“I see that. But I think you must know that I have no near relative in Austria whom I need fear for.”
“Certainly we do—and did. But to intern one alien to protect him so that he cannot obey the Nazis is not usually quite sufficient. Enough people must be interned with him so that no suspicion arises that he has told the truth to the authorities. Otherwise the threatened relative may suffer all the worse.”
“It’s obliging of you to explain this. I see the difficulties …”
“But this does not explain your arrest last week?”
“I should like to think it did.”
He laughed. “ You’re a younger man than I expected to meet, Dr Mencken.”
“I’m thirty-one. You must know that.”
“I do. I mean in manner. For your academic distinction, thirty-one is in any case very young.”
“It somewhat depends how you start. Most people spend seven years as children on general subjects; a liberal education they call it. I started very early on what interested me. Therefore I knew quite a bit on some subjects—on others virtually nothing at all.”
He leaned back in his big leather chair—so slim that another could have sat beside him. “Would it surprise you to know that of the seventy-three thousand three hundred Germans and Austrians in this country, you are the only one who was re-arrested last week?”
I shifted uneasily. All this friendliness and lack of ceremony.… What action of mine recently could possibly have been misinterpreted? That letter I wrote to Giiligan at the Royal Society? My demands to the electricians for extra power points? My telephone call to Leeds?
He was watching me closely. “ This work you are doing. It’s of national importance, I understand.”
“Among other things, I am working on a process for utilising sisal in submarines.”
“Would you say that is of vital national importance?”
“I don’t quite understand. All such processes are of exceptional value in wartime. This not more so than many others. Not less so either.”
“Would you consider yourself indispensable to the country’s effort—say for a couple of months? I understand there are other men working on the same idea. Professor Martin, for instances of Edinburgh.”
“You know him? Then you must know as much about all this as I do.”
“You think Professor Martin is likely to succeed independently of yon?”
“I have not seen him since May. He’s a clever man and has better facilities.”
“More whisky, Dr Mencken?”
“Thank you; I’ve not finished this yet.”
He looked out of the window, his blue eyes [??? Page No.16] as if temporarily he was thinking of something else. “Would it be true to say you were an expert on the subject of poison gas?”
I thought this out. The alien problem, sisal waste, and now gas. Even for a chat over after-dinner port it seemed a little disconnected. “No. I would not call myself anything like an expert.”
“But you gave a course of three lectures on various gases at London University the first winter you were here.”
“Those,” I said, “were ionised gases.”
He paused. “I didn’t know. I thought …”
“I’m sorry.”
There was nothing absent-minded about his eyes now. Someone was going to get into big trouble for that mistake.
“Those lectures,” I said. “In any case they were not very profound. I was invited to give them because I had been a friend and confidant of Kaufmann in Vienna. I was reporting some of the original ideas of a great man. There was little original of my own in them. And anyway—as you will know—that is really a branch of atomic physics.”
He had risen and gone to his desk, picked up a paper and read through it. “ But I understand from this that you did some work on poison gases when you were in Vienna.”
“Ah, yes, a little, when I was younger. But when I was twenty-six I gave all that up.”
“Why?”
“By then many of us in Austria could see the writing on the wall. As an Austrian, Hitler would never be content without possessing Austria. If he did take it I knew I would not want to stay. (Always, of course, I have been half English in sentiment.) But if my work there was such that it could contribute to military knowledge I knew I should not be allowed to leave. So I turned to other things.”
“Very far sighted of you.” He was still staring at the paper.
“You see,” I said, “in spite of having avoided a liberal education I am really rather a jack of all trades. It is not really the way to achieve eminence.”
“Suppose,” he said, “you were to see a gas manufactured in a laboratory, and demonstrated; would you be able to tell in what way it differed from a known gas, and—and recognise and remember the elements going to its composition?”
“Oh, yes. If I had full access to the laboratory.”
He nodded, “Perhaps it’s time we stopped beating about the bush, Dr Mencken.”
I said I thought it was.
“You have been very patient. But in a letter to your sister—I’m so sorry but these things are always intercepted—in a letter to your sister written last Satuday you complain rather bitterly of this country’s lack of confidence in your patriotism. I think we can prove to you now that we have a very real confidence in your patriotism—if you’ll allow us to make use of it.”
“I hope I can.”
“Well … it’s no sinecure that we offer.”
Outside, some machine was at work. I think it was a reaper, cutting and gathering the mixed corn that grew on the one-time lawn in front of the house.
“My name is Brown,” he said. “ I belong to the Special Branch of the British Intelligence Department. A little while ago we had a word from the head of our northers Italian organisation, appealing for extra help for a job which had come their way and asking if we could supply it. This we have been considering. The help they need is only one man. But unless that man conforms to certain definite requirements he would be better not sent.”
I sipped my whisky. Now I needed it. “ I conform to these requirements?”
He smiled suddenly. “ That, for the last two weeks, we have been trying to decide. The requirements are that he must be completely trustworthy, and able to keep his mouth shut if things go right—or still more if they go wrong. He must speak Italian like a native and know German too. And he must be a first-class chemist. That is the great difficulty.”
“With some knowledge on the subject of poison gases?”
“As you say.”
“Anything else?” I asked with a touch of sarcasm.
“He must be prepared to face all that such a mission would entail. Since we are at war, I imagine that goes without saying.”
I felt rather unwell. Half an hour ago I had been an interned alien with no immediate prospect of release and with only one prospect before me If I were released: a return to the seclusion of a laboratory. Now a sudden new world was open. I felt like a bird suddenly freed and too suddenly confronted with the menaces which were a part of freedom—there was already a yearning for the protection of the cage.
Adventure and danger were well enough for those who were used to it. I was not. Very far from it. I had always had too much imagination, and too much solitude in which to exercise it, to be a brave man. This thing I was being offered might need courage of a higher order. Better to refuse now than to fail miserably later and involve others in the failure.
“What physical qualifications?” I asked.
“None.”
“There’s no question of my having to—to impersonate someone else?” As soon as I asked I was ashamed of the question.
“Nothing like that. We might perhaps have preferred someone a little older, but …”
A vitally important and unpleasant factor was that I knew myself still to be an Austrian citizen. If I were discovered in Italy and not shot out of hand I would be sent at once back to German. In the back of my mi
nd hung the menace of the concentration camp and the totschläger. Even after two years in England I could still wake up in the night sweating. And we had only been under direct Nazi rule for four months before we left. It is well to be brave. It is very enviable to be brave …
“Have you anyone else in view?”
“Not anyone nearly so suitable.”
“What assistance would I have?”
“All that could be given you. You’d make contact with some of our agents over there and they would have everything arranged. With luck you could be back in England for Christmas.”
Agents. Cardboard figures. Notes pushed under doors and hidden in bouquets of flowers. Passwords, secret signs, seedy men standing in shadowy doorways scattering cigarette ash. Cardboard figures who would become real.
“I still don’t understand what you would expect. What would I have to do?”
“Attend a conference of Italian and German scientists in Milan on October the fourteenth and fifteenth.”
I got up and walked across to the window, peered out. It was a reaper. I wiped the palms of my hands with a handkerchief. In a very nasty way indeed I was caught with my own grievance. As Colonel Brown had said, my complaint all along had been that England was mistreating her adopted sons by putting them behind barbed wire. The least she could do was give them a rifie and let them fight. I’d said as much to Inspector Donnington. Well, now I had the opportunity I had been demanding. But it was neither what I wanted nor what I had expected. I would have given two years of my life to get out of this piece of war work that was being offered me. But the challenge was flung down. And in a sense it was a private challenge. How would I live with myself if I refused?
Chapter Three
Great adventures seldom start ostentatiously, and the second stage of this one began even more quietly than the first. There was in fact, I suppose, a certain proper drama in my arrest, the sharp severing of an ordinary life, my laboratory left untidy, a letter half written, a meal in preparation, a book open face down on the bedside table. But the second stage had only secrecy to commend it.
I left Liverpool in a little tramp steamer, one unit of a miscellaneous and ragged convoy bound for Lisbon. No one even came to the quayside to wish me luck. I walked up the gangway with a single suitcase, hat brim turned down and collar pulled up against the thick Merseyside drizzle. I thought of that distinguished English lady who had been in the Bahamas at the time of Dunkirk and had immediately left to return to her own country to see how she could help at such a time of danger and catastrophe. To the first person she met in England—the officer examining her passport—she had exclaimed: “ Isn’t it dreadful! Isn’t it dreadful!” And the officer had looked up and said: “What? What? Of … yes, it’s been raining like this for three days.”
The thought and what it implied was a comfort to me now. I wished I had more of that spirit myself. I felt I might need to remember its message in the days ahead.
Shaded blue lights on the quay, the throb of engines; crew all too busy to pay me attention, but one detached himself to show me my cabin. I had hardly unpacked my few things before the little tramp was under way. I had already seen the last of England, for when I went on deck half an hour later the land had vanished into mist and darkness.
For some days the weather had shown signs of breaking, and we met autumnal winds. I am a miserable sailor, and the long trek round the north coast of Ireland was an experience which only Biscay forced me to forget.
Not a pleasant trip, but between bouts of nausea I re-read Bergendorff’s Der Chemische Krieg, and Meyer’s Der Gaskampf und die Chemischen Kampstoffe and several others. I felt myself out of date and out of toucin.
The Tagus safely, and not an enemy plane or ship; but once or twice I had been so low that a periscope would have been a diversion. Lisbon as the only neutral Atlantic port was a clearing house of gossip, and I found it crowded with refugees washed up like flotsam by the tide of Nazi aggression. All nationalities and political colours rubbed shoulders in the common misfortune: French socialists and Polish aristocrats, Belgian cabinet ministers and Rumanian oil magnates, Dutch bankers and Spanish republicans. Germans too, men of importance in the National Socialist world. One I recognised whom I had last seen in the third car of Hitler’s triumphal entry into Vienna. Perhaps they wished to be sure that Portugal should not feel neglected.
Feeling better with dry land underfoot, I went at once to seek out the man who had been told to expect me. I located him in a maze of narrow streets below the National Library and near that pleasant shady, the Prace. A Jew and a seller of antiques, he was so much like Gielgud’s Shylock that I expected him at any moment to cry, “An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven: Shall I lay perjury upon my soul? No, one for Venice.”
In the event it would not have been inappropriate.
But in fact he was not concerned for my soul nor for his own, but only for my personality. I lost it. In the back room of his little shop, I lost it, together with luggage, books, clothing and Anglo-Austrian identity. No change in actual appearance, but I found that my name was now Edmondo Catania, that my passport had been issued by the Italian government, that I lived in Lisbon and occupied a comfortable flat overlooking the gardens of St. Pedro de Alcantara and had an office in the city from which I carried on a business as agent representing one of the largest silk exporters in Rome. My hair, said my passport, echoing my old one, was dark brown, my eyes grey, my height five feet ten inches. I had been born is Turin and my age was 35. I was, it seemed, returning to my own country to volunteer for military service.
This patriotic plan I now put into practice, travelling over-land to Madrid and thence to Barcelona. From here I caught another tramp steamer bound for Venice, and spent the early days of the voyage reading some papers which bad been provided and which I was respectfully requested to commit to memory and then burn.
Colonel Brown had really told me very little of what was ahead, and these papers were nothing to do with the future. They only told me what sort of a man Edmondo Catania had been in the past.
Even though this little tramp was a neutral, the captain seemed in no mind to take undue risks, with the sudden collapse of France, and trigger-happy Italian and British warships liable to appear over the horizon at any time, so we hugged the coastline most of the way, and as a result we did not reach Venice until the afternoon of October the ninth, when she berthed four days behind her own pessimistic schedule.
I was very anxious now. Four important days had been lost and might ruin the whole enterprise for lack of time. No one had said where I must stay, so I booked a room in a hotel overlooking the Lagoon and unpacked my few things. Nothing now till nightfall.
Strange to be in this loveliest of all cities again after five years, especially so after the dangerous and depressing journey, first across wide and devious stretches of sea in a state of unsleeping armed alert, then across country still showing the blight of civil war—that civil war which had been a symptom of the ailment of which all Europe was now sick. The last time I was in Venice the Spanish sore hadn’t even begun to fester; and Schuschnigg at least was still alive and a free Austrian cabinet still met—whether it was to consider the Fatherland Front or the future of comic opera; and the shadow of a bloodstained neurotic despot had fallen across my beloved Vienna, but only the shadow. That Europe in which I had grown up had never been a real place. In it men had worked and played and tended their own affairs, not quite conscious, but never entirely unconscious, of the insecure, fluid, temporary nature of it all. Like ants building in ground soon to be re-turned.
The differences which war had brought to this city of pleasure seemed at first quite few. Many of the gondola men still plied, but the water buses were happily fewer; the enchanted St. Mark’s Square was scarcely less crowded for the time of year, the pigeons as numerous and as well fed. Shops were still stacked with beautiful silks, tooled leathers, costume jewellery, Murano glass, shirts, embroidered blouses, rich ma
terials, haute couture fashions. The grocery shops and fish shops were full, fruit shops were overflowing. I had forgotten that I had now been moved to the winning side.
Perhapsthe greatest difference was in the languages. I heard no English, no French, only once American, twice Spanish. Being a polyglot, I am sensitive to the dialects of others; and I could pick out Bavarian from Prussian, Saxon from Westphalian, northern Italian from Roman; twice with something of a thrill I heard pure Viennese.
Only when dusk fell did more changes show. The brilliance of the cafés and the lights round the Piazza San Marco had gone, as had all the lights except navigation lights on the lagoon. Even the lanterns in the gondolas had been dimmed; they moved through the narrow canals like glow-worms, and the gondoliers called their peculiar cry more often at corners so that they should not bump into their fellows. The great clock of the Campanile was not lit. The Lido was invisible. The cathedral and churches were not flood-lit. All this seemed to me a great improvement.
The day had been bright and clear, but towards evening a watery mist crept over the sun, and now in the dusk a feeling of damp crept over the city. Depressed, I went back to the hotel.
The depression was perhaps more one of instinct and fore-boding, because so far everything had gone without a hitch. The first big test had come on landing from the ship and passing the port authorities, but the questions asked had been well within the scope of a man who knew Edmondo Catania as well as I did. Of course the secret police had been hanging about, and one of them had listened to my answers, but I had been used to them in Italy for a long time, and they seemed no different from before the war. Mussolini’s Mafia, my father had called them, because the Duce had truncated and rendered innocuous that earliest of racketeering organisations by the expedient of incorporating its leading members in his secret police.