Operation Pax

by Michael Innes

  The centenarian had stopped before a small detached villa lying behind a low brick wall from which the iron railings had been cut during some wartime drive for metal. As they walked up a short garden path Routh decided that the house was on the way to decay somewhat ahead of its owner. But what much more engaged his attention was the fact that he had gained its shelter without the observation of his enemies. For he was off the road and still there was no Squire.

  ‘Come, my dear boy, come straight into my library – into my library, I say, into my library.’ Routh was aware of a small gloomy hall, of a passage where his feet stumbled on an untidy rug, and of his protector throwing open a door at the end of it and beckoning him to follow. He was well into the room before he saw that it was entirely unfurnished. The centenarian stood by the single window, which was barred. He had thrown down his hat – and with his hat he had thrown down his beard as well. Routh heard a step behind him and spun round. Squire stood in the doorway.

  6

  ‘Put up your hands.’

  Squire had him covered with a revolver – the same, no doubt, which he had covertly employed in what Routh knew now to have been a grisly comedy on the bus.

  Routh put his hands above his head. He was caught. For a moment it seemed utterly incredible. For a moment the ramshackle structure of his self-confidence stood, even with its foundations vanished. And then it crashed. They had got him, after all. For behind him was a barred window, and in front Squire’s square shoulders were like another and symbolical bar across the door.

  But – oddly – he no longer felt fear. Somewhere in him was a flicker of anger – anger at the cleverness of the thing because it had been cleverer than the cleverness of Routh. Apart from this faintly stirring emotion the moment held a dreamlike calm and an extreme visual clarity. He saw that his centenarian stood revealed as an elderly man with the air of a broken actor. He saw that the house was untenanted and indeed derelict. Paper hung in strips from the walls; there were places where the skirting board had fallen away in tinder; the floor, which lay thick in dust, was loose and rickety from some sort of dry rot – it would be a good spot, he suddenly thought, under which to dispose of a body. But still he felt no terror. Far away he heard a bicycle bell and children’s voices, and these mingled with the limp arabesques of the peeling paper and the sour smell of decaying timber in one complex sensory impression.

  ‘Get the van round the lane at the back – at once.’ Squire, without taking his eyes off Routh, snapped out the command to his accomplice. And the man went – keeping well clear of Squire’s possible line of fire.

  As soon as he was alone with Squire, Routh experienced in every limb and organ the flood of fear that had in the past few moments eluded him. For he recognized in Squire’s gaze a lust deeper than the promptings of the predatory social animal and the gambler for high fortune.

  It was something in the way that Squire’s glance moved over him. He was studying the several parts of Routh’s body in anticipation of the exercise of a sheer and disinterested cruelty. Routh felt giddy. He shifted the weight on his feet to prevent himself from falling. For a moment he thought that he was really going down – that the power of self-balance had left him. Then he realized that it was his footing that was unstable. A floorboard had given and sunk beneath his heel. And his senses, again preternaturally sharp, glimpsed a faint stirring in the dust immediately in front of his enemy. Routh was at one end of a loose board. Squire was at the other. And the board would pivot halfway between them.

  But the revolver was pointing straight at his heart. Surprise must be absolute. And time was short. Routh wept. Without any effort, tears of rage and weakness and terror flowed from his eyes. ‘You can’t do this to me!’ he cried – and his arms, still above his head, shook in helpless agitation. ‘You can’t – you can’t!’

  Squire smiled. He was beginning to enjoy himself.

  ‘I tell you, you can’t do it – you can’t!’ Routh was now no more than a terrified and bewildered child. He stamped with one foot – weakly. Then with all his might he stamped with the other. The board leapt up. Squire’s evil face vanished within a cloud of dust. His revolver exploded in air. Routh sprang forward and with clenched fist and the weight of his whole body hit Squire behind the ear. And then he ran from the room.

  There would be the men working on the telephone pole, the man clipping the hedge, the group of athletes gossiping round the sports car… He was out of the house and had bolted into the road. Directly in front of him, one small boy was tinkering with a bicycle at the kerb. Otherwise, there wasn’t a living soul in sight. It was disconcerting. Squire would be staggering to his feet at this moment, and groping in that blessed dust for his gun. Routh had seconds, not minutes, in which to vanish from the landscape.

  Although the telephone men had disappeared they had left their equipment behind them: a ladder running halfway up the pole and a litter of stuff on a barrow. Sheer inspiration seized Routh. He grabbed the stout leather sling in which he had often seen such workers buckle themselves. Then he ran to the ladder – making a gesture as he did so to the small boy; a gesture that was an instantaneous invitation to complicity. He scrambled up the ladder, got the length of stiff leather round the pole and buckled again, and then mounted by the metal cleats to the wires. When Squire rushed from the house a moment later Routh was no more than legs and a bottom, a foreshortened trunk, and an arm working industriously as if at some screwing or tightening process.

  Covertly, Routh peered down. It all depended on the boy. And Squire, glancing up and down the road, was talking to him now. The boy raised an arm and pointed. He pointed straight down the road in the direction which Routh and the false centenarian had been taking before they turned into that horrible house. And Squire at once set off at a run. Routh waited until he had disappeared: then he clambered rapidly to the ground. The small boy had placidly resumed tinkering with the bicycle. But as Routh came to earth he glanced up at him. ‘Excuse me,’ he said politely, ‘but are you Dick Barton?’

  ‘I’m Snowy. And thank you very much.’

  ‘I wish I had my autograph book with me.’

  Routh realized that he was being addressed with irony; that the small boy shared, in fact, in the general queerness of the place. ‘Look here,’ he said urgently, ‘how can I–’

  The small boy pointed across the road. ‘There’s a narrow path between those two houses. My plan is that you should go down that. It comes out by my school. Hide in one of the form rooms, if you like. There won’t be anybody there.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’ Routh gave an apprehensive glance up and down the road, and then began to cross it. ‘You’d better get home, sonny,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘If he comes back he mayn’t like you.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not frightened of him, thank you.’ The boy’s voice, which held a muted and urbane mockery, was succeeded by the composed chinking of a spanner. Routh lost no more time, but bolted for the shelter of the path pointed out to him.

  It ran first between two houses and then between long, narrow gardens. He saw the school, and hesitated. But instinct warned him against these empty rooms and outbuildings. Were he the hunter, he would be prompted to range through them at sight. So he went on, and presently found himself in another quiet suburban road. He walked down it, feeling his back immensely vulnerable. It became clear to him that he was fatally without a plan. His helplessness turned on the cardinal fact that he was penniless. There was now no possibility of hiring a car as he had proposed. He was so shabby that nobody would think of driving him a long distance without asking to see the colour of his money first. If he could get back to that pub he might with luck recover his wallet. And working his way back into the city would be no more hazardous than any other sort of wandering. Indeed, it was these quiet and unfrequented places that were supremely dangerous. Squire had probably begun a rapid scouring of this whole suburb in his van by now. And if that van came round a corner behind him at the present moment he would
have hardly a resource left… Routh glanced nervously behind him. A small closed van had rounded the far corner. From the seat beside the driver somebody was leaning out and scanning the road ahead.

  At the same moment a group of people emerged from a side road just in front of him and walked down the road in the same direction as himself. They were elderly persons of leisurely movement, and they had an air of proceeding to some nearby social occasion. There was a silver-haired man in an Inverness cape and an elderly lady in clothes that were uncompromisingly Edwardian. To Routh, who by this time estimated all mankind simply in terms of potential resistance to armed aggression, they looked far from promising. And now they had paused by a garden gate. At the same moment he heard the van accelerate behind him. He found himself without the resolution to look round again and learn the worst. The group of elderly persons were moving up the path towards a large, ugly house standing in a substantial garden. Routh followed them. And at this the silver-haired man in the cape turned round for a moment and wished him a courteous good evening. He realized that the group was a heterogeneous one, and that not all its members were known to each other. Routh replied amiably, put one hand in a trouser pocket – the pocket that was no more than a jagged hole – and affected an unconcerned stroll. One of his new companions, a man of imposingly intellectual features, wore clothes very like a tramp’s. His own shabbiness, Routh realized, was something that the conventions of Oxford rendered virtually invisible.

  He heard the van stop and its door being flung open. Simultaneously the party to which he had attached himself turned away from the house and passed through a further gate leading to a garden on a lower level. At the end of this stood a large wooden hut. It was being used, Routh guessed, for some sort of entertainment. For on either side of a wooden porch attached to it stood a small girl in fancy dress, handing out what were evidently programmes. At the sight of this Routh’s group blessedly mended its pace, as being fearful of keeping the show waiting. In another moment he was inside the hut.

  The interior formed a single large room, long and low and bare. Islanded in the middle, something like a score of people had disposed themselves on forms and chairs. The farther end was shut off by an untidy but effective system of curtains. Routh slipped into a seat and glanced at the piece of paper which had been handed to him. It read:

  DICK WHITTINGTON

  PLAY

  IN AID OF

  DUMB FRIENDS

  Routh turned from this to his neighbours, and his heart sank. It was true that nobody seemed disposed to question his presence. The gathering was one of parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts; and in various groups and couples they were animatedly discussing the schooling, athletic ability, artistic talent, physical health, nervous stability, feeding, clothing and disciplining of their own or each other’s charges. They all spoke very loud – this being necessary in order to make themselves heard above a hubbub rising from the other side of the curtains. But although an individual voice could be lost, an individual face could not. Anybody stepping into the hut in search of him would be bound to succeed in a matter of seconds.

  ‘You are Martin’s father, are you not?’ A woman beside Routh had turned to him and was looking at him in friendly interrogation.

  For a moment Routh stared at her in stupid panic. Then he nodded spasmodically, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s right. I’m Martin’s father.’ He might as well say one thing as another. It must be a matter of seconds now.

  ‘I saw the resemblance at once. May I introduce myself? I’m Elizabeth’s mother.’ The woman laughed charmingly, as if there was a great deal of merriment in this fact.

  Routh half rose from his seat. ‘How do you do,’ he said – and found even in his desperation a grain of satisfaction in having done the thing rather well. Polished Routh… His eye went past the laughing woman to a window close by the door through which he had entered. He just glimpsed, walking past it, the man with the red beard. So they were all after him. Probably the fellow he had knocked out in the helicopter as well.

  ‘And in that case I have a message for you. Martin wants his part.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Although still automatically the thorough gentleman, Routh was momentarily uncomprehending.

  ‘It seems you have Martin’s part. And he wants it to glance at between the scenes.’

  ‘By jove, stupid of me – what?’ Routh rather overdid it this time. But what did that matter? He was on his feet and dashing for the curtains. ‘Give it to him now,’ he called back. He was just vanishing through them when he sensed, rather than saw, the form of the man with the red beard darkening the farther doorway.

  He had tumbled into a midget world of confused and furious activity. A horde of children, none of whom could have been older than thirteen, were making final preparations for their play. Close by Routh, a small boy in a boiler suit was cautiously testing the cords that were to draw aside the curtains. At his feet a small girl, also in a boiler suit, was banging at some invisible object with a hammer. In one corner several coal-black savages – presumably of the country which was going to be overrun by rats – were practising what appeared to be a spirited cannibal feast. A flaxen-haired girl in a ballet dress waved a wand in the manner approved for the Good Fairy; another girl, dressed as a cook, was warming up at the business of banging a ladle loudly inside a metal pot; a boy with a sheaf of papers was rushing up and down shouting ‘Where’s Miles? Miles ought to be here. Has anybody seen that twerp Miles?’ And in the middle of the floor Dick Whittington – who was a boy, not a girl, sat in austere distinction on a milestone, surveying the scene with the resigned condescension of a superior mind.

  Routh took all this in very vaguely indeed. He had no doubt that the bearded man, as soon as he had satisfied himself that the fugitive was not in the audience, would come straight behind the scenes. One or two children were staring at him, but the majority were too much occupied to notice. He began to circle the stage, tripped over a welter of dangerous-looking electric wiring, and almost crushed a member of the boiler-suited squad who was crouched over a portable gramophone. He spied a door behind the backcloth and made a dash for it; as he reached it and slipped through he heard an adult voice behind him.

  ‘May I just take a look round, boys? I am the inspector, you know, from the Fire Brigade. I go round all the theatres.’

  There was a respectful hush on the stage. Routh ground his teeth and looked desperately about him. He was at an impasse. This room at the end of the hut was no more than a storage space; it had no other exit and was lit only by two small windows impossible to scramble through. The floor was littered with costumes and effects, and there was a square wicker basket in which some of these appeared to have been stored. Routh opened it with the desperate notion of jumping in. But he realized that even an incompetent searcher – and the bearded man would be far from that – would throw open the lid as he passed and glance into it. He was about to shut it again when he realized the nature of the single article left inside. He had worked in panto himself and had no doubt about it. If only he had the time –

  From the stage behind him rose a clear, level voice. He guessed at once that it was Dick Whittington’s. ‘I think if you were from the Fire Brigade you would be in uniform.’ The bearded man’s answer was lost in a buzz of speculation. And then Dick Whittington was heard again, speaking very politely. ‘If you don’t mind, I think I would rather you saw my father.’

  Already Routh had profited by the delay. His jacket and shoes were off. There was a minute of breathless struggle – the thing was, of course, far too small for him – and then he had bounded back on the stage on all fours, metamorphosed into Dick Whittington’s cat. He miaowed loudly; a small girl screamed delightedly: ‘Miles! Here’s Miles!’; he went forward in a series of quick jumps, making his tail wave behind him. Through his mask he had a glimpse of the bearded man, confronting Whittington in momentary irresolution. Routh jumped at him, and rubbed himself vigorously against his le
gs. The bearded man cursed softly, looked quickly round him, strode into the inner room. Routh could hear him lifting the lid of the basket. Then he was out again and had vanished through the curtains. There was an indignant shout or two, and then everybody appeared to forget about him. The gramophone was giving out the sound of Bow bells very loudly.

  ‘What are you doing in my cat?’

  The mask was twitched indignantly from Routh’s head. A red-haired boy stood planted before him in a belligerent attitude, looking him very straight in the eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Routh. ‘I thought it would be fun to try.’

  ‘It’s not Miles – it’s a man!’ The small girl who had been shouting before, now cried out in high indignation. A circle of children gathered round Routh and there was a hubbub of voices.

  ‘I never allow anybody in my cat.’ Miles, as he realized the enormity of what had happened, was going as red as his own hair. ‘And you’re much too big. You might bust it.’

  ‘I’m very sorry.’ Routh was inclined to think that he had escaped from the frying pan merely to fall into the fire. He scrambled hastily out of the cat. ‘I’d better be–’

  ‘And who are you, anyway? And who was that other person?’ This was Whittington’s voice again, bringing its higher cogency to bear on the situation.

  ‘Yes, who are you… Why are you spoiling our play… Dick’s father should send for the police… He’s bust Miles’ cat…’ The tumult of indignant voices grew, so that Routh was convinced that some of the grown-ups from the other side of the curtain were bound to come and investigate.

  ‘Oh, he’s all right. He’s cracked.’