by Len Deighton
Behind the fire, four men were standing round one of the few trees that remained on the site. I saw the sulphurous yellow glare of a firework. Then the group and the tree disappeared into the darkness again. There was a tiny flicker of yellow flame as one of the men thumbed his cigarette lighter. One said, ‘It’s gone out’ and someone else said, ‘Go and blow on it, Charlie,’ and they all laughed. All around us there was the flare and bang of fireworks and a pitter-patter overhead where rockets were spitting at the stars. There was a soft buzz as something landed at my feet. ‘Oops a daisy,’ said a fat woman walking towards me and we both leapt aside as there was a great smash of sound.
Hallam had dropped behind to have a cigarette without offering them to me. I could see the outline of figures against the light reflected in the house-fronts, but it was hard to know which one was Hallam until there was the loud cloth-tearing sound of a rocket, then the intense white light of the parachute flare which it had contained. Suddenly the whole site was as light as midday. I looked back in the direction we had come. I saw Hallam. He was dressed in his black melton overcoat and bowler hat with a bright yellow silk scarf. The thing I noticed about him was that he was carrying a .45 pistol and it was pointing directly at me. The flare surprised him as much as it did me. I saw him push the huge pistol into the front of his coat. The flare was beginning to die now. I looked around and saw the small crater I had almost fallen into. I dropped into it as the flare went out. It was very dark, the fire was behind me and Hallam in front; I peeped over the edge of the hole to see if I could see him.
He was standing in the same place. He had wrapped his scarf around the gun. Two old women were picking their way carefully past the crater. ‘Look out, Mabel,’ said one of them and the other one caught sight of me and said loudly, ‘Cor, look at him, dear. He’s had one over the eight, all right.’ The other one said, ‘One over the eighteen, you mean.’
It was all Hallam needed to locate me. I decided to get up right away and get close to the two old ladies. There was a crash and rip of a .45 bullet passing above my cranium. ‘Oops,’ said the old ladies. ‘There’s a loud one.’ Hallam wanted me to stay right where I was until he came over to do his task and then leave me there. The two old ladies said, ‘Aren’t they terrible?’
I felt in my pocket for the fireworks I had brought and found a ‘Tiny Demon’. I lit and carefully threw it at Hallam. The explosion had him leaping aside and a man who saw it said, ‘Stop throwing those bangers, you hooligans. I’ll have the law on you.’
I lit another and threw that at Hallam too. He was ready this time but the blast had him keeping his distance. A man passing by said, ‘Are you all right down there?’ and his friend said, ‘It’s just an excuse to get plastered for some of them,’ and they hurried away.
Behind Hallam, the fireworks were bright green and yellow, popping and sending little showers of golden rain into the sky. It gave me a chance to range him in. I watched the fine red tip of the firework land near Hallam’s feet and for a second or so he didn’t see it and when he did he moved fast. There was a big blast but Hallam was merely a little shaken. I looked around for some way out of this fiasco. The whole site was crowded with people coming and going, blissfully unaware of Hallam trying to kill me.
A man was looking into the crater, saying, ‘Have you slipped?’
‘I’m not drunk,’ I said. ‘I’ve twisted my ankle.’ The man reached down a large hard hand to help me. I came to my feet like a man with a twisted ankle and there was a stab of flame as Hallam fired again.
Someone from the darkness yelled, ‘Bloke there is holding bangers in his hand—you don’t want to do that, mate.’ Hallam shuffled to one side a little self-consciously. ‘I’ll be OK now,’ I said to my benefactor. Near by there was a whirling buzz as a Catherine wheel tore a golden hole in the night.
As the man moved away there was another pistol shot and near by someone laughed. Hallam had fired high for fear of hitting the man, and I started to think that he had decided to back me up against the bonfire, with the idea of tipping me in. All sorts of ideas occurred to me such as falling to the ground when I heard the next bullet in the hope that Hallam would come within striking distance. That plan assumed Hallam would be careless; there was no reason to think that Hallam would be careless. To my right there was the choking sound of a roman candle sending livid balls of fire high above my head. Two red spots moved towards me. One said, ‘Where did you put it?’ The other one said, ‘Under this bush, nearly half a bottle; Haig and Haig.’ They moved past. The other two men of a party of four lit another roman candle.
I had lost sight of Hallam, which made me a little nervous. I knew that as soon as the second roman candle went up Hallam would pinpoint me and he didn’t have so many rounds left in the pistol. The next shot might well prove fatal.
I moved in among the men and their roman candles like David among the Philistines. I put my foot on the roman candle and ground it into the earth just as the ignition began. ‘Here, here,’ shouted the biggest one of the men. ‘What the——hell you think you are on?’
‘I’m doing a trick,’ I said. ‘Hold that.’ I took the bottle of rum out of my pocket and gave it to him. ‘Suppose I don’t want to,’ he said. ‘Then me and my mates will smash your head in,’ I said in a surly voice. He backed away hurriedly. I searched through their huge box of fireworks and found a parachute flare. I put the stick of it into the bottle and lit it. There was a great roar of sparks and it took off to burst in a great white glow that momentarily dimmed the bonfire. I stayed close to the tree. There was a great ‘Ooohh’ and ‘Aaahh’ as the rocket burst, and I picked out Hallam in his bowler hat standing near the old Victorian perambulator. I had wedged three more rockets into the crutch of the tree. Hallam looked around feverishly. I depressed the elevation of the first rocket and lined it up with Hallam. I lit it.
‘Steady on,’ said one of the men.
‘Come away, Charlie,’ said his friend. ‘He’s going to do someone an injury and I’m not going to be around.’
As I was lighting the second rocket, the first one began to fire sparks, then it gained power and roared forward like a bazooka shell. It passed about six feet over Hallam’s head and about four feet to the right side. I lit a firecracker and let it burn its fuse well down before hurling it towards Hallam’s feet. By this time he was looking around and he saw the fire of the second rocket begin. There was a flash as he fired a pistol and a chunk of tree ripped a hole in my sleeve. The second rocket roared towards Hallam. It’s easy to see a rocket. It leaves a trail like a tracer bullet. He moved easily to one side and the rocket thudded harmlessly into the ground just beyond where he had been standing. He fired again and there was a crunch of breaking wood. I peeped over the crutch of the tree and saw a great snowstorm of sparks, like it was raining golden sovereigns. Beyond Hallam there was the asterisks of sparklers.
Nearer to me a man said, ‘Well, I’ll tackle him. I paid for those rockets and I’m going to let them off.’ His voice was slurred with drink and I thought at first that it was the men who had been looking for the Haig and Haig coming back to remonstrate with me, but they walked past the tree still talking. Hallam began to load the pistol. I could just see his movements in the gloom. To his right the bonfire was burning brightly; the wind had caught it, and the side which had hitherto been hardly alight suddenly caught fire with a roar.
I groped around feverishly for more fireworks. There was only one more rocket and some roman candles and groups of tiny bangers with rubber bands round them. I grabbed one bundle, lit them with my hand shaking so much I could hardly hold the match and tossed them in the direction of Hallam. I put the last rocket in the branch of the tree and lit it just as the bundle of bangers went off with a huge crash. It put Hallam off guard. My last rocket tore a yellow gash in the fabric of night. At first I thought it would hit him, but at the last minute he saw it coming and moved aside. It went into the soft earth a few feet behind him and expired softly.
Two shots ripped notches into the tree. I shrank down behind it with the idea of running for the nearest cover. I looked at the brightly lit ground around me. There was no cover. Nothing between me and Hallam now.
I looked around the shadow side of the tree fairly low down, and as I did I saw what happened. The second or third rocket lying on the ground suddenly obediently discharged its flare. I saw Hallam’s whole figure silhouetted in the great white light behind him. I could read the wrestling ad about Dr Death. Hallam half turned, probably thinking that he was being attacked from the rear and as he did I saw his scarf was alight. The scarf hung from his hand like a great flaming walking stick and he beat it against himself to put the flames out. Suddenly there was an enormous sheet of flame into which Hallam disappeared. It flickered for a moment and I saw Hallam’s body twisted in the very centre of the flame. Then suddenly there was a roar like a jet motor, and where there had been flame there was nothing but a great white fireball, so bright that the bonfire looked dull and yellow. Some vintage, that Algerian wine. It was a Molotov cocktail to dispose of my mortal remains.
‘Cor, what a beauty.’
‘Hello, somebody’s thrown a match into a box of fireworks; easy to do.’
‘A few bobs’ worth of whizzers gone up there, Mabel.’
‘I bet my dog’s going mad.’
‘Mind how you go there, there’s a hole there. One drunk feller has fallen into it already.’
‘I wonder who clears it all up.’
‘We’ve got some cold sausages in the fridge or we can stop off for some fried fish and chips.’
‘Look at that green one.’
‘Oooooohh, what a terrible smell of burning food. Look at that smoke.’
‘Leave off, George.’
‘Hello, there’s a crowd gathering over there. I’ll bet there’s been an accident.’
Chapter 49
If a player is not in check but can only make
a move that will place him in check; this is
stalemate and is scored as a draw.
Wednesday, November 6th
‘Well, you had better not put any of that in the report,’ said Dawlish. ‘The Cabinet will go dotty if you’ve been mixed up with two nasty businesses in one week.’
‘How many am I allowed per week?’ I said.
Dawlish just sucked an empty pipe.
‘How many?’ I asked again.
‘As one man who hates violence to another,’ said Dawlish patiently, ‘you are developing an unfortunate habit of being near by when people commit suicide.’
‘You are damn right,’ I told him. ‘I’ve spent my whole adult life being near by, watching half the human race committing suicide, and from where I’m sitting the other half seem hell-bent on following suit.’
‘Don’t go on,’ said Dawlish. ‘You’ve made your point.’ There was a long silence with just the ticking of the clock. It was 2.30 in the middle of the night. We always seemed to be in Dawlish’s office in the middle of the night.
Dawlish fiddled around with some papers in the tiny light on his desk. Outside I could hear lorries laden with deliveries of milk roaring and clinking at breakneck speed into the city. I sat in front of the tiny coal fire that no one in the building except Dawlish could ever get to burn, sipped his best brandy and waited while Dawlish got ready to tell me something. By now I could recognize the signs. ‘It’s my fault,’ said Dawlish. ‘My fault that this happened.’ I said nothing. Dawlish came across to the fire and sat down in the biggest armchair.
‘You checked…’ Dawlish spoke to the mantelpiece rather than to me. ‘…that Hallam was to leave the Civil Service next week?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You know why?’ he asked.
I sipped my brandy and took my time about replying. I knew that Dawlish wouldn’t hurry me. ‘He was a bad security risk,’ I said.
‘My report said he was not a good security risk,’ said Dawlish emphasizing the difference. ‘My report,’ he repeated.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You knew.’
‘You kept telling me not to ill-treat him,’ I said. Dawlish nodded. ‘That’s right, I did,’ he agreed. We both stared into the fire for a long time, me sipping brandy, Dawlish with both palms pressed flat together and the two index fingers rubbing the tip of his nose.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Dawlish. ‘You know my views.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I sent in a long supplementary attached to his file, and three memos about him in particular and homosexuals in general. Do you know what happened?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘A certain hooligan in the Cabinet’—I had never heard Dawlish describe his superiors in quite such terms—‘had Ross at the War Office check me to see whether I have homosexual tendencies.’ He leaned forward and prodded the fire gently with the poker. ‘Whether I have them.’
‘That’s the way your mind works if you are a politician,’ I said. I suppose I smiled. Dawlish said sadly, ‘It’s not funny.’ He poured me another brandy and decided to have one himself. ‘That’s what happens once you start moving along these sort of lines. Look at the Americans. They have invented some quality called un-Americanism just as though Americanism were a concept of an individual instead of a Government’s concept. There are strong resemblances between Americanism, communism and Aryanism: all are Government ideas and therefore will naturally describe characteristics of the easily governed; other differences are minor.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Dawlish wasn’t talking to me, he was just thinking aloud. I wanted to know what would happen about the Hallam disaster but I would let Dawlish get to it in his own way.
Dawlish said, ‘That’s what one doesn’t like about this homosexual business. We may as well say that all women are a security risk because they can have illicit relations with men. Or vice versa.’
‘For those who like their vice versa,’ I said.
Dawlish nodded. ‘The only solution is to take the social pressures off the homosexuals. These damned security hunts just put more pressure on. If someone gets on to one of these johnnies before we do he’s got an extra threat for him—losing his job; if they weren’t going to lose their job, they might ask to have “homosexual” entered on their dossiers voluntarily. If they then had someone pressuring them, they could report to their security people and we’d have some sort of chance of dealing with it. This damned system, all that happens is that we make enemies.’ I nodded.
‘Don’t even report to me,’ said Dawlish, and I realized that part of his mind had been thinking of the Hallam situation all the time. ‘Just act as if you knew nothing whatsoever.’
‘That comes naturally to me,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ said Dawlish. He sucked his pipe and said, ‘Poor old Hallam, what a way to go,’ two or three times and then finally, ‘are you happy, that’s the main thing?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘An all-laughing, all-dancing, all-singing, Technicolor wide-screen massacre. Why wouldn’t I be happy?’
‘Desperate diseases require desperate remedies,’ said Dawlish.
‘Says who?’ I said.
‘Guy Fawkes, I believe,’ said Dawlish. He was just great at quoting people.
I said, ‘Why don’t you and me clear off to Zürich and claim the quarter of a million? We’ve got the proof.’ I tapped the envelope full of Broum.
‘For the department?’ said Dawlish, walking back to his desk.
‘Us,’ I said.
‘It would mean living with all those Swiss,’ said Dawlish. ‘They’d never let us grow weeds there.’ He opened a drawer, dropped the documents into it and locked it, before coming back to the fireside.
‘Shall we try and get that bastard Mohr?’ I said.
‘You are a callow youth,’ said Dawlish. ‘If we tell Bonn he is a war criminal, either they won’t claim him at all or else they will give him some nice fat government job. You know what always happens
.’
‘You’re right,’ I said, and we both sat quietly staring into the fire. Every now and then Dawlish said how amazing it was that Vulkan never really existed, and poured me another drink. ‘I’ll tell Stok about Mohr,’ I said.
‘Do that,’ said Dawlish, ‘and we’ll watch what happens.’
‘If anything,’ I said.
‘So Vulkan never really existed?’
‘Vulkan existed all right,’ I said. ‘He was a concentration-camp guard until a wealthy prisoner (who had been an assassin for the Communist Parties) arranged to have him killed. This man was Broum, and an SS medical officer named Mohr…’
‘The one in Spain now. Our Mohr.’
I nodded. ‘…made a deal. The SS officer staged a death scene and made sure that Broum was believed dead by all the prisoners. Broum meanwhile dressed as a German soldier and disappeared. In 1945 even being a German soldier was better than being a murderer. What’s more Broum (or Vulkan) got along very well financially even without the £250,000, but it was nice to think it was there waiting. Perhaps he intended to leave it to someone. Perhaps on his death-bed, beyond the reach of the guillotine, he was going to say who he really was. No. It was this new law about unclaimed property that made him suddenly start to move. What he needed was a way of proving he was Broum and then of not being Broum just as quickly.
‘It’s astonishing,’ said Dawlish, ‘to think of a Jewish prisoner who had suffered so much going all through his life saying that he had been a Nazi guard in a concentration camp.’
‘He didn’t know whether he was up or down,’ I said. ‘He came to the conclusion that if you threw enough money around you don’t have enemies. Vulkan, Broum, whatever you want to call him, his final allegiance was to cash.’