The Broken Penny

by Julian Symons

  Chapter Six

  ‘Make that pot of tea for two, Miss,’ said Mr Hards to the cow-eyed waitress. ‘And mind it’s hot and strong.’

  ‘Anything to eat?’

  ‘Toasted tea cake, and a little something sweet in the way of pastries. I like to get my teeth into a little something sweet.’ And here Mr Hards showed his small regular white teeth in a merry smile, and raked the waitress’ solid figure with a glance that seemed to include her among the sweet things he would like to get his teeth into. He eyed her broad retreating back. ‘A fine figure of a woman. I like ’em buxom. There’s always something about the sea air that gives me the old rodeodo feeling if you understand me. It’s the ozone.’ With no change of tone he added, ‘I’m afraid our friend wasn’t able to keep his appointment.’

  How much did Hards know? Garden seized upon the one fact of which the little man must certainly be ignorant, that Peterson’s body had been found. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Transferred to another job very likely. They asked me to come instead.’ The waitress brought the tea and food. While she bent over the table to put down the pastries Mr Hards, his eyes fixed greedily upon them, deliberately gave her ample buttocks a great pinch. Horrified, Garden watched the expanse of black material gathered up by bony thumb and finger, the pinch carried out. He watched for the effect, but the expression on the waitress’ placid face did not change. She walked away apparently unaware that her person had been rudely violated. Was her rear covered by a rubber pad, Garden wondered? Mr Hards, in high spirits, poured out his tea and drank it while steam rose from the cup. He disposed of the toasted tea cake in three powerful bites, and selected a sickly pastry.

  ‘It seems very odd that they should have changed their minds at the last moment, when it was too late to let me know.’

  ‘Often happens. They’ve got their reasons.’ With a sudden reptilian gulp the little man finished the pastry. ‘I waited at the entrance of the pier. You stayed a long time. See anyone?’

  ‘Two people fishing. There was nobody else at the end of the pier.’ In his pocket Garden could feel the wallet. He added carefully, ‘Nor on the landing stage.’

  The black eyes stared hard at Garden. ‘Why the landing stage? What’s that got to do with it? You weren’t meeting him there.’

  ‘I just said there was nobody. Why didn’t you come up to the end of the pier and meet me? I should have been saved half an hour’s wait.’

  ‘I was coming, then I spotted a couple of lads who know me. Decided it wouldn’t do. Waited at the entrance and followed you in here.’

  ‘What do you mean, lads who know you?’

  Mr Hards carefully selected a cream bun. ‘There are quite a lot of people who’d like to stop us carrying out this little job. I saw two of ’em today, though they didn’t see me.’ He bit into the bun. Cream spurted out over his cheek.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  There was no reply. Garden stared idly at the little man’s coat, hat and umbrella that hung on the stand. Some kind of recollection struggled for acknowledgement at the back of his mind. Then he realised that there was something odd about the silence. Mr Hards was staring with peculiar fixity at Garden’s raincoat which, flung carelessly over the chair beside him, showed marks of damp, and green slime from the pillar. On the little man’s cheek there remained a blob of cream. His bony hand shot out, fingered the raincoat and picked off a green fragment. As Mr Hards looked consideringly at the fragment of slime, Garden knew what he had been trying to remember. The slightly familiar figure hurrying off the pier as Garden walked on it had been Mr Hards. He had been lying, then, when he said that he waited at the end of the pier. For what purpose?

  ‘Not exactly seaweed,’ the little man said. ‘Slime. Wonder where that came from.’

  ‘I had a few minutes to spare,’ Garden said easily. ‘I used to know Brightsand quite well. I went up to Cliff End and scrambled among the rocks there.’

  ‘You’ll catch a cold,’ Mr Hards said mildly. ‘Cliff End, that’s where we’ve got to pay our call. Sure you didn’t look in and see Arbitzer on your own?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘That’s good. I shouldn’t have liked that, I mean the big boys wouldn’t have liked it when I sent in my report.’ He put the scrap of slime on his plate.

  ‘You’ve got cream on your face.’

  The little man picked off the cream with a fingernail, put it beside the slime and frowned at the two as if they were irreconcilable elements in a jigsaw puzzle, Then he abandoned them and called, ‘Here, Josephine, let’s have the bill.’ The waitress came over. Mr Hards eyed her hungrily up and down and returned to what Garden had begun to regard as a kind of professional patter. ‘And what do you do when the washing-up’s done and the blinds are pulled down, eh, Josephine? As if I didn’t know. What do you say we bat it around together some dark corner some dark night? Say the end of the pier at eight o’clock?’ His eyes twinkling merrily, Mr Hards glanced covertly at Garden.

  ‘All right. I’ll bring my husband. He’s a policeman.’

  ‘Good. And I’ll bring my wife, she’s a coal-heaver.’ He cackled with laughter and rose from the chair, two inches shorter than the waitress and a head below Garden. As the girl turned away, however, his laughter turned to a ferocious scowl. He took out a threepenny piece, bit it and put it down by his plate. ‘That’s enough for her,’ he said, and tried almost angrily to refuse any help in putting on his coat. Garden, however, already had the coat in his hand. As the little man slipped into it Garden noticed upon the right sleeve of the coat, near the cuff, three new reddish-brown spots. They might be some kind of rust or stain. They might also, Garden thought, be blood.

  Chapter Seven

  Cliff End lies on the west side of Brightsand. The residential villas have given way to bungalows, the bungalows have lessened in density and increased in size, so that they are single spots on the road that rises sharply upward with the chalk cliffs at one side falling steeply to the sea. When you reach the top there is sharp air, a fine view over rolling downs and the rose pink stucco Cliff Top Café with its chromium-armed chairs and glass-topped tables. After two hundred yards the road begins to descend again until it reaches the outskirts of Brightsand’s rival resort of Pallersea.

  Here Jacob Arbitzer lived in a bungalow named Mon Repos, which Garden had rented for him after their escape from Arbitzer’s country. The bungalow belonged to Garden’s stockbroker uncle, George Monk, who with a flat in London and a house in Hampshire used it very rarely and was pleased to let it furnished. Later he had agreed to sell the place and Arbitzer, who had been able to get most of his money over to England, bought it. Here Garden had last seen him some three years ago, when the former Professor seemed to have settled into a placid domesticity. He had expressed little interest in British politics or in the possibility of his own return to power – all that, he seemed to imply, was done with. He talked instead about the fine air at Cliff End, and was particularly enthusiastic about the vegetables he had been able to grow in the sheltered patch of garden at the back of the bungalow. Garden found the visit disheartening, and did not go down to Brightsand again. His last news of the Professor had been that a young niece of his had joined the household, and that he had taken up chess. But that news was two years old and now, with the prospect for Arbitzer of a return to his own country, things must be very different.

  ‘Have you met the Professor?’ Garden asked. They had come up the hill in the bus. Nobody else had got out at the Cliff Top Café, and Mr Hards had seen nobody he knew.

  Mr Hards shook his head. He looked an incongruous figure in his neat town clothes and tightly rolled umbrella. ‘Don’t know the old boy from Adam. Seen his photograph, of course. I say, devilish windy up here, isn’t it? Shouldn’t care for it myself, but everyone to his taste as the young man said when he got into bed with a female sea serpent. Here we are.’

  Garden saw that the bungalow’s name had been changed to Distant
Prospect. Then his companion lifted the latch of the little wooden gate and they walked up the path. The bell sounded clearly inside the house. For perhaps a minute there was no sound. Then the door half opened and a girl stood there, with her hand on the collar of an alsatian dog. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Come from Mr Floy to see the Professor,’ said Mr Hards cheerfully.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she said ungraciously. ‘You’d better come in. Quiet, Nicko. Friends.’

  She let them into a small square hall, and at sight of it the past came rushing back again to Garden, as it had done so often in these last hours. He remembered how he had stood, a gangling nervous boy, uneasily turning school cap in hand, or winding and unwinding his red and white scarf, in the moment before entering the room full of roaring laughing people brought together by Uncle George because it was Christmas or because it was Aunt Ellen’s birthday or simply because he liked to have a good time.

  These thoughts he put resolutely away as he stood in the square hall looking curiously at the girl, who now that he saw her clearly, was not a girl at all but a sullen young woman. She stood there now, slim and small breasted, with straw-coloured hair combed carelessly over her ears, arms hanging down at her sides with a certain helplessness or hopelessness about them, exposing herself indifferently to the bright eager gaze of Mr Hards. She was wearing a scarlet sweater and a grey skirt, and she somehow had the air of a juvenile delinquent who neither expects nor wishes to change her way of life. She paused with her hand on a door to the right. In her gaze there was nothing friendly. ‘Where is the other then, Floy? I don’t know you.’

  ‘He couldn’t manage it,’ Hards said briskly. ‘May I?’ He took off his overcoat, laid it carefully over a chair with hat and umbrella and fingered his neat tie. ‘You’re Miss Arbitzer.’

  ‘Ilona Arbitzer, yes.’

  ‘My name’s Hards, Samuel Hards. Pleased to meet you. I’m only a little chap they tell me, but I always say little and good.’ Her limp hand was pressed tightly by his bony one. She opened the door. For a moment Garden seemed to hear distinctly the back-slapping shouts and laughter of the past. Then this was washed away in a sea of silence, to the actuality of two people sitting in a rather badly lighted room. A small woman with faded grey hair sat by the window working on a hand loom. This was Madame Arbitzer. A man sat close to the fire, with one leg stretched out on a footstool. This was Jacob Arbitzer himself, the man of legend. Madame Arbitzer came over to greet them at once. Arbitzer hoisted himself to a standing position with the aid of a stick.

  Madame Arbitzer clasped Garden’s hand warmly in both her own. ‘My dear, dear Charles, it is so long since you have been to see us. But no matter, for you are here. Your friend though, where is he?’ Madame Arbitzer spoke English well, but rather slowly.

  ‘Couldn’t come.’ Mr Hards stepped forward, bowed gallantly over her hand and kissed it. ‘I’ve replaced him – temporarily, only temporarily. Hards is the name. Samuel Hards at your service.’

  ‘That is a pity. We liked him very much, and he was looking forward to seeing you again, Charles.’ Garden saw Mr Hards’ little head rear like a cobra’s at this word again and then hunch inside his shoulders. Madame Arbitzer smiled. ‘My manners are bad. We are pleased to see you also, Mr Hards. It is good of you to come.’

  ‘Jacob,’ Garden said. The figure by the fireplace had moved over to them slowly, leaning on his stick. Garden was shocked by the change in Arbitzer’s appearance. The features, always ascetic, now seemed almost ghostly in their white refinement, some kind of cloud had misted the brightness and keenness of the eyes, the once upright shoulders sagged sadly forward. There could be no doubt, however, of Arbitzer’s pleasure in seeing Garden, and the voice in which he spoke had at least something of the resonance and firmness that Garden remembered.

  ‘So here is another one come to persuade me against my better judgement. I am very happy to see you, Charles, and you too, Sir. Sit down, sit down.’ Mr Hards gave Arbitzer’s hand a cautious shake, and sat down on the edge of a chair. ‘Where is our friend, Floy?’

  Now Mr Hards was rather curt. ‘Couldn’t come. Shouldn’t be surprised if headquarters has transferred him to another assignment.’

  ‘Why?’ said Garden.

  ‘Don’t ask me. Maybe Floy was–’ He paused and looked slyly at Garden. ‘Friend of yours, was he?’

  ‘I knew him for a month or two,’ Garden said. ‘But that was a long time ago.’

  ‘You know as well as I do that a lot of people want to stop the Professor here getting back home. Communists who’ve got hold of his country don’t want him back, they tell me. They got their agents. Could be Floy was one of them and our HQ found it out.’ Mr Hards had been looking at his fingernails. Now he stared at Garden, and Garden remembered the spots of blood. ‘I don’t say it is, I say it could be.’

  Madame Arbitzer expostulated. ‘That I cannot believe. Floy – that was not his real name I think – had told us his story. The Communists had treated him shamefully, oh shamefully. In Spain they put him in prison, he escaped, they caught him again. He was working in Poland and they took him to the Soviet Union. Then he was in a labour camp until the end of 1940 and then, oh it was beastly, how can human beings commit such beastliness, such cynicism, they handed him to the Germans because he was originally an Austrian. He was in Dachau until the war ended.’

  The little man had listened to this with bored politeness. ‘Could be true, could be a good story. Anyway, as far as I know he’s been transferred. Have to put up with me, I’m afraid.’

  There was a silence which Garden, at least, felt to be uneasy. Arbitzer broke it when he addressed the girl, who had been leaning by the door looking indifferently at Garden and Hards. ‘Ilona, my dear, tea for our guests.’ She nodded and left the room. Arbitzer sat down in the chair by the fire, and again propped up his leg on the stool. ‘This weather gets into my bones. Arthritis, I have arthritis in the winter very badly. I can always feel the cold weather coming on. In the next week or two the weather will change, I can feel it.’ Looking into the fire Arbitzer said, ‘So you have come to persuade me to go back, to be the man I was in the old days. And you will be by my side, eh, as you were in the old days, that’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Garden.

  ‘Ah, I was a man and a half then, isn’t that so? I had something, some dynamo inside here.’ Arbitzer touched his chest.

  ‘You still have it.’ Garden said what seemed expected of him. ‘May be a little rusty, that’s all, needs use.’

  ‘You are flattering me.’ Still Arbitzer stared into the fire, never once raising his eyes to look Garden in the face. ‘But tell me, there is something I often think about, Charles. I was a man and a half then, you were with me, we had devoted and intelligent friends. And yet we failed. Why was it that we failed?’

  ‘We were tricked. We made mistakes.’

  ‘Those are the simple answers. But I often wonder now – was it all decreed that it should be as it was? The barbarians conquered the civilised, but who knows, perhaps it was the decree of history that the barbarians should conquer. It has happened before, it will happen again.’

  Garden moved uncomfortably in his chair. He began to understand what Sir Alfred had meant by saying that he might find Arbitzer changed. ‘You used to believe,’ he said, ‘that men might control their history.’

  Looking into the fire, rubbing his hands, Arbitzer went on talking as though Garden had not spoken. ‘You tell me I should go back. The papers tell me about riots in my country, crowds in the streets shouting my name. The exiles, the dispossessed, come down here and talk – how they do talk, to be sure. They say I have only to show myself and the country will rise. The army is on my side, half the Air Force. There will be little bloodshed, no bloodshed. Your friend, Latterley, told me that when he came to see me. Floy also. He is an idealist that one, a good man, but he understood little of my country’s problems. Would it be enough for me to go back? Perhaps, perhap
s. But shall I tell you what three-quarters of those who talk to me are really thinking? The exiles think I shall be a puppet whose strings they can pull, that when I am there again they will get back their big estates, they will recreate their old world of dances and parties, good manners and polite corruption, law for the rich and a whip for the poor. That is what they think. And what does this Latterley think who comes down and talks so smoothly, Latterley and whoever is behind him in your government? He thinks: when we have put him back into power, he is bound to show his gratitude for our help. Indeed, if he does not show his gratitude, we can soon make him. Trade concessions, military bases – oh, yes, I can see clearly enough what he is after. I shall be in the hands of these people, Charles. It is for this I should return?’

  Garden gripped one hand with the other. When he spoke there was no sympathy in his voice. ‘You pity yourself too much.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You don’t really believe that your return is impossible. You know it can be done. But you know it will mean hard work after you are back. When we were in the hills together such things didn’t worry you. We fought the Germans with one hand, the native profiteers and bloodsuckers with the other. But now you think, “I am an old man, I cannot go through all that again, they had their chance of decent government, honest elections, a liberal regime, and they didn’t take it. Let them stew in their own juice, I have done enough for my country. I–”’

  ‘Tea,’ the girl said. She handed a cup to Garden. He put it on the table without looking at her. ‘I have earned the right, you think, to sit back now and live out the rest of my life in peace.’ The teacup rattled as Garden’s hand struck the table in front of him. ‘Let me tell you, Jacob – it is something that in the past you have often told me – there is no such right. The cause for which we are working, you said to me, is one which far outweighs the value of our individual lives. I have not forgotten those words, Jacob. Have you?’