Part 6 (2/2)

A week later, when I took a discreet look at the Daisy at her berth in Blankenese; Bella was there again, wearing her shorts and scampering over the deck in her bare feet as if we were planning a Mediterranean cruise.

”For heaven's sake. We can't have girls aboard. London will go mad,” I told Brandt that night. ”So will the crew. You know how superst.i.tious they are about having women on the s.h.i.+p. You're the same yourself.”

He brushed me aside. My predecessor had raised no objection, he said. Why should I? ”Bella makes the boys happy,” he insisted. ”She's from home, Ned, she's a kid. She's a family for them, come on!”

When I checked the file, I discovered he was half right. My predecessor, a seconded naval officer, had reported that Bella was ”conscious to” the Daisy, even adding that she seemed to ”exert a benign influence as s.h.i.+p's mascot.”

And when I read between the lines of his report of the Daisy's most recent operational mission, I realised that Bella had been there on the dockside to wave them off - and no doubt to wave them safely back as well.

Now of course operational security is always relative. I had never imagined that everything in the Brandt organisation was going to be played by Sarratt rules. I was aware that in the cloistered atmosphere of Head Office it was too easy to mistake our tortuous structures of codenames, symbols and cut-outs for life on the ground. Cambridge Circus was one thing. A bunch of volatile Baltic patriots risking their necks was another.

Nevertheless the presence of an uncleared, unrecruited camp follower at the heart of our operation, privy to our plans and conversations, went beyond anything I had imagined-and all this in the wake of the betrayals five years earlier. And the more I worried over it, the more proprietorial, it seemed to me, did Brandt's devotion to the girl become. His endearments grew increasingly lavish in my presence, his caresses more demonstrative. ”A typical older man's infatuation for a young girl,” I told London, as if I had seen dozens of such cases.

Meanwhile a new mission was being planned for the Daisy, the purpose to be revealed to us later. Twice, three times a week, I found myself of necessity driving out to the farmhouse, arriving after dark, then sitting for hours at the table while we studied charts and weather maps and the latest sh.o.r.e observation bulletins. Sometimes the full crew came, sometimes it was just the three of us. To Brandt it made no difference. He clasped Bella to him as if the two of them were in the throes of constant ecstasy, fondling her hair and neck, and once forgetting himself so far as to slip his hand inside her s.h.i.+rt and cup her naked breast while he gave her a prolonged kiss. Yet as I discreetly looked away from these disturbing scenes, what remained longest in my sight was Bella's gaze on me, as if she were telling me she wished that it was I, not Brandt, who was caressing her.

”Explicit embraces appear to be the norm,” I wrote drily on the encounter sheet, Hamburg to London Station, late that night in my office. And in my nightly log: ”Route, weather and sea conditions acceptable. We await firm orders from Head Office. Morale of crew high.”

But my own morale was fighting for survival as one calamity followed upon another.

There was first the unfortunate business of my predecessor, full name Lieutenant Commander Perry de Mornay Lipton, D.S.O., R.N., retd., sometime hero of Jack Arthur Lumley's wartime irregulars. For ten years until my arrival, Lipton had cultivated the role of Hamburg character, by day acting the English b.l.o.o.d.y fool, sporting a monocle and hanging around the expatriate clubs ostensibly to pick up free advice on his investments. But come nightfall, he put on his secret hat and went to work briefing and debriefing his formidable army of secret agents. Or so the legend, as I had heard it from Head Office.

The only thing that had puzzled me was that there had been no formal handover between us, but Personnel had told me tersely Lipton was on a mission elsewhere. I was now admitted to the truth. Lipton had departed, not on some life-and-death adventure in darkest Russia, but to southern Spain, where he had set up house with a former Corporal of Horse named Kenneth, and two hundred thousand pounds of Circus funds, mainly in gold bars and Swiss francs, which he had paid out over several years to brave agents who did not exist.

The mistrust shed by this sad discovery now spilled into every operation Lipton had touched, including inevitably Brandt's. Was Brandt too a Lipton fiction, living high on our secret funds in exchange for ingeniously fabricated intelligence? Were his networks, were his vaunted collaborators and friends, many of whom were drawing liberal salaries? And Bella-was Bella part of the deception? Had Bella softened his head and weakened his will? Was Brandt too feathering his nest before retiring with his loved one to the south of Spain? A procession of Circus experts pa.s.sed through the doors of my little s.h.i.+pping office. First came an improbable man called Captain Plum. Crouched in the privacy of my safe room, Plum and I pored over the Daisy's old fuel dockets and mileage records and compared them with the perilous routes that Brandt and the crew claimed to have steered on their missions along the Baltic coast. The s.h.i.+p's logs were sketchy at best, as most logs are, but we read them all, alongside Plum's records of signals intercepts, radar stations, navigational buoys and sightings of Soviet patrol boats.

A week later Plum was back, this time accompanied by a foulmouthed Mancunian called Rose, a former Malayan policeman who had made himself a name as a Circus sniffer dog. Rose questioned me as roughly as if I were myself a part of the deception. But when I was about to lose my temper he disarmed me by declaring that, on the evidence available, the Brandt organisation was innocent of misdoing.

Yet in the minds of such people as this, suspicions of one kind only fired suspicions of another, and the question mark hanging over Bella's father, Feliks, had not gone away. If the father was bad, then the daughter must know it, went the reasoning. And if she knew and had not said it, then she was bad as well. Moscow Centre, like the Circus, was well known for recruiting entire families. A father-and-daughter team was eminently plausible. Soon, without any solid evidence I was aware of, London Station began to peddle the notion that Feliks had been responsible for the betrayals five years ago.

Inevitably, this placed Bella in an even more sinister light. There was talk of ordering her to London and grilling her, but here my authority as Brandt's case officer held sway. Impossible, I advised London Station. Brandt would never stand for it. Very well, came the answer - typical of Haydon's cavalier approach - bring them both over and Brandt can sit in while we interrogate the girl. This time I was sufficiently moved to fly back to London myself, where I insisted on stating my case personally to Bill. I entered his room to find him stretched out on a chaise longue, for he affected the eccentricity of never sitting at his desk. A joss stick was burning from an old ginger jar.

”Maybe Brother Brandt isn't as p.r.i.c.kly as you think, Master Ned,” he said accusingly, peering at me over his half-framed spectacles. ”Maybe you're the p.r.i.c.kly one?”

”He's besotted with her,” I said.

”Are you?”

”If we start accusing his girl in front of him, he'll go crazy. He lives for her. He'd tell us to go to h.e.l.l and dismantle the network, and I doubt whether anyone else could run it.”

Haydon pondered this: ”The Garibaldi of the Baltic. Well, well. Still, Garibaldi wasn't much b.l.o.o.d.y good, was he?”

He waited for me to answer but I preferred to take his question as rhetorical. ”Those jokers she shacked up in the forest with,” he drawled finally. ”Does she talk about them?”

”She doesn't talk about any of it. Brandt does, she doesn't.”

”So what does she talk about?”

”Nothing much. If she says anything of significance, it's usually in Latvian and Brandt translates or not as he thinks fit. Otherwise she just smiles and looks.”

”At you?”

”At him.”

”And she's quite a looker, I gather.”

”She's attractive, I suppose. Yes.”

Once more he took his time to consider this. ”Sounds to me like the ideal woman,” he p.r.o.nounced. ”Smiles and looks, keeps quiet, f.u.c.ks - what more can you ask?”

He again examined me quizzically over his spectacles. ”Do you mean she doesn't even speak German? She must do, coming from up there. Don't be daft.”

”She speaks German reluctantly when she's got no choice. Speaking Latvian's a patriotic act. German isn't.”

”Good t.i.ts?”

”Not bad.”

”Couldn't you get alongside her a bit more? Without rocking the lovers' boat, obviously. Just the answers to a few basic questions would be a help. Nothing dramatic. Just whether she's the real thing, or whether Brother Brandt smuggled her into the nest in a warming pan-or whether Moscow Centre did, of course. See what you can get out of her. He's not her natural father, you realise that, I suppose. He can't be.”

”Who isn't?”

For a confused moment I had thought he was still talking about Brandt.

”Her daddy. Feliks. The one who got shot or didn't. The farmer. According to the record, she was born January '45, wasn't she?”

”Yes.”

”Ergo, conceived around April '44. At which time - if Brother Brandt's to be believed - her supposed daddy was languis.h.i.+ng in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Mind you, we shouldn't be too strait laced about it. No great feat of skill, I suppose, to get yourself knocked up while your old man's in the pen. Still every little helps when we're trying to decide whether to abort a network which may have run its course.”

I was grateful for Mabel's company that night, even if we had not yet found our form as the great lovers we were so anxious to become. But of course I didn't tell her anything of my business, least of all about Bella. As a Vetting girl, Mabel was on the routine side of the Circus. It would have been quite improper for me to share my problems with her. If we had already been married - well, that might have been a different thing. Meanwhile, Bella must remain my secret.

And she did. Back in my solitary bed in Hamburg I thought of Bella and little else. The double mystery of her-as a woman and as a potential traitor-elevated her to an object of almost unlimited danger to me. I saw her no longer as a fringe figure of our organisation but its destiny. Her virtue was ours. If Bella was pure, so was the network. But if she was the plaything of another service - a deceiver planted on us to tempt and weaken and ultimately betray us - then the integrity of those round her was soiled with her own, and the network would indeed, as Haydon put it, have run its course.

I closed my eyes and saw her gaze upon me, sunny and beckoning. I felt again the softness of her kisses each time we greeted one another - always, as it seemed to me, held for a fraction longer than formality required. I pictured her liquid body in its different poses, and turned it over and over in my imagination in the same way that I contemplated the possibilities of her treason. I remembered Haydon's suggestion that I should try to ”get alongside her,” and discovered I was incapable of separating my sense of duty from my desires.

I retold myself the story of her escape, questioning it at every stage. Had she got away before the shooting or during it? And how? Had some lover among the security troops tipped her off? Had there been a shooting at all? And why did she not grieve more for her dead father, instead of making love to Brandt? Even her happiness seemed to speak against her. I imagined her in the forest, with the cutthroats and outlaws. Did each man take her at his will, or did she live now with this one, now with that? I dreamed of her, naked in the forest, and myself naked with her. I awoke ashamed of myself and put through an early-morning call to Mabel.

Did I understand myself? I doubt it. I knew little about women, beautiful women least of all. I am sure it never occurred to me that finding fault with Bella might be my way of weakening her s.e.xual hold on me. Determined on the straight path, I wrote to Mabel daily.

Meanwhile I fixed on the Daisy's forthcoming mission as the perfect opportunity to undertake a hostile questioning of Bella. The weather was turning foul, which was what suited the Daisy best. It was autumn and the nights were lengthening. The Daisy liked the dark too.

”Crew stand by to sail Monday,” said London Station's first signal. The second, which did not arrive till Friday evening, gave their destination as the Narva Bay in northern Estonia, not a hundred miles west of Leningrad. Never before had the Daisy ventured so far along the Russian seaboard; only rarely had she been used in support of non-Latvian patriots.

”I would give my eyes,” I told Brandt.

”You're too d.a.m.n dangerous, Ned,” he replied, clapping me on the shoulder. ”Be seasick four days, lie in your bunk, get in the way, what the h.e.l.l?”

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