Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  Ralph Exton gazed around him and saw her. What’s a pretty girl like you doing . . . ?

  It wasn’t unusual for him to spend time checking faces and locations, the clothes he’d been told they’d wear, the paper they’d be carrying. A terraced garden separated the hotel and its forecourt from a suburban road

  Is that the best you can do?

  It was good to watch and bad to hurry. She was in profile to him, strong features and naturally gold hair. She sat upright and didn’t look behind her. The clothes were good. He remembered that in Armagh, city and countryside, the women had looked worn-down and their clothes had been cheap. A stereotypical memory, but it was there. She wore the black business suit he had been told to look out for, a white blouse and a small green scarf knotted at her throat. No other decoration. Where she sat she would have had a good view down the slope to the curve of the river and upstream towards the castle. She smoked. The cigarette betrayed her nerves: as he’d noted at the airport, she took little snatches at it and blew the smoke straight out of her mouth.

  Small mercies – as he’d noted at the airport, she was easy on the eye and wasn’t one of the thugs who enjoyed switching on power drills.

  They’d not told him her name. He went down the steps and through the upper part of the garden.

  She dragged on the cigarette again, stubbed it out on the side of the bench, then flicked it, accurately, towards a rubbish bin. It had been laid down that they would meet at the airport, but if not the airport, then mid-afternoon, the following day, in the garden.

  Ralph Exton’s loyalties were governed by the need to keep lit fags off his skin, a drill bit out of his knees and eyes, and avoid being adjacent to a cell door swinging shut. The majority of his loyalty was to himself. He came behind her.

  ‘Morning. Nice place. I’m Ralph. Good view.’

  She spun round. ‘Where were you?’

  He had his hand out. ‘I wasn’t given a name.’

  ‘Frankie. Where were you?’

  He said that at the airport concourse she’d stood out and he hadn’t been happy with the place. ‘Can’t be too careful.’ A little shrug.

  She stood up, came to the side of the bench and took his hand. Hers was hard, cold and bony. There were thicker shrubs up a little path and a hut where the gardeners would have kept tools. Out of sight. She stopped and faced him. Her face was no longer pretty but lined and hard. There was a snap in her voice. He was to hold out his arms.

  Ralph Exton did so.

  She frisked him. Armpits, waist and belt area, inside the trouser leg, down to his ankles. Then she unbuttoned his shirt. Fingers against his skin. He asked her if she was forgetting the belt but she didn’t reply. She stepped back, brushed her hands, and left him to do up his shirt.

  ‘Now you,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your turn – Frankie.’

  A blush, almost crimson. Her arms went out. He took his time and did it just as Miss Gabrielle would have done it. Nothing left to chance, each orifice checked. He felt her wince.

  ‘You finished?’

  He stepped back. ‘Yes. Can never be too careful, as we agreed. Five makes very sensitive kit these days, so I’m told. I imagine it’s your first time on the road.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘If you’d been around longer you’d know what I’ve done for your people and the risks I’ve taken.’

  ‘I was told precious little about you.’

  He said, ‘And when the big man comes in tonight, will you strip him down to his boxers? You can never be too careful.’

  He laughed quietly. She did not respond. He thought her humourless. Hugo Woolmer had once said, ‘The women are the worst, Ralph, because they have no fun in them. Just deadly serious. The Bundesgrenzschutz, in their manual, suggest it’s always best to slot the women first. Usually have big doses of ideology.’ She was quiet and the hardness had gone. Ralph read people well. She was first time, prey to nerves – but fetchingly good-looking and the touch search had been a bonus. They went to have coffee.

  They sat in a café, a far corner. She spoke of the big man who was coming to the city that evening. He went over with her what had been on the list of items they’d purchase, and the cost. She talked him through the detail of the bank arrangements. Together, they bickered over when payment should be made, the timing of a credit transfer: she tried to fight her corner – cash after the test firings – and he shrugged. The impression he gave was that she could take the responsibility for screwing the deal if she wished to. He thought her clever, probably a graduate, and on the team because they were short of quality. She’d have been what Miss Gabrielle would call a ‘clean skin’. He doubted he would get another chance to run his fingers over her and satisfy himself that she wasn’t wearing a wire. She was distant when they parted. He wondered what had triggered her enlistment. She talked with reverence of the big man who was coming in that evening.

  Ralph had said, straight face, ‘A useful man to have around the house, handy with a drill.’

  He told her it was a fine city and she might get in some sightseeing, or do a guided tour. He said, too, that he’d be making final arrangements the next evening, would meet the supplier. He asked her if she would be queuing up for a turn at the test-firing, the rocket-propelled grenade launcher, the machine-gun, or the rifle with the big telescope screwed to the top of the barrel, but added it would be painful if her shoulder was bruised by their recoil. He said how the next contact would be made. He called the tunes, not her. His schedules . . . Maybe she knew already that he had no respect for her.

  What should she do, hours to kill until the next stage?

  Ralph Exton said airily, ‘As I suggested, see the sights, take in a concert, tramp round a gallery or entertain the big man when he turns up.’

  He left the table and walked out into the warm afternoon air.

  Miss Gabrielle was sitting on a concrete wall, reading a woman’s magazine. Not much in the fashion pages had rubbed off on her. Unlike Frankie, she was a mess. She’d looked better with only the towel round her. Shit, he felt old. The stress was catching up with him.

  How much should he tell his handler? That was the big problem. How much should he keep from her, and at what cost? How much should she know about Timofey Simonov, his old pal and mucker?

  What the hell had they been up to? She had no idea. They had met at the bench, then gone walkabout into the bushes. When they’d reappeared he’d been grinning and her face was red. Then they’d gone into a coffee shop, and everything had returned to normal.

  The girl had followed Exton out. Gaby Davies had no trace on her: no photograph and no file copy. She wasn’t confident. A fine chain hung round her throat, with a tiny crucifix: visible now, hidden before. She’d taken a loop from the chain into her mouth, as if it was something to hold on to because the going had been rough. A new kid on the block. As Gaby had been. The only kid from her school ever to win a place at a half-decent university, the only young woman with a provincial accent to leap the hurdles at Thames House. She’d climbed over Hugo Woolmer and gone up another rung . . . But there were confusions.

  Danny Curnow was one, and the boss, Matthew Bentinick, was another. She didn’t know where they were in the city or what they were doing.

  They weren’t team players, and had been dismissive of what she had achieved over the last five years in milking information from Ralph Exton, and building a relationship she reckoned to be rock steady and profitable. Bentinick should have been put out to grass years ago. Danny Curnow should never have been brought back and put on the payroll. She felt alone. She knew that Exton had seen her. A tiny flutter of an eyebrow, recognition. They’d meet that evening: she’d have more than a bloody towel on her back, and they might get a chuckle out of her ‘‘showing out’’.

  He was gone.

  She watched the girl, who seemed lost in thought and insecure.

  Bentinick was a bigger confusion than
Danny Curnow, a cold little man, harbouring attitudes from the Dark Ages. A miserable, desiccated creature. Had he ever been seen to laugh? Not that she’d heard. How would Bentinick be in his suburban street? How would a wife put up with him? How would anyone touch any sensitivity in him?

  The girl left the café and Gaby tracked her. It was hard to understand why the two men had ditched her and disappeared. She didn’t know what they were doing, or why.

  Danny Curnow, walking slowly, learned of the destruction of Lidice.

  After a night locked in the church, the men had been taken to the garden at the Horak farm. The executions started. At first five at a time, then ten were called forward to face the firing squads. Apparently all had refused to be blindfolded, facing the rifle barrels and the men behind them. Those killed at Lidice numbered 173. Another nineteen died at the firing range in Prague. The priest was among the last.

  Bentinick said, ‘There were men in London who decided to launch the attack, called for volunteers, trained them and parachuted them in. They knew that reprisals would follow. They bore the burden of it. A different scale and a different time, but I took the weight of it and so did you. Different scale, same story. We did the God bit because someone had to.’

  The children were taken to a concentration camp at Chełmno where most were gassed: seventeen lived and seventy-one died. The village buildings – homes, church, hall, farms – were destroyed by explosives, the ruins burned with motor fuel.

  ‘The attack on Heydrich brought respect to the people. They would have talked about the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’. That was what you and I did, Danny. You did it well so I called you back.’

  They were at a group statue. It stunned Danny Curnow in its complexity. Life-sized children with universal expressions of numbed resignation, dignified, and showing no fear. He thought it the most moving memorial he had ever seen. It was humbling. He no longer heard the buzzard’s cry, or the song of any other bird.

  ‘The women went to Ravensbrück, north of Berlin, as forced labour. Most survived but twenty-one died there. The village is merely a memory. Could you have taken responsibility for training the paratroopers, equipping and despatching them? Could you have persuaded yourself that a bigger picture needed to be painted? . . . Shall we have some coffee?’

  The sun was bright on his face, the grass was a brilliant green and the falling leaves were golden. He felt no warmth and the beauty was lost on him. ‘Why did you bring me?’

  ‘Time to kill, Danny, don’t you know? Time to lose.’

  As Dusty Miller had seen it, if Desperate had hit him back, one of them would have ended up in A&E, then been on the way to an intensive-care unit, or worse. It was after they had lost Gerry Prentiss, taxi driver, in Coalisland. He did nights mainly, and his cards were all round the bars in the town where the Provos and their supporters drank. They needed cabs to get them, pissed, home. FRU needed to know who they travelled with, gave lifts to, and where they were dropped off. Low-level stuff. A passenger had been arrested, a coup, then passed on to the crime suite for interrogation and charging, a triumph. A big fish was caught in a small net. The big fish was a marksman and spent most of his nights in Monaghan town across the border. He’d been talking in the bar with an asset, an agent who also led an active-service unit. They were not idiots: those who had known where the marksman would sleep were the taxi driver and the ASU leader. The ASU leader was handled by Vagabond call-sign: he belonged to Desperate and Dusty. The taxi driver had lived with his mother, who was crippled with arthritis and housebound. She was isolated but for her son. The fifty pounds a week he brought home from his handler, Vivian, paid for some of the minimal comforts the woman enjoyed. He’d been found that morning. The usual scene: no shoes or socks, money stuffed into his mouth, a hole in the back of his head, burns and bruises. No argument: an ASU leader would always carry the day, not a taxi driver of occasional use.

  Captain Bentinick wasn’t in evidence – might have been at Brigade. Support gathered around Vivian and plied him with drinks. Late that evening, Desperate and Dusty had come back from a meeting and were ending a shift. Alcohol and anguish were the ingredients in the cocktail.

  A volley slurred at Desperate. He thought himself the big man. The big man did not have to worry about regulations and small print, rode roughshod over them. The big fucking man who always had an excuse for letting a Joe go to the wall – actually, to the mortuary. The big fucking man who didn’t give a toss about the consequences of choosing who lived and who went to the knacker. An old woman, disabled, helpless, had no son to care for her, and it was not as though the taxi driver had volunteered for the fifty pounds a week. It was a well-worn trick: the police would pull over a delivery driver, an ambulance driver, a taxi driver and he’d breathe into the kit. They’d shake their heads, look concerned and cart him down to the station. There’d be an FRU man – or girl – there, so kind-hearted, only wanting to help, dishing out sympathy and tearing up the ‘evidence’ on the machine’s printout, then seeing him back into his vehicle with a deal done. The taxi driver might have been over the limit and might not, but had been recruited. So had an estate agent, with three kids and—

  Maybe Desperate’s silence in the face of the taunts and gibes, the insults, had boosted Vivian’s righteous anger.

  Dusty had been a pace behind him. Desperate had stood his ground but his hands were behind his back and he’d looked straight into Vivian’s eyes. Dusty knew the mask of indifference was a sham. Vivian, a fellow sergeant, had thrown a punch.

  Desperate had ridden it, but the fourth or fifth had caught him in the face and split his lip. If Desperate had hit him back, they would have half killed each other. The hands had stayed clasped behind the back.

  The captain had come into the mess. He’d have heard about a ‘nutting’ in a lane and would have expected it because the deal on priorities had been effected in his office.

  Captain Bentinick had said, voice never rising, ‘Probably enough, lads. If your jobs were easy I’d not be looking for special men. I could pick any riff-raff bayonet-pusher out of an infantry crowd. It’s not easy, and I admire and respect you. Don’t carry it through to the morning.’

  It was never mentioned again and the lip had healed, but not the wound to Desperate’s soul. Dusty had been witness to the damage done, which had built on what had gone before. The sea crashed on the shingle and the surf surged. It was where Desperate would have been at this time, on this day, of the week.

  The beach, Plage de Puys, was to the north of the harbour and town of Dieppe. The bus would drop the visitors on a concrete esplanade beside a considerably ugly restaurant, closed because the season was over. A slipway for small open fishing boats and pleasure craft divided the wide expanse of loose shingle. That was where the tourists gathered and their guide addressed them. The village was situated along a winding road that dropped down fast towards the sea, and the valley walls were littered with weekend cottages for an affluent élite. Either side of the beach there were sheer cliffs, white and similar to those of the Kentish coast. Many of the householders had adapted defensive gun emplacements of reinforced concrete into patios or sheds: too well built to be dismantled. The guide would deal with the facts.

  Six hundred troops of the Royal Regiment of Canada had come ashore. When the evacuation was ordered, the raid an abject failure, only 240 had made it back to the ships waiting for them; the rest had been killed, wounded or captured. The defenders seemed to have known what was coming and when. The tide had been low when the fifty tanks accompanying the ground force had waddled ashore but on wet sand they’d had almost no traction. Those who reached the shingle found it scattered under the tracks and marooned then, stationary and helpless. The guide would say that the sole value of the Dieppe raid was that the planners for the great invasion two years later had been shown the dangers of a contested landing from the sea. No laughter among the visitors, no jokes. A sad, grey place.

  Many heads were shaken
in respect of the tragedy.

  Mountain troops, scrambling up ropes to reach the batteries, had made heroic efforts to silence the guns on the clifftops but they had lost their explosives in the ascent.

  The driver would usually stand to the side here and not contribute unless invited to by the guide. His eyes were often on the pebbles and he always looked for those that were bright red under the retreating surf. A good one would go into his pocket: all men who’d worn a waist holster had kept smooth pebbles in the pocket of the jacket that hid the holster.