Switchback: to return to original position in any given sequence.
Friday, October 25th
Someone from the Meteorological Office should discover why it is that every time I fly into London Airport it is raining. Perhaps I should ask Mrs Meynard. The great silver wings shone with it and the motors made the puddles sag and blew them into weird branch shapes as the plane trundled towards the apron. There was the click of seat belts being loosened and that sudden nervous chatter of relief. Somewhere near the front, efficient men in camel-hair waistcoats were on their feet probing for plastic raincoats and bottles and cameras amongst the salvage of their holiday.
The stewardess shook off her lethargic disinterest in the passengers and in a sudden surge of newfound energy began to assemble her own belongings. The motors gave a volley of pops before the blades came to a final sticky halt. Outside on the wet tarmac shiny loaders clustered around their siege ladders. The great door of the city swung open. In the corridors there was a last-minute scuffle as the engines of war moved closer – so must the greedy eyes have watched Bokhara. From their positions of power men in uniforms of blue and gold appeared, still strapping together their documents and treasures even as the sack began.
‘Nice trip?’ said Jean.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I read a history book for most of the way – and tried to forget the taste of the meal.’
‘That can be quite difficult.’ Jean had wangled a Jaguar from the car pool. I eased myself into the leather-work as the driver nosed his way into London Road traffic.
‘Been working hard?’
‘I’ve been getting my hair done almost every day.’
‘It looks nice.’
‘Does it?’ Jean turned her head and prodded at the chignon. ‘It’s a new man who used to be an assistant …’
‘Don’t tell me the secrets,’ I said. ‘It spoils the magic for me.’
‘There’s a few things that you’ll have to check. There are a couple of letters that I’ve written undated so that you can see if I’ve done the right thing. The only appointment you have is lunch with Grenade tomorrow but I haven’t promised.’
‘It’s some conference that O’Brien at the Foreign Office has arranged. I said you probably wouldn’t be back in time. I’ve told Chico that he must go.’
‘Good girl,’ I said. ‘Why does Grenade bother with those things? They only have them so that O’Brien can write those long reports and have his neighbours in East Anglia along as guest speakers at twenty-five guineas a time.’
‘Grenade goes to them because it’s an expense-paid trip to London where, as you well know, he spends all his time on draughty railway stations watching trains.’
‘Well, that’s harmless enough.’
‘It’s not harmless when you make me entertain him. Last November I had ten days ill in bed with influenza through standing around on the sloping ends of railway stations. All I got out of it was where to find an ashpan drop-bottom, steam accumulators and why they are still used, and the ability to recognize a three-cylinder locomotive by sound alone.’
‘I think you are secretly rather proud of yourself.’
‘If he wasn’t such a nice old character I’d flatly refuse to go again.’
‘Then you are offering to go again?’
‘You dare.’
‘It’s all guilt, you know,’ I said.
‘What, the trains?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was in Resistance during the war. He destroyed any number of locomotives. Now that they are being exterminated by progress he feels he has a task to protect and preserve them.’
‘Are you giving him lunch?’
‘Yes. You can come too. He likes you.’
‘I’ll book a table then – Chez Solange?’
‘No, make it King’s Cross Station Restaurant – he’ll like that better.’
‘Over my dead body,’ said Jean.
I scarcely recognized the office. It had been repapered; it was lighter than I ever remembered it before. I was deprived of those hollow areas of paper which made a drumming sound when you tapped them, but Jean thought that was a good thing.
The gramophone music from the dispatch department hadn’t changed, though, and the sound of Munn and Felton’s (Footwear) Band sailing through the ‘Thunder and Lightning Polka’ was clearly audible from the second floor. I flipped the switch on my intercom. The duty dispatch clerk answered, ‘Sir.’
‘Angels Guard Thee,’ I said and flipped the switch off.
‘And the new window,’ said Jean. ‘You haven’t mentioned that.’
‘I noticed,’ I said. ‘And the Mother-in-law’s Tongue is coming on a treat.’
‘I’ve been oiling the leaves,’ said Jean. ‘It’s a lot of trouble but the man in the shop said it was well worth while.’
‘He was right,’ I said. ‘It looks great.’ I turned over the stuff on my desk.
The trombone solo of ‘Angels Guard Thee’ filtered up from dispatch. ‘Everything is great,’ I said.
‘I had a reply from Berlin Documents Centre1 – nothing known there.’ I grunted. ‘I have one or two things though,’ said Jean, ‘if you’d like to see.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘In a minute or so.’
Jean walked across to her desk and the wet sort of light that envelops London on rainy days made a halo around her face as she stood near the window. I watched the movements of her hands as she picked up the large heaps of uncompleted work. Her hands moved without haste or irritation: like a skilled nurse or a croupier. She wore one of those shirt-style dresses with buttons and pockets and too many seams. Her hair was drawn back tightly from her face and her skin was taut and wrinkle-free like the very finest aero-dynamic design. She felt me looking at her and looked at me. I smiled but she did not smile back. She opened a small compartment of her desk. The dispassionate impersonal attitude made her very desirable. ‘You are looking pretty damn sexy today, Jean,’ I said.
‘Thanks,’ she said. She continued to process a heap of file cards and I read a memo from the Defence Ministry. Jean had that diligence upon which all intelligence work and all police work and for that matter all research of any kind must be based. Jean could sift through a haystack, find a pin and then look at it close enough to see the Lord’s Prayer written on the head of it. It’s that extra piece of effort at the end which makes the difference.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You’ve signed the Official Secrets Act. You know that withholding information from me is a felony. Let’s see what it is.’
‘Now then,’ said Jean, ‘don’t be all pompous.’
‘There are days when I could cheerfully consign you to a job at the FO,’ I said. ‘You’d find out what pomposity really means there. They all talk like officers in English war films.’
Jean riffed through her desk. It was a large Knoll International desk that I had had to really fight the appropriations people about. There were so many drawers and sub-compartments that only Jean knew her way around it. She produced a limp paper file. She’d written ‘Broum’ in pencil on the front.
‘There’s no code name for him,’ she said.
I lifted the key on the desk communication box. Alice answered, ‘Yep.’
‘Alice,’ I said, ‘can you let me have one of those code names we reserved for the Cuban Embassy people last year?’
‘What for?’ said Alice, adding a ‘sir’ as an afterthought.
‘It’s for those papers in the name of Broum that Hallam is supplying for us.’
‘You want a depersonified one then?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We think there may be a real live Broum hanging around somewhere. If we have to make a claim to FO or HO for any documents on him it would make our position stronger to have an open file ready.’
‘Death’s-head hawk moth,’ said Alice. ‘I’ll backdate the opening of the file a year ago today.’
‘Thanks, Alice,’ I said.
You couldn’t fail by talking to Alice in terms of inter-departmental conspiracy. I told Jean the code name and the file date.
‘Death’s-head hawk moth,’ said Jean. ‘That’s a terrible long code name. Do I have to type that out all through the file?’
‘Yes you do,’ I said. ‘I have enough trouble with Alice as it is without asking her to change a code name after I’ve wangled one out of her.’
Jean raised one eyebrow. ‘You’re frightened of Alice.’
‘I’m not frightened of Alice,’ I said. ‘I just want to work without unnecessary friction.’
Jean opened the brown folder. Inside there were some flimsy typewritten documents. Printed at the top it said ‘Sûreté Nationale’. Under that, the typing was single-spaced and the open part of many of the round characters was clogged with dirt. I read it through slowly and painfully. It was a transcript of a judge’s preliminary hearing of a murder case.2 It was datelined Colmar, February 1943.
‘Just an ordinary murder,’ I said to Jean. ‘This fellow Broum was a murderer?’
I read the transcript through again. ‘The way this reads, he was about to get the chop,’ I said. Jean passed me a photostat of a German Army document. The photostat was brown and spotted. It was a receipt for a prisoner taken from the civil prison in Colmar by a German Army major whose signature was like a piece of rusty barbed wire. ‘Photo of Broum?’ I asked.
‘If you read it carefully you’ll find you’re holding a receipt for a prisoner and a dossier. Also notice,’ said Jean, ‘that the French documents have him as Monsieur Broum but the German one says Obergefreiter Broum. The Archives must have checked back to his desertion from Caen, and he probably had an equivalent army rank.’
‘I noticed,’ I said. ‘Check Caen area court-martial records. The normal procedure is to return a man to his unit …’
‘We know all that, darling, but his unit was no longer there and I can’t find where they were. The group 312 Geheime Feldpolizei had vanished, as far as I can find, and Ross at the War Office says that the Germans didn’t send their people back to the original unit.’
‘He’s an old know-all, Ross,’ I said.
‘He’s been very sweet and helpful.’
‘I hope you haven’t been giving him access to our records,’ I said. I shuffled all the stuff on the desk. ‘Good, good.’ I said. ‘Send a thank you to Grenade through the usual channels, even though I will tell him tomorrow myself.’
‘Grenade has got nothing to do with it,’ said Jean.
‘Didn’t this come from Grenade?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Jean. ‘I got it.’
‘What do you mean you got it?’ I said. ‘You climbed through the window of the Sûreté Nationale at dead of night, do you mean?’
‘Silly,’ said Jean. ‘All I did was put a Green through to Interpol.’
‘What?’
‘Now don’t blow your top, darling. I mixed it up with a lot of ancient old tat and even then I had Special Branch origin it.’
‘Grenade will know,’ I said. ‘All Interpol requests go straight to DST.’
Jean said, ‘If you sat over there for a couple of days –’ she pointed to her desk: it was stacked with documents, dossiers, newspaper clippings, unsorted file cards, unanswered correspondence and IBM cards – ‘you’d know how unlikely it is that Grenade or anyone else at DST is going to attach any significance to an Interpol Green. Even if they do, it won’t have origined us. It origined Special Branch. Even if they dust it for fingerprints and find where it came from, so what? Is that what we’re supposed to be doing here in Charlotte Street, working against Grenade?’
‘Simmer down,’ I said. ‘It’s not the role of this department to make political decisions. That’s what we have Houses of Parliament for.’
‘Which, coming from you,’ said Jean, ‘is very funny.’
‘Why coming from me?’
‘Because when Parliament wake up in the small hours of the morning bathed in sweat and screaming, you are what they are dreaming of.’
‘Look, Jean,’ I said.
‘I’m joking,’ said Jean. ‘Don’t give me the Dutch Uncle just because I made a joke.’
I took no notice. ‘You only have the same sort of fear that everyone here has. That’s why you are employed here. The moment we notice someone who isn’t frightened that this set-up and all the other set-ups like it are a threat to democratic parliamentary systems – we fire him. The only way a department that pries can run is to admit of no elite which is immune from prying.
‘On the other hand this is a Government department like all other Government departments; without money it could not exist. There is the danger that the people who allocate the money are going to feel that they should be immune from prying. That is why, every time someone is after my blood, Dawlish protects me. Dawlish and I have a perfect system. It is a well-known fact that I am an insolent intractable hooligan over whom Dawlish has only a modicum of control. Dawlish encourages this illusion. One day it will fail. Dawlish will throw me to the wolves. Until he does, Dawlish and I have a closeness in inverse proportion to our differences because that’s his protection, my protection and, believe it or not, Parliament’s protection.’
Jean said, ‘And next week, schools, your lesson will be “Statesmanship for the under fives”. And now back to Victor Sylvester.’
‘Victor Sylvester,’ I said. ‘My God, did you fix with the BBC for him to play “Someday I’ll find you”?’
Jean said, ‘Good job I don’t rely on your memory. You create an international incident by proxy. The tune was “There’s a small Hotel” and it went out on the BBC Overseas request programme yesterday morning.’
‘Good,’ I said.
‘Speaking of music, I’ve bought you a little gift.’ She opened the vast filing drawer of her teak desk and produced a brown paper envelope. Inside was a twelve-inch gramophone record of Schönberg’s ‘Variations for wind band’.
I looked at it and wondered why Jean had bought it for me. I’d only heard it the previous week when I went to the concert with … Oh.
Jean was looking down at me like a protégée of Count Dracula. ‘I was at the Royal Festival Hall that night when you had business with the celebrated Miss Steel.’
‘So what,’ I said. ‘So were a couple of thousand other music lovers.’
‘The operative word is lovers,’ said Jean.
‘Go down to dispatch,’ I said, ‘and borrow their gramophone.’
‘I hope you feel guilty every time you hear it,’ Jean said.
‘I will if we break the gramophone,’ I said.
The dispatch department had all put five shillings a week towards buying it. It was a good machine. Not like my hi-fi, mind you, but really good for a small mass-production job. The bass instruments came through with a fine clarity and the volume was such that when I started to play the record a second time Dawlish began to thump on the floor in complaint.
‘Schönberg’s Variations for wind band,’ I said.
Dawlish said, ‘I don’t care if it’s the Treasury Choral Society. I won’t have it in my office.’
‘It’s not in your office,’ I said, ‘it’s in my office.’
‘It might just as well be in my office,’ Dawlish said. ‘I can’t hear myself speak.’
‘You’re not missing a thing,’ I said.
Dawlish waved his pipe stem at me and at an armchair. ‘It doesn’t even make an irregular pattern,’ said Alice to Dawlish. I sat down in one of the black leather armchairs. There was a great stack of newspapers on the table. I sorted through them carefully – finally selecting the Herald Tribune.
Dawlish said, ‘The Liberal Party’ to Alice.
Alice shrugged and put the finder card into the IBM 88 stacking a huge pile of cards into the sloping rack on the right. She switched the Collator on and there was a whirring noise like a piece of paper stuck into a cycle wheel. The cards piled up in the reject racks except for four cards which were flicked along the machine.
‘Four,’ Alice called like a croupier.
‘Key-punch a finder card for the Tory Party,’ said Dawlish.
‘No,’ said Alice. ‘It will be far too many, it’s not worth trying it.’
Dawlish laid a clean piece of paper on his desk, studied it, then produced a device from his pocket that looked like something on which the Spanish Inquisition would have taken out a provisional patent. He reamed the bowl of his pipe with it, shedding crispy, well-done pieces of tobacco in a nasty little heap. ‘Another way then.’ He prodded the detritus with his finger. ‘Sort out the aircraft companies who have given any sort of hospitality or entertainment …’
‘Not aircraft firms,’ said Alice. ‘This is missiles – we need to have the engineering firms.’
‘Where the Inland Revenue interim analysis shows over £10,000 in the last fiscal year. We’ll process any new firms afterwards. It has to show up there somewhere, it’s just a matter of keeping at it. Put them on the machine later, Alice, it makes such a terrible noise.’
Alice walked across to Dawlish’s desk and carefully folded up the tobacco ash into a neat envelope and put it into the waste basket. Then she straightened the pen set and went out. Dawlish said, ‘“Variations for wind band”, eh? Very nice. Very nice.’
I said, ‘You know Harvey Newbegin – State Department. Been in Prague for a few years now?’
Dawlish said ‘Newbegin’ softly to himself over and over again putting the emphasis on every syllable I could have thought of and a couple of syllables that didn’t exist. Dawlish produced a shiny plastic pouch and began to pound fresh golden tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. ‘Trouble,’ said Dawlish quietly like that was another name that someone had asked him if he remembered. ‘Trouble with a girl in …’ He looked up and, raising his voice and the stem of his pipe in unison, he said ‘Prague’ quite loudly.
‘That’s what I said,’ I said. ‘Prague. I’ve just told you that.’
‘Told me what?’ said Dawlish vaguely.
‘Newbegin – State Department in Prague.’
‘It’s not worth arguing about,’ said Dawlish. ‘Why, we could have got it from the records in a minute or two. There’s no need to take such a childish delight in remembering trivia.’
‘I think we should employ him,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Dawlish, ‘I can’t agree.’
‘Why?’
‘Four years with the US Defence Department before going to State Department. They will be as paranoiac as anything if we give him a contract.’ I realized that Dawlish knew about Harvey being fired and had been giving our dossier on Newbegin a careful going over in spite of all that vagueness about his name. ‘I think it’s worth chancing it,’ I said. ‘He’s a first-rate man.’
‘What sort of money would he want?’ said Dawlish cautiously.
‘He’s an FSO 3. I’d say he’s making fourteen thousand dollars a year. On top of that he’ll be getting Post differential, quarters, and whisky allowance …’
‘Good grief, man,’ said Dawlish. ‘I know all that. That sort of money is out of the question.’
‘But there is one thing that we can offer him that won’t cost a bean,’ I said, ‘a British passport for his future wife – this Czech girl.’
‘You mean naturalize Newbegin so that his wife will become British by marriage.’
‘No, I don’t mean that,’ I said. ‘Let Newbegin keep his US passport and give the girl a British one. It gives us slightly more control.’
‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?’ said Dawlish.
‘Do you think Czech intelligence have got a hold on the girl?’ asked Dawlish.
‘We would have to assume that,’ I said. Dawlish pursed his lips and nodded. ‘The State Department,’ I said sardonically. ‘They make me …’
‘They have their own way of working,’ said Dawlish.
‘Finding out about things by not going near them?’ I said.
Dawlish smiled.
‘It’s such a waste when they have such good people,’ I said. ‘Harvey Newbegin speaks Russian like a native.’
‘Not surprising. His mother and father were Russian,’ said Dawlish.
‘You’d think the State Department would pay him a bonus for marrying a Czech girl. All they ever seem to do is order everyone to stand up and chant loyalty oaths.’
‘It’s a young country,’ said Dawlish. ‘Don’t go on about it – what are you doing with that New York Herald Tribune?’
‘It’s a ladder,’ I said.
‘Good gracious, man, they have to go downstairs to be filed, don’t tear them up – are you completely irresponsible? Suppose we wanted to refer to a new item for that date – by George, it’s very long, isn’t it?’
‘It will go right from here to the window.’
‘No,’ said Dawlish.
‘If you hold it there and pull the paper gently.’
‘Remarkable,’ said Dawlish. ‘You must show me how to do it. My children would find that awfully good fun.’
‘You need – keep going, there’s lots more – you need one of these American newspapers really.’
‘Look at that, it’s remarkable,’ said Dawlish. ‘Open the office door and we’ll see how far it will go down the corridor. Get Sunday’s New York Times from my desk. That’s even thicker.’
I opened the door only to find Alice standing in the corridor with an arm full of engineering companies’ file cards.
‘Don’t drop your end,’ Dawlish shouted. Then he looked up and saw Alice too.
1 BDC: an archive of Nazi Party Membership records saved from a paper mill at the end of the war.
2 In continental trials the first stage consists of the judge examining the accused about his work, his health, his general ambition and demeanour in order to build a picture of the accused before hearing about the crime. In England the exact contrary happens. Any evidence about previous crimes or anything which might influence the jury against the accused is expressly forbidden. While the English system is clung to on the grounds of ‘fair play’, the continental system can in its way be more humane.