‘I wonder though, what’s going to happen to us,’ he said.
She lounged on the sofa opposite and, peeling an orange from the cloth bag she carried, leaned forward to pass him a segment. ‘I’ll tell you, if you like. We’ll get ashore, and I’ll take you to the nearest decent place for a meal. We’ll talk, and hold hands, and the men in the room will envy you, and wonder what you’ve got that they haven’t. I’ll moon over you to make them jealous. Then we’ll go to a hotel and have a proper sleep together. I’ll lead you by the hand.’
‘I’ll hold you to it.’
She passed another sliver of orange. ‘Eat it. We share. You brought me back to life, didn’t you? You made me feel like myself again, and I know it took a lot of doing.’
He laughed, drinking in the spirit of her still uncaring youth. ‘I didn’t even try.’
‘So what would happen if you did? Whizz bang! You’d never get rid of me.’
‘I’ll never want to.’
‘Oh, right. I don’t even have to think about what I’m going to say when I talk to you. I just say it and know it’ll be all right. With Carla it was different. I had to be careful. I could never be easy with her. She thought I was, but she was so selfish she could never know the tension I was under.’
Nor had he, because she’d sounded relaxed enough over the radio on all those nights he’d listened. She hadn’t known about his crafty eavesdropping, though perhaps he would be able to tell her, if such a time ever came. ‘What a life it’s been for you.’
‘Flippin’ amazing how you can love someone who’s not very nice. She didn’t even understand me, I’ll never know why. It should have been easy enough. But I’m keeping my man from his precious wireless. You’re the ears of the boat, and that’s more important than eyes. Everybody’s got eyes. They’re ten a penny. But ears are different. They’re special. Not as special as your hands, though. They’re brilliant. Still, you’d better get back to it, while I go and see what’s for our dinner.’
‘A kiss before you go.’
‘You don’t have to ask.’ He had to believe she had fallen in love with him, because a blind man had no right to be sceptical. He had kept the secret of his love from Laura, but she had been his nurse rather than that divine love which ever)’ member of the human species who had evolved out of the slime ought to experience once in life. He hadn’t been the love of her life, either, merely the purpose of her existence, that of keeping a safe house around him, to make a refuge for herself as well. On a walk in Malvern she had said a car had just passed with a logo in the window saying: ‘DARWIN WAS RIGHT’, and he was appalled that someone should flaunt such a daft statement, though now, the boat whacking its way through a following sea, he had to believe it.
The staccato rhythm of Portishead pumped out the weather forecast. Everyone on board would agree that Darwin was right, that only the fittest would survive, the fittest being those who saw nowhere to go after death but into blackness, and who behaved as instinct required for the ultimate good of self preservation.
A force five wind, in the North Sea, occasionally gale, but it would diminish and grow calm by tomorrow, a better telegram to hand Waistcoat, he thought, on knocking at his door. He took a few steps to where he smelled the steak being eaten for lunch, and gave him the paper, arm full out, as close as he could get without bumping the table. ‘The latest weather, Chief.’
Waistcoat snapped it away to read. ‘That’s good. We’ll need it good by then.’ His cutlery rattled. ‘Any other interesting stuff?’
‘Most of the waves are surprisingly quiet.’
‘Let’s hope it stays that way.’ He ate easily, at home in the serpentine mud walled tunnels of his mind. ‘What are you waiting for?’
Howard turned. ‘I was about to go.’
‘No, hang on a bit.’ His appetite was good, wine glass and eating irons moving in harmony. ‘I’ve got something to say to you, Howard.’
‘What might that be?’
‘Don’t get huffy with me. All I want to say is, just watch out for that Judy. She’s had more boyfriends than you’ve had hot dinners. Girlfriends, as well. A few things in between, I shouldn’t wonder.’
He punctuated Waistcoat’s laugh: ‘I’ll listen out during the night. Maybe I’ll hear something. I don’t need much sleep. You never can tell what I might pick up.’
‘Yeh, slog your guts out at that boffin’s gear. Work like the rest of us. I’ll tell you this, though: I rely on you as much as any of the others. Maybe even more – if I think about it.’
He shuffled along the deck, knowing he must stay wary in the maritime den he was trapped in, because Waistcoat’s remark was unusual, after the era of mistrust, as if he had hoped to lure him into a mistake plain for everyone to witness, even sending a message for unknown listeners to hear.
Scraps of talk from various places on the boat were joined by zones of darkness, but he found a cleanliness in the sea air which encouraged him in his design. Waistcoat’s foul remarks about Judy – made out of spite, hatred, and perhaps even envy – didn’t disturb him. Everybody on board knew he and Judy were in love, hard to hide it in such a place, and who would care to, in any case? They noted every move he made, and neither he nor Judy cared.
Three ships on the same frequency were calling different stations – Portishead, Gdynia, and Bahrein – and getting no answers. They would soon enough, so he spun the needle and tuned in to something else. Morse tinkled into space and was lost, and thus were the cries of humans likewise unmet. Even when two bodies were face to face the wrong signals could be sent, or none that were vital be transmitted, or the right ones that were misconstrued.
A Russian ship failed to get through, the same for one calling Algiers, as if a fearful ambush of atmospherics hovered over the coast stations, or the operators’ ears were for some reason stopped up. Communication could be uncertain at the best of times, and often there was nothing to do but wait for the sunspot to go, or hope for better conditions, or persist in your attempts until the blockage dissolved from whoever’s ears.
He copied the Mediterranean weather, to give the impression he still had his uses. Richard tapped him in passing: ‘Keep it up.’
‘I will.’
As long as he did he would come to no harm, Richard thought as he stood by the wheel. Being on watch took his tiredness away. When not working he craved sleep, for the trip to be over, to wake up in the luxury of isolation at home, but it was a perilous state of mind, looking so far ahead when the job was nowhere finished.
An engine sounded in the obscurity of low cloud. Aircraft could take photographs through any amount of precipitation, or plot them on their radar, but what was a large piston-engined plane doing out of the air traffic control zone? Gone, as eerily as it had come, but would it return?
He hadn’t felt a moment’s ease on the trip. So unexpectedly summed up, he knew it to be true. On other jobs his mind had been in neutral from start or finish, a couldn’t care less attitude which told him that good sense wasn’t buried too deeply and would come when needed. Confident and relaxed – but now he wasn’t, not anymore – now that he had told himself so. He wondered if he was the only one on board with forebodings, thought he was, because the others seemed normal enough. Normal however, was button-lipped at the best as well as at the worst of times. You couldn’t know what they were thinking even when you had sailed with them so often.
In improving visibility he tried to make out the Isle of Wight through binoculars, not sure whether he fixed on a bank of cloud, or a line of hills. Land played tricks, coy or perilous, scotch mist or fleeting image. Rain splattered the windows. The cloudscape had gaps, a line of sun either to bless or blemish. Cleaver, never one to shun work, recorded its wayward appearances with the sextant, while Killisick slaved to make ends meet in the galley. Food was running short, at least in variety, though nobody much cared since land was so close. Waistcoat paced his state room, aware more than anyone else that the test was coming.
Time that dragged by the minute had to be endured. Luckily there was no such thing as forever. His course was steady, no shake at the compass, a dead-on zero-seven-five towards the narrowing mouth of Dover, old Cape Grey Nose to starboard.
A single engined low wing monoplane made a shadow over the water. Another inquisitive bastard, this time different. Maybe he was a private aviator coming from France, except that he should have been higher. One plane was fortuitous, a second definitely worrying.
Howard came in. ‘He was talking on VHF. Nearly popped my eardrums.’
‘Who to?’
‘Somebody on shore, I suppose. In English. La-di-da voice. Said numbers, which sounded like course and position.’
‘What did the others say back?’
‘They just acknowledged the signal. It could have been his coordinates, but the course sounded like ours.’
‘We’ll lose ’em in the night. A bit of zig-zagging ought to do it. It’s far from beyond us. I’ll tell the chief as soon as Cleaver takes over. No use worrying him too soon.’
‘Meanwhile I’ll do a stint on the Interpol frequencies.’
He wanted fog, a nice all-hiding cough-dropping fog, but the last way to get anything was to pray for it, though mist around the Foreland would also have its dangers – like bumping into the wall of a container ship or cross-Channel ferry. Even a fishing boat would mean a nasty smack. Bad luck to kill ourselves, or anyone else, come to that. Such blatant aerial shadowing hadn’t happened before.
Waistcoat would scream that they had been shopped, and who could deny it? Maybe the people in the Azores had set the trap. He would believe anything, except that Howard had had anything to do with stitching them up. In the drugs game everyone played dirty. The more stuff at the bottom of the sea, or burned behind a customs warehouse, the more the price of powder and weed went up, so all the better for those who found a chair when the music stopped. On the other hand it could mean a grudge was being settled, someone getting his own back on a bit of pique so ancient that he who had done the trickery – hardly thought of as such at the time – had lost all memory of it. The trouble was, half a dozen good men went down with whoever they were after, and none could be sure who had gone shopping with such a big trolley.
When anybody was caught it was always because of a tip-off, which those betrayed could never see the reason for. Yet even the South Americans – savages to a man – wouldn’t do anything to Waistcoat. Or so Richard hoped, a ripple of ice going into his blood. Of course they wouldn’t. Waistcoat knew too much, was too solidly embedded in the network. Such treachery on that level of the hierarchy was unthinkable, would ricochet too far upstairs, though never far enough if Waistcoat began to tell all he knew – which he surely would – to get a shorter sentence.
Morbid thoughts because he had heard a couple of aeroplanes, but every sign worried when close to the white cliffs. Keep a good lookout, and forget all else. He stood at the stern after Cleaver had taken the wheel. Pale grey cumulus, settled in the west, had decided to come after them, egged on by those behind flamed into orange by the setting sun. The wind diminished but the chase was on. Only a fool would deny it. The evening was peaceful enough, but a menace from both west and east was about to box them into a situation hard to avoid or get out of. He didn’t like it, tapped the pistol under his coat, and resisted the urge to throw it into the water.
THIRTY-THREE
Howard’s inner sight was for the time being of a blacker blackness than during the day. He only knew it was night because he was tired, yet the blacker the blackness the more he needed to see. In the sink of exhaustion he forced senses into sharpness, though for what end he found hard to say. Every shape on the boat haunted him: every person was on the hunt to get him. They were invisible in their prowling.
Hearing didn’t give enough proof as to whether they knew what was in his mind. He put fists to his ears, pressed at them painfully as if to get into his head and rearrange his brain. Sharper hearing was the only way, and he wondered whether anyone else would know when he achieved it.
He gave his attention to the radio. The crew had eaten their evening slop, and their vigilance seemed relaxed. Voices were tracking a boat which could only be theirs. Perhaps every small craft was likewise noted. He wouldn’t know, but in spite of the elliptical maritime lingo he knew they had found the position of the boat, divined its course and speed – a simple matter if they knew what to look for.
The boat was clogging fair and square into a trap, though Waistcoat might yet have a few sly moves in mind. Should they turn out to be too deviously on the way to succeeding, Howard would break radio silence and reveal the position to whoever was listening. His fingers had explored the face of the transmitter for a dummy run every day since leaving port. He knew how to set the frequency and the morse key in his bag would be plugged in to do its work.
The voices were circumspect, brief and self assured. A few clipped numerals, and they were off the air, confident at not being overheard, never imagining that Waistcoat’s yacht would be carrying a man whose only job was to listen at the radio. He would not tell Waistcoat what he had heard: no more cooperation, though it might make little difference.
‘Are we going to be all right?’
He felt his soul damned in lying to her. ‘Yes, I think so. No problem.’
‘Anything startling on shortwave?’
‘I listen. Not a word from Carla on any wave.’
‘Her boat’s done turnaround and gone back to the Med. The skipper she works for doesn’t lose any time.’
‘Nobody does, if they can help it.’
‘Not in this game they don’t. I’ve given her up, anyway.’
He switched on the shortwave transmitter, curbing his despondency. ‘Give her a call.’
‘Do you mean it?’
She failed the test – for which he was risking his life – yet he wanted her to go on knowing Carla, because if something happened to him she wouldn’t be without a friend. ‘This is the time she would listen.’
She picked up the microphone: ‘Daedalus calling Pontifex, how do you read me, over?’ No response, she tried once more, then pushed the microphone aside.
He noted the shaking of her hand. ‘She’s not there.’
‘That’s it, then,’ she said. ‘Thanks for letting me try. You know I only love you, don’t you?’
He felt for her. ‘I’m aware of that.’
She drew him into her arms, her words so close at his lips that he saw them as if written. ‘Don’t think I love you only because you let me use the radio. If I’d heard her I would have told her to get lost. I really mean it.’
‘Let’s go on deck.’ He would set no more tests. ‘You can tell me what stars are out.’
‘You want them to see us kissing?’
He felt the twenty-five he had never been. ‘Yes, and even more than that.’
She led him to the bows. ‘It’s cold. Real England weather.’
‘I like it. But you need your anorak.’
‘I don’t mind.’ She put an arm through his. ‘I see the Plough, so we must be heading east-north-east. When we turn north the fun will start. There’s tension on the boat, but I don’t care what happens now I have you.’ She kissed him, warm in his arms. ‘I don’t care about anything. I know we’ll make out. I don’t want to lose you, and I won’t.’
‘We’ll
be together.’ He could hardly imagine it, but to question her hopes would smash his own. He was more than happy to welcome back the young man in him, only wishing he had new eyes to see. ‘Just as long as you like. I don’t want to be with anyone else. I should have met you when I was twenty. I don’t feel much use to you now.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I can be every use to you, if you’ll let me.’
‘I will, for as long as you like,’ though he didn’t want her to Laura him.
She laughed. ‘It’s wonderful what we agree on. We’re two of a kind. It’s like being with a brother, except it’s very sexy.’ She turned, head up he knew: ‘The Plough’s covered. Gone to watch another couple, though they won’t be as happy as us. Maybe you ought to get back to the radio. I’ll see if the chief needs anything from the galley. Be back later.’
Shortwave, lively in fine sunspot conditions, rippled with activity, Warsaw hammering out its messages, call sign before bubbles of sound, harsh yet rhythmical, pleasant, almost hypnotic to hear. Forecasts came from all corners promising good weather tomorrow. The German Numbers Woman strung him along, and all was right beneath the heaviside layer because he was in love with a woman who loved him.
Voices on VHF indicated that someone was in the know about their boat. His morse letter-tape must have been received. Perhaps even poor Jehu had landed with confirmation of their return. He was aware of Waistcoat standing close.
‘Any news, Sparks?’
Howard took off his earphones. ‘It’s quiet tonight.’
‘Even on VHF?’
‘There’s something in the distance. I think it’s in German. Can’t be anything to do with us.’
‘All right. But keep your ears pinned back.’
Such mateyness was disturbing though he imagined that a man of Waistcoat’s moods could occasionally crave ease and openness, unable to survive all the time in an unloved state. A friendly word or two, even a smile, sent him to bed happy. Good that he seemed halfway human now and again.
The German Numbers Woman Page 41