The Fire Fighter

by Francis Cottam

  Except for Absalom. He had studied the random click and whir of the Absalom machines and known because the card sharp Kevin Pilley had schooled him in the subject that they were devices geared to the laws of probability. Pilley’s hopeless ambition when they shared a punishment cell in the Portland Borstal had been to become an actuary. Pilley had made a science of chance. Finlay had learned more from him than how to deal the ace of spades to a looting fire fighter from the bottom of the deck. He had learned enough to know that the machines in Absalom House had been dedicated to code-breaking. It was why they had never rested. Despite his elaborate efforts, their component pieces rested in oblivion now.

  Over time, Finlay tried to grieve for Rebecca Lange. But he could not reconcile himself. He would walk back from the running track, its oval picked out in faint chalk on the wet grass, spent from effort, steam rising from his shoulders into the dampness of dusk, and he would use the seclusion of the moment to dwell on what had become of her. Still unable to think of it without anger, he would try to see some significance in her death. At this time of day there were always aeroplanes passing overhead, fighters on their way to valiantly defend the innocents on the ground against the random destruction of bombs. Finlay knew that when pilots died, they usually died horribly; the inferno of their cockpits oxygen-fed, perspex raining molten on to them from the canopies that confined them in aerial tombs. But at least they died for something.

  Rebecca had been sent to Scotland to suffer vile abuse on a futile mission. She had been used as a pawn by her godfather in a game Finlay still did not believe she had understood. Trapped by fire in the atrium at Absalom House, she would have been forced to wait helplessly for the gruesome manner and detail of her death. Finlay thought of her the first time he had seen her, dazzling; a glowering, exultant cocktail of glamour and sexual mischief. Hers was an obscene loss, a terrible squandering. He thought of the look on her face as she assembled his makeshift meal prior to his departure for Wales. The expression on her face, when he had lifted her chin to kiss her goodbye, was transparent with unexpected happiness and hope. The death of Rebecca, burned, was a loss Finlay did not yet possess the endurance to confront. This perhaps because he believed her murdered.

  And he missed her. He had taken to drinking a cup of tea after his exercises in a derelict classroom that had somehow escaped redesignation for some other, dreary, official use by the hospital authorities. The classroom had a large revolving globe on a stand by the teacher’s desk. A wall chart showed the continents. Another showed the prevailing currents in the oceans of the world; dark blue patterns of compelling force through thousands of miles of paler water.

  He would sit at a desk and think of her. Of her sharpness, of her surprising warmth and her laughter. Of her recklessly generous nature. Of her tearing absence.

  Once, when this reverie brought him close to tears he could not risk, Finlay walked across to a bookcase to distract himself. Most of the books had gone, he supposed to be pulped into instructional leaflets and ration coupons. Two or three volumes had escaped the cull and he chose one of these at random. He flicked through the pages and stopped at a landscape photograph of a frozen sea, ice clinging in great blank stalactites to ship rigging, waves petrified by cold in the very motion of breaking.

  ‘Lake Michigan, from the Chicago shore,’ the picture caption underneath it read. Finlay shivered. ‘Winter is coming,’ he said, to the dry geography classroom walls.

  The sallow registrar examined Finlay on what was to be his day of release. Finlay did not know that, standing naked for his examination, even when a nurse knocked and entered the examination room carrying a pile of clothes, neatly folded, across both hands. He didn’t know because the clothes were so clearly the rough woollen serge of an army uniform; the coarse khaki of an army shirt. Army boots topped the pile. Finlay did not suppose that this uniform had been brought for him to put on. He was a fire fighter.

  The doctor was using a small light to examine Finlay’s left eye.

  ‘The skull fracture has healed completely. There are odd glass fragments between bone and scalp, but they’re literally fragments, too small to cause discomfort.’

  The doctor spoke in a loud voice, as if dictating. But nobody was taking any notes. Finlay assumed he was showing off to the nurse who stood behind him with a perfect view, Finlay assumed, of his arse. At least his arse was a part of him not scarred.

  ‘The ribs are entirely knitted and the ribcage has resumed its original integrity,’ the doctor said, tapping Finlay’s flanks. ‘Blow into this.’ He gave Finlay a balloon. Finlay blew. The doctor pinched the aperture of the balloon and plucked it from Finlay’s lips.

  ‘About three and a half litres of lung capacity,’ he said. ‘You should enter bicycle races. Show me your tongue.’

  It was a thorough examination. Finlay’s brain had swelled with concussion after the kicking inflicted by the Dubliner’s friends and they had also cracked his skull. At University College Hospital, to which McKay had carried him, they had used a hand-drill to bore a hole in his skull and relieve the pressure on the brain and reduce the risk of an aneurism. The treatment had worked and the hole, like the fracture above his left temple, had healed perfectly. Finlay never found out what the brace in which they held his head was for. Perhaps it was a precaution only.

  The doctor slapped him on the back.

  ‘Robust proletarian genes. It’s the only explanation. Your powers of recuperation are extraordinary. But this was not an average Saturday night set-to, Sergeant Finlay. If I were you, I wouldn’t do it again.’

  Finlay realized then that the uniform the nurse had brought into the room was for him. He didn’t know how to feel about this. In one way, it represented a catastrophic loss of rank and responsibility and accordant privilege. In another, it seemed a kind of liberation. He no longer had an appetite for fighting incendiary fires. He looked at his wristwatch.

  ‘Where am I supposed to get to?’

  ‘They’re coming to collect you.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Twelve. In about fifteen minutes. Why?’

  Naked, Finlay nodded at the kit the nurse had brought in.

  ‘Because I’d better bull those boots. Or I’ll be in for a bollocking.’

  Behind Finlay, the nurse giggled. The doctor raised his eyebrows in pantomimic disgust at the imbecility of military custom. He could of course afford his disdain. He would never have to fight.

  Finlay would not miss him.

  McKay was in jocular mood on the way back to London. He had burst out laughing, rocked with laughter, driving gauntlets in one fist, fists on his hips, when he saw Finlay dressed as a Royal Artillery Sergeant at the entrance to the hospital. Finlay ignored the mirth, grateful to see that they had given McKay a spotless new camel coat to replace the one Finlay had spoiled with blood coughed from his punctured lung.

  ‘I’d like to thank you, Sarn’t McKay.’

  ‘Get out of it,’ McKay said, laughing. ‘Going to put the wind up General Rommel, are we? Oh, Master Jack,’ he wheezed, ‘you kill me. You really do.’

  All the way back to London, McKay sang. He sang marching songs and sentimental songs from the ’fourteen-eighteen. He sang sea-shanties and folk-songs. He sang a Christmas carol. He stopped when they reached the eastern extremities of the capital and the bomb damage, grave and appalling in daylight, began to amass its catalogue of weary devastation.

  ‘Can I ask you a serious question, Sarn’t McKay?’

  ‘Don’t ask, you don’t get,’ McKay said.

  ‘Do you think we’re going to win this war?’

  McKay chewed on this and drove. Everywhere people scurried through damaged streets, excavating, salvaging, clearing, hammering and baling spent water in human chains, splashing zinc pails of it from link to link. It was an uncharitable thought, but there was something insectlike about the scurry and sheer zeal of the populace as it struggled to restore order over the chaos of bombs. Here and there on the st
reets Finlay saw tea wagons, the women staffing them wearing florid turbans of silk print on their heads, or fans of dead, yellow hair falling to their shoulders. McKay pulled up and brought them tea before addressing Finlay’s question as they sipped the black brew and the car idled on a street in Walthamstow and young children gawped at it and at the giant McKay, in his yellow coat and gauntlets, sipping his beverage at the wheel.

  ‘If I learned one thing in the ’fourteen-eighteen, it was this,’ he said eventually. ‘I learned that men can tolerate anything. You can tolerate any amount of rain and mud and rats and cold and marching and corpses. Any deprivation and indignity. It might be the one unendurable thing about human life, Master Jack. No species is so adaptable as ours. We can take anything.’

  Finlay sipped tea.

  ‘I don’t see how that’s an answer to the question.’

  ‘Because you haven’t given it sufficient thought,’ McKay said. ‘You really think that White and Grey are the sort that wave a white flag when things get a bit sticky? You really think that Churchill is going to stand in chains before a cunt like Hitler, begging for a merciful peace?’

  They sat in silence, drinking tea. McKay blew on his to cool it and condensation misted the windscreen for an instant and then was gone.

  ‘What do you think will happen?’

  ‘Lap of the gods, Master Jack. Adolf might invade. If it all goes to pot, I’ve a place in the Brecon Beacons I bought with a bit I put by after the last lot. Under the floorboards I’ve a Webley revolver and a Mauser sniper’s rifle I brought back as a souvenir from France. Both are fully serviced and I’ve plenty of ammunition. The missus passed on two years ago. Our girl is raised and wed and living on her husband’s farm in Rhodesia. If they invade, I’ll do some serious mischief in the hills with the Mauser. I’m a fair shot and can live off the land. I’ll stand my ground. But if it really goes to pot, I’ll save a bullet for the Webley and myself.’

  ‘But you just told me we can tolerate anything. Nothing is unendurable, you said.’

  ‘I did. But can doesn’t mean the same as have to, Master Jack.’ He winked. ‘Now we’d best be off. The General’s a bugger for punctuality.’

  It was White and Grey. No tea. No offer of biscuits. It was business, without deception or refreshment. Grey wore the uniform of a full colonel. The chicken wire had gone and they had new windows. The windows looked to Finlay like an act of bravado and filled the room with the smell of fresh putty.

  ‘Why did you attack the Irishman?’

  ‘I think you know, sir.’

  ‘I’d like your explanation nevertheless,’ Grey said.

  ‘He planted the devices that destroyed Absalom House. I’ve seen enough fires to know arson from incendiary bombs.’

  White and Grey looked at one another.

  ‘Go on,’ White said.

  ‘The Absalom blaze had two separate seats,’ Finlay said. ‘Third and fourth floors. There wasn’t enough inflammable material on either floor to sustain a blaze of that intensity. It was deliberately set. That’s what he was doing in Chiswell Street the night he came across Nevin’s crew. He had set his charges and was on his way back to The Fitzroy Tavern for a well-earned drink. He would have used something slow, an acid fuse, for the flash charges that ignited his accelerants. I suspect he used gelignite on a clock or timer triggered by temperature to blow up the generator.’

  ‘Why would he want to set fire to Absalom House?’ White looked genuinely baffled.

  ‘Because it was a building familiar to him from his friendship with Rebecca Lange, sir. Because he had identified it through her relationship with me as a priority target. And because that’s the IRA strategy, isn’t it, to take advantage of the current circumstances whenever they can.’

  ‘It might be,’ Grey said. ‘But the chap you attacked is a writer. And he didn’t destroy Absalom House, I can assure you. Because I know who did.’

  Finlay sat rigid. There was a knock at the door. An orderly came in and gave Grey a note which he unfolded and read. He dismissed the orderly and passed the note to White. White looked at it and folded it and put it in his breast pocket.

  ‘So it was you lot. You used Rebecca Lange. And then you killed her,’ Finlay said.

  Grey held up his hands as if to show his clean, white palms.

  ‘The former, certainly. But there’s no reason to believe that she is dead.’

  ‘She wasn’t at Coptic Street,’ Finlay said. ‘I checked on my way to deal with the Irishman.’

  ‘You think she’s dead because she’s disappeared,’ White said. ‘It’s a fair assumption, but hardly conclusive.’

  Finlay gripped the edges of his chair. He felt as though the world had shifted, slipping from under him.

  ‘There was nothing valuable to us in Absalom House, Sergeant,’ Grey said. ‘There was nothing of value in any of your buildings. The research was bogus, the science a deliberate babble of mumbo-jumbo and mysticism.’

  ‘You’re a fucking liar, Grey. I know about Rebecca’s father and his work on propulsion.’

  White smiled indulgently at him. ‘Half the boffins in Europe have a theory about propulsion. Lange’s work showed theoretical promise some years ago, but in practical terms got nowhere. The suggestion that it did was ours. And it was a fiction.’

  Finlay turned furiously to Grey.

  ‘You risked your life and mine getting that apparatus out of a basement. I saw the machine myself. I helped you carry it.’

  ‘Something the Major had his tame chaps at Borehamwood concoct,’ Grey said. ‘One of their special effects.’

  Vertigo was a sensation Finlay had never felt before. Now he was dizzy with it.

  ‘Why?’ he said, arms wide, hoarse with fury. ‘For fuck’s sake, why?’

  ‘We are working on all kinds of genuine projects,’ White said. He looked quickly at Grey and then back towards Finlay. ‘One of them is an early warning system that should prove an effective means of countering these air raids. It could be operational as early as the spring. The more bogus projects the Luftwaffe target, the thinner they have to spread themselves and the less chance there is of them doing real damage to a genuine facility. The square mile has no residential population. Most of the financial institutions relocated to the suburbs in the phoney war. And the high density of buildings in the City confines blast damage. It was a pragmatic choice.’

  Finlay sat with his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor. He hawked and spat deliberately on the carpet.

  ‘Please don’t take it personally,’ White said. ‘There’s an entire provincial city, made of wood, on the hills outside Sheffield. These are necessary ploys.’

  ‘And then of course there’s Babcock,’ Grey said.

  White turned sharply towards him.

  ‘Babcock?’ Finlay said.

  White sagged. ‘Oh, tell him, Grey. After what he’s been through. I mean, we’re hardly going to hamper ourselves now by his knowing.’

  ‘You were right about Babcock, Finlay,’ Grey said, ‘He really is a Communist. We knew that he was passing information to the Russians. He’s been doing it for a decade or more.’

  ‘We’re not at war with Russia.’

  ‘No. And neither is Germany.’

  ‘What we needed to know,’ White said, ‘is whether Moscow is sharing intelligence with Berlin. In the concerted bombing of your buildings, we believe we have our answer.’

  ‘Why those buildings?’

  ‘One of them was built by Lange,’ Grey said. ‘The Germans knew something about Lange’s scientific bent. And together on a map the buildings formed the precise geometric outline of a pentagram. That would mean nothing to Moscow. But we thought it might get the Germans out of their prams. The Nazis are buggers for the occult. Did you know Hitler packed off a team of eminent archaeologists to search in all seriousness for the Holy Grail? That he daily consults an astrologer?’

  ‘I didn’t tell Babcock anything.’

  ‘Oh, ye
s, you did,’ Grey said. ‘Most of it, we suspect, when he treated your leg. We’ve analysed what it was he gave you. It was a great deal more than morphine.’

  Finlay tried to gather himself, to compose and orchestrate the headlong chaos of his thoughts and feelings. He looked around the familiar room, which was now almost jaunty, optimistic with its smell of putty and repair. His gaze turned to White, finally justified in the general’s uniform his breeding had predestined him to wear. He looked at Grey: the louche civilian now so much fictitious history, Colonel Grey far more convincing than any of the matinee idols he had seen in press photographs, seductively tailored into martial costume.

  He swallowed. ‘Rebecca. Tell me how Rebecca fitted in. Was she just so much window dressing? Was the charred corpse of an innocent woman a necessary part of your necessary ploy?’

  ‘We didn’t really have a choice,’ Grey said. ‘Her father is a prominent victim of Nazi butchery. Her mother is a Polish aristocrat lobbying hard for American involvement in the war. Rebecca wanted to be involved in the war effort and as her godfather, I felt obliged to oblige.’

  Finlay had one more question to ask. He asked it of Grey. ‘Why me?’

  ‘In the ‘thirties Babcock worked for Paolo Cardoza.’ Finlay looked blank.

  ‘The man who owned Pimlico Rubber,’ White said. ‘We knew that Babcock would remember you, at least by reputation. And that he would grade the importance of your mission accordingly.’

  ‘And we needed a character like you,’ Grey said. ‘Not just prepared to walk on thin ice, but to stamp all over it.’

  Finlay could think of nothing to say.

  ‘Course we didn’t know you’d fall for the Lange woman,’ White said. ‘And we didn’t imagine you’d concoct your own plot and blame the Fenian for Absalom House. You’d be dead, you know, if McKay hadn’t followed you.’