Citadel (4 page)

“I hope I'm smart enough to stay up with all
these wrinkles, gentlemen. I already have a
headache.”

“Welcome to the world of espionage,” said Sir
Colin. “We all have headaches. Professor, please
continue.”

“The volume in the library is indeed controlled
by only one man,” Turing said. “And he is the senior
librarian of the institution. Alas, his loyalties
are such that they are not, as one might hope and
expect, for his own country. He is instead one of
those of high caste taken by fascination for another
creed, and it is to that creed he pays his deepest allegiance.
He has made himself useful to his masters
for many years as a ‘talent spotter,' that is, a man
who looks at promising undergraduates, picks
those with keen policy minds and good connections,
forecasts their rise, and woos them to his side
as secret agents with all kinds of babble of the sort
that appeals to the mushy romantic brain of the
typical English high-class idiot. He thus plants the
seeds of our destruction, sure to bloom a few
decades down the line. He does other minor tasks
too, running as a cutout, providing a safe house,
disbursing a secret fund, and so forth. He is committed maximally and he will die before he betrays
his creed, and some here have suggested a bullet in
the brain as apposite, but actually, by the tortured
rules of the game, a live spy in place is worth more
than a dead spy in the ground. Thus he must not
be disturbed, bothered, breathed heavily upon—
he must be left entirely alone.”

“And as a consequence you cannot under any
circumstances access the book. You do not even
know what it looks like?” Basil asked.

“We have a description from a volume published
in 1932, called
Treasures of the Cambridge
Library
.”

“I can guess who wrote it,” said Basil.

“Your guess would be correct,” said Sir Colin.
“It tells us little other than that it comprises thirtyfour
pages of foolscap written in tightly controlled
nib by an accomplished freehand scrivener. Its eccentricity
is that occasionally apostolic bliss came
over the author and he decorated the odd margin
with constellations of floating crosses, proclaiming
his love of all things Christian. The Reverend
MacBurney was clearly given to religious swoons.”

“And the librarian is given to impenetrable security,”
said the admiral. “There will come a time
when I will quite happily murder him with your
cricket bat, Captain.”

“Alas, I couldn't get the bloodstains out and left
it in Malay. So let me sum up what I think I know
so far. For some reason the Germans have a fellow
in the Cambridge library controlling access to a
certain 1767 volume. Presumably they have sent
an agent to London with a coded message he himself
does not know the answer to, possibly for security
reasons. Once safely here, he will approach
the bad-apple librarian and present him with the
code. The bad apple will go to the manuscript, decipher
it, and give a response to the Nazi spy. I suppose
it's operationally sound. It neatly avoids radio,
as you say it cannot be breached without giving
notice that the ring itself is under high suspicion,
and once armed with the message, the operational
spy can proceed with his mission. Is that about it?”

“Almost,” said Sir Colin. “In principle, yes, you
have the gist of it—manfully done. However, you
haven't got the players quite right.”

“Are we then at war with someone I don't know
about?” said Basil.

“Indeed and unfortunately. Yes. The Soviet
Union. This whole thing is Russian, not German.”

The Second Day (cont'd.)

If panic flashed through Basil's mind, he did not
yield to it, although his heart hammered against
his chest as if a spike of hard German steel had
been pounded into it. He thought of his L-pill, but
it was buried in his breast pocket. He thought next
of his pistol: Could he get it out in time to bring a
few of them down before turning it on himself?
Could he at least kill this leering German idiot who
… but then he noted that the characterization had
been delivered almost merrily.

“You must be a spy,” said the colonel, laughing
heartily, sitting next to him. “Why else would you
shave your moustache but to go on some glamorous
underground mission?”

Basil laughed, perhaps too loudly, but in his
chest his heart still ran wild. He hid his blast of fear
in the heartiness of the fraudulent laugh and came
back with an equally jocular, “Oh, that? It seems in
winter my wife's skin turns dry and very sensitive,
so I always shave it off for a few months to give the
beauty a rest from the bristles.”

“It makes you look younger.”

“Why, thank you.”

“Actually, I'm so glad to have discovered you. At
first I thought it was not you, but then I thought,
Gunther, Gunther, who would kidnap the owner
of the town's only hotel and replace him with a
double? The English are not so clever.”

“The only thing they're any good at,” said Basil,
“is weaving tweed. English tweed is the finest in
the world. “

“I agree, I agree,” said the colonel. “Before all
this, I traveled there quite frequently. Business, you
know.”

It developed that the colonel, a Great War aviator,
had represented a Berlin-based hair tonic
firm whose directors had visions, at least until
1933, of entering the English market. The colonel
had made trips to London in hopes of interesting
some of the big department stores in carrying a
line of lanolin-based hair creams for men, but was
horrified to learn that the market was controlled
by the British company that manufactured Brylcreem and would use its considerable clout to keep
the Germans out.

“Can you imagine,” said the colonel, “that in the
twenties there was a great battle between Germany
and Great Britain for the market advantage of lubricating
the hair of the British gentleman? I believe
our product was much finer than that English
goop, as it had no alcohol and alcohol dries the
hair stalk, robbing it of luster, but I have to say that
the British packaging carried the day, no matter.
We could never find the packaging to catch the
imagination of the British gentleman, to say nothing
of a slogan. German as a language does not
lend itself to slogans. Our attempts at slogans were
ludicrous. We are too serious, and our language is
like potatoes in gravy. It has no lightness in it at all.
The best we could come up with was, ‘Our tonic is
very good.' Thus we give the world Nietzsche and
not Wodehouse. In any event, when Hitler came
to power and the air forces were reinvigorated, it
was out of the hair oil business and back to the
cockpit.”

It turned out that the colonel was a born talker.
He was on his way to Paris on a three-day leave to
meet his wife for a “well-deserved, if I do say so
myself” holiday. He had reservations at the Ritz
and at several four-star restaurants.

Basil put it together quickly: the man he'd
stolen his papers from was some sort of collaborationist
big shot and had made it his business to
suck up to all the higher German officers, presumably
seeing the financial opportunities of being in
league with the occupiers. It turned out further
that this German fool was soft and supple when it
came to sycophancy and he'd mistaken the Frenchman's
oleaginous demeanor with actual affection,
and he thought it quite keen to have made a real
friend among the wellborn French. So Basil committed
himself to six hours of chitchat with the
idiot, telling himself to keep autobiographical details
at a minimum in case the real chap had already
spilled some and he should contradict
something previously established.

That turned out to be no difficulty at all, for
the German colonel revealed himself to have an
awesomely enlarged ego, which he expressed
through an autobiographical impulse, so he virtually
told his life story to Basil over the long drag,
gossiping about the greed of Göring and the reluctance
of the night fighters to close with the
Lancasters, Hitler's insanity in attacking Russia,
how much he, the colonel, missed his wife, how
he worried about his son, a Stuka pilot, and how
sad he was that it had come to pass that civilized
Europeans were at each other's throats again, and
on and on and on and on, but at least the Jews
would be dealt with once and for all, no matter
who won in the end. He titillated Basil with inside
information on his base and the wing he commanded,
Nachtjagdgeschwader-9, and the constant
levies for Russia that had stripped it of
logistics, communications, and security people,
until nothing was left but a skeleton staff of air
crew and mechanics, yet still they were under
pressure from Luftwaffe command to bring down
yet more Tommies to relieve the night bombing
of Berlin. Damn the Tommies and their brutal
methods of war! The man considered himself fascinating,
and his presence seemed to ward off the
attention of the other German officers who came
and went on the trip to the Great City. It seemed
so damned civilized that you almost forgot there
was a war on.

It turned out that one of the few buildings in Paris
with an actual Nazi banner hanging in front of it
was a former insurance company's headquarters
at 14 rue Guy de Maupassant in the sixth arrondissement.
However, the banner wasn't much, really just an elongated flag that hung limply off a
pole on the fifth floor. None of the new occupants
of the building paid much attention to it. It was
the official headquarters of the Paris district of the
Abwehr, German military intelligence, ably run
from Berlin by Admiral Canaris and beginning to
acquire a reputation for not being all that crazy
about Herr Hitler.

They were mostly just cops. And they brought
cop attributes to their new headquarters: dyspepsia,
too much smoking, cheap suits, fallen arches,
and a deep cynicism about everything, but particularly
about human nature and even more particularly
about notions of honor, justice, and duty.
They did believe passionately in one cause, however:
staying out of Russia.

“Now let us see if we have anything,” said
Hauptmann Dieter Macht, chief of Section III-B
(counterintelligence), Paris office, at his daily staff
meeting at three p.m., as he gently spread butter
on a croissant. He loved croissants. There was
something so exquisite about the balance of elements—
the delicacy of the crust, which gave way
to a kind of chewy substrata as you peeled it away,
the flakiness, the sweetness of the inner bread, the
whole thing a majestic creation that no German
baker, ham-thumbed and frosting-crazed, could
ever match.

“Hmmm,” he said, sifting through the various
reports that had come in from across the country.
About fifteen men, all ex-detectives like himself, all
in droopy plain clothes like himself, all with uncleaned
Walthers holstered sloppily on their hips,
awaited his verdict. He'd been a Great War aviator,
an actual ace in fact, then the star of Hamburg
Homicide before this war, and had a reputation for
sharpness when it came to seeing patterns in seemingly
unrelated events. Most of III-B's arrests came
from clever deductions made by Hauptmann
Macht.

“Now this is interesting. What do you fellows
make of this one? It seems in Sur-la-Gane, about
forty kilometers east of here, a certain man known
to be connected to inner circles of the Maquis was
spotted returning home early in the morning by
himself. Yet there has been no Maquis activity in
that area since we arrested Pierre Doumaine last
fall and sent him off to Dachau.”

“Perhaps,” said Leutnant Abel, his second-in-
command, “he was at a meeting and they are becoming
active again. Netting a big fish only tears
them down for a bit of time, you know.”
“They'd hold such a meeting earlier. The
French like their sleep. They almost slept through
1940, after all. What one mission gets a Maquis up
at night? Anyone?”

No one.

“British agent insertion. They love to cooperate
with the Brits because the Brits give them so much
equipment, which can either be sold on the black
market or be used against their domestic enemies
after the war. So they will always jump lively for
the SOE, because the loot is too good to turn
down. And such insertions will be late-night or
early-morning jobs.”

“But,” said Leutnant Abel, “I have gone through
the reports too, and there are no accounts of aviation
activities in that area that night. When the
British land men in Lysanders, some farmer always
calls the nearby police station to complain about
low-flying aviators in the dark of night, frightening
the cows. You never want to frighten a peasant's
cows; he'll be your enemy for life. Believe me,
Hauptmann Macht, had a Lysander landed, we'd
know from the complaints.”

“Exactly,” said Macht. “So perhaps our British
visitor didn't arrive for some reason or other and
disappointed the Sur-la-Gane Resistance cell, who
got no loot that night. But if I'm not mistaken, that
same night complaints did come in from peasants
near Bricquebec, outside Cherbourg.”

“We have a night fighter base there,” said Abel.
“Airplanes come and go all night—it's meaningless.”

“There were no raids that night,” said Macht.
“The bomber stream went north, to Prussia, not
to Bavaria.”

“What do you see as significant about that?”

“Suppose for some reason our fellow didn't
trust the Sur-la-Gane bunch, or the Resistance either.
It's pretty well penetrated, after all. So he directs
his pilot to put him somewhere else.”

“They can't put Lysanders down just anywhere,”
said another man. “It has to be set up,
planned, torches lit. That's why it's so vulnerable
to our investigations. So many people—someone
always talks, maybe not to us, but to someone, and
it always gets to us.”