by H. B. Lyle
A black card popped up on the screen, casting a gloom. Two of the audience got up and left. A third snored heavily. The organist abruptly segued from jaunty action to funereal dirge.
‘There’s a couple of questions I need answers to, if you don’t mind,’ Kell muttered, irked. ‘How did you find my office? And get in?’
‘Easy. Your card. I telephoned the exchange.’
‘The exchange has strict instructions not to give out my details.’
Wiggins sighed. ‘Which means you must be War Office, Admiralty or Special Branch. No one else would bother. Simple from then on.’
‘But how did you get in?’
‘Past the most fearsome commissionaire in Whitehall?’ Wiggins said. ‘Give me some credit. A brown coat, a bit of the old chit-chat and Bob’s your uncle.’
‘And how did you know I was being followed today?’
Wiggins shook his head. He waited as a couple walked past them to the front of the stalls. ‘Because I was following you.’
‘But I saw no one.’
‘Well, that’s the point, ain’t it? Now, Mr Kell. Your turn. What’s the plan?’
The screen burst into light.
‘Yes?’ she said abruptly. Her face – oval in a headscarf – showed no surprise. She angled her birthmark away from him.
Wiggins blinked, struck mute. He’d tried to find her every day for two weeks and now she was finally in front of him ‘Don’t you remember me?’ he said at last.
‘I remember you. You piss in street. And you like fighting.’
Wiggins felt the heat in his face but took heart from the arch in her eyebrow. ‘It’s Bela, right?’
She nodded. ‘Why you follow me?’
‘I wasn’t, I didn’t …’ Wiggins tailed off. ‘Only from the …’
Wiggins had followed her. He’d waited at the laundry then trailed her bobbing head down the passageways and alleys of Whitechapel, until the junction with the main road. He’d been debating with himself whether or not to stop her when she’d swivelled to face him of her own accord. Wiggins squinted in the morning sun, his cheeks pinched by the cold. He knew he’d gone red but he couldn’t think of anything to say, which made him redder still.
Bela frowned and smiled at the same time. An apple cart clattered past and Wiggins had to step towards her to get out of the way. She looked up at his face, now close. ‘How did you know I work at laundry?’ she said at last.
He coughed. ‘Can we walk?’
She glanced about her. ‘I must go.’
‘Two minutes.’
They broke out onto Whitechapel. Bela held a small canvas bag in front of her. Wiggins thrust his hands deep into his pockets. ‘You saved my life.’
‘You made mistake. You speak Russian, maybe Nikolai and the others like you more.’
Wiggins scratched the back of his head. ‘Would that have made a difference?’
‘I go this way.’ Bela stopped at a crossroads. ‘You go that way.’ She pointed.
‘Sorry. I should … I don’t know. My friend died … killed. I wanted to find out why.’
‘Why would I know this?’
‘I’m not asking for help. I just wanted to … Can I see you again?’
‘See me?’
‘For a drink?’
‘Drink? I think maybe you are not a good man to do this with, no? Last time, it not end so well.’
‘Tea?’
‘What would your wife say?’
Wiggins shook his head. ‘I ain’t married.’
‘I must go.’
Wiggins pointed up the street. ‘There’s the bus. I’ll treat you.’
‘Treat?’
‘Pay.’ Wiggins took her arm and she didn’t resist. They stepped up onto the open top and sat at the front, faces turned to the milky sun. ‘I’ve got money now.’
‘What is your job?’ Bela asked, folding her hands on her bag.
‘I’m a watchman down a big factory, in Woolwich. Good money.’
She tucked a stray strand of hair back in her headscarf. ‘What do they make?’
Wiggins tapped his nose.
‘You don’t like the pub, you don’t like tea. How about a stroll? I could take you to the park.’
‘Which park?’
‘Victoria, Regent’s – we could even push the boat out and walk down Rotten Row.’
Bela looked puzzled. ‘Why?’ she said.
‘You don’t make it easy, do you?’
The bus jerked beneath them, the conductor singing out the stops each time. Wiggins searched his hands for something to say. He cracked his knuckles.
‘What does a watchman do?’ Bela said.
‘Watch. I used to be in the army. I’m on a late shift today, so I come down to the laundry. In passing, like …’
Bela gave him a sideways look, amused.
‘What do you do for larks?’ Wiggins ploughed on. ‘How about the pictures? The cinematograph.’
Bela half smiled. His powers of deduction often failed when faced with a woman.
‘The female mind is irrational,’ Holmes once told him when he was tasked with following a posh bint up St John’s Wood way. ‘They are ruled by emotion. Your job is simply to record her movements, gather the data. Her mind will forever be a mystery to you.’
As an eight-year-old, Wiggins had taken this advice to heart, and he’d been no better at dealing with women since – other than Sal, but she was a mate. Bill had had a bluff way with women. Not just with Emily, but the pretty Spanish girls who used to promenade the quay in Gibraltar, swaying their hips and toying with parasols. Talk to ’em, Bill would say, show ’em your medals. Girls don’t bite.
‘I’m going to this meeting, in Jubilee Street.’ Wiggins finally found Bela’s eye as the bus juddered forward. ‘Politics, like, you want to come to that? On Friday.’ His insides shrank with shame. Politics?
Bela frowned. ‘Is this the Anglish way, what people like to do? In my country when a man talks to a woman he asks her about music. Or maybe he has a flower. Or maybe he says, do you walk here every day? Will I see you here again? But the Anglish, are they so serious? I don’t understand.’
‘Sorry, all I meant … actually, I’m not sure,’ Wiggins floundered.
Bela burst out laughing. ‘No, I am sorry. I make fun. I know this place.’ She stood up, eyeing the next stop. ‘I will go,’ she said, smiling still. ‘But only if you tell how you know I work at laundry?’
‘You’ll come?’ Wiggins squinted up at her, surprised.
‘How you know?’ Bela said again.
Wiggins examined her half-brown, half-white face – the birthmark’s permanent shade all the more pronounced in the sun. ‘Your shoes.’ He pointed. ‘I noticed the night we met. The suds marks on the uppers – too extensive to be only home washing. And your fingertips. You’ve had your hands in water all day.’
Bela opened and closed her hands quickly as the bus slowed. ‘You are odd man. I think I understand why you not married.’
‘What?’
Bela was already halfway down the aisle towards the stairs. She didn’t turn back to reply but her cloth-bound head inclined to the left in acknowledgement. Wiggins released his fists as the bus pulled away, the engine grinding. He breathed in deeply and ran a hand through his hair – which all of a sudden felt far too long.
* * *
Wiggins may have felt unsure in the presence of a woman, but Bela knew men. A lesson learned long ago.
‘You Grybas girls will kill me,’ her father shouted. ‘One, all of town wants to fuck, the other with a face like a cow shat on it. Sarah, you will have to marry Vincas – he’s the only one who’ll take you before Bela, and nobody wants Bela.’
‘Vincas is a lunatic,’ Bela said. ‘Sarah can’t marry him.’
‘Shut up.’ He slapped her with the back of his hand. ‘None of this would have happened but for you. I’ve lived with this for eighteen years. Everyone thinks we’re cursed. I should never have married a
Jew.’
Bela held her face and avoided his eye. Her younger sister Sarah gripped her arm tightly, but said nothing. Vincas, the eldest son of old Marinsky the flour merchant, was known throughout the neighbourhood and even the whole of Dvinsk. When he was a child he tortured small birds, then cats and dogs. And now he wanted to move on to her sister.
‘I can’t support the two of you for ever.’ Her father pulled at his knuckles, checked that the skin hadn’t broken on his hand. ‘You think I have roubles coming out of my ears?’
Bela felt Sarah tremble. Their father paced the small room, chuntering. Bela knew he couldn’t be swayed by reason, he could barely be swayed at all, except by the prospect of booze or money. She played her only card, all she had left to save her sister. ‘I’ll marry him,’ she said in a cold whisper. ‘Promise to let Sarah have her pick, and I’ll marry Vincas.’
‘You dare make bargains with me?’ Her father loomed over her, spittle flecking his chin. ‘Smart-arse bitch. I should string you up and be done with it.’ He pulled his hand back, sneering. ‘Ach, what do I care – if Vincas will take you, then Sarah can fuck who she likes.’ He kicked open the door to their two-room shack and stumbled out into the night, once more blaming his own inadequacies on the facial blemish of his oldest daughter.
‘Vincas? Bela, are you sure?’
‘He can’t be worse than him,’ Bela replied. She looked at her beautiful, flawless little sister and gently stroked her hair. She’d been looking after her for more than fifteen years and now this was the last thing she could do for her.
Sarah held on to her sister. ‘Mother – would she have protected us?’
‘I was three, little one, I don’t know. But I will protect you. Make sure you choose a husband well, but quickly. Father won’t wait for ever.’
‘Stasys will do fine,’ Sarah smiled hopefully. ‘When he is of age.’
‘He is poor.’
‘So are we. But he’s kind.’
Two days later, Bela returned from work to find Sarah at the door. ‘He wants you at the Marinskys’ now,’ she said. ‘He’s waiting.’
Bela charred for a rich family in town, the Plovs. That afternoon, she ditched her apron, sloshed her face from the bucket inside the door and squeezed Sarah in a tight hug. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said and set out for the Marinskys’. A grit-rich wind stung her face. Winter was coming. Life in Dvinsk was bounded by the seasons. The stinking heat of July, the desperate paralysis of an ice-bound January, hoping for that sliver of comfort in spring and autumn. She longed for a world of the middle ground, the mild, where it didn’t feel like you were on the very edge of life all the time.
She read of such places in the books of the Plovs’ library. One of her tasks at the house included cleaning out the fire from the night before and setting a new one. The room looked out over Nevsky Park and contained books from floor to ceiling, a leathered treasure trove of browns and greens and age-beaten red spines. Her aunt had taught her to read many years previously, hidden from her father. Every Sunday morning when Bela was little, they would go through the letters. Her aunt never spoke of Bela’s father, just the letters, the words, a rare power.
Access to the library enthralled Bela. She never dared take a book, or even suggest to the master that she might borrow one. Instead, she would pull one from the shelf and keep her place with a tiny strand of hair, hoping that one of the family wouldn’t be reading that volume. In addition, she’d take scraps of the newspaper left out to set the fire, mostly the classified adverts. Only once did she take anything home.
The previous January, when the streets were ice-slick and Nevsky Park a virgin white, she picked up a volume of Blok’s verses. The library fire crackled. Inside the book she found a pamphlet, Common Cause. It was full of revolutionary ferment and froth, a dangerous article to possess, seditious. Bela thought it must have been left there by Dimitry Plov, recently home for the holidays from university in St Petersburg. Certainly left there by accident; he would not complain at its removal, could not. Bela held the flimsy paper, fingered the bold lettering of the heading. She turned the phrases in her head: ‘the workers must unite,’ ‘fair pay for a fair day’ … The library doors creaked.
‘What’s taking you so long?’ Dunya, the housekeeper, snapped. ‘The mistress will be back soon.’
‘Sorry.’ Bela ducked her head. ‘I am finished.’ She scuttled out of the room, her right hand pinning the pamphlet in the folds of her skirt. She had her prize.
She read that pamphlet often, in the mornings before her father rose. Sarah’s reading improved under her guidance. Using the scraps of newspaper, and then the pamphlet, Sarah learnt to read well. It was Bela’s greatest gift to her sister. Their father didn’t know they could read since he couldn’t himself. He didn’t even know Bela spoke Yiddish and Russian. He could barely master one language. And yet, he was her master.
Bela finally reached the Marinskys’ place. Her father stood outside the large double doors of the flour warehouse. He grunted as he saw her approach. ‘We’ve been waiting for you. In the back.’
She followed him through the deserted shop. Flour dust hung in the air. She licked a stray speck from her lips. In the back room, a gas lamp burnt in the middle of the table, despite the daylight outside, a show of meagre wealth. A fireplace gaped cold, the exposed brickwork dirty and unkempt. She glanced up quickly. Around the table sat old man Marinsky, his eldest, Vincas, and the younger son, Arvo, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. If anything, he was more distasteful than his older brother: as cruel and sadistic but with a cold intelligence about him, difficult to read.
No one asked her to sit down.
Her father, standing also, coughed. ‘Good news,’ he said at last. ‘Vincas has agreed to the match.’
She nodded and kept her eyes on the floor.
‘And you know young Arvo here. He plans to go to America next month. And, er, Mr Marinsky has kindly agreed to let him marry Sarah before he goes.’
Bela looked up, startled. ‘But,’ she cried, ‘you said—’
Her father slapped her. ‘Shut up. Sorry, sir.’ He nodded at Marinsky.
Bela held her head down and fought back tears. Her father had never hit her in public before and her face burned with shame. She was used to the pain but not the humiliation.
‘I trust this disobedience is a display of sisterly love,’ old man Marinsky said after a pause. ‘Rather than a sign of things to come? We are risking much, marrying someone of her background.’
‘Don’t worry, Papa,’ Vincas replied in a quiet, half-amused, half-drunk slur. ‘She is nothing I cannot handle. I like spirit.’
8
‘Watson, you’re late.’
‘Sorry, sir. The trains at Woolwich.’
‘Trains! In my day we walked to work.’ Old man Rayner coughed into Wiggins’s face. ‘Fack trains. They ain’t good for nothing but excuses. This is the last time. There’s plenty scum out there who’d jump at this job. It’s a cushy billet.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Wiggins replied.
Rayner had been waiting for him at the main gates, theatrically looking up at the large clock above the entrance way to the munitions factory. Now, as they paced towards workshop 4, he glanced back at Wiggins. ‘Wipe that facking smile off your face,’ he rasped.
Wiggins grinned wider. He’d come directly from his meeting with Bela and couldn’t help it. Her dark-light, harlequin face flashed in his mind. He liked a girl with spirit.
Rayner dredged up a plump gobbet of phlegm and arced it towards the wall. ‘And you say you was army? If you’d been in my outfit you’d have been flayed for lateness. Twice!’ He thrust out two gnarled fingers to emphasise the hideousness of this crime.
The old man, Wiggins’s boss for his first two weeks at Woolwich, talked often of his ‘unit’ in the army. Wiggins watched the back of his boots as they whipped up angry whirls of white dust. He didn’t have the heart to point out the telltale signs: the peculiar scars on
Rayner’s hands (multiple nicks and scratches and various minor burns), the way he tucked in his shirt, even the hunch of his shoulders. Rayner, nominal head of security for the shell shed, a self-important, trumped-up sentinel, far from being the one-time sergeant major of some crack infantry regiment as he liked to hint, had obviously been a cook in the Army Services Corps.
‘Get on your rounds, sharpish. Take a look-see as per, and meet me back here before I go.’ Rayner pulled open the door to a small wooden guardhouse. It smelt of burnt creosote and damp socks. ‘And sign in. How many times do I need to tell you, anyone staying overnight has to sign in and sign out. Any bags?’
‘Does it look like it?’
‘Don’t sauce me. And don’t touch anything in there neither. It’s treason to monkey around in the shed.’
‘And treason’s a death penalty,’ Wiggins said simultaneously with the old man, annoying him further. ‘Don’t worry, chief, I’ll keep me hands pocketed so I will.’
Wiggins began his stroll round the perimeter of workshop 4. He looked askance at the massive brick building. It was low-ceilinged and loud and he thanked Christ he didn’t have to work in there all day. A tall chimney at the far end belched black smoke at an alarming rate, and the earth around him was flecked with unworldly white dust quite unlike chalk. Wiggins pulled open the door to the shed.
The noise was terrific. Metal on metal, replicated hundreds of times a minute, in close proximity, pounding at his ears more than any big gun he’d had to handle in the army, not even that Congreve nightmare. The Empire was at peace, apparently, but the workshop felt like war itself. He walked along the far edge of the huge, hellish brick hangar, full of men stripped to the waist, like moving organic parts of a bigger machine; they looked as one, glistening with sweat and dust and dirt, sinews straining. Iron filings clung to his hair and the white dust clouded his eyes. The place reeked of scorched iron and sulphur combined with a rank odour of men hard at work. A foreman caught his eye, and spat. Wiggins couldn’t blame him. For all the talk of outsiders looking in, everyone knew the real job of the watchmen was to watch the staff. Like a redcap.