The Ability to Kill (20 page)

I had not noticed her doing this earlier, and now I asked her what she was looking for.

‘My boys,’ she said vaguely; ‘my boys.’ She pronounced it ‘boyce.’

It was not until the next day that I discovered who her boys were.

At that time, Spanish waters were heavily patrolled by several European navies and ‘courtesy’ visits to the international port of Tangier were part of the cold war routine. As I have already noted, the courtesies were not always strictly observed, but the traditional formalities were, and it was usual, at any rate during the daylight hours, for a warship in the port to send a few trusted liberty men ashore. British, French, Italians and Germans were, of course, the most frequent visitors. The interesting thing was that, irrespective of nationality, most of the favoured few patronised
La Voile Blanche.
These were Annette’s boys; and quite a high proportion of them were petty officers.

Why did they choose
La Voile Blanche
?

A British Engine Room Artificer explained why he came.
La Voile
, he said, was the only place in Tangier where you could get eggs and chips and a decent cup of tea. When I learned that for the Italians it was the only place in Tangier where you could eat
pasta
like mother made, and for the French the only place that served really eatable
casse-croutes
, copious yet reasonable in price, I began to understand why Annette gazed so often and so anxiously out to sea. The nationality of the visiting warships would determine her shopping list for the day.

Moreover, home cooking was not the only service that Annette offered her boys. She minded their valuables while they went swimming. She lent them swimming shorts and towels. She changed money for them. She mended their socks. It was even said that, in the case of one or two of the older men,
she was not averse to a romp on the vast double bed that filled the room at the back. All, it seemed, that she demanded in return (apart from her modest charges for food and drink) was friendship; but friendship expressed in a particular way. Annette was lonely. What you had to do was to write to her now and then, and tell her how you were. She had quite a big post every day.

I wish I could claim that I ‘spotted’ Annette immediately. Unfortunately, I did not. But, as most experienced spotters will appreciate, things were very different then. Modern recognition aids would have left me in no doubt. Annette had the highest
louche
-rating I have ever encountered.

For those who are unfamiliar with the newest thought on spy-spotting, I should explain that all recognition now is based on what is called the ‘
louche
assessment figure’ or ‘
louche
-rating’ which works roughly on the same principle as the Beaufort scale for rating wind velocities.

Louche
, you will recall, means literally, ‘ambiguous.’ Applied to persons, however, it has a special meaning hard to define. ‘Questionable,’ ‘bogus,’ ‘meretricious’—none of them is quite synonymous. Broadly speaking the word suggests that the person to whom it is applied is suspect in a moral and/or social context, that he (or she) may have a faintly disreputable aspect, or a vice of which one would like to be forewarned. A prosperous
maquereau
sipping Vichy water in a Paris night club presents an unmistakably
louche
appearance (about seven on the scale); so does that attractive young woman whom nobody can remember inviting to join the party, and who borrowed ten shillings for a taxi home (
louche
-rating, two). ‘Beware,’ said Somerset Maugham, ‘of the Englishman who speaks perfect French. He is either a confidence trickster or an embassy attaché.’ ‘
Louche
-rating, five’ might be the spy-spotter’s comment on that one.

Here is how the scale is divided. Note that the assessments are purely metaphorical, merely denoting the degree of suspicion aroused for a given
louche
-rating. Thus, a woman could have a rating of six or seven and yet be quite irresistible.
^‡

Annette’s final
louche
-rating was nine.

She had a passion for telling the story of her life and explaining how it was that she had come to be a
patronne
of
La Voile Blanche.
The interesting thing was that she never told the same story twice and yet seemed totally unaware of the fact. Of course, her ‘boys’ came and went and, presumably they either failed to notice the contradictions or did not care; but for three weeks I was a steady and fascinated audience. I soon came to know when a fresh version was brewing. It was always when business was slack. For perhaps ten minutes she would stand gazing out to sea, gloomily, like a ship-wrecked sailor who has given up hope of rescue. Then, she would turn away,
sit down beside me and send Fatima for the brandy and two glasses.

‘It is too much for one woman,’ she would begin. ‘I shall sell the place. I have received some serious offers. It is incredible that a person in my position should be obliged to do this kind of work. But when one is no longer young one becomes a victim. When I was an attractive girl, my friend.…’ And she was away.

I have said that the story was never the same. That is not quite so. The
shape
of the one she told me was always the same. It began when she was a girl, the cherished daughter of titled parents with big estates and peasants who adored them. But in common with other landowners they had had troubles. She had been affianced to a millionaire foreigner who was socially beneath her. For a time she had lived happily with him. She had had carriages, great wealth. Then, the rich bourgeois had revealed his true nature—drink, other women, perversions of every kind. She had refused to live any longer under his roof. There were some things no woman of spirit and breeding could support. She had preferred to starve. Parents dead. Estates confiscated. Gallant struggles.
La Voile Blanche.

That was the pattern. The details, however, varied fantastically. The family estate had sprawled over the plains of Hungary, clustered round a Polish castle, stretched as far as the eye could see towards the hills of Greece and burgeoned under the friendly Bohemian sun. Papa had been a count, a
Freiherr
, a
chevalier
, a
von und zu
, a
Graf
, a Knight of the Holy Fleece. Mama had been distantly related to practically every royal house in Europe. The low-born millionaire husband had been a Frenchman, a German, an Italian, a Swiss, a Swede. He had made his fortune in soap, oil, ‘contracting,’ steel, munitions, scent, brandy. He had been surprised in every
compromising situation from plain adultery with a
fille de joie
to the most intricate sado-masochistic orgies in the company of—‘but a woman cannot speak of such bestialities, you understand.’ And he had struck her. Heavens, how he had struck her! With a sjambok, with his ivory riding crop, with a knout, with the back of his hand, the flat of his hand, his knotted fist, the leather belt of his hunting jacket, a rawhide whip. ‘Do you not see the scar? No? In some lights one can still see it.’

I was an attentive, credulous listener. In a sense, every writer of fiction is a liar; and the fact that he writes his lies down in the hope of selling them for profit, instead of delivering them by word of mouth free of charge, does not, I think, entitle him to be censorious. She was enjoying herself. I was being satisfactorily entertained. I thought that we both understood each other very well.

I was mistaken.

I had been sleeping in my deck chair one afternoon and awoke to the sound of Annette’s voice. Her audience was a moody young sailor off the
Deutschland
and she was, of course, telling him the story of her life; but to my astonishment I realised that she was telling him one of a different pattern. There were no noble parents, no vast estates, no carriages, no rich foreign husband. This one was about a Little Nell of the Vienna slums, or someone out of a German edition of
Little Women
edited for publication by the brothers Grimm. I listened fascinated. ‘Often,’ she was saying, ‘we had only a crust to eat. What milk we were able to get was saved, naturally, for the younger children.’

At that moment, she looked up and caught my eye.

For not more than a second, she looked disconcerted. Then, and, I suppose, because she had been disconcerted, she made a mistake. With a quick glance to make sure that the young German was not watching her, she grinned at me and winked.

Now, the only thing that makes a liar tolerable is innocence. No matter how outrageous the fairy tale, she (or he) must believe in it
at the time.
The game of make-believe is then possible. The rules are tacitly accepted by both parties. The element of calculation is almost non-existent. To find, suddenly, then, that not merely has all the make-believe been on your side, but that you have been listening like a fool to someone skilfully pretending to be a pathological liar, is a shattering experience. What sort of mind is it that can contrive such a disguise? And what is it that has to be hidden?

I now know, of course, that the whole thing was really very simple. The clumsy lying was just another brush stroke in the synthetic character of ‘dear, old, harmless, motherly Annette, with all her cock-and-bull stories about her past which you pretend to believe so that she’ll forget to put those brandies on your bill, just as the other boys told you she would.’ The wink was a mistake, as I have said, but it was a mistake of arrogance, not fear. She could have bluffed me easily with a wide-eyed stare. But, caught off balance, she responded instinctively, and pride in her own cleverness got in ahead of her sense of self-preservation. As
louche
as a wagonload of monkeys.

A few days later I learned the truth about Annette from a French radio operator off the destroyer
Simoun
, who had been one of her regular boys. I came across him sitting in a café in the town, and asked him why he was not down at
La Voile Blanche.
He told me that all the liberty men on his ship had been warned before going ashore that day not to go to Annette’s. I asked him why.

‘You know, of course, that she’s a spy.’

‘No.’

‘I thought everybody knew.’

Every spotter will sympathise with my dislike of this odious young man. I asked him what he meant.

‘Well, you know all those letters she gets every morning.’

‘What about them?’

‘She passes them on to the Russian consulate.’

‘What for?’

‘Movements of foreign ships. Gossip about what they have been doing and where they are going next. State of morale. Information about officers. Little scandals. You’d be surprised what some imbeciles will put in a letter.’

‘You knew this all the time?’

‘Of course. Only now the intelligence people have found out, too. So we have been ordered not to go there any more, and not to write to her. Myself, I never wrote, but it is boring not to have the use of the café.’

I was leaving early the next morning and had already said good-bye to Annette; but I could not resist the temptation to walk past
La Voile Blanche
to have another look at her.

The café was quite empty. She was standing in front of it, her hands shading her eyes as she gazed out to sea.
Simoun
was anchored only a quarter of a mile away from her, but she did not look in that direction. She must have guessed that something had gone wrong there. For her, no doubt,
Simoun
had now ceased to exist.

There was a strong mistral blowing. Her skirt was flattened against her big thighs and her hair streamed wildly as the wind tore at the hairpins. For no sensible reason that I could think of, I felt sorry for her.

For myself, I felt only disgust. I had spotted her all right, but not, unfortunately, as a spy. My own lame suspicion had been that she was in a drug smuggling racket of some kind. A really painful error. I have never had the heart to return to Tangier, though I understand that it remains very much a spotters’ paradise. Perhaps Annette is still there. If so, I would like to think that she is now working for NATO. But I
shall not trouble to find out. Nowadays, I prefer the other end of the Mediterranean.

The best way for a spotter to go to Istanbul is by sea. Denizyollari, the Turkish state shipping line, runs a regular service from Barcelona and Marseille. Their crack ship,
Ankara
, is particularly clean and comfortable. It calls at Genoa, Naples, and the Piraeus on the way. There are few tourists. Most of the passengers are travelling for business reasons, and there is magnificent spotting to be had. The crew is Turkish and highly respectable, while the captain has an unromantic passion for efficiency and punctuality; but some of the passengers are sure to have really exciting
louche
-ratings.

However, I must warn you that Istanbul itself is a troubling experience for the visiting spy-spotter. The inhabitants are so spy-conscious that one is made to feel like a tyro. The reason is that
everyone
in Istanbul has been spy-spotting passionately from the cradle on. Spies and spying are the staple subjects of polite conversation. The terrace of the Park Oteli looking out over the Bosphorus has one of the most exquisite views in the world and in the evenings the tables there are crowded. But nobody ever looks at the view. Everybody is too busy spotting and being spotted, and gossiping about the latest finds. The atmosphere is positively feverish.

The local rules, too, are confusing. In Istanbul there is one which allows anyone to be deemed
louche
who appears not to be
louche.
The results can be quite remarkable. On one occasion I was solemnly assured by intelligent Turkish friends that Douglas Fairbanks, Jnr., who had recently spent a few days there discussing a projected film about the life of Kemal Attaurk, was really a British [
sic
] spy, and that the film project was his cover story. Istanbul is definitely no place for the beginner.