Perhaps they are not typical of the letters that I took from the cylinder. I spread them all out across the table. Some were written under engraved headings, some on paper torn from exercise books. What did they all have in common?
I shook the tiny tin of silica gel crystals that had helped keep the documents dry and I flipped through the yellow-paged, rough-printed book of names and addresses. I wondered if I would have reasoned that these things were among the great treasures of the modern world. I decided that I wouldn’t have, but then da Cunha was more than a little dotty. Da Cunha who could sit and lecture me about the sanctity of the middle classes.
When Nazi Germany was falling about its creator’s ears the bigwigs were busy making a grab for a souvenir of something they had known and loved – like money.
Some liked big pictures and they took old master paintings; some liked little pictures and they took stamp collections; some liked luxury, they took gold; some liked la belle époque, they took heroin; but one had developed a taste for power. He took these letters.
When the Wehrmacht was straining its eyes to peer through the Channel mist, the order went out to form a British Puppet Government. German diplomatic circles were asked to contact likely sympathizers, using the individual approach as far as possible. So it was that earnest, charming, personal letters reached earnest, charming people who might be prepared to be a Member of Parliament in the Nazi-backed National Socialist Government that was to have its seat in the Channel Islands until London was made ready.
These letters were filed when winter set in. They were filed again at the end of the next summer, when letters about puppet governments were addressed to earnest, charming Bessarabians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. They had collected dust until, one day in 1945, a man realized that these letters from influential people might make life easier in an unfriendly world.
Fregattenkapitän Knobel, a scientific officer of the German Navy, took his packet of letters and his tin of heroin and went aboard the Type XXI U-boat at Cuxhaven. Da Cunha knew all about the meteorological buoys and he spent an hour sealing his package of blackmail ammunition into the canister and re-fixing the waterproof seal. Off Albufeira he ordered the commander of the U-boat to drop the canister, and then da Cunha went ashore in a rubber dinghy. The U-boat captain lost a dinghy and very soon after he lost his life, for the U-boat foundered with all hands.
What happened will probably never be known. Few Type XXIs ever came into contact with water. Most of them were packed tightly together, half-completed, on the slipways of Northern Germany, when the Allied armies reached them. As far as I know there isn’t a whole XXI anywhere in the world, unless we count the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean just off Albufeira.
Tomas realized that a U-boat full of high-ranking Nazis would contain valuable loot – if you don’t mind probing around rotting bodies. How much Tomas minded is another thing we shall never know. When he removed the canisters of heroin he needed help in disposing of it. He couldn’t have found a more suitable helpmate than H.K., but they both stayed clear of da Cunha’s preserves.
Tomas never lost his respect for da Cunha. He stiffened when da Cunha came near and answered him in the short monosyllabic tones of the German Navy. Like all Germans, da Cunha was able to master accentless Portuguese. How much Tomas knew about the cylinder is difficult to decide, but he guessed enough to blackmail at least one person named therein – Smith. Although Tomas went with da Cunha to check the meteorology cylinder every six months, until our voyage together he had made no attempt to retrieve the cylinder from the ocean bed. Tomas had only a radio receiver; from da Cunha we had stolen a transmitter which would summon the cylinder from the sea bed rather than just receive a signal every twelve hours. Tomas rushed to get the cylinder when he discovered that da Cunha had fled (as H.K. guessed he would).
Why did da Cunha keep the papers on the sea bed? He was a blackmailer. Smith was ‘persuaded’ to equip a research lab. for him. Smith was ‘persuaded’ to have me recalled from Albufeira. How many other people were persuaded to do things?
I took the file marked OSTRA. (An ‘oyster’: lying at the bottom of the sea with a pearl inside, that was da Cunha’s cylinder.) I added the letters I had taken from the buoy. They made a small mountain on Dawlish’s bright mahogany desk.
‘So this is the lot,’ Dawlish said. He sniffed contemplatively.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d guess that most of these people have donated money to the “Young Europe Movement” at one time or another.’
‘Jolly good,’ said Dawlish, ‘I knew you would manage.’
‘Oh sure,’ I said, ‘especially when you wanted to cancel the whole operation.’
Dawlish looked at me over his spectacles, which can get to be very irritating.
‘Furthermore,’ I said, ‘you knew that that girl was employed by the American Narcotics Bureau, and you didn’t tell me.’
‘Yes,’ said Dawlish blandly, ‘but she was a very low-echelon employee and I had no wish to inhibit intercourse among the group.’ We looked blankly at each other for two or three minutes.
‘Social,’ Dawlish amended.
‘Of course,’ I agreed. Dawlish disembowelled his pipe with a penknife.
‘When will Smith be arrested?’ I asked.
‘Arrested?’ said Dawlish. ‘What an extraordinary question; why would he be arrested?’
‘Because he is a corner-stone of an international Fascist movement dedicated to the overthrow of democratic government.’ I said it patiently, even though I knew that Dawlish was deliberately leading me on.
Dawlish said, ‘You surely don’t imagine that they can put everyone who answers that description in jail. Where would we find room for them, and besides, where would the Bonn government get another Civil Service?’ He gave a sardonic smile and tapped the pile of documents. ‘Our friends here are much more useful where they are – as long as they know that H.M. Government have this little pile in Kevin Cassel’s cellar.’
He opened the drawer of his desk and produced an even more enormous file of documents. Across the front it said ‘Young Europe Movement’ in Alice’s fuse-wire handwriting, and was bulging with months of work that Dawlish had never even told me about.
‘You didn’t understand your role, my boy,’ he said in his smug voice; ‘we didn’t want you to discover anything. Somehow we knew that you would make them do something indiscreet.’