by Len Deighton
Alf exploded with volubility. ‘I don’t care if he does, mate. You won’t catch me climbing garden walls to get away from him.’ I was suitably admonished. It was very kind of Alf, and could he wait till Friday for the bean frame money. ‘Today’s Friday,’ said Alf. He had me there.
‘Yes, next Friday,’ I said, deciding to complete the picture for him. ‘I’ve given my wife my wage packet for this week. Nights get paid first thing Friday morning.’
‘Cor blimey!’ said Alf.
At the last minute Alf gave me sixpence and some coppers and a really withering look as I got on the bus. I was what things are coming to these days.
Chapter 27
[Aquarius (Jan 20-Feb 19) If you are a stick-in-the-mud you’ll get nowhere. Widen your social horizons. Go somewhere gay and relaxing.]
I heard the operator asking Charlie if he’d accept a reversed charge call. He said OK. ‘This is a friend of Reg,’ I said.
‘I recognize the voice.’
‘I’m in quite a bit of trouble, Mr Cavendish.’
‘That’s right,’ said Charlie. ‘You got it?’ He was referring to the cable I’d had in Tokwe.
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘’s OK. What can I do for you, my boy?’
‘Could you meet me? Now?’
‘Sure. Where?’
‘Thanks.’
‘’s OK,’ said Charlie. ‘Where?’
I paused. I’d prepared the next bit: ‘“A dungeon horrible, on all sides round…”’ I paused and Charlie completed it for me.
‘“As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible.”’
That may not appeal to you, but to Milton and Charlie it was just the thing. ‘That’s it,’ I said.
‘OK. I’ve got you. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. I’ll go in first and pay for you. Anything special you want?’
‘Yes, a job.’
Charlie gave a squeaky little laugh and rang off.
There are no lights inside but through the huge windows that form one wall of the little chamber two lights that wouldn’t have chagrined a medium flak battery, stare relentlessly. The view through the glass is impressionist; the world outside muted by the constant dribble and trickle of hot water across the glass. The endless crash of sheets of water hitting the red stone floor provided a banshee background to the sudatory heat. Through the dense vapour Charlie’s pale pink and white blotchy body wrapped in a small gingham towel could just be seen.
‘Good idea,’ Charlie said. He was six inches shorter than me and he stared up with bright myopic eyes, now more shiny than ever. ‘Good idea this.’ I was flattered at Charlie’s enthusiasm. ‘I brought you some clothes. A white shirt — one of Reg’s. I thought you’d take about the same size as Reg. Socks and a pair of old canvas shoes size ten. Too big for me.’
There was a crash as someone leapt into the cold plunge.
‘Turkish baths,’ said Charlie, ‘and sleep here too if you want.’
The pain was beginning to trickle out of my pores. I said, ‘You see, Mr Cavendish…’ the wet heat struck the back of my lungs as I opened my mouth ‘…I had no one else to go to.’
‘’s OK. I would have been furious if you hadn’t come to your Uncle Charlie.’ It was a joke we had between us, like the joke of Charlie reciting those stanzas of Paradise Lost here in the steam room on previous occasions. Charlie was looking at the cuts on my face and my bruised cheek. The steam had probably made them much more visible. ‘You look like you got caught in a combine harvester,’ Charlie said gently.
‘Yes, and now they’ve sent me a bill for the damages.’
‘Go on. What a sauce,’ said Charlie seriously, then he did his squeaky laugh. Charlie wouldn’t hear of me going anywhere but back to his place. Although the Turkish bath was very therapeutic I was still as weak as a half-drowned kitten. I let him put me into his 1947 Hillman that was parked right outside the door in Jermyn Street.
When I woke up on Saturday morning it was in Charlie’s bed — Charlie had spent the night on the sofa. There was a smell of freshly ground coffee, a spitting of grilling bacon, and a big coal fire that had reached that state of perfection that the manufacturers of plastic fronts for electric ones seek to emulate.
I’m not good at guessing numbers, so it would be the roughest possible estimate if I said that Charlie’s little apartment contained three thousand books. Enough to say perhaps that in no room was there much wall to be glimpsed. And I wouldn’t like you to think that they were paperbacks of the Bushwacker of Deadman’s Gulch genre either. No, these wonderful books were the reason Charlie Cavendish hadn’t got past 1947 with his motor-cars.
‘You’re up,’ said Charlie, coming into the livingroom with a big white coffee-pot. ‘Continental roast. OK?’ I hoped I wasn’t becoming that sort of fanatic that people had to check blends with before they could offer me a cup of coffee. ‘Great,’ I said.
‘Would music bother you?’
‘No, it would do me good,’ I answered. Charlie went across to the hi-fi. It was a mass of valves and assorted components strung together with loops of wire, sticking-plaster and slivers of matchstick. He laid a huge shiny LP on the heavy turntable and delicately applied the diamond head. Strange that he should have chosen Mozart’s 41st; for the second movement took me directly back to that evening I sat with Adem listening to the song of the blackcap. How long ago was that?
After breakfast Charlie settled down with Encounters and I tuned in to the Saturday morning concert and began to wish I hadn’t eaten, I was feeling pretty sick. I walked into the bedroom and took the weight off my feet. I had to think. I’d told Charlie as much as he need know, and ideally I should get away from here. Implicating a personal friend was bad enough, implicating someone employed within the framework of the service was unforgivable.
I had got as far as this merely because K.K. and Co had divided their anxieties between recapturing me and packing up their confidential stuff and clearing out quickly. But that did not mean that they were a set of amateurs, nor that they were going to take the heat off me in any way. What to do now?
Dalby seemed out of the question, so did anyone who worked for him. Ross wasn’t even on my list. I could go to the CIGS but I really wasn’t under Army jurisdiction any longer. Anyway that was out because Dalby would hear about my application for an interview before the ink on it was dry. If I gave a false name they would look me up in the List and arrest me when they found it wasn’t there. If I gave someone else’s name? No, of the Military Police and secretaries at the War House there was too many that know me by sight. Anyway, the CIGS probably wouldn’t believe me. Ripley is probably the only one that will believe it, I thought.
The PM? I toyed with this idea for thirty seconds. What would the Prime Minister do? He’d have to ask advice from the next responsible security authority. Who was that? In this particular case it was Dalby. Even if it wasn’t Dalby it would be someone closely associated with Dalby. It was a maze and Dalby stood at the only exit.
Then perhaps the only way was to go directly to Dalby and sort out this muddle with him. After all, I knew I wasn’t working for anyone else. There must be a way of proving it. On the other hand there wasn’t a government in the world who’d have any compunction about killing an operator who knew as much as I did, if there were any doubts about loyalty. In a way this cheered me up. Whatever else, I wasn’t dead yet, and killing someone isn’t difficult.
I suddenly remembered Barney on the generator truck. I wondered if it was true. It had a terrible ring of truth somehow, but if Barney was killed for warning me, what did I deserve? Perhaps the Americans who held me weren’t genuine. After all, the Hungarians hadn’t been. No, that was out of the question.
Those interrogations had been as American as shoo-fly pie and hominy grits. The ‘Hungarians’; where did they fit into all this? Who was K.K.? Naturally he would be keeping out of the way. That didn’t mean that he wasn’
t in British Government pay.
Did the Al Gumhuria file that I’d declined to buy from Ross have anything to do with it? Things seemed to go wrong for me soon after that.
I must have dozed off with my problem still unresolved. Charlie woke me with tea and biscuits and said I had been shouting in my sleep. ‘Nothing that I could understand,’ said Charlie hastily. All day Saturday and all day Sunday I did nothing. Charlie fed me bouillon and steak while I hung around and felt sorry for myself. Sunday evening found me listening to Alistair Cooke on the radio and staring at a piece of blank paper upon which I’d resolved to write my plan of action.
I was better after the food and rest. I was still no Steve Reeves but I was moving into the Sir Cedric Hardwicke class. The paper I was doodling on stared back at me. Dalby’s name I’d underlined. Connected to it in one direction: Alice; in the other: Ross, because if Dalby was going to crucify me there’s no one to give him a more willing hand than Ross and the military boys. Murray and Carswell I’d linked together as the two unknowns. Chances were that by now Dalby had detached them back into some long-lost dustcovered office in the War House. Then there was Chico. He had the mind of a child of four, and the last time I’d heard from him was on the phone from Grantham. Jean? That was another big query. She’d risked a lot to help me in Tokwe, but just how long do you stick your neck out in this business? I was probably in a very good position to find out. Any way I worked it out the answer seemed to be: see Dalby. I resolved to do so. But there was something that must be done first.
By 9.30 P.M. I decided that I’d have to ask Charlie yet another favour. By 10 P.M. he was out of the house. Everything depended on Charlie then, or so it seemed at the time. I looked at the sepia photo of Reg Cavendish,[24] Charlie’s son. He looked down from the top of the writing cabinet in one of those large boat-shaped forage caps that we’d all looked so silly in. I remembered coming to tell his father of his death when, after four years of unscathed combat action, Reg was killed by a truck in Brussels four days before VE day.
I had told Charlie that his son had been killed in a traffic accident just as simply as I’d heard it on the phone. He went into the kitchen and began to make coffee. I sat with the smell of my best uniform wet with the spring rain, and looked around at the shelves of books and gramophone records. At Balzac and Byron, Ben Jonson and Proust, Beethoven, Bach, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
I remember that when Charlie Cavendish had come back with coffee we talked about the weather and the wartime Cup Final and the subjects people talk about when they want to think about something else.
I remember thinking the coffee rather strange, it was as black as coal and almost as solid. It was only after two or three subsequent visits that I realized that Charlie had stood in the kitchen that night, ladling spoonful after spoonful of coffee into his white porcelain coffee-pot while his mind refused to function.
And now here I was again, sitting alone among Charlie’s books; again I was waiting for Charlie to come back.
By 11.25 P.M. I heard his footsteps on the creaking winding staircase. I brought him coffee in that same white German porcelain coffee-pot that I had remembered from 1945. I went to the FM and switched ‘Music at Night’ down in volume.
Charlie spoke. ‘A cipher,’ he said, ‘nothing nowhere, no trace, not ever.’
‘You’re joking,’ I said. ‘You must have got the Indian Army stuff.’
‘No,’ said Charlie, ‘I even did a repeat request under “Calcutta Stats Office”. There’s no Carswell with the initials J.F. and the only one with anything possible is P. J. Carswell, aged 26.’
‘No, that’s nowhere near him,’ I said.
‘Are you sure of the spelling? Want me to try Carwell?’
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I’m sure of the spelling as much as I’m sure of anything. Anyway, you’ve taken enough chances already.’
‘A pleasure,’ said Charlie simply and sincerely. He continued with his coffee. ‘French drip. I used to make it vacuum. Another time I had one of those upside-down Neapolitan things. French drip is best.’
‘I’ll tell you the whole story if you like, Charlie,’ I offered. I always find it difficult to use his first name, having been a friend of his son before I met him.
‘Rather not. I know too many secrets already,’ he said. It was a magnificent understatement. ‘I’m turning in now. If you get inspired, let me know. It wouldn’t be unusual me popping into “tracing” in the middle of the night.’
‘Good night, Charlie,’ I said. ‘I’ll work something out.’ But I was no longer sure that I would.
Chapter 28
[Aquarius (Jan 20-Feb 19) Don’t allow petty irritations to mar your good nature. Sometimes success brings a train of jealousy. It is up to you to rise above it.]
Near Leicester Square there are some grubby little newsagents who specialize in the fleshier style of art magazine. Carnal covers posture, peer and swarm like pink spiders across their shop windows. For a small fee they act as accommodation addresses for people who receive mail that they would rather didn’t arrive at home.
From the inner confines came the smell of boiled socks and an old bewhiskered crone with a fat manilla envelope addressed to the person I was purporting to be.
I opened it right away for they have little curiosity left, the people who work in these shops. Inside I knew there was a new Chubb key, a United Kingdom passport, an American passport (clipped to which was a social security card in the same name), and a UN Secretariat passport. Tucked inside each was an International driving licence, and a few bills and used envelopes in the same name as that particular passport. There were also cheque books issued by the Royal Bank of Canada, Chase Manhattan, Westminster and the Dai-ichi Bank of Tokyo, a small brown pawn ticket, twenty used ten-shilling notes, a folded new manilla envelope, and a poor-quality forged Metropolitan Police warrant card.
I put the key, pawn ticket, warrant card and money into my pocket and the other things into the new manilla envelope. I walked down the road and posted the envelope back to the same address. A taxi took me to a bank in the city and the chief clerk conducted me to the vaults. I fitted the key into the safe deposit box. I removed some fivepound notes from inside it. By this time the clerk had discreetly left me alone. From under the banknotes I slid a heavy cardboard box, and broke the wax seals on it with my thumb-nail. It was the work of a moment to slip the Colt.32 automatic into one pocket and two spare clips into the other.
‘Good day, sir,’ the clerk said as I left.
‘Yes, it’s a bit brighter,’ I told him.
The pawn shop was near Gardner’s corner. I paid £11 13s 9d and exchanged the pawn ticket for a canvas travelling bag. Inside was a dark green flannel suit, cotton trousers, two dark shirts and six white ones, a bright Madras jacket, ties, socks, underwear, black shoes and canvas ones. The side panels contained razor, shaving cream, blades, comb, compressed dates, plastic raincoat, folding knife, prismatic compass and a packet of Kleenex. Into the lining of the suit was sewn a 100NF note, a £5 note, and a 100DM note, and into the small amount of padding was sewn another key to another safe deposit box. This, too, is a spy’s insurance policy.
I booked into a hotel near Bedford Square, then met Charlie in Tottenham Court Road Fortes. Charlie was dead on time as usual: 12.7 (to make appointments on the hour or half-hour is to ask for trouble). I took off the raincoat and gave it to him, producing my own plastic one from my pocket. ‘I’ve left your door key in my hotel room,’ I told him.
‘Yerse?’ said the girl behind the counter. We ordered some coffee and sandwiches, and Charlie put on the raincoat. ‘It’s just beginning to spot with rain,’ he said.
‘What a shame,’ I said, ‘it seemed as though it was going to be a nice day.’ We munched the sandwiches.
‘You can let yourself in and leave the key on the shelf, because I must be back by two o’clock,’ said Charlie. I paid for the food and he thanked me. ‘Look after yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ve g
ot used to having you drop in from time to time.’ Before he left me, Charlie told me three times that I must contact him if I needed any help. Naturally I was tempted to use Charlie to help me. He was too old to be foolhardy, too knowledgeable to be garrulous, and too content to be curious, but he was too willing to be exploited.
I left Charlie, and from Fortes I went to a black sooty building in Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘Waterman’s World-Wide Detective Agency’ it said, in black raised letters on the door. Inside, a thin shiny-black-suited detective looked up like a subject of a photo in a divorce case. He was removing a piece of wax from his ear with a match stick. He thought I should have knocked; if it hadn’t prejudiced his income he might have told me about it. Instead he took off his bowler hat and said, ‘Can I be of any assistance?’ He didn’t like me sitting down without permission either. I told him that I was in a difficult domestic situation. ‘Really, sir? I’m sorry,’ he said, like he had never met anyone in a difficult domestic situation before.
I gave him a lot of stuff about my wife and another fellow, and he ‘ho’ed’ and ‘oh deared’ his way through it. I didn’t think there would be a breach of the peace, I told him, but if he could be on hand. We agreed on a fee of eight guineas, which was pretty handsome. This character would lay on an SS Armoured Division for a fiver. I felt better now I had finally decided not to involve Charlie, and it was five o’clock that afternoon before I got back to Charlie’s place in Bloomsbury. I wanted to speak to him before he went to his part-time job as barman at the ‘Tin-Tack Club’, and give him his key.
I arrived at Charlie’s place at 5.10. I let myself in by the front door. The slight amount of daylight that filtered through the green glass window on the back stairs lit the moth-eaten stair-carpet with a dense emerald light. The place smelt of unlit corners, bicycles in the hall and yesterday’s cat food. One ascended like a diver, slowly nearing the white daylight surface of Charlie’s top flat. I reached the loose stair-rod two steps from the top of the first flight before I heard the sound. I paused and listened without breathing for a second or so. I know now that I should have turned around and left the house, and I knew it then. But I didn’t go. I continued up the stairs towards the woman’s sobbing.