The Conduct of Major Maxim

Chapter 15

The doctor had been and gone by the time Maxim reached the little cottage on the hillside above Caswell's father-in-law's garage. Maxim suspected that the cottage belonged to the old man, too, and went with the job. He wondered how long Jim would stand that.

"Said he's doing very well," Caswell reported. "Gave him some more shots, his temperature's well down. Told me to keep himstill for a couple of days. "

"Is he awake now?"

"Yes, he's listening to the radio. I'll shift the telly in there for him tomorrow, that might keep him quiet."

"Has he heard about the one in the hospital?"

"Yes. It doesn't seem to bother him."

"Well…" But did they want it to bother him? Blagg's touching faith that Maxim would save him from murder charges in two countries might at least mean that he would stay where he was and do nothing – for once. Caswell led the way.

Blagg was lying flat on his back but bulging out of a small single bed that itself crowded the tiny room. It was all very cottagey, the uneven walls papered with a tiny flower pattern and all filled with an odd green light reflected in from the hillside that sloped up just outside the window. Blagg pulled out the radio earpiece and struggled to sit up.

"Lie still, you stupid little man!" Caswell thundered, all sergeant again. Blagg relaxed sheepishly.

For a couple of minutes they made sickbed small talk while Maxim tried to decide just how Blagg was. The right side of his face was a mass of scratches, there was a sticking plaster on his ear, and his chest was heavily bandaged, but even in that sickly light he seemed bright-eyed and calm. Best of all, hewas talking long sentences without a hint of breathlessness. Maxim was fit enough himself but, he thought wistfully, there's no medicine like being only twenty-five.

"Is this the first time you've copped one?" he asked.

"Nah, I got one in Armagh. Smack in the arse, but it was probably just about spent. Bloody funny that was, for everybody else. Have you, sir?"

"Years back, out in the Gulf." Maxim touched the outside of his right thigh; through the thin cotton trousers he could trace the hardedged crater that had come close to killing him, out in the desert hours from real medical aid. Instead, it had only taken away six months of his life – at a critical point that just might have foreclosed on his promotion hopes. If, of course, he still had any. Well, as they said, why didy oujoin the Army if you can't take a joke?

"One thing," Blagg said; "I'm lucky I don't smoke." He grinned slyly at Caswell, who had already twice taken out and then put away his cigarettes.

"Right, then," Maxim called the meeting to order. "I've talked to Six, and somebody in the Foreign Office. I'm sorry it took all this to get them out into the open – as far as they've come. They've said they'll do what they can for you, and I believe them. That wound might help with some fairy story… But you've got to tell me everything now. You hadn't remembered you had that gun, last time. "

"Lucky I had, though, wasn't it?" Blagg said aggressively. "Who was they, those two at Dave's place?"

"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…"

"There was a growing need for marriage lines. "

He looked puzzled.

"Oh, for heaven's sake. The girl was in the club, knocked up, a bun in the oven – 'ow's yer father?"

George stiffened into the Compleat Civil Servant. "If you intend me to infer that she was pregnant, then for the life of me I can see no reason why you don't actually say so. I don't find all two-syllable words either incomprehensible or, when comprehended, necessarily shocking."

"She was pregnant," Agnes said, staring at the low coffee-table, not at George. "And marriage itself might have been a useful bit of insurance for Gustav: herrelatives or guardians would have been less likely to inform on her husband than on some passing stranger who could get his trousers open in Olympic time."

"Is there something," George asked icily, "about the atmosphere of this place that causes you to come up with suchexpressions? If so, we can easily adjourn to Fred's Caff in Brixton where you might react by trying to speak the Queen's English."

Agnes looked up. From over George's shoulder stared the portrait of a general whose handling of an attack in the South African war had caused so many casualties to his own brigade that he had immediately been promoted away to see if he could do the same thing with divisions and corps. In 1915 and '16 he had proved he hadn't lost his old touch, and so died in bed at a great age, garnished with colourful honours, many of them from grateful countries whose soldiers he hadn't got killed even on purpose. He was looking at Agnes with exactly the expression he would have chosen had he lived to see a woman in his club.

"It must be something about the place, " she agreed meekly. "Must try harder. Where were we?"

"Gustav wasjust getting married."

"Yes. That happened in May 1944. The boy, Manfred, was born in the October. "

George did mental arithmetic on his fingers. "That means around January… Gustavdidn't waste much time about…"

Agnes didn't say a word. She looked very much like somebody not saying a word.

"And the wife, Brigitte: when did she die, or was supposed to have died?"

"April 1945, just before the end of the war.Mina said Gustavsaid she'd been killed by Allied planes. She hadn't been around herself at the time and said Gustavdidn't like talking about it much. Fair enough, I suppose."

"Where did this happen?"

"She didn't say."

"Isn't that odd?"

"She wasn't hiding anything. If our people had asked her, she'd have had to answer. It was her applying for asylum, not us inviting her. But they can't have asked: why should they? They weren't interested in her war story, they'd heard a million war stories. They just wanted to know what was going on in East Germany there and then. She only mentionedone place after they'd gone underground and that was where Gustavgot married: Sangerhausen. In East Germany, now."

"So we can't get at the marriage certificate," George brooded. There was a burst of male laughter from the bar, which had suddenly filled up with men wearing MCC ties; the day's play at Lord's would have ended just about twenty minutes ago. The servant fought his way clear and delivered their drinks; George grunted, Agnes smiled and shifted carefully on the sofa. There was no way to be comfortable on it, and even movement was risky because the old leather was cracking like dry parchment.

"Mind you, " George said abruptly, "that certificate must be sheer balls because he'd have to use his roadname on it. Not Eismark at all."

Agnes sipped and shrugged. "They did the best they could in the circumstances. It showed willing."

"It also showed the baby was started before the marriage. Is there any leverage in that?"

"No, not even in the GDR. It wasn't adultery, he Did The Right Thing by a girl who had only months to live, Hitler's hounds baying at their heels… They weep over muck like that on their side, too. "

George nodded. "The baby was only five months, still in arms.-Why didn't he get killed, too?"

"A good question, and one widely asked in East Germany, I imagine. Manfred's a big boy now and a full colonel in the SSD. Old Gustavmay still have some old-time socialist ideals about the rights of man, but the general feeling is that Manfred would have done well on the faculty at Belsen. "

"So I'd heard. But anyway, that's all she had to say?"

"That's only onepage of what she said. There's at least another thirty about life in the GDR in the fifties, how they treat musicians, how she brought up baby Manfred while Gustav wasoff in Moscow learning to run a shipyard and getting booster shots of dialectical materialism. It read as if having to play auntie instead of Schumann first gave her the idea of coming over – Here's our hunter home from the hill. "

The junior hall porter was guiding Maxim through the crowd by the bar. George waved and Maxim was released tomake the last few yards by himself. He sat down beside Agnes, who said: "Don't wriggle or you'll collapse a hundred years of military history."

"How is he?" George demanded.

"Better than I expected. He's tough."

"And talkative, I trust?"

"I think I've got everything, at last. "

"What is it?"

"I didn't say I'd got anything, but -"

"Harry…"

"Let him say his piece," Agnes said.

"We know Blagg picked up the money and the car keys. Now he says he also took a batch of papers and a bit of film, negative film. He thought the papers were all death certificates or copies; he remembers a word like Sterbeurkunde-"

"Thatis death certificate," Agnes said.

"It was when I learned German, too. "

"Children, children," George said warningly. "Go on, Harry."

"About thirty or forty of them, all from April 1945. Seems a bit odd, but… All this was mixed up with the newspapers and the money. Something thatwasn't there was a magazine she'd asked him to get: a back copy of a thing called Focus on Germany. It's a sort of goodwill thing that Bonn puts out for the Allied forces; it doesn't outsell Playboy. He just pinched it from the Services Liaison Officer's files in Soltau. I've got the date."

"Fine, fine," George said. "But you've got all the rest?"

"No, it's--"

"For God's sake -"

"He left it with a woman in Germany."

After a time, Agnes said thoughtfully: "That boy's no fool, keeping a nice big ace in the hole in case Six won't play ball. No fool at all."

His mother abandoned him before he could crawl, " Maxim said. "He didn't quite grow up with a happy trusting nature like you and George."

'Quite," George said. "But is he prepared to trust you now?"

"I've got her name and address. "

"Good. Well, we give her to Six. It's all we can do, and perhaps we'll really finally be out of it."

"Hold on, " Agnes warned; she had been watching Maxim's expression. "Something tells me it isn't going to be that easy. "

Maxim flashed his quick defensive smile. "Blagg told her not to hand them over to anybody but himself or somebody with a letter from him. I've got the letter. It names me as the messenger boy."

There was a moment of silence, then George erupted. "Youarranged that. We had our chance to get Number 10clear of this whole… wholecatastrophe, but not you, no, you want a front seat for the opening night of Armageddon, you do…"

"I didn't arrange it, but I didn't dodge it," Maxim said doggedly. "Blagg just doesn't trust Six any more. They screwed him at least once and he knows it. And so do you. "

A member, passing with both hands full of glasses, stopped suddenly. "George! We hardly ever see you. Do tell, how's the Prime Ministerreally?"

"Dead, if he's got any sense," George snapped.

The member stiffened, then edged away in a fading mumble: "Well, I suppose things must be rather trying for you, what with…"

George's short tempers were at least short. Suddenly he was Organisation Man, and Agnes could see why politicans liked having him around. "All right, you be in Germany tomorrow some time. You'll need some money. I'll ask Sir Bruce to send a signal to Rhine Army and then you tell him what you want: a room somewhere, I'll leave that to you. Don't go armed, for God's sake. And I'll have to tell Six. They'll probably get somebody to contact you over there and you just hand over the material and come quietly home without blowing any bridges behind you. If you think you can manage that, we'll get over to Number 10and start the wheels turning. "