The Broken Penny

by Julian Symons

  ‘Cigarette?’ Granz said, staring at him. Arbitzer took one of the strong black cigarettes of their country. Peterson was right about this, Garden thought. He’s frightened. It will be a mouse dressed up as a lion that we take with us. Aloud he asked, ‘Where do we go to?’

  ‘Lodno. My plane came from there, and the airfield there is ours. The committee will meet us. Then tomorrow we act. You know what tomorrow is, eh? Seven years ago to the day you left the country, Jacob. They have made it a holiday, a day of national rejoicing. It is a good day to act on, yes?’

  ‘Very good.’ Arbitzer’s reply was shaky.

  Granz’s enthusiasm mounted as he talked. ‘We are organised in cells of five members, so that betrayal by any individual is not important. Twenty cells make a group, every five groups has a committee member in charge of it. We have relied very much on the committee members. They are all tried men. In the north things have been handled by Peplov. He has seen to it that the 23rd Regiment is quartered in the capital. They are ours, from Colonel to mess orderly. He is a great brain, that Peplov. He will be there tonight, as well as others that you know – Cetkovitch, Volnich, Udansky.’

  ‘I look forward to meeting him,’ Arbitzer said with a kind of trembling dignity. ‘We shall see if a place can be found for him in the administration.’

  ‘See if a place can be found.’ Granz spoke half-incredulously, then burst into a countryman’s guffaw. ‘After we have taken power Peplov will name his own place.’

  ‘I see. You do not want me, you want my name. I suppose I should have understood that.’

  Granz caught his arm. ‘Jacob. I am a fool and my tongue often says what it does not intend. You know that we want you, we cannot do without you. Believe that.’ He shook the thin arm almost angrily.

  ‘My beliefs or disbeliefs, what do they matter? Do not be afraid, Theo. I have been given a part to play and I shall play it. I don’t doubt that Peplov has done much and will deserve a high place. It is simply that all this means violence, and I feel more and more doubt of…’ His voice died away as he walked over to the fire and stood staring down at the dully burning logs.

  Granz looked at Garden, and then tapped the maps. ‘Jacob.’

  Arbitzer looked up. ‘The plans, yes, of course. But not just now, Theodore. Leave me alone for a little while. I wish to think, to compose myself.’ He smiled faintly at the look of alarm on Granz’s face. ‘Don’t worry. These are not second thoughts, though perhaps they are last thoughts. How soon do we need to leave?’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  Arbitzer bowed his head in a gesture of dismissal about which there was undoubtedly something Presidential. Garden and Granz left the room and stood in the passage. ‘He has changed,’ Granz said.

  ‘We’ve all changed.’ Even to himself he could not admit how great was the change in Arbitzer. In the bedroom to the right he could hear the sound of muffled sobs. The little hall stifled him with its weight of memories. ‘Breath of air,’ he said, and opened the front door. Granz joined him on the porch. Outside was a clear moonless night with stars, and the wind blowing in cold from the sea. In his thin clothes Garden shivered. ‘I wonder what’s happened to the man Hards was talking about. He said the side of the house. You take left, I’ll take right.’

  Granz murmured something and moved away. As silently as possible Garden moved round the hedge that skirted the house. His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, made out the positions of trees, avoided a flower bed. Hards had said the man could watch both front and back entrances. If so he must have been somewhere about here… At the side of a bush Garden almost tripped over something bulky. He knelt, could not find a match and groped with hands. They touched the cloth of trousers, a coat, a face. When Garden called for Granz his hand was warm, and felt wet. The big man was with him quickly. Garden was surprised to find his own breath coming faster than usual. ‘Torch, match, lighter, quickly. Someone here.’ The finger of light from a torch with Granz’s protective grasp over part of it showed the bright red stain on Garden’s hand and moved on to the crumpled figure who stared open-eyed but sightlessly at the night sky. The torch played on the body, moved up to the blood-covered collar, lingered a moment on the wound in the neck and stopped on a dark thin face that was strange and yet somehow familiar. Granz’s voice said harshly: ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Garden said. ‘I’ve seen him recently. Run the torch over him again, will you?’ He exclaimed sharply as the light showed a green jerkin. Now he could see that this man also had been stabbed through the body. ‘He was one of the two fishing on the pier this afternoon. I told you about them.’ With a decisive click Granz snapped off the torch. Garden rubbed his bloody right hand on the grass and stood up. ‘This is what our friend Hards calls stalling. He stabbed this one twice, neck and body. I wonder how he got near enough to do it. I told you about Floy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Granz said indifferently. He dropped to his knees, ran his hands over the body and straightened up. ‘You have a revolver? Then take this one. Perhaps we shall need it.’

  Garden’s hand closed on metal. ‘Hards must have surprised him. Why didn’t he use this?’

  In Granz’s voice there was a note of impatience. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Who was he and what did he want?’ Garden shivered again suddenly. ‘That man Hards is a killer. For pleasure.’

  ‘For pleasure or not, what does it matter? You have seen dead men before. Is there something about this English air that makes men timid? You know the struggle we are engaged in, you say you believe in it, you know there is no time for sentiment, wondering this and fearing that. At times like these some people die unjustly, some who should have a rope round their necks get a medal.’ This was a long speech for Granz.

  ‘I know all that,’ Garden said hesitantly.

  ‘If you know it, good. It is time to go.’

  Garden stood by the side of the body, staring down at the dark mass. How was it possible to explain what he felt? How, indeed, could he be quite sure of what it was he wanted to say, what truths struggled for expression within him? Did it amount to anything more than a certainty that Floy or Peterson was one of the best men he had ever known, and that there was something evil about Hards? He remembered Peterson’s note with the initials Ha.: ‘Cobra with rabbit appetites. Dangerous.’ Was it mere sentiment that made him dislike finding himself on the side of such a man? He walked slowly with Granz into the house, and washed his hands in the small bathroom. Red stain came off them and flowed down the waste.

  Outside the bathroom door he met the girl. She said to him calmly, ‘Katerina and I are going with you.’

  Garden thought quickly. If the two women were left in the bungalow they would certainly have awkward explanations to make. ‘I thought you never wanted to go back.’

  ‘I have changed my mind. If it is all as you say, if he is going back, perhaps I shall meet the gentleman who came to arrest us that day and pulled Peter’s ear. I should have something to say to him.’ One finger curled round in her hair and tugged it. ‘You don’t understand that I might want to see him, do you? Or what I should like to do to him? That is beyond you.’

  He stood there looking at the childlike face set into its mould of sullenness. ‘I can understand it, yes, I don’t like it. But perhaps you ought to come back.’

  He was glad of the words when for a moment the sullenness vanished and she ran to the door of the front room, pulled it open and cried like a child who has been given permission to go to a party: ‘He says we can go.’

  In the room Katerina Arbitzer was stuffing things into a large suitcase, Arbitzer and Granz were talking in low voices. ‘Does he?’ Arbitzer said. ‘We had reached the same conclusion.’

  The girl pointed at Granz. ‘But I thought he said–’

  On the rocklike, reliable but slightly stupid face of Granz there was a look like that of an ox who is being pestered almost beyond the limits of docility: ‘It is all nothing to me. Bring everythin
g, sewing machine, loom, anything, as long as your uncle comes too.’

  ‘That means Nicko can come,’ she said eagerly.

  ‘Who is Nicko?’ The alsatian came into the room and stood by the girl’s side. ‘The dog. Yes, let us take along the dog by all means. He will not object to the aeroplane?’ Granz asked with heavy sarcasm.

  ‘It may be a good idea for them to come, in view of all the circumstances,’ Garden said to Granz, who shook his head in disgust.

  ‘Bah. You behave like children. But if we are going, let us go. My car is on the back road.’

  Katerina Arbitzer stood up, an old woman flushed with bending. ‘I have shared his fate so long. Theodore, you can understand that we do not wish to be separated now.’ She looked speculatively at the loom in the window. ‘You said the loom. I have a carpet there half-finished. I do not suppose–’

  ‘No, no,’ Granz cried. There was something pathetic about him. ‘This is ridiculous. I came here to take back the leader of a revolution. I am saddled with a pack of women and dogs, and the leader himself–’

  He stopped. Arbitzer was rubbing his knee gently. ‘Yes, Theodore, what about the leader himself?’

  Granz pushed his hand through his hair like a schoolboy. ‘He is fine. I give you all five minutes to get into the car.’

  Chapter Nine

  The car was an old Daimler. They got in, Arbitzer in the front with Granz, Garden between the two women in the back. The dog settled at Ilona’s feet. At the last moment Katerina Arbitzer cried out something unintelligible and hurried back into the house. She came out again with a rug which she carefully tucked round her husband’s legs. ‘His leg gets stiff if it is not wrapped up,’ she said apologetically, and then to Arbitzer: ‘Have you got your stick?’ His reply was lost in the sound of the engine as Granz started the car.

  They drove for a few miles along the coastal road, and then turned inland. Garden soon gave up trying to follow the direction they were taking. Ilona’s thin knee pressed against him, he could smell the faint fresh odour of the scent she used. They did not speak. In the front Arbitzer and Granz carried on a conversation audible only as differing voice tones, Arbitzer’s light and faintly petulant, Granz’s a bearlike roar. Garden was jerked from remembrances of his childhood at Brightsand by some words of Katerina Arbitzer’s.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I said where are we going?’ With her lips pressed almost to his ear she whispered. ‘Is he altogether to be trusted, this Granz?’

  He was shocked. His instinct was to answer with an immediate ‘Yes’, but the words sowed in his mind the smallest possible seed of doubt. Katerina voiced exactly the nature of this doubt when she whispered again. ‘He is somehow so changed from what I remember. He was always so respectful to Jacob.’

  He is somehow changed, Garden thought, it is what we are all saying. Perhaps we should have changed as Granz has done if we had lived through years of imprisonment and conspiracies. And have not we changed more whose minds have lost the flexibility, whose wills have lost the courage, that Granz still possesses? He gave an encouraging pressure to Katerina’s arm at the same moment that she whispered, ‘I am glad you are with us, Charles.’

  The Daimler, which had just passed through a small village, now swung right up a hill, then right again into a big asphalted courtyard. The car stopped and Granz got out. Peering out of the window, Garden could see buildings in front of them, black masses untouched by light. In the car’s headlights he saw Granz advance toward a door ahead of them and knock, two short, one long, two short. Shutters rolled up ahead of them to reveal a garage. Granz got back into the Daimler, drove them in and got out of the car again.

  ‘Here we are then,’ he said with recovered cheerfulness. ‘Now, where are the others?’

  Electric light suddenly illuminated the garage, revealing it as a big, bare and very high shed, with wooden steps at one end leading to an upper room. The door of this room opened and a voice said: ‘Hello hello. Done the first lap in good time, eh?’ Colonel Hunt clattered down the wooden stairs, beefy hand outstretched. ‘How are you, me boy,’ he said to Garden. ‘And this is the Professor. Greatly honoured to meet you, sir.’ Arbitzer got out of the car leaning on his stick, and allowed his hand to be pumped up and down.

  A voice from above said, ‘Who else is in the car?’ Katerina and Ilona got out. The alsatian stood quietly by the girl’s side. Garden looked up and saw the narrow figure of Bretherton.

  Granz said, ‘Jacob’s wife and niece. He insisted that they come.’

  The Colonel goggled with surprise. His hand quickly ran up to his bald head. He seemed at a loss for words. The voice from above spoke again: ‘They’d better come up.’

  Upstairs there was a large room with a table, uncomfortable wooden chairs and a map of England on the wall. A small electric fire gave a little warmth. The Colonel sat down heavily behind the table. ‘Unexpected,’ he said, ‘certainly unexpected. Always delighted to see the ladies of course, but – well dammit, this is a man’s job.’ Apparently at a loss he looked at Bretherton.

  The secretary looked down at his fingernails. ‘You realise, Professor Arbitzer, that no guarantee of your safety can be given. Everything possible has been done to ensure that things go smoothly, but you have powerful enemies. They are active even in this country, which they would like to stop you leaving.’

  Garden leaned forward. ‘But Hards can be relied on to deal with them, isn’t that so? Like the man watching the bungalow. Was he an enemy?’

  Bretherton stared at Garden speculatively, but did not reply. Arbitzer said, ‘I don’t understand. What–’

  ‘There was a man watching the house, Hards told us that. Somebody killed him.’

  The Colonel said in his plummy voice, ‘Unfortunate that was, unfortunate but necessary. Can’t have things going wrong now. Sammy told us about it. Impetuous boy, but his heart’s in the right place.’

  ‘Let us get back to the point,’ Bretherton said, and again Garden interrupted him.

  ‘That is just the point. We could not leave Madame Arbitzer and her niece to face a police investigation.’

  ‘So that was why you agreed we should come,’ the girl said scornfully. ‘I should have known it was not simple generosity.’

  ‘We can keep the two ladies in hiding. I can assure you that they will be perfectly safe. They can join you in a few days when the movement has succeeded. It is hazarding everything – the success of the movement and their own safety – to take them with you now.’ There was a faint but penetrating note of irony in Bretherton’s voice as he added, ‘And to take a dog as well, that makes it perfect. What do you think you will be doing, playing a parlour game?’ The alsatian pricked up his ears at the word ‘dog’. The girl patted his head.

  Both Bretherton and the Colonel looked at Garden, but it was Arbitzer who answered them, speaking with some of the force and incisiveness that Garden remembered.

  ‘I have not met either of you gentlemen before today. You are showing your interest in our cause, and I am grateful for it. Nevertheless, our interests are not identical and our risks are not equal. If we fail you will say, “ Well it was a pity.” But we – you know very well what will happen to us. When I talked to Mr Latterley and Mr Floy’ – here a glance impossible to interpret flashed between Bretherton and Colonel Hunt – ‘I asked them if your government could not give me some official backing. They both told me that it was absolutely out of the question, that I must be content with unofficial blessing and private help. I realise the reasons for that decision and I bow to them. The fact remains that the risks are being taken by me and my friends. Accordingly the decisions are ours, not yours. Theodore, the plane can take these extra passengers?’

  Granz shrugged and nodded. ‘Very well. The ladies will go. There is no more to be said.’

  ‘And the dog?’ Bretherton was sarcastic.

  ‘And the dog.’

  The Colonel looked at Bretherton. Bretherton pushed at the
cuticle of a fingernail and nodded almost imperceptibly. With a great outrush of breath and a quick scrabbling at his jaw the Colonel said, ‘My word, Professor, you’re a man after my own heart. Come right out and say what you mean, no beating about the bush. You want the ladies to go, right you are then, they’re going. Nuff said. Let’s have a little drink on it, success to a mission.’ He was interrupted by a light showing on the desk. The Colonel pressed a button and a telephone swung out from the wall. He barked monosyllables into it and then slammed down the receiver. ‘No cause for alarm, but no time for that drink. One of our boys from Brightsand – not Sammy. Sammy’s got himself in enough trouble, he’s lying low like Brer Rabbit. But they’ve found that feller in the Professor’s garden and they’re headed this way. Don’t know this place as far as I know, got a perfectly good reputation as a warehouse of Multiple Steel Products – but better be on the safe side.’

  Garden leaned forward. ‘Colonel, who are they?’

  The Colonel’s bloodshot eyes stared at him blankly. Then he guffawed. ‘They want to keep you from getting away, want to stop the old mission. Plain enough, eh? No prizes for guessing who they are.’

  ‘It is plain enough,’ Arbitzer said. ‘Not plain to you, Charles? Not satisfied?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ What, after all, was in his mind but an obscure uneasiness, a tangle of doubts and hesitations? And was this uneasiness anything more than an acknowledgement of the fact that he was no longer by any means the man who had been Peterson’s companion in Spain, not even the man who had been dropped into the country shaped like a broken penny during the war? Was it mere age that made him find something ludicrous about this adventure undertaken by two middle-aged men, two women and a dog? And, of course, Granz. A little reluctantly Garden admitted to himself that Granz seemed efficient enough. But Granz was younger, perhaps Granz was the only one of them who felt a really wholehearted enthusiasm for what they were going to do. This is dangerous thinking, Garden told himself, this will never do. ‘Satisfied,’ he said.