by Len Deighton
‘He arrested four boys from the Gehlen set-up, didn’t he?’
‘Five,’ said Johnnie. ‘Another failed to report in this morning.’
‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘and you got a little extra pay and some expenses and London will read your report and say what a good boy you have been.’
‘And you, you slimy bastard. What’s your angle?’
‘I have my methods, Watson,’ I said. ‘I’ve been arranging the Berlin hit parade and you’ve slipped five notches to nowhere. You and that girl thought you had a nice deal, didn’t you? Well, your big mistake was trying to exploit me as a part of it. Papers,’ I said. I picked up a couple of the pamphlets from inside the coffin and let them flutter to the floor. ‘There are the only papers you’re getting, they aren’t made out in the name of Broum but on the other hand there are probably no spelling errors.’
‘You——’ said Vulkan and from his superior
position on the bench-top tried to kick my head in. I backed off.
‘I’ll tell you your trouble, Johnnie,’ I said from a safe distance. ‘You’ve become a professional phoney. You’ve become so good at pretending to be different that you have lost contact with your identity. You’ve learnt so much jargon that you don’t know which side you are on. Every time you move through the frontier of space you slip through the frontier of time. Perhaps you like that. OK. Be a Waldgänger,1 but don’t expect me to pay your expenses. Be a freelance, but don’t expect a salary. You would be playing along with me now if you were smart. Stok’s boys won’t have anything more to do with you, you are poison to Gehlen…’
‘Through you,’ Vulkan shouted. ‘You messed up Gehlen.’
‘You are poison to Gehlen,’ I continued. ‘And if you foul up with me there isn’t a place left in the whole world where they would let you get a sniff of a job. You are dead, Johnnie. Dead and you don’t know it. Dead and you can’t afford the funeral expenses. Get clever!’
There was a long silence broken only by Johnnie’s feet knocking against a valve.
‘I always return the things I am given,’ said Johnnie menacingly, ‘and that especially includes good advice.’ He reached into his jacket and I saw his fingers flicker as he eased them around his ugly little Mauser H SC. ‘I’ve planned this operation for fifteen years and I’ve worked out every conceivable contingency, including Semitsa’s nonarrival. That’s unfortunate but it won’t impede the remainder of the programme, whether you choose to stand in the way or not, because this time they are going to be building the barbed wire through you.’ He clicked the gun casing to show he meant business. Now we both knew the gun was ready loaded and cocked.
‘The girl and I did a deal,’ Vulkan went on. ‘Her interests and my interests complement each other: there is no conflict. Her side of the deal has gone on the rocks but that’s too bad. I’m going to cut my losses. I need four days without you sounding off your big mouth. It’s going to cost me eighty pounds per day to keep you on ice so you can see that I’m prepared to be out of pocket—because I could have you knocked off for one hundred pounds.’
‘Listen, Johnnie,’ I said in an all-good-pals-together sort of voice, ‘cut me in. I can get back that photo of you in prison clothes with Mohr.’
‘You lying bastard,’ said Johnnie.
I said, ‘It’s the papers you want?’
Johnnie said softly, ‘If you don’t have them I’ll kill you. You know that, don’t you?’
What could he do in four days? Knowing Vulkan, I could risk a guess. ‘Can you get the money and be clear in four days?’ I asked.
‘I told you I’ve been planning this for fifteen years. I laid the claim ages ago. I have three lawyers and a witness standing by—I…’ he smiled ‘…talk too much,’ he finished. I began to see the pattern but I didn’t want that to be the last thing I ever saw.
‘Mohr is the witness,’ I said. ‘You met him in Hendaye and told him that Samantha was a Shinbet2 agent after him for war crimes. You told him that you could call her off if he did as you told him over the next day or so. Mohr saw Broum die. He’s important to…’
‘Shut your crummy mouth,’ said Vulkan. ‘I’m a Waldgänger, just like you said.’ He walked along the bench, the light glistening on his face. He walked slowly, picking his way among the set of drills, the mallets and rusty sparking plugs and little tin boxes of nuts and bolts, his shiny shoes moving, hesitating and placing themselves down like little flying saucers playing tag on a desolate landscape.
Every now and again he flexed his fingers before easing them back around the handle of the pistol. I had seen Vulkan use that gun on the range; I knew he could put the whole eight-shot magazine into a six-inch group before I could swing open even one door-bolt. It seemed as though an hour went by as he moved along the bench but it probably wasn’t more than forty-five seconds. That’s the theory of relativity, I thought.
‘Get them,’ said Vulkan.
I had the big manilla envelope in my raincoat pocket. It had the royal coat of arms on the outside and ‘Home Office’ printed in prim roman letters across the corner. On the front was a white label that said that to help the war effort one should use envelopes as many times as possible. I moved towards the bench and handed the envelope to Vulkan who reached down with his left hand to take the corner.
‘Careful,’ he said, in a genuinely solicitous voice. ‘I want no complications at all. Let alone shooting you.’ I nodded. ‘I like you,’ he added.
‘That puts a new complexion on the whole thing,’ I said.
The envelope had one of those little card circles that you wind string round. If you don’t know what I mean, believe me you need two hands to open it, because that’s the important point. Vulkan kept his finger on the trigger but held the corner of the envelope with his gun hand, using his left hand to unravel the string. It’s the timing that was so important, because as soon as the string is unravelled you need two hands for only as long as it takes to get your hand inside and around the papers. Added to this factor was the risk that the longer I stayed there the more chance there was of Vulkan moving me back to a safe distance.
Vulkan’s knee was level with the top of my head. I judged my distance with care. There is a groove in the fibula just below the knee where the lateral popliteal nerve passes close against the bone. A sharp blow here paralyses the lower leg—‘dead man’s leg’ we called it in the school playground.
‘They are all falling out,’ I shouted suddenly in panic. ‘The papers.’ Johnny clutched the bottom of the envelope as I pushed it—and the gun—upwards away from my cranium. I jabbed at his knee. I hit but not accurately enough. My head sang like a massed-voice choir as the nasty sharp front edge of the magazine hit the side of my head. I had already begun to fall back. Again I punched out, scarcely able to see Vulkan’s leg for the bright crimson pain that sang its song in the empty echo chamber of my head.
I felt him go. He toppled like a felled redwood, the spilled papers spinning and drifting all around him. The crash of his body collapsing full-length across the bench was followed by the clatter of dislodged junk. An insurance renewal slip fell like a sycamore seed into the open tin of grease. ‘I’ve hurt my back,’ he said urgently; but training won out and the Mauser stayed firmly in his fist. Its chamfered snout made a little circling motion like a clerk’s pencil just about to write. I waited for the bang.
‘I’ve hurt my back,’ he said again. I moved towards him but the foresight made that tiny movement again and I froze. His leg was crossed under him like a stone figure on a knight’s tomb. I saw the real, ageing man behind the careless young mask. He twisted his shaken body and, more slowly than I had ever seen him move before, he eased his feet over the edge of the bench towards the greasy floor. His voice was a soft growl, ‘Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.’3
I watched him with that sort of hypnotic horror that venomous insects evoke, but between me and Johnnie Vulkan there was no glass. His feet took the weight of his body and his face
took its pain. He groped along the bench towards me. I moved back. He stepped awkwardly as though his foot had gone to sleep, his muscles uncoordinated, his face twitching, but the Mauser always steady. His foot descended gently into the big tin of grease. Vulkan looked down at it. Now was the time to jump him. ‘I’ve ruined my suit,’ he said. The grease spattered around his leg and the Oxford made loud squelching noises inside the tin. He stood with one hand on the bench, one foot in the tin of grease and the Mauser H SC pointed at my middle. ‘My suit,’ he said and he laughed gently, keeping his mouth wide open, like imbeciles and drunks do, until the laugh became a gurgle, like soap suds going down a kitchen sink.
The bare bulb was in my eyes, so it took me a few seconds to see the blood that was flowing out of his mouth. It was light pink and very frothy. He swayed, then crashed to the stone floor and the grease keg unstuck from his foot with a ‘chug’ and rolled across the garage, rattling as it struck the old debris, and bounced into the greasing pit. Johnnie was face-flat on the petrolshiny floor. His whole body contracted and arched like someone was pouring salt on to him, and then the flat of his hand slapped the concrete, making three loud cracks like pistol shots. Suddenly he was relaxed and still. Stuck fairly high on to Vulkan’s back was the thick oval of polished wood with the words ‘Schmidt’s of Soligen’, and under that, ‘the best drills in the world.’ Vulkan now had their complete range driven deep into his dead body.
It was all so in character. This little Faust, seeker of salvation by striving. This Sturm-und-Drang artist, with his two demanding masters, who tried to die with Goethe on his lips but was carried away by concern for his suit. I wondered whether Samantha was Gretchen or Helena. There was no doubt about my role.
I stacked Stok’s pamphlets in a pile near the door and, buttoning my trenchcoat tight around me, I lifted Johnnie’s bloody carcass into the satinupholstered coffin. Death had cut him down to size and I could hardly recognize the man whose ankle showed a four-inch scar. I took a grease pencil from the medical kit and, after wiping the blood from his face, I wrote ‘1 G. Na Am’ on Vulkan’s forehead. I looked at my watch and wrote ‘18.15’ under it on the tanned skin. Anything that would increase the confusion when that box was opened was working in my favour.
I had only four of the screws in when I heard the lorry outside. The place seemed to smell of blood, which perhaps was my imagination, but I tipped a little petrol on the floor just to be on the safe side, and hid my bloodstained coat.
I swung the doors open. It was dark now and it had begun to snow. They drove in. I helped the driver unlock the rear doors of the truck. A figure stood inside the van holding an old Mark II Sten gun: a figure in a battered leather coat that bulged agreeably in just the right places.
‘Act your age, Sam,’ I said. ‘If there’s only three of us it’s going to be enough trouble lugging this thing into the truck. Lower that gun.’
She didn’t lower the gun. ‘Where’s Johnnie?’ she said.
‘Lower that gun, Samantha. If you’d seen as many accidents as I’ve seen with those shoddy Sten guns you wouldn’t behave that way. Don’t they teach you anything in Haifa?’
She smiled, pulled the cocking handle back, pushed it up into the lock slot and lowered the gun. ‘Johnnie knows you’re here?’
‘Of course he does,’ I said. ‘This is Johnnie’s show, but you will never get away with your end of the deal.’
‘Maybe I won’t,’ she said, and leaned her face very close to mine, ‘but my pop became a piece of soap in this Goddamned country so I’m going to try.’ She paused. ‘We found out what happens if you don’t—six million of you amble forward gently to die without too much mess or inconvenience—so from now on we Jews are going to try. Maybe I won’t get away very far, but this boy…’ she stabbed a bright red fingernail towards the driver, ‘…is right behind, and behind him there are plenty more.’
‘OK,’ I said. She was right. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what the chances are. ‘Plenty more,’ she said. I nodded.
The military-style leather coat suited her. It suited the aggressive boyish stance that she had picked up along with the machine-gun. She leaned an elbow against the van and fanned her fingertips across her cheek as though the coat was the latest fashion and the machine-gun a photographer’s prop.
‘You should have told me that you were in on it.’
‘Over that telephone of yours?’ I said.
‘I saw the newspapers,’ she said. ‘We were careless.’
‘Is that what you call it?’ I said.
‘I suppose the man downstairs burgled my flat too.’
‘There’s no doubt,’ I said.
‘Haifa thought your people had done it.’
I shrugged and made the international sign for money with the index finger and thumb. ‘How much of it’s in German money?’ I asked.
‘It all is,’ she said, ‘all Deutsche marks.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘We have to pay the people at the mortuary for the turn-round there.’ She was still a little suspicious.
‘He’s had one gramme of sodium amytal.’ I waved towards Vulkan’s medical supplies and the coffin. ‘He’s sleeping quietly, we didn’t use the oxygen, but Johnnie said to take the unit and antidote with you. I’ve marked the dose and time on his forehead so even if you forget to warn the people you pass him to, you’ll be OK.’
She nodded and put down the gun and tried to push the coffin. I said, ‘He’ll be out for eight hours solid.’
‘It’s heavy,’ she said.
‘There’s just one little thing,’ I said, ‘before we put him into your van. I would like the money here.’ I held out my hand as Stok had done to me. She went to the cab and from a large leather handbag produced a bundle of new 100 DM notes. She said, ‘You realize there is nothing to stop me blasting you and taking Semitsa.’ The driver came around the back of the lorry. He was carrying the gun, not aiming it, just carrying it.
‘Now you know why Johnnie isn’t here,’ I said.
Her face showed great relief. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I might have known he’d think of that. He’s “Mr Angle”: Johnnie Vulkan.’ She gave me the money like she was sorry to see it go.
‘It’s extortion, ghoul,’ she said. ‘He’s not worth this much.’
‘That’s what the Roman soldiers said to Judas,’ I said. I put the money into my raincoat pocket and we all began to heave at the coffin.
There was a time when I thought we weren’t going to get it in, but slowly it inched into the truck. When it was far enough in for the rear doors to close (and we tried three times before it was) we stood there drinking in the smell of petrol by the deep lungful without enough energy to speak. I poured a big shot of Johnnie’s Glenlivet whisky into the small plastic cups that he had been thoughtful enough to provide in his kit. My whole body suddenly began to shake. The neck of the whisky bottle chattered against the cup in a tiny shudder of sound. I saw Sam and the driver watching me. ‘Bottoms up,’ I said and poured the smoky malt fluid into my bloodstream.
Sam said, ‘You told those French cops that I was working for the Krauts.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have an unpleasant sense of humour.’
‘You knew I was working for the Israeli Intelligence.’
‘Is that who you work for?’ I said in mock innocence.
‘Um,’ she said and sipped her whisky. The driver was watching us both.
‘It’s all a game for you,’ she said, ‘but it’s life and death for us. Those Egyptians have so many Kraut scientists working for them that their laboratory instruction manuals are printed in German as well as Arabic. With this guy we can really even things up.’
‘Enzymes,’ I said.
‘Let’s not kid each other any longer,’ she said. ‘Sure in Israel we can use Semitsa’s knowledge of insecticides, but that’s not half the story and you know it.’
I didn’t say anything. She buttoned her leather coat tighter around her chin. ‘T
hese insecticides Semitsa is working on are nerve gases! They’ve had lots of horticultural workers go crazy already. They attack the nervous system, they say they’re the most deadly substances known to man. It’s true, isn’t it?’
She needed to know. ‘It’s true enough,’ I said.
She spoke more quickly, relieved to know that her assignment was as important and factual as she wanted to believe. ‘One day those Egyptians are going to come back,’ she said. ‘One day soon. When they come they are going to have weapons that those Kraut scientists have built for them. Our people in the nahals4 have got to pack a punch.’ There was a sharp click of plastic as she put down the empty whisky cup. ‘That’s why nothing that you or I could think or do stood a chance. This is something that could be the finale of the Jewish nation; no one is more important than that.’
‘If I’d known you were that keen I would have let you collect him from the Adlon.’
She gave me a playful punch on the arm. ‘You think we couldn’t have done it? If there’s one thing we know something about, it’s cities divided by a wall. We’ve had a wall across Jerusalem ever since I was a kid. We’ve mastered every technique there is for getting over, round, through and under it.’
I opened the rear doors of the truck and heaved the two dark shiny wreaths in. ‘From old friends,’ one of them said. It had hooked itself over a coffin handle. ‘We don’t want those,’ said Sam.
‘You take them,’ I said. ‘You don’t know when you are likely to need a wreath from old friends. None of us does.’
Sam smiled and I slammed the truck doors. I opened the garage doors with their carefully oiled bolts and I waved good-bye solemnly as the truck moved slowly forward. Sam was smiling out of her leather coat. Behind her head I could see the big polished box that contained the mortal remains of John Vulkan and just for a moment I felt like calling this over-confident child back. It’s OK to have soft feelings knowing that years of training preclude me from obeying them.
‘Bis hundertundzwanzig,’5 I said gently. The car lurched forward and Sam had to twist her head to keep me in sight. ‘Mazel Tov,’ she called back. ‘My darling ghoul.’ Florins of snow hit the ebony windscreen and slid gently down the warm glass. The driver flipped his lights on to reveal long yellow cones of fast-moving snow. I closed out the sound of the engine and promised myself another Glenlivet whisky; it wasn’t cold but I had the shivers again.