Letters for a Spy Read online

  “I think you will find Martin the man you want. He is quiet and shy at first, but he really knows his stuff. He was more accurate than some of us about the probable run of events at Dieppe and he has been well in on the experiments with the latest barges and equipment which took place up in Scotland.

  “Let me have him back, please, as soon as the assault is over. He might bring some sardines with him—they are ‘on points’ here!

  “Yours sincerely,

  “Louis Mountbatten.”

  Although I had been shown this letter before and had been given several minutes in which to digest it, Mannheim now—in heavily accented English—reread to me the sentence referring to the dead man’s prophecy. He hadn’t needed to. The fact that Lord Louis Mountbatten himself, Chief of Combined Operations, should be tacitly admitting the raid on Dieppe had been nothing short of a fiasco was something which must strongly appeal to anyone here who saw it. And, indeed, by this time word of the admission must surely have filtered through to everybody in Intelligence. Morale-boosting! How the Führer himself must have gone into transports when he heard of it!

  “So Anders,” said Mannheim finally, “there you have it. In a nutshell!”

  Mannheim wasn’t known for his levity—well, certainly not at work; certainly not in wartime. But now he added:

  “Or should I say, perhaps … in a tin of sardines?”

  3

  But no. There I didn’t have it at all, neither in a nutshell nor in a tin of sardines.

  “Sir? Going back to the post-mortem for a moment … How reliable would that have been?”

  Mannheim shrugged. “The findings were the expected ones … and presumably correct. The man had drowned. He’d been in the sea for anything between four and six days.”

  The man. For some reason I didn’t like the way he said the man.

  “Do we know if there was any evidence of the impact made on him—made on Major Martin—when his plane came down?”

  “None mentioned.”

  “Isn’t that a little strange?” I felt like a detective. (As a boy of thirteen, when I’d first seen The Maltese Falcon, I’d decided that in time I should move to Los Angeles and become a private eye. It was ironic: was I now—when I’d nearly forgotten all about this—soon to achieve a small surviving part of that ambition?) “There may not have been any broken bones, but surely there must have been some cuts … grazes…?”

  “Must there?” he asked; in truth not sounding very interested.

  “And would he have been thrown out of the aircraft—or sucked out—or what? Was he conscious when he hit the water? Can’t they gauge such things as concussion in a circumstance like that?”

  “Oh well, Anders, you know these Spanish. They quite pride themselves on being slap-happy. But in any case, what difference would it make?”

  Yes. I paused. He was right. What difference would it make?

  And while I had naturally hoped my questions might lead on to others more productive, I suspected I had also been firing them off simply for the sake of showing that I could.

  Yet, all the same, I felt surprised. Mannheim was generally meticulous.

  He must have sensed my reaction.

  “Of course, Anders, it’s good that you should question. But let’s face it: this post-mortem could hardly have seemed that important to anyone. And we have to remember that the body was wanted for burial at noon the following day. Besides, we must be fair. The doctor would have had a very clear notion of what he was about to find. The man died when his plane was lost at sea. That’s obvious. It’s not under debate. Cuts, grazes—concussion—all totally beside the point. Yes?”

  “Yes, sir. But why was his the only body? And why no bits of wreckage?”

  “The only body so far. The others could well have been caught by different currents; may not be found for months, if found at all. The same for any floating debris. I repeat: it’s good to be conscientious—incontestably it is—but at present I think you’re refining too much on something that doesn’t require it. Do you feel in any doubt there was a plane crash? Do you feel in any doubt we have a dead body which was drifting in the sea?”

  “No, sir. Of course not.” I shook my head, yet at the same time couldn’t help but purse my lips a little: a persistent trait my mother used to tease me about when I’d been small and getting ready to be difficult. My English mother, who had died in 1927—December 1927—three days in advance of my tenth birthday.

  And I was aware that I was beginning to irritate him.

  But if so, I reflected, then I might as well make a thorough job of it. Having once begun.

  “But if I’m really to be given carte blanche, sir…?”

  ‘Carte blanche’ had been Mannheim’s phrase. He had already spoken about my setting off for England later that same night and about my being allowed a full week for my enquiries, “if a full week should turn out to be absolutely necessary!” Now he nodded. I thought I must have somewhat overrated my tendency to irritate, for his nod seemed almost avuncular.

  “Then where I’d truly like to start, sir—if it’s at all feasible, that is—would be with the exhumation of Major Martin’s body.”

  Suddenly no aspect of him seemed even remotely avuncular. (Unless in the manner of Uncle Silas; or of Uncle Ebenezer.)

  “Well, you can’t!” he snapped. “It isn’t feasible; not in the slightest!”

  But after a moment he again relaxed. “And what’s more—you know it isn’t! In Spain we don’t possess so much as one shred of authority.” He smiled. “Well, anyway, not officially,” he said.

  I accepted such defeat. I had merely wanted to be laying the foundations for my defence—in case the worst should happen, and my eventual findings should prove to be misjudged.

  For I couldn’t forget that earlier phrase he had employed. It had begun to sound intimidating.

  Your responsibility.

  He might not have stressed the adjective as now, inside my head, I was hearing it stressed. But I knew the stress had been implicit.

  “And even if—officially speaking—we did possess such authority,” he went on, “again I ask you, how would it serve, to demand an exhumation? Anders, you need to concentrate on the essentials. You really do!”

  I felt that—by this time—he had truly made his point.

  “And the essentials are plain. That letter from Nye to Alexander … is it genuine? That letter from Mountbatten to Cunningham? Although if the one is, then undoubtedly the other will be, too. Genuine not simply as regards their having been written by these men, but as regards their having been written by them in complete good faith. That’s the first thing. And the second? Well, if all goes according to plan, they will shortly get those letters back—returned to Whitehall by the Naval Attaché in Madrid. He’ll have received them from the Spanish Chief of Naval Staff. So, Anders, what you’ve got to find out is whether the British will realize the documents have been tampered with. Or was the resealing of the envelopes done so skilfully that they’ll imagine themselves quite safe?”

  This secretly amused me. I had a picture of myself strolling into the War Office and debonairly twirling a brolly or a baton. “Oh, good morning, gentlemen! May I put to you a rather silly question?”

  The question which I now put to Mannheim, though, wasn’t so much silly, I thought, as superfluous. (“Well—again!” he might have said.)

  “I take it their casualty lists have all been checked?”

  “Yes, obviously they have. And he was there all right. In those of last Friday.”

  And he was there all right. Well, then—in its externals, anyway—the matter seemed watertight.

  And in fact I wasn’t too surprised about this. Despite my initial astonishment regarding Sardinia.

  Which may sound strange … especially on the part of a person expressly chosen to be sceptical. But right from the start I had actually thought those papers likely to be genuine, and for a reason possibly as piffling as Mannheim’s concern
over a preposition: ironically, a reason also occasioned by an apparent misuse of language. In other words, by that opening sentence of Sir Archibald Nye’s—which had not been written in good English.

  “I am taking advantage of sending you a personal letter by hand of one of Mountbatten’s officers…”

  Not been written in good English? You could go further. You could say it was written in execrable English. It impressed you as having been dashed off without so much as a second’s thought. It gave no sign of being a fair copy. No sign of having been considered in a way that surely even the tiniest detail would need to be considered if it were going to form any part of some thoroughly complex stratagem.

  So, to paraphrase Mannheim a little, “Often it’s exactly this kind of clumsiness that can lead to somebody’s belief.”

  Though, even whilst thinking about it right now, it occurred to me that perhaps I was being naïve. Wasn’t clumsiness—or at least spontaneity—precisely the kind of impression they would have been aiming to convey, if this were indeed a subterfuge? An impression of such spontaneity that it amounted almost to sloppiness?

  Yes, maybe it was.

  No, how stupid of me! ‘Maybe’? Quite certainly it was! If this were indeed a subterfuge.

  If … But what did I mean, if? Again, wasn’t I the man who had been detailed to assume duplicity? The man handpicked for the job by Admiral Canaris; handpicked to be a Doubting Thomas, a devil’s advocate, a private eye? Detailed to assume that this was quite definitely a trick, and to go back at once to asking questions about the major’s post-mortem and about the plane crash and about all other such related issues—no matter how irrelevant or incidental these might for the moment seem?

  Not necessarily to be asking them of my section head, but most certainly to be asking them of myself.

  4

  In the briefcase there had been a second short letter from Lord Mountbatten, this time to General Eisenhower … also, of course, care of the Allied Forces HQ in Algiers. It enclosed the proofs of—and photographs to be used in—a booklet describing the activities of the Commandos. What had been wanted from Eisenhower was a brief foreword so that the book would ‘be given every chance to bring its message of cooperation to our two people’.

  “I am sending the proofs by hand of my Staff Officer, Major W. Martin of the Royal Marines, who will be leaving London on April 24th … I fully realize what a lot is being asked of you at a time when you are so fully occupied with infinitely more important matters … You may speak freely to Major Martin in this as well as any other matters since he has my entire confidence.”

  And although this third letter was actually of no value to us we were plainly lucky that they had decided to send it with the major: the two normal-sized envelopes could easily have gone inside a jacket pocket, but this one, with its bulky enclosure, had clearly necessitated the carrying of the briefcase. It would have been irksome if our agent in Huelva—or maybe one of his employees—hadn’t had something so very official and obvious to attract the attention; the body itself mightn’t have been thought sufficiently interesting to merit the complications of a search and the plausible delaying of its progress towards the British vice-consul.

  Lucky? Irksome? Good God, it must have been contagious! The English were the ones who were commonly supposed to employ understatement.

  Actually, in his jacket pockets the major had carried still more letters. But all of these had been personal. One, for instance, was from the head office of Lloyds Bank in London, EC3. Another was from his father, enclosing a copy of something he’d written on his son’s behalf to a firm of solicitors. There was even a communication from that same firm of solicitors, dealing with another matter and dispatched directly to the son.

  Additionally, there were three receipts: one from the Naval & Military Club covering the two nights prior to April 24th; one from Messrs Gieves Ltd, a gentlemen’s outfitters in Piccadilly; and one for a diamond ring—Major Martin had recently become engaged: a fact that compounded this tragedy of war still further. If such a thing were possible.

  Also, there had been a packet of Player’s … with only seven cigarettes remaining out of twenty—I found it faintly surprising a number could still be determined upon. A box of matches, a bunch of keys and a pencil stub. Two ticket counterfoils for the Prince of Wales Theatre, dated April 22nd. Two bus tickets. A half-crown, florin, three shillings, a sixpence, threepenny bit and five coppers. A five-pound note, twice folded, which had now, of course, completely lost its crispness. A couple of pound notes—one with a tear across its top right-hand corner.

  These last had been in his wallet, naturally … along with a snapshot of his fiancée (incidentally, a photograph far better preserved, just by reason of its being inside the wallet, than those intended for General Eisenhower) and two letters that had come from her, likewise better safeguarded than the remainder of his mail. The wallet had further contained a book of stamps—of which three had been used—an invitation to something called the Cabaret Club; his CCO pass and Admiralty Identity Card (these two kept together in a little cellophane folder); and a St Christopher medal … which clearly hadn’t done him an awful lot of good.

  Major Martin was evidently a magpie. His uniform, even supposing it hadn’t been in the water for six days, could hardly have retained its original immaculate appearance.

  Otherwise about his person the dead man wore a wristwatch, and a silver cross upon a silver neckchain. He also carried two identity discs. These were attached to his braces. ‘Major W. Martin, RM, R/C.’

  The inventory Madrid had sent us appeared to be exhaustive; the photographs supporting it, a bonus. My eye was drawn back time after time to those two ticket-stubs. I couldn’t forget that only forty-eight hours before his plane crash—maybe even fewer—the poor fellow had been sitting in a theatre in London’s West End: a district still quite glamorous, probably, despite the blackout.

  I assumed that he had been with his fiancée.

  I could only hope their evening had been a very special one. In every way. A fitting culmination.

  5

  Her name was Sybella.

  (This resonated. My mother’s name was Penny, but up to the last moment she might well have been christened Sybil.)

  “And I should strongly suggest,” recommended Mannheim, resuming the briefing after we had stopped for coffee and, in his own case, for a couple of chain-smoked cigarettes, “I should strongly suggest that your investigations begin with her. Cherchez la femme, as Monsieur Dumas—Monsieur Dumas père—once famously advised.”

  I wouldn’t have known the source.

  “Or, indeed, to quote him more accurately, cherchons la femme. Cherchons, cherchons.”

  That was unfortunate. It immediately set up a rhythm in my head as insistent as train wheels and it made me think of Walt Disney. ‘Chechens … coercions … it’s off to work we’ve gone! We work all day and get no pay, coercions … coercions, coercions, coercions…’ I was aware it wasn’t appropriate. I picked up the facsimile of the young woman’s snapshot. She looked nice. Not just pretty; wide-smiled—warm-eyed—nice. The sympathy I’d felt towards her fiancé extended now towards her. The song subsided.

  “For it’s perfectly possible,” Mannheim continued, “that if this whole business is a hoax then Major Martin could have been a party to it. ‘I think you will find Martin the man you want.’ ‘You may speak freely to Major Martin in this as well as any other matters.’ And if he did know what was going on, if he did know the nature of the letters he was going to be entrusted with, I also consider it perfectly possible that in a particularly unguarded moment or during a particularly … intimate one, let us say … well, that he might unwittingly have revealed something secret to the woman he loved. I mean simply the odd word or so, but maybe that odd word or so could prove to be illuminating.”

  He dropped onto the desk the two letters he had quoted from, having briefly looked at each for perhaps the twentieth time that afternoon.
>
  “And, of course, it’s more than probable,” he added, “that she wouldn’t even have understood their significance. Still doesn’t, in fact.”

  When he tested me like this I found it hard to conceal my impatience.

  “But it could scarcely be a hoax,” I said, momentarily forgetting my role as devil’s advocate. “If that air crash hadn’t happened, how on earth would they have got all this information through to us?” I indicated the desktop.

  “Yes, exactly,” he agreed.

  It seemed I had supplied the answer he wanted. But I felt less gratified at my success than offended by his implication of possible failure.

  We were silent for a moment. Then he shook his head.

  “In fact, Anders, do you know what I think? That in sending you to England we’re wasting your time. Wasting our time, too. And all the manpower involved in getting you out there and getting you back … to say nothing of our other highly valuable resources!”

  Well, privately I agreed—although I would have refused absolutely to admit this. (Apart from all the rest of it, I wanted to go to England.) But even in spite of what I had recently admitted to, I tried to view the matter with complete distrust. Yes, it was a hoax. Of course it was. It was the most arrant form of deception imaginable. How it had been brought about—or would have been brought about—was basically beside the point.

  “For, Anders, can we really believe the British would sabotage one of their own planes, and sacrifice one of their ablest men, purely on the off-chance of these papers eventually finding their way home to us? End justifying means? Can we really believe the British would ever stoop so low as that, even in the interests of the greater good?”

  A Freudian slip, maybe. I imagined he meant only the greater good so far as the British saw it.

  “Yet isn’t it conceivable,” I said, “that the operation simply went awry? That there may have been some sad—no, totally unspeakable—error of judgment?”