Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) (43 page)

He placed a bet with himself that when someone finally shoved the door open it would be Ruthven-Greene, with a bullshitting yarn to spin him. It wasn’t. It was Gelbroaster.

‘Son,’ he said simply. ‘Mind if I pull up a chair?’

They were both on foreign territory.

‘Be their guest,’ said Cal.

The general smiled at this. Lowered himself into the only other chair in the room with an old man’s sigh, rested his hands a moment on his knees, then sat back. Rolled an unlit cigar
between his fingers. Thought better of it. Stuck it back in his top pocket.

‘You’ve done a man’s job, my boy. They found pages and pages of notes in Stahl’s room – he’d filled a legal pad. The British are well pleased.’

‘You know, sir,’ said Cal, ‘I can hear the “but” coming.’

‘But . . . there are one or two chiggers in the shoo-fly pie.’

It was a Stilton moment without Walter. Cal had always half felt that Walter made up some of his English turns of phrase. He was damn sure Gelbroaster had just made up an American one.

‘Such as?’

‘The information you unearthed about the Soviet Union is . . . prickly.’

‘Prickly?’

‘Spiky as a saguaro in the Arizona desert. How we, how they, use it is going to be a delicate matter. Kind of thing you only pull out with tweezers.’

Gelbroaster was labouring the point. Cal already had the message.

‘You mean they’re not going to tell the Russians.’

Gelbroaster looked faintly surprised at this.

‘Perceptive of you. But yes, that’s exactly what I mean. The decision’s been taken. What you and Reggie found out will be kept a secret. Wasn’t my decision, you
understand. But I’m going to go along with it.’

‘Who’s decision was it?’

‘Churchill’s.’

‘Are we bound by what the British do? The Germans have three million men poised to rip all hell out of Russia – and we’re not going to tell them?’

‘If it were up to me I would, but we’re in the army, we take orders. Churchill has spoken to the President. He’s the commander-in-chief, and his orders are we don’t tell
’em. I’ve never questioned a presidential order. I don’t intend to start now.’

‘And I don’t mean to question your orders either, sir. But they’re going to massacre the Russians and those they don’t massacre they’ll turn into slaves.’

‘I don’t doubt it. But Churchill wants Russia in the war on his side. He wants no loophole that would let Stalin pull off one more deal with Hitler. It may sound heartless, but this
way the Russian entry into the war is guaranteed.’

Cal got out of his seat. Ready to leave.

‘Heartless? It’s murder!’

Gelbroaster waved him back down.

‘Sit down and hold your fire, son. There’s more to come.’

Cal stood.

‘Such as? I don’t see what more they can do. Walter Stilton died getting us that information. Stahl died for it, in his own mad way. I damn near got killed myself. And they’re
just going to throw it away?’

‘Sit down.’

Cal sat.

‘It’s this. With Stahl dead, your mission in Zurich is over. So we’re flying you back to Washington.’

‘You mean they’re flying me out of here because I know too much?’

‘Churchill insisted on it. He wants nothing to get out. Believe me, son, there’s no disgrace. There’s even a promotion. You’ll go home a major and there’ll be a
good job for you at the War Department.’

Gelbroaster paused.

‘And?’

‘This is the hard bit. You know who I mean by Fritz Kuhn?’

‘Sure, everybody’s heard of him. He led the German-American Bund. He got nailed for embezzlement about two years ago.’

‘His successor in the Bund was a guy named Wilhelm Kunze. Kunze fled to Mexico earlier this year and the Bund has kind of fallen apart. It’s no real threat to anyone any more. But
– and this is a huge but – there’s no denying that a fifth column back home was a dangerous thing for a while. Mostly assholes who liked fancy uniforms and parading up and down
doing idiotic salutes. Get ’em in every town, particularly when there’s nothing worth hunting and nothing much else to do. What mattered was who they’d got in power. Nobody much
cared if a potato farmer from Idaho dressed up like a Nazi at the weekend – what mattered was who mattered. If you catch my drift. Feds have been trying to crack the Bund for a while. Pick up
the messy trail Kuhn and Kunze left. Well, they finally got their hands on the Bund’s files. A lot of it’s coded, in a crude kind of way – fake names, that sort of thing, box
numbers rather than real addresses, nothing a high school kid couldn’t crack overnight. Mostly it is potato farmers in Idaho – but it also seems fairly certain that they’ve
identified Frank Reininger as a member.’

‘Jesus!’ Cal said softly. Then, ‘How long have you known?’

‘Not long.’

‘How long? Long enough to get me here and flush him out for you?’

Gelbroaster drew a deep breath, his pace and his manner altering not one jot.

‘I know this has been a hard time for you. You’ve lost something very precious to you. I don’t doubt that after two years there was some sort of bond between you and Stahl, and
it seems from all I’ve heard that you and the English cop were good friends, but the biggest loss is the loss of innocence. I think that’s what you’ve been through. The loss of
innocence. But son, the biggest loss of innocence has got to be a refusal ever to believe in coincidence again. I didn’t get you here to flush out Frank. If I’d known or even suspected
Frank was working for the Germans I’d’ve busted him myself. Believe me, you did a great job in catching up with him, but neither I nor Deke Shaeffer had any idea that it was Frank you
were after.’

Cal felt almost chastened – but not quite.

‘But I’m still being sent home?’

‘’Fraid so, and there’s more. We’re fairly certain that your father had links with the Bund too.’

Cal whispered ‘What?’, his voice buried somewhere in the back of his throat.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t mince words, dammit. Son, he was a paid-up member, he donated funds, he fed them information. Now that’s about as plain as I can tell it.’

Cal found it hard to be outraged, but disbelief came readily.

‘My father supports America First, plenty of people do, patriotic people do – and even then he does it low key – he’s never spoken on their platform as far as I know. He
writes speeches for Lindbergh. He gives the idiot the facts and the arguments he needs to address an audience and be taken seriously. General, that’s one hell of a way from joining the
Bund.’

‘And he thinks there’s a conspiracy between Churchill and Roosevelt to bring America into this war by any reasonable pretext.’

‘By any reasonable pretext.’ The phrasing was too close, too accurate. It had stuck in Cal’s mind too.

‘You’ve been intercepting my mail?’

‘’Fraid so. Necessity. But there you are.’

‘Sir, that’s just my father being cranky. He sees conspiracies everywhere. Given his opposition to the war, he’s bound to see one between the Prime Minister and the
President.’

‘I agree,’ said Gelbroaster. ‘And he’s absolutely right. There is.’

‘What?’

‘I doubtthey callita conspiracy.Personally . . .ifthe capfits wear it . . . in effect . . . what your father perceives is exactly what is happening. Right now we’re looking out for
that reasonable pretext.’

‘You mean you want another
Lusitania
?’

Gelbroaster shrugged. ‘Something quicker, I’d hope. Took two years to get us into the war after the
Lusitania
. Something less drastic would do. We may not get that lucky of
course.’

‘You know,’ said Cal, ‘I was getting ready to write to my father and tell him he’s nuts.’

‘ You’ll be able to tell him in person. We can’t use this information publicly, you understand – but privately . . . well, your father’s career is over. If he so
much as mutters that he’s thinking of running for any other office but the one he’s got, then someone will show him an FBI file and he’ll be quietly told to stand down. He’s
an ambitious man, but any dreams he might have had of running for president in five or ten years . . .’

Gelbroaster didn’t bother to end the sentence. They both knew how it ended.

‘Why not?’ said Cal. ‘Why not reveal the names, just publish and be damned?’

‘Son, I was with Joe Kennedy when he picked up a paper knife and broke the lock on the
Red Book
– now do you know what that is?’

‘No – I don’t.’

‘It’s the membership list of the British Right Club. Bunch of Jew-baiting Anglo-Nazis. We got hold of it last year. The Right Club gave it to Tyler Kent, thinking diplomatic immunity
was eternal. When MI5 blew the whistle on Kent we busted him and Joe busted thebook.Itreadlikea
Who’s Who
– members of parliament, dukes and earls – would you believe the
Marquis of Graham, Lord Redesdale, the Duke of goddam Wellington? Publish and be damned is just about right. The effects would have been crushing on British morale if we’d let any of that
out. Even Kennedy could see that. He threw Kent to the wolves and high-tailed it out of here before the next bomb could fall. The same’s true back home. We have our own morale to sustain.
We’re going to war – it might last another two years or another ten. The press would be deadly – better by far to know who’s rotten in the barrel and let ’em know you
know.’

‘And the British still want me to go back to Washington? To the same city my father lives in? And they still expect me to tell no-one?’

‘
I
expect you to tell no-one. And I didn’t say it was logical. That’s too much to ask of the British at the best of times, and this is one of the worst. Besides, we have
our secrets too. The British will never know how far the Bund penetrated into the Army or the Capitol.’

‘It’s still crazy. I’m a safer bet right here. In London.’

‘But you’re going home, all the same. First flight we can get you on.’

Cal knew he had lost. They lapsed into silence. Gelbroaster retrieved his cigar and lit up. For a minute or more all Cal could hear was the puffing and lip-smacking of the smoker’s
ritual.

‘How long do I have? I mean, there are one or two things I have to do. Things I have to sort out.’

‘Three or four days. There’s a log jam of people trying to get out to Lisbon, but we’ll bump you up the list.’

Gelbroaster got up to leave. Dirty work done.

‘I want you to know that I personally could not be more grateful to you.’

He was heading for the door now, the last remark all but thrown over his shoulder. Too casual to be literal. ‘If there’s anything you need, anything at all . . .’

‘There is one thing,’ said Cal, being as literal as he could.

Gelbroaster turned back to him. Clearly he’d not expected Cal to want anything quite so soon.

Troy was having a lazy day. There was a brilliant June sun in the sky, after yesterday’s unseasonal cold. He had been up to the urban ‘farm’ at Seven Dials,
where a bloke he knew kept goats and hens not spitting distance from Shaftesbury Avenue’s theatres, and had haggled for half a dozen eggs. He offered to tip the nod to the local beat bobby to
keep a close eye on the ‘farm’ at night and came away with four hen and two goose. Enough to let him indulge in a three-egg scramble for late breakfast, or was it early lunch? It was
corruption, of course, but after what he’d been through lately it troubled that near-dormant organ, his conscience, not one whit. Besides, he’d paid more than twice the pre-war
price.

The first egg fell into the pan and rose up proud as an orange jelly, a thick mass of albumen orbiting it as precisely as the rings of Saturn. He’d not seen an egg this fresh for the best
part of a year. It seemed almost a shame to scramble it but scramble it he did – on toast with the meagre scraping of his butter ration.

Then he put a dining chair out in the courtyard, aimed it at the sun, and read in the western light of a London summer’s afternoon.

The Times
ran an obituary for the late Kaiser. Troy glanced at it with a ‘so what?’ running through his mind. He was not, he realised, much in the mood for news, even the last
word on a man not much heard of these twenty years. He was in the mood for fiction. He tried
Ulysses
by James Joyce, loved the opening bit about the fat bloke shaving – he always did
– but then he sort of got lost – he always did. Then he picked up
The Edwardians
by Vita Sackville-West and had read twenty pages before he realised he had read it before. At
last he settled upon
The Professor
by Rex Warner – a book Rod had given him about the time of the Munich crisis. Dirty deeds in one of those Continental republics cobbled together at
the Treaty of Versailles. Rod was forever giving him books. Rod read new books. Rod read topical books. Rod loved the idea of authors – he was forever saying he’d met ‘so and
so’ at a ‘do’. This appeared to be the tale of one Professor A. Oh no, thought Troy, not initials, not like that bugger Kafka with his K bloke? He wasn’t sure about this,
but he read on and was still happily engrossed an hour later when he heard Onions, police boots sparking on the cobbles, lumbering down the yard from St Martin’s Lane.

‘Starting a library, are we?’ Stan said, eyeing the pile of half a dozen books next to the chair. Stan read little, if at all. Half a dozen probably was a library to him.

‘Just passing the time,’ Troy replied.

‘Wound giving you gyp?’

‘A bit,’ said Troy.

‘You’ve not been out much then?’

Troy saw the trap for what it was and decided not to answer. He got up, stuck
The Professor
on his chair and said ‘I’ll stick the kettle on.’

Stan followed him inside.

‘Don’t bother for me. I don’t want to use up your ration.’

‘Well – perhaps a belt of something a bit stronger then?’

The sofa groaned as Onions lowered his bulk onto it. He was sweating. Suit, tie, as well as the regulation-issue boots.

‘Not for me. Still on duty.’

Troy sat opposite Stan and said nothing, waiting for Stan to speak his piece. What could bring Stan round in duty hours in the middle of the week? As if he couldn’t guess.