Most Secret (45 page)

“If I were you,” I said, “I should think up a cablegram and send it off to her. You’ll have a month to do on this side, getting hold of the job. I should think you’d be in San Francisco some time in February.”

He left me soon after that, and I went on with my work. I saw him again a few days later, when he looked in to show me the answer to his cablegram. He was as pleased as a dog with two tails, and insisted on me reading it. It said:

“Billy was her cat,” he explained. “I’m real sorry about Billy. He was a good, tough kind of cat, ’n a match for any dog.”

I handed him back the cable. “I should send her some dough to be going on with, if you’ve got any,” I remarked. “I’ve been finding out about your marriage allowance. They cater for a case like yours. You can draw it, but you’ve got to make a declaration. Look, this is what you’ve got to do.”

I went through the Admiralty Fleet Order with him and explained it to him in detail. “I did hear something about this,” he said at last.

Thinking of the girl in Oakland, I was a little short with him. “You might have done something about it,” I said.

He looked abashed. “Guess I never had a commander that I’d care to talk it over with before,” he said.

I told him he was a fool, and sent him away to make out his declaration.

About a fortnight later McNeil rang me up. “You might look in some time,” he said. “I’ve got a couple more flimsies in about
Geneviève.
”

I went round to his office after lunch. He took them from a drawer and passed them to me. “Not very good news, I’m afraid,” he said.

The first one read:

Rennes. A British officer named Charles Simon was
executed at the rifle range to-day. This man was convicted of an act of espionage at Lorient last spring, at which time his status was that of a civilian. It is believed that the severe damage caused to the U-boat base was due to information passed by this man to the British. Ends.

I looked up at the brigadier. “I’m very sorry about this,” I said.

He nodded. “So am I.” He paused. “I was very much afraid that this would happen,” he said quietly. “It would have been a miracle if they hadn’t spotted him.”

“You think some German recognised him, and remembered?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Something of the sort. I don’t suppose we’ll ever hear the details now.”

“He must have known what he was doing,” I said slowly. “When he gave himself up, he must have known the risk.”

McNeil said: “He was probably thinking of the hostages.”

“Of course.” I sat there staring at the message in my hand, and the slow anger rose in me. “We’ve been a couple of bloody fools over this,” I said at last. “We should have managed better.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean just this,” I said. “Simon was the best officer for working on the other side this country ever had, or is ever likely to get. And now he’s dead. We should have thought more deeply before risking him again in Douarnenez.”

“It’s not so easy to rope in these chaps,” McNeil said heavily. “The better they are, the more difficult they are to manage. You know that.” I did, and I was silent. “He was a damn good man,” he said. “But there are others just as good.”

“You can’t have so many Simons as all that,” I replied. “We’ve gone and wasted one of them.”

“Wasted …” he said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure that you’re right.” He glanced at me. “Did you read the other one?”

I turned to the other flimsy. This one said:

I stood there reading this again, and as I did so I could feel the hate swelling and seething on the other side. I put down the flimsies, sick of the whole miserable business.

“In any case,” I said, “this winds up
Geneviève
. Simon was the last of them to be accounted for, and now that’s over.”

The brigadier nodded. “It’s all finished now. I’ll let you know if anything else turns up.”

“I shan’t be here,” I said. “I’m going back to sea.” It was a relief to talk of cleaner things. “They’re giving me one of the Tribal class destroyers.”

“Glad to go?”

I said: “Yes. Somebody has to do this Admiralty work, of course, but I’d rather be at sea with a definite job to do. Here you work all day in the office, and nothing ever seems to be achieved.”

He stared at me. “I don’t know what you want,” he said. “The operations that we did with
Geneviève
have been a most successful show.”

“We lost the ship and all her crew,” I said bitterly.

“We lost a fishing vessel and two officers,” he retorted. “Against that we destroyed three
Raumboote
and damaged a destroyer. We killed not less than ninety Germans. We landed seventy machine-guns, and put fresh heart into a town that needed it. And not the least part, we drew off a division from the Russian front.”

“A pretty scruffy sort of a division,” I remarked.

“I grant you that,” he said. “It was a very tired division. But it was a division, none the less, taken from the Russian front at Rostov.”

He turned to me. “Who knows what that may mean?”