David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

That his cousin had been paddling in political waters came as no surprise to Paul. It took no stretch of the imagination to superimpose the bigoted opinions of the boy Paul remembered onto a grown man, although he did wonder if Mikhail’s sister, Sofya, shared her brother’s views. It wasn’t quite as easy for Paul to picture Sofya as being anyhow different from the golden haired child of his memory. Paul’s uncle, Ivan Nikolayevich, would have been as reactionary as ever and just the sort of man Cumming could have used. But he was dead, so it had to be Mikhail or nothing. If Paul couldn’t find him, he supposed he would have to make for the nearest unit of the Czech Legion he could find.

He was aware that none of this left much room for manoeuvre. Cumming had seemed to think there was always the chance, given the fluid nature of the situation, that the Bolshevik regime might fall before Paul even got there. That would make things easier, of course, but then present him with a new set of circumstances. It had been made plain that he was expected to think on his feet, an idea he hadn’t much cared for. He had never possessed any great capacity for initiative. It hadn’t been required at school, and certainly not in the army. In the military one was told what to do and one had better do it, and sharpish. It didn’t do to stand around asking why, or suggesting that there might be a better way of doing it. He had got into the army’s way of doing things, and quite easily, and had assumed that was they way it always was. Now, after talking to Cumming and Browning, despite both men holding military rank, he wasn’t so sure. Their approach seemed to Paul barely coherent. He didn’t so much mind their attitude — exemplified by the sort of expressions they tossed across the desk like, that’s actually confidential and you must take this on trust , as he was quite willing to accept that one had to expect that sort of thing; they were brass, after all, and could be expected to guard jealously whatever secrets had been vouchsafed them. Some things weren’t for him to know. That was a prerogative of rank. What he did mind was his suspicion that the whole thing hadn’t been properly thought through. It all had the air of having been worked out on the back of an envelope. To begin with, having made the elementary mistake of confusing him with the other Paul Ross, one had to wonder what else they had got wrong. After all, he was carrying a sealed order requesting the Legion to act against the Bolsheviks. Bad enough to be caught with that at any time, he would have thought. But the country hadn’t been at war with the Bolsheviks when the plan had been devised; Intervention in Murmansk and the proposed landing at Archangel had changed that. Now they were at war and if he was caught he supposed he would be shot. That alone seemed to epitomise the back-of-an-envelope air of the whole scheme. No allowance made for a changed circumstance (why weren’t they thinking on their feet?) and too many suppositions made. If Paul’s time in the army had taught him anything, it was how the vague suppositions of military men, repeated often enough, had the capacity of firming up into what were seen as hardened facts. Given what he’d witnessed, he saw no reason to suspect that the same didn’t hold true for spymasters.

Wrapped in his greatcoat he moved to the bow once the dark outline of Yarmouth had disappeared. The coast, somewhere to port as they steamed north, was lost in the twilight. Now and then he saw a light, a farmhouse or some other building he supposed. Despite there not being much of a sea running, judging by the speed at which these lights passed, the steamer didn’t seem to be making much headway.

A crewman told him a meal was to be served in the dining room but that there’d be no formal dinner until the following evening, after they left Hull. The captain would join them then. That suited Paul. The fewer people he met the better. Cumming had told him to keep his head down and that’s what he planned to do.

Pinker was still fussing with his luggage in the cabin. It had occurred to Paul that Pinker might actually be Hart. Even though the man said he was a commercial traveller and looked like Paul’s idea of a commercial traveller, not a secret agent. He was rather thin, balding and wearing a moustache, perhaps to compensate. His face had the colour of early primroses which, nice enough on the flowers, seemed to Paul too yellow on skin to look healthy. Not yet too old for conscription, Paul suspected Pinker’s jaundiced complexion and hollow-chest had kept him out of the army. Without entirely abandoning the thought that Pinker could be Hart, Paul decided it best to let the man broach the subject first. If he wasn’t , then whether Pinker fitted Cumming’s criteria as someone ‘to watch’ was altogether a different matter.

‘Harold Filbert,’ Paul said awkwardly as he had neglected to introduce himself earlier.

Pinker, volunteering for the top bunk and having finally finished putting away his gear, dropped onto the lower and pulled a sample of his wares from a box beneath it. Paul took the chair and examined the boot Pinker gave him.

He was from Northampton. ‘The home of good boots’. His company, convinced of an imminent German defeat, had despatched him to take advantage of the countless subjugated Teutons who would be in need of good boots.

‘The Hun’s finished,’ Pinker insisted, ‘but following up behind the army’s no good. You have to be on the spot. Have your operation up and running before anyone else. That’s where we’re one step ahead of our competition.’

Pinker’s plan — or his company’s, to be exact — was to be based on the Danish-German border in the region of Schleswig-Holstein, from where they would be able to sell to a captive — or at least conquered — market. Paul had never been one to dampen another’s enthusiasm, but he did wonder why Pinker expected the Germans to buy English boots rather than those of German manufacture if they needed them.

‘They won’t have any choice, will they?’ Pinker argued. ‘It’s common knowledge that an obligation to buy British goods will be part of any terms of surrender.’

‘Will it?’

‘Stands to reason. Besides, there’s the quality. He might be the “beastly Hun” and all that, but no one has ever suggested that your average German on the Clapham omnibus, so to speak, doesn’t know a decent boot when he sees one.’

Paul didn’t know. The only Germans he had ever encountered hadn’t been on omnibuses going to Clapham or anywhere else. But something was worrying Pinker. A series of furrows creased his balding forehead.

‘Never been there, that’s the only thing. Learned a bit of German but it’s not the sort of thing a man can go around practising at the minute.’

‘No,’ Paul said. ‘I suppose not.’

‘Have you been there by any chance? Schleswig-Holstein, I mean?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

The only thing Paul recalled about Schleswig-Holstein was that the last century it had been the centre of some infernally complicated political question or other. There had been a remark of Palmerston’s he remembered from school that said of the three people who did understand the Schleswig-Holstein question, one was dead, one had gone mad, and the other… well, he didn’t remember that bit. He knew where Schleswig-Holstein was, being to the south of Denmark, but he had never been there. The closest he had ever got was hundreds of miles away, in the mud they’d called Passchendael and, given what had happened to him there, he wouldn’t want to get much closer.

‘Pity,’ Pinker said. ‘But if a man wants to advance himself he goes where his company sends him, doesn’t he though? And jolly lucky to get a berth, by all accounts. This service has been suspended since the beginning of the war. My office has been trying to get a toe into Denmark for two years. Don’t mind telling you it was all a bit of a rush when we got the nod about this sailing. General opinion was nothing would start up again till after the war. The fact is, old chap, up to now a man couldn’t get permission to travel to the continent for love or money if he wasn’t in uniform.’