High Requiem: A Johnny Fedora Espionage Spy Thriller Assignment Book 6

by Desmond Cory

  Discordantly, in the office, the telephone began to ring.

  They went back inside, Emerald flicking on the electric-light as he passed the switch. He scooped up the telephone receiver: “Emerald here,” he said, and then listened intently.

  “I see. Well, that’s not so good.

  “…!

  “Well, and what did he say?

  “…Then there’s nothing else for it. Have to keep hunting, that’s all, and keep in touch with me. Good luck.”

  He replaced the receiver and looked at Johnny, his round face set in almost comical lines of melancholy.

  “Nothing so far. O’Brien’s still very much on the loose.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Johnny.

  “Too bad. Yes, it is. But what is this character, anyway - the Scarlet Pimpernel or something?” Emerald seated himself solidly at his desk. “Is he in heaven or is he in hell, or can he possibly have got to Tripoli? … I wonder.” His podgy fingers drummed noiselessly on the edge of a file of papers. Johnny perched himself on the side of the desk and put his good hand in his pocket.

  “Take a look at this, will you, Johnny?”

  “What is it?”

  “It represents a means of communication peculiar to this the twentieth century, vulgarly known as a telegram. You might care to study it.”

  Johnny straightened the flimsy sheet of paper across his knee. The message was directed, simply enough, to Bailey, Zocodover 14, Tripoli.

  Weeks leave begins tomorrow Pack bags for Bloodyville Will pick you up before noon Mike

  “Who sent this?”

  “Squadron-Leader Bailey.”

  “To his wife?”

  “No. She’s his sister.”

  “Who lives at Tripoli?”

  “That’s right. Bailey has a flat there. She keeps it tidy for him.”

  “I see. A real sister, or …?”

  “Oh yes. No jiggery-pokery. She’s a nice little thing, too.”

  “… Mike.”

  “Eh?”

  “That was it all right.”

  “What was what all right?” Emerald seemed mildly irritated.

  “That was the name O’Brien mentioned. The one that slipped my mind … Michael, I’m sure it was Michael. A Squadron-Leader. And living in Tripoli.”

  “It fits together well enough.” Emerald’s fingers, that had been still, began their silent drumming once again.

  “It does. Do you suppose …?”

  “Bailey served in 1440 Squadron. That was O’Brien’s mob. I haven’t any doubt of it, really.”

  “Well, I’m damned,” said Johnny. “So it’s Bailey he’s looking for.”

  “I’m acting on that assumption. What do you make of that telegram?”

  Johnny glanced down at it. “I don’t know. Where is Bloodyville?”

  “A euphemism. On the map, it says Bir Ladi. It’s what is known as a rest-centre - heaven knows why they call it that. Swimming-pools. Riding. Tennis. All that tosh.” Emerald rose abruptly from his seat. “About thirty miles out of Tripoli, as if that mattered. The point is that Bailey, apparently, isn’t any too anxious to be found.”

  Johnny folded the telegram contemplatively and placed it on the desk. “You think he knows that O’Brien is O’Brien and not the legendary Cody?”

  “It looks that way - doesn’t it? I took the trouble to put two and two in front of him, to see if he could make four out of them. And it seems he has.”

  “I see. It’s puzzling, though. If he wants O’Brien to be caught …”

  Surprisingly, Emerald smote the desk a resounding blow with his fist. “Of course he does. He must do, unless he’s gone flaming well bonkers. Yet here he is … quietly doing a bunk … Puzzling isn’t the word for it.”

  “All the same,” said Johnny,” he isn’t mad.”

  “Oh no. He’s not mad. All I can say is, we’re fishing in devilish deep waters, Watson. And I don’t like it a bit.”

  “Um.” Johnny adjusted the shoulder-knot of his arm-sling, pushing it round to a more comfortable position. “Is that right about his week’s leave?”

  “Yes. He applied this evening. Just before he sent off that wire.”

  “And got it? Just like that?”

  “Just like that. He’s entitled to it. It’s one of the privileges of his … rather unusual position here.” Emerald was now pacing to and fro, his forehead furrowed in thought. “He’ll be off to Tripoli tomorrow morning.”

  “I see.”

  “And,” said Emerald, turning tigerishly, “— so will you be.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. I’m shipping you out of here. To mix my metaphors, I’m going to put both my kids in one basket. I suppose your arm’s not going to play you up too much - a big tough fellow like you - if I send you into Tripoli tomorrow?”

  “No,” said Johnny. “My arm’s all right.”

  “That’s fine. You be ready to leave early tomorrow then. Bailey’ll give you a lift. In his snazzy roadster. Oh, you’ll travel in style.”

  “And when I get to Tripoli?”

  “Then you can find him for me.”

  “Who, The Crimson Periwinkle?”

  “Who else?”

  “Then you think he’s got through?”

  “It begins to look as though he might have. And I’m not taking any chances. Well, there’s a trick or two in the old dog yet.” Emerald snapped his fingers. “I’ve still got a trick or two left …”

  5

  After so many hours bumpily spent in the cabin of O’Brien’s van, Johnny had almost forgotten the capabilities of a really fast car on a moderately good road. Bailey owned a Bentley; sleek, grey, magnificently sprung; and did not believe in driving it at less than seventy miles an hour - at ninety, he seemed to feel that he had, at any rate, achieved a fair cruising speed. The car leaped over the unevennesses of the road’s surface as though about to take off, returning to the flat with only the slightest of shudders; Bailey’s foot on the accelerator pedal remained steady as the Sphinx, his expression almost rapt. The twisted contours of the Western Desert were flung backwards and into the void they had come from; contortions of bluish-red rock, long low hillocks of slipping sand, rounded yellow boulders that seemed poised on the slopes, on the verge of toppling … All hovered uneasily in a whirling miasma of speed, then were sucked inexorably into the backwash of time. Johnny lit a cigarette, using the dashboard lighter.

  “We’ll soon be in Tripoli at this rate,” he observed, rather pointlessly.

  Bailey glanced sideways, no more than fractionally. “Three hours forty-eight minutes. That’s my record to date.”

  “Pretty good going.”

  “There’s a stretch that slows us down a lot. About twenty miles ahead.”

  “Perhaps it doesn’t seem so fast,” said Johnny, “when you’re used to flying jets. Through the sound barrier, and all that.”

  “Ah yes. We’re really moving about now, in some of these new jobs.”

  “Have you gone faster than sound, ever?”

  “Once or twice,” said Bailey modestly.

  Johnny looked up, half-instinctively, at the sky. It was clear, or almost clear, being feathered to the north only with the lightest imaginable flakes of cirrus. Elsewhere, it was the deep, resonant blue of mid-morning; of a profundity, of a totally untouchable clarity. Or of a … Johnny did not know the right word. There was the sky and the earth around him, nothing more; the words he knew were words of the earth only. Therefore he could not formulate the thoughts that the sky, the blue sky, strove to make rise within him.

  “What’s it like?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Flying. At that sort of speed.”

  “It’s fine” said Bailey. “It’s fine.”

  And after a few moments’ pause,

  “It feels like nothing else. You get the idea there is nothing else. There’s just you and the plane … which is really a part of yourself … or it seems to be, anyway. Of c
ourse, you get a bit worried sometimes. When the jolting begins it’s rather frightening. Naturally. It’s like being a bullfighter, watching the bull start to come towards you. Sometimes you get scared all right; until you go through - with a click, just like that - and then it’s all right again. It’s fine. You feel there’s nothing can stop you. You feel you can go faster and faster and faster until … Well …” Bailey sighed. “Well, there’s nothing you can really compare it to. Except … I’ve sometimes thought … maybe music.”

  “Music.” Johnny nodded slowly. “I think I know what you mean.”

  “You know. You get that feeling with Beethoven and Brahms … and Mozart … Climbing up until you’re aching for it to stop and yet not wanting it to. I don’t read much poetry, but maybe that gives the same sensation. Benthall says so.” Bailey’s foot twitched infinitesimally on the accelerator pedal. “… Used to say so.”

  “Benthall? Who’s he?”

  “Fellow I knew once.”

  “A flier?”

  “One of the best.” Bailey spoke a trifle thickly. “Mind if we don’t discuss him?”

  “Sorry,” said Fedora.

  Bailey drove on, faster than ever. He drove as though seeking to escape from something, from some unseen pursuer; there were tiny drops of sweat upon his forehead, beneath the visor of his cap. Orestes at the wheel of a Bentley, trying to evade his destiny … Or was he Icarus? … The sands of Africa stretched around the road, lone and bare. Bailey was outstripping the sun, outstripping his shadow. Time was his enemy. Fedora watched him, though not obviously, and his hands caressing the steering-wheel.

  Three for eternity; thought Johnny. Revie, Bailey, O’Brien. Three to go where the first had already gone. Of the mechanics of their departure he was beginning to understand something; more than he needed, more than he wanted to. Mr. Mitchell knew it all; Jimmy Emerald knew it all. Perhaps the man sitting beside him knew it all, though Johnny doubted that. Evidently it was knowledge of a sort to make no one happy; it was dangerous knowledge. Johnny did not greatly aspire towards it.

  Benthall knew it all, too. Benthall knew more than anybody now. Benthall had been the first.

  “Sorry to cut you short like that,” said Bailey casually. “Dam’ rude, of course. Can’t think what’s the matter with me.”

  Johnny made the expected conciliatory noises.

  “Fellow I mentioned died quite recently. He was rather a pal of mine. Still, no need for me to be so dam’ touchy about it.”

  “Don’t give it a thought,” said Johnny mildly. “I know how it is.”

  “Well. Apologies, anyway. Pity you have so little time to spare,” said Bailey, changing the subject, “before your boat leaves; or you could have come round for a noggin. Would’ve liked you to meet my sister. Charming girl, though I say it myself”

  Johnny again murmured the conventionalities.

  “Still, there are plenty of girls in Europe. All waiting for you on the quay. I wouldn’t mind being in your shoes, Fedora, you lucky devil.”

  “You think I’ll catch the boat all right?”

  “Oh yes. We’ll do it comfortably. We’ll do it comfortably,” repeated Bailey; and Johnny had the impression that, momentarily, he had lost the thread of the conversation. A moment later, however … “Lucky I happened to be driving in this morning,” he continued. “There isn’t another bus on the station that would’ve got you there in time.”

  “I’m very grateful.”

  “Oh, nonsense. Just give my love to the girls, that’s all, when you get back to … You’re not married, by any chance?”

  “N-no,” said Johnny. Then, as Bailey had apparently detected the note of hesitation in his voice, “I get the idea I’ve stayed too long in Africa.”

  “Bad luck. So she married someone else?”

  “The last I heard, she was going to do so. And that was some time ago.”

  “Bad luck,” said Bailey again.

  “She was French.”

  “Oh yes? Too bad.”

  Johnny wondered whether or not to continue the conversation; Bailey, clearly, found the topic of little interest. He wanted to drive; that was all. There they were, two kids tethered in the clearing; there was probably little to gain by bleating to one another. All the same, Johnny rather liked Bailey, and wished to enter to some extent into his manner of thought, to understand the strain conditioning his every action; in short, to help in some way …

  “Are you very fond of music?”

  “Well, yes.” Bailey nodded. “Mind you, though, I don’t know anything about it. I just find it relaxing. Especially Chopin; I’m very fond of Chopin.”

  “I’m a pianist myself”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I was a professional, once.”

  “And a professional hunter, too? That seems the hell of an odd mixture.”

  “I know. Still, they’re the two things I do best. Playing the piano and—”

  “—Killing things.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was your outfit in the war?”

  “I was in America at the time. So I didn’t see very much of it.”

  “Oh,” said Bailey. He took one hand from the wheel and wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Hot, isn’t it?”

  “Very.”

  “… Any further news of your friend Cody?”

  Johnny shook his head. “No. Nothing new.”

  “Why d’you suppose he skipped off in such a hurry?”

  “I don’t know,” said Johnny. There followed a lengthy silence.

  “… Last night you said something about your interests being bound up with Cody’s. What did you mean by that?”

  “Last night? Well, last night maybe I got a little pickled. I get that way at times.”

  “It seems funny, though. Coincidental, I mean. Did you mean you’d met Cody before?”

  “No. That is, I might have. I don’t think so … I knew a fellow called Cody once, but probably not the same. He was a … little dark-haired fellow … Doesn’t sound the same at all.”

  “No,” said Johnny. “It doesn’t.” Inventive genius, he reflected sadly, was certainly not Bailey’s forte.

  … He decided that he had better drop the subject. It might be a dangerous one; and Emerald had given him no precise instructions as to how to handle it. He guessed that he would do better to remain passive, to be the mere recipient of such remarks as Bailey saw fit to utter, rather than to probe surgeon-like in search of a growth whose position and identity were uncertain. This task, in so far as it was his own, was unlike any of his previous assignments; for Johnny was accustomed to work from initial information which - though often sketchy in the extreme - had always been precise and accurate. Here, working and yet not working on Emerald’s behalf, all that he could do was collate his own information from so many guarded hints; uncertain of its accuracy, uncertain of its precision, uncertain of its relevance - and, above all, uncertain of how he was supposed to act on it.

  The important thing was not to lose sight of his immediate aim. His aim was to find O’Brien. And O’Brien, he supposed, had by now made his way to Tripoli …

  Tripoli.

  And the sea; for the first time in three thousand miles of travelling, the sea …

  It stretched tranquilly out towards the horizon, blue and green and glittering in the sun; while a single arm, translucent as glass, smooth, yet as though stirring in its sleep, reached towards the placid quays of the harbour. There was stone, old and weathered stone that burnt with a myriad lights while retaining but a single colour; there were white houses and tall palms and a far-off trundling of traffic; rocks, older than the town and older than the harbour and, to judge from their outward aspect, but a little younger than Time itself, rocks and their heavy shadows on the land and the greeny-blue opacities that were pooled beneath them on the water, rocks that snarled up in headlands to the east and rocks that stood isolated, rounded as billiard balls by the constant erosion of the un
told years. Over the long quays, brown feet powdered by layers of white dust, moved the Arab dock-labourers; arms and legs mirrors of shining brown, hook-nosed, their voices rising gutturally like the cries of sea-birds. Johnny sat on his new suitcase in the shade of the shipping office, his white-slinged arm folded pathetically at his side, breathing in the warm salt air and watching the harbour scene.

  The boat that, theoretically, he was to catch was making ready to leave: a small, squat, ugly vessel, suited to no other than Mediterranean seas. Johnny, aware of the replenished wallet nestling in his inside pocket, was strongly tempted to take it, anyway; to ignore the very nebulous responsibilities that had been laid upon him and to depart instead, swiftly and without fuss, for the not-too-distant shores of Italy. There was an impatience within him to feel again the stir of movement of the great cities, to return to the ambiente of twentieth-century Europe …

  He shifted his position slightly, and immediately became conscious of somebody standing beside him. He glanced up, and saw a tall Arab dressed in Western clothes; bareheaded, with a battered dispatch-case clasped in his right hand. Another prospective passenger, Johnny guessed, and was looking back towards the ship when the other man spoke.

  “Would you care to come with me?” he said.

  Johnnny looked up again, surprised. Perhaps this wasn’t a passenger, after all, but some kind of harbour official … “I’m … I don’t think I’ll be travelling on the boat. At least, not today.”

  “I see. Mr. Fedora, isn’t it? I am sent by Mr. O’Brien.” Johnny stood up slowly, turning as he did so to face the Arab; who looked into his eyes from exactly his own height, matching Johnny’s steady blue with a liquid, unspeculative brown. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Yusuf.”

  “Delighted,” said Johnny, and Yusuf inclined his head politely.

  “Mr. O’Brien is now staying in my house. Or, to be more exact, in the house which I am now renting. He sent me to see if, perhaps, you were waiting to travel on the Dunia.” He indicated the wallowing little ship with his thumb. “I recognised you easily, with your broken arm, and from the description which Mr. O’Brien gave me.”