She had a Decca navigator that took readings from slave stations on the shore, but so did everyone. She had nothing inside or out that was not consistent with her modesty. Each of her three-man crew could turn his hand to everything. There were no specialists, though each had his particular love. When we needed expert despatchers or fitters, the Royal Navy was on hand to help us.
So you can see that, what with a new dynamic team to back me up at London Station, and a full hand of sources to test my versatility, and the Daisy and her crew to manage, I had everything that a Head of Station with salt water in his blood could decently inherit.
And of course I had Brandt.
Brandt’s two years before the Circus mast had altered him in ways I at first found hard to define. It was not so much an aging or a hardening I observed in him, as that wearying alertness, that overwakefulness, which the secret world with time imprints upon even the most relaxed of its inhabitants. We met at the safe flat. He entered. He stopped dead and stared at me. His jaw fell open and he let out a great shout of recognition. He seized my arms in a sultan’s greeting and nearly broke them. He laughed till the tears came, he held me away to look at, then hauled me back to hug against his black overcoat. But his spontaneity was strained by watchfulness. I knew the signs. I had seen them in other joes.
“God damn, why they don’t tell me nothing, Herr Konsul?” he cried as he embraced me yet again. “What damn game they playing? Listen, we do some good things over there, hear me? We got good people, we beat those damn Russians to death, okay?”
“I know,” I said, laughing back at him. “I heard.”
And when night fell he insisted on seating me among the coils of rope in the back of his van and driving me at breakneck speed to the remote farmhouse that London had acquired for him. He was determined to introduce me to his crew and I looked forward to it. And I looked forward even more to getting a sight of his girlfriend Bella, because London Station was feeling a little queasy about her recent arrival in his life. She was twenty-two years old and had been with him three months. Brandt was looking hard at fifty. It was midsummer, I remember, and the inside of the van smelt of freesias, for he had bought her a bunch at the market.
“She’s a number one girl,” he told me proudly as we entered the house. “Cooks good, makes good love, learns English, everything. Hey, Bella, I brought you new boyfriend!”
Painters and sailors make the same kind of houses, and Brandt’s was no exception. It was scant but homely, with brick floors and low, white-raftered ceilings. Even in the darkness it seemed to usher in the outside light. From the front door we stepped straight down into the drawing room. A wood fire smouldered in the hearth and a ship’s lamp shone on the naked flank of a girl as she lay reading on a heap of cushions. Hearing us enter, she sprang excitedly to her feet. Twenty-two and going on eighteen, I thought as she grabbed my hand and gaily pumped it up and down. She was wearing a man’s shirt and very short shorts. A gold amulet glinted at her throat, declaring Brandt’s possession of her: this is my woman, wearing my badge of ownership. Her face was peasant and Slav and naturally happy, with clear, wide eyes, high cheeks and a tipped-up smile even when her lips were in repose. Her bare legs were long and tanned to the same gold colour as her hair. She had a small waist, high breasts and full hips. It was a very beautiful, very young body, and whatever Brandt was thinking, it belonged to no one of his age, or even mine.
She set his freesias in a vase and fetched black bread and pickles and a bottle of schnapps. She was carelessly provocative in her movements. Either she knew exactly, or not at all, the power of each slight gesture she made. She sat beside him at the table, smiled at me and threw her arm around him, letting her shirt gape. She took possession of his hand and showed me by comparison the slenderness of her own, while Brandt talked recklessly about the network, mentioning joes and places by name, and Bella measured me with her frank eyes.
“Listen,” Brandt said, “we got to get Aleks another radio, hear me, Ned? They take it apart, they put new spares, batteries, that radio’s lousy. That’s a bad-luck radio.”
When the phone rang, he answered it imperiously: “Listen, I’m busy, okay? . . . Leave the package with Stefan, I said. Listen, have you heard from Leonids?”
The room gradually filled up. First to enter was a darting, bandy-legged man with a drooping moustache. He kissed Bella rapturously but chastely on the lips, punched Brandt’s forearm and helped himself to a plateful of food.
“That’s Kazimirs,” Brandt explained, with a jab of his thumb. “He’s a bastard and I love him. Okay?”
“Very okay,” I said heartily.
Kazimirs had escaped three years ago across the Finnish border, I remembered. He had killed two Soviet frontier guards along his way, and he was crazy about engines—never happier than when he was up to his elbows in oil. He was also the respected ship’s cook.
After Kazimirs came the Durba brothers, Antons and Alfreds, stocky and pert like Welshmen, and blue-eyed like Brandt. The Durbas had sworn to their mother that they would never go to sea together, so they took it in turns, for the Daisy handled best with three, and we liked to leave space for cargo and unexpected passengers. Soon everyone was talking at once, shooting questions at me, not waiting for the answers, laughing, proposing toasts, smoking, reminiscing, conspiring. Their last run had been bad, really bad, said Kazimirs. That was three weeks ago. Daisy had hit a freak storm off the Gulf of Danzig and lost her mizzen. At Ujava on the Latvian coast, they had missed the light signal in the fog, said Antons Durba. They had fired a rocket and God help them, there was this whole damned reception party of crazy Latvians standing on the beach like a delegation of city fathers! Wild laughter, toasts, then a deep Nordic silence while everyone but myself was struck by the same solemn memory.
“To Valdemars,” said Kazimirs, and we drank a toast to Valdemars, a member of their group who had died five years ago. Then Bella took Brandt’s glass and drank too, a separate ceremony while she watched me over the brim. “Valdemars,” she repeated softly, and her solemnity was as beguiling as her smile. Had she known Valdemars? Had he been one of her lovers? Or was she simply drinking to a brave fellow countryman who had died for the Cause?
But I have to tell you a little more about Valdemars—not whether he had slept with Bella or even how he had died, for no one knew for sure. All that was known was that he had been put ashore and never heard of again. One story said he had managed to swallow his pill, another that he had given orders to his bodyguard to shoot him if he walked into a trap. But the bodyguard had disappeared too. And Valdemars was not the only one who had disappeared during what was now remembered by the group as “the autumn of betrayal.” In the next few months, as the anniversaries of their deaths came round, we drank to four other Latvian heroes who had perished unaccountably in the same ill-starred period—delivered, it was now believed, not to partisans in the forest, nor loyal reception parties on the beach, but straight into the hands of Moscow Centre’s chief of Latvian operations. And if new networks had been cautiously rebuilt meanwhile, five years later the stigma of these betrayals still clung to the survivors, as Haydon had been at pains to warn me.
“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 spar
k 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.