Chapter Twenty-five

BILLY LOOKED OUT OF THE porthole window in the tiny garret, but he couldn’t see a thing. The snow that had been falling all night long had plastered itself across the rooftops and windows of the Buckingham Hotel, turning it into a palace of pure white.

Billy’s quarters were small but, ever since he’d moved in here, he’d treated them as if they were the quarters of a prince. Every night, after his shift was finished, he swept the floor around the bed. Every night, he polished the desk that sat in the window, dusted the bookshelf by the door, straightened his uniform shirts in the little wardrobe set into the wall – and made certain that the contours of his cap were not creasing out of shape. There was nothing that made Billy more proud than fulfilling his duties to the Buckingham to the utmost of his abilities.

It was just a cruel twist of fate that, of late, his duties provoked such fear.

An hour before the chambermaids awoke, when the Buckingham was populated only by night porters, Billy dropped through the chilly hotel and slipped into the post room. The clock on the wall told him it was not yet five o’clock; that gave him two hours until Mrs Farrier arrived, expecting to find the place spick and span and ready for the day’s deliveries.

So he set about his work.

It had been two weeks since Ansel died; two weeks since Billy had received his new instructions, and he was only just beginning to conquer the nerves of it. As he sifted through the sacks, searching out yet more letters bound for Vienna, he kept pausing to control the hammering of his heart. It wasn’t as if he’d never done special tasks for Mr Charles before. He’d spent years accepting his little missions, eavesdropping on dinners in the Queen Mary. Intelligence gathering, Mr Charles called it – which always made Billy feel proud, because most people liked to tell Billy Brogan he needed to gather some intelligence of his own. This, though? This felt different. He sifted through each sack and when, at last, he found the envelope he knew would be here – addressed to Vienna, in a familiar spidery hand – he made sure that everything else was straightened up, and settled down at Mrs Farrier’s desk.

It was half past five.

Sliding his finger carefully into the envelope, he teased it open. The trick with this sort of envelope was that, if you softened it, just slightly, with the tip of your tongue, the paper moistened enough that it came apart without any damage. Then he could slide the letter out.

All of these words, all of these symbols – and Billy hardly knew what a single one of them meant. It was just as well. He often thought that, if he’d known what was in these letters, he wouldn’t have dared to be sitting here, in the cold dark of the hotel basement, transcribing every word.

By the light of Mrs Farrier’s lantern, Billy set about his work. On one side of him: the letter to Vienna – and, at its bottom, the signature of the man who called himself Tobias Bauer. On the other: a blank page, onto which he diligently copied every letter and curlicue, every full stop and stroke of the pen.

It was quarter to seven by the time Billy, having completed his task, had sealed the envelope again, clamping it tightly between his fingers to invigorate what little of the adhesive paste was left, and made haste to Mr Charles’s office. There, as every morning, Mr Charles was waiting at his desk.

‘Another one, Billy?’

‘It’s the third this week, sir.’

He handed Mr Charles the page and waited as the elder man’s eyes scoured the letter.

‘Thank you, Billy. You may go.’

Billy turned on his heel, feeling the great weight lifting off him, and plodded back across the office, looking forward to another day listening to Mrs Farrier’s hard luck stories and ferrying her pots of tea.

‘And, Billy?’ Maynard called after.

‘Yes, sir?’

When Billy looked up, the hotel director was giving him the strangest look: it was a look, he thought, of simple gratitude.

‘Keep up the good work, Mr Brogan. It may make all of the difference in the world.’

*

Some nights later, with the snow lying deep and crisp across Berkeley Square, Maynard entered the Candlelight Club and, among the sea of bobbing heads, identified Moorcock in the booth closest to the terrace doors. That weathered face, scored in lines – he could pick it out anywhere. How the man called himself a spy, Maynard did not know.

He did not go to him straight away. There were protocols to observe. Instead, he took a dry Martini at the bar, engaging passing guests in conversations of his own, then waited until the hour approached midnight and, inevitably, the guests began to depart. Only when the Candlelight Club was approaching its closing did he settle down at Moorcock’s side.

‘You do like to keep a fellow waiting, Mr Charles.’

‘I’m observing decorum, Mr Moorcock. I’m a man who likes to do things by the book.’

As Maynard sat down, he reached inside his jacket and produced the papers that had been folded into his inside pocket. These he fanned out across the table, so that Mr Moorcock could see. Each one of them was written in Billy’s hand, just as Maynard himself had instructed – but recreated, too, were the little flourishes of the pen that Lukas Jager used, his lettering depicted exactly as Brogan had seen it.

Moorcock nodded, without a word. Then, sliding the papers into the inside pocket of his own jacket, he said, ‘Your man Brogan’s doing a good job. But how long can he last? The last time we spoke, you seemed doubtful.’

‘I don’t doubt the boy’s nerve,’ Maynard replied. ‘He’s shown me, often enough, the stuff he’s made of. I’d want Billy Brogan standing with me to go over the top – though heaven forfend he should ever know it – the thought alone would make his head swell. But I do fear for him, and I do worry where his loyalties lie. He’s a simple boy, Mr Moorcock. He came to the hotel to make a wage for his family, down in Lambeth. He has brothers and sisters he looks out for. His mother and father depend on him. He’s been stealing from this hotel for years – just bits from the kitchens, raiding the larders here and there. He thinks I don’t know about it – but the fact is, I’ve been turning a blind eye to Mr Brogan for many years. I like him, you see. And I believe I know him. It’s true that he’s in love with this hotel, but in the end, his family will come first. If I ask too much of him, if he fears he may get ejected from this hotel – or worse, that something terrible might happen to him, as it happened to young Ansel Albrecht – he’ll retreat from this. He needs to know he’s safe.’

Moorcock nodded. ‘Don’t fear, Mr Charles. I’ve been running agents half of my lifetime. I know how to look after a soul like Brogan.’

‘These letters,’ Charles went on. ‘I can understand so little, but they don’t seem to say anything particularly untoward. It’s just dear old Herr Bauer prattling on about his luxurious exile. London in autumn. London, when the first snows came.’

‘The man you have staying in your hotel is not so amateur as to be writing to his superiors with a neat list of all the intelligence he’s gathered. I’m afraid, Mr Charles, that we have concluded our initial report into this man you accepted into your hotel – and it is most troubling indeed.’ He hesitated. ‘Lukas Jager began working in law enforcement in Vienna long before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He’s been a policeman more than half his adult life. Excepting his years as a commissioned officer on the Western Front, Jager devoted himself to following in his father’s footsteps, and rose through the ranks of the Gendarmerie, the Austrian police. He was good at it, too. A brute like that, diminutive as he seems, always will be. From what we’ve seen, it seems he took great strides in his career with the downfall of the Austrian Republic in 1934. Perhaps you can guess my inference at this.’

‘You’ll have to enlighten me.’

‘Well, the end of the republic and the birth of the Federal State of Austria has some interesting ramifications. The historians can pore over the finer details of it, Maynard. Let us leave that to our children’s children, should humanity survive that far. The short story is that, with the rise of the Austrofascists, Lukas Jager found an administration more to his liking, more in step with his own thoughts about the way the world should be.’ When the silence stretched on for too long, Moorcock added, ‘Jager’s a nasty little fascist, Maynard. While the rest of the police force in Vienna put up a resistance to the Anschluss earlier this year, Jager welcomed it with open arms.’

‘He said he came here as a refugee from the Anschluss.’ Maynard sighed. ‘I believed him.’

‘And you, the man who knows every little thing going on in his precious hotel .?.?.’

Maynard felt withered by this. If it had been just one little slip, perhaps he needn’t have worried. But he’d overlooked what was happening with Miss Marchmont, hadn’t he? He’d turned a blind eye to Vivienne Edgerton as well. It was like Lord Edgerton had said: he was old, tired, and losing his touch.

‘I’ll admit I was wrong, Mr Moorcock. What more do you want me to say? I saw an old man, who needed help, in an indifferent world.’

‘You made a mistake, Mr Charles – but, in doing so, you have given us an opportunity my superiors insist we exploit. But first, let me finish my story. It is best that you are fully briefed. Jager’s fellows in the police force knew him for what he was. Some time before the Anschluss, he deserted them. Retired, they said – the world was not kind to old policemen like him. But the facts, as we now know them, were different. Jager had not retired, but been tempted by darker forces. We believe he made his deal before the Anschluss was even completed – to work for the intelligence services of Herr Hitler’s Third Reich. To help bring about the empire Herr Hitler seeks.’

‘Then he did kill Ansel,’ Maynard whispered. ‘Ansel knew him for who he really was, and paid the price for it.’

‘Let us suppose the boy was lured to Jager’s suite on some pretext. Let us suppose he went willingly, to make sense of this aberration he’d perceived. Well, he paid with his life to keep Jager’s secret. Pushed down the stairs, to preserve a spy’s cover. Simple tradecraft, but effective. Who would ever suspect poor, tottering Tobias Bauer?’

‘I would eject him from the hotel, if I could.’

‘You already know that you can’t. Mr Charles, these letters he sends – they are not just the diary entries of a gossiping old man. When he recounts the comings and goings of British gentry through this hotel, when he makes notes of who he has seen dining with who, what they have said, how he has tried to engage them in idle talk, it is not just meaningless meandering. These are critical reports on the movements of British lords who can be leveraged to be faithful to Mr Chamberlain’s cause – and, by doing so, let Herr Hitler do as he pleases on the Continent. These are documents providing clues as to how influential British peers might be pressured into saying the right thing into the right ear – all so that His Majesty keeps letting Nazi Germany conquer whichever poor country they desire.

‘Take the last batch of letters. In the final one, Herr Bauer was at pains to explain to his “dear cousin Emma” about Miss Vivienne Edgerton’s disgrace – a pregnancy, out of wedlock, and hidden from her poor mother! It might seem tittle-tattle, but it is anything but. Rest assured that men in Berlin are, even now, devising ways to use this kind of information to sway the heart and mind of Vivienne’s stepfather. All a department like mine needs is a little scrap of information to exploit. You would be surprised how much control a little piece of information can provide.’

Maynard thought: I really wouldn’t. It wasn’t long ago that you, Mr Moorcock, held one of those pieces of information over me. I danced and sang for you and your Office, all to keep it a secret.

At least, now, he was here of his own free will. There was power in that.

‘He’s not the only one in London,’ Moorcock went on. ‘This city is nothing if not a home for rats.’

‘Why keep them here at all? Why not round them up and be done with it?’

‘Because, Mr Charles, they are better off where we can see them. You know how serious things have become. This delegation coming to London to petition the Crown cannot be compromised. Herr Jager’s little scheme puts us in danger, but it presents us with a possibility as well.’

‘If Bauer reports on them to Berlin, the Nazis might understand what they’re here for.’

‘Yes,’ said Moorcock, ‘but his reports won’t be reaching Berlin.’

‘You mean for me to destroy his letters?’

Moorcock laughed and shook his head.

‘You are not that na?ve, Mr Charles. If Bauer suddenly stopped writing, what kind of a message might that send? No, these shadow wars of ours go a little deeper than that.’ He paused. ‘Mr Charles, here’s what must happen. Your Mr Brogan must lift each letter “Bauer” writes from the hotel post room. Instead of opening and transcribing their contents before sending the original on, I would have him deliver each letter, after midnight, to this address.’ Mr Moorcock took out a notebook and pencil and scrawled down the address of a gentlemen’s club overlooking Green Park. ‘Before dawn, he will return to the club and receive a letter in kind, which he will then deposit in the post room for onward delivery to this Vienna address, and Herr Bauer’s cousin, Emma – though, of course, no such person exists.’

Maynard Charles said, ‘I understand.’

‘Do you?’

‘The letters Billy takes back to the post room – they won’t be the letters Bauer wrote. They’re ones you devise, to take their place.’

Moorcock smiled. ‘We have men whose lives are built on this kind of work. The dark arts, they call it. Experts in lettering and imitation. Bauer’s stream of reports mustn’t be interrupted, lest they know his cover is blown. It’s important that he keeps writing. But it’s equally important that his reports reveal nothing we don’t ourselves control. We would tease out a sentence here and there, replace them with sentences of our own. The flow of information, my good man. That is how wars are won.’

Moorcock stood, fastened the buttons on his overcoat, and finished his drink.

‘You could have been one of us, Mr Charles. Welcome to the world of counter-espionage. The real looking-glass war.’

After he had gone, Maynard began to feel the dirt of it. He felt the weight of telling Billy Brogan too. If he could have done it himself, he would gladly have stepped into those shoes, gladly have spared the young man his fate. But a hotel director was always noticeable; Billy would go better unseen.

Eager for the fresh, clean air, Maynard demanded the keys to the Candlelight Terrace from Diego, who was finishing tidying up at the bar, and slipped out into the balcony gardens. The shrubbery, as naked and stark as the winter, shielded him from the worst of the wind, but there was no denying the cold of a November night. He came to the railing that ran around the terrace and looked down, through curling ripples of snow, to the square beneath him. What a beautiful thing winter was. The snow captured the lights of the stars and made it seem as if it was almost day on Berkeley Square.

He fancied he could see Moorcock, turning his collar up as he vanished back to the night. Such a diminutive man, to be directing a game like this. Maynard watched him as he skirted the edge of the square, as the flare of a tiny cigarillo appeared at his lips. But then he blinked – and, just like the ghost that he was, Moorcock was gone.