The Key to Rebecca (18 page)

His pants off, that was it.

He would have the key to his briefcase in his pocket.

Wolff peeped between the curtains. Smith and Sonja lay on the bed. She was on her back, eyes closed. He lay beside her, propped up on one elbow, touching her. She was arching her back as if she were enjoying it. As Wolff watched, Smith rolled over, half lying on her, and put his face to her breasts.

Smith still had his shorts on.

Wolff put his head through the curtains and waved an arm, trying to attract Sonja’s attention. He thought: Look at me, woman! Smith moved his head from one breast to the other. Sonja opened her eyes, glanced at the top of Smith’s head, stroked his brilliantined hair, and caught Wolff’s eye.

He mouthed: Take off his pants.

She frowned, not understanding.

Wolff stepped through the curtains and mimed removing pants.

Sonja’s face cleared as enlightenment dawned.

Wolff stepped back through the curtains and closed them silently, leaving only a tiny gap to look through.

He saw Sonja’s hands go to Smith’s shorts and begin to struggle with the buttons of the fly. Smith groaned. Sonja rolled her eyes upward, contemptuous of his credulous passion. Wolff thought: I hope she has the sense to throw the shorts this way.

After a minute Smith grew impatient with her fumbling, rolled over, sat up and took them off himself. He dropped them over the end of the bed and turned back to Sonja.

The end of the bed was about five feet away from the curtain.

Wolff got down on the floor and lay flat on his belly. He parted the, curtains with his hands and inched his way through, Indian fashion.

He heard Smith say: “Oh, God, you’re so beautiful.”

Wolff reached the shorts. With one hand he carefully turned the material over until he saw a pocket. He put his hand in the pocket and felt for a key.

The pocket was empty.

There was the sound of movement from the bed. Smith grunted. Sonja said: “No, lie still.”

Wolff thought: Good
girl.

He turned the shorts over until he found the other pocket. He felt in it. That, too, was empty.

There might be more pockets. Wolff grew reckless. He felt the garment, searching for hard lumps that might be metal. There were none. He picked up the shorts—

A bunch of keys lay beneath them.

Wolff breathed a silent sigh of relief.

The keys must have slipped out of the pocket when Smith dropped the shorts on the floor.

Wolff picked up the keys and the shorts and began to inch backward through the curtains.

Then he heard footsteps on deck.

Smith said: “Good God, what’s that!” in a high-pitched voice.

“Hush!” Sonja said. “Only the postman. Tell me if you like this ...”

“Oh, yes.”

Wolff made it through the curtains and looked up. The postman was placing a letter on the top step of the stairs, by the hatch. To Wolff’s horror the postman saw him and called out:
“Sabah el-kheir
—good morning!”

Wolff put a finger to his lips for silence, then lay his cheek against his hand to mime sleep, then pointed to the bedroom.

“Your pardon!” the postman whispered.

Wolff waved him away.

There was no sound from the bedroom.

Had the postman’s greeting made Smith suspicious? Probably not, Wolff decided: a postman might well call good morning even if he could see no one, for the fact that the hatch was open indicated that someone was at home.

The lovemaking noises in the next room resumed, and Wolff breathed more easily.

He sorted through the keys, found the smallest, and tried it in the locks of the case.

It worked.

He opened the other catch and lifted the lid. Inside was a sheaf of papers in a stiff cardboard folder. Wolff thought: No more menus, please. He opened the folder and looked at the top sheet.

He read:

 

OPERATION ABERDEEN

1. Allied forces will mount a major counterattack at dawn on 5 June.

2. The attack will be two-pronged ...

Wolff looked up from the papers. “My God,” he whispered. “This is it!”

He listened. The noises from the bedroom were louder now. He could hear the springs of the bed, and he thought the boat itself was beginning to rock slightly. There was not much time.

The report in Smith’s possession was detailed. Wolff was not sure exactly how the British chain of command worked, but presumably the battles were planned in detail by General Ritchie at desert headquarters then sent to GHQ in Cairo for approval by Auchinleck. Plans for more important battles would be discussed at the morning conferences, which Smith obviously attended in some capacity. Wolff wondered again which department it was that was housed in the unmarked building in the Shari Suleiman Pasha to which Smith returned each afternoon; then he pushed the thought aside. He needed to make notes.

He hunted around for pencil and paper, thinking: I should have done this beforehand. He found a writing pad and a red pencil in a drawer. He sat down by the briefcase and read on.

The main Allied forces were besieged in an area they called the Cauldron. The June 5 counterattack was intended to be a breakout. It would begin at 0520 with the bombardment, by four regiments of artillery, of the Aslagh Ridge, on Rommel’s eastern flank. The artillery was to soften up the opposition in readiness for the spearhead attack by the infantry of the 10th Indian Brigade. When the Italians had breached the line at Aslagh Ridge, the tanks of the 22nd Armored Brigade would rush through the gap and capture Sidi Muftah while the 9th Indian Brigade followed through and consolidated.

Meanwhile the 32nd Army Tank Brigade, with infantry support, would attack Rommel’s northern flank at Sidra Ridge.

When he came to the end of the report Wolff realized he had been so absorbed that he had heard, but had not taken notice of, the sound of Major Smith reaching his climax. Now the bed creaked and a pair of feet hit the floor.

Wolff tensed.

Sonja said: “Darling, pour some champagne.”

“Just a minute—”

“I want it now.”

“I feel a bit silly with me pants off, m’dear.”

Wolff thought: Christ, he wants his pants.

Sonja said: “I like you undressed. Drink a glass with me before you put your clothes on.”

“Your wish is my command.”

Wolff relaxed. She may bitch about it, he thought, but she does what I want!

He looked quickly through the rest of the papers, determined that he would not be caught now: Smith was a wonderful find, and it would be a tragedy to kill the goose the first time it laid a golden egg. He noted that the attack would employ four hundred tanks, three hundred and thirty of them with the eastern prong and only seventy with the northern; that Generals Messervy and Briggs were to establish a combined headquarters; and that Auchinleck was demanding—a little peevishly, it seemed—thorough reconnaissance and close cooperation between infantry and tanks.

A cork popped loudly as he was writing. He licked his lips, thinking: I could use some of that. He wondered how quickly Smith could drink a glass of champagne. He decided to take no chances.

He put the papers back in the folder and the folder back in the case. He closed the lid and keyed the locks. He put the bunch of keys in a pocket of the shorts. He stood up and peeped through the curtain.

Smith was sitting up in bed in his army-issue underwear with a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, looking pleased with himself. The cigarettes must have been in his shirt pocket: it would have been awkward if they had been in his shorts.

At the moment Wolff was within Smith’s field of view. He took his face away from the tiny gap between the curtains, and waited. He heard Sonja say: “Pour me some more, please.” He looked through again. Smith took her glass and turned away to the bottle. His back was now to Wolff. Wolff pushed the shorts through the curtains and put them on the floor. Sonja saw him and raised her eyebrows in alarm. Wolff withdrew his arm. Smith handed Sonja the glass.

Wolff got into the cupboard, closed the door and eased himself to the floor. He wondered how long he would have to wait before Smith left. He did not care: he was jubilant. He had struck gold.

It was half an hour before he saw, through the peephole, Smith come into the living room, wearing his clothes again. By this time Wolff was feeling very cramped. Sonja followed Smith, saying: “Must you go so soon?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said. “It’s a very awkward time for me, you see.” He hesitated. “To be perfectly frank, I’m not actually supposed to carry this briefcase around with me. I had the very devil of a job to come here at noon. You see, I have to go from GHQ straight to my office. Well, I didn’t do that today—I was desperately afraid I might miss you if I came late. I told my office I was lunching at GHQ, and told the chaps at GHQ I was lunching at my office. However, next time I’ll go to my office, dump the briefcase, and come on here—if that’s all right with you, my little poppet.”

Wolff thought: For God’s sake, Sonja, say something!

She said: “Oh, but, Sandy, my housekeeper comes every afternoon to clean—we wouldn’t be alone.”

Smith frowned. “Damn. Well, we’ll just have to meet in the evenings.”

“But I have to work—and after my act, I have to stay in the club and talk to the customers. And I couldn’t sit at your table every night: people would gossip.”

The cupboard was very hot and stuffy. Wolff was perspiring heavily.

Smith said: “Can’t you tell your cleaner not to come?”

“But darling, I couldn’t clean the place myself—I wouldn’t know how.”

Wolff saw her smile, then she took Smith’s hand and placed it between her legs. “Oh, Sandy, say you’ll come at noon.”

It was much more than Smith could withstand. “Of course I will, my darling,” he said.

They kissed, and at last Smith left. Wolff listened to the footsteps crossing the deck and descending the gangplank, then he got out of the cupboard.

Sonja watched with malicious glee as he stretched his aching limbs. “Sore?” she said with mock sympathy.

“It was worth it,” Wolff said. “You were wonderful.”

“Did you get what you wanted?”

“Better than I could have dreamed.”

Wolff cut up bread and sausage for lunch while Sonja took a bath. After lunch he found the English novel and the key to the code, and drafted his signal to Rommel. Sonja went to the racetrack with a crowd of Egyptian friends: Wolff gave her fifty pounds to bet with.

In the evening she went to the Cha-Cha Club and Wolff sat at home drinking whiskey and reading Arab poetry. As midnight approached, he set up the radio.

At exactly 2400 hours, he tapped out his call sign, Sphinx. A few seconds later Rommel’s desert listening post, or Horch Company, answered. Wolff sent a series of V’s to enable them to tune in exactly, then asked them what his signal strength was. In the middle of the sentence he made a mistake, and sent a series of E’s—for Error—before beginning again. They told him his signal was maximum strength and made GA for Go Ahead. He made a KA to indicate the beginning of his message; then, in code, he began: “Operation Aberdeen....”

At the end he added AR for Message Finished and K for Over. They replied with a series of R’s, which meant: “Your message has been received and understood.”

Wolff packed away the radio, the core book and the key, then he poured himself another drink.

All in all, he thought he had done incredibly well.

THE SIGNAL FROM THE SPY WAS ONLY ONE OF TWENTY OR THIRTY REPORTS ON the desk of von Mellenthin, Rommel’s Ic—intelligence officer—at seven o’clock on the morning of June 4. There were several other reports from listening units: infantry had been heard talking to tanks
au clair;
field headquarters had issued instructions in low-grade codes which had been deciphered overnight; and there was other enemy radio traffic which, although indecipherable, nevertheless yielded hints about enemy intentions simply because of its location and frequency. As well as radio reconnaissance there were the reports from the Ics in the field, who got information from captured weapons, the uniforms of enemy dead, interrogation of prisoners and simply looking across the desert and
seeing
the people they were fighting. Then there was aerial reconnaissance, a situation report from an order-of-battle expert and a summary—just about useless—of Berlin’s current assessment of Allied intentions and strength.

Like all field intelligence officers, von Mellenthin despised spy reports. Based on diplomatic gossip, newspaper stories and sheer guesswork, they were wrong at least as often as they were right, which made them effectively useless.

He had to admit that this one
looked
different.

The run-of-the-mill secret agent might report: “9th Indian Brigade have been told they will be involved in a major battle in the near future,” or: “Allies planning a breakout from the Cauldron in early June,” or: “Rumors that Auchinleck will be replaced as commander in chief.” But there was nothing indefinite about this report.

The spy, whose call sign was Sphinx, began his message: “Operation Aberdeen.” He gave the date of the attack, the brigades involved and their specific roles, the places they would pounce, and the tactical thinking of the planners.

Von Mellenthin was not convinced, but he was interested.

As the thermometer in his tent passed the 100-degree mark he began his routine round of morning discussions. In person, by field telephone and—rarely—by radio, he talked to the divisional Ics, the Luftwaffe liaison officer for aerial reconnaissance, the Horch Company liaison man and a few of the better brigade Ics. To all of these men he mentioned the 9th and 10th Indian Brigades, the 22nd Armored Brigade, and the 32nd Army Tank Brigade. He told them to look out for these brigades. He also told them to watch for battle preparations in the areas from which, according to the spy, the counter-thrust would come. They would also observe the enemy’s observers: if the spy were right, there would be increased aerial reconnaissance by the Allies of the positions they planned to attack, namely Aslagh Ridge, Sidra Ridge and Sidi Muftah. There might be increased bombing of those positions, for the purpose of softening up, although this was such a giveaway that most commanders would resist the temptation. There might be decreased bombing, as a bluff, and this too could be a sign.