The Elegant Lie

…

That evening Carter was lying spread-eagled on his bed in room 201 of the Hotel Europa.

The mattress was so soft, and he was so unused to being comfortable when he lay down, that he wondered if he would end up sleeping on the floor that night.

He closed his eyes and listened to the rumble of cars out in the street, the soft clang of the elevator’s bell as it moved from floor to floor and the clatter of the metal cage door as the elevator attendant opened it to let people in or out. And then there was the creaking of the carpeted floorboards as guests passed by his room.

Although he had no trouble identifying every sound, they seemed so distant in his memory that it was almost as if they had been borrowed from someone else’s recollections. They had been overlaid by the sounds of the Langsdorf◦– the jangle of keys, the slamming of metal doors, the rustle of water in pipes. But more than anything else, it was the silence of the prison that had settled like a suffocating weight upon his chest, stifling the voices of the convicts, who never raised their voices without punishment. Out here in the world, the silence existed only in between the noises that made things normal. But in the jail, it was the silence that ruled over everything else, so that the noises became little more than punctuation in the terrible language of stillness.

Carter heard the floorboards creak outside his room. And then he heard them stop. He sat upright, no longer drowsy from the wandering of his thoughts.

There was a sharp knock on the door.

He waited, thinking maybe they would go away.

But the knocking came again.

‘Who is it?’ he asked.

‘Room service!’ was the muffled reply.

Carter slipped off the bed and went to the door. He opened it slightly, keeping the guard chain on and standing to one side, knowing that if someone tried to kick the door in, the chain would be of little help in stopping them. A man stood with a tray balanced on one hand. He was wearing a short, white jacket and a pillbox hat. The contents of the tray were covered with a silver metal dome, which also obscured his face.

‘I didn’t order any room service,’ said Carter.

‘Oh yes you damned well did,’ said the man and, as he spoke, he shifted the tray so that Carter could see his face.

He was clean-shaven and sallow-looking, with thinning brown hair which was turning grey around the temples. Carter immediately recognised his control officer, Marcus Wilby.

‘Hold on a second,’ said Carter. He closed the door for a moment, undid the guard chain and then opened the door again, swinging it wide so that the man could pass through.

As soon as the door was shut again, Wilby thumped the tray down on a desk by the window, whipped off the pillbox cap and tossed it away into a corner of the room. ‘Damn,’ he muttered. ‘I bet I get fleas from that thing!’

‘Hello, Captain,’ said Carter.

‘It’s Major now,’ he replied, unbuttoning the white coat, ‘and I heard Dasch offered you a job.’

‘He did.’

Wilby paused. ‘What kind of a job?’

‘He wants me to use my contacts at the American military bases, so that he can start buying stolen goods from them directly. Except I don’t have any contacts.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Wilby. ‘We can take care of it. Just tell him you can get whatever he wants, then stall him for a couple of days. It might take me a while to set things up.’

‘And if I need to reach you?’

‘Use the standard protocols, the same as you’d have done with Eckberg.’ Wilby flopped down into a wing-backed chair by the window, subsiding into the upholstery as if his bones were dissolving inside him.

‘Why did you pull him?’

‘Security concerns,’ replied Wilby. ‘Nothing you need to worry about.’

‘Why don’t you tell me what’s going on and let me decide if I need to worry or not?’

Wilby paused. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘A few days ago, we lost somebody who worked at the embassy in Bonn.’

‘An agent?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Wilby, ‘but I did have her working on some agency business, and I think that might have got her killed.’

‘So who was she? What was she doing?’

‘I got to know her when I was stationed in Berlin, right after the end of the war. All of us who worked for the CIA, or Strategic Services, as it was known back then, were quartered at what they called the Joe House on Promenadenstrasse. It was like a cross between a country club and a boarding school, and for all I know it may have been one of those things before we took it over. It was one of the only places in the city where you could get a decent meal and sleep in clean sheets. We were all lumped in there together, trying to figure out how to deal with the Russians, who were way ahead of us in almost every aspect of intelligence gathering. We knew that Soviet agents had penetrated British intelligence and that these agents had recruited people who were already working at MI5 and MI6. It became so bad that we hesitated to share information with the British, knowing it would be funnelled directly to the Russians. As a countermeasure to this happening in our own offices, we began placing agents in low-level but important positions at various stations around Europe. These agents had instructions to let slip comments which might make any potential recruiter for the Soviets believe that they had found a suitable candidate.’

‘What kind of comments?’ asked Carter.

‘Just little things,’ replied Wilby. ‘A mention here or there expressing admiration for the Russians. Music. Writers. Food. Nothing too obvious.’

‘But if you place an agent whose job is to catch Russian spies, how do you make sure that the spy isn’t told about the operation?’

‘Exactly,’ answered Wilby. ‘And the answer is, you don’t tell them. You don’t tell anyone at all. I put her in play at the Bonn station two months ago. I gave her a bottom-rung job as an archivist at the embassy. She wasn’t even directly attached to the CIA branch.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Nothing, at first,’ replied Wilby, ‘but about two weeks ago, she informed me that she had been approached by someone she thought might be trying to recruit her.’

‘And you knew this person?’

‘No, and neither did she. It came in the form of a letter, which somebody left on her desk. It said it was from someone who shared her views and who wanted to meet to discuss them.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I told her to go to the meeting,’ said Wilby. ‘It was due to take place in the Poll district, just across the river from here. I was going to be there to make sure everything went smoothly. Then, at the last minute, her contact moved the time up. She left me a message but, by the time I received it, it was too late. When I got there, she had already been and gone.’

‘Was she able to identify the person?’ asked Carter.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Wilby. ‘She washed up in the reeds two days later.’

‘I just read about that in the paper,’ said Carter. ‘They said it was a suicide.’

‘I’ll be damned if it was,’ replied Wilby, ‘although I can’t prove it, of course.’

‘So what you’re telling me,’ he said, ‘is that Bonn station has been compromised?’

Wilby sat forward and touched his fingertips together. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. It might be nothing. Maybe she did kill herself.’

‘You just said—’

‘I said I don’t know!’ Wilby raised his voice.

‘But you think Eckberg might be leaking information?’

‘Not deliberately. Not him. But he’s not ready for this. You could see that for yourself. The problem is, they’re sending us people straight out of college who don’t have any real world experience, let alone field craft. To them, the whole world is a Norman Rockwell painting. If there is someone working for the Russians at Bonn station, Eckberg is exactly the kind of person they’ll go after. That’s why I took him out of the loop◦– I stopped any problems before they could start.’

‘Who else knows about me?’ asked Carter.

‘Aside from Eckberg, just the station chief, Colonel Babcock. And now that Eckberg is out of the picture, it’s just Babcock and me. I’m keeping everything as tight as possible for now. The fewer links between you and me, the less chance there is of compromise. Surely you can see the sense in that.’

‘It will do for a start,’ replied Carter, ‘and next maybe you can explain why Dasch had me standing in front of him within an hour of my getting out of Langsdorf.’

‘I admit, there is plenty that we still need to learn about him.’

‘Including un-learning some of what you thought you knew.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Wilby.

‘You told me he wasn’t violent.’

‘Dasch? He isn’t, at least according to his profile.’

‘Well, this morning, while he was giving me his version of a job interview, I had a gun stuck in my face by the gorilla that follows him around. He said his name was Ritter.’

‘What did this man look like?’

‘Medium height. Thinning hair. Wearing a suit. He had a military bearing. Looked like he could take a lot of punishment.’

‘That’s Ritter, all right. Anton Ritter. He spent a couple of years on the Russian front. Stay clear of him if you can, and from Dasch’s daughter, as well.’

‘Teresa?’

‘So you’ve met.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘She’s smarter than her father. Things that Dasch himself might put up with from you simply because you’re an American are not going to fly with Teresa.’

‘She made that perfectly clear,’ said Carter, ‘and Dasch himself was pretty clear that he would have ordered me killed if I had failed his little interview.’

‘I’m sure he wouldn’t have gone through with it,’ said Wilby. ‘You’re still here, after all.’

‘Listen to the words you are saying,’ Carter murmured through clenched teeth. ‘I didn’t spend the last year of my life in prison for a crime that I not only did not commit, but that never even happened in the first place, just so I could get my brains blown out on the first day I get out of my cage, and all because you got your profile on him wrong.’

‘There are always risks,’ said Wilby. ‘You knew that going into this.’

‘But there are different kinds of risk,’ said Carter. ‘There are the risks you take, and then there are the risks I take. You and I both know those risks are not the same.’

‘You have every right to be concerned,’ Wilby tried to reassure him, ‘but don’t lose sight of how much is at stake here. If you succeed, we will have brought down one of the most profitable black market operations in this country.’

Dasch’s success had been astonishing, especially since he seemed to have begun with almost nothing, appearing out of nowhere just after the end of the war, driving a truck with which he began delivering goods around the city of Cologne. But not just any goods. From sources no one had ever been able to trace, Dasch had access to wine, champagne, cigars, canned fruits, vegetables and meat, as well as jams and chocolate. No one had seen anything like this in years. Even when such luxuries had been available, the prices were so astronomical that almost nobody could afford them, but Dasch had immediately grasped exactly what the market could bear. He began selling them off to restaurants, private clubs and a selection of diplomats, high-ranking officers and the wealthiest of them all◦– civilians who had secured contracts for the rebuilding of German railways, sewage plants, electrical power grids and telephone networks. The fact that almost all of his customers were either members of the Allied nations or those who catered to them meant that all attempts to investigate him somehow faltered when important documents were lost, or when Dasch would be tipped off about a raid. Added to this was the foregone conclusion that, in the years immediately after the war, when corruption in both civilian and military circles had reached epidemic proportions, any goods confiscated during one of these raids would wind up being consumed, and possible resold, by the same people who had ordered the investigation. The result of this was that no one seemed in a hurry to track down the source of Dasch’s wealth, especially since, by keeping prices down, he was making them available to those who had never been able to buy them in the past, war or no war.

If Dasch had been dealing in guns or stolen works of art, all bets would have been off, but he kept his inventory limited to those things that might be overlooked from time to time, even by those for whom austerity had become like a second religion.

Roughly 60 per cent of Dasch’s business was entirely above board: delivering construction supplies for the rebuilding of Cologne, transporting drinking water to areas of the city where plumbing had not yet been restored, even shuttling children to school. It was that remaining 40 per cent which fuelled Wilby’s obsession with Dasch.

And Wilby was not just a man. He was a sign of changing times. As the time drew closer when the zones of occupation would be dissolved and Germany◦– the western part of it anyway◦– would be allowed once more to govern itself, the Allied governments began to crack down on the kinds of crimes that might previously have been ignored. The reason for this was that most of those crimes, specifically prostitution, gambling and the selling of black market goods, had served as pressure valves for occupation troops. With those days coming to an end, the French, British and Americans became concerned that the fledgling German government would not be able to cope with such levels of crime and might collapse as a result, even before it had been able to prove the worth of its existence.

Even more troubling to men like Wilby was the chance that Russia might find ways to exploit this marketplace of necessary evils in the western zones of occupation, as they had already done with medical supplies such as morphine and penicillin. Wilby knew how real a threat that was, because his own side had been doing it for years inside the Russian zone. For that reason, more than any other, war had been declared on Hanno Dasch.

‘Do you know any more about him than you did before I went away?’ asked Carter.

‘Only that he’s still in business, which is close to miraculous. Almost every other player has been rounded up, or fled the country or got themselves killed in some internal dispute. But Dasch is still out there, which tells me he’s got contacts at very high levels. Customs. Law enforcement. Transport. Border police. Diplomats. He has to contend with all of these in order to maintain his supply chain, and yet we can’t find anyone in any of those circles who knows how he operates, at least anyone who will talk. Usually, the way we break into these organisations is by chipping away around the edges. We get hold of one low-level contact and persuade him to give us what little he knows. Then we move on to the next one, moving up the chain until we can finally break into the inner circles where the real business is getting done. But none of that has worked. The only way we’re going to make any progress with this guy is by going straight to the source. If you ask me, Dasch is the most accomplished criminal to appear since the end of the war, and there has been no shortage of contenders. If he was working for us, he’d probably be my boss right now.’

‘So what exactly do you want from me?’ asked Carter.

‘Specifically, we have got to know how he is moving his black market products from one place to another, where he’s storing them and who is supplying him. If you can get him to trust you, sooner or later you’re going to start seeing some clues as to how he operates. There’s no way he can keep that big a secret to himself. Judging from what he sells, he has contacts all over the continent◦– wine from France, chocolate from Belgium, cans of meat from Denmark, jars of fruit from Italy, Turkish cigarettes◦– and it’s all best quality stuff. If you can just find us one piece of that puzzle, we can begin putting the whole picture together; but right now, in spite of all the times the British occupation police have raided his premises or searched his vehicles for contraband, we have come up with nothing at all. We’re all relying on you,’ said Wilby. ‘Frankly, I don’t think there is anyone else who could pull this off. For that, you have my utmost respect.’

‘I don’t need your respect,’ said Carter. ‘I just need you to keep me alive.’

‘Then you can start by trusting me, because I’m one of the only people on this earth who knows you aren’t actually a criminal. And I’m the only one who can give you back your life◦– which I will, just as I promised, as long as you hold up your end of the bargain.’

‘It was never a bargain. It was blackmail.’

‘Call it whatever you want.’ As Wilby spoke, he lifted the metal dome of the food tray he had brought, revealing a half-eaten meal that he had picked up outside the room of another guest on his way up the back stairs. He pinched a piece of roast potato between his thumb and index finger and popped it in his mouth. ‘Nice place you got here,’ he said. ‘You’d best enjoy it while you can.’ Then he slipped out into the hall and closed the door quietly behind him.

Carter listened to the creak of Wilby’s footsteps fading away down the carpeted hallway. Then he lay back down, exhausted but unable to sleep. After a few minutes, he climbed off the bed, stretched out on the floor and closed his eyes.

The final thought to pass through his head before unconsciousness washed over him was how he could not have predicted, never in a million years, that his life would have turned out like this.