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

by Desmond Cory

  “He was really putting it away back there,” said Johnny.

  “So were we.”

  “He had a good start on us. Even so, I can’t say I feel very much like lunch.”

  Emerald grunted. Johnny looked round the entrance hall of the little house, at the potted ferns beside the coat-hangars, at the portrait of Sir Winston Churchill that hung, slightly skew-wiff, to the right of the far door.

  “Who lives here, apart from Bailey?”

  “Revie. Revie used to. You could move in, now, if you liked.” Emerald, too, glanced uneasily backwards towards his late Prime Minister. “That’s another job for me, this afternoon. Personal belongings. Next of kin. Etcetera. What makes it my business, I don’t know. Still, somebody’s got to do it.”

  “He wasn’t married, was he?”

  “No. Single men only accepted for this little joy-ride. He’s got an aunt somewhere, I think. No other relations.”

  “Too bad,” said Johnny.

  “Why? It’s better that way.”

  Emerald looked across the road to where other little houses were bunched together, their walls etched violently into brightness and darkness beneath the hanging blue curtain of the sky. “Benthall had that one. With a boy from the Research Department. The rest of ’em all belong to boffins, except the end one. That’s mine. Haven’t seen it for three days now.”

  “A great life,” agreed Johnny.

  “Yes. If you don’t weaken. What’s the time?”

  “… Just gone one o’clock.”

  “Lunch, I suppose,” said Emerald, with repugnance. “Let’s have it in the bar, Jimmy. They tell me it’s dangerous to mix food and drink.”

  Emerald patted his tummy thoughtfully. From the room behind them, in the depths of the house, came the cool sound of trickling water; followed by a rhythmic swish … swish … swish … Finally, silence again.

  “It’s been a funny sort of a morning,” said Emerald.

  “Hilarious from start to finish.”

  “I mean it’s funny the way things affect people.”

  “I can see what you’re getting at,” said Johnny cautiously.

  “Can you? That’s good. I was wondering if I might not be imagining it all. It’s like a … a grenade, or something.”

  “A grenade?”

  “Yes. Exploding.” Emerald illustrated his meaning with a violent throwing-outwards of his hands. “These last couple of days have been like this,” and he clenched his hands together, tightly, tightly, until the knuckles showed white. “Everybody in a group. Everybody with a common interest. That interest being Revie’s flight. And now that it’s all over,” he dropped his hands to his sides, “everybody’s suddenly individual again. Horrifyingly so. Everybody’s dived back into himself, as it were … It may be a normal reaction, I don’t know. Defensive mechanism, and all that. All the same, it’s very puzzling.”

  Johnny tapped the floor with his toe.

  “The fact is, we live such a damned abnormal life here. Nothing but sand and sun and mental strain. I can see this whole blasted enterprise cracking up through sheer over-effort.” Emerald glanced back once again. “What’s happening to Bailey is just an amplified version of what’s happening to everybody.”

  “And do you think he’s going to crack up?”

  “God, yes,” said Emerald.

  “Then who’ll fly the thing instead?”

  “Cave, maybe. Dickinson. One of the dashing young reserves who haven’t gone through the preliminaries properly and haven’t really got a clue as to what it’s all about. I don’t know … Bailey may last out. It won’t make a lot of difference either way … You see what I mean? It’s catching.”

  “I shouldn’t worry too much if I were you,” said Johnny.

  “Well, why the hell should I?” Valiantly Emerald simulated nonchalance. “It doesn’t seem to help at all, does it? You had a nice long chat with the Golden Boy before he wrapped it in, anyway.”

  “Yes. I certainly did.”

  “And what was he talking about?”

  “The war, mostly. It seems he quite enjoyed it. He told me about some of his operations … I must say they sounded very exciting.”

  “Yes?” Emerald looked at Johnny shrewdly. Fedora’s ideas on what constituted war-time excitement would have been considered somewhat advanced by a normal, healthy V.C. “Funny thing, this back-to-battle complex.”

  “I agree.”

  “And bloody dangerous, too. What they want to do is go back, and war itself has gone forward. The next one won’t be nearly such a cheerful party, not for anybody.”

  “I hinted as much myself.”

  “Did you? I don’t suppose it was much use. Nostalgia can always beat logic; and hysteria can beat either - that’s the trouble with America nowadays. What else did he talk to you about?”

  “He talked quite a bit about O’Brien’s marriage.”

  “Oh, yes?” Emerald showed interest.

  “But nothing we didn’t know before. One can see why O’Brien got fed up, actually. Nice girl, but the possessive type.”

  “Lovely legs.”

  “Maybe, but legs aren’t everything.”

  “It’s so long since I’ve seen anything more exciting, I really wouldn’t know.” Emerald examined his thumb-nail, rather as though he were about to throw it away. “Funny, all the same, their meeting like that … O’Brien and .. .”

  “Yes. Very dramatic.”

  “But that’s just what it wasn’t. They seemed to be … However.”

  “By the way, where is O’Brien?”

  “Still in the bar, I imagine. Finishing off the bottle. I must admit,” said Emerald with respect, “that boy really can drink. The amount of radioactive cognac he’s got swirling about inside him simply doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “Let’s go and offer some competition,” said Johnny.

  They went slowly over to the jeep. Leaving the shade of the porch for the full heat of the day was like opening the door of a vast and sky-lined oven; there was no wind, no movement, little sound; only the sun and the hard, dry sand underfoot. At the end of the avenue, the inevitable clump of palm-trees seemed to be wilting in the heat; their fronds moved lazily, infinitesimally, in the upwards current of warm air, and the fine tracery of their shadows was speared to the ground by the sun. Emerald took off his spectacles; wiped them.

  “It doesn’t have to be as hot as this,” he complained bitterly.

  11

  O’Brien lay stretched out on his bed; smoking; thinking. A pulse beat uncomfortably midway between his eyes, and in his mouth was an unpleasant after-flavour of alcohol, a rancid taste that tobacco smoke did very little to cure. He lay completely relaxed, his big body slumped on the mattress, collapsed as small children collapse; only his right arm moved from time to time, raising the cigarette to his mouth.

  Within him he could feel - or it was as though he could feel - the tiny killer at work. Wherever he went, it was always there; disintegrating the living cells of his body, minute by minute, hour by hour, ruthlessly, inexorably. Even sleep gave no escape. His shoulder ached; there was a sore patch on the side of his tongue. Yet O’Brien had come to terms with his fear; and now he felt as if this murdering scrap of metal were something that he had always carried, that had been with him from birth, though only recently discovered.

  It was the physical manifestation of something that had always lived within him; something of unrest, of discord, perhaps of evil. Something that throughout his life had always worked, as it was working now, to destroy him. That had refused to let him live in peace, as his friends had lived in peace, and had forced him to deny the very meaning of the word. That had sent him, once the legitimate crime of war had ended, to drive paths across the more primitive parts of the world, to live among men and with women whose thoughts followed foreign patterns, whose gods were hidden and strange, whose minds were different from his own. He had been searching for something unknown to himself about himself, an
d his search had led him into crime and intrigue and murder … The Grail had always eluded him, and always would; of that, O’Brien felt sure. But he had at last discovered, not the object of his chase, but at any rate that which had made him a hunter; it had taken a tangible form, existed to his senses as a constant throbbing in his shoulder and a dull pain over his heart. Now that O’Brien could recognise the source of his own evil and lust, he felt much more at peace; more than at any time he could remember … Except, of course, those moments when hunter and quarry had become miraculously united, with the world spread out beneath him and the sky about him … At twenty thousand feet …

  Beside his bed was a cigarette-tin, filled with water. O’Brien dropped his dog-end into it and listened to its expiring hiss. Then he lowered his feet to the ground and struggled to sit up … Clusters of damp hairs clung to the pillow where his head had lain. He brushed them away with angry, rapid sweeps of the palm of his hand.

  He walked over to the window, folded back the blinds and peered out. Outside was Africa. The continent he had needed in his extremity, and then had wished to discard … It refused to relinquish its grasp. In Africa he was going to die.

  Red land, he thought, lion-backed; land made a lion by the sun. Earth shaped crouching, crouching to spring; what terror! Red walls built in the desert; walls made flame. Red land; burning land; Africa. These were the things that Yusuf wanted to say, to say in stone, to say in the stone of his country; perhaps he would succeed, and others would succeed, would build voiceless statues that would cry out loud from O’Brien’s silent dust. There were things that O’Brien wanted to say, too; things that he needed to tell; he did not know to whom, nor how.

  Perhaps he wished to tell of an aeroplane, weightless in the gathering night; its steel sides brushed to splendour by the glow of the planets and the foam of the Milky Way. Of the great silence through which it moved, the silence of a desert of shadow and of pale yellow undulating sands; a silence that beat and throbbed with its own intensity, like the interior of some enormous and slowly dying heart. Perhaps of sunset in the Sahara, of a world of gold and purple, regal, Egyptian; of echoes of light hanging like veils in the west before the immortal blue of the night. Perhaps of a woman, one of the many; the shadows of long lashes on a cheek half-hidden by white cloth; a memory of round-limbed unconscious grace, of harsh and bitter smells, of rough Arabian fabrics, of darkness and of firelight, and the shade of the tent and, at last, of clean wet dew … Or perhaps of the men, the men of the plains and of the hills; of low yet rich voices pitched to a tone of conspiracy, of bejewelled brown hands that moved on the surface of a richly woven mat, over silence, conjuring up sadness and death … O’Brien remembered the nights spent playing at draughts in stifling tents or in narrow streets; the earth’s heat everywhere; the arguments, the agreements, the friendships, the hatreds; the final walking-out into the near-coolness of the morning, with maybe the raw scent of crude oil drifting in from the south …

  There was the sea, and the sharp-sailed Arab boats, and the brown half-naked fisher-boys; the sea, and the lean black frigate-birds flying off the coast of Pelusium; the harbours of Lebanon and Latakia … There were the inland cities, Petra and Homs and Hama, most fiercely Mohammedan of all; Baalbek and Sidon, petrified with age and grief; Mosul and Baghdad and Tabriz … and Damascus, always Damascus, the last and loveliest of towns …

  There was the air, his own dominion, cloaking both land and sea; linking the chained hills of the east to the jungles of Central Africa. The herds of antelope scattering as his shadow fell across them; to his right the great snow-peaked tower of Kilimanjaro, higher even than he; the great lakes and green, green, everywhere was green …

  O’Brien remained for a long time staring out of the window. All that he had to say remained within him; he stood like a poet whose final strophe has failed to emerge, but continues to hover indefinably on the verge of the tremendous. Eventually somebody passed by in the corridor outside, heavy boots tramping over the planking, and O’Brien, who was crying, came, half-reluctantly, out of his dream or out of his nightmare. He didn’t know which it was.

  But green. Everything had been green. And beautiful.

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket and, very slowly, he wiped the sweat from his forehead; from his temples; from the sides of his neck. Finally, he wiped the palms of his hands.

  Then he looked down to see what the time was.

  Fedora’s broken arm was healing fast. It had left against the brown skin an angrily rising weal; but the bone itself was knitting smoothly, without irregularities. Garrett moved the wrist gently to and fro, prodding around the scar with the tips of his blunt fingers; his eyes were focused intently, yet seemed to be - somehow - preoccupied elsewhere.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we’re coming along very nicely. It’s not causing you any trouble, is it?”

  “None at all. It tends to itch from time to time, but nothing to signify.”

  “Ah well. That’s only to be expected.” Garrett picked up a fresh roll of bandage. “It’s healing perfectly. Nice clean place, the desert. These things usually patch themselves up without any complications.”

  “Good,” said Johnny.

  “Central Africa - that’s another matter altogether. You get gangrene in a matter of hours there, I’m told. But you’ve had some goes of fever yourself, I should guess.”

  “Only one really bad session. And two others I shook off all right.”

  “Yes. You’ve got a very fine constitution. But you’re amazingly heavily scarred for a chap of your age … This’ll be one more for the collection, anyway.” He scooped up a pair of scissors. “I want you to start using this arm again, in moderation. Just try it out from time to time. Don’t put any strain on it, of course, but … You get the idea.” Snip. “You’ve clearly had this sort of thing before.”

  He leaned forward, his fingers making swift, competent knots in the thin linen. While he was doing this, the door opened. Wray looked in, perplexedly.

  “Garrett, have you got O’Brien?”

  “Why, no.” Garrett looked up. “I haven’t seen him. Not since lunch.”

  “He went to his room,” said Johnny, “to lie down.”

  “Well, he’s not there now. He’s supposed to be. It’s … Confound it, it’s twenty to three.” Wray shot a piercing glance towards the medicine cabinet, as though he suspected O’Brien to be curled up foetus-like within. “Sir Robert will be seriously put out if … Oh dear, he’ll be most annoyed.”

  “Tried the bar?” suggested Johnny.

  “Emerald’s just sent somebody round there. Really, there’s some shocking incompetence somewhere. It’s intolerable that this fellow can just … disappear whenever he feels in the mood.”

  “You can’t blame Jimmy for that,” Fedora pointed out.

  “Those were the boss’s orders.”

  “What were?”

  “That O’Brien could go where he wanted. That was all a part of the Peaceful Persuasion scheme. He’s supposed to have a guard, I’ll admit.”

  “Then why isn’t the guard in constant contact with the Colonel’s office? No, no - this sort of thing is really inexcusable.”

  Garrett closed a drawer and pushed back his chair awkwardly. “I’ve got my jeep outside,” he said. “You can take it over there, if you like, to see what’s going on. I won’t need it for another couple of hours.”

  “Well, thanks. That’s a good idea. I think I’ll do that.”

  “Mind if I come, too?” asked Johnny.

  “No, not at all. Come along.”

  They strode along the corridor together, Wray fulminating to himself “All this is damnably inconvenient. The operation’ll have to be postponed, that’s all; and of course Sir Robert’ll be livid …”

  “Operation?” said Johnny, puzzled.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” and Wray flung open the door. “Scheduled for three o’clock. Can’t possibly prepare the patient in time.”

  “But I
thought … Has O’Brien changed his mind again?”

  “No. We’re going through with it, anyway.”

  “I see,” said Johnny, sucking in his lower lip.

  “Well, get in, there’s a good chap,” said Wray irritably, lowering his behind to the driver’s seat. “Don’t just hop in, stand there.”

  He certainly seemed perturbed, thought Johnny, clambering into the back. Wray sounded the engine violently, glanced back over his shoulder and then shot the jeep off in an enormous cloud of dust. They swung round the corner at a pace that almost precipitated Johnny outwards into the road, and went roaring up the camp’s main thoroughfare at a thoroughly alarming speed. Then another jeep appeared, travelling towards them, pursued by another pale yellow dust-cloud; the two trails converged; slowed down; and finally stopped. The two jeeps stood overlapping each other, bonnet to bonnet; Emerald, red-faced, peered across the intervening gap and shouted,

  “I was just coming for you, doc.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “We’ve found him all right. He’s with Levison.”

  “Where?”

  “Over in the XP hangars, of course.”

  “Well, carry on. We’ll follow you.”

  Emerald obligingly carried on. Wray again eased in the clutch, moved the jeep round in short, sharp, bursts of the engine, and finally set off in pursuit. “Over in the hangars,” he grumbled. “And what business has he there, I should like to know. Should be in bed and resting. Levison ought to know better.”

  He drove on morosely, overhauling Emerald at the hangar gates. They were in time to hear his salutation to the sentry.

  “Has Mr. O’Brien gone through here?”

  “Yes, sir. Half an hour ago. He and Mr. Levison.”

  “What the hell did you let him in for?”

  The guard looked surprised. “He has a pass, sir. With the Director’s own signature.”

  “Yes. Come to think of it, I suppose he must have. He was here this morning, wasn’t he? … Okay, Brown. Thanks.”

  The guard saluted smartly; Emerald drove on, pulling up on the asphalt transport park a hundred yards farther on. He dismounted and brushed dust from his shoulders; Wray and Johnny drew up alongside.