The Folks at Fifty-Eight (2 page)

After attending the Rouen debriefing, Hammond never again spoke of the horror and carnage that he and his team had wreaked in the early hours of that innocuous spring morning. He never spoke of the accusing faces that visited him every night, and he never spoke of the shame and disgust that remained lodged so vividly in both conscious and subconscious minds.

Nowadays he spent his nights alone, in a cold sweat, and his days sitting behind a desk among the labyrinth of streets and avenues that sprawl in all directions from Washington’s Dupont Circle; the land of ambition and greed, where the fortunate few come to rule and the aroma of power and privilege hangs in the air like perfumed smog.

Sadly, for Hammond, there were no windows in his office to invite that wonderful aroma, just a softwood door and wafer-thin partition wall between him and the typing pool outside; no intoxicating whiff of power and privilege, just the stench of tedium and failure.

“God Almighty, save me.”

Suddenly there was only silence. The petty gossip, cackling laughter and constant tap, tap, tap of the typewriters had all stopped. For a splendid moment he sat quietly appreciating the silence, idly wishing it could always be like this, before suddenly realizing why it was.

He had spoken his blasphemy out loud and they had heard. He smiled a cynical smile. Perhaps God had heard, too.

Moments later, normal activity resumed, assuming that such an ugly racket could ever be described as normal. The gossip, the cackling, the tap, tap, tap; it had all returned to irritate him, and it had fetched the sadness with it.

It was now just after three o’clock in afternoon, and he was sitting with his head in his hands and his eyes closed. In the two hours since returning from lunch he had managed to collate just four items of correspondence from a stack of a hundred. He opened his eyes to view the unfinished work, piled up in his in-tray and felt even more miserable. He hated every aspect of this job.

A knock at the door interrupted the gloom.

“What is it?”

“It’s Alice, Mr Hammond. I’ve got someone here who wants to see you.”

A portly figure pushed her aside and a face Hammond remembered well smiled warmly.

“Gerald, it’s good to see you after all this time. How long has it been now?”

The man was short in stature and long in self-importance, with slicked and thinning hair receding from a well-padded face and small grey eyes. He wore a dark blue three-piece suit and a starched white shirt, with a gold pocket watch and chain that looped its way across a well-padded midriff. To complete the immaculate presentation he wore a blue and white diagonal-striped silk tie that said, ‘If you don’t know this is Yale, you don’t matter’. Should an ignorant world still fail to realize just how important this man was, he carried a monogrammed black calfskin briefcase and a rolled-up copy of the
Wall
Street
Journal,
presumably for swatting lesser beings.

Gerald Hammond knew how long it had been: twenty-three months and two weeks. Hammond remembered precisely, because he would never forget his previous encounter with Davis Alan Carpenter. Today the features looked bloated and supercilious, but two years ago they hadn’t looked like that. Two years ago, in the torchlight’s beam, they had been thin and drawn and contorted in terror.

“May I come in?” Davis Carpenter ambled through the doorway without waiting for an answer. Hammond clasped the outstretched hand and gestured to a chair. The portly bureaucrat sagged into it. He fished in his pocket for a handkerchief and then mopped at his brow. “God, it’s hot in here.” He replaced the handkerchief and began rummaging through his briefcase, talking as he searched.

“You know, Gerald, I never got the chance to thank you properly for that bit of business in Northern France. Perhaps I can do that now.”

“I’m sorry, what’s this all about?”

“They tell me you’re looking for work with the State Department.”

Hammond nodded furiously and rifled through his desk drawer for a résumé. He found a dog-eared copy and offered it to Carpenter, who grinned and waved it away.

“I already know what the résumé says, Gerald.”

Davis Carpenter produced a pack of cigars from his briefcase. He took one, lit it, and offered the case to Hammond, who shook his head.

“And what else do you know?” he asked.

“That you’re a small-arms and unarmed combat expert, but perhaps a little rusty. You like to drink scotch, but only in moderation. You’re employed here, as a grade-three manager, with the Washington office of The Mutual and Equitable Insurance Company of Beaumont Texas, but despise the job. You’re bored and in a rut, but don’t see a way out. You want into the State Department, but have run out of any contacts who might sponsor you. . . Did I miss anything?”

“Not much. Now tell me what you don’t know.”

Davis Carpenter took a moment before answering. He seemed almost embarrassed.

“I know you’ve got ability, Gerald, and I know you had a heart big enough to take on an army. I should know that better than most. However, and let me be candid here, all that cloak-and-dagger stuff is a young man’s game. You’re forty years old.”

Hammond tried to interrupt. Carpenter held up his hands in mock surrender.

“I know. I know. It’s not two years since you pulled me out of Rouen, and there’s none of us getting any younger, but I’m not gonna pull punches here, I’ve got too much respect for you to do that.”

There was clearly a more aggressive side to the portly and pretentious Davis Carpenter.

“I think you’re one of the good guys, Gerald, but let’s face facts. You’ve taken some knocks recently; some pretty serious knocks. You’ve no friends, or none that could do you any good. You’ve no immediate family to speak of, or none that could give a damn. Your wife screws her way all round Washington, and rubs your nose in it at the same time, and whatever’s left of a once-promising career is now well on its way down the toilet.”

Hammond watched Carpenter watching him, seeing the clumsy attempt to incite and understanding the reason for it. If Davis Carpenter wanted to spark a reaction, wanted to see if the heart was still there, Gerald Hammond was only too happy to oblige.

“If that’s true, then what’s a high-flyer like you doing, taking the time to visit a washed-up wreck like me? Deskbound bureaucrats like you don’t need the aggravation.”

Carpenter’s answer was equally candid.

“Because I saw you in Rouen, and you were magnificent. You were, you know. I honestly thought I was dead until you came along. We bet everything on you then and you didn’t let us down. Problem is, we don’t know if we should do it again. We don’t know how badly these domestic problems have affected you, or how much remains of that big heart of yours.”

Sensing the approach of yet another disappointment, Hammond pushed back.

“There’s more than enough heart in me, and you owe me.”

“That’s true. As a friend and a colleague I owe you more than I could ever repay. But as the man who has to decide whether an emotionally damaged, forty-year-old former OSS agent can still serve and protect the country we love from those who seek to destroy it. . .”

Carpenter shrugged and left the point unfinished. Hammond frowned.

“What is all this, anyway? I thought this was about a post with the State Department?”

“Oh, it is, and I’m pleased to tell you that, as soon as I put in the paperwork, you’ll report directly to me. However, there was something else we rather hoped you’d do for us in the interim. You do speak German, don’t you? That is one of yours? Oh yes, and Russian, of course?” Hammond frowned again, and then slowly nodded. Carpenter nodded back and once again began rummaging through his case. “Yes, that’s what they told me.” He explained as he searched. “You see, Gerald, we’ve something in mind for you that’s a little more up your street, as they say; a little more involved. Now where did I put that file? Ah yes, here it is.”

There were many who believed the curfew was just another Bolshevik excuse for furthering Stalingrad’s vengeance. They said the average Red Army soldier didn’t care about the time. They said he couldn’t even tell the time. They said if he ever got a clear shot on a dull day, he’d kill you just for the meanness of it. Others went further. They said the average Red Army soldier would open fire under the mitigating shade of a drifting cloud. All fat Martin Kube knew was that dusk had fallen thirty minutes ago, and he was still on the street.

He had been at the rendezvous point on time, but the contact had failed to show, and so he’d waited there for over an hour, crouched in the alleyway, silently cursing from the shadows, allowing the sweat to slide, the panic to calm, and the breathing to quieten. He shifted position to ease the cramp and mopped at heavy jowls with a grime- and sweat-stained sleeve. Then he shuffled his uncomfortable bulk back into deeper shadows, to wait a little longer.

As dusk became darkness he gathered his courage and peered out from the alley, panning the grim silhouettes of bombed-out buildings and crater-strewn streets dotted with piles of rubble and fallen masonry. He was looking for hidden snipers and approaching patrols, listening for the sound of a voice, or the clatter of boots on the cobbles. Praying they wouldn’t see him there, crouched among the shadows; praying, too, for salvation.

For a moment of curious bravery he peered around the corner. Narrow-set eyes squinted through the gloom as he mentally gauged the distance from where he now hid to the single yellow light at the street’s western end. It acted as a beacon for returning Red Army foot patrols and a killing field for the machine-gun nest they’d hidden in the ruins beyond. He judged the distance from his current position of safety to that SG43 and certain death to be around three hundred meters. He decided this was as close as sanity allowed.

He racked his memory and made a further calculation. Assuming he could somehow negotiate the foot patrols and the killing fields, the distance from that solitary light to the back of the burnt-out Reichstag building was a matter of five hundred or so meters more. From there a desperate man could work his way around to the front of the building. Then it was only a brief, albeit terrifying, dash across the rubble to the safety of the American sector.

Unhappily for Martin Kube, the proximity of sanctuary only mocked at his cowardice. It was less than a kilometre away. It might just as well have been a million.

“Where the hell are you, you bastards!”

The oath echoed around the alley and out to the street. He ducked down and mentally cursed his own stupidity, while frantically scanning the surrounding gloom for any sign of other’s awareness. There was nothing he could see or hear, or was there?

It was then that he saw it, to the rear of the building across the street: the faintest of lights for the briefest of instants. It had momentarily glowed out from among the piles of rubble and tangled metal. He peered harder and silently mused. Broken glass perhaps, reflecting a passing light from the street beyond? But then the glow was there again, and the scuff of footsteps on rubble carried through the night. It was obviously the light from a cigarette, but who was on the other end?

He clutched at a breath, and held it, while a bolt of adrenaline surged from somewhere to nowhere. Then he remembered the Radom and fumbled in the coat’s right-hand pocket for the pistol’s reassurance. After that, he kept his place among the shadows and gripped the butt in blunt fat fingers and a palm that was slippery with sweat.

He could see them now, three of them, shadowy figures moving slowly through the rubble, slipping and sliding as they searched.

They paused and he heard them muttering. A flame briefly flared in the darkness as someone lit another cigarette. The muttering stopped. They began moving again. Then they altered course and started towards him.

The shapes were clearer now. They were undoubtedly Russians, a lone patrol with three at the front, and three more a few paces farther back. They were obviously searching for someone, and more than likely him. He wondered if they had seen him, crouched there in the alleyway, or if their sudden change of direction was just another slice of the same bad luck that had dogged him since Prague.

He wiped the sweat from his palm, then pulled the Radom and aimed it at the nearest Bolshevik, feeling the pulse thumping against his temple and knots of fear gripping at his stomach.

“Put the gun away, Herr Linz, before you get us all killed.”

The voice had come from somewhere behind him. Despite the even tone, it made him start and almost drop the gun. He swivelled around to see who had spoken, but saw nothing in the alleyway but blackness. As he peered into the gloom the voice spoke again, the accent clipped and precise, the instructions delivered in the same low and even tone.

“Stay low, keep quiet, move slowly. There is a gap in the wall, ten paces back and left. Get into it.” As he started backing up, his foot dislodged a brick. The sound echoed around the alleyway. The voice stopped him. “Keep calm. Turn around. Look to where you are going.”

He slid the Radom back into his coat and did as ordered, turning on all fours and then slowly creeping his way back along the alley, with the sweat running and his limbs trembling. The voice had told him the distance to the gap was ten paces. Expecting to feel a bullet in his back at any moment, it felt more like a hundred.

But then fear suddenly turned to panic as he heard the sound of another voice. It was startled and agitated and shouting in Russian. It came from behind him and alerted the rest of the patrol. It told him that whatever luck he’d had to this point had just run out. Then another voice shouted at him in broken German. It ordered him to stay where he was. When he pulled the Radom and began to move, a shot cracked into the night. He heard the bullet whine as it passed overhead, before ricocheting off the wall to the right.