The Judas Code

‘I like to gamble.’

‘Who gave you the information?’

‘I gleaned it.’

He spoke beautiful English. Perhaps he had been to Cambridge where the Russians were so assiduously recruiting agents.

‘Who from?’

Spearman put two fingers inside his mouth. They came out holding a tooth. Then the spirit seemed to go out of Spearman, so often the case when a homosexual realises his looks have been damaged.

Sensing that the moment had come to change the approach, Canaris dismissed the two Gestapo thugs. They hesitated, unsure of Canaris’s authority.

Without raising his voice, Canaris said: ‘Get out.’

They went.

Canaris sat down opposite Spearman, gave him another cigarette and said in a friendly, almost paternal, tone: ‘Come now, stop being so obstinate. An admirable quality, I agree, and very British, but entirely misplaced at the moment.’

Tears gathered in Spearman’s eyes. ‘I just don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I pass on information, that’s all. I don’t pretend it’s true, I never have. And what happens …?’ His voice trembled and he brushed at his eyes with blood-stained fingers; Canaris felt almost, but not quite, sorry for him. ‘This is what happens … It isn’t fair.’

‘If you co-operate it won’t happen again. Believe me, I don’t want to see you hurt.’ True enough. ‘And if you do help us we might even increase your reward.’

Spearman stared at Canaris beseechingly. ‘But I have co-operated; I don’t understand …’

‘Your informant, who was he?’ Canaris hardened his tone a little.

‘I told you it was only hearsay.’

‘A homosexual?’

‘Does that make it more suspect?’ a little spirit returning to him.

Canaris shook his head. ‘It makes no difference. Gossip is gossip. It’s up to us to process it.’ He handed Spearman a handkerchief. ‘Who was he?’

Spearman pressed the white silk handkerchief to his eyes. ‘Yes, he’s queer all right.’

‘Your … friend?

Spearman nodded.

‘British?’

‘Swiss.’

‘You move in exalted circles, Mr. Spearman,’ because there was no such mortal as a poor Swiss here, or anywhere else for that matter.

‘I move in influential circles.’

‘You mean, I think, that for reasons we won’t pursue you are briefly admitted to the fringe of such circles. Among the fugitive kings of Europe reigning in Estoril.’

‘And bankers and businessmen and diplomats and spies, of course. There are more spies in Estoril than whores in Piccadilly.’

‘And your friend … what is his profession?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Oh yes,’ Canaris said, ‘it matters very much.’

‘Very well then, he’s a businessman.’

‘You’re not giving very much away, Mr. Spearman. I understood you were going to co-operate.’

‘I thought it was an unwritten law,’ Spearman said, puffing away at his cigarettes, ‘that informants weren’t obliged to give away their source of information.’

‘I just re-wrote that law.’

‘Very well, his business is cork.’

‘Along with every other businessman in Lisbon. But hardly a profitable enterprise for a Swiss. After all, they don’t produce that much wine, and none of that particularly memorable. Are you sure it’s cork, Mr Spearman?’

‘I understand he’s a middleman.’

‘Ah, but he wouldn’t be anything else, would he?’ Canaris touched his grey eyebrows, a habit of his; his wife had clipped them for him at their home on Lake Ammersee in Bavaria just before he left for Portugal; he wished profoundly that he was back there now. He unbuttoned his overcoat, leaned forward and snapped: ‘His name please.’

‘I can’t give it to you. You’ll have him beaten just as you’ve beaten me.’

‘A Swiss businessman? I doubt that, I doubt that very much,’ Canaris said. ‘British draft-dodgers, yes, we beat the hell out of them. But not Swiss businessmen. In any case we might need his cork, if cork it is, for some of our Rhine wines. He is German Swiss?’

‘No, French … Shit!’ Spearman stamped on his cigarette butt. ‘That was bloody clever.’

‘At least it narrows the field. You might as well tell me his name, I’ll find out soon enough. If you die during further interrogation,’ his voice still pleasant, man-to-man, ‘then it will merely be a process of elimination.’

Spearman began to shiver. ‘If I do, you won’t —’

‘Reveal the source of my information? Certainly not. I am an officer and a gentleman, although that may have escaped you.’

Spearman gave him a name. Cottier. Canaris stood up and began to pace the floor. Cottier? It meant nothing to him.

‘… in any case,’ Spearman was saying, ‘he only heard it indirectly at a party. You know those Estoril parties …’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Canaris, thinking of France, Belgium, Holland bleeding from the wounds of war. ‘And who was his informant, for God’s sake?’

The transfer of responsibility seemed to cheer Spearman up a little. He uttered a name which stopped Canaris in his tracks because it was the name of one of the two sources that had brought him to Lisbon.

*

Half an hour later Canaris lunched with Fritz von Claus, head of the Abwehr operation in Portugal, in his small terrace house overlooking the flea market.