reached them. As far as I know there isn’t a whole XXI anywhere in the world, unless we count the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean just off Albufeira.
Tomas realized that a U-boat full of high-ranking Nazis would contain valuable loot — if you don’t mind probing around rotting bodies. How much Tomas minded is another thing we shall never know. When he removed the canisters of heroin he needed help in disposing of it. He couldn’t have found a more suitable helpmate than H.K., but they both stayed clear of da Cunha’s preserves.
Tomas never lost his respect for da Cunha. He stiffened when da Cunha came near and answered him in the short monosyllabic tones of the German Navy. Like all Germans, da Cunha was able to master accentless Portuguese. How much Tomas knew about the cylinder is difficult to decide, but he guessed enough to blackmail at least one person named therein — Smith. Although Tomas went with da Cunha to check the meteorology cylinder every six months, until our voyage together he had made no attempt to retrieve the cylinder from the ocean bed. Tomas had only a radio receiver; from da Cunha we had stolen a transmitter which would
Why did da Cunha keep the papers on the sea bed? He was a blackmailer. Smith was ‘persuaded’ to equip a research lab. for him. Smith was ‘persuaded’ to have me recalled from Albufeira. How many other people were persuaded to do things?
I took the file marked OSTRA. (An ‘oyster’: lying at the bottom of the sea with a pearl inside, that was da Cunha’s cylinder.) I added the letters I had taken from the buoy. They made a small mountain on Dawlish’s bright mahogany desk.
‘So this is the lot,’ Dawlish said. He sniffed contemplatively.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d guess that most of these people have donated money to the “Young Europe Movement” at one time or another.’
‘Jolly good,’ said Dawlish, ‘I knew you would manage.’
‘Oh sure,’ I said, ‘especially when you wanted to cancel the whole operation.’
Dawlish looked at me over his spectacles, which can get to be very irritating.
‘Furthermore,’ I said, ‘you knew that that girl was employed by the American Narcotics Bureau, and you didn’t tell me.’
‘Yes,’ said Dawlish blandly, ‘but she was a very low-echelon employee and I had no wish to inhibit intercourse among the group.’ We looked blankly at each other for two or three minutes.
‘Social,’ Dawlish amended.
‘Of course,’ I agreed. Dawlish disembowelled his pipe with a penknife.
‘When will Smith be arrested?’ I asked.
‘Arrested?’ said Dawlish. ‘What an extraordinary question; why would he be arrested?’
‘Because he is a corner-stone of an international Fascist movement dedicated to the overthrow of democratic government.’ I said it patiently, even though I knew that Dawlish was deliberately leading me on.
Dawlish said, ‘You surely don’t imagine that they can put everyone who answers that description in jail. Where would we find room for them, and besides, where would the Bonn government get another Civil Service?’ He gave a sardonic smile and tapped the pile of documents. ‘Our friends here are much more useful where they are — as long as they know that H.M. Government have this little pile in Kevin Cassel’s cellar.’
He opened the drawer of his desk and produced an even more enormous file of documents. Across the front it said ‘Young Europe Movement’ in Alice’s fuse-wire handwriting, and was bulging with months of work that Dawlish had never even told me about.
‘You didn’t understand your role, my boy,’ he said in his smug voice; ‘we didn’t want you to
Last Word
I took all the material down to Kevin Cassel in his Central Register last Tuesday. He signed and embossed the official receipt and wished me merry Christmas.
‘Well over the fast,’ I said. Why was he always smiling?
As I drove back through Ripley an old lady was sticking tufts of cotton wool into her shop-window to spell ‘Merry Xmas’. Outside a man was using a shovel to clear a path to the door.
‘Now you see what it’s like where the work is done,’ said Dawlish, and went on to make provocative remarks about lying around in the sun. Dawlish had convened the training structure sub-committee on my behalf. It was a master-stroke in his battle with O’Brien for control of the Strutton Committee. Dawlish had put every member of the Strutton Committee on the training structure subcommittee with the exception of O’Brien. In other words it was like holding meetings with O’Brien locked out. Dawlish was all knees and elbows. He sat in his battered leather armchair and puffed clouds of smoke at the Duke of Wellington, and said that being successful was just a state of mind.
Bernhard had spread himself all over my office but had taken care not to do any of my paper work. The thirteen-centimetre lens for the Nikon had apricot jam on it, and my secretary was doing half the typing in the building. I kicked Bernhard and his twenty cardboard folders out, and although he protested volubly he set up shop elsewhere. ‘And I owe you a two-pound bag of sugar,’ he said as he left.
‘Stealing sugar is a felony,’ I grumbled. ‘Didn’t you learn any manners at Cambridge?’
‘The only thing I learned at Cambridge,’ said Bernhard, ‘was how to put on a pair of fifteen-inch trousers without first removing my chukka boots.’
Alice brought me some sugar.
On Friday I took Charly Christmas shopping in the West End. She bought her father a subscription to
‘Your old man
‘Yes, dream man.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I want to speak to him about that diving equipment. Lisbon have lost part of it. It’s on my charge, you see. They want me to pay ?250 towards it.’
‘Come back to my place,’ she said, ‘I’ll see what can be done.’
‘You’ll help?’ I said.
‘Console,’ she said, ‘console.’
Appendixes
‘When you talk into a telephone, you shout from the roof,’ Ivor Butcher said one day. A tremendous number of phone calls are tapped in the U.K. In the U.S. wiretapping is an industry.
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