The Secret Families

by John Gardner

  The telephone jangled in the bureau recess. That would be Iris. He picked up the hand­piece and heard her voice - an amalgam of honey and rough sand - soft in his ear:

  'Boysie?'

  'Yes, sweetie?'

  He could feel his body rise even at the sound of her. It had been like that for six months now - half a year of concentrated technique between assignments. She knew the game all right. When you dealt with the luscious Iris, it wasn't just a matter of one night in the Savoy Grill then oops into bed with no remorse. There had been moments of frustration of course, but, on the whole, Boysie had enjoyed the protracted love-play which, all being well, would end that very night on a bed not a spit from the palm fronds and surf of the Mediterranean. Again the spectre of Mostyn slunk quietly through his mind. One didn't take Mostyn's personal secretary for a dirty weekend on the French Riviera every day - and get away with it. Oh well, let's hope she's worth it, he thought.

  'Boysie? I'm just leaving the flat. Everything all right?'

  'Right as rain, sweetie. Don't worry about a thing. I'm going to ring the duty officer in a minute.' For a second he wondered if he was allowing his manner to assume too much urgency.

  'You do think it'll be all right?'

  'I've told you. Don't worry. Your boss never appears before midday on a Saturday, and by that time, sweetie, we'll be off into the wide blue yonder.' His stomach gave another twitch. There was silence, and for a moment he thought they had been cut off:

  'Sweetie?'

  'Yes, Boysie?'

  'Don't forget, will you? You mustn't even notice me on the plane. Get a seat right up front, I'll sit at the back. We meet accidentally by the taxi rank outside Nice airport. Got it?'

  'Uh hu.'

  'You go straight through the Customs' Hall and out of the swing doors; it's ...'

  'I know, Boysie ...' she cut in on him, 'I've been there before ...'

  'And where else have you been, sweetie?'

  'You'd be surprised.'

  'I bet. Looking forward to it?'

  'Of course.'

  'You sound like a bride, darling.'

  'See you, Boysie.' She had hung up on him. Still playing it distant, he smiled, dialling the Whitehall number. The signal burped at the other end and he heard a woman's crisp efficient voice.

  'Mandrake Club.'- The code name for the day.

  'I have a reservation. Number Two, please.' Better be on the safe side just in case Mostyn had come in early for a change.

  'Do you want Number Two personally?'

  'Yes.'

  'He's not in yet.'

  'OK. Give me Two Five.'

  'Very good. One minute.' He heard the exchange click and a man's voice came on:

  'Two Five. Duty Waiter.'

  'This is "L'',' said Boysie.

  'Yes. Go ahead "L''.'

  'I'm off duty and want to catch some real sun ...'

  'One moment.' There was a pause. 'All right: yes, you're off duty, I was just checking.'

  'I only wanted to say that I will be out of the country until Tuesday morning. In emergency you can get me at the Hotel Miramont, Menton, Alpes Maritimes, under my own name.'

  'Understood. Thank you, "L". Behave yourself.'

  'And you.' Mentally, Boysie gave him a 'soldier's farewell'.

  He put down the receiver and grinned. In a grey building off Whitehall a young man sitting shirt-sleeved at a battery of coloured telephones made a note on an official file. 'Ten thirty-eight. Direct call from "L''. "L'' will be out of the country from a.m. today until a.m. Tuesday. Address, Hotel Miramont, Menton, Alpes Maritimes, France. Non-operational: under own name. Memos to Colonel Mostyn and pass to relieving D.O.' He pushed the slip across the desk to the honey-blonde secretary sitting at a small typing table in front of him. She smiled winningly and slid a sheet of paper into her typewriter. The Duty Officer of Special Security gazed into space and returned to pondering on the possibility of persuading the honey-blonde to spend Sunday at his flat in Knightsbridge - a vain hope, as he well knew that it was against the rules to frat with the hired help.

  *

  There was no doubt about it, Boysie was petrified with fear. It was the one thing that really worried and haunted him. Flying. Try as he could, the fear always swept into his guts just before take-off. The couple of twinges he had felt back in the flat were merely forerunners to the screaming terror that was now beginning to give him what Mostyn called 'the rectal twitch'. Seat belt tight across his midriff, he closed his eyes, and in a moment the whole wretched picture was clear. The Comet quivering on the runway. Brakes off. Wheels slashing the tarmac. The steep angle of climb; then, at about three hundred feet, the sudden, horrible shudder of engine failure or an incomprehensible error up on the flight deck.

  There would be silence as the whole machine strained upwards against the sky, then dipped like some fairground monster to go whistling down. He could even hear the screams of his companions as he watched, from behind tightly shut lids, the slow­motion ball of fire and twisted metal gyrating towards him. Prophetically, the headlines of the evening papers were printed across his mind (HORROR AT LONDON AIRPORT), together with the familiar photograph of wreckage - a denuded tailplane pointing to the clouds, the ground mist of sinking smoke playing round a fireman's boots and, way down in column seven, his name among the bold-typed list of dead.

  As the aircraft neared the turning point at the end of the runway, an arm of sunlight reached through the port nearest to him and, for a moment, the trick of light reflected his left eyebrow in the corresponding lens of his dark glasses. For a couple of seconds he glimpsed a bushy little forest speckled with tiny bulbs of sweat. He ran his hand over his forehead and blinked, feeling the pearls of water under his armpit change into rivulets, at the sudden movement, and trickle down his left side until they were blotted where his vest caught tight against the skin. His hands were unnaturally hot and his stomach jerked.

  He dared not look around. A cursory glance as they had taxied away from the departure building had been enough. To the eye, his fellow travellers were unmoved by the imminent leap into the unusual environment of air and clouds. They looked calm, even matter-of-fact, chatty and relaxed. This was what he found so humiliating - the normal sense of loneliness magnified by the thought that he was the only terrified person among these insensible fleshlings: what rankled most was that, for him, it was so out of character.

  Departure Building! Wasn't it the lounge at Tokyo Airport which bore the sinister legend FINAL DEPARTURE? The fear, he told himself, was irrational. Must think of something else. Statistics showed that the chances of being killed in a commercial airliner were infinitesimal: smaller even than the chance you took crossing Piccadilly Circus. (Immediately Boysie remembered the morning when a taxi's mudguard had caught him a glancing blow on the right buttock just after he had stepped off the pavement opposite the Trocadero. 'Mind your arse, guv'nor!' The driver had shouted through a grin embellished with National Health dentures.) Every time he flew, Boysie went through the same kind of personal hell; and after every trip, he swore that he would never do it again. But, in his kind of business, time and clients would not wait. The last occasion - only a week ago - had been a quick flight from London to Manchester, and he had been faced with the awful experience of sitting next to a man who, green-gilled, had muttered: 'The last time I was in an aeroplane, I was the only survivor.'

  He wondered if Iris knew. Thank heaven she was not sitting with him, or behind him, to sense the fear. What would she think if she knew Boysie Oakes - Liquidator for Special Security - was transformed into a jelly at the thought of flying?

  If he looked down the cabin he could see her hand resting on the aisle seat five rows to his right; her forefinger running rhythmically up and down the edge of the ashtray, as though she were trying to smooth out the metal. Perhaps this was the outward sign of some inward trepidation. Perhaps she was frightened as well. But he would never know. Boysie could never bring himself to ask her - eve
n if they ever did get to Nice!

  'Good-morning, ladies and gentlemen. Captain Andrews and his crew welcome you on board this Comet of British European Airways. In a few minutes we will be taking off for Nice. We will be flying at a height of...' The stewardess' voice pattered out the mechanical greetings in English and French. Boysie blanched at the usual request for passengers to read the safety instructions, and the qualifying sentence about this being only a 'routine measure'.

  Up on the flight deck, they were completing the long pre-take-off drill as the aircraft neared the threshold - '...rudder limiter out, cabin signs on, inverters on, fuel cocks check, radio check ...' Cleared by Control, the big silver dart swept in a tight turn on to the runway, the Captain twisting the nosewheel steering to line up for the final race into the air.

  'All right, let's try this one.' Captain Andrews looked round. 'Give me full power.' The Flight Engineer leaned forward between the pilots' seats and put the flat of his hand across the throttles, holding them steady as the Captain eased the jets into their upwards roar.

  'Full power.'

  'Rolling.'

  The rpm indicators showed a steady 8,000 as they trundled out; speed building up; the nosewheel hugging the centre of the tarmac; the horizon steady; the needles on the airspeed indicators travelling in their smooth arcs and the First Officer shouting above the noise:

  'Airspeed both sides .. . one hundred knots ... V-One ... Rotate!'

  Andrews eased back on the control column yoke. The nose lifted and the ground fell away.

  'V-Two ... noise abatement climb.' The Captain put the Comet into a steep full­power climb that took them up to one thousand five hundred feet in a matter of seconds, quickly reducing the earsplitting whine that fractured the nerves of householders in the immediate vicinity of the airport.

  Boysie, still sitting rigid, retched, made a grab for the little brown bag poking from the net holder on the seat in front, and was noisily sick. The man sitting next to him looked embarrassed and turned away.

  Later, after the illuminated sign - fasten seat belts. No smoking - had flicked off, the stewardess collected the bag, exchanging it for a large Courvoisier to settle the 'queasy tummy'.

  'Something I ate last night,' lied Boysie. 'Been feeling a bit off ever since I got up.'

  His neighbour swapped a knowing look with the stewardess, and Boysie pushed the cylindrical button under the chair arm, slid the seat back into the dental reclining position, closed his eyes and tried to blot the vacuum hum of engines from his mind.

  As always at times of tension or stress, Boysie's lips began to move - showering a soundless stream of obscenities in the direction of Mostyn, the man he ever held responsible for any terror that came his way.

  Slowly, as though the inaudible invective acted as a soporific, he seemed to relax. At the end of it all there would be Iris - lovely, lithe, athletic, red-haired Iris.

  He lit a cigarette with the Windmaster, which bore his unfortunate monogrammed initials B.O, and contemplated the svelte behind of the stewardess as she bent over a passenger farther up the aisle. If Boysie had realised what confusion was about to be released by his lecherous and carefully planned Riviera jaunt, he would have been on his knees pleading to be taken home.

  *

  In a pink and white villa nestling on a terrace above the point where the Corniche Inferieure bends into Beaulieu-sur-Mer - between Nice and Monaco - a man called Sheriek was replacing the telephone receiver.

  'The London people are really excellent, my dear,' he said to the girl who was engrossed in varnishing the toe-nails of her right foot. 'He is on his way. Unfortunately, there is a woman in tow, but I don't think she will cause us much trouble - a minor detail.'

  The girl cursed mildly as a drop of Dior 135 spilled on to the hem of her eau de nil housecoat.

  Sheriek continued, his soft accent almost running the words together: 'They also tell me that our co-ordinator for this operation - someone rather important - is en route. It is up to us: we must show some enthusiasm, my dear. In fact, I think we should take steps before we are contacted, just to prove that we are on the ball - as our American friends so quaintly put it. A drink?'

  *

  At London Airport a young man in a cavalry-twill suit was dialling a Whitehall number and asking for 'Number Two.'

  *

  The Comet crossed the Channel coast, nosing along the airways towards Nice.

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