The Secret Pilgrim (12 page)

“They're a careless bunch of sods,” he had said with his usual irreverence, “and when they're not being careless, they're duplicitous. Don't be fooled by all that Nordic phlegm and backslapping.”

I was remembering his words as I continued my mental reconnaissance of Bella. Sometimes she listened resting her head on her clenched fist, sometimes she laid her head on Brandt's forearm, dreaming his thoughts for him while he plotted and drank. But her big, light eyes never ceased visiting me, working me out, this Englishman sent to rule our lives. And occasionally, like a warm cat, she shook herself free of Brandt and took time to groom herself, recrossing her legs and primly correcting the fit of her shorts, or twisting a hank of hair into a plait, or drawing her gold amulet from between her breasts and examining it front and back. I waited for a spark of complicity between herself and other members of the crew, but it was clear to me that Brandt's girl was holy ground. Even the ebullient Kazimirs deadened his face to talk to her. She fetched another bottle, and when she returned she sat down beside me and took hold of my hand and opened my palm on the table, examining it while she spoke in Latvian to Brandt, who broke into a gust of laughter which the rest of them took up.

“You know what she say?”

“I'm afraid I don't.”

“She says English make damn good husband. If I die, she going to have you instead!”

She clambered back to him and, laughing, wriggled into his embrace. She didn't look at me after that. It was as if she didn't need to. So I avoided her eyes in return, and thought dutifully
about her history as told to London Station by Sea Captain Brandt.

She was the daughter of a farmer from a village near Jelgava, who had been shot dead when security police raided a secret meeting of Latvian patriots, Brandt had said. The farmer was a founder member of the group. The police wanted to shoot the girl as well, but she escaped into the forest and joined up with a band of partisans and outlaws who passed her round among them for a summer, which did not seem to have upset her. By stages she had made her way to the coast and, by a route that was still mysterious to us, got word to Brandt, who, without troubling to mention her to London in advance, picked her off a beach while he was landing a new radio operator to replace another who had had a nervous breakdown. Radio operators are the opera star of every network. If they don't have breakdowns, they have shingles.

“Great guys,” said Brandt enthusiastically as he drove me back to town. “You like them?”

“They're terrific,” I said, and meant it, for there is no better company anywhere than men who love the sea.

“Bella want to work with us. She want to kill the guys who shoot her father. I say no. She's too young. I love her.”

A fierce white moon shone on the flat meadows, and by its light I saw his craggy face in profile, as if set against the storm to come.

“And you knew him,” I suggested, affecting to recapitulate something I vaguely remembered. “Her father. Feliks. He was a friend of yours.”

“Sure I knew Feliks! I love him! He was a great guy! The bastards shot him dead.”

“Did he die immediately?”

“They shoot him to pieces. Kalashnikovs. They shoot everybody. Seven guys. All shot.”

“Did anyone see it happen?”

“One guy. He see it, run away.”

“What became of the bodies?”

“Secret police take them. They're scared, those police guys. Don't want no trouble from the people. Shoot the partisans, throw them in a truck, drive away to hell.”

“How well did you know him—her father?”

Brandt made his sweeping gesture with his forearm. “Feliks? He was my friend. Fought at Leningrad. Prisoner of war in Germany. Stalin didn't like those guys. When they came home from Germany, he sent them to Siberia, shot them, gave them a bad time. What the hell?”

But London Station had picked up a different story, even if at this stage it was only a whisper. The father had been the informant, said the whisper. Recruited in Siberian captivity and sent back to Latvia to penetrate the groups. He had called the meeting, tipped off his masters, then climbed out of the back window while the partisans were being slaughtered. As a reward, he was now managing a collective farm near Kiev, living under a different name. Somebody had recognised him and told somebody else who had told somebody else. The source was delicate, checking would be a lengthy process.

So I was warned. Watch out for Bella.

I was more than warned. I was disturbed. In the next weeks I saw Bella several times, and each time I was obliged to record my impressions on the encounter sheet which London Station now insisted must be completed each time she was sighted. I made a rendezvous with Brandt at the safe flat, and to my alarm he brought her with him. She had spent the day in town, he said. They were on their way back to the farmhouse, why not?

“Relax. She don't speak no English,” he reminded me with a laugh, noticing my discomfort.

So I kept our business short, while she lounged on the sofa and smiled and listened to us with her eyes, but mostly she listened to me.

“My girl's studying,” Branch told me proudly, patting her on the backside as we prepared to separate. “One day she be a big professor.
Nicht wahr, Bella? Du wirst ein ganz grosser Professor, du!”

A week later, when I took a discreet look at the
Daisy
at her berth in Blankenese, Bella was there again, wearing her shorts and scampering over the deck in her bare feet as if we were planning a Mediterranean cruise.

“For heaven's sake. We can't have girls abroad. London will go mad,” I told Brandt that night. “So will the crew. You know how superstitious they are about having women on the ship. You're the same yourself.”

He brushed me aside. My predecessor had raised no objection, he said. Why should I?

“Bella makes the boys happy,” he insisted. “She's from home, Ned, she's a kid. She's a family for them, come on!”

When I checked the file, I discovered he was half right. My predecessor, a seconded naval officer, had reported that Bella was “conscious to” the
Daisy,
even adding that she seemed to “exert a benign influence as ship's mascot.” And when I read between the lines of his report of the
Daisy
's most recent operational mission, I realised that Bella had been there on the dockside to wave them off—and no doubt to wave them safely back as well.

Now of course operational security is always relative. I had never imagined that everything in the Brandt organisation was going to be played by Sarratt rules. I was aware that in the cloistered atmosphere of Head Office it was too easy to mistake our tortuous structures of codenames, symbols and cutouts for life on the ground. Cambridge Circus was one thing. A bunch of volatile Baltic patriots risking their necks was another.

Nevertheless the presence of an uncleared, unrecruited campfollower at the heart of our operation, privy to our plans and conversations, went beyond anything I had imagined—and all this in the wake of the betrayals five years earlier. And the more I worried over it, the more proprietorial, it seemed to me, did Brandt's devotion to the girl become. His endearments grew increasingly lavish in my presence, his caresses more demonstrative. “A typical
older man's infatuation for a young girl,” I told London, as if I had seen dozens of such cases.

Meanwhile a new mission was being planned for the
Daisy,
the purpose to be revealed to us later. Twice, three times a week, I found myself of necessity driving out to the farmhouse, arriving after dark, then sitting for hours at the table while we studied charts and weather maps and the latest shore observation bulletins. Sometimes the full crew came, sometimes it was just the three of us. To Brandt it made no difference. He clasped Bella to him as if the two of them were in the throes of constant ecstasy, fondling her hair and neck, and once forgetting himself so far as to slip his hand inside her shirt and cup her naked breast while he gave her a prolonged kiss. Yet as I discreetly looked away from these disturbing scenes, what remained longest in my sight was Bella's gaze on me, as if she were telling me she wished that it was I, not Brandt, who was caressing her.

“Explicit embraces appear to be the norm,” I wrote drily on the encounter sheet, Hamburg to London Station, late that night in my office. And in my nightly log: “Route, weather and sea conditions acceptable. We await firm orders from Head Office. Morale of crew high.”

But my own morale was fighting for survival as one calamity followed upon another.

There was first the unfortunate business of my predecessor, full name Lieutenant Commander Perry de Mornay Lipton, D.S.O., R.N., retd., sometime hero of Jack Arthur Lumley's wartime irregulars. For ten years until my arrival, Lipton had cultivated the rôle of Hamburg character, by day acting the English bloody fool, sporting a monocle and hanging around the expatriate clubs ostensibly to pick up free advice on his investments. But come nightfall, he put on his secret hat and went to work briefing and debriefing his formidable army of secret agents. Or so the legend, as I had heard it from Head Office.

The only thing that had puzzled me was that there had been no formal handover between us, but Personnel had told me tersely
Lipton was on a mission elsewhere. I was now admitted to the truth. Lipton had departed, not on some life-and-death adventure in darkest Russia, but to southern Spain, where he had set up house with a former Corporal of Horse named Kenneth, and two hundred thousand pounds of Circus funds, mainly in gold bars and Swiss francs, which he had paid out over several years to brave agents who did not exist.

The mistrust shed by this sad discovery now spilled into every operation Lipton had touched, including inevitably Brandt's. Was Brandt too a Lipton fiction, living high on our secret funds in exchange for ingeniously fabricated intelligence? Were his networks, were his vaunted collaborators and friends, many of whom were drawing liberal salaries?

And Bella—was Bella part of the deception? Had Bella softened his head and weakened his will? Was Brandt too feathering his nest before retiring with his loved one to the south of Spain?

A procession of Circus experts passed through the door of my little shipping office. First came an improbable man called Captain Plum. Crouched in the privacy of my safe room, Plum and I pored over the
Daisy's
old fuel dockets and mileage records and compared them with the perilous routes that Brandt and the crew claimed to have steered on their missions along the Baltic coast. The ship's logs were sketchy at best, as most logs are, but we read them all, alongside Plum's records of signals intercepts, radar stations, navigational buoys and sightings of Soviet patrol boats.

A week later Plum was back, this time accompanied by foulmouthed Mancunian called Rose, a former Malayan policeman who had made himself a name as a Circus sniffer dog. Rose questioned me as roughly as if I were myself a part of the deception. But when I was about to lose my temper he disarmed me by declaring that, on the evidence available, the Brandt organisation was innocent of misdoing.

Yet in the minds of such people as this, suspicions of one kind only fired suspicions of another, and the question mark hanging
over Bella's father, Feliks, had not gone away. If the father was bad, then the daughter must know it, went the reasoning. And if she knew and had not said it, then she was bad as well. Moscow Centre, like the Circus, was well known for recruiting entire families. A father-and-daughter team was eminently plausible. Soon, without any solid evidence I was aware of, London Station began to peddle the notion that Feliks had been responsible for the betrayals five years ago.

Inevitably, this placed Bella in an even more sinister light. There was talk of ordering her to London and grilling her, but here my authority as Brandt's case officer held sway. Impossible, I advised London Station. Brandt would never stand for it. Very well, came the answer—typical of Haydon's cavalier approach—bring them both over and Brandt can sit in while we interrogate the girl. This time I was sufficiently moved to fly back to London myself, where I insisted on stating my case personally to Bill. I entered his room to find him stretched out on a chaise longue, for he affected the eccentricity of never sitting at his desk. A joss stick was burning from an old ginger jar.

“Maybe Brother Brandt isn't as prickly as you think, Master Ned,” he said accusingly, peering at me over his half-framed spectacles. “Maybe
you're
the prickly one?”

“He's besotted with her,” I said.

“Are you?”

“If we start accusing his girl in front of him, he'll go crazy. He lives for her. He'd tell us to go to hell and dismantle the network, and I doubt whether anyone else could run it.”

Haydon pondered this: “The Garibaldi of the Baltic. Well, well. Still, Garibaldi wasn't much bloody good, was he?” He waited for me to answer but I preferred to take his question as rhetorical. “Those jokers she shacked up in the forest with,” he drawled finally. “Does she talk about them?”

“She doesn't talk about any of it. Brandt does, she doesn't.”

“So what does she talk about?”

“Nothing much. If she says anything of significance, it's usually in Latvian and Brandt translates or not as he think fit. Otherwise she just smiles and looks.”

“At you?”

“At him.”

“And she's quite a looker, I gather.”

“She's attractive, I suppose. Yes.”

Once more he took his time to consider this. “Sounds to me like the ideal woman,” he pronounced. “Smiles and looks, keeps quiet, fucks—what more can you ask?” He again examined me quizzically over his spectacles. “Do you mean she doesn't even speak
German
? She must do, coming from up there. Don't be daft.”

“She speaks German reluctantly when she's got no choice. Speaking Latvian's a patriotic act. German isn't.”