by James Munro
yl'd rather pick my own," Craig said, but Loomis shook his head.
"That's out," he said. "Pity. But it'll keep anyway. This Simmons person—pretty, is she?"
"Very."
"Twenty," Loomis said. "And rich. Very rich. Only child, too. Her father dotes on her. And she's daft enough to dote on you. Use that."
"All right," said Craig.
"I give you a free hand," Loomis said. "Do what
you like, tell her what you like—only find out
where her father gets his Russian news from. And,
son, she's young, she'll be looking for glamour.
You'd better make yourself—" he sought, found,
triumphantly produced the word—"dishy." * * *
Simmons fiddled deftly with the toy theater, and the curtains parted. It was a lush and Edwardian theater, all red plush and heavy gilt. It reminded Brodski of the millionaires' whorehouse his uncle had described visiting in Moscow in 1911. Brodski's uncle had been a man who had enjoyed life to the very last. That had been in Cracow in 1946, as far as Brodski had been able to discover. An Uzbek infantryman had got him with a bayonet . . . Simmons began to arrange cutout figures on the stage: tiny nude models of women, with remarkable fidelity to detail.
Brodski asked: "Is this my new floor show?"
"Good God no," said Simmons. "It's far too good for Nuderama. This is for a party at my place."
He maneuvered the chorus line into place: eight girls in picture hats. They wore nothing except boots.
"Extraordinary how much more naked they look with their hats on," he said. Brodski sighed.
"I do not like your parties," he said.
"I do," said Simmons. "They're works of art. A chance for me to be creative. Besides, BC needs a party." Brodski still looked sullen. "Look," said Simmons, "we've done very well so far. You've had the contacts and I've had the money. The security's been just about perfect, because you've stayed here and run the club and the contacts have come to you. They come here and they get paid C.O.D.—every time. We're reliable. We pay big money for big jobs." He looked round Brodski's office. "And a strip club's been the perfect cover, so far. But we're moving on to something bigger still."
Brodski said: "I'm delighted to hear it."
"That's why Jane had to contact Soong," said Simmons. "We're going to mess up a moon shot, Brodski."
He arranged another figure in Edwardian costume in front of the chorus line.
"She should sing one of those inane music-hall songs while she strips," said Simmons.
Brodski said: "A moon shot? How?"
"Soong had a contact for us. I can get it from elsewhere. That part's all right. But it'll cost money. Big money." He pulled delicately on strings attached to the figure; her costume came off. "A million," he said. "I haven't got a million. That's why I need the party."
"You have no money?"
"None. I have newspapers and magazines and a television company. But I don't have money. Not now. BC got the lot."
"You have been very generous—"
"I've done what I have to do. Russia must be hurt. We know that. So far I've spent a million and a half on that very purpose. And you have risked your life many times. We've both given what we had. But for this job we need more." He stared at the tiny stage, and let the curtains fall. "We need Airlie," he said. "He has a million to spare, and he wants to marry Jane. He is also an idealist—he wants to fight the Russians. Good. He's also young and hot-blooded. He likes women. Even better. We can appeal to him on two levels, Brodski. Idealism and blackmail."
"I do not like to blackmail a gentleman," said Brodski.
"Nor I, but it must be done. There's no other way," said Simmons.
"There's Medani. He has money."
"No," said Simmons. "Medani's father has money. In Morocco/He can't get it out. Anyway, we need Medani in Morocco, to fight the Russians there. He's a good Mohammedan—and a nobleman. His father's a very powerful man. If the time comes he could start a holy war."
Brodski said: "We have money in Morocco, too."
Simmons stared at him for a moment, then began to laugh.
"So we have," he said. "But are we really justified in spending it?"
Brodski began to talk about ethics, and Simmons grew bored. He let his mind drift away back to the old days, in Yugoslavia, up in the mountains. Tito's men had been doctrinaire and tiresome, but he'd met a group that had worked with Mihajlovic'. Guerrillas who fought because fighting was what men were for, fighting and drinking and women. For three months his life had been a wide-screen epic. But in the end he'd been recalled and his men had been betrayed. Not to the Germans, to the Russians. The men, and the woman Simmons adored. When Simmons got back he learned that even heroes could die, and die horribly. The woman had died most horribly of all. Since that time sex had been something to be exploited in others, nothing more. Love was something else again—love was what a man had for his daughter. It was just as well, he thought, that his wife had fallen off that damn horse.
Brodski stopped talking and Simmons said quickly: "Aren't you forgetting what the Russians did to you? Tell me about your brother."
Slowly, reluctantly at first, Brodski told him,
then as the story went on the words came faster.
Torture, agony, betrayal, death—for Brodski's
brother, his wife, his father, his uncle. On and on
went the story, and always it was the Russians who
were responsible. The Russians. The Russians. The
Russians. Simmons began to relax. Brodski was
going to be all right. He had learned to hate almost
as well as Simmons himself. And anyway, it was
time to get him out of the country.
* * *
Craig pondered the need for dishiness; unquestionably it existed. Girls like Jane Simmons had everything. To achieve novelty with them was an impossibility. Next morning he asked Mrs. McNab about it, but Mrs. McNab was still angry. She would talk only of Grierson and how irresistible he was because he was a gentleman. Craig could never be a gentleman and knew it. But he could buy a dark suit, a Royal Navy tie, a black briefcase, an umbrella, and—from Scott's—a bowler hat. He had never owned an umbrella or bowler hat before. The thought amused him. He'd owned part of a tramp-shipping line, a V8 Bristol, a vast assortment of firearms, a house in Northumberland, a small Greek island, even a slave. But not a bowler. The one he bought delighted him: it had a low crown and a narrow brim, and made him, he thought, elegant but respectable. Mrs. McNab thought it made him look like a bookmaker. Loomis said it was exactly right.
"They take all kinds of fellas in the Foreign Office nowadays," he said. "Here're your papers." He handed Craig the special passport, the pass, the visitor's card, the necessary files that some genius had spent the night preparing. Craig worked through them slowly, carefully, and Loomis glowed approval and lit a vile cigar.
"You'll have to use your own name," he said. "Doesn't matter if Simmons rings up about you. We'll have the call rerouted here." He leaned back, looked at Craig, six feet four from the soles of his Lobb shoes to the crown of his bowler.
"You went into the Foreign Office from the navy," he said. "You weren't at public school. You're classless. A New Man."
"That's right," said Craig.
"But you're still in the F.O.," said Loomis. "Don't hit anybody." Craig grinned. "You figured out how you're going to be dishy?"
"I always am," said Craig.
Already he'd gone over in his mind his two previous meetings with Jane Simmons, and the answer was obvious. Jane Simmons was attracted to him because she was afraid of him. She'd sensed the power in him, and the danger, and they had frightened her. She'd never been frightened before. That was all the novelty he had, but it might be enough.
He drove his Mark X back to Regent's Park, locked it in the garage, then took his suitcase, briefcase, and umbrella and got on a bus, then took the tube. He got off the tube at Piccadilly
, then darted back on again at the last possible moment. He was almost certain that no one was following him, but if they were, that trick nearly always worked, even if the man following had been trained by Department K. For Loomis sometimes had his own people followed; Loomis had at all times to be sure, and Craig, while he could see no harm in this, felt almost shy of Loomis's hearing about his latest possession. It lived in a little mews garage in Knightsbridge, a glistening, scarlet success symbol that had nothing at all to do with rolled umbrellas and bowler hats: a twelve-cylinder, 4.5-liter Lamborghini Miura, with a top speed of 180 miles an hour, ample room for two and no room at all for three. Five thousand pounds of his own money, and the only thing left for which he could feel any affection. The Lamborghini was as efficient as he was, its lines, like his own, dictated by the end for which it was created. But it was also a splendid thing to own. Expensive, illogical, flamboyant, and splendid. It made him happy. He got in, tossed the bowler hat behind him, and turned the key. The engine exploded into life, then modulated at once into the most superb of all mechanical sounds, the whisper of perfectly controlled power. Craig eased her out into the mews, locked the garage, then set off for Surrey. The best part. Where even the temperature of the rain is thermostatically controlled.
Simmons had quite a lot of space in Who's Who. Educated at Rugby and Magdalene College, Cambridge, only son of Reverend Percy and Mrs. Dora Simmons. Married Lady Jane Manners (deceased), oldest daughter of the Earl of Worthing. Clubs: White's, Athenaeum; hobbies listed as various. Age forty-five. Christian names Christopher Galahad. Who's Who didn't say that he owned a national daily, a national Sunday, seventeen provincial newspapers, three magazines, a television station, and a small but growing paperback publishing firm. But he did. It didn't say that during the war he had fought in the Balkans with various unorthodox units and won a D.S.O. But he had. It didn't say that he was worth seven million pounds. But he was. Craig opened out the Miura as he reached the Surrey road and wondered what a millionaire seven times over meant when he said his hobbies were various. Doubtless he would find out.
He'd heard already how he had made his money. That had started with his father. The Rev. Percy Simmons had been an unabashed hell-fire Baptist during the earlier part of his life. His visions of hell, described graphically and at length, had drawn enormous crowds three times every Sunday. That was in the 1880's, when hell still smelled of sulfur and northern congregations knew how to groan. A jobbing printer had approached the young, brazen-tongued reverend with the idea of printing his sermons, and a great career was born. The minister found he had another talent, another duty, besides that of preparing devout and quivering Yorkshiremen for the imminence of hell. He could publish—and prepare—the whole world, or at least that part of it which could read the English language. He started with The Bible Weekly, then a Christian daily, The Good News, then The Christian Woman's Companion, which was to evolve, gradually but remorselessly, into Woman's Way, weekly net average six million. There was a period when the Reverend Simmons founded three publications a year, and a lot of them crashed, but the ones that stuck did very good business indeed.
When World War I came, Simmons combined religion with patriotism, and his readers in the trenches found that his vision of hell was by no means exaggerated. After that war, the Christianity slowly but surely diminished but the patriotism stuck. Simmons gloried in his Englishness, and persuaded a lot of other people to glory in it too. It was what God had set him to do, and it paid a six per cent dividend. In 1921 at the age of sixty, he'd made a million and discovered he had no one to share it with, so he married a lady missionary who bore him Christopher Galahad (the latter name was her idea; she read a lot of Tennyson) and died when the child was three. Christopher had been sent to public school and Cambridge, though his old man had prayed at him for a solid hour every day of every vacation. He'd been destined to help his father when he was twenty-one, but the war stopped that. After five terms at Cambridge, at the age of nineteen, he became a cadet at Sandhurst. By 1942, on his twenty-first birthday, he was on a mission to Tito in Yugoslavia. When the war ended he was twenty-five, with the substantive rank of major. He never went back to the university, though they gave him an honorary doctorate after he built them a new college; instead, he went to help his father, then eighty-four, who was running the firm on an unrelieved diet of Union Jacks and brimstone. The old man dropped dead quite suddenly in the late summer of 1945—Loomis said it was because Labour won the election.
Christopher Galahad took over at once as chairman of the company, and within a year was managing director too. He had all of his father's canni-ness and drive, and a shrewdness for handling nicely calculated odds that slithering about the Balkans two jumps ahead of the Gestapo had honed to a very fine edge indeed. He was Britain's leading expert on the technique of making money out of the printed and spoken word. In 1946 he married the daughter of a sporting peer, and she promptly bore him a daughter, then died on the hunting field when the child was six months old. He never went near a place of worship.
9
Craig fumbled his way among the houses of the fairly rich—"two minutes from station, superior view"—to the stone-walled estates of the very rich indeed. Here the road spiraled gently around the curves of the downs, and copses and spinneys of firs were a black drama of lances against a blue pastel sky. Here the grass was short and plentiful, apt for the hooves of superior horses, and villages hid their lack of wealth discreetly, between folds of the smooth, expensive hills. The Lamborghini became more and more the right car to be driving; a Bentley would have been cowardly.
He found the place at last. About four miles of flintstone wall, pierced by lodge gates with a pretty eighteenth-century cottage at the side. He slowed as he turned into the gates, but the lodgekeeper took one look at the car and waved him on, through a mile of elm trees to a house designed during Queen Anne's reign by a pupil of Christopher Wren; a plain, neat rectangle of a house, flanked by identical wings, its brick faded to an enduring rose, its portico unpretentious, its chimney stacks slim and austere—a house entirely beautiful
because of the perfection of its proportions. He drove on to a graveled area, flanked by barbered lawn, and heard the whoosh of stones beneath his racing tires. Five other cars stood on the graveled area: two Rolls Royces, a Mercedes 800, a Ferrari, and a little Alfa-Romeo; there was plenty of room for the Lamborghini.
Craig retrieved his bowler, settled it at the right angle, then took up his briefcase and umbrella. It was time to pay his respects to Mammon. As he slammed the Lamborghini's door the whole scene seemed to freeze; himself with a ten-guinea bowler standing beside a five-thousand-pound automobile, with a quarter of a million pound's real estate as background. It looked like a whisky ad in a Sunday supplement. And then he remembered the night when he and his father had been out in the coble and the mackerel had run with the crazy death wish of which only mackerel are capable, so that the boat was heaped with the graceful shapes of fish, urgent even in death, that the moonlight had turned to a pale-winking silver, and his father's voice had said: "There's a fortune here, Jackie lad. A fortune." And he'd been able to do no more than nod, he was so bone-weary, but when they reached the little Tyneside port, every fish had had to be gutted and boxed and packed in ice. Then his father had had to carry him home on his shoulders, and he felt so marvelous—tired as he was—it was like riding between the stars. His father's share of the fortune had been four pounds thirteen and ninepence—and mackerel for a week.
The memory came sharp and clear, and Craig dismissed it, erasing it from his mind like a sponge erases the writing from a blackboard. That kind of thing took your mind from the job in hand; it made you vulnerable. He walked across the gravel toward the broad, shallow flight of steps that led to the house, and already a man was there, waiting for him. Craig felt a swift flash of disgust with himself; if he hadn't been standing daydreaming he'd have been ready for this man, instead of being watched by him.
He wa
s a man to be ready for: taller than Craig's six feet, wide-shouldered, barrel-chested, but with an economy of movement that made Craig think of a mountaineer he had known in Crete. There was the same combination of tremendous strength and physical control. This man wore striped gray trousers, a short black coat, a black -and-silver tie. His face was round but without weakness, the cheekbones set rather high, the eyes very dark. A face rather Slav than Teuton, but without the usual free play of Slav emotion. It was the face of a man who would treat cruelty and kindness with equal indifference.
Craig said: "Miss Simmons, please."
The man said: "I will inquire, sir. What name shall I give?"
"John Craig."
He could have said: "Tell her we met in the Lake District. I inquired into the death of the Chinaman." Or even: "I've come to make further enquiries." But his name alone was better—if she remembered.
The butler opened the great half-door behind him and Craig walked into a hall floored in black and white marble, and furnished with the kind of
wealth going shabby that only utter certainty of riches can afford. The picture over the mantelpiece needed cleaning, but it was by Van Dyck; the breakfront table had a scar on it, but Sheraton had made it. And the whole place was littered with coats, a fencing mask, two shotguns in a case, and a pile of Woman's Way. The wealth here was to be used. Craig sat in an armchair and looked at the shotguns as the butler moved away with the long, tireless stride that can keep going all day. The guns were a matched pair, their barrels chased in silver, but they looked bloody accurate, the balance exactly right. Money could buy you that, and every variation of it, but it couldn't teach you to hit the target. Money bought you butlers too, even this butler, who looked about as much in place here as a leopard would have. He's in his early thirties, Craig thought. The absolute prime for a man like that, a man who'd seen a lot and done a lot more, till he knew there weren't many men he need be afraid of —and yet he moved cautiously just the same. Craig looked around; the butler was walking toward him across the marble, and a cat would have made no more noise.