by Len Deighton
‘Round outside means a soft centre,’ H.K. said with a grin.
He pointed to a cigarette near his foot. I nodded and he picked it up and lit it from his stub. ‘This man isn’t a martyr, idealist or intellectual. He thinks with his muscle. Guys like him work themselves into an early grave organizing wildcat strikes or breaking up political meetings. In wars they get V.C.s or court martials. Sometimes both. Fernie said he had been recommended for a D.S.A. at the time of his capture.’
‘A D.S.O.,’ I said.
‘Well, there you are. Like I told you, no sex, no drink, no politics, a dedicated malcontent and maybe the best underwater man in Europe.’
‘The best now, maybe,’ I said, ‘but until there was a fatal accident out on the ocean floor not too long ago, he was number two.’
H.K.’s face tightened like a clenched fist. He said, ‘Fernie would never do that. I don’t like the guy but he would never kill in cold blood, believe me.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘we’ll leave that for a minute. Tell me how da Cunha fits into the picture. And before you start: I’m not a cop; my directions don’t include bringing you in. I’m here for information: set up the facts and then you can fade as far as I’m concerned.’
Charly rose to her feet.
‘Fade?’ said Charly. ‘Do you know what sort of filthy business this man is in?’ She moved in on the equipment like a Luddite and swept some of it to the floor with a crash of disintegrating glass and dented tin.
I said nothing. H.K. said, ‘Sure he does, sweetheart, he’s just too smart to mention it before he has all the info. he can get.’
Charly froze. She said to me, ‘I’m sorry,’ and sat down.
‘I’m not kidding, Harry,’ I said, ‘I’ll break you up as far as staying in Europe is concerned but I’ll give you a chance to get clear.’
‘I’ll sing,’ said H.K., ‘what do you want to know?’
‘Who is da Cunha?’ I asked.
‘Boy, you’re really skipping the easy ones,’ he said. ‘Da Cunha; they think a lot of him hereabouts. He says he’s the V.N.V. agent for the district. He says that when the revolution comes he will be the Governor of the district.’
‘But you don’t believe him.’
‘One Fascist bastard is much like another as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that I have paid him a sum of three hundred dollars per month via a New York bank in exchange for a promise that the new government won’t snoop too close around here.’
‘Insurance?’
‘Yes, that’s it. I could afford to throw him a little dough on the off-chance – a load of good it did me, eh?’
‘Don’t be bitter, Harry,’ I said. He kneaded his brown face with a hairy hand, and as his eyes and nose emerged from the open fingers he smiled a humourless smile.
‘And Fernie,’ I said, ‘how did he get along with da Cunha?’
‘O.K. Nothing special. Just O.K. is all.’
‘Did you ever go into a room and hear a snatch of conversation between them that you weren’t supposed to hear? Any scientific talk, for instance?’
‘Loads of times, but it was never anything special.’
‘That’s all,’ I said, ‘we’ll play it your way. You think you’re the blue paper in my potato crisps, but I can work you over my way and still have enough left to shovel up for the Lagos cops.’
‘F’r instance,’ said H.K., but his voice was a little hoarse.
‘Well, I’ll tell you, Harry, if we can’t have a gentlemanly chat I’ll warm up a nice big dessert-spoonful of warm water and lactose and give you a generous ten per cent dose of the stuff in that pulverizer over there …’
‘Just try,’ said H.K.
‘You’ve got me mixed up with those weedy accents that play policemen on English TV, Harry,’ I said. ‘I will try.’
There was a short sharp silence.
‘I’m not a hop-head,’ said H.K. His tan had disappeared now. ‘A ten per cent dose will kill me.’ He folded his arms tightly.
‘You may swell a little but you’ll survive for the second dose and the others until I hand you over to the cops. Then you can rest until I call back for you in a week’s time. You’ll talk, Harry, believe me. Just look upon it as sales research – it’s probably tax-deductible.’
Harry’s head sank forward and he rocked gently in his seat as he tried to wake up in a morning in which I did not exist.
When he continued to speak it was in an impersonal monotone, like an announcer with a weather report which he didn’t believe. ‘Fernie worked for da Cunha. Fernie had a great respect for him. Even after we had enough money not to worry, Fernie would continue to say “sir” to him. Fernie had contacts all over the world, and they all liked him. Maybe you find that hard to believe, but it’s true. Fernie had only to whisper about something he wanted done and, bingo, it was done. Fernie arranged the supplies of the morphine base, I processed and arranged sales.’
‘How did the morphine base arrive?’ I asked.
‘By ship once a month. The ships didn’t stop. Only an expert frogman could do it. We went out in the boat and then Fernie used his frogman gear and a powered undersea sled to get under the hull of the moving ship and remove the container that was held on the bilge keel by magnetic clamps. We processed the stuff here and sealed it into sardine-cans. Then Fernie fixed the consignment to a ship heading Stateside. I notified my contacts in New York. They gave the ship time to clear customs, then had a frogman go under it while it was at the quayside and prise the horse loose. Easy. How am I doing?’
‘You are doing O.K.,’ I said. ‘Your boat; did Fernie ever use that?’
‘Sure, he was a mile better sailor than I’ll ever be. He borrowed it whenever he wanted to. It was da Cunha borrowing it that made me sore. I’d never trust the old guy alone, I don’t care if he was an admiral in the Kraut navy.’
‘Did they always use a similar amount of fuel?’
‘Yeah,’ said H.K., ‘I checked on that out of curiosity. They went up the coast about twelve miles, give a little, take a little.’
‘Tell me more about da Cunha,’ I said.
‘Da Cunha rides around the town in that old 1935 Ford like it was a Thunderbird. Thinks he owns the town. He closes his eyes; it’s night. When he sends Tomas along to borrow the boat it’s like he’s doing me a favour. Da Cunha; wise guy. One day I get here; he’s loading himself a crate of sardines. “I’ve gotcha red-handed,” I say, smiling like I might be joking. “Better the red face than the black heart, Mister Kondit,” he says – an old Portuguese saying it is, he says. “So who cares?” I say. “I do,” he says, “and I’m the only one,” and off he drives with the sardines.
‘He’s in deep with the local church, and last week there was a gang of business tycoons down from Madrid. Whatever he intends to do for Portugal it certainly won’t include moving the average wage up from four dollars a week.’ H.K. raised his head and said, ‘You’re not kidding me about letting me scram, are you? Because if I’m shooting my mouth off for nothing …’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you can talk your way out as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Boat and all?’ asked H.K.
‘Boat and all,’ I said.
‘I bet that da Cunha’s V.N.V. is a local branch office of the Young Europe machine. You know what I’m talking about?’
‘Talk on,’ I said.
‘It’s a network of Fascists throughout Europe, Rabat to Narvik. The O.A.S. in France, the Belgian M.A.C. As far as these boys are concerned the present régime here in Portugal is Socialist.’
‘What can you offer as proof?’
‘Not a thing, pal. I wish I had something, it’s been my big dream to iron him out.’
‘Looks like you’re too late now,’ I said.
‘The Fascists will tumble; historically it’s all part of the class struggle.’
‘Class struggle,’ I said, ‘that’s hilarious, coming from you.
You are the spokesman for the Hopheads and General Narcotic Dealers’ Union?’
‘Yeah, the dope outfit – I’m the chief dope,’ said H.K.H.K.’s eyes held mine. I decided to try a bluff. ‘The English visitor,’ I coaxed gently, ‘don’t forget the English visitor, Harry.’
‘Pal of Fernie’s,’ H.K. said. ‘Nice little guy, great sense of fun.’
‘His name?’
‘Ivor Butcher,’ said H.K., ‘great sense of fun.’
‘Great sense of fun,’ I said. Now it was shuffling its way together. Ivor Butcher knew Fernie. A messenger? A courier? Did Smith tell Fernie what to do or was it the other way round? In either case: why?
I looked around at the darkened factory: the oily machinery, the great piles of tins.
‘Harry,’ I said, ‘I want Fernie Tomas here; get him here and you can go.’
H.K. sucked his cheeks in and snorted a laugh down his nose. ‘You can get him as easily as I can,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to rub my face in the dirt.’ He walked across to the sink and washed his hands with the strange flecked Portuguese soap that looks like Roquefort cheese, dried them, put on his wrist-watch and turned to face us. ‘You did the hero bit already, pal. Now I’m walking out of here, hardware or no hardware.’
‘You think so,’ I said, but I did nothing as he walked across to the chair and picked up his cashmere cardigan, and nothing as he walked down between the machines towards the door. He looked back once to see how I was reacting. I put my gun into my jacket pocket and he looked reassured. It was then that a flash roared across the tension and echoed through the piles of empty tins like a piranha in a goldfish bowl. Charly had fished a pistol out of her handbag and let fly at H.K. I saw him spin around and fall forward against the pressing machine. I reached out to take the gun from her. The gun crashed again and the heat bent the hairs on the back of my hand. The bullet nicked the machinery with a clang and whined off into the darkness. My hand closed over the barrel to drag it from her, but it was hot enough to burn me and I dropped it with a crash. I flung my arm around Charly and held her captive.
From behind the machinery H.K.’s voice asked, ‘Where did that loony dame get a gun?’
I looked at the old Italian Victoria 7.65 automatic on the floor. ‘Out of a Christmas cracker by the look of it,’ I said. ‘Now beat it, fade, before I change my mind.’
Charly beat her fists against my button-down madras and yelled, ‘Don’t let him go – he killed your friend!’ over and over again. She stopped to draw breath. ‘You just aren’t human,’ she said quietly. I held her tightly while H.K. limped away with a big red hand clamped across his forearm.
I sat Charly down. Finally she blew her nose into my handkerchief and told me that she worked for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Washington, and that I had just messed everything up. It was her damaged esprit de corps she was crying about as she sat in Harry Kondit’s dream house.
‘Then you knew that the smell of vinegar was acetic acid and would be coming from the processing of morphine. Why didn’t you tell me the real story?’
She blew her nose again. ‘Because a good operator lets other law-enforcement agencies spearhead his actions,’ she quoted between sniffs.
At that precise moment we heard H.K. start the engine. ‘He’s taking our car,’ said Charly, ‘we’re going to be left here.’ She began to giggle.
It was a little over three kilometres to Albufeira. We skirted the huge plantation of fig trees and smelt the olive crop ready for the press. Charly took her shoes off after one kilometre and stopped sniffing after two. For the fiftieth time she said, ‘You’ve let him get away. I must phone the police.’
‘Look,’ I finally said, ‘I don’t know what they teach you in the Treasury Department,* but if you think your prestige there depends on putting the iron bangles across H.K. you are quite nutty. Let him go spread panic among his pals. If he goes to the end of the world you can be there in a day or phone there in an hour. This is a strictly cerebral business and just because I wave an old war-souvenir pistol around to impress you, it doesn’t mean you have to go off your trolley. You might hurt him.’
This last remark stung Charly into a fury and she said I was just as bad as H.K. As for hurting H.K., if it hadn’t been for me getting in the way she would have killed him and a good thing too.
You can’t help envying these narcotics sleuths. The governments of the world are all so keen to prove themselves blameless that, far from asking awkward questions about firearms, they will steady up your gun elbow while you’re firing. I couldn’t afford luxuries like remembering that H.K.’s desire to remove the evidence had certainly killed Joe MacIntosh.
My position wasn’t quite so pretty. I couldn’t have Charly phoning up the police and attracting attention to our enterprise. At least not before I contacted Singleton, folded up the equipment and faded out. I began to be aware of a silence and realized that Charly had asked me a question. ‘Umm,’ I said, as though I was considering it carefully.
‘It’s so confusing, isn’t it?’ Charly said.
‘Confusing,’ I replied, ‘of course it’s confusing. You involve yourself in industrial espionage and then you complain about it being confusing.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Charly. ‘I’m not involved with industrial espionage.’
‘Aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Narcotics is a multi-million-dollar industry. Half of that industry is devoted to making money, the other half to making you confused.’ There was a silence. ‘In one way or another,’ I added.
‘Just exactly what does that last crack mean?’
‘It means authority can be confused in many ways, by bribes, codes, camouflage, false informers or even by pressures so powerful that the law can be changed to suit the lawbreaker. But the most confusing thing of all is old-fashioned lying by old liars: like H.K.’
‘Why, was a lot of what he said untrue?’ She stopped in the centre of the road and pulled her shoes on again.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but like all first-class lies it had a firm foundation of truth, like margarine with twelve and a half per cent butter.’
‘What did he say that was true?’ asked Charly.
‘Well, suppose you get those smart boys at the Treasury Department to work it out for you. I’ll just say he didn’t leave us in any doubt about the way our investigations should continue. Providing that we want it tailored one hundred per cent to the convenience of Harry Kondit.’
‘Yes,’ said Charly obediently, and she hugged my arm. I wish I had listened to my last remark more closely.
45 Man and boy are this
It was damn nice of H.K. to leave the car outside Number 12 Praca Miguel Bombarda. Charly said that it looked as though we had collected a parking fine. Which was Charly’s idea of a joke; the white envelope under the wiper was a note from H.K.:
Sorry to hijack the sled but when you got to go, you got to go. I didn’t think you were levelling with me when you promised; but like I said, when winter comes you find which trees are the evergreens!
Al Content [obviously H.K.’s guarded way of naming Fernie] is moving like a scalded cat. What you said I could take I ain’t taking but you can bet Charly’s pants that Al wants it instead. [This could only mean the power boat.]
What I didn’t tell you is that Al has the sweetest blackmail set-up of all time and do I mean all time. If the name Weiss List means anything to you you’ll know I ain’t kidding.
Watch what I ain’t taking and you will get your file closed – AND HOW!!
Yours in a million years,
HARRY
Singleton was not expected back from Lisbon for another twenty-four hours. Anything to be done had to be done alone. I went into Joe’s old room and prised up a floorboard with one of the kitchen knives.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Charly. I told her to buzz off and fix some strong tea. I was feeling very tired what with one thing and another.
From under the floorboard I got the small radio transmi
tter with which Joe had contacted London. I set it to transmit, raised the antenna and set the cipher numbers on the Kurier.* I cranked the handle at twenty-three minutes past the hour (as our arrangement with R.N. Gibraltar demanded) and then put the apparatus away.
Charly brought tea. I told her I had sent a signal to London and she was now free to take any action she wished in respect of the narcotics processing. I also cautioned her that under the Official Secrets Act any mention of the operation in which we had been engaged at Albufeira was actionable, and that if there was any reason to suspect her of indiscretion in this respect her employment by the Federal Narcotics Bureau in the U.S.A. made her liable for trial as an agent of a foreign power. I thanked her for the tea and gave her a reassuring and not too brotherly kiss.
‘You must row me out to H.K.’s boat,’ I said. I was dog-tired.
Charly brought the dinghy alongside the forty-foot cabin cruiser with skill befitting an admiral’s daughter. I scrambled on to the teak-laid deck in my stockinged feet – I couldn’t risk leaving wet footmarks across it. Charly spun the dinghy round and rowed back to the cove. I watched the cliff-top and willed Fernie Tomas not to appear until she was over the headland by the steep high path. Then I walked across the bridge and got into the big stowage locker under one of the extra bunks. It was a bit coffin-like, but I jammed a pencil under the lid, which gave me air, although not enough to dispel the smell of tar and mothballs. I waited.
Something struck the side of the boat with a thud. It wasn’t very Royal Navy and I began to wonder whether it was Fernie Tomas. Perhaps H.K. had lured me into a trap. I flushed with sudden fear at the thought of this locker really becoming a coffin.
A woman’s voice – Fernie’s wife – gabbled in Portuguese, the dinghy was drifting away. Hold the rope. Couldn’t he help her. Take the suitcase. There is water in the bottom of the boat. An oar has slipped into the water. The conversation went the way it does when women are in boats.