The Paper Chase (13 page)

Applegate lay in bed and stared up into darkness. He closed his eyes and the darkness was full of luminous patterns. The patterns coalesced into a face, round headed and curly haired, the mouth set in a mocking smile. When the trail had been followed to the end, what kind of man did it reveal? A masterly opportunist, a crook no doubt, a man capable of the most vicious actions – but surely something more than that as well? The man who had been so brutal to poor little Fish was also the man who had saved Jews from the Nazis, the man who trafficked in drugs had also been engaged on some sort of official mission when he was killed.

What sort of mission? Was it linked with Bogue’s boast that in a week or two he would be the richest man in the world? And if that was the case, wouldn’t it be useful to know what the mission had been? Applegate suddenly spoke into the darkness. “Fazackerley,” he said.

Edmund Fazackerley was a friend of Uncle Roger, a dapper little young-old kind of man who had a job in something which he simply called S. This really stood for ESS, or the Economic Statistical Section, which seemed to have some tenuous attachment to the Treasury. Fazackerley was the kind of man who is always anxious to display his knowledge, and he would certainly not admit defeat in a case like that of Johnny Bogue.

Fazackerley, then, must be telephoned in the morning. Applegate became aware that he was more than half-asleep. He was suddenly startled into wakefulness by an appalling noise outside his door. There were shrieks, angry and excited voices, and there was a sound also as of a heavy body being dragged along the corridor. Applegate sprang out of bed, darted to the door, and opened it.

He recoiled from the sight that met his eyes in the ghostly light afforded by a blue night light in the corridor. Jeremy Pont, dressed in his pyjamas, his face furious with effort, was pulling a cardboard carton down the corridor. He was being hampered by his wife who with shrieks, pulls at his arm, everything short of actual blows, tried to restrain him. She wore a striped dressing gown tied together loosely enough to reveal that beneath it she had on nothing at all. By the side of Mrs Pont, with one hand upon her arm, was the youthful Deverell, who was attempting without success to persuade her to go back to her room.

She brushed off the hand he placed on her arm with the dramatic gesture of a third-rate Shakespearian actress. “I will not be stayed,” she cried. “Jeremy, those are mine.”

“If you’ll just come back to bed, Mr Pont and I will…” Deverell’s voice was low and deferential.

“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,” said Mrs Pont. A push from her brawny arm caught Deverell off balance and he staggered back against Hedda’s door. At the same moment the door opened, so that Deverell fell back into Hedda’s arms. Pont pulled the carton a little farther down the corridor. He looked up and saw Applegate.

“Stop her,” he panted. “I’ve found her store of drink. She hides it, you know. In the – airing cupboard this time. Empty it down the sink. Keep her away.”

Applegate moved in front of Mrs Pont, barring her way. “Now, now…”

Her eyes were wild. “He’s taking it away. Let me pass.”

“Taking what away?”

“Oil for the lamps of China. Grease for the axle wheel of progressive education. We must have more and more. Never enough. Let me pass.”

“It’s dark,” Applegate said. “Too dark to grease any axle wheels tonight. Leave it until the morning and I’ll help you.” He gripped one arm firmly. Hedda came from her doorway and took hold of the other.

“Come along now,” she said. “Come to bed, Aunt Janine.”

“So that’s your game, is it?” cried Mrs Pont. “Adventurers and defeatists all. I’ll match you.” She gave a great lunge forward. The arm Applegate held began to wriggle about as if with a life of its own. The arm held by Hedda got loose and flailed the air. Distantly, down the corridor, Pont could be seen trailing his carton of Haig and Johnny Walker.

“Janine,” he called back. “Go to bed.”

“Janine not me,” cried his wife. “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure. Unhand me now, I say.” Her roving arm struck the unfortunate Deverell, who was again sent staggering against the wall. It appeared for a moment that she might be successful in freeing herself, but her quite literal downfall was brought about by the grease for the axle wheels of progressive education. Her foot slipped on a bottle of Johnny Walker which must have come out of the carton. She skidded, and fell heavily to the floor. The dressing gown opened. Her silver hair was jerked aside to reveal a bald pate. She lay on the ground quietly moaning, and offered no resistance when Applegate, Deverell and Hedda hoisted her erect again. A weighty sack, she submitted as they propelled her across to the door of her room, and into bed. An odour of whisky surrounded her, she might have bathed in it.

“All right,” Hedda said. “She’ll be no trouble now. I can manage.”

There was another outbreak of noise, thuds succeeded by crashes. Applegate and Deverell ran outside and down the stairs to find Pont sitting at the bottom of the stairs, surrounded by whisky bottles, some empty, some broken and some full. The carton had been too much for him. They poured out the whisky from the full bottles and cleared up the others. “Do you suppose that’s all she’s got?” Applegate asked.

Pont made a hopeless gesture. “Possibly. She will find another hiding place. She always does. Janine, you know, is very highly strung. An emotional shock of this kind…” His voice trailed away.

“There may be more somewhere about?”

“I hope not.” He gave them a wan good night.

At the door of his room Deverell said to Applegate: “I’m beginning to think it’s a good thing I’m not staying here.”

“Mr Pont hasn’t been able to get in touch with your parents?”

“With Dad, no. He’s a real grasshopper, never in the same place more than a few days at a time. Couple of weeks ago he was in Venezuela. Chances are he’s in Lima now. He mentioned he might be going to Peru.”

“Your mother’s dead?”

“Dad divorced her when I was ten.”

“If they can’t get in touch with your father–”

Deverell laughed. “Don’t worry. Dad keeps me well supplied with money, and I’m used to looking after myself. I’ll just move into the local hotel and send cables until I get hold of him. Good night.”

A very self-possessed youth, Applegate thought, taking drunken women as all in the evening’s work. On his own mind the scene impressed itself as fantastic and gruesome. That great body flailing and writhing under the light of a blue moon, the discordant shreds of quotation, the odour of whisky everywhere, the silver wig falling off like a mask. Safely between sheets, he shuddered. It was a long time before he fell asleep.

“Bogue,” Fazackerley said in a slightly insulted voice. “But naturally I remember Bogue. What’s your interest in him?”

He was a little man with dark, wavy hair going grey at the sides and a handsome head which he held pushed up into the air to conceal an incipient double chin. The effort was rather as though his head was supported by an invisible high collar. His appearance was spoiled by his very short legs, and somehow he looked rather more like an assistant head waiter than like Sir Anthony Eden. Behind his desk in ESS, however, Fazackerley was quite reasonably impressive.

“Bogue died in 1943, when a plane in which he was flying was shot down by the Germans, or perhaps it just crashed. He was supposed to be engaged on a special mission at the time. I wanted to find out what that mission was.”

“Yes, dear boy, but why?”

Applegate had his story ready. “A man has been killed in the school I’m working at, a place named Bramley Hall. The Hall used to belong to Bogue…”

Fazackerley nodded, with the merest trace of impatience. He did not like the implication that he was ignorant of any subject whatever.

“And I’ve become very interested in him. I wrote a detective story…”

This time the shadow of impatience on Fazackerley’s brow was unmistakable.

“It seemed to me that Bogue would be an awfully good subject for a biography. An extraordinary life and a mysterious death. What do you think of it?”

Above the invisible high collar Fazackerley nodded again, sagely. “He sounds to me an excellent subject, as you say. I’m surprised nobody’s dealt with him before.”

“Delighted that you think so.” He warmed to his work. “On the other hand, it may be that for reasons unknown to me it is impossible to tell Bogue’s story. I asked myself who I should approach, and thought I really couldn’t do better than come to the fountainhead.”

It is rarely possible to spread the butter of flattery too thick. Fazackerley expanded before these words like a Japanese flower in water. He took a lip between thumb and finger and pulled at it. Then he consulted a file on his neat, glass-topped desk, talking as he ran through an alphabetical index.

“Strictly speaking, this kind of thing hasn’t anything to do with ESS, or even with PED, which was the original department that was converted into ESS after the war, but we have our contacts, you know. There’s Bosanquet now, moved from PED to some remote branch of the FO, now has a cosy little nook in J of L. No, hardly your man perhaps. Corliss, Mottingham, Peach, any of those
might
be able to help, but I think there may be somebody more – ah, yes, Tarboe. I really think Tarboe is your man.”

“That’s wonderful.” Applegate simulated boyish enthusiasm. “Who
is
Tarboe exactly?”

“You haven’t met him?” Fazackerley was delighted. “Well, Tarboe
does
operate behind the scenes, so I suppose that’s natural. During the war he was in charge of one of those queer little organisations that were responsible for all kinds of things from sending out missions to Tibet to providing protection for distinguished visitors who weren’t even supposed to be here, if you know what I mean. That was dak.”

“Dak?” said Applegate foolishly. “I thought that was a trouser.”

Fazackerley frowned disapproval of levity. “DAC was the Division for Administrative Co-operation. It has been merged with MOLE and WHY, but Tarboe is now with ENOS. Have you heard of ENOS?”

With some difficulty Applegate restrained the words that rose to his tongue.

“ENOS is really very hush-hush. Nobody knows just what it is concerned with as far as I know, except that it’s got some sort of attachment to the Treasury.”

“What do the letters stand for?”

“The letters?” Fazackerley echoed in surprise. “I’m really not sure – the European and National Operations Service, I believe. But that’s not important.”

“And Tarboe runs ENOS?”

“My dear boy, of course not. The chap who runs ENOS is – well, he’s very hush-hush indeed. Tarboe is just an EO, Executive Officer.”

“But why should ENOS have anything to do with Bogue?”

“Not ENOS, dear boy, but DAC. Anyway, you go and see Tarboe. I think you’ll find he’s your man. I’ll just give him a tinkle.” Fazackerley looked delicately at his watch. “Delighted to have put you on the track. Come along to the Club and have a drink when you’re next in town. We’ll talk about your book.”

“Why do you want to know about Bogue?” Tarboe asked. ENOS occupied two floors of a building in Soho Square, and on one of the floors Tarboe had a small, square box with a very tiny, square window. He was a lean, hard, wooden-faced man with grey hair, a grey toothbrush moustache, and one blind eye.

Applegate told his story. Tarboe made no direct comment, but he felt it had not been well received. “What do you expect me to tell you?”

“The end of Bogue’s story. After all, he’s been dead for years now. There can’t be any reason for secrecy.”

Tarboe raised eyebrows that were thin as pencil lines. “Can’t there? Are you under the impression that all wartime secrets have been revealed because Sir Winston Churchill has published his memoirs and a version of the Yalta documents has appeared, and all sorts of agents have published stories in which they’ve told a little bit of the truth about how they tricked the Germans? Truth is like an iceberg. Nine-tenths of it remains always unrevealed. But you want to know the truth about Bogue. I warn you that you won’t be able to use it.”

About Tarboe’s blind eye there was something mesmeric. Applegate said that he still wanted to know the truth.

“Very well. Fazackerley says that you are honest and discreet. Not that it matters much, because if you attempt to use anything I say in this conversation I shall simply deny it. I should say also that my only contact with Bogue was during the war. I have a file on his pre-war activities, but only one of them has any bearing on the story I am going to tell you. Bogue was not a member of the British Union of Fascists, but he had contacts with important members of the Nazi Party in Germany. You know that, I expect?”

“Yes.”

Tarboe opened a manilla folder. “In January, 1940, Bogue approached a member of Neville Chamberlain’s Government, and suggested that he might usefully be employed as an intermediary to negotiate peace terms with Germany. The offer was rejected. Later in the year – in August, when the period of the phony war was over – Bogue made another approach, saying that he had many German contacts but was a patriotic Briton, and offering his services in any connection in which they could be used.

“This time the offer was accepted. We were under no false impressions about Bogue, don’t think that. We kept a close watch on his activities, and we were not impressed by his claim to patriotism. I was the security officer dealing with his case.”

“And Fazackerley knew that?”

It was difficult for Tarboe’s wooden face to express surprise, but he showed a trace of it now. “Naturally. That’s why he sent you to me.”

Applegate snorted. All Fazackerley’s poking about among the files had been deliberate mystification. “Then DAC was–”

“Concerned with internal security,” Tarboe said in a voice so severe that further questions seemed precluded. “Chief among Bogue’s activities at this time was the running of a drug ring. The war had made it increasingly difficult for him to get supplies into this country. His organisation was busy building up contacts with merchant seamen, and he hoped by doing official work for the Government to obtain information which he could use to increase the amount of his supplies and the number of his agents. We knew all this. Nevertheless, we decided to employ him.”

“Why didn’t you clamp down on the drug ring?”

“Difficult to make someone like you understand. You look on drug selling as a purely moral problem. To us it’s a practical one. Arrest the chief organisers of a drug ring, what happens? The addicts go to someone else. Arrest enough people and somebody obtains a monopoly, pushes up the price. Result, more suicides, more gangsterism, more blackmail pressure on addicts who must have their supplies of heroin or cocaine. What you can’t do is to exterminate drug addiction by cutting off supplies. Witness the United States where the importation of heroin has been forbidden, but the market in it flourishes. There’s a good case for keeping the cost of drugs as low as possible.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Is that so?” Was it Tarboe’s blind eye or the good one that imparted that boiled, ironic look? “Anyway, believe me, it’s useful to know as much as you can about the details of a drug ring’s operation in wartime. In Bogue’s case we were able to trace through him dozens of important addicts, and we knew they were people particularly susceptible to blackmail by the cutting off of supplies. That information was potentially very valuable.

“I’ve said we decided to use Bogue. His contacts with the Nazis were mostly indirect, filtered through several European countries, or through the Argentine, Brazil or South Africa. He got through quite a lot of stuff to us about German progress with submarines and automatic weapons, most of it not very new but some undoubtedly useful. Occasionally we sent him abroad – he went with some sort of trade mission to Rio de Janeiro in April, 1941, as a special envoy to Buenos Aires in 1942, and on a mission to Lisbon in April, 1943. In Rio he managed to put pressure on an official in the German Embassy, von Sillert, who was a heroin addict. It was all done through intermediaries, you understand. Bogue and von Sillert never saw each other, but he got back the news that Germany intended to invade the Soviet Union. Unfortunately he got the month wrong – July instead of June – and also nobody here took much notice of it. Soon after Bogue left Rio von Sillert committed suicide. We never knew whether it was because his drug supplies had been temporarily cut off – we intended to renew them later – or because his leaks had been discovered. Bogue’s Buenos Aires trip didn’t have much result, but he came back from Lisbon with detailed information about the Italian military position, and about the number of divisions the Germans were taking away from the Eastern and Western fronts to try to contain the situation in Italy. Bogue got that information by making love to the wife of a second secretary in the Rumanian Legation at Lisbon. The second secretary himself was having an
affaire
with the wife of a third secretary in the Italian Legation, so there were quite a few sources of leakage.”

Tarboe turned the pages of the folder. “That was April, 1943. I won’t bother you with the details of Bogue’s other jobs, most of which were handled in England through various agents. The results of them varied from good to indifferent, which is exactly what you’d have expected. We didn’t flatter ourselves that the Germans were ignorant of what he was up to, or that Bogue himself wasn’t perfectly aware that we knew of his drug-trafficking activities, and tolerated them because of his usefulness. It was in June, 1943, that we found that Bogue was acting as a double agent.”

“How did you find that out?”

“In the simplest way. Bogue went to dinner one evening with a retired General, highly patriotic but renowned for his indiscretion. A story about the date of the opening of a Second Front had been planted on this General in some detail at a conference a couple of days earlier. The day after Bogue had dined with the General this information had been conveyed to a German agent here named Holmstetter.”

“By Bogue?”

“No. By a creature of Bogue’s named Jenks.”

Applegate bit back the exclamation on his tongue. One of Tarboe’s eyes stared at him, the other gazed across at the wall. “Fortunately we were fully aware of Holmstetter’s activities, but we then looked more carefully at the information we had ourselves obtained through Bogue. The information about the attack on the Soviet Union, for instance. The fact that it was a month wrong rendered it really of very little use. And the information about troop movements in Italy – this had come from two other sources a few days before we had it from Bogue. At the time it seemed to be a valuable confirmation, but it was perfectly possible that the Germans, knowing a genuine leak had taken place, gave it to Bogue as well with instructions to pass it on. We reviewed all the information we’d had through Bogue, and decided that at the best it really didn’t amount to very much.

“The case was talked about in all its aspects at a high level. Bogue’s drug organisation, his notoriety at one time as a public figure, his potential usefulness as a means of planting false information. Finally, it was decided that he was more dangerous than useful.” Tarboe closed the file and tapped it gently with two fingers. “It was decided that Bogue was expendable.”

Applegate looked at Tarboe’s wooden face, then away from him to the tiny square window that let in four slivers of light, then back again. It seemed now to be Tarboe’s blind eye that was looking at him, but he had become confused. Whichever eye it was, the eye was wholly expressionless.

“I’m not sure that I understand.”

“During July, 1943, we gradually tightened control over Bogue’s drug ring, cutting off supplies and arresting some minor agents. He became very short of money, and complained about it obliquely. He was told that the police had apparently got onto the trail of his agents, and that he could not be protected beyond a certain point. Late in July we had word from the Germans that they were prepared to discuss the exchange of the ‘
Prominente
’ for certain important Germans in our custody, in particular Rudolf Hess. You know about the ‘
Prominente’
?”

“Earl Haig and the Queen Mother’s nephew, the Master of Elphinstone, and Churchill’s nephew, Giles Romilly, and so on.”

“Yes. Bogue was told about this proposition, and was asked to go to Madrid where a German envoy was coming to discuss the matter. On the 24th August Bogue set off for Madrid.”

“And his plane was shot down by a German fighter.” Tarboe said nothing. His face was expressionless.

“Wasn’t it?”

“A security man named Shalson travelled with Bogue in the plane. The pilot and co-pilot were also security agents of ours. And by an odd chance they were also suspected of passing on information to the enemy. In fact, suspected is too mild a word. You hardly ever have absolute proof in these cases, but here the evidence was strong. We only have Shalson’s story of what happened. According to him, the plane ran into some trouble in the air through a leaky fuel tank. They had to bale out some twenty miles inside Portugal. Shalson managed it safely. And the others jumped too.”

“What happened to them?”

“Extraordinary thing.” Tarboe looked straight at Applegate with the dead eye. The other wandered from wall to ceiling. “Awful lot of faulty equipment there was just about that time. None of their parachutes opened.”

Applegate stayed silent, looking into the dead eye.

“We sent out another agent, but of course nothing happened. About the
Prominente
, I mean. They weren’t freed until the end of the war. We clamped down finally on the drug ring, arrested Bogue’s chief lieutenant, chap named Martin. No point in letting it go after Bogue was dead.”

“And Shalson?”

“Shalson? He left the service when the war ended. Don’t know what he’s doing now. Growing flowers, I dare say. He was a great gardener. That’s the end of the story.”

Applegate shivered. “A hateful story.”

A smile was carved for a moment on Tarboe’s wooden face. “You are too romantic. There is no need to be sentimental about men like Bogue.” Suddenly, dramatically, Tarboe put his hand up to his face and turned away from Applegate. When he turned back again his eye-socket was blank and he held a blue marble in his hand. “How do you suppose I lost this? Through a man like Bogue, one of our own agents who told the Germans where I was hiding. I have told you this story only so that you should understand that it is impossible to do anything about Bogue. In this department he has been forgotten. His file is permanently closed. You would be well advised to forget him also. Do you understand? Stick to your detective stories, Mr Applegate. Leave real life to those who know something about reality.”