“Steve once worked for Andy, but I didn’t know that when I took him on. Andy didn’t trust him. He wasn’t happy when he found out.”
“So Steve double-crossed you.”
“How was I to know he would do something like this?, Sears pleaded. He was really only an engineer, as far as I was concerned.”
“How did he get to know about the Package?”
“I used him to deliver messages and papers, that kind of thing, when I was setting things up with the Casino. There was a lot of coming and going and these people don’t like talking on the phone. But I should have known better, I just couldn’t have been careful enough. Andy was right about him. I don’t want the Operation to blame me though.”
“For what?”
“For everything. The whole mess. They know Steve worked for me.”
“But you’ve just said he stole the money from you, not them.”
“It’s not just the money. It’s the idea of any of this getting out. Can you guess what’s involved in running a Casino these days, especially in this country. The whole thing has got to look clean from top to bottom.”
I could see he was as scared of the Operation as I was. But he wanted his money. Sears was Sears, even in all this.
“We might have a deal,” I told him.
“I never meant Andy any harm,” he added convincingly.
“So how exactly did it all end up like this?”
“When my money didn’t turn up on time I got a bit jumpy. I’m not exactly experienced in this kind of thing. I went out to the caravan to see him. You know how Andy is about using mobiles. When he told me what Steve had done I didn’t know how to handle it. I knew he didn’t approve of Steve but maybe they had settled their differences or something like that so I didn’t know if I could believe him. I panicked. Andy was unarmed, and hobbling about on a crutch. But he’s not been hurt in any way by me, I assure you, and he’s not going to come to any harm where he is.”
“So how do we arrange this?”
“I have a boat down in the Marina – The Firefly.”
chapter twenty-three
As I left Sears’ office and headed for the nearest exit, I saw Benny’s head protruding from the half-open door of the sales office. I guessed he must be wondering where I was going. In actual fact, he knew as much about my destination as I did myself at that point for I just wanted to get into the car and drive, to get behind the wheel, where I was in control, and had enough knowledge and skill to keep out of danger.
It worked for a while but, like my other more complex means of escape – music, art and the Book Collection, driving about aimlessly wasn’t going to solve anything. I was glad when it was at last time to go to the flat and wait for Karen to phone me. Was it possible that this flat, this one-time haven, might become a haven again, now that I was no longer in any immediate danger from the Operation? I asked myself.
I had made a good job of furnishing and decorating the place, I pointlessly observed, as I tried unsuccessfully to concentrate my attention on the events which had just unfolded. It was the kind of place I could have brought Linda to without feeling at a disadvantage. I tried to picture what this would have been like and imagined her sitting across from me on the sofa as Karen had done, filling the room with her presence, while I admired her legs and impressed her with my ownership of an original oil painting that had my surname on it.
For a while I imagined they were both sitting there across from me, side by side, Karen’s smile holding me in its spell, while the rays from Linda’s smile spread throughout the whole room.
So different from each other in personality and background, they nevertheless had that one defining feature in common. In this, I couldn’t say which of them was the more attractive, although I knew that there was a difference of some kind in the way that I felt about them. I was equally aware that the true nature of this disparity was very difficult to define.
In spite of their strongly contrasting backgrounds Karen seemed every bit as refined as Linda, and Linda seemed as strong and determined as Karen, a resemblance which I would once have thought unusual. But as Andy had once pointed out, people who worked in Casinos nowadays had to be as presentable as those who didn’t.
While Linda was well set-up with a neat figure, and was almost but not quite sturdy looking, Karen’s thin legs and almost athletic build were suggestive of the stamina I knew she possessed. They were both ‘almost’ something other than what they were but this very nearness, in them, was potent.
I had made progress with Linda. But the direction in which I had had to go, in my innermost thoughts, to do this had made me realise that I would have to adopt a lifestyle that was foreign to me if I was to take the relationship any further. The fact that I couldn’t see her making a similar kind of sacrifice for me, surely said something significant about our relationship, I reasoned sadly.
I had made progress in my relationship with Karen, too, which was only natural, I felt, in view of what we had been through together. But while this should have been on an entirely different plane, because she was Andy’s girl, comparing the two of them in the way that I was doing suggested otherwise. I now seemed to be faced with two problems of a not dissimilar kind. I didn’t know what to do about Linda, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about Karen.
I sprang out of my chair at the sound of the telephone.
“Where are you?” I asked Karen, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.
“Is it safe to say?”
“Yes, absolutely,” I told her, in a tone of voice that hid my lack of composure.
“I’ve ended up at Liz’s”, she told me.
Although surprised, I wasn’t too concerned to hear this for after all, no one was chasing us now. It didn’t really matter where she was.
“Are you ok?” she asked me, in a soft, concerned tone of voice.
“Stay there, Karen, I’ll be right over.”
I wondered to what extent and in what way she cared. Her question and her manner of asking it could mean different things.
*
Having taken the package from her, as soon as I got there, “I’ve to take it to Sears tonight,” I told her, as Liz went to make some tea.
“Sears?”
“The money’s his.”
“You mean Sears is mixed up in all this?” she gasped. “So what do you think about it all, now?” she asked, when I had come to the end of my explanation.
“I’ll have to go along with him.”
As she rose to help with the tea I could tell from the strained expression on her face that she didn’t agree with my suggestion and I thought I knew why. It was leaving too much to chance. There was nothing to fall back on.
“Did you know Big Tom has been on the phone from down South?” Liz asked, as she filled my cup. “He’s been trying to get in touch with Andy.”
I looked uneasily at Karen., wondering how much she had told her friend. Would Liz have been able to tell Tom on the phone that something had gone seriously wrong up here?
“And is he coming back up?” I asked her.
“Tomorrow some time,” she said, dashing my hopes that immediate help might be at hand.
“I haven’t told Liz what this is all about,” Karen quietly explained to me, reading my thoughts, while Liz was out of earshot in the kitchen.
“Look you two,” Liz chided, an affectionate smile appearing on her face, “you know I’ll do anything to help that I can. What’s the problem. What’s this all about?”
“This is something I don’t want to get you involved in, Liz,” Karen said to her friend. “I really shouldn’t have come here.”
“I know. You’ve already said that. But where else would you go?” Liz scolded. “I always go to you when I have a problem, don’t I?”
“Not a problem like this. Its something I d
efinitely don’t want you to get mixed up in,” Karen told her.
“Surely I’m involved already,” Liz insisted, looking at me. “I was there when you met him.”
“Met who?” I asked, puzzled.
“She means you,” Karen said.
Liz looked puzzled too now and Karen seemed ill at ease.
“Me?”
“I’d better leave you two alone,” Liz said, clumsily lifting up the empty tea pot and going back into the kitchen.
“Liz thinks you and I are an item,” Karen said pointedly.
“An item?” How on earth does she think that?”
“I couldn’t tell her exactly why I was so worried about you and why I had to contact you, so she’s jumped to conclusions, I suppose.”
“But what about Andy?”
“What about him?”
“I mean you and Andy.”
“What on earth has Andy got to do with you and I being an item?” she asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
I had got a lot of things wrong recently but, if her words meant what I thought they meant, this was going to be my crowning achievement? Was the relationship between Karen and Andy not what I had thought it was?
“So what’s Andy to you?” I asked her bluntly.
“I’ve been Andy’s point of contact at the Casino. I thought you knew that. I do work there, remember!”, she said scathingly.
“And that’s all?”
“What do you mean ‘that’s all’? It’s not been easy seeing that the changeover goes smoothly. It’s a great big job,” she said, misunderstanding me.
Her words confirmed my suspicions, though. Once more a seemingly trivial gap in my knowledge had become a major failure in my overall comprehension. My ideas on where she stood with Andy, and possibly on where she stood with me, too, had been seriously wrong. I had been getting it wrong all the time.
But what kind of impression had a mistake of this kind been making on her? I wondered anxiously. “I wasn’t talking about the Casino,” I pointed out to her. “I didn’t mean that.”
“I f you didn’t mean that, then what exactly did you mean?” she asked.
“Karen. I thought you and Andy were, you know …”
“You thought what? How …”
“Look. Have I been wrong?” I asked, impatiently cutting her off.
“Now I get it,” she loudly exclaimed, smiling in astonishment. “John, I was beginning to wonder about you. Andy’s a really good friend, that’s all. One of my very best friends actually.”
“Wonder in what way?” I asked, as if I didn’t understand.
“Look,” she said, her smile fading. “It’s maybe not the best time to discuss this.”
It felt like it was the best time but I knew she was right. We were still in very serious trouble. Nothing else had changed.
“About the package,” she went on. “You’re surely not just going to hand it over, are you? Not to someone like him.”
“He says he’ll let Andy go.”
“He says! Sears says! John, don’t hold your breath”, she snapped.
Her words told me what I should, undoubtedly, have already realised, and I had no excuse, I told myself. Even at this late stage I was reverting to type. In spite of all that had happened I was still projecting my own sense of decency and fair-play onto someone else and expecting them to act in the same way. And this, even when Andy was being held prisoner and our very lives, in spite of what Sears had said, might still be in danger.
And her life too, if I didn’t do something about it, I realised.
“Look Karen, I’ve got to clear my head. I’m going to the flat to get some fresh clothes,” I lied. We’ll decide what to do when I get back.”
chapter twenty-four
With an hour to spare before I went to meet Sears at the boat, I sat in the flat going over the whole thing again, trying to be as clear-headed and objective as possible. One thing, at least, was glaringly obvious. I always seemed to be on the wrong end of things, trying to get shopkeepers to buy fire extinguishers, trying to accommodate myself to the Pastor’s way of looking at things, and even, in a sense, feeling I had to get Bethea to accept me for ‘what I was’, when ‘who I was’ should have been enough. I was like a British soldier in the trenches in the early days of the First World War, always having to go over the top in spite of what he knew he was walking into.
The fact that many of these victims of suicidal military resolve, that I had read about, would have added fifty years to their lives it they had seriously taken into account the fact it was immediate death and not ultimate victory through attrition that was to be their lot and, of course assuming that they had been able to do something about it, seemed worthy of note. Wasn’t I doing something just as futile? I was ‘going over the top’ to meet Sears at his boat with as much real knowledge of what I was up against as these soldiers had, or even worse, like some conscientious objector who thought the enemy would be nice to him if he was nice to them. After all that had happened this didn’t say much for me, I knew. Or was the fact that mankind in general projected a blurred image of itself something I could use as an excuse? After all, I was far from being the only one who couldn’t make up his mind about whether man was essentially good or essentially bad.
That a violent criminal could love children and be loyal to his friends suggested that man could often be a volatile mixture. As did the unusual fact that to his presentable young secretary, Gertrud Junge, Hitler had fbeen a kindly older man and one of the best bosses she had ever had.
But I couldn’t afford to behave as if this mixture was going to settle in my favour and expect that Sears, a man I had no reason to think I could trust, would do as he said he would. There was too much at stake. This world had people in it who, from the very core of their being, could see little real or essential difference between right and wrong. I had to get it into my head, once and for all, that there were men like Eichmann out there, the Austrian Nazi who had sought out and relentlessly gathered together millions of Jews so that they might thereafter be murdered, whilst claiming at his trial in 1961 that he had had no personal antipathy towards them. And people like Rudolph Hoess, the Commandant of the extermination camp at Auschwitz, during whose tenure at least 1.5 million inmates were murdered, who actually felt himself to be a victim of the system, a man whose deepest regret was, when looking back over his ‘career’ that he hadn’t been able to spend more time with his family.
Surely I could at last resolve this inner conflict about how I went about things. Surely with people like these men in the world, men who had a host of human characteristics in common with the rest of us, I couldn’t let my guard drop for an instant, ever let someone have the edge on me. What the Pastor taught made a lot of sense but to even think along the lines of being ‘as harmless as a dove’ in a situation like this was ridiculous. The other part of the verse – being ‘as wise as a serpent’ had a better ring to it, although this wasn’t enough either, I firmly concluded.
In going to meet Sears at his boat, therefore, I wasn’t going to make another of these mistakes described in the Book Collection. The British Prime Minister, Chamberlain, I had read there, had assumed, prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, that Hitler was telling the truth about his desire for peace when he should have assumed that he wasn’t. Chamberlain, it seemed, had preferred to believe that Hitler was a reasonable and honest man like himself simply because he could think of no other way of dealing with him if he wasn’t. This could be me. But it wasn’t going to be, not now.
Sears was an enemy, and I had to treat him as such. Imputing right motives to people like him in a situation like this didn’t make sense, in spite of what the Pastor would seem to suggest. There was no way, I finally convinced myself, that you could deal realistically with the evil in men’s hearts without sacrificing some of the purity in your own.
In the light of all this I could see that, right from the start, I would have to adopt a more realistic and, if needs be, unprincipled approach if I was meet Sears on his own terms. He simply couldn’t be trusted, and if he had known some of the things that were running through my mind he would have felt the same way about me. I was prepared to do absolutely anything to make sure nothing went wrong and that Andy was safely released.
Did this mean, I asked myself warily, that there was no limit now to what I might stoop to in my new-found determination to deal with this matter realistically? Did it mean, for instance, that I could kill to achieve my ends? Was I to become just like some of the more worthy of these men in the Book Collection who had felt able to set aside the First Commandant to achieve their ends because they were fighting for a good cause. Was there nothing remaining of my old self that might separate me from them, nothing that might enable me to live with myself? Something that nevertheless might still give me an advantage!?
But what weapon other than the gun did I have? How else could I be sure of getting the better of Sears if my worst fears were confirmed and I found out I was being led into a trap? What else could I do but run the risk of taking a life, of becoming a murderer, for that was exactly what was on my mind?
But there was indeed another weapon, I began to see. It was one of Hitler’s favourites, I knew, although a lot of good men had used it too. It wasn’t as bad as setting aside the First Commandant so that you would be the ‘fittest who survived’. I felt better already. The idea which was beginning to form in my mind wouldn’t even call for the use of the gun. In fact, out of deference for what the Pastor taught, I wouldn’t even take the weapon. I would stake all on the results of what I felt, all things considered, was the best way for someone like me to go about things. After all, I wasn’t altogether unacquainted with the idea. Hadn’t ‘deceit’, only recently, been one of the tools of my trade?
At the caravan with Karen, when confronting Steve and the smiling man, I had been carried along by events. The scene had already been set and the role I had had to play had been decided in advance. Although the scene I was now facing had likewise been set up beforehand the nature of my performance was going to be entirely different. I could see things quite clearly now, and the end was going to justify the means, too.
Am I Being Followed? Page 18