Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  It was not a had-it-worse-than-thou comparison. The sadness in his tone told Troy it was identification. He’d known the solid world to dissolve about him, the permanence of life to crumble in the dust of war.

  ‘You should rebuild,’ he said. ‘I noticed from the train last week. And around St Paul’s. So much of London is like this. I find it hard to see why. The Germans level our cities; we rebuild them. We house our people.’

  Troy felt almost in need of Brother Rod, who could give Khrushchev chapter and verse ad tedium on Britain’s failure to rebuild and rehouse in the aftermath of war. They walked along Balaclava Street towards the end of Jamaica Street. A huge chimney stack lay on its side like a slaughtered Titan. It had fallen almost intact, back broken like a ship run aground, but not shattered. Troy had no idea when. It had been standing the last time he looked, but that had been years ago. He usually avoided this route, almost unconsciously. It must have been five or six years since he had walked this way. Twenty years ago, as a beat bobby, he walked it every day. He found it hard to admit, but the place held too many memories.

  ‘Do the English keep their bombsites as monuments?’ Khrushchev asked. Troy had never looked at it this way before, but silently agreed that that was exactly what they did. Their finest hour laid out in blasted brick and broken glass. And when they were fed up with them as monuments, they turned them into car parks.

  It had turned chilly. The warmth as Troy pushed open the door into the Bricklayer’s Arms was welcoming. The people’s palace sounded to Troy like a good name for a defunct music hall. He thought the notion that it could be reapplied to a railway station, any railway station, an absurd piece of Soviet pseudo-realism. If anything the people’s palaces were public houses. In their relentless, unvarying shades, dirty red, dirty brown, they were, he thought, some sort of refuge from the cloying English privacy, the world behind the rustling lace curtains, and an escape from the new invader, the one-eyed god of the living room. The public bar was half full at best. Monday was hardly the best night of the week for an evening in a pub, nor was Tuesday, most people being flat broke from the weekend, lacking the courage to run up a slate until pay day—Friday—was visible in the near future—but it would have to do.

  ‘Before we go in,’ Troy said to his companion, ‘I should warn you. It’s Monday. Don’t expect cheerful cockneys doing the Lambeth Walk and the Hokey-Cokey.’

  ‘Hokey-Cokey,’ said Khrushchev. ‘What is Hokey-Cokey?’

  ‘Forget it,’ Troy said. ‘It’s too difficult to explain.’

  And so saying concealed the truth, that he’d no real idea what it was himself.

  The pub had hardly changed since the end of the war, it was if anything simply ten years shabbier, ten years deeper into its nicotine hue. Most noticeably, the spot behind the bar where Churchill’s photograph had hung for so long was now occupied by one of the footballer Tom Finney, star of Preston North End, a suitably neutral team on turf naturally split between Millwall and West Ham and, as it happened, the hometown of Eric the landlord, a man who had been known to crack heads over the matter of local loyalties.

  Troy found Bonham at a corner table playing cribbage with two other men. He introduced Khrushchev as Uncle Nikki. Bonham looked down at Khrushchev from his six foot six plus and scrutinised him.

  ‘No he’s not,’ he said. ‘I know your Uncle Nikki. He’s a little fat bloke with a beard.’

  ‘Well, this is a little fat bloke without a beard,’ Troy said. ‘This is my Uncle Nikki on my mother’s side. And he doesn’t speak English.’

  ‘Good Eefenning,’ said Khrushchev. ‘Good Eefenning to you oll.’

  ‘Well, that’s his limit,’ Troy said.

  ‘A pleasure to meet you,’ Khrushchev went on.

  ‘Mutual,’ Bonham replied and moved up the bench to make room for him. He looked at Troy.

  ‘Are you quite sure?’ he said.

  Troy sat down opposite Khrushchev. ‘It’s just phrases, that’s all. He picks up the odd thing.’

  ‘Mind the gap!’ said Khrushchev, smiling at his own parrotry.

  Bonham looked quizzically at Troy. ‘Are you two having me on?’

  ‘Honestly,’ Troy protested. ‘It’s just phrases.’

  ‘Sounds pretty damn kosher to me,’ said Bonham. ‘I think you’d better get them in, Freddie.’

  Over a pint of best—Troy had no idea where Khrushchev had learnt ‘wallop’—they taught him the rudiments of cribbage. Khrushchev paid enough attention to pass muster but was clearly far more interested in the players than the play. Next to Troy sat Alf and Stanley, a docker and a jobbing carpenter respectively. From Alf Khrushchev learnt of the power of the trades union and the way they had wrestled a decent standard of living from their employers before the war under the leadership of Ernest Bevin. Khrushchev’s eyebrows rose a fraction at the mention of the name. From Stanley he learnt of the uncertainties of casual labour on the building sites east of the Lea Valley, of tax-cheating cash in hand, no insurance and no questions asked, and of the long lay-offs when no houses were built and no carpenters required. The reassuring proof, the quick quick slow of capitalism’s inherent cycle of boom and slump.

  The kitten’s boundless curiosity humanised Khrushchev. The nutty brown eyes sparkled; the fat, fleshy lips parted in a revealing gap-tooth smile that needed only to chomp on a cigarette holder to look just like Roosevelt’s famous letterbox grin. Khrushchev delved into everything, asked about their families, their wives, the education of their children, and of course, he asked them how they voted and what they thought of their leaders. They were both solidly Labour, but Gaitskell was a mystery to them, too new a leader to have made any definite impression. Eden, Stanley told him, was a joke, a living anachronism. Why not, Alf retorted, the whole country was one ‘bleedin’ great anachronism’—were they living in 1926 or 1956? Bonham said he felt quite certain that life was better. There had been, he declared, progress. Lots of it.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Alf asked. ‘Washing machines? Fridges?’ And spitting contempt, ‘The telly?’

  ‘National Health Service?’ said Stanley. ‘Ain’t that progress? Heard the one about the National Health Service?’

  Alf groaned. Who had not heard the National Health joke? Only Troy’s newfound Uncle Nikki. Troy dutifully translated it for Khrushchev, rendering Stanley’s poor version of Max Miller as precisely as he could.

  ‘This bloke on the building site. Comes in every morning, picks up a full sack of cement, grunting fit to burst, then throws it down. Next day, does the same thing, and the next day and the day after that. Eventually one of his mates comes over and says, “Bert, why do you fling a full sack of cement around first thing each morning?” “Well,” says Bert, “I pays me stamp to the Government every week, and I’ve had me free pair o’ specs and I’ve had me free set of false teeth—I’ll be buggered if I won’t get me free truss as well.”

  Khrushchev laughed. It might well have been the funniest joke the man had ever heard. He threw back his head and roared, slapped the table with the flat of his hand and hooted with laughter.

  It was almost ten-thirty. Troy felt exhausted. He dearly wished they could call it a night. He had never guessed that being an interpreter for the nosiest man alive would prove so taxing. Nor would he have anticipated that the dialogue Khrushchev had sought so keenly would have touched himself so little. He added next to nothing of his own to the litany of complaint—the great British whine—that Alf, dejected middle age and Stan, frustrated youth, poured out for Khrushchev’s benefit. It was left to Bonham to offer the inadequacies of moderation, the unconvincing reassurance that we had emerged from the world war with ‘fings better than wot they was’ and that ‘never again’ would we suffer the tribulations of the thirties. Troy had no heart for such argument, and when Stan aired his view that he’d be ‘better off in America’, that it was ‘years ahead of us, years’, and that he’d ‘be off like a shot’ if he’d the price of the passage, he rendered
it precisely and neutrally and watched the glint in Khrushchev’s eyes.

  ‘Is this your Britain?’ he asked of Troy. ‘The Forty-ninth state, a nation of second-rate, would-be Americans? Do you all want to be Americans?’

  The Bricklayer’s Arms, like many local pubs, closed when the last policeman in the bar chose to go home. On the dot often-thirty, far from calling last orders, Eric the landlord came round to collect empties and fresh orders.

  ‘Where’s the little feller tonight?’ Eric asked.

  ‘What little feller?’ said Troy.

  ‘That little feller,’ Bonham said, pointing off over Troy’s shoulder. Troy squirmed round in his seat. At the bar was a short, ugly man in a heavy black overcoat, glistening with raindrops, Homburg pushed back on his head, News Chronicle sticking out of his pocket. If there was one man in London Troy could have done without tonight, it was Ladislaw Konradovitch Kolankiewicz. Polish exile, Senior Pathologist for the Home Office, one of the finest minds at the Yard’s disposal, and the most foul-mouthed, bloody-minded, cantankerous creature ever to walk the earth.

  ‘Oh God,’ Troy said to Bonham. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘Mondays and Thursdays. Our regular crib nights. He’s been coming for about five years now.’

  ‘Why didn’t you warn me!’

  Too late. Kolankiewicz had picked up his pint and was walking towards them, quizzically scrutinising Khrushchev. He sat down next to Troy.

  ‘Inch up, smartyarse.’

  Then he paused to suck the foam off his pint, all the time staring at Khrushchev across the rim of the glass. He set it down.

  ‘Who’s the new boy?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Fred’s Uncle Nikki,’ Bonham volunteered.

  ‘I know your Uncle Nikki, he’s a little fat bloke with a beard.’

  ‘A different Uncle Nikki. On my mother’s side,’ Troy said, and dropping his voice to a whisper he leaned in close to Kolankiewicz.

  ‘Listen, you Polish pig. If you fuck this up, I don’t care how many years you’ve got left till retirement, but I’ll see to it you never get another good body from the Yard as long as you live. I’ll have you scraping the mud off the soles of suspicious boots for the rest of your days. The nearest you’ll ever get to a corpse is your own funeral. Do I make myself clear?’

  Kolankiewicz hadn’t even looked at Troy. He took another inch off his pint and spoke directly to Khrushchev in flawless Russian.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Uncle Nikki. It’s not often I get the chance of a chat with a relative of Troy’s.’

  On the final phrase he turned to Troy and grinned the grin of the Cheshire cat.

  Bonham scraped in the cards and dished out dominoes. The rules were simple enough. Only the principle of knocking required anything by way of explanation from Troy. Bonham took the first game; Khrushchev the second. He smiled gently, but he had stopped asking questions in the presence of Kolankiewicz. One round into the third Kolankiewicz raised his fist as though about to knock on to Khrushchev, then he unfolded it and one by one set his remaining dominoes on end.

  ‘East Germany,’ he said, reverting to Russian, as he set up the first. ‘Czechoslovakia.’ Up went the second. ‘Hungary, Poland, Lithuania.’

  He ran out of dominoes, looked across at Khrushchev for the first time since the play had passed to him, clenched his fist again, and tapping it lightly with the forefinger of his left hand said in a hoarse whisper, ‘Soviet Union!’ The fist crashed down to the table, and the dominoes toppled down one by one. Lithuania took out Poland, Poland took out Hungary, Hungary took out Czechoslovakia and Czechoslovakia walloped East Germany. He looked into Khrushchev’s eyes and said softly and, it seemed to Troy, almost sweetly, ‘One man’s buffer zone is another man’s home.’

  In his heart Troy had always known he was not the stuff that heroes are made of. Pleasing, flattering to his vanity though the idea was, it was always going to be someone else who lit Khrushchev’s fuse. That the someone should be Kolankiewicz, the Polish beast, the most rough-hewn of heroes, was wholly appropriate. He should have known that no threat, however uttered, would deter him. He waited for the explosion, for Khrushchev to erupt in a furious spurt of Russian cursing. Bonham and his mates looked baffled, having no idea what Kolankiewicz had said by way of preface to the gesture.

  Khrushchev smiled back at Kolankiewicz, laid a six and three against Troy’s six and one and passed to Bonham. Bonham studied his hand for what seemed an age, and finally knocked gently. The game went full circle, punctuated only by the banal chatter of play. Troy won, and as Bonham scooped up the dominoes in his colossal paws, found Khrushchev looking straight at him.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Do you suppose they serve vodka in this place?’

  ‘Almost certainly,’ Troy answered. ‘It’s immigrant territory. I should think they have Genever and Schnapps too if they’re to your taste.’

  ‘Vodka will do. Poland and I clearly have things to discuss that can only be thrashed out over vodka. Perhaps you would have two glasses—large ones—sent over.’

  With that he beckoned to Kolankiewicz and moved to an empty table by the Jug and Bottle. Kolankiewicz looked at Troy. Sheepishly, Troy thought. Troy had never known Kolankiewicz hesitant in his life—sheepish he was not—where angels feared to tread he was usually to be found in residence, having rushed in hours before with a camp bed, a shooting stick and a full thermos.

  ‘Go on,’ Troy said. ‘It’s what you wanted. It’s certainly what you asked for.’

  An hour or so later, heading back to the West End in a taxi, Troy said, ‘What did you and Kolankiewicz talk about?’

  Khrushchev was staring out of the window again into the night and drizzle. He did not turn around.

  ‘Oh, this and that,’ he said with the stifling of a yawn in his voice. ‘We redrew the map of Europe. What else should happen when a Russian and a Pole get together?’

  ‘I thought that line went “a Russian and a German”?’

  ‘Germans,’ Khrushchev replied, ‘are like policemen. Never one around when you want one.’

  §13

  It was one in the morning before Troy turned in at Goodwin’s Court. He hung up the leather holster and the Browning on the bedstead and threw his shirt into the laundry basket. The gun had left an oily stain on the shirt, the shape of a tiny heart, right over his heart. He declined to see a symbol in it and fell into bed. Before he could even switch off the lamp the phone was ringing. It had to be Cobb.

  ‘You didn’t report in, Mr Troy,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Pubs,’ said Troy simply and honestly.

  ‘The procedure, I should not have to remind you, is that everyone logs off with me. Not four hours later, but when they hand over Red Pig.’

  Troy hated this addiction the man had for code-words. Why couldn’t he say ‘Khrushchev’? The pretence of secrecy was absurd.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said lamely. ‘Forgot.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Cobb paused. ‘Anything to report?’

  Troy remembered Khrushchev’s ‘Do it’. It puzzled him greatly and was undoubtedly the kind of thing he’d been placed to overhear. But, and there were two buts, Khrushchev had uttered the cryptic two syllables in full knowledge of Troy’s command of the language, and, but the second, to tell Cobb anything now would be to invite his curiosity about the entire evening, when it was best that he asked no more and learnt no more. Troy was confident that their jaunt had—Kolankiewicz apart—gone undetected. He’d been, as Clark had pointed out, very lucky. The last thing he wanted was Cobb nosing around.

  ‘No,’ he lied. ‘Not a damn thing.’

  ‘Really? I heard there was quite a to-do at the Commons.’

  ‘There was, but as it all took place in public, indeed in the presence of a sizeable gathering of our lords and masters, I hardly saw it as a matter of any secrecy or importance. Or am I now spying on George Brown and Nye Bevan as well Khrushchev and Bulganin?’

  The irri
tation in Troy’s voice produced the desired effect.

  ‘Play it by the book will you, Mr Troy!’ Cobb snapped, and then he hung up.

  Troy put out the light, still wondering what Khrushchev and Kolankiewicz had said to each other.

  §14

  The following day he accompanied Khrushchev to the Strangers’ Gallery at the House of Commons. A Tory MP, a man whose hobby seemed to be the Russian language, sat in as interpreter, and for once Khrushchev seemed genuinely interested by the farce that was democracy. At the best of times Prime Minister’s Question Time could be like a bear pit, the semblance of English manners tossed to the wind—surely something any Russian could identify with? Khrushchev warmed to the occasion, upstaged the clowns in the pit by taking a bow every time someone looked up and recognised him, as though the cry of ‘author author!’ had gone up from the stalls. It was an anodyne session until Troy saw Rod get to his feet from the Labour front bench.

  ‘Will the Prime Minister inform the House of what arms Her Majesty’s Government have supplied to Egypt and Israel?’

  Eden rose to answer him. Khrushchev looked sideways at Troy, seated on the far side of Bulganin.

  Eden invoked security and declared that he could not answer the question. Rod rose with his supplementaries.

  Khrushchev stopped playing the showman, became attentive to the line of questioning—as well he might. It was a drama in which he made many of the noises off. Colonel Nasser was rapidly assuming the proportions of a cult figure among the Arabs. He had asserted the simple truth that the old imperial powers had no business in Egypt or any part of the Arab world, and offered his vision of a Pan-Arabia stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, from Morocco to Aden. He was held to be hostile in the extreme towards Britain, a nation which fondly flattered itself that it had done rather a lot for ‘Johnny Arab’—indeed there were those who thought we had done rather too much in giving him the financial aid he’d requested for his hydroelectric dam across the Nile. Troy knew—Rod left no stone unturned when he wanted you to know—that this was a cynical ploy to keep Nasser out of the Soviet camp, and were it not for the prospect of a fat Russian bankroll, the moths would have stayed zipped up in the British purse. But that was part of the national failing—the white man’s failing.