XPD, Page 30

  ‘Who complains all the time?’ said Parker.

  The light was orange. It was evening and the dying sun was huge and pincered between the tall buildings. Outside in the street some boys were playing softball on a diamond marked in chalk. They could hear their shouts.

  ‘Max Breslow complains all the time,’ said Kleiber, looking at Parker with narrowed eyes and wondering why his boss was so slow to comprehend him. ‘The joke of it is that Böttger’s people have encouraged him to continue making this film. Once they had seen the script, and decided it was harmless, they told him to actually go ahead and make this damned film.’ Kleiber laughed. He wrinkled his nose as he did it. The sound was more like a snigger than the sort of belly-laugh one would expect from this pack-booted German rowdy, thought Parker, but he allowed himself a smile.

  ‘There is no chance that Breslow guesses you are working for the Soviet Union?’ Parker looked at his watch. It was 6.10 P.M. He must catch a plane back to Chicago in time to do some paperwork before going to bed. At one time the illegal resident had always lived in Canada, but Parker had pressed Moscow Centre to let him be in the USA. Because he travelled so much of the time, they reluctantly agreed.

  Kleiber laughed. ‘My old comrade Max would challenge you to a duel if you suggested such a thing.’ They were speaking English. Kleiber’s English was heavily accented compared with Parker’s, but Kleiber prided himself on his command of languages and Parker was wise enough to indulge his agent’s ego.

  ‘And what of Böttger and these other madmen? Are you sure they have no suspicions that you are working for the Soviet Union?’ His lungs gurgled on the humid air. Parker removed his jacket and loosened his tie. He detested these New York City summers. The buildings strapped the damp, stale air and made the ugly sounds of the streets unnaturally loud.

  Kleiber grinned. ‘Eddie, Eddie, Eddie,’ he called in a lilting tone that mocked Parker’s caution. ‘Böttger, Rau and the others are senile, my friend. Crazy! … Meschugge! … Nuts! … Loco rematado! … I tell you this over and over again, but still you don’t believe me. Listen, Eddie, these old fools are going through their second childhoods. They are liberals, they think I am a liberal, they don’t suspect me of anything. Now quit worrying, will you?’

  But Parker did not quit worrying. He was a worrier by nature and he had mixed feelings about Kleiber. Kleiber’s loyalty to Moscow Centre was never in doubt, but then he would have given equal loyalty to any organization that gave him a realistic opportunity to relive something of his wartime life. He was as hard and fit as many men half his age, and as dispassionate as a machine. He was intelligent and, judging from what Parker knew of Kleiber’s security organization, a shrewd businessman. But for his weaknesses – women and gambling – he would by now have been wealthy. But Kleiber did not want to be wealthy. Kleiber was in love with hardship.

  ‘And Breslow will make money from the film,’ said Kleiber. He laughed again. He seemed to think it was genuinely funny. Obviously he had no resentment about the money that Breslow would make. Parker noted that; it was unusual in a man.

  Parker said, ‘General Zhadov has ordered that the Stein documents are top priority. Nothing must stand in the way of our getting them.’ Parker had always used the name Zhadov – his old commander in the Fifth Army – to personify the whole bureaucratic empire of Moscow Centre and any orders or instructions emanating from it. But this time Parker had General Shumuk in his mind when he said it. ‘And General Zhadov,’ Parker added, ‘is a very tough cookie who doesn’t get his priorities wrong.’

  Kleiber smiled. ‘You tell your General Zhadov to get stuffed,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the Stein documents, and I’ll get them my way. And it won’t be because some senile old fart in Moscow Centre tells me it’s a top priority.’ The air was heavy and unmoving. Somewhere on the other side of the city they heard a police siren wailing.

  Parker said nothing, although for a moment he relished the vision of Kleiber confronting General Shumuk. Parker knew that Shumuk had accounted for tens of thousands of Kleibers in his time. He would be trampled underfoot without pause.

  ‘You’ll end up a general there someday, Willi,’ said Parker, ‘then you’ll change your tune.’ It was the standard Moscow line for outstanding agents. You gave them medals and military ranks. Once, Parker had gone to all the trouble of getting a Russian colonel’s uniform, complete with orders, medals and all the trimmings, just to show it to a nasty little computer programmer in Kansas City who was stalling with material that Moscow Centre kept demanding. The uniform did the trick; the programmer paraded in front of a mirror with it. The following year Parker promoted him again and the little jerk responded by wanting to go to Moscow for a visit. What a fiasco that would have been. Luckily the little fellow’s employer lost his War Department contract, so that he was no longer handling material that Moscow wanted; sudden reduction in rank! Parker smiled at the thought of it.

  ‘Me a general?’ said Kleiber. ‘No thanks. You’ll never get me to Moscow, Eddie. Forget that idea, right now.’

  ‘They all say that at first, Willi,’ said Parker. It was fun to encourage this man’s egomania to see how far he would go.

  ‘You know they are in Geneva,’ said Willi Kleiber. ‘You know Stein’s documents are in this big house on the lake front.’ He had already told Parker his important news but he wanted to enjoy it again.

  ‘Yes,’ said Parker. ‘It’s a small package. Bring it. There should be no trouble.’

  ‘Fly stateside from Geneva?’ said Kleiber. He wrinkled his nose, as if detecting a foul smell. ‘Geneva has more Moscow Centre people living there than you’ll find in Moscow itself. It’s the espionage capital of Europe, you know that, Eddie. Why bring the documents back here, when I can hand them over in Geneva for the diplomatic bag, and have them in Moscow the same night?’

  Parker realized that he should not have baited Kleiber, who was an intelligent man. This was his retaliation. Kleiber knew that if the documents were handed over to a Russian agent in Geneva, Parker would share little of the credit for the coup. Perhaps he guessed too how badly Parker needed some credibility with Moscow Centre.

  ‘I’d prefer you to bring the documents back here,’ said Parker. His voice was cold and pitched a little higher than previously. His nerves had tightened the muscles of his throat. Kleiber had a quick eye for other men’s weaknesses; he smiled. Parker added, ‘How do we know who we might be dealing with in Geneva, Willi? You might be handing the result of all this effort and hazard to some dumb clerk who’ll file it, or lose it, or some damned thing. These things happen, you know.’

  ‘Is it an order, Eddie?’

  In fact, Edward Parker had no authority to make the carriage of the documents back to the USA a direct order. Not only was it in contravention of standing instructions about briefing agents for missions overseas but it exceeded his territorial authority. The rulebook said Kleiber should be provided with a ‘drop’ and ‘letter box’, if not a proper structure and ‘cut-out’. This was especially true of Task Pogoni, the very high priority mission for which the Centre had sent General Shumuk all the way to Mexico City.

  But this was a chance for Edward Parker to redeem his reputation with his Russian superiors. It would perhaps provide a chance for him to see once more the wife and grown-up son whom he sometimes missed with a yearning which bordered on physical pain, and was all the more agonizing because he could speak of it to no one. ‘Bring them back here, Willi. It’s an order?’ He looked at his watch again and began calculating how long it would take to get to the airport. Before going to bed tonight he must go through his factory accounts again.

  The FBI sound engineer and his assistants were pleased that the meeting was at an end. Boxed inside a poorly ventilated panel truck together with a photographer, driver and clerk, they were all shiny with perspiration. They had long since emptied the tiny refrigerator of its cold drinks. The sound engineer removed his headphones. ‘That’s it,’ he said. In the street ou
tside someone started shouting at the children playing softball. A transistor radio was playing ‘Hello Dolly’, and whoever was carrying it banged on the panel truck as he passed. It was a normal extrovert action in that locality, but the men knew it was their signal to move.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ said the sound engineer. ‘He wants him to bring the papers back to the USA. That’s good. The boys will snatch him when he re-enters the country. The poor bastard is going to get a hundred years in the pen.’

  Todd Wynn, Kalkhoven’s young assistant, checked his shorthand notes, then took the spool of tape off the machine and pocketed it before signing a receipt for the driver.

  ‘What gets into these guys?’ said the driver bitterly. ‘They have no loyalty to their friends or the people they work with. Do they get a kick out of betraying people?’

  ‘They should get the chair,’ said Melvin Kalkhoven. ‘These two hoodlums are the ones who snuffed that movie producer in LA and hacked his head off. And Scotland Yard are looking for them on account of the same kind of job they did in London.’

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said the driver, as he climbed carefully over the recording equipment. ‘I’ve got a lovely wife waiting in bed for me.’

  The other men laughed. They knew he meant some other man’s wife.

  Todd Wynn glanced at Kalkhoven, who, if he had a biblical quotation apt for such hypocrisy, kept it to himself.

  Chapter 35

  While Kleiber and Parker suffered the humid languor of that Manhattan evening, Boyd Stuart in London watched the hands of the clock move to midnight and on into the first day of August. His windowless basement room in the Ziggurat was bleak and far too deep underground for him to hear the chimes of Big Ben, or the traffic which moved unceasingly over Westminster Bridge. The shiny brickwork interior was finished in the same acid green that Whitehall had been specifying for official habitation, from post offices to prisons, since Queen Victoria’s reign, and perhaps before. Two wooden trestle tables had been moved close to the wall, in an attempt to steady precarious piles of books and documents which now reached almost to the low ceiling, the sprinklers and the blue fluorescent light which hummed.

  Stuart shifted in discomfort on the hard wooden chair. It had been repaired by the Department of the Environment and was now relegated to this ‘Secure Room No 4’ because it rocked on its uneven legs. There was little else in the room, except for a red fire extinguisher and a framed, fly-spotted notice which went into considerable detail about the Official Secrets Act’s references to official papers. It was dated 1962, but little had changed.

  The hours had passed quickly as Stuart went through these references to the events of the summer of 1940. All the published accounts were here: the memoirs of the victors and of the conquered. There were unpublished accounts too: dusty typewritten bundles of reports, diaries and memoirs, detailing the days of men long dead and half forgotten.

  Stuart had been sceptical at first. Had Winston Churchill actually become so depressed and demoralized, as the German Panzer divisions swept through France so effortlessly, that he had himself gone to see Adolf Hitler, the man he so abhorred? Had he really gone to the German Führer, cap in hand, and offered to trade away his allies to the men he called ‘gangsters’? Boyd Stuart had prepared a large sheet of paper and noted down the movements of both men through the days of May and June.

  It was the clock striking midnight that made Stuart realize how long he had spent with his history books. There could no longer be any doubt about it. The diaries clearly showed when it was that Churchill had made his secret trip to meet Hitler. It would be obvious to anyone once the facts were assembled.

  Churchill’s visit to Paris on 16 May was far too early, the German advance had only been going six days and the Allies entertained hopes of a complete recovery. The visit to Château de Vincennes – HQ of the French supreme command – on 22 May was equally impossible. It involved all the complications of another visit to Paris, and all the witnesses to the Prime Minister’s movements.

  On 31 May, Churchill flew to Paris for the third time. With him went General Dill, General Ismay and Clement Attlee. This time, instead of visiting the Quai d’Orsay, Churchill went to see Paul Reynaud, the French Premier. They met in a room at the War Office in the Rue St Dominique. As on all his visits to France in May, Churchill slept in the British embassy and returned to England the following morning.

  None of Churchill’s visits in May provided any chance for him to confer with German plenipotentiaries, let alone with Hitler himself. But Churchill’s next visit to France on 11 and 12 June was curious in every way. Even though German spearheads were at the gates of Paris, and were to occupy the city three days later, Churchill’s private aircraft flew beyond the German columns, to land at a very small airfield near the little country town of Briare. In Vol. 2 of his memoirs, Churchill admitted that the rendezvous was not fixed until the day of departure. This was because he was waiting for a message from Adolf Hitler, sent to London through the Spanish embassy.

  The clue to Winston Churchill’s secret onward flight was contained in the fact that the British Prime Minister did not remain with the others of the British contingent. General Dill, General Ismay, Anthony Eden, the Foreign Minister, and even Churchill’s translator were all accommodated in a nearby military train. As soon as the aircraft landed, Churchill departed again unaccompanied.

  Boyd Stuart turned again to the memoirs of Sir Edward Spears* – no one had been closer to Churchill during those terrible days. Of the morning of 12 June 1940, which followed that night spent in France with the German armies racing even closer, Spears wrote, ‘I did not look up for a while, and when I did I was astonished to see the Prime Minister’s detective, Thompson.’ Thompson was a permanent feature of the Churchill household and had been for many years. It was amazing that he should be separated from the man he protected. Spears continues, ‘Surprised into tactlessness I said, “Why, Thompson, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you with the Prime Minister? Surely he will need you?”

  ‘“I had to sleep here, and the French failed to realize I needed a car.”’

  So that was it. Not even Winston Churchill’s own bodyguard had stayed with him. Was that a condition that Adolf Hitler had imposed, or had Churchill decided that his secret flight must put no one to hazard but himself?

  For by that time, on 14 June 1940, Winston Churchill was alone, far away from his staff, his interpreter, his bodyguard and his advisers. He had already had two long sessions with Adolf Hitler.

  If Churchill’s movements were significant, then Hitler’s were even more so. On 6 June 1940 after frantic construction work carried out at short notice, a secret meeting-place had been improvised in Belgium at the tiny frontier zone village of Brûly de Pesche. The airraid shelter there was still damp from freshly poured concrete and Hitler refused to go inside it. Here the airstrip was no more than a meadow big enough to land a small communications aircraft, so Churchill’s twin engined de Havilland Flamingo had landed near to Hitler’s Junkers at Rocroi, just across the border in France. The Fieseler Storch was already warmed up when Churchill landed, and by the time the little plane was airborne Churchill’s Flamingo was shrouded in camouflage nets on the far side of the airfield.

  Significant too was the fact that the Brûly de Pesche headquarters was used once only, for this meeting with Winston Churchill. The whole elaborate place was constructed solely for this secret summit meeting and after its few days of importance was left to rot.

  On 17 June, his hopes of a British request for a ceasefire faded, Adolf Hitler travelled to Munich where, in the Prince Carl Palace, Benito Mussolini was hoping to hear that the British would no longer resist his armies in Africa. By 21 June the fighting in France was all but finished. Hitler was motoring through the Forest of Compiègne in his open Mercedes, arranging that the German army engineers bring out of its museum the railway coach in which the Germans had signed a peace with France after the First World War. On 22 Ju
ne the French armistice was signed in that same Pullman car. The brief chance of early peace between Britain and Germany had gone for ever.

  Stuart went through the papers again and again. He looked at the Waffen SS and army unit war diaries that the War Office had provided from their archives. He looked at the tall stack of biographies that described Adolf Hitler’s life in such minute detail. He looked at xerox copies from the Berlin document centre and the West German archives. He looked once more at the published memoirs. Once the truth was known, so many other mysteries were solved. For instance, why had the twelve Hawker Hurricanes that escorted Churchill’s aircraft out of Briare on 11 June not been sent out to escort him for the return flight the next day?* It was especially puzzling in the light of the RAF’s order of battle, which showed that six Hurricane squadrons were based in France until 17 June. The fighters would not even have had to cross the Channel to get to Briare.

  The real answer was obvious now, but the official reason had been given as bad weather. (It hardly fitted with the fact that on this same day RAF aircraft had found the weather and visibility good enough to make low-level bombing attacks on bridges over the Albert Canal in nearby Belgium, to say nothing of long-range bombers flying from England to Turin.) The fact was that the Hawker Hurricane pilots might, by some error or disruption of the schedule, have glimpsed the unthinkable.