The Harry Palmer Quartet

The sun was low towards the west by now, and the spiky leaves of the palms sliced the heavy blue sky. Jean took a rubber-covered torch out of the glove compartment and we continued along the same pathway on foot. Through the undergrowth we passed the cheap-wristwatch sounds of a thousand insects kicking the heavy air.

‘I don’t want to pry or appear paranoiac,’ I said, ‘but what’s the deal?’ She took her time about answering and I supposed that she had as many doubts and puzzlements as any of us at that time.

‘Last night I was up here with Dalby. He took me along so that if anyone found us off the road it would just look like a petting party. I’m returning on my own account. You’re along for the ride. OK?’

I said ‘OK.’ What else could I say? We went on in silence.

Then she said, ‘Last night I was left in the car. Now I want to see the part I missed.’

I helped her over a rusting coil of barbed wire. We went out of sight of the road, and unless anyone looked very closely, the car was well hidden, too. Over to the right, the shore line, away from the new road, had been left littered with World War II debris. Golden-brown rust patterns grew over the broken landing craft. One on the far side gaped with rectangular holes, as though someone had attempted to salvage the metal with a cutter, but had found the market price out of proportion to the work. The one nearest me, a Tank Landing Craft, was charred at the front. The heat had bent the steel doors like a tin toy under a child’s foot. Below the water-line rich wet greenery busied itself in the lapping, clear movement of the water. The land was at its most uneven here and had clearly provided opportunities for a tenacious defensive. So well had the Japanese engineers merged their defence works into the terrain that I wasn’t aware of the enormous Japanese blockhouse until I saw Jean standing in its doorway. It was nearly twenty-five feet high and built of tree trunks with steel rail supports here and there. The weather had eaten at the poor-quality cement, and the vegetation had run riot. The entrance was low even for a Japanese, and waist-high scarlet flowers followed the great burnt scars along the timbers as though the plant gained a special nutriment from the carbonized wood.

Jean’s rubber-soled shoes left waffles in the sand, and where the ground was damper I noticed Dalby’s. His were deeper, especially at the heel.

‘Was it heavy –’ I said.

‘The box he carried? Yes, it looked heavy. How did you know?’

‘I guessed he didn’t drop by for the view, and something kept him too busy to notice you behind him.’

She stood aside as I climbed up the partly blocked entrance. ‘He told me to wait by the car, but I was curious. I came after him as far as the entanglement.’ Her voice changed and echoed mid sentence as we moved into the fort. It was a well-made one. The island had been one of the well-prepared outer-perimeter island bases bypassed until the latter days of the war. Through the entrance a narrow passage led down a gentle slope into a pitch-dark little room about twelve feet square. The air was cold and moist. We stood there in silence hearing the steady crunch and whoosh of breakers on the shore, and the constant rasping of insects. I’d taken off my dark glasses and slowly my range of vision increased.

The greater part of the room was taken up by olive-coloured metal boxes, upon which the faint English words like ‘Factory’ and some numbers could be read. In the far corner bars of sunlight revealed broken wooden boxes, large metal cartridge clips and some rotting leather straps. On a level with the top of my head a platform extended the width of the blockhouse, and provided slots for the machine-gunners and riflemen. Jean’s torch made yellow ovals as it splashed over the emplacement walls, and held in one spot almost over the entrance door. She’d seen Dalby’s torch shine through that particular port. I moved the green metal boxes to make a step. The paint on the underside where they had been packed together was fresh with stencilled lettering: ‘.5 Machine-Gun. US Army. 80770/GH/CIN/1942’. I moved a second box to put on the first, and fifteen inches of brightly coloured lizard flashed away under my feet. I climbed up on the platform and edged slowly along the crumbling earth ledge. Close to, the sand was almost black, and stank of death and the things that lived on it.

There was not room to stand upright, and I went slowly on my hands and knees. The bright daylight burned my eyes through the narrow slot, and I could see a small traverse of beach. The largest of the grey landing craft was directly in line with me, and from this angle I was able to see a burnt and battered tank jammed into the open doors like a squashed orange in the mouth of a barbecued sucking-pig. A red and yellow butterfly entered the white chalky bars of light from the aperture. Slowly I moved towards the corner position. It was darker and damper there. Jean threw the torch to me without switching it off. Its beam described a curious parabola. I used it to probe the thick roof timbering above me. Part of the ceiling had given way when the flame-thrower had poured its jet of flaming petrol into the firing position. The timber supports were charred, and under my hands, only the metal parts of a heavy bolted-down machine-gun remained. I could see nothing that looked recently disturbed. I moved the light a little to the left. There was a wooden crate with writing on it. It said, ‘Harry Jacobson, 1944, 24 DEC. OAKLAND. CALIF. USA.’ and was empty. Jean said why didn’t I try the box underneath. I’m glad I did. It was a new cardboard box and carried the words ‘General foods. One gross 1 lb packets Frozen Cranberries’. Under that was printed a small certificate of purity, and a long serial number. Inside was a brand new short pattern seven-inch cathode ray tube, about a dozen transistors, a white envelope and a yellow duster containing a long-barrelled machine-pistol shiny with fresh oil. There were no cranberries. I opened the envelope, and inside was a small slip of paper about 2 in by 6 in. On it were written about fifty words. There was a VLF (very low frequency) radio wave-length, and a compass bearing and some mathematical symbols that were a bit too post-graduate for me. I held it up for Jean to read. She looked up and said, ‘Can you read Russian?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s something about …’

I interrupted her. ‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘Even I know the Russian script for “Neutron Bomb”.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’ she asked.

I took the paper, still carefully holding it by the edge and dropped it back into the cranberry box. The envelope I burned, and ground up the ash under my heel. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

We scrambled down the steep approach to the beach. The sun was a two-dimensional magenta disc, and the sunset lay in horizontal stripes like finger-nails and torn golden lacerations across the ashen face of the evening. I wanted to be away from something – I don’t know from what. So we walked along the water-line, stepping around crates full of death, Coca-Cola and Band-Aids.

‘Why would anyone,’ Jean didn’t like to say Dalby, ‘take a cathode ray tube up there?’

‘He didn’t want anyone to know that he can’t bear to miss “Wagon Train”.’

Jean didn’t even contract her lip muscles.

‘I don’t want to pry,’ I said, ‘but I’d find this whole thing more simple if you’d tell me what he said about me.’

‘That’s easy – he said that one of the departments of the “friends” is sure you are working for the KGB.1 They told the CIA direct and everyone is pretty steamed up. Dalby said he wasn’t sure one way or the other but that the CIA are keen to believe it since you killed a couple of their Navy people a long while ago.’

‘Dalby said it’s not him that laid the complaint?’ I asked.

‘No – he said that one department gives you a higher clearance than he has at present – him working away from the office caused that of course – he didn’t seem very happy about that, by the way.’

She paused, and said apologetically, ‘Did you kill those men?’

‘Yes,’ I said a little viciously, ‘I killed them. That brought my total up to three, unless you count the war. If you count the war …’

‘You don’t have to explain,’ Jean said.

‘Look, it was a mistake. There’s nothing anyone could do. Just a mistake. What do they want me to do? Write to Jackie Kennedy and say I didn’t mean it?’

Jean said, ‘He seemed to think they’d wait to see if you made a contact before doing anything. He wondered if Carswell was working with you, and radioed a code message to have Carswell and Murray isolated.’

‘He’s too late,’ I said. ‘They bludgeoned me into giving them a leave of absence just before we left.’

‘That will probably convince Dalby,’ Jean said. She looked great with the sun behind her and I wished I had more of my frontal lobes to spare to think about it.

‘That Carswell’s my contact?’ I mused. ‘Maybe. But I’d say he’s more likely to suspect you.’

‘I’m not your contact.’ She almost seemed not sure.

‘I know that, dope. If I was really working for the KGB I’d be smarter than to be suspected, and I’d know who my contact was before I reached an island like this one, or there’d be no way for me to cross-check on you. But since I’m not working for that six-storey building in Dzerzhinsky Street, there isn’t a contact, so you’re not one.’ Jean splashed a foot deliberately into the water and smiled a childlike smile. The sun was behind her head like the open door of a Scunthorpe steel furnace. A light breeze coming off the ocean had her dress clinging like cheap perfume. I dragged my mind back to earth. She said, ‘It seems I didn’t listen as closely as you did at Guildford.’

A tank track lay half out of the water like a giant caterpillar, and the waves spurted and splashed through the intricacies of the interwoven castings. Beyond us, B61, the tank with one track missing, lay head down in the glistening foam. The sea, to which it had returned in a great involuntary semicircle, drummed and slapped at the great metal hull in restless derision. Jean stopped and turned back to me; across her gold face a strand of black hair hung like a crack in a Sung vase. I must concentrate.

‘Suppose you don’t work for the KGB but whoever thinks you do, wants to do something to stop it, what will they do?’

‘It’s something no one in our position ever dares think about,’ I said.

‘But suppose it happens. Then they have to think about it.’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘then they think about it.’

Jean’s voice was husky, a bit edgy and rasplike. I realized she’d spent a lot of night time wondering what to do about me, and at least I owed her enough not to kid her around.

I said, ‘They don’t give them free legal aid at the Old Bailey, and let them sell their memoirs to the Sundays if that’s what you mean.’

‘No, that’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘It’s only multiple murderers who are allowed to do that.’ She paused. ‘So what does happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s never happened to me before. I suppose it’s “Slip your feet into this bag of wet cement, the boat’s just leaving.”’

The breakers bombarded the reef in thundering crashes that shook the sand beneath our feet.

‘It’s getting chilly,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back to the car.’

1 The Soviet spy apparatus: ‘Committee on State Security’.

21

[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) You may meet delays in private plans, but be circumspect. Your well-meaning efforts may well be misunderstood.]

The next two days were nerve racking. Life on the atoll busied itself into a frenetic but organized scramble as the day for the explosion neared. As far as I could tell, my role as observer was uninterrupted, and my entrée to the dreariest possible conferences unfortunately unimpeded. Jean and I had few opportunities for more than a word or so without the risk of being overheard or recorded. Our decision to appear rather distant meant a chance of remaining unimplicated for her – but a feeling of sharpened desire in me that no man should feel for his secretary if he wants to stay in a position to fire her. I saw her waiting for signatures or documents in the long grey fibreboard corridors. While standing still, her smooth body would move – slowly and imperceptibly – under the thin summer uniform fabric, and I would think of the small circular gold ear-ring of hers that I had found in my bed-clothes on Wednesday morning.

More times than I care to provide excuses for, I edged past her in narrow corridors and doorways. Electricity passing between us assuaged the deep aloneness I felt. My desire wasn’t a burgeoning pent-up explosive fullness, but a gentle vacant need. Fear brings an edge to physical desire sharper than a Toledo blade, and a pitch more plaintive than a Dolmetsch flute.

I’d spent most of the two days working closely with Dalby. It was a pleasure. The difference between Dalby and the other people from the Intelligence units with his background was his readiness to use information from his inferiors – both socially and militarily speaking. He was prepared to let the technicians conclude opinions from their data, where others would try to understand the techniques in order to jealously guard the privilege of deciding anything at all.

Jean and I had discovered the box in the blockhouse on Tuesday. On Thursday the General Commanding – General Y. O. Guerite, had invited all commissioned men and available girls to a party in his house.

The General’s house backed on to one of the coves on the rocky side of the island. The sun made the tree trunks a pink that stampeded the gastric juices. Once more the sunset was a layer cake of mauve and gold. The insects had come out to do their daily battle with the resources of the American chemical industries, and through the trees an obliging Engineers Corps had remembered to provide lines of winking fairy lights. Large martinis clinked with ice and glowed with lemon and cherries. Small pasty-faced waiters walked heavily on their flat, perpetually aching feet, and looked ill at ease out of doors. Here and there well-built clean-cut figures, tanned and alert, moved briskly to distribute trays of drinks, and tried to look like the pasty-faced aching waiters whose white jackets they shared.

Three army musicians moved coolly and mathematically within the modal range of ‘There’s a small Hotel’ and linking modulated inversions walked around the middle eight with creditable synchronization. Here and there a laugh walked up the foothills of noise.

Beyond the lights at the far end of the General’s little garden, Dalby was sitting perched uncomfortably on a rock edge. Two or three feet below him the water moved quietly. Out at sea a grey destroyer sat at anchor, a trace of smoke demonstrating its ever-ready head of steam. On its sides, a huge white ‘R’ told me it was one of the ships used to measure force and radiation underwater by means of vast wire nets to which measuring equipment was attached. Upon a launch alongside, shiny black rubber-garbed frogmen climbed, explained, ordered, carried and descended, as they checked the net fittings on the hull.

Dalby made circular motions with his glass of martini, swirling it into a thin layer of clear centrifugal controlled violence. He sipped a little of the undulating alcoholic surface and rubbed the glass edge on his lower lip.

‘There’s no way of contracting out,’ he was saying.

I couldn’t help connecting his remark with myself, but he went on, ‘To do any sort of bargain with them is quite out of the question, merely because there is no guarantee that their word will be kept. The minute war becomes the better way to expound Communism, war will be begun by Communists. And make no mistake, they won’t be using kids’ stuff like this bomb. It will be area saturation with suitable nerve gases.’

He looked across the imported and carefully laid out grass turf now crowded with summer-uniformed men and women. Between me and the big long tables of food a plump girl in white held the arms of two Marine Corps lieutenants, and all three heads bowed as her white pointed shoes nimbly followed the triple rhythms and superimposed discords of a cha cha cha.

‘Don’t make any mistake, Jimmy,’ Dalby was speaking directly to a staff-brigadier. ‘Where your military system has the direct support of commerce and industry, you are absolute world beaters. This whole atoll is an unrivalled feat: but it’s a feat of logistics and organization that you’ve had a lot of practice in. There is not much difference between creating, at a speed fast approaching the Biblical record, a Coca-Cola plant with a shooting gallery for employee recreation, and creating a shooting plant with a Coca-Cola gallery for recreation.’

‘So does it matter, Dalby?’ The Brigadier, a big-boned athlete of sixty or more, hair grey and one eighth of an inch long, spectacles with their fine gold frames glinting as the reflections of a hundred fairy lights ran across his eyes. ‘Who cares where the credit lies. If we can make the biggest damndest greatest bang no one is going to give a damn about details. They’re just going to stay well clear of Uncle Sam.’ Finding something lacking in the audience reaction, he hastily added, ‘And well clear of NATO too. The whole free world in fact.’

‘I don’t think that’s what Dalby means,’ I said. I was always explaining to people what other people meant. ‘He grants you the ability but is unsure if you will use it correctly.’

‘You’re going to give me the old “Europe: home of diplomacy” stuff, eh boy?’ The Brigadier turned his huge grey head to face me. ‘I thought Khrushchev tactics had brought you guys up to date on that stuff.’

‘No, merely that Europeans have a firm and fearful knowledge of what happens when diplomats fail,’ I told him.

‘Diplomats and surgeons never fail,’ said Dalby. ‘They have too strong a union ever to have to admit it.’

I went on, ‘Americans are not noted for assuming failure to be possible before starting something.’

‘Oh heck, relationships between any rival business outfits are the same as between nations.’

‘I think that was true at one time, but now the destructive capabilities are such that, to extend your analogy, we must think in terms of cartels. Rivals must unite to live and let live.’

‘You Europeans always think in terms of cartels. That’s one of your worst failings. An American guy figures out how to make a ballpoint pen, he figures on selling them at a nickel a throw. In Europe when you first had speed-balls I saw them on sale nudging two English pounds! The difference is: the English guy makes three and a half thousand per cent profit, and his competitors steal his ideas, but the American with a two per cent profit sells so many no one can catch up – he winds up a millionaire.’

A tall, very thin girl with large teeth and a streak of silver hair across the crown of her head came up behind the Brigadier and touched her elegantly manicured and varnished nails to his mouth. In front of the musicians, a wooden dance floor as big as a gramophone record was as crowded as a magnet dipped in iron filings and only half as comfortable. The Brigadier was led off in that direction. Dalby and I stood submerged in the sea sounds, the wind in the trees sound, the chatter and ice and ‘Lady Be Good’ and hand-hitting-shoulder sounds, passing police jeep and ‘Why don’t we drive out there while it’s a lovely moon,’ and pebble in the sea sounds, glassful down uniform, and ‘if he’s a very close friend of yours’ and flattened sevenths and ‘you do that up this very minute’ sounds, and Dalby said, ‘Americans are funny.’ Getting no response from me he went on, ‘Americans are much too brutal while they are trying to make money, and much too sloppily sentimental and even gullible after they make it. Before: they think the world is crooked. After: they think it quaint.’

‘Which category does your Brigadier friend come into?’ I asked.

‘Oh neither,’ said Dalby, and little decisions about saying more filtered through his eyes. ‘He had one of the best brains I have ever come across. He owned a small publishers in Munich between the wars and then after the war, was in and out of all kinds of things. Three times, so the stories go, he’s had a million dollars, and twice he’s had only the battered old Riley car he runs around in, and a suit. A couple of months ago he was heading into the ground very quickly, when the army conscripted him into this project! An extraordinary fellow isn’t he?’

I could see the Brigadier now: his dark-green tie, tucked neatly into the opening of his light-buff shirt, a slab of ribbons as large as a half-pound of chocolate, and his big beat-up face with pockets of light and shadow running across it as he performed the slow motion ‘running on the spot’ movements of the dance.

‘Wanted to borrow you for a year,’ Dalby said. We both continued to look at the dance floor.

‘Did he get me?’

‘Not unless you particularly want to go. I said you’d prefer to stay with Charlotte.’

‘Let me know if I change my mind,’ I said, and Dalby gave me the slanted focus.

‘Don’t let the last few days put a scare into you,’ Dalby said. The plump little girl in white was still demonstrating dance steps. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, really. It was planned to keep you on the hook for a day or so,’ Dalby went on, since I hadn’t replied, ‘but they were anxious to take the heat off a high-ranking suspect, so they did a phase two on you so he’d stick his neck out helping to clobber you. Just grin and bear it for a little while longer, and look like you’re suffering.’

I said, ‘Just as long as the executioner is in on our cosy little secret,’ and I headed across to the girl in white for a cha-cha lesson.

By twelve-thirty I was loaded with anchovy, cheese dip, hard egg and salmon, and about 300 geometrically shaped pieces of cold toast. I cut out by the side entrance of the garden, across the service road at the side of the post office. Blue light glowed from within the sorting office, and a radio played soft big band music which jarred against the music and laughter from the General’s garden. Beyond the post office a white quonset hut stood alone. Inside, behind the counter, a young blond PFC with an almost invisible moustache handed me two cablegrams that had arrived since I last saw him at 6.30.

‘A spy has no friends’ people say; but it’s more complex than that. A spy has to have friends, in fact many sets of friends. Friends he’s made by doing things and by not doing other things. Every agent has his own ‘old boy network’ and like every other ‘old boy network’ it cuts across frontiers, jobs and every other loyalty – it’s a sort of spy’s insurance policy. One has no specific arrangement with anyone, no code other than a mutual sensitivity to euphemisms.

I opened the first cable. It was from a man named Grenade.* He was a political man now, and of high enough rank never to have it used as a prefix to his name. The cable said, ‘YOUR NOMINEE REDUNDANT STOP 13BT1818 WILL PAY BERT.’ It had come from the main post office in Lyons and there was no way of associating it with Grenade except that I had monitored some stuff when he was working for French Intelligence, and Bert had been his cover name.

The PFC lit a cigarette for me and coughed his way into the harsh French tobacco of one of mine. I looked at the other cable. It was an ordinary civilian cable handed over a post office counter, and paid for in cash. It had originated at Gerrard Street post office, London. It said: ‘READING A PAPER IN JC ON 3rd OF SECOND.’ It was signed: ‘ARTEMIDORUS.’

I looked at the two sheets of paper. Each sender had implied his message in different ways. Grenade was clearly telling me that I was for the high jump, but that I could use the funds he’d stacked at that number bank account in Switzerland. To find which bank would be easy enough, since they had different codes, and anyone quoting the number can draw without too much trouble. I smiled as I wondered whether this account was the result of the American Express forgeries he had once been involved with. It would be ironic if I was clamped for being an accessory when I tried to draw on it. The second cable was from Charlie Cavendish, who was an undercover man for C-SICH.1 He liked me because I’d been in the Army with his son. When his son was killed, I’d told him, and had got on so well with the old man that I saw him often. He had a great and devastating sense of humour that illuminated dark corners and prevented him getting a senior position. He lived in a poky Bloomsbury flat, ‘to be near the British Museum,’ he said, and probably had trouble finding the few bob to pay for the cable. It was the most sobering of all my messages.