It was a safe-conduct pass or Courier's Passport as it said at the top, issued by the British ambassador in the city where I was born and valid only for a journey to Gibraltar and back, dated February 16,1941, right in the middle of the Second World War, and then renewed ten days later and made valid for a journey to London via Lisbon. 'These are to request and require, in the Name of His Majesty,' it read, 'all those whom it may concern to allow Mr. Ian Lancaster Fleming charged with despatches to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford him every assistance and protection of which he may stand in need.'
'Oh, I see,' I said, unmoved. 'Ian Fleming.' Wheeler seemed a little disappointed by my lack of surprise. He didn't know that I had already stumbled on the dedications that the creator of James Bond had written in copies of his novels (To Peter Wheeler who may know better. Salud!), which was why the fact that they were friends or acquaintances did not catch me entirely unawares. 'So they shared an adventure,' I thought, then said, in order to cheer him up: 'So the two of you shared an adventure in Spain, before he became a writer. How amazing.'
'This passport is from the following year. He gave it to me later on, when he was already famous, as a souvenir of our time in Portugal more than of our time in Spain. We were stuck there with that frivolous pair from June to August. Mrs. Simpson, I mean the Duchess, was not prepared to go into exile, which is how they saw it, without her wardrobe, her table linen, her royal bedlinen, her silver and her porcelain dinner service, all of which was supposed to arrive from Paris, via Madrid, in eight Hispano-Suizas hired by the multimillionaire Calouste Gulbenkian, a risky journey in those days. (Oddly enough, that was the same year in which Gulbenkian, who was Armenian in origin, was declared "Enemy under the Act" and thus lost his British nationality and became Persian instead; so when he helped the Duke and Duchess, I don't know if he was still a friend or an enemy.) Anyway, we had to wait in Estoril and accompany them each night to the casino, either Ian Fleming or myself or, more often, to be on the safe side, both of us. It's hardly surprising that there are so many casinos in the Bond novels: since the 1920s he had been a frequent visitor to the casinos in Deauville, Le Touquet, and later Biarritz; he loved to play, especially baccarat, which was a real stroke of luck because it meant the Duchess was kept entertained when he was around. (He never won very much and even lost, he was a fairly conservative player, placing low bets, not like the fictional character he created.) As for the Duke, at least he was a reasonable conversationalist. We had a somewhat bland but cordial relationship: he had studied here, at Magdalen, and so when I couldn't think how else to entertain him, I could always resort to telling him the latest Oxford gossip. He would listen in amazement, and with a touch of possibly feigned innocence, especially to news of any sexual shenanigans. But he didn't know how to laugh. A dull man and possibly not very bright, but worldly in a pleasant way and, of course, with impeccable manners: after all, there's no denying that he came from a good family.' And Peter laughed again at his little joke. 'Finally, we managed to send the royal couple off safe and sound, along with all the silver and porcelain and bedlinen, in a British destroyer that had been anchored in the Tagus, and it was with great relief that we saw them head off across the Atlantic, bound for the Bahamas. We parted company then, Ian Fleming and I, and didn't meet again until some time later. He was a personal assistant to Rear Admiral Godfrey and had a lot of contact with Hillgarth and with Sefton Delmer, I think he and the latter had been together in Moscow and they collaborated on the PWE's black game . . .'—'Black game,' he said. I had heard young Pérez Nuix use the term 'black gamblers' once, or was it 'wet gamblers'; it had made me think of cardsharps anyway. I didn't know what those initials, PWE, meant, but I didn't want to interrupt Wheeler.—'We lost track of each other, well, that was normal during the War, we were sent here, there and everywhere, wherever they chose to post us, and you always said goodbye to someone knowing full well that you probably wouldn't see them again. Not because it simply wouldn't happen, but because they or you or both of you might easily die. It happened every time I had to leave and say goodbye to Valerie . . . Every time . . .' His voice had been growing fainter and fainter until, when he spoke those last words, his voice was barely a murmur; he had probably worn himself out with speaking. He did not go on. He placed his two arms on the stick that lay across the arms of the chair, as if he had just engaged in some physical exertion and needed to rest. He looked tired, I thought, and his gaze was slightly abstracted. 'Yes, Sefton Delmer's black propaganda, that's what it was,' he added thoughtfully, then fell silent again. Perhaps he had remembered too much, mechanically at first and with great animation subsequently, but all memories lead to more memories and there is always a moment, sooner or later, when one comes upon a sad one, a loss, a nostalgia, an unhappiness that was not an invention. People then sit with eyes lowered or gaze abstracted and stop talking, fall silent.
'I don't know who Sefton Delmer was, Peter,' I said. 'Nor what PWE means.'
He raised his eyes and fixed them on me, wearily and with a certain bewilderment too. He said:
'Why are we talking about this? I don't know how it came up, I've forgotten.' The truth was I had forgotten too. 'Why don't you tell me something? You must have a reason for coming here today, without warning. I'm delighted to see you, but tell me, why have you come today?'
He was right. Wheeler still missed very little, even if his mind wasn't what it was and even though he now paid less attention to the outside world and was developing a form of loquacious introspection (or, I suppose, just introspection plain and simple when he was alone). Yes, I did have a reason for going to Oxford on that Sunday exiled from the infinite, to his house by the River Cherwell, whose quiet or languid murmur was just audible from where we were sitting, very faint, but still audible, and I recalled the words that my thoughts had attributed to it as they finally fell asleep, very late, on the night I had met Tupra there during a buffet supper: 'I am the river, I am the river and, therefore, a connecting thread between the living and the dead, just like the stories that speak to us in the night, I take on the likeness of past times and past events too, I am the river. But the river is just the river. Nothing more.' I had gone there to tell Wheeler what had happened to me or rather what I had done—after all, nothing had happened to me: other people had been the losers—and to ask him if he could have foreseen something like that happening when he first introduced me to the group to which he, too, had belonged; that is, in his role as intermediary, how far had he been aware of what he was getting me involved in and the risks he was laying me open to. He must have known about the possible consequences of our reports and about the uses to which they were sometimes put, to immediate and practical use or, in my case, to ruthless and criminal use. If, in times of relative peace, the result of one such report was a homicide and a scandalous arrest, the death of an innocent person and the ruin of another, tricked into being the guilty party, then, presumably, during the War, when the group had been created, and there would have been little margin for checking facts and when hasty decisions would sometimes have been made, the interpretation of people and the translation of lives or the anticipation of stories would inevitably have led to people being eliminated, to disasters and calamities. Although they would also have contributed to avoiding those things—I was sure of that. Wheeler would perhaps have found himself in a situation similar to mine now; he was not an unscrupulous person, and even though he might, in his day, have spread outbreaks of cholera and malaria and plague, that wasn't the man I knew. Perhaps his words had killed not one man, but many, some perhaps who should not have died. However, had that happened, he would always have had the consolation, the justification, the excuse that a war was on. I did not.
'Yes, I do have a reason for coming here today, Peter,' I said. And I put him in the picture and explained what had happened, just as I had with Pérez Nuix the night before.
Wheeler heard me out in silence, without interrupting me once, with his walking
stick upright now, the tip resting on the floor, and the palm of one hand cradling his cheek in the gesture of one listening attentively. I told him about that first encounter with Dearlove and about Edinburgh, thus affording his weary tongue a rest. I spoke to him of my suspicions—or, rather, certainties—regarding the crime that had caused a frenzy of press speculation in the last few days and about which I assumed he would know.
'Yes, I read about it in the newspapers.' And he brushed the papers beside him with the tips of his fingers, as if he feared dirtying his hands. 'The contemptible Sunday papers are full of it, and Mrs. Berry, who watches television more than I do, told me how shocked and horrified she was. And very disappointed too: apparently, she enjoys this Dearlove fellow's music. I'm clearly not au fait with all her interests.' He paused and added, as if issuing a statement: 'It would never have occurred to me that you and your colleagues had anything to do with it. It's surprising really that the group can still surprise me. Although, naturally, things must have changed beyond belief.' He thought a little more, then said: 'I don't know. Jacobo. I don't know what Tupra is up to, he rarely calls me and confides in me still less. The older one gets, the more distant people become, not that I'm reproaching any of you for that.' But there was reproach, towards me as well, in those words. And of course it's very much Tupra's style when he doesn't act impulsively and takes his time; insofar as I know him, that is, which isn't very well. Toby knew him better. At least he knew the Tupra who was his student, the person he used to be. I find it hard to imagine what possible danger that singer could represent, to necessitate laying a trap for him and getting rid of him. But one shouldn't discount anything; in time one learns that, in theory, as people in our line of work come to realize, anyone can be dangerous. And our line of work, don't forget, is about protecting other people. And about protecting ourselves, because if we don't safeguard ourselves, we won't be able to protect anyone. It would seem, though, that you're quite right, given that they've carried out your predictions to the letter. The man was clearly a real danger, a madman. A murderer. You mustn't torment yourself overmuch on his account.'
'You don't mind if I smoke, do you?' He shook his head. I offered him the pack of cigarettes, he shook his head again, and I lit a Karelias. 'I'm afraid that they fulfilled those predictions only because I made them, Peter,' I said. 'It's not that easy. The thing didn't just happen naturally and spontaneously. Calculation and artifice played their part, as did machination and scheming; there was the interested party to whom I gave the idea, as if I were an Iago. Without my prognostications nothing would have happened, I'm sure, and Dearlove would not be a murderer. And a young man who had nothing whatsoever to do with it wouldn't have died. He may not even have received his payment for the job. I doubt that Tupra would have paid him in advance. I don't know how I'm going to be able to live with that.' Wheeler said nothing. He sat looking at me, his hand on his chin, attentive, thoughtful, rather as if I were new to him, or as if he were wondering what to do with me in a situation that was not so much unforeseen as insoluble. He didn't even say 'Hm,' but just sat there, looking at me. 'When I first got involved in this,' I went on, 'did you know that something like this might happen? That what you called my gift or my talent might be used for such things, with one person killed and another sent to prison? That it could lead to such drastic measures being taken, measures that could change lives so radically, and even put an end to one person's life? I don't think I can continue in this job. And I'd like you to know that before anyone else does, before Tupra knows. After all, you were the one who encouraged me, the one who first spoke to me about the group.'
Then I realized that he had got stuck again, that his voice or his words would not come out, that he had been assailed once more by that momentary aphasia, which, according to him was not physiological, but like a sudden withdrawal of his will: this was the third time I had witnessed this, so it obviously wasn't as infrequent as he had told me. As on the two previous occasions, it didn't happen in the middle of a sentence that I could then help him to conclude with conjectures, the way one does with people who stutter, but before he had actually spoken. This time, he was not pointing to anything that would help me orient myself (a cushion in the first instance, a cutting of an Eric Fraser cartoon in the second, when the helicopter flew over). He merely made a gesture with one hand asking me to be patient, to wait, as if he knew that it would soon pass and that it was best to leave him be and not add any more questions to those I had already asked him, best not to pressure him. His lips were pressed tight shut, as if they had suddenly become glued together and he could not open them. His face, however, remained unchanged, it was still attentive and thoughtful, as if he were preparing himself to tell me whatever it was he was going to tell me as soon as he could, once he had recovered the power of speech or liberated the word that had got stuck. This finally happened after about two minutes. He made no reference to his difficulty and answered me as if that silent hiatus had not existed:
'The problem isn't the group, Jacobo,' he said. 'You'll find this out for yourself, but leaving it won't necessarily prevent what you feel has happened to you happening again. It hasn't, in fact, happened to you. It has simply happened, and that kind of thing can occur anywhere. You can't control what use other people might make of your ideas or words, nor entirely foresee the ultimate consequences of what you say. In life in general. Never. It doesn't make sense for you to ask me if I knew or didn't know: no one can ever know, in any circumstance, what they might be unleashing, and everything can be put to use, for one purpose or for its complete opposite. The risk that you might trigger misfortunes was no greater here than if you had never moved from your home, from Madrid, from Luisa's side.' I thought of Custardoy for a moment, of my hand holding the pistol and of his shattered hand. Wheeler, with his now recovered voice, was still looking at me hard, as if he were analyzing me. I couldn't help but feel observed or more than that: spied on, decoded, laid bare. Then he added, as if, having examined me, he had decided to risk a diagnosis. 'Of course you can live with it. I can assure you that, unlike Valerie, you can live with what's happened to you or with what you think of as having happened to you. Strange though it may seem, in some respects I know you better than I knew her. We've studied you, but in her case, we were too late.'
I didn't know what to ask him about first, whether about the study that had been made of me or about Valerie, his wife, whom he had already mentioned; on that particular Sunday her name was haunting his tongue. I felt that if I showed too much curiosity about her fate, he might withdraw and say again: Ah . . . Do you mind if I tell you another day. If that's all right.' It was possible that there wouldn't be another day. It was best if that story arrived of its own accord, if it ever did.
'I know you've studied me,' I repeated. 'I've seen a report about me in some old files at the office. Who wrote that? Was it you?'
'Oh, no, it wasn't me, I've never written reports, I've only ever given them orally, you know, keeping to the bare essentials; writing reports would be too bureaucratic, too boring. No, that must have been Toby, during the time when you taught at Oxford. He was the one who discovered you, if I may use that expression. The first to speak of you to me and, I imagine, to the others.
The one who discovered your good gifts, as I think I told you, what, fifteen years ago? Twenty? No, it can't be that long.'
It didn't seem very likely to me. It was possible, but in that case, who were the 'you' and the 'her' alluded to in the report? '. . . It's almost frightening to imagine what he must know, how much he sees and how much he knows,' it said. 'About me, about you, about her. He knows more about us than we ourselves do. About our characters I mean. Or, more than that, about what shaped us. With a knowledge to which we are not a party . . .' Perhaps 'you' was Cromer-Blake, my other Oxford friend from that time and who was also a great friend of Rylands; and then 'her' had to be Clare Bayes, my former lover, from my youth, and whom I had never seen again. But that would mean that Crome
r-Blake had belonged to the group as well, and that didn't fit at all; although, who knows, in Oxford everyone pretends all the time ... I didn't believe Wheeler in that respect. I assumed that he didn't want to tell me who had written that report and it was easy to attribute it to someone who was dead. Or else he preferred not to confess it had been him, that was more likely. He was always reserved, except when he dropped his guard a little, as on that Sunday.
'What happened to your wife, what happened to Valerie?' And again I had that sense of abuse or sacrilege on my lips when I pronounced her name.
This time he raised his hand to his forehead, the same hand on which he had been resting his cheek and chin, while his other hand was holding, no, gripping his walking stick. He narrowed his eyes as we short-sighted people do in order to see into the distance and no longer directed them at me, but further off, at some point in the garden or the river, through the windows.
'We miscalculated, or, rather, it never even occurred to me that a calculation needed to be made. Had the group been formed earlier, if whoever had come up with the idea had done so a few months before (Vivian, Menzies, Cowgill or Crossman, or it might have been Delmer or even Churchill himself), she might not have been allowed to go so far. Or else I wouldn't have let her. They would of course: they would stop at nothing.' And here he used the Spanish expression pararse en barras. 'But I wasn't around much during the War, I was away on those "special employments." I only came back occasionally and then only briefly, and so I probably wouldn't have been able to prevent it anyway' He stopped. He must have been thinking that he had started, but that he could still stop. But I think he decided not to make a dilemma out of it and simply to carry on. 'Valerie, like almost everyone then, wanted to make an active contribution, to help in some way. As I said, she spoke excellent German, because she had spent many summers in her childhood and adolescence with an Austrian family who were old friends of her parents, and the couple's youngest daughter was about her age; there were three other children, the eldest of whom was ten years older than her. She used to spend the summers in Melk, on the banks of the Danube, in Lower Austria, near the famous Benedictine abbey, you know, the Baroque monastery' He saw my blank look, and added, as a parenthesis: '(It doesn't matter, there's no reason why you should know it.) And the girl who was the same age as her used to spend Christmas with her here in England. When war broke out, Val thought of volunteering as an infiltrator and being sent to Germany. However, she knew she wasn't very brave and would easily have lost heart and been discovered at once. She was very willing and intelligent, but she just didn't have the right temperament for a job like that. She lacked the necessary aplomb and the ability to pretend or, indeed, to deceive. She would never have made a good spy. Contrary to popular belief, most people wouldn't or couldn't spy. Besides, she was very young, only nineteen when the War began; I was seven years older than her at the time, but now the gap in our ages is much greater, and I oughtn't to let that gap get any bigger.' As if to confirm this, he looked down resignedly at his own veined, wrinkled, freckled hand. 'She worked as a translator and interpreter for the Foreign Office until, in August 1941, all the propaganda, both black and white, was handed over to the PWE, and they recruited as many people with a good knowledge of German as they could. The Political Warfare Executive,' he explained at last, and I immediately tentatively translated this to myself: "'El Ejecutivo de la Guerra Political I thought; or "El Ejecutivo Politico de la Guerra" or perhaps "del Guerrear" would be closer.' 'I thought this would suit her well. It was quite safe. I didn't want her running any risks, excessive risks, I mean, I didn't want her to be too exposed, because obviously everyone was running risks, as you know, at the front and in the rearguard. The PWE was a secret department and purely temporary, lasting only as long as the War, and began to be dismantled as soon as Germany signed the unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945. Its name or its acronym didn't become public knowledge until much later. A lot of the people who worked there didn't even know they were working for it and thought they were just part of the Foreign Office's PID, Political Intelligence Department, supposedly a small, non-secret section of the Ministry. The people who wrote the white propaganda (the BBC broadcasts intended for Germany and occupied Europe, for example, or the pamphlets that the RAF threw out of their planes on their raids, bearing the imprint of His Majesty's Government and all that) tended to know absolutely nothing about the existence of the black propaganda, or even the grey propaganda, which was being created by their colleagues, who were working in separate divisions and in utmost secrecy. The great advantage of the black propaganda was that no one ever acknowledged that it was British in origin, and we, of course, always denied authorship. As a consequence, the people involved had a completely free hand, with almost no restraints. Remember that officially we weren't doing certain things, even though we were doing them undercover. We never admitted it, because, among other reasons, hardly anyone knew that such things were being done. When Richard Crossman talked about the PWE in the 1970s, in a newspaper article about Watergate that had a lot of repercussions at the time (I remember that Lord Ritchie-Calder and others intervened), he admitted that during the War there had been what he called "an inner Government" with rules and codes of conduct that were completely at odds with those of the visible public Government, and he added that during total warfare, this was a necessary mechanism. Crossman was one of the key figures in the PWE, although not as important as Sefton Delmer, who was the genius responsible for creating a whole new concept of psychological warfare as purely destructive. Crossman had been a member of Harold Wilson's Cabinet in the 1960s and so his views were respected and what he said couldn't easily be contradicted . . .'