Capricorn and Cancer

by Geoffrey Household

  Pidgegood would talk of nothing else but Valdes. He reproached me to my face for not getting him off. There wasn’t a man in the company, he said, whatever his colour, who wouldn’t have died for Valdes, except me. I didn’t attempt to explain. Pidgegood never understood the army machine.

  ‘Have you seen him?’ I asked.

  ‘Gawd, yes! We runs round the yard together.’

  They did not have a condemned cell, you see. Firing squads were hardly ever used in the humane army of the last war. I suppose the proper procedure for dealing with Valdes was laid down, but it was not a matter of everyday experience and nobody wanted to be too formal.

  And then, corrupted by the mere presence and criminality of Pidgegood, I suddenly saw a remote chance.

  ‘Do you want to go back to the psychiatric ward?’ I asked him.

  ‘They won’t ’ave nothing more to do with me,’ he said.

  ‘Ever tried attempted murder?’

  ‘Not worth it. Touch one of them warders, and they’ll ’alf kill you and swear it was done resisting constraint.’

  ‘It wasn’t one of them I meant,’ I explained.

  He got it. He got it instantly. His gipsy mind took him right to the point before I had done more than feel for it myself.

  ‘I couldn’t do ’im any ’arm with my bare ’ands,’ he said, ‘before they’d separate us.’

  We were alone in the cell. The warder was outside, but he didn’t bother to supervise interviews between a prisoner and his long-suffering commanding officer. I took a handkerchief from the pocket of my battle-dress trousers and blew my nose, looking away from Pidgegood. When I had replaced the handkerchief and done up the button I noticed that the familiar lump against my thigh, which was my powerful pocket knife, had disappeared. I swear I felt nothing. It only occurred to me later that the unaccountable loss of several of my treasured possessions had always taken place when that scoundrel was with the company.

  ‘The face, if possible, Pidgegood,’ I said, getting ready to go. ‘And if there is anything I can do for you at any time, you know I will.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. But I reckon I won’t be coming back to the company this time.’

  Then I went on to see Valdes. There was a sergeant of military police present throughout the interview, and I couldn’t drop a hint of what was brewing. When I left the cell I returned Valdes’s salute with the tears running down my face. I was sure I would never see him again. Pidgegood seemed a frail ally against the imposing formality of military justice.

  Not till the morning when Valdes, we all assumed, had been executed did I hear what had happened. The Spaniards of his section came babbling into the orderly room all at once and for the first time in their lives had to be reminded by a roaring and indignant sergeant-major that they were soldiers.

  Did I know the news from Bari? No I didn’t. Valdes had been attacked in the exercise yard by Pidgegood and carved up with two strokes of a knife. The first had slit him from mouth to ear and taken the ear three-quarters off; the second had ripped open the artery of his left arm. Did I know that it was not the custom to execute a hospital patient? Did I know that he must be nursed back to health before he could be shot?

  I showed as much pleasure as could be expected from an unemotional company commander, and asked how Pidgegood had come by a knife. That did not seem to bother anybody. Pidgegood could not be imagined without a knife. They forgot the regular searches of cell and person. In fact it was very fortunate that Valdes, Pidgegood and their fellow criminals had been doubled out for exercise within a few hours of my visit.

  Through the correct channels I asked whether it was permissible to visit Valdes in hospital, not being quite sure whether he was officially dead or not. Nothing against it. He was very glad to see me. His head was swathed in bandages, and the pale oak colour of his face had changed to yellow. He could not understand what had come over Pidgegood. He assumed that the doctors must have been right about him after all.

  Military justice was now following all the rules of the game. Valdes had a guard continually at his bedside—or at least playing cards not more than three beds away. He was not even allowed to attend to the needs of nature alone, though his escort remained outside the swing door. I took a fatherly interest in all these arrangements. I also took note of the exact measurements and windings of his bandages.

  I gave liberal leave to the Spaniards of his section—with the exception of Moreno. The hospital doorkeepers became accustomed to their cheerful arrivals and chattering departures. Valdes soon looked his normal self and colour. The surgeons, knowing what was in store for him when they released him, kept him as long as they mercifully could, and even wasted time in removing the scar of Pidgegood’s knife—or mine, rather—by the latest plastic operation. But at last the week arrived when he had to be passed fit for execution.

  I allowed four of the section to take a company truck and pay a good-bye visit. I met the truck on the road and put Moreno in the back of it, holding a saint of painted wood on a rather large base representing a rock. Inside the base was a sort of cap, made of bandages wound over the thinnest possible mould of plaster of paris. It needed only one more wind and a safety pin to be an exact replica of Valdes’ bandage. Parcels brought by visitors were examined at the door, so we had to use this subterfuge. We felt sure the saint would have no objection to taking part in an errand of mercy.

  Beyond providing the party with very precise operation orders which I made them learn by heart, I had nothing else to do with the proposed felony. Whatever happened I knew they would never give me away or even refer to the matter again.

  At 14.15 hrs. the detachment passed the lavatories on Valdes’ floor. Moreno whipped the cap out of its hiding place and entered No. 3 lavatory. The rest went straight on to Valdes’ ward and presented him with the saint. At 14.18 hours Valdes, accompanied by his guard, also entered No. 3 lavatory, sidling in and not opening the door too wide. It was a stable door, but so long as Valdes and Moreno kept their heads down they could not be seen. We simply had to trust that the guard would not look under the door and see four feet instead of two.

  Valdes put on Moreno’s battle-dress, and shoved his bandages in the pocket. Moreno put on the cap, and Valdes’ pyjamas. Groaning a little and holding his tummy to disguise his height, he trotted back to bed and dived under the bedclothes. His four visitors made a little doleful conversation and said an emotional good-bye. Then they picked up Valdes and drove like hell for our camp, passing close behind the French sector of the front where they dropped their corporal. I wasn’t sure that I had not been too impudently ingenious there. But the plan worked. After all the last place anyone would look for Valdes was among the French.

  He changed into ragged civilian clothes—also provided in the truck—and spend the night crawling through the French forward positions until he was sure that only enemy patrols were ahead of him. Next morning, pretending to have escaped from a German labour battalion, he came in. The French believed him, or said they did. They were always short of good men and pretty unscrupulous how they recruited them. Six hours later Valdes had enlisted in the Foreign Legion.

  Moreno had a much better run for his money than we ever thought he could. He kept up the deception till dawn of the following day, and very gladly accepted what I had prophesied—two years reduced to one when the sentence came up for revision. The others swore that they had never known that the man in bed was not Valdes, and the prosecution just failed to prove beyond a doubt that they did.

  Pidgegood enjoyed a happy and idle war in the mental home. As for me, the worst I had to bear was an interview with my colonel who told me privately that I was strongly suspected of knowing more about the escape of Valdes than I had stated in evidence. He had sworn to my character and assured the military detectives that their suspicions were impossible.

  ‘It’s an immoral trade, command,’ he said, looking me straight in the eye. ‘One becomes far too fond of one’s subordinates.’


  6

  Woman in Love

  IT was the nearest he had ever come to sending an agent to his death. Her death, rather. He admitted that he shouldn’t have taken the risk, that a man with his experience of women should have known better; but there he was with the enemy order of battle—or ally’s peaceful deployment, according to how you look at it—all along the southern fringe of the Iron Curtain from Bratislava to the Black Sea. The list was complete, and accurate up to the previous Saturday; and there wasn’t a chance of getting it out to the west. No handy secret wireless. No landing grounds. Not a trustworthy agent who had the remotest hope of being given a passport in time to be of use. Theotaki had found his job much easier when operating under the noses of the Gestapo.

  He was a Roumanian of Greek origin, with all a Greek’s hungry passion for the ideal freedom which had never in practical politics existed, and never could. He had also the Greek’s love of adventurous intrigue for its own sake. One gets used to the trade, he would say. Steeplejacks, for example. They couldn’t be thinking all the time about risk. They took, he supposed, meticulous care with all their preparations—blocks and tackle, scaffolding, belts—and then got on with the job. It was only when a man had scamped the preliminaries that he need worry about risks.

  Normally there was no need to scamp them, no disastrous demand for hurry. Cold war wasn’t like hot war, and there weren’t any impatient generals howling for immediate results. So caution, caution, caution, all the time. It was a bit dull, he said, but the main objective had to be to keep his organization alive.

  He admitted, however, that this had been an occasion for desperate measures. The only chance he could see of getting that enemy order of battle into hands that would appreciate it was D17. D17 was going to the very next day to Stockholm to be married. She would never have been allowed to leave for less neutral territory; but it was hard, even for communist bureaucrats, to think up a really valid excuse for preventing a citizen—an entirely useless citizen whose parents were living on the proceeds of their jewellery and furniture—from taking herself off to Sweden and matrimony, when a firm request for her had been passed through diplomatic channels.

  Alexia—D17—was a very minor agent: somewhat too enthusiastic, said Theotaki, for her sister had been mishandled by the Russian advance guards when they entered Bucharest and had died the following week. The unfortunate incident had had some effect on Theotaki’s ideals of freedom too. But he never confessed to emotion. To judge by his jowled, dead, decadent face, you wouldn’t have thought him capable of feeling any.

  Since he had moved before the war in the social circle of the parents and their two daughters, he knew Alexia very well. She had, of course, no idea that he was in any way responsible for the occasional orders received by D17. She couldn’t have given away more than the three names of the other members of her cell—at least she couldn’t up to the time when Theotaki was forced into gambling against his better judgment.

  He kept her under observation all the morning. She was shopping for a few clothes and necessary trifles that she could much better have bought abroad. But she didn’t know that. Alexia visualized the outside world as seething with unemployment and economic distress. Of course she did, of course she did, exclaimed Theotaki, defending this absurd shopping. Even when you are aware that all your news is tainted, you have to believe some of it. For all Alexia knew, the shops of Stockholm might well have been looted by starving rioters or bought out by dollar-waving American troops.

  She was obviously happy. Well, why wouldn’t she be? She was a tense and luminous woman in her middle twenties escaping to her lover and doing a bit of buying to please his eyes. When, however, she sat down, alone, in the huge barren hall of a cheap café, she was ashamed of herself. Theotaki guessed it from her bearing, from the uncertainty of her eyes. He was clever as any woman at guessing mood when not a word had passed. To be ashamed of yourself for being happy was, he explained, one of the most damnable, minor, nagging aches of political tyranny. Your personal tastes and joys could not be altered by the common discontent, yet you felt they should be. Love and the flighting of duck at first light and the relish of wine to a man and the feel of a dress to a woman—they don’t come to an end because your country is enslaved and terrorized.

  So that was the position—D17 sitting in a café, thinking of her beloved with one half of her mind, and with the other her duty to hate; and Theotaki moving behind her to find a table, not too far away, where she couldn’t see and greet him.

  He took one of the café’s illustrated papers in its cane frame, and began abstractedly to write a poem across the blank spaces of an advertisement. When he had finished his drink and his casual scribbling, he paid his bill and sent the waiter to Alexia with the paper. He then vanished from his table and stood talking to a casual acquaintance by the door, whence he could watch in a mirror the effect of his inspiration.

  The waiter suspected nothing. It was a quite normal act to send a paper to a customer who had asked for it—especially if the customer were a pretty girl. At least it appeared quite normal when Theotaki did it. That he was alive at all was largely due to his naturalness of manner.

  Alexia received the paper as if it were expected. Theotaki approved her presence of mind, and well he might. Any gesture of surprise could have led—if the waiter earned a little extra money by giving information to the police—to prolonged questioning of both of them. He admitted that he had been apprehensive. He hadn’t been able to arrange much training for her and her like.

  She glanced idly through the coarse rotogravures of factory openings and parades, and found the doodling of some previous reader. There were girls’ heads, and jottings for a very commonplace love poem to sweet seventeen. Among the half lines, the blanks to be filled in, the notes for promising rhymes, was a phrase your garden at three in the morning continually repeated, toyed with and crossed out because no order of the words could be made to scan. Then came a row of capital D’s, as if the lovesick doodler, failing to succeed as a poet, had tried to design the most decorative letter with which to begin his work.

  D17’s garden at 3 a.m—the message would have been instantly clear to Theotaki who never read anything that was misplaced, even a printer’s error, without wondering why it was misplaced. But he didn’t expect the same alertness from D17; he only hoped. As a man of imagination he had, he insisted, the keenest sympathy for romance, and therefore thought it more than likely that Alexia would be too absorbed by justifiable dreams to notice his vulgar scribblings. He was very pleased with her indeed when her hand began to fiddle with ash-tray, saucer and salt-cellar arranging them into a group of three to show, if there were anyone watching her, that she had read and understood.

  D17’s garden—or rather her parents’—was a reasonably safe spot for a rendezvous. A high but climbable wall separated its overgrown shrubbery from the state-disciplined bushes of a public park. In happier days Alexia and her sister had been very well aware of its advantages.

  High-spirited young ladies, said Theotaki. Yes, and they had had their own uproarious methods of discouraging unwelcome suitors. When he dropped over the wall that night, for the second time in his life, he remembered that ten years earlier there had been a cunning arrangement of glass and empty cans to receive him, and a crash that woke the uneasy summer sleepers in four blocks of flats that faced the park.

  This time there were only silence and soft leaf-mould. Theotaki in a whisper reminded the darkness of his last visit and of the two excitable policemen who had burst with Alexia’s father into the garden. Even in those days he had been skilled at evading policemen.

  The darkness did not answer. Very rightly. This might be a trap. D17 had not received her orders through the usual channels.

  Theotaki sat down with his back against the wall and waited. After a while he again addressed the dark shapes of the bushes. He warned them that if they were not alone they had better say so, for he was about to speak of the relationship—the
1951 relationship, that is—between himself and Alexia.

  Alexia detached herself from her background, and assured him that she was alone. As proof of his authority, he told her the names and numbers of the other members of her cell and what their recent activities had been.

  ‘Will that do?’ he asked, ‘or do you want more details, D17?’

  She murmured that she couldn’t know … that she would never have believed it possible … that never in all her life had she respected him—or anyone—so much. …

  Theotaki apologized for being desperate. Caution—caution, he told her, was the only road to success. There was no hurry, no room for either risks or enthusiasm. Still, sometimes—regretfully—one had to improvise. Where was it safe to talk?

  She led him away from the wall into a tunnel of green darkness, and begged him to say what he wanted from her. Always that dangerous feminine enthusiasm. Yet it was a little forced. Theotaki could tell by her voice that she was uneasy at the unexpected mixture of her social life—such as it was—with her very secret service.

  He apologized again for his inefficiency, for the urgency—there should never be any urgency—which had compelled him to appeal to her directly.

  ‘It isn’t fair to any of us,’ he said.

  ‘Whatever happens to me, I shall not talk,’ Alexia assured him in a passionate whisper.

  Theotaki considered the eager, small-boned body with the pitying eye of a professional. It would be capable of exquisite suffering, but he was inclined to share Alexia’s faith in its resistance. Torture had little effect upon a flame. Better technique was to confine it closely and have patience until it went out. He reckoned that about three months would be enough to draw out full confession from an Alexia who by then would be Alexia no longer.

  Three months. Or much less, if she were caught without possibility of blank denials. Good God, when he thought, afterwards, how nearly it had happened, how but for the most amazing luck …