Double Cross Blind

by Joel N. Ross

  Highcastle grunted, and Davies-Frank tapped the white umbrella in his lap. Poor timid Mr. Melville. Wandered into a bomb site and caught his toe in rubble. It wasn’t uncommon—bomb sites were dangerous. Like the Queen’s Hall, at which the secondary meet with Duckblind had been set. Davies-Frank had peered inside. Within the buckling walls, a cross-section was visible—there the third floor, there the second, there the dank basement glowered through a hole. And there, on the ground floor, squatted an EWS static water tank. Twenty thousand gallons for the fire brigades. Children climbed in for a swim and drowned; they played in the rubble between crumbling walls and sinkhole cellars. They hoarded jumble, and prized nothing more highly than UXB, unexploded bombs. Bomb sites were dangerous, but Mr. Melville was no child. Caught his toe in rubble, hit by a falling wall . . . but why had he been there?

  “Scavenging?” Highcastle said, echoing Davies-Frank’s thoughts. “Not our Mr. Melville.”

  “Rescuing a stray dog.”

  Highcastle grunted. “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “No. I’ll have the body sent to Dr. Wheeler for postmortem. Illingworth will investigate. There’s nothing more to do.”

  “There’s always more.”

  Highcastle scowled at the near-deserted street and Davies-Frank followed his gaze. A man in his middle years escorted his elderly father over the road. A gentleman in a lounge suit and a mud-colored trilby strode past. A young mother guided her children along the pavement.

  “Five to nine,” Highcastle said, consulting his watch.

  “Shall I step outside?” Davies-Frank was suddenly nervous, though all he needed was to allow Duckblind to make contact, and to signal the men.

  “Patience,” Highcastle said. “Soon.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  NIGHT, DECEMBER 2, 1941

  THE AIR-RAID SIRENS faded for a moment, and hoofbeats sounded behind Tom, echoing down the narrow street. The sky was lighted by the moon and the flush of a hundred fires. It was beautiful. It had been beautiful on Crete—the ocean, the hills, the blue sky above the dying boy clawing in the blood-damp dirt with the stump of his arm.

  Hoofbeats. A dappled horse trotted across an empty intersection, an elegant animal, glossy and well muscled. A woman rode astride. She passed out of view, leaving nothing behind but the clip-clop of hooves.

  The sirens drowned out the echoes, and Tom saw a Beaufighter whining above. A dark speck against the moon, it arced in a graceful half circle, closed with one of the German raiders, and was lost to Tom as a cloud of smoke drifted overhead.

  Tom followed the smoke, and across the city the blacked-out streets were wreathed in flames as the Luftwaffe loosed their bombs. “The sparks,” a bald man told Tom, his face raised to the sky. “Feel like snowflakes on your skin.”

  A furnace blast of heat exploded from the paint factory across the street as something flammable ignited. Tom’s face was dripping sweat; his shirt was soaked. The roiling flames consumed the building, and a tin of paint burst and rocketed skyward in a Fourth of July display.

  “I was working late when the raid came,” the bald man said. “I ran downstairs, and old Sandy’s sitting in his chair, calm as you please. I clap a hand on his shoulder—” Three Roman candles burst from the factory. “One side of his face hadn’t a hair out of place. The other side,” the bald man said, “was charred black.”

  A flock of pigeons circled above, drawn to the flame or the heat. Tom watched them and felt snowflakes brush his face.

  Fire trucks arrived. There were jets of flame and jets of water. An AFB screamed that there were engineers trapped in the pit under the buses. He shouted, “Drive the buses out! Get the bloody buses!”

  The bald man said, “Shall we?”

  A spray of water hammered them, and they were behind the wheels of neighboring buses. The noise was an unbearable clangor, the heat buckling metal and burning Tom’s eyes. They drove to the street and Tom lost the bald man. He collapsed on the curb and watched the slicks of clear varnish rippling with blue flame.

  Hours later, Tom stood beneath a lamppost that had wilted from the heat, bowed low to the ground. On the corner, a heap of rubble swarmed with rescue and ambulance workers. Filmy wafts of smoke reeked of fish oil, and a woman’s high-pitched keen rose and fell above the din.

  A soot-covered woman—a FANY, a WAFS—told Tom they’d been digging for hours. The keening woman was at the bottom of a ten-foot shaft. They’d uncovered her head, but her body was trapped. There’d been a man, earlier, who’d fallen silent.

  “She’d have, too,” the WAFS woman said, “if not for her dog.”

  “Fallen silent?”

  “Scrappy little mite scratched for her when the first lot fell,” she said. “He was standing over her when the roof came down. Saved her life, didn’t he?”

  Tom said, “It’s hell being man’s best friend,” and a wall collapsed and the woman’s keening stopped.

  The rescue workers paused a moment, then began again.

  TEN O’CLOCK. Davies-Frank ran his fingers through his hair, brushed his cuff clean of a speck of ash, and almost smiled. He was being ridiculous. No reason to become overwrought, especially about an imaginary ash on gray cheviot after sundown. He’d be home with Joan and the twins in two hours. He’d creep into the girls’ room, watch their sweet faces closed with sleep, and feel his heart expand in his chest.

  He checked his watch. Four minutes after the hour. He tapped the tip of the umbrella against the side of his shoe. The street itself was quiet, though the bombers and night fighters battled in the skies above the other end of the city.

  Ten-oh-eight. An elderly man staggered from a side street. Why was a man that age abroad on a raid night? Innocent perhaps. Or Duckblind. Davies-Frank stayed relaxed, and the elderly man passed, trailing a whiff of liquor.

  Davies-Frank casually swung the umbrella in a half circle, propped it against his left shoulder—silently telling Highcastle’s men to stop the man for questioning.

  It was thirteen minutes after ten. The moon was bright, and the night busy with muffled explosions, the distant rattle of antiaircraft batteries. The wind rose, and storefront signs swayed and creaked on their chains.

  “Here, mister!” Something tugged his sleeve.

  “Good God!” Davies-Frank almost hit the grubby little girl with a reflexive jab of his umbrella. “You’ll be the death of me, a fright like that. Have you lost your mum?”

  “I’ve a message.” She glanced at the umbrella, ghostly white in the gloom. “For you.”

  He swung the umbrella jauntily across his right shoulder. “A message? Well, now—is it a singing telegram?”

  She looked dubious. “No.”

  “Pity, that. I’ve always fancied a singing telegram. Do you know what those are?”

  “Message is you should come along and follow me.”

  “The gentleman is not born,” he said, “who could refuse such a charming invitation as that.”

  She headed away from Queen’s Hall, and he saw no option but to follow. Duckblind was too important. The Twenty Committee was too important. Still, what the devil was he meant to do with this child? He walked slowly, giving Highcastle time to react. Not cricket, Duckblind using a child as a contact. . . .

  But his nervousness was suddenly gone. His fear had evanesced and the night air warmed him. Any positive activity—even this—was an antidote to the endless Sisyphean strategizing. He’d been too long chained to a desk, to the painstaking groundwork. It was simple: The XX Committee trumped all other considerations. What was there to fear? Sondegger might outwit him, but he could never undermine him. Tomorrow, he’d stride down the hall at Hennessey Gate and throw open the white door without fear. Look into Sondegger’s eyes and reveal nothing but contempt, contempt and the satisfaction of tonight’s job well done.

  �
�What sort of chap gave you the message?” he asked the girl. “Skinny or fat? Taller than I?”

  She shook her head.

  “Shorter than you?” he asked, attempting to charm her.

  “I’m not s’posed to say.”

  “Will you tell me for half a crown?”

  They turned onto a narrow street and she scratched her nose, considering the offer. “Must I share with George?”

  “George is the skinny bloke with the message?”

  “He’s my brother. He thinks he’s clever.”

  “Half a crown for you, half a crown for George.”

  “She says she’ll give a crown each.”

  So it was a woman. “Has she brown hair? Blond? Is she—”

  “She says the Tube smells awfully. She’s taking us to tea tomorrow—with cake and oranges. There’s George.”

  She lifted a chubby hand. Over the road, next to a newsstand, a boy straddled the front wheel of a bicycle. He jingled the bell as they approached.

  “What ho, George,” Davies-Frank said. “I hear you’ve a message for me.”

  “Yes, sir.” The boy patted a fur coat in the bicycle basket. “It’s right under—”

  TOM READ A NOTICE in a shop window—NO CHOCOLATE, NO SACCHARINE—and saw flames gleaming over rooftops, and a thousand-pounder burst down the street. He dropped onto his face and groped for his rifle as an avalanche of glass and plaster swept over him.

  “Reggie?” A woman in a white gown staggered past, cupping her elbow in her hand. “Reggie?”

  “Get down!” he shouted. “Get goddamn down!”

  Behind the woman, the churning air parted like a curtain, revealing a lanky man with sandy hair standing in the street, hip cocked. No rifle, no helmet . . . A shaft of firelight flicked over his face.

  Earl.

  Tom scrabbled for his Colt. Earl was here, twenty yards away. He grabbed a length of metal, a faucet with a bit of copper pipe attached. It was wet and cold and heavy enough for a cudgel. He angled over the rubble but couldn’t see ten yards through the murk. Earl was gone. . . . No, there—between the fire pump and the wall. Behind the crowd of shouting men in their steel helmets.

  Tom ran low over fire hoses squirming like fat worms through the debris. Earl slipped away. Tom stalked past an old man weeping outside a burning draper’s shop. Caught glimpses of his brother, too far ahead—a blurred figure moving with Earl’s unmistakable grace. He passed a teenage lad fashioning a splint from bits of shattered trellis, passed two dead cats on an overturned wardrobe.

  Earl slipped wraithlike into the shadows and was gone.

  Tom shouted. “Earl! It’s me!” No answer but the roar of bombs and the roar of fire. “It’s Tom. Your brother.”

  There was a brick wall where Earl had vanished. He was nowhere. Tom wiped his face. It’s Tom, your brother. Remember the summer in Maine, teaching me how to stick a worm on a hook? Remember ruffling my hair, telling me slow and steady wins the race? Remember the jazz clubs, the dance halls, the cramped, smoky bars?

  He dropped the copper pipe. Earl was gone.

  He trudged through the darkness, toward the Waterfall. There was nowhere else to go. He almost felt his rifle webbing biting into his shoulder, almost smelled the Cretan night, almost saw the parachutes blooming like lesions overhead. Almost heard a tune he knew, in a sudden break in the noise, a mumbled hymn. It was the shambling peddler with the tattered cart and the wild beard and yellow teeth—the jobber. The man was squatting behind his cart, eating a tin of sardines, his woolen mittens unraveled, revealing grimy fingertips.

  “Fancy a chew, guv?” the man asked, offering the tin.

  “You buy books. You’re a scrap jobber.”

  “Chapman’s what I am.” The man guffawed, his beard rippling like an animal’s pelt. “Rags and bones and the old goat’s teeth.”

  “You buy from the Waterfall? Near Tudor’s?”

  “Part of my itinerary. Linens past mending and wore-out bits to sew into patchwork.”

  “And books.”

  The man shook his head. “No books from them.”

  “You bought a stack of books”—Tom lifted the canvas half-covering the cart—“yesterday. At the Waterfall.”

  “Never did, guv.”

  Groping under the canvas, Tom found brass fittings, bottles of tonic, a musty leather bag stuffed with fabric scraps. . . .

  “Those’ll fetch me a few,” the man said, pointing to three typewriters. “Taylor’s on Chancery pays honest.”

  Tom dug beneath a bag of seed, a thick bundle of dowels tied with twine—and found a stack of books. There was a math primer with a water-stained cover, and Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, but nothing of Earl’s.

  “Got any lighters?” Tom asked.

  The man wiped his greasy mittens on his pants. “That I do. Know a bloke works munitions—turns out petrol lighters when he has the time. Three and six.”

  “How about cigarettes?”

  The man rummaged in his pockets, emerged with a handful of half-smoked butts. “Help yerself.”

  Tom didn’t. “Got a torch? I could use—”

  He saw a flash of familiar color in the cart, under a cracked ceramic lamp: the spine of a book. It was the poetry of Robert Burns, same color as the Waterfall peach trap. Tom pushed the lamp aside and found six more books, poetry and literature and philosophy. None of them was Tristram Shandy.

  Tom turned on the shambling man, stepped close.

  “Ain’t mine!” The man raised his mittens in fright. “Ain’t mine. Didn’t buy that lot—took ’em on assign. I’ll cart ’em round, ask if the bookmen have a need. Bring ’em to Cubby’s and—”

  “How many?”

  “Them there.”

  “You sold the rest?”

  “On assign, guv. To Cubby.” The man put a nervous hand on the six books remaining. “Not these. It was on assign. You ask Cubby, he’ll tell you.”

  Ask Cubby. Walk back through the damaged dark city, the fire and the fear, and find Cubby.

  AN HOUR LATER, Tom flicked the petrol lighter, put his face to the glass of the small bookshop. Cumberson and Sons Booksellers. The jobber said Cubby had stacked Earl’s books on the desk, but Tom couldn’t see the desk.

  He tapped at the door. Nobody came, so he tossed a rock through the window, then wrapped his jacket around his forearm and cleared the glass. He’d heard looting was a problem during the blackout. It wasn’t a problem for him. He stepped inside and found Earl’s books, but no Tristram Shandy. He crumpled a sheet of paper into an ashtray and set it on fire for light. He found a letter opener in the top drawer and slit the spines of Earl’s books. There was room for a microphotograph. There was room for a fucking loaf of bread. There was room for all his delusions, and all his failures, too.

  What the hell was he doing?

  There was no Earl, no book. Should he try to find the jobber again? If he hadn’t sold it, and he didn’t have it, then what? Harriet had it. Or Earl had hidden it. Or Sondegger was pulling an invisible string, and Tom was dancing to the rhythm of his narcotic voice.

  TOM COULDN’T FIND the jobber. He found the back stairway to the Waterfall instead. Climbed to the third floor—the Pugilist Room. Fumbled in the frigid dark until he fit the key to the lock. It was warmer inside. He flicked the light and sat in the chair.

  There was a folded note on the table: “Dear Tommy, the room is yours for another month. Please see me—after you sleep! I have something for you. Dream sweet, A. Pritchett.”

  The note smelled of her perfume. Clean white flowers, plain and pure.

  He washed his face in the bathroom. His clothes were mud-splattered and flecked with ash and splinters. There was a slash on his jacket, from the window at Cubby’s. He bathed and picked through Earl’s clothes in the closet. The best looked li
ke a zoot suit on him, all he needed was a knee-length key chain and a big bow tie. And a strong drink.

  Downstairs, he stepped onto the parquet floor and wished he had a cigarette. A band was playing and a dozen couples were scuffing the dance floor. He sat at the bar, nursed a double scotch, and watched the dancers. Audrey wasn’t among them. Inch wasn’t at his table. He flagged a cigarette girl and bought a pack of Goldflake on Earl’s account. He asked if there’d be a tableau tonight, but the girl said he was hours too late.

  He didn’t ask the time. He didn’t want to know.

  The band took a break and a comedian had a set. One more drink and he’d try Audrey’s flat, see what she had for him. Maybe news of Earl. What he wanted was to dance. He used to know how to swing.

  Someone tapped his shoulder. He turned, and Highcastle spun him violently off the bar stool.

  “Jesus!” Tom tried to twist away, but Highcastle clamped his arm at the small of his back. Tom slammed down hard with his heel and Highcastle made a noise and stepped away. Tom hit him in the stomach and moved closer to hit him again, but one of Highcastle’s soldiers appeared between them.

  It was Ginger—the granite-hewn redhead who’d driven Tom from the embassy to the Rowansea. He hadn’t gotten any smaller. “Not here, mate,” he said.

  Another soldier jerked Tom’s arm behind him before he could answer, then frog-marched him up the stairs.

  “I know how to walk,” Tom said, struggling free. “You fuck.”

  Highcastle shoved him across the foyer. “Rupert’s dead.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MORNING, DECEMBER 3, 1941

  TOM AND THE GUARDS waited in the car as Highcastle trudged up the front steps of Davies-Frank’s town house. They waited as he stood motionless at the closed door, as he lifted his hand to the bell. Tom recognized the set of his shoulders: The adjunct general desires to express his deep regret that your son was killed in action. . . .