Radio Moscow’s claims as to the damage inflicted on our ships are grossly exaggerated, a Royal Navy spokesman has stated, the Times story said primly. Once upon a time not so long ago-before he resigned from the Army-Walsh would have been sure that was true. Trust the Russians ahead of his own government? Not a chance!
But there was a chance, and maybe a good chance. If a Bentley could run down a prominent critic of the government’s policy, what was safe after that? Not a thing, not so far as Walsh could see.
Not for the first time, he wondered if he was safe himself. He supposed so-he was too small a fish to worry the likes of Sir Horace Wilson. The same didn’t hold, though, for his newfound friends. That he should be friends with MPs still amazed him. If the wind had blown Rudolf Hess’ parachute a few fields over, odds were he’d still be a senior noncom today.
“Odds were I’d be happier, too,” he muttered. That, however, was easier to say than to prove. He might be fighting the Russians right this minute, and wondering how the hell his country came to make the big switch.
As things had worked out, he bloody well knew how. Whether he was better off knowing was a different question. Somebody’d once said you didn’t want to look too closely at what went into making sausages or politics. Walsh was damned if he could remember who the bright bastard was. Any which way, he’d hit it spot on.
Walsh walked down the street, soaking up more war news from the Times. Japanese troops had landed in the Philippines. The Yanks were fighting now, whether they liked it or not. And more Japanese troops had invaded French Indochina. More still were in Malaya, and others in the Dutch East Indies. He scanned the paper for reports that they’d landed in Madagascar, or possibly Peru. He didn’t see any. He supposed that was good news. Other good news about Japan seemed harder to find. None of the stories said anything of Japanese troops retreating. Wherever they’d landed, they were moving forward.
If the same were true of English troops in Russia… Walsh knew he still would have been disgusted at allying with Hitler’s Germany. But it wasn’t true. Winter had frozen the front line solid, except where the Red Army prodded at it. Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, and London denied any serious Soviet penetrations. They might all have been telling the truth. If they were, it would have been a world’s first for Radio Berlin.
With a grimace, Walsh chucked the paper into a rubbish bin. The Nazis had a particularly nasty radio traitor, an Irishman named William Joyce, who was usually called Lord Haw-Haw because of the posh, affected accent he could put on. Lots of people listened to him, though few took him seriously. Ever since the big switch, he’d been broadcasting variations on the theme of I told you so. It made Walsh want to chuck a rock or a pint mug at the wireless set every time the louse’s voice came out of it.
He’d just turned away from the bin when he noticed the skinny fellow with the fawn fedora and the big ears. He’d seen the man a couple of times before as he walked through London. He hadn’t paid much attention to him; London was the biggest city of the world, and full of people. Now he wondered if he was being followed.
Well, he could find out. He walked rapidly down the street and turned a corner. Then he stood in front of a shop window, pretending to admire a display of Wellingtons. Sure as hell, here came the little pitcher with the big ears. He jammed on the brakes when he saw Walsh going nowhere fast.
Walsh turned away from the Wellies and ambled on as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He rounded another corner. This next block had exactly what he was looking for: a deep doorway in which he could stand and wait.
He didn’t have to wait long. The little man walked past him, then stopped in dismay when he realized he no longer had his target in his sights. He turned around-and there stood Walsh, right behind him. “Hello, chum,” Walsh said, almost pleasantly. “Do we know each other?”
“Not to my knowledge,” the little man answered, sounding nearly as affected as Lord Haw-Haw. But his ears betrayed him: they flamed red.
Seeing that told Walsh he wasn’t imagining things. “Then why are you following me?” he demanded.
Even though the stranger’s ears went redder yet, he said, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And I’m bloody sure you do.” If Walsh clouted the bugger right here, a bobby would bring him up on charges, and that wouldn’t be so good. He deliberately kept his hands in the pockets of his civilian topcoat. “Go tell whoever’s paying you that I’m wise to him, and he’d damn well better leave me alone from here on out.”
The little man licked his lips. “You don’t know who you’re messing with, mate,” he said, trying for bravado.
“Hell I don’t. You can tell that to Sir Horace himself, by Jesus,” Walsh said.
This time, the little man’s ears went white, as if he’d rubbed them with crushed ice. He wasted no more time trading words with Alistair Walsh. Instead, he ran off like a fox pursued by a prime pack of hounds.
“Cor!” a Cockney voice said from in back of Walsh. “Yer didn’t ’arf put the fear o’ God in ’im, did yer?”
“Whatever I gave him, he deserves worse,” Walsh said.
Later that day, he met Ronald Cartland and some of the other insurgent MPs at a pub not far from the Palace of Westminster. When he described his shadow, Cartland whistled thoughtfully. “I do believe I’ve made the acquaintance of that particular gentleman,” he said, knocking back the whiskey in his glass. “He gets his pay from Scotland Yard.”
“Bleeding hell!” Walsh burst out. “They’re making it into the Gestapo, then! He had no warrant from a judge, to give him the right to follow.”
“The government has no warrant for worse things than that,” Cartland said.
“Ah, well. They spy on us, we spy on them. They diddle us, we diddle them. The game’s not all one-sided, not by a long chalk.” One of Cartland’s comrades in insurgency did his best to wax philosophical.
Philosophy didn’t appeal to Alistair Walsh. “They tell people what to do. They tell the blasted country what to do, and the blasted country damned well does it. And we… We sit around in pubs and complain.”
“Oh, we do rather more than that,” Cartland said. “We do a good deal more than that, as a matter of fact. I’d tell you more, but the walls have ears.”
If Scotland Yard tapped telephones, if it used operatives to follow the likes of ex-Sergeant Walsh, no doubt it could and would plant microphones in the public houses the insurgents frequented. “God help the poor blighter who’s got to wade through all the other drivel-” another MP began.
“Before he wades through our drivel.” Cartland’s interruption neatly capped him.
“Talk is cheap,” Walsh said. “We’ve got to take the country back from them, is what we’ve got to do.”
By the way they eyed him, he might have been something escaped from a zoo. Or, then again, he might not. “There’s been no successful coup d’etat here since 1688,” Cartland said in musing tones. “Maybe it’s high time for another one.”
“Maybe it’s past time,” Walsh said, and he might not have been such a strange beast after all.
Even before the Nazis took over, German bureaucracy had been among the most formidable in Europe. German functionaries didn’t invent pseudo-rational reasons for denying requests: that was a French game. They didn’t casually lose or forget about papers, the way their Italian counterparts were known to do. Once a paper landed in a German file, it was there forevermore, and ready to be retrieved at a moment’s notice. Efficiency.
Before the Nazis took over, Sarah Goldman’s father had taught her to admire Germanic efficiency. He hadn’t altogether changed his mind even when that efficiency began to be aimed at him.