FOGGIE FICTION THE LAST PART OF OUR FOUR-PART ESPIONAGE TALE

OLDBEAR WAS VISIBLY SHAKEN, I COULD SEE THAT, WHEN THE TWO GERMANS JOINED THE THREE OF US IN THE GARDENS OF WALTHAM ABBEY.

I’d recovered from my initial shock, after making the phone call, but I still wondered what the hell an important member of the Federal Republic of West Germany was doing in company with an influential Party member of the Democrat People’s Republic of East Germany’s Politburo, at an address that was, apparently, a Chinese restaurant in Peckham, but not doing any business because (so the voice’d said until I gave the word ‘Rheingold’) it was in the process of being renovated.

Oldbear recovered somewhat, and turned to Slattery, “I don’t think we need to have Mike here with us any longer, Herr Schlachter, do you? Perhaps it might be a good idea if he left now.”

“Yes, Commander,” Slattery answered, and looked across at me, and nodded. “Please go, Mr Dawson, but I would be grateful if you could stay with the motorcycle, and keep an eye on it for me, until I am ready to leave too. Oh”, he added, and threw the music case across to me “and you may have this…” He smiled grimly, as I stood holding the music case, with the blood draining from my face. “Just papers,” he remarked. “You see, Commander Oldbear is not always right.”

As I walked away from the four men, they started talking in German, fast and angrily, and I could hear Slattery’s voice, louder than the rest. He seemed to be haranguing the other two Germans, and although my German’s practically nonexistent, I caught something about ‘unholy marriage’, ‘Rheingold’, and ‘the gift of Nazism’. No, not the gift of Nazism – the German word ‘gift’ means ‘poison’, so ‘Nazismus-gift’ is the poison of Nazism. There was something else too – I couldn’t make out the entire phrase, but what Slattery was saying was something like “And is this why so many millions died?”

As I turned the corner, round the front of the Abbey, I heard the two Germans answering; one spoke in an authoritarian voice, and the other was more cajoling, more mollifying, and then Slattery replied, even angrier than before, but I was too far away to hear the words clearly, even if I could’ve understood them.

I waited by the Harley for threequarters of an hour, watching the people drift away from the Abbey, happy, well fed, and having enjoyed a pleasant afternoon, and a rewarding one, no doubt. No-one came near me or the Sportster – I guess Slattery was worried about somebody tampering with the bike before he could ride off on it. I saw him walk around the Abbey, and draw near to me where I stood by the black Harley. He stopped, and held out his hand for one of the helmets I’d taken off the bike, and was resting on the Abbey wall, beside the music case.

“Goodbye, Mr Dawson,” he said. “Thank you for your help. You have made it possible for me to do something I think was very important. Thank you.”

“What was it all about, Slattery?” I A FOUR-PART SERIAL BY JIM FOGG

asked him. “And what the hell are you going to do now? Where are you going?”

“Nowhere much, I think,” he replied, in answer to my last question, “and nothing much either. Ask Commander Oldbear what it was all about – he may tell you, or he may not. Goodbye, Mr Dawson.”

He switched the Sportster on, and kicked it over. The big vee-twin coughed a few times, and then rumbled into life, and he rode the short distance to the road from the tiny parking spot, and turned left into the one-way system. When he’d gone about a hundred yards, he turned round in the saddle of the Harley, and looked back over his left shoulder – it might’ve been at the Abbey, or maybe he’d wondered where the other three men were, but I think it was at me as his left arm started to come up in a wave of farewell. I saw that, and then I saw the bike go out of control, sliding sideways down the road in a shower of sparks, bouncing along an empty road, its rider thrown to one side like a carelessly thrown down rag doll when its owner’s tired of it and it’s long past her bed time. It seemed to take an eternity, but I don’t suppose the crash lasted more than a few seconds. And, in between the wave and the crash, I’m certain that I saw the left eye-piece of Slattery’s goggles (my goggles, in fact, I realised I’d given him my helmet) star, and then shatter, and his left eye socket suddenly turned dark… maybe black, maybe a terrible deep, dark, welling red.

It was deathly quiet, and then I heard kids screaming as they saw the results of the accident as they were walking away from the Abbey gardens, on their way home. Two or three men, one in a cassock, the others in suits, ran into the road, and pulled Slattery and the bike into the side, and laid him on the pavement – one was still attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as an ambulance arrived, followed by a police Granada. Then a dark blue Mercedes drew up to the Abbey precincts, and the two Germans got into it, and it drove away.

I turned round, and saw Oldbear. He was talking to a thin-featured man who was dressed like an angler, carrying a fishing basket, a bag, and a long canvas tube – the sort sold to carry fishing rods when they’ve been dismantled... or rifles, of course. Oldbear and the man must’ve exchanged a joke because they both laughed briefly, and then Oldbear shook the man’s hand in an oddly formal sort of way. The thin-featured man got into a battered old maroon Allegro, and Oldbear waved to him as he drove off, turning down a side street, nowhere near the main road where the police and the ambulance men were blocking the traffic with their vehicles as they loaded Slattery into the ambulance.

I went over to Oldbear. “I thought you said there wouldn’t be any surveillance,” I said angrily to him. “You promised Slattery, you bastard – what the hell was that guy, Oldbear?”

“I promised Schlachter there wouldn’t be any surveillance on us, that we wouldn’t be followed, if you remember,” Oldbear answered. “I didn’t say that he wouldn’t be. As a matter of fact, Mike, he’s been under close scrutiny ever since he arranged the accident in Walthamstow – you don’t think we’d let him roam around the Home Counties unattended do you?”

“So why the hell didn’t you just pull him in, instead of going through this bloody farce?” I asked. “Why the hell set all this up?”

“We had to find out how much he knew,” Oldbear said, “and how far he was prepared to talk about it, of course. And, unfortunately, when we’d found out, it meant that Schlachter’s usefulness was at an end, and that explains his… err, motorcycle accident. I must tell you about T.E. Lawrence some day,” he went on, apparently meaninglessly, and with an odd, tight sort of smile. “Of course, high-powered air-rifles’ve come on a long way since those days, even if vee-twin motorcycles haven’t, apparently.”

“So that, I presume, was one of our best men?” I enquired bitterly, referring to the thin-featured man who’d driven away in the Allegro.

Oldbear looked shocked, momentarily. “Oh, dear me, no,” he replied, “it was one of theirs...”

It was over a week before I went to see Oldbear at his Essex cottage, and I went by hire car – someone’d stolen my Trident from High Beach, and the Police, after telling me that British Classics were a favourite of thieves, and mine'd probably end up in the States or maybe even Japan, didn’t hold out too much hope for its recovery. I was in no good frame of mind when I arrived, and I felt like I could do with more explanation than he was probably prepared to give.

“You’re probably too young, Mike, to remember Nikita Khrushchev’s famous words to one of the Soviet Army Marshals when he was visiting East Berlin,”

Oldbear said. “I think it was Zhukov or Voroshilov; anyway, it doesn’t matter. They were reviewing East German troops, and the Marshal, who’d fought against the Germans in World War II, looked at the soldiers strutting past, turned to Khrushchev, and said, ‘Nikita, these Germans are pigs.’

“‘Yes,’ Khrushchev answered, ‘but at least these Germans are our pigs.’

The Russians, no doubt with memories of the losses they sustained, and how close Hitler and his generals came to conquering the USSR, aren’t at all keen on a reunited Germany, Mike – neither are we Anglo-Saxons, us and the Americans to be honest.”

“And that was ‘Rheingold’, was it?” I asked. “A plan for the reunification of the two Germanies? So where does Slattery come into this?”

“The reunification of the two

Germanies might well become an economic and political necessity for both us and the Russians,” Oldbear replied. “We’ve got a scheme on paper – we call it ‘Strange Bedfellows’, nothing like as romantic as the German name. I’ve no doubt the Russians have too. It’ll probably happen someday, but when it does, we’ll all be in on it, and it won’t just be the East and West Germans sitting down together for a cosy chat without consulting their partners, I can assure you. Smacks a little bit too much of the start of a Fourth Reich, don’t you think?”

“And that was ‘Rheingold’?” I asked. He nodded. “Schlachter was, unfortunately for him, as idealogically sound as any East German communist should be. No doubt his early schooling’d indoctrinated him with a hatred of the earlier, united Nazi Germany, as well as the capitalist West – it was unfortunate for him that a good number of his masters didn’t view matters in such black and white terms, and were coming round to reaching an understanding with their West German counterparts. On the one hand he was a good East German, faithful to the State and his masters, but on the other he could see them pursuing a course

that was hateful to him, and would've undoubtedly invited retribution from the Russians, so what could he do?”

“Defect? Blow the gaff? But at the same time, I suppose, he regarded it as his duty to screw up talks about East-West Germany reunification, but without alerting the Russians,” I remarked. “Christ, it must be a hell of a life being a good communist and a loyal German, given circumstances like that – when your head’s in Moscow, and your heart’s in East Berlin. It made him… well, shall we say unbalanced, as well as very dangerous? This is probably why he decided to approach the British Intelligence Service. I’m too old and cynical to believe that it was because he regarded us as any sort of honest broker, because those days're probably long gone, I’m afraid. He couldn’t approach the Russians; he probably didn’t want to try the Americans, who are a little bit triggerhappy at the moment; I don’t suppose he even considered the French; and so that left us – we’d let the West Germans know that we were aware of their clandestine meetings with the East Germans, and the possibility of reunification’d be quietly shelved by Bonn, allowing the

East Germans to bow out gracefully as well. No harm done, no Fourth Reich, no Russian anger at East Germany’s independent action, no problems at all.”

“So where did he go wrong then?” I asked. “The way you’ve described it, Slattery’s motives and actions seem… well, not reasonable, maybe, but logical.”

“Ah, well, there’re certain long-standing agreements we have with the Russians,” Oldbear answered. “They’re reasonable and logical, too, and they tend to survive spy scandals, defecting diplomats, and all the rest of the nonsense career politicians and the media blow up from time to time. And so the Russians knew about Schlachter – it was my duty to tell them, in fact.”

“And so you got together and eliminated him,” I said. “And I presume the Russians know about ‘Rheingold’ as well? So there’s going to be a purge in East Germany – the very thing that Slattery wanted to avoid?”

“Oh, I don’t think it’ll be a purge,” Oldbear remarked. “A few prominent Party members’ll be replaced, a few more’ll head out into the wilderness of obscurity, a few might even be promoted sideways into dead-end jobs.

Schlachter’s removal’ll’ve proved to be enough of a salutary lesson, I’m sure. And,” he remarked, and I began to see how labyrinthine and devious his mind was, “there’ll be a whole new generation of East German leaders coming into prominence – some of them rather interesting too, from our point of view.”

I took the whisky he handed me, and sipped it in silence for a while. “I suppose I can’t use any of this?” I asked him. “I suppose it wouldn’t be in my best interests to, I mean?”

“We’d rather you didn’t,” he said, and it was an order, however courteously phrased. “It would only be a nine days’ wonder, after all, Mike, and once the fame and notoriety died away, you might find your creditability as a journalist had been damaged irreparably.”

There was silence again, and then Oldbear spoke. “I was sorry to hear about your motorcycle being stolen at High Beach – Tridents’re rather distinctive, aren’t they? I expect the thief didn’t take too much notice of my BMW – they probably all look alike to anyone not au fait with the various models, and there isn’t the same market for German motorcycles as there is for English ones. Still, you must let us provide you with a new one…”

“They don’t make new Tridents any more, Oldbear. Didn’t you know?”

“Another one, I meant, of course,” he answered deprecatingly. “One as good… no, better than the one you’ve lost, I mean.”

“I’d rather have the Sportster,” I told him. “Just get that out of whatever police garage it’s in, have it fixed up, and have it transferred to me, that’s all I’d like.”

Oldbear looked surprised. “Is there any reason?” he asked. “It’s rather an odd sort of request, Mike.”

“I’d like to keep it to remind me of a very brave kind of guy,” I told him, and he looked quite pleased.

“That’s very touching, Mike,” he commented. “It would please Sergeant Jackson’s widow very much to know that’s how you felt about it. I’m only sorry we’ll never be able to tell her.”

Which was great, but I don’t think I was referring to Rolly Jackson, late of the SAS Regiment – not at that particular moment anyway.

“We must go out for the odd ride, when we’ve fixed up the Harley for you,” Oldbear said next. “That would be pleasant, wouldn’t it, Mike?”

I thought a little while, and then answered. “I don’t think so, Oldbear. They’re different sorts of bikes, that

Harley and your Krauser BMW – they belong to two different lifestyles, do you know what I mean?”

Oldbear nodded reluctantly, and he looked slightly pained, as well as thoughtful. “Yes, perhaps you’re right, I think I see what you mean, Mike. Yes, two different lifestyles, you’re probably right.” A thought struck him, and he put it into words. “I keep thinking about what you said about Schlachter not keeping a low profile while everybody was looking for him. It is extraordinary, come to think of it – I wonder why he chose to join the dangerous obscurity of a motorcycle gang, and patronise The Eagle’s Claw? Perhaps it’s not out of character in the man, but it’s still odd, don’t you think? Of course, he wasn’t fully in control, during the last few weeks of his life…”

I thought I knew the answer, but I still had enough liking, as well as respect, left for Oldbear not to tell him. “I don’t know,” I answered. “I really don’t, Oldbear. I suppose we all do strange things when we’re under pressure.”

“I suppose we do,” he replied. “None of us’re ever entirely responsible for our actions, believe me, Mike, not when we’re under pressure, whatever that pressure might be….”

But I think I know why Slattery, and I still can’t think of him as Schlachter, chose to become an outlaw biker as cover, and went every night to The Eagle’s Claw. Maybe it was the only place left for him where he could be sure of finding truth – whatever the hell that is. Truth, and a sort of life he’d never experienced before maybe. Noisy, smoky, sometimes sordid, and maybe often violent, among people who’d always been told they were losers by a society that hadn’t made any attempt to understand them, and'd come to terms with the fact, on their own terms and within their own frames of reference. Maybe it’s something to do with freedom too – maybe when society decides you’re not worth bothering with, and it’s best leaving you and your kind alone… well, maybe then you’re finally truly free in a way you’re not as a telly journalist with a mortgage and maintenance to an ex-wife to pay, always having to please your

masters, and seeing a lot of your best work end up on the cutting room floor. Or as an intelligence agent, believing whole-heartedly in an ideal, however misguided it might be, becoming aware that your leaders’ ideas’re changing with every new move on the chess board of realpolitik, swinging around like the sails of a windmill to every new breeze. Or even as a spymaster, so deep in the labyrinth that you can never see the sunlight as you tread warily through the passageways, seeing only endless shades of grey, pursuing a minotaur that might not even be there, and might never’ve been in the first place.

I can understand Christopher Marlow better now. He was a poet in the England of Elizabeth I – another violent, bawdy, devious, and colourful age, and maybe not too different from our own, with threats from abroad and, so people thought, subversion from within. He was as good a poet as Shakespeare – an elegant, dangerous man, too Italianate and scheming for his own good, a duelist and an artist, a man who frittered away his talents in low-life and scheming. He was killed in a pub, I think it was in Deptford, and maybe it was called

The Bear, but it doesn’t really matter, by two daggers in the back that sliced through his brocaded silk padded doublet, and splashed his blood into a trestle table. He was killed, it seems, by order of Francis Walsingham, who was Elizabeth I’s spymaster-in-chief, because he was proving to be something of an embarrassment. No-one seemed surprised or shocked by his death – tavern brawls were common in Elizabethan England, and even poets died by cold steel, or of plague, or pox, or the executioner’s axe, because life was cheap, maybe cheaper than it is now.

Je n’ai pas des enemies – ils sont tout morts.

I have no enemies – they are all dead. Elizabeth I spoke many languages, and I’ve no doubt French was among them. And I’ve no doubt fluency in that language is one of Oldbear’s many accomplishments too. He remains likeable, as far as I’m concerned, and possessed of a certain charm, and a powerful and appealing magnetism as well, with his old-fashioned courtesy and diffidence, and his lack of irritation with the world’s problems. Everything has a solution – nothing need be too worrying, a way can always be found. Maybe the most truly dangerous man in the world, and perhaps the most evil in moral terms that have nothing to do with a society I don’t have all that much respect for any more, is the man who selflessly pursues a philosophy, and isn’t out for fame, or glory, or being who he is just for the hell of it, or because he doesn’t know any different. What that philosophy is, in Oldbear’s case, I wouldn’t know, and neither would I try to guess, either. I know he’ll be in touch with me again, when he thinks things are a little less painful for me, and memory’s faded a little.

And so I sit in The Eagle’s Claw, in between assignments, and drink too much beer – a middle-aged man who’s tolerated by the younger bikers around him, and their girls, because he has a shiny black Sportster parked outside. I never see Sammy now – there doesn’t seem any point in going round to see her. The music’s still loud in The Eagle’s Claw, but just occasionally they play records I can hear the words of, like Bob Dylan:

‘… for the Masters make the rules For the wise men and the fools…’

Oldbear’ll be in touch, sooner or later. THE LATE JIM FOGG RIP ILLUSTRATIONS: LOUISE LIMB