William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

On another: “Twen five thou coffins to Allouagne.”

And more of the same: ‘One mil five thou three oh three Aubers Ridge sector’; ‘Six field dressing stations villages behind Lens’; ‘Ammo railheads St Venant Lapugnoy first army Strazeele cavalry’; ‘Sixteen adv dressing stns Grenay Vermelles Cambrin Givenchy Beuvry’; ‘Fourteen trch mortar La Bassee canal’.

The list grew in astonishing, minute detail as he worked steadily through the close columns of numbers in the six letters. Assuming that the dates were recorded when these letters were intercepted, he reasoned, then this data would give a very intriguing picture of the focus of an impending attack. Artillery shells, small arms ammunition, food and rations, signalling equipment, field hospitals, pack animals, transportation — it seemed almost too random but anyone who knew what was involved in a ‘push’ would be able to read the signs and narrow the sector down with remarkably precise accuracy.

It was also clear to him that this information must have been generated far behind the lines — the scale and the quantities applied to armies and brigades, not regiments and battalions. Battalions drew their supplies from dumps that these movement orders fed. And even further away — there was mention of ten batteries of 18-pounder guns being shipped from Folkestone to Havre and then entrained for Abbeville; a loco shop was being established at Borre; a new forage depot at Mautort; summary of shunts at the Traffic Office, Abbeville; total of remounts sent from England to the First Army in May. Some of these facts and figures would be known to senior supply officers in France but the range and the scope of the knowledge displayed in the Glockner letters spoke instead — as far as Lysander’s ill-informed mind could determine — of a far greater overview of the whole movement and ordnance operation for the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. The writer of these coded letters wasn’t in General Sir John French’s high command in St Other, he reckoned, but safely at home in the War Office or the Ministry of Munitions in London.

He put his pen down and, with some unease, picked up the source text — Andromeda und Perseus . He turned to the title page, noting with some relief that this edition wasn’t the same as the one he had. It had been published in Dresden in 1912, a year before his trip to Vienna, and had the title and author as simple text on the cover with no illustration. He knew that the fatal Viennese performances of Toller’s opera were not its premiere, so he assumed that must have taken place in Dresden, whence this copy originated…

Malign coincidence? No, impossible. As obscure texts went, Andromeda und Perseus was about as recherché as you could find. But the more questions he asked himself about the conceivable provenance of this, the key text in the PLWL cipher, the more confused and troubled he became. Why this particular, forgotten opera? And how come he was the one to discover it? The unwelcome thought came to him that the only other person he knew who possessed a copy of this libretto was one Lysander Rief. And what did that imply?…

He decided that it was pointless speculating further. He had to return home and, with Munro and Fyfe-Miller, thoroughly analyse all the ramifications of this discovery. There was nothing much he could do on a Sunday afternoon in Geneva — the Hôtel des Postes closed at midday so he’d have to wait until tomorrow to telegraph Massinger in Thonon. It opened at 7. 00 in the morning — he would be there. He sealed his transcripts of the six letters in an envelope and wrote his name and the Claverleigh Hall address on the front. Best for the precise details to be kept out of everyone’s hands for the moment, he reckoned, at least until he had decided what to reveal — or not — about the key to the cipher.

He went out for a stroll in the late afternoon, thinking that perhaps he would have liked to have talked over the matter — discreetly — with Florence Duchesne but he realized that he didn’t know where she lived. Then again, perhaps it was best that she knew as little as possible.

He took a tram across the Arve River and disembarked at one of the entrances to the Bois de la Bâtre on the far bank from the city. He wandered into the thick woods and left the pathway to find a secluded spot — far from any picnickers or strolling families — and patiently burned Glockner’s copy of Andromeda und Perseus a page at a time. He kicked the small pile of frail ashes here and there, stamping them into the turf as though they might somehow be reconstituted and read once more. He was beginning to think that the crucial course of action was to keep the cipher text a secret that only he knew — he wasn’t quite sure why, but out of the jabber of questions and answers that raged in his mind an instinctive way forward seemed to be emerging. Make himself the only keeper of the secret — who knew, in that case, what others might inadvertently reveal? The minute he saw Massinger he would be asked for it — he was fully aware of that — still, he had plenty of time to concoct a plausible story.

He ate an omelette in a brasserie by the steamer jetties and checked the departure times of the express steamers that did a round trip of the lake in a day. He drank too much wine and found his previous clarity of purpose begin to cloud as he wandered the streets, as if suddenly cognizant of the fact that, this Sunday morning in Geneva, he had tortured a man and extracted information from him. What was happening to him? What kind of fiend was he becoming? But then he thought — was ‘torture’ the right word? He hadn’t bludgeoned Glockner’s head to a bloody pulp; he hadn’t mangled his genitalia, or torn out his fingernails. He had given him every warning, also, every chance to speak…But he was disturbed, as well, he had to confess — disturbed by his own swift ingenuity and resourcefulness. Maybe it was the very absence of blood — and of mucus, piss and shit — that made his own…he searched for the word — device — that made his device so distancing and therefore easier to live with. What he had done seemed more like an experiment in a chemistry laboratory than the wilful inflicting of pain on a fellow human being…But then another voice told him not to be so stupid and sensitive: he was under orders, on a mission and the knowledge he had gained by his clever, robust and admittedly brutal actions had been vital for the war effort and, conceivably, could save countless lives. Of course it could. He had been told in no uncertain terms — do your duty as a soldier — and he had.

The night porter at the Hôtel Touring sleepily and grudgingly opened the main door for him after midnight. Lysander went up to his room, feeling tired but sure he would be denied even a minute of sound sleep, such were the relentless churnings of his thoughts. They were added to, considerably, when he saw that a note had been pushed under his door. It was unaddressed but he tore it open, knowing who had sent it.

“Your brother Manfred is gravely ill. Leave for home at once. People are very concerned.”

It could only be Florence Duchesne. Manfred — how did she know about Glockner? And what was the significance of that underscored ‘concerned ‘?…He lay on his bed fully clothed, running through the possibilities for the following day — what he should try and do and what he absolutely had to do in his own best interests. He was still awake, waiting and thinking, as the sunrise began to lighten the curtains on his windows.

♦

At seven o’clock in the morning Lysander was third in the queue at the main door of the central post office on the Rue du Mont Blanc. It was a huge grand ornate building — more like a museum or a ministry of state than a post office — and when it opened he strode to a guichet in the vast vaulted vestibule and immediately sent a long telegram to Massinger in Thonon.