quick thinking, that did.’
‘Which does nothing to explain your presence in La Rochelle. I hope you have not come all this way to tell me to desist.’
‘Would it matter if I had?’
‘No, and since we are not at home I don’t see how you could.’
‘There are ways, old boy. For instance, I could always tip off the chaps at the old Deuxieme Bureau, tell ’em what I suspect, though judging by the way you are being tailed it looks as if they are aware already. Weapons for Ireland they won’t give a damn about but they are hotter than we are on Spain.’
Peter shook the pot. ‘Do you know how to work this damn thing, Cal? You are, after all, practically a native.’
‘I’ve told you I don’t want coffee.’
‘Selfish to the last, as always. What about me?’ Peter replied peevishly, the cigarette jerking between his lips as he looked around the poorly furnished room. ‘Because of what you are up to I had to rent this dump. A hotel was out of the question.’
Even if it struck Cal as unusual, there was a certain logic in that; every French hotel registered their guests by their passports, names and home address, while the completed forms were collected by the local gendarmerie, leaving an undesirable record of who stayed where and when — even with false papers, for anyone involved in intelligence, it was probably better to stay out of the system if you could.
Cal stood up and took the battered blue pot, waved the smoke out of his face and went past Peter into the kitchen, to where there was an open tin of ground coffee. The filling of both the base and the metal filter he carried out while talking, also the lighting of the gas onto which the pot was placed, his mind working on a couple of nagging inconsistencies.
‘Surely you have not come all this way to have me show you how to make coffee French-style?’ he asked eventually.
‘No. The powers that be I mentioned want your services and I have been sent to rope you in.’
‘To do what?’
‘The usual, old boy, to risk life and limb for little or no reward.’
The coffee pot had to begin to make a bubbling sound before Cal replied to that, which left a very long conversational gap. It was like Hamburg all over again, where Peter had turned up with information that Cal’s activities had come to the attention of the authorities, bringing the threat of possible arrest by the Gestapo. That had led to a very hairy and hurried departure not only for them, but also for a Jewish family he was in the process of extracting. Escape had been a close-run thing in which he had only avoided being taken up by the amount of time and effort he had put into setting up more than one escape route for himself.
As he heard the water bubble he was thinking that was one thing he now lacked unless he abandoned that cargo. La Rochelle was not on the route to anywhere, it was one of those places you came to or went from, or left by sea, and if his position was threatened he had few alternatives on how to avoid anyone seeking to arrest him.
That he was in a risky business went without saying, and that was made doubly so by the nature of who those weapons were for and the fact that there was a French embargo on weapons to Spain as well. What was irritating him now was the resemblance to Hamburg; it was just too pat and the similarities were too great.
Yet he could not just dismiss what was on offer until he knew the threat it posed to that which he was already engaged in. The men fighting against Franco’s forces in the Cantabrian Mountains needed those weapons, and job number one was to get them loaded aboard ship and on their way.
‘How’s that coffee coming along?’ Peter called.
‘Nearly there.’
‘Fetch out the old confiture, Cal, there’s a good chap, the old stomach is rumbling somewhat.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘ Must have been a bit hairy in Czechoslovakia, Cal, buying and shipping out your cargo with the nation mobilised for a possible war with the Hun.’
Peter had emptied the coffee pot and chewed steadily on his bread and jam to the point of swallowing half the loaf, a time during which Cal Jardine had kept off the subject and stuck to conversational generalities to allow himself time to think; now he was being dragged back to the present and what might become a dilemma. For a moment he wondered whether to answer, but given what Peter already knew it seemed harmless to oblige.
‘The order I made was placed and the paperwork sorted before the crisis blew up, but the Czechs honoured the deal, which was pretty straight of them considering they had Adolf breathing fire. Not that they were surprised; they knew Hitler was bound to come after them once he’d swallowed up Austria. How did you know about the false End User Certificate, by the way?’
‘Our military attache in Prague got wind of it and sent a standard report to London. That was where the Irish connection first raised questions, given how sensitive we are in Blighty about possible shipments to the IRA.’
Cal was thinking that such an explanation did not clarify why Peter was here.
‘We had to be sure, Cal, they were going to where the certificate said. I also have to admit it was a damn clever ploy, given our chaps are busy licensing the same weaponry for use by the British army and, of course, the Irish would follow suit, piggybacking on our research and approval. I hope it was worth whatever you forked out to get the Czechs to fall for it.’
If it was clever, the real reason that he had been successful in his purchase was more to do with the Czech factory having no desire to question him too closely about his bona fides: his papers were in order as far as they could see and the people he claimed to represent appeared sound.
In reality they were not looking too closely; they badly wanted his money, or to be more precise, the Spanish republican gold with which he was prepared to pay, as did a government under threat from a powerful neighbour, keen to amass foreign exchange, so extracting a false certificate from the relevant Czech ministry had been something of a formality in which no one had even demanded an illegal payment.
It was a good deal; the weapons he had bought were perfect for guerrilla warfare, a new pattern of easily portable light machine guns deadly in that kind of close combat. It was a ground and vehicle weapon, and added to that, so low was the recoil, they could be fired from the hip while on the move, all of which Peter listened to with polite interest; if he knew Cal was stalling, which he was, he gave no indication of it.
‘You can tell the staff wallahs from me they’ve bought a good infantry weapon.’
‘Sorry to disappoint you, Cal, but I doubt your estimation would carry much weight with the military brass and even less if I passed it on from MI6, given the army think we are all overeducated dolts. Anyway, to cut to the chase, we’re not interested in guns; what the firm is after is your opinion of the Czechs as a nation.’
‘Do you mean the Czech Czechs, the Slovaks, the Ruthenians, the Poles, the Hungarians or the Sudetenland Germans?’
Peter sighed. ‘Do you have to complicate things?’
Cal felt he needed to make the point even if the world was less ignorant now than it had been a few months before, because Czechoslovakia was very much in the news, with German newspapers ranting daily about the ‘plight’ of their racial brethren in the border regions called the Sudetenland.
Yet, even on the front pages of the world, few appreciated how much the nation was a construct nation of peoples hacked out of the dismembered Austro-Hungarian Empire, with a dozen languages and rivalries going back centuries. Like most of his fellow countrymen, and most unfortunately the people in power in London, Peter did not appreciate the problems that produced.
If the Sudeten German minority were the most vocal in the search for concessions to their racial background they were just one of half a dozen similar problems facing the Prague Government, given every ethnic group had, to varying degrees, jumped on the federalist bandwagon. Tempted to explain, Cal decided not to bother; the nub of the question was not about that.
‘Despite the bleating of their minorities, the Czechs are an honest bunch who run a democratic government that others of a similar ilk should support. How does that sound?’
