Riptide

by John Lawton

  ‘So you did sell it to him?’

  ‘Yes. But treason was no part of it. I believed him to be Czech. Another victim. Like me.’

  ‘How much did you touch this victim for, Wally? Ten bob? A quid? Two quid?’

  Fish Wally said nothing. Met Stilton’s gaze without blinking.

  ‘Faker Forsyte says he sold you two ration books. What did you do with the other?’

  ‘He told you that? He’s a liar.’

  ‘Have it your own way.’

  Stilton left again. He could keep this up all night if he had to.

  Around midnight he flipped the peephole on the cell door. Fish Wally was pacing the floor, restless and caged. Seconds out, thought Stilton, round three.

  He set out the photographs once more. Smulders and Stahl.

  ‘I know,’ said Wally. ‘These you showed me at the crypt. I told you the truth then. I saw them both. I told you everything I knew. Do not fling these in my face and call me a liar.’

  ‘You didn’t mention the third bloke.’

  ‘What third bloke?’

  Stilton pointed at the sketch of Stahl.

  ‘A third bloke who looked pretty much like this bloke.’

  ‘I told you. I saw no third bloke that night. This bloke is this bloke. Him I sold the book to. Him I took to Cash Wally.’

  ‘Not necessarily the same night.’

  Stilton could almost hear Fish Wally thinking, wondering how much he could admit to without digging himself a deeper hole.

  ‘Wally-why do you think any of these blokes come to you?’

  ‘I’m known,’ he said. ‘Cash Wally is a misanthropist, a recluse. Hates humanity with a vengeance. Trusts only money and food. He needs me to help out. I’m known as Cash Wally’s cousin. In immigrant circles word spreads.’

  ‘I’m not talking about immigrant circles. I’m talking about these blokes. Germans.’

  ‘No-the older one, he is Dutch.’

  ‘No, Wally, he was Dutch.’

  ‘You killed them both!?’

  ‘Let’s just say they’re both dead. And Dutch or not, he was a German agent. We’d been watching him since he landed.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. Go on, get up and walk out again. Every time I call the bluff you walk out.’

  Stilton leaned on his elbows, that bit the closer to Wally, his voice dropped to pianissimo.

  ‘They come to you, Wally, because you’re known. Known to the Abwehr as well as the immigrants. You’re part of their network, whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. They’ve been using you to place their agents among immigrant groups in London.’

  He knew he’d hit home. He knew Fish Wally would not call him a liar again. He was pale, his skin sagged like a punctured balloon. It was as though he had only to prick up his ears to hear the air hiss out of him. He knew Stilton was telling the truth. Stilton knew that he knew. He croaked out, ‘Stilton, what do you want?’

  ‘The third bloke. Probably came to you a day or two before these two. You sold him a ration book and you found him a room, right?’

  Fish Wally said nothing.

  ‘I asked you about him. This is him.’

  Stilton tapped the sketch of Stahl with his index finger.

  ‘I asked you about him. You sent me to the German. I had no picture of the German. I was asking you about this bloke.’

  Fish Wally picked up the sketch. Looked at it for more than a minute.

  ‘I had always thought there was something wrong. The scar. The German had no scar. Do you have a pencil?’

  Stilton took one from his breast pocket and gave it to him.

  ‘This one you call the third man. He had a scar. Not as pronounced as your sketch would have it. But he looked nothing like this.’

  Fish Wally’s crab hands clutched the pencil awkwardly, but the tip flew across the paper with the facility of a skilled draughtsman. A thin, dark moustache, darker hair.

  ‘And here and here.’ Fish Wally tapped each temple. ‘Bald. The rest of the hair was black, turning to grey. I would say he was forty or more. Not the twenty-something you have here.’

  ‘And you sold him a ration book?’

  Wally nodded.

  ‘And you got him a room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Cash Wally was full that day. I sent him to the Welsh Widow in the Holloway Road.’

  Stilton ordered tea for Fish Wally. When he got back about twenty minutes later, Fish Wally was swilling the dregs and asking for more. He looked at the sheet of foolscap Stilton held in his hand and said, ‘So, now we hit the bottom, eh, Walter? Now you charge me.’

  Stilton took a fiver and a fountain pen from his pocket and pushed them across the table to him.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Your wages. Just sign here. You’re one of us now.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘From now on you tell us everything. Every foreigner, whether you think he’s suspicious or not, that comes to you, you tell us. Sign, before I change my mind. Sign now. It’s this or spend the rest of the war in chokey.’

  Fish Wally picked up the pen and read.

  ‘What am I signing?’

  ‘A receipt for five quid.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And the Official Secrets Act.’

  Troy

  § 58

  Walter Stilton ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He was more than partial to thick giblet soup, the toughness of gizzard held no fear for him and stuffed, roast heart no symbol. When he could get it-when his wife had queued half a morning to get it-he loved liver slices fried in breadcrumbs-but most of all he adored to start the day with grilled mutton kidneys, faintly piss-tanged to the palate-a breakfast, if not fit for a king, then sweetly fit for a Chief Inspector of the London Metropolitan Police Force.

  He moved softly about the kitchen. It had been light since before five and first light woke him better than any alarm clock. Tangible light in the basement room, the promise of the heat of the day beyond its windows. Summer mornings such as this made him peckish. He’d eat his plate of grilled kidneys, washed down with strong, sweet, milky tea, silently reading last night’s evening paper. And when he had done he would pad about the kitchen in his socks, shirtless, the braces hanging down his back like the reins of some giant and unruly toddler, making tea and toast for his wife. He was always first up-had been since the first morning of their marriage. It was a habit of his father’s. Handed down. A Derbyshire miner, at work before the world was awake, he would always light the fire, feed himself and take breakfast to his wife. It was the only domestic chore he would undertake-so it was with Stilton. He’d never washed so much as a cup and saucer in his married life, but he’d stoked the Aga and made breakfast every day of it.

  A saucer of milk for the pusscat, then softly up the stairs to the first floor. Edna was awake, windows open, a curtain flapping gently in the summer breeze. Stilton set down the tray upon her knees and said nothing. He’d run out of things to say to her. And there was nothing she asked of him.

  ‘Will you be late home?’ she asked.

  ‘Hard to say, love.’

  And in that the routine of conversation in the wake of the death of their children varied not one whit from the routine of thirty years and more. They neither had the vocabulary to prolong the manifestation of grief.

  Stilton dressed. A clean shirt aired on the Aga’s front rail. The collar stud eased in with a practised thumb. His Metropolitan Police Bowls Team tie. His shiny black boots, the pusscat weaving between his legs and lashing out at the laces as he did them up.

  Looking at himself in the mirror of the hallstand-a silent voice in the head telling him to look like a copper, shoulders back, a tug of the hatbrim, trying for the glint of steel in the eyes-he heard the creak of bedsprings in the room above and the plump thump of his plump wife’s feet on the floor. Day begun. He pulled the door wide, the morning light reflecting brightly off the brok
en facade of the house opposite, and stepped out into the last day of his life.

  § 59

  As Walter Stilton stepped into the street Sergeant Troy was awoken by a telephone call from his father, a man who would never accept that his son did not ‘do’ mornings unless duty required. As a boy he had known his father to bumble into his bedroom in the pitch-darkness of pre-dawn with some philosophical conundrum on his lips. Today was a day just like those old days. Troy had long since learnt to move from sleep to waking without transition-one second sound asleep the next wide awake and firing on all cylinders.

  ‘What was it Berdyaev used to say about Russia?’ Alex said without greeting, without so much as a syllable from Troy.

  Lately-the last ten years or so-his father had tended to treat Troy as an extension of his memory. A substitute for his own failing powers. He had made Troy read so much as a child-all those prolonged, sickly weeks off school-that his education was warped by the old man-he knew things no one of his generation or education might ordinarily be expected to know. Alex would ask Troy things he could not ask Rod. It depressed Troy to think that his father was still grinding away at his Russian piece. If he hadn’t finished it by now? And what had become of his collaboration with Wells?

  ‘What exactly about Russia? He banged on about so many things.’

  ‘It’s in The Soul of Russia-or at least I thought it was. I cannot find it. Books without indexes should be banned.’

  ‘That’s probably what first narked Hitler.’

  Alex ignored this. ‘He was, as you put it, banging on about the Russian Mission.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Troy, ‘that. The Light from the East. It’s not Berdyaev-well, not just him, it’s most of the old ones. It’s in Dostoevsky. Perhaps even in Tolstoy, and you might recall your dad had more than a bit of a bee in his bonnet about the Holy Russian Mission.’

  ‘Holy?’ said Alex as though the word meant nothing to him, one atheist talking to another.

  ‘The Great Civilising Mission westward, how Russia as the keeper of the flame of Orthodoxy, the original true faith of Christ, would ultimately be the salvation of the decadent West, by which they meant anything west of Lvov. Of course they were right, in a way.’

  ‘What way?’ said his dad.

  ‘There was indeed a Russian mission west-it just wasn’t anything to do with Christ or Orthodoxy or Holy Mother Russia. It was born in 1917 and it died at the end of Frank Jacson’s icepick about nine months ago.’

  ‘Permanent Revolution,’ said Alex. ‘The earth-shattering theory of the late Comrade Trotsky. How very cynical of you, my boy.’

  He rang off. Troy wondered if he’d pushed the old man too far. He was fed up with things Russian, but Trotsky’s murder had run a shudder through the Troy household. If, his mother had protested, the arm of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin reached all the way to Mexico, then who in Europe was safe? Troy’s father had remained unruffled. He was, he pointed out, no threat to Stalin, no renegade Red and, better still, no exiled White. Stalin would not bother with him. Rod had strongly urged him to seek official protection, to talk to Churchill, and the old man had firmly and impolitely refused.

  Troy looked at the clock and felt lazy. He could go back to sleep for another hour, perhaps two. He was on the late shift and would not see his bed again before midnight. Besides, Kitty had not been round for a day or two-it would be just like her to turn up tonight; so lie decided to sleep while he could.

  § 60

  Cal passed the morning lying on his bed blowing smoke rings. It was the sum total of what he had learnt in two years at military academy. He rarely smoked, but when he did it was a sign of tension or boredom or both. A letter had come from his father, from New York-what was he doing in New York?-via Zurich. Postmarked April 23rd. The mail was speeding up. He had read it over breakfast. It filled him with despair.

  Plaza Hotel

  Grand Army Plaza

  New York

  Dear Son,

  America took a giant step today. The people spoke. Thirty thousand attended the New York America First Rally to hear Lindbergh speak. If FDR ignores this he’s a fool. This is the voice of America. This is the voice of the people.

  There were few things he hated more than having his father address him as though he were a voter rather than his own flesh and blood. Then the tone changed-a cloying confidentiality that had him yearning for the old man to get back on the stump.

  Of course I stayed off the platform. Let Lindy do the talking-as much as I could. The man is not the brightest bear in the woods, and God knows what he’d’ve said if I hadn’t written most of the speech for him. He was all set to sock it to the Jews. I told him ‘There’s no votes in criticizing Jews, in New York City of all places. Hymietown, for Christ’s sake. As long as we can keep him clear of anti-Semitism he’ll do fine. Just the figurehead we need. Perhaps we can let him rip when we get out West-nobody there gives a damn one way or the other about the Jews.

  What we have to get across is the conspiracy-there’s no other word for it-between the British and the White House, between FDR and Winston Churchill to bring America into this war, against the wishes of the people, by any reasonable pretext they can drum up. If That’s what America First has to expose…

  Cal stopped reading. Conspiracy? The old man was getting crazy. Poking around under the bed with a shotgun.

  He passed the afternoon drifting. Hating Walter for his absence. Drifting. From the leafy squares of Mayfair into the West End. Peering in the gentleman’s outfitters of Jermyn Street-wishing Frank Reininger had given him enough coupons to go in and ask them to measure him for a shirt. Thinking of Reininger he made his way back to the embassy-passed an hour waiting to see if Frank showed up. He didn’t. Berg did, greeted him as though his presence was an affront-‘So you finally decided to show up.’ Cal said ‘Fuck you, Henry,’ and left.

  He found his way to a cafe in Brewer Street. It was dismally quiet. Two old men shoving halfpennies up and down a marked board, just as he’d seen men doing that night in the crypt of St Alkmund’s, the radio on merely as a background burble. Then, the volume soared as the proprietor turned it up for the news, and a bloodless BBC voice announced the sinking of the Bismarck. What little chatter there had been stopped. Cal could count the beating seconds by the sound of his own heart. Half a minute passed this way. He was surprised. He’d half expected cheering or someone to get up and sing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. At last one of the old men picked up a halfpenny and said, ‘That’s that, then.’ And the other just said, ‘Yus.’

  He ate alone at the Bon Viveur. A table for two-a dinner for one. He figured to time his return to Claridge’s for the end of Kitty’s shift. With any luck they’d meet in the elevator. He’d persuade her to come out. Postpone the inevitability of sex until they’d been out somewhere. A club, a bar, somewhere.

  When he collected his key at the front desk the clerk handed him another letter. It looked like Kitty’s writing-that childish, half-formed hand he’d seen on her odd notes to him. The scrawl was hereditary. The letter was from her father.

  Been trying to get you on the phone for a couple of hours. Thought you’d be around. Meet me in Coburn Place N1 at 10.30 tonight. It’s an alley between two pubs, the Green Man and the Hand & Racquet. Don’t be late.

  Hoping this reaches you, one way or another.

  Yrs.

  Walter Stilton

  PS Wot larx!

  The address meant nothing to Cal. He asked at the desk-they silently handed him a street map of London. He found Coburn Place. Only with difficulty. It was tiny-it lurked under the L of ISLINGTON, sprawled across the grid in letters half an inch high. The two pubs weren’t marked on the map, but a music hall close by was-Collins’ Music Hall. He’d look for that.

  ‘How long would it take to get to Islington?’

  ‘By taxi, sir?’

  ‘Sure.’

  The clerk spun the map to face him. Cal lifted his finger.

  ‘Le
ss than half an hour. Perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes.’

  It was 10.05 now. Cal ran to the front door and told the doorman to hail him a cab. He’d be lucky to make it. Don’t be late, Walter had written. But better late than never.

  Late it was. In front of King’s Cross railway station the damage of May nth was still being patched up. A water main exposed-a deep trench in the road, a dozen workmen up to their ankles in brimming water, a lone policeman waving at the traffic and directing them all south, into Finsbury, a loop past Farringdon station, through Clerkenwell and into Islington from the other side. Cal sat with the street map open, trying to follow their route by the frequent flick of his cigarette lighter, glancing all too often at his watch.

  Late it was, and later. At 10.40 he paid off the cabby by Collins’ Music Hall and found Coburn Place, bent between the two public houses, zig-zagging right and left. He almost fell down the open cellar hatch of the Hand and Racquet. He struck his lighter with the ball of his thumb, held the cap open against the spring and moved slowly on with his left hand on the bricks as though to trace out his trail would somehow lead him back like Ariadne’s thread.

  Flickering, miasmic light-enough to see five paces ahead; enough, too, to see the leather soles of a pair of shoes that lay on the cobblestones not twenty feet beyond the cellar. He dropped the lighter-got down on his hands and knees and groped about on the stones. Found it, struck the flint and struck it again, and in the yellow light found himself looking into the dead eyes of Walter Stilton.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  He let his thumb off the lighter-sank into darkness, wondering if he’d seen what he knew he’d seen, wondering if he had the courage to look again.

  He flicked the flint. Walter was lying on his front down the length of the alley-the right side of his face lay in a pool of blood, the left looked up at Cal. One arm outstretched, the other lost beneath the body. His hat lay a few feet ahead, angled against the wall, as though it had spun off him like a loose hubcap. And there was no doubt about it. The man was dead. His third encounter with violent death, and already Cal knew the sight and fact of death with unquestioning certainty.