The Tenth Man

3

A SECOND CRISIS-NEEDING MORE DELICATE HANDLING THAN Stott’s-blows up. The threat of European war is deepening and London considers that Tripp’s position in Latesthia is a key one. He must have a proper staff: Singer Sewing Machines are persuaded in the interests of the nation to build up their agency in Latesthia and they inform Tripp that they are sending out to him a secretary-typist and a clerk. Tripp is innocently delighted that his work for Singer has borne such fruit and that sewing machines are booming. He is less pleased, however, when the clerk and typist arrive and prove to be members of the Secret Service sent to assist him in handling his now complicated network of agents.

The clerk is a young man with a penetrating cockney accent and an enormous capacity for hero worship and heroine worship. His devotion is equally aroused by what he considers the experience and daring of Tripp and by the legs and breasts of Tripp’s wife. His name is Cobb, and he has an annoying habit of asking questions. He says himself, “You don’t have to bother to explain things, Chief. Just let me dig in and ask questions, and I’ll get the hang of things for myself.”

The typist-Miss Jixon-is a withered spinster of forty-four who regards everyone and everything with suspicion. She believes that even the most innocent labourer is in the pay of the secret police, and she is shocked by the inadequacy of the security arrangements in the office. She insists on all blotting paper being locked in the safe and all typewriter ribbons being removed at night. This is highly inconvenient as no one is very good at fixing typewriter ribbons. Once she finds a used ribbon thrown in the wastepaper basket instead of being burned in the incinerator and she begins to demonstrate the danger of the practice by deciphering the impress on the ribbon. All she can make out is “Red lips were ne’er so red nor eyes so pure,” which turns out to be a line of a sonnet written by Cobb-obviously with Mrs. Tripp in mind.

“He’s really rather sweet,” Mrs. Tripp says. The chief problem that Tripp has to solve is how to disguise the fact that he has no sources for his reports. He finds this unexpectedly easy. He goes shopping and returns with envelopes that have been handed to him, he says, from under the counter; he makes a great show of testing perfectly innocent letters about sewing machines for secret inks; he takes Cobb for a round of the town and now and then in the restaurants points out his agents.

“A very discreet man. You’ll see he won’t show the least flicker of recognition.”

The monthly payments to agents present a difficulty: Miss Jixon objects strongly to the payments being made by himself.

“It’s irregular, insecure: HQ would never countenance it.”

By this time, for the sake of his assistants, he has drawn up an impressive chart of his sources, with the immediate head agents who control each gang. Miss Jixon insists that from now on he shall cut off his personal contacts with all but his head agents (of whom the cinema actress is one) and that he should meet them on every occasion in a different disguise.

Disguises become the bane of Tripp’s life. What makes it worse, of course, is that his wife knows nothing. Miss Jixon shows a horrible ingenuity: Tripp’s makeup box for the operatic productions of the Anglo-Latesthian Society is requisitioned. He finds himself being forced to slip out of back doors in red wigs and return by front doors in black wigs. She makes him carry at least two soft hats of varying colors in his overcoat pockets, so that he can change hats. Spectacles, horn-rimmed and steel-rimmed, bulge his breast pockets.

The strain tells. He becomes irritable and Mrs. Tripp is reduced to tears. Cobb is torn between hero worship and heroine worship.