The Tenth Man Page 2

  The typist—Miss Jixon—is a withered spinster of forty-four who regards everyone and everything with suspicion. She believes that even the most innocent laborer is in the pay of the secret police, and she is shocked by the inadequacy of the security arrangements in the office. She insists on all blotting paper being locked in the safe and all typewriter ribbons being removed at night. This is highly inconvenient as no one is very good at fixing typewriter ribbons. Once she finds a used ribbon thrown in the wastepaper basket instead of being burned in the incinerator and she begins to demonstrate the danger of the practice by deciphering the impress on the ribbon. All she can make out is "Red lips were ne'er so red nor eyes so pure," which turns out to be a line of a sonnet written by Cobb—obviously with Mrs. Tripp in mind.

  "He's really rather sweet," Mrs. Tripp says. The chief problem that Tripp has to solve is how to disguise the fact that he has no sources for his reports. He finds this unexpectedly easy. He goes shopping and returns with envelopes that have been handed to him, he says, from under the counter; he makes a great show of testing perfectly innocent letters about sewing machines for secret inks; he takes Cobb for a round of the town and now and then in the restaurants points out his agents.

  "A very discreet man. You'll see he won't show the least flicker of recognition."

  The monthly payments to agents present a difficulty: Miss Jixon objects strongly to the payments being made by himself.

  "It's irregular, insecure: HQ would never countenance it."

  By this time, for the sake of his assistants, he has drawn up an impressive chart of his sources, with the immediate head agents who control each gang. Miss Jixon insists that from now on he shall cut off his personal contacts with all but his head agents (of whom the cinema actress is one) and that he should meet them on every occasion in a different disguise.

  Disguises become the bane of Tripp's life. What makes it worse, of course, is that his wife knows nothing. Miss Jixon shows a horrible ingenuity: Tripp's makeup box for the operatic productions of the Anglo-Latesthian Society is requisitioned. He finds himself being forced to slip out of back doors in red wigs and return by front doors in black wigs. She makes him carry at least two soft hats of varying colors in his overcoat pockets, so that he can change hats. Spectacles, horn-rimmed and steel-rimmed, bulge his breast pockets.

  The strain tells. He becomes irritable and Mrs. Tripp is reduced to tears. Cobb is torn between hero worship and heroine worship.

  4

  NEXT CRISIS: THE ENEMY BEGINS TO TAKE TRIPP SERIOUSLY. He becomes aware that he is followed everywhere—even to the Anglo-Latesthian musical soiree—"an evening with Edward German and Vaughan Williams." Miss Jixon's security arrangements have been a little too good and the Germans are no longer able to keep an eye on the reports he sends.

  She has objected to the use of the Chief of Police as transmitter and has evolved an elaborate method of sending secret ink messages on postage stamps. (There is a moment when Miss Jixon skirts shyly round the possibility of bird shit as secret ink.) Unfortunately the ink never develops properly—single words will appear and disappear with disconcerting rapidity.

  Tripp, in order to be able to fake his expenses sheet and show the expenditure of huge sums for entertainment, is forced to dine out at least three times a week. He hates restaurant meals—and in any case it would be fatal if one of his assistants saw him dining alone. He therefore rents a room in the suburbs and retires there for a quiet read (his favorite authors are Charles Lamb and Newbolt) or the writing of a bogus report, taking a little food out of the larder with him. (In his account book this appears as "Dinner for three (political sources) with wines, cigars, etc., £5. l0s.0d.") This constant dining out had never been necessary in the old days before his assistants came, and Mrs. Tripp resents it.

  The domestic crisis reaches its culmination when on payday Tripp has to pretend to visit the home of the cinema actress with pay for her subsources. Cobb keeps guard in the street outside and Tripp, wearing a false mustache, proceeds up to the actress's flat, rings the bell and inquires for an imaginary person. He turns away from the closing door just as Mrs. Tripp comes down from visiting a friend in the flat above. His excuse that he was trying to sell a sewing machine seems weak to Mrs. Tripp in view of his false mustache.

  Domestic harmony is further shattered when Cobb, anxious to make peace between his hero and his heroine, tells Mrs. Tripp everything—or what he thinks is everything. "It's for his country, Mrs. Tripp," he says.

  Mrs. Tripp decides that she too will go in for patriotism. She begins to dine out too, and Tripp, not unduly disturbed, takes the opportunity of appointing her as agent with a notional lover in the Foreign Ministry.

  "That fellow Tripp," they say in London, "deserves a decoration. The Service comes even before his wife. Good show."

  His notional mistress and his wife's notional lover are among his most interesting sources. Unfortunately, of course, his wife does not believe that his mistress is notional, and her dinner companion, unlike the notional member of the Foreign Ministry, is a very real young man attached to Agriculture and Fisheries.

  Mrs. Tripp gets news of Tripp's hideout and decides to track him down. She is certain she will find him in the company of the actress and that he will not be engaged in work of national importance.

  The enemy are aware of his hideout.

  5

  TRIPP HAS GOT HIS LEGS UP ON THE STOVE, SOME SAUSAGE rolls in his pocket, and he is reading his favorite poet Newbolt aloud, in a kind of subhuman drone which is his method with poetry. "Play up, play up and play the game... the dons on the dais serene..." He is surprised by a knock at the door. He opens it and is still more surprised by the sight of his notional subagent, the cinema actress. Her car has broken down outside: can she have his help? Outside in the car two thugs crouch ready to knock Tripp on the head. A third—a tall stupid sentimental-looking German of immense physique—keeps watch at the end of the street. Tripp says he knows nothing about cars; now if it had been a sewing machine...

  Mrs. Tripp is coming up the road. She has obviously lost her way. Tripp by this time is demonstrating the special points of the Singer sewing machine... Mrs. Tripp is cold and miserable. She leans against a fence and cries. A little further down the road the sentimental German watches her. He is torn between pity and duty. He edges nearer.

  Mr. Tripp is talking about poetry to the cinema actress...

  Mrs. Tripp weeps on the German's shoulder and tells him how her husband is betraying her at this moment, but she can't remember the number of the house...

  The Germans in the car are getting very cold. They get out and begin to walk up and down... Tripp is reading Newbolt to the actress... "His captain's hand on his shoulder smote... " Mrs. Tripp and the German peer in at the window. He hasn't realized that this treacherous husband has anything to do with him. Mrs. Tripp moans, "Take me away," and he obeys at once—in his comrades' car. Somebody—he is too sentimentally wrought up to care who—tries to stop him and he knocks him down. He deposits Mrs. Tripp at her own door.

  Tripp is still reading poetry when there is another knock at the door. One German pulls in the other German who is still unconscious. There is a babble of German explanations. "He was trying to mend the car," the actress explains, "and it ran away from him."

  "I'll ring up the garage," Tripp says. He goes in an alcove, where nobody has seen the telephone. They prepare to knock him out. "Wrong number," he says furiously. "It's the police." When he puts down the receiver again they knock him out.

  6

  MR. TRIPP HAS NOT RETURNED HOME FOR SOME DAYS. COBB and Miss Jixon are worried. Mrs. Tripp is furious but finds consolation.

  Tripp comes to himself inside the German Embassy. Enormous pressure is put on him to betray his organization, but he has no organization to betray. The threat forcibly resolves itself into this: either he will remain a prisoner in the Embassy until war starts, when he will be handed to the Gestapo as a spy, or he will se
nd a message for them—containing false information carefully devised to discredit him—to London and then in due course he will be released. They show him films of concentration camps, they keep him from sleeping: he is shut up in a cell with the sentimental German, now disgraced, who wakes him whenever he tries to sleep and reproves him for betraying his wife.

  The German Ambassador, in collaboration with the Military Attache, plans out the message for him to send. On one sheet the Military Attache notes the facts to be concealed: the date of invasion, number of divisions, etc. On the other they note the lies to be revealed. A breeze from the open window whips the papers around. The wrong notes (that is to say the true notes) are handed to Tripp to write in secret ink. Tripp gives way. To send one more message of false information seems a small price to pay.

  To make all secure and ensure that no Tripp message will ever be believed again, the Germans instruct the Chief of Police to go to the British Ambassador and expose Tripp's dealings with him—the invented messages which he used to show to the Germans before transmitting them. He gives the impression that Tripp knew that the Germans saw them.

  Tripp is arrested by the police immediately after he leaves the German Embassy. He is escorted home where he is allowed to pack a bag. Mrs. Tripp is not there. Cobb shows him a decoded cable from London: "Dismiss Agent XY27 [his wife]. Intercepted correspondence to school friend shows she is carrying on intrigue with... of Agriculture and Fisheries Ministry instead of... of Foreign Ministry. Unreliable."

  Tripp says goodbye to his home, to Cobb and Miss Jixon, to his makeup box, presented to him by the Anglo-Latesthian Society, to his collected works of Gilbert and Sullivan. He empties his pockets of the false mustache, soft hats, spectacles. "These were the trouble," he says sadly to Miss Jixon.

  He is put on board a plane to England.

  An official inquiry awaits him at HQ. His Ambassador's report has been received, but opinion among his judges before he comes is divided. The trouble is that his reports have been welcomed by the Armed Forces. The whole Secret Service will look foolish if they have to recall hundreds of reports over the last two years—ones which have been acclaimed as "most valuable." The head of the inquiry points out that it will discredit the whole Service. Any of their agents could have done the same. None of them will be believed in future.

  A message arrives that Tripp is in the outer office, and the youngest member of the inquiry—a dapper, earnest FO type—goes out to see him. He whispers to him urgently, "Everything will be all right. Deny everything."

  "If only," the chairman is saying, "he hadn't sent that last message. All his other messages are matters of opinion. You remember the underground works at Leipzig. After all, they are underground—we can't be sure he invented them. General Hays particularly liked that report. He said it was a model report. We've used it in our training courses. But this one—it gives a time and date for zero hour, and the source claimed—the German Military Attache himself—you can't get round that. Such and such divisions will cross the frontiers at ten o'clock today. If we hadn't been warned by the Ambassador we'd have had the whole Army, Navy and Air Force ringing us up to know who the devil had sent such nonsense. Come in, Tripp. Sit down. This is a very serious matter. You know the charges against you."

  "I admit everything."

  The dapper young man whispers excitedly, "No, no, I said deny."

  "You can't possibly admit everything," the chairman interrupts with equal excitement, "it's for us to tell you what you admit and what you don't admit. Of course this last message—" The telephone rings. He raises the receiver: "Yes, yes. Good God!"

  He puts the receiver down and addresses the inquiry board. "The Germans crossed the Polish frontier this morning. Under the circumstances, gentlemen, I think we should congratulate Mr. Tripp on his last message from Latesthia. It is unfortunate that bungling in the British Embassy resulted in no use being made of it but those after all are the chances of the Service. We can say with confidence among ourselves that the Secret Service was informed of the date and time of war breaking out."

  Tripp is given the OBE. He is also appointed chief lecturer at the course for recruits to the Secret Service. We see him last as he comes forward to the blackboard, cue in hand, after being introduced to the recruits as "one of our oldest and soundest officers—the man who obtained advance news of the exact date and even the hour of the German attack—Richard Tripp will lecture on 'How to Run a Station Abroad'"

  THE TENTH MAN

  PART ONE

  1

  MOST OF THEM TOLD THE TIME VERY ROUGHLY BY THEIR meals, which were unpunctual and irregular: they amused themselves with the most childish games all through the day, and when it was dark they fell asleep by tacit consent—not waiting for a particular hour of darkness for they had no means of telling the time exactly: in fact there were as many times as there were prisoners. When their imprisonment started they had three good watches among thirty-two men, and a secondhand and unreliable—or so the watch owners claimed—alarm clock. The two wristwatches were the first to go: their I owners left the cell at seven o'clock one morning—or seven-ten the alarm clock said—and presently, some hours later, the watches reappeared on the wrists of two of the guards.

  That left the alarm clock and a large old-fashioned silver watch on a chain belonging to the Mayor of Bourge. The alarm clock belonged to an engine driver called Pierre, and a sense of competition grew between the two men. Time, they considered, belonged to them and not to the twenty-eight other men. But there were two times, and each man defended his own with a terrible passion. It was a passion which separated them from their comrades, so that at any hour of the day they could be found in the same corner of the great concrete shed: they even took their meals together.

  Once the mayor forgot to wind his watch: it had been a day of rumor, for during the night they had heard shooting from the direction of the city, just as they had heard it before the two men with wristwatches were taken away, and the word "hostage" grew in each brain like a heavy cloud which takes by a caprice of wind and density the shape of letters. Strange ideas grow in prison and the mayor and the engine driver drew together yet more intimately it was as though they feared. that the Germans chose deliberately the men· with watches to rob them of time: the mayor even began to suggest to his fellow prisoners that the two remaining timepieces should be kept hidden rather than that all should lose their services, but when he began to put this idea into words the notion suddenly seemed to resemble cowardice and he broke off in midsentence.

  Whatever the cause that night, the mayor forgot to wind his watch. When he woke in the morning, as soon as it was light enough to see he looked at his watch. "Well," Pierre said, "what is the time? What does the antique say?" The hands stood like black neglected ruins at a quarter to one. It seemed to the mayor the most terrible moment of his life: worse, far worse, than the day the Germans fetched him. Prison leaves no sense unimpaired, and the sense of proportion is the first to go. He looked from face to face as though he had committed an act of treachery: he had surrendered the only true time. He thanked God that there was no one there from Bourge. There was a barber from Etain, three clerks, a lorry driver, a greengrocer, a tobacconist—every man in the prison but one was of a lower social plane than himself, and while he felt all the greater responsibility toward them, he also felt they were easy to deceive, and he told himself that after all it was better so: better that they should believe they still had the true time with them than trust to their unguided guesses and the secondhand alarm clock.

  He made a rapid calculation by the gray light through the bars. "It's twenty-five minutes past five," he said firmly and met the gaze of the one whom he was afraid might see through his deceit: a Paris lawyer called Chavel, a lonely fellow who made awkward attempts from time to time to prove himself human. Most of the other prisoners regarded him as an oddity, even a joke—a lawyer was not somebody with whom one lived: he was a grand doll who was taken out on particular occ
asions, and now he had lost his black robe.

  "Nonsense," Pierre said. "What's come over the antique? It's just a quarter to six."

  "A cheap alarm like that always goes fast."

  The lawyer said sharply as though from habit, "Yesterday you said it was slow." From that moment the mayor hated Chavel. Chavel and he were the only men of position in the prison; he told himself that never would he have let Chavel down in that way, and immediately began tortuously to seek for an explanation—some underground and disgraceful motive. Although the lawyer seldom spoke and had no friends, the mayor said to himself, "Currying popularity. He thinks he'll rule this prison. He wants to be a dictator."

  "Let's have a look at the antique," Pierre said, but the watch was safely tethered by its silver chain weighted with seals and coins to the mayor's waistcoat. It couldn't be snatched. He could safely sneer at the demand.

  But that day was marked permanently in the mayor’s mind as one of those black days of terrible anxiety which form a private calendar: the day of his marriage; the day when his first child was born; the day of the council election; the day when his wife died. Somehow he had to set his watch going and adjust the hands to a plausible figure without anyone spotting him—and he felt the Paris lawyer's eyes on him the whole day. To wind the watch was fairly simple: even an active watch must be wound, and he had only to wind it to half its capacity, and then at some later hour of the day give it absentmindedly another turn or two.