Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

"Supposed to be East German. They're involved, anyway."

"How did they know where I was?"

Maxim thought for a moment. "My guess – it's no more than that – is that somebody came around earlier and told Mrs Tanner that there'd be a couple of hundred quid in it for her if you showed up. She's out of work, and I don't suppose Dave makes a fortune…"

"That littlescrubber," Blagg breathed. "I didn't think she liked me much, but I'm one of Dave's oldest mates and… when I get up, I'll bloody-"

"You'll do nothing. She can still tell the police you were in that shooting and oncethey get you, you can forget you everhad any friends or were ever in the Army. All right? Why didyou go back to London in the first place? – why didn't you stay here?

"Dave rang me, see, and he said there'd been some blokes asking around about me and he didn't think they were coppers at all, and I thought well, that could be The Firm -"

"It was."

" – and I wanted to get in touch with them, anyway, and… well…"

"And I didn't seem to be doing much that was any use. Goon."

"I thought I might get just to chat to one of them, but instead I suddenly found a whole bleeding pack of them behind me. Just following, but still…"

Sadly, Maxim remembered how long – and how much luck – it had taken for him to spot his own pack.

"So I thought bugger this for a lark and got rid of them, and the next couple of days I tried to ring you, but…"

The two days Maxim spent ambushing his own followers and then kicked into exile by George.

"All right," he said. "Problems all round us. Butnow let's hear the rest about Bad Schwärzendem."He sat down on a tiny painted nursery chair beside the bed.

Blagg hesitated, or perhaps was trying to remember, and Caswell said in a firm voice: "The shooting was just after ten, you said. You left the car at Dortmund and caught an early morning train for Ostend – you said. Dortmund's less than a hundred miles, mostly by Autobahn, so you could have been there by midnight. And the first boat train's at half past six. Now don't tell me you spent the night sitting on the station, because they wouldn't let you, or parked in a stolen car, because you're not that stupid, not quite. Now…"

Caswell hadn't only been doing some thinking, he'd been looking up maps and timetables.

"Well," Blagg said slowly, "what it was, see…"

George belonged to things. He liked to boast that, in central London, he was never more than a couple of hundred yards from some club, institution or association of which he was amember and which could provide, at the very least, a roof in a rainstorm. "You can'tlose a club, the way you can an umbrella," he once told Agnes. She had replied that it still seemed an expensive policy compared with even the dearest of umbrellas, and George had thought about that and said: "You can't piss into an umbrella, either. Not without attracting unfavourable comment anyway."

This particular club faced across Green Park, which on that evening looked very green and crisp, the trees standing tall and full against the restless sky. It was probably something to do with the view that had convinced George he ought to be drinking a very large glass of dry sherry from the wood. Agnes had taken a smaller one; she had just got back from her service's registry.

"You do appreciate," she was saying, "that all our material on Eismark is about thirty years out of date? We don't try to keep up with people like that. Really all we've got is what his sister told us when she came over."

"We're supposed to be interested in his first marriage and that's more than thirty years ago, isn't it? What did she have to say about that?"

"Well…" She was sitting in a very old overstuffed leather sofa and hiding a notebook behind her large handbag because she wasn't sure notebooks were allowed in the club; not much was. "Gustav's the younger by just over two years… he was nine when his father died… they moved away from Rostock, went to stay with relatives in the Harzmountains… mother married again and rather faded away, they were brought up mostly by grandparents and aunts. They don't seem to have been poor: she had all her piano lessons, Gustavhad a racing bicycle when he was still at school. Did you know he had a glass eye?"

"Can't say I did. Why should-Ah, I see: no war service for young Gustav. Wasthat the bicycle?"

"Yes, he got his face mixed up with the spokes of-"

"Please: I get enoughofthatsortofthingfrom Harry. Go on with the non-bloody bits. "

"He did well at school -Mina thought he was a genius -and actually got a year in college. At Bremen; he wanted to bea naval architect in those days. Then Hitler invaded Russia, everybody remembered old man Eismark had been a pinko, and Gustav washove into the night. "

"He was lucky not to be in a concentration camp or the Todt Organisation."

"He was lucky to have a talented sister. She'd already made a bit of a name for herself, only locally but you know what the Germans are about music, and the district party bosses liked romantic pieces so she became the star turn at their more respectable booze-ups. That was when she started using her mother's name, Linnarz, to get away from the Eismark stigma. And they tolerated Gustav- gave him a job on the land – as long as it kept Mina happy and she kept them happy. There must have been a lot of that sort of thing, when you come to think about it: tolerating ideological undesirables as long as it suited your own book – not that National Socialism had much ideology beyond being first at the trough. It couldn't last, of course."

"What went wrong?"

"The party got a new Kreisleiterwho didn't dig music and wasn't going to have any damned Commie subverting his cabbages, so he blew the whistle.Mina got the tip-off just in time and they became U-boats, went underground. Just who did it for them she didn't seem to know, it was all contacts of Gustav's. Probably he made some useful friends in Bremen;Mina said he was always asking her if she'd heard any interesting gossip at her musicalsoirées.Butone way or another, somebody came up with the fulltabled'hôte:safe havens, roadnames and the paperwork to back them up. Even money from time to time. This was November '43."

George made a long thinking, grumbling noise, then said, mostly to himself: "The paperwork must have been good… if they were living on it for eighteen months… they weren't escaped prisoners of war trying to reach Switzerland on a hand-copied Fremdenpass… Could they have been in with the real Communist underground?"

Agnes lifted her eyebrows in a facial shrug; George knew far more about that period of history than she did. "Could have been. I thought it was pretty badly penetrated, but…"

"Oh, it was. The Gestapo was just about running the Communist party by 1944, but to do that they'd have to let some small fry run free, and from their point of view the Eismarks would be very small indeed. They didn't actually go in for sabotage or anything, did they?"

"No, according to her theyjust stayed undercover-separately – in small villages and so on until the end of the war.

George grunted and finished his sherry. "Thank God: now I can have areal drink. What about you? Same again?" He pressed a bellpush. "Come along, young Algar: what about this marriage? – when do we get to that?"

"Very soon, " Agnes said patiently."Brigitte Krone: she was living with one of the families Gustavhid up with that winter. Parents had been killed in the Hamburg bombing, so perhaps she was feeling lonely. Anyway, all the other young men were away at the war, Gustavmust have been spending just about all his time indoors, young love wove its spell and… 'ow's yer father?" Agnes lapsed into stage cockney.

George frowned, absent-mindedly gave their order to the servant who had appeared, and said: "I don't know… marriage seems a public sort of affair. I'd've thought that would be adding enormously to the risk…"