“Please proceed, Professor. Pay no attention to Captain St. Florian’s abominable manners. We interrupted him at play in a bawdy house for this meeting and he is cranky.”
“Yes, then. The book code stems from the presumption that both sender and receiver have access to the same book. It is therefore usually a common volume, shall we say Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. I want to send you a message, say ‘Meet me at two p.m. at the square.’ I page through the book until I find the word ‘meet.’ It is on page 17, paragraph 4, line 2, fifth word. So the first line in my code is 17-4-2-5. Unless you know the book, it is meaningless. But you, knowing the book, having the book, quickly find 17-4-2-5 and encounter the word ‘meet.’ And on and on. Of course variations can be worked—we can agree ahead of time, say, that for the last designation we will always be value minus two, that is, two integers less. So in that case the word ‘meet’ would actually be found at 17-4-2-3. Moreover, in picking a book as decoder, one would certainly be prone to pick a common book, one that should excite no excitement, that one might normally have about.”
“I grasp it, Professor,” said Basil. “But what, then, if I take your inference, is the point of choosing as a key book the Right Reverend MacBurney’s The Path to Jesus, of which only one copy exists, and it is held under lock and key at Cambridge? And since last I heard, we still control Cambridge. Why don’t we just go to Cambridge and look at the damned thing? You don’t need an action-this-day chap like me for that. You could use a lance corporal.”
“Indeed, you have tumbled to it,” said Sir Colin. “Yes, we could obtain the book that way. However, in doing so we would inform both the sender and the receiver that we knew they were up to something, that they were control and agent and had an operation under way, when our goal is to break the code without them knowing. That is why, alas, a simple trip to the library by a lance corporal is not feasible.”
“I hope I’m smart enough to stay up with all these wrinkles, gentlemen. I already have a headache.”
“Welcome to the world of espionage,” said Sir Colin. “We all have headaches. Professor, please continue.”
“The volume in the library is indeed controlled by only one man,” Turing said. “And he is the senior librarian of the institution. Alas, his loyalties are such that they are not, as one might hope and expect, for his own country. He is instead one of those of high caste taken by fascination for another creed, and it is to that creed he pays his deepest allegiance. He has made himself useful to his masters for many years as a ‘talent spotter,’ that is, a man who looks at promising undergraduates, picks those with keen policy minds and good connections, forecasts their rise, and woos them to his side as secret agents with all kinds of babble of the sort that appeals to the mushy romantic brain of the typical English high-class idiot. He thus plants the seeds of our destruction, sure to bloom a few decades down the line. He does other minor tasks too, running as a cutout, providing a safe house, disbursing a secret fund, and so forth. He is committed maximally and he will die before he betrays his creed, and some here have suggested a bullet in the brain as apposite, but actually, by the tortured rules of the game, a live spy in place is worth more than a dead spy in the ground. Thus he must not be disturbed, bothered, breathed heavily upon— he must be left entirely alone.”
“And as a consequence you cannot under any circumstances access the book. You do not even know what it looks like?” Basil asked.
“We have a description from a volume published in 1932, called Treasures of the Cambridge Library.”
“I can guess who wrote it,” said Basil.
“Your guess would be correct,” said Sir Colin. “It tells us little other than that it comprises thirtyfour pages of foolscap written in tightly controlled nib by an accomplished freehand scrivener. Its eccentricity is that occasionally apostolic bliss came over the author and he decorated the odd margin with constellations of floating crosses, proclaiming his love of all things Christian. The Reverend MacBurney was clearly given to religious swoons.”
“And the librarian is given to impenetrable security,” said the admiral. “There will come a time when I will quite happily murder him with your cricket bat, Captain.”
“Alas, I couldn’t get the bloodstains out and left it in Malay. So let me sum up what I think I know so far. For some reason the Germans have a fellow in the Cambridge library controlling access to a certain 1767 volume. Presumably they have sent an agent to London with a coded message he himself does not know the answer to, possibly for security reasons. Once safely here, he will approach the bad-apple librarian and present him with the code. The bad apple will go to the manuscript, decipher it, and give a response to the Nazi spy. I suppose it’s operationally sound. It neatly avoids radio, as you say it cannot be breached without giving notice that the ring itself is under high suspicion, and once armed with the message, the operational spy can proceed with his mission. Is that about it?”
“Almost,” said Sir Colin. “In principle, yes, you have the gist of it—manfully done. However, you haven’t got the players quite right.”
“Are we then at war with someone I don’t know about?” said Basil.
“Indeed and unfortunately. Yes. The Soviet Union. This whole thing is Russian, not German.”
The Second Day (cont’d.)
If panic flashed through Basil’s mind, he did not yield to it, although his heart hammered against his chest as if a spike of hard German steel had been pounded into it. He thought of his L-pill, but it was buried in his breast pocket. He thought next of his pistol: Could he get it out in time to bring a few of them down before turning it on himself? Could he at least kill this leering German idiot who … but then he noted that the characterization had been delivered almost merrily.
“You must be a spy,” said the colonel, laughing heartily, sitting next to him. “Why else would you shave your moustache but to go on some glamorous underground mission?”
Basil laughed, perhaps too loudly, but in his chest his heart still ran wild. He hid his blast of fear in the heartiness of the fraudulent laugh and came back with an equally jocular, “Oh, that? It seems in winter my wife’s skin turns dry and very sensitive, so I always shave it off for a few months to give the beauty a rest from the bristles.”
“It makes you look younger.”
“Why, thank you.”
“Actually, I’m so glad to have discovered you. At first I thought it was not you, but then I thought, Gunther, Gunther, who would kidnap the owner of the town’s only hotel and replace him with a double? The English are not so clever.”
“The only thing they’re any good at,” said Basil, “is weaving tweed. English tweed is the finest in the world. “
“I agree, I agree,” said the colonel. “Before all this, I traveled there quite frequently. Business, you know.”
It developed that the colonel, a Great War aviator, had represented a Berlin-based hair tonic firm whose directors had visions, at least until 1933, of entering the English market. The colonel had made trips to London in hopes of interesting some of the big department stores in carrying a line of lanolin-based hair creams for men, but was horrified to learn that the market was controlled by the British company that manufactured Brylcreem and would use its considerable clout to keep the Germans out.
“Can you imagine,” said the colonel, “that in the twenties there was a great battle between Germany and Great Britain for the market advantage of lubricating the hair of the British gentleman? I believe our product was much finer than that English goop, as it had no alcohol and alcohol dries the hair stalk, robbing it of luster, but I have to say that the British packaging carried the day, no matter. We could never find the packaging to catch the imagination of the British gentleman, to say nothing of a slogan. German as a language does not lend itself to slogans. Our attempts at slogans were ludicrous. We are too serious, and our language is like potatoes in gravy. It has no lightness in it at all. The best we could come up with was, ‘Our tonic is
very good.’ Thus we give the world Nietzsche and not Wodehouse. In any event, when Hitler came to power and the air forces were reinvigorated, it was out of the hair oil business and back to the cockpit.”
It turned out that the colonel was a born talker. He was on his way to Paris on a three-day leave to meet his wife for a “well-deserved, if I do say so myself” holiday. He had reservations at the Ritz and at several four-star restaurants.
Basil put it together quickly: the man he’d stolen his papers from was some sort of collaborationist big shot and had made it his business to suck up to all the higher German officers, presumably seeing the financial opportunities of being in league with the occupiers. It turned out further that this German fool was soft and supple when it came to sycophancy and he’d mistaken the Frenchman’s oleaginous demeanor with actual affection, and he thought it quite keen to have made a real friend among the wellborn French. So Basil committed himself to six hours of chitchat with the idiot, telling himself to keep autobiographical details at a minimum in case the real chap had already spilled some and he should contradict something previously established.
That turned out to be no difficulty at all, for the German colonel revealed himself to have an awesomely enlarged ego, which he expressed through an autobiographical impulse, so he virtually told his life story to Basil over the long drag, gossiping about the greed of Göring and the reluctance of the night fighters to close with the Lancasters, Hitler’s insanity in attacking Russia, how much he, the colonel, missed his wife, how he worried about his son, a Stuka pilot, and how sad he was that it had come to pass that civilized Europeans were at each other’s throats again, and on and on and on and on, but at least the Jews would be dealt with once and for all, no matter who won in the end. He titillated Basil with inside information on his base and the wing he commanded, Nachtjagdgeschwader-9, and the constant levies for Russia that had stripped it of logistics, communications, and security people, until nothing was left but a skeleton staff of air crew and mechanics, yet still they were under pressure from Luftwaffe command to bring down yet more Tommies to relieve the night bombing of Berlin. Damn the Tommies and their brutal methods of war! The man considered himself fascinating, and his presence seemed to ward off the attention of the other German officers who came and went on the trip to the Great City. It seemed so damned civilized that you almost forgot there was a war on.
It turned out that one of the few buildings in Paris with an actual Nazi banner hanging in front of it was a former insurance company’s headquarters at 14 rue Guy de Maupassant in the sixth arrondissement. However, the banner wasn’t much, really just an elongated flag that hung limply off a pole on the fifth floor. None of the new occupants of the building paid much attention to it. It was the official headquarters of the Paris district of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, ably run from Berlin by Admiral Canaris and beginning to acquire a reputation for not being all that crazy about Herr Hitler.
They were mostly just cops. And they brought cop attributes to their new headquarters: dyspepsia, too much smoking, cheap suits, fallen arches, and a deep cynicism about everything, but particularly about human nature and even more particularly about notions of honor, justice, and duty. They did believe passionately in one cause, however: staying out of Russia.
“Now let us see if we have anything,” said Hauptmann Dieter Macht, chief of Section III-B (counterintelligence), Paris office, at his daily staff meeting at three p.m., as he gently spread butter on a croissant. He loved croissants. There was something so exquisite about the balance of elements— the delicacy of the crust, which gave way to a kind of chewy substrata as you peeled it away, the flakiness, the sweetness of the inner bread, the whole thing a majestic creation that no German baker, ham-thumbed and frosting-crazed, could ever match.
“Hmmm,” he said, sifting through the various reports that had come in from across the country. About fifteen men, all ex-detectives like himself, all in droopy plain clothes like himself, all with uncleaned Walthers holstered sloppily on their hips, awaited his verdict. He’d been a Great War aviator, an actual ace in fact, then the star of Hamburg Homicide before this war, and had a reputation for sharpness when it came to seeing patterns in seemingly unrelated events. Most of III-B’s arrests came from clever deductions made by Hauptmann Macht.
“Now this is interesting. What do you fellows make of this one? It seems in Sur-la-Gane, about forty kilometers east of here, a certain man known to be connected to inner circles of the Maquis was spotted returning home early in the morning by himself. Yet there has been no Maquis activity in that area since we arrested Pierre Doumaine last fall and sent him off to Dachau.”
“Perhaps,” said Leutnant Abel, his second-in- command, “he was at a meeting and they are becoming active again. Netting a big fish only tears them down for a bit of time, you know.” “They’d hold such a meeting earlier. The French like their sleep. They almost slept through 1940, after all. What one mission gets a Maquis up at night? Anyone?”
No one.
“British agent insertion. They love to cooperate with the Brits because the Brits give them so much equipment, which can either be sold on the black market or be used against their domestic enemies after the war. So they will always jump lively for the SOE, because the loot is too good to turn down. And such insertions will be late-night or early-morning jobs.”
“But,” said Leutnant Abel, “I have gone through the reports too, and there are no accounts of aviation activities in that area that night. When the British land men in Lysanders, some farmer always calls the nearby police station to complain about low-flying aviators in the dark of night, frightening the cows. You never want to frighten a peasant’s cows; he’ll be your enemy for life. Believe me, Hauptmann Macht, had a Lysander landed, we’d know from the complaints.”
“Exactly,” said Macht. “So perhaps our British visitor didn’t arrive for some reason or other and disappointed the Sur-la-Gane Resistance cell, who got no loot that night. But if I’m not mistaken, that same night complaints did come in from peasants near Bricquebec, outside Cherbourg.”
“We have a night fighter base there,” said Abel. “Airplanes come and go all night—it’s meaningless.”
“There were no raids that night,” said Macht. “The bomber stream went north, to Prussia, not to Bavaria.”
“What do you see as significant about that?”
“Suppose for some reason our fellow didn’t trust the Sur-la-Gane bunch, or the Resistance either. It’s pretty well penetrated, after all. So he directs his pilot to put him somewhere else.”
“They can’t put Lysanders down just anywhere,” said another man. “It has to be set up, planned, torches lit. That’s why it’s so vulnerable to our investigations. So many people—someone always talks, maybe not to us, but to someone, and it always gets to us.”
“The Bricquebec incident described a roar, not a put-put or a dying fart. The roar would be a Lysander climbing to parachute altitude. They normally fly at 500, and any agent who made an exit that low would surely scramble his brains and his bones. So the plane climbs, this fellow bails out, and now he’s here.”
“Why would he take the chance on a night drop into enemy territory? He could come down in the Gestapo’s front yard. Hauptsturmführer Boch would enjoy that very much.”
Actually the Abwehr detectives hated Boch more than the French and English combined. He could send them to Russia.
“I throw it back to you, Walter. Stretch that brain of yours beyond the lazy parameters it now sleepily occupies and come up with a theory.”
“All right, sir, I’ll pretend to be insane, like you. I’ll postulate that this phantom Brit agent is very crafty, very old school, clever as they come. He doesn’t trust the Maquis, nor should he. He knows we eventually hear everything. Thus he improvises. It’s just his bad luck that his airplane awakened some cows near Bricquebec, the peasants complained, and so exactly what he did not want us to know is exactly what we do know. Is
that insane enough for you, sir?”
Macht and Abel were continually taking shots at each other, and in fact they didn’t like each other very much. Macht was always worried about Is- Russia as opposed to Not-Russia, while the younger Abel had family connections that would keep him far from Stalin’s millions of tanks and Mongols and all that horrible snow.
“Very good,” said Macht. “That’s how I read it. You know when these boys arrive they stir up a lot of trouble. If we don’t stop them, maybe we end up on an antitank gun in Russia. Is anyone here interested in that sort of a job change?”
That certainly shut everyone up fast. It frightened Macht even to say such a thing.
“I will make some phone calls,” Abel said. “See if there’s anything unusual going on.”
It didn’t take him long. At the Bricquebec prefecture, a policeman read him the day’s incident report, from which he learned that a prominent collaborationist businessman had claimed that his papers were stolen from him. He had been arrested selling black-market petrol and couldn’t identify himself. He was roughly treated until his identity was proven, and he swore he would complain to Berlin, as he was a supporter of the Reich and demanded more respect from the occupiers.
His name, Abel learned, was Piens.
“Hmmm,” said Macht, a logical sort. “If the agent was originally going to Sur-la-Gane, it seems clear that his ultimate destination would be Paris. There’s really not much for him to do in Bricquebec or Sur-la-Gane, for that matter. Now, how would he get here?”
“Clearly, the railway is the only way.”
“Exactly,” said Hauptmann Macht. “What time does the train from Cherbourg get in? We should meet it and see if anyone is traveling under papers belonging to M. Piens. I’m sure he’d want them returned.”
A few days earlier (cont’d.)
“Have I been misinformed?” asked Basil. “Are we at war with the Russians? I thought they were our friends.”