“The volume in the library is indeed controlled by only one man,” Turing said. “And he is the senior librarian of the institution. Alas, his loyalties are such that they are not, as one might hope and expect, for his own country. He is instead one of those of high caste taken by fascination for another creed, and it is to that creed he pays his deepest allegiance. He has made himself useful to his masters for many years as a ‘talent spotter,’ that is, a man who looks at promising undergraduates, picks those with keen policy minds and good connections, forecasts their rise, and woos them to his side as secret agents with all kinds of babble of the sort that appeals to the mushy romantic brain of the typical English high-class idiot. He thus plants the seeds of our destruction, sure to bloom a few decades down the line. He does other minor tasks too, running as a cutout, providing a safe house, disbursing a secret fund, and so forth. He is committed maximally and he will die before he betrays his creed, and some here have suggested a bullet in the brain as apposite, but actually, by the tortured rules of the game, a live spy in place is worth more than a dead spy in the ground. Thus he must not be disturbed, bothered, breathed heavily upon— he must be left entirely alone.”
“And as a consequence you cannot under any circumstances access the book. You do not even know what it looks like?” Basil asked.
“We have a description from a volume published in 1932, called Treasures of the Cambridge Library.”
“I can guess who wrote it,” said Basil.
“Your guess would be correct,” said Sir Colin. “It tells us little other than that it comprises thirtyfour pages of foolscap written in tightly controlled nib by an accomplished freehand scrivener. Its eccentricity is that occasionally apostolic bliss came over the author and he decorated the odd margin with constellations of floating crosses, proclaiming his love of all things Christian. The Reverend MacBurney was clearly given to religious swoons.”
“And the librarian is given to impenetrable security,” said the admiral. “There will come a time when I will quite happily murder him with your cricket bat, Captain.”
“Alas, I couldn’t get the bloodstains out and left it in Malay. So let me sum up what I think I know so far. For some reason the Germans have a fellow in the Cambridge library controlling access to a certain 1767 volume. Presumably they have sent an agent to London with a coded message he himself does not know the answer to, possibly for security reasons. Once safely here, he will approach the bad-apple librarian and present him with the code. The bad apple will go to the manuscript, decipher it, and give a response to the Nazi spy. I suppose it’s operationally sound. It neatly avoids radio, as you say it cannot be breached without giving notice that the ring itself is under high suspicion, and once armed with the message, the operational spy can proceed with his mission. Is that about it?”
“Almost,” said Sir Colin. “In principle, yes, you have the gist of it — manfully done. However, you haven’t got the players quite right.”
“Are we then at war with someone I don’t know about?” said Basil.
“Indeed and unfortunately. Yes. The Soviet Union. This whole thing is Russian, not German.”
If panic flashed through Basil’s mind, he did not yield to it, although his heart hammered against his chest as if a spike of hard German steel had been pounded into it. He thought of his L-pill, but it was buried in his breast pocket. He thought next of his pistoclass="underline" Could he get it out in time to bring a few of them down before turning it on himself? Could he at least kill this leering German idiot who… but then he noted that the characterization had been delivered almost merrily.
“You must be a spy,” said the colonel, laughing heartily, sitting next to him. “Why else would you shave your moustache but to go on some glamorous underground mission?”
Basil laughed, perhaps too loudly, but in his chest his heart still ran wild. He hid his blast of fear in the heartiness of the fraudulent laugh and came back with an equally jocular, “Oh, that? It seems in winter my wife’s skin turns dry and very sensitive, so I always shave it off for a few months to give the beauty a rest from the bristles.”
“It makes you look younger.”
“Why, thank you.”
“Actually, I’m so glad to have discovered you. At first I thought it was not you, but then I thought, Gunther, Gunther, who would kidnap the owner of the town’s only hotel and replace him with a double? The English are not so clever.”
“The only thing they’re any good at,” said Basil, “is weaving tweed. English tweed is the finest in the world. “
“I agree, I agree,” said the colonel. “Before all this, I traveled there quite frequently. Business, you know.”
It developed that the colonel, a Great War aviator, had represented a Berlin-based hair tonic firm whose directors had visions, at least until 1933, of entering the English market. The colonel had made trips to London in hopes of interesting some of the big department stores in carrying a line of lanolin-based hair creams for men, but was horrified to learn that the market was controlled by the British company that manufactured Brylcreem and would use its considerable clout to keep the Germans out.
“Can you imagine,” said the colonel, “that in the twenties there was a great battle between Germany and Great Britain for the market advantage of lubricating the hair of the British gentleman? I believe our product was much finer than that English goop, as it had no alcohol and alcohol dries the hair stalk, robbing it of luster, but I have to say that the British packaging carried the day, no matter. We could never find the packaging to catch the imagination of the British gentleman, to say nothing of a slogan. German as a language does not lend itself to slogans. Our attempts at slogans were ludicrous. We are too serious, and our language is like potatoes in gravy. It has no lightness in it at all. The best we could come up with was, ‘Our tonic is very good.’ Thus we give the world Nietzsche and not Wodehouse. In any event, when Hitler came to power and the air forces were reinvigorated, it was out of the hair oil business and back to the cockpit.”
It turned out that the colonel was a born talker. He was on his way to Paris on a three-day leave to meet his wife for a “well-deserved, if I do say so myself” holiday. He had reservations at the Ritz and at several four-star restaurants.
Basil put it together quickly: the man he’d stolen his papers from was some sort of collaborationist big shot and had made it his business to suck up to all the higher German officers, presumably seeing the financial opportunities of being in league with the occupiers. It turned out further that this German fool was soft and supple when it came to sycophancy and he’d mistaken the Frenchman’s oleaginous demeanor with actual affection, and he thought it quite keen to have made a real friend among the wellborn French. So Basil committed himself to six hours of chitchat with the idiot, telling himself to keep autobiographical details at a minimum in case the real chap had already spilled some and he should contradict something previously established.
That turned out to be no difficulty at all, for the German colonel revealed himself to have an awesomely enlarged ego, which he expressed through an autobiographical impulse, so he virtually told his life story to Basil over the long drag, gossiping about the greed of Göring and the reluctance of the night fighters to close with the Lancasters, Hitler’s insanity in attacking Russia, how much he, the colonel, missed his wife, how he worried about his son, a Stuka pilot, and how sad he was that it had come to pass that civilized Europeans were at each other’s throats again, and on and on and on and on, but at least the Jews would be dealt with once and for all, no matter who won in the end. He titillated Basil with inside information on his base and the wing he commanded, Nachtjagdgeschwader-9, and the constant levies for Russia that had stripped it of logistics, communications, and security people, until nothing was left but a skeleton staff of air crew and mechanics, yet still they were under pressure from Luftwaffe command to bring down yet more Tommies to relieve the night bombing of Berlin. Damn the Tommies and their brutal methods of war! The man considered himself fascinating, and his presence seemed to ward off the attention of the other German officers who came and went on the trip to the Great City. It seemed so damned civilized that you almost forgot there was a war on.