World War Two Will Not Take Place by Bill James
‘At the club you mentioned?’
‘The Toledo.’
‘Did Knecht’s wife go to the club and do some damage, although she’s not heavily built?’ Mount said. ‘Was Knecht there having a sundowner?’
‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’
‘Which?’
‘Most believe he was off with a girl somewhere.’
‘Which most?’
‘In the club at the time.’
‘She went there because she thought he didn’t have just the sundowners he might be entitled to, did she?’
‘I don’t know whether he brought something home,’ Fromanteel said.
‘Brought something home?’
‘The word is that the girls there are extremely hygienic, with the management supervising and very rigorous. But error can, in a manner of speaking, slip in.’
‘Had she heard things about him, and went to the club to check?’
‘They met on a fast promotion course years ago in the secret state police. It was a lovely, dazzling, famed romance, I’m told. Two spirited, talented young people, top of their classes, brought together not just by their respective beauty and joie de vivre, but by a shared affinity for their approaching . . . well, métier. Many have said they were both brilliantly right for the secret police, born to it. This seemed a relationship made in heaven.’
‘Lovely.’
‘After some time, she left to have the children. But it goes without saying that she knows about prising information and is useful at other skills, too. They were surprised in the club that someone so petite could not just pick up a bar table, but raise it in two hands above her head and fling it. A few argued that, in fact, her petiteness could be an advantage, because she wouldn’t have to lift the table so very high to get it above her head. I don’t know. This might be illogical. The Toledo has a huge mirror behind the bar, virtually all one wall, enabling men customers to get varying views of the girls. Well, so much glass – that’s asking for trouble, isn’t it? But all credit to them, they got it replaced inside twenty four hours. One girl was slightly hurt by flying splinters. Named Annette. The lower arm. Not the face, though, which could have hurt her career.
‘There’s a view that it was unfair for Charlotte Knecht to take action against the club when the real objective was her husband. However, people are not happy about criticizing Knecht, because of his police position. Apparently, he’s often in touch with at least Heinrich Himmler. This mirror is very much part of the Toledo’s character. People may forget the name of the club, but they will say, “Oh, you know, that busy little place where you can see the girls’ faces and arses at more or less the same time owing to a reflection.” It became very much a priority to restore that service. As you would expect, the police came. That’s why I thought I must talk to you, regardless of the usual prohibition. You’ll understand.’
‘No,’ Mount said.
‘Two questions. One, will Adolf hear about it? Two, if he does, will Knecht keep his job? Poxing is no way to produce a master race. Hitler might take a broad, permissive attitude to one of his most gifted colonels going to a whore. Normal male high-jinks. You’d agree, I think. But the Toledo fracas, the rumour of uncleanness, the hurled table, the fractured glass, the injury to another whore – all this might pile up and become unforgivable. Knecht could be damned by that disturbance at the Toledo.’
Mount said: ‘The mirror cracked from side to side,
“The curse is come upon me,” cried,
Colonel Maximilian Knecht.’
‘That’s your Tennyson, isn’t it?’
‘Prolific.’
‘We have to remember, don’t we, that Knecht is nominally in charge of a possible mission in Britain to accumulate usable murk about Lionel Paterin. But how valid would any such work of his be in that regard if Knecht can be shown by the British propaganda apparatus to be sexually tainted himself? “The pot calling the kettle smutty.”’ Fromanteel went into English for these few words. ‘Even if I hadn’t come to visit you now, news of that Toledo turmoil and its reasons would have reached you eventually, I think. And you’d have transmitted it via Bernard Kale-Walker. Anyway, rest easy, London has been informed.’ He paused and blushed slightly. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said “eventually”. It makes you sound slow, dismally out of touch, immature.’
‘Yes, I thought so.’
‘You’d have cottoned on to the implications and wondered. I thought it vital to brief you face-to-face.’
‘Knecht might be disciplined? Moved out of his post?’
‘This is why I’m here. You see it now, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Explanation: it was, on the face of it, Knecht’s orders that you and Toulmin should be allowed to continue your operation here without interference.’
‘How the hell did you discover he’d ordered that?’
‘I gather they had you under surveillance, but this was suddenly stopped.’
‘How the hell did you discover he’d ordered that?’
‘It’s not in the wider policy interest to hinder you. They want a continuing trickle of information about the possibility or non-possibility of a Soviet-German agreement to go to London. They’d like to maintain the idea that things are happening between Moscow and Berlin, though nothing substantive yet. Their aim is to promote uncertainty, and to fend off any decisive response by Britain. German rearmament can proceed. Those cardboard tanks scattered around the country to fool reconnaissance aircraft with the appearance of strength can then be replaced by real ones. Germany needs the time as much as Britain does, and perhaps more.’
‘So, following the Toledo incident, there—’
‘Following the Toledo incident there will be no change in the tolerance they offer you and Toulmin. The news from the club and the likely repercussions might put you off-balance, made your work seize up, they will think. Even if Knecht is kicked out, the policy will remain. As I suggested, Knecht works for Himmler, and Himmler works for Adolf. Knecht was their messenger boy, that’s all. Their mouthpiece. He told Valk to let you run free and to call off the gumshoes because he’d been told to tell Valk to let you run free and to call off the gumshoes. The overall thinking hasn’t altered.’
‘The context.’
‘The time factor. I thought you should be informed at once that you will have no immediate trouble should Knecht get pushed. You must not panic. But neither will you and Toulmin be any safer in reality than before Knecht got pushed. I don’t know the Dresden area very well. Do you think there might be reasonably remote flat ground somewhere nearby for a make-do airstrip? Perhaps Bernard will tack on a little survey of the environs with this in mind. Quite often in our kind of métier, there’s the main task, but also a side issue to be dealt with, isn’t there?’
‘As just discussed.’
‘Quite,’ Fromanteel said.
So there had been a Fromanteel warning, though nothing outright or absolute. In this operation, absolutes were rare. When Fromanteel had gone, Mount swapped the chairs back, then got into the shower and gave himself a good check over. What was that war poem by Rosenberg about a ‘cosmopolitan’ rat moving between both sides on the battlefield? You could get cosmopolitan lice, too – the pubic kind.
BOOK THREE
TEN
Perhaps, then, it was coming to an end with Liz. Lionel Paterin allowed himself to think so now: allowed himself to think so at last. For weeks, for more than a month, he had resisted – had refused to let himself think so, because, of course, he realized the idea would flatten him, drop him into sadness and a terrible sense of loss.
But no . . . no . . . This was a stupidly false account of what had happened in his head, and he knew it. He couldn’t really have ‘refused to let himself think so’. Thoughts would not be kept walled-off like that. They’d jump over the wall, slither over the wall, get round the wall. Somehow, they’d sneak in. You might think you’d been thinking about other things, and you might
It wasn’t right, either, to say the ‘idea’ would do him deep damage, flatten him, drop him into sadness. Ideas were wool, ideas were fleeting. The damage came from his decision at last to acknowledge to himself what was happening to them: at last to recognize the gap that had lately opened up between them, and which stayed there, and which he sensed would continue to stay there and very likely get worse. He believed he understood how this had happened. She suspected she was being watched, suspected they were being watched. And that possibly had speeded up her decision to finish it. But only speeded it up. The actual reason went deeper than that, much. ‘Well, I don’t think there’s anyone around spying on us now,’ he said.
‘Perhaps they’re not horsey. And, even if they are, how would they get themselves fixed up with mounts out here?’ Elizabeth had a divorced friend – a ‘horsey’ friend – who ran stables and could generally provide them with nags if Paterin telephoned. They usually managed a couple of hours on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. Generally, when they went riding together she was at her happiest and most relaxed. And that brought him happiness, too. Now, though, he could spot no pleasure in her face, no contentment at being with him on this stretch of open ground with nobody else about.
Her fair hair was cut short, a part return to the Eton-crop style of the twenties, but bits of it stuck out from under the sides of her riding helmet. She had an oval, usually cheery and friendly, delicate-featured face. Today, though, he read determination there. He didn’t like it because he guessed that any determination around was to do with cutting him adrift. Normally, there’d be a bright touch of mischief in her dark-blue eyes. He didn’t find it there now, though. Oh, hell, had he brought these peepers, peekers, pryers, these trackers, these intruders on to their love by his special public prominence lately? Of course he had. This horrified him, enraged him, brought him a bucketful of guilt. He’d made himself very noticeable lately with the anti-appeasement speeches. Perhaps he’d also made himself – and herself – targets. And so they were shadowed. He felt almost certain of it. Liz felt totally certain of it.
He recalled a Robert Browning poem, ‘The Last Ride Together’. It sounded like a double entendre. He could remember some of its lines, clumsy and prosaic like so much of Browning, but they seemed right for today:
Take back the hope you gave, – I claim
Only a memory of the same,
– And this beside, if you will not blame,
Your leave for one more last ride with me.
God, ‘of the same’! It sounded like a business letter. Anything for a rhyme. They cantered a while. He drew alongside her, and they stopped.
‘It doesn’t trouble you all that much, does it?’ she said, spoken like an accusation. ‘These snoopers.’
‘I’ll try to discover what it’s about.’
‘Couldn’t you have started earlier?’
Yes, possibly he could have. ‘I—’
‘You didn’t accept it was happening, did you?’
‘I couldn’t understand why it should be. I still can’t.’
‘I can think of half a dozen, none of them very nice, Lionel. And I expect you can, too, really.’
Near the Highgate flat they used, and once in town when they were waiting at a cab rank, he thought he’d noticed a pair of men close to the kind of description she’d reported to him: both in their twenties, one about 6′ 3″, dark-haired, bony profile, pointed, Mr Punch chin; the other shorter, plump faced, squarely built, also dark-haired but close cropped. Until then, in the taxi queue, yes, he’d wondered whether she was imagining, and whether he was imagining, too. It wouldn’t have been like her to make such a mistake, but he’d wondered. Now, though, he’d admit that she, and perhaps both of them, might have this secret, off-and-on company. Did it trouble him ‘all that much’? How much was all that much, his fiddly, fine-point brain asked. He couldn’t quantify, but it certainly did trouble him. It baffled him. Who were they? More important, who sent them?
‘You’re an important figure,’ she said.
‘I’ve had some luck.’
‘No, you deserve it – and know you do.’
He saw that behind this piffling chatter lay the true cause of distance between them. She’d come to regard him as caught up in a bigger world than hers: the Cabinet world, the Defence world, the Government world, the international politics world, the war or peace world. Perhaps that made it seem he had a place among great events and great people. Did Liz feel left behind, excluded? She wasn’t the sort to tolerate that, or not for long. She wouldn’t at all object to the kind of theme he’d been preaching lately, questioning the appeasement policy. She thought it was the right theme. What offended her, he thought, was the way this mission seemed to have taken him over, blocked her out.
‘Would she put people on to you, on to us?’ she said.
‘My wife? Detectives?’
She said nothing for a moment, leaned forward in the saddle and stroked the animal’s neck. ‘No. All right, I can see that’s unlikely. A Minister’s wife hiring sleuths to track her hubby, prove his adultery? Suppose it became public knowledge, and it very easily might. The disgrace – for her as much as for you.’
‘Exactly,’ Paterin said.
‘Could it be the Press tailing us, then?’
‘A pair of reporters?’
‘Wouldn’t it be news – well-known Cabinet minister’s affair with the wife of company chairman? Now, extremely well-known. Hold the front page!’
‘The Press doesn’t poke into private lives – not where there’s potential scandal touching important people. Think how long it took to get Mrs Simpson into the British Press, and then only when she and the relationship had been made more or less respectable through the marriage and title of consort.’
‘Wasn’t that silence a special arrangement with editors?’
‘The Press knows how to be discreet, and not just for royalty.’
She frowned and did some more thinking, some more pawing of the horse. ‘Well, possibly you’re a potential security lapse because of me,’ she said. ‘They could blackmail you.’
‘You mean the watchers are foreign spies?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because we wouldn’t be of interest to them. And because the spies of all sides have plenty of real work to do at present.’ He knew though, of course, that he and she would be of interest to an espionage operation. They rated as real work for them. Wouldn’t Hitler’s propaganda wizard, Josef Goebbels, judge it useful to have on file a few compromising facts about a government bigwig, especially a bigwig involved in Defence, and inclined to speak of the Reich as a dangerous, duplicitous enemy? This was the kind of mucky tactic he specialized in, wasn’t it? True, relations between Britain and Germany looked serene after Munich. But not everyone believed that would last. Goebbels, or someone else high in the German hierarchy, might not believe it, and decide to prepare a muck fusillade in case. Paterin had heard that a specialist German team were in London to examine the processional route for the Hitler visit and discuss all-round protection measures. Suppose, as an extra, these people were told to find what they could about a noisy Cabinet minister’s extramarital life. Paterin knew the rumours of his link with Liz were around in London. They might well have reached Berlin.
‘I feel what I’ve never felt before about us – dirtied,’ she said.
‘If it happened – some sort of exposure – but it won’t – but if it did, they’d be the dirtied ones.’
‘How? By contact with us? There are too many ifs and buts in your answer,
They took a woodland path in single file on their way back towards the stables, Paterin ahead. He loathed being in front now: it was as though he wanted to lead peaceably, compliantly back to the stables, where they would say goodbye for good. They’d come in separate cars. How could he convince Elizabeth he needed her more than he needed these people who might change the world, and who adored spouting their brilliant plans from platforms? He’d say his public piece, make his uncompromising speeches, because he felt he had to. It was his role, as he saw it, his job. But this shouldn’t come between her and him.
While they were still in the wood, Paterin saw a couple of men coming towards them on foot. They wore walking boots and hard-weather coats and trousers. One of them had a haversack on his back. They stared towards him and Liz. Paterin turned to alert her. He watched her face as she gazed past him at the men. Paterin made out no recognition in her eyes. He himself had already decided these were not the two he had glimpsed at Highgate and the taxi rank. The ages might be right, but not the physiques. Neither looked over six feet, neither was heavily built.
‘I told Nicholas here that we’d probably meet you on this path,’ one of them said: an educated, cocky voice. ‘I’m Fallows. Oliver Fallows. This is Nicholas Baillie. We carry identity, if you think that’s necessary. We have a security role. Generally, we do overseas, but there is a strong foreign aspect to this, and it’s one of our colleagues in another country who has drawn our attention to it. This is a passably discreet spot for a conversation, if you have a minute. The stables won’t be expecting you back quite yet.’
‘Which security role?’ Liz said. She and Paterin had stopped their horses.
‘Oh, yes,’ Fallows said.
‘Very much to do with your well-being,’ Baillie said.