Spook's Gold (27 page)

Marner pulled out the piece of paper from his tunic. “I picked this up from the radio room where Graf shot the wireless operator. At first I assumed that Graf had simply wanted to silence an accomplice. I now suspect that Graf went to the wireless room to force the operator to send a message, and then shot him and took away the sheet of paper that the radio operator had encoded the message on. What I have here – I hope! – is the sheet that was underneath. It has the imprint of some writing on it; unfortunately I think that the imprints on it are from numerous previous sheets that were above it. But some of the imprints are heavier than others, so perhaps we can get something from it.”

“Dieter, there is one essential thing you haven’t got,” sighed Boris. “You have not got an Enigma unit or the code book required to turn whatever is on that sheet back into clear language. Without those, that piece of paper won’t tell you anything.”

Marner looked back at the blank sheet of paper, angling it against the light so that it caught as best as possible the faint marks and creases of the letters embossed into it. If that was not good news, Lemele added to his woes, “And you’ve been keeping it in your tunic?  You fool! The body heat will be smoothing out the imprints in it, like using a hot iron to get creases out of clothes.”  She plucked it out of his hand.

“How do you know stuff like that?” asked Boris.

“From one of my classes in forensic science.”

Boris raised his eyebrows to Marner in a ‘can you believe this?’ manner, but Marner just slouched further in his chair. Even the arrival of a steaming bowl of soup and bread did not seem to encroach on his consciousness as he stared morosely at the table.

Lemele had taken the sheet of paper to the window and was examining it closely, alternating the angle to catch the shadow in the shallow indents in the paper.

“So what do you think?” asked Boris when she sat back down and placed the sheet of paper carefully into her bag under the table.

“There is a lot of text on it, various orientations, sizes and depths, so probably the previous three or four sheets above have carried over into our one. But until we get to work on it, we won’t know if any of it is of any use.”

“Do we have anything else to go on?” asked Boris.

Marner sat staring at the table, and so Lemele filled the silence. “I don’t think so. We need to see if anything is of use on the paper, for which I will need some supplies and somewhere quiet to work on it. Why don’t you go back to your office?  If there has been a sighting of Graf, you will be in the right place to hear about it. Also, the longer you stay out, the more suspicion you’ll attract.”

Boris grunted his agreement, drained his new beer in one long swallow and staggered up. He and Lemele agreed their evening meeting location and then he thumped Marner on the shoulder. “Cheer up Dieter and eat your lunch. With me on the case and our very own forensic expert on the team, what else do we need?  Eh?”

Marner looked up at him, trying to put into words his utter astonishment that Boris seemed to have no concept of the gravity of the situation. By the time that he was capable of articulating this, Boris had gone and Lemele was thrusting a spoon at him and telling him to hurry up and eat.

Chapter Twenty Seven

They too departed by the back alley, stepping around rancid bins of rubbish fermenting in the summer heat. Lemele stated that she needed to go to an art supplies shop and so led him into the streets north of Opéra, in the direction of Montmartre.

Both became aware again of the looks that they were drawing, the SS officer and the French woman. Marner was also sure that the Parisians were becoming more blatant and challenging in their stares. In his early days in Paris most of the domestic population avoided any unnecessary contact, especially eye-contact with him. Gradually, as German officers had become a routine aspect of their everyday world, he had felt less conspicuous, although his uniform always brought deference and, if not respect, then obedience. But now, with the English and American armies encroaching into France, the populace must be feeling the looming possibility of liberation from German rule, for which Marner could not blame them. Until he had met Lemele and heard her outspoken views, someone who had dared to openly state such things to his face, he had not consciously considered that he was an invader. Unwelcome and even hated.

After a few blocks he pulled Lemele to a stop. “How much further until we find what you’re looking for?”

“I am not sure. We need a shop that sells soft charcoal sticks, the type used for drawing and artwork. The Montmartre artists’ quarter is where we are most likely to find the right shop.”

“Okay. I suggest that we split up again. I am conspicuous and if I’m spotted I can move and evade easier without you. Also, I am putting you at risk. So go and find what you need and meet me at the Clarisse Hotel on Rue Saint-Lazare in an hour. We also need a fall-back rendezvous so that if one or other of us cannot make a meeting or it does not feel safe, we have a backup location to re-establish contact.”  He named a cemetery close to the Jardin du Luxembourg. “If I don’t turn up for an agreed meeting, or the meeting place is not safe and you have to break off, go to the cemetery at two thirty in the afternoon for the next two days. After those two days you have to consider that I have been caught and you should not go back there.  It will then be up to you to decide what you do next; whether it is safe for you to go back to your old life, or if you need to move on.”  He paused, not sure how to phrase what he wanted to say next and could only finish lamely, “I’m sorry for getting you into this mess.”  He tried for a smile but only achieved a grimace. Lemele nodded, opened her mouth to say something but then just nodded again and walked away.

----

At the Clarisse, Marner entered and circulated around the salon, scrutinising the people hanging around the bar. This hotel was outside of the usual quartiers of Paris that were frequented by German personnel, the military offices being primarily concentrated in the west and centre of the city. The hotel was sufficiently upmarket and close to the northern train stations to attract the few wealthier private and business people who were still travelling. Apart from a couple of characters in the bar nursing flat beers, whom Marner labelled as pimps or black market traders trawling for commercial contacts, no one aroused his suspicion. When he walked over to Lemele who he had thus far ignored, seated in a far corner of the salon, he could see immediately that she was excited about something.

“Look what I found!” she exclaimed, holding the sheet towards him. It was now largely grey all over, and Lemele’s fingers were smudged and grubby too. This was explained by the broken and worn stubs of charcoal sticks and dust scattered across the table. She had been using the charcoal to bring out the relief of the printing in the paper. He knew the same trick with standard pencils; from what he could see of the paper she held, the softer charcoal was far more efficient in highlighting the potential marks in the paper. The greater sensitivity meant that the paper was a jumbled mess of figures running in several directions, over-laid on top of one another. To him it was simply a confusing mess.

He reached for it but she snatched it away again. “It is very delicate and easily smudged. So don’t touch, just look,” she scolded, with a coquettish nuance in her voice and smile on her lips that was entirely new to him. He sat, surprised, looking at her, not the paper. What was this new aspect to her character?  Was she actually enjoying this cat and mouse game, despite the danger that they were in?

“Look,” she said, growing impatient. “There is a lot of printing that has been picked out, but we can work on the assumption that the heaviest and clearest is what interests us. It indicates what was written last, on the sheet that was directly above this one.”  Holding the sheet up, she pointed with her finger to two lines of hand-writing across the top centre of the page. The characters were lighter than the surrounding shaded-in paper, where the charcoal had passed over their indents. Though criss-crossed by other numbers and letters, they were clearer. “So we can assume that this is the message that was sent by Graf, or perhaps I should say that Graf made the radio operator send.”

Marner was still feeling somewhat discouraged and his mood carried over into his answer, “But we have to assume that whoever has been writing on this pad, and it may have been more than one operator from what I see there – we have to assume that they were pressing with equal force. Therefore, perhaps what you are assuming to be ‘our message’ is actually from an earlier sheet and the writer just pressed harder than others.”

Lemele started to interrupt, and he did not want to bring down her mood or positive attitude, so he quickly continued, “But for now it seems to be our best assumption, so let’s go with it. Okay, I see two rows of digits. But they don’t mean anything to us. As Boris stated, we need the code book and the coding machine that was used to create them. I don’t rate very highly my probability of sneaking back into Kriegsmarine and the radio room again.”

“We need help. We need someone who understands the Kriegsmarine encoding methods.”

“Did you have anyone in mind?” he asked sarcastically. “Do you have friends at the Kriegsmarine?”

Lemele thought for a moment. “No. But I’ll bet that Boris knows someone. Let’s call him.”

Marner asked to use a telephone at the reception counter and dialled through to Boris. When Boris picked up he gave the receiver to Lemele. Boris confirmed by “yes” and “no” responses that he could not speak openly, but that he was okay to listen. She explained the basic problem to him and where they were. “I understand, I’ll look into it and get back to you
.”

Chapter Twenty Eight

When Boris arrived at the Clarisse forty minutes later, Lemele immediately pressed him for any information that he had on the Kriegsmarine codes. Boris pulled a face and looked at Marner, uncomfortable discussing information such as codes with an outsider, his military indoctrination over-riding his willingness to help his friend. Just sharing the little that he had learned with Dieter, now an outsider to his own organisation, could earn Boris a bullet. Marner sensed and understood his reticence. “Boris, you know that we’re not using this information for anything underhand, anything against our country. Think about it: we are just trying to capture a criminal who has murdered at least four people, most of them Germans.”

Boris nodded his acknowledgement of the truth and logic of this statement but hesitated for a moment, scanning the bar as if now truly caught up in Marner’s paranoia. “Well, I did manage to find out a couple of things. Firstly, the Kriegsmarine signals are more complex than the other military services. They require the message to be pre-encrypted using a
kurzsignalheft
code book prior to entry into the Enigma unit for full encryption. Secondly, there is a five-digit authentication code and a four-digit date code added to the message. The placing of these at the beginning and end of the transmission serves as additional verification and also assures the recipient that they have received the entire message in full. So in summary, you have the double encryption of the message, plus you need another two separate code books to authenticate the message. Without them, I do not see how we are going to get anywhere.”

Lemele had already pulled out her writing pad onto which she had transcribed the rows of numbers from the original sheet. “In that case, what Boris has told actually helps us enormously.”  She copied the numbers out in duplicate and gave them each a copy. “I’ll leave out the first five and the last four digits, since we don’t need to authenticate the message. The upper row has a digit that is not clear so I have left a blank space. Now then, tell me what you see,” she instructed them.

48420  89N04060301W20060100

YDFBG8A5THXOV5RS9EKPQ6FB4T

Boris looked at Marner for help, suspecting a trick question. “Two rows of digits. How does what I told you help us?  We don’t have the code books!”

Lemele gave him a look of exasperation, the kind of look reserved for dim pupils who have failed to grasp the most elementary principle. She shook her head at his stupidity. “Two rows, both are an equal number of digits, one above the other. TWO! What does that tell you?” She looked at him for a long moment, her head cocked in a ‘come on, you can do it if you put your mind to it’ way, willing him to grasp this simple thing. He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s simple!” she shouted, and then lowered her voice again. “You told us that the message has to be pre-encoded using the kurtzsignal-thingy book. Therefore one of these rows must be the message in plain clear text, possibly even written by Graf himself. The other will be the form of it converted into pre-code by the radio operator, that he was then forced to transmit on the Enigma.”

Brightening, Marner nodded. “Yes, I follow your logic. So which is which?  How are we even going to work that out?”

“We will just have to work on both of them, and see which one of them yields something meaningful.”

“I really don’t see any pattern or meaning to either of them,” he conceded after staring at the sheet for a couple of minutes.

Boris offered an opinion, “The lower row is a complete nonsense of letters and numbers. If that is the original non-encoded message, then I don’t understand what it could possibly mean. So maybe the upper row which is mostly numbers is the original. But how can that be a message?”

“Telephone number?” proposed Marner. “But it seems too long; too many numbers and the couple of letters in the middle ruin the theory. Or maybe a bank account number!” he suggested, suddenly excited. “If we are talking about gold, then it could be a bank account number for the deposit.”  But even he did not sound entirely convinced, and the others did not even offer a grunt of acknowledgement.

After only a minute more, Boris threw his page onto the table in disgust. He was just opening his mouth to speak when Lemele exclaimed with excitement, “Wait! Wait just a minute. Oh we are so dumb, it’s obvious!” The look exchanged between Marner and Boris made it clear that they did not think that anything was obvious.