Len Deighton - Harry Palmer 02 - Horse Under Water

by Horse Under Water(Lit)

  I nodded. 'Tell me about Smith,' I said.

  'Smith was only one,' Tomas went on, 'da Cunha forced a lot of people on the "Weiss List" to send him money or gifts.'

  'But you soon got the idea,' I supplemented, 'you told Smith to arrange supplies of morphine so that your little partnership with Kondit would flourish.'

  'It wasn't hard to guess, I suppose.' Tomas nodded.

  I said, 'What did da Cunha do with the money?' There was no reply. I said, 'Did he finance the Young Europe Movement? Did it all go to present-day Fascist groups?'

  Tomas closed his eyes, 'Yes,' he said, 'I'm still a believer.'

  'And to finance his ice-melting laboratory experiments?'

  'Like many great men,' said Tomas, 'Senhor da Cunha has some childish weaknesses. His ice-melting machine is one of them.' His eyes were still dosed.

  Augusto's voice from the wheelhouse sounded above the beat of the sea. We were nearing the coast.

  'I'll come up,' said Tomas. As he said it there was a thump like a heavy hammer being swung against the hull. 'A piece of flotsam,' said Tomas. Augusto had brought the throttles back to half-speed. Again there was a thump and a third immediately after. Augusto coughed and then fell down the ladder into the cabin. I caught him. Augusto was limp as he slid to the floor. The front of my suit was soaked in blood. Augusto's blood.

  Tomas and I stood motionless as we processed the possibilities through our brains. I was thinking of nautical mishaps, but Tomas had a more practical bent. He knew the person concerned.

  'It's Harry Kondit,' he said. The boat purred gently towards the shore.

  'Where?' I said.

  'Firing his target rifle from the cliff-top,' said Tomas.

  There were two more thumps and now, listening for it, I heard the gun crack a long way away. The floor was slippery with blood.

  Tomas was as calm as a Camembert. He said, 'If we go up to the wheelhouse we get shot. If we stay here the boat heaves itself on to the cliff at Tristos and we drown.' The boat lurched against the swell.

  'Can we get to the rudder control without going across the deck?'

  'Too slow, in this sort of sea we have to do something quick.'

  Without Augusto at the helm the boat was slopping and slipping beam-on to the sea. It was a plywood boat. I imagined it hitting the rocks and changing to firewood at one swipe. Augusto had stuffed a signal flag into his mouth. He bit on it hard instead of screaming through his punctured lung.

  Tomas was carrying the little refrigerator across the cabin, and up the four steps. How he lifted it I have no idea. It thumped into the wheelhouse and then Tomas climbed to the bridge, using it as a shield. He pushed it forward and I heard a great echoing clang as one of Harry Kondit's bullets glanced off the metal. Tomas was lying full-length on the deck by now, with the lowest part of the control wheel in his hand. He pulled it and the boat began to answer. Through the port-hole I could see the rocks. They were very close, and after each great wave the water ran off the jagged fangs like a drooling monster awaiting its prey.

  The boat was well into the turn now. I shouted to Tomas to come back in; he yelled, 'Do you want to go round and round in a bloody circle?' He stayed where he was. Again there was a slam of metal hitting metal. The door of the refrigerator fell open and coke bottles, ice and smoked salmon came sliding down into the cabin.

  As soon as we were round far enough Tomas jammed a footstool into the wheel. He began to crawl back, but he had left it too late. The change of course that had reprieved the boat sentenced Tomas to death. The refrigerator was no longer a shield. H.K. pumped bullet after bullet into him; but with those Zeiss x 4 telescopic sights, one would have been enough.

  47 Relinquish

  A dozen spent 7-mm. rimless cartridge shells on the cliff-top was the only trace of H.K. hi the vicinity by the time we had anchored the power boat. The weather had dragged the cloud base and the barometer well down, the fishermen were working on nets scattered along the strand like huge discarded nylons.

  I went up the beach to get Charly. Augusto needed a doctor quickly. When I reached the top of the steps I looked down from the high balcony. Augusto was still on the boat with eyes unseeing and his mind in neutral; he was holding Fernie Tomas's hand very tightly. He wouldn't let go.

  Charly was at the cafe with two plain-clothes pidemen.[P.I.D.E.: Internal Police for the Defence of the State, i.e. Secret Police.] She took the death of Fernie Tomas in her stride and wrote it into the narcotics investigation smoothly enough to allow me to escape entanglement.

  After what Fernie had told me, a lot of the unrelated ends began to tie themselves together. Not all of them did, of course, but that was too much to expect. There would always be unexplainable actions by unpredictable people, but the motives began to show. I knew, for instance, what we would rind up at da Cunha's house, but I went anyway.

  The furniture was shrouded and my footfalls echoed and creaked round the bookless shelves. Some of the big chandeliers were burning bloodshot in the bright daylight. I went upstairs, searching for the sort of room that I knew must be there. I had to break the lock in order to open it. The heavy oak door moved grudgingly. It was a long room, painted white. Fluorescent lights hung over the benches and a lot of equipment remained, showing that it had been a well-equipped laboratory.

  This wasn't a hasty hole-in-a-corner pharmacy like the one H.K. had assembled in a spare corner of his factory. It was a large air-conditioned research lab. of the type that pharmaceutical companies build instead of paying income tax. I moved along the benches, looking at the meters, test-tubes, and electric vibrators. I examined the radiant-heat machinery and the complex array of thermometers for measuring conductivity of liquids. I didn't find Senhor Manuel Gambeta do Rosario da Cunha, because he had been gone for a long time.

  *

  Clive Singleton had returned from Lisbon in time to be told to pack everything up and head right back again.

  I told him that he had the most important task of all. He would be returning the underwater gear to London. It would cost me more than I cared to think about if anything happened to it. Charly was enjoying her performance as the narcotics investigator and Clive Singleton was more than ever her devoted slave.

  I phoned London on the open line. I told them to have Ivor Butcher shadowed. Use Tinkle Bell, I told them. They said he wasn't very good as a tail, but I told them that we all have to learn. 'Suppose Butcher tries to leave the country?' London said.

  'Take him in on a holding charge,' I told them patiently.

  'What charge?' they asked.

  'Try the Street Offences Act,' I said, and hung up irritably.

  48 Ivor Butcher entertains

  I stepped through the aeroplane door at London Airport and watched the rain swirling across the shiny apron. The mainplanes shed little niagaras, and the ground hostess clamped her collar hi her fist and screwed up her face in the teeth of the rainstorm. Jean was waiting for me in the lounge with a heavy briefcase.

  It was the beginning of a week of hard work; we had the first meeting of the Strutton Committee. It went as all first meetings go; people requiring definitions, and asking for copies of memos that had long since been lost. Dawlish and I made a good team; I turned the major objections into minor objections and Dawlish's speciality was ironing out minor objections. As these combined committees go, it was successful enough but I could see that O'Brien was going to make trouble for us. He insisted upon all kinds of procedural rigmarole hoping that Dawlish would get flustered or annoyed or both. But Dawlish had been weaned on this sort of thing. He let O'Brien talk himself to a standstill and then paused a long time before saying, 'Oh yes?' as though he wasn't sure that O'Brien had made his point. Then Dawlish made his point all over again hi careful measured syntax as though speaking to a child. Dawlish would rather split his trousers than an infinitive. I tell you it was a pleasure to watch him handle it.

  Bernhard was a new, intelligent youth that Charlotte Street had recruited hi
my absence. He was a tall, good-looking boy who wore woollen shirts, went to see films with writing on them and was apt to use one long word where eight short ones would do. I told him to start investigating all Smith's holdings. Smith employed a legal staff to wrap up his companies in holding companies, and other holding companies' companies. It would be a long task.

  On Thursday morning Ivor Butcher phoned. He used one of the outside phones which was listed as a Detective Agency in the G.P.O. list. Jean said that I would see him at an S.W.7 address at 8.30 p.m.

  I was busy all that afternoon. At 7.301 closed and locked the I.B.M. machine which we used to correlate most of the secret information we held hi the building. Without it our file cards were meaningless collections of street numbers, road names, photos, and data.

  I'd submitted a superficial report of the Albufeira situation; I marked the Alforreca file 'closed' and submitted it to Dawlish for initialling. He chiselled his signature into the little manilla rectangle without comment, then gave the file to Alice, but his eyes never left mine.

  *

  Number 37 Little Charton Mews is one of a labyrinth of cobbled cul-de-sacs in that section of Kensington where having a garage as a living-room is celebrated by planting a rose bush in a painted barrel. Outside, two men in short lambswool coats poured whisky from a hip-flask into glasses. I tapped lightly on the brass-plated doorknocker and a man in a rubber gorilla mask opened the door. 'Come one come all,' he said. His voice vibrated and boomed inside the thin rubber.

  'Popsies to the right, booze straight on.' He smelled of Algerian wine.

  There was a dense scrum of party-goers - men with regimental ties and girls with velvet gloves up to the armpit.

  Someone behind me was using words like 'quasi-humanist' and 'empirical' and a man who was using two hands to drink his beer said, '... so what; does Picasso understand me?' I reached the big table at the far end. Behind it was a man with a paisley scarf inside an open-neck shirt He said, 'There's only gin, beer, tonic, and...' he shook a bottle of sherry viciously, '... sherry.' He held it up to what light there was and said 'sherry' again. A girl with a long ivory cigarette-holder said, 'But I like my body better than I like yours.'

  I took my drink and wandered off through a doorway into a tiny kitchen. A girl with smudged mascara was eating pilchards out of a tin and sobbing. I turned round. The girl who liked her body was talking about automatic chokes.

  Nowhere did I see Ivor Butcher. It was just as crowded upstairs except for a small room at the end of the passage. Inside were three young men in jeans and thick sweaters. The blue TV set had its controls set to give, a narrow distorted image and its sound turned down. The soft music of Mingus came from the gramophone. They turned their heads slowly towards me. One face removed its dark glasses, 'You're standing there like it's another channel, dad.'

  'Sorry fellers,' I said, and closed the door on the gentle fug of reefer smoke. I finally found Ivor Butcher downstairs. In the centre of the crush half a dozen couples danced very slowly so as not to get their clothes slashed by diamond rings. Ivor Butcher was dancing rather unsteadily with a short girl who had green eyes, a large body and a small evening gown.

  'Great to see you pal,' Ivor Butcher said in a slurred voice. 'Swell party?'

  'Fascinating,' I said. He grew with pride and I decided that hyperbole had outlived its usefulness as a means of communication. After his dance Ivor Butcher wanted a word with me. He went out to my car with uncertain steps. The man in the gorilla mask was holding the shoulders of a girl who was being spectacularly ill.

  49 And again

  'Do you know what?' said Ivor Butcher once we were seated in the car. He was looking around the dashboard anxiously. I pointed to the second knob from the left. He pulled it and the windscreen wipers started. He nodded. Windscreen-wiper motors mar tape recordings.

  'What's the trouble?' I asked.

  'I'm being followed,' he said.

  'Really,' I said.

  'Straight up,' he said, 'I wasn't sure until today. Then I phoned you.'

  'I don't know why you phoned me,' I said. 'There's nothing / can do.' I paused. 'It's gone too far for me to interfere.'

  'Too far?' said Ivor Butcher. 'What's gone too far?'

  'I don't know anything about it,' I said, like I'd said too much already.

  'You mean the Portuguese business? The Spanish bloke and all that?'

  'What do you think?' I said. 'You've been dabbling in pretty big stuff. Can't Smith help you?'

  'He says he can't. What's going to happen now?'

  I tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'You know I could get into a lot of trouble just talking to you.'

  Ivor Butcher said, 'Yeah,' in varying permutations about twelve times. At what I considered the appropriate interval I said, 'It was because you gave us false information that things really came to a head. You know,' I said casually, 'became treason.'

  Ivor Butcher repeated the word treason a few times, changing it from a statement to an interrogative, transcribing it to a minor key and pitching it an octave higher each time. 'You mean that I could be shot?'

  'No,' I said, 'this is England after all. We don't do things like that. No. You'll be hanged.'

  'No.' Ivor Butcher's voice came back like an echo and he leaned heavily against the passenger door. He had fainted. The man with the gorilla mask left his Mend and asked if he could help. 'My friend isn't very well,' I told him. 'It's all that heat and noise and strong drink. Perhaps a glass of water would help.' It took gorilla-head a long time to push his way through to the kitchen. In the meantime Ivor Butcher shook his head and breathed heavily.

  I'm sorry,' he said, 'you must think I'm a terrible neddie.'

  'It's all right,' I told him, 'I know exactly how you feel.' I knew.

  'You're a good sort, you are,' he said. 'Do you think I should make a proper statement? Smith paid me practically nothing for what I did. I'm just small fry.' He closed his eyes at the thought I said to make a proper statement would be a sensible idea. Then gorilla-head came back with a jam-jar of water.

  'There aren't any glasses left in the kitchen,' he said in his echoing voice.

  He offered the water to Ivor Butcher, who said, 'He's the one,' in a shrill, frightened voice and lost consciousness again.

  'Is that girl with the smudged mascara still in the kitchen?' I asked.

  'Yes,' said gorilla-face. 'She says Elvis Presley is a square.' His voice echoed.

  'Why don't you go and see if you can't talk her round?' I said, 'because you needn't continue with this surveillance any longer.'

  'Very good, sir,' he said.

  'And Tinkle Bell,' I said, 'take that mask off, it makes your voice echo.'

  50 One named OSTRA has no number

  If you ever get clear away from a difficult situation by abandoning a large part of your personal belongings, you may feel an urgent need of certain articles you have left behind, like a Locarte fluorimeter that has an eight-month delivery time. Don't send for them; because that's how we traced da Cunha.

  I asked Alice for a manilla cover and wrote 'Ostra' on the front Into that I put certified copies of all Ivor Butcher's mail. I added six foolscap sheets of his statement, laced the file and locked it back into the top drawer of my desk. So far it had no file number. It was my special secret contribution to the nation's security. I looked at the map. The Ford station-wagon with da Cunha's laboratory equipment was moving north and looked as though it would cross the Spanish border near Badajoz.

  Dawlish called me up for a drink that evening. He had been so busy building the administrative side of the Strut-ton Committee that I had seen little of him. I knew that O'Brien was still making things difficult for us. O'Brien, unmarried, propped up the corner of the downstairs bar at the Travellers' Club, twenty-four hours a day. What he was giving up in food he was gaining in influence. O'Brien was trying to get Foreign Office people on all the subcommittees with executive power. Dawlish said that, at the meeting I had missed,
he had taken the liberty of putting me up as convening chairman of the training structure sub-committee. I told him that I might be away for a few days. Dawlish said he thought that might be the case. He blew his nose loudly and smiled drily from behind his big handkerchief. 'I'll convene the meeting and you delegate your vote to me. It will be all right.'

  'Thank you very much, sir,' I said, and I drank to his success. Dawlish came from behind his desk and stood near the gas fire, which was popping and spluttering as they always do about 5 p.m.

  'Did you check with the Sc.Ad.C [ Sc.Ad.C.: Scientific Adviser to the Cabinet.] about the molecular ice-melting theory?' I asked him.

  Dawlish gave a histrionic sigh. 'Don't you ever give up.' he said. 'It is impossible to rearrange molecules as a way of changing ice to water.' We stared at each other for a minute or so. 'Very well, my boy, I'll ask him.' He closed his eyes, gulped down his claret and leaned against the wall like a worn-out roll of lino.