Сэм Истлэнд - The Elegant Lie

In what had once been a dining area, a man stood staring at a map that he had laid out on a dining table so massive it must have been built inside the room.

‘Major Wharton,’ said the soldier, ‘here’s the guy.’

At the mention of his name, Major Wharton looked up from the map. He was a small, aggressive-looking man with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, their colour hidden by a squint. He wore a double-breasted, hip-length coat made of faded pea green canvas with a shawl collar fashioned out of olive brown army-blanket wool. Strapped across his middle was a thick belt made of webbing, from which hung a brown leather holster and a pouch for extra magazines. His helmet lay upturned upon the table. Its surface, the colour of pine needles, was stippled with sand, which had been mixed into the paint to roughen up the texture. ‘They said they were sending me a cop. A cop from New Jersey, they said.’

‘That would be me,’ replied Carter.

‘Well, mister cop from New Jersey, welcome to the asshole of the world, where nobody cares about your fuel truck or the guys who stole it. We’re just a couple of hundred men living like trolls out here on the border who are trying not to starve or freeze to death. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just wasting your time. If whoever stole that fuel could have been caught, they would have been, and long ago, without your help.’

‘So why weren’t they?’

Wharton threw up his hands. ‘Due to all the people here who hate our guts.’

‘Why? Because that town got bombed?’

‘That’s part of it. But there’s others who hated us long before we got here and others who didn’t think about us one way or another until we arrived, and after what happened in St Christophe, some of them hate us even worse than they hated the Germans.’

‘You mean collaborators?’

‘No!’ exclaimed Wharton. ‘Anybody who seriously collaborated with the Germans during the occupation fled across the border when the German Army fell back into their own country.’

‘Then who are we talking about?’ demanded Carter.

‘Just regular people,’ said Wharton, ‘who are looking to get back to living whatever they have left of their lives, and they can’t do that while we’re living in their houses, driving our tanks all over their fields and sometimes blowing them to pieces, even if it is by mistake. But don’t take my word for it. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough that people aren’t going to like you snooping around here◦– and that goes for soldiers as well as civilians◦– any more than people back home in New Jersey like it when the police start knocking on their doors.’

‘I’ll keep that all in mind,’ said Carter.

Wharton stared at him for a moment longer. Then he went back to looking at the map. ‘Close the door on your way out,’ he said.

Although many of the skills Carter picked up while working undercover with the police had prepared him well for working under Wilby, there were others he’d had to learn from scratch. The most important of these, Wilby stressed, was the necessity of following agency protocols as soon as he emerged from Langsdorf prison.

The first step on being released had been to make contact with the barber on Zülpicherplatz, who then relayed the message to Bonn station that Carter was now ‘in play’, as Wilby had termed it.

After their initial meeting at the hotel, all future contact was to be initiated with the use of a drop box. This was not actually a box, but a loose brick in a wall in an alley called the Höfergasse, right outside the Cologne central train station. The message was written on a piece of cigarette paper, which would be rolled up and stashed behind the brick. The message contained five numbers, the first being between one and six. Each of these corresponded to one of six pre-arranged meeting places scattered around the city. One was in Vorgebirgs Park in the Raderberg district, just south of the main city centre. Another, on the steps of St Heribert church, was in the Deutz district, on the other side of the river from Cologne. A third was in a meat market on Jennerstrasse in the Ehrenfeld district, in the far north-west corner of the city. For each meeting place, a safety sign had been arranged. A man holding up a sign emblazoned with the words ‘Christ is Risen’ was an indicator that the meeting place had been compromised. Curtains drawn in an apartment that overlooked the cold storage warehouse where the Jennerstrasse meetings took place were also a warning to stay away. The drop box was checked twice a day and the time of the meetings corresponded to the remaining numbers that were written in the message. If the numbers were underlined, the meeting time was p.m.

Although Carter had made use of pre-arranged meeting places when working undercover in New Jersey, these had never involved drop boxes or safety signs. The added security measures came as no surprise to him. He did not have to be told more than once that his life depended on their being used correctly.

Once the protocols had been established, Carter had to memorise them. No written record could be kept.

There was one final message he could send. It consisted of an X with one dot pencilled into each of the four open V-shapes of the letter. This meant that his cover had been blown and that he was on the run. If this happened, he was to make his way to a safe house, located across the river at 106 Nassaustrasse in the Humboldt district. From there, if necessary, he would be smuggled out of the country.

For their first rendezvous using the numbered protocols, Carter chose the steps of St Heribert. Churches made good meeting places because they always had multiple exits and the layout of most provided excellent fields of view.

He chose eight o’clock in the morning, at the height of the rush hour. Joining a multitude of people passing over the Deutzer bridge, he turned right down a long set of stone steps, many of which still showed the marks of shrapnel damage from air raids which had pounded the district. He wandered through the narrow streets◦– Arminiusstrasse, Adolphstrasse, Mathildenstrasse◦– their names whispering themselves inside his skull, until he came to the church. It, too, had been badly damaged in the war, but enough of it still stood or else had been repaired that the structure had not been abandoned.

On his way he glanced in shop windows, studying the reflection of people passing in the street, in case he was being followed. Once or twice, he stopped and tied his shoes, glancing back to see if anyone came to a stop or suddenly changed direction, a sure sign that he had picked up a tail.

But there didn’t seem to be anyone and, as he walked across the city, his nerves were not crackling like static, the way they sometimes did when something was wrong, even if he couldn’t say exactly what it was.

Carter found Wilby sitting on the church steps reading a newspaper, a trilby pulled down over his eyes and a short-stemmed pipe jutting from between his clenched teeth. Before approaching his control officer, Carter looked for a person with a Christ is Risen placard, but there wasn’t anyone around. As he approached the man, Wilby folded the newspaper, stood and walked away.

Carter followed him across the wide Siegburger road and into a narrow park that ran beside the river. They leaned against a railing that overlooked the Rhine. The rush hour had passed and only a few people were left from the throng of pedestrians travelling over the Deutzer bridge. A barge passed by, its engine chugging against the current. A Dutch flag whipped from a post above its wheelhouse.

‘I found you a contact in the army,’ said Wilby, ‘someone who can get what Dasch is looking for. He’s a quartermaster at the base in Oberursel. The base is closing down and he’s responsible for shipping out about a hundred tons of supplies, either back to the States or else to bases that are remaining open. He can get you canned food, medical supplies, furniture. Whatever you want.’