The Broken Penny

by Julian Symons

  When they were alone Lepkin stared steadily at Garden, still with that air of one who sees something utterly indifferent to him. The picture above looked down approvingly. Garden braced himself for an unexpected question as Lepkin put the tips of his fingers together, but he was still unready for the one that came.

  ‘Have you read G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday?’

  Garden was utterly confused. ‘I – why, yes. A long time ago.’

  ‘It is a foolish book, a feeble bourgeois fairy tale, but there is an ingenious idea in it. Chesterton wrote of a society of anarchists, all of whom turn out to be policemen. A bourgeois fairy tale, as I said, based on a belief in the stability of society. In our day the anarchists are not policemen, but it is possible that the policemen may be anarchists, or at least revolutionaries.’ Garden stared at him. ‘Come, come. This diary is Peterson’s. I know his writing. How did you get it?’

  What kind of game was Lepkin playing? In any case, it could do no harm to tell him the truth about Peterson. ‘I took it from his body. Peterson is dead.’

  Lepkin nodded. ‘Did you kill him? You can tell me, it does not matter. But we have little time for talking, it is essential that you believe what I say. You see this letter signed “Rosa”. I am Rosa.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Lepkin wrote a few words on a memorandum sheet and pushed them over to Garden, together with the letter from Peterson’s pocket. He had written the same words in German, and even though the ink had run on the original letter it was obvious that they were in the same writing. ‘You believe now?’ Garden nodded. Lepkin struck a match and carefully burned both letter and memorandum sheet. ‘That letter could have been the end of me,’ he said casually. ‘Now, listen, and speak only when I ask you questions. I believe you knew Peterson in Spain. He had been a revolutionary for many years and recently had joined our party, the WUSR, that is the Workers for Universal Socialist Revolution.’

  ‘You are not an anarchist then?’

  ‘I asked you to speak only when I asked questions,’ Lepkin said snappishly. ‘Of course I am not a romantic anarchist. I am a Universal Revolutionary. Peterson was one of us. He was in England trying to persuade Arbitzer to come out here. He was also keeping an eye on the Communists, who were playing some little game of their own. Who killed him I don’t know, nor

  does it particularly matter. Peterson was romantic.’ Lepkin compressed his lips. It was obvious that he could offer no greater condemnation. ‘This ridiculous fairy tale about the fox and the tiger, that was typical. Our party was the fox, of course, and he meant that we had to be cautious because we worked from weakness instead of from strength. But what a way to put it. Chestertonian!’ Lepkin’s eyes were cold. ‘We were cautious enough. Our plan was to help Arbitzer’s Social Democrats to take power and then act as a group inside them. Within six months we would have ruled the country. There are not very many of us but we have determination and intelligence. The Social Democrats lack both. But something went wrong, the whole thing was given away to the Communists.’

  Garden had to stifle a sudden impulse to laugh. I am a Universal Revolutionary – he was back in the old days of the Spanish Civil War, the furious internecine struggles, the phrase-mongering. ‘Supporters of Roosevelt are Labour Fascists’, ‘Peace Front the road to War’, ‘Treat the Trotsky-anarchist as you would a Fascist’. Absurd, absurd. Yet here and now, at this time and in this place, was it so absurd? Had it not, in the implacable, intelligent figure of Lepkin a terrible plausibility?

  ‘We have to begin again,’ Lepkin was saying. ‘Now what has happened to Arbitzer?’

  ‘He’s dead. At least I think so. He was going to give himself up. Granz shot him so that he should not stand trial.’

  ‘So. Granz then is not such a fool as he looks. How did you get away from Baritsa? What is the little man doing with you, and the girl?’

  Garden told him and described Milo’s trick with the car. Lepkin shook his head. ‘Ingenious, yes, but it will not deceive Peplov. He is no fool.’ Lepkin made this remark, about both Granz and Peplov, in a tone of disdainful superiority, like a schoolmaster applauding the brightest in a class of dullards. ‘He may be tricked for a little. Then it will occur to him that the food in the car was a blind. If it was a blind, what does it mean? It implies clearly that you were intending to go to the western frontier. The conclusion is then that you mean to do nothing of the sort. What other possibility is there? Why, the river. Peplov finds out what boats were sailing down the Molna that night, and there you are. Your Captain does not sound like the kind of man who holds out under interrogation. The position is not comfortable. I will be frank with you, and say that my position is almost as uncomfortable as yours. You understand that?’ Garden felt inclined to say that he was no fool, but he nodded instead. ‘Prilit is stupid. He is also devoted to me. I make him jump through the hoop, and he loves me for it. But he is not too stupid nor so devoted that he will fail to understand eventually that you came to me expecting help, and that my name is written down in these notes. Within an hour or two the obvious will occur to him, and he will get in touch with the Director-General on his own account.

  ‘What is to be done, then?’ Lepkin took a long-tipped Russian cigarette out of a box on the desk and lit it. Garden realised suddenly that the man was actually enjoying the situation. ‘Shall I give you up? In the case of Milo and Granz that would present little difficulty. They are small fish, nobody would pay much attention to the tale they told. But with you and the girl, who is Arbitzer’s niece and also knew Peterson, the case is different. You will betray me under pressure, and that will be the end of me. That will not do. Besides, I should not wish to see you on trial. Your admissions would be damaging.’

  Lepkin blew a perfect smoke ring. ‘Shall I have you killed then, you and the girl? Nothing is easier, I assure you. You could be shot trying to escape, a little tablet could be forced down your throat, there are half a dozen other ways. Then I triumphantly present Peplov with Milo and Granz. But that does not solve my problem. If Arbitzer is dead – and if he were alive I should have heard something about his capture – you and the girl are the only ones of any use to them for a trial proving that they have checked an uprising backed by Anglo-American spies. A fine fool I shall look presenting Peplov with the two people he wanted – dead.’ Lepkin gave a bark of laughter, a logical unamused acknowledgement of the comedy of the situation. ‘Besides there is something else. I wonder if you realise what it is?’

  ‘Prilit.’

  ‘Precisely, Prilit.’ Lepkin looked vaguely surprised and not very pleased, as though a pupil had given a right answer at a wrong time. ‘There is that cursed Prilit who is going to say: “Garden came to see District Commander Lepkin because he had his name written down in a little diary. I saw it myself.”

  ‘Then what is the solution? How can I help you and the girl to get away – not because I love you, my friend, I assure you of that, but simply in my own interest?’ The whole thing was settled in Lepkin’s mind, Garden realised, and any suggestion or interruption would be pointless. ‘The key to the situation is Prilit. While he survives we are all in danger. Prilit, then, must be eliminated. Listen carefully. I shall give you back your revolver. I shall ask Prilit to bring in the girl. You will shoot Prilit, and shoot to kill. The sound of a shot is not unusual here, and there will be no investigation until I order it. This pass will take you out of the building, together with the girl. Go left when you are outside the building, and then left again. A hundred yards down the road you will find the Seven Sisters Hotel. Say that you come from Joseph and give him this card. He will look after you until you hear from me.’

  Garden took the pass and card. ‘What about the others?’

  ‘They must be left. Your escape can be blamed on Prilit’s stupidity, but I cannot let you all go. That would be too much.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come, Garden, be logical. Have you any other plan to suggest that will
cover your interests and my own? No? Then what are we arguing about?’

  Garden hesitated. ‘All right. Give me the revolver.’

  ‘You are not thinking of playing some trick on me, I hope.’ The impersonal eyes behind the rimless glasses looked at him coldly. ‘Believe me, you are in no position to play tricks.’

  ‘I know that. Give me the revolver.’

  Still looking hard at Garden, Lepkin wiped the revolver and then handed it to him. Garden broke it, made sure that it contained six cartridges and pointed it at Lepkin. ‘Tell Prilit to come in and bring all three of them with him.’

  Lepkin stared at Garden. ‘You are a fool.’

  With a parody of Lepkin’s didactic manner, Garden said, ‘Not at all. You are mistaken, District Commander Lepkin, in assuming that we have identical interests. If you don’t lift the telephone I shall shoot.’

  The President looked down on them. ‘You are a fool,’ Lepkin said again. He picked up the telephone and gave the order. Garden stood at one side of the door. Lepkin said in a strangled voice, ‘It is essential, Garden, absolutely essential, that Prilit should be eliminated.’

  ‘Essential to your safety,’ Garden said. ‘But not to mine.’ It was very simple. When Prilit came in Garden knocked the revolver out of his hand and gave it to Granz. Prilit’s mouth made an O of surprise. Without taking his eyes off Lepkin, Garden said. ‘He wanted me to shoot you, Prilit, while the girl and I got away. Don’t worry, I have no intention of doing it.’

  Prilit seemed not to have heard. He was looking at Lepkin, and there was no change in the fawning devotion of his gaze.

  ‘Prilit,’ Lepkin said sharply, ‘Go and get him. It is your chance to be a hero.’

  The little man turned and then jumped without hesitation at Garden. As he did so Lepkin’s hand moved to his desk and came out with something shining. Within the endlessly long moment of Prilit’s jump there was a fraction of time in which his body was interposed between Lepkin and Garden. This was the moment at which Lepkin shot, throwing himself sideways in the following instant so that he was behind the barricade of his desk.

  Prilit gasped, clawed at the air and came down to the floor with a hole in the back of his head. His eyes, open, showed no change in the devotion that had moved him to obey his master’s voice. He had died with his illusions about him like a cloak which, Garden reflected afterwards, is perhaps as good a way as any to die.

  At the moment Garden was conscious only of unreasoning anger. A shot hurriedly fired by Granz at Lepkin had struck the President’s picture, which clattered to the floor. Splinters of broken glass covered the carpet. Lepkin was half-hidden by the desk, and as Garden stepped round it he made no attempt to shoot again, but began to say something. Was it another plea for reason and logic? Garden never knew, for he shot Lepkin, as Lepkin had shot Prilit, neatly in the head.

  Chapter Six

  There is no chaos like that of a bureaucratic organisation deprived of its chief. Had Lepkin been alive he could have picked up the telephone on his desk and ordered their arrest. In that case they would probably never have reached the outer hall. With Lepkin and Prilit dead, there was nobody to issue orders. Garden showed the pass and they strolled calmly out under the eyes of the guards.

  ‘We have a minute or two before they give the alarm,’ Garden said. ‘And even then they don’t know who we are. We have a chance, especially if we split up. Ilona and I, Theo and–’ He looked at the other two, remembering the scene in the cabin.

  ‘That is all right,’ Granz said. He patted Milo’s shoulder. ‘But we must have a place to meet.’

  ‘Three miles from here on the coast, a fishing village called Zeb.’ Milo chuckled at the surprise on their faces. ‘I told you I had a friend. A real friend, not like your Lepkin. He is a fisherman named Poltzer, he lives in a pinkwashed cottage on the left-hand side at the end of the village farthest from here. I have a little idea this Poltzer may help us.’

  ‘A boat?’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps. Who knows but he might be our pilot, if we paid him enough. Meet there tonight at nine o’clock.’

  ‘Tonight, nine o’clock, the village of Zeb, at the house of Poltzer the fisherman.’

  ‘Until then, good luck.’ For a moment they were all standing on the corner of the Street of the October Revolution, the decorous shabbily dressed crowds eddying round them. For a moment Garden saw their faces, fixed in expressions that he remembered ever afterwards, Milo’s nut-brown and wrinkled, set in his determined smile, Granz with thick brows drawn together over dark and puzzled eyes. Then they had crossed the street and were walking away together, a big lumbering man and a little perky one, looking like thousands of big and little men all over the world. As they went the overcast skies broke. Rain spattered down in large drops, making dark blobs on the pavement.

  ‘What are we going to do now?’ Garden noticed absently that some of the old hostility was back in the girl’s voice.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure that we ought to get out of here. That’s just what they’ll expect us to do. Within a couple of hours they will realise just who it was that escaped from police headquarters. They will expect us to leave the town. It might be a good idea to stay if we can find a bolthole.’ He stopped outside a shabby building with dirty windows. It was the Seven Sisters Hotel. ‘Lepkin told me to come here. Do you think we should take a chance on it?’

  She shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘Why ask me? You were very good at shooting Lepkin back there. You will know whether to take his advice about a place to stay.’

  The immediate past had already become utterly remote in Garden’s mind. Was it really true that, for the first time in years, he had killed a man? Why had he done it? For reasons that had seemed extraordinarily cogent at the time, but were now as fantastic as the whole scene in the office. It was in a dream, surely, that all these things had happened. Or was that dream, as he had been told very long ago, reality itself, a terrible rending of the veils of falsity through which we generally look at life? And in the dream that was reality, surely, the death of Lepkin had been urgently necessary? Out of such reflections he produced the words, ‘It was necessary.’

  ‘It was necessary,’ she mocked him. ‘To you killing is always necessary. I said nothing would come of this but killing.’

  Garden came back suddenly into the world in which he was being hunted by the People’s Police. A voice boomed his Christian name. Turning round, he saw Trelawney. His hand was vigorously pumped.

  ‘Haven’t seen you for years, old man. What are you doing? Marvellous country, isn’t it? But what filthy weather. This your wife? Come along and meet the boys and girls.’ Garden allowed himself to be borne along on what he remembered as a typically Trelawneyan flood of ejaculatory eloquence into a building three doors away which had once been a church and was now, he saw, the local Museum of Revolutionary History. Inside, two or three small knots of people, each piloted by a voluble English-speaking Dravinian, looked at relics of the new history – the paper once edited in exile by the President, the letters exchanged by the Foreign Secretary and Stalin on the Nationalities question, a reconstruction of the President’s escape from a Royalist prison in the thirties, a great mass of material about the Peasant Rising of 1875 when thousands of countrymen armed with clubs and farm implements had been mowed down by a crack Guards Division. The history of the last few years remained undocumented, no doubt, Garden thought, because it was subject to such a rapid process of change. He reflected also that in a sense the Museum of Revolutionary History had changed its religious character remarkably little. The relics were here, although they were not the same relics, and, as always, the older they were, the safer and the more holy. As always, too, the relics produced a strong emotional effect – voices were hushed, the demeanour of the worshippers had a proper reverence. The enthusiasm of Trelawney, however, was only slightly dampened by the reverential atmosphere. In a loud whisper he told Garden of the splendid tour they were having under th
e auspices of some Friendship Society or another, of the enthusiasm of the workers, of the new housing projects and the spread of education.

  In an anteroom they drank glasses of lemonade and ate little cakes. Trelawney talked on with undiminished zest, blowing a fine spray of spittle toward them. How was it possible to make use of Trelawney? Garden remembered him as a kind of ideal Left Book Club figure of the thirties. He was a tall, thin, raw-boned man with a prominent Adam’s apple, who always wore sports jackets with sleeves that were slightly too short. In moments of excitement, and Trelawney was often excited, the sleeves shot up to show hairy reddish wrists. Trelawney was an accountant with a passion for statistics. He read almost all of the Left Book Club publications, but the ones he enjoyed most were those that told him by what percentage Russian production of pig iron had increased in the past year or how quickly the Soviet transport system had been unified. ‘I like something I can get my teeth into,’ Trelawney would say with a grin showing great horselike yellow fangs that could champ through an economic survey or an analysis of the Corporate state in a couple of hours. Trelawney was also interested in art and literature. ‘A fine old argy-bargy we had the other night,’ he would say, puffing at his pipe. ‘Social realism versus formal expression. I don’t pretend to be an artistic chap, but I can see what they mean about the decadence of formalism. Take Eisenstein now–’ Or Trelawney would take Stravinsky or Proust or Joyce or Swift or Michelangelo and repeat the latest judgement on them that he had been reading in International Literature or Left Review. Perhaps he had never read a page of Proust or Joyce, never looked at a Michelangelo reproduction (for art, as he readily admitted, was not really his cup of tea); that was of much less importance to Trelawney than getting the right outlook on books and pictures. And once you had the right outlook, once you had realised that Proust and Joyce were typical figures of the bourgeois decadence, why then there was no point in reading them anyway.