Free Letters for a Spy by Stephen Benatar Page B

route.
    Besides, why the hell should anyone be following me?
    However, I surreptitiously kept him under surveillance; and before long I saw him turn to the right and head towards Waterloo Bridge. (Waterloo Place to Waterloo Bridge? There seemed a symmetry about his journey.) Afterwards, I was endlessly scanning the crowds in search of a replacement.
    Until at last I told myself—told myself again—to stop being so imaginative. I carried on to Fleet Street, attempting not to look back. (I looked back only three times; it could have been much worse.) Halfway down Fleet Street, on the left-hand side, I came to the shiny black wall of the Express building. All glass and chrome and black reflection.
    I had chosen the Express for reasons that weren’t perhaps the most scientific but seemed at least as good as any other: it was the newspaper my grandparents had always read and therefore the only one in this country for which I felt affection—Rupert Bear had played a major part in my development.
    Now I walked into the paper’s spacious lobby and learnt that I shouldn’t, after all, be in need of its back-numbers department. Not for any date as recent as last month. I was shown a couple of enormous binders that sat side-by-side on a display stand.
    My search began with the issue dated Sunday April 25 th . There was no report in it of any Allied aircraft being lost in the Atlantic but I should have felt surprised if there had been. Supposing the crash had happened on the 24 th it would surely have been too new for even the stop press. Particularly if it had happened late on the 24 th .
    But after skimming the actual news I started to read an article purporting to be about my boss at the Abwehr. Yet it was all so ridiculous I could barely make myself continue. The piece had been headed: ‘MAN WHO WAS AFRAID TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED. Hitler’s Number 1 Spy.’
    “Only half a dozen men outside Germany have ever met Admiral Canaris, the mysterious chief of the German Secret Service, who is reported from Stockholm to have been dismissed at the demand of Himmler, head of the Gestapo…”
    Well, now, who’d have thought it? The admiral dismissed, indeed … and at Himmler’s instigation! How strange that no word of this had yet filtered through to Berlin—or, anyway, hadn’t done so by the time that I’d departed. And all the more remarkable, of course, when London’s Sunday Express had known about it for practically a fortnight. My, my! How remiss of Stockholm! Such laxity in keeping us abreast!
    “In the years leading up to the war Canaris began to work on undermining the countries scheduled as the future victims of Hitler’s and Germany’s world-conquering ambitions.
    “To Canaris was entrusted the work of infiltration, corruption and demoralization. He marked down the future quislings of Europe. He sent hundreds of his handsomest agents, men and women, to corrupt some of the most influential figures—social, political and financial—in the lands to be invaded…”
    No, why was I even troubling to read it? Further down the page there was something of far greater import. The latest film reviews.
    ( Mademoiselle France . Joan Crawford playing a selfish Parisian dress designer asked to help a stranded American flyer get out of Paris during the Occupation. This pilot was John Wayne so she obviously fell in love with him and became a very much nicer person. Bully for Joan.)
    And while I was on the entertainments page I looked to see what show Major Martin had taken his fiancée to (had presumably taken his fiancée to). It was advertised as George Black’s Strike A New Note . Starring somebody named Sid Field. I recalled that they had gone to the second house. Second house at five-thirty.
    Then I glanced back at the article on Canaris and acknowledged my debt to the writer: “At least you signposted the way to Joan and John and Sid. You mustn’t feel your efforts were entirely wasted.”
    I moved on to the Express of the