SS-GB (38 page)

‘One of us had better be there,’ said Mayhew.

‘My lads can think of a million reasons for scrambling across the countryside after curfew. But they’ll never be able to account for chaps like you being with them.’ Garin gave another of his snorting laughs. It was an ugly sound but it had an infectious quality that made Mayhew and Douglas laugh too.

Sydney Garin said it would take only half an hour for his ‘lads’ to bring the parachutist back to Linden Manor. But the wind took the parachute farther than anyone at the landing fires was able to judge. The parachutist twisted his ankle landing in a muddy piece of scrubland near the river. He showed an exaggerated caution in ignoring the calls of the search party, and was found only because of the behaviour of a little mongrel dog belonging to a stable-lad.

‘Its mother was always following the foxhounds,’ said the boy proudly as the parachutist was brought back to the Manor.

It was almost two hours later before he arrived in the drawing-room where Mayhew, Garin and Douglas waited impatiently after the news came that the parachutist had been found. This was the same room where they had met before dinner. The silk curtains were
closed now, as they had been then, and the fire was not much lower, and yet the interior had changed in the way that all rooms change at night. Every sound came edgy and distinct; in the silence they heard an owl, the trees moving in the wind, the steady tick of the skeleton clock, the movement of the burning coals settling into the grate, and then a servant’s footfalls along the corridor. The room was filled with the aromatic smoke from Mayhew’s Havana cigars.

‘Your visitor, sir,’ said the butler as the parachutist entered the drawing-room. He was American, no longer young and yet, like so many of his compatriots, he had all the movements and gestures of youth. He seemed restless but it was not the sort of nervous fidgeting that Douglas had noticed in Mayhew that evening, rather it was the kind of impatience that is evident in athletes just before some testing event. His handsome face was square-shaped and tanned, his eyes narrowed; the face of a man who’d spent most of his life on some sunbaked prairie or desert, or was it from holiday beaches and swimming pools? The American’s hair was fair, and cut very short all over his head. Douglas had heard of this strange new hair fashion but this was the first time he’d seen it. In Britain such haircuts were seen only on newly-released prisoners and some of the German occupation army.

As if aware of the effect of his crewcut, the American ran a hand across his head. A man’s hands betray all his secrets, and these hands were soft, white, uncalloused and slightly wrinkled, with cared-for nails and visible vein lines. They were the hands of an affluent sedentary man without manual skills; a man nearer forty than thirty and vain enough to have regular manicures.

In the hearth, Garin’s huge Irish Wolfhound stirred to see the newcomer, yawned and settled back to sleep as Garin handed his guest an empty glass and inclined
the whisky bottle. The American nodded and Garin poured him a large measure. A servant followed carrying a portable radio transmitter. It was part of the parachutist’s load, its canvas case designed to make it resemble an accordion. But what chance did this urbane man have of passing himself off as an itinerant musician?

‘We thought the wind was going to carry you into the dark interior of Essex,’ said Mayhew.

The American sipped his drink. ‘I heard the jungle drums,’ he said. ‘Umm! That’s the first drink I’ve had in nearly three weeks.’

‘US warships are dry,’ said Mayhew with a nod. ‘I was warned about that.’

‘The ship was British, a fifteen-thousand-ton merchantman,’ said the American. ‘You’d better remember that. We painted over the markings on the plane and your people gave the pilot a commission in the Royal Navy, just in case.’

‘Pray God he’ll not require it,’ said Mayhew.

As the American lifted his glass to drink to that, he winced with pain and rubbed his back. ‘We catapulted off the ship using an old catapult from one of your battle cruisers. For a moment I thought it had wrenched my head off.’

‘Your driver was a bit nervous,’ said Mayhew.

‘Did you see those Junkers transports?’

‘The Germans are bringing in another infantry division, by air,’ said Mayhew. ‘They were the empties, going back for more.’

‘There wasn’t enough room to get into your field,’ said the American. ‘And we sure as hell didn’t want to leave a wrecked airplane for you to explain away tomorrow morning.’

‘That was most considerate,’ said Garin. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘We had a steak dinner before takeoff. The Scotch will do me fine, thanks.’ He looked down at his shoe. The impact of his parachute landing had split the sole away from its upper. He twisted the shoe against the carpet to see the gap.

‘You talked to your people in Washington? What will be the arrangements?’

‘I talked,’ said the American, ‘and how I talked!’

‘And?’

‘And they say “no!”’

Mayhew stared at him. ‘No?’

‘I even talked with the President…for thirty minutes. He kept the Secretary of Labor waiting while we talked.’ The excitement was draining out of him, revealing a tired man. He walked across the room, sank down on the sofa and stretched his head to ease his neck muscles. ‘And I talked to several personal friends at the State Department, as well as to the Senate subcommittee set up to deal with your people.’

‘And the army and the navy?’ said Mayhew.

‘And the army and the navy.’

‘Surely to God, American Jews understand that Hitler has got to be stopped?’ said Garin.

‘There aren’t too many Jews in the Chief of Staff’s office,’ said the American dryly. ‘Your King would be a liability to America. Do you think Roosevelt wants to go into schoolbooks as the man who invited the King of England back to the US of A? No sir! And what the heck would they do with him? Do they want us to give him a room at the White House, one Admiral said to me, or would we have to build a palace?’

‘I’m sure the President didn’t say anything like that,’ said Mayhew.

‘You’ve got to stop thinking that Roosevelt is some kind of fanatical Anglophile. He’s a politician, and back home that means a wily bird.’

Mayhew said, ‘Of course it’s politically sensitive –’

‘Correction, buddy; politically it’s suicide. Every politician is promising he won’t get American boys into a foreign war. You think anyone is going to invite your King there, when he’s the focal point of the whole European wrangle?’

‘War,’ said Mayhew, coldly objecting to the word ‘wrangle’. ‘We call it war.’

‘You call it anything you like, but for most people back home, it’s in the past tense. And the Krauts have changed the tense.’

‘We were asking a lot of you,’ said Mayhew. ‘Perhaps Sir Robert Benson should have gone to Washington.’

The American leaned back and closed his eyes. It was difficult to decide whether he was tired, disillusioned or just counting to ten before exploding with anger. ‘We went all through that weeks ago,’ he said softly. ‘You were the one so keen to send me. You said a well-informed American, sympathetic to Britain, would have the best chance.’ He put a hand over his glass to decline the whisky that Garin offered him. ‘Don’t think I pulled my punches. And don’t think America is blind to what’s happening in the world. Congress has given the army six billion dollars in the last six months, so we can get a fighting army, and buy the Air Corps better airplanes. But we’ve got our own Hitler; he’s got a yellow face and narrow eyes, and he signs his mail Tojo.’

Mayhew rested a hand on the fireplace and stared into the flames. ‘The King will have to be told,’ he said sadly. ‘He’ll go to Canada, and that’s that.’

The American found some dried mud on his trouser leg, picked it off and threw it into the fire. ‘I’m just not getting through to you, am I? Is it my accent or something?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Mayhew sharply. He turned to face the American.

‘I mean your King will not be welcome in North America. And that goes for the real estate north of the forty-ninth parallel.’

‘Washington dare not forbid Canadians to give refuge to their sovereign!’

‘Washington forbids nothing. The Canadians won’t take him. I was up in Ottawa talking with them. They have the same political problems we have. Having a King Emperor as a resident will dwarf the authority of their Prime Minister.’

‘The King will take no part in Canadian politics,’ said Mayhew.

‘The Canadians felt the heavy paternal hand of London for too many years, Colonel. Finally they get a degree of independence. Now you want them to have the King living there. No politician wants to risk what the opposition will do to him if he’s a party to that step backwards.’

‘They have all Britain’s gold, valued at six hundred and thirty-seven million, in old pounds sterling. And when HMS
Revenge
took that first consignment, more than a thousand million pounds of securities went there too.’

‘No sweat,’ said the American. ‘The securities are in the Sun-Life insurance building in Ottawa – the gold’s in Montreal. No one’s going to gyp the King out of his dough.’

‘It’s not the King’s money,’ said Mayhew with a flash of anger.

The American made an apologetic gesture with his hand, but Mayhew turned away to flick ash into the fire, and took an exaggerated interest in the clock.

In a posture that was unmistakably American, the other man sat back with one foot resting on his knee,
while he massaged his broken shoe as if it were a small animal that needed comforting.

‘Your shoes are ruined,’ said Douglas. But he knew that the American would not be conspicuous in a land where half the overcoats were fashioned from army blankets, and women were sewing curtains to make dresses.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the American. He stopped rubbing his shoe and opened his hand to look at the cuts he’d suffered as the parachute dragged him through a hedge. The palms were mottled by liberal applications of brightly coloured iodine. ‘I’ll be back on ship by next week.’

‘The ship is waiting out there?’ said Douglas.

‘Destroyer Squadron 2 – USS
Moffett
and friends – is part of the Atlantic Fleet Fall exercises.’

‘This close to British shores?’

‘Freedom of the seas, mister. We didn’t come into the three-mile limit.’

Douglas looked at the other men. Mayhew was staring into the fire and Garin was using a small ivory-handled folding knife to open a new box of cigars. ‘Have you ever heard of an atomic explosion?’ Douglas asked the American. There was no reply.

Douglas said, ‘The US Navy has sent a destroyer squadron provocatively close to Britain, through water still officially classified as a war zone. And they are staying in the vicinity while you spend a week seeing the sights of London. What for?’

Mayhew straightened up and tugged at his cuffs. The American still did not answer.

‘He’s going to do a deal with you, Colonel Mayhew,’ Douglas told him, while still looking at the American. ‘And just to make sure that the bargain will be the best thing America can get, he is starting off with a “no”.’

‘But whatever for?’ said Mayhew, looking from one to the other.

‘They want the calculations that Spode burned, Colonel.’ The American stared at Douglas without allowing any emotion to register on his face, but Douglas noticed the way that his fingers prised his torn shoe with enough force to make the damage worse.

‘An atomic device in the hold of a ship. That’s the only kind of weapon that could bring about the conquest of America by a European power.’ Douglas stepped nearer to the American and spoke directly to him as if there was no one else present. ‘If Hitler gets such a device he’ll use it against you, make no mistake.’

‘I know,’ said the American. He took a huge Colt automatic pistol from his pocket. ‘Can I put this somewhere, please? It’s already torn a hole in my pocket.’ Sydney Garin took it from him and looked at it under the light before placing it in the top drawer of a small antique commode.

The American was tired. Douglas had seen that same quality in the faces of other men. They’d got to a point where they could no longer be bothered to keep to their story. ‘You mean that no one in Washington spoke to you about Professor Frick? Or about the atomic physics work that has been done at the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford, the Liverpool Cyclotron, Chadwick, or by Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory? Or of the work the Germans have done since taking over the research at Bringle Sands?’

‘No one in Washington was talking about atomic physics,’ said the American. He grinned at the idea of it.

But the denial was too laconic to convince Douglas. ‘Are you just a messenger boy then?’ Douglas asked
him. ‘Why send warships when they could have posted a letter saying “no”?’ Douglas paused and sipped his drink almost without tasting it. ‘Suppose I told you that other governments are also interested in the calculations we have?’

‘The Russkies?’

‘The Germans have most to offer.’

‘What?’

‘They’d rewrite the proposals for the peace treaty,’ said Douglas improvising desperately. ‘We can have an army, a small coastal force and a proper civil government to replace the toadies of this puppet regime. The Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Defence would be run by us. The occupied zone would be no more than a strip of coast, and we’d control all essential imports, have a merchant fleet and get the value of the pound sterling adjusted against the Reichsmark. Reparations would be slashed almost to nothing.’

‘All that for a few pages of calculations?’ said the American.

‘For many years of hard work, thousands of hours on calculating machines, for the willing cooperation of our top physicists. Do you know that the German army have started to run their pile? They’ll get plutonium when it cools. From that it will be only a couple of steps to an explosive device.’

‘A Congressional committee has been examining the idea,’ admitted the American, relinquishing his pretence. ‘They’ve talked to Einstein. But the estimates are reaching into billions of dollars, and there’s no certainty that a bang will ever be possible.’