John Lawton - Riptide

But then, by then, Cal had worked that out for himself. He’d heard too many of the rows between his father and his grandfather. Ante-Bellum man versus All-American man. And he had little faith in either.

The letter on the top of his in-tray was an airmail from his father. He’d know that copperplate script anywhere: ‘Capt. Calvin M. Cormack III, United States Consulate, Zurich’, written with all the pride a man could put into his son’s rank and address. He eased his glasses forward a fraction on his nose. Held the letter, not wanting to rip it open. Light as a feather. He could all too easily guess its contents. His father had been ranting at him for years now. Like father like son. It was enough to make you want to break the cycle. Fuck your life away and never marry-never, never, have children. If his grandfather flew the tattered flag of the Confederacy and talked sentimentally of the Rebels, his father flew the near-invisible flag of Isolationism and talked contemptuously of Europe. What was World War II to a beleaguered little island was ‘a European skirmish’ to Representative Calvin M. Cormack Jr of Virginia, Chairman of the all-powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and ‘little or nothing to do with any right-thinking, God-fearing American’. Not that his father feared God. His father feared nothing, as far as Cal had ever been able to tell, and certainly not an entity in which he did not believe in the first place. At least they had that in common, all three generations of them. Not much, and not enough.

He’d read it later. He just wasn’t in the mood right now. He dropped it in his in-tray and slipped a brown cardboard file out of the top drawer of his desk. In it was the decrypted message he’d received from Berlin a little over two weeks ago: ‘TIN MAN DEAD’. A simple, too simple, conclusion to a complicated life. His assistant had filled the file with clippings-more than twenty snipped pieces from the German press. A hero’s funeral. He looked at them every day. Not disbelieving. Wanting not to believe.

His office door opened. Cal was still staring at the clippings. He looked up slowly and found himself panning up from a pair of stiletto heels-albeit in army colours-the length of two short, shapely legs, across a non-regulation, over-tight, over-tailored skirt, an olive green blouse thrust out by big breasts, two corporal’s stripes on the sleeve, to a pretty face, red lips, nut brown eyes, under the shortest haircut he’d ever seen on a woman. She was clutching a single sheet of paper to her bosom. He’d no idea who she was.

‘Have we met?’ he said simply.

‘Sure, day before yesterday. Can I help it if you got a memory like a spaghetti strainer?’

‘You’re new?’

‘Cypher clerk. Whole bunch of us got in Friday. I guess you were too busy to give us the twice-over. I settled for the once-over. Hurts to know how big an impression I made on you.’

Cal was dumbfounded-no corporal in the United States Army had ever talked to him this way-but he was a slave to his upbringing. He’d been taught to stand in the presence of a lady-even a New York loudmouth like this one-so he stood and offered her his hand.

‘Calvin Cormack,’ he said.

‘Larissa Tosca,’ she replied. ‘But you can call me Lara. Now you wanna read what I got or you just wanna flirt with me? You could read it now and if it’s nothing we could flirt some more, or we could flirt all morning and let the war go hang.’

‘Er…’

‘OK. This is what it says. It says “Tell RG everything.-Gelbroaster”.’

‘”Tell RG everything-Gelbroaster”? That’s all?’

‘Yep.’

General Gelbroaster was the head of US Army Intelligence, London. There were plenty who thought him nuts, but in London his word was little short of law. Even when his word was as terse as this.

‘I was curious about the R and the G. I checked it every goddam which way for mistakes but that’s the way it comes out. RG. Every combination I tried I still get RG.’

‘That’s OK. I know who he means.’

‘Fine. Look me up when you’ve finished.’

Corporal Tosca slapped the paper on Cal’s desk and walked out. Buttocks sashaying in the tight skirt. Quite the shortest, rudest woman he had ever met. He wondered if Gelbroaster was now recruiting people as nutty as he was himself. They’d sent him some wackos over the last two years, but this one took the prize.

Cal called the British Consulate and asked for Lt. Col. Ruthven-Greene. He heard the mechanical, ratchet rattle of the switchboard and then an unsurprisingly hearty English voice.

‘Calvin-dear boy. Just the chap I was thinking of. Tell me, do you think you could fit in a spot of lunch today? Here at the Consulate. A bit of a chat over beer and sandwiches, eh?’

Cal knew Ruthven-Greene fairly well. He had met him on his last London trip in ‘39, and on a dozen other occasions when the man had shown up in Zurich.

Reggie was an affable man. Indeed, you might be fooled into thinking that affability was all there was to him. He cultivated the faintly raffish air of a man who knew where the good times were to be had, and all in all gave the impression of being a man who had just failed the audition for a Hollywood role that had gone to George Sanders instead. He was always in civilian clothes, and although Cal had heard members of the embassy staff address him as Colonel, it was pretty clear he was no regular kind of colonel. He was too young, at thirty-nine or forty, to have seen much of the last war-at best he’d’ve been a subaltern in the last weeks. It was possible he’d spent the long weekend between the wars on the reserve list, only to be called up at once when rain stopped play at Munich. It was possible he’d been promoted in the background. Much more possible, to the point of highly likely, was that Alistair Ruthven-Greene-known to his friends as Reggie-was a career spook. Nominally a serving soldier, but who’d not seen a parade ground in years, and wore his uniform only on occasions of state-whatever they were. The funerals of kings, Cal thought, and the British didn’t lose kings on anything like a regular basis. Still, who was he to quibble? There were states in the Deep South where colonels were dashed out as honours faster than the Pope created counts.

Ruthven-Greene swept him into a large office-a partner’s desk, a low table framed by a couple of deep-cushioned sofas, made his own office look at best perfunctory. And on the low table sat a plate of roast beef sandwiches, a pot of strong English mustard and two tall bottles of pale ale. Ruthven-Greene was being literal, he had said beer and sandwiches so beer and sandwiches it was. Cal had learnt that when the British served beer with beef they meant to talk turkey.

Ruthven-Greene flipped the top off a bottle and poured it into two half-pint tankards. Cal helped himself to a sandwich-minus the English mustard. What kind of a nation was it that could delight in so searing its taste buds?

‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Reggie?’

‘Codes, dear boy. Codes.’

Codes? They didn’t share codes. We have ours and they have theirs. Never the twain…

Ruthven-Greene took a small leather-bound diary from his inside pocket. A sheet of white paper larger than the book itself was sticking out. He extracted it and handed it to Cal.

‘I’m sure you’re familiar with this,’ he said.

Cal took one look at it and hoped he had not turned white-or worse, blushed red. The note was preceded by several lines of numerical gobbledegook, but in the centre of the page, in capital letters, it read ‘TIN MAN DEAD’.

‘You’ve broken our code?’

‘Well. Yes and no.’

‘What’s the yes?’

‘We broke it last year. Best part of twelve months ago, in fact. We regularly monitor all your embassy transmissions from the Cape to Cairo, from Timbuktu to Tokyo. Sorry. But there you are. We’re not allies. Well, not yet at any rate.’