“I wish it were as easy as that,” said Sir Colin. “But it never is. Yes, in one sense we are at war with Germany and at peace with Russia. On the other hand, this fellow Stalin is a cunning old brute, stinking of bloody murder to high heaven, and thus he presumes that all are replicas of himself, equally cynical and vicious. So while we are friends with him at a certain level, he still spies on us at another level. And because we know him to be a monster, we still spy on him. It’s all different compartments. Sometimes it’s damned hard to keep straight, but there’s one thing all the people in this room agree on: the moment the rope snaps hard about Herr Hitler’s chicken neck, the next war begins, and it is between we of the West and they of the East.”
“Rather dispiriting,” said Basil. “One would have thought one had accomplished something other than clearing the stage for the next war.”
“So it goes, alas and alack, in our sad world. But Basil, I think you will be satisfied to know that the end game of this little adventure we are preparing for you is actually to help the Russians, not to hurt them. It benefits ourselves, of course, no doubt about it. But we need to help them see a certain truth that they are reluctant, based on Stalin’s various neuroses and paranoias, to believe.”
“You see,” said the general, “he would trust us a great deal more if we opened a second front. He doesn’t think much of our business in North Africa, where our losses are about one-fiftieth of his. He wants our boys slaughtered on the French beaches in numbers that approach the slaughter of his boys. Then he’ll know we’re serious about this Allies business. But a second front in Europe is a long way off, perhaps two years. A lot of American men and matériel have to land here before then. In the meantime we grope and shuffle and misunderstand and misinterpret. That’s where you’ll fit in, we hope. Your job, as you will learn at the conclusion of this dreadful meeting about two days from now, is to shine light and dismiss groping and shuffling and misinterpretation.”
“I hope I can be of help,” said Basil. “However, my specialty is blowing things up.”
“You have nothing to blow up this time out,” said Sir Colin. “You are merely helping us explain something.”
“But I must ask, since you’re permitting me unlimited questions, how do you know all this?” said Basil. “You say Stalin is so paranoid and unstable he does not trust us and even spies upon us, you know this spy exists and is well placed, and that his identity, I presume, has been sent by this absurd book-code method, yet that is exactly where your knowledge stops. I am baffled beyond any telling of it. You know so much, and then it stops cold. It seems to me that you would be more likely to know all or nothing. My head aches profoundly. This business is damned confounding.”
“All right, then, we’ll tell you. I think you have a right to know, since you are the one we are proposing to send out. Admiral, as it was your service triumph, I leave it to you.”
“Thank you, Sir Colin,” said the admiral. “In your very busy year of 1940, you probably did not even notice one of the world’s lesser wars. I mean there was our war with the Germans in Europe and all that blitzkrieg business, the Japanese war with the Chinese, Mussolini in Ethiopia, and I am probably leaving several out. 1940 was a very good year for war. However, if you check the back pages of the Times, you’ll discover that in November of 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. The border between them has been in dispute since 1917. The Russians expected an easy time of it, mustering ten times the number of soldiers as did the Finns, but the Finns taught them some extremely hard lessons about winter warfare, and by early 1940 the piles of frozen dead had gotten immense. The war raged for four long months, killing thousands over a few miles of frozen tundra, and ultimately, because lives mean nothing to Communists, the Russians prevailed, at least to the extent of forcing a peace on favorable terms.”
“I believe I heard a bit of it.”
“Excellent. What you did not hear, as nobody did, was that in a Red Army bunker taken at high cost by the Finns, a half-burned codebook was found. Now since we in the West abandoned the Finns, they were sponsored and supplied in the war by the Third Reich. If you see any photos from the war, you’ll think they came out of Stalingrad, because the Finns bought their helmets from the Germans. Thus one would expect that such a highvalue intelligence treasure as a codebook, even half burned, would shortly end up in German hands.
“However, we had a very good man in Finland, and he managed somehow to take possession of it. The Russians thought it was burned. The Germans never knew it existed. Half a code is actually not merely better than nothing, it is far better than nothing, and is in fact almost a whole codebook, because a clever boots like young Professor Turing here can tease most messages into comprehension.”
“I had nothing to do with it,” said the professor. “There were very able men at Bletchley Park before I came aboard.”
What, wondered Basil, would Bletchley Park be?
“Thus we have been able to read and mostly understand Soviet low- to midlevel codes since 1940. That’s how we knew about the librarian at Cambridge and several other sticky lads who, though they speak high Anglican and know where their pinkie goes on the teacup, want to see our Blighty go all red and men like us stood up to the wall and shot for crimes against the working class.”
“That would certainly ruin my crease. Anyhow, before we go much further, may I sum up?” said Basil.
“If you can.”
“By breaking the Russian crypto, you know that a highly secure, carefully guarded book code has been given to a forthcoming Russian spy. It contains the name of a highly important British traitor somewhere in government service. When he gets here, he will take the code to the Cambridge librarian, present his bona fides, and the librarian will retrieve the Reverend Thomas MacBurney’s Path to Jesus—wait. How would the Russians themselves have … Oh, now I see, it all hangs together. It would be easy for the librarian, not like us, to make a photographed copy of the book and have it sent to the Russian service.”
“NKVD, it is called.”
“I think I knew that. Thus the librarian quickly unbuttons the name and gives it to the new agent, and the agent contacts him at perhaps this mysterious Bletchley Park that the professor wasn’t supposed to let slip—”
“That was a mistake, Professor,” said Sir Colin. “No milk and cookies for you tonight.”
“So somehow I’m supposed to, I don’t know what, do something somewhere, a nasty surprise indeed, but it will enable you to identify the spy at Bletchley Park.”
“Indeed, you have the gist of it.”
“And you will then arrest him.”
“No, of course not. In fact, we shall promote him.”
The Second Day/The Third Day
It was a pity the trip to Paris lasted only six hours with all the local stops, as the colonel had just reached the year 1914 in his life. It was incredibly fascinating. Mutter did not want him to attend flying school, but he was transfixed by the image of those tiny machines in their looping and spinning and diving that he had seen—and described in detail to Basil—in Mühlenberg in 1912, and he was insistent upon becoming an aviator.
This was more torture than Basil could have imagined in the cellars of the Gestapo, but at last the conductor came through, shouting, “Paris, Montparnasse station, five minutes, end of the line.”
“Oh, this has been such a delight,” said the colonel. “Monsieur Piens, you are a fascinating conversationalist—”
Basil had said perhaps five words in six hours.
“—and it makes me happy to have a Frenchman as an actual friend, beyond all this messy stuff of politics and invasions and war and all that. If only more Germans and French could meet as we did, as friends, just think how much better off the world would be.”
Basil came up with words six and seven: “Yes, indeed.”
“But, as they say, all good things must come to an end.”
“They must. Do you mind, Colonel, if I excuse myself for a
bit? I need to use the loo and prefer the first class here to the pissoirs of the station.”
“Understandable. In fact, I shall accompany you, monsieur, and—oh, perhaps not. I’ll check my documents to make sure all is in order.”
Thus, besides a blast of blessed silence, Basil earned himself some freedom to operate. During the colonel’s recitation—it had come around to the years 1911 and 1912, vacation to Cap d’Antibes— it had occurred to him that the authentic M. Piens, being a clear collaborationist and seeking not to offend the Germans, might well have reported his documents lost and that word might, given the German expertise at counterintelligence, have reached Paris. Thus the Piens documents were suddenly explosive and would land him either in Dachau or before the wall.
He wobbled wretchedly up the length of the car—thank God here in first class the seats were not contained as in the cramped little compartments of second class!—and made his way to the loo. As he went he examined the prospective marks: mostly German officers off for a weekend of debauchery far from their garrison posts, but at least three French businessmen of proper decorum sat among them, stiff, frightened of the Germans and yet obligated by something or other to be there. Only one was anywhere near Basil’s age, but he had to deal with things as they were.
He reached the loo, locked himself inside, and quickly removed his M. Piens documents and buried them in the wastebasket among repugnant wads of tissue. A more cautious course would have been to tear them up and dispose of them via the toilet, but he didn’t have time for caution. Then he wet his face, ran his fingers through his hair, wiped his face off, and left the loo.
Fourth on the right. Man in suit, rather blasé face, impatient. Otherwise, the car was stirring to activity as the occupants set about readying for whatever security ordeal lay ahead. The war—it was such an inconvenience.
As he worked his way down the aisle, Basil pretended to find the footing awkward against the sway of the train on the tracks, twice almost stumbling. Then he reached the fourth seat on the right, willed his knees to buckle, and, with a squeal of panic, let himself tumble awkwardly, catching himself with his left hand upon the shoulder of the man beneath, yet still tumbling further, awkwardly, the whole thing seemingly an accident as one out-of-control body crashed into the other, in-control body.
“Oh, excuse me,” he said, “excuse, excuse, I am so sorry!”
The other man was so annoyed that he didn’t notice the deft stab by which Basil penetrated his jacket and plucked his documents free, especially since the pressure on his left shoulder was so aggressive that it precluded notice of the far subtler stratagem of the pick reaching the brain.
Basil righted himself.
“So sorry, so sorry!”
“Bah, you should be more careful,” said the mark.
“I will try, sir,” said Basil, turning to see the colonel three feet from him in the aisle, having witnessed the whole drama from an advantageous position.
Macht requested a squad of feldpolizei as backup, set up a choke point at the gate from the platform into the station’s vast, domed central space, and waited for the train to rumble into sight. Instead, alas, what rumbled into sight was his nemesis, SS Hauptsturmführer Boch, a toadlike Nazi true believer of preening ambition who went everywhere in his black dress uniform.
“Dammit again, Macht,” he exploded, spewing his excited saliva everywhere. “You know by protocol you must inform me of any arrest activities.”
“Herr Hauptsturmführer, if you check your orderly’s message basket, you will learn that at tenthirty p.m. I called and left notification of possible arrest. I cannot be responsible for your orderly’s efficiency in relaying that information to you.”
“Calculated to miss me, because of course I was doing my duty supervising an aktion against Jews and not sitting around my office drinking coffee and smoking.”
“Again, I cannot be responsible for your schedule, Herr Hauptsturmführer.” Of course Macht had an informer in Boch’s office, so he knew exactly where the SS man was at all times. He knew that Boch was on one of his Jew-hunting trips; his only miscalculation was that Boch, who was generally unsuccessful at such enterprises, had gotten back earlier than anticipated. And of course Boch was always unsuccessful because Macht always informed the Jews of the coming raid.
“Whatever, it is of no consequence,” said Boch. Though both men were technically of the same rank, captains, the SS clearly enjoyed Der Führer’s confidence while the Abwehr did not, and so its members presumed authority in any encounter. “Brief me, please, and I will take charge of the situation.”
“My men are in place, and disturbing my setup would not be efficient. If an arrest is made, I will certainly give the SS credit for its participation.”
“What are we doing here?”
“There was aviation activity near Bricquebec, outside Cherbourg. Single-engine monoplane suddenly veering to parachute altitude. It suggested a British agent visit. Then the documents of a man in Bricquebec, including travel authorization, were stolen. If a British agent were in Bricquebec, his obvious goal would be Paris, and the most direct method would be by rail, so we are intercepting the Cherbourg–Paris night train in hopes of arresting a man bearing the papers of one Auguste M. Piens, restaurateur, hotel owner, and well-known ally of the Reich, here in Paris.”
“An English agent!” Boch’s eyes lit up. This was treasure. This was a medal. This was a promotion. He saw himself now as Obersturmbannführer Boch. The little fatty all the muscular boys had called Gretel and whose underdrawers they tied in knots, an Obersturmbannführer! That would show them!
“If an apprehension is made, the prisoner is to be turned over to the SS for interrogation. I will go to Berlin if I have to on this one, Macht. If you stand in the way of SS imperatives, you know the consequences.”
The consequence: “Russian tanks at 300! Load shells. Prepare to fire.”“Sir, I can’t see them. The snow is blinding, my fingers are numb from the cold, and the sight is frozen!”
Even though he had witnessed the brazen theft, the colonel said nothing and responded in no way. His mind was evidently so locked in the beautiful year 1912 and the enchantment of his eventual first solo flight that he was incapable of processing new information. The crime he had just seen had nothing whatsoever to do with the wonderful French friend who had been so fascinated by his tale and whose eyes radiated such utter respect, even hero worship; it could not be fitted into any pattern and was thus temporarily disregarded for other pleasures, such as, still ahead, a narration of the colonel’s adventures in the Great War, the time he had actually shaken hands with the great Richthofen, and his own flight-ending crash—left arm permanently disabled. Luckily, his tail in tatters, he had made it back to his own lines before going down hard early in ’18. It was one of his favorite stories.
He simply nodded politely at the Frenchman, who nodded back as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
In time the train pulled into the station, issuing groans and hisses of steam, vibrating heavily as it rolled to a stop.
“Ah, Paris,” said the colonel. “Between you and me, M. Piens, I so prefer it to Berlin. And so especially does my wife. She is looking forward to this little weekend jaunt.”
They disembarked in orderly fashion, Germans and Frenchmen combined, but discovered on the platform that some kind of security problem lay ahead, at the gate into the station, as soldiers and SS men with machine pistols stood along the platform, smoking but eyeing the passengers carefully. Then the security people screamed out that Germans would go to the left, French to the right, and on the right a few dour-looking men in fedoras and lumpy raincoats examined identification papers and travel authorizations. The Germans merely had to flash leave papers, so that line moved much more quickly.
“Well, M. Piens, I leave you here. Good luck with your sister’s health in Paris. I hope she recovers.”
“I’m sure she will, Colonel.”
“Adieu.”
He sped ahead and disappeared through the doors into the vast space. Basil’s line inched its way ahead, and though the line was shorter, each arrival at the security point was treated with thorough Germanic ceremony, the papers examined carefully, the comparisons to the photographs made slowly, any bags or luggage searched. It seemed to take forever.
What could he do? At this point it would be impossible to slip away, disappear down the tracks, and get to the city over a fence; the Germans had thrown too many security troops around for that. Nor could he hope to roll under the train; the platform was too close to it, and there was no room to squeeze through.
Basil saw an evil finish: they’d see by the document that his face did not resemble the photograph, ask him a question or two, and learn that he had not even seen the document and had no idea whose papers he carried. The body search would come next, the pistol and the camera would give him away, and it was off to the torture cellar. The L-pill was his only alternative, but could he get to it fast enough?
At the same time, the narrowing of prospects was in some way a relief. No decisions needed to be made. All he had to do was brazen it out with a haughty attitude, beaming confidence, and it would be all right.
Macht watched the line while Abel examined papers and checked faces. Boch meanwhile provided theatrical atmosphere by posing heroically in his black leather trench coat, the SS skull on his black cap catching the light and reflecting impulses of power and control from above his chubby little face.
Eight. Seven. Six. Five.
Finally before them was a well-built chap of light complexion who seemed like some sort of athlete. He could not be a secret agent because he was too charismatic. All eyes would always turn to him, and he seemed accustomed to attention. He could be English, indeed, because he was a sort called “ginger.” But the French had a considerable amount of genetic material for the hue as well, so the hair and the piercing eyes communicated less than the Aryan stereotypes seemed to proclaim.
“Good evening, M. Vercois,” said Abel in French as he looked at the papers and then at the face, “and what brings you to Paris?”