‘Then you’ll come with me,’ he ordered – I swear it was an order – ‘to burgle a house in Bournemouth.’
Sorry!’ I said. ‘No!’
‘A communist’s house. You can’t refuse.’
‘But how the hell am I to know it’s a communist’s house? And even if it was!’
My broad grin spoilt his fantasy. He saw himself for the moment, I think, as a gallant, outlaw captain whose commands could only meet with instant acceptance or cowardly refusal. It was a shock to him that I should find those commands merely comic.
‘I forgot,’ he said. ‘Damn it, why should any of you trust me?’
I explained apologetically that it was just the idea of Bournemouth communists which I couldn’t take seriously.
‘Why not?’ he asked.
‘Oh, it’s so blasted full of gentility.’
‘Wherever the leader class is, you’ll find its enemies,’ he insisted.
‘Me, for one,’ I answered, ‘if they call themselves that.’
But of course, he might be right. A residential town would be enough to turn anyone into a communist. I could live in the blackest industrial area, and never for a moment believe that revolution would make it any pleasanter; but long residence in any of the south-coast Blankmouths, full of folk with a sense of their own importance and nothing much to show for it, might make a communist of me in desperation.
‘Anyway, if you want to burgle a desirable, pine-clad villa,’ I said, ‘you’ll bloody well have to burgle it by yourself. And don’t imagine for a moment that we’re going to keep you out of quod.’
‘You can go to hell, Taine,’ he answered superbly. ‘All I want from you is to pass on what I shall give you.’
As he paddled me back up the creek, I was convinced of the absolute futility of Pink. We were as silent and sullen as the brown water which had flooded the banks while we talked. I loathed the jargon which he used instead of thought. Would he ever understand, I wondered, that the proudest claim any man could make was to belong to the Servant Class? But of course, at bottom, he did. That was what was wrong with him and his former friends of the People’s Union. They were ready enough to be Servants, but nobody wanted their services.
Nobody, nobody at all, wanted them. Oh, I don’t know what it was which overwhelmed me with pity for the man – whether the motionless melancholy of Poole Harbour, or just his loneliness, which was emphasized, like that of some old maid, by the scrupulous neatness of his living-quarters.
However it was, I made one of those irrevocable remarks which change the course of a life. They are nearly always charitable remarks. One impulsively slaps someone else’s burden on top of one’s pack, and there it sticks for good. The irrevocable remark which destroys a relationship and eases one of responsibility for the neighbour as effectively as a kick in the face – well, that, too, stays for life, but on the conscience.
‘Pink,’ I said, ‘what’s the latest you can put me on shore?’
‘Three hours from now.’
‘Look here, if you care to take me back on board and spend those three hours telling your story – all of it, not just hints – I promise not to be hasty.’
‘All of it?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think you’d be much interested.’
‘From your arrival in Portugal, I mean.’
‘Oh … well, yes, I see your point.’
He swung the little pram round on her own axis, and paddled me back to Olwen. Till we were on board he didn’t say a word except to mumble that there was plenty of gin.
I shall try not to put down anything that Pink did not tell me or imply, and I shall leave out his political asides. It is enough to say that he disliked socialists, communists and all other professional politicians, as well as Jews, Freemasons, Catholics, the Admiralty and the War Office. The only type of man that met with his approval was the chap selflessly doing a job in a Kiplingesque manner. Of this rare but admirable creature he felt that his own country had a monopoly, and that if foreigners and the masses could only be brought to see the value of him, the world might be run like a healthy public school.
You must imagine such a man standing on the waterfront of Lisbon with a valid passport, money enough, and some letters of introduction to friends whom he felt to be dubious. When he was organizing the rough stuff for the People’s Union, he may have felt the romance of a movement which passed all frontiers – generally illegally – and he was quite at home with the bad characters of several nations. But he hadn’t felt himself to be one of them. He was no internationalist, and he didn’t much care for the society which was awaiting him.
He liked it a lot less that first night. After plenty of drinks and mutual commiseration, he came to anchor in a quiet restaurant with an Italian, a German and a Portuguese. They spoke German. It was Pink’s only foreign language. He found it necessary to apologize to me for speaking it well. He had, he said, learned it – as a matter of duty – in the Navy.
Pink’s reputation had preceded him; those letters of introduction, too, had been fulsome in praise of his audacity. Consequently the German and Italian felt free to talk. Their conversation played over the incidents of exile and after-war agitation – abortive plots, provoking of strikes, the personal weaknesses of intelligence officers, kidnappings to and from the Russian zones; and, as the red wine, for which the Portuguese was paying, slid down into their bellies, they were frank in discussion of ways for a bold man to earn his living on the fringes of politics. It shook Pink badly to see that these two comrades took him to be as ruthless a soldier of fortune as they. That wasn’t his picture of himself at all. He was an English gentleman, exiled for the sake of his opinions.
The Portuguese had little to contribute beyond the drinks. He remained smiling and courteous, and, towards the end of the dinner, turned his attention exclusively to Pink. He assured him that Portugal was honoured by his presence, that he would have no trouble whatever with the authorities, and that if he, Pink, would obligingly keep an eye on British seamen and officers, and report from time to time …
‘My God!’ said Pink. ‘He wanted me to be a copper’s nark!’
He took credit for not smashing a plate on the secret policeman’s head. Restraint of that sort he called tact.
In the weeks that followed, Pink, idly and morosely trailing between flashy bars and secretive cafés, began to appreciate where he stood. He did not doubt the idealism of his late leader, Heyne-Hassingham – and in that he was possibly right – but he had gained vision of the scum that every fascist wave carries along with it. He was far from admitting that he himself was part of that scum, but all the same he couldn’t avoid some unpleasant hours of self-revelation.
A sensible man with Pink’s private income, who couldn’t return to his own country, would have bought himself a little sunny estate and settled down to a new life. Pink, however, couldn’t keep out of mischief. His scheme for rehabilitating himself in his own eyes was to dive a bit deeper into the scum, with the vague intent of being on duty as a one-man secret service.
By this time he was well in with the Lisbon Germans. His particular friend was a certain Ritter, an ex-Nazi and former naval officer, of a far superior type to the German he had met on the evening of his arrival. Pink trusted him absolutely. They used to weep together over the Europe that might have been, if ever England and Germany had been allies, and they speculated happily on whether a communism in which the commissars were gentlemen might not be a very desirable state of affairs. Poor old Pink began to see himself in a double role – as saviour of the decent world by the force of this magnificent idea, and, at the same time, as Borer from Within.
He offered, of course, no problem at all to intelligent communist agents, who would have sized him up at once as a woolly and fearless character trying to cash in on the winning side when his own was doomed. They were quite willing that he should.
Ritter must have been chosen with considerable care to guide Pink along the way he should go. He put him to wo
rk as a courier to Italy. The job seemed natural enough to Pink; after all, he could travel freely – so long as he kept clear of territories under British control – and the German exiles could not. That he should be on friendly terms with ex-fascist communists in Milan, who were surprisingly easy to dine and drink with, did not disturb him. Wasn’t it necessary to be an ally of communism in order to control it?
As soon as Pink had exhibited his remarkable facility for believing fairy-tales – and, I suppose, his talent for skulduggery of all sorts – his employers must have considered that he should be tied to them by more than loyalty. I needn’t go into all the details of the sordid and complex story. Ritter filled him up with a bit of romance exactly calculated to appeal to Pink. He was to help in the rescue of a political prisoner who was being deported from Portugal.
Pink helped all right, but found himself alone in the night, on a country road, with a stolen taxi and a dead prisoner. He cleared out instantly and on foot – at the cost of leaving his finger-prints all over the dead man’s baggage and the car. Ritter was full of apologies and explanations. He told Pink that he couldn’t expect to play with fire without occasionally being burnt, and sent him over to Tangier to be out of the way.
Pink’s life was becoming too complicated even for him. So, when he was offered the command, indeed the nominal ownership, of a neat little motor-cruiser that could do a hundred and fifty miles in one night, he refused. He was then reminded that if a set of his finger-prints, with his name and address at the bottom, were sent to the Portuguese police, he wouldn’t be able to put up much of a defence. That was true. Pink didn’t know who had fired that shot from the dark roadside, or why. He could only tell the jury the orders that Ritter had given him, and insist that he had been double-crossed. Ritter himself was out of reach. He had at last returned to East Germany and vanished.
‘And if he ever comes out,’ Pink shouted, ‘I’ll get him if I have to follow him for a month.’
I must admit that I found his longing for revenge somewhat over-dramatic and Italianate. I had still to learn that there are times when a man will kill as ruthlessly as in war, and with a hatred that is utterly unknown in war.
Well, Pink could do nothing but accept. The motor-cruiser’s papers were in perfect order; and what more natural than that Pink, as a former naval officer under a cloud, should be living on a boat and idling away his time between Tangier and the fishing ports of Spain and Portugal? He was free to go on shore when he wished, visit hotels and amuse himself. When a job had to be done, his orders were brought to him by a Spaniard, who thereupon stayed on board, ostensibly as a paid hand. He was a good seaman, said Pink, and so discreetly cheerful a character that all embarrassment was avoided.
Meanwhile the one-man secret service was pretty well played out. Pink did not even know whether his employers were communists or Ritter’s ambitious fellow-travellers or just a gang. What he was doing was plain enough – ferrying to and from North Africa people who did not wish their movements to be known. Often enough he was tempted to run into Gibraltar and throw himself on the mercy of naval intelligence officers.
‘I wonder what would have happened,’ he said to me, ‘if I had just walked in and asked someone who knew me whether I was the sort of man to commit a cold-blooded murder.’
It was enough that he should wonder. In the bottom of his heart he knew quite well that his question would have been answered by a polite silence.
One day in early March his Spanish hand, spy or supercargo – Pink never knew which he really was – came on board and gave him orders to proceed to Faro in Portugal, pick up a passenger, drop him in an inlet west of Cape Spartel, and take him back to Portugal the next night. Pink, who was then lying at Tangier, first went round the Cape to see what sort of place he was supposed to get into. His employers, he said, were no seamen. Weather and tide barely entered their calculations.
The inlet was only some ten miles from Tangier by land. There was a nasty sand-bar across the mouth, which was enough to discourage the curious, but could be crossed at the top of the tide provided the swell from the open Atlantic was not too heavy. The north bank of the inlet was obviously the property of a European. There were fields of lucerne, neatly wired, and a lot of paddocks and barns, with an attractive villa set above them on the terraced hillside. The estate looked like some sort of experimental station.
‘Holberg’s place, of course!’ said Pink. ‘He’d been working there since the early 1920s. I don’t think anyone took him seriously. Tangier is too full of people with crazy hobbies.’
Pink and his Spaniard were conditioned by that time not to open their mouths for the discussion of anything more than navigation and what they would have for dinner. Some sort of explanation, however, couldn’t be avoided. The Spaniard told him that a scientist who had been a refugee in Portugal and was now – like Ritter – returning to East Germany, was anxious to consult Holberg before he left, but had been refused a visa for Tangier. He added that Holberg had no politics at all – which agreed with all that Pink had heard about him.
‘A surly sort of cove they called him in Tangier,’ he told me, ‘though he’d break out every so often and give a binge, and as likely as not be picked up stark naked a mile down the road.’
Well, Pink collected the eminent colleague without any trouble, put him ashore on Holberg’s land and saw him escorted through the lucerne by a picturesque Berber servant in baggy pants. Pink and the Spaniard returned to their moorings in Tangier harbour, and set out the next evening to take the chap up again. He didn’t come down to the creek at the appointed time, and after midnight, when there was only an hour left to catch the tide, Pink strolled up to the villa to see what was wrong.
He had a friendly chat with the Berber servant who was on guard in the patio between the wings of the house, and knew, of course, who he was. The Berber told him to go round to the front door, ring the bell and get the butler out of bed, and deliver his message.
‘He had evidently got it in for the butler,’ said Pink, ‘but I didn’t feel like obliging him.’
On his way round the house he passed the great east window of the living-room. The curtains were not drawn tight. He looked through; and there were the two Germans as drunk as students on a Saturday night, and happily gathered round a Christmas tree. His passenger kept passing a hand under the foliage and cackling with laughter. Then he would brush something off his hand into a tray beneath the tree.
Pink was interested. Since he had every right to be where he was, he could afford to take a chance of getting into the house, and possibly into the room, unseen. The plan of the room was inviting – at any rate to a rash lunatic such as Pink. On the side opposite the patio was a row of thick, low arches in the Spanish colonial style, and beyond them two doors into the entrance hall. If one of the doors opened quietly, he could enter the room unperceived by the occupants; if it didn’t, he could always excuse himself on the grounds that he was looking for his passenger.
That villa, he said, was clean and fresh as a ship. Holberg evidently liked the night air of early spring to blow right through it. Pink accompanied the breeze through a window, and so into the entrance hall. The two doors into the long living-room were obvious. He chose one, slipped through and jumped behind a pillar. Pink, when he liked, could move like a scrum-half with leopard’s paws for boots. I’d had experience of it.
He was in cover for the moment, but as soon as one of these boozing Germans got up to leave the room he had to be seen, single or double. There was nothing to hide him but a tall, tapestried chair in the corner of the room. He moved from pillar to pillar, and so to chair. He described himself as being perfectly safe behind it. It wouldn’t occur to him that he might sneeze, or that someone might want the chair. He wasn’t blessed with that sort of imagination.
Holberg and passenger were certainly taking their hair down over the bottles. They had reverted to the noisy indiscretions of youth. That, evidently, was Holberg’s form of relaxation:
to drink himself riotous once a month or so with some chosen companion. The passenger was just the man for him – it was probable that they had known each other at the university – and they were having fun with heavy technical jokes that weren’t at all easy to understand. Indeed, they were having fun at the expense of everything but themselves, the communist party included. It was frankly assumed between them that they had joined the party because it offered the only hope of revenge on the brother – yes, they called them brother Anglo-Saxons.
Then the Christmas tree came in for more attention. Now that Pink could observe it more closely, he saw that it wasn’t a tree, but branches of some North African thorn standing in a big vase, or, perhaps, potted in earth. It pleased the passenger to baptize the leaves of the thorn with wine and to giggle because something – Pink didn’t know the word he used – was remarkably resistant to alcohol.
After a bit they reached a solemn and tearful state of mutual admiration. Pink’s passenger stood up and made a set speech to his colleague in imitation of a chancellor or public orator conferring high honours upon him. The missing word, now repeated in several contexts, was clear. The things on the thorn which the passenger had attracted to his hand and baptized with wine were cattle ticks.
Now, anyone who listens to a foreign language spoken rapidly by two drunks with a heap of slurred technicalities and private allusions isn’t going to get a lot of the sense. Pink admitted that even if he had been a vet he couldn’t have given a detailed account of what he overheard; he claimed, however, to be sure of the main facts. That well-lubricated passenger had run on and on with so many repetitions that he often gave a second chance at his meaning.
It was clear that Holberg had been working for years on an anti-toxin for foot-and-mouth disease, and had managed to establish the virus in a strain of cattle ticks. The tick was none the worse; and, if removed from an infected cow when swollen with blood, it could be brewed up by some process or other, and the anti-bodies extracted from the mash. Pink’s passenger was congratulating Holberg on his discovery of a prophylactic against the disease.
A Time to Kill Page 2