But which appointed page in which appointed book?
I knew that for the full twenty-six-letter encryption, the Germans had the habit of assigning one page of the book for each day of the year. That left Erich Maria Remarque’s Drei Kameraden out—the little novel was only 106 pages long. I assumed that Drei Kameraden was the source for the “first word” that would decide how the grid was partitioned. But which page? That would have been sent in a coded signal prior to the actual translation. And did the encrypted transmission we had in the book relate to the twenty-six-letter code or the first-word code?
No matter, I thought. I had Kohler’s jotted notes for the transmissions themselves: h-r-l-s-l / r-i-a-l-u / i-v-g-a-m… and so on. All I had to do was sort out which transmission went with which code based on which words or phrases from which books on which pages.
Ah, well. A hundred and six pages was finite enough… I would just substitute the first word on each of the 106 pages, block the grids accordingly, and see how the encrypted message played. First, though, I found myself sliding into the simple prose of Remarque—“ Meinen letzten Geburtstag hatte ich im Café International gefeiert…”—and paying attention to the tale of automobiles, love, disease, friendship, and loss. I stopped myself sixty-one pages in—“ Und da kam sie, aus dem Gebrodel der Nacht, die ruhige Stimme Kosters…” This was no time to read my first make-believe book.
Many of the first words could be discarded as too short—Ich, Und, Die, and so forth. Many of the rest—uberflutete (page 11), mussen (page 24), Gottfried (page 25), and so forth—started promisingly but led to nonsense when I tried to block the grid and transpose the transmission sequence.
By the afternoon of our dinner party with Helga Sonneman, Teddy Shell, and the mysterious “Kraut,” I had gotten precisely nowhere. The Kraut was to stay in the guest house for a few days, so I helped Hemingway pack away our Crook Factory maps, files, dossiers, and typewriter—setting Kohler’s codebook and the three German books in the safe in the main house—and then I packed up my own gear and carried it to Vigía–Grade A, la casa perdita, where Maria Marquez greeted my moving in with a raised eyebrow and a slight curve of those full lips. Xenophobia had been allowed to eat with the servants at the big house and to lounge by the pool in the afternoons when Hemingway was around to protect her, but today the finca was strictly off-limits and the girl was in a pouty mood.
I was supposed to run half a dozen errands in Havana before the Lincoln was due back at the farm. Whoever the Kraut was, Hemingway was going to the airport to pick him or her up at four-thirty that afternoon. I had two hours.
I stopped at the first pay phone. The voice on the other end of the line said, “Of course, Mr. Lucas. Come right up. We will be waiting for you.”
The Nacional was the most expensive hotel in Havana. I had parked the car near the waterfront and walked several blocks, doubling back, darting in front of traffic, checking in shop windows, and generally using careful tradecraft to make sure that I was not being followed. There was no sign of Maldonado, Delgado, or any of the other parties who had been taking an interest in me recently. Still, I hesitated before going in the wide double doors of the hotel. Everything else I had done to this point might be explained to the Bureau. Omitting my primary role in the fireworks caper and holding off on reporting on the possession of the codebook until it was decrypted might be explained away if the rest of my mission was successful.
What I was about to do violated Bureau rules, SIS procedure, and interagency protocol.
Fuck it.
“Ah, come in, come in, Mr. Lucas,” said Wallace Beta Phillips, at the door of Room 314.
There was another man in the room and it was not the driver from the other day, Mr. Cowley. This man was a professional, tall, slim, silent. He kept his jacket on in the dim heat. I guessed that it was a large-caliber revolver in his shoulder holster. Mr. Phillips did not introduce us. The hairless dwarf nodded and the other man went out onto the balcony of the suite, pulling the doors shut behind him.
“Scotch?” said the little man, pouring one for himself.
“Sure,” I said. “A bit of ice.”
Phillips sat on one of the gilded chairs and waved me to a place on the couch. The rumble of Havana traffic came through the tall windows and doors. I noticed that the hunchback’s feet did not quite touch the floor as he sat. His shoes were brightly polished, his cream-colored suit as impeccably tailored and sharply pressed as the outfit he had worn in the car the last time I’d seen him.
“To what do we owe this pleasure, Mr. Lucas?” The ice clinked in his crystal Scotch glass as he drank. “Information to share, I hope?”
“A question to ask,” I said.
The hairless man nodded and waited.
“Hypothetically speaking,” I said, “would your interest in this Hemingway situation extend to offering some help in decrypting some radio intercepts?”
Wallace Beta Phillips showed no surprise. “Hypothetical radio intercepts, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Your Bureau has an extensive decryption department, Mr. Lucas. Failing that, they could always go through channels to Mr. Donovan or ONI, as they are wont to do.”
I waited.
Phillips smiled slightly. “Or perhaps this hypothetical exercise involves less formal chains of command.”
“Perhaps,” I said.
“Pose the question, please,” said the former Chief of Naval Intelligence for Latin America.
I sipped Scotch and set the glass down carefully. “Let’s assume that someone found an Abwehr radio codebook,” I said. “Standard grids per page. Several transmissions jotted outside the grids.”
“One would need to know the books that operator had been using, of course,” said Phillips, studying the amber fluid in his glass. The light danced on crystal and filtered through the whiskey.
“Yes,” I said.
Phillips waited calmly. I noticed how dry and smooth his pink skin looked. His nails had been recently manicured.
What the hell, I thought. I was already in over my head. I gave him the three titles.
Phillips nodded again. “And the question, Mr. Lucas?”
“Any suggestions on how to find pages and key words?” I said. “The Abwehr changes the pattern frequently.”
“Quite frequently,” agreed the dwarf. He drank the last of his Scotch and set the glass down on the Louis XV end table. “May I ask how OSS or ONI cooperation at this point could benefit either or both of these agencies, Mr. Lucas?”
I made a gesture. “Hypothetically, Mr. Phillips, any decoded information that would pertain to COI… excuse me, OSS… or ONI operations could be passed along.”
Phillips regarded me for a long moment. His eyes were very blue. “And who would determine whether such hypothetical information was relevant to OSS operations, Mr. Lucas? We or thee?”
“Me,” I said.
Phillips exhaled and studied the pattern in the Persian carpet beneath his polished shoes for a moment. “Do you know the expression ‘buying a pig in a poke,’ Mr. Lucas?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, I believe I am about to purchase a porcine in such a package.” He crossed the floor, picked up my glass on his way to the bar, poured two more drinks for us, handed me mine, and walked to the tall window. “You know about the crackdown in Brazil?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I believe the Abwehr does not know the full extent of the arrests or DOPS operations there,” said Phillips. “Your FBI found it to their advantage to continue some clandestine radio traffic through the ‘Bolivar’ nexus, and Mr. Donovan’s analysts concur that Admiral Canaris and his people have not yet discovered that Engels and some of his top people have been arrested.”
I frowned. “I heard about the move against the Rio transmitter at the end of March,” I said. “How could the Abwehr not know that their organization was compromised?”
Phillips turned around. His silhouette aga
inst the bright window reminded me of a diminutive J. Edgar Hoover. “Engels—code-named ‘Alfredo,’ you may remember—was among the first arrested in mid-March. But as I mentioned, his transmissions have continued.”
I nodded. The FBI had pulled this trick before, continuing sending classified information to the enemy in order to reap the benefits of the contact later. “It must be run straight out of the U.S. embassy in Brazil,” I said. “None of the SIS traffic has carried this.”
“It is,” said Wallace Beta Phillips. “Do you know Special Agent Jack West?”
“No, but I’ve heard the name. Works under D. M. Ladd.”
“Precisely. Agent West was dispatched to Brazil in March shortly after the Queen Mary incident on March 12…”
That “incident” had been when the Rio transmitter had broadcast the sailing dates for the British ship carrying nine thousand American troops.
“… and he personally oversaw the arrests with the Brazilian federal police in Rio and São Paulo,” finished Phillips. “The Abwehr has received sporadic transmissions from ‘Alfredo’ since then, warning of increased police pressure, necessitating that the organization lie dormant for a while…”
“Not knowing that they’re dormant in jail cells,” I said. “But the Bureau can’t continue that for long.”
Phillips lifted a palm in a dismissive gesture. “Long enough.”
I understood then. Long enough for Theodor Schlegel to leave on his Viking Fund mission without suspecting that Engels and his other comrades were either under arrest or being watched. Long enough for Admiral Canaris to be reassured… to what end? To continue whatever Abwehr project existed on or around Cuba.
For a second my blood literally ran cold. Both British and American intelligence services had run the risk that German subs would torpedo the British Queen Mary with nine thousand U.S. troops on board rather than compromise this operation. What the hell was going on?
I could simply ask Wallace Beta Phillips, but I knew that the little man would not tell me. Not now. Whatever my role in this labyrinthine game was meant to be, I would have to act it out myself before I found any answers. But Phillips was willing to buy his pig in a poke, risking more than I was. Obviously, ONI and Donovan’s new OSS already had some or all of the German code if they were monitoring the FBI’s ‘Bolivar’ and ‘Alfredo’ transmissions.
“What’s the key?” I said. “Where in Drei Kameraden?”
Phillips smiled again. Unlike Delgado’s leer, the hunchbacked dwarf’s smile was quite pleasant, never taunting. “Since late April, the Abwehr and Schlegel have been using Geopolitík and the German literature anthology you mentioned, dear boy. I’m afraid that Remarque’s book simply isn’t in it.”
“Then why did Kohler have it with him?” I said.
Phillips returned to his chair and hopped into it. “Perhaps he simply likes a good book.”
“The page code?” I said.
“They are currently using April twentieth as ‘day one/page one,’ ” said Phillips. “That was the day the key was changed, and I am aware of no further changes at this time.”
“Books?” I said.
“My guess is that the word-based code is in Geopolitík and the alphabet-based key in the anthology,” said Phillips.
I nodded, set my empty glass on the end table, and went to the door.
“Mr. Lucas?”
I held the door and waited.
“Do you happen to know the significance of April twenty?”
“It’s Adolf Hitler’s birthday,” I said. “I didn’t know that Admiral Canaris was so sentimental.”
Phillips was still smiling. “Nor we, Mr. Lucas. We suspect that our friend in the harbor, Herr Schlegel, is the sentimental… if not to say simple-minded… one who suggested that date.”
I turned to go.
“Mr. Lucas?”
The hallway outside was empty. I stood in the open door and looked at the tiny, hunchbacked figure, now standing in a trapezoid of rich light.
“You will be liberal in deciding what might be of interest to the OSS, yes?”
“I’ll be in touch,” I said, and went out the door.
I TOLD HEMINGWAY that I had to see the codebook and reference books again. The writer was bustling around, tying his tie and preparing for the trip to the airport, but he opened the safe for me.
“You can’t work on that in the guest house,” he said. “The Kraut’s staying there tonight.”
“I’ll take them to Grade A,” I said.
“Don’t let Xenophobia see what you’re doing.”
I stared at him. Did Hemingway think that I was a fool?
“Oh… and Helga and Teddy Shell are coming earlier than six-thirty,” he said, pulling on a linen jacket. Gellhorn brushed past us in the hallway, called for Juan the chauffeur to hurry up, and told Hemingway to hurry up in the same tone she had used for the chauffeur. The writer paused by a mirror to run his palms over his slicked-back hair. Whoever the Kraut was, Hemingway wanted to make an impression.
“We’re going to have a little party by the pool before the cocktail hour,” said Hemingway, “although there’ll be cocktails enough by the pool as well. Bring swim trunks if you have them.”
“Swim trunks?”
Hemingway showed all of his teeth in a wide grin. “I was talking to Helga on the phone this afternoon. She was delighted to learn that we have a pool. It seems that she just learned that there are sharks in the waters around Havana Bay… and she likes to swim.”
“Ernest!” It was Gellhorn’s shout from the car. “I swear to God, you won’t let me get my makeup on and then you keep me waiting.”
“Good luck with those,” said Hemingway, handing me the four books as if in afterthought before he jogged out to the waiting Lincoln.
I walked up to la casa perdita, wondering where I was going to exile Xenophobia while I decrypted the Nazi radio transmissions.
14
THE THREE WOMEN in their swimsuits were not hard to look at. Martha Gellhorn wore a white, one-piece, elastic suit with piping around the bodice. Helga Sonneman had on a two-piece cotton swimsuit with stripes on both the halter top and the shortslike lower piece. Marlene Dietrich wore a trim suit of a navy blue so dark as to appear almost black. In body types, they ran from Sonneman’s athletic but lush, almost luscious, Germanic fullness, through Gellhorn’s American mixture of sharp lines and soft curves, to Dietrich’s angular eroticism.
I had not been overly surprised when the “Kraut” turned out to be another movie star… this one in particular, actually. What little I had known about Hemingway a few weeks before included his friendship with this woman. I did not go to the movies that often, but when I did, I usually chose westerns or gangster pictures. I had seen Dietrich in that Jimmy Stewart movie—Destry Rides Again—just before Hitler had invaded Poland. I usually liked Jimmy Stewart, but I had not liked that movie very much; it seemed to be making fun of other westerns, and the Dietrich character, although speaking in her thick, German accent, was called “Frenchy.” It seemed silly. Then I had seen her last summer in Manpower—a forgettable tough-guy movie starring two of my favorite tough guys, Edward G. Robinson and George Raft. Her character had seemed weak, almost superfluous, in that movie, and all I remembered of her were scenes where she showed her legs—still shapely even though she must have been forty years old by then—and a scene where she was cooking up a storm in a small kitchen. While sitting in the Mexico City theater, thinking of other things and ignoring the Spanish subtitles, I had realized—She’s really cooking that stew.
Before I could go to the pool party, I’d needed to hide the codebook and reference books. Using Wallace’s system, it had taken me less than fifteen minutes to find the reference words, block the grids accordingly, and work the codes. I was eager to show the result to Hemingway, but when I walked over to the finca, the writer was busy showing his home to his guests, and I thought that it was less than a good idea to bring the codebook to him in
front of Teddy Shell, aka Theodor Schlegel, the man who had almost certainly hired Martin Kohler to send and receive those secret transmissions.
I couldn’t leave the books in the dairy cottage. There had been no problem with Xenophobia when I arrived earlier; she was simply gone. The young whore was not supposed to wander off by herself, but she had been upset by being excluded from the finca all day, and I could only guess that she was wandering around the hillsides or even as far as San Francisco de Paula, down the hill. I hoped to hell that she had not gone into one of the bars or stores in that village, since both the National Police and Schlegel’s people were reported to be looking for the girl, and the friendly villagers were almost certainly frightened enough of Caballo Loco to tell his people what they wanted to know. Not to mention that Schlegel’s bribes would find eager tongues in that poor village.
I told myself that Maria Marquez was not my problem. My problem was finding a secure place for these books, especially the codebook, until this stupid party was over and I could talk to Hemingway. Picking up my books and notes, I changed into swimming trunks, wrapped the books in the checkered cloth from the counter, carried them in the back entrance to the finca while everyone was laughing and splashing out by the pool, opened Hemingway’s safe—I had watched intently from across the room when he had opened the little safe that afternoon—and locked the books away before going out to meet the Abwehr spy, the keeper of ancient artifacts, and the movie star.
IT WAS OBVIOUS that Dietrich had never been to the finca before. Earlier, I had caught the tail end of the twenty-five-cent tour of the house, with Helga Sonneman making polite comments but obviously put off by the animal trophies, Theodor Schlegel sipping his drink between polite grunts, but Marlene Dietrich exclaiming over everything—the hunting trophies, the books, the artwork, the long, cool rooms, Hemingway’s writing place at the tall bookcase near his bed, everything. Her German accent was almost, not quite, as thick as I had heard it in the movies, but there was something much more relaxed and friendly about her tone than I had ever picked up sitting in a theater.