When I had cleared the paper, I looked inside. The cylinder was an ordinary cardboard roll–the sort that one uses as a container for maps or blueprints. It was tied over the open ends with tape and sealed with a lead seal. Fingers rather than eyes found a wire running through the tape into the center of the cylinder and attached to the latch of the case. It looked as if slipping the catch or removing the roll would pull the wire.
I tried to remember, among all the debris of long forgotten courses on everything from control of flies to detection of wooden mines (the answer in both cases being that you couldn’t), what I had learned about all the dirty tricks of sappers. There was something about a spring which released a plunger which broke a vessel of sulphuric acid which did pretty well anything you wanted it to do.
Well, if the pulling of the catch pulled the wire–as it obviously did–and released the plunger, there must be some way by which Lex could prevent it happening. I wished I had done a course on bomb disposal. I wished I had been in the garden. I wished above all that I had the power to take my left hand off the top of the case and that I wouldn’t press so hard. I wished that we hadn’t bought a new bedroom carpet.
I poked about inside the other end of the cylinder and, sure enough, I found a metal slide with a small knob on the end lying along the cardboard. Lex could have got at this knob from the outside of the case by thrusting a finger into the cheap, pliable material and feeling for it. He couldn’t possibly have pulled it; so I put an overcoat over my face, in case I was wrong, and pressed it. It slid home with a comforting click.
There were probably no other risks, but I wasn’t going to find out. I cut the stitches that held the cardboard roll to the side of the case, cut the tape, and slipped off the roll. Inside was a metal cylinder, rather larger than a fat fountain pen, still attached by its plunger wire to the interior of the latch. So far as I was concerned, it could stay attached.
I gave Sandorski full marks as a commanding officer. He had made none of his staccato and intelligent suggestions, and had remained perfectly quiet, confident and close to me through the whole business.
We withdrew the papers from their container, and unrolled them. They were important enough to justify the extreme precautions that senders and recipients had taken, and for Sandorski they completed the picture. I forget the exact words he used, but his explanation left me with an image of a cone made, let us say, of separate wires, within which he stood. He knew already the circular base of the cone and varying lengths of the upward course of the wires. What these documents gave him was the apex where they all met. We had:
1. List of cover names.
This was without heading or remark, and was a fairly harmless document if kept apart from the others. It gave us the national leaders who were in correspondence with each other. I can’t say they were very impressive, but they had this in common, according to Sandorski: that they were sincere.
2. Files of leading fascists who were still at large in Italy, Germany and the free countries of Europe, with notes on their reliability.
3. Propaganda directive for Heyne-Hassingham, with unintelligible code references which looked like dates for action.
4. A letter to Hiart asking for a report on the family connections, political sympathies and past of certain financiers in Sweden and America who had offered money.
5. Draft of an agreement for either signature or initialing by Heyne-Hassingham.
There it was, all the old stuff of the logo’s in a brand-new dress! A revolution of the little man to answer the revolution of the littler man. There were to be simultaneous coups d’etat in the states of western Europe, and the immediate promise of peace and unity; and until that millennium arrived, all the weapons of communism were to be used to defeat communism. For me and my like it merely meant that the flag over our concentration camp would be white instead of red.
The strength of the movement was in Hiart and his opposite numbers abroad. Since these officials were the most trusted servants of state, the damage they could do by collaborating with each other behind the backs of their governments was incalulable. None of the political chiefs expected anything spectacular of Heyne-Hassingham; but, even so, they had fallen into Ribbentrop’s mistake. They thought that his precious People’s Union could make such a nuisance of itself that British policy would be forced to be neutral.
“That’s the end of Heyne-Hassingham,” I said. “Now we go straight to the police.”
“Do we? Colonel, my lad, the value of all this just depends on my reliability and yours.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Don’t you–ha? Your security people get this sort of thing once a week. Wild political accusations. Just what you’d expect from a bunch of unemployed Polish officers who wanted money. I might have forged all this–easily.”
Up to then I had followed his lead blindly, for I was in such a mess that there was nothing else I could do; but now my responsibility, my duty, had become equal to his.
“No complications,” I said. “I insist on immediate action.”
He went all general, and treated me as if I had been some Polish officer who dared to question his patriotism. I didn’t mind. I knew he was loosing off the accumulated strain of the last hour. He told me–if it can be called telling–that because he was anti-communist, it didn’t mean he was a pro-fascist traitor.
“Patience, not politics!” he shouted at me. “Do you understand? Patience is what we need.”
“We do,” I said drily.
He barked at me, and fumed and fretted for a moment, trying, for the sake of his pride, to work up his temper again. It couldn’t be done. He apologized with a most wholehearted grace. His words were so gallant that they might have been addressed to a woman. The art of the apology has been lost in countries where the duel is out of fashion.
“I’ll get off to London tonight,” he said, “and take Lex with me.”
“Will he go?”
“Go? Why not? Doesn’t know where he is. Doesn’t know who I am. What can he do? Shove his head out of the window and howl for Heyne-Hassingham? Lex will come like a lamb so long as we don’t frighten him. Look the blighter up!”
We found Lex on the list of cover names. Sandorski knew of him, but they had never met. He was a Czech of Austrian descent, and had been, in better days, a prominent lawyer with a taste for wildcat politics. We also found Pink’s true name. He was the tough and eccentric son of an obscure English peer, and he had been fired out of the Navy for gross insubordination. Evidently he had been under the impression that he was Nelson.
Peter Sandorski boldly made his arrangements by telephone. There was no reason to suppose we were under any suspicion, and indeed at that time–which was about midday–we were not. He called a Whitehall number, and spoke to a friend named Roland, asking him to make arrangements for two air passages to Vienna and for a safe-he stressed safe–lodging meanwhile. It was clear that he had the connections to travel freely, even semiofficially. How far the secret services of Western powers supplied him with funds, I do not know; but his organization of Poles and expatriates, playing for European peace and stability, must have been extremely useful.
When Cecily came back from her shopping and her children, she gave us a picnic lunch in the roof, and herself kept watch below. Lex returned to consciousness and gave little trouble. I think it was Cecily who put confidence into him. He couldn’t believe that such a woman would feed him and fuss over him if anything were intended against his life or liberty. As an experienced lawyer he must have been a fair judge of human nature. What he made of us then, I don’t know. He probably trusted us provisionally, failing anyone else to trust. We told him that his suitcase was in a safe place, and lent him a razor. We also gave him a good story to the effect that we had had to drug him, so that if he were caught he wouldn’t be able to talk until Heyne-Hassingham had an opportunity to tell him what to say.