Riptide

by Lawton, John

  ‘He doesn’t mean to. In fact he doesn’t know he’s doing it. He just drops bricks.’

  ‘Your faith in innocence would be touching were it not for your odd choice of profession.’

  It was odd. And she’d never let him forget it.

  § 21

  Cal dashed into Lippschitz Bros., slapped down two pounds ten shillings and grabbed the package the old men had for him.

  ‘Don’t you want to wait for a fitting?’ they yelled after him.

  ‘Don’t have the time!’

  It was a mistake. He stood in front of the mirror in his room at Claridge’s and cursed the name of Lippschitz. The waist bagged, the jacket hung on him like something made for Cab Calloway to sport on Lenox Avenue, and the trouser cuffs let daylight onto his socks. He looked like a clown. Damn, damn, damn. And there wasn’t a spare second to do a thing about it. He ran for a cab.

  He was wondering why Stilton had suggested a pub and not Scotland Yard or the American Embassy, wondering how he’d know Stilton if he saw him.

  It was too easy. He pushed open the saloon door of the Green Man in the Strand. A man leant against the bar, chatting happily to the barman in an accent Cal could not place, one hand in his trouser pocket, one elbow on the bar, looking for all the world as though he could hold the posture all night if need be.

  ‘Not so much as a whizz or a bang for five days. ’Appen it’s over,’ he was saying.

  ‘More like Adolf’s saving it all up for a big one. I’ve heard say the next’ll be the biggest we’ve seen.’

  ‘Jack, you are a miserable sod, you always look on the black side. Try being an optimist. Like I said, ’appen it’s over.’

  Jack gave this a second’s thought, then slapped his hand on the bar. ‘Touch wood,’ he said, then he looked at Cal, as though waiting for his order. Stilton’s eyes followed and found Cal.

  He was a big man, as tall as Cal himself, but sixty or more pounds the heavier, and every inch the London bobby. A nondescript, voluminous brown macintosh, a trilby hat perched on the bar next to his pint, shiny boots – polished until they gleamed like ebony – and a plump, reddish, fiftyish face, framing bright brown eyes and a big, bushy, wild moustache – the only un-neat thing about the man. Peeping from beneath the macintosh were the folds of a dark, striped suit – better by far than the work of the fifty-shilling tailor Reininger had sent him to – knife-edge creases in the trousers, cuffs neatly resting upon the tops of his boots, not hovering at half-mast around the ankles like Cal’s.

  He straightened up. Stuck out a hand.

  ‘Stilton. Walter Stilton. You must be Mr Cormack.’

  Cal shook the hand. Tried once more to place the accent and couldn’t.

  ‘Do I look that much like an American?’ he asked.

  ‘You said it, lad, I didn’t. Now. What’s your poison?’

  ‘A pint,’ said Cal, hoping it was what was expected of him.

  ‘Pint o’ what?’ Stilton replied, piling on the confusion.

  ‘What do you have?’

  The barman answered. ‘Bitter, mild, stout . . .’

  Bitter sounded . . . well . . . bitter. Mild sounded pathetic. Had to be stout.

  ‘Fine,’ said Stilton. ‘Jack, bring ’em over. Mr Cormack an’ me’ll be in the snug.’

  The snug turned out to be a room the size of a closet, partitioned from the main bar by an elaborately etched glass door. He guessed that Stilton wanted privacy. The snug was empty, but then so was the bar. Thursday evening was clearly not their rush hour.

  ‘I’ve not been told a lot, you understand. Just the basics. You’ll have to bring me up to date as best you can.’

  Cal stared at the poster on the wall above Stilton’s head. A caricature of Hitler, all cowlick and toothbrush moustache, had been worked into a repeated motif for wallpaper – little Hitlers spiralling down the poster – and the caption ‘Walls have ears’. He’d seen posters much like this dotted all over London in the last few days: ‘Walls have ears’ – ‘Careless talk costs lives’ – ‘Keep Mum She’s Not So Dumb’ – and no one seemed to pay a blind bit of notice.

  The barman set a pint of black stuff in front of him. Stilton put a few coppers on the table and waved Cal down when he reached for his wallet.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Stilton.

  Cal sipped at his pint. It tasted like mud. It was so thick you couldn’t see through it. He must have pulled a face.

  ‘Not to your taste, lad?’

  ‘No, no,’ Cal lied. ‘It justs takes a bit of getting used to. So many things do.’

  ‘Now – to business. About this Jerry we’re after. Colonel Ruthven-Greene got on the blower to . . .’

  ‘The blower?’

  ‘Telephone, lad. I left a message for him at Broadway. He called me back. Filled me in. Told me to lend you a hand.’

  Cal wondered again about the English. Reggie had ‘filled him in’. Over the telephone? A little Hitler caught his eye.

  ‘Scrambler, o’ course,’ Stilton added, as though he had read Cal’s mind. ‘He called me on a scrambler.’

  ‘Did he say where he was?’

  ‘Where he was?’

  ‘I’ve been calling him at the Savoy since Monday. I got through to him once. It’s Thursday now. We’ve lost the best part of four days.’

  ‘Can’t help that, lad. They didn’t bring me in till Tuesday. It was yesterday before Colonel Ruthven-Greene called me back and . . .’

  ‘OK, OK. I know it’s not your fault,’ Cal conceded. ‘Perhaps you had better tell me what you have to tell me.’

  He listened while Stilton told him what he knew, nodded, said ‘yes’ when it seemed necessary, feeling all the time that the little Hitlers in the wallpaper were watching him, only him, and that if he looked up quickly he would catch the beady eyes upon him.

  At the end of it Stilton asked simply, ‘D’ye have any questions?’

  ‘Do I have any questions?’

  ‘Well. Do you?’

  ‘If you put it like that – yes I do. Can we find him?’

  ‘If he’s in London we’ll find him.’

  ‘That’s part of the problem. Reggie was convinced Stahl would come to London. He could be here now.’

  ‘He could. But not without we know about it. Now . . .’

  Stilton rummaged in an inside pocket. Found his wallet, pulled out a piece of paper and stared at it.

  ‘Would this be anything like your man? Six foot or more, light hair, blue eyes, thirty or thereabouts. Weight about thirteen stone.’

  ‘Thirteen stone?’ Cal said, feeling slightly stunned by the speed with which Stilton had changed course.

  ‘Thirteen stone. About one hundred and eighty pounds.’

  ‘Six foot, blond, one eighty. Yes, that could be Stahl.’

  ‘D’ye reckon he could pass for a foreigner?’

  ‘He is a foreigner.’

  ‘I meant, could he be taken for Swiss if he tried to pass himself off as one? To a Swedish crew, I mean.’

  ‘Of course. He’s an Austrian. Both countries speak German. I don’t think the finer points of a German accent would be all that obvious to the Swedes, or to the English for that matter.’

  Stilton spread the sheet of paper out on the table.

  ‘’Appen this is him, then. On the seventh a Swedish merchantman was anchored overnight off Hull waiting for the tide.’

  Stilton paused almost imperceptibly, changed tone, threw in the next line almost as an aside.

  ‘Hull’s a big port up Yorkshire way. About two hundred miles north of London.’

  Well, thought Cal, I asked for the High School geography lesson, didn’t I?

  ‘Next morning Immigration and Special Branch sail out with the pilot to check out the crew. Matter of routine with neutral shipping, these days. One man was missing. Erich Hober, aged thirty, signed on in Stockholm. Papers showed he’d shipped out from Danzig before that.’

  ‘Missing? How does anyone go missing from a sh
ip at sea?’

  ‘Easy lad. They’d be within sight of land. Hull’s a good way up an estuary the size of the Thames. They’d not be at sea, they’d be in the dredger channel. A good swimmer could slip over the side and make for the shore. If that’s what this chap did, he’d have eight hours’ start on us. He’d’ve been in London before they were even looking for him in Hull.’

  Cal had that sinking feeling. The one that had set in with Ruthven-Greene’s last phone call. Stahl had got here before him. Stahl was doing whatever he had come to London to do. And Cal had been dumped. Fobbed off with a pensionable policeman who spoke a language that baffled him with every other sentence.

  ‘That could be him. It sounds like him.’

  ‘Good, now all we’ve got to do is find the bugger.’

  Stilton downed most of his pint, a dusting of froth on the ends of his moustache, smiled at Cal. Cal left his beer untouched. Good God, they’d given him a grinning fool.

  ‘Where,’ he asked, ‘where do we even begin to look in a city of five million people?’

  ‘More like six and a half, lad, and we look in all the right places and ignore the wrong ones. I know what you’re thinking. And I wouldn’t blame you. But tracking Jerries is my job. My speciality. I’ve narks in every immigrant quarter in the city. You’ll find the refugees tend to gravitate to the pubs and restaurants around their own exiled governments. And the poorer they get, the further they fan out. A bit like tribes around the wigwam. I’ve Poles in Putney, Czechs in Bayswater, Norwegians in Kensington, French in Piccadilly, a few Dutch here and there and a handful of Belgians. There’s nowhere this bloke can go and not surface sooner or later, and if he surfaces in the wrong quarter, tries a bluff too far, then they’ll spot him, and we’ll get a tip off. A lot of these people hate each other – that’s Europe for you after all, ten centuries of hating each other – but they’ve one thing in common. They all hate Jerry. There are times I think they hate us too – most of ’em learn just enough English to order a meal.’

  ‘Then you’d better leave the talking to me. I’ve got my specialty too. German.’

  Stilton was grinning at him again. One bushy eyebrow slightly up.

  ‘Where d’you learn the lingo?’

  ‘Family. My grandmother’s family were Germans. Moravians. There’s a lot of Moravians in the Southern States. We all got German handed down to us along with the family bible. It was a good start. I polished it at school. And I’ve spent the last two years and more in Zurich.’

  Stilton was nodding now, not grinning quite so much.

  ‘Well, lad . . .’ he said at last, and Cal knew he’d come to hate being called lad. ‘I do envy you. I learnt mine in Cottbus.’

  ‘Cottbus? What’s Cottbus?’

  ‘German prisoner-of-war camp, lad. Prussia. 1916–1918. I learnt it the hard way. I’ve picked up Polish and Czech on the streets of London. A damn sight more fun, I can tell you.’

  Just a little, Cal felt humbled.

  ‘So,’ Stilton resumed. ‘He can pass for Swiss. He’d hardly be still using that as his cover though. What’s his next best ticket?’

  ‘Czech. Sudeten Czech. Bilingual. German-speaking as well as Czech. That could explain any oddities in the accent. He could maybe lose himself in a Czech district. Or Polish at a pinch. He could pass for a Pole to you and me, but I doubt he’d fool a real Pole. And of course Austrian. Pretend to be what he really is. You didn’t mention Austrians in your list.’

  ‘Oh there’s Austrians all right. Jews mostly. Could he pass for Jewish?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cal. ‘What does a Jew look like?’

  ‘That’s rhetoric, I take it?’

  ‘Pretty well.’

  ‘Then I’d say it’s got a damn sight less to do with what he looks like than what he says and what he sounds like. If as you say he’s going to have to lose himself, he has to blend. I couldn’t blend into Jewish culture, could you?’

  ‘Probably not. I’d mess it up at the first “maseltov”.’

  Stilton scribbled in his notebook with a pencil stub, mouthing the words as he did so. Cal felt as though they’d both just tested each other – and passed.

  ‘There’s one or two blokes I could get hold of this evening if you’ve the time.’

  ‘I’ve all the time in . . .’

  The barman cut Cal off.

  ‘Stinker! Your man Dobbs on the dog an’ bone!’

  The barman lifted up the wooden flap of the bar to let Stilton through.

  ‘’Scuse us, lad,’ Stilton said over his shoulder. ‘Telephone.’ Telephone? ‘Dog an’ bone’? He’d only just learnt ‘blower’.

  He tipped the rest of his pint into the pot of a ragged aspidistra. It needed a drink more than he did. When he returned Stilton’s expression had changed. He was angry – controlling it, but angry.

  ‘Change of plan, I’m afraid. I’ve got to go to Hoxton. You’d best come with me. It’ll mean missing my Czech nark, but he’ll not say a dicky bird without me there. ’Appen we can salvage some of the evening a bit later.’

  He grabbed his hat and swept out, clearly expecting Cal to follow. ‘Dicky bird?’ Word? Word! Good God, that was it – the English talked in rhymes.

  Out in the street, Stilton yanked open the driver’s door of a large four-door Riley Kestrel and pointed Cal to the other side.

  ‘Or did you think you were going to drive?’ he asked rhetorically.

  He pressed the starter and the car jerked out into a street all but empty of traffic. They’d driven a mile before either of them spoke again.

  ‘What’s in Hoxton?’ Cal asked, hoping for an answer.

  ‘’Nother Jerry,’ Stilton said tersely. ‘An agent they’ve sent over. But we were on to him from the first. He’ll never get to do what he’s come to do.’

  ‘You think he’s a spy?’

  ‘Most of ’em are. But not this one. This one’s a killer. Sent over to bump off some poor bugger.’

  Cal wondered how to phrase the next question. A piece of the puzzle, the first, had just landed on the board. The last thing he wanted to do was alarm Stilton, risk him clamming up.

  ‘You sure?’ he said simply.

  ‘Oh aye, I’m sure. But we’ll stop him. Whatever it is, we’ll stop him.’

  ‘Why are we going to Hoxton now?’

  ‘My man Dobbs. He’s watching the boarding house. He rang to tell me there’s police in the building.’

  ‘Is that a problem?’

  Stilton snorted with laughter. ‘Oh, it’s a problem all right. The last thing you want is the boys in blue trampling all over the shop in their size tens. Wot larx, eh?’

  Cal let this one sink in. He thought he’d got the gist of it. The Branch were political police. And they regarded the criminal police as a nuisance. In this scenario, he and Stilton were the Feds, racing to take over from a county sheriff in some hick town in the mid-west that had been lucky enough to trap Dillinger. Slang was OK. He’d get used to it. He was in the picture. The big picture. It might not be so bad after all. Stilton might not be so bad after all. But he’d no idea what the man meant by ‘Wot larx’. It didn’t seem to rhyme with anything.

  § 22

  Hoxton Street was long, narrow and not particularly straight. It snaked its way from Shoreditch station almost to Dalston, fizzling out and changing names just short of the Grand Union Canal. Halfway up it stood the Red Lion public house, and opposite the Red Lion stood Mrs O’Grady’s Boarding House – its trade announced by a hand-written card in the ground floor window: ‘Furn. rooms avail. for respec. gents. No gippos.’ Outside the house was a small black car – a Bullnose Morris. By the Bullnose Morris was a nervous, pacing, slyly smoking policeman, a cigarette cupped between his fingers, the glowing tip facing backwards, as though this simple precaution might make his illicit action the less obvious.

  ‘Put that bloody fag out!’ Stilton roared as he and Cal got out of the car.

  Dobbs dropped the cigarette
and ground it underfoot. Stilton pointed at the Bullnose Morris.

  ‘Troy?’ he said.

  ‘Upstairs, boss. I couldn’t stop ’im.’

  ‘Save it, lad. I’ll listen to your lies later.’

  He led off, into the house. Cal followed. Inside the door, a large, stout, worried woman in a pinafore stood waiting, looking up the stairs. She turned when they entered.

  ‘Oh Mr Stilton, thank Gawd it’s you. What a to-do! What a to-do!’

  Stilton ignored her display. Grief or fear or whatever.

  ‘First floor, is it?’ he asked, and headed up the stairs. Cal followed. Smiled at the woman. In return she told him once more what a to-do it was.

  He stood behind Stilton, looking past him into the landing of the next floor, where a second staircase led to the floor above that. A man in a black cashmere overcoat was bending over the body of a big man – barefoot, vest and trousers – crumpled at the foot of the stairs, the arms, legs and neck jammed between the wall, the banister rails and the floor at unnatural angles – as though someone had picked up Pinocchio and just dropped him. The young man was talking to a white-haired man of sixty or so – a doctor, repacking his bag and looking at his watch.

  ‘All I’m saying is that nothing like this can ever be open and shut.’

  ‘It’s as simple as this, Sergeant. He’s at the bottom of the stairs, the carpets are worn to buggery and he’s got his neck broken. I can’t see the mystery in that.’

  The younger man stood up. He looked tiny to Cal. No more than five foot six or seven – a mop of thick black hair falling across his forehead, so that he was forever sweeping it back with one hand, and shining, black eyes in a pale face. He looked like a freshman student. Far too young to be a cop.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he said bluntly. ‘The neck isn’t just broken, it’s twisted. We need a full post-mortem to determine the cause of death. We need –’

  And there Stilton cut him short.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Troy. Good of you to step into the breach. But this is a Branch matter, and I’ll take over now.’