Gifts of War (35 page)

The brigadier did as he always did. He took out his expensive pen and began scribbling on the pad in front of him. “If you’re right—”

“If I’m right, it means that people who
think
they are making insecticides in the Hood factories in Canning Town are in fact making stuff that is being used to kill our own soldiers.”

“I realize that,” said the brigadier. “That’s not what I meant. I was going to say that a major shareholder in Hood is Sir Kingsley Draper, junior minister in the Foreign Office. He gave up his shares when he took on his official duties, but whichever way you look at it, this is a major scandal. If, however, we go public, we alert the Germans to what we know.”

He looked at Lockart, tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair. The silence lengthened. Then: “In the first place, I think Hal should transfer to this office. I don’t know how we’re going to play it, but the fewer people who know about this the better.”

On our way back from a concert at the Wigmore Hall one Sunday afternoon (the name change had taken place by then), Sam and I had reached Baker Street, where we normally caught an omnibus home. But this time, after waiting twenty minutes for a bus that, as sometimes happened in wartime, was obviously not coming, we decided to walk the whole way, and cut across Hyde Park.

We entered the park at Speakers’ Corner. I knew about Speakers’ Corner, of course, though I had never made a point of going to hear all the religious and political extremists and nutcases who made it what it was. Sam had her arm in mine and we drifted from speaker to speaker, comparing styles, smiling at the way they handled hecklers, invoked the Almighty, or thundered about the doom that was just around the corner. There were communists, Indian anti-imperialists, Zionists, Irish anti-British nationalists, and, inevitably perhaps, rabid anti-German zealots. When I realized that we had strayed into an anti-German orbit, I tried to hurry Sam out of earshot, but she wouldn’t be rushed.

“No, Hal. Hold on. Let’s hear what he has to say, and how he says it.”

It wasn’t pleasant. The gist of his argument, as I remember it, was that although the world had stumbled into war, in reality the Germans had started it, that they had wanted a fight, to prove their newfound industrial and military power and because “they think they are better than we are.” It was probably what most people there that day wanted to hear, and I began to think he was being paid by the army recruiting services. But then he changed and broadened his argument, to say that this was a war quite unlike any previous war in history, because of the vast number of civilians involved as conscripts, and that as a result we
were creating a generation of children without fathers and that, according to the new psychology—a Germanic psychology, no less— this too was the first time such a thing had happened in history and that as a consequence an entire generation would grow up disturbed, that the emotional effects of the war would last a long time, be far more severe than we yet knew, and that Britain would never be the same again. As a rhetorical flourish, at the end, he lifted aloft a baby, a baby in a shawl to which were attached, incongruously, two medals. The child, he said—he
declaimed—
was his nephew, his brother’s son, a son his brother would never meet, because he himself was dead, shot to pieces somewhere in France. The medals were the baby’s father’s.

The speaker was beginning to rant, and Sam pulled at my arm. “Let’s go,” she said softly.

We wormed our way through the crowds and reached the open park proper. We headed southwest. Gradually the sound of shouting, and heckling, subsided.

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

Then Sam said, “Some of the children at school who have lost their fathers have begun wearing their medals.”

“Do you approve?”

“I don’t mind. Why wouldn’t I approve?”

“Isn’t it a bit like wearing your heart on your sleeve?”

“Oh no! Don’t say that, Hal. These are orphans, or half orphans anyway. It’s a badge of pride. Surely you see that. A badge of honor.”

“Yes, of course, of course. But I was talking to Lottie the other night, when she was working on the posters for Will’s room, and we were discussing how the war is changing us. There’s never been a war like this one, as that speaker was saying, never one that involved civilians so much … it’s changing our psychology and, I think, making us
more emotional in public. We’re not buttoning things up as much as we used to.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing!” she almost shouted. “Think how much I have to keep buttoned up.”

Neither of us spoke for a moment. Had Sam said more than she meant?

“I mean, I can’t tell anyone we aren’t married.”

I said nothing as three young children, chasing a dog, nearly ran into us.

“You can’t tell anyone—anyone except Lottie and me—about Wilhelm, that’s what you meant. And, assuming we don’t lose the war, and if Wilhelm has been killed, you won’t be able to unbutton even afterward. Will can never wear
his
medals.”

Another pause. “No.”

We walked by what had been, before the war, a flower bed. No money for such luxuries now.

I was buttoned up, too, of course, though Sam didn’t know how much. It seemed that at every turn, these days, she was torn by her past, stranded by it, and I had it in my power, if not to remove her torment completely, at least to ease the burden. How simple it would be to tell her what I knew.

In the distance I could see the Albert Memorial. We’d be home in half an hour.

Two things came out of my meeting with Brigadier Malahyde, in regard to the
Samuel Hood
. First, as he had insisted, I was transferred to the brigadier’s office later the same day, occupying a makeshift desk near Margaret, his formidable secretary. We soon found out that the ship was indeed unloading its cargo of pyrethrum in Agadir, and replacing
it with dried olives before going on to Uruguay. Our people in Morocco produced photographs of both the unloading and the loading. But our side in London also uncovered the possibly even more revealing statistic that, despite the submarine attacks that were playing havoc with our merchant fleet, none of the Hood company ships had ever been attacked by German subs, let alone sunk. So the whole thing suddenly looked very suspicious.

The second thing I have to put down to the brigadier himself. He called me in one day, late in the afternoon, and offered me a whisky. He made it clear he was going to have one himself, so I accepted. It was a dismal day outside and the lamps in his office threw warm cones of yellow light, which winked in the golden liquid.

“That was pretty nifty thinking, Hal,” he said after trying the whisky. “Just like your idea about Lenin. You’ve got a good intelligence brain. Well done.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But we can’t sit on our laurels.” He fixed me with a look he had. It was halfway to a smile but it was a shrewd sizing-up glance as well. That look said, “Can you see where I’m headed in this conversation?”

I couldn’t second-guess him. “Go on, sir.”

“You yourself said that the Hood share price has been doing well.”

“Yes sir, that’s what attracted me to them in the first place.”

“Very well. But think: if the share price is doing well, it means they are making a healthy profit.”

I nodded.

“Which means they need a healthy income.”

I sipped more whisky. Some things were obvious.

“So it’s unlikely Hood would have
given
its pyrethrum to Frankel.”

I saw what he was getting at. “Money will have changed hands.”

His half smile became a 60 percent smile.

But not in Morocco, I breathed. “Too risky.”

He let a silence elapse, so I could digest what I had just worked out.

“If not Morocco, where?”

“America?”

He shook his head. “Too far away. Risky as well—they are allies, after all. Now.”

“Uruguay?” But I shook my head immediately. “That’s too far away as well.”

“Which leaves … ?”

“Switzerland?”

“That’s my guess,” he said, nodding. He drank more of his whisky, stood up, retrieved the bottle from the cabinet, and gave us both a refill.

He sat down again.

“The photographs from Agadir confirm that what you thought might be happening
is
actually happening. However, before we go public, or put the directors of Hood in jail or the Tower of London, we need to box clever. If we barge in, we stop Hood from doing what they have been doing for God knows how long … But if we were to find out how they are paid, we might found out a whole lot more. Germany, we know, is feeling the pinch so far as raw materials are concerned. They must have some way of paying for illicit goods on the black market—and my guess is that such an operation, if it exists, must be in Switzerland.”

“I agree with your reasoning, sir, but how would we ever close in on the payment mechanism? I, for one, wouldn’t know where to start looking.”

“Try this.” He unbuttoned his jacket, something he hardly ever did. “Neither the Germans nor Hood would want a paper trail—too incriminating. It could be leaked at any time, even after the war. The
Hood people could never sleep soundly in their beds, for fear of the early morning knock from the police or MI5.” He paused, sipped his whisky, savored the taste. “No, the transactions have to be made in cash. Someone from Frankel or some special German government ‘front’ organization must meet someone from Hood, who will be in Switzerland under some pretext or another.”

I didn’t respond. He had this worked out—he was that kind of man. I waited for the punch line.

“Anyone from Hood who went to Switzerland would need to go officially—because, again, it would be too risky not to. Which means they must have registered with our embassy in Bern. What we need, therefore, is someone from here to go to Bern—under cover, of course—check out the records, and see where it takes us.”

It all dropped into place. The late hour of the meeting, the two whiskies, the unbuttoned jacket.

“But sir,” I said. “I have a limp; I sometimes need a cane. I’m not properly fit.”

He sipped his whisky and gave me a 90 percent smile. “It may surprise you to know that your limp has all but disappeared. But, in any case, take your cane if you want. That, to my way of thinking, is the perfect cover.”

Sam didn’t like this piece of news one little bit.

“Switzerland? For how long? Is it dangerous?”

“I don’t know for how long, Sam. Until I get a result, I suppose. The only risk is in getting there. I have to travel through France—well behind the front lines—then cross Lake Geneva. Switzerland itself will be quite safe.”

“Did you even
try
to get out of it, Hal? Will’s going to be devastated. Remember how he was when you came home late that night?”

I nodded but tried to make light of it. “He’ll probably forget all about me when I’ve been gone a week.”

“Don’t say that! He’s surrounded by too many women as it is. Oh Hal, this is horrible—horrible, horrible, horrible!”

When we told Will, his first question was “Will come?” This was his way of saying “Can I come?” He had the habit just then of referring to himself by name rather than the personal pronoun.

When I gently told him he couldn’t come, he went very quiet and clung to his mother.

Dinner was a dismal affair that evening and, later, as soon as Sam and I retired to bed, Will came into our room and slid under the sheets between us. He was exhausted, however, and as soon as he had fallen asleep, I carried him back to his own bed.

When I returned to our room, Sam had turned out her bedside lamp and had pulled the blankets right up over her shoulder.

“Look, Sam, I’m sorry about this, but… come on. It’s the war. It plays with all our lives. You want me to refuse to obey orders? I could be prosecuted for treason, jailed. It would certainly be the end of my career, or my chance to be useful in the war. Don’t be unreasonable— please. This is our last night together for… for however long it is. Don’t spoil it.”

She just lay there, not moving, not speaking.

“It’s not as if I’m going back to the Front, being shot at. I’m not going into any real danger.”

Now she did turn and face me. “How do you know? How can you be so certain? You’ll be some sort of spy—I’m not stupid. I know you can’t tell me why you’re going—and I don’t want to know, not really. But spies, in wartime, even in neutral Switzerland, kill each other.” She sat up, her breasts rising and falling under her nightdress. “We were doing so well… now you’re doing a Wilhelm on me, only this time it’s on
us
, both of us, Will and me. What if you don’t come
back, Hal… I don’t think I could bear that… to be left, to be abandoned … war-widowed twice. I’ve seen the children at school who’ve lost their fathers, I’ve seen what happens to them, how they close up, how they are diminished, smaller, less complete than they used to be, quieter, locked away somewhere, as if something that was inside them has escaped… Is that going to happen to Will? Please God, no!”

She gasped these last words and fell toward me. I put my arms around her and kissed her. Her cheeks were wet from tears. I found the slight salt taste arousing. I placed my mouth on her breast, under her thin nightshirt, and she cried out.