Yesterday's Spy

Chapter 7

‘You’d sooner live in a dump than live in a nice home,’ said Schlegel accusingly.

‘No,’ I said, but without much conviction. I didn’t want to argue with him.

He opened the shutters so that he could see the charcuterie across the alley. The tiny shop-window was crammed with everything from shredded carrot to pig feet. Schlegel shuddered. ‘Yes, you would,’ he insisted. ‘Remember that fleapit you used to have in Soho. Look at that time we booked you into the St Regis, and you went into a cold-water walk-up in the Village. You like dumps!’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘If this place had some kind of charm, I’d understand. But it’s just a flophouse.’ For a long time he was silent. I walked across to the window and discovered that he was staring into the first-floor window across the alley. A fat woman in a frayed dressing-gown was using a sewing machine. She looked up at Schlegel, and when he did not look away she closed her shutters. Schlegel turned and looked round the room. I’d put asters, souci and cornflowers into a chipped tumbler from the washbasin. Schlegel flicked a finger at them and the petals fell. He went over to the tiny writing table that wobbled unless something was wedged under one leg. My Sony radio-recorder almost toppled as Schlegel tested the table for stability. I had turned the volume down as Schlegel had entered, but now the soft sounds of Helen Ward, and Goodman’s big band, tried to get out. Schlegel pushed the ‘off’ button, and the music ended with a loud click. ‘That phone work?’ he asked.

‘It did this morning.’

‘Can I give you a word of advice, fella?’

‘I wish you would,’ I told him.

For a moment I thought I’d offended him, but you don’t avoid Schlegel’s advice that easily. ‘Don’t stay in places like this, pal. I mean … sure, you save a few bucks when you hit the cashier’s office for the price of a hotel. But jeeze … is it worth it?’

‘I’m not hitting the cashier’s office for the price of anything more than I’m spending.’

His face twisted in a scowl as he tried to believe me. And then understanding dawned. ‘You came in here, in the sub, in the war. Right? I remember now: Villefranche — it’s a deep-water anchorage. Yeah. Sure. Me too. I came here once … a long time ago on a flat-top, with the Sixth Fleet. Nostalgia, eh?’

‘This is where I first met Champion.’

‘And the old doll downstairs.’ He nodded to himself. ‘She’s got to be a hundred years old … she was the radio operator … the Princess! Right?’

‘We just used this as a safe-house for people passing through.’

‘It’s a brothel!’ Schlegel accused.

‘Well, I don’t mind that so much,’ I told him. ‘The baker next door waves every morning when I leave. This morning, he winked.’

‘Wouldn’t you rather be in a hotel?’

‘Well, I’m going to ask the Princess if the girls could be a little quieter with the doors.’

‘Banging all night?’ said Schlegel archly.

‘Exactly,’ I said.

‘A cat house,’ mused Schlegel. ‘A natural for an escape chain. But the Nazis had them high on the check-out list.’

‘Well, we won the war,’ I said sharply. Schlegel would get in there, checking out the syntax of my dreams, if he knew the way.

‘I’ll call Paris,’ he said.

‘I’d better tell the Princess.’

‘Do we have to?’

‘We have to,’ I said. ‘Unless you want her interrupting you to tell you how much it’s costing, while you’re talking to the Elysée Palace.’

Schlegel scowled to let me know that sarcasm wasn’t going to help me find out who he was phoning. ‘Extension downstairs, huh?’

I went to the door and yelled down to the bar, at which the Princess was propped with Salut les Copains and a big Johnny Walker. ‘I’m calling Paris,’ I shouted.

‘You called Paris already today, chéri,’ she said.

‘And now we’re calling again, you old bag,’ growled Schlegel, but he took good care to keep his voice down. Already she’d made him apologize to one of the bar girls for saying goddamn.

‘That’s right,’ I told her.

‘Just as long as you don’t forget the money you’re spending, my darling.’

‘Darleeeng,’ growled Schlegel. ‘Will you believe that’s the first hearing-aid I’ve seen with sequins on it?’

He picked up his plastic case, put it on the bed and opened it. At first glance it might have been mistaken for a portable typewriter, permanently built into its case. It was the newest model of acoustic coupler. Schlegel began typing on the keys.

I said, ‘Anything fresh on the girl? Body been found, or anything?’

Schlegel looked up at me, sucked his teeth and said, ‘I’ll ask them what Missing Persons knows.’ When Schlegel finished typing his message he dialled the Paris number. He gave his real name. I suppose that was to save all the complications that would arise if he was phoning from a hotel that held his passport. Then he said, ‘Let’s scramble,’ and put the phone handpiece into the cradle switch inside the case. He pressed the ‘transmit’ button and the coupler put a coded version of what he’d typed through the phone cables at thirty or forty characters a second. There was a short delay, then the reply came back from the same sort of machine. This time Schlegel’s coupler decoded it and printed it on to tape in ‘plain English’. Schlegel read it, grunted, pushed the ‘memory erase’ button and rang off.

‘You ask those guys the time, and they’d tell you what trouble they’re having from the Records Office,’ he said. He burned the tape without showing it to me. It was exactly the way the textbook ordered but it didn’t make me want to open my heart to him about Champion’s version of the girl’s death.

But I told him everything Champion had said.

‘He’s right,’ said Schlegel. ‘He knows we wouldn’t be pussyfooting around if we had the evidence. Even if he enters the UK I doubt whether the department would let us hold him.’

‘He must have killed the girl,’ I said, with some hesitation.

‘He didn’t collect that shiner by walking into a lamppost.’

I nodded. Champion’s bruised face was just the sort of blow he might have suffered while overpowering the girl. And the two scratches on his cheek were just like the damage to the wallpaper near the bed. No matter how much I tried to push the idea away, Champion’s guilt bobbed up again like a plastic duck.

‘You tell me Champion was some kind of master spy,’ Schlegel said. ‘Well, I’m telling you he’s a loser. So far he’s fouled up every which way, so I’m not joining the fan club. Champion is a creep, an over-confident creep, and if he steps out of line we’ll clobber him, but good!’

‘That’s the way it looks,’ I agreed.

‘You’re telling me it’s all a set-up?’

I shrugged. ‘That’s one of the new couplers, is it?’

Schlegel stroked the metal case that was intended to make it look like a cheap typewriter. ‘I can plug that baby into any computer with terminals. Last week I used the CIA TELCOM from a call-box, and tomorrow I’ll abstract from the London Data Bank.’

‘London will ring you back?’

‘But not here. Not secure enough. That old doll downstairs … no, I’ll have to get going.’

‘Meet her,’ I said. ‘Otherwise I’ll get endless questions.’

‘One drink,’ he said.

‘You could be right … about Champion, I mean. People change.’

We picked our way down the narrow creaking staircase before the time-switch plopped. I opened the door marked ‘No Entry’ and went through it into the bar.

Through the bead curtain I could see a patch of sunlight on the scaly brickwork of the alley. But inside, the room was as dark as night. An ornate table-lamp at one end of the bar made a golden spot on each of the bottles lined up behind the counter, and gave just enough light for the Princess to see the cash register.

‘Come and sit here, Charlie darling,’ she said, but her eyes were fixed on Colonel Schlegel. Obediently, I took the bar stool she indicated. Schlegel sat down, too. I put my arm round the Princess and gave her rouged and powdered cheek a circumspect kiss.

‘Rapist!’ said the Princess.

A girl appeared from out of nowhere and put her hands on the counter to show us how willing she was to serve expensive drinks.

‘Underberg,’ said Schlegel, ‘and soda.’

‘And Charlie will have Scotch,’ said the Princess. ‘So will I.’

The girl served the drinks and, without discussing the subject, put it all on my bill. Schlegel had the coupler at his feet and I noticed the way he kept his shoe pressed against it to be sure it was not removed.

‘Does your friend know that you were here in the war, Charlie?’

‘Yes, he knows,’ I said.

‘What war was that, Charlie?’ said Schlegel.

The Princess pretended not to hear Schlegel. She craned her neck to look in the fly-specked mirror behind the bar, so that she could make adjustments to her rouge and eye make-up.

‘We had good times, didn’t we, Charlie? We had good times as well as bad ones.’ She turned to face us again. ‘I can remember nights when we sat along this bar counter, with the German sentries walking along the sea-front there. Guns in my cellar and the wireless set in a wine barrel. My God! When I think of the risks we took.’

‘You knew this guy Champion then?’ Schlegel asked her.

‘And I liked him. I still do like him, although I haven’t seen him for years. A gentleman of the old sort.’ She looked at Schlegel as he swilled down his Underberg and then crunched the ice-cubes in his teeth. ‘If you know what I mean,’ she added.

‘Yeah, well, there’s a lot of definitions,’ said Schlegel affably, ‘and most of them are obscene. So you liked him, eh?’

‘Well, at least he didn’t betray us,’ said the Princess.

‘Did anyone?’ I said.

‘That filthy little Claude betrayed us,’ said the Princess.

‘Claude l’avocat? I saw him only yesterday.’

‘Here? The little swine is here?’ shouted the Princess angrily. ‘He’ll get killed if he comes here to Villefranche.’ She clasped her beads and twisted them against her neck, staring at me as if angry that I didn’t understand. ‘If only I’d kept the newspaper clipping.’

‘About Claude?’

‘He got a medal — an iron cross or something — he was working for the German police all the time. His real name is Claude Winkler, or some name like that. His mother was French, they say. He betrayed Marius and old Madame Baroni and poor Steve Champion, too.’

I drank my whisky. ‘All that time and he was working for the Abwehr.’

‘The Abwehr — how could I forget that word,’ said the Princess.

‘And they let us go on functioning,’ I said. ‘That was cunning.’

‘Yes, if they’d arrested us all, others would have replaced us. It was clever of them to let us continue.’

‘So Claude was a German,’ I said. ‘When I think of all those months …’

‘And the RAF escape-route,’ said the Princess. ‘They let that continue, too.’

I nodded. ‘As long as the flyers came through here, London would be convinced that all was well.’

‘I would kill him,’ said the Princess. ‘If he came in this bar now, I’d kill him.’

‘Claude Winkler,’ said Schlegel, as the Princess got up from the bar stool in order to pour more drinks for us. ‘Do you know what he does now?’

‘Yes,’ said the Princess. ‘He still works for the Boche Secret Police.’ She poured drinks for us. ‘The nerve of the man! To come back here again.’

I put my hand over my glass. She poured whisky for herself, and this time Schlegel too had whisky.

‘I’ll kill him if he comes in here,’ she said again. ‘People think I’m a silly old woman, but I’ll do it, I promise you.’

‘Claude l’avocat,’ I said. There were more tourists now, peering into the bars, reading the menus and looking at the crude daubs that the ‘artists’ sold on the waterfront. None of them came into this bar: it was a dump, just as Schlegel said. Fly-specked old bottles of watered-down cognac, and re-labelled champagne. Bar girls with fat legs and unseeing eyes. And upstairs, broken beds, dirty counterpanes and a ‘badger man’ who came in and shouted ‘That’s my wife!’ before even your pants were down.

‘So Claude betrayed us,’ I said.

‘Are you all right?’ said the Princess.

‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘You look like you are going to be sick,’ she said. If you work in a bar for thirty years, you develop a sharp eye for people who feel sick.