Spy Games
Tintin and the captain in a child’s Eric Ambler
The Calculus Affair by Hergé
This is an early Cold War world. A world of endless, ceaseless suspicion. A situation we know well from fiction. World-ending weapons, a scientific arms race, a space race, a race of races. A world where new devices for ending all life on earth are made almost monthly. Feverish development. Men in white coats. Military applications.
Where there is nothing too difficult, nothing impossible, and where the resources of the state — its money, its talent, its espionage — are directed towards securing some advantage in industry and development.
In the world of intercontinental ballistic missiles, there is no defence. No defence against attack. The only defensive is offensive, and the capabilities must be offensive to all — offensive to decency, to taste, to humanity. All must have omelettes, the fates of the eggs be damned.
And some of the eggs are the scientists. They must be found and captured, or sweet-talked. They must give up what they know and work on what they might rather not. States cannot take no for an answer; they cannot be put off by scruples. If a man must be bribed, bribe him. If he will not work for money, kidnap him. Steal his work. And if he will not do as asked, disappear him, as so many men before have been disappeared.
What does this all have to do with Tintin? Our hero Tintin and his friend Captain Haddock (and Snowy, Tintin’s dog) are all relaxing at the captain’s large country house, Marlinspike. The captain is just telling Tintin, and Snowy, that he is not interested any more in adventure — that he wants to hang his hat and put his feet up — and then something strange happens. All the glass in the house starts to shatter. For some time, Tintin and the captain are deceived by the terrific storm that’s raging outside. Flashes of lightning, clashes of thunder almost unknown. But as glasses and window panes and mirrors begin to be shivered to pieces in great glass crashes, they start to wonder what might be causing all of it.
A strange event in the grounds — a man is out there, shot — only deepens the mystery. It appears that the captain and Tintin are being spied upon. And by more than one intelligence agency. When they summon help for the man who’d been hit, the two of them realise he’s gone — ferried away by his colleagues, or by Charon. Who’s to say?
Tintin and the captain ponder. They’re thrown. What could possibly be going on?
It’s not long after that their friend — and the captain’s fellow inhabitant of Marlinspike, Professor Calculus — declares that now’s the time. He’s off. Off to a conference in Geneva, he says. Back in a few days; don’t wait up. And for a time, Tintin and the captain let him go.
They don’t see the series of traps that are laid for the professor. He’s offered a lift by a local van just as a car full of spies prepared to descend on him. But Calculus cannot remain fortunate forever.
At the hall, the captain and Tintin think about the mystery of the glass. Tintin conjectures that Calculus must have had something to do with it. It’s stopped now he has gone away. They go into Calculus’s room and find a great amplifying machine. It looks like a radar station. But it’s more dangerous than that. Instead, it seems to focus the vibrations of sound for destructive ends. It could be used to break every window in a city. It could be used to shudder whole skyscrapers to the ground. A dangerous weapon.
It’s only then that they guess Calculus must be in danger. They must go to Geneva and find him, protect him for his own good. There’s no time to waste. They head to Geneva immediately, missing Calculus a few times in comic fashion. All the while, Tintin and the captain are trailed and dogged by their own personal intelligence service escort. They bump into men in long raincoats and low hats. Physically bump into them, in the captain’s case. But Calculus still eludes them. Finally, they head off to a house where the professor was scheduled to meet a colleague of his. Urgently, they run. There was no time to waste. Unluckily for Tintin, and the captain (and for Calculus), the professor has already gone missing. But they are not to know.
It’s only when they find Calculus’s colleague, tied up and left to rot in the coal cellar, that they discover the truth.
This is a particularly twisty story. It takes place, largely, in the central European states that float between 1950s mid-century modernity, extreme affected ancient ritual, and cheerful rural squalor. It’s a spy game. We have secret policemen in absurd uniforms; we have bugged telephones. We have devious spying and counter-spying as everyone involved is chased all over the map.
It’s a child’s Eric Ambler. Arms deals; industrial and corporate espionage. All to gain hold of the scientist who can build the great invention — to locate the microfilm he has somewhere hidden — to make use of what he’s made and the contents of his head before the contents are extinguished forever.