Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  He waited for the man to come and served in the sports shop during the day, and prayed each night in his room that he would be worthy of the trust placed in him.

  Malachy felt the train slow, and as the rattle of the wheels died he heard the scream of sea birds. He reached up, unhitched the window blind, let it fly clear, and rubbed condensation off the glass.

  He did not know whether he had reached, almost, the end of a journey or the start of one. Could not have said if this was where, almost, an old life ended and for him a new day started. Would not have been able to tell himself if this was the place, almost, that disgrace was finished and where he would now find the searched-for quality of respect.

  His face was pressed against the cleared window.

  Under the platform lights passengers, dazed from the night journey, coughed, spat and hacked their throats clear, then lugged down suitcases, parcels and rucksacks. The station was Norden. He could smell, distantly, sea air, but by the time the train jolted away and picked up speed, the rain falling from the darkness obscured the glass. When he stretched up and looked down the length of the carriage he saw only emptiness. He was alone. Through the mist now settled on the window, he saw occasional front-porch lights, an illuminated forecourt to a petrol station, a car showroom. Some of the roads were lit like daylight and some were dark – and the gulls cried louder, as if greeting him.

  The last stop of the train's route – from Munich, on to Cologne, then to Rotenburg, Bremen, Oldenburg and Emden – was the harbour at Norddeich. It was flat there, exposed, and the wind ripped at flags and came in battering gusts on to the side of the carriage. The isolation, he thought, was precious to him and gave him strength. He stepped down from the carriage.

  Ahead of him, tied up, was a ferry. To his left a marina of yachts nestled behind a sea wall, and to his right, crowded close, a fishing fleet. He saw the wind, the rain, hit the ferry's superstructure and rock the masts of the pleasure-craft and the small trawlers.

  He walked towards the ferry and the elements almost keeled him over. He braced himself to advance. He found a man in a precariously rocking hut, who smoked an old pipe and had a coffee mug cupped in his hands as if for warmth.

  Was this the boat, the ferry, for the island of Baltrum?

  The man, bored and cold, shook his head.

  Where was the ferry that went to the island?

  The man growled, indistinct, 'Nessmersiel/ then sucked at his pipe and billowed smoke.

  How could he reach Nessmersiel for the ferry?

  He should go by bus.

  When and where did the bus go from?

  First the man shrugged. Then he took his pipe from his mouth, sipped from his mug and waved back in the direction the train had come.

  Malachy thanked the man for his kindness and wished him a good day. In another world, the old one, he would have felt a spurt of anger at the slowness of the extraction of answers… but the former life of Malachy Kitchen had ebbed. He smiled. He went out through the door where a length of string, holding it open, strained to breaking-point. Where he had been, what had happened to him, had slowed his anger, deadened it.

  The wind scurried against his back as he walked past the deserted train, away from the tethered fishing fleet and the rattle of rigging on the yachts in the marina. Rain bit at his shoulders and hips and at the back of his legs. He walked well and the pains, aches and itches were behind him. He was alone, as he would have wanted to be, and his journey was nearly done, or was nearly started.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The bus parked beside the gangplank.

  The dawn had come, and the rain had eased but not the gale.

  The bus for which he had waited nearly two hours had brought Malachy, and three others, along a straight road behind the sea-defence dyke. Then, at the village of Nessmersiel, the bus had swung to the north, and the last stretch of the route had been on a road flanked by neat, darkened homes. The driver had broken clear of the village and brought them to the harbour where a squat ferry waited.

  She stood a little step aside from the gangway, and had a packed rucksack high on her shoulders. She had two small stubs, tickets, in her hand and held them out. 'We get two for the price of one,' she said.

  'I didn't ask you to come,' he said flatly.

  'Our people always like it when field people go cheapskate. I didn't say you asked me. Next week, getting ready for the season, the full fare starts.'

  'I don't want you with me.'

  'Don't sulk – you look grim enough without that.'

  'And I don't want your concern.'

  Her eyes sparked. 'Well, I'm here, and you should get used to it.'

  Malachy took a ticket from her and went up the gangway. He heard her heavy shoes tramp up after him. The other passengers from the bus, on boarding, bolted from the open deck and went inside a doorway that advertised a cafeteria service. Exhausted obstinacy led him to a part of the open deck where the rain slanted in hard, and the wind. He slumped down on a plastic-coated bench that puddled water. She followed him and tried to wriggle the rucksack off her back. He made no move to help her but then she gasped in frustration and he reached to take the weight of it.

  'That's better. Well done. Join the human race.'

  'I was fine on my own,' he said.

  The rain made a film on her hair but when she twisted her head to face him and dumped the rucksack down, the wind caught and tousled it, broke the film and droplets sparkled. She sat beside him. She wore strong lace-up shoes and a long waxed coat that she hitched round her knees but, out on the deck, her ankles took the rain.

  She snatched off her spectacles, blinked, then rummaged in a pocket for a handkerchief and wiped furiously at the lenses. She grinned. 'You display, Malachy, a quite staggering degree of self-importance.

  I'd like to give that a kick. I'm not with you to watch your back. Get yourself thumped and see if I care.

  Now, get a load of this: parallel lines run along adjacent to each other – not often, but sometimes, they move together and merge. Then, geometry or whatever pushes the lines apart again, so that they're no longer joined but are parallel. Pretty simple, eh?

  Maybe everybody gets a chance to wave goodbye and maybe they don't, but for a few hours, or at most a couple of days, the lines go together, then… nothing's permanent. I brought us some kit.'

  'What for?'

  'Don't go sour again, Malachy. It spoils you.'

  The eyes danced and the mouth quivered. He felt the ludicrousness of the sulk she'd identified. She dived her hands into the rucksack's neck.

  She showed him dry socks and clean Union Jack boxer shorts, rolled up all-weather trousers and a rainproof top, a battery razor, a plastic bag with a toothbrush and paste, and a shirt crumpled by the weight on it. She laid them on his lap. As the boat's engine shuddered beneath them, a man came out, waited for them to find their ticket stubs, punched them and hurried for cover. She showed him, then put back in the rucksack, a miniature radio transmitter with earphones, a Thermos and a collapsible Primus stove, big binoculars and, last, a sleeping-bag that was rolled tightly. She dug deeper, and swore with vigour.

  A pistol fell from the sleeping-bag and clattered on the deck planks.

  He jerked down, fast reaction – as if the tiredness was gone – and snatched it up while it still rolled by his shoes. 'If you didn't know, they're quite dangerous things.'

  'It's not my area, couldn't hit a front door at three yards.'

  Astonished, confused but wary. 'Is that for me?'

  'Take it. Think of it as insurance. Do you know what it is?'

  He held it carefully, his finger way clear of the trigger, then sucked in a breath, looked over his shoulder and saw that the deck was clear. The boat moved away from the quay. As he had been taught, Malachy took out the magazine, cleared the breech, and depressed the safety button, then pressed on the trigger, felt its resistance and heard the click of the harmless mechanism. He gazed at it. At Brigade and Battalion, h
e had worn a pistol at his webbing belt. On the patrol he had carried, and had lost, an assault rifle. It came at him, the memory of running hunched with the file of soldiers, like a knife thrust.

  He said, 'It's a nine-millimetre PMM self-loading pistol, updated from the Makarov, twelve-round magazine, around four hundred and twenty metres per second muzzle velocity. It's-'

  'Don't wave it around, just put the bloody thing in your pocket.'

  He did. He thought it weighed, in his pocket, two or three times more than the plastic toy he had carried in the Amersham. He gazed at her and she seemed amused. She let the tip of her tongue jut between her teeth, and he thought she brought danger with her.

  'What is the need for insurance?'

  'Not the place to start. You've done the Secrets Act stuff? Believe in it?'

  'I have, I think I do… in spite of.'

  'Forget the mawkish bit. That's history. We'll start with the convergence of parallel lines. It's not original, did it at university. The right-wing Christian Democrats and the left-wing Italian Communists were edging towards a coalition government – it's nearly forty years ago. Two parallel lines of political opinion, but coming together and ultimately merging.

  The originator was Aldo Moro, a CD bigwig. Didn't do him much good, because extremists, from the Brigate Rosse, kidnapped and shot him. You and I, Malachy, are parallel lines but for convenience we've linked up. What I like about you, you don't interrupt.

  Perhaps you're too bloody cold to bother.'

  She told him, sketchily, about a man who had sent his wife a gold chain to mark his love, about a co-ordinator who had been bought time in an apartment under the roofs, about a Czech furniture factory and the link to Timo Rahman who ran organized crime in Hamburg, and she told him about an idiot who had broken into the grounds of the home of Timo Rahman and eavesdropped the name of an island – and she said they would, together, observe and possibly disrupt what her boss called a 'rat run'… and then she told him that only a serious idiot would sit in the rain in soaked clothes without protection from the wind. He took into the toilets the clothing given him.

  When he returned, warmer, drier and with insurance heavy in his pocket, she was leaning against the rail at the back of the ferry, and gulls flew prettily above her. She took the clothes that Ivanhoe Manners had bought for him in a charity shop, long ago, and didn't dump them in the rubbish bin near to her but chucked them up and high, so that for a moment socks, pants and a shirt soared with the birds, then dropped into the ferry's wake.

  'At least now,' she said, 'you won't stink. You did, worse than a pheasant hung too long.'

  'For your consideration, Miss Wilkins, thank you,' he said evenly.

  'Polly'll do… Too much formality might screw up the convergence of parallel lines.'

  When the mainland had slipped away into the mist, while the shaking boat went slow up a channel marked by dead wood poles, they left the back, went to the side and leaned out. The wind ripped at their hair, and he stood close enough for her to feel the weight of the pistol in his pocket. They saw a sandbank high above the surf with seals on it, then the island's shoreline.

  'Don't think I need you,' he said.

  'Believe what you want to.'

  Oskar Netzer snarled at the man, his neighbour,

  'You'll take it with you. We don't want it here.'

  He had opened his front door, pushed it wide enough against the wind's force to slip through it and it had slammed behind him. Across the sagged wire fence that divided their properties, the chemist from the mainland was putting out plastic bags by the little wicket gate at the end of his front garden path; bottle necks peeped from one. Already, with the day hardly started, he had heard the clatter of the pushed mower on the aprons of grass flanking the path and down the side of their house.

  The man stood up slowly, as if that made for a more defiant pose, and gazed back at him. Oskar had a canvas bag slung on his shoulder, heavy with the tools he would need for his day's work, but he held his ground and allowed the wind to whip his face. On a point of principle he burned his own rubbish, everything he could, in a brazier at the back, letting the elements take the smoke and scatter the ashes. There was a rubbish collection each week in Westdorf and the disposal of it was a constant burden on the permanent residents and was paid for by their taxes, but Oskar Netzer, self-appointed guardian of Baltrum's purity, was considered too impoverished to pay dues to the island's council.

  The woman, the chemist's wife, had come to the door of their house and stared back at Oskar. He saw her annoyance, and also that her husband's chin shook at the effort to suppress his anger. He went down his own path, where weeds grew in the spaces between flagstones, and past his own beds, where more weeds flourished: he would clear those beds only when flowers came up in the summer. Then he would cut them and take them to the cemetery in Ostdorf.

  He glanced down at the neatly stacked plastic bags.

  'Is that all you do, make rubbish for us to clear? You should take it with you, back where you came from.'

  He walked away, almost cheerfully, up the street.

  He heard only a hiss of breath from the chemist.

  Should either have sworn at him, if their annoyance had exploded, it would have made perfect the beginning of the day. But Oskar had had enough from them to be almost happy, and he strode off. He would soon be out of the abomination of close-set houses and away in the freedom of the west of the island where his ducks were, and the viewing platform he would repair. It was a relief that the rain had been blown away and he expected to be able to work a full day without interruption and alone. By the time he was at the end of his street, he had forgotten them, and their rubbish.

  Billy had the wheel. Harry had the chart spread on the table behind his son's back. Paul, his grandson, clung to a holding rail as if his life depended on it. The i trawler crawled forward erratically, and the course set by Harry would take the Anneliese Royal away from the east coast of England, out through offshore gas rigs, north of the Bruine Bank. A pencil line on the chart ended south of the German Bight at an island shore. She had a maximum speed of twelve knots, but they did a mere half of that. The horizon swung between white-grey cloud and green-grey sea. It was worse because Harry's course dictated that the waves' swell came from the south-west and battered against the trawler's stern, and the pinnacle of each wave drove them, aft first, into the unyielding mass of the wave ahead. They always said, skippers with experience, that a sea coming against a boat from the stern made for hell on water. The boy had already been sick and some of his vomit had missed the bucket lashed by its handle to the back of the wheel-house.

  Harry had had the course, the destination in German waters, from the radio – a frequency on the extreme of the UHF band that was rarely used and therefore was unlikely to be listened to, and Ricky had given him the co-ordinates. 'What I need to know, Harry, when are you going to be there?' He'd yelled back the answer that he didn't effing know. 'That's not co-operation, Harry, that doesn't make my life easy – you going to be there tonight?' He'd heard the distorted whine in the voice, then said he'd be there when he was there, and not an effing hour before or after. He'd smiled then, grimly, to himself and had reflected that if this weather held there would be no German craft, Customs or coastguard, out of harbour and that the sea conditions would obscure the shore radar signature of the Anneliese Royal. Small bloody mercy He'd finished by cutting across Ricky's bleat to tell him that he was switching off the radio and would use it again when he was an hour or two from the rendezvous point. The sea tossed, shook and battered the trawler while his son gripped the wheel, his grandson the rail and Harry held fast to the chart table

  – and Ricky had said it was all to bring back to England just one man.

  'So good of you to come, Mr Capel, and at such short notice. All of us on this team, we're very grateful. We sincerely appreciate your co-operation. May I call you Percy? I'd like to.'

  He was a gentleman, Percy Capel knew.
Hadn't met many, but there'd been enough for him to know one. He would have said that a judge at the Old Bailey was a gentleman, sent him down for five years when it could have been ten with hard labour, and there had been a whisper of a smile on his face as he'd heard the testimony of how Percy had done the entry bit. And, of course, the best gentleman had been Major Anstruther.

  This one, no doubt about it, was a proper gentleman.

  'What we've realized, Percy, is that our records on Albania are quite pathetically thin. Files of stuff about Yugoslavia and Greece, but some very good things were done in Albania and we don't have an adequate picture of them. Time goes on, and if we don't shift ourselves the eyewitnesses, the participants, will be beyond reach. We want to talk to you about Albania and your work alongside the group led by Mehmet Rahman. Would you be up for that, Percy?'

  He nodded, muttered that he'd be happy to, then saw the smile of appreciation on the gentleman's face.

  It had all happened fast. Him still in bed, with a cup of tea, Sharon in her housecoat doing breakfast, Mikey I shaving – and the phone had rung. Sharon had screamed up the stairs that the Imperial War Museum was on the phone, and wanted Percy for his experiences – and apologies and apologies and more apologies than he could count for the lack of notice, and the liberty taken of having sent a car for him in the hope that he wasn't too busy. No, Percy Capel had not been too busy. He had been driven by a respectful chauffeur across south-east London and at the museum – beside those damn great naval guns – the gentleman had been waiting for him.

  'It's what we try to do, fill holes in knowledge, and nowhere better than from the people who were on the ground. I expect you'd like some coffee, and I think we can rustle up some biscuits.'