him to take a crack at
Winston now would they?’

It took days to reach England. A hop across Vichy France in a Swiss plane to Lisbon, and a two day lay-up at the Avis Hotel while they waited for the irregular American Clipper
service to Poole, on the south coast of England. It was a mark of how much things had changed since the war, how much they’d changed since the fall of Holland and the loss of the KLM planes.
It had been a daily service, the flying boats had connected fairly neatly with the steamers – some of them even bounced on via the Azores to touch down in Bowery Bay NY, within sight and
sound of Manhattan – and you got your mail on time. Now there were queues of passengers, often more than a hundred, waiting day after day to cross the Atlantic or to skim the waves to
England. Ruthven-Greene argued their priority over anyone short of a general and bumped them up the list and on to the next available plane.

Cal liked Lisbon. Its steep hills and streetcars put him in mind of San Francisco, its sidewalk cafés of Paris. It was the antithesis of Zurich. Zurich was polite and businesslike in its
teutonic fashion. The factions made appointments to see one another and observed a diplomatic regularity. Lisbon was nothing if not irregular. Lisbon in May, Lisbon at peace, even if everyone else
was at war, was warm and sunny and a little careless. The warring sides passed each other in the street, rubbed shoulders in the bars and cafés, murdered one another in the alleys. It was
new to Cal, and visibly old hat to Ruthven-Greene. On the second afternoon he had rummaged in his pockets for a light, ignored the book of matches on the café’s kerbside table and
nipped across the street to bum a light from a man smoking outside the café opposite. Reggie had chatted to the man for several minutes before he came back, scarcely suppressing a grin.

‘Someone you know?’ Cal asked.

‘Yes. Old Dietrich from the German embassy. Usually pays to have a bit of a chat with the old sod. His boastfulness always gets the better of his discretion. One day soon they’ll
find his body floating in the harbour, and it won’t be because of anything our lot have done. He came out with an absolute corker. Asked me about this bunker Churchill’s having built
under Glamis castle in Scotland – courtesy of the Queen’s people, who own it – so he can hold the Jerries at Hadrian’s Wall after they’ve conquered England. I
don’t know where he gets such twaddle, but I rather wish I’d made it up myself.’

Cal loved flying. He felt safe in the fat body of the little Boeing Clipper. He didn’t get sick and there was something deeply reassuring about the throb of four robust-sounding
piston-engined propellers close to the ear.

He watched the Spanish coast fall away as they flew on to the Bay of Biscay, swinging westward to avoid the German-occupied French Atlantic ports – U-boat bases for the wolf packs that
harassed shipping.

An unsafe thought crossed his mind. An unsafe question passed his lips.

‘Supposing they fired on us?’

‘Eh?’ said Ruthven-Greene.

‘By mistake, I mean.’

‘Be the biggest mistake of the war so far. A diplomatic incident, old boy. It’d be like the last war – remember the sinking of the
Lusitania
? You and I would go down to
the Jerry guns in the noble cause of bringing Uncle Sam into the war lickety-split.’

After planes, Cal liked trains. They brought out the boy in him. Memories of long journeys across the wet flatlands of Pennsylvania and Maryland as his father shuffled the
family between New York and Washington. Fonder memories of backtracks in the heart of rural Virginia as his father indulged him rarely in pleasure trips on the Norfolk and Western – riding
for the fun of it – where trains the size of mountains moved at the speed of a horse and wagon, snaking through the countryside and crawling down Main Street in little towns for whom Main was
the only street.

From Poole to Waterloo he could see nothing. The blackouts were drawn tight, and the compartments packed. Passengers sat four toaside.

Soldiers in uniform sat on their kitbags in the corridors, and a group of weary, dishevelled NCOs played poker in the mail van. The station porters yelled out the names of the stations at the
tops of their voices – still people missed them.

He did not know what to say to anyone. Ruthven-Greene said it all. Cal had rarely seen a man quite so affable, quite so banal – a master of inane chat – and he talked without, as Cal
heard it, telling a single truth. Years of practice, he assumed – since Reggie could not tell the truth about what he did in the war he seemed to have achieved a believable cover so plausible
he uttered it without any consciousness of it not being true. The fate of all spies, to believe one’s own lies. Reggie chatted to the district nurse, to the naval lieutenant going home on
leave, to the rural archdeacon going up to town to meet the bishop, and told them all he was an oatmeal buyer for the Highland Light Infantry. An army marches on its stomach, he said, quoting
Napoleon, but a Scottish army marches on porridge, he said, making it up as he went along. And then he asked them a hundred nosy questions, recommended a few nightclubs to the Navy man, asked the
nurse about her family and sang snatches of his favourite hymns for the clergyman. Cal nodded off to the sound of ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam . . .’

At Waterloo Reggie nudged him and said, ‘Shall we share a cab? You could drop me at the Savoy and then take it on to Claridge’s.’

Cal demurred. He’d trust to the
cabman’s sense of geography. Reggie would tell him the Savoy was on the way to Claridge’s even if it wasn’t.

In the back of the cab as they crossed the Thames Reggie handed Cal a card with his name and the Savoy’s address and telephone number on it and said, ‘We’ve got tomorrow off. I
suggest you get some rest, see a bit of the town and report to your blokes at the embassy on Monday. I’ll see my chaps and give you a bell before noon.’

‘My blokes?’

Reggie stuck his hand into his jacket pocket and brought out another of his many-folded bits of paper.

‘A Major Shaeffer and a Colonel Reininger. D’ye know ’em?’

‘I’ve met Shaeffer. On my last visit in ’39. I’ve known Frank Reininger all my life. When I was a teenager he was based in Washington. My father sat on one of the House
Defence Committees – Frank liaised. I guess you could call him my father’s protegé.
E pluribus unum.
’

‘Well he’s the chap you report to.’

‘Reggie – you could have told me that in Zurich.’

‘Need to know, old boy, need to know. If Jerry had nabbed you, the less you knew the better.’

Cal was getting used to the jolts, the sudden reversals of tone and timbre – the instantaneous way the fact of war came home in a blunt sentence. Now, Reggie swung back the other way

‘Uncle Sam does you proud doesn’t he? Claridge’s. Pretty damn swanky.’

‘You’re staying at the Savoy!’

‘No, old boy. I’m
living
at the Savoy. And I’m paying for it. It’s not the same thing at all.’

And back again.

‘Had a nice little house in Chester Street, round the back of Buck House. Got blown to buggery just before Christmas.’

The cab swung off the Strand into the north forecourt of the Savoy. Reggie stepped out and took his bag from the front.

‘Do you fancy a nightcap?’ he said.

‘Thanks Reggie, but I’d rather hit the sack.’

‘Are you sure? You’ll find a lot of your countrymen knocking about the place. I saw that newspaperman the other day – Quentin somebody or other. And wotsisname Knickerbocker.
And Clare Booth Luce stays here too. You know, the woman from
Time
. Oris it
Life
?’

As if by magic, another cab disgorged Mrs Luce exactly as Reggie spoke her name. Cal saw him wave to her. She waved back. A smile. A glimpse of those familiar high cheekbones and too-prominent
upper lip. That clinched it, if tiredness had not – the last thing Cal wanted was to while away an evening being Congressman Cormack’s son once more for the benefit of the American
press. He’d rather face a Panzer unit than the barbed tongue of Mrs Luce should it turn out that his father was currently out of favour with America’s other First Lady. He told the
cabbie to drive on and left Reggie lugging his bag, in search of porter, reporter and a stiff drink.

Claridge’s put Cal on the sixth floor – a large, comfortable room – table, chairs and a small sofa at one end, a big bed at the other, and its own bathroom.
And all for four dollars a day. The window gave a good view of the western sky and, if the building opposite had been a tad lower, a better view across Grosvenor Square to Hyde Park. He could see a
barrage balloon floating serenely over the square. Cal dumped his suitcase – in the absence of able-bodied bellhops (there’d been dozens last time, all in little red waistcoats, now all
in khaki, he assumed) he’d lugged his own bags – and threw open a window. It was May 10th – it wasn’t exactly summer, it wasn’t even spring, it was plain chilly, but
he wanted air, fresh and cool. There was a full moon in heaven tonight – he rather thought this was what the English meant by a bomber’s moon. He’d no clear idea of what to expect
in an air raid, but he found out soon enough.

He’d kicked off his shoes, thrown his jacket across the room and lain back on the bed. He was too tired to sleep, besides, the London air carried a whisper of anticipation on its wings.
Forty-five minutes later he heard the wail of the air-raid sirens. He slipped on his jacket, grabbed his shoes and stepped into the corridor. He’d read about this. Wasn’t this where
everyone headed for the cellar until it was all over? Sang songs and drank sweet tea?

A maid was dashing along outside his door. He caught her.

‘What happens now?’ he said.

She stared at him. ‘Sorry, sir, I don’t follow . . .’

‘I mean do we all get directed to the shelter?’

‘Well . . . if you like . . . I can do that . . . but most people don’t bother.’

‘What do they do, then?’

‘Well, sir, the women mostly put in earplugs and go to bed, and the men use it as an excuse to gather on the ground floor and play pontoon and drink half the night.’

Cal had no idea what to do now. He hadn’t brought any earplugs and he’d never played pontoon.

‘Is it safe up here?’

‘God knows, sir. It’s a modern building. Steel ribs an’ all. But if Jerry’s got your name on a bomb, well, goodnight Vienna. Look – you’ll be as safe here as
anywhere. Just don’t use the lifts, eh? Takes an age to get people out of lifts if the electric goes off.’

She continued her dash and vanished down a rabbit hole. Cal put on his shoes
and looked around for the stairs. It might at least make sense to find the shelter. He pushed open a swing door at the end of the corridor. The wallpaper and the wooden moulding vanished and he
found himself in a shaft of concrete stairs, painted walls and steel railings, looking down the pit. He looked up. A glint of moonlight. There must be a door or a window up there. He climbed the stairs.

The door to the roof was open. He stepped out. A voice cried, ‘Shut the goddam door! Don’t want the whole goddam world to follow you up here, do you?’

A short, bald man sat on a folding canvas chair. A US Army greatcoat draped over his shoulders. Striped flannelette pyjamas and slippers peeking out from under it. On his shoulders two stars
glinting in the light of the full moon. It was General Gelbroaster – General William Tecumseh Sherman Gelbroaster. In his mouth was an unlit cigar of a length to make Winston S. Churchill
jealous, and across his knees a rifle of a length to make William F. Cody jealous.

Gelbroaster scanned the skies.

‘You ever shoot buffalo, boy?’

‘No, sir. A few ducks in the Ozarks. Nothing bigger than that.’

‘I shot buffalo. When we had buffalo to shoot, that is. My daddy took me hunting with him the first time in ’99. Nebraska. I was fourteen. Gave me this gun when I was
sixteen.’