by Len Deighton
With some effort, he managed a smile. ‘I’ve been going over the notes I’ve made. On both my last visits you said something that interested me very much.’
I yawned and nodded.
He said, ‘It could just be that our friends have botched up their case even before it comes to trial.’
‘Yes?’
‘No promises, mind. Lots of legal work yet. I’ll have to see a couple of people in Lincoln’s Inn – and that will cost you a monkey …’
He waited until I nodded my assent to another five hundred pounds.
‘I hope you don’t think …’ he said.
‘Never mind the amour propre,’ I said. ‘You get your friends working on the legal double-talk. Right?’
‘Not friends – colleagues. No fee-splitting, if that’s what you’re hinting at.’
‘You get them working on it, and come back in the morning to tell me what they say.’ I got up from the table and walked across to the bedside cabinet for my cigarettes.
‘Probably take me two or three days to get a meeting – these chaps are the top people …’
‘What am I?’ I said. ‘Bottom people?’ I leaned over him to take his gold lighter. I used it, and tossed it back on to the table in front of him.
He didn’t look round at me. He got out a red foulard handkerchief and made a lot of noise blowing his nose. He was still dabbing at it when he spoke again. ‘You sit in here and get broody,’ he accused me. ‘You think I’m sitting on my arse all day. You think I take your money and then don’t give a damn.’
‘Is it your legal training that makes you so perceptive?’ I said. ‘Or have you got second sight?’
‘I work bloody hard,’ he said. ‘Worrying about people who if they had anything between the ears wouldn’t be in here in the first place.’ He sat down and fingered some papers on the table. ‘Not you, I don’t mean you, but some of them … Look, it will take me a few days to set up this meeting. Now, be patient, just trust me.’
I lit my cigarette. From behind him I leaned down and whispered softly, very close to his ear. ‘Do you know what it’s like in this lousy nick, waiting while some overfed mouthpiece spares time to earn the bread he’s taken in advance?’
‘I know, I know,’ he said.
‘I’m in here for topping this bird, Michael, old pal. I mean, I’ve got nothing to lose. You know what I mean: nothing to lose, except wonderful friendships.’
‘Now, cut that out,’ he said, but I’d shaken him. I saw his hands tremble as he put his typed notes back into the pigskin document case. ‘I’ll see them this afternoon, if I can. But it might not be possible.’
‘I’ve got every confidence in you, Michael. You won’t disappoint me.’
‘I hope not,’ he said, and again managed a smile.
Stupid bastard, I thought. Three QCs from the Public Prosecutor’s department worked a holiday weekend to build mistakes into that paperwork. By now, any prison-visitor with Everyman’s Guide to the Law could have sprung me in ten minutes, but this schnorrer needed ten days, and two consultants, and he was still only nibbling at the edges.
‘I don’t like the way they are treating you in here,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘No association, no sport, no TV, no educationals, and your visits all closed. It’s not right. I’ve complained about it.’
‘I’m violent,’ I told him.
‘That’s what they always say, but you’re getting your forty-five minutes’ exercise, aren’t you? You’re entitled to that.’
‘I threatened a warder,’ I told him. ‘So they stopped it.’
He looked at me, and shook his head. ‘You behave like you prefer it inside,’ he said.
I smiled at him.
After he’d gone, I settled down with Inside the Third Reich, but it was not easy to concentrate. As a remand prisoner I’d been given a quiet landing, but there was always the clickety-clack of the peep-hole. As the screw passed, I’d hear his footsteps slow and then there was a moment or so as he watched me, to be sure I wasn’t doing any of the forbidden things. It was the same when there was a visit. The peep-hole slammed shut and there was a jangle of keys and the clatter of the door-lock.
‘Visitor! Stand up!’
It was Schlegel, complete with document case and a supply of cigarettes. I sat down again. Schlegel remained standing until we both heard the warder move away from the door.
‘Stir-crazy yet?’ Schlegel asked. ‘They say the first ten years is the worst.’
I didn’t answer. He went across to the wall cupboard, opened it, pushed my shaving brush and soap aside, and threw the cigarette packets well to the back of the second shelf. ‘We’d better keep them out of sight,’ he explained. He closed the cupboard door, and reached into his pocket to find his ivory cigarette holder. He blew through it noisily.
‘And don’t smoke,’ I said. He nodded.
‘Anything happened in here? Champion is in London, that we know! Anything happened here inside?’ He smiled.
‘Not a thing,’ I told him.
‘You got the butter, and the tea and stuff? Dawlish said it wouldn’t be exactly what you had in mind, but we figured that a parcel from Harrods might be a bit too conspicuous.’
‘Can’t leave it alone, can you, Schlegel,’ I said. ‘Just couldn’t resist coming in to take a look, eh?’
He said nothing. He put his cigarette holder back into his top pocket. A passing warder rattled his keys against the metal railings, making a sudden loud noise, like a football rattle. Schlegel was startled.
I whispered, ‘Schlegel, come here.’ He sat down opposite me and bent his head forward to hear better. I said, ‘If you, or any of your minions, come here again, spy on me, pass me notes, send me parcels, ask for special privileges for me, ask me or even furrow your brow when my name is mentioned, I’ll consider it a very, very unfriendly act. I not only will screw up your goddamned Champion project but I will wreak physical vengeance upon all concerned …’
‘Now, wait just one minute …’
‘You button up your Aquascutum raincoat, Colonel, and rap on that door. You get out of here in a hurry, before I cut you into pieces small enough to squeeze through the peep-hole. And you stay away – a long, long way from me, until I make a contact – and you make sure there are no misunderstandings, because I’m a very nervous man. Remember that, very nervous.’
Schlegel got to his feet and went to the door. He was about to rap on the door to call the warder, but he stopped, his fist in mid-air. ‘Did you hear the ruckus this morning?’
‘No.’
‘Twelve prisoners coming back from their meal. Staged a sit-down in the offices. Threw a scare into the clerks, threw a typewriter into the yard and tore the locks off the filing cabinets: all good clean fun.’
‘And?’
‘It was all over in an hour or two. No sweat. They threatened to stop their TV, or cut back on the smokes, or something.’ He thumped the door. ‘High spirits, I guess. Don’t worry, we had all the exits covered, pal.’
If he was expecting some significant reaction from me, he was disappointed. I shrugged. Schlegel rapped on the door. Within a minute the door was unlocked. He tipped his hat to me, and left.
It was only after he’d gone that the penny dropped. Why a sit-in, and why would they break the locks off the filing cabinets, except that they wanted to read the files. There was a dossier for each of the prisoners in that office. It might simply be high spirits; or it might be an indication of how far someone was prepared to go to get a look at my prison documents.
I stayed in London after my release.
For the first few nights, I slept at Waterloo Station. The first night, I used the waiting-room, but the railway police come round asking to see rail tickets. Out on the concourse, it’s cold. The regulars steal the unsold newspapers and line the slatted benches to stop the draughts, but you have to be tough, or very tired, to get much rest there.
By the third night I’d
learned a thing or two. An old man they called ‘the Bishop’, who had arrived on foot from Winchester, told me how to choose the trains. The heat comes from the front, so the residual warmth lasts longer at that end. The Bishop preferred dirty trains, because in those he’d be discovered by cleaners instead of by some railway cop who might turn him in. It was the Bishop who told me always to pretend to any inquisitive policeman that my wife had locked me out. His filthy raincoat tied with string, his broken boots and bundle of belongings, gave him no chance to try that story himself. But I used it three or four times and it worked like a charm. But now my shirt was dirty, and the sort of hasty shave I was able to have in the gents’ toilet was stretching the errant-husband story thin.
It was the Bishop who found me a billet on Friday night. There were three of us. We got on to platform four, where the Guildford train was about to leave, and then slipped round behind the buffers to a darkened train that would not go until morning. It was the Bishop who had the square-sectioned key that opens the guard’s-van doors. The Bishop settled into the narrow pew from which the periscope gives a view along the train top, while I kipped with Fuller, wedged behind some freight. Fuller was a hatchet-faced thirty-year-old. He wore a battered leather coat and a red-and-white woolly hat. He was a sociology graduate from Sussex University who ‘weaseled’ luggage for the boat-train passengers and was not above stealing the occasional camera or transistor radio. Such items went on sale in The Cut street-market, not thirty yards away, while the owner was still searching the taxi line to locate the ‘well-spoken porter’ and trying to remember when he last renewed the insurance.
‘It’s my back,’ explained the Bishop. ‘Sleeping on the floor plays merry hell with my back.’
‘Spare us the details,’ said Fuller. ‘We know all about the state of your health.’
‘You’ll be old yourself someday,’ said the Bishop.
‘You need a bit of exercise,’ said Fuller, ‘that’s what you need. You come and help me with that boat-train tomorrow. It’ll be a good one, they say.’
‘I wish I could, but I’d do myself an injury,’ said the Bishop. He wriggled into the upholstered seat and searched inside his hat. He kept everything in there: paper money, cigarette stubs, string and matches. Finally he found the matches he wanted. Then he searched through his pockets until he found a tin. It was dented and all vestiges of advertising lettering had long since been polished away. Now it shone like silver, and from inside it he took a cigarette-rolling machine. ‘Exercise is no good to anybody,’ said the Bishop. ‘Who lives to be a hundred? These fellers you see jogging down the road in a track suit at night, or those old cows with their poodles and their chauffeurs and their afternoon naps? You answer me that.’
‘Trust you to rationalize it out,’ said Fuller, but he found no easy answer to the old man’s contention.
The Bishop smiled. He was like some down-at-heel Father Christmas, his beard stained with nicotine and his teeth long and yellow. And yet he did not smell: for a tramp, that was quite an achievement.
‘Either of you two want a smoke?’ he said. He rolled them carefully, thin tubes of white paper, marked with the Bishop’s grey dabs, and spilling dried tobacco.
‘Thanks, Bish,’ I said. But Fuller did not smoke. Even before the Bishop had given me a light, Fuller was beginning to snore.
‘First today,’ said the Bishop proudly, holding the roll-up in the air.
‘My first for six days,’ I said.
‘You want to give it up, son,’ he said. As he inhaled, the burning cigarette lit up his arthritic knuckles and watery eyes. ‘Money going up in smoke: my old mother said it, and she was right.’
‘And what did your mother do with her bread?’ I said. ‘Play the stock exchange?’
‘You’ve been in nick, haven’t you, son?’
‘I was working the North Sea oil rigs. I told you that.’
‘Yeah, you told me that,’ said the Bishop. ‘But I’m saying you’ve been doing porridge!’
I pinched out the cigarette and pushed it into the top pocket of his tattered overcoat.
‘Naw, no offence, son.’
‘Get stuffed,’ I said.
‘No need to get nasty.’
‘Think yourself lucky I didn’t poke it down your throat,’ I said.
‘I’m old enough to be your father.’
‘But not bright enough.’ I turned over and closed my eyes.
I only dozed for a moment or two before I heard the old man’s voice again. He was leaning out of the window. ‘They’re raking everybody out,’ he said. ‘Like they did last week. It must be another bloody bomb warning.’
We scattered before the police reached the front carriage. I evaded the half-asleep porters and ticket men, and shuffled off down the freight road that bisects the station layout.
‘In here.’ I was too tired to recognize the voice. For a moment I thought it was the Bishop, or Fuller.
‘In here.’ It was not any of the layabouts from the station. It was a short thickset man named Pierce, who was from the department, and behind him I saw Schlegel. They were crowded into a phone booth. I moved fast. I hit Schlegel first, and he reeled. There was a crunch as his elbow hit a metal panel. I saw the look of open-mouthed bewilderment on Pierce’s face, and then I slammed two body punches into him and hooked him as he doubled up. The two of them were jammed tight into the corner of the phone booth; neither stood much chance against me, for I had room to swing my elbows. I hit Schlegel again, and tapped blood from his nose. I gave him a moment to collect himself. ‘Easy, easy,’ he grunted. He was tucking his chin in and holding up his hands in a gesture that was neither defence nor surrender, but had a measure of both.
Pierce was huddled almost on the floor, and Schlegel was twisted into a corner, with the phone jammed into his backside. ‘What did I tell you, that day in the Scrubs,’ I said.
Schlegel stared at me. I not only looked different: I was different. The world had worn me shiny. Prodded awake by cops, cursed by screws, threatened by yobs who wanted your coat, or thought you might have cash. How did a man survive it, except by violence. The world was at your knees, or at your throat. Or so it seemed at the time. But the look in Schlegel’s eyes made me realize how far I’d come down the long road.
‘You got the passport and everything?’ said Schlegel. ‘You should be in France.’
‘You stupid sod. You people never learn, do you? Champion is one of ours – or was once – he knows all that departmental crap. Our Swiss passports would never fool him for thirty seconds. It went into the furnace along with the letters of credit. Me and Champion set up that payment line back in 1941. It was his idea.’ I straightened up, and pushed my fist into the small of my back, to ease the aches and pains of sleeping on the hard floor of the guard’s van.
But I kept them both pinned tight into the booth, with Pierce on the floor. Schlegel tried to move, but I forced him back into the corner with my forearm, and he only retained his balance by treading on Pierce’s leg. ‘Champion is going to come and find me,’ I told them. ‘He won’t buy it any other way. And I’m not sure he’ll swallow it, even without you stupid bastards trying to hurry things along.’ I stopped. I was so tired I could have lain down on the street and sobbed myself to sleep. But I rubbed my face, and blinked, and shook my brains from side to side until I heard a reassuring rattle. ‘And if he doesn’t buy it,’ I said, ‘I get dead. So forgive me, girls, if I’m a little bit sensitive. Because I’ve got a whole lot of dances on my programme, I don’t need a hand up my skirt.’
‘OK,’ said Schlegel. ‘You’re right.’ He found a handkerchief and dabbed his bloody nose.
‘You’d just better believe it, Schlegel, because next time I won’t be just tweaking your nose. You want to give me credentials for Champion? Great! I’ll kill you, Schlegel. And I’ll cool any of the boys you bring along, and not even Champion will think that was a set-up.’
‘You don’t talk to me like that,’ growle
d Schlegel, and he coughed as he sniffed his own blood. I had him, and he knew it, and I leaned across and with the knuckle of my left fist I tapped his jaw, as one might when playing with a baby. And he didn’t take his eyes off my right fist, that was all set to drive him into the wall.
‘Give me some money,’ I said.
He reached into his inside pocket and found three crumpled five-pound notes. I took them from him, and then I stepped backwards and I felt Pierce’s feet sprawl out. I almost ran down the slope towards York Road.
It was a full moon. ‘Hello, son,’ said the Bishop, as I overtook him. He was hurrying down the traffic ramp, with his bundle of belongings slung over his back. ‘A regular purge tonight, eh?’ He chuckled.
‘Looks like,’ I said. ‘But I can buy us a night’s kip, and a plate of eggs and sausage.’ I brandished the money.
‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ said the Bishop. He was not looking at the notes in my hand, but at Schlegel’s blood on my cuff and knuckles.
‘We’ve been together all evening,’ I said.
‘Portsmouth train, platform eighteen,’ said the Bishop.
‘Near the front,’ I agreed happily, ‘in a non-smoker.’
The next day, I tried for job number eighteen on my list. It was a small private bank off Fetter Lane. It specialized in everything from sanction-breaking to fraud. I’d chosen my list of jobs with great care. A man with my qualifications, booted into the street, isn’t going to apply for a trainee’s job with ICI. These were all dodgy concerns, who knew how to double the five or six grand salary I was asking. But they put a hatchet-man with a big carnation alongside the drinks cabinet, and gave me two glasses of dry sherry and economic-recession talk. I was expecting it, because I had spent nearly five hours on the memo that ensured that each of these companies had a visit from a Special Branch officer at least a week before I arrived.
‘Thank the Lord for Saturday,’ said the Bishop late Friday night as we sat in our local, nursing one glass of warm beer, and taking simulated swigs at it whenever the landlord glared at us.