he'd been nervous it would not have been with fear, but with a craftsman's excitement at the prospect of demonstrating his special aptitude again.
He shivered at the magnitude of his error of judgement, which was all the more unpardonable when he set this new information in perspective: if Montuori wanted Ruelle so badly he would naturally put one of his best men on the job.
Also, Boselli was one good reason why Audley had been so intractably determined to get away again. So long as he was with them there'd be precious little chance of holding out on the Italians.
'Well, we'll have to make the best of him for the time being,'
said Richardson philosophically. 'And at least he'll have an eye cocked for Ruelle.'
'True.' Audley still didn't sound unduly worried about the Bastard—a little surprisingly in view of his Ostian experience, Richardson thought.
'You know he operated in these parts in the old days?'
'Ruelle? I thought Latium was his province?'
A flicker of interest now.
'Not to start with. He led a partisan group up Avellino way in
'43.'
'Indeed?' The flicker brightened, steadied. 'Well, that might account for it—'
'For what?'
'Eh?' Audley looked at him. 'Oh—I mean it might account dummy2
for the presence of old Peter Korbel.'
'For Korbel?'
'The art of deserting and surviving—Korbel could write a book about that, and it would take the form of an autobiography.' Audley grunted. 'You know where he came from?'
'He was born in the Ukraine. The Germans captured him in
'41 —he came to England as a DP after the war, I thought?'
'Yes and no.' Audley regarded him donnishly over his spectacles. 'He started from the Ukraine right enough, but he came to us the long way round—via Italy.'
He paused smugly. 'Jack Butler did a rundown on him a few weeks ago, as a matter of fact, after that business of ours in Cumbria. . . . More out of curiosity than necessity, really, because everyone thinks they know everything about Korbel, and none of it matters anyway. But Jack has a more orderly mind than most—he likes to be sure.
'According to him Korbel deserted to the Wehrmacht, he wasn't captured. Told 'em he was a Volga German and made his story stick— or stick well enough for them to recruit him and ship him off to the Italian front. The whole world was fighting here anyway, so he'd fit in whatever he was.'
That was true enough, reflected Richardson. The armies which had descended on poor old Italy had been absurdly polyglot. On the Allied side there had been everything from Maoris and Red Indians to Berbers and Japanese Americans, dummy2
and the ex-Red Army men fighting under the German banner had even included two bewildered Tibetans who strayed across their Himalayan frontier accidentally years before. He himself was a living testimony of that racial confusion, with an Amalfitan mother and a father from Tunbridge Wells.
'Butler reckons he'd aimed to join the winning side, but when he got this far he realised he'd miscalculated. So in '43
he mustered out again—and became a Ukranian again too—
and joined up with us after the Salerno breakout.'
Again Audley paused. But the drift of his information was clear enough: Korbel had been here in Campania, changing allegiance again, at the exact moment when Ruelle had started operations—Richardson frowned as the curious contradictions in this coincidence began to occur to him.
Even if Korbel and Ruelle had known each other all those years ago their connection now was still very odd indeed. If the Russians had, for reasons which were still totally obscure, decided to investigate Audley's Italian mission, then it would not have been Korbel's job to start things moving—
and even if it had, he would never have called on a bloody-minded old has-been like Ruelle to undertake the job.
In fact, the more he thought about it, the stranger it seemed, because the Russians hadn't even recruited Korbel until the mid-fifties —and by then the Italian Communists had already dumped Ruelle. 'David—' he tried to sound half-jocular, '—
you wouldn't be putting me on, would you?'
'Putting you on?' Audley looked at him questioningly.
dummy2
'About Korbel?'
'About Korbel getting through to his old pal Ruelle.'
As he stared back at Audley the sheer copper-bottomed absurdity of it mushroomed: not just the idea of Korbel suggesting the recruitment of Ruelle, but of the London KGB
