Hopscotch

by Brian Garfield

  Somewhere along the Archway Road, not quite sure of his bearings, he dropped off the truck and made his way afoot off the lighted thoroughfare into a dreary lane of grim Victorian brick—identical attached row houses of Dickensian bleakness. Cars were jammed together along both curbs but it wasn’t transport he needed just now.

  He went the length of the lane—two hundred yards, not much more. It ended against a parapet; a steep slope fed down into a railway cut. He saw no signal lights along the tracks; perhaps it was an abandoned line. Garden allotments were terraced into the slope, each with its little padlocked tool shed, a few with greenhouses.

  He’d worn no topcoat because he hadn’t wanted the clumsiness of flapping skirts in his burglary; he was chilled to the bone in shirt and jacket but what mattered was that they knew the clothes he was wearing and they knew he had no money to buy different garb. He couldn’t very well go back to his hotel for a change of clothes; they’d have that sealed off first thing because one or another of them was bound to be inspired by that plastic calendar with the hotel’s advertisement on it.

  He got up on the stone retaining wall and made his way around behind the row of houses. The back gardens had their degrees of individuality and some of them were fenced but none of the fences was too high to scale. He began to explore.

  Each house appeared to have been subdivided into flats, one apartment to each floor; the three ground-floor windows at the rear of a house represented kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Toward the front he surmised there’d be a sitting room and a stair hall. They weren’t tenements but neither were they upper-middle-class digs; these were workingmen’s flats.

  The windows were of two kinds: casements on the baths and kitchens, old-fashioned bay windows on the bedrooms. These were vertically hinged-in panels and could be held open at specific apertures by ratchet-holed interior levers that lay at angles across metal pins on the sills. The Englishman was a creature who had a mystical faith in the curative powers of fresh air irrespective of chill, humidity or pollution. Nearly every bedroom window in the row was open at least one notch.

  He judged it near three in the morning; they were as sound asleep as they’d ever be. He went along the row exploring. It was only a matter of reaching the fingertips inside, lifting each lever off its pin and swinging the window gently wider; then quietly press a curtain aside far enough to see inside.

  They weren’t people of uniform habits. Some were married, some slept alone; some were pin-neat and must have hung their clothes in the cupboards while others had left jackets and trousers strewn across chairs or dressing tables. One flat was postered with psychedelic colors and ban-the-bomb slogans and the bed seemed to be occupied by at least three people. It was the only iconoclast; the other bedrooms he investigated were sedate.

  He retraced his way to the stone wall, climbed over and went carefully down the allotment paths. He broke into a splintered tool shed and picked the longest-handled tool he could find, a garden rake, and worked the rake head off the handle. It gave him a pole the length of a short fishing rod. He scrounged in the bins, found an old nail that would do and banged the nail at a right angle into one end of the pole, using the head of the rake for a hammer. He was thinking: if they’d found the manuscript he’d cached in the hotel basement than he’d have to grant them the victory and call off the game. The carbon copy was still safe in Florida but it would stay there untouched; he’d hidden it there for use only in the event some blind accident should destroy the original. But if Cutter’s minions found it in the soap carton that wouldn’t be blind accident; he’d have to concede Cutter the game.

  But he didn’t think they’d look for it there. They’d be more clever than that. They’d stake out terminal lockers and they might canvass the banks to find out if a man answering Kendig’s description had rented a safe-deposit box. Probably it wouldn’t occur to them to search the rest of the hotel if they didn’t find the script in his room. And even if they did think of it they’d have to make it no more than a cursory search and the odds against their looking in that particular carton among many were pretty good.

  He carried the hooked rod back up to the wall, went over it and started to work through the bedroom window of the second house. He used the pole to reach in through the narrow window, hook the trousers off the chair and pull them out through the window. He did it with a great deal of stealth. The pockets were empty. He hung the trousers back on the hook and pushed them back inside onto the chair. The configuration wasn’t the same as it had been but the man would never notice the difference and even if he did he’d be no more than mildly puzzled; nothing had been removed from him.

  The third window was useless; he passed it up. The fourth yielded the first prize of the night: a tweed jacket with a wallet in the inside pocket. There were sixteen pounds in five- and one-pound notes. He took ten pounds, left six, and returned the jacket to the bedroom, hanging it carefully over the back of the chair as it had been before. Then he closed the window back to its original aperture. The man would have to conclude he’d miscounted the contents of his wallet.

  The next window was latched shut; the one beyond was the ban-the-bomb hippies; the seventh yielded up a pair of dungarees with only two and a half quid in the wallet. He didn’t touch the cash but he lifted half the loose change from the front pocket and he liberated a Barclay Bank plastic credit card from among three cards in the wallet pocket. He replaced the dungarees on the floor whence he’d hooked them and moved on down the row.

  There were twenty houses in all; he hit seven of them with his fishing rod and stole not more than one or two small items from each—never enough to induce the victim to report the theft. When he was finished he had a threadbare topcoat, a trilby hat, an umbrella and a pocketful of mismatched identification, credit cards and money. He hadn’t lifted any wallets because that would be noticed; but a wallet was easy enough to buy.

  After a counter breakfast in Highgate he bought a shave and a short haircut in a barbershop. In a drugstore he bought essential kit—toothbrush, paste, razor and a cosmetic tinting kit for people who wanted to cover grey hair. He rode a bus into the King’s Cross district, bought a few items of clothing and chose a small unpretentious commercial-travelers’ hotel and walked straight in across the lobby as though he had business there. No one challenged him; he went upstairs and searched the corridor until he found the bathroom for use by those whose rooms did not have private bath. It was past rush hour and the chamber was not in use. He locked himself in and took his time bathing, darkening his hair and getting into the new clothes—underwear, socks, dark blue slacks that fit well enough, an ordinary round-collar white shirt, a Navy four-in-hand, an imitation-suede sport jacket for which he’d laid out five pounds twenty. He brushed off the topcoat and trilby and put them on; wrapped his old clothes in the parcel from which he’d taken the new ones; and sat down to examine the night’s haul of credit cards and money.

  He’d taken three driver’s licenses and now he chose the one that came closest to his own age and decription; he tore the others into pieces and flushed them away. He had a bit over fourteen pounds remaining in notes and coin. It would do for the moment.

  He carried the parcel of old clothes out with him and deposited it in a dustbin two blocks from the hotel; went down the King’s Cross station and rode the tubes to Covent Garden. He had the hat down around his ears—he’d stuffed the bands with newspaper and it was still a fraction too large but that was all right. With the umbrella in hand he knew he was well camouflaged; nevertheless every stranger’s face might be an enemy’s and as he threaded the crowds he felt sweat break out like needles, prickling his scalp.

  In a passage off Drury Lane there was a philatelists’ shop run by a man who dealt not only in rare postage stamps but also in stolen documents and passports. The shop was on the Agency’s list of sources but Kendig had never been inside it. There was a chance they’d be watching it; there was a chance they wouldn’t be.

  He stopped
at the corner and went into a leather and luggage shop; bought a cheap wallet and a large cheap briefcase of the sort college students sometimes used to carry school books. It was a small valise, really; the manuscript would fit easily.

  He carried the empty case up to Drury Lane and went down as far as the passage; he hadn’t known the philatelist’s exact address but the passage was only a hundred feet long and he saw the place as soon as he’d turned the corner. He stopped there to survey it.

  The cardboard sign in the door said CLOSED. A few pedestrians moved through the passage but none of them was a stakeout; there was nobody sitting in a parked car, nobody holding up a lamppost. A uniformed traffic warden walked across the far end of the passage but didn’t even glance down its length. Kendig crossed to the opposite curb and made another search from that angle but nothing showed up.

  Then the philatelist’s door opened and a squat man emerged, reaching behind him to flip the sign over. Now it read OPEN. The squat man went down the passage away from Kendig and turned the far corner.

  Kendig put his back to the place and walked away. His steps were leisurely but his pulse raced.

  It had taken only a glance to know what the squat man was. Kendig hadn’t seen him before but the serge, the Slavic scowl and the clumsy shoes had been dead giveaways.

  They’d set something up for him there; it was in readiness now and the shop had reopened. Ten minutes later and he’d have walked right into it.

  It meant Yaskov had his people out in force. There were at least three other passport dealers in London but if Yaskov had set a trap in this one it meant he’d set traps in all four. It meant, further, that Yaskov had been briefed by the British or had found out on his own hook through some English contact that they’d flushed Kendig and had him on the run without papers.

  Coolly and relentlessly they were inscribing the pattern of his annihilation.

  It began to rain again in the early afternoon. Discreetly he checked out an Avis car-hire office; there was a man in a doorway opposite it trying not to look like a policeman. He didn’t need to know any more than that. He went into an oak-dark restaurant and sat at a small table over a mixed grill watching through the window beside him while cars moved by, their tires hissing on the wet paving.

  Jaws and mind ruminated. They were handling it properly—the way it had to be done. Once they’d taken the decision to treat him as a security crisis they’d had no alternative. He’d given them an advantage by issuing the big challenge here in London: he was isolating himself on an island. It was a big island with an enormous population but it was finite and had a limited number of routes of escape; knowing that fact made it possible for them to commit great forces to the job. He’d chosen England for that reason—he wanted to make it as costly as he could, that was part of the game, and by giving them the opportunity here he’d made it possible for them to concentrate far more effort and manpower than they’d have been willing to spare on him if he’d picked a porous playing field like the Continent or South America.

  The Soviets were in it in strength as he’d hoped they’d be. That fellow watching the Avis office had all the earmarks of copper; so Chartermain had brought the Yard into it and Kendig’s likeness would be folded into every bobby’s pocket south of Inverness. Cutter and Follett would be spreading the word about Kendig’s supposed French passport and they’d be covering the intervals between Chartermain’s suave troops and the Yard’s stubborn flat-feet. No doubt the delegations of half a dozen smaller powers in London had got the word through one source or another and had alerted their personnel.

  The longer he kept them at bay the more desperate they’d become. It wouldn’t be long—if it hadn’t happened already—before the orders would come down to take off the last of the kid gloves; probably the orders would be to make it look like an accident. They wouldn’t shoot him in a public place.

  They were governed by no code except expedience. There were no Commandments except Thou Shalt Succeed. Some of them had consciences of one kind or another but they all were caught in the gears of their great machinery. They believed in using any necessary means to preserve what they thought of as the greater good. It was a curious sinister idealism that motivated the best of them; the rest didn’t count, they were merely Good Germans, they’d do as they were told—lost souls who’d settled years ago for the usual hypocrisies and specious rationalizations.

  He’d always recognized the weakness in himself and that was why he saw it in the rest of them. In his own case it had never been put to the test. He had never been ordered to kill anyone. Lurid fictions to the contrary it was not part of the usual plays of espionage to commit murder; there had been assassinations, politically motivated, of which he had knowledge afterward and of which he had written with feelings of genuine outrage in his book. But he had never participated in any effort to take out a person, whether an ally or an enemy agent. It simply wasn’t done. The objective nearly always was to obtain information or to plant false information. In either case it had to be done without the other side’s realizing it had been done. Ideally the operative worked in such a way that nobody found out he’d been there at all. That sort of ideal couldn’t be achieved if he left the landscape littered behind him with dead bodies.

  Kendig was not certain what he might have done if Myerson had given him a kill order. He’d had training in the use of weapons and the tactics of unarmed combat but he’d never had to use them; last night’s football yardage in the police station had been the most violent escape of his life except for the night he’d taken a bullet in the head on the Czech border wire; and he’d done no one any real injury. The game was one of wits, not of brute strength or ruthlessness.

  But now they meant to kill him. This was something he’d known all along but the full realization had been creeping up on him for a while that there was a point at which they were bound to succeed if he kept playing the game with them: time, numbers and all the probabilities were in their favor. A matter of ten minutes one way or the other this morning might have delivered him onto Mikhail Yaskov’s chopping block.

  He visualized himself walking through a door and into the guns. It would happen sooner or later. And what then?

  It distressed him in an almost comical way to realize how ordinary he was after all. Neither a pacifist nor a first-strike Neanderthal; merely a man who believed in self-defense. He knew, studying it as honestly as he was able, that if they tried to kill him he would try to kill them first.

  A squall rattled the windows; it had become a cloudburst, the rain oiled across the panes and shattered in a haze on the surface of the street, cars spraying high turbulent wakes from the spitting puddles. A man sprinted out holding a tent of newspaper over his head; dodged a car and dashed across the street to catch the tall red double-decker that swayed around the corner.

  He saw no point going out into that. He had no dry clothes to change into.

  The place had a saloon bar and he was able to get a drink at his table; he ordered Dewar’s straight up. He finished the meal, enjoying it, and when the whiskey came he sipped it and took pleasure in the flavor. His appetite had been ravenous for weeks—the voracity of a condemned man eating his last meal—but now he was luxuriating in the subtler tastes and textures of things.

  The Dewar’s was Carla Fleming’s brand. He’d been flashing images of her. He’d no passion to rejoin her; she hadn’t been or done anything extraordinary; it wasn’t infatuation. But she was a vivid bookmark, marking the place where he’d turned a page. That night in Birmingham he’d begun to look at things beyond self-pity and the escape from boredom. That was when he’d discovered the moral outcry of the book he was writing.

  The joy she took from flying had triggered something in him. It hadn’t been superficial; it was the genuine joy with which she justified her existence and in some profound osmotic way it had communicated itself to him: the rediscovery of pleasure in the simple act of living.

  The challenge of the game had beg
un as a desperate lunge against the blackness of his terrible ennui. He’d been greedy for the matching of wits, He might have gone on enjoying it indefinitely if he’d been able to sustain it as an open-ended excuse for staying alive.

  But he wasn’t sure he needed the excuse any more. Being alive had become its own justification. That was what he’d re-learned: that was what the Dewar’s reminded him of.

  He was thinking too clearly today, no longer overcharged by the surge of emotionalism that had carried him soaring through the heady weeks of writing and running. The ability to reason coldly was bringing him to a logical conclusion he’d been able to evade before. He’d not speculated on the finalities of the endgame; he’d shied away from it consistently but it had crept up on him anyhow.

  Of course Chartermain or Yaskov might get to him first but most likely it would be Joe Cutter who’d end up facing Kendig over gunsights—literal or figurative; pull the trigger or order it pulled, it came down to the same thing. But Joe Cutter was no more a killer than Kendig was. What gnawed Kendig was that he’d put Cutter in an intolerable dilemma. He was making a murderer of Cutter.

  The irony was inescapable. He’d set the avalanche in motion; it was too late to get out from under it; and Cutter would be buried with him through no fault of Cutter’s own.

  He ordered another Dewar’s and thought the thing the whole way through. There was no calling it off, not in the usual sense; he couldn’t simply phone them and tell them where to pick up the manuscript and say he was stopping the game. They’d come after him anyway—they could never trust him not to start it up again.

  But there was a way it might be done. It depended on a number of things but most of all it depended on Joe Cutter’s willingness to be fooled as a means of escaping from his dilemma.