Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  Troy blinked into the light of an unshaded overhead bulb. There was a small woman, two men flanked her like colossal bookends. They were in a cellar.

  ‘Wassamatterbaby? Light too bright for you? My boys hit you too hard?’

  Troy looked at the two men. Large, dark and anonymous in their heavy black overcoats. Broad, brutal Slav faces. The one very much like the other.

  ‘Do we need them?’ he asked.

  She waved the two men towards the door. It thudded behind them, and in a swift upward movement Troy seized Tosca by the throat.

  ‘I thought you were dead!’

  ‘Take it easy, baby,’ she gasped.

  His grip tightened.

  ‘I thought you were dead!’

  He had her back against the brick wall. Anger gave him a strength he did not feel.

  ‘I thought you were dead! There was blood all over the place!’

  ‘Let me go and I’ll tell you!’

  Troy eased his grip. He felt his legs would buckle under him, but he stood looking down into the clear brown eyes.

  ‘I thought you’d spot it.’

  ‘Spot what?’

  ‘You know. It’s an old trick. I felt sure you’d get the message. Oh, Come on, baby. We talked about the goddam book the first time we met. Remember? Huck Finn?’

  ‘The blood group matched yours. I had it checked against your army medical record. I really thought you were dead. Huck Finn used pig’s blood!’

  ‘Oh come on. Where in hell d’you think I’d get a live pig three blocks from Trafalgar Square? Besides it took less than a pint. You splash it around enough and it can look like a real mess.’

  ‘A set-up?’

  ‘Sure. What else?’

  ‘An NKVD set-up?’

  ‘We got a new name for it now. New initials too.’

  ‘And I suppose we’re in the East now?’

  ‘Well – I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto.’

  97

  Spent seed did not send Troy tumbling into a vulnerable, satiated sleep. Tosca slept. Troy felt he would never sleep again. Understanding so little, nettled into a stinging alertness. The back of his head throbbed. He wrapped his shirt around him and stumbled into the sliver of light that came from the crack between the shutters. The light hit the cracked linoleum floor, a rough shard beneath his feet. How often had he shuffled around her bedroom, in and out of the light, working out the pieces she had put in front of him, so seemingly casual, teasing him like a child with the jumbled mess of a jigsaw puzzle.

  As ever her eyes flicked open. Not even a flutter of the eyelids to drag herself from sleep. She woke instantly, totally, hard-eyed and staring.

  ‘Oh God, Troy. Do you never sleep?’

  ‘I was waiting.’

  ‘Waiting for what for Chrissake?’

  ‘For you to tell me what a fool I’ve been.’

  ‘OK. You’ve been a fool. The complete horse’s ass. Now come back to bed.’

  ‘How long did you string me out? Feeding me titbits. From the start?’

  ‘You don’t want to go into that. Really you don’t.’

  ‘You played me for a fool. I think I deserve an explanation.’

  ‘Oh my. Have you turned into a pompous asshole or what?’

  He had drifted too close to the bed. A powerful hand snatched him back. Her left foot shot out, biffed him lightly in the belly and pinned him to a sitting position. Her grip on his arm was fierce. She squirmed upright, looking straight into his eyes.

  ‘You want it? You’ll get it. Could be a long story. I have to go back a few years.’

  ‘I’ve got the patience of Job,’ Troy said quietly.

  ‘No, Troy, I don’t think you have. You have the fucked-up selfmartyrdom of one of those boring Christian saints.’

  It was the most complex notion Troy had heard pass her lips.

  ‘OK. OK. Picture this, you complete pain in the ass. 1905 – my dad, like your dad, gives up on the revolution. He gets out of Russia. He thinks it’s never going to happen. So he sails for New York. Settles on the Lower East Side, where the wops and the Jews live, a dozen or so to a room. There he meets my sweet little Italian momma, only seventeen years old when he marries her in 1910 – in 1911 I come along. Born an American, raised an American. Then it happens. The revolution does come, and the old man can’t wait to get back – he’s itching for it, but he can’t get there. Everybody in Europe’s fighting everybody else. It’s 1919 before he can get a passage to St Petersburg. All three of us make the crossing. I puked every day for two weeks. But the old man is happy – he dumps us in a crummy apartment in Moscow, flourishes his party card and suddenly he’s gone – we don’t see the bastard for nearly two years. He fights for Mother Russia, the reddest soldier in the Red Army – by the end of the war they’re pinning medals on him so fast they have to use a fuckin’ stapler. So, he comes home, one eye gone, three fingers missing and a chestful of ribbons. He looks like Halloween. I guess I’m eleven or twelve. My Russian’s fluent – which is just as well, on account of all my mom can do is struggle with her mishmash of English and Italian and scream that she wants to go home. We don’t. We’re here for good he tells her. And just to show her he uses privilege and gets her a classy apartment and enrolls me in the youth wing of the party. And every night she cries herself to sleep.’

  Troy’s mouth opened to speak and Tosca’s hand flashed out at the intake of breath, her fingertips resting on his lips.

  ‘Whatever it is, keep it. Just shuttup. You wanted it all. So shuttup or I stop.

  ‘Now. It’s 1924. Lenin’s been dead about three months. Trotsky’s losing out. May Day parade’s over. The goons are climbing down off their podium and some lunatic cries “Long Live Holy Mother Russia” and points a gun at Trotsky. So what does my father do? The stupid bastard bursts out of the crowd and throws himself in front of Trotsky and takes a full magazine right in the chest. Well, of course, he gets a hero’s funeral. We already knew he was a hero, but to tell the truth this really doesn’t count for much with my mother. All she can think of is that they’re burying him in three different places – ’cos one eye’s in Siberia somewhere, and the three fingers are in the Ukraine. The day after his funeral she asks to leave – like a kid in a school she hates she says “Can I go home now?” ’Cos she’s had the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Well, you’d expect they’d say no. And they go on saying no – until ’31 when I’m told to present myself at Party Headquarters. They’ve cooked up a lulu of a scheme. Am I a loyal party member? Of course I am, I say. After all to say no is to ask for a one-way ticket to the salt mines. Even at twenty I know that. How did I see the future of Europe? I stumble through that one. It’s kind of a biggie. I seem to recall something about the inevitable collapse of the evil British Imperialists as the irresistible workers’ movement wells up in the rainy little islands. Cut the crap, says the head brasshat, in so many words. The Brits are out of it. Let ’em drink tea. What about the Germans? Like I said I was a shrewd twenty-year-old. It’s Hitler I said. He’s your problem. A year or two, maybe five and the little corporal could be chancellor of the paper republic. That was the right answer. Jackpot. Hole-in-one. How would I like to go back to the States? they ask. For a second or two this throws me – one minute we’re discussing Germany. Now it’s America. But I get the message. Momma can go home, but I have to go with her and I have to go as an agent of the Soviet Union.

  ‘I said it was a lulu, didn’t I? They fix us up a phoney past to explain the twelve years in Russia – we’ve been picking lemons in the hills above Naples or some place like that. And as we’re both American citizens we’ve no trouble getting back in. I enlist. Do my basic training in Virginia, and go to serve Uncle Sam, but really I’m serving Uncle Joe, ’cos what worries the Russians is that when the war comes – and they’d no doubts that it would – America will stay neutral, that they’ll let Europe go under and Russia with it. So – they need people on the inside. I guess
I was one of a dozen, maybe more, working my way up, working my way closer. I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen, I didn’t have a clue what I believed.

  ‘Then, a few months after basic training I was posted to a desk job in Washington. It was April or May of ’32. That spring thousands and thousands of poor people, First-War vets most of ’em, marched on Washington, camped around the edge in a colossal shanty town. All they asked was a bonus payment – something they were owed anyway for doing their bit in the war. Do you know what the home of the brave and the land of the free did to its poor? They bulldozed their shacks and shanties, and MacArthur, Ike and that lunatic George Patton turned the cavalry loose on those walking bags of bones. I was there. I saw that. Troy, if I didn’t believe in what I was doing before, I sure as hell did after. Life, liberty and the pursuit of hogwash.’

  ‘And what do you believe now?’

  ‘What? What? What in hell gives you the right to ask me what I believe?’

  Tosca leapt from the bed, banging heavily on the floor. Her fists pounded each shutter in turn, sending them crashing into the window. She turned to face him, red with rage, her arms in the air, her breasts shaking with the weight of anger.

  ‘Troy, Troy, Troy. What do you believe? Don’t answer that! I can tell you. Troy, you believe nothing.’

  She knelt at his feet, took his hands in hers and pulled him down to her. She held him by the head, face to face, their noses almost touching, one hand spanning the lump on the back of his head and the cut on his temple, the other palm spread across his cheekbone.

  ‘Troy,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘if you believed in anything it would be in justice or whatever you want to call it, or maybe the rule of law. I prefer justice. At first I used to think that’s what drove you. Justice. That’s not the way it is. The guys you catch could swing or walk free for all you cared – you love one thing only, the pursuit. You have a sense of means without a sense of ends. You can’t see beyond the pursuit. You’re like some fifth horseman of the Apocalypse. After War and Famine comes the Avenging Demon. Never asks where it’s all leading but never gives up. It’s as though you’re no part of the system that follows, the system it all fits into. I am. I know what I do. I know what connects with what. You don’t. You never did. So you can’t ask me what I believe.’

  From saint and martyr to demon possessed in a thousand easy moves, thought Troy. Her mouth closed on his. As she pulled back from the kiss to look at him, four years of rage and pain welled momentarily in his eyes. Tosca licked the tears, kissed Troy on each eyelid, on the forehead, all over his face. Pressed into the flesh of her cheek, smothered in the smell of Tosca, he said as clearly as he could, ‘I honestly thought you were dead.’

  ‘Well. It’s time to fuck the ghost.’ And she tore the shirt from his back.

  98

  The radiator creaked and strained in the corner, occasionally kicking out with a knock that echoed around the building in a slow diminuendo. Troy stood in the window looking down into the street. The greyest of days. The streets empty of people. A joyless Christmas morning silence, broken only by the near-subliminal hum of aeroplanes. Tosca had been an age in the bathroom. He was fully dressed. Hands in his overcoat pockets, waiting again. There was a gentle rap on the door. Troy opened it. A small, dark man, buried in a huge grey overcoat, his face half-hidden by a scarf wrapped up over his chin and a trilby pulled well down on to his forehead.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said in near-perfect English and swung his attaché case forward to indicate his wish to come in. Troy stepped aside. The man set down the case on the bed and turned back to Troy. Troy wondered whether Tosca had a gun, and what he should do if the man produced a weapon. The man unwrapped a layer of scarf revealing the kind of face that has five-o’clock shadow all day, and pushed his hat further back on his head. He looked to Troy to be about forty-five.

  ‘At last,’ he said.

  ‘At last?’ said Troy. ‘At last what?’

  ‘At last we meet. A little late, but not too late I believe to express my gratitude.’

  Troy stared. He could not place the face, he could not place the accent. A Czech, a Pole, one of those airmen that used to be so abundant in England only a few years ago?

  ‘You weren’t to know what you were doing for me. But believe me, it helped my faith in humanity to know that my death was not ignored. Strange as it may seem it gave me a grudging respect for the Metropolitan Police that I had scarcely felt in all my years in London.’

  A sepia photograph, a paler patch on patterned wallpaper where it had once stood came flashing back through Troy’s mind, even to the mundanity of the flowered pattern itself.

  ‘You’re Peter Wolinski,’ he said.

  The man glanced impatiently at the bathroom door.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and if you will forgive me this will be but a short reunion. If you would be so good as to tell Major Toskevich I called.’

  ‘Toskevich?’

  ‘If you ever have to adopt an alias, Inspector Troy, you will find it easier to adjust the closer it is to your own name. But, then I suppose that was exactly the logic your late father employed. He never ceased to be one of us you know, but I doubt there was any way he could have told you. Well, I’ll bid you goodbye.’

  He opened the door, and Troy grabbed him by the sleeve.

  ‘My uncle too?’ he asked.

  ‘Good Lord no. A complete maverick. What nation in its right mind wants a secret agent who tells the truth from a soapbox at Speaker’s Corner? Only the most far-fetched paranoiacs in the Secret Service could ever think he was one of us.’

  With that he was gone. Troy turned to the case. He listened to the sound of running water in the bathroom. He flicked the catches on the case and opened the lid. It was empty but for a fat bundle of crisp, white five-pound notes. He looked once more at the bathroom door. It had opened noiselessly and she was standing in it. Fully clothed and made-up. She bent to pull on her shoes, saying as she did, ‘Go ahead. It’s yours.’

  Troy picked up the bundle and riffled a few sheets.

  ‘Are they real?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course they’re not real. You think I’d waste a thousand smackeroos on a fuckin’ Nazi? We ran ’em off by the wagonload during the war. Never got used. I just helped myself to a handful.’

  ‘Dieter said there were few secrets in Berlin,’ Troy sighed.

  ‘Von Asche’ll never spot the difference. They’re the best. Pay the guy and take your chance. It’s a good scheme. I could have thought it up myself.’

  ‘Was the messenger your idea too?’

  ‘No – I think Peter was just curious. I think he felt he had to prove something to you. I guess after four years he wanted to let you know he was still alive. Something like that. You know these Poles, they’re not like you and me. They’re half-crazy to begin with.’

  ‘You and I are alike?’

  Troy split the bundle into two and stuffed a wad in each pocket of his overcoat. Tosca slipped on her fur coat and told him it was time to go. Out in the street Troy asked how he would get back.

  ‘No problem. We’re only on the Schadowstrasse. The end of the block and you’re back on Unter den Linden. You could practically spit through the Brandenburg Gate.’

  ‘What do I do?’ he asked, clueless. ‘Just walk across?’

  Tosca slipped an arm though his and tapped his shoulder lightly with the side of her head – walking along in the bitter biting cold like young lovers.

  ‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘With me along, you think anybody’s going to ask you a damn thing? Just walk right into the British sector. I am known in these parts. Believe me, baby, I am known.’

  She eased her grip on him slightly and kicked out a few paces in mock goose step.

  ‘I don’t think anyone’s going to find that funny,’ Troy said.

  At the Brandenburg Gate four soldiers stood bored and cold. Troy wondered if they would salute Tosca or block his way. They looked, but ther
e seemed to be not a flicker of recognition or concern on their faces, and as Tosca stepped under the arch two of them shouldered their rifles in a semblance of duty and moved off. The arch was chipped and scarred from bullets, parts of it flaked and crumbled almost before the eyes, the dust of a thousand-year Reich.

  ‘I’ll see you at Gatow tonight,’ she said, and pecked him on the cheek, the perfect wife seeing off her commuter husband on the 8.10 from Weybridge.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought the RAF wangled you on to a night flight out?’

  ‘They have. But how the hell do you expect to get into a British base?’

  ‘Oh baby, this is so elementary. Two and two are four – you get my drift. Now, Gatow is an airfield. That means planes land there, right? Now how do planes land – yes I know they have pilots – but, my stupid angel, they also need air traffic control or they’d be flying up each other’s asshole like New England turkeys in a blizzard! Who do you think runs air traffic control? We do. Not a single damn plane could make it down the air corridor to land if we told the Krauts on this side to pull air traffic control.’

  ‘Your world,’ he said, ‘is composed of so many shades of grey . . . it isn’t even worth guessing any more.’

  ‘Suit yourself – but Uncle Joe and the Missouri haberdasher have a few little deals going here and there. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stalin hasn’t got a tasteless tie for Christmas. Trust me. I’ll be there. Pay the Kraut and get out to Gatow. And don’t mess around. I don’t have all day. Bob Hope’s playing Tempelhof tonight. I wouldn’t want to miss him!’

  ‘Curiouser . . . ’ said Troy.

  ‘It’s all part of the game.’

  ‘ . . . And curiouser,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you knew my father?’ She shook her head, grinning.

  ‘Or Tom Driberg?’

  ‘Now you’re being silly.’

  She pecked him on the cheek again, turned, and with what Troy would have said was a skip in her step, set off quickly back down Unter den Linden. Troy looked to the guards. One of them made a beckoning motion, pointed to the West and then turned his back on him. Troy walked through the arch, hearing the sound of his own shoes clatter on the flagstones in the vast silence as though he were the only person in all Berlin. Everywhere the piles of rubble had been turned into shining white mountains by the overnight snow, but nothing on earth could make the man-made ruins seem natural. A landscape in white, slashed by jagged lines. It reminded Troy of the day nearly five years ago when he and Bonham had followed the ragtag army of Stepney schoolboys out to the ruined streets on the Green. Another white, dazzling landscape of war’s detritus. The silence shattered. Planes overhead. No more Heinkel, no more Dornier. Douglas Dakotas droned and purred. Rising out of Tempelhof.